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Concise Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy Taylor & Francis Routledge 0415223644 9780415223645 9780203169940 English Philosophy--Encyclopedias. 2000 B51.C58 2000eb 100 Philosophy--Encyclopedias.
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Page i Concise Routledge Encyclopedia of PHILOSOPHY
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Page iii Concise Routledge Encyclopedia of PHILOSOPHY
London and New York
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Page iv First published 2000 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2001. © 2000 Routledge All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-15790-7 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-16994-8 (OEB Format) ISBN 0-415-22364-4 (Print Edition)
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Page v Contents Introduction List of entries and contributors The Encyclopedia : Alphabetical entries Index
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vii ix 1 951
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Page vi
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Page vii Introduction The Concise Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a complete introduction to world philosophy. Its 2,000 plus entries range from the Presocratics, Ancient Egypt and early Chinese philosophy up to the present day, and across the world to include the philosophies of the West, the Arab world, India, East Asia, Latin America and Africa. Subject matter is broad ranging, from aesthetics to mathematics, from philosophy of religion to philosophy of science. Entries fall into three broad types. First, lengthy entries provide introductions to major disciplines within philosophy (epistemology, ethics, metaphysics and so on) and major time periods and regions (ancient philosophy, medieval philosophy, Indian and Tibetan philosophy and so on), defining the concepts, movements and topics and summing up the major positions and debates within each. Shorter entries, ranging from a few dozen words to several hundred, then describe more specific concepts in greater detail. Finally, biographical entries provide information on the life, work and thought of hundreds of the world’s philosophers, from household names like Plato and Confucius to others who, almost forgotten, none the less made important contributions. Using this volume is simple. First, entries are arranged in strict alphabetical order. For biographical entries, we have chosen the main word in the subject’s surname: thus al-Farabi appears under F, not A. If you do not at first find an entry where you expect to see it, try looking again under another word: for example, ‘philosophy of mind’ appears here as ‘mind, philosophy of’. A comprehensive index has also been provided with references and page numbers for thousands of words and names. For the reader wanting information on very specific subjects, the index may well be the best place to start. Finally, there are cross-references within the text. The longer thematic entries described above contain a number of cross-references to other entries which may be relevant or provide further information. These appear within the text in small capitals, thus: AQINAS, YORUBA EPISTEMOLOGY, and so on. Also, many of the shorter entries have at the end of the text one or two references to other relevant entries. Using these cross-references, the reader can follow various concepts and ideas through many entries, gaining fresh perspectives from each. In general, suggestions for further reading have been kept to a minimum: such references as have been provided are by and large to introductory texts, most of which should be accessible through any major university or large public library. These references are intended for the use of the interested lay reader or student, not the academic specialist. As its title suggests, this volume is a condensed version of the ten-volume Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy . For readers who find themselves interested in or captivated by a particular subject or person discussed in these pages, the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy may well be the best place to turn next, as it has much greater depth of cross-referencing and extensive bibliographies (this work also should be available through most major libraries). This present volume does not contain detailed, technical studies of philosophical topics. What it does contain are helpful, informative overviews which will introduce you to almost every aspect of philosophy since philosophical thinking began. What you hold in your hand represents the product of almost 3,000 years of human thought, study and endeavour. This book provides you with a gateway into those realms of knowledge, and as such, it is to be read and studied; but most of all, it is to be enjoyed.
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Page viii
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Page ix List of entries and contributors Below is a complete list of entries and contributors in the order in which they appear in the Concise Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy . A posteriori Paul K. Moser A priori Paul K. Moser Abduh, Muhammad Neal Robinson Abelard, Peter Martin M. Tweedale Aberdeen Philosophical Society Paul Wood Abhinavagupta Paul E. Muller-Ortega Abravanel, Isaac Oliver Leaman Abravanel, Judah ben Isaac Idit Dobbs-Weinstein Absolute, the T.L.S. Sprigge Absolutism Anthony Pagden Abstract objects Bob Hale Academy Jonathan Barnes Action Jennifer Hornsby Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund J.M. Bernstein Adverbs James Higginbotham Aenesidemus R.J. Hankinson Aesthetic attitude Malcolm Budd Aesthetic concepts Marcia Eaton Aesthetics Malcolm Budd Aesthetics, African Barry Hallen Aesthetics and ethics Michael Tanner Aesthetics, Chinese Stephen J. Goldberg Aesthetics in Islamic philosophy Deborah L. Black Aesthetics, Japanese Meera Viswanathan Affirmative action Bernard Boxill al-Afghani, Jamal al-Din Elsayed M.H. Omran
Oliver Leaman African philosophy K. Anthony Appiah African philosophy, anglophone Kwasi Wiredu African philosophy, francophone F. Abiola Irele African traditional religions K. Anthony Appiah Agnosticism William L. Rowe Agricola, Rudolph Peter Mack Agricultural ethics Gary L. Comstock Agrippa R.J. Hankinson Agrippa von Nettesheim, Henricus Cornelius Michael H. Keefer Ailly, Pierre d’ Olaf Pluta Ajdukiewicz, Kazimierz Jan Woleński Akan philosophical psychology Kwasi Wiredu Akrasia Helen Steward Albert of Saxony Joël Biard Albert the Great Alain de Libera Albo, Joseph Daniel H. Frank Alchemy Michela Pereira Alcinous John Dillon Alcmaeon Malcolm Schofield Alemanno, Yohanan ben Isaac Abraham Melamed D’Alembert, Jean Le Rond Paul F. Johnson Alexander, Samuel Dorothy Emmet Alexander of Aphrodisias R.W. Sharples Alexander of Hales Gedeon Gál Alienation Allen W. Wood Alighieri, Dante Dominik Perler Alison, Archibald Dabney Townsend Alterity and identity, postmodern theories of Peter Fenves Althusser, Louis Pierre Alex Callinicos Ambedkar, Bimrao Ramji
Alan Sponberg Ambiguity Kent Bach American philosophy in the 18th and 19th centuries Russell B. Goodman William C. Dowling al-Amiri, Abul Hasan Muhammad ibn Yusuf Tom Gaskill Ammonius, son of Hermeas Christian Wildberg Amo, Anton Wilhelm John S. Wright Analysis, nonstandard Moshé Machover Analysis, philosophical issues in I. Grattan-Guinness
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Page x Analytic ethics Peter Railton Analytical philosophy Thomas Baldwin Analytical philosophy in Latin America Oscar R. Martí Analyticity George Bealer Anaphora Nicholas Asher Anarchism George Crowder Anaxagoras Malcolm Schofield Anaxarchus Jacques Brunschwig Anaximander Richard McKirahan Anaximenes Richard McKirahan Ancient philosophy David Sedley Anderson, John A.J. Baker Animal language and thought Dale Jamieson Animals and ethics James Rachels Anomalous monism Brian P. McLaughlin Anscombe, Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Michael Thompson Anselm of Canterbury Jasper Hopkins Anthropology, philosophy of Merrilee H. Salmon Antiochus Jonathan Barnes Antiphon Angela Hobbs Anti-positivist thought in Latin America Michael A. Weinstein Antirealism in the philosophy of mathematics A.W. Moore Anti-Semitism Oliver Leaman Clive Nyman Antisthenes Malcolm Schofield Applied ethics Brenda Almond Apuleius John Dillon Aquinas, Thomas Norman Kretzmann Eleonore Stump Arama, Isaac ben Moses
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Josef Stern Arcesilaus Jonathan Barnes Archaeology, philosophy of Alison Wylie Archē Richard McKirahan Architecture, aesthetics of John J. Haldane Archytas Hermann S. Schibli Arendt, Hannah B. Parekh Aretē David Sedley Argentina, philosophy in Juan Carlos Torchia Estrada Aristippus the Elder Voula Tsouna Ariston of Chios David Sedley Aristotelianism in Islamic philosophy Kiki Kennedy-Day Aristotelianism in the 17th century Roger Ariew Aristotelianism, medieval Mark D. Jordan Aristotelianism, Renaissance Edward P. Mahoney James South Aristotle T.H. Irwin Aristotle commentators Richard Sorabji Arithmetic, philosophical issues in Michael Potter Armstrong, David Malet Frank Jackson Arnauld, Antoine Steven Nadler Art, abstract John Brown Art and morality Michael Tanner Art and truth Paul Taylor Art criticism Colin Lyas Art, definition of Stephen Davies Art, performing Stephen Davies Art, understanding of Colin Lyas Art, value of Malcolm Budd Art works, ontology of Gregory Currie Artificial intelligence Margaret A. Boden
Artistic expression Stephen Davies Artistic forgery Gregory Currie Artistic interpretation Alan H. Goldman Artistic style Jenefer M. Robinson Artistic taste Ted Cohen Artist’s intention Paul Taylor Arya Samaj K.S. Kumar Asceticism Philip L. Quinn Ashariyya and Mutazila Neal Robinson Asmus, Valentin Ferdinandovich David Bakhurst Astell, Mary Eileen O’Neill Atheism William L. Rowe Atomism, ancient David Sedley Atonement Colin Gunton Augustine Gareth B. Matthews Augustinianism Mark D. Jordan Aureol, Peter Robert Pasnau Aurobindo Ghose Stephen H. Phillips Austin, John Robert N. Moles Austin, John Langshaw J.O. Urmson Australia, philosophy in C.A.J. Coady Authority Leslie Green Autonomy, ethical Andrews Reath Avenarius, Richard Augustin Riska
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< previous page Page xi Averroism Sten Ebbesen Averroism, Jewish Oliver Leaman Awakening of Faith in Mahyna Peter N. Gregory Awareness in Indian thought Stephen H. Phillips Axiology Barry Smith Alan Thomas Axiom of choice Gregory H. Moore Ayer, Alfred Jules Graham MacDonald Bachelard, Gaston Mary Tiles Bacon, Francis J.R. Milton Bacon, Roger Georgette Sinkler al-Baghdadi, Abul-Barakat Y. Tzvi Langermann Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich Gary Saul Morson Bakunin, Mikhail Aleksandrovich Aileen Kelly Báñez, Domingo Mauricio Beuchot Bar Hayya, Abraham Geoffrey Wigoder Barth, Karl Jean-Loup Seban Barthes, Roland James Risser Bartolus of Sassoferrato (or Saxoferrato) William M. Gordon Bataille, Georges Jonathan Maskit Baudrillard, Jean Mark Poster Bauer, Bruno Lawrence S. Stepelevich Baumgardt, David Zeev Levy Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb Dabney Townsend Bayle, Pierre Charles Larmore Beattie, James Paul Wood Beauty John H. Brown Beauvoir, Simone de Eva Lundgren-Gothlin Beck, Jacob Sigismund Eckart Förster
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Behaviourism, analytic David Braddon-Mitchell Behaviourism in the social sciences Rom Harré Behaviourism, methodological and scientific C.R. Gallistel Being Mark Okrent Belief David Braddon-Mitchell Frank Jackson Belief and knowledge Steven Luper Belinskii, Vissarion Grigorievich Victor Terras Bell’s theorem Arthur Fine Benjamin, Walter Julian Roberts Bentham, Jeremy Ross Harrison Bentley, Richard Rom Harré Berdiaev, Nikolai Aleksandrovich James P. Scanlan Bergson, Henri-Louis A.R. Lacey Berkeley, George Ian Tipton Berlin, Isaiah Bernard Williams Bernard of Clairvaux Sean Murphy Bernard of Tours Winthrop Wetherbee Bernier, François Thomas M. Lennon Bernstein, Eduard H. Tudor Beth’s theorem and Craig’s theorem Zeno Swijtink Bharthari Johannes Bronkhorst Bible, Hebrew Dan Cohn-Sherbok Biel, Gabriel John L. Farthing Bioethics R.G. Frey Bioethics, Jewish Noam J. Zohar Blackstone, William N.E. Simmonds Blair, Hugh Richard Sher Blanchot, Maurice Alan Milchman Alan Rosenberg Blasius of Parma Graziella Federici Vescovini
Bloch, Ernst Simon Vincent Geoghegan Bobbio, Norberto Patrizia Borsellino Bodily sensations M.G.F. Martin Bodin, Jean Julian H. Franklin Boehme, Jakob Jean-Loup Seban Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus Henry Chadwick Boethius of Dacia Sten Ebbesen Bogdanov, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich David Joravsky Bohr, Niels Mara Beller Bold, Samuel G.A.J. Rogers Bolzano, Bernard Wolfgang Künne Bonaventure Bonnie Kent Bonhoeffer, Dietrich Jean-Loup Seban Bonnet, Charles F.C.T. Moore Boole, George Theodore Hailperin Boolean algebra J.L. Bell Bosanquet, Bernard Peter P. Nicholson Bourdieu, Pierre Patrick Baert Boutroux, Emile Didier Gil Bowne, Borden Parker Keith E. Yandell Boyle, Robert Rose-Mary Sargent Bradley, Francis Herbert Stewart Candlish Bradwardine, Thomas Edith Dudley Sylla Brahman Stephen H. Phillips
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Page xii Brahmo Samaj K.S. Kumar Brazil, philosophy in Fred Gillette Sturm Brentano, Franz Clemens Roderick M. Chisholm Peter Simons Bridgman, Percy William Frederick Suppe Brinkley, Richard Robert Andrews Brito, Radulphus Sten Ebbesen Broad, Charlie Dunbar Peter Smith Brown, Thomas Christopher Bryant Browne, Peter Kenneth P. Winkler Brunner, Emil Jean-Loup Seban Bruno, Giordano E.J. Ashworth Brunschvicg, Léon Maurice Loi Bryce, James Colin Munro Buber, Martin Tamra Wright Büchner, Friedrich Karl Christian Ludwig (Louis) Michael Heidelberger Buddha L.S. Cousins Buddhism, bhidharmika schools of Collett Cox Buddhism, Mdhyamika: India and Tibet Leslie S. Kawamura Buddhism, Yogcra school of Dan Lusthaus Buddhist concept of emptiness Paul Williams Buddhist philosophy, Chinese Dan Lusthaus Buddhist philosophy, Indian Richard P. Hayes Buddhist philosophy, Japanese John C. Maraldo Buddhist philosophy, Korean Sungtaek Cho Buffier, Claude James W. Manns Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Robert Wokler Bulgakov, Sergei Nikolaevich Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal Bultmann, Rudolf Jean-Loup Seban
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Buridan, John Jack Zupko Burke, Edmund Iain Hampsher-Monk Burley, Walter Edith Dudley Sylla Burthogge, Richard Michael Ayers Bushi philosophy Paul Varley Business ethics Tom Sorell Butler, Joseph R.G. Frey Byzantine philosophy Phil Linos Benakis Cabanis, Pierre-Jean F.C.T. Moore Cabral, Amílcar K. Anthony Appiah Cajetan (Thomas de Vio) Edward P. Mahoney Calcidius John Dillon Callicles Angela Hobbs Calvin, John Ronald J. Feenstra Cambridge Platonism Frederick Beiser Campanella, Tommaso John M. Headley Campbell, George Jeffrey M. Suderman Campbell, Norman Robert D. H. Mellor Camus, Albert David A. Sprintzen Cantor, Georg Ulrich Majer Cantor’s theorem Mary Tiles Capreolus, Johannes Michael Tavuzzi Cardano, Girolamo Eckhard Kessler Carlyle, Thomas A.L. Le Quesne Carmichael, Gershom James Moore Michael Silverthorne Carnap, Rudolf Richard Creath Carneades Jonathan Barnes Carolingian renaissance John Marenbon Cassirer, Ernst Donald Phillip Verene Casuistry
Martin Stone Categories Robert Wardy Category theory, applications to the foundations of mathematics Colin McLarty Category theory, introduction to Colin McLarty Cattaneo, Carlo Delia Frigessi Causality and necessity in Islamic thought David Burrell Causation Nancy Cartwright Causation, Indian theories of Roy W. Perrett Cavell, Stanley Stephen Mulhall Cavendish, Margaret Lucas Eileen O’Neill Celsus John Dillon Certainty Peter Klein Certeau, Michel de Tom Conley Chaadaev, Pëtr Iakovlevich Andrzej Walicki Chaldaean Oracles Lucas Siorvanes Change Robin Le Poidevin Chaos theory Stephen H. Kellert Charity Bernard Hoose Charity, principle of Richard Feldman Charleton, Walter G.A.J. Rogers Charron, Pierre Richard H. Popkin Chartres, School of John Marenbon Chatton, Walter Stephen F. Brown Chemistry, philosophical aspects of Noretta Koertge
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Page xiii Cheng Philip J. Ivanhoe Cheng Hao Hoyt Cleveland Tillman Cheng Yi Hoyt Cleveland Tillman Chernyshevskii, Nikolai Gavrilovich Andrzej Walicki Chillingworth, William J.R. Milton Chinese classics Lisa Raphals Chinese philosophy David L. Hall Roger T. Ames Chinese Room Argument Robert Van Gulick Chinul Robert E. Buswell, Jr Chisholm, Roderick Milton David Benfield Chomsky, Noam Norbert Hornstein Chông Yagyong Yông-ho Choe Christine de Pizan Charity Cannon Willard Chrysippus David Sedley Church, Alonzo Peter Dolník Church’s theorem and the decision problem Rohit Parikh Church’s thesis Stewart Shapiro Cicero, Marcus Tullius Stephen A. White Cieszkowski, August von Lawrence S. Stepelevich Citizenship Will Kymlicka Civil disobedience Kent Greenawalt Civil society Jean L. Cohen Cixous, Hèléne Verena Andermatt Conley Clandestine literature Antony McKenna Clarembald of Arras Stephen F. Brown Clarke, Samuel Stephen Gaukroger Clauberg, Johannes Daniel Garber Cleanthes David Sedley
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Clement of Alexandria Henry Chadwick Cleomedes Robert B. Todd Cockburn, Catharine Sarah Hutton Coercion Joel Feinberg Cognition, infant Alison Gopnik Andrew N. Meltzoff Cognitive architecture Zenon W. Pylyshyn Cognitive development F.C. Keil G. Gutheil Cognitive pluralism Stephen P. Stich Cohen, Hermann Michael Zank Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Mary Anne Perkins Collegium Conimbricense John P. Doyle Collier, Arthur Kenneth P. Winkler Collingwood, Robin George Simon Blackburn Collins, Anthony Kenneth P. Winkler Colour and qualia Joseph Levine Colour, theories of David R. Hilbert Combinatory logic David Charles McCarty Comedy John Morreall Comenius, John Amos Josef Zumr Common Law Martin Krygier Common Sense School Edward H. Madden Common-sense ethics Charlotte R. Brown Common-sense reasoning, theories of John Horty Commonsensism Roderick M. Chisholm Communication and intention Simon Blackburn Communicative rationality Peter Dews Communism Lyman Tower Sargent Community and communitarianism Allen Buchanan Complexity, computational Alasdair Urquhart
Compositionality Mark Richard Computability and information Cristian S. Calude Computability theory Daniele Mundici Wilfried Sieg Computer science John Winnie Comte, Isidore-Auguste-Marie-François-Xavier Angèle Kremer-Marietti Concepts Georges Rey Conceptual analysis Robert Hanna Condillac, Etienne Bonnot de Paul F. Johnson Condorcet, Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas Caritat de David Williams Confirmation theory Theo A.F. Kuipers Confucian philosophy, Chinese A.S. Cua Confucian philosophy, Japanese Peter Nosco Confucian philosophy, Korean Michael C. Kalton Confucius D. C. Lau Roger T. Ames Connectionism Brian P. McLaughlin Conscience Nicholas Dent Consciousness Eric Lormand Consent A. John Simmons Consequence, conceptions of Timothy Smiley Consequentialism David McNaughton Conservation principles James T. Cushing Conservatism Anthony O’Hear
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Page xiv Constant de Rebeque, Henri-Benjamin Dennis Wood Constitutionalism Ulrich K. Preuß Constructible universe John P. Burgess Constructivism Stephen M. Downes Constructivism in ethics Onora O’Neill Constructivism in mathematics David Charles McCarty Content, indexical Kent Bach Content, non-conceptual Tim Crane Content: wide and narrow Kent Bach Contextualism, epistemological Bruce W. Brower Contingency Ralph C.S. Walker Continuants Robin Le Poidevin Continuum hypothesis Mary Tiles Contractarianism Samuel Freeman Conventionalism Paul Horwich Conway, Anne Sarah Hutton Copernicus, Nicolaus Ernan McMullin Cordemoy, Géraud de Steven Nadler Corruption Mark Philp Cosmology Ernan McMullin Cosmology and cosmogony, Indian theories of Edeltraud Harzer Clear Counterfactual conditionals Frank Döring Cournot, Antoine Augustin H. O. Mounce Cousin, Victor David Leopold Crathorn, William Robert Pasnau Cratylus A.A. Long Creation and conservation, religious doctrine of William Hasker Crescas, Hasdai Seymour Feldman Crime and punishment
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R.A. Duff Criteria Marie McGinn Critical legal studies Alan Norrie Critical realism Andrew Collier Critical theory Raymond Geuss Croce, Benedetto Richard Bellamy Crucial experiments Peter Achinstein Crusius, Christian August Michael J. Seidler Cudworth, Ralph Sarah Hutton Cultural identity John A. Loughney Culture Anthony O’Hear Culverwell, Nathaniel Frederick Beiser Cumberland, Richard Knud Haakonssen Cynics R. Bracht Branham Cyrenaics Voula Tsouna Czech Republic, philosophy in Josef Zumr Dai Zhen Yü Ying-shih Damascius John Dillon Damian, Peter William E. Mann Dance, aesthetics of Graham McFee Dao David L. Hall Roger T. Ames Daodejing Michael LaFargue Daoist philosophy David L. Hall Roger T. Ames Darwin, Charles Robert Peter J. Bowler David of Dinant William E. Mann Davidson, Donald Ernie Lepore al-Dawani, Jalal al-Din John Cooper Daxue Tu Weiming De David L. Hall Roger T. Ames
De Man, Paul Timothy Bahti De Morgan, Augustus Daniel D. Merrill De re/de dicto André Gallois Death Fred Feldman Decision and game theory Cristina Bicchieri Deconstruction Christopher Norris Dedekind, Julius Wilhelm Richard Howard Stein Deductive closure principle Anthony Brueckner Definition G. Aldo Antonelli Definition, Indian concepts of Sibajiban Bhattacharyya Deism William L. Rowe Deleuze, Gilles Dorothea E. Olkowski Delmedigo, Elijah Kalman Bland Demarcation problem Peter Achinstein Democracy Ross Harrison Democritus C.C.W. Taylor Demonstratives and indexicals Harry Deutsch Dennett, Daniel Clement William G. Lycan Denys the Carthusian Kent Emery Jr Deontic logic Marvin Belzer Deontological ethics David McNaughton Depiction R. D. Hopkins Derrida, Jacques Andrew Cutrofello Descartes, René Daniel Garber Descriptions Stephen Neale
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Page xv Desert and merit David Miller Desgabets, Robert Patricia A. Easton Desire Philip Pettit Determinism and indeterminism Jeremy Butterfield Development ethics David A. Crocker Dewey, John James Gouinlock Dharmakrti Ernst Steinkellner Dialectical materialism Allen W. Wood Dialectical school David Sedley Dialogical logic Erik C.W. Krabbe Dicey, Albert Venn Martin Loughlin Diderot, Denis Robert Wokler Dietrich of Freiberg Fiona Somerset Digby, Kenelm Christia Mercer Dignga Richard P. Hayes Dilthey, Wilhelm Rudolf A. Makkreel Diodorus Cronus Nicholas Denyer Diogenes Laertius David T. Runia Diogenes of Apollonia Malcolm Schofield Diogenes of Oenoanda Michael Erler Diogenes of Sinope R. Bracht Branham Discourse semantics Nicholas Asher Discovery, logic of Thomas Nickles Discrimination James W. Nickel Dissoi logoi M.F. Burnyeat Dodgson, Charles Lutwidge (Lewis Carroll) Peter Heath Dōgen Thomas P. Kasulis Dong Zhongshu Michael Nylan Dooyeweerd, Herman
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John Bolt Dostoevskii, Fëdor Mikhailovich Gary Saul Morson Double effect, principle of Suzanne Uniacke Doubt Michael Williams Doxography David T. Runia Dreaming Roberto Casati Du Bois-Reymond, Emil Daniel N. Robinson Du Châtelet-Lomont, Gabrielle-Émilie Robert L. Walters Dualism David M. Rosenthal Ducasse, Curt John Edward H. Madden Duhem, Pierre Maurice Marie Don Howard Dühring, Eugen Karl Robin Small Dummett, Michael Anthony Eardley Barry Taylor Duns Scotus, John Stephen D. Dumont Duran, Profiat Menachem Kellner Oliver Leaman Duran, Simeon ben Tzemach Menachem Kellner Durandus of St Pourçain Mariateresa Fumagalli Beonio-Brocchieri Durkheim, Emile Marco Orr Duty Robert L. Frazier Duty and virtue, Indian conceptions of John A. Taber Dworkin, Ronald Emilios A. Christodoulidis Dynamic logics Ulf Friedrichsdorf East Asian philosophy Roger T. Ames Eberhard, Johann August Henry E. Allison Ecological philosophy Freya Mathews Ecology John Beatty Economics and ethics Daniel Hausman Michael S. McPherson Economics, philosophy of Daniel Hausman Education, history of philosophy of Randall R. Curren
Education, philosophy of Randall R. Curren Edwards, Jonathan William J. Wainwright Egoism and altruism Richard Kraut Egyptian cosmology, ancient John D. Ray Egyptian philosophy: influence on ancient Greek thought Mary Lefkowitz Einstein, Albert Arthur Fine Don Howard John D. Norton Electrodynamics James T. Cushing Eliade, Mircea Bryan Stephenson Rennie Eliminativism Georges Rey Eliot, George John Beer Elisabeth of Bohemia Eileen O’Neill Emerson, Ralph Waldo Russell B. Goodman Emotion in response to art Jerrold Levinson Emotions, nature of Robert C. Solomon Emotions, philosophy of Robert C. Solomon Emotive meaning David Phillips Emotivism Michael Smith Empedocles Malcolm Schofield Empiricism William P. Alston Encyclopedists, eighteenth-century John Hope Mason Encyclopedists, medieval Samuel Barnish Engels, Friedrich Terrell Carver Engineering and ethics Michael Davis
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< previous page Page xvi Enlightenment, continental Robert Wokler Enlightenment, Jewish Jay M. Harris Enlightenment, Russian W. Gareth Jones Enlightenment, Scottish Christopher J. Berry Enthusiasm Robert Shaver Environmental ethics Andrew Brennan Epicharmus Glenn W. Most Epictetus Brad Inwood Epicureanism David Sedley Epicurus David Sedley Epiphenomenalism Keith Campbell Nicholas J.J. Smith Epistemic logic Jaakko Hintikka Ilpo Halonen Epistemic relativism Stephen P. Stich Epistemology Peter D. Klein Epistemology and ethics Richard Feldman Epistemology, history of George S. Pappas Epistemology in Islamic philosophy Shams C. Inati Epistemology, Indian schools of Stephen H. Phillips Equality Albert Weale Erasmus, Desiderius Erika Rummel Eriugena, Johannes Scottus Dermot Moran Erotic art Jerrold Levinson Error and illusion, Indian conceptions of Stephen H. Phillips Eschatology Stephen T. Davis Essentialism Stephen Yablo Eternity Eleonore Stump Norman Kretzmann Eternity of the world, medieval views of J.M.M.H. Thijssen
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Ethical systems, African K. Anthony Appiah Ethics Roger Crisp Ethics in Islamic philosophy Majid Fakhry Ethiopia, philosophy in Claude Sumner Ethnophilosophy, African Ivan Karp D.A. Masolo Eudaimonia C.C.W. Taylor Eudoxus Liba Taub Eurasian movement Nicholas V. Riasanovsky Eusebius Christopher Stead Evans, Gareth John McDowell Events D. H. Mellor Evil John Kekes Evil, problem of Marilyn McCord Adams Evolution and ethics Elliott Sober Evolution, theory of Elisabeth A. Lloyd Evolutionary theory and social science Elliott Sober Examples in ethics Robert B. Louden Existence Penelope Mackie Existentialism Charles B. Guignon Existentialist ethics David E. Cooper Existentialist theology C. Stephen Evans Existentialist thought in Latin America María Teresa Bertelloni Experiment Margaret C. Morrison Experiments in social science John A. Hughes Explanation Philip Kitcher Explanation in history and social science David-Hillel Ruben Fa Thomas P. Kasulis Fackenheim, Emil Ludwig Michael L. Morgan Facts Alex Oliver Fact/value distinction
Roger Crisp Faith Nicholas P. Wolterstorff Fallacies Douglas Walton Fallibilism Nicholas Rescher Family, ethics and the William Ruddick Fanon, Frantz K. Anthony Appiah al-Farabi, Abu Nasr Ian Richard Netton Fardella, Michelangelo Luciano Floridi Farrer, Austin Marsden Thomas Williams Fascism Roger Eatwell Fatalism Edward Craig Fatalism, Indian Julian F. Woods Fazang Francis H. Cook Fechner, Gustav Theodor Daniel N. Robinson Federalism and confederalism Wayne Norman Fëdorov, Nikolai Fëdorovich George M. Young Feminism Susan James Feminism and psychoanalysis Margaret Whitford Feminism and social science Alison Wylie Feminist aesthetics Carolyn Korsmeyer Feminist epistemology Lorraine Code Feminist ethics Rosemarie Tong Feminist jurisprudence E.F. Kingdom Feminist literary criticism Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
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Page xvii Feminist political philosophy Susan Mendus Feminist theology Marjorie Suchocki Feminist thought in Latin America Amy A. Oliver Fénelon, François de Salignac de la Mothe Patrick Riley Ferguson, Adam David Kettler Ferrier, James Frederick John J. Haldane Feuerbach, Ludwig Andreas Hans-Martin Sass Feyerabend, Paul Karl Michael Williams Fichte, Johann Gottlieb Daniel Breazeale Ficino, Marsilio James Hankins Fiction, semantics of Robert Howell Fictional entities Peter Lamarque Fictionalism Arthur Fine Field theory, classical Mark Wilson Field theory, quantum Paul Teller Film, aesthetics of Gregory Currie Filmer, Sir Robert Johann P. Sommerville Florenskii, Pavel Aleksandrovich Robert Slesinski Fludd, Robert Stephen Gaukroger Fodor, Jerry Alan Peter Godfrey-Smith Folk psychology Georges Rey Stephen P. Stich Fonseca, Pedro da John P. Doyle Fontenelle, Bernard de Martin Schönfeld Forcing John P. Burgess Forgiveness and mercy Jeffrie G. Murphy Formal and informal logic Douglas Walton Formal languages and systems Heinrich Herre Peter Schroeder-Heister Formalism in art
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Malcolm Budd Foucault, Michel Gary Gutting Foucher, Simon Steven Nadler Foundationalism Ernest Sosa Francis of Meyronnes Jeffrey Hause Frank, Jerome Neil Duxbury Neil MacCormick Frank, Semën Liudvigovich Philip J. Swoboda Frankfurt School Axel Honneth Franklin, Benjamin Murray G. Murphey Free logics Ermanno Bencivenga Free logics, philosophical issues in Karel Lambert Free will Galen Strawson Freedom and liberty Joel Feinberg Freedom, divine William L. Rowe Freedom of speech Peter Jones Frege, Gottlob Alexander George Richard Heck Frei, Hans Nicholas P. Wolterstorff French philosophy of science Gary Gutting Freud, Sigmund James Hopkins Friendship Neera K. Badhwar Fries, Jacob Friedrich Allen W. Wood Fujiwara Seika John Allen Tucker Fuller, Lon Louvois Massimo La Torre Functional explanation Richard N. Manning Functionalism David Papineau Functionalism in social science John Bigelow Future generations, obligations to Avner de-Shalit Fuzzy logic Charles G. Morgan Gaddhara Jonardon Ganeri Gadamer, Hans-Georg
Kathleen Wright Gaius Grant McLeod Galen R.J. Hankinson Galilei, Galileo Ernan McMullin Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand Frank J. Hoffman Gageśa Stephen H. Phillips Garrigou-Lagrange, Réginald Ralph McInerny Gassendi, Pierre Margaret J. Osler Gauya Vaiavism Jan K. Brzezinski Gautama, Akapda Eli Franco Karin Preisendanz Gender and science Sandra G. Harding Genealogy R Kevin Hill General relativity, philosophical responses to T.A. Ryckman General will Peter P. Nicholson Genetics Lindley Darden Genetics and ethics Ruth Chadwick Gentile, Giovanni Richard Bellamy Gentzen, Gerhard Karl Erich Volker Peckhaus Geology, philosophy of Rachel Laudan Geometry, philosophical issues in T.A. Ryckman George of Trebizond John Monfasani Gerard, Alexander Dabney Townsend Gerard of Cremona Mark D. Jordan Gerard of Odo Bonnie Kent Gerbert of Aurillac Fiona Somerset
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Page xviii Gerdil, Giancinto Sigismondo Patrick Riley German idealism Paul Franks Gerson, Jean Mark S. Burrows Gersonides Seymour Feldman Gestalt psychology Barry Smith Gettier problems Robert K. Shope Geulincx, Arnold Theo Verbeek al-Ghazali, Abu Hamid Kojiro Nakamura Gilbert of Poitiers Klaus Jacobi Giles of Rome Francesco del Punta Cecilia Trifogli Gioberti, Vincenzo Mario Piccinini Glanvill, Joseph G.A.J. Rogers Gnosticism Christopher Stead God, arguments for the existence of Alvin Plantinga God, concepts of Brian Leftow God, Indian conceptions of Sibajiban Bhattacharyya Gödel, Kurt John W. Dawson, Jr Gödel’s theorems Michael Detlefsen Godfrey of Fontaines John F. Wippel Godwin, William Mark Philp Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von Nicholas Boyle Good, theories of the Christine M. Korsgaard Goodman, Nelson Catherine Z. Elgin Goodness, perfect Linda Zagzebski Gorgias Charles H. Kahn Grace David Braine Gramsci, Antonio Richard Bellamy Greek philosophy: impact on Islamic philosophy Majid Fakhry
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Green political philosophy Terence Ball Green, Thomas Hill Richard Bellamy Gregory of Rimini Stephen F. Brown Grice, Herbert Paul Judith Baker Grosseteste, Robert Scott MacDonald Grote, John John Gibbins Bart Schultz Grotius, Hugo J.D. Ford Guanzi Isabelle Robinet Gurney, Edmund Jerrold Levinson Ahad, Haam Zeev Levy Habermas, Jürgen Kenneth Baynes Haeckel, Ernst Heinrich Paul Weindling Hägerström, Axel Anders Theodor Thorild Dahlquist Ann-Mari Henschen-Dahlquist Halakhah Noam J. Zohar Halevi, Judah L.E. Goodman Hamann, Johann Georg Frederick Beiser Hamilton, William H. O. Mounce Han Feizi Leo S. Chang Han Wônjin Michael C. Kalton Han Yu Charles Hartman Hanslick, Eduard Peter Kivy Hanson, Norwood Russell Edward Mackinnon Happiness J.P. Griffin Hare, Richard Mervyn A.W. Price Harrington, James Mark Goldie Hart, Herbert Lionel Adolphus Neil MacCormick Hartley, David Roy Porter Hartmann, Karl Robert Eduard von Christopher Adair-Toteff Hartmann, Nicolai Michael Inwood
Hasidism Rachel Elior Hayek, Friedrich August von Chandran Kukathas Heaven Linda Zagzebski Heaven, Indian conceptions of Frederick M. Smith Hedonism Justin Gosling Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Rolf-Peter Horstmann Hegelianism Robert Stern Nicholas Walker Hegelianism, Russian Andrzej Walicki Heidegger, Martin Thomas Sheehan Heideggerian philosophy of science Joseph Rouse Heisenberg, Werner Mara Beller Hell Marilyn McCord Adams Hellenistic medical epistemology R.J. Hankinson Hellenistic philosophy David Sedley Helmholtz, Hermann von Catherine Chevalley Helmont, Franciscus Mercurius van Stuart Brown Help and beneficence Liam B. Murphy Helvétius, Claude-Adrien Mark Hulliung Hempel, Carl Gustav R. Jeffrey Henricus Regius Daniel Garber Henry of Ghent Steven P. Marrone Henry of Harclay George Molland
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Page xix Heraclides of Pontus H.B. Gottschalk Heraclitus A.A. Long Herbart, Johann Friedrich Alfred Langewand Herbert Edward (Baron Herbert of Cherbury) David A. Pailin Herbrand’s theorem A.M. Ungar Herder, Johann Gottfried Frederick Beiser Hermeneutics Michael Inwood Hermeneutics, Biblical Anthony C. Thiselton Hermetism John Procopé Herrera, Abraham Cohen de Nissim Yosha Hertz, Heinrich Rudolf Peter Barker Hervaeus Natalis Dominik Perler Herzen, Aleksandr Ivanovich Aileen Kelly Heschel, Abraham Joshua David Novak Hesiod Glenn W. Most Hess, Moses Shlomo Avineri Hessen, Sergei Iosifovich Andrzej Walicki Heytesbury, William John Longeway Hierocles Brad Inwood Hilbert’s Programme and Formalism Michael Detlefsen Hildegard of Bingen Claudia Eisen Murphy Hillel ben Samuel of Verona Caterina Rigo Hindu philosophy Edeltraud Harzer Clear Hippias Charles H. Kahn Hippocratic medicine R.J. Hankinson Historicism Christopher Thornhill History, Chinese theories of Philip J. Ivanhoe History, philosophy of Gordon Graham Hobbes, Thomas
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Tom Sorell Hohfeld, Wesley Newcomb Neil MacCormick Holcot, Robert Robert Pasnau Hölderlin, Johann Christian Friedrich Nicholas Walker Holism and individualism in history and social science Rajeev Bhargava Holism: mental and semantic Ned Block Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr Matthew H. Kramer Holocaust, the Steven T. Katz Home, Henry (Lord Kames) Roger L. Emerson Homer Glenn W. Most Honour Julian Roberts Hooker, Richard A.S. McGrade Hope Philip Stratton-Lake Horkheimer, Max J.M. Bernstein Huainanzi H.D. Roth Huet, Pierre-Daniel Luciano Floridi Hugh of St Victor Mark D. Jordan Human nature Ian Shapiro Human nature, science of, in the 18th century Christopher J. Berry Humanism John C. Luik Humanism, Renaissance John Monfasani Humboldt, Wilhelm von Frederick Beiser Hume, David Annette Baier Humour Jerrold Levinson Hungary, philosophy in László Perecz Hus, Jan Curtis V. Bostick Husserl, Edmund Dagfinn Føllesdal Hutcheson, Francis David Fate Norton Huxley, Thomas Henry Mario A. Di Gregorio Hypatia Lucas Siorvanes Iamblichus
Lucas Siorvanes Ibn Adi, Yahya Shams C. Inati Ibn al-Arabi, Muhyi al-Din Neal Robinson Ibn ar-Rawandi Shams C. Inati Ibn Bajja, Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Yahya ibn as-Sayigh Shams C. Inati Ibn Daud, Abraham Norbert M. Samuelson Ibn Ezra, Abraham Raphael Jospe Ibn Ezra, Moses ben Jacob Paul B. Fenton Ibn Falaquera, Shem Tov Raphael Jospe Ibn Gabirol, Solomon Daniel H. Frank Ibn Hazm, Abu Muhammad Ali Oliver Leaman Salman Albdour Ibn Kammuna Y. Tzvi Langermann Ibn Khaldun, Abd al-Rahman Charles Issawi Oliver Leaman Ibn Massara, Muhammad ibn Abd Allah George N. Atiyeh Ibn Miskawayh, Ahmad ibn Muhammad Oliver Leaman Ibn Paquda, Bahya L.E. Goodman Ibn Rushd, Abul Walid Muhammad Oliver Leaman Ibn Sabin, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Haqq Elsayed M.H. Omran Ibn Sina, Abu Ali al-Husayn Salim Kemal Ibn Taymiyya, Taqi al-Din James Pavlin Ibn Tufayl, Abu Bakr Muhammad Shams C. Inati
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< previous page Page xx Ibn Tzaddik, Joseph ben Jacob Tamar Rudavsky Idealism T.L.S. Sprigge Idealizations Ronald Laymon Ideals Connie S. Rosati Identity Timothy Williamson Identity of indiscernibles Peter Simons Ideology Michael Freeden Ikhwan Al-Safa Ian Richard Netton Ilenkov, Evald Vasilevich David Bakhurst Ilin, Ivan Aleksandrovich Philip T. Grier Illuminati Margaret C. Jacob Illumination Scott MacDonald Illuminationist philosophy Hossein Ziai Oliver Leaman Imagery Michael Tye Imagination J. O’Leary-Hawthorne Immanuel ben Solomon of Rome Caterina Rigo Immutability Brian Leftow Impartiality John Cottingham Imperative logic Mitchell Green Implicature Wayne A. Davis Incarnation and Christology Peter van Inwagen Incommensurability Dudley Shapere Indian and Tibetan philosophy Richard P. Hayes Indicative conditionals Frank Jackson Indirect discourse Gabriel Segal Induction, epistemic issues in Mark Kaplan Inductive definitions and proofs Vann McGee Inductive inference Patrick Maher
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Inference, Indian theories of Brendan S. Gillon Inference to the best explanation Jonathan Vogel Infinitary logics Bernd Buldt Infinity A.W. Moore Information technology and ethics Helen Nissenbaum Information theory Kenneth M. Sayre Information theory and epistemology Fred Dretske Ingarden, Roman Witold Antoni B. Stepien Inge, William Ralph Keith E. Yandell Innate knowledge Elliott Sober Innocence Bernard Hoose Institutionalism in law Anna Pintore Intensional entities George Bealer Intensional logics James W. Garson Intensionality Simon Christmas Intention Robert Dunn Intentionality Tim Crane Internalism and externalism in epistemology William P. Alston International relations, philosophy of Charles R. Beitz Interpretation, Indian theories of Madhav M. Deshpande Introspection, epistemology of Hilary Kornblith Introspection, psychology of Barbara Von Eckardt Intuitionism David Charles McCarty Intuitionism in ethics Robert L. Frazier Intuitionistic logic and antirealism Peter Pagin Iqbal, Muhammad Riffat Hassan Irigaray, Luce Tina Chanter Isaac of Stella Winthrop Wetherbee Islam, concept of philosophy in Oliver Leaman Islamic fundamentalism Youssef Choueiri
Islamic philosophy Oliver Leaman Islamic philosophy, modern Parviz Morewedge Oliver Leaman Islamic philosophy: transmission into Western Europe Charles Burnett Islamic theology Abdelwahab El-Affendi Israeli, Isaac Ben Solomon Daniel J. Lasker Italy, philosophy in Gaetano Chiurazzi Itō Jinsai John Allen Tucker Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich George di Giovanni Jaina philosophy Jayandra Soni James of Viterbo Edward P. Mahoney James, William Ruth Anna Putnam Japanese philosophy Thomas P. Kasulis Jaspers, Karl Kurt Salamun Jefferson, Thomas Murray G. Murphey Jewish philosophy L.E. Goodman Jewish philosophy, contemporary Henry S. Levinson Jonathan W. Malino Jewish philosophy in the early 19th century Kenneth Seeskin Jhering, Rudolf von Elspeth Attwooll Jia Yi Michael Nylan Joachim of Fiore Sean Eisen Murphy John of Damascus John Longeway John of Jandun Edward P. Mahoney John of La Rochelle Mark D. Jordan
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Page xxi John of Mirecourt Fiona Somerset John of Paris Mark D. Jordan John of Salisbury Mark D. Jordan John of St Thomas John P. Doyle Johnson, Alexander Bryan K.T. Fann Johnson, Dr Samuel Roy Porter Johnson, Samuel Charles J. McCracken Journalism, ethics of Andrew Belsey Judah ben Moses of Rome Caterina Rigo Jung, Carl Gustav George B. Hogenson Jungius, Joachim Ralph Häfner Jurisprudence, historical Peter Stein Justice Brian Barry Matt Matravers Justice, equity and law John Tasioulas Justice, international Brian Barry Matt Matravers Justification, epistemic Richard Foley Justification, religious Diogenes Allen Justinian Grant McLeod al-Juwayni, Abul Maali Oliver Leaman Salman Albdour Kabbalah Oliver Leaman Kaibara Ekken Mary Evelyn Tucker Kant, Immanuel Paul Guyer Kantian ethics Onora O’Neill Kaplan, Mordecai David Ellenson Karaism Daniel Frank Karma and rebirth, Indian conceptions of Wilhelm Halbfass Katharsis Glenn W. Most
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Kauilya Purushottama Bilimoria Kautsky, Karl Johann H. Tudor Keckermann, Bartholomew Christia Mercer Kelsen, Hans Zenon Bankowski Kemp Smith, Norman Robert R. Calder George Davie Kepler, Johannes Ernan McMullin Keynes, John Maynard Margaret Schabas Kierkegaard, Sùren Aabye Patrick Gardiner Kilvington, Richard Norman Kretzmann Kilwardby, Robert Alessandro D. Conti al-Kindi, Abu Yusuf Yaqub ibn Ishaq Kiki Kennedy-Day Knowledge and justification, coherence theory of Laurence BonJour Knowledge by acquaintance and description Richard Fumerton Knowledge, causal theory of Marshall Swain Knowledge, concept of Peter D. Klein Knowledge, defeasibility theory of Marshall Swain Knowledge, Indian views of Stephen H. Phillips Knowledge, tacit C.F. Delaney Knutzen, Martin A. Laywine Kojève, Alexandre Michael S. Roth Kokoro Meera Viswanathan Kotarbiński, Tadeusz B. Stanosz Koyré, Alexandre Pietro Redondi Krause, Karl Christian Friedrich Teresa Rodriguez de Lecea Kripke, Saul Aaron Michael Jubien Kristeva, Julia Tina Chanter Krochmal, Nachman Jay M. Harris Kronecker, Leopold Ulrich Majer Kropotkin, Pëtr Alekseevich Caroline Cahm Kuhn, Thomas Samuel
Paul Hoyningen-Huene Kkai Thomas P. Kasulis Kuki Shzō Nagatomo Shigenori Kumazawa Banzan Steven Heine Kyoto school J.W. Heisig La Forge, Louis de Steven Nadler La Mettrie, Julien Offroy de Kathleen Wellman Labriola, Antonio Geoffrey Hunt Lacan, Jacques Thomas Brockelman Lachelier, Jules Michel Piclin Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe Giovanni Scibilia Lakatos, Imre John Worrall Lambda calculus David Charles McCarty Lambert, Johann Heinrich Günter Zöller Lange, Friedrich Albert George J. Stack Langer, Susanne Katherina Knauth Peg Brand Language, ancient philosophy of Christopher Shields Language and gender Sally McConnell-Ginet Language, conventionality of Barry C. Smith Language, early modern philosophy of Zoltàn Gendler Szabó Language, Indian theories of Johannes Bronkhorst Language, innateness of Fiona Cowie Language, medieval theories of Sten Ebbesen
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< previous page Page xxii Language of thought Georges Rey Language, philosophy of Mark Crimmins Language, Renaissance philosophy of E.J. Ashworth Language, social nature of Barry C. Smith Lassalle, Ferdinand H. Tudor Latin America, colonial thought in Walter B. Redmond Latin America, philosophy in Amy A. Oliver Latin America, pre-Columbian and indigenous thought in Laura Mues de Schrenk Latitudinarianism John Marshall Lavrov, Pëtr Lavrovich Andrzej Walicki Law and morality N.E. Simmonds Law and ritual in Chinese philosophy R.P. Peerenboom Law, economic approach to Jules L. Coleman Law, Islamic philosophy of Norman Calder Law, limits of G.W. Smith Law, philosophy of Neil MacCormick Beverley Brown Law, William Paul G. Stanwood Laws, natural C.A. Hooker Le Clerc, Jean Theo Verbeek Le Doeuff, Michèle Max Deutscher Le Grand, Antoine Patricia A. Easton Le Roy, Edouard Louis Emmanuel Julien Don Howard Learning C.R. Gallistel Clark Glymour Lebensphilosophie Jason Gaiger Lefebvre, Henri Rob Shields Legal concepts Åke Frändberg Legal discourse Beverley Brown
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Legal evidence and inference David A. Schum Legal hermeneutics Peter Goodrich Legal idealism Elspeth Attwooll Legal positivism Mario Jori Legal realism Neil Duxbury Legal reasoning and interpretation Neil MacCormick Legalist philosophy, Chinese Leo S. Chang Legitimacy David Beetham Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm Daniel Garber Leibowitz, Yeshayahu David Hartman Lenin, Vladimir Ilich Robert Service Leontev, Konstantin Nikolaevich George L. Kline Leśniewski, Stanisław Jan Woleśski Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim Dabney Townsend Leucippus C.C.W. Taylor Levinas, Emmanuel Robert Bernasconi Lévi-Strauss, Claude Olivia Harris Lewis, Clarence Irving Sandra B. Rosenthal Lewis, Clive Staples Richard L. Purtill Lewis, David Kellogg Peter van Inwagen Li Philip J. Ivanhoe Liber de causis Hannes Jarka-Sellers Liberalism Jeremy Waldron Liberalism, Russian G.M. Hamburg Liberation philosophy Horacio Cerutti-Guldberg Liberation theology Roger Haight Libertarianism Jonathan Wolff Libertins Ian Maclean Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph Günter Zöller Life and death John Harris
Life, meaning of Susan Wolf Life, origin of Lenny Moss Limbo Linda Zagzebski Linear logic G.M. Bierman Linguistic discrimination Naomi Scheman Linji Shigenori Nagatomo Linnaeus, Carl von P.F. Stevens Lipsius, Justus E.J. Ashworth Literature, philosophy in Latin American José Luis Gómez-Martíez Literature, philosophy in modern Japanese Paul Anderer Llewellyn, Karl Nickerson William Twining Neil MacCormick Llull, Ramon Mark D. Johnston Locke, John Michael Ayers Logic, ancient Paul Thom Logic in China Chad Hansen Logic in Islamic philosophy Deborah L. Black Logic in Japan Thomas P. Kasulis Logic in the 17th and 18th centuries Mirella Capozzi Logic in the 19th century Randall R. Dipert Logic in the early 20th century Gregory H. Moore Logic machines and diagrams Randall R. Dipert Logic, medieval E.J. Ashworth
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Page xxiii Logic of ethical discourse Mark Timmons Logic, philosophy of Graeme Forbes Logic, Renaissance E.J. Ashworth Logical atomism Alex Oliver Logical constants Timothy McCarthy Logical form Christopher Menzel Logical laws Greg Restall Logical positivism Michael Friedman Logical and mathematical terms, glossary of Michael Detlefsen David Charles McCarty John B. Bacon Logicism Howard Stein Logos Christopher Stead Loisy, Alfred Keith E. Yandell Lombard, Peter Marcia L. Colish Lonergan, Bernard Joseph Francis Hugo Meynell Lorenzen, Paul Julian Roberts Losev, Aleksei Fëdorovich George L. Kline Lossky, Nicholas Onufrievich James P. Scanlan Lotze, Rudolf Hermann David Sullivan Love Martha C. Nussbaum Löwenheim-Skolem theorems and non-standard models W.D. Hart Lu Xiangshan Anne D. Birdwhistell Lucian R. Bracht Branham Lucretius Michael Erler Lukács, Georg Alex Callinicos Łukasiewicz, Jan Jan Woleński Lushi chunqiu James D. Sellmann Luther, Martin M.A. Higton Luxemburg, Rosa
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H. Tudor Lyotard, Jean-François David Carroll Mach, Ernst Andy Hamilton Machiavelli, Niccolò Mary G. Dietz MacIntyre, Alasdair Alan Thomas McTaggart, John McTaggart Ellis Thomas Baldwin Mdhava Edeltraud Harzer Clear Madhva Valerie Stoker Mahvra Jayandra Soni Maimon, Salomon Paul Franks Maimonides, Abraham ben Moses Paul B. Fenton Maimonides, Moses L.E. Goodman Maine de Biran, Pierre-François F.C.T. Moore Major, John Joël Biard Malebranche, Nicolas Steven Nadler Mamardashvili, Merab Konstantinovich Caryl Emerson Mandeville, Bernard M.M. Goldsmith Manicheism Christopher Kirwan Manifoldness, Jaina theory of Jayandra Soni Many-valued logics Charles G. Morgan Many-valued logics, philosophical issues in Lloyd Humberstone Marcel, Gabriel David E. Cooper Marcus Aurelius Brad Inwood Marcuse, Herbert Alex Callinicos Marginality Amy A. Oliver Maritain, Jacques Ralph McInerny Marius Victorinus John Peter Kenney Market, ethics of the David Miller Marsilius of Inghen E. P. Bos Marsilius of Padua A.S. McGrade Marston, Roger
Girard J. Etzkorn Martineau, Harriet R. K. Webb Marx, Karl Michael Rosen Marxism, Chinese Donald J. Munro Marxism, Western John Torrance Marxist philosophy of science Richard W. Miller Marxist philosophy, Russian and Soviet David Bakhurst Marxist thought in Latin America Ofelia Schutte Masaryk, Thomáš Garrigue Josef Zumr Masham, Damaris Sarah Hutton Mass terms Jeffry Pelletier Materialism George J. Stack Materialism in the philosophy of mind Howard Robinson Materialism, Indian school of Eli Franco Karin Preisendanz Mathematics, foundations of Michael Detlefsen Matter Dudley Shapere Matter, Indian conceptions of Paul Schweizer Matthew of Aquasparta Stephen F. Brown Mauthner, Fritz Elizabeth Bredeck Maxwell, James Clerk C.W. F. Everitt Mead, George Herbert Hans Joas Meaning and communication Simon Blackburn Meaning and rule-following Barry C. Smith
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< previous page Page xxiv Meaning and truth Stephen G. Williams Meaning and understanding Ian Rumfitt Meaning and verification W.D. Hart Meaning in Islamic philosophy Oliver Leaman Meaning, Indian theories of Madhav M. Deshpande Measurement, theory of Patrick Suppes Mechanics, Aristotelian Allan Franklin Mechanics, classical Mark Wilson Medical ethics Daniel Wikler Medicine, philosophy of Kenneth F. Schaffner H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr Medieval philosophy Scott MacDonald Norman Kretzmann Medieval philosophy, Russian Claire Farrimond Megarian School David Sedley Meinecke, Friedrich Roger Hausheer Meinong, Alexius Peter Simons Meister Eckhart Jan A. Aertsen Melanchthon, Philipp Peter Mack Melissus David Sedley Memory Max Deutscher Memory, epistemology of Earl Conee Mencius Bryan W. Van Norden Mendelssohn, Moses Allan Arkush Mental causation Barry Loewer Mental illness, concept of Karen Neander Mental states, adverbial theory of Michael Tye Mereology Peter Forrest Merleau-Ponty, Maurice Thomas Baldwin Mersenne, Marin
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Peter Dear Messer Leon, Judah Hava Tirosh-Samuelson Metaphor A.P. Martinich Metaphysics Edward Craig Methodological individualism Gabriel Segal Mexico, philosophy in Horacio Cerutti-Guldberg Meyerson, Emile David A. Sipfle Mi bskyod rdo rje Paul Williams Midrash Philip S. Alexander Mikhailovskii, Nikolai Konstantinovich Andrzej Walicki Miki Kiyoshi J.W. Heisig Mill, James Terence Ball Mill, John Stuart John Skorupski Millar, John Martin Loughlin Mms John A. Taber Mimēsis Glenn W. Most Mind, bundle theory of Stewart Candlish Mind, child’s theory of Alan M. Leslie Mind, computational theories of Ned Block Georges Rey Mind, identity theory of Frank Jackson Mind, Indian philosophy of Joy Laine Mind, philosophy of Frank Jackson Georges Rey Mir Damad, Muhammad Baqir Hamid Dabashi Miracles David Basinger mKhas grub dge legs dpal bzang po José Ignacio Cabezón Modal logic Steven T. Kuhn Modal logic, philosophical issues in Thomas J. McKay Modal operators Paul Schweizer Model theory Wilfrid Hodges Models
Elisabeth A. Lloyd Modernism Thomas Vargish Modularity of mind Zenon W. Pylyshyn Mohist philosophy Philip J. Ivanhoe Molecular biology Michael R. Dietrich Molina, Luis de Alfred J. Freddoso Molinism Alfred J. Freddoso Molyneux problem Menno Lievers Momentariness, Buddhist doctrine of Alexander von Rospatt Monboddo, Lord (James Burnett) Robert Wokler Monism Edward Craig Monism, Indian Stephen H. Phillips Monotheism George I. Mavrodes Montague, Richard Merett Terence Parsons Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de Richard H. Popkin Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat Mark Hulliung Moore, George Edward Thomas Baldwin Moral agents Vinit Haksar Moral development Owen Flanagan Moral education John White Moral expertise Brad Hooker Moral judgment Garrett Cullity Moral justification T.M. Scanlon Moral knowledge Geoffrey Sayre-McCord Moral luck Daniel Statman
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Page xxv Moral motivation R. Jay Wallace Moral particularism Roger Crisp Moral pluralism Daniel M. Weinstock Moral psychology Michael Slote Moral realism Jonathan Dancy Moral relativism David B. Wong Moral scepticism Mark T. Nelson Moral sense theories Jacqueline Taylor Moral sentiments R. Jay Wallace Moral standing Arthur Kuflik Moralistes Ian Maclean Morality and emotions Martha C. Nussbaum Morality and ethics John Skorupski Morality and identity Ira Singer More, Henry Kenneth P. Winkler Moscow-Tartu School William Mills Todd III Motoori Norinaga Thomas P. Kasulis Mozi Robin D.S. Yates Mujō Monte S. Hull Mulla Sadra (Sadr al-Din Muhammad al-Shirazi) John Cooper Multiculturalism Arthur Ripstein Multiple-conclusion logic Timothy Smiley al-Muqammas, Daud Sarah Stroumsa Music, aesthetics of Jerrold Levinson Musonius Rufus Brad Inwood Mystical philosophy in Islam Seyyed Hossein Nasr Mysticism, history of Steven Payne Mysticism, nature of Steven Payne Nss, Arne
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Ingemund Gullvåg Ngrjuna Mark Siderits Nagel, Ernest Isaac Levi Nagel, Thomas Sonia Sedivy Nahmanides, Moses Josef Stern Nancy, Jean-Luc Peter Fenves Narrative Gregory Currie Nation and nationalism David Miller Native American philosophy Peter M. Whiteley Nativism Jerry Samet Natural deduction, tableau and sequent systems A.M. Ungar Natural kinds Chris Daly Natural Law John Finnis Natural philosophy, medieval Edith Dudley Sylla Natural theology Scott MacDonald Naturalism in ethics Nicholas L. Sturgeon Naturalism in social science Ted Benton Naturalized epistemology Steven Luper Naturalized philosophy of science Ronald N. Giere Nature, aesthetic appreciation of Allen Carlson Nature and convention Kate Soper Naturphilosophie Michael Heidelberger Necessary being Brian Leftow Necessary truth and convention Alan Sidelle Neckham, Alexander Mark D. Jordan Needs and interests Albert Weale Negative facts in classical Indian philosophy Brendan S. Gillon Negative theology David Braine Nemesius John Bussanich Neo-Confucian philosophy Philip J. Ivanhoe Neo-Kantianism
Hans-Ludwig Ollig Neo-Kantianism, Russian Thomas Nemeth Neoplatonism Lucas Siorvanes Neoplatonism in Islamic philosophy Ian Richard Netton Neo-Pythagoreanism Hermann S. Schibli Neumann, John von Brian Rosmaita Neurath, Otto Nancy Cartwright Jordi Cat Neutral monism Nicholas Griffin Neutrality, political Jeremy Waldron Newman, John Henry Ian Ker Newton, Isaac William L. Harper George E. Smith Nichiren J.W. Heisig Nicholas of Autrecourt Dominik Perler Nicholas of Cusa Jasper Hopkins Niebuhr, Helmut Richard Martin E. Marty Niebuhr, Reinhold Martin E. Marty Nietzsche, Friedrich Maudemarie Clark Nietzsche, impact on Russian thought Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal Nifo, Agostino Edward P. Mahoney Nihilism Donald A. Crosby Nihilism, Russian Stephen Lovell Nirva L.S. Cousins Nishi Amane Himi Kiyoshi
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< previous page Page xxvi Nishida Kitarō John C. Maraldo Nishitani Keiji Graham Parkes Nominalism Michael J. Loux Nominalism, Buddhist doctrine of John D. Dunne Non-constructive rules of inference A.P. Hazen Non-monotonic logic André Fuhrmann Normative epistemology Earl Conee Norms, legal Zenon Bań kowski Norris, John Sarah Hutton Nous A.A. Long Nozick, Robert Jonathan Wolff Numbers Graham Priest Numenius John Dillon Nursing ethics Geoffrey Hunt Nyya-Vaiśeika Eli Franco Karin Preisendanz Nygren, Anders Diogenes Allen Oakeshott, Michael Joseph Kenneth Minogue Objectivity Alexander Miller Obligation, political A. John Simmons Observation Peter Kosso Occasionalism William Hasker Ogy Sorai John Allen Tucker Oken, Lorenz Barry Gower Olivecrona, Karl Aleksander Peczenik Olivi, Peter John Robert Pasnau Oman, John Wood Keith E. Yandell Omnipotence Joshua Hoffman Gary Rosenkrantz Omnipresence
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Brian Leftow Omniscience Thomas P. Flint Ontological commitment Michael Jubien Ontology Edward Craig Ontology in Indian philosophy David Ambuel Opera, aesthetics of Michael Tanner Operationalism Frederick Suppe Optics Roger Jones Ordinal logics Solomon Feferman Ordinary language philosophy A.P. Martinich Ordinary language philosophy, school of Geoffrey Warnock Oresme, Nicole George Molland Orientalism and Islamic philosophy Ubai Nooruddin Origen Jeffrey Hause Orphism Walter Burkert Ortega y Gasset, José N. Orringer Oswald, James M.A. Stewart Other minds Alec Hyslop Otto, Rudolf Keith E. Yandell Overton, Richard Udo Thiel Owen, Gwilym Ellis Lane John M. Cooper Oxford Calculators Edith Dudley Sylla Paine, Thomas Bruce Kuklick Paley, William Charlotte R. Brown Panaetius Stephen A. White Pan-Africanism K. Anthony Appiah Panpsychism T.L.S. Sprigge Pan-Slavism Nicholas V. Riasanovsky Pantheism Keith E. Yandell Paracelsus (Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim) E.J. Ashworth Paraconsistent logic
Graham Priest Paradoxes, epistemic Jonathan L. Kvanvig Paradoxes of set and property Gregory H. Moore Paranormal phenomena Stephen E. Braude Parapsychology Allen Stairs Pareto principle David Miller Parmenides David Sedley Particulars John Bigelow Partiinost David Joravsky Pascal, Blaise Ian Maclean Passmore, John Arthur Frank Jackson Patañjali Johannes Bronkhorst Paternalism Richard J. Arneson Patočka, Jan Josef Zumr Patristic philosophy John Peter Kenney Patrizi da Cherso, Francesco E.J. Ashworth Paul of Venice E.J. Ashworth Pecham, John Girard J. Etzkorn Peirce, Charles Sanders Christopher Hookway Pelagianism Christopher Kirwan Perception M.G.F. Martin Perception, epistemic issues in Brian P. McLaughlin Perfectionism Thomas Hurka Performatives Kent Bach
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< previous page Page xxvii Peripatetics R.W. Sharples Personal identity Brian Garrett Personalism Keith E. Yandell Persons Brian Garrett Peter of Auvergne Robert Andrews Peter of Spain John L. Longeway Petrarca, Francesco John Monfasani Petrażycki, Leon Aleksander Peczenik Phenomenalism Richard Fumerton Phenomenological movement Lester Embree Phenomenology, epistemic issues in Jane Howarth Phenomenology in Latin America María Teresa Bertelloni Phenomenology of religion Merold Westphal Philip the Chancellor Scott MacDonald Philo of Alexandria David T. Runia Philo of Larissa Jonathan Barnes Philo the Dialectician Nicholas Denyer Philodemus Michael Erler Philolaus Hermann S. Schibli Philoponus Christian Wildberg Photography, aesthetics of Gregory Currie Physis and nomos Angela Hobbs Piaget, Jean Alison Gopnik Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni James Hankins Pietism Allen C. Guelzo Planck, Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Don Howard Platform Sutra John R. McRae Plato Malcolm Schofield Platonism, Early and Middle
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John Dillon Platonism in Islamic philosophy David Burrell Platonism, medieval Dermot Moran Platonism, Renaissance James Hankins Pleasure Graeme Marshall Plekhanov, Georgii Valentinovich James D. White Plotinus Eyjólfur Kjalar Emilsson Pluralism Edward Craig Plutarch of Chaeronea John Dillon Pneuma Christopher Stead Poetry Richard M. Shusterman Poincaré, Jules Henri David J. Stump Poland, philosophy in Jan Czerkawski Antoni B. Stępień Stanisław Wielgus Polanyi, Michael R.T. Allen Polish logic Jan Zygmunt Political philosophy David Miller Political philosophy, history of Iain Hampsher-Monk Political philosophy in classical Islam Daniel H. Frank Political philosophy, Indian Sohail Inayatullah Political philosophy, nature of Raymond Plant Pomponazzi, Pietro Martin L. Pine Popper, Karl Raimund Ian C. Jarvie Population and ethics David Heyd Pornography Susan Mendus Porphyry Lucas Siorvanes Port-Royal Antony McKenna Posidonius Keimpe A. Algra Positivism in the social sciences Harold Kincaid Positivism, Russian Andrzej Walicki Positivist thought in Latin America
Oscar R. Martí Possible worlds Joseph Melia Post, Emil Leon Michael Scanlan Postcolonial philosophy of science Sandra G. Harding Postcolonialism Ato Quayson Postmodern theology Merold Westphal Postmodernism Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth Postmodernism and political philosophy Stephen K. White Postmodernism, French critics of Reginald Lilly Post-structuralism Gary Gutting Post-structuralism in the social sciences Gary Gutting Potentiality, Indian theories of Richard P. Hayes Pothier, Robert Joseph Neil MacCormick Pound, Roscoe Neil MacCormick Power Leslie Green Practical reason and ethics Onora O’Neill Pragmatics François Recanati Pragmatism Richard Rorty Pragmatism in ethics J.E. Tiles Praise and blame Martha Klein Praxeology Bengt Molander Prayer George I. Mavrodes Predestination George I. Mavrodes Predicate calculus Timothy Smiley Predication Kevin Mulligan
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Page xxviii Prescriptivism R.M. Hare Presocratic philosophy David Sedley Presupposition Ian Rumfitt Price, Richard Stephen Darwall Prichard, Harold Arthur Jim MacAdam Priestley, Joseph Robert E. Schofield Primary-secondary distinction A.D. Smith Prior, Arthur Norman C.J.F. Williams Privacy Frances Olsen Private language argument Stewart Candlish Private states and language Edward Craig Probability, interpretations of Paul Humphreys Probability theory and epistemology Barry Loewer Process philosophy David Ray Griffin Process theism David Basinger Processes Dorothy Emmet Proclus Lucas Siorvanes Prodicus Charles H. Kahn Professional ethics Ruth Chadwick Projectivism Simon Blackburn Promising T.M. Scanlon Proof theory Wilfried Sieg Proper names Graeme Forbes Property Stephen R. Munzer Property theory Nino B. Cocchiarella Prophecy David Shatz Propositional attitude statements Kenneth A. Taylor Propositional attitudes Graham Oppy Propositions, sentences and statements
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Pascal Engel Protagoras Charles H. Kahn Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph Richard Vernon Provability logic Albert Visser Providence William Hasker Prudence Gerard J. Hughes Pseudo-Dionysius Hannes Jarka-Sellers Pseudo-Grosseteste Mark D. Jordan Psychē A.A. Long Psychoanalysis, methodological issues in Patricia Kitcher Psychoanalysis, post-Freudian James Hopkins Psychology, theories of N. E. Wetherick Ptolemy Ferruccio Franco Repellini Public interest Albert Weale Pufendorf, Samuel J.D. Ford Purgatory Linda Zagzebski Putnam, Hilary Yemima Ben-Menahem Pyrrho Jacques Brunschwig Pyrrhonism R.J. Hankinson Pythagoras Hermann S. Schibli Pythagoreanism Hermann S. Schibli Qi David L. Hall Roger T. Ames Qualia Janet Levin Quantification and inference Jeffrey C. King Quantifiers Jaakko Hintikka Gabriel Sandu Quantifiers, generalized Dag Westerståhl Quantifiers, substitutional and objectual Mark Richard Quantum logic Peter Forrest Quantum measurement problem Jeffrey Bub Quantum mechanics, interpretation of
Allen Stairs Questions David Harrah Quine, Willard Van Orman Alex Orenstein Rabelais, François Edwin M. Duval Race, theories of Michael Banton Radbruch, Gustav Massimo La Torre Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli Robert N. Minor Radical translation and radical interpretation Roger F. Gibson Rahner, Karl Jack A. Bonsor Ramakrishna movement Thomas L. Bryson Rmnuja Jan K. Brzezinski Ramsey, Frank Plumpton D. H. Mellor Ramsey, Ian Thomas Keith E. Yandell Ramus, Petrus Peter Mack Rand, Ayn Chandran Kukathas Randomness William A. Dembski Rashdall, Hastings Keith E. Yandell Rational beliefs Christopher Cherniak Rational choice theory Russell Hardin Rationalism Peter J. Markie Rationality and cultural relativism Lawrence H. Simon Rationality of belief Jonathan E. Adler Rationality, practical Jean Hampton
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Page xxix Ravaisson-Mollien, Jean-Gaspard Félix Lacher Pierrette Bonet Rawls, John Samuel Freeman al-Razi, Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariyya Paul E. Walker al-Razi, Fakhr al-Din John Cooper Realism and antirealism Edward Craig Realism in the philosophy of mathematics Patricia A. Blanchette Reasons and causes Michael Smith Reasons for belief Robert Audi Reciprocity Lawrence C. Becker Recognition Axel Honneth Rectification and remainders Claudia Falconer Card Recursion-theoretic hierarchies Harold Hodes Reduction, problems of Jaegwon Kim Reductionism in the philosophy of mind Kim Sterelny Reference Michael Devitt Régis, Pierre-Sylvain Thomas M. Lennon Reichenbach, Hans Wesley C. Salmon Reid, Thomas Roger Gallie Reinach, Adolf Barry Smith Reincarnation Keith E. Yandell Reinhold, Karl Leonhard George di Giovanni Relativism Edward Craig Relativity theory, philosophical significance of Michael Redhead Relevance logic and entailment Stephen Read Reliabilism Alvin I. Goldman Religion and epistemology Alvin Plantinga Religion and morality Richard J. Mouw Religion and political philosophy Paul J. Weithman Religion and science
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Nancey Murphy Religion, critique of Matthias Lutz-Bachmann Religion history of political philosophy William P. Alston Religion, philosophy of Eleonore Stump Religious experience William P. Alston Religious language William P. Alston Religious pluralism Philip L. Quinn Renaissance philosophy E.J. Ashworth Renner, Karl Richard Kinsey Neil MacCormick Renouvier, Charles Bernard Laurent Fedi Representation, political Andrew Reeve Reprobation Ronald J. Feenstra Reproduction and ethics Rosalind Hursthouse Republicanism Russell L. Hanson Respect for persons Thomas E. Hill, Jr Responsibilities of scientists and intellectuals Alan Montefiore Responsibility R.A. Duff Resurrection Peter van Inwagen Revelation Richard Swinburne Revolution Peter A. Schouls rGyal tshab dar ma rin chen Georges B.J. Dreyfus Rhetoric Eugene Garver Richard of Middleton Stephen F. Brown Richard of St Victor Kent Emery, Jr Richard Rufus of Cornwall Rega Wood Ricoeur, Paul John B. Thompson Right and good Charles Larmore Rights Rex Martin Risk Kristin Shrader-Frechette Risk assessment Kristin Shrader-Frechette
Ritual Howard Wettstein Rohault, Jacques Theo Verbeek Roman law P.B.H. Birks Romanticism, German Frederick Beiser Rorty, Richard McKay Michael David Rohr Roscelin of Compiègne Martin M. Tweedale Rosenzweig, Franz Myriam Bienenstock Rosmini-Serbati, Antonio Guido Verucci Ross, Alf Enrico Pattaro Ross, William David David McNaughton Rousseau, Jean-Jacques N.J.H. Dent Royce, Josiah Robert W. Burch Rozanov, Vasilii Vasilevich Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal Ruge, Arnold Hans-Martin Sass Rule of law (Rechtsstaat) T.R.S. Allan Russell, Bertrand Arthur William Nicholas Griffin Russian empiriocriticism David Joravsky Russian literary formalism Carol Any Russian Materialism: ‘The 1860s’ James P. Scanlan Russian philosophy Aileen Kelly Russian religious-philosophical renaissance Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal Ryle, Gilbert William Lyons Sa skya paita Georges B.J. Dreyfus
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Page xxx Saadiah Gaon L.E. Goodman al-Sabzawari, al-Hajj Mulla Hadi John Cooper Sacraments David Braine Saint-Simon, Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de David Leopold Salvation Keith E. Yandell Sanches, Francisco Richard H. Popkin Sanctification Diogenes Allen akara Andrew O. Fort Skhya Dan Lusthaus Santayana, George John Lachs Sapir-Whorf hypothesis John A. Lucy Sartre, Jean-Paul Christina Howells Saussure, Ferdinand de David Holdcroft Savigny, Friedrich Karl von Neil MacCormick Scandinavia, philosophy in Dagfinn Føllesdal Scepticism Stewart Cohen Scepticism, Renaissance Richard H. Popkin Scheler, Max Ferdinand Francis Dunlop Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Andrew Bowie Schellingianism Victor Terras Schiller, Ferdinand Canning Scott Reuben Abel Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich T.J. Reed Schlegel, Friedrich von Frederick Beiser Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst Günter Meckenstock Schlick, Friedrich Albert Moritz Thomas Oberdan Schmitt, Carl David Ludovic Dyzenhaus Schopenhauer, Arthur Christopher Janaway Schumpeter, Joseph Alois Richard Swedberg Schurman, Anna Maria van
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Eileen O’Neill Schütz, Alfred Finn Collin Science in Islamic philosophy Ziauddin Sardar Science, 19th century philosophyof Robert E. Butts Science, philosophy of John Worrall Scientific method Gary Hatfield Scientific realism and antirealism Arthur Fine Scientific realism and social science Russell Keat Scope Mark Richard Searle, John Ernie Lepore Second- and higher-order logics Shaughan Lavine Second-order logic, philosophical issues in Stewart Shapiro Secondary qualities Colin McGinn Selden, John Peter Goodrich Self, Indian theories of T.S. Rukmani Self-control Philip L. Quinn Self-cultivation in Chinese philosophy Tu Wei-ming Self-deception Alfred R. Mele Self-deception, ethics of Mike W. Martin Self-realization Mark Evans Self-respect Cynthia A. Stark Sellars, Wilfrid Stalker Jay F. Rosenberg Semantic paradoxes and theories of truth Vann McGee Semantics Mark Crimmins Semantics, conceptual role Ned Block Semantics, game-theoretic Michael Hand Semantics, informational Brian P. McLaughlin Georges Rey Semantics, possible worlds John R. Perry Semantics, situation John R. Perry Semantics, teleological Peter Godfrey-Smith
Semiotics W.C. Watt Seneca, Lucius Annaeus Brad Inwood Sengzhao Thomas P. Kasulis Sense and reference Genoveva Martí Sense perception, Indian views of Stephen H. Phillips Sense-data André Gallois Sergeant, John Beverley Southgate Set theory John P. Burgess Set theory, different systems of Michael Potter Sextus Empiricus R.J. Hankinson Sexuality, philosophy of Alan Soble Shaftesbury, Third Earl of (Anthony Ashley Cooper) David McNaughton Shah Wali Allah (Qutb al-Din Ahmad al-Rahim) Hafiz A. Ghaffar Khan Shao Yong Anne D. Birdwhistell Shem Tov Family Hava Tirosh-Samuelson Shestov, Lev (Yehuda Leib Shvartsman) Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal Shinran Taitetsu Unno Shintō Paul Varley Shōtoku Constitution Yukio Kachi Shpet, Gustav Gustavovich Alexander Haardt
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Page xxxi Sidgwick, Henry Bart Schultz Siger of Brabant John F. Wippel Signposts movement Aileen Kelly al-Sijistani, Abu Sulayman Muhammad George N. Atiyeh Silvestri, Francesco Michael Tavuzzi Simmel, Georg David Frisby Simplicity (in scientific theories) Elliott Sober Simplicity, divine Brian Leftow Simplicius Christian Wildberg Sin Philip L. Quinn Sirhak Yông-ho Choe Situation ethics Gene Outka Skinner, Burrhus Frederick Owen Flanagan Georges Rey Skovoroda, Hryhorii Savych Taras D. Zakydalsky Slavery Stephen L. Esquith Nicholas D. Smith Slavophilism Andrzej Walicki Slovakia, philosophy in Josef Zumr Smart, John Jamieson Carswell Frank Jackson Smith, Adam Knud Haakonssen Social action Raimo Tuomela Social choice Alan Hamlin Social democracy David Miller Social epistemology Frederick F. Schmitt Social laws Philip Pettit Social norms Margaret Gilbert Social relativism Alan Musgrave Social science, contemporary philosophy of David Braybrooke Social science, history of philosophy of
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Peter T. Manicas Social science, methodology of Alex Rosenberg Social sciences, philosophy of David-Hillel Ruben Social sciences, prediction in Eerik Lagerspetz Social theory and law Roger Cotterrell Socialism Russell Keat John O’Neill Society, concept of Angus Ross Socinianism John Marshall Sociobiology Alex Rosenberg Sociology of knowledge David Bloor Sociology, theories of Jeffrey C. Alexander Socrates John M. Cooper Socratic dialogues Charles H. Kahn Socratic schools Voula Tsouna Solidarity Andrew Mason Solipsism Edward Craig Soloveitchik, Joseph B. D. Hartman Solovëv, Vladimir Sergeevich Andrzej Walicki Sophists Charles H. Kahn Sorel, Georges Jeremy Jennings Sôsan Hyujông Sung Bae Park Soto, Domingo de John P. Doyle Soul in Islamic philosophy Shams C. Inati Soul, nature and immortality of the Richard Swinburne South Slavs, philosophy of Aleksandar Pavković Živan Lazović Sovereignty J.D. Ford Space Roberto Torretti Spacetime Roberto Torretti Spain, philosophy in José Luis Abellán Species
Kim Sterelny Speech acts Kent Bach Spencer, Herbert Tim S. Gray Speusippus John Dillon Spinoza, Benedict de Henry E. Allison Split brains Charles Marks Sport and ethics Drew A. Hyland Sport, philosophy of Drew A. Hyland Staël-Holstein, Anne-Louise-Germaine, Mme de David Leopold Stair, James Dalrymple, Viscount Scott C. Styles State, the Peter P. Nicholson Statistics James Woodward Statistics and social science Peter Spirtes Steiner, Rudolf Keith E. Yandell Stevenson, Charles Leslie James Dreier Stewart, Dugald Edward H. Madden Stirner, Max David Leopold Stoicism David Sedley Strato R.W. Sharples Strauss, David Friedrich Horton Harris Strauss, Leo Shadia B. Drury Strawson, Peter Frederick Paul F. Snowdon Structuralism Jonathan Culler Structuralism in linguistics D. Holdcroft
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Page xxxii Structuralism in literary theory Joseph Margolis Structuralism in social science Theodore R. Schatzki Suárez, Francisco John P. Doyle Subject, postmodern critique of the Laura Hengehold Sublime, the Paul Crowther Substance Michael Ayers Suchon, Gabrielle Michèle Le Doeuff Suffering David DeGrazia Suffering, Buddhist views of origination of Marek Mejor al-Suhrawardi, Shihab al-Din Yahya John Cooper Suicide, ethics of Paul Edwards Sunzi Roger T. Ames Supererogation Gregory Velazco y Trianosky Supervenience Simon Blackburn Supervenience of the mental B. Loewer Suso, Henry John Bussanich Swedenborg, Emanuel Alison Laywine Symbolic interactionism Arthur Brittan Syntax Stephen Neale Systems theory in social science Alan Ryan James Bohman Tagore, Rabindranath Robert N. Minor Taine, Hippolyte-Adolphe Colin Evans Tanabe Hajime Himi Kiyoshi Tarski, Alfred Roman Murawski Tarski’s definition of truth Anil Gupta Tauler, John John Bussanich al-Tawhidi, Abu Hayyan Charles Genequand Taxonomy David L. Hull
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Taylor, Charles Craig Calhoun Taylor, Harriet Candace Vogler Technology and ethics Carl Mitcham Helen Nissenbaum Technology, philosophy of Peter Kroes Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre Keith E. Yandell Tel Quel School Stephen Heath Teleological ethics Christine M. Korsgaard Teleology Andrew Woodfield Telesio, Bernardino Eckhard Kessler Temple, William Keith E. Yandell Tennant, Frederick Robert Stephen Maitzen Tense and temporal logic Quentin Smith Tertullian, Quintus Septimus Florens John Peter Kenney Testimony C.A.J. Coady Testimony in Indian philosophy Purushottama Bilimoria Tetens, Johann Nicolaus Günter Zöller Thales Richard McKirahan Themistius John Bussanich Theological virtues William E. Mann Theology, political Matthias Lutz-Bachmann Theology, Rabbinic Aryeh Botwinick Theophrastus Pamela M. Huby Theoretical (epistemic) virtues William G. Lycan Theories, scientific Frederick Suppe Theory and observation in social sciences William Outhwaite Theory and practice John O’Neill Theory of types Nino B. Cocchiarella Theosophy Michael B. Wakoff Thermodynamics Lawrence Sklar
Thielicke, Helmut Keith E. Yandell Thierry of Chartres John Marenbon Thomas à Kempis Kent Emery, Jr Thomas of York Fiona Somerset Thomasius (Thomas), Christian Knud Haakonssen Thomism John Haldane Thoreau, Henry David Timothy Gould Thought experiments David C. Gooding Thrasymachus Angela Hobbs Thucydides Paul Woodruff Ti and yong Philip J. Ivanhoe Tian David L. Hall Roger T. Ames Tibetan philosophy Tom J.F. Tillemans Tillich, Paul Guyton B. Hammond Time Lawrence Sklar Time travel Paul Horwich Timon Jacques Brunschwig Tindal, Matthew Jean-Loup Seban Tocqueville, Alexis de L.A. Siedentop Todorov, Tzvetan Françoise Lionnet Toland, John J.A.I. Champion Toleration John Horton Toletus, Franciscus John P. Doyle Tolstoi, Count Lev Nikolaevich Gary Saul Morson Tominaga Nakamoto John Allen Tucker
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< previous page Page xxxiii Tonghak Yông-ho Choe Totalitarianism Margaret Canovan Tradition and traditionalism Anthony O’Hear Tragedy Susan L. Feagin Transcendental arguments Ross Harrison Translators Jozef Brams Trinity Peter van Inwagen Troeltsch, Ernst Peter Wilhelm Jean-Loup Seban Trotsky, Leon Alex Callinicos Trust Karen Jones Truth, coherence theory of Richard L. Kirkham Truth, correspondence theory of Richard L. Kirkham Truth, deflationary theories of Richard L. Kirkham Truth, pragmatic theory of Richard L. Kirkham Truthfulness Sissela Bok Tschirnhaus, Ehrenfried Walther von Martin Schönfeld Tsong kha pa Blo bzang grags pa Tom J.F. Tillemans Tucker, Abraham T. McNair Turing, Alan Mathison James H. Moor Turing machines Guglielmo Tamburrini Turing reducibility and Turing degrees Harold Hodes Turnbull, George Paul Wood al-Tusi, Khwajah Nasir John Cooper Twardowski, Kazimierz Jan Wolenński Type/token distinction Linda Wetzel Udayana Joy Laine Uddyotakara Joy Laine isang Robert E. Buswell, Jr
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Ulrich of Strasbourg John Bussanich Unamuno y Jugo, Miguel de Nelson R. Orringer Unconscious mental states Georges Rey Underdetermination Larry Laudan Unity of science Jordi Cat Universal language Donald Rutherford Universalism in ethics Onora O’Neill Universals John Bigelow Universals, Indian theories of John A. Taber Use/mention distinction and quotation Corey Washington Utilitarianism Tim Chappell Roger Crisp Utopianism Lyman Tower Sargent Vagueness Michael Tye Vaihinger, Hans Christopher Adair-Toteff Valla, Lorenzo John Monfasani Vallabhcrya Richard J. Cohen Value judgements in social science Tom L. Beauchamp Value, ontological status of Alex Oliver Values Alan Thomas Vasubandhu Richard P. Hayes Marek Mejor Vtsyyana Joy Laine Vednta Stephen H. Phillips Venn, John Daniel D. Merrill Vernia, Nicoletto Edward P. Mahoney Vico, Giambattista Leon Pompa Vienna Circle F. Stadler Villey, Michel Neil MacCormick Violence C.A.J. Coady Virtue epistemology Linda Zagzebski
Virtue ethics Roger Crisp Virtues and vices Bernard Williams Vision Frances Egan Vital du Four William E. Mann Vitalism William Bechtel Robert C. Richardson Vitoria, Francisco de Anthony Pagden Vives, Juan Luis Rita Guerlac Vlastos, Gregory Daniel W. Graham Voegelin, Eric H.M. Höpfl Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) David Williams Voluntarism Brian Leftow Voluntarism, Jewish Allan Lazaroff Von Wright, Georg Henrik Ilkka Niiniluoto Vulnerability and finitude Onora O’Neill Vygotskii, Lev Semënovich David Joravsky Vysheslavtsev, Boris Petrovich James P. Scanlan Wallace, Alfred Russel Barbara G. Beddall Wang Chong Agnes Chalier Wang Fuzhi Alison H. Black Wang Yangming Shun Kwong-loi War and peace, philosophy of Terry Nardin Watsuji Tetsurō Steve Odin Weber, Max Stephen P. Turner Regis A. Factor Weil, Simone R. Williams
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< previous page Page xxxiv Weinberger, Ota Neil MacCormick Welfare Albert Weale Weyl, Hermann T.A. Ryckman Weyr, František Ota Weinberger Whewell, William Menachem Fisch White, Thomas Beverley Southgate Whitehead, Alfred North James Bradley Will, the Thomas Pink William of Auvergne Steven P. Marrone William of Auxerre Scott MacDonald William of Champeaux Martin M. Tweedale William of Conches John Marenbon William of Ockham Claude Panaccio William of Sherwood John Longeway Williams, Bernard Arthur Owen Ross Harrison Wisdom Nicholas D. Smith Witherspoon, John R.J. Fechner Wittgenstein, Ludwig Josef Johann Jane Heal Wittgensteinian ethics Sabina Lovibond Wodeham, Adam Rega Wood Wolff, Christian Charles A. Corr Wollaston, William Charlotte R. Brown Wollstonecraft, Mary Susan Khin Zaw Wônchk Shotaro Iida Wônhyo Sung Bae Park Work, philosophy of Richard Arneson Wróblewski, Jerzy Marek Zirk-Sadowski Wundt, Wilhelm Jens Brockmeier
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Wyclif, John Jeremy Catto Xenocrates John Dillon Xenophanes J.H. Lesher Xenophon David K. O’Connor Xin (heart and mind) David L. Hall Roger T. Ames Xin (trustworthiness) Philip J. Ivanhoe Xing David L. Hall Roger T. Ames Xunzi A.S. Cua Yang Xiong Michael Nylan Yangzhu H.D. Roth Yi Hwang Michael C. Kalton Yi Kan Michael C. Kalton Yi Yulgok Young-chan Ro Yijing Richard John Lynn Yin-yang Roger T. Ames Yoruba epistemology Barry Hallen You-wu David L. Hall Roger T. Ames Zabarella, Jacopo Eckhard Kessler Zeami Michiko Yusa Zeno of Citium David Sedley Zeno of Elea Stephen Makin Zermelo, Ernst Volker Peckhaus Zhang Zai Kirill Ole Thompson Zheng Xuan Michael Nylan Zhi David L. Hall Roger T. Ames Zhi Dun John R. McRae Zhiyi Daniel B. Stevenson Zhongyong Tu Wei-ming
Zhou Dunyi Kirill Ole Thompson Zhu Xi Kirill Ole Thompson Zhuangzi Roger T. Ames Zionism Zeev Levy Zongmi Peter N. Gregory Zoroastrianism Alan Williams
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Page 1 A A POSTERIORI A prominent term in theory of knowledge since the seventeenth century, ‘a posteriori’ signifies a kind of knowledge or justification that depends on evidence, or warrant, from sensory experience. A posteriori truth is truth that cannot be known or justified independently of evidence from sensory experience, and a posteriori concepts are concepts that cannot be understood independently of reference to sensory experience. A posteriori knowledge contrasts with a priori knowledge, knowledge that does not require evidence from sensory experience. A posteriori knowledge is empirical, experiencebased knowledge, whereas a priori knowledge is non-empirical knowledge. Standard examples of a posteriori truths are the truths of ordinary perceptual experience and the natural sciences; standard examples of a priori truths are the truths of logic and mathematics. The common understanding of the distinction between a posteriori and a priori knowledge as the distinction between empirical and non-empirical knowledge comes from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787). See also: A PRIORI Further reading Kant, I. (1781/1787) Critique of Pure Reason , trans. N. Kemp Smith, London: Macmillan, 1963. (Classic statement of the a priori–a posteriori and analytic–synthetic distinctions; see especially the introduction, §§I–IV.) PAUL K. MOSER A PRIORI An important term in epistemology since the seventeenth century, ‘a priori’ typically connotes a kind of knowledge or justification that does not depend on evidence, or warrant, from sensory experience. Talk of a priori truth is ordinarily shorthand for talk of truth knowable or justifiable independently of evidence from sensory experience; and talk of a priori concepts is usually talk of concepts that can be understood independently of reference to sensory experience. A priori knowledge contrasts with a posteriori knowledge, knowledge requiring evidence from sensory experience. Broadly characterized, a posteriori knowledge is empirical, experience-based knowledge, and a priori knowledge is non-empirical knowledge. Standard examples of a priori truths are the truths of mathematics, whereas standard examples of a posteriori truths are the truths of the natural sciences. See also: A POSTERIORI Further reading Moser, P.K. (ed.) (1987) A Priori Knowledge , Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Contains ten of the most important recent essays on a priori knowledge and a bibliography of recent work on the topic.) PAUL K. MOSER ‘ABDUH, MUHAMMAD (1849–1905) The Egyptian reformer and Muslim apologist Muhammad ‘Abduh was a pupil and friend of al-Afghani. Although deeply influenced by him, ‘Abduh was less inclined to political activism and concentrated on religious, legal and educational reform. His best-known writings are a theological treatise, Risalat altawhid (translated into English as The Theology of Unity ), and an unfinished Qur’anic commentary, Tafsir al-manar (The Manar Commentary), on which he collaborated with Rashid Rida. One of the key themes of these works is that since modernity is based on reason, Islam must be compatible with it. But ‘Abduh’s ‘modernism’ went hand in hand with returning to an idealized past, and his ‘rationalism’ was tempered by a belief in divine transcendence which limits the scope of intellectual inquiry. In ethics as in theology, he regarded the classical debates as arid and divisive, although on the issues of free will and moral law his position was in fact similar to that of the Mu‘tazila. See also: ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY, MODERN Further reading Abduh, M. (1897) Risalat al-tawhid (The Theology of Unity), Cairo; trans. I. Musa‘ad and K. Cragg, The Theology of Unity , London: George Allen & Unwin, 1966. (One of ‘Abduh’s major works on philosophical theology.) NEAL ROBINSON
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Page 2 ABELARD, PETER (1079–1142) Among the many scholars who promoted the revival of learning in western Europe in the early twelfth century, Abelard stands out as a consummate logician, a formidable polemicist and a champion of the value of ancient pagan wisdom for Christian thought. Although he worked within the Aristotelian tradition, his logic deviates significantly from that of Aristotle, particularly in its emphasis on propositions and what propositions say. According to Abelard, the subject matter of logic, including universals such as genera and species, consists of linguistic expressions, not of the things these expressions talk about. However, the objective grounds for logical relationships lie in what these expressions signify, even though they cannot be said to signify any things. Abelard is, then, one of a number of medieval thinkers, often referred to in later times as ‘nominalists’, who argued against turning logic and semantics into some sort of science of the ‘real’, a kind of metaphysics. It was Abelard’s view that logic was, along with grammar and rhetoric, one of the sciences of language. In ethics, Abelard defended a view in which moral merit and moral sin depend entirely on whether one’s intentions express respect for the good or contempt for it, and not at all on one’s desires, whether the deed is actually carried out, or even whether the deed is in fact something that ought or ought not be done. Abelard did not believe that the doctrines of Christian faith could be proved by logically compelling arguments, but rational argumentation, he thought, could be used both to refute attacks on Christian doctrine and to provide arguments that would appeal to those who were attracted to high moral ideals. With arguments of this latter sort, he defended the rationalist positions that nothing occurs without a reason and that God cannot do anything other than what he does do. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM, MEDIEVAL; LOGIC, MEDIEVAL Further reading Marenbon, J. (1997) The Philosophy of Peter Abelard , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (The most recent biography of Abelard.) Tweedale, M.M. (1976) Abailard on Universals , Amsterdam: North Holland. (Translates and analyses from a modern perspective the main texts relating to Abelard’s ontology.) MARTIN M. TWEEDALE ABERDEEN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY The Aberdeen Philosophical Society (1758–73) played a formative role in the genesis of Scottish common sense philosophy. Its founder members included the philosopher Thomas Reid and the theologian George Campbell. Its discussions favoured the natural and human sciences, particularly the science of the mind, and one of its central concerns was the refutation of the work of David Hume. See also: COMMON SENSE SCHOOL PAUL WOOD ABHINAVAGUPTA ( c .975–1025) Abhinavagupta was a Kashmiri philosopher, theologian and early exponent of the Hindu Tantra, often counted as the most illustrious representative of the nondual Śaivism of Kashmir. Author of influential Sanskrit works dealing with the philosophy of recognition and the theological interpretation of the Śaivite scriptures, including the encyclopedic Tantrāloka (Light on the Tantras), he also wrote definitively on Indian aesthetic theory. The tradition of the nondual Śaivism of Kashmir gathers up the teachings of several related lineages of northern Śaivite philosophers which developed in Kashmir between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, such as Vasugupta, Kallaṙa, Somānanda and Utpala. Basing his writings on these authors as well as on revealed texts, Abhinavagupta propounds a tantric alternative to the restrictive and orthodox Mīmāṃsā and elaborates a challenge to the later mainline Vedānta. He offers the earliest theoretical bases for a complex and sophisticated Hindu Tantra based on the notion of Śiva as the nondual and all-pervading consciousness. His writings highlight the centrality of the Goddess as the Śakti or power of consciousness. Abhinavagupta elaborates the ritual and meditative methods for the experiential and blissful recognition of Śiva as the intrinsic self-identity of the practitioner. See also: HINDU PHILOSOPHY Further reading Muller-Ortega, P.E. (1989) The Triadic Heart of Śiva: Kaula Tantricism of Abhinavagupta in the Non-Dual Shaivism of Kashmir, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. (An introduction to the Kaula mysticism of the heart as elaborated by Abhinavagupta.) Singh, J. (trans. and ed.) (1991) The Yoga of Delight, Wonder, and Astonishment: A Translation of the Vijñā nabhairava,
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Page 3 Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. (A useful translation of one of the definitive tantras often referred to by Abhinavagupta.) PAUL E. MULLER-ORTEGA ABRAHAM IBN EZRA see IBN EZZRA, ABRAHAM ABRAVANEL, ISAAC (1437–1509) Abravanel is often seen as having a unique position in Jewish philosophy, between the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance. His ideas point both to the past – especially to Maimonides – and to the future, in his approach to the questions of history and of authority in the state. His defence of what he takes to be religious orthodoxy is carried out with serious attention to the arguments of his predecessors. Abravanel takes great pains to understand their reasoning. He even supplies them with additional arguments, before he presents what he takes to be a decisive objection. In particular he expounds Maimonides’ thought in considerable detail, defending him from his critics, while also insisting that Maimonides misrepresented the religious notions he analyses. Abravanel’s most original work lies in his view of history as either natural or artificial. Most human history is artificial, since it represents life in rebellion against God. The best form of government is not a monarchy, despite the views of most Jewish philosophers. For a monarchy does not essentially replicate the relationship of God with his subjects, and other forms of government can produce relatively successful societies. The Messiah, who will eventually transform artificial into natural history, is not a king but more a judge and prophet. He will establish the perfect society through a divine miracle. As long as the state is an absolute monarchy, however, its citizens owe absolute obedience to its ruler. See also: MAIMONIDES, M. Further reading Netanyahu, B. (1972) Don Isaac Abravanel: Statesman and Philosopher , Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society. (The standard work on the life and thought of Abravanel.) OLIVER LEAMAN ABRAVANEL, JUDAH BEN ISAAC ( c .1460/5– c .1520/5) Judah ben Isaac Abravanel was born in Lisbon. After the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, Leone, as he was known, and his family migrated to Naples, but fled two years later following the French invasion. After brief residences in various Italian cities, Leone returned to Naples where he served as court physician to the Spanish Viceroy. Well-versed in the sciences of his day, including physics, medicine and philosophy, whether Jewish, Islamic or Christian, he composed his major work, Dialoghi d’amore (Dialogues of Love), in 1501–2. Although the work influenced such important thinkers as Montaigne, Bruno and Spinoza, its main influence was in literature rather than philosophy. Its style resembles that of other Renaissance works in the ambit of Ficino’s commentary on Plato’s Symposium but, unlike these works, it is neither philosophical commentary nor courtly literature. Adopting the idiom of courtly love and drawing on Platonic and Neoplatonic sources, it complements them with mythological, biblical and Aristotelian sources to produce a novel synthesis of Plato and Aristotle with ideas drawn from the pagan and the revealed traditions, aiming to demonstrate that love is the animating principle of the universe and the cause of all existence, divine as well as material. The three dialogues between Philo, the poetic lover, and his beloved Sophia address the relations between love and desire, the universality of love and the origin of love. Each discussion pivots on an apparent opposition between Philo’s Aristotelian and Sophia’s Platonic views. The discussion of the relations between love and desire raises fundamental questions about the relations of soul and body. See also: PLATONISM, RENAISSANCE Further reading Ruderman, D. (ed.) (1992) Essential Papers on Jewish Culture in Renaissance and Baroque Italy , New York: New York University Press. (Of special importance is ‘The Place of the Dialoghi d’amore in Contemporaneous Jewish Thought’, by A.M. Lesley.) IDIT DOBBS-WEINSTEIN ABSOLUTE, THE The expression ‘the Absolute’ stands for that (supposed) unconditioned reality which is either the spiritual ground of all being or the whole of things considered as a spiritual unity. This use derives especially from Schelling and Hegel, prefigured by Fichte’s talk of an absolute self which lives its life through all finite persons. In English-language philosophy it is associated
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Page 4 with the monistic idealism of such thinkers as F.H. Bradley and Josiah Royce, the first distinguishing the Absolute from God, the second identifying them. See also: IDEALISM T.L.S. SPRIGGE ABSOLUTISM The term ‘absolutism’ describes a form of government in which the authority of the ruler is subject to no theoretical or legal constraints. In the language of Roman law – which played a central role in all theories of absolutism – the ruler was legibus solutus, or ‘unfettered legislator’. Absolutism is generally, although not exclusively, used to describe the European monarchies, and in particular those of France, Spain, Russia and Prussia, between the middle of the sixteenth century and the end of the eighteenth. But some form of absolutism existed in nearly every European state until the late eighteenth century. There have also been recognizable forms of absolute rule in both China and Japan. As a theory absolutism emerged in Europe, and in particular in France, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, in response to the long Civil Wars between the Crown and the nobility known as the Wars of Religion. In the late eighteenth century, as the reform movement associated with the Enlightenment began to influence most European rulers, a form of so-called ‘enlightened absolutism’ (or sometimes ‘enlightened despotism’) emerged. In this the absolute authority of the ruler was directed not towards enhancing the power of the state, but was employed instead for advancing the welfare of his subjects. Further reading Skinner, Q. (1978) The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. 2, The Age of Reformation , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Provides the most succinct account of the political theory of absolutism.) ANTHONY PAGDEN ABSTRACT OBJECTS The central philosophical question about abstract objects is: Are there any? An affirmative answer – given by Platonists or Realists – draws support from the fact that while much of our talk and thought concerns concrete (roughly, spatiotemporally extended) objects, significant parts of it appear to be about objects which lie outside space and time, and are therefore incapable of figuring in causal relationships. The suggestion that there really are such further non-spatial, atemporal and acausal objects as numbers and sets often strikes nominalist opponents as contrary to common sense. But precisely because our apparent talk and thought of abstracta encompasses much – including virtually the whole of mathematics – that seems indispensable to our best attempts to make scientific sense of the world, it cannot be simply dismissed as confused gibberish. For this reason nominalists have commonly adopted a programme of reductive paraphrase, aimed at eliminating all apparent reference to and quantification over abstract objects. In spite of impressively ingenious efforts, the programme appears to run into insuperable obstacles. The simplicity of our initial question is deceptive. Understanding and progress are unlikely without further clarification of the relations between ontological questions and questions about the logical analysis of language, and of the key distinction between abstract and concrete objects. There are both affinities and, more importantly, contrasts between traditional approaches to ontological questions and more recent discussions shaped by ground-breaking work in the philosophy of language initiated by Frege. The importance of Frege’s work lies principally in two insights: first, that questions about what kinds of entity there are cannot sensibly be tackled independently of the logical analysis of language; and second, that the question whether or not certain expressions should be taken to have reference cannot properly be separated from the question whether complete sentences in which those expressions occur are true or false. See also: UNIVERSALS Further reading Wright, C. (1983) Frege’s Conception of Numbers as Objects, Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press. (Excellent exposition and vigorous defence of Frege’s position. Chapters 1 and 2 are especially relevant.) BOB HALE ACADEMY The Academy was a public gymnasium in northwest Athens. Plato taught there, and the Academy remained the centre of Platonic philosophizing until the first century BC. Hence the term ‘Academy’ came to be used to designate Plato’s school; members of the school were called ‘Academics’; and hence, ultimately, the
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Page 5 modern use of the words to describe intellectual institutions and their members. See also: PLATO Further reading Cicero, M.T. (early 45 BC) Academics , trans. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, and London: Heinemann, 1933. (A philosophical retrospect on the Academy by one of its best-known adherents.) JONATHAN BARNES ACTION Philosophical study of human action owes its importance to concerns of two sorts. There are concerns addressed in metaphysics and philosophy of mind about the status of reasoning beings who make their impact in the natural causal world, and concerns addressed in ethics and legal philosophy about human freedom and responsibility. ‘Action theory’ springs from concerns of both sorts; but in the first instance it attempts only to provide a detailed account that may help with answering the metaphysical questions. Action theorists usually start by asking ‘How are actions distinguished from other events?’. For there to be an action, a person has to do something. But the ordinary ‘do something’ does not capture just the actions, since we can say (for instance) that breathing is something that everyone does, although we don’t think that breathing in the ordinary way is an action. It seems that purposiveness has to be introduced – that someone’s intentionally doing something is required. People often do the things they intentionally do by moving bits of their bodies. This has led to the idea that ‘actions are bodily movements’. The force of the idea may be appreciated by thinking about what is involved in doing one thing by doing another. A man piloting a plane might have shut down the engines by depressing a lever, for example; and there is only one action here if the depressing of the lever was (identical with) the shutting down of the engines. It is when identities of this sort are accepted that an action may be seen as an event of a person’s moving their body: the pilot’s depressing of the lever was (also) his moving of his arm, because he depressed the lever by moving his arm. But how do bodies’ movings – such events now as his arm’s moving – relate to actions? According to one traditional empiricist account, these are caused by volitions when there are actions, and a volition and a body’s moving are alike parts of the action. But there are many rival accounts of the causes and parts of actions and of movements. And volitional notions feature not only in a general account of the events surrounding actions, but also in accounts that aim to accommodate the experience that is characteristic of agency. See also: RATIONALITY, PRACTICAL Further reading Brand, M. and Walton, D. (eds) (1976) Action Theory , Dordrecht: Reidel. (Varied collection of accessible articles.) Donagan, A. (1987) Choice: The Essential Element in Human Action , London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (Readable introduction, introducing more background than many standard works on ‘action theory’.) JENNIFER HORNSBY ADORNO, THEODOR WIESENGRUND (1903–69) Philosopher, musicologist and social theorist, Theodor Adorno was the philosophical architect of the first generation of Critical Theory emanating from the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany. Departing from the perspective of more orthodox Marxists, Adorno believed the twin dilemmas of modernity – injustice and nihilism – derived from the abstractive character of Enlightenment rationality. In consequence, he argued that the critique of political economy must give way to a critique of Enlightenment, instrumental reason. Identity thinking, as Adorno termed instrumental rationality, abstracts from the sensory, linguistic and social mediations which connect knowing subjects to objects known. In so doing, it represses what is contingent, sensuous and particular in persons and nature. Adorno’s method of negative dialectics was designed to rescue these elements from the claims of instrumental reason. Adorno conceded, however, that all this method could demonstrate was that an abstract concept did not exhaust its object. For a model of an alternative grammar of reason and cognition Adorno turned to the accomplishments of artistic modernism. There, where each new work tests and transforms the very idea of something being a work of art, Adorno saw a model for the kind of dynamic interdependence between mind and its objects that was required for a renewed conception of knowing and acting.
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Page 6 Further reading Adorno, T.W. and Horkheimer, M. (1947) Dialektik der Aufklärung , Amsterdam: Querido; trans. J. Cumming, Dialectic of Enlightenment, London: Allen Lane and New York: Herder & Herder, 1972. (This is the founding document of first-generation Critical Theory in which the critique of instrumental reason comes to displace the critique of political economy. It includes Adorno’s famous treatment of Odysseus as already enacting the Enlightenment sacrifice of the particular to the universal, and his analysis of the culture industry.) Jay, M. (1984) Adorno , London: Fontana. (A clear introduction for the general reader, but without a sharp, philosophical focus.) J.M. BERNSTEIN ADVERBS Adverbs are so named from their role in modifying verbs and other non-nominal expressions. For example, in ‘John ran slowly’, the adverb ‘slowly’ modifies ‘ran’ by characterizing the manner of John’s running. The debate on the semantic contribution of adverbs centres on two approaches. On the first approach, adverbs are understood as predicate operators: for example, in ‘John ran slowly’, ‘ran’ would be taken to be a predicate and ‘slowly’ an operator affecting its meaning. Working this out in detail requires the resources of higher-order logic. On the second approach, adverbs are understood as predicates of ‘objects’ such as events and states, reference to which is revealed in logical form. For example, ‘John ran slowly’ would be construed along the lines of ‘there was a running by John and it was slow’, in which the adverb ‘slowly’ has become a predicate ‘slow’ applied to the event that was John’s running. Since adverbs are exclusively modifiers, they are classed among the syncategorematic words of terminist logic, the investigation of which carried the subject forward from Aristotle in the thirteenth century. (The contrasting ‘categoremata’ – grammatical subjects and predicates – are those words which have meaning independently.) They are of contemporary interest for philosophical logic and semantic theory, because particular accounts of them carry implications for the nature of combinatorial semantics and language understanding, and for ontology. Further reading Parsons, T. (1990) Events in the Semantics of English , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (Extended development and discussion of adverbs; clear and, for the most part, non-technical; good bibliography.) JAMES HIGGINBOTHAM AENESIDEMUS (1st century BC) Aenesidemus was a Greek philosopher of the first century BC who revived Pyrrhonian Scepticism, formulating the basic Ten Modes of Scepticism, or tropoi, and demonstrating that concepts such as cause, explanation, goodness and the goal of life engendered endemic and undecidable dispute. Faced with this the Sceptic suspends judgment, and tranquillity follows. Further reading Hankinson, R.J. (1995) The Sceptics , London: Routledge. (Chapter VII deals with Aenesidemean Scepticism.) R.J. HANKINSON AESTHETIC ATTITUDE It is undeniable that there are aesthetic and non-aesthetic attitudes. But is there such a thing as the aesthetic attitude? What is meant by the aesthetic attitude is the particular way in which we regard something when and only when we take an aesthetic interest in it. This assumes that on all occasions of aesthetic interest the object attended to is regarded in an identical fashion, unique to such occasions; and this assumption is problematic. If an attitude’s identity is determined by the features it is directed towards; if an aesthetic interest in an object is (by definition) an interest in its aesthetic qualities; and if the notion of aesthetic qualities can be explained in a uniform manner; then there is a unitary aesthetic attitude, namely an interest in an item’s aesthetic qualities. But this conception of the aesthetic attitude would be unsuitable for achieving the main aim of those who have posited the aesthetic attitude. This aim is to provide a definition of the aesthetic, but the aesthetic attitude, understood as any attitude focused upon an object’s aesthetic qualities, presupposes the idea of the aesthetic, and cannot be used to analyse it. So the question is whether there is a characterization of the aesthetic attitude that describes its nature without explicitly or implicitly relying on the concept of the aesthetic. There is no good reason to suppose so. Accordingly, there is no such thing as the aesthetic attitude, if this is an attitude that is both necessary and sufficient for aesthetic
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Page 7 interest and that can be characterized independently of the aesthetic. See also: AESTHETIC CONCEPTS MALCOLM BUDD AESTHETIC CONCEPTS Aesthetic concepts are the concepts associated with the terms that pick out aesthetic properties referred to in descriptions and evaluations of experiences involving artistic and aesthetic objects and events. The questions (epistemological, psychological, logical and metaphysical) that have been raised about these properties are analogous to those raised about the concepts. In the eighteenth century, philosophers such as Edmund Burke and David Hume attempted to explain aesthetic concepts such as beauty empirically, by connecting them with physical and psychological responses that typify individuals’ experiences of different kinds of objects and events. Thus they sought a basis for an objectivity of personal reactions. Immanuel Kant insisted that aesthetic concepts are essentially subjective (rooted in personal feelings of pleasure and pain), but argued that they have a kind of objectivity on the grounds that, at the purely aesthetic level, feelings of pleasure and pain are universal responses. In the twentieth century, philosophers have sometimes returned to a Humean analysis of aesthetic concepts via the human faculty of taste, and have extended this psychological account to try to establish an epistemological or logical uniqueness for aesthetic concepts. Many have argued that although there are no aesthetic laws (for example, ‘All roses are beautiful,’ or ‘If a symphony has four movements and is constructed according to rules of Baroque harmony, it will be pleasing’) aesthetic concepts none the less play a meaningful role in discussion and disputation. Others have argued that aesthetic concepts are not essentially distinguishable from other types of concepts. Recently theorists have been interested in ways that aesthetic concepts are context-dependent – constructed out of social mores and practices, for example. Their theories often deny that aesthetic concepts can be universal. For example, not only is there no guarantee that the term ‘harmony’ will have the same meaning in different cultures: it may not be used at all. See also: AFRICAN AESTHETICS; FEMINIST AESTHETICS Further reading Hume, D. (1757) Of the Standard of Taste and Other Essays, ed. J.W. Lenz, Indianapolis, IN: BobbsMerrill, 1965. (A classic and highly readable historical text.) Kant, I. (1790) The Critique of Judgment , trans. J.C. Meredith, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973. (A classic historical text.) MARCIA EATON AESTHETICS Aesthetics owes its name to Alexander Baumgarten who derived it from the Greek aisthanomai, which means perception by means of the senses (see BAUMGARTEEN, A.G.). As the subject is now understood, it consists of two parts: the philosophy of art, and the philosophy of the aesthetic experience and character of objects or phenomena that are not art. Non-art items include both artefacts that possess aspects susceptible of aesthetic appreciation, and phenomena that lack any traces of human design in virtue of being products of nature, not humanity. How are the two sides of the subject related: is one part of aesthetics more fundamental than the other? There are two obvious possibilities. The first is that the philosophy of art is basic, since the aesthetic appreciation of anything that is not art is the appreciation of it as if it were art. The second is that there is a unitary notion of the aesthetic that applies to both art and non-art; this notion defines the idea of aesthetic appreciation as disinterested delight in the immediately perceptible properties of an object for their own sake; and artistic appreciation is just aesthetic appreciation of works of art. But neither of these possibilities is plausible. The first represents the aesthetic appreciation of nature as essentially informed by ideas intrinsic to the appreciation of art, such as style, reference and the expression of psychological states. But in order for that curious feeling, the experience of the sublime – invoked, perhaps, by the immensity of the universe as disclosed by the magnitude of stars visible in the night sky (see SUBLIME, THE) – to be aesthetic, or for you to delight in the beauty of a flower, it is unnecessary for you to imagine these natural objects as being works of art. In fact, your appreciation of them is determined by their lack of features specific to works of art and perhaps also by their possession of features available only to aspects of nature (see NATURE, AESTHETIC APPRECIATION OF). The second fails to do justice to the significance for artistic appreciation of various features of works of art that are not immediately perceptible, such as a work’s provenance (see
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Page 8 ARTISTIC FORGERY) and its position in the artist’s oeuvre. A more accurate view represents the two parts of the subject as being related to each other in a looser fashion than either of these positions recognizes, each part exhibiting variety in itself, the two being united by a number of common issues or counterpart problems, but nevertheless manifesting considerable differences in virtue of the topics that are specific to them. In fact, although some issues are common to the two parts, many are specific to the philosophy of art and a few specific to the aesthetics of non-art objects. Both works of art and other objects can possess specifically aesthetic properties, such as beauty and gracefulness. If they do possess properties of this sort, they will also possess properties that are not specifically aesthetic, such as size and shape. And they will be susceptible of aesthetic and non-aesthetic appreciation, and subject to aesthetic and non-aesthetic judgments. What distinguishes an item’s aesthetic from its non-aesthetic properties and what faculties are essential to detecting aesthetic properties (see AESTHETIC CONCEPTS)? What is the nature of aesthetic appreciation? It has often been thought that there is a particular attitude that is distinctive of aesthetic appreciation: you must adopt this attitude in order for the item’s aesthetic properties to be manifest to you, and if you are in this attitude you are in a state of aesthetic contemplation (see AESTHETIC ATTITUDE). This suppositious attitude has often been thought of as one of disinterested contemplation focused on an item’s intrinsic, non-relational, immediately perceptible properties. But perhaps this view of aesthetic interest as disinterested attention is the product of masculine bias, involving the assumption of a position of power over the observed object, a reflection of masculine privilege, an expression of the ‘male gaze’. Another idea is that awareness of an object’s aesthetic properties is the product of a particular species of perception, an idea which stands in opposition to the claim that this awareness is nothing but the projection of the observer’s response onto the object (see ARTISTIC TASTE). An object’s beauty would appear to be a relational, mind-dependent property – a property it possesses in virtue of its capacity to affect observers in a certain manner. But which observers and what manner? And can attributions of beauty, which often aspire to universal interpersonal validity, ever attain that status (see BEAUTY)? The great German philosopher Immanuel Kant presented a conception of an aesthetic judgment as a judgment that must be founded on a feeling of pleasure or displeasure; he insisted that a pure aesthetic judgment about an object is one that is unaffected by any concepts under which the object might be seen; and he tried to show that the implicit claim of such a judgment to be valid for everyone is justified. But how acceptable is his conception of an aesthetic judgment and how successful is his attempted justification of the claims of pure aesthetic judgments (see KANT, I.)? 1 Aesthetics of art Those questions that are specific to the philosophy of art are of three kinds: ones that arise only within a particular art form or set of related arts (perhaps arts addressed to the same sense), ones that arise across a number of arts of heterogeneous natures, and ones that are entirely general, necessarily applying to anything falling under the mantle of art. Here are some of the most salient facts about art. Not everything is art. Artists create works of art, which reflect the skills, knowledge and personalities of their makers, and succeed or fail in realizing their aims. Works of art can be interpreted in different ways, understood, misunderstood or baffle the mind, subjected to analysis, and praised or criticized. Although there are many kinds of value that works of art may possess, their distinctive value is their value as art. The character of a work of art endows it with a greater or lesser degree of this distinctive value. Accordingly, the most fundamental general question about art would seem to be: what is art? Is it possible to distinguish art from non-art by means of an account that it is definitive of the nature of art, or are the arts too loosely related to one another for them to possess an essence that can be captured in a definition (see ART, DEFINITION OF)? Whatever the answer to this question may be, another entirely general issue follows hard on its heels. It concerns the ontology of art, the kind of thing a work of art is. Do some works of art fall into one ontological category (particulars) and some into another (types) or do they all fall within the same category (see ART WORKS, ONTOLOGY OF)? And a number of other important general questions quickly arise. What is a work’s artistic value and which aspects of a work are relevant to or determine this value? Is the value of a work of art, considered as art, an intrinsic or an extrinsic feature of it? Is it determined solely by the work’s form or by certain aspects of its content – its truth or its moral sensitivity, for
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Page 9 example? Can judgments about a work’s artistic value justifiably lay claim to universal agreement or are they merely expressions of subjective preferences? And how is a work’s artistic value related to, and how important is it in comparison with, other kinds of value it may possess (see ART, VALUE OF; FORMALISM IN ART; ART AND TRUTH; ART AND MORALITY; SCHILLER, J.C.F.)? What is required to detect the critically relevant properties of artworks, over and above normal perceptual and intellectual powers, and how can judgments that attribute such properties be supported (see ART CRITICISM)? What kinds of understanding are involved in artistic appreciation, and must an acceptable interpretation of a work be compatible with any other acceptable interpretation (see ART, UNDERSTANDING OF; ARTISTIC INTERPRETATION; STRUCTURALISM IN LITERARY THEORY)? In what way, if any, does the artist’s intention determine the meaning or their work (see ARTIST’S INTENTION)? What is an artist’s style and what is its significance in the appreciation of the artist’s work (see ARTISTIC STYLE)? 2 Aesthetics and the arts One question that arises only for a small set of art forms concerns the nature of depiction. It might be thought that the analysis of the nature of depiction has no special importance within the philosophy of art, for pictorial representation is just as frequent outside as inside art. But this overlooks the fact that real clarity about the ways in which pictures can acquire value as art must be founded on a sophisticated understanding of what a picture is and the psychological resources needed to grasp what it depicts. So what is it for a surface to be or contain a picture of an object or state of affairs? Must the design on the surface be such as to elicit a certain species of visual experience, and must the function of the means by which the pattern was produced, or the intention of the person who created it, be to replicate features of the visible world? Or is a picture a member of a distinctive kind of symbol system, which can be defined without making use of any specifically visual concepts (see DEPICTION; GOODMAN, N.)? Another question that has a limited application concerns the distinctive nature and value of a particular artistic genre, the response it encourages from us, and the insight into human life it displays and imparts. For example, whereas a comedy exploits our capacity to find something funny, a tragedy engages our capacity to be moved by the fate of other individuals, and erotic art aims to evoke a sexual reaction; and this difference in the emotional responses at the hearts of the genres goes hand in hand with the different aspects of human life they illuminate (see COMEDY; EMOTION IN RESPONSE TO ART; EROTIC ART; HUMOUR; TRAGEDY). Questions about the individual natures and possibilities of the various arts include some that are specific to the particular art and some that apply also to other arts. On the one hand, relatively few art forms (architecture and pottery, for example) are directed to the production of works that are intended to perform non-artistic functions, or are of a kind standardly used for utilitarian purposes, and, accordingly, the issue of the relevance to its artistic value of a work’s performing, or presenting the appearance of performing, its intended non-artistic function satisfactorily is confined to such arts (see ARCHITECTURE, AESTHETICS OF). Again, only in some arts does a spectator witness a performance of a work, so that issues about a performer’s contribution to the interpretation of a work or about the evaluation of different performances of the same work are limited to such arts (see ART, PERFORMING). And since only some works of art (novels, plays and films, for example) tell a story, and only some refer to fictional persons or events, questions about the means by which a story is told or how references to fictional objects should be understood have a restricted application within the arts (see NARRATIVE; FICTIONAL ENTITIES). On the other hand, most, if not all, arts allow of works within their domain being correctly perceived as being expressive of psychological states, and, accordingly, give rise to the question of what it is for a work to be expressive of such a condition (see ARTISTIC EXPRESSION). But the means available within the different arts for the expression of psychological states are various: poetry consists of words, dance exploits the human body, and instrumental music uses nothing other than sounds. And these different artistic media impose different limits on the kinds of state that can be expressed by works of art, the specificity of the states, and the significance within an art of the expressive aspects of its products (see GURNEY, E.). Furthermore, it is a general truth about the various arts, rather than one special to expression, that what can be achieved within an art is determined by the nature of the medium the art is based on. Accordingly, an adequate philosophy of art must investigate the variety of such media and elucidate the peculiar advantages they offer and the limitations they impose (see ABSTRACT ART;
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Page 10 DANCE, AESTHETICS OF; FILM, AESTHETICS OF; HANSLICK, E.; LANGER, S.K.K.; LESSING, G.E.; MUSIC, AESTHETICS OF; OPERA, AESTHETICS OF; PHOTOGRAPHY, AESTHETICS OF; POETRY). See also: AESTHETICS, AFRICAN Further reading Hegel, G. (1835) Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T.M. Knox, Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1975. (Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics, delivered in Berlin in the 1820s, are a classic introduction to the subject.) Kant, I. (1790) Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, trans. W.S. Pluhar, Indianapolis, IN and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987. Wollheim, R. (1980) Art and Its Objects, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Essay considering the philosophical issues of works of art.) MALCOLM BUDD AESTHETICS, AFRICAN The study and analysis of African art and aesthetics have been dominated by Western culture. Initially the aesthetic sensitivities of African cultures were characterized as ‘primitive’ and of low intellectual calibre. Africans reacted to such negative stereotyping by articulating their own, deliberately nonWestern aesthetic theories. The best known of these is négritude. With its emphasis on learning about a culture by living in it for a period of time, anthropology encouraged scholars to relate African art directly to the aesthetic values of the cultures that produced it. This kind of contextual approach has also become the special concern of African art historians. One can exemplify the exploration of the aesthetic conceptions of a particular culture in this way by considering the case of the Yoruba peoples of southwestern Nigeria. The Yoruba have a detailed and refined aesthetic vocabulary that has been subjected to extended description and analysis. Where human beings are concerned, the highest form of beauty is attributed to a person’s good moral character. Where objects are concerned, beauty is influenced by their utility or, in the case of figurative carvings, by the intelligence and ability of the artist. Further reading Abiodun, R., Drewal, H. and Pemberton, J. (eds) (1990) African Art Studies: the State of the Discipline , Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. (A collection of clear assessments by African art historians, detailing the accomplishments and shortcomings of their discipline. The contribution by R. Abiodun on Yoruba aesthetic terminology is noteworthy.) Irele, A. (1990) The African Experience in Literature and Ideology , Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. (A cultural and historical analysis of négritude as an African ideological movement.) BARRY HALLEN AESTHETICS AND ETHICS The contrast between ethical and aesthetic judgments, which has provided a good deal of the subjectmatter of aesthetics, stems largely from Immanuel Kant’s idiosyncratic view of morality as a series of imperatives issued in accordance with the dictates of practical reason, while for him judgments of taste are based on no principles. This has led even non-Kantians to argue that aesthetic judgments are primarily concerned, as is art itself, with uniqueness, while morality has mainly to do with repeatable actions. This tends to separate art from other human activities, a separation which was encouraged by the collection of useless items by ‘connoisseurs’, who took over as their vocabulary of appreciation the traditional language of religious contemplation. This viewpoint has been attacked passionately by idealist aestheticians, who claim that art is a heightening of the common human activity of expressing emotions, to the point where they are experienced and rendered lucidly, as they rarely are in everyday life. Marxist aestheticians, whose roots lie in the same tradition as idealists, argue that art is inherently political, and that the realm of ‘pure aesthetic experience’ is chimerical. Meanwhile the analytic tradition in aesthetics has spent much effort amplifying Kant-style positions, without taking into account their historical conditioning. There is a tendency to contrast the activities of the moralist, prescribing courses of action, with that of the critic, whose only job can be to point to the unrepeatable features which constitute a work of art. See also: ART AND MORALITY Further reading Mothersill, M. (1984) Beauty Restored, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (A full-length Kantian account of aesthetic judgment, full of resourceful and stimulating argument.) MICHAEL TANNER
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Page 11 AESTHETICS, CHINESE In China, poetry, painting and calligraphy are traditionally known as the ‘Three Perfections’ of the cultivated scholar. They are construed as ethico-aesthetic acts of self-signification and are evaluated as to their efficacy in fostering harmonious relations of social exchange within the concrete circumstances of particular social contexts. In contrast to Western notions of mimesis, the Chinese poetic tradition assumes the existence of fundamental, mutually implicating correlations between the patterns ( wen ) immanent in nature and those of human culture. This gives rise to two traditions of Chinese poetics. First, there is the canonical tradition of Confucian exegesis, in which a poem was assumed to invoke a network of pre-established categorical correlations ( lei) between poet and world, which enabled the imagery to be read as verbal indices of both personal feeling and the relative stability of the social and natural order. Second, there is the non-canonical tradition of neo-Daoist and Buddhist-inspired poetics which represented a shift from the didactic to the affective power of natural imagery to make reference to the poet’s state of mind. Calligraphy and painting were adopted by the gentleman-scholar as ethico-aesthetic practices of xiushen (self-cultivation) and self-expression, and for promotion of social exchange. Early writings describing calligraphy and painting deploy metaphorical imagery that makes reference to both nature and the body. This imagery invoked the indigenous correlative rhetoric that sought consonance between the patterns immanent within the natural order and those of the human realm. The embodiment of tradition, through the practice of making artistic references to the past, was fundamental to the art of the scholar-painter, for it served to establish one’s artistic lineage and to sanction or authorize one’s own self-presentation within a particular historical situation. See also: AESTHETICS, JAPANESE Further reading Bush, S. and Shih Hsiao-yen (eds) (1985) Early Chinese Texts of Painting , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Thematically arranged compilation of translations of Chinese writings on art.) Driscoll, L. and Toda, K. (1935) Chinese Calligraphy, Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. (The first systematic discussion of Chinese calligraphy in English.) Liu, J.J.Y. (1975) Chinese Theories of Literature , Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (A thorough study of the different theories of Chinese literature.) STEPHEN J. GOLDBERG AESTHETICS, FEMINIST see FEMINIST AESTHETICS AESTHETICS IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY The major Islamic philosophers produced no works dedicated to aesthetics, although their writings do address issues that contemporary philosophers might study under that heading. The nature of beauty was addressed by Islamic philosophers in the course of discussions about God andhis attributes inrelation to his creation, under the inspiration of Neoplatonic sources such as the pseudo-Aristotelian Theology of Aristotle, a compilation based upon the Enneads of Plotinus. Considerations of artistic beauty and creativity were also addressed in works inspired by Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics , and Islamic philosophers also adapted some of Plato’s views on literature and imitation, particularly those expressed in the Republic. On the whole, Islamic philosophers did not view artistic and literary creativity as ends in themselves. Rather, their interest was in explaining the relations of these activities to purely intellectual ends. In the case of poetics and rhetoric in particular, the emphasis in Islamic philosophy was pragmatic and political: poetics and rhetoric were viewed as instruments for communicating the demonstrated truths of philosophy to the populace, whose intellectual abilities were presumed to be limited. The medium of such communication was usually, although not necessarily, that of religious discourse. Islamic philosophers also devoted considerable attention to explaining the psychological and cognitive foundations of aesthetic judgment and artistic production within the spectrum of human knowledge. They argued that rhetoric and poetics were in some important respects non-intellectual arts, and that poetics in particular was distinctive in so far as it addressed the imaginative faculties of its audience rather than their intellects. Further reading Kemal, S. (1991) The Poetics of Alfarabi and Avicenna , Leiden: Brill. (Various aspects of these two philosophers’ views on poetics.) DEBORAH L. BLACK
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Page 12 AESTHETICS, JAPANESE While the terms ‘aesthetics’ and ‘philosophy’ were only introduced into Japan during the Meiji Period (post 1868), Japanese culture has nevertheless witnessed the proliferation of various arts and theories of art for over a millenium. Given that ‘aesthetics’ generally connotes a scientific, often taxonomic approach to the inquiry into beauty and art, it may be preferable to consider Japanese art and theories of art from the perspective of different ways of artistry, rather than impose on it alien categories and assumptions. Even our understanding about what constitutes art must alter when we consider such arts as the production of incense, the tea ceremony, the martial arts or flower arrangement, most of which do not have precise analogues in the West; or if they do, are not considered arts alongside poetry, drama, music and painting. One of the hallmarks of Japanese art is the emphasis on an awareness of nature. Not only is the natural world a rich storehouse of images and metaphors for use as subject matter, but it is also the means whereby the practices, values and aspirations of the art are defined. Significantly, art itself is seen to be catalysed directly by an encounter with the natural world. All living beings, we are told, are given to song. Yet the natural world also came to be a shibboleth in society among the members of the Japanese court, where a finely honed seasonal awareness came to attest to the refinement and sensibility of the individual. Of all the arts, poetry was seen as pre-eminent, in part because of poetry’s powers to influence the spirits inherent in the natural world. Even the emphasis on place and place-names in Japanese art may be traced to an understanding of the Japanese landscape and language as sacredly imbued. Another feature of Japanese art and theories of art is its orientation toward the human. In other words, we may define Japanese art as ‘expressive–affective’ in its configuration, stressing the experience of the artist as well as the response of the audience in encountering such a work. In fact, the two roles of artist and audience are related through the focus of the work of art, which usually frames a single moment and its quintessential significance, hon-i, which is unchanging. The quality which ideally characterizes both artist and audience is makoto or sincerity, underlining the point that the function of most Japanese art is to make us feel, rather than think. As in a number of other traditions, Japanese ways of art are bound up inextricably with issues of religion and religious practice. Not only did Shintō animatism have a profound impact on how Japanese viewed their landscape as well as their own lives, but other imported systems of belief also influenced the course of artistic development, especially Buddhism. Buddhism darkened the hues of classical Japanese art by introducing ideas such as mappō (Latter Days of the Law), which saw the present as degraded and corrupt with respect to the past, and mujō (inconstancy), or the awareness of the ephemerality of this phenomenal world. In Mahāyā na Buddhism, art was perceived as a means of religious awakening, both in the case of poetry viewed as a form of intense meditation ( shikan ) and as parables whereby the truth could be disseminated obliquely ( hōben). This paved the way for the pursuit of various forms of art to become a path ( michi ) to spiritual awareness. The relation of teacher and student in an art form closely resembled the relation of spiritual master to disciple, a feature which is echoed in the various ‘secret’ artistic treatises whose form, approach and significance suggest esoteric Buddhist manuals setting forth precepts for future generations. Japanese theories of art also concerned themselves with various aesthetic ideals, distillations of the changing notion of beauty in each era. From aware (the beauty inherent in transience) and miyabi (courtly beauty) during the Heian Period (784–1185), to yūgen (the beauty of mystery and overtones) and sabi (the beauty of desolation and loneliness) in the medieval period, finally to wabi (the beauty of dearth and the humble) and karumi (the beauty of playful lightness) during the Edo Period (1600–1868), to mention only a few of the many ideals, we see an evolution of ideals as a response to cultural and historical change. What becomes evident in any survey is the assumption of an underlying unity, as in the notions that the impulse toward art is natural and universal; that art functions as a bridge mediating the experience of artist and audience; that sincerity and heart are to be privileged above all other qualities; and that the discipline of art can be a means of spiritual awakening. But we also discover that ideas, such as play, are critical to all forms of art in Japan. Other issues have surfaced periodically in various art forms in the course of Japanese history, such as the struggle between tradition and innovation or the debate about art as spontaneous versus art as the product of careful cultivation (that is, the question of artifice in
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Page 13 art), or the question of the singularity of Japanese art. See also: AESTHETICS, CHINESE; KOKORO Further reading Suzuki, D.T. (1959) Zen and Japanese Culture, Princeton, NJ: Bollingen-Princeton University Press. (An imaginative and insightful explanation of how Zen principles permeate Japanese art and thought by one of the great proponents of our century; the section on ‘Zen and Swordsmanship’ is especially pertinent.) Ueda Makoto (1967) Literary and Art Theories in Japan , Cleveland, OH: Press of Western Reserve University. (Comprehensive overview of the theories of a number of different theorists from a variety of periods and disciplines.) MEERA VISWANATHAN AFFIRMATIVE ACTION The term ‘affirmative action’ originated in the USA under President Kennedy. Originally it was designed to ensure that employees and applicants for jobs with government contractors did not suffer discrimination. Within a year, however, ‘affirmative action’ was used to refer to policies aimed at compensating African-Americans for unjust racial discrimination, and at improving their opportunities to gain employment. An important implication of this shift was that affirmative action came to mean preferential treatment. Preferential treatment was later extended to include women as well as other disadvantaged racial and ethnic groups. The arguments in favour of preferential treatment can be usefully classified as backwardlooking and forward-looking. Backward-looking arguments rely on the claim that preferential treatment of women and disadvantaged racial minorities compensates these groups or the members for the discrimination and injustices they have suffered. Forward-looking arguments rely on their claim that preferential treatment of women and disadvantaged racial minorities will help to bring about a better society. There has been much criticism of both types of argument. The most common accusation is that preferential treatment is reverse discrimination. Other criticisms are based around who exactly should be compensated, by what means and to what extent, and at whose cost. Finally, there is the fear of the unknown consequences of such action. Arguments have been forwarded to try and solve such difficulties, but the future of preferential treatment seems to lie in a combination of the two arguments. See also: EQUALITY Further reading Ezorsky, G. (1991) Racism and Justice , Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. (A recent persuasive defence of affirmative action.) Wilson, W.J. (1987) The Truly Disadvantaged , Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (Contains arguments that affirmative action rewards African-Americans who are already advantaged, and adds to the isolation of those who are truly disadvantaged.) BERNARD BOXILL AL-AFGHANI, JAMAL AL-DIN (1838–97) Al-Afghani is often described as one of the most prominent Islamic political leaders and philosophers of the nineteenth century. He was concerned with the subjection of the Muslim world by Western colonial powers, and he made the liberation, independence and unity of the Islamic world one of the major aims of his life. He provided a theoretical explanation for the relative decline of the Islamic world, and a philosophical theory of history which sought to establish a form of modernism appropriate to Islam. See also: ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY, MODERN Further reading Keddie, N. (1972) Sayyid Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani: A Political Biography , Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. (An important study of al-Afghani’s politics, with useful material on his general philosophical views.) ELSAYED M.H. OMRAN OLIVER LEAMAN AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY In order to indicate the range of some of the kinds of material that must be included in a discussion of philosophy in Africa, it is as well to begin by recalling some of the history of Western philosophy. It is something of an irony that Socrates, the first major philosopher in the Western tradition, is known to us entirely for oral arguments imputed to him by his student Plato. For the Western philosophical tradition is, above all else, a tradition of texts. While there are some important ancient philosophers, like Socrates, who are largely known to us through the reports of others, the tradition has developed
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Page 14 of those arguments – in ethics and politics, metaphysics and epistemology, aesthetics and the whole host of other major subdivisions of the subject – concern questions about which many people in many cultures have talked and many, although substantially fewer, have written outside of the broad tradition of Western philosophy. The result is that while those methods of philosophy that have developed in the West through thoughtful analysis of texts are not found everywhere, we are likely to find in every human culture opinions about some of the major questions of Western philosophy. On these important questions there have been discussions in most cultures since the earliest human societies. These constitute what has sometimes been called a ‘folk-philosophy’. It is hard to say much about those opinions and discussions in places where they have not been written down. However, we are able to find some evidence of the character of these views in such areas as parts of sub-Saharan Africa where writing was introduced into oral cultures over the last few centuries. As a result, discussions of African philosophy should include both material on some oral cultures and rather more on the philosophical work that has been done in literate traditions on the African continent, including those that have developed since the introduction of Western philosophical training there. 1 Oral cultures Two areas of folk-philosophy have been the object of extended scholarly investigation in the late twentieth century: the philosophical psychology of people who speak the Akan languages of the west African littoral (now Ghana) (see AKAN PHILOSOPHICAL PSYCHOLOGY) and the epistemological thought of Yoruba-speaking people of western Nigeria (see YORUBA EPISTE MOLOGY). In both cases the folk ideas of the tradition have been addressed by contemporary speakers of the language with Western philosophical training. This is probably the most philosophically sophisticated work that has been carried out in the general field of the philosophical study of folk-philosophy in Africa. It also offers some insight into ways of thinking about both the mind and human cognition that are different from those that are most familiar within the Western tradition. One can also learn a great deal by looking more generally at ethical and aesthetic thought, since in all parts of the continent, philosophical issues concerning evaluation were discussed and views developed before writing (see AESTHETICS, AFRICAN; ETHICAL SYSTEMS, AFRICAN). Philosophical work on ethics is more developed than in aesthetics and some of the most interesting recent work in African aesthetics also focuses on Yoruba concepts which have been explored in some detail by Western philosophers. The discussion of the status of such work has largely proceeded under the rubric of the debate about ethnophilosophy, a term intended to cover philosophical work that aims to explore folk philosophies in a systematic manner (see ETHNOPHILOSOPHY, AFRICAN). Finally, there has also been an important philosophical debate about the character of traditional religious thought in Africa (see AFRICAN TRADITIONAL RELIGIONS). 2 Older literate traditions Although these oral traditions represent old forms of thought, the actual traditions under discussion are not as old as the remaining African literate traditions. The earliest of these is in the writings associated with the ancient civilizations of Egypt, which substantially pre-date the pre-Socratic philosophers who inhabit the earliest official history of Western philosophy (see EGYPTIAN COSMOLOGY, ANCIENT). The relationship between these Egyptian traditions and the beginnings of Western philosophy have been in some dispute and there is much recent scholarship on the influence of Egyptian on classical Greek thought (see EGYPTIAN PHILOSOPHY: INFLUENCE ON ANCIENT GREEK THOUGHT). Later African philosophy looks more familiar to those who have studied the conventional history of Western philosophy: the literate traditions of Ethiopia, for example, which can be seen in the context of a long (if modest) tradition of philosophical writing in the horn of Africa. The high point of such writing has been the work of the seventeenth-century philosopher, Zar’a Ya‘ecob. His work has been compared to that of Descartes (see ETHIOPIA, PHILOSOPHY IN). It is also worth observing that many of the traditions of Islamic philosophy were either the product of, or were subject to the influence of scholars born or working in the African continent in centres of learning such as Cairo and Timbuktu (see ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY). Similarly,theworkof some of themost important philosophers among the Christian Church Fathers, was the product of scholars born in Africa, like St AUGUSTINE, and some was written in the African provinces of Rome. In considering African-born philosophers,
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Page 15 there is Anton Wilhelm Amo, who was born in what is now Ghana and received, as the result of an extraordinary sequence of events, philosophical training during the period of German Enlightenment, before returning to the Guinea coast to die in the place he was born. Amo’s considerable intellectual achievements played an important part in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century polemics relating to the ‘capacity of the negro’. Unfortunately, only a portion of his work has survived. 3 Recent philosophy Most work in African philosophy in the twentieth century has been carried out by African intellectuals (often interacting with scholars outside Africa) under the influence of philosophical traditions from the European countries that colonized Africa and created her modern system of education. As the colonial systems of education were different, it is helpful to think of this work as belonging to two broadly differentiated traditions, one Francophone and the other Anglophone. While it is true that philosophers in the areas influenced by French (and Francophone Belgian) colonization developed separately from those areas under British colonial control, a comparison of their work reveals that there has been a substantial cross-flow between them (as there generally has been between philosophy in the Frenchand English-speaking worlds). The other important colonial power in Africa was Portugal whose commitment to colonial education was less developed. The sole Portuguese-speaking African intellectual who made a significant philosophical contribution is Amílcar CABRAL, whose leadership in the independence movement of Guinea Bissau and the Cape Verde islands was guided by philosophical training influenced by Portuguese Marxism. Cabral’s influence has not been as great as that of Frantz FANON. He was born in the French Antilles, but later became an Algerian. He was a very important figure in the development of political philosophy in Africa (and much of the Third World). Among the most important political thinkers influenced by philosophy are Kwame Nkrumah, Kenneth Kaunda and Julius Nyerere (see AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY, ANGLOPHONE). Out of all the intellectual movements in Africa in this century, the two most important ones of philosophical interest have been négritude and pan-Africanism (see AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY, FRANCOPHONE; PAN-AFRICANISM). Philosophy in Africa has changed greatly in the decades since the Second World War and, even more, as African states have gained their independence. Given the significance of the colonial legacy in shaping modern philosophical education in Africa it is not surprising that there have been serious debates about the proper understanding of what it is for a philosophy to be African. These lively debates, prevalent in the areas of African epistemology, ethics and aesthetics, are found in both Francophone and Anglophone philosophy (see AESTHETICS, AFRICAN). See also: MARGINALITY Further reading Eze, E. (1997) Postcolonial African Philosophy: a Critical Reader, Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell. (A useful collection of important work in contemporary African philosophy.) Masolo, D.A. (1994) African Philosophy in Search of Identity , Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. (A critical history of modern African philosophy.) K. ANTHONY APPIAH AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY, ANGLOPHONE Contemporary African philosophy is in a state of flux, but the flow is not without some watersheds. The chief reason for the flux lies in the fact that Africa, in most part, is in a state of transition from a traditional condition to a modernized one. Philosophically and in other ways, the achievement of independence was the most significant landmark in this transition. Independence from European rule (which began in Libya in 1951, followed by Sudan in 1956, Ghana in 1957 and continued to be won at a rapid pace in other parts of Africa in the 1960s) did not come without a struggle. That struggle was, of necessity, both political and cultural. Colonialism involved not only political subjection but also cultural depersonalization. Accordingly, at independence it was strongly felt that plans for political and economic reconstruction should reflect the needs not only for modernization but also for cultural regeneration. These are desiderata which, while not incompatible in principle, are difficult to harmonize in practice. The philosophical basis of the project had first to be worked out and this was attempted by the first wave of post-independence leaders. The task of devising technical philosophies cognizant of Africa’s past and present and oriented to her long-term future has been in the hands of a crop of
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Page 16 professional philosophers trained in Western-style educational institutions. Philosophical results have not been as dramatic as in the case of the political, but the process is ongoing. The political figures that led African states to independence were not all philosophers by original inclination or training. To start with only the best known, such as Leopold Senghor of Senegal, or Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, were trained philosophers, but others, such as Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, brought only an educated intelligence and a good sense of their national situations to the enterprise. In all cases they were rulers enthusiastically anointed by their people to chart the new course and lead them to the promised land. An example of how practical urgency can inspire philosophical productivity can be found in the way that all these philosophers propounded blueprints for reconstruction with clearly articulated philosophical underpinnings. Circumstantial necessity, then, rather than Platonic selection made these leaders philosopher-kings. It is significant, also, to note that all the leaders mentioned (and the majority of their peers) argued for a system of socialism deriving from their understandings of African traditional thought and practice, and from their perceptions of the imperatives generated by industrialization, such as it had been. Concern with this latter aspect of the situation led to some flirtation and even outright marriage with Marxism. But, according to the leaders concerned, the outcome of this fertilization of thought had enough African input to be regarded as an African progeny. Accordingly, practically all of them proffered their theories and prescriptions under the rubric of African socialism. No such labelling is possible in the work of African philosophers, but there are some patterns of preoccupation. See also: AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY, FRANCOPHONE Further reading Oruka, O.H. (1990) Trends in Contemporary African Philosophy , Nairobi: Shirikon Publishers. (Analyses and criticisms of trends in contemporary African philosophy by one of the most active contributors to the discipline.) Serequeberhan, T. (1991) African Philosophy: The Essential Readings , New York: Paragon House. (Anthology of contributions to the debate on the meaning and method of African philosophy from Bodunrin, Hountondji, Keita, Okolo, Onyewuenyi, Oruka, Owomoyela, Serequeberhan, Towa, WambaDia-Wamba and Wiredu.) KWASI WIREDU AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY, FRANCOPHONE The imaginative and intellectual writings that have come out of French-speaking Africa have tended to be associated exclusively with the négritude movement and its global postulation of a black racial identity founded upon an original African essence. Beyond its polemical stance with regard to colonialism, the movement generated a theoretical discourse which served both as a means of selfvalidation for the African in particular and the black race in general. This discourse developed further as the elaboration of a new worldview derived from the African cultural inheritance of a new humanism that lays claim to universal significance. Despite its prominence in the intellectual history of Francophone Africa and in the black world generally, négritude does not account for the full range of intellectual activity among the French-speaking African intelligentsia. The terms of its formulation have been challenged since its inception, leading to ongoing controversy. This challenge concerns the validity of the concept itself and its functional significance in contemporary African thought and collective life. It has involved a debate regarding the essential nature of the African, as well as the possibility of constructing a rigorous and coherent structure of ideas (with an indisputable philosophical status) derived from the belief systems and normative concepts implicit in the institutions and cultural practices subsisting from Africa’s precolonial past. The postcolonial situation has enlarged the terms of this debate in French-speaking Africa. It has come to cover a more diverse range of issues touching upon the African experience of modernity. As an extension of the ‘indigenist’ theme which is its point of departure, the cultural and philosophical arguments initiated by the adherents of négritude encompass a critical reappraisal of the Western tradition of philosophy and its historical consequences, as well as a consideration of its transforming potential in the African context. Beyond the essentialism implied by the concept of négritude and related theories of Africanism, the problem at the centre of French–African intellectual preoccupations relates to the modalities of African existence in the modern world. From this perspective, the movement of ideas of the French-speaking African intelligentsia demonstrates the plurality of African discourse, as shaped by a continuing crisis of African consciousness provoked by the momentous
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Page 17 process of transition to modernity. A convergence can be discerned between the themes and styles of philosophical discourse and inquiry in Francophone Africa and some of the significant currents of twentieth-century European philosophy and social thought engaged with the fundamental human issues raised by the impact of modern technological civilization. Two dominant perspectives frame the evolution of contemporary thought and philosophical discourse in French-speaking Africa: the first is related to the question of identity and involves the reclamation of a cultural and spiritual heritage considered to be imperilled; the second relates to what has been called ‘the dilemma of modernity’ experienced as a problematic dimension of contemporary African life and consciousness. See also: AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY, ANGLOPHONE Further reading Masolo, D.A. (1994) African Philosophy in Search of Identity , Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. (The most comprehensive study of African philosophy published to date.) Oladipo, O. (1992) The Idea of African Philosophy , Ibadan: Molecular Publishers. (A wide-ranging discussion of the situation and role of philosophy in Africa.) F. ABIOLA IRELE AFRICAN TRADITIONAL RELIGIONS Religion has been at the centre of recent philosophical debate in Africa for two major reasons. The first is that the answers to many central canonical philosophical questions in precolonial African societies take a religious form. As a result any attempt to construct an African philosophy begs attention to the epistemological and ontological standing of claims of this general sort. The second reason religion has been central to African philosophy is that one of the major issues in modern African philosophy is whether distinctively African modes of thought exist. Within this debate influential positions have been argued by reflecting on the character of traditional religious thought and practice and contrasting it with modes of thought purportedly associated with Western science. See also: LATIN AMERICA, PRE-COLUMBIAN AND INDIGENOUS THOUGHT IN Further reading Appiah, K.A. (1982) In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture , London: Methuen; 2nd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. (Chapter 6 includes an extended discussion of the character of traditional religious thought.) Horton, R. (1993) Patterns of Thought in Africa and the West, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Summarizes the most significant debates in African philosophy of religion from the point of view of a leading partisan.) K. ANTHONY APPIAH AGNOSTICISM In the popular sense, an agnostic is someone who neither believes nor disbelieves in God, whereas an atheist disbelieves in God. In the strict sense, however, agnosticism is the view that human reason is incapable of providing sufficient rational grounds to justify either the belief that God exists or the belief that God does not exist. In so far as one holds that our beliefs are rational only if they are sufficiently supported by human reason, the person who accepts the philosophical position of agnosticism will hold that neither the belief that God exists nor the belief that God does not exist is rational. In the modern period, agnostics have appealed largely to the philosophies of Hume and Kant as providing the justification for agnosticism as a philosophical position. Two twentieth-century philosophical movements, logical positivism and naturalism, have also given at least indirect support to agnosticism. See also: ATHEISM Further reading Hume, D. (1748) Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge and P.H. Nidditch, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. (Presents Hume’s mature philosophy concerning human knowledge and conduct. The first of the two Enquiries contains his important essay attacking the rationality of belief in miracles.) Plantinga, A. (1981) ‘Is Belief in God Properly Basic?’, Nous 15 (1): 41–51. (Argues that some beliefs are rational in the absence of evidence and suggests that belief in God is one of them.) WILLIAM L. ROWE AGRICOLA, RUDOLPH (1444–85) Rudolph Agricola was one of the leading humanists of northern Europe in the late fifteenth century. His polished Latin style, his Greek learning and his knowledge of classical
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Page 18 literature made him a hero to Erasmus, More, Vives, Melanchthon and Ramus. His major work, De inventione dialectica (On Dialectical Invention) (1479), provides an original account of practical argumentation by combining elements from the established teachings of rhetoric and dialectic with analysis of passages from classical literature. It includes a new version of the topics of invention, based on Cicero’s method of devising arguments, outlined in his Topics . Agricola’s letter De formando studio (On Shaping Studies) (1484), which circulated widely in the sixteenth century, outlines a plan of knowledge and discusses methods of study. Although his approach was strongly humanist and the Roman rhetorician Quintilian was his favourite author, his logic remained firmly Aristotelian, unlike that of his predecessor Lorenzo Valla. He remained aware of the achievements of scholasticism, expressing admiration for Duns Scotus and adopting an extreme realist position in metaphysics. Further reading Agricola, R. (1479) De inventione dialectica (On Dialectical Invention), ed. Alardus, Cologne, 1539; repr. Nieuwkoop: de Graaf, 1967; ed. and German trans. L. Mundt, Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1992; English trans. J.R. McNally, ‘Rudolph Agricola’s De inventione dialectica : A Translation of Selected Chapters’, Quarterly Journal of Speech 34: 393–422. (Agricola’s major work, describing the discovery of persuasive arguments and the composition of texts.) Akkerman, F. and Vanderjagt, A.J. (eds) (1988) Rodolphus Agricola Phrisius (1444–1485) , Leiden: Brill. (A valuable collection of essays with a full secondary bibliography and a list of Agricola’s works.) PETER MACK AGRICULTURAL ETHICS Agricultural ethics is the study of moral issues raised by farming. These include: human interference with the course of nature; the effects of certain agricultural practices on present social conditions, and on the conditions under which future generations will live; the treatment of animals, especially when its aim is human advantage; and the value of farming as a human activity in itself. The study of agricultural ethics involves considerations of both social justice, particularly including fairness in the distribution of food and farmland, and virtue, the extent to which farming may be said to be a virtuous calling. In ancient times, both Xenophon and Socrates argued that the latter was the case. Further reading See also: ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS Further reading Blatz, C. (1991) Ethics and Agriculture: An Anthology on Current Issues in World Context , Moscow, ID: University of Idaho Press. (Sections on agriculture’s aims, practitioners, conduct and development. Includes a useful bibliography.) GARY L. COMSTOCK AGRIPPA (1st/2nd century AD) Agrippa, a Sceptic of the first or second century AD, compiled five general modes of Sceptical argument: the views of positive theorists are subject to endemic disagreement due to the relativity of appearances, and adjudication cannot succeed, since it will either be mere assertion (and hence will not command assent) or appeal to further considerations, which process will either be infinitely regressive or circular, or terminate in unfounded assumption. Further reading Barnes, J. (1990) The Toils of Scepticism , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (A detailed and subtle philosophical treatment of Agrippa’s modes.) R.J. HANKINSON AGRIPPA VON NETTESHEIM, HENRICUS CORNELIUS (1486–1535) Famous in the sixteenth century for writings in which he steps forward variously as magician, occultist, evangelical humanist and philosopher, Agrippa shared with other humanist writers a thoroughgoing contempt for the philosophy of the scholastics. In his more evangelical moods Agrippa could be taken for a radical exponent of the philosophia Christi of his older contemporary Erasmus, or mistaken for a follower of Luther, whose early writings he actively disseminated in humanist circles. However, his deepest affinities are with magically inflected philosophies: the Neoplatonism and Hermetism of Marsilio Ficino, and the syncretic Christian Kabbalah of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Johannes Reuchlin and Johannes Trithemius. As well as expounding an influential magical view of language, Agrippa contributed to the sixteenthcentury revival of scepticism, denounced the ‘tyranny’ of those who obstructed a free search for truth, criticized the subjection of women and (with a courage unusual in his
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Page 19 time) resisted and mocked the instigators of the witch-craze. Finding in Hermetic–Kabbalistic doctrines the inner truth both of religion and of philosophy, Agrippa was also aware of parallels between these magical doctrines and the Gnostic heresies. His heterodoxy made him a target for pious slanders: within several decades of his death he became the protagonist of demonological fictions which were soon absorbed into the legend of Dr Faustus. See also: HUMANISM, RENAISSANCE; KABBALAH Further reading Agrippa, H.C. (1533) De occulta philosophia libri tres, Cologne; trans. J. Freake, Three Books of Occult Philosophy , London, 1651; repr., ed. D. Tyson, St Paul, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 1993. (The bestknown Renaissance encyclopedia of learned magic, this book effectively de-centres orthodox Christianity through its explorations of parallels with Judaic, Muslim and pagan traditions.) Nauert, C.G., Jr (1965) Agrippa and the Crisis of Renaissance Thought, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. (The standard biography and the most detailed study of Agrippa’s thought.) MICHAEL H. KEEFER AILLY, PIERRE D’ (1350–1420) D’Ailly was a prolific writer on a number of subjects. His best known philosophical works concentrate on logic and on faith and reason, with strong influences from Ockham in particular. He also wrote influential works on the nature of the soul. He was one of the most eminent partisans of the late medieval nominalist movement and was numbered among the foremost doctores renovatores by King Louis XI in his decree against the nominalists. His works continued to be highly influential as late as the Reformation period. See also: WILLIAM OF OCKHAM Further reading Spade, P.V. (1980) Peter of Ailly: Concepts and Insolubles, An Annotated Translation , Dordrecht: Reidel. (The introduction (1–15) presents an introduction to the main topics of Conceptus and Insolubilia with special emphasis on d’Ailly’s sources.) OLAF PLUTA AJDUKIEWICZ, KAZIMIERZ (1890–1963) Ajdukiewicz, like other typical members of the Lwów–Warsaw School, the main Polish analytic movement, was basically interested in logic, philosophy of language, epistemology, and philosophy of science. In the 1930s, he proposed a form of radical conventionalism, an extension of the conventionalism of Duhem and Poincaré. Later, he rejected this radical conventionalism in favour of a semantic epistemology. In the philosophy of science he tried to build a general theory of fallible inferences based on decision theory. Ajdukiewicz’s most important contribution to logic is his formal notation for syntactic categories. Further reading Sinisi, V. and Woleński, J. (eds) (1995) The Heritage of Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, Amsterdam: Rodopi. (A collection of essays on Ajdukiewicz’s philosophy; includes the complete bibliography of Ajdukiewicz’s writings and a selected bibliography on Ajdukiewicz.) JAN WOLEŃSKI AKAN PHILOSOPHICAL PSYCHOLOGY The word Akan refers to the Twi-speaking people of southern and central Ghana. Akan traditional philosophy is essentially a philosophy of the person. It has cosmological ramifications, but the basic concepts emerge from the analysis of the human personality. That analysis is extremely sensitive to the complexity of the human psyche and the social dimensions of individual consciousness. These considerations explain and justify the prominent position occupied by the concept of a person in contemporary Akan philosophy. Further reading Gyekye, K. (1987) An Essay on African Philosophical Thought: The Akan Conceptual Scheme , New York: Cambridge University Press. (Chapter 6: ‘The Concept of a Person’ and pages 163–8, 198–9 contain references to the work of scholars such as Rattray and Meyerowitz on the Akan conception of a person.) KWASI WIREDU AKRASIA The Greek word ‘ akrasia’ is usually said to translate literally as ‘lack of self-control’, but it has come to be used as a general term for the phenomenon known as weakness of will, or incontinence, the disposition to act contrary to one’s own considered judgment about what it is
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Page 20 best to do. Since one variety of akrasia is the inability to act as one thinks right, akrasia is obviously important to the moral philosopher, but it is also frequently discussed in the context of philosophy of action. Akrasia is of interest to philosophers of action because although it seems clear that it does occur – that people often do act in ways which they believe to be contrary to their own best interests, moral principles or long-term goals – it also seems to follow from certain apparently plausible views about intentional action that akrasia is simply not possible. A famous version of the suggestion that genuine akrasia cannot exist is found in Socrates, as portrayed by Plato in the Protagoras. Socrates argues that it is impossible for a person’s knowledge of what is best to be overcome by such things as the desire for pleasure – that one cannot choose a course of action which one knows full well to be less good than some alternative known to be available. Anyone who chooses to do something which is in fact worse than something they know they could have done instead, must, according to Socrates, have wrongly judged the relative values of the actions. See also: WILL, THE Further reading Gosling, J. (1990) Weakness of the Will , London: Routledge. (A useful overview, which contains a good bibliography.) HELEN STEWARD ALBERT OF SAXONY ( c .1316–90) Albert of Saxony, active in the middle and late fourteenth century, taught at the University of Paris and was later instrumental in founding the University of Vienna. He is best known for his works on logic and natural philosophy. In the latter field he was influenced by John Buridan, but he was also influenced by the English logicians. His thought is rather typical of the sort that followed Buridan, combining critical analysis of language with epistemological realism. He was important in the diffusion of terminist logic in central Europe, and of the new physics in northern Italy. See also: LOGIC, MEDIEVAL Further reading Albert of Saxony (before 1390) Perutilis logica (Very Useful Logic), ed. and Spanish trans. A. Muñoz de García, Maracaibo: Universidad del Zulia, 1988. (This edition is after the incunable edition, first published in Venice (1522).) JOËL BIARD ALBERT THE GREAT (1200–80) Albert the Great was the first scholastic interpreter of Aristotle’s work in its entirety, as well as being a theologian and preacher. He left an encyclopedic body of work covering all areas of medieval knowledge, both in philosophy (logic, ethics, metaphysics, sciences of nature, meteorology, mineralogy, psychology, anthropology, physiology, biology, natural sciences and zoology) and in theology (biblical commentaries, systematic theology, liturgy and sermons). His philosophical work is based on both Arabic sources (including Alfarabi, Avicenna and Averroes) and Greek and Byzantine sources (such as Eustratius of Nicaea and Michael of Ephesus). Its aim is to insure that the Latin world was properly introduced to philosophy by providing a systematic exposition of Aristotelian positions. Albert’s method of exposition (paraphrase in the style of Avicenna rather than literal commentary in the style of Averroes), the relative heterogeneity of his sources and his own avowed general intention ‘to list the opinions of the philosophers without asserting anything about the truth’ of the opinions listed, all contribute to making his work seem eclectic or even theoretically inconsistent. This was compounded by the nature and number of spurious writings which, beginning in the fourteenth century, were traditionally attributed to him in the fields of alchemy, obstetrics, magic and necromancy, such as The Great and the Little Albert, The Secrets of Women and The Secrets of the Egyptians . This impression fades, however, when one examines the authentic works in the light of the history of medieval Aristotelianism and of the reception of the philosophical sources of late antiquity in the context of the thirteenth-century university. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM, MEDIEVAL Further reading Albert the Great (1200–80) Works, ed. P. Jammy, Alberti Magni Opera omnia , Lyon, 1651, 21 vols; ed. A. Borgnet and E. Borgnet, Alberti Magni Opera omnia , Paris, 1890–9, 38 vols; Alberti Magni Opera omnia edenda curavit Institutum Alberti Magni Coloniense Bernhardo Geyer praeside , Münster: Aschendorff, 1951–. (The latter is a critical edition, publication of which is still underway.)
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Page 21 Libera, A. de (1990) Albert le Grand et la Philosophie (Albert the Great and Philosophy), Paris: Vrin. (A general exposition of the broad themes in Albert’s philosophy.) Translated from the original French by Claudia Eisen Murphy ALAIN DE LIBERA ALBERTUS MAGNUS see ALBERT THE GREAT ALBO, JOSEPH ( c .1380–c .1444) Writing in the early fifteenth century, in times of extreme urgency for Spanish Jewry, Joseph Albo presented Judaism as an axiomatic system founded on three primary principles and eight secondary ones. His Sefer ha-‘Iqqarim (Book of Principles), sought to defend Judaism against Christian attacks by laying out the basic presuppositions of the Mosaic law. Albo’s theology belongs to a tradition of theorizing going back to Maimonides in the twelfth century. But his approach was grounded in a non-Maimonidean moral psychology. Responding to the Aristotelian intellectualism of the Maimonidean philosophy, which held true belief to be essential to human virtue and salvation, Albo focused on practice, fulfilment of the commandments. His act-centred view, grounded in the premise that beliefs cannot be commanded, allowed for a certain latitude in faith, which had both intra-communal and intercommunal advantages. If controversial doctrines such as ex nihilo creation could be made less prominent, acrimonious internal debates could be avoided, and the community could be somewhat less exposed to external attack. See also: MAIMONIDES, M. Further reading Albo, Joseph (c.1425) Sefer ha-‘Iqqarim (Book of Principles), ed. and trans. I. Husik, Sefer ha-‘Iqqarim: Book of Roots, Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publications Society, 1946, 5 vols. (The standard critical edition, with an English translation and notes.) DANIEL H. FRANK ALCHEMY Alchemy is the quest for an agent of material perfection, produced through a creative activity ( opus), in which humans and nature collaborate. It exists in many cultures (China, India, Islam; in the Western world since Hellenistic times) under different specifications: aiming at the production of gold and/or other perfect substances from baser ones, or of the elixir that prolongs life, or even of life itself. Because of its purpose, the alchemists’ quest is always strictly linked to the religious doctrine of redemption current in each civilization where alchemy is practised. In the Western world alchemy presented itself at its advent as a sacred art. But when, after a long detour via Byzantium and Islamic culture, it came back again to Europe in the twelfth century, adepts designated themselves philosophers. Since then alchemy has confronted natural philosophy for several centuries. In contemporary thought the memory of alchemy was scarcely regarded, save as protochemistry or as a branch of esotericism, until interest in it was revived by C.G. Jung. Recent research is increasingly showing the complexity of alchemy and its multiple relation to Western thought. Further reading Coudert, A. (1980) The Philosopher’s Stone , Boulder, CO: Shambala Publications. (A historical survey, not strictly limited to the Western world, paying attention to the religious contents of alchemy.) Jung, C.G. (1944) Psychologie und Alchemie , Olten: Walter Verlag; trans. R. Hull, The Collected Works of C.G. Jung , vol. XII, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, and London: Routledge, 1953–91. (Alchemy as historical parallel to psychological individuation.) MICHELA PEREIRA ALCIBIADES see PLATO; SOCRATIC DIALOGUES ALCINOUS ( c . 2nd century AD) Long misidentified with the Middle Platonist philosopher Albinus, Alcinous is author of a ‘handbook of Platonism’, which gives a good survey of Platonist doctrine as it was understood in the second century AD. The work covers logic, physics and ethics, and shows considerable influence from both Stoicism and Aristotelianism, in both terminology and doctrine, while remaining in all essentials Platonic. See also: PLATONISM, EARLY AND MIDDLE Further reading Alcinous ( c . 2nd century AD) Didaskalikos tōn Platōnos dogmatōn, ed. J. Dillon, Alcinous, The Handbook of Platonism , Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. (The former offers text,
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Page 22 French translation and notes, the latter an English translation, with introduction and philosophical commentary.) JOHN DILLON ALCMAEON ( c . early to mid 5th century BC) Alcmaeon of Croton was a Greek thinker with philosophical and medical interests. His work focused on the nature of man. Health was the outcome of ‘equal rights’ between, for example, hot and cold, moist and dry, disease that of the ‘monarchy’ of one of them. ‘Passages’ linked the sense organs to the brain, which Alcmaeon took to be the seat of sensation and understanding. Plato followed him in this view, as also in his proof of the immortality of the soul from its continual motion. Further reading Guthrie, W.K.C. (1962–78) A History of Greek Philosophy , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (The most detailed and comprehensive English-language history of early Greek thought; the full treatment of Alcmaeon, in volume 1 pages 341–59, is the best available account of his philosophy in English; translates most of the main texts that are relevant.) MALCOLM SCHOFIELD ALEMANNO, YOHANAN BEN ISAAC (1433/4–after 1503/4) An outstanding Jewish thinker of the Italian Renaissance, Alemanno combined an eclectic Jewish philosophic rationalism, steeped in the medieval sources – Maimonidean, Averroist and Kabbalistic – with Renaissance humanism and Neoplatonism. He was an Aristotelian and Maimonidean in ethics, a Platonist and Averroist in political philosophy and a Neo-platonist and Kabbalist in metaphysics. His fusing of Aristotelian rationalism with Platonizing mysticism is striking but not atypical for the period. Influenced by Renaissance thought after he settled in Italy, he was active in Christian as well as Jewish circles in Florence, Padua and Mantua. Pico della Mirandola learned Hebrew under his instruction and relied on him for access to medieval Jewish texts in philosophy and Kabbalah. Both Christian Kabbalah and Renaissance Hebraism were products of the interactions in which Alemanno was a chief participant. His ties to the Florentine Academy of the late 1480s are evident in his adaptations to Jewish thinking of the ideas current among its members as to the unity of truth, the immortality of the soul and the dignity of man. See also: AVERROISM, JEWISH; KABBALAH Further reading Idel, M. (1983) ‘The Magical and Neoplatonic Interpretation of the Kabbalah in the Renaissance’, in B.D. Cooperman (ed.) Jewish Thought in the Sixteenth Century, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 186–242. (Examines Alemanno’s Kabbalistic ideas and Renaissance Kabbalism.) ABRAHAM MELAMED D’ALEMBERT, JEAN LE ROND (1717–2683) Mathematician, scientist and man of letters, Jean D’Alembert is a central figure of the French Enlightenment. As a young man he made significant contributions to the refinement of mathematical techniques, and later was actively engaged in the theoretical controversies which surrounded the gradual assimilation of Newtonian mechanics into the mainstream of European science. For twelve years (1746–58) he was co-editor, with Denis Diderot, of the Encyclopedia , the serial publication of which was one of the defining events of the Enlightenment period as a whole. D’Alembert frequented the various Paris salons where much of the intellectual fervour and high-spiritedness of the age was cultivated and given shape. As Secretary of the French Academy he worked assiduously to advance the cause of human knowledge. D’Alembert’s philosophy is characterized by an abiding commitment to the clarity and precision which attends mathematical abstraction. He believed that in its essence the natural order is internally structured by laws whose operation can be articulated under the principles of geometry. All natural phenomena are to be explained under the terms of those basic mathematical principles that govern the scientific domain in which they are located (chemistry or astronomy for example), and all scientific domains could be brought ultimately to perfect consistency and systematic order within a comprehensive theory. The events and processes which constitute the natural order reflect the reality of the mathematical structure which underlies them. As he says in the Preliminary Discourse (1751) to the Encyclopedia (1751–65), ‘The universe would only be one fact and one great truth for
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Page 23 whoever knew how to embrace it from a single point of view’. See also: ENCYCLOPEDISTS, EIGHTEENTH CENTURY; ENLIGHTENMENT, CONTINENTAL Further reading D’Alembert, J. Le R. (1751) Discours préliminaire, trans. R.N. Schwab, Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot, Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963. Grimsley, R. (1963) Jean D’Alembert, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Presents a detailed discussion of D’Alembert’s engagement with the Encyclopedia and his work in the French Academy; excellent introduction to the life and works of D’Alembert and the French Enlightenment period generally.) PAUL F. JOHNSON ALEXANDER OF APHRODISIAS ( fl. c. AD 200) The Peripatetic philosopher Alexander was known to posterity as the commentator on Aristotle, until Averroes took over this title. His commentaries eclipsed most of those of his predecessors, which now survive only in scattered quotations. Used by Plotinus, Alexander’s commentaries were the basis for subsequent work on Aristotle by Neoplatonist commentators, and even though some themselves survive only in quotations by these later writers, Alexander’s interpretations of particular passages are still helpful and are cited by commentators today. In addition to Alexander’s commentaries we have a number of monographs, and also collections of short discussions which are connected with themes in his writings, though some are probably by pupils rather than by Alexander himself. Alexander’s most influential and controversial doctrine has been his interpretation of Aristotle’s theory of soul and intellect; regarding the soul as the product of the mixture of the bodily elements, he has been seen as subordinating form to matter and as thereby misinterpreting Aristotle. Certainly his view excludes any immortality for individuals, but even if Aristotle himself allowed this it is arguable that to do so was incompatible with his definition of soul as the form of potentially living body. Alexander himself interpreted Aristotle’s ‘active intellect’ not as an immortal element in each individual, but as god, the unmoved mover, apprehended by our own intellects. Both on the question of soul and on that of the status of universals, Alexander gives a non-Platonizing reading of Aristotle, which accounts for some of the criticism to which he has been subjected by successors both ancient and modern. His treatment of the problem of free will has also been influential, though his criticisms of determinism are more telling than his own positive solution. Seeing his task as interpreting Aristotle’s writings with the aid of one another and explaining apparent inconsistencies, Alexander contributed to the growth of Aristotelianism as a system; he does not criticize nor challenge Aristotle, and regards his own innovations as Aristotelian doctrine, developed in the context of new questions which Aristotle himself had not confronted in the same form. He was better at seeing the details than at comprehending the global picture, and the potential of some of his doctrinal contributions is most apparent in what they suggested to others; but there is still much to interest philosophers in his detailed argumentation on particular points and passages. See also: ARISTOTLE COMMENTATORS; PERIPATETICS Further reading Alexander ( fl. c. AD 200) On the Soul and On Intellect , trans. in A.P. Fotinis, The De Anima of Alexander of Aphrodisias, Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1979. (English translation, with commentary.) Alexander ( fl. c. AD 200) On Fate , in R.W. Sharples, Alexander of Aphrodisias On Fate , London: Duckworth, 1983. (Sharples has Greek text reprinted from Bruns (1887– 92), with English translation and commentary.) R.W. SHARPLES ALEXANDER OF HALES ( c .1185–1245) Alexander’s emphasis on speculative theology initiated the golden age of scholasticism. His philosophy was influenced by that of Aristotle, particularly in the field of ethics, and also by Augustine, Boethius and Peter Lombard. He believed that philosophy, based on natural reason, and theology, based on divine revelation, were two different disciplines and that philosophy ought to be independent of theology. He himself was primarily a theologian, and the colossal Summa Halesiana, most of which was compiled under his direction, constitutes the first complete theological synthesis in the West. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM, MEDIEVAL Alexander of Hales (before 1245) Summa Halesiana, ed. as Doctoris Irrefragabilis Alexandri de Hales Ordinis Minorum Summa Theologica, vols I–III, Quaracchi: Collegii S.
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Page 24 Bonaveturae, 1924–48. (The vast prolegomenon in Librum III is a work of extraordinary erudition, a mine of information about scholastic authors in the first half of the thirteenth century.) GEDEON GÁL ALEXANDER, SAMUEL (1859–1938) Alexander propounded a metaphysical system based on a view of Space-Time differentiated into ‘motions’ from which new qualities emerged at certain levels of organization; matter, life and mind being those qualities so far realized. Space-Time is a process with a ‘nisus’ (that is, an internal drive) towards a quality, as yet unrealized, called ‘Deity’. The time dimension of Space-Time gives things and internal aspect as going through a process, while the space dimension sets them in an external relation called ‘compresence’. This directly realist view is maintained by Alexander in his discussions of aesthetic appreciation. See also: AESTHETIC CONCEPTS Further reading Alexander, S. (1920) Space, Time and Deity , London: Macmillan; 2nd edn, 1927. (The second impression contains an important new preface. A paperback edition appeared in 1966.) DOROTHY EMMET ALGAZEL see AL-GHAZALI, ABU HAMID ALHAZEN see IBN HAZM, ABU MUHAMMAD ‘ALI ALIENATION ‘Alienation’ is a prominent term in twentieth-century social theory and social criticism, referring to any of various social or psychological evils which are characterized by a harmful separation, disruption or fragmentation which sunders things that properly belong together. People are alienated from one another when there is an interruption in their mutual affection or reciprocal understanding; they are alienated from political processes when they feel separated from them and powerless in relation to them. Reflection on your beliefs or values can also alienate you from them by undermining your attachment to them or your identification with them; they remain your beliefs or values faute de mieux , but are no longer yours in the way they should be. Alienation translates two distinct German terms: Entfremdung (‘estrangement’) and Entaußerung (‘externalization’). Both terms originated in the philosophy of Hegel, specifically in his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). Their influence, however, has come chiefly from their use by Karl Marx in his manuscripts of 1844 (first published in 1930). Marx’s fundamental concern was with the alienation of wage labourers from their product, the grounds of which he sought in the alienated form of their labouring activity. In both Hegel and Marx, alienation refers fundamentally to a kind of activity in which the essence of the agent is posited as something external or alien, assuming the form of hostile domination over the agent. Further reading Ollman, B. (1976) Alienation , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd edn. (A widely-known philosophical discussion of Marx’s concept of alienation.) ALLEN W. WOOD ALIGHIERI, DANTE (1265–1321) Although Dante never received a systematic training in philosophy, he tackled some of the most controversial philosophical problems of his time. In his theory of science, he asked how we are to explain the fact that science is a unified, strictly ordered system of knowledge. He answered by comparing the scientific disciplines with the celestial spheres, claiming that the system of knowledge mirrors the cosmological order. In his political philosophy, he asked why all humans want to live in a peaceful society. All humans seek full use of their cognitive capacity, was his answer, and they can achieve it only if they interact socially. In his philosophy of nature, Dante asked what brings about the order of the elements, and suggested that the elements obey the laws of a universal nature in a strictly ordered cosmos. He elaborated all his answers in a scholastic framework that made use of both Aristotelian and Neoplatonic traditions. See also: NATURAL PHILOSOPHY, MEDIEVAL; POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, HISTORY OF Further reading Boyde, P. (1981) Dante Philomythes and Philosopher, Man in the Cosmos, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Detailed study of Dante’s natural philosophy and cosmology with an extensive analysis of the scholastic background.)
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Page 25 (Study focusing on Dante’s philosophy of mind and epistemology). DOMINIK PERLER ALISON, ARCHIBALD (1757–1839) Archibald Alison was born in Edinburgh but was educated at Balliol and ordained in the Church of England. He returned to Edinburgh in 1800 as an Anglican clergyman and served there until his death. His published works included collections of sermons, but he is best known for his Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste. This work was published in 1790, the same year as ImmanuelKant’sthird Critique; but it became popular only after a second edition appeared in 1811. See also: TASTE, ARTISTIC Further reading Alison, A. (1790) Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste, London. (Alison’s principal work went through a number of editions in the nineteenth century, but there is no modern reprint.) Kivy, P. (1976) The Seventh Sense, New York: Franklin. (Traces the concept of internal sense through eighteenth-century aesthetics.) DABNEY TOWNSEND ALTERITY AND IDENTITY, POSTMODERN THEORIES OF Theories of alterity and identity can be said to be ‘postmodern’ if they challenge at least two key features of modern philosophy: (1) the Cartesian attempt to secure the legitimacy of knowledge on the basis of a subject that immediately knows itself and (2) the Hegelian attempt to secure self-knowledge and self-recognition by showing that knowledge and recognition are mediated by the whole. Postmodern thought does not necessarily champion a wholly other, but it generally conceives of selfidentity in terms of a radical alterity. Theories of difference can be found in the writings of postmodern philosophers such as Deleuze and Derrida. See also: POSTMODERNISM Further reading Descombes, V. (1980) Modern French Philosophy , trans. L. Scott-Fox and J. Harding, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Originally titled ‘ The Same and the Other’, this is a good, critical introduction to many of the debates surrounding postmodern philosophy.) Norris, C. (1990) What’s Wrong with Postmodernism: Critical Theory and the Ends of Philosophy , Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. (A series of essays that attempt to stake out a version of postmodern philosophy and criticism that are heirs to enlightenment thought. Polemical and generally accessible.) PETER FENVES ALTHUSSER, LOUIS PIERRE (1918–90) Louis Althusser was the most influential philosopher to emerge in the revival of Marxist theory occasioned by the radical movements of the 1960s. His influence is, on the face of it, surprising, since Althusser’s Marx is not the theorist of revolutionary self-emancipation celebrated by the early Lukács. According to Althusser, Marx, along with Freud, was responsible for a ‘decentring’ of the human subject. History is ‘a process without a subject’. Its movement is beyond the comprehension of individual or collective subjects, and can only be grasped by a scientific ‘theoretical practice’ which keeps its distance from everyday experience. This austere version of Marxism nevertheless captured the imagination of many young intellectuals by calling for a ‘return to Marx’, with the implication that his writings had been distorted by the official communist movement. In fact, Althusser later conceded, his was an ‘imaginary Marxism’, a reconstruction of historical materialism reflecting the same philosophical climate that produced the post-structuralist appropriations of Nietzsche and Heidegger by Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault. Most of the philosophical difficulties in which Althusser found himself can be traced back to the impossibility of fusing Marx’s and Nietzsche’s thought into a new synthesis. See also: MARX, K. Further reading Althusser, L. (1965) Pour Marx , Paris: Maspero; trans. B. Brewster, For Marx , London: Allen Lane, 1969. (Althusser’s most famous book, a collection of essays that outline his theory of overdetermination and his account of the ‘epistemological break’ separating the young Marx from the old.) Elliott, G. (ed.) (1994) Althusser: A Critical Reader, Oxford: Blackwell. (Includes contemporary critical reactions to Althusser by Eric Hobsbawm, Axel Honneth, Paul Ricoeur and Pierre Vilar, and a discussion by the editor of the autobiographical writings.) ALEX CALLINICOS
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Page 26 ALTRUISM see EGOISM AND ALTRUISM AMBEDKAR, BHIMRAO RAMJI (1891–1956) Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar was a statesman, scholar, human rights advocate, educator, barrister, first law minister of the Republic of India and architect of its constitution. Born into the untouchable Mahar subcaste, he became the widely revered leader of India’s more than 100 million hereditary outcastes, the social and psychological emancipation of whom remained his lifelong objective. Strongly influenced by Anglo-American liberalism and pragmatism, Ambedkar was a staunch constitutionalist and social democrat. Locating the source of untouchability within the caste system itself, he became a militant critic of Hinduism, eventually affirming Buddhism as the universal ethical teaching that he felt could lead all of India into modernity. Further reading Keer, D. (1954) Dr Ambedkar: Life and Mission , Bombay: Popular Prakashan; revised 3rd edn, 1971. (The most popular and complete biography of Ambedkar.) ALAN SPONBERG AMBIGUITY A word, phrase or sentence is ambiguous if it has more than one meaning. The word ‘light’, for example, can mean not very heavy or not very dark. Words like ‘light’, ‘note’, ‘bear’ and ‘over’ are lexically ambiguous. They induce ambiguity in phrases or sentences in which they occur, such as ‘light suit’ and ‘The duchess can’t bear children’. However, phrases and sentences can be ambiguous even if none of their constituents is. The phrase ‘porcelain egg container’ is structurally ambiguous, as is the sentence ‘The police shot the rioters with guns’. Ambiguity can have both a lexical and a structural basis, as with sentences like ‘I left her behind for you’ and ‘He saw her duck’. The notion of ambiguity has philosophical applications. For example, identifying an ambiguity can aid in solving a philosophical problem. Suppose one wonders how two people can have the same idea, say of a unicorn. This can seem puzzling until one distinguishes ‘idea’ in the sense of a particular psychological occurrence, a mental representation, from ‘idea’ in the sense of an abstract, shareable concept. On the other hand, gratuitous claims of ambiguity can make for overly simple solutions. Accordingly, the question arises of how genuine ambiguities can be distinguished from spurious ones. Part of the answer consists in identifying phenomena with which ambiguity may be confused, such as vagueness, unclarity, inexplicitness and indexicality. See also: LANGUAGE, PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Atlas, J.D. (1989) Philosophy Without Ambiguity: A Logico-Linguistic Essay, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Examines ambiguity tests and questions certain philosophical appeals to ambiguity.) KENT BACH AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY IN THE 18TH AND 19TH CENTURIES Jonathan Edwards, the first great American philosopher, interpreted Calvinist theology within the newer framework of Newtonian physics and Lockean empiricism in his Freedom of the Will (1754). However, he was all but forgotten by the end of the eighteenth century, when political rather than theological issues held centre stage. In the years leading up to the American Revolution, the moral sense theory of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, Lockean liberalism and classical republican theory all contributed to the thought of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and others who saw themselves as parties to a contract with a monarch, defenders of the rights of humans, and members of a new and virtuous republic. In the early nineteenth century, Scottish common sense realism prevailed in the universities, but the most original and influential philosophical writing came from the communities of the transcendentalists. Emerson and Thoreau developed philosophies of life, language, knowledge and being in writings drawing on the Greek and Roman classics, English and German Romanticism, Christianity, and nonWestern thought. After the Civil War (1861–5), a series of clubs in the East and Midwest, and the new Journal of Speculative Philosophy made Hegel more accessible to Americans; while in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the ‘Metaphysical Club’ of William James, Charles Peirce, Chauncey Wright and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr became the birthplace of pragmatism. The last quarter of the nineteenth century saw the professionalization of American philosophy: new graduate departments at Harvard and Johns Hopkins, professional journals, and
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Page 27 state-supported universities in the Midwest building non-denominational departments of philosophy. By the end of the century, James had published his vast Principles of Psychology (1890) and enunciated a version of pragmatism; Peirce had produced an outpouring of writing on pragmatism, scientific method, logic, semiotics and metaphysics; and Josiah Royce and John Dewey were launched on influential academic careers. Further reading Flower, E. and Murphey, M.G. (1977) A History of Philosophy in America, New York: Capricorn Books, 2 vols. (Volume 1 contains important chapters on Jonathan Edwards and the development of Scottish common sense philosophy in the American context. Volume 2 discusses the St. Louis Hegelians, Peirce, James, Royce, Santayana and Dewey.) Schneider, H. (1963) A History of American Philosophy , New York: Columbia University Press, 2nd edn. (Classic study, containing a good bibliography of primary sources.) RUSSELL B. GOODMAN WILLIAM C. DOWLING AL-‘AMIRI, ABU’L HASAN MUHAMMAD IBN YUSUF (d. 992) Although al-‘Amiri had only a limited long-term impact, his extant works provide useful insights into an extremely creative period in Islamic philosophy in the tenth century AD. He attempted to reconcile philosophy with religion by showing that the genuine conclusions of philosophy could not contradict the revealed truths of Islam, and attempted to build consensus within Islam. He argued for the individual immortality and the punishment or reward of the soul. His analysis of the soul is largely Neoplatonic. The reward of the afterlife is determined by the actualization of the intellect in this life, aided primarily by right actions which moderate the physical faculties and turn the intellect toward the Divine. See also: ISLAMIC THEOLOGY Further reading Rowson, E.K. (1996) ‘Al-‘Amiri’, in S.H. Nasr and O. Leaman (eds) History of Islamic Philosophy , London: Routledge, ch. 14, 216–21. (Concise evaluation of the career of this influential thinker.) TOM GASKILL AMMONIUS, SON OF HERMEAS ( c . AD 440–521) The Greek philosopher Ammonius, ‘son of Hermeas’ was an Alexandrian Neoplatonist. Educated by Proclus in Athens, he succeeded his father as head of the school in Alexandria, where he cultivated the tradition of learned commentary on Aristotle. Simplicius, Philoponus, Asclepius, Damascius and Olympiodorus ranked among his pupils. See also: ARISTOTLE COMMENTATORS Further reading Ammonius Hermeae ( c .485–510) On Aristotle’s Categories , trans. S.M. Cohen and G.B. Matthews, Ammonius On Aristotle’s Categories , London: Duckworth, 1991. (Contains a concise introduction to Ammonius by Richard Sorabji.) CHRISTIAN WILDBERG AMO, ANTON WILHELM ( c .1703–56) The first European-trained African philosopher, Amo pursued a scholarly career in jurisprudence and then in rationalist psychology, logic, and metaphysics. He trained at Halle, Wittenberg and Jena universities, and was influenced by the systems of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Christian von Wolff. While at Halle university, he wrote a pioneering legal dissertation on the application of Roman laws of slavery to Africans in Europe. Subsequently drawn to classical, biblical, and hermetic traditions that apotheosized a cultural continuity with ancient Africa, Amo focused his theoretical and practical concerns on the exterior world of international law and the interior world of deliberative intellectual acts. See also: SLAVERY Further reading Amo, A.W. (c.1703–56) Antonius Guilielmus Amo Afer of Axim in Ghana: Translation of his Works, ed. D. Siegmund-Schultze; trans. L.A. Jones and W.E. Abraham, Halle: Martin Luther University HalleWittenberg, 1968. (A collection of all of Amo’s works.) JOHN S. WRIGHT ANALYSIS, NONSTANDARD Nonstandard analysis is an important application of mathematical logic to the rest of mathematics. Invented in 1960, it provided a long-sought-for rigorous justification for the use of infinitely large and infinitely small
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Page 28 (infinitesimal) quantities in the differential and integral calculus, and the first sound canon for manipulating such quantities. Consider the structure of real numbers, that is, the set of real numbers together with operations and relations on them. We specify a formal language , which has names for all individual real numbers as well as for the operations and relations of . We can then obtain an enlargement (a special kind of extension) * (‘pseudo- ’) of such that * and have exactly the same formal properties: that is, properties expressible in . But, far from being merely a copy of , * has convenient properties not expressible in , which are not shared by . In particular, * has additional ‘nonstandard’ objects (which have no names in ), some of which behave as infinite or infinitesimal quantities. If, using these novel objects and properties of * , we prove a proposition about * that can be expressed in , then this proposition holds automatically also for . Such ‘nonstandard’ proofs of results about are often easier and more intuitive than conventional proofs, which operate wholly within . More generally, this method is applied to other structures, in virtually every branch of mathematics, including algebraic number theory, various branches of classical and modern analysis, probability theory and mathematical physics, to yield highly intuitive characterizations of various infinitary concepts, to simplify proofs and to provide new, efficient ways of generating mathematical constructs. Further reading Cutland, N. (ed.) (1988) Nonstandard Analysis and its Applications , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Collection of papers on NSA, including a wide range of applications to pure and applied mathematics. See especially S. Albeverio, ‘Applications of Non-standard Analysis in Mathematical Physics’, and C.W. Henson, ‘Infinitesimals in Functional Analysis’.) Robinson, A. (1979) Selected Papers of Abraham Robinson, vol. 2, Nonstandard Analysis and Philosophy , ed. H.J. Keisler, W.A.J. Luxemburg and S. Körner, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. (Includes Robinson’s papers on NSA, including seminal applications in diverse fields.) MOSHÉ MACHOVER ANALYSIS, PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES IN The term ‘mathematical analysis’ refers to the major branch of mathematics which is concerned with the theory of functions and includes the differential and integral calculus. Analysis and the calculus began as the study of curves, calculus being concerned with tangents to and areas under curves. The focus was shifted to functions following the insight, due to Leibniz and Isaac Newton in the second half of the seventeenth century, that a curve is the graph of a function. Algebraic foundations were proposed by Lagrange in the late eighteenth century; assuming that any function always took an expansion in a power series, he defined the derivatives from the coefficients of the terms. In the 1820s his assumption was refuted by Cauchy, who had already launched a fourth approach, like Newton’s based on limits, but formulated much more carefully. It was refined further by Weierstrass, by means which helped to create set theory. Analysis also encompasses the theory of limits and of the convergence and divergence of infinite series; modern versions also use point set topology. It has taken various forms over the centuries, of which the older ones are still represented in some notations and terms. Philosophical issues include the status of infinitesimals, the place of logic in the articulation of proofs, types of definition, and the (non-) relationship to analytic proof methods. See also: AXIOM OF CHOICE; CONTINUUM HYPOTHESIS Further reading Bottazzini, U. (1986) The Higher Calculus, Heidelberg: Springer. (Covers both real and complex analysis, 1750–1900.) I. GRATTAN-GUINNESS ANALYTIC ETHICS Moral philosophy has traditionally been divided into normative ethics and meta-ethics. Normative ethics concerns judgments about what is good and how we should act. Meta-ethics, with which ‘analytic ethics’ is typically identified, seeks to understand such judgments. Are they factual statements capable of being literally true or false ( cognitivism)? Or are they commands or expressions of attitude, capable only of greater or lesser appropriateness or efficacy ( noncognitivism )? Cognitivists focus on whether the facts to which they claim moral judgments correspond are discovered from experience, or whether they occupy a different realm, as do
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Page 29 mathematical facts. Noncognitivists, in contrast, arguing that moral judgments are not fact-stating, ask if they signal our feelings or commitments, or are imperatives of conduct. Other questions concerning moral judgments include whether they are subjective or objective, and how they are connected to motivation. Analytic ethics therefore not only concerns the meaning of moral terms, but ranges over such areas as epistemology, metaphysics and the theory of action. As a field it remains full of controversy. It has developed approaches that afford specific insights into morality, and contributed to our understanding of the functions of thought and language. See also: MORAL JUDGMENT Further reading Pojman, L. (ed.) (1989) Ethical Theory: Classical and Contemporary Readings , Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. (Useful anthology containing many influential writings in analytic ethics.) Williams, B. (1985) Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy , Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press and London: Fontana. (Influential criticism of various trends in moral theory.) PETER RAILTON ANALYTICAL PHILOSOPHY Philosophical analysis is a method of inquiry in which one seeks to assess complex systems of thought by ‘analysing’ them into simpler elements whose relationships are thereby brought into focus. This method has a long history, but became especially prominent at the start of the twentieth century and, by becoming integrated into Russell’s development of logical theory, acquired a greater degree of sophistication than before. The logical positivists developed the method further during the 1930s and, in the context of their anti-metaphysical programme, held that analysis was the only legitimate philosophical inquiry. Thus for them philosophy could only be ‘analytical philosophy’. After 1945 those philosophers who wanted to expand philosophical inquiries beyond the limits prescribed by the positivists extended the understanding of analysis to include accounts of the general structures of language and thought without the earlier commitment to the identification of ‘simple’ elements of thought. Hence there developed a more relaxed conception of ‘linguistic analysis’ and the understanding of ‘analytical philosophy’ was modified in such a way that a critical concern with language and meaning was taken to be central to it, leading, indeed, to a retrospective re-evaluation of the role of Frege as a founder of analytical philosophy. At the same time, however, Quine propounded influential arguments which suggest that methods of analysis can have no deep significance because there is no determinate structure to systems of thought or language for the analytical philosopher to analyse and assess. Hence some contemporary philosophers proclaim that we have now reached ‘the end of analytical philosophy’. But others, who find Quine’s arguments unpersuasive, hold that analytical philosophy has virtues quite sufficient to ensure it a role as a central philosophical method for the foreseeable future. See also: LOGICAL POSITIVISM Further reading Montefiore, A. and Williams, B. (1966) British Analytical Philosophy , London: Routledge. (An influential collection of papers in which the post-war Oxford conception of linguistic analysis is propounded and discussed.) Passmore, J. (1957) A Hundred Years of Philosophy , London: Duckworth; 2nd edn repr. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968. (Much of the second half of the book provides a survey of the development of analytical philosophy, which is carried further in the 1966 Penguin edition.) THOMAS BALDWIN ANALYTICAL PHILOSOPHY IN LATIN AMERICA In Latin America, philosophical analysis has been portrayed as an intellectual revolution. Its avowed goal has been to replace the abstruseness and obscurantism of scholastic and metaphysical jargon perceived as typical of much of Latin American philosophy with the clarity and rigour of mathematical and scientific discourse. Arriving around the mid-1940s, analytic philosophy at first met with little interest because of a shortage of its classics in translation, cultural obstacles and opposition from the more traditional, entrenched philosophies. By the 1960s it had overcome many obstacles and stimulated considerable philosophical activity, mainly in Mexico and Argentina. By the 1980s, in spite of political opposition, analysis had created an international forum for the discussion of philosophical problems. It attracted to its ranks several distinguished philosophers and scientists with philosophical interests, among them Mario Bunge (Argentina and Canada), Héctor-Neri
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Page 30 Castañeda (Guatemala and the USA) and Francisco Miró Quesada (Peru). An ambitious translation effort was launched and several important journals were founded, such as Análisis filosófico (Philosophical Analysis), Revista latinoamericana de filosofía (Latin American Journal of Philosophy) (Argentina), Crítica. Revista hispanoamericana de filosofía (Criticism. Hispanoamerican Journal of Philosophy) (Mexico), Manuscrito (Manuscript) (Brazil) and Diálogos (Dialogues) (Puerto Rico). See also: ANALYTICAL PHILOSOPHY Further reading Gracia, J.J.E., Rabossi, E., Villanueva, E. and Dascal, M. (eds) (1984) Philosophical Analysis in Latin America, Synthese Library, Studies in Epistemology, Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science 172, Dordrecht: D. Reidel. (The best collection in English of contemporary Latin American analytic philosophers.) Wittgenstein, L. (1957) Tractatus Logico Philosophicus (Treatise on Logic and Philosophy), Madrid: Revista de Occidente. (Translation of the English version dated 1922.) OSCAR R. MARTÍ ANALYTICITY In Critique of Pure Reason , Kant introduced the term ‘analytic’ for judgments whose truth is guaranteed by a certain relation of ‘containment’ between the constituent concepts, and ‘synthetic’ for judgments which are not like this. Closely related terms were found in earlier writings of Locke, Hume and Leibniz. In Kant’s definition, an analytic judgment is one in which ‘the predicate B belongs to the subject A, as something which is (covertly) contained in this concept A’. Kant called such judgments ‘explicative’, contrasting them with synthetic judgments which are ‘ampliative’. A paradigmatic analyticity would be: bachelors are unmarried. Kant assumed that knowledge of analytic necessities has a uniquely transparent sort of explanation. In the succeeding two centuries the terms ‘analytic’ and ‘synthetic’ have been used in a variety of closely related but not strictly equivalent ways. In the early 1950s Morton White and W.V. Quine argued that the terms were fundamentally unclear and should be eschewed. Although a number of prominent philosophers have rejected their arguments, there prevails a scepticism about ‘analytic’ and the idea that there is an associated category of necessary truths having privileged epistemic status. See also: CONCEPTS; LOGICAL POSITIVISM Further reading Quine, W.V. (1970) Philosophy of Logic , Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. (Attack on the ontology of propositions.) GEORGE BEALER ANAPHORA Anaphora describes a dependence of the interpretation of one natural language expression on the interpretation of another natural language expression. For example, the pronoun ‘her’ in (1) below is anaphorically dependent for its interpretation on the interpretation of the noun phrase ‘Sally’ because ‘her’ refers to the same person ‘Sally’ refers to. 1 Sally likes her car. As (2) below illustrates, anaphoric dependencies also occur across sentences, making anaphora a ‘discourse phenomenon’: 2 A farmer owned a donkey. He beat it. The analysis of anaphoric dependence has been the focus of a great deal of study in linguistics and philosophy. Anaphoric dependencies are difficult to accommodate within the traditional conception of compositional semantics of Tarski and Montague precisely because the meaning of anaphoric elements is dependent on other elements of the discourse. Many expressions can be used anaphorically. For instance, anaphoric dependencies hold between the expression ‘one’ and the indefinite noun phrase ‘a labrador’ in (3) below; between the verb phrase ‘loves his mother’ and a ‘null’ anaphor (or verbal auxiliary) in (4); between the prepositional phrase ‘to Paris’ and the lexical item ‘there’ in (5); and between a segment of text and the pronoun ‘it’ in (6). 3 Susan has a labrador. I want one too. 4 John loves his mother. Fred does too.
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Page 31 argued that verb tenses generate anaphoric dependencies. See also: DISCOURCE Further reading Gamut, L.T.F. (1991) Logic, Language and Meaning , esp. vol. 2, Intensional Logic and Logical Grammar, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (This book is a very good introduction to semantics. Dynamic semantics is presented in volume 2.) NICHOLAS ASHER ANARCHISM Anarchism is the view that a society without the state, or government, is both possible and desirable. Although there have been intimations of the anarchist outlook throughout history, anarchist ideas emerged in their modern form in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the wake of the French and Industrial Revolutions. All anarchists support some version of each of the following broad claims: (1) people have no general obligation to obey the commands of the state; (2) the state ought to be abolished; (3) some kind of stateless society is possible and desirable; (4) the transition from state to anarchy is a realistic prospect Within this broad framework there is a rich variety of anarchist thought. The main political division is between the ‘classical’ or socialist school, which tends to reject or restrict private property, and the ‘individualist’ or libertarian tradition, which defends private acquisition and looks to free market exchange as a model for the desirable society. Philosophical differences follow this division to some extent, the classical school appealing principally to natural law and perfectionist ethics, and the individualists to natural rights and egoism. Another possible distinction is between the ‘old’ anarchism of the nineteenth century (including both the classical and individualist traditions) and the ‘new’ anarchist thought that has developed since the Second World War, which applies the insights of such recent ethical currents as feminism, ecology and postmodernism. Anarchists have produced powerful arguments denying any general obligation to obey the state and pointing out the ill effects of state power. More open to question are their claims that states ought to be abolished, that social order is possible without the state and that a transition to anarchy is a realistic possibility. Further reading Bakunin, M. (1973) Selected Writings, trans. S. Cox and O. Stevens, ed. A. Lehning, London: Jonathan Cape. (The best selection of Bakunin’s writings available in English.) Miller, D. (1984) Anarchism , London: Dent. (The best analytical and critical introduction.) GEORGE CROWDER ANAXAGORAS (500–428 BC) Anaxagoras of Clazomenae was a major Greek philosopher of the Presocratic period, who worked in the Ionian tradition of inquiry into nature. While his cosmology largely recasts the sixth-century system of Anaximenes, the focus of the surviving fragments is on ontological questions. The often quoted opening of his book – ‘all things were together’ – echoes the Eleatic Parmenides’ characterization of true being, but signals recognition of time, change and plurality. Even so, Anaxagoras is deeply committed to the Eleatic notions that, strictly speaking, there can be no coming into being or going out of existence, nor any separation of one part of reality from any other. His main object is to show how the variety of the world about us is somehow already contained in the primordial mixture, and is explicable only on the assumption that latent within each substance are portions of every other. Whether or not he owed his conception of unlimited smallness to Zeno of Elea, he held that there could be no such thing as a magnitude of least size; and he claimed that there was accordingly no difference in complexity between the large and the small. Mind, however, is a distinct principle; unlimited, autonomous, free from the admixture of any other substance. Hence Anaxagoras’ decision to make it the first cause of the ordered universe we now inhabit. Mind initiates and controls a vortex, which from small beginnings sucks in an ever-increasing expanse of the surrounding envelope. The vortex brings about an incomplete separation of the ingredients of the original mixture: hot from cold, dry from wet, bright from dark, and so on, with a flat earth compacted at the centre and surrounded by misty air and clearer ether above and below. Contemporaries were scandalized by Anaxagoras’ claim that sun, moon and stars were nothing but incandescent stones caught up in the revolving ether. Later fifth-century physicists – notably Archelaus and Diogenes of Apollonia – developed revised versions of Anaxagoras’ system, but abandoned his dualism. His conception of
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Page 32 mind excited but disappointed Socrates, and exercised a profound influence on Plato’s cosmology and Aristotle’s psychology. Aristotle was also fascinated by the complexities of the remarkable theory of ‘everything in everything’. Anaxagoras’ philosophy was never subsequently revived, but he was remembered as the mentor of the statesman Pericles and the poet Euripides. His reputation as a rationalist critic of religion persisted throughout antiquity. See also: PRESOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY Further reading Schofield, M. (1980) An Essay on Anaxagoras , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (A monograph on Anaxagoras’ theories of mind and matter based on detailed study of the principal fragments.) Sider, D. (1981) The Fragments of Anaxagoras , Meisenheim am Glan: Verlag Anton Hain. (A useful edition of the Greek text of the fragments, with translation and commentary.) MALCOLM SCHOFIELD ANAXARCHUS ( c .380–c .330 BC) The Greek philosopher Anaxarchus of Abdera was a friend of Alexander the Great, teacher and friend of Pyrrho, and heroic victim of a tyrant. More a court philosopher than a school one, and an ambiguous personality, he seems to have mixed a highly original philosophical cocktail: a primarily ethical, cynically inclined outlook, combined with certain elements of Democritean ethics, epistemology and physics. His only attested work was a treatise On Kingship , his dominant interest perhaps being the theory and practice of relations between intellectual and ruler. See also: PRESOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY Further reading Diogenes Laertius ( c . early 3rd century AD) Lives of the Philosophers, trans. R.D. Hicks, Dio genes Laertius Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and London: Heinemann, 1925, 2 vols. (Book IX, 58–60 is a life of Anaxarchus.) JACQUES BRUNSCHWIG ANAXIMANDER ( c .610–after 546 BC) The Greek philosopher Anaximander of Miletus followed Thales in his philosophical and scientific interests. He wrote a book, of which one fragment survives, and is the first Presocratic philosopher about whom we have enough information to reconstruct his theories in any detail. He was principally concerned with the origin, structure and workings of the world, and attempted to account for them consistently, through a small number of principles and mechanisms. Like other thinkers of his tradition, he gave the Olympian gods no role in creating the world or controlling events. Instead, he held that the world originated from a vast, eternal, moving material of no definite nature, which he called apeiron (‘boundless’ or ‘unlimited’). From this, through obscure processes including one called ‘separation off’, arose the world as we know it. Anaximander described the kosmos (world) and stated the distances of the celestial bodies from the earth. He accounted for the origin of animal life and explained how humans first emerged. He pictured the world as a battleground in which opposite natures, such as hot and cold, constantly encroach upon one another, and described this process as taking place with order and regularity. See also: PRESOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY Further reading Kahn, C.H. (1960) Anaximander and the Origins of Greek Cosmology, New York: Columbia University Press; repr. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1994. (The best book on the Milesians, including Anaximander.) RICHARD MCKIRAHAN ANAXIMENES (6th century BC) The Greek philosopher Anaximenes of Miletus followed Anaximander in his philosophical and scientific interests. Only a few words survive from his book, but there is enough other information to give us a picture of his most important theories. Like the other early Presocratic philosophers he was interested in the origin, structure and composition of the universe, as well as the principles on which it operates. Anaximenes held that the primary substance – both the source of everything else and the material out of which it is made – is air. When rarefied and condensed it becomes other materials, such as fire, water and earth. The primordial air is infinite in extent and without beginning or end. It is in motion and divine. Air generated the universe through its motion, and continues to govern it. The human soul is composed of air and it is likely that Anaximenes believed the entire kosmos (world) to be alive, with air functioning as its soul. Like other Presocratics, he proposed theories of the nature
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Page 33 of the heavenly bodies and their motions, and of meteorological and other natural phenomena. See also: PRESOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY Further reading Kahn, C.H. (1960) Anaximander and the Origins of Greek Cosmology, New York: Columbia University Press; repr. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1994. (The best book on the Milesians, including Anaximenes.) RICHARD MCKIRAHAN ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY The philosophy of the Greco-Roman world from the sixth century BC to the sixth century AD laid the foundations for all subsequent Western philosophy. Its greatest figures are Socrates (fifth century BC) and Plato and Aristotle (fourth century BC). But the enormously diverse range of further important thinkers who populated the period includes the Presocratics and Sophists of the sixth and fifth centuries BC; the Stoics, Epicureans and sceptics of the Hellenistic age; and the many Aristotelian and (especially) Platonist philosophers who wrote under the Roman Empire, including the great Neoplatonist Plotinus. Ancient philosophy was principally pagan, and was finally eclipsed by Christianity in the sixth century AD, but it was so comprehensively annexed by its conqueror that it came, through Christianity, to dominate medieval and Renaissance philosophy. This eventual symbiosis between ancient philosophy and Christianity may reflect the fact that philosophical creeds in late antiquity fulfilled much the same role as religious movements, with which they shared many of their aims and practices. Only a small fraction of ancient philosophical writings have come down to us intact. The remainder can be recovered, to a greater or lesser extent, by piecing together fragmentary evidence from sources which refer to them. 1 Main features ‘Ancient’ philosophy is that of classical antiquity, which not only inaugurated the entire European philosophical tradition but has exercised an unparalleled influence on its style and content. It is conventionally considered to start with THALES in the mid sixth century BC, although the Greeks themselves frequently made HOMER ( c .700 BC) its true originator. Officially it is often regarded as ending in 529 AD, when the Christian emperor Justinian is believed to have banned the teaching of pagan philosophy at Athens. However, this was no abrupt termination, and the work of Platonist philosophers continued for some time in self-imposed exile (see ARISTOTLE COMMENTATORS; NEOPLATONISM; SIMPLICIUS). Down to and including Plato (in the first half of the fourth century BC), philosophy did not develop a significant technical terminology of its own – unlike such contemporary disciplines as mathematics and medicine. It was Plato’s pupil Aristotle, and after him the Stoics (see STOICISM), who made truly decisive contributions to the philosophical vocabulary of the ancient world. Ancient philosophy was above all a product of Greece and the Greek-speaking parts of the Mediterranean, which came to include southern Italy, Sicily, western Asia, and large parts of North Africa, notably Egypt. From the first century BC, a number of Romans became actively engaged in one or other of the Greek philosophical systems, and some of them wrote their own works in Latin (see Lucretius; CICERO; SENECA; APULEIUS). But Greek remained the lingua franca of philosophy. Although much modern philosophical terminology derives from Latinized versions of Greek technical concepts, most of these stem from the Latin vocabulary of medieval Aristotelianism, not directly from ancient Roman philosophical writers. 2 The sixth and fifth centuries BC The first phase, occupying most of the sixth and fifth centuries BC, is generally known as Presocratic philosophy (see PRESOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY). Its earliest practitioners (THALES; ANAXIMANDER; ANAXIMENES) came from Miletus, on the west coast of modern Turkey. The dominant concern of the Presocratic thinkers was to explain the origin and regularities of the physical world and the place of the human soul within it (see especially PYTHAGOREANISM; HERACLITUS; ANAXAGORAS; EMPEDOCLES; DEMOCRITUS), although the period also produced such rebels as the Eleatic philosophers (Parmenides; Zeno of Elea; Melissus), whose radical monism sought to undermine the very basis of cosmology by reliance on a priori reasoning. The label ‘Presocratic’ acknowledges the traditional view that SOCRATES (469–399 BC) was the first philosopher to shift the focus away from the natural world to human values. In fact, however, this shift to a large extent coincides with the concerns of his contemporaries the Sophists, who professed to teach the fundamentals of political and social success and
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Page 34 consequently were also much concerned with moral issues (see SOPHISTS). But the persona of Socrates became, and has remained ever since, so powerful an icon for the life of moral scrutiny that it is his name that is used to mark this watershed in the history of philosophy. In the century or so following his death, many schools looked back to him as the living embodiment of philosophy and sought the principles of his life and thought in philosophical theory (see especially SOCRATIC SCHOOLS). 3 The fourth century BC Socrates and the Sophists helped to make Athens the philosophical centre of the Greek world, and it was there, in the fourth century, that the two greatest philosophers of antiquity lived and taught, namely Plato and Aristotle. PLATO, Socrates’ pupil, set up his school the Academy in Athens (see ACADEMY). Plato’s published dialogues are literary masterpieces as well as philosophical classics, and develop, albeit unsystematically, a global philosophy which embraces ethics, politics, physics, metaphysics, epistemology, aesthetics and psychology. The Academy’s most eminent alumnus was ARISTOTLE, whose own school the Lyceum came for a time to rival its importance as an educational centre. Aristotle’s highly technical but also often provisional and exploratory school treatises may not have been intended for publication; at all events, they did not become widely disseminated and discussed until the late first century BC. The main philosophical treatises (leaving aside his important zoological works) include seminal studies in all the areas covered by Plato, plus logic, a branch of philosophy which Aristotle pioneered. These treatises are, like Plato’s, among the leading classics of Western philosophy. Platonism and Aristotelianism were to become the dominant philosophies of the Western tradition from the second century AD at least until the end of the Renaissance, and the legacy of both remains central to Western philosophy today. 4 Hellenistic philosophy Down to the late fourth century BC, philosophy was widely seen as a search for universal understanding, so that in the major schools its activities could comfortably include, for example, biological and historical research. In the ensuing era of Hellenistic philosophy, however, a geographical split helped to demarcate philosophy more sharply as a self-contained discipline (see HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHY). Alexandria, with its magnificent library and royal patronage, became the new centre of scientific, literary and historical research, while the philosophical schools at Athens concentrated on those areas which correspond more closely to philosophy as it has since come to be understood. The following features were to characterize philosophy not only in the Hellenistic age but also for the remainder of antiquity. The three main parts of philosophy were most commonly labelled ‘physics’ (a primarily speculative discipline, concerned with such concepts as causation, change, god and matter, and virtually devoid of empirical research), ‘logic’ (which sometimes included epistemology), and ‘ethics’. Ethics was agreed to be the ultimate focus of philosophy, which was thus in essence a systematized route to personal virtue (see ARETĒ) and happiness (see EUDIAMONIA).There was also a strong spiritual dimension. One’s religious beliefs – that is, the way one rationalized and elaborated one’s own (normally pagan) beliefs and practices concerning the divine – were themselves an integral part of both physics and ethics, never a mere adjunct of philosophy. The dominant philosophical creeds of the Hellenistic age (officially 323–31 BC) were Stoicism (founded by ZENO OF CITIUM) and Epicureanism (founded by EPICURCUS) (see STOICISM; EPICUREANISM). Scepticism was also a powerful force, largely through the Academy (see ARCESILAUS; CARNEADES), which in this period functioned as a critical rather than a doctrinal school, and also, starting from the last decades of the era, through Pyrrhonism (see PYRRHONISM) 5 The imperial era The crucial watershed belongs, however, not at the very end of the Hellenistic age (31 BC, when the Roman empire officially begins), but half a century earlier in the 80s BC. Political and military upheavals at Athens drove most of the philosophers out of the city, to cultural havens such as Alexandria and Rome. The philosophical institutions of Athens never fully recovered, so that this decentralization amounted to a permanent redrawing of philosophical map. (The chairs of Platonism, Aristotelianism, Stoicism and Epicureanism which the philosopher-emperor MARCUS AURELIUS established at Athens in AD 176 were a significant gesture, but did not fully restore Athens’ former philosophical pre-eminence.) Philosophy was no longer, for most of its adherents, a living activity within the Athenian school founded by Plato, Aristotle, Zeno or Epicurus. Instead it was a subject
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Page 35 pursued in small study groups led by professional teachers all over the Greco-Roman world. To a large extent, it was felt that the history of philosophy had now come to an end, and that the job was to seek the correct interpretation of the ‘ancients’ by close study of their texts. One symptom of this feeling is that doxography – the systematic cataloguing of philosophical and scientific opinions (see DOXOGRAPHY) – concentrated largely on the period down to about 80 BC, as did the biographical history of philosophy written circa AD 300 by DIOGENES LAERTIUS. Another such symptom is that a huge part of the philosophical activity of late antiquity went into the composition of commentaries on classic philosophical texts. In this final phase of ancient philosophy, conveniently called ‘imperial’ because it more or less coincides with the era of the Roman empire, the Hellenistic creeds were gradually eclipsed by the revival of doctrinal Platonism, based on the close study of Plato’s texts, out of which it developed a massively elaborate metaphysical scheme. Aristotle was usually regarded as an ally by these Platonists, and became therefore himself the focus of many commentaries (see PLATONISM, EARLY AND MIDDLE; PERIPATETICS; NEOPLATONISM; ARISTOTLE COMMENTATORS). Despite its formal concern with recovering the wisdom of the ancients, however, this age produced many powerfully original thinkers, of whom the greatest is PLOLTINUS. 6 Schools and movements The early Pythagoreans constituted the first philosophical group that can be called even approximately a ‘school’. They acquired a reputation for secrecy, as well as for virtually religious devotion to the word of their founder PYTHAGORAS. ‘He himself said it’ (best known in its Latin form ‘ ipse dixit ’) was alleged to be their watchword. In some ways it is more accurate to consider them a sect than a school, and their beliefs and practices were certainly intimately bound up in religious teachings about the soul’s purification. It is no longer accepted, as it long was, that the Athenian philosophical schools had the status of formal religious institutions for the worship of the muses. Their legal and institutional standing is in fact quite obscure. Both the Academy and the Lyceum were so named after public groves just outside the walls of Athens, in which their public activities were held. The Stoics too got their name from the public portico, or ‘stoa’, in which they met, alongside the Athenian agora. Although these schools undoubtedly also conducted classes and discussions on private premises too, it was their public profile that was crucial to their identity as schools. In the last four centuries BC, prospective philosophy students flocked to Athens from all over the Greek world, and the high public visibility of the schools there was undoubtedly cultivated partly with an eye to recruitment. Only the Epicurean school kept its activities out of the public gaze, in line with Epicurus’ policy of minimal civic involvement. A school normally started as an informal grouping of philosophers with a shared set of interests and commitments, under the nominal leadership of some individual, but without a strong party line to which all members owed unquestioning allegiance. In the first generation of the Academy, for example, many of Plato’s own leading colleagues dissented from his views on central issues. The same openness is discernible in the first generations of the other schools, even (if to a much lesser extent) the Epicurean. However, after the death of the founder the picture usually changed. His word thereafter became largely beyond challenge, and further progress was presented as the supplementation or reinterpretation of the founder’s pronouncements, rather than as their replacement. To this extent, the allegiance which in the long term bound a school together usually depended on a virtually religious reverence for the movement’s foundational texts, which provided the framework within which its discussions were conducted. The resemblance to the structure of religious sects is no accident. In later antiquity, philosophical and religious movements constituted in effect a single cultural phenomenon, and competed for the same spiritual and intellectual high ground. This includes Christianity, which became a serious rival to pagan philosophy (primarily Platonism) from the third century onwards, and eventually triumphed over it. In seeking to understand such spiritual movements of late antiquity as Hermetism, Gnosticism, Neo-Pythagoreanism, Cynicism and even Neoplatonism itself, and their concern with such values as asceticism, self-purificaton and self-divinization, it is inappropriate to insist on a sharp division between philosophy and religion (see HERMETISM; GNOSTICISM; NEOPYTHAGOREANISM; CYNICS; NEOPLATONISM). ‘Ancient philosophy’ is traditionally understood as pagan and distinguished from the Christian Patristic philosophy of late antiquity
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Page 36 (see PATRISTIC PHILOSOPHY). But it was possible to put pagan philosophy at the service of Judaism (see PHILO OF ALEXANDRIA), or Christianity (see for example CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA; ORIGEN; AUGUSTINE; BOETHIUS; PHILOPONUS), and it was indeed largely in this latter capacity that the major systems of ancient philosophy eventually became incorporated into medieval philosophy and Renaissance philosophy, which they proceeded to dominate (see MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY; RENAISSANCE PHILOSOPHY). This extensive overlap between philosophy and religion also reflects to some extent the pervasive influence of philosophy on the entire culture of the ancient world. Rarely regarded as a detached academic discipline, philosophy frequently carried high political prestige, and its modes of discourse came to infect disciplines as diverse as medicine, rhetoric, astrology, history, grammar and law. The work of two of the greatest scientists of the ancient world, the doctor GALEN and the astronomer PTOLEMY, was deeply indebted to their respective philosophical backgrounds. 7 Survival A very substantial body of works by ancient philosophical writers has survived in manuscript. These are somewhat weighted towards those philosophers – above all Plato, Aristotle and the Neoplatonists – who were of most immediate interest to the Christian culture which preserved them throughout the Middle Ages, mainly in the monasteries, where manuscripts were assiduously copied and stored. Some further ancient philosophical writings have been recovered through translations into Arabic and other languages, or on excavated scraps of papyrus. The task of reconstituting the original texts of these works has been a major preoccupation of modern scholarship. For the vast majority of ancient philosophers, however, our knowledge of them depends on secondary reports of their words and ideas in other writers, of whom some are genuinely interested in recording the history of philosophy, but others bent on discrediting the views they attribute to them. In such cases of secondary attestation, strictly a ‘fragment’ is a verbatim quotation, while indirect reports are called ‘testimonia’. However, this distinction is not always rigidly maintained, and indeed the sources on which we rely rarely operate with any explicit distinction between quotation and paraphrase. It is a tribute to the philosophical genius of the ancient world that, despite the suppression and distortion which its contributions have suffered over two millennia, they remain central to any modern conspectus of what philosophy is and can be. See also: EGYPTIAN PHILOSOPHY: INFLUENCE ON GREEK THOUGHT Further reading Algra, K., Barnes, J., Mansfeld, J. and Schofield, M. (eds) (1998) The Cambridge History of Hellenistic Philosophy , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Bridges the gap between Guthrie (1962–81) and Armstrong (1967).) Armstrong, A.H. (ed.) (1967) The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Continuation of Guthrie (1962–81), but skipping Hellenistic philosophy.) Guthrie, W.K.C. (1962–81) A History of Greek Philosophy , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 6 vols. (The major work of its kind in English, but does not go beyond Aristotle.) DAVID SEDLEY ANDERSON, JOHN (1893–1962) Arguing against metaphysical ‘ultimates’ (that is, supposed unconditioned conditions of things), relative truth, appeals to subjective experience, and opposing some of the main tendencies of twentieth-century philosophy, Anderson developed a wide-ranging realist and empiricist philosophy. Highly critical of religion, he was much concerned with other cultural values and advanced views (influential in Australia) on freedom of thought, education, ethics and aesthetics. In ethics, for example, his view is that objective good is not good because it is approved of by certain people; rather those who approve of good (or have other relations to it) do so because it is good. He carefully distinguished questions about the intrinsic character of good from those about relations social groups may have to it, and goes on to develop an account of intrinsic goods as certain socio-mental activities: enterprise or freedom, objective inquiry, artistic production and appreciation, love and courage. Similarly, in aesthetics he distinguishes characteristics of works of art from possible relations between artists, works, appreciators and critics, such as a work’s relation to a writer’s intentions. In Anderson’s view the character and structure of the work itself alone provides an
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Page 37 aesthetic criterion for assessing the merit of works of art. See also: AUSTRALIA, PHILOSOPHY IN Further reading Anderson, J. (1962) Studies in Empirical Philosophy , Sydney: Angus & Robertson. (Contains most of Anderson’s philosophical articles.) Baker, A.J. (1986) Australian Realism, The Systematic Philosophy of John Anderson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Analyses the main features of Anderson’s overall philosophy.) A.J. BAKER ANIMAL LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT The question of animal language and thought has been debated since ancient times. Some have held that humans are exceptional in these respects, others that humans and animals are continuous with respect to language and thought. The issue is important because our self-image as a species is at stake. Arguments for human exceptionalism can be classified as Cartesian, Wittgensteinian and behaviourist. What these arguments have in common is the view that language and thought are closely associated, and animals do not have language. The ape language experiments of the 1960s and 1970s were especially important against this background: if apes could learn language then even the advocates of human exceptionalism would have to admit that they have thoughts. It is now generally believed that whatever linguistic abilities apes have shown have been quite rudimentary. Yet many sceptics are willing to grant that in some cases apes did develop linguistic skills to some extent, and clearly evidenced thought. Studies of other animals in captivity and various animals in the wild have provided evidence of highly sophisticated communicative behaviour. Cognitive ethology and comparative psychology have emerged as the fields that study animal thought. While there are conceptual difficulties in grounding these fields, it appears plausible that many animals have thoughts and these can be scientifically investigated. Further reading Bekoff, M. and Jamieson, D. (eds) (1995) Readings in Animal Cognition , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (This is a collection of articles on animal cognition by leading philosophers, psychologists and biologists, including Cheney and Seyfarth, Herman, Ristau and Savage-Rumbaugh.) Terrace, H.S. (1980) Nim, London: Methuen. (A critique of the ape language experiments and the report of a failed attempt to teach language to a chimpanzee.) DALE JAMIESON ANIMALS AND ETHICS Does morality require that we respect the lives and interests of nonhuman animals? The traditional doctrine was that animals were made for human use, and so we may dispose of them as we please. It has been argued, however, that this is a mere ‘speciesist’ prejudice and that animals should be given more or less the same moral consideration as humans. If this is right, we may be morally required to be vegetarians; and it may turn out that laboratory research using animals, and many other such practices, are more problematic than has been realized. Opposing views in the twentieth century, such as those based on contractarianism, have revived the argument against animals having rights. See also: ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS Further reading Regan, T. and Singer, P. (eds) (1989) Animal Rights and Human Obligations , Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2nd edn. (A collection of readings on all sides of the issue. Includes a selection from Aristotle, which illustrates his view that because humans have a privileged moral status, on the grounds that they alone are rational, animals exist to provide food and other ‘aids in life’ for humans.) JAMES RACHELS ANNICERIS see CTRENAICS ANOMALOUS MONISM Anomalous monism, proposed by Donald Davidson in 1970, implies that all events are of one fundamental kind, namely physical. But it does not deny that there are mental events; rather, it implies that every mental event is some physical event or other. The idea is that someone’s thinking at a certain time that the earth is round, for example, might be a certain pattern of neural firing in their brain at that time, an event which is both a thinking that the earth is round (a type of mental event) and a pattern of neural firing (a type of physical event). There is just one event, that can be characterized both in mental terms and in physical terms. If mental events are physical events, they can, like all
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Page 38 physical events, be explained and predicted (at least in principle) on the basis of laws of nature cited in physical science. However, according to anomalous monism, events cannot be so explained or predicted as described in mental terms (such as ‘thinking’, ‘desiring’, ‘itching’ and so on), but only as described in physical terms. The distinctive feature of anomalous monism as a brand of physical monism is that it implies that mental events as such (that is, as described in mental terms) are anomalous – they cannot be explained or predicted on the basis of strict scientific laws. See also: REDUCTION, PROBLEMS OF Further reading Davidson, D. (1980) Actions and Events, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Collection of some of Davidson’s papers on actions, events, causation, and anomalous monism.) BRIAN P. McLAUGHLIN ANSCOMBE, GERTRUDE ELIZABETH MARGARET (1919–) Elizabeth Anscombe has contributed to all principal areas of philosophy, most influentially to ethics and the philosophy of mind. She is the founder of contemporary action theory, and an important source of the revival of interest in virtue ethics. The chief influences on her thought are the work of her teacher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, much of which she has translated and of which she is an important interpreter, and the classical and medieval traditions, as found in Aristotle and Aquinas. She has also made a number of contributions to the defence of Roman Catholic religious belief. Further reading Anscombe, G.E.M. (1981) Collected Philosophical Papers , Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 3 vols. (The definitive edition of Anscombe’s works.) MICHAEL THOMPSON ANSELM OF CANTERBURY (1033–1109) Anselm of Canterbury, also known as Anselm of Aosta and Anselm of Bec or Saint Anselm, was first a student, then a monk, later prior and finally abbot of the monastery of Bec in Normandy, before being elected Archbishop of Canterbury in 1093. He remains one of the best-known and most readily engaging philosophers and theologians of medieval Europe. His literary corpus consists of eleven treatises or dialogues, the most important of which are the philosophical works Monologion and Proslogion and the magnificent theological work Cur deus homo (Why God Became a Man). He also left three meditations, nineteen prayers, 374 extant letters including Epistolae de Sacramentis (Letters on the Sacraments) and a collection of philosophical fragments, together with a compilation of his sayings ( Dicta Anselmi) by Alexander, a monk of Canterbury, and a compilation of his reflections on virtue, De morum qualitate per exemplorum coaptationem (On Virtues and Vices as Illustrated by a Collage of Examples), possibly also by a monk at Canterbury. At Bec Anselm wrote his first philosophical treatise, the Monologion , a title signifying a soliloquy. This work was followed by the Proslogion, the title meaning an address (of the soul to God). At Bec he also completed the philosophical dialogues De grammatico (On (an) Expert in Grammar), De veritate (On Truth), De libertate arbitrii (Freedom of Choice) and De casu diaboli (The Fall of the Devil). Near the end of his time at Bec, he turned his attention to themes more theological, drafting a first version of De incarnatione Verbi (The Incarnation of the Word) before September 1092 and completing the final revision around the beginning of 1094. During his time in office at Canterbury, which included two long exiles from England (1097–1100 and 1103–6), he wrote the Cur deus homo, followed by the concisely reasoned treatises De conceptu virginali et originali peccati (The Virgin Conception and Original Sin), De processione Spiritus Sancti (The Procession of the Holy Spirit) and De concordia praescientiae et praedestinationis et gratiae dei cum libero arbitrio (The Harmony of the Foreknowledge, the Predestination and the Grace of God with Free Choice). Though his principal writings at Bec were more philosophical while his foremost writings as archbishop were more theological, still we must remember that Anselm himself made no express distinction between philosophy and theology,that at Bechealsowrote two meditations and sixteen prayers, and that his Cur deus homo and De concordia, in dealing with the weighty theological doctrines of atonement, predestination and grace, incorporate philosophical concepts such as necessitas praecedens (preceding necessity) and necessitas sequens (subsequent necessity). Anselm’s most famous philosophical work is certainly the Proslogion, while his most influential theological work is undoubtedly the Cur deus homo. The style of the Proslogion imitates
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Page 39 that of Augustine in the Confessiones, where the soul invokes God as it prayerfully reflects and meditates. By contrast, the Cur deus homo is cast in dialogue form because, as Anselm states in I.1, ‘issues which are examined by the method of question and answer are clearer, and so more acceptable, to many minds – especially to minds that are slower.’ About his aims in the Proslogion there is no scholarly consensus. The traditional view holds that he is undertaking the twofold task of demonstrating the existence of God and demonstrating certain truths regarding God’s attributes. In carrying out this task, he has recourse to a single consideration ( unum argumentum ), namely, that God is aliquid quo nihil maius cogitari potest (something than which nothing greater can be thought). This single consideration gives rise to a single argument form; the logical structure of the reasoning which purports to establish that quo nihil maius is actually existent is also the structure of the arguments which conclude that quo nihil maius is so existent that it cannot be thought not to exist, is alone existent per se, is omnipotent, merciful yet impassable, is supremely just and good, is greater than can be thought, and so on. According to this interpretation, the Proslogion seeks to establish most of the same conclusions that were reached in the earlier Monologion , but to establish them more directly, simply and tersely. The central thrust of the Cur deus homo may be discerned from the title: namely, to explain why it was necessary for God, in the person of the Son, to become a man (that is, to become incarnate as a human being ( homo)). Anselm uses the Latin word homo generically and not in the sense of male ( vir ). This fact is seen clearly in Cur deus homo II, 8: ‘nil convenientius, quam ut de femina sine viro assumat [deus] illum hominem quem quaerimus’ (nothing is more fitting than that God assume from a woman without a male that man [human being] about whom we are inquiring). Though the sense of homo varies in accordance with whether Anselm is speaking about a human being or about a human nature, there is no doubt about the meaning of the title: the Son of God assumed a human nature, thereby becoming a man; he did not assume another man (in other words, assume a human person together with a human nature) as the heretical Nestorians had taught, nor did he become man (in other words, become universal man, by assuming unindividuated human nature as such). Anselm’s detailed theory of satisfaction for sin was in large measure a putative theoretical justification of the institutionalized practices of the confessional and the penitential system as found in the medieval Christian church, which understood every sin to constitute a punishable demerit and to require both the imploring of God’s forgiveness and the making of amends for having dishonoured him. Throughout the intricate and sustained reasoning of the Cur deus homo, Anselm seeks to show one central truth: ‘because only God can make this satisfaction and only a man ought to make it, it is necessary that a God-man make it’ ( Cur deus homo II, 6). As in the Cur deus homo, so also in his other treatises Anselm proceeds insofar as he deems possible, sola ratione (by recourse to rational considerations alone). Accordingly, he is rightly called the ‘Father of Scholasticism’. He understands ratio in a broad sense, broad enough to encompass appeals to experience as well as to conceptual intelligibility. Although the main intellectual influence upon him was Augustine, he is less platonistic than the latter, and the influence of Aristotle’s De interpretatione and Categories (from Boethius’ Latin translations) is clearly discernible in his philosophical works. See also: AUGUSTINIANISM; MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY Further reading Anselm (1076–8) Monologion and Proslogion, trans. J. Hopkins, A New Interpretive Translation of St. Anselm’s Monologion and Proslogion, Minneapolis: Banning, 1986. (Anselm’s first major philosophical work, showing the influence of Neoplatonism.) ——(completed 1098) Cur deus homo (Why God Became a Man), trans. J. Hopkins and H. Richardson, Anselm of Canterbury, vol. 3, New York: Mellen, 1976. (Demonstrates Anselm’s view that only through incarnation could God have made provision for human salvation.) Southern. R.W. (1990) Saint Anselm: A Portrait in a Landscape , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Replaces his older work, Saint Anselm and his Biographer, 1963.) JASPER HOPKINS ANTHROPOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY OF Anthropology, like philosophy, is multifaceted. It studies humans’ physical, social, cultural and linguistic development, as well as their material culture, from prehistoric times up to the present, in all parts of the world. Some anthropological sub-fields have strong ties with the physical and biological sciences; others identify more closely
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Page 40 with the social sciences or humanities. Within cultural and social anthropology, differing theoretical approaches disagree about whether anthropology can be a science. The question of how it is possible to understand cultures different from one’s own, and to transmit that knowledge to others is central to anthropology because its answer determines the nature of the discipline. Philosophy of anthropology examines the definitions of basic anthropological concepts, the objectivity of anthropological claims and the nature of anthropological confirmation and explanation. It also examines the problems in value theory that arise when anthropologists confront cultures that do not share their own society’s standards. See also: VALUE JUDGMENTS IN SOCIAL SCIENCE Further reading Hollis, M. and Lukes, S. (eds) (1982) Rationality and Relativism, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (Essays by contemporary philosophers and anthropologists.) MERRILEE H. SALMON ANTIOCHUS ( c .130–68 BC) For most of his career the Greek philosopher Antiochus of Ascalon, a pupil of Philo of Larissa, was an orthodox ‘sceptical’ Academic. He then changed his philosophy: some called him a Stoic, but he himself claimed to be returning to the Old Academy of Plato and his immediate successors. He took a generous view of his new home, urging that the Peripatetics and the Stoics were not new schools of thought but mere modifications of Platonism, and the philosophical position which he advocated was a ‘syncretism’ – an amalgam of ideas and doctrines and arguments taken from several sources. To philosophy itself he contributed little, but he was a figure of considerable importance in the larger world, where he presented Greek philosophy to an educated Roman public. Further reading Barnes, J. (1989) ‘Antiochus of Ascalon’, in M. Griffin and J. Barnes (eds) Philosophia Togata I, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Contains everything one needs to know, and more, about Antiochus.) JONATHAN BARNES ANTIPHON (late 5th century BC) Antiphon was a Greek Sophist. His most famous work, On Truth , partially survives in two substantial papyrus fragments, plus a number of purported quotations. It sets up a bold antithesis between the claims of physis (nature) and nomos (law/convention), arguing that it is more advantageous to follow nature when one can do so without detection. The antithesis suggests several important questions about the meaning of ‘nature’ and its role in ethics, the origin of social laws and their authority and the meaning and value of justice. It is disputed whether he is to be identified with the orator Antiphon of Rhamnus. See also: PHYSIS AND NOMOS Further reading Sprague, R.K. (ed.) (1992) The Older Sophists, Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 106– 240. (Full English translation of the fragments and testimonia, plus the speeches of Antiphon of Rhamnus.) ANGELA HOBBS ANTI-POSITIVIST THOUGHT IN LATIN AMERICA Anti-positivist philosophy arose in Latin America at the turn of the twentieth century in response to the dominance of closed positivistic systems of historical development in the climate of intellectual opinion. Argentina, Mexico and Uruguay were all centres of anti-positivist theorizing. Philosophers such as Mexicans Antonio Caso and José Vasconcelos, the Argentinian Alejandro Korn and the Uruguayan Carlos Vaz Ferreira attacked Auguste Comte’s positivism, as well as deterministic forms of scientific Marxism and Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinism for their denials of creative freedom and spiritual values. Latin American anti-positivism is characterized as a form of modernism although it incorporates elements of traditionalism. It is self-consciously critical of the limitations of modern progressivism and willing to supplement the modern paradigm with premodern discourses. Anti-positivist philosophy is also firmly committed to the modern embrace of process over fixed form. Latin American anti-positivism is founded in a comprehensive interpretation of experience that embraces phenomena such as creative freedom, tentative and experimental thinking, imaginative coordination and charitable love. These aspects are excluded from the purview of what positivists allow to be objects of scientific knowledge. Anti-positivists interpret experience as a bi-polar struggle in which the free side of
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Page 41 life battles to prevail over the forces of necessity, system, abstraction and egoism. South American anti-positivists concentrated on issues of knowledge and the structure of thought and experience, whereas Mexican anti-positivists, who were products of a formal education modelled on Comte’s prescriptions, undertook a more total revolt. This revolt had metaphysical, moral and political dimensions. For the most part anti-positivists did not fully escape the doctrines they criticized. They took from these doctrines descriptions of unredeemed, degraded and mechanized life which they opposed to redemptive practices of struggle. See also: POSITIVIST THOUGHT IN LATIN AMERICA Further reading Stabb, M.S. (1967) Latin America in Quest of Identity , Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. (A general background of the historical conditions for the development of anti-positivism in Latin America.) MICHAEL A. WEINSTEIN ANTIREALISM see INTUITIONISTIC LOGIC AND ANTIREALISM; REALISM AND ANTIREALISM; SCIENTIFIC REALISM AND ANTIREALISM ANTIREALISM IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF MATHEMATICS Realism in the philosophy of mathematics is the position that takes mathematics at face value. According to realists, mathematics is the science of mathematical objects (numbers, sets, lines and so on); mathematicians, to use the old metaphor, are discoverers, not inventors. Moreover, just as there may be truths about physical reality which we can never know, so too, realists say, there may be truths about mathematical reality which we can never know. It is this claim in particular which antirealists find unacceptable. Equating what can be known in mathematics with what can be proved, they insist that only what can be proved is true. (Only what can be proved: different accounts of what this ‘can’ means, facing different difficulties, generate different positions.) This leads anti-realists to recoil not only from realism but also from the practice of mathematicians themselves. For the orthodox assumption that every mathematical statement is either true or false would be invalidated, on the antirealist view, by a statement that was neither provable nor disprovable. Not that antirealists themselves can see it in these terms. For if a statement were neither provable nor disprovable, that would itself be an unprovable truth about mathematical reality. Antirealists must learn how to be circumspect even in defence of their own circumspection. Further reading Benacerraf, P. and Putnam, H. (eds) (1964) Introduction to Philosophy of Mathematics: Selected Readings , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd edn, 1983, 1–37. (Useful survey of the basic issues in the philosophy of mathematics, touching helpfully on both realism and antirealism.) Wright, C. (1980) Wittgenstein on the Foundations of Mathematics, London: Duckworth. (Very thorough discussion of antirealism in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy of mathematics.) A.W. MOORE ANTI-SEMITISM Anti-Semitism is a form of racism which sees Jews as a dangerous and despicable group in society. It has solid philosophical sources in the work of German Idealism which emphasized the distinctiveness of Judaism and how it has been superseded by Christianity. Both Kant and Hegel made a sharp distinction between Judaism and what they regarded as more rational religions, and they questioned the capability of the Jewish people for playing an integral role in the state. Sartre used the notion of anti-Semitism to show how a sense of self-identity is created by the attitudes of others towards the individual and the group. That is, what makes Jews Jews is the fact that there is anti-Semitism, and there is nothing that Jews can do about anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is a problem for the anti-Semites themselves; antiSemitism, by Sartre‘s account, is in fact an attempted solution to the difficulties of taking free and authentic decisions. Anti-Semitism has played an important role in Jews’ self-definition, in attitudes to the State of Israel and to the religion of Judaism itself. See also: HOLOCAUST, THE; JEWISH PHILOSOPHY, CONTEMPORARY Further reading Rotenstreich, N. (1963) The Recurring Pattern: Studies in Anti-Judaism in Modern Thought, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. (Interesting discussion of Kant, Hegel and Toynbee and their uniformly negative views on Judaism.) OLIVER LEAMAN
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Page 42 ANTISTHENES ( c .445–c .365 BC) Antisthenes was one of the most devoted followers of Socrates. As a young man he was heavily influenced by the display speeches of Gorgias the rhetorician and the interpretation of Homer practised by the Sophists. He himself wrote much in the same vein, although almost all has been lost. Antisthenes’ influence can be recognized most in the writer Xenophon. Although it is likely that he succeeded in annoying Plato and Isocrates, his influence on Cynicism has been greatly exaggerated. Little survives of his moral philosophy, but what there is is Socratic in conception, and indeed Socrates’ own courage and tenacity are its avowed inspiration. Antisthenes focuses on virtue, conceived as inner strength, a fortress founded on wisdom and its unassailable reasonings. Virtue is acquired and maintained by ‘exertions’, a term deliberately recalling the labours of Heracles: these consist of the struggle to overcome the difficulties of, for example, poverty or unpopularity, by understanding how they can be viewed as good things – provided the riches of the soul are intact. Pleasure and sex are accordingly seen as threats to virtue’s integrity. Antisthenes enjoins us to redraw our moral categories: the good and just are our true friends and kin. In theory of language Antisthenes defended the paradox that contradiction is impossible, deriving his argument from the idea that there can be no successful reference to anything except by its own ‘account’, revealing what it is. See also: SOCRATIC SCHOOLS Further reading Diogenes Laertius (early 3rd century AD) Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, trans. R.D. Hicks, Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and London: Heinemann, 1925, 2 vols. (Book VI, sections 1–19 contain his life of Antisthenes.) MALCOLM SCHOFIELD APPLIED ETHICS Applied ethics is marked out from ethics in general by its special focus on issues of practical concern. It therefore includes medical ethics, environmental ethics, and evaluation of the social implications of scientific and technological change, as well as matters of policy in such areas as health care, business or journalism. It is also concerned with professional codes and responsibilities in such areas. Typical of the issues discussed are abortion, euthanasia, personal relationships, the treatment of nonhuman animals, and matters of race and gender. Although sometimes treated in isolation, these issues are best discussed in the context of some more general questions which have been perennial preoccupations of philosophers, such as: How should we see the world and our place in it? What is the good life for the individual? What is the good society? In relation to these questions, applied ethics involves discussion of fundamental ethical theory, including utilitarianism, liberal rights theory and virtue ethics. ‘Applied ethics’ and ‘applied philosophy’ are sometimes used as synonyms, but applied philosophy is in fact broader, covering also such fields as law, education and art, and theoretical issues in artificial intelligence. These areas include philosophical problems – metaphysical and epistemological – that are not strictly ethical. Applied ethics may therefore be understood as focusing more closely on ethical questions. Nevertheless, many of the issues it treats do in fact involve other aspects of philosophy, medical ethics, for example, including such metaphysical themes as the nature of ‘personhood’, or the definition of death. See also: RESPONSIBILITIES OF SCIENTISTS AND INTELLECTUALS Further reading Rachels, J. (ed.) (1971) Moral Problems, New York: Harper & Row; 3rd edn, 1979. (Usefully representative collection of articles on applied ethics, including discussion of racism, discrimination, obligations to poorer countries.) Singer, P. (ed.) (1986) Applied Ethics , Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Classic articles, including Hume on suicide and Mill on the death penalty.) BRENDA ALMOND APULEIUS ( c . AD 125–180) The Latin writer Apuleius of Madaura was a professional rhetorician, a novelist and an amateur Platonist. His handbook of Platonism and his essay on the guardian spirit of Socrates are valuable sources on Middle Platonism. The handbook is comparable to that of his probable contemporary Alcinous, but covers only physics (including metaphysics) and ethics. See also: PLATONISM, EARLY AND MIDDLE Further reading
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Page 43 London: Duckworth. (Chapter 6 offers an introductory account of Apuleius.) JOHN DILLON AQUINAS, THOMAS (1224/6–74) Aquinas lived an active, demanding academic and ecclesiastical life that ended while he was still in his forties. He nonetheless produced many works, varying in length from a few pages to a few volumes. Because his writings grew out of his activities as a teacher in the Dominican order and a member of the theology faculty of the University of Paris, most are concerned with what he and his contemporaries thought of as theology. However, much of academic theology in the Middle Ages consisted in a rational investigation of the most fundamental aspects of reality in general and of human nature and behaviour in particular. That vast domain obviously includes much of what is now considered to be philosophy, and is reflected in the broad subject matter of Aquinas’ theological writings. The scope and philosophical character of medieval theology as practised by Aquinas can be easily seen in his two most important works, Summa contra gentiles (Synopsis [of Christian Doctrine] Directed Against Unbelievers) and Summa theologiae (Synopsis of Theology). However, many of the hundreds of topics covered in those two large works are also investigated in more detail in the smaller works resulting from Aquinas’ numerous academic disputations (something like a cross between formal debates and twentieth-century graduate seminars), which he conducted in his various academic posts. Some of those topics are taken up differently again in his commentaries on works by Aristotle and other authors. Although Aquinas is remarkably consistent in his several discussions of the same topic, it is often helpful to examine parallel passages in his writings when fully assessing his views on any issue. Aquinas’ most obvious philosophical connection is with Aristotle. Besides producing commentaries on Aristotle’s works, he often cites Aristotle in support of a thesis he is defending, even when commenting on Scripture. There are also in Aquinas’ writings many implicit Aristotelian elements, which he had thoroughly absorbed into his own thought. As a convinced Aristotelian, he often adopts Aristotle’s critical attitude toward theories associated with Plato, especially the account of ordinary substantial forms as separately existing entities. However, although Aquinas, like other medieval scholars of western Europe, had almost no access to Plato’s works, he was influenced by the writings of Augustine and the pseudoDionysius. Through them he absorbed a good deal of Platonism as well, more than he was in a position to recognize as such. On the other hand, Aquinas is the paradigmatic Christian philosopher-theologian, fully aware of his intellectual debt to religious doctrine. He was convinced, however, that Christian thinkers should be ready to dispute rationally on any topic, especially theological issues, not only among themselves but also with non-Christians of all sorts. Since in his view Jews accept the Old Testament and heretics the New Testament, he thought Christians could argue some issues with both groups on the basis of commonly accepted religious authority. However, because other non-Christians, ‘for instance, Mohammedans and pagans – do not agree with us about the authority of any scripture on the basis of which they can be convinced . . . it is necessary to have recourse to natural reason, to which everyone is compelled to assent – although where theological issues are concerned it cannot do the whole job’, since some of the data of theology are initially accessible only in Scripture ( Summa contra gentiles I.2.11). Moreover, Aquinas differed from most of his thirteenth-century Christian colleagues in the breadth and depth of his respect for Islamic and Jewish philosopher– theologians, especially Avicenna and Maimonides. He saw them as valued co-workers in the vast project of philosophical theology, clarifying and supporting doctrine by philosophical analysis and argumentation. His own commitment to that project involved him in contributing to almost all the areas of philosophy recognized since antiquity, omitting only natural philosophy (the precursor of natural science). A line of thought with such strong connections to powerful antecedents might have resulted in no more than a pious amalgam. However, Aquinas’ philosophy avoids eclecticism because of his own innovative approach to organizing and reasoning about all the topics included under the overarching medieval conception of philosophical Christian theology, and because of his special talents for systematic synthesis and for identifying and skilfully defending, on almost every issue he considers, the most sensible available position. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM, MEDIEVAL; THOMISM Further reading Aquinas, Thomas (1248–73)
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Page 44 Opera omnia (Complete Works), ed. Leonine Commission, S. Thomae Aquinatis Doctoris Angelici. Opera Omnia. Iussu Leonis XIII, P.M. edita, Rome: Vatican Polyglot Press, 1882–. (Many of the editions in this series are repeated in the Marietti Editions.) Kretzmann, N. and Stump, E. (eds) (1993) The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Ten studies specifically designed to introduce all the important aspects of Aquinas’ thought; includes bibliography.) NORMAN KRETZMANN ELEONORE STUMP ARAMA, ISAAC BEN MOSES ( c .1420–94) Like many of his fifteenth-century Spanish contemporaries, Arama opposed the Aristotelianism of Maimonides. His philosophical sermons and biblical commentaries attack Jewish Aristotelians on charges of subordinating revelation to reasoning, upholding an eternal universe whose necessity limits God’s power, and excluding miracles and individual providence. Yet while stressing the fallibility of human reason, Arama is no fideist. An eclectic, he values reason and philosophy as ways of deepening the understanding of Scripture through allegorical interpretation. He also develops striking philosophical theories of miracles, providence and the fundamentals of faith. See also: MAIMONIDES, M. Further reading Pearl, C. (1971) The Medieval Mind, London: Vallentine, Mitchell. (An accessible, thorough exposition of Arama’s philosophy.) JOSEF STERN ARCESILAUS ( c .316–c .240 BC) Arcesilaus of Pitane came to Athens as a young man, and was seduced by Platonic philosophy. Around 265 he became head of the Academy. He turned the school in a sceptical direction, urging that Plato himself had been of a sceptical bent. He revived the Socratic practice of dialectical argument, in which he displayed remarkable logical skill and honeyed oratorical talent. His dialectical prowess led him to ‘suspend judgment about everything’; but the main target of his arguments was Stoicism, and in particular Stoic epistemology, which he claimed to reduce to incoherence. Recognizing that a sceptic must live and act, he introduced the notion of ‘the reasonable’ as a criterion of sceptical action. See also: PYRRHONISM Further reading Striker, G. (1980) ‘Sceptical Strategies’, in M. Schofield, M.F. Burnyeat and J. Barnes (eds) Doubt and Dogmatism, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (An account of the aims and methods of Academic scepticism.) JONATHAN BARNES ARCHAEOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY OF Questions about the scientific status of archaeology have been central to field-defining debates since the late nineteenth century and have frequently involved appeals to philosophical sources. With the possible exception of Collingwood, however, there was little systematic exploration of the bearing of philosophical literature on these questions until the advent, in the 1960s and 1970s, of the New Archaeology, a selfconsciously positivist research programme. The New Archaeology originated in North America but has been widely influential, especially in giving prominence to philosophical and theoretical issues. The New Archaeologists’ advocacy of a positivist (Hempelian) conception of scientific goals and practice provoked intense debate which involved philosophers of science as well as archaeologists from the early 1970s. Although the positivist commitments of the programme were widely repudiated a decade later, philosophical exchange has continued and expanded to include consideration of a range of postpositivist models of scientific inference that emphasize the theory-ladeness of archaeological evidence, as well as hermeneutic and post-structuralist models of archaeological interpretation. The analysis of epistemological issues is also closely tied to foundational questions about how the cultural subject of archaeological inquiry should be conceptualized and has led, increasingly, to a consideration of normative questions about the values and interests that shape archaeological research and the ethical responsibilities of practitioners. In 1992 Embree argued that work in this area had achieved sufficient maturity to be recognized as a subfield which he designated ‘meta-archaeology’. See also: POSTCOLONIAL PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE Further reading Embree, L. (ed.) (1992) Metaarchaeology: Reflections by Archaeologists and Philosophers, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Boston, MA: Clair. (Embree
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Page 45 provides a detailed survey of jointly philosophical and archaeological analyses which he designates ‘meta-archaeology’ and assembles representative essays by most of those he discusses in his introduction.) Salmon, M.H. (1982) Philosophy and Archaeology , New York: Academic Press. (The first sustained analysis of philosophical models for archaeological practice.) ALISON WYLIE ARCHĒ Archē, or ‘principle’, is an ancient Greek philosophical term. Building on earlier uses, Aristotle established it as a technical term with a number of related meanings, including ‘originating source’, ‘cause’, ‘principle of knowledge’ and ‘basic entity’. Accordingly, it acquired importance in metaphysics, epistemology and philosophy of science, and also in the particular sciences. According to Aristotle’s doctrine of scientific principles, all sciences and all scientific knowledge are founded on principles ( archai) of a limited number of determinate kinds. Further reading McKirahan, R.D. (1992) Principles and Proofs . Aristotle’s Theory of Demonstrative Science , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Discusses the nature of science according to Aristotle, including the kinds of scientific principles and their roles in demonstrations.) RICHARD MCKIRAHAN ARCHITECTURE, AESTHETICS OF The philosophy of architecture is a branch of philosophical aesthetics concerned with various issues arising from the theory and practice of building design. The oldest writings on architecture date from antiquity and link architectural principles to more general, metaphysical elements of form and order. This tradition persisted into and beyond the Renaissance, but in the eighteenth century it began to give way to new philosophies of mind and value, according to which the determining factors of aesthetic experience are the interests and attitudes of informed subjects. Thereby architecture came within the sphere of the theory of taste. Nineteenth-century revivals of classical and Gothic styles produced renewed interest in the nature of architecture, its place within the scheme of arts and sciences, and its role in society. Following this, twentieth-century modernism offered various accounts of the rational basis of architectural form and combined these with utopian political philosophies. As it had been in antiquity and during the Renaissance, architecture was again viewed as central to and partly definitive of a culture. More recently, however, attention has returned to analytical questions such as ‘What is the nature of the aesthetic experience of architecture?’ and, relatedly, ‘How is it possible for there to be reasoned, critical judgments about the meaning and value of buildings?’ In order to deal with such issues philosophers in different traditions have begun to develop accounts of the social aspects of architecture, recognizing that critical judgments presuppose the capacity to identify buildings as being of various types: public, domestic, formal, informal and so on. The nature of architecture is in part, therefore, a matter of social convention or more generally ‘forms of life’, and this limits the scope for abstract ahistorical theorizing. None the less, the resources of metaphysics, the theories of mind, action, meaning and value are all utilized in contemporary philosophy of architecture. See also: MODERNISM Further reading Kant, I. (1790) Critique of Judgment , trans. W. Pluhar, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987. (Notwithstanding its obscurity and difficulty this is generally held to be the classic work of philosophical aesthetics.) Scruton, R. (1979) The Aesthetics of Architecture, London: Methuen. (The locus classicus of philosophical architectural aesthetics, written from a neo-Kantian and conservative perspective.) JOHN J. HALDANE ARCHYTAS (early to mid 4th century BC) Archytas of Tarentum (modern Taranto in southern Italy) was a contemporary and personal acquaintance of Plato, and the last of the famous Pythagoreans in antiquity. An ancient source (Proclus) includes Archytas with those mathematicians ‘who increased the number of theorems and progressed towards a more scientific arrangement of them’ and ranks him among the predecessors of Euclid. His chief contribution in mathematics was to find a solution for the doubling of the cube. As a Pythagorean philosopher, Archytas gave mathematics universal scope: he viewed the four cardinal branches of Greek scientific knowledge – arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music – as ‘sister sciences’ since they could
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Page 46 be formulated mathematically. In both mathematics and music he emphasized the study of mean proportionals. He also conducted empirical investigations in acoustics and invented simple technical devices by which to illustrate the application of mathematical principles to mechanics. Archytas was able to combine his philosophical-scientific interests with an active political career; he was a leading statesman of Tarentum and served as a successful general. See also: PYTHAGOREANISM Further reading Burkert, W. (1972) Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism, trans.E.L. Minar,Jr, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Discusses passim the science and philosophy of Archytas; in particular, pages 379–83 consider Archytas’ acoustics in the context of Presocratic science, pages 384–9 examine his musical theory and pages 442–7 his number theory.) HERMANN S. SCHIBLI ARENDT, HANNAH (1906–75) Hannah Arendt was one of the leading political thinkers of the twentieth century. She observed Nazi totalitarianism at close quarters and devoted much of her life to making sense of it. In her view it mobilized the atomized masses around a simple-minded ideology, and devised a form of rule in which bureaucratically minded officials performed murderous deeds with a clear conscience. For Arendt, the only way to avoid totalitarianism was to establish a well-ordered political community that encouraged public participation and institutionalized political freedom. She considered politics to be one of the highest human activities because it enabled citizens to reflect on their collective life, to give meaning to their personal lives and to develop a creative and cohesive community. She was deeply worried that the economically obsessed modern age discouraged political activity, and created morally superficial people susceptible to the appeal of mindless adventurism. See also: POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY Further reading Arendt, H. (1958) The Human Condition , Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (An examination of the nature of modernity in the light of Arendt’s discussion of labour, work and action.) Canovan, M. (1992) Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of her Political Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (A sympathetic and comprehensive study of Arendt’s political thought, with an excellent bibliography. Stresses the centrality of the totalitarian experience to Arendt’s thought.) B. PAREKH ARETĒ A pivotal term of ancient Greek ethics, aretē is conventionally translated ‘virtue’, but is more properly ‘goodness’ – the quality of being a good human being. Philosophy came, largely through Plato, to recognize four cardinal aretai: wisdom (phronēsis), moderation (sōphrosynē), courage (andreia) and justice (dikaiosynē). Others, considered either coordinate with these or their sub-species, included piety, liberality and magnanimity. The term generated many controversies. For example, is aretē a state of intellect, character or both? Does it possess intrinsic or only instrumental value? Is it teachable, godgiven or otherwise acquired? Is it one thing or many? If many, how are they differentiated, and can you have one without having all? See also: VIRTUES AND VICES Further reading Prior, W.J. (1991) Virtue and Knowledge: An Introduction to Ancient Greek Ethics , London: Routledge. (An elementary history from Homer to Stoicism.) DAVID SEDLEY ARGENTINA, PHILOSOPHY IN Philosophy has been present throughout Argentine cultural life since the beginning of Spanish colonization. Despite institutional ups and downs, the teaching of philosophy was a practically constant component of higher and even secondary education. The principal currents that shaped that teaching for more than three centuries were Scholasticism, French ideology, eclectic spiritualism, positivism and in the twentieth century, all of the contemporary manifestations, such as, Husserlian phenomenology, existentialism, analytical philosophy and structuralism. A permanent characteristic, nevertheless, has been that the political vicissitudes of the country affected educational institutions. In the nineteenth century, during the period of national independence and organization, public figures used philosophical ideas to analyse the problems of society and to make the political and institutional contributions that a country in formation required. Juan Bautista
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Page 47 Alberdi and Domingo Sarmiento are, in this respect, two representative examples. In the twentieth century, the figure of the professional philosopher, one who is interested in philosophical research for itself, emerged and expanded. However, thought that reflected direct interest in the problems of the community and in the ethical demands of praxis did not disappear during this era. This can be seen in such thinkers as José Ingenieros and Alejandro Korn and more recently in what has been called liberation philosophy. Academic philosophy has made considerable progress. In the second half of the twentieth century, it has attained a high level of professional quality. In some cases, even original contributions have been made which go beyond assimilation or commentary about external philosophical influences. In Argentina, as in the rest of Latin America, philosophy began as a pure transplant brought by those who conquered the continent. Upon creating centres of higher education (either as part of the religious orders or with the character of universities), the philosophical teaching being practised in the Spanish universities of Salamanca and Alcalá was reproduced in the Spanish colonies. Argentine philosophy shares the same general characteristics and historical periods with the philosophies developed in other Latin American countries. In general terms, philosophy can be divided into three periods: the colonial period, the nineteenth century, or national period and the twentieth century. Further reading Gracia, J.J.E. (ed.) (1986) Latin American Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books. (An anthology including the works of Francisco Romero, Risieri Frondizi, Carlos Astrada, Alejandro Korn and Arturo Roig.) —— (1954) Contemporary Latin American Philosophy , Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press. (Selections of texts with useful introductions to authors, such as, Korn, Ingenieros and Romero.) JUAN CARLOS TORCHIA ESTRADA ARISTIPPUS THE ELDER ( c .435–c .355 BC) Aristippus of Cyrene was a member of Socrates’ entourage who after Socrates’ death (399 BC) founded the Cyrenaic school. He was primarily interested in practical ethics. He focused on the concepts of pleasure and pain, and classed them as bodily motions of which we are conscious. He considered pleasure a major component of happiness, but also attributed intrinsic value to virtue and emphasized the importance of study and exercise as means to self-control. See also: CYRENAICS Further reading Doering, K. (1988) Der Sokratesschüler Aristippund die Kyrenaiker (Socrates’ Pupil Aristippus and the Cyrenaics), Wiesbaden and Stuttgart: Akademie Verlag. (The most recent book-length study on Aristippus and the Cyrenaic school.) VOULA TSOUNA ARISTON OF CHIOS (early to mid 3rd century BC) The Greek philosopher Ariston (alternatively Aristo), from the Aegean island of Chios, was an exceptionally independent-minded member of the early Stoic school. A pupil of the founder Zeno of Citium, he was among the most prominent philosophers working at Athens in the mid-third century BC. He concentrated on ethics, dismissing logic and physics as irrelevant. Like many contemporary philosophers, including Zeno, Ariston undoubtedly saw his own views as the ones most authentically capturing those of Socrates. Virtue he considered a unitary intellectual state, its conventional fragmentation into kinds being misleading at best. He resisted Zeno’s doctrine that nonmoral desiderata like health, although indifferent, were naturally ‘preferable’. Total indifference to them, rather than rationally choosing between them, was the true goal of life. He rejected rules of conduct – much favoured by Zeno – as founded on the same mistake of treating indifferent things as if they could be ranked in terms of intrinsic values. See also: CYRENAICS Further reading Diogenes Laertius (early 3rd century AD) Lives of the Philosophers, trans. R.D. Hicks, Diogenes Laertius Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and London: Heinemann, 1925, 2 vols. (VII 160–4 in volume 2, is his life of Ariston.) DAVID SEDLEY
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Page 48 ARISTOTELIANISM IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY In Arabic, Aristotle was referred to by name as Aristutalis or, more frequently, Aristu, although when quoted he was often referred to by a sobriquet such as ‘the wise man’. Aristotle was also generally known as the First Teacher. Following the initial reception of Hellenistic texts into Islamic thought in alKindi’s time, al-Farabi rediscovered a ‘purer’ version in the tenth century. In an allusion to his dependence on Aristotle, al-Farabi was called the Second Teacher. Ibn Rushd, known in the West as Averroes, was the last great Arabophone commentator on Aristotle, writing numerous treatises on his works. A careful examination of the Aristotelian works received by the Arabs indicates they were generally aware of the true Aristotle. Later, transmission of these works to Christian Europe allowed Aristotelianism to flourish in the scholastic period. We should not take at face value the Islamic philosophers’ claims that they were simply following Aristotle. The convention in Islamic philosophy is to state that one is repeating the wisdom of the past, thus covering over such originality as may exist. There was a tendency among Islamic philosophers to cite Aristotle as an authority in order to validate their own claims and ideas. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM, MEDIEVAL; PLATONISM IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY Further reading Gutas, D. (1988) Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition, Leiden: Brill. (A new interpretation of Ibn Sina’s development as a philosopher.) Leaman, O. (1988) Averroes and His Philosophy , Oxford: Clarendon Press; repr. Richmond: Curzon, 1997. (A basic introduction to Ibn Rushd.) KIKI KENNEDY-DAY ARISTOTELIANISM IN THE 17TH CENTURY Aristotelians in the seventeenth century comprised a group of mostly anonymous textbook writers whose chief claim to fame is that their philosophy was opposed by such as Descartes and Galileo. In line with the characterization of them by their opponents, their philosophy has generally been depicted as extremely conservative, monolithic and moribund. However, it is difficult to ratify such judgments. As Aristotelians, these philosophers do not seem particularly conservative; they appear to have assimilated many of the scientific developments of the seventeenth century, and the diversity and range of their views is quite broad. Some of the doctrines peculiar to them, or their particular developments of older views, can be seen as the background against which modern philosophy developed. Eustachius a Sancto Paulo, Franciscus Toletus, Charles d’Abra de Raconis, Scipion Dupleix and the scholars of the Comibra school in Portugal are among the most noted commentators on Aristotle of this period. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM, RENAISSANCE Further reading Gilson, E. (1976) Études sur le rôle de la pensée médiévale dans la formation du systéme cartésien (Studies on the role of medieval thought in the formation of the Cartesian system), 2nd edn, Paris: Vrin. (Consists of a collection of essays which trace the roots of Cartesianism in late scholasticism.) Sortais, G. (1924) Histoire de la Philosophie moderne depuis Bacon jusqu’à Leibniz (History of modern philosophy from Bacon to Leibniz), Paris: Beauchesne. (Imparts a history of seventeenth century philosophy that does not neglect minor figures, including scholastics.) ROGER ARIEW ARISTOTELIANISM, MEDIEVAL Although there are many possible definitions, ‘medieval Aristotelianism’ is here taken to mean explicit receptions of Aristotle’s texts or teachings by Latin-speaking writers from about AD 500 to about AD 1450. This roundabout, material definition avoids several common mistakes. First, it does not assert that there was a unified Aristotelian doctrine across the centuries. There was no such unity, and much of the engagement with Aristotle during the Middle Ages took the form of controversies over what was and was not Aristotelian. Second, the definition does not attempt to distinguish beforehand between philosophical and theological receptions of Aristotle. If it is important to pay attention to the varying and sometimes difficult relations of Aristotelian thought to Christian theology, it is just as important not to project an autonomous discipline of philosophy along contemporary lines back into medieval texts. The most important fact about the medieval reception of Aristotle is in many ways the most elementary: Aristotle wrote in Greek, a language unavailable to most educated Europeans from 500 to 1450. Aristotle’s fate in medieval Europe was largely determined by his fate in
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Page 49 Latin. Early on, Boethius undertook to translate Aristotle and to write Latin commentaries upon him in order to show the agreement of Aristotle withPlato,and also presumably to make Aristotle available to readers increasingly unable to construe Greek. He was able to finish translations only of the logical works, and to write commentaries on a few of them and some related treatises. Even this small selection from Aristotle was not received entire in the early Middle Ages. Of the surviving pieces, only the translations of the Categories and De interpretatione were widely studied before the twelfth century, though not in the same way or for the same purposes. Before the twelfth century, Aristotelian teaching meant what could be reconstructed or imagined from a slim selection of the Organon and paraphrases or mentions by other authors. The cultural reinvigoration of the twelfth century was due in large part to new translations of Greek and Arabic works, including works of Aristotle. Some translators worked directly from the Greek, among whom the best known is James of Venice. Other translators based themselves on intermediary Arabic translations; the best known of these is Gerard of Cremona. Although the translations from Greek were often the more fluent, translations from the Arabic predominated because they were accompanied by expositions and applications of the Aristotelian texts. To have a Latin Aristotle was not enough; Latin readers also needed help in understanding him and in connecting him with other authors or bodies of knowledge. Hence they relied on explanations or uses of Aristotle in Islamic authors, chiefly Avicenna. The thirteenth century witnesses some of the most important and energetic efforts at understanding Aristotle, together with reactions against him. The reactions begin early in the century and continue throughout it. The teaching of Aristotelian books was condemned or restricted at Paris in 1210, 1215 and 1231, and lists of propositions inspired by certain interpretations of Aristotle were condemned at Paris and Oxford in 1270 and 1277. However, interest in Aristotle continued to grow, fuelled first by the translation of Averroes’ detailed commentaries, then by new translations from Greek. At the same time, some of the most powerful Christian theologians were engaged in large-scale efforts to appropriate Aristotle in ways that would be both intelligible and congenial to Christian readers. Albert the Great composed comprehensive paraphrases of the whole Aristotelian corpus, while his pupil Thomas Aquinas undertook to expound central Aristotelian texts so as to make them clear, coherent, and mostly concordant with Christianity. Very different projects predominate in the fourteenth century. For John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, the texts of Aristotle serve as distant ground against which to elaborate philosophical and theological teachings often radically anti-Peripatetic. If they are fully conversant with Aristotle, if they speak technical languages indebted to him, they are in no way constrained by what they take his teaching to be. Other fourteenth-century projects include the application of procedures of mathematical reasoning to problems outstanding in Aristotelian physics, the elaboration of Averroistic positions, and the rehabilitation of Albert’s Peripateticism as both faithful and true to reality. By the end of the Middle Ages, then, there is anything but consensus about how Aristotle is to be interpreted or judged. There is instead the active rivalry of a number of schools, each dependent in some way on Aristotle and some claiming to be his unique interpreters. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY; ARISTOTELIANISM, RENAISSANCE; AVERROISM Further reading Dod, B.G. (1982) ‘ Aristoteles latinus ’, in N. Kretzmann, A. Kenny and J. Pinborg (eds) The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 45–79. (Includes a very helpful chart summarizing medieval Latin translations of Aristotle.) Van Steenberghen, F. (1955) Aristotle in the West: The Origins of Latin Aristotelianism, trans. L. Johnston, Louvain: E. Nauwelaerts. (A narrative survey of the reception of Aristotle in Paris and Oxford to 1277; somewhat dated.) MARK D. JORDAN ARISTOTELIANISM, RADICAL see AVERROISM ARISTOTELIANISM, RENAISSANCE By the Renaissance here is meant the period of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries during which there was a deliberate attempt, especially in Italy, to pattern cultural activities on models drawn from antiquity. However, Aristotelianism during that period was not cut off from medieval developments, since earlier interests and topics of discussion still held the attention of philosophers,
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Page 50 theologians and non-academic intellectuals. Moreover, given that Aristotelianism was embedded in the university curriculum, the approach and activities of Renaissance Aristotelians often reflected earlier institutional developments. The educational reforms of the German Lutheran Philipp Melanchthon and of the newly-founded Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) ensured that Aristotle remained central to the curriculum. On the other hand, deliberate attempts to divorce themselves from earlier structures and approaches can be discerned in some Renaissance Aristotelians. Owing to the influence of humanism, professors of philosophy whose loyalty was to Aristotle came to study Greek and explicate Aristotle from the Greek text, to imitate the style of classical models, and to prefer the Greek commentators over the medieval Latins because their language was Greek. Renaissance Aristotelianism did not constitute a uniform, coherent school of thought with a clearly defined body of doctrines shared by all adherents. A careful reading of the many commentaries, paraphrases, textbooks and treatises based on Aristotle’s works reveals a surprisingly wide variation in interpretation and a strong tendency to modify or supplement the Stagirite’s teachings with tenets derived from other philosophical or scientific sources or from contemporary interests and discoveries. It is perhaps wise to speak of a variety of Aristotelianisms rather than to perpetuate the long-standing caricature of ‘modern’ philosophy and science arising by throwing off the shackles of a monolithic Peripatetic orthodoxy. The various Aristotelianisms included Albertism, Thomism, Scotism and Averroism, but as a result of the new translations of the Greek commentators on Aristotle there were also Renaissance Aristotelians who approached Aristotle by way of Alexander of Aphrodisias, Themistius, Simplicius and John Philoponus. Another current is best described as ‘eclectic Aristotelianism’. Some Aristotelians adopted a ‘philological’ approach, approaching Aristotle simply through analysis of the Greek text and not as a philosophical challenge. This approach made Aristotelianism irrelevant to the enterprise of philosophy, but fortunately did not predominate. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM IN THE 17TH CENTURY; ARISTOTELIANISM, MEDIEVAL Further reading Kristeller, P.O. (1974) ‘Thomism and the Italian Thought of the Renaissance’, ed. and trans. E.P. Mahoney, Medieval Aspects of Renaissance Learning, New York: Columbia University Press, 2nd edn; repr. 1992, 29–91. (A pioneering study of Aquinas’ influence on Renaissance philosophy by a celebrated scholar.) Schmitt, C.B. (1983) Aristotle and the Renaissance, Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press. (A very clear introduction to the subject that delineates the different types of Renaissance Aristotelianism.) EDWARD P. MAHONEY JAMES B. SOUTH ARISTOTLE (384–322 BC) Aristotle of Stagira is one of the two most important philosophers of the ancient world, and one of the four or five most important of any time or place. He was not an Athenian, but he spent most of his life as a student and teacher of philosophy in Athens. For twenty years he was a member of Plato’s Academy; later he set up his own philosophical school, the Lyceum. During his lifetime he published philosophical dialogues, of which only fragments now survive. The ‘Aristotelian corpus’ (1462 pages of Greek text, including some spurious works) is probably derived from the lectures that he gave in the Lyceum. Aristotle is the founder not only of philosophy as a discipline with distinct areas or branches, but, still more generally, of the conception of intellectual inquiry as falling into distinct disciplines. He insists, for instance, that the standards of proof and evidence for deductive logic and mathematics should not be applied to the study of nature, and that neither of these disciplines should be taken as a proper model for moral and political inquiry. He distinguishes philosophical reflection on a discipline from the practice of the discipline itself. The corpus contains contributions to many different disciplines, not only to philosophy. Some areas of inquiry in which Aristotle makes a fundamental contribution are as follows: (1) Logic. Aristotle’s Prior Analytics constitutes the first attempt to formulate a system of deductive formal logic, based on the theory of the ‘syllogism’. The Posterior Analytics uses this system to formulate an account of rigorous scientific knowledge. ‘Logic’, as Aristotle conceives it, also includes the study of language, meaning and their relation to non-linguistic reality; hence it includes many topics that might now be assigned to philosophy of language or
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Page 51 philosophical logic ( Categories, De Interpretatione, Topics ). (2) The study of nature. About a quarter of the corpus (see especially the History of Animals, Parts of Animals, and Generation of Animals; also Movement of Animals, Progression of Animals) consists of works concerned with biology. Some of these contain collections of detailed observations. (The Meteorology contains a similar collection on inanimate nature.) Others try to explain these observations in the light of the explanatory scheme that Aristotle defends in his more theoretical reflections on the study of nature. These reflections (especially in the Physics and in Generation and Corruption ) develop an account of nature, form, matter, cause and change that expresses Aristotle’s views about the understanding and explanation of natural organisms and their behaviour. Natural philosophy and cosmology are combined in On the Heavens . (3) Metaphysics. In his reflections on the foundations and presuppositions of other disciplines, Aristotle describes a universal ‘science of being qua being’, the concern of the Metaphysics. Part of this universal science examines the foundations of inquiry into nature. Aristotle formulates his doctrine of substance, which he explains through the connected contrasts between form and matter, and between potentiality and actuality. One of his aims is to describe the distinctive and irreducible character of living organisms. Another aim of the universal science is to use his examination of substance to give an account of divine substance, theultimate principle of the cosmic order. (4) Philosophy of mind. The doctrine of form and matter is used to explain the relation of soul and body, and the different types of soul found in different types of living creatures. In Aristotle’s view, the soul is the form of a living body. He examines the different aspects of this form in plants, non-rational animals and human beings, by describing nutrition, perception, thought and desire. His discussion (in On the Soul , and also in the Parva Naturalia ) ranges over topics in philosophy of mind, psychology, physiology, epistemology and theory of action. (5) Ethics and politics ( Nicomachean Ethics, Eudemian Ethics, Magna Moralia). In Aristotle’s view, the understanding of the natural and essential aims of human agents is the right basis for a grasp of principles guiding moral and political practice. These principles are expressed in his account of human wellbeing, and of the different virtues that constitute a good person and promote wellbeing. The description of a society that embodies these virtues in individual and social life is a task for the Politics , which also examines the virtues and vices of actual states and societies, measuring them against the principles derived from ethical theory. (6) Literary criticism and rhetorical theory ( Poetics, Rhetoric ). These works are closely connected both to Aristotle’s logic and to his ethical and political theory. The explicit influence of Aristotle’s philosophical works and theories has been variable. He was not prominently cited in the Hellenistic period, but the study of his works was revived by around the first century AD. He was widely studied in the Islamic world, and later his works were revived in Western Europe by, among others, Thomas Aquinas, and Aristotle remained important into the seventeenth century. A further revival began in the nineteenth century. However, while Aristotle himself may have had mixed fortunes, his ideas have had a considerable impact; some aspects of his philosophy have become so familiar that we do not even attribute them to him. See also: ARISTOTLE COMMENTATORS; ARISTOTELIANISM, MEDIEVAL; ARISTOTELIANISM IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY Further reading Ackrill, J.L. (1981) Aristotle the Philosopher , Oxford: Oxford University Press. (This is one of the best short introductions.) Barnes, J., Schofield, M. and Sorabji, R. (eds) (1975–9) Articles on Aristotle, London: Duckworth, 4 vols. (Good collections of essays, including translated selections from non-English works; full bibliographies.) T.H. IRWIN ARISTOTLE COMMENTATORS Aristotle’s school treatises were given renewed prominence by Andronicus of Rhodes in the first century BC, and from then on numerous commentaries were written on them. The main modern edition runs to 15,000 pages. They are not just commentaries, but represent the thought and classroom teaching on philosophy quite generally first of the Peripatetic (that is, Aristotelian) school, and then of the Neoplatonists between AD 200 and 600, with further activity from the ninth century in the Islamic world and from the eleventh in the Byzantine. See also: ARISTOTLE; NEOPLATONISM Further reading Sorabji, R. (ed.) (1990) Aristotle Transformed: The Ancient Commentators and their Influence,
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Page 52 London: Duckworth and Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. (A comprehensive survey of the present state of knowledge, with extensive bibliography.) RICHARD SORABJI ARISTUPPUS THE YOUNGER see CYRENAICS ARITHMETIC, PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES IN The philosophy of arithmetic gains its special character from issues arising out of the status of the principle of mathematical induction. Indeed, it is just at the point where proof by induction enters that arithmetic stops being trivial. The propositions of elementary arithmetic – quantifier-free sentences such as ‘7 + 5 = 12’ – can be decided mechanically: once we know the rules for calculating, it is hard to see what mathematical interest can remain. As soon as we allow sentences with one universal quantifier, however – sentences of the form ‘( x) f ( x) = 0’ – we have no decision procedure either in principle or in practice, and can state some of the most profound and difficult problems in mathematics. (Goldbach’s conjecture that every even number greater than 2 is the sum of two primes, formulated in 1742 and still unsolved, is of this type.) It seems natural to regard as part of what we mean by natural numbers that they should obey the principle of induction. But this exhibits a form of circularity known as ‘impredicativity’: the statement of the principle involves quantification over properties of numbers, but to understand this quantification we must assume a prior grasp of the number concept, which it was our intention to define. It is nowadays a commonplace to draw a distinction between impredicative definitions, which are illegitimate, and impredicative specifications, which are not. The conclusion we should draw in this case is that the principle of induction on its own does not provide a non-circular route to an understanding of the natural number concept. We therefore need an independent argument. Four broad strategies have been attempted: formalism, empiricism, intuitionism and logicism. Further reading Benacerraf, P. and Putnam, H. (eds) (1964) Philosophy of Mathematics: Selected Readings , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd edn, 1983. (Includes work by Hilbert and Benacerraf, as well as several other relevant articles.) Ewald, W.B. (ed.) (1996) From Kant to Hilbert: A Source Book in the Foundations of Mathematics, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Includes much relevant material by Kant, Hilbert, Brouwer and others.) MICHAEL POTTER ARMSTRONG, DAVID MALET (1926–) David Armstrong has made many major contributions to central topics in epistemology and metaphysics, including perception, laws, universals, the mind, belief and knowledge, and possibility. His overall programme has been the articulation of a naturalistic metaphysics, understood as the doctrine that nothing at all exists except the single world of space and time. A notable feature of his work in these contentious areas has been its directness and clarity, and the central importance he attaches to squaring what the philosopher says with what science, especially physical science, teaches us. In both these respects he is like another important Australian philosopher, J.J.C. Smart, and together they have influenced the way a generation of philosophers in Australia do philosophy, as well as influencing the doctrines they espouse. See also: AUSTRALIA, PHILOSOPHY IN Further reading Armstrong, D.M. (1968) A Materialist Theory of the Mind, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (Discussed in §3. A paperback edition with a new preface and bibliography appeared in 1993.) FRANK JACKSON ARNAULD, ANTOINE (1612–94) Antoine Arnauld, a leading theologian and Cartesian philosopher, was one of the most important and interesting figures of the seven-teenth century. As the most prominent spokes-person and defender of the Jansenist community based at Port-Royal, almost all Arnauld’s efforts were devoted to theological matters. But early on, with his largely constructive objections to Descartes’ Meditations in 1641, he established a reputation as an analytically rigorous and insightful philosophical thinker. He went on to become perhaps Descartes’ most faithful and vociferous defender. He found Cartesian metaphysics, particularly mind-body dualism, to be of great value for the Christian religion. In a celebrated debate with Nicolas Malebranche, Arnauld advanced something like a direct realist account of perceptual acquaintance by arguing
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Page 53 that the representative ideas that mediate human knowledge and perception are not immaterial objects distinct from the mind’s perceptions, but are just those perceptions themselves. His criticisms of Leibniz gave rise to another important debate. He also co-authored the so-called ‘Port-Royal Logic’, the most famous and successful logic of the early modern period. The underlying motives in all Arnauld’s philosophical writings were, however, theological, and his greatest concern was to safeguard God’s omnipotence and to defend what he took to be the proper Catholic view on questions of grace and divine providence See also: PORT-ROYAL Further reading Arnauld, A. (1641) Quartae objectiones , in Oeuvres, vol. 38; trans. J. Cottingham, D. Murdoch and R. Stoothoff as ‘Fourth Objections’, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 2, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. (Arnauld’s objections to Descartes’ Meditations.) Kremer, E.J. (ed.) (1994) The Great Arnauld and Some of his Philosophical Correspondents , Toronto, Ont.: University of Toronto Press. (A collection of important essays by leading scholars on Arnauld’s philosophy and philosophical theology.) STEVEN NADLER ART, ABSTRACT The use of the term ‘abstract’ as a category of visual art dates from the second decade of the twentieth century, when painters and sculptors had turned away from verisimilitude and launched such modes of abstraction as Cubism, Orphism, Futurism, Rayonism and Suprematism. Two subcategories may be distinguished: first, varieties of figurative representation that strongly schematize, and second, completely nonfigurative or nonobjective modes of design (in the widest sense of that term). Both stand opposed to classic representationalism (realism, naturalism, illusionism, mimeticism) understood as the commitment to a relatively full depiction of the subject matter and construed broadly enough to cover the traditional ‘high art’ canon through to Post-Impressionism. Analytic and Synthetic Cubism are model cases of the first subcategory while Mondrian’s neoplasticism and Pollock’s classic drip works are paradigms of the second. Though the effect was revolutionary, the positive motivations for this degree of abstraction in visual art were not wholly new. What was new was the elevation of previously subordinate aims to the front rank and the pursuit of certain principal aims in isolation from the full pictorial package. Thus abstract art variously celebrates structural and colour properties of objects, scenes and patterns; effects of motion, light and atmosphere; aspects of perceptual process, whether normal or expressively loaded; and forms expressing cosmic conceptions, visionary states or utopian ambitions. With a few exceptions (for example, the Futurists) the founders of abstract art were far from lucid or forthcoming about the significance of their work, and viewers have found successive waves of abstraction initially baffling and even offensive. But abstract art now forms a secure part of the ‘high art’ canon, though generally its appeal is less well understood than that of the classic modes of representation. Criticisms of abstract art have also become more lucid. The chief philosophical issues affecting abstract art concern the definition of the term and the delineation of subordinate types; the relation between abstraction and other modes of avantgarde art that superficially resemble it; the magnitude of the artistic values so far achieved by the various forms; and finally the theoretical limits of significance attainable by abstraction as compared with the limits encountered in figurative art. See also: EXPRESSION, ARTISTIC Further reading Osborne, H. (1979) Abstraction and Artifice in Twentieth-Century Art, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (The only comprehensive treatment of the subject by a philosopher available in English. Generally sound, provided that one abstracts from the information-theoretic concepts by substituting ‘schematic’ for ‘semantic’ and ‘nonfigurative’ for ‘syntactic’ [abstraction].) Whitford, F. (1984) Understanding Abstract Art, New York: E.P. Dutton. (A wide-ranging introduction to abstract painting.) JOHN H. BROWN ART AND MORALITY A complex set of questions is raised by an examination of the relationship between art and morality. First there is a set of empirical considerations about the effect that works of art have on us – one obviously contentious case is that of pornography. Many would argue that the artistic merits of a work are independent of
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Page 54 any attitudes or actions it may lead us to adopt or perform. This claim does not survive scrutiny, however, though there is a distinction to be drawn between artistic value and the value of art as a whole. Though there are no coercive arguments to show that we have to take into account the moral qualities of works of art, it is in practice very difficult to ignore them, especially when the point of the work is insistently moral, or when the work is conspicuously depraved. There is a long tradition, dating back to Plato, of regarding art with suspicion for its power over our emotions, and much of Western aesthetic theorizing has been a response to Plato’s challenge. The longest-lasting defence justified art in terms of a combination of pleasure and instruction, though the two never hit it off as well as was hoped. In the early nineteenth century a new, more complex account of art was offered, notably by Hegel, in the form of a historicized view in which art is one of the modes by which we come to self-awareness; the emphasis altered from truth to an independently existing reality to truthfulness to our own natures, as we explore them by creating art. Taken into the social sphere, this became a doctrine of the importance of art as an agent of political consciousness, operating in subtle ways to undermine the view of reality imposed on us by the ideologies that hold us captive. See also: EMOTION IN RESPONSE TO ART; PORNOGRAPHY Further reading Adorno, T.W. (1991) The Culture Industry, London: Routledge. (The most accessible introduction to Adorno’s Marxist attack on mass culture, and a defence of the social role of art.) Collingwood, R.G. (1938) The Principles of Art, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (The introduction and first book provide a sophisticated exposition of art in terms of expression, and launch a vehement attack on all other theories). MICHAEL TANNER ART AND TRUTH Some things are true within the world of a literary work. It is true, in the world evoked by Madame Bovary , that Emma Roualt married Charles Bovary. In this entry, however, we are not concerned with truth in fiction but rather with what it is for a work of art to be true of, or true to, the actual world. Representational works represent states of affairs, or objects portrayed in a certain way. The concept of truth naturally gets a grip here, because we can ask whether the represented state of affairs actually exists in the world, or whether a represented object exists and really is the way it is represented to be, or whether a representation of a kind of thing offers a genuinely representative example of that kind. If so, we could call the work true, or true in the given respect. A work will often get us to respond to what is portrayed in a way similar to what our response would have been to the real thing – we are moved to fear and pity by objects we know are merely fictions. But a work could also portray characters responding in certain ways to the imaginary situations it conjures, often with the implication that the response is a likely human emotional or practical response to that situation, or a response to be expected of a character of the given type, and we could reasonably call the work true if we believed the portrayed reaction was a likely one. Arguably, if we judge a work to be in some respect true to life, we must already have known that life was like that in order to make the judgment. But, interestingly, works of art appear to be able to portray situations that we have not experienced, in which the portrayal seems to warrant our saying that the work has shown (that is, taught) us a likely or plausible unfolding of the portrayed situation, or shown us what it would have been like to experience the situation. It is also said, especially of narrative fiction, that, because of its power to show us what various alternative imaginary situations would be like, it can enlighten us about how we ought to live. So we may consider how a work of art might be a vehicle of truths about the actual world. This gives rise to a further question – sometimes called the problem of belief – of whether the value of a work of art as a piece of art is related to its truth. If a work implies or suggests that something is the case, ought I to value it more highly as art if I accept what it implies as the truth? Alternatively, should I take it as an aesthetic shortcoming if I do not? See also: ART, VALUE OF Further reading Putnam, H. (1978) Meaning and the Moral Sciences, Part Two, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 83–94. (A relatively lucid discussion of the capacity of literary works to give us knowledge; compares the cognitive function of literature with that of science.) PAUL TAYLOR
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Page 55 ART CRITICISM To criticize a work of art is to make a judgment of its overall merit or demerit and to support that judgment by reference to features it possesses. This activity is of great antiquity; we find Aristotle, for example, relating the excellence of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex to the excellence of its plot construction. Criticism became a topic in philosophy because reflection on the kinds of things said by critics generated various perplexities and in some cases encouraged a general scepticism about the possibility of criticism. Two general and related problems in particular have taxed philosophers. The first is the question of whether criticism is a rational activity, that is to say, whether critics can give reasons for their judgments that would persuade potential dissenters of the rightness of those judgments. The second, a matter to which Kant and Hume made notable contributions, is the problem of the objectivity of critical judgments, it being widely believed that critical appraisals are wholly subjective or just ‘a matter of taste’. Arguments that use deductive or inductive reasoning to demonstrate the possibility of proofs of critical judgments are generally agreed to have failed. Another approach redescribes the critic altogether, not as someone who uses argument to prove their judgments to an audience, but as someone who aims to help the audience perceive features of the work of art and understand their role in the work. See also: AESTHETIC CONCEPTS Further reading Lyas, C. (1992) ‘The Evaluation of Art’, in O. Hanfling (ed.) Philosophical Aesthetics , Oxford: Blackwell. (Describes many of the arguments on this subject.) COLIN LYAS ART, DEFINITION OF Many of the earliest definitions of art were probably intended to emphasize salient or important features for an audience already familiar with the concept, rather than to analyse the essence possessed by all art works and only by them. Indeed, it has been argued that art could not be defined any more rigorously, since noimmutable essence is observable in its instances. But, on the one hand, this view faces difficulties in explaining the unity of the concept – similarities between them, for example, are insufficient to distinguish works of art from other things. And, on the other, it overlooks the attractive possibility that art is to be defined in terms of a relation between the activities of artists, the products that result and the audiences that receive them. Two types of definition have come to prominence since the 1970s: the functional and procedural. The former regards something as art only if it serves the function for which we have art, usually said to be that of providing aesthetic experience. The latter regards something as art only if it has been baptized as such through an agent’s application of the appropriate procedures. In the version where the agent takes their authority from their location within an informal institution, the ‘artworld’, proceduralism is known as the institutional theory. These definitional strategies are opposed in practice, if not in theory, because the relevant procedures are sometimes used apart from, or to oppose, the alleged function of art; obviously these theories disagree then about whether the outcome is art. To take account of art’s historically changing character a definition might take a recursive form, holding that something is art if it stands in an appropriate relation to previous art works: it is the location of an item within accepted art-making traditions that makes it a work of art. Theories developed in the 1980s have often taken this form. They variously see the crucial relation between the piece and the corpus of accepted works as, for example, a matter of the manner in which it is intended to be regarded, or of a shared style, or of its being forged by a particular kind of narrative. See also: ARTIST’S INTENTION Further reading Davies, S. (1991) Definitions of Art, Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press. (Detailed review of philosophical treatments of the topic since the 1950s; contains a bibliography.) STEPHEN DAVIES ART, EROTIC see EROTIC ART ART, PERFORMING Some works, such as plays and pieces of classical music, are created as instructions (either notated or implicit in an exemplar) for performers; performances of such pieces arise from the appropriate execution of those instructions. Because the instructions do not specify all features possessed by an accurate performance, performers inevitably contribute something to the performance; even ideally accurate performances differ in the interpretations they offer.
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Page 56 Some such works serve primarily to highlight the performer’s talents. Even where this is not so, some awareness of what is involved in rendering a piece is necessary to appreciate a work written for performance, since the skills and techniques of performance are the artistic media through which the work’s contents are presented. Performances are evaluated for the life, integrity and interest of their interpretations, as well as for their accuracy. The desirability of one performance over another relates partly to the knowledge and experience of the intended audience. Other works, such as films, involve performance in their creation rather than in their transmission. If these works are multiple, they are so because copies are cloned from a master. When completed, such pieces are not performed or interpreted; they are shown or displayed. Free improvisation might stand as performance in its own right, being neither the creation of a work nor an instance of one. The criteria in terms of which improvisations are evaluated differ from those involved in the creation or transmission of works, taking into account the fact that the improviser’s efforts involve the risks, as well as the delights, of spontaneity. See also: DANCE, AESTHETICS OF; MUSIC, AESTHETICS OF Further reading Davies, S. (1987) ‘Authenticity in Musical Performance’, The British Journal of Aesthetics 27: 39–50. (Outlines conditions for the authentic performance of works and emphasises their compatibility with performers’ creativity.) McFee, G. (1992) Understanding Dance, New York: Routledge. (Introductory text on the philosophy of dance.) STEPHEN DAVIES ART, UNDERSTANDING OF Art engages the understanding in many ways. Thus, confronted with an allegorical painting such as Van Eyk’s The Marriage of Arnolfini, one might want to understand the significance of the objects it depicts. Similarly, confronted with an obscure poem, such as Eliot’s The Waste Land , one might seek to understand what it means. Sometimes, too, we claim not to understand a work of art, a piece of music, say, when we are unable to derive enjoyment from it because we cannot see how it is organized or hangs together. Sometimes what challenges the understanding goes deeper, as when we ask why some things, including such notorious productions of the avant garde as the urinal exhibited by Marcel Duchamp, are called art at all. Some have also claimed that to understand a work of art we must understand its context. Sometimes the context referred to is that of the particular problems and aims of the individual artist in a certain tradition, as when the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields is understood as a contribution by its architect to the vexing problem of combining a tower with a classical façade. Sometimes the context is social, as when some Marxists argue that works of art can best be understood as reflections of the more or less inadequate economic organizations of the societies that gave rise to them. The understanding of art becomes a philosophical problem because, first, it is sometimes thought that one of the central tasks of interpretation is to understand the meaning of a work. However, recent writers, notably Derrida, query the notion of the meaning of a work as something to be definitively deciphered, and offer the alternative view of interpretation as an unending play with the infinitely varied meanings of the text. Second, a controversial issue has been the extent to which the judgment of works of art can be divorced from an understanding of the circumstances, both individual and cultural, of their making. Thus Clive Bell argued that to appreciate a work of art we need nothing more than a knowledge of its colours, shapes and spatial arrangements. Others, ranging from Wittgenstein to Marxists, have for a variety of different reasons argued that a work of art cannot be properly understood and appreciated without some understanding of its relation to the context of its creation, a view famously characterized by Beardsley and Wimsatt (1954) as the ‘genetic fallacy’. See also: ARTIST’S INTENTION; ARTISTIC INTERPRETATION Further reading Bell, C. (1914) Art, London: Chatto & Windus. (A classic statement of the case that only a minimal understanding of art is needed as a precondition for appreciation.) Derrida, J. (1972) Margins , trans. A. Bass, Brighton: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1982. (Denies that the task of the interpreter is to understand a text by deciphering its meaning. Notoriously obscure writer, though the text cited is one of the more accessible, see esp. 316ff.) COLIN LYAS
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Page 57 ART, VALUE OF Art has as many kinds of value as there are points of view from which it can be evaluated. Moreover, the benefits of art vary with the role of the participant, for there are benefits that are specific to the creation, the performance and the mere appreciation of art. But in the philosophy of art one value is basic, namely the distinctive value of a work of art, its value as a work of art, which can be called its ‘artistic value’. This value is intrinsic to a work in that it is determined by the intrinsic, rather than the instrumental, value of an informed experience of it, an experience of it in which it is understood. Artistic value is a matter of degree, but it is not a measurable quantity, and whether one work is better than another may be an indeterminate issue. A judgment about a work’s artistic value claims validity, rightly or wrongly, not merely for the person who makes the judgment but for everyone. Both David Hume and Immanuel Kant tried to show how such a claim could be well-founded, but their attempts are usually considered failures, and there is no accepted solution to the problem they addressed. Many philosophers have been concerned with the relation between artistic value and other values. The most famous attack on art, founded on its supposed relation to other values, was made by Plato, who claimed that nearly all art has undesirable social consequences and so should be excluded from a decent society. Plato overlooked many possibilities, however, and the question of art’s beneficial or harmful influence is a much more complex issue than he recognized. See also: ART, UNDERSTANDING OF Further reading Budd, M. (1995) Values of Art, London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press. (Part 1 contains an account of artistic value and a consideration of the views of Hume and Kant.) Janaway, C. (1995) Images of Excellence: Plato’s Critique of the Arts, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (A comprehensive and penetrating examination of Plato’s views about the value of art.) MALCOLM BUDD ART WORKS, ONTOLOGY OF In trying to decide what kinds of thing art works are, the most natural starting point is the hypothesis that they are physical objects. This is plausible only for certain works, such as paintings and sculptures; in such cases we say that the work is a certain marked canvas or piece of stone. Even for these apparently favourable cases, though, there is a metaphysical objection to this proposal: that works and the physical objects identified with them do not possess the same properties and so cannot be identical. There is also an aesthetic objection: that the plausibility of the thesis for painting and sculpture rests on the false view that the authentic object made by the artist possesses aesthetically relevant features which no copy could possibly exemplify. Once it is acknowledged that paintings and sculptures are, in principle, reproducible in the way that novels and musical scores are, the motivation for thinking of the authentic canvas or stone as the work itself collapses. For literary and musical works, the standard view is that they are structures: structures of word-types in the literary case and of sound-types in the musical case. This structuralist view is opposed by contextualism, which asserts that the identity conditions for works must take into account historical features involving their origin and modes of production. Contextualists claim that works with the same structure might have different historical features and ought, therefore, to count as distinct works. Nelson Goodman has proposed that we divide works into autographic and allographic kinds; for autographic works, such as paintings, genuineness is determined partly by history of production: for allographic works, such as novels, it is determined in some other way. Our examination of the hypothesis that certain works are physical objects and our discussion of the structuralist/contextualist controversy will indicate grounds for thinking that Goodman’s distinction does not provide an acceptable categorization of works. A wholly successful ontology of art works would tell us what things are art works and what things are not; failing that, it would give us identity conditions for them, enabling us to say under what conditions this work and that are the same work. Since the complexity of the issues to be discussed quickly ramifies, it will be appropriate after a certain point to consider only the question of identity conditions. For simplicity, this entry concentrates on works of art that exemplify written literature, scored music and the plastic and pictorial arts. See also: ARTISTIC FORGERY; TYPE/TOKEN DISTINCTION Further reading Currie, G. (1989) An Ontology of Art, London: Macmillan. (Emphasizes the requirement that
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Page 58 an ontology of art incorporate an historical dimension.) GREGORY CURRIE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Artificial intelligence (AI) tries to make computer systems (of various kinds) do what minds can do: interpreting a photograph as depicting a face; offering medical diagnoses; using and translating language; learning to do better next time. AI has two main aims. One is technological: to build useful tools, which can help humans in activities of various kinds, or perform the activities for them. The other is psychological: to help us understand human (and animal) minds, or even intelligence in general. Computational psychology uses AI concepts and AI methods in formulating and testing its theories. Mental structures and processes are described in computational terms. Usually, the theories are clarified, and their predictions tested, by running them on a computer program. Whether people perform the equivalent task in the same way is another question, which psychological experiments may help to answer. AI has shown that the human mind is more complex than psychologists had previously assumed, and that introspectively ‘simple’ achievements – many shared with animals – are even more difficult to mimic artificially than are ‘higher’ functions such as logic and mathematics. There are deep theoretical disputes within AI about how best to model intelligence. Classical (symbolic) AI programs consist of formal rules for manipulating formal symbols; these are carried out sequentially, one after the other. Connectionist systems, also called neural networks, perform many simple processes in parallel (simultaneously); most work in a way described not by lists of rules, but by differential equations. Hybrid systems combine aspects of classical and connectionist AI. More recent approaches seek to construct adaptive autonomous agents, whose behaviour is self-directed rather than imposed from outside and which adjust to environmental conditions. Situated robotics builds robots that react directly to environmental cues, instead of following complex internal plans as classical robots do. The programs, neural networks and robots of evolutionary AI are produced not by detailed human design, but by automatic evolution (variation and selection). Artificial life studies the emergence of order and adaptive behaviour in general and is closely related to AI. Philosophical problems central to AI include the following. Can classical or connectionist AI explain conceptualization and thinking? Can meaning be explained by AI? What sorts of mental representations are there (if any)? Can computers, or non-linguistic animals, have beliefs and desires? Could AI explain consciousness? Might intelligence be better explained by less intellectualistic approaches, based on the model of skills and know-how rather than explicit representation? See also: CONNECTIONISM; MIND, COMPUTATIONAL THEORIES OF; TURING MACHINES Further reading Boden, M.A. (1987) Artificial Intelligence and Natural Man, London: MIT Press, 2nd edn, expanded. (A non-technical introduction to AI, including its philosophical, psychological and social implications; extensive bibliography.) Rich, E. and Knight, K. (1991) Artificial Intelligence, New York: McGraw-Hill, 2nd edn. (A comprehensive textbook of AI, including detailed descriptions of various AI methods; good bibliography.) MARGARET A. BODEN ARTISTIC EXPRESSION Many kinds of psychological state can be expressed in or by works of art. But it is the artistic expression of emotion that has figured most prominently in philosophical discussions of art. Emotion is expressed in pictorial, literary and other representational works of art by the characters who are depicted or in other ways presented in the works. We often identify the emotions of such characters in much the same way as we ordinarily identify the emotions of others, but we might also have special knowledge of a character’s emotional state, through direct access to their thoughts, for instance. A central case of the expression of emotion by works of art is the expression of emotion by a purely musical work. What is the source of the emotion expressed by a piece of music? While art engages its audience, often calling forth an emotional response, its expressiveness does not consist in this power. It is not because an art work tends to make us feel sad, for instance, that we call it sad; rather, we react as we do because sadness is present in it. And while artists usually contrive the expressiveness of their art works, sometimes expressing their own emotions
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Page 59 in doing so, their success in the former activity does not depend on their doing the latter. Moreover, the expressiveness achieved has an immediacy and transparency, like that of genuine tears, apparently at odds with this sophisticated, controlled form of self-expression. It is because art presents emotion with simple directness that it can be a vehicle for self-expression, not vice versa. But if emotions are the experiences of sentient beings, to whom do those expressed in art belong if not to the artist or audience? Perhaps they are those of a fictional persona. We may imagine personae who undergo the emotions expressed in art, but it is not plain that we must do so to become aware of that expressiveness, for it is arguable that art works present appearances of emotions, as do masks, willow trees and the like, rather than outward signs of occurrent feelings. Expressiveness is valuable because it helps us to understand emotions in general while contributing to the formation of an aesthetically satisfying whole. See also: EMOTION IN RESPONSE TO ART STEPHEN DAVIES ARTISTIC FORGERY Forgery in art occurs when something is presented as a work of art with a history it does not actually have. Typically this involves a false claim about the producer’s identity. Forgeries are most usually works in the style of the artist whose work they falsely claim to be, while a forgery that is a copy of an existing work is a fake. Forgery is most common in the visual arts, but is also possible in other arts, such as literature and music. The main aesthetic problem that forgery poses is that typically no deception is practised concerning what we might call the appearance of the forged object (generalizing from the pictorial case). Thus the forger does not deceive us about the disposition of colours on the canvas, the sequence of musical notes in the score, or the sequence of words in the text. If we adopt the widely held view that aesthetic value is a function of appearance alone, we shall conclude that something’s being a forgery is irrelevant to its aesthetic worth; whatever false beliefs the viewer might be induced to have about the work, those beliefs could not affect an honest judgment of its aesthetic value. But in the art world it is universal practice to condemn forgery. If that practice is to be justified as anything other than artistic snobbery and the protection of prices in the art market, it must be shown that the aesthetic interest of a work is not exhausted by its appearance alone. In fact it can be shown that the aesthetic features of a work often depend on its historical features as well as on its appearance, and that these historical features are likely to be obscured by the deception that forgery involves. See also: ARTIST’S INTENTION Further reading Dutton, D. (1983) The Forger’s Art, Berkeley, CA, and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. (An anthology of work by art historians, critics and philosophers.) GREGORY CURRIE ARTISTIC INTERPRETATION Interpretation aims to advance understanding by providing explanations of various kinds. In art, it should aim to maximize our understanding and appreciation of a work, and enable us to grasp its artistic values. When we interpret an art work we may explain why its elements are placed in their contexts, for example, to convey a certain meaning or express a certain feeling. In the case of literature we explain why words and passages are placed where they are, why characters and events are described as they are, and so on. When we interpret whole works, we explain how they fit into broader explanatory frameworks (for instance, Freudian or Marxist) or how they relate to various traditions so as to serve (or reject) the values emphasized in those traditions. The distinction between description, or the presentation of the fundamental data constituting a work of art, and interpretation, which involves explaining why those elements exist in a work, what values they serve, may be used to justify claims that interpretations can never be known to be true, while descriptions are obviously true or false. While this is reinforced by the fact that a work may generate conflicting interpretations, the distinction does not imply that interpretations cannot be known to be correct. In a related debate, many see the artist’s intention in creating their work as the key to a valid interpretation. Since, however, many people find value in works in ways unintended by the artist, the onus is on the intentionalist to demonstrate the primacy of the value that the artist intended the work to have. Ultimately, contending interpretations may not present as great a problem to a theory of interpretation as at first seems inevitable.
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Page 60 Interpretations give priority in different ways to different artistic values; the choice of these values is simply a matter of artistic taste, not truth, and may not threaten the validity of any reasonably grounded interpretation. See also: ART CRITICISM; ART, UNDERSTANDING OF Further reading Eco, U. (1990) The Limits of Interpretation, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. (Reasserts limits to the freedom of interpreters.) Gill, N.S. (ed.) (1982) Structuralism and Literary Criticism, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. (A collection of French structuralist interpretation.) ALAN H. GOLDMAN ARTISTIC STYLE Artistic style is a problematic notion in several ways. Sometimes the term refers to style in general, as it does in ‘Good style requires good diction’. Sometimes it refers to style as a particular, as in ‘Van Gogh’s style’ or ‘the Baroque style’. In antiquity, style was a rhetorical concept referring to diction and syntax; consequently style is very often identified with the formal elements of a work of art as opposed to the content. However, the kind of subject matter an artist chooses may itself be a significant feature of style. One way of thinking about style is as a set of recurrent features of works of art that identify them as the product of a particular person, period or place. This may be adequate for some purposes, but it ignores the fact that a style has a unified ‘physiognomy’ or expressive character. The relation between style and expression is complex. A period style is often thought to express the cultural attitudes of the period, but it cannot do so in a very direct way. What a style expresses is a function of where it occurs in the history of style. Similarly, a work of art in an artist’s individual style will be expressive only in the context of the possibilities of that style. According to the Romantic tradition, individual style is a genuine expression of the artist’s self. But according to others, style is simply a construction by readers, viewers and listeners. See also: AESTHETIC CONCEPTS; FORMALISM IN ART Further reading Lang, B. (1987) The Concept of Style , Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. (First edition 1979. Contains a number of important essays on style by philosophers, art historians and others.) Van Eck, C., McAllister, J. and Van de Vall, R. (1995) The Question of Style in Philosophy and the Arts, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (A collection of essays on style.) JENEFER M. ROBINSON ARTISTIC TASTE Taste has been variously understood as (1) the capacity to take pleasure in certain artistic and natural objects, (2) the capacity to identify the constituent elements in such objects, and (3) the capacity to discern certain special properties. Taste in sense (1) has been a topic since the early eighteenth century, culminating in the work of Hume and Kant. This conception of taste is annexed to the idea that ‘beauty’ or ‘artistic excellence’ is not itself an objective property of things, but that it is recorded in judgments of beauty as a report of a certain kind of pleasure felt by the judge in the presence of these things. Taste in sense (2), which is an analogue of the notion of taste as the ability to discriminate with the tongue and taste buds, has also been a topic since the eighteenth century, articulated perhaps most clearly by Hume. A connection between sense (1) and sense (2) is intended by eighteenth-century authors, but the connection has not been formulated clearly. Taste in sense (3) is a conception originating in the mid-twentieth century, notably in the work of Frank Sibley. It is primarily the idea that beauty, elegance, gracefulness and other properties – collectively called ‘aesthetic properties’ – require a special capacity for their discernment, although these are truly objective properties located in the objects being judged. See also: AESTHETIC CONCEPTS; BEAUTY Further reading Dickie, G. (1995) The Century of Taste: Five Philosophers, New York: Oxford University Press. (A critical history of the development of the theory of taste in Hutcheson, Gerard, Alison, Kant and Hume, which argues that Hume’s version of the theory is the most defensible.) Dickie, G., Sclafani, R. and Roblin, R. (eds) (1989) Aesthetics: A Critical Anthology, 2nd edn, New York: St Martin’s Press. (A useful reprinting of Sibley’s original essay, along with some criticism and an excellent guide to the literature. It also contains remarks offered by Sibley for this edition of the anthology.) TED COHEN
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Page 61 ARTIST’S INTENTION W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley’s famous paper ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ (1946) began one of the central debates in aesthetics and literary theory of the last half-century. By describing as a fallacy the belief that critics should take into account the author’s intentions when interpreting or evaluating a piece of literature, they were rejecting an entrenched assumption of traditional criticism – and a natural one, since we normally take it for granted that understanding actions, including acts of speech and writing, requires a grasp of the intentions of the agent. But they were expressing an idea that has been greatly influential; it was a central claim of the ‘new criticism’, while the marginalization of the author is also a marked feature of structuralist and poststructuralist literary theory. Most of the debate over the artist’s intentions – ‘artist’ here being used as a general word for writer, composer, painter, and so on – has centred on their relevance for interpreting art works. More particularly, the question has been whether external evidence about the artist’s intentions – evidence not presented by the work itself – is relevant to determining the work’s meaning. See also: ART, UNDERSTANDING OF; ARTISTIC EXPRESSION; INTENTION Further reading Lyas, C. (1983) ‘The Relevance of the Author’s Sincerity’, in P. Lamarque (ed.) Philosophy and Fiction, Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 17–37. (Especially helpful for coming to grips with arguments concerning experience and meaning.) PAUL TAYLOR ARYA SAMAJ The Arya Samaj ( ārya-samāj, ‘The Association of Nobles’) is a Hindu reform movement founded in 1875 by Swami Dayanand Saraswati (1824–83). Based on the supposition that the true religion of India was put forth in the ancient Vedas, rather than in later epics and cycles of myths, the principal aim of the Arya Samaj is to purge modern Hinduism of beliefs and practices associated with the devotional and mythic literature of India. Condemning the hereditary caste system and dismissing the practice of using icons and idols in worship, the society favoured a more rationalistic, humanistic and nationalistic form of Hinduism as India entered the modern era. See also: BRAHMO SAMAJ Further reading Lajpat Rai, L. (1967) A History of the Arya Samaj: An Account of its Origin, Doctrines and Activities, with a Biographical Sketch of the Founder, Bombay: Orient Longman. (A very good book for the beginner, giving the historical development and basic principles of Arya Samaj, along with a biography of its founder, Swami Dayanand Saraswati.) K.S. KUMAR ASCETICISM The term ‘asceticism’ is derived from the Greek word, askēsis, which referred originally to the sort of exercise, practice or training in which athletes engage. Asceticism may be characterized as a voluntary, sustained and systematic programme of self-discipline and self-denial in which immediate sensual gratifications are renounced in order to attain some valued spiritual or mental state. Ascetic practices are to be found in all the major religious traditions of the world, yet they have often been criticized by philosophers. Some argue that the religious doctrines that they presuppose are false or unreasonable. Others contend that they express a preference for pain that humans cannot consistently act upon. See also: RELIGION AND MORALITY Further reading Hardman, O. (1924) The Ideals of Asceticism: An Essay in the Comparative Study of Religion, New York: Macmillan. (A readable but somewhat dated overview, written from an explicitly Christian perspective.) PHILIP L. QUINN ASCLEPIADES see HELLENISTIC MEDICAL EPISTEMOLOGY ASH‘ARIYYA AND MU‘TAZILA The Mu‘tazila – literally ‘those who withdraw themselves’ – movement was founded by Wasil bin ‘Ata’ in the second century ah (eighth century AD). Its members were united in their conviction that it was necessary to give a rationally coherent account of Islamic beliefs. In addition to having an atomistic view of the universe, they generally held to five theological principles, of which the two most important were the unity of God and divine justice. The former led them to deny that the attributes of God were distinct entities or that the Qur’an was eternal, while the latter led them to assert the existence of free will.
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Page 62 Ash‘ariyya – named after its founding thinker, al-Ash‘ari – was the foremost theological school in Sunni Islam. It had its origin in the reaction against the excessive rationalism of the Mu‘tazila. Its members insisted that reason must be subordinate to revelation. They accepted the cosmology of the Mu‘tazilites but put forward a nuanced rejection of their theological principles. See also: ISLAM, CONCEPT OF PHILOSOPHY IN Further reading Gimaret, D. (1990) La doctrine d’al-Ash‘ari (The Doctrine of al-Ash‘ari), Paris: Éditions du Cerf. (A systematic and comprehensive treatment of the subject.) Hourani, G. (1985) Reason and Tradition in Islamic Ethics , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Excellent defence of the Mu‘tazilite position.) NEAL ROBINSON ASMUS, VALENTIN FERDINANDOVICH (1894–1975) One of the most accomplished thinkers in the Soviet Marxist tradition, Asmus wrote extensively in many areas of philosophy, and was widely regarded as the Soviet Union’s principal Kant scholar. Early in his career, he became associated with the influential school of ‘dialecticians’ led by A.M. Deborin and produced a number of significant writings in the history of philosophy. When Deborin and his followers were condemned as ‘Menshevizing idealists’ in 1931, Asmus shifted the principal focus of his work to aesthetics and logic. His 1947 textbook of formal logic subsequently became the principal text for logic instruction in the USSR. Throughout his long career, Asmus experienced a number of political difficulties. Nevertheless, he avoided imprisonment and published consistently, though he was never permitted to go abroad. His importance in Russian philosophy derives not so much from the significance of his theories, but from his role in preserving philosophical culture in Russia through the Stalin period. He aspired to high standards of scholarship and worked hard to foster the study of logic and the history of philosophy. The breadth of his interests and his excellence as a teacher made him an inspirational figure to the young scholars striving to revive Soviet philosophy in the 1960s. See also: MARXIST PHILOSOPHY, RUSSIAN AND SOVIET Further reading Asmus, V.F. (1924) Dialekticheskii materializm i logika (Dialectical Materialism and Logic), Kiev. (Asmus’ first major work and one which brought him to the attention of Deborin and his followers in Moscow.) ‘V.F. Asmus – pedagog i myslitel’ (V.F. Asmus – teacher and thinker) (1995), in Voprosy filosofii (Questions of Philosophy) 1: 31–51. (Insightful reminiscences of Asmus’ life and work by former students and colleagues commemorating the hundredth anniversary of his birth.) DAVID BAKHURST ASTELL, MARY (1666–1731) Best known for her proposal to establish a women’s college, Astell published on a variety of other topics: religious dissent, the social contract, the marriage contract, epistemic issues, mind–body dualism, immortality, proofs for God’s existence, reason and revelation, and Locke’s views on ‘thinking matter’. Her correspondence with John Norris treated the pure love of God and occasionalism. On marriage she drew a shrewd contrast between the treatment of political tyranny by contractarians (such as Locke), and their failure to deal with domestic tyranny. Some of her reactions to the views of major philosophers anticipated later debates. Further reading Perry, R. (1986) The Celebrated Mary Astell: An Early English Feminist, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (A detailed social and intellectual history of Astell and her times; appendices include some of Astell’s letters and poems.) EILEEN O’NEILL ATHEISM Atheism is the position that affirms the non-existence of God. It proposes positive disbelief rather than mere suspension of belief. Since many different gods have been objects of belief, one might be an atheist with respect to one god while believing in the existence of some other god. In the religions of the west – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – the dominant idea of God is of a purely spiritual, supernatural being who is the perfectly good, all-powerful, all-knowing creator of everything other than himself. As used in this entry, in the narrow sense of the term an atheist is anyone who disbelieves in the existence of this being, while in
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Page 63 the broader sense an atheist is someone who denies the existence of any sort of divine reality. The justification of atheism in the narrow sense requires showing that the traditional arguments for the existence of God are inadequate as well as providing some positive reasons for thinking that there is no such being. Atheists have criticized the traditional arguments for belief and have tried to justify positive disbelief by arguing that the properties ascribed to this being are incoherent, and that the amount and severity of evils in the world make it quite likely that there is no such all-powerful, perfectly good being in control. See also: AGNOSTICISM; GOD, ARGUMENTS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF Further reading Thrower, J. (1971) A Short History of Western Atheism , London: Pemberton Publishing Co. (A very readable summary of the development of Western atheism.) WILLIAM L. ROWE ATOMISM, ANCIENT Ancient Greek atomism, starting with Leucippus and Democritus in the fifth century BC, arose as a response to problems of the continuum raised by Eleatic philosophers. In time a distinction emerged, especially in Epicurean atomism (early third century BC), between physically indivisible particles called ‘atoms’ and absolutely indivisible or ‘partless’ magnitudes. Further reading Sorabji, R. (1983) Time, Creation and the Continuum , London: Duckworth. (Includes a magisterial study of the debate between atomicity and continuity, from the fifth century BC to the fourteenth century AD.) DAVID SEDLEY ATONEMENT As a theological concept, atonement articulates the acts by which relations between God and creatures, disrupted by human offence, can be restored. Although other cultures show an awareness of the need for atonement, the Christian tradition understands it as provided by God’s particular historical action in Jesus Christ. At its centre is the notion of reconciliation between God and his alienated creatures, which is achieved particularly by the death of Jesus. The distinctive philosophical and other problems of atonement theology derive from two features in particular: its claiming of universal significance for the historical life and death of Jesus of Nazareth (the problem of universality); and the moral difficulties, especially in the realm of human freedom and responsibility, which arise from the claim that he is the vehicle of atonement with God (the problem of human autonomy). Although there were many theologies of atonement before Anselm of Canterbury’s, his systematic treatment is the fountainhead of much modern discussion, both Roman Catholic and Protestant. Centring on the concept of satisfaction, it understands Christ as the Godman, satisfying both divine justice and human need by a free gift of his life. Criticisms of the formulation have centred on its understanding of sin and its tendency to understand atonement in external, transactional terms. Subsequent discussion of the concept has also raised questions about Christ’s substitutionary and representative roles and about the relation between the justice and the love of God. A significant proportion of modern thinkers have rejected the need for any concept of atonement at all. They have preferred instead to understand Jesus as an example to be followed (‘exemplarism’) or to concentrate upon the effect his behaviour and example have on the believer (‘subjectivism’) – or to adopt a combination of both. See also: GRACE; SIN Further reading Barth, K. (1956) Church Dogmatics, vol. 4/1: The Doctrine of Reconciliation, trans. G.W. Bromiley, Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark. (A major twentieth-century treatment of the doctrine.) Campbell, J.M. (1878) The Nature of the Atonement , London: Macmillan. (A modern attempt to stress representative rather than substitutionary aspects of atonement.) COLIN GUNTON AUGUSTINE (AD 354–430) Augustine was the first of the great Christian philosophers. For well over eight centuries following his death, in fact until the ascendancy of Thomas Aquinas at the end of the thirteenth century, he was also the single most influential Christian philosopher. As a theologian and Church Father, Augustine was the person who did the most to define Christian heresy and so, by implication, to formulate Christian orthodoxy. Of the three most prominent heresies defined by Augustine – Donatism, Pelagianism and Manicheism – the latter two also have especially important philosophical implications.
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Page 64 In rejecting Pelagianism and its thesis of human perfectibility, Augustine rejected one form of the principle, often associated with Kant, that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’, and in rejecting Manicheism, with its doctrine that good and evil are equally basic metaphysical realities, Augustine rejected one solution to the philosophical problem of evil. The Categories may have been the only work of Aristotle that Augustine actually read. Plato he knew somewhat better. He seems to have been familiar with several Platonic dialogues and he clearly felt a special affinity for Plato and the Platonists, which is particularly evident in De civitate Dei (The City of God) and De vera religione (On True Religion). Although he could be said to have responded to classical Greek philosophy in consequential ways, it must be added that what he responded to had been filtered through Neoplatonism, Hellenistic scepticism and Stoicism. It was principally through the writings of Cicero that Augustine became schooled in the opinions of his philosophical predecessors, and it was through the works of the Neoplatonists that he developed his deep appreciation for Plato. Augustine’s philosophy thus draws significantly on the philosophy of late antiquity as well as on Christian revelation. Its originality lies partly in its synthesis of Greek and Christian thought, and partly in its development of a novel ego-centred approach to philosophy that anticipates modern thought, especially as exemplified in the philosophy of Descartes. In his De trinitate (The Trinity) and De civitate Dei, Augustine presents a line of thinking that foreshadows Descartes’ famous cogito, ergo sum . Through his Confessionum libri tredecim (Confessions, more usually known as Confessiones), the first significant autobiography in Western literature, and also through his Soliloquia (Soliloquies), which is a dialogue between himself and Reason, Augustine introduced a first-person perspective to Western philosophy. Early in his career, Augustine found himself attracted to philosophical scepticism. In his earliest extant work he offers his most extensive response to the main sceptical arguments of his day, including those that raise the possibility one might only be dreaming. His later responses to scepticism, though less extensive, are better focused; they concentrate on the self-knowledge he considers directly available to each knowing subject, including the knowledge that one exists. Taking the first-person perspective one can also develop, he tries to show, in his De trinitate, a convincing argument for mind–body dualism. But supposing, as he does, that each of us knows from our own case what a mind is raises, as Augustine is perhaps the first philosopher to realize, a problem about how one can ever know that there are minds in addition to one’s own. Augustine’s account of language and meaning influenced the development of ‘terminist’ logic in the high middle ages. His thoughts on language acquisition in Confessiones provide a foil for Wittgenstein in the latter’s Philosophical Investigations . Yet, some of Augustine’s own reflections on ostensive definition in his dialogue De magistro (The Teacher) anticipate Wittgenstein’s own views on language learning. Augustine develops what is described as an ‘active’ theory of sense perception, according to which rays of vision touch objects whose consequent action on the body is ‘noticed’ by the mind or soul. Although his ideas on sense perception are interesting, his most influential epistemological conception is certainly his ‘theory of illumination’. Instead of supposing that what we know can be abstracted from sensible particulars that instantiate such knowledge, he insists that our mind is so constituted as to see ‘intelligible realities’ directly by an inner illumination. The modern concept of the will is often said to originate with Augustine. Certainly the idea of will is central to his philosophy of mind, as well as to his account of sin and the origin of evil. Strikingly, he uses psychological ‘trinities’, including the trinity of memory, understanding and will, to illuminate the doctrine of the Divine Trinity, where there is also a baffling unity in plurality. The theological warrant for this analogy Augustine finds in the biblical idea that God created human beings, and specifically the human mind, in his own image. Augustine’s attempts to achieve a philosophical understanding of theology and religious belief set the framework for much later medieval and early modern philosophy. On the issue of how reason should bear on religious faith, Augustine develops the idea that reason should work out an understanding of what we must first accept on faith. Yet he also displays a keen sensitivity to those issues most likely to challenge one’s religious faith. Prominent among his concerns is the philosophical problem of evil, to which he offers what has proved to be perhaps the most influential type of solution. Particularly striking is Augustine’s virtually lifelong preoccupation with human freedom and how the fact that human beings are free to make their own choices can be reconciled with the
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Page 65 Christian doctrines of God’s foreknowledge, predestination and grace. Almost every important medieval philosopher in the Christian West would later contribute to the continuing effort to achieve a satisfactory reconciliation of these issues. It is significant that Leibniz, who gave the problem of freedom, foreknowledge, predestination and grace one of its most sophisticated treatments, also gave much of his philosophical attention to the equally Augustinian problem of evil. Although Augustine did present an argument for the existence of God, it is his understanding of the divine attributes, and especially his insistence on divine ‘simplicity’, that is, on the idea that God is not distinct from his attributes, that has been especially influential on later thinkers. Also influential are his various attempts to understand the created world. Augustine made several important efforts, perhaps most notably in the last books of his Confessiones and in his De genesi ad litteram (The Literal Meaning of Genesis) to give a philosophically sophisticated account of the creation story in the biblical book of Genesis. His contrast between God’s eternity and human temporality set the stage for later medieval and modern discussions of these issues, and his discussion of the nature of time in Book XI of his Confessiones is sometimes taken to epitomize philosophy. Augustine’s descriptions of mystical experience are among the most eloquent in Western literature; they belong among the classic texts of mysticism. However, Augustine’s attempts to understand ritual are perhaps more remarkable for the directness with which he identifies and confronts difficult issues than for the success of his efforts to solve them. Those efforts seem to be hobbled by his version of mind– body dualism. Augustine is a thoroughgoing intentionalist in ethics. This feature of his thought, as well as his unflinching insistence that one can do what one knows one ought not to be doing, mark him off from ethicists of the classical Greek period. Yet Augustine also preserves in his own thinking important strands of ancient Greek thought. Thus, for example, his development of the doctrine of the Christian virtues includes an echo of Plato’s idea of the unity of the virtues. His insistence that ‘ought’ does not, in any straightforward way, imply ‘can’, distinguishes him, not only from his contemporary Pelagius, whom he helped brand as a Christian heretic, but also from most modern ethicists as well. See also: AUGUSTINIANISM; PATRISTIC PHILOSOPHY; RELIGION, HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Augustine (386–429) Collected Works. (The seventeenth-century Maurist edition of Augustine’s works is to be found in J.P. Migne (ed.) Patrologia Latina, Paris, 1844–6, vols 32– 47. English translations of Augustine’s major works are to be found in P. Schaff (ed.) A Select Library of the Nicene and PostNicene Fathers of the Christian Church , First Series, Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1886–8, repr: Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1971–74. A smaller selection is found in W. Oates (ed.) Basic Writings of Saint Augustine, New York: Random House, 1948, 2 vols. The first English translation of Augustine’s complete works is currently being published in 46 vols, edited by J.E. Rotelle, Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, in conjunction with the Augustinian Heritage Institute.) Brown, P. (1967) Augustine of Hippo, Berkeley, CA: University of California. (The best general biography in English.) Kirwan, C. (1989) Augustine, London: Routledge. (The best treatment of Augustine’s philosophy from a contemporary analytic point of view.) GARETH B. MATTHEWS AUGUSTINIANISM The influence of Augustine on Western philosophy is exceeded in duration, extent and variety only by that of Plato and Aristotle. Augustine was an authority not just for the early Middle Ages, when he was often the lone authority, but well into modern times. He was in many ways the principal author in contention during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and in France alone he was variously received by authors as diverse as Montaigne, Descartes, Malebranche, Arnauld and Pascal. The breadth of Augustine’s influence makes it difficult to give precise sense to the term ‘Augustinianism’, even when considering only a single period. Historians of medieval philosophy use the term ‘Augustinianism’ to describe three rather different relations to the thought of Augustine. The first relation is a comprehensive dependence on Augustine both for philosophical principles or arguments, and for instruction in the topics and procedures of ancient philosophy.
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Page 66 Augustine serves as the trustworthy guide to philosophy as a whole. The second kind of relation is a defence of specific Augustinian teachings in the face of rival teachings, most especially those of Aristotle. These Augustinian teachings include the function of divine ideas in knowledge, the unity of the human soul’s essential powers, and the unfolding of potential intelligibilities in material substances. The third relation is the reappropriation of Augustinian principles, especially those of his later writings, to address quandaries newly formulated with the tools of nominalist semantics and the mathematics of continuities. Among these quandaries are the contingency of future human actions and the certainty of human cognition. These three relations to Augustine can be found in texts throughout the medieval period. They are not neatly correlated with particular centuries, but one or another does tend to be predominant at different times. Thus the first relation, of comprehensive dependence, is seen in the great majority of Latin writers on philosophic topics through the twelfth century. The second relation, of topical defence, appears prominently during the thirteenth-century contest between so-called ‘Augustianians’ and ‘Aristotelians’. The third relation, of reappropriation in reaction to newly formulated quandaries, is found particularly in writings of the fourteenth century and beyond. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM, MEDIEVAL; AUGUSTINE Further reading King, E.B., and Schaefer, J.T. (1988) Saint Augustine and His Influence in the Middle Ages, Sewanee, TN: Press of the University of the South. (Anthology of conference papers; the contributions by Chadwick and Evans are particularly pertinent.) Oberman, H.A., and James III, F.A. (eds) (1991) Via Augustini: Augustine in the Later Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation: Essays in Honor of Damasus Trapp , Leiden/New York: Brill. (Anthology of rather narrowly focused essays.) MARK D. JORDAN AUREOL, PETER ( c .1280–1322) A master of theology at the University of Paris and a member of the Franciscan order, Peter Aureol helped shape the philosophical agenda of the fourteenth century. His original and provocative views were widely discussed during the later Middle Ages, but his influence was rather indirect since his views almost always met with hostility. Although Aureol wrote extensively on a wide range of philosophical and theological issues, his most-discussed contributions to philosophy, in epistemology and metaphysics, centre on his theory of esse apparens (apparent existence). See also: DUNS SCOTUS, J. Further reading Tachau, K. (1988) Vision and Certitude in the Age of Ockham: Optics, Epistemology and the Foundations of Semantics, 1250–1345, Leiden: Brill. (Contains a detailed discussion of Aureol’s theory of esse apparens.) ROBERT PASNAU AUROBINDO GHOSE (1872–1950) Aurobindo Ghose was a leading Indian nationalist at the beginning of the twentieth century who became a yogin and spiritual leader as well as a prolific writer (in English) on mysticism, crafting a mystic philosophy of Brahman (the Absolute or God). Aurobindo fashioned an entire worldview, a system intended to reflect both science and religion and to integrate several concerns of philosophy – epistemology, ontology, psychology, ethics – into a single vision. Of particular importance to his cosmological thinking was evolutionary biology. But Aurobindo also understood the fundamental nature of matter to include – for metaphysical reasons – an ‘evolutionary nisus’ that ensures the emergence of individuals capable of mystical experience in which the supreme reality, Brahman, is revealed. See also: BRAHAMAN Further reading Aurobindo Ghose (1914–21) The Life Divine , Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, revised edn, 1943–4, 2 vols. (Aurobindo’s major work of philosophy, written in dozens of chapters, with much repetition of the principal themes.) Heehs, P. (1989) Sri Aurobindo: A Brief Biography , Delhi: Oxford University Press. (Contains useful summaries of the various areas of Aurobindo’s writing as well as a lively account of Aurobindo’s political life.) STEPHEN H. PHILLIPS AUSTIN, JOHN (1790–1859) Although written in the early nineteenth century, Austin’s work is probably the most coherent and
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Page 67 of legal positivism. He explored the complex relationships between legal positivism and the concepts of morality and politics, arguing that positive law and positive morality were ‘inseparably connected parts of a vast organic whole’. His writings on jurisprudence remain important, but are explored by him but are often neglected or misunderstood in modern commentaries. See also: LAW, PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Austin, J. (1832) The Province of Jurisprudence Determined , London: John Murray; with intro. by H.L.A. Hart, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1954; with intro. by W.E. Rumble, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. (The only book to be published by Austin in his lifetime, being a series of six lectures originally delivered as ten. The 1995 edition includes a good bibliography.) Rumble, W.E. (1985) The Thought of John Austin, London: Athlone Press. (This is a good scholarly account of Austin’s work; good bibliography, and comprehensive survey of the works.) ROBERT N. MOLES AUSTIN, JOHN LANGSHAW (1911–60) J.L. Austin was a leading figure in analytic philosophy in the fifteen years following the Second World War. He developed a method of close examination of nonphilosophical language designed to illuminate the distinctions we make in ordinary life. Professional philosophers tended to obscure these important and subtle distinctions with undesirable jargon which was too far removed from everyday usage. Austin thought that a problem should therefore be tackled by an examination of the way in which its vocabulary is used in ordinary situations. Such an approach would then expose the misuses of language on which many philosophical claims were based. In ‘Other Minds’ (1946), Austin attacked the simplistic division of utterances into the ‘descriptive’ and ‘evaluative’ using his notion of a performatory, or performative utterances. His notion was that certain utterances, in the appropriate circumstances, are neither descriptive nor evaluative, but count as actions. Thus to say ‘I promise’ is to make a promise, not to talk about one. Later, he was to develop the concepts of locutionary force (what an utterance says or refers to), illocutionary force (what is intended by saying it) and perlocutionary force (what effects it has on others). See also: ORDINARY LANGUAGE PHILOSOPHY, SCHOOL OF Further reading Warnock, G.J. (1980) J.L. Austin, London: Routledge. (A general critical account of Austin’s philosophy.) J.O. URMSON AUSTRALIA, PHILOSOPHY IN Australian academic philosophy has made an international impact disproportionate to the country’s small population, though its beginnings contain little that might have suggested such influence. The first Philosophy Chair was established at the University of Melbourne in 1886 and its occupant Henry Laurie was more notable for extravagant shyness than public impact or academic achievement. Until the 1920s, the dominant philosophical outlook was idealism. After the arrival from Glasgow of the charismatic John Anderson to the Chair in Sydney in 1927, this outlook was challenged by his vigorous, distinctive, highly metaphysical and somewhat dogmatic version of realism. Anderson had little international recognition during his working life, but he had a powerful effect upon Australian cultural life and upon students who themselves achieved a significant international presence. Thinkers like David Armstrong, John Mackie and John Passmore diverged in many ways from Andersonianism but the indelible mark of the Sydney baptism remained with them even when they had accommodated to the international profile. For twenty-five years or so, there was a strong contrast and rivalry between the style of philosophy done in Sydney and that done in Melbourne. Idealist influences persisted longer in Melbourne due to the two Boyce Gibsons (father and son) who occupied the Melbourne Chair successively, but the significant contrasts really began when Melbourne came under the sway of Wittgenstein’s philosophy in the 1940s. This was due principally to the presence during the war years of G.A. Paul, one of Wittgenstein’s pupils, and later Paul’s friend Douglas Gasking, who had studied under Wittgenstein in Cambridge, and another pupil of Wittgenstein, A.C. (‘Camo’) Jackson. Where Anderson’s orientation was systematic, metaphysical and provincial, the Melbournians were piecemeal, anti-metaphysical and (relatively) cosmopolitan. As a direct force in academic philosophy,
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Page 68 Anderson’s system died with him in 1962, as did the striking contrast in style between Melbourne and Sydney philosophy. With the expansion of universities and philosophy departments, the metaphysical emphasis of Sydney and the analytical professionalism of Melbourne merged in a technique that had no particular regional significance, even when some of its concerns were distinctive. Among these was the phenomenon known as Australian Materialism, associated principally with J.J.C. Smart and David Armstrong. This continued the metaphysical orientation of so much Australian philosophy, though deploying the analytical and argumentative skills by then common to English-speaking philosophy anywhere. Much of the passion surrounding the materialism debates of the 1960s and 1970s, involving the pros and cons of ‘the scientific world view’ and its reductionist enthusiasms, dissipated into broader metaphysical and psychological interests such as the discussion of universals and laws, realism versus antirealism, the ontology of space and time, and the status and pretensions of cognitive science. There remains important work that is somewhat independent, even occasionally sceptical, of these metaphysical directions: work in epistemology, philosophical psychology, history of philosophy, and value theory. In pure value theory, there has been little home-grown work that is highly original though there have been many solid contributions by Australian philosophers to international debates, and Peter Singer is famous beyond philosophical circles for his theorizing of ‘animal liberation’ and opposition to ‘sanctity of human life’ outlooks in bioethics. The general tenor of Australian philosophy remains resolutely ‘analytical’ though there is a significant minority interest in ‘continental’ philosophy and some efforts to reach a modus vivendi between the two. Until late in the twentieth century, women played no prominent role, but women philosophers and feminist philosophy have become increasingly significant and, although many find the ‘continental’ mode congenial to their approach, there is strong representation of the more ‘analytic’ tradition. Another prominent emphasis has been environmental philosophy which incorporates the traditional interest in metaphysics but with a less reductive touch than has been characteristic of the mainstream. Further reading Brown, R. and Rollins, C.D. (1969) Contemporary Philosophy in Australia, London: Allen & Unwin. (Articles on sundry philosophical topics by Australians, with an introduction by Alan Donagan on the state of Australian philosophy and its background.) Grave, S.A. (1984) A History of Philosophy in Australia, St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. (The definitive work on this subject by a former Professor of Philosophy at the University of Western Australia, Grave’s finely researched book is comprehensive, thoughtful, and particularly valuable on the period up to 1970 or so.) C.A.J. COADY AUTHORITY The notion of authority has two main senses: expertise and the right to rule. To have authority in matters of belief (to be ‘an authority’) is to have theoretical authority ; to have authority over action (to be ‘in authority’) is to have practical authority . Both senses involve the subordination of an individual’s judgment or will to that of another person in a way that is binding, independent of the particular content of what that person says or requires. If a person’s authority is recognized then it is effective or de facto authority; if it is justified then it is de jure authority. The latter is the primary notion, for de jure authority is what de facto authorities claim and what they are believed to have. Authority thus differs from effective power, but also from justified power, which may involve no subordination of judgment. In many cases, however, practical authority is justified only if it is also effective. Political authority involves a claim to the obedience of its subjects. Attempts to justify it have always been at the core of political philosophy. These include both instrumental arguments appealing to the expertise of rulers or to their capacity to promote social cooperation, and non-instrumental arguments resting on ideas such as consent or communal feeling. Whether any of these succeed in justifying the comprehensive authority that modern states claim is greatly disputed. Further reading Green, L. (1988) The Authority of the State , Oxford: Oxford University Press. (An examination of the nature of and purported justifications for political authority.) Raz, J. (ed.) (1990) Authority , Oxford: Blackwell. (A collection of essays providing a good survey of the issues, with a helpful introduction.) LESLIE GREEN
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Page 69 AUTONOMY, ETHICAL The core idea of autonomy is that of sovereignty over oneself, self-governance or self-determination: an agent or political entity is autonomous if it is self-governing or self-determining. The ancient Greeks applied the term to city-states. In the modern period, the concept was extended to persons, in particular by Kant, who gave autonomy a central place in philosophical discourse. Kant argued for the autonomy of rational agents by arguing that moral principles, which authoritatively limit how we may act, originate in the exercise of reason. They are thus laws that we give to ourselves, and Kant thought that rational agents are bound only to self-given laws. Much contemporary discussion has focused on the somewhat different topic of personal autonomy, and autonomy continues to be an important value in contemporary liberalism and in ethical theory. It is important to distinguish different senses of autonomy because of variation in how the concept is used. Self-governance or self-determination appears to require some control over the desires and values that move one to action, and some such control is provided by the capacity to subject them to rational scrutiny. Thus, autonomy is often understood as the capacity to critically assess one’s basic desires and values, and to act on those that one endorses on reflection. In other contexts, autonomy is understood as a right, for example as the right to act on one’s own judgment about matters affecting one’s life, without interference by others. The term is also sometimes used in connection with ethics itself, to refer to the thesis that ethical claims cannot be reduced to nonethical claims. See also: FREEDOM AND LIBERTY Further reading Christman, J. (ed.) (1989) The Inner Citadel: Essays on Individual Autonomy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (A collection of contemporary essays. Good introduction to contemporary discussions of personal autonomy, with an extensive bibliography.) Dworkin, G. (1988) The Theory and Practice of Autonomy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Accessible treatment of the nature and value of autonomy.) ANDREWS REATH AVEMPACE see IBN BAJJA, ABU BAKR MUHAMMAD IBN YAHYA IBN AS-SA’IGH AVENARIUS, RICHARD (1843–96) Richard Avenarius, a German philosopher, is known as a proponent of ‘empiriocriticism’ and the principle of economy of thinking. Empiriocriticism is a modern version of empiricism which attempts to restore the concept of the natural world and ‘pure experience’ through the elimination of ‘introjection’, understood as an insertion of redundant or distorted ideas and images into the objects of our knowledge. Avenarius traced back the origin of introjection to the cultural stages dominated by magic and mythology, yet his criticism applied also to traditional philosophy and science. His position is usually classified as a version of positivism, closely resembling the empiricist doctrine of Ernst Mach. Although his influence on some members of the Vienna Circle, especially Moritz Schlick, was considerable, the impact of his contribution has been hampered by his idiosyncratic use of language, especially in his masterpiece Kritik der reinen Erfahrung (The Critique of Pure Experience) (1888–90). See also: EMPIRICISM Further reading Avenarius, R. (1888–90) Kritik der reinen Erfahrung (The Critique of Pure Experience), Leipzig: O.R. Reisland; 2nd and 3rd edn, ed. J. Petzoldt; repr. Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International, 1980, 2 vols. (Avenarius’ masterpiece, almost 800 pages long, very difficult to read. Volume 1 deals with the independent vital series, while volume 2 treats dependent vital series.) Bush, U.T. (1905) Avenarius and the Standpoint of Pure Experience, New York: Science Press. (Based on a Ph.D. thesis at Columbia University, New York; one of very few English publications on Avenarius’ work.) AUGUSTIN RISKA AVERROES see IBN RUSHD, ABU’L WALID MUHAMMAD AVERROISM ‘Averroism’, ‘radical Aristotelianism’ and ‘heterodox Aristotelianism’ are nineteenth- and twentiethcentury labels for a late thirteenth-century movement among Parisian philosophers whose views were not easily reconcilable with Christian doctrine. The three most important points of difference were the individual immortality of human intellectual souls, the attainability of happiness in this life and the eternity of the world. An ‘Averroist’ or ‘Radical Aristotelian’ would hold that philosophy leads
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Page 70 to the conclusions that there is only one intellect shared by all humans, that happiness is attainable in earthly life and that the world has no temporal beginning or end. Averroists have generally been credited with a ‘theory of double truth’, according to which there is an irreconcilable clash between truths of faith and truths arrived at by means of reason. Averroism has often been assigned the role of a dangerous line of thought, against which Thomas Aquinas opposed his synthesis of faith and reason. The term ‘Averroism’ is also used more broadly to characterize Western thought from the thirteenth through sixteenth centuries which was influenced by Averroes, and/or some philosophers’ selfproclaimed allegiance to Averroes. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM, MEDIEVAL; AVERROISM, JEWISH Further reading Libera, A. de (1991) Averroès et l’Averroïsme. Que sais-je? (Averroes and Averroism: Survey), Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. (Good overview of the subject.) STEN EBBESEN AVERROISM, JEWISH Averroism was enthusiastically taken up by many Jewish philosophers and adapted in a number of ways that extended its scope beyond mere repetition of Averroes’ own arguments. Jewish Averroists were particularly drawn by the potential they found in Averroism for resolving the delicate questions they faced about the relationship between philosophy and religion. The idea that both philosophy and religion are true even when they appear to produce different answers to the same question. Fascinated by the Averroistic idea that religious claims can be interpreted as popular expressions of philosophical truths, the Jewish Averroists followed up with vigour the programme of showing how to translate traditional religious statements into philosophical statements. Many Jewish philosophers found themselves in a difficulty which they took great pains to resolve, namely, how to reconcile what they believed through faith with what they believed through reason. Averroism seems to be the solution to this problem, since it embodies a theory that explains how faith and reason are connected and makes it possible to be both religious and rational at the same time. It is not surprising, then, that many Jewish thinkers were attracted to this philosophical doctrine. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM, MEDIEVAL; AVERROISM Further reading Bland, K. (1981) The Epistle on the Possibility of Conjunction with the Active Intellect by Ibn Rushd with the Commentary of Moses Narboni, New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America. (An edition and translation of an important commentary.) Leaman, O. (1988) Averroes and His Philosophy , Oxford: Clarendon Press. (A general survey of Averroes and Averroism.) OLIVER LEAMAN AVICEBROL/AVICEBRON see IBN GABIROL, SOLOMON AVICENNA see IBN SINA, ABU ‘ALI ALHUSAYN AWAKENING OF FAITH IN MAHĀYĀNA The Awakening of Faith in Mahāyāna ( Dasheng qixinlun ) is one of the most influential philosophical texts in East Asian Buddhism. It is most important for developing the Indian Buddhist doctrine of an inherent potentiality for Buddhahood ( tathāgatagarbha) into a monistic ontology based on the mind as the ultimate ground of all experience. Its most significant contribution to East Asian Buddhist thought is its formulation of the idea of original enlightenment ( benjue , or in Japanese, hongaku). See also: BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY IN INDIA Further reading Hakeda Yoshito (1967) The Awakening of Faith, New York: Columbia University Press. (Although not always satisfactory, this book offers the best translation of the Awakening of Faith into English.) PETER N. GREGORY AWARENESS IN INDIAN THOUGHT Classical Indian schools all stake out positions on awareness, its intrinsic nature, its place in the causal processes crucial to human accomplishment, its relations to objects in the world, and the possibilities, according to certain religious or spiritual theories, of mystical transformation. In several prominent instances, stances taken on awareness may be said to constitute the most salient differentiation among schools, so central to a school’s overall outlook is its view on the topic. Classical epistemological conceptions, for example, are in large part shaped by positions on awareness, and the spiritual
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Page 71 which Indian thought is best known present theories of awareness to guide meditation and mystical practice. Yogic, Vedāntic and Buddhist mysticism all came to be supported by views of the true nature of awareness or its native state. In the professionalized debates that fill the immense proliferation of philosophical texts in the classical period (from approximately AD 100 to the eighteenth century and later), key issues are whether awarenesses have forms of their own or assume content only with reference to objects, and the precise nature of the relation, or relations, of awarenesses to objects in the world, including the role of awareness in human activity. Some important positions are shared across schools, and apart from the anti-theoretic polemics of Mādhyamaka Buddhists and others, a phenomenalist and idealist stance, a representationalism, and a direct or causal realism are the major theories concerning the content of awarenesses. The world-oriented philosophies of Logic (Nyāya) and Exegesis (Mīmāmsā) engage spiritual or mystical views (principally, Buddhist Yogācāra and Advaita Vedānta) on the issue of self-awareness or awareness of awareness. The exchange between upholders of Nyāya and Advaita Vedānta (Vedāntic Monism) on this score is, in particular, an admirable philosophical achievement. See also: KNOWLEDGE, INDIAN VIEWS OF; SELF, INDIAN THEORIES OF Further reading Matilal, B.K. (1986) Perception: An Essay on Classical Indian Theories of Knowledge , Oxford: Oxford University Press. (A modern classic by a premier scholar and philosopher intent on defending Nyāya.) Phillips, S.H. (1995) Classical Indian Metaphysics: Refutations of Realism and the Emergence of ‘New Logic’, La Salle, IL: Open Court. (Contains elaboration of the issues concerning self-awareness.) STEPHEN H. PHILLIPS AXIOLOGY Axiology is the branch of practical philosophy which studies the nature of value. Axiologists study value in general rather than moral values in particular and frequently emphasize the plurality and heterogeneity of values while at the same time adopting different forms of realism about values. Historically, three groups of philosophers can be described as axiologists: the original Austrian and German schools of value phenomenologists; American theorists of value who offered an account of value which reduces it to human interests; and an English school, influenced by Austro-German phenomenology, which included such diverse figures as G.E. Moore, Hastings Rashdall and W.D. Ross. Recent philosophy has seen a resurgence of interest in value realism in the broadly axiological tradition. See also: VALUE, ONTOLOGICAL STATUS OF Further reading Moore, G.E. (1903) Principia Ethica, ed. T. Baldwin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, revised edn, 1993. (One of the classic texts of modern moral philosophy and the origin of the modern British tradition in value theory. This revised edition has a valuable introduction by Thomas Baldwin and includes a reprint of ‘The Conception of Intrinsic Value’.) Smith, B. (1994) Austrian Philosophy: The Legacy of Franz Brentano, Chicago, IL: Open Court. (Historical study of Austrian philosophy which offers a comprehensive background account to the Austrian theory of value, especially Brentano’s work.) BARRY SMITH ALAN THOMAS AXIOM OF CHOICE The axiom of choice is a mathematical postulate about sets: for each family of non-empty sets, there exists a function selecting one member from each set in the family. If those sets have no member in common, it postulates that there is a set having exactly one element in common with each set in the family. First formulated in 1904, the axiom of choice was highly controversial among mathematicians and philosophers, because it epitomized ‘non-constructive’ mathematics. Nevertheless, as time passed, it had an increasingly broad range of consequences in many branches of mathematics. Further reading Moore, G.H. (1982) Zermelo’s Axiom of Choice: Its Origins, Development, and Influence, New York: Springer. (A detailed historical treatment of the axiom from its prehistory to the independence proofs. An appendix gives a translation of the most important document by the French opponents of the axiom.) GREGORY H. MOORE
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Page 72 AYER, ALFRED JULES (1910–89) A.J. Ayer made his name as a philosopher with the publication of Language, Truth and Logic in 1936, a book which established him as the leading English representative of logical positivism, a doctrine put forward by a group of philosophers known as members of the Vienna Circle. The major thesis of logical positivism defended by Ayer was that all literally meaningful propositions were either analytic (true or false in virtue of the meaning of the proposition alone) or verifiable by experience. This, the verificationist theory of meaning, was used by Ayer to deny the literal significance of any metaphysical propositions, including those that affirmed or denied the existence of God. Statements about physical objects were said to be translatable into sentences about our sensory experiences (the doctrine known as phenomenalism). Ayer further claimed that the propositions of logic and mathematics were analytic truths and that there was no natural necessity, necessity being a purely logical notion. Finally the assertion of an ethical proposition, such as ‘Stealing is wrong’, was analysed as an expression of emotion or attitude to an action, in this case the expression of a negative attitude to the act of stealing. During the rest of his philosophical career Ayer remained faithful to most of these theses, but came to reject his early phenomenalism in favour of a sophisticated realism about physical objects. This still gives priority to our experiences, now called percepts, but the existence of physical objects is postulated to explain the coherence and consistency of our percepts. Ayer continued to deny that there were any natural necessities, analysing causation as consisting in law-like regularities. He used this analysis to defend a compatibilist position about free action, claiming that a free action is to be contrasted with one done under constraint or compulsion. Causation involves mere regularity, and so neither constrains nor compels. See also: Logical positivism Further reading Ayer, A.J. (1936) Language, Truth and Logic, London: Gollancz; 2nd edn, 1946. (The first classic statement of Ayer’s positivist philosophy. The second edition contains an important new introduction amending the verification principle.) Foster, J. (1985) A.J. Ayer, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (An excellent book-length study of Ayer’s philosophy, concentrating on verificationism and knowledge. Fairly rigorous.) GRAHAM MACDONALD
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Page 73 B BACHELARD, GASTON (1884–1962) One indication of the originality of Bachelard’s work is that he was famous for his writings both in the philosophy of science and on the poetic imagination. His work demonstrates his belief that the life of the masculine, work-day consciousness (animus), striving towards scientific objectivity through reasoning and the rectification of concepts, must be complemented by the life of a nocturnal, feminine consciousness (anima), seeking an expanded poetic subjectivity, as, in reverie, it creates the imaginary. In common with other scientist-philosophers writing in the first half of the twentieth century, Bachelard reflected on the upheavals wrought by the introduction of relativity theory and quantum mechanics. The views at which he arrived were, however, unlike those of his contemporaries; he argued that the new science required a new, non-Cartesian epistemology, one which accommodated discontinuities (epistemological breaks) in the development of science. It was only after he had established himself as one of France’s leading philosophers of science, by succeeding Abel Rey in the chair of history and philosophy of science at the Sorbonne, that Bachelard began to publish works on the poetic imagination. Here his trenchantly anti-theoretical stance was provocative. He rejected the role of literary critic and criticized literary criticism, focusing instead on reading images and on the creative imagination. See also: ART CRITICISM;SCIENCE, PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Bachelard, G. (1938) La formation de l’esprit scientifique: contribution à une psychanalyse de la connaissance objective (The Formation of the Scientific Spirit: A Contribution to a Psychoanalysis of Objective Knowledge), Paris: Vrin. (A pivotal work, dealing with the boundaries between subjective and objective in the construction of scientific knowledge. Here Bachelard introduces and develops the concept of an epistemological obstacle.) McAllester, M. (ed.) (1989) The Philosophy and Poetics of Gaston Bachelard , Washington, DC: Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology and University Press of America. (Useful collections of papers covering Bachelard’s epistemology, his poetics and the relation between them.) MARY TILES BACON, FRANCIS (1561–1626) Along with Descartes, the English politician and philosopher Francis Bacon was the most original and most profound of the intellectual reformers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He had little respect for the work of his predecessors, which he saw as having been vitiated by a misplaced reverence for authority, and a consequent neglect of experience. Bacon’s dream was one of power over nature, based on experiment, embodied in appropriate institutions and used for the amelioration of human life; this could be achieved only if the rational speculations of philosophers were united with the craft-skills employed in the practical arts. The route to success lay in a new method, one based not on deductive logic or mathematics, but on eliminative induction. This method would draw on data extracted from extensive and elaborately constructed natural histories. Unlike the old induction by simple enumeration of the logic textbooks, it would be able to make use of negative as well as positive instances, allowing conclusions to be established with certainty, and thus enabling a firm and lasting structure of knowledge to be built. Bacon never completed his project, and even the account of the new method in the Novum Organum (1620) remained unfinished. His writings nevertheless had an immense influence on later seventeenthcentury thinkers, above all in stimulating the belief that natural philosophy ought to be founded on a systematic programme of experiment. Perhaps his most enduring legacy, however, has been the modern concept of technology – the union of rational theory and empirical practice – and its application to human welfare. See also: INDUCTION, EPISTEMIC ISSUES IN Further reading Bacon, F. (1620) Novum Organum; repr. ed. T. Fowler as Bacon’s Novum Organum, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888; trans. P. Urbach and J. Gibson, La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1994.
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Page 74 (Bacon’s most important philosophical work, containing a detailed though still important account of his work. Fowler reproduces the original Latin text with very useful notes; Urbach and Gibson offer a good modern translation.) Pentonen, M. (ed.) (1996) The Cambridge Companion to Bacon, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (A collection of up-to-date surveys, with a full bibliography.) J.R. MILTON BACON, ROGER ( c .1214–92/4) Associated with both the University of Paris and Oxford University, the English Franciscan Roger Bacon was one of the first in the Latin West to lecture and comment on Aristotle’s writings on subjects other than logic. After he came to know Robert Grosseteste’s work in natural philosophy, he became the advocate of a curricular reform that emphasized scientific experiment and the study of languages. His views were often unpopular, and he constantly belittled all who disagreed with him. Bacon’s work in logic and semantic theory had some influence during his lifetime and immediately after his death. His work in science, however, had little impact. His renown in the history of science is due in part to his being viewed as a precursor of the Oxford Calculators, who in turn anticipated certain important developments in seventeenth-century science. See also: LANGUAGE, MEDIEVAL THEORIES OF; NATURAL PHILOSOPHY, MEDIEVAL Further reading Bacon, R. (1267) Opus maius, ed. J.H. Bridges, The ‘Opus maius’ of Roger Bacon, Oxford, 1879–90, 3 vols; repr. 1964; Part III, De signis (On Signs), ed. K.M. Fredborg, L. Nielsen and J. Pinborg, ‘An Unedited Part of Roger Bacon’s “ Opus Maius: De Signis ” ’, Traditio 34: 75–136, 1978. (Bacon’s encyclopedia of the sciences and proposal for educational reform.) Pinborg, J. (1981) ‘Roger Bacon on Signs: A Newly Recovered Part of the Opus Maius’, Miscellanea Mediaevalis 13: 403–12. (Preliminary investigation into Bacon’s importance as a philosopher of language.) GEORGETTE SINKLER AL-BAGHDADI, ABU ’L-BARAKAT ( fl. c .1200–50) A Jewish-born convert to Islam, Abu ‘l-Barakat al-Baghdadi was a physician and teacher of medicine in Baghdad. A maverick philosopher, respected medical authority, and seemingly somewhat tempestuous individual, he produced one voluminous work (the Kitab al-mu‘tabar ) in which the philosophical views current in his day – principally associated with the name of Ibn Sina – were subjected to a penetrating analysis, and many interesting alternatives suggested. His most provocative ideas concern selfawareness, the physics of motion and the idea of time. See also: IBN SINA Further reading Pines, S. (1979) Studies in Abu’l-Barakat al-Baghdadi: Physics and Metaphysics , The Collected Works of Shlomo Pines, vol. 1, Jerusalem and Leiden: Magnes & Brill. (A collection of Pines’ most important studies on al-Baghdadi, some not published elsewhere.) Y. TZVI LANGERMANN BAKHTIN, MIKHAIL MIKHAILOVICH (1895–1975) Bakhtin is generally regarded as the most influential twentieth-century Russian literary theorist. His writings on literature, language, ethics, authorship, carnival, time and the theory of culture have shaped thinking in criticism and the social sciences. His name is identified with the concept of dialogue, which he applied to language and numerous other aspects of culture and the psyche. Bakhtin viewed literary genres as implicit worldviews, concrete renditions of a sense of experience. Strongly objecting to the idea that novelists simply weave narratives around received philosophical ideas, he argued that very often significant discoveries are made first by writers and are then ‘transcribed’, often with considerable loss, into abstract philosophy. For example, he regarded the novelists of the eighteenth century as explorers of a modern concept of historicity long before philosophers took up the topic. He argued that considerable wisdom could be achieved by probing the form, as well as the explicit content, of literary works. In literature as in life, however, much wisdom is never fully formalizable, although we may approximate some of it and gesture towards more. Such partial recuperation was, in Bakhtin’s view, the principal task of literary criticism. Bakhtin’s favourite genre was the realist novel. In his view, novels contain the richest sense of language, psychology, temporality and ethics in Western thought. He revolutionized the study of novels by arguing that traditional
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Page 75 poetics, which employed categories suitable to poetry and to drama, had been unable to appreciate just what is novelistic and especially valuable about novels. Seeking the essence of ‘prosaic intelligence’, he therefore formulated an alternative to poetics, which critics have called ‘prosaics’. This term also designates an important part of his worldview in approaching many other topics, especially language. Bakhtin stressed the prosaic, ordinary, unsystematic, events of the world as primary. In culture, order can never be presumed, but is always a ‘task’, the result of work that is never completed and always upset by everyday contingent events. Better than any other form of thought, great prose, especially realistic novels, captures this prosaic sense of life. Believing in contingency and human freedom, Bakhtin described individual people, and cultural entities generally, as ‘unfinalizable’. Human beings always manifest ‘surprisingness’ and can never be reduced to a fully comprehensible system. Bakhtin therefore opposed all deterministic philosophies and all cultural theories that understate the messiness of things and the openness of time. He rigorously opposed Marxism and semiotics, although, strangely enough, in the West his work has been appropriated by both schools. Further reading Bakhtin, M. (1929) Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo ; expanded 2nd edn 1963; ed. and trans. C. Emerson, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics , Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. (This is a translation of the expanded 1963 edition. Perhaps his single most important work, it discusses genres, ethics, the novel and the theory of language with Dostoevskii as constant illustration.) Morson, G.S. and Emerson, C. (1990) Rethinking Bakhtin: Extensions and Challenges, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. (An anthology containing a range of views, including critiques; the introduction offers a detailed summary of Towards a Philosophy of the Act .) GARY SAUL MORSON BAKUNIN, MIKHAIL ALEKSANDROVICH (1814–76) Bakunin was the leading proponent in the second half of the nineteenth century of a variety of anarchism rooted in a Romantic cult of primitive spontaneity, and one of the principal ideologists of Russian populism. But along with his public defence of the principle of ‘absolute liberty’, he attempted to set up networks of secret societies which were to direct the revolution and subsequently assume dictatorial powers. The contradiction between these two aspects of his activities has puzzled historians, many of whom have sought the answer in his personality, in which the urge to dominate was as strong as the urge to rebel. See also: ANARCHISM Further reading Bakunin, M. (1973) Selected Writings, ed. and introduced by A. Lehning, trans. S. Cox and O. Stevens, New York: Grove Press. (Selections from letters and works from 1836–73, including ‘Reaction in Germany’.) Carr, E.H. (1975) Michael Bakunin , London: Macmillan, 2nd edn. (Still the best biography of Bakunin.) AILEEN KELLY BÁÑEZEZ, DOMINGO (1528–1604) Domingo Báñez, once spiritual advisor to St Teresa of Avila, was a prominent Spanish theologian. In his commentaries on the Summa theologiae of Thomas Aquinas, he challenged an essentialist reading of Aquinas, and insisted that esse (being) was an act. He is best known for his opposition to Molina’s attempt to reconcile human free choice with divine foreknowledge, providence and grace. He also wrote on logic, and commented on Aristotle’s On Generation and Corruption . See also: AQUINAS, T.; MOLINA, L. DE Further reading Báñez, D. (1584) The Primacy of Existence in Thomas Aquinas , trans. B.S. Llamzon, Chicago, IL: Henry Regnery Company, 1966. (Translation of Báñez’s commentary on Summa theologiae Ia.3.4.) Translated from the Spanish by E.J. Ashworth MAURICIO BEUCHOT BAR HAYYA, ABRAHAM ( c .1016–c .1136) Abraham bar Hayya (also called bar Hiyya) sought to reconcile Jewish tradition with contemporary philosophical thought, in his case that received from Arabic sources. Little is known of his life; he is known to have lived in Barcelona, but there is evidence that he also visited France, probably Provence. Generally considered to be a Neoplatonist whose philosophy is enriched with Aristotelian accretions, he has also been called the first Jewish
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Page 76 Aristotelian. He pioneered the writing of philosophy in Hebrew, and his work influenced later Jewish philosophers and the Kabbalah. Further reading Bar Hayya, Abraham (c.1016–c.1136) Hegyon ha-Nefesh ha-Azuvah (The Meditation of the Sad Soul), ed. G. Wigoder, Jersualem: Mosad Bialik, 1971; trans. G. Wigoder, The Meditation of the Sad Soul , London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969. (Very important text detailing bar Hayya’s main philosophical principles.) GEOFFREY WIGODER BAR HIYYA, ABRAHAM see BAR HAYYA, ABRAHAM BARTH, KARL (1886–1968) Karl Barth was the most prominent Protestant theologian of a generation shaken by the traumatic experience of the First World War and concerned with giving Christian theology a new grounding. He took a creative part in the struggle of the German Church against National Socialism, and, after the Second World War, exerted a worldwide influence that reached beyond the bounds of Protestantism. Although influenced at first by Christian socialism, Barth came to repudiate such ‘hyphenated’ versions of Christianity, which, he felt, underemphasize or ignore the otherness of God. There is an infinite qualitative distinction between the divine and the human; the Enlightenment attempt to historicize and secularize revelation was profoundly mistaken. This ‘dialectical theology’ attracted a number of leading theologians in the 1920s. Later, however, Barth felt compelled to close the gap with the divine, and developed a ‘theology of the Word’ to this end. Central to this approach is the concept of the knowledge conferred by faith, which makes theological understanding and rationality possible. It was on the basis of this that Barth constructed his massive Die Kirchliche Dogmatik ( Church Dogmatics) (1932–70). In this, he emphasizes the self-expounding nature of Scripture (by contrast with nineteenth-century biblical scholarship, which stressed the need for a historical approach to the text) and the importance of Christ in the understanding of theology and human nature. He was a determined opponent of natural theology, and was critical of the idea that philosophy could complement theology. Further reading Barth, K. (1932–70) Die Kirchliche Dogmatik 1 – 4, with index vol., Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, and Zurich: Evangelischer Verlag; trans. G.W. Bromiley et al ., ed. G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance, Church Dogmatics, Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1956–77. (Barth’s greatest, and longest, work: a sadly unfinished interpretation of all the major Christian doctrines.) Hunsinger, G. (1991) How to Read Karl Barth: The Shape of his Theology , Oxford: Oxford University Press. (An introduction to reading the Church Dogmatics, and a study of Barth’s treatment of truth and freedom.) JEAN-LOUP SEBAN BARTHES, ROLAND (1915–80) In the field of contemporary literary studies, the French essayist and cultural critic Roland Barthes cannot be easily classified. His early work on language and culture was strongly influenced by the intellectual currents of existentialism and Marxism that were dominant in French intellectual life in the mid-twentieth century. Gradually his work turned more to semiology (a general theory of signs), which had a close association with the structuralist tradition in literary criticism. In his later work, Barthes wrote more as a post-structuralist than as a structuralist in an attempt to define the nature and authority of a text. Throughout his writings, Barthes rejected the ‘naturalist’ view of language, which takes the sign as a representation of reality. He maintained that language is a dynamic activity that dramatically affects literary and cultural practices. See also: POSTSTRUCTURALISM Further reading Barthes, R. (1975) Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes , trans. R. Howard, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes , New York: Hill & Wang, 1977. JAMES RISSER BARTOLUS OF SASSOFERRATO (OR SAXOFERRATO) (1313/14–57) The medieval Italian legal scholar Bartolus gave his name to the Bartolist school of civil lawyers or ‘commentators’, which dominated university law teaching from the fourteenth century. Challenged by the humanists in the sixteenth century, they remained influential in practice. Bartolus excelled among them in the ability to devise solutions to practical problems and provide clear and workable doctrines applying
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Page 77 the civil law texts to legal and political problems. He left behind a large body of writing, although both manuscripts and prints contain false attributions. See also: LAW, PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Segoloni, D. (ed.) (1962) Bartolo da Sassoferrato. Studi e documenti per il VI centenario, Milan: Giuffrè. (An invaluable multilingual collection of articles on the work and influence of Bartolus.) WILLIAM M. GORDON BASSO, SEBASTIANO see ARISTOTELIANISM IN THE 17TH CENTURY BATAILLE, GEORGES (1897–1962) Georges Bataille was born in Billom, France, raised in Reims, and spent much of his adult life in Paris. Never formally trained as a philosopher, he worked from 1922 to 1942 as a librarian at the Bibliothèque Nationale. In addition to his philosophical works, Bataille also wrote on the history of art as well as a number of critical works and novels. Owing to his position outside academic philosophy, Bataille was able to treat diverse topics in ways which might have been unacceptable otherwise. His work addresses the importance of sacrifice, eroticism and death, as well as the kinds of ‘expenditure’ evidenced by what he called the general economy . He draws on diverse sources (Hegel, Nietzsche, Marcel Mauss, anthropological research, and the history of religion, among others) and treats a wide range of topics: the role of art in human life, the practice of sacrifice in ancient and modern cultures, the role of death in our understanding of subjectivity, and the limits of knowledge. See also: STRUCTURALISM Further reading Bataille, G. (1949) La Part maudite , vol. 1, La Consommation, Paris: Éditions de Minuit; trans. R. Hurley, The Accursed Share , vol. 1, New York: Zone Books, 1991. (Bataille’s definitive text on general economy. The most important work in the later part of La Somme athéologique. Volume 1 treats historical sources and the importance of sacrifice.) Richman, M. (1982) Beyond the Gift: Reading Georges Bataille, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. (A very good introduction to Bataille focusing on the importance of expenditure and general economy. Probably the clearest book on Bataille in English.) JONATHAN MASKIT BAUDRILLARD, JEAN (1929–) Jean Baudrillard taught for most of his career at the Nanterre campus of the University of Paris in the department of sociology. He began writing as a neo-Marxist in the tradition of Henri Lefebvre and Herbert Marcuse but very quickly developed his distinctive style of social and cultural criticism. He may be understood generally as a post-structuralist who focused on the importance of language in society and invented novel concepts and terms to understand the most advanced features of electronic communications. He has been hailed as the guru of postmodernity and berated as faddish trend follower. He has written polemical pieces like Oublier Foucault (1977) ( Forget Foucault, 1987) and controversial ones such as La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991b) ( The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, 1995). See also: POSTMODERNISM; POST-STRUCTURALISM Further reading Baudrillard, J. (1977) Oublier Foucault, Paris: Éditions Galilée; trans. S. Lotringer, Forget Foucault, New York: Semiotext(e), 1987. Kellner, D. (1989) Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond , Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. (A comprehensive, critical review of Baudrillard’s ideas in relation to social theory.) MARK POSTER BAUER, BRUNO (1809–82) The career of the German Hegelian theologian Bruno Bauer is marked by his sudden turn from a reasoned defender of Christianity into one of its most extreme critics. His radical interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy, which he first used to defend orthodox biblical hermeneutics, ultimately led him to become, as one of his admirers said, the ‘Robespierre of theology’. As the leader of the so-called ‘Young Hegelian’ school, Bauer was one of Hegel’s most gifted students. However, his condemnation of theology in general and his thesis that the New Testament was merely the fictional product of an unknown author contributed to the general distrust of Hegelianism among religious thinkers. Although his many
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Page 78 student and friend, and is still evident in such contemporaries as Jürgen Habermas. See also: RELIGION AND EPISTEMOLOGY Further reading Bauer, B. (1841) Die Posaune des jüngsten Gerichts über Hegel den Atheisten und Antichristen: Ein Ultimatum, Leipzig: Otto Wiegand; repr. Aalen: Scientia, 1969; trans. L.S. Stepelevich, The Trumpet of the Last Judgement Against Hegel the Atheist and Antichrist: An Ultimatum, Lewiston, MA: Edward Mellen Press, 1989. (This analysis of Hegel’s views on religion and politics expressed the basic premises of Young Hegelianism. The translator’s introduction includes the most extensive biography of Bauer yet written.) LAWRENCE S. STEPELEVICH BAUMGARDT, DAVID (1890–1963) Born in Germany, Baumgardt emigrated first to England and then to the United States following the rise of Hitler. His early works dealt with the problem of modalities in the philosophies of Kant, Husserl and Meinong and with German philosophical romanticism, especially in the mystic Franz von Baader. Although he never engaged in systematic inquiry into Judaism or Jewish philosophy, he was fascinated by the Jewish religious legacy, and his philosophical reflections on Jewish issues were integral to his philosophical work. A secular Jew, he associated himself with the liberal trends within Judaism. The Jewish philosophers he most highly prized were Maimonides, Spinoza and Mendelssohn. The chief goal of his Jewish studies was to promote those beliefs in Judaism that are of ethical significance and to draw out the import of the moral demands found scattered throughout the ancient Jewish Scriptures. Baumgardt’s concern with ethics grew with his increasingly critical stance towards traditional religion. In that vein, he laid great stress on the distinction between knowledge and belief and on that between Jewish rituals and their underlying meaning. Further reading Levy, Z. (1989) David Baumgardt and Ethical Hedonism, Hoboken, NJ: Ktav Publishing House. (An analysis of Baumgardt’s Jewish writings and of his ethical theory and a critical inquiry into ethical hedonism.) ZE’EV LEVY BAUMGARTEN, ALEXANDER GOTTLIEB (1714–62) The German philosopher Baumgarten is known primarily for his introduction of the word ‘aesthetics’ to describe the affects of art and nature, which in the course of the seventeenth century replaced the older theory of beauty. Baumgarten derived the term from the Greek aisthanomai, which he equated with the Latin sentio . He understood it to designate the outer, external or bodily sense, as opposed to the inner sense of consciousness. Thus aesthetics is the realm of the sensate, of sense perception and sensible objects. Baumgarten understood his usage to be consistent with classical sources, but he was aware also that he was extending logic and science into a new realm. Baumgarten’s importance lay in adapting the rationalism of Leibniz for both the study of art and what came to be known after Kant as the aesthetic. See also: SUBLIME, THE Further reading Baumgarten, A.G. (1735) Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus , trans. K. Aschenbrenner and W.B. Holther as Reflections on Poetry , Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1954. (English translation of Baumgarten’s dissertation with a useful introduction.) DABNEY TOWNSEND BAYESIANISM see CONFIRMATION THEORY; INDUCTIVE INFERENCE; PROBABILITY, INTERPRETATIONS OF; PROBABILITY THEORY AND EPISTEMOLOGY; RAMSEY, FRANK PLUMPTON; STATISTICS BAYLE, PIERRE (1647–1706) Bayle was one of the most profound sceptical thinkers of all time. He was also a champion of religious toleration, and an important moral philosopher. The fundamental aim of his scepticism was to curb the pretensions of reason in order to make room for faith. Human reason, he believed, suffers from two fundamental weaknesses: it has a limited capacity to motivate our actions, and it is more a negative than a positive faculty, better at uncovering the defects of various philosophical positions than at justifying any one of them. This conception of reason led Bayle to see, with an uncommon clarity, that the nature of the sceptic’s arguments must be to proceed by internal demolition,
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Page 79 showing how claims to knowledge undermine themselves in their own terms. Bayle’s moral thought is to be found essentially in his critique of attempts (such as that of Malebranche) to show how God, all-powerful and good, could have created a world in which there is evil. Such theodicies, he argued, rely on unacceptable models of moral rationality. Bayle’s arguments reveal a view of moral reasoning that is of considerable interest in its own right. Like Malebranche (and contrary to Leibniz, who attacked Bayle’s critique of theodicy), he believed that there are duties superior to that of bringing about the most good overall. But unlike Malebranche, Bayle saw these duties as lying not in what the rational agent owes himself but in what he owes to the inviolable individuality of others. This outlook had its psychological roots, no doubt, in Bayle’s own experience as a Huguenot victim of religious persecution. Further reading Bayle, P. (1696) Dictionnaire historique et critique; selective trans. R. Popkin and C. Brush, Historical and Critical Dictionnary , Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965. (Bayle’s most important philosophical work.) Labrousse, E. (1983) Bayle, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (The best short introduction by the leading contemporary Bayle scholar; includes bibliography.) CHARLES LARMORE BEATTIE, JAMES (1735–1803) James Beattie was famed as a moralist and poet in the late eighteenth century, and helped to popularize Scottish common-sense philosophy. At Marischal College, Aberdeen, Beattie cultivated a lecturing style which differed significantly from that of his Aberdonian predecessors. Because he believed that the form of abstract analysis characteristic of the science of the mind in his day often led students into the morass of Humean scepticism, Beattie endeavoured to inculcate sound moral and religious principles through the study of ancient and modern literature. Consequently his version of commonsense philosophy diverged from that developed by Thomas Reid. Beattie was more of a practical moralist than an anatomist of the mind, and his treatment of common-sense epistemology lacked the philosophical range and rigour of Reid’s. Further reading King, E.H. (1977) James Beattie , Boston: Twayne. (An introduction to Beattie’s career as a man of letters.) PAUL WOOD BEAUTY On the subject of beauty, theorists generally agree only on rudimentary points about the term: that it commends on aesthetic grounds, has absolute and comparative forms, and so forth. Beyond this, dispute prevails. Realists hold that judgments of beauty ascribe to their subjects either a nonrelational property inherent in things or a capacity of things to affect respondents in a way that preserves objectivity. In both cases, acute problems arise in defining the property and in explaining how it can be known. Classical Platonism holds that beauty exists as an ideal supersensible Form, while eighteenthcentury theorists view it as a quasisensory property. Kant’s transcendental philosophy anchors the experience of beauty to the basic requirements of cognition, conferring on it ‘subjective universality and necessity’. Sceptics complain that the alleged property is merely a reflection of aesthetic pleasure and hence lacks objective standing. Partly due to its preoccupation with weightier matters, the philosophic tradition has never developed any theory of beauty as fully and deeply as it has, say, theories in the domain of morality. Comparative neglect of the subject has been encouraged by the generally subjectivistic and relativistic bent of the social sciences and humanities, as well as by avant-gardism in the arts. However, several recent and ambitious studies have given new impetus to theorizing about beauty. See also: AESTHETIC CONCEPTS; ARTISTIC TASTE Further reading Hutcheson, F. (1725) An Inquiry concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony, Design, ed., with intro. and notes by P. Kivy, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1993. (The fullest formulation of the eighteenth-century sense of beauty theory.) Plato ( c .380s BC) Symposium , trans. M. Joyce, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed.E. Hamilton and H. Cairns, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963, 209d–212a. (The classic account of the ascent of the soul to the vision of absolute beauty.) JOHN H. BROWN
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Page 80 BEAUVOIR, SIMONE DE (1908–86) Simone de Beauvoir, a French novelist and philosopher belonging to the existentialist-phenomenological tradition, elaborated an anthropology and ethics inspired by Kierkegaard, Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre in Pyrrhus et Cinéas (1944) and Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté (The Ethics of Ambiguity) (1947). In her comprehensive study of the situation of women, Le deuxième sexe (The Second Sex) (1949), this anthropology and ethics was developed and combined with a philosophy of history inspired by Hegel and Marx. The most prominent feature of Beauvoir’s philosophy is its ethical orientation, together with an analysis of the subordination of women. Her concept of woman as the Other is central to twentiethcentury feminist theory. Further reading Vintges, K. (1996) Philosophy as Passion: The Thinking of Simone de Beauvoir , Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. (An easily comprehensible summary of Beauvoir’s philosophy and its relation to her life. Argues that Beauvoir’s ethics is an ‘art of living’, which she formulated through her autobiography and fiction.) EVA LUNDGREN-GOTHLIN BECK, JACOB SIGISMUND (1761–1840) Born in West Prussia and educated in Königsberg, Beck played a brief but important role in the development of post-Kantian philosophy. A former student of Kant, he published at his teacher’s instigation three volumes of ‘Explanatory Abstracts’ of Kant’s major writings. In the third volume Beck presented what he regarded as the ‘Only Possible Standpoint’ from which Critical Philosophy had to be judged if misunderstandings of Kant’s work were to be avoided. His ‘Doctrine of the Standpoint’ involved a ‘reversal’ of the method of the Critique of Pure Reason and the elimination of the ‘thing-in-itself’ from Kant’s theoretical philosophy. See also: GERMAN IDEALISM Further reading Beck, J.S. (1793–6) Erläuternder Auszug aus den critischen Schriften des Herrn Prof. Kant, auf Anrathen desselben (Explanatory Abstracts of Prof. Kant’s Critical Writings, at the Latter’s Instigation), Riga: Hartknoch, 3 vols; partly trans. in G. di Giovanni and H.S. Harris (eds) Between Kant and Hegel , Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1985. (This is Beck’s principal text. Volume 3 is subtitled Einzigmöglicher Standpunct, aus welchem die critische Philosophie beurtheilt werden muß (Only Possible Standpoint from which Critical Philosophy Must Be Judged).) ECKART FÖRSTER BEHAVIOURISM, ANALYTIC Analytical behaviourism is the doctrine that talk about mental phenomena is really talk about behaviour, or tendencies to behave. For an analytical behaviourist, to say that Janet desires ice cream is to say that, all things being equal, she tends to seek it out. To say that Brad is now feeling jealous is to say no more than that he is now behaving in a way characteristic of jealousy, or perhaps that he would do so under appropriate provocation. Analytical behaviourism differs from methodological behaviourism in insisting that our ordinary use of mental language really is, in some sense, already about behaviour. The methodological version claims either that in doing psychology we should restrict ourselves to notions which can be defined behaviourally, or, sometimes, that our general psychological language, even if not already definable in this way, should be reformed in this general direction. The most telling objection to this account of the mind is that it is inconsistent with the requirement that mental states are causes of behaviour. Ordinarily we might note that Brad has a tendency to display jealous behaviour with little provocation, and conjecture that this is caused by his feeling jealous (rather than, say, practising for his forthcoming part in a Jacobean tragedy). But according to analytical behaviourism his feeling jealous just is his tendency to the behaviour, and since nothing causes itself, his jealousy cannot be the cause of the pattern of behaviour. See also: RYLE, G. Further reading Ryle, G. (1949) The Concept of Mind, London: Hutchinson. (The central exposition of analytical behaviourism.) DAVID BRADDON-MITCHELL BEHAVIOURISM IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES Classical behaviourism has had almost no direct reflection in the social sciences, in that there has never been a behaviourist social psychology or sociology. However, various features of the
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Page 81 cluster of behaviourist doctrines have been widespread in the human sciences. Behaviourism as it developed from its roots in the proposals of Watson, and in its transformation by Skinner, had two influential aspects, one metaphysical and the other methodological. The metaphysics of behaviourism was positivistic. It was hostile to theory, favouring a psychology the subject matter of which was limited to stimuli and responses. It was hospitable to the conception of causation as regular concomitance of events, rejecting any generative or agent causal concepts. The methodology of behaviourism was hospitable to simple experimental techniques of inquiry, seeking statistical relations between independent and dependent variables. It was hostile to descriptions of human action that incorporated the intentions of the actor, favouring a laconic vocabulary of neologisms. Metaphysically and methodologically behaviourism favoured the individual as the locus of psychological phenomena. But, in practice, the use of statistical analyses of data abstracted psychological processes from real human beings leaving only simplified automata in their place. See also: POSITIVISM IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES; SKINNER, B.F. Further reading Danziger, K. (1990) Constructing the Subject , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Selective history of modern psychology that sees psychology, not so much as a body of facts or theories, but as a special set of social activities intended to produce something that counts as psychological knowledge under certain historical conditions.) Harré, R. (1977) Social Being , Oxford: Blackwell, 2nd edn, 1993. (Emphasizes language as the main medium of human interaction.) ROM HARRÉ BEHAVIOURISM, METHODOLOGICAL AND SCIENTIFIC Methodological behaviourism is the doctrine that the data on which a psychological science must rest are behavioural data – or, at the very least, publicly observable data – not the private data provided to introspection by the contents of an observer’s consciousness. Scientific , or,as it was sometimes called, ‘radical’, behaviourism contends that scientific psychology ought to be concerned only with the formulation of laws relating observables such as stimuli and responses; not with unobservable mental processes and mechanisms such as attention, intention, memory and motivation. Methodological behaviourism is all but universally embraced by contemporary experimental psychologists, whereas scientific behaviourism is widely viewed as a doctrine in decline. Both forms of behaviourism were articulated by J.B. Watson in 1913. B.F. Skinner was the most prominent radical behaviourist. In addition to its empiricist strictures against inferred mental mechanisms, radical behaviourism was also empiricist in its assumptions about learning, assuming that: (1) organisms have no innate principles that guide their learning; (2) learning is the result of a general purpose process, not of a collection of mechanisms tailored to the demands of different kinds of problems; and (3) learning is a change in the relation between responses and the stimuli that control or elicit them. Many of these ideas continue to be influential, for example, in connectionism. See also: COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT Further reading Kendler, H.H. (1987) Historical Foundations of Modern Psychology , Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. (A good historical discussion of behaviourism.) Zuriff, G.E. (1985) Behaviorism: A Conceptual Reconstruction , New York: Columbia University Press. (A philosophically oriented discussion of both aspects of behaviourism.) C.R. GALLISTEL BEING Although ‘being’ has frequently been treated as a name for a property or special sort of entity, it is generally recognized that it is neither. Therefore, questions concerning being should not be understood as asking about the nature of some object or the character of some property. Rather, such questions raise a variety of problems concerning which sorts of entities there are, what one is saying when one says that some entity is, and the necessary conditions on thinking of an entity as something which is. At least four distinct questions concerning being have emerged in the history of philosophy: (1) Which things are there? (2) What is it to be? (3) Is it ever appropriate to treat ‘is’ as a predicate, and, if not, how should it be understood? (alternatively, is existence a property?) (4) How is it possible to intend that something is? Twentieth-century discussions of being in the analytic tradition have focused on the first and third questions. Work in the German tradition,
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Page 82 especially that of Martin Heidegger, has emphasized the fourth. See also: EXISTENCE; ONTOLOGY Further reading Inwagen, P. van (1993) Metaphysics, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. (Excellent introduction to metaphysics.) MARK OKRENT BELIEF We believe that there is coffee over there; we believe the special theory of relativity; we believe the Vice-Chancellor; and some of us believe in God. But plausibly what is fundamental is believing that something is the case – believing a proposition, as it is usually put. To believe a theory is to believe the propositions that make up the theory, to believe a person is to believe some proposition advanced by them; and to believe in God is to believe the proposition that God exists. Thus belief is said to be a propositional attitude or intentional state: to believe is to take the attitude of belief to some proposition. It is about what its propositional object is about (God, coffee, or whatever). We can think of the propositional object of a belief as the way thebelief represents things as being – its content, as it is often called. We state what we believe with indicative sentences in ‘that’-clauses, as in ‘Mary believes that the Democrats will win the next election ’. But belief in the absence of language is possible. A dog may believe that there is food in the bowl in front of it. Accordingly philosophers have sought accounts of belief that allow a central role to sentences – it cannot be an accident that finding the right sentence is the way to capture what someone believes – while allowing that creatures without a language can have beliefs. One way of doing this is to construe beliefs as relations to inner sentences somehow inscribed in the brain. On this view although dogs do not have a public language, to the extent that they have beliefs they have something sentence-like in their heads. An alternative tradition focuses on the way belief when combined with desire leads to behaviour, and analyses belief in terms of behavioural dispositions or more recently as the internal state that is, in combination with other mental states, responsible for the appropriate behavioural dispositions. An earlier tradition associated with the British Empiricists views belief as a kind of pale imitation of perceptual experience. But recent work on belief largely takes for granted a sharp distinction between belief and the various mental images that may or may not accompany it. See also: BELIEF AND KNOWLEDGE; DE RE/DE DICTO; FAITH Further reading Quine, W.V. (1960) Word and Object, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (Detailed, sympathetic discussion of whether belief should be thought of as ‘believing-true’ some linguistic item. Relates the discussion to the distinction between belief de dicto and belief de re .) Ramsey, F.P. (1931) The Foundations of Mathematics, London: Kegan Paul. (Classic source of the view of belief as a map by which we steer, and of treatments of degree of belief in terms of betting behaviour.) DAVID BRADDON-MITCHELL FRANK JACKSON BELIEF AND KNOWLEDGE It is often said that for people to know that such and such is the case, they must have something like a belief that such and such is the case. This is known as the ‘entailment thesis’. It is usually added that the converse (call it the ‘converse entailment thesis’) is false: it is false that my belief-like attitude that such and such is the case always counts as knowledge. This standard view, combining the entailment thesis with the denial of the converse thesis, has been challenged in a number of ways. The ‘identity thesis’ would retain the entailment thesis but would also endorse the converse entailment thesis. Knowledge and belief entail each other. (While no one has defended precisely this claim, Donald Davidson has come close.) The ‘incompatibility thesis’ rejects the entailment thesis as well as the converse entailment thesis, and says that knowledge and belief are mutually incompatible. Similarly, the ‘separability thesis’ also rejects the entailment thesis and the converse entailment thesis, but adds that knowledge and belief are mutually compatible. Those who defend the ‘eliminativism thesis’ hold that belief, like other elements of ‘folk’ or popular psychology, is an outmoded notion, and what is ‘in our heads’ when we know about the world is something other than beliefs. Further reading Ayer, A.J. (1956) The Problem of Knowledge , Harmondsworth: Penguin. (Analyses knowledge; discusses
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Page 83 Truth and Knowledge’, in Kant Oder Hegel , Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta Buchhandlung, 423–38. (Attempts to refute scepticism by showing that belief is by its nature veridical.) STEVEN LUPER BELINSKII, VISSARION GRIGORIEVICH (1811–48) Belinskii was considered by his followers in the nineteenth century, and by the official ideology of the Soviet period, to be not only Russia’s greatest literary critic, but also a leading Russian thinker. Soviet encyclopedias label him ‘critic, publicist and philosopher’. His role in Russian cultural life has been given positive as well as negative assessments, but there can be no doubt as to his huge influence. He is largely responsible for the fact that Russian literature and art, for a century and a half now, have been considered an organ of society, a mirror of the Russian nation’s destiny and a vehicle of its historical progress. It is largely his merit – or fault – that in Russia, art and literature have been accorded a lofty status of leadership and authority, and also that ‘art for art’s sake’ never became respectable in Russia. The influence of Belinskii’s philosophy of art extended through the entire political spectrum, far beyond his political legacy which was limited to the revolutionary left. The idea that art and literature are organic functions of society, nationhood and historical progress, which Belinskii took for granted, was passed on even to the Slavophile right and the liberal Westernizing centre. It was still an integral part of the doctrine of Socialist Realism. Further reading Belinskii, V.G. (1956) Selected Philosophical Works, Moscow: Progress. (Contains most of Belinskii’s programmatic articles.) Bowman, H. (1954) Vissarion Belinski, 1811–1848: A Study in the Origins of Social Criticism in Russia , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (A solid study of the social aspect of Belinskii’s criticism.) VICTOR TERRAS BELL’S THEOREM Bell’s theorem is concerned with the outcomes of a special type of ‘correlation experiment’ in quantum mechanics. It shows that under certain conditions these outcomes would be restricted by a system of inequalities (the ‘Bell inequalities’) that contradict the predictions of quantum mechanics. Various experimental tests confirm the quantum predictions to a high degree and hence violate the Bell inequalities. Although these tests contain loopholes due to experimental inefficiencies, they do suggest that the assumptions behind the Bell inequalities are incompatible not only with quantum theory but also with nature. A central assumption used to derive the Bell inequalities is a species of no-action-at-a-distance, called ‘locality’: roughly, that the outcomes in one wing of the experiment cannot immediately be affected by measurements performed in another wing (spatially distant from the first). For this reason the Bell theorem is sometimes cited as showing that locality is incompatible with the quantum theory, and the experimental tests as demonstrating that nature is nonlocal. These claims have been contested. See also: QUANTUM MEASUREMENT PROBLEM; QUANTUM MECHANICS, INTERPRETATION OF Further reading Bell, J. (1987) Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics , Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. (Contains most of Bell’s important papers, including his version of the Kochen–Specker theorem.) ARTHUR FINE BENJAMIN, WALTER (1892–1940) Walter Benjamin was one of the most influential twentieth-century philosophers of culture. Born in Berlin, he was forced to flee to Paris in 1933. His work combines formal analysis of art works with social theory to generate an approach which is historical, but is far more subtle than either materialism or conventional Geistesgeschichte (cultural and stylistic chronology). The ambiguous alignment of his work between Marxism and theology has made him a challenging and often controversial figure. In 1940 Benjamin was again forced to flee from the Nazis, and eventually took his own life after crossing the Pyrenees in a vain attempt to reach safety in Spain. See also: FRANKFURT SCHOOL Further reading Roberts, J. (1982) Walter Benjamin, London: Macmillan. (An intellectual and personal biography.) JULIAN ROBERTS BENTHAM, JEREMY (1748–1832) Jeremy Bentham held that all human and political action could be analysed in terms of
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Page 84 pleasure and pain, and so made comprehensible. One such analysis is how people actually do behave; according to Bentham, seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. Another such analysis is of how they ought to behave. For Bentham, this is that they should maximize utility, which for him is the same as producing the greatest happiness of the greatest number, which, again, is the same for him as maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain. His chief study was planning how there could be a good system of government and law; that is, how laws could be created so that people being as they actually are (seeking their own pleasure) might nevertheless do what they ought (seek the greatest pleasure of all). The instruments which government use in this task are punishment and reward, inducing action by threats and offers. For Bentham, punishment is done not for the sake of the offender, but to deter other people from doing the same kind of thing. Hence on his theory it is the apparent punishment which does all the good, the real punishment which does all the harm. Bentham thought that the primary unit of significance was the sentence, not the word. He used this idea to produce profound analyses of the nature of law and legal terms, such as’ right’, ‘duty’ or ‘property’. These are what he calls names of fictions – terms which do not directly correspond to real entities. However, this does not mean that they are meaningless. Instead, meaning can be given to them by translating sentences in which they occur into sentences in which they do not occur. Thus legal rights are understood in terms of legal duties, because sentences involving the former can be understood in terms of sentences involving the latter; these in turn can be analysed in terms of threats of punishment or, again, pleasure and pain. This gives sense to legal rights, but sense cannot be given in the same way to natural rights. For Bentham, we have no natural rights and the rights that we do have, such as property rights, are created by government, whose chief task is to protect them. Bentham also worked out how people could be protected from government itself, designing an elaborate system of constitutional law in which representative democracy was a central element. Bentham invented the word ‘international’, and when he died he had an international legal and political influence. His chief influence in philosophy has been as the most important historical exponent of a pure form of utilitarianism. See also: LAW, PHILOSOPHY OF; UTILITARIANISM Further reading Bentham, J. (1843) The Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. J. Bowring, Edinburgh, 10 vols. (The original collected edition, gradually being replaced, but still the source for Essay on Logic and Essay on Language, both in volume 8.) Harrison, R. (1983) Bentham, London: Routledge. (General introduction to all the philosophical aspects of Bentham.) ROSS HARRISON BENTLEY, RICHARD (1662–1742) A towering figure in the history of textual criticism, Bentley’s importance in the development of English philosophical thought rests on both public and private achievements. His great public contribution was made in the first Boyle lectures of 1692. In private, his correspondence with Newton sought the great man’s blessing on the arguments and opinions advanced in these lectures, persistently questioning him on the possibility of a natural origin for the universe and on the role and nature of gravity in physics in general. Bentley’s influence helped to establish the Newtonian consensus dominant in Europe until the end of the nineteenth century. See also: NEWTON, I. Further reading Bentley, R. (1838) The works of Richard Bentley , ed. A. Dyce, London. (These volumes are mainly concerned with his scholarly controversies. The Dissertation on the Epistles of Phalaris is found in volume 1, pages 75–430 and volume 2, pages 1–181.) ROM HARRÉ BERDIAEV, NIKOLAI ALEKSANDROVICH (1874–1948) Nikolai Berdiaev, Russian religious idealist, was one of many non-Marxist thinkers expelled from Russia by communist authorities in 1922. Although attracted to Marxism in his youth, even then he tempered it with a Neo-Kantian ethical theory. Well before the Bolshevik Revolution, he became seriously disenchanted with Marxist philosophy (though not with the idea of socialism)and embarked onthecareerof elaborating a personalistic Christian philosophy that occupied him for the rest of his life. Dubbed ‘the philosopher of freedom’, Berdiaev wrote prolifically on that subject and on related topics in metaphysics, philosophy of history, ethics, social philosophy and other fields
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Page 85 (but not epistemology, which he rejected as a fruitless exercise in scepticism). Because his approach to philosophy was admittedly anthropocentric and subjective, he accepted the label ‘existentialist’ and acknowledged his kinship with Dostoevskii, Nietzsche and (to a lesser degree) Jaspers. Like them, he constructed no philosophical system, though he did expound views that were coherently interrelated in the main, if impressionistically and sometimes obscurely expressed. Among his more prominent ideas were his conception of freedom (for which he was indebted to the mystical philosophy of Jakob Boehme), his distinction between spirit and nature, his theory of ‘objectification’, his doctrine of creativity and his conception of time. The most frequently translated of twentieth-century Russian thinkers, Berdiaev has been widely studied in the West since the 1930s, particularly in schools of religion and theology and by philosophers in the existentialist and personalist traditions. Although many Western readers considered him the voice of Russian Orthodox Christianity, his independent views drew fire from some Orthodox philosophers and theologians and also from strongly anti-Soviet Russian émigrés. His writings in emigration were eagerly embraced in his homeland once they could be published there, beginning in the late 1980s. See also: EXISTENTIALISM; NEO-KANTIANISM, RUSSIAN Further reading Berdiaev, N. (1939) O rabstve i svobode cheloveka. Opyt personalisticheskoi filosofii (On Slavery and the Freedom of Man: An Essay in Personalist Philosophy), Paris: YMCA-Press; trans. R.M. French, Slavery and Freedom, London: Geoffrey Bles, 1943. Lowrie, D.A. (1960) Rebellious Prophet: A Life of Nicolai Berdyaev , New York: Harper & Bros. (A general biography by a long-time associate; contains bibliographies.) JAMES P. SCANLAN BERGSON, HENRI-LOUIS (1859–1941) So far as he can be classified, Bergson would be called a ‘process philosopher’, emphasizing the primacy of process and change rather than of the conventional solid objects which undergo those changes. His central claim is that time, properly speaking and as we experience it (which he calls ‘duration’), cannot be analysed as a set of moments, but is essentially unitary. The same applies to movement, which must be distinguished from the trajectory it covers. This distinction, he claims, solves Zeno of Elea’s paradoxes of motion, and analogues of it apply elsewhere, for instance, in biology and ethics. Bergson makes an important distinction between sensation and perception. He repudiates idealism, but claims that matter differs only in degree from our perceptions, which are always perfused by our memories. Perception free from all memory, or ‘pure’ perception, is an ideal limit and not really perception at all, but matter. Real perception is pragmatic: we perceive what is necessary for us to act, assisted by the brain which functions as a filter to ensure that we remember only what we need to remember. Humans differ from animals by developing intelligence rather than instinct, but our highest faculty is ‘intuition’, which fuses both. Bergson is not anti-intellectualist, though, for intuition (in one of its two senses) presupposes intelligence. He achieved popularity partly by developing a theory of evolution, using his élan vital , which seemed to allow a role for religion. In ethics he contrasted a ‘closed’ with a (more desirable) ‘open’ morality, and similarly contrasted ‘static’ with ‘dynamic’ religion, which culminates in mysticism. See also: PERCEPTION; PROCESS PHILOSOPHY Further reading Bergson, H.-L. (1959) Oeuvres, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. (Centennial edition containing all the above except Durée et simultaneité , with an introduction by H. Gouhier and critical and historical notes by A. Robinet.) Moore, F.C.T. (1996) Bergson: Thinking Backwards , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Good attempt to give brief and accessible expression to some of Bergson’s more difficult doctrines, and to bring out their significance.) A.R. LACEY BERKELEY, GEORGE (1685–1753) George Berkeley, who was born in Ireland and who eventually became Bishop of Cloyne, is best known for three works that he published while still very young: An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision (1709), Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1713), and in particular for A Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710). In the Principles he argues for the striking claim that there is no external, material world; that houses, trees and the like are simply collections of ‘ideas’; and that it is
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Page 86 God who produces ‘ideas’ or ‘sensations’ in our minds. The New Theory of Vision had gone some way towards preparing the ground for this claim (although that work has interest and value in its own right), and the Dialogues represent Berkeley’s second attempt to defend it. Other works were to follow, including De Motu (1721), Alciphron (1732) and Siris (1744), but the three early works established Berkeley as one of the major figures in the history of modern philosophy. The basic thesis was certainly striking, and from the start many were tempted to dismiss it outright as so outrageous that even Berkeley himself could not have taken it seriously. In fact, however, Berkeley was very serious, and certainly a very able philosopher. Writing at a time when rapid developments in science appeared to be offering the key to understanding the true nature of the material world and its operations, but when scepticism about the very existence of the material world was also on the philosophical agenda, Berkeley believed that ‘immaterialism’ offered the only hope of defeating scepticism and of understanding the status of scientific explanations. Nor would he accept that his denial of ‘matter’ was outrageous. Indeed, he held that, if properly understood, he would be seen as defending the views of ‘the vulgar’ or ‘the Mob’ against other philosophers, including Locke, whose views posed a threat to much that we would ordinarily take to be common sense. His metaphysics cannot be understood unless we see clearly how he could put this interpretation on it; and neither will we do it justice if we simply dismiss the role he gives to God as emerging from the piety of a future bishop. Religion was under threat; Berkeley can probably be judged prescient in seeing how attractive atheism could become, given the scientific revolution of which we are the heirs; and though it could hardly be claimed that his attempts to ward off the challenge were successful, they merit respectful attention. Whether, however, we see him as the proponent of a fascinating metaphysics about which we must make up our own minds, or as representing merely one stage in the philosophical debate that takes us from Descartes to Locke and then to Hume, Kant and beyond, we must recognize Berkeley as a powerful intellect who had an important contribution to make. See also: MEANING AND UNDERSTANDING; VISION Further reading Berkeley, G. (1948–57) The Works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne , ed. A.A. Luce and T.E. Jessop, Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson, 9 vols. (The standard edition, containing Berkeley’s published and unpublished writings, both philosophical and non-philosophical. The philosophical correspondence between Berkeley and Samuel Johnson is in vol. 2.) Berman, D. (1994) George Berkeley: Idealism and the Man, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (A lively introduction to Berkeley’s life and writings which is particularly interesting on works such as Passive Obedience, Alciphron, and Siris , and which throws light on the Irish context of Berkeley’s thought.) IAN TIPTON BERLIN, ISAIAH (1909–97) Berlin said that he decided about 1945 to give up philosophy, in which he had worked up to that time, in favour of the history of ideas. Some of his best-known work certainly belongs to the history of ideas, but he continued in fact both to write philosophy and to pursue philosophical questions in his historical work. Born in Latvia, Berlin was educated and spent his life in Britain. His main philosophical contributions are to political philosophy and specifically to the theory of liberalism. He emphasizes a distinction between ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ concepts of liberty: the former is a Hobbesian idea of absence of constraint or obstacle, while the latter is identified with a notion of moral self-government, expressed for instance in Rousseau, which Berlin finds politically threatening. His anti-utopian approach to politics is expressed also in his view that values necessarily conflict; this irreducible ‘value pluralism’ may be his most original contribution to philosophy, though advances it through example and historical illustration rather than in semantic or epistemological terms. He also expresses himself against necessitarian interpretations of history, and in favour of an anti-determinist conception of free will. See also: FREEDOM AND LIBERTY Further reading Berlin, I. (1997) The Proper Study of Mankind , ed. H. Hardy and R. Hausheer, London: Chatto & Windus. (An anthology of Berlin’s best-known essays.) Margalit, E. and Margalit, A. (eds) (1991) Isaiah Berlin, A Celebration, London: Hogarth Press. (Essays by various writers, about half of them on philosophical subjects.) BERNARD WILLIAMS
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Page 87 BERNARD OF CLAIRVAUX (1090–1153) Born into a noble family near Dijon in Burgundy, Bernard joined the Cistercian Order in 1113 and, two years later, became abbot of the new foundation at Clairvaux, a position he held until his death. Bernard was recognized by his contemporaries as the spiritual leader of western Europe. He was an indefatigable advocate of the monastic life and occasionally criticized the schools on moral grounds, but he was by no means an anti-intellectual. He encouraged a number of early scholastic philosopher-theologians in their work. Although he devoted the better part of his efforts to his wide-ranging pastoral duties, Bernard’s own sermons and treatises make a significant contribution to twelfth-century theology and philosophy. See also: RELIGION, HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Gilson, E. (1940) The Mystical Theology of St. Bernard , trans. A.H.C. Downes, London and New York: Sheed & Ward; repr. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1990. (First published in 1934, this still indispensable classic reconstructs the theological system underlying Bernard’s contemplative writings.) SEAN EISEN MURPHY BERNARD OF TOURS ( fl. 1147, d. before 1178) Bernard of Tours, better known as Bernardus Silvestris, was closely acquainted with the major developments in science and theology which took place in the mid-twelfth century. His major work, the Cosmographia , an allegorical account of the creation of the universe and humankind, is dedicated to the philosopher-theologian Thierry of Chartres, who was probably also his teacher. However, Bernard himself was best known as a poet, and he seems to have made his living primarily as a teacher of grammar and rhetoric. His career perhaps reflects the fragmentation of the liberal arts curriculum in his day, including the segregation of literary studies from the increasingly specialized pursuit of the sciences. See also: CHARTRES, SCHOOL OF Further reading Wetherbee, W. (1972) Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth Century, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Considers the Cosmographia as synthesizing the concerns of earlier twelfth-century philosophy.) WINTHROP WETHERBEE BERNARDUS SILVESTRIS see BERNARD OF TOURS BERNIER, FRANÇOIS (1620–88) Bernier was a minor figure who influenced the history of philosophy out of all proportion to his own strictly philosophical abilities. He was effective as a propagandist in the debates over the analysis of matter, and especially as a popularizer of the views of Pierre Gassendi, whose nominalism he sought to apply with greater consistency. By far the most influential of Bernier’s works was his Abrégé of Gassendi’s philosophy, published in 1674–8. See also: GASSENDI, P. Further reading Lennon, T.M. (1993) The Battle of The Gods And Giants: The Legacies of Descartes And Gassendi, 1655–1715, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Sections 5–9 discuss Bernier as participant in the seventeenth-century contest between Cartesian Platonism and materialism.) THOMAS M. LENNON BERNSTEIN, EDUARD (1850–1932) Eduard Bernstein, an eminent German social democrat, is now noted as ‘the father of revisionism’. He made a reputation as the radical editor of the German Social Democratic Party organ, Der Sozialdemokrat , and became a close associate of Friedrich Engels. However, after the death of Engels he abandoned revolutionary Marxism and argued that socialism could be achieved by legal means and piecemeal reform. In doing this, he raised fundamental questions concerning the validity of Marxism and the direction of socialist political strategy, thus provoking what is now known as the ‘revisionist debate’. See also: SOCIALISM; MARXISM, WESTERN Further reading Bernstein, E. (1899) Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie , Stuttgart: Dietz; trans. and ed. H. Tudor, The Preconditions of Socialism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. (Bernstein’s main theoretical work.) H. TUDOR BETH’S THEOREM AND CRAIG’S THEOREM Beth’s theorem is a central result about definability of non-logical symbols in classical
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Page 88 first-order theories. It states that a symbol P is implicitly defined by a theory T if and only if an explicit definition of P in terms of some other expressions of the theory T can be deduced from the theory T. Intuitively, the symbol P is implicitly defined by T if, given the extension of these other symbols, T fixes the extension of the symbol P uniquely. In a precise statement of Beth’s theorem this will be replaced by a condition on the models of T. An explicit definition of a predicate symbol states necessary and sufficient conditions: for example, if P is a one-place predicate symbol, an explicit definition is a sentence of the form ( x)( Px ≡ ( x)), where ( x) is a formula with free variable x in which P does not occur. Thus, Beth’s theorem says something about the expressive power of first-order logic: there is a balance between the syntax (the deducibility of an explicit definition) and the semantics (across models of T the extension of P is uniquely determined by the extension of other symbols). Beth’s definability theorem follows immediately from Craig’s interpolation theorem. For first-order logic with identity, Craig’s theorem says that if is deducible from ψ , there is an interpolant θ, a sentence whose non-logical symbols are common to and ψ , such that θ is deducible from c, while is deducible from θ. Craig’s theorem and Beth’s theorem also hold for a number of non-classical logics, such as intuitionistic first-order logic and classical second-order logic, but fail for other logics, such as logics with expressions of infinite length. See also: DEFINITION Further reading Beth, E.W. (1962) Formal Methods: An Introduction to Symbolic Logic and to the Study of Effective Operations in Arithmetic and Logic , Dordrecht: Reidel. (Shows how Beth’s semantic tableau gives a method for constructing a Craig interpolant, and how this leads to the construction of an explicit definition in case Padoa’s method fails.) ZENO SWIJTINK BHARTṚHARI ( c . 5th century) Bhartṛhari is the Indian philosopher of grammar par excellence. His philosophy is expressed in the Vākyapadīya , a difficult work whose serious scholarly study remains in its infancy. Drawing on practically all the schools of thought of his time – religious, philosophical, linguistic and ritual – he uses elements from them to create a philosophy. This philosophy, while claiming to be grammatical, goes far beyond traditional grammar, constituting a new and remarkably original system of thought. See also: LANGUAGE, INDIAN THEORIES OF Further reading Iyer, K.A. Subramania (1969) Bhartṛhari , Poona: Deccan College. (The most comprehensive study of Bhartṛhari, his works and thought.) JOHANNES BRONKHORST BIBLE, HEBREW Although the Bible is not a work of systematic philosophy, it none the less contains a wide variety of philosophical and theological ideas which have served as the framework for rabbinic speculation through the centuries. Although these views about the nature and activity of God are not presented systematically, they do provide an overview of the ancient Israelite understanding of the Godhead, creation, divine providence and human destiny. Throughout rabbinic literature these notions served as the bedrock for theological speculation, and with the emergence of systematic Jewish philosophy in the Middle Ages, they came to preoccupy a variety of thinkers. Similarly, in the post-Enlightenment period until the present, scriptural teaching has served as the starting point for philosophical and theological reflection. Foremost among scriptural beliefs is the conviction that one God has created the cosmos. As the transcendent creator of the universe, he reigns supreme throughout nature and is intimately involved in earthly life. God is both omnipotent and omniscient and exercises divine providence over all creatures – from on high he oversees all the inhabitants of the earth. In exercising his providential care, Scripture repeatedly asserts, God is a benevolent ruler who shows compassion and mercy to all. Furthermore, as lord of history, he has chosen Israel to be his special people and has revealed the Torah to them on Mount Sinai. The Jewish people are to be a light to the nations, and from their midst will come a Messianic redeemer who will inaugurate a period of divine deliverance and eventually usher in the world to come. Israel thus plays a central role in the unfolding of God’s plan for all human beings. See also: THEOLOGY, RABBINIC Further reading Jacobs, L. (1973) A Jewish Theology , London: Darton, Longman & Todd. (Definitive survey
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Page 89 of the history of Jewish theology from biblical times.) DAN COHN-SHERBOK BIEL, GABRIEL (before 1425–95) The German philosopher Gabriel Biel was the last great systematizer of scholastic theology and philosophy. Not noted for originality, he sought to produce a synthesis of the work of his predecessors. His thought is pervasively religious; a profound sense of the freedom of God’s will is basic to his perspective. He followed Ockham and Duns Scotus in emphasizing the sheer contingency of things. Nature, morality and salvation depend entirely on God’s will, and God could have determined otherwise. Such a view places sharp limits on the ability of reason to discover the truth about the nature and will of God; Biel subordinates reason to faith (although he is a master in the use of reason to defend revealed truth). The radical freedom of God coexists with significant moral freedom in humanity, since it is decreed by God that humans should be free to play an active role in determining their own destiny. Implied in this view of the human situation is an activist, pragmatic tendency, an interest in concrete applications of theoretical insights rather than in abstract speculation for its own sake. See also: GRACE; OMNIPOTENCE Further reading Biel, G. (1501) Epithoma pariter et collectorium circa quattuor libros Sententiarum (Synopsis and Commentary on the Four Books of Sentences), Mohr: Paul Siebeck, 1973–84. (Biel’s most thorough exposition of his position on a wide range of philosophical and theological issues.) Farthing, J. (1988) Thomas Aquinas and Gabriel Biel , Durham, NC: Duke University Press. (An analysis of Biel’s citations and interpretations of materials drawn from Aquinas’ theology.) JOHN L. FARTHING BIOETHICS While bioethics, a part of applied ethics, is usually identified with medical ethics, in its broadest sense it is the study of the moral, social and political problems that arise out of biology and the life sciences generally and involve, either directly or indirectly, human wellbeing. Thus, environmental and animal ethics are sometimes included within it. In this regard, bioethics can be of broader concern than is either medical/biomedical ethics or the study of the moral problems that arise out of new developments in medical technology. The interrelated issues of who or what has moral status, of what justifies a certain kind of treatment of one creature as opposed to another, and whether, if a creature has moral status, it can lose it, have proved especially important issues in this broadest sense of bioethics. The philosophical task of probing arguments for soundness appears essential to deciding these issues. As a part of applied ethics, bioethics is exposed to the difficulty that (1) we do not agree in our moral convictions and principles about many of the cases that feature in bioethics, (2) we do not agree in the moral theories in which our moral principles find their home and by which we try to justify them, and (3) we do not agree in the test(s) of adequacy by which to resolve the disagreements at the level of moral theory. We seem left with no way of deciding between contending principles and theories. See also: BIOETHICS, JEWISH; MEDICAL ETHICS; RESPONSIBILITIES OF SCIENTISTS AND INTELLECTUALS Further reading Beauchamp, T.L. and Childress, J.F. (1979) Principles of Biomedical Ethics , New York: Oxford University Press; 4th edn, 1994. (A major text in contemporary medical ethics.) Potter, V.R. (1971) Bioethics: Bridge to the Future, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. (Considered to be the first text to introduce the term ‘bioethics’, where it is understood to include environmental concerns.) R.G. FREY BIOETHICS, JEWISH Jewish bioethics seeks to apply Jewish modes of normative discourse in bioethics. For some moral issues in medicine, explicit guidance may be found in the traditional sources of halakhah; but many others require creative application of ancient or medieval precedents and norms. Much of the contemporary writing in this area takes the classical form of rabbinic Responsa to specific queries from adherents of the halakhah. But the field also includes contributions from thinkers who offer not rulings on religious law but the fruits of moral inspiration by the tradition. In the Judaic tradition the idea that each human being is created in God’s image fosters a
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Page 90 powerful commitment to saving and prolonging life. Murder and suicide are terrible sacrileges. Procreation is highly valued. Contraception is not easily countenanced, and still less is abortion. But abortion is clearly distinguished from homicide. The symbolic preciousness of the divine image disallows disfigurement of human corpses. The implications of this prohibition for pathology and for the study of anatomy are hotly disputed. The prohibition is overridden, however, in cases of immediate life-saving. Regarding triage and resource allocation, the universal egalitarianism implied by the idea of God’s image fosters a powerful reluctance against bringing about any person’s death, even to save a number of lives. Some tension arises between this egalitarianism and traditional structures of social and religious hierarchy. See also: LIFE AND DEATH; HALAKHAH Further reading Jakobovits, I. (1975) Jewish Medical Ethics , New York: Bloch. (Revised text by the former Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, widely considered the founder of this academic subdiscipline.) Zohar, N. (1997) Alternatives in Jewish Bioethics , Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. (A non-authoritarian presentation and analysis of various traditional voices in dialogue with contemporary philosophical bioethics.) NOAM J. ZOHAR BLACKSTONE, WILLIAM (1723–80) An English legal scholar and judge, Blackstone produced the first systematic exposition of English law as a body of principles. His enterprise was founded upon the assumption that the detailed rules of English law embodied and enforced natural law. Blackstone’s invocation of natural law has frequently been regarded as ornamental rather than substantial, but there is no good reason for taking this view. Blackstone is now remembered as much for Bentham’s attacks upon him as for his own contribution. See also: COMMON LAW Further reading Blackstone, W. (1765–9) Commentaries on the Laws of England , 4 vols, Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1979. (The 1979 edition contains valuable editorial introductions to each volume.) N.E. SIMMONDS BLAIR, HUGH (1718–1800) A clergyman and professor of rhetoric and belles-lettres at the University of Edinburgh, Blair was the foremost literary critic and preacher of the Scottish Enlightenment. He participated in the thriving cultural life of eighteenth-century Edinburgh, and along with William Robertson, Adam Ferguson and other enlightened Moderate party clergymen was a close friend of that city’s greatest philosopher, David Hume. Further reading Blair, H. (1783) Lectures on Rhetoric and Belleslettres, ed. H.F. Harding, Carbondale, Il: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965, 2 vols. (Facsimile of first edition, with a useful introduction and bibliography.) Sher, R.B. (1985) Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. (A study of Blair’s circle of Presbyterian clergymen of letters, with a lengthy bibliography.) RICHARD SHER BLAISE OF PARMA see BLASIUS OF PARMA BLAME see PRAISE AND BLAME BLANCHOT, MAURICE (1907–) Maurice Blanchot, has since the 1940s been a dominant voice in French philosophy and letters, initiating a postmodern discourse which has had a profound impact on Bataille, Levinas, Foucault and Derrida. His early writings, between 1930 and 1940, consisted of cultural and political criticism. The experience of the Second World War led him to disengage from politics and he became an essayist and novelist. His works have included novels, narratives and, notably, criticism. Since the 1970s he has produced a series of fragmentary writings in which the line between literature and philosophy is shattered and, since the 1980s, meditations on language, death, the ‘disaster’ and community. See also: ALTERITY AND IDENTITY, POSTMODERN THEORIES OF Further reading Blanchot, M. (1955) L’Éspace littéraire , Paris: Gallimard; trans. A. Smock, The Space of Literature ,
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Page 91 Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (A comprehensive overview of Blanchot, which includes an excellent bibliography of both primary and secondary sources.) ALAN MILCHMAN ALAN ROSENBERG BLASIUS OF PARMA (d. 1416) Blasius of Parma was an important Italian philosopher, mathematician and astrologer who popularized the achievements of Oxford logic and Parisian physics in Italy. He questioned the Aristotelian foundations of medieval physical science, mechanics, astronomy and optics, thus helping to open the way to the mathematics, optics and statics of modern times. His teaching influenced the artists of the Florentine Renaissance in their rediscovery of linear perspective, and his discussion of proportions influenced the Paduan mathematicians up to the time of Galileo. He presented an atomist and quantitative account of physical reality, and a materialist account of the human intellect. His consequent denial of the immortality of the soul won him the title of ‘diabolical doctor’ ( doctor diabolicus ). His position on the human ability to avoid astrological determinism was equivocal. Though his work was scholastic in style, he enjoyed good relations with such Italian humanists as Vittorino da Feltre, whose request for lessons in mathematics he refused. In Florence, he took part in conversations between humanists and scholastics. See also: NATURAL PHILOSOPHY, MEDIEVAL Further reading Federici Vescovini, G. (1979) Astrologia e scienza: La crisi dell’aristotelismo sul cadere del Trecento e Biagio Pelacani da Parma (Astrology and Science: Blasius of Parma and the Crisis of Aristotelianism at the End of the 14th Century), Florence: Vallecchi. (Detailed analysis of Blasius’ thought.) Translated from the original Italian by E.J. Ashworth GRAZIELLA FEDERICI VESCOVINI BLOCH, ERNST SIMON (1885–1977) Born in Germany, Bloch was one of the most innovative Marxist philosophers of the twentieth century. His metaphysical and ontological concerns, combined with a self-conscious utopianism, distanced him from much mainstream Marxist thought. He was sympathetic to the classical philosophical search for fundamental categories, but distinguished earlier static, fixed and closed systems from his own open system, in which he characterized the universe as a changing and unfinished process. Furthermore, his distinctive materialism entailed the rejection of a radical separation of the human and the natural, unlike much twentieth-century Western Marxism. His validation of utopianism was grounded in a distinctive epistemology centred on the processes whereby ‘new’ material emerges in consciousness. The resulting social theory was sensitive to the many and varied ways in which the utopian impulse emerges, as, for example, in its analysis of the utopian dimension in religion. See also: MARXISM, WESTERN Further reading Bloch, E. (1963–4) Tübinger Einleitung in die Philosophie , Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2 vols; vol. 1, trans. J. Cumming, A Philosophy of the Future, New York: Herder & Herder, 1970. (A succint presentation of many of the major components of Bloch’s philosophy.) Hudson, W. (1982) The Marxist Philosophy of Ernst Bloch , London: Macmillan. (The best study to date of Bloch’s thought.) VINCENT GEOGHEGAN BOBBIO, NORBERTO (1909–) The foremost legal and political theorist in Italy today, Norberto Bobbio founded in the 1940s Italian analytical legal positivism, trying to merge logical positivism and Kelsen’s legal positivism. As a political thinker, he defends a synthesis of liberalism and socialism, focusing in particular on the defence of human and civil rights in democratic societies. He has consistently played a part in active political debate in many fields: politics and culture, the defence of human and civil rights, and the problem of peace in the nuclear age. See also: DEMOCRACY; LAW, PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Bobbio, N. (1984) Il futuro della democrazia , Turin: Einaudi; The Future of Democracy , Oxford: Polity Press, 1987. (Defendsthe liberal idea of representative democracy, trying to extend it beyond parliamentary politics to many domains of social life.) PATRIZIA BORSELLINO BODILY SENSATIONS
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Page 92 philosophers contrast bodily sensations with perceptions of the external world, claiming that sensations provide one with awareness of nothing independent of them. An alternative approach is to take sensations to be a form of awareness of one’s body – on one view sensations are simply the perception of the state and properties of one’s body. Bodily sensations have been seen as a major problem for any attempt to give an account of the mind that takes it to be part of the material world as investigated by the physical sciences. See also: PRIVATE LANGUAGE ARGUMENT Further reading Armstrong, D.M. (1962) Bodily Sensations , London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (This is a detailed defence of the view that sensations are perceptions of one’s body.) Wittgenstein, L. (1952) Philosophical Investigations , Oxford: Blackwell, §242–315. (The famous private language argument, which some philosophers take to be an attack on the idea of sensations as inner or private objects.) M.G.F. MARTIN BODIN, JEAN (1529/30–96) The Frenchman Jean Bodin was one of the great universal scholars of the later Renaissance. Despite political distractions, he made major contributions to historiography and the philosophy of history, economic theory, public law and comparative public policy, the sociology of institutions, as well as to religious philosophy, comparative religion and natural philosophy. Among his most celebrated achievements are his theory of sovereignty, which introduced a new dimension to the study of public law, and his Neoplatonist religion, which opened new perspectives on universalism and religious toleration. Many of these intellectual positions, moreover, were responses, at least in part, to great political issues of the time. Against doctrines of popular sovereignty and the right of resistance put forward in the course of the religious wars, Bodin sought to show that the king of France was absolute. Against the widespread corruption and laxity that weakened and undermined the monarchy, he argued for administrative reform. And against the party that pressed the king to impose religious uniformity, he cautiously supported religious toleration. In all these respects Bodin’s thought helped to inform the policies of the early Bourbon dynasty esatblished by Henry IV. See also: SOVEREIGNTY; TOLERATION Further reading Franklin, J.H. (1973) Jean Bodin and the Rise of Absolutist theory , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (A critical analysis of the genesis, structure and ideological impact of Bodin’s theory of sovereignty.) JULIAN H. FRANKLIN BOEHME, JAKOB (1575–1624) Born in Silesia, Boehme was a Lutheran mystic and pantheist. He held that God is the Abyss that is the ground of all things. The will of the Abyss to know itself generates a process that gives rise to nature, which is thus the image of God. Life is characterized by a dualistic struggle between good and evil; only by embracing Christ’s love can unity be regained. Boehme was highly regarded by such diverse writers as William Law, Newton, Goethe and Hegel. Further reading Boehme, J. (1624) Der Weg zu Christo , trans. P.C. Erb, The Way to Christ , New York: Paulist Press, 1978. (Nine mystical treatises: the best introduction to Boehme’s spirituality.) JEAN-LOUP SEBAN BOETHIUS, ANICIUS MANLIUS SEVERINUS ( c .480–525/6) Boethius was a principal transmitter of classical Greek logic from Aristotle, the Stoics and the Neoplatonists to the schoolmen of the medieval Latin West. His contemporaries were largely unimpressed by his learned activities, and his writings show him to have been a lonely, rather isolated figure in a world where the old Roman aristocrats were struggling to maintain high literary culture in an Italy controlled by barbarous and bibulous Goths, whose taste in music and hairgrease Boethius found painful. Boethius himself was born into a patrician family in Rome, but was orphaned and raised instead by Q. Aurelius Memmius Symmachus, a rich Christian heir to a distinguished pagan line; Boethius later married the latter’s daughter, Rusticiana. As well as Symmachus, Boethius had a small circle of educated friends, including the Roman deacon John (who probably became Pope John I, 523–6), who shared his enthusiasm for logical problems. The Gothic king of Italy at Ravenna, Theoderic, had met high culture
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Page 93 made use of experienced Roman aristocrats as administrators. He employed Boethius to design a sundial for the Burgundian king and also a waterclock, specimens of advanced technology intended to impress a barbarian; he also sent a harpist to Clovis, the Frankish king, no doubt intended to soften the latter’s bellicose spirit. By 507 Boethius had gained the title ‘patrician’ and received letters addressed to ‘your magnitude’. Symmachus was in a position to promote his public career. He was nominated consul for the year 510, a position without political power but of high standing and requiring large disbursements of private wealth; it also carried the perquisite that the consul’s name stood on all dated documents for that year. In 522 his two sons were installed as consuls, a promotion that gave their father intense pride and pleasure, and he took up seriously the political post of Master of the Offices. In this capacity, his determination to eliminate corruption earned him numerous enemies among both Goths and his fellow Roman aristocrats. His relations with the courtiers at Ravenna became disastrous. Boethius’ fall came when he rashly defended a senator who had been delated to King Theoderic for conducting treasonable correspondence with persons high in the court of the emperor at Constantinople. There is no improbability in the notion that, along with other Roman aristocrats, Boethius would have preferred to be rid of the crude Goths and to see Theoderic replaced by a ruler congenial to the emperor. His great erudition had aroused fears that he was engaged in occult practices dangerous to the Ravenna dynasty. In 524 or early 525, Boethius was imprisoned at Pavia (Ticinum). Here, while awaiting the execution already decreed against him, he composed his masterpiece, De consolatione philosophiae (The Consolation of Philosophy). De consolatione philosophiae, a bitterly hostile attack on Theoderic prefacing a philosophical discussion of innocent suffering and the problem of evil, must have been smuggled out of prison, no doubt with the aid of gold coins from Rusticiana or Symmachus. In the ninth century, the work captured the imagination of Alcuin at the court of Charlemagne, became a standard textbook in schools and was set on the way to being one of the greatest books of medieval culture, especially popular among laymen. Boethius’ earlier works have been the preserve of more specialized readers, especially concerned with the history of ancient philosophy. His stated original intention was to educate the West by translating all of Plato and Aristotle into Latin and to supply explanatory commentaries on many of their writings. That was too ambitious. He did not proceed beyond some of the logical works (Organon) of Aristotle, prefaced by a commentary on a Latin translation of Porphyry’s Isagōgē (Introduction) made in the fourth century by Marius Victorinus, an African teaching in Rome, and then by a second commentary on a translation of the same text made by himself. This commentary underlay the medieval debates on universals. He also wrote a commentary on Aristotle’s Categories and two commentaries on Aristotle’s De interpretatione. In addition, Boethius adapted Nicomachus of Gerasa’s Arithmetic for Latin readers, Nicomachus’ introduction to music as a liberal art, a commentary on Cicero’s Topics , a short treatise ‘On Division’, important treatises on categorical and hypothetical syllogisms and a further tract on different kinds of ‘topic’. Intricate theological debates between Rome and Constantinople convinced him that a trained logician could contribute clarification, and he composed four theological tractates on the doctines of the Trinity and the person of Christ, concentrating on logical problems. In addition, a fifth tract became a statement of orthodox belief without much reference to logical implications. The five pieces, or Opuscula sacra , became hardly less influential than De consolatione philosophiae, especially from the twelfth century onwards. We hear of critics who thought contemporary theologians knew more about Boethius than about the Bible. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM, MEDIEVAL; PATRISTIC PHILOSOPHY; PLATONISM, MEDIEVAL Further reading Boethius ( c .480–525/6) De consolatione philosophiae (The Consolation of Philosophy), ed. and trans. H.F. Stewart, E.K. Rand and S.J. Tester, Boethius: Theological Tractates, Consolation of Philosophy , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973. (For an English translation only, see V.E. Watts, The Consolation of Philosophy , Baltimore, MD: Penguin, 1969.) Chadwick, H. (1981) Boethius, the Consolations of Music, Logic, Theology and Philosophy , Oxford: Clarendon Press; Italian translation, Bologna: Mulino, 1986. (Describes Boethius’ works in relation to the historical context of his life and to the intellectual background of his philosophical writings, with bibliography.) Gibson, M.T. (ed.) (1981) Boethius, His Life , Thought and Influence,
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Page 94 Oxford: Blackwell. (A symposium of different authors, more on Boethius’ influence than on his contemporary setting.) HENRY CHADWICK BOETHIUS OF DACIA ( fl. c .1275) The Danish philosopher Boethius of Dacia developed an original theory of scientific knowledge designed to reconcile science with Christian doctrine without allowing one to determine the contents of the other. His main strategy was to consider each science as an independent system of axioms and theorems while also operating with a hierarchy of causes, the highest of which (God) is fundamentally unpredictable as to its operations. Boethius did, however, stress the powers of the human intellect and the possibility of reaching happiness through rational understanding; he vigorously objected to demands that natural science should adapt its axioms to the demands of Christian faith. This laid him open to suspicions of heresy. Boethius’ work on grammar is the most complete application of his ideas of how to construct a science. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM, MEDEIVAL; LANGUAGE, MEDIEVAL THEORIES OF Further reading Boethius of Dacia ( c .1275) De summo bono (On the Supreme Good), ed. N.J. Green-Pedersen in Opera, vol. VI, Copenhagen: DSL/Gad, 1976; trans. J.F. Wippel, On the Supreme Good. On the Eternity of the World. On Dreams , Mediaeval Sources in Translation 30, Toronto, Ont.: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1987. (Boethius’ major work on the good; the Wippel translation also contains two other important works.) STEN EBBESEN BOGDANOV, ALEKSANDR ALEKSANDROVICH (1873–1928) Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Bogdanov, né Malinovskii, was a Russian thinker who helped Lenin create the Bolshevik or Communist Party, broke with Lenin over a mixture of philosophical and political issues, yet would not quit the Revolution. His life and thought illuminate the interaction of philosophy and politics within the tumultuous context of a ‘developing’ country, which calls in question political philosophies that take for granted the conditions of ‘developed’ countries. Bogdanov never won such widespread interest as those dissident communists – Georg Lukács, most notably – who turned Marxism away from claims of science towards theories of consciousness and wilful action. Bogdanov sought a positivist basis for his philosophy of action or practice. He offered ‘empiriomonism’ and ‘organizational science’ to creators of a ‘free collectivism’, but the creators of the Soviet system brushed him aside. He has been studied by scholars who wonder why the Russian Revolution – or twentieth-century revolutions in many developing countries – have failed to realize dreams of justice and freedom, and by a different cluster of scholars who conceive of a metascience that might unify the fragmented world of knowledge. Less known is Bogdanov’s sense of tragic contradictions in revolutionary pragmatism, as we may call active belief in Marx’s famous declaration that the point of philosophizing is not merely to interpret the world but to change it. See also: MARXIST PHILOSOPHY, RUSSIAN AND SOVIET; RUSSIAN EMPIRIOCRITICISM Further reading Grille, D. (1966) Lenins Rivale: Bogdanov und sein Philosophie , Köln: Wissenschaft und Politik. (The most detailed intellectual biography, emphasizing the derivative nature of his thought and his character as ‘the red Hamlet’.) Sochor, Z.A. (1988) Revolution and Culture: The Bogdanov–Lenin Controversy , Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. (A detailed analysis with emphasis on the role of utopian faith.) DAVID JORAVSKY BOHR, NIELS (1885–1962) One of the most influential scientists of the twentieth century, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr founded atomic quantum theory and the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics. This radical interpretation renounced the possibility of a unified, observer-independent, deterministic description in the microdomain. Bohr’s principle of complementarity – the heart of the Copenhagen philosophy – implies that quantum phenomena can only be described by pairs of partial, mutually exclusive, or ‘complementary’ perspectives. Though simultaneously inapplicable, both perspectives are necessary for the exhaustive description of phenomena. Bohr aspired to generalize complementarity into all fields of knowledge, maintaining that new epistemological insights are
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Page 95 obtained by adjoining contrary, seemingly incompatible, viewpoints. See also: QUANTUM MECHANICS, INTERPRETATION OF Further reading Bohr, N. (1972–86) Collected Works, Volumes 1–9 , Amsterdam: North Holland. (Contains Bohr’s major scientific and philosophical papers on quantum theory until 1932, and those on nuclear physics until 1952.) Pais, A. (1991) Niels Bohr’s Times: In Physics, Philosophy and Polity , New York: Oxford University Press. (Description of Bohr’s life and thought by a physicist who adheres to Bohr’s complementarity.) MARA BELLER BOLD, SAMUEL (1649–1737) Samuel Bold (or Bolde) was a Latitudinarian minister who defended John Locke’s Reasonableness of Christianity and his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Bold published a series of pamphlets and short books which argued a theological position substantially identical to that of Locke. He also mounted a philosophical defence of Locke’s definition of knowledge and his supposition that it was possible that God could, if he so wished, superadd to matter the power of thought. In a book on the theological issue of the resurrection of the same body he defended Locke’s account of personal identity. G.A.J. ROGERS BOLZANO, BERNARD (1781–1848) Bernard Bolzano was a lone forerunner both of analytical philosophy and phenomenology. Born in Prague in the year when Kant’s first Critique appeared, he became one of the most acute critics both of Kant and of German Idealism. He died in Prague in the same year in which Frege was born; Frege is philosophically closer to him than any other thinker of the nineteenth or twentieth century. Bolzano was the only outstanding proponent of utilitarianism among German-speaking philosophers, and was a creative mathematician whose name is duly remembered in the annals of this discipline. His Wissenschaftslehre ( Theory of Science ) of 1837 makes him the greatest logician in the period between Leibniz and Frege. The book was sadly neglected by Bolzano’s contemporaries, but rediscovered by Brentano’s pupils. Its ontology of propositions and ideas provided Husserl with much of his ammunition in his fight against psychologism and in support of phenomenology, and through Twardowski it also had an impact on the development of logical semantics in the Lwów-Warsaw School. See also: ANALYTICAL PHILOSOPHY Further reading Bolzano, B. (1837) Wissenschaftslehre , Sulzbach: Seidel, 4 vols; selections, trans. and ed. R. George, in Theory of Science , Oxford: Blackwell, 1972; selections, trans. B. Terrell, ed. J. Berg, in Theory of Science , Dordrecht: Reidel, 1973. (A highly original philosophy of logic followed by treatises on empiricist epistemology, heuristics and textbook methodology.) Dummett, M. (1993) Origins of Analytical Philosophy , London: Duckworth. (Places Bolzano in the prehistory of analytic philosophy and phenomenology.) WOLFGANG KÜNNE BONAVENTURE ( c .1217–74) Bonaventure (John of Fidanza) developed a synthesis of philosophy and theology in which Neoplatonic doctrines are transformed by a Christian framework. Born in Tuscany, he studied at the University of Paris, where he joined the Franciscan Order. Though often remembered for his denunciations of Aristotle, Bonaventure’s thought includes some Aristotelian elements. His criticisms of Aristotle were motivated chiefly by his concern that various colleagues, more impressed by Aristotle’s work than they had reason to be, were philosophizing with the blindness of pagans instead of the wisdom of Christians. To Bonaventure, the ultimate goal of human life is happiness, and happiness comes from union with God in the afterlife. If one forgets this goal when philosophizing, the higher purpose of the discipline is frustrated. Philosophical studies can indeed help in attaining happiness, but only if pursued with humility and as part of a morally upright life. In the grander scheme of things, the ascent of the heart is more important than the ascent of the mind. Bonaventure’s later works consistently emphasize that all creation emanates from, reflects and returns to its source. Because the meaning of human life can be understood only from this wider perspective, the general aim is to show an integrated whole hierarchically ordered to God. The structure and symbolism favoured by Bonaventure reflect mystical elements as well. The world, no less than a book, reveals its creator: all visible things represent a higher
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Page 96 reality. The theologian must use symbols to reveal this deeper meaning. He must teach especially of Christ, through whom God creates everything that exists and who is the sole medium by which we can return to our creator. Bonaventure’s theory of illumination aims to account for the certitude of human knowledge. He argues that there can be no certain knowledge unless the knower is infallible and what is known cannot change. Because the human mind cannot be entirely infallible through its own power, it needs the cooperation of God, even as it needs God as the source of immutable truths. Sense experience does not suffice, for it cannot reveal that what is true could not possibly be otherwise; so, in Bonaventure’s view, the human mind attains certainty about the world only when it understands it in light of the ‘eternal reasons’ or divine ideas. This illumination from God, while necessary for certainty, ordinarily proceeds without a person’s being conscious of it. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM, MEDIEVAL; MYSTICISM, HISTORY OF Further reading Bonaventure (1259) Itinerarium mentis in Deum (Journey of the Mind to God), trans. P. Boehner, The Journey of the Mind to God, ed. S. Brown, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1993. (The mind’s ascent from the contemplation of the sensible world to the contemplation of God.) Gilson, E. (1965) The Philosophy of St Bonaventure , trans. I. Trethowan and F. Sheed, Paterson, NJ: St Anthony Guild. (The standard exegesis of Bonaventure’s philosophy, tendentious in places but probably still unrivalled.) BONNIE KENT BONHOEFFER, DIETRICH (1906–45) Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a twentieth-century Lutheran theologian who associated Christian belief and political action in an exemplary fashion. His part in the struggle of the Confessing Church and of the German resistance against the National-Socialist dictatorship cost him his life. Christocentric and ecclesiocentric, he stressed personal and collective piety and revived the idea of the imitation of Christ; the concepts of obedience and of the suffering God are central to his view. His Ethik (1949) was widely influential; in it, he argued that Christians should not retreat from the world, but have a duty to act within it. His answer to the secularization of the modern world was a ‘religionless Christianity’, a communocentric, pietistic, personal discipline. Further reading Bonhoeffer, D. (1949) Ethik, ed. E. Bethge, Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag; trans. N. Horton Smith, Ethics , London: SCM, 1955. (An incomplete and fragmentary work, Ethik was written secretly by Bonhoeffer in the years before his arrest, and deals very practically with Christian citizenship and conformity to Christ.) JEAN-LOUP SEBAN BONNET, CHARLES (1720–93) In his youth, the Swiss naturalist and philosopher Bonnet made a meticulous and creative study of insects, which won him international fame for his discoveries as well as his methods. He turned to psychology and offered a detailed, but speculative, account of the physiology of mental states. His empirical work was overtaken by speculative ambition. In later life, he developed (from elements already present in his early studies) a comprehensive view of the universe, of its history and its natural history, of theology and of moral philosophy. Christianity was proved, the great chain of being was mapped over time towards an ultimate perfection, and human morality, based on self-love, formed part of the Creator’s scheme. The Creator, at the moment of creation, brought into being all the elements from which this vast unfolding would occur, without further intervention. See also: EVOLUTION, THEORY OF Further reading Bonnet, C. (1770) Recherches philosophiques sur les preuves du christianisme, Geneva:C. Philibert & B. Chirol; trans. J.L. Boissier, Philosophical and Critical Inquiries concerning Christianity , London: Stockdale, 1787. (Reproduces some traditional theistic proofs, and adds the claim that miracles were prefigured.) Anderson, L. (1982) Charles Bonnet and the Order of the Known, Dordrecht: Reidel. (A thorough and interesting survey of Bonnet’s work, influenced by the approach of Foucault.) F.C.T. MOORE BOOK OF CAUSES see LIBER DE CAUSIS BOOK OF CHANGES see YIJING
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Page 97 BOOLE, GEORGE (1815–64) George Boole, a British mathematician, is credited with making a fundamental contribution to modern logic. If Leibniz’s manuscript essays on logic, effectively unknown until the end of the nineteenth century, are excluded, then Boole’s algebra of logic (1847, 1854) was the first successful mathematical treatment of one part of logic. The treatment was mathematical in the broad sense of using a formal language expressed in symbols with definite rules. It was also mathematical in a narrow sense of being closely modelled after numerical algebra, from which it differed by an additional axiom, x2 = x. Letter symbols of this algebra were conceived as representing classes, 1 standing for a ‘universe’ of objects and 0 for the empty class. By identifying logical terms with their extensions, that is, with classes, inferences of a much more general character than those of the traditional syllogistic could be carried out. Boole also showed how this algebra could be used in propositional logic, presenting its earliest systematic general formulation. See also: BOOLEAN ALGEBRA Further reading Boole, G. (1854) An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, on Which are Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities, London: Walton & Maberly; repr. as George Boole’s Collected Logical Works, Chicago, IL, and New York: Open Court, 1916, vol. 2; repr. New York: Dover, 1951. (This work is also notable for its contribution to the origins of modern algebra and, less so, for its extensive discussions, from an unconventional viewpoint, of probability matters.) MacHale, D. (1985) George Boole: His Life and Work, Dublin: Boole Press. (A highly recommended biography. Contains an extended bibliography.) THEODORE HAILPERIN BOOLEAN ALGEBRA Boolean algebra, or the algebra of logic, was devised by the English mathematician George Boole (1815–64) and embodies the first successful application of algebraic methods to logic. Boole seems to have had several interpretations for his system in mind. In his earlier work he thinks of each of the basic symbols of his ‘algebra’ as standing for the mental operation of selecting just the objects possessing some given attribute or included in some given class; later he conceives of these symbols as standing for the attributes or classes themselves. In each of these interpretations the basic symbols are conceived as being capable of combination under certain operations: ‘multiplication’, corresponding to conjunction of attributes or intersection of classes; ‘addition’, corresponding to (exclusive) disjunction or (disjoint) union; and ‘subtraction’, corresponding to ‘excepting’ or difference. He also recognizes that the algebraic laws he proposes are satisfied if the basic symbols are interpreted as taking just the number values 0 and 1. Boole’s ideas have since undergone extensive development, and the resulting concept of Boolean algebra now plays a central role in mathematical logic, probability theory and computer design. See also: BOOLE, G. Further reading Bell, J.L. (1985) Boolean Valued Models and Independence Proofs in Set Theory , Oxford Logic Guides 12, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (A detailed technical account of the subject.) Halmos, P.R. (1963) Lectures on Boolean Algebras, Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand. (An attractively written exposition of the basic theory of Boolean algebras.) J.L. BELL BOSANQUET, BERNARD (1848–1923) One of the most prominent and prolific of the British Idealists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Bosanquet ranged across most fields of philosophy, making his main contributions in epistemology, metaphysics, aesthetics and especially political philosophy. He was deeply influenced by Plato and by Hegel. Bosanquet and F.H. Bradley were close on many matters, and each regarded the other as a co-worker; however, Bosanquet was always more Hegelian, less rigorous in argument than Bradley and lacking his sceptical approach. Bosanquet treats knowledge and reality as a single whole, working out the implications in the concrete ‘modes of experience’ of philosophy, science, morality, art, religion, and social and political life. He is at his best in explaining and developing the thoughts of others, particularly of Hegel, Bradley, Rousseau and T.H. Green. See also: HEGELIANISM Further reading Muirhead, J.H. and R.C. Bosanquet (eds) (1927) Science and Philosophy and Other Essays by the Late Bernard Bosanquet , London: Allen & Unwin. (Good selection of
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Page 98 previously published papers in logic, metaphysics, ethics, politics and aesthetics.) Bosanquet, H. (1924) Bernard Bosanquet: A Short Account of his Life , London: Macmillan. (By his wife; the main biographical source.) PETER P. NICHOLSON BOURDIEU, PIERRE (1930–) Critically assessing both hermeneutic and structuralist approaches, the French philosopher Pierre Bourdieu’s social theory aims at transcending the opposition between the individual and society. On the one hand, people exhibit practical skills which are adjusted to the constraints of the environment. On the other hand, society does not determine people’s actions: the very same practical skills allow them to improvise and deal with an infinite number of situations. Although Bourdieu takes into account the individual, he does not succumb to the Cartesian notion of a self-sufficient subject. Also, his view is very much in opposition to rational choice theory. His theoretical framework has emerged out of his empirical research and vice versa. In his research Bourdieu applies his reflexive sociology: a critical reflection on the part of the social scientist towards their own practices. See also: SOCIOLOGY, THEORIES OF Further reading Harker, R., Mahar, C. and Wilkes, C. (eds) (1990) An Introduction to the Work of Pierre Bourdieu: The Practice of Theory , Basingstoke: Macmillan. (A lively reconstruction of the major themes in Bourdieu’s work, while taking into account the French academic context. One chapter is an interview with the man himself.) PATRICK BAERT BOUTROUX, ÉMILE (1845–1921) The French philosopher Émile Boutroux wanted to reestablish metaphysics in the face of a growing tendency towards materialism, but without rejecting the natural sciences. He hoped to achieve this by showing that only an immaterial mind that is a free and final cause of everything that is determined can give an absolute foundation to the sciences and to nature. Scientific determinism, according to which all phenomena are governed by mathematical necessities, is not incompatible with freedom. Indeed, the contingency of things and of human reason, which one sees in scientific experience, shows that the mind is free; it is therefore only mind which can give a determined existence to things and necessity to scientific explanations. In trying to reconcile metaphysics and science through a philosophy of nature, Boutroux represents a major turning point in French spiritualism, foreshadowing not only Bergson but also Bachelard. Further reading Boutroux, É. (1879) De la contingence des lois de la nature, Paris: Alcan; trans. F. Rothwell, The Contingency of the Laws of Nature , Chicago, IL and London: Open Court, 1916. (Contains Boutroux’s first discussion of necessity and contingency.) Archambault, P. (1928) Émile Boutroux, Paris: Vald. Rasmussen. (General study.) Translated from the French by Robert Stern DIDIER GIL BOWNE, BORDEN PARKER (1847–1910) Bowne was one of the most influential thinkers and writers of the American personalist school of philosophy. His position is theistic and idealistic, and finds in human persons the key to meaning in the world. Knowledge comes only through personal experience, through which we understand ourselves to be enduring thinking entities with a certain degree of freedom. The uniformity of God’s activity is such as to make nature intelligible to us, but our minds are nevertheless independent of God’s. See also: PERSONALISM Further reading Bowne, B.P. (1910) Metaphysics, NewYork: American Book Company. (Detailed argument for Bowne’s personalist metaphysic.) McConnell, F.J. (1929) Borden Parker Bowne , New York: Abington Press. (Biography of Bowne by close friend who was a Methodist bishop.) KEITH E. YANDELL BOYLE, ROBERT (1627–91) Boyle is often remembered for the contributions that he made to the sciences of chemistry and pneumatics. Like other natural philosophers in seventeenth-century England, however, he was a synthetic thinker who sought to advance knowledge in all areas of human concern. An early advocate of experimental methods, he argued that experimentation would not only reveal the hidden processes operative in the world but
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Page 99 would also advance the cause of religion. Through the study of nature, experimentalists would come to understand that the intricacy of design manifest in the world must be the result of an omniscient and omnipotent creator. Boyle’s experimental investigations and theological beliefs led him to a conception of the world as a ‘cosmic mechanism’ comprised of a harmonious set of interrelated processes. He agreed with the leading mechanical philosophers of his day that the corpuscular hypothesis, which explains the causal powers of bodies by reference to the motions of the least parts (corpuscles) of matter, provided the best means for understanding nature. He insisted, however, that these motions and powers could not be known by reasoning alone, but would have to be discovered experimentally. See also: MECHANICS, CLASSICAL Further reading Boyle, R. (1744) The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle , ed. T. Birch, London, 5 vols. Available on microfilm in the Landmarks of Science series, eds Sir H. Hartley and D.H.D. Roller, New York: Readex Microprint, 1967– 76. (Contains all of the works published by Boyle during his lifetime as well as some posthumous works, an autobiographical account of his youth, Birch’s life of Boyle and correspondence between Boyle and a number of the leading figures of his day.) Maddison, R.E.W. (1969) The Life of the Honourable Robert Boyle , New York: Barnes & Noble. (The most definitive life of Boyle, corrects some errors contained in Birch’s account as well as supplementing it with material from the private papers of Boyle’s relations.) ROSE-MARY SARGENT BRADLEY, FRANCIS HERBERT (1846–1924) Bradley was the most famous and philosophically the most influential of the British Idealists, who had a marked impact on British philosophy in the later nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries. They looked for inspiration less to their British predecessors than to Kant and Hegel, though Bradley owed as much to lesser German philosophers such as R.H. Lotze, J.F. Herbart and C. Sigwart. Bradley is most famous for his metaphysics. He argued that our ordinary conceptions of the world conceal contradictions. His radical alternative can be summarized as a combination of monism (that is, reality is one, there are no real separate things) and absolute idealism (that is, reality is idea, or consists of experience – but not the experience of any one individual, for this is forbidden by the monism). This metaphysics is said to have influenced the poetry of T.S. Eliot. But he also made notable contributions to philosophy of history, to ethics and to the philosophy of logic, especially of a critical kind. His critique of hedonism – the view that the goal of morality is the maximization of pleasure – is still one of the best available. Some of his views on logic, for instance, that the grammatical subject of a sentence may not be what the sentence is really about, became standard through their acceptance by Bertrand Russell, an acceptance which survived Russell’s repudiation of idealist logic and metaphysics around the turn of the century. Russell’s and G.E. Moore’s subsequent disparaging attacks on Bradley’s views signalled the return to dominance in England of pluralist (that is, non-monist) doctrines in the tradition of Hume and J.S. Mill, and, perhaps even more significantly, the replacement in philosophy of Bradley’s richly metaphorical literary style and of his confidence in the metaphysician’s right to adjudicate on the ultimate truth with something more like plain speaking and a renewed deference to science and mathematics. Bradley’s contemporary reputation was that of the greatest English philosopher of his generation. This status did not long survive his death, and the relative dearth of serious discussion of his work until more general interest revived in the 1970s has meant that the incidental textbook references to some of his most characteristic and significant views, for example, on relations and on truth, are often based on hostile and misleading caricatures. See also: JAMES, W.; MOORE, G.E. Further reading Bradley, F.H. (1994) Writings on Logic and Metaphysics , ed. and with intros by J.W. Allard and G. Stock, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Contains well-chosen extracts from the Logic, Appearance and Reality and Essays on Truth and Reality . The helpful introductions are both general and topicspecific; this is a very useful edition for undergraduates.) Manser, A. and Stock, G. (eds) (1984) The Philosophy of F.H. Bradley , Oxford: Clarendon Press. (A wellreviewed collection of essays, covering the full range of Bradley’s work, with a useful scene-setting editorial
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Page 100 introduction. Suitable for advanced undergraduates. Reprinted in paperback in 1986.) STEWART CANDLISH BRADWARDINE, THOMAS ( c .1300–49) The English philosopher Thomas Bradwardine was a leading figure in fourteenth-century philosophy and theology from 1328, when he completed De proportionibus velocitatum in motibus (On the Ratios of Velocities in Motions), until his death in 1349, shortly after becoming Archbishop of Canterbury. His theory of ratios of velocities in motions was an important reinterpretation of Aristotle and was influential throughout Europe. The author of numerous mathematical and logical works, Bradwardine helped to initiate a style of natural philosophical analysis using a standard set of logical and mathematical tools. On the Continent, Nicole Oresme, Albert of Saxony and many others wrote works on the ratios of velocities in motions following Bradwardine’s lead. In his De futura contingentibus (On Future Contingents) and De causa Dei Pelagium (On the Cause of God Against the Pelagians), Bradwardine staked positions emphasizing the symmetry of God’s omniscience with respect to past, present and future. See also: OXFORD CALCULATORS Further reading Bradwardine, T. (1328) De proportionibus velocitatum in motibus (On the Ratios of Velocities in Motions), ed. and trans. H.L. Crosby, Jr in Thomas of Bradwardine: His Tractatus de Proportionibus, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1955. (Bradwardine’s extremely influential exposition of one traditional interpretation of the Euclidean theory of operations on ratios, along with its application to the Aristotelian problem of the relations of forces, resistances and velocities in motions.) Dolnikowski, E.W. (1995) Thomas Bradwardine: A View of Time and a Vision of Eternity in FourteenthCentury Thought, Leiden: Brill. (Links Bradwardine’s mathematics, logic, natural philosophy and theology through his concept of time.) EDITH DUDLEY SYLLA BRAHMAN The Sanskrit word brahman (neuter) emerged in late Vedic literature and Upaniṣads (900–300 BC) as the name (never pluralized) of the divine reality pervading the universe, knowledge or experience of which is a person’s supreme good. The word’s earliest usage (often pluralized) is to refer to the verses of the oldest work in Sanskrit (and in any Indo-European language), the Ṛg Veda ( c .1200 BC), which is a compilation of poems and hymns to Indo-European gods. The individual verses of the poems are mantras ( brahmāṛi ), whose proper enunciation in the course of ritual and sacrifice was thought to secure various aims. Thematically, the Ṛg Veda and other early Indian literature presents a sense of pervasive divinity. Apparently through an assimilation of the idea of the magic of mantras to the divine immanence theme the word brahman assumed its later meaning. In any case, Brahman – the Absolute, the supremely real – became the focus of Indian spirituality and the centre of much metaphysics for almost three thousand years, down to the present day. In the Upaniṣads, which are mystic treatises containing speculation about Brahman’s nature and relation to ourselves and the world, the central positions of Vedānta schools emerge, all of which are philosophies of Brahman. But not even in the narrow set of the earliest and most universally accepted Upaniṣads (numbering twelve or thirteen) is there expressed a consistent worldview. Important themes about Brahman may be identified, but there is no overall unity of conception, despite what later exegetes claim. The unity of the early Upaniaads concerns the premier importance of mystical knowledge or awareness of Brahman ( brahmavidyā), not precisely what it is that is to be mystically known. The classical Indian philosophical schools of Vedānta systematized the thought of early Upaniaṣds. See also: GOD, INDIAN CONCEPTIONS OF; VEDĀNTA Further reading Upaniṣads (800–300 BC), trans. P. Olivelle, Upaniṣads, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. (A new translation that may well be the best; readable and accurate.) Warrier, A.G.K. (1977) God in Advaita , Simla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study. (Shows that Śannkara, the great Advaitin, takes seriously the Upaniaadic teaching of saguṇna brahman – that is, God.) STEPHEN H. PHILLIPS BRAHMO SAMAJ The Brahmo (or Brahma) Samaj (‘Society of Brahma’) is the name of a theistic society founded by Raja Rammohun Roy in Calcutta
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Page 101 in 1828. It advocated reform, and eventually abolition, of the traditional caste system, as well as legislation aimed at improving the social status of women and greater protection of children. Also dedicated to Hindu religious reform, the Brahmo Samaj stressed a monotheistic doctrine with a policy of tolerance and respect for all major religions of the world. The society split into two factions in 1866, largely over the issue of the speed of reform. Another split occurred in 1878 over whether the society’s constitution was to be fully democratic. The democratic wing, called the Sadhāraih Brahmo Samaj (‘Universal Brahma Society’), is still active in India. See also: ARYA SAMAJ Further reading Kopf, D. (1979) The Brahmo Samaj and the Shaping of the Modern Indian Mind, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Illustrates the impact of the Brahmo Samaj on the people of India after independence.) K.S. KUMAR BRAZIL, PHILOSOPHY IN It is possible to distinguish between European philosophy in Brazil and Brazilian philosophy. The former refers to Brazilians who participate in discussions of issues occurring in the European philosophic tradition without any reference to Brazilian reality and its problems; the latter to those Brazilian intellectuals who respond to the problems growing out of situations which have confronted the nation historically whether their philosophical orientations have originated in Europe or elsewhere. In the latter case a historical progression. This progression can be seen, from the precabralian Tupi-Guarani speaking societies of eastern South America to the healthy development of Brazilian philosophy since 1950 after the founding of the Institute of Brazilian Philosophy. Brazilian philosophers have since established international reputations in their fields, and one group, known as the Culturalists, have emerged with a distinctly Brazilian approach to philosophy. Further reading Cruz Costa, J. (1964) A History of Ideas in Brazil: the Development of Philosophy in Brazil and the Evolution of National History , Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. (The leading historian of Brazilian philosophy relates national and societal development, covering colonial formation and its basis in Portuguese philosophy and culture.) Revista Brasileira de Filosofia (Review of Brazilian Philosophy) (1951–), São Paulo: Instituto Brasileira de Filosofia. (A quarterly journal.) FRED GILLETTE STURM BRENTANO, FRANZ CLEMENS (1838–1917) Brentano was a philosopher and psychologist who taught at the Universities of Würzburg and Vienna. He made significant contributions to almost every branch of philosophy, notably psychology and philosophy of mind, ontology, ethics and the philosophy of language. He also published several books on the history of philosophy, especially Aristotle, and contended that philosophy proceeds in cycles of advance and decline. He is best known for reintroducing the scholastic concept of intentionality into philosophy and proclaiming it as the characteristic mark of the mental. His teachings, especially those on what he called descriptive psychology, influenced the phenomenological movement in the twentieth century, but because of his concern for precise statement and his sensitivity to the dangers of the undisciplined use of philosophical language, his work also bears affinities to analytic philosophy. His anti-speculative conception of philosophy as a rigorous discipline was furthered by his many brilliant students. Late in life Brentano’s philosophy radically changed: he advocated a sparse ontology of physical and mental things (reism), coupled with a linguistic fictionalism stating that all language purportedly referring to non-things can be replaced by language referring only to things. See also: INTENTIONALITY Further reading Brentano, F. (1874) Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte, Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot; 2nd edn, ed. O. Kraus, Leipzig: Meiner, 1924; repr. Hamburg: Meiner, 1973; trans. A.C. Rancurello, D.B. Terrell and L.L. McAlister and ed. L.L. McAlister, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, London, Routledge, 1969; 2nd edn, 1995. (Brentano’s best-known and most influential work.) McAlister, L.L. (ed.) (1976) The Philosophy of Brentano, London: Duckworth. (An informative collection including personal reminiscences by Stumpf and Husserl.) RODERICK M. CHISHOLM PETER SIMONS
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Page 102 BRIDGMAN, PERCY WILLIAM (1882–1961) Bridgman founded high-pressure experimental physics and was committed to a classical empiricist view of science – a view challenged by twentieth-century developments in relativistic and quantum mechanics. He argued that developments in special relativity showed the experimental operations scientists performed were suitable substitutes for basic constituents of matter, thus founding operationalism, a methodological position which influenced logical positivism and, transformed beyond his recognition, was expropriated by the behaviourist school in the social sciences. As Bridgman grappled with the challenges of general relativity and quantum mechanics, he increasingly parted company with his positivistic and behaviourist followers by moving more towards subjectivist views of science and knowledge. These later views led him to see and explore intimate connections between foundations of scientific knowledge and human freedom. See also: GENERAL RELATIVITY, PHILOSOPHICAL RESPONSES TO Further reading Walter, M.L. (1990) Science and Cultural Crisis: An Intellectual Bibliography of Percy Williams Bridgman (1882–1961), Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. (An invaluable, detailed biography based on archival and published sources. Does an excellent job of relating how Bridgman’s scientific work informs his philosophical views. Contains comprehensive bibliography.) FREDERICK SUPPE BRINKLEY, RICHARD ( fl. 1350–73) Richard Brinkley was a Franciscan theologian at the University of Oxford in the latter half of the fourteenth century. Probably at the request of his superiors, he undertook an attack on nominalism and conceptualism, resulting in his best-known work, Summa logicae (Synopsis of Logic). Other works include a commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sentences, which survives only fragmentarily and in a student’s shortened version. Brinkley had a significant influence on several generations of Oxford logicians and Parisian theologians. See also: LANGUAGE, MEDIEVAL THEORIES OF Further reading Gál, G. and Wood, R. (1980) ‘Richard Brinkley and His Summa logicae’, Franciscan Studies 40: 59–101. (An introduction to the Summa logicae , with an edition of five scattered chapters from Parts I–IV.) ROBERT ANDREWS BRITO, RADULPHUS ( c .1270–c .1320) Radulphus Brito was a prominent master of arts at the University of Paris around 1300. In order to secure the foundation of concepts in extramental reality, he devised a system of four types of ‘intentions’, first and second, abstract and concrete. As a philosopher of language, similar concerns made him claim a formal identity between the modes of signifying (of words) and the modes of being signified (of things). See also: LANGUAGE, MEDIEVAL THEORIES OF Further reading Pinborg, J. (1984) Medieval Semantics, Selected Studies on Medieval Logic and Grammar, ed. S. Ebbesen, London: Variorum. (Several relevant papers, including one on the reception of Brito’s theory of intentions.) STEN EBBESEN BROAD, CHARLIE DUNBAR (1887–1971) A Cambridge contemporary of Russell, Moore and Wittgenstein, C.D. Broad wrote on an exceptional range of topics, including causation, perception, the philosophy of space and time, probability and induction, mind and body, ethics and the history of philosophy. He typically set out a number of received positions on a topic, explored their consequences with great clarity, and then came to a cautious estimate of where the truth probably lay. However, Broad made some notable contributions of his own, especially on perception (he defended a representative theory), induction (he argued that our inductive practices require the existence of natural kinds), and time (he argued that tensed facts cannot be analysed away). Although his talents lay in very careful analysis, Broad insisted that there was a proper place in philosophy for metaphysical speculation; he particularly admired McTaggart, and his monumental Examination of McTaggart’s Philosophy (1933, 1938) contains some of Broad’s best work. Further reading Broad, C.D. (1933, 1938) Examination of McTaggart’s Philosophy , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Over 1,250 pages, the ‘mausoleum’ in which Broad inters his
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Page 103 admired teacher’s philosophy contains some of his own most impressive work.) Schilpp, P.A. (ed.) (1959) The Philosophy of C.D. Broad , New York: Tudor. (Contains Broad’s ‘Autobiography’, twenty-one critical essays – still overall the most useful discussions of his philosophy – and Broad’s ‘Reply to My Critics’. It also contains a detailed bibliography of Broad’s publications up to 1959.) PETER SMITH BROWN, THOMAS (1778–1820) Thomas Brown was the last prominent figure in the Scottish philosophical tradition deriving from David Hume and Thomas Reid. Like Reid, he took the mind’s knowledge about itself to be a datum it is pointless to challenge or try to justify, since no other grounds can be more certain for us. But he defended Hume’s account of causation as nothing more than invariable succession. The mind, therefore, is a simple substance, whose successive states are affected by and affect the states of physical objects: the laws according to which these changes take place are no harder to grasp than the effects of gravitation. Brown’s lectures, published as delivered daily to Edinburgh students, seek to classify the laws of the mind so that we can conveniently understand ourselves, and direct our lives accordingly; the last quarter of his course draws conclusions for ethics and natural religion. Further reading Brown, T. (1820) Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind, Edinburgh: Tait, 4 vols. (Brown’s lecture course as delivered to Edinburgh undergraduates day by day. A broadly associationist psychology which seeks to classify and analyse mental operations of all kinds – perception, judgment, thought, desire, value.) CHRISTOPHER BRYANT BROWNE, PETER (1666–1735) Peter Browne, an Irish bishop, was a critic of Locke’s theory of ideas. His chief philosophical concern was to explain how human beings can conceive of God. He proposed that God’s existence and attributes can be understood analogically, by their real – though inevitably partial – resemblance to human things. He distinguished between analogy, which turns on a ‘real resemblance’, and metaphor, which turns on a merely imagined one. George Berkeley was one of Browne’s students when the latter was provost of Trinity College Dublin. Further reading Browne, P. (1728) The Procedure, Extent, and Limits of Human Understanding , London; repr. New York: Garland, 1976. (Browne’s main work, develops an anti-Lockean theory of knowledge.) KENNETH P. WINKLER BRUNNER, EMIL (1889–1966) Emil Brunner was one of the most influential Protestant theologians of the twentieth century. He was a minister of the Swiss Reformed Church, a professor at the University of Zurich, and held distinguished lectureships in England, the USA and Japan. He joined the ‘dialectical school’ early in his career, but tried to rehabilitate natural theology, which led to a rift with Barth. His works were widely read and often served as basic texts in Reformed and Presbyterian seminaries. He rejected the historicist reduction of Christ to a wise teacher figure that was characteristic of neo-Protestantism. He was also critical of modern philosophical anthropologies – as propounded by Marx or Nietzsche, for example – because he felt that they reduced human essence to a single dimension. Only theological anthropology can fully interpret human essence; and of central importance here is the ‘I–Thou encounter’, whereby the fulfilment of the human ‘I’ is achieved through a relationship with the divine ‘Thou’. Brunner also unfolded an original view on the relation of theology to philosophy. Reason, he argued, is essential for the elucidation and communication of faith. Philosophy, in so far as it indicates the limitations of reason, can serve to prepare us for the revelation of the Absolute. Further reading Brunner, E. (1946–60) Dogmatik , Zurich: Zwingli-Verlag, 3 vols; trans. O. Wyon (vols 1 and 2) and D. Cairns (vol. 3), London: Lutterworth, 1949–62. (Volume 1: the doctrine of God; volume 2: the doctrines of creation and redemption; volume 3: the doctrines of Church, faith and ‘the consummation’.) Kegley, C.W. (ed.) (1962) The Theology of Emil Brunner , New York: Macmillan. (Contains essays by prominent theologians, autobiographical material and a reponse from Brunner, and a bibliography complete to 1962.) JEAN-LOUP SEBAN
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Page 104 BRUNO, GIORDANO (1548–1600) Giordano Bruno was an Italian philosopher of nature and proponent of artificial memory systems who abandoned the Dominican Order and, after a turbulent career in many parts of Europe, was burned to death as a heretic in 1600. Because of his unhappy end, his support for the Copernican heliocentric hypothesis, and his pronounced anti-Aristotelianism, Bruno has often been hailed as the proponent of a scientific worldview against supposed medieval obscurantism. In fact, he is better interpreted in terms of Neoplatonism and, to a lesser extent, Hermeticism (also called Hermetism). Several of Bruno’s later works were devoted to magic; and magic may play some role in his many books on the art of memory. His best-known works are the Italian dialogues he wrote while in England. In these Bruno describes the universe as an animate and infinitely extended unity containing innumerable worlds, each like a great animal with a life of its own. His support of Copernicus in La Cena de le ceneri ( The Ash Wednesday Supper) was related to his belief that a living earth must move, and he specifically rejected any appeal to mere mathematics to prove cosmological hypotheses. His view that the physical world was a union of two substances, Matter and Form, had the consequence that apparent individuals were merely collections of accidents. He identified Form with the World-Soul, but although he saw the universe as permeated by divinity, he also believed in a transcendent God, inaccessible to the human mind. Despite some obvious parallels with both Spinoza and Leibniz, Bruno seems not to have had much direct influence on seventeenth-century thinkers. See also: COPERNICUS, N.; HERMETISM Further reading Bruno, G. (1584) La Cena de le ceneri, ed. G. Aquilecchia, Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1955; trans. S.L. Jaki, The Ash Wednesday Supper. La Cena de le Ceneri, The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1975; trans. E. Gosselin and L. Lerner, The Ash Wednesday Supper: La cena de le ceneri , Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1977. Singer, D.W. (1950) Giordano Bruno: His Life and Thought With Annotated Translation of His Work ‘On the Infinite Universe and Worlds’, New York: Henry Schuman. (Good biography, with a useful chronological bibliography of Bruno’s writings.) E.J. ASHWORTH BRUNSCHVICG, LÉON (1869–1944) Born in Paris, Brunschvicg occupied a central place in French philosophy during the first part of the twentieth century. In 1909 he became a professor at the Sorbonne, teaching there and at the École Normale Supérieure for the next thirty years. His indefatigable activity, wide curiosity and erudition made him a leading figure of French philosophy. His influence is manifest in the work of Bachelard, Piaget, Guéroult, Nabert, Koyré and Sartre. His most important work lay in the field of the philosophy of mathematics, where (among other things) he introduced French philosophers to the work of Frege and Russell. See also: FRENCH PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE Further reading Brunschvicg, L. (1912) Les étapes de la philosophie mathématique (The Stages in the Philosophy of Mathematics), Paris: Alcan; revised edn, Paris: Blanchard, 1972. (A description of the different stages in the mathematical philosophical process.) Boirel, R. (1964) Brunschvicg , Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. (An account of Brunschvicg’s life and works, with an exposition of his philosophy.) MAURICE LOI BRYCE, JAMES (1838–1922) James Bryce, British statesman and writer, combined a distinguished public life with scholarship in history, politics and law. As a jurist his interest lay in historical jurisprudence, but he is best remembered for his comparative politics. He contributed significantly to democratic political theory and to a liberal-historicist approach in philosophy of law. In juristic interests and endeavour, he was closer to the comparative method and historical jurisprudence of Maine. See also: COMMON LAW; LAW, PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Fisher, H.A.L. (1927) James Bryce, London: Macmillan. (This is the standard biography, readily accessible to the general reader.) COLIN MUNRO BUBER, MARTIN (1878–1965) Martin Buber was born in Vienna, but spent most of his career in Germany and Israel. He covered a
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Page 105 pology and theology. Above all, however, Buber was a philosopher, in the lay-person’s sense of the term sense: someone who devoted his intellectual energies to contemplating the meaning of life. Buber’s passionate interest in mysticism was reflected in his early philosophical work. However, he later rejected the view that mystical union is the ultimate goal of relation, and developed a philosophy of relation. In the short but enormously influential work, Ich und Du (I and Thou). Buber argued that the I emerges only through encountering others, and that the very nature of the I depends on the quality of the relationship with the Other. He described two fundamentally different ways of relating to others: the common mode of ‘I–It’, in which people and things are experienced as objects, or, in Kantian terms, as ‘means to an end’; and the ‘I–Thou’ mode, in which I do not ‘experience’ the Other, rather, the Other and I enter into a mutually affirming relation, which is simultaneously a relation with another and a relation with God, the ‘eternal Thou’. Buber acknowledged that necessity of I–It, even in the interpersonal sphere, but lamented its predominance in modern life. Through his scholarly work in philosophy, theology and biblical exegesis, as well as his translation of Scripture and adaptations of Hasidic tales, he sought to reawaken our capacity for I–Thou relations. See also: JEWISH PHILOSOPHY, CONTEMPORARY Further reading Buber, M. (1923) Ich und Du, Leipzig: Insel Verlag; trans. R.G. Smith, I and Thou, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2nd edn, 1958; trans. W. Kaufman, I and Thou, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970. ( Ich und Du is Buber’s most famous and influential work, in which he describes two modes of relating to others: ‘I–Thou’ and ‘I–It’.) Friedman, M. (1991) Encounter on the Narrow Ridge: A Life of Martin Buber , New York: Paragon House. (An accessible intellectual biography of Buber which includes an annotated bibliography of Buber’s most important works in English translation.) TAMRAWRIGHT BÜCHNER, FRIEDRICH KARL CHRISTIAN LUDWIG (LOUIS) (1824–99) The German philosopher Ludwig Büchner wrote one of the most popular and polemical books of the strong materialist movement in later nineteenth century Germany, his Kraft und Stoff (Force and Matter) (1855). He tried to develop a comprehensive worldview, which was based solely on the findings of empirical science and did not take refuge in religion or any other transcendent categories in explaining nature and its development, including human beings. When Büchner tried to expose the backwardness of traditional philosophical and religious views in scientific matters, his arguments had some force, but the positive part of his programme was not free of superficiality and naivety. Büchner’s writings helped to strengthen progressive and rational traditions inside and outside philosophy, but they can also serve as the prime example of the uncritical nineteenth-century belief in science’s capacity to redeem humankind from all evil. Further reading Büchner, L. (1855) Kraft und Stoff. Empirischnaturphilosophische Studien. In allgemein-verständlicher Darstellung, Frankfurt am Main: Meidinger; trans. J.F. Collingwood, Force and Matter, or Principles of the Natural Order of the Universe, London: Trübner, 1864. (Subtitle is changed in later editions. The 4th English edn of 1884 was much reprinted.) Gregory, F. (1977) Scientific Materialism in Nineteenth-Century Germany , Dordrecht: Reidel. (Standard account, comprehensive and very readable.) MICHAEL HEIDELBERGER BUDDHA (6th–5th century BC) The title of Buddha is usually given to the historical founder of the Buddhist religion, Siddhārtha Gautama, although it has been applied to other historical figures, Buddhist and non-Buddhist, and to many who may be mythological. The religion which he founded was enormously successful and for a long period was probably the most widespread world religion. It is sometimes argued that it is not so much a religion as a kind of philosophy. Indeed, Buddhism bears close comparison with some of the philosophical schools of the Hellenistic world in this respect. The Buddha himself does not seem to have known the concept of a transcendent God and most schools of Buddhism have repudiated it on the grounds, among others, that it undermines personal responsibility for action. Buddhism could be considered as a kind of ‘metareligion’, open to many religious practices and tolerating others, but not identifiable with religious
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Page 106 activity as such – more a kind of philosophical structuring of religion together with a methodology for self-development. Associated with this latter is an elaborate and sophisticated account of mental states and the functioning of consciousness. Characteristic of earlier Buddhist thought is a positive emphasis upon balanced states and a strong rejection of any form of underlying substance and most types of changelessness. See also: BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY, INDIAN Further reading Pye, M. (1979) The Buddha , London: Duckworth. (An interesting attempt to distinguish myth, legend and history.) Thomas, E.J. (1927) The Life of Buddha , London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975. (A classic, but still useful account.) L.S. COUSINS BUDDHISM, ĀBHIDHARMIKA SCHOOLS OF During the first centuries after the Buddha, with the development of a settled life of scholarly study and religious practice, distinct schools began to emerge within the Buddhist community. In their efforts to organize and understand the Buddha’s traditional teachings, these schools developed a new genre of text, called ‘Abhidharma’, to express their doctrinal interpretations. More importantly, the term ‘Abhidharma’ was also used to refer to the discriminating insight that was not only requisite for the elucidation of doctrine but also indispensable for religious practice: only insight allows one to isolate and remove the causes of suffering. Abhidharma analysis is innovative in both form and content. While earlier Buddhist discourses were colloquial, using simile and anecdotes, Abhidharma texts were in a highly regimented style, using technical language, intricate definitions and complex classifications. The Abhidharma genre also promoted a method of textual exegesis combining scriptural citation and reasoned arguments. In content, the hallmark of Abhidharma is its exhaustive classification of all factors that were thought to constitute experience. Different schools proposed different classifications; for example, one school proposed a system of seventy-five distinct factors classified into five groups, including material form, the mind, mental factors, factors dissociated from material form and mind, and unconditioned factors. These differences led to heated doctrinal debates, the most serious of which concerned the manner of existence of the individual factors and the modes of their conditioning interaction. For example, do the factors actually exist as real entities or do they exist merely as provisional designations? Is conditioning interaction always successive or can cause and effect be simultaneous in the same moment? Other major topics of debate included differing models for mental processes, especially perception. See also: BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY, INDIAN Further reading Frauwallner, E. (1995) Studies in Abhidharma Literature and the Origins of Buddhist Philosophical Systems , trans. S.F. Kidd, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. (Studies of northern Indian Abhidharma texts.) Lamotte, É. (1988) History of Indian Buddhism , trans. S. Webb-Boin, Louvain and Paris: Peeters Press. (Thorough history of all aspects of early Indian Buddhism.) COLLETT COX BUDDHISM, MĀDHYAMIKA: INDIA AND TIBET Madhyamaka (‘the Middle Doctrine’) Buddhism was one of two Mahāyāna Buddhist schools, the other being Yogācāra, that developed in India between the first and fourth centuries AD. The Mādhyamikas derived the name of their school from the Middle Path ( madhyamapratipad) doctrine expounded by the historical Siddhārtha, prince of the Śākya clan, when he gained the status of a buddha, enlightenment. The Madhyamaka, developed by the second-century philosopher Nāgārjuna on the basis of a class of sūtras known as the Prajñāpāramitā (‘Perfection of Wisdom’), can be seen in his foundational Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (Fundamental Central Way Verses). Therein he expounds the central Buddhist doctrines of the Middle Path in terms of interdependent origination ( pratītyasamutpāda ), conventional language ( prajñapti), no-self nature ( nihsvabhāva) and voidness ( śūnyataā ). He grants that the dharma taught by the enlightened ones is dependent upon two realities ( dve satye samupāśritya ) – the conventional reality of the world ( lokasaṃvṛtisatyam ) and reality as the ultimate ( satyam paramārthatah ). Although voidness is central to Madhyamaka, we are warned against converting śūnyatā into yet another ‘ism’. Historically, Madhyamaka in India comprises
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Page 107 three periods – the early period (second to fifth century), represented by the activities of Nāgārjuna, Āryadeva and Rāhulabhadra; the middle period (fifth to seventh century) exemplified by BuddhapĀlita and Bhāvaviveka (founders respectively of the *Prāsangika and *Svātantrika schools of Madhyamaka), and Candrakīrti; and the later period (eighth to eleventh century), which includes Śāntarakṣaita and Kamalaśīla, who fused the ideas found in the Madhyamaka and Yogācāra systems. Many of the Indian Madhyamaka scholars of the later period contributed to Madhyamaka developments in Tibet. See also: BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY, INDIAN; TIBETAN PHILOSOPHY Further reading Ruegg, D.S. and Schmithausen, L. (eds) (1990) Earliest Buddhism and Madhyamaka , Leiden: Brill. (Five outstanding articles on Madhyamaka by leading writers in the field.) Streng, F.J. (trans.) (1967) Emptiness: A Study in Religious Meaning , NewYork: Abington Press. (A readable English translation of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā interpreted from a philosophical view.) LESLIE S. KAWAMURA BUDDHISM, YOGĀCĀRA SCHOOL OF Yogācāra is one of the two schools of Indian Mahāyāna Buddhism. Its founding is ascribed to two brothers, Asanga and Vasubandhu, but its basic tenets and doctrines were already in circulation for at least a century before the brothers lived. In order to overcome the ignorance that prevented one from attaining liberation from the karmic rounds of birth and death, Yogācāra focused on the processes involved in cognition. Their sustained attention to issues such as cognition, consciousness, perception and epistemology, coupled with claims such as ‘external objects do not exist’ has led some to misinterpret Yogācāra as a form of metaphysical idealism. They did not focus on consciousness to assert it as ultimately real (Yogācāra claims consciousness is only conventionally real), but rather because it is the cause of the karmic problem they are seeking to eliminate. Yogācāra introduced several important new doctrines to Buddhism, including vijñaptimātra, three selfnatures, three turnings of the dharma-wheel and a system of eight consciousnesses. Their close scrutiny of cognition spawned two important developments: an elaborate psychological therapeutic system mapping out the problems in cognition with antidotes to correct them and an earnest epistemological endeavour that led to some of the most sophisticated work on perception and logic ever engaged in by Buddhists or Indians. Although the founding of Yogaācāra is traditionally ascribed to two half-brothers, Asanga and Vasubandhu (fourth–fifth century BC), most of its fundamental doctrines had already appeared in a number of scriptures a century or more earlier, most notably the Saṃdhinirmocanasūtra (Elucidating the Hidden Connections) (third–fourth century BC). Among the key Yogācāra concepts introduced in the Saṃdhinirmocanasūtra are the notions of ‘only-cognition’ ( vijñaptimātra), three self-natures (trisvabhāva), warehouse consciousness ( ālayavijñāna), overturning the basis ( āśrayaparāvṛtti) and the theory of eight consciousnesses. The Saṃdhinirmocanasūtra proclaimed its teachings to be the third turning of the wheel of dharma. Buddha lived around sixth–fifth century BC, but Mahāyāna Sūtra did not begin to appear probably until five hundred years later. New Mahāyāna Sūtra continued to be composed for many centuries. Indian Mahāyānists treated these Sūtras as documents which recorded actual discourses of the Buddha. By the third or fourth century a wide and sometimes incommensurate range of Buddhist doctrines had emerged, but whichever doctrines appeared in Sūtras could be ascribed to the authority of Buddha himself. According to the earliest Pāli Sutta, when Buddha became enlightened he turned the wheel of dharma, that is, began to teach the path to enlightenment. While Buddhists had always maintained that Buddha had geared specific teachings to the specific capacities of specific audiences, the Saṃdhinirmocanasūtra established the idea that Buddha had taught significantly different doctrines to different audiences according to their levels of understanding; and that these different doctrines led from provisional antidotes ( pratipakṣa) for certain wrong views up to a comprehensive teaching that finally made explicit what was only implicit in the earlier teachings. In its view, the first two turnings of the wheel – the teachings of the Four Noble Truths in Nikāya and Abhidharma Buddhism and the teachings of the Madhyamaka school, respectively – had expressed the dharma through incomplete formulations that required further elucidation ( neyārtha ) to be properly understood and thus effective. The first turning, by emphasizing entities (such as dharmas and aggregates)
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Page 108 while ‘hiding’ emptiness, might lead one to hold a substantialistic view; the second turning, by emphasizing negation while ‘hiding’ the positive qualities of the dharma, might be misconstrued as nihilism. The third turning was a middle way between these extremes that finally made everything explicit and definitive ( nīthartha). In order to leave nothing hidden, the Yogācārins embarked on a massive, systematic synthesis of all the Buddhist teachings that had preceded them, scrutinizing and evaluating them down to the most trivial details in an attempt to formulate the definitive Buddhist teaching. Stated another way, to be effective all of Buddhism required a Yogācārin reinterpretation. Innovations in abhidharma analysis, logic, cosmology, meditation methods, psychology, philosophy and ethics are among their most important contributions. Asanga’s magnum opus, the Yogācārabhūmiśāstra (Treatise on the Stages of Yoga Practice), is a comprehensive encyclopedia of Buddhist terms and models, mapped out according to his Yogācārin view of how one progresses along the stages of the path to enlightenment. See also: BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY, INDIAN; BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY, JAPANESE Further reading Griffiths, P. (1986) On Being Mindless: Buddhist Meditation and the Mind–Body Problem , La Salle, IL: Open Court. (Analytic philosophical discussion of the ‘mindless’ cessation meditations, translating and examining some relevant sections of Theravāda, Vaibhāṣaika and Yogācāra texts. Helpful for understanding how Yogācārin positions relate to Buddhism at large.) Nagao, G. (1991) Mādhyamika and Yogācāra , trans. L. Kawamura, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. (Fine collection of essays by one of Japan’s leading Yogācāra scholars.) Powers, J. (1991) The Yogācāra School of Buddhism: A Bibliography, Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press. (A fairly comprehensive bibliography, listing virtually all known Yogācāra works in Sanskrit and Tibetan and most standard Western language works. Its coverage of East Asian Yogācāra is less complete.) DAN LUSTHAUS BUDDHIST CONCEPT OF EMPTINESS ‘Emptiness’ or ‘voidness’ is an expression used in Buddhist thought primarily to mark a distinction between the way things appear to be and the way they actually are, together with attendant attitudes which are held to be spiritually beneficial. It indicates a distinction between appearance and reality, where the paradigm for that distinction is ‘ x is empty ( śūnya ) of y’, and emptiness ( śūnyatā ) is either the fact of x’s being empty of y or the actual absence itself as a quality of x. It thus becomes an expression for the ultimate truth, the final way of things. Śūnya is also a term which can be used in the nontechnical contexts of, for example, ‘The pot is empty of water’. These terms, however, are not univocal in Buddhist thought. If x is empty of y, what this means will depend upon what is substituted for ‘ x’ and ‘ y’. In particular, any simplistic understanding of ‘emptiness’ as the Buddhist term for the Absolute, approached through a sort of via negativa, would be quite misleading. We should distinguish here perhaps four main uses of ‘empty’ and ‘emptiness’: (1) all sentient beings are empty of a Self or anything pertaining to a Self; (2) all things, no matter what, are empty of their own inherent or intrinsic existence because they are all relative to causes and conditions, a view particularly associated with Nāgārjuna and the Mādhyamika school of Buddhism; (3) the flow of nondual consciousness is empty of hypostasized subject–object duality, the Yogācāra view; (4) the Buddha-nature which is within all sentient beings is intrinsically and primevally empty of all defilements, a notion much debated in Tibetan Buddhism. See also: BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY, INDIAN; NOMINALISM, BUDDHIST DOCTRINE OF Further reading Streng, F. (1967) Emptiness: A Study in Religious Meaning , Nashville, TN and New York: Abingdon Press. (Dated but extremely readable introduction to Madhyamaka, with some translated texts. Places Madhyamaka within the context of Religious Studies and the history of Buddhism. An excellent bibliography up to its date of publication.) PAUL WILLIAMS BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY, CHINESE When Buddhism first entered China from India and Central Asia two thousand years ago, Chinese favourably disposed towards it tended to view it as a part or companion school of the native Chinese Huang–Lao Daoist tradition, a form of Daoism rooted in texts and practices attributed to Huangdi (the Yellow Emperor) and Laozi. Others, less accepting of this
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Page 109 ‘foreign’ incursion from the ‘barbarous’ Western Countries, viewed Buddhism as an exotic and dangerous challenge to the social and ethical Chinese civil order. For several centuries, these two attitudes formed the crucible within which the Chinese understanding of Buddhism was fashioned, even as more and more missionaries arrived (predominantly from Central Asia) bringing additional texts, concepts, rituals, meditative disciplines and other practices. Buddhists and Daoists borrowed ideas, terminology, disciplines, cosmologies, institutional structures, literary genres and soteric models from each other, sometimes so profusely that today it can be difficult if not impossible at times to determine who was first to introduce a certain idea. Simultaneously, polemical and political attacks from hostile Chinese quarters forced Buddhists to respond with apologia and ultimately reshape Buddhism into something the Chinese would find not only inoffensive, but attractive. In the fifth century AD, Buddhism began to extricate itself from its quasi-Daoist pigeonhole by clarifying definitive differences between Buddhist and Daoist thought, shedding Daoist vocabulary and literary styles while developing new distinctively Buddhist terminology and genres. Curiously, despite the fact that Mahāyāna Buddhism had few adherents in Central Asia and was outnumbered by other Buddhist schools in India as well, in China Mahāyāna became the dominant form of Buddhism, so much so that few pejoratives were as stinging to a fellow Buddhist as labelling him ‘Hīnayāna’ (literally ‘Little Vehicle,’ a polemical term for non-Mahāyānic forms of Buddhism). By the sixth century, the Chinese had been introduced to a vast array of Buddhist theories and practices representing a wide range of Indian Buddhist schools. As the Chinese struggled to master these doctrines it became evident that, despite the fact that these schools were all supposed to express the One Dharma (Buddha’s Teaching), their teachings were not homogenous, and were frequently incommensurate. By the end of the sixth century, the most pressing issue facing Chinese Buddhists was how to harmonize the disparities between the various teachings. Responses to this issue produced the Sinitic Mahāyāna schools, that is, Buddhist schools that originated in China rather than India. The four Sinitic schools are Tiantai, Huayan, Chan and Pure Land (Jingtu). Issues these schools share in common include Buddhanature, mind, emptiness, tathāgatagarbha, expedient means ( upāya), overcoming birth and death ( saṃsāra), and enlightenment. See also: BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY, INDIAN; BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY, JAPANESE; BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY, KOREAN; CHINESE PHILOSOPHY; FAZANG; LINJI Further reading Ch’en, K. (1964) Buddhism in China , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Though somewhat dated, still a classic overview of the early history of Buddhism in China.) Wright, A. (1990) Studies in Chinese Buddhism , ed. R. Somers, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. (Essays dealing with important people and issues during the formative years of Buddhism in China.) Zürcher, E. (1959) The Buddhist Conquest of China , Leiden: Brill, 2 vols. (Another classic, dealing with the formative periods of Chinese Buddhism.) DAN LUSTHAUS BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY IN TIBET see TIBETAN PHILOSOPHY BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY, INDIAN Buddhism was an important ingredient in the philosophical melange of the Indian subcontinent for over a millennium. From an inconspicuous beginning a few centuries before Christ, Buddhist scholasticism gained in strength until it reached a peak of influence and originality in the latter half of the first millennium. Beginning in the eleventh century, Buddhism gradually declined and eventually disappeared from northern India. Although different individual thinkers placed emphasis on different issues, the tendency was for most writers to offer an integrated philosophical system that incorporated ethics, epistemology and metaphysics. Most of the issues addressed by Buddhist philosophers in India stem directly from the teachings attributed to Siddhārtha Gautama, known better through his honorific title, the Buddha. The central concern of the Buddha was the elimination of unnecessary discontent. His principal insight into this problem was that all dissatisfaction arises because people (and other forms of life as well) foster desires and aversions, which are in turn the consequence of certain misunderstandings about their identity. Discontent can be understood as frustration, or a failure to achieve what one wishes; if one’s wishes are generally unrealistic and therefore unattainable, then one will naturally be generally dissatisfied. Since the Buddha saw human frustration as an effect of misunderstandings
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Page 110 concerning human nature, it was natural for Buddhist philosophers to attend to questions concerning the true nature of a human being. Since the Buddha himself was held as the paradigm of moral excellence, it was also left to later philosophers to determine what kind of being the Buddha had been. A typical question was whether his example was one that ordinary people could hope to follow, or whether his role was in some way more than that of a teacher who showed other people how to improve themselves. The Buddha offered criticisms of many views on human nature and virtue and duty held by the teachers of his age. Several of the views that he opposed were based, at least indirectly, on notions incorporated in the Veda, a body of liturgical literature used by the Brahmans in the performance of rituals. Later generations of Buddhists spent much energy in criticizing Brahmanical claims of the supremacy of the Veda; at the same time, Buddhists tended to place their confidence in a combination of experience and reason. The interest in arriving at correct understanding through correct methods of reasoning led to a preoccupation with questions of logic and epistemology, which tended to overshadow all other philosophical concerns during the last five centuries during which Buddhism was an important factor in Indian philosophy. Since the Buddha saw human frustration as an effect that could be eliminated if its cause were eliminated, it was natural for Buddhist philosophers to focus their attention on a variety of questions concerning causality. How many kinds of cause are there? Can a multiplicity of effects have a single cause? Can a single thing have a multiplicity of causes? How is a potentiality triggered into an actuality? Questions concerning simplicity and complexity, or unity and plurality, figured prominently in Buddhist discussions of what kinds of things in the world are ultimately real. In a tradition that emphasized the principle that all unnecessary human pain and conflict can ultimately be traced to a failure to understand what things in the world are real, it was natural to seek criteria by which one discerns real things from fictions. See also: BUDDHISM, MĀDHYAMIKA: INDIA AND TIBET; BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY, CHINESE; HINDU PHILOSOPHY; JAINA PHILOSOPHY; TIBETAN PHILOSOPHY Further reading Conze, E. (1967) Buddhist Thought in India, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. (A good survey of the issues and the schools of Indian Buddhism.) Warder, A.K. (1970) Indian Buddhism , Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. (This thorough study of the history of Buddhism in India contains several chapters on the history and principal schools of its philosophy.) RICHARD P. HAYES BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY, JAPANESE Buddhism transformed Japanese culture and in turn was transformed in Japan. Mahāyāna Buddhist thought entered Japan from the East Asian continent as part of a cultural complex that included written language, political institutions, formal iconography and Confucian literature. From its introduction in the sixth century through to the sixteenth century, Japanese Buddhism developed largely by incorporating Chinese Buddhism, accommodating indigenous beliefs and reconciling intersectarian disputes. During the isolationist Tokugawa Period (1600–1868), neo-Confucian philosophy and Dutch science challenged the virtual hegemony of Buddhist ways of thinking, but served more often as alternative and sometimes complementary models than as incompatible paradigms. Only since the reopening of Japan in 1868 has Japanese Buddhist thought seriously attempted to come to terms with early Indian Buddhism, Western thought and Christianity. Through the centuries, Buddhism gave the Japanese people a way to make sense of life and death, to explain the world and to seek liberation from suffering. When it engaged in theorizing, it did so in pursuit of religious fulfilment rather than of knowledge for its own sake. As an extension of its practical bent, Japanese Buddhist thought often tended to collapse differences between Buddhism and other forms of Japanese religiosity, between this phenomenal world and any absolute realm, and between the means and end of enlightenment. These tendencies are not Japanese in origin, but they extended further in Japan than in other Buddhist countries and partially define the character of Japanese Buddhist philosophy. In fact, the identity of ‘Japanese Buddhist philosophy’ blends with almost everything with which we would contrast it. As a development and modification of Chinese traditions, there is no one thing that is uniquely Japanese about it; as a Buddhist tradition, it is characteristically syncretistic, often assimilating Shintō and Confucian philosophy in both its doctrines and practices. Rituals, social practices, political
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Page 111 institutions and artistic or literary expressions are as essential as philosophical ideas to Japanese Buddhism. Disputes about ideas often arose but were seldom settled by force of logical argument. One reason for this is that language was used not predominately in the service of logic but for the direct expression and actualization of reality. Disputants appealed to the authority of Buddhist sūtras because these scriptures were thought to manifest a direct understanding of reality. Further, as reality was thought to be allinclusive, the better position in the dispute would be that which was more comprehensive rather than that which was more consistent but exclusive. Politics and practical consequences did play a role in the settling of disputes, but the ideal of harmony or conformity often prevailed. The development of Japanese Buddhist philosophy can thus be seen as the unfolding of major themes rather than a series of philosophical positions in dispute. These themes include the role of language in expressing truth; the non-dual nature of absolute and relative, universal and particular; the actualization of liberation in this world, life or body; the equality of beings; and the transcendent non-duality of good and evil. See also: BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY, CHINESE; DŌGEN; KŪKAI; NICHIREN; SHINRAN Further reading Kitagawa, J. (1987) On Understanding Japanese Religion, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (A collection of essays by a historian of religions that treats both specific topics and the general character of Japanese Buddhism in a manner accessible to the general reader.) Suzuki, D.T. (1964) An Introduction to Zen Buddhism , New York: Grove Press. (Essays by the most influential advocate of the distinctiveness of Zen Buddhism.) JOHN C. MARALDO BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY, KOREAN Buddhism was transmitted to the Korean peninsula from China in the middle of the fourth century AD. Korea at this time was divided into three kingdoms: Kokuryô, Paekche and Silla. Both Kokuryô and Paekche accepted Buddhism as a state religion immediately after it was introduced, to Kokuryô in 372 AD and to Paekche in 384 AD. However, it was not until two centuries later that Silla accepted Buddhism as a state religion. This was because Silla was the last of the three kingdoms to become established as a centralized power under the authority of one king. It is not coincidental that Buddhism was accepted by these three states at the very same time that a strong kingship, independent of the aristocracy, was created. These newly established kingships needed a new ideology with which to rule, separate from the age-old shamanistic tradition which had been honored among the previous loose confederations of tribes. Buddhism fulfilled this need. It became a highly valued tool which kings used shrewdly, not only to provide their societies with a political ideology but to give them a foundation from which to build a viable system of ethics and philosophical thinking. Given this historical legacy, Korean Buddhism came to possess a feature which set it apart from the other East Asian traditions: it became ‘state-protection’ Buddhism. Although this was not a particularly sophisticated phenomenon on a philosophical level, this feature had a lasting influence on all aspects of Buddhist thought in Korea. In general, Korean Buddhism has followed a course of development more or less parallel to that of the greater East Asian context, although with notably closer ties to China than to Japan. There is no historical evidence which indicates any direct intellectual transmission from India, Buddhism’s birthplace; rather, most of the philosophical development of Buddhism in Korea occurred as Korean monks travelled to China to study and obtain Buddhist texts which had either been written in or translated into Chinese. Despite such close ties to China, however, Korean Buddhism has developed its own identity, distinct from that of its progenitor. Compared to Indian and Central Asian Buddhism, which developed along clear historical lines, the development of Buddhism in China was largely dependent on the personalities of individual monks, and was thus affected by such factors as their region of origination and the particular texts which they emphasized. Thus, in the process of assimilating Indian Buddhism, the Chinese created and developed a number of widely varying schools of Buddhist thought. In Korea, however, such a diverse number of philosophical traditions was never established. Rather, one of the distinct features of Korean Buddhism has been its preference for incorporating many different perspectives into a single, cohesive body of thought. See also: CHINUL; SÔSAN HYUJÔNG; ÛISANG; WÔNCH’Ū K; WÔNHYO
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Page 112 Further reading Buswell, R. (1983) The Korean Approach to Zen: The Collected Works of Chinul, Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press. (This work includes a brief outline of Korean Buddhism before Sôn, but mainly deals with Chinul’s life and works. It includes an English translation of most of the major works of Chinul, and a bibliography of works on Korean Buddhism written in Asian languages.) Korean Buddhist Research Institute (ed.) (1993) The History and Culture of Buddhism in Korea, Seoul: Dongguk University Press. (This edited translation of works on Korean Buddhism covers the Three Kingdoms period to modern times.) SUNGTAEK CHO BUFFIER, CLAUDE (1661–1737) A French Jesuit who flourished in the early eighteenth century, Buffier developed an outlook that he referred to as common-sense philosophy. While deeply influenced by the philosophies of Descartes and Locke, he saw their reliance on the testimony of inner experience to be conducive to scepticism concerning the external world. In reaction to this, he sought to establish the irrevocable claims of various ‘first truths’, which pointed towards external reality and qualified it in various respects. His work anticipates certain themes that surfaced later in the common-sense philosophy of Thomas Reid. See also: COMMON SENSE SCHOOL Further reading Buffier, C. (1843) Oeuvres philosophiques du Père Buffier (Philosophical Works of Father Buffier), ed. Bouillier, F., Paris: Charpentier. (Contains major works including the Traité, the Eléments and the Examen ; preceded by a substantial and insightful introduction.) Marcil-Lacoste, L. (1982) Claude Buffier and Thomas Reid: Two Common-Sense Philosophers, Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. (Good comparison between Buffier and Reid, requiring some philosophical sophistication; good bibliography of secondary literature.) JAMES W. MANNS BUFFON, GEORGES LOUIS LECLERC, COMTE DE (1707–88) Both as a scientist and as a writer, Buffon was one of the most highly esteemed figures of the European Enlightenment. In depicting the perpetual flux of the dynamic forces of Nature, he portrayed the varieties of animal and vegetable species as subject to continual change, in contrast with Linnaeus, whose system of classification based on physical descriptions alone appeared timeless. But Buffon’s definition of a species in terms of procreative power excluded the evolutionary hypothesis that any species could become transformed into another. Hybrids, as imperfect copies of their prototypes, were in his scheme ultimately destined to become sterile rather than to generate fresh species. By virtue of the same definition, he judged that the different races of mankind formed family members of a single species, since the mating of humans of all varieties was equally fertile. See also: ENLIGHTENMENT, CONTINENTAL; EVOLUTION, THEORY OF Further reading Buffon, G.L.L. (1749–88) Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière (General and particular natural history), Paris: Imprimerie Royale. Gerbi, A. (1973) The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, 1750–1900 . (A comprehensive account of the influence of Buffon’s denigration of the natural species of America, originally published in Italian in 1955.) ROBERT WOKLER BULGAKOV, SERGEI NIKOLAEVICH (1871–1944) A luminary of the Russian Religious-Philosophical Renaissance, Bulgakov moved from Marxism, to idealism, to Christianity in the early twentieth century. He rejected historical determinism, class struggle and all theories of progress that accept the suffering of one generation as a bridge to the happiness of another. He regarded the abolition of poverty as a moral imperative, insisted that Christianity mandates political and social reform, and wanted to create a new culture in which Orthodox Christianity would permeate every area of Russian life. His most important philosophical works, Filosofiia khoziaistva, chast’ pervaia (The Philosophy of the Economy, Part I) (1912) and Svet nevechernyi (Unfading Light) (1917), reflect his turn to a Solov’ëvian mysticism which apotheosized transfiguration, Sophia and Godmanhood ( Bogochelovechestvo). Bulgakov saw the cosmos as an organic whole, animated and structured by a World Soul, an
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Page 113 entelechy that he called Sophia, Divine Wisdom. Sophia mediates between God and his creation, working mysteriously through human beings. In emigration, Bulgakov developed new interpretations of Orthodox dogmatics and participated in the ecumenical movement. His lifelong concerns were the Church in the world and the interconnection of religion and life. His writings on contemporary political, social and cultural issues helped inspire the Russian Religious-Philosophical Renaissance. See also: RUSSIAN RELIGIOUS-PHILOSOPHICAL RENAISSANCE Further reading Evtuhov, C. (1996) The Cross and the Sickle: Sergei Bulgakov and the Fate of Russian Religious Philosophy , Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press (Bulgakov’s thought in the context of the Russian Silver Age.) BERNICE GLATZER ROSENTHAL BULTMANN, RUDOLF (1884–1976) Rudolf Bultmann, who lived and taught all his life in Germany, was one of the most influential Protestant theologians of the period that immediately followed the Second World War. A founding member of the school of dialectical theology in the 1920s, he was a major New Testament scholar, who refined the method of form criticism. He argued that the Synoptic Gospels reveal not the historical Jesus, but the Christ of faith, the Christ-myth developed by the early church. The existentialist philosophy of Martin Heidegger was a major influence, and he adapted it to the needs of Christian theology, devising an existential access to faith. He contrasted Historie – objective, factual accounts of historical events – with Geschichte – the meaning that people choose to give to those events. One must demythologize the New Testament – strip it of its prescientific imagery – before one can interpret its significance for oneself. Bultmann defined biblical hermeneutics as an inquiry into the reality of human existence and proposed a new understanding of the person and teaching of Christ. Central to this is the concept of the kerygma, the proclamation of the salvation-event focused on Christ. It is in response to the kerygma that a human being can actively opt for faith. Bultmann reinterpreted the Lutheran doctrine of justification and the theology of the cross in the light of this. See also: EXISTENTIALIST THEOLOGY Further reading Bultmann, R. et al . (1948–55) Kerygma und Mythos: ein theologisches Gesprach , ed. H.W Bartsch, Hamburg: Reich & Heidrich, 5 vols; trans. R.H. Fuller, Kerygma and Myth: A Theological Debate , London: SCM Press, 2 vols, 1953, 1962. (Selections from the first two German volumes are in the first English volume, and selections from the last three are in the second. This is the definitive guide to the theological debate on demythologization.) Braaten, C.E. and Harrisville, R. (eds) (1962) Kerygma and History: A Symposium on the Theology of Rudolf Bultmann , New York: Abingdon, 1962. (An important collection of essays by prominent theologians.) JEAN-LOUP SEBAN BUNDLE THEORY OF MIND see MIND, BUNDLE THEORY OF BURIDAN, JOHN ( c .1300–after 1358) Unlike most other important philosophers of the scholastic period, John Buridan never entered the theology faculty but spent his entire career as an arts master at the University of Paris. There he distinguished himself primarily as a logician who made numerous additions and refinements to the Parisian tradition of propositional logic. These included the development of a genuinely nominalist semantics, as well as techniques for analyzing propositions containing intentional verbs and paradoxes of self-reference. Even in his writings on metaphysics and natural philosophy, logic is Buridan’s preferred vehicle for his nominalistic and naturalistic vision. Buridan’s nominalism is concerned not merely with denying the existence of real universals, but with a commitment to economize on entities, of which real universals are but one superfluous type. Likewise, his representationalist epistemology accounts for the difference between universal and singular cognition by focusing on how the intellect cognizes its object, rather than by looking for some difference in the objects themselves. He differs from other nominalists of the period, however, in his willingness to embrace realism about modes of things to explain certain kinds of physical change. Underlying Buridan’s natural philosophy is his confidence that the world is knowable by us (although not with absolute certainty). His approach to natural science is empirical in the sense that it emphasizes the evidentness of appearances, the reliability of a posteriori modes of reasoning and the application of certain
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Page 114 naturalistic models of explanation to a wide range of phenomena. In similar fashion, he locates the will’s freedom in our evident ability to defer choice in the face of alternatives whose goodness appears dubious or uncertain. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM, MEDIEVAL; NOMINALISM Further reading Faral, E. (1950) Jean Buridan: Maître dès Arts de l’Université de Paris (Jean Burdian: Master of Arts of the University of Paris), Extrait de l’Histoire littéraire de la France,Tome XXVIII, 2e partie, Paris: Imprimerie Nationale. (Still the best account of the many sources on Buridan’s life and times.) Hughes, G.E. (1982) John Buridan on Self-Reference: Chapter Eight of Buridan’s Sophismata with a Translation, an Introduction, and a Philosophical Commentary, New York: Cambridge University Press. (Discusses Buridan’s treatment of self-referential paradoxes.) JACK ZUPKO BURKE, EDMUND (1729–97) Edmund Burke’s philosophical importance lies in two fields, aesthetics and political theory. His early work on aesthetics, the Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), explored the experiential sources of these two, as he claimed, fundamental responses, relating them respectively to terror at the fear of death and to the love of society. Active in British politics from 1759, and Member of Parliament from 1765, he wrote and delivered a number of famous political pamphlets and speeches, on party in politics – Thoughts on the Causes of the Present Discontents (1770), on the crisis with the American colonies – On Conciliation with America (1775), on financial reform and on the reform of British India – Speech on Mr Fox’s East India Bill (1783). While clearly informed by a reflective political mind, these are, however, pièces d’occasion , not political philosophy, and their party political provenance has rendered them suspect to many commentators. His most powerful and philosophically influential works were written in opposition to the ideas of the French Revolution, in particular Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), which has come to be seen as a definitive articulation of anglophone political conservatism. Here Burke considered the sources and desirability of social continuity, locating these in a suspicion of abstract reason, a disposition to follow custom, and certain institutions – hereditary monarchy, inheritance of property, and social corporations such as an established Church. His Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791) insisted on the distinction between the French and Britain’s revolution of 1688; while his final works, Letters on a Regicide Peace (1795), urged an uncompromising crusade on behalf of European Christian civilization against its atheist, Jacobin antithesis. See also: CONSERVATISM Further reading Burke, E. (1886) The Works of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke , London: Bell. O’Brien, C.C. (1992) The Great Melody, London: Sinclair-Stevenson. (A very full and reflective biography.) IAIN HAMPSHER-MONK BURLEY, WALTER ( c .1275–c .1345) Active in the first half of the fourteenth century, Burley received his arts degree from Oxford before 1301 and his doctorate in theology from Paris before 1324. At one time a fellow of Merton College, he – along with Thomas Bradwardine, Richard Kilvington and others – became a member of the household of Richard de Bury, Bishop of Durham and served several times as envoy of the King of England to the papal court. Despite his extra-university activities, Burley continued to compose Aristotelian commentaries and to engage in disputations to the end of his life. A clear and prolific writer, Burley has been labelled an ‘Averroist’ and a ‘realist’ because of his arguments against Ockham, but it would perhaps be more accurate to see him as a middle-of-the-road Aristotelian whose intellectual activity coincided with the transition between the approaches of Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus on the one hand and those of William of Ockham and the Oxford Calculators on the other. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM, MEDIEVAL; OXFORD CALCULATORS Further reading Sylla, E.D. (1988) ‘Walter Burley’s Tractatus Primus: Evidence Concerning the Relations of Disputations and Written Works’, Franciscan Studies 44: 257–74. (Deals with Burley’s Tractatus primus and the various opponents whose opinions are considered in that work.) EDITH DUDLEY SYLLA
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Page 115 BURNETT, JAMES see MONBODDO, LORD (JAMES BURNETT) BURTHOGGE, RICHARD ( c .1638–c .1704) The English physician Richard Burthogge, perhaps the first but certainly not the least interesting modern idealist, was a minor philosopher who responded to a variety of English and Dutch influences. His epistemology, constructed as an undogmatic framework within which to debate theological and metaphysical issues, contains remarkable resemblances to later, even recent idealism. He argued that, since our faculties help to shape their objects, we never know things as they are in themselves: all the immediate objects of thought are appearances. ‘Metaphysical truth’ is therefore beyond us, but we approach ‘logical truth’ in so far as our notions harmonize or cohere with one another and with experience. In this spirit, Burthogge advocated a tolerant reasonableness in religion, while in metaphysics he postulated a universal mind, united with matter, of which individual minds are local manifestations. Further reading Burthogge, R. (1921) The Philosophical Writings of Richard Burthogge , ed.M.W.Landes, Chicago, IL, and London: Open Court. (Contains the Organum Vetus et Novum, Of the Soul of the World , with selections from An Essay upon Reason . Introduction presents Burthogge as precursor of Kant.) Yolton, J.W. (1968) John Locke and the Way of Ideas, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Contains discussions of Burthogge’s relation to Locke.) MICHAEL AYERS BUSHI PHILOSOPHY Bushi is one of several terms for the warrior of premodern Japan; samurai is another. The ‘way of the warrior’ – that is, the beliefs, attitudes and patterns of behaviour of the premodern Japanese warrior – is commonly called bushidō (literally, the ‘way of the bushi ’). However, bushidō is actually a phrase of rather late derivation, and in premodern times was never exclusively used to describe the warrior way. Two of the earliest and most enduring phrases for the way of the warriors who rose in the provinces of Japan in the late ninth and tenth centuries were the ‘way of the bow and arrow’ and the ‘way of the bow and horse’. These phrases, however, referred to little more than prowess in the military arts, the most important of which, as the second phrase clearly specifies, were horse riding and archery. For many centuries no one in Japan undertook to define systematically what the way of the warrior in a larger sense was or should be. Warrior beliefs, ideals and aspirations – including loyalty, courage, the yearning for battlefield fame, fear of shame and an acute sense of honour and ‘face’ – were widely recognized, but neither warriors nor others apparently felt the need to codify them in writing. Not until the establishment of the Tokugawa military government (shogunate) in 1600, which brought two and a half centuries of nearly uninterrupted peace to Japan, did philosophers begin to study and write about the warrior way ( bushidō ). Concerned about the meaning and proper role of a ruling warrior class during an age of peace, philosophers posited that warriors should not only maintain military preparedness to deal with fighting that might occur, but should also develop themselves, through education based primarily on Confucianism, to serve as models and moral exemplars for all classes of Japanese society. See also: HONOUR; WAR AND PEACE, PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Varley, P. (1994) Warriors of Japan, As Portrayed in the War Tales, Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press. (Description of the samurai class.) Yamamoto Tsunetomo (1716) Hagakure (In the Shadow of the Leaves), trans. W.S. Wilson, Tokyo: Kodansha, 1979. (One of the most prominent works of bushi philosophy.) PAUL VARLEY BUSINESS ETHICS Business ethics is the application of theories of right and wrong to activity within and between commercial enterprises, and between commercial enterprises and their broader environment. It is a wide range of activity, and no brief list can be made of the issues it raises. The safety of working practices; the fairness of recruitment; the transparency of financial accounting; the promptness of payments to suppliers; the degree of permissible aggression between competitors: all come within the range of the subject. So do relations between businesses and consumers, local communities, national governments and ecosystems. Many, but not all, of these issues can be understood to bear on distinct, recognized groups with their own stakes in a business: employees, shareholders,
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Page 116 consumers, and so on. The literature of business ethics tends to concentrate on ‘stakeholders’ – anyone who occupies a role within the business or who belongs to a recognized group outside the business that is affected by its activity – but not in every sort of business. Corporations are often discussed to the exclusion of medium-sized and small enterprises. Theories of right and wrong in business ethics come from a number of sources. Academic moral philosophy has contributed utilitarianism, Kantianism and Aristotelianism, as well as egoism and social contract theory. There are also theories that originate in organized religion, in the manifestos of political activists, in the thoughts of certain tycoons with an interest in social engineering, and in the writings of management ‘gurus’. Recently, business ethics has been affected by the ending of the Cold War, and the breakdown of what were once command economies. These developments have encouraged enthusiasts for the market economy to advocate moral and political ideas consistent with capitalism, and the handing over to private companies of activity in certain countries that has long been reserved for the state. See also: ECONOMICS AND ETHICS; PROFESSIONAL ETHICS Further reading Solomon, R. (1992) Ethics and Excellence: Co-operation and Integrity in Business, New York: Oxford University Press. (Adapts the Aristotelian concept of virtue to the demands of business ethics; works out virtues for managers.) Sorell, T. and Hendry, J. (1994) Business Ethics . Oxford: Heinemann. (A review of the subject from a British and western European perspective.) TOM SORELL BUTLER, JOSEPH (1692–1752) The English moral philosopher Joseph Butler is in that long line of eighteenth-century thinkers who sought to answer Thomas Hobbes on human nature and moral motivation. Following the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, he rejects any purely egoistic conception of these. Instead, he analyses human nature into parts, of which he notices in detail appetites, affections, and passions on the one hand and the principles of self-love, benevolence and conscience on the other. His ethics consists in the main in showing the relation of these parts to each other. They form a hierarchy, ordered in terms of their natural authority, and while such authority can be usurped, as when the particular passions overwhelm self-love and conscience, the system that they constitute, or human nature, is rightly proportioned when each part occupies its rightful place in the ordered hierarchy. Virtue consists in acting in accordance with that ordered, rightly proportioned nature. As a philosopher of religion, Butler addresses himself critically to the eighteenth-century flowering of deism in Britain. On the whole, the deists allowed that God the Creator existed but rejected the doctrines of natural and, especially, revealed religion. Butler’s central tactic against them is to argue, first, that the central theses associated with natural religion, such as a future life, are probable; and second, that the central theses associated with revealed religion, such as miracles, are as probable as those of natural religion. Much turns, therefore, on the success of Butler’s case in appealing to what is present in this world as evidence for a future life. See also: SHAFTESBURY, THIRD EARL OF Further reading Butler, J. (1896) Collected Works, ed.W.E. Gladstone, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2 vols. (Volume 1 contains The Analogy , the dissertations Of Personal Identity, Of the Nature of Virtue and the Correspondence with Samuel Clarke. Volume 2 contains Butler’s various sermons and the Charge to the Durham Clergy .) Cunliffe, C. (ed.) (1992) Joseph Butler’s Moral and Religious Thought, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Collection of original articles on Butler’s ethics and philosophy of religion.) R.G. FREY BYZANTINE PHILOSOPHY In Byzantium from the ninth century through to the fifteenth century, philosophy as a discipline remained the science of fundamental truths concerning human beings and the world. Philosophy, the ‘wisdom from without’, was invariably contrasted with the ‘philosophy from within’, namely theology. The view that philosophy is ‘the handmaiden of theology’, which the Greek Church Fathers derived from Philo and the Alexandrian school of theology, was not the dominant position in Byzantium as it was in the West; philosophy, and logic in particular, was never treated as a mere background to, or tool of, theology. By the same token, theology in Byzantium never developed into a systematic
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Page 117 method of dialectical inquiry into Christian truths, or a science. Thus the initial distinction between philosophy and theology remained intact. In terms of institutional practice, theological schools and studies did not exist in Byzantium and the main purpose of higher studies was to train state functionaries. This instruction, based on philosophy and the quadrivium, was mainly private, but it received support from the emperor and the church and we do hear of occasional interference by the secular or ecclesiastical authorities, perhaps because of professional or personal rivalries among the philosophy teachers. Furthermore, Byzantium had no independent universities or centres of study instituted by monastic orders as there were in the West, where social and political conditions were different. Philosophy in Byzantium also steered clear of involvement in the theological controversies that arose from time to time. The prevalent model of the thinker in Byzantium was a sort of encyclopedic teacher of philosophy, an erudite scholar who kept in touch with the sciences of the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music) and other disciplines and set the philosophical tone of the scientific curricula. The development of philosophy in Byzantium was thus very different from that of Western scholasticism. See also: MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY; PATRISTIC PHILOSOPHY; PLATONISM, EARLY AND MIDDLE; MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY, RUSSIAN Further reading Tatakis, B.N. (1949) La Philosophie byzantine (Byzantine Philosophy), Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. (The first systematic survey of the subject, now somewhat out of date.) Woodhouse, C.M. (1986) Gemistos Plethon: The Last of the Hellenes , Oxford: Clarendon Press. (The life of Gemistos-Plethon, perhaps the most original thinker in Byzantium.) PHIL LINOS BENAKIS
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Page 118 C CABANIS, PIERRE-JEAN (1757–1808) The French physician Cabanis believed in the possibility of a ‘science of man’, having its basis in medicine. He tried to show how a materialist conception of the human organism can throw light on our mental and moral life. The properties of living matter were derived from physical laws, but had their own peculiarities. In particular, the property of sensibility (being able to have sensations) and the property of motility (involving the experience of effort and of resistance to it) were the keys to understanding human nature. Though the thrust of Cabanis’ thought is materialistic, his emphasis on medical science distinguishes him both from the mechanistic tradition as represented by La Mettrie, and from the intellectualist tradition represented by Condillac, in which sensations are taken as given mental items, from which the rest of our mental life is constructed by operations of reasoning or association. See also: HUMAN NATURE, EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY SCIENCE OF; LA METTRIE, J.O. DE Further reading Cabanis, P.-J.G. (1956) Œeuvres philosophiques (Philosophical works), ed. J. Cazeneuve and C. Lehec, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. (Cabanis’ collected philosophical works.) Staum, M.S. (1980) Cabanis: Enlightenment and Medical Philosophy in the French Revolution , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (A very useful study.) F.C.T. MOORE CABRAL, AMÍLCAR (1924–73) Amílcar Cabral was founder and leader of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC), which led a war of liberation in the Portuguese colonies of Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde that ended with the recognition of their joint independence by the Portuguese government in October 1974. Cabral was assassinated in 1973, the victim of an attempted coup by opponents aiming to take over the PAIGC leadership. Thus he did not live to see the independence for which he had struggled. Cabral’s importance for African political philosophy lies in his having developed an undogmatic left-wing analysis of the situation of the Guinean peasantry. While familiar with Marxist analysis, Cabral was always willing to adapt it to the empirical realities of the Guinean situation. His writings on the role of culture in the nationalist struggle, which have important affinities with Gramsci, combine theoretical ingenuity with detailed local knowledge. See also: FANON, F.; GRAMSCI, A. Further reading Cabral, A. (1973) Return to the Source , New York: Monthly Review Press. (Selected speeches, including ’The Weapon of Theory’ and an important essay on ‘Identity and Dignity in the Context of National Liberation’, which discusses the idea of a ‘return to the source’ quite extensively.) Chabal, P. (1983) Amílcar Cabral: Revolutionary Leadership and People’s War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (The first scholarly biography with a substantial chapter devoted to Cabral’s social and political thought. Also contains a thorough bibliography of Cabral’s writings.) K. ANTHONY APPIAH CAJETAN (THOMAS DE VIO) (1468–1534) The Italian cardinal Thomas de Vio, better known as Cajetan, has long been considered to be the outstanding commentator on the philosophical thought of Thomas Aquinas. He has had a great influence not only on discussions about Aquinas’ theory of analogical predication regarding God and creatures but also on discussions about Aquinas’ fundamental notions of essence and existence. On both counts his interpretations are at variance with Aquinas himself. He also set himself in opposition to Aquinas when he denied in his later writings that the immortality of the human soul could be demonstrated, arguing that it is a doctrine that must be accepted simply on faith, like the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. His explication of Aquinas’ cognitive psychology
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Page 119 is an interesting development that goes beyond Aquinas. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM, RENAISSANCE; THOMISM Further reading Cajetan [Vio, T. de] (1495) In De Ente et Essentia divi Thomae Aquinatis , ed. M.-H. Laurent, Turin: Marietti, 1934; trans. L.H. Kendzierski and F.C. Wade, Cajetan: Commentary on ‘Being and Essence’, Mediaeval Philosophical Texts in Translation 14, Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1964. ( In De Ente was finished at Padua in 1495 and first published at Venice in 1496. While commenting on Aquinas’ text, Cajetan develops metaphysical ideas of his own.) EDWARD P. MAHONEY CALCIDIUS ( c . 4th century AD) The Platonist Calcidius (sometimes less correctly spelt Chalcidius) was the author of a Latin work containing a partial translation of, and partial commentary on, Plato’s Timaeus . Although of uncertain date, the doctrinal content of his commentary reflects the thought of the Middle Platonist era ( c .50 BC– AD 200). See also: PLATONISM, EARLY AND MIDDLE Further reading Dillon, J. (1977) The Middle Platonists , London: Duckworth, 401–8. (Introductory account of Calcidius.) JOHN DILLON CALLICLES (late 5th century BC) Callicles, although known only as a character in Plato’s Gorgias (the dramatic date of which is somewhere between 430 and 405 BC), was probably an actual historical person. Employing a distinction between nature ( physis) and convention ( nomos), he argues eloquently that the naturally superior should seize both political power and a greater share of material goods: it is only a convention of the weak majority which labels such behaviour unjust. In private life the superior should indulge their desires freely: excess and licence are true virtue and happiness. See also: PHYSIS AND NOMOS Further reading Plato ( c .395–387 BC) Gorgias , ed. E.R. Dodds, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959; trans. T. Irwin, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979. (The earlier edition is scholarly and sensitive; it includes Greek text, with introduction and commentary and contains a useful appendix on Callicles and Nietzsche; the translation, with introduction and notes, contains a crisp and rigorous appraisal of Callicles’ philosophical position.) ANGELA HOBBS CALVIN, JOHN (1509–64) John Calvin, French Protestant reformer and theologian, was a minister among Reformed Christians in Geneva and Strasbourg. His Institutes of the Christian Religion (first edition 1536) – which follows the broad outline of the Apostles’ Creed and is shaped by biblical and patristic thought – is the cornerstone of Reformed theology. Calvin’s religious epistemology links self-knowledge and knowledge of God. He identifies in humans an innate awareness of God, which is supported by the general revelation of God in creation and providence. Because sin has corrupted this innate awareness, Scripture – confirmed by the Holy Spirit – is needed for genuine knowledge of God. Scripture teaches that God created the world out of nothing and sustains every part of it. Humanity, which was created good and with free will, has defaced itself and lost significant freedom due to its fall into sin. Calvin sees Christ the mediator as the fulfilment of the Old Testament offices of prophet, priest and king. Calvin insists that God justifies sinners on the basis of grace and not works, forgiving their sins and imputing Christ’s righteousness to them. Such justification, received by faith, glorifies God and relieves believers’ anxiety about their status before God. On the basis of his will alone, God predestines some individuals to eternal life and others to eternal damnation. Calvin dignifies even ordinary occupations by seeing them as service to God. He recognizes the distinction between civil government and the Church, although he says that government should protect true worship of God and Christians should obey and support their government. Calvin’s thought was dominant in non-Lutheran Protestant churches until the eighteenth century and has enjoyed a resurgence since the mid nineteenth century. See also: LUTHER, M. Further reading Calvin, J. (1559) Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. J.T. McNeill, trans. F.L. Battles, The Library of Christian Classics, Philadelphia, PA: Westminster, 1960, 2 vols. (The
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Page 120 standard translation of the definitive 1559 edition.) McNeill, J.T. (1954) The History and Character of Calvinism , Oxford: Oxford University Press. (A classic study of Calvin, his background and his influence.) RONALD J. FEENSTRA CAMBRIDGE PLATONISM Cambridge Platonism was an intellectual movement broadly inspired by the Platonic tradition, centred in Cambridge from the 1630s to the 1680s. Its hallmark was a devotion to reason in metaphysics, religion and ethics. The Cambridge Platonists made reason rather than tradition and inspiration their ultimate criterion of knowledge. Their central aim was to reconcile the realms of reason and faith, the new natural philosophy and Christian revelation. Although loyal to the methods and naturalism of the new sciences, they opposed its mechanical model of explanation because it seemed to leave no room for spirit, God and life. In epistemology the Cambridge Platonists were critics of empiricism and stressed the role of reason in knowledge; they also criticized conventionalism and held that there are essential or natural distinctions between things. In metaphysics they attempted to establish the existence of spirit, God and life in a manner consistent with the naturalism and method of the new sciences. In ethics the Cambridge Platonists defended moral realism and freedom of the will against the voluntarism and determinism of Hobbes and Calvin. Cambridge Platonism was profoundly influential in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was the inspiration behind latitudinarianism and ethical rationalism, and many of its ideas were developed by Samuel Clarke, Isaac Newton and the Third Earl of Shaftesbury. See also: CUDWORTH, R.; MORE, H. Further reading Cassirer, E. (1953) The Platonic Renaissance in England, London: Nelson. (Still the best study.) Patrides, C.A. (ed.) (1968) The Cambridge Platonists , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (A good anthology.) FREDERICK BEISER CAMPANELLA, TOMMASO (1568–1639) Tommaso Campanella was an Italian Counter-Reformation theologian, a Renaissance magus, a prophet, a poet and an astrologer, as well as a philosopher whose speculations assumed encyclopedic proportions. As a late Renaissance philosopher of nature, Campanella is notable for his early, and continuous, opposition to Aristotle. He rejected the fundamental Aristotelian principle of hylomorphism, namely the understanding of all physical substance in terms of form and matter. In its place he appropriated Telesio’s understanding of reality in terms of the dialectical principles of heat and cold; and he adopted a form of empiricism found in Telesio’s work that included pansensism, the doctrine that all things in nature are endowed with sense. Especially after 1602, Campanella’s exposure to Renaissance Platonism also involved him in panpsychism, the view that all reality has a mental aspect. Thus his empiricism came to show a distinctly metaphysical and spiritualistic dimension that transformed his philosophy. At the same time his epistemology embraced a universal doubt and an emphasis on individual self-consciousness that are suggestive of Descartes’ views. Campanella’s career as a religious dissident, radical reformer and leader of an apocalyptic movement presents a political radicalism that was oddly associated with more traditional notions of universal monarchy and the need for theocracy. The only one of his numerous writings that receives attention today, La Città del Sole ( The City of the Sun) (composed 1602, but not published until 1623), has come to occupy a prominent place in the literature of utopias though Campanella himself seems to have expected some form of astronomical/ apocalyptic realization. Campanella’s naturalism, especially its pansensism and panpsychism, enjoyed some currency in Germany and France during the 1620s, but in the last five years of his life it was emphatically rejected by the intellectual communities headed by Mersenne and Descartes, as well as by Galileo. See also: PLATONISM, RENAISSANCE; TELESIO, B. Further reading Campanella, T. (1623) La Città del Sole: Dialogo Poetico; The City of the Sun: A Poetical Dialogue , trans. and ed. D.J. Donno, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, and London: University of California Press, 1981. (Although composed in 1602, La Cittè del Sole was not published until 1623; most famous as a work of utopian literature.) Headley, J.M. (1997) Tommaso Campanella and the Transformation of the World , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. (Seeks
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Page 121 to contextualize the thought of Campanella according to major issues in the Europe of the seventeenth century.) JOHN M. HEADLEY CAMPBELL, GEORGE (1719–96) George Campbell, Scottish minister, professor and religious thinker, is now remembered primarily for The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776). Here he employed the Scottish Enlightenment’s developing science of human nature to explain the effectiveness of the classical rules of rhetoric. He did this by relating the various ends of persuasive discourse to the natural faculties and propensities of the human mind. In his own time Campbell was better known as a religious apologist, using an enlightened theory of evidence in A Dissertation on Miracles (1762) to defend the believability of Christian miracles against the sceptical attack of David Hume. See also: ENLIGHTENMENT, SCOTTISH; MIRACLES Further reading Campbell, G. (1776) The Philosophy of Rhetoric , ed. L. Bitzer, Carbondale, IL and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988. (The now standard edition of the Rhetoric ; Bitzer’s introduction is the best short scholarly introduction to Campbell’s life and thought.) JEFFREY M. SUDERMAN CAMPBELL, NORMAN ROBERT (1880–1949) The British phyisicist Norman Robert Campbell made important contributions to philosophy of science in the 1920s, influenced by Poincaré, Russell and his own work in physics. He produced pioneering analyses of the nature of physical theories and of measurement, but is mainly remembered for requiring a theory, for example, the kinetic theory of gases, to have an ‘analogy’, that is, an independent interpretation, for example, as laws of motion of a swarm of microscopic particles. See also: MEASUREMENT, THEORY OF Further reading Campbell, N.R. (1920) Physics: the Elements , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Republished in 1957 as Foundations of Science , New York: Dover Publications. Part I contains Campbell’s account of theories, Part II his account of measurement.) D.H. MELLOR CAMUS, ALBERT (1913–60) The French-Algerian writer Albert Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1957 for having ‘illuminated the problems of the human conscience in our times’. By mythologizing the experiences of a secular age struggling with an increasingly contested religious tradition, he dramatized the human effort to ‘live and create without the aid of eternal values which, temporarily perhaps, are absent or distorted in contemporary Europe’. Thus the challenge posed by ‘the absurd’ with which he is so universally identified. See also: EXISTENTIALISM Further reading Camus, A. (1942) L’Étranger, Paris: Gallimard; trans. M. Ward, The Stranger , New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988. Sprintzen, D.A. (1988) Camus: A Critical Examination , Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. (A comprehensive critical analysis of the philosophical structure and development of Camus’ thought.) DAVID A. SPRINTZEN CANTOR, GEORG (1845–1918) Georg Cantor and set theory belong forever together. Although Dedekind had already introduced the concept of a set and naõÈve set theory in 1872, it was the German mathematician Cantor who singlehandedly created transfinite set theory as a new branch of mathematics. In a series of papers written between 1874 and 1885, he developed the fundamental concepts of abstract set theory and proved the most important of its theorems. Although today set theory is accepted by the majority of scientists as an autonomous branch of mathematics, and perhaps the most fundamental, this was not always the case. Indeed, when Cantor set out to develop his conception of sets and to argue for its acceptance, he initiated an inquiry into the infinite which raised questions that have still not been completely resolved today. See also: CANTOR’S THEOREM; SET THEORY Further reading Cantor, G. (1895, 1897) ‘Beiträge zur Begründung der transfiniten Mengenlehre’, parts 1 and 2, Mathematische Annalen 46: 481–512, 49: 207–48; trans. P.E.B. Jourdain (1915), Contributions to the
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Page 122 Dauben, J.W. (1979) Georg Cantor: His Mathematics and Philosophy of the Infinite, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; repr. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (An excellent intellectual biography which traces the development of Cantor’s mathematical ideas, putting them in the context of his philosophy and professional life.) ULRICH MAJER CANTOR’S THEOREM Cantor’s theorem states that the cardinal number (size) of the set of subsets of any set is greater than the cardinal number of the set itself. So once the existence of one infinite set has been proved, sets of ever increasing infinite cardinality can be generated. The philosophical interest of this result lies (1) in the foundational role it played in Cantor’s work, prior to the axiomatization of set theory, (2) in the similarity between its proof and arguments which lead to the set-theoretic paradoxes, and (3) in controversy between intuitionist and classical mathematicians concerning what exactly its proof proves. See also: CONTINUUM HYPOTHESIS Further reading Wittgenstein, L.J.J. (1956) Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, ed. G.H. von Wright, R. Rhees and G.E.M. Anscombe, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, Oxford: Blackwell, 2nd edn, 1967, part 1, appendix 2, 54–63; 3rd edn, 1978. (Includes a discussion of what exactly the proof of Cantor’s theorem proves.) MARY TILES CAPREOLUS, JOHANNES ( c .1380–1444) Thomist philosopher and theologian, the French Dominican Capreolus composed a lengthy commentary on Aquinas’ work on Peter Lombard’s Sentences, known as Defensiones theologiae divi Thomae Aquinatis (Defences of the Theology of Thomas Aquinas) (first printed in 1483–4). He sought to refute the criticisms of Thomism by competing scholastic traditions during the fourteenth century. The Thomistic school was so impressed with Capreolus’ achievement that it came to refer to him as Princeps Thomistarum (leader of the Thomists). Twentieth-century Thomists have, generally, considered him more faithful to the teachings of Aquinas than later commentators such as Cajetan. His philosophical opinions which have received most attention concern analogy, the formal ontological constituent of the person and the individuation of material substances. See also: AQUINAS, T.; THOMISM Further reading Bedouelle, G., Cessario, R. and White, K. (eds) (1997) Jean Capreolus et son temps 1380–1444 (Capreolus and His Times), special issue of Mémoire Dominicaine 1. (Includes articles on Capreolus’ background, doctrine and influence.) MICHAEL TAVUZZI CARDANO, GIROLAMO (1501–76) The Renaissance Italian Girolamo Cardano is famous for his colourful personality, as well as for his work in medicine and mathematics, and indeed in almost all the arts and sciences. He was an eclectic philosopher, and one of the founders of the so-called new philosophy of nature developed in the sixteenth century. He used both the Aristotelian and the Neoplatonic traditions as starting points, and following the medical paradigm of organic being, he transformed the traditional Aristotelian universe into an animated universe in which, thanks to their organic functional order, all individual parts strive towards the conservation both of themselves and of the whole universe. As a result, they can be subjected to a functional analysis. In his more casual writings on moral philosophy, Cardano showed his orientation to be basically Stoic. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM, RENAISSANCE Further reading Fierz, M. (1977) Girolamo Cardano (1501–1576) , Basle and Stuttgart: Birkhäuser. (Discussion of Cardano’s achievements as philosopher and scientist.) ECKHARD KESSLER CARDANUS, HIERONYMUS see CARDANO, GIROLAMO CARLYLE, THOMAS (1795–1881) Although widely influential as a historian, moralist and social critic, Carlyle has no real claim to be considered a philosopher. He does have some importance as one of the transmitters of the ideas of the German Idealists, such as Kant and Fichte, to Britain, and as one of the chief British spokesmen for the Romantic exaltation of the imagination above the understanding; but his grasp of philosophical issues is vague. His later writings are dominated by the
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Page 123 idea, derived from his childhood Calvinism, of a divine justice working in history through the medium of great men (‘heroes’) who are its conscious or unconscious instruments. See also: GERMAN IDEALISM Further reading Kaplan, F. (1983) Thomas Carlyle , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (The most recent authoritative biography.) A.L. LE QUESNE CARMICHAEL, GERSHOM (1672–1729) Gershom Carmichael was a teacher and writer of pivotal importance for the Scottish Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. He was the first Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, predecessor of Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith and Thomas Reid. Carmichael introduced the natural law tradition of Grotius, Pufendorf and Locke to the moral philosophy courses he taught at the University of Glasgow (1694–1729). His commentaries on Samuel Pufendorf’s work on the duty of man and citizen (1718 and 1724) made his teaching available to a wider readership in Great Britain and in Europe. He also composed an introduction to logic, Breviuscula Introductio ad Logicam , (1720 and 1722) and a brief system of natural theology, Synopsis Theologiae Naturalis (1729). See also: NATURAL LAW Further reading Moore, J. and Silverthorne, M. (1983) ‘Gershom Carmichael and the natural jurisprudence tradition in eighteenth-century Scotland’, in I. Hont and M. Ignatieff (eds) Wealth and Virtue: the Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 73–87. (Describes how John Locke’s ideas of property and the original contract were communicated to Scottish students of moral philosophy.) JAMES MOORE MICHAEL SILVERTHORNE CARNAP, RUDOLF (1891–1970) Carnap was one of the most significant philosophers of the twentieth century, and made important contributions to logic, philosophy of science, semantics, modal theory and probability. Viewed as an enfant terrible when he achieved fame in the Vienna Circle in the 1930s, Carnap is more accurately seen as one who held together its widely varying viewpoints as a coherent movement. In the 1930s he developed a daring pragmatic conventionalism according to which many traditional philosophical disputes are viewed as the expression of different linguistic frameworks, not genuine disagreements. This distinction between a language (framework) and what can be said within it was central to Carnap’s philosophy, reconciling the apparently a priori domains such as logic and mathematics with a thoroughgoing empiricism: basic logical and mathematical commitments partially constitute the choice of language. There is no uniquely correct choice among alternative logics or foundations for mathematics; it is a question of practical expedience, not truth. Thereafter, the logic and mathematics may be taken as true in virtue of that language. The remaining substantive questions, those not settled by the language alone, should be addressed only by empirical means. There is no other source of news. Beyond pure logic and mathematics, Carnap’s approach recognized within the sciences commitments aptly called a priori – those not tested straightforwardly by observable evidence, but, rather, presupposed in the gathering and manipulation of evidence. This a priori, too, is relativized to a framework and thus comports well with empiricism. The appropriate attitude towards alternative frameworks would be tolerance, and the appropriate mode of philosophizing the patient task of explicating and working out in detail the consequences of adopting this or that framework. While Carnap worked at this tirelessly and remained tolerant of alternative frameworks, his tolerance was not much imitated nor were his principles well understood and adopted. By the time of his death, philosophers were widely rejecting what they saw as logical empiricism, though often both their arguments and the views offered as improvements had been pioneered by Carnap and his associates. By his centenary, however, there emerged a new and fuller understanding of his ideas and of their importance for twentieth-century philosophy. See also: ANALYTICAL PHILOSOPHY Further reading Carnap, R. (1934) Logische Syntax der Sprache, Vienna: Springer; trans. A. Smeaton, The Logical Syntax of Language, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1937. (Carnap’s most important presentation of his conventionalism.) Schilpp, P.A. (ed.) (1963) The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap, La Salle, IL: Open Court. (Its
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Page 124 1,100 pages contain twenty-six critical essays on Carnap’s work, Carnap’s autobiography, replies, and a bibliography.) RICHARD CREATH CARNEADES (214–129 BC) The Greek philosopher Carneades was head of the Academy from 167 to 137 BC. Born in North Africa he migrated to Athens, where he studied logic with the Stoic Diogenes of Babylon; but he was soon seduced by the Academy, to which his allegiance was thereafter lifelong. He was a celebrated figure; and in 155 BC he was sent by Athens to Rome as a political ambassador, where he astounded the youth by his rhetorical powers and outraged their elders by his arguments against justice. Under Carneades’ direction the Academy remained sceptical. But he enlarged the sceptical armoury – in particular, he deployed sorites arguments against various dogmatic positions. He also broadened the target of sceptical attack: thus he showed an especial interest in ethics, where his ‘division’ of possible ethical theories served later as a standard framework for thought on the subject. But his major innovation concerned the notion of ‘the plausible’ ( to pithanon). Even if we cannot determine which appearances are true and which false, we are able to distinguish the plausible from the implausible – and further to distinguish among several grades of plausibility. It is disputed – and it was disputed among his immediate followers – how, if at all, Carneades’ remarks on the plausible are to be reconciled with his scepticism. See also: ACADEMY Further reading Sextus Empiricus ( c . AD 200) Against the Mathematicians, trans. R.G. Bury, Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and London: Heinemann, 1935. (Book VII includes a long presentation of some of Carneades’ arguments.) JONATHAN BARNES CAROLINGIAN RENAISSANCE The ‘Carolingian renaissance’ is the name given to the cultural revival in northern Europe during the late eighth and ninth centuries, instigated by Charlemagne and his court scholars. Carolingian intellectual life centred around the recovery of classical Latin texts and learning, though in a strictly Christian setting. The only celebrated philosopher of the time is Johannes Scottus Eriugena, but the daring Neoplatonic speculations of his masterpiece, the Periphyseon (On the Division of Nature) are not at all characteristic of the time and are based on Greek sources (Pseudo-Dionysius, Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus the Confessor) generally unknown to his contemporaries. The mainstream of Carolingian thought is important for the history of philosophy in three particular ways. First, it was at this time that logic first started to take the fundamental role it would have throughout the Middle Ages. Second, scholars began to consider how ideas they found in late antique Latin Neoplatonic texts could be interpreted in a way compatible with Christianity. Third (as would so often again be the case in the Middle Ages), controversies over Christian doctrine led thinkers to analyse some of the concepts they involved: for instance, the dispute in the mid-ninth century over predestination led to discussion about free will and punishment. See also: BYZANTINE PHILOSOPHY; CHARTRES, SCHOOL OF Further reading Bullough, D. (1991) Carolingian Renewal: Sources and Heritage, Manchester: Manchester University Press. (Wide-ranging studies in Carolingian intellectual history and its political background.) Marenbon, J. (1981) From the Circle of Alcuin to the School of Auxerre, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought, 3rd series, vol. 15, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Logic, philosophy and theology from circa 790–890.) JOHN MARENBON CARROLL, LEWIS see DODGSON, CHARLES LUTWIDGE CARTESIANISM see DESCARTES, RENÉ; GEULINCX, ARNOLD; MALEBRANCHE, NICOLAS CASSIRER, ERNST (1874–1945) Cassirer is one of the major figures in the development of philosophical idealism in the first half of the twentieth century. He is known for his philosophy of culture based on his conception of ‘symbolic form’, for his historical studies of the problem of knowledge in the rise of modern philosophy and science and for his works on the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Cassirer expanded Kant’s critique of reason to a critique of culture by regarding the symbol as the common denominator of all
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Page 125 forms of human thought, imagination and experience. He delineates symbolic forms of myth, religion, language, art, history and science and defines the human being as the ‘symbolizing animal’. All human experience occurs through systems of symbols. Language is only one such system; the images of myth, religion and art and the mathematical structures of science are others. Being of Jewish faith, Cassirer left Germany in 1933 with the rise of Nazism, going first to Oxford, then to university positions in Sweden and the USA. In the last period of his career he applied his philosophy of culture generally and his conception of myth specifically to a critique of political myths and to the study of irrational forces in the state. See also: IDEALISM Further reading Cassirer, E. (1923–9) Philosophie der symbolischen Formen , Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 3 vols; trans. R. Manheim, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms , New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 3 vols, 1955–7: vol. 1, Language; vol. 2, Mythical Thought; vol. 3, The Phenomenology of Knowledge . (The major statement of Cassirer’s systematic philosophy.) Krois, J.M. (1987) Cassirer: Symbolic Forms and History , New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. (Definitive study of the various aspects of Cassirer’s philosophy.) DONALD PHILLIP VERENE CASUISTRY Casuistry, from the Latin casus (cases), has been understood in three separate yet related senses. In its first sense casuistry is defined as a style of ethical reasoning associated closely with the tradition of practical philosophy influenced by Aristotle and Aquinas. In its second sense it is reasoning about ‘cases of conscience’ ( casus conscientiae ). The third sense, moral laxism, arose out of Pascal’s famous critique of casuistry, which did much to diminish its influence. In recent years, however, a renewed interest in the first and second senses of casuistry has been witnessed in the areas of practical reasoning and applied philosophy. See also: LOGIC OF ETHICAL DISCOURSE Further reading Keenan, J.F. and Shannon, T.A. (eds) (1995) The Context of Casuistry, Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. (A rich collection of articles which discuss the roots, practice and legacy of casuistry in moral philosophy and theology.) MARTIN STONE CATEGORIES Categories are hard to describe, and even harder to define. This is in part a consequence of their complicated history, and in part because category theory must grapple with vexed questions concerning the relation between linguistic or conceptual categories on the one hand, and objective reality on the other. In the mid-fourth century BC, Aristotle initiated discussion of categories as a central enterprise of philosophy. In the Categories he presents an ‘ontological’ scheme which classifies all being into ten ultimate types, but in the Topics introduces the categories as different kinds of predication, that is, of items such as ‘goodness’ or ‘length of a tennis court’ or ‘red’, which can be ‘predicated of’ subjects. He nowhere attempts either to justify what he includes in his list of categories or to establish its completeness, and relies throughout on the unargued conviction that language faithfully represents the most basic features of reality. In the twentieth century, a test for category membership was recommended by Ryle, that of absurdity: concepts or expressions differ in logical type when their combination produces sentences which are palpable nonsense. Kant, working in the eighteenth century, derives his categories from a consideration of aspects of judgments, hoping in this manner to ensure that his scheme will consist exclusively of a priori concepts which might constitute an objective world. The Sinologist Graham argues that the categories familiar in the West mirror Indo-European linguistic structure, and that an experimental Chinese scheme exhibits suggestively different properties, but his relativism is highly contentious. See also: UNIVERSALS Further reading Aristotle (4th century BC) Categories , trans. and notes J. Ackrill, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979. (Aristotle’s treatment of categories.) Ryle, G. (1937–8) ‘Categories’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society , reprinted in A.G.N. Flew (ed.) Logic and Language, 2nd series, Oxford: Blackwell, 1959. (Pithily brilliant classic introduction of his views.) ROBERT WARDY
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Page 126 CATEGORY THEORY, APPLICATIONS TO THE FOUNDATIONS OF MATHEMATICS Since the 1960s Lawvere has distinguished two senses of the foundations of mathematics. Logical foundations use formal axioms to organize the subject. The other sense aims to survey ‘what is universal in mathematics’. The ontology of mathematics is a third, related issue. Moderately categorical foundations use sets as axiomatized by the elementary theory of the category of sets (ETCS) rather than Zermelo– Fraenkel set theory (ZF). This claims to make set theory conceptually more like the rest of mathematics than ZF is, and it suggests that sets are not ‘made of’ anything determinate; they only have determinate functional relations to one another. The ZF and ETCS axioms both support classical mathematics. Other categories have also been offered as logical foundations. The ‘category of categories’ takes categories and functors as fundamental. The ‘free topos’ stresses provability. These and others are certainly formally adequate. The question is how far they illuminate the most universal aspects of current mathematics. Radically categorical foundations say mathematics has no one starting point; each mathematical structure exists in its own right and can be described intrinsically. The most flexible way to do this to date is categorically. From this point of view various structures have their own logic. Sets have classical logic, or rather the topos Set has classical logic. But differential manifolds, for instance, fit neatly into a topos Spaces with nonclassical logic. This view urges a broader practice of mathematics than classical. Further reading Lawvere, F.W. (1964) ‘An Elementary Theory of the Category of Sets’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 52: 1,506–11. (Requires basic category theory.) Mac Lane, S. (1986) Mathematics Form and Function , New York: Springer, 386–402. (Easy account of the categorical terms.) COLIN MCLARTY CATEGORY THEORY, INTRODUCTION TO A ‘category’, in the mathematical sense, is a universe of structures and transformations. Category theory treats such a universe simply in terms of the network of transformations. For example, categorical set theory deals with the universe of sets and functions without saying what is in any set, or what any function ‘does to’ anything in its domain; it only talks about the patterns of functions that occur between sets. This stress on patterns of functions originally served to clarify certain working techniques in topology. Grothendieck extended those techniques to number theory, in part by defining a kind of category which could itself represent a space. He called such a category a ‘topos’. It turned out that a topos could also be seen as a category rich enough to do all the usual constructions of set-theoretic mathematics, but that may get very different results from standard set theory. Further reading Mac Lane, S. (1986) Mathematics Form and Function , New York: Springer, 386–402. (Basic category theory, including Set, is described with no substantial prerequisites.) Mac Lane, S. and Moerdijk, I. (1992) Sheaves in Geometry and Logic , Berlin: Springer. (The general theory of Grothendieck toposes, with many examples, including Cohen’s forcing as a topos construction. Requires some category theory.) COLIN MCLARTY CATTANEO, CARLO (1801–69) The figurehead of the Italian democratic movement prior to the unification of Italy, Carlo Cattaneo developed a theory of federalism as a practice of self-government, envisaging a United States of Italy. He identified the bourgeoisie as the most dynamic force in contemporary history and regarded scientific culture as the engine of progress. Often dubbed the first Italian positivist, he perceived empirical philosophy as a kind of synthesis of all the sciences, but also stressed its anthropological and psychological dimensions and above all its character as a methodology of knowledge; his objective was to study human thought. The great themes of Cattaneo’s philosophy are nature, the individual and society, particularly the last. See also: ITALY, PHILOSOPHY IN Further reading Cattaneo, C. (1972) Opere scelte (Selected Works), ed. D. Castelnuovo Frigessi, Turin: Einaudi, 4 vols. (A selection of Cattaneo’s major writings in a range of subjects.) Translated from the Italian by Virginia Cox DELIA FRIGESSI
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Page 127 CAUSALITY AND NECESSITY IN ISLAMIC THOUGHT Discussions of causality and necessity in Islamic thought were the result of attempts to incorporate the wisdom of the Greeks into the legacy of the Qur’an, and specifically to find a philosophical way of expressing faith in the free creation of the universe by one God. Moreover, that article of faith was itself a result of the revelation of God’s ways in the free bestowal of the Qur’an on a humanity otherwise locked in ignorance, which a purportedly Aristotelian account of the necessary connection of cause and effect might be taken to rule out. Thus free creation of the universe and free gift of the Qur’an formed a logical unit. The challenge, therefore, was to compose an account of metaphysical and ethical matters which permits rational discourse about them, without obscuring their ultimate source or precluding divine action in the course of world events and human actions. The scheme of emanation elaborated by al-Farabi sought to give ‘the First’ the place of pre-eminence which the Qur’an demanded for the Creator, but did so by modelling creation on a logical system whereby all things emanated necessarily from this One. It was this necessity, further articulated by Ibn Sina, which al-Ghazali took to jeopardize the freedom of God as Creator and as giver of the Qur’an. AlGhazali’s objections were honed by a previous debate among Muslim theologians ( mutakallimun), who had elaborated diverse views on human freedom in an effort to reconcile the obvious demand for free acceptance of the Qur’an with its claims regarding God’s utter sovereignty as Creator over all that is. Natural philosophy was also affected by these debates, specifically with regard to the ultimate constitution of bodies as well as accounts that could be given of their interaction. However, the primary focus was on human actions in the face of a free Creator. See also: CAUSATION; ISLAMIC THEOLOGY Further reading al-Farabi (c.870–950) al-Madina al-fadila (The Virtuous City), trans. R. Walzer, Al-Farabi on the Perfect State , Oxford: Clarendon, 1985. (Clear presentation of the emanation scheme.) Frank, R. (1992) Creation and the Cosmic System: Al-Ghazali and Avicenna , Heidelberg: Carl Winter. (A careful study of al-Ghazali’s relation to Ibn Sina.) DAVID BURRELL CAUSATION Two opposed viewpoints raise complementary problems about causation. The first is from Hume: watch the child kick the ball. You see the foot touch the ball and the ball move off. But do you see the foot cause the ball to move? And if you do not see it, how do you know that that is what happened? Indeed if all our experience is like this, and all of our ideas come from experience, where could we get the idea of causation in the first place? The second is from Kant. We can have no ideas at all with which to experience nature – we cannot experience the child as a child nor the motion as a motion – unless we have organized the experience into a causal order in which one thing necessarily gives rise to another. The problem for the Kantian viewpoint is to explain how, in advance of experiencing nature in various specific ways, we are able to provide such a complex organization for our experience. For the Kantian the objectivity of causality is a presupposition of our experience of events external to ourselves. The Humean viewpoint must find something in our experience that provides sufficient ground for causal claims. Regular associations between putative causes and effects are the proposed solution. This attention to regular associations connects the Humean tradition with modern statistical techniques used in the social sciences to establish causal laws. Modern discussions focus on three levels of causal discourse. The first is about singular causation: about individual ‘causings’ that occur at specific times and places, for example, ‘the cat lapped up the milk’. The second is about causal laws: laws about what features reliably cause or prevent other features, as in, ‘rising inflation prevents unemployment’. The third is about causal powers. These are supposed to determine what kinds of singular causings a feature can produce or what kinds of causal laws can be true of it – ‘aspirins have the power to relieve headaches’ for example. Contemporary anglophone work on causality has centred on two questions. First, ‘what are the relations among these levels?’ The second is from reductive empiricisms of various kinds that try to bar causality from the world, or at least from any aspects of the world that we can find intelligible: ‘what is the relation between causality (on any one of the levels) and those features of the world that are supposed to be less problematic?’ These latter are taken by different authors to include different things.
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Page 128 Sensible or measurable properties like ‘redness’ or ‘electric voltage’ have been attributed a legitimacy not available to causal relations like ‘lapping-up’ or ‘pushing over’: sometimes it is ‘the basic properties studied by physics’. So-called ‘occurrent’ properties have also been privileged over dispositional properties (like water-solubility) and powers. At the middle level where laws of nature are concerned, laws about regular associations between admissible features – whether these associations are deterministic or probabilistic – have been taken as superior to laws about what kinds of effects given features produce. See also: CAUSALITY AND NECESSITY IN ISLAMIC THOUGHT; CAUSATION, INDIAN THEORIES OF Further reading Anscombe, G.E.M. (1971) Causality and Determination, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Sophisticated but accessible to beginners.) Mackie, J.L. (1980) The Cement of the Universe: A Study of Causation , Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Intermediate–advanced; a good survey.) NANCY CARTWRIGHT CAUSATION, INDIAN THEORIES OF Causation was acknowledged as one of the central problems in Indian philosophy. The classical Indian philosophers’ concern with the problem basically arose from two sources: first, the cosmogonic speculations of the Vedas and the Upaniṣads, with their search for some simple unitary cause for the origin of this complex universe; and second, the Vedic concern with ritual action ( karman) and the causal mechanisms by which such actions bring about their unseen, but purportedly cosmic, effects. Once the goal of liberation ( mokṣa) cameto be accepted as the highest value, these two strands of thought entwined to generate intense interest in the notion of causation. The systematic philosophers of the classical and medieval periods criticized and defended competing theories of causation. These theories were motivated partly by a desire to guarantee the efficacy of action and hence the possibility of attaining liberation, partly by a desire to understand the nature of the world and hence how to negotiate our way in it so as to attain liberation. Indian philosophers extensively discussed a number of issues relating to causation, including the nature of the causal relation, the definitions of cause and effect, and classifications of kinds of causes. Typically they stressed the importance of the material cause, rather than (as in Western philosophy) the efficient cause. In India only the Cārvāka materialists denied causation or took it to be subjective. This is unsurprising given that a concern with demonstrating the possibility of liberation motivated the theories of causation, for only the Cārvākas denied this possibility. The orthodox Hindu philosophers and the heterodox Buddhists and Jainas all accepted both the possibility of liberation and the reality of causation, though they differed sharply (and polemically) about the details. The Indian theories of causation are traditionally classified by reference to the question of whether the effect is a mode of the cause. According to this taxonomy there are two principal theories of causation. One is the identity theory ( satkāryavāda), which holds that the effect is identical with the cause, a manifestation of what is potential in the cause. This is the Sānkhya-Yoga view, though that school’s particular version of it is sometimes called transformation theory ( pariṇāmavāda ). Advaita Vedā nta holds an appearance theory ( vivartavāda ), which is often considered a variant of the identity theory. According to the appearance theory effects are mere appearances of the underlying reality, Brahman. Since only Brahman truly exists, this theory is also sometimes called satkāraikavāda (the theory that the cause is real but the effect is not). The other principal theory of causation is the nonidentity theory ( asatkāryavāda ), which denies that the effect pre-exists in its cause and claims instead that the effect is an altogether new entity. Both adherents of Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika and the Buddhists are usually classified as nonidentity theorists, but they differ on many important details. One of these is whether the cause continues to exist after the appearance of the effect: Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika claims it does, the Buddhists mostly claim it does not. Finally, some philosophers try to take the middle ground and claim that an effect is both identical and nonidentical with its cause. This is the position of the Jainas and of some theistic schools of Vedānta. See also: CAUSATION Further reading Bhartiya, M.C. (1973) Causation in Indian Philosophy , Ghaziabad: Vimal Prakashan. (Good comparative review with special reference to Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika.) Kalupahana, D.J. (1975) Causality: The Central Philosophy of Buddhism , Honolulu, HI: University Press of Hawaii.
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Page 129 (Good study of dependent origination with special reference to early Buddhism.) ROY W. PERRETT CAVELL, STANLEY (1926–) Born in Atlanta, Georgia, Stanley Cavell has held the Walter M. Cabot Chair in Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University since 1963. The range, diversity and distinctiveness of his writings are unparalleled in twentieth-century Anglo-American philosophy. As well as publishing essays on modernist painting and music, he has created a substantial body of work in film studies, literary theory and literary criticism; he has introduced new and fruitful ways of thinking about psychoanalysis and its relationship with philosophy; and his work on Heidegger and Derrida, taken together with his attempts to revitalize the tradition of Emersonian Transcendentalism, have defined new possibilities for a distinctively American contribution to philosophical culture. This complex oeuvre is unified by a set of thematic concerns – relating to scepticism and moral perfectionism – which are rooted in Cavell’s commitment to the tradition of ordinary language philosophy, as represented in the work of J.L. Austin and Wittgenstein. Further reading Cavell, S. (1979) The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy , Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Cavell’s much-revised dissertation, this contains his most detailed elaboration of his interpretation of criteria, and sets the scene for all his future writing.) Mulhall, S. (1994) Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (The first full-length general philosophical study of Cavell’s work.) STEPHEN MULHALL CAVENDISH, MARGARET LUCAS (1623–73) The only seventeenth-century woman to publish numerous books on natural philosophy, Cavendish presented her materialism in a wide range of literary forms. She abandoned her early commitment to Epicurean atomism and, rejecting the mechanical model of natural change, embraced an organicist materialism. She also addressed the relations that hold among philosophy, gender and literary genre. See also: MATERIALISM Further reading Jones, K. (1988) A Glorious Fame: The Life of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, 1623–1673 , London: Bloomsbury. (A biography which places Cavendish within the context of other women intellectuals of the period.) EILEEN O’NEILL CELSUS (late 2nd century AD) The Greek philosopher Celsus of Alexandria was a Middle Platonist, known only for his anti-Christian work The True Account . The work is lost, but we have Origen’s reply to it, Against Celsus. In it Celsus defends a version of Platonist theology. See also: NEOPLATONISM; ORIGEN Further reading Celsus ( c . 180 AD) The True Account , ed. O. Glöckner, Celsus’ Alēthēs logos , Bonn: A. Marcus und E. Webers Verlag, 1924; trans. R.J. Hoffman, Celsus, On the True Doctrine , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. (Celsus’ lost text as reconstructed from extracts of Origen’s work Against Celsus.) JOHN DILLON CERTAINTY ‘Certainty’ is not a univocal term. It is predicated of people, and it is predicated of propositions. When certainty is predicated of a person, as in ‘Sally is certain that she parked her car in lot 359’, we are ascribing an attitude to Sally. We can say that a person, S, is psychologically certain of a proposition, p, just in case S believes p without any doubts. In general, psychological certainty has not been a topic which philosophers have found problematic. On the other hand, certainty as a property of propositions, as in ‘The proposition that Sally parked her car in lot 359 is certain for Sally’, has been discussed widely by philosophers. Roughly, we can say that a proposition, p, is propositionally certain for a person, S, just in case S is fully warranted in believing that p and there are no legitimate grounds whatsoever to doubt that p. The philosophical issue, of course, is whether there are any such propositions and, if so, what makes them certain. See also: DOUBT; RATIONAL BELIEFS Further reading Dewey, J. (1929) The Quest for Certainty , New York: Putnam, 1960. (Contains a defence of a pragmatic epistemology.)
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Page 130 Klein, P. (1981) Certainty , Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. (Development of the nature of objective propositional certainty.) PETER D. KLEIN CERTEAU, MICHEL DE (1925–86) Michel de Certeau, a French philosopher trained in history and ethnography, was a peripatetic teacher in Europe, South America and North America. His thought has inflected four areas of philosophy. He studied how mysticism informs late medieval epistemology and social practice. With the advent of the Scientific Revolution, the affinities the mystic shares with nature and the cosmos become, like religion itself, repressed or concealed. An adjunct discipline, heterology, thus constitutes an anthropology of alterity, studying the ‘other’ and the destiny of religion since the sixteenth century. De Certeau opens the hidden agendas that make representations of the past a function of social pressures, so that sometime histories are rearticulated in mirrored or subversive forms. This subversion makes accessible a general philosophy of invention that works within and against the strategic policies of official institutions. De Certeau’s writings also belong to activism, the history of ideological structures, psychoanalysis, and post-1968 theories of writing ( écriture) as defined by Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault and Lyotard. See also: ALTERITY AND IDENTITY, POSTMODERN THEORIES OF Further reading Ahearne, J. (1995) Michel de Certeau, London: Polity Press. (Terse and informative study for anglophone readers.) Certeau, M. de (1982) La Fable mystique, Paris: Gallimard; trans .M. Smith The Mystic Fable, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993. (Comprehensive study of mysticism and heterology.) TOM CONLEY CHAADAEV, PËTR IAKOVLEVICH (1794–1856) Pëtr Chaadaev was the first Russian thinker for whom his own country became a philosophical problem. His works initiated the powerful Russian tradition of reflecting on Russia’s whence and whither: that is to say, the meaning of Russian history, the character of Russian national identity, and the possible, or necessary, paths of Russian historical development in the future. However, Chaadaev’s answer to these questions was mostly negative: he defined Russia not by what it was, but by what it was not. A paradoxical feature of Chaadaev’s position was that his general philosophical views did not apply to his native country. He was a convinced Westernizer, identifying Western development with universal human history, but Russia was in his view the opposite of the West, an exception to the general rules. His general social philosophy, deeply influenced by the French theocratic traditionalists, was inherently conservative, stressing the importance of supra-individual unity and of continuous historical traditions; in contrast with this, his philosophy of Russian history defined Russia as a country without unity and without history, thus lacking the basic conditions for a genuine conservatism. This view provoked a strong reaction among Russian Romantic conservatives: they accepted some aspects of Chaadaev’s conservative critique of atomistic individualism but tried to refute his pessimistic view of Russia, by arguing that, in fact, not Russia but the West represented atomistic disintegration and incapacity for organic development. See also: SLAVOPHILISM Further reading Chaadaev, P. Ia. (1969) The Major Works of Peter Chaadaev, ed. and trans. R. McNally, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. (Includes commentary and bibliographical notes.) McNally, R.T. (1971) Chaadaev and His Friends , Tallahassee, FL: Diplomatic Press. ANDRZEJ WALICKI CHALCIDIUS see CALCIDIUS CHALDAEAN ORACLES The Chaldaean Oracles were a collection of revelatory verses purportedly compiled in the second century AD. Along with the Orphic texts, Neoplatonists regarded them as divine words. When the Oracles appear in philosophical works, they lend support to select cosmological, metaphysical or psychological propositions which have already been formulated. See also: NEOPLATONISM Further reading Lewy, H. (1978) Chaldaean Oracles and Theurgy , ed. M. Tardieu, Paris: Études Augustiniennes,
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Page 131 2nd edn. (The seminal work on the Oracles, with updated evaluations, notes and articles.) LUCAS SIORVANES CHANG TSAI see ZHANG ZAI CHANGE Change in general may be defined as the variation of properties (whether of things or of regions of space) over time. But this definition is incomplete in a number of respects. The reference to properties and time raises two important questions. The first concerns whether we need to specify further the kinds of properties which are involved in change. If we define change in an object as temporal variation of its properties we are faced with the problem that some properties of an object may alter without there being a consequent change in the object itself. The second question concerns the passage of time: does temporal variation constitute change only in virtue of some feature of time itself, namely the fact (or putative fact) that time passes? Some philosophers have wished to reject the notion of time’s passage. Are they thereby committed to a picture of the world as unchanging? See also: EVENTS; PROCESSES Further reading McTaggart, J.M.E. (1927) The Nature of Existence , vol. 2, ed. C.D. Broad, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (See pages 9–22 for the famous proof of the unreality of time. Not an easy read, but does not presuppose a great deal of philosophical knowledge.) Russell, B. (1903) The Principles of Mathematics, London: Allen & Unwin. ROBIN LE POIDEVIN CHAOS THEORY Chaos theory is the name given to the scientific investigation of mathematically simple systems that exhibit complex and unpredictable behaviour. Since the 1970s these systems have been used to model experimental situations ranging from the early stages of fluid turbulence to the fluctuations of brain wave activity. This complex behaviour does not arise as a result of the interaction of numerous subsystems or from intrinsically probabilistic equations. Instead, chaotic behaviour involves the rapid growth of any inaccuracy. The slightest vagueness in specifying the initial state of such a system makes longterm predictions impossible, yielding behaviour that is effectively random. The existence of such behaviour raises questions about the extent to which predictability and determinism apply in the physical world. Chaos theory addresses the questions of how such behaviour arises and how it changes as the system is modified. Its new analytical techniques invite a reconsideration of scientific methodology. See also: RANDOMNESS Further reading Devaney, R. (1986) An Introduction to Chaotic Dynamical Systems , Menlo Park, CA: Benjamin-Cummins Publishing. (A standard presentation of the mathematics of chaos at the introductory level.) STEPHEN H. KELLERT CHARITY Within at least some branches of Christianity, the term ‘charity’ has been used to mean the love mandated by Jesus. In recent theological writings, however, there has been a tendency to replace it with the Greek word agapē. There has been some disagreement in the twentieth century concerning the precise nature and functioning of Christian love, a major catalyst for debate having been Anders Nygren’s book Agapē and Eros (1930–6). Numerous scholars have complained that charity does not have a high profile nowadays and have noted that, in common parlance, the word usually has the meaning of benevolence or beneficence. Some attempts have been made to place greater emphasis on Christian love and relationships within Christian ethics. Of some interest in this regard is the notion of an ethic of care, which is not confined to Christian circles but has been the subject of some debate in recent times. See also: THEOLOGICAL VIRTUES Further reading Larrabee, M.J. (ed.) (1993) An Ethic of Care: Feminist and Interdisciplinary Perspectives , London: Routledge. (A collection of contributions to the debate on an ethic of care by various authors, with particular attention being given to matters concerning moral philosophy, psychological aspects and cultural aspects.) Nygren, A. (1930–6) Agapē and Eros, London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. (A long and very detailed study of the meaning of Christian love. The author also sets out to show the major changes in
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Page 132 meaning that have taken place in the course of history.) BERNARD HOOSE CHARITY, PRINCIPLE OF The principle of charity governs the interpretation of the beliefs and utterances of others. It urges charitable interpretation, meaning interpretation that maximizes the truth or rationality of what others think and say. Some formulations of the principle concern primarily rationality, recommending attributions of rational belief or assertion. Others concern primarily truth, recommending attributions of true belief or assertion. Versions of the principle differ in strength. The weakest urge charity as one consideration among many. The strongest hold that interpretation is impossible without the assumption of rationality or truth. The principle has been put to various philosophical uses. Students are typically instructed to follow the principle when interpreting passages and formulating the arguments they contain. The principle also plays a role in philosophy of mind and language and in epistemology. Philosophers have argued that the principle of charity plays an essential role in characterizing the nature of belief and intentionality, with some philosophers contending that beliefs must be mostly true. A version of the principle has even served as a key premise in a widely discussed argument against epistemological scepticism. See also: RATIONAL BELIEFS; SCEPTICISM Further reading Govier, T. (1987) Problems in Argument Analysis and Evaluation, Dordrecht: Foris Publications. (Discusses the role of charitable interpretation in critical thinking and argument analysis.) RICHARD FELDMAN CHARLETON, WALTER (1620–1707) The physician Walter Charleton was the first to introduce Epicurean atomism into England in the form advocated in France by Gassendi. Charleton’s version of atomism, although largely derivative, was nevertheless influential. Together with his advocacy of a Christian hedonism, it helped to make both atomism in natural philosophy (with its associated mechanistic account of nature) and utilitarian theories in ethics acceptable to such thinkers as Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, John Locke and others associated with the foundation of the Royal Society, of which Charleton was himself an active early member. See also: ATOMISM Further reading Charleton, W. (1654) Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charletoniana: or a Fabrick of Science Natural upon the Hypothesis of Atoms. Founded by Epicurus, Repaired by Petrus Gassendus, Augmented by Walter Charleton, London. (Charleton’s most important and influential work which argues for an Epicurean atomism, as compatible with traditional Christian doctrine, following Gassendi’s interpretation.) G.A.J. ROGERS CHARRON, PIERRE (1541–1603) Pierre Charron was a French Catholic priest of the late sixteenth century who used Montaigne’s sceptical thought, which he presented in didactic form, in order to refute Calvinists, non-Christians, and atheists. He advanced a fideistic defence of religious thought which was based on accepting complete scepticism while appealing to faith alone as the source of religious knowledge. His De la Sagesse (On Wisdom) (1601) is one of the first significant philosophical works to be written in a modern language. It is also one of the first modern works to set forth a naturalistic moral theory independent of religious considerations, and based primarily on Stoic ideas. Charron’s views were extremely popular in the seventeenth century, and they influenced many sceptically inclined thinkers in France and England. His sceptical ‘defence’ of religion was regarded as insincere by some of the orthodox theologians, but other important religious thinkers defended him. See also: SCEPTICISM, RENAISSANCE Further reading Charron, J.D. (1961) The ‘Wisdom’ of Pierre Charron, an Original and Orthodox Code of Morality, University of North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures 34, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina. (Includes a list of editions and translations of De la Sagesse on pages 147– 51.) Charron, P. (1601) De la Sagesse (On Wisdom), ed. A. Duval, Paris: Chassériau, 1824, 3 vols; repr. Geneva: Slatkine, 1968. (An important source of sceptical ideas for Renaissance theologians and philosophers.) RICHARD H. POPKIN
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Page 133 CHARTRES, SCHOOL OF In the first half of the twelfth century, the most advanced work in teaching and discussion of logic, philosophy and theology took place in the schools attached to the great cathedrals. Chartres was undoubtedly one of the more important of these schools, and Gilbert of Poitiers and Thierry of Chartres were certainly connected with it. To some historians, Chartres was the great intellectual centre of the period, and the greatest achievement of early twelfth-century thought was a brand of Platonism distinctive of this school. However, this view has been challenged by scholars who stress the preeminence of Paris, where the schools emphasized logic. See also: GILBERT OF POITIERS; THIERRY OF CHARTRES; WILLIAM OF CONCHES Further reading Wetherbee, W. (1972) Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth Century: The Literary Influence of the School of Chartres , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Urges an understanding of ‘school of Chartres’ as the label for a type of thought.) JOHN MARENBON CHATTON, WALTER ( c .1290–1343) Chatton was an English philosopher, Franciscan friar and theologian who developed a detailed critique of the work of William of Ockham, causing the latter to revise some of his earlier writings. Chatton was also at times an opponent of Peter Aureol and Richard of Campsall; he generally, though not always, followed John Duns Scotus and responded to his critics. He is known also for his writings on physics, where he held views in line with those of Pythagoras and Plato, and on the Trinity, where he was strongly attacked by Adam Wodeham. See also: BRADWARDINE, T.; WODEHAM, A. Further reading Murdoch, J.E. (1982) ‘Infinity and Continuity’, in N. Kretzmann, A. Kenny and J. Pinborg (eds) Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 564–94. (Contains a brief account of Chatton’s views on indivisibles.) STEPHEN F. BROWN CHEMISTRY, PHILOSOPHICAL ASPECTS OF Chemistry, like all theoretical sciences, is deeply rooted in philosophical inquiry. Early Greek atomism was a response to Parmenides’ argument that the very concept of change is unintelligible. Aristotle in turn argued that a vacuum is impossible and proposed that qualitative change could be better understood in terms of four elements and an underlying prime matter. During the Arabic and Latin Middle Ages, philosophical commentaries on the nature of materials were brought into juxtaposition with the practical arts of the alchemist, miner and pharmacist. As chemical speculations became more closely connected to observations during the time of the Scientific Revolution, natural philosophers became more and more interested in the methodological aspects of chemistry. Galileo and Locke tried to clarify the relationship between primary and secondary qualities. Boyle struggled to understand how the selective affinities so characteristic of chemical reagents could be explained within the framework of Descartes’ mechanical philosophy. Lavoisier’s textbook was organized around principles drawn from philosophes such as Condillac. As chemistry became an autonomous science, chemists turned less often to philosophy as a source of theoretical inspiration. However, they frequently appealed to philosophies of science in order to defend their own theories or criticize those of their opponents. The so-called ‘atomic debates’ amongst chemists in the British Association during the 1860s were primarily disputes about the epistemological legitimacy of appeals to unobservable entities. Many of the same issues were taken up at the end of the century by Ostwald, Mach and Duhem. Logical empiricists in the twentieth century have often turned to chemistry as an example of the successful reduction of a secondary science to physics. Thus, it is claimed that the laws of classical thermodynamics, expressed using concepts such as enthalpy and entropy, can be derived from the laws of statistical mechanics describing the motions of particles. The details of this purported derivation have been questioned. Even more controversial is the attempt to derive accounts of the chemical bond and the shape of molecules from the first principles provided by quantum mechanics. See also: CONSERVATION PRINCIPLES; QUANTUM MECHANICS, INTERPRETATION OF; REDUCTION, PROBLEMS OF Further reading Lavoisier, A.-L. (1789) Traité élémentaire de chimie ; trans. R. Kerr, The Elements of Chemistry ,
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Page 134 London: Wm. Creech, 1790. (A very influential textbook.) Primas, H. (1983) Chemistry, Quantum Mechanics, and Reductionism , NewYork: Springer. (Account of technical difficulties in carrying out the reduction.) NORETTA KOERTGE CH’ENG see CHENG CHENG In early Confucian writings, cheng describes the quality of authentically realizing or ‘completing’ a given thing’s true nature. It appears together with xin (trustworthiness), a character to which it is related in sense. Cheng refers primarily to the fulfilment of a thing’s true nature, while xin refers to the quality resulting from this. With regard to human beings, cheng is the authentic realization of ones nature. In texts such as the Xunzi and Zhongyong, the idea is related to the role human beings are believed to play in realizing or ‘completing’ a greater universal pattern. This development becomes centrally important for later neo-Confucian thinkers, who see these as different aspects of a single project. See also:NEO-CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY; SELF-CULTIVATION, CHINESE THEORIES OF Further reading Graham, A.C. (1992) Two Chinese Philosophers, La Salle, IL: Open Court. (An insightful study of two neo-Confucian thinkers, Cheng Hao and Cheng Yi; contains helpful discussions of cheng , particularly on pages 67–73.) PHILIP J. IVANHOE CH’ENG HAO see CHENG HAO CHENG HAO (1032–85) Cheng Hao was a pivotal figure in the creation of a Confucian tradition that was to become the basis for intellectual and state orthodoxy in China from the thirteenth century to the twentieth century. His decision to seek the Confucian Way ( dao) through a direct and personalized reading of the classics was later projected as the beginning of this movement. From a new perspective, he redirected Confucian discourse on such cardinal concepts as humaneness and human nature. See also: CHENG YI; CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY, CHINESE Further reading Graham, A.C. (1958) Two Chinese Philosophers: Ch’eng Ming-tao and Ch’eng Yi-ch’uan, London: Lund Humphries; repr. La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1992. (Classic study by a significant modern philosopher, with copious translated passages from both Cheng brothers.) HOYT CLEVELAND TILLMAN CHENG HSÜAN see ZHENG XUAN CH’ENG I see CHENG I CH’ENG MING-TAO see CHENG HAO CHENG YI (1033–1107) One of the most creative Chinese intellectuals, Cheng Yi was the most systematic and influential of a group of thinkers which channelled Confucian thinking into a new philosophical direction that gradually became dominant in East Asia for several centuries. Buddhism was still the most pervasive and sophisticated religious philosophy of his day; yet he effectively borrowed some of its ideas and methods to formulate a philosophy that would enable Confucian teachers to draw intellectuals away from the Buddhist masters. See also: CHENG HAO; NEO-CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY Further reading Tillman, H.C. (1992) Confucian Discourse and Chu Hsi’s Ascendancy, Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press. (A study of the Confucian fellowship and its ideas beginning with Cheng Yi and continuing through its establishment as orthodoxy in 1241.) HOYT CLEVELAND TILLMAN CH’ENG YI-CH’UAN see CHENG YI CHERNYSHEVSKII, NIKOLAI GAVRILOVICH (1828–89) Nikolai Chernyshevskii was the main theorist of the Russian democratic radicalism of ‘the 1860s’ or,
more precisely, of the period of political ‘thaw’ and liberal reforms which followed Russian defeat in the Crimean War and the enthronement (in 1855) of Alexander II. He was also the best representative of the non-conformist elements among the raznochintsy , that is, the educated commoners, who at that time began to figure prominently in Russian intellectual and social life. As such, he exerted a powerful formative influence on the Russian intelligentsia. In 1862 Chernyshevskii was arrested, brought to trial and, despite insufficient evidence, condemned to lifetime banishment in Siberia. In
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Page 135 exile, preserving his integrity to the end, he stoutly refused to ask for clemency (as a result, he remained in a remote Siberian village until 1883). In prison, waiting for trial, he wrote the novel Chto Delat’ (What Is To Be Done?) in which he showed the ‘new men’ of Russia – ‘rational egoists’, devoted to the cause of progress, and even a type of ascetic, self-sacrificing revolutionist. Thanks to a strange oversight of the censor the novel was serialized in the journal Sovremennik (The Contemporary) and, despite lack of literary distinction, became a powerful source of inspiration for several generations of Russian progressive youth. Chernyshevskii’s philosophical reputation was created by the Russian Marxists. The ‘father of Russian Marxism’, G.V. Plekhanov, greatly impressed by Chernyshevskii’s combination of Feuerbachian materialism and respect for Hegelian dialectics, described him as an important precursor of dialectical materialism. This view was taken up by Lenin who in Materialism and Empiriocriticism called Chernyshevskii ‘the great Russian Hegelian and materialist’, the only Russian philosopher before Marxism who was able to defend ‘integral materialism’ against the agnosticism and subjectivism of NeoKantians, positivists, Machists and ‘other muddle-heads’. Soviet philosophers went even further: Chernyshevskii was treated by them not only as the greatest Russian philosopher before Marxism, but also as the greatest pre-Marxian philosopher of the world, founder of the highest form of pre-Marxian materialism. For several decades this was the obligatory dogma of the Soviet official ideology. After the breakdown of the Soviet Union, interest in Chernyshevskii’s philosophy almost completely disappeared in Russia. It is impossible, however, to deny Chernyshevskii’s importance in Russian intellectual history. Hence the need for a rethinking of his philosophical legacy. Further reading Chernyshevskii, N.G. (1953) Selected Philosophical Essays, Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House. (A representative selection of Chernyshevskii’s philosophical thought in English. Includes ‘Aesthetic Relations Between Artand Reality’,’Anthropological Principle in Philosophy’ and ’Criticism of Philosophical Prejudices Against the Peasant Commune’.) Pereira, N.G.O. (1975) The Thought and Teachings of N.G. Černyševskij , The Hague: Mouton. (A good introduction to Chernyshevskii’s thought in English.) ANDRZEJ WALICKI CHI see QI CHIA I see JIA YI CHIH TUN see ZHI DUN CHIH-I see ZHIYI CHILLINGWORTH, WILLIAM (1602–44) Chillingworth was one of the most notable English-speaking contributors to debates between Protestants and Catholics in the seventeenth century. His use of a distinction between metaphysical and moral certainty proved extremely influential, as did his rationalist and fallibilist approach to issues of faith and authority. See also: FAITH Further reading Orr, R.R. (1967) Reason and Authority: the Thought of William Chillingworth , Oxford: Clarendon Press. (The fullest account of Chillingworth’s life and thought, including a list of unpublished manuscripts.) J.R. MILTON CHINESE CLASSICS The Chinese Classics are a group of texts of divination, history, philosophy, poetry, ritual and lexicography that have, to a significant extent, defined the orthodox Ruhist (Confucian) tradition of China. Since the Song dynasty (960–1279), they have consisted of the following thirteen texts: (1) The Shujing, orShangshu (Book of Documents, or Documents), the ‘classic’ of Chinese political philosophy. Allegedly compiled by Confucius, it contains a variety of historical documents, mostly dating from the fourth century BC. (2) The Yijing (Book of Changes), a divinatory work using sixty-four permutations of broken ( yin) and straight ( yang ) lines in six positions. It has two parts: the ‘Zhouyi’ (Zhou Changes), an ancient divination manual, and the Shiyi (Ten Wings), a commentary dating from the Warring States period (403–222 BC). (3) The Shijing (Book of Songs, or Odes), a collection of 305 poems, ostensibly selected by Confucius,
on a wide variety of subjects. It
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Page 136 includes songs of farming, feasting and love that are clearly of popular origin. It also contains a variety of court poetry including dynastic hymns, hunting and banquet songs and political satires from the Zhou court (1121–222 BC). (4) The Yili (Ceremony and Rites), a Warring States ritual text. (5) The Zhouli (Rites of Zhou), another Warring States ritual text. (6) the Liji (Book of Rites), a Han work that provides information about early Confucian philosophy and ritual. Together, works (4), (5) and (6) make up the Lijing (Classic of Rites). (7) The Zuozhuan (Zuo Annals). (8) The Guliangzhuan (Guliang Annals). (9) The Gongyangzhuan (Gongyang Annals). Works (7), (8) and (9) are commentaries to the Chunqiu (Spring and Autumn Annals, or simply Annals), a chronicle of the reigns of twelve rulers of the state of Lu; its presentation of diplomatic and political events from 722–481 BC is terse and factual, but the three commentaries provide substantial elaboration and exegesis. (10) The Analects of Confucius ( Lunyu), containing anecdotes and short dialogues between Confucius and his disciples. In this work, Confucius established a new emphasis on humanistic ethics and political and social order. (11) The Xiaojing (Book of Filial Piety), a short dialogue between Confucius and one of his disciples, concerned with filiality in both private and public life; it discusses children’s filiality to their parents and subjects’ filiality toward their rulers. (12) The Erya , a book of glosses of Zhou dynasty terms (the title means ‘Graceful and Refined’). (13) The Mengzi , which records a series of dialogues and debates between the philosopher Mencius and his students, several rulers and a variety of rhetorical and philosophical opponents. Mencius elaborated upon the Analects, arguing that human nature was inherently good and claiming that four ‘sprouts’ of goodness could be educated to create intuitive ability as the correct basis for moral judgments. The practice of appealing to authoritative texts appeared as early as the Analects of Confucius, around 500 BC. An explicit classical canon first appeared some four hundred years later during the Han dynasty (206 BC–DA 220), when Emperor Wu institutionalized a set of five classics associated with Confucius. At the same time he established new procedures for recruiting officials, created official chairs for the study of the Five Classics, restricted official academic appointments to those five areas and founded an imperial academy for the study and transmission of those works. In this way he effectively created a new ‘Confucian’ state religion. The term ‘classic’ ( jing) also appears as the first of six categories of literature in the classification system of the bibliographical chapter of the Hanshu (History of the Former Han Dynasty). Classics ( jing) are distinguished from masters ( zi), the latter being grouped into nine schools starting with the Ru, or Confucians. Since the Han dynasty, the content of the classical canon has grown from the original five (or seven) texts, as established during the Han dynasty. The original group of classical texts that acquired official sanction during the early Han empire was supplemented by additional texts during the Tang (617–907) and Song (960–1279) periods. The Chunqiu (Spring and Autumn Annals) became known under the titles of three commentary editions, the Gongyangzhuan, Guliangzhuan and Zuozhuan, as noted above. The Lijing became known as three separate works on ritual, the Yili , the Zhouli and the Liji, again as noted above. The Erya was added to the classical canon during the Tang dynasty and the Mengzi during the Song dynasty, bringing the total to what became the standard thirteen texts. These works functioned as classics in a number of ways. They formed the core education of the bureaucratic elite, they provided an important source for imperial authority and they set the philosophical agenda for the dominant Confucian tradition. The classics are also significant for what they do not contain. Many of what are now considered the greatest philosophical works of the Warring States period are classified as masters, not classics; examples include the Zhuangzi, the Xunzi and (until the Song dynasty) even the Mengzi . See also: CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY, CHINESE; DAOIST PHILOSOPHY; DAODEJING; YIJING LISA RAPHALS CHINESE PHILOSOPHY Any attempt to survey an intellectual tradition which encompasses more than four thousand years would be a daunting task even if it could be presumed that the reader shares, at least tacitly, many of the assumptions underlying that tradition. However, no such commonalities can be assumed in attempting to introduce Asian thinking to Western readers. Until the first Jesuit incursions in the late sixteenth century, China had developed in virtual independence of
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Page 137 the Indo-European cultural experience and China and the Western world remained in almost complete ignorance of one another. The dramatic contrast between Chinese and Western modes of philosophic thinking may be illustrated by the fact that the tendency of European philosophers to seek out the being of things, the essential reality lying behind appearances, would meet with little sympathy among Chinese thinkers, whose principal interests lie in the establishment and cultivation of harmonious relationships within their social ambiance. Contrasted with Anglo-European philosophic traditions, the thinking of the Chinese is far more concrete, this-worldly and, above all, practical. One reason for this difference is suggested by the fact that cosmogonic and cosmological myths played such a minor role in the development of Chinese intellectual culture and that, as a consequence, Chinese eyes were focused not upon issues of cosmic order but upon more mundane questions of how to achieve communal harmony within a relatively small social nexus. The rather profound linguistic and ethnic localism of what Pliny the Elder described as a ‘stay-at-home’ China, reinforced by a relative freedom from intercultural contact, generated traditional radial communities in which moral, aesthetic and spiritual values could remain relatively implicit and unarticulated. By contrast, in the West these norms had to be abstracted and raised to the level of consciousness to adjudicate conflicts occasioned by the complex ethnic and linguistic interactions associated with the development of a civilization rooted almost from the beginning in the confluence of Greek, Hebrew, and Latin civilizations. The distinctive origins and histories of Chinese and Western civilizations are manifested in a number of important ways. The priority of logical reasoning in the West is paralleled in China by the prominence of less formal uses of analogical, parabolic and literary discourse. The Chinese are largely indifferent to abstract analyses that seek to maintain an objective perspective, and are decidedly anthropocentric in their motivations for the acquisition, organization and transmission of knowledge. The disinterest in dispassionate speculations upon the nature of things, and a passionate commitment to the goal of social harmony was dominant throughout most of Chinese history. Indeed, the interest in logical speculations on the part of groups such as the sophists and the later Mohists was short-lived in classical China. The concrete, practical orientation of the Chinese toward the aim of communal harmony conditioned their approach toward philosophical differences. Ideological conflicts were seen, not only by the politicians but by the intellectuals themselves, to threaten societal well-being. Harmonious interaction was finally more important to these thinkers than abstract issues of who had arrived at the ‘truth’. Perhaps the most obvious illustration of the way the Chinese handled their theoretical conflicts is to be found in mutual accommodation of the three emergent traditions of Chinese culture, Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism. Beginning in the Han dynasty (206 BC–AD 220), the diverse themes inherited from the competing ‘hundred schools’ of pre-imperial China were harmonized within Confucianism as it ascended to become the state ideology. From the Han synthesis until approximately the tenth century AD, strong Buddhist and religious Daoist influences continued to compete with persistent Confucian themes, while from the eleventh century to the modern period, Neoconfucianism – a Chinese neoclassicism – absorbed into itself these existing tensions and those that would emerge as China, like it or not, confronted Western civilization. In the development of modern China, when Western influence at last seemed a permanent part of Chinese culture, the values of traditional China have remained dominant. For a brief period, intellectual activity surrounding the May Fourth movement in 1919 seemed to be leading the Chinese into directions of Western philosophic interest. Visits by Bertrand Russell and John Dewey, coupled with a large number of Chinese students seeking education in Europe, Great Britain and the USA, promised a new epoch in China’s relations with the rest of the world. However, the Marxism that Mao Zedong sponsored in China was ‘a Western heresy with which to confront the West’. Mao’s Marxism quickly took on a typically ‘Chinese’ flavour, and China’s isolation from Western intellectual currents continued essentially unabated. See also: AESTHETICS, CHINESE; BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY, CHINESE; CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY, CHINESE; DAOIST PHILOSOPHY; LAW AND RITUAL IN CHINESE PHILOSOPHY; LEGALIST PHILOSOPHY, CHINESE; LOGIC IN CHINA; MARXISM, CHINESE; MOHIST PHILOSOPHY; NEO-CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY; SELF-CULTIVATION IN CHINESE PHILOSOPHY Further reading Graham, A.C. (1989) Disputers of the Tao , La Salle, IL: Open Court. (The most sophisticated
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Page 138 overview of major philosophical developments in China’s formative period.) Hall, D.L., and Ames, R.T. (1987) Thinking Through Confucius , Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. (A comparative study which attempts to identify underlying assumptions in Confucian thinking.) Schwartz, B.I. (1985) The World of Thought in Ancient China , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (An accessible history of classical Chinese philosophy emphasizing continuities with Western culture.) DAVID L. HALL ROGER T. AMES CHINESE ROOM ARGUMENT John Searle’s ‘Chinese room’ argument aims to refute ‘strong AI’ (artificial intelligence), the view that instantiating a computer program is sufficient for having contentful mental states. Imagine a program that produces conversationally appropriate Chinese responses to Chinese utterances. Suppose Searle, who understands no Chinese, sits in a room and is passed slips of paper bearing strings of shapes which, unbeknown to him, are Chinese sentences. Searle performs the formal manipulations of the program and passes back slips bearing conversationally appropriate Chinese responses. Searle seems to instantiate the program, but understands no Chinese. So, Searle concludes, strong AI is false. See also: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: INTENTIONALITY Further reading Dennett, D.C. and Hofstadter, D. (eds) (1981) The Mind’s I, New York: Basic Books. (A diverse and delightful collection with commentary by the editors including critical discussion of the Chinese room.) ROBERT VAN GULICK CHINUL (1158–1210) Chinul was the founder of the Korean Chogye school of Buddhism. He sought to reconcile the bifurcation between Kyo (doctrinal) thought and Sôn (Zen) practice that rent the Korean Buddhist tradition of his time, by showing the symbiotic connection between Buddhist philosophy and meditation. He also advocated a distinctive program of soteriology that became emblematic of Korean Buddhism from that time forward: an initial sudden awakening to the nature of the mind followed by gradual cultivation of that awakening until full enlightenment was achieved. See also: BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY, KOREAN Further reading Buswell, R. (1983) The Korean Approach to Zen: The Collected Works of Chinul, Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press. (The standard English edition and translation of virtually all of Chinul’s works. Abridged in paperback as Tracing Back the Radiance: Chinul’s Korean Way of Zen , Classics in East Asian Buddhism 2, Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1991.) ROBERT E. BUSWELL, JR CHISHOLM, RODERICK MILTON (1916–) Chisholm is an important analytic philosopher of the second half of the twentieth century. His work in epistemology, metaphysics and ethics is characterized by scrupulous attention to detail, the use of a few basic, undefined or primitive terms, and extraordinary clarity. One of the first Anglo-American philosophers to make fruitful use of Brentano and Meinong, Chisholm translated many of Brentano’s philosophical writings. As one of the great teachers, Chisholm is widely known for the three editions of Theory of Knowledge , a short book and the standard text in US graduate epistemology courses. An ontological Platonist, Chisholm defends human free will and a strict sense of personal identity. See also: FREE WILL Further reading Bogdan, R.J. (ed.) (1986) Roderick M. Chisholm , Boston, MA: Reidel. (Contains a complete bibliography and a useful self-profile essay by Chisholm) DAVID BENFIELD CHOMSKY, NOAM (1928–) Fish swim, birds fly, people talk. The talents displayed by fish and birds rest on specific biological structures whose intricate detail is attributable to genetic endowment. Human linguistic capacity similarly rests on dedicated mental structures many of whose specific details are an innate biological endowment of the species. One of Chomsky’s central concerns has been to press this analogy and uncover its implications for theories of mind, meaning and knowledge. This work has proceeded along two broad fronts.
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Page 139 First, Chomsky has fundamentally restructured grammatical research. Due to his work, the central object of study in linguistics is ‘the language faculty’, a postulated mental organ which is dedicated to acquiring linguistic knowledge and is involved in various aspects of language-use, including the production and understanding of utterances. The aim of linguistic theory is to describe the initial state of this faculty and how it changes with exposure to linguistic data. Chomsky (1981) characterizes the initial state of the language faculty as a set of principles and parameters. Language acquisition consists in setting these open parameter values on the basis of linguistic data available to a child. The initial state of the system is a Universal Grammar (UG): a super-recipe for concocting language-specific grammars. Grammars constitute the knowledge of particular languages that result when parametric values are fixed. Linguistic theory, given these views, has a double mission. First, it aims to ‘adequately’ characterize the grammars (and hence the mental states) attained by native speakers. Theories are ‘descriptively adequate’ if they attain this goal. In addition, linguistic theory aims to explain how grammatical competence is attained. Theories are ‘explanatorily adequate’ if they show how descriptively adequate grammars can arise on the basis of exposure to ‘primary linguistic data’ (PLD): the data children are exposed to and use in attaining their native grammars. Explanatory adequacy rests on an articulated theory of UG, and in particular a detailed theory of the general principles and open parameters that characterize the initial state of the language faculty (that is, the biologically endowed mental structures). Chomsky has also pursued a second set of concerns. He has vigorously criticized many philosophical nostrums from the perspective of this revitalized approach to linguistics. Three topics he has consistently returned to are: Knowledge oflanguage andits general epistemological implications Indeterminacy and underdetermination in linguistic theory Person-specific ‘I-languages’ versus socially constituted ‘E-languages’ as the proper objects of scientific study. See also: LANGUAGE, PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Chomsky, N. (1981) Lectures on Government and Binding , Dordrecht: Foris. Pinker, S. (1994) The Language Instinct, New York: Morrow. (Combines Darwin and Chomsky to argue that linguistic competence is a human instinct rather than cultural phenomenon. Good introduction to linguistic research.) NORBERT HORNSTEIN CHÔNG YAGYONG (TASAN) (1762–1836) Chông Yagyong was a government official and a scholar of the Sirhak (Practical Learning) school in the late Chosôn dynasty of Korea. He is also known by his literary name Tasan. A man of independent mind, Chông was not satisfied with the conventional interpretation of the Confucian classics. He immersed himself in research on the Six Classics and the Four Books, investigating a whole range of writings by scholars from the Han through the Qing dynasties and searching for the true and original intents of the ancient sages uncorrupted by later interpretations. In the course of clarifying ancient terms and concepts, he frequently challenged the orthodox views of the Song neo-Confucianism that had largely dominated the intellectual climate of Chosôn Korea. Although he frequently praised Zhu Xi, he did not hesitate to point out the shortcomings of the neo-Confucian masters. See also: CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY, KOREAN Further reading Setton, M. (1996) Chông Yagyong: Korea’s Challenge to Orthodox Neo-Confucianism, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. (A penetrating study of the worldview behind Chông Yagyong’s reform ideas, with comparative perspectives of China and Japan.) YÔNG-HO CH’OE CHRISTINE DE PIZAN(1365–c .1430) Christine de Pizan, France’s ‘first woman of letters’, is primarily remembered as a courtly poet and a propagandist for women. Her extensive writings were influenced by the early humanists, reflecting an interest in education (particularly for women and young people) and in government. Following Aquinas, Christine defined wisdom as the highest intellectual virtue and tried to apply the concept of the just war to contemporary problems. Her works are also noteworthy for their contribution to the transmission of Italian literature to Parisian intellectual circles. See also: HUMANISM, RENAISSANCE
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Page 140 Further reading Christine de Pizan ( c .1406) Le Livre du Corps de Policie , trans. and ed. K. Langdon Forhan, The Book of the Body Politic , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. (Major political work; argues for the interdependence of rulers and subjects.) Willard, C.C. (1984) Christine de Pizan. Her Life and Works, New York: Persea. (General discussion with modern bibliography.) CHARITY CANNON WILLARD CHRISTOLOGY see INCARNATION AND CHRISTOLOGY CHRYSIPPUS ( c .280–c .206 BC) The Greek philosopher Chrysippus of Soli was the third and greatest head of the Stoic school in Athens. He wrote voluminously, and in particular developed Stoic logic into a truly formidable system. His philosophy is effectively identical with ‘early Stoicism’. See also: LOGIC, ANCIENT Further reading Gould, J.B. (1970) The Philosophy of Chrysippus, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. (Lucid survey.) DAVID SEDLEY CHU HSI see ZHU XI CHUANG TZU see ZHUANGZI CHUNG YUNG see ZHONGYONG CHURCH, ALONZO (1903–95) Alonzo Church was one of the twentieth century’s leading logicians. His work covers an extensive range of topics in logic and in other areas of mathematics. His most influential work relates to three areas: the general properties of functions, as presented in his ‘calculus of lambda conversion’; the theory of computability and the decision problem, to which he made fundamental contributions, known as Church’s thesis and Church’s theorem; and intensional logic, developing Frege’s theory of sense and denotation. In the last four decades of his life Church continued working mostly in this last area. See also: INTENSIONAL LOGICS Further reading Church, A. (1999) Collected Papers , ed.T. Burge, H.B. Enderton and M. Zeleny, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (A new two-volume collection of Church’s work.) PETER DOLNÍK CHURCH’S THEOREM AND THE DECISION PROBLEM Church’s theorem, published in 1936, states that the set of valid formulas of first-order logic is not effectively decidable: there is no method or algorithm for deciding which formulas of first-order logic are valid. Church’s paper exhibited an undecidable combinatorial problem P and showed that P was representable in first-order logic. If first-order logic were decidable, P would also be decidable. Since P is undecidable, first-order logic must also be undecidable. Church’s theorem is a negative solution to the decision problem ( Entscheidungsproblem ), the problem of finding a method for deciding whether a given formula of first-order logic is valid, or satisfiable, or neither. The great contribution of Church (and, independently, Turing) was not merely to prove that there is no method but also to propose a mathematical definition of the notion of ‘effectively solvable problem’, that is, a problem solvable by means of a method or algorithm. See also: CHURCH’S THESIS Further reading Davis, M. (ed.) (1965) The Undecidable: Basic Papers on Undecidable Propositions, Unsolvable Problems and Computable Functions , Hewlett, NY: Raven Press. (Includes a corrected version of Church’s original paper, and Turing’s article.) ROHIT PARIKH CHURCH’S THESIS An algorithm or mechanical procedure A is said to ‘compute’ a function f if, for any n in the domain of f, when given n as input, A eventually produces fn as output. A function is ‘computable’ if there is an algorithm that computes it. A set S is ‘decidable’ if there is an algorithm that decides membership in S:
if, given any appropriate n as input, the algorithm would output ‘yes’ if n S, and ‘no’ if n S. The notions of ‘algorithm’, ‘computable’ and ‘decidable’ are informal (or pre-formal) in that they have meaning independently of, and prior to, attempts at rigorous formulation. Church’s thesis, first proposed by Alonzo Church in a paper published in 1936, is the assertion that a function is computable if and
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Page 141 only if it is recursive: ‘We now define the notion . . . of an effectively calculable function . . . by identifying it with the notion of a recursive function . . . .’ Independently, Alan Turing argued that a function is computable if and only if there is a Turing machine that computes it; and he showed that a function is Turing-computable if and only if it is recursive. Church’s thesis is widely accepted today. Since an algorithm can be ‘read off’ a recursive derivation, every recursive function is computable. Three types of ‘evidence’ have been cited for the converse. First, every algorithm that has been examined has been shown to compute a recursive function. Second, Turing, Church and others provided analyses of the moves available to a person following a mechanical procedure, arguing that everything can be simulated by a Turing machine, a recursive derivation, and so on. The third consideration is ‘confluence’. Several different characterizations, developed more or less independently, have been shown to be coextensive, suggesting that all of them are on target. The list includes recursiveness, Turing computability, Herbrand–Gödel derivability, λ-definability and Markov algorithm computability. See also: COMPUTABILITY THEORY; LOGIC MACHINES AND DIAGRAMS Further reading Davis, M. (ed.) (1965) The Undecidable: Basic Papers on Undecidable Propositions, Unsolvable Problems and Computable Functions , Hewlett, NY: Raven Press. (Original papers, or English translations, by Gödel, Church, Turing, Rosser, Kleene and Post; includes some items not published elsewhere.) Rogers, H. (1967) Theory of Recursive Functions and Effective Computability, NewYork: McGraw-Hill. (Comprehensive mathematical development, based on ‘argument by Church’s thesis’.) STEWART SHAPIRO CICERO, MARCUS TULLIUS (106–43 BC) Cicero, pre-eminent Roman statesman and orator of the first century BC and a prolific writer, composed the first substantial body of philosophical work in Latin. Rising from small-town obscurity to the pinnacle of Rome’s staunchly conservative aristocracy, he devoted most of his life to public affairs. But he was deeply interested in philosophy throughout his life, and during two intervals of forced withdrawal from politics wrote two series of dialogues, first elaborating his political ideals and later examining central issues in epistemology, ethics and theology. Designed to establish philosophical study as an integral part of Roman culture, these works are heavily indebted to Greek philosophy, and some of the later dialogues are largely summaries of Hellenistic debates. But Cicero reworked his sources substantially, and his methodical expositions are thoughtful, judicious and, on questions of politics and morals, often creative. An adherent of the sceptical New Academy, he was opposed to dogmatism but ready to accept the most cogent arguments on topics important to him. His vigorously argued and eloquent critical discussions of perennial problems greatly enriched the intellectual and moral heritage of Rome and shaped Western traditions of liberal education, republican government and rationalism in religion and ethics. These works also afford invaluable insight into the course of philosophy during the three centuries after Aristotle. Further reading Cicero, M.T. (early 45 BC) Academics , trans. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and London: Heinemann, 1933. (Dialogue on the nature and possibility of knowledge. Substantial parts of two versions survive: the second of two books from the first version, entitled Lucullus but often called Prior Academics or Academics II; and the first of four books from a thorough revision, entitled Varro but often called Posterior Academics or Academics I.) Rawson, E. (1983) Cicero: A Portrait, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2nd edn. (Thoughtful and engaging biography emphasizing intellectual and ethical aspects.) STEPHEN A. WHITE CIESZKOWSKI, AUGUST VON (1814–94) Cieszkowski is perhaps best known for being the first to revise Hegel’s philosophy of history into a basis for future social reform. His introduction of the idea of ‘praxis’ as a synthesis between abstract theory and undirected practice was fundamental in the development of the Young Hegelian school, which formed shortly after Hegel’s death and sought the radical transformation of all then-existing political, religious and economic orders. See also: HISTORY, PHILOSOPHY OF
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Page 142 Further reading Liebich, A. (1979) Between Ideology and Utopia: The Politics and Philosophy of August Cieszkowski , Dordrecht: Reidel. (A comprehensive study of the whole of Cieszkowski’s life and works.) LAWRENCE S. STEPELEVICH CITIZENSHIP Within political philosophy, citizenship refers not only to alegal status,but also to a normative ideal – the governed should be full and equal participants in the political process. As such, it is a distinctively democratic ideal. People who are governed by monarchs or military dictators are subjects, not citizens. Most philosophers therefore view citizenship theory as an extension of democratic theory. Democratic theory focuses on political institutions and procedures; citizenship theory focuses on the attributes of individual participants. One important topic in citizenship theory concerns the need for citizens to actively participate in political life. In most countries participation in politics is not obligatory, and people are free to place private commitments ahead of political involvement. Yet if too many citizens are apathetic, democratic institutions will collapse. Another topic concerns the identity of citizens. Citizenship is intended to provide a common status and identity which helps integrate members of society. However, some theorists question whether common citizenship can accommodate the increasing social and cultural pluralism of modern societies. See also: DEMOCRACY; REPUBLICANISM Further reading Beiner, R. (1994) Theorizing Citizenship , Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. (A collection of prominent contemporary essays on citizenship, covering most of the theories and issues discussed in this article.) Clarke, P.B. (1994) Citizenship , London: Pluto Press. (A collection of historical writings on citizenship, from Aristotle to the present day.) WILL KYMLICKA CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE According to common definitions, civil disobedience involves a public and nonviolent breach of law that is committed in order to change a law or policy, and in order to better society. More, those classed as civilly disobedient must be willing to accept punishment. Why is the categorization of what counts as civil disobedience of practical importance? The usual assumption is that acts of civil disobedience are easier to justify morally than other illegal acts. Acts of civil disobedience, such as those committed by abolitionists, by followers of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr and by opponents of the Vietnam War, have been an important form of social protest. The decision as to what exactly should count as civil disobedience should be guided both by an ordinary understanding of what the term conveys and by what factors are relevant for moral justification. For justification, nonviolence and publicness matter because they reduce the damage of violating the law. Tactics should be proportionate to the evil against which civil disobedience is aimed; someone who assesses the morality of a particular act of civil disobedience should distinguish an evaluation of tactics from an evaluation of objectives. See also: GANDHI, M.K. Further reading Bedau, H. (ed.) (1969) Civil Disobedience: Theory and Practice , Indianapolis, IN: Pegasus. (Contains important writings by theorists and by leaders of acts of civil disobedience, with an illuminating introductory essay.) Zinn H. (1968) Disobedience and Democracy: Nine Fallacies on Law and Order , New York: Vint. (Expansive account of civil disobedience and when it is justified; nonphilosophical treatment.) KENT GREENAWALT CIVIL SOCIETY In modern social and political philosophy civil society has come to refer to a sphere of human activity and a set of institutions outside state or government. It embraces families, churches, voluntary associations and social movements. The contrast between civil society and state was first drawn by eighteenth-century liberals for the purpose of attacking absolutism. Originally the term civil society (in Aristotelian Greek, politike koinonia) referred to a political community of equal citizens who participate in ruling and being ruled In the twentieth century the separation of philosophy from social sciences, and the greatly expanded role of the state in economic and social life, have seemed to deprive the concept of both its intellectual
home and its critical force. Yet, approaching the end of the century, the discourse of civil society is now enormously influential. What explains the concept’s revival?
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Page 143 Does it have any application in societies that are not constitutional democracies? From a normative point of view, what distinguishes civil society from both the state and the formal economy? Further reading Cohen, J.L. and Arato, A. (1992) Civil Society and Political Theory , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (The most comprehensive theoretical statement to date.) Keane, J. (ed.) (1988) Civil Society and the State , London: Verso. (Collection of seminal essays on the civil society.) JEAN L. COHEN CIXOUS, HÉLÈNE (1937–) Hélène Cixous, a prolific French author born in Algeria, works between poetry and philosophy. She is part of a larger intellectual community in France that, since the 1960s, has sought a critique of the Western (male) subject, claiming that the ‘metaphysical’ notion of the subject has for three centuries contributed to the repression of nature, women and other cultures by construing human existence in terms of the separation of mind from body, and more generally of concept from metaphor. Influenced by Nietzsche and Freud, Cixous privileges the artistic and poetic but all her work has philosophical underpinnings, especially those proposed by Derrida. Like his, her thought champions notions of difference, multiplicity and life over identity, univocity and death. She seeks to displace the unified, narcissistic (male) subject, which in her view is on the side of death. Cixous is also importantly influenced by her critical reception of Hegel and Heidegger. See also: DECONSTRUCTION; FEMINISM AND PSYCHOANALYSIS Further reading Cixous, H. (1975) La Jeune Née , with Catherine Clément, Paris: Christian Bourgois; trans. B. Wing, The Newly Born Woman, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. (A militant essay that focuses on the previous exclusion of women from cultural discourses and invents new cultural practices through writing.) Conley, V.A. (1984) Hélène Cixous: Writing the Feminine, Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press, expanded edn, 1991. (A critical, introductory study especially of Cixous’ early writings. Contains interview.) VERENA ANDERMATT CONLEY CLANDESTINE LITERATURE Clandestine philosophical (anti-Christian) literature of the seventeenth century circulated in manuscript form until its publication by the philosophes in the later eighteenth century. Since research began, the list of texts has grown and now includes some 260 titles which cover the classical heritage of the Renaissance, the works of La Peyrère and Cyrano, the influence of Spinoza, the growth of rationalism which accompanied the splintering of Protestant churches and sects, and the development of the deist debate in Britain. See also: LIBERTINS Further reading Wade, I.O. (1938) The Clandestine Organisation and Diffusion of Philosophic ideas in France from 1700 to 1750, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; New York: Octagon, 1967. (A first inventory of 102 clandestine manuscript titles in France.) ANTONY MCKENNA CLAREMBALD OF ARRAS (1110/20–c .1187) A teacher of philosophy at Laon and commentator on Boethius, Clarembald was a product of the School of Chartres. His principal philosophical work, the Tractatulus (Short Treatise on Genesis), is an attempt to link Platonic theories of creation with the account given in Scripture, and includes a discussion of the nature of form and matter. See also: CHARTRES, SCHOOL OF Further reading Clarembald of Arras ( c .1160s) Tractatulus (Short Treatise on Genesis), in N.M. Häring, Life and Works of Clarembald of Arras, Toronto, Ont.: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1965. (Clarembald’s short commentary on Genesis.) STEPHEN F. BROWN CLARKE, SAMUEL (1675–1729) Regarded in his lifetime along with Locke as the leading English philosopher, Clarke was best known in his role as an advocate of a thoroughgoing natural theology and as a defender of Newtonianism, most notably in his famous correspondence with Leibniz. His natural theology was set out in his Boyle lectures
of 1704 and 1705, but it left little room for revelation, and endeared him to neither side in the quarrel between deists and orthodox Anglicans.
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Page 144 A staunch proponent of Newtonian natural philosophy, he defended it against criticisms of its notions of gravity and absolute space. Further reading Alexander, H.G. (1956) The Leibniz–Clarke Correspondence, Manchester: Manchester University Press. (Contains a useful introduction and notes to the translation of this exchange.) STEPHEN GAUKROGER CLASSICAL MECHANICS see MECHANICS, CLASSICAL CLAUBERG, JOHANNES (1622–65) Johannes Clauberg was a member of the Cartesian school in the years immediately following Descartes’ death, and is extremely important as an early expositor of Descartes and a spirited defender of the Cartesian philosophy. His writings include a number of direct commentaries on Descartes’ published works, as well as extensions and elaborations of the master’s views. See also: DESCARTES, R. Further reading Verbeek, T. (1992) Descartes and the Dutch: Early Reactions to Cartesian Philosophy, 1637–1650, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. (A general study of Dutch Cartesianism, in which Clauberg plays a significant role.) DANIEL GARBER CLEANTHES (331–232 BC) The Greek philosopher Cleanthes of Assos played a leading role in the formation of Stoicism. He was at once the most physicalist and the most religious of the Stoics. Pupil, and eventual successor (in 262), of the school’s founder Zeno, he wrote numerous philosophical works, including some poetry. In particular, he developed the notion of fire as the world’s governing principle. Further reading Cicero (45 BC) On the Nature of the Gods , trans. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and London: Heinemann, 1933. (Latin text with English translation. Book II is an eloquent presentation of Stoic theology; see 13–15, 24, 40–1 for Cleanthes’ contributions.) DAVID SEDLEY CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA (AD 150–215) Clement of Alexandria, a Christian Platonist, came to conversion through philosophy. In a series of allusive writings he presented a Hellenized Christianity along with the philosophical syncretism of his age: Stoic ethics, Aristotelian logic and especially Platonic metaphysics. Just as Paul saw the Hebrew prophets and law as a preparation for the Gospel, Clement saw Christianity as making possible a confluence of Plato and the Old Testament, both offering anticipations of Jesus’ teaching. Clement’s fusion of Platonism and Christianity vehemently opposed the dualism and determinism of gnostic theosophy, and stressed free choice and responsibility as fundamental to moral values. Central to his writing is the vindication of faith as the foundation for growth in religious knowledge by philosophical contemplation and biblical study. See also: ORIGEN; PLATONISM, EARLY AND MIDDLE Further reading Lilla, S. (1971) Clement of Alexandria: A Study in Christian Platonism and Gnosticism , London: Oxford University Press. (The best study of Clement’s middle Platonism.) HENRY CHADWICK CLEOMEDES ( c . 2nd century AD) Cleomedes was the author of On the Heavens , a Greek treatise on elementary astronomy surviving from a larger exposition of Stoic philosophy. Its account of measurements of the earth, and its applications of Stoic epistemology and philosophy of science, make it important evidence on poorly documented subjects. Further reading Cleomedes ( c . 2nd century AD) On the Heavens , ed. R.B. Todd, Cleomedis Caelestia , Leipzig: Teubner; 1990; trans. R. Goulet, Cléomède: Théorie Élémentaire, Paris: Vrin, 1980. (Respectively, Greek text and French translation with commentary.) ROBERT B. TODD COCKBURN, CATHARINE (1679–1749) Catharine Cockburn (Catharine Trotter) was a British moral philosopher who turned to philosophy after a successful career as one of the first woman playwrights. She wrote no substantial systematic treatise of
her own, but intervened ably and anonymously in philosophical and
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Page 145 theological debates of her day, in particular the debate on ethical rationalism triggered by Samuel Clarke’s 1704–5 Boyle lectures. Her adversaries included Thomas Rutherforth, William Warburton, Isaac Watts, Francis Hutcheson and Lord Shaftesbury. Her most famous contribution to the philosophy of her time was her able 1702 defence of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding . Her letters, published posthumously, discuss a range of philosophical topics. See also: HUTCHESON, F.; SHAFTESBURY, THIRD EARL OF Further reading Cockburn, C. (1702) A Defence of Mr Locke’s Essay of Human Understanding , London: W. Turner & J. Nutt. (Defence of Locke’s Essay, published anonymously.) SARAH HUTTON COERCION Coercion (also called ‘duress’) is one of the basic exculpating excuses both in morality and in some systems of criminal law. Unlike various kinds of direct compulsion that give a victim no choice, a coercee is left with a choice, albeit a very unappealing one. They can do what is demanded, or can refuse, opting instead for the consequences, with which they are threatened. Sometimes courts find that the coercive threat that led the defendant to act as they did was objectively resistible by any person of reasonable fortitude, especially when the defendant’s conduct was gravely harmful to others or to the state. A proposal is an offer when it projects for the recipient’s consideration a prospect that is welcome in itself, and not harmful or unwelcome beyond what would happen in the normal course of events. Coercive offers, according to some writers, are those that force a specific choice from the victim while actually enhancing their freedom. Some argue, however, that genuine coercion requires the active and deliberate creation of a vulnerability, and not mere opportunistic exploitation of a vulnerability discovered fortuitously. See also: FREEDOM AND LIBERTY; RESPONSIBLITY Further reading Wertheimer, A. (1987) Coercion , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (One of the few book-length analyses of the concept of coercion, both in law and everyday life. Contains detailed discussion of the relation between coercive threats and offers, coercion and exploitation, and coercion and voluntariness.) JOEL FEINBERG COGNITION, INFANT In the past thirty years developmental psychologists have developed techniques for investigating the cognitive resources of infants. These techniques show that an infant’s initial representation of the world is richer and more abstract than traditional empiricists supposed. For instance, infants seem to have at least some understanding of distance, of the continued existence of objects which are out of sight, and of the mental states of others. Such results have led philosophers to reconsider the idea – to be found in Plato – that there may be innate constraints on the way we view the world, and to examine the extent to which innate ‘knowledge’ may be revised as a result of learning. Further reading Bower, T.G.R. (1982) Development in Infancy, San Francisco, CA: W.H. Freeman. (A seminal and philosophically sophisticated (if sometimes controversial) look at infant perception and cognition.) Piaget, J. (1952) The Origins of Intelligence in Childhood, New York: Basic Books. (Classic discussion of infant action and cognition.) ALISON GOPNIK ANDREW N. MELTZOFF COGNITIVE ARCHITECTURE Cognitive architecture involves the properties of mental structures and mental mechanisms that do not vary when people have different goals, beliefs, precepts or other cognitive states. A serious computational theory of mind (CTM) requires that the architecture be constrained independently of such states. One consequence of taking the distinction between architecture and representation-governed process seriously is that it provides a reply to those who are sceptical about the role of rules in cognition, on the grounds that following rules leads to an infinite regress: in CTM, rules are executed by the causal structure of the architecture, and hence do not require further rules for following rules. See also: COMPUTABILITY THEORY; MODULARITY OF MIND Further reading Newell, A. (1990) Unified Theories of Cognition , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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Page 146 (The definitive last work by Newell on a proposed cognitive architecture.) ZENON W. PYLYSHYN COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT Psychological research of the last two decades has produced a surge of surprising results regarding cognitive development in children that has challenged a number of traditional philosophical assumptions about the nature of knowledge. The developing cognitive system seems organized in terms of specific domains, rather than as a general, all-purpose processor to which traditional empiricism was committed. Children’s conceptual development is often guided by highly abstract principles and parameters that are present in a child’s mind long before concrete details of a domain are encountered. Moreover, the data seem to indicate that development consists predominantly of gradual conceptual enrichment over time, rather than radical change. See also: LEARNING Further reading Carey, S. (1985) Conceptual Change in Childhood, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (Proposes a model of conceptual change for biology in which biological thought emerges largely out of a native psychology.) Keil, F. (1995) ‘The Growth of Causal Understanding in Natural Kinds’, in E. Sperber, D. Premack and A.J. Premak (eds) Causal Cognition: A Multidisciplinary Debate, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 234–62. (Discusses how the emergence of causal understandings of natural kinds can be dramatically different from other sorts of entities such as artefacts.) F.C. KEIL G. GUTHEIL COGNITIVE PLURALISM Descriptive cognitive pluralism claims that different people, or people in different cultures, go about the business of reasoning (that is, forming and revising beliefs) in significantly different ways. If descriptive cognitive pluralism is true, it lends considerable urgency to the venerable philosophical problem of deciding which strategies of belief formation and revision we ourselves should use. Normative cognitive pluralism claims that various quite different systems of reasoning may all be equally good. Epistemic relativism, which claims that different strategies of reasoning are best for different people, is a species of normative cognitive pluralism. Evaluative-concept pluralism claims that different people in different cultures use very different concepts of cognitive evaluation. Their notions of rationality and justification (or the closest equivalents in their culture) are quite different from ours. If this is right, it poses a prima facie challenge to a central strategy in analytic epistemology which tries to arbitrate between different systems of reasoning by determining which system best comports with our own concepts of epistemic evaluation. See also: GENDER AND SCIENCE; POSTCOLONIAL PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE; RATIONAL BELIEFS Further reading Stich, S. (1990) The Fragmentation of Reason , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (Chapters 1, 4 and 6 are especially relevant and expand on the material in this entry.) Wilson, B. (ed.) (1979) Rationality, Oxford: Blackwell. (Collection of essays by philosophers, anthropologists and others exploring various aspects of cognitive pluralism.) STEPHEN P. STICH COHEN, HERMANN (1842–1918) Hermann Cohen was the founder of the Marburg School of Neo-Kantianism and a major influence on twentieth-century Jewish thought. Die Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums (Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism) (1919) is widely credited with the renewal of Jewish religious philosophy. Cohen’s philosophy of Judaism is inextricably linked with his general philosophical position. But his system of critical idealism in logic, ethics, aesthetics and psychology did not originally include a philosophy of religion. The mainly Protestant Marburg School in fact regarded Cohen’s Jewish philosophy as an insufficient solution to the philosophical problem of human existence and to that of determining the role of religion in human culture. Thinkers who favoured a new, more existentialist approach in Jewish thought, however, saw Cohen’s introduction of religion into the system as a daring departure from the confines of philosophical idealism. Cohen identified the central Jewish contribution to human culture as the development of a religion that unites historical particularity with ethical universality. At the core of this religion of reason is the interdependence of the idea of God and that of the human being. Cohen derives this theme from the Jewish canon
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Page 147 through a philosophical analysis based on his transcendental idealism. Further reading Cohen, H. (1919) Die Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums, Leipzig: Fock; trans. S. Kaplan with an introduction by L. Strauss, Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism , New York: Frederick Ungar, 1972. (Hailed by Julius Guttmann as having renewed the discipline of Jewish philosophy, this work nevertheless failed to have a serious impact until its current rediscovery as a serious interpretation of a classical religion in the spirit of humanistic philosophy.) Edel, G. (1988) Von der Vernunftkritik zur Erkenntnislogik: Die Entwicklung der theoretischen Philosophie Hermann Cohens, Freiburg: Alber. (The most lucid exposition of the development of Cohen’s theoretical philosophy to date. With a bibliography of literature on Cohen.) MICHAEL ZANK COIMBRA GROUP see COLLEGIUM CONIMBRICENSE COLERIDGE, SAMUEL TAYLOR (1772–1834) Although much of Coleridge’s life and his best critical and creative powers were devoted to the attempt to develop a philosophical system, he is less well known as a philosopher than as a romantic poet. This is partly because many of his writings remained unpublished until recent years; they now shed new light on the extent of his knowledge of intellectual history, and on the significance of his philosophical synthesis. As a young man, Coleridge was attracted by the materialist philosophies and theories of human nature which had become part of the Enlightenment’s ‘Science of Man’. These coincided with his support for the drive towards progress and human brotherhood which he thought inspired the French Revolution. At Cambridge (1791–4) religious doubt accompanied his radical politics and he turned from orthodox Christianity to Unitarianism. Gradually, however, he became dissatisfied with the ‘mechanistic’ reductive principles of British eighteenth-century thought. His visit to Germany (1798–9) and his subsequent study of German ideas convinced him that here was a spectrum of philosophical insights which was more adequate to the whole of human nature; one through which ‘head and heart’ might be reconciled. Coleridge’s work reflects his experience of a world subject to violent revolutionary upheavals and his sense of widespread intellectual and moral confusion. Becoming convinced in the early years of the nineteenth century of both the intellectual and spiritual value of Christianity, he sought to re-establish a unity between religious faith and experience and critical philosophy. His ‘ideal Realism’ reconciled elements of Greek and German philosophy with reinterpretations of Judaeo-Christian themes and doctrines, and with the moral lessons he believed history provided. Any sound philosophy must, he insisted, do justice to every aspect of human nature. He declared that he was not concerned to be ‘original’ but to provide a new synthesis, and boldly claimed to have been the first to have ‘attempted to reduce all knowledges into harmony’; although his copious notes intended for an Opus Maximum , the ‘Logosophia’, were never organized into publishable form. See also: GERMAN IDEALISM Further reading Coleridge, S.T. (1957–) The Coleridge Notebooks , ed. K. Coburn and M. Christensen, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 5 vols. ( The Coleridge Notebooks reveal not only the vast range of Coleridge’s reading and his intellectual brilliance and profundity, but show his repeated return to struggle with certain topics and the sources of influence on which he drew.) Perkins, M.A. (1994) Coleridge’s Philosophy: the Logos as Unifying Principle , Oxford: Oxford University Press. (A thorough, sometimes demanding overview of Coleridge’s thought in the light of his search for unity.) MARY ANNE PERKINS COLLEGIUM CONIMBRICENSE The Collegium Conimbricense (‘Coimbra group’) or the Conimbricenses were late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Jesuit philosophy professors at the University of Coimbra, specifically in the College of Arts, which in 1555 had been placed under the direction of the Society of Jesus. Encouraged by their religious superiors and especially by Pedro da Fonseca, between 1592 and 1606 the Conimbricenses published five volumes containing eight treatises of commentary on Aristotle. Distributed particularly through the Jesuits, these volumes were widely influential in Europe, America, and the Far East, including Japan and China. On this last, Sommervogel (1891) has
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Page 148 cited the seventeenth-century Jesuit, Athanasius Kircher, to the effect that by his time all the Coimbra commentaries had been translated into Chinese. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM, RENAISSANCE; FONSECA, P. DA Further reading Lohr, C.H. (1987) Latin Aristotle Commentaries. II Renaissance Authors , Florence: Olschki, 98–9. (Contains bibliographical information on the commentaries of the Collegium Conimbricense.) JOHN P. DOYLE COLLIER, ARTHUR (1680–1732) Arthur Collier was an English parish priest who arrived, independently, at a version of immaterialism strikingly similar to that of Berkeley. In his 1713 work Clavis Universalis (‘universal key’), Collier contends that matter exists ‘in, or in dependence on’ the mind. Like Berkeley, he defends immaterialism as the only alternative to scepticism. He admits that bodies appear to be external, but their apparent or ‘quasi’ externeity is, he argues, merely the effect of God’s will, and not a sign of ‘real’ externeity or mindindependence. In Part I of the Clavis , Collier argues (as Berkeley had in his New Theory of Vision) that the visible world is not external. In Part II he argues (as Berkeley had in both the Principles and the Three Dialogues) that the external world ‘is a being utterly impossible’. See also: IDEALISM Further reading Benson, R. (1837) Memoirs of the life and writings of the Rev. Arthur Collier , London: E. Lumley; repr. Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1990. (A biography, with long selections from Collier’s correspondence. Chapter 2 contains several letters of philosophical interest. Collier’s theological views, examined in Chapter 3, are summarized in an unpublished manu script that appears as Appendix A.) KENNETH P. WINKLER COLLINGWOOD, ROBIN GEORGE (1889–1943) Collingwood was the greatest British philosopher of history of the twentieth century. His experience as a practising historian of Roman Britain led him to believe that the besetting vice of philosophy is to abstract propositions away from the context of the practical problems and questions that gave rise to them. Until we know the practical context of problems and questions to which a proposition is supposed to be an answer, we do not know what it means. In this respect his concern with the living activities of language users parallels that of the later Wittgenstein. Collingwood also believed that the interpretation of others was not a scientific exercise of fitting their behaviour into a network of generalizations, but a matter of rethinking their thoughts for oneself. His conviction that this ability, which he identified with historical thinking, was the neglected and crucial component of all human thought stamped him as original, or even a maverick, during his own lifetime. He also shared with Wittgenstein the belief that quite apart from containing propositions that can be evaluated as true or false, systems of thought depend upon ‘absolute presuppositions’, or a framework or scaffolding of ideas that may change with time. The business of metaphysics is to reconstruct the framework that operated at particular periods of history. Collingwood had extensive moral and political interests, and his writings on art, religion and science confirm his stature as one of the greatest polymaths of twentieth-century British philosophy. See also: HISTORY, PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Collingwood, R.G. (1946) The Idea of History , Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Collingwood’s most widely read and influential work, covering history and historiography from Herodotus to Toynbee and Spengler.) Mink, L.O. (1969) Mind, History, and Dialectic, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. (Probably the best overall introduction to Collingwood. It includes revealing discussions of the ‘scale of forms’ and Collingwood’s more general metaphysical standpoint.) SIMON BLACKBURN COLLINS, ANTHONY (1676–1729) Anthony Collins was an English freethinker, best-known to philosophers for his reconciliation of liberty and necessity, and his criticisms of Samuel Clarke’s arguments for the immateriality and immortality of the soul. ‘I was early convinced’, Collins wrote, ‘that it was my duty to enquire into, and judge for my self about matters of Religion’. This is a fair summary of Collins’ lifelong project: to judge the claims of religion as an impartial scientist would judge the claims of a theory, not by ‘the Way of Authority ’, but by reason or ‘the Way of private
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Page 149 Judgment ’. Collins took on almost the whole of religion as affirmed and practised in the eighteenthcentury Church of England: its philosophical foundations, its theological doctrines, its methods of scriptural interpretation and its views on the politics of church and state. He found most of it wanting. His conclusions were at least deistic and perhaps atheistic (though he remained a practising member of the established church): the irony of his writing and the reactive character of virtually everything he published make it difficult to know for sure. Further reading Collins, A. (1713) A discourse of free-thinking, occasion’d by the rise and growth of a sect call’d freethinkers , London; repr. New York: Garland, 1976. (Collins’ defence of freethinking.) O’Higgins, J. (1970) Anthony Collins: The Man and His Works, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. (A richly documented study of Collins’ life, work and influence on, for example, Voltaire and d’Holbach.) KENNETH P. WINKLER COLOUR AND QUALIA There are two basic philosophical problems about colour. The first concerns the nature of colour itself. That is, what sort of property is it? When I say of the shirt that I am wearing that it is red, what sort of fact about the shirt am I describing? The second problem concerns the nature of colour experience. When I look at the red shirt I have a visual experience with a certain qualitative character – a ‘reddish’ one. Thus colour seems in some sense to be a property of my sensory experience, as well as a property of my shirt. What sort of mental property is it? Obviously, the two problems are intimately related. In particular, there is a great deal of controversy over the following question: if we call the first sort of property ‘objective colour’ and the second ‘subjective colour’, which of the two, objective or subjective colour, is basic? Or do they both have an independent ontological status? Most philosophers adhere to the doctrine of physicalism, the view that all objects and events are ultimately constituted by the fundamental physical particles, properties and relations described in physical theory. The phenomena of both objective and subjective colour present problems for physicalism. With respect to objective colour, it is difficult to find any natural physical candidate with which to identify it. Our visual system responds in a similar manner to surfaces that vary along a wide range of physical parameters, even with respect to the reflection of light waves. Yet what could be more obvious than the fact that objects are coloured? In the case of subjective colour, the principal topic of this entry, there is an even deeper puzzle. It is natural to think of the reddishness of a visual experience – its qualitative character – as an intrinsic property of the experience. Intrinsic properties are distinguished from relational properties in that an object’s possession of the former does not depend on its relation to other objects, whereas its possession of the latter does. If subjective colour is intrinsic, then it would seem to be a neural property of a brain state. But what sort of neural property could explain the reddishness of an experience? Furthermore, reduction of subjective colour to a neural property would rule out even the possibility that forms of life with different physiological structures, or intelligent robots, could have experiences of the same qualitative type as our experiences of red. While some philosophers endorse this consequence, many find it quite implausible. Neural properties seem best suited to explain how certain functions are carried out, and therefore it might seem better to identify subjective colour with the property of playing a certain functional role within the entire cognitive system realized by the brain. This allows the possibility that structures physically different from human brains could support colour experiences of the same type as our own. However, various puzzles undermine the plausibility of this claim. For instance, it seems possible that two people could agree in all their judgments of relative similarity and yet one sees green where the other sees red. If this ‘inverted spectrum’ case is a genuine logical possibility, as many philosophers advocate, then it appears that subjective colour must not be a matter of functional role, but rather an intrinsic property of experience. Faced with the dilemmas posed by subjective colour for physicalist doctrine, some philosophers opt for eliminativism, the doctrine that subjective colour is not a genuine, or real, phenomenon after all. On this view the source of the puzzle is a conceptual confusion; a tendency to extend our judgments concerning objective colour, what appear to be intrinsic properties of the surfaces of physical objects, onto the properties of our mental states. Once we see that all that is happening ‘inside’ is a perceptual judgment concerning the properties of external objects, we will understand why we
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Page 150 cannot locate any state or property of the brain with which to identify subjective colour. The controversy over the nature of subjective colour is part of a wider debate about the subjective aspect of conscious experience more generally. How does the qualitative character of experience – what it is like to see, hear and smell – fit into a physicalist scientific framework? At present all of the options just presented have their adherents, and no general consensus exists. See also: COLOUR, THEORIES OF; QUALIA Further reading Clark, A. (1993) Sensory Qualities , Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Presents a theory of sensory qualities as points in a multidimensional quality space defined in terms of similarity judgments. Very detailed and somewhat technical.) Hardin, C.L. (1988) Color for Philosophers: Unweaving the Rainbow , Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company. (Excellent review of the empirical literature regarding colour. Argues both for irrealism about objective colour and against the inverted spectrum argument in support of a functional analysis.) JOSEPH LEVINE COLOUR, THEORIES OF The world as perceived by human beings is full of colour. The world as described by physical scientists is composed of colourless particles and fields. Philosophical theories of colour since the Scientific Revolution have been driven primarily by a desire to harmonize these two apparently conflicting pictures of the world. Any adequate theory of colour has to be consistent with the characteristics of colour as perceived without contradicting the deliverances of the physical sciences. Given this conception of the aim of a theory of colour, there are three possibilities for resolving the apparent conflict between the scientific and perceptual facts. The first is to deny that physical objects have colours. Theories of this kind admit that objects appear coloured but maintain that these appearances are misleading. The conflict is resolved by removing colour from the external world. Second, it might be that colour is a relational property. For an object to possess a particular colour it must be related in the right way to a perceiver. One common version of this view analyses colour as a disposition to cause particular kinds of perceptual experience in a human being. Since the physical sciences deal only with the intrinsic properties of physical objects and their relations to other physical objects and not their relations to perceiving subjects, the possibility of conflict is removed. A third possible response is to maintain that colour really is a property of external objects and that the conflict is merely apparent. Some theories of this form maintain that colour is identical to a physical property of objects. Others maintain that colour is a property that physical objects possess over and above all their physical properties. Philosophical discussions of colour typically take the form of either elaborating on one of these three possibilities or attempting to show more generally that one of these three types of response is to be preferred to the others. See also: COLOUR AND QUALIA; SECONDARY QUALITIES Further reading Hardin, C.L. (1988) Color for Philosophers, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett; repr. expanded edn, 1993. Argues for an eliminativist theory of colour. Also presents a useful introduction to colour science.) Hilbert, D.R. (1987) Color and Color Perception , Stanford, CA: Centre for the Study of Language and Information. Defends a physicalist theory of colour.) DAVID R. HILBERT COMBINATORY LOGIC Combinatory logic comprises a battery of formalisms for expressing and studying properties of operations constitutive to contemporary logic and its applications. The sole syntactic category in combinatory logic is that of the applicative term. Closed terms are called ‘combinators’; there is no binding of variables. Systems containing the basic combinators S and K exhibit the crucial property of combinatorial completeness: every routine expressible in the system can be captured by a term composed of these two combinators alone. Combinatory logic is a close relative of Church’s lambda calculus. M. Schönfinkel first introduced and defined basic combinators in 1920 in assaying foundations for mathematics that avoid bound variables and take operations, rather than sets, as fundamental. H. Curry later rediscovered the combinators (and coined the term ‘combinatory logic’) independently of Schönfinkel. Curry constructed various formal systems for combinatory logic and, throughout most of the subject’s history, was the central figure in the
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Page 151 research. In 1969, D. Scott succeeded in constructing set-theoretic, functional models for the lambda calculus and combinatory logic. Since then semantic studies of combinatory systems, together with research on their applications to computer science and further development as foundational systems, have dominated the field. Further reading Hindley, J. and Seldin, J. (1986) Introduction to Combinators and λ-Calculus, London Mathematical Society Student Texts no. 1, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (An excellent introduction, highly recommended for beginners.) Schönfinkel, M. (1924) ‘Über die Bausteine der mathematischen Logik’, Mathematische Annalen 92: 305– 16; trans. On the Building Blocks of Mathematical Logic , ed. H. Behmann; repr. in J. van Heijenoort (ed.) From Frege to Gödel: A Source Book in Mathematical Logic, 1879–1931 , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967, 355–66. (From a 1920 presentation to the Mathematical Society at Göttingen. Introduction in the 1967 version by W.V. Quine.) DAVID CHARLES MCCARTY COMEDY In the narrowest sense, comedy is drama that makes us laugh and has a happy ending. In a wider sense it is also humorous narrative literature with a happy ending. In the widest sense, comedy includes any literary or graphic work, performance or other art intended to amuse us. This entry will leave aside theories of humour and concentrate on comedy as a dramatic and literary form. Comedy began at about the same time as tragedy, and because they represent alternative attitudes toward basic issues in life, it is useful to consider them together. Unfortunately, several traditional prejudices discriminate against comedy and in favour of tragedy. There are four standard charges against comedy: it emphasizes the animal aspects of human life, encourages disrespect for leaders and institutions, is based on malice, and endangers our morality. These charges are easily answered, for none picks out something that is both essential to comedy and inherently vicious. In fact, once we get past traditional prejudices, several of the differences between comedy and tragedy can be seen as advantages. While tragedy tends to be idealistic and elitist, for example, comedy tends to be pragmatic and egalitarian. While tragedy values honour, even above life itself, comedy puts little stock in honour and instead emphasizes survival. Tragic heroes preserve their dignity but die in the process; comic characters lose their dignity but live to tell the tale. Most generally, comedy celebrates mental flexibility and a realistic acceptance of the limitations of human life. The comic vision of life, in short, embodies a good deal of wisdom. See also: HUMOUR; TRAGEDY Further reading Gutwirth, M. (1993) Laughing Matter: An Essay on the Comic, Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press. (A synthesis of previous theories of laughter and an exploration of the values of comedy. Moderately difficult.) Morreall, J. (ed.) (1987) The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor, Albany,NY:State University of New York Press. (An anthology of philosophical writings on laughter and humour from Plato to Roger Scruton.) JOHN MORREALL COMENIUS, JOHN AMOS (1592–1670) Comenius (Jan Amos Komensky), a Czech philosopher and theologian, was one of the founders of modern educational theory. As a Protestant minister he had to leave Bohemia during the CounterReformation, spending most of his life in various European countries. His greatest work (not published during his lifetime) is De rerum humanarum emendatione consultatio catholica (A General Consultation on the Reform of Human Affairs), whose leading idea is the demand for a harmonious arrangement of human relations on the basis of rational enlightenment, the development of education, and the instruction of all humankind. Comenius builds his philosophy on an idea of human nature understood as grounded in an active creative force perpetually leading to improvement: instruction and education are the tools to fulfil this humanitarian ideal. To lend force to this, Comenius constructs a whole ontological system, in which a harmonious development of the whole of existence leads to human reality as its highest tier. See also: CZECH REPUBLIC, PHILOSOPHY IN Further reading Pešková, J., Cach, J. and Svatoš, M. (eds) (1991) Homage to J.A. Comenius, Prague: Karolinum.
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Page 152 (A collection of papers in English, exploring a wide range of Comenius’ ideas.) JOSEF ZUMR COMMON LAW Common law and custom are features of most enduring legal orders. In English law the concepts have taken on special and interrelated significance, since English law is said to be grounded in common law and that in turn is said to derive from custom. According to classical common law theory, which crystallized in the seventeenth century, common law grew from the customs of the English people. It was not made by legal officials, as statutes are. Change was accommodated in this theory, on the basis not of identity of elements of law over time but of continuity, a continuity of authority and reception of legal customs, and of the traditional legal order which declared them to be law. The role of legal officials – particularly judges – was to interpret and declare legal custom; their judgments provided evidence of it. They did not make it or invent it. This mode of development through continual interpretation and reinterpretation of the significance and bearing of the legal inheritance was, according to common lawyers, better adapted to social complexity, change and variety, and also to human epistemological and practical limitations, than attempts to cover any field with legislation. This theory was largely eclipsed in nineteenth-century England by the theory of legal positivism, and with it were eclipsed for a time some useful insights into social complexity and institutional limitations. Also lost was a sense of the complex dialectic between continuity and change in legal and institutionalized traditions. In its best moments, common law theory had such a sense. Further reading Blackstone, Sir W. (1765–9) Commentaries on the Laws of England , 4 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1787; Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1979. (The 1979 edition contains valuable editorial introductions to each volume.) Postema, G.J. (1986) Bentham and the Common Law Tradition, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (One of the best available accounts of the legal theory of the common law tradition, and of Jermey Bentham’s criticisms of, and alternative to, that theory.) MARTIN KRYGIER COMMON SENSE SCHOOL The term ‘Common Sense School’ refers to the works of Thomas Reid and to the tradition of Scottish realist philosophy for which Reid’s works were the main source. The ideas of the school were carried abroad to France and to the USA, where they were highly influential, particularly among leading academics critical of Calvinism. Interest in Reid and the tradition to which he gave rise was revived almost a century later by leading American philosophers and their students. See also: ABERDEEN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY; Further reading Manns, J.W. (1993) Reid and his French Disciples, Leyden: Brill. (Exhibits the best understanding of the common sense tradition yet written.) EDWARD H. MADDEN COMMON-SENSE ETHICS ‘Common-sense ethics’ refers to the pre-theoretical moral judgments of ordinary people. Moral philosophers have taken different attitudes towards the pre-theoretical judgments of ordinary people. For some they are the ‘facts’ which any successful moral theory must explain and justify, while for others the point of moral theory is to refine and improve them. ‘Common Sense ethics’ as a specific kind of moral theory was developed in Scotland during the latter part of the eighteenth century to counter what its proponents saw as the moral scepticism of David Hume. Thomas Reid, the main figure in this school, and his followers argued that moral knowledge and the motives to abide by it are within the reach of everyone. They believed that a plurality of basic self-evident moral principles is revealed by conscience to all mature moral agents. Conscience is an original and natural power of the human mind and this shows that God meant it to guide our will. A deeply Christian outlook underwrites their theory. See also: INTUITIONISM IN ETHICS; MORAL KNOWLEDGE Further reading Grave, S.A. (1960) The Scottish Philosophy of Common Sense, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (The most comprehensive critical discussion of Common Sense moral philosophy, including coverage of Reid, Stewart and Beattie.) Stewart, D. (1828) Philosophy of the Active and Moral Powers of Man , ed. and abridged by J. Walker, Boston, MA: Phillips, Samson and Co., 1868. (An expanded version of the
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Page 153 Outlines , this work contains a critical survey of British modern moral philosophy. Stewart argues against Hobbes and others that the sense of duty cannot be reduced to self-love. He opposes Paley’s associationism and Bentham’s utilitarianism. The influence of Reid is especially evident, as well as that of Cudworth, Shaftesbury, Butler and Price. Stewart tends to avoid appeals to a common sense.) CHARLOTTE R. BROWN COMMON-SENSE REASONING, THEORIES OF The task of formalizing common-sense reasoning within a logical framework can be viewed as an extension of the programme of formalizing mathematical and scientific reasoning that has occupied philosophers throughout much of the twentieth century. The most significant progress in applying logical techniques to the study of common-sense reasoning has been made, however, not by philosophers, but by researchers in artificial intelligence, and the logical study of common-sense reasoning is now a recognized sub-field of that discipline. The work involved in this area is similar to what one finds in philosophical logic, but it tends to be more detailed, since the ultimate goal is to encode the information that would actually be needed to drive a reasoning agent. Still, the formal study of common-sense reasoning is not just a matter of applied logic, but has led to theoretical advances within logic itself. The most important of these is the development of a new field of ‘non-monotonic’ logic, in which the conclusions supported by a set of premises might have to be withdrawn as the premise set is supplemented with new information. See also: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Further reading Gabbay, D., Hogger, C.J. and Robinson, J.A. (eds) (1994) Handbook of Logic in Artificial Intelligence and Logic Programming, vol. 3, Nonmonotonic Reasoning and Uncertain Reasoning, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Definitive and detailed survey articles on a variety of non-monotonic logics.) Thomason, R. (1988) Philosophical Logic and Artificial Intelligence , Dordrecht: Kluwer. (Some essays at the intersection of philosophical logic and artificial intelligence.) JOHN HORTY COMMONSENSISM ‘Commonsensism’ refers to one of the principal approaches to traditional theory of knowledge where one asks oneself the following Socratic questions: (1) What can I know?; (2) How can I distinguish beliefs that are reasonable for me to have from beliefs that are not reasonable for me to have? and (3) What can I do to replace unreasonable beliefs by reasonable beliefs about the same subject-matter, and to replace beliefs that are less reasonable by beliefs that are more reasonable? The mark of commonsensism is essentially a faith in oneself – a conviction that a human being, by proceeding cautiously, is capable of knowing the world in which it finds itself. Any inquiry must set out with some beliefs. If you had no beliefs at all, you could not even begin to inquire. Hence any set of beliefs is better than none. Moreover, the beliefs that we do find ourselves with at any given time have so far survived previous inquiry and experience. And it is psychologically impossible to reject everything that you believe. ‘Doubting’, Peirce says, ‘is not as easy as lying’. Inquiry, guided by common sense, leads us to a set of beliefs which indicates that common sense is on the whole a reliable guide to knowledge. And if inquiry were not thus guided by common sense, how would it be able to answer the three Socratic questions with which it begins? See also: CONTEXTUALISM, EPISTEMOLOGICAL Further reading Chisholm, R.M. (1996) A Realistic Theory of Categories: An Essay on Ontology , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (A summation of Chisholm’s views on an enormous range of topics.) Moore, G.E. (1959) Philosophical Papers , London: George Allen & Unwin. (Chapter 2, ‘A Defence of Common Sense’, and Chapter 7, ‘Proof of an External World’, are perhaps the clearest writings that exist on the relation of common sense to philosophy.) RODERICK M. CHISHOLM COMMUNICATION AND INTENTION The classic attempt to understand communication in terms of the intentions of a person making an utterance was put forward by Paul Grice in 1957. Grice was concerned with actions in which a speaker means something by what they do and what is meant might just as much be
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Page 154 false as true. He looked for the essence of such cases in actions intended to effect a change in the recipient. Grice saw successful communication as depending on the recognition by the audience of the speaker’s intention. Since then there have been many attempts to refine Grice’s work, and to protect it against various problems. There has also been worry that Grice’s approach depends on a false priority of psychology over semantics, seeing complex psychological states as existing independently of whether the agent has linguistic means of expressing them. See also: MEANING AND COMMUNICATION Further reading Bennett, J. (1976) Linguistic Behaviour , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (A lively development of Grice’s work, especially valuable for its discussion of the relation between full intentionality and more primitive signalling systems.) Grice, P. (1957) ‘Meaning’, Philosophical Review 66: 377–88; repr. in Studies in the Way of Words, Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1989. (The seminal article in the field.) SIMON BLACKBURN COMMUNICATIVE RATIONALITY The concept of ‘communicative rationality’ is primarily associated with the work of the philosopher and social theorist Jürgen Habermas. According to Habermas, communication through language necessarily involves the raising of ‘validity-claims’ (distinguished as ‘truth’, ‘rightness’ and ‘sincerity’), the status of which, when contested, can ultimately only be resolved through discussion. Habermas further contends that speakers of a language possess an implicit knowledge of the conditions under which such discussion would produce an objectively correct result, and these he has spelled out in terms of the features of an egalitarian ‘ideal speech situation’. Communicative rationality refers to the capacity to engage in argumentation under conditions approximating to this ideal situation (‘discourse’, in Habermas’ terminology), with the aim of achieving consensus. Habermas relies on the concept of communicative rationality to argue that democratic forms of social organization express more than simply the preferences of a particular cultural and political tradition. In his view, we cannot even understand a speech-act without taking a stance towards the validity-claim it raises, and this stance in turn anticipates the unconstrained discussion which would resolve the status of the claim. Social and political arrangements which inhibit such discussion can therefore be criticized from a standpoint which does not depend on any specific value-commitments, since for Habermas achieving agreement ( Verständigung) is a ‘telos’ or goal which is internal to human language as such. A similar philosophical programme has also been developed by KarlOtto Apel, who lays more stress on the ‘transcendental’ features of the argumentation involved. See also: HABERMAS, J.; REASONING/ RATIONALITY: PRACTICAL Further reading Cooke, M. (1994) Language and Reason: A Study of Habermas’ Pragmatics , Cambridge MA: MIT Press. (A detailed, sympathetic but critical analysis of Habermas’ concept of communicative rationality.) Habermas, J. (1968) Erkenntnis und Interesse , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag; trans. J.J. Shapiro as Knowledge and Human Interests , London: Heinemann, 1971. Develops the distinction between instrumental action and communicative action as two distinct forms of action.) PETER DEWS COMMUNISM Communism is the belief that society should be organized without private property, all productive property being held communally, publicly or in common. A communist system is one based on a community of goods. It is generally presented as a positive alternative to competition, a system that is thought to divide people; communism is expected to draw people together and to create a community. In most cases the arguments for communism advocate replacing competition with cooperation either for its own sake or to promote a goal such as equality, or to free specific groups of people to serve a higher ideal such as the state or God. See also: EQUALITY; SOCIALISM Further reading Dawson, D. (1992) Cities of the Gods: Communist Utopias in Greek Thought, New York: Oxford University Press. (Early developments of communism.) Wiles, P.J.D. (1962) The Political Economy of Communism , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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Page 155 (Includes a good discussion of ‘full’ or ‘pure’ communism.) LYMAN TOWER SARGENT COMMUNITY AND COMMUNITARIANISM Reflections on the nature and significance of community have figured prominently in the history of Western ethics and political philosophy, both secular and religious. In ethics and political philosophy the term ‘community’ refers to a form of connection among individuals that is qualitatively stronger and deeper than a mere association. The concept of a community includes at least two elements: (1) individuals belonging to a community have ends that are in a robust sense common, not merely congruent private ends, and that are conceived of and valued as common ends by the members of the group; and (2) for the individuals involved, their awareness of themselves as belonging to the group is a significant constituent of their identity, their sense of who they are. In the past two decades, an important and influential strand of secular ethical and political thought in the English-speaking countries has emerged under the banner of communitarianism. The term ‘communitarianism’ is applied to the views of a broad range of contemporary thinkers, including Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, Michael Sandel, and sometimes Michael Walzer. It is important to note, however, that there is no common creed to which these thinkers all subscribe and that for the most part they avoid the term. There are two closely related ways to characterize what communitarians have in common; one positive, the other negative. As a positive view, communitarianism is a perspective on ethics and political philosophy that emphasizes the psycho-social and ethical importance of belonging to communities, and which holds that the possibilities for justifying ethical judgments are determined by the fact that ethical reasoning must proceed within the context of a community’s traditions and cultural understandings. As a negative view, communitarianism is a variety of anti-liberalism, one that criticizes liberal thought for failing to appreciate the importance of community. At present the communitarian critique of liberalism is more developed than is communitarianism as a systematic ethical or political philosophy. Existing communitarian literature lacks anything comparable to Rawls’ theory of justice or Feinberg’s theory of the moral limits of criminal law, both of which are paradigmatic examples of systematic liberal ethical and political theory. For the most part, the positive content of the communitarians’ views must be inferred from their criticisms of liberalism. Thus, to a large extent communitarianism so far is chiefly a way of thinking about ethics and political life that stands in fundamental opposition to liberalism. To some, communitarian thinking seems a healthy antidote to what they take to be excessive individualism and obsessive preoccupation with personal autonomy. To others, communitarianism represents a faliure to appreciate the value – and the fragility – of liberal social institutions. The success of communitarianism as an ethical theory depends upon whether an account of ethical reasoning can be developed that emphasizes the importance of social roles and cultural values in the justification of moral judgments without lapsing into an extreme ethical relativism that makes fundamental ethical criticism’s of one’s own community impossible. The success of communitarianism as a political theory depends upon whether it can be demonstrated that liberal political institutions cannot provide adequate conditions for the flourishing of community or secure appropriate support for persons’ identities so far as their identities are determined by their membership in communities. See also: LIBERALISM Further reading Mulhall, S. and Swift, A. (1992) Liberals and Communitarians , Oxford: Oxford University Press. (An introduction to the thought of Sandel, MacIntyre, Taylor and Walzer, and the liberal responders, Rawls, Rorty and Raz.) Plant, R. (1974) Community and Ideology , London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (Examines the concept of community and different conceptions of community in political philosophy.) ALLEN BUCHANAN COMPLEXITY, COMPUTATIONAL The theory of computational complexity is concerned with estimating the resources a computer needs to solve a given problem. The basic resources are time (number of steps executed) and space (amount of memory used). There are problems in logic, algebra and combinatorial games that are solvable in principle by a computer, but computationally intractable because the resources required by
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Page 156 relatively small instances are practically infeasible. The theory of NP -completeness concerns a common type of problem in which a solution is easy to check but may be hard to find. Such problems belong to the class NP ; the hardest ones of this type are the NP -complete problems. The problem of determining whether a formula of propositional logic is satisfiable or not is NP complete. The class of problems with feasible solutions is commonly identified with the class P of problems solvable in polynomial time. Assuming this identification, the conjecture that some NP problems require infeasibly long times for their solution is equivalent to the conjecture that P ≠ NP . Although the conjecture remains open, it is widely believed that NP -complete problems are computationally intractable. See also: COMPUTABILITY THEORY Further reading Sipser, M. (1997) Introduction to the Theory of Computation, Boston, MA: PWS. (An elegant introduction to the basics of computational complexity theory, written by a major figure in the area.) ALASDAIR URQUHART COMPOSITIONALITY A language is compositional if the meaning of each of its complex expressions (for example, ‘black dog’) is determined entirely by the meanings its parts (‘black’, ‘dog’) and its syntax. Principles of compositionality provide precise statements of this idea. A compositional semantics for a language is a (finite) theory which explains how semantically important properties such as truth-conditions are determined by the meanings of parts and syntax. Supposing English to have a compositional semantics helps explain how finite creatures like ourselves have the ability to understand English’s infinitely many sentences. Whether human languages are in fact compositional, however, is quite controversial. See also: MEANING AND TRUTH; SEMANTICS Further reading Davidson, D. (1984) Inquiries into Truth and Understanding , Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Essay 1 argues that learnable languages have compositional semantics; essay 7 argues against Fregean accounts of ‘thinks’.) Schiffer, S. (1987) Remnants of Meaning , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (Contains arguments against the existence of compositional semantics for natural languages.) MARK RICHARD COMPUTABILITY AND INFORMATION The standard definition of randomness as considered in probability theory and used, for example, in quantum mechanics, allows one to speak of a process (such as tossing a coin, or measuring the diagonal polarization of a horizontally polarized photon) as being random. It does not allow one to call a particular outcome (or string of outcomes, or sequence of outcomes) ‘random’, except in an intuitive, heuristic sense. Information-theoretic complexity makes this possible. An algorithmically random string is one which cannot be produced by a description significantly shorter than itself; an algorithmically random sequence is one whose initial finite segments are almost random strings. Gödel’s incompleteness theorem states that every axiomatizable theory which is sufficiently rich and sound is incomplete. Chaitin’s information-theoretic version of Gödel’s theorem goes a step further, revealing the reason for incompleteness: a set of axioms of complexity N cannot yield a theorem that asserts that a specific object is of complexity substantially greater than N. This suggests that incompleteness is not only natural, but pervasive; it can no longer be ignored by everyday mathematics. It also provides a theoretical support for a quasi-empirical and pragmatic attitude to the foundations of mathematics. Information-theoretic complexity is also relevant to physics and biology. For physics it is convenient to reformulate it as the size of the shortest message specifying a microstate, uniquely up to the assumed resolution. In this way we get a rigorous, entropy-like measure of disorder of an individual, microscopic, definite state of a physical system. The regulatory genes of a developing embryo can be ultimately conceived as a program for constructing an organism. The information contained by this biochemical computer program can be measured by information-theoretic complexity. Further reading Calude, C. (1994) Information and Randomness: An Algorithmic Perspective , Berlin: Springer. (An informative introduction to basic results in algorithmic information theory in a general setting.) Chaitlin, G.J. (1987) Algorithmic Information Theory , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Page 157 (The classic introduction to the subject.) CRISTIAN S. CALUDE COMPUTABILITY THEORY The effective calculability of number-theoretic functions such as addition and multiplication has always been recognized,and forthat judgment a rigorous notion of ‘computable function’ is not required. A sharp mathematical concept was defined only in the twentieth century, when issues including the decision problem for predicate logic required a precise delimitation of functions that can be viewed as effectively calculable. Predicate logic emerged from Frege’s fundamental ‘ Begriffsschrift’ asan expressive formal language and was described with mathematical precision by Hilbert in lectures given during the winter of 1917–18. The logical calculus Frege had also developed allowed proofs to proceed as computations in accordance with a fixed set of rules; in principle, according to Gödel, the rules could be applied ‘by someone who knew nothing about mathematics, or by a machine’. Hilbert grasped the potential of this mechanical aspect and formulated the decision problem for predicate logic as follows: ‘The Entscheidungsproblem [decision problem] is solved if one knows a procedure that permits the decision concerning the validity, respectively, satisfiability of a given logical expression by a finite number of operations.’ Some, for example, von Neumann believed that the inherent freedom of mathematical thought provided a sufficient reason to expect a negative solution to the problem. But how could a proof of undecidability be given? The unsolvability results of other mathematical problems had always been established relative to a determinate class of admissible operations, for example, the impossibility of doubling the cube relative to ruler and compass constructions. A negative solution to the decision problem obviously required the characterization of ‘effectively calculable functions’. For two other important issues a characterization of that informal notion was also needed, namely, the general formulation of the incompleteness theorems and the effective unsolvability of mathematical problems (for example, of Hilbert’s tenth problem). The first task of computability theory was thus to answer the question ‘What is a precise notion of effectively calculable function?’. Many different answers invariably characterized the same class of number-theoretic functions: the partial recursive ones. Today recursiveness or, equivalently, Turing computability is considered to be the precise mathematical counterpart to ‘effective calculability’. Relative to these notions undecidability results have been established, in particular, the undecidability of the decision problem for predicate logic. The notions are idealized in the sense that no time or space limitations are imposed on the calculations; the concept of ‘feasibility’ is crucial in computer science when trying to capture the subclass of recursive functions whose values can actually be determined. See also: FREGE, G. Further reading Cutland, N. (1980) Computability – An Introduction to Recursive Function Theory , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (An informative introduction to basic results.) Odifreddi, P. (1992) Classical Recursion Theory , Amsterdam: North Holland, 2 vols. (A comprehensive modern treatise on computability theory.) DANIELE MUNDICI WILFRIED SIEG COMPUTER SCIENCE At first sight, computers would seem to be of minimal philosophical importance; mere symbol manipulators that do the sort of things that we can do anyway, only faster and more conveniently. Nevertheless, computers are being used to illuminate the cognitive abilities of the human and animal mind, explore the organizational principles of life, and open up new approaches to modelling nature. Furthermore, the study of computation has changed our conception of the limits and methodology of scientific knowledge. Computers have been able to do all this for two reasons. The first is that material computing power (accuracy, storage and speed) permits the development and exploration of models of physical (and mental) systems that combine structural complexity with mathematical intransigence. Through simulation, computational power allows exploration where mathematical analysis falters. The second reason is that a computer is not merely a concrete device, but also can be studied as an abstract object whose rules of operation can be specified with mathematical precision; consequently, its strengths and limitations can be systematically investigated, exploited and appreciated. Herein lies that area of computer science of most interest to
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Page 158 philosophers: the theory of computation and algorithms. It is here where we have learned what computers can and cannot do in principle. See also: COMPLEXITY, COMPUTATIONAL; COMPUTABILITY AND INFORMATION Further reading Davis, M. (ed.) (1965) The Undecidable, New York: Raven Press. (A sourcebook of classic papers on computation theory.) Davis, M., Sigal, R. and Weyuker, E. (1983) Computability, Complexity, and Languages: Fundamentals of Theoretical Computer Science , Boston, MA: Academic Press; 2nd edn, 1994. (A handbook, perhaps the handbook, of the current state of computation theory. A work of moderate technical difficulty.) JOHN WINNIE COMTE, ISIDORE-AUGUSTE-MARIE-FRANÇOIS-XAVIER (1798–1857) The French philosopher and social theorist Auguste Comte is known as the originator of sociology and ‘positivism’, a philosophical system by which he aimed to discover and perfect the proper political arrangements of modern industrial society. He was the first thinker to advocate the use of scientific procedures in the study of economics, politics and social behaviour, and, motivated by the social and moral problems caused by the French Revolution, he held that the practice of such a science would lead inevitably to social regeneration and progress. Comte’s positivism can be characterized as an approach which rejects as illegitimate all that cannot be directly observed in the investigation and study of any subject. His system of ‘positive philosophy’ had two laws at its foundation: a historical or logical law, ‘the law of three stages’, and an epistemological law, the classification or hierarchy of the sciences. The law of three stages governs the development of human intelligence and society: in the first stage, early societies base their knowledge on theological grounds, giving ultimately divine explanations for all phenomena; later, in the metaphysical stage, forces and essences are sought as explanations, but these are equally chimerical and untestable; finally, in the positive or scientific stage, knowledge is secured solely on observations, by their correlation and sequence. Comte saw this process occurring not only in European society, but also in the lives of every individual. We seek theological solutions in childhood, metaphysical solutions in youth, and scientific explanations in adulthood. His second, epistemological law fixed a classification or hierarchy of sciences according to their arrival at the positive stage of knowledge. In order of historical development and thus of increasing complexity, these are mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology and sociology. (Comte rejected psychology as a science, on the grounds that its data were unobservable and therefore untestable.) Knowledge of one science rested partly on the findings of the preceding science; for Comte, students must progress through the sciences in the correct order, using the simpler and more precise methods of the preceding science to tackle the more complex issues of later ones. In his six-volume Cours de philosophie positive (The Positive Philosophy) (1830–42), Comte gave an encyclopedic account of these sciences, ending with an exposition of what he regarded as the most advanced: social physics or ‘sociology’ (a term he invented). The sociologist’s job would be to discover the laws that govern human behaviour on a large scale, and the ways in which social institutions and norms operate together in a complex yet ultimately predictable system. In his later work, Comte fleshed out his vision of the positive society, describing among other things a Religion of Humanity in which historical figures would be worshipped according to their contribution to society. Despite such extravagances, however, the broader themes of his positivism – especially the idea that long-standing social problems should be approached scientifically – proved influential both in France and, through J.S. Mill’s early support, in England. See also: MILL, J.S. Further reading Comte, A. (1830–42) Cours de philosophie positive (Course in Positive Philosophy), Paris: Société Positiviste, 5th edn (identical to the first), 1892, 6 vols; ed. M. Serres et al ., Paris: Hermann, 1975, 2 vols; trans. and condensed H. Martineau, The Positive Philosophy , London: G. Bell, 1896, 3 vols. (Comte’s major work.) Pickering, M. (1993) Auguste Comte: An Intellectual Biography , vol. 1, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (The newest and very important history of Comte’s thought and life.) Translated from the French by Mary Pickering ANGÈLE KREMER-MARIETTI
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Page 159 CONCEPTS The topic of concepts lies at the intersection of semantics and philosophy of mind. A concept is supposed to be a constituent of a thought (or ‘proposition’) rather in the way that a word is a constituent of a sentence that typically expresses a thought. Indeed, concepts are often thought to be the meanings of words (and will be designated by enclosing the words for them in brackets: [city] is expressed by ‘city’ and by ‘metropolis’). However, the two topics can diverge: non-linguistic animals may possess concepts, and standard linguistic meanings involve conventions in ways that concepts do not. Concepts seem essential to ordinary and scientific psychological explanation, which would be undermined were it not possible for the same concept to occur in different thought episodes: someone could not even recall something unless the concepts they have now overlap the concepts they had earlier. If a disagreement between people is to be more than ‘merely verbal’, their words must express the same concepts. And if psychologists are to describe shared patterns of thought across people, they need to advert to shared concepts. Concepts also seem essential to categorizing the world, for example, recognizing a cow and classifying it as a mammal. Concepts are also compositional : concepts can be combined to form avirtual infinitude of complex categories, in such a way that someone can understand a novel combination, for example, [smallest sub-atomic particle], by understanding its constituents. Concepts, however, are not always studied as part of psychology. Some logicians and formal semanticists study the deductive relations among concepts and propositions in abstraction from any mind. Philosophers doing ‘-philosophical analysis’ try to specify the conditions that make something the kind of thing it is – for example, what it is that makes an act good – an enterprise they take to consist in the analysis of concepts. Given these diverse interests, there is considerable disagreement about what exactly a concept is. Psychologists tend to use ‘concept’ for internal representations , for example, images, stereotypes, words that may be the vehicles for thought in the mind or brain. Logicians and formal semanticists tend to use it for sets of real and possible objects, and functions defined over them; and philosophers of mind have variously proposed properties, ‘ senses ’, inferential rules or discrimination abilities. A related issue is what it is for someone to possess a concept. The ‘classical view’ presumed concepts had ‘definitions’ known by competent users. For example, grasping [bachelor] seemed to consist in grasping the definition, [adult, unmarried male]. However, if definitions are not to go on forever, there must be primitive concepts that are not defined but are grasped in some other way. Empiricism claimed that these definitions were provided by sensory conditions for a concept’s application. Thus, [material object] was defined in terms of certain possibilities of sensation. The classical view suffers from the fact that few successful definitions have ever been provided. Wittgenstein suggested that concept possession need not consist in knowing a definition, but in appreciating the role of a concept in thought and practice. Moreover, he claimed, a concept need not apply to things by virtue of some closed set of features captured by a definition, but rather by virtue of ‘family resemblances’ among the things, a suggestion that has given rise in psychology to ‘prototype’ theories of concepts. Most traditional approaches to possession conditions have been concerned with the internal states, especially the beliefs, of the conceptualizer. Quine raised a challenge for such an approach in his doctrine of ‘confirmation holism’, which stressed that a person’s beliefs are fixed by what they find plausible overall. Separating out any particular beliefs as defining a concept seemed to him arbitrary and in conflict with actual practice, where concepts seem shared by people with different beliefs. This led Quine himself to be sceptical about talk of concepts generally, denying that there was any principled way to distinguish ‘analytic’ claims that express definitional claims about a concept from ‘synthetic’ ones that express merely common beliefs about the things to which a concept applies. However, recent philosophers suggest that people share concepts not by virtue of any internal facts, but by virtue of facts about their external (social) environment. For example, people arguably have the concept [water] by virtue of interacting in certain ways with H2O and deferring to experts in defining it. This work has given rise to a variety of externalist theories of concepts and semantics generally. Many also think, however, that psychology could generalize about people’s minds independently of the external contexts they happen to inhabit, and so have proposed ‘two-factor theories’, according to which there is an internal component to a concept that may play a role in
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Page 160 psychological explanation, as opposed to an external component that determines the application of the concept to the world. See also: SEMANTICS Further reading Laurence, S. and Margolis, E. (eds) (1998) Concepts , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (An excellent collection of leading articles on the topic by philosophers, psychologists and logicians.) Peacocke, C. (1992) A Study of Concepts , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (Sophisticated and influential defence of a ‘sense’ theory of concepts.) Stalnaker, R. (1984) Inquiry , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Bradford Books. (Clear and readable defence of a theory of meaning and concepts as intension-functions on possible worlds.) GEORGES REY CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS A distinction must be made between the philosophical theory of conceptual analysis and the historical philosophical movement of Conceptual Analysis. The theory of conceptual analysis holds that concepts – general meanings of linguistic predicates – are the fundamental objects of philosophical inquiry, and that insights into conceptual contents are expressed in necessary ‘conceptual truths’ (analytic propositions). There are two methods for obtaining these truths: direct a priori definition of concepts; indirect ‘transcendental’ argumentation. The movement of Conceptual Analysis arose at Cambridge during the first half of the twentieth century, and flourished at Oxford and many American departments of philosophy in the 1950s and early 1960s. In the USA its doctrines came under heavy criticism, and its proponents were not able to respond effectively; by the end of the 1970s the movement was widely regarded as defunct. This reversal of fortunes can be traced primarily to the conjunction of several powerful objections: the attack on intensions and on the analytic/synthetic distinction; the paradox of analysis; the ‘scientific essentialist’ theory of propositions; and the critique of transcendental arguments. Nevertheless a closer examination indicates that each of these objections presupposes a covert appeal to concepts and conceptual truths. In the light of this dissonance between the conventional wisdom of the critics on the one hand, and the implicit commitments of their arguments on the other, there is a manifest need for a careful reexamination of conceptual analysis. See also: ANALYTICAL PHILOSOPHY; CONCEPTS Further reading Ryle, G. (1971) Collected Papers , vol. 2, London: Hutchinson. (Exercises in conceptual analysis, mostly deflationary in tone and import; see especially essay 12 for a treatment of syncategorematic concepts.) Strawson, P.F. (1992) Analysis and Metaphysics , Oxford: Oxford University Press. (An introduction to Strawsonian conceptual analysis.) ROBERT HANNA CONDILLAC, ETIENNE BONNOT DE (1715–80) One of the leading figures of the French Enlightenment period, Condillac is the author of three highly influential books, published between 1746 and 1754, in which he attempted to refine and expand the empirical method of inquiry so as to make it applicable to a broader range of studies than hitherto. In the half-century following the publication of Newton’s Principia Mathematica in 1687, intellectual life in Europe had been engaged upon a fierce debate between the partisans of Cartesian physics, who accepted Descartes’ principles of metaphysical dualism and God’s veracity as the hallmark of scientific truth, and those who accepted Newton’s demonstration that the natural order constituted a single system under laws which could be known through painstaking observation and experiment. By the mideighteenth century Newton had gained the ascendancy, and it was the guiding inspiration of the French thinkers, known collectively as the philosophes, to appropriate the methods by which Newton had achieved his awesome results and apply them across a broader range of inquiries in the hope of attaining a similar expansion of human knowledge. Condillac was at the centre of this campaign. Condillac’s first book, An Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge (1746), bears the subtitle A Supplement to Mr. Locke’s Essay on the Human Understanding . While Condillac is usually seen as merely a disciple and popularizer of Locke offering little of any genuine originality, and while he did indeed agree with Locke that experience is the sole source of human knowledge, he attempted to improve on Locke by
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Page 161 arguing that sensation alone – and not sensation together with reflection – provided the foundation for knowledge. His most famous book, the Treatise on the Sensations (1754) is based upon the thoughtexperiment of a statue whose senses are activated one by one, beginning with the sense of smell, with the intention of showing how all the higher cognitive faculties of the mind can be shown to derive from the notice the mind takes of the primitive inputs of the sense organs. Condillac also went beyond Locke in his carefully argued claims regarding the extent to which language affects the growth and reliability of knowledge. His Treatise on Systems (1749) offers a detailed critique of how language had beguiled the great seventeenth-century systemsbuilders like Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza and led them into erroneous conceptions of the mind and human knowledge, the influence of which conceptions was as insidious as it was difficult to eradicate. See also: EMPIRICISM Further reading Condillac, E.B. de (1754) Traité des sensations, trans. G. Carr, in H.W. Carr (ed.) Treatise on the Sensations, Los Angeles, CA: University of Southern California, 1930. (This is Condillac’s best-known and most frequently cited book, containing his famous example of the statue which is endowed one by one with the five senses. The book is frequently acknowledged as a seminal text in the history of psychology.) Knight, I.F. (1968) The Geometric Spirit: The Abbé de Condillac and the French Enlightenment, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. (The only book in English devoted to a comprehensive survey of Condillac’s life and work.) PAUL F. JOHNSON CONDORCET, MARIE-JEAN-ANTOINE-NICOLAS CARITAT DE (1743–94) The Marquis de Condorcet belongs to the second generation of eighteenth-century French philosophes. He was by training and inclination a mathematician, and his work marks a major stage in the development of what is known today as the social sciences. He was held in high regard by contemporaries for his contributions to probability theory, and he published a number of seminal treatises on the theory and application of probabilism. He is best known today for the Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain (1795), his monumental, secularized historical analysis of the dynamics of man’s progress from the primitive state of nature to modernity. Condorcet’s principal aim was to establish a science of man that would be as concise and certain in its methods and results as the natural and physical sciences. For Condorcet there could be no true basis to science without the model of mathematics, and there was no branch of human knowledge to which the mathematical approach was not relevant. He called the application of mathematics to human behaviour and organization ‘social arithmetic’. The central epistemological assumption, upon which his philosophy was based, was that the truths of observation, whether in the context of the physical or the moral and social sciences, were nothing more than probabilities, but that their varying degrees of certainty could be measured by means of the calculus of probabilities. Condorcet was thus able, through mathematical logic, to counteract the negative implications of Pyrrhonic scepticism for the notions of truth and progress, the calculus providing not only the link between the different orders of knowledge but also the way out of the Pyrrhonic trap by demonstrating man’s capacity and freedom to understand and direct the march of progress in a rationally-ordered way. In his Esquisse Condorcet set out to record not only the history of man’s progress through nine ‘epochs’, from the presocial state of nature to the societies of modern Europe, but in the tenth ‘epoch’ of this work he also held out the promise of continuing progress in the future. He saw the gradual emancipation of human society and the achievement of human happiness as the consequence of man having been endowed by nature with the capacity to learn from experience and of the cumulative, beneficial effects of the growth of knowledge and enlightenment. Condorcet’s Esquisse laid the basis for the positivism of the nineteenth century, and had a particularly significant impact on the work of SaintSimon and Auguste Comte. See also: HUMAN NATURE, SCIENCE OF, IN THE 18TH CENTURY; POSITIVISM IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES Further reading Condorcet, M.J.A.N. (1795) Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain, Paris: Agasse; repr. A. Pons (ed.), Paris: Flammarion, 1988; trans. J. Barraclough, in S. Hampshire (ed.), Sketch for a Historical Tableau of the Progress of the Human Mind,
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Page 162 London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Shapiro, J. (1978) Condorcet and the Rise of Liberalism, New York: Octagon Books. (A general account of Condorcet’s philosophy of progress, with particular reference to the Esquisse . A good and lively introduction to Condorcet for the general reader.) DAVID WILLIAMS CONFEDERALISM see FEDERALISM AND CONFEDERALISM CONFIRMATION THEORY The result of a test of a general hypothesis can be positive, negative or neutral. The first, qualitative, task of confirmation theory is to explicate these types of test result. However, as soon as one also takes individual hypotheses into consideration, the interest shifts to the second, quantitative, task of confirmation theory: probabilistically evaluating individual and general hypotheses in the light of an increasing number of test results. This immediately suggests conceiving of the confirmation of an hypothesis as increasing its probability due to new evidence. Rudolf Carnap initiated a research programme in quantitative confirmation theory by designing a continuum of probability systems with plausible probabilistic properties for the hypothesis that the next test result will be of a certain kind. This continuum of inductive systems has guided the search for optimum systems and for systems that take analogy into account. Carnapian systems, however, assign zero probability to universal hypotheses. Jaakko Hintikka was the first to reconsider the confirmation of such hypotheses and using Carnap’s continuum for this purpose has set the stage for a whole spectrum of inductive systems of this type. See also: INDUCTION, EPISTEMIC ISSUES IN; PROBABILITY THEORY AND EPISTEMOLOGY Further reading Hilpinen, R. (1968) Rules of Acceptance and Inductive Logic , Amsterdam: North Holland. (Gives a detailed analysis of Hintikka’s two-dimensional continuum and corresponding rules of acceptance.) Kuipers, T. (1978) Studies in Inductive Probability and Rational Expectation, Dordrecht: Reidel. (Studies the systems of Carnap, Hintikka and Niiniluoto, and their generalization, in great detail. Refers also to the related work of Carnap and Hintikka, and to the work of Hilpinen, Pietarinen and Stegmüller.) THEO A.F. KUIPERS CONFUCIAN ANALECTS see CONFUCIUS CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY, CHINESE Chinese Confucian philosophy is primarily a set of ethical ideas oriented toward practice. Characteristically, it stresses the traditional boundaries of ethical responsibility and dao, or the ideal of the good human life as a whole. It may be characterized as an ethics of virtue in the light of its conception of dao and de (virtue). Comprising the conceptial framework of Confucian ethics are notions of basic virtues such as ren (benevolence), yi (rightness, righteousness), and li (rites, propriety). There are also notions of dependent virtues such as filiality, loyalty, respectfulness and integrity. Basic virtues are considered fundamental, leading or actionguiding, cardinal and the most comprehensive. In the classic Confucian sense, ren pertains to affectionate concern for the well-being of fellows in one’s community. Notably, ren is often used in an extended sense by major Song and Ming Confucians as interchangeable with dao for the ideal of the universe as a moral community. Yi pertains to the sense of rightness, especially exercised in coping with changing circumstances of human life, those situations that fall outside the scope of li . Li focuses on rules of proper conduct, which have three functions: delimiting, supportive and ennobling. That is, the li define the boundaries of proper behaviour, provide opportunities for satisfying desires of moral agents within these boundaries, and encourage the development of noble characters which markedly embody cultural refinement and communal concerns. The li are the depository of insights of the Confucian tradition as a living ethical tradition. This tradition is subject to changing interpretation governed by the exercise of quan or the weighing of circumstances informed by the sense of rightness ( yi). However, the common Confucian appeal to historical events and paradigmatic individuals is criticized because of lack of understanding of the ethical uses of such a historical appeal. The pedagogical use stresses the study of the classics in terms of the standards of ren , yi and li . Learning, however, is not a mere acquisition of knowledge, but requires understanding and insight. Also, the companion study of paradigmatic individuals is important, not only because
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Page 163 they point to models of emulation but also because they are, so to speak, exemplary personifications of the spirits of ren , yi and li . Moreover, they also function as reminders of moral learning and conduct that appeal especially to what is deemed in the real interest of the learner. The rhetorical use of the historical appeal is basically an appeal to plausible presumptions, or shared beliefs and trustworthiness. These presumptions are subject to further challenge, but they can be accepted as starting points in discourse. The elucidative use of historical appeal purports to clarify the relevance of the past for the present. Perhaps most important for argumentative discourse is the evaluative function of historical appeal. It focuses our knowledge and understanding of our present problematic situations as a basis for exerting the unexamined claims based on the past as a guidance for the present. Thus, both the elucidative and evaluative uses of historical appeal are critical and attentive to evidential grounding of ethical claims. Because of its primary ethical orientation and its influence on traditional Chinese life and thought, Confucianism occupies a pre-eminent place in the history of Chinese philosophy. The core of Confucian thought lies in the teachings of Confucius (551–479 BC) contained in the Analects ( Lunyu), along with the brilliant and divergent contributions of Mencius (372?–289 BC) and Xunzi ( fl. 298–238 BC), as well as the Daxue (Great Learning) and the Zhongyong (Doctrine of the Mean), originally chapters in the Liji (Book of Rites). Significant and original developments, particularly along a quasi-metaphysical route, are to be found in the works of Zhou Dunyi (1017–73), Zhang Zai (1020–77), Cheng Hao (1032–85), Cheng Yi (1033–1107), Zhu Xi (1130–1200), Lu Xiangshan (1139–93), and Wang Yangming (1472–1529). Li Gou (1009–59), Wang Fuzhi (1619–92), and Dai Zhen (1723–77) have also made noteworthy contributions to the critical development of Confucian philosophy. In the twentieth century, the revitalization and transformation of Confucian philosophy has taken a new turn in response to Western philosophical traditions. Important advances have been made by Feng Youlan, Tang Junyi, Thomé H. Fang, and Mou Zongsan. Most of the recent works in critical reconstruction are marked by a selfconscious concern with analytic methodology and the relevance of existentialism, phenomenology, and hermeneutics. Still lacking is a comprehensive and systematic Confucian theory informed by both the history and the problems of Western philosophy. See also: CONFUCIUS; CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY, JAPANESE; CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY, KOREAN Further readings Hall, D.L. and Ames, R.T. (1987) Thinking Through Confucius , Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. (A conceptual reconstruction of Confucian terms based primarily on the Analects.) Naess, A. and Hannay, A. (eds) (1972) Invitation to Chinese Philosophy , Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. (An important anthology of recent comparative Chinese and Western introductions to Chinese philosophy, dealing with such topics as Chinese wisdom, paradigmatic individuals, neo-Confucianism, Daoism, Chan (Zen) Buddhism and so on. Seven of the eight essays by different authors were reprinted from Inquiry (1971).) A.S. CUA CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY, JAPANESE Confucian philosophy is said to have arrived in Japan as early as the third century AD, but it did not become a subject of meaningful scholarly inquiry until the seventh century. The ‘Confucianism’ to which Japanese elites and scholars were first attracted represented fields of knowledge concerned more with ontology and divination than with social ethics and politics. Because of the priority given to birth over talent in official appointments, Confucianism in Japan remained more a gentlemanly accomplishment and never approached the status it had in China, where mastery of its teachings represented a gateway to officialdom. Intellectually, Confucian philosophy was overshadowed both in Japan and on the continent at this time by the teachings of Buddhism, which provided answers both to spiritual and metaphysical concerns. Confucianism in China was refashioned in the eleventh and twelfth centuries by a number of scholars, of whom Zhu Xi was the most prominent. He revised the curriculum, restored social and ethical concerns to positions of centrality within the tradition and formulated a new rationalistic ontology. His teachings won a broad following among intellectuals in China and eventually earned the government’s endorsement as the official interpretation for China’s examination system. From the seventeenth century onwards, Zhu Xi’s teachings reached a comparably distin
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Page 164 guished position within scholarly circles in Japan, though the government’s endorsement of the Hayashi family as official interpreters of Zhu Xi’s teachings was the limit of the official authorization of that philosophy in Japan. Though the idealistic Wang Yangming school challenged Zhu Xi’s teachings in Japan as it had in China, the more effective challenge was mounted by the classicist teachings known as Ancient Studies. These scholars, of whom the best known was Ogyū Sorai, sought the ‘true message of the sages’ by emphasizing direct study of the ancient core texts of Confucianism rather than the exegesis on those classics by Zhu Xi and others. Confucian philosophy contributed to the rationalism, humanism, ethnocentrism and ‘historical mindedness’ of Tokugawa Japan. The teachings were also responsible for changing fundamental ontological and epistemological assumptions, while also opening intellectual circles to unprecedented pluralism and diversity. Towards the end of the Tokugawa period in the mid-nineteenth century, Confucian philosophy (particularly in the variety fashioned by Wang Yangming) also provided inspiration and justification for those activist reformers who succeeded in overthrowing the old order. During the modern period, Confucian philosophy has been identified with the Tokugawa tradition which has been at times idealized and and at other times vilified. Nonetheless, a number of the assumptions central to Confucian philosophy continue to characterize much popular and intellectual thought in contemporary Japan, as well as those ethics that tend to be most admired, even though actual knowledge of Confucian philosophy does not appear to be widespread any longer in Japan. See also: CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY, CHINESE; JAPANESE PHILOSOPHY Further reading Nosco, P. (ed.) (1986) Confucianism and Tokugawa Culture, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Contains nine essays and an introduction on the general theme of responses to Confucianism.) Tsunoda, R. et al . (eds) (1964) Sources of Japanese Tradition, New York: Columbia University Press, 2 vols. (Avaluable collection of translated exerpts from the writings of a number of major Japanese Confucian philosophers.) PETER NOSCO CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY, KOREAN Confucianism came to Korea in the late fourth century AD. While Buddhism, which had arrived at the same time, was for centuries the central spiritual and intellectual tradition of Korea, Confucianism was viewed as largely limited to the world of government functionaries. In China during the Song dynasty (979–1279) a creative Confucian movement revitalized and reshaped the tradition, giving rise to what Western Scholars call ‘neo-Confucianism’. By the end of the fourteenth century neo-Confucian learning had penetrated deeply among young scholarofficials in Korea, who used it as a lever against the deeply entrenched Buddhist establishment. In 1392, in history’s only neo-Confucian revolution, a new dynasty was founded in Korea. The Chosôn dynasty (1392–1910), ruling a country smaller in scale and more centrally unified than China, was to make Korea the most (neo-) Confucian of all East Asian societies. The scale, control, and temper of Korean society had important consequences for the development of the neo-Confucian tradition. In China the Cheng–Zhu school of neo-Confucian thought held privileged status as the orthodox standard for the all-important civil service examinations. Zhu Xi (1130–1200) was the great creative synthesizer of this school and its foremost authority, but his synthesis drew especially upon the work of the Cheng brothers. The Cheng–Zhu school was rivalled and even eclipsed in popularity later by the school of Wang Yangming (1472–1529), whose more Zen-like approach also found great favour in Japan. Korea, in contrast to both China and Japan, remained almost exclusively devoted to the Cheng–Zhu school. This exclusive and intensive development of the Cheng–Zhu school of neo-Confucian thought is the most generally distinctive characteristic of Korean neo-Confucianism. When the thinkers of a culture devote themselves for centuries to a single complex body of learning, as was the case for example with Aristotle and medieval Europe, the result is a mode of philosophical discourse described as ‘scholasticism’. Scholastic philosophy is renowned for the intricacy and closeness of its argumentation, though this may be an obstacle for the outsider for whom it is often difficult to recapture the intense and absorbing vision which inspired major controversy about seemingly minor differences. Korea, with its exclusive cultivation of Zhu Xi’s complex synthesis, produced the most scholastic version of neoConfucian thought.
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Page 165 The writings of scholars or scholar-officials of note were commonly collected and published after their death, so the centuries of ‘collected works’, written in literary Chinese, are a vast resource in which the twists and turns, the problems and potentials for development in the Cheng–Zhu school are examined with unequalled thoroughness. To understand the particular contribution this Korean scholasticism made to neo-Confucian thought one must be aware of the scope and complexity of Zhu Xi’s synthesis. The intellectual culture within which the Confucian revivalists of the Song dynasty worked had for seven or eight centuries been predominantly shaped by Daoist and Buddhist influences, so the questions in their minds as they returned to the Confucian classics included dimensions neglected by more traditional Confucianism. Read with new eyes, an entirely new level of meaning was uncovered in the ancient texts: they discovered a Confucian foundation for the meditative cultivation of consciousness that had been a particular strength of the Buddhists, and to frame it and provide an account of sagehood equal to Buddhist talk of enlightenment, they found a complete metaphysical system, a Confucian version of the kind of thinking that had been elaborated mainly under Daoist auspices. Thus Zhu Xi’s synthesis knit together not just disparate thinkers of the Song dynasty, but contemporary questions with texts well over a thousand years old. It incorporated Daoist metaphysics with Buddhist meditative cultivation in a new structure with Confucian moral values and social concerns at that structure’s core. Implicit in this was the conflation of the distinctive world views of India, the origin of Buddhism, and China. This has important metaphysical consequences, for the central paradigm for Indian reflection on the nature of existence was consciousness, while for the Chinese it was the image of a single living physical body. A synthesis of this scope cannot be a seamless whole, though the conceptual system with which Zhu Xi knit it together achieved a remarkable degree of verbal consistency. This, in fact, is where Korean neoConfucian thought makes a special contribution. For it is at the seams, where differences and tensions inherent in a synthesis are conceptually masked, that the kind of problems occur that become the source of endless scholastic controversy. Korean neoConfucianism contains two such controversies; each has occupied minds for centuries. Though the points being debated resist any ultimate solution, the disputes themselves disclose the creative tensions at the heart of Zhu Xi’s synthesis. The first of these controversies arose in the middle of the sixteenth century and decisively shaped the intellectual agenda for the remainder of the Chosôn dynasty. The protagonists in the controversy, Yi Hwang and Yi I, are the two most famous names in Korean thought, and allegiance to each became the central dividing line of Korean neo-Confucianism. Known as the ‘Four–Seven Debate,’ this controversy is the most famous philosophical dispute in Korean history. On the surface it involves the question of feelings and how they arise. Some feelings, such as commiseration or shame at doing evil, seem spontaneously human and correct, while others, such as fear, anger, or pleasure, seem more questionable. Are there then two kinds of feelings that arise from different sources? The question is of great philosophical importance, because ultimately it discloses tensions at the heart of the dualistic monism/monistic dualism which is the fundamental structure of Zhu Xi’s metaphysical system. The second great controversy arose among followers of Yi I in the early eighteenth century. NeoConfucian metaphysics views the entire universe as possessing a single nature, which is manifested differently at different levels of existence due to the differing capacities of the concrete, psychophysical component of various sorts of creatures. The Horak controversy swirled about the question of whether the fundamental or ‘original’ nature of things is the same or different. The fundamental nature is normative, and it would be absurd to say the norm for a cow is the same as for a human; but the fundamental nature is fundamental and normative precisely because it is considered as anterior to the limitation/distortion of the imperfect psychophysical component. How then can it be considered as differentiated into cow and human? Pulling at these seemingly verbal loose ends leads again deep into Zhu Xi’s metaphysics, revealing between its Indian and Chinese (Buddhist and Daoist) motifs tensions which come to a focus more clearly here perhaps than anywhere else in neo-Confucian thought. See also: NEO-CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY Further reading Deuchler, M. (1992) The Confucian Transformation of Korea, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Excellent analysis of process by which Korea became East Asia’s ‘most Confucian’ society.)
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Page 166 Kalton, M.C., Kim Oaksook, C., Park Sung-Bae, Ro Youngchan, Tu Weiming and Yamashita, S. (trans) (1993) The Four–Seven Debate , Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. (An annotated translation of the most famous controversy in Korean neo-Confucian thought.) MICHAEL C. KALTON CONFUCIUS (551–479 BC) Confucius is arguably the most influential philosopher in human history – ‘is’ because, taking Chinese philosophy on its own terms, he is still very much alive. Recognized as China’s first teacher both chronologically and in importance, his ideas have been the rich soil in which the Chinese cultural tradition has grown and flourished. In fact, whatever we might mean by ‘Chineseness’ today, some two and a half millennia after his death, is inseparable from the example of personal character that Confucius provided for posterity. Nor was his influence restricted to China; all of the Sinitic cultures – especially Korea, Japan and Vietnam – have evolved around ways of living and thinking derived from the wisdom of the Sage. A couple of centuries before Plato founded his Academy to train statesmen for the political life of Athens, Confucius had established a school with the explicit purpose of educating the next generation for political leadership. As his curriculum, Confucius is credited with having over his lifetime edited what were to become the Chinese Classics, a collection of poetry, music, historical documents and annals that chronicled the events at the Lu court, along with an extensive commentary on the Yijing (Book of Changes). These classics provided a shared cultural vocabulary for his students, and became the standard curriculum for the Chinese literati in subsequent centuries. Confucius began the practice of independent philosophers travelling from state to state in an effort to persuade political leaders that their particular teachings were a practicable formula for social and political success. In the decades that followed the death of Confucius, intellectuals of every stripe – Confucians, Legalists, Mohists, Yin–yang theorists, Militarists – would take to the road, attracted by court academies which sprung up to host them. Within these seats of learning, the viability of their various strategies for political and social unity would be hotly debated. Further reading Confucius (551–479 BC) Lunyu (Analects), trans. D.C. Lau, Confucius: The Analects (Lun-yu) , Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1992. (Although the dates given are for Confucius’ own life, the Analects were in fact compiled over a long period after his death, as noted in the text of the entry. Lau provides a revised bilingual translation of the Analects, complete with a philosophical introduction, appendices on the history of the text, events in the life of Confucius and a characterization of his various disciples. The standard English translation.) Hall, D.L. and Ames, R.T. (1987) Thinking Through Confucius , Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. (A reconstruction of the philosophical insights of Confucius, comparing the presuppositions of his way of thinking with presuppositions that underlie the Western traditions of philosophy.) D.C. LAU ROGER T. AMES CONNECTIONISM Connectionism is an approach to computation that uses connectionist networks. A connectionist network is composed of information-processing units (or nodes); typically, many units process information simultaneously, giving rise to massively ‘parallel distributed processing’. Units process information only locally: they respond only to their specific input lines by changing or retaining their activation values; and they causally influence the activation values of their output units by transmitting amounts of activation along connections of various weights or strengths. As a result of such local unit processing, networks themselves can behave in rule-like ways to compute functions. The study of connectionist computation has grown rapidly since the early 1980s and now extends to every area of cognitive science. For the philosophy of psychology, the primary interest of connectionist computation is its potential role in the computational theory of cognition – the theory that cognitive processes are computational. Networks are employed in the study of perception, memory, learning and categorization; and it has been claimed that connectionism has the potential to yield an alternative to the classical view of cognition as rule-governed symbol manipulation. Since cognitive capacities are realized in the central nervous system, perhaps the most attractive feature of the connectionist approach
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Page 167 to cognitive modelling is the neural-like aspects of network architectures. The members of a certain family of connectionist networks, artificial neural networks, have proved to be a valuable tool for investigating information processing within the nervous system. In artificial neural networks, units are neuron-like; connections, axon-like; and the weights of connections function in ways analogous to synapses. Another attraction is that connectionist networks, with their units sensitive to varying strengths of multiple inputs, carry out in natural ways ‘multiple soft constraint satisfaction’ tasks – assessing the extent to which a number of non-mandatory, weighted constraints are satisfied. Tasks of this sort occur in motor-control, early vision, memory, and in categorization and pattern recognition. Moreover, typical networks can re-programme themselves by adjusting the weights of the connections among their units, thereby engaging in a kind of ‘learning’; and they can do so even on the basis of the sorts of noisy and/or incomplete data people typically encounter. The potential role of connectionist architectures in the computational theory of cognition is, however, an open question. One possibility is that cognitive architecture is a ‘mixed architecture’, with classical and connectionist modules. But the most widely discussed view is that cognitive architecture is thoroughly connectionist. The leading challenge to this view is that an adequate cognitive theory must explain highlevel cognitive phenomena such as the systematicity of thought (someone who can think ‘The dog chases the cat’ can also think ‘The cat chases the dog’), its productivity (our ability to think a potential infinity of thoughts) and its inferential coherence (people can infer ‘p’ from ‘p and q’). It has been argued that a connectionist architecture could explain such phenomena only if it implements a classical, language-like symbolic architecture. Whether this is so, however, and, indeed, even whether there are such phenomena to be explained, are currently subjects of intense debate. See also: COGNITIVE ARCHITECTURE Further reading Bechtel, W. and Abrahamsen, A. (1991) Connectionism and the Mind, Oxford: Blackwell. (Presently the most comprehensive philosophical discussion of the connectionist approach to cognition.) Horgan, T. and Tienson, J. (eds) (1991) Connectionism and the Philosophy of Mind, Dordrecht: Kluwer. (Anthology of papers examining the potential role of connectionism in understanding cognition.) BRIAN P. MCLAUGHLIN CONSCIENCE To have a conscience involves being conscious of the moral quality of what one has done, or intends to do. There are several elements under the idea of conscience. First, conscience can signify those very moral convictions persons cleave to most firmly and judge themselves by. Second, the notion may cover the faculty by which we come to know moral truths (assuming there to be such) and apply them to ourselves. Third, conscience can be said to concern the examination by a person of the morality of their desires, actions and so on. Finally, conscience can involve guilt: one can suffer from a ‘bad conscience’. In the Christian tradition, conscience can be viewed as ‘the voice of God within’ each of us. Several of these aspects of conscience are expressed in Milton’s lines from Paradise Lost , when God says: ‘And I will place within them as a guide/My umpire Conscience’ (III: 194–5). See also: COMMON-SENSE ETHICS; INTUITIONISM IN ETHICS Further reading Benedict, R. (1946) The Chrysanthemum and the Sword , Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle, ch. 10. (Important discussion of guilt and shame cultures.) Wallace, J.D. (1978) Virtues and Vices , Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ch. 4. (A careful discussion of many aspects of conscience.) NICHOLAS DENT CONSCIOUSNESS Philosophers have used the term ‘consciousness’ for four main topics: knowledge in general, intentionality, introspection (and the knowledge it specifically generates) and phenomenal experience. This entry discusses the last two uses. Something within one’s mind is ‘introspectively conscious’ just in case one introspects it (or is poised to do so). Introspection is often thought to deliver one’s primary knowledge of one’s mental life. An experience or other mental entity is ‘phenomenally conscious’ just in case there is ‘something it is like’ for one to have it. The clearest examples are: perceptual experiences, such as tastings and seeings; bodily-sensational experiences, such as those of pains, tickles and itches; imaginative experiences, such as those of
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Page 168 one’s own actions or perceptions; and streams of thought, as in the experience of thinking ‘in words’ or ‘in images’. Introspection and phenomenality seem independent, or dissociable, although this is controversial. Phenomenally conscious experiences have been argued to be nonphysical, or at least inexplicable in the manner of other physical entities. Several such arguments allege that phenomenal experience is ‘subjective’; that understanding some experiences requires undergoing them (or their components). The claim is that any objective physical science would leave an ‘explanatory gap’, failing to describe what it is like to have a particular experience and failing to explain why there are phenomenal experiences at all. From this, some philosophers infer ‘dualism’ rather than ‘physicalism’ about consciousness, concluding that some facts about consciousness are not wholly constituted by physical facts. This dualist conclusion threatens claims that phenomenal consciousness has causal power, and that it is knowable in others and in oneself. In reaction, surprisingly much can be said in favour of ‘eliminativism’ about phenomenal consciousness; the denial of any realm of phenomenal objects and properties of experience. Most (but not all) philosophers deny that there are phenomenal objects – mental images with colour and shape, painobjects that throb or burn, inner speech with pitch and rhythm, and so on. Instead, experiences may simply seem to involve such objects. The central disagreement concerns whether these experiences have phenomenal properties – ‘qualia’; particular aspects of what experiences are like for their bearers. Some philosophers deny that there are phenomenal properties – especially if these are thought to be intrinsic, completely and immediately introspectible, ineffable, subjective or otherwise potentially difficult to explain on physicalist theories. More commonly, philosophers acknowledge qualia of experiences, either articulating less bold conceptions of qualia, or defending dualism about boldly conceived qualia. Introspective consciousness has seemed less puzzling than phenomenal consciousness. Most thinkers agree that introspection is far from complete about the mind and far from infallible. Perhaps the most familiar account of introspection is that, in addition to ‘outwardly perceiving’ non-mental entities in one’s environment and body, one ‘inwardly perceives’ one’s mental entities, as when one seems to see visual images with one’s ‘mind’s eye’. This view faces several serious objections. Rival views of introspective consciousness fall into three categories, according to whether they treat introspective access (1) as epistemically looser or less direct than inner perception, (2) as tighter or more direct, or (3) as fundamentally non-epistemic or nonrepresentational. Theories in category (1) explain introspection as always retrospective, or as typically based on self-directed theoretical inferences. Rivals from category (2) maintain that an introspectively conscious mental state reflexively represents itself, or treat introspection as involving no mechanism of access at all. Category (3) theories treat a mental state as introspectively conscious if it is distinctively available for linguistic or rational processing, even if it is not itself perceived or otherwise thought about. See also: AWARENESS IN INDIAN THOUGHT; REDUCTIONISM IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND Further reading Flanagan, O. (1992) Consciousness Reconsidered , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (A good extended introduction to the central philosophical issues.) McGinn, C. (1982) The Character of Mind, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (A brief but rich introduction to philosophy of mind; criticizes inner sense.) ERIC LORMAND CONSENT A concept of central importance in moral, political and legal philosophy, consent is widely recognized as justifying or legitimating acts, arrangements or expectations. In standard cases, a person’s consent to another person’s acts removes moral or legal objections to or liability for the performance of those acts. Thus, in medical practice the informed consent of a patient to a procedure can justify the physician’s actions. In law, the maxim ‘ volenti non fit injuria’ (the willing person is not wronged) governs a wide range of acts and transactions, from the economic to the sexual. And in politics, it is often supposed that it is ‘the consent of the governed’ that justifies or makes permissible both governmental policies and the use of official coercion to compel obedience to law. Consent may be given in a variety of more and less direct forms, but its binding force always rests on the satisfaction of conditions of knowledge, intention, competence, voluntariness and acceptability of content. See also: FREEDOM AND LIBERTY; RIGHTS
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Page 169 Further reading Beran, H. (1987) The Consent Theory of Political Obligation , London: Croom Helm. (The most complete presentation of consent theory in political philosophy.) Simmons, A.J. (1993) On the Edge of Anarchy: Locke, Consent, and the Limits of Society , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Discussion of Locke and the implications of consent theory in chapters 3, 4, 7 and 8; extensive bibliography.) A. JOHN SIMMONS CONSEQUENCE, CONCEPTIONS OF The idea of one proposition’s following from others – of their implying it – is central to argument. It is, however, an idea that comes with a history attached to it, and those who blithely appeal to an ‘intuitive’ or ‘pre-theoretic’ idea of consequence are likely to have got hold of just one strand in a string of diverse theories. This entry introduces the main alternatives – to call them rivals would be too strong, since it suggests that they are necessarily in competition with one another. Simply put, consequence may be conceived as a relation that is or is not modal in character, and is or is not formal. Thus for Aristotle, consequence is both necessary and formal; for Chrysippus it is necessary but not formal; for Bolzano and Tarski it is formal but not necessary; and for Philo and Russell it is neither necessary nor formal. Conceptions of consequence that are neither necessary nor formal are also needed if justice is to be done to deduction in science, the law and daily life. Cutting across all these other differences there is a perennial controversy about relevance. Does implication always require a full-blooded connection between premises and conclusion, or may it hold simply because of some property of either separately, for example, because the premises are impossible? Further reading Etchemendy, J. (1990) The Concept of Logical Consequence, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Uses a distinction between ‘representational’ and ‘interpretational’ semantics to develop Kneale’s criticism of Tarski, from a standpoint of uncritical adherence to Chrysippian consequence, relevance and all.) Kneale, W. and Kneale, M. (1962) The Development of Logic , Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Chapters 2–4 include an invaluable introduction to the early history of consequence.) TIMOTHY SMILEY CONSEQUENTIALISM Consequentialism assesses the rightness or wrongness of actions in terms of the value of their consequences. The most popular version is act-consequentialism, which states that, of all the actions open to the agent, the right one is that which produces the most good. Act-consequentialism is at odds with ordinary moral thinking in three respects. First, it seems excessively onerous, because the requirement to make the world a better place would demand all our time and effort; second, it leaves no room for the special duties which we take ourselves to have to those close to us: family, friends and fellow citizens; and third, it might require us, on occasion, to do dreadful things in order to bring about a good result. Consequentialists standardly try to bring their theory more into line with common thinking by amending the theory in one of two ways. Indirect act-consequentialism holds that we should not necessarily aim to do what is right. We may get closer to making the world the best possible place by behaviour which accords more with ordinary moral thought. Rule-consequentialism holds that an action is right if it is in accordance with a set of rules whose general acceptance would best promote the good. Such rules will bear a fairly close resemblance to the moral rules with which we now operate. See also: PERFECTIONISM Further reading Scheffler, S. (1988) Consequentialism and Its Critics , Oxford: Oxford University Press. (A very useful collection of seminal articles.) Sidgwick, H. (1874) The Methods of Ethics , London: Macmillan; 7th edn, 1907, esp. I (ch. 9), II (ch. 1), III (chaps 11, 13), IV (chaps 2–5). (The classic source of many of the strategies now discussed by consequentialists and their opponents.) DAVID MCNAUGHTON CONSERVATION PRINCIPLES In antiquity ‘self-evident’ principles were used to argue for the conservation of certain quantities. The concept of quantitative conservation laws, such as those of mass and energy, is of much later origin. Even prior to the development of modern mechanics, symmetries were employed to solve some dynamical problems. The relation
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Page 170 between conserved quantities and symmetries has come to play a central role in the physical sciences. Conservation laws may reflect as much about the way the human mind organizes the phenomena of the world as they do about physical reality itself. Further reading Elkana, Y. (1974) The Discovery of the Conservation of Energy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (An examination of the origins of this concept in modern science.) Goldstein, H. (1950) Classical Mechanics, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. (A lucid and thorough exposition of the principles of mechanics, including the relation between symmetries and conservation laws.) JAMES T. CUSHING CONSERVATISM Conservatism is an approach to human affairs which mistrusts both a priori reasoning and revolution, preferring to put its trust in experience and in the gradual improvement of tried and tested arrangements. As a conscious statement of position, it dates from the reaction of Burke and de Maistre to the Enlightenment and Revolutionary thought and practices in the eighteenth century. Its roots, however, go far deeper. From Plato, conservatives derive a sense of the complexity and danger of human nature, although they reject emphatically his belief in the desirability of philosophical governance. From Aristotle, conservatives derive their sense of the need for practical experience in judging both moral and political matters, and their understanding of the role of tradition in inculcating habits of virtue and wisdom in the young. Against Plato, conservatives prefer the limited government advocated by Hobbes, because of their belief in the ignorance and corruptibility of rulers, and because of their wish to encourage the self-reliance of subjects. They do, however, reject any conception of a social contract. In this, they follow de Maistre, who argued that creatures with the institutions and reactions necessary to form a social contract will already be in a society and hence have no need of such a thing. While de Maistre emphasized the terror underlying political power, more characteristic of modern AngloSaxon conservatism is the position of Burke. For Burke, a good constitution is one adorned with ‘pleasing illusions’ to make ‘power gentle and obedience liberal’. It is also one which dissipates power in a society through autonomous institutions independent of the state. For both these reasons the communist regimes of eastern Europe could not be defended by conservatives, even though for a time they represented a form of social order. While conservatism is not antithetical to the free market, and while the market embodies virtues the conservative will approve of, for the conservative the market needs to be supplemented by the morality, the institutions and the authority necessary to sustain it. Human beings are by nature political, and also inevitably derive their identity from the society to which they belong. Our sense of self is established through our family relationships and also through the wider recognition and apportionment of roles we achieve in the public world beyond the family. According to Hegel, who since Aristotle has written most profoundly on the interplay of the private and the public in human life, both family and the public world of civil society need to be sustained through the authority of the state. On the other hand, the distinctions between family, civil society and the state need to be maintained against the characteristically modern tendency to treat them collectively. In his insistence both on authority and on the checks and balances needed in a good society, Hegel may be said to be the most articulate and systematic of conservative thinkers. Conservatism has been much criticized for its tendency towards complacency and to accept the status quo even when it is unacceptable. However, in its stress on the imperfectibility of human nature and on the dangers of wholesale revolution, it may be said to be more realistic than its opponents. Conservatives can also be quite content with the claim that societies animated by conservative political structures have been more successful morally and materially than socialist or liberal societies. This claim they believe to be true, and it is a fundamental aspect of their position that the dispute between them and their opponents is, at bottom, an empirical one. See also: HUMAN NATURE Further reading Burke, E. (1790) Reflections on the Revolution in France , Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986. (Classic statement of a conservative position.) Scruton, R. (1980) The Meaning of Conservatism , London: Penguin. (A strong exposition of conservatism.) ANTHONY O’HEAR
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Page 171 CONSTANT DE REBECQUE, HENRI-BENJAMIN (1767–1830) Benjamin Constant combined the activities of a religious historian, autobiographer and novelist with a career as a political theorist and politician. Constant’s intellectual outlook was shaped by French Enlightenment thought and two years spent at Edinburgh University in 1783–5 added experience of observing the British government and constitution at work. Through all of Constant’s writings runs a consistent theme: the necessity of safeguarding the freedom of the individual in modern society. At the end of his life he summed up his liberalism thus: ‘Freedom in all things, in religion, philosophy, literature, industry and politics. And by freedom I mean the triumph of the individual both over an authority that would wish to govern by despotic means and over the masses who would claim the right to make a minority subservient to a majority’ Constant’s political activity and his writings, which some consider prophetic of the growth of modern totalitarian regimes, have been influential in the development of liberal thought in Europe and the USA. Further reading Berlin, I. (1969) Four Essays on Liberty, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Constant as ‘the most eloquent of all defenders of freedom and privacy’.) Constant, B. (1806) Principes de politique applicables à tous les gouvernements (Political Principles Applicable to All Governments), ed. E. Hofmann, Geneva: Droz, 1980. (A summary of Constant’s political beliefs.) DENNIS WOOD CONSTITUTIONALISM Constitutionalism comprises a set of ideas, principles and rules, all of which deal with the question of how to develop a political system which excludes as far as possible the chance of arbitrary rule. While according to one of the classic sources of constitutionalism, article sixteen of the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, ‘any society in which rights are not guaranteed, or in which the separation of powers is not defined, has no constitution’, the scope of constitutional principles is in fact broader. In addition to these two defining principles, the following are essential: popular sovereignty; the rule of law; rules about the selection of powerholders and about their accountability to the ruled; and principles about the making, unmaking, revision, interpretation and enforcement of a constitution. Despite close affiliations, constitutionalism and democracy are not the same. Whereas democracy is an institutional device which realizes the right of the people to govern themselves, constitutionalism aims to establish institutional restraints on the power of the rulers, even if they are popularly elected and legitimized. Constitutionalism embodies the self-rationalizing and self-restraining principles of popular government. See also: SHŌTOKU CONSTITUTION Further reading Elkin, S.L. and Soltan, K.E. (eds) (1993) A New Constitutionalism. Designing Political Institutions for a Good Society , Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press. (Thorough and multifaceted reflections about the possible meaning of a new constitutionalism and how it differs from traditional constitutionalism.) McIlwain, C.H. (1966) Constitutionalism: Ancient and Modern, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. (Indispensable for the understanding of the historical emergence of modern constitutionalism; particular emphasis on England.) ULRICH K. PREUß THE CONSTRUCTIBLE UNIVERSE The ‘universe’ of constructible sets was introduced by Kurt Gödel in order to prove the consistency of the axiom of choice (AC) and the continuum hypothesis (CH) with the basic (ZF) axioms of set theory. The hypothesis that all sets are constructible is the axiom of constructibility (V = L). Gödel showed that if ZF is consistent, then ZF + V = L is consistent, and that AC and CH are provable in ZF + V = L. See also: AXIOM OF CHOICE; CONTINUUM HYPOTHESIS Further reading Gödel, K. (1940) The Consistency of the Continuum Hypothesis, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. (The original source.) JOHN P. BURGESS CONSTRUCTIVISM Originally proposed by sociologists of science, constructivism or social constructivism is a view about the nature of scientific knowledge held by many philosophers of science. Constructivists maintain that scientific knowledge is made by scientists and not determined by the world. This
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Page 172 makes constructivists antirealists. Constructivism here should not be confused with constructivism in mathematics or logic, although there are some similarities. Constructivism is more aptly compared with Berkeley’s idealism. Most constructivist research involves empirical study of a historical or a contemporary episode in science, with the aim of learning how scientists experiment and theorize. Constructivists try not to bias their case studies with presuppositions about how scientific research is directed. Thus their approach contrasts with approaches in philosophy of science that assume scientists are guided by a particular method. From their case studies, constructivists have concluded that scientific practice is not guided by any one set of methods. Thus constructivism is relativist or antirationalist. There are two familiar (and related) criticisms of constructivism. First, since constructivists are selfavowed relativists, some philosophers argue that constructivism fails for the same reasons that relativism fails. But many philosophers of science note that relativism can be characterized in various ways and that versions of relativism can be useful in the interpretation of science. Therefore, constructivism’s relativism does not by itself render it unacceptable. Second, constructivists are accused of believing that scientists literally ‘make the world’, in the way some make houses or cars. This is probably not the best way to understand constructivism. Rather, constructivism requires only the weaker thesis that scientific knowledge is ‘produced’ primarily by scientists and only to a lesser extent determined by fixed structures in the world. This interprets constructivism as a thesis about our access to the world via scientific representations. For example, constructivists claim that the way we represent the structure of DNA is a result of many interrelated scientific practices and is not dictated by some ultimate underlying structure of reality. Constructivist research provides important tools for epistemologists specializing in the study of scientific knowledge. See also: FRENCH PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE Further reading Collins, H. and Pinch, T. (1993) The Golem, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (A useful introduction to constructivist methodology, which is accessible to all readers. Empirical programme of relativism.) Knorr-Cetina, K and Mulkay, M. (1982) Science in Context , London: Sage. (A useful collection of case studies and theoretical debates about constructivism.) STEPHEN M. DOWNES CONSTRUCTIVISM IN ETHICS There have been many forms of the idea that there are no distinctively ethical properties, and that ethical claims are composed or constructed out of other considerations. In some sociological writing, the term is used for the view that ethics is artificial or socially constructed, for example out of social norms or attitudes. However, constructivism in ethics is now identified mainly with certain views not of the source but of the justification of ethics, which have their origin in Kant’s work and have been revived and developed by John Rawls. Constructivism in ethics seeks to show how substantive principles, and in particular principles of justice, can be built out of minimal, uncontroversial elements, such as a slender account of action and reason. See also: PRACTICAL REASON AND ETHICS Further reading O’Neill, O. (1989) Constructions of Reason: Explorations of Kant’s Practical Philosophy , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Papers on Kant’s vindication of reason and on his ethics; emphasis on their constructive character.) Rawls, J. (1971) A Theory of Justice , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (His magnum opus: the most influential work in political philosophy of the late twentieth century.) ONORA O’NEILL CONSTRUCTIVISM IN MATHEMATICS Constructivism is not a matter of principles: there are no specifically constructive mathematical axioms which all constructivists accept. Even so, it is traditional to view constructivists as insisting, in one way or another, that proofs of crucial existential theorems in mathematics respect constructive existence: that a crucial existential claim which is constructively admissible must afford means for constructing an instance of it which is also admissible. Allegiance to this idea often demands changes in conventional views about mathematical objects, operations and logic, and, hence, demands reworkings of ordinary mathematics along nonclassical lines. Constructive existence may be so interpreted as to require the abrogation of the law of the excluded middle and the adoption of nonstandard laws of constructive logic and mathematics in its place.
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Page 173 There has been great variation in the forms of constructivism, each form distinguished in its interpretation of constructive existence, in its approaches to mathematical ontology and constructive logic, and in the methods chosen to prove theorems, particularly, theorems of real analysis. In the twentieth century, Russian constructivism, new constructivism, Brouwerian intuitionism, finitism and predicativism have been the most influential forms of constructivism. Further reading Benacerraf, P. and Putnam, H. (eds) (1964) Philosophy of Mathematics: Selected Readings , Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2nd edn, 1983. (An invaluable collection of classic essays on the foundations of mathematics; most are nontechnical.) DAVID CHARLES MCCARTY CONTENT, INDEXICAL Many of our thoughts are about particular individuals (persons, things, places. . .). For example, one can spot a certain Ferrari and think that it is red. What enables this thought to latch onto that particular object? It cannot be how the Ferrari looks, for this could not distinguish one Ferrari from another just like it. In general, how a thought represents something cannot determine which thing it represents. What a singular thought latches onto seems to depend also on features of the context in which the thought occurs. This suggests that its content is essentially indexical, contextually variable much as the content of an utterance such as ‘I am hungry’ depends on who utters it and when. The indexical model of singular thought is not limited to thoughts about individuals one perceives, but applies also to thoughts about individuals one remembers or has been informed of, such as an old bicycle or Christopher Columbus. In each case, a certain contextual relation, based on perception, memory or communication, connects thought to object. See also: CONTENT: WIDE AND NARROW; REFERENCE Further reading Bach, K. (1987) Thought and Reference, Oxford: Oxford University Press, chaps 1, 2. (Develops a relational account of perception-, memory- and communication-based singular thought, according to which percepts, memories and names [as labels on mental files] function as mental indexicals.) Perry, J. (1993) The Problem of the Essential Indexical and Other Essays, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Collects the author’s influential papers on irreducibly indexical aspects of content.) KENT BACH CONTENT, NON-CONCEPTUAL To say that a mental state has intentional content is to say that it represents features of the world. The intentional content of a belief can be characterized in terms of concepts: the content of the belief that fish swim is characterized by the concepts ‘fish’ and ‘swimming’. The contents of beliefs are, for this reason, often described as conceptual. One way to explain this idea is to say that to have a belief, one has to possess the concepts which characterize the belief’s content. However, some philosophers believe that certain mental states have non-conceptual contents: these states represent the world without the subject having to possess the concepts which characterize their contents. The main examples of these putative states are conscious perceptual experiences and the non-conscious states of cognitive informationprocessing systems (such as the visual system). Further reading Peacocke, C. (1993) A Study of Concepts , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (Lucid though difficult, chapter 3 defends an account of the non-conceptual content of perceptual experience.) TIM CRANE CONTENT: WIDE AND NARROW A central problem in philosophy is to explain, in a way consistent with their causal efficacy, how mental states can represent states of affairs in the world. Consider, for example, that wanting water and thinking there is some in the tap can lead one to turn on the tap. The contents of these mental states pertain to things in the world (water and the tap), and yet it would seem that their causal efficacy should depend solely on their internal characteristics, not on their external relations. That is, a person could be in just those states and those states could play just the same psychological roles, even if there were no water or tap for them to refer to. However, certain arguments, based on some imaginative thought experiments, have persuaded many philosophers that thought contents do depend on external factors, both physical and social. A tempting solution to this dilemma has been to
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Page 174 suppose that there are two kinds of content, wide and narrow. Wide content comprises the referential relations that mental states bear to things and their properties. Narrow content comprises the determinants of psychological role. Philosophers have debated whether both notions of content are viable and, if so, how they are connected. See also: CONTENT, INDEXICAL; METHODOLOGICAL INDIVIDUALISM Further reading Fodor, J. (1987) Psychosemantics: The Problem of Meaning in the Philosophy of Mind, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (Explores White’s idea that narrow content is a function from context to wide content.) Stich, S. and Warfield, T. (eds) (1994) Mental Representation: A Reader, Oxford: Blackwell. (Includes important articles on major theories of content.) KENT BACH CONTEXTUALISM, EPISTEMOLOGICAL The idea that norms vary with social setting has long been recognized, but it is only in the late twentieth century that philosophers have developed precise versions of epistemological contextualism, the theory that standards of knowledge and justification vary with context. Ordinary practice seems to support this rather than the ‘invariantist’ view that epistemological standards are uniform. Suppose, for example, that having seen my children a minute ago, I assert ‘I know my children are in the garden’. My neighbour Harold then says, ‘Good, because an escaped prisoner is seeking hostages nearby’. I may then appropriately claim, ‘On second thoughts, I do not know, I should check carefully’. Standards for knowledge appear to have shifted, since they now require further investigation. Contextualism’s greatest advantage is its response to scepticism. Sceptics raise radical possibilities, such as that we might be dreaming. The contextualist grants that such doubts are legitimate in the sceptical context, but holds they are illegitimate in everyday situations. Yet contextualism can appear to be an objectionable form of relativism, and may be accused of confusing standards that we apply in practical conversational contexts with the true standards that determine whether someone has knowledge. See also: JUSTIFICATION, EPISTEMIC; KNOWLEDGE, CONCEPT OF Further reading Unger, P. (1984) Philosophical Relativity , Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. (Contains an original and carefully developed account of contextualism and invariantism.) Williams, M. (1991) Unnatural Doubts: Epistemological Realism and the Basis of Scepticism , Oxford: Blackwell. (Thorough study of scepticism that develops the contextualist alternative.) BRUCE W. BROWER CONTINGENCY People are often puzzled about the apparent contingency of the world. To say that something happens contingently is to say that it might not have happened, and to think of the world as contingent is to think that it might not have existed. Is it contingent? Those who ask this are asking whether there might not have been a world at all, or none that was at all like ours. Usually they are not asking whether there could have been a world which differed from ours only in its details: for example, one in which free agents made slightly different choices. That is an important question too, but a separate one. Some people reject the question of the contingency of the world as meaningless because they do not see how any answer to it could be verified. But such verificationism is controversial, and even if there is something wrong with the question it is still worth asking why people find it compelling. Further reading Leslie, J. (1989) Universes, London: Routledge. (Argues that the universe requires an explanation. Favours an account described as theistic, but the theism is Neoplatonic: God is said to be ‘the world’s creative ethical requiredness’, and the universe came about because it was good that it should – on this see especially ch. 8.) RALPH C.S. WALKER CONTINUANTS There is a common-sense distinction between terms such as ‘statue’ or ‘chair’ on the one hand, and ‘concert’ or ‘war’ on the other. A long-standing tradition in metaphysics has attached some significance to this distinction, holding that the first kind of term is used to name continuants, whereas the second kind is used to name events or processes. The difference is that continuants can be said to change, and therefore persist through change, whereas events do not.
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Page 175 However, the distinction between continuants and events has been challenged on the grounds that no concrete object does, in fact, retain its identity through time. It has been suggested, for example, that unless we give up the notion of identity through time, we are faced with questions that we cannot answer. In addition, the notion that things persist through change is, apparently, threatened by a certain view of time. On this view there is in reality no past, present and future, but rather unchanging temporal relations between events. It has been suggested that such a view is committed to the idea that objects have temporal parts, and these by definition cannot persist through time. See also: PROCESSES Further reading Mellor, D.H. (1981) Real Time, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Defends the tenseless theory of time and attempts to reconcile the theory with the existence of continuants, by treating properties as relations between objects and times. A good but relatively demanding introduction to the tenseless theory of time.) ROBIN LE POIDEVIN CONTINUUM HYPOTHESIS The ‘continuum hypothesis’ (CH) asserts that there is no set intermediate in cardinality (‘size’) between the set of real numbers (the ‘continuum’) and the set of natural numbers. Since the continuum can be shown to have the same cardinality as the power set (that is, the set of subsets) of the natural numbers, CH is a special case of the ‘generalized continuum hypothesis’ (GCH), which says that for any infinite set, there is no set intermediate in cardinality between it and its power set. Cantor first proposed CH believing it to be true, but, despite persistent efforts, failed to prove it. König proved that the cardinality of the continuum cannot be the sum of denumerably many smaller cardinals, and it has been shown that this is the only restriction the accepted axioms of set theory place on its cardinality. Gödel showed that CH was consistent with these axioms and Cohen that its negation was. Together these results prove the independence of CH from the accepted axioms. Cantor proposed CH in the context of seeking to answer the question ‘What is the identifying nature of continuity?’. These independence results show that, whatever else has been gained from the introduction of transfinite set theory – including greater insight into the import of CH – it has not provided a basis for finally answering this question. This remains the case even when the axioms are supplemented in various plausible ways. Further reading Gödel, K. (1940) The Consistency of the Continuum Hypothesis, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. (Revised and more complete version of the original proof.) Tiles, M.E. (1989) The Philosophy of Set Theory: An Introduction to Cantor’s Paradise , Oxford: Blackwell. (Traces the philosophical and mathematical background to the formulation of CH and considers whether it can be decided.) MARY TILES CONTRACTARIANISM The idea that political relations originate in contract or agreement has been applied in several ways. In Plato’s Republic Glaucon suggests that justice is but a pact among rational egoists. Thomas Hobbes developed this idea to analyse the nature of political power. Given the predominantly self-centred nature of humankind, government is necessary for society. Government’s role is to stabilize social cooperation. By exercising enforcement powers, government provides each with the assurance that everyone else will abide by cooperative rules, thereby making it rational for all to cooperate. To fulfil this stabilizing role, Hobbes argued that it is rational for each individual to agree to authorize one person to exercise absolute political power. Neo-Hobbesians eschew absolutism and apply the theory of rational choice to argue that rules of justice, perhaps even all morality, can be construed in terms of a rational bargain among self-interested individuals. John Locke, working from different premises than Hobbes, appealed to a social compact to argue for a constitutional government with limited powers. All men are born with a natural right to equal freedom, and a natural duty to God to preserve themselves and the rest of mankind. No government is just unless it could be commonly agreed to form a position of equal freedom, where agreement is subject to the moral constraints of natural law. Absolutism is unjust according to this criterion. Rousseau developed egalitarian features of Locke’s view to contend for a democratic constitution.The Social Contract embodies the General Will of society, not the unconstrained
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Page 176 private wills of its members. The General Will wills the common good, the good of society and all of its members. Only by bringing our individual wills into accord with the General Will can we achieve civic and moral freedom. In this century, John Rawls has recast natural rights theories of the social contract to argue for a liberal egalitarian conception of justice. From a position of equality, where each person abstracts from knowledge of their historical situations, it is rational for all to agree on principles of justice that guarantee equal basic freedoms and resources adequate for each person’s independence. T.M. Scanlon, meanwhile, has outlined a right-based contractualist account of morality. An act is right if it accords with principles that could not be reasonably rejected by persons who are motivated by a desire to justify their actions according to principles that no one else can reasonably reject. See also: INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, PHILOSOPHY OF; LIBERALISM Further reading Hampton, J. (1986) Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Prominent interpretation of Hobbesian tradition.) Rawls, J. (1971) A Theory of Justice , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (The major contemporary statement of democratic contractarianism.) SAMUEL FREEMAN CONVENTIONALISM How is it known that every number has a successor, that straight lines can intersect each other no more than once, that causes precede their events, and that the electron either went through the slit or it did not? In cases like these it is not easy to find observable evidence, and it is implausible to postulate special modes of intuitive access to the phenomena in question. Yet such theses are relied on in scientific discourse and can hardly be dismissed as meaningless metaphysical excess. In response to this problem the positivists and empiricists (notably Poincaré, Hilbert, Carnap, Reichenbach and Ayer) developed a strategy known as conventionalism. The idea was that certain statements, including fundamental principles of logic, arithmetic and geometry, are asserted as a matter of conventional stipulation, being no more than definitions of some of their constituent terms; consequently they must be true, our commitment to them cannot but be justified, and the facts in virtue of which they are true are simply the facts of our having made those particular decisions about the use of words. This doctrine was a compelling and powerful weapon in the positivist–empiricist arsenal, evolving throughout the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. But it fell into disfavour under a barrage of serious challenges due mainly to Quine. How are ‘conventions’ to be identified as such? How could they possibly provide words with meanings, or have the epistemological import that is claimed for them? How could arbitrary, contingent decisions about the use of words result in the existence of necessary facts? In the absence of satisfactory replies to these objections, few philosophers these days believe that conventionalism can settle the semantic, epistemological and metaphysical questions that it was intended to answer. However, certain aspects of the view remain defensible and interesting. See also: LANGUAGE, CONVENTIONALITY OF; NECESSARY TRUTH AND CONVENTION Further reading Ayer, A.J. (1936) Language, Truth and Logic, New York: Dover. (Forcefully advocates conventionalism and elaborates its extensive philosophical ramifications.) Quine, W.V. (1935) ‘Truth by Convention’, in The Ways of Paradox, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976. (Argues that logic cannot derive from explicit conventions.) PAUL HORWICH CONWAY, ANNE ( c .1630–79) Anne Conway (née Finch) wasthe most important of the few English women who engaged in philosophy in the seventeenth century. Her reputation derives from one work published after her death, Principia philosophiae antiquissimae et recentissimae (1690), which proposes a Neoplatonic system of metaphysics featuring a monistic concept of created substance. The work entails a critique of the dualism of both Descartes and Henry More, as well as of the materialism (as she saw it) of Hobbes and Spinoza. In her concept of the monad and her emphasis on the benevolence of God, Conway’s system has some interesting affinities with that of Leibniz. See also: SALVATION Further reading Conway, A. (1690) Principia philosophiae anti-quissimae et recentissimae de Deo, Christo et Creatura id est de materia et spiritu in genere,
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Page 177 in Opuscula Philosophica, Amsterdam; trans. as The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy , London, 1692; new trans. by A. Condert and T. Corse, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. (Latin translation of a now-lost English original, and an English translation of this. The introduction to the modern reprint is not wholly reliable.) SARAH HUTTON COPERNICUS, NICOLAUS (1473–1543) Copernicus argued that the earth is a planet revolving around the sun, as well as rotating on its own axis. His work marked the culmination of a tradition of mathematical astronomy stretching back beyond Ptolemy, to the Greeks and Babylonians. Though it was associated with methods and assumptions that had been familiar for centuries, it was also revolutionary because of its implications for the relations between humankind and the universe at large. See also: COSMOLOGY Further reading Westman, R. (ed.) (1975) The Copernican Achievement , Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. (A set of essays marking the fifth centenary of Copernicus’ birth. Lively scholarship on a wide array of Copernican topics.) ERNAN MCMULLIN CORDEMOY, GéRAUD DE (1626–84) Géraud de Cordemoy was, by profession, first a lawyer, then a tutor to the Dauphin (the future Louis XV). But he was also one of the more important Cartesian philosophers in seventeenth-century France. In Le discernement du corps et de l’ame , Cordemoy defended a strict dualist and mechanist philosophy. But his Cartesianism was unorthodox, since he introduced indivisible atoms into his natural philosophy and was one of the first to argue for occasionalism, the doctrine that God alone is a true causal agent. He also wrote an important work on the nature and origins of speech and language, Le discours physique de la parole. See also: DESCARTES, R. Further reading Balz, A.G.A. (1951) Cartesian Studies , New York: Columbia University Press. (Contains a useful chapter on Cordemoy’s philosophy in general.) STEVEN NADLER CORRUPTION Corruption denotes decay or perversion. The term implies that there is a natural or normal standard of functioning or conduct from which the corrupt state of affairs or action deviates. When we talk of a person becoming corrupt, we mean not just that they have broken a rule, but that the basic norms of ethical conduct no longer have any force for them. Corruption strikes at the root of a thing. Political corruption involves the decay or perversion of political rule. Broadly, this occurs when a group or individual subverts a society’s publicly endorsed practices for conciliating conflicts and pursuing the common good so as to gain illegitimate advantage for their interests in the political process. The precise specification of the nature and dynamics of corruption is inherently controversial. Classical accounts associate it with a collapse of civic virtue and the eventual destruction of the state. Modern theories focus more narrowly on the misuse of public office for private gain. Further reading Heidenheimer, A.J., Johnston, M. and Levine, V.T. (eds) (1989) Political Corruption: A Handbook , New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Press. (The standard work on the subject in politics.) MARK PHILP COSMOLOGY The term ‘cosmology’ has three main uses. At its most general, it designates a worldview, for example, the Mayan cosmology. In the early eighteenth century, shortly after the term made its first appearance, Christian Wolff used it to draw a distinction between physics, the empirical study of the material world, and cosmology, the branch of metaphysics dealing with material nature in its most general aspects. This usage remained popular into the twentieth century, especially among Kantian and neo-scholastic philosophers. But recent developments in science that allow the construction of plausible universe models have, effectively, pre-empted the use of the term in order to designate the science that deals with the origins and structure of the physical universe as a whole. Cosmology may be said to have gone through three major phases, each associated with a single major figure – Aristotle, Newton and Einstein. The ancient Greeks were the first to attempt to give a reasoned account of the cosmos. Aristotle constructed a complex interlocking set of
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Page 178 spheres centred on an immovable central earth to account for the motions of the heavenly bodies. Newton formulated a theory of gravitational force that required space and time to be both absolute and infinite. Though the laws of nature could, in principle, be specified, nothing could be said about the origins or overall structure of the cosmos. In 1915, Einstein proposed a general theory of relativity whose field-equations could be satisfied by numerous universe-models. Hubble’s discovery of the galactic red shift in 1929 led Lemaître in 1931 to choose from among these alternatives an expandinguniverse model, which, though challenged in the 1950s by a rival steady-state theory, became the ‘standard’ view after the cosmic microwave background radiation it had predicted was observed in 1964. The ‘Big Bang’ theory has since been modified in one important respect by the addition of an inflationary episode in the first fraction of a second of cosmic expansion. As a ‘cosmic’ theory, it continues to raise issues of special interest to philosophers. See also: COSMOLOGY AND COSMOGONY, INDIAN THEORIES OF; SPACE Further reading Leslie, J. (1989) Universes, London: Routledge. (An extensive review of the evidence for ‘fine tuning’ in recent cosmology and of the various responses to it. Concludes that either God (in the form of an ethical requirement) is real or that there exist many varied universes.) Munitz, M.K. (ed.) (1957) Theories of the Universe from Babylonian Myth to Modern Science , Glencoe, IL: Free Press. (Selection of readings from those who shaped the science of cosmology, ranging from Aristotle and Lucretius, through Newton and Kant, to Lemaître and Gamow.) ERNAN MCMULLIN COSMOLOGY AND COSMOGONY, INDIAN THEORIES OF Theories of the origin of the universe have been told as stories, riddles and instruction in India since early times. The three prominent religious movements, Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism each had their own myths and speculations. In the Hindu tradition there was never one single theory. Among the divergent ideas we can distinguish an early stage, which included themes such as there being nothing at the beginning, or the universe being created by mutual birth, or creation as the dismemberment of a sacrificial victim, or the gods arriving after the first moment of creation; and a later stage, in which Viaihu or Brahmā was regarded as the creator of the universe. Simultaneously, the old Sānkhya idea of the self-creating universe, in which the original material stuff transforms itself into the different parts of the universe, coexisted with the idea of a god creating the universe. The early Buddhist tradition neglected questions such as ‘Does the universe exist?’ The first mention of such topics occurred in the Pāli Canon, where they were condemned. A few centuries later, these cosmological ideas were taken up by Vasubandhu, who collected them and formulated them in a comprehensive way. Without a creator god, the universe is primarily a reflection of meditational experiences of the world, a Single Circular System. There are several other systems, such as the Thousand Universe System, the Immeasurable Universe System and the Pure Land. The Jaina tradition had a very detailed theory of the spatial arrangement of the universe. This was essential for understanding where all the individual selves travel to after death, given their spiritual accomplishments (or lack of them). From earth they go to heavens or hells, the aim being eventually to reach the place of bliss and thus to gain final freedom. See also: GOD, INDIAN CONCEPTIONS OF; HEAVEN, INDIAN CONCEPTIONS OF Further reading Gombrich, R. (1975) ‘Ancient Indian Cosmology’, in C. Blacker and M. Loewe (eds) Ancient Cosmologies, London: Allen & Unwin. (Single, short survey covering all the major facets of cosmologies.) Kloetzli, R. (1983) Buddhist Cosmology. From Single World System to Pure Land: Science and Theology in the Images of Motion and Light, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. (A good, comprehensive introduction.) EDELTRAUD HARZER CLEAR COUNTERFACTUAL CONDITIONALS ‘If bats were deaf, they would hunt during the day.’ What you have just read is called a ‘counterfactual’ conditional; it is an ‘If. . . then . . . ’ statement the components of which are ‘counter to fact’, in this case counter to the fact that bats hear well and sleep during the day. Among the analyses proposed for such statements, two have been especially prominent. According to the first, a counterfactual asserts
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Page 179 that there is a sound argument from the antecedent (‘bats are deaf’) to the consequent (‘bats hunt during the day’). The argument uses certain implicit background conditions and laws of nature as additional premises. A variant of this analysis says that a counterfactual is itself a condensed version of such an argument. The analysis is called ‘metalinguistic’ because of its reference to linguistic items such as premises and arguments. The second analysis refers instead to possible worlds. (One may think of possible worlds as ways things might have gone.) This analysis says that the example is true just in case bats hunt during the day in the closest possible world(s) where they are deaf. See also: POSSIBLE WORLDS; RELEVANCE LOGIC AND ENTAILMENT Further reading Goodman, N. (1954) Fact, Fiction, and Forecast , Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Athlone Press. (A non-technical classic.) Stalnaker, R. (1984) Inquiry , Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books. (An excellent non-technical discussion of counterfactual and indicative conditionals and their role in reasoning.) FRANK DÖRING COURNOT, ANTOINE AUGUSTIN (1801–77) Cournot is best known for his work in applying mathematical techniques to economic and social affairs and is generally acknowledged to be the founder of econometrics. His work in philosophy, however, is at least as distinguished. His philosophy may be seen as a meditation on continuity and discontinuity, on law and brute empirical fact, which is unassimilable to law. Empiricism is exclusively preoccupied with the latter phenomenon, rationalism with the former. Cournot affirmed the reality of both. His philosophy thus mediates between empiricism (which, when it is consistent, leads on his view to scepticism) and rationalism (which, when it is consistent, loses contact with reality). Continuity is real because the world is not a chaos; it is a network of events, forming various series, which reveal necessary and determinable relations. But discontinuity is also real, for the order we discern in the various events is not a single order. The series are independent and the points where they intersect cannot be predicted from within the series themselves. Brute contingency is therefore as real as law. Consequently, though the world may be known, it can never be reduced to a single scheme. See also: EMPIRICISM Further reading Cournot, A.A. (1861) Essai sur les fondements de nos connaissances et sur les caracteres de la critique philosophique , Paris, 2 vols; trans. M.H. Moore, An Essay on the Foundations of Our Knowledge , New York: The Liberal Arts Press, 1956. (His main work in philosophy.) Moore, M.H. (1934) ‘The Place of A.A. Cournot in the History of Philosophy’, Philosophical Review 43: 380–401. (The best introduction to Cournot in English.) H.O. MOUNCE COUSIN, VICTOR (1792–1867) French philosopher, educationalist and historian, Victor Cousin is primarily associated with ‘Eclecticism’ and the history of philosophy, but his work also includes contributions to aesthetics, philosophy of history and political theory. He was a prolific writer and editor, and a significant figure in the development of philosophy as a professional discipline in France. See also: GERMAN IDEALISM Further reading Simon J. (1887) Victor Cousin, trans. G. Masson, London: George Routledge & Sons, 1888. (A general work by a student and contemporary of Cousin.) DAVID LEOPOLD CRATHORN, WILLIAM ( fl. c .1330) An English scholastic a generation younger than William of Ockham, Crathorn’s theological writings confront the central metaphysical and epistemological problems of his day. He is of interest largely because of his willingness to pursue the logical implications of his views to the most extreme conclusions. This characteristic makes Crathorn a provocative and idiosyncratic thinker, although not always a coherent one. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM, MEDIEVAL Further reading Pasnau, R. (1997) Theories of Cognition in the Later Middle Ages, New York: Cambridge University Press. (Gives an extended discussion of Crathorn’s likeness theory of mental representation (Chapter 3) and his treatment of scepticism (Chapter 7).) ROBERT PASNAU
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Page 180 CRATYLUS (late 5th/early 4th century BC) Probably an Athenian, Cratylus was a radical Heraclitean, holding that the world is in constant and total flux. Through this doctrine he had a seminal influence on Plato. Cratylus also, for some time at least, defended the natural correctness of names. Further reading Plato ( c .380–367 BC) Cratylus, trans. in J. M. Cooper (ed.) Plato: Complete Works, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997. (Our main source on Cratylus, especially his linguistc naturalism.) A.A. LONG CREATION AND CONSERVATION, RELIGIOUS DOCTRINE OF The doctrine of the creation of the universe by God is common to the monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam; reflection on creation has been most extensively developed within the Christian tradition. Creation is by a single supreme God, not a group of deities, and is an ‘absolute’ creation (creation ex nihilo , ‘out of nothing’) rather than being either a ‘making’ out of previously existing material or an ‘emanation’ (outflow) from God’s own nature. Creation, furthermore, is a free act on God’s part; he has no ‘need’ to create but has done so out of love and generosity. He not only created the universe ‘in the beginning’, but he sustains (‘conserves’) it by his power at each moment of its existence; without God’s support it would instantly collapse into nothingness. It is controversial whether the belief in divine creation receives support from contemporary cosmology, as seen in the ‘Big Bang’ theory. See also: ETERNITY; GOD, CONCEPTS OF Further reading Burrell, D.B. (1993) Freedom and Creation in Three Traditions, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. (Comparative analysis of medieval thought on freedom and creation in Judaism, Christianity and Islam.) Craig, W.L. and Smith, Q. (1993) Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Debate on the implications of Big Bang cosmology with a finite past for the universe.) WILLIAM HASKER CRESCAS, HASDAI ( c .1340–1410) During the most tragic period of Spanish-Jewish history (1391–1492), Hasdai Crescas wrote a philosophical-theological treatise, Or Adonai (Light of the Lord), seeking to define and fortify the Jewish faith in the face of constant Christian attack. It is a polemical book, aiming to defend a traditional version of Judaism by criticizing the Aristotelian formulations proposed by such Jewish philosophers as Moses Maimonides and Levi ben Gershom (Gersonides). Since they relied on Aristotelian physics, Crescas began his reconstruction of Jewish theology with a demolition of Aristotle’s natural philosophy. He then turned to metaphysics in general and Jewish theology in particular. His constructive work was especially novel in its treatment of human choice, divine omniscience and creation. Aiming to defend traditional Jewish ideas, Crescas in the end broached some of the most radical challenges to be found within the medieval philosophical tradition, including the proposal that there might be numerous worlds other than our own, infinite magnitudes, and a void, or vacuum. See also: GERSONIDES; MAIMONIDES, M. Further reading Crescas, H. (1929) Crescas’ Critique of Aristotle, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (The major study of Crescas’ critique of Aristotelian natural philosophy; contains a critical edition, translation and commentary on Book 1 of Or Adonai .) SEYMOUR FELDMAN CRIME AND PUNISHMENT An account of how state punishment can be justified requires an account of the state, as having the authority to punish, and of crime, as that which is punished. Crime, as socially proscribed wrongdoing, may be formally censured, and may lead to the payment of compensation to those injured by it – but why should it also attract the kind of ‘hard-treatment’ punishment which characterizes a system of criminal law? How should we decide which kinds of wrongdoing should count as crimes? Consequentialists justify punishment by its beneficial effects, notably in preventing crime by deterring, reforming or incapacitating potential criminals. They face the objection that the wholehearted pursuit of such goals would lead to injustice – punishment of those who do not deserve it. Even if that objection is met by imposing non-consequentialist constraints on the system, they also face the objection that a
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Page 181 consequentialist system fails to respect criminals as responsible moral agents. Retributivists hold that punishment must be deserved if it is to be justified, and that the guilty (and only the guilty) deserve punishment. Positive retributivists hold that the guilty should be punished as they deserve, even if this will achieve no consequential good. Negative retributivists hold that only the guilty may be punished, but that they should be punished only if their punishment will be beneficial. The main objection to retributivism is that it fails to explain why the guilty deserve punishment. Some retributivists have argued that the guilty deserve censure, and that punishment serves to communicate that censure. But why should we use ‘hard treatment’ such as imprisonment or fines to communicate censure? Does the hard treatment function as a consequentialist deterrent? Or could such punishments serve to reform or educate criminals, thus bringing them to repent their crimes and restoring their relationships with those they have wronged? A theory of justified punishment must be related to our existing penal institutions. It must, in particular, have something to say about sentencing: about what kinds of punishment should be imposed, and about how sentencers should decide on the appropriate severity of punishment. A central issue concerns the role of the principle of proportionality: the demand that the severity of punishment should be proportionate to the seriousness of the crime. But we must also ask whether our existing penal practices can be justified at all. We must face the abolitionists’ argument that punishment should be abolished in favour of social practices which treat ‘crimes’ not as wrongdoings that must be punished, but as ‘conflicts’ which must be resolved by a reconciliatory rather than a punitive process. See also: JUSTICE; LAW, PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Honderich, T. (1984) Punishment: The Supposed Justifications , Harmondsworth: Penguin, revised edn. (A critical discussion of the standard theories of punishment.) Primoratz, I. (1989) Justifying Legal Punishment , Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. (A useful introductory text, criticizing utilitarian and ‘mixed’ accounts, arguing for retributivism.) R.A. DUFF CRITERIA The concept of criteria has been interpreted as the central notion in the later Wittgenstein’s account of how language functions, in contrast to the realist semantics of the Tractatus . According to this later account, a concept possesses a sense in so far as there are conditions that constitute non-inductive evidence for its application in a particular case. This condition on a concept’s possessing a sense has been thought to enable Wittgenstein to refute both solipsism and scepticism about other minds. There are powerful objections to this conception of criteria, which have led some philosophers to look for an alternative account of the role of criteria in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. See also: CONTEXTUALISM, EPISTEMOLOGICAL Further reading Wittgenstein, L. (1992) Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology: The Inner and the Outer, Oxford: Blackwell. (Provides the most sustained treatment of the topic of criteria. But note that it is in the nature of Wittgenstein’s philosophical method that remarks on criteria are spread throughout his works and that these remarks bear complex relations both with each other and with other topics discussed.) MARIE MCGINN CRITICAL LEGAL STUDIES Critical Legal Studies first developed in the USA in the latter half of the 1970s. Drawing on the political inspiration of the contemporary New Left, it was an intellectual movement committed to radicalizing legal theory by bringing together US legal realism and modern European social theory. In so doing, it sought to provide a fundamental critique of the nature and place of law in modern capitalist society. In its first phase, its main target was the liberal positivist theories of law that dominate Anglo-American jurisprudence. Such theories inform both the organization of the traditional legal curriculum and the nature of legal practice. By contrast, Critical Legal Studies saw law as based upon deeply contradictory premises, so that the orthodox positivist claim that law could be in principle rational and coherent was rejected in favour of the ‘indeterminacy thesis’. Legal decisions were in truth a matter not of logical deduction but of choice. They could always go one way or the other. Ultimately, therefore, it was an open political decision made
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Page 182 by a judge which determined a legal conclusion. The idea of the ‘rule of law’ operating above politics was rejected, but regarded as important in terms of the political legitimation function it served in Western societies. While the name ‘Critical Legal Studies’ has a US provenance, a number of different critical legal projects can be identified. These projects reflect the broader character of the national traditions of which they are a part. European approaches, particularly the German and the British, reveal a more sustained engagement with modern and postmodern social theory. However, as a result of problems in the original project, Critical Legal Studies has entered into a second phase in the USA in which there is an increasing interest in social theory. The result has been a convergence of European and US concerns, but around a highly fragmented group of modern and postmodern social theories. Nietzsche, Foucault, Derrida and Habermas have been introduced into legal theory while Marx and Weber, the original theoretical mainstays of a critical approach to law, have been sidelined. There is a danger in this that Critical Legal Studies will become little more than a group of theorists talking among themselves. While the original US critique of legal doctrine may have run out of steam for want of sufficient theoretical sophistication, it is important not to lose sight of its direct focus on law and legal forms. It is arguable that the recent ‘turn to theory’ must validate itself in terms of the contribution it is able to make to a critical understanding of law and its practices; also that an important, as yet unaddressed, question concerns the relationship between postmodern forms of criticism and sociological analyses of the development of law. See also: CRITICAL THEORY; SOCIAL THEORY AND LAW Further reading Kelman, M. (1987) A Guide to Critical Legal Studies , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (An insider’s analysis and reconstruction of the Critical Legal Studies movement in the USA.) Unger, R.M. (1986) The Critical Legal Studies Movement , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (A virtuoso ‘manifesto’ for the Critical Legal Studies movement in the USA by one of its leading figures.) ALAN NORRIE CRITICAL REALISM Critical realism is a movement in philosophy and the human sciences starting from Roy Bhaskar’s writings. It claims that causal laws state the tendencies of things grounded in their structures, not invariable conjunctions, which are rare outside experiments. Therefore, positivist accounts of science are wrong, but so is the refusal to explain the human world causally. Critical realism holds that there is more to ‘what is’ than ‘what is known’, more to powers than their use, and more to society than the individuals composing it. It rejects the widespread view that explanation is always neutral – to explain can be to criticize. See also: EXPERIMENT; EXPLANATION IN HISTORY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE Further reading Bhaskar, R. (1978) A Realist Theory of Science , Hemel Hempstead: The Harvester Press. (Basic text on transcendental realist philosophy of science.) Collier, A. (1993) Critical Realism, London: Verso. (General introductory exposition of critical realism.) ANDREW COLLIER CRITICAL THEORY The term ‘critical theory’ designates the approach to the study of society developed between 1930 and 1970 by the so-called ‘Frankfurt School’. A group of theorists associated with the Institute for Social Research, the School was founded in Frankfurt, Germany in 1923. The three most important philosophers belonging to it were Max Horkheimer, Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno and Herbert Marcuse. Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse feared that modern Western societies were turning into closed, totalitarian systems in which all individual autonomy was eliminated. In their earliest writings from the 1930s they presented this tendency towards totalitarianism as one result of the capitalist mode of production. In later accounts they give more prominence to the role of science and technology in modern society, and to the concomitant, purely ‘instrumental’, conception of reason. This conception of reason denies that there can be any such thing as inherently rational ends or goals for human action and asserts that reason is concerned exclusively with the choice of effective instruments or means for attaining arbitrary ends. ‘Critical theory’ was to be a form of resistance to contemporary society; its basic
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Page 183 method was to be that of ‘internal’or ‘immanent’ criticism. Every society, it was claimed, must be seen as making a tacit claim to substantive (and not merely instrumental) rationality; that is, making the claim that it allows its members to lead a good life. This claim gives critical theory a standard for criticism which is internal to the society being criticized. Critical theory demonstrates in what ways contemporary society fails to live up to its own claims. The conception of the good life to which each society makes tacit appeal in legitimizing itself will usually not be fully propositionally explicit, so any critical theory will have to begin by extracting a tacit conception of the good life from the beliefs, cultural artefacts and forms of experience present in the society in question. One of the particular difficulties confronting a critical theory of contemporary society is the disappearance of traditional substantive conceptions of the good life that could serve as a basis for internal criticism, and their replacement with the view that modern society needs no legitimation beyond simple reference to its actual efficient functioning, to its ‘instrumental’ rationality. The ideology of ‘instrumental rationality’ thus itself becomes a major target for critical theory. See also: FRANKFURT SCHOOL Further reading Held, D. (1980) Introduction to Critical Theory , Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. (Best general introduction.) Jay, M. (1973) The Dialectical Imagination , Boston, MA: Little, Brown. (Historical account of the Institute for Social Research.) RAYMOND GEUSS CROCE, BENEDETTO (1866–1952) The leading Italian philosopher of his day, Croce presented his philosophy as a humanist alternative to the consolations of religion. A Hegelian idealist, he argued that all human activity was orientated towards either the Beautiful, the True, the Useful or the Good. These ideals were the four aspects of what, following Hegel, he termed spirit or human consciousness. The first two corresponded to the theoretical dimensions of spirit, namely intuition and logic respectively, the last two to spirit’s practical aspects of economic and ethical willing. He contended that the four eternal ideals were ‘pure concepts’ whose content derived from human thought and action. Spirit or consciousness progressively unfolded through human history as our ideas of beauty, truth, usefulness and morality were steadily reworked and developed. Croce insisted that his idealism was a form of ‘absolute historicism’, since it involved the claim that all meaning and value evolved immanently through the historical process. He strenuously denied that spirit could be regarded as some form of transcendent puppet-master that existed apart from the human beings through which it expressed itself. He accused Hegel of making this mistake. He also maintained that Hegel’s conception of the dialectic as a synthesis of opposites had paid insufficient attention to the need to retain the distinct moments of spirit. He argued that the Beautiful, the True, the Useful and the Good, though linked, ought never to be confused, and he criticized aestheticism and utilitarianism accordingly. Croce developed his thesis both in philosophical works devoted to aesthetics, ethics, politics and the philosophy of history, and in detailed historical studies of Italian and European literature, culture, politics and society. Opposition to the Fascist regime led him to identify his philosophy with liberalism on the grounds that it emphasized the creativity and autonomy of the individual. In practical politics, however, he was a conservative. See also: HEGELIANISM Further reading Croce, B. (1902) Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale, Milan, Palermo, Naples: Sandron; trans. D. Ainslie, Aesthetic , London: Macmillan, 1909; 2nd complete edn, 1922. (The first volume of his Philosophy of Spirit , which provides both the first version of his aesthetic doctrine and of his philosophy as a whole – each of which were subsequently much modified.) Orsini, G.N.G. (1961) Benedetto Croce, Philosopher of Art and Literary Critic , Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. (The best account in English of Croce’s aesthetics.) RICHARD BELLAMY CRUCIAL EXPERIMENTS A ‘crucial experiment’ allegedly establishes the truth of one of a set of competing theories. Francis Bacon (1620) held that such experiments are frequent in the empirical sciences and are particularly important for terminating an investigation. These claims were denied by Pierre Duhem (1905), who maintained that crucial experiments are impossible in the
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Page 184 physical sciences because they require a complete enumeration of all possible theories to explain a phenomenon – something that cannot be achieved. Despite Duhem, scientists frequently regard certain experiments as crucial in the sense that the experimental result helps make one theory among a set of competitors very probable and the others very improbable, given what is currently known. Further reading Duhem, P. (1905) The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991. (One of the greatest and most readable twentieth-century works in the philosophy of science.) Glymour, C. (1980) Theory and Evidence, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Argues, contra Duhem, that individual hypotheses in a theory can be confirmed.) PETER ACHINSTEIN CRUSIUS, CHRISTIAN AUGUST (1715–75) Crusius was a pivotal figure in the middle period of the German Enlightenment, linking Pufendorf and Thomasius with Kant. Though sometimes wrongly characterized (for example, by Hegel) as a Wolffian, he was instead an important critic of that position. His system reflected a new alliance between Pietism and Lutheran orthodoxy, offering a comprehensive antirationalist, realist, and voluntarist alternative to the neoscholastic tradition as renovated by Leibniz. Crusius was important in Kant’s development and helps us understand the latter’s philosophical Protestantism. Born a pastor’s son in Leuna bei Merseburg, in Saxony, Crusius was educated at Leipzig and much influenced there by the Thomasian professor A.F. Hoffmann (1703–41). Interested in both philosophy and theology throughout his career, he accepted a chair as extraordinary professor of philosophy at Leipzig in 1744. In 1750, however, he became ordinary professor of theology, also retaining his teaching post in philosophy until his death. His reputation as a philosopher peaked in Germany during the 1750s and 1760s, mainly on the basis of four scholastic manuals published in German during 1744–9. His greater theological reputation as founder of a ‘biblico-prophetic’ school emphasizing the inspirational unity of Scripture lasted well into the mid-nineteenth century. See also: ENLIGHTENMENT, CONTINENTAL Further reading Beck, L.W. (1969) Early German Philosophy , Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 394–402. (Reliable but limited mainly to Crusius’ Entwurf.) Schneewind, J.B. (trans.) (1990) ‘Christian August Crusius’, in J.B. Schneewind (ed.) Moral Philosophy from Montaigne to Kant , vol. 2: 568–85, New York: Cambridge University Press. (These excerpts from the Anweisung are the only translation of Crusius into English.) MICHAEL J. SEIDLER CUDWORTH, DAMARIS see MASHAM, DAMARIS CUDWORTH, RALPH (1617–88) Ralph Cudworth was the leading philosopher of the group known as the Cambridge Platonists. In his lifetime he published only one work of philosophy, his True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678). This was intended as the first of a series of three volumes dealing with the general topic of liberty and necessity. Two further parts of this project were published posthumously, from the papers he left when he died: A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality (1731) and A Treatise of Freewill (1838). Cudworth’s so-called Cambridge Platonism is broadly Neoplatonic, but he was receptive to other currents of thought, both ancient and modern. In philosophy he was an antideterminist who strove to defend theism in rational terms, and to establish the certainty of knowledge and the existence of unchangeable moral principles in the face of the challenge of Hobbes and Spinoza. He admired and borrowed from Descartes, but also criticized aspects of Cartesianism. Cudworth’s starting point is his fundamental belief in the existence of God, conceived as a fully perfect being, infinitely powerful, wise and good. A major part of his True Intellectual System is taken up with the demonstration of the existence of God, largely through consensus gentium (universal consent) arguments and the argument from design. The intellect behind his ‘intellectual system’ is the divine understanding. Mind is antecedent to the world, which is intelligible by virtue of the fact that it bears the stamp of its wise creator. The human mind is capable of knowing the world since it participates in the wisdom of God, whence epistemological certainty derives. The created world is
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Page 185 also the best possible world, although not bound by necessity. A central element of Cudworth’s philosophy is his defence of the freedom of will – a meaningful system of morals would be impossible without this freedom. Natural justice and morality are founded in the goodness and justice of God rather than in an arbitrary divine will. The principles of virtue and goodness, like the elements of truth, exist independently of human beings. A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality contains the most fully worked-out epistemology of any of the Cambridge Platonists and constitutes the most important statement of innate-idea epistemology by any British philosopher of the seventeenth century. See also: CAMBRIDGE PLATONISM Further reading Cudworth, R. (1678) The True Intellectual System of the Universe, London; repr. ed. J. Harrison, London, 1845; repr. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 1964. (The only major work of philosophy by Cudworth to be published in his lifetime.) SARAH HUTTON CULTURAL IDENTITY If cultural identity means that a person achieves the fullest humanity within an accepted context of traditional symbols, judgments, values, behaviour and relationships with specific others who selfconsciously think of themselves as a community, then it must be seen as a great contemporary challenge to many Western philosophical assertions about the person, society, meaning and truth. This sense of cultural identity, as well as more extreme forms, can amount to classic determinism: individuals are subsumed under the relations with meaning and people surrounding them. Advocates of the centrality of cultural identity often make an argument rooted in an ‘authenticity’ which purports that, to fully encounter oneself, each of us must grasp and fully accept one’s psychological and social location within a specific group of people who interpret life in terms of the particular civilization that contains them. See also: COMMUNITY AND COMMUNITARIANISM; PERSONS Further reading Schutte, O. (1993) Cultural Identity and Social Liberation in Latin American Thought, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. (A thorough analysis of the positive features of cultural identity in Latin America.) Weinstein, M.A. (1976) The Tragic Sense of Political Life , Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press. (Contains the argument that the individual is badly served by identification with, or belonging to a ‘people’, or nation-state.) JOHN A. LOUGHNEY CULTURE Culture comprises those aspects of human activity which are socially rather than genetically transmitted. Each social group is characterized by its own culture, which informs the thought and activity of its members in myriad ways, perceptible and imperceptible. The notion of culture, as an explanatory concept, gained prominence at the end of the eighteenth century, as a reaction against the Enlightenment’s belief in the unity of mankind and universal progress. According to J.G. Herder, each culture is different and has its own systems of meaning and value, and cannot be ranked on any universal scale. Followers of Herder, such as Nietzsche and Spengler, stressed the organic nature of culture and praised cultural particularity against what Spengler called civilization, the world city in which cultural distinctions are eroded. It is difficult, however, to see how Herder and his followers avoid an ultimately self-defeating cultural relativism; the task of those who understand the significance of human culture is to make sense of it without sealing cultures off from one another and making interplay between them impossible. Over and above the anthropological sense of culture, there is also the sense of culture as that through which a people’s highest spiritual and artistic aspirations are articulated. Culture in this sense has been seen by Matthew Arnold and others as a substitute for religion, or as a kind of secular religion. While culture in this sense can certainly inveigh against materialism, it is less clear that it can do this effectively without a basis in religion. Nor is it clear that a rigid distinction between high and low culture is desirable. It is, in fact, only the artistic modernists of the twentieth century who have articulated such a distinction in their work, to the detriment of the high and the low culture of our time. See also: SOCIAL RELATIVISM Further reading Arnold, M. (1869) Culture and Anarchy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Page 186 (Puts the argument for culture’s civilizing force.) Barnard, F.M. (ed.) (1969) J.G. Herder on Social and Political Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Classic source on the importance of culture for the history of a people.) ANTHONY O’HEAR CULVERWELL, NATHANIEL ( c .1618–c .1651) Nathaniel Culverwell (or Culverwel) was one of the first natural law theorists in seventeenth-century England, and one of the first moral philosophers to stress the primacy of reason. His aim was to revive the natural law tradition of Aquinas and Suarez, which had fallen into disrepute in English Calvinism. Culverwell’s theory is a synthesis of rationalism and voluntarism. It attempts to do justice to both the normative and coercive, to the moral and punitive aspects of law. The emphasis of his theory is, however, strongly rationalist, a reaction against the voluntarist legacy of Calvinism. Culverwell had close connections with some of the leading figures of Cambridge Platonism. He is not, however, a typical member of this school, because of the strong Calvinist strands of his early sermons. See also: NATURAL LAW Further reading Culverwell, N. (1652) An Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature, with several other Treatises, London: Rothwell. (The classic first edition, reissued in 1654, 1661 and 1669. The other treatises included, among others, ‘The White Stone’, ‘Spiritual Opticks’ and ‘The Act of Oblivion’.) De Pauley, W.C. (1937) The Candle of the Lord: Studies in the Cambridge Platonists , New York: Macmillan, ch. 7, 163–74. (A helpful analysis.) FREDERICK BEISER CUMBERLAND, RICHARD (1632–1718) Richard Cumberland developed his ideas in response to Hobbes’ Leviathan. He introduced concepts of aggregate goodness (later used in utilitarianism), of benevolence (used in moral-sense theory), of moral self-obligation, of empirical proofs of providence and of the moral importance of tradition à lá Burke. The philosophical basis for Cumberland’s views was a theory of natural law which was strongly antivoluntarist and committed to objective moral values, but recognizing institutions such as governments of state and church as conventional or traditional. Cumberland was often seen as the third co-founder, with Pufendorf and Grotius, of modern natural law. See also: NATURAL ALW Further reading Kirk, L. (1987) Richard Cumberland and Natural Law: Secularisation of Thought in Seventeenth-Century England, Cambridge: James Clarke & Co. (The only modern monograph; strong on biography and textual problems.) KNUD HAAKONSSEN CYNICS Cynicism (originating in the mid-fourth century BC) was arguably the most original and influential branch of the Socratic tradition in antiquity, whether we consider its impact on the formation of Stoicism or its role in the Roman Empire as a popular philosophy and literary tradition. The self-imposed nickname ‘Cynic’, literally ‘doglike’, was originally applied to Antisthenes and to Diogenes of Sinope, considered the founders of Cynicism, and later to their followers, including Crates of Thebes and Menippus. It emphasizes one of the most fundamental and controversial features of Cynic thought and practice – its radical re-examination of the animal nature of the human being. Their decision to ‘play the dog’ revolutionized moral discourse, since humans had traditionally been defined by their place in both a natural (animal → human → god) and a civic hierarchy. By calling such hierarchies into question, Cynicism re-evaluated the place of humankind in nature and the role of civilization in human life. Cynicism includes an innovative and influential literary tradition of satire, parody and aphorism devoted to ‘defacing the currency’ (that is, the dominant ideologies of the time). It proposes a new morality based on minimizing creaturely needs in pursuit of self-sufficiency ( autarkeia ), achieved in part by physical training ( askēsis), and on maximizing both freedom of speech ( parrhēsia ) and freedom of action ( eleutheria) in open defianceof themost entrenched social taboos; and an anti-politics which sees existing governments as a betrayal of human nature, and traditional culture as an obstacle to happiness. In their place, Cynics advocated an immediate relationship to nature and coined the oxymoron kosmopolitēs or ‘citizen of the cosmos’. However the literary,
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Page 187 ethical and political elements of Cynicism are interrelated, all are most easily defined by what they oppose – the inherited beliefs and practices of classical Greek civilization. The virtual loss of all early Cynic writings means that the history of Cynicism must be reconstructed from much later sources dating from the Roman Empire, the most important of which is Diogenes Laertius (third century AD). See also: ARISTON OF CHIOS; SOCRATIC SCHOOLS; ZENO OF CITIUM Further reading Branham, R.B. and Goulet-Cazé, M.-O. (eds) (1996) The Cynics: The Cynic Movement in Antiquity and its Legacy. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. (Surveys the history of the movement and its reception; includes a comprehensive catalogue of the ancient Cynics and an annotated bibliography.) Downing, F.G. (1992) Cynics and Christian Origins , Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark. (Studies the Cynic influence on Christianity.) R. BRACHT BRANHAM CYRENAICS The Cyrenaic school was a Greek philosophical school which flourished in the fourth and early third centuries BC. It took its name from the native city of its founder, Aristippus of Cyrene, a member of Socrates’ entourage. His most important successors were his grandson, Aristippus the Younger, and Theodorus, Anniceris and Hegesias, the heads of three separate Cyrenaic sects. The basis of Cyrenaic philosophy is physiological and psychological. It focuses on the individual feelings of pleasure and pain which are classed as pathē, experiences produced in a subject by its contact with an object. They are described, respectively, in terms of smooth and rough movements, of the flesh or of the soul. A third category of pathē, described as intermediate between pleasure and pain, is also defined as movements and related to one’s perception of individual properties or qualities. All pathē are shortlived and have no value beyond the actual time of their occurrence. These physiological characteristics are encountered both in theethicsand in the epistemology of the school. Although the Cyrenaics differed in their ethical doctrines, all of them attributed a central role in their systems to the individual bodily pleasure experienced in the present moment, and some of them considered it the moral end: it is pursued for its own sake, whereas happiness, conceived as the particular collection of pleasures that one experiences during a lifetime, is sought for the sake of its component pleasures. The goodness of individual pathē of pleasure is supported by an elaborate epistemological doctrine whose central claims are that we are infallibly and incorrigibly aware of the occurrence and content of our own pathē, but that we cannot apprehend the properties of external objects. A striking feature of this doctrine is the neologisms designating the perception of qualities, such as ‘I am whitened’ and ‘I am affected whitely’. This, and other features of Cyrenaic subjectivism, anticipate some modern philosophical analyses of subjective experience. Further reading Tsouna, V. (1998) The Epistemology of the Cyrenaic School , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (The only full-scale study of this topic, with translations of the relevant texts.) VOULA TSOUNA CZECH REPUBLIC, PHILOSOPHY IN The foundation of the University of Prague in 1348 contributed significantly to establishing Bohemia as a centre of philosophical thought. The main philosophers and theologians from the University favoured the Platonic tradition, and from this position they criticised corruption in the Church. The most important representative of this trend was Jan Hus who followed the teaching of John Wyclif in the spirit of rationalism and humanism. His ideas became an ideological base for the anti-feudal Hussite Revolution in the fifteenth century and the later Czech Reformation. Theoreticians on the extreme wing of the Revolution held a natural worldview, opposing the notion of transcendence. Social thinking in this era found expression in Petr Chelčický, who preached a strict pacifism and a classless society. The Revolution broke the power of the Church’s ideological monopoly, and had a positive impact on the development of Czech society for the following two centuries. The atmosphere of relative tolerance allowed Renaissance thinking and Czech Reformation rationalism and humanism to enrich each other. This tradition culminated in the work of Jan Amos Comenius, who aimed to improve social relations through rational enlightenment and education, promoting harmony and justice for the development of all humankind.
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Page 188 After 1620, Czech spiritual life was paralysed for many centuries by a forced anti-Reformation and the emigration of many of the country’s leading intellectuals. A revival started only at the end of the eighteenth century. František Palacký, inspired by the neohumanism of his era and by the Czech Reformation, formed a new philosophy of Czech history. B. Bolzano achieved impressive results in philosophy of science and logic, while A. Smetana created an independent variant of the philosophy of identity. In the second half of the nineteenth century Herbartism became very influential, contributing to social psychology and aesthetics. The most important representative of modern Czech thinking is T.G. Masaryk, creator of a philosophical concept of democracy understood in the context of a humanistic world view. Masaryk’s philosophy has been followed by many philosophers and theologians in the twentieth century. In the period between the wars, important concepts based on structuralism were created by J.L. Fischer (philosophy, sociology), J. Mukařovský (aesthetics), V. Příhoda (psychology, pedagogy), and many linguists. J. Patočka contributed to the development of phenomenology with his concept of the natural world. In opposition to ‘school’ philosophy L. Klíma preached extreme subjectivism and individualism. Nondogmatic Marxists wrote internationally regarded works. Well known in analytical philosophy and modern logic are the achievements of L. Tondl, O. Weinberger, K. Teige, R. Kalivoda and K. Kosík and P. Tichý. See also: MARXIST PHILOSOPHY, RUSSIAN AND SOVIET; SLOVAKIA, PHILOSOPHY IN Further reading Gabriel, Jiří-Nový, Lubomír (eds) (1993) ‘Czech Philosophy in the 20th Century’, Czech Philosophical Studies II, Cultural Heritage and Contemporary Change IV, Washington, DC: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy. (Summary of separate trends of Czech thinking written by a team of authors.) Král, J. (1934) La philosophie en Tchécoslovaquie (Philosophy in Czecheslovakia), Prague: Bibliothèque des problèmes sociaux. (Digest of history of philosophy in Bohemia and Slovakia with a separate chapter about German philosophy in Bohemia.) Translated by G.R.F. Burša JOSEF ZUMR
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Page 189 D DAI ZHEN (1724–77) Dai Zhen, a neo-Confucian philosopher, argues against the received neo-Confucian view of dao as a metaphysical entity. On the contrary, dao is immanent in the world and, in the case of the human world specifically, in the everyday lives of ordinary people irrespective of social status. His philosophical views had important political and social implications. See also: NEO-CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY Further reading Dai Zhen (1766) Yuanshan (Inquiry into Goodness), in Dai Zhen guanji (Complete Works of Dai Zhen), Beijing: Qinghua University Press, 1991, vol. 1, 9–27; trans. Cheng Chung-Ying, Tai Chen’s Inquiry into Goodness , Honolulu, HI: East–West Center Press, 1971. (Edition and translation.) Chin Ann-ping and Freeman, M. (1996) Tai Chen on Mencius, New Haven, CN: Yale University Press. (An analysis of Dai Zhen’s writings on Mencius.) YÜ YING-SHIH DAMASCIUS ( c .462–540) The late Neoplatonist philosopher Damascius was the last head of the Platonist school in Athens. He largely accepted the metaphysical system of the Athenian School of Syrianus and Proclus, but subjected it to acute dialectical scrutiny in a series of commentaries, and especially in his treatise On First Principles . His philosophical position is not comprehensible without bearing in mind that of Proclus, although on certain issues, such as the nature of the first principle and of the soul, he prefers the solutions of the earlier Iamblichus. See also: NEOPLATONISM Further reading Gersh, S. (1978) From Iamblichus to Eriugena, Leiden: Brill. (Contains much discussion of Damascius’ philosophy.) JOHN DILLON DAMIAN, PETER (1007–72) Peter Damian is noted for his asceticism, contributions to church reform and literary style, the latter in writings that are primarily religious in character. Because of his hostility to the unbridled use of the disciplines of grammar and dialectic in religious matters, Damian is sometimes depicted as an opponent of philosophy. A more accurate assessment of his attitude is that the liberal arts, including philosophy, must remain subservient to religion. Damian’s major work De divina omnipotentia (On Divine Omnipotence) shows that he was willing and able to use philosophical argument in theology. See also: OMNIPOTENCE Further reading Damian, P. (1007–72) De divina omnipotentia (On Divine Omnipotence); in A. Cantin (ed.) Lettre sur la toute-puissance divine , Sources Chrétiennes 191, Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1972. (Contains the complete Latin text with a French translation.) WILLIAM E. MANN DANCE, AESTHETICS OF The aesthetics of dance is the philosophical investigation of the nature of dance, of our interest in it, especially as an art form, and of the variety of aesthetic judgments we make about it – judgments of beauty, grace, line and other aesthetic qualities. Most philosophical issues concerning dance result from considering philosophical questions that arise in other areas: another art form, art in general, or human action. Sometimes the issue for dance can usefully be seen as a combination of issues from other areas. Often, one’s response to such issues gives a possible direction for one’s thoughts about dance. A selection of such questions can be taken from the characteristics of dance. Since some dances are works of art, is there a kind of judgment characteristic of an interest in art, and, if so, what are its features? In particular, and in parallel with questions for other arts, does knowledge of the choreographer’s intention have any role in understanding the dance? What follows for the understanding of dance from the fact that dance is a multiple art: that a particular dance (like a particular piece of
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Page 190 music) can be performed in London at the same time as it is performed in New York? What follows from dance’s status as a performing art (like music)? Is any special role for the understanding of dance to be assigned to a notated score in a dance notation? (If so, does this differ from music?) How is the special place of the dancer to fit into accounts of understanding dance? As some dances are regularly thought to be communicative, how does dance differ (if at all) from so-called ‘nonverbal communication’? More generally, dance study must address farreaching philosophical issues: the place of dance as human action; the ‘role’ of dance, for example, in ritual; the relevance of the history and traditions of danceforms to the understanding of those forms. See also: ARTISTIC INTERPRETATION; ART, PERFORMING Further reading McFee, G. (1992) Understanding Dance, London: Routledge. (An introductory text raising all of the issues discussed here and focusing on the art form of dance.) Sparshott, F. (1988) Off the Ground: First Steps to a Philosophical Consideration of Dance, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (A systematic attempt to address the whole of the aesthetics of dance. Especially good on questions other than those relating to dance as an art form. Some technicality.) GRAHAM MCFEE DAO Dao, conventionally translated ‘the Way’, is probably the most pervasive and widely recognized idea in Chinese philosophy. The specific character of Chinese philosophy arises because a dominant cultural factor in the tradition, now and then, has been the priority of process and change over form and stasis, a privileging of cosmology over metaphysics. That the Yijing (Book of Changes) is first among the Chinese Classics in every sense bears witness to the priority of cosmological questions – how, or in what way ( dao) should the world hang together? – over metaphysical and ontological questions – what is the reality behind appearance, the Being behind the beings, the One behind the many, the true behind the false? The contrast lies in finding a way rather than seeking the truth. See also: DAODEJING; DAOIST PHILOSOPHY Further reading Hansen, C. (1992) A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought, New York: Oxford University Press. (An account of ancient Chinese philosophy that emphasizes language and dao as a guiding discourse.) DAVID L. HALL ROGER T. AMES DAODEJING The Daodejing (or Tao Te Ching) is a brief work probably composed during the period 350–250 BC. It later became the most authoritative ‘scripture’ in the Daoist religious and philosophical tradition, and in modern times has become among the most often-translated and popular works in world religious literature. It recommends cultivating mental calm, an intuitive, non-conceptual understanding of the world, an integrated and balanced personality, a self-effacing manner and a low-key and non-intrusive leadership style. One who has this spirit has dao ( tao ), which is also conceived of as a cosmic reality, the origin of the world. See also: DAO; DE Further reading LaFargue, M. (trans.) (1992) The Tao of the Tao Te Ching, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. (Translation, detailed commentary and essays on main themes; analyses text into oral sayings and editorial additions; translation recommended for novice reader.) Schwartz, B. (1985) The World of Thought in Ancient China, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 192–215. (The most persuasive and nuanced version of the mystical/metaphysical interpretation of dao in the Daodejing ; includes also a detailed discussion of its relation to the concrete advice given; for the general reader.) MICHAEL LAFARGUE DAOIST PHILOSOPHY Early Daoist philosophy has had an incalculable influence on the development of Chinese philosophy and culture. Philosophical Daoism is often called ‘Lao–Zhuang’ philosophy, referring directly to the two central and most influential texts, the Daodejing (or Laozi) and the Zhuangzi, both of which were composite, probably compiled in the fourth and third centuries BC. Beyond these two texts we might include the syncretic Huainanzi ( circa 140 BC) and the Liezi, reconstituted around the fourth century AD, as part of the traditional Daoist corpus. Second in influence only to the Confucian school, the classical Daoist philosophers in
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Page 191 many ways have been construed as both a critique on and a complement to the more conservative, regulatory precepts of their Confucian rivals. Daoism has frequently and unfortunately been characterized in terms of passivity, femininity, quietism and spirituality, a doctrine embraced by artists, recluses and religious mystics. Confucianism, by contrast, has been cast in the language of moral precepts, virtues, imperial edicts and regulative methods, a doctrine embodied in and administered by the state official. The injudicious application of this yin–yang -like concept to Daoism and Confucianism tends to impoverish our appreciation of the richness and complexity of these two traditions. Used in a heavy-handed way, it obfuscates the fundamental wholeness of both the Confucian and Daoist visions of meaningful human existence by imposing an unwarranted conservatism on classical Confucianism, and an unjustified radicalism on Daoism. There is a common ground shared by the teachings of classical Confucianism and Daoism in the advocacy of self-cultivation. In general terms, both traditions treat life as an art rather than a science. Both express a ‘this-wordly’ concern for the concrete details of immediate existence rather than exercising their minds in the service of grand abstractions and ideals. Both acknowledge the uniqueness, importance and primacy of the particular person and the person’s contribution to the world, while at the same time stressing the ecological interrelatedness and interdependence of this person with their context. However, there are also important differences. For the Daoists, the Confucian penchant for reading the ‘constant dao’ myopically as the ‘human dao’ is to experience the world at a level that generates a dichotomy between the human and natural worlds. The argument against the Confucian seems to be that the Confucians do not take the ecological sensitivity far enough, defining self-cultivation in purely human terms. It is the focused concern for the overcoming of discreteness by a spiritual extension and integration in the human world that gives classical Confucianism its sociopolitical and practical orientation. But from the Daoist perspective, ‘overcoming discreteness’ is not simply the redefinition of the limits of one’s concerns and responsibilities within the confines of the human sphere. The Daoists reject the notion that human experience occurs in a vacuum, and that the whole process of existence can be reduced to human values and purposes. To the extent that Daoism is prescriptive, it is so not by articulating rules to follow or asserting the existence of some underlying moral principle, but by describing the conduct of an achieved human being – the sage ( shengren ) or the Authentic Person ( zhenren ) – as a recommended object of emulation. The model for this human ideal, in turn, is the orderly, elegant and harmonious processes of nature. Throughout the philosophical Daoist corpus, there is a ‘grand’ analogy established in the shared vocabulary used to describe the conduct of the achieved human being on the one hand, and the harmony achieved in the mutual accomodations of natural phenomena on the other. The perceived order is an achievement, not a given. Because dao is an emergent, ‘bottom-up’ order rather than something imposed, the question is: what is the optimal relationship between de and dao, between a particular and its environing conditions? The Daoist response is the self-dispositioning of particulars into relationships which allow the fullest degree of self-disclosure and development. In the Daoist literature, this kind of optimally appropriate action is often described as wuwei, ‘not acting wilfully’, ‘acting naturally’ or ‘non-assertive activity’. Wuwei , then, is the negation of that kind of ‘making’ or ‘doing’ which requires that a particular sacrifice its own integrity in acting on behalf of something ‘other’, a negation of that kind of engagement that makes something false to itself. Wuwei activity ‘characterizes’ – that is, produces the character or ethos of – an aesthetically contrived composition. There is no ideal, no closed perfectedness. Ongoing creative achievement itself provides novel possibilities for a richer creativity. Wuwei activity is thus fundamentally qualitative: an aesthetic category and, only derivatively, an ethical one. Wuwei can be evaluated on aesthetic grounds, allowing that some relationships are more productively wuwei than others. Some relationships are more successful than others in maximizing the creative possibilities of oneself in one’s environments. This classical Daoist aesthetic, while articulated in these early texts with inimitable flavour and imagination, was, like most philosophical anarchisms, too intangible and impractical to ever be a serious contender as a formal structure for social and political order. In the early years of the Han dynasty (206BC–AD 220), there was an attempt in the Huainanzi to encourage the Daoist sense of ethos by tempering the lofty ideals with a functional practicality. It appropriates a syncretic political framework as a compromise for promoting a kind of
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Page 192 practicable Daoism – an anarchism within expedient bounds. While historically the Huainanzi fell on deaf ears, it helped to set a pattern for the Daoist contribution to Chinese culture across the sweep of history. Over and over again, in the currency of anecdote and metaphor, identifiably Daoist sensibilities would be expressed through a range of theoretical structures and social grammars, from military strategies, to the dialectical progress of distinctively Chinese schools of Buddhism, to the constantly changing face of poetics and art. It can certainly be argued that the richest models of Confucianism, represented as the convergence of Daoism, Buddhism and Confucianism itself, were an attempt to integrate Confucian concerns with human community with the broader Daoist commitment to an ecologically sensitive humanity. See also: CHINESE PHILOSOPHY; DAODEJING; ZHUANGZI Further readings Graham, A.C. (1989) Disputers of the Tao , La Salle, IL: Open Court. (A contextualization of Daoist thinking within classical Chinese philosophy.) Hall, D.L. (1982) The Uncertain Phoenix , New York: Fordham University Press. (Daoism as a philosophical resource for contemporary philosophical issues, especially technology.) DAVID L. HALL ROGER T. AMES DARWIN, CHARLES ROBERT (1809–82) Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) popularized the theory that all living things have evolved by natural processes from preexisting forms. This displaced the traditional belief that species were designed by a wise and benevolent God. Darwin showed how many biological phenomena could be explained on the assumption that related species are descended from a common ancestor. Furthermore, he proposed a radical mechanism to explain how the transformations came about, namely, natural selection. This harsh and apparently purposeless mechanism was seen as a major threat to the claim that the universe has a transcendent goal. Because Darwin openly extended his evolutionism to include the human race, it was necessary to reexamine the foundations of psychology, ethics and social theory. Moral values might be merely the rationalization of instinctive behaviour patterns. Since the process which produced these patterns was driven by struggle, it could be argued that society must inevitably reflect the harshness of nature (‘social Darwinism’). Darwin’s book has been seen as the trigger for a ‘scientific revolution’. It took many decades for both science and Western culture to assimilate the more radical aspects of Darwin’s theory. But since the mid-twentieth century Darwin’s selection mechanism has become the basis for a highly successful theory of evolution, the human consequences of which are still being debated. See also: EVOLUTION, THEORY OF; EVOLUTIONARY THEORY IN SOCIAL SCIENCES; HUXLEY, T.H. Further reading Darwin, C. (1859) On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life , London: John Murray. (Darwin’s main work on evolution; the much-revised sixth edition of 1872 is the one most frequently reprinted.) Desmond, A. and Moore, J. (1991) Darwin , London: Micheal Joseph. (Massive biography stressing the social context of Darwin’s thought.) PETER J. BOWLER DAVID OF DINANT ( fl. c .1210) A twelfth- and early thirteenth-century philosopher who may have taught at Paris, David of Dinant was noted for a heretical, pantheistic view that identified God, mind and matter. None of his works survive intact, and we know of them primarily through the works of other authors. His major work, the Quaternuli , was condemned at Paris in 1210. His heretical views were influential enough to receive critical attention in the works of Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM, MEDIEVAL Further reading David of Dinant (1266–73) Summa theologiae , published as Summa Theologica, Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1981, 5 vols. (A reprint of the translation of the Fathers of the English Dominican Province. Volume 1 contains the first part of the Summa theologiae . Aquinas says that David ‘most stupidly’ identified God and prime matter (part 1, question 3, article 8, ‘Whether God enters into the composition of other things’).) WILLIAM E. MANN
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Page 193 DAVIDSON, DONALD (1917–) Donald Davidson’s views about the relationship between our conceptions of ourselves as people and as complex physical objects have had significant impact on contemporary discussions of such topics as intention, action, causal explanation and weakness of the will. His collection of essays, Actions and Events (1980), contains many seminal contributions in these areas. But perhaps even greater has been the influence of Davidson’s philosophy of language, as reflected especially in Inquires into Truth and Interpretation (1984). Among the philosophical issues connected to language on which Davidson has been influential are the nature of truth, the semantic paradoxes, first person authority, indexicals, modality, reference, quotation, metaphor, indeterminacy, convention, realism and the publicity of language. See also: LANGUAGE, SOCIAL NATURE OF; MEANING AND UNDERSTANDING Further reading Davidson, D. (1984) Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Includes essays on the philosophy of language (’Thought and Talk’ and ’On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme’) and ’True to the Facts’. Others mentioned in the article are listed under separate titles.) Lepore, E. (ed.) (1986) Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson , Oxford: Blackwell. (Useful essays on this aspect of Davidson’s work.) ERNIE LEPORE AL-DAWANI, JALAL AL-DIN (1426–1502) Jalal al-Din al-Dawani was a prominent philosopher and theologian from Shiraz, who came to the note of Western scholars through an English translation of his ethical treatise the Akhlaq-e Jalali (Jalalean Ethics), published in 1839. Although the larger part of his work written in Arabic has been little studied, he did write extensively and engaged in a famous and lengthy philosophical dispute with another leading philosopher, Sadr al-Din al-Dashtaki. His metaphysical views were quoted, and refuted, by Mulla Sadra. He emerges as a thinker who combined elements of illuminationist and Peripatetic philosophy (and possibly also interests in Ibn al-‘Arabi) to confront theological, ethical, political and mystical concerns. See also: ILLUMINATIONIST PHILOSOPHY Further reading Rosenthal, E.I.J. (1962) Political Thought in Medieval Islam, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 210–23. (A chapter in this work examines the political section of the Akhlaq-e Jalali .) JOHN COOPER DAXUE Originally a chapter in the Liji (Book of Rites), one of the Five Classics in the Confucian tradition, the Daxue (Great Learning) has for centuries attained the status of a canon, arguably the most influential foundational text in East Asian Confucian humanism. When the great neo-Confucian thinker Zhu Xi grouped the Daxue with the Zhongyong (Doctrine of the Mean), another chapter in the Liji, the Confucian Analects and the Mengzi as the Four Books, its prominence in the Confucian scriptural tradition was assured. Since the Four Books with Master Zhu’s commentaries became the required readings for the civil service examinations in 1313, and since Master Zhu insisted that the Daxue must be studied first among the Four, it has been widely acknowledged as the quintessential Confucian text. See also: CHINESE CLASSICS; CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY, CHINESE Further reading Chan Wing-tsit (1963) A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (A standard translation of the Daxue , with commentary.) TU WEI-MING DE Across the corpus of pre-Qin philosophical literature, de , conventionally translated as ‘potency’ or ‘virtue’, seems to have a fundamental cosmological significance from which its other connotations are derived. We begin from the pervasive assumption that existence is an uncaused, spontaneous process. It is ziran: so-of-itself. As a total field, this dynamic process is called dao; the individuated existents in this field – its various foci – are called de . See also: DAO; Further reading Hall, D.L. and Ames, R.T. (1987) Thinking Through Confucius , Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. (A study of
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Page 194 the central vocabulary of classical Confucianism.) DAVID L. HALL ROGER T. AMES DE DICTO see DE RE/DE DICTO DE MAN, PAUL (1919–83) De Man’s work is among the most renowned and influential in American literary theory of the latter twentieth century, especially regarding literary theory’s emergence as an interdisciplinary and philosophically ambitious discourse. Always emphasizing the linguistic aspects of a literary work over thematic, semantic or evaluative ones, de Man specifically focuses on the figurative features of literary language and their consequences for the undecidability of meaning. His extension of his mode of ‘rhetorical reading’ to philosophic texts also participates in the blurring of generic and institutional distinctions between literature and philosophy, a tendency pronounced in French philosophy of the latter twentieth century. See also: DECONSTRUCTION; POST-STRUCTURALISM Further reading de Man, P. (1971) Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, New York: Oxford University Press. (Includes the important critique of Derrida, ‘The Rhetoric of Blindness’.) TIMOTHY BAHTI DE MORGAN, AUGUSTUS (1806–71) Augustus De Morgan was an important British mathematician and logician. Much of his logical work was directed to expanding the traditional syllogistic theory, and to meeting the objections of Sir William Hamilton and his allies to the techniques he used. More important for the future of logic, though, was De Morgan’s work in two areas: the logic of complex (compound) terms, in which he essentially developed the theory of Boolean algebra, and his introduction of the logic of relations as a serious topic for formal logic. His work on probability logic, while flawed, was also significant. See also: LOGIC IN THE 19TH CENTURY Further reading De Morgan, A. (1838) An Essay on Probabilities, London: Longman’s; repr. New York: Arno Press, 1981. (Contains a useful introduction to De Morgan’s philosophy of probability.) Merrill, D.D. (1990) Augustus De Morgan and the Logic of Relations , Dordrecht: Kluwer. (A study of the philosophical and technical aspects of De Morgan’s logic of relations.) DANIEL D. MERRILL DE RE/DE DICTO ‘ De re ’ and ‘ de dicto’ have been used to label a host of different, albeit interrelated, distinctions. ‘ De dicto’ means ‘of, or concerning, a dictum’, that is, something having representative content, such as a sentence, statement or proposition. ‘ De re ’ means ‘of, or concerning, a thing’. For example, a de dicto belief is a belief that a bearer of representative content is true, while a de re belief is a belief concerning some thing, that it has a particular characteristic. Consider the following example: John believes his next-door neighbour is a Buddhist. This statement is ambiguous. Construed de dicto, it is true in the following circumstance. John has never had any contact with his next-door neighbour. Nevertheless, John believes that his next-door neighbour is bound to be a Buddhist. Construed in this de dicto fashion, the statement does not attribute to John a belief that is distinctively about a particular individual. In contrast, construed de re , it does attribute to John a belief that is about a particular individual. For example, construed de re , the statement is true in the following circumstance. John encounters his next-door neighbour, Fred, at a party without realizing that Fred is his next-door neighbour. On the basis of his conversation with Fred, John forms a belief about the individual who is in fact his next-door neighbour to the effect that he is a Buddhist. See also: ESSENTIALISMUSE/MENTION DISTINCTION AND QUOTATION Further reading Kneale, W. (1960) ‘Modality De Dicto and De Re ’, in E. Nagel, P. Suppes and A. Tarski (eds) Logic, Methodology and the Philosophy of Science: Proceedings of the 1960 International Conference, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962, 622–33. (Particularly useful in providing a historical background to the distinction between de re and de dicto modalities.)
ANDRÉ GALLOIS
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Page 195 DEATH Reflection on death gives rise to a variety of philosophical questions. One of the deepest of these is a question about the nature of death. Typically, philosophers interpret this question as a call for an analysis or definition of the concept of death. Plato, for example, proposed to define death as the separation of soul from body. However, this definition is not acceptable to those who think that there are no souls. It is also unacceptable to anyone who thinks that plants and lower animals have no souls, but can nonetheless die. Others have defined death simply as the cessation of life. This too is problematic, since an organism that goes into suspended animation ceases to live, but may not actually die. Death is described as ‘mysterious’, but neither is it clear what this means. Suppose we cannot formulate a satisfactory analysis of the concept of death: in this respect death would be mysterious, but no more so than any other concept that defies analysis. Some have said that what makes death especially mysterious and frightening is the fact that we cannot know what it will be like. Death is typically regarded as a great evil, especially if it strikes someone too soon. However, Epicurus and others argued that death cannot harm those who die, since people go out of existence when they die, and people cannot be harmed at times when they do not exist. Others have countered that the evil of death may lie in the fact that death deprives us of the goods we would have enjoyed if we had lived. On this view, death may be a great evil for a person, even if they cease to exist at the moment of death. Philosophers have also been concerned with the question of whether people can survive death. This is open to several interpretations, depending on what we understand to be people and what we mean by ‘survive’. Traditional materialists take each person to be a purely physical object – a human body. Since human bodies generally continue to exist after death, such materialists presumably must say that we generally survive death. However, such survival would be of little value to the deceased, since the surviving entity is just a lifeless corpse. Dualists take each person to have both a body and a soul. A dualist may maintain that at death the soul separates from the body, thereby continuing to enjoy (or suffer) various experiences after the body has died. Some who believe in survival think that the eternal life of the soul after bodily death can be a good beyond comparison. But Bernard Williams has argued that eternal life would be profoundly unattractive. If we imagine ourselves perpetually stuck at a given age, we may reasonably fear that eternal life will eventually become rather boring. On the other hand, if we imagine ourselves experiencing an endless sequence of varied ‘lives’, each disconnected from the others, then it is questionable whether it will in fact be ‘one person’ who lives eternally. Finally, there are questions about death and the meaning of life. Suppose death marks the end of all conscious experience – would our lives be then rendered meaningless? Or would the fact of impending death help us to recognize the value of our lives, and thereby give deeper meaning to life? See also: LIFE AND DEATH; SOUL, NATURE AND IMMORTALITY OF Further reading Donnelly, J. (ed.) (1994) Language, Metaphysics, and Death, 2nd edn, New York: Fordham University Press. (Useful and well-organized collection of essays on the nature and meaning of death, the nature of the soul, and immortality. Includes papers by Nagel, Williams, Rosenbaum, Edwards, Feldman and others.) Fischer, J.M. (1993) The Metaphysics of Death, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. (Clear and wellorganized introduction by Fischer, followed by sixteen papers on death. Includes papers by Nagel, Williams, Parfit, McMahan, Feldman and others. Excellent bibliography.) FRED FELDMAN DECISION AND GAME THEORY Decision theory studies individual decision-making in situations in which an individual’s choice neither affects nor is affected by other individuals’ choices; while game theory studies decision-making in situations where individuals’ choices do affect each other. Decision theory asks questions like: what does it mean to choose rationally? How should we make choices when the consequences of our actions are uncertain? Buying insurance and deciding which job to take are examples of the kind of decisions studied by this discipline. Game theory instead applies to all decisions that have a strategic component. The choices of an oligopolist, voting strategies, military tactical problems, deterrence, but also common phenomena such as threatening, promising, conflict and coopera
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Page 196 tion are its subject matter. In a strategic situation, the goal is not just to choose rationally, but to choose in such a way that a mutual solution is achieved, so that choices ‘coordinate’ in the right way. The formal methods developed by game theory do not require that the subject making a choice be an intentional agent: coordinated interaction between animals or computers can be successfully modelled as well. See also: PROBABILITY, INTERPRETATIONS OF; SEMANTICS, GAME-THEORETIC Further reading Bicchieri, C. (1993) Rationality and Coordination , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (A comprehensive introduction to the philosophical foundations of game theory.) Maynard Smith, J. (1982) Evolution and the Theory of Games , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (A classic application of game theory to biology.) CRISTINA BICCHIERI DECONSTRUCTION Although the term is often used interchangeably (and loosely) alongside others like ‘post-structuralism’ and ‘postmodernism’, deconstruction differs from these other movements. Unlike post-structuralism, its sources lie squarely within the tradition of Western philosophical debate about truth, knowledge, logic, language and representation. Where post-structuralism follows the linguist Saussure – or its own version of Saussure – in espousing a radically conventionalist (hence sceptical and relativist) approach to these issues, deconstruction pursues a more complex and critical path, examining the texts of philosophy with an eye to their various blindspots and contradictions. Where postmodernism blithely declares an end to the typecast ‘Enlightenment’ or ‘modernist’ project of truth-seeking rational enquiry, deconstruction preserves the critical spirit of Enlightenment thought while questioning its more dogmatic or complacent habits of belief. It does so primarily through the close reading of philosophical and other texts and by drawing attention to the moments of ‘aporia’ (unresolved tension or conflict) that tend to be ignored by mainstream exegetes. Yet this is not to say (as its detractors often do) that deconstruction is a kind of all-licensing textualist ‘freeplay’ which abandons every last standard of interpretive fidelity, rigour or truth. At any rate it is a charge that finds no warrant in the writings of those – Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man chief among them – whose work is central to deconstruction. See also: POST-STRUCTURALISM Further reading Derrida, J. (1967c) L’Écriture et la Différence; trans. A. Bass as Writing and Difference , Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1978. (Essays on Husserl, Levinas, Foucault, structuralism and the human sciences.) Norris, C. (1987) Derrida, London: Fontana. (Introductory work for students of philosophy and literary theory.) CHRISTOPHER NORRIS DEDEKIND, JULIUS WILHELM RICHARD (1831–1916) The German mathematician Dedekind is known chiefly, among philosophers, for contributions to the foundations of the arithmetic of the real and the natural numbers. These made available for the first time a systematic and explicit way, starting from very general notions (which Dedekind himself regarded as belonging to logic), to ground the differential and integral calculus without appeal to geometric ‘intuition’. This work also forms a pioneering contribution to set theory (further advanced in Dedekind’s correspondence with Georg Cantor) and to the general notion of a ‘mathematical structure’. Dedekind’s foundational work had a close connection with his advancement of substantive mathematical knowledge, particularly in the theories of algebraic numbers and algebraic functions. His achievements in these fields make him one of the greatest mathematicians of the nineteenth century. See also: CANTOR, G. Further reading Dedekind, J. (1890) Letter to H. Keferstein , trans. H. Wang and S. Bauer-Mengelberg, in J. van Heijenoort (ed.) From Frege to Gödel: A Source Book in Mathematical Logic, 1879–1931, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967, 99–103. (A masterly presentation, in a short space, of the basic ideas of Dedekind’s theory. A very useful guide for the beginner.) HOWARD STEIN DEDUCTIVE CLOSURE PRINCIPLE It seems that one can expand one’s body of knowledge by making deductive inferences from propositions one knows. The ‘deductive closure
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Page 197 principle’ captures this idea: if S knows that P, and S correctly deduces Q from P, then S knows that Q. A closely related principle is that knowledge is closed under known logical implication: if S knows that P and S knows that P logically implies Q, then S knows that Q. These principles, if they hold, are guaranteed by general features of the concept of knowledge. They would form part of a logic of knowledge. An influential argument for scepticism about knowledge of the external world employs the deductive closure principle. The sceptic begins by sketching a logically possible hypothesis, or counter-possibility (for example, that one is a brain in a vat, with computer-induced sense experience) which is logically incompatible with various things one claims to know (such as that one has hands). The proposition that one has hands logically implies the falsity of the sceptical hypothesis. Supposing that one is aware of this implication, the deductive closure principle yields the consequence that if one knows that one has hands, then one knows that one is not a brain in a vat. The sceptic argues that one does not know this: if one were in a vat, then one would have just the sensory evidence one actually has. It follows that one does not know that one has hands. Some philosophers have sought to block this argument by denying the deductive closure principle. See also: EPISTEMIC LOGIC Further reading Williams, M. (1991) Unnatural Doubts: Epistemological Realism and the Basis of Scepticism , Oxford: Blackwell. (Chapter 8 contains arguments that reliabilism does not induce the failure of closure.) ANTHONY BRUECKNER DEFINITION A definition is a statement, declaration or proposal establishing the meaning of an expression. In virtue of the definition, the expression being defined (the ‘definiendum’) is to acquire the same meaning as the expression in terms of which it is defined (the ‘definiens’). For example, ‘Man is a rational animal’ determines the meaning of the term ‘man’ by making it synonymous with ‘rational animal’. Classical theory maintains that a good definition captures the ‘real nature’ of what is defined: ‘A “definition” is a phrase signifying a thing’s essence’ (Aristotle). Historically, philosophers have come to distinguish these ‘real’ definitions from ‘nominal’ definitions that specify the meaning of a linguistic expression rather than signify the essential nature of an object, ‘making another understand by Words, what Idea, the term defined stands for’ (Locke). A further distinction can be drawn between contextual or implicit definitions, on the one hand, and explicit definitions, on the other. Often a definition fixes meaning directly and explicitly: for example, the definition of a proper name might well take the form of an explicit identity statement (‘Pegasus = the winged horse’) and a definition of a predicate is usually given (or can be re-cast) in the form of an equivalence (‘For every x: x is a man if and only if x is a rational animal’). But sometimes the meaning of a term is specified in context, by way of the meaning of larger expressions in which the term occurs. A paradigmatic example of this is Bertrand Russell’s analysis of the meaning of the definite article. See also: PARADOXES OF SET AND PROPERTY Further reading Gupta, A. and Belnap, N.D. (1993) The Revision Theory of Truth , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (Includes the first full presentation of revision theory as a general theory of definition.) Suppes, P. (1957) Introduction to Logic , Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand. (Possibly the best treatment of definitions in first-order logic from an elementary point of view.) G. ALDO ANTONELLI DEFINITION, INDIAN CONCEPTS OF Definitions in Indian philosophy are conceived very differently from definitions in Western philosophy. In Western philosophy and logic, it is usual to define a term or a linguistic expression. A definition here consists of a ‘definiens’, typically a longer expression, statement or proposal, and a ‘definiendum’, a shorter expression or term whose meaning is established by the definiens. Definitions permit the definiendum to be put in place of the definiens and are thus ‘abbreviations’ (for example, ‘father’ is an abbrevation of ‘male parent’). In India, definitions in the sense of abbreviations were regularly used in grammar from the earliest times, as in the work of Pāṇini ( c .800 BC). In Indian philosophy, however, definitions are not conceived of as abbreviations. We may have direct acquaintance with an object; this is one way of knowing it. We may also know an object or many objects through their properties or features; this is another way of knowing them.
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Page 198 These properties or features are the modes under which objects are cognized. If we know objects through the properties that belong to all of them and only to them, then the objects are collected together through their properties to form a group. A group is nothing real; it is a way of collecting objects by knowing them under one mode. When we know a group of objects through properties common to all of them and only to them, we may also want to know another set of properties or features which also belongs to all the objects and only to them. The second set of properties is the defining mark ( lakṣaṣa ), or, simply, the definition, of the objects collected together into a group by being known under one mode. The objects themselves are the definienda of the definition. The first set of properties through which the definienda are collected together to form a group is called ‘the limiting properties of being the definienda of the definition’. The defining mark, that is, the definition, is not an essential property of the definienda, but is only a property (or set of properties) common to all of them and only them. See also: DEFINATION Further reading Bhattacharyya, S. (1987) Doubt, Belief and Knowledge , New Delhi: Allied Publishers, esp. chaps 17–18. (General introduction to the Navya-Nyāya theory of inference.) Bhattacharya, S. (1990) Gadādhara’s Theory of Objectivity , New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, esp. part 1, ch. 5. (For detailed discussion of the Navya-Nyāya theory of definition.) SIBAJIBAN BHATTACHARYYA DEISM In the popular sense, a deist is someone who believes that God created the world but thereafter has exercised no providential control over what goes on in it. In the proper sense, a deist is someone who affirms a divine creator but denies any divine revelation, holding that human reason alone can give us everything we need to know to live a correct moral and religious life. In this sense of ‘deism’, some deists held that God exercises providential control over the world and provides for a future state of rewards and punishments, while other deists denied this. However, they all agreed that human reason alone was the basis on which religious questions had to be settled, rejecting the orthodox claim to a special divine revelation of truths that go beyond human reason. Deism flourished in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, principally in England, France and America. See also: NATURAL THEOLOGY; PROVIDENCE Further reading Byrne, P. (1989) Natural Religion and the Nature of Religion: The Legacy of Deism , London and New York: Routledge. (Contains a valuable discussion of deism.) Morais, H.M. (1960) Deism in Eighteenth Century America, New York: Russell & Russell. (Useful summary of the views of a number of eighteenth-century American deists.) WILLIAM L. ROWE DELEUZE, GILLES (1925–95) Although grounded in the history of philosophy, the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s work does not begin with first principles but grasps the philosophical terrain ‘in the middle’. This method overthrows subject–object relations in order to initiate a philosophy of difference and chance that is not derived from static being; a philosophy of the event, not of the signifiersignified; a form of content that consists of a complex of forces that are not separable from their form of expression; the assemblage or body without organs, not the organized ego; time, intensity and duration instead of space; in short, a world in constant motion consisting of becomings and encounters with the ‘outside’ that such concepts do not grasp. This radical philosophical project is rendered most clearly in Deleuze (and his collaborator Guattari’s concept of the ‘rhizome’). The rhizome is a multiplicity without any unity that could fix a subject or object. Any point of the rhizome can and must be connected to any other, though in no fixed order and with no homogeneity. It can break or rupture at any point, yet old connections will start up again or new connections will be made; the rhizome’s connections thus have the character of a map, not a structural or generative formation. The rhizome, then, is no model, but a ‘line of flight’ that opens up the route for encounters and makes philosophy into cartography. See also: ALTERITY AND IDENTITY, POSTMODERN THEORIES OF; SELFHOOD, POSTMODERN CRITIQUE OF Further reading Bogue, R. (1989) Deleuze and Guattari , New York: Routledge. (An introduction to Deleuze’s best-known work including A Thousand Plateaus .)
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Page 199 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1980) Capitalisme et schizophrénie, vol. 2, Mille Plateaux, Paris: Éditions de Minuit; trans. B. Massumi, A Thousand Plateaus , Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. (Fifteen chapters, called plateaus, traversing traditional disciplines and analyses. Each plateau develops its own concepts to construct new thematics in place of the traditional ones.) DOROTHEA E. OLKOWSKI DELMEDIGO, ELIJAH ( c .1460–93) Throughout the treatises and translations commissioned by his many patrons in Italy, Elijah Delmedigo championed Aristotle and Ibn Rushd (Averroes). In Latin texts prepared for Pico della Mirandola, Delmedigo affirmed such cardinal Averroist notions as the absolute unity of all human minds and the role of God as the unmeditated principle of intelligibility in the universe. In the Hebrew Behinat ha-Dat (The Examination of Religion), Delmedigo urges the superiority of a rationalistic Judaism over other religions, especially Christianity, and over the nonphilosophic, improperly philosophic and antiphilosophic versions of Judaism. Sections of this work amount to a nuanced critique of Kabbalah. Combining ardent Averroism with qualified admiration for Maimonides, Delmedigo repeatedly argued for the compatibility of Judaism with secular philosophic speculation. See also: AVERROISM, JEWISH Further reading Delmedigo, E. ( c .1480–90) Parafrasi Della Repubblica Nella Traduzione Latina Di Elia Del Medigo (Latin Paraphrase by Elia Del Medigo of the Republic), ed. A. Coviello and P.E. Fornaciari, Delmedigo’s Latin Translation of Ibn Rushd’s Paraphrase and Commentary to Plato’s Republic, Florence: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 1994. (Delmedigo’s Latin translation of Ibn Rushd’s paraphrase and commentary to Plato’s Republic.) KALMAN BLAND DEMARCATION PROBLEM The problem of demarcation is to distinguish science from nonscientific disciplines that also purport to make true claims about the world. Various criteria have been proposed by philosophers of science, including that science, unlike ‘non-science’, (1) is empirical, (2) seeks certainty, (3) proceeds by the use of a scientific method, (4) describes the observable world, not an unobservable one, and (5) is cumulative and progressive. Philosophers of science offer conflicting viewpoints concerning these criteria. Some reject one or more completely. For example, while many accept the idea that science is empirical, rationalists reject it, at least for fundamental principles regarding space, matter and motion. Even among empiricists differences emerge, for example between those who advocate that scientific principles must be verifiable and those who deny that this is possible, claiming that falsifiability is all that is required. Some version of each of these five criteria – considered as goals to be achieved – may be defensible. See also: LOGICAL POSITIVISM Further reading Duhem, P. (1991) The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (A modern classic in the philosophy of science.) Popper, K. (1934) The Logic of Scientific Discovery, London: Hutchinson, 1959. (The most famous twentieth-century defence of hypothetico-deductivism and the idea that science is falsifiable but not verifiable.) PETER ACHINSTEIN DEMOCRACY Democracy means rule by the people, as contrasted with rule by a special person or group. It is a system of decision making in which everyone who belongs to the political organism making the decision is actually or potentially involved. They all have equal power. There have been competing conceptions about what this involves. On one conception, this means that everyone should participate in making the decision themselves, which should emerge from a full discussion. On another conception, it means that everyone should be able to vote between proposals or for representatives who will be entrusted with making the decision; the proposal or representative with most votes wins. Philosophical problems connected with democracy relate both to its nature and its value. It might seem obvious that democracy has value because it promotes liberty and equality. As compared with, for example, dictatorship, everyone has equal political power and is free from control by a special individual or group. However, at least on the voting conception of democracy, it is the majority who have the control. This means that the minority may not
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Page 200 be thought to be treated equally; and they lack liberty in the sense that they are controlled by the majority. Another objection to democracy is that, by counting everyone’s opinions as of equal value, it considers the ignorant as being as important as the knowledgeable, and so does not result in properly informed decisions. However, voting may in certain circumstances be the right way of achieving knowledge. Pooling opinions may lead to better group judgement. These difficulties with democracy are alleviated by the model which concentrates on mutual discussion rather than people just feeding opinions into a voting mechanism. Opinions should in such circumstances be better formed; and individuals are more obviously equally respected. However, this depends upon them starting from positions of equal power and liberty; rather than being consequences of a democratic procedure, it would seem that equality and liberty are instead prerequisites which are needed in order for it to work properly. See also: CONSTITUTIONALISM; REPRESENTATION, POLITICAL Further reading Copp, D., Hampton, J. and Roemer, J.E. (eds) (1993) The Idea of Democracy , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Full collection of studies on truth, antecedent preferences and publicity.) Harrison, R. (1993) Democracy , London: Routledge. (Historical account and analysis of value in terms of such values as equality, knowledge and autonomy.) ROSS HARRISON DEMOCRITUS (mid 5th–4th century BC) A co-founder with Leucippus of the theory of atomism, The Greek Philosopher Democritus developed it into a universal system, embracing physics, cosmology, epistemology, psychology and theology. He is also reported to have written on a wide range of topics, including mathematics, ethics, literary criticism and theory of language. His works are lost, except for a substantial number of quotations, mostly on ethics, whose authenticity is disputed. Our knowledge of his principal doctrines depends primarily on Aristotle’s critical discussions, and secondarily on reports by historians of philosophy whose work derives from that of Aristotle and his school. The atomists attempted to reconcile the observable data of plurality, motion and change with Parmenides’ denial of the possibility of coming to be or ceasing to be. They postulated an infinite number of unchangeable primary substances, characterized by a minimum range of explanatory properties (shape, size, spatial ordering and orientation within a given arrangement). All observable bodies are aggregates of these basic substances, and what appears as generation and corruption is in fact the formation and dissolution of these aggregates. The basic substances are physically indivisible (whence the term atomon , literally ‘uncuttable’) not merely in fact but in principle; (1) because (as Democritus argued) if it were theoretically possible to divide a material thing ad infinitum, the division would reduce the thing to nothing; and (2) because physical division presupposes that the thing divided contains gaps. Atoms are in eternal motion in empty space, the motion caused by an infinite series of prior atomic ‘collisions’. (There is reason to believe, however, although the point is disputed, that atoms cannot collide, since they must always be separated by void, however small; hence impact is only apparent, and all action is at a distance.) The void is necessary for motion, but is characterized as ‘whatis-not’, thus violating the Eleatic principle that what-is-not cannot be. Democritus seems to have been the first thinker to recognize the observer-dependence of the secondary qualities. He argued from the distinction between appearance and reality to the unreliability of the senses, but it is disputed whether he embraced scepticism, or maintained that theory could make good the deficiency of the senses. He maintained a materialistic account of the mind, explaining thought and perception by the physical impact of images emitted by external objects. This theory gave rise to a naturalistic theology; he held that the gods are a special kind of images, endowed with life and intelligence, intervening in human affairs. The ethical fragments (if genuine) show that he maintained a conservative social philosophy on the basis of a form of enlightened hedonism. See also: ATOMISM, ANCIENT Further reading Barnes, J. (1987) Early Greek Philosophy , Harmondsworth: Penguin, 244–88. (Fragments and testimonia of Democritus in English translation.) C.C.W. TAYLOR
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Page 201 DEMONSTRATIVES AND INDEXICALS Demonstratives and indexicals are words and phrases whose interpretations are dependent on features of the context in which they are used. For example, the reference of ‘I’ depends on conditions associated with its use: as you use it, it refers to you; as I use it, it refers to me. In contrast, what ‘the inventor of bifocals’ refers to does not depend on when or where or by whom it is used. Among indexicals are the words ‘here’, ‘now’, ‘today’, demonstrative pronouns such as ‘this’, reflexive, possessive and personal pronouns; and compound phrases employing indexicals, such as ‘my mother’. C.S. Peirce introduced the term ‘indexical’ to suggest the idea of pointing (as in ‘index finger’). The phenomenon of indexicality figures prominently in recent debates in philosophy. This is because indexicals allow us to express beliefs about our subjective ‘place’ in the world, beliefs which are the immediate antecedents of action; and some argue that such beliefs are irreducibly indexical. For example, my belief that I am about to be attacked by a bear is distinct from my belief that HD is about to be attacked by a bear, since my having the former belief explains why I act as I do (I flee), whereas my having the latter belief explains nothing unless the explanation continues ‘and I believe that I am HD’. It seems impossible to describe the beliefs that prompt my action without the help of ‘I’. Similarly, some have argued that indexical-free accounts of the self or of consciousness are necessarily incomplete, so that a purely objective physicalism is impossible. In a different vein, some (such as Putnam 1975) have argued that our terms for natural substances, kinds and phenomena (‘gold’, ‘water’, ‘light’) are indexical in a way that entails that certain substantive scientific claims – for example, that water is H2O – are, if true, necessarily true. Thus, reflection on indexicality has yielded some surprising (and controversial) philosophical conclusions. See also: REFERENCE Further reading Forbes, G. (1989) Languages of Possibility, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (This work includes a detailed neo-Fregean theory of indexicality. In contrast, the Kaplan–Perry theory discussed above may be described as ‘anti-Fregean’.) Yourgrau, P. (ed.) (1990) Demonstratives , Oxford: Oxford University Press. (This is a collection of essays on indexicality which emphasize not only semantic issues but also metaphysical and epistemological themes.) HARRY DEUTSCH DENNETT, DANIEL CLEMENT (1942–) A student of Gilbert Ryle and a connoisseur of cognitive psychology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology, American philosopher Daniel Dennett has urged Rylean views in the philosophy of mind, especially on each title topic of his first book, Content and Consciousness (1969). He defends a broadly instrumentalist view of propositional attitudes (such as belief and desire) and their intentional contents; like Ryle and the behaviourists, Dennett rejects the idea of beliefs and desires as causally active inner states of people. Construing them in a more purely operational or instrumental fashion, he maintains instead that belief- and desire-ascriptions are merely caculational devices. Dennett offers a severely deflationary account of consciousness, subjectivity and the phenomenal or qualitative character of sensory states. He maintains that those topics are conceptually posterior to that of propositional-attitude content: the qualitative features of which we are directly conscious in experience are merely the intentional contents of judgments. Further reading Dalhbom, B. (ed.) (1993) Dennett and His Critics: Demystifying Mind, Oxford: Blackwell. (Essays on Dennett and a collective reply. Full bibliography of Dennett’s writings.) Dennett, D.C. (1978) Brainstorms, Montgomery, VT: Bradford Books. (Most of Dennett’s classic papers, on propsositional attitudes, consciousness and personhood.) WILLIAM G. LYCAN DENYS THE CARTHUSIAN (1402/3–71) Denys de Leeuwis was born in the village of Rijkel, in modern Belgium. In 1421 he matriculated at the University of Cologne, where he received the Master of Arts degree in 1424. There he followed ‘the way of Thomas Aquinas’, whom he calls his ‘patron’ in his early works. Later Denys adopted ‘Albertist’ against ‘Thomist’ positions on a number of philosophical issues. After leaving the University, he entered the Carthusian monastery in Roermond, where, save for brief periods, he spent the rest of his life. He corresponded with Nicholas of Cusa and dedicated two or three works to him. Denys was a voracious reader of the ancient and medieval
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Page 202 philosophers whose writings were available in Latin, and of scholastic theologians. Because of his extensive references to authorities, historians often call him ‘eclectic’. Yet from his sources he educes his own distinctive philosophy. Like Albert the Great, Denys practised philosophy and theology by paraphrasing and analysing their histories. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM, MEDIEVAL Further reading Stoelen, A. (1957) ‘Denys le Chartreux’, in Dictionnaire de spiritualité ascétique et mystique, histoire et doctrine , Paris: Beauchesne, vol. 3: 430–49. (An excellent introduction to Denys’ life, works and doctrine, with a chronology of the works and a good bibliography of older scholarship.) KENT EMERY, JR DEONTIC LOGIC Deontic logic is the investigation of the logic of normative concepts, especially obligation (‘ought’, ‘should’, ‘must’), permission (‘may’) and prohibition (‘ought not’, ‘forbidden’). Deontic logic differs from normative legal theory and ethics in that it does not attempt to determine which principles hold, nor what obligations exist, for any given system. Rather it seeks to develop a formal language that can adequately represent the normative expressions of natural languages, and to regiment such expressions in a logical system. The theorems of deontic logic specify relationships both among normative concepts (for example, whatever is obligatory is permissible) and between normative and non-normative concepts (for example, whatever is obligatory is possible). Contemporary research beginning with von Wright treats deontic logic as a branch of modal logic, in so far as (as was noted already by medieval logicians) the logical relations between the obligatory, permissible and forbidden to some extent parallel those between the necessary, possible and impossible (concepts treated in ‘alethic’ modal logic). Further reading Chellas, B.F. (1980) Modal Logic , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, esp. 190–203, 272–7. (Discusses SDL and its extensions, the dependence of obligation on time, and conditional obligation.) MARVIN BELZER DEONTOLOGICAL ETHICS Deontology asserts that there are several distinct duties. Certain kinds of act are intrinsically right and other kinds intrinsically wrong. The rightness or wrongness of any particular act is thus not (or not wholly) determined by the goodness or badness of its consequences. Some ways of treating people, such as killing the innocent, are ruled out, even to prevent others doing worse deeds. Many deontologies leave agents considerable scope for developing their own lives in their own way; provided they breach no duty they are free to live as they see fit. Deontology may not have the theoretical tidiness which many philosophers crave, but has some claim to represent everyday moral thought. See also: DOUBLE EFFECT, PRINCIPLE OF Further reading Fried, C. (1978) Right and Wrong, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (A readable and vigorous defence of an absolutist deontology.) DAVID MCNAUGHTON DEPICTION How do pictures work? How are they able to represent what they do? A picture of a goat, for example, is a flat surface covered with marks, yet it depicts a goat, chewing straw, while standing on a hillock. The puzzle of depiction is to understand how the flat marks can do this. Language poses a similar problem. A written description of a goat will also be a collection of marks on a flat surface, which none the less represent that animal. In the case of language the solution clearly has something to do with the arbitrary way we use those marks. The word ‘leg’, for example, is applied to legs, but any other mark would do as well, providing we all use it in the same way. In the case of pictures, however, something different seems to be going on. There is not the same freedom in producing a picture of a goat on a hillock chewing straw – the surface must be marked in the right way, a way we are not free to choose. So what is the right way? A helpful thought is that the surface must be marked so as to let us experience it in a special way. With the description, we merely need to know what the words it contains are used to stand for. With the picture, we must instead be able to see a goat in it. However, although this does seem right, it is difficult to make clear. After all, we do not see a goat in the same way
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Page 203 that we see a horse in a view from a window. For one thing, there is no goat there to be seen. For another, it is not even true that looking at the picture is like looking at a goat. It is partly because of the differences that, as we look at the picture, we are always aware that it is merely a collection of marks on a flat surface. So what is this special experience, seeing a goat in the picture? This is the question that a philosophical account of depiction must try to answer. See also: FICTIONAL ENTITIES; PHOTOGRAPHY, AESTHETICS OF Further reading Gombrich, E.H. (1977) Art and Illusion, 5th edn, Oxford: Phaidon. (An influential and seminal work, deploying immense knowledge of art history, philosophy and psychology.) Goodman, N. (1969) Languages of Art, 2nd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Difficult, technical, but brilliant treatment of this and several other problems concerning the arts.) R.D. HOPKINS DERRIDA, JACQUES (1930–) Jacques Derrida is a prolific French philosopher born in Algeria. His work can be understood in terms of his argument that it is necessary to interrogate the Western philosophical tradition from the standpoint of ‘deconstruction’. As an attempt to approach that which remains unthought in this tradition, deconstruction is concerned with the category of the ‘wholly other’. Derrida has called into question the ‘metaphysics of presence’, a valuing of truth as self-identical immediacy which has been sustained by traditional attempts to demonstrate the ontological priority and superiority of speech over writing. Arguing that the distinction between speech and writing can be sustained only by way of a violent exclusion of otherness, Derrida has attempted to develop a radically different conception of language, one that would begin from the irreducibility of difference to identity and that would issue in a correspondingly different conception of ethical and political responsibility. See also: DECONSTRUCTION; POSTMODERNISM Further reading Derrida, J. (1978) Éperons: les styles de Nietzsche ; trans. B. Harlow, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles , Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1979. (A short, and in some ways exemplary, deconstructive reading of Nietzsche.) Gasché, R. (1994) Inventions of Difference: On Jacques Derrida, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Essays which examine specific aspects of Derrida’s philosophical problematics in detail.) ANDREW CUTROFELLO DESCARTES, RENÉ (1596–1650) René Descartes, often called the father of modern philosophy, attempted to break with the philosophical traditions of his day and start philosophy anew. Rejecting the Aristotelian philosophy of the schools, the authority of tradition and the authority of the senses, he built a philosophical system that included a method of inquiry, a metaphysics, a mechanistic physics and biology, and an account of human psychology intended to ground an ethics. Descartes was also important as one of the founders of the new analytic geometry, which combines geometry and algebra, and whose certainty provided a kind of model for the rest of his philosophy. Descartes was born in the Touraine region of France, in the town of La Haye, later renamed Descartes in his honour. After an education in the scholastic and humanistic traditions, Descartes’ earliest work was mostly in mathematics and mathematical physics, in which his most important achievements were his analytical geometry and his discovery of the law of refraction in optics. In this early period he also wrote his unfinished treatise on method, the Rules for the Direction of the Mind, which set out a procedure for investigating nature, based on the reduction of complex problems to simpler ones solvable by direct intuition. From these intuitively established foundations, Descartes tried to show how one could then attain the solution of the problems originally posed. Descartes abandoned these methodological studies by 1628 or 1629, turning first to metaphysics, and soon afterwards to an orderly exposition of his physics and biology in The World . But this work was overtly Copernican in its cosmology, and when Galileo was condemned in 1633, Descartes withdrew The World from publication; it appeared only after his death. Descartes’ mature philosophy began to appear in 1637 with the publication of a single volume containing the Geometry, Dioptrics and Meteors , three essays in which he presented some of his most notable scientific results, preceded by the Discourse on the Method , a semi-autobiographical introduction that out
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Page 204 lined his approach to philosophy and the full system into which the specific results fit. In the years following, he published a series of writings in which he set out his system in a more orderly way, beginning with its metaphysical foundations in the Meditations (1641), adding his physics in the Principles of Philosophy (1644), and offering a sketch of the psychology and moral philosophy in the Passions of the Soul (1649). In our youth, Descartes held, we acquire many prejudices which interfere with the proper use of our reason. Consequently, later we must reject everything we believe and start anew. Hence the Meditations begins with a series of arguments intended to cast doubt upon everything formerly believed, and culminating in the hypothesis of an all-deceiving evil genius, a device to keep former beliefs from returning. The rebuilding of the world begins with the discovery of the self through the ‘Cogito Argument’ (‘I am thinking, therefore I exist’) – a self known only as a thinking thing, and known independently of the senses. Within this thinking self, Descartes discovers an idea of God, an idea of something so perfect that it could not have been caused in us by anything with less perfection than God Himself. From this he concluded that God must exist which, in turn, guarantees that reason can be trusted. Since we are made in such a way that we cannot help holding certain beliefs (the so-called ‘clear and distinct’ perceptions), God would be a deceiver, and thus imperfect, if such beliefs were wrong; any mistakes must be due to our own misuse of reason. This is Descartes’ famous epistemological principle of clear and distinct perception. This central argument in Descartes’ philosophy, however, is threatened with circularity – the Cartesian Circle – since the arguments that establish the trustworthiness of reason (the Cogito Argument and the argument for the existence of God) themselves seem to depend on the trustworthiness of reason. Also central to Descartes’ metaphysics was the distinction between mind and body. Since the clear and distinct ideas of mind and body are entirely separate, God can create them apart from one another. Therefore, they are distinct substances. The mind is a substance whose essence is thought alone, and hence exists entirely outside geometric categories, including place. Body is a substance whose essence is extension alone, a geometric object without even sensory qualities like colour or taste, which exist only in the perceiving mind. We know that such bodies exist as the causes of sensation: God has given us a great propensity to believe that our sensations come to us from external bodies, and no means to correct that propensity; hence, he would be a deceiver if we were mistaken. But Descartes also held that the mind and body are closely united with one another; sensation and other feelings, such as hunger and pain, arise from this union. Sensations cannot inform us about the real nature of things, but they can be reliable as sources of knowledge useful to maintaining the mind and body unity. While many of Descartes’ contemporaries found it difficult to understand how mind and body can relate to one another, Descartes took it as a simple fact of experience that they do. His account of the passions is an account of how this connection leads us to feelings like wonder, love, hatred, desire, joy and sadness, from which all other passions derive. Understanding these passions helps us to control them, which was a central aim of morality for Descartes. Descartes’ account of body as extended substance led to a physics as well. Because to be extended is to be a body, there can be no empty space. Furthermore, since all body is of the same nature, all differences between bodies are to be explained in terms of the size, shape and motion of their component parts, and in terms of the laws of motion that they obey. Descartes attempted to derive these laws from the way in which God, in his constancy, conserves the world at every moment. In these mechanistic terms, Descartes attempted to explain a wide variety of features of the world, from the formation of planetary systems out of an initial chaos, to magnetism, to the vital functions of animals, which he considered to be mere machines. Descartes never finished working out his ambitious programme in full detail. Though he published the metaphysics and the general portion of his physics, the physical explanation of specific phenomena, especially biological, remained unfinished, as did his moral theory. Despite this, however, Descartes’ programme had an enormous influence on the philosophy that followed, both within the substantial group that identified themselves as his followers, and outside. See also: CERTAINTY; RATIONALISM Further reading Cottingham, J.G. (1986) Descartes, Oxford: Blackwell. (Good introductory study of Descartes’ philosophical thought.) Descartes, R. (1984–91) The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, ed. and trans. J. Cotting
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Page 205 ham, R. Stoothoff, D. Murdoch and A. Kenny, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 3 vols. (The nowstandard English translation of Descartes’ writings. It contains the entire Rules, Discourse, Meditations and Passions, as well as selections from his other writings and letters.) Voss. S. (ed.) (1993) Essays on the Philosophy and Science of René Descartes, New York and Oxford; Oxford University Press. (Collection of articles that gives a good idea of current/ recent work.) DANIEL GARBER DESCRIPTIONS ‘Definite descriptions’ are noun phrases of the form ‘the’ + noun complex (for example, ‘the finest Greek poet’, ‘the cube of five’) or of the form possessive + noun complex (for example, ‘Sparta’s defeat of Athens’). As Russell realized, it is important to philosophy to be clear about the semantics of such expressions. In the sentence ‘Aeschylus fought at Marathon’, the function of the subject, ‘Aeschylus’, is to refer to something; it is a referential noun phrase (or ‘singular term’). By contrast, in the sentence ‘Every Athenian remembers Marathon’, the subject noun phrase, ‘every Athenian’, is not referential but quantificational. Definite descriptions appear at first sight to be referential. Frege treated them referentially, but Russell held that they should be treated quantificationally in accordance with his theory of descriptions, and argued that certain philosophical puzzles were thereby solved. Further reading Neale, S. (1990) Descriptions, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (Discussion of the various views in more detail. Extensive bibliography.) Strawson, P.F. (1972) Subject and Predicate in Logic and Grammar, London: Methuen. (Full statement of Strawson’s views.) STEPHEN NEALE DESERT AND MERIT The ideas of desert and merit are fundamental to the way we normally think about our personal relationships and our social institutions. We believe that people who perform good deeds and display admirable qualities deserve praise, honours and rewards, whereas people whose behaviour is anti-social deserve blame and punishment. We also think that justice is in large part a matter of people receiving the treatment that they deserve. But many philosophers have found these ways of thinking hard to justify. Why should people’s past deeds determine how we should treat them in the future? Since we cannot see inside their heads, how can we ever know what people really deserve? How can we reconcile our belief that people must be responsible for their actions in order to deserve credit or blame with the determinist claim that all actions are in principle capable of being explained by causes over which we have no control? See also: MORAL SENTIMENTS; RECTIFICATION AND REMAINDERS Further reading Adkins, A.W.H. (1960) Merit and Responsibility, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Explores ideas of merit in classical Greek thought.) Sher, G. (1987) Desert, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (The best recent discussion of desert, exploring possible justifications for a wide range of desert claims.) DAVID MILLER DESGABETS, ROBERT (1610–78) Although he is now little known, Desgabets was an important seventeenth-century French philosopher, theologian, scientist and mathematician. An early defender of Cartesian philosophy, his physical explication of transubstantiation created such an uproar that he complied with a public order and renounced his views. He defended the essential union and interaction of soul and body, and the free creation of the eternal truths. The latter view led him to an empiricist epistemology: all ideas have a sensory basis and are essentially related to existing objects. Despite his originality, he is best known for his polemic with Foucher. See also: DESCARTES, R. Further reading Rodis-Lewis, G. (1966) The Downfall of Cartesianism 1673–1712, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. (Includes an examination of Foucher’s critique of Desgabets’ account of ideas as intentional representations.) PATRICIA A. EASTON DESIRE If an agent is to be moved to action, then two requirements have to be fulfilled: first, the agent must possess beliefs about the way things actually are, about the actions possible given the way things are, and about the likely effects of those actions on how things are; and, second,
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Page 206 the agent must have or form desires to change the way things are by resorting to this or that course of action. The beliefs tell the agent about how things are and about how they can be altered; the desires attract the agent to how things are not but can be made to be. This rough sketch of beliefs and desires is widely endorsed in contemporary philosophy; it derives in many ways from the seminal work of the eighteenth century Scottish philosopher David Hume. The striking thing about it, from the point of view of desire, is that it characterizes desire by the job desire does in collaborating with belief and thereby generating action: it characterizes desire by function, not by the presence of any particular feeling. The account raises a host of questions. Is desire an entirely different sort of state from belief, for example, and from belief-related states like habits of inference? Does desire have to answer to the considerations of evidence and truth that are relevant to belief and inference? How does desire relate to preference and choice? And how does desire relate to the values that we ascribe to different courses of action and that influence us in what we do? See also: ACTION; INTENTION Further reading Hume, D. (1739–40) A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888, revised P.H. Nidditch, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978. (Book II, part 3 is the classic presentation of reason and belief as existence distinct from passion and desire.) Marks, J. (ed.) (1986) The Ways of Desire , Chicago, IL: Precedent. (Useful collection of articles on various aspects of desire.) PHILIP PETTIT DETERMINISM AND INDETERMINISM Over the centuries, the doctrine of determinism has been understood, and assessed, in different ways. Since the seventeenth century, it has been commonly understood as the doctrine that every event has a cause; or as the predictability, in principle, of the entire future. To assess the truth of determinism, so understood, philosophers have often looked to physical science; they have assumed that their current best physical theory is their best guide to the truth of determinism. It seems that most have believed that classical physics, especially Newton’s physics, is deterministic. And in this century, most have believed that quantum theory is indeterministic. Since quantum theory has superseded classical physics, philosophers have typically come to the tentative conclusion that determinism is false. In fact, these impressions are badly misleading. The above formulations of determinism are unsatisfactory. Once we use a better formulation, we see that there is a large gap between the determinism of a given physical theory, and the bolder, vague idea that motivated the traditional formulations: the idea that the world in itself is deterministic. Admittedly, one can make sense of this idea by adopting a sufficiently bold metaphysics; but it cannot be made sense of just by considering determinism for physical theories. As regards physical theories, the traditional impression is again misleading. Which theories are deterministic turns out to be a subtle and complicated matter, with many open questions. But broadly speaking, it turns out that much of classical physics, even much of Newton’s physics, is indeterministic. Furthermore, the alleged indeterminism of quantum theory is very controversial: it enters, if at all, only in quantum theory’s account of measurement processes, an account which remains the most controversial part of the theory. See also: CAUSATION; MECHANICS, CLASSICAL Further reading Earman, J. (1986) A Primer on Determinism , Dordrecht: Reidel. (The best single book on determinism in the physical sciences.) JEREMY BUTTERFIELD DEVELOPMENT ETHICS Development ethics is ethical reflection on the ends and means of socioeconomic change in poor countries and regions. It has several sources: criticism of colonialism and post-Second World War development strategies; Denis Goulet’s writings; Anglo-American philosophical debates about the ethics of famine relief; and Paul Streeten’s and Amartya Sen’s approaches to development. Development ethicists agree that the moral dimension of development theory and practice is just as important as the scientific and policy components. What is often called ‘development’ – economic growth, for instance – may be bad for people, communities and the environment. Hence, the process of development should be reconceived as beneficial change, usually specified as alleviating human misery and environmental degradation in poor countries. Development ethicists do not yet agree on
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Page 207 whether their ethical reflection should extend to destitution in rich countries or aspects of North–South relations apart from development aid. Other unresolved controversies concern the status and content of substantive development norms. Finally, agreement does not yet exist as to how the benefits of and responsibilities for development should be distributed within and between countries. See also: FUTURE GENERATIONS, OBLIGATIONS TO; POSTCOLONIALISM Further reading Aman, K. (ed.) (1991) Ethical Principles for Development: Needs, Capacities or Rights? , Upper Montclair, NJ: Institute for Critical Thinking. (Outlines diverse approaches to the question of whether development ethics should emphasize needs, capabilities or rights.) Goulet, D. (1971) The Cruel Choice: A New Concept in the Theory of Development, New York: Athenaeum. (In this seminal work, the pioneer in development ethics applies ethical reflection to development theory, policy and practices.) DAVID A. CROCKER DEWEY, JOHN (1859–1952) The philosophy of the American John Dewey is original and comprehensive. His extensive writings contend systematically with problems in metaphysics, epistemology, logic, aesthetics, ethics, social and political philosophy, philosophy and education, and philosophical anthropology. Although his work is widely read, it is not widely understood. Dewey had a distinctive conception of philosophy, and the key to understanding and benefiting from his work is to keep this conception in mind. A worthwhile philosophy, he urged, must be practical. Philosophic inquiry, that is, ought to take its point of departure from the aspirations and problems characteristic of the various sorts of human activity, and an effective philosophy would develop ideas responsive to those conditions. Any system of ideas that has the effect of making common experience less intelligible than we find it to be is on that account a failure. Dewey’s theory of inquiry, for example, does not entertain a conception of knowledge that makes it problematic whether we can know anything at all. Inasmuch as scientists have made extraordinary advances in knowledge, it behoves the philosopher to find out exactly what scientists do, rather than to question whether they do anything of real consequence. Moral philosophy, likewise, should not address the consternations of philosophers as such, but the characteristic urgencies and aspirations of common life; and it should attempt to identify the resources and limitations of human nature and the environment with which it interacts. Human beings might then contend effectively with the typical perplexities and promises of mortal existence. To this end, Dewey formulated an exceptionally innovative and far-reaching philosophy of morality and democracy. The subject matter of philosophy is not philosophy, Dewey liked to say, but ‘problems of men’. All too often, he found, the theories of philosophers made the primary subject matter more obscure rather than less so. The tendency of thinkers is to become bewitched by inherited philosophic puzzles, when the persistence of the puzzle is a consequence of failing to consider the assumptions that created it. Dewey was gifted in discerning and discarding the philosophic premises that create needless mysteries. Rather than fret, for instance, about the question of how immaterial mental substance can possibly interact with material substance, he went to the root of the problem by challenging the notion of substance itself. Indeed, Dewey’s dissatisfaction with the so-called classic tradition in philosophy, stemming at least from Plato if not from Parmenides, led him to reconstruct the entire inheritance of the Western tradition in philosophy. The result is one of the most seminal and fruitful philosophies of the twentieth century. Further reading Dewey, J. (1969–90) The Early Works of John Dewey, 1882–1898; The Middle Works of John Dewey, 1899–1924; The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953, ed. J.A. Boydston, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 37 vols. (Contains the entirety of Dewey’s published work. Does not include his correspondence, which is being edited for eventual publication.) Campbell, J. (1995) Understanding John Dewey , Chicago, IL: Open Court. (The best general introduction to Dewey’s philosophy.) JAMES GOUINLOCK DHARMAKĪRTI ( c .600–60) Dharmakīrti represents the philosophical apex of the Buddhist contribution to Indian thought
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Page 208 of the post-systematic period. On the basis of Dignāga’s late works he developed a system of epistemology with a strong emphasis on logic, propounding it both as an explanation and defence of Dignāga’s thought. His logic, particularly, was new; in order to create a system of Buddhist logic proper, it clearly established the general Indian idea that logical relations are founded in reality. Buddhist epistemology as shaped by Dharmakīrti became a strong and influential rational tradition in late Indian Buddhism and has been studied and continued in Tibet up to the present time. See also: BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY, INDIAN; EPISTEMOLOGY, INDIAN SCHOOLS OF Further reading Dreyfus, G.B. (1997) Recognizing Reality, Dharmakīrti’s Philosophy and its Tibetan Interpretations, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. (A comprehensive study of the Tibetan philosophical work in continuation of Dharmakīrti’s ontology, philosophy of language and epistemology.) ERNST STEINKELLNER DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM Dialectical materialism is the official name given to Marxist-Leninist philosophy by its proponents in the Soviet Union and their affiliates elsewhere. The term, never used by either Karl Marx or Friedrich Engels, was the invention of the Russian Marxist Georgii Plekhanov, who first used it in 1891. Engels, however, favourably contrasted ‘materialist dialectics’ with the ‘idealist dialectics’ of Hegel and the German idealist tradition, and the ‘dialectical’ outlook of Marxism with the ‘mechanistic’ or ‘metaphysical’ standpoint of other nineteenth-century materialists. Dialectical materialism proclaims allegiance to the methods of empirical science and opposition to all forms of scepticism which deny that science can know the nature of reality. Dialectical materialists reject religious belief generally, denying the existence of non-material or supernatural entities (such as God or an immortal human soul). Unlike other forms of materialism, however, dialectical materialists maintain that the fundamental laws governing both matter and mind are dialectical in the sense in which that term is used in the philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel. Although dialectical materialism is supposed to constitute the philosophical underpinnings of Marxism, Marx’s only major contribution to it was his materialist conception of history. The more fundamental philosophical views of dialectical materialism have their main source in the writings of Engels, especially Anti-Dühring (1878), Dialectics of Nature (1875–82) and Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886). To this last work Engels appended the eleven ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ written by Marx in 1845, which contrasted the ‘old’ or ‘contemplative’ materialism with the practically oriented materialism which was to be the basis of the proletarian movement. Further developments of dialectical materialism are found in writings by V.I. Lenin and subsequent Soviet writers. Lenin’s chief additions were his critique of ‘empirio-criticism’ (the empiricist phenomenalism of certain Russian followers of Ernst Mach, who argued that matter was to be reduced to sense data), and his conception of the ‘partisanship’ of all philosophical views. See also: ENGELS, F.; MATERIALISM Further reading Cornforth, M. (1971) Dialectical Materialism , New York: International Publishers. (A standard survey of Marxist-Leninist philosophy by an important British exponent.) Engels, F. (1878) Anti-Dühring, Moscow: Progress, 1962. (The major philosophical work by Engels.) ALLEN W. WOOD DIALECTICAL SCHOOL An offshoot of the Megarian school, and active c .350–250 BC, the Dialectical school was an important precursor of Stoic logic. Its leading members were Diodorus Cronus and Philo. Its interests included modality, conditionals and logical puzzles. Its primary allegiance was probably Socratic, but with some additional debt to the Eleatic Zeno. See also: MEGARIAN SCHOOL Further reading Diogenes Laertius (c. early 3rd century AD) Lives of the Philosophers, trans. R.D. Hicks, Diogenes Laertius Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and London: Heinemann, 1925, 2 vols. (Book II 106–12 in volume 1 covers the main Dialectical philosophers.) DAVID SEDLEY
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Page 209 DIALOGICAL LOGIC Dialogical logic characterizes logical constants (such as ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘for all’) by their use in a critical dialogue between two parties: a proponent who has asserted a thesis and an opponent who challenges it. For each logical constant, a rule specifies how to challenge a statement that displays the corresponding logical form, and how to respond to such a challenge. These rules are incorporated into systems of regimented dialogue that are games in the game-theoretical sense. Dialogical concepts of logical consequence can then be based upon the concept of a winning strategy in a (formal) dialogue game: B is a logical consequence of A if and only if there is a winning strategy for the proponent of B against any opponent who is willing to concede A. But it should be stressed that there are several plausible (and non-equivalent) ways to draw up the rules. Further reading Felscher, W. (1986) ‘Dialogues as a Foundation for Intuitionistic Logic’, in D. Gabbay and F. Guenthner (eds) Handbook of Philosophical Logic, vol. 3, Alternatives to Classical Logic , Dordrecht: Reidel, 341–72. (A useful and concise introduction to the subject, with a useful bibliography. A bit technical.) Lorenzen, P. (1969) Normative Logic and Ethics , Mannheim: Bibliographisches Institut. (An early and brief exposition in English.) ERIK C.W. KRABBE DICEY, ALBERT VENN (1835–1922) A.V. Dicey, who held the Vinerian Chair of English Law at Oxford University between 1882 and 1909, is widely regarded as the high priest of orthodox constitutional thought in Britain. Living through a period of great political and economic change, Dicey recognized that the duty of the constitutional lawyer could no longer be one of simply venerating Britain’s ancestral, unwritten constitution. He appreciated the need to try to lay bare its legal foundations and to identify its fundamental principles. In embarking on this exercise, Dicey, a follower of John Austin, employed an analytical method which treated law as a datum to be analysed and classified and which served to furnish a descriptive account of how law’s various divisions fit together to provide an ordered whole. Dicey was the first to apply this legal positivist method to the study of constitutional law in Britain. The method became so ensconced in legal thought in twentieth-century Britain that today lawyers scarcely acknowledge any work in constitutional law which predates Dicey’s work. It is as though he invented the subject. See also: CONSTITUTIONALISM; LEGAL POSITIVISM Further reading Dicey, A.V. (1885) An Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution , 8th edn, London: Macmillan, 1915. (The last edition which Dicey edited of his classic work.) Cosgrove, R.A. (1980) The Rule of Law: Albert Venn Dicey, Victorian Jurist , Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. (Competent intellectual biography.) MARTIN LOUGHLIN DIDEROT, DENIS (1713–84) Chief editor of the great eighteenth-century Encyclopédie (1751–72), Diderot set out a philosophy of the arts and sciences which took the progress of civilization to be a measure of mankind’s moral improvement. He did not regard that progress as having produced universal benefits, however, and perceived the Christian religion which had accompanied it as morally harmful to those who subscribed to it and even more dangerous to societies thus far untouched by it. Religious dogmas tended to pervert the organic development of human passions, and secular education which presumed that all minds were equally receptive to instruction threatened to thwart the natural evolution of human faculties in other ways. Like Rousseau, Diderot subscribed to a philosophy of education which encouraged curiosity rather than promoted truth. He stressed the need for the adaptability of moral rules to the physiological characteristics of the individuals to whom they applied, pointing to a connection between human cultures and biology in a manner that would influence fresh outlooks upon the sciences of man at the end of the Age of Enlightenment. See also: ENLIGHTENMENT, CONTINENTAL; ENCYCLOPEDISTS, EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY Further reading Crocker, L. (1966) Diderot: The Embattled Philosopher , New York: Free Press. (A well-informed intellectual portrait intended for a popular readership.) Diderot, D. (1875–7) Oeuvres complètes , ed. J. Assézat and M. Tourneux, Paris. (The best more or less complete edition.) ROBERT WOKLER
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Page 210 DIETRICH OF FREIBERG ( c .1250–AFTER 1310) In his work on the rainbow, De iride et radialibus impressionibus (On the Rainbow and Radial Impressions), the German Dominican Dietrich makes extensive use of experimental observation. He also wrote a number of other, more theoretical works including De esse et essentia (On Existence and Essence) and De intellectu et intelligibili (On Intellect and the Intelligible). In these works, Dietrich’s emphasis varies; his theological works tend to be heavily Neoplatonic, while his more secular philosophical works are more Aristotelian. Dietrich disagreed with Aquinas on certain metaphysical issues, and seems to have written in opposition to particular works by Aquinas. Further reading Boyer, C.B. (1959) The Rainbow: From Myth to Mathematics, New York: T. Yoseloff, 110–24. (Explains the importance and the influence of Dietrich’s work on the rainbow.) FIONA SOMERSET DIGAMBARA JAINISM see JAINA PHILOSOPHY DIGBY, KENELM (1603–65) Seventeenth-century English Catholic, original member of the Royal Society, and one of the first philosophers to produce a fully developed system of mechanical philosophy, Sir Kenelm Digby cut a dashing figure as a poet, privateer and philosopher. As a Catholic and royalist, he spent much of his life in semi-exile on the continent where he conversed with many of the political and intellectual leaders of his time; as a philosopher, he was favourably compared to René Descartes and John Locke. He attempted to wed the philosophy of Aristotle to the new mechanical physics, which maintained that every event in the material world is reducible to matter in motion. His interests and writings cover a wide range, from religion and magic to vegetative growth and literary commentary. The explicit goal of his most significant book, Two Treatises (1644), was to prove the immortality of the human soul. To this end, the first treatise constitutes an exhaustive study of bodies and their features. By showing that all corporeal qualities are to be explained in strictly material terms, he prepares the way for a thorough discussion of the soul. Digby argues that the soul must be immaterial (and hence immortal) because otherwise its features cannot be explained. He went on to apply the mechanical principles which he developed in this work to a variety of topics, including some traditionally associated with the occult. His works on alchemical, medical and religious topics were also widely read. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM IN THE 17TH CENTURY Further reading Digby, K. (1644) Two Treatises, In the one of which the Nature of Bodies; in the other, the Nature of Mans Soule; is looked into: in the way of discovery, of the Immortality of Reasonable Soules, Paris; repr. New York: Garland, 1978. Petersson, R.T. (1956) Sir Kenelm Digby: The Ornament of England, 1603–65 , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (A thorough and colourful account of Digby’s life and work, with a complete bibliography of his works.) CHRISTIA MERCER DIGNĀGA ( c .480–c .540) A logician and epistemologist, Dignāga is traditionally regarded as the founder of a Buddhist school that sought to avoid divisive controversies over which Buddhist writings were authentic by emphasizing logic and epistemology rather than the study of scriptures and their commentaries. His principal contributions consisted of refining the theory of inference and tightening the forms of argument commonly used in debate and polemics. His theories became the basis on which the influential philosopher Dharmakīrti built his system, which became the standard Buddhist scholastic system in India and later in Tibet. See also: EPISTEMOLOGY, INDIAN SCHOOLS OF Further reading Dignāga ( c .530) Pramāṇasamuccaya (Collected Writings on the Acquisition of Knowledge), first chapter translated in Hattori, M., Dignāga, On Perception , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968. (A collection of writings on epistemology, with sections on sense perception, inference, debate and theory of language.) Hayes, R.P. (1988) Dignāga on the Interpretation of Signs , Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. (A study of several of Dignāga’s works on epistemology, with an attempt to place his
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Page 211 theories in the context of earlier Buddhist philosophers.) RICHARD P. HAYES DILTHEY, WILHELM (1833–1911) Wilhelm Dilthey studied theology at Heidelberg and Berlin before turning his attention to history and philosophy. He saw his work as contributing to a ‘Critique of Historical Reason’ which would expand the scope of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason by examining the epistemological conditions of the human sciences as well as of the natural sciences. Both kinds of science take their departure from ordinary life and experience, but whereas the natural sciences seek to focus on the way things behave independently of human involvement, the human sciences take account of this very involvement. The natural sciences use external observation and measurement to construct an objective domain of nature that is abstracted from the fullness of lived experience. The human sciences (humanities and social sciences), by contrast, help to define what Dilthey calls the historical world. By making use of inner as well as outer experience, the human sciences preserve a more direct link with our original sense of life than do the natural sciences. Whereas the natural sciences seek explanations of nature, connecting the discrete representations of outer experience through hypothetical generalizations and causal laws, the human sciences aim at an understanding that articulates the fundamental structures of historical life given in lived experience. Finding lived experience to be inherently connected and meaningful, Dilthey opposed traditional atomistic and associationist psychologies and developed a descriptive psychology that has been recognized as anticipating phenomenology. Dilthey first thought that this descriptive psychology could provide a neutral foundation for the other human sciences, but in his later hermeneutical writings he rejected the idea of a foundational discipline or method. Thus he ends by claiming that all the human sciences are interpretive and mutually dependent. Hermeneutically conceived, understanding is a process of interpreting the ‘objectifications of life’, the external expressions or manifestations of human thought and action. Interpersonal understanding is attained through these common objectifications and not, as is widely believed, through empathy. Moreover, to fully understand myself I must analyse the expressions of my life in the same way that I analyse the expressions of others. Not every aspect of life can be captured within the respective limits of the natural and the human sciences. Dilthey’s philosophy of life also leaves room for a kind of anthropological reflection whereby we attempt to do justice to the ultimate riddles of life and death. Such reflection receives its fullest expression in world-views, which are overall perspectives on life encompassing the way we perceive and conceive the world, evaluate it aesthetically and respond to it in action. Dilthey discerned many typical worldviews in art and religion, but in Western philosophy he distinguished three recurrent types: the worldviews of naturalism, the idealism of freedom and objective idealism. See also: HISTORY, PHILOSOPHY OF; SOCIAL SCIENCE, HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Dilthey, W. (1910) Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften , trans. R.A. Makkreel and F. Rodi, The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences , in Selected Works, ed. R.A. Makkreel and F. Rodi, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, vol. 3, (forthcoming). (Here Dilthey comes closest to working out his Critique of Historical Reason.) Ermarth, M. (1978) Wilhelm Dilthey: The Critique of Historical Reason , Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (A comprehensive account of Dilthey’s thought with a good historical background.) RUDOLF A. MAKKREEL DIODORUS CRONUS (late 4th–early 3rd centuries BC) The most famous member of the Dialectical school, the Greek philosopher Diodorus Cronus maintained various paradoxical theses. He argued that any attempt to divide space, time or matter must end with little regions, periods or bodies that cannot further be divided; hence, he inferred, things cannot be in motion. Diodorus also contributed to the contemporary debate on conditionals: one proposition implies another, he held, if and only if it never has been possible, and is not now possible, to have the former proposition true and the latter proposition false. Diodorus is however most famous for inventing the master argument. The master argument relied on two assumptions: that every past truth is necessary, and that the impossible does not follow from the possible. It concluded, on these
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Page 212 assumptions, that no proposition is possible unless it either is true or will be. The master argument was designed to support Diodorus’ definition of possibility: a proposition is possible if and only if it either is or will be true. This definition is not exactly tantamount to the fatalist doctrine that all truths are necessary, but it was felt to come too close to fatalism for comfort. See also: LOGIC, ANCIENT Further reading Gaskin, R. (1995) The Sea Battle and the Master Argument , Berlin and New York: de Gruyter. (Contains ample discussion of rival interpretations, together with a massive bibliography.) NICHOLAS DENYER DIOGENES LAERTIUS ( c . AD 300–50) Diogenes Laertius is the author of a famous work entitled Lives of the Philosophers, consisting of nearly one hundred accounts of individual philosophers. These contain mainly biographical information, but sometimes also include doctrinal summaries. The work is extremely valuable because it preserves much information on Greek philosophers from sources now lost. Further reading Diogenes Laertius (c. early 3rd century AD) Lives of the Philosophers, trans. R.D. Hicks, Diogenes Laertius Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and London: Heinemann, 1925, 2 vols; revised H.S. Long, 1972. (English translation with Greek text facing; outdated edition, but not yet superseded.) DAVID T. RUNIA DIOGENES OF APOLLONIA (5th century BC) Diogenes was the last of the early Greek physicists. He claimed that interactions between things would be impossible unless all were forms of one basic substance. Adapting ideas of Anaximenes and Anaxagoras, he identified the basic substance as air, which in its optimal form possesses intelligence and thereby controls the universe at large and animal life in particular. Diogenes worked out a detailed psychology and physiology, explaining sense perception as an exercise of intelligence due to interaction between air in the region of the brain and atmospheric air. This theory was mocked by Aristophanes, but influenced various Hippocratic writings. Further reading Kirk, G.S., Raven, J.E. and Schofield, M. (1983) The Presocratic Philosophers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd edn. (A valuable survey of Presocratic philosophy, including texts and translations; contains an engaged but judicious evaluation of Diogenes.) MALCOLM SCHOFIELD DIOGENES OF OENOANDA ( c . 2nd century AD) The Epicurean philosopher Diogenes came from the Greek town Oenoanda in Lycia (Turkey). He is known exclusively for his massive philosophical inscription, erected in a colonnade there. Its remains contain sayings of Epicurus, plus Diogenes’ own writings, mainly on physics and ethics. His Epicureanism is largely traditional, but possible innovations include talk of a future Epicurean golden age. Further reading Diogenes of Oenoanda ( c . 2nd century AD) Fragments, ed. M.F. Smith, Diogenes of Oinoanda, The Epicurean Inscription , Naples: Bibliopolis, 1993. (Up-to-date edition, with English translation and lucid commentary, by the scholar who has discovered numerous new fragments of the inscription.) MICHAEL ERLER DIOGENES OF SINOPE (412/403–324/321 BC) Diogenes of Sinope was considered, along with Antisthenes, the founder of Cynicism. His nickname ‘Cynic’, literally ‘doglike’, reflects the highly unconventional lifestyle he lived and advocated. Radically reevaluating mankind’s relation to both nature and civilization, Diogenes redefined the individual’s freedom and self-sufficiency, advocating a training ( askēsis) for achieving both. See also: CYNICS Further reading Diogenes Laertius ( c . early 3rd century AD) Lives of the Philosophers, trans. R.D. Hicks, Diogenes Laertius Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and London: Heinemann, 1925, 2 vols. (Parallel Greek text
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Page 213 and English translation; Book VI is our most important source for Diogenes of Sinope.) R. BRACHT BRANHAM DISCOURSE SEMANTICS Discourse and its interpretation have interested philosophers since ancient times, and have been studied in different areas of philosophy such as rhetoric, the philosophy of language and the philosophy of literature. Discourse has attracted interest from philosophers working in the continental tradition, and it received considerable attention in the 1980s from analytic philosophers, philosophers of language, linguists, cognitive scientists and computer scientists; within these fields a formal, logical analysis of discourse interpretation, or discourse semantics, has emerged. Discourse semantics arose in an attempt to solve certain problems that affected formal theories of meaning for single sentences. These problems had to do with the interpretation of pronouns and other ‘anaphoric’ elements in language. A detailed examination of the data showed that the meaning of an individual sentence in a discourse could depend upon information given by previous sentences in the discourse. To analyse this dependence, discourse semantics developed a formal analysis of a discourse context and of the interaction between the meaning of a sentence and the discourse context in which it is to be interpreted. The essential idea of discourse semantics is that the meaning of a sentence is a relation between contexts. The ‘input’ discourse context furnishes the information needed to interpret the anaphoric elements in the sentence; the information conveyed by the sentence when added to the input context yields a new, or ‘output’, discourse context that can serve to interpret the next sentence in the discourse. See also: PRAGMATICS Further reading Kamp, H. and Reyle, U. (1993) From Discourse to Logic; Introduction to Model-Theoretic Semantics of Natural Language, Formal Logic and Discourse Representation Theory , Dordrecht: Kluwer. (This book is an introductory textbook to DRT that extends considerably the semantic coverage of the theory from that given in Kamp’s original presentation of the subject.) NICHOLAS ASHER DISCOVERY, LOGIC OF Bacon, Descartes, Newton and other makers of the Scientific Revolution claimed to have found and even used powerful logics or methods of discovery, step-by-step procedures for systematically generating new truths in mathematics and the natural sciences. Method of discovery was also the prime method of justification: generation by correct method was something akin to logical derivation and thus the strongest justification a claim could have. The ‘logic’ of these methods was deductive, inductive or both. By the mid-nineteenth century, logic of discovery was yielding to the more flexible and theory-tolerant method of hypothesis as the ‘official’ method of science. In the twentieth century, Karl Popper and most logical positivists completed the methodological reversal from generativism to consequentialism by setting their hypothetico-deductive method against logic of discovery. What is epistemologically important, they said, is not how new claims are generated but how they fare in empirical tests of their predictive consequences. They demoted discovery to the status of historical anecdote and psychological process. Since the late 1950s, however, there has been a revival of interest in methodology of discovery on two fronts – logical and historical. An earlier explosion of work in symbolic logic had led to automata theory, computers, and then artificial intelligence. Meanwhile, a maturing history of science was furnishing information on science as a process, on how historical actors and communities actually discovered or constructed their claims and practices. Now, in the 1980s and 1990s, liberal epistemologists once again admit discovery as a legitimate topic for philosophy of science. Yet attempts to both naturalize and to socialize inquiry pose new challenges to the possibility of logics of discovery. Its strong associations with ‘the’ method of science makes logic of discovery a target of postmodernist attack, but a more flexible construal is defensible. See also: SCIENTIFIC METHOD Further reading Kleiner, S. (1993) Scientific Discovery: A Theory of the Rationality of Science , Dordrecht: Kluwer. (Logic of questions applied to Darwin’s work.) Popper, K.R. (1959) The Logic of Scientific Discovery, New York: Basic Books. (Popper defends his hypothetico-deductive method
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Page 214 against inductivist and other methods of discovery.) THOMAS NICKLES DISCRIMINATION A principle forbidding discrimination is widely used to criticize and prohibit actions and policies that disadvantage racial, ethnic and religious groups, women and homosexuals. Discriminatory actions often rely on unfavourable group stereotypes and the belief that members of certain groups are not worthy of equal treatment. A prohibition of discrimination applies to the distribution of important benefits such as education and jobs, and says that people are not to be awarded or denied such benefits on grounds of characteristics such as race, ethnicity, religion or gender. Attempts have been made to expand this principle to cover institutional discrimination. Discrimination is morally wrong because its premise that one group is less worthy than another is insulting to its victims, because it harms its victims by reducing their self-esteem and opportunities, and because it is unfair. See also: LINGUISTIC DISCRIMINATION Further reading Ezorsky, G. (1991) Racism and Justice: The Case for Affirmative Action, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. (Chapter 1 contains a good discussion of ‘overt and institutional racism’.) JAMES W. NICKEL DISCRIMINATION AND LANGUAGE see LINGUISTIC DISCRIMINATION DISSOI LOGOI Dissoi logoi (‘Twofold Arguments’) is the title scholars apply to a short anonymous collection of arguments for and against various theses. The work, in Greek, is (questionably) dated around 400 BC, and regarded as an interesting, if second-rank, product of the Sophistic age. The work survives as an appendix to the manuscripts of Sextus Empiricus, who regularly argues for and against a thesis to induce suspension of judgment about it. Further reading Robinson, T.M. (1979) Contrasting Arguments: An Edition of the Dissoi Logoi, New York: Arno Press. (The first and only full-length edition, with translation, commentary and bibliography of previous work.) M.F. BURNYEAT DODGSON, CHARLES LUTWIDGE (LEWIS CARROLL) (1832–98) Dodgson, an Oxford teacher of mathematics, is best known under his pseudonym, Lewis Carroll. Although not an exceptional mathematician, his standing has risen somewhat in the light of recent research. He is also of note as a symbolic logician in the tradition of Boole and De Morgan, as a pioneer in the theory of voting, and as a gifted amateur photographer. His literary output, ranging from satirical pamphleteering, light verse and puzzle-making to an immense correspondence, is again largely amateur in nature, and would hardly have survived without the worldwide success of his three master-works, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Through the Looking-Glass (1871) and The Hunting of the Snark (1876). Together with portions of his two-volume fairy-novel Sylvie and Bruno (1889/93) they are the only writings, ostensibly for children, to have attracted or deserved the notice of philosophers. Further reading Carroll, Lewis (1865) Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, London: Macmillan, 1866. Gardner, M. (1960) The Annotated Alice, New York: Clarkson Potter, and London: Penguin; revised edn, 1993. (Along with Hudson’s biography, this work is largely responsible for the widespread modern-day interest in Alice.) PETER HEATH DŌGEN (1200–53) DŌgen Kigen, the founder of Japanese Sōtō Zen Buddhism, is most noted for his argument that meditation is the expression or enactment of enlightenment, not the means to attaining it. Dōgen believed that even a novice might achieve insight, however fleeting. The difficulty, however, is in expressing that insight in one’s daily acts, both linguistic and non-linguistic. In developing his position, Dōgen articulated a phenomenology of incarnate consciousness and a sophisticated analysis of meaning. His theories of mind–body unity, contextualized meaning, temporality and theory–praxis influenced many prominent modern Japanese philosophers such as Watsuji Tetsurō, Tanabe Hajime and Nishitani Keiji. See also: BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY, JAPANESE Further reading Dōgen (1200–53) Shōbōgenzō (Treasury of the True Dharma Eye), trans. Kim Hee-jin,
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Page 215 Flowers of Emptiness: Selections from Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō , Studies in Asian Thought and Religion 2, Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1985; trans. Yokoi Yūhō, The Shōbōgenzō, Tokyo: SankibōBusshorin, 1985. (Kim’s edition is a translation of the bulk of the text with the aim of capturing in English some of the philosophical wordplay of Dōgen’s distinctive style of writing.) THOMAS P. KASULIS DONG ZHONGSHU (195–115 BC) Tradition hailed Dong Zhongshu as the ‘father of Han Confucianism’ because of his influential theories that posit a perfect congruence between divine and human realms kept in balance by the true king, who functions as mediator, moral exemplar and lawmaker. Undoubtedly the most famous exegete in the ‘Gongyang’ commentarial tradition to the Chunqiu (Spring and Autumn Annals), Dong is also credited by convention with the composition of the Chunqiufanlu (Luxuriant Dew of the Annals), though recent scholarship questions this attribution. See also: CHINESE CLASSICS; CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY, CHINESE Further reading Queen, S. (1996) From Chronicle to Canon: The Hermeneutics of the Spring and Autumn, According to Tung Chung-shu, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (A fine introduction to Dong, with special emphasis on his elaboration of Gongyang theories.) MICHAEL NYLAN DOOYEWEERD, HERMAN (1894–1977) A Dutch philosopher and legal theorist, Herman Dooyeweerd challenged the Enlightenment ideal of autonomous rational thought and sought a religious foundation for philosophy. Religious self-knowledge, he contended, is the necessary condition of all knowing. Dooyeweerd proposed an elaborate ontology of physical and social reality based on the Christian doctrine of creation. His thought has been influential among Calvinists in The Netherlands, North America and South Africa. Further reading Kalsbeek, L. (1975) Contours of a Christian Philosophy: An Introduction to Herman Dooyeweerd’s Thought, Toronto, Ont.: Wedge. (A very readable entry into Dooyeweerd’s often complex thought.) JOHN BOLT DOSTOEVSKII, FËDOR MIKHAILOVICH (1821–81) Dostoevskii, regarded as one of the world’s greatest novelists, is especially well known for his mastery of philosophical or ideological fiction. In his works, characters espouse intriguing ideas about theology, morality and psychology. Plots are shaped by conflicts of ideas and by the interaction of theories with the psychology of the people who espouse them. Indeed, Dostoevskii is usually considered one of the greatest psychologists in the history of Western thought, not only because of the accounts of the mind his characters and narrators elucidate in detail, but also because of the peculiar behaviour betraying the depths of their souls. Dostoevskii is particularly well known for his description of the irrational in its many modes. Deeply engaged with the political and social problems of his day, Dostoevskii brought his understanding of individual and social psychology to bear on contemporary issues and gave them a lasting relevance. His predictions about the likely consequences of influential ideas, such as communism and the social theory of crime, have proven astonishingly accurate; he has often been regarded as something of a prophet of the twentieth century. His reputation rests primarily on four long philosophical novels – Prestuplenie i nakazanie ( Crime and Punishment ) (1866), Idiot ( The Idiot ) (1868–9), Besy ( The Possessed, also known as The Devils) (1871–2) and Brat’ia Karamazovy ( The Brothers Karamazov) (1879–80) – and on one novella, Zapiski iz podpol’ia ( Notes From Underground ) (1864). In his day, Dostoevskii was as famous for his journalistic writing as for his fiction, and a few of his articles have remained classics, including ‘Mr. D–bov and the Question of Art’ (1861) – a critique of utilitarian aesthetics – and ‘Environment’ (1873). Dostoevskii’s works have had major influence on Western and Russian philosophy. In Russia, his novels inspired numerous religious thinkers, including Sergei Bulgakov and Nikolai Berdiaev; existentialists, such as Lev Shestov; and literary and ethical theorists, most notably Mikhail Bakhtin. In the West, his influence has also been great. Here, too, his writings are repeatedly cited (along with Kierkegaard’s) as founding works of existentialism. Perhaps because of a misreading, they influenced Freud and Freudianism. Directly and through the medium of Bakhtin, his ideas have played a role in the rethinking of mind and language.
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Page 216 And his rejection of utopianism and socialism has been repeatedly cited in twentieth-century political debates and theories. Dostoevskii’s influence has been diverse and at times contradictory, in part because of the different genres in which his ideas are expressed. Not only the overall meanings of his novels but also the views of his characters, including those he meant to refute, have been attributed to him. Moreover, his essays sometimes express ideas at variance with his novels. Most recently, philosophical significance has been discovered not only in the content but also in the very form of his novels. Their odd plot structure has been shown to have implications for an understanding of authorship, responsibility and time. See also: BAKHTIN, M.M.; EXISTENTIALISM Further reading Dostoevskii, F.M. [Dostoevsky] (1912–20) The Novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky , trans. C. Garnett, 12 vols;repr. NewYork: Modern Library, 1950; repr. New York: Dutton, 1960. (The best translation of Dostoevskii’s novels, reissued and revised many times.) Jackson, R.L. (1966) Dostoevsky’s Quest for Form: A Study of His Philosophy of Art, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. (Explores Dostoevskii’s aesthetics as expressed in his articles and embodied in his work.) GARY SAUL MORSON DOUBLE EFFECT, PRINCIPLE OF ‘Double effect’ refers to the good and bad effects which may foreseeably follow from one and the same act. The principle of double effect originates in Aquinas’ ethics, and is supposed to guide decision about acts with double effect where the bad effect is something that must not be intended, such as the death of an innocent person. The principle permits such acts only if the bad effect is unintended, not disproportionate to the intended good effect, and unavoidable if the good effect is to be achieved. The principle has wide relevance in the moral evaluation of acts which have foreseen double effects. Controversy arises over the identification of the agent’s intention in difficult cases, and over the use of the principle to resolve issues such as abortion, euthanasia, the use of pain-relieving drugs which hasten death, self-defence, and the killing of certain sorts of non-combatants in war. See also: INTENTION; RESPONSIBILITY Further reading Connell, F.J. (1967) ‘Double Effect, Principle of’, in New Catholic Encyclopedia , New York: McGraw-Hill, vol. 4, 1020–2. (Clear traditional statement of the principle and its conditions.) SUZANNE UNIACKE DOUBT Doubt is often defined as a state of indecision or hesitancy with respect to accepting or rejecting a given proposition. Thus, doubt is opposed to belief. But doubt is also contrasted with certainty. Since it seems intelligible to say that there are many things we believe without being completely certain about them, it appears that we may not have a unitary concept of doubt. Although doubt is often associated in philosophy with scepticism, historically the relation between the two is complex. Moreover, some philosophers deny that sceptical arguments have any essential connection with inducing doubts. Sceptical doubts, as philosophers understand them, differ from ordinary doubts in their depth and generality. We all have doubts about some things. But the philosophical sceptic wonders whether we ever have the slightest reason to believe one thing rather than another. However, the reasonableness of such doubts – and even their intelligibility – remains controversial. The various attitudes philosophers adopt with respect to the status of sceptical doubts characterize the main approaches to epistemological theory. See also: FALLIBILISM; SCEPTICISM Further reading Descartes, R. (1641) Meditations on First Philosophy , in J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff and D. Murdoch (eds) The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975, vol. 2. (The most important discussion of sceptical doubts in early modern philosophy.) Wittgenstein, L. (1969) On Certainty , Oxford, Blackwell. (Argues that doubt can arise only within contexts in which other beliefs are held certain: hence global doubt is impossible.) MICHAEL WILLIAMS DOXOGRAPHY Doxography is a term describing the method of recording opinions ( doxai) of philosophers frequently employed by ancient Greek writers on philosophy. It can also refer to texts or passages consisting of
such accounts. The ancient tradition of doxographical writing finds its origin in the dialectical method of Aristotle
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Page 217 and Theophrastus. Later works by authors such as Aëtius and Arius Didymus record much valuable material on ancient philosophers, although usually with little analysis or argumentation. Doxographical passages are also found in other ancient philosophical works, usually as a prelude to the discussion of a theme. Further reading Mansfeld, J. and Runia, D.T. (1996) Aëtiana: The Method and Intellectual Context of a Doxographer , volume 1: The Sources, Philosophia Antiqua 73, Leiden: Brill. (First volume of a thorough analysis of the Diels hypothesis and the entire doxographical tradition.) DAVID T. RUNIA DREAMING We naturally think of dreams as experiences very like perceptions or imaginings, except that they occur during sleep. In prescientific thought the interpretation of dreams played a role in divining the future, and it plays a role, albeit a much more limited one, in modern psychology (although in Freudian psychoanalysis dreams have been considered to give access to some of the hidden operations of the mind). Dreaming is puzzling in many respects. We do not have ready-to-hand criteria for checking dream reports, not even our own; conscious or lucid dreams are the exception rather than the rule; and there is the puzzle of how we distinguish waking experience from a very lifelike dream. Furthermore, the nature of dreams is doubtful – some have even denied that to dream is to undergo an experience during sleep: dreams on this view are to be understood in terms of what happens when we ‘recall’ them. Further reading Aristotle ( c .350 BC) On Dreams , in W.D. Ross (ed.) The Works of Aristotle, London: Oxford University Press, 1931, vol. 3. (The first complete small treatise on dreams.) Malcolm, N. (1959) Dreaming , London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (Important monograph on the concept of dreaming, with some of the most debated arguments, and useful excerpts from the philosophical literature.) ROBERTO CASATI DU BOIS-REYMOND, EMIL (1818–96) Emil du Bois-Reymond conducted pioneering research in electrophysiology which established him as a major figure in German science in the second half of the nineteenth century. His influence extended further through his more general writings in politics and philosophy of science, in which he argued for theoretical restraint and for the recognition that certain problems (for example, the mind–body problem) fell beyond scientific modes of inquiry and explanation. Further reading Cranefield, P.F. (ed.) (1982) Two Great Scientists of the Nineteenth Century: Correspondence of Emil Du Bois-Reymond and Carl Ludwig , trans. S.L. Ayed, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. (This volume presents letters collected by Estelle Du Bois-Reymond and contains a foreword by Paul Cranefield as well as notes and indexes.) DANIEL N. ROBINSON DU CHÂTELET-LOMONT, GABRIELLEÉMILIE (1706–49) The name of this aristocratic woman, a true intellectual with a passion for mathematics, philosophy and science, is linked to that of Voltaire, whose life and interests she shared for fifteen years. In the rural retreat of Cirey they studied, disagreed, wrote and published. She was introduced to Newtonian science by Maupertuis and Voltaire but departed from their views, when she tried to combine Leibnizian metaphysics with Newton’s empirically based science in her Institutions de physique (1740). She translated Newton’s Principia from Latin into French and added a commentary on the system of the world (published in 1756). See also: NEWTON, I.; VOLTAIRE Further reading Vaillot, R. (1978) Madame du Châtelet , Paris: Michel. (A readable biography, which examines the various aspects of her life.) ROBERT L. WALTERS DUALISM Dualism is the view that mental phenomena are, in some respect, nonphysical. The best-known version is due to Descartes, and holds that the mind is a nonphysical substance. Descartes argued that, because minds have no spatial properties and physical reality is essentially extended in space, minds are wholly nonphysical. Every human being is accordingly a composite of two objects: a physical body, and a
nonphysical object that is that human being’s mind. On a weaker version of dualism, which contemporary thinkers find more acceptable,
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Page 218 human beings are physical substances but have mental properties, and those properties are not physical. This view is known as property dualism, or the dual-aspect theory. Several considerations appear to support dualism. Mental phenomena are strikingly different from all others, and the idea that they are nonphysical may explain just how they are distinctive. Moreover, physical reality conforms to laws formulated in strictly mathematical terms. But, because mental phenomena such as thinking, desiring and sensing seem intractable to being described in mathematical terms, it is tempting to conclude that these phenomena are not physical. In addition, many mental states are conscious states – states that we are aware of in a way that seems to be wholly unmediated. And many would argue that, whatever the nature of mental phenomena that are not conscious, consciousness cannot be physical. There are also, however, reasons to resist dualism. People, and other creatures with mental endowments, presumably exist wholly within the natural order, and it is generally held that all natural phenomena are built up from basic physical constituents. Dualism, however, represents the mind as uniquely standing outside this unified physical picture. There is also a difficulty about causal relations between mind and body. Mental events often cause bodily events, as when a desire causes an action, and bodily events often cause mental events, for example in perceiving. But the causal interactions into which physical events enter are governed by laws that connect physical events. So if the mental is not physical, it would be hard to understand how mental events can interact causally with bodily events. For these reasons and others, dualism is, despite various reasons advanced in its support, a theoretically uncomfortable position. See also: MENTAL CAUSATION Further reading Descartes, R. (1641) Meditations on First Philosophy , in The Philosophical Writings of René Descartes, trans. by J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff and D. Murdoch, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984, vol. 2, 1–62. (Classic statement and defence of dualism; influences all subsequent discussions.) Robinson, H. (ed.) (1993) Objections to Physicalism , Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Fine collection of articles defending dualism.) DAVID M. ROSENTHAL DUCASSE, CURT JOHN (1881–1969) Ducasse, who was born in France but spent most of his adult life in the USA, was a highly systematic philosopher and scarcely any field or topic escaped his attention. He criticized Hume’s account of causality, advocated ‘soft determinism’ and developed an ‘adverbial’ realist account of our knowledge of the external world. He was a dualist on the mind–body relation, a ‘progressive hedonist’ in ethics, a defender of the ‘will to believe’, an expressionist in the philosophy of art, a scourge of art critics and a critic of theism. He also wrote on propositions, truth, signs, liberal education, linguistic metaphilosophy and paranormal phenomena. His influence on younger philosophers has been greatest, however, in the areas of causality, adverbial realism, progressive hedonism, the will to believe and aesthetics. Ducasse died in 1969, but his work remains significant, especially through his influence on Roderick Chisholm and Wilfred Sellars. Further reading Ducasse, C.J. (1944) Art, the Critics and You, New York: Oskar Piest. (A popular presentation of his aesthetic theory, but more importantly a stinging criticism of art critics who think that scholarly information about works of art is necessary for appreciation of art.) EDWARD H. MADDEN DUHEM, PIERRE MAURICE MARIE (1861–1916) Duhem was a French Catholic physicist, historian of science and philosopher of science. Champion of a programme of generalized thermodynamics as a unifying framework for physical science, he was a pioneer in the history of medieval and renaissance science, where he emphasized a continuity between medieval and early modern science. Duhem was also one of the most influential philosophers of science of his day, thanks to his opposition to mechanistic modes of explanation and his development of a holistic conception of scientific theories, according to which individual empirical propositions are not tested in isolation but only in conjunction with other theoretical claims and associated auxiliary hypotheses. Such a view of theory testing entails that there are no ‘crucial experiments’ deciding unambiguously for or against a given theory and that empirical evidence therefore underdetermines theory choice. Theory choice is thus partly a matter of convention. Duhem’s conventionalism is similar in kind to
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Page 219 that later advocated by Otto Neurath and by W.V. Quine. See also: CRUCIAL EXPERIMENTS; SCIENTIFIC METHOD Further reading Duhem, P.M.M. (1996) Essays in the History and Philosophy of Science , trans. R. Ariew and P. Barker, Indianapolis, IN and Cambridge: Hackett. (A collection of essays in translation.) Jaki, S.L. (1987) Uneasy Genius: The Life and Work of Pierre Duhem , Dordrecht: Nijhoff. (The most comprehensive recent biography; also contains the most complete bibliography.) DON HOWARD DÜHRING, EUGEN KARL (1833–1921) Versatile and prolific, the German philosopher Eugen Dühring constructed a metaphysical system uniting naturalism with a priori principles, such as a ‘law of definite number’ which asserts that everything countable must be finite; hence, the natural world must be limited, and past time must have a beginning. Value judgments are based on natural drives and feelings: in particular, the concept of injustice arises from the resentment produced by injury. Since criminal law is ‘a public administration of revenge’, the deterrent function of punishment is irrelevant to its rightness. In politics, Dühring combined his socialism with a fervent racism, chauvinism and anti-Semitism. See also: NATURALISM IN ETHICS Further reading Dühring, E. (1875) Cursus der Philosophie (Course of Philosophy), Leipzig: E. Koschny. (Exposition of Dühring’s metaphysical system.) Vaihinger, H. (1876) Hartmann, Dühring und Lange, Iserlohn: J. Baedeker. (A balanced contemporary assessment.) ROBIN SMALL DUMMETT, MICHAEL ANTHONY EARDLEY (1925–) For the English logician and philosopher of language Michael Dummett, the core of philosophy lies in the theory of meaning. His exploration of meaning begins with the model proposed by Gottlob Frege, of whose work Dummett is a prime expositor. A central feature of that model is that the sense (content) of a sentence is given by a condition for its truth, displayed as deriving from its constituent structure. If sense so explicated is to explain linguistic practice, knowledge of these truth-conditions must be attributed to language users by identifying features of use in which it is manifested. Analysis of truth suggests we seek such manifestation in patterns of assertion. But scrutiny of those patterns shows that there is no distinction between use which manifests knowledge of classical truth-conditions, and use which manifests knowledge of a weaker kind of truth – for example, one which holds whenever we possess a potential warrant for a statement. Such considerations motivate reconstruing sense as given by conditions for this weaker kind of truth. But rejigging Fregean semantics in line with such a conception is highly nontrivial. Mathematical intuitionism, properly construed, gives us models for doing so with mathematical language; Dummett’s programme is to extend such work to everyday discourses. Since he further argues that realism consists in defending the classical semantics for a discourse, this programme amounts to probing the viability of antirealism about such things as the material world, other minds and past events. See also: FREGE, G. Further reading Dummett, M.A.E. (1973) Frege: Philosophy of Language, London: Duckworth; 2nd edn, 1981. (Detailed discussion of Frege’s philosophy of language, and themes arising therefrom.) Heck, R. (ed.) (1998, forthcoming) Logic, Language, and Reality: Essays in Honour of Michael Dummett, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Collection of papers on all aspects of Dummett’s work.) BARRY TAYLOR DUNS SCOTUS, JOHN ( c .1266–1308) Duns Scotus was one of the most important thinkers of the entire scholastic period. Of Scottish origin, he was a member of the Franciscan order and undertook theological studies first at Oxford and later at Paris. He left behind a considerable body of work, much of which unfortunately was still undergoing revision at the time of his death. Notable among his works are questions on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, at least three different commentaries on the Sentences of Peter Lombard (the required text for a degree in theology) and a lengthy set of university disputations, the quodlibetal questions. A notoriously difficult and highly original thinker, Scotus was referred to as ‘the subtle
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Page 220 doctor’ because of his extremely nuanced and technical reasoning. On many important issues, Scotus developed his positions in critical reaction to the Parisian theologian Henry of Ghent, the most important thinker of the immediately preceding generation and a severe Augustinian critic of Aquinas. Scotus made important and influential contributions in metaphysics, epistemology and ethics. In metaphysics, he was the first scholastic to hold that the concepts of being and the other transcendentals were univocal, not only in application to substance and accidents but even to God and creatures. In this, Scotus broke with the unanimous view based on Aristotle that being could not be predicated of both substance and accident, much less of, except by analogy, God and creature. Scotus argued in general that univocity was required to underwrite any natural knowledge of God from creatures or of substance from accidents. Given univocity, he concluded that the primary object of the created intellect was being, rejecting Aquinas’ Aristotelian view that it was limited to the quiddity of the sense particular and Henry of Ghent’s Augustinian view that it was God. That is, Scotus argues that even the finite intellect of the creature is by its very nature open to knowing all being. Scotus’ proof of the existence of God is the most ambitious of the entire scholastic period. Prior efforts at demonstrating the existence of God showed little concern with connecting the eclectic body of inherited arguments. Scotus’ proof stands apart as an attempt to integrate logically into a single demonstration the various lines of traditional argument, culminating in the existence of God as an actually infinite being. As a result, his demonstration is exceedingly complex, establishing within a sustained and protracted argument God as first efficient cause, as ultimate final cause and as most eminent being – the so-called triple primacy – the identity within a unique nature of these primacies, and finally the actual infinity of this primary nature. Only with this final result of infinity is Scotus prepared to claim he has fully demonstrated the existence of God. Notable features of the proof include Scotus’ rejection of Aristotle’s argument from Physics VIII (the favoured demonstration of Aquinas), the reduction of exemplar cause to a species of efficient cause, important clarifications about the causal relations at issue in arguments against infinite regress, an a priori proof constructed from the possibility of God similar to that proposed by Leibniz, and the rejection of the traditional argument that the infinity of God can be inferred from creation ex nihilo . Scotus is a realist on the issue of universals and one of the main adversaries of Ockham’s programme of nominalism. He endorsed Avicenna’s theory of the common nature, according to which essences have an independence and priority to their existence as either universal in the mind or singular outside it. Intepreting Avicenna, Scotus argued that natures as common must have their own proper unity which is both real and less than the numerical unity of a singular; that is, natures are common prior to any act of the intellect and possess their own real, lesser unity. They are accordingly not of themselves singular, but require a principle of individuation. Rejecting the standard views that essences are individuated by either actual existence, quantity or matter, Scotus maintained that the principle of individuation is a further substantial difference added to the species. This ‘individual difference’ is the so-called haecceitas or ‘thisness’, a term used seldom by Scotus himself. The common nature and individual difference were said by Scotus to be really identical in the individual, but ‘formally distinct’. The ‘formal distinction,’ developed by Scotus chiefly in connection with the Trinity and the divine attributes, is an integral part of his realism and was as such attacked by Ockham. It admits within one and the same thing a distinction between realities, formalities or entities antecedent to any act of the intellect to provide an objective foundation for our concepts. These formalities are nonetheless really identical and inseparably united within the individual. In epistemology, Scotus is important for his demolition of Augustinian illumination, at least in the elaborate defence of it given by Henry of Ghent, and the distinction between intuitive and abstractive cognition. Scotus rejected Henry’s defence as leading to nothing but scepticism, and set about giving a complete account of certitude apart from illumination. He grounded certitude in the knowledge of selfevident propositions, induction and awareness of our own states. After Scotus, illumination never made a serious recovery. Scotus’ other epistemological contribution was the allocation to the intellect of a direct, existential awareness of the intelligible object. This was called intuitive cognition, in contrast to abstractive knowledge, which seized the object independently of whether it was present to the intellect in actual existence or not. This distinction, credited to Scotus by his contemporaries, was invoked in
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Page 221 nearly every subsequent scholastic discussion of certitude. While known primarily for his metaphysics, the importance and originality of Scotus’ ethical theory has been increasingly appreciated. Scotus is a voluntarist, holding for example that not all of the natural law (the decalogue) is absolutely binding, that prudence and the moral virtues are not necessarily connected and that the will can act against a completely correct judgment of the intellect. It is Scotus’ theory of will itself, however, that has attracted the most attention. He argues that the will is a power for opposites, not just in the sense that it can have opposite acts over time but in the deeper sense that, even when actually willing one thing, it retains a real, active power to will the opposite. In other words, he detaches the notion of freedom from those of time and variability, arguing that if a created will existed only for an instant its choice would still be free. In this, he has been heralded as breaking with ancient notions of modality that treated contingency principally in terms of change over time. Scotus argued that the will, as a capacity for opposites, was the only truly rational power, where the rational was opposed to purely natural agents whose action was determined. In this sense, the intellect, as a purely natural agent, was not a rational power. Finally, Scotus endowed the will with an innate inclination to the good in itself apart from any advantage it might bring to the agent. This inclination or affection for the just ( affectio iustitiae , as it was termed by Anselm), enabled the will to escape the deterministic inclination of natures toward their own perfection and fulfilment. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM, MEDIEVAL; GOD, ARGUMENTS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF; HENRY OF GHENT Further reading Duns Scotus ( c .1308) De primo principio (On First Principle), ed. and trans. A.B. Wolter, John Duns Scotus: A Treatise on God as First Principle , Chicago, IL: Franciscan Herald Press, 1966; 2nd revised edn, 1983. (An edition and translation of De primo principio . The revised edition adds an extensive commentary.) Wolter, A.B. (1990) The Philosophical Theology of John Duns Scotus , ed. M. Adams, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. (Collection of many of Wolter’s excellent and clear articles on Scotus covering main topics in his epistemology, metaphysics and theory of will.) STEPHEN D. DUMONT DURAN, PROFIAT (d. c .1414) The Spanish-Jewish theologian and polemicist Profiat Duran, known also as Efodi, produced a wide variety of works displaying a considerable understanding of Christian culture, which he then used to criticize Christianity from a Jewish perspective. Heavily influenced by both Maimonides and Abraham ibn Ezra, he stressed the dual nature of the Torah as a system of belief and practice. His work includes Neoplatonic and astrological ideas, and sought to emphasize the salvific force of the Torah. See also: IBN EZRA, A.; MAIMONIDES, M. Further reading Sirat, C. (1985) A History of Jewish Philosophy in the Middle Ages, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 352–7. (General discussion of Duran’s life and works, linking him closely with Abraham ibn Ezra and Moses Maimonides.) MENACHEM KELLNER OLIVER LEAMAN DURAN, SIMEON BEN TZEMACH (1361–1444) Simeon Duran was born in Spain but fled to North Africa to escape the anti-Jewish outbreaks of 1391. He was chiefly a religious thinker who incorporated a variety of philosophical traditions into his thought. He argues that revelation is the only certain route to knowledge. Following this principle, he criticizes those who argued that some of the principles of religion are more important or basic than others. To reject any aspect of religious law is to abandon the whole, and on this point Duran sets himself against Maimonides. See also: MAIMONIDES, M. Further reading Kellner, M. (1986) Dogma in Medieval Jewish Thought, Oxford: Oxford University Press, ch. 3. (Contains translations of Duran’s writings on dogma and analyses of them; the notes contain full references to studies on Duran.) MENACHEM KELLNER DURANDUS OF ST POURÇAIN (1275?–1334) Although strongly Aristotelian in outlook, the French Dominican scholar Durandus rejected certain classic points of Thomist doctrine such as the speculative ‘scientific’ and unique nature of theology, the theory of the active intellect and the doctrine of species. After carrying out a
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Page 222 detailed examination of the Thomist theses, Durandus decided firmly in favour of theology being faith in revelation, something aenigmatica and therefore meritorious. In this way, in the opinion of some modern scholars, he anticipated the position of William of Ockham; the position later known as ‘Ockham’s razor’ appears more than once in his writings. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM, MEDIEVAL Further reading Godet, P. (1924) ‘Durand de S. Pourçain’, Dictionnaire de théologie catholique , vol. IV, Paris: Letouzey et Ane, 1964–6. (Short biography.) MARIATERESA FUMAGALLI BEONIO-BROCCHIERI DURKHEIM, ÉMILE (1858–1917) Émile Durkheim is generally recognized to be one of the founders of sociology as a distinct scientific discipline. Born in France and trained as a philosopher, Durkheim identified the central theme of sociology as the emergence and persistence of morality and social solidarity (along with their pathologies) in modern and traditional human societies. His distinctive approach to sociology was to adopt the positivistic method in identifying and explaining social facts – the facts of the moral life. Sociology was to be, in Durkheim’s own words, a science of ethics. Durkheim’s sociology combined a positivistic methodology of research with an idealistic theory of social solidarity. On the one hand, Durkheim forcefully claimed that the empirical observation and analysis of regularities in the social world must be the starting point of the sociological enterprise; on the other hand, he was equally emphatic in claiming that sociological investigation must deal with the ultimate ends of human action – the moral values and goals that guide human conduct and create the essential conditions for social solidarity. Accordingly, in his scholarly writings on the division of labour, on suicide, on education, and on religion, Durkheim sought to identify through empirical evidence the major sources of social solidarity and of the social pathologies that undermine it. See also: SOCIAL SCIENCE, METHODOLOGY OF Further reading Durkheim, É. (1895) Les regles de la methode sociologique, Paris: Alcan; trans. S.A. Solovay and J.H. Mueller, The Rules of Sociological Method, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1938. (Durkheim’s attempt to establish sociology as a discipline.) Thompson, K. (1982) Émile Durkheim, New York: Tavistock. (An introductory overview of Durkheim.) MARCO ORRÚ DUTCH BOOK ARGUMENT see PROBABILITY THEORY AND EPISTEMOLOGY DUTY To have a duty is, above all, to be subject to a binding, normative requirement. This means that unless there are exculpating reasons someone who has a duty is required to satisfy it, and can be justifiably criticized for not doing so. Having a duty to do something is like having been given a command by someone who has a right to be obeyed: it must be done. Sometimes we speak as if we have duties to individuals (such as persons and institutions). So, for example, if Jones makes a promise to Smith, then Jones has a duty to Smith to keep the promise. We also talk as if we have duties to perform, or to refrain from performing, types of actions, for instance, a duty to help those in need. Even if the performance of such a duty involves treating an individual in a certain way, the duty may not be to that individual. For example, a duty to be charitable might not be a duty to anyone, not even the recipient of the charity. An important feature of duties is that they provide some justifying reason for action. If we explain why we did something by saying that it was our duty, we are offering a justification for the action. Such a justifying reason does not depend on the entire nature of the action. For example, if we make a promise, we have some justifying reason for keeping it, regardless of what was promised, or to whom the promise was made. Again, it is like a command. If we are given a command by someone with a right to be obeyed, we have some justification for obeying it, no matter what we are commanded to do. On some views, however, the justifying reason we have for doing something because it is required by duty may not be decisive: we may have an even better reason for doing something else. None the less, that something is required by duty provides some justifying reason for doing it. Talk about duties is found in many areas; we speak, for example, of legal duties, moral duties, professional duties, the duties of a scholar and, even, matrimonial duties. This discussion will
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Page 223 focus on moral duty, but may have wider application. See also: CONSCIENCE; DUTY AND VIRTUE, INDIAN CONCEPTIONS OF Further reading Thomson, J.J. (1990) The Realm of Rights, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Includes a discussion of the relationship between duties and rights, and a discussion of who (or what) can have rights and duties.) Zimmerman, M.J. (1996) The Concept of Moral Obligation , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (A very general and comprehensive account of obligation (or duty).) ROBERT L. FRAZIER DUTY AND VIRTUE, INDIAN CONCEPTIONS OF Two principal strains of ethical thought are evident in Indian religious and philosophical literature: one, central to Hinduism, emphasizes adherence to the established norms of ancient Indian culture, which are stated in the literature known as the Dharmaśāstras; another, found in texts of Buddhism, Jainism and Hinduism alike, stresses the renunciation of one’s familial and social obligations for the sake of attaining enlightenment or liberation from the cycle of rebirth. The Dharmaśāstras define in elaborate detail a way of life based on a division of society into four ‘orders’ ( varṇas) – priests, warriors, tradesmen and servants or labourers – and, for the three highest orders, four ‘stages of life’ ( āśramas). Renunciation is valid only in the final two stages of life, after one has fulfilled one’s responsibilities as a student of scripture and as a householder. The various traditions that stress liberation, on the other hand, advocate total, immediate commitment to the goal of liberation, for which the householder life presents insuperable distractions. Here, the duties of the householder are replaced by the practice of yoga and asceticism. Nevertheless, specific ethical observances are also recommended as prerequisites for the achievement of higher knowledge through yoga, in particular, nonviolence, truthfulness, not stealing, celibacy and poverty. The liberation traditions criticized the system of the Dharmaśāstras for being overly concerned with ritual and external forms of purity and condoning – indeed, prescribing – the killing of living beings in Vedic sacrifices; but it was only in the Dharmaśāstras that the notion of action solely for duty’s sake was appreciated. The Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gītā (Song of God) represents an effort to synthesize the two ideals of renunciation and the fulfilment of obligation. It teaches that one should integrate yoga and action in the world. Only when acting out of the state of inner peace and detachment that is the culmination of the practice of yoga can one execute one’s duty without regard for the consequences of one’s actions. On the other hand, without the cultivation of inner yoga, the external forms of renunciation – celibacy, mendicancy, asceticism – are without significance. It is inner yoga that is the essence of renunciation, yet yoga is quite compatible with carrying out one’s obligations in the world. See also: FATALISM, INDIAN; KARMA AND REBIRTH, INDIAN CONCEPTIONS OF Further reading Bhagavad Gītā (Song of God) ( c .200 BC), trans. F. Edgerton The Bhagavad Gītā , Harvard Oriental Series 38–9, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1944. (A readable and accurate translation of the most important text of Hinduism.) Hopkins, E.W. (1924) Ethics of India, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. (Still the best survey of Indian ethics.) JOHN A. TABER DWORKIN, RONALD (1931–) The American philosopher Ronald Dworkin’s early, highly controversial, thesis that there are right answers in hard cases in law, coupled with his attack on the idea that law is simply a system of rules, gained him a prominent and distinct place in the anti-positivist strand of legal theory. He has developed and enriched his earlier insights by tying his notion of law-as-interpretation to the ideals of community and equality. Dworkin is an influential representative of liberal thought, who combines clear and analytical thinking with political involvement expressed in decisive and timely interventions in many of the important political debates of our time. See also: JUSTICE, EQUITY AND LAW; LEGAL IDEALISM Further reading Dworkin, R. (1986) Law’s Empire , London: Fontana. (Dworkin’s major work in legal theory on the nature of law as an interpretive practice and his prescription as to how legal interpretation should be undertaken.) Guest, S. (1992) Ronald Dworkin, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. (Sympathetic and
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Page 224 comprehensive account of the life and the works; includes full bibliography.) EMILIOS A. CHRISTODOULIDIS DYNAMIC LOGICS Dynamic logics have been designed by Pratt as formal systems for reasoning about computer programs. The main ingredients discussed are programs, operations on programs, states and properties of states. In particular, one can formalize that every execution of a program p starting in state s terminates in a state with a given property. Thus correctness statements for programs can be dealt with. According to Segerberg, programs might be viewed more generally as actions of some agent so that certain aspects of human action theory can also be formulated and studied in these systems. Further reading Segerberg, K. (1980) ‘Applying modal logic’, Studia Logica vol. 39, 275–95. (A good introduction to dynamic logic.) ULF FRIEDRICHSDORF
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Page 225 E EARLY CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY see PATRISTIC PHILOSOPHY EAST ASIAN PHILOSOPHY Sinitic civilization, which includes the Chinese-influenced cultures of Japan and Korea, established an early lead over the rest of the world in the development of its material culture – textiles, iron casting, paper, maritime arts, pottery, soil sciences, agricultural and water technologies, and so on. For centuries after the first sustained incursions of Europe into East Asia, there were more books printed in the classical Chinese language – the ‘Latin’ of East Asia – than in all of the rest of the world’s languages combined. As recently as the beginning of the industrial revolution in the eighteenth century, it was China rather than Europe which, by most standards, was the arbiter of science and civilization on this planet. If ‘philosophy’– the pursuit of wisdom – is an aspiration of high cultures generally, why then was it not until the late nineteenth century, in response to a growing relationship with Western learning, that an East Asian term for ‘philosophy’ was coined, first by the Japanese ( tetsugaku ),and then introducedintoChinese ( zhexue) and Korean ( ch’êlhak )? If it would be absurd to suggest that East Asian cultures have no history, no sociology, no economics, then how do we explain the fact that Asian philosophy is a subject neither researched nor taught in most Anglo-European seats of higher learning? 1 Uncommon assumptions, common misconceptions The prominent French sinologist Jacques Gernet (1985) argues that when the two civilizations of China and Europe, having developed almost entirely independently of each other, first made contact in about 1600, the seeming resistance of the Chinese to embracing Christianity and, more importantly, the philosophic edifice that undergirded it was not simply an uneasy difference in the encounter between disparate intellectual traditions. It was a far more profound difference in mental categories and modes of thought, and particularly, a fundamental difference in the conception of human agency. Much of what Christianity and Western philosophy had to say to the East Asians was, quite literally, nonsense – given their own philosophic commitments, they could not think it. In turn, the Jesuits interpreted this difference in ways of thinking quite specifically as ineptness in reasoning, logic and dialectic. The West has fared little better in its opportunity to appreciate and to appropriate Sinitic culture. In fact, it has fared so badly that the very word ‘Chinese’ in the English language, found in illustrative expressions from ‘Chinese revenge’ and ‘Chinese puzzle’ to ‘Chinese firedrill’, came to denote ‘confusion’, ‘incomprehensibility’ or ‘impenetrability’, a sense of order inaccessible to the Western mind. The degree of difference between a dominant Western metaphysical sense of order and the historicist ‘aesthetic’ order prevalent in the radial Sinitic world view has plagued the encounter between these antique cultures from the start. When seventeenth-century European savants such as LEIBNIZ and WOLFF were looking to corroborate their universal indices in other high cultures – the one true God, impersonal rationality, a universal language – China was idealized as a remarkable and ‘curious land’ requiring the utmost scrutiny. In the course of time, however, reported on by philosophers such as KANT, HEGEL, MILL and EMERSON, Western esteem for this ‘curious land’ plummeted from such ‘Cathay’ idealizations to the depths of disaffection for the inertia of what, in the context of the Europe-driven industrial revolution, was recast as a moribund, backward-looking and fundamentally stagnant culture. In classical Chinese there is an expression: ‘We cannot see the true face of Mount Lu because we are standing on top of it.’ Although virtually all cultural traditions and historical epochs are complex and diverse, there are certain fundamental and often unannounced assumptions on which they stand that give them their specific genetic identity and continuities. These assumptions, extraordinarily important as they are for understanding the cultural narrative, are often concealed from the consciousness of the participants in the culture who are inscribed by them, and become obvious only from a perspective external to the particular tradition or epoch. Often a tradition suspends
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Page 226 within itself competing and even conflicting elements which, although at odds with one another, still reflect a pattern of importances integral to and constitutive of its cultural identity. These underlying strands are not necessarily or even typically logically coherent or systematic, yet they do have a coherence as the defining fabric of a specific and unique culture. Looking at and trying to understand elements of the East Asian cultural narrative from the distance of Western traditions, then, embedded as we are within our own pattern of cultural assumptions, has both advantages and disadvantages. One disadvantage is obvious and inescapable. To the extent that we are unconscious of the difference between our own fundamental assumptions and those that have shaped the emergence of East Asian philosophies, we are sure to impose upon this geographical area our own presuppositions about the nature of the world, making what is exotic familiar and what is distant near. On the other hand, a clear advantage of an external perspective is that we are able to see with greater clarity at least some aspects of ‘the true face of Mount Lu’: we are able to discern, however imperfectly, the common ground on which the Confucian and the Buddhist stand in debating their differences, ground which is in important measure concealed from they themselves by their unconscious assumptions. 2 One-world natural cosmology In the dominant world view of classical East Asia, we do not begin from the dualistic ‘two-world’ reality/appearance distinction familiar in classical Greek metaphysics, giving rise as it does to ontological questions such as: ‘What is the Being behind the beings?’ Rather, we begin from the assumption that there is only the one continuous concrete world that is the source and locus of all of our experience, giving rise to cosmological and ultimately ethical questions such as: ‘How do these myriad beings best hang together?’ Order within the classical East Asian world view is ‘immanental’ and ‘emergent’, an indwelling regularity in things themselves. It is the always unique yet continuous graining in wood, the distinctive striations in a piece of jade, the regular cadence of the surf, the peculiar veining in each and every leaf. The power of creativity resides in the world itself. The order and regularity this world evidences is neither derived from nor imposed upon it by some independent, activating power, but inheres in the world itself. Change and continuity are equally ‘real’; time itself is the persistence of this self-transformation. The ‘one’ world, then, is the efficient cause of itself. Situation takes priority over agency; process and change take priority over form and stasis. The context itself is resolutely dynamic, autogenerative, selforganizing and, in a real sense, alive. This one world is constituted as a sea of qi , psychophysical energy that disposes itself in various concentrations, configurations and perturbations (see QI). There is an intelligible pattern (see LI) that can be discerned and mapped from each different perspective within the world (see DE) that is its dao, a ‘pathway’ which can, in varying degrees, be traced out to make one’s place and one’s context coherent (see DAO). Dao is, at any given time, both what the world is and how it is, always as entertained from some particular perspective or another. In this tradition, there is no final distinction between some independent source of order, and what it orders. There is no determinative beginning or presumptive teleological end. The world and its order at any particular time is self-causing, ‘so-of-itself’ ( ziran) (see CHINESE PHILOSOPHY; DAOIST PHILOSOPHY; DAODEJING; ZHUANGZI). Truth, beauty and goodness as standards of order are not ‘givens’: they are historically emergent, something done, a cultural product. Given the priority of situation over agency, there is a continuity between nature and nurture, a mutuality between context and the human being. In such a world, it is not unexpected that the Yijing (Book of Changes) is the first among the ancient classics (see YIJING). 3 Ars contextualis: the art of contextualizing The ‘two-world’ metaphysical order inherited out of classical Greece has given the Western tradition a theoretical basis for objectivity – the possibility of standing outside and taking a wholly external view of things – a ‘view from nowhere’. Objectivity is not only the basis for such universalistic claims as objective truth, impersonal reason and necessity, but further permits the decontextualization of things as ‘objects’ in our world. It is the basis on which we can separate objective description from subjective prescription. By contrast, in the ‘one world’ of classical East Asia, instead of starting abstractly from some underlying, unifying and originating principle, one begins from one’s own specific place within the world. Without objectivity, ‘objects’ dissolve into the flux and flow, and existence becomes a continuous, uninterrupted
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Page 227 process. Each person is invariably experiencing the world as one perspective within the context of many. Since there is only the one world, we cannot get outside of it. From the always unique place one occupies within the cosmos of classical East Asia, one construes and interprets the order of the world around one as contrasting ‘thises’ and ‘thats’– ‘this person’ and ‘that person’ – more or less proximate to oneself. Since each and every person or thing or event is perceived from some position or other, and hence is continuous with the position that entertains it, each thing is related to and a condition of every other. In the human world, all relationships are continuous from ruler and subject to friend and friend, relating everyone as an extended ‘family’. Similarly, all ‘things’, like all members of a family, are correlated and thus interdependent. Every thing is holographic in entailing all other things as conditions for its continued existence, and is what it is at the pleasure of everything else. Whatever can be predicated of one thing or one person is a function of a network of relationships, all of which combine to give it its role and to constitute its place and its definition. There is no strict notion of identity that issues forth as some essential defining feature – a divinely endowed soul, rational capacity or natural locus of rights – that makes all human beings equal. In the absence of such equality, the various relationships which define one thing in relation to another are qualitatively hierarchical and contrastive: bigger or smaller, more noble or more base, harder or softer, stronger or weaker, more senior or more junior. Change in the quality of relationships between things always occurs on a continuum as movement between such polar oppositions. The general and most basic language for articulating such correlations among things is metaphorical: in some particular aspect at some specific point in time, one person or thing is ‘overshadowed’ by another; that is, made yin to another’s yang . Literally, yin means ‘shady’ and yang means ‘sunny’, defining in the most general terms those contrasting and hierarchical relationships which constitute indwelling order and regularity (see YIN–YANG). It is important to recognize the interdependence and correlative character of the yin–yang kind of polar opposites, and to distinguish this contrastive tension from the dualistic opposition implicit in the vocabulary of the classical Greek world, where one primary member of a set such as Being transcends and stands independent of, and thus is more ‘real’ than the world of Becoming. The implications of this difference between dualism and correlativity contrast are fundamental and pervasive. To continue the ‘person’ example, generally in East Asian philosophy, a particular person is not a discrete individual defined in terms of some inherent nature, but is a centre of constitutive roles and relationships. These roles and relationships are dynamic, constantly being enacted, reinforced and ideally deepened through the multiple levels of natural, cultural and social discourse. By virtue of these specific roles and relationships, a person comes to occupy a place and posture in the context of family, community and world. The human being is not shaped by some given design which underlies natural and moral order in the cosmos, and which stands as the ultimate objective of human growth and experience. Rather, the ‘purpose’ of the human experience, if it can be so described, is more immediate; it is to coordinate the various ingredients which constitute one’s particular world here and now, and to negotiate the most productive harmony out of them. Simply put, it is to get the most out of what you have here and now. 4 Radial harmony A major theme in Confucianism, foundational throughout East Asia, is captured in the phrase from Analects 13.23, ‘the exemplary person pursues harmony ( ho), not sameness’ (see CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY, CHINESE; CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY, JAPANESE; CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY, KOREAN; NEO-CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY). This conception of ‘harmony’ is explained in the classical commentaries by appeal to the culinary arts. In the classical period, a common food staple throughout northern Asia was keng , a kind of a millet gruel in which various locally available and seasonal ingredients were brought into relationship with one another. The goal was for each ingredient – the cabbage, the radish, the bit of pork – to retain its own colour, texture and flavor, but at the same time to be enhanced by its relationship with the other ingredients. The key to this sense of harmony is that it begins from the unique conditions of a specific geographical location and the full contribution of those particular ingredients readily at hand – this piece of cabbage, this fresh, young radish, this tender bit of pork and so on – and relies upon artistry rather than recipe for its success. The Confucian distinction between an inclusive harmony and an exclusive sameness has an
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Page 228 obvious social and political application, underscoring the fertility of the kind of harmony that maximizes difference. This ‘harmony’ is not a given in some preassigned cosmic design, but is the quality of the combination at any one moment created by effectively correlating and contextualizing the available ingredients, whether they be foodstuffs, farmers or infantry. It is not a quest of discovery, grasping an unchanging reality behind the shadows of appearance, but a profoundly creative journey where the quality of the journey is itself the end. It is the attempt to make the most of any situation. In summary, at the core of the classical East Asian world view is the cultivation of radial harmony, a specifically ‘centre-seeking’ or ‘centripetal’ harmony which is productive of consensus and orthodoxy. This harmony begins from what is most concrete and immediate – that is, from the perspective of any particular human being – and draws through patterns of deference from the outside in toward its centre. Hence there is the almost pervasive emphasis on personal cultivation and refinement as the starting point for familial, social, political and cosmic order (see SELF-CULTIVATION IN CHINESE PHILOSOPHY). A preoccupation in classical East Asian philosophy, then, is the cultivation of this centripetal harmony as it begins with oneself, and radiates outward. The East Asian world view is thus dominated by this ‘bottom-up’ and emergent sense of order which begins from the coordination of concrete detail. It can be described fairly as an ‘aestheticism’, exhibiting concern for the artful way in which particular things canbecorrelated efficaciously to thereby constitute the ethos or character of concrete historical events and cultural achievements. Order, like a work of art, begins with always unique details, from ‘this bit’ and ‘that’, and emerges out of the way in which these details are juxtaposed and harmonized. As such, the order is embedded and concrete – the colouration that differentiates the various layers of earth, the symphony of the morning garden, the wind piping through the orifices of the earth, the rituals and roles that constitute a communal grammar to give community meaning. Such an achieved harmony is always particular and specific, and is resistant to notions of formula and replication. 5 Philosophical syncreticism As one might expect in a cultural narrative which privileges interdependence and the pursuit of radial harmony, orthodoxy is neither exclusive nor systematic. Rather, traditions are porous and syncretic. In the Han dynasty, for example, Confucianism is first fortified by elements appropriated from the competing schools of pre-Qin China such as Daoism and Legalism (see LEGALIST PHILOSOPHY, CHINESE). Later it absorbs into itself an increasingly Sinicized Buddhist tradition, evolving over time into a neo-Confucianism (see NEO-CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY). At the same time, the shuyuan acadamies established by the great neo-Confucian syncretist ZHU XI are modelled on Buddhist monastic schools. In more recent years the Western heresy, Marxism, and other elements of Western learning such as the philosophy of KANT and HEGEL, are being appropriated by China and digested to produce what today is being called the ‘New Confucianism’ (see MARXISM, WESTERN; MARXISM, CHINESE). The indigenous shamanistic tradition of Korean popular religion absorbed first Buddhism and then Confucianism from China, reshaping these traditions fundamentally to suit the uniqueness of the Korean social and political conditions (see BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY, KOREAN; CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY, KOREAN). Native Japanese Shintoism emerges as a distinction made necessary by the introduction of first Buddhism and then Confucianism, where each tradition assumes a complementary function within the culture (see SHINTō; CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY, JAPANESE; BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY, JAPANESE). More recently, in the work of Kyoto School thinkers such as NISHIDA, TANABE and NISHITANI, German idealism is mined and alloyed with the Japanese Buddhist tradition to produce new directions. Although Confucianism, Buddhism and Daoism – the dominant traditions of East Asia – have certainly been rivals at one level, it has been characteristic of the living philosophical traditions defining of East Asian culture to pursue mutual accommodation through an ongoing process of encounter and appropriation; hence the familiar expression sanjiao weiyi, ‘the three teachings (Confucianism, Buddhism and Daoism) are as one’. A continuation of this process is presently underway with the ongoing East Asian appropriation of Western philosophy. See also: ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY; CHINESE PHILOSOPHY; INDIAN AND TIBETAN PHILOSOPHY; JAPANESE PHILOSOPHY Further reading Gernet, J. (1985) China and the Christian Impact , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (A reconstructed conversation between
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Page 229 the Jesuits and Chinese intellectuals on their first encounters in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.) Hall, D.L and Ames, R.T. (1995) Anticipating China: Thinking Through the Narratives of Chinese and Western Culture, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. (A comparative study of the uncommon assumptions that ground the Chinese and Western philosophical traditions.) —— (1997) Thinking From the Han: Self, Truth, and Transcendence in China and the West , Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. (An examination of several fundamental themes that distinguish the Chinese cultural narrative from the Western philosophical tradition.) Mungello, D.E. (1985) Curious Land: Jesuit Accommodation and the Origins of Sinology , Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press. (A discussion of the inquiry of the seventeenth-century European intellectuals into Sinitic culture.) ROGER T. AMES EBERHARD, JOHANN AUGUST (1739–1809) A German philosopher and theologian, Eberhard was trained in the rationalist tradition of Christian Wolff, but was also influenced by the more empirical ‘popular philosophy’ of the Enlightenment. Although a prolific author, who wrote on virtually every area of philosophy, he is best known today for his controversies with the two foremost German thinkers of his time, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Immanuel Kant. See also: ENLIGHTENMENT, CONTINENTAL Further reading Allison, H.E. (1966) Lessing and the Enlightenment, Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press. (Contains analysis of both Eberhard’s theological views and Lessing’s critique.) HENRY E. ALLISON ECOLOGICAL PHILOSOPHY In the early 1970s a small number of academic philosophers in the English-speaking world began to turn their attention to questions concerning the natural environment. Environmental philosophy initially encompassed various types of inquiry, including applied ethics oriented to issues such as nuclear power and the deployment of toxic chemicals; more abstract extrapolations of traditional ethical theories, such as Kantianism and utilitarianism, into environmental contexts; and, also, a far more radical project involving the reappraisal of basic presuppositions of Western thought in the light of their implications for our relation to the natural world. The first two were basically extensions of existing areas of philosophy, and it is arguably the third project – often described as ‘ecological philosophy’ or ‘ecophilosophy’ – which constitutes a distinctively new branch of philosophy. It is to environmental philosophy in this third sense that the present entry is devoted. Although the ecophilosophical project was explicitly normative in intent, it was quickly found to entail far-reaching investigations into the fundamental nature of the world. Indeed it was seen by many as entailing a search for an entirely new ecological paradigm – a worldview organized around a principle of interconnectedness, with transformative implications for metaphysics, epistemology, spirituality and politics, as well as ethics. Moreover, the process of elaborating a new ecological view of the world was found to uncover the contours of an already deeply embedded worldview, organized around a principle of separation or division, underlying and shaping the traditional streams of modern Western thought. See also: ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS; GREEN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY Further reading Bateson, G. (1979) Mind and Nature , London: Wildwood House. (Systems approach to mind and nature.) Bookchin, M. (1982) The Ecology of Freedom, Palo Alto, CA: Cheshire Books. (A source book for the metaphysical foundations of social ecology.) FREYA MATHEWS ECOLOGY Philosophers of science have paid relatively little attention to ecology (compared to other areas of biology like evolution and genetics), but ecology poses many interesting foundational and methodological problems. Examples include the problems of clarifying the differences and causal connections between the various levels of the ecological hierarchy (organism, population, community, ecosystem); the issue of how central evolutionary biology is to ecology; long-standing issues concerning the extent to which the domain of ecology is more law-governed or
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Page 230 more a matter of historical contingency, and the related question of whether ecologists should rely more on laboratory/manipulative versus field/comparative methods of investigation. See also: ECOLOGICAL PHILOSOPHY; ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS Further reading Hagen, J.B. (1992) An Entangled Bank: The Origins of Ecosystem Ecology , New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. (An historical introduction to foundational issues in community and ecosystems ecology.) McIntosh, R.P. (1985) The Background of Ecology: Concept and Theory , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (A comprehensive survey – somewhat historical, somewhat philosophical – of foundational and methodological issues in ecology.) JOHN BEATTY ECONOMICS AND ETHICS Unlike many other sciences, economics is linked both to ethics and to the theory of rationality. Although many economists regard economics as a ‘positive’ science of one sort of social phenomena, economics is built around a normative theory of rationality, and has a special relevance to policy making and the criticism of social institutions. Economics complements and intersects with moral philosophy in both the concepts it has constructed and in its treatment of normative problems. Fundamental to modern economics is its conception of human beings as rational agents, whose choices are determined by complete and transitive preferences. Although economists stress the usefulness of this notion of rationality in explaining human behaviour, rationality is clearly also a normative notion. The mathematical tools economists have developed to represent and study the implications of rational action in collective and interactive contexts are thus of immediate relevance to moral philosophers. Also of interest to moral philosophy is the problematic attempt in welfare economics to fashion a normative theory of economic institutions and policies around the goal of helping people satisfy their subjective preferences. This project relies, controversially, on equating people’s wellbeing with the degree of satisfaction of their subjective preferences; an individual’s ‘utility’ on this view is no more than an index of how well their subjective preferences are satisfied. Furthermore, since most welfare economists assume that there is no meaningful way to compare degrees of preference satisfaction across people, the project also requires a scheme for weighing the effectiveness of alternative economic arrangements in satisfying preferences without weighing the comparative satisfaction levels of different individuals. Central to the project is Pareto optimality – the notion of an ‘efficient’ arrangement as one in which no individual can achieve higher preference satisfaction without someone else undergoing a reduction in their satisfaction level. Economic policies and institutions can be appraised in terms of a variety of values other than efficiency. Notable both in historical and contemporary discussions are the values of liberty, justice and equality. Since a large part of economics is carried out with a view to its possible application to policy, ethics has a significant part to play in economics. By the same token, economics may be of great importance to ethics, both through its exploration of consequences and through the development of mathematical and conceptual tools. See also: ECONOMICS, PHILOSOPHY OF; MARKET, ETHICS OF THE Further reading Hausman, D. and McPherson, M. (1996) Economic Analysis and Moral Philosophy , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (A nontechnical introduction to major issues in economics and ethics.) Sen, A.K. (1982) Choice, Welfare and Measurement , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (This collection of essays contains many of Sen’s principal earlier contributions to ethics and welfare economics.) DANIEL HAUSMAN MICHAEL S. MCPHERSON ECONOMICS, PHILOSOPHY OF People have thought about economics for as long as they have thought about how to manage their households, indeed Aristotle compared the study of the economic affairs of a city to the study of the management of a household. During the two millennia between Aristotle and Adam Smith, one finds reflections concerning economic problems mainly in the context of discussions of moral or policy questions. For example, scholastic philosophers commented on money and interest in inquiries concerning the justice of ‘usury’ (charging interest on money loans), and in the seventeenth century there was a great deal of discussion of policy concerning foreign trade. Economics only emerged as a
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Page 231 distinct field of study with the bold eighteenth-century idea that there were ‘economies’ – that is autonomous law-governed systems of human interaction involving production, distribution and exchange. This view was already well developed in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, from which much of economics derives. Economics is of philosophical interest in three main regards: it raises moral questions concerning welfare, justice and freedom; it raises foundational questions concerning the nature of rationality; and it raises methodological or epistemological questions concerning the character and possibility of knowledge of social phenomena. The fundamental theory of standard orthodox economics is of particular epistemological interest because of its resemblance to theories in the natural sciences coupled with its uneven empirical performance. More than 150 years ago John Stuart Mill confronted the problem of how to reconcile his high regard for economics (despite its empirical adequacies) with his commitment to empiricism. His solution, which was accepted by most economists until the 1930s, held that the basic principles of economics are well established by introspection or everyday experience. One can thus justifiably have confidence in economics, despite the inexactness of its implications, which is only to be expected, since economics deals only with the most important determinants of economic phenomena. In the 1930s Mill’s views were rejected as too dogmatic and insufficiently empirical. But the views that succeeded Mill’s during the generation after the Second World War, most notably the position of Milton Friedman and views deriving from the work of Karl Popper and Imre Lakatos, were less able to deal satisfactorily with the empirical inadequacies of economic theories than were Mill’s. Since the mid 1980s there have been several new approaches, ranging from Donald McCloskey’s rejection of methodological assessment at one extreme to Alexander Rosenberg’s conclusion that economics cannot be a successful empirical science at the other. See also: SOCIAL SCIENCE, HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Hausman, D. (ed.) (1984) The Philosophy of Economics: An Anthology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (A collection of both classic and recent essays in the philosophy of economics.) Smith, A. (1776) An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976. (One of the most important economics books ever written; cited in introduction.) DANIEL HAUSMAN EDUCATION, HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY OF The philosophy of education may be considered a branch of practical philosophy, aimed ultimately at the guidance of an important aspect of human affairs. Its questions thus arise more or less directly from the features of educational practice and the role of education in the promotion of individual and social wellbeing, however much its answers may be conditioned by the larger philosophical and historical settings in which they are posed. Philosophers have concerned themselves with what the aims of education should be, and through what forms of instruction, inquiry and practice those aims might be attained. This demands attention to the contents of instruction and who shall have authority over it. It demands attention to the nature of instruction itself, its epistemic dimensions and what is entailed by its reliance on language; the nature of learning and human development, both moral and intellectual; and how all of these are interrelated. The philosophy of education thus stands at the intersection of moral and political philosophy, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind and language, as they bear on the foundations of educational practice. The philosophy of education began in classical antiquity with the challenges posed by Socrates to the educational claims of the sophists. Plato and Aristotle developed systematic theories of education guided by an ethic of justice and self-restraint, and by the goal of promoting social harmony and the happiness or wellbeing of all citizens. The Stoic descendants of Socrates were expelled from Rome and the oratorical model of higher education given official sanction, but Augustine re-established the philosophical model through a synthesis of Platonism and Christianity, and in his mature educational thought brought elements of the oratorical and Platonic models together in his account of the Christian teacher’s training. The religious wars of the Reformation inspired several philosophical stances toward the relationships of Church, state, school and conscience. Hobbes argued for a consolidation of ecclesiastical and civil authority, with full sovereign authority over education; Locke for liberty, religious toleration, and private
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Page 232 education aiming at self-governance in accordance with reason; and Rousseau not just for the free development and exercise of the full array of human faculties, but for the establishment of a civic religion limited to the core of shared Christian beliefs which Enlightenment figures from Descartes onward had thought evident to natural reason. The Enlightenment’s embrace of science and reason yielded efforts towards the development of a science of learning and pedagogy in the nineteenth century, but Rousseau’s romantic reaction to it and defence of democracy were also powerful influences. In the twentieth century, Dewey produced a new synthesis of Enlightenment and Rousseauian themes, drawing on Hegel, the experimentalism of Mill, evolutionary theory and psychology, and aspects of the substance and intent of Rousseau’s pedagogy. See also: EDUCATION, PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Marrou, H. (1956) A History of Education in Antiquity , trans. G. Lamb, London: Sheed & Ward. (A readable account of educational theory and practice down through the Hellenistic, Roman and early medieval periods.) Ulich, R. (ed.) (1954) Three Thousand Years of Educational Wisdom: Selections From Great Documents , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Useful as an introduction to texts and traditions in educational thought which could not be included here.) RANDALL R. CURREN EDUCATION, PHILOSOPHY OF The philosophy of education is primarily concerned with the nature, aims and means of education, and also with the character and structure of educational theory, and its own place in that structure. Educational theory is best regarded as a kind of practical theory which would ideally furnish useful guidance for every aspect and office of educational practice. Such guidance would rest in a wellgrounded and elaborated account of educational aims and the moral and political dimensions of education, and also in adequate conceptions and knowledge of teaching, learning, evaluation, the structure and dynamics of educational and social systems, the roles of relevant stakeholders and the like. Philosophers of education often approach educational issues from the vantage points of other philosophical sub-disciplines, and contribute in a variety of ways to the larger unfinished project of educational theory. These contributions may be divided into work on the nature and aims of education, on the normative dimensions of the methods and circumstances of education, and on the conceptual and methodological underpinnings of its methods and circumstances – either directly or through work on the foundations of other forms of research relied upon by education theory. Philosophical analysis and argument have suggested certain aims as essential to education, and various movements and branches of philosophy, from Marxism and existentialism to epistemology and ethics, have suggested aims, in every case controversially. Thus, one encounters normative theories of thought, conduct and the aims of education inspired by a broad consideration of epistemology, logic, aesthetics and ethics, as well as Marxism, feminism and a host of other ‘-isms’. In this mode of educational philosophizing, the objects of various branches of philosophical study are proposed as the ends of education, and the significance of pursuing those ends is elaborated with reference to those branches of study. A second form of educational philosophy derives from substantive arguments and theories of ethics, social and political philosophy and philosophy of law, and concerns itself with the aims of education and the acceptability of various means to achieve them. It revolves around arguments concerning the moral, social and political appropriateness of educational aims, initiatives and policies, and moral evaluation of the methods, circumstances and effects of education. Recent debate has been dominated by concerns about children’s rights and freedom, educational equality and justice, moral and political education, and issues of authority, control and professional ethics. The philosophy of education has also sought to guide educational practice through examining its assumptions about the structure of specific knowledge domains and the minds of learners; about learning, development, motivation, and the communication and acquisition of knowledge and understanding. Philosophy of science and mathematics have informed the design of curriculum, pedagogy and evaluation in the teaching of science and mathematics. Philosophy of mind, language and psychology bear on the foundations of our understanding of how learning occurs, and thus how teaching may best promote it. See also: EDUCATION, HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY OF
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Page 233 Further reading Kleinig, J. (1982) Philosophical Issues in Education , London: Croom Helm. (A good survey of issues with an excellent bibliography.) Passmore, J. (1980) The Philosophy of Teaching, London: Duckworth. (A comprehensive philosophy of pedagogy.) RANDALL R. CURREN EDWARDS, JONATHAN (1703–58) Jonathan Edwards’ work as a whole is an elaboration of two themes – God’s absolute sovereignty and the beauty of his holiness. God’s sovereignty is articulated in several ways. Freedom of the Will (1754) defends theological determinism. God is the complete cause of everything that occurs, including human volitions. Edwards is also an occasionalist, idealist and mental phenomenalist. God is the only real cause of events. Human volitions and ‘natural causes’ are mere ‘occasions’ upon which God produces the appropriate effects. Physical objects are collections of sensible ‘ideas’ of colour, shape, solidity, and so on, and finite minds are collections of ‘thoughts’ or ‘perceptions’. God’s production of sensible ideas and thoughts in the order which pleases him is the only ‘substance’ underlying them. God is thus truly ‘being in general’, the ‘sum of all being’. The beauty or splendour of God’s holiness is the principal theme of two late works – End of Creation and True Virtue (both published posthumously in 1765). The first argues that God’s end in creation is the external manifestation of his internal splendour. That splendour primarily consists in his holiness and its most perfect external expression is the holiness of the saints, which mirrors and depends upon it. True Virtue defines holiness as ‘true benevolence’ or ‘the love of being in general’, and distinguishes it from such counterfeits as rational self-love, instincts like parental affection and pity, and natural conscience. Since beauty is defined as ‘agreement’ or ‘consent’ and since true benevolence consents to being in general, true benevolence alone is truly beautiful. Natural beauty and the beauty of art are merely its image. Only those with truly benevolent hearts, however, can discern this beauty. Edwards’ projected History of Redemption would have drawn these themes together, for it is in God’s work of redemption that his sovereignty, holiness and beauty are most effectively displayed. Further reading Edwards, J. (1957) The Works of Jonathan Edwards, ed. P. Miller (vols 1–2), J. Smith (vols 3–9) and H.S. Stout (vols 10–), New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957–. (The nineteenth-century Dwight edition is a widely available edition of Edwards’ work. Miller et al . will supersede earlier editions when completed; the extensive introductions are especially helpful.) Winslow, O.E. (1940) Jonathan Edwards 1703–1758: A Biography , New York: Macmillan. (Still the best biography.) WILLIAM J. WAINWRIGHT EFODI see DURAN, PROFIAT EGOISM AND ALTRUISM Henry Sidgwick conceived of egoism as an ethical theory parallel to utilitarianism: the utilitarian holds that one should maximize the good of all beings in the universe; the egoist holds instead that the good one is ultimately to aim at is only one’s own. This form of egoism (often called ‘ethical egoism’) is to be distinguished from the empirical hypothesis (‘psychological egoism’) that human beings seek to maximize their own good. Ethical egoism can approve of behaviour that benefits others, for often the best way to promote one’s good is to form cooperative relationships. But the egoist cannot approve of an altruistic justification for such cooperation: altruism requires benefiting others merely for their sake, whereas the egoist insists that one’s ultimate goal must be solely one’s own good. One way to defend ethical egoism is to affirm psychological egoism and then to propose that our obligations cannot outstrip our capacities; if we cannot help seeking to maximize our own well being, we should not hold ourselves to a less selfish standard. But this defence is widely rejected, because psychological egoism seems too simple a conception of human behaviour. Moreover, egoism violates our sense of impartiality; there is no fact about oneself that justifies excluding others from one’s ultimate end. There is, however, a different form of egoism, which flourished in the ancient world, and is not vulnerable to this criticism. It holds that one’s good consists largely or exclusively in acting virtuously, and that self-interest properly understood is therefore our best guide. See also: MORAL MOTIVATION Further reading
Sidgwick, H. (1874) The Methods of Ethics ,
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Page 234 London: Macmillan; 7th edn, 1907. (Argues for the plausibility of both egoism and utilitarianism.) RICHARD KRAUT EGYPTIAN COSMOLOGY, ANCIENT Ancient Egypt has left us no systematic philosophy in the modern sense. However, there is abundant evidence that the Egyptians were concerned with all the usual problems of existence. The answers to these questions were mostly expressed through the use of myth, or commentary upon myth. Though complex and polytheistic, Egyptian religion provided a subtle means of commentary upon a range of theological, ethical and psychological questions. The range and quality of Egyptian technical achievements presupposes a degree of theoretical knowledge, some of which has survived and some of which can be reconstructed, either from Egyptian texts themselves, or from commentaries in the classical authors. Until recently much of the latter has been dismissed as inaccurate, but modern scholars are increasingly inclined to agree with the high value which Greek commentators placed on Egyptian thinking. See also: EGYPTIAN PHILOSOPHY: INFLUENCE ON ANCIENT GREEK THOUGHT Further reading Hornung, E. (1983) Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: the One and the Many, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (Thoughtful analysis of the main patterns of Egyptian thought.) Lichtheim, M. (1973–80) Ancient Egyptian Literature , 3 vols, Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. (Clear translations and extracts from standard works.) JOHN D. RAY EGYPTIAN PHILOSOPHY: INFLUENCE ON ANCIENT GREEK THOUGHT Before the decipherment of hieroglyphics (a process only completed in the 1830s), it was widely believed that many famous Greek philosophers had studied in Egypt and that Greek philosophy was ultimately derived from a lost ‘Egyptian mystery system’. This belief was derived in part from ancient sources, which described how certain Greek philosophers had studied with Egyptian priests. The notion that these individual sessions were part of an extensive formal programme of education derives from an historical novel, Séthos (1731), by the Abbé Jean Terrasson. This book, which pretended to be based on lost original sources, offered a detailed portrait of a complex Egyptian university system. It was translated into several European languages and widely popularized in the rituals and mythology of Freemasonry. The existence of such a formal Egyptian mystery system of education was not confirmed by actual Egyptian sources once they could be read and translated. The myth has been given a new lease of life in revisionist histories of the ancient world composed by writers whose ancestors had been brought to the New World as slaves. These writers sought to show that Greek philosophy was derived from Egyptian philosophy and that what has been recognized as Western civilization stems from Africa. This entry reviews the evidence for these claims and concludes that although the Greeks had great respect for Egyptian wisdom and piety, what has always been known as Greek philosophy derives from the original work of Greeks. It finds moreover that if the Greek philosophers who lived in Ionia were influenced by any outside ideas, these came to them through the monotheistic religions of other peoples living in the Near East. See also: EGYPTIAN COSMOLOGY, ANCIENT Further reading James, G.G.M. (1954) Stolen Legacy, New York: Philosophical Library. (Claims that Greek philosophy was stolen from Egypt.) Lefkowitz, M. (1996) Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History , New York: Basic Books. (Examines Afrocentric myths about Greek culture and the origins of Greek civilization.) MARY R. LEFKOWITZ EINSTEIN, ALBERT (1879–1955) Albert Einstein was a German-born Swiss and American naturalized physicist and the twentieth century’s most prominent scientist. He produced the special and general theories of relativity, which overturned the classical understanding of space, time and gravitation. According to the special theory (1905), uniformly moving observers with different velocities measure the same speed for light. From this he deduced that the length of a system shrinks and its clocks slow at speeds approaching that of light. The general theory (completed 1915) proceeds from Hermann Minkowski’s geometric
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Page 235 formulation of special relativity as a four-dimensional spacetime. Einstein’s theory allows, however, that the geometry of spacetime may vary from place to place. This variable geometry or curvature is associated with the presence of gravitational fields. Acting through geometrical curvature, these fields can slow clocks and bend light rays. Einstein made many fundamental contributions to statistical mechanics and quantum theory, including the demonstration of the atomic character of matter and the proposal that light energy is organized in spatially discrete light quanta. In later life, he searched for a unified theory of gravitation and electromagnetism as an alternative to the quantum theory developed in the 1920s. He complained resolutely that this new quantum theory was not complete. Einstein’s writings in philosophy of science developed a conventionalist position, stressing our freedom to construct theoretical concepts; his later writings emphasized his realist tendencies and the heuristic value of the search for mathematically simple laws. See also: RELATIVITY THEORY, PHILOSOPHICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF; SPACETIME Further reading Einstein, A. (1977) Relativity: The Special and the General Theory , London: Methuen, 15th edn. (A popularization of relativity theory.) Schilpp, P.A. (ed.) (1951) Albert Einstein: Philosopher–Scientist , New York, Tudor, 2nd edn. (Discussion of Einstein’s work by leading scientists and philosophers of Einstein’s later years; includes Einstein’s Autobiographical Notes, Einstein’s ‘Reply to Criticisms’ and bibliography of Einstein’s writing.) ARTHUR FINE DON HOWARD JOHN D. NORTON ELEATIC PHILOSOPHY see GORGIAS; MEGARIAN SCHOOL; MELISSUS; PARMENIDES; PRESOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY; XENOPHANES; ZENO OF ELEA ELECTRODYNAMICS Electric charges interact via the electric and magnetic fields they produce. Electrodynamics is the study of the laws governing these interactions. The phenomena of electricity and of magnetism were once taken to constitute separate subjects. By the beginning of the nineteenth century they were recognized as closely related topics and by the end of that century electromagnetic phenomena had been unified with those of optics. Classical electrodynamics provided the foundation for the special theory of relativity, and its unification with the principles of quantum mechanics has led to modern quantum field theory, arguably our most fundamental physical theory to date. See also: MECHANICS, CLASSICAL; RELATIVITY THEORY, PHILOSOPHICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF Further reading Jackson, J.D. (1975) Classical Electrodynamics, New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2nd edn. (An authoritative modern textbook on the technical aspects of the subject.) JAMES T. CUSHING ELIADE, MIRCEA (1907–86) Born in Romania, Eliade was educated as a philosopher. He published extensively in the history of religions and acted as editor-in-chief of Macmillan’s Encyclopedia of Religion (published in 1987). The influence of his thought, through these works and through thirty years as director of the history of religions department at Chicago University, is considerable. Eliade’s analysis of religion assumes the existence of ‘the sacred’ as the object of worship of religious humanity. It appears as the source of power, significance and value. Humanity apprehends ‘hierophanies’ – physical manifestations or revelations of the sacred – often, but not only, in the form of symbols, myths and rituals. Any phenomenal entity is a potential hierophany and can give access to nonhistorical time, what Eliade calls illud tempus (‘that time’). The apprehension of this sacred time is a constitutive feature of the religious aspect of humanity. See also: PHENOMENOLOGY OF RELIGION Further reading Eliade, M. (1954) Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return , trans. W. Trask, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Probably Eliade’s most crucial and approachable short work. Contains his analysis of heterogeneous and homogeneous time, and his conception of the ‘terror of history’ and the ability to ‘reactualize’ religious time.) Olson, C. (1992) The Theology and Philosophy of Eliade, New York: St Martin’s Press. (A general and readable consideration of Eliade’s thought.)
BRYAN STEPHENSON RENNIE
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Page 236 ELIMINATIVISM ‘Eliminativism’ refers to the view that mental phenomena – for example, beliefs, desires, conscious states – do not exist. Although this can seem absurd on its face, in the twentieth century it has gained a wide variety of adherents, for example, scientific behaviourists, who thought that all human and animal activity could be explained in terms of the history of patterns of stimuli, responses and reinforcements; as well as some who have thought that neurophysiology alone is all that is needed. Two immediate objections to eliminativism – for example, that it is incoherent because it claims there are no ‘claims’, and that it conflicts with data of which we are all immediately aware – arguably beg the question against the view. What is wanted is non-tendentious evidence for the mind. Contrary to behaviourism, this seems to be available in the intelligent behaviour of most higher animals. See also: MATERIALISM IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND Further reading Lycan, W. (ed.) (1990) Mind and Cognition , Oxford: Blackwell. (Excellent anthology of many recent papers on eliminativism, dualism and reductionism.) GEORGES REY ELIOT, GEORGE (1819–80) George Eliot is the pseudonym of the English writer Mary Ann Evans, whose mind was strongly influenced by the main philosophical currents of the time and who made a distinctive contribution of her own through her critical essays and fiction. Her strongest sympathies were perhaps with the intellectual position of Ludwig Feuerbach, who saw religion as essentially an anthropological phenomenon. Eliot thought of herself primarily as an aesthetic teacher, and Feuerbach’s example provided an attractive way of viewing her own role as a novelist, using her longer fictions both as a respository for observations tested by experience and a crucible for the exposition and testing of her own ideas. Further reading Dodd, V.A. (1990) George Eliot: An Intellectual Life , London: Macmillan. (An account of her intellectual development.) Eliot, G. (1984) Daniel Deronda, ed. G. Handley, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (The standard edition of this the longest and most complex of Eliot’s novels.) JOHN BEER ELISABETH OF BOHEMIA (1618–80) Elisabeth of Bohemia, Princess Palatine, exerted an influence on seventeenth-century Cartesianism via her correspondence with Descartes. She questioned his accounts of mind–body interaction and free will, and persuasively argued that certain facts of embodiment, the unlucky fate of loved ones, and the demands of the public good, constitute serious challenges to Descartes’ neo-Stoic view of the happy life of the autonomous will. Further reading Bordo, S. (ed.) (1998) Rereading the Canon: Descartes, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. (Contains several essays exploring Elisabeth’s philosophical contributions.) EILEEN O’NEILL EMERSON, RALPH WALDO (1803–82) The American philosopher and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson developed a philosophy of flux or transitions in which the active human self plays a central role. At the core of his thought was a hierarchy of value or existence, and an unlimited aspiration for personal and social progress. ‘Man is the dwarf of himself’, he wrote in his first book Nature (1836). Emerson resented a dire portrait of humankind’s condition: ‘Men in the world of today are bugs or spawn, and are called “the mass” and “the herd”’. We are governed by moods which ‘do not believe in one another’, by necessities real or only imagined, but also, Emerson held, by opportunities for ‘untaught sallies of the spirit’ – those few real moments of life which may nevertheless alter the whole. Emerson’s lectures drew large audiences throughout America and in England, and his works were widely read in his own time. He influenced the German philosophical tradition through Nietzsche – whose The Gay Science carries an epigraph from ‘History’ – and the Anglo-American tradition via William James and John Dewey. Emerson’s major works are essays, each with its own structure, but his sentences and paragraphs often stand on their own as expressions of his thought. See also: AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY IN THE 18TH AND 19TH CENTURIES
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Page 237 Further reading Emerson, R.W. (1971–) The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson , ed. R. Spiller et al., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (The new standard edition of Emerson’s writings.) Richardson, R.D., Jr (1995) Emerson: The Mind on Fire , Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. (An excellent, comprehensive biography of Emerson.) RUSSELL B. GOODMAN EMOTION IN RESPONSE TO ART The main philosophical questions concerning emotion in response to art are as follows. (1) What kind or type of emotions are had in response to works of art? (2) How can we intelligibly have emotions for fictional persons or situations, given that we do not believe in their existence? (This is known as ‘the paradox of fiction’.) (3) Why do abstract works of art, especially musical ones, generate emotions in audiences, and what do audiences then have these emotions towards ? (4) How can we make sense of the interest appreciators have in experiencing empathetically art that is expressive of negative emotions? (A particular form of this query is ‘the paradox of tragedy’.) (5) Is there a special aesthetic emotion, raised only in the context of experience of art? (6) Is there an irresolvable tension between an emotional response to art and the demands of aesthetic appreciation? Answers to these questions depend to some extent on the conception of emotion adopted. See also: ART, VALUE OF; EMOTIONS, PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Hjort, M and Laver, S. (eds) (1997) Emotion and the Arts, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (A collection of new essays on the present topic.) Matravers, D. (1997) Art and Emotion, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (A sophisticated defence of the arousal theory of emotional content in art, with reference to both fiction and music.) JERROLD LEVINSON EMOTIONS, NATURE OF What is an emotion? This basic question was posed by William James in 1884, and it is still the focus for a number of important arguments in the philosophy of mind and ethics. It is, on the face of it, a quest for a definition, but it is also a larger quest for a way of thinking about ourselves: how should we think about emotions – as intrusive or as essential to our rationality, as dangerous or as indispensable to our humanity, as excuses for irresponsibility or, perhaps, as themselves our responsibilities? Where do emotions fit into the various categories and ‘faculties’ of the mind, and which of the evident aspects of emotion – the various sensory, physiological, behavioural, cognitive and social phenomena that typically correspond with an emotion – should we take to be essential? Which are mere accompaniments or consequences? Many philosophers hold onto the traditional view that an emotion, as a distinctively mental phenomenon, has an essential ‘subjective’ or ‘introspective’ aspect, although what this means (and how accessible or articulate an emotion must be) is itself a subject of considerable dispute. Many philosophers have become sceptical about such subjectivism, however, and like their associates in the social sciences have turned the analysis of emotions to more public, observable criteria – to the behaviour that ‘expresses’ emotion, the physiological disturbances that ‘cause’ emotion, the social circumstances and use of emotion language in the ascription of emotions. Nevertheless, the seemingly self-evident truth is that, whatever else it may be, an emotion is first of all a feeling. But what, then, is a ‘feeling’? What differentiates emotions from other feelings, such as pains and headaches? And how does one differentiate, identify and distinguish the enormous number of different emotions? See also: EMOTION IN RESPONSE TO ART; EMOTIONS, PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Calhoun, C. and Solomon, R. (eds) (1984) What is an Emotion?, New York: Oxford University Press. (A wide-ranging collection of original sources from Aristotle to contemporary philosophy and psychology, including James, Cannon, Bedford, Freud and Sartre.) Kenny, A. (1963) Action, Emotion and Will , London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (A classic study of the notion of intentionality and the role of the formal object in emotion.) ROBERT C. SOLOMON EMOTIONS, PHILOSOPHY OF Emotions have always played a role in philosophy, even if philosophers have usually denied them centre stage. Because philosophy has so often been described as first and foremost a discipline of reason, the emotions have often
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Page 238 been neglected or attacked as primitive, dangerous or irrational. Socrates reprimanded his pupil Crito, advising that we should not give in to our emotions, and some of the ancient Stoic philosophers urged a life of reason free from the enslavement of the emotions, a life of apatheia (apathy). In Buddhism, too, much attention has been given to the emotions, which are treated as ‘agitations’ or klesas. Buddhist ‘liberation’, like the Stoic apatheia, becomes a philosophical ideal, freedom from the emotions. Philosophers have not always downgraded the emotions, however. Aristotle defended the view that human beings are essentially rational animals, but he also stressed the importance of having the right emotions. David Hume, the eighteenth-century empiricist, insisted that ‘reason is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions’. In the nineteenth century, although Hegel described the history of philosophy as the development of reason he also argued that ‘nothing great is ever done without passion’. Much of the history of philosophy can be told in terms of the shifting relationship between the emotions (or ‘passions’) and reason, which are often at odds, at times seem to be at war, but ideally should be in harmony. Thus Plato painted a picture of the soul as a chariot with three horses, reason leading the appetites and ‘the spirited part’, working together. Nietzsche, at the end of the nineteenth century, suggested that ‘every passion contains its own quantum of reason’. Nietzsche’s suggestion, that emotion and reason are not really opposites but complementary or commingled, has been at the heart of much of the debate about emotions since ancient times. Are emotions intelligent, or are they simply physical reactions? Are they mere ‘feelings’, or do they play a vital role in philosophy and in our lives? Further reading James, W. (1890) What is an Emotion?, New York: Dover. (One of the classic work by the great American philosopher-psychologist, the basis of much debate about emotions ever since.) Sartre, J.P. (1938) The Emotions: Sketch of a Theory , trans. B. Frechtman, New York: Philosophical Library, 1948. (A remarkably clear, single-minded exploration of the ‘existentialist’ view of emotion, focusing on emotions as ‘magical transformations’.) ROBERT C. SOLOMON EMOTIVE MEANING Emotive meaning contrasts with descriptive meaning. Terms have descriptive meaning if they do the job of stating facts: they have emotive meaning if they do the job of expressing the speaker’s emotions or attitudes, or exciting emotions or attitudes in others. Emotivism, the theory that moral terms have only or primarily emotive meaning, is an important position in twentieth-century ethics. The most important problem for the idea of emotive meaning is that emotive meaning may not really be a kind of meaning: the jobs of moral terms supposed to constitute emotive meaning may really be performed by speakers using moral terms, on only some of the occasions on which they use them. See also: EMOTIVISM; PRESCRIPTIVISM Further reading Ayer, A.J. (1936) Language, Truth and Logic, New York: Dover. (Chapter 6 is Ayer’s classic argument for and presentation of emotivism.) Urmson, J.O. (1968) The Emotive Theory of Ethics , London: Hutchinson & Co. (Balanced consideration and development of emotive theory.) DAVID PHILLIPS EMOTIVISM Emotivists held that moral judgments express and arouse emotions, not beliefs. Saying that an act is right or wrong was thus supposed to be rather like saying ‘Boo!’ or ‘Hooray!’ Emotivism explained well the apparent necessary connection between moral judgment and motivation. If people judge it wrong to lie, and their judgment expresses their hostility, then it comes as no surprise that we can infer that they are disinclined to lie. Emotivism did a bad job of explaining the important role of rational argument in moral practice, however. Indeed, since it entailed that moral judgments elude assessment in terms of truth and falsehood, it suggested that rational argument about morals might be at best inappropriate, and at worst impossible. See also: EXPRESSION, ARTISTIC; MORALITY AND EMOTIONS Further reading Ayer, A.J. (1936) Language, Truth and Logic, London: Gollancz; 2nd edn, 1946, ch. 6. (Contains a classic statement of emotivism by a logical positivist.) Warnock, G. (1967) Contemporary Moral Philosophy ,
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Page 239 London: Macmillan, ch. 3. (Contains a critical discussion of emotivism.) MICHAEL SMITH EMPEDOCLES ( c .495–c.435 BC) Empedocles, born in the Sicilian city of Acragas (modern Agrigento), was a major Greek philosopher of the Presocratic period. Numerous fragments survive from his two major works, poems in epic verse known later in antiquity as On Nature and Purifications . On Nature sets out a vision of reality as a theatre of ceaseless change, whose invariable pattern consists in the repetition of the two processes of harmonization into unity followed by dissolution into plurality. The force unifying the four elements from which all else is created – earth, air, fire and water – is called Love, and Strife is the force dissolving them once again into plurality. The cycle is most apparent in the rhythms of plant and animal life, but Empedocles’ main objective is to tell the history of the universe itself as an exemplification of the pattern. The basic structure of the world is the outcome of disruption of a total blending of the elements into main masses which eventually develop into the earth, the sea, the air and the fiery heaven. Life, however, emerged not from separation but by mixture of elements, and Empedocles elaborates an account of the evolution of living forms of increasing complexity and capacity for survival, culminating in the creation of species as they are at present. There followed a detailed treatment of a whole range of biological phenomena, from reproduction to the comparative morphology of the parts of animals and the physiology of sense perception and thinking. The idea of a cycle involving the fracture and restoration of harmony bears a clear relation to the Pythagorean belief in the cycle of reincarnations which the guilty soul must undergo before it can recover heavenly bliss. Empedocles avows his allegiance to this belief, and identifies the primal sin requiring the punishment of reincarnation as an act of bloodshed committed through ‘trust in raving strife’. Purifications accordingly attacked the practice of animal sacrifice, and proclaimed prohibition against killing animals to be a law of nature. Empedocles’ four elements survived as the basis of physics for 2,000 years. Aristotle was fascinated by On Nature ; his biology probably owes a good deal to its comparative morphology. Empedocles’ cosmic cycle attracted the interest of the early Stoics. Lucretius found in him the model of a philosophical poet. Philosophical attacks on animal sacrifice made later in antiquity appealed to him as an authority. Further reading Kingsley, P. (1995) Ancient Philosophy, Mystery and Magic: Empedocles and Pythagorean Tradition , Oxford: Clarendon Press. (On Empedocles’ physical system and its connection with Pythagorean traditions.) Wright, M.R. (1981) Empedocles: The Extant Fragments, New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press. (An edition with translations, commentary and glossary; an indispensable aid to deeper study; contains a useful statement of the double-cosmogony interpretation.) MALCOLM SCHOFIELD EMPIRICISM In all its forms, empiricism stresses the fundamental role of experience. As a doctrine in epistemology it holds that all knowledge is ultimately based on experience. Likewise an empirical theory of meaning or of thought holds that the meaning of words or our concepts are derivative from experience. This entry is restricted to epistemological empiricism. It is difficult to give an illuminating analysis of ‘experience’. Let us say that it includes any mode of consciousness in which something seems to be presented to the subject, as contrasted with the mental activity of thinking about things. Experience, so understood, has a variety of modes – sensory, aesthetic, moral, religious and so on – but empiricists usually concentrate on sense experience, the modes of consciousness that result from the stimulation of the five senses. It is obvious that not all knowledge stems directly from experience. Hence empiricism always assumes a stratified form, in which the lowest level issues directly from experience, and higher levels are based on lower levels. It has most commonly been thought by empiricists that beliefs at the lowest level simply ‘read off’ what is presented in experience. If a tree is visually presented to me as green I simply ‘register’ this appearance in forming the belief that the tree is green. Most of our beliefs – general beliefs for example – do not have this status but, according to empiricism, are supported by other beliefs in ways that eventually trace back to experience. Thus the belief that maple trees are bare in winter is supported by
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Page 240 particular perceptual beliefs to the effect that this maple tree is bare and it is winter. Empiricism comes in many versions. A major difference concerns the base on which each rests. A public version takes beliefs about what we perceive in the physical environment to be directly supported by experience. A phenomenalist version supposes that only beliefs about one’s own sensory experience are directly supported, taking perceptual beliefs about the environment to get their support from the former sort of beliefs. The main difficulties for a global empiricism (all knowledge is based on experience) come from types of knowledge it is difficult to construe in this way, such as mathematical knowledge. See also: INNATE KNOWLEDGE; RATIONALISM Further reading BonJour, L. (1985) The Structure of Empirical Knowledge , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (An accessible presentation of a coherentist account of empirical knowledge.) Moser, P. (1989) Knowledge and Evidence, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (A difficult but comprehensive presentation of an empiricist foundationalism.) WILLIAM P. ALSTON EMPIRIOCRITICISM, RUSSIAN see RUSSIAN EMPIRIOCRITICISM EMPTINESS, BUDDHIST CONCEPT OF see BUDDHIST CONCEPT OF EMPTINESS ENCYCLOPEDISTS, 18TH-CENTURY The Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers was published in seventeen folio volumes (about 20 million words) between 1751 and 1765, accompanied by eleven volumes of engravings (1762–72). Its chief editor was Diderot, with D’Alembert acting as co-editor for the first seven volumes. The work was an expression of the Enlightenment belief in improvement through knowledge. From the outset it attracted hostile criticism, especially from ecclesiastical circles; publication was halted twice, and the last ten volumes had to be collected by subscribers from outside Paris. See also: ENLIGHTENMENT, CONTINENTAL Further reading Diderot, D. and D’Alembert, J. Le R. (eds) (1751–65) Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire rais onné des sciences, des arts et des métiers , Paris; trans. N. Hoyt et al., Encyclopedia , New York, 1965. (The translation contains thirty-nine articles.) Kafker, F.A. and Kafker, S.L. (1988) The Encyclopedists as individuals: a biographical dictionary of the ‘Encyclopédie’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 257, Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation. (Comprehensive study of the contributors.) JOHN HOPE MASON ENCYCLOPEDISTS, MEDIEVAL The modern encyclopedic genre was unknown in the classical world. In the grammar-based culture of late antiquity, learned compendia, by both pagan and Christian writers, were organized around a text treated as sacred or around the canon of seven liberal arts and sciences, which were seen as preparatorytodivine contemplation. Such compendia, heavily influenced by Neoplatonism, helped to unite the classical and Christian traditions and transmit learning, including Aristotelian logic, to the Middle Ages. Writers in the encyclopedic tradition include figures such as Augustine and Boethius, both of whom were extremely influential throughout the medieval period. Other important writers included Macrobius, whose Saturnalia spans a very wide range of subjects; Martianus Capella, whose De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii (The Marriage of Philology and Mercury) covers the seven liberal arts and sciences; Cassiodorus, who presents the arts as leading towards the comtemplation of the heavenly and immaterial; and Isidore, whose Etymologies became one of the most widely referred-to texts of the Middle Ages. These writers also had a strong influence which can be seen later in the period, particularly in the Carolingian Renaissance and again in the twelfth century. See also: PATRISTIC PHILOSOPHY Further reading Laistner, M.L.W. (1957) Thought and Letters in Western Europe, A.D. 500–1900, London: Methuen. (Has material on Hrabanus Maurus, Cassiodorus and Isidore. Standard work, but should be used with caution.) Martianus Capella (perhaps c .470) De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii (The Marriage of Philology and Mercury), ed. J. Willis, Leipzig: Teubner, 1983; trans. W.H. Stahl and E.L. Burge, The Marriage of
Philology and Mercury , vol. II, trans. W.H. Stahl and E.L. Burge, Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts,
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Page 241 New York: Columbia University Press, 1977. (Encyclopedic learning presented in an allegorical myth. Volume I of this work (with R. Johnson) gives a full introduction to Martianus Capella.) SAMUEL BARNISH ENGELS, FRIEDRICH (1820–95) Until the 1970s the most influential framework for understanding Marx’s career and ideas was the one established by Engels. This framework was crucially related to his understanding of philosophy and its supposed culmination in Hegel’s systematic and all-encompassing idealism. Engels claimed that Marx had grounded Hegel’s insights in a materialism that was coincident with the physical and natural sciences of his day, and that Marx had identified a dialectical method applicable to nature, history and thought. With respect to history, Marx was said to have formed a ‘materialist conception’, from which his analysis of capitalist society and its ‘secret’ of surplus value were derived. Together these intellectual features were the core of the ‘scientific socialism’ which, Engels argued, should form the theory, and inform the practice, of the worldwide socialist or communist movement. This was to abolish the poverty and exploitation necessarily engendered, he claimed, by modern industrial production. Philosophically the tenets of dialectical and historical materialism have been defended and modified by orthodox communists and non-party Marxists, and expounded and criticized by political and intellectual opponents. The three laws of dialectics, and the doctrine that history is determined by material factors in the last instance, have been attacked as tautologous and indeterminate. Engels’s view that scientific socialism is a defensible representation of Marx’s project has also been challenged by textual scholars and historians. See also: MARXISM, WESTERN; SOCIALISM Further reading Engels, F. (1878–9) Herrn Eugen Dührings Umwälzung der Wissenschaft, trans. E. Burns, Anti-Dühring, in K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1987, vol. 25, 5–309. (Polemical work incorporating Engels’s influential interpretation and defence of Marx.) Arthur, C. J. (ed.) (1996) Engels Today: A Centenary Appreciation , London: Macmillan. (Collection of original articles covering aspects of Engel’s work that are currrently of interest.) TERRELL CARVER ENGINEERING AND ETHICS Engineering ethics is that form of applied or professional ethics concerned with the conduct of engineers. Though engineers do many different things, they share a common history, which includes codes of ethics. Most codes explicitly declare public health, safety and welfare to be ‘paramount’. Many questions of engineering ethics concern interpretation of ‘public’, ‘safety’ and ‘paramount’. Engineers also have important obligations to client and employer, including confidentiality, proper response to conflict of interest, stewardship of resources, and honesty (not only avoiding false statements but volunteering certain information). Each engineer also has obligations to other engineers and to the profession as a whole. See also: RESPONSIBILITIES OF SCIENTISTS AND INTELLECTUALS; TECHNOLOGY AND ETHICS Further reading Johnson, D.G. (1991) Ethical Issues in Engineering , Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. (Standard collection of readings, useful for introduction to issues.) Schlossberger, E. (1993) The Ethical Engineer, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. (Emphasizes morality, rather than codes, in analyzing issues in engineering ethics.) MICHAEL DAVIS ENLIGHTENMENT, CONTINENTAL The Enlightenment is frequently portrayed as a campaign on behalf of freedom and reason as against dogmatic faith and its sectarian and barbarous consequences in the history of Western civilization. Many commentators who subscribe to this view find the Enlightenment’s cosmopolitan opposition to priestly theology to be dangerously intolerant itself, too committed to uniform ideals of individual self-reliance without regard to community or diversity, or to recasting human nature in the light of science. Modern debates about the nature of the Enlightenment have their roots in eighteenth-century controversies about the arts and sciences and about ideas of progress and reason and the political consequences of promoting them. Even when they shared common objectives, eighteenth-century philosophers were seldom in
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Page 242 agreement on substantive issues in epistemology or politics. If they were united at all, it was by virtue only of their collective scepticism in rejecting the universalist pretensions of uncritical theology and in expressing humanitarian revulsion at crimes committed in the name of sacred truth. See also: ENLIGHTENMENT, JEWISH; ENLIGHTENMENT, RUSSIAN; ENLIGHTENMENT, SCOTTISH Further reading Hampson, N. (1968) The Enlightenment, Harmondsworth: Penguin. (A general study of eighteenthcentury thinkers within their particular backgrounds.) Yolton, J.W., Porter, R., Rogers, P. and Stafford, B.M. (eds) (1991) The Blackwell Companion to the Enlightenment, London: Blackwell. (An illustrated encyclopedic treatment of political and literary doctrines and their authors, and of the arts and sciences in the eighteenth century.) ROBERT WOKLER ENLIGHTENMENT, JEWISH The eighteenth century in Europe saw the beginnings of Jewish emancipation, and this led to an intellectual development which came to be known as the Jewish Enlightenment or Haskalah. This movement emphasized the rational individual, the notion of natural law, natural religion and toleration, and natural rights. The effect of this form of thought was to provide a justification for the equality of the Jews with other citizens of national entities. The most important exponent of this movement was Moses Mendelssohn, who dominated the debate on the role Jews should play in the state and the rationality of Judaism as a religion. Ultimately the Jewish Enlightenment moved east and became connected with such movements as Zionism. In Germany it led to the development of the Reform movement. The Jewish Enlightenment very much set the agenda for the next two centuries of debate about Jewish ideas by seeking to analyse the links between religion and reason in Judaism. See also: JEWISH PHILOSOPHY IN THE EARLY 19TH CENTURY; MENDELSSOHN, M. Further reading Arkush, A. (1994) Moses Mendelssohn and the Enlightenment, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. (An effort to situate Mendelssohn within the context of the thought of Leibniz, Wolff, Kant and Lessing, based almost exclusively on Mendelssohn’s German writings.) JAY M. HARRIS ENLIGHTENMENT, RUSSIAN When Russia embraced secular European ways of thought under Peter the Great, its educated elite came into contact first with the German Enlightenment, which combined the rationalism of Descartes and Leibniz with the emotionalism of Protestant pietism. With its acknowledgement of established authority, and emphasis on a person’s responsibility to the community rather than individual rights, this strand of early Enlightenment thought suited the state-building of Peter. By the second half of the eighteenth century, the universality of the French language, the influence of geniuses such as Montesquieu and Voltaire, and the formation of a conscious Enlightenment party among the French philosophes meant that their polemical writings carried the mainstream of progressive thought. It was this Enlightenment that was embraced by Catherine the Great, who professed its tenets: tolerance and the conviction that perfecting social organization would ensure human happiness. She encouraged the growth of an intellectual elite to spread the ideas of the philosophes and form an enlightened public opinion. Russia’s tradition of absolutism and the institution of serfdom, however, proved inimical to Enlightenment values. Nevertheless, the Russian Enlightenment engendered an elite of individuals eager to act as critics and moral leaders of their society who would determine the future course of Russian social thought. See also: ENLIGHTENMENT, CONTINENTAL; LIBERALISM, RUSSIAN Further reading Billington, J.H. (1966) The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture , London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. (The chapter ‘The Troubled Enlightenment’ (213–68) examines the Enlightenment in the context of Russia’s general cultural history.) Raeff, M. (1966) The Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia: the Eighteenth-Century Nobility , New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. (The contribution of the nobility to the Enlightenment.) W. GARETH JONES
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Page 243 ENLIGHTENMENT, SCOTTISH This term refers to the intellectual movement in Scotland in roughly the second half of the eighteenth century. As a movement it included many theorists – the best known of whom are David Hume, Adam Smith and Thomas Reid – who maintained both institutional and personal links with each other. It was not narrowly philosophical, although in the Common Sense School it did develop its own distinctive body of argument. Its most characteristic feature was the development of a wide-ranging social theory that included pioneering ‘sociological’ works by Adam Ferguson and John Millar, socio-cultural history by Henry Home (Lord Kames) and William Robertson as well as Hume’s Essays (1777) and Smith’s classic ‘economics’ text The Wealth of Nations (1776). All these works shared a commitment to ‘scientific’ causal explanation and sought, from the premise of the uniformity of human nature, to establish a history of social institutions in which the notion of a mode of subsistence played a key organising role. Typically of the Enlightenment as a whole, this explanatory endeavour was not divorced from explicit evaluation. Though not uncritical of their own commercial society, the Scots were in no doubt as to the superiority of their own age compared to what had gone before. See also: ABERDEEN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY; COMMENSENSISM Further reading Campbell, R. and Skinner, A. (eds) (1982) The Origins and Nature of the Scottish Enlightenment, Edinburgh: Donald. (A collection which deals both with the institutional setting, precursors and aspects of the Scots’ thought). Stewart, M.A. (ed.) (1990) Studies in the Philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (A mix of general and specific – especially on Hume – essays.) CHRISTOPHER J. BERRY ENTAILMENT see RELEVANCE LOGIC AND ENTAILMENT ENTHUSIASM For much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, enthusiasm denotes a state of (claimed) divine inspiration. The claimed inspiration is almost always seen by those who employ the term as delusory, and enthusiasm is almost always seen as bad, akin to fanaticism, irrationality, and madness. The term is most commonly applied to Protestants outside the Church of England and, at times, to Catholics and pre-Christian mystics. Throughout the period, enthusiasm much less often denotes devotion and zeal or poetic inspiration. In the nineteenth century, concern with enthusiasm declined. See also: RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE Further reading Knox, R.A. (1950) Enthusiasm, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (A detailed history of the subject, concentrating on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.) ROBERT SHAVER ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS Theories of ethics try to answer the question, ‘How ought we to live?’. An environmental ethic refers to our natural surroundings in giving the answer. It may claim that all natural things and systems are of value in their own right and worthy of moral respect. A weaker position is the biocentric one, arguing that living things merit moral consideration. An ethic which restricts the possession of moral value to human persons can still be environmental. Such a view may depict the existence of certain natural values as necessary for the flourishing of present and future generations of human beings. Moral respect for animals has been discussed since the time of the pre-Socratic philosophers, while the significance to our wellbeing of the natural environment has been pondered since the time of Kant and Rousseau. The relation of the natural to the built environment, and the importance of place, is a central feature of the philosophy of Heidegger. Under the impact of increasing species loss and land clearance, the work on environmental ethics since the 1970s has focused largely on one specific aspect of the environment – nature in the wild. See also: AGRICULTURAL ETHICS; ECOLOGICAL PHILOSOPHY Further reading Heidegger, M. (1971) Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. and with an introduction by A. Hofstadter, New York: Harper & Row. (Three essays in this volume – ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, ‘The Thing’ and ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’ – outline Heidegger’s theory that our buildings can both disclose and appropriate our natural surroundings. When we build poetically, we dwell in and belong to the places we occupy.)
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Page 244 Norberg-Schulz, C. (1988) Architecture, Meaning and Place, New York: Electa/Rizzoli. (Provides a reading of Heidegger enriched by his own striking turns of phrase. An easy introduction to difficult subject-matter.) ANDREW BRENNAN ENVIRONMENTALISM see GREEN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY EPICHARMUS ( c . early 5th century BC) One of the earliest Greek dramatists, Epicharmus wrote mostly comedies with mythological content in Sicily around 500 BC. A number of philosophical passages were attributed to him in antiquity; their authenticity, sometimes doubted even then, has remained controversial, but the quotations were widely influential and remain of interest. Further reading Pickard-Cambridge, Sir A. (1927) Dithyramb Tragedy and Comedy, revised T.B.L. Webster, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2nd edn, 1962. (Chapter 4 pages 230–88, especially 247–55, presents an excellent survey of the material and its difficulties.) GLENN W. MOST EPICTETUS (AD c .50–c .120) Epictetus was a Greek Stoic philosopher of the late first and early second centuries AD. He developed Stoic ideas of responsibility into a doctrine of autonomy and inner freedom based on his concept of moral personality ( prohairesis ). Ethics and practical moral training are central to his thought, but he was also responsible for innovations in epistemology. He emphasized the need to achieve freedom from the passions and to maintain equanimity in the face of a world determined by a providential, though often inscrutable, fate. He frequently treats the Stoic Zeus as a personal deity, and his distinctive combination of personal piety and stringent rationalism (together with his pungent style) have contributed to his enduring influence. See also: STOICISM Further reading Epictetus ( c . early 2nd century AD) The Handbook (Enchiridion), trans. W.A. Oldfather, Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and London: Heinemann, 1925–8; trans. N. White, The Handbook of Epictetus , Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1983. (The former includes Greek text; the latter is the best available translation, with a good introduction to Epictetus.) BRAD INWOOD EPICUREANISM Epicureanism is one of the three dominant philosophies of the Hellenistic age. The school was founded by Epicurus (341–271 BC). Only small samples and indirect testimonia of his writings now survive, supplemented by the poem of the Roman Epicurean Lucretius, along with a mass of further fragmentary texts and secondary evidence. Its main features are an anti-teleological physics, an empiricist epistemology and a hedonistic ethics. Epicurean physics eveloped out of the fifth-century atomist system of Democritus. The only per se existents are bodies and space, each of them infinite in quantity. Space includes absolute void, which makes motion possible, while body is constituted out of physically indissoluble particles, ‘atoms’. Atoms are themselves further measurable into sets of absolute ‘minima’, the ultimate units of magnitude. Atoms are in constant rapid motion, at equal speed (since in the pure void there is nothing to slow them down). Stability emerges as an overall property of compounds, which large groups of atoms form by settling into regular patterns of complex motion. Motion is governed by the three principles of weight, collisions and a minimal random movement, the ‘swerve’, which initiates new patterns of motion and obviates the danger of determinism. Atoms themselves have only the primary properties of shape, size and weight. All secondary properties, for example, colour, are generated out of atomic compounds; given their dependent status, they cannot be added to the list of per se existents, but it does not follow that they are not real. Our world, like the countless other worlds, is an accidentally generated compound, of finite duration. There is no divine mind behind it. The gods are to be viewed as ideal beings, models of the Epicurean good life, and therefore blissfully detached from our affairs. The foundation of the Epicurean theory of knowledge (‘Canonic’) is that ‘all sensations are true’ – that is, representationally (not propositionally) true. In the paradigm case of sight, thin films of atoms (‘images’) constantly flood off bodies, and our eyes mechanically register those which reach them, neither embroidering nor interpreting. These primary visual data (like photographs, which ‘cannot lie’) have
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Page 245 unassailable evidential value. But inferences from them to the nature of external objects themselves involves judgment, and it is there that error can occur. Sensations thus serve as one of the three ‘criteria of truth’, along with feelings, a criterion of values and psychological data, and prolēpseis, naturally acquired generic conceptions. On the basis of sense evidence, we are entitled to infer the nature of microscopic or remote phenomena. Celestial phenomena, for example, cannot be regarded as divinely engineered (which would conflict with the prolēpsis of god as tranquil), and experience supplies plenty of models adequate to explain them naturalistically. Such grounds amount to consistency with directly observed phenomena, and are called ouk antimarturēsis , ‘lack of counterevidence’. Paradoxically, when several alternative explanations of the same phenomenon pass this test, all must be accepted as true. Fortunately, when it comes to the foundational tenets of physics, it is held that only one theory passes the test. In ethics, pleasure is the one good and our innately sought goal, to which all other values are subordinated. Pain is the only bad, and there is no intermediate state. Bodily pleasure becomes more secure if we adopt a simple lifestyle which satisfies only our natural and necessary desires, with the support of like-minded friends. Bodily pain, when inevitable, can be outweighed by mental pleasure, which exceeds it because it can range over past, present and future enjoyments. The highest pleasure, whether of soul or of body, is a satisfied state, ‘static pleasure’. The short-term (‘kinetic’) pleasures of stimulation can vary this state, but cannot make it more pleasant. In striving to accumulate such pleasures, you run the risk of becoming dependent on them and thus needlessly vulnerable to fortune. The primary aim should instead be the minimization of pain. This is achieved for the body through a simple lifestyle, and for the soul through the study of physics, which offers the most prized ‘static’ pleasure, ‘freedom from disturbance’ ( ataraxia ), by eliminating the two main sources of human anguish, the fears of god and of death. It teaches us that cosmic phenomena do not convey divine threats, and that death is mere disintegration of the soul, with hell an illusion. Being dead will be no worse than not having yet been born. Physics also teaches us how to evade determinism, which would turn moral agents into mindless fatalists: the indeterministic ‘swerve’ doctrine (see above), along with the logical doctrine that future-tensed propositions may be neither true nor false, leaves the will free. Although Epicurean groups sought to opt out of public life, they respected civic justice, which they analysed not as an absolute value but as one perpetually subject to revision in the light of changing circumstances, a contract between humans to refrain from harmful activity in their own mutual interest. See also: HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHY Further reading Asmis, E. (1986) Epicurus’ Scientific Method , Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. (The fullest account of Epicurean epistemology.) Long, A.A. (1974) Hellenistic Philosophy , London: Duckworth. (Includes the best introductory account of Epicureanism.) DAVID SEDLEY EPICURUS (341–271 BC) Epicurus of Samos founded the Epicurean school of philosophy. Initially a Democritean, he overhauled Democritus’ atomism so radically that his system was soon considered an independent one. He formed three Epicurean communities, the final one at Athens where his school, the Garden, became synonymous with Epicureanism. He and his three leading colleagues wrote voluminously, and their collective works became the school’s canonical texts in later generations. Those of Epicurus alone amounted to 300 books (scrolls), including his seminal treatise On Nature . Most were long and technical, but he also composed short digests as an aide memoire. See also: EPICUREANISM Further reading Bailey, C. (1926) Epicurus, The Extant Remains, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Unfortunately still the best English edition of Epicurus’ main surviving writings; includes Greek text.) DAVID SEDLEY EPIPHENOMENALISM Epiphenomenalism is a theory concerning the relation between the mental and physical realms, regarded as radically different in nature. The theory holds that only physical states have causal power, and that mental states are completely dependent on them. The mental realm, for epiphenomenalists, is nothing more than a series of conscious states which signify the occurrence of states of the nervous system, but which play no causal role. For example, my
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Page 246 feeling sleepy does not cause my yawning – rather, both the feeling and the yawning are effects of an underlying neural state. Mental states are real, and in being conscious we are more than merely physical organisms. Nevertheless, all our experiences, thoughts and actions are determined by our physical natures. Mental states are actually as smoke from a machine seems to be, mere side effects making no difference to the course of Nature. See also: CONSCIOUSNESS; MENTAL CAUSATION Further reading Campbell, K. (1984) Body and Mind, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2nd edn. (Classic source for new epiphenomenalism.) James, W. (1890) The Principals of Psychology , New York: Holt, ch. 5. (Extended, ultimately critical discussion.) KEITH CAMPBELL NICHOLAS J.J. SMITH EPISTEMIC LOGIC Modern treatment of epistemic logic began in the 1950s when some philosophers noticed (as scholastics had done before them) certain regularities in the logical behaviour of the concept of knowledge (for example, that knowing a conjunction is equivalent to knowing all its conjuncts) and began to systematize them. Initially these regularities were presented in the form of an axiomatic-deductive system, as in other branches of logic. Later, questions began to be asked concerning the model theory on which such an ‘epistemic logic’ is based. Still later, the concrete interpretation of this model theory has become an issue. In this way, gradually a bridge has begun to be forged from purely logical questions to such central epistemological questions as those concerning the objects of knowledge, different kinds (or even senses) of knowledge (and their interrelations), the intensional character of knowledge, the de dicto versus de re distinction, and so on. Further reading Boh, I. (1993) Epistemic Logic in the Later Middle Ages, London: Routledge. (The prehistory of epistemic logic.) Hintikka, J. and Hintikka, M.B. (1989) The Logic of Epistemology and the Epistemology of Logic , Dordrecht: Kluwer. (Essay 2 is an alternative survey of epistemic logic; essay 4 applies epistemic logic to the problem of the objects of knowledge; essay 5 treats the problem of logical omniscience; and essay 8 explores the connections between different modes of identification and their manifestations in cognitive science.) JAAKKO HINTIKKA ILPO HALONEN EPISTEMIC PARADOXES see PARADOXES, EPISTEMIC EPISTEMIC RELATIVISM An account of what makes a system of reasoning or belief revision a good one is relativistic if it is sensitive to facts about the person or group using the system. It may then turn out that one system is best for one person or group, while a quite different system is best for another. Some of the most popular accounts of how systems of reasoning are to be assessed, including those based on reflective equilibrium and those based on the system’s truth-generating capacity, appear to be relativistic. It is sometimes claimed that epistemic relativism leads to nihilism or that it severs the connection between good reasoning and true belief. See also: RELATIVISM Further reading Goodman, N. (1965) Fact, Fiction and Forecast , Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill. (The classic statement of a reflective-equilibrium account of justification.) STEPHEN P. STICH EPISTEMOLOGY Epistemology is one of the core areas of philosophy. It is concerned with the nature, sources and limits of knowledge (see KNOWLEDGE, CONCEPT OF). There is a vast array of views about those topics, but one virtually universal presupposition is that knowledge is true belief, but not mere true belief (see BELIEF AND KNOWLEDGE). For example, lucky guesses or true beliefs resulting from wishful thinking are not knowledge. Thus, a central question in epistemology is: what must be added to true beliefs to convert them into knowledge?
1 The normative answers: foundationalism and coherentism The historically dominant tradition in epistemology answers that question by claiming that it is the quality of the reasons for our beliefs that converts true beliefs into knowledge (see EPISTEMOLOGY, HISTORY OF). When the reasons are sufficiently cogent, we have knowledge (see RATIONAL BELIEFS). This is the normative
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Page 247 tradition in epistemology (see NORMATIVE EPISTEMOLOGY). An analogy with ethics is useful: just as an action is justified when ethical principles sanction its performance, a belief is justified when epistemic principles sanction accepting it (see JUSTIFICATION, EPISTEMIC; EPISTEMOLOGY AND ETHICS). The second tradition in epistemology, the naturalistic tradition, does not focus on the quality of the reasons for beliefs but, rather, requires that the conditions in which beliefs are acquired typically produce true beliefs (see INTERNALISM AND EXTERNALISM IN EPISTEMOLOGY; NATURALIZED EPISTEMOLOGY). Within the normative tradition, two views about the proper structure of reasons have been developed: foundationalism and coherentism (see REASONS FOR BELIEF). By far, the most commonly held view is foundationalism. It holds that reasons rest on a foundational structure comprised of ‘basic’ beliefs (see FOUNDATIONALISM). The foundational propositions, though justified, derive none of their justification from other propositions. (Coherentism, discussed below, denies that there are foundational propositions). These basic beliefs can be of several types. Empiricists (such as HUME and LOCKE) hold that basic beliefs exhibit knowledge initially gained through the senses or introspection (see A POSTERIORI; EMPIRICISM; INTROSPECTION, EPISTEMOLOGY OF; PERCEPTION, EPISTEMIC ISSUES IN). Rationalists (such as DESCARTES, LEIBNIZ and SPINOZA) hold that at least some basic beliefs are the result of rational intuition (see A PRIORI; RATIONALISM). Since not all knowledge seems to be based on sense experience, introspection or rational intuition, some epistemologists claim that some knowledge is innate (see INNATE KNOWLEDGE; KNOWLEDGE, TACIT; KANT, I.; PLATO). Still others argue that some propositions are basic in virtue of conversational contextual features. That is, some propositions are taken for granted by the appropriate epistemic community (see CONTEXTUALISM, EPISTEMOLOGICAL). Foundationalists hold that epistemic principles of inference are available which allow an epistemic agent to reason from the basic propositions to the non-basic (inferred) propositions. They suggest, for example, that if a set of basic propositions is explained by some hypothesis and additional confirming evidence for the hypothesis is discovered, then the hypothesis is justified (see INFERENCE TO THE BEST EXPLANATION). A notorious problem with this suggestion is that it is always possible to form more than one hypothesis that appears equally well confirmed by the total available data, and consequently no one hypothesis seems favoured over all its rivals (see INDUCTION, EPISTEMIC ISSUES IN; GOODMAN, N.). Some epistemologists have argued that this problem can be overcome by appealing to features of the rival hypotheses beyond their explanatory power. For example, the relative simplicity of one hypothesis might be thought to provide a basis for preferring it to its rivals (see SIMPLICITY (IN SCIENTIFIC THEORIES); THEORETICAL (EPISTEMIC) VIRTUES). In contrast to foundationalism, coherentism claims that every belief derives some of its justification from other beliefs (see KNOWLEDGE AND JUSTIFICATION, COHERENCE THEORY OF; PROBABILITY THEORY AND EPISTEMOLOGY; BOSANQUET, B.; BRADLEY, F.H.). All coherentists hold that, like the poles of a tepee, beliefs are mutually reinforcing. Some coherentists, however, assign a special justificatory role to those propositions that are more difficult to dislodge because they provide more support for the other propositions and are more supported by them. The set of these special propositions overlaps the set of basic propositions specified by foundationalism. There are some objections aimed specifically at foundationalism and others aimed specifically at coherentism. But there is one deep difficulty with both traditional normative accounts. This problem, known as the ‘Gettier Problem’ (after a famous three-page article by Edmund Gettier in 1963), can be stated succinctly as follows (see GETTIER PROBLEMS): suppose that a false belief can be justified (see FALLIBILISM), and suppose that its justificatory status can be transferred to another proposition through deduction or other principles of inference (see DEDUCTIVE CLOSURE PRINCIPLE). Suppose further that the inferred proposition is true. If these suppositions can be true simultaneously – and that seems to be the case – the inferred proposition would be true, justified (by either foundationalist or coherentist criteria) and believed, but it clearly is not knowledge, since it was inferred from a false proposition. It is a felicitous coincidence that the truth was obtained. One strategy for addressing the Gettier Problem remains firmly within the normative tradition. It employs the original normative intuition that it is the quality of the reasons that distinguishes knowledge from mere true belief. This is the defeasibility theory of knowledge. There are various defeasibility accounts but, generally, all of them hold that the felicitous coincidence can be avoided if the reasons which justify the belief are such that they cannot be
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Page 248 defeated by further truths (see KNOWLEDGE, DEFEASIBILITY THEORY OF). 2 The naturalistic answers: causes of belief There is a second general strategy for addressing the Gettier Problem that falls outside of the normative tradition and lies squarely within the naturalistic tradition (see QUINE, W.V.). As the name suggests, the naturalistic tradition describes knowledge as a natural phenomenon occurring in a wide range of subjects. Adult humans may employ reasoning to arrive at some of their knowledge, but the naturalists are quick to point out that children and adult humans arrive at knowledge in ways that do not appear to involve any reasoning whatsoever. Roughly, when a true belief has the appropriate causal history, then the belief counts as knowledge (see KNOWLEDGE, CAUSAL THEORY OF). Suppose that I am informed by a reliable person that the temperature outside the building is warmer now than it was two hours ago. That certainly looks like a bit of knowledge gained and there could be good reasons provided for the belief. The normativists would appeal to those good reasons to account for the acquisition of knowledge. The naturalists, however, would argue that true belief resulting from testimony from a reliable source is sufficient for knowledge (see SOCIAL EPISTEMOLOGY; TESTIMONY). Testimony is just one reliable way of gaining knowledge (see RELIABILISM). There are other ways such as sense perception, memory and reasoning. Of course, sometimes these sources are faulty (see MEMORY, EPISTEMOLOGY OF). A central task of naturalized epistemology is to characterize conditions in which reliable information is obtained (see INFORMATION THEORY AND EPISTEMOLOGY). Thus, in some of its forms, naturalized epistemology can be seen as a branch of cognitive psychology, and the issues can be addressed by empirical investigation. Now let us return to the Gettier Problem. Recall that it arose in response to the recognition that truth might be obtained through a felicitous coincidence. The naturalistic tradition ties together the belief and truth conditions of knowledge in a straightforward way by requiring that the means by which the true belief is produced or maintained should be reliable. 3 Scepticism The contrast between normative and naturalized epistemology is apparent in the way in which each addresses one of the most crucial issues in epistemology, namely, scepticism (see SCEPTICISM). Scepticism comes in many forms. In one form, the requirements for knowledge become so stringent that knowledge becomes impossible, or virtually impossible, to obtain. For example, suppose that a belief is knowledge only if it is certain, and a belief is certain only if it is beyond all logically possible doubt. Knowledge would then become a very rare commodity (see CERTAINTY; DOUBT). Other forms of scepticism only require good, but not logically unassailable, reasoning. We have alluded to scepticism about induction. That form of scepticism illustrates the general pattern of the sceptical problem: there appear to be intuitively clear cases of the type of knowledge questioned by the sceptic, but intuitively plausible general epistemic principles appealed to by the sceptic seem to preclude that very type of knowledge. Another example will help to clarify the general pattern of the sceptical problem. Consider the possibility that my brain is not lodged in my skull but is located in a vat and hooked up to a very powerful computer that stimulates it to have exactly the experiences, memories and thoughts that I am now having. Call it the ‘sceptical hypothesis’. That hypothetical situation is clearly incompatible with the way I think the world is. Now, it seems to be an acceptable normative epistemic principle that if I am justified in believing that the world is the way I believe it to be (with other people, tables, governments and so on), I should have some good reasons for denying the sceptical hypothesis. But, so the argument goes, I could not have such reasons; for if the sceptical hypothesis were true, everything would appear to be just as it now does. So, there appears to be a conflict between the intuition that we have such knowledge and the intuitively appealing epistemic principle. Thus, scepticism can be seen as one instance of an interesting array of epistemic paradoxes (see PARADOXES, EPISTEMIC). Of course, epistemologists have developed various answers to scepticism. Within the normative tradition, there are several responses available. One of them is simply to deny any epistemic principle – even if it seems initially plausible – that precludes us from having what we ordinarily think is within our ken (see COMMONSENSISM; CHISHOLM, R.M.; MOORE, G.E.; REID, T.). Another response is to examine the epistemic principles carefully in an attempt to show that, properly interpreted, they do not lead to scepticism. Of course, there is always the option of simply declaring that we do not have knowledge. Whatever choice is made, some initially plausible intuitions will be sacrificed.
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Page 249 Within the naturalistic tradition, there appears to be an easy way to handle the sceptical worries. Possessing knowledge is not determined by whether we have good enough reasons for our beliefs but, rather, whether the processes that produced the beliefs in question are sufficiently reliable. So, if I am a brain in a vat, I do not have knowledge; and if I am not a brain in a vat (and the world is generally the way I think it is), then I do have knowledge. Nevertheless, those within the normative tradition will argue that we are obliged to withhold full assent to propositions for which we have less than adequate reasons, regardless of the causal history of the belief. 4 Recent developments in epistemology Some recent developments in epistemology question and/or expand on some aspects of the tradition. Virtue epistemology focuses on the characteristics of the knower rather than individual beliefs or collections of beliefs (see VIRTUE EPISTEMOLOGY). Roughly, the claim is that when a true belief is the result of the exercise of intellectual virtue, it is, ceteris paribus, knowledge. Thus, the virtue epistemologist can incorporate certain features of both the normative and naturalist traditions. Virtues, as opposed to vices, are good, highly prized dispositional states. The intellectual virtues, in particular, are just those deep dispositions that produce mostly true beliefs. Such an approach reintroduces some neglected areas of epistemology, for example, the connection of knowledge to wisdom and understanding (see WISDOM). In addition, there are emerging challenges to certain presuppositions of traditional epistemology. For example, some argue that there is no set of rules for belief acquisition that are appropriate for all peoples and all situations (see COGNITIVE PLURALISM; EPISTEMIC RELATIVISM). Others have suggested that many of the proposed conditions of good reasoning, for example ‘objectivity’ or ‘neutrality’, are not invoked in the service of gaining truths, as traditional epistemology would hold, but rather they are employed to prolong entrenched power and (at least in some cases) distort the objects of knowledge (see FEMINIST EPISTEMOLOGY). In spite of these fundamental challenges and the suggestions inherent in some forms of naturalized epistemology that the only interesting questions are empirically answerable, it is clear that epistemology remains a vigorous area of inquiry at the heart of philosophy. See also: CRITERIA; EPISTEMIC LOGIC; HERMENEUTICS; PHENOMENALISM; SOLIPSISM Further reading Chisholm, R. (1966/1977/1989) Theory of Knowledge , Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1st, 2nd and 3rd edns. (The successive editions contain a general introduction to many issues in epistemology and increasingly complex foundationalist accounts of knowledge, along with versions of the defeasibility account. The first edition is a good place to begin a study of contemporary epistemology.) Lucey, K. (1996) On Knowing and the Known, Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books. (A collection of contemporary, fairly accessible articles on a wide variety of epistemic issues.) Sosa, E. (ed.) (1994) Knowledge and Justification, vols 1 and 2, Brookfield, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company. (A comprehensive set of contemporary essays in epistemology.) PETER D. KLEIN EPISTEMOLOGY AND ETHICS Epistemology and ethics are both concerned with evaluations: ethics with evaluations of conduct, epistemology with evaluations of beliefs and other cognitive acts. Of considerable interest to philosophers are the ways in which the two kinds of evaluations relate to one another. Philosophers’ explorations of these relations divide into two general categories: examination of potential analogies between the two fields, and attempts to identify necessary or conceptual connections between the two domains. There is little doubt that there are at least superficial similarities between ethics and epistemology: one might say that ethics is about the appraisal of social behaviour and agents, while epistemology is about the appraisal of cognitive acts and agents. On the other hand, the widely held view that behaviour subject to moral evaluation is free and voluntary while beliefs are not, suggests one important disanalogy between the two fields. See also: CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY, CHINESE; NORMATIVE EPISTEMOLOGY Further reading Moore, G.E. (1903) Principia Ethica, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968. (Contains the classic statement of Moore’s open question argument.) Zagzebski, L. (1996) Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Develops a unified virtue theory in ethics and epistemology.)
RICHARD FELDMAN
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Page 250 EPISTEMOLOGY, HISTORY OF Epistemology has always been concerned with issues such as the nature, extent, sources and legitimacy of knowledge. Over the course of western philosophy, philosophers have concentrated sometimes on one or two of these issues to the exclusion of the others; rarely has a philosopher addressed all of them. Some central questions are: What is knowledge – what is the correct analysis or definition of the concept of knowledge? What is the extent of our knowledge – about what sorts of things is knowledge actually held? What are the sources of knowledge – how is knowledge acquired? Is there any genuine knowledge? Concern with the first question has predominated in philosophy since the mid-twentieth century, but it was also discussed at some length in antiquity. Attention to the second question seems to have begun with Plato, and it has continued with few interruptions to the present day. The third question was also important in antiquity, but has also been a central focus of epistemological discussion through the medieval and early modern periods. The fourth question raises the issue of scepticism, a topic which has generated interest and discussion from antiquity to the present day, though there were some periods in which sceptical worries were largely ignored. Various attempts to answer these questions throughout the history of philosophy have invariably served to raise additional questions which are more narrow in focus. The principal one which will be treated below can be stated as: 5. What is a justified belief – under which conditions is a belief justified? There has been but occasional interest in this last question in the history of philosophy; however, it has been a crucial question for many philosophers in the twentieth century. See also: CHINESE PHILOSOPHY; EPISTEMOLOGY, INDIAN SCHOOLS OF; EPISTEMOLOGY IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY; KNOWLEDGE, CONCEPT OF Further reading Irwin, T. (1988) Aristotle’s First Principles , Oxford: Clarendon. (A fine, detailed treatment of Aristotle’s epistemological doctrines.) Popkin, R. (1979) The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza , Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. (A great source of information, both historical and philosophical.) GEORGE S. PAPPAS EPISTEMOLOGY IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY Muslim philosophers agree that knowledge is possible. Knowledge is the intellect’s grasp of the immaterial forms, the pure essences or universals that constitute the natures of things, and human happiness is achieved only through the intellect’s grasp of such universals. They stress that for knowledge of the immaterial forms, the human intellect generally relies on the senses. Some philosophers, such as Ibn Rushd and occasionally Ibn Sina, assert that it is the material forms themselves, which the senses provide, that are grasped by the intellect after being stripped of their materiality with the help of the divine world. However, the general view as expressed by al-Farabi and Ibn Sina seems to be that the material forms only prepare the way for the reception of the immaterial forms, which are then provided by the divine world. They also state that on rare occasions the divine world simply bestows the immaterial forms on the human intellect without any help from the senses. This occurrence is known as prophecy. While all Muslim philosophers agree that grasping eternal entities ensures happiness, they differ as to whether such grasping is also necessary for eternal existence. See also: LOGIC IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY; MEANING IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY Further reading Davidson, H.A. (1992) Al-Farabi, Avicenna and Averroes on Intellect , London: Oxford University Press. (Discusses the link between Greek and Arabic understanding of intellect and the various transformations the concept of intellect underwent in Islamic philosophy.) Rosenthal, F. (1970) Knowledge Triumphant: The Concept of Knowledge in Medieval Islam, Leiden: Brill. (By far the best work on epistemology in Islamic thought, authoritative and always interesting.) SHAMS C. INATI EPISTEMOLOGY, INDIAN SCHOOLS OF Each classical Indian philosophical school classifies and defines itself with reference to a foundational text or figure, through elaboration of inherited positions, and by disputing the
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Page 251 views of other schools. Moreover, the schools have literatures that define them in a most concrete sense, literatures that in some cases stretch across twenty centuries and comprise hundreds of texts. And without exception, every school takes a stance on the nature of knowledge and justification, if only, as with the Mādhyamika Buddhist, to attack the positions of others. A blend of epistemology, ontology or metaphysics, and, sometimes, religious or ethical teachings constitutes the view of most schools, and sometimes only very subtle shifts concerning a single issue differentiate one school’s stance from another’s. Relabelling schools of Indian epistemology using terminology forged in Western traditions (‘foundationalism’, ‘coherentism’, and so on) risks skewing the priorities of classical disputants and distorting classical debates. Nevertheless, there are positions shared across some of the schools, as well as refinements of position that apparently because of merit received greater attention in classical discussions and appear to deserve it still. Given the broad context of world philosophy, selectivity cannot be free from bias stemming from a sense of reverberation with non-Indian traditions of thought. With these warnings in mind, we may proceed to examine three important approaches within classical Indian philosophy to questions of epistemology. First, the late Yogācāra Buddhist philosophers, Dignāga (b. circa 480), Dharmakīrti ( c .600–660) and followers, present a complex first-person approach to questions about knowledge that is constrained by an anti-metaphysical theme (found in earlier Buddhist treatises), along with a phenomenalism that grows out of a vivid sense of the real possibility of nirvāṇa experience as the supreme good. Their thought also exhibits an academic strand that is sensitive to non-Buddhist philosophical discussions. Second, a reliabilism identifying sources of veridical awareness is the most distinctive, and most central, approach to epistemology within classical Indian philosophy as a whole. Even the Yogācāra first-person approach gets framed in terms of reliable sources (perception and inference as pramāṇas , ‘sources of knowledge’). Philosophers of diverse allegiance make contributions to what may be called this field of thought (as opposed to an approach ), since, to repeat, it is the philosophical mainstream. However, the Nyāya school (the ‘Logic’ school) leads in most periods. Finally, the Brahmanical school known as Mṇmāṃsā (‘Exegesis’), supplemented in particular by centuries of reflection under an Advaita Vedānta flag, develops what can be called an ethics of belief, namely, that we should accept what we see (for example) as real (and the propositional content of perceptual awarenesses as true), what we are told by another as true, what we infer as true, and so on, except under specific circumstances that prove a proposition false or at least draw it into question. The (Nyāya) epistemological mainstream is moved to incorporate a variation on this position; for Mṇmāṃsā and Advaita, ‘self-certification’ ( svatahprāmāṇya ), or the intrinsic veridicality of cognition, defines an alternative approach to questions about knowledge, awareness and a presumed obligation to believe. See also: BUDDHISM, YOGĀCĀRA SCHOOL OF; MĪMĀṂSĀ; NYĀYA-VAIŚEṢIKA Further reading Matilal, B.K. (1986) Perception: An Essay on Classical Indian Theories of Knowledge , Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Though Matilal defends Nyāya, his discussion ranges penetratingly over the whole of classical Indian theory of knowledge.) Matilal, B.K. and Evans, R.D. (eds) (1986) Buddhist Logic and Epistemology, Dordrecht: Kluwer. (Contains several excellent papers on the Yogācāra logicians and epistemologists.) STEPHEN H. PHILLIPS EPISTEMOLOGY, NORMATIVE see NORMATIVE EPISTEMOLOGY EPISTEMOLOGY, SOCIAL see SOCIAL EPISTEMOLOGY EPISTEMOLOGY, YORUBA see YORUBA EPISTEMOLOGY EQUALITY Equality has long been a source of political and philosophical controversy. A central question about equality is howone might link empirical or moral claims about the extent to which persons are equal to judgements about the moral acceptability or unacceptability of social inequalities, and in particular how far considerations of equality license social action to bring about greater social equality. A traditional liberal argument holds that approximate equality of human strength makes it prudent for humans to place themselves under a common political authority, thus producing a justification for equality before the law. But any generalization of this argument ignores the cases where strength is unequal and the resulting balance of power unjust. Equality of worth is a principle
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Page 252 recognized in many philosophical traditions, but its broad acceptance leaves open many problems of interpretation. In particular, it is not clear how far the principle calls for greater equality of social conditions. Persons may derive a sense of worth from enjoying the fruits of their labour, and this will legitimately block some redistribution; certain inequalities may work to everyone’s advantage; and the impartial concern of the equality principle may be at odds with the sense of ourselves as persons with specific attachments. In this context, some have wanted to soften the interpretation of equality to mean equality of opportunity or merely that inequalities should not be cumulative, although how far these moves are justified is a matter for dispute. By contrast, challenges to the equality principle from considerations of incentives, desert or difference can more easily be met. See also: BUDDHISM, YOGĀCĀRA SCHOOL OF Further reading Barry, B.M. (1989) Theories of Justice , London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. (An extended discussion of the implications for equality and social justice of the equality of strength argument and its weaknesses.) Walzer, M. (1983) Spheres of Justice , Oxford: Martin Robertson. (A statement of the view that it is cumulative inequalities, rather than inequality itself, that is morally objectionable.) ALBERT WEALE EQUITY see JUSTICE, EQUITY AND LAW ERASMUS, DESIDERIUS ( c .1466–1536) Although the Dutch writer Erasmus was not a systematic philosopher, he gave a philosophical cast to many of his works. He believed in the human capacity for self-improvement through education and in the relative preponderance of nurture over nature. Ideally, education promoted docta pietas, a combination of piety and learning. Erasmus’ political thought is dominated by his vision of universal peace and the notions of consensus and consent, which he sees as the basis of the state. At the same time he upholds the ideal of the patriarchal prince, a godlike figure to his people, but accountable to God in turn. Erasmus’ epistemology is characterized by scepticism. He advocates collating arguments on both sides of a question but suspending judgment. His scepticism does not extend to articles of faith, however. He believes in absolute knowledge through revelation and reserves calculations of probability for cases that are not settled by the authority of Scripture or the doctrinal pronouncements of the Church, the conduit of divine revelation. Erasmus’ pioneering efforts as a textual critic of the Bible and his call for a reformation of the Church in its head and members brought him into conflict with conservative Catholic theologians. His support for the Reformation movement was equivocal, however. He refused to endorse the radical methods of the reformers and engaged in a polemic with Luther over the question of free will. On the whole, Erasmus was more interested in the moral and spiritual than in the doctrinal aspects of the Reformation. He promoted inner piety over the observance of rites, and disparaged scholastic speculations in favour of the philosophia Christi taught in the gospel. The term ‘Christian humanism’ best describes Erasmus’ philosophy, which successfully combined Christian thought with the classical tradition revived by Renaissance humanists. See also: HUMANISM, RENAISSANCE; LUTHER, M. Further reading Erasmus, D. (1511) In Praise of Folly , in R.M. Adams (ed.) The Praise of Folly and Other Writings, New York: W.W. Norton, 1990. (Includes Paraclesis, Querela Pacis , the foreword to the New Testament, a selection of colloquies and letters, and critical essays by modern scholars.) McConica, J.K. (1991) Erasmus, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (A concise, insightful examination of Erasmus’ thought.) ERIKA RUMMEL ERIUGENA, JOHANNES SCOTTUS ( c .800–c .877) Johannes Scottus Eriugena is the most important philosopher writing in Latin between Boethius and Anselm. Of unknown origin (though possibly born in Ireland, as his name suggests), he was a liberal arts master at the court of Charles the Bald from the 840s onwards. A Christian Neoplatonist, he developed a unique synthesis between the Neoplatonic traditions of Pseudo-Dionysius and Augustine. Eriugena knew Greek, which was highly unusual in the West at that time, and his translations of Dionysius and other Greek authors provided access to a theological tradition hitherto unknown in the Latin West. From these sources, Eriugena produced an original cosmology with Nature as the first principle. Nature, the totality of all things that are and are not, includes both God and creation, and has four divisions: nature which creates and is not
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Page 253 created, nature which creates and is created, nature which is created and does not create, and nature which is neither created nor creates. These divisions participate in the cosmic procession of creatures from God and in their return to God. As everything takes place within Nature, God is present in all four divisions. Eriugena influenced twelfth-century Neoplatonists but was condemned in the thirteenth century for teaching the identity of God and creation. See also: CAROLINGIAN RENAISSANCE; PLATONISM, MEDIEVAL Further reading Marenbon, J. (1981) From the Circle of Alcuin to the School of Auxerre: Logic, Theology and Philosophy in the Early Middle Ages, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (A study of Eriugena in the context of Latin philosophy of the early Middle Ages.) O’Meara, J.J. (1988) Eriugena, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Contains a very useful summary of Eriugena’s On the Division of Nature together with a translation of some poems.) DERMOT MORAN EROTIC ART Erotic art is art with a sexual content, which may be more or less overt. The presence of sexual content, however, is not sufficient for a work of art to be considered erotic. Although there is more than one sense in which a work can be said to be erotic, an erotic work of art must aim at and to some extent succeed in evoking sexual thoughts, feeling or desires in the spectator, in virtue of the nature of the sexual scene it represents and the manner in which it represents it. This aim, definitive of erotic art, may be a work’s principal aim, but need not be. Erotic art often tends to express the artist’s interest in and attitude towards sexuality; and whether or not it does, seeing it as expressing the artist’s sexuality is likely to contribute towards the spectator’s sexual arousal. An erotic work of art has an intended audience of a more or less specific kind, most frequently men. Erotic art is distinguished from pornography in at least two ways. First, pornography lacks any artistic intent. Second, its main aim is not only to stimulate the spectator sexually but to degrade, dominate and depersonalize its subject, usually women. See also: AESTHETIC ATTITUDE; PORNOGRAPHY Further reading Lucie-Smith, E. (1972, 1991) Sexuality in Western Art, London: Thames & Hudson. (The standard survey of eroticism in the visual art of the West, focusing on painting.) Wollheim, R. (1987) Painting as an Art, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (A masterly survey, with a number of elaborate case studies ascribing sexual content to the work of painters in whom such content is not obvious.) JERROLD LEVINSON ERROR AND ILLUSION, INDIAN CONCEPTIONS OF From the earliest Indian speculation, illusion has been key in the exposition of Indian mysticism. In classical philosophy proper, all schools take positions concerning illusion (sometimes called error) early in their histories, and in some schools successive refinements are achieved over the centuries. There is a wealth of reflection on illusion from different angles – for example, psychological treatments that differentiate seven, eight or ten types of illusion, identifying causal factors for each variety. Illusion is taken to have ontological and epistemological ramifications brought out in elaborations of one or another metaphysical system. The sections of classical philosophical texts devoted specifically to illusion generally presuppose or smuggle in criteria of veridical awareness in the midst of causal analyses or systematic explanations of such stock examples as a snake appearing as a rope, a piece of shell appearing as silver, two moons, a ‘red’ crystal with a red flower behind it, a mirage, the ‘blue’ of the sky, and dreams. Arguments in support of a criterion, or set of criteria, of veridicality do appear, however. How we understand (1) what counts as a veridical and a nonveridical experience and (2) why individual cases of illusion occur are distinct issues, but positions taken on the former determine important parts of conceptions about why illusions occur. A peculiar stylistic feature of the later and more refined philosophic treatments is a polemical ordering, where a first view’s inadequacy is shown to lead to a second view whose inadequacy, demonstrated in turn, leads on to a better theory, and so on, until we reach the right view, which is thus established by a sequence of arguments. See also: KNOWLEDGE, INDIAN VIEWS OF; SENSE PERCEPTION, INDIAN VIEWS OF Further reading Matilal, B.K. (1986) Perception: An Essay on Classical Indian Theories of Knowledge ,
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Page 254 Oxford: Oxford University Press. (The best philosophical study to appear on issues surrounding perception as understood in classical Indian philosophies; highly readable and strongly recommended.) Phillips, S.H. (1995) Classical Indian Metaphysics: Refutations of Realism and the Emergence of ‘New Logic’, La Salle, IL: Open Court. (Contains an annotated translation of Gangeśa’s reflections on how veridicality should be characterized or defined.) STEPHEN H. PHILLIPS ESCHATOLOGY Eschatology is the study of or doctrine about the end of history or the last things. Eschatology is a branch of Christian theology, and the term still finds its primary home in that context, but it is also used broadly to cover any theory about the end of human life or of the world. There are many types of eschatological theory. Some of the most important are those of Plato, Vedāntic Hinduism, Karl Marx and Christianity. The contemporary philosopher of religion who makes most use of eschatology in his thinking is doubtless John Hick. There are several issues that are of interest to philosophers in the area of eschatology. Among them are such questions as whether there is good reason to believe that human life and/or history are moving towards a final end; whether personal identity problems are solvable in the eschaton (the end-state); whether eschatological considerations can help philosophers address other philosophical problems (for example, the problem of evil); whether the very notion of disembodied survival of death is coherent; and how (in Christian theology especially) immortality of the soul and bodily resurrection are related. See also: HEAVEN Further reading Badham, P. and Badham, L. (1982) Immortality or Extinction? , London: Macmillan. (A clear discussion of various options in personal eschatology and an assessment of the relevant evidence for and against survival of death.) Davis, S.T. (1993) Risen Indeed: Making Sense of the Resurrection , Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. (A defence of a fairly traditional notion of the resurrection of Jesus and of the general resurrection.) STEPHEN T. DAVIS ESSENTIALISM Essentialists maintain that an object’s properties are not all on an equal footing: some are ‘essential’ to it and the rest only ‘accidental’. The hard part is to explain what ‘essential’ means. The essential properties of a thing are the ones it needs to possess to be the thing it is. However, this can be taken in several ways. Traditionally it was held that F is essential to x if and only if to be F is part of ‘what x is’, as elucidated in the definition of x. Since the 1950s, however, this definitional conception of essence has been losing ground to the modal conception: x is essentially F if and only if necessarily whatever is x has the property F; equivalently, x must be F to exist at all. A further approach conceives the essential properties of x as those which underlie and account for the bulk of its other properties. This entry emphasizes the modal conception of essentiality. Acceptance of some form of the essential/ accidental distinction appears to be implicit in the very practice of metaphysics. For what interests the metaphysician is not just any old feature of a thing, but the properties that make it the thing it is. The essential/accidental distinction helps in other words to demarcate the subject matter of metaphysics. But it also constitutes a part of that subject matter. If objects have certain of their properties in a specially fundamental way, then this is a phenomenon of great metaphysical significance. See also: NATURAL KINDS; SUBSTANCE Further reading Kripke, S.A. (1980) Naming and Necessity , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Argues for essentiality of kinds and origins, and sketches a de re modal epistemology.) Sidelle, A. (1989) Necessity, Essence, and Individuation, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. (Defends a sophisticated conventionalism about essential properties.) STEPHEN YABLO ETERNITY The distinctive, philosophically interesting concept of eternity arose very early in the history of philosophy as the concept of a mode of existence that was not only beginningless and endless but also essentially different from time. It was introduced into early Greek philosophy as the mode of existence required for fundamental reality (being) contrasted with ordinary appearance (becoming). But the concept was
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Page 255 given its classic formulation by Boethius, who thought of eternity as God’s mode of existence and defined God’s eternality as ‘the complete possession all at once of illimitable life’. As defined by Boethius the concept was important in medieval philosophy. The elements of the Boethian definition are life, illimitability (and hence duration), and absence of succession (or timelessness). Defined in this way, eternality is proper to an entity identifiable as a mind or a person (and in just that sense living) but existing beginninglessly, endlessly and timelessly. Such a concept raises obvious difficulties. Some philosophers think the difficulties can be resolved, but others think that in the light of such difficulties the concept must be modified or simply rejected as incoherent. The most obvious difficulty has to do with the combination of atemporality and duration. Special objections have arisen in connection with ascribing eternality to God. Some people have thought that an eternal being could not do anything at all, especially not in the temporal world. But the notion of an atemporal person’s acting is not incoherent. Such acts as knowing necessary truths or willing that a world exist for a certain length of time are acts that themselves take no time and require no temporal location. An eternal God could engage in acts of cognition and of volition and could even do things that might seem to require a temporal location, such as answering a prayer. The concept of God’s eternality is relevant to several issues in philosophy of religion, including the apparent irreconcilability of divine omniscience with divine immutability and with human freedom. See also: GOD, CONCEPTS OF Further reading Hasker, W. (1989) God, Time, and Knowledge , Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press. (Contains a careful examination of the concept of eternity, finally rejecting it.) Leftow, B. (1991) Time and Eternity , Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press. (An excellent discussion of all aspects of the concept of eternity, with some philosophically interesting modifications of it.) ELEONORE STUMP NORMAN KRETZMANN ETERNITY OF THE WORLD, MEDIEVAL VIEWS OF The problem of the eternity of the world was much debated in Western philosophy from the twelfth through the fourteenth centuries, but its history goes back as far as Philo of Alexandria and the Church Fathers. The principal topic of controversy was the possibility of a beginningless and yet created world. The arguments that fashioned the medieval discussion rested upon assumptions concerning the concepts of eternity and creation. In addition, the issue of eternity intertwined with discussions of the relationship of God to creation, with proofs of the existence of God, with the nature of the material universe and with the nature of infinity. Some of the most ingenious ideas in these debates were obtained from pagan Greek, Islamic and Jewish traditions. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM, MEDIEVAL; NATURAL PHILOSOPHY, MEDIEVAL Further reading Dales, R.C. (1990) Medieval Discussions of the Eternity of the World , Leiden: Brill. (Assembles and discusses a wealth of source material and provides an extensive bibliographical guide.) Dales, R.C. and Argerami, O. (1991) Medieval Latin Texts on the Eternity of the World , Leiden: Brill. (A dossier of medieval Latin texts extending from the 1220s to the second quarter of the fourteenth century, accompanied by brief introductions.) J.M.M.H. THIJSSEN ETHICAL SYSTEMS, AFRICAN Ethical thought in sub-Saharan Africa grows largely out of traditions that are communalistic, not based in individual consent, anti-universalizing, naturalistic, and humanist. Within such thought, the general vocabulary of evaluation, like such English words as ‘good’ and ‘bad’, does not strongly differentiate between narrow moral assessments, on the one hand, and technical or aesthetic evaluation on the other. This is true of places where Islam has been present for many centuries. The substantial exposure, in the colonial and postcolonial periods, to European moral ideas (both through various forms of Christian missionary evangelism and as a result of contact with secular moral and political traditions from elsewhere), along with the changes produced by the modern economy, have produced a wide range of ethical ideas. However, the residue of precolonial ethical theory remains the most distinctive, if not always the most important, component and is the main topic of this entry. See also: AFRICAN TRADITIONAL RELIGIONS
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Page 256 Further reading Ackah, C.A. (1988) Akan Ethics: A Study of the Moral Ideas and the Moral Behaviour of the Akan Tribes of Ghana , Accra: Ghana University Press. (Discussion of Akan ethics in theory and practice.) Mbiti, J. (1969) African Religions and Philosophy , London: Heinemann, 2nd edn, 1990. (Covers a range of philosophical and religious ideas across Africa.) K. ANTHONY APPIAH ETHICS 1 Ethics and meta-ethics What is ethics? First, the systems of value and custom instantiated in the lives of particular groups of human beings are described as the ethics of these groups. Philosophers may concern themselves with articulating these systems, but this is usually seen as the task of anthropology. Second, the term is used to refer to one in particular of these systems, ‘morality’, which involves notions such as rightness and wrongness, guilt and shame, and so on (see RECTIFICATION AND REMAINDERS). A central question here is how best to characterize this system. Is a moral system one with a certain function, such as to enable cooperation among individuals, or must it involve certain sentiments, such as those concerned with blame (see MORALITY AND ETHICS; MORAL SENTIMENTS; PRAISE AND BLAME; RECIPROCITY)? Third, ‘ethics’ can, within this system of morality itself, refer to actual moral principles: ‘Why did you return the book?’ ‘It was the only ethical thing to do in the circumstances.’ Finally, ethics is that area of philosophy concerned with the study of ethics in its other senses (see ETHICS IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY). It is important to remember that philosophical ethics is not independent of other areas of philosophy. The answers to many ethical questions depend on answers to questions in metaphysics and other areas (see AESTHETICS AND ETHICS; METAPHYSICS; PRAGMATISM IN ETHICS). Furthermore, philosophers have been concerned to establish links between the ethical sphere of life itself and other spheres (see ART AND MORALITY; LAW AND MORALITY). Some philosophers have, for philosophical reasons, had doubts about whether philosophy provides anyway the best approach to ethics (see THEROY AND PRACTICE; WITTGENSTEINIAN ETHICS). And even those who believe philosophy has a contribution to make may suggest that ethical justification must refer outside philosophy to common sense beliefs or real-life examples (see EXAMPLES IN ETHICS; MORAL JUSTIFICATION). A central task of philosophical ethics is to articulate what constitutes ethics or morality. This project is that of meta-ethics. What is it that especially constitutes the moral point of view as opposed to others? Some argue that what is morally required is equivalent to what is required by reason overall, whereas others see morality as providing just one source of reasons (see PRACTICAL REASON AND ETHICS). Yet others have suggested that all reasons are self-interested, and that concern for others is ultimately irrational (see EGOISM AND ALTRUISM). This has not been seen to be inimical in itself to the notion of morality, however, since a moral system can be seen to benefit its participants (see CONTRACTARIANISM; DECISION AND GAME THEORY). The moral point of view itself is often spelled out as grounded on a conception of equal respect (see EQUALITY; RESPECT FOR PERSONS). But there is some debate about how impartial morality requires us to be (see IMPARTIALITY). Another set of issues concerns what it is that gives a being moral status, either as an object of moral concern or as an actual moral agent (see MORAL AGENTS; MORAL STANDING; RESPONSIBILITY). And how do our understandings of human nature impinge on our conception of morality and moral agency (see MORALITY AND IDENTITY)? Once we have some grip on what ethics is, we can begin to ask questions about moral principles themselves. Moral principles have often been put in terms of what is required by duty, but there has been something of a reaction against this notion (see DUTY). Some have seen it as outdated, depending on a conception of divine law with little relevance to the modern world (see ANSCOMBE, G.E.M.; SCHOPENHAUER, A.); while others have reacted against it as a result of a masculine overemphasis on rules at the cost of empathy and care (see FEMINIST ETHICS; WOLLSTONECRAFT, M.). These doubts are related to general concerns about the role principles should play in ethical thought. Situation ethicists suggest that circumstances can lead to the abandonment of any moral principle, particularists arguing that this is because it cannot be assumed that a reason that applies in one case will apply in others (see MORAL PARTICULARISM; SITUATION ETHICS). The casuistical tradition has employed moral principles, but on the understanding that there is no ‘super-principle’ to decide conflicts of
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Page 257 principles (see CASUISTRY). At the other end of the spectrum, some philosophers have sought to understand morality as itself constituted by a single principle, such as that not to lie (see WOLLASTON, W.). Duties have been seen also as constituting only a part of morality, allowing for the possibility of heroically going beyond the call of duty (see SUPEREROGATION). This is a matter of the scope of the notion of duty within morality. There are also issues concerning the scope of moral principles more generally. Does a given moral principle apply everywhere, and at all times, or is morality somehow bounded by space or time (see MORAL RELATIVISM; UNIVERSALISM IN ETHICS)? This question is related to that concerning what is going on when someone allows morality to guide them, or asserts a moral principle (see EPISTEMOLOGY AND ETHICS; MORAL JUDGMENT; MORAL KNOWLEDGE). How is the capacity of moral judgment acquired (see MORAL EDUCATION)? The view that humans possess a special moral sense or capacity for intuition, often identified with conscience, is still found among contemporary intuitionists (see COMMON-SENSE ETHICS; CONSCIENCE; CUDWORTH, R.; HUTCHESON, F.; INTUITIONISM IN ETHICS; MORAL SENSE THEORIES; MOORE, G.E.; ROSS, W.D.; SHAFTESBURY). Scepticism about the claims of morality, however, remains a common view (see MORAL SCEPTICISM; NIETZSCHE, F.). In recent centuries, a dichotomy has opened up between those who believe that morality is based solely on reason, and those who suggest that some nonrational component such as desire or emotion is also involved (see HUME, D.; MORALITY AND EMOTIONS; RATIONALISM). Denial of pure rationalism need not lead to the giving up of morality. Much work in the twentieth century was devoted to the question whether moral judgments were best understood as beliefs (and so candidates for truth and falsity), or as disguised expressions of emotions or commands (see ANALYTIC ETHICS; EMOTIVISM; HARE, R.M.; LOGIC OF ETHICAL DISCOURSE; PRESCRIPTIVISM; STEVENSON, C.L.). Can there be moral experts, or is each person entirely responsible for developing their own morality (see EXISTENTIALIST ETHICS; MORAL expertise)? These questions have been seen as closely tied to issues concerning moral motivation itself (see MORAL MOTIVATION). Moral judgments seem to motivate people, so it is tempting to think that they crucially involve a desire. Moral principles can be understood to rest on moral values, and debate continues about how to characterize these values and about how many evaluative assumptions are required to ground ethical claims (see AXIOLOGY; CONSTRUCTIVISM IN ETHICS; MORAL PLURALISM; VALUES). Against the emotivists and others, moral realists have asserted the existence of values, some identifying moral properties with those properties postulated in a fully scientific worldview (see FACT/VALUE DISTINCTION; MORAL REALISM; NATURALISM IN ETHICS; VALUE, ONTOLOGICAL STATUS OF). 2 Ethical concepts and ethical theories Some philosophical ethics is broad and general, seeking to find general principles or explanations of morality. Much, however, focuses on analysis of notions central to ethics itself. One such notion which has been the focus of much discussion in recent years is that of autonomy (see AUTONOMY, ETHICAL). The interest in self-governance sits alongside other issues concerning the self, its moral nature and its ethical relation to others (see AKRASIA; DETERMINISM AND INDETERMINISM; EVOLUTION AND ETHICS; FREE WILL; SELF-DECEPTION, ETHICS OF; SELF-RESPECT; WILL, THE); and the relations of these selves in a social context (see RECOGNITION; SOLIDARITY; VULNERABILITY AND FINITUDE). Other topics discussed include the nature of moral ideals, and the notions of desert and moral responsibility (see IDEALS; DESERT AND MERIT; MORAL LUCK). The question of what makes for a human life that is good for the person living it has been at the heart of ethics since the Greek philosophers enquired into eudaimonia (‘happiness’) (see ARISTOTLE; EUDAIMONIA; HAPPINESS; LIFE, MEANING OF; PLATO; SOCRATES). Once again, a philosopher’s theory of the good will almost always be closely bound up with their views on other central matters (see GOOD, THEORIES OF THE). For example, some of those who put weight on sense experience in our understanding of the world have been tempted by the view that the good consists entirely in a particular kind of experience, pleasure (see EMPIRICISM; PLEASURE). Others have claimed that there is more to life than mere pleasure, and that the good life consists in fulfilling our complex human nature (see PERFECTIONISM; SELF-REALIZATION). Nor have philosophers forgotten ‘the bad’ (see EVIL; SUFFERING; SUFFERING, BUDDHIST VIEWS OF ORIGINATION OF). Moral philosophy, or ethics, has long been at least partly concerned with the advocacy of particular ways of living or acting. Some
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Page 258 traditions have now declined (see ASCETICISM; MACINTYRE, A.); but there is still a large range of views on how we should live. One central modern tradition is that of consequentialism (see CONSEQUENTIALISM). On this view, as it is usually understood, we are required by morality to bring about the greatest good overall (see TELEOLOGICAL ETHICS). The nature of any particular consequentialist view, therefore, depends on its view of the good. The most influential theory has been that the only good is the welfare or happiness of individual human and other animals, which, when combined with consequentialism, is utilitarianism (see BENTHAM, J.; MILL, J.S.; UTILITARIANISM). It is commonly said that consequentialist views are based on the good, rather than on the right (see RIGHT AND GOOD; RIGHTS). Theories based on the right may be described as deontological (see DEONTOLOGICAL ETHICS). The towering figure in the deontological tradition has been the eighteenthcentury German philosopher, Immanuel Kant (see KANT, I.; KANTIAN ETHICS). Such theories will claim, for example, that we should keep a promise even if more good overall would come from breaking it, or that there are restrictions on what we can intentionally do in pursuit of the good (see DOUBLE EFFECT, PRINCIPLE OF; PROMISING). In the second half of the twentieth century there was a reaction against some of the perceived excesses of consequentialist and deontological ethics, and a return to the ancient notion of the virtues (see ARETĒ THEOLOGICAL VIRTUES; VIRTUE ETHICS; VIRTUES AND VICES). Work in this area has consisted partly in attacks on modern ethics, but also in further elaborations and analyses of the virtues and related concepts (see CHARITY; FORGIVENESS AND MERCY; HELP AND BENEFICENCE; HONOUR; HOPE; INNOCENCE; LOVE; PRUDENCE; SELF-CONTROL; TRUST; TRUTHFULNESS). 3 Applied ethics Philosophical ethics has always been to some degree applied to real-life. Aristotle, for example, believed that there was no point in studying ethics unless it would have some beneficial effect on the way one lived one’s life. But, since the 1960s, there has been a renewed interest in detailed discussion of particular issues of contemporary practical concern (see APPLIED ETHICS). One area in which ethics has always played an important role is medicine, in particular in issues involving life and death (see BIOETHICS; BIOETHICS, JEWISH; LIFE AND DEATH; MEDICAL ETHICS; SUICIDE, ETHICS OF). Recently, partly as a result of advances in science and technology, new areas of enquiry have been explored (see GENETICS AND ETHICS; REPRODUCTION AND ETHICS). In addition, certain parts of medical practice which previously lacked their own distinctive ethics have begun to develop them (see NURSING ETHICS). This development is part of a wider movement involving research into the ethical requirements on those with particular occupations. Some of this research is again related to scientific advance and its implications for public policy (see INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND ETHICS; RESPONSIBILITIES OF SCIENTISTS AND INTELLECTUALS; RISK; TECHNOLOGY AND ETHICS). But, again, attention has also been given to occupations not in the past subjected to much philosophical ethical analysis (see BUSINESS ETHICS; JOURNALISM, ETHICS OF; PROFESSIONAL ETHICS; SPORT AND ETHICS). The planet, and those who live and will live on it, have in recent times become the focus of much political concern, and this has had its effect on philosophy (see AGRICULTURAL ETHICS; ANIMALS AND ETHICS; DEVELOPMENT ETHICS; ECOLOGICAL PHILOSOPHY; ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS; FUTURE GENERATIONS, OBLIGATIONS TO; POPULATION AND ETHICS). But just as the scope of ethical enquiry has broadened, so there has been renewed interest in the specific details of human relationships, whether personal or between society, state and individual (see ECONOMICS AND ETHICS; MARKET, ETHICS OF THE; FAMILY, ETHICS AND THE; FRIENDSHIP; PATERNALISM; POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY; PORNOGRAPHY; SEXUALITY, PHILOSOPHY OF). See also: CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY, CHINESE; DUTY AND VIRTUE, INDIAN CONCEPTIONS OF; ETHICS IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY Further reading Rachels, J. (1986) The Elements of Moral Philosophy , New York: Random House. (A helpful introduction to metaethics and ethical theory, with good use made of real-life examples. Contains suggestions for further reading.) Singer, P. (ed.) (1991) A Companion to Ethics , Oxford: Blackwell. (Contains short, pithy articles on central topics in ethics, including metaethics, ethical theory, and applied ethics. The articles include useful bibliographies.) ROGER CRISP ETHICS IN INDIAN PHILOSOPHY see DUTY AND VIRTUE, INDIAN CONCEPTIONS OF
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Page 259 ETHICS IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY The study of Islamic ethics, whether philosophical or theological, grew out of early discussions of the questions of predetermination ( qadar ), obligation ( taklif ) and the injustices of temporal rulers, particularly the caliphs. Early writers on ethics from the Mu‘tazila school were probably influenced by Greek philosophy. By the third century AH (ninth century AD) a clearly discernible current of philosophical ethics began to take shape, with strong influences from Greek ethics including Stoicism, Platonism and Aristotelianism. Al-Kindi, the first genuine philosopher of Islam, appears from his extant ethical writings to have been particularly influenced by Socrates and Diogenes the Cynic. Other classical influences can be seen in the work of Platonists such as Abu Bakr al-Razi, who followed Plato’s division of the parts of the souls, and Neoplatonists such as al-Farabi, while Aristotelian influences can be seen in al-Farabi, who also discussed the problem of evil, Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd. Ibn Sina developed a theory of the conjunction of the soul with the active intellect; with this conjunction is bound up the ultimate perfection of the soul which has attained the highest degree of wisdom and virtue. Neoplatonism again surfaces in the work of Ibn Miskawayh and his followers, to whom we owe the groundwork of a whole ethical tradition which flourished in Persia well into the twelfth century AH (eighteenth century AD) and beyond. Onto Plato’s threefold division of the soul, Ibn Miskawayh grafts a threefold division of virtue into wisdom, courage and temperance. His views were elaborated upon by al-Tusi and al-Dawwani, among others. A blend of philosophical and religious ethics is characteristic of the work of some later writers such as al-Ghazali and Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, in which the road to moral and spiritual perfection has mystical overtones. See also: IBN MISKAWAYH; NEOPLATONISM IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY Further reading Fakhry, M. (1994) Ethical Theories in Islam, Leiden: Brill, 2nd enlarged edn. (A systematic analysis of philosophical and religious ethical theories in Islam.) Hourani, G. (1985) Reason and Tradition in Islamic Ethics , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (An important collection of ethical studies by an eminent writer on ethical questions in Islam.) MAJID FAKHRY ETHIOPIA, PHILOSOPHY IN Ethiopia is a unique phenomenon in Africa for three reasons: first, because of its historical continuity and political independence; second because of its written language and third because of its written philosophy. Ethiopian philosophy in the broadest sense is expressed in both oral and written language. We are dealing here only with the written documents, which limits the investigation to linguistic and cultural phenomena as it deals with the ancient Semitic language known as Ethiopic and the Christian zones of influence on the high plateaus of Ethiopia. There are five basic texts of Ethiopian philosophical literature: the Physiologue (the Fisalgwos) ( c . fifth century AD), The Book of the Wise Philosophers (1510/22), The Life and Maxims of Skendes ( c . eleventh century AD), The Treatise of Zar’a Ya‘ecob (1667) and The Treatise of Wäldä Heywåt ( c . eighteenth century). The first three are adaptations of works transmitted from Greek sources through Arabic; the latter two (appearing in modern publications in a combined form) are original works of a rationalist flavour. Further reading Sumner, C. (1985) Classical Ethiopian Philosophy , Addis Ababa: Alliance Ethio-Française. (Complete English translation of the five texts mentioned above. General introduction on Ethiopia and its culture and specific introductions for each of the five basic texts. Recommended as introductory reading.) —— (1986) The Source of African Philosophy: the Ethiopian Philosophy of Man, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag Wiesbaden. (Analysis of the five basic texts. Recommended as a companion to Classical Ethiopian Philosophy , 1985.) CLAUDE SUMNER ETHNOPHILOSOPHY, AFRICAN Ethnophilosophy refers to bodies of belief and knowledge that have philosophical relevance and which can be redescribed in terms drawn from academic philosophy, but which have not been consciously formulated as philosophy by philosophers. These bodies of belief and knowledge are manifested in the thoughts and actions of people who share a common culture. Most of the literature on ethnophilosophy is written about African cultures. Ethnophilosophy’s most immediate African antecedents include Leopold Senghor’s philosophy of
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Page 260 négritude and the writings of the Belgian missionary to the Congo (later Zaire), Placide Tempels. Ethnophilosophy examines the systems of thought of existing and precolonial African communities in order to determine what can be the ideal forms of ‘authentic’ African philosophy and praxis in the emerging post-colonial situation. In addition to the pioneering work of Senghor and Tempels, this school is represented in the writings of philosopher Alexis Kagamé and theologian John Mbiti among others, many of whom were regarded as Tempels’s disciples. The central themes of the work of these disciples include assertions that there is a unified ‘Bantu philosophy’ and that its fundamental categories are manifested in features of language such as grammar, or features of culture such as cosmology and ritual. According to many of these authors writing about Bantu philosophy, the boundaries between self and other are not as rigid as in Western philosophy. Also, interdependence rather than competition is a primary social value and the human and nonhuman world is animated by a ‘vital force’, which underlies the perception of reality. See also: AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY, ANGLOPHONE; AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY, FRANCOPHONE Further reading Kagamé, A. (1956) La philosophie bantu-rwandaise de l’être (The Bantu-Rwandan Philosophy of Being), Brussels: Académie Royale des Sciences Coloniales. (Perhaps the most detailed and analytical study of an African system of thought from an ethnophilosophical point of view.) Mbiti, J. (1969) African Religions and Philosophy , London: Heinemann, 2nd edn, 1990. (Ethnophilosophy is combined with Christian theology in this influential book.) IVAN KARP D.A. MASOLO EUDAIMONIA The literal sense of the Greek word eudaimonia is ‘having a good guardian spirit’: that is, the state of having an objectively desirable life, universally agreed by ancient philosophical theory and popular thought to be the supreme human good. This objective character distinguishes it from the modern concept of happiness: a subjectively satisfactory life. Much ancient theory concerns the question of what constitutes the good life: for example, whether virtue is sufficient for it, as Socrates and the Stoics held, or whether external goods are also necessary, as Aristotle maintained. Immoralists such as Thrasymachus (in Plato’s Republic) sought to discredit morality by arguing that it prevents the achievement of eudaimonia , while its defenders (including Plato) argued that it is necessary and/or sufficient for eudaimonia . The primacy of eudaimonia does not, however, imply either egoism (since altruism may itself be a constituent of the good life), or consequentialism (since the good life need not be specifiable independently of the moral life). The gulf between ‘eudaimonistic’ and ‘Kantian’ theories is therefore narrower than is generally thought. See also: WISDOM Further reading Annas, J. (1993) The Morality of Happiness , Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. (Aristotle and later Greek philosophers on happiness and the good.) Kenny, A. (1992) Aristotle on the Perfect Life , Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Aristotle’s treatments of virtue and the good life.) C.C.W. TAYLOR EUDOXUS ( c .390–c .340 BC) Eudoxus of Cnidos was a Greek mathematician with wide-ranging philosophical and scientific interests. He was known in antiquity for his mathematical astronomy and his philosophical hedonism, and placed, if loosely, within the Pythagorean tradition. More recently, debate about the correspondence between mathematical models produced by astronomers and the physical motions of the astronomical bodies themselves has focused especially on Eudoxus, since he is generally regarded as the first to have used a mathematical model in astronomy. Further reading North, J. (1994) The Fontana History of Astronomy and Cosmology, London: Fontana, 1994. (A useful description of Eudoxus’ geometric model.) LIBA TAUB EURASIAN MOVEMENT The Eurasian movement was a creation of émigré Russian intellectuals following the First World War and the October Revolution. The ideology of Eurasianism was formally proclaimed in 1921. It obtained considerable development, prominence, distinction and notoriety in the two following decades, essentially
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Page 261 running its course by the time of the Second World War. Eurasianism attracts attention because of the novelty and originality of its central argument, proposing that the Russian Empire and later the Soviet Union constituted an independent organic entity separate from both Europe and Asia, called Eurasia (it was the complete separation from Europe that represented an explosive novelty), and because of the intellectual variety and abilities, at times brilliance, of its proponents. Also, as an extraordinary phenomenon in Russian intellectual history, it demands explanation. Further reading Trubetskoi, N.S. [Trubetzkoy] (1991) The Legacy of Genghiz Khan and Other Essays on Russian Identity , ed. and with postscript by A. Liberman, preface by V.V. Ivanov, Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan Slavic Publication. NICHOLAS V. RIASANOVSKY EUSEBIUS ( c . AD 264–c .339) Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea in Palestine from c .314, was the foremost Christian scholar of his age and wrote extensively on history, geography, chronology, apologetics and philosophical and biblical theology. He is best known for his pioneering History of the Church , but philosophers may prefer to consult his Preparation of the Gospel , which argues that basic Christian doctrines had been foreshadowed by wellknown philosophers and preserves valuable extracts from writers whose works have otherwise been lost. In his own philosophical ideas, Eusebius was strongly influenced by classical philosophy, especially Platonism, and sought to reconcile this with Christian theology. See also: PLATONISM, EARLY AND MIDDLE Further reading Eusebius ( c .312–18) Praeparatio evangelica (Preparation of the Gospel), trans. and ed. E.H. Gifford, Eusebii praeparatio evangelica , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 5 vols, 1903. (Outstandingly good edition, with Greek text, English translation and valuable notes.) Wallace-Hadrill, D.S. (1960) Eusebius of Caesarea, London: Mowbray. (Reliable introduction to Eusebius’ life and works, a complete list of which can be found on pages 57–8.) CHRISTOPHER STEAD EVANS, GARETH (1946–80) Frege’s notion of sense is a conception of content whose application is controlled by the idea of rationality. A Fregean outlook is often taken to imply that singular reference is always mediated by descriptions, and hence to be inconsistent with the insights that have motivated proponents of ‘direct reference’. However, in his major work, The Varieties of Reference (1982), the British philosopher Gareth Evans showed how a treatment of singular reference on Fregean lines can accommodate those insights. This means that the semantics of singular reference need not be distanced from the philosophy of mind, in the way that proponents of ‘direct reference’ typically suppose. Within the framework provided by this synthesis, Evans gave detailed treatments of the different ways in which thought and speech are directed at particular objects. Particularly notable are his discussions of demonstrative thinking, which exploits the perceptible presence to the thinker of the object it concerns; of first-personal thinking; and of singular statements of non-existence. See also: REFERENCE Further reading Evans, G. (1982) The Varieties of Reference, ed. J. McDowell, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Evans’ major work; it places Frege and Russell with respect to more recent reflection about singular reference, and discusses the various ways in which thought and speech are targeted on particular objects. Rough in places, and occasionally technical, but well worth the effort.) JOHN MCDOWELL EVANS, MARY ANN see ELIOT, GEORGE EVENTS Events are entities like collisions and speeches, as opposed to things like planets and people. Many are changes, for example things being first hot and then cold. All lack a thing’s full identity over time: either they are instantaneous, or they have temporal parts, like a speech’s words, which stop them being wholly present at an instant; whereas things, which lack temporal parts, are wholly present throughout their lives. Events may be identified with two types of entity: facts, like the fact that David Hume dies, corresponding to truths like ‘Hume dies’; or particulars which, like things, correspond to names, for example ‘Hume’s death’. Which one they are taken to be affects the content of many metaphysical
theories: such as that all particulars are things; that times, or causes and effects,
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Page 262 or actions, are events; or that mental events are physical. See also: CAUSATION; MOMENTARINESS, BUDDHIST DOCTRINE OF Further reading Bennett, J. (1988) Events and Their Names , Oxford: Clarendon Press. (An analytic assessment of rival views of events, concluding that they are facts.) Davidson, D. (1980) Essays on Actions and Events, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (A collection of articles arguing for and applying the view that events are particulars.) D.H. MELLOR EVIL Evil is serious unjustified harm inflicted on sentient beings. Two types of evil can be distinguished: ‘natural evil’, which is the product of nonhuman agency, and ‘moral evil’, which is the product of human agency. Moral thinking tends to focus on moral evil, and three main interpretations of it have been made. One, initiated by Socrates, holds moral evil to be deviation from the good; another, favoured by Stoic-Spinozists, views it as illusory; the third, made originally by Leibniz, sees it as a contrast necessary for the existence of the good. A realistic account must face the fact that moral evil does exist, and much of it is due to common human vices, which coexist with virtues in human character. It is primarily the proportion of the mixture, not the knowledge and intentions of agents, that determines how much evil will be caused by specific individuals in specific contexts. See also: EVIL, PROBLEM OF; HOLOCAUST, THE Further reading Kekes, J. (1990) Facing Evil , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (A treatment of evil from a secular point of view.) McCord Adams, M. and Adams, R.M. (eds) (1991) The Problem of Evil , New York: Oxford University Press. (A collection of articles and a bibliography representing recent work on the Christian problem of evil.) JOHN KEKES EVIL, PROBLEM OF In this context, ‘evil’ is given the widest possible scope to signify all of life’s minuses. Within this range, philosophers and theologians distinguish ‘moral evils’ such as war, betrayal and cruelty from ‘natural evils’ such as earthquakes, floods and disease. Usually the inescapability of death is numbered among the greatest natural evils. The existence of broad-sense evils is obvious and spawns a variety of problems, most prominently the practical one of how to cope with life and the existential one of what sort of meaning human life can have. Philosophical discussion has focused on two theoretical difficulties posed for biblical theism. First, does the existence of evils show biblical theism to be logically inconsistent? Is it logically possible for an omnipotent, omniscient and perfectly good God to create a world containing evil? One classical response to this, following Leibniz, is to argue that such a God would create the best of all possible worlds, but that such a world may contain evil as an indispensable element. Alternatively, evil may be an unavoidable consequence of the boon of free will, or it may be part of a divine plan to ensure that all souls attain perfection. The second difficulty for biblical theism is, even if we grant logical consistency, does evil (in the form, for instance, of apparently pointless suffering) nevertheless count as evidence against the existence of the Bible’s God? One frequent theistic response here is to argue that the apparent pointlessness of evil may be merely a result of our limited cognitive powers; things would appear the same to us whether or not there were a point, so it is not legitimate to argue from the evidence. See also: EVIL; GOD, ARGUMENTS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF Further reading Hick, J. (1966) Evil and the God of Love , San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, 2nd edn, 1978. (Criticizes ‘Augustinian’ theodicies that rely on the doctrine of the Fall, and develops a soul-making theodicy in the spirit of Irenaeus.) Plantinga, A. (1974) The Nature of Necessity , Oxford: Clarendon Press, ch. 9, §10, 191–3. (Develops the possible-worlds version of the free-will defence, with considerable attention to counterfactuals of freedom and the hypothesis of transworld depravity.) MARILYN MCCORD ADAMS EVOLUTION AND ETHICS The fact that human beings are a product of biological evolution has been thought to impinge on the study of ethics in two quite different ways. First, evolutionary ideas may help account for why people
have the ethical
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Page 263 thoughts and feelings they do. Second, evolutionary ideas may help illuminate which normative ethical claims, if any, are true or right or correct. These twin tasks – explanation and justification – may each be subdivided. Evolutionary considerations may be relevant to explaining elements of morality that are culturally universal; they also may help explain why individuals or societies differ in the ethics they espouse. With respect to the question of justification, evolutionary considerations have sometimes been cited to show that ethics is an elaborate illusion – that is, to defend versions of ethical subjectivism and emotivism. However, evolutionary considerations also have been invoked to justify ethical norms. Although there is no conflict between using evolution both to explain traits that are universal and to explain traits that vary, it is not consistent to claim both that evolution unmasks ethics and justifies particular ethical norms. See also: HUMAN NATURE; SOCIOBIOLOGY ELLIOTT SOBER EVOLUTION, THEORY OF The biological theory of evolution advances the view that the variety and forms of life on earth are the result of descent with modification from the earliest forms of life. Evolutionary theory does not attempt to explain the origin of life itself, that is, how the earliest forms of life came to exist, nor does it apply to the history of changes of the non-biological parts of the universe, which are also often described as ‘evolutionary’. The mechanisms of natural selection, mutation and speciation are used in evolutionary theory to explain the relations and characteristics of all life forms. Modern evolutionary theory explains a wide range of natural phenomena, including the deep resemblances among organisms, the diversity of life forms, organisms’ possession of vestigial organs and the good fit or ‘adaptedness’ between organisms and their environment. Often summarized as ‘survival of the fittest’, the mechanism of natural selection actually includes several distinct processes. There must be variation in traits among the members of a population; these traits must be passed on from parents to offspring; and the different traits must confer differential advantage for reproducing successfully in that environment. Because evidence for each of these processes can be gathered independently of the evolutionary claim, natural selection scenarios are robustly testable. When a trait in a population has arisen because it was directly selected in this fashion, it is called an adaptation. Genetic mutation is the originating source of variation, and selection processes shape that variation into adaptive forms; random genetic drift and various levels and forms of selection dynamic developed by geneticists have been integrated into a general theory of evolutionary change that encompasses natural selection and genetic mutation as complementary processes. Detailed ecological studies are used to provide evidence for selection scenarios involving the evolution of species in the wild. Evolutionary theory is supported by an unusually wide range of scientific evidence, gaining its support from fields as diverse as geology, embryology, molecular genetics, palaeontology, climatology and functional morphology. Because of tensions between an evolutionary view of homo sapiens and some religious beliefs, evolutionary theory has remained controversial in the public sphere far longer than no less well-supported scientific theories from other sciences. See also: DARWIN, C.SPENCER, H Further reading Darwin, C. (1859) On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life , London: John Murray. (Revolutionary argument for both the evolution of varied forms of life from earlier ones, and the theory of evolution by natural selection. Accessible to general readers.) Hull, D.L. (1974) Philosophy of Biological Science , Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. (Classic presentation and discussion of key philosophical issues in evolutionary theory; especially notable discussion of goal-orientated processes.) ELISABETH A. LLOYD EVOLUTIONARY THEORY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE Ideas from evolutionary theory impinge on the social sciences in two ways. First, there is the research programme of sociobiology, which attempts to demonstrate the impact of biological evolution on important features of human mind and culture. Second, there is the idea that biological evolution provides a suggestive analogy for the processes that drive cultural change. Both research programmes have tended to focus on the idea of natural selection, even though the theory of biological evolution
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Page 264 considers processes besides selection. Sociobiology attempts to show that the following conditional helps explain psychological traits just as it applies to traits of morphology and physiology: if a trait varies in a population, makes a difference for the survival and reproduction of individuals, and is influenced by genetic factors, then natural selection will lead the trait to change its frequency in the population. Models of cultural evolution are built on an analogous conditional: if a set of alternative ideas are found in a culture, and people tend to find some of these ideas more attractive than others, then the mix of ideas in the culture will change. Sociobiology and the understanding of cultural change as an evolutionary process are approaches that have a history and both will continue to be explored in the future. Each is a flexible instrument, which may be better suited to some tasks than to others, and may be handled well by some practitioners and poorly by others. As a consequence, neither can be said to be ‘verified’ and ‘falsified’ by their track records to date. See also: EVOLUTION AND ETHICS; EVOLUTION, THEORY OF Further reading Alexander, R. (1979) Darwinism and Human Affairs, Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. (An energetic defence of sociobiology.) Sober, E. (1993) Philosophy of Biology, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (An introduction to philosophy of biology that discusses adaptationism, sociobiology, models of cultural evolution, and the issue of phylogenetic reconstruction.) ELLIOTT SOBER EXAMPLES IN ETHICS Philosophers often employ examples to illustrate how their favoured principles are to be applied to concrete cases, and sometimes even to show that principles are of no help in decision-making. Examples are also used to convince readers of the existence of moral dilemmas – unresolvable conflicts between moral obligations. But a variety of different philosophical questions concerning the role, status, and nature of examples used in ethics have also been raised. One such question concerns the role that examples should play in our moral experience: should this be a rhetorical, pedagogic role of persuading us to do what is right, as determined by pre-existing principle; or a stronger, logical role of helping to determine what is morally right? Another query relates to moral teaching: is exposure to and reflection on stories, tales, narratives and exemplars sufficient for moral education, or is there a further need for exposure to principles and theories of ethics? Third, in terms of the kinds of examples employed in moral philosophy and reflection, should such examples be culled from great literature or sacred texts? Alternatively, should they be actual case studies drawn from real life, or hypothetical but realistic examples constructed by theorists? Or should they be imaginary, highly improbable cases designed to test our intuitions? A fourth question asks how examples are best identified and described, and to what extent the examples used in ethics are themselves theory-laden or even theory-constituted. See also: CASUISTRY; SITUATION ETHICS; THEORY AND PRACTICE Further reading Flanagan, O. (1991) Varieties of Moral Personality: Ethics and Psychological Realism , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Develops exemplar issue within virtue ethics movement.) Jonsen, A.R. and Toulmin, S. (1988) The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning, London: University of California Press. (Excellent history and defence of moral casuistry tradition.) ROBERT B. LOUDEN EXISTENCE Philosophical problems concerning existence fall under two main headings: ‘What is existence?’ and ‘What things exist?’ Although these questions cannot be entirely separated, this entry will concentrate on the first. The question ‘What is existence?’ has produced a surprising variety of answers. Some hold that existence is a property that every individual has, others that it is a characteristic that some individuals have but other (for example, imaginary) individuals lack, while proponents of the thesis that ‘existence is not a predicate’ hold that existence is not a property or characteristic of individuals at all. Other philosophical issues concerning existence include disputes about whether there are abstract objects (for example, numbers, universals) as well as concrete ones, immaterial souls as well as bodies, possible objects as well as actual ones, and so on; and questions about
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Page 265 which entities (if any) are the fundamental constituents of reality. See also: BEING; ONTOLOGY Further reading Barnes, J. (1972) The Ontological Argument , London: Macmillan, ch. 3. (A succinct critical discussion of the thesis that existence is not a predicate, including many references to other works.) Williams, C.J.F. (1981) What is Existence?, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (A wide-ranging discussion, including a defence of a version of the quantifier account against numerous objections.) PENELOPE MACKIE EXISTENTIALISM The term ‘existentialism’ is sometimes reserved for the works of Jean-Paul Sartre, who used it to refer to his own philosophy in the 1940s. But it is more often used as a general name for a number of thinkers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who made the concrete individual central to their thought. Existentialism in this broader sense arose as a backlash against philosophical and scientific systems that treat all particulars, including humans, as members of a genus or instances of universal laws. It claims that our own existence as unique individuals in concrete situations cannot be grasped adequately in such theories, and that systems of this sort conceal from us the highly personal task of trying to achieve self-fulfilment in our lives. Existentialists therefore start out with a detailed description of the self as an ‘existing individual’, understood as an agent involved in a specific social and historical world. One of their chief aims is to understand how the individual can achieve the richest and most fulfilling life in the modern world. Existentialists hold widely differing views about human existence, but there are a number of recurring themes in their writings. First, existentialists hold that humans have no pregiven purpose or essence laid out for them by God or by nature; it is up to each one of us to decide who and what we are through our own actions. This is the point of Sartre’s definition of existentialism as the view that, for humans, ‘existence precedes essence’. What this means is that we first simply exist – find ourselves born into a world not of our own choosing – and it is then up to each of us to define our own identity or essential characteristics in the course of what we do in living out our lives. Thus, our essence (our set of defining traits) is chosen, not given. Second, existentialists hold that people decide their own fates and are responsible for what they make of their lives. Humans have free will in the sense that, no matter what social and biological factors influence their decisions, they can reflect on those conditions, decide what they mean, and then make their own choices as to how to handle those factors in acting in the world. Because we are self-creating or self-fashioning beings in this sense, we have full responsibility for what we make of our lives. Finally, existentialists are concerned with identifying the most authentic and fulfilling way of life possible for individuals. In their view, most of us tend to conform to the ways of living of the ‘herd’: we feel we are doing well if we do what ‘one’ does in familiar social situations. In this respect, our lives are said to be ‘inauthentic’, not really our own. To become authentic, according to this view, an individual must take over their own existence with clarity and intensity. Such a transformation is made possible by such profound emotional experiences as anxiety or the experience of existential guilt. When we face up to what is revealed in such experiences, existentialists claim, we will have a clearer grasp of what is at stake in life, and we will be able to become more committed and integrated individuals. See also: EXISTENTIALIST THOUGHT IN LATIN AMERICA; SARTRE, J.-P. Further reading Blackham, H.J. (1952) Six Existentialist Thinkers , New York: Harper Torchbooks, 2nd edn, 1959. (Dependable introductions to Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Jaspers, Marcel, Heidegger and Sartre.) Guignon, C. and Pereboom, D. (eds) (1995) Existentialism: Basic Writings, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company. (Core texts by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Sartre, with extensive introductions by the editors.) Sartre, J.-P. (1946) L’Existentialisme est un humanisme , trans. B. Frechtman as Existentialism, New York: Philosophical Library, 1946. (Influential, brief statement of Sartre’s existentialist views.) CHARLES B. GUIGNON EXISTENTIALIST ETHICS Central to existentialism is a radical doctrine of individual freedom and responsibility. On the
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Page 266 basis of this, writers such as Sartre have offered an account of the nature of morality and also advanced proposals for moral conduct. Important in that account are the claims that (a) moral values are ‘created’ rather than ‘discovered’, (b) moral responsibility is more extensive than usually assumed, and (c) moral life should not be a matter of following rules. Existentialist proposals for conduct derive from the notion of authenticity , understood as ‘facing up’ to one’s responsibility and not ‘fleeing’ it in ‘bad faith’. Authenticity, many argue, entails treating other people so as to encourage a sense of freedom on their part, although there is disagreement as to the primary forms such treatment should take. Some have argued that we promote a sense of freedom through commitment to certain causes; others that this is best achieved through personal relationships. theology See also: EXISTENTIALISM; EXISTENTIALIST THEOLOGY Further reading Marcel, G. (1935) Être et Avoir, trans. K. Farrer, Being and Having, London: Dacre, 1949. (Sensitive exploration of personal relationships by a neglected thinker.) Olafson, F. (1967) Principles and Persons: An Ethical Interpretation of Existentialism , Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. (Full and penetrating discussion of existentialist ethics. Usable as a sophisticated introduction.) DAVID E. COOPER EXISTENTIALIST THEOLOGY Existentialist theology is a term used to describe the work of a number of theologians, chiefly from the twentieth century, whose writings were strongly influenced by the literary and philosophical movement known as existentialism. Because of the diversity of the movement, it is difficult to say much that is illuminating about existentialist theology as a whole. In general, however, these theologians attempt to understand God in relation to the situation of the concretely existing human individual. Their analysis of human existence is one that emphasizes the freedom of individuals to shape their own identities through choices, and the paradoxical, ambiguous or even absurd character of the reality that humans encounter. Religious faith is seen as closely related to feelings of alienation and despair; faith may grow out of such emotions or it may provide the key to overcoming them, or both these relations may be present at once. Though the designation of any particular theologian as ‘existentialist’ is a controversial matter, Karl Barth, Rudolf Bultmann and Paul Tillich are among the more important thinkers whose work exhibits existentialist themes. The entire movement has been strongly influenced, directly or indirectly, by the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher-theologian Søren Kierkegaard, while the works of the Russian novelist Fëdor Dostoevskii and the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, both from the late nineteenth century, have also been important. See also: BUBER, M.; EXISTENTIALISM Further reading Brunner, E. (1937) Man in Revolt , trans. O. Wyon, London: Lutterworth, 1939. (Provides a theology of the human person heavily shaped by existential philosophy.) Bultmann, R. (1957) History and Eschatology , Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. (Develops the distinction between what is historic as existentially meaningful and what is merely historical in the sense of being the object of historical science.) C. STEPHEN EVANS EXISTENTIALIST THOUGHT IN LATIN AMERICA In Latin America, the thought and teaching of José Ortega y Gasset have been very influential. Their influence leaves an important mark on the substance of existentialism. The most effective aspect of Ortega y Gasset’s philosophical conception was his thesis that humans do not have a nature, only a history. It is this concept that encouraged Latin American thinkers to create their own original thought as a product of their concrete historical circumstances. This entry will deal with Latin American existence, unique in its historical concreteness, and from this general view will attempt to construct a metaphysical theory of Latin America’s historical endeavour. Given that all historicist conception involves values that are objective in nature, it is not surprising that Latin American existentialism was profoundly influenced by Max Scheler and Nicolai Hartmann, together with the existential analysis of Martin Heidegger. Consequently, in opposition to the phenomenologists with a Husserlian orientation, implicit in Latin American existentialism, there is a phenomenological methodology in the interpretation of history as
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Page 267 culture in accordance with the analysis of the dialectics of the structure of history. This opposes all possible perceptions of pure essences which might precede existence. The essence of existence is seen as progressive, constructing itself as it is bypassed by historical events. Both in terms of the search for an original philosophy, which could be reduced to a philosophy of history (for example in the Orteguian philosophy of life) and in terms of a Heideggerian approach, Latin American philosophy applies a phenomenological method in its analysis. This would explain the fusion of phenomenology and existentialism in the works of Latin American philosophers. All Latin American phenomenological-existentialist philosophical effort is a struggle between the analysis and interpretation of the European currents and their search for the historical realization of the autonomous Latin American being. See also: EXISTENTIALISM; ORTEGA Y GASSET, J. Further reading Sánchez-Reulet, A. (ed.) (1954) Contemporary Latin American Philosophy: a Selection, with an Introduction and Notes , trans. W.R. Trask, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. (An anthology of Latin American existentialist thought.) MARÍA TERESA BERTELLONI EXPERIMENT Experiment, as a specific category of scientific activity, did not emerge until the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. Seen primarily as an arbiter in theory choice, there was little, if any, analysis of experimental techniques or, the ways in which data become transformed into established facts. Philosophical analysis of experiment was typically simplistic, focusing on the role of observation alone as the foundation for experimental facts. This was challenged by Thomas Kuhn, who stressed the importance of background theory and beliefs in all perception, including (its role in) scientific experiment. This interconnection between theory and experiment severely undermined the idea that experiment could stand as an independent and objective criterion for judging the merits of one theory over another. In the 1980s new philosophical analyses of experiment began to emerge, emphasizing the ways in which experiment could be seen to have a life of its own embodying activities that could supposedly be understood without recourse to theory. Factors important in the evaluation of experimental results as well as the ways in which laboratory science differs from its theoretical counterpart became the focus for a new history and philosophy of experiment. Consequently, further debates arose regarding the relationship of experiment to theory, and whether it is possible to provide a methodological framework within which experimental practice can be evaluated. See also: EXPERIMENTS IN SOCIAL SCIENCE; SCIENTIFIC REALISM ANTIREALISM Further reading Ackerman, R. (1985) Data, Instruments and Theory , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (A discussion of the role of instruments in providing stable data. Ackerman argues that experimental practice provides continuity in the face of theoretical change.) Hacking, I. (1983) Representing and Intervening , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (The first systematic treatment of the role of experiment in philosophy of science. The history of theory-dominated philosophy is discussed in a clear and comprehensive way.) MARGARET C. MORRISON EXPERIMENTS, CRUCIAL see CRUCIAL EXPERIMENTS EXPERIMENTS IN SOCIAL SCIENCE Within social science the experiment has an ambiguous place. With the possible exception of social psychology, there are few examples of strictly experimental studies. The classic study still often cited is the Hawthorne experiments, which began in 1927, and is used mainly to illustrate what became known as the ‘Hawthorne Effect’, that is, the unintended influence of the research itself on the results of the study. Yet, experimental design is often taken within social research as the embodiment of the scientific method which, if the social sciences are to reach the maturity of the natural sciences, social research should seek to emulate. Meeting this challenge meant trying to devise ways of applying the logic of the experiment to ‘non-experimental’ situations where it was not possible directly to manipulate the experimental conditions. Criticisms have come from two main sources: first, from researchers who claim that the techniques used to control factors within non-experimental situations are unrealizable with current statistical methods and, second, those who reject the very idea of
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Page 268 hypothesis-testing as an ambition for social research. See also: EXPERIMENT; STATISTICS AND SOCIAL SCIENCE Further reading Hughes, J.A. (1990) The Philosophy of Social Research , London: Longman, 2nd revised and enlarged edn. (A discussion of some of the philosophical problems arising from social research methods, including the experiment.) Roethlisberger, F.J. and Dickson, W.J. (1939) Management and the Worker , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (A presentation of the famous Hawthorne studies.) JOHN A. HUGHES EXPLANATION Philosophical reflections about explanation are common in the history of philosophy, and important proposals were made by Aristotle, Hume, Kant and Mill. But the subject came of age in the twentieth century with the provision of detailed models of scientific explanation, prominently the covering-law model, which takes explanations to be arguments in which a law of nature plays an essential role among the premises. In the heyday of logical empiricism, philosophers achieved a consensus on the covering law model, but, during the 1960s and 1970s, that consensus was challenged through the recognition of four major kinds of difficulty: first, a problem about the relation between idealized arguments and the actual practice of explaining; second, the difficulty of characterizing the underlying notion of a law of nature; third, troubles in accounting for the asymmetries of explanation; and, fourth, recalcitrant problems in treating statistical explanations. Appreciation of these difficulties has led to the widespread abandonment of the coveringlaw model, and currently there is no consensus on how to understand explanation. The main contemporary view seeks to characterize explanation in terms of causation, that is, explanations are accounts that trace the causes of the events (states, conditions) explained. Other philosophers believe that there is no general account of explanation, and offer pragmatic theories. A third option sees explanation as consisting in the unification of the phenomena. All of these approaches have associated successes, and face particular anomalies. Although the general character of explanation is now a subject for philosophical debate, some particular kinds of explanation seem to be relatively well understood. In particular, functional explanations in biology, which logical empiricists found puzzling, now appear to be treated quite naturally by supposing them to make tacit reference to natural selection. Further reading Pitt, J. (1989) Theories of Explanation, New York: Oxford University Press. (A collection containing many important contemporary articles.) Rubin, D.-H. (1994) Explanation, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (A collection explicitly designed to complement the Pitt volume.) PHILIP KITCHER EXPLANATION IN HISTORY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE Historians and social scientists explain at least two sorts of things: (a) those individual human actions that have historical or social significance, such as Stalin’s decision to hold the show trials, Diocletian’s division of the Roman Empire, and the Lord Chief Justice’s attempt to reform the English judicial system; (b) historical and social events and structures (‘large-scale’ social phenomena), such as wars, economic depressions, social customs, the class system, the family, the state, and the crime rate. Philosophical questions arise about explanations of both kinds (a) and (b). Concerning (b), perhaps the most pressing question is whether explanations of this sort can, ultimately, be understood as merely explanations of a large number of individual human actions, that is, as a complex set of explanations of the first kind, (a). A causal explanation is an explanation of something in terms of its event-cause(s). Some explanations under (b) appear not to be causal explanations in this sense. There are two ways in which this appears to happen. First, we sometimes seem to explain a social structure or event by giving its function or purpose. This seems to be an explanation in terms of its effects rather than by its causes. For example, it might be claimed that the explanation for a certain social custom in a tribal society is the way in which it contributes to social stability or group solidarity. An explanation of a thing in terms of its effects cannot be a causal explanation of that thing. Second, we sometimes seem to cite social structure as the explanation of something. Whatever a social structure is, it is not itself an event, and since only (it is often said) events can
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Page 269 be causes, such a ‘structural’ explanation does not seem to be a causal explanation. A second question, then, about explanations of kind (b) is whether some of them, at any rate, are genuinely non-causal explanations, or whether functional and/or structural explanations of this sort can be seen as special sorts of causal explanation. Explanations of kind (a) are a proper subset of explanations of human actions generally. Although some of the discussion of these issues began life as a distinct literature within the philosophy of history, it has now been absorbed into philosophical action theory more generally. Even so, a question that remains is just which proper subset of human actions are the ones of interest to the historical and social sciences: how can we discriminate within the class of human actions between those in which historians or social scientists have a legitimate interest and those outside their purview? See also: FUNCTIONAL EXPLANATION; HOLISM AND INDIVIDUALISM IN HISTORY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE Further reading Ryan, A. (1973) The Philosophy of Social Explanation, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (A somewhat dated but still useful collection of articles on a range of issues about explanation in the social sciences.) Wright, G.H. von (1971) Explanation and Understanding, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (An unrivalled, insightful discussion of the contrasting merits of the two great traditions of explanation.) DAVID-HILLEL RUBEN
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Page 270 F FA Fa is a technical term in a variety of Chinese philosophical traditions. As a noun it means ‘standard’ or ‘norm’, and, by extension, ‘law’. As a verb it means ‘to be in accord with’. The disagreements among the various indigenous schools tended to focus on the origin and nature of fa , whether it is an order or pattern within things or an external pattern to which things conform. When Buddhism entered China, translators often used fa for rendering the Sanskrit term dharma. Depending on context, the Buddhist term could refer to true teachings, moral duty, phenomenal reality or rule. See also: LAW AND RITUAL IN CHINESE PHILOSOPHY Further reading Chan Wing-tsit (1963) A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (A useful, inclusive definition of fa is found in the appendix, page 786; this index is generally useful in finding key uses of the term in various Chinese philosophies by following references to either ‘law’ or ‘ dharma’.) THOMAS P. KASULIS FACKENHEIM, EMIL LUDWIG (1916–) Fackenheim is best known for his account of authentic philosophical and Jewish responses to the Nazi Holocaust. Fackenheim’s thought, indebted to German philosophy, always had a practical, existential purpose. He aimed, consistently, to show how philosophical and theological thought could pay attention to lived experience in order to gain the understanding it sought. In this way, he exposed the varied ways in which thought and life, ideas and history, are interdependent. Philosophical and religious thought are grounded in historical experience and give direction to that experience; life is the ground of reflection and derives its meaning from it. See also: HOLOCAUST, THE; JEWISH PHILOSOPHY, CONTEMPORARY Further reading Fackenheim, E.L. (1982) To Mend the World , New York: Schocken Books; 3rd edn, 1994. (Systematic recovery of Jewish thought through encounters with Spinoza, Rosenzweig, Hegel and Heidegger; justification for the necessity and possibility of post-Holocaust response by Judaism, Christianity, philosophers and others.) MICHAEL L. MORGAN FACTS The existence and nature of facts is disputed. In ordinary language we often speak of facts (‘that’s a fact’) but it is hard to take such talk seriously since it can be paraphrased away. It is better to argue for the existence of facts on the basis of three connected theoretical roles for facts. First, there are facts as the referents of true sentences: ‘the cat sat on the mat’, if true, refers to the fact that the cat sat on the mat. Second, there are facts as the truth-makers of true sentences: the fact that the cat sat on the mat is what makes ‘the cat sat on the mat’ true. Third, there are facts as causal relata, related in such sentences as ‘Caesar died because Brutus stabbed him’. The so-called ‘slingshot’ argument aims to show that these roles are misconceived. See also: NEGATIVE FACTS IN CLASSICAL INDIAN PHILOSOPHY Further reading Olson, K.R. (1987) An Essay on Facts, CSLI Lecture Notes Number 6, Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University. (A detailed appraisal of rival accounts of facts and a history of the slingshot argument.) ALEX OLIVER FACT/VALUE DISTINCTION According to proponents of the fact/value distinction, no states of affairs in the world can be saidto bevalues,and evaluative judgments are best understood not to be pure statements of fact. The distinction was important in twentieth-century ethics, and debate continues about the metaphysical status of value, the epistemology of value, and the best characterization of value-judgments.
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Page 271 Further reading Mackie, J.L. (1977) Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, Harmondsworth: Penguin. (Claims that values are not facts, but that moral language attempts to state facts.) ROGER CRISP FAITH Faith became a topic of discussion in the Western philosophical tradition on account of its prominence in the New Testament, where the having or taking up of faith is often urged by writers. The New Testament itself echoes both Hellenistic concepts of faith and older biblical traditions, specifically that of Abraham in the Book of Genesis. The subsequent attention of philosophers has been focused primarily on three topics: the nature of faith, the connection between God’s goodness and human responsibility, and the relation of faith to reason. Discussions on the nature of faith, from Aquinas to Tillich, have tried to examine the subject in terms of whether it is a particular form of knowledge, virtue, trust and so on. Regarding divine goodness, the argument has primarily focused on the relationship between faith and free will, and whether lack of faith is the responsibility of the individual or of God. Concerning the relation between faith and reason, there are two quite separate issues: the relation of faith to theorizing, and the rationality of faith. Aquinas in particular argued that faith is a necessary prerequisite for reasoning and intellectual activity, while later, John Locke explored the relationship between faith, reason and rationality, and concluded that faith can be reached through reason. This latter viewpoint was later heavily criticized by Wittgenstein and his followers. See also: NATURAL THEOLOGY; RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE Further reading Kenny, A. (1992) What Is Faith?, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (A good entry into contemporary philosophical discussions concerning faith.) Swinburne, R. (1984) Faith and Reason , Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Swinburne’s corpus as a whole can be seen as an attempt to revive the Lockean vision in the twentieth century; this is perhaps the best point of entry.) NICHOLAS P. WOLTERSTORFF FALLACIES Fallacies are common types of arguments that have a strong tendency to go badly wrong, or to be used as deceptive tricks when two parties reason together. In some instances they are simply careless errors in thinking, while in other cases they are techniques of argumentation used by one arguer more or less deliberately to try to fool another into accepting a false conclusion. Fallacies have been described in logic textbooks since the time of Aristotle; their study, long neglected, has begun to be revived in recent years, as its practical importance in natural language reasoning has become apparent. See also: FORMAL AND INFORMAL LOGIC Further reading Walton, D.N. (1995) A Pragmatic Theory of Fallacy, Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press. (Up to date and comprehensive.) DOUGLAS WALTON FALLIBILISM Fallibilism is a philosophical doctrine regarding natural science, most closely associated with Charles Sanders Peirce, which maintains that our scientific knowledge claims are invariably vulnerable and may turn out to be false. Scientific theories cannot be asserted as true categorically, but only as having some probability of being true. Fallibilists insist on our inability to attain the final and definitive truth regarding the theoretical concerns of natural science – in particular at the level of theoretical physics. At any rate, at this level of generality and precision each of our accepted beliefs may turn out to be false, and many of them will. Fallibilism does not insist on the falsity of our scientific claims but rather on their tentativity as inevitable estimates: it does not hold that knowledge is unavailable here, but rather that it is always provisional. See also: COMMONSENSISM; SCEPTICISM Further reading Peirce, C.S. (1931) ‘Principles of Philosophy’, in Collected Papers of C. S. Peirce , Vol. 1, ed. C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Classic statement of fallibilism by the father of the doctrine. Section 1.120 ‘The Uncertainty of Scientific Results’ is especially relevant.) Rescher, N. (1984) The Limits of Science , Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. (A synoptic examination of
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Page 272 scientific fallibilism. Extensive bibliographic information.) NICHOLAS RESCHER FAMILY, ETHICS AND THE Do obligations to children take priority over filial and other family obligations? Do blood kin have stronger moral claims than relatives acquired through marriage? Whatever their origin, do family obligations take precedence over obligations to friends, neighbours, fellow citizens? Do family moral ties presuppose specific family feeling, love, or loyalty? Is the traditional family of a married, heterosexual couple with biological offspring morally preferable to families formed by adoptive, single, remarried or same-sex parents, or with the help of gamete donors or gestational (‘maternal’) surrogates? On what grounds may friends, neighbours or government agencies intrude upon ‘family privacy’? To simplify the complexity and diversity of family life, reasoned answers to such questions may stress a single dimension. A metaphysical approach draws on the commands of a deity or the needs of a nation. A biological approach appeals to physical resemblance, blood or genes. An economic approach focuses on family property, income, division of work and resources, and inheritance. A related political approach attends to power, subordination, and rights within a family, as well as to their regulation by the state. A psychological approach takes affection, identification, intimacy, and emotional needs as morally decisive. A narrative approach makes recalling and revision of family stories the basis of moral education and the definition of family ties. Although mutually compatible, these approaches do each tend to favour particular moral theories. See also: GENETICS AND ETHICS; SEXUALITY, PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Blustein, J. (1982) Parents and Children: The Ethics of the Family , New York: Oxford University Press. (An analysis that draws on Locke and Rawls for an analysis of parental obligations to meet a child’s needs for ‘primary goods’ and to foster a child’s autonomy.) Houlgate, L. (ed.) (1998) Family Values: Issues in Ethics, Society and the Family , Boulder, CO: Westview. (A collection of classic and current philosophic commentaries on ethical problems in marriage and family relations.) WILLIAM RUDDICK FANON, FRANTZ (1925–61) Fanon’s views (and often various misinterpretations of them) on the nature of colonialism, racism and the role of violence in Third World revolutions were enormously influential. The main themes of all his writing are the critique of ethnopsychiatry and the Eurocentrism of psychoanalysis, the critique of négritude and the development of a political philosophy for Third-World liberation. Frantz Fanon was born in the French Antilles on the island of Martinique and was educated there and in France. He served in the Free French army during the Second World War, both in north Africa and in Europe. He went on to study medicine and psychiatry at the University of Lyons between 1947 and 1951. In 1953 he was appointed chief of service of the psychiatry department of a hospital in Algeria (which was then still a French territory). He joined the Algerian liberation movement in 1954 and began to work for its underground newspaper El Moudjahid a few years later. His political activities caused him to leave his job, after which he moved to Tunisia where he practised psychiatry from 1957 to 1959. In 1961 he was appointed ambassador to Ghana by the Algerian provisional government. He died of leukaemia in 1961. See also: AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY, FRANCOPHONE; CULTURAL IDENTITY Further reading Fanon, F. (1952) Black Skin, White Masks, London: Pluto Press, 1986. (His first major work.) Caute, D. (1970) Fanon , London: Fontana. (A brisk intellectual biography.) K. ANTHONY APPIAH AL-FARABI, ABU NASR ( c .870–950) Al-Farabi was known to the Arabs as the ‘Second Master’ (after Aristotle), and with good reason. It is unfortunate that his name has been overshadowed by those of later philosophers such as Ibn Sina, for al-Farabi was one of the world’s great philosophers and much more original than many of his Islamic successors. A philosopher, logician and musician, he was also a major political scientist. Al-Farabi has left us no autobiography and consequently, relatively little is known for
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Page 273 certain about his life. His philosophical legacy, however, is large. In the arena of metaphysics he has been designated the ‘Father of Islamic Neoplatonism’, and while he was also saturated with Aristotelianism and certainly deploys the vocabulary of Aristotle, it is this Neoplatonic dimension which dominates much of his corpus. This is apparent in his most famous work, al-Madina al-fadila (The Virtuous City) which, far from being a copy or a clone of Plato’s Republic, is imbued with the Neoplatonic concept of God. Of course, al-Madina al-fadila has undeniable Platonic elements but its theology, as opposed to its politics, places it outside the mainstream of pure Platonism. In his admittedly complex theories of epistemology, al-Farabi has both an Aristotelian and Neoplatonic dimension, neither of which is totally integrated with the other. His influence was wide and extended not only to major Islamic philosophers such as Ibn Sina who came after him, and to lesser mortals such as Yahya ibn ‘Adi, al-Sijistani, al-‘Amiri and al-Tawhidi, but also to major thinkers of Christian medieval Europe including Thomas Aquinas. See also: NEOPLATONISM IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY Further reading al-Farabi ( c .870–950) al-Madina al-fadila (The Virtuous City), trans. R. Walzer, Al-Farabi on the Perfect State: Abu Nasr al-Farabi’s Mabadi’ Ara Ahl al-Madina al-Fadila , Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985. (Revised with introduction and commentary by the translator.) Netton, I.R. (1992) Al-Farabi and His School , Arabic Thought and Culture Series, London and New York: Routledge. (Assesses the philosopher through an epistemological lens.) IAN RICHARD NETTON FARDELLA, MICHELANGELO ( c .1646–1718) Fardella was one of the first and most famous Italian Cartesians. Influenced by Malebranche and Leibniz, he rejected materialism in metaphysics, and endorsed a strongly Augustinian form of Cartesian dualism in philosophy of mind. In mathematics, he popularized Descartes’ analytic method. An insufficiently radical thinker, the cultural significance of his work rests on his defence of the Cartesian method against scholasticism. Further reading Lauria, D. (1974) Agostinismo e Cartesianesimo in Michelangelo Fardella , Catania: Niccolò Gannotta Editore. (A brief introduction to Fardella’s Augustinian Cartesianism including correspondence between Fardella and Matteo Giorgi about Descartes’ theory of material substance). LUCIANO FLORIDI FARRER, AUSTIN MARSDEN (1904–68) Austin Farrer is widely regarded as the Church of England’s most brilliant philosophical theologian of the twentieth century. His elegant, sometimes difficult, writings aim more at synthesis and the elaboration of images than at analytical rigour; they characteristically take the form of a running debate between opposing positions. He focuses on the relations between divine and creaturely action in the spheres of nature, revelation and grace. See also: GRACE; REVELATION Further reading Farrer, A.M. (1967) Faith and Speculation , London: Adam & Charles Black. (Farrer’s mature thinking in natural theology, synthesizing his work on a great range of topics.) Eaton, J.C. and Loades, A. (eds) (1983) For God and Clarity: New Essays in Honor of Austin Farrer , Allison Park, PA: Pickwick Publications. (Chiefly valuable for its bibliography of works by and about Farrer.) THOMAS WILLIAMS FASCISM ‘Fascism’ is a term referring both to a political ideology and to a concrete set of political movements and regimes. Its most prominent examples were the Italian and German regimes in the interwar period. Fascist ideology is sometimes portrayed as merely a mantle for political movements in search of power, but in reality it set forth a new vision of society, drawing on both left- and right-wing ideas. Fascists stressed the need for social cohesion and for strong leadership. They were more concerned to revitalize nations by cultural change than to propose institutional changes, but they saw themselves as offering a third way between capitalism and communism. There was no fascist philosophy as such, but fascist ideology drew inspiration from earlier philosophers, most notably Nietzsche and Sorel, and was supported by several contemporary philosophers, including Heidegger, Gentile and Schmitt. See also: TOTALITARIANISM
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Page 274 Further reading Aschheim. S. (1993) The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890–1990, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. (Shows how Nietzsche’s legacy was manipulated, but also clearly illustrates the affinities between aspects of Nietzsche’s thought and fascism.) Griffin, R. (1995) Fascism: A Reader, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Excellent set of texts – coming up to the 1990s – which seek to illustrate the author’s thesis that fascism is a form a ‘palingenetic, populist, ultranationalism’, but cover other interpretations as well.) ROGER EATWELL FATALISM ‘Fatalism’ is sometimes used to mean the acceptance of determinism, along with a readiness to accept the consequence that there is no such thing as human freedom. The word is also often used in connection with a theological question: whether God’s supposed foreknowledge means that the future is already fixed. But it is sometimes explained very differently, as the view that human choice and action have no influence on future events, which will be as they will be whatever we think or do. On the face of it this is barely coherent, and invites the assessment that fatalism is simply an expression of resigned acceptance. See also: FREE WILL; PREDESTINATION Further reading Cicero (44 BC) De Fato (On Fate), with trans. and commentary by R.W. Sharples, Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1991. (Sections 28–30 offer an account of Stoic views on fatalism, which they appear to have understood both as determinism and in the sense emphasized in this entry.) EDWARD CRAIG FATALISM, INDIAN Indian speculation about the vicissitudes of human life has a long and complex history. Life in the early Vedic period was considered to be largely hostage to the ‘fate’ of natural and psychic forces controlled by various gods ( devas). Fate was what proceeded ‘from the gods’ ( daiva ), who were considered to be the guardians of the cosmic order and the ultimate source of prosperity. Sacrifice and prayer were the principal means to win their favour. Later the idea arose that one’s present lot is due, not to the whim of some god, but to karma, the effect of one’s own actions performed in this or previous lives. On this view, humans do have some scope or ‘freedom’ to change themselves and the environment in which they live. This more individual potential is called puruṣakāra, which, to varying degrees, may modify daiva . The literal meaning of this term is ‘human action’ (from the Sanskrit for ‘man’ and a verbal root meaning ‘to act’). With the increasing popularity of the karma theory, daiva tended to become equated with the effects of past behaviour. Finally, in the context of the spiritual ascent towards a unifying vision of existence, the status of human agency itself became an issue. As long as the seeker remains blinded by false notions of ‘I’, the ego must experience a sense of agency and a modicum of freedom to chart its course of life. However, from the perspective of enlightenment, or mokṣa, all is ‘fate’ in the hands of a personal God or a Supreme Self. See also: KARMA AND REBIRTH, INDIAN CONCEPTIONS OF; PREDESTINATION Further reading O’Flaherty, W.D. (ed.) (1980) Karma and Rebirth in Classical Indian Traditions, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. (A useful collection of articles by well-known authorities on the subject of karma in Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and various Indian philosophical traditions.) JULIAN F. WOODS FA-TSANG see FAZANG FAZANG (643–712) The monk-scholar Fazang is one of China’s great Buddhist thinkers. Drawing on Buddhist scriptural literature and exegetical and systematic works of his predecessors, he fashioned a highly elaborate philosophy that served to provide a rational explanation of his vision of the way things really are. Huayan philosophy is an attempt to show rationally and systematically how the many phenomena that make up existence abide harmoniously in a double relationship of identity and interpenetration. Fazang was credited by his successors with being the third patriarch of the Huayan school. See also: BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY, CHINESE Further reading Fazang (643–712) Huayan wujiaozhang (Huayan Treatise on the Five Doctrines), trans. F.H. Cook, ‘Fa-
tsang’s Treatise on the Five Doctrines: An Annotated Translation’, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of
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Page 275 Wisconsin, 1970. (Fazang’s most complete discussion of the intricacies of Huayan philosophy; he was the chief architect of Huayan thought.) FRANCIS H. COOK FECHNER, GUSTAV THEODOR (1801–87) Fechner was a pioneer in experimental psychology and the founder of psychophysics, the speciality within psychology devoted to quantitative studies of perception. In his foundational Elemente der Psychophysik ( Elements of Psychophysics) (1860), he defined the mission of the new science to be the development of an ‘exact theory of the functionally dependent relations of . . . the physical and the psychological worlds’. It is in this work that Fechner developed the law of sensation-magnitudes (Fechner’s Law): the strength of a sensation is proportional to the logarithmic value of the intensity of the stimulus. Among his contemporaries he was well known not only for basic research in the field of electricity, but also as the author of a number of satirical works under the name ‘Dr Mises’. See also: PSYCHOLOGY, THEORIES OF Further reading Fechner, G.T. (1860) Elemente der Psychophysik , Leipzig: Breitkopf & Hartel; trans. H. Adler, Elements of Psychophysics, New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1960. (Fechner’s major contribution to experimental psychology in which a precise methodology is developed and its rationale defended productively and with rigour. It is one of the classical works in the history of psychological thought.) DANIEL N. ROBINSON FEDERALISM AND CONFEDERALISM Federative arrangements involve two or more governments ruling over the same territory and population. They have been of interest to political philosophers because they challenge, or at least complicate, some fundamental political concepts like authority, sovereignty, democracy and citizenship. Like citizens in actual federations, philosophers do not treat the terms of federation as a merely technocratic matter: they believe that there are morally legitimate and illegitimate ways of, among other things, dividing powers between governments, determining the representation of the subunits (for example, provinces) within federal institutions and amending the constitution. Philosophers also see in federalism a means of securing a degree of self-determination for ethnic minorities who cannot realistically expect to have their own homogeneous nation-states. See also: MULTICULTURALISM Further reading Forsyth, M. (1981) Unions of States: The Theory and Practice of Confederation, Leicester: Leicester University Press. (An excellent and accessible introduction to the history of federal and confederal thought.) WAYNE NORMAN FËDOROV, NIKOLAI FËDOROVICH (1829–1903) Like many other major figures in the nineteenth-century Russian tradition of speculation, Fëdorov was not an academic philosopher, but an unsystematic religious thinker who sought working answers to the fundamental questions of life. Fëdorov’s basic question was: ‘Why do the living die?’ His answer, in short, was that we die because we neglect our God-given duty to regulate nature. Fëdorov’s life work was to formulate an activist approach to the problem of death, a ‘common task’ in which all people living on earth, all religions and all sciences would eventually be united in a universal project to resurrect all the dead. Further reading Fëdorov, N.F. (1990) What Was Man Created For? The Philosophy of the Common Task. Selected Works, trans. E. Koutaissoff and M. Minto, UK: Honeyglen and Switzerland: L’Age d’Homme. (The first English translation of extensive selections from Fëdorov’s major essays.) Young, G.M. (1979) Nikolai Fedorov: An Introduction , Belmont, MA: Nordland. (A general introduction to the life and thought.) GEORGE M. YOUNG FEMINISM Feminism is grounded on the belief that women are oppressed or disadvantaged by comparison with men, and that their oppression is in some way illegitimate or unjustified. Under the umbrella of this general characterization there are, however, many interpretations of women and their oppression, so that it is a mistake to think of feminism as a single philosophical doctrine, or as implying an agreed political programme. Just as there are diverse images of liberation, so there are a number of feminist
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Page 276 philosophies, yoked together not so much by their particular claims or prescriptions as by their interest in a common theme. In the earlier phases of feminism, advocates focused largely on the reform of women’s social position, arguing that they should have access to education, work or civil rights. During the latter half of the twentieth century, however, feminists have become increasingly interested in the variety of social practices (including theoretical ones) through which our understandings of femininity and masculinity are created and maintained. As a result, the scope of feminist enquiry has broadened to include, for example, jurisprudence, epistemology and psychoanalysis. Despite its diversity, this work characteristically draws on and grapples with a set of deeply-rooted historical attempts to explain the domination of women. Aristotle’s claim that they are mutilated males, together with the biblical account of the sin of Eve, gave rise to an authoritative tradition in which the weakness, irrationality and ineducability of women, the inconstancy, inability to control their emotions and lack of moral virtue, were all regularly cited and assumed as grounds for controlling them and excluding them from the public realm. See also: GENDER AND SCIENCE; LANGUAGE AND GENDER Further reading Beauvoir, S. de (1949) The Second Sex , trans. and ed. H.M. Parshley, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972. (The classic existentialist interpretation of masculinity and femininity and a path-breaking analysis of the social construction of gender.) Millett, K. (1969) Sexual Politics , London: Virago, 1977. (A formative analysis of the construction of femininity in twentieth-century literature and in social theory.) SUSAN JAMES FEMINISM AND PSYCHOANALYSIS Broadly speaking, there have been two main types of philosophical response to psychoanalysis. The first sets out to assess the scientific status of Freud’s hypotheses; the second uses the insights of psychoanalytic theory to re-evaluate the status and foundations of philosophy. Feminists in philosophy have overwhelmingly adopted the second stance, which in practice turns the first on its head, since the epistemological basis of science itself becomes a problem from the vantage point of psychoanalytic accounts. Although in the popular imagination feminism and psychoanalysis are sworn enemies, and many feminists continue to be hostile to Freud, serious feminist engagement with psychoanalysis began with post-1970 feminism in the work of Juliet Mitchell, Luce Irigaray, Dorothy Dinnerstein and Nancy Chodorow. Feminists in philosophy turned to psychoanalysis in an attempt to understand what they perceived as the masculinism of philosophy and its attempt to exclude the feminine. Since psychoanalysis is specifically concerned with issues such as the formation of masculine and feminine identity at the level of the unconscious, it provides a framework for arguing that rationality and knowledge are always unconsciously gendered, thus challenging the self-proclaimed neutrality and universality of philosophy, a claim which feminists had come to see as increasingly suspect. See also: FEMINIST EPISTEMOLOGY; PSYCHOANALYSIS, POST-FREUDIAN Further reading Minsky, R. (1996) Psychoanalysis and Gender: An Introductory Reader, NewYorkand London: Routledge. (Lucid and accessible account. An ideal introduction.) Wright, E. (1984) Psychoanalytic Criticism: Theory in Practice , New York and London: Methuen. (Highly recommended for its account of the implications of psychoanalysis for texts in general, written for the non-specialist reader.) MARGARET WHITFORD FEMINISM AND SOCIAL SCIENCE Feminists have two sorts of interest in the social sciences. With the advent of the second-wave women’s movement, they developed wide-ranging critiques of gender bias in the conceptual framework and methodology, as well as in the goals, institutions and practice of virtually all the social sciences; they argue that the social sciences both reflect and contribute to the sexism of the larger societies in which they are embedded. Alongside these critiques feminist practitioners have established constructive programmes of research that are intended to rectify the inadequacies of existing traditions of research and to address questions of concern to women. In this they are committed both to improving the disciplines in which they participate and to establishing a sound empirical and theoretical basis for feminist activism. This engagement of feminists with social science, as
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Page 277 commentators and practitioners, raises a number of philosophical issues that have been addressed by feminist social scientists and philosophers. These include questions about ideals of objectivity and the role of contextual values in social scientific inquiry, the goals of feminist research, the forms of practice appropriate to these goals, and the responsibilities of feminist researchers to the subjects of inquiry and to those who may otherwise be affected by its conduct or results. See also: FEMINIST EPISTEMOLOGY; FEMINIST JURISPRUDENCE; FEMINIST POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY Further reading Fonow, M.M. and Cook, J.A. (eds) (1991) Beyond Methodology: Feminist Scholarship as Lived Research , Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. (A useful collection of essays on feminist contributions to the social sciences with an excellent introductory summary of the principles that inform feminist research.) Reinharz, S. (1992) Feminist Methods in Social Research , Oxford: Oxford University Press. (The most comprehensive account available of feminist research practice in the social sciences.) ALISON WYLIE FEMINIST AESTHETICS Feminist perspectives in aesthetics and philosophy of art have emerged not only from the discipline of philosophy but also from cognate fields such as literary theory, film studies and art history. Like other feminist philosophy, feminist aesthetics is founded upon critiques of fundamental assumptions that have traditionally governed this area of study. Such staple concepts as aesthetic value, disinterested attention, aesthetic perception and fine art have been analysed for biased perspectives that explicitly or covertly favour masculine gender. Gender bias has been located, for example, in theories of aesthetic attention and appreciation. Feminist analyses have speculated that the traditional, ideal, ‘disinterested’ aesthetic perceiver covertly stands in a position of masculine privilege encouraging desire and control of the object of contemplation. Calling attention to the masculine position of the perceiver goes hand in hand with analyses of visual arts and literature that focus on their representations of gender – formalist interpretive methods that ignore the portrayal of women and sexuality have been especially criticized. The paucity of female artists on lists of acknowledged geniuses and the relative absence of their work from canons of art has occasioned speculation that the concept of art itself is biased in so far as it excludes the creations of most women. Feminist analyses stress the social contexts within which theories develop. Not only do concepts basic to aesthetics manifest ideas about gender that derive from formative traditions, but notions of beauty and art are themselves influential components of culture and contribute to the shape and perpetuation of gender roles. See also: BEAUTY Further reading Battersby, C. (1989) Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetic , London: The Women’s Press. (An analysis of the concept of genius from classical antiquity to the present.) Hein, H. and Korsmeyer, C. (eds) (1993) Aesthetics in Feminist Perspective , Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. (Collection of articles exploring aesthetics in the light of feminist theory.) CAROLYN KORSMEYER FEMINIST EPISTEMOLOGY The impact of feminism on epistemology has been to move the question ‘Whose knowledge are we talking about?’ to a central place in epistemological inquiry. Hence feminist epistemologists are producing conceptions of knowledge that are quite specifically contextualized and situated, and of socially responsible epistemic agency. They have elaborated genealogical/interpretive methods, have advocated reconstructions of empiricism, have articulated standpoint positions and have demonstrated the potential of psychosocial and post-structural analyses to counter the hegemony of epistemological master narratives. In these reconfigured epistemologies, feminists have argued that the cognitive status and circumstances of the knower(s) are central among conditions for the possibility of knowledge. They have demonstrated the salience, in evaluating any epistemic event, of the social arrangements of power and privilege by which it is legitimated or discredited. Feminists are engaged at once in critical projects of demonstrating the privilege-sustaining, androcentric character of ‘the epistemological project’ in most of its received forms, and in transformative projects of reconstructing
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Page 278 methodologies and justificatory procedures so as to eradicate their oppressive, exclusionary effects. They have shown that, in late-twentieth-century western philosophy, the circumstances of mature white men continue to generate prevailing ideals and norms of ‘human nature’, while the ideals of reason, objectivity and value-neutrality around which most mainstream theories of knowledge are constructed, like the knowledge they legitimate, tacitly validate affluent male experiences and values. Scientific knowledge, which is still an overwhelmingly male preserve, stands as the regulative model of objective epistemic authority; and the experiences and values of non-male, non-white and otherwise differently placed knowers typically have to accommodate themselves, Procrustean-style, to an idealized scientific and implicitly masculine norm, or risk dismissal as inconsequential, aberrant, mere opinion. In engaging with these issues, most feminists – like many other participants in ‘successor epistemology’ projects – retain a realist commitment to empirical evidence, while denying that facts or experiences ‘speak for themselves’ and maintaining that most truths are as artefactual as they are factual. Questions of cognitive authority and answerability thus figure as prominently as issues of epistemic warrant in these projects, where feminists are concentrating less on formal, universal conditions for making and justifying knowledge ‘in general’ than on the specificities of knowledge construction. Hence these inquiries are often interdisciplinary, producing detailed analyses of everyday knowledge-making and of scientific or social scientific inquiry; drawing out their gendered and other locational implications. In these projects feminists are showing that avowedly engaged, politically committed investigations can yield well-warranted conclusions. See also: FEMINISM AND PSYCHOANALYSIS; FEMINIST POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY Further reading Alcoff, L. and Potter, E. (eds) (1993) Feminist Epistemologies, New York: Routledge. (Elaborations and refinements of most of the principal approaches to feminist epistemology in the early 1990s.) Duran, J. (1991) Toward a Feminist Epistemology, Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. (A discussion of the resources of ‘naturalized’ epistemology and a proposal for a gynocentric epistemics.) LORRAINE CODE FEMINIST ETHICS Critics greet feminist ethics with suspicion, alleging that it is biased towards the interests of women. Feminist ethicists reply that it is traditional ethics which is biased. As they see it, for centuries traditional ethicists claimed to speak for all of humanity, when they were speaking only or primarily for men, and the most privileged of men at that. In contrast, although feminist ethicists openly admit that they proceed from the perspective of women’s experience, their paramount goal is simply to reconstruct traditional ethics so that it becomes more universal and objective by including women’s as well as men’s moral voices. Far from being monolithic, feminist ethics encompasses a wide variety of woman-centred approaches to the moral life. Feminine approaches to ethics, with their stress on personal relationships and an ethics of care, put a premium on the value of human connection. Maternal approaches focus on one relationship in particular, that between mothers and children, as the paradigm for moral interaction. Lesbian approaches stress choice rather than duty, aiming to define the conditions in which lesbian women can flourish. Finally, specifically feminist approaches to ethics emphasize the political task of eliminating systems and structures of male domination and female subordination in both the public and the private domains. See also: FEMINIST JURISPRUDENCE; SEXUALITY, PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Held, V. (1993) Feminist Morality: Transforming Culture, Society, and Politics , Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (Argues that society would be more moral if the ideal of the ‘autonomous man’ were replaced with the ideal of the ‘relational woman’.) Tong, R. (1993) Feminine and Feminist Ethics , Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. (Explains the difference between a ‘feminine’ ethics of care and a ‘feminist’ ethic of power.) ROSEMARIE TONG FEMINIST JURISPRUDENCE The diversity of feminist philosophy and theory is represented in feminist jurisprudence, but two models of feminist jurisprudence predominate: the parity model, according to which women should be given legal parity with men; and the transformative model, which proposes the transformation of male legal categories and
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Page 279 concepts to address women’s experiences. The parity model has also been identified by the terms ‘the male monopoly of law’, or ‘law as male bias’. The transformative model has sometimes been equated with feminist jurisprudence per se, sometimes more specifically with US feminist jurisprudence. The two models differ primarily in their response to the claim of liberal jurisprudence – a claim made by law itself – that law is a neutral, rational and fair institution which defends individual liberty and treats people equally. The models also differ over the analysis of rights, and over the place of feminist jurisprudence in the legal curriculum. Both models have been subjected to a subversionist critique of any form of feminist jurisprudence. The parity model supports the values of liberal jurisprudence as imputed to law, but identifies a discrepancy between those liberal values and legal practice, such that women are not accorded parity with men. It follows either that law must be persuaded to apply these standards more rigorously in the case of women or that liberal values must be revised to recognize gender as a source of social injustice. The objective is to give women genuine, as opposed to nominal, equal rights or, where their special social situation demands it, special rights. On this model, courses in feminist jurisprudence comprise what have come to be known as ‘women and law’ studies which generally promote the visibility of women in jurisprudence. These studies may include documentation of law’s discrimination against women, analyses of law’s male bias against women, and reviews of all liberal jurisprudence which omits reference to gender. The transformative model also notes the discrepancy between the liberal values imputed to law and law’s treatment of women but recognizes the limitations of attempting to close the gap between liberal jurisprudence and legal practice either by making law apply liberal principles more scrupulously in the area of gender or by revising liberal principles. Instead, feminists working with this model argue that liberal jurisprudence can make no impact on law’s treatment of women so long as legal categories, such as crime or family law, and legal concepts, such as provocation or marriage, embody male norms and accordingly fail to address women’s experiences. It follows that such legal categories and concepts must be transformed to address women’s social position and experiences. In so far as rights discourse embodies male norms, it too must be transformed. On this view, courses in feminist jurisprudence comprise the transformation of broad legal categories and specific legal concepts so that they engage with the reality of women’s lives. The subversionist critique seeks to undermine both the parity model and the transformative model. This critique questions the value of feminist jurisprudence for feminist politics. The reason given is that to work within the paradigm of jurisprudence is to legitimate the strategy of recourse to law as the proper means of solving social problems, the very strategy which both the parity model and the transformative model have exposed as inadequate. The subversionist critique recommends instead that feminists subvert the paradigm of jurisprudence, if necessary by abstaining from engagement with it. The use of rights discourse becomes a tactical calculation, and the inclusion of feminist jurisprudence in the law curriculum is a dubious strategy for feminists. The subversionist critique has been criticized in its turn for undervaluing the achievements of liberal legal systems and liberal jurisprudence. See also: FEMINIST POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY; LAW, PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Atkins, S. and Hoggett, B. (1984) Women and the Law , Oxford: Blackwell. (The classic text of the parity model of feminist jurisprudence.) Smart, C. (1989) Feminism and the Power of Law , London: Routledge. (The most influential account of feminist discourses and law. A critique of feminist jurisprudence in chapter 4 and a summary of feminist theories of rights.) E.F. KINGDOM FEMINIST LITERARY CRITICISM Feminist literary criticism looks at literature assuming its production from a male-dominated perspective. It re-examines canonical works to show how gender stereotypes are involved in their functioning. It examines (and often rediscovers) works by women for a possible alternative voice. A study of the social suppression and minimalization of women’s literature becomes necessary. These questions emerge: What is sexual difference and how has it been represented? How has the representation of woman relied on a presupposition of inequality between the sexes? Is there a feminine essence, biological or otherwise, that produces ‘women’s writing’? Feminists who believe that a ‘woman’ is culturally or socially constructed look for
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Page 280 evidence of that process in literature. The sociocultural and politico-economic construction of sexual difference is ‘gender.’ A study of the difference between sexual and gender difference can establish alliances with gay and lesbian studies. Feminist criticism sometimes relates to psychoanalysis and/or Marxism, criticizing their masculinism and using their resources. It expands into film/video as well as socialscientific or philosophical texts. Feminists sensitive to racism and imperialism demonstrate the culture-specificity of all of the above. See also: FEMINIST AESTHETICS Further reading Ellmann, M. (1968) Thinking About Women, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. (Outstanding analysis of common-sense sexism, written in the style of the familiar essay.) Showalter, E. (1977) A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Introduction to feminist literature, establishing the difference between ‘female’, ‘feminine’ and ‘feminist’.) GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE see GENDER AND SCIENCE FEMINIST POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY In all its forms, feminism asserts that social and political structures in society discriminate against women. Feminist political philosophy aims to show how traditional political philosophy is implicated in that discrimination and how the resources of political philosophy may nevertheless be employed in the service of women. Sometimes, feminist political philosophy extends the arguments of traditional political philosophy to indicate that women are unjustly treated and to propose ways in which that injustice might be removed. This is clearest in liberal feminism, where it is argued that since women are essentially the same as men in being rational creatures, they are entitled to the same legal and political rights as men: arguments which defend the rights of man also support the rights of women. Similarly, Marxist and socialist feminism extend the insights of Marxism and socialism in an attempt to expose and remove the oppression of women: Marxist emphasis on the exploitation of labour under capital is supplemented by Marxist feminist emphasis on the exploitation of women under patriarchy. However, there are also forms of feminist political philosophy which are more critical of traditional political philosophy and which question the very distinctions upon which it is premised. Thus, radical feminist philosophers question the scope of the term ‘political’ as it is usually used by political philosophers, and argue that by excluding domestic concerns, traditional political philosophy excludes many of the things which are most important to women. The aim here is not to extend the insights of political philosophy, but rather to highlight the ways in which political philosophy itself shows a distinct gender bias. Yet more radically, the postmodernists have been critical of philosophy’s emphasis on truth and objectivity, and some feminists have extended their arguments to suggest that the very language of philosophy, and by extension of political philosophy, is ‘man-made’. Feminist political philosophy is therefore not one thing but many, and feminist political philosophers are deeply divided as to whether traditional political philosophy may be modified so as to include women’s interests, or whether it is itself one of the ways in which women’s politically disadvantaged position is legitimized and perpetuated. See also: FEMINIST JURISPRUDENCE Further reading Bryson, V. (1992) Feminist Political Theory , London: Macmillan. (An excellent introductory text, clear and comprehensive, containing an extensive bibliography.) Phillips, A. (1991) Engendering Democracy , Oxford and Cambridge: Polity Press. (A clearly written and accessible account of the ways in which democratic theory is gendered.) SUSAN MENDUS FEMINIST THEOLOGY Feminist theology began as a reaction to the exclusion of women and women’s concerns from traditional Christian theology, but it soon incorporated constructive as well as critical elements. Originating ‘from the margins’ of women’s exclusion, it now is a major force within Christian theological thought. The issue it raised initially was the cultural and social suppositions that inform all theological thinking and that enter into theologies as ‘universals’. In response to such universals, a feminist ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’ seeks out the hidden norms and biases within religious texts. Feminist theology is diverse, but it is char
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Page 281 acterized by pervasive themes. Immanence is valued over transcendence, relation over substance, change over immutability, liberation over salvation, and ecological concerns over traditional Christian eschatological concerns. As could be expected from its hermeneutic of suspicion, feminist theology is also characterized by its insistence on the social location of all thinking. Feminist theologians uniformly use gender-inclusive language not only in reference to humanity, but also in reference to God. Finally, all feminist theologians manifest a concern for liberation from every type of oppression, environmental as well as social, and not just liberation from the oppression women have experienced. See also: FEMINISM Further reading Johnson, E. (1992) She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse, New York: Crossroad Publishing. (Redevelops the notion of the trinity through the centrality of Sophia-Spirit, with implications developed for human communities involving just and liberating relationships.) Ruether, R.R. (1983) Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology , Boston, MA: Beacon Press. (Argues that Christianity has a prophetic stream within it that works towards its own transformation, and redevelops major Christian doctrines accordingly.) MARJORIE SUCHOCKI FEMINIST THOUGHT IN LATIN AMERICA Any analysis of feminist thought in Latin America is burdened by the task of combatting the frequent assumption that feminism is an ideology imported from the USA or Europe. One could begin by arguing that in certain senses autocthonous feminist thought has existed in Latin America for centuries. The thought of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz,a seventeenth-century Mexican writer and nun, had certain qualities, themes and perspectives that can be called feminist. Her autobiographical essay, ‘Reply to Sor Filotea de la Cruz’, is a brilliant defence of a woman’s right to engage in intellectual pursuits and includes many feminist strategies and dimensions. Among the Latin American feminists through the centuries, exemplary passages are easily found, such as the following from the Peruvian Flora Tristán, who said ‘Without liberation of woman, there will be no liberation of man’ (1843). Revisionist reappraisals of underappreciated women thinkers have grown more common. Venezuelan Teresa de la Parra’s important writings which have been re-examined as texts by women continue to be rescued from relative obscurity. Rosario Castellanos, Rigoberta Menchú and Domitila Barrios de Chungara count among those whose work has enjoyed increased critical attention. Concurrently, the voices of traditionally voiceless women are being heard through expanding oral history projects, such as those of domestic workers in Bogotá: ‘It is not enough to have rights. We must raise consciousness and organize ourselves to defend those rights’. In recent years, particularly after the international year of the woman in 1975 and the decade of the woman sponsored by the United Nations from 1976 to 1985, women and men have continued to develop feminist philosophies appropriate for Latin American contexts. Professional feminist philosophy has been practised in Latin America since the early part of the twentieth century. Perhaps surprisingly, a theoretically sophisticated feminist philosophy was practised in Uruguay at this time by male social philosopher, Carlos Vaz Ferreira (1871–1958). His work had significant impact on women’s rights in Latin America. Vaz Ferreira was a pioneer in feminist theory. See also: FEMINIST POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY Further reading Cruz, J. Inés de la ( c .1700) A Woman of Genius: the Intellectual Autobiography of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz , trans. and intro. M. Sayers Peden, Salisbury, CT: Lime Rock Press, 1982. (Contains her autobiographical essay, ‘Reply to Sor Filotea de la Cruz’.) Hierro, G. (1985) La naturaleza feminina: tercercoloquio nacional de filosof ía (Feminine Nature: Third National Convention on Philosophy), Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. (Anthology of articles by feminist philosophers in Mexico, many of which centre on the question of the existence of feminine nature.) AMY A. OLIVER FÉNELON, FRANÇOIS DE SALIGNAC DE LA MOTHE (1651–1715) Born into a French aristocratic family, Fénelon is best-known for his utopian political novel Aventures de Télémaque fils d’Ulysse (Telemachus, Son of Ulysses) (1699), which contrasts the rustic simplicity of Greek antiquity with the
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Page 282 corrupt luxuriousness of Louis XIV’s Versailles. The crucial philosophical works of Fénelon are the Refutation of Malebranche ( c .1686–7) and the Maxims of the Saints (1697). The latter work, which argued for five degrees of ‘purity’ or ‘disinterestedness’ in the human love of God, resulted in his being banished by Louis XIV. Further reading Fénelon, F. de S. de la M. (1835) Oeuvres de Fénelon , Paris, 3 vols. (All the works of Fénelon mentioned are most conveniently to be found in this collection. Includes Réfutation du système du Pére Malebranche ( c .1686–7), Maximes des saints (1697), Telemachus (1699) and De l’existence de Dieu (1713).) PATRICK RILEY FERGUSON, ADAM (1723–1815) Rarely mentioned by philosophers except as companion of David Hume and Adam Smith, Ferguson contributed a political consciousness to the moral philosophy of eighteenth-century Scotland. In An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), Ferguson used a comparative method to reflect on a commercial society distinguished by refined division of labour and to caution against its political dangers. With his intentionally elevated rhetoric he sought to counter his philosophical contemporaries’ analytical aloofness from the negative effects of the civility, commerce, security and critical philosophy they prized. Ferguson’s textbooks and Roman history deserve philosophical attention for their help with interpreting his distinctive social diagnosis of the liberal political constitution. Further reading Ferguson, A. (1767) An Essay on the History of Civil Society , ed. and intro by D. Forbes, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1966; ed. D. Forbes with intro. L. Schneider, New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Transaction, 1980. (Forbes 1966 edition is a reprint of the first edition, with a collation of the variants in the seventh edition of 1814.) Kettler, D. (1965) The Social and Political Thought of Adam Ferguson , Columbus OH: Ohio State University Press. (A sociology of knowledge approach, with special emphasis on Ferguson as a representative ‘intellectual’; as well as university teacher and popular moralist.) DAVID KETTLER FERRIER, JAMES FREDERICK (1806–64) Ferrier represents the transition within nineteenth-century Scottish philosophy from the tradition of common-sense realism begun by Thomas Reid, the last major exponent of which was Ferrier’s mentor, Sir William Hamilton, to versions of idealism influenced by German philosophers, especially Hegel. Although he is largely forgotten, Ferrier merits study for at least two reasons. First, he had a role in importing Hegelian ideas into British thought; and second there are parallels between his arguments and those advanced by antirealist philosophers in the analytical tradition. See also: HAMILTON, W. Further reading Haldane, E. (1899) James Frederick Ferrier , Edinburgh: Oliphant. (The most comprehensive and reliable introduction to Ferrier’s life and work.) JOHN J. HALDANE FEUERBACH, LUDWIG ANDREAS (1804–72) Ludwig Feuerbach, one of the critical Young Hegelian intellectuals of the nineteenth century, has become famous for his radical critique of religious belief. He himself studied philosophy with Hegel in Berlin. In Das Wesen des Christentums ( Essence of Christianity ) (1841) he develops the idea that God does not exist in reality but as a human projection only, and that the Christian principles of love and solidarity should be applied directly to fellow humans rather than being regarded as an indirect reflection of God’s love. In religion, the believer ‘projects his being into objectivity, and then again makes himself an object of an object, another being than himself’. Religious orientation is an illusion and is unhealthy, as it deprives and alienates the believer from true autonomy, virtue and community, ‘for even love, in itself the deepest, truest emotion, becomes by means of religiousness merely ostensible, illusory, since religious love gives itself to man only for God’s sake, so that it is given only in appearance to man, but in reality to God’ (Feuerbach 1841: 44, 48). In Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft ( Principles of the Philosophy of the Future) (1843) he extends his criticism to all forms of metaphysics and religion, criticizing in particular his former teacher Hegel. The philosophy of the future has to be both sensual and communal, equally based on theory and practice and
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Page 283 among individuals. In an anonymous encyclopedia article (1847) he defines his position: ‘the principle from which Feuerbach derives everything and towards which he targets everything is “the human being on the ground and foundation of nature”’, a principle which ‘bases truth on sensuous experience and thus replaces previous particular and abstract philosophical and religious principles’. Feuerbach’s sensualism and communalism had great influence on the young Karl Marx’s development of an anthropological humanism, and on his contemporaries in providing a cultural and moral system of reference for humanism outside of religious orientation and rationalistic psychology. In the twentieth century, Feuerbach influenced existential theology (Martin Buber, Karl Barth) as well as existentialist and phenomenological thought. See also: HEGELIANISM Further reading Feuerbach, L. (1841) Das Wesen des Christentums, trans. M. Evans (George Eliot) as Essence of Christianity , 1854; new edn, intro. K. Barth, foreword H.R. Niebuhr, New York: Harper & Row, 1957. (Feuerbach’s most influential work.) Harvey, Van A. (1995) Feuerbach and the Interpretation of Religion, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Classic study of Feuerbach’s epistemology and interpretation of religion in the context of the philosophical and theological disputes on the validity of Feuerbach’s critique of religion.) HANS-MARTIN SASS FEYERABEND, PAUL KARL (1924–94) Feyerabend was an Austrian philosopher of science who spent most of his academic career in the USA. He was an early, persistent and influential critic of the positivist interpretation of science. Though his views have some affinities with those of Thomas Kuhn, they are in important ways more radical. Not only did Feyerabend become famous (or notorious) for advocating ‘epistemological anarchism’ – the position that there is no such thing as scientific method, so that in advancing scientific research ‘anything goes’ – he also argued that the scientific outlook is itself just one approach to dealing with the world, an approach that is not self-evidently superior in all respects to other approaches. This radicalism led to his being widely attacked as an irrationalist, though perhaps he might better be seen as a sceptic in the humane and tolerant tradition of Sextus Empiricus and Montaigne. See also: INCOMMENSURABILITY Further reading Feyerabend, P. (1975) Against Method, London: New Left Books. (Feyerabend’s best-known book, in which he defends the position that the only generally valid methodological maxim for science is ‘anything goes’.) Munevar, G. (ed.) (1991) Beyond Reason: Essays on the Philosophy of Paul Feyerabend , Dordrecht, and Boston, MA: Kluwer. (Essays on Feyerabend by various contemporary philosophers of science.) MICHAEL WILLIAMS FICHTE, JOHANN GOTTLIEB (1762–1814) Fichte developed Kant’s Critical philosophy into a system of his own, which he named ‘Theory of Science’ or Wissenschaftslehre . Though Fichte continued to revise this system until the end of his life, almost all of his best known and most influential philosophical works were written in first portion of his career, when he was a professor at the University of Jena. The task of philosophy, as understood by Fichte, is to provide a transcendental explanation of ordinary consciousness and of everyday experience, from the standpoint of which philosophy must therefore abstract. Such an explanation can start either with the concept of free subjectivity (‘the I’) or with that of pure objectivity (the ‘thing in itself’), the former being the principle of idealism and the latter that of what Fichte called ‘dogmatism’ (or transcendental realism). Though neither of these first principles can be theoretically demonstrated, the principle of freedom possesses the advantage of being practically or morally certain. Moreover, according to Fichte, only transcendental idealism, which begins with the principle of subjective freedom and then proceeds to derive objectivity and limitation as conditions for the possibility of any selfhood whatsoever, can actually accomplish the task of philosophy. One of the distinctive features of Fichte’s Jena system is its thoroughgoing integration of theoretical and practical reason, that is, its demonstration that there can be no (theoretical) cognition without (practical) striving, and vice versa. Another important feature is Fichte’s demonstration of the necessary finitude of all actual selfhood. The ‘absolute I’ with which the
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Page 284 system seems to begin turns out to be only a practical ideal of total self-determination, an ideal toward which the finite I continuously strives but can never achieve. Also emphasized in Fichte’s Jena writings is the social or intersubjective character of all selfhood: an I is an I only in relationship to other finite rational subjects. This insight provides the basis for Fichte’s political philosophy or ‘theory of right’, which is one of the more original portions of the overall system of the Wissenschaftslehre , a system that also includes a foundational portion (or ‘first philosophy’), a philosophy of nature, an ethics and a philosophy of religion. See also: ENLIGHTENMENT, CONTINENTAL; KANTIAN ETHICS Further reading Adamson, R. (1881) Fichte , Edinburgh: Blackwood. (Though seriously out of date, this remains the only full-scale treatment of Fichte in English.) Fichte, J.G. (1794/5) ‘Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre’ (Foundations of the Entire Science of Knowledge), in P. Heath and J. Lachs (eds) Science of Knowledge (Wissenschaftslehre) , trans. P. Heath, New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1970; 2nd edn., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. (An adequate translation of Fichte’s most famous work, despite the retention of the traditional and misleading title ‘Science of Knowledge’.) DANIEL BREAZEALE FICINO, MARSILIO (1433–99) With Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Marsilio Ficino was the most important philosopher working under the patronage of Lorenzo de’Medici, ‘Il Magnifico’, in the Florence of the High Renaissance. Ficino’s main contribution was as a translator of Platonic philosophy from Greek into Latin: he produced the first complete Latin version of the works of Plato (1484) and Plotinus (1492) as well as renderings of a number of minor Platonists. He supplied many of his translations with philosophical commentaries, and these came to exercise great influence on the interpretation of Platonic philosophy in the Renaissance and early modern periods. Ficino’s most important philosophical work, the Theologia platonica de immortalitate animae (Platonic Theology, On the Immortality of the Soul) (1474) aimed to use Platonic arguments to combat the Averroists, ‘impious’ scholastic philosophers who denied that the immortality of the soul could be proven by reason. The most famous concept associated with his name is that of ‘Platonic love’. See also: PLATONISM, RENAISSANCE Further reading Ficino, M. (1474) Theologia platonica de immortalitate animae (Platonic Theology, On the Immortality of the Soul), ed. and trans. R. Marcel, Théologie platonicienne de l’immortalité des âmes , Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1964–79, 3 vols. (Edition of the Latin text with a French translation; the third volume also contains most of Book 2 of Ficino’s Letters .) Kristeller, P.O. (1943) The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino, New York: Columbia University Press; revised edn, Il pensiero filosofico di Marsilio Ficino, Florence: Le Lettere, 1988. (The classic study of Ficino’s philosophical thought. Revised edition was published in Italian with an updated bibliography.) JAMES HANKINS FICTION, SEMANTICS OF Taken at face value, ‘Anna Karenina is a woman’ seems true. By using Tolstoi’s name ‘Anna Karenina’ and the predicate ‘is a woman’, we appear to refer to the character Anna and to attribute to her a property which she has. Yet how can this be? There is no actual woman to whom the name refers. Such problems of reference, predication and truth also arise in connection with representational art and with beliefs and other attitudes. Meinong distinguishes the ‘being’ of objects (including fictional objects) from the ‘existence’ of actual objects such as Napoleon. ‘Anna Karenina’ refers to a concrete, particular, non-existent object that has the property of womanhood. However, Meinong’s distinction seems to many ontologically suspect. Perhaps, then, being is existence and ‘Anna Karenina is a woman’ is actually false because ‘Anna Karenina’ has no referent. Russell in ‘On Denoting’ (1905) agrees. But how can we explain the apparent contrast in truth between this sentence and the unquestionably erroneous ‘Anna Karenina is from Moscow’? Or is it that being is existence but ‘Anna Karenina’ refers to an abstract, not a concrete, thing – an existent, abstract thing that does not have the property of being a woman but has merely the property of being said, by Tolstoi’s novel, to be a woman? Then, however, the meaning of our sentence about Anna no longer parallels that of ‘Emily Dickinson is a woman’.
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Page 285 Perhaps, as many argue, we only pretend that ‘Anna Karenina’ refers and that the sentence is true. This position may not adequately explain the intuitions that support Anna Karenina as a genuine object of reference and predication, however. See also: PROPER NAMES; REFERENCE Further reading Crittenden, C. (1991) Unreality, Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press. (Defends a Meinongian view against competing theories.) Russell, B. (1905) ‘On Denoting’, Mind 14: 479–93; repr. in Logic and Knowledge: Essays 1901–1950, ed. R.C. Marsh, London: Routledge, 1992. (A classic treatment of reference and description.) ROBERT HOWELL FICTIONAL ENTITIES By ‘fictional entities’, philosophers principally mean those entities originating in and defined by myths, legends, fairy tales, novels, dramas and other works of fiction. In this sense unicorns, centaurs, Pegasus, the Time Machine and Sherlock Holmes are all fictional entities. A somewhat different category of fictional entities is associated with empiricist philosophy. It includes entities apparently assumed by common discourse but which admit of no direct empirical experience. Thus Jeremy Bentham classified as ‘fictitious entities’ motion, relation, power and matter, as well as, notoriously, rights, obligations and duties. David Hume called substance, the self, even space and time ‘fictions’ and Bertrand Russell thought ordinary things, such as Piccadilly or Socrates, were fictions, on the grounds that they are ‘constructed’ out of simpler, more immediate objects of acquaintance. Philosophical interest in fictional entities thus covers a surprisingly wide area of the subject, including ontology and metaphysics, epistemology, logic, philosophy of language and aesthetics. The first question that arises is how the distinction should be drawn between fictional and nonfictional entities. As the examples from Bentham, Hume and Russell show, this is by no means a straightforward matter. The next question concerns what to do with fictional entities once they have been identified. Here the primary philosophical task has been to try to accommodate two powerful yet apparently conflicting intuitions: on the one hand, the intuition that there are no such things as fictional entities, so that any seeming reference to them must be explained away; on the other hand, the intuition that because ‘things’ like Sherlock Holmes and Anna Karenina are so vividly drawn, so seemingly ‘real’, objects of thoughts and emotions, they must after all have some kind of reality. Broadly speaking, we can discern two kinds of philosophical approach: those which incline towards the latter intuition, being in some way hospitable to fictional entities; and the less hospitable kind, which incline towards the former and seek only to show how fictional entities can be eliminated altogether in the strict regime of rational discourse. See also: FICTION, SEMANTICS OF; REFERENCE Further reading Lamarque, P.V. and Olsen, S.H. (1994) Truth, Fiction and Literature: A Philosophical Perspective , Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Useful introduction to logical, epistemological and literary conceptions of fiction.) Wolterstorff, N. (1980) Works and Worlds of Art, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (. At times difficult; but a powerful case for fictional characters as eternal kinds.) PETER LAMARQUE FICTIONALISM ‘Fictionalism’ generally refers to a pragmatic, antirealist position in the debate over scientific realism. The use of a theory or concept can be reliable without the theory being true and without the entities mentioned actually existing. When truth (or existence) is lacking we are dealing with a fiction. Thus fictionalism is a corollary of instrumentalism, the view that what matters about a theory is its reliability in practice, adding to it the claim that science often employs useful fictions. Perhaps the fullest expression of fictionalism occurs in Vaihinger’s once popular philosophy of ‘as if’. See also: SCIENTIFIC REALISM AND ANTIREALISM Further reading Schaper, E. (1966) ‘The Kantian Thing-In-Itself as a Philosophical Fiction’, Philosophical Quarterly 16: 233–43. (Traces the Kantian roots of fictionalism.) ARTHUR FINE FIELD THEORY, CLASSICAL A physical quantity (such as mass, temperature or electrical strength) appears as a field if it is distributed continuously and variably throughout a region. In distinction to a ‘lumped’ quantity, whose condition at any time can be
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Page 286 specified by a finite list of numbers, a complete description of a field requires infinitely many bits of data (it is said to ‘possess infinite degrees of freedom’). A field is classical if it fits consistently within the general framework of classical mechanics. By the start of the twentieth century, orthodox mechanics had evolved to a state of ontological dualism , incorporating a worldview where massive matter appears as ‘lumped’ points which communicate electrical and magnetic influences to one another through a continuous intervening medium called the electromagnetic field. The problem of consistently describing how matter and fields function together has yet to be fully resolved. See also: ELECTRODYNAMICS; FIELD THEORY, QUANTUM Further reading Hesse, M. (1965) Forces and Fields , Totowa, NJ: Littlefield, Adams. (Readable survey of the historical struggle between field and action-at-a-distance perspectives.) MARK WILSON FIELD THEORY, QUANTUM Quantum field theory extends the basic ideas of quantum mechanics for a fixed, finite number of particles to systems comprising fields and an unlimited, indefinite number of particles, providing a coherent blend of field-like and particle-like concepts. One can start from either field- or particle-like concepts, apply the methods of quantum mechanics, and arrive at the same theory. The result inherits all the puzzles of conventional quantum mechanics, such as measurement, superposition and quantum correlations; and it adds a new roster of conceptual difficulties. To mention three: the vacuum seems not really to be empty; the particle concept clashes with classical intuitions; and a method called ‘renormalization’ gets the best predictions in physics, apparently by dropping infinite terms. See also: QUANTUM MEASUREMENT PROBLEM Further reading Teller, P. (1995) An Interpretive Introduction to Quantum Field Theory , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (A general introduction to the elementary formalism and interpretive problems of quantum field theory, accessible to anyone who knows a little quantum mechanics.) PAUL TELLER FILM, AESTHETICS OF Film aesthetics has been dominated by issues of realism. Three kinds of realism attributable to film may be distinguished: (1) the realism inherent in film because of its use of the photographic method (realism of method); (2) realism as a style which approximates the normal conditions of perception (realism of style); and (3) realism as the capacity of film to engender in the viewer an illusion of the reality and presentness of fictional characters and events (realism of effect). Some theorists have argued that realism of method requires us to avoid realist style, others that it requires us to adopt realist style. Most have agreed that realist style makes for realism of effect; they disagree about whether this is a desirable goal. It is argued here that these realisms are independent of one another, that realism of style does not entail any kind of metaphysical realism, and that realism of effect is irrelevant to understanding the normal experience of cinema. Realism of style suggests a way of making precise the claim that cinema is an art of time and of space, because this kind of realism is partially explicated in terms of the representation of time by time and of space by space. Psychological theorizing about the cinema has been strongly connected with realism of effect, and with the idea that an illusion of the film’s reality is created by the identification of the viewer’s position with that of the camera. Another version of illusionism has it that the experience of film-watching is significantly similar to that of dreaming. Such doctrines are undermined when we acknowledge that realism of effect is an insignificant phenomenon. See also: SEMIOTICS Further reading Carroll, N. (1988) Philosophical Problems of Classical Film Theory , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (A useful discussion of expressionist and realist tendencies.) GREGORY CURRIE FILMER, SIR ROBERT (1588–1653) Filmer was one of the most important political thinkers in seventeenth-century England, and the author of Patriarcha. Locke replied to this and other works by Filmer in the Two Treatises of Government – perhaps the most famous of all works of liberal political theory. Filmer argued that notions of mixed or limited government were false and pernicious, and that the powers of all legitimate rulers were derived not from the
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Page 287 people but directly from God, to whom alone rulers were accountable. Filmer’s contemporaries commonly held that the authority of a father and husband over his family stemmed not from the consent of his wife and children but from the natural and divinely appointed order of things. Filmer harnessed such ideas to the cause of royal absolutism by arguing that the state and the family were essentially the same institution. Further reading Filmer, Sir R. (1991) Patriarcha and Other Writings, ed. J.P. Sommerville, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Includes a number of Filmer’s writings, edited from the manuscripts and original editions.) JOHANN P. SOMMERVILLE FINCH, ANNE see CONWAY, ANNE FINITUDE see VULNERABILITY AND FINITUDE FINLAND, PHILOSOPHY IN see SCANDINAVIA, PHILOSOPHY IN FLORENSKII, PAVEL ALEKSANDROVICH (1882–1937) A figure of genius in the history of twentieth-century Russian religious philosophy, Florenskii did much to influence the directions of subsequent Russian thought, both within the Soviet Union and abroad in the Russian diaspora. Florenskii’s originality is most noticeable in his chief philosophical work, Stolp i utverzhdenie istiny (The Pillar and Foundation of Truth) (1914), a somewhat eclectic and romantic work in which he sets forth his basic tenets in epistemology and sophiology. The work, which was his doctoral dissertation, represents a decisive rejection of rationalist and Western-orientated religious philosophy and theology in favour of a more concrete and experiential methodology. Further reading Florenskii, P.A. (1914) Stolp i utverzhdenie istiny (The Pillar and Foundation of Truth), Moscow: Izdatel’stvo ‘Pravda’, 1990, 2 vols; trans. B. Jakim, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. (Florenskii’s best-known work, detailing his epistemology and sophiology.) Slesinski, R. (1984) Pavel Florensky: A Metaphysics of Love , Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press. (The most extensive commentary on Florenskii in English.) ROBERT SLESINSKI FLUDD, ROBERT (1574–1637) Fludd is a marginal figure in the mainstream development of philosophy in seventeenth-century England, but of some importance in the development of an esoteric and mystical philosophy which took the form of an ‘underground’ movement, Rosicrucianism. Rejecting the various types of scholastic philosophy that were still dominant in his day, Fludd drew on Neoplatonist and Renaissance sources in an effort to redirect learning in what he took to be a Christian direction. His writings centre around a search for hidden connections between a purely intelligible realm and the realm of sensation. See also: NEOPLATONISM Further reading Debus, A.C. (1966) The English Paracelsians , New York: Franklin Watts, 105–27. (Good general account of Fludd’s work, paying special attention to his work in alchemy and medicine.) STEPHEN GAUKROGER FODOR, JERRY ALAN (1935–) Jerry Fodor has been one of the most influential figures in the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of psychology, and ‘cognitive science’ through the latter part of the twentieth century. His primary concern has been to argue (vigorously) for a certain view of the nature of thought. According to this view, thinking is information processing within ‘the language of thought’. The mind can be understood as a computer, which directs action with the aid of internal representations of the world. Further reading Fodor, J.A. (1975) The Language of Thought, New York: Thomas Crowell. (Probably Fodor’s most influential book. Outlines and defends the hypothesis of a language of thought, utilizing both philosophical and psychological evidence with great ingenuity.) PETER GODFREY-SMITH FOLK PSYCHOLOGY There is wide disagreement about the meaning of ordinary mental terms (such as ‘belief’, ‘desire’,
‘pain’). Sellars suggested that our use of these terms is governed by a widely shared theory, ‘folk psychology’, a suggestion that has gained empirical support in psychological studies of self-attribution and in a growing literature concerning how children acquire (or, in
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Page 288 the case of autism, fail to acquire) ordinary mental concepts. Recently, there has been a lively debate about whether people actually ‘theorize’ about the mind, or, instead, engage in some kind of ‘simulation’ of mental processes. Further reading Sellars, W. (1956) ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’, in Science, Perception and Reality , London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963, 127–96. (A detailed exposition of the ‘myth of Jones’ and its implication.) STEPHEN P. STICH GEORGES REY FONSECA, PEDRO (1528–99) Called in his own time ‘the Portuguese Aristotle’, Pedro da Fonseca was a sixteenth-century Jesuit philosopher and theologian. Schooled as a Thomist, Fonseca was a master of the Greek, Arabic and scholastic traditions, which enabled him to pursue his own independent line on various issues dealt with by Aquinas and Aristotle. As reflected in his publications, his chief accomplishments were in logic and metaphysics. He authored two very important and widely used works: a clear, comprehensive and systematic textbook in logic ( Institutionum dialecticarum ) and an edition of Aristotle’s Metaphysics with translation plus explanation and commentary. A third shorter work of introduction to logic ( Isagoge philosophica) was also influential. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM, RENAISSANCE Further reading Lohr, C.H. (1987) Latin Aristotle Commentaries . II Renaissance Authors , Florence: Olschki, 150–1. (Contains bibliographical information on Fonseca.) JOHN P. DOYLE FONSECA, PETRUS see FONSECA, PEDRO DA FONTENELLE, BERNARD DE (1657–1757) Despite his considerable historical importance and vast output of literary, critical and philosophical works, the French writer Fontenelle did not make original contributions to philosophy. He popularized a modern view of nature, and raised doubts about institutionalized religions and unexamined theistic beliefs. As a champion of science and secularization, Fontenelle was extremely influential; his Entretiens (Conversations) of 1686 were quickly translated into many languages and became one of the basic texts of the early Enlightenment. Further reading Carré, J.-R. (1932) La Philosophie de Fontenelle ou le sourire de la raison , Paris: F. Alcan; repr. Geneva: Slatkine, 1970. (A general survey of Fontenelle’s views.) Fontenelle, B. de (1686) Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes habités, in Oeuvres complètes , ed. G.-B. Depping, vol. 2; trans. H. Hargreaves, Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds , Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1990. (Fontenelle’s main work, which has appeared in almost one hundred editions since its first publication.) MARTIN SCHÖNFELD FORCING The method of forcing was introduced by Paul J. Cohen in order to prove the independence of the axiom of choice (AC) from the basic (ZF) axioms of set theory, and of the continuum hypothesis (CH) from the accepted axioms (ZFC = ZF + AC) of set theory. Given a model M of ZF and a certain P M , it produces a ‘generic’ G P and a model N of ZF with M N and G N. By suitably choosing P, N can be ‘forced’ to be or not be a model of various hypotheses, which are thus shown to be consistent with or independent of the axioms. This method of proving undecidability has been very widely applied. The method has also motivated the proposal of new so-called forcing axioms to decide what is otherwise undecidable, the most important being that called Martin’s axiom (MA). See also: AXIOM OF CHOICE; SET THEORY Further reading Jech, T. (1978) Set Theory , New York: Academic Press. (A comprehensive treatise, covering the applications mentioned and many more besides, with attributions to their original authors and references to the original technical literature.) JOHN P. BURGESS FORGERY, ARTISTIC see ARTISTIC FORGERY
FORGIVENESS AND MERCY Forgiveness and mercy are regarded as virtues in many moral and religious traditions, although different traditions will emphasize
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Page 289 different aspects. The Christian tradition, for example, tends to emphasize purity of heart as the core of the virtue of forgiveness, whereas the Judaic tradition gives priority to the social dimension of reintegration into the covenanted community. Forgiveness involves the overcoming of anger and resentment, and mercy involves the withholding of harsh treatment that one has a right to inflict. Both allow for healing, but some critics would say that this healing may come at too high a price. Forgiveness, if carried to extremes, can lapse into servility, entailing a loss of self-respect. There are similar paradoxes associated with mercy, particularly in the context of punishment; too strong an emphasis on mercy can lead to a departure from justice. Clearly, though both forgiveness and mercy are obvious virtues, there are difficulties in putting them into practice in the complex situations that make up everyday reality. See also: ATONEMENT; SIN Further reading Murphy, J.G. and Hampton, J. (1988) Forgiveness and Mercy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Hampton’s two chapters seek to develop, with philosophical rigour, a Christian defence of forgiveness and mercy, while Murphy’s three chapters explore the sceptical case against the claim that forgiveness and mercy are virtues.) JEFFRIE G. MURPHY FORMAL AND INFORMAL LOGIC Formal logic abstracts the form of an argument from an instance of it that may be encountered, and then evaluates the form as being valid or invalid. The form is the important thing, rather than the concrete instance of the form. Informal logic, on the other hand, evaluates how an argument is used in a given context of conversation. This more practical, real-world orientation requires more judgment in interpreting what a given text of discourse should be taken to argue. Further reading Jeffrey, R.C. (1967) Formal Logic: Its Scope and Limits , New York: McGraw-Hill, 2nd edn, 1981. (General introduction to formal logic.) Walton, D. (1989) Informal Logic , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (General introduction to informal logic.) DOUGLAS WALTON FORMAL LANGUAGES AND SYSTEMS Formal languages and systems are concerned with symbolic structures considered under the aspect of generation by formal (syntactic) rules, that is, irrespective of their or their components’ meaning(s). In the most general sense, a formal language is a set of expressions. The most important way of describing this set is by means of grammars. Formal systems are formal languages equipped with a consequence operation yielding a deductive system. If one further specifies the means by which expressions are built up (connectives, quantifiers) and the rules from which inferences are generated, one obtains logical calculi of various sorts, especially Frege–Hilbert-style and Gentzen-style systems. See also: GENTZEN, G.K.E. Further reading Hopcroft, J.E. and Ullman, J.D. (1979) Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages and Computation, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. (Elementary textbook of formal language theory.) HEINRICH HERRE PETER SCHROEDER-HEISTER FORMALISM IN ART Formalism in art is the doctrine that the artistic value of a work of art is determined solely by the work’s form. The concept of artistic form is multiply ambiguous, however, and the precise meaning of formalism depends upon which sense of form it operates with. There are two main possibilities. The first understands form as the structure of a work’s elements, the second as the manner in which it renders its ‘content’. If form is understood as structure, formalism is still ambiguous: understood one way, it has never been denied; understood another way, it is untenable. If form is understood as manner, formalism is false. See also: ART, VALUE OF Further reading Bell, C. (1961) Art, London: Arrow Books. (The best-known statement of formalism with respect to visual art.) MALCOLM BUDD FORMALISM, RUSSIAN
see RUSSIAN LITERARY FORMALISM
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Page 290 FOUCAULT, MICHEL (1926–84) Michel Foucault was a French philosopher and historian of thought. Although his earliest writings developed within the frameworks of Marxism and existential phenomenology, he soon moved beyond these influences and developed his own distinctive approaches. There is no overall methodological or theoretical unity to Foucault’s thought, but his writings do fall into several main groups, each characterized by distinctive problems and methods. In his early studies of psychiatry, clinical medicine and the social sciences, Foucault developed an ‘archaeology of knowledge’ that treated systems of thought as ‘discursive formations’ independent of the beliefs and intentions of individuals. Foucault’s archaeology displaced the human subject from the central role it played in the humanism which had been dominant since Kant. While archaeology provided no account of transitions from one system to another, Foucault later introduced a ‘genealogical’ approach, which seeks to explain changes in systems of discourse by connecting them to changes in the non-discursive practices of social power structures. Like Nietzsche’s, Foucault’s genealogies refused all comprehensive explanatory schemes, such as those of Marx or Freud. Instead he viewed systems of thought as contingent products of many small, unrelated causes. Foucault’s genealogical studies also emphasize the essential connection between knowledge and power. Bodies of knowledge are not autonomous intellectual structures that happen to be employed as Baconian instruments of power. Rather, they are essentially tied to systems of social control. Foucault first used his genealogical approach to study the relations between modern prisons and the psychological and sociological knowledge on which they are based. He next proposed a similar analysis of modern practices and ‘sciences’ of sexuality, but eventually decided that such a study had to begin with an understanding of ancient Greek and Roman conceptions of the ethical self. This study was published in two volumes that appeared just before his death. Further reading McNay, L. (1994) Foucault: A Critical Introduction , New York: Continuum. (An excellent introductory survey of Foucault’s work.) Macey, D. (1993) The Lives of Michel Foucault: A Biography , New York: Pantheon. (The best of the several biographies of Foucault.) GARY GUTTING FOUCHER, SIMON (1644–96) Simon Foucher, Canon of Dijon, was a sceptical thinker, active in intellectual circles in Paris. His main philosophical project was the revival of Academic scepticism, and he emerged as an important and influential critic of Cartesian philosophy, questioning the consistency of the Cartesians’ commitment both to mind–body dualism and to the claims that ideas in the mind represent and make known external bodies, and that mind and body interact. He was generally concerned to undermine the Cartesian pretension to know the real essences of mind and body. Foucher was also an early constructive critic of Leibniz’s system of pre-established harmony. See also: DESCARTES, R. Further reading Watson, R.A. (1987) The Breakdown of Cartesian Metaphysics , Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. (Contains a reissue of The Downfall of Cartesianism, which analyses Foucher’s critique of Cartesian philosophy and Cartesian responses to that critique.) STEVEN NADLER FOUNDATIONALISM Some foundationalists are rationalists who rely on intuition and deduction. Others are empiricists, in a broad sense, and accept observation and induction or abduction or yet other ways to support beliefs by means of other beliefs. What they have in common is that they are all willing to hazard a positive view about what in general makes a belief epistemically justified in the way required for it to be a case of knowledge; and they all propose something of the following general form: belief b is justified if and only if either b is foundationally justified through a psychological process of direct apprehension p (such as rational intuition, observation, introspection, and so on) or else b is inferentially justified through a psychological process of reasoning r (such as deduction, induction, abduction, and so on) ultimately from beliefs all of which are acquired or sustained through p. If one rejects all forms of such foundationalism, then a question remains as to what distinguishes in general the cases where a belief is epistemically justified from the cases in which it is not. Can anything general and illuminating be said about what confers epistemic justification on a belief, and what gives a belief the epistemic status required for it to constitute knowledge (provided it is true)? See also: CERTAINTY; REASONS FOR BELIEF
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Page 291 Further reading Audi, R. (1993) The Structure of Justification, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Collected essays by an important defender of a moderate foundationalism.) Moser, P. (1989) Knowledge and Evidence, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Sophisticated book-length development of strong foundationalism, the most thorough and unified.) ERNEST SOSA FRANCIS OF MEYRONNES (d. after 1325) The French Franciscan scholar Francis of Meyronnes, the doctor illuminatus (Enlightened Doctor), was called the ‘Prince of the Scotists’ for his work in systematizing and propagating the philosophy of Duns Scotus in the fourteenth century. His work in metaphysics and theology, while heavily dependent on Scotus, shows originality and independence of mind, and is characterized by his dedication to finding rational defences of Catholic doctrine. His discussion of Ideas includes a critique of Aristotelian metaphysics, and he argues instead for a position based on his conception of Platonism. See also: PLATONISM, MEDIEVAL Further reading Roth, B. (1936) Franz von Mayronis, O.F.M. Sein Leben, seine Werke, seine Lehre vom Formalunterschied in Gott (Francis of Meyronnes, OFM: His Life, Works and Teaching on the Formal Distinction in God), Werl-in-Westfalen: Franziskus-Druckerei. (The most complete study of Francis’s life and works.) JEFFREY HAUSE FRANCIS SYLVESTER OF FERRARA see SILVESTRI, FRANCESCO FRANCISCO DE TOLEDO see TOLETUS, FRANCISCUS FRANCISCUS PATRITIUS see PATRIZI DA CHERSO, FRANCESCO FRANK, JEROME (1889–1957) The American lawyer and judge Jerome Frank was a significant contributor to the ‘realist’ movement in US legal theory. He is most closely associated with ‘fact scepticism’, the view that legal processes, especially court processes, are afflicted with pervasive uncertainty and unpredictability because of the difficulties of finding out with certainty or even strongly justified confidence what happened in the past. See also: LEGAL REALISM Further reading Frank, J. (1930) Law and the Modern Mind, Birmingham, AL: Legal Classics Library, 1985. (This is a reprint of the original edition, including a useful introduction by Julian Mack.) NEIL DUXBURY NEIL MACCORMICK FRANK, SEMËN LIUDVIGOVICH (1877–1950) The philosophy of S.L. Frank was one product of the renewed interest in epistemology, speculative metaphysics and religion among educated Russians in the quarter-century preceding the Revolution of 1917. Frank published the first volume of his philosophical system in 1915, but most of his major works were written after the Revolution, in European exile. Influenced by tendencies in turn-of-the-century European thought that criticized the exaggerated pretensions of scientific reason, Frank formed the conviction that abstract, conceptual thought was inherently incapable of mastering ultimate reality. A valid metaphysics was nevertheless possible, founded on our capacity for direct, intuitive apprehension of reality in its living concreteness. In intuitive knowledge, reality discloses itself as a ‘total-unity’ – an all-embracing unity in which the dualities with which conceptual thought wrestles are overcome without being dissolved. Ultimate reality is itself grounded in, and embraced by, a principle Frank termed ‘Divinity’, one that manifests itself in religious experience as the personal God of Christian faith. The rootedness of the human person in this divine principle is the condition of possibility of all spiritual creativity – of art, science, morality and law, and religion. See also: RUSSIAN RELIGIOUS-PHILOSOPHICAL RENAISSANCE Further reading Boobbyer, P. (1995) S.L. Frank: The Life and Work of a Russian Philosopher, 1877–1950 , Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. (The first full-length biography of Frank; some discussion of his philosophy; good bibliography.)
Frank, S. (1946) God With Us: Three Meditations, trans. N. Duddington, London: Jonathan Cape; S nami Bog: Tri razmyshleniia ,
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Page 292 Paris: YMCA-Press, 1964. (A presentation of Frank’s philosophy of religion, first published in translation, intended for the general reader.) PHILIP J. SWOBODA FRANKFURT SCHOOL The origins of the circle of philosophers and social scientists now known as the Frankfurt School lie in the 1920s when a number of critics and intellectuals were attempting to adapt Marxism to the theoretical and political needs of the time. The distinguishing feature of the approach adopted by the Frankfurt School lies less in its theoretical orientation than in its explicit intention to include each of the disciplines of the social sciences in the project of a critical theory of society. The objectives of this theoretical innovation vis-à-vis all the traditional Marxist approaches were established by Max Horkheimer in various articles written in the 1920s and 1930s. His critique of neo-idealist philosophy and contemporary empiricism sought to develop a philosophy of history which would comprehend the evolution of human reason; in so doing, he drew on empirical research. Thus the Institute of Social Research, conceived as a way of realizing this plan, was founded in 1929. Its work drew on economics, psychology and cultural theory, seeking to analyse, from a historical perspective, how a rational organization of society might be achieved. However, after the National Socialists came to power and drove the Institute into exile, historical/philosophical optimism gave way to cultural/critical pessimism. Horkheimer and Adorno now saw it as the function of a critical theory of society to try, by returning to the history of civilization, to establish the reasons for the emergence of Fascism and Stalinism. Their Dialectic of Enlightenment, which bears some resemblance to Heidegger, impressively testifies to this change of orientation: it asks why totalitarianism came into being and it identifies a cognitive and practical perspective on the world which, because of its concern with the technical control of objects and persons, only allows for an instrumental rationality. But there was some opposition to this critique of reason which tended to view totalitarianism as a consequence of an inescapable cycle of instrumental reason and social control. The concept of total reification was called into question by some of the more marginal members of the Institute working under Adorno and Horkheimer. These were far more interested in asking whether, even under totalitarian conditions, they could determine the remains of a desire for communicative solidarity. The work of philosopher Walter Benjamin constitutes an analysis of the interrelation of power and the imagination; Franz Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer inquired into legal consensus culture and social control; while Erich Fromm conducted a psychoanalytic investigation of communicative needs and their potential for resistance. After the core members of the School had returned from exile, the Institute resumed its work in Frankfurt and embarked on large-scale empirical projects. From the very beginning, however, a considerable gap existed between the empirical investigations which focused on the industrial workplace and the philosophical radicalization of negativity on which Adorno and Horkheimer worked, albeit with differing emphasis. This gap was bridged only when Habermas began to challenge the systematic bases of critical theory, causing the basic philosophical concepts and the intentions of empirical social research once again to correspond. The central idea, with which Habermas introduced a new phase in the history of the Frankfurt School, was his understanding of a form of rationality which would describe the communicative agreement between subjects rather than the instrumental control of things. The concept of communicative rationality which emerged from this idea has since formed the basis for the moral grounds and democratic application of critical theory. See also: CRITICAL THEORY Further reading Arato, A. and Gebhardt, E. (eds) (1978) The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, Oxford: Blackwell. (Excellent selection of articles on the central concerns of critical theory by members of The Frankfurt School, with additional explanatory commentaries by the editors.) Jay, M. (1973) The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–50 , London: Heinemann. (A model of intellectual clarity and accuracy, perhaps the best and most accessible introduction to the early work of the Frankfurt School available in English.) Translated from the German by Bridget Thomson AXEL HONNETH
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Page 293 FRANKLIN, BENJAMIN (1709–70) Benjamin Franklin was a candlemaker’s son who became a successful businessman, politician, diplomat, scientist, philosopher, writer, and social reformer. He played a major role in winning American independence and in American intellectual history. In philosophy Franklin was a deist, and struggled much with problems of morality and determinism. See also: AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY IN THE 18TH AND 19TH CENTURIES; JEFFERSON, T. Further reading Cohen, I. B. (1956) Franklin and Newton, Philadelphia, PA: American Philosophical Society. (Excellent study of Franklin’s scientific work.) Franklin, B. (1725) A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain, London: Samuel Palmer’s Printing House. (Addressed to his friend James Ralph, the pamphlet advances an extreme form of mechanisitic Deism designed to prove that ‘all is right’.) MURRAY G. MURPHEY FREE LOGICS We often need to reason about things that do not – or may not – exist. We might, for example, want to prove that there is no highest prime number by assuming its existence and deriving a contradiction. Our ordinary formal logic, however (that is, anything including standard quantification theory), automatically assumes that every singular term used has a denotation: if you can use the term ‘God’ – if that term is part of your language – automatically there is a denotation for it, that is, God exists. Some logicians have thought that this assumption prejudges too many important issues, and that it is best to get rid of it. They have therefore constructed logics free of this assumption, called ‘free logics’. See also: EXISTENCE; FREE LOGICS, PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES IN Further reading Lambert, K. (ed.) (1991) Philosophical Applications of Free Logic , NewYork: Oxford University Press. (A collection of articles illustrating various uses of free logic.) ERMANNO BENCIVENGA FREE LOGICS, PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES IN The expression ‘free logic’ is a contraction of the more cumbersome ‘logic free of existence assumptions with respect to both its general terms (predicates) and its singular terms’. Its most distinctive feature is the rejection of the principle of universal specification, a principle of classical predicate logic which licenses the logical truth of statements such as ‘If everything rotates then (the planet) Mars rotates’. If a free logic contains the general term ‘exists’, this principle is replaced by a restricted version, one which licenses the logical truth only of statements such as ‘If everything rotates then Mars rotates, provided that Mars exists’. If the free logic does not contain the general term ‘exists’, but contains the term ‘is the same as’, the principle is replaced by a version which licenses only statements such as ‘If everything rotates then Mars rotates, provided that there is an object the same as Mars’. Most free logicians regard the restricted version of universal specification as simply making explicit an implicit assumption, namely, that Mars exists. Indeed, free logic is the culmination of a long historical trend to rid logic of existence assumptions with respect to its terms. Just as classical predicate logic purports to be free of the hidden existence assumptions which pervaded the medieval theory of inference with respect to its general terms, so free logic rids classical predicate logic of hidden existence assumptions with respect to its singular terms. There are various kinds of free logic, with many interesting and novel philosophical applications. These cover a wide range of issues from the philosophy of mathematics to the philosophy of religion. In addition to the issue of how to analyse singular existence statements, of the form ‘3 + 7 exists’ and ‘That than which nothing greater can be conceived exists’, of special importance are issues in the theory of definite descriptions, set theory, the theory of reference, modal logic and the theory of complex general terms. See also: FREE LOGICS Further reading Bencivenga, E. (1989) ‘Why Free Logic?’ in Looser Ends, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. (A very readable and distinctive philosophical explanation of free logic.) KAREL LAMBERT FREE WILL ‘Free will’ is the conventional name of a topic that is best discussed without reference to the will. Its central questions are ‘What is it to act
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Page 294 (or choose) freely?’, and ‘What is it to be morally responsible for one’s actions (or choices)?’ These two questions are closely connected, for freedom of action is necessary for moral responsibility, even if it is not sufficient. Philosophers give very different answers to these questions, hence also to two more specific questions about ourselves: (1) Are we free agents? and (2) Can we be morally responsible for what we do? Answers to (1) and (2) range from ‘Yes, Yes’ to ‘No, No’ – via ‘Yes, No’ and various degrees of ‘Perhaps’, ‘Possibly’, and ‘In a sense’. (The fourth pair of outright answers, ‘No, Yes’, is rare, but appears to be accepted by some Protestants.) Prominent among the ‘Yes, Yes’ sayers are the compatibilists , who hold that free will is compatible with determinism . Briefly, determinism is the view that everything that happens is necessitated by what has already gone before, in such a way that nothing can happen otherwise than it does. According to compatibilists, freedom is compatible with determinism because freedom is essentially just a matter of not being constrained or hindered in certain ways when one acts or chooses. Thus normal adult human beings in normal circumstances are able to act and choose freely. No one is holding a gun to their heads. They are not drugged, or in chains, or subject to a psychological compulsion. They are therefore wholly free to choose and act even if their whole physical and psychological make-up is entirely determined by things for which they are in no way ultimately responsible – starting with their genetic inheritance and early upbringing. Incompatibilists hold that freedom is not compatible with determinism. They point out that if determinism is true, then every one of one’s actions was determined to happen as it did before one was born. They hold that one cannot be held to be truly free and finally morally responsible for one’s actions in this case. They think compatibilism is a ‘wretched subterfuge. . . a petty word-jugglery’, as Kant put it (1788: 189–90). It entirely fails to satisfy our natural convictions about the nature of moral responsibility. The incompatibilists have a good point, and may be divided into two groups. Libertarians answer ‘Yes, Yes’ to questions (1) and (2). They hold that we are indeed free and fully morally responsible agents, and that determinism must therefore be false. Their great difficulty is to explain why the falsity of determinism is any better than the truth of determinism when it comes to establishing our free agency and moral responsibility. For suppose that not every event is determined, and that some events occur randomly, or as a matter of chance. How can our claim to moral responsibility be improved by the supposition that it is partly a matter of chance or random outcome that we and our actions are as they are? The second group of incompatibilists is less sanguine. They answer ‘No, No’ to questions (1) and (2). They agree with the libertarians that the truth of determinism rules out genuine moral responsibility, but argue that the falsity of determinism cannot help. Accordingly, they conclude that we are not genuinely free agents or genuinely morally responsible, whether determinism is true or false. One of their arguments can be summarized as follows. When one acts, one acts in the way one does because of the way one is. So to be truly morally responsible for one’s actions, one would have to be truly responsible for the way one is: one would have to be causa sui, or the cause of oneself, at least in certain crucial mental respects. But nothing can be causa sui – nothing can be the ultimate cause of itself in any respect. So nothing can be truly morally responsible. Suitably developed, this argument against moral responsibility seems very strong. But in many human beings, the experience of choice gives rise to a conviction of absolute responsibility that is untouched by philosophical arguments. This conviction is the deep and inexhaustible source of the free will problem: powerful arguments that seem to show that we cannot be morally responsible in the ultimate way that we suppose keep coming up against equally powerful psychological reasons why we continue to believe that we are ultimately morally responsible. See also: MORAL AGENTS; WILL, THE Further reading Kane, R. (1996) The Significance of Free Will , New York: Oxford University Press. (Contains a careful statement of the ‘free willist’, libertarian case, and a general survey of the debate.) Kant, I. (1788) The Critique of Practical Reason , trans. L.W. Beck, Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956. (Kant grounds human freedom in a ‘noumenal’ self not subject to the laws of causality, and holds that it requires that one be responsible for one’s character: he believes that we cannot understand how freedom is possible, although we can know that it exists.) Strawson, G. (1986) Freedom and Belief, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Puts the case for disbelief in
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Page 295 free will and discusses the ‘cognitive phenomenology’ of belief in free will.) GALEN STRAWSON FREEDOM AND LIBERTY There are at least two basic ideas in the conceptual complex we call ‘freedom’; namely, rightful selfgovernment (autonomy), and the overall ability to do, choose or achieve things, which can be called ‘optionality’ and defined as the possession of open options. To be autonomous is to be free in the sense of ‘self-governing’ and ‘independent’, in a manner analogous to that in which sovereign nation states are free. Optionality is when a person has an open option in respect to some possible action, x, when nothing in the objective circumstances prevents them from doing x should they choose to do so, and nothing requires them to do x should they choose not to. One has freedom of action when one can do what one wills, but in order to have the full benefit of optionality, it must be supplemented by freedom of choice (free will), which consists in being able to will what one wants to will, free of internal psychological impediments. Autonomy and optionality can vary independently of one another. A great deal of one can coexist with very little of the other. Perhaps the most controversial philosophical question about the analysis of freedom concerns its relation to wants or desires. Some philosophers maintain that only the actual wants that a person has at a given time are relevant to their freedom, and that a person is free to the extent that they can do what they want, even if they can do very little else. Other philosophers, urging that the function of freedom is to provide ‘breathing space’, insist that freedom is a function of a person’s ability to satisfy possible (hypothetical) as well as actual wants. A third group consists of those who hold a ‘value-oriented’ theory according to which freedom is not merely the power of doing what one wants or may come to want, rather it is the capacity of doing something ‘worth doing or enjoying’, something that is important or significant to the person said to be free, or to others. See also: FREEDOM OF SPEECH; LAW, LIMITS OF Further reading Miller, D. (ed.) (1991) Liberty, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (The most useful bibliography of philosophical analyses of freedom. Contains, among other things, influential articles by T.H. Green, Isaiah Berlin, Gerald C. MacCallum and G.A. Cohen.) Pelczynski, Z.A. and Gray, J.N. (eds) (1984) Conceptions of Liberty in Political Philosophy , London: Athlone Press. (Contemporary authors discuss the differing conceptions of freedom that appear throughout the history of philosophy, from the ancient Greeks to John Rawls. A major theme is the comparison of the various views with Berlin’s distinction between positive and negative freedom.) JOEL FEINBERG FREEDOM, DIVINE In the theistic tradition, many thinkers have held that God is infinitely powerful, all-knowing, perfectly good and perfectly free. But since a perfectly good being would invariably follow the best course of action, what can be meant when it is said that God acts freely? Two different views of divine freedom have emerged. According to the first view, God acts freely provided nothing outside him determines him to act. So when we consider God’s action of creating a world, it is clear that on the first view he acts freely since there is nothing outside him to determine him to do as he does. The difficulty with this view is that it neglects the possibility that God’s own nature might require him to create one particular world rather than another or none at all. According to the second view, God is free in an action provided it was within his power not to perform that action. Unlike the first view, on this view God acts freely only if nothing beyond God’s control necessitates his performing that action. The problem for this view is that since it is impossible for God, being perfectly good, not to choose to follow the best course of action, it is difficult to see how God could be free in such an action. See also: CREATION AND CONSERVATION, RELIGIOUS DOCTRINE OF; OMNIPOTENCE Further reading Morris, T.V. (1993) ‘Perfection and Creation’, in E. Stump (ed.) Reasoned Faith, Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press. (Argues that if it is impossible for God to do the best he can, his perfection is not impaired by his creating a world when he could have created a better world.) Quinn, P. (1982) ‘God, Moral Perfection, and Possible Worlds’, in F. Sontag and M. Darrol Bryant (eds.) God: The Contemporary Discussion , New York: The Rose of Sharon Press. (Somewhat technical discussion of the
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Page 296 principles governing God’s freedom in relation to creation.) WILLIAM L. ROWE FREEDOM OF SPEECH Freedom of speech is one of the most widely accepted principles of modern political and social life. The three arguments most commonly offered in its defence are that it is essential for the pursuit of truth, that it is a fundamental constituent of democracy, and that it is a liberty crucial to human dignity and wellbeing. Its advocates also plead the dangers of allowing governments to control what may be said or heard. Yet there is also general agreement that speech should be subject to some limits. Most contemporary controversies about free speech concern those limits; some focus upon what should count as ‘speech’, others upon the harms that speech may cause. Further reading Baker, C.E. (1989) Human Liberty and Freedom of Speech, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (A comprehensive study which integrates philosophical and legal issues.) Fish, S. (1994) There is No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It’s a Good Thing Too , Oxford: Oxford University Press. (A sceptical appraisal of enthusiasm for free speech.) PETER JONES FREGE, GOTTLOB (1848–1925) A German philosopher-mathematician, Gottlob Frege was primarily interested in understanding both the nature of mathematical truths and the means whereby they are ultimately to be justified. In general, he held that what justifies mathematical statements is reason alone; their justification proceeds without the benefit or need of either perceptual information or the deliverances of any faculty of intuition. To give this view substance, Frege had to articulate an experience- and intuition-independent conception of reason. In 1879, with extreme clarity, rigour and technical brilliance, he first presented his conception of rational justification. In effect, it constitutes perhaps the greatest single contribution to logic ever made and it was, in any event, the most important advance since Aristotle. For the first time, a deep analysis was possible of deductive inferences involving sentences containing multiply embedded expressions of generality (such as ‘Everyone loves someone’). Furthermore, he presented a logical system within which such arguments could be perspicuously represented: this was the most significant development in our understanding of axiomatic systems since Euclid. Frege’s goal was to show that most of mathematics could be reduced to logic, in the sense that the full content of all mathematical truths could be expressed using only logical notions and that the truths so expressed could be deduced from logical first principles using only logical means of inference. In this task, Frege is widely thought to have failed, but the attempted execution of his project was not in vain: for Frege did show how the axioms of arithmetic can be derived, using only logical resources, from a single principle which some have argued is, if not a logical principle, still appropriately fundamental. In addition, Frege contributed importantly to the philosophy of mathematics through his trenchant critiques of alternative conceptions of mathematics, in particular those advanced by John Stuart Mill and Immanuel Kant, and through his sustained inquiry into the nature of number and, more generally, of abstract objects. In the course of offering an analysis of deductive argument, Frege was led to probe beneath the surface form of sentences to an underlying structure by virtue of which the cogency of inferences obtains. As a consequence of his explorations, Frege came to offer the first non-trivial and remotely plausible account of the functioning of language. Many of his specific theses about language – for instance, that understanding a linguistic expression does not consist merely of knowing which object it refers to – are acknowledged as of fundamental importance even by those who reject them. More generally, three features of Frege’s approach to philosophical problems have shaped the concerns and methods of analytic philosophy, one of the twentieth century’s dominant traditions. First, Frege translates central philosophical problems into problems about language: for example, faced with the epistemological question of how we are able to have knowledge of objects which we can neither observe nor intuit, such as numbers, Frege replaces it with the question of how we are able to talk about those objects using language and, once the question is so put, avenues of exploration previously invisible come to seem plausible and even natural. Second, Frege’s focus on language is governed by the principle that it is the operation of sentences that is explanatorily primary: the explanation of the functioning of all parts of speech is to be in terms of their contribution to the meanings of
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Page 297 full sentences in which they occur. Finally, Frege insists that we not confuse such explanations with psychological accounts of the mental states of speakers: inquiry into the nature of the link between language and the world, on the one hand, and language and thought, on the other, must not concern itself with unshareable aspects of individual experience. These three guiding ideas – lingua-centrism, the primacy of the sentence, and anti-psychologism – exercised a commanding influence on early analytic philosophers, such as Wittgenstein, Russell and Carnap. Through them, these ideas have been spread far and wide, and they have come to create and shape analytic philosophy, with whose fathering Frege, more than anyone else, must be credited. See also: LOGIC IN THE 19TH CENTURY; LOGIC IN THE EARLY 20TH CENTURY Further reading Frege, G. (1884) Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik: eine logisch-mathematische Untersuchung über den Begriff der Zahl, Breslau: Koebner; trans. J.L. Austin, The Foundations of Arithmetic: A LogicoMathematical Enquiry into the Concept of Number , Oxford: Blackwell, 2nd edn, 1980. (Includes criticism of then extant views about the nature of arithmetic, motivation for Frege’s own proposal and informal proofs of the laws of arithmetic. One of Frege’s most central texts.) Dummett, M. (1973) Frege: Philosophy of Language, London: Duckworth, 2nd edn, 1992. (This is a long, difficult, but superb and seminal study of Frege’s views on language and logic which is relied upon heavily throughout the above.) ALEXANDER GEORGE RICHARD HECK FREI, HANS (1922–88) Hans Frei was an American theologian who fled his native Germany before the Second World War and spent almost all of his teaching career at Yale University. Frei was concerned with two particular questions: why had the traditional Christian mode of biblical interpretation collapsed in the modern world, and how could it be recovered? He argued that, while the traditional interpretation of the Bible treated it as realistic narrative, in the modern period it had become accepted to treat the events described in it as myths and allegories. He argued for a more literal interpretation of the Gospels, which could lead to a more realistic interpretation of the person and nature of Jesus. See also: HERMENEUTICS, BIBLICAL Further reading Frei, H. (1974) The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. (Frei’s classic study of biblical hermeneutics; densely written.) NICHOLAS P. WOLTERSTORFF FRENCH PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE A distinctively French tradition in the philosophy of science began with Descartes, continued through the Enlightenment in works such as D’Alembert’s Discours préliminaire and the Encyclopédie , and flowered in the ninteenth and the early twentieth century with the work of Comte, Duhem, Meyerson and Poincaré. Throughout the twentieth century, the dominant fashions in French philosophy derived more and more from German influences, especially idealism and phenomenology (Hegel to Heidegger). But amidst these developments, there persisted an essentially autonomous tradition of French philosophy of science that offered an indigenous alternative to the Germanic imports. Here the key figure was Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962), for many years professor at the Sorbonne and director of the Institut d’Histoire des Sciences et des Techniques. His work was continued and modified by Georges Canguilhem (1904– 95), his successor at the Institute, who himself was an important influence on philosophers such as Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault and Michel Serres. Jean Cavaillès’ critique of Husserl’s philosophy of mathematics and his effort to develop a neo-Hegelian alternative to it had deep affinities with Bachelard’s work and was also an important influence on Canguilhem. The most important general features of twentieth-century French philosophy of science appear if we contrast it with its two major rivals: existential phenomenology and logical positivism. Existential phenomenology is a ‘philosophy of the subject’, maintaining that ultimate truth resides in the immediacy of lived experience. Bachelard and his followers, by contrast, proposed a ‘philosophy of the concept’, for which experiential immediacy is subordinate to and corrected by concepts produced by rational reflection. This process of rational reflection is, moreover, embodied in science, which is not, as existential phenomenology maintains, a
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Page 298 derivative and incomplete form of knowing, but the very paradigm of knowledge. In giving science a privileged epistemic position, the French philosophers of science are like the logical positivists. But, unlike the positivists, they treat science as essentially historical, irreducible in either method or content to the rigour of a formal system. They also opposed the positivists’ effort to find the foundations of scientific knowledge in sense experience, maintaining that there are no simply given data and that all experience is informed by conceptual interpretation. Further reading Bachelard, G. (1934) Le nouvel esprit scientifique , Paris: Alcan; trans. A. Goldhammer, The New Scientific Spirit, Boston, MA: Beaconb Press, 1984. (An important early statement of Bachelard’s approach to the philosophy of science.) Canguilhem, G. (1966) Le normale et le pathologique , Paris: PUF; trans. C. Fawcett, The Normal and the Pathological , New York: Zone Books, 1991. (A study of the concept of the normal in biology and medicine; the English translation also includes an important essay on Canguilhem by Michel Foucault.) GARY GUTTING FREUD, SIGMUND (1856–1939) Born in Moravia, Freud lived and practised in Vienna until the Nazi occupation. He developed the theory and practice of psychoanalysis, one of the most influential schools of psychology and psychotherapy of the twentieth century. He established a relationship with his patients which maximized information relevant to the interpretation of their behaviour, and this enabled him to find explanations of dreams, symptoms and many other phenomena not previously related to desire. In consequence he was able radically to extend our common-sense psychology of motive. On Freud’s account everyday actions are determined by motives which are far more numerous and complex than people realize, or than common-sense understanding takes into account. The most basic and constant motives which influence our actions are unconscious, that is, difficult to acknowledge or avow. Such motives are residues of encounters with significant persons and situations from the past, often reaching back to early childhood; and they operate not to achieve realistic satisfaction, but rather to secure a form of pacification through representation. When we interpret what others say and do we apply these patterns of satisfaction and pacification to explain their behaviour; and in so far as we succeed in understanding others in this way we support the patterns as empirical generalization. While we recognize that pacification consequent on genuine satisfaction is deeper and more lasting than that effected by representation alone, we also know that human desire outruns opportunities for satisfaction to such an extent that pacification via imagination is common. This is a view which psychoanalysis radically extends. This understanding of the mind enabled Freud to give psychological accounts of neurosis and psychosis, and to explicate how the past gives significance to the present in normal mental functioning. Past desires, even those of infancy, are not psychologically lost; rather they are continually re-articulated through symbolism, so as to direct action towards their representational pacification throughout life. In this Freud provides both a radically holistic account of thecausation of action anda naturalistic description of the generation of meaning in life. New goals acquire significance as representatives of the unremembered objects of our earliest and most visceral passions; and the depth of satisfaction we feel in present accomplishments flows from their unacknowledged pacification of unknown desires from the distant past. Thus, paradoxically, significant desires can remain forever flexible, renewable and satisfiable in their expressions, precisely because they are immutable, frustrated and unrelenting at the root. See also: JUNG, C.G.; PSYCHOANALYSIS, METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES IN; PSYCHOANALYSIS, POSTFREUDIAN Further reading Freud, S. (1953–74) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , trans. anded. J. Strachey et al., London: Hogarth Press, 24 vols. (The standard English edition of Freud’s works.) Gay, P. (1988) Freud, A Life for Our Time, London and Melbourne: J.M. Dent. (Biography which contains accounts of Freud’s main ideas and a comprehensive Bibliographical Essay.) Neu, J. (ed.) (1992) The Cambridge Companion to Freud , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Philosophical essays on Freud and psychoanalysis.) JAMES HOPKINS
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Page 299 FRIENDSHIP Philosophical interest in friendship has revived after a long eclipse. This is due largely to a renewed interest in ancient moral philosophy, in the role of emotion in morality, and in the ethical dimensions of personal relations in general. Questions about friendship are concerned with issues such as whether it is only an instrumental value (a means to other values), or also an intrinsic value – a value in its own right; whether it is a mark of psychological and moral self-sufficiency, or rather of deficiency; and how friendship-love differs from the unconditional love of agapē. Other issues at stake include how – if at all – friendship is related to justice; whether the particularist, partialist perspective of friendship can be reconciled with the universalist, impartialist perspective of morality; and whether friendship is morally neutral. See also: SEXUALITY, PHILOSOPHY OF; TRUST Further reading Blum, L. (1980) Friendship, Altruism, and Morality, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (The first book on friendship since Aelred’s De spiritali amicitia, and probably the best-known single contemporary work on the topic. Argues that sympathy, compassion and concern are cognitive emotions that are intentionally diverted at others’ good and since friendship is a locus of these emotions, it is an intrinsically moral phenomenon.) Mitsis, P. (1988) Epicurus’ Ethical Theory: The Pleasures of Invulnerability , Ithaca,NY: Cornell University Press, ch. 3. (Expands on Epicurus’ interpretation of friendship, particularly his conception of eudamonia as invulnerable.) NEERA K. BADHWAR FRIES, JACOB FRIEDRICH (1773–1843) Fries was a German post-Kantian philosopher, active chiefly in Jena and Heidelberg. He was a personal as well as a philosophical enemy of Hegel. Fries’ version of Kantian philosophy opposed the speculative idealism of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, developing an ‘anthropological critique of reason’. Fries also emphasized subjectivity in ethics and religion. In politics he was a republican and a German nationalist. For his participation in the Wartburg Festival of 1817 (a gathering of radical student fraternities), Fries was removed from his professorship at Jena in 1820, but restored in 1824. He wrote both scholarly and popular treatises on metaphysics, logic, ethics and politics, as well as mathematics and natural science. His continuing influence early in this century was mediated chiefly by the Göttingen Neo-Kantian Leonard Nelson and by Rudolf Otto’s theory of religious experience. See also: GERMAN IDEALISM Further reading Fries, J.F. (1982) Dialogues on Morality and Religion, ed. D.Z. Phillips, trans. D. Walford, Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble. (The recent translation of Fries, an abridged version of Julius and Evagoras . The editor emphasizes the affinity of Fries’ philosophy of religion with Wittgensteinian Fideism.) Otto, R. (1931) The Philosophy of Religion Based on Kant and Fries , trans. E.B. Dickler, London: Allen & Unwin. (The author is an influential twentieth-century philosopher of religion, whose classic study The Idea of the Holy was strongly influenced by Fries’ theory of religious experience.) ALLEN W. WOOD FUJIWARA SEIKA (1561–1619) In Tokugawa intellectual historiography, Fujiwara Seika has been traditionally deemed the founding father of the Zhu Xi school of neo-Confucianism in Japan. He emphasized seiza (quiet-sitting) in order to perceive the ethical essence of human nature, and asserted the priority of principle, moving away from dualism towards a more rationalistic monism. See also: CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY, JAPANESE; ZHU XI Further reading de Bary, W.T. and Bloom, I. (eds) (1979) Principle and Practicality: Essays in Neo-Confucianism and Practical Learning, New York: Columbia University Press. (An anthology including sophisticated essays, many pertaining to Seika, by leading Japanese and American scholars.) JOHN ALLEN TUCKER FULLER, LON LOUVOIS (1902–78) Lon Louvois Fuller was a leading US legal philosopher and contracts lawyer who in his controversies with H.L.A. Hart and with US ‘legal realists’ advanced a version of ‘procedural natural law’ deriving an ‘inner morality of law’ from the formal properties of law. At the same time, through his insistence that legal interpretation must always consider the essentially purposive character of legal activity, he forms
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Page 300 an intellectual bridge between earlier pragmatist accounts of law and the late twentieth-century interpretivist approach associated particularly with Ronald Dworkin. See also: LAW, PHILOSOPHY OF; NORMS, LEGAL Further reading Fuller, L.L. (1964) The Morality of Law , 2nd revised edn, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1969. (The great work which establishes the thesis of the ‘inner morality of law’ in opposition to the version of legal positivism proposed by H.L.A. Hart.) MASSIMO LA TORRE FUNCTIONAL EXPLANATION Explanations appealing to the functions of items are common in everyday discourse and in science: we say that the heart pumps blood because that is its function, and that the car fails to start because the ignition is not functioning. Moreover, we distinguish the functions things perform from other things they do: the heart makes a noise, but that is not one of its functions. Philosophical discussions in this area attempt to specify conditions under which it is appropriate to ascribe functions to items and under which it is appropriate to appeal to those functions in explanations. Difficulties arise because functions are normative: there is some sense in which items ought to perform their functions; failure to perform is a kind of error. Philosophical discussions investigate whether and how this normativity can be understood in scientifically respectable terms. This is important, because biological entities are among the most characteristically functional items. This issue gives rise to differing views as to what it is that functional explanations explain. One view is that they explain how a containing system achieves some goal or effect. Another is that functional explanations explain causally why the functional item exists. See also: CAUSATION; TELEOLOGY Further reading Millikan, R.G. (1984) Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (Influential theory of ‘proper functions’ for use in naturalized semantics; technical but rewarding.) RICHARD N. MANNING FUNCTIONALISM The term ‘functionalism’ means different things in many different disciplines from architectural theory to zoology. In contemporary philosophy of mind, however, it is uniformly understood to stand for the view that mental states should be explained in terms of causal roles. So, to take a simple example, a functionalist in the philosophy of mind would argue that pains are states which are normally caused by bodily damage, and tend in turn to cause avoidance behaviour. Functionalism is often introduced by an analogy between mental states and mechanical devices. Consider the notion of a carburettor, say. For something to be a carburettor it need not have any particular physical make-up. Carburettors can come in many different materials and shapes. What makes it a carburettor is simply that it plays the right causal role, namely that it mixes air with petrol in response to movements of the accelerator and choke. Similarly, argue functionalists, with the mind. The possession of mental states does not depend on the physical make-up of the brain; it depends only on its displaying the right causal structure. Since organisms with very different sorts of biological make-up, like octopuses and humans, can have states with the causal role of pain, say, it follows from functionalism that octopuses and humans can both be in pain. There exists a number of different subspecies of functionalism. One important division depends on how the relevant causal roles are determined. ‘Common-sense’ functionalists take them to be fixed by common-sense psychology; ‘scientific’ functionalists take them to be fixed by the discoveries of scientific psychology. So, for example, common-sense functionalists will hold that emotions play the causal role that common-sense psychology ascribes to emotions, while scientific psychologists will argue that scientific psychology identifies this causal role. Functionalism, of whatever subspecies, is open to a number of well-known criticisms. One central objection is that it cannot accommodate the conscious, qualitative aspect of mental life. Could not a machine share the causal structure of someone who was in pain, and thereby satisfy the functionalist qualification for pain, and yet have no conscious feelings? It might seem that functionalists can respond to this difficulty by being more stringent about the requirements involved in the causal role of a given human sensation. But there is a danger that functionalism will then lose much of its appeal. The original attraction of functionalism was that its ‘liberal’ specification of causal roles allowed that humans could share mental states with non-humans. This feature is likely to be lost
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Page 301 if we switch to more ‘chauvinist’ specifications designed to explain why non-humans do not share our conscious life. Another objection to functionalism is that it cannot account for mental representation. Functionalism focuses on the way mental states enter into causal structure. But it is doubtful that mental representation can be explained in purely causal terms. Some philosophers argue that the issue of mental representation can be dealt with by adding some teleology to functionalism, that is by considering the biological purposes for which mental states have been designed, as well as their actual structure of causes and effects. However, once we do appeal to teleology in this way, it is not clear that we still need a functionalist account of representational states, for we can now simply identify such states in terms of their biological purposes, rather than their causal roles. See also: MATERIALISM IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND; REDUCTIONISM IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND Further reading Block, N. (ed.) (1980) Readings in the Philosophy of Psychology , London: Methuen, vol. 1. (The section on functionalism contains many important articles, including early versions of functionalism by H. Putnam, D. Lewis and D.M. Armstrong. See also Block’s Introduction to this section, and the difficulties he raises in ‘Troubles with Functionalism’.) Rosenthal, D.M. (ed.) (1991) The Nature of Mind, London: Oxford University Press. (Good general collection on contemporary philosophy of mind. Papers by W.G. Lycan and E. Sober argue for ‘microfunctionalism’ (Lycan) and ‘teleofunctionalism’ (Lycan and Sober).) DAVID PAPINEAU FUNCTIONALISM IN SOCIAL SCIENCE In the social sciences, functionalists are theorists who give an especially prominent role to functional explanations. One of the most influential self-defined functionalists, Malinowski, summed up this view: the functionalist ‘insists. . . upon the principle that in every type of civilisation, every custom, material object, idea and belief fulfils some vital function, has some task to accomplish, represents an indispensable part within a working whole’. As an example of a functionalist explanation, one might consider the hypothesis, as argued for instance by Evans-Pritchard in his work on the Azande in Africa, that belief in witches generally plays a role in maintaining social stability. In the last few decades of the twentieth century, postmodern, or post-structuralist, sociologists have largely disavowed the pursuit of functional explanations. The extremism of some functionalist theses has been matched by an equal extremism in postmodern antitheses. In denying that everything must be explained functionally, some go so far as to say that nothing should ever be explained functionally. Yet there is liveable logical space between the modernist’s ‘There has always got to be a reason, the real reason, for everything’, and the postmodernist’s ‘There is never any real reason for anything’. We do not have to be card-carrying functionalists to suspect that functional explanations might be found for at least some of the bewildering things that some people do in various parts of the world. New models of functional explanation are emerging from recent ferment in the biological sciences, and these new models may suggest new ways of approaching functional explanations in the social sciences. See also: EXPLANATION IN HISTORY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE; FUNCTIONAL EXPLANATION Further reading Elster, J. (1979) Ulysses and the Sirens, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (An influential Marxist critique of functional explanations.) Hempel, C.G. (1965) Aspects of Scientific Explanation, New York: Free Press. (A classic in the broadly logical positivist tradition, including an influential analysis of scientific explanation in general, and functional explanations in particular.) JOHN C. BIGELOW FUTURE GENERATIONS, OBLIGATIONS TO There are at least three different views concerning obligations to future generations. One is that morality does not apply here, future generations not being in any reciprocal relationship with us. Another is that, though we are not obliged to do anything for future generations, it would be praiseworthy to do so. A third view is that justice demands that we respect the interests of future generations. Philosophers and others have discussed obligations in three main areas: the environment, and the damage inflicted upon it in pursuit of
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Page 302 profit; savings and the accumulations of capital; and population policy. Different theoretical approaches have been taken. According to utilitarianism, the interests of people count equally with those of present people, and all interests are to be satisfied maximally. This may have very demanding implications. Contractarianism rests morality on the agreement of all affected parties. But whose views will be considered in the case of future generations? Perhaps the most plausible approach is communitarianism, according to which obligations can rest on a sense of community which stretches into the future. See also: DEVELOPMENT ETHICS; RECIPROCITY Further reading de-Shalit, A. (1994) Why Posterity Matters, London: Routledge. (Expounds a communitarian theory of justice between generations.) Partridge, E. (ed.) (1981) Responsibilities to Future Generations , Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books. (A collection of essays which mainly discusses theoretical questions. Very good as an introduction.) AVNER DE-SHALIT FUZZY LOGIC The term ‘fuzzy’ refers to concepts without precise borders. Membership in a ‘fuzzy’ set – the set of things to which a ‘fuzzy’ concept (fuzzily) applies – is to be thought of as being a matter of degree. Hence, in order to specify a fuzzy set, one must specify for every item in the universe the extent to which the item is a member of the set. The engineer Lotfi Zadeh developed a theory of fuzzy sets and advocated their use in many areas of engineering and science. Zadeh and his zealous followers have attempted to develop fuzzy systems theory, fuzzy algorithms and even fuzzy arithmetic. The phrase ‘fuzzy logic’ has come to be applied rather imprecisely to any analysis that is not strictly binary. It does not refer to any particular formal logic, in the sense in which the term ‘logic’ is used by philosophers and mathematicians. (‘Fuzzy logic’ is sometimes used anachronistically to refer to any many-valued logic.) Further reading Kosko, B. (1993) Fuzzy Thinking , New York: Hyperion. (A much less formal version of the previous item with some intellectual history.) CHARLES G. MORGAN
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Page 303 G GADĀDHARA (1604–1709) Gadādhara Bhaṭṭācārya was a seventeenth-century Indian philosopher belonging to a school of thinkers, Navya-Nyāya, noted for its extreme realism and its contributions to philosophical methodology. Though Gadādhara’s commentaries on the school’s key texts are recognized as among the latest, most detailed and innovative, his greater claim to fame is due to his composition of a number of independent tracts on topics in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, ethics and legal theory. He may be credited in particular with the discovery of a version of the pragmatic theory of pronominal anaphora. His work on case grammar and inferential fallacies is highly admired in India, while recent translations into English have begun to make him better known outside. See also: LANGUAGE, INDIAN THEORIES OF Further reading Gadādhara Bhaṭṭācārya (1604–1709) Viṣayatāvāda , trans. S. Bhattacharya, Gadādhara’s Theory of Objectivity, Containing the Text of Gadādhara’s Viṣayatāvāda with an English Translation and Explanatory Notes , Part II, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1990. (A clear presentation of Gadādhara’s work on mental content and intentionality.) JONARDON GANERI GADAMER, HANS-GEORG (1900–) The German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer is best known for his philosophical hermeneutics. Gadamer studied with Martin Heidegger during his preparation of Being and Time (1927). Like Heidegger, Gadamer rejects the idea of hermeneutics as merely a method for the human and historical sciences comparable to the method of the natural sciences. Philosophical hermeneutics is instead about a process of human understanding that is inevitably circular because we come to understand the whole through the parts and the parts through the whole. Understanding in this sense is not an ‘act’ that can be secured methodically and verified objectively. It is an ‘event’ or ‘experience’ that we undergo. It occurs paradigmatically in our experience of works of art and literature. But it also takes place in our disciplined and scholarly study of the works of other human beings in the humanities and social sciences. In each case, understanding brings self-understanding. Philosophical hermeneutics advocates a mediated approach to self-understanding on the model of a conversation with the texts and works ofothers.The concept of dialogue employed here is one of question and answer and is taken from Plato. Such understanding never becomes absolute knowledge. It is finite because we remain conditioned by our historical situation, and partial because we are interested in the truth that we come to understand. By grounding understanding in language and dialogue as opposed to subjectivity, Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics avoids the danger of arbitrariness in interpreting the works of others. Gadamer’s most important publication is Wahrheit and Methode (Truth and Method) (1960). He has also published four volumes of short works, Kleine Schriften (1967–77), containing important hermeneutical studies of Plato, Hegel, and Paul Celan among others. His many books and essays are collected into ten volumes ( Gesammelte Werke ). Gadamer is widely known as a teacher who practises the dialogue which is at the core of his philosophical hermeneutics. Further reading Gadamer, H.-G. (1960) Wahrheit und Methode, Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck); trans. Truth and Method, New York: Sheed & Ward, 1975; 2nd edn, rev. trans. J. Weinsheimer and D.G. Marshall, 1989. (Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics. The later, revised translation is preferred.) Wachterhauser, B. (ed.) (1986) Hermeneutics and Modern Philosophy , Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. (Important essays on Gadamer.) KATHLEEN WRIGHT GAIUS ( c .110–c .180) Gaius was a great but not a typical classical Roman jurist. His Institutes ( c .AD 161), an introductory textbook, is the first known
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Page 304 attempt to see Roman law as a systematic whole. His scheme was used by Justinian and so played a central role in subsequent European thought on the classification of law. See also: ROMAN LAW Further reading Gaius ( c .AD 161) The Institutes of Gaius, F. de Zulueta (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946, 1953; W.M. Gordon and P.F. Robinson (eds), London: Duckworth, 1988. (In the former part 1 is the text with critical notes and a translation, part 2 an extensive and useful commentary. The latter edition has the text with a readable, modern translation.) GRANT McLEOD GALEN (AD 129–c .210) Galen was the most influential doctor of late Greco-Roman antiquity. But he was also a notable philosopher, who desired to effect a synthesis of what was best in the work of his predecessors, not only in medicine but also in logic, epistemology, philosophical psychology and the philosophy of science and explanation. In logic he made use of both Aristotelian and Stoic material, but supplemented them with his own treatment of relational logic. His epistemology, while resolutely anti-sceptical on the grounds that nature could not have furnished us with systematically delusive sense-organs, was none the less sober and cautious: some philosophers’ questions are simply unanswerable. He attacked the Stoics’ unitary psychology, establishing by means of detailed experiments that the brain was the source of voluntary action. Finally, drawing on the philosophical and medical tradition, he crafted a theory of cause and explanation sophisticated enough to rebut the sceptical challenges to such notions, and rich enough to enable him to construct a comprehensive physiology and pathology on its basis. Further reading Galen ( c . AD 175) On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato, trans. P.H. De Lacy, Galeni de Placitis Hippocratis et Platonis, in Corpus Medicorum Graecorum V 42 1, Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 3 vols, 1978– 83. (Magisterial edition and translation, with short commentary, on Galen’s great text.) Temkin, O. (1973) Galenism , Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. (A good general account of Galen’s medical views and their afterlife.) R.J. HANKINSON GALILEI, GALILEO (1564–1642) The Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei, one of the most colourful figures in the long history of the natural sciences, is remembered best today for two quite different sorts of reason. He has often been described as the ‘father’ of modern natural science because of his achievements in the fields of mechanics and astronomy, and for what today would be called his philosophy of science, his vision of how the practice of science should be carried on and what a completed piece of natural science should look like. While none of the elements of that philosophy was entirely new, the way in which he combined them was so effective that it did much to shape all that came after in the sciences. In the popular mind, however, as a continuing stream of biographies attest, it is his struggle with Church authority that remains the centre of attention, symbolic as it is of the often troubled, but always intriguing, relationship between science and religion. See also: MECHANICS, ARISTOTELIAN Further reading Galilei, G. (1632) Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems , trans. S. Drake, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1953. (The classic work in which Galileo undermines the Aristotelian arguments against the Copernican proposal, refutes Aristotle’s own concentric world-system, and advances a number of arguments in support of the Copernican alternative.) Machamer, P. (ed.) (1998) Cambridge Companion to Galileo , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (A set of essays from recent contributors to Galileo scholarship that effectively illustrates how diverse that scholarship’s findings still remain.) ERNAN McMULLIN GALILEO see GALILEI, GALILEO GAME THEORY see DECISION AND GAME THEORY; SEMANTICS, GAME-THEORETIC GAME-THEORETIC SEMANTICS see SEMANTICS, GAME-THEORETIC GANDHI, MAHATMA see GANDHI, MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND
GANDHI, MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND (1869–1948) Gandhi was called Mahatma (the Great Soul) by Rabindranath Tagore and many in the West, while Gandhi’s followers often simply called him
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Page 305 Bapuji (Father). His confrontation with racism in South Africa provided a challenging context for the development of his idea of satyāgraha (holding fast to the truth), a method of nonviolent, noncooperative resistance to the authorities. Influenced by several religious traditions, such as Hinduism (especially Vaishnava), Jainism, Islam and Christianity, Gandhi was both a religious thinker and practical reformer. While in jail on several occasions, he wrote prolifically. He was murdered on 30 January 1948 by a Hindu zealot. See also: POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, INDIAN; Further reading Gandhi, M.K. (1927) An Autobiography, or the Story of My Experiments with Truth , trans. M. Desai, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1957. (This book is the single most important work by Gandhi for understanding his philosophy of life.) FRANK J. HOFFMAN GAṄGEŚA ( fl. c .1325) Gangeśa launched and solidified advances in logic and epistemology within the classical Indian school of Logic, Nyāya. He is traditionally taken to have inaugurated the ‘New’ school, Navya-Nyāya. Nyāya, both Old and New, is a multidimensional system that belies the stereotype of Indian philosophy as idealist and mystical in orientation. Gangeśa worked with a realist ontology of objects spoken about and experienced every day. He articulated what may be called a reliabilist theory of knowledge: under specified conditions, sense-mediated and inferential cognitions (along with two other types) are reliable sources of information about reality. Gangeśa was a pivotal figure in classical Indian philosophy; most later debate both within his school and outside it presupposed cognitive analyses that he standardized. These analyses focus on properties exhibited by things known, properties central to the processes whereby they are known. Properties relating the cognized to the cognizer are especially important. Though Gangeśa had a lot to say about the ontological status of these properties, others in his school found them problematic. Such controversy appears to have contributed to New Logic’s success: proponents of rival views were able to utilize Gangeśa’s formulas and definitions without abandoning their own positions on what is real. See also: KNOWLEDGE, INDIAN VIEWS OF; ONTOLOGY IN INDIAN PHILOSOPHY Further reading Bhattacharyya, S. (1993) Gangeśa’s Theory of Indeterminate Perception , New Delhi: Indian Council of Philosophical Research. (Lucid explanation of key concepts of Gangeśa’s epistemology and philosophy of perception.) Phillips, S.H. and Tatacharya N.S.R. (trans.) (1998) Gangeśa’s ‘Jewel of Reflection on Reality’, the Perception Chapter , Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. (Translation, interspersed with the translators’ commentary, of the entire first chapter of Gangeśa’s ‘Jewel’.) STEPHEN H. PHILLIPS GARRIGOU-LAGRANGE, RÉGINALD (1887–1964) Garrigou-Lagrange was a French Dominican who for decades adorned the Angelicum in Rome, where in his courses he commented closely on the Summa theologiae . The spiritual life was a principal interest of GarrigouLagrange, and many of his books are devoted to the theology and practice of mystical union with God. Impatient with theological novelty, Garrigou-Lagrange came to be caricatured by the champions of innovators. His own work, solid, careful, illuminating, is a monument to a golden period of the Thomistic revival. See also: THOMISM Further reading Garrigou-Lagrange, R. (1915) Dieu, son existence et sa nature, trans. Dom B. Rose, God: His Existence and His Nature , St Louis, MO: Herder, 2 vols, 1934, 1935. (Proof of the demonstrability of God; treats the Five Ways of St Thomas, and various divine attributes and their interrelationship.) RALPH McINERNY GASSENDI, PIERRE (1592–1655) Pierre Gassendi, a French Catholic priest, introduced the philosophy of the ancient atomist Epicurus into the mainstream of European thought. Like many of his contemporaries in the first half of the seventeenth century, he sought to articulate a new philosophy of nature to replace the Aristotelianism that had traditionally provided foundations for natural philosophy. Before European intellectuals could accept the philosophy of Epicurus, it had to be purged of various heterodox notions. Accordingly, Gassendi modified the philosophy of his ancient model to make it conform to the demands of Christian theology.
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Page 306 Like Epicurus, Gassendi claimed that the physical world consists of indivisible atoms moving in void space. Unlike the ancient atomist, Gassendi argued that there exists only a finite, though very large number of atoms, that these atoms were created by God, and that the resulting world is ruled by divine providence rather than blind chance. In contrast to Epicurus’ materialism, Gassendi enriched his atomism by arguing for the existence of an immaterial, immortal soul. He also believed in the existence of angels and demons. His theology was voluntarist, emphasizing God’s freedom to impose his will on the Creation. Gassendi’s empiricist theory of knowledge was an outgrowth of his response to scepticism. Accepting the sceptical critique of sensory knowledge, he denied that we can have certain knowledge of the real essences of things. Rather than falling into sceptical despair, however, he argued that we can acquire knowledge of the way things appear to us. This ‘science of appearances’ is based on sensory experience and can only attain probability. It can, none the less, provide knowledge useful for living in the world. Gassendi denied the existence of essences in either the Platonic or Aristotelian sense and numbered himself among the nominalists. Adopting the hedonistic ethics of Epicurus, which sought to maximize pleasure and minimize pain, Gassendi reinterpreted the concept of pleasure in a distinctly Christian way. He believed that God endowed humans with free will and an innate desire for pleasure. Thus, by utilizing the calculus of pleasure and pain and by exercising their ability to make free choices, they participate in God’s providential plans for the Creation. The greatest pleasure humans can attain is the beatific vision of God after death. Based on his hedonistic ethics, Gassendi’s political philosophy was a theory of social contract, a view which influenced the writings of Hobbes and Locke. Gassendi was an active participant in the philosophical and natural philosophical communities of his day. He corresponded with Hobbes and Descartes, and conducted experiments on various topics, wrote about astronomy, corresponded with important natural philosophers, and wrote a treatise defending Galileo’s new science of motion. His philosophy was very influential, particularly on the development of British empiricism and liberalism. See also: ATOMISM, ANCIENT; SCEPTICISM, RENAISSANCE Further reading Gassendi, P. (1972) The Selected Works of Pierre Gassendi , trans. C. Brush, New York: Johnson Reprint. (English translations of selections from Exercitationes paradoxicae adversus Aristoteleos, De motu impressu, Rebuttals to Descartes from the Disquisitio metaphysica, and Syntagma philosophicum.) Joy, L.S. (1987) Gassendi the Atomist: Advocate of History in an Age of Science , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Interprets Gassendi’s atomism in light of his use of the history of philosophy.) MARGARET J. OSLER GAUḌĪYA VAIṢṆAVISM The philosophical school encompassing the Bengali devotees of the god Viṣṇu traditionally known as the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava school. Caitanya is considered to be the founder of this school in the sense that he led a revival of Kṛṣṇa devotionalism in Bengal during the early sixteenth century, inspiring a number of contemporary intellectuals to some original speculations of a metaphysical nature. Some of these were directly related to Vedānta, others were not. Since the eighteenth century the school has also become associated through Baladeva Vidyābhūṣaṇa with the Madhva school. However, the latter propounded a dualistic doctrine, while the Gauḍīyas are believers in the inconceivable simultaneous difference and oneness of the Supreme and his creation. See also: VEDĀNTA Further reading Chakravarty, R. (1985) Bengal Vaiṣṇavism, 1486–1900, Calcutta: Sanskrit Pustaka Bhandar. (An excellent history of the school.) JAN K. BRZEZINSKI GAUTAMA, AKṢAPĀDA ‘Akṣapāda Gautama’ (or ‘Gotama’) stands for the legendary founder of the Nyāya (‘Logic’) school of Indian philosophy, who is reputed also to be the author of its basic text, the Nyāyasūtra. This compilation of roughly 500 mnemonic sentences reached its first defined form around AD 400. Its oldest core preserves a manual of philosophical debate supplemented by elements of an early philosophy of nature and a basic soteriology. The later parts of the text deal with the number and nature of the means of valid cognition; they further treat the objects of
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Page 307 valid cognition and discuss basic questions of metaphysical content. See also: NYĀYA-VAIśEṢIKA Further reading Saha, S. (1987) Perspectives on Nyaya Logic and Epistemology, Calcutta/New Delhi: K P Bagchi & Company. (Although the author makes some use of later materials, he concentrates on the Nyāyasūtra and follows the text’s order in his clear presentation.) ELI FRANCO KARIN PREISENDANZ GENDER AND LANGUAGE see LANGUAGE AND GENDER GENDER AND SCIENCE Gender-based analyses of philosophies of science have arisen at the conjunction of two other movements. First, in the 1960s it became increasingly the accepted position that scientific claims failed to reflect only an external reality. Scientific processes are not transparent; they necessarily permit cultural and social values and interests to contribute to the descriptions and explanations of nature’s order. Thus gender values and interests, too, could have shaped scientific practices and claims. Second, women’s movements developed powerful gender analyses of all other aspects of social relations. What resources could such accounts provide to illuminate also the practices and cultures of the sciences? Consequently, diverse analyses have appeared showing how sexist and androcentric values and interests have shaped scientific projects, and shaped them with unfortunate results not only for gender relations, but also for the advance of both sciences and philosophy. They also examine how other values and interests, ones that are gender-neutral and ones that draw on resources found in women’s lives, can have beneficial effects. Concern has been raised in the following issues. Is correcting ‘bad science’ sufficient to eliminate sexist and androcentric results of research? How has the exclusion of women from those groups that select what will count as scientific problems resulted in narrow and distorted representations of nature’s order? How has excessive reliance on gendered meanings of nature, the scientist, and scientific method – gender coding – shaped scientific claims? If the subject of science remains coded masculine, how can women claim positions as speakers/authors of scientific research – as scientific subjects? In what ways have research procedures (technologies) been gender-coded and how has their use directed the development of subsequent sexist and androcentric technologies and applications of science? Why have standards for maximizing objectivity and good method been too weak to prevent of knowledge-decreasing values and interests from shaping the results of research? See also: FEMINIST EPISTEMOLOGY Further reading Haraway, D. (1989) Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science , New York: Routledge. (Primatology’s role in the production of androcentric and Eurocentric culture, and vice versa. Early classic accounts of how gender and race shaped the choice and conceptual frameworks of scientific projects.) Merchant, C. (1980) The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution , New York: Harper & Row. (Important history of early modern science. How modern sciences came to reflect and help to shape shifting gender relations of fifteenth- through seventeenth-century Europe.) SANDRA G. HARDING GENEALOGY ‘Genealogy’ is an expression that has come into currency since the 1970s, a result of Michel Foucault’s works Surveiller et punir ( Discipline and Punish ) and The History of Sexuality . Foucault’s use of the term continues Nietzsche’s in his On the Genealogy of Morals. For both philosophers, genealogy is a form of historical critique, designed to overturn our norms by revealing their origins. Whereas Nietzsche’s method relies on psychological explanations, and attacks modern conceptions of equality in favour of a perfectionist ethic, Foucault’s relies on micro-sociological explanations, and attacks modern forms of domination in favour of radical politics. See also: FOUCAULT, M. Further reading Dreyfus, H.L. and Rabinow, P. (1982) Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics , Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (An accessible introduction to Foucault’s thought, with extensive discussion of the methodological issues raised by genealogy.) R. KEVIN HILL
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Page 308 GENERAL RELATIVITY, PHILOSOPHICAL RESPONSES TO Much of the early philosophical attention given Einstein’s theory of gravitation was not uncontaminated by a grim post-war atmosphere conducive to public diversions, hysteria and national chauvinism. Most was ill-informed regarding the mathematical and physical content of the theory. Even amongst the scientifically literate, there was disagreement as to the theory’s philosophical implications. In part, this lack of clarity is due to Einstein. In an endeavour to eliminate references to ‘absolute space’ as the earlier special (or, as it was then known, restricted) theory of relativity (STR) had eliminated reference to ‘absolute time’, Einstein had motivated his theory of gravitation as arising from an epistemologically mandated generalization of the relativity principle of STR, which governed only inertial motions, and he misleadingly baptized it a theory of ‘general relativity’, wherein all motions are regarded as relative to other bodies. This the theory does not show. Also, some incautiously expressed remarks on the formal requirement of general covariance were seized upon as evidence for antithetical epistemological and ontological attitudes. Amidst such confusions, it is not at all surprising that inherently antagonistic philosophical outlooks claimed vindication or confirmation by the general theory of relativity (GTR). In turn, the perceived failure of both Machian positivism and Neo-Kantianism to accommodate the revolutionary theory spurred the development of a new ‘scientific philosophy’, logical positivism. The subsequent course of philosophy of science in the twentieth century was indelibly marked by this development. Yet it would turn out that Einstein himself refused to be a cooperative exemplar for any of the major philosophical schools, positivism, Kantianism, or, to its embarrassment, logical positivism. See also: EINSTEIN, A.; RELATIVITY THEORY, PHILOSOPHICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF Further reading Hentschel, K. (1990) Interpretationen und Fehlinterpretationen der speziellen und der allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie durch Zeitgenossen Albert Einstein (Interpretations and Misinterpretations of the Special and the General Theory of Relativity by Einstein’s Contempories), Basel-Boston-Berlin: Birkhäuser. (Encyclopedic reference of all the various ‘schools’ of interpretation.) T.A. RYCKMAN GENERAL WILL The fundamental claim for general will is that the members of a political community, as members, share a public or general interest or good which is for the benefit of them all and which should be put before private interests. When the members put the general good first, they are willing the general will of their community. The claim was given special and influential shape by Rousseau. He produced a comprehensive theory of the legitimacy of the state and of government, revolving around the general will. Some contend this solves the central problem of political philosophy – how the individual can both be obliged to obey the state’s laws, and be free. If laws are made by the general will, aimed at the common good and expressed by all the citizens, the laws must be in accordance with the public interest and therefore in the interest of each, and each is obliged by the law yet free because they are its author. Rousseau’s formulation has been much criticized. But others have found it essentially true and have variously adapted it. Further reading Levine, A. (1993) The General Will: Rousseau, Marx, Communism , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (The use of the idea of the general will in current political philosophy.) Riley, P. (1986) The General Will Before Rousseau: The Transformation of the Divine into the Civic , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Traces the theological origins of the idea of the general will in writers such as Pascal and Malebranche.) PETER P. NICHOLSON GENETICS Genetics studies the problem of heredity, namely why offspring resemble their parents. The field emerged in 1900 with the rediscovery of the 1865 work of Gregor Mendel. William Bateson called the new field ‘genetics’ in 1905, and W. Johannsen used the term ‘gene’ in 1909. By analysing data about patterns of inheritance of characters, such as yellow and green peas, Mendelian geneticists infer the number and type of hypothetical genes. The major components of the theory of the gene, which proposed the model of genes as beads on a string, were in place by the 1920s. In the 1930s, the field of population genetics emerged from the synthesis of results from Mendelian genetics with Darwinian natural selection. Population geneticists study the distribution of genes in the gene pool
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Page 309 of a population and changes caused by selection and other factors. The 1940s and 1950s saw the development of molecular genetics, which investigates problems about gene reproduction, mutation and function at the molecular level. Philosophical issues arise, such as the question about the evidence for the reality of hypothetical genes, and the status of Mendel’s laws, given that they are not universal generalizations. Debates have occurred about the nature of the relation between Mendelian and molecular genetics. Population genetics provides the perspective of the gene as the unit of selection in evolutionary theory. Molecular genetics and its accompanying technologies raise ethical issues about humans’ genetic information, such as the issue of privacy of information about one’s genome and the morality of changing a person’s genes. The nature– nurture debate involves the issue of genetic determinism, the extent to which genes control human traits and behaviour. See also: GENETICS AND ETHICS; SPECIES Further reading Dunn, L.C. (1965) A Short History of Genetics, New York: McGraw-Hill. (History of genetics from Mendel to 1939.) Stern, C. and Sherwood, E. (eds) (1966) The Origin of Genetics, A Mendel Source Book, San Francisco, CA: W.H. Freeman. (Contains translations of Mendel’s original papers, letters and the papers of his rediscovers, Hugo de Vries and Carl Correns.) LINDLEY DARDEN GENETICS AND ETHICS The identification of human genes poses problems about the use of resources, and about ownership and use of genetic information, and could lead to overemphasis of the importance of genetic make-up. Genetic screening raises problems of consent, stigmatization, discrimination and public anxiety. Counselling will be required, but whether this can facilitate individual choice is unclear. It will also involve problems of confidentiality. On the other hand genetic knowledge will pave the way for genetic therapies for hereditary disease. This raises the question whether a therapy which alters an individual at the genetic level is different in kind from conventional medical treatment. Genetic alterations passed on to future generations raise problems regarding consent. Genetic intervention could also be used to make ‘improvements’ in human genetic potential, leading to anxieties about eugenic attempts to design the species. Transgenics, the introduction of foreign genes into a genome, raises questions about the integrity of species boundaries and the assessment of risk. See also: APPLIED ETHICS; BIOETHICS Further reading Chadwick, D. et al. (1990) Human Genetic Information: Science, Law and Ethics , Chichester: John Wiley. (Deals with issues raised by the attempt to map and sequence the human genome.) RUTH CHADWICK GENTILE, GIOVANNI (1875–1944) Best known as the self-styled philosopher of Fascism, Gentile, along with Benedetto Croce, was responsible for the ascendance of Hegelian idealism in Italy during the first half of the twentieth century. His ‘actual’ idealism or ‘actualism’ was a radical attempt to integrate our consciousness of experience with its creation in the ‘pure act of thought’, thereby abolishing the distinction between theory and practice. He held an extreme subjectivist version of idealism, and rejected both empirical and transcendental arguments as forms of ‘realism’ that posited the existence of a reality outside thought. His thesis developed through a radicalization of Hegel’s critique of Kant that drew on the work of the nineteenth-century Neapolitan Hegelian Bertrando Spaventa. He argued that it represented both the natural conclusion of the whole tradition of Western philosophy, and had a basis in the concrete experience of each individual. He illustrated these arguments in detailed writings on the history of Italian philosophy and the philosophy of education respectively. He joined the Fascist Party in 1923 and thereafter placed his philosophy at the service of the regime. He contended that Fascism was best understood in terms of his reworking of the Hegelian idea of the ethical state, a view that occasionally proved useful for ideological purposes but which had little practical influence. Further reading Gentile, G. (1916) Teoria generale della spirito come atto puro , Pisa: Mariotti; trans. H. Wildon Carr, The Theory of Mind as Pure Act , London: Macmillan, 1922. (Presents the first full account of Gentile’s actualist doctrine.) Harris, H.S. (1960) The Social Philosophy of Giovanni Gentile , Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
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Page 310 (The best account of Gentile’s philosophy, with particular reference to his social and political thought.) RICHARD BELLAMY GENTZEN, GERHARD KARL ERICH (1909–45) The German mathematician and logician Gerhard Gentzen devoted his life to proving the consistency of arithmetic and analysis. His work should be seen as contributing to the post-Gödelian development of Hilbert’s programme. In this connection he developed several logical calculi. The main device used in his proofs was a theorem in which he proved the eliminability of the inference known as ‘cut’ from a variety of different kinds of proofs. This ‘cut-elimination theorem’ yields the consistency of both classical and intuitionistic logic, and the consistency of arithmetic without complete induction. His later work was aimed at providing consistency proofs for less restricted systems of arithmetic and analysis. See also: GÖDEL’S THEOREMS Further reading Gentzen, G. (1969) The Collected Papers of Gerhard Gentzen, ed. M.E. Szabo, Amsterdam and London: North Holland. (English translations of most of Gentzen’s papers, including the first publication of some. See also Szabo’s ‘Biographical Sketch’ and ‘Introduction’.) Prawitz, D. (1965) Natural Deduction: A Proof-Theoretical Study, Stockholm Studies in Philosophy 3, Stockholm, Göteborg and Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell. (A study of Gentzen’s logic and its development up to 1965.) VOLKER PECKHAUS GEOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY OF In the mid-1960s, geology underwent a conceptual revolution. Prior to that time, most geologists believed that the continents and oceans were fixed and permanent, the basic features of the earth’s crust. Subsequently they came to agree that the earth was covered by rigid plates, thin in relation to the earth’s diameter, in which the continents were embedded like logs in icebergs. It was the creation, movement and destruction of these plates that were responsible for the mid-ocean ridges, the areas of mountain building and earthquake activity, and the deep ocean trenches. This conceptual revolution also marks a shift in the philosophy of geology. From the early nineteenth century, the chief philosophical question posed by geology was whether a historical science encountered special epistemic problems, a question that was usually answered by invoking the principle of uniformitarianism. In its strict form this stated that the only kind and intensities of causes that could be used to explain past geological phenomena were those that could be directly observed. Many sloppier formulations were invoked under the same name. Since the revolution, philosophers have turned to geology chiefly to use the revolution to exemplify or challenge one or another theory of scientific change. See also: SCIENCE, 19TH CENTURY, PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading LeGrand, H. (1988) Drifting Continents and Shifting Theories , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Contrasts philosophical and sociological accounts of scientific change.) RACHEL LAUDAN GEOMETRY, PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES IN The least abstract form of mathematics, geometry has, from the earliest Hellenic times, been accorded a curious position straddling empirical and exact science. Its standing as an empirical and approximate science stems from the practical pursuits of land surveying and measuring, from the prominence of visual aids (figures and constructions) in geometric proofs and, in the twentieth century, from Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, which holds that the geometry of spacetime is dependent upon physical quantities. On the other hand, very early on, the symmetry and perfect regularity of certain geometric figures were taken as representative of a higher knowledge than that afforded by sense experience. And its concern with figures and constructions, rather than with number and calculation, rendered geometry amenable to axiomatic formulation and syllogistic deduction, establishing a paradigm of demonstrative knowledge which endured for two millennia. While the progress of mathematics has surmounted traditional distinctions between geometry and the mathematics of number, leaving only a heuristic role for geometric intuition, geometric thinking remains a vital component of mathematical cognition. See also: MATHEMATICS, FOUNDATIONS OF; RELATIVITY THEORY, PHILOSOPHICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF
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Page 311 Further reading Euclid ( c .300 BC) The Thirteen Books of Euclid’s Elements , trans. T. Heath, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd edn, 1956, 3 vols. (First articulated conception of geometry as a deductive science, based upon axioms, postulates and definitions.) Müller, I. (1981) Philosophy of Mathematics and Deductive Structure in Euclid’s Elements , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (A modern perspective on axiomatic method in Euclid.) T.A. RYCKMAN GEORGE OF TREBIZOND ( c .1396–c .1472) George was a fifteenth-century humanist, born in Crete but spending most of his career in Florence and Rome, where he became a papal secretary. He is important for his work in rhetoric, his translations from the Greek, and his role in the Renaissance Plato–Aristotle controversy. In 1458, as a fierce opponent of Plato and supporter of Aristotle, he transformed what had previously been a quarrel among Byzantines into a major European controversy. He also wrote the first and, for a time, the most popular humanist manual of logic. See also: HUMANISM, RENAISSANCE Further reading Monfasani, J. (1976) George of Trebizond: A Biography and a Study of His Rhetoric and Logic , Leiden: Brill. (The Plato–Aristotle controversy is treated at length.) JOHN MONFASANI GERARD, ALEXANDER (1728–95) Alexander Gerard was Professor of Moral Philosophy and Logic (1752) and Professor of Divinity (1759) at Marischal College, and Professor of Divinity (1773) at King’s College, Aberdeen. A leading member of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society, he wrote a new plan of education for Marischal College as well as works on divinity. He is best known, however, for his Essay on Taste (1759). In 1774, he returned to the subject with An Essay on Genius. Gerard was associated with Thomas Reid in the Philosophical Society until Reid’s transfer to Glasgow in 1764. The work of David Hume was a principal influence. See also: ABERDEEN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY; ENLIGHTENMENT, SCOTTISH Further reading Gerard, A. (1759) An Essay on Taste, London: Miller; 3rd edn repr. Gainsville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1963. (Sifts internal sense toward a theory of imagination and association.) McCosh, J. (1875) The Scottish Philosophy , New York: Carter, 1911–2; repr. Bristol: Thoemmes, 1990. (Brief biographical sketch and commentary.) DABNEY TOWNSEND GERARD OF CREMONA (1114–87) Gerard of Cremona was the most important translator of philosophical works from Arabic to Latin in the twelfth century. During a career of about forty years, he translated at least seventy books. The most famous translations are those of works of Aristotle, including Posterior Analytics, Physics, On the Heavens, On Generation and Corruption and Meteorology 1–3. Gerard also translated a number of works as part of the Aristotelian corpus that were not at all Aristotelian; the most important of these is the socalled Liber de causis (Book of Causes). However, the Aristotelian translations were only a small part of his labour. He translated many more works that were medical, astronomical or mathematical, bringing into Latin several small libraries of fundamental natural science. See also: ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY: TRANSMISSION INTO WESTERN EUROPE; TRANSLATORS Further reading Lemay, R. (1978) ‘Gerard of Cremona’, Dictionary of Scientific Biography 15 (Supplement 1): 173–92. (The most useful introduction in English; contains an exhaustive list of the translations, with bibliography.) MARK D. JORDAN GERARD OF ODO ( c .1290–c .1349) The French Franciscan Gerard of Odo, a scholastic philosopher and theologian who wrote a long commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics , is one of many scholastics who attempted to reconcile Aristotle’s teachings with the views of Christian authorities. Gerard’s work declares the subject of ethics to be the human being as free, makes the will’s power of self-determination a necessary condition for moral responsibility, and in other respects reflects the voluntarism commonly found in Franciscan writings of the period. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM, MEDIEVAL Further reading
Kent, B. (1984)
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Page 312 Aristotle and the Franciscans: Gerald Odonis’ Commentary on the “Nicomachean Ethics”, Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University. (Places Gerard’s Ethics commentary in the context of late thirteenthand early fourteenth-century Franciscan psychology and ethics.) BONNIE KENT GERBERT OF AURILLAC (938–1003) Gerbert is chiefly remembered as an educational reformer. He established a syllabus for the university course in logic, the logica vetus, that remained in use until the mid-twelfth century. Most of his academic writings are instructional works on mathematics. In his single philosophical work, De rationali et ratione uti (On That Which is Rational and Using Reason), he uses Boethius’ logical commentaries to develop a distinctly Platonic solution to a problem he derives from Porphyry’s Isagōgē . At the end of a somewhat controversial ecclesiastical career, Gerbert was elected as Pope Sylvester II in 999. See also: LOGIC, MEDIEVAL Further reading Marenbon, J. (1983) Early Medieval Philosophy (480–1150) , London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 82–3. (A clear, accessible exposition of De rationali et ratione uti.) FIONA SOMERSET GERDIL, GIANCINTO SIGISMONDO (1718–1802) A lifelong member of the Barnabite religious order, Gerdil became well-known as the most eminent Italian disciple of Malebranche (and critic of Locke); in 1764 he published a critique of Émile (1762) which Rousseau himself called the only attack worth reading in its entirety. Only extreme old age kept Cardinal Gerdil from being elected Pope at Venice in 1798. Further reading Gerdil, G.S. (1764) Réflexions sur la théorie et la pratique de l’éducation, contre les principes de J.J. Rousseau (Reflections on the theory and practice of education, against the principles of J.-J. Rousseau), Paris. PATRICK RILEY GERMAN IDEALISM From the late eighteenth century until the middle of the nineteenth, German philosophy was dominated by the movement known as German idealism, which began as an attempt to complete Kant’s revolutionary project: the derivation of the principles of knowledge and ethics from the spontaneity and autonomy of mind or spirit. However, German idealists produced systems whose relation to Kant is controversial, due to their emphasis on the absolute unity and historical development of reason. See also: IDEALISM; ROMANTICISM, GERMAN Further reading Solomon, R. and Higgins, K. (1993) The Age of German Idealism , London and New York: Routledge. (Accessible and useful collection of articles on individual thinkers, well suited to beginners.) PAUL FRANKS GERSON, JEAN (1363–1429) The French theologian Jean Gerson was one of the leading proponents of the via moderna , the ‘modern way’ of nominalism. A fervent critic of the ‘formalists’ of the via antiqua , Gerson stood in the Ockhamist tradition as a pastoral theologian opposed to strictly speculative questions. His overarching interests lay in the pastoral foundations of theology and opposed abstract and hence ‘unedifying’ metaphysical questions, as these dominated scholastic discourse in the theological faculty at Paris, where he was chancellor of the university. He sought to mediate between increasingly polemical school disputes, arguing for the recovery of a ‘biblical’ theology that led away from speculative questions toward mystical encounter with God. Later known as doctor christianissimus (the most Christian doctor), Gerson exerted such a profound influence upon the subsequent theological horizon that one historian has aptly called the fifteenth century ‘le siècle de Gerson’. See also: WILLIAM OF OCKHAM Further reading Burrows, M. (1991) Jean Gerson and ‘De Consolatione Theologiae’ (1418): The Consolation of a Biblical and Reforming Theology for a Disordered Age, Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck). (Oriented toward Gerson’s writings from 1415, with opening discussion of current Gerson historiography, full bibliography and detailed consideration of how pastoral and ecclesiological concerns shaped philosophical and theological arguments.) MARK S. BURROWS
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Page 313 GERSONIDES (1288–1344) Living all his life in southern France, Levi ben Gershom, known as Gersonides in Latin texts, was an accomplished astronomer and mathematician as well as a philosopher. A prolific and engaged exegete, Gersonides wrote biblical commentaries that are still studied today. His philosophical magnum opus, Milhamot ha-Shem (The Wars of the Lord), reached original and often unorthodox conclusions regarding many of the great issues of medieval philosophical theology. It denied creation ex nihilo , preferring a modified version of the doctrine of formatio mundi traditionally ascribed to Plato (formation of the world from pre-existing matter). It qualified traditional doctrines of divine omniscience by denying God’s determinate knowledge of future contingent events. And it confined personal immortality to the rational portion of the soul, that is, the intellect. See also: PLATONISM, MEDIEVAL Further reading Levi ben Gershom (Gersonides) (1317–29) Milhamot ha-Shem (The Wars of the Lord), Leipzig: Lorck, 1866; Books 1–4 trans. S. Feldman, The Wars of the Lord , Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society, 1984, 1987, 2 vols. (Covers the full range of medieval psychology, metaphysics, philosophy of nature and cosmology. The longest part of the work is devoted to formulating numerous arguments in support of some form of creation.) SEYMOUR FELDMAN GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY The term ‘Gestalt’ was introduced into psychology by the Austrian philosopher Christian von Ehrenfels. ‘Gestalt’, in colloquial German, means ‘shape’ or ‘structure’. Ehrenfels demonstrates in his essay of 1890 that there are certain inherently structural features of experience that must be acknowledged in addition to simple tones, colours and other mental ‘atoms’ or ‘elements’ if we are to do justice to the objects towards which perception, memory and abstract thinking are directed. His essay initiated a reaction against the then still dominant atomism in psychology, a reaction that led in turn to the ideas on ‘cerebral integration’ of the so-called Berlin school of Gestalt psychology and thence to contemporary investigations of ‘neural networks’ in cognitive science. Many of the specific empirical facts discovered by the Gestaltists about the perception of movement and contour, about perceptual constancy and perceptual illusions, and about the role of ‘good form’ in perception and memory have been absorbed into psychology as a whole. See also: PERCEPTION Further reading Smith, B. (ed.) (1988) Foundations of Gestalt Theory , Munich and Vienna: Philosophia. (Survey of Gestalt tradition with extensive annotated bibliography; includes translations also of writings on the logic of Gestalt by Kurt Grelling and Paul Oppenheimer.) BARRY SMITH GETTIER PROBLEMS The expression ‘the Gettier problem’ refers to one or another problem exposed by Edmund Gettier when discussing the relation between several examples that he constructed and analyses of knowing advanced by various philosophers, including Plato in the Theatetus . Gettier’s examples appear to run counter to these ‘standard’ or ‘traditional’ analyses. A few philosophers take this appearance to be deceptive and regard the genuine problem revealed by Gettier to be: ‘How can one show that Gettier’s examples are not really counterexamples to the standard analyses?’ But most philosophers take seriously the problem which is the central concern of this entry: ‘How can such standard analyses be altered so that Gettier’s cases do not constitute counterexamples to the modified analyses (and without opening the analyses to further objections?)’. Gettier’s short paper spawned many important, ongoing projects in contemporary epistemology – for instance, attempts to add a fourth condition of knowing to the traditional analyses, attempts to replace some conditions of those analyses, such as externalist accounts of knowing or justification (causal theories and reliability theories), and revived interest in scepticism, including an investigation of the deductive closure principle. Difficulties uncovered at each stage of this research have generated an ever more sophisticated set of accounts of knowing and justification, as well as a wealth of examples useful for testing proposed analyses. In spite of the vast literature that Gettier’s brief paper elicited, there is still no widespread agreement as to whether the Gettier problem has been solved, nor as to what constitutes the most promising line of research. See also: INTROSPECTION, EPISTEMOLOGY OF; RELIABILISM
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Page 314 Further reading Gettier, E. (1963) ‘Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?’, Analysis 23 (6): 121–3; repr. in M. Roth and L. Galis (eds) Knowing: Essays in the Analysis of Knowledge , New York: Random House, 1970, 35–8. (Gettier’s presentation of his own two examples.) ROBERT K. SHOPE GEULINCX, ARNOLD (1624–69) Born in Antwerp, Geulincx was professor of theology at Louvain, before converting to Calvinism and moving to Leiden, where he lectured in logic. Rediscovered in the middle of the nineteenth century, for a long time it was only his relations with other more conspicuous philosophers, such as Spinoza, Leibniz and Kant, that aroused any interest in Geulincx arose. It has since become clear that he was an original thinker in his own right, who proposed an intriguing metaphysics and made interesting contributions to logic. Further reading Nuchelmans, G. (1986) Geulincx’ containment theory of logic , Amsterdam, Oxford and New York: North Holland. (One of the few works in English on Geulincx.) THEO VERBEEK AL-GHAZALI, ABU HAMID (1058–1111) Al-Ghazali is one of the greatest Islamic jurists, theologians and mystical thinkers. He learned various branches of the traditional Islamic religious sciences in his home town of Tus, Gurgan and Nishapur in the northern part of Iran. He was also involved in Sufi practices from an early age. Being recognized by Nizam al-Mulk, the vizir of the Seljuq sultans, he was appointed head of the Nizamiyyah College at Baghdad in AH 484/AD 1091. As the intellectual head of the Islamic community, he was busy lecturing on Islamic jurisprudence at the College, and also refuting heresies and responding to questions from all segments of the community. Four years later, however, al-Ghazali fell into a serious spiritual crisis and finally left Baghdad, renouncing his career and the world. After wandering in Syria and Palestine for about two years and finishing the pilgrimage to Mecca, he returned to Tus, where he was engaged in writing, Sufi practices and teaching his disciples until his death. In the meantime he resumedteaching fora fewyearsat the Nizamiyyah College in Nishapur. Al-Ghazali explained in his autobiography why he renounced his brilliant career and turned to Sufism. It was, he says, due to his realization that there was no way to certain knowledge or the conviction of revelatory truth except through Sufism. (This means that the traditional form of Islamic faith was in a very critical condition at the time.) This realization is possibly related to his criticism of Islamic philosophy. In fact, his refutation of philosophy is not a mere criticism from a certain (orthodox) theological viewpoint. First of all, his attitude towards philosophy was ambivalent; it was both an object and criticism and an object of learning (for example, logic and the natural sciences). He mastered philosophy and then criticized it in order to Islamicize it. The importance of his criticism lies in his philosophical demonstration that the philosophers’ metaphysical arguments cannot stand the test of reason. However, he was also forced to admit that the certainty of revelatory truth, for which he was so desperately searching, cannot be obtained by reason. It was only later that he finally attained to that truth in the ecstatic state ( fana’ ) of the Sufi. Through his own religious experience, he worked to revive the faith of Islam by reconstructing the religious sciences upon the basis of Sufism, and to give a theoretical foundation to the latter under the influence of philosophy. Thus Sufism came to be generally recognized in the Islamic community. Though Islamic philosophy did not long survive al-Ghazali’s criticism, he contributed greatly to the subsequent philosophization of Islamic theology and Sufism. See also: ISLAM, CONCEPT OF PHILOSOPHY IN; MYSTICAL PHILOSOPHY IN ISLAM Further reading Al-Ghazali (1095) Tahafut al-falasifa (The Incoherence of the Philosophers), ed. M. Bouyges, Beirut: Imprimerie Catholique, 1927; trans. S.A. Kamali, Al-Ghazali’s Tahafut al-Falasifah , Lahore: Pakistan Philosophical Congress, 1963. (Al-Ghazali’s refutation of Islamic philosophy.) Leaman, O. (1985) An Introduction to Medieval Islamic Philosophy , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (A good introduction to al-Ghazali’s philosophical arguments against the historical background of medieval Islamic philosophy.) KOJIRO NAKAMURA GILBERT OF POITIERS ( c .1085–1154) Gilbert taught theology in Chartres and in Paris before being made Bishop of Poitiers. His most
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Page 315 important work is his commentary on the theological treatises of Boethius. His contemporaries valued him not only as a theologian but also as a philosopher, especially as a logician. Their estimation was well-founded. Although today we possess only theological writings from his own hand, these allow us to reconstruct a body of rich and independent philosophical thought. The most salient characteristic of Gilbert’s thought is the precise, analytical reflection that he brought to bear on the linguistic and conceptual means by which we think about whatever exists. In Gilbert’s thought, two things go hand in hand: a philosophy of the concrete and the particular and an intellectual viewpoint whose conceptual resources are manifestly Platonist. In the history of philosophy, these two things are not usually found together. See also: PLATONISM, MEDIEVAL Further reading Elswijk, H.C. van (1966) Gilbert Porreta, Sa Vie, son oeuvre, sa pensée (Gilbert of Poiters: His Life, Work and Thought), Louvain: Spicilegium sacrum Lovaniense. (Reliably informative about Gilbert’s life and work.) Gilbert of Poitiers ( c .1085–1154) Commentaries on Boethius, ed. N.M. Häring, The Commentaries on Boethius by Gilbert of Poitiers , Toronto, Ont.: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1966. (Includes Gilbert’s commentaries on De hebdomadibus and De trinitate.) Translated from the German by Hannes Jarka-Sellers KLAUS JACOBI GILES OF ROME ( c .1243/7–1316) Giles of Rome was one of the most eminent theologians and commentators on the works of Aristotle at the University of Paris in the second half of the thirteenth century. He was probably a pupil of Thomas Aquinas, who exerted a deep influence on Giles’ metaphysical and theological thought. Giles’ reception of Aquinas’ positions, however, was often critical and original. For historians of medieval philosophy, Giles’ name is mainly associated with the doctrine of ‘the real distinction’ between essence ( essentia ) and existence ( esse ). According to this doctrine, essence and existence are two completely distinct things ( res ) of which the ontological structure of every created being is composed. On the issue of the relationship between essence and existence Giles took a firm position against his contemporary Henry of Ghent, who maintained that existence is a mere relation of the essence of a created being to its creator. Giles was also involved in the debate over the unity of the substantial form in composite substances, another burning issue in the thirteenth century. As a commentator on Aristotle’s works, Giles made original contributions to the tradition of Aristotelian natural philosophy, especially in his treatment of extension, place, time and motion in a vacuum. See also: AQUINAS, T.; ARISTOTELIANISM, MEDIEVAL Further reading Nash, P.W. (1950) ‘Giles of Rome on Boethius’ Diversum est esse et id quod est’, Mediaeval Studies 12: 57–91. (A study on Giles’ doctrine of the real distinction between essence and existence.) FRANCESCO DEL PUNTA CECILIA TRIFOGLI GINZBERG, ASHER see HA’AM, AHAD GIOBERTI, VINCENZO (1801–52) The work of Vincenzo Gioberti was a life-long attempt to reconnect philosophy and Christianity, and tradition and progress, within the political turmoil of early nineteenth-century Italy and the rise of new philosophies of history. His critique of subjectivism led him to propose a Neoplatonic scheme (epitomized in what he called the ‘ideal formula’), which finds its root in an original intuition of being. From this intuition he deduced that the Being as the creator is God. But reflective judgment is not mere contemplation: as thinking and creating are the same in God (God is ‘the first philosopher’), so thinking and acting are the same in man, as an image of God. History and civilization are the continuation of the creative process in which the return of existence to being leads duality to unity again, although it keeps the ontological gap of creatural relationship. See also: GERMAN IDEALISM; ITALY, PHILOSOPHY IN Further reading Gioberti, V. (1840) Introduzione allo studio della filosofia (Introduction to the Study of Philosophy), Milan: Bocca, 2 vols, 1939–41. (The most organized exposition of Gioberti’s philosophical system.) Stefanini, L. (1947) Gioberti , Milan: Bocca. (A wide study which stresses the elements of continuity in Gioberti’s thought against the neo-idealistic interpretation.)
MARIO PICCININI
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Page 316 GLANVILL, JOSEPH (1636–80) The English philosopher Joseph Glanvill was an opponent of the scholastic philosophy which he had been taught in England, supporting instead the new learning associated with Francis Bacon and the Royal Society of which he became a Fellow in 1664. Although he called himself a sceptic and is often so classified, this may easily give a misleading picture of his philosophy. He was a sceptic in so far as he believed that human knowledge is very limited, opposing both the extravagant religious ‘enthusiasm’ for doctrines to the contrary which still retained adherents throughout his life, and the more general dogmatism which holds firmly to an opinion even though the evidence does not warrant it. Although he was not untouched by the revival of Platonic philosophies in Cambridge and was a great admirer of Henry More, in general he advocated an anti-dogmatic and generally empirical philosophy which in some ways anticipates the thought of Locke. In one area he might be accused of succumbing to the enthusiasm of his opponents, and that was in his espousal of a belief in witchcraft, though he claimed that in his explorations of the spirit world he was merely concerned to gather empirical evidence for a religious view. His analysis of causation has been held to anticipate that of Hume. Although it is true that he does have some of Hume’s insights, the extent of that anticipation has sometimes been exaggerated. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM IN THE 17TH CENTURY Further reading Cope, J.I. (1956) Joseph Glanvill: Anglican Apologist , St Louis, MO: Washington University Studies. (A scholarly and comprehensive intellectual biography.) Glanvill, J. (1661) The Vanity of Dogmatizing: or Confidence in Opinions. Manifested in a Discourse of the Shortness and Incertainty of our Knowledge, and its Causes, with some reflections on Peripateticism; and an Apology for Philosophy , London. (Glanvill’s most important work. It argues a cautious empiricist philosophy in keeping with the programme of the Royal Society.) G.A.J. ROGERS GNOSTICISM Gnosticism comprises a loosely associated group of teachers, teachings and sects which professed to offer ‘gnosis’, saving knowledge or enlightenment, conveyed in various myths which sought to explain the origin of the world and of the human soul and the destiny of the latter. Everything originated from a transcendent spiritual power; but corruption set in and inferior powers emerged, resulting in the creation of the material world in which the human spirit is now imprisoned. Salvation is sought by cultivating the inner life while neglecting the body and social duties unconnected with the cult. The Gnostic movement emerged in the first and second centuries AD and was seen as a rival to orthodox Christianity, though in fact some Gnostic sects were more closely linked with Judaism or with Iranian religion. By the fourth century its influence was waning, but it persisted with sporadic revivals into the Middle Ages. Further reading Foerster, W. (ed. and trans.) (1972, 1974) Gnosis , Oxford: Clarendon Press. (An English translation of Gnostic texts in two volumes: 1, Patristic Evidence: 2, Coptic and Mandaean Sources.) Wilson, R.M. (1968) Gnosis and the New Testament, Oxford: Blackwell. (Fairly simple in treatment, but totally reliable.) CHRISTOPHER STEAD GOD, ARGUMENTS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF Arguments for the existence of God go back at least to Aristotle, who argued that there must be a first mover, itself unmoved. All the great medieval philosophers (Arabic and Jewish as well as Christian) proposed and developed theistic arguments – for example, Augustine, al-Ghazali, Anselm, Moses Maimonides, Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus. Most of the great modern philosophers – in particular René Descartes, Gottfried Leibniz and Immanuel Kant – have also offered theistic arguments. They remain a subject of considerable contemporary concern; the twentieth century has seen important work on all the main varieties of these arguments. These arguments come in several varieties. Since Kant, the traditional Big Three have been the cosmological, ontological and teleological arguments. The cosmological argument goes back to Aristotle, but gets its classic statement (at least for European philosophy) in the famous ‘five ways’ of Aquinas, in particular his arguments for a first uncaused cause, a first unmoved mover, and a necessary being. According to the first-mover argument (which is a special case of the first-cause argument),
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Page 317 whatever is moved (that is, caused to move) is moved by something else. It is impossible, however, that there should be an infinite series of moved and moving beings; hence there must be a first unmoved mover. Aquinas goes on to argue that a first mover would have to be both a first cause and a necessary being; he then goes on in the next parts (Ia, qq.3–11) of the Summa theologiae to argue that such a being must have the attributes of God. The perennially fascinating ontological argument, in Anselm’s version, goes as follows: God is by definition the being than which none greater can be conceived. Now suppose God did not exist. It is greater to exist than not to exist; so if God did not exist, a being greater than God could be conceived. Since God is by definition the being than which none greater can be conceived, that is absurd. Therefore the supposition that God does not exist implies an absurdity and must be false. This argument has had many illustrious defenders and equally illustrious attackers from Anselm’s time to ours; the twentieth century has seen the development of a new (modal) version of the argument. Aquinas’ fifth way is a version of the third kind of theistic argument, the teleological argument; but it was left to modern and contemporary philosophy to propose fuller and better-developed versions of it. Its basic idea is simple: the universe and many of its parts look as if they have been designed, and the only real candidate for the post of designer of the universe is God. Many take evolutionary theory to undercut this sort of argument by showing how all of this apparent design could have been the result of blind, mechanical forces. Supporters of the argument dispute this claim and retort that the enormously delicate ‘fine tuning’ of the cosmological constants required for the existence of life strongly suggests design. In addition to the traditional Big Three, there are in fact many more theistic arguments. There are arguments from the nature of morality, from the nature of propositions, numbers and sets, from intentionality, from reference, simplicity, intuition and love, from colours and flavours, miracles, play and enjoyment, from beauty, and from the meaning of life; and there is even an argument from the existence of evil. See also: AGNOSTICISM; ATHEISM; GOD, CONCEPTS OF Further reading Craig, W. (1980) The Cosmological Argument from Plato to Leibniz , London: Macmillan. (An excellent history of the cosmological argument, especially good on the versions given by the medieval Arabic and Jewish philosophers.) Plantinga, A. (1974) The Nature of Necessity , Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Contains a version of the ontological argument developed in terms of the metaphysics of modality (possible worlds) that is immune to Kant’s criticism (whatever precisely it was).) Swinburne, R. (1979) The Existence of God , Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Contains a very full and sophisticated version of the teleological argument, developed in terms of probability.) ALVIN PLANTINGA GOD, CONCEPTS OF We think of God as an ultimate reality, the source or ground of all else, perfect and deserving of worship. Such a conception is common to both Eastern and Western religions. Some trace this to human psychology or sociology: Freud regarded God as a wishfulfilling projection of a perfect, comforting father-figure; Marxists see belief in God as arising from the capitalist structure of society. Believers, however, trace their belief to religious experience, revealed or authoritative texts, and rational reflection. Philosophers flesh out the concept of God by drawing inferences from God’s relation to the universe (‘first-cause theology’) and from the claim that God is a perfect being. ‘Perfect-being’ theology is the more fundamental method. Its history stretches from Plato and Aristotle, through the Stoics, and into the Christian tradition as early as Augustine and Boethius; it plays an important role in underwriting such ontological arguments for God’s existence as those of Anselm and Descartes. It draws on four root intuitions: that to be perfect is perfectly to be, that it includes being complete, that it includes being allinclusive, and that it includes being personal. Variously balanced, these intuitions yield our varied concepts of God. Criticisms of perfect-being theology have focused both on the possibility that the set of candidate divine perfections may not be consistent or unique, and doubts as to whether human judgment can be adequate for forming concepts of God. Another problem with the method is that different accounts of perfection will yield different accounts of God: Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd, for instance, appear to have held that God would be the more perfect for lacking
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Page 318 some knowledge, while most Christian writers hold that perfection requires omniscience. Views of God’s relation to the universe vary greatly. Pantheists say that God is the universe. Panentheists assert that God includes the universe, or is related to it as soul to body. They ascribe to God the limitations associated with being a person – such as limited power and knowledge – but argue that being a person is nevertheless a state of perfection. Other philosophers, however, assert that God is wholly different from the universe. Some of these think that God created the universe ex nihilo , that is, from no pre-existing material. Some add that God conserves the universe in being moment by moment, and is thus provident for his creatures. Still others think that God ‘found’ some pre-existing material and ‘creates’ by gradually improving this material – this view goes back to the myth of the Demiurge in Plato’s Timaeus , and also entails that God is provident. By contrast, deists deny providence and think that once God made it, the universe ran on its own. Still others argue that God neither is nor has been involved in the world. The common thread lies in the concept of perfection: thinkers relate God to the universe in the way that their thoughts about God’s perfection make most appropriate. See also: MONOTHEISM; PANTHEISM; TRINITY Further reading Morris, T.V. (1991) Our Idea of God , Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. (Good introduction to issues in philosophical theology.) Tillich, P. (1955) Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality , Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (On religion’s relation to philosophy.) BRIAN LEFTOW GOD, INDIAN CONCEPTIONS OF In the Ṛg Veda , the oldest text in India, many gods and goddesses are mentioned by name; most of them appear to be deifications of natural powers, such as fire, water, rivers, wind, the sun, dusk and dawn. The Mīmāṃsā school started by Jaimini ( c . AD 50) adopts a nominalistic interpretation of the Vedas. There are words like ‘Indra’, ‘Varuṇa’, and so on, which are names of gods, but there is no god over and above the names. God is the sacred word (mantra) which has the potency to produce magical results. The Yoga system of Patañjali ( c . AD 300) postulates God as a soul different from individual souls in that God does not have any blemishes and is eternally free. The ultimate aim of life is not to realize God, but to realize the nature of one’s own soul. God-realization may help some individuals to attain self-realization, but it is not compulsory to believe in God to attain the summum bonum of human life. Śankara ( c . AD 780), who propounded the Advaita Vedānta school of Indian philosophy, agrees that God-realization is not the ultimate aim of human life. Plurality, and therefore this world, are mere appearances, and God, as the creator of the world, is himself relative to the concept of the world. Rāmānuja (traditionally 1016–1137), the propounder of the Viśiṣṭādvaita school, holds God to be ultimate reality, and God-realization to be the ultimate goal of human life. The way to realize God is through total self-surrender to God. Nyāya theory also postulates one God who is an infinite soul, a Person with omniscience and omnipresence as his attributes. God is the creator of language, the author of the sacred Vedas, and the first teacher of all the arts and crafts. See also: HEAVEN, INDIAN CONCEPTIONS OF Further reading Frauwallner, E. (1973) History of Indian Philosophy , trans. V.M. Bedekar, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2 vols. (Contains original researches into many Indian systems.) Ṛg Veda ( c .1200 BC), trans. H.H. Wilson, ṚgVeda Samhita , Delhi: Nag Publishers, 1990, 7 vols. (An English translation of the entire ṚgVeda. The Indian tradition is that the Vedas are beginningless; Wilson is of the opinion that they are of human composition.) SIBAJIBAN BHATTACHARYYA GÖDEL, KURT (1906–78) The greatest logician of the twentieth century, Gödel is renowned for his advocacy of mathematical Platonism and for three fundamental theorems in logic: the completeness of first-order logic; the incompleteness of formalized arithmetic; and the consistency of the axiom of choice and the continuum hypothesis with the axioms of Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory. Born in Czechoslovakia and educated in Vienna, Gödel emigrated to the USA in 1940 and taught at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton until his death. See also: CONTINUUM HYPOTHESIS; GÖDEL’S THEOREMS Further reading Dawson, J. (1997) Logical Dilemmas: The Life The Life and Work of Kurt Gödel ,
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Page 319 Wellesley, MA: Peters. (A full-length scientific biography.) JOHN W. DAWSON, JR GÖDEL’S THEOREMS Utilizing the formalization of mathematics and logic found in Whitehead and Russell’s Principia Mathematica , Hilbert and Ackermann (1928) gave precise formulations of a variety of foundational and methodological problems, among them the so-called ‘completeness problem’ for formal axiomatic theories – the problem of whether all truths or laws pertaining to their subjects are provable within them. Applied to a proposed system for first-order quantificational logic, the completeness problem is the problem of whether all logically valid formulas are provable in it. In his doctoral dissertation, Gödel gave a positive solution to the completeness problem for a system of quantificational logic based on the work of Whitehead and Russell. This is the first of the three theorems that we here refer to as ‘Gödel’s theorems’. The other two theorems arose from Gödel’s continued investigation of the completeness problem for more comprehensive formal systems – including, especially, systems comprehensive enough to encompass all known methods of mathematical proof. Here, however, the question was not whether all logically valid formulas are provable (they are), but whether all formulas true in the intended interpretations of the systems are. For this to be the case, the systems would have to prove either S or the denial of S for each sentence S of their languages. In his first incompleteness theorem, Gödel showed that the systems investigated were not complete in this sense. Indeed, there are even sentences of a simple arithmetic type that the systems can neither prove nor refute, provided they are consistent. So even the class of simple arithmetic truths is not formally axiomatizable. The idea behind Gödel’s proof is basically as follows. Let a given system T satisfy the following conditions: (1) it is powerful enough to prove of each sentence in its language that if it proves it, then it proves that it proves it, and (2) it is capable of proving of a certain sentence G (Gödel’s self-referential sentence) that it is equivalent to ‘G is not provable in T’. Under these conditions, T cannot prove G, so long as T is consistent. For suppose T proved G. By (1) it would also prove ‘G is provable in T’, and by (2) it would prove ‘G is not provable in T’. Hence, T would be inconsistent. Under slightly stronger conditions – specifically, (2) and (1′) every sentence of the form ‘X is provable in T’ that T proves is true – it can be shown that a consistent T cannot prove ‘not G’ either. For if ‘not G’ were provable in T it would follow by (2) that ‘G is provable in T’ would also be provable in T. But then by (1′) G would be provable. Hence, T would be inconsistent. The proof of Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem essentially involves formalizing in T a proof of a formula expressing the proposition that if T is consistent, then G. The second incompleteness theorem (that is, the claim that if T is consistent it cannot prove its own consistency) then follows from this and the first part of the proof of the first incompleteness theorem. The two incompleteness theorems have been applied to a wide variety of concerns in philosophy. The best known of these are critical applications to Hilbert’s programme and logicism in the philosophy of mathematics and to mechanism in the philosophy of mind. See also: CHURCH’S THEOREM AND THE DECISION PROBLEM Further reading Gödel, K. (1986–95) Collected Works, ed. S. Feferman et al., vol. 1, Publications 1929–1936, 1986; vol. 2, Publications 1938–1974, 1990; vol. 3, Unpublished Essays and Lectures , 1995, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. German originals and English translations. (Accurate yet readable translations, useful introductory essays and bibliography.) Hilbert, D. and Ackermann, W. (1928) Grundzüge der theoretischen Logik , Berlin: Springer, 2nd edn, 1938; 2nd edn trans. L.M. Hammond, G.G. Leckie and F. Steinhardt, Principles of Mathematical Logic , ed. R.E. Luce, New York: Chelsea, 1950. (Text in which the standard problems of metamathematics – consistency, completeness, independence and decidability – received their first precise formulations; readable and illuminating source for students today. These formulations guided Gödel and Church in their subsequent research.) MICHAEL DETLEFSEN GODFREY OF FONTAINES ( c .1250–c .1306/9) Born in Belgium, Godfrey of Fontaines studied philosophy and theology at the University of
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Page 320 Paris and subsequently taught theology there. A theologian by profession, he developed a highly interesting philosophy, especially a metaphysics. For Godfrey, metaphysics studies being as being. Being itself is divided into cognitive being and real being, and real being is divided into being in act and being in potency. In finite beings, essence and existence are neither really distinct nor intentionally distinct; they are identical. Human reason can prove that God exists, and reach some imperfect knowledge concerning what God is, but cannot prove that the world began to be. For Godfrey, corporeal entities in this world are composed of matter and form, but heavenly bodies probably lack prime matter. On philosophical grounds, he favours the theory that there is only one substantial form in human beings – the intellective soul – but for theological reasons leaves this question open. His philosophy is somewhat more Aristotelian and less Neoplatonic than that of most of his contemporaries. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM, MEDIEVAL Further reading Wippel, J.F. (1981) The Metaphysical Thought of Godfrey of Fontaines: A Study in Late ThirteenthCentury Philosophy , Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press. (A general account of Godfrey’s metaphysical thought and his contributions to philosophy, with bibliography.) JOHN F. WIPPEL GODWIN, WILLIAM (1756–1836) The English writer William Godwin is considered the founder of philosophical anarchism. His An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) contends that although government is a corrupt force in society, perpetuating dependence and ignorance, it will increasingly be rendered impotent by the gradual spread of knowledge. Politics will be displaced by an enlarged morality as truth conquers error and mind subordinates matter. He predicts the end to cooperative activities (which restrain individual freedom), the abandonment of marriage and private property, and increasing longevity and ultimate immortality. Godwin’s moral theory is often described as utilitarian, but he understands pleasure to be inseparable from the development of truth and wisdom through the full and free exercise of private judgment and public discussion. As such, his position is better understood as perfectionist. See also: ANARCHISM; WOLLSTONECRAFT, M. Further reading Godwin, W. (1793) An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice , London: Robinson; revised 1796, 1798. (Godwin’s major philosophical treatise in which he develops a philosophical anarchism which looks forward to the increasing perfection of the human race through the development of mind.) Locke, D. (1980) A Fantasy of Reason: The Life and Thought of William Godwin, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (A major biography with substantial philosophical commentary.) MARK PHILP GOETHE, JOHANN WOLFGANG VON (1749–1832) Goethe was a statesman, scientist, amateur artist, theatrical impresario, dramatist, novelist and Germany’s supreme lyric poet; indeed he provided the Romantic generation which followed him with their conception of what a poet should be. His works, diaries and about 12,000 letters run to nearly 150 volumes. His drama Faust (1790–1832) is the greatest long poem in modern European literature and made the legend of Dr Faust a modern myth. He knew most of the significant figures in the philosophical movement of German Idealism (though he never met Kant), but he was not himself a philosopher. His literary works certainly addressed contemporary philosophical concerns: Iphigenie auf Tauris (Iphigenia in Tauris) (1779–86) seems a prophetic dramatization of the ethical and religious autonomy Kant was to proclaim from 1785; in his novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften (The Elective Affinities) (1809) a mysterious natural or supernatural world of chemistry, magnetism or Fate, such as ‘ Naturphilosophie’ envisaged, seems to underlie and perhaps determine a human story of spiritual adultery; in Faust , particularly Part Two, the tale of a pact or wager with the Devil seems to develop into a survey of world cultural history, which has been held to have overtones of Schelling, Hegel or even Marx. But whatever their conceptual materials, Goethe’s literary works require literary rather than philosophical analysis. There are, however, certain discrete concepts prominent in his scientific work, or in the expressions of his ‘wisdom’ – maxims, essays, autobiographies, letters and conversations – with which Goethe’s name is particularly associated and which are capable of being separately discussed. Notable among these are: Nature
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Page 321 and metamorphosis ( Bildung ), polarity and ‘intensification’ ( Steigerung ), the ‘primal phenomena’ ( Urphänomene ), ‘the daemonic’ ( das Dämonische) and renunciation ( Entsagung ). See also: GERMAN IDEALISM; NATURPHILOSOPHIE; ROMANTICISM, GERMAN Further reading Goethe, J.W. von (1983–9) Goethe: Collected Works, Cambridge, MA: Suhrkamp Publishers Inc., Suhrkamp Edition, 12 vols. (An extensive collection of modern translations, with some notes, and including two volumes of essays, maxims and scientific writing.) Reed, T.J. (1984) Goethe , Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Excellent summary account of life and works.) NICHOLAS BOYLE GOOD, THEORIES OF THE ‘Good’ is the most general term of positive evaluation, used to recommend or express approval in a wide range of contexts. It indicates that a thing is desirable or worthy of choice, so that normally, if you have reason to want a certain kind of thing, you also have reason to prefer a good thing of that kind. A theory of the good may consist in a general account of the good, which is meant to apply to all good things; or in a definition of ‘good’, an account of how the term functions in the language. Theories of the good have metaphysical implications about the relations of fact and value. Many ancient and medieval philosophers believed in the ultimate identity of the real and the good. Modern philosophers reject this identification, and have held a range of positions: realists, for example, hold that the good is part of reality, while certain moral sense theorists hold that when we call something good we are projecting human interests onto reality; and emotivists hold that we use the term ‘good’ only to signify subjective approval. Theorists of the good also categorize different kinds of goodness and explain how they are related. Good things are standardly classified as ends, which are valued for their own sakes, or means, valued for the sake of the ends they promote. Some philosophers also divide them into intrinsic goods, which have their value in themselves, and extrinsic goods, which get their value from their relation to something else. Various theories have been held about the relation between these two distinctions – about whether an end must be something with intrinsic value. Philosophers also distinguish subjective goods – things which are good for someone in particular – from objective goods, which are good from everyone’s point of view. Views about how these kinds of goodness are related have important implications for moral philosophy. Usually, a theory of the good is constructed in the hope of shedding light on more substantive questions, such as what makes a person, an action, or a human life good. These questions raise issues about the relation between ethical and other values. For example, we may ask whether moral virtue is a special sort of goodness, or just the ordinary sort applied to persons. Or, since actions are valued as ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, we may ask how these values are related to the action’s goodness or badness. We may also pose the question of whether a life that is good in the sense of being happy must also be a morally good or virtuous life. This last question has occupied the attention of philosophers ever since Plato. See also: EVIL; RIGHT AND GOOD Further reading Griffin, J. (1986) Well-Being , Oxford: Clarendon Press. (One of the most complete presentations of the view that the good is what we would desire under ideal conditions of knowledge and reflection.) Moore, G.E. (1903) Principia Ethica, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971. (Argues that goodness must be an intrinsic non-natural property, and explains the idea of ‘organic unities’.) CHRISTINE M. KORSGAARD GOODMAN, NELSON (1906–) Nelson Goodman is an American philosopher who has written important works in metaphysics, aesthetics and epistemology. Throughout his work runs a concern with the ways that the symbols we construct inform the facts that we find and structure our understanding of them. Different symbol systems yield irreconcilable structures. So there is no one way things really are. There are, he concludes, many worlds if any. Moreover, worlds are made rather than found, for the categories we construct fix the criteria of identity for the individuals and kinds we recognize. Thus they determine what objects and kinds constitute a world. Goodman argues that the arts as well as the sciences make and reveal worlds. Aesthetics as he construes it is a branch of epistemology. He analyses a variety of modes of symbolization, literal and metaphorical, and shows how they
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Page 322 contribute in the arts and elsewhere to the advancement of understanding. Goodman’s ‘new riddle of induction’ reveals that the problem of induction runs deeper than philosophers had thought. He defines the predicate ‘grue’ as ‘examined before future time t and found to be green or not so examined and blue.’ All emeralds examined to date have been both green and grue. What justifies our expecting future emeralds to be green rather than grue? Inductive validity, the new riddle shows, turns not only on the constitution of an evidence class, but also on its characterization. The question then is what favours one characterization over its rivals. The fact that ‘green’ has been used far more often than ‘grue’ in induction, Goodman contends, provides the answer – not because it increases our odds of being right, but because of its pragmatic advantages. See also: INDUCTION, EPISTEMIC ISSUES; Further reading Goodman, N. (1951) The Structure of Appearance, Boston, MA: Reidel, 3rd edn, 1977. (This work uses devices of formal logic to construct systems that solve or dissolve perennial problems in epistemology. It argues that the availability of multiple, divergent constructional systems is a virtue rather than a flaw.) Elgin, C.Z. (1983) With Reference to Reference, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company. (An explication and elaboration of Goodman’s theory of symbols, which also extends it to the philosophy of language.) CATHERINE Z. ELGIN GOODNESS, PERFECT The concept of perfect goodness had a central place in ancient Greek and medieval philosophy, and is still frequently discussed in contemporary natural theology. Medieval philosophers adopted the idea from the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, with the difference that they identified perfect goodness with a personal God. In ancient and medieval philosophy the concept is primarily a metaphysical one, since goodness was thought to be extensionally equivalent to being, but it is secondarily a moral concept referring to the distinctive sort of goodness appropriate to those beings that have wills. Thus it is fundamental to a long tradition on the metaphysical basis of value which lasted from Plato until at least the sixteenth century. In Plato, perfect goodness is the Form of the Good, upon which everything that has being is ontologically and causally dependent. In Aristotle, the good is identified with the end or purpose of a natural being. The good is that towards which all things move for the fulfilment of their natures. By the time of Aquinas, medieval philosophers had identified the good in both the Platonic and Aristotelian senses with the Christian God and had argued that God is both the perfectly good creative source and the perfectly good end of all beings other than himself. The concept of a perfectly good being in Christian philosophical theology faces two major kinds of difficulty. One is the problem that perfect goodness appears to be incompatible with the divine attributes of omnipotence and freedom of the divine will. And if a perfectly good being does not have a will that is free in a morally significant sense, that being seems to lack goodness in the moral sense of goodness. The second kind of problem is that the existence of a being who is both omnipotent and perfectly good seems to be incompatible with the existence of evil. In spite of these problems, there is a strong attraction to the idea of a perfectly good God in contemporary philosophical theology. The category of perfect goodness is therefore one of the most persistent of the concepts in the Platonic legacy. See also: GOD, CONCEPTS OF Further reading MacDonald, S. (ed.) (1991) Being and Goodness , Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. (This collection provides an up-to-date treatment of the metaphysics of goodness as it appears in medieval philosophy broadly construed. It includes a translation of Boethius’ De hebdomadibus in the appendix.) Plato ( c .380–367 BC) Republic, trans. G.M.A. Grube, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1974. (This is a classic of political philosophy as well ethics and metaphysics, and its influence on theology has been considerable.) LINDA ZAGZEBSKI GORGIAS (late 5th century BC) The most important of the fifth-century BC Greek Sophists after Protagoras, Gorgias was a famous rhetorician, a major influence on the development of artistic prose and a gifted dabbler in philosophy. His display speeches, Encomium of Helen of Troy and Defence of Palamedes , are masterpieces of the art of
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Page 323 making a weak case seem strong, and brilliant exercises in symmetrical and antithetical sentence structure. Of philosophical importance is his treatise On Not-Being, or On the Nature of Things, an elaborate reversal of the metaphysical argument of Parmenides, showing: (1) that nothing exists; (2) that if anything exists, it cannot be known; and (3) if anything can be known, it cannot be communicated. This nihilistic tour de force is probably a caricature rather than a serious statement of a philosophical position. Gorgias is a master of the persuasive use of logos (discourse), understood both as eloquence and as argumentative skill. See also: SOPHISTS Further reading Plato ( c .395–387 BC) Gorgias , trans. T. Irwin, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. (Includes commentary.) Sprague, R.K. (ed.) (1972) The Older Sophists, Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 30–67. (Full translation of the fragments.) CHARLES H. KAHN GOTAMA see GAUTAMA, AKṢAPĀDA GRACE Grace is a gift of personal relationship with God surpassing the powers of nature. Such relationship presupposes the relation every creature has with God as immediately dependent on him for its very existence and continuance, but goes beyond it in its distinctive personal character and the resulting more intimate dependence. Such personal relationship necessarily depends upon some will or expression of will. The development of the relationship must be free in relation to what has gone before – it must in no way be necessitated. Therefore, if the relationship arises within some established natural system involving some degree of conformity to law at some levels of description (physical or otherwise), such a system and laws must leave some degree of indeterminacy. This allows the possibility that free actions, physically and psychologically contingent, should be among the ultimate determinants of what unfolds. For the workings of grace must always be free or contingent in relation to such a system of nature, concordant with and fulfilling nature, but working according to distinct principles – grace and nature are both equally God’s gift, but always distinct. The notion of grace has no place outside some kind of theism. Implicit in Judaism, its explicit development has been in Christian theology, which sees human beings as radically dependent upon God not only for redemption from personal sin, but for any personal or ‘supernatural’ relationship to God at all. This emphasis on grace is peculiar to Christianity, although the general conception seems implicit in most theistic religions; it can perhaps be found in the more theistic forms of Hindu devotion, although it is absent from Buddhism and the stricter forms of Hinduism. See also: JUSTIFICATION, RELIGIOUS; PROVIDENCE Further reading Küng, H. (1964) Justification: The Doctrine of Karl Barth and a Catholic Reflection , London: Burns & Oates. (The then Catholic theologian’s attempt to reconcile Protestant and Catholic views of justification.) DAVID BRAINE GRAMSCI, ANTONIO (1891–1937) An Italian Marxist theorist and activist, Gramsci’s main contribution lies in his critique of dialectical materialism. This school treated both the power of the bourgeois state and the prospects for its revolutionary overthrow and replacement by a stateless communist society as necessary consequences of the autonomous development of the economic forces of production. In contrast, Gramsci emphasized the relatively independent role played by politics and culture in upholding the authority of the state and in organizing popular resistance to it. A canonical figure of Western Marxism, he is credited with formulating a strategy applicable to all communist parties operating in the democratic states of advanced industrial societies. However, the posthumously published Quaderni del carcere (Prison Notebooks) elaborate on theoretical questions that had preoccupied Gramsci throughout most of his political career and which reflect peculiarities of the Italian political situation and traditions. Further reading Fiori, G. (1977) Antonio Gramsci: Life of a Revolutionary , trans. T. Nairn, London: Verso. (The standard biography.) Gramschi, A. (1926–37) Lettere dal carcere (Prison Letters), ed. S. Caprioglio and E. Furbini, Turin:
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Page 324 source for the evolution of Gramsci’s thought at this time; definitive English translation.) RICHARD BELLAMY GREEK PHILOSOPHY see ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY GREEK PHILOSOPHY: IMPACT ON ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY During the Hellenistic period (323–43 BC), classical Greek philosophy underwent a radical transformation. From being an essentially Greek product, it developed into a cosmopolitan and eclectic cultural movement in which Greek, Egyptian, Phoenician and other Near Eastern religious and ethical elements coalesced. This transformation is best symbolized by the role Alexandria played as the hub of diverse currents of thought making up the new philosophy. When the Abbasid Caliphate was founded in Baghdad in 750 AD, the centre of learning gradually moved to the Abbasid capital, which became in due course the heir of Athens and Alexandria as the new cultural metropolis of the medieval world. About two centuries later Cordoba, capital of Muslim Spain, began to vie with Baghdad as the centre of ‘ancient learning’. From Cordoba, Greek–Arabic philosophy and science were transmitted across the Pyrenees to Paris, Bologna and Oxford in the twelfth and the thirteenth centuries. The initial reception of Greek–Hellenistic philosophy in the Islamic world was mixed. It was frowned upon at first as being suspiciously foreign or pagan, and was dismissed by conservative theologians, legal scholars and grammarians as pernicious or superfluous. By the middle of the eighth century AD the picture had changed somewhat, with the appearance of the rationalist theologians of Islam known as the Mu‘tazilites, who were thoroughly influenced by the methods of discourse or dialectic favoured by the Muslim philosophers. Of those philosophers, the two outstanding figures of the ninth and tenth centuries were al-Kindi and al-Razi, who hailed Greek philosophy as a form of liberation from the shackles of dogma or blind imitation ( taqlid). For al-Kindi, the goals of philosophy are perfectly compatible with those of religion, and, for al-Razi, philosophy was the highest expression of man’s intellectual ambitions and the noblest achievement of that noble people, the Greeks, who were unsurpassed in their quest for wisdom ( hikma ). See also: ARISTOTELIANISM IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY; NEOPLATONISM IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY; PLATONISM IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY Further reading Walzer, R. (1962) Greek into Arabic, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (A collection of studies dealing with the transmission of Greek philosophy to the Arabs, by an eminent classical scholar and Arabist.) MAJID FAKHRY GREEN ETHICS see ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS GREEN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY All the major political philosophies have been born of crisis. Green political philosophy is no exception to this general rule. It has emerged from that interconnected series of crises that is often termed ‘the environmental crisis’. As we enter the third millennium and the twenty-first century it seems quite clear that the level and degree of environmental degradation and destruction cannot be sustained over the longer term without dire consequences for human and other animal species, and the ecosystems on which all depend. A veritable explosion in the human population, the pollution of air and water, the overfishing of the oceans, the destruction of tropical and temperate rain forests, the extinction of entire species, the depletion of the ozone layer, the build-up of greenhouse gases, global warming, desertification, wind and water erosion of precious topsoil, the disappearance of valuable farmland and wilderness for ‘development’ – these and many other interrelated phenomena provide the backdrop and justification for the ‘greening’ of much of modern political thinking. The task of outlining and summarizing the state of green political philosophy is made more difficult because there is as yet no agreement among ‘green’ political thinkers. Indeed there is, at present, no definitive ‘green political philosophy’ as such. The environmental or green movement is diverse and disparate, and appears in different shades of green. These range from ‘light green’ conservationists to ‘dark green’ deep ecologists, from ecofeminists to social ecologists, from the militant ecoteurs of Earth First! to the low-keyed gradualists of the Sierra Club and the Nature Conservancy. These groups differ not only over strategy and tactics, but also over fundamental philosophy. While there is no single, systematically articulated and agreed-upon green political philosophy, however, there are none the less
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Page 325 recurring topics, themes, categories and concepts that are surely central to such a political philosophy. These include the idea that humans are part of nature and members of a larger and more inclusive ‘biotic community’ to which they have obligations or duties. This community includes both human and non-human animals, and the conditions conducive to their survival and flourishing. Such a community consists, moreover, not only of members who are alive but those who are as yet unborn. A green political philosophy values both biological and cultural diversity, and views sustainability as a standard by which to judge the justness of human actions and practices. Exactly how these themes might fit together to form some larger, systematic and coherent whole is still being worked out. See also: ECOLOGY; ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS Further reading Bookchin, M. (1990) Remaking Society: Pathways to a Green Future, Boston, MA: South End Press. (A philosophical and programmatic statement by a leading social ecologist.) Dobson, A. (1990) Green Political Thought, London: Unwin Hyman. (A useful introduction.) TERENCE BALL GREEN, THOMAS HILL (1836–82) Green was a prominent Oxford idealist philosopher, who criticized both the epistemological and ethical implications of the dominant empiricist and utilitarian theories of the time. He contended that experience could not be explained merely as the product of sensations acting on the human mind. Like Kant, Green argued that knowledge presupposes certain a priori categories, such as substance, causation, space and time, which enable us to structure our understanding of empirical reality. Physical objects and even the most simple feelings are only intelligible as relations of ideas constituted by human consciousness. However, unlike Kant, he did not draw the conclusion that things in themselves are consequently unknowable. Rather, he argued that reality itself is ultimately spiritual, the product of an eternal consciousness operating within both the world and human reason. Green adopted a similarly antinaturalist and holistic position in ethics, in which desires are seen as orientated towards the realization of the good – both within the individual and in society at large. In politics, this led him to criticize the laissez-faire individualist liberalism of Herbert Spencer and, to a lesser extent, of J.S. Mill, and to advocate a more collectivist liberalism in which the state seeks to promote the positive liberty of its members. See also: EMPIRICISM; NATURALISM IN ETHICS Further reading Green, T.H. (1997) Works, ed. P. Nicholson, 5 vols, Bristol: Thoemmes Press. (Volumes 1–3 reproduce the Nettleship edition of the Works (1885–8), volume 4 the 1883 edition of the Prolegomena to Ethics , which was not included in Nettleship’s Works, and volume 5 reprints all previously uncollected published material, including letters and selections from Green’s papers, plus a new bibliography and an introduction by the editor.) Vincent, A. (ed.) (1986) The Philosophy of T.H. Green , Aldershot: Gower. (Contains articles covering all aspects of Green’s activity and thought, together with a very useful bibliography.) RICHARD BELLAMY GREGORY OF RIMINI ( c .1300–58) The Augustinian theologian Gregory of Rimini was for a long time known primarily for his doctrine of predestination and for his notion of ‘the complexly signifiable’ in the semantics of propositions. However, he also provides an interesting alternative to William of Ockham among medieval nominalists. His chief work was his Lectura super primum et secundum Sententiarum (Lectures on Books I and II of Peter Lombard’s Sentences). See also: AUGUSTINIANISM Further reading Leff, G. (1961) Gregory of Rimini: Tradition and Innovation in Fourteenth Century Thought, Manchester: Manchester University Press. (Full survey of Gregory’s life and works.) STEPHEN F. BROWN GRICE, HERBERT PAUL (1913–88) Born in Birmingham, Grice was a leading member of the post-war Oxford group of analytic philosophers. His small body of published work, together with an oral tradition, has been deeply influential among both philosophers and theoretical linguists. His outline of general rules of conversation began a new era in pragmatics. Grice’s analysis of speaker’s meaning explicates semantic notions in terms of the psychological concepts of intention and belief. His theory of conversation is based on the nature of language as a rational, cooperative
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Page 326 activity. His account of conversational rules gave him a tool that he applied to a wide class of philosophical problems. Although Grice is most famous for his work on language and meaning, his interests cover a full range of philosophical topics, including ethics, moral psychology and philosophical psychology. See also: COMMUNICATION AND INTENTION Further reading Grice, H.P. (1989) Studies in the Way of Words, Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press. (Collected essays, some previously published in journals, written 1946–88. Includes ‘Meaning’ (1957), ‘The Causal Theory of Perception’ (1967), the first complete publication of The William James Lectures (1967) and ‘Utterer’s Meaning and Intentions’ (1969).) Levinson, S. (1983) Pragmatics , Cambridge. MA: Harvard University Press. (A good introduction to pragmatics and to Grice’s contribution to the field.) JUDITH BAKER GROSSETESTE, ROBERT ( c .1170–1253) Grosseteste taught theology at Oxford before becoming Bishop of Lincoln. His thought is representative of the conflicting currents in the intellectual climate of Europe in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. On the one hand, his commitment to acquiring, understanding and making accessible to his Latin contemporaries the texts and ideas of newly discovered Arabic and Greek intellectual traditions places him in the vanguard of a sweeping movement transforming European thought during his lifetime. His work in science and natural philosophy, for example, is inspired by material newly translated from Arabic sources and by the new Aristotelian natural philosophy, especially the Physics, On the Heavens and Posterior Analytics (Aristotle’s treatise on the nature of scientific knowledge). Similarly, in his work in metaphysics, ethics and theology Grosseteste turns to ancient sources previously unknown (or incompletely known) to Western thinkers, prominent among which are Aristotle’s Ethics and the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius. His work as a translator of and commentator on Aristotle and Pseudo-Dionysius places Grosseteste among the pioneers in the assimilation of these important strands of the Greek intellectual heritage into the mainstream of European thought. On the other hand, Grosseteste’s views are in significant respects conservative. His greatest debt is to Augustine, and his most original ideas – such as his view that light is a fundamental constituent of all corporeal reality – are extensions of recognizably Augustinian themes. Moreover, although his work on Aristotle is groundbreaking, his approach is judicious and measured, lacking any hint of the crusader’s zeal that marks the work of the later radical Aristotelians. In general his practice conforms to the traditional Neoplatonist line, viewing Aristotle as a guide to logic and natural philosophy while turning to Platonism – in Grosseteste’s case, Augustinian and Pseudo-Dionysian Platonism – for the correct account of the loftier matters of metaphysics and theology. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM, MEDIEVAL; AUGUSTINIANISM; PSEUDO-GROSSETESTE Further reading Callus, D.A. (ed.) (1955) Robert Grosseteste: Scholar and Bishop, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Six seminal essays on Grosseteste’s life and thought.) Southern, R.W. (1986) Robert Grosseteste: The GrowthofanEnglish Mind in Medieval Europe , Oxford: Clarendon Press; 2nd edn, 1992. (A provocative reassessment of Grosseteste’s intellectual development and historical significance.) SCOTT MacDONALD GROTE, JOHN (1813–66) From 1855 Grote was Knightbridge Professor at Cambridge. His literary legacy was largely posthumous. Often seen as unsystematic, he was in fact a penetrating thinker who forcefully criticized utilitarianism and positivism and ably argued that ‘all that we call existence is for us a thought of ours’. His was a seminal British idealism, stressing both the gulf between philosophical inquiry and the sciences and the difficulty of distinguishing the necessary from the contingent. See also: EPISTEMIC RELATIVISM Further reading Gibbins, J. (1997) John Grote, Cambridge University and the Development of Victorian Ideas, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. (This book locates Grote in the context of his day, analyses his original theories of history, politics and language, and provides photographs and an up-to-date bibliography of manuscripts and references to Grote.) JOHN GIBBINS BART SCHULTZ
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Page 327 GROTIUS, HUGO (1583–1645) Scholar, lawyer and statesman, Grotius was born in Holland but spent much of his career in France. He contributed to a number of different disciplines. His reputation as the founder both of a new international order and of a new moral science rests largely on his De iure belli ac pacis (The Law of War and Peace) (1625). Though the tendency today is to regard Grotius as one figure among others in the development of the concept of international law, he is increasingly regarded as one of the most original moral philosophers of the seventeenth century, in particular as having laid the foundations for the post-sceptical doctrine of natural law that flourished during the Enlightenment. See also: WAR AND PEACE, PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Grotius, H. (1625) De iure belli ac pacis (The Law of War and Peace), trans. F.W. Kelsey, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1925. (Translation printed along with a facsimile of the 1646 edition.) Knight, W.S.M. (1925) The Life and Works of Hugo Grotius , London: Sweet and Maxwell. (The most detailed biography.) J.D. FORD GUANZI The Guanzi, or ‘Book of Master Guan’, is an eclectic work including textual materials dating from the fourth century BC to the first century AD, drawing on themes from Daoism, the science of government, yin–yang and the Five Phases, Legalism, Confucianism, the art of war, economics and the Huang–Lao movement. Its pragmatic outlook is founded on a kind of objective realism that is the signature of the famous fourth-century BC Jixia academy in the principality of Qi. It was this academy that consolidated several different schools of thought. See also: CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY, CHINESE Further reading Guanzi (4th century BC–1st century AD), trans. W. Allyn Rickett, Kuan-tzu, a Repository of Early Chinese Thought, Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong Press, 1965; trans. W. Allyn Rickett, Guanzi: Political, Economic, and Philosophical Essays from Early China , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985. (Two translations of the Guanzi.) ISABELLE ROBINET GUIFENG ZONGMI see ZONGMI GURNEY, EDMUND (1847–88) Edmund Gurney was an English psychologist and musician. His major work, The Power of Sound , is a vast treatise on musical aesthetics, ranging from issues in the physiology of hearing to the question of the relation of music to morality, but is mostly devoted to central questions of form, expression and value in music. It is the most significant work of its kind in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Commentators often couple Gurney with Hanslick as a supporter of musical formalism, but his views on the expressive dimension of music are neither as restrictive nor as doctrinaire as Hanslick’s. Hanslick insisted on denying specific emotional content to music, allowing it only to convey dynamic features, which emotions, among other things, might exhibit. Gurney, on the other hand, grants that some music possesses fairly definite emotional expression, and discusses at length the grounds of such expression; he is primarily concerned to deny that musical impressiveness, or beauty, is either the same as or depends on musical expressiveness. Gurney maintains that overall form in music is not of primary relevance to the appreciation of music. This is because the central feature of musical comprehension is the grasping of individual parts as they occur, and the grasping of connections to immediately neighbouring parts, whatever the overarching form of a piece might be. The value of a piece is directly a function of the pleasurableness of its individual parts and the cogency of sequence exhibited at the transitions between them, not a function of its global architecture. See also: ART, UNDERSTANDING OF; MUSIC, AESTHETICS OF Further reading Budd, M. (1985) Music and the Emotions, London: Routledge, ch. 4. (Discusses Gurney’s views on the roots of musical affect and the nature of musical expressiveness.) Gurney, E. (1880) The Power of Sound , New York: Basic Books, 1966. (His major work, an important contribution to aesthetics of music in the nineteenth century.) JERROLD LEVINSON GYELTSAP DARMA RINCHEN
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Page 328 H HA’AM, AHAD (1856–1927) Ahad Ha’am (Asher Hirsch Ginzberg) was one of the most remarkable Jewish thinkers and Zionist ideologists of his time. Born in the province of Kiev in the Ukraine, he moved in 1884 to Odessa, an important centre of Hebrew literary activity. In 1907 he moved on to London, and in 1922 settled in the young city of Tel Aviv. He attended the universities of Vienna, Berlin and Breslau but did not pursue any regular course of study and was primarily an autodidact. Never a systematic philosopher, Ginzberg, who wrote in Hebrew and adopted the pen name Ahad Ha’am, ‘one of the people’, became a first-rate and widely read essayist and polemicist. He engaged in controversies over the practical problems of the early Jewish settlements in Palestine, his opposition to Theodore Herzl’s drive to create a Jewish state, and numerous problems of Hebrew culture, tradition and literature. No single principle or theme stands out as the guiding idea of his thought. Indeed, his ideas are sometimes inconsistent. But his writings preserve the flavour of his values and commitments. Although his outlook never became the main road of Zionist ideology, its impact on Zionist thought was powerful, especially after the establishment of the State of Israel. See also: ZIONISM Further reading Ha’am, Ahad (1950) Kol Kit’ve Ahad Ha’am (Complete Works of Ahad Ha’am), Tel Aviv: Dvir. (The essays deal with Judaism, Zionism and the issues of the Zionist movement and colonization of Palstine.) Simon, L. (1960) Ahad Ha’am Asher Ginzberg: A Biography , New York: Herzl Press. (Biography of Ahad Ha’am.) ZE’EV LEVY HABERMAS, JÜRGEN (1929–) Jürgen Habermas, German philosopher and social theorist, is perhaps best known for his wide-ranging defence of the modern public sphere and its related ideals of publicity and free public reason, but he has also made important contributions to theories of communication and informal argumentation, ethics, and the foundations and methodology of the social sciences. He studied in Göttingen, Zurich and Bonn, completing a dissertation on Schelling’s philosophy in 1954. After working for a short time as Theodor Adorno’s research assistant at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt he held professorships in Heidelberg and Frankfurt and, from 1971 to 1981, was co-director of the Max Planck Institute in Starnberg. With the publication of Knowledge and Human Interests (1968) he became widely recognized as the leading intellectual heir to the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, a variant of Western Marxism that included such figures as Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse. His two-volume The Theory of Communicative Action (1981) is a major contribution to social theory, in which he locates the origins of the various political, economic and cultural crises confronting modern society in a one-sided process of rationalization steered more by the media of money and administrative power than by forms of collective decision-making based on consensually grounded norms and values. See also: FRANKFURT SCHOOL; MODERNISM Further reading Habermas, J. (1981) Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns , Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2 vols; trans. T. McCarthy, The Theory of Communicative Action, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1984/1987. (His two-volume magnum opus, a systematic treatise on the foundations of social theory and one-sided process of rationalization in modern societies.) White, S. (1995) The Cambridge Companion to Habermas , New York: Cambridge University Press. (A volume dealing primarily with Habermas’ political theory and postmodernism.) KENNETH BAYNES HAECKEL, ERNST HEINRICH (1834–1919) Haeckel was the leading German Darwinist. His evolutionary philosophy of monism differed substantially from the views of Darwin or of British evolutionary philosophers such as
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Page 329 Herbert Spencer or the dualist T.H. Huxley. Haeckel’s monism asserted the unity of physical and organic nature, and included mental processes and social phenomena. Its initial form was mechanistic, seeking to reduce vital processes to physicochemical laws and substances. However, his efforts to construct the history of life meant that Haeckel became preoccupied with historical processes. In its final form, his monism was pantheistic. Although Haeckel has been regarded as a forerunner of national socialism, a contextual reading of his works does not support this interpretation. See also: EVOLUTION, THEORY OF Further reading Haeckel, E.H. (1899) Die Welträthsel , Bonn: E. Strauss; trans. J. McCabe, The Riddle of the Universe, London: Watts, 1929. (A popular evolutionary cosmology.) Weindling, P.J. (1989) ‘Ernst Haeckel, Darwinismus and the secularisation of nature’, in Moore, J.R. (ed.) History, Humanity and Evolution, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 311–29. (A contextualized exposition of Haeckel’s changing views.) PAUL WEINDLING HÄGERSTRÖM, AXEL ANDERS THEODOR (1868–1939) Hägerström was professor of philosophy at Uppsala University, Sweden, from 1911 until 1933, and together with his pupil Adolf Phalén founded the Uppsala school of conceptual analysis. He first came to the attention in 1902 with a study of Kant’s ethics, but his main claim to fame rests upon the antimetaphysical and emotivist positions which he developed during the years 1905–39. Thus the two fundamental theses of his moral philosophy are that moral valuations are neither true nor false, and that the proper task of moral philosophy itself is only descriptive and not normative. In this connection he argued that the philosophical ideas of objective moral values and of absolute rights have created fanaticism and sharpened conflicts in human history. He is also well known for his work in jurisprudence as the founder of Scandinavian legal realism. Here again his thought is predominantly antimetaphysical, and he criticized many legal concepts for their metaphysical and magical elements. See also: SCANDINAVIA, PHILOSOPHY IN Further reading Broad, C.D. (1964) ‘Memoir of Axel Hägersträm’, in A. Hägerström, Philosophy and Religion, trans. R.T. Sandin, London: Allen & Unwin. (A biographical sketch, mainly based on a biography published in Swedish in 1961 by Hägerström’s daughter Margit Waller.) Hägerström, A. (1964) Philosophy and Religion, trans. R.T. Sandin, London: Allen & Unwin. (Selected writings on moral philosophy and philosophy of religion.) THORILD DAHLQUIST ANN-MARI HENSCHEN-DAHLQUIST HALAKHAH The central ideal of rabbinic Judaism is that of living by the Torah, that is, God’s teachings. These teachings are mediated by a detailed normative system called halakhah, which might be translated as ‘the Way’. The term ‘rabbinic law’ captures the form of halakhic discourse, but not its range. Appropriate sections of halakhah have indeed served as the law of Jewish communities for two millennia. But other sections relate to individual conscience and religious observance and are enforceable only by a ‘heavenly court’. Although grounded in Scripture, halakhah’s frame of reference is the ‘oral Torah’, a tradition of interpretation and argument culminating in the twenty volumes of the Talmud. God’s authority is the foundational norm, but it is only invoked occasionally as superseding human understanding. Indeed, the rabbis disallowed divine interference in their deliberations, asserting, in keeping with Scripture, that Torah is ‘not in heaven’ (Bava Metzia 59b, citing Deuteronomy 30: 12). Given the lack of binding dogma in Judaism, halakhic practice has often been regarded as the common denominator that unites the Jewish community. The enterprise of furnishing ‘reasons of the commandments’ ( ta’amei ha-mitzvot), central to many thinkers in Judaism, accordingly reveals a great diversity of orientations. These range, in medieval Judaism, from esoteric mystical doctrines to Maimonides’ rational and historical explanations; and among modern writers, from moral positivism to existentialism. See also: BIBLE, HEBREW; THEOLOGY, RABBINIC Further reading Elon, M. (1994) Jewish Law: History, Sources, Principles , trans. B. Auerbach and M.J. Sykes, Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society. (A comprehensive description and analysis of the halakhic legal system: its constitution, textual sources, and evolution.)
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Page 330 HALEVI, JUDAH (before 1075–1141) Physician, philosopher and perhaps the greatest Hebrew poet since the Psalms, Judah Halevi studied the Neoplatonic Aristotelianism widespread in Islamic Spain, but his loyalty to Judaic traditions, love of Israel and poetic empathy for the sufferings and aspirations of his people made him a powerful critic of that philosophical tradition. His philosophical masterpiece, the Kuzari , is a fictional dialogue set at the court of the king of the Khazars, a people of the Volga basin whose leaders had converted to Judaism in the early ninth century. Reports of the Khazar realm sparked Halevi’s imagination and gave him the backdrop for this effort to celebrate and shape his ancestral faith. Beyond heartening his fellow Jews in times of upheaval, Halevi confronted philosophical questions that conventional thinkers often begged or ignored. He found the erudite Neoplatonism of his day too confining to God, too speculative and a priori. Tellingly, he condemns Neoplatonism for cultural vacuity, moral sterility and spiritual escapism: while Christians and Muslims, with the highest spiritual intentions, earnestly set about one another’s murder, the philosophers fail to differentiate one faith from another. What is needed, Halevi reasons, is not a still more spiritual intellectualism but a historically and geographically rooted tradition concretely directed by God’s love. Halevi did not, as romantics often suppose, simply turn his back on reason, or on philosophy generically. Rather, he used his own philosophical gifts and poetic tact to retune philosophy to the ground notes of Jewish experience. He retained but structurally adapted the Neoplatonic linkage of God to the world via emanation, replacing the elaborate hierarchy of star souls with the simple manifestation of God’s word, the ’ Amr. Like Philo’s Logos , Halevi’s ’ Amr was at once an attribute of God, his wisdom and a manifestation of God immanent in nature. Since the ’ Amr is an imperative, it connotes power, volition and command, not just logical entailment or necessitation. Since it is immanent, it allows fuller appropriation than was possible for many philosophers and many of the pietists and mystics in their wake, of the material side of nature, including human nature: language, material culture – including agriculture and other economic activities – law and politics belong to realm of God’s expression. Particularity is not isolated from God. Poetry and works of imagination can be expressions of the divine, not just stepchildren mediating the ever more abstract and abtruse flights of the intellect. Zion could be acknowledged as the land where the divine afflatus was most clearly articulated as a way of life. Longing for Zion need no longer be sublimated in prayer; rather, Israel’s songs of longing for the robust life of the land of God’s grace would voice a spiritual imperative that demanded practical expression and historical realization. See also: ZIONISM Further reading Halevi, Judah ( c .1130–40) Kitab al-radd wa- ’ldalil fi ’l-din al-dhalil (Kuzari) (A Defence and an Argument on behalf of the Abased Religion), ed. D.H. Baneth, Jerusalem: Magnes Press; trans. H. Hirschfeld, London: Routledge, 1905; repr. New York: Schocken, 1974. (The Hirschfeld translation is misleadingly imprecise. A new translation is in preparation as part of the Yale Judaica series.) Silman, Y. (1995) Philosopher and Prophet: Judah Halevi, the Kuzari and the Evolution of his Thought, trans. L.J. Schramm, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. (Analyses the Kuzari from a developmental perspective, showing how it embeds elements of the poet’s early attachment to the Neoplatonic philosophical tradition and how the work grows beyond its original aim, as a riposte to Karaism.) L.E. GOODMAN HAMANN, JOHANN GEORG (1730–88) Hamann was one of the most important critics of the German Enlightenment or Aufklärung . He attacked the Aufklärung chiefly because it gave reason undue authority over faith. It misunderstood faith, which consists in an immediate personal experience, inaccessible to reason. The main fallacy of the Aufklärung was hypostasis, the reification of ideas, the artificial abstraction of reason from its social and historical context. Hamann stressed the social and historical dimension of reason, that it must be embodied in society, history and language. He also emphasized the pivotal role of language in the development of reason. The instrument and criterion of reason was language, whose only sanction was tradition and use. Hamann was a sharp critic of Kant, whose philosophy exemplified all the sins of the Aufklärung . Hamann attacked the critical philosophy for its purification of reason from experience, language and tradition. He also
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Page 331 strongly objected to all its dualisms, which seemed arbitrary and artificial. The task of philosophy was to unify all the various functions of the mind, seeing reason, will and feeling as an indivisible whole. Although he was original and unorthodox, Hamann’s critique of reason should be placed within the tradition of Protestant nominalism. Hamann saw himself as a defender of Luther, whose reputation was on the wane in late eighteenth-century Germany. Hamann was also a founder of the Sturm und Drang, the late eighteenth-century literary movement which celebrated personal freedom and revolt. His aesthetics defended creative genius and the metaphysical powers of art. It marked a sharp break with the rationalism of the classical tradition and the empiricism of late eighteenth-century aesthetics. Hamann was a seminal influence upon Herder, Goethe, Jacobi, Friedrich Schlegel and Kierkegaard. See also: ENLIGHTENMENT, CONTINENTAL Further reading Berlin, I. (1993) The Magus of the North: J.G. Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism, London: John Murray. FREDERICK BEISER HAMILTON, WILLIAM (1788–1856) Sir William Hamilton was a leading exponent of the Scottish philosophy of ‘common sense’. This philosophy had its origin in the works of Thomas Reid, but it was through Hamilton that it achieved its most subtle form and exerted its greatest influence. ‘Common-sense’ philosophy, on a superficial view, may seem to hold that philosophical problems should be settled by appealing to the commonly accepted opinions of ordinary people. But that is not what it holds. The ‘common sense’ to which it refers are certain powers and beliefs natural to the mind and therefore common alike to the learned and vulgar. Hamilton holds that these powers and beliefs can neither be doubted nor justified. They carry their own authority. This view derives its significance from a point which has often been overlooked. When we doubt or justify a belief, we stand outside that belief and compare it with the world. But the power to compare a belief with the world itself presupposes beliefs about the world. We cannot step outside all our beliefs. That is why, according to Hamilton, certain powers and beliefs must carry authority. See also: COMMONSENSISM Further reading Grave, S.A. (1960) The Scottish Philosophy of Common Sense, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (A modern survey of the Scottish school.) Hamilton, W. (1853) Discussions on Philosophy and Literature, Education and University Reform , London: Longman. (Hamilton’s major work.) H.O. MOUNCE HAN FEI/HAN FEI-TZU see HAN FEIZI HAN FEIZI ( c .280–233 BC) Han Feizi was the pre-eminent Legalist philosopher. The work attributed to him, the Han Feizi , is his conscious response to the general breakdown of civil order and the interminable inter-state struggle for survival and conquest during the Warring States period (463–222 BC). However, Han Feizi’s work transcends the particular circumstances that gave rise to it and addresses perennial philosophical issues conerning the nature of power and the law that continue to remain relevant. See also: FA; LEGALIST PHILOSOPHY, CHINESE Further reading Han Feizi ( c .280–233 BC) Han Feizi , ed. Wang Xianshen, Han Feizi jijie (The Complete Works of Han Feizi with Collected Commentaries), 1896; trans. W.K. Liao, The Complete Works of Han Fei Tzu , London: Arthur Probsthian, vol. 1, 1938; vol. 2, 1959. (Liao remains the only complete translation of the work in English, although twelve chapters are translated by B. Watson in Han Fei Tzu: Basic Writings, New York: Columbia University Press, 1964.) LEO S. CHANG HAN WÔNJIN (1682–1751) Han Wônjin was a major thinker of the Korean neo-Confucian tradition. One of the leading scholars of his time, he is especially remembered as a protagonist in the Horak controversy, which he ignited with the observation that ki (in Chinese, qi ) or ‘material force’ is present even when the mind is in a meditative, quiescent state. See also: CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY, KOREAN; QI
MICHAEL C. KALTON
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Page 332 HAN YU (768–824) Among the most important figures in the history of medieval Confucianism, Han Yu helped to redefine and adapt earlier Confucian teachings to the needs of his contemporary society. He strove to make Confucianism a more popular and comprehensive doctrine by devising a basic metaphysics and epistemology to complement the earlier Confucian emphasis on ethics. See also: CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY, CHINESE Further reading Hartman, C. (1986) Han Yü and the T’ang Search for Unity , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (The only attempt at a comprehensive study of Han Yu in a Western language; Chapter 3 is devoted to Han Yu’s philosophical thought.) CHARLES HARTMAN HANSLICK, EDUARD (1825–1904) Eduard Hanslick, a music critic for the popular Viennese press, is principally known as the author of Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (1854). This is probably the most widely read work in the aesthetics of music for both philosophers and musicians, and remains the starting point for any discussion either of the place of emotion in music, or of the doctrine usually referred to as ‘musical purism’. On the former, Hanslick maintained what he calls the negative thesis, which ’first and foremost opposes the widespread view that music is supposed to represent the feelings’; on purism, he proposed the positive thesis or antithesis, ’that the beauty of a piece of music is specifically musical, that is, is inherent in the tonal relationships without reference to an extraneous, extra-musical context’. See also: EMOTION IN RESPONSE TO ART; MUSIC, AESTHETICS OF Further reading Hanslick, E. (1854) Vom Musikalisch-Schönen , Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Hartel, 1980; trans. G. Payzant, On the Musically Beautiful, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1986. (The 1986 translation is new and philosophically superior to Cohen’s 1957 translation, which however remains useful.) PETER KIVY HANSON, NORWOOD RUSSELL (1924–67) Hanson was an American philosopher of science who introduced novel ways of relating logical, historical and linguistic analyses. His best-known book, Patterns of Discovery, stressed the theory-ladenness of observational reports and argued that causalityisa featureof inference systems, rather than of nature as such. He pioneered in combining historical and analytic analyses of significant breakthroughs in science. Though he clarified patterns of discovery he never succeeded in the project of developing a logic of discovery, or an account of the inferences leading from problematic situations to novel explanatory hypotheses. A man of many talents, he also made contributions to the history of science, aerodynamics and epistemology. See also: DISCOVERY, LOGIC OF; SCIENTIFIC METHOD Further reading Hanson, N.R. (1958) Patterns of Discovery, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (His basic work, reprinted in paperback in 1961.) EDWARD MacKINNON HAPPINESS In ordinary use, the word ‘happiness’ has to do with one’s situation (one is fortunate) or with one’s state of mind (one is glad, cheerful) or, typically, with both. These two elements appear in different proportions on different occasions. If one is concerned with a long stretch of time (as in ‘a happy life’), one is likely to focus more on situation than on state of mind. If a short period of time, it is not uncommon to focus on states of mind. By and large philosophers are more interested in long-term cases. One’s life is happy if one is content that life has brought one much of what one regards as important. There is a pull in these lifetime assessments towards a person’s objective situation and away from the person’s subjective responses. The important notion for ethics is ‘wellbeing’ – that is, a notion of what makes an individual life go well. ‘Happiness’ is important because many philosophers have thought that happiness is the only thing that contributes to wellbeing, or because they have used ‘happiness’ to mean the same as ‘wellbeing’. What, then, makes a life go well? Some have thought that it was the presence of a positive feeling tone. Others have thought that it was having one’s desires fulfilled – either actual desires (as some would say) or informed desires (as others would say). It is unclear how stringent the requirement of ‘informed’ must be; if it is
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Page 333 fairly stringent it can, in effect, require abandoning desire explanations and adopting instead an explanation in terms of a list of good-making features in human life. Further reading Annas, J. (1993) The Morality of Happiness , New York: Oxford University Press. (A history of ancient ethics, focused on the notions of virtue and happiness, from Aristotle onwards.) Sumner, L.W. (1996) Welfare, Happiness, and Ethics , Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Rejects hedonism and desire accounts, and defends a close connection of wellbeing to happiness.) J.P. GRIFFIN HARE, RICHARD MERVYN (1919–) The British philosopher R.M. Hare is the creator of the ethical theory called ‘prescriptivism’. This holds that moral statements differ from purely factual ones in prescribing conduct; they differ from simple imperatives in invoking universal principles that apply to all similar cases. The theory has three aspects: prescriptivity and universalizability as formal features of moral statements; appeal to the Golden Rule (that we should do to others as we wish them to do to us) for selecting moral principles; two levels of practical thinking, critical and intuitive. See also: PRESCRIPTIVISM Further reading Hare, R.M. (1952) The Language of Morals, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Discusses imperative inference, explains ‘good’ as a term of commendation, and relates ‘ought’ to imperatives.) A.W. PRICE HARRINGTON, JAMES (1611–77) Harrington was the premier English republican political theorist. His The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656), published soon after the Civil War, analysed the collapse of monarchy and recommended institutions for a perfect commonwealth. He argued that forms of government were shaped by modes of land tenure; the decline of the feudal aristocracy and rise of the gentry rendered monarchy inviable. His proposed republic entailed regular elections for all public offices and secret ballots among a citizenry of independent gentlemen. Harrington influenced English, American and French radicals throughout the eighteenth century. Today he tends to be a talisman for those who would inject an aspect of ‘civic republicanism’ or ‘public virtue’ into contemporary politics, by contrast with the liberal rights theories of the natural jurisprudence tradition. See also: REPUBLICANISM Further reading Harrington, J. (1656) Oceana, in The Political Works of James Harrington , ed.J.G.A. Pocock, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 155–360. (England’s premier republican text. Part 1 analyses the historical reasons for the collapse of the monarchy; part 2 sketches the spirit and institutions of an ideal agrarian republic.) MARK GOLDIE HART, HERBERT LIONEL ADOLPHUS (1907–93) H.L.A. Hart, Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford University, 1952–1968, is an outstanding representative of the analytical approach in jurisprudence and philosophy of law. He restated ‘legal positivism’ in the tradition of Jeremy Bentham and John Austin, differentiating between law’s existence and its moral qualities. But he rejected the Benthamite identification of law with a sovereign’s commands, advancing instead a theory of law as comprising a special, systematically organized, kind of social rules. He did this in a linguistic-analytical style, showing how attention to our way of speaking and thinking about rules can yield new insights into their nature. See also: AUSTIN, J.; LAW, PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Hart, H.L.A. (1961) The Concept of Law , Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Hart’s most celebrated work, originally intended as a highlevel student’s introduction to jurisprudence. A gracefully written book, deceptively easy to read.) NEIL MacCORMICK HARTLEY, DAVID (1705–1757) The English philosopher David Hartley commands a distinctive place in Enlightenment thinking for his attempt to establish an empiricist epistemology upon a foundation of ontological materialism – in other words, a philosophy of mind that incorporates a physiology of the brain. He also set forth an optimistic vision of human progress which was nonetheless cast within the framework of a transcendental theology. Though his views might seem to be a
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Page 334 singular fusion of disparate strands, they nevertheless epitomized much liberal and advanced English thinking of the time, and exercised considerable influence upon the philosophical radicalism of subsequent generations. See also: HUMAN NATURE, SCIENCE OF, IN THE 18TH CENTURY Further reading Hartley, D. (1749) Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations , London: Leake & Frederick, 2 vols. (Hartley’s opus magnum, subsequently edited in ‘bowdlerized’ form by Joseph Priestley, sets out a materialist theory of the activity of mind, understood in terms of Newtonian corpuscular theory and a Providential reading of Christianity.) ROY PORTER HARTMANN, KARL ROBERT EDUARD VON (1842–1906) Eduard von Hartmann was born in Berlin and lived there for most of his life. He was a prolific writer of both scholarly and popular works on a wide variety of topics, including aesthetics, ethics, religion and politics. He forecast a gloomy future for Germany, insisting that the only way to rectify the problems of modernity was with a strong nationalistic Germany ruled by an educated elite. See also: GERMAN IDEALISM Further reading Hall, G.S. (1912) Founders of Modern Psychology , New York and London: D. Appleton; reprinted Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1978, 178–242. (A readable introduction by one of Hartmann’s acquaintances.) CHRISTOPHER ADAIR-TOTEFF HARTMANN, NICOLAI (1882–1950) Nicolai Hartmann was born in Latvia and educated in St Petersburg before moving to Germany. His intellectual trajectory was similar to that of his contemporary, Heidegger. He abandoned his early NeoKantian concern with knowledge and its foundations in favour of ‘ontology’, a study of the being of entities. Unlike Heidegger he assigned no ontological priority to human beings. Human beings are the highest level of entities, perched precariously above the physical, organic and animal levels, but conferring meaning and value on an otherwise meaningless and Godless universe. Further reading Heimsoeth, H. and Heiss, H. (1952) Nicolai Hartmann: Der Denker und sein Werk (Nicolai Hartmann: The Thinker and his Work), Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. (Fifteen essays by German philosophers, with a bibliography of works by and about Hartmann.) MICHAEL INWOOD HASIDISM Its name literally meaning pietism, Hasidism is a mystical renewal movement that originated in eastern Europe in the mid-eighteenth century. It has become one of the most important spiritual and social developments of Orthodox Judaism and has exerted an influence as well on non-Jews and Jews who are not Orthodox. Early Hasidic leaders claimed their spiritual authority on the basis of heavenly revelations and mystical awakenings. But they generally differed from the more esoterically minded Kabbalists, from whom they drew their earliest following, in seeking to present the fruits of mystical inspiration to the community. Hasidic teachings fostered specific spiritual and ritual innovations, which gave outward expression to the profound nexus that the Hasidic masters saw between mundane existence and the inner, mystical meaning of God’s law. According to Hasidic thinking, the divine and the human formed a single, all-encompassing unity, and it was on this basis that the Hasidic rabbis found in acts of Jewish piety means of linking divine experience with human responsiveness. Notable for its vitality and continuity in diversity, Hasidism continues its influence on religious Jewry and beyond to the present day. See also: KABBALAH; MYSTICISM, NATURE OF Further reading Heschel, A.J. (1989) The Circle of the Ba‘al Shem Tov, Chicago. IL: University of Chicago Press. (A study of the group that initiated the Hasidic movement in the first half of the eighteenth century.) Weiss, J. (1985) Studies in Eastern European Jewish Mysticism , Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Essays on various aspects of Hasidism, integrating phenomenological and historical approaches.) RACHEL ELIOR
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Page 335 HAYEK, FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON (1899–1992) An Austrian-born British economist who turned political philosopher, Hayek was best known for his critique of socialism and the modern welfare state. Writing as an avowed classical liberal (he repudiated the label ‘conservative’), he attempted to develop his account of the market as a mechanism facilitating economic coordination into a more general theory of law and politics. Hayek’s liberalism was first formulated as a response to totalitarianism, which he regarded as a tendency manifest in the regimes of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, and inherent in proposals for central planning in society. This was the basis of his early opposition to socialism and his theory of limited constitutional government under the rule of law. The development of his political thought, however, saw him become increasingly critical of government and its interventions in the spontaneous evolution of society. Society was a ‘spontaneous order’ and not the product of human design. The threat to this order or civilization came from mankind’s mistaken confidence in reason’s capacity to take control of social processes to shape society in accordance with particular ideals. Socialism, as well as proposals for social justice, he regarded as variants of this tendency, which he labelled ‘constructivist rationalism’. This social philosophy was underpinned by a philosophy of science which emphasized the subjective character of the data of the social sciences. See also: ECONOMICS, PHILOSOPHY OF; LIBERALISM Further reading Barry, N. (1979) Hayek’s Social and Economic Philosophy , London: Macmillan. (An expository account of Hayek’s social and economic thought.) Hayek, F.A. von (1960) The Constitution of Liberty, London: Routledge. (A statement of Hayek’s liberalism containing his theory of the rule of law.) CHANDRAN KUKATHAS HEAVEN In Christian theology, heaven is both the dwelling place of God and the angels, and the place where all who are saved ultimately go after death and judgment to receive their eternal reward. The doctrine of the resurrection of the body requires that heaven be a place because it must contain the glorified bodies of the redeemed, but heaven is more theologically important as a state than as a place. This state is traditionally described as involving the most intimate union with God without the elimination of the individual human personality (the beatific vision); it is a state of perfect bliss beyond anything possible on earth. In high medieval theology, the happiness of heaven is understood to be so great that it is even beyond the capability of human nature to enjoy without divine aid. There are varying views on the nature of heavenly society, however, with some theologians (Augustine, Aquinas, Bonaventure) arguing that perfect happiness will be derived from the love of God alone, while others (for example, Giles of Rome) stress the joy that will be derived from the company of the elect. More recently, interest in the nature of heaven has declined, and Christian theology has tended to play down its importance. See also: HEAVEN, INDIAN CONCEPTIONS OF; HELL; TIAN Further reading McDannell, C. and Lang, B. (1988) Heaven: A History , New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. (A useful and interesting history of the idea of heaven in Western religion, with discussions of its treatment in imaginative literature and art, as well as theology and philosophy; not theologically technical.) LINDA ZAGZEBSKI HEAVEN, CHINESE CONCEPT OF see TIAN HEAVEN, INDIAN CONCEPTIONS OF Heaven is an important part of Indian religious cosmology and also figures strongly in Indian philosophical discourse. In the cosmologies of the early period of Indian thought, from the Ṛg Veda to the advent of the so-called heterodox schools of Jainism and Buddhism ( c .1500–500 BC), heaven was conceived of in relatively simple terms, as a happy and permanent abode for both the deceased (particularly those who performed Vedic sacrifices) and the gods. In all three of the major religious systems of classical India, namely Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism, heavenly realms expanded in number, and were usually depicted in terms of the deities who inhabited them and the prevailing lifesituations of the deceased. Geographically, the heavens of classical India were envisaged as either parallel, occupying separate, bounded, horizontal space, or vertical, existing on separate tiers of upperlevel space. Philosophically, the existence and
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Page 336 soteriological value of heaven were much debated, from the earliest Upaniaads ( c .500 BC) and philosophical sūtras of Vedānta and Pūrva Mīmāṃsā (the Brahmasūtra of Bādarāyaṇa and the Mīmāṃsāsūtra of Jaimini respectively) to the later logicians and systematizers of the standard philosophical systems ( c .1500 and beyond). Religion and philosophy were always intimately linked in India, indeed were often barely distinguishable; thus the soteriology of a religious form would be logically supported and fully explicated by allied philosophical schools. Broadly, two points of view were represented: first, that heavenly realms did exist and were achievable for one’s ultimate benefit, or, second, that they existed but were phenomena subject to decay, rather like ordinary reality, or (as the Buddhists thought) were mental constructs. In the second case, heaven was regarded as inferior to variously conceived states of enlightenment or liberation. See also: COSMOLOGY AND COSMOGONY, INDIAN THEORIES OF; HINDU PHILOSOPHY Further reading Gonda, J. (1966) Loka: World and Heaven in the Veda , Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing Company. (A thorough, indispensible and highly philological account of heaven as it is represented in the early and middle Vedic literature.) FREDERICK M. SMITH HEDONISM Hedonism is the doctrine that pleasure is the good. It was important in ancient discussions, and many positions were taken, from the view that pleasure is to be avoided to the view that immediate bodily pleasure is to be sought. More elevated views of pleasure were also taken, and have been revived in modern times. There are three varieties of hedonism. Psychological hedonists hold that we can pursue only pleasure; evaluative hedonists that pleasure is what we ought to pursue; reflective hedonists that it is what on reflection gives value to any pursuit. Arguments for psychological hedonism suggest that an agent’s actions are a function of what they think will maximize their pleasure overall. Explaining altruism can lead such theories into truism. Similar arguments are used for reflective hedonism, and the same problem arises. The difficulty for evaluative hedonism lies in deciding how we can establish certain ends as desirable. The claim that pleasure is to be maximized seems immoral to many. Hedonism also faces problems with the measurement of pleasure. See also: ASCETICISM; HAPPINESS Further reading Brandt, R.B. (1979) A Theory of the Good and the Right, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Sophisticated contemporary discussion, which defends hedonism against modern criticisms.) Gosling, J.C.B. and Taylor, C.C.W (1982) The Greeks on Pleasure , Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Comprehensive discussion of the disputes in classical Greece up to Epicurus and the early Stoics.) JUSTIN GOSLING HEGEL, GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH (1770–1831) Hegel was the last of the main representatives of a philosophical movement known as German Idealism, which developed towards the end of the eighteenth century primarily as a reaction against the philosophy of Kant, and whose main proponents, aside from Hegel, include Fichte and Schelling. The movement played an important role in the philosophical life of Germany until the fourth decade of the nineteenth century. Like the other German Idealists, Hegel was convinced that the philosophy of Kant did not represent the final word in philosophical matters, because it was not possible to conceive a unified theory of reality by means of Kantian principles alone. For Hegel and his two idealistic predecessors, a unified theory of reality is one which can systematically explain all forms of reality, starting from a single principle or a single subject. For Hegel, these forms of reality included not only solar systems, physical bodies and the various guises assumed by organic life, for example, plants, animals and human beings, but also psychic phenomena, social and political forms of organization as well as artistic creations and cultural achievements such as religion and philosophy. Hegel believed that one of the essential tasks of philosophy was the systematic explanation of all these various forms starting from one single principle, in other words, in the establishment of a unified theory of reality. He believed this because only a theory of this nature could permit knowledge to take the place of faith. Hegel’s goal here, namely the conquest of faith, places his philosophical programme, like that of the other German Idealists, within the wider context of the philosophy of the German Enlightenment. For Hegel, the fundamental principle which
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Page 337 explains all reality is reason. Reason, as Hegel understands it, is not some quality which is attributed to some human subject; it is, by contrast, the sum of all reality. In accordance with this belief, Hegel claims that reason and reality are strictly identical: only reason is real and only reality is reasonable. The considerations which moved Hegel to identify reason with reality are various. On the one hand, certain motives rooted in Hegel’s theological convictions play a role. According to these convictions, one must be able to give a philosophical interpretation of the whole of reality which can simultaneously act as a justification of the basic assumptions of Christianity. On the other hand, epistemological convictions also have to be identified to support Hegel’s claim that reason and reality are one and the same. Among these convictions belong the assumptions (1) that knowledge of reality is only possible if reality is reasonable, because it would not otherwise be accessible to cognition, and (2) that we can only know that which is real. According to Hegel, although reason is regarded as the sum total of reality, it must not be interpreted along the lines of Spinoza’s model of substance. Reason is rather to be thought of as a process which has as its goal the recognition of reason through itself. Since reason is the whole of reality, this goal will be achieved when reason recognizes itself as total reality. It is the task of philosophy to give a coherent account of this process which leads to self-knowledge of reason. Hegel conceived this process by analogy with the model of organic development which takes place on various levels. The basic presupposition governing the conception of this process is that reason has to be interpreted in accordance with the paradigm of a living organism. Hegel thought of a living organism as an entity which represents the successful realization of a plan in which all individual characteristics of this entity are contained. He called this plan the concept of an entity, and conceived its successful realization as a developmental process, in the course of which each of the individual characteristics acquires reality. In accordance with these assumptions, Hegel distinguished the concept of reason from the process of the realization of this concept. He undertook the exposition of the concept of reason in that section of his philosophical system which he calls the Wissenschaft der Logik ( Science of Logic ). In this first part of his system, the various elements of the concept of reason are discussed and placed into a systematic context. He presented the process of the realization of this concept in the other two parts of his system, the Philosophie der Natur ( Philosophy of Nature ) and the Philosophie des Geistes ( Philosophy of Spirit ). Apart from their systematic function, which consists in demonstrating reason in the Hegelian sense as total reality, both parts have a specifically material function in each case. In the Philosophy of Nature , Hegel aims to describe comprehensively all aspects of natural phenomena as a system of increasingly complex facts. This system begins with the simple concepts of space, time and matter and ends with the theory of the animal organism. The Philosophy of Spirit treats of various psychological, social and cultural forms of reality. It is characterized by the assumption of the existence of something like genuine, spiritual facts, which cannot be described as subjective states of individual persons possessing consciousness, but which have an independent, objective existence. For Hegel, examples of such facts are the state, art, religion and history. In spite of the relatively abstract metaphysical background of his philosophy, which is difficult to reconcile with common sense, Hegel’s insights in his analysis of concrete facts have guaranteed him a permanent place in the history of philosophy. None the less, for contemporary readers these insights are interesting hypotheses, rather than commonly accepted truths. Of lesser importance among these insights should be counted Hegel’s results in the realm of natural philosophy, which soon suffered considerable criticism from practising natural scientists. The important insights apply more specifically to the spheres of the theory of knowledge as well as the philosophy of right, and social and cultural philosophy. Hegel is thus regarded as an astute and original representative of the thesis that our conception of objectivity is largely determined by social factors which also play a significant role in constituting the subject of cognition and knowledge. His criticisms of the seventeenth-and eighteenthcentury concepts of natural law and his thoughts on the genesis and significance of right in the modern world have had a demonstrable influence on the theory of right in juridical contexts. Hegel’s analysis of the relationship and interplay between social and political institutions became a constituent element in very influential social theories, in particular that of Marx. The same applies to his central theses on the theory of art and the philosophy of religion and history. Hegel’s thoughts on the history of philosophy made that topic a philosophical discipline in its own right. Thus Hegel was a very influential philo
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Page 338 sopher. That his philosophy has none the less remained deeply contentious is due in part to the fact that his uncompromising struggle against traditional habits of thought and his attempt to establish a conceptual perspective on reality in contrast with the philosophical tradition of the time remains characterized by a large measure of obscurity and vagueness. Unfortunately these characteristics also infect every summary of his philosophy. See also: GERMAN IDEALISM; HEGELIANISM Further reading Hegel, G.W.F. (1830) Enzyklopödie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse. Dritte Ausgabe , Heidelberg: Winter. (The last and most comprehensive version of his system.) Stern, R. (ed.) (1993) G.W.F. Hegel: Critical Assessments, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 4 vols. (A voluminous collection of essays on Hegel.) Taylor, C. (1975) Hegel , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (The best and most comprehensive introduction to Hegel for the English speaking reader.) Translated from the German by Jane Michael-Rushmer ROLF-PETER HORSTMANN HEGELIANISM As an intellectual tradition, the history of Hegelianism is the history of the reception and influence of the thought of G.W.F. Hegel. This tradition is notoriously complex and many-sided, because while some Hegelians have seen themselves as merely defending and developing his ideas along what they took to be orthodox lines, others have sought to ‘reform’ his system, or to appropriate individual aspects and overturn others, or to offer consciously revisionary readings of his work. This makes it very hard to identify any body of doctrine common to members of this tradition, and a wide range of divergent philosophical views can be found among those who (despite this) can none the less claim to be Hegelians. There are both ‘internal’ and ‘external’ reasons for this: on one hand, Hegel’s position itself brings together many different tendencies (idealism and objectivism, historicism and absolutism, rationalism and empiricism, Christianity and humanism, classicism and modernism, a liberal view of civil society with an organicist view of the state); any balance between them is hermeneutically very unstable, enabling existing readings to be challenged and old orthodoxies to be overturned. On the other hand, the critical response to Hegel’s thought and the many attempts to undermine it have meant that Hegelians have continually needed to reconstruct his ideas and even to turn Hegel against himself, while each new intellectual development, such as Marxism, pragmatism, phenomenology or existential philosophy, has brought about some reassessment of his position. This feature of the Hegelian tradition has been heightened by the fact that Hegel’s work has had an impact at different times over a long period and in a wide range of countries, so that divergent intellectual, social and historical pressures have influenced its distinct appropriations. At the hermeneutic level, these appropriations have contributed greatly to keeping the philosophical understanding of Hegel alive and open-ended, so that our present-day conception of his thought cannot properly be separated from them. Moreover, because questions of Hegel interpretation have so often revolved around the main philosophical, political and religious issues of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Hegelianism has also had a significant impact on the development of modern Western thought in its own right. As a result of its complex evolution, Hegelianism is best understood historically, by showing how the changing representation of Hegel’s ideas have come about, shaped by the different critical concerns, sociopolitical conditions and intellectual movements that dominated his reception in different countries at different times. Initially, Hegel’s influence was naturally most strongly felt in Germany as a comprehensive, integrative philosophy that seemed to do justice to all realms of experience and promised to preserve the Christian heritage in a modern and progressive form within a speculative framework. However, this position was quickly challenged, both from other philosophical standpoints (such as F.W.J. Schelling’s ‘positive philosophy’ and F.A. Trendelenburg’s neo-Aristotelian empiricism), and by the celebrated generation of younger thinkers (the so-called ‘Young’ or ‘Left’ Hegelians, such as Ludwig Feuerbach, David Strauss, Bruno Bauer, Arnold Ruge and the early Karl Marx), who insisted that to discover what made Hegel a truly significant thinker (his dialectical method, his view of alienation, his ‘sublation’ of Christianity), this orthodoxy must be overturned. None the less, both among these radicals and in academic circles, Hegel’s influence was considerably weakened in Germany by the 1860s and 1870s, while by this time developments in
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Page 339 Hegelian thought had begun to take place elsewhere. Hegel’s work was known outside Germany from the 1820s onwards, and Hegelian schools developed in northern Europe, Italy, France, Eastern Europe, America and (somewhat later) Britain, each with their own distinctive line of interpretation, but all fairly uncritical in their attempts to assimilate his ideas. However, in each of these countries challenges to the Hegelian position were quick to arise, partly because the influence of Hegel’s German critics soon spread abroad, and partly because of the growing impact of other philosophical positions (such as Neo-Kantianism, materialism and pragmatism). Nevertheless, Hegelianism outside Germany proved more durable in the face of these attacks, as new readings and approaches emerged to counter them, and ways were found to reinterpret Hegel’s work to show that it could accommodate these other positions, once the earlier accounts of Hegel’s metaphysics, political philosophy and philosophy of religion (in particular) were rejected as too crude. This pattern has continued into the twentieth century, as many of the movements that began by defining themselves against Hegel (such as Neo-Kantianism, Marxism, existentialism, pragmatism, poststructuralism and even ‘analytic’ philosophy) have then come to find unexpected common ground, giving a new impetus and depth to Hegelianism as it began to be assimilated within and influenced by these diverse approaches. Such efforts at rapprochement began in the early part of the century with Wilhelm Dilthey’s attempt to link Hegel with his own historicism, and although they were more ambivalent, this connection was reinforced in Italy by Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile. The realignment continued in France in the 1930s, as Jean Wahl brought out the more existentialist themes in Hegel’s thought, followed in the 1940s by Alexander Kojève’s influential Marxist readings. Hegelianism has alsohad an impact onWesternMarxism through the writings of the Hungarian Georg Lukács, and this influence has continued in the critical reinterpretations offered by members of the Frankfurt School, particularly Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Jürgen Habermas and others. More recently, most of the major schools of philosophical thought (from French post-structuralism to Anglo-American ‘analytic’ philosophy) have emphasized the need to take account of Hegel, and as a result Hegelian thought (both exegetical and constructive) is continually finding new directions. See also: FRANKFURT SCHOOL; GERMAN IDEALISM; RUSSIAN HEGELIANISM Further reading Brazill, W.J. (1970) The Young Hegelians , New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. (Discusses the origins and development of the Young Hegelian school.) Löwith, K. (1941) From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteeth-Century Thought, trans. D.E. Green, London: Constable, 1965. (A classic study of the fate of the Hegelian system and the subsequent polarization of right and left interpretations.) Toews, J. (1980) Hegelianism: The Path Towards Dialectical Humanism, 1805–1841, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (A study of the Hegelian movement before and after Hegel’s death.) ROBERT STERN NICHOLAS WALKER HEGELIANISM, RUSSIAN In Russian intellectual history the so-called ‘remarkable decade’ of 1838–48 (P.V. Annenkov’s expression) could be characterized as a truly ‘philosophical epoch’. Speculative philosophy was seen by then as directly relevant to all important questions of national existence. A similar situation obtained then, in exactly the same years, in the lands of partitioned Poland. In both countries all philosophical discussions revolved around Hegel, whose system was perceived as the culminating point in the development of Western philosophy. In Russia the fascination with Hegelianism was widespread and profound, reaching distant provincial centres and leaving its mark on literature. ‘Philosophical notions’, wrote Ivan Kireevskii in 1845, ‘have become quite commonplace here now. There is scarcely a person who does not use philosophical terminology, nor any young man who is not steeped in reflections on Hegel’. Herzen provides an identical testimony. Hegel’s works, he wrote, were discussed incessantly; there was not a paragraph in the three parts of the Logic, in the two of the Aesthetics , the Encyclopaedia and so on, which had not been the subject of desperate disputes for several nights together. People who loved each other avoided each other for weeks at a time because they disagreed about the definition of ‘all-embracing spirit’, or had taken as a personal insult
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Page 340 an opinion on the ‘absolute personality and its existence in itself’. (Herzen [1853] 1968: 398) This vivid reception of Hegelianism was a socially important phenomenon, meeting several deep-seated psychological demands of the young Russian intelligentsia. First, as in Germany, speculative idealism provided the intelligentsia with a sort of compensation for the paralysis of public life under authoritarian government. Second, Hegelian philosophy was welcomed as an antidote to introspective day-dreaming and attitudes of Romantic revolt; in this context Hegelianism was largely interpreted as a philosophy of ‘reconciliation with reality’. Somewhat later this conservative interpretation of Hegelianism was replaced by a Left-Hegelian philosophy of rational and conscious action; at this stage Hegelianism came to be a powerful instrument in the struggle against Slavophile conservative Romanticism. Both as a philosophy of reconciliation and as a philosophy of action, Russian Hegelianism was above all a philosophy of reintegration; a philosophy which helped young intellectuals in overcoming their feeling of alienation and in building bridges between their ideals and reality. See also: HEGELIANISM; IL’IN, I.A. Further reading Herzen, A.I. (1853) Byloe i dumy , London; trans. C. Garnett, My Past and Thoughts. The Memoirs of Alexander Herzen , revised by H. Higgens, introduced by I. Berlin, London: Chatto & Windus, 1968, 4 vols. (See ch. 24, vol. 2 for the reception of Hegel in Russia.) ANDRZEJ WALICKI HEIDEGGER, MARTIN (1889–1976) Martin Heidegger taught philosophy at Freiburg University (1915–23), Marburg University (1923–8), and again at Freiburg University (1928–45). Early in his career he came under the influence of Edmund Husserl, but he soon broke away to fashion his own philosophy. His most famous work, Sein und Zeit (Being and Time)was published in 1927. Heidegger’s energetic support for Hitler in 1933–4 earned him a suspension from teaching from 1945 to 1950. In retirement he published numerous works, including the first volumes of his Collected Edition . His thought has had strong influence on trends in philosophy ranging from existentialism through hermeneutics to deconstruction, as well as on the fields of literary theory and theology. Heidegger often makes his case in charged and dramatic language that is difficult to convey in summary form. He argues that mortality is our defining moment, that we are thrown into limited worlds of sense shaped by our being-towards-death, and that finite meaning is all the reality we get. He claims that most of us have forgotten the radical finitude of ourselves and the world we live in. The result is the planetary desert called nihilism, with its promise that an ideally omniscient and virtually omnipotent humanity can remake the world in its own image and likeness. None the less, he still holds out the hope of recovering our true human nature, but only at the price of accepting a nothingness darker than the nihilism that now ravishes the globe. To the barely whispered admission, ‘I hardly know anymore who and where I am’, Heidegger answers: ‘None of us knows that, as soon as we stop fooling ourselves’. Yet he claims to be no pessimist. He merely wants to find out what being as such means, and Being and Time was an attempt at this. He called it a fundamental ontology: a systematic investigation of human being (Dasein) for the purpose of establishing the meaning of being in general. Only half of the book – the part dealing with the finitude and temporality of human being – was published in 1927. Heidegger elaborated the rest of the project in a less systematic form during the decades that followed. Heidegger distinguishes between an entity (anything that is) and the being of an entity. He calls this distinction the ‘ontological difference’. The being of an entity is the meaningful presence of that entity within the range of human experience. Being has to do with the ‘is’: what an entity is, how it is, and the fact that it is at all. The human entity is distinguished by its awareness of the being of entities, including the being of itself. Heidegger names the human entity ‘Dasein’ and argues that Dasein’s own being is intrinsically temporal, not in the usual chronological sense but in a unique existential sense: Dasein eksists (stands-out) towards its future. This ek-sistential temporality refers to the fact that Dasein is always and necessarily becoming itself and ultimately becoming its own death. When used of Dasein, the word ‘temporality’ indicates not chronological succession but Dasein’s finite and mortal becoming. If Dasein’s being is thoroughly temporal, then all of human awareness is conditioned by this temporality, including one’s understanding of being. For Dasein, being is always known temporally and indeed is temporal. The mean
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Page 341 ing of being is time. The two main theses of Being and Time – that Dasein is temporal and that the meaning of being is time – may be interpreted thus: being is disclosed only finitely within Dasein’s radically finite awareness. Heidegger arrives at these conclusions through a phenomenological analysis of Dasein as being-in-theworld, that is, as disclosive of being within contexts of significance. He argues that Dasein opens up the arena of significance by anticipating its own death. But this event of disclosure, he says, remains concealed even as it opens the horizon of meaning and lets entities be understood in their being. Disclosure is always finite: we understand entities in their being not fully and immediately but only partially and discursively; we know things not in their eternal essence but only in the meaning they have in a given situation. Finite disclosure – how it comes about, the structure it has, and what it makes possible – is the central topic of Heidegger’s thought. ‘Time is the meaning of being’ was only a provisional way of expressing it. Dasein tends to overlook the concealed dimension of disclosure and to focus instead on what gets revealed: entities in their being. This overlooking is what Heidegger calls the forgetfulness of the disclosure of being. By that he means the forgetting of the ineluctable hiddenness of the process whereby the being of entities is disclosed. He argues that this forgetfulness characterizes not only everyday ‘fallen’ human existence but also the entire history of being, that is, metaphysics from Plato to Nietzsche. He calls for Dasein resolutely to reappropriate its own radical finitude and the finitude of disclosure, and thus to become authentically itself. See also: KUKI SHŪZŌ; PHENOMENOLOGICAL MOVEMENT Further reading Heidegger, M. (1927) ‘Sein und Zeit’, Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung 8: 1– 438; Sein und Zeit , Halle an der Salle: Max Niemeyer; trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, Being and Time, New York: Harper & Row, 1962; trans. J. Stambaugh, Being and Time, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996. (Heidegger’s most famous work, which treats the structure of Dasein as being-in-the-world and as temporal. The unpublished second half of the work was to have shown that the meaning of being is time.) Pöggeler, O. (1987) Martin Heidegger’s Path of Thinking , Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. (Lucid overview by the leading German commentator.) THOMAS SHEEHAN HEIDEGGERIAN PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE Heidegger’s importance in the philosophy of science stems less from his scattered remarks about science than from the larger conception of intentionality and ontology that informs them. Heidegger’s earliest major work, Being and Time (1927), displayed everyday practical purposive activity as the most fundamental setting for the disclosure of things in the world. Heidegger claimed that the traditional epistemological conception of a subject who represents objects was derivative from and dependent upon such ongoing everyday practical engagement with one’s surroundings. Science was then supposed to be the practice that allows things to show themselves shorn of their significance within the ‘in-order-to-forthe-sake-of’ structure of everyday activity; nevertheless, the sense of scientific claims remained dependent upon the everyday interactions from which they were abstracted. Shortly after writing Being and Time, Heidegger revised his project in ways that also transformed his account of science. His overall project shifted from describing the transcendental structure of the meaning of being, to interpreting the ‘history of being’. Science was reinterpreted as an activity (‘research’) closely allied with machine technology, and oriented towards more extensive and intensive manipulation and ordering of things. Understood as such, science for Heidegger was an essential manifestation of the modern age. Whereas, earlier, Heidegger thought that science presupposed a philosophical ontology, Heidegger eventually portrayed science and technology as the conclusion of the philosophical tradition. While philosophical metaphysics and epistemology were thus naturalized, Heidegger was concerned with the possibility of a way of thinking outside this convergence of scientific and philosophical metaphysics. See also: HEIDEGGER, M. Further reading Ihde, D. (1991) Instrumental Realism, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. (Develops a Heideggerian interpretation of science emphasizing instrumentation and the relation of science to technology; usefully connects Heidegger to more recent philosophy of science.)
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Page 342 Rouse, J. (1987) Knowledge and Power, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. (Draws extensively upon Heidegger to emphasize the practical and political aspects of science, while opposing both realism and antirealism.) JOSEPH ROUSE HEISENBERG, WERNER (1901–76) One of the most outstanding of twentieth-century physicists, Werner Heisenberg is famous for the uncertainty, or indeterminacy, principle of quantum mechanics, widely interpreted as implying an irreducibly indeterministic conception of nature. The main proponent of the Copenhagen interpretation after Bohr, Heisenberg conceived of the quantum description as referring not to objective spacetime realities, but merely to the probable outcomes of measurements. Heisenberg’s philosophy, containing contradictory positivistic and realistic strands, is best understood in the context of his creative scientific theorizing. See also: QUANTUM MECHANICS, INTERPRETATIONS OF Further reading Cassidy, D.C. (1992) Uncertainty. The Life and Work of Werner Heisenberg , New York: Freeman. (The only comprehensive biography of Heisenberg, this book traces Heisenberg’s intellectual and personal life in the changing sociopolitical context.) Heisenberg, W. (1930) Die Physikalischen Prinzipien der Quantentheorie (Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory), Leipzig: Hirzel; trans. C. Eckart and F.C. Hoyt, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1930. (A presentation of the foundations of the quantum theory and its interpretation in the ‘Copenhagen Spirit’.) MARA BELLER HELL The ancient idea that the dead go to a dark subterranean place gradually evolved into the notion of divinely instituted separate postmortem destinies for the wicked and the righteous. If the former lies behind the Psalms, the latter version appears in apocalyptic works, both canonical and deutero- or noncanonical, and is presupposed by numerous passages in the New Testament. Through the patristic and medieval periods the doctrine gradually achieved ecclesiastical definition, stipulating eternal torment (both physical and spiritual) in a distinctive place for those who die in a state of mortal sin. Most reformers recognized biblical authority for this doctrine. Philosophically, the notion of postmortem survival raises many questions in the philosophy of mind about personal identity. Recent discussion, however, has concentrated on the specialized version of the problem of evil to which the doctrine gives rise. See also: HEAVEN; LIMBO; PURGATORY Further reading Adams, M.M. (1993) ‘The Problem of Hell: A Problem of Evil for Christians’, in E. Stump (ed.) Reasoned Faith, A Festschrift for Norman Kretzmann, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 301–27. (Defends universalism in preference to doctrines of hell or annihilation.) Walls, J. (1992) Hell: The Logic of Damnation, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. (Offers a free-will defence of a ‘Methodist’ hell modified by the hypothesis that God gives disadvantaged agents a postmortem opportunity to make a decisive choice.) MARILYN McCORD ADAMS HELLENISTIC MEDICAL EPISTEMOLOGY During the Hellenistic period (323–31 BC), there arose, largely in Alexandria, a profound debate in medical methodology. The main participants were the Empiricists, committed to an anti-theoretical, practical medicine based on observation and experience and the various Rationalists, such as Herophilus, Erasistratus and Asclepiades, who held that general theories of physiology and pathology were both attainable and essential to proper medical understanding and practice. Dispute about the nature of scientific inference and the status of causal explanation mirrored and to some extent conditioned the contemporary debate between Stoics and sceptics about epistemology. Further reading Edelstein, L. (1967) Ancient Medicine, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. (Fine collection of papers, several of which are relevant to the themes of this article.) Herophilus ( fl. c .260 BC) Fragments, in H. von Staden, Herophilus: The Art of Medicine in Early Alexandria, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. (Fine edition with translation and discussion.) R.J. HANKINSON
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Page 343 HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHY The Hellenistic schools dominated the Greco-Roman world from c .300 BC to the mid first century BC, making it an era of great philosophical brilliance. The principal doctrinal philosophies were Stoicism and Epicureanism, but this was also the age in which scepticism emerged as a philosophical movement. The central issues of debate were the nature and origin of the world, the means to attaining truth and the ethical goal. See also: ACADEMY; HELLENISTIC MEDICAL EPISTEMOLOGY Further reading Long, A.A. (1974) Hellenistic Philosophy , London: Duckworth. (Superbly accessible and engaging introductory account.) DAVID SEDLEY HELMHOLTZ, HERMANN VON (1821–94) In physiology, physics, mathematics, aesthetic theory and epistemology, Helmholtz intervened, and innovated. He contributed to the physiology of perception through work on the central nervous system, followed by work on optics and acoustics. He invented instruments, such as the opthalmoscope and introduced the mathematical principle of the conservation of energy to physics. For geometry, Helmholtz elaborated on the concept of an n-dimensional manifold. He secured the influence of the ‘Berlin physics’, introduced Faraday and Maxwell to Germany, refined the theory of electrodynamics and reflected on the role of discrete entities in physics. Having become the most influential representative of German science and its uncontested spokesperson, he repeated the importance of the connection between education and research and the necessity not to separate the natural sciences ( Naturwissenschaften) from the social sciences ( Geisteswissenschaften). This monumental body of work is experiencing a revival of interest today as historians of both science and culture consider it in a new light. But the question remains of how to characterize what we might call ‘the Helmholtz effect’ in philosophy . Why was Helmholtz equally influential not only on Cassirer, Husserl, Schlick, Meyerson and Freud, but also on the principal founders of contemporary physics; Einstein, Bohr and Heisenberg? To grasp this, we must understand the constant interaction between science and philosophy which characterized, even permitted, the extraordinary developments in mathematics, physics and physiology in Germany at that time. Here the connection between Helmholtz and Kant is fundamental, since ‘the Helmholtz effect’ transformed the Kantian heritage. Helmholtz did not write a systematic philosophical work, but in redefining fundamental epistemological concepts and constructing a large part of the conceptual structure in which both philosophy and relativistic and quantum physics developed during the early twentieth century, he modified the very problems of epistemology. See also: NEO-KANTIANISM; SCIENCE, 19TH CENTURY PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Kahl, R. (ed.) (1971) Selected Writings of H. von Helmholtz , Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. (Recent compilation.) Koenigsberger, L. (1902–3) Hermann von Helmholtz , Braunschweig: F. Vieweg und Sohn, 3 vols;abridged English trans. F.A. Welby, Oxford, 1906; repr. New York, 1965. (The standard biography.) Translated from the French by J. Maskit CATHERINE CHEVALLEY HELMONT, FRANCISCUS MERCURIUS VAN (1614–98) Although he lived in the seventeenth century, van Helmont belongs more to late Renaissance than to modern intellectual culture. Born near Brussels, he became a larger-than-life figure who, in his prime, had an international reputation as an alchemist and a physician. His metaphysical interests came increasingly to the fore, however, and he became particularly associated with Kabbalistic doctrines. A friend of Locke and Henry More, he was also closely connected with Anne Conway and Leibniz, with whom he shared many intellectual affinities. It is these connections that make his philosophy – in particular, his theodicy and his monadology – of enduring interest. See also: KABBALAH Further reading Brown, S. (1997) ‘F.M. van Helmont: his philosophical connections and the reception of his later Cabbalistic philosophy (1677–1699)’, in Oxford Studies in Seventeenth Century Philosophy , ed. M.A. Stewart, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Includes accounts of van Helmont’s relationships with both Locke and
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Page 344 Leibniz, as well of his extensive publications in English.) STUART BROWN HELP AND BENEFICENCE Which people are we morally required to help, and to what extent? In a world where the basic needs of many millions remain unmet, this is a philosophical question of great practical urgency. A minimal position is that while it is always praiseworthy to help someone, we are morally required to help only those to whom we stand in some special relation. In addition to the objection that it is too minimal, this view faces difficulties in accounting for emergency cases, in which one could, for example, save a stranger’s life at little cost to oneself. More stringent views that place no restrictions on the range of people to be helped do not have these difficulties; they do, however, raise the intractable problem of how much we must sacrifice for the sake of others. See also: EGOISM AND ALTRUISM; IMPARTIALITY Further reading Paul, E.F., Miller, F.D. and Paul, J. (eds) (1987) Beneficence, Philanthropy and the Public Good, New York: Blackwell. (Collection devoted to beneficence, offering a variety of approaches.) LIAM B. MURPHY HELVÉTIUS, CLAUDE-ADRIEN (1715–71) Helvétius was one of the most noteworthy and notorious figures of the French Enlightenment. In common with his fellow philosophes, he asserted that all philosophical discussions should be based on the empiricism of Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding (1689). But unlike Voltaire, d’Alembert, and the other members of ‘the party of humanity’, Helvétius took literally the notion that each person is a tabula rasa at birth – he boldly argued the case for unabashed environmental determinism. We are what our surroundings have made us, and nothing more. Immediately after Helvétius published De l’Esprit in 1758, the Catholic authorities cited his book as definitive proof that the philosophes were out to destroy religion, throne, family, and all that is sacred. Only the struggle between court and parliament over control of censorship, along with his ties to Madame de Pompadour and the Duc de Choiseul, saved Helvétius. After suffering the indignity of three recantations, he decided upon posthumous publication of his second major work, De l’Homme (1773). Not a single philosophe accepted Helvétius’ view that the mind is a completely passive recipient of data received through the senses; nor did any of his comrades second his constantly reiterated claim that all sensibility may be reduced to physical sensations. Some privately expressed their exasperation that Helvétius published so much that seemed to vindicate every charge the Church lodged against them: that they were materialists, advocates of free love, and champions of a scandalous hedonism. Nevertheless at least a few of the philosophes, after setting aside the philosophical suppositions of De l’Esprit, came to appreciate that the larger concern of Helvétius was with their own search for the social and political preconditions of an independent intelligentsia, the would-be agents of Enlightenment. See also: ENLIGHTENMENT, CONTINENTAL Further reading Andlau, B. (1939) Helvétius, Seigneur de Voré , Paris: Fernand Sorlot. (See for information about his life and family. A good study of his thought has yet to be written.) MARK HULLIUNG HEMERKEN, THOMAS see THOMAS À KEMPIS HEMPEL, CARL GUSTAV (1905–1997) Born in Germany, Hempel went to the USA shortly before the Second World War, where he lived and worked for most of the rest of his life. His defence of Carnap’s and Neurath’s physicalism testifies to the presence of certain ‘postmodern’ themes in logical empiricism (or logical positivism): (1) a textualist turn to sentences from the facts or reality they are said to report; (2) a pragmatic turn from truth to inclusion in the text as the basic scientific concern; and (3) a descriptive turn from logic to empirical sociology of science. Throughout his philosophical writings Hempel held that the question of what truth-claims mean should be replaced by the question of what criteria we use in deciding whether or not to call sentences true. Granted that ‘Whales are mammals’ is true if and only if whales are mammals, the question remains of how observation reports bear on whether or not to include a sentence in the text of current knowledge, and how received observation sentences may be dropped from it. For Hempel, then, the problem
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Page 345 of analysing the concept of confirmation of sentences by sentences is either the heart of the problem of truth or the successor to that problem. Like Carnap, in 1945 he thought such an analysis necessary to connect the terms ‘logical’ and ‘empiricism’; but four decades later he would conclude that, after all, one must ‘leave the decision in matters of confirmation to the intuitive appraisal of the scientist’. See also: MEANING AND VERIFICATION Further reading Hempel, C.G. (1966) Philosophy of Natural Science , Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. (A lucid introduction, from a broadly logical empiricist standpoint.) Heijenoort, J. van (ed.) (1967) From Frege to Gödel , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (A valuable source book.) R. JEFFREY HENRICUS REGIUS (1598–1679) Henricus Regius, one of Descartes’ first Dutch disciples, supported many of Descartes’ doctrines, such as the distinction between mind and body, but disagreed with Descartes’ arguments for that distinction, and rejected metaphysics. Their differences led to a celebrated public dispute which lasted until Descartes’ death. Further reading Verbeek, T. (1992) Descartes and the Dutch , Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. (A short but engaging account of Descartes’ troubles in Utrecht and Leiden, containing a good account of his relations with Regius.) DANIEL GARBER HENRY OF GHENT (early 13th century–1293) Perhaps the most influential theologian between Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure in the third quarter of the thirteenth century and John Duns Scotus at the beginning of the fourteenth century, Henry of Ghent stands at a turning point in scholastic philosophy. Master of theology at Paris by 1276, he was a defender of traditional Neoplatonic positions and has often been seen as the epitome of thirteenthcentury Augustinianism. Yet his convoluted metaphysics and a theory of knowledge weaving together Neoplatonic and Aristotelian strands inspired novel philosophical trends in the fourteenth century, particularly among Franciscan thinkers. His work thus constituted the point of departure for scholastic giants like Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, who not only used him as a foil against which to articulate their own system of thought but also absorbed much of his fundamental philosophical outlook and terminology. Characteristic of Henry’s metaphysics was an essentialism so pronounced that critics accused him of positing a realm of essences separate from worldly actuality. In his defence, Henry insisted that essences, though prior to actual existence, were separate only as grounded in the divine exemplars of things, but the Platonism of his approach struck hiscontemporariesas extraordinary nonetheless. Ironically, Henry’s understanding of essence as congruent with intellectual coherence provided an opening for a more logic-based analysis of modality, especially possibility, in succeeding thinkers such as Duns Scotus. The emphasis on essence re-emerged in Henry’s theory of knowledge, and at least in his early writings he offered a vision of knowing truth through divine illumination often taken as paradigmatic of medieval Augustinianism. Even his later attempts to cast epistemology in a more Aristotelian light retained the insistence that true knowledge somehow entails access to the exemplary essences in God’s mind. The same essentialism led Henry to formulate what he called an a priori proof for God’s existence, best approximation in the thirteenth century to Anselm’s ontological argument. Again, however, Henry’s Augustinianism provided an unintended springboard for innovation, leading to Duns Scotus’ theory of the univocity of being and metaphysical proof of God’s existence. Further reading Marrone, S.P. (1985) Truth and Scientific Knowledge in the Thought of Henry of Ghent , Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy. (On the relation between Henry’s changing theory of knowledge and his metaphysics.) STEVEN P. MARRONE HENRY OF HARCLAY ( c .1270–1317) An English philosopher of the early fourteenth century, Harclay moved away from the position of Duns Scotus on the extramental existence of universals and towards the more conceptualist or nominalist stance of William of Ockham. On questions of infinity and continuity, Henry was strongly antiAristotelian, holding that there were numbers that were actually infinite and not all equal to each other,
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Page 346 was composed of an actual infinity of indivisibles, by which it was properly measured. His position came under powerful mathematical attack. Further reading Murdoch, J.E. (1982) ‘Infinity and Continuity’, in N. Kretzmann, A. Kenny and J. Pinborg (eds) The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 564–91. (Valuable for placing Henry’s views on the subject in their historical context.) GEORGE MOLLAND HERACLIDES OF PONTUS (4TH century BC) Heraclides, a pupil of Plato, was roughly contemporaneous with Aristotle. Best known in antiquity as a writer of dialogues on moral and religious themes, he also held interesting views about cosmology and the structure of matter. Only fragments of his works survive. Further reading Gottschalk, H.B. (1980) Heraclides of Pontus, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Includes English translations of most of the important fragments and a full bibliography; in the appendices some new texts are added and others are shown to be spurious.) H.B. GOTTSCHALK HERACLITUS ( c .540–c .480 BC) No Greek philosopher born before Socrates was more creative and influential than Heraclitus of Ephesus. Around the beginning of the fifth century BC, in a prose that made him proverbial for obscurity, he criticized conventional opinions about the way things are and attacked the authority of poets and others reputed to be wise. His surviving work consists of more than 100 epigrammatic sentences, complete in themselves and often comparable to the proverbs characteristic of ‘wisdom’ literature. Notwithstanding their sporadic presentation and transmission, Heraclitus’ sentences comprise a philosophy that is clearly focused upon a determinate set of interlocking ideas. As interpreted by the later Greek philosophical tradition, Heraclitus stands primarily for the radical thesis that ‘Everything is in flux’, like the constant flow of a river. Although it is likely that he took this thesis to be true, universal flux is too simple a phrase to identify his philosophy. His focus shifts continually between two perspectives – the objective and everlasting processes of nature on the one hand and ordinary human beliefs and values on the other. He challenges people to come to terms, theoretically and practically, with the fact that they are living in a world ‘that no god or human has made’, a world he describes as ‘an ever-living fire kindling in measures and going out in measures’ (fr. 30). His great truth is that ‘All things are one’, but this unity, far from excluding difference, opposition and change, actually depends on them, since the universe is in a continuous state of dynamic equilibrium. Day and night, up and down, living and dying, heating and cooling – such pairings of apparent opposites all conform to the everlastingly rational formula ( logos ) that unity consists of opposites; remove day, and night goes too, just as a river will lose its identity if it ceases to flow. Heraclitus requires his audience to try to think away their purely personal concerns and view the world from this more detached perspective. By the use of telling examples he highlights the relativity of value judgments. The implication is that unless people reflect on their experience and examine themselves, they are condemned to live a dream-like existence and to remain out of touch with the formula that governs and explains the nature of things. This formula is connected (symbolically and literally) with ‘ever-living fire’, whose incessant ‘transformations’ are not only the basic operation of the universe but also essential to the cycle of life and death. Fire constitutes and symbolizes both the processes of nature in general and also the light of intelligence. As the source of life and thought, a ‘fiery’ soul equips people to look into themselves, to discover the formula of nature and to live accordingly. The influence of Heraclitus’ ideas on other philosophers was extensive. His reputed ‘flux’ doctrine, as disseminated by his follower Cratylus, helped to shape Plato’s cosmology and its changeless metaphysical foundations. The Stoics looked back to Heraclitus as the inspiration for their own conception of divine fire, identifying this with the logos that he specifies as the world’s explanatory principle. Later still, the neo-Pyhrronist Aenesidemus invoked Heraclitus as a partial precursor of scepticism. See also: PRESOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY Further reading Kahn, C. (1979) The Art and Thought of Heraclitus , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Text, translation and commentary; a
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Page 347 fundamental exposition, taking the condition of mortality to be Heraclitus’ real subject.) Kirk, G.S. (1962) Heraclitus: The Cosmic Fragments, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Classic study, particularly valuable for assessing the authenticity of key fragments.) A.A. LONG HERBART, JOHANN FRIEDRICH (1776–1841) From 1798, the German philosopher Herbart developed a ‘realistic’ alternative to the idealistic philosophy of Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. His theoretical philosophy, which centres around metaphysics and psychology, is sharply critical of the idealistic concept of subjectivity. His practical philosophy rests on ethics and educational theory, each of which presumes the existence of the other. See also: GERMAN IDEALISM Further reading Dunkel, H.D. (1970) Herbart and Herbartianism: An Educational Ghost Story, Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago. (A systematic introduction to Herbartian pedagogy.) ALFRED LANGEWAND HERBERT, EDWARD (BARON HERBERT OF CHERBURY) ( c .1583–1648) Responding, on the one hand, to religious conflicts over the question of the locus and interpretation of authority for deciding what constitutes authentic belief and, on the other hand, to general philosophical scepticism, Herbert of Cherbury wrote De Veritate (On Truth) in an attempt to determine the character and circumstances of true understanding. In this work, first published in 1624, he sought to enable people to decide for themselves, by the use of their reason, what they ought to hold. According to his thesis the touchstone for such decisions is provided by certain fundamental truths, the ‘common notions’, which all people recognize to be true once they have become aware of them. In two later works, De Religione Gentilium (On the Religion of the Heathens) (1663) and A Dialogue between a Tutor and his Pupil (1768), both published after his death, Herbert attempted to show that his position is not falsified by the evidence of wide differences among religions. His other writings include an important history of Henry VIII based on research into state papers, an autobiography that tells the story of his life up to 1624, and some poems. While this courtier, adventurer and diplomat was something of a failure as a public figure, and while he is commonly held to have essayed views about innate notions that were to be refuted by Locke’s Essay, his writings provide pioneering studies in England in the genres of metaphysics, comparative religion and autobiography. Religiously he has been persistently maligned as ‘the father of English deism’ although closer consideration suggests that this reputation is not justified. He is, rather, to be considered an independent thinker who wanted to identify a form of religious belief that was rationally warranted and universally perceivable. Further reading Bedford, R.D. (1979) The Defence of Truth: Herbert of Cherbury and the Seventeenth Century, Manchester: Manchester University Press. (Readable and comprehensive work that perhaps exaggerates the influence of hermetic ideas upon Herbert. Select bibliography.) DAVID A. PAILIN HERBRAND’S THEOREM According to Herbrand’s theorem, each formula F of quantification theory can be associated with a sequence F1, F2, F3, . . . of quantifier-free formulas such that F is provable just in case Fn is truthfunctionally valid for some n. This theorem was the centrepiece of Herbrand’s dissertation, written in 1929 as a contribution to Hilbert’s programme. It provides a finitistically meaningful interpretation of quantification over an infinite domain. Furthermore, it can be applied to yield various consistency and decidability results for formal systems. Herbrand was the first to exploit it in this way, and his work has influenced subsequent research in these areas. While Herbrand’s approach to proof theory has perhaps been overshadowed by the tradition which derives from Gentzen, recent work on automated reasoning continues to draw on his ideas. See also: HILBERT’S PROGRAMME AND FORMALISM; PROOF THEORY Further reading Andrews, P.B. (1986) An Introduction to Mathematical Logic and Type Theory: To Truth Through Proof , New York: Academic Press. (§35 contains an interesting discussion of Herbrand’s theorem, focusing on its significance for decision problems and automated theorem proving, as well as a proof of one version of it.)
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Page 348 Shoenfield, J. (1967) Mathematical Logic , Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. (Chapter 4 includes an accessible and enlightening proof of Herbrand’s theorem for the predicate calculus with equality.) A.M. UNGAR HERDER, JOHANN GOTTFRIED (1744–1803) Herder was a central figure in the German intellectual renaissance of the late eighteenth century. His achievement spanned virtually every domain of philosophy, and his influence, especially upon Romanticism and German idealism, was immense. In social and political philosophy he played a prominent role in the development of historicism and nationalism. In metaphysics he developed the doctrine of vitalist pantheism, which later became important for Goethe, Schelling and Hegel. In the philosophy of mind he formulated an organic theory of the mind-body relationship, which was crucial for Schelling and Hegel. And in aesthetics he was among the first to defend the value of ethnic poetry and the need for the internal and historical understanding of a text. Herder’s main aim was to extend the powers of naturalistic explanation to the realm of culture, so that characteristic human activities, such as art, religion, law and language, could be included within the scientific worldview. But he also wanted to avoid reductivistic forms of explanation that viewed such activities as nothing more than matter-in-motion or stimulus-response mechanisms. He insisted that explanation in the cultural sphere had to be holistic and internal as well as mechanical and external. An action had to be understood in its historical context and according to the intention of the agent and not simply as another instance of a causal regularity between events. Herder’s programme, then, was to develop naturalistic yet non-reductivistic explanations for the realm of culture. He attempted to realize this programme in many spheres, especially language, history, religion and the mind. See also: ROMANTICISM, GERMAN Further reading Clark, R.C. (1955) Herder. His Life and Thought, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. (The most comprehensive study in English). FREDERICK BEISER HERMENEUTICS Hermeneutics, the ‘art of interpretation’, was originally the theory and method of interpreting the Bible and other difficult texts. Wilhelm Dilthey extended it to the interpretation of all human acts and products, including history and the interpretation of a human life. Heidegger, in Being and Time (1927), gave an ‘interpretation’ of the human being, the being that itself understands and interprets. Under his influence, hermeneutics became a central theme of continental philosophy. Hermeneutics generates several controversies. In interpreting something do we unearth the author’s thoughts and intentions, imagining ourselves in his position? Or do we relate it to a wider whole that gives it meaning? The latter view gives rise to the hermeneutic circle: we cannot understand a whole (for example, a text) unless we understand its parts, or the parts unless we understand the whole. Heidegger discovered another circle: as we inevitably bring presuppositions to what we interpret, does this mean that any interpretation is arbitrary, or at least endlessly revisable? See also: HERMENEUTICS, BIBLICAL; LEGAL HERMENEUTICS; MIDRASH Further reading Bruns, G.L. (1992) Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. (A good introduction to the subject, covering the whole history of hermeneutics.) Heidegger, M. (1927) Sein und Zeit , Halle an der Salle: Max Niemeyer; trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson as Being and Time, New York: Harper & Row, 1962; trans. J. Stambaugh, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996. (Heidegger’s first major work, which initiated the modern interest in philosophical hermeneutics.) MICHAEL INWOOD HERMENEUTICS, BIBLICAL Hermeneutics has traditionally been defined as the theory of interpretation. Biblical hermeneutics concerns the interpretation of biblical texts. But ‘interpretation’ tends to reflect the nature of the discipline only from ancient times to about 1960. Increasingly it has come to be seen not as a tool used for difficult or obscure texts, or even for the application of such texts to the present, but as a theory of understanding in the broadest sense. It currently also relates to views of contextual theories of meaning and truth, in contrast to formalist approaches.
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Page 349 From ancient times until about 1800, philosophy played a minimal role in biblical hermeneutics. The subject concerned theology in the context of grammatical, philological, historical and linguistic inquiry. With the work of Schleiermacher in the early years of the nineteenth century, however, hermeneutics entered a new phase. It became a transcendental discipline, seeking to explore the conditions under which the understanding of texts becomes possible at all. In the era following Schleiermacher, theorists drew on the work of Dilthey and Heidegger, among others. A third phase began with the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer in the early 1960s. Gadamer replaced the Enlightenment preoccupation with ‘method’ in the context of ‘science’ and ‘reason’ with a hermeneutics which took full account of the interpreter’s prior situatedness within a given historical tradition. This angle of approach was developed further by Habermas, who noted the role of ‘interest’ in understanding, and by Ricoeur, who, in dialogue with Freud and others, stressed the role of ‘suspicion’ as well as ‘listening’ in hermeneutics. Barthes and Derrida challenged the very notion of a ‘given’ text, shifting emphasis to construals by society and by readers which reflect motivations not immediately apparent from the supposed messages of texts. This raises a multitude of fundamental questions for biblical hermeneutics and theology. If texts are no more than shifting constructs, what may still be said about divine grace or revelation? Do sacred texts merely mediate idolatrous constructs? How may hermeneutics serve to unmask interests which interpreters bring to the text and tempt them to use texts manipulatively? See also: MIDRASH; POSTMODERN THEOLOGY Further reading Morgan, R. and Barton, J. (1988) Biblical Interpretation, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (A basic introduction to some general issues.) Thiselton, A.C. (1980, 1993) The Two Horizons: New Testament Hermeneutics and Philosophical Description, Carlisle: Paternoster, and Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. (Detailed exposition and bibliography, with special studies of Heidegger, Bultmann, Gadamer and Wittgenstein.) ANTHONY C. THISELTON HERMENEUTICS, LEGAL see LEGAL HERMENEUTICS HERMETISM A primarily religious amalgam of Greek philosophy with Egyptian and other Near Eastern elements, Hermetism takes its name from Hermes Trismegistus, ‘thrice greatest Hermes’, alias the Egyptian god Thoth. Numerous texts on philosophical theology and various occult sciences, ascribed to or associated with this primeval figure, were produced in Greek by Egyptians between roughly AD 100 and 300, and are a major document of late pagan piety. Reintroduced into Western Europe during the Renaissance, they provided considerable inspiration to philosophers, scientists and magicians of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. See also: GNOSTICISM; RENAISSANCE PHILOSOPHY Further reading Copenhaver, B.P. (ed.) (1992) Hermetica: The Greek ‘Corpus Hermeticum’ and the Latin ‘Asclepius’ , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (English translation, with notes and a useful introduction.) Fowden, G. (1986) The Egyptian Hermes, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Important for the historical and social background of the Hermetica.) JOHN PROCOPÉ HERRERA, ABRAHAM COHEN DE ( c .1562–c .1635) Herrera was a philosophically oriented Kabbalist who combined Neoplatonism and Kabbalistic knowledge learned from Israel Sarug, a disciple of Isaac Luria. In his Spanish works Puerta del Cielo (The Gate of Heaven), and Casa de la Divinidad (The House of Divinity), he considered Kabbalah as the source of the ancient truth. Herrera believed that as the intellect is the highest epistemic grade, one must rely on philosophy to reach the divine secrets. He dealt with the concept of Ensoph (his own spelling of Eyn Sof – the Infinite) in terms of its Thomistic and Renaissance definitions – the Infinite that excludes limit. Tzimtzum is the voluntary Contraction of Ensoph, which prepares space for worlds to be created. The space opened up is metaphorically called Adam Kadmon (Primordial Man), the first emanation of which is the Intelligible World and the Tetragrammaton, the principle that shapes the Chain of Being around the Pythagorean number four. Neoplatonically, Adam Kadmon is the Intelligible World. Herrera’s account incorporates further complex ideas about First and Second Causes of creation.
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Page 350 In 1699, Herrera drew the attention of Johan Georg Wachter, who, on the basis of Knorr von Rosenroth’s Latin translations of Herrera’s works in Kabbala Denudata , blamed him for inspiring Spinoza’s supposed pantheistic heresy. See also: KABBALAH; PLATONISM, RENAISSANCE Further reading Yosha, N. (1994) Mytos u-metaforah – haparshanut ha-filisofit shel Abraham Cohen Herrera le-kabbalat ha-Ari (Myth and Metaphor: Abraham Cohen Herrera’s Philosophical Interpretation of the Kabbalah of the ARI (R. Isaac ben Solomon Luria)), Jerusalem: The Magness Press. (In this Hebrew work with an English summary, Yosha addresses Herrera’s philosophic interpretation of Lurianic Kabbalah, referring in detail both to Herrera’s Kabbalistic and philosophical sources and to its influence on later thinkers.) NISSIM YOSHA HERTZ, HEINRICH RUDOLF (1857–94) The German scientist Heinrich Hertz demonstrated the existence of radio waves in research between 1887 and 1888, opening the way for Marconi to develop long-distance radio communication. Hertz’s results confirmed Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory, and sealed the fate of action-at-a-distance in physics. His theoretical analysis included the famous dictum: ‘Maxwell’s theory is Maxwell’s system of equations’. Hertz also developed a new formulation of Newtonian mechanics using the concepts of mass, length and time, but not force. He presented mechanics as the axiomatic consequence of a single fundamental law: ‘every free system persists in its state of rest or of uniform motion in a straightest path’. Hertz’s ideas influenced later philosophers of science but were most important as a source for Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus , which influenced logical positivism. Hertz’s proposal to eliminate the concept of force in physics was an important contribution to the twentieth-century ideal of a philosophical method that does not solve, but rather dissolves, philosophical problems. See also: FIELD THEORY, CLASSICAL; MECHANICS, CLASSICAL Further reading Buchwald, J.Z. (1994) The Creation of Scientific Effects: Heinrich Hertz and Electric Waves , Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (An important historical study of Hertz.) Mulligan, J. (ed.) (1994) Heinrich Rudolf Hertz (1857–94): A Collection of Articles and Addresses , NewYork: Garland. (English versions of most of Hertz’s important papers, including the introductions to Electric Waves and Principles of Mechanics , and remarks on Hertz by Helmholtz, Planck and others.) PETER BARKER HERVAEUS NATALIS (d. 1323) The French scholastic philosopher and theologian Hervaeus Natalis was not only one of the most influential early Thomists, but was also an original thinker who made an important contribution to the medieval debate on intentionality. He examined carefully the ontological question of what intentional objects are, and discussed the epistemological problem of how they are generated in a cognitive act. Hervaeus argued that intentional objects are ‘third entities’ that cannot be reduced to extramental or mental entities, a thesis that sparked controversy in the fourteenth century. Further reading Roensch, F.J. (1964) Early Thomistic School , Dubuque, IA: The Priory Press. (Short presentation of Hervaeus’ life and intellectual activity.) DOMINIK PERLER HERZEN, ALEKSANDR IVANOVICH (1812–70) Lauded by Nietzsche as ‘a man of every distinctive talent’ and admired by Lenin as the founder of the Russian revolutionary movement, Herzen eludes all neat categorizations. As a moral preacher he stands alongside Tolstoi and Dostoevskii (who praised him as a poet). As a philosopher, he was the principal interpreter and popularizer of Hegel’s thought in Russia in the first half of the 1840s, while the rebellion against metaphysical systems in his mature work has led him to be seen as a precursor of existentialism. Through the Russian press that he founded in emigration he helped to shape the beginnings of a public opinion in his country and played a major role in debates on Russia’s political future on the eve of the emancipation of the serfs, while laying the foundations of the Russian populist movement through his writings on Russian socialism. He is best known in the West for his memoirs, Byloe i dumy ( My Past and Thoughts ) (1861, 1866), which rank among the great works of Russian literature, and for S togo berega ( From the Other Shore) (1850), the most brilliant and original of the works in which
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Page 351 he expresses his rejection of all teleological conceptions of history. See also: LIBERALISM, RUSSIAN; SLAVOPHILISM Further reading Herzen, A.I. (1850) S togo berega, Paris; trans. M. Budberg, From the Other Shore, with an introduction by I. Berlin (ed.), London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1956. Malia, M. (1961) Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism, 1812–1855, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (A detailed study of Herzen’s formative period.) AILEEN KELLY HESCHEL, ABRAHAM JOSHUA (1907–72) Born in Warsaw and educated there and in Berlin, Abraham Joshua Heschel moved to the USA in 1940, where he lived and taught for the rest of his life. His elegantly written books and essays and his striking personality made him a key figure in American Jewish philosophical theology after the Second World War. Written in German, English, Hebrew and Yiddish, his books reflect widely on the Hebrew Bible, Talmud and midrash, and on Jewish mystical writings, continuously engaging with contemporary philosophy and theology. See also: BIBLE, HEBREW Further reading Heschel, A.J. (1975) Between God and Man: An Interpretation of Judaism , ed. F. Rothschild, New York: Free Press. (An anthology of some of Heschel’s more important writings along with a general introduction and shorter introductions to the sections of the anthology.) Merkle, J.C. (1985) The Genesis of Faith: The Depth Theology of Abraham Joshua Heschel, New York: Macmillan. (The most extensive analysis of Heschel’s philosophical theology.) DAVID NOVAK HESIOD ( c .700 BC) One of the earliest surviving Greek poets, Hesiod was a direct precursor of the first philosophers. He composed one poem on mythic cosmogony and cosmology ( Theogony) and another on work and justice in human life ( Works and Days ). See also: PRESOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY Further reading Solmsen, F. (1949) Hesiod and Aeschylus , Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. (Provides a useful general account at pages 3–100, focusing on Hesiod’s relation to his predecessors.) GLENN W. MOST HESS, MOSES (1812–75) Born into a Jewish family in Germany, Hess was a socialist philosopher, closely connected with the Young Hegelians, who influenced the initial philosophical development of Karl Marx. He later articulated, in the context of a critique of European bourgeois society, one of the first calls for the re-establishment of a Jewish commonwealth in Palestine. See also: ZIONISM Further reading Avineri, S. (1985) Moses Hess: Prophet of Communism and Social Zionism , New York: New York University Press. (A detailed study of the development of Hess’ thought, based on his writings throughout his life. Contains extensive quotations from the writings and a bibliography.) SHLOMO AVINERI HESSEN, SERGEI IOSIFOVICH (1887–1950) Sergei Hessen, a disciple of Rickert, has been described as ‘the most brilliant and philosophically gifted’ representative of Neo-Kantian transcendentalism in Russia on the eve of the Revolution. A co-editor of the St Petersburg-based philosophical journal Logos , he represented a distinctively Westernizing trend, critical in many respects of the openly metaphysical religious idealism of the ‘religious-philosophical renaissance’ in Russia. However, he readily acknowledged the existence of an ineradicable metaphysical need in human beings and stressed the metaphysical relevance of his philosophy of moral and cultural values. B.V. Iakovenko attributed to him a pronounced ‘ontological aspiration’ and Hessen’s philosophical evolution led him beyond ‘pure anthropologism’, towards a religiously tinged Platonism. Like many Russian philosophers, Hessen concentrated on philosophical problems which had direct relevance for practice. His main fields were philosophical pedagogy, which he defined as ‘applied philosophy’, and political philosophy, with particular emphasis on philosophy of law. Like many other Russian philosophers, he was forced to emigrate, moving from one country to another, which did not help his professional career. Nevertheless, his work
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Page 352 Osnovy pedagogiki (Foundations of Pedagogy) (published in Berlin, 1923) was translated into many languages and won him international recognition as the main author of the ‘pedagogy of culture’. His original conception of ‘rule-of-law socialism’ (which deserves to be regarded as the last link in the legal philosophy of Russian liberalism) was much less known, and the manuscripts of his two books on political philosophy perished in the Warsaw uprising of 1944. Still, the UNESCO Committee on the Philosophic Basis of Human Rights invited him to contribute to the preparation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. His article for UNESCO, together with his writings on political philosophy published posthumously in Italy, were a Russian contribution to the philosophy of human rights in modern, liberal democratic states. Further reading Hessen, S.I. (1949) ’The Rights of Man in Liberalism, Socialism and Communism’, in Human Rights. Comments and Interpretations. A Symposium , edited by UNESCO with an introduction by J. Maritain, New York. ANDRZEJ WALICKI HEYTESBURY, WILLIAM (before 1313–1372/3) William Heytesbury, an English logician of the mid-fourteenth century, is, with Richard Kilvington, Richard Swineshead, Thomas Bradwardine and John Dumbleton, one of several philosophers known as the Oxford Calculators. In his works, Heytesbury examined mathematical topics related to motion and the continuum as well as paradoxes of self-reference and problems arising from intentional contexts, all within the context of terminist logic, through the resolution of sophismata. He is most noted for developing the mathematics of uniform acceleration, and for his contributions to developing the mathematical treatment of physical qualities such as heat. See also: NATURAL PHILOSOPHY, MEDIEVAL; OXFORD CALCULATORS Further reading Wilson, C. (1960) William Heytesbury: Medieval Logic and the Rise of Mathematical Physics , Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. (An excellent study of the last three chapters of the Regulae solvendi sophismata with complete information on Heytesbury.) JOHN LONGEWAY HIEROCLES (2nd century AD) The Stoic philosopher Hierocles lectured and wrote on ethics. He is important for his defence of the theory of oikeiōsis (affiliation), a form of self-perception and self-love which becomes the foundation for human commitment to rationality and virtue. Observation of animal and human behaviour, he argues, shows that oikeiōsis is innate, rather than learned. Further reading Inwood, B. (1984) ‘Hierocles: Theory and Argument in the Second Century AD’, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 2: 151–83. (Discussion of date, identity and nature of argument.) BRAD INWOOD HIGH-ORDER LOGICS see SECOND- AND HIGHER-ORDER LOGICS HILBERT’S PROGRAMME AND FORMALISM In the first, geometric stage of Hilbert’s formalism, his view was that a system of axioms does not express truths particular to a given subject matter but rather expresses a network of logical relations that can (and, ideally, will) be common to other subject matters. The formalism of Hilbert’s arithmetical period extended this view by emptying even the logical terms of contentual meaning. They were treated purely as ideal elements whose purpose was to secure a simple and perspicuous logic for arithmetical reasoning – specifically, a logic preserving the classical patterns of logical inference. Hilbert believed, however, that the use of ideal elements should not lead to inconsistencies. He thus undertook to prove the consistency of ideal arithmetic with its contentual or finitary counterpart and to do so by purely finitary means. In this, ‘Hilbert’s programme’, Hilbert and his followers were unsuccessful. Work published by Kurt Gödel in 1931 suggested that such failure was perhaps inevitable. In his second incompleteness theorem, Gödel showed that for any consistent formal axiomatic system T strong enough to formalize what was traditionally regarded as finitary reasoning, it is possible to define a sentence that expresses the consistency of T, and is not provable in T. From this it has generally been concluded that the consistency of even the ideal arithmetic of the natural numbers is not finitarily provable and that Hilbert’s programme must therefore fail.
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Page 353 Despite problematic elements in this reasoning, post-Gödelian work on Hilbert’s programme has generally accepted it and attempted to minimize its effects by proposing various modifications of Hilbert’s programme. These have generally taken one of three forms: attempts to extend Hilbert’s finitism to stronger constructivist bases capable of proving more than is provable by strictly finitary means; attempts to show that for a significant family of ideal systems there are ways of ‘reducing’ their consistency problems to those of theories possessing more elementary (if not altogether finitary) justifications; and attempts by the so-called ‘reverse mathematics’ school to show that the traditionally identified ideal theories do not need to be as strong as they are in order to serve their mathematical purposes. They can therefore be reduced to weaker theories whose consistency problems are more amenable to constructivist (indeed, finitist) treatment. See also: ARITHMETIC, PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES IN; GEOMETRY, PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES IN Further reading Hilbert, D. (1899) Grundlagen der Geometrie, Leipzig: Teubner, 7th edn, 1930; 2nd edn trans. L. Unger and P. Bernays, Foundations of Geometry, La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1971. (Influential treatment of geometry from the widely held formalist perspective of the late nineteenth century.) Webb, J. (1980) Mechanism, Mentalism, and Metamathematics: An Essay on Finitism , Boston, MA: Reidel. (Insightful discussion of various of Hilbert’s philosophical ideas and the bearing of Gödel’s theorems upon them.) MICHAEL DETLEFSEN HILDEGARD OF BINGEN (1098–1179) Hildegard of Bingen saw herself as a prophet sent by God to awaken an age in which great troubles were besieging the Church and people no longer understood Scripture. She tried to alleviate the first problem by writing letters to secular and religious leaders and preaching against those she saw as the culprits, and to this end she undertook preaching tours throughout Germany, preaching in cathedrals, monasteries and synods. Her writings, primarily interpretations of her own visions, address the second problem by trying to cast a new light on Christian revelation through illustrating it with original vivid imagery and personifications of abstract concepts. Though her works are not, for the most part, clearly philosophical, Hildegard does show philosophical insight. See also: MYSTICISM, HISTORY OF Further reading Hildegard of Bingen (1141–51) Scivias (Know the Ways), ed. A. Führkötter and A. Carlevaris, Hildegardis Scivias , Corpus Christianorum: continuatio mediaevalis 43 and 43a, Turnhout: Brepols, 1978; trans. Mother Columbia Hart and J. Bishop, Scivias , New York: Paulist Press, 1990. (Barbara Newman’s introduction to this volume is an excellent introduction to important themes in Hildegard’s thought, and more especially to the Scivias .) CLAUDIA EISEN MURPHY HILLEL BEN SAMUEL OF VERONA ( c .1220–95) The Italian Jewish physician and scholar Hillel played a crucial role in the response of the philosophers in the Jewish community to the attacks made upon them by their enemies. He stoutly defended Maimonides while at the same time opposing the allegorical interpretation of miracles. Far less radical than Maimonides or Averroes, he tended to follow the approach of Aquinas. He also translated many philosophical texts from Latin into Hebrew. He was influenced by scholastic ideas and especially by the anti-Averroistic controversy. His major work, Tagmule ha-Nefesh (The Rewards of the Soul), completed in Forlì in 1291, deals with the nature of the soul and the intellect and with the spiritual requital of the soul after death. The chief purpose of this work is ‘to explain the existence of the soul, its essence and its rational faculty, which continues to exist externally after death’. See also: MAIMONIDES, M. Further reading Sermoneta, G. (1962) Hillel ben Shemuel of Verona and his Philosophical Doctrine , Ph.D. dissertation, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. (A monograph on Hillel’s philosophy.) CATERINA RIGO HINDU PHILOSOPHY Hindu philosophy is the longest surviving philosophical tradition in India. We can recognize several historical stages. The earliest, from around 700 BC, was the proto-philosophical period, when karma and liberation theories arose, and the proto-scientific ontological lists
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Page 354 in the Upaniaads were compiled. Next came the classical period, spanning the first millennium AD, in which there was constant philosophical exchange between different Hindu, Buddhist and Jaina schools. During this period, some schools, such as Sānkhya, Yoga and Vaiśeṣika, fell into oblivion and others, such as Kashmir Saivism, emerged. Finally, after the classical period only two or three schools remained active. The political and economic disturbances caused by repeated Muslim invasions hampered intellectual growth. The schools that survived were the Logic school (Nyāya), especially New Logic (Navya-Nyāya), the grammarians and, above all, the Vedānta schools. The central concerns of the Hindu philosophers were metaphysics, epistemological issues, philosophy of language, and moral philosophy. The different schools can be distinguished by their different approaches to reality, but all considered the Vedas (the sacred scriptures) authoritative, and all believed that there is a permanent individual self ( ātman ). They shared with their opponents (Buddhists and Jainas) a belief in the need for liberation. They used similar epistemic tools and methods of argument. In contrast to their opponents, who were atheists, Hindu philosophers could be either theists or atheists. Actually we can observe an increased tendency towards theistic ideas near the end of the classical period, with the result that the strictly atheistic teachings, which were more philosophically rigorous and sound, fell into disuse. Hindu metaphysics saw ātman as part of a larger reality (Brahman). Because these views of the world differed, they had to be proved and properly established. Accordingly, logical and epistemological tools were developed and fashioned according to the needs and beliefs of individual philosophers. Most agreed on two or three sources of knowledge: perception and inference, with verbal testimony as a possible third. In this quest for philosophical rigour, there was a need for precision of language, and there were important philosophical developments among the grammarians and the philosophers who explained the Vedas (the Mīmāṃsakas). A culmination of these linguistic efforts can be seen in the philosopher of language Bhartṛhari. One of his greatest accomplishments was the full articulation of the theory that a sentence as a whole is understood in a sudden act of comprehension. It is customary to name six Hindu schools, of the more than a dozen that existed, thus lumping several into a single school. This is particularly the case with Vedānta. The six are listed in three pairs: Sānkhya–Yoga; Vedānta–Mīmāṃsā; Nyāya–Vaiśeṣika. This does not take account of the grammarians or Kashmir Saivism. In their quest for freedom from rebirth, all the Hindu schools operated within the same framework. Their ultimate goal was liberation. How much they were truly engaged in the quest for liberation apart from their philosophical preoccupations is not always clear, yet they never doubted its real possibility. See also: MĪMĀṂSĀ; NYĀYA-VAIŚEṢIKA; SĀṄKHYA; VEDĀNTA Further reading Chattopadhyaya, D. (1964) Indian Philosophy: A Popular Introduction , Delhi: People’s Publishing House; repr. 1972. (Lucid and accessible survey of Indian philosophical schools.) Potter, K.H. (1963) Presuppositions of India’s Philosophies, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: PrenticeHall. (Discusses issues in Indian philosophies, identifying liberation as the ultimate goal for most schools. In a very useful diagram, philosophers are arranged according to their stances on liberation.) EDELTRAUD HARZER CLEAR HIPPIAS (late 5th century BC) The Greek Sophist Hippias of Elis is a familiar figure in Plato’s dialogues. He served his city as ambassador, and he earned a great deal of money from his lectures. His unusually wide range of expertise included not only rhetoric but also history, literature, mnemonics, mathematics and natural philosophy. See also: SOPHISTS Further reading Plato ( c .395–387 BC) Hippias Minor , trans. H.N. Fowler, Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and London: Heinemann, 1926. (Short conversation between Socrates and Hippias on Achilles and truthtelling.) CHARLES H. KAHN HIPPOCRATIC MEDICINE The Hippocratic corpus is a disparate group of texts relating primarily to medical matters composed between c .450 and c .250 BC and dealing with physiology, therapy, surgery, clinical practice, gynaecology and obstetrics, among other topics. The treatises are (for the most part) notable for their sober naturalism in physiolo
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Page 355 gical theory, their rejection of supernatural explanations for disease, and their insistence on the importance of careful observation. Although embodying a variety of different physiological schemes, they are the origin of the enormously influential paradigm of humoral pathology. In antiquity, the authorship of the entire corpus was mistakenly ascribed to the semi-legendary doctor Hippocrates of Cos ( fl. c .450 BC). See also: GALEN Further reading Hippocratic corpus ( c .450–250 BC) in Hippocrates , trans. W.H.S. Jones, E.T. Withington and P. Potter, Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and London: Heinemann, 6 vols, 1923, 1931, 1987. (Good selection of the basic Hippocratic texts with parallel Greek/English translation.) R.J. HANKINSON HISTORICISM Historicism, defined as ‘the affirmation that life and reality are history alone’ by Benedetto Croce, is understood to mean various traditions of historiographical thinking which developed in the nineteenth century, predominantly in Germany. Historicism is an insistence on the historicity of all knowledge and cognition, and on the radical segregation of human from natural history. It is intended as a critique of the normative, allegedly anti-historical, epistemologies of Enlightenment thought, expressly that of Kant. The most significant theorists and historians commonly associated with historicism are Leopold von Ranke, Wilhelm Dilthey, J.G. Droysen, Friedrich Meinecke, Croce and R.G. Collingwood. The main antecedents for the development of historicism are to be found in two key bodies of work. J.G. Herder’s Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man (1784) argues against the construction of history as linear progress, stating rather that human history is composed of fundamentally incomparable national cultures or totalities. G.W.H. Hegel’s The Philosophy of History (1826) insists on the historical situatedness of each individual consciousness as a particular moment within the total progression of all history towards a final goal. The shifting fusion of these ideas provides the foundation for both the strengths and the problems of historicism. Historicism follows both Herder, in attempting to do justice to objective history in its discontinuity and uniqueness, and Hegel, in attempting to determine general patterns of historical change. Indeed, historicism can perhaps be best termed a Hegelian philosophy of history without an all-encompassing notion of progress. Rather than constituting a unified intellectual movement, historicism is best known for its elusiveness. Its multifarious quality can be inferred from the variety of critical positions taken up against it. Influential critiques of historicism have been written by Friedrich Nietzsche, Friedrich Rickert, Ernst Troeltsch, Walter Benjamin, Karl Löwith and Karl Popper. Critical engagement with historicism has focused on its alleged relativism, its alleged particularism, its alleged claims to totality, its alleged subjectivism and its alleged objectivism. More positive debates with historicism have significantly influenced the thought of Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl and Hans-Georg Gadamer. See also: HISTORY, PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Herder, J.G. (1784) Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, London: Johnson, 1800. (Seminal work of pre-Hegelian philosophy of history; especially influential in nineteenth-century national theory.) Popper, K. (1957) The Poverty of Historicism, London: Routledge. (Enormously influential, but theoretically misinformed reading of historicism.) CHRISTOPHER THORNHILL HISTORY, CHINESE THEORIES OF The beginnings of Chinese historical writing can be seen in the works of several early thinkers of the sixth through third centuries BC. The various features which we see in their nascent form in early classical sources were developed, synthesized and found their first mature expression in the composition of what came to be known as the Standard or Official Histories, notably the Spring and Autumn Annals, the Shiji (Records of the Historian) and the Hanshu (History of the Former Han Dynasty). Much has been made of the purported ‘cyclical’ nature of Chinese views of time and the implications this has had on everything from Chinese views of history to the development of science. It is alleged that there was no notion of historical progress among the Chinese, who purportedly held a fatalistic view of infinitely repeating cycles of alternating political order and
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Page 356 chaos, beyond human control. However, Chinese thinkers have held a wide range of different views about the pattern and flow of history. While the amount of historical writing in China is truly staggering, Chinese thinkers have paid relatively little attention to the systematic study of the methodology and nature of history. However, there have been notable exceptions in both critical and speculative history. Critical historians at different times modified and made further suggestions regarding the form and content of the Official Histories. They also criticized the methods by which material for the Official Histories was gathered and controlled, and offered a variety of opinions regarding other forms of historical writing. Chinese philosophers of history developed elegant and sophisticated theories of history which purport to reveal the significance and structure of historical processes. The nineteenth century marks the beginning of modern Chinese views of history, when Chinese intellectuals were first deeply influenced by Western views on the nature of history and historical method. This was also a time when Chinese society was shaken to its foundations by Western colonialism. Chinese historians of this period responded with impressive syntheses of traditional and western views. Traditional notions – for example the idea that history must fulfil a moral purpose – were recast in terms of the emerging phenomenon of Chinese nationalism. At the same time, new ideas about how objective factors, such as economic forces, shape historical events and the global scale on which these events take shape were incorporated into novel Chinese conceptions of history. This process continued into the early twentieth century when Marxist views became most influential. Early Chinese Marxist theories of history reveal a remarkable mixture of the strange and the familiar. However, Stalinist ideology quickly came to dominate more subtle forms of Marxism. As a result, Chinese Marxist views of history soon became ossified and uninspired. Little new or interesting can be found after the early 1950s. See also: CHINESE CLASSICS; MARXISM, CHINESE Further reading Feuerwerker, A. (ed.) (1968) History in Communist China , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (A collection of articles on various aspects of Marxist historiography.) Watson, B. (1963) Ssu-ma Ch’ien, Grand Historian of China , New York: Columbia University Press. (A thorough study of the Shiji and its author, Sima Qian.) PHILIP J. IVANHOE HISTORY, PHILOSOPHY OF Philosophy of history is the application of philosophical conceptions and analysis to history in both senses, the study of the past and the past itself. Like most branches of philosophy its intellectual origins are cloudy, but they lie in a refinement of ‘sacred’ histories, especially those of Judaism and Christianity. The first major philosopher to outline a scheme of world history was Immanuel Kant in The Idea of a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784), and German Idealism also produced Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of World History (1837), a much longer and more ambitious attempt to make philosophical sense of the history of the world as a whole. According to Hegel, history is rational, the working out, in fact, of philosophical understanding itself. The accelerating success of natural science in the nineteenth century gave rise to a powerful combination of empiricism and logical positivism which produced a philosophical climate highly unfavourable to Hegelian philosophy of history. The belief became widespread among philosophers that Hegel, and Marx after him, had developed a priori theories that ignored historical contingency in favour of historical necessity, and which were empirically unfalsifiable. Karl Popper’s philosophy of science was especially influential in converting philosophy of history to a new concern with the methods of historical study rather than with the shape of the past. Two rival conceptions of historical method existed. One tried to model explanation in history on what they took to be the form of explanation in science, and argued for the existence of ‘covering laws’ by which historians connect the events they seek to explain. The other argued for a distinctive form of explanation in history, whose object was the meaning of human action and whose structure was narrative rather than deductive. Neither side in this debate was able to claim a convincing victory, with the result that philosophers gradually lost interest in history and began to concern themselves more generally with the nature of human action. This interest, combined with a revival of nineteenth-century German hermeneutics, the study of texts in their socialand cultural milieu, in turn revived interest among analytical philosophers in the writings of Hegel and Nietzsche. The impact of
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Page 357 continental influences in philosophy, art criticism and social theory was considerable, and reintroduced a historical dimension that had been largely absent from twentieth-century analytical philosophy. In particular, the formation of fundamental philosophical ideas began to be studied as a historical process. The Enlightenment came to be seen as a crucial period in the development of philosophy, and of modernity more generally, and with this understanding came the belief that the contemporary Western world is postmodern. In this way, social theory and the philosophy of culture in fact returned, albeit unawares, to the ‘grand narrative’ tradition in philosophy of history. See also: HISTORICISM; HISTORY, CHINESE THEORIES OF Further reading Hegel, G.W.F. (1837) Lectures on the Philosophy of World History , trans. H.B. Nisbet, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. (The best translation of the high point of philosophical history.) Walsh, W.H. (1967) Introduction to Philosophy of History , London: Hutchinson, 3rd revised edn. (For many years the standard introduction to the subject.) GORDON GRAHAM HOBBES, THOMAS (1588–1679) Among the figures who were conscious of developing a new science in the seventeenth century, the Englishman Hobbes stands out as an innovator in ethics, politics and psychology. He was active in a number of other fields, notably geometry, ballistics and optics, and seems to have shown considerable acumen as a theorist of light. His contemporaries, especially in Continental Europe, regarded him as a major intellectual figure. Yet he did not earn a living as a scientist or a writer on politics. In 1608 he entered the service of Henry Cavendish, First Earl of Devonshire, and maintained his connections with the family for more than seventy years, working as tutor, translator, travelling companion, business agent and political counsellor. The royalist sympathies of his employers and their circle determined Hobbes’ allegiances in the period preceding and during the English Civil War. Hobbes’ first political treatise, The Elements of Law (1640), was not intended for publication but was meant as a sort of long briefing paper that royalists in parliament could use to justify actions by the king. Even Leviathan (1651), which is often read as if it is concerned with the perennial questions of political philosophy, betrays its origins in the disputes of the pre-Civil War period in England. For much of his life the aristocrats who employed Hobbes brought him into contact with the intellectual life of Continental Europe. He found not just the ideas but also the spokesmen congenial. Perhaps as early as 1630 he met Marin Mersenne, then at the centre of a Parisian network of scientists, mathematicians and theologians that included Descartes as a corresponding member. It was to this group that Hobbes attached himself in 1640 when political events in England seemed to him to threaten his safety, causing him to flee to France. He stayed for ten years and succeeded in making a name for himself, particularly as a figure who managed to bring geometrical demonstration into the field of ethics and politics. His De cive , a treatise that has much in common with the Elements of Law , had a very favourable reception in Paris in 1642. By the time De cive appeared, Hobbes had taught himself enough natural philosophy and mathematics to be taken seriously as a savant in his own right. He had also conceived the plan of producing a largescale exposition of the ‘elements’ of philosophy as a whole – from first philosophy, geometry and mechanics through to ethics and politics. De cive would be the third volume of a trilogy entitled The Elements of Philosophy . These books present Hobbes’ considered views in metaphysics, physics and psychology against the background of a preferred scheme of science. Metaphysics, or first philosophy, is primarily a definitional enterprise for Hobbes. It selects the terms whose significations need to be grasped if the principles of the rest of the sciences are to be taught or demonstrated. Foremost among the terms that Hobbes regards as central are ‘body’ and ‘motion’. According to Hobbes, the whole array of natural sciences can be organized according to how each treats of motion. Geometry is the first of these sciences in the ‘order of demonstration’ – that is, the science whose truths are the most general and on which the truths of all the other natural sciences somehow depend. Mechanics is next in the preferred order of the sciences. It considers ‘what effects one body moved worketh upon another’. Physics is the science of sense and the effects of the parts of bodies on sense. Moral philosophy or ‘the science of the motions of the mind’ comes next, and is informed by physics. It studies such passions as anger, hope and fear, and in doing so informs civil philosophy. Starting from the human emo
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Page 358 tional make up, civil philosophy works out what agreements between individuals will form commonwealths, and what behaviour is required within commonwealths to make them last. The behaviour required of the public in order to maintain a commonwealth is absolute submission to a sovereign power. In practice this means abiding by whatever a sovereign declares as law, even if those laws appear to be exacting. Law-abiding behaviour is required so long as, in return, subjects can reasonably expect effective action from the sovereign to secure their safety and wellbeing. With minor variations, this is the theme of all three of Hobbes’ political treatises – the Elements of Law , De cive and Leviathan. Government is created through a transfer of right by the many to the one or the few, in whom an unlimited power is vested. The laws of the sovereign power may seem intrusive and restrictive, but what is the alternative to compliance? Hobbes’ answer is famous: a life that is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. This conception of life without government is not based on the assumption that human beings are selfish and aggressive but, rather, on the idea that if each is their own judge of what is best, there is no assurance that one’s safety and one’s possessions will not be at the mercy of other people – a selfish few, a vainglorious minority or even members of a moderate majority who think they have to take pre-emptive action against a vainglorious or selfish few. It is the general condition of uncertainty, in conditions where people can do anything they like to pursue their wellbeing and secure their safety, that Hobbes calls ‘war’. See also: HUMAN NATURE; PUBLIC INTEREST Further reading Hobbes, T. (1651) Leviathan, or the Matter, Form and Power of Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil , in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, vol. 3, ed. W. Molesworth, London: John Bohn, 1839; repr. ed. R. Tuck, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991; repr. ed. E. Curley, Chicago, IL: Hackett Publishing Company, 1994. (Hobbes’ masterpiece.) Peters, R. (1956) Hobbes, Harmondsworth: Penguin. (A clearly written study of all Hobbes’ philosophy.) TOM SORELL HOHFELD, WESLEY NEWCOMB (1879–1918) W.N. Hohfeld, US law professor and proponent of analytical jurisprudence, was responsible for one of the most influential analyses of the concept of a right in legal and moral philosophy. He offered to resolve all complex legal relations into a few simple and elementary ones, often confusedly referred to as ‘rights’. See also: RIGHTS Further reading Hohfeld, W.N. (1919) Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning, ed. W.W. Cook, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966. (Hohfeld’s basic statement of position, comprising a series of highly influential and attractively written articles from learned journals.) NEIL MacCORMICK HOLCOT, ROBERT ( c .1290–1349) Earlier scholars labelled Robert Holcot a sceptic, a nominalist and an Ockhamist. In fact, the work of this English Dominican friar is too complex and original for any simple label. What can be said with justice is that Holcot belongs among philosophers who work not at developing their own systematic philosophies but at criticizing the speculative efforts of their predecessors. Holcot questions the scope of Aristotelian logic, the extent of theological knowledge and even the extent to which we can have knowledge of the world around us. See also: NATURAL PHILOSOPHY, MEDIEVAL Further reading Kennedy, L.A. (1993) The Philosophy of Robert Holcot, Fourteenth-Century Skeptic , Lewiston, NY: Mellen. (Valuable for the passages that it collects and translates, and for the seven quodlibetal questions it edits.) ROBERT PASNAU HÖLDERLIN, JOHANN CHRISTIAN FRIEDRICH (1770–1843) An outstanding German poet, Hölderlin is now widely recognized as one of the most important writers and thinkers of his time. After an initial period of critical neglect and relative public indifference, he eventually came to enjoy a privileged status in German cultural life at the beginning of the twentieth century, and has continued to exercise a profound influence on modern literature and critical thought. Hölderlin’s work emerged within the context of Kant’s
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Page 359 Critical Revolution and developed in constant interaction with the German Idealist speculation this subsequently provoked, against the background of the French Revolution and the fundamental issues raised in its wake for an entire generation. Hölderlin was personally acquainted with many of the leading figures of the period, including Schiller, Goethe, Herder, Novalis, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. His writings reflect and respond to many of the central philosophical concerns and themes of his time, in a highly original and prescient fashion. However, it is only since Wilhelm Dilthey that the importance of his specific influence on the intellectual development of Schelling and Hegel in particular has been fully recognized, so that he has even been described as the ‘Doctor Seraphicus’ of German Idealism. His work subsequently provided a frequent point of reference for the Frankfurt School’s engagement with the heritage of German Idealism and the problem of the relationship between aesthetics, ethics and politics. More recently, Hölderlin has become a major presence in much contemporary critical and deconstructive theory, largely through the pervasive influence of Martin Heidegger. See also: GERMAN IDEALISM; ROMANTICISM, GERMAN Further reading Henrich (1997) The Course of Remembrance and other Essays on Hölderlin , Stanford: Stanford University Press. (Contains a detailed study of one of Hölderlin’s late poems, and other essays on Hölderlin in the context of German idealist thought.) Hölderlin, J.C.F. (1798) Hyperion , trans. W.R. Trask in E.L. Santer (ed.) Friedrich Hölderlin. Hyperion and Selected Poems , New York: Continuum, 1994. (English translation of Hölderlin’s novel, adapted by D. Schwarz, and bilingual selection of mainly later poems translated by various hands.) NICHOLAS WALKER HOLISM AND INDIVIDUALISM IN HISTORY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE Methodological individualists such as Mill, Weber, Schumpeter, Popper, Hayek and Elster argue that all social facts must be explained wholly and exhaustively in terms of the actions, beliefs and desires of individuals. On the other hand, methodological holists, such as Durkheim and Marx, tend in their explanations to bypass individual action. Within this debate, better arguments exist for the view that explanations of social phenomena without the beliefs and desires of agents are deficient. If this is so, individualists appear to have a distinct edge over their adversaries. Indeed, a consensus exists among philosophers and social scientists that holism is implausible or false and individualism, when carefully formulated, is trivially true. Holists challenge this consensus by first arguing that caricatured formulations of holism that ignore human action must be set aside. They then ask us to re-examine the nature of human action. Action is distinguished from mere behaviour by its intentional character. This much is uncontested between individualists and holists. But against the individualist contention that intentions exist as only psychological states in the heads of individuals, the holist argues that they also lie directly embedded in irreducible social practices, and that the identification of any intention is impossible without examining the social context within which agents think and act. Holists find nothing wrong with the need to unravel the motivations of individuals, but they contend that these motivations cannot be individuated without appeal to the wider beliefs and practices of the community. For instance, the acquiescence of oppressed workers may take the form not of total submission but subtle negotiation that yields them sub-optimal benefits. Insensitivity to social context may blind us to this. Besides, it is not a matter of individual beliefs and preferences that this strategy is adopted. That decisions are taken by subtle strategies of negotiation rather than by explicit bargaining, deployment of force or use of high moral principles is a matter of social practice irreducible to the conscious action of individuals. Two conclusions follow if the holist claim is true. First, a reference to a social entity is inescapable even when social facts are explained in terms of individual actions, because of the necessary presence of a social ingredient in all individual intentions and actions. Second, a reference to individual actions is not even necessary when social facts are explained or understood in terms of social practices. Thus, the individualist view that explanation in social science must rely wholly and exhaustively on individual entities is hotly contested and is not as uncontroversial or trivial as it appears. See also: HOLISM: MENTAL AND SEMANTIC; METHODOLOGICAL INDIVIDUALISM Further reading Popper, K.R. (1960) The Poverty of Historicism, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (Passio
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Page 360 nate defence of methodological individualism. One of the principal originators of the debate.) Ryan, A. (1970) The Philosophy of Social Explanation, London: Macmillan. (Useful introduction to the main issues in the philosophy of social science, including the individualist/holist controversy.) RAJEEV BHARGAVA HOLISM: MENTAL AND SEMANTIC Mental (or semantic) holism is the doctrine that the identity of a belief content (or the meaning of a sentence that expresses it) is determined by its place in the web of beliefs or sentences comprising a whole theory or group of theories. It can be contrasted with two other views: atomism and molecularism. Molecularism characterizes meaning and content in terms of relatively small parts of the web in a way that allows many different theories to share those parts. For example, the meaning of ‘chase’ might be said by a molecularist to be ‘try to catch’. Atomism characterizes meaning and content in terms of none of the web; it says that sentences and beliefs have meaning or content independently of their relations to other sentences or beliefs. One major motivation for holism has come from reflections on the natures of confirmation and learning. As Quine observed, claims about the world are confirmed not individually but only in conjunction with theories of which they are a part. And, typically, one cannot come to understand scientific claims without understanding a significant chunk of the theory of which they are a part. For example, in learning the Newtonian concepts of ‘force’, ‘mass’, ‘kinetic energy’ and ‘momentum’, one does not learn any definitions of these terms in terms that are understood beforehand, for there are no such definitions. Rather, these theoretical terms are all learned together in conjunction with procedures for solving problems. The major problem with holism is that it threatens to make generalization in psychology virtually impossible. If the content of any state depends on all others, it would be extremely unlikely that any two believers would ever share a state with the same content. Moreover, holism would appear to conflict with our ordinary conception of reasoning. What sentences one accepts influences what one infers. If I accept a sentence and then later reject it, I thereby change the inferential role of that sentence, so the meaning of what I accept would not be the same as the meaning of what I later reject. But then it would be difficult to understand on this view how one could rationally – or even irrationally! – change one’s mind. And agreement and translation are also problematic for much the same reason. Holists have responded (1) by proposing that we should think not in terms of ‘same/different’ meaning but in terms of a gradient of similarity of meaning, (2) by proposing ‘two-factor’ theories, or (3) by simply accepting the consequence that there is no real difference between changing meanings and changing beliefs. Further reading Stich, S. (1983) From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (Argument against appealing to content in psychological explanation.) NED BLOCK HOLMES, OLIVER WENDELL, JR (1841–1935) The most famous judge in the history of the USA, Holmes was also one of the most important US legal theorists. Within US jurisprudence, his work prefigured and stimulated the development of a general distrust of abstractions. Holmes emphasized that, in so far as logical deductions and abstract principles play any role at all in the law, they are side-effects of the ways in which struggles among different interests have been varyingly resolved. For him, the life of the law was not logic but experience; and experience was too diverse and conflict-ridden to be controllable on the basis of any sweeping formulae. See also: COMMON LAW; LAW, PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Gordon, R. (ed.) (1992) The Legacy of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr , Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. (Collection of essays.) Holmes, O.W., Jr (1881) The Common Law , Boston, MA: Little, Brown. (Holmes’ magnum opus.) MATTHEW H. KRAMER HOLOCAUST, THE The specific, tragic event of the Holocaust – the mass murder of Jews by the Nazis during the Second World War – raises profound theological and philosophical problems, particularly problems about the existence of God and the meaning of Jewish existence. Among the thinkers who have tried to wrestle with the conceptual challenge posed by the destruction
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Page 361 of European Jewry, three who have presented original arguments that can be termed, in a relatively strict sense, philosophical are Richard L. Rubenstein, Emil Fackenheim and Arthur A. Cohen. Rubenstein has formulated an argument that turns on the theological difficulties raised by the realities of the evil of Auschwitz and Treblinka in a world putatively created and ordered by a benign God. For him, such evil decisively refutes the traditional theological claim that a God possessed of goodness and power exists, and entails the conclusion that ‘there is no [traditional] God’. In working out this conceptual position, he uses an unsatisfactory empirical theory of verification concerning religious propositions and too narrow a notion of evidence, both historical and ethical, that ultimately undermines his counterclaims and ‘Death of God’ affirmations. Fackenheim seeks not to defend a religious ‘explanation’ of the Holocaust, but rather to provide a ‘response’ to it that maintains the reality of God and his continued presence in human, and particularly Jewish, history. To do so, he uses Martin Buber’s understanding of dialogical revelation, asserting that revelation is an ever-present possibility, and formulates his own moral-theological demand to the effect that after the Holocaust, Jewish survival is the ‘614th commandment’ (there are 613 commandments in classical Judaism). Fackenheim’s defence of this position, however, is philosophically problematic. Cohen probvides a ‘process theology’ argument as an explanation of the Holocaust; that is, the Holocaust requires a revision in our understanding of God’s nature and action. It forces the theological conclusion that God does not possess the traditional ‘omni’ predicates; God does not intervene in human affairs in the manner taught by traditional Western theology. However, Cohen’s working out of a process theological position in relation to the Holocaust raises as many philosophical problems as it solves. See also: ANTI-SEMITISM; JEWISH PHILOSOPHY, CONTEMPORARY Further reading Katz, S.T. (1992) Historicism, The Holocaust, and Zionism: Critical Studies in Modern Jewish Thought and History , New York: New York University Press. (Essays on the basic issues surrounding the Holocaust and Zionism.) STEVEN T. KATZ HOME, HENRY (LORD KAMES) (1696–1782) Henry Home (better known as Lord Kames, his title as a Scottish judge of the Courts of Session and Justiciary) was an important promoter of and contributor to the Scottish Enlightenment. His philosophy was a search for causes which could serve as the bases of policies to improve most aspects of Scottish life and thought. His writings, like his involvements in clubs, government bodies and improving economic activities, were all means to enlightened and improving ends. Kames was perhaps the most typical thinker of the Scottish Enlightenment, uniting interests in philosophy, science, belles lettres , history, education and practical improvements of every sort. See also: ENLIGHTENMENT, SCOTTISH Further reading Home, H. [Lord Kames] (1751) Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion, Edinburgh: Kincaid & Donaldson; revised London: Hitch & Hawes and Dodsley, Rivington, Fletcher & Richardson, 1758; Edinburgh: Bell & Murray, 1779. Ross, I.S. (1972) Lord Kames and the Scotland of His Day , Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Currently the best biography.) ROGER L. EMERSON HOMER ( fl. c .700 BC) Author of the Iliad and Odyssey, the Greek poet Homer is probably the earliest surviving, and certainly among the greatest, of European poets. Down to the Renaissance he was considered the source of all scientific and philosophical wisdom; and he still supplies fruitful material for philosophical discussion of moral issues. Further reading Lamberton, R. and Keaney, J.J. (eds) (1992) Homer’s Ancient Readers. The Hermeneutics of Greek Epic’s Earliest Exegetes , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (A useful collection of essays ranging from Homer to the Renaissance.) GLENN W. MOST HONOUR Honour consists in living up to the expectations of a group – in particular, in keeping faith, observing promises, and telling truth. This restriction to a particular group is not easy to justify against the background of universalist theories of ethics, and neither does honour
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Page 362 accord readily with the central modern concepts duty and utility. Honour requires a social context in which individuals can bind themselves, and has tended to be restricted to free, adult males, who alone have been thought to have the capacity to bind themselves in this way. Older traditions, however, regarded honour as the goal of all virtuous action; and newer thinkers have been rediscovering attractions in this view. Further reading Hume, D. (1741/2) Political Essays, ed. K. Haakonssen, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. (Discusses honour and fidelity.) JULIAN ROBERTS HOOKER, RICHARD (1554–1600) Hooker’s Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1593–1662) is the first major work of English prose in the fields of philosophy, theology and political theory. After setting out an entire worldview in terms of the single idea of law, Hooker attempted to justify – and, arguably, to transform – the religious and political institutions of his day. Hooker’s work contributed to later, more narrowly political, political thought (Locke cited ‘the judicious Hooker’ at crucial points in his Second Treatise of Civil Government ), but the Laws is chiefly significant for articulating the ideal of a society coherent in and through its religion, a body politic which succeeds in being – not merely having – a church. In Hooker’s England this meant that royal authority in religion was extensive, but derived from the community and limited by law. Modern separations of politics from religion and of philosophy from edification have made him difficult to assimilate. More recent critiques of Enlightenment secularism and purely technical philosophy help make him again intelligible. See also: NATURAL LAW; SOVEREIGNTY Further reading McGrade, A.S. (ed.) (1997) Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community, Tempe, AZ: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies. (Bibliography; papers on different sides of central issues concerning Hooker’s historical and current significance.) A.S. McGRADE HOPE In Christian theology, ‘hope’ has a central role as one of the three theological virtues. As theology has gradually become separated from moral theory, the inclusion of ‘hope’ within a theory of ethics has become rare. Hope can be either intentional or dispositional. The former is a specific hope for something, whereas the latter is a state of character. Kant gave a central place to intentional hopes in his moral theory with his doctrine of the postulates. Hope also played an essential role in the moral and political writings of Ernst Bloch and Gabriel Marcel. Bloch regarded hope as concerned with a longing for utopia, whereas Marcel regarded hope as a disposition to rise above situations which tempt one to despair. In each of these writers the Christian connection between hope, on the one hand, and faith and love, on the other, remained, although Kant and Bloch did not oppose these categories to reason, but sought to ‘subsume’ them under it. Further reading Bloch, E. (1954–9) Das Prinzip Hoffnung , Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2 vols; trans. N. Plaice, S. Plaice and P. Knight, The Principle of Hope, vol. 3: Oxford: Blackwell, 1986. (Bloch’s major, encyclopedic work expressing his views about hope.) Godfrey, J.J. (1987) A Philosophy of Human Hope, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. (An excellent account of different types of hope, and an overview of its role in the writings of Kant, Bloch and Marcel. It is better on Bloch and Marcel than on Kant.) PHILIP STRATTON-LAKE HORKHEIMER, MAX (1895–1973) One of the initiators and founders of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany, Max Horkheimer’s philosophical importance derives from his programmatic essays of the 1930s in which he conceptualized the Institute’s project of interdisciplinary research, and his later collaboration with Theodor W. Adorno in writing Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947). Horkheimer’s vision of a ‘critical theory’ of society was intended as a reformulation of Marxist theory in which empirical research would be combined with philosophical reflection. See also: FRANKFURT SCHOOL Further reading Adorno, T.W. and Horkheimer, M. (1947) Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. J. Cumming, London: Allen Lane, New York: Herder & Herder, 1972. (The classic text of first generation Critical Theory, arguing
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Page 363 instrumental rationality and a new form of mythology.) Benhabib, S., Bonß,W. and McCole, J. (eds) (1993) On Max Horkheimer: New Perspectives , London: MIT Press. (An excellent collection of fifteen essays covering in detail the most important aspects of Horkheimer’s thought. All are worth reading.) J.M. BERNSTEIN HSIN (HEART-AND-MIND) see XIN (HEART-AND-MIND) HSIN (TRUSTWORTHINESS) see XIN (TRUSTWORTHINESS) HSING see XING HSüN TSU/HSüN TZU see XUNZI HUAI-NAN TZU see HUAINANZI HUAINANZI (179–122 BC) Huainanzi is both the honorific name of Liu An, the second king of Huainan and the title of the philosophical work for which he was responsible. The most important surviving text of the academy he established at his court, it consists of twenty-one essays that form a compendium of knowledge the Daoist ruler needs to govern effectively. In this work, the universe is a well-ordered, dynamic and interrelated whole, interfused by the unifying principle of the dao, that develops according to patterns and processes comprehensible to self-realized human beings. The ruler must cultivate himself fully so that he comprehends these patterns and processes and must establish human society in harmony with them. Embracing the best ideas of earlier philosophers within a Daoist framework, the Huainanzi represents the fullest flowering of the Huang–Lao thought that dominated the early Han dynasty. See also: DAOIST PHILOSOPHY Further reading Ames, R. (1983) The Art of Rulership: A Study in Ancient Chinese Political Thought, Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press. (A careful and readable translation of Huainanzi 9, the essay on political theory, that contains a valuable analysis of the philosophical background of its key ideas.) H.D. ROTH HUET, PIERRE-DANIEL (1630–1721) Huet was a French Catholic bishop who wrote important works in theology, philology and literary criticism. In philosophy, he defended an apologetic interpretation of scepticism and opposed Cartesianism, which he thought to be a fanatical form of rationalism. For Huet, faith must guide reason since only the former, received from God, can provide absolute certainty, whereas human knowledge is inevitably fallible. A moderate scepticism is therefore the most appropriate attitude for a philosopher, since it tempers the ambitious claims of reason and extricates the mind from prejudices and false certainties, thus preparing it to receive the divine gift of faith. See also: SCEPTICISM, RENAISSANCE Further reading Huet, P.D. (1723) Traité philosophique de la faiblesse de l’esprit humain , Amsterdam; repr. Hildesheim, New York: G. Olms, 1974; trans. as An essay concerning the weakness of the Human Understanding, London, 1725; and as A philosophical treatise concerning human understanding, London, 1729. (Written in 1690 but published posthumously, this combines ancient, sceptical arguments with the antiintellectualist perspective of the Pauline tradition and the Neoplatonist distrust of empirical knowledge, to attack Cartesianism as the latest form of dogmatism.) LUCIANO FLORIDI HUGH OF ST VICTOR (D. 1141) Hugh of St Victor initiated the teaching programme that distinguished the Parisian abbey of St Victor during the twelfth century. His teaching combined an ambitious programme of biblical exegesis with the construction of theological syntheses and the detailed subordination of a comprehensive philosophy to both. Hugh’s principal works in theology are biblical commentaries of different kinds and a theological overview based on the notion of sacrament. His philosophical works include Epitome Dindimi in philosophiam (Dindimus’ Epitome of Philosophy) and, most importantly, the Didascalicon de studio legendi (Didascalion, or On the Study of Reading). This last book attempts to show how all human knowledge can be used as preparation for the study of the Christian Bible, which in turns leads to the
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Page 364 Further reading Hugh of St Victor (1120–5) Didascalicon de studio legendi (Didascalicon, or On the Study of Reading), ed. C.H. Buttimer, Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1939; trans. J. Taylor, Didascalicon: A Medieval Guide to the Arts, New York: Columbia University Press, 1961. (Taylor’s translation contains an ample introduction and very rich notes.) MARK D. JORDAN HUMAN NATURE Every political philosophy takes for granted a view of human nature, and every view of human nature is controversial. Political philosophers have responded to this conundrum in a variety of ways. Some have defended particular views of human nature, while others have sought to develop political philosophies that are compatible with many different views of human nature, or, alternatively, which rest on as few controversial assumptions about human nature as possible. Some political philosophers have taken the view that human nature is an immutable given, others that it is shaped (in varying degrees) by culture and circumstance. Differences about the basic attitudes of human beings toward one another – whether selfish, altruistic or some combination – have also exercised political philosophers. Although none of these questions has been settled definitively, various advances have been made in thinking systematically about them. Four prominent debates concern: (1) the differences between perfectionist views, in which human nature is seen as malleable, and constraining views, in which it is not; (2) the nature/ nurture controversy, which revolves around the degree to which human nature is a consequence of biology as opposed to social influence, and the implications of this question for political philosophy; (3) the opposition between self-referential and other-referential conceptions of human nature and motivation – whether we are more affected by our own condition considered in itself, or by comparisons between our own condition and that of others; and (4) attempts to detach philosophical thought about political association from all controversial assumptions about human nature. See also: XING Further reading Bentham, J. (1948) A Fragment on Government and An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, Oxford: Blackwell. (The locus classicus of Bentham’s utilitarianism. Contains a programmatic statement of his assumptions about human nature, as well as applications in the fields of politics, law and economics. Easy to read despite arcane English.) Locke, J. (1690) Two Treatises of Government , ed. P. Laslett, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960. (The most elaborate statement of Locke’s views on human nature and politics. Reasonably accessible.) IAN SHAPIRO HUMAN NATURE, SCIENCE OF, IN THE 18TH CENTURY Eighteenth-century speculation on human nature is distinguishable by its approach and underlying assumptions. Taking their cue from Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton, many philosophers of the Enlightenment endeavoured to extend the methods of natural science to the moral sciences. Perhaps the most explicit of such endeavours was David Hume’s ambition for a ‘science of man’, but he was not alone. There was a general convergence on the idea that human nature is constant and uniform in its operating principles – that is, its determining motives (passions), its source of knowledge (sense experience) and its mode of operation (association of ideas). By virtue of this constancy human nature was predictable, so that once it was scientifically understood, then social institutions could be designed to effect desired outcomes. See also: ENLIGHTENMENT, CONTINENTAL; ENLIGHTENMENT, SCOTTISH Further reading Baker, K.M. (1975) Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (Not only the best book on Condorcet but one of the richest on Enlightenment thought in general and social science in particular.) Hume, D. (1739–40) A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge, revised P.H. Nidditch, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978. (One of philosophy’s great books that Hume himself later dismissed in preference for his subsequent writing.) CHRISTOPHER J. BERRY
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Page 365 HUMANISM The philosophical term ‘humanism’ refers to a series of interrelated concepts about the nature, defining characteristics, powers, education and values of human persons. In one sense humanism is a coherent and recognizable philosophical system that advances substantive ontological, epistemological, anthropological, educational, aesthetic, ethical and political claims. In another sense humanism is understood more as a method and a series of loosely connected questions about the nature and character of human persons. From the fourteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century, humanism minimally meant: (1) an educational programme founded on the classical authors and concentrating on the study of grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry and moral philosophy; (2) a commitment to the perspective, interests and centrality of human persons; (3) a belief in reason and autonomy as foundational aspects of human existence; (4) a belief that reason, scepticism and the scientific method are the only appropriate instruments for discovering truth and structuring the human community; (5) a belief that the foundations for ethics and society are to be found in autonomy and moral equality. From the end of the nineteenth century, humanism has been defined, in addition to the above, by the way in which particular aspects of core humanist belief such as human uniqueness, scientific method, reason and autonomy have been utilized in such philosophical systems as existentialism, Marxism and pragmatism. See also: HUMANISM, RENAISSANCE; ENLIGHTENMENT, CONTINENTAL Further reading Gay, P. (1959) The Party of Humanity , New York: Norton. (An elegant discussion of the Enlightenment concept of humanism.) Manuel, F. and Manuel, F. (1979) Utopian Thought in the Western World , Boston, MA: Harvard University Press. (Humanism within the context of the larger issues of utopianism and human perfectability.) JOHN C. LUIK HUMANISM, RENAISSANCE The early nineteenth-century German educator, F.J. Niethammer, coined the word ‘humanism’, meaning an education based on the Greek and Latin classics. The Renaissance (for our purposes, Europe from about 1350 to about 1650) knew no such term. The Renaissance had, instead, the Latin phrase studia humanitatis (literally ‘the studies of humanity’), best translated ‘the humanities’. The Renaissance borrowed the phrase from classical antiquity. Cicero used it a few times, but it was the later grammarian Aulus Gellius who clearly equated the Latin word humanitas with Greek paideia , that is, with the classical Greek education of liberal learning, especially literature and rhetoric, which was believed to develop the intellectual, moral and aesthetic capacities of a child ( pais in Greek; hence paideia ). Renaissance humanists understood by studia humanitatis a cycle of five subjects: grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history and moral philosophy, all based on the Greek and Latin classics. A humanist was an expert in the studia humanitatis . The dominant discipline was rhetoric. Eloquence was the highest professional accomplishment of the Renaissance humanists, and rhetorical interests coloured humanists’ approach to the other parts of the studia humanitatis . The Renaissance humanists were the successors of the medieval rhetorical tradition and the resuscitators of the classical rhetorical tradition. Renaissance humanism was, in the words of P.O. Kristeller, ‘a characteristic phase in what may be called the rhetorical tradition in Western culture’. Renaissance humanism was neither a philosophy nor an ideology. It reflected no fixed position towards religion, the state, or society. Rather it was a cultural movement centred on rhetoric, literature and history. Its leading protagonists held jobs primarily as teachers of grammar and literature. Outside academia, they served as secretaries, ambassadors and bureaucrats. Some were jurists. The Renaissance humanists reasserted the importance of the humanities against the overwhelming dominance of philosophy and science in medieval higher education. As humanism penetrated the wider culture, it was combined with other disciplinary interests and professions so that one found humanist philosophers, physicians, theologians, lawyers, mathematicians and so forth. Ideologically humanists were a varied lot. Some were pious, some were not. Some were interested in philosophy, most were not. Some became Protestants, others remained Catholic. Some scorned the vernacular while others made important contributions to it. Humanism influenced virtually every aspect of high culture in the West during the Renaissance. Depending on the humanist under discussion, one can legitimately speak of Christian humanism, lay hu
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Page 366 manism, civic humanism, Aristotelian humanism and other combinations. Humanism had a profound effect on philosophy. Writing outside the philosophical establishment, humanists sought to make philosophy more literary in presentation and more amenable to rhetorical concerns. No less importantly, they recovered and translated into Latin a large reservoir of Greek classical texts unknown or ignored in the Middle Ages. Platonism, Stoicism, Epicureanism and scepticism all experienced revivals. The humanists challenged medieval Aristotelianism by offering new Latin translations of Aristotle that in some respects amounted to fresh interpretations. They also significantly enriched the Aristotelian corpus by translating the Poetics and the late ancient Greek commentators on Aristotle. Renaissance humanism arose out of the peculiar social and cultural circumstances of thirteenth-century Italy. It came to maturity in Italy in the fifteenth century and spread to the rest of Europe in the sixteenth. It gradually lost its vitality in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as its focus on Latin eloquence became out of date in a world increasingly won over to the vernacular literatures and new science. In the nineteenth century, it did not so much die as become metamorphosed. Renaissance humanism sloughed off its rhetorical impulse and became modern scholarly classicism. Today the word humanism has taken on new connotations, but the heritage of Renaissance humanism runs deep in our culture. As long as we continue to value literature and history, and the functional skills and cultural perspective attached to these disciplines, every educated person by training will be a humanist in the Renaissance sense. See also: RENAISSANCE PHILOSOPHY; SCEPTICISM, RENAISSANCE Further reading Ferguson, W.K. (1948) The Renaissance in Historical Thought, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (The best study on the idea of the Renaissance with many references to humanism.) Rabil, A., Jr (ed.) (1988) Renaissance Humanism: Foundations, Forms, and Legacy, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 3 vols. (A rich collection of articles by many specialists.) JOHN MONFASANI HUMBOLDT, WILHELM VON (1767–1835) Along with Schiller and Goethe, Humboldt was one of the chief representatives of Weimar classicism, a movement that aspired to revive German culture along the lines of ancient Greece. Humboldt’s philosophical significance resides mainly in two areas: political theory and the philosophy of language. In political theory he was one of the founders of modern liberalism; and in the philosophy of language, he was among the first to stress the importance of language for thought, and of culture for language. See also: LIBERALISM Further reading Beiser, F. (1992) Enlightenment, Revolution and Romanticism, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 111–37. (A detailed summary of Humboldt’s early political theory.) FREDERICK BEISER HUME, DAVID (1711–76) Hume’s philosophy has often been treated as the culmination of the empiricist tradition of Locke and Berkeley, but it can also be seen to continue the sceptical tradition, and, even more strikingly, the naturalist tradition of Epicurus, Lucretius, Hobbes and Spinoza. Hume challenges orthodox religious conceptions of human nature. He presents us as part of a larger nature, sharing our basic cognitive and affective capacities with the higher animals. Our ‘reason’ is not some God-given privileged access to truth, but simply our language-affected variant of ‘reason in animals’. The negative, anti-rationalist arguments of his first work, A Treatise of Human Nature , where he attacks the views of theistic rationalists, are more muted in his later writings, but the anti-religious arguments become ever more explicit. The importance of his philosophy lies in the thoroughness of his naturalistic project. He tries to show that neither knowledge nor ethics nor the political order needs any sort of religious foundations, and also to explain why so many thinkers had mistakenly held that they did. To the end of his life Hume called himself a sceptic, but his scepticism was in the service of his secular reform of culture, and always ‘mitigated’ by his recognition that a ‘true sceptic’ would be as diffident of his doubts as of his convictions. Sceptical arguments are found useful, however, to cut down the pretensions of dogmatic religious and rationalist
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Page 367 claims. His essay ‘The Sceptic’, although purporting only to portray one sort of philosopher, is often read as a self-portrait. His first and now most famous work, his Treatise , was ‘of human nature’ , which he takes to include our understanding, our passions, and what drives our moral and political life. Much of Book I of the Treatise , ‘Of the Understanding’, is devoted to showing how many of our beliefs are owing to our ‘imagination’, rather than to our ‘reason’. Book II analyses our passions, their foundation in pleasure and pain, their various idea ‘causes’ and ‘objects’, and their communication by sympathy. One of its most famous claims is that passions are needed to motivate action. Hume, whose project is similar to that of Hobbes in Human Nature or the Fundamental Elements of Policy , follows him in taking will to be simply the transition from belief-informed passions to action, and takes voluntary human action to be in principle predictable, like everything else. Book III examines our moral evaluations of actions and passions. In the Abstract of the Treatise Hume underscores the importance of psychological association in our passions, our belief formation, and, more generally, in the workings of our imagination. Where John Locke and Francis Hutcheson had found associative thinking a disease of the mind, Hume makes it the norm. Association of ideas by ‘resemblance’, by temporal and spatial ‘contiguity’, and by ‘causation’ gently guides our minds in our spontaneous thinking and fantasizing, and association by causation guides us less gently in our inferences. Like Locke, Hume takes it for granted that ‘anatomists’ will have some explanation, say in terms of our nervous system and the physical proximity of memory traces in the brain, to account for the psychological phenomena. Hume emphasizes the influence of experienced repetition on our beliefs and our passions. His famous account of causal inference, which Immanuel Kant claimed woke him from his ‘dogmatic slumber’, makes it the more or less instinctive extrapolation into the future of regularities and frequencies that have been experienced in the past, along with a tendency to project the felt ‘determination of the mind’, in its causal inferences, onto the subject matter of those inferences, giving us the idea of causal necessity. Even when made explicit in language, our causal inferences cannot be made into ‘demonstrations’, in which the conclusion follows with logical necessity from premises known to be true. Hume is credited with discovering ‘the problem of induction’, although Pascal may have helped in that discovery. Problematic or not, induction is relied on in Hume’s own account of our nature. Indeed he believed that, unless we did rely on it in ordinary life, we would ‘perish and go to ruin’. Hume’s general theory of human nature, and of the basic capacities and passions which we share with other mammals, is put to work in his account of what is distinctive to us, namely morality, religion, art, politics, and criticism. Like Shaftesbury and Hutcheson before him, he takes morality to involve a special pleasure taken in some human character traits. As moral judges, we find various character traits pleasing and displeasing, and we evaluate forms of social, cultural, and political organization which express or encourage such traits. Our moral sense is a reflexive form of our more basic capacity to take pleasure and displeasure in a range of different things. Morality, as Hume analyses it, is in no way dependent on that other distinctively human phenomenon, religion. In his writings on religion he gave great offence to believers of his day, both by his diagnosis of the causes of religious fervour, and by his claims about its ‘pernicious’ effects. Like Pascal, he saw the basic cause of religion to lie in our anxiety about our own fate, but unlike him, did not endorse the religious response to this anxiety. Our ability to think about the future, combined with the limits of our success in finding natural causes for events that affect our happiness, and the intensity of our concern for that, lead us to postulate gods, invisible intelligent causal forces, super-persons, whom we try to please and placate by our prayers and devotions. Different religions and different forms of monotheism naturally develop, and religious persecution and religious wars are the result. This entirely naturalistic account of reason, morality, politics, culture, and religion made Hume a hero for later Darwinians, such as Huxley, and the toast of the free-thinking Paris salons of his day. But in Britain, despite the fact that his political views are often taken to be conservative, his views on religion were seen by his contemporaries as dangerously radical, as an attack on the very foundations of his own culture. See also: COMMON SENSE SCHOOL; ENLIGHTENMENT, SCOTTISH Further reading Hume, D. (1875) The Philosophical Works of David Hume, ed. T.H. Green and T.H. Grose,
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Page 368 London: Longman, Green, 4 vols. (At present the most complete edition of Hume’s philosophical writings. It contains ‘A Dialogue’, and all the following works except the History of England, the ‘Abstract’ of the Treatise , and The Letter from a Gentleman . A new edition of Hume’s writings, to be published by Clarendon Press, is in progress, edited by T.L. Beauchamp, D.F. Norton and M.A. Stewart.) Penelhum, T.H. (1975) Hume, London: Macmillan. (A short clear book, especially interesting and influential on personal identity.) ANNETTE BAIER HUMOUR What is meant by saying that something is humorous or funny? It is clear that humorousness must be elucidated in terms of the characteristic response to humour, namely humorous amusement, or mirth. It is plausible to define humour in this way: for something to be humorous is for it to be disposed to elicit mirth in appropriate people through their awareness or cognition of it, and not for ulterior reasons. But this invites the question, ‘What is mirth?’ The three leading ideas in philosophical theories of humour are those of incongruity, superiority and relief or release. Although the perception of incongruity is often involved in finding something funny, and the resolution of a perceived incongruity plays an important role in good humour, none of these, in themselves or combined with others, is capable of capturing the concept of mirth. Mirth is not identical with the pleasurable perception of an incongruity, pleasure in feeling superior, the relief of tension or release of accumulated mental energy, or any combination of these elements. A better account of mirth is that it is a certain kind of pleasurable reaction which tends to issue in laughter if the reaction is sufficiently intense. So something is funny if it in itself pleases appropriate people through being grasped, where the pleasure is of the sort that leads, though not inevitably, to laughter. See also: COMEDY Further reading Monro, D.H. (1951) The Argument of Laughter, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. (Comprehensive classification and survey of theories of humour.) Mulkay, M. (1988) On Humour, Oxford: Blackwell. (General survey of the topic from a sociological point of view.) JERROLD LEVINSON HUNGARY, PHILOSOPHY IN The situation of Hungarian philosophy can be best illustrated by two sayings: ‘there are Hungarian philosophers, but there is no Hungarian philosophy’, and ‘a certain period of Hungarian philosophy stretches from Descartes to Kant’. The two ideas are closely connected. Thus on the one hand, there is such a thing as Hungarian philosophy: there are scientific-educational institutions in philosophical life and there are philosophers working in these institutions. On the other hand, there is no such thing as Hungarian philosophy: it is a history of adoption, largely consisting of attempts to introduce and embrace the great trends of Western thought. After some preliminaries in the medieval and early-modern periods, Hungarian philosophy started to develop at the beginning of the nineteenth century. As a result of the reception of German idealism – the so-called Kant debate and Hegel debate – the problems of philosophy were formulated as independent problems for the first time, and a philosophical language began to evolve. After an attempt to create a ‘national philosophy’ – and after some outstanding individual achievements – the institutionalization of Hungarian philosophy accelerated at the end of the century. The early years of the twentieth century brought the first heyday of philosophy to Hungary, with the rapid reception of new idealist trends and notable original contributions. In the period between the two wars the development stopped: many philosophers were forced to emigrate, and Geistesgeschichte (the history of thought) became prevalent in philosophical life. Following the communist take-over, the institutions of ‘bourgeois’ philosophy were eliminated, and Marxism-Leninism, which legitimated political power, took a monopolistic position. During this period, the only significant works created were in the tradition of critical Marxism and philosophical opposition. The changes in 1989 regenerated the institutional system, and the articulation of international contemporary trends – analytic philosophy, hermeneutic tradition and postmodernism – came to the fore. Besides some works by thinkers in exile, Hungarian philosophy has produced only one achievement which can be considered significant at an international level: the oeuvre of György (Georg) Lukács.
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Page 369 Further reading Hanák, T. (1990) Geschichte der Philosophie in Ungarn. Ein Grundriß (History of Philosophy in Hungary: An Outline), Munich: Dr Rudolf Trofenik Verlag. (The most up-to-date monograph on the subject.) LÁSZLÓ PERECZ HUS, JAN ( c .1369–1415) From his appointment as rector of the Bethlehem chapel in Prague in 1402 until his execution at the Council of Constance in 1415, Jan Hus advanced the goals of an ecclesiastical reform movement with Czech national overtones. Hus’ ministerial and academic posts provided a broad platform for his leadership. He preached tenaciously against clerical abuses. At the University of Prague he taught philosophical and ecclesiological doctrines which, his opponents charged, were taken from the radical Oxford reformer, John Wyclif. Whereas Wyclif’s philosophical realism (for example, the indestructibility of ‘being’, led him to adopt several positions, condemned as heretical, Hus’ polemic, in which he castigated the fiscalization and bureaucratization of the papacy, sprang more from his ideals of evangelical minority and apostolic poverty. See also: WYCLIF, J. Further reading Spinka, M. (1968) John Hus, a Biography , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Well-written but partisan.) CURTIS V. BOSTICK HUSSERL, EDMUND (1859–1938) Through his creation of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl was one of the most influential philosophers of our century. He was decisive for most of contemporary continental philosophy, and he anticipated many issues and views in the recent philosophy of mind and cognitive science. However, his works were not reader-friendly, and he is more talked about than read. Husserl was born in Moravia, received a Ph.D. in mathematics while working with Weierstraû, and then turned to philosophy under the influence of Franz Brentano. He was particularly engaged by Brentano’s view on intentionality and developed it further into what was to become phenomenology. His first phenomenological work was Logische Untersuchungen (Logical Investigations) (1900–1). It was followed by Ideen (Ideas) (1913), which is the first work to give a full and systematic presentation of phenomenology. Husserl’s later works, notably Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time) (1928), Formale und transzendentale Logik (Formal and Transcendental Logic) (1929), Kartesianische Meditationen (Cartesian Meditations) (1931) and Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie (Crisis of the European Sciences) (partly published in 1936), remain largely within the framework of the Ideas. They take up topics that Husserl only dealt with briefly or were not even mentioned in the Ideas, such as the status of the subject, intersubjectivity, time and the lifeworld. Brentano had characterized intentionality as a special kind of directedness upon an object. This leads to difficulties in cases of hallucination and serious misperception, where there is no object. Also, it leaves open the question of what the directedness of consciousness consists in. Husserl therefore endeavours to give a detailed analysis of those features of consciousness that make it as if of an object. The collection of all these features Husserl calls the act’s ‘noema’. The noema unifies the consciousness we have at a certain time into an act that is seemingly directed towards an object. The noema is hence not the object that the act is directed towards, but is the structure that makes our consciousness be as if of such an object. The noemata are akin to Frege’s ‘third world’ objects, that is, the meanings of linguistic expressions. According to Husserl, ‘the noema is nothing but a generalization of the notion of meaning [Bedeutung] to the field of all acts’. Just as distinguishing between an expression’s meaning and its reference enables one to account for the meaningful use of expressions that fail to refer, so, according to Husserl, can the distinction between an act’s noema and its object help us overcome Brentano’s problem of acts without an object. In an act of perception the noema we can have is restricted by what goes on at our sensory surfaces, but this constraint does not narrow our possibilities down to just one. Thus in a given situation I may perceive a man, but later come to see that it was a mannequin, with a corresponding shift of noema. Such a shift of noema is always possible, corresponding to the fact that perception is always fallible. These boundary conditions, which constrain the noemata we can have, Husserl calls ‘hyle’. The hyle are not objects experienced by us, but are experiences of a kind which we typically have
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Page 370 when our sense organs are affected, but also can have in other cases, for example under the influence of fever or drugs. In our natural attitude we are absorbed in physical objects and events and in their general features, such as their colour and shape. These general features, which can be shared by several objects, Husserl calls essences, or ‘eidos’ (Wesen). Essences are studied in the eidetic sciences, of which mathematics is the most highly developed. We get to them by turning our attention away from the concrete individuals and focusing on what they have in common. This change of attention Husserl calls ‘the eidetic reduction’, since it leads us to the eidos. However, we may also more radically leave the natural attitude altogether, put the objects we were concerned with there in brackets and instead reflect on our own consciousness and its structures. This reflection Husserl calls ‘the transcendental reduction’, or ‘epoché’. Husserl uses the label ‘the phenomenological reduction’ for a combination of the eidetic and the transcendental reduction. This leads us to the phenomena studied in phenomenology, that is, primarily, the noemata. The noemataare rich objects, with an inexhaustible pattern of components. The noema of an act contains constituents corresponding to all the features, perceived and unperceived, that we attribute to the object, and moreover constituents corresponding to features that we rarely think about and are normally not aware of, features that are often due to our culture. All these latter features Husserl calls the ‘horizon’ of the act. The noema is influenced by our living together with other subjects where we mutually adapt to one another and come to conceive the world as a common world in which we all live, but experience from different perspectives. This adaptation, through empathy (Einfühlung), was extensively studied by Husserl. Husserl emphasizes that our perspectives and anticipations are not predominantly factual: ‘this world is there for me not only as a world of mere things, but also with the same immediacy as a world of values, a world of goods, a practical world’. Further, the anticipations are not merely beliefs – about factual properties, value properties and functional features – but they also involve our bodily habits and skills. The world in which we find ourselves living, with its open horizon of objects, values, and other features, Husserl calls the ‘lifeworld’. It was the main theme of his last major work, The Crisis of the European Sciences , of which a part was published in 1936. The lifeworld plays an important role in his view on justification, which anticipates ideas of Goodman and Rawls. See also: PHENOMENOLOGICAL MOVEMENT Further reading Bell, D. (1990) Husserl, The Arguments of the Philosophers, London: Routledge. (Good on the early Husserl.) DAGFINN FØLLESDAL HUTCHESON, FRANCIS (1694–1746) Born in Ireland, Francis Hutcheson is often taken to be the founder of the Scottish Enlightenment. He is best known for his contributions to moral theory, but he also contributed to the development of aesthetics. Although his philosophy owes much to John Locke’s empiricist approach to ideas and knowledge, Hutcheson was sharply critical of Locke’s account of two important normative ideas, those of beauty and virtue. He rejected Locke’s claim that these ideas are mere constructs of the mind that neither copy nor make reference to anything objective. He also complained that Locke’s account of human pleasure and pain was too narrowly focused. There are pleasures and pains other than those that arise in conjunction with ordinary sensations; there are, in fact, more than five senses. Two additional senses, the sense of beauty and the moral sense, give rise to distinctive pleasures and pains that enable us to make aesthetic and moral distinctions and evaluations. Hutcheson’s theory of the moral sense emphasizes two fundamental features of human nature. First, in contrast to Thomas Hobbes and other egoists, Hutcheson argues that human nature includes a disposition to benevolence. This characteristic enables us to be, sometimes, genuinely virtuous. It enables us to act from benevolent motives, whereas Hutcheson identifies virtue with just such motivations. Second, we are said to have a perceptual faculty, a moral sense, that enables us to perceive moral differences. When confronted with cases of benevolently motivated behaviour (virtue), we naturally respond with a feeling of approbation, a special kind of pleasure. Confronted with maliciously motivated behaviour (vice), we naturally respond with a feeling of disapprobation, a special kind of pain. In short, certain distinctive feelings of normal observers serve to distinguish between virtue and vice. Hutcheson was careful, however, not to identify virtue and vice with these feelings. The feelings are perceptions
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Page 371 (elements in the mind of observers) that function as signs of virtue and vice (qualities of agents). Virtue is benevolence, and vice malice (or, sometimes, indifference); our moral feelings serve as signs of these characteristics. Hutcheson’s rationalist critics charged him with making morality relative to the features human nature happens at present to have. Suppose, they said, that our nature were different. Suppose we felt approbation where we now feel disapprobation. In that event, what we now call ‘vice’ would be called ‘virtue’, and what we call ‘virtue’ would be called ‘vice’. The moral sense theory must be wrong because virtue and vice are immutable. In response, Hutcheson insisted that, as our Creator is unchanging and intrinsically good, the dispositions and faculties we have can be taken to be permanent and even necessary. Consequently, although it in one sense depends upon human nature, morality is immutable because it is permanently determined by the nature of the Deity. Hutcheson’s views were widely discussed throughout the middle decades of the eighteenth century. He knew and advised David Hume, and, while Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow, taught Adam Smith. Immanuel Kant and Jeremy Bentham, among other philosophers, also responded to his work, while in colonial America his political theory was widely seen as providing grounds for rebellion against Britain. See also: ENLIGHTENMENT, SCOTTISH; HUME, D. Further reading Hope, V. (1989) Virtue by Consensus: The Moral Philosophy of Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith , Oxford: Clarendon Press. (An essentially comparative study of Hutcheson, Hume and Adam Smith.) Hutcheson, F. (1755) A System of Moral Philosophy , Glasgow. (Written by 1738, but published posthumously by Hutcheson’s son, Francis the Younger. A comprehensive account of morality in three books. Includes discussions of human nature, the supreme good, and of our natural and civil duties.) DAVID FATE NORTON HUXLEY, THOMAS HENRY (1825–95) Huxley, an English zoologist with strong philosophical interests, originally influenced by K.E. von Baer’s embryological typology, became an authority first in invertebrate zoology and then in vertebrate palaeontology. After the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, he proclaimed his acceptance of the theory of evolution, but disagreed on important points and applied common descent – but not natural selection – in his scientific works only after reading Ernst Haeckel’s Generelle Morphologie (1866). He published extensively in anthropology, ethnology, philosophy, religion, politics and ethics, and was a great popularizer of science. See also: EVOLUTION, THEORY OF; PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE IN THE 19TH CENTURY Further reading Desmond, A. (1994, 1996) Huxley, The Devil’s Disciple, London: Michael Joseph, 2 vols. (A biography of Huxley in his social and political context.) MARIO A. DI GREGORIO HYPATIA ( c . AD 370–415) The Greek philosopher Hypatia was a Neo-platonist. She was famous for her public talks on philosophy and astronomy, and her forthright attitude to sex. Alhough concerned with higher knowledge, she was also a political animal and had a keen sense of practical virtue. She was killed by a Christian mob, and has remained since a martyr to the cause of philosophy. Further reading Dzielska, M. (1995) Hypatia the Alexandrian , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Extensive account of Hypatia’s life, historical and ideological context.) LUCAS SIORVANES
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Page 372 I IAMBLICHUS ( c . AD 242–327) The late ancient philosopher Iamblichus was, alongside Plotinus and Porphyry, a founder of Neoplatonism. He established a new curriculum for the teaching of philosophy and formulated many distinctions that pervaded later Neoplatonic metaphysics. He began to mathematize all fields of philosophical concern. Most of all, he asserted that acts of transcendence, not contemplation, secure union with the divine, because it can only be reached by an equally divine faculty, which is present in every individual. Matter, soul and mind contain images of the divine and so are genuine participants in salvation. Further reading Iamblichus (late 3rd century AD) On the Mysteries , ed. E. des Places, Jamblique. Les mystères d’ Égypte , Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1989; trans. T. Taylor, On the Mysteries , London, 1821; repr. Hastings: Chthonios Books, 1989. (The former is parallel Greek text and French translation; the latter is English translation of old edition.) Gersh, S. (1978) From Iamblichus to Eriugena, Leiden: Brill. (Detailed account of later Neoplatonic metaphysics and the transition to medieval theology, including pseudo-Dionysius; major themes are illustrated with diagrams.) LUCAS SIORVANES IBN ‘ADI, YAHYA (893–974) Following in the footsteps of the Greek philosophers, Ibn ‘Adi concerned himself with the ultimate human end, happiness, which he found in knowledge. However, he was primarily occupied with defending the compatibility between the concept of God’s unity and that of the trinity. He reasoned that a thing can be one in one respect and many in another. Therefore, there is no inconsistency in holding that God is both one and three. Ibn ‘Adi can best be described as the Christian philosopher of unity, as he devoted most of his career and used all his logical skills to defend the concept of God’s unity and its consistency with the concept of trinity. See also: GOD, CONCEPTS OF Further reading Endress, G. (1977) The Works of Yahya Ibn ‘Adi: An Analytical Inventory, Wiesbaden: Reichert. (The best available classification of Ibn ‘Adi’s works.) SHAMS C. INATI IBN AL-‘ARABI, MUHYI AL-DIN (1164–1240) Ibn al-‘Arabi was a mystic who drew on the writings of Sufis, Islamic theologians and philosophers in order to elaborate a complex theosophical system akin to that of Plotinus. He was born in Murcia (in southeast Spain) in AH 560/AD 1164, and died in Damascus in AH 638/ AD 1240. Of several hundred works attributed to him the most famous are al-Futuhat al-makkiyya (The Meccan Illuminations) and Fusus al-hikam (The Bezels of Wisdom). The Futuhat is an encyclopedic discussion of Islamic lore viewed from the perspective of the stages of the mystic path. It exists in two editions, both completed in Damascus – one in AH 629/AD 1231 and the other in AH 636/AD 1238 – but the work was conceived in Mecca many years earlier, in the course of a vision which Ibn al-‘Arabi experienced near the Kaaba, the cube-shaped House of God which Muslims visit on pilgrimage. Because of its length, this work has been relatively neglected. The Fusus , which is much shorter, comprises twenty-seven chapters named after prophets who epitomize different spiritual types. Ibn al-‘Arabi claimed that he received it directly from Muhammad, who appeared to him in Damascus in AH 627/AD 1229. It has been the subject of over forty commentaries. Although Ibn al-‘Arabi was primarily a mystic who believed that he possessed superior divinely-bestowed knowledge, his work is of interest to the philosopher because of the way in which he used philosophical terminology in an attempt to explain his inner experience. He held that whereas the divine Essence is absolutely unknowable, the cosmos as a whole is the locus of manifestation of all God’s attributes. Moreover, since these attributes require the creation for their expression, the One is continually
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Page 373 driven to transform itself into Many. The goal of spiritual realization is therefore to penetrate beyond the exterior multiplicity of phenomena to a consciousness of what subsequent writers have termed the ‘unity of existence’. This entails the abolition of the ego or ‘passing away from self’ ( fana’ ) in which one becomes aware of absolute unity, followed by ‘perpetuation’ ( baqa’) in which one sees the world as at once One and Many, and one is able to see God in the creature and the creature in God. See also: MYSTICAL PHILOSOPHY IN ISLAM Further reading Ibn al-‘Arabi ( c .1231–8) al-Futuhat al-makkiyya (The Meccan Illuminations), Cairo, 1911; partial trans. M. Chodkiewicz et al., Les Illuminations de la Mecque: The Meccan Illuminations , Textes choisis/Selected Texts, Paris: Sindbad, 1988. (The definitive synthesis of Ibn al-‘Arabi’s teaching, comprising 560 chapters which deal with every aspect of mystical knowledge.) Chittick, W.C. (1989) The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-‘Arabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination , Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. (Exposition of Ibn al- ‘Arabi’s thought, based primarily on The Meccan Illuminations with extensive excerpts translated by the author.) NEAL ROBINSON IBN BAJJA, ABU BAKR MUHAMMAD IBN YAHYA IBN AS-SAY’IGH (D. 1138) The Spanish Moslem physician Ibn Bajja’s philosophy may be summed up in two words; al-ittisal (conjunction) and al-tawahhud (solitude). Conjunction is union with the divine realm, a union that reveals the eternal and innermost aspects of the universe. Through this union or knowledge, one is completed as a human being, and in this completion the ultimate human end, happiness, is achieved. Solitude, on the other hand, is separation from a society that is lacking in knowledge. Once united with the eternal aspects of the universe, one must isolate oneself from those who are not in the same state, who may therefore distract one from the supernatural realm through their ignorance and corruption. See also: EPISTEMOLOGY IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY Further reading Goodman, L. (1996) ‘Ibn Bajjah’, in S.H. Nasr and O. Leaman (eds) History of Islamic Philosophy , London: Routledge, ch. 21, 294–312. (Discussion of the thinker and his period, describing in detail the cultural context within which he worked.) SHAMS C. INATI IBN CRESCAS, HASDAI see CRESCAS, HASDAI IBN DAUD, ABRAHAM ( c .1110–c .1180) Ibn Daud was born in Cordoba and died in Toledo. In Jewish texts he is known as Rabad, an acronym of his Hebrew name, Rabbi Abraham ben David. He was known to medieval Christian philosophers by a variety of names, including Avendauth and possibly John of Spain as well. His Sefer ha-Kabbalah (The Book of Tradition), regarded by some scholars as the first comprehensive study of Jewish history, is an extended argument for the authority of rabbinic Judaism on the grounds that it is an unbroken tradition of authentic sources, from the Mosaic origins through the first two Jewish commonwealths, the exile, and down to the author’s time. His major work in philosophy is Al-‘Aqida al-Rafi‘a (The Exalted Faith), composed in 1160 in Judaeo-Arabic, the form of Arabic written in Hebrew characters that was commonly used by Jewish scholars and thinkers in the Muslim milieu. It survives only in two late fourteenthcentury Hebrew translations, one by Samuel Motot, entitled Ha-Emunah ha-Nissa’ah, and the other, better known, by Solomon ibn Labi, entitled Ha-Emunah ha-Ramah . Further reading Ibn Daud, A. (1160) Ha-Emunah ha-Ramah , trans. N.M. Samuelson, ed. N.M. Samuelson and G. Weiss, The Exalted Faith, Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1986. (Written originally in Judaeo-Arabic as Al-‘Aqida al-Rafi‘a. The work is now known by the title cited here, which is that of the Hebrew translation made in the late fourteenth-century by Solomon ibn Labi.) NORBERT M. SAMUELSON IBN EZRA, ABRAHAM (1089–1164) The philosophy of Ibn Ezra attained broad influence in Jewish literature through his Bible commentaries, included to this day in rabbinic Bibles. Born in Tudela, Spain, he was forced in later life (1140 until his death) to wander widely, at length settling in Rome and Lucca, where he composed some of his greatest works. A friend and, by some traditions, son-in-law of the poet-philosopher Judah Halevi, whom he mentions occasionally, he was himself a poet and wrote
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Page 374 prolifically on grammar, exegesis, philosophy, medicine, astronomy and astrology. The many editions and manuscripts of his works attest their popularity, and some, especially on astronomy and astrology, were translated into Latin and then into French, Spanish, English and German. See also: HALEVI, J. Further reading Esteban, F.D. (ed.) (1990) Abraham ibn Ezra and His Age: Proceedings of the International Symposium , Madrid: Association Espanola de Orientalistas. (An important collection of recent international scholarship on diverse aspects of Ibn Ezra’s work and thought.) Goldstein, D. (ed.) (1971) The Jewish Poets of Spain: 900–1250, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 153–62. (Selected poems by Ibn Ezra in English translation.) RAPHAEL JOSPE IBN EZRA, MOSES BEN JACOB ( fl. 1055–1135) Ibn Ezra was an exegete, Jewish scholar and one of the foremost Hebrew poets of medieval Spain. Although none of his systematic biblical commentaries have been preserved, two important works survive in Judaeo–Arabic prose, both dealing with biblical literary theory, rhetoric and philosophy. The literary dimension of his work makes Ibn Ezra a forerunner of modern biblical criticism. His speculative system, deeply influenced by Neplatonism, was to have a profound impact on the early Spanish Kabbalists. See also: NEOPLATONISM Further reading Fenton, P. (1997) ‘Traces of Moses Ibn ‘Ezra’s ‘Arugat ha-bosem in the Writings of the Early Spanish Qabbalists’, in I. Twersky (ed.) Studies in Medieval Jewish History and Literature III, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, Center for Jewish Studies. (His links with the Kabbalists.) PAUL B. FENTON IBN FALAQUERA, SHEM TOV (1223/8–AFTER 1290) A prolific author with a clear and precise Hebrew style, Ibn Falaquera wrote both original works and Hebrew translations of Arabic works of philosophy and science. His writings include encyclopedias, Bible commentaries, the first commentary on Maimonides’ Guide to the Perplexed and, by his own account, some twenty thousand verses of poetry. Unlike Maimonides, who wrote for the intelligentsia, Ibn Falaquera wrote most of his works with the stated aim of raising the cultural level of the Jewish people. Most of his prose works survive, many in multiple editions or manuscripts and several in European translations, a testimony to their popularity. A consistent theme in his works is the harmony of faith and reason. See also: MAIMONIDES, M. Further reading Jospe, R. (1988) Torah and Sophia: The Life and Thought of Shem Tov ibn Falaquera , Cincinnati, OH: Hebrew Union College Press. (The most complete study to date of Ibn Falaquera’s life and philosophy, including a critical edition and annotated translation of Sefer ha-Nefesh and a critical edition of Shelemut ha-Ma‘asim.) RAPHAEL JOSPE IBN GABIROL, SOLOMON (1021/2–57/8) Ibn Gabirol was an outstanding exemplar of the Judaeo–Arabic symbiosis of medieval Muslim Spain, a poet as well as the author of prose works in both Hebrew and Arabic. His philosophical masterwork, the Mekor Hayyim (Fountain of Life), was well known to the Latin scholastics in its twelfth century Latin translation, the Fons Vitae . The work presents a Neoplatonic conception of reality, with a creator God at the apex. The universal hylomorphism that pervades the created order, both spiritual and corporeal, has divine will as the intermediary between God and creation, allowing Ibn Gabirol to avoid the rigidly determinist emanationism of his Greek predecessors. The Fons Vitae challenged such philosophers as Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus to critical reflections regarding individuation and personal immortality. See also: PLATONISM, MEDIEVAL Further reading Sirat, C. (1985) A History of Jewish Philosophy in the Middle Ages, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 68–81. (A short account that focuses on the metaphysics of both the Fons Vitae and the philosophical poem Keter Malkhut .) DANIEL H. FRANK IBN HAZM, ABU MUHAMMAD ‘ALI (994–1063) The Andalusian jurist Ibn Hazm was the originator of a school of interpretation which
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Page 375 based its understanding of religious texts on the apparent meaning of scriptural concepts as opposed to their hidden meaning. He argued that there is a place for reason in the understanding of scripture, but that it has to be used within the context of revelation and is severely limited in terms of what it can demonstrate. His approach is based on the idea that the language and context of religious texts are sufficient for their readers to understand them, and that there is no need to use concepts such as analogy. See also: ISLAMIC THEOLOGYLAW, ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Ibn Hazm (994–1063) Tawq al-hamama (The Dove’s Neck Ring), trans. A. Arberry, The Ring of the Dove, London: Luzac, 1953. (A systematic treatment of love and affection, combining metaphysics, social commentary and psychology.) Chejne, A. (1982) Ibn Hazm, Chicago: Kazi Publications. (A general account of his life and thought.) OLIVER LEAMAN SALMAN ALBDOUR IBN KAMMUNA (d. 1284) Physician and man of letters, Ibn Kammuna left a number of writings on philosophy and religion. His treatise comparing Judaism, Christianity and Islam caused major rioting in Baghdad, forcing him to flee that city in secret. His commentary on al-Suhrawardi’s Talwihat, the major text of Islamic Illuminationist philosophy remains one of the clearest and most thorough expositions of that branch of thought. See also: ILLUMINATIONIST PHILOSOPHY Further reading Ibn Kammuna (before 1284) Tanqih al-abhath fiakhbar al-milal al-thalath (An Overview of Investigations into the Views of the Three Faiths), ed. M. Perlman, Ibn Kammuna’s Examination of the Inquiries into the Three Faiths, Berkeley, CA: University of California, 1967; trans. M. Perlman, Ibn Kammuna’s Examination of the Three Faiths, Berkeley, CA: University of California, 1971. (The 1971 translation contains Arabic text and English translation, both with a short introduction, and brief notes.) Y. TZVI LANGERMANN IBN KHALDUN, ‘ABD AL-RAHMAN (1332–1406) Born in Tunis, Ibn Khaldun travelled widely in North Africa and Spain. His work on the philosophy of history is a landmark of social thought. Many historians – Greek, Roman, Muslim and other – had written valuable historiography, but here we have brilliant reflections on the meaning, pattern and laws of history and society, as well as profound insights into the nature of social processes and the interconnections between phenomena in such diverse fields as politics, economics, sociology and education. By any reckoning, Ibn Khaldun was the outstanding figure in the social sciences between Aristotle and Machiavelli, and one of the greatest philosophers of history of all time. His most important philosophical work is the Muqaddima, the introduction to a much longer history of the Arabs and Berbers. In this work, Ibn Khaldun clearly defines a science of culture and expounds on the nature of human society and on political and social cycles. Different social groups, nomads, townspeople and traders, interact with and affect one another in a continuous pattern. Religion played an important part in Ibn Khaldun’s conception of the state, and he followed al-Ghazali rather than Ibn Rushd as a surer guide to the truth. See also: HISTORY, PHILOSOPHY OF; POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY IN CLASSICAL ISLAM Further reading Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) Muqaddima, ed. and trans. F. Rosenthal, The Muqaddimah, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967. (Outstanding translation of this key introduction to Ibn Khaldun’s history of the Arabs and Berbers, the Kitab al-‘ibar .) Rosenthal, E. (1956) ‘The Theory of the Power-State: Ibn Khaldun’s Study of Civilization’, in E. Rosenthal, Political Thought in Medieval Islam, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (A masterly summary of Ibn Khaldun’s political philosophy.) CHARLES ISSAWI OLIVER LEAMAN IBN MAIMON, MUSA see MAIMONIDES, MOSES IBN MASARRA, MUHAMMAD IBN ‘ABD ALLAH (883–931) Muhammad ibn Masarra is said to be responsible for the first structuring of Andalusian Spanish Muslim philosophy. The thrust of his
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Page 376 philosophy was to show the agreement between reason and revelation. The two paths taken by honest philosophers and prophets lead to the same goal of reaching the knowledge of the oneness of God. We can only know that God exists but not what His nature is. Ibn Masarra held that the divine attributes of knowledge, will and power are a distinct aspect of the simple and ineffable essence of God, and the Neoplatonic theory that all beings have emanated from him through the First Intellect and are either invisible or apparent. There are two sciences, one of the invisible, transcendental world, the other of the apparent and sensible world. The inner meanings in the sciences can be learned through the science of letters. By studying the enigmatic letters at the beginning of the Qur’anic surahs, one can decipher the secret knowledge of the truth symbolized by them. See also: NEOPLATONISM IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY Further reading Asín Palacios, M. (1972) The Mystical Philosophy of Ibn Masarra and His Followers , trans. E.H. Douglas and H.W. Yoder, Leiden: Brill. (Still the major work on Ibn Masarra, although some of the conclusions have been challenged.) GEORGE N. ATIYEH IBN MISKAWAYH, AHMAD IBN MUHAMMAD ( c .940–1030) Like so many of his contemporaries in the fourth and fifth centuries AH (tenth and eleventh centuries AD) Ibn Miskawayh was eclectic in philosophy, basing his approach upon the rich variety of Greek philosophy that had been translated into Arabic. Although he applied that philosophy to specifically Islamic problems, he rarely used religion to modify philosophy, and so came to be known as very much an Islamic humanist. He represents the tendency in Islamic philosophy to fit Islam into a wider system of rational practices common to all humanity. Ibn Miskawayh’s Neoplatonism has both a practical and a theoretical side. He provides rules for the preservation of moral health based on a view of the cultivation of character. These describe the ways in which the various parts of the soul can be brought together into harmony, so achieving happiness. It is the role of the moral philosopher to prescribe rules for moral health, just as the doctor prescribes rules for physical health. Moral health is based upon a combination of intellectual development and practical action. See also: ETHICS IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY; NEOPLATONISM IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY Further reading Ibn Miskawayh (before 1030) Tahdhib al-akhlaq (Cultivation of Morals), ed. C. Zurayk, Beirut: American University of Beirut Centennial Publications, 1966; trans. C. Zurayk, The Refinement of Character , Beirut: American University of Beirut, 1968. (A summary of Ibn Miskawayh’s ethical system. This work is also known as Taharat al-a‘raq (Purity of Dispositions).) Leaman, O. (1996) ‘Ibn Miskawayh’, in S.H. Nasr and O. Leaman (eds) History of Islamic Philosophy , London: Routledge, 252–7. (An account of the context within which Ibn Miskawayh worked and the influence of his views.) OLIVER LEAMAN IBN PAQUDA, BAHYA ( fl. EARLY 12TH CENTURY) Bahya ibn Paquda, the chief exponent of Jewish pietism, gave that ecumenical strand of thought and practice a markedly philosophical cast, preferring the intellectual to the fideistic side of pietist tradition, and embracing rationalism as the ally of faith rather than rejecting it as an enemy. Born in Saragossa, Spain, he served as a rabbinic judge. Drawing selectively from Muslim as well as Jewish sources, Bahya’s spiritual vademecum, al-Hidaya ila fara’id al-qulub (The Book of Guidance to the Duties of the Heart), was widely studied ever since its composition, especially in its medieval Hebrew translation, and parts of it are even included in the liturgical meditations of the Ten Days of Penitence. In it, Bahya thematizes his materials carefully, using his own sense of the reasonable to structure pietism as a philosophical system, controlling the monistic penchant of mysticism and disciplining the ascetic tendencies of the devotional cast of mind. Maimonides found Bahya’s asceticism excessive and rejected Bahya’s related leanings towards predestinarianism and resignation; but he quietly adopted Bahya’s moral and intellectual interpretation of the mystic quest for unity with God, fell into step with his predilection for spiritual immortality as distinguished from bodily resurrection, echoed his affirmation of God’s absolute unity and simplicity, and
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Page 377 concurred in his admiration for negative theology, the theology of divine transcendence. See also: PIESTISM Further reading Ibn Pakuda, Bahya (before 1161) al-Hidaya ila fara’id al-qulub (The Book of Guidance to the Duties of the Heart), ed. A.S. Yahuda, Leiden: Brill, 1912; trans. M. Mansoor, The Book of Direction to the Duties of the Heart, London: Routledge, 1973. (Judah ibn Tibbon’s medieval translation is edited with English translation by M. Hyamson, New York, 1925–47, 5 vols; repr. Jerusalem: Boys Town Publishers, 1965.) L.E. GOODMAN IBN AR-RAWANDI ( c .910?) A highly enigmatic and controversial figure in the history of Islamic thought, Ibn ar-Rawandi wavered between a number of Islamic sects and then abandoned all of them in favour of atheism. As an atheist, he used reason to destroy religious beliefs, especially those of Islam. He compared prophets to unnecessary magicians, God to a human being in terms of knowledge and emotion, and the Qur’an to an ordinary book. Contrary to Islamic belief, he advocated that the world is without a beginning and that heaven is nothing special. He is known to have lived in Baghdad, but other details of his life are confused. Further reading al-A‘sam, A. (1975) History of Ibn Ar-Riwandi the Heretic, Beirut: Dar al-Afaq al-Jadida. (A collection of the most important medieval Islamic sources, including those of Ibn al-Jawzi and al-Mu’ayyad fi ad-Din, that mention Ibn ar-Rawandi. It shows that the majority of Muslim thinkers in the Middle Ages rejected his views and tried to distance themselves from him.) SHAMS C. INATI IBN RUSHD, ABU’L WALID MUHAMMAD (1126–98) Ibn Rushd (Averroes) is regarded by many as the most important of the Islamic philosophers. A product of twelfth-century Islamic Spain, he set out to integrate Aristotelian philosophy with Islamic thought. A common theme throughout his writings is that there is no incompatibility between religion and philosophy when both are properly understood. His contributions to philosophy took many forms, ranging from his detailed commentaries on Aristotle, his defence of philosophy against the attacks of those who condemned it as contrary to Islam and his construction of a form of Aristotelianism which cleansed it, as far as was possible at the time, of Neoplatonic influences. His thought is genuinely creative and highly controversial, producing powerful arguments that were to puzzle his philosophical successors in the Jewish and Christian worlds. He seems to argue that there are two forms of truth, a religious form and a philosophical form, and that it does not matter if they point in different directions. He also appears to be doubtful about the possibility of personal immortality or of God’s being able to know that particular events have taken place. There is much in his work also which suggests that religion is inferior to philosophy as a means of attaining knowledge, and that the understanding of religion which ordinary believers can have is very different and impoverished when compared with that available to the philosopher. When discussing political philosophy he advocates a leading role in the state for philosophers, and is generally disparaging of the qualities of theologians as political figures. Ibn Rushd’s philosophy is seen to be based upon a complex and original philosophy of languages which expresses his critique of the accepted methods of argument in Islamic philosophy up to his time. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY; AVERROISM; AVERROISM, JEWISH Further reading Ibn Rushd (1179–80) Fasl al-maqal (Decisive Treatise), ed. G. Hourani, Averroes on the Harmony of Religion and Philosophy , London: Luzac, 1961; repr. 1976. (Translation and discussion of the Fasl almaqal and two other short pieces on the same topic.) Leaman, O. (1988) Averroes and His Philosophy , Oxford: Clarendon Press; 2nd edn, Richmond: Curzon, 1997. (A general account of his philosophy.) OLIVER LEAMAN IBN SAB‘IN, MUHAMMAD IBN ‘ABD AL-HAQQ (1217–68) The Spanish Muslim writr Ibn Sab‘in is well-known in Islamic philosophy for presenting perhaps the most radical form of Sufism. He argued that everything is really just one thing, part of the deity, and that breaking up reality into different units is to deny the nature of
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Page 378 creation. He was hostile as a result to the attempts of the philosophers who were inspired by Aristotle to develop logic as a means to understand reality. The best way to attain the truth is the mystical path, and this is achieved by appreciating the unity of everything, not by analysing reality into separable concepts. See also: MYSTICAL PHILOSOPHY IN ISLAM Further reading Taftazani, A. and Leaman, O. (1996) ‘Ibn Sab‘in’, in S.H. Nasr and O. Leaman (eds) The History of Islamic Philosophy , London: Routledge, 346–9. (General account of Ibn Sab‘in’s thought and times.) ELSAYED M. H. OMRAN IBN SINA, ABU ‘ALI AL-HUSAYN (980–1037) Ibn Sina (Avicenna) was born near Bukhara in Central Asia. He is one of the foremost philosophers in the Medieval Hellenistic Islamic tradition that also includes al-Farabi and Ibn Rushd. His philosophical theory is a comprehensive, detailed and rationalistic account of the nature of God and Being, in which he finds a systematic place for the corporeal world, spirit, insight, and the varieties of logical thought including dialectic, rhetoric and poetry. Central to Ibn Sina’s philosophy is his concept of reality and reasoning. Reason, in his scheme, can allow progress through various levels of understanding and can finally lead to God,the ultimate truth. He stresses the importance of gaining knowledge, and develops a theory of knowledge based on four faculties: sense perception, retention, imagination and estimation. Imagination has the principal role in intellection, as it can compare and construct images which give it access to universals. Again the ultimate object of knowledge is God, the pure intellect. In metaphysics, Ibn Sina makes a distinction between essence and existence; essence considers only the nature of things, and should be considered apart from their mental and physical realization. This distinction applies to all things except God, whom Ibn Sina identifies as the first cause and therefore both essence and existence. He also argued that the soul is incorporeal and cannot be destroyed. The soul, in his view, is an agent with choice in this world between good and evil, which in turn leads to reward or punishment. Reference has sometimes been made to Ibn Sina’s supposed mysticism, but this would appear to be based on a misreading by Western philosophers of parts of his work. As one of the most important practitioners of philosophy, Ibn Sina exercised a strong influence over both other Islamic philosophers and medieval Europe. His work was one of the main targets of al-Ghazali’s attack on Hellenistic influences in Islam. In Latin translations, his works influenced many Christian philosophers, most notably Thomas Aquinas. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY; SOUL IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY Further reading Ibn Sina (980–1037) al-Isharat wa-’l-tanbihat (Remarks and Admonitions) , ed. S. Dunya, Cairo, 1960; parts translated by S.C. Inati, Remarks and Admonitions, Part One: Logic , Toronto, Ont.: Pontifical Institute for Mediaeval Studies, 1984, and Ibn Sina and Mysticism, Remarks and Admonitions: Part 4, London: Kegan Paul International, 1996. (The English translation is very useful for what it shows of the philosopher’s conception of logic, the varieties of syllogism, premises and so on.) Goodman, L. (1992) Avicenna , London: Routledge. (A useful introduction to central features of Ibn Sina’s philosophical theories.) SALIM KEMAL IBN TAYMIYYA, TAQI AL–DIN (1263–1328) The Syrian Ibn Taymiyya was a staunch defender of Sunni Islam based on strict adherence to the Qur’an and authentic sunna (practices) of the Prophet Muhammad. He believed that these two sources contain all the religious and spiritual guidance necessary for our salvation in the hereafter. Thus he rejected the arguments and ideas of both philosophers and Sufis regarding religious knowledge, spiritual experiences and ritual practices. He believed that logic is not a reliable means of attaining religious truth and that the intellect must be subservient to revealed truth. He also came into conflict with many of his fellow Sunni scholars because of his rejection of the rigidity of the schools of jurisprudence in Islam. He believed that the four accepted schools of jurisprudence had become stagnant and sectarian, and also that they were being improperly influenced by aspects of Greek logic and thought as well as Sufi mysticism. His challenge to the leading scholars of the day was to return to an understanding
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Page 379 of Islam in practice and in faith, based solely on the Qur’an and sunna. See also: LAW, ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328) al-Jawab al-sahih liman baddala din al-masah (The Correct Answer to the One Who Changed the Religion of the Messiah), trans. T.F. Michel, A Muslim Theologian’s Response to Christianity , Delmar, NY: Caravan Books, 1984. (This is an abridged translation, with an excellent introduction to Ibn Taymiyya’s polemics against various groups and an extensive bibliography.) JAMES PAVLIN IBN TUFAYL, ABU BAKR MUHAMMAD (before 1110–85) The thought of the Spanish Muslim writer Ibn Tufayl can be captured in his only extant work, Hayy Ibn Yaqzan (The Living Son of the Vigilant), a philosophical treatise in a charming literary form. It relates the story of human knowledge, as it rises from a blank slate to a mystical or direct experience of God after passing through the necessary natural experiences. The focal point of the story is that human reason, unaided by society and its conventions or by religion, can achieve scientific knowledge, preparing the way to the mystical or highest form of human knowledge. The story also seeks to show that, while religious truth is the same as that of philosophy, the former is conveyed through symbols, which are suitable for the understanding of the multitude, and the latter is conveyed in its inner meanings apart from any symbolism. Since people have different capacities of understanding that require the use of different instruments, there is no point in trying to convey the truth to people except through means suitable for their understanding. See also: MYSTICISM IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY Further reading Hawi, S. (1974) Islamic Naturalism and Mysticism: A Philosophical Study of Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy Yaqzan, Leiden: Brill. (Study of Hayy Ibn Yaqzan.) Ibn Tufayl (before 1185) Hayy Ibn Yaqzan (The Living Son of the Vigilant), ed. L. Gauthier, Beirut: Catholic Press, 1936; trans. L. Goodman, Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, a Philosophical Tale, New York: Twain Publishers, 1972. (Ibn Tufayl’s only extant work, this book captures his main philosophical thought.) SHAMS C. INATI IBN TZADDIK, JOSEPH BEN JACOB (d. 1149) Joseph ibn Tzaddik was a Spanish Jewish thinker firmly within the Neoplatonic tradition of Jewish philosophy. He argued that through knowledge of our own body we understand the natural world, and through knowledge of our soul the spiritual world. He identified prophecy with philosophy and suggested that we need to employ both philosophy and the religious commandments in order to worship God. Not everyone can understand philosophy, but everyone can follow the commandments and thus approach God. Human beings will receive their deserts in the next world. The pure soul will rise to the realm of spirituality, while the evil soul will be heavy and sink into matter, never achieving repose but continually caught up in the movement of the spheres. See also: IBN GABIROL Further reading Guttman, J. (1966) Philosophies of Judaism , New York: Anchor Books. (A history of Jewish philosophy, including material on Ibn Tzaddik.) TAMAR RUDAVSKY I-CHING see YIJING IDEALISM Idealism is now usually understood in philosophy as the view that mind is the most basic reality and that the physical world exists only as an appearance to or expression of mind, or as somehow mental in its inner essence. However, a philosophy which makes the physical world dependent upon mind is usually also called idealist even if it postulates some further hidden, more basic reality behind the mental and physical scenes (for example, Kant’s things-in-themselves). There is also a certain tendency to restrict the term ‘idealism’ to systems for which what is basic is mind of a somewhat lofty nature, so that ‘spiritual values’ are the ultimate shapers of reality. (An older and broader use counts as idealist any view for which the physical world is somehow unreal compared with some more ultimate, not necessarily mental, reality conceived as the source of value, for example Platonic forms.) The founding fathers of idealism in Western
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Page 380 thought are Berkeley (theistic idealism), Kant (transcendental idealism) and Hegel (absolute idealism). Although the precise sense in which Hegel was an idealist is problematic, his influence on subsequent absolute or monistic idealism was enormous. In the US and the UK idealism, especially of the absolute kind, was the dominating philosophy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, receiving its most forceful expression with F.H. Bradley. It declined, without dying, under the influence of G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, and later of the logical positivists. Not a few philosophers believe, however, that it has a future. See also: GERMAN IDEALISM Further reading Kant, I. (1781) Critique of Pure Reason , trans. N. Kemp Smith, London: Macmillan, 1933. (The classic statement of Kant’s transcendental idealism, one of the greatest and most influential works in the history of philosophy.) Sturt, H. (ed.) (1902) Personal Idealism: Philosophical Essays by Eight Members of the University of Oxford, London: Macmillan. (Personal idealist manifesto against the submerging of the individual by absolute idealism. See especially the contributions of F.C.S. Schiller and Hastings Rashdall.) T.L.S. SPRIGGE IDEALISM, GERMAN see GERMAN IDEALISM IDEALIZATIONS Scientific analyses of particular phenomena are invariably simplified or idealized. The universe does not contain only two bodies as assumed in Newton’s derivation of Kepler’s laws, or only one body as assumed in Schwarzschild’s relativistic update; real economic agents do not act exclusively to maximize expected utilities, the surfaces of ordinary plate condensers are not infinitely extended planes, and the sine of an angle is not equal in measure to the angle itself. There are many reasons for the use of such misdescriptions. First and foremost is the need to achieve mathematical tractability. Science gets nowhere unless numbers, or numerical constraints, are produced that can form the basis of predictions and explanations. Idealizations may also be required because of the unavailability of certain data or because of the absence of necessary auxiliary theories. The philosophical problem is to make normative sense of this common but complex scientific practice. For example, how can theories be tested given that they connect to the world only through the intermediary of idealized descriptions? In what sense can there be scientific explanations if what is to be explained must be misdescribed before theory can be brought to bear? The fact that idealizations can often be improved, with corresponding salutary effect on the accuracy of prediction or usefulness of explanation, suggests that idealizations should be understood as part of some sort of convergent process. See also: MODELS; THEORIES, SCIENTIFIC Further reading Cartwright, N. (1983) How the Laws of Physics Lie , Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Discusses many interesting scientific cases and presents a very original view of the relevance of the use of idealizations for scientific realism and instrumentalism.) RONALD LAYMON IDEALS Ideals are models of excellence. They can be moral or nonmoral, and either ‘substantive’ or ‘deliberative’. Substantive ideals present models of excellence against which things in a relevant class can be assessed, such as models of the just society or the good person. Deliberative ideals present models of excellent deliberation, leading to correct or warranted ethical conclusions. Ideals figure in ethics in two opposed ways. Most centrally, ideals serve to justify ethical judgments and to guide people in how to live. Sometimes, however, ideals may conflict with moral demands, thereby testing the limits of morality. Reliance upon ideals in the development of ethical theories seems unavoidable but raises difficult questions. How can the choice of a particular ideal be justified? How might conflicts between ideals and other values, especially moral demands, be resolved? See also: PERFECTIONISM Further reading Anderson, E. (1993) Value in Ethics and Economics , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Develops a clear and accessible ideal-based theory of value.) Hare, R.M. (1963) Freedom and Reason , Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Contains discussion of
conflicts between ideals and interests and how this may limit the scope of moral argument as Hare depicts it.) CONNIE S. ROSATI
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Page 381 IDENTITY Anything whatsoever has the relation of identity to itself, and to nothing else. Things are identical if they are one thing, not two. We can refute the claim that they are identical if we can find a property of one that is not simultaneously a property of the other. The concept of identity is fundamental to logic. Without it, counting would be impossible, for we could not distinguish in principle between counting one thing twice and counting two different things. When we have acquired the concept, it can still be difficult to make this distinction in practice. Misjudgments of identity are possible because one thing can be presented in many guises. Identity judgments often involve assumptions about the nature of things. The identity of the present mature tree with the past sapling implies persistence through change. The non-identity of the actual child of one couple with the hypothetical child of a different couple is implied by the claim that ancestry is an essential property. Knowledge of what directions are involves knowledge that parallel lines have identical directions. Many controversies over identity concern the nature of the things in question. Others concern challenges to the orthodox conception just sketched of identity itself. See also: IDENTITY OF INDISCERNIBLES; PERSONAL IDENTITY Further reading Kripke, S.A. (1980) Naming and Necessity , Oxford: Blackwell. (A basic work on the connection between identity and necessity.) Noonan, H.W. (ed.) (1993) Identity , Aldershot: Dartmouth. (Collects many relevant articles.) TIMOTHY WILLIAMSON IDENTITY AND MORALITY see MORALITY AND IDENTITY IDENTITY OF INDISCERNIBLES The principle of the identity of indiscernibles states that objects which are alike in all respects are identical. It is sometimes called Leibniz’s Law. This name is also frequently used for the converse principle, the indiscernibility of identicals, that objects which are identical are alike in all respects. Both principles together are sometimes taken to define the concept of identity. Unlike the indiscernibility of identicals, which is widely accepted as a logical truth, the identity of indiscernibles principle has frequently been doubted and rejected. The principle is susceptible of more precise formulation in a number of ways, some more dubitable than others. Further reading Mates, B. (1986) The Philosophy of Leibniz: Metaphysics and Language, New York: Oxford University Press. (Chapter 7, §3 discusses the identity of indiscernibles principle in Leibniz.) PETER SIMONS IDENTITY, POSTMODERN THEORIES OF see ALTERITY AND IDENTITY, POSTMODERN THEORIES OF IDENTITY THEORY OF MIND see MIND, IDENTITY THEORY OF IDEOLOGY An ideology is a set of ideas, beliefs and attitudes, consciously or unconsciously held, which reflects or shapes understandings or misconceptions of the social and political world. It serves to recommend, justify or endorse collective action aimed at preserving or changing political practices and institutions. The concept of ideology is split almost irreconcilably between two major senses. The first is pejorative, denoting particular, historically distorted (political) thought which reinforces certain relationships of domination and in respect of which ideology functions as a critical unmasking concept. The second is a non-pejorative assertion about the different families of cultural symbols and ideas human beings employ in perceiving, comprehending and evaluating social and political realities in general, often within a systemic framework. Those families perform significant mapping and integrating functions. A major division exists within this latter category. Some analysts claim that the study of ideology can be non-evaluative in establishing scientific facts about the way political beliefs reflect the social world and propel people to specific action within it. Others hold that ideology injects specific politically value-laden meanings into conceptualizations of the social world which are inevitably indeterminate, and is consequently a means of constructing rather than reflecting that world. This also applies to interpretations undertaken by the analysts of ideology themselves. Further reading Bell, D. (1960) The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties ,
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Page 382 Glencoe, IL: Free Press. (The most prominent statement on the subject.) Larrain, J. (1979) The Concept of Ideology , London: Hutchinson. (A sophisticated overview, supportive of the critical function of ideology.) MICHAEL FREEDEN IKHWAN AL-SAFA’ The philosophy of the group of Arab philosophers of the fourth or fifth century AH (tenth or eleventh century AD) known as the Ikhwan alSafa’ (Brethren of Purity) is a curious but fascinating mixture of the Qur’anic, the Aristotelian and the Neoplatonic. The group wrote fifty-two epistles, which are encyclopedic in range, covering matters as diverse as arithmetic, theology, magic and embryology. Their numerology owes a debt to Pythagoras, their metaphysics are Aristotelian and Neoplatonic and they incorporate also a few Platonic notions into their philosophy. The latter, however, is more than a mere synthesis of elements from Greek philosophy, for it is underpinned by a considerable Qur’anic substratum. There are profound links between the epistemology and the soteriology (doctrine of salvation) of the Ikhwan, and it would not be an exaggeration to say that the former feeds the latter. In the history of Islamic philosophy the Ikhwan illustrate a group where the Aristotelian and the Neoplatonic clash head-on and where no attempt is made to reconcile competing and contradictory notions of God, whom the Epistles treat in both Qur’anic and Neoplatonic fashion. The final goal of the Ikhwan is salvation; their Brotherhood is the ship of that salvation, and they foster a spirit of asceticism and good living accompanied by ‘actual knowledge’ as aids to that longed-for salvation. See also: ISLAMIC THEOLOGY; MYSTICAL PHILOSOPHY IN ISLAM Further reading Netton, I.R. (1982) Muslim Neoplatonists: An Introduction to the Thought of the Brethren of Purity (Ikhwan al-Safa’) , London: Allen & Unwin; paperback edn, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991. (A major introduction in English to the thought of the Ikhwan.) IAN RICHARD NETTON IL’ENKOV, EVAL’D VASIL’EVICH (1924–79) Eval’d Il’enkov advanced a distinctive brand of Hegelian Marxism that was influential in the rejuvenation of Soviet philosophy after Stalin. Il’enkov draws on Hegel and Marx to argue that non-material phenomena can exist as genuine features of objective reality independent of the consciousness and will of individuals. Il’enkov argues that the existence of such phenomena, conceived as objectifications of human social activity, is central to the explanation of the nature and possibility of the human mind. The world becomes a possible object of thought through its ‘idealization’ by activity, and children attain mental capacities in the full sense only through the appropriation of the ideal as it exists objectified in ‘humanity’s spiritual culture’. Il’enkov’s defence of the reality of culture represents a critique of positivism and scientism, a critique he pursued in many other writings. A tireless opponent of reductionist theories of mind and ‘biological determinist’ theories of human development, he advanced a view of persons as socially constituted beings and stressed socialism’s obligation to create the circumstances in which human beings may develop their almost limitless potential. Like many in the post-Stalin era, his criticism of the Soviet philosophical establishment takes the form of a call for a genuinely orthodox form of Marxism, faithful to the spirit of Marx’s thought. See also: MARXIST PHILOSOPHY, RUSSIAN AND SOVIET Further reading Bakhurst, D.J. (1991) Consciousness and Revolution in Soviet Philosophy. From the Bolsheviks to Evald Ilyenkov, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. (An account of Il’enkov’s thought, set in the context of the history of the Soviet philosophical tradition.) Il’enkov, E.V. (1960) Dialektika abstraktnogo i konkretnogo v ’Kapitale’ Marksa, Moscow: Akademiia nauk; trans. S. Syrovatkin, The Dialectics of the Abstract and the Concrete in Marx’s ‘Capital’, Moscow: Progress, 1982. (Il’enkov’s influential work on Marx’s method; said to have been heavily censored before publication.) DAVID BAKHURST IL’IN, IVAN ALEKSANDROVICH (1883–1954) Educated in law and philosophy in the first years of the twentieth century at Moscow
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Page 383 University and several Western European universities, Il’in produced an important two-volume commentary on Hegel’s philosophy (1918), and a number of substantial works in political and legal theory, ethics and religious thought, aesthetics and literary criticism in later years. As a resolute foe of the Bolsheviks before and after the Revolution of 1917, he was exiled by them in 1922, living in Berlin until 1938, and subsequently in Switzerland until his death. Throughout his exile he remained deeply devoted to his Russian homeland, circulating extensive proposals for the eventual reconstruction of the Russian state, Church and society following the collapse of the Soviet regime (see Nashi zadachi (Our Tasks) (1956a)). He developed his own distinctive theory of monarchy as an ideal political form, grounded in a doctrine of natural right, and advocated it as the most appropriate choice for Russia in the best case, though he withheld judgment as to whether it would prove historically possible to implement it in the conditions prevailing after the demise of the Soviet system. His writing also focused to a significant extent upon moral and spiritual discipline and renewal, for societies as well as individuals, as necessary conditions of the well-ordered state and the well-lived life. See also: HEGELIANISM, RUSSIAN Further reading Grier, P.T. (1994) ‘The Complex Legacy of Ivan Il’in’, in Russian Thought After Communism: The Recovery of a Philosophical Heritage, ed. J.P. Scanlan, Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 165–86. (A discussion of the contemporary revival and reception of Il’in’s writings in Russia.) —— (1997) ‘The Speculative Concrete: I.A. Il’in’s Interpretation of Hegel’, in Hegel, History and Interpretation, ed. S. Gallagher, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 169–93. (An examination of distinguishing features of Il’in’s interpretation of Hegel.) PHILIP T. GRIER ILLUMINATI Begun in 1776 in Bavaria, the Illuminati were an overtly political as well as morally orientated secret organization that imitated the forms of freemasonry. While masonic lodges forbade discussion of politics and religion at their meetings, the Illuminati did the reverse. They were openly yet paradoxically secret about their irreligion and their devotion to the radical French Enlightenment; and they wanted reform in the absolutist states of Central Europe. The authorities arrested and persecuted them, but their activism foreshadows the French Revolution and a desire for more representative systems of government in Continental Europe. Despite the notoriety of the Illuminati, no more than about 600 members have been identified. See also: ENLIGHTENMENT, CONTINENTAL Further reading Jacob M.C., (1991) Living the Enlightenment. Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth Century Europe , New York: Oxford University Press. (A survey of European freemasonry from its foundation in England in 1717 to the French revolution.) MARGARET C. JACOB ILLUMINATION The most influential theories of illumination explain certain features of our knowledge by developing an analogy with ordinary sensory vision and the role played in it by light. According to theories of this sort, our knowledge of necessary and immutable objects and truths requires the activity of a kind of intelligible light illumining objects that are purely intelligible, thereby making them ‘visible’ to our mind. Plato held that this light comes from the Form of the Good, Augustine that it comes from God, and others that it is intrinsic to reason itself. The peculiar nature and behaviour of light has provided a model not just for theories of knowledge but also for philosophical accounts of fundamental features of reality. Neoplatonist cosmologies, for example, liken the genesis of the universe to the emanation of rays of light from a light source. Theories of illumination therefore can be metaphysical as well as epistemological. Both kinds of theory have their historical roots in Platonism broadly construed. See also: ILLUMINATIONIST PHILOSOPHY Further reading Plotinus ( c .260) Enneads, trans. A.H. Armstrong, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966–88, 7 vols. (Plotinus develops Platonist themes into full-blown cosmological emanationism.) SCOTT MacDONALD ILLUMINATIONIST PHILOSOPHY Illuminationist philosophy started in twelfth-century Persia, and has been an important force
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Page 384 in Islamic, especially Persian, philosophy right up to the present day. It presents a critique of some of the leading ideas of Aristotelianism, as represented by the philosophy of Ibn Sina (Avicenna), and argues that many of the distinctions which are crucial to the character of that form of philosophy are misguided. Illuminationists develop a view of reality in accordance with which essence is more important than existence, and intuitive knowledge is more significant than scientific knowledge. They use the notion of light, as the name suggests, as a way of exploring the links between God, the Light of Lights, and his creation. The result is a view of the whole of reality as a continuum, with the physical world being an aspect of the divine. This sort of language proved to be very suggestive for mystical philosophers, and Illuminationism quickly became identified with Islamic mysticism. See also: MYSTICAL PHILOSOPHY IN ISLAM Further reading Netton, I. (1989) Allah Transcendent: Studies in the Structure and Semiotics of Islamic Philosophy, Theology and Cosmology, London: Routledge. (Very clear account of the metaphysics of illuminationism.) Walbridge, J. (1992) The Science of Mystic Lights: Qutb al-Din Shirazi and the Illuminationist Tradition in Islamic Philosophy , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (A commentaary on al-Suhrawardi and Ibn Sina, with an excellent discussion of the leading principles of illuminationism.) HOSSEIN ZIAI OLIVER LEAMAN IMAGERY Most philosophers prior to the twentieth century thought of mental images as inner pictures, along lines suggested by introspection. But there are obvious differences between mental images and pictures. The former have no objective size or shape, for example. These differences have led some philosophers to argue that mental images are more like linguistic descriptions. The descriptional view of images is also taken by some cognitive psychologists. Other psychologists maintain that the pictorial conception of images provides the best explanation for the results of a number of intriguing experiments on imagery. See also: VISION Further reading Block, N. (ed.) (1981) Imagery, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (Useful anthology of central papers on both the philosophy and psychology of images.) Tye, M. (1991) The Imagery Debate , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (Summary of the debate between pictorialism and descriptionalism and elaboration of an intermediate position.) MICHAEL TYE IMAGINATION ‘Imagination’ and ‘imagine’ enjoy a family of meanings, only some of which imply the use of mental imagery. If I ask you to imagine a red flower, I will likely be inviting you to form an image. But if, for example, I say that I imagine that I will go to the party after taking a nap, I am not obviously giving voice to mental imagery. A variety of questions has arisen concerning imagination in its various forms, of which the following four are central. How do internal acts of imagining come to be about particular external objects and states of affairs, actual and non-actual? How are perceptual acts similar to and different from the central cases of imagining? To what extent does routine perception and cognition use similar cognitive resources to creative imagination? Are there any cognitive pursuits in which imagination can play a justificatory role? See also: IMAGERY Further reading Strawson, P.F. (1970) ‘Imagination and Perception’ in L. Foster and J.W. Swanson (eds) Experience and Theory , 31–54. (Contains excellent discussion of Hume and Kant.) Warnock, M. (1976) Imagination , London: Faber & Faber. (Useful history of the concept of imagination from Hume to the twentieth century, aimed at bringing out the importance for education of cultivating the imagination.) J. O’LEARY-HAWTHORNE IMMANUEL BEN SOLOMON OF ROME ( c .1261–before 1336) The son of a rabbi, Immanuel of Rome wrote commentaries on the Bible and poems of a religious, philosophical or jocular nature, concerning the most varied themes. His main topics are conjunction with the ‘active intellect’ and the superiority of theoretical knowledge. He participated in many of the leading controversies of his
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Page 385 time and is interesting for the ways in which he managed to express theoretical ideas poetically. Further reading Sermoneta, G. (1976) ‘Yehudah and Immanuel ha-Romi, "Rationalism Culminating in Mystical Faith"’, in M. Hallamish and M. Schwarz (eds) Revelation, Faith, Reason , Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University, 54–70. (Examines Immanuel’s doctrine of conjunction with the active intellect.) CATERINA RIGO IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL see SOUL, NATURE AND IMMORTALITY OF IMMUTABILITY The doctrine of divine immutability consists in the assertion that God cannot undergo real change. Plato and Boethius infer divine immutability from God’s perfection, Aristotle from God’s being the first cause of change, Augustine from God’s having created time. Aquinas derives divine immutability from God’s simplicity, his having no parts or attributes which are distinct from himself. All of these arguments finally appeal to aspects of God’s perfection; thus, the doctrine of divine immutability grew from a convergence of intuitions about perfection. These intuitions dominated Western thought about God well into the nineteenth century. The doctrine’s foes argue that God’s power, providence and knowledge require its rejection. Their arguments contend that since the world does in fact change through time, this must entail change in God. If God responds to changing historical circumstances and to prayers, that would seem to require some sort of change in him (from not responding to responding). And if he does not intervene to prevent a war, for example, then after the war, he will have lost the power to prevent it (assuming, as many do, that God cannot alter the past), so again there is a change of state. Finally, it is argued that God’s knowledge of tensed truths (for example, ‘it is now noon’) must change as what time ‘now’ is changes. Some responses to these arguments appeal to the claim that God is in some sense outside time. See also: NECESSARY BEING; PROCESS THEISM Further reading Leftow, B. (1991) Time and Eternity , Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. (Treats divine immutability and related issues in defending divine timelessness. Rigorous but not technical.) Sorabji, R. (1983) Time, Creation and the Continuum , Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. (Valuable, clear treatment of many issues related to divine immutability.) BRIAN LEFTOW IMPARTIALITY On the one hand, most of us feel that we are permitted, even required, to give special consideration to the interests of ourselves and our loved ones; on the other hand, we also recognize the appeal of a more detached perspective which demands equal consideration for the interests of all. Among writers in the utilitarian tradition, some insist that the strictly impartial perspective is the only one that is ethically tenable, while others argue that a measure of institutionalized partiality can be justified as a means to maximizing welfare. An alternative tradition, stemming from Kant, sees the demand for impartiality as deriving from the importance of fairness and equal respect for persons, but tends to leave open the degree of partiality permitted. Finally, the Aristotelian conception of ethics offers a justification of partiality based on the structure of those virtuous dispositions of character (such as those involved in friendship and self-esteem) which are required for developing our distinctively human potentialities. See also: EQUALITY; JUSTICE Further reading Godwin, W. (1793) An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice , London: G.G. and J. Robinson, 3rd edn, 1798; 3rd edn, ed. I. Kramnick, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985, book II, ch. 2. (Introduces the dilemma of whether to rescue a philanthropic archbishop or a chambermaid, who happens to be my mother, from a burning building.) Nagel, T. (1991) Equality and Partiality , New York: Oxford University Press. (A compelling account of the conflict between the impersonal and the personal perspectives in ethics.) JOHN COTTINGHAM IMPERATIVE LOGIC Imperatives lie at the heart of both practical and moral reasoning, yet they have been overshadowed by propositions and relegated by many philosophers to the status of exclamations. One reason for this is that a sentence’s having literal meaning seems to require its having truth-conditions and ‘Keep your promises!’ appears to lack such conditions, just as ‘Ouch!’ does. One reductionist attempt to develop a
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Page 386 imperatives translates them into declaratives and construes inferential relations among the former in terms of inferential relations among the latter. Since no such reduction seems fully to capture the meaning of imperatives, others have expanded our notion of inference to include not just truth – but also satisfaction – preservation, according to which an imperative is satisfied just in case what it enjoins is brought about. A logic capturing what is distinctive about imperatives may shed light on the question whether an ‘ought’ is derivable from an ‘is’; and may elucidate the claim that morality is, or comprises, a system of hypothetical imperatives. Furthermore, instructions, which are often formulated as imperatives (‘Take two tablets on an empty stomach!’), are crucial to the construction of plans of action. A proper understanding of imperatives and their inferential properties may thus also illuminate practical reasoning. See also: PRAGMATICS; SPEECH ACTS Further reading Austin, J.L. (1962) How to Do Things with Words, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (A classic work in the theory of speech acts. Defends a version of the ‘I order you to. . . ’ species of reduction.) Hamblin, C.L. (1987) Imperatives , New York: Blackwell. (Best full-length treatment to date of the grammar, semantics and pragmatics of imperatives. Includes an extensive bibliography.) MITCHELL GREEN IMPLICATURE A term used in philosophy, logic and linguistics (especially pragmatics) to denote the act of meaning or implying something by saying something else. A girl who says ‘I have to study’ in response to ‘Can you go to the movies?’ has implicated (the technical verb for making an implicature) that she cannot go. Implicatures may depend on the conversational context, as in this example, or on conventions, as when a speaker says ‘He was clever but poor’, thereby implying – thanks to the conventional usage of the word ‘but’ – that poverty is unexpected given intelligence. Implicature gained importance through the work of H.P. Grice. Grice proposed that conversational implicatures depend on a general principle of rational cooperation stating that people normally try to further the accepted purpose of the conversation by conveying what is true, informative, relevant and perspicuous. The extent and nature of the dependence, and the precise maxims involved, are matters of controversy. Other issues include whether certain implications are implicatures rather than presuppositions or parts of the senses (literal meanings) of the words used. See also: MEANING AND COMMUNICATION; PRAGMATICS Further reading Grice, H.P. (1989) Studies in the Ways of Words, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Contains all of Grice’s work on meaning and implicature, plus an introduction and retrospective epilogue.) Levinson, S.C. (1983) Pragmatics , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (A leading introduction to pragmatics, with an extensive discussion of conversational implicature and presupposition from a Gricean point of view.) WAYNE A. DAVIS INCARNATION AND CHRISTOLOGY It is a central and essential dogma of Christianity that Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified in Judea during the procuratorship (AD 26–36) of Pontius Pilate, and God, the eternal and omnipresent creator of the universe, were in some very strong sense ‘one’. The department of Christian theology that is devoted to the study of the nature and implications of this ‘oneness’ is called Christology. Orthodox Christology (unlike certain heretical Christologies) sees this oneness as a oneness of person, as consisting in the co-presence of two natures, the divine and the human, in one person, Jesus Christ. To speak plainly, orthodox Christology holds that there is someone, Jesus Christ, who is both divine and human. Because God pre-existed and is superior to every human being, orthodox theologians have found it natural to speak of the union of the divine and human natures in the person of Jesus Christ as something that happened to the pre-existent divine nature: at a certain point in time, at the moment of the conception of Jesus, it ‘took on flesh’ or ‘became incarnate’; in the words of the Athanasian Creed, the union of the two natures was accomplished ‘not by conversion of the God-head [ divinitas] into flesh, but by taking of the manhood into God’. This event, and the continuing union it established, are called ‘the Incarnation’. The Incarnation was not, according to Christian teaching, undone by Christ’s death (his corpse – a human corpse – continued to be united with the divine nature by the same
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Page 387 bond by which the living man had been united) or by his ‘Ascension’ (his ‘withdrawal’ from the everyday world of space and time forty days after the Resurrection), and it will never be undone: the Incarnation is eternal. The primary statements of the dogma of the Incarnation are the Definition issued by the Council of Chalcedon (AD 451) and the Athanasian Creed (fifth century; its origins are obscure). The creed issued by the Council of Nicaea (AD 325) and the longer, revised version of this creed that is today used liturgically (and commonly called ‘the Nicene Creed’) contain nothing of substance that is not found in the two later statements. See also: SIMPLICITY, DIVINE Further reading Kelly, J.N.D. (1960) Early Christian Doctrines , London: A. & C. Black, 2nd edn. (The source of the translation of the Definition of Chalcedon quoted in the text; see especially pages 339–41.) McGrath, A.E. (1994) Christian Theology: An Introduction , Oxford: Blackwell. (Recommended for readers with no background in theology or Church history. Clear and reliable. See especially chapter 9, ‘The Doctrine of the Person of Christ’.) PETER VAN INWAGEN INCOMMENSURABILITY When one scientific theory or tradition is replaced by another in a scientific revolution, the concepts involved often change in fundamental ways. For example, among other differences, in Newtonian mechanics an object’s mass is independent of its velocity, while in relativity mechanics, mass increases as the velocity approaches that of light. Earlier philosophers of science maintained that Einsteinian mechanics reduces to Newtonian mechanics in the limit of high velocities. However, Thomas Kuhn (1962) and Paul Feyerabend (1962, 1965) introduced a rival view. Kuhn argued that different scientific traditions are defined by their adherence to different paradigms , fundamental perspectives which shape or determine not only substantive beliefs about the world, but also methods, problems, standards of solution or explanation, and even what counts as an observation or fact. Scientific revolutions (changes of paradigm) alter all these profoundly, leading to perspectives so different that the meanings of words looking and sounding the same become utterly distinct in the pre- and post-revolutionary traditions. Thus, according to both Kuhn and Feyerabend, the concepts of mass employed in the Newtonian and Einsteinian traditions are incommensurable with one another, too radically different to be compared at all. The thesis that terms in different scientific traditions and communities are radically distinct, and the modifications that have stemmed from that thesis, became known as the thesis of incommensurability. Further readings Gutting, G. (ed.) (1980) Paradigms and Revolutions: Applications and Appraisals of Thomas Kuhn’s Philosophy of Science , Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press. (Articles on Kuhn, including both critical reviews and case studies.) Sankey, H. (1994) The Incommensurability Thesis, Sydney: Averbury Press. (Critical review of attempts to deal with the problem, with the author’s own views. Comprehensive bibliography.) DUDLEY SHAPERE INDETERMINISM see DETERMINISM AND INDETERMINISM INDEXICAL CONTENT see CONTENT, INDEXICAL INDIAN AND TIBETAN PHILOSOPHY The people of South Asia have been grappling with philosophical issues, and writing down their thoughts, for at least as long as the Europeans and the Chinese. When Hellenistic philosophers accompanied Alexander the Great on his military campaigns into the Indus valley, on the western edge of what is now the Republic of India, they expressed delight and amazement upon encountering Indians who thought as they thought and lived the sort of reflective life that they recommended living. Nearly all philosophical contributions in India were made by people writing (or speaking) commentaries on already existing texts; to be a philosopher was to interpret a text and to be part of a more or less well-defined textual tradition. It is common, therefore, when speaking of Indian philosophers, to identify them as belonging to one school or another. To belong to a school of philosophy was a matter of having an interpretation of the principal texts that defined that school. At the broadest level of generalization, Indians of the classical period were either Hindus, Buddhists or Jainas (see BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY, INDIAN; HINDU PHILO SOPHY;
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Page 388 JAINA PHILOSOPHY). In addition to these three schools, all of which were in some sense religious, there was a more secular school in the classical period, whose tenets were materialistic and hedonistic (see MATERIALISM, INDIAN SCHOOL OF). The end of the classical period in Indian philosophy is customarily marked by the arrival of Muslims from Turkey and Persia at the close of the first millennium. The contributions of Indian Muslims added to the richness of Indian philosophy during the medieval period (see ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY). Writing was introduced into Tibet not long after the arrival of Buddhism from India in the seventh century. The earliest literature of Tibet was made up mostly of Buddhist texts, translated from Indian languages and from Chinese. Eventually, ideas associated with Bon, the indigenous religion of Tibet, were also written down. Tibetan philosophers followed the habit of Indians in that they made their principal contributions by writing commentaries on earlier texts (see TIBETAN PHILOSOPHY). Key Buddhist philosophers from Tibet are SA SKYA PAṆḌITA (1182–1251), TSONG KHA PA BLO BZANG GRAGS PA (1357–1419), RGYAL TSHAB DAR MA RIN CHEN (1364–1432), MKHAS GRUB DGE LEGS DPAL BZANG PO (1385–1438) and MI BSKYOD RDO RJE (1507–54). 1 Hindu philosophy The philosophical schools associated with what we now call Hinduism all had in common respect for the authority of the Veda (‘Knowledge’), scriptures accepted as a revealed body of wisdom, cosmological information and codes of societal obligations. The textual schools that systematized disciplines derived from the Veda were the Mīmāṃsā, the Nyāya, the Vaiśeṣika, the Sānnkhya and the various Vedānta schools (see MĪMĀṂSĀ; NYĀYA-VAIŚEṢ; SĀṄKHYA; VEDAĀNTA). Concerned as all these schools were with correct interpretation of the Veda, it is natural that questions of language were of paramount importance in Indian philosophy (see LANGUAGE, INDIAN THEORIES OF; MEANING, INDIAN THEORIES OF). These involved detailed investigation into how subjects are to be defined and how texts are to be interpreted (see DEFINITION, INDIAN CONCEPTS OF; INTERPRETATION, INDIAN THEORIES OF). Closely related to questions of language were questions of knowledge in general and its sources (see EPISTEMOLOGY, INDIAN SCHOOLS OF; KNOWLEDGE, INDIAN VIEWS OF). The two most important sources of knowledge that Indian philosophers discussed were sensation and inference, the theory of inference being important to the development of logic in India (see SENSE PERCEPTION, INDIAN VIEWS OF; INFERENCE, INDIAN THEORIES OF). Another topic about which Indian thinkers had much to say was the problem of how absences are known (see NEGATIVE FACTS IN CLASSICAL INDIAN PHILOSOPHY). Because of the importance of scriptures and religious teachers, epistemologists in India discussed the issue of the authority of texts and the question of the reliability of information conveyed through human language (see TESTIMONY IN INDIAN PHILOSOPHY). The questions associated with epistemology are in Indian philosophy often closely connected with questions of human psychology (see AWARENESS IN INDIAN THOUGHT; ERROR AND ILLUSION, INDIAN CONCEPTIONS OF). Most schools of Indian philosophy offered not only an epistemology but also an ontology (see ONTOLOGY IN INDIAN PHILOSOPHY). Many posited a personal creator god or an impersonal godhead (see GOD, INDIAN CONCEPTIONS OF; BRAHMAN; MONISM, INDIAN). Just how particular things come into being through creative agency or through impersonal natural laws was a matter of considerable debate (see CAUSATION, INDIAN THEORIES OF; COSMOLOGY AND COSMOGONY, INDIAN THEORIES OF). Indian thinkers also debated the precise nature of matter, the ontological status of universals, and how potentials become actualities (see MATTER, INDIAN CONCEPTIONS OF; UNIVERSALS, INDIAN THEORIES OF; POTENTIALITY, INDIAN THEORIES OF). In addition to epistemology and metaphysics, a third area that Indian systematic philosophers nearly always commented upon were issues concerning the nature of the human being (see SELF, INDIAN THEORIES OF; MIND, INDIAN PHILOSOPHY OF). This included thoughts on a variety of ethical questions and the rewards for living an ethical life (see DUTY AND VIRTUE, INDIAN CONCEPTIONS OF; KARMA AND REBIRTH, INDIAN CONCEPTIONS OF; FATALISM, INDIAN; HEAVEN, INDIAN CONCEPTIONS OF). While most thinkers dealt with individual ethics, some also gave attention to the question of collective behaviour and policy (see POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, INDIAN). The Hindu tradition produced a number of important individual philosophers. Among the earliest extant philosophers from India are the political theorist KAUTILYA (fourth century BC) and the grammarian and philosopher of language PATAÑJALI (second century BC). The
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Page 389 legendary founder of the Nyāya school, Akṣapāda GAUTAMA, is traditionally regarded as the author of a set of aphorisms that modern scholars believe were composed in the second or third century. These aphorisms present the basic ontological categories and epistemological principles that were followed not only by the Nyāya school but by many others as well. The philosopher of language BHARTṚHARI (fifth century) developed the intriguing idea that the basic stuff of which all the universe is made is an intelligence in the form of a readiness to use language. VĀTSYĀYANA (fifth century) and UDDYOTAKARA (sixth century) were both commentators on Gautama. The Vedānta systematist ŚAṄKARA (eighth century) wrote that realizing the underlying unity of all things in the form of Brahman could set one free. The aesthetician ABHINAVAGUPTA (tenth–eleventh century) made the education of the emotions through the cultivation of aesthetic sensitivity the basis of liberation from the turmoil of life. UDAYANA (eleventh century) of the Nyāya school developed important arguments for the existence of God. RĀMĀNUJA (eleventh–twelfth century) and MADHVA (thirteenth century), both Vedāntins, offered systems that became serious rivals to Śaṇkara’s monism. The work of the logician GAṆGEŚA (fourteenth century), who revised the classical system of logic and epistemology, became the foundation for an important new school of thought, Navya-Nyāya (‘New Nyāya’). MĀDHAVA (fourteenth century) and VALLABHĀCĀRYA (fifteenth–sixteenth century) made important contributions to Vedāntin philosophy. GADĀDHARA (seventeenth century) continued making advances in logical theory by building on the work of Ganngeśa. Also important in the sixteenth century were several thinkers who commented upon the religious thinker Caitanya (see GAUḌĪYA VAIṢṆAVISM). Finally, there were several thinkers and movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a period during which Indian intellectuals struggled to reconcile traditional Indian ways of thinking with European and especially British influences (see AUROBINDO GHOSE; GANDHI, M.K.; RADHAKRISHNAN, S.; TAGORE, R.; ARYA SAMAJ; BRAHMO SAMAJ; RAMAKRISHNA MOVEMENT). 2 Buddhist and Jaina philosophy As was the case for Hindu philosophy, Buddhist and Jaina Philosophy in India tended to proceed through commentaries on already existing texts. Jainism was founded by MAHĀVĪRA and is best known for its method of seeing every issue from every possible point of view (see MANIFOLDNESS, JAINA THEORY OF). The principal Buddhist traditions that incorporated significant philosophical discussions were those that tried to systematize doctrines contained in various corpora of texts believed to be the words of the Buddha (see BUDDHISM, ĀBHIDHARMIKA SCHOOLS OF; BUDDHISM, MĀDHYAMIKA: INDIA AND TIBET; BUDDHISM, YOGĀĀRA SCHOOL OF). An important issue for Buddhist thinkers, as for most Indian philosophers, was analysing the causes of discontent and suggesting a method for eliminating unhappiness, the cessation of suffering being a condition known as nirvāṇia (see SUFFERING, BUDDHIST VIEWS OF ORIGINATION OF; NIRVĀṆA). A doctrine of special interest to the Mādhyamika school was that everything is conditioned and therefore lacking independence (see BUDDHIST CONCEPT OF EMPTINESS). Some Buddhists developed the view that the conditioned world is so transitory that it disappears and is recreated in every moment (see MOMENTARINESS, BUDDHIST DOCTRINE OF). In the area of epistemology and philosophy of language, some Buddhists repudiated the Hindu confidence in the authority of the Veda (see NOMINALISM, BUDDHIST DOCTRINE OF). The Buddhist tradition gave India a number of important philosophers, beginning with the founder of the religion, the BUDDHA (fifth century BC). The first important Buddhist philosopher to write in Sanskrit and the man traditionally regarded as the founder of the Mādhyamika school was NĀGĀRJUNA (second century). A key commentator in both the Ābhidharmika schools and in the Yogācāra school was VASUBANDHU (fifth century). Two key Buddhist epistemologists and logicians were DIGNĀGA (fifth century) and DHARMAKĪRTI (seventh century). Buddhism disappeared from northern India in the twelfth century and from southern India a few centuries later. In the twentieth century, there has been an effort to revive it, especially among the community formerly known as ‘untouchables’. A remarkable leader of this community was Bhimrao Ramji AMBEDKAR. 3 Pronunciation of Sanskrit words Sanskrit is an Indo-European language, closely related to Greek and Latin. In India, it is written in a variety of phonetic scripts, and in the West it is customary to write it in roman script. Many letters used to write Sanskrit are pronounced almost as they are in English; k, g, j, t, d, n, p, b, m, y, r, l, s and h can be pronounced as in
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Page 390 English without too much distortion. The sound of the first consonant in the English word ‘church’ is represented by a simple ‘c’ in Sanskrit. In addition to these consonants there is a class of retroflex consonants, so called because the tongue is bent back so that the bottom side of the tongue touches the roof of the mouth. These sounds are represented by letters with dots under them: ṭ, ḍ, ṇ, ṣ. As in English, some consonants are heavily aspirated, so that they are pronounced with a slight puff of air. These consonants are represented by single letters in Indian scripts but by two-letter combinations in roman script; thus ‘kh’ is pronounced as the ‘k’ in English ‘kill’, ‘th’ as ‘t’ in ‘tame’ (never as ‘th’ in ‘thin’ or ‘there’), ‘dh’ as in ‘mudhouse’, and ‘ph’ as ‘p’ in ‘pat’ (never as ‘ph’ in ‘philosophy’). The letter ‘ś’ is approximately like ‘sh’ in ‘shingle’. The letter ‘n’ is like ‘ng’ in ‘finger’ or ‘nk’ in ‘sink’, while ‘ñ’ is approximately like ‘ny’ in ‘canyon’. Vowels are pronounced approximately as in Spanish or Italian. Vowels with a macron over them (ā, ī and ū) are pronounced for twice as much time as their unmarked equivalents. The vowel ‘ṛ’ is pronounced with the tip of the tongue elevated towards the roof of the mouth, very much like the ‘er’ in the American pronunciation of ‘carter’. The diphthongs ‘ai’ and ‘au’ are pronounced as ‘i’ in ‘kite’ and ‘ou’ in ‘scout’ (or almost as ‘ei’ and ‘au’ are pronounced in German) respectively. Accent tends to be on the third syllable from the end; thus the name ‘Śānkara’ sounds like ‘SHANG-ka-ra’, not ‘shang-KA-ra’. If the second syllable from the end is long, then it is accented; ‘Dignāga’ is pronounced ‘dig-NAA-ga’. 4 Pronunciation of Tibetan words Tibetan is a language of the Sino-Tibetan family, which includes various languages spoken in China as well as Burmese and Thai. It is written in a phonetic alphabet derived from the Brahmi script of India, from which most modern Indian scripts, as well as the alphabets used to write Sinhalese, Thai and Mon, are also derived. There are many different systems commonly used by Europeans to transliterate the spelling of Tibetan words. In this encyclopedia, the system designed by T. Wylie is used for transliteration, and a system used at the University of Virginia is used to indicate approximate pronunciation of names. The spelling of Tibetan words was fixed over a millennium ago and has not changed since. Pronunciation, however, has shifted. Unfortunately, it has not shifted in exactly the same way in every region of Tibet, with the result that the same written word may be pronounced quite differently in the east of Tibet from the way it is pronounced in the west and the central region. The University of Virginia system of indicating pronunciation captures the dialects of central Tibet, which have shifted the greatest distance from the pronunciations of a millennium ago. Consequently, many combinations of letters are not pronounced at all as they once were, and numerous letters have become silent in modern central Tibetan dialects. Given all these changes, the pronunciation of some Tibetan words can be surprisingly different from what one might expect from their spelling. Many single letters and combinations are pronounced about as in Sanskrit, as described above; so k, kh, g, n, c, j, ñ, t, th, d, n, p, ph, b, m, y, r, l, s and h can be pronounced as described there. The pairs of letters ‘ts’ and ‘dz’ represent single letters in the Tibetan alphabet and are pronounced as they would be in English ‘cats’ and ‘adze’ respectively. The letters ‘tsh’ represent a single Tibetan letter that is pronounced like an aspirated version of ‘ts’. The combination ‘sh’ is used to represent a Tibetan letter that is pronounced about like ‘sh’ in ‘show’. Some combinations of Tibetan letters are no longer pronounced as they were when spelling was fixed. Examples of this are ‘kr’, ‘tr’ and ‘pr’, all of which are now pronounced the same way, approximately as the ‘tr’ in ‘trick’. Similarly, ‘gr’, ‘dr’ and ‘br’ are all pronounced about like ‘dr’ in ‘drink’. When the letters ‘g’, ‘b’, ‘m’, ‘r’, ‘l’ and ‘s’ occur at the beginning of a syllable and are followed immediately by any consonant other than ‘r’ or ‘l’, they are usually silent. The letter ‘s’ at the end of a syllable is usually silent. Thus ‘bsdigs’ is pronounced somewhere between English ‘dig’ and ‘dick’. The Tibetan script does not have upper-case and lower-case letters, so there is no custom of writing proper names any differently from ordinary words. In roman transliteration, however, it is customary to capitalize the first pronounced letter of a name. In the name ‘rGyal tshab’, for example, the silent ‘r’ is not capitalized. Similarly, in ‘mKhas grub’ the silent ‘m’ is not upper case. Tibetan consonants are pronounced with no trace of aspiration or with heavy aspiration. To the English ear attuned to hearing aspiration about midway between that used in Tibetan consonants, Tibetan ‘t’ can sound like English ‘d’ and vice versa. Similarly, Tibetan ‘k’ and ‘p’ can sound like English ‘g’ and ‘b’ respectively. At the end of words, Tibetan ‘g’ and ‘b’ may
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Page 391 sound like English ‘k’ and ‘p’ respectively. It is for this reason that the Virginia phonetic system renders ‘Tsong kha pa’ as ‘Dzong-ka-ba’ and ‘rGyal tshab’ as ‘Gyel-tsap’. In the name ‘mKhas grub rje’ we can see many of the principles discussed above represented in its Virginia rendering as ‘kay-drup-jay’. See also: BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY, CHINESE; IQBAL, M.; SHAH WALI ALLAH (QUTB AL-DIN AHMAD ALRAHIM) Further reading Mohanty, J.N. (1992) Reason and Tradition in Indian Thought. An Essay on the Nature of Indian Philosophical Thinking , Oxford: Clarendon Press. (A thoughtful exploration of the principal issues of Indian philosophy.) Powers, J. (1995) Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism , Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion Publications. (A useful survey of the main schools of Tibetan Buddhism, as well as of the Bon tradition.) Raju, P.T. (1985) Structural Depths of Indian Thought, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. (A good survey of the different schools of Indian philosophy from ancient times to the present.) RICHARD P. HAYES INDICATIVE CONDITIONALS Examples of indicative conditionals are ‘If it rained, then the match was cancelled’ and ‘If Alex plays, Carlton will win’. The contrast is with subjunctive or counterfactual conditionals, such as ‘If it had rained, then the match would have been cancelled’, and categoricals, such as ‘It will rain’. Despite the ease with which we use and understand indicative conditionals, the correct account of them has proved to be very difficult. Some say that ‘If it rained, the match was cancelled’ is equivalent to ‘Either it did not rain, or the match was cancelled’. Some say that the sentence asserts that the result of ‘adding’ the supposition that it rained to the actual situation is to give a situation in which the match was cancelled. Some say that to assert that if it rained then the match was cancelled is to make a commitment to inferring that the match was cancelled should one learn that it rained. This last view is often combined with the view that indicative conditionals are not, strictly speaking, true or false; rather, they are more or less assertible or acceptable. See also: RELEVANCE LOGIC AND ENTAILMENT Further reading Appiah, A. (1985) Assertion and Conditionals , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (A detailed exposition of an account of indicative conditionals in terms of assertibility, set within the philosophy of mind.) Jackson, F. (1987) Conditionals , Oxford: Blackwell. (A detailed defence of the supplemented equivalence theory with criticisms of various alternative accounts of indicative conditionals.) FRANK JACKSON INDIRECT DISCOURSE Indirect discourse is a mode of speech-reporting whereby a speaker conveys the content of someone’s utterance without quoting the actual words. Thus, if Pierre says, ‘Paris est belle’, an English speaker might truly say, (1) Pierre said that Paris is beautiful. In English, sentences of indirect discourse often have the form ‘A said that s’, where ‘A’ refers to a person and ‘s’ is often called the ‘content sentence’ of the report. Sentences of indirect discourse have been classed with attributions of belief (and other psychological states) in view of an apparent conflict with the ‘principle of the intersubstitutability of coreferring terms’, which states that the truth-value of a sentence does not alter if one term in a sentence is replaced with another referring to the same thing. If (1) is true and ‘Paris’ and ‘the City of Light’ refer to the same thing, (2) may still be false: (2) Pierre said that the City of Light is beautiful. See also: PROPOSITIONAL ATTITUDE STATEMENTS Further reading Geach, P.T. (1957) Mental Acts , London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (A general work in the philosophies of mind and language, including extended discussion of the relationship between saying and propositional attitudes such as believing or judging.) GABRIEL SEGAL INDUCTION, EPISTEMIC ISSUES IN Consider the following: (1) Emeralds have been regularly dug up and observed for centuries; while there are still emeralds yet
to be observed, every one observed so far has been green.
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Page 392 It is easy to see why we regard (1) as evidence, if true, that: (2) Every emerald observed up until 100 years ago was green. (1) logically implies (2): there is no way (1) could be true without (2) being true as well. It is less easy to see why we should think that (1), if true, is any evidence at all that: (3) All hitherto unobserved emeralds are green as well. (1) does not logically imply (3): it is consistent with (1) that (3) be false – that the string of exclusively green emeralds is about to come to an end. None the less, we do regard (1) as evidence, if true, that (3). What, if anything, justifies our doing so? To answer this question would be to take a first step towards solving what is known as the ‘problem of induction’. But only a first step. There is, at least on the surface, a wide variety of arguments that share the salient features of the argument from (1) to (3): their premises do not logically imply their conclusions, yet we think that their premises, if true, constitute at least some evidence that their conclusions are true. A fully fledged solution to the problem of induction would have to tell us, for each of these arguments, what justifies our regarding its premises as evidence that its conclusion is true. Still, the question as to how this step might be taken has been the focus of intense philosophical scrutiny, and the approaches outlined in this entry have been among the most important. See also: CONFIRMATION THEORY; INDUCTIVE INFERENCE Further reading Swinburne, R. (ed.) (1974) The Justification of Induction, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Collection of important papers on the topic, particularly on the pragmatic, inductive and ordinary-language approaches.) MARK KAPLAN INDUCTIVE DEFINITIONS AND PROOFS An inductive definition of a predicate R characterizes the Rs as the smallest class which satisfies a basis clause of the form ( ß( x) → Rx), telling us that certain things satisfy R, together with one or more closure clauses of the form (Ф( x, R) → Rx), which tell us that, if certain other things satisfy R, x satisfies R as well. ‘Smallest’ here means that the class of Rs is included in every other class which satisfies the basis and closure clauses. Inductive definitions are useful because of inductive proofs. To show that every R has property P, show that the class of Rs that have P satisfies the basis and closure clauses. The closure clauses tell us that if certain things satisfy R, x satisfies R as well. Thus satisfaction of the condition Ф( x, R) should be ensured by positive information to the effect that certain things satisfy R, and not also require negative informative that certain things fail to satisfy R. In other words, the condition Ф( x, R) should be monotone , so that, if R S and Ф( x, R), then Ф( x, S); otherwise, we would have no assurance of the existence of a smallest class satisfying the basis and closure conditions. While inductive definitions can take many forms, they have been studied most usefully in the special case in which the basis and closure clauses are formulated within the predicate calculus. Initiated by Yiannis Moschovakis, the study of such definitions has yielded an especially rich and elegant theory. See also: DEFINITION; INFINITARY LOGICS Further reading Moschovakis, Y.N. (1974) Elementary Induction on Abstract Structures, Amsterdam: North Holland. (This is the fundamental work on inductively defined sets. Lucid and readable.) VANN McGEE INDUCTIVE INFERENCE According to a long tradition, an inductive inference is an inference from a premise of the form ‘all observed A are B ’ to a conclusion of the form ‘all A are B ’. Such inferences are not deductively valid, that is, even if the premise is true it is possible that the conclusion is false, since unobserved As may differ from observed ones. Nevertheless, it has been held that the premise can make it reasonable to believe the conclusion, even though it does not guarantee that the conclusion is true. It is now generally allowed that there are many other patterns of inference that can also provide reasonable grounds for believing their conclusions, even though their premises do not guarantee the truth of their conclusions. In current usage, it is common to call all such inferences inductive. It has been widely thought that all knowledge of matters of fact that we have not observed must be based on
inductive inferences from what we have observed. In
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Page 393 particular, all knowledge of the future is, on this view, based on induction. See also: CONFIRMATION THEORY; INDUCTION, EPISTEMIC ISSUES IN Further reading Fraassen, B.C. van (1989) Laws and Symmetry , Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Chapters 6 and 7 discuss inference to the best explanation.) Skyrms, B. (1986) Choice and Chance, Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 3rd edn. (An elementary contemporary introduction to induction, probability and decision theory.) PATRICK MAHER INDUCTIVE PROOFS see INDUCTIVE DEFINITIONS AND PROOFS INFANT COGNITION see COGNITION, INFANT INFERENCE, INDIAN THEORIES OF The use of argument in rational inquiry in India reaches almost as far back in time as its oldest extant literature. Even in very early texts, one finds the deliberate use of modus tollens, for example, to refute positions thought to be false. In light of such practice, it is not surprising to discover that Indian thinkers came to identify certain forms of reasoning and to study them systematically. The study of inference in India is, as Karl Potter (1977) has emphasized, not the study of valid reasoning as reflected in linguistic or paralinguistic forms, but the study of the circumstances in which knowledge of some facts permits knowledge of another fact, and of when acceptance by one person of some state of affairs as a fact requires that that person accept another as a fact. Still, the form of inference which came to be systematically investigated in India can be given schematically (see below). At the core of the study of inference in India is the use of a naïve realist ontology. The world consists of individual substances or things ( dravya ), universals ( sāmānya), and relations between them. The fundamental relation is the one of occurrence ( vṛtti ). The relata of this relation are known as substratum ( dharmin) and superstratum ( dharma) respectively. The relation has two forms: contact ( saṃyoga) and inherence ( samavāya ). So, for example, one individual substance, say a pot, may occur on another, say the ground, by the relation of contact. In this case, the pot is the superstratum and the ground is the substratum. Or a universal, say brownness, may occur in an individual substance, say a pot, by the relation of inherence. Here, brownness, the superstratum, inheres in the pot, the substratum. The converse of the relation of occurrence is the relation of possession. Another important relation is the relation that one superstratum bears to another. This relation, known as pervasion ( vyāpti ), can be defined in terms of the occurrence relation. One superstratum pervades another just in case wherever the second occurs the first occurs. The converse of the pervasion relation is the concomitance relation. As a result of these relations, the world embodies a structure: if one superstratum H is concomitant with another superstratum S, and if a particular substratum p possesses the former superstratum, then it possesses the second. This structure is captured in this inferential schema: Pakṣa (thesis): p has S. Hetu (ground): p has H. Vyāpti (pervasion): Whatever has H has S. Here are two paradigmatic cases of such an inference: Pakṣa (thesis): p has fire. Hetu (ground): p has smoke. Vyāpti (pervasion): Whatever has smoke has fire. Pakāa (thesis): p is a tree (that is, has tree-ness). Hetu (ground): p is an oak (that is, has oakness). Vyāpti (pervasion): Whatever is an oak (that is, has oak-ness) is a tree (that is, has tree-ness). See also: DEFINITION, INDIAN CONCEPTS OF; KNOWLEDGE, INDIAN VIEWS OF Further reading Matilal, B.K. (1985) Logic, Language, and Reality: An Introduction to Indian Philosophical Studies , Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. (The first two chapters address many of the outstanding philosophical and philological problems pertaining to the study of inference in Indian philosophy. This is a difficult but important work by one of the twentieth century’s major contributors to Indian philosophy.)
Potter, K.H. (1977) ‘Introduction to the Philosophy of Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika’, in Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies, vol. 2, New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. (Chapter 9 of Part 1
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Page 394 gives a clear thirty-page survey of the Nyāya theory of inference.) BRENDAN S. GILLON INFERENCE TO THE BEST EXPLANATION Inference to the best explanation is the procedure of choosing the hypothesis or theory that best explains the available data. The factors that make one explanation better than another may include depth, comprehensiveness, simplicity and unifying power. According to Harman (1965), explanatory inference plays a central role in both everyday and scientific thinking. In ordinary life, a person might make the inference that a fuse has blown to explain why several kitchen appliances stopped working all at once. Scientists also seem to engage in inference to the best explanation; for example, astronomers concluded that another planet must exist in order to account for aberrations in the orbit of Uranus. However, despite the suggestiveness of cases like these, the extent to which we do and should rely on inference to the best explanation is highly controversial. See also: RATIONAL BELIEFS Further reading Harman, G.H. (1965) ‘The inference to the best explanation’, Philosophical Review 74 (1): 88–95. (A seminal article.) JONATHAN VOGEL INFINITARY LOGICS An infinitary logic arises from ordinary first-order logic when one or more of its finitary properties is allowed to become infinite, for example, by admitting infinitely long formulas or infinitely long or infinitely branched proof figures. The need to extend first-order logic became pressing in the late 1950s when it was realized that many of the fundamental notions of mathematics cannot be expressed in firstorder logic in a way that would allow for their logical analysis. Because infinitary logics often do not suffer the same limitation, they have become an essential tool in mathematical logic. Further reading Barwise, J. (1975) Admissible Sets and Structures: An Approach to Definability Theory, New York: Springer. (Reference work concerning infinitary logic and admissible set theory; accessible.) Ebbinghaus, H.-D. and Flum, J. (1995) Finite Model Theory , Berlin: Springer. (Textbook which also covers the use of infinitary logics in the growing field of finite model theory; very readable.) BERND BULDT INFINITY The infinite is standardly conceived as that which is endless, unlimited, immeasurable. It also has theological connotations of absoluteness and perfection. From the dawn of civilization, it has held a special fascination: people have been captivated by the boundlessness of space and time, by the mystery of numbers going on forever, by the paradoxes of endless divisibility and by the riddles of divine perfection. The infinite is of profound importance to mathematics. Nevertheless, the relationship between the two has been a curiously ambivalent one. It is clear that mathematics in some sense presupposes the infinite, for instance in the fact that there is no largest integer. But the idea that the infinite should itself be an object of mathematical study has time and again been subjected to ridicule. In the nineteenth century this orthodoxy was challenged, with the advent of ‘transfinite arithmetic’. Many, however, have remained sceptical, believing that the infinite is inherently beyond our grasp. Perhaps their scepticism should be trained on the infinite itself: perhaps the concept is ultimately incoherent. It is certainly riddled with paradoxes. Yet we cannot simply jettison it. This is why the paradoxes are so acute. The roots of these paradoxes lie in our own finitude: it is self-conscious awareness of that finitude which gives us our initial sense of a contrasting infinite, and, at the same time, makes us despair of knowing anything about it, or having any kind of grasp of it. This creates a tension. We feel pressure to acknowledge the infinite, and we feel pressure not to. In trying to come to terms with the infinite, we are trying to come to terms with a basic conflict in ourselves. See also: CONTINUUM HYPOTHESIS, THE; DEATH Further reading My thanks are due to Dartmouth publishers for permission to re-use material from the introduction to my book Infinity. Benardete, J.A. (1964) Infinity: An Essay in Metaphysics , Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Entertaining and wide-ranging discussion of the infinite, with particular emphasis on its paradoxes.) Moore, A.W. (ed.) (1993) Infinity , Aldershot: Dartmouth. (Collection of the most impor
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Page 395 tant and influential articles on infinity published since 1950, with an extensive annotated bibliography and an introduction which expands on the material in this entry.) A.W. MOORE INFORMAL LOGIC see FORMAL AND INFORMAL LOGIC INFORMATION AND COMPUTABILITY see COMPUTABILITY AND INFORMATION INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND ETHICS Information technology ethics is the study of the ethical issues arising out of the use and development of electronic technologies. Its goal is to identify and formulate answers to questions about the moral basis of individual responsibilities and actions, as well as the moral underpinnings of public policy. Information technology ethics raises new and unique moral problems because information technology itself has brought about dramatic social, political, and conceptual change. Because information technology affects not only how we do things but how we think about them, it challenges some of the basic organizing concepts of moral and political philosophy such as property, privacy, the distribution of power, basic liberties and moral responsibility. Specific questions include the following: what are the moral responsibilities of computer professionals? Who is to blame when computer software failure causes harm? Is computer hacking immoral? Is it immoral to make unauthorized copies of software? Questions related to public policy include: what constitutes just policy with respect to freedom of speech, association, and the exercise of other civil liberties over computer networks? What determines the extent and limits of property rights over computer software and electronic information? What policies adequately protect a right to privacy? The list of questions shifts in response to developments in information technology. One noteworthy example is the rise in prominence of questions about communication and information in response to the explosive growth of highspeed digital networks. This shift has subsumed the field commonly called ‘computer ethics’ under the broader rubric of ‘information technology ethics’. See also: APPLIED ETHICS; TECHNOLOGY AND ETHICS Further reading Johnson, D.G. (1994) Computer Ethics , Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. (Clear introductory text written from a philosophical perspective.) Johnson, D.G. and Nissenbaum, H. (eds) (1995) Computers, Ethics, and Social Responsibility, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. (Comprehensive set of readings from various disciplines.) HELEN NISSENBAUM INFORMATION THEORY Information theory was established in 1948 by Claude Shannon as a statistical analysis of factors pertaining to the transmission of messages through communication channels. Among basic concepts defined within the theory are information (the amount of uncertainty removed by the occurrence of an event), entropy (the average amount of information represented by events at the source of a channel), and equivocation (the ‘noise’ that impedes faithful transmission of a message through a channel). Information theory has proved essential to the development of space probes, high-speed computing machinery and modern communication systems. The information studied by Shannon is sharply distinct from information in the sense of knowledge or of propositional content. It is also distinct from most uses of the termin the popular press (‘information retrieval’, ‘information processing’, ‘information highway’, and so on). While Shannon’s work has strongly influenced academic psychology and philosophy, its reception in these disciplines has been largely impressionistic. A major problem for contemporary philosophy is to relate the statistical conceptions of information theory to information in the semantic sense of knowledge and content. See also: INFORMATION THEORY AND EPISTEMOLOGY Further reading Sayre, K.M. (1976) Cybernetics and the Philosophy of Mind, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (An attempt to establish a naturalistic view of the world on the basis of information theory.) Sloane, N.J.A. and Wyner, A.D. (eds) (1993) Claude Elwood Shannon: Collected Papers , New York: IEEE Press. (A complete collection of Shannon’s technical papers, including two delightful biographical essays.) KENNETH M. SAYRE
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Page 396 INFORMATION THEORY AND EPISTEMOLOGY The mathematical theory of information (also called communication theory) defines a quantity called mutual information that exists between a source, s, and receiver, r. Mutual information is a statistical construct, a quantity defined in terms of conditional probabilities between the events occurring at r and s. If what happens at r depends on what happens at s to some degree, then there is a communication ‘channel’ between r and s, and mutual information at r about s. If, on the other hand, the events at two points are statistically independent, there is zero mutual information. Philosophers and psychologists are attracted to information theory because of its potential as a useful tool in describing an organism’s cognitive relations to the world. The attractions are especially great for those who seek a naturalistic account of knowledge, an account that avoids normative – and, therefore, scientifically unusable – ideas such as rational warrant, sufficient reason and adequate justification. According to this approach, philosophically problematic notions like evidence, knowledge, recognition and perception – perhaps even meaning – can be understood in communication terms. Perceptual knowledge, for instance, might best be rendered in terms of a brain (r) receiving mutual information about a worldly source (s) via sensory channels. When incoming signals carry appropriate information, suitably equipped brains ‘decode’ these signals, extract information and thereby come to know what is happening in the outside world. Perception becomes information-produced belief. See also: KNOWLEDGE, CONCEPT OF; PERCEPTION, EPISTEMIC ISSUES IN Further reading Cherry, C. (1957) On Human Communication , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (Excellent history and exploration of the attempts to apply information theory in a variety of areas – including psychology.) Sayre, K. (1965) Recognition: A Study in the Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence , South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. (Early, interesting attempt by a philosopher to apply informationtheoretical ideas to epistemology.) FRED DRETSKE INGARDEN, ROMAN WITOLD (1893–1970) Ingarden was a leading exponent of phenomenology and one of the most outstanding Polish philosophers. Representing an objectivist approach within phenomenology he stressed that phenomenology employs a variety of methods, according to the variety of objects, and aspires to achieve an original cognitive apprehension of these objects. Its aim is to reach the essence of an object by analysing the contents of appropriate ideas and to convey the results of this analysis in clear language. Ingarden applied his methods in many areas of philosophy. He developed a pluralist theory of being and an epistemology which makes it possible to practise this discipline in an undogmatic manner and to defend the value of human knowledge. In the theory of values he developed an inspiring approach to the analysis of traditionally problematic areas. He was best known for his work in aesthetics, in which he analysed the structure of various kinds of works of art, the nature of aesthetic experience, the cognition of works of art and the objective character of aesthetic values. In general, he gave phenomenology a lucid and precise shape. In the interwar period Ingarden was the main opponent in Poland of the dominant Lwów–Warsaw School (Polish Analytic School), which had a minimalistic orientation. The main lines of his own investigations emerged largely as a result of his regular debates with Husserl, in particular those concerning Husserl’s transcendental idealism. Ingarden’s best-known work, Das literarische Kunstwerk ( The Literary Work of Art) (1931a) has its origins in this debate. Further reading Ingarden, R.W. (1931a) Das literarische Kunstwerk, Halle an der Saale: Niemeyer, 1960, 1965; trans. G.G. Grabowicz, The Literary Work of Art, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973. (Ingarden’s classic work which began a revolution in aesthetics. It contains, among other things, analyses of four layers of literary work.) Translated from the Polish by Piotr Gutowski ANTONI B. STĘPIEŃ INGE, WILLIAM RALPH (1860–1954) Inge, a British philosopher and theologian, was a Christian Platonist. Platonic philosophy emphasized knowledge of necessary truths that it held to be grounded in abstract objects; its deity was a designer limited by the properties of a matter it
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Page 397 did not create. Christian theology emphasizes a God who, both Creator and Providence, became incarnate in Jesus Christ. For Platonism, nothing historical could have ultimate significance or importance; for Christianity, the birth, death, and resurrection of Christ have ultimate significance. As his thought developed, Inge increasingly was able to retain much of Platonism while slowly coming to accept the consequences of the Christian emphasis on history. Further reading Inge, W.R. (1899) Christian Mysticism , London: Methuen. (Contains Inge’s Bampton Lectures; emphasizes the importance of religious experience as contrasted to texts and institutions.) KEITH E. YANDELL INNATE KNOWLEDGE If innate knowledge exists, there must be innate beliefs and those beliefs must count as knowledge. In consequence, the problem of clarifying the concept of innate knowledge divides in two: to explain what it is for a belief to be innate and then to connect that account with a characterization of what knowledge is. Modern biology requires changes in traditional philosophical conceptions of innateness; and two quite different theories of knowledge entail that innate beliefs will often fail to count as knowledge. See also: COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT; LANGUAGE, INNATENESS OF Further reading Stich, S. (1975) Innate Ideas, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. (Anthology of historical and contemporary essays, some of which address issues concerning Chomskian linguistics.) ELLIOTT SOBER INNOCENCE In its most general sense, innocence refers to the state of being without sin. A more restricted meaning is attributed to the word in the legal sphere, where people who are found not to be guilty of a particular crime are described as innocent. In official teaching of the Roman Catholic church, all direct killing of the innocent is forbidden. Here the word refers to people who are not harmful. Today, this can be taken to mean ‘non-aggressors’. According to Rousseau, humans possess original goodness. Corrupting influences come from outside them. Further reading Rousseau, J-J. (1762) Émile: ou, de l’éducation, trans. A. Bloom, Emile: or, On Education , Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991. (Rousseau claims that every child is born innocent.) BERNARD HOOSE INSTITUTIONALISM IN LAW ‘Institutionalism’ is the name for an approach to the theory of law worked out in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by a number of scholars from continental Europe, working mainly in independence from each other. Their common characteristics can be stated only in rather generic and negative terms. They are all critical of statalism, that is, too readily identifying law and state; of voluntarism, that is, treating will as an essential element of law; and of normativism, defining law as a body of norms. In positive terms, they have in common a generic emphasis on the social character of law, and a sense of the need to take a view of legal experience broader than that defined by its traditional boundaries, and to extend the ‘official’ catalogue of the sources of law. At present, there is new talk of institutionalism in the philosophy of law, but in a different sense, with reference to the idea of law as made up of institutional facts, that is, facts whose meaning depends on norms. This neo-institutionalism is normativist, analytical and hermeneutic in approach and has only the most tenuous links with classical institutionalism. See also: LAW, PHILOSOPHY OF; SOCIAL THEORY AND LAW Further reading Broderick, A. and Welling, M. (eds) (1970) The French Institutionalists: Maurice Hauriou, Georges Renard, T. Delos, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Scholarly studies of French institutionalists from a standpoint broadly sympathetic to theirs; a helpfully constructive critique.) MacCormick, N. and Weinberger, O. (1986) An Institutional Theory of Law: New Approaches to Legal Positivism , Dordrecht: Reidel. (This is the ‘manifesto’ of neo-institutionalism, comprising a collection of essays independently written by the two authors, together with a jointly-written introduction.) Translated by D.N. MacCormick ANNA PINTORE INTENSIONAL ENTITIES Intensional entities are such things as concepts, propositions and properties. What makes them
‘intensional’ is that they violate the principle of
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Page 398 extensionality; the principle that equivalence implies identity. For example, the concept of being a (wellformed) creature with a kidney and the concept of being a (well-formed) creature with a heart are equivalent in so far as they apply to the same things, but they are different concepts. Likewise, although the proposition that creatures with kidneys have kidneys and the proposition that creatures with hearts have kidneys are equivalent (both are true), they are not identical. Intensional entities are contrasted with extensional entities such as sets, which do satisfy the principle of extensionality. For example, the set of creatures with kidneys and the set of creatures with hearts are equivalent in so far as they have the same members and, accordingly, are identical. By this standard criterion, each of the following philosophically important types of entity is intensional: qualities, attributes, properties, relations, conditions, states, concepts, ideas, notions, propositions and thoughts. All (or most) of these intensional entities have been classified at one time or another as kinds of universals. Accordingly, standard traditional views about the ontological status of universals carry over to intensional entities. Nominalists hold that they do not really exist. Conceptualists accept their existence but deem it to be minddependent. Realists hold that they are mindindependent. Ante rem realists hold that they exist independently of being true of anything; in re realists require that they be true of something. See also: INTENSIONAL LOGICS; Further reading Carnap, R. (1947) Meaning and Necessity , Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (Early presentation of the contemporary use of ‘intension’ and ‘extension’ and precursor to the possible worlds theory.) GEORGE BEALER INTENSIONAL LOGICS Intensional logics are systems that distinguish an expression’s intension (roughly, its sense or meaning) from its extension (reference, denotation). The purpose of bringing intensions into logic is to explain the logical behaviour of so-called intensional expressions. Intensional expressions create contexts which violate a cluster of standard principles of logic, the most notable of which is the law of substitution of identities – the law that from a = b and P(a) it follows that P(b). For example, ‘obviously’ is intensional because the following instance of the law of substitution is invalid (at least on one reading): Scott = the author of Waverley; obviously Scott = Scott; so, obviously Scott = the author of Waverley. By providing an analysis of meaning, intensional logics attempt to explain the logical behaviour of expressions such as ‘obviously’. On the assumption that it is intensions and not extensions which matter in intensional contexts, the failure of substitution and related anomalies can be understood. Alonzo Church pioneered intensional logic, basing it on his theory of types. However, the widespread application of intensional logic to linguistics and philosophy began with the work of Richard Montague, who crafted a number of systems designed to capture the expressive power of natural languages. One important feature of Montague’s work was the application of possible worlds semantics to the analysis of intensional logic. The most difficult problems concerning intensional logic concern the treatment of propositional attitude verbs, such as ‘believes’, ‘desires’ and ‘knows’. Such expressions pose difficulties for the possible worlds treatment, and have thus spawned alternative approaches. See also: INTENSIONAL ENTITIES Further reading Barwise, J. and Perry, J. (1983) Situations and Attitudes, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (An enjoyable introduction to situation semantics, an influential outgrowth of possible worlds semantics for intensional logic.) Montague, R. (1974) Formal Philosophy: Selected Papers of Richard Montague, ed. R.H. Thomason, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. (A collection of Richard Montague’s papers prefaced by a very helpful introduction describing the application of intensional logic to natural language.) JAMES W. GARSON INTENSIONALITY The truth or falsity of many sentences depends only on which things are being talked about. Within intensional contexts, however, truth values also depend on how those things are talked about, not just on which things they are. Philosophers and logicians have offered different analyses of intensional contexts and the behaviour of terms occurring within them. See also: CONCEPTS Further reading Searle, J.R. (1983) Intentionality , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Chapter 1 con
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Page 399 tains a useful discussion of the relationship between inten Sionality and inten T ionality.) SIMON CHRISTMAS INTENTION Suppose that Kevin intends to brush up on his predicate logic, and acts on this intention, because he wants to conduct a good tutorial and he believes that some preparatory revision will help him to do so. In an example like this, we explain why Kevin intends to revise his logic, and why he (intentionally) does revise it, by appealing to the belief and desire which provide his reasons both for his intention and his corresponding intentional action. But how does Kevin’s intention to act, coming between his reasons and his action, help to explain what he does? Central questions in the theory of intention include the following: Are intentions distinct mental attitudes or are they analysable in terms of other mental attitudes – such as beliefs and desires? How is intending to do something related to judging that it is best to do it? What distinctive roles, if any, do intentions play in getting us to act? Are foreseen but undesired consequences of an intentional action intended? See also: BELIEF; DESIRE Further reading Davidson, D. (1978) ’Intending’, in Essays on Actions and Events, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980, 83– 102. (Davidson’s classic article on intentions as all-out evaluative judgments.) ROBERT DUNN INTENTIONALITY Intentionality is the mind’s capacity to direct itself on things. Mental states like thoughts, beliefs, desires, hopes (and others) exhibit intentionality in the sense that they are always directed on, or at, something: if you hope, believe or desire, you must hope, believe or desire something. Hope, belief, desire and any other mental state which is directed at something, are known as intentional states. Intentionality in this sense has only a peripheral connection to the ordinary ideas of intention and intending. An intention to do something is an intentional state, since one cannot intend without intending something; but intentions are only one of many kinds of intentional mental states. The terminology of intentionality derives from the scholastic philosophy of the Middle Ages, and was revived by Brentano in 1874. Brentano characterized intentionality in terms of the mind’s direction upon an object, and emphasized that the object need not exist. He also claimed that it is the intentionality of mental phenomena that distinguishes them from physical phenomena. These ideas of Brentano’s provide the background to twentieth-century discussions of intentionality, in both the phenomenological and analytic traditions. Among these discussions, we can distinguish two general projects. The first is to characterize the essential features of intentionality. For example, is intentionality a relation? If it is, what does it relate, if the object of an intentional state need not exist in order to be thought about? The second is to explain how intentionality can occur in the natural world. How can merely biological creatures exhibit intentionality? The aim of this second project is to explain intentionality in nonintentional terms. See also: IMAGINATION; INTENTION Further reading Searle, J.R. (1983) Intentionality , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (A complete theory of intentionality. Chapter 1 is a good introduction.) Sorabji, R. (1991) ‘From Aristotle to Brentano: The Development of the Concept of Intentionality’, in H. Blumenthal and H. Robinson (eds) Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy , supplementary vol. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Informative discussion of how the concept of intentionality developed, particularly in later Greek philosophy, also with reference to Islamic and scholastic writers.) TIM CRANE INTERESTS see NEEDS AND INTERESTS INTERNALISM AND EXTERNALISM IN EPISTEMOLOGY The internalism–externalism distinction is usually applied to the epistemic justification of belief. The most common form of internalism (accessibility internalism) holds that only what the subject can easily become aware of (by reflection, for example) can have a bearing on justification. We may think of externalism as simply the denial of this constraint. The strong intuitive appeal of internalism is due to the sense that we should be able to determine whether we are justified in believing something just by carefully considering the question, without the need for any further investigation. Then there is the idea that we can successfully reply to sceptical doubts about the possibility of knowledge or justified beliefs only if we can determine the epistemic
status of
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Page 400 our beliefs without presupposing anything about which sceptical doubts could be raised – the external world for example. The main objections to internalism are: (1) it assumes an unrealistic confidence in the efficacy of armchair reflection, which is often not up to surveying our entire repertoire of beliefs and other possible grounds of belief and determining the extent to which they support a given belief; and (2) if we confine ourselves to what we can ascertain on reflection, there is no guarantee that the beliefs that are thus approved as justified are likely to be true. And the truth-promoting character of justification is the main source of its value. Externalism lifts this accessibility constraint, but in its most general sense it embodies no particular positive view. The most common way of further specifying externalism is reliabilism, the view that a belief is justified if and only if it was produced and/or sustained by a reliable process, one that would produce mostly true beliefs in the long run. This is a form of externalism because whether a particular belief-forming process is reliable is not something we can ascertain just on reflection. The main objections to externalism draw on internalist intuitions: (1) If the world were governed by an evil demon who sees to it that our beliefs are generally false, even though we have the kind of bases for them we do in fact have, then our beliefs would still be justified, even though formed unreliably. (2) If a reliable clairvoyant (ones who ‘sees’ things at a great distance) forms beliefs on this basis without having any reason for thinking that they are reliably formed, those beliefs would not be justified, even though they pass the reliability test. See also: JUSTIFICATION, EPISTEMIC; REASONS FOR BELIEF Further reading Dretske, F.I. (1981) Knowledge and the Flow of Information, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (Major statement of an externalist theory of knowledge.) Foley, R. (1987) The Theory of Epistemic Rationality, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (A relatively subjectivist form of internalism.) WILLIAM P. ALSTON INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, PHILOSOPHY OF The philosophy of international relations – or more precisely its political philosophy – embraces problems about morality in diplomacy and war, the justice of international practices and institutions bearing on economic welfare and the global environment, human rights, and the relationship between sectional loyalties such as patriotism and global moral commitments. Not everyone believes that such a subject can exist, or rather, that it can have significant ethical content. According to political realism – a widely-held view among Anglo-American students of international relations – moral considerations have no place in decisions about foreign affairs and international behaviour. The most extreme varieties of realism deny that moral judgment can have meaning or force in international affairs; more moderate versions acknowledge the meaningfulness of such judgments but hold either that leaders have no responsibility to attend to the morality of their actions in foreign affairs (because their overriding responsibility is to advance the interests of their constituents), or that the direct pursuit of moral goals in international relations is likely to be selfdefeating. Leaving aside the more sceptical kinds of political realism, the most influential orientations to substantive international morality can be arrayed on a continuum. Distinctions are made on the basis of the degree of privilege, if any, extended to the citizens of a state to act on their own behalf at the potential expense of the liberty and wellbeing of persons elsewhere. ‘The morality of states’, at one extreme, holds that states have rights of autonomy analogous to those of individuals within domestic society, which secure them against external interference in their internal affairs and guarantee their ownership and control of the natural and human resources within their borders. At the other end of the continuum, one finds cosmopolitan views which deny that states enjoy any special privilege; these views hold that individuals rather than states are the ultimate subjects of morality, and that value judgments concerning international conduct should take equally seriously the wellbeing of each person potentially affected by a decision, whether compatriot or foreigner. Cosmopolitan views may acknowledge that states (and similar entities) have morally significant features, but analysis of the significance of these features must connect them with considerations of individual wellbeing. Intermediate views are possible; for example, a conception of the privileged character of the state can be combined with a conception of the international realm as weakly normative (that is, governed by principles which demand that states
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Page 401 adhere to minimum conditions of peaceful coexistence). The theoretical difference between the morality of states and a fully cosmopolitan morality is reflected in practical differences about the justifiability of intervention in the internal affairs of other states, the basis and content of human rights, and the extent, if any, of our obligations as individuals and as citizens of states to help redress the welfare effects of international inequalities. See also: STATE, THE Further reading Beitz, C.R. (1979) Political Theory and International Relations , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (A critical analysis of political realism and the morality of states, and an effort to set forth a cosmopolitan theory of international justice; extensive bibliography.) Nardin, T. (1983) Law, Morality, and the Relations of States , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Argues that the aim of international law and morality is to regulate a pluralistic international society consisting of states with differing internal moralities; comprehensive bibliography.) CHARLES R. BEITZ INTERPRETATION, ARTISTIC see ARTISTIC INTERPRETATION INTERPRETATION, INDIAN THEORIES OF Need for interpretation of texts was felt already during the ancient period of Vedic texts in India. Vedic texts were orally transmitted for over a thousand years. During this period, the change in locations of people reciting the texts and the mother tongues of the reciters led to a widening gap between the preserved sacred texts and their interpreters. Additionally, there was a notion that the sacred language was a mystery which was only partially understood by the common people. This led to the early development of exegetical tools to assist the interpretation of the sacred literature. Later, grammarians and etymologists developed sophisticated exegetical tools and theories of interpretation. These generally led to a deeper understanding of the structure of language. The priestly tradition developed its own canons of interpretation, which are manifest in the system of Mīmāṃsā. Here we have the first fully developed theory of discourse and context. The categories developed by Mīmāsāwere used by other schools, especially by the school of Dharmaśāstra, or Hindu religious law. Both Mīmāṃsāand Dharmaśāstra created sets of hierarchical principles for authoritative guidance in interpretation. Other philosophical and religious traditions developed categories of their own to deal with problems of interpretation. A major problem was created when the literature accepted as authoritative by a tradition contained apparently contradictory passages. The traditions had to deal with this problem and find ways of explaining away those passages which did not quite fit with their own view of truth. For this purpose, a whole set of categories were employed. At a later period, several ingenious principles of interpretation were used for texts in general. Here, significant contributions were made by the traditions of Sanskrit grammar and poetics. See also: LANGUAGE, INDIAN THEORIES OF; MEANING, INDIAN THEORIES OF Further reading Deshpande, M.M. (1992) The Meaning of Nouns: Semantic Theory in Classical and Medieval India, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. (The bulk of the book is an annotated translation of a seventeenth-century Sanskrit text on the meaning of nouns. The introduction covers the history of a number of semantic theories in Sanskrit grammar and philosophy.) Raja, K. (1963) Indian Theories of Meaning , Adyar Library Series 91, Madras: Adyar Library and Research Centre. (A somewhat dated, but still very useful, account.) MADHAV M. DESHPANDE INTROSPECTION, EPISTEMOLOGY OF If we wish to know what is going on in someone else’s mind, we must observe their behaviour; on the basis of what we observe, we may sometimes reasonably draw a conclusion about the person’s mental state. Thus, for example, on seeing someone smile, we infer that they are happy; on seeing someone scowl, we infer that they are upset. But this is not, at least typically, the way in which we come to know our own mental states. We do not need to examine our own behaviour in order to know how we feel, what we believe, what we want and so on. Our understanding of these things is more direct than our understanding of the mental states of others, it seems. The term used to describe this special mode of access which we seem to have to our own mental states is ‘introspection’.
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Page 402 A view which takes its inspiration from Descartes holds that introspection provides us with infallible and complete access to our states of mind. On this view, introspection provides us with a foundation for our knowledge of the physical world. On this view we come to know the physical world by first coming to recognize certain features of our mind, namely, the sensations which physical objects excite in us, and then drawing conclusions about the likely source of these mental states. Our knowledge of the physical world is thus indirect; it is grounded in the direct knowledge we have of our own minds. The view that introspection provides an infallible and complete picture of the mind, however, is no longer widely accepted. Introspection has also been called upon to support various metaphysical conclusions. Descartes argued for dualism on the basis of introspective evidence, and certain contemporary philosophers have argued in much the same spirit. Hume noted that introspection does not reveal the presence of an enduring self, but only a series of fleeting perceptions; some have concluded, therefore, that there is no enduring self. Philosophers concerned with self-improvement, whether epistemological or moral, have frequently called upon introspection. Introspection has been thought to aid in forming beliefs on the basis of adequate evidence, and it has been used as a tool of self-scrutiny by those concerned to understand and refine their motivations and characters. See also: CONSCIOUSNESS; UNCONSCIOUS MENTAL STATES Further reading Descartes, R. (1641) Meditations on First Philosophy , in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff and D. Murdoch, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 3 vols, 1985. (The tranparency view may be found in Meditation Two, the argument for dualism is in Meditation Six.) Lehrer, K. (1991) Metamind , Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Presents a Cartesian perspective on the importance of introspective understanding for a wide range of rational activities.) HILARY KORNBLITH INTROSPECTION, PSYCHOLOGY OF Introspection is the process of directly examining one’s own conscious mental states and processes. Since the seventeenth century, there has been considerable disagreement on the scope, nature and epistemic status of introspection. Descartes held that all our mental states are subject to introspection; that it is sufficient to have a mental state to be aware of it; and that when we introspect, we cannot be mistaken about what we ‘see’. Each of these views has been disputed. Nineteenth-century psychology relied heavily on introspection, but with the exception of important work in psychophysics and perception, it is now primarily of historical interest. Recently, Nisbett and Wilson have argued that when people attempt to report on the processes mediating the effects of a stimulus on a response, they do not do so on the basis of introspection but, rather, on the basis of an implicit common-sense ‘theory’. Ericsson and Simon have developed a model of the mechanisms by which ‘introspective’ reports are generated and have used that model to identify the conditions under which such reports are reliable. See also: CONSCIOUSNESS; INTROSPECTION, EPISTEMOLOGY OF Further reading Comte, A. (1830) Introduction to Positive Philosophy , trans. and ed. F. Ferre, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1988. (The classic statement of objections to the possibility and reliability of introspection.) Farthing, G.W. (1992) The Psychology of Consciousness, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. (A useful psychology text on consciousness, with two chapters on introspection.) BARBARAVON ECKHARDT INTUITIONISM Ultimately, mathematical intuitionism gets its name and its epistemological parentage from a conviction of Kant: that intuition reveals basic mathematical principles as true a priori. Intuitionism’s mathematical lineage is that of radical constructivism: constructive in requiring proofs of existential claims to yield provable instances of those claims; radical in seeking a wholesale reconstruction of mathematics. Although partly inspired by Kronecker and Poincaré, twentieth-century intuitionism is dominated by the ‘neo-intuitionism’ of the Dutch mathematician L.E.J. Brouwer. Brouwer’s reworking of analysis, paradigmatic for intuitionism, broke the bounds on traditional constructivism by embracing real numbers given by free choice sequences. Brouwer’s theorem – that every real-valued function on a closed, bounded interval is uniformly continuous
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Page 403 – brings intuitionism into seeming conflict with results of conventional mathematics. Despite Brouwer’s distaste for logic, formal systems for intuitionism were devised and developments in intuitionistic mathematics began to parallel those in metamathematics. A. Heyting was the first to formalize both intuitionistic logic and arithmetic and to interpret the logic over types of abstract proofs. Tarski, Beth and Kripke each constructed a distinctive class of models for intuitionistic logic. Gödel, in his Dialectica interpretation, showed how to view formal intuitionistic arithmetic as a calculus of higherorder functions. S.C. Kleene gave a ‘realizability’ interpretation to the same theory using codes of recursive functions. In the last decades of the twentieth century, applications of intuitionistic higherorder logic and type theory to category theory and computer science have made these systems objects of intense study. At the same time, philosophers and logicians, under the influence of M. Dummett, have sought to enlist intuitionism under the banner of general antirealist semantics for natural languages. Obstacles to the antirealist programme include the difficulties inherent in designing, even in outline, a coherent antirealist semantics that covers all the territory Dummett has suggested it might cover, including antirealism about psychology and the past. Also, it is in no way clear that features of intuitionistic logic and mathematics can be well understood from the vantage of a semantic theory. It remains to be shown that intuitionistic mathematics, rather than finitism or Markovian constructivism, is the true ally of antirealist semantics. Lastly, it is a concern that Dummett’s ideas flout one of the main planks of Brouwer’s intuitionism: that mathematics must be independent of metaphysics. For traditional intuitionists, there can be no final explanation for intuitionistic mathematics other than the mathematics itself. Further reading Dummett, M.A.E. (1977) Elements of Intuitionism, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. (An influential text in which great emphasis is placed upon the metalogic of intuitionism.) Heyting, A. (1956) Intuitionism: An Introduction , Amsterdam: North Holland; 3rd revised edn, 1971. (The first – and still the most charming – popular technical account of Brouwer’s intuitionism.) DAVID CHARLES McCARTY INTUITIONISM IN ETHICS To intuit something is to apprehend it directly, without recourse to reasoning processes such as deduction or induction. Intuitionism in ethics proposes that we have a capacity for intuition and that some of the facts or properties that we intuit are irreducibly ethical. Traditionally, intuitionism also advances the important thesis that beliefs arising from intuition have direct justification, and therefore do not need to be justified by appeal to other beliefs or facts. So, while intuitionism in ethics is about the apprehension of ethical facts or properties, traditional intuitionism is principally a view about how beliefs, including ethical beliefs are justified. Varieties of intuitionism differ over what is intuited (for example, rightness or goodness?); whether what is intuited is general and abstract or concrete and particular; the degree of justification offered by intuition; and the nature of the intuitive capacity. The rejection of intuitionism is usually a result of rejecting one of the views that lie behind it. Note that ‘intuition’ can refer to the thing intuited as well as the process of intuiting. Also, somewhat confusingly, intuitionism is sometimes identified with pluralism, the view that there is a plurality of fundamental ethical properties or principles. This identification probably occurs because pluralists often accept the epistemological version of intuitionism. See also: COMMON SENSE ETHICS; MORAL JUDGMENT Further reading Moore, G.E. (1903) Principia Ethica, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, esp. chaps 5, 6. (Holds that intuitions are general, that the truth of utilitarianism is self-evident and that we can intuit the goodness of some properties.) Schneewind, J.B. (1990) Moral Philosophy from Montaigne to Kant , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2 vols. (Contains descriptions of, and extracts from, many of the early intuitionists, including Richard Cumberland, Samuel Clarke, Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, Joseph Butler, Richard Price and Thomas Reid.) ROBERT L. FRAZIER INTUITIONISTIC LOGIC AND ANTIREALISM The law of excluded middle (LEM) says that every sentence of the form A ¬A (‘A or not A’) is logically true. This law is accepted in classical
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Page 404 logic, but not in intuitionistic logic. The reason for this difference over logical validity is a deeper difference about truth and meaning. In classical logic, the meanings of the logical connectives are explained by means of the truth tables, and these explanations justify LEM. However, the truth table explanations involve acceptance of the principle of bivalence, that is, the principle that every sentence is either true or false. The intuitionist does not accept bivalence, at least not in mathematics. The reason is the view that mathematical sentences are made true and false by proofs which mathematicians construct. On this view, bivalence can be assumed only if we have a guarantee that for each mathematical sentence, either there is a proof of the truth of the sentence, or a proof of its falsity. But we have no such guarantee. Therefore bivalence is not intuitionistically acceptable, and then neither is LEM. A realist about mathematics thinks that if a mathematical sentence is true, then it is rendered true by the obtaining of some particular state of affairs, whether or not we can know about it, and if that state of affairs does not obtain, then the sentence is false. The realist further thinks that mathematical reality is fully determinate, in that every mathematical state of affairs determinately either obtains or does not obtain. As a result, the principle of bivalence is taken to hold for mathematical sentences. The intuitionist is usually an antirealist about mathematics, rejecting the idea of a fully determinate, mindindependent mathematical reality. The intuitionist’s view about the truth-conditions of mathematical sentences is not obviously incompatible with realism about mathematical states of affairs. According to Michael Dummett, however, the view about truth-conditions implies antirealism. In Dummett’s view, a conflict over realism is fundamentally a conflict about what makes sentences true, and therefore about semantics, for there is no further question about, for example, the existence of a mathematical reality than as a truth ground for mathematical sentences. In this vein Dummett has proposed to take acceptance of bivalence as actually defining a realist position. If this is right, then both the choice between classical and intuitionistic logic and questions of realism are fundamentally questions of semantics, for whether or not bivalence holds depends on the proper semantics. The question of the proper semantics, in turn, belongs to the theory of meaning. Within the theory of meaning Dummett has laid down general principles, from which he argues that meaning cannot in general consist in bivalent truth-conditions. The principles concern the need for, and the possibility of, manifesting one’s knowledge of meaning to other speakers, and the nature of such manifestations. If Dummett’s argument is sound, then bivalence cannot be justified directly from semantics, and may not be justifiable at all. See also: ANTIREALISM IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF MATHEMATICS; REALISM AND ANTIREALISM; REALISM IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF MATHEMATICS Further reading Dummett, M. (1977) Elements of Intuitionism, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (A thorough introduction to intuitionistic mathematics and logic. Densely written.) Tennant, N. (1987) Antirealism and Logic: Truth as Eternal , Oxford: Clarendon Press. (A well-written and useful introduction to, and overview of, the issues, both philosophical and formal, and a defence of antirealism.) PETER PAGIN IQBAL, MUHAMMAD (1877–1938) Muhammad Iqbal was an outstanding poet-philosopher, perhaps the most influential Muslim thinker of the twentieth century. After studying at Cambridge, he taught and practised law in India and was also involved in Indian politics. His philosophy, though eclectic and showing the influence of Muslims thinkers such as al-Ghazali and Rumi as well as Western thinkers such as Nietzsche and Bergson, was rooted fundamentally in the Qur’an, which Iqbal read with the sensitivity of a poet and the insight of a mystic. Iqbal’s philosophy is known as the philosophy of khudi or Selfhood. Rejecting the idea of a ‘Fall’ from Eden or original sin, Iqbal regards the advent of human beings on earth as a glorious event, since Adam was designated by God to be God’s viceregent on earth. Human beings are not mere accidents in the process of evolution. The cosmos exists in order to make possible the emergence and perfection of the Self. The purpose of life is the development of the Self, which occurs as human beings gain greater knowledge of what lies within them as well as of the external world. Iqbal’s philosophy is essentially a philosophy of action, and it is concerned primarily with motivating human beings to strive to actualize their God-given potential to the fullest degree. See also: ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY, MODERN
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Page 405 Further reading Hassan, R. (1979) An Iqbal Primer, Lahore: Aziz. (An introduction to Iqbal’s philosophy, analysing the salient ideas in each of his works.) Vahid, S.A. (1959) Iqbal: His Art and Thought, London: John Murray. (A comprehensive overview of Iqbal’s literary and philosophical ideas by a noted Iqbal scholar.) RIFFAT HASSAN IRIGARAY, LUCE (1930–) Luce Irigaray holds doctorates in both linguistics and philosophy, and has practised as a psychoanalyst for many years. Author of over twenty books, she has established a reputation as a pre-eminent theorist of sexual difference – a term she would prefer to ‘feminist’. The latter carries with it the history of feminism as a struggle for equality, whereas Irigaray sees herself more as a feminist of difference, emphasizing the need to differentiate women from men over and above the need to establish parity between the sexes. Speculum de l’autre femme (1974) (Speculum of the Other Woman) (1985), the book that earned her international recognition, fuses philosophy with psychoanalysis, and employs a lyrical ‘mimesis’, or mimicry, that parodies and undercuts philosophical pretensions to universality. While adopting the standpoint of universality, objectivity and uniformity, the philosophical tradition in fact reflects a partial view of the world, one which is informed by those largely responsible for writing it: men. Without the material, maternal and nurturing succour provided by women as mothers and homemakers, men would not have had the freedom to reflect, the peace to think, or the time to write the philosophy that has shaped our culture. As such, women are suppressed and unacknowledged; femininity is the unthought ground of philosophy – philosophy’s other. See also: FEMINISM AND PSYCHOANALYSIS Further reading Irigaray, L. (1974) Speculum de l’autre femme, Paris: Éditions de Minuit; trans. G.C. Gill, Speculum of the Other Woman, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985. (Exposes the phallogocentric mythology pervading philosophical texts of the Western tradition from Plato to Freud.) Whitford, M. (1991) Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine, London and New York: Routledge. (The first monograph on Luce Irigaray’s work to appear in English; a comprehensive and scholarly discussion of her work, focusing on its psychoanalytic aspects. Very good bibliography.) TINA CHANTER ISAAC BEN MOSES LEVI see DURAN, PROFIAT ISAAC ISRAELI see ISAAC OF STELLA ISAAC OF STELLA (d. c .1177) Isaac of Stella was born in England but spent most of his career in France, where he studied and became abbot of the Cistercian monastery of l’Étoile, near Poitiers. Like other twelfth-century Cistercians, he was well versed in secular learning. Centrally engaged with the contemplative life, he expresses his spiritual insights in terms of the science of his day, and combines a spiritual psychology derived from Johannes Scottus Eriugena and Hugh and Richard of St Victor with an anthropology grounded in Stoic physics, Greek and Arab medicine, and a cosmic model derived from Plato’s Timaeus . A unifying theme of his writings is the relation between the physical and spiritual dimensions of human experience. Further reading McGinn, B. (1969) The Golden Chain. A Study in the Theological Anthropology of Isaac of Stella , Cistercian Studies Series 15, Washington, DC: Cistercian Publications, Consortium Press. (Places Isaac’s writings in the context of twelfth-century thought and learning.) WINTHROP WETHERBEE ISHRAQ see ILLUMINATIONIST PHILOSOPHY ISLAM, CONCEPT OF PHILOSOPHY IN There is no generally accepted definition of what Islamic philosophy is, and the term will be used here to mean the sort of philosophy which arose within the culture of Islam. There are several main strands to Islamic philosophy. Peripatetic philosophy follows broadly the Greek tradition, while Sufism uses the principle of mystical knowledge as its leading idea. Some would argue that Islamic philosophy has never lost its concentration on the Qur’an and other significant Muslim texts, and that throughout its history it
has sought to understand the essence of the realities both of the Sacred Book and of the created world. The decline of Peripatetic philosophy in the Islamic world did not mean the decline of philosophy as such, which continued
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Page 406 to flourish and develop in other forms. Although it is sometimes argued that philosophy is not a proper activity for Muslims, since they already have a perfect guide to action and knowledge in the Qur’an, there are good reasons for thinking that Islamic philosophy is not intrinsically objectionable on religious grounds. See also: ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY, MODERN; ISLAMIC THEOLOGY Further reading Akhtar, S. (1995) ‘The Possibility of a Philosophy of Islam’, in S.H. Nasr and O. Leaman (eds) The History of Islamic Philosophy , London: Routledge, 1162–9. (Defence of the view that there is scope for philosophy within an Islamic context.) Corbin, H. (1993) History of Islamic Philosophy , trans. L. Sherrard, London: Kegan Paul International. (Very important defence of the significance of mysticism and Persian thought as key aspects of Islamic philosophy.) OLIVER LEAMAN ISLAMIC FUNDAMENTALISM The philosophical roots of Islamic fundamentalism are largely the result of a conscious attempt to revive and restate the theoretical relevance of Islam in the modern world. The writings of three twentiethcentury Muslim thinkers and activists – Sayyid Qutb, Ayatollah Ruhollah al-Khumayni and Abu al-‘Ala alMawdudi – provide authoritative guidelines delineating the philosophical discourse of Islamic fundamentalism. However, whereas al-Khumayni and al-Mawdudi made original contributions towards formulating a new Islamic political theory, it was Qutb who offered a coherent exposition of Islam as a philosophical system. Qutb’s philosophical system postulated a qualitative contradiction between Western culture and the religion of Islam. Its emphasis on Islam as a sui generis and transcendental set of beliefs excluded the validityof all other values and concepts. It also marked the differences between the doctrinal foundations of Islam and modern philosophical currents. Consequently Islamic fundamentalism is opposed to the Enlightenment, secularism, democracy, nationalism, Marxism and relativism. Its most original contribution resides in the formulation of the concept of God’s sovereignty or lordship. This concept is the keystone of its philosophical structure. The premises of Islamic fundamentalism are rooted in an essentialist world view whereby innate qualities and attributes apply to individuals and human societies, irrespective of time, historical change or political circumstances. Hence, an immutable substance governs human existence and determines its outward movement. See also: ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY, MODERN; ISLAMIC THEOLOGY Further reading Choueiri, Y.M. (1990) Islamic Fundamentalism, London: Pinter Publishers; 2nd revised edn, London and Washington, DC: Cassell-Pinter, 1997. (An essential guide to the philosophical and political discourse of al-Mawdudi, al-Khumayni and Qutb.) al-Khumayni, Imam R. (1981) Islam and Revolution , trans. and annotated H. Algar, Berkeley, CA: Mizan Press. (An essential collection of articles, essays and speeches outlining the theoretical and political background to Khumayni’s contribution.) YOUSSEF CHOUEIRI ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY Islamic philosophy may be defined in a number of different ways, but the perspective taken here is that it represents the style of philosophy produced within the framework of Islamic culture. This description does not suggest that it is necessarily concerned with religious issues, nor even that it is exclusively produced by Muslims. 1 The early years of Islamic philosophy Islamic philosophy is intimately connected with Greek philosophy, although this is a relationship which can be exaggerated. Theoretical questions were raised right from the beginning of Islam, questions which could to a certain extent be answered by reference to Islamic texts such as the Qur’an, the practices of the community and the traditional sayings of the Prophet and his Companions. On this initial basis a whole range of what came to be known as the Islamic sciences came to be produced, and these consisted largely of religious law, the Arabic language and forms of theology which represented differing understandings of Islam. The early conquests of the Muslims brought them into close contact with centres of civilization heavily influenced by Christianity and Judaism, and also by Greek culture. Many rulers wished to understand and use the Greek forms of knowledge, some practical and some theoretical, and a large translation
project started which saw official support for the assimilation of Greek culture (see GREEK PHILOSOPHY: IMPACT ON ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY). This had a powerful impact upon all areas of
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Page 407 Islamic philosophy. Neoplatonism definitely became the prevalent school of thought (see NEOPLATONISM IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY), following closely the curriculum of Greek (Peripatetic) philosophy which was initially transmitted to the Islamic world. This stressed agreement between Plato and Aristotle on a range of issues, and incorporated the work of some Neoplatonic authors. A leading group of Neoplatonic thinkers were the Ikhwan al-Safa’ (Brethren of Purity), who presented an eclectic philosophy designed to facilitate spiritual liberation through philosophical perfection (see IKHWAN ALSAFA’). However, there was also a development of Aristotelianism in Islamic philosophy, especially by those thinkers who were impressed by the logical and metaphysical thought of Aristotle, and Platonism was inspired by the personality of Socrates and the apparently more spiritual nature of Plato as compared with Aristotle (see ARISTOTELIANISM IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY; PLATONISM IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY). There were even thinkers who seem to have been influenced by Greek scepticism, which they turned largely against religion, and IBN ARRAWANDI and Muhammad ibn Zakariyya’ AL-RAZI presented a thoroughgoing critique of many of the leading supernatural ideas of Islam. AL-KINDI is often called the first philosopher of the Arabs, and he followed a broadly Neoplatonic approach. One of the earliest of the philosophers in Baghdad was in fact a Christian, Yahya IBN ‘ADI, and his pupil AL-FARABI created much of the agenda for the next four centuries of work. Al-Farabi argued that the works of Aristotle raise important issues for the understanding of the nature of the universe, in particular its origination. Aristotle suggested that the world is eternal, which seems to be in contradiction with the implication in the Qur’an that God created the world out of nothing. Al-Farabi used as his principle of creation the process of emanation, the idea that reality continually flows out of the source of perfection, so that the world was not created at a particular time. He also did an enormous amount of work on Greek logic, arguing that behind natural language lies logic, so that an understanding of the latter is a deeper and more significant achievement than a grasp of the former. This also seemed to threaten the significance of language, in particular the language – Arabic – in which God transmitted the Qur’an to the Prophet Muhammad. A large school of thinkers was strongly influenced by al-Farabi, including AL-‘AMIRI, AL-SIJISTANI and AL-TAWHIDI, and this surely played an important part in making his ideas and methodology so crucial for the following centuries of Islamic philosophy. IBN SINA went on to develop this form of thought in a much more creative way, and he presented a view of the universe as consisting of entirely necessitated events, with the exception of God (see CAUSALITY AND NECESSITY IN ISLAMIC THOUGHT). This led to a powerful reaction from AL-GHAZALI, who in his critique of Peripatetic philosophy argued that it was both incompatible with religion, and also invalid on its own principles. He managed to point to some of the major difficulties with the developments of Neoplatonism which had taken place in Islamic philosophy, and he argued that while philosophy should be rejected, logic as a conceptual tool should be retained. This view became very influential in much of the Islamic world, and philosophy came under a cloud until the nineteenth century. 2 Philosophy in Spain and North Africa A particularly rich blend of philosophy flourished in al-Andalus (the Islamic part of the Iberian penninsula), and in North Africa. IBN MASARRA defended a form of mysticism, and this type of thinking was important for both IBN TUFAYL and IBN BAJJA, for whom the contrast between the individual in society and the individual who primarily relates to God became very much of a theme. The argument was often that a higher level of understanding of reality can be attained by those prepared to develop their religious consciousness outside of the framework of traditional religion, a view which was supported and became part of a highly sophisticated account of the links between religion and reason as created by IBN RUSHD. He set out to defend philosophy strenuously from the attacks of al-Ghazali, and also to present a more Aristotelian account than had been managed by Ibn Sina. He argued that there are a variety of routes to God, all equally valid, and that the route which the philosopher can take is one based on the independent use of reason, while the ordinary member of society has to be satisfied with the sayings and obligations of religion. IBN SAB‘IN, by contrast, argued that Aristotelian philosophy and logic were useless in trying to understand reality since those ideas fail to mirror the basic unity which is implicit in reality, a unity which stems from the unity of God, and so we require an entirely new form of thinking which is adequate to the task of representing the oneness of the world. A thinker better known perhaps for his work on history and sociology than in philosophy is IBNKHALDUN,
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Page 408 who was nonetheless a significant philosophical writer; he presents an excellent summary of preceding philosophical movements within the Islamic world, albeit from a conservative (Ash‘arite) point of view. 3 Mystical philosophy Mystical philosophy in Islam represents a persistent tradition of working philosophically within the Islamic world (see MYSTICAL PHILOSOPHY IN ISLAM). Some philosophers managed to combine mysticism with Peripatetic thought, while others saw mysticism as in opposition to Peripateticism. AlGhazali had great influence in making mysticism in its Sufi form respectable, but it is really other thinkers such as AL-SUHRAWARDI and IBN AL-‘ARABI who produced actual systematic mystical thought. They created, albeit in different ways, accounts of how to do philosophy which accord with mystical approaches to reality, and which self-consciously go in opposite directions to Peripateticism. Ibn al‘Arabi concentrated on analysing the different levels of reality and the links which exist between them, while al-Suhrawardi is the main progenitor of Illuminationist philosophy (see ILLUMINATIONIST PHILOSOPHY). This tries to replace Aristotelian logic and metaphysics with an alternative based on the relationship between light as the main principle of creation and knowledge, and that which is lit up – the rest of reality. This tradition has had many followers, including AL-TUSI, MULLA SADRA, MIR DAMAD and AL-SABZAWARI, and has been popular in the Persian world right up to today. SHAH WALI ALLAH extended this school of thought to the Indian subcontinent. 4 Islamic philosophy and the Islamic sciences Islamic philosophy has always had a rather difficult relationship with the Islamic sciences, those techniques for answering theoretical questions which are closely linked with the religion of Islam, comprising law, theology, language and the study of the religious texts themselves. Many theologians such as IBN HAZM, AL-JUWAYNI and Fakhr al-Din AL-RAZI presented accounts of Islamic theology which argued for a particular theory of how to interpret religious texts (see ISLAMIC THEOLOGY). They tended to advocate a restricted approach to interpretation, rejecting the use of analogy and also the idea that philosophy is an objective system of enquiry which can be applied to anything at all. Most theologians were Ash‘arites (see ASH‘ARIYYA AND MU‘TAZILA), which meant that they were opposed to the idea that ethical and religious ideas could be objectively true. What makes such ideas true, the Ash‘arites argued, is that God says that they are true, and there are no other grounds for accepting them than this. This had a particularly strong influence on ethics (see ETHICS IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY), where there was much debate between objectivists and subjectivists, with the latter arguing that an action is just if and only if God says that it is just. Many thinkers wrote about how to reconcile the social virtues, which involve being part of a community and following the rules of religion, with the intellectual virtues, which tend to involve a more solitary lifestyle. IBN MISKAWAYH and ALTUSI developed complex accounts of the apparent conflict between these different sets of virtues. Political philosophy in Islam looked to Greek thinkers for ways of understanding the nature of the state, yet also generally linked Platonic ideas of the state to Qur’anic notions, which is not difficult given the basically hierarchical nature of both types of account (see POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY IN CLASSICAL ISLAM). Even thinkers attracted to Illuminationist philosophy such as AL-DAWANI wrote on political philosophy, arguing that the structure of the state should represent the material and spiritual aspects of the citizens. Through a strict differentiation of role in the state, and through leadership by those skilled in religious and philosophical knowledge, everyone would find an acceptable place in society and scope for spiritual perfection to an appropriate degree. Particular problems arose in the discussions concerning the nature of the soul (see SOUL IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY). According to the version of Aristotle which was generally used by the Islamic philosophers, the soul is an integral part of the person as its form, and once the individual dies the soul disappears also. This appears to contravene the notion of an afterlife which is so important a part of Islam. Even Platonic views of the soul seem to insist on its spirituality, as compared with the very physical accounts of the Islamic afterlife. Many of the philosophers tried to get around this by arguing that the religious language discussing the soul is only allegorical, and is intended to impress upon the community at large that there is a wider context within which their lives take place, which extends further than those lives themselves. They could argue in this way because of theories which presented a sophisticated view of different types of meaning that a statement may have in order to appeal to different audiences and carry out a number of different functions (see MEANING IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY). Only the philosopher really has the ability to understand this range of meanings,
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Page 409 and those who work in the Islamic sciences do not know how to deal with these issues which come outside of their area of expertise. While those skilled in dealing with the law will know how to adjudicate between different legal judgements, we need an understanding of the philosophy of law in Islam if we are to have access to what might be called the deep structure of law itself (see LAW, ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY OF). Similarly, although the Qur’an encourages its followers to discover facts about the world, it is through the philosophy of science that we can understand the theoretical principles which lie behind that physical reality (see SCIENCE IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY). Many of the problems of religion versus philosophy arose in the area of aesthetics (see AESTHETICS IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY). The rules of poetry which traditionally existed in the Arabic tradition came up against the application of Aristotle’s Poetics to that poetry. One of the interesting aspects of Islamic aesthetics is that it treated poetry as a logical form, albeit of a very low demonstrative value, along the continuum of logical forms which lie behind all our language and practices. This is explained in studies of both epistemology and logic (see EPISTEMOLOGY IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY; LOGIC IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY). Logic came to play an enormous role in Islamic philosophy, and the idea that logic represents a basic set of techniques which lies behind what we think and what we do was felt to be very exciting and provocative. Many theologians who attacked philosophy were staunch defenders of logic as a tool for disputation, and IBN TAYMIYYA is unusual in the strong critique which he provided of Aristotelian logic. He argued that the logic entails Aristotelian metaphysics, and so should be abandoned by anyone who wishes to avoid philosophical infection. However, the general respect for logic provides the framework for the notion that there is a range of logical approaches which are available to different people, each of which is appropriate to different levels of society. For the theologian and the lawyer, for instance, dialectic is appropriate, since this works logically from generally accepted propositions to conclusions which are established as valid, but only within the limits set by those premises. This means that within the context of theology, for example, if we accept the truth of the Qur’an, then certain conclusions follow if we use the principles of theology; but if we do not accept the truth of the Qur’an, then the acceptability of those conclusions is dubious. Philosophers are distinguished from everyone else in that they are the only people who use entirely certain and universal premises, and so their conclusions have total universality as well as validity. When it comes to knowledge we find a similar contrast. Ordinary people can know something of what is around them and also of the spiritual nature of reality, but they are limited to the images and allegories of religion and the scope of their senses. Philosophers, by contrast, can attain much higher levels of knowledge through their application of logic and through their ability to perfect their understanding and establish contact with the principles which underlie the whole of reality. 5 Islamic philosophy in the modern world After the death of Ibn Rushd, Islamic philosophy in the Peripatetic style went out of fashion in the Arab world, although the transmission of Islamic philosophy into Western Europe started at this time and had an important influence upon the direction which medieval and Renaissance Europe was to take (see AVERROISM; AVERROISM, JEWISH; TRANSLATORS; ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY: TRANSMISSION INTO WESTERN EUROPE). In the Persian-speaking world, Islamic philosophy has continued to follow a largely Illuminationist curriculum right up to today; but in the Arab world it fell into something of a decline, at least in its Peripatetic form, until the nineteenth century. Mystical philosophy, by contrast, continued to flourish, although no thinkers matched the creativity of Ibn al-‘Arabi or Ibn Sab‘in. AL-AFGHANI and Muhammad ‘ABDUH sought to find rational principles which would establish a form of thought which is both distinctively Islamic and also appropriate for life in modern scientific societies, a debate which is continuing within Islamic philosophy today (see ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY, MODERN). IQBAL provided a rather eclectic mixture of Islamic and European philosophy, and some thinkers reacted to the phenomenon of modernity by developing Islamic fundamentalism (see ISLAMIC FUNDAMENTALISM). This resuscitated the earlier antagonism to philosophy by arguing for a return to the original principles of Islam and rejected modernity as a Western imperialist instrusion. The impact of Western scholarship on Islamic philosophy has not always been helpful, and Orientalism has sometimes led to an overemphasis of the dependence of Islamic philosophy on Greek thought, and to a refusal to regard Islamic philosophy as real philosophy (see ORIENTALISM AND ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY). That is, in much of the exegetical literature there has been too much concern dealing with the
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Page 410 historical conditions under which the philosophy was produced as compared with the status of the ideas themselves. While there are still many disputes concerning the ways in which Islamic philosophy should be pursued, as is the case with all kinds of philosophy, there can be little doubt about its major achievements and continuing significance. See also: JEWISH PHILOSOPHY; MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY Further reading Corbin, H. (1993) History of Islamic Philosophy , trans. L. Sherrard, London: Kegan Paul International. (An authoritative account of most Islamic philosophy, stressing in particular the illuminationist and mystical trends.) Gibb, H. et al. (eds) (1960–) Encyclopaedia of Islam: New Edition , Leiden: Brill. (A continuing project which provides exhaustive accounts of all the main philosophical figures and concepts.) Nasr, S. and Leaman, O. (eds) (1996) History of Islamic Philosophy , London: Routledge. (A comprehensive account of the different schools of thought, thinkers and concepts.) OLIVER LEAMAN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY, MODERN There are a number of major trends in modern Islamic philosophy. First, there is the challenge of the West to traditional Islamic philosophical and cultural principles and the desire to establish a form of thought which is distinctive. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, Islamic philosophers have attempted to redefine Islamic philosophy; some, such as Hasan Hanafi and Ali Mazrui, have sought to give modern Islamic philosophy a global significance and provide an agenda for world unity. Second, there is a continuing tradition of interest in illuminationist and mystical thought, especially in Iran where the influence of Mulla Sadra and al-Suhrawardi has remained strong. The influence of the latter can be seen in the works of Henry Corbin and Seyyed Hossein Nasr; Mulla Sadra has exercised an influence over figures such as Mahdi Ha’iri Yazdi and the members of Qom School, notably Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The philosopher Abdul Soroush has introduced a number of concepts from Western philosophy into Iran. Finally, there have been many thinkers who have adapted and employed philosophical ideas which are originally non-Islamic as part of the normal philosophical process of seeking to understand conceptual problems. This is a particularly active area, with a number of philosophers from many parts of the Islamic world investigating the relevance to Islam of concepts such as Hegelianism and existentialism. At the same time, mystical philosophy continues to exercise an important influence. Modern Islamic philosophy is thus quite diverse, employing a wide variety of techniques and approaches to its subject. See also: ILLUMINATIONIST PHILOSOPHY; ISLAMIC FUNDAMENTALISM Further reading Djait, H. (1986) Europe and Islam: Cultures and Modernity, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. (Discussion of how the Islamic renaissance came about through contact with the West, and how it has revived Arab culture.) Rahman, F. (1982) Islam and Modernity: Transformation of an Intellectual Tradition , Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (A defence of modernism and the importance of independent judgment, and an emphasis on ethics as opposed to metaphysics in philosophy.) PARVIZ MOREWEDGE OLIVER LEAMAN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY: TRANSMISSION INTO WESTERN EUROPE The Arabs took on the mantle of late antique philosophy and passed it on to both Latin scholars and Jewish scholars in Western Europe in the Middle Ages. The debates among Islamic scholars between rationalism and fideism also provided texts and models for Christian and Jewish debates. In this assimilation of Islamic thought, several stages can be observed. First, there was an interest in Neoplatonic cosmology and psychology in the latter half of the twelfth century, which fostered the translation of texts by al-Kindi, al-Farabi, the Ikhwan al-Safa’ and, especially, Avicenna (Ibn Sina). Second, the desire to understand Aristotle’s philosophy resulted in the translation of the commentaries and epitomes of Averroes (Ibn Rushd) in the second quarter of the thirteenth century. Jewish scholars participated in both these movements, and from the second quarter of the thirteenth century they took the initiative in translating and commenting upon Arabic texts. Thus when, in the late fifteenth century, a renewed interest in the ancient texts led scholars to search out the
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Page 411 most accurate interpretations of these texts, it was to Jewish scholars that they turned for new translations or retranslations of Avicenna and, in particular, Averroes. From the early sixteenth century, Arabic philosophical texts were again translated directly into Latin, Arabic speakers began to collaborate with Christian scholars and the foundations for the teaching of Arabic were being laid. With the establishment of Arabic chairs in European universities, the rich variety of Islamic thought began to be revealed. This process has lasted until the present day. See also: AVERROISM; TRANSLATORS Further reading Butterworth, C.E. and Kessel, B.A. (1994) The Introduction of Arabic Philosophy into Europe, Leiden: Brill. (Articles deal respectively with Spain (before 1200), Paris in the thirteenth century, British schools in the Middle Ages, Oxford in the seventeenth century, Louvain from the sixteenth century to the present day, Budapest, Cracow and Kiev, and with the reception of Sufism in the West.) Russell, G.A. (1994) The ‘Arabick’ Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth-Century England , Leiden: Brill. (On the beginnings of academic research into Arabic learning.) CHARLES BURNETT ISLAMIC THEOLOGY ‘Ilm al-kalam (literally ‘the science of debate’) denotes a discipline of Islamic thought generally referred to as ‘theology’ or (even less accurately) as ‘scholastic theology’. The discipline, which evolved from the political and religious controversies that engulfed the Muslim community in its formative years, deals with interpretations of religious doctrine and the defence of these interpretations by means of discursive arguments. The rise of kalam came to be closely associated with the Mu‘tazila, a rationalist school that emerged at the beginning of the second century AH (seventh century AD) and rose to prominence in the following century. The failure of the Mu‘tazila to follow up their initial intellectual and political ascendancy by imposing their views as official state doctrine seriously discredited rationalism, leading to a resurgence of traditionalism and later to the emergence of the Ash‘ariyya school, which attempted to present itself as a compromise between the two opposing extremes. The Ash‘arite school gained acceptability within mainstream (Sunni) Islam. However, kalam continued to be condemned, even in this ‘orthodox’ garb, by the dominant traditionally-inclined schools. In its later stages, kalam attempted to assimilate philosophical themes and questions, but the subtle shift in this direction was not completely successful. The decline of kalam appeared to be irreversible, shunned as it was by traditionalists and rationalists alike. Although kalam texts continued to be discussed and even taught in some form, kalam ceased to be a living science as early as the ninth century ah (fifteenth century AD). Attempts by reformers to revive it, beginning in the nineteenth century, have yet to bear fruit. See also: ASH‘ARIYYA AND MU‘TAZILA; MYSTICAL PHILOSOPHY IN ISLAM; Further readings Corbin, H. (1993) History of Islamic Philosophy, trans. L. Sherrard, London: Kegan Paul International. (While most introductions tend to neglect Shi‘i contributions to kalam, this one redresses the imbalance, with an extensive bibliography.) Macdonald, D. (1903) Muslim Theology, Jurisprudence and Constitutional Theory , New York: Scribner’s. (A scholarly introduction that deserves its status as a classic in the field.) ABDELWAHAB EL-AFFENDI ISRAELI, ISAAC BEN SOLOMON ( c .855–955) A pioneering Jewish philosopher and a physician, Isaac Israeli was among the very first medieval Jewish writers to formulate a philosophy employing Greek sources. He based his metaphysics chiefly on the Neoplatonic theory of emanation. However, like many later Jewish philosophers, Israeli understood God as a voluntary agent who acted through power and will. He combined a commitment to the traditional doctrine of creation ex nihilo with the idea of emanation: the first level of the ontic hierarchy was formed by divine creation but lower levels emerged by emanation. This original synthesis was Israeli’s most prominent philosophical innovation. Israeli’s anthropology was at base largely Neoplatonic, teaching that the soul can ascend the emanatory ladder back to God. The first Jew to give a psychological account of prophecy, Israeli, unlike later Jewish thinkers, did not discuss at length the relation between his philosophical ideas and traditional sources. His pioneering work did not have a decisive impact on later generations of Jewish thinkers; he was
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Page 412 known in Latin Europe, but mainly for his medical writings. See also: NEOPLATONISM; VOLUNTARISM, JEWISH Further reading Israeli, Isaac ben Solomon (before 955) Collected Works, ed. A. Altmann and S.M. Stern, Isaac Israeli. A Neoplatonic Philosopher of the Early Tenth Century: His Works Translated with Comments and an Outline of his Philosophy , London: Oxford University Press, 1958. (English translations of Israeli’s major philosophical works, and a thorough discussion of his philosophy, with extensive bibliography.) DANIEL J. LASKER ITALY, PHILOSOPHY IN Since the Renaissance, Italian philosophy has been rooted in the humanist and historical tradition, stemming from the rediscovery of Greek philosophy in the fifteenth century and the resumption of classical studies at that time. However, the momentous cultural and religious transformations of sixteenth-century Europe caused a reaction which greatly restrained the innovative impact of Renaissance thought. Living through these two periods, Bruno, Campanella and Galileo experienced all the conflicts of the Counter-Reformation, when philosophy especially felt the weight of the Roman Catholic Church which exercised a tight control on the culture of the time. The best traditions of the Renaissance were inherited and maintained solely by Vico, the most important figure of this latter period. As the spirit of the Counter-Reformation declined, Italian philosophy acquired a new vigour in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This occurred especially in the north of the country where contacts with modern European culture influenced a political situation dominated by the question of national unity (a problem debated since the time of Machiavelli). Philosophical thought during this period tended to be strongly political (as in the philosophy of Cattaneo), although it also assumed a deeply religious tone (for example, Mazzini and Gioberti). These themes were united in Hegelian Idealism, promoted by Spaventa among others. The neo-Idealists of the early twentieth century, such as Croce and Gentile, distinguished themselves by assuming a political role and by opposing empiricism and positivism, philosophical heirs of the Enlightenment which were traditionally considered alien although popular at that time. The aftermath of the Second World War brought to gradual dissolution both philosophical and political neo-Idealism, a movement which was rooted especially at the universities of Rome and Naples; it also saw the rise of Marxist thought (Gramsci) and Existentialism, especially at the universities of Bologna, Milan and Turin. Among the most important figures in contemporary Italian philosophy we find Bobbio (political philosophy), Pareyson, Vattimo and Eco. While both French and German philosophy still play a major role in the philosophical debate, in recent years increasing attention has been paid to AngloSaxon philosophy. See also: RENAISSANCE PHILOSOPHY Further reading Bausola, A. et al. (1985) La filosofia italiana dal dopoguerra a oggi (Italian philosophy from the end of the Second World War to today), Rome and Bari: Laterza. (Essays by Garin, Dal Pra, Pera, Bedeschi, Bausola and Verra on the most significant movements in contemporary Italian philosophy.) Geymonat, L. (1970–2) Storia della pensiero filosofico e scientifico (History of philosophical and scientific thought), Milan: Garzanti, 6 vols. (University-level manual with particular reference to the history of scientific thought, structured by topic, with specific chapters on Italian philosophy and a bibliography up to the 1970s.) Translated by Anna Gannon GAETANO CHIURAZZI ITŌ JINSAI (1627–1705) Itō Jinsai, along with his contemporary Yamaga Sokō, pioneered the kogaku, or ‘Ancient Learning’, philosophical movement of Tokugawa Japan. Kogaku reacted against the allegedly stifling and excessively metaphysical ideas of Zhu Xi’s neo-Confucianism. In making his call for a return to the ancient Confucian teachings, Jinsai produced one of the first and most systematic visions of Confucian philosophy. See also: CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY, JAPANESE Further reading Spae, J.J. (1948) Itō Jinsai , New York: Paragon; repr. 1967. (The only biography of Jinsai in English.) JOHN ALLEN TUCKER
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Page 413 J JACOBI, FRIEDRICH HEINRICH (1743–1819) Polemicist and literary figure, Jacobi was an outspoken and effective defender of individualism. He accused philosophers of conceptualizing existence according to the requirements of explanation, thus allowing no room for individual freedom or for a personal God. In a series of polemics that influenced the reception of Kant, Jacobi applied his formula, ‘Consistent philosophy is Spinozist, hence pantheist, fatalist and atheist’, first to Enlightenment philosophy and then to idealism. Jacobi was not however opposed to reason; in ‘faith’ and ‘feeling’ he sought to recover the intuitive power of reason philosophers ignored. Jacobi also criticized the literary movement spearheaded by the young Goethe, because of its latent fatalism. He dramatized in two novels the problem of reconciling individualism with social obligations. An exponent of British economic and political liberalism, Jacobi was an early critic of the French revolution which he considered the product of rationalism. See also: ENLIGHTENMENT, CONTINENTAL Further reading di Giovanni, G. (ed. and trans.) (1994) The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel ‘Allwill’ , Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen. (This volume includes complete translations of Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza (1785), David Hume (1787), Allwill, Jacobi to Fichte , the introduction to the David Hume of 1815, and excerpts from other works. It also includes a long study on Jacobi and his age, and a detailed bibliography.) GEORGE DI GIOVANNI JAINA PHILOSOPHY The issues in Jaina philosophy developed concurrently with those that emerged in Buddhist and Hindu philosophy. The period from the second century BC to about the tenth century AD evinces a tremendous interaction between the schools of thought and even an exchange of ideas, borne out especially in the rich commentary literature on the basic philosophical works of the respective systems. Jaina philosophy shares with Buddhism and Hinduism the aim of striving, within its own metaphysical presuppositions, for absolute liberation ( mokṣa or nirvāna ) from the factors which bind human existence. For the philosophical systems of Indian thought, ignorance (of one’s own nature, of the nature of the world and of one’s role in the world) is one of the chief such factors, and Jainism offers its own insights into what constitutes the knowledge that has the soteriological function of overcoming ignorance. Jainism is not exempt from the problem of distinguishing the religious and/or mystical from the ‘philosophical’; the Indian tradition has no exact equivalents for these categories as they are usually employed in Western thought. The significance ascribed to knowledge is reflected in the attention given to epistemology and logic by Jaina philosophers. The first systematic account was given by the fourth- or fifth-century philosopher Umāsvāti, who distinguished two types of knowledge: partial knowledge, which is obtained from particular standpoints, and comprehensive knowledge, which is of five kinds – sensory knowledge, scriptural knowledge, clairvoyance, telepathy and omniscience. Of these, the first two are held to be indirect (consisting in, or analogous to, inference) and the remainder are direct; Jainism is unique among Indian philosophies in characterizing sensory knowledge as indirect. The aim of the treatises on knowledge is to present what the Jainas believe would be known in the state of omniscience, as taught by Mahāvīra. Omniscience is an intrinsic condition of all souls; however, due to the influence of karma since beginningless time this essential quality of the soul is inhibited. The Jaina interest in logic arose, as with the other schools, through a consideration of inference as a mode of knowledge. The methods and terminology of the Nyāya school were heavily drawn upon; this is evident in Siddhasena Divākara’s Nyāyāvatāra (The Descent of Logic) ( c . fifth century), one of the first detailed presentations of Jaina logic. The Jainas used logic to criticize other schools and defend their own. The acquaintance with other traditions that this implies is a notable aspect of classical Jainism; their interest in other schools, coupled
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Page 414 with their belief in collecting and preserving manuscripts, makes the Jaina corpus very important for the study of classical Indian thought. According to Jaina ontology, reality is divided into the two basic principles of sentience and nonsentience, neither of which is reducible to the other. The former is manifested in souls, of which there are an infinite number, and the latter in the five basic substances, which are matter, dharma and adharma (factors posited to explain movement and rest), space and time. Matter consists of atoms; as it becomes associated with the soul, it gets attached to it, becomes transformed into karma and thereby restricts the functions of consciousness. This pernicious process can only be reversed through ascetic practices, which ultimately lead to liberation. Ascetic practices constitute the basis of Jaina ethics, the framework of which are the ‘five great vows’, according to which the ascetics vow to live. These are: nonviolence towards all forms of life, abstinence from lying, not taking what is not given, celibacy and renunciation of property. Nonviolence is strongly emphasized, since violence produces the greatest amount of karma. Hence great care has to be exercised at all times, especially because injury of life forms should be avoided also in plants, water, fire, etc. The minimization of physical activity to avoid injury is therefore an important ideal of Jaina asceticism. Inspiration for constant ethical behaviour is provided by a contemplation of the lives of the twenty-four Jinas, of whom Mahāvīra was the last. Though human, these ‘conquerors of the passions’ are worshipped as divine beings because of their conduct in the world and knowledge of the nature of ultimate reality. See also: MAHĀVĪRA Further reading Tatia, N. (1951) Studies in Jaina Philosophy , Varanasi: P.V. Research Institute. (A systematic interpretation of Jaina philosophy based on a critique of other schools.) Yaśovijaya (17th century) Jaina Tarka Bhāṣā (The Language of Jaina Logic), trans. and ed. D. Bhargava, Mahopādhyāya Yaśovijaya’s Jaina Tarka Bhāśā , Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1973. (A critical edition of a popular treatise on Jaina epistemology serving also as a manual of Jaina logic.) JAYANDRA SONI JAMES OF VITERBO ( c .1255–1308) James of Viterbo was an Italian Augistinian who studied and taught in Paris and Naples before becoming Archbishop of Naples. His writings reveal a loyalty to Augustine combined with an interest in Neoplatonic sources such as Proclus, Pseudo-Dionysius and Boethius. He also reveals a strong interest in the Greek commentators on Aristotle, in Simplicius as regards predication and language and in Themistius and John Philoponus as regards the nature of the intellect and intellectual cognition. Frequently, after presenting various positions on a topic and noting how they differ, he proposes to state what seems probable to him. He thus proposes, for example, a theory of innatism. In contrast, he shows no little certitude in his De regimine christiano (On Christian Rule), where he presents a markedly papalist political theory. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM, MEDIEVAL Further reading James of Viterbo ( c .1255–1308) De regimine christiano (On Christian Rule) in H.-X. Arquillière, Le plus ancien traité de l’Église: Jacques de Viterbe ‘De regimine christiano’ (1301–1302). Étude des sources et édition critique, Paris: Gabriel Beauchesne, 1926; ed. and trans. R.W. Dyson, On Christian Government: De Regimine Christiano , Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1995. (James’ work on political philosophy.) EDWARD P. MAHONEY JAMES, WILLIAM (1842–1910) The American William James was motivated to philosophize by a desire to provide a philosophical ground for moral action. Moral effort presupposes that one has free will, that the world is not already the best of all possible worlds, and, for maximum effort, according to James, the belief that there is a God who is also on the side of good. In his famous, often misunderstood paper ‘The Will to Believe’, James defended one’s right to believe in advance of the evidence when one’s belief has momentous consequences for one’s conduct and success, and a decision cannot be postponed. One such belief is the belief in objective values. Generally, a belief is objective if it meets a standard independent of the believer’s own thought. In morals, objective values emerge from each person’s subjective valuings, whatever their psychological source, when these valuings become the values of a community of persons who care for one another. Still, even in such a community there will be conflicting claims, and the obligations generated by these claims will need to be ranked and conflicts resolved. James’
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Page 415 solution is to say that the more inclusive claim – the claim that can be satisfied with the lesser cost of unsatisfied claims – is to be ranked higher. This is not to be mistaken for utilitarianism: James is not a hedonist, and it is not clear what he means by the most inclusive claim. A concern for others makes sense only if there are others who inhabit with us a common world. Pragmatism, which he co-founded with C.S. Peirce, and radical empiricism provide James’ answer to those who would be sceptics concerning the existence of the common-sense world. Pragmatism is both a theory of meaning and a theory of truth. As a theory of meaning it aims at clarity; our thoughts of an object are clear when we know what effects it will have and what reactions we are to prepare. As a theory of truth, pragmatism makes clear what is meant by ‘agreement’ in the common formula that a belief is true if it agrees with reality. Only in the simplest cases can we verify a belief directly – for example, we can verify that the soup is too salty by tasting it – and a belief is indirectly verified if one acts on it and that action does not lead to unanticipated consequences. Contrary to a widespread misunderstanding, this does not mean that James defines truth as that which is useful; rather, he points out that it is, in fact, useful to believe what is true. James rejects the dualism of common sense and of many philosophers, but he is neither a materialist nor an idealist, rather what he calls a ‘pure experience’ (for example, your seeing this page) can be taken as an event in your (mental) history or as an event in the page’s (physical) history. But there is no ‘substance’ called ‘pure experience’: there are only many different pure experiences. You and I can experience the same page, because an event in your mental history and an event in mine can be taken to be events in the same physical history of the page; James may even have been tempted to say that a pure experience can be taken to belong to more than one mental history. According to James, pragmatism mediates the so-called conflict between science and religion. James took religious experiences very seriously both from a psychologist’s perspective and as evidence for the reality of the divine. See also: PRAGMATISM Further reading Bird, G. (1987) William James , London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (A volume in the Arguments of the Philosophers series; an excellent and very readable introduction to James.) James, W. (1902) The Varieties of Religious Experience, New York: Collier Books; repr. London: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1961. (James’ most popular book is a careful account and analysis of the various types of religious experience and religious personality, mostly Christian.) RUTH ANNA PUTNAM JAPANESE PHILOSOPHY The most distinctive characteristic of Japanese philosophy is how it has assimilated and adapted foreign philosophies to its native worldview. As an isolated island nation, Japan successfully resisted foreign invasion until 1945 and, although it borrowed ideas freely throughout its history, was able to do so without the imposition of a foreign military or colonial presence. Japanese philosophy thus bears the imprint of a variety of foreign traditions, but there is always a distinctively Japanese cultural context. In order to understand the dynamics of Japanese thought, therefore, it is necessary to examine both the influence of various foreign philosophies through Japanese history and the underlying or continuing cultural orientation that set the stage for which ideas would be assimilated and in what way. The major philosophical traditions to influence Japan from abroad have been Confucianism, Buddhism, neo-Confucianism and Western philosophy. Daoism also had an impact, but more in the areas of alchemy, prognostication and folk medicine than in philosophy. Although these traditions often overlapped, each also had distinctive influences. In its literary forms, Japanese philosophy began about fourteen centuries ago. Confucian thought entered Japan around the fifth century AD. Through the centuries the imprint of Confucianism has been most noticeable in the areas of social structure, government organization and ethics. Philosophically speaking, the social self in Japan has its roots mainly in Confucian ideals, blended since the sixteenth century with certain indigenous ideas of loyalty and honour developed within the Japanese samurai or warrior class. The philosophical impact of Buddhism, introduced around the same time as Confucianism, has been primarily in three areas: psychology, metaphysics and aesthetics. With its emphasis on disciplined contemplation and introspective analysis, Buddhism has helped define the various Japanese senses of the inner, rather than social, self. In metaphysics, Buddhist
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Page 416 esotericism has been most dominant; through esoteric Buddhist philosophy, the Japanese gave a rational structure to their indigenous beliefs that spirituality is immanent rather than transcendent, that mind and body (like humanity and nature) are continuous rather than separate, and that expressive power is shared by things as well as human thought or speech. This metaphysical principle of expression has combined with the introspective psychology and emphasis on discipline to form the foundation of the various aesthetic theories that have been so well developed in Japanese history. Neo-Confucianism became most prominent in Japan in the sixteenth century. Like classical Confucianism, it contributed much to the Japanese understanding of virtue and the nature of the social self. Unlike classical Confucianism in Japan, however, neo-Confucianism also had a metaphysical and epistemological influence. Its emphasis on investigating the principle or configuration of things stimulated the Japanese study of the natural world. This reinforced a tendency initiated with the very limited introduction of Western practical sciences and medicine in the sixteenth century. Western philosophy, along with Western science and technology, has had its major impact in Japan only since the middle of the nineteenth century. The process of modernization forced Japanese philosophers to reconsider fundamental issues in epistemology, social philosophy and philosophical anthropology. As it has assimilated Asian traditions of thought in the past – absorbing, modifying and incorporating aspects into its culture – so Japan has been consciously assimilating Western thought since the early twentieth century. The process continues today. What in all this is distinctively Japanese? On the superficial level, it might seem that Japan has drawn eclectically from a variety of traditions without any inherent sense of intellectual direction. A more careful analysis, however, shows that Japanese thinkers have seldom adopted any foreign philosophy without simultaneously adapting it. For example, the Japanese philosophical tradition never fully accepted the emphasis on propriety or the mandate of heaven so characteristic of Chinese Confucianism. It rejected the Buddhist idea that impermanence is a reality to which one must be resigned, and instead made the appreciation of impermanence into an aesthetic. It criticized the neo-Confucian and Western philosophical tendencies toward rationalism and positivism, even while accepting many ideas from those traditions. In short, there has always been a complex selection process at work beneath the apparent absorption of foreign ideas. Both historically and in the present, some Japanese philosophers and cultural critics have tried to identify this selection process with Shintō, but Shintō itself has also been profoundly shaped by foreign influences. The selection process has shaped Shintō as much as Shintō has shaped it. In any case, we can isolate a few axiological orientations that have seemed to persist or recur throughout the history of Japanese thought. First, there has been a tendency to emphasize immanence over transcendence in defining spirituality. Second, contextual pragmatism has generally won out over attempts to establish universal principles that apply to all situations. Third, reason has often been combined with affect as the basis of knowledge or insight. Fourth, theory is seldom formulated in isolation from a praxis used to learn the theory. Fifth, although textual authority has often been important, it has not been as singular in its focus as in many other cultures. Thus, the Japanese have not typically identified a single text such as the Bible, the Analects, the Qur’an or the Bhagavad Gītā as foundational to their culture. Although there have been exceptions to these general orientations, they do nonetheless help define the broader cultural backdrop against which the drama of Japanese philosophy has been played out through history. See also: AESTHETICS, JAPANESE; BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY, JAPANESE; BUSHI PHILOSOPHY; CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY, JAPANESE; LITERATURE, PHILOSOPHY IN MODERN JAPANESE; KOKORO; KYOTO SCHOOL; LOGIC IN JAPAN; SHINTŌ Further reading Nakamura Hajime (1969) A History of the Development of Japanese Thought, Tokyo: Kokusai Bunka Shinkokai (Japan Cultural Society), 2 vols, 2nd edn. (Not an integrated book but a set of seven excellent essays on different periods of Japanese philosophy. Out-of-print, but still one of the most insightful discussions available in English.) Tsunoda, R., de Bary, W.T. and Keene, D. (eds) (1964) Sources of Japanese Traditions, New York: Columbia University Press, 2 vols. (Extensive collection of short excepts from philosophical texts in translation, including brief but useful introductions to each writer.) THOMAS P. KASULIS
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Page 417 JASPERS, KARL (1883–1969) Karl Jaspers studied medicine and psychology at Heidelberg before turning to philosophy. He is generally known as an existentialist, but he also developed interesting conceptions in other fields of philosophy: in philosophy of religion, the concepts of Transcendence, cipher and philosophical faith; in philosophy of history, the thesis of an Axial Period in history; in political philosophy, the idea of a new, reasonable politics. His existentialism deals mainly with personal moral attitudes and private aspects of individual self-realization in boundary situations and intimate interpersonal communication. His political philosophy concentrates on controversial political affairs and some of the urgent problems of his age (for example, the possibility of extinguishing all life on earth by the atom bomb, or of establishing a worldwide totalitarian regime). See also: EXISTENTIALISM Further reading Hersch, J. (1986) Karl Jaspers: Eine Einführung in sein Werk , Munich: R. Piper. (An introduction to the main ideas of Jaspers’ philosophy.) Jaspers, K. (1932) Philosophie , Berlin: Springer, 3 vols; trans. E.B. Ashton, Philosophy , Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 3 vols, 1969–71. (Jaspers’ main work in existentialism, comprising three volumes: World-Orientation, Existential Elucidation And Metaphysics.) KURT SALAMUN JEFFERSON, THOMAS (1743–1826) Thomas Jefferson came from a privileged background, began his public career as a lawyer, and rose to hold the governorship of his home state of Virginia and to serve his country successively as minister to France, secretary of state, vice-president and president. His proudest declared achievements were to have been author of the Declaration of Independence, and of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom, and founder of the University of Virginia. An architect, inventor, scientist, educator and writer, he was one of the most versatile and brilliant men of his generation. In philosophy his main contribution was to political theory, where he supported a social contract theory and a doctrine of natural rights. See also: AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY IN THE 18TH AND 19TH CENTURIES Further reading Sheldon, G.W. (1991) The Political Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson , Baltimore: John Hopkins Press. (Relying on the recent work of J.G.A. Pocock, Joyce Appleby and others, Sheldon attempts to fit Jefferson’s thought into the current debates over Republicanism, Liberalism and Classicism.) MURRAY G. MURPHEY JEWISH PHILOSOPHY Jewish philosophy is philosophical inquiry informed by the texts, traditions and experiences of the Jewish people. Its concerns range from the farthest reaches of cosmological speculation to the most intimate theatres of ethical choice and the most exigent fora of political debate. What distinguishes it as Jewish is the confidence of its practitioners that the literary catena of Jewish tradition contains insights and articulates values of lasting philosophical import. One mark of the enduring import of these ideas and values is their articulation in a variety of idioms, from the mythic and archetypal discourse of the Book of Genesis to the ethical and legislative prescriptions of the Pentateuch at large, to the admonitions of the Prophets, the juridical and allegorical midrash and dialectics of the Rabbis, and to the systematic demonstrations, flights of imagination, existential declarations and apercus of philosophers in the modern or the medieval mode. 1 The nature of Jewish philosophy Students of Jewish philosophy, especially those who aspire to contribute a window or a wing to the edifice, must learn many languages, to read and listen to voices very different from their own. Just as the writers of the Genesis narratives or of the Pentateuch had to recast and reinvent the ancient creation myths and the ancient Babylonian laws to express the distinctively universal ethical demands and aesthetic standards of their God, and just as the Deuteronomist had to rediscover the ethical core in the original Mosaic legislation, hearing God’s commands now as urgent reminders through the very human voice of Moses, so in every generation new interpreters are needed, to rediscover what is essential and living in the tradition. Such interpreters have always needed to negotiate the rapids of historical change – not just with regard to idiom but also with regard to content, refocusing and restructuring the living tradition, sculpting it philosophically with their own moieties of reason. Such thinkers have worked always with a view to the continuity of the tradition; that is, to the faithfulness of its
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Page 418 future to its past, but also to the vitality and vivacity of what they found timeless in the tradition and therefore capable of acquiring new meanings and new spheres of application in the present. The confidence of the practitioners of Jewish philosophy in the conceptual vitality and continually renewed moral and spiritual relevance of the tradition is typically the reflex of an existential commitment to that tradition and to the people who are its bearers. That confidence, and its repeated vindication by the richness of the tradition itself, is also a wellspring of renewal and encouragement for the commitment that energizes it – even, and especially, in times of historical crisis and external pressures, which have rarely confined themselves to sheerly intellectual challenges. Symptomatic of that commitment is the prominence and recurrence of the philosophy of Judaism among the concerns of Jewish philosophy. However, the two should not be confused. The philosophy of Judaism is inquiry into the nature and meaning of Jewish existence. Its questions address the sense to be given to the idea of a covenant between the universal God and the people of Israel, the meaning of that people’s mission, their chosenness, their distinctive laws, customs and rituals and the relation of those norms to the more widely recognized norms of humanity, of which the Prophets of Israel were early and insistent messengers. The philosophy of Judaism wants to understand Zionism, the Holocaust, the Jewish Diaspora and the historical vicissitudes that gave shape to Jewish experience over the millennia, from the age of the biblical patriarchs to the destruction of the first and second temples in Jerusalem, to the exile of the Jewish people and the return of many, after a hundred generations, to the land they had been promised and in which they had prospered, a land which some had never left but which most, for centuries, had pictured only through the sublimating lenses of sacred history, apocalypse and philosophy. The philosophy of Judaism wants to understand the ancient Jewish liturgy, the exegetical practices and hermeneutical standards of the Jewish exegetes. Like Freud, it wants to understand Jewish humour. Like Pico della Mirandola, it wants to understand Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism, and like Buber, it wants to understand Hasidism. The concerns of the philosophy of Judaism touch every aspect of Jewish experience, just as the concerns of philosophy at large touch every aspect of experience in general. But the concerns of Jewish philosophy, like those of general philosophy, do not confine themselves to Jewish experience. They are, in fact, the same concerns as those of general philosophy, rendered distinctively Jewish by their steady recourse to the resources of the tradition, and sustained as philosophical by an insistence on critical receptivity, responsible but creative appropriation of ideas and values that withstand the scrutiny of reason and indeed grow and give fruit in its light. 2 Strengths and weaknesses There are two weaknesses in Jewish philosophy as practised today. One is a tendency to historicism, that is, the equivocal equation of norm with facticity and facticity with norm that leads to an abdication of philosophical engagement for a detached clinical posture or an equally unwholesome surrender of judgment to the flow of events. Historicism is a natural by-product of respect for tradition, or of expectation of progress. It becomes particularly debilitating under the pressure of positivism, whether of the logical empiricist sort that dominated philosophy for much of the early twentieth century, or of the more endemic sort that thrives on the sheer givenness of any system of law and ritual or that allows itself to be overwhelmed by the press of history itself. It is not unusual, even today, when logical positivism is widely thought to be long dead, to find scholars of Jewish thought who substitute historical descriptions for philosophical investigations, often in the process begging or slighting the key philosophical questions. Nor is it unusual among those of more traditional stamp for scholars to be found who imagine that a faithful description of the contents of authentic Jewish documents constitutes doing Jewish philosophy – as though faithfulness to the tradition were somehow a substitute for critical grappling with the issues and problems, and as though the question as to what constitutes faithfulness to the tradition, conceptually, historically, morally and spiritually, were not itself among the most crucial of those issues and problems. The second weakness is a narrowing of the gaze, a tendency to substitute philosophy of Judaism for the wider discourse of Jewish philosophy, as though the resources of the tradition had nothing (or nothing more) to contribute to ethics, or natural theology, or metaphysics and logic, for that matter. The work of the great practitioners of Jewish philosophy has repeatedly given the lie to such narrow expectations. In every epoch of its existence,
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Page 419 Jewish philosophy has played an active role in the philosophical conversation of humankind – which is a universal conversation precisely because and to the extent that those who take part speak every language and bring to the conversation experiences that are universal as well as those that are unique. But if two weaknesses are to be mentioned here, at least one strength should be cited as well: Jewish philosophy, although intimately engaged throughout its history with the philosophical traditions of the West, has also been a tradition apart. The open access of most of its practitioners to the Hebrew (and Aramaic) Jewish sources has afforded a perspective that is distinctive and that can be corrective of biases found in other branchings of the tree of philosophical learning. The early access of medieval Jewish philosophers to Arabic philosophical and scientific writings, and to the Greek works preserved in Arabic, enriched and broadened their philosophical repertoire. The scholastic learning of later medieval Jewish philosophers and their collaboration with scholastic thinkers made them at once participants and observers of in the lively philosophical debates of their day. The immersion and active participation of Renaissance and Enlightenment Jewish philosophers in the movements that spawned modernity gave them a similar philosophical vantage point. All philosophers must be, to some degree, alien to their society – Socrates and Nietzsche, and for that matter even Plato, Aristotle and Descartes were, to some degree, intellectual outsiders in their own times – not so alien as to have no word or thought in common with their contemporaries, but not so well integrated as to become mere apologists, or complacent and unquestioning acquiescors in the given. Jewish philosophy has long made and continues to make a distinctive, if today underutilized, contribution to cosmopolitan philosophical discourse in this regard. It shares the problematic of Western philosophy but typically offers a distinctive slant or perspective that calls into question accepted verities and thus enhances the critical edge of philosophical work for those who study it. 3 Movements and important figures Jewish philosophy has over the course of its history been the source of a number of different types of study based on the philosophically relevant ideas of the Hebrew Bible, Rabbinic Law (Halakhah), Rabbinic theology and Rabbinic homiletics, exegesis and hermeneutics (midrash) (see BIBLE, HEBREW; HALAKHAH; THEOLOGY, RABBINIC; MIDRASH). The anti-Rabbinical, biblicist movement known as Karaism and the mystical tradition of the Kabbalah are examples of differing types of movements which have emerged (see KARAISM; KABBALAH), while Jewish voluntarism and Jewish Averroism were fields for the rivalry between intellectualist and less deterministic, more empiricist views of theology as it was played out among Jewish thinkers (see VOLUNTARISM, JEWISH; AVERROISM, JEWISH). More modern movements include the Jewish pietist movement founded by Israel Baal Shem Tov and known as Hasidism, the Jewish Enlightenment movement known as the Haskalah, and Zionism, the movement that led to the establishment of the modern State of Israel (see HASIDISM; ENLIGHTENMENT, JEWISH; ZIONISM). The first exponent of Jewish philosophy was PHILO OF ALEXANDRIA, a major contributor to the synthesis of Stoicism, Middle Platonism and monotheistic ideas that helped forge the tradition of scriptural philosophy in the West. Other early figures include DAUD AL-MUQAMMAS and ISAAC ISRAELI, two of the first figures of medieval Jewish philosophical theology. Al-Fayyumi SAADIAH GAON (882– 942), the first systematic Jewish philosopher, was also a major biblical translator and exegete, a grammarian, lexicographer and authority on Jewish religious law and ritual. The rationalism, pluralism and intellectual honesty evident in his work made it a model of Jewish philosophy for all who came after him. SOLOMON IBN GABIROL ( c .1020– c.1057), long known as a Hebrew poet, was discovered in the nineteenth century to have been the author as well of the famous Neoplatonic philosophical work, preserved in Latin as the Fons Vitae . Moses IBN EZRA ( c .1055–after 1135) is notable for his poetic and philosophic conributions. ABRAHAM IBN EZRA ( c .1089–1164) is likewise noted for his hermeneutical ideas and methods; his forthright approach to the Hebrew Bible was a critical influence on the thinking of Jewish philosophers from the Middle Ages to Spinoza and beyond. A less familiar figure is ABU ’LBARAKAT AL-BAGHDADI ( fl. c .1200–50), a brilliant Jewish thinker who converted to Islam late in life. He developed highly independent views about the nature of time, human consciousness, space, matter and motion. His work undercuts the notion that the medieval period was simply an age of faith and static commitment to a faith community. A polymath of rather different spirit was Abraham BAR HAYYA in the eleventh century, who wrote on astronomy, mathematics, geography, optics and music as well as philosophy and
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Page 420 who collaborated on scientific translations with the Christian scholar Plato of Tivoli, the transmitter of the Ptolemaic system to the Latin world. Bar Hayya’s Meditation of the Sad Soul expresses the forlornness of human life in exile from the world of the divine, a forlornness tinged with the hope of future glory. Joseph ibn TZADDIK (d. 1149) similarly developed Neoplatonic ideas around the theme of the human being as a microcosm. Bahya ibn Pakuda (early twelfth century) wrote as a pietist philosopher. He placed philosophical understanding and critical thinking at the core of the spiritual devotion called for by the sincerest form of piety. Judah HALEVI (before 1075–1141), probably the greatest Hebrew poet after the Psalms, wrote a cogently argued philosophical dialogue best known as the Kuzari , but more formally titled, A Defence and an Argument in behalf of the Abased Religion. Set in the Khazar kingdom, whose king, historically, had converted to Judaism, the work mounts a trenchant critique of the intellectualism of the prevalent philosophical school and the spiritualizing and universalizing ascetic pietism that was its counterpart. Calling for a robust recovery of Jewish life and peoplehood in the Land of Israel, the work is not only a striking anticipation of Zionist ideas but a remarkable expression of the need to reintegrate the spiritual, intellectual, moral and physical dimensions of Jewish life. Abraham IBN DAUD ( c .1110–80), a historian as well as a philosopher, used his historiography to argue for the providential continuity of the Jewish intellectual and religious tradition. His philosophical work laid the technical foundations that made possible the philosophical achievement of Moses MAIMONIDES (1138– 1204), the greatest of the philosophers committed to the Jewish tradition. Besides his medical writings and his extensive juridical corpus, which includes the authoritative fourteen-volume code of Jewish law, the Mishneh Torah , Maimonides was the author of the famous Guide to the Perplexed . Written in Arabic and intended for an inquirer puzzled by the apparent discrepancies between traditional Judaism and Aristotelian-Neoplatonic philosophy, the Guide is a paradigm in the theology of transcendence, addressing questions ranging from the overt anthropomorphism of the scriptural text to the purposes of the Mosaic legislation, to the controversy over the creation or eternity of the world, the problem of evil, and the sense that can be made of the ideas of revelation, providence, divine knowledge and human perfectibility. Like Halevi’s Kuzari and Bahya’s Duties of the Heart, the Guide to the Perplexed continues to be studied to this day by Jews and non-Jews for its philosophical insights. Abraham ben Moses MAIMONIDES (1186– 1237), the son of the great philosopher and jurist, began his scholarly life as a defender of his father’s work against the many critics who feared Maimonidean rationalism. In his mature work he became the exponent of a mystical, pietist and ascetic movement, largely influenced by Sufism. Moses NAHMANIDES (1194–1270), exegete, theologian and a founding figure of the Kabbalistic theosophy, championed Judaism in the infamous Barcelona Disputation of 1263 and played a leading role in the Maimonidean controversy. He struggled to harmonize his conservative and reactive tendencies with his respect for reason and the unvarnished sense of the biblical text. IBN KAMMUNA (d. 1284) was a pioneer in other areas. Besides his work in the Ishraqi or Illuminationist tradition of theosophy, laid out in commentary on the Muslim philosopher IBN SINA (Avicenna), he wrote a distinctively dispassionate study of comparative religions, favouring Judaism but fairly and unpolemically presenting the Christian and Muslim alternatives. Shem Tov IBN FALAQUERA ( c .1225–c .1295) was a warm exponent of Maimonidean rationalism and an ardent believer in the interdependence of faith and reason. His selections in Hebrew from the lost Arabic original of Ibn Gabirol’s magnum opus allowed modern scholars to identify Ibn Gabirol as the Avicebrol of the surviving Latin text, the Fons Vitae . HILLEL BEN SAMUEL OF VERONA ( c .1220– 95), physician, translator, Talmudist and philosopher was a Maimonist who introduced numerous scholastic ideas into Hebrew philosophical discourse. IMMANUEL OF ROME ( c .1261–before 1336) was a prolific author of philosophical poetry and exegesis, often praising reason and intellectual love. JUDAH BEN MOSES OF ROME ( c .1292–after 1330), known as Judah Romano, was an active bridge person between the Judaeo-Arabic and the scholastic tradition of philosophical theology. Levi ben Gershom, known as GERSONIDES (1288–1344), was an important astronomer and mathematician as well as a biblical exegete and philosopher. His Wars of the Lord grappled with the problems of creation, providence, divine knowledge, human freedom and immortality. Aiming to defend his ancestral faith, Gersonides followed courageously where the argument led,
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Page 421 often into radical and creative departures from traditional views. Hasdai CRESCAS (1340–1410), an ardent defender of Judaism against Christian conversionary pressures, was among the most creative figures of Jewish philosophy, challenging many of the givens of Aristotelianism, including the idea that the cosmos must be finite in extent. Crescas’ student Joseph ALBO ( c .1360–1444) sought to organize Jewish theology into an axiomatic system, in part to render Jewish thought defensible against hostile critics. Profiat DURAN (d. c . 1414), also known as Efodi, used his extensive understanding of Christian culture to criticize Christianity from a Jewish perspective. Deeply influenced by Moses Maimonides and Abraham ibn Ezra and by Neoplatonic and astrological ideas, he sought to balance the practical with the intellectual aspects of the Torah. Simeon ben Tzemach Duran (1361–1444) contributed an original approach to the project of Jewish dogmatics and an implicit critical examination of that project. The Shem Tov family included four thinkers active in fifteenth century Spain (see SHEM TOV FAMILY). Their works follow the persecution of 1391 and the ensuing mass apostasy of Spanish Jews and seek to rethink the relations of philosophy to Judaism. Shem Tov, the paterfamilias , criticized Maimonides and endorsed Kabbalah, but his sons Joseph, a court physician and auditor of royal accounts at Castile, and Isaac, a popular teacher of Aristotelian philosophy, and Joseph’s son, again named Shem Tov, wrote numerous Peripatetic commentaries. These offspring charted a more moderate course that enabled Jewish intellectuals to cultivate philosophy and the kindred arts and sciences while asserting the ultimate primacy of their revealed faith. Isaac ben Moses ARAMA ( c .1420–94), like Nahmanides, was critical of Maimonidean and Aristotelian rationalism but did not discard reason, seeing in it a crucial exegetical tool and an avenue toward understanding miracles and providence. Isaac ABRAVANEL (1437–1508), leader of the Jews whom Ferdinand and Isabella exiled from Spain in 1492, like Arama criticised Maimonidean rationalism in the interest of traditional Judaism as he saw it, but at the same time put forward a theistic vision of history and strikingly modern views about politics and the state. His son, Judah ben Isaac ABRAVANEL, also known as Leone Ebreo ( c .1460–c .1521), wrote the Dialoghi d’amore. Couched in the language of courtly love, the work explores the idea that love is the animating force of the cosmos. The work stands out as a brilliant dialectical exploration of the differences and complementarities of the Platonic and Aristotelian approaches to philosophy. Judah MESSER LEON ( c .1425–c .1495) was a philosopher, physician, jurist, communal leader, poet and orator. Awarded a doctorate in medicine and philosophy by the Emperor Frederick III, he could confer doctoral degrees in those subjects on the students in his yeshivah . He saw logic as the key to harmonizing religion and philosophy and favored scholastic logic over the Arabic logical works. His encyclopedia became a popular textbook, and his systematic elicitation of Hebrew rhetoric from the biblical text, in The Book of the Honeycomb’s Flow , one of the first Hebrew books to be printed, was a masterpiece of cross-cultural humanistic scholarship. But Messer Leon failed to curb the spread of Kabbalah, whose underlying Platonic metaphysics he abhorred and whose appropriation by Christian Platonists he held in deep suspicion. Indeed, his own son turned toward the Kabbalah and sought to combine its teachings with the Aristotelianism favored by his father. Yohanan ben ISAAC ALEMANNO (1433/4–after 1503/4) brought together in his thinking Averroist, Kabbalistic, Neoplatonic and Renaissance humanist themes. He instructed PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA inHebrewand in Kabbalah, bringing to birth what became a Christian, syncretic Kabbalism. Elijah DELMEDIGO ( c .1460–93) was an Aristotelian and Averroist. He translated works into Latin for Pico della Mirandola and developed a subtle critique of the kabbalistic ideas that in his time were rivaling and often displacing what he saw as more disciplined philosophical thinking. Abraham Cohen de HERRERA ( c .1562–c .1635) was a philosophically oriented kabbalist of Spanish origin. His Spanish writings, in Latin translation, were blamed for inspiring Spinoza’s views. 4 Movements and important figures (cont.) Moses MENDELSSOHN (1729–86), a leading figure of the European Enlightenment, spread Enlightenment ideas to Hebrew literature, fought for Jewish civil rights and did pioneering conceptual work on political theory, especially with regard to religious liberty in his Jerusalem. Solomon MAIMON (1753/4–1800) took his name in honour of Moses Maimonides. Trained as a rabbi, he pursued secular and scientific learning and became an important and original critic of the philosophy of Kant. Nachman KROCHMAL
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Page 422 (1785–1840), a leader of the Jewish Enlightenment in Galicia, found anticipations of Kant, Hegel and Schelling in the ancient Jewish writings. His work shows how a thinker whose underlying assumptions differ from those of the idealist philosophers could take their views in quite a different direction from the one they chose. Hermann COHEN (1842–1918), a major Kantian philosopher and one of the first non-baptized Jews to hold an important academic post in Germany, applied his own distinctive version of critical idealism to the understanding of Judaism as a spiritual and ethical system. Franz ROSENZWEIG (1886–1929), an important Hegelian thinker, went on to formulate a Jewish existential philosophy that deeply influenced many of the most prominent Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century. Martin BUBER (1878–1965), Zionist advocate of accommodation with the Palestinian Arabs and an admiring student of Hasidic traditions, added his own stamp to the continental tradition of Jewish philosophy by developing a widely influential dialogical philosophy that privileged relationships experientially and celebrated the I–thou, a mode of relation that allows for authentic encounter. A number of twentieth century philosophers of Judaism have grasped at diverse threads of the Jewish experience, illustrating both the attractions of the tradition and the fragmentation produced by centuries of persecution that would culminate in the Holocaust, only to be accentuated by the centrifugal tendencies of Jewish life in post-Holocaust liberal societies. Ahad HA’AM, the pen name of Asher Ginzberg (1856–1927), was an essayist who argued that the creation of a ‘spiritual centre’ of Jewish culture in Palestine would provide the sustenance needed to preserve the diaspora Jewry from the threat of assimilation. No state was needed. David BAUMGARDT (1890–1963) was a philosopher who sought to reconcile ethical naturalism with the ideals he found in the Jewish sources, but, unlike Hermann Cohen, Baumgardt did not explore those sources in close detail. Mordecai KAPLAN (1881–1981) sought to devise a social mission and communal identity for Jews without reliance on many of the core beliefs and practices that had shaped that identity in the past. Abraham Joshua HESCHEL (1907–72) sought to salvage the spiritual dimensions of Jewish experience, which found expression both in ritual and in ethical and social action. Joseph SOLOVEITCHIK (1903– 93) gave canonical expression to Orthodox ideals by focusing on the intellectual and ritual rigours of his archetypal figures, Halakhic man and the Lonely Man of Faith. Yeshayahu LEIBOWITZ (1903–94), an influential Israeli thinker, struggled for the disengagement of authentic and committed religious observance from the toils of governmental officialdom. Jews are mandated, he argued, to observance, as a community. That imperative is not to be put aside. Neither can the observant pretend to ignore the State of Israel. But the State can give no mandate to religious observance, and religious faithfulness can impart none of its aura to the State. For it is essential not to place God in the service of politics. Emil FACKENHEIM (1916–) seeks an authentic response to the Holocaust, which he formulates in an intentionally inclusionary way, as a ‘614th’ commandment, not to hand Hitler a posthumous victory but to find some way, that might vary from individual to individual, of keeping alive Jewish ideas, practices and commitments. See also: ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY; MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY; RENAISSANCE PHILOSOPHY L.E. GOODMAN JEWISH PHILOSOPHY, CONTEMPORARY Jewish philosophy is pursued by committed Jews seeking to understand Judaism and the world in one another’s light. In this broad sense, contemporary Jewish philosophy maintains the central focus of classical, medieval and Enlightenment Jewish philosophy. But a certain kind of traditionalism distinguishes many contemporary Jewish philosophers from their predecessors: an effort to show how Judaism maintains continuity and coherence despite historical change. Jewish thinkers who are traditionalists in this sense are no longer preoccupied with showing non-Jewish philosophers how Judaism fares when evaluated by universal reason, as their classical, medieval and modern predecessors were. Nor is their chief concern with exhibiting the good reasons for remaining Jewish and not converting to Christianity or Islam, as was that of many earlier Jewish thinkers. One work that sets an agenda for many of these traditionalists is Franz Rosenzweig’s Der Stern der Erlösung (The Star of Redemption) (1921). Like Rosenzweig, (1) they often reject the Enlightenment demand for a transcendental propaedeutic as a prelude to asking substantive questions. Instead, they address Jewish thought, ethics and experience head on. (2) None among this group thinks of
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Page 423 his work as beholden primarily and inevitably to standards of thought articulated first and foremost outside distinctively Jewish experience. (3) The six points of Der Stern der Erlösung (The Star of Redemption) – Creation, Revelation, Redemption, God, Israel, and the World – mark the large themes they aim to define or the categories through which they propose, explore and defend their claims. Besides traditionalism thus understood, contemporary Jewish philosophy, particularly among philosophers with analytic training, is marked by efforts philosophically to reanimate the classic texts of medieval Jewish philosophy, especially the work of Moses Maimonides. See also: ENLIGHTENMENT, JEWISH; JEWISH PHILOSOPHY IN THE EARLY 19TH CENTURY Further reading Cohen, H. (1919) Die Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums, Leipzig: Fock; trans. S. Kaplan with an introduction by L. Strauss, Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism , New York: Frederick Ungar, 1972. (A systematic exposition of Judaism by the founder of German Neo-Kantianism.) Rosenzweig, F. (1921) Der Stern der Erlösung, Frankfurt: Kauffmann; trans. W.W. Hallo, The Star of Redemption, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1970. (The highly influential twentieth-century philosophy of Judaism opposing all Enlightenment Jewish philosophy.) HENRY S. LEVINSON JONATHAN W. MALINO JEWISH PHILOSOPHY IN THE EARLY 19TH CENTURY Although Jewish philosophy flourished in the Middle Ages, it underwent a serious decline in 1492, when the Jews were expelled from Spain. The period following Kant and Mendelssohn witnessed an attempt to reintegrateJewish philosophy into the mainstream of Western culture. The strategy of reintegration consisted of two elements: (1) showing that there is more to Judaism than the study of Scripture and (2) arguing that some of the ideas that won favour in the Enlightenment were anticipated by Jews centuries earlier. The most central idea that Jewish thinkers claimed as their own is a shift in focus from theoretical issues to practical ones. As important features of the medieval worldview fell into disrepute, many philosophers began to ask whether there are limits to what human reason can know. Can it really prove that God exists or that the soul is immortal? One response was to argue that even if no proof can be found, there are still grounds for believing, particularly if our understanding of ourselves as moral agents makes no sense without them. But it did not take long for people to argue that moral agency requires not just a God but a free and transcendent God capable of issuing commands to free agents created in the divine image. Here too, Jewish thinkers claimed that the idea of a God who is not limited by nature and insists on mercy and justice for all people was an integral part of monotheism as understood by the Hebrew prophets. See also: JEWISH PHILOSOPHY, CONTEMPORARY; MENDELSSOHN, M. KENNETH SEESKIN JHERING, RUDOLF VON (1818–92) The Austrian lawyer and legal scholar Jhering saw law as a mechanism for achieving current purposes, supplying the compulsion needed where other levers were insufficient to secure the conditions of social life. In this, he took issue with those other nineteenth-century German jurists who regarded law as a settled hierarchy of rules and concepts. He had considerable influence on the development of jurisprudential thought both in Germany and in the USA. See also: LAW, PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Jhering, R. von (1872) Der Kampf um’s Recht , Vienna: G.J. Manz; trans. from 5th edn by J.J. Lalor, The Struggle for Law , 2nd edn with intro. by A. Koucourek, Chicago, IL: Callaghan and Co., 1915. (Regarded as one of his main jurisprudential works.) ELSPETH ATTWOOLL JIA YI (201–169 BC) Jia Yi, in forging a brilliant synthesis of classical Legalist, Daoist and Confucian doctrines, fashioned a coherent political and educational philosophy in support of strong central government. Jia’s impact on Chinese history can hardly be overestimated; his philosophy significantly shaped the imperial institutions of the Han dynasty (202 BC–AD 220), which became the models for successive dynasties of imperial China. See also: CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY, CHINESE Further reading Hsiao Kung-ch’üan (1979) A History of Chinese Political Thought,
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Page 424 trans. F.W. Mote, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, vol. I, 469–83. (Still the standard overview on Jia Yi’s political programmes.) MICHAEL NYLAN JOACHIM OF FIORE ( c .1135–1202) Joachim, an Italian Benedictine, was a charismatic monastic reformer and inventive scriptural exegete whose study of the Bible led him to propound complex theories of history. Especially interested in the Apocalypse as a guide to history, he believed that the advent of the Antichrist and a violent end of the age were imminent. Contemporaries considered him a prophet, and this reputation – furthered by spurious works attributed to him – endured for four centuries. His theology, however, was widely criticized by such authoritative thinkers as Aquinas, Bonaventure and Bradwardine. See also: HISTORY, PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading West, D.C. and Zimdars-Swartz, S. (1983) Joachim of Fiore: A Study in Spiritual Perception and History , Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. (A good introduction to Joachim because it assumes no prior knowledge and follows the texts very closely.) SEAN EISEN MURPHY JOHN OF DAMASCUS ( c .675–c .750) John of Damascus, who lived in the seventh and eighth centuries, is known for his Fount of Knowledge , which became the standard textbook of theology in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, and his opposition to the Iconoclasts, who opposed the use of images in Christian worship. The Fount of Knowledge , which drew heavily on patristic sources, was translated in the West by Robert Grossteste, where it had an influence on writers such as Peter Lombard. See also: BYZANTINE PHILOSOPHY; PATRISTIC PHILOSOPHY Further reading John of Damascus (after 743) Fount of Knowledge: The Philosophical Chapters , ed. P.B. Kotter in Die Schriften des Johannes von Damaskos , Berlin: de Gruyter, vol. 1; trans. F.H. Chase in John of Damascus: Writings, Fathers of the Church 37, New York: Fathers of the Church, 1958. (There are several other modern editions and a German translation of this work.) JOHN LONGEWAY JOHN OF FIDANZA see BONAVENTURE JOHN OF JANDUN ( c .1280/9–1328) The French scholar John of Jandun was the most important medieval philosopher in the Latin West to consider Averroes the true interpreter of the thought of Aristotle. He consideredAristotleto be ‘the prince of philosophers’, and Averroes to be the best philosopher after him. Jandun’s defense of Averroes’ attributing to Aristotle the doctrine that the intellect is one for all humans, and his own interpretation of various doctrines of Averroes, were much debated and criticized in Italy during the late fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries. In his own time, Jandun was exiled and excommunicated for his views, along with Marsilius of Padua. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM, MEDIEVAL; AVERROISM; AVERROISM Further reading MacClintock, S. (1956) Perversity and Error: Studies on the ‘Averroist’ John of Jandun , Indiana University Publications, Humanities Series 37, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. (Study of Jandun’s position on the soul, the intellect and the agent sense. Many references to manuscripts.) EDWARD P. MAHONEY JOHN OF LA ROCHELLE (d. 1245) John of La Rochelle was one of the first generation of Franciscan theologians at the University of Paris. What little is known of his life places him as a close partner to the greatest of the early Franciscan teachers, Alexander of Hales. John collaborated with Alexander not only in steering the Franciscan order towards some sort of institutional equilibrium, but also in the elaboration of the first synthesis of Franciscan theology, the Summa Fratris Alexandri (Summa of Brother Alexander). Whole sections of the Summa were written by John, most notably the treatment of moral law. John wrote in his own voice a number of theological works and two books on the soul, the Tractatus de divisione multiplici potentiarum animae (Treatise on the Multiple Division of the Soul’s Power) and the Summa de anima (Summa on the Soul). See also: ALEXANDER OF HALES; ARISTOTELIANISM, MEDIEVAL Further reading
Smalley, B. (1985) The Gospels in the Schools, c.1100–c.1280 , London: Hambledon Press,
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Page 425 171–190. (On John’s Gospel commentaries, with particular attention to their Franciscan elements.) MARK D. JORDAN JOHN OF MIRECOURT ( fl. c .1345) John of Mirecourt, a Cistercian monk, lectured on the Sentences of Peter Lombard at Paris, following which a number of his propositions were condemned. The traditional view that the condemnation came about because he was a radical sceptic has been brought into question by more extensive research on his writings. For example, it appears that he did not doubt the existence of God as he was accused of doing. John was, however, greatly interested in describing as accurately as possible the kinds of evidence that lead to knowledge and the means by which they are produced. Further reading Tachau, K. (1988) Vision and Certitude in the Age of Ockham , Leiden: Brill, 365, 371–3 and passim. (The best guide to the intellectual background to Mirecourt’s theory of cognition in late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century Oxford. Examines the situation in Paris only briefly and in conclusion. Shows the influence of Wodeham on I 3–5.) FIONA SOMERSET JOHN OF PARIS ( c .1260–1306) John of Paris was a prominent Dominican theologian at Paris at the end of thirteenth century. He began his career with polemical works in defense of Thomist positions. In them, he asserts the distinction between essence and existence, the unity of substantial form and the function of matter as principle of bodily individuation. John later took part in wider controversies, including those between the French crown and the papacy. His best known work is a treatise on the mutual independence of secular and spiritual authority. See also: AQUINAS, T.; ARISTOTELIANISM, MEDIEVAL Further reading John of Paris (1302–3) De potestate regia et papali (On Royal and Papal Power), trans. J.A. Watt, On Royal and Papal Power, Toronto, Ont.: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1971. (Watt’s translation contains a full and helpful introduction.) Roensch, F.J. (1964) Early Thomistic School , Dubuque: Priory Press, 98–104. (The most synoptic treatment in English.) MARK D. JORDAN JOHN OF SALISBURY (1115/20–1180) The Englishman John of Salisbury is one of the most learned and penetrating of twelfth-century Latin writers on moral and political matters. In his style as in his teaching, John represents a style of medieval philosophy heavily indebted to Roman models of rhetorical education. His interests in grammar, dialectic, politics and ethics are subordinated to an over-arching concern for moral formation. Three of John’s works stand out. The Entheticus de dogmate philosophorum (Entheticus of the Teaching of the Philosophers) is a satire on the pretensions and immoralities of those who divorce eloquence from philosophy in order to pursue power. The Metalogicon defends the traditional arts of the trivium and asserts the unity of eloquence and the other verbal arts with philosophy. By far the most important is the Policraticus, a sustained argument for philosophic wisdom against the vanities of worldly success, especially in politics. See also: CHARTRES, SCHOOL OF Further reading John of Salisbury (1159) Policraticus, ed. C.C.J. Webb, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909; Policraticus I–IV, ed. K.S.B. Keats-Rohan, with the Entheticus minor , Turnhout: Brepols, 1993. (Salisbury’s major work of political philosophy. A translation of the whole of the Policraticus can be pieced together from J. Dickinson, Policraticus: The Statesman’s Book, New York: Knopf, 1927, and J.B. Pike, The Frivolities of Courtiers and the Footprints of the Philosophers, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1938.) Wilks, M. (ed.) (1984) The World of John of Salisbury , Oxford: Blackwell. (An anthology of twenty-four papers, with a bibliography of works on John for 1953–82 on pages 445–57.) MARK D. JORDAN JOHN OF ST THOMAS (1589–1644) The seventeenth-century Portuguese Dominican, John of St Thomas or John Poinsot, was a major figure in late scholastic philosophy and theology. Educated at Coimbra and Louvain, he taught both disciplines in Spain: at Madrid, Plasencia and Alcalá. Aspiring to be a faithful disciple of Thomas Aquinas, he published a
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Page 426 three-volume Cursus philosophicus thomisticus (Thomistic Philosophical Course) and before he died began the publication of a Cursus theologicus (Theological Course). His philosophical writing was explicitly on logic and natural philosophy. However, in both his philosophical and theological works, he treated many metaphysical, epistemological and ethical issues. His logic is divided into two parts, formal and material. Of particular interest is his semiotic doctrine which appears in the second part. In natural philosophy, he explained Aristotle with a Thomistic slant. While following Aquinas in theology, John at times developed his master’s doctrine along new lines. Both in his own time and after he has had considerable authority within scholasticism, especially for Thomists. Among those whom he has influenced in twentieth-century Thomism are Joseph Gredt, Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Santiago Ramirez, Jacques Maritain and Yves Simon. See also: AQUINAS, T.; ARISTOTELIANISM IN THE 17TH CENTURY Further reading John of St Thomas (1631–2) Cursus philosophicus: Ars Logica (Philosophical Course: Logical Art), ed. B. Reiser, vol. 1, Turin: Marietti, 1930; trans. F.C. Wade, Outlines of Formal Logic , Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1955; trans. Y.R. Simon, J.J. Granville and G.D. Hollenhorst, The Material Logic of John of St Thomas, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1955. (Contains the two parts of John’s formal and material logic. The 1955 editions are partial translations.) JOHN P. DOYLE JOHN THE GRAMMARIAN see PHILOPONUS JOHNSON, ALEXANDER BRYAN (1786–1867) The English-born American Johnson was a self-taught philosophic genius who, completely alone, set out in the 1820s to analyse the nature and limits of language. He was the first thinker who consciously and systematically based his whole approach to philosophical problems on a critique of language. According to Johnson, a knowledge of the nature of language is important because it ‘bears the same relation to all speculative learning as a knowledge of the qualities of drugs bears to the practice of medicine or as a knowledge of perspective and colours bears to painting’. Further reading Rynin, D. (ed.) (1947) Alexander Bryan Johnson: A Treatise on Language, ed. D. Rynin, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1947. (A collated version of Johnson’s Treatises of 1828 and 1836, with a critical essay on his philosophy of language.) K.T. FANN JOHNSON, SAMUEL (1709–84) Famous as a man of letters and lexicographer, Johnson was no formal academic philosopher – indeed he was suspicious of abstractions. His works perfectly embody the darker side of the eighteenth-century mind, with its distrust of theoretical reason and system-mongering, and a profound sensitivity to the imperfections of a human existence in which there was more to be endured than to be enjoyed. Further reading Gross, G.S. (1992) This Invisible Riot of the Mind: Samuel Johnson’s Psychological Theory , Baltimore, MD: University of Pennsylvania Press. (Explores Johnson’s view of human nature as well as his own psychological weaknesses.) ROY PORTER JOHNSON, SAMUEL (1696–1772) Johnson was the first important philosopher in colonial America and author of the first philosophy textbook published there. He derived his views largely from others, combining in one system elements from diverse sources. He followed the empiricists in holding that knowledge begins with sensations but held the Augustinian view that knowledge of necessary truths comes only from the mind’s illumination by divine light. With Berkeley, he denied matter’s existence, viewing bodies as collections of ideas. He held that these ideas are ‘faint copies’ of God’s archetypal ideas, which he thought of in much the same way as had Malebranche and John Norris. His ethical views, influenced by William Wollaston, take happiness to be the supreme good, stressing that human beings should seek a happiness consonant with their nature as rational, immortal and social beings. See also: IDEALISM Further reading Johnson, S. (1929) Samuel Johnson: President of King’s College, His Career and Writings, ed. H.W. Schneider and C. Schneider, New York: Columbia University Press, 4 vols. (The
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Page 427 standard edition of Johnson’s works; volume 2 includes his previously unpublished ‘Encyclopedia of Philosophy’ and ‘Logic’, and his philosophical correspondence with Berkeley and others.) CHARLES J. McCRACKEN JOURNALISM, ETHICS OF It is sometimes suggested that ethical principles, even fundamental ones like nonmaleficence and beneficence, are totally out of place in journalism, and that it should be shaped solely by market forces. This suggestion should be resisted. One reason why journalism should be ethical is that in a democracy it is expected to serve the public interest, which means that it should accept the responsibility to circulate the information and opinion without which a democracy could not operate, and to enable it to do this the freedom of the press is acknowledged. If journalism is to serve the public interest, then a commitment to truth-telling is fundamental. Journalists should also be fair and accurate in reporting news, should publish corrections, should offer a right of reply. They should avoid discrimination, deception, harassment, betraying confidences and invasions of privacy. But ethical journalism is more than lists of requirements and prohibitions. In investigative journalism, for example, some deception or intrusion into privacy could be justified in order to uncover corruption. Ethical journalism is therefore reflective understanding of the underlying principles of harm and benefit and the public interest, and an ability to apply them in particular cases. See also: APPLIED ETHICS; RESPONSIBILITIES OF SCIENTISTS AND INTELLECTUALS Further reading Belsey, A. and Chadwick, R. (eds) (1992) Ethical Issues in Journalism and the Media, London: Routledge. (A collection of introductory essays on various aspects of media ethics.) Lee, S. (1990) The Cost of Free Speech, London: Faber & Faber. (A close critical examination of the usual justifications of free speech.) ANDREW BELSEY JUDAH BEN MOSES OF ROME ( c .1292–after 1330) Judah Romano, translator and Maimonidean philosopher, participated in the intellectual climate of Latin scholasticism, introducing a large number of the ideas of the Christian philosophers into Hebrew. He gained his knowledge in the various branches of philosophy through meticulous study of the writings of Aristotle and the scholastic commentaries to his works (particularly those of Albert the Great, Aquinas and Giles of Rome), of the Maimonidean-Tibbonian school, and of some Arabic philosophical treatises in Latin translation. Influenced by Albert the Great, Aquinas and Maimonides, he discussed all the major philosophical topics, and especially the idea of creation through intermediaries, the origins of the human soul, the cognitive process, which represents the real purpose of man, the nature of prophecy and prayer. See also: MAIMONIDES, M. Further reading Sermoneta, G. (1976) ‘Yehudah and Immanuel ha-Romi, "Rationalism Culminating in Mystical Faith"’, in M. Hallamish and M. Schwarz (eds) Revelation, Faith, Reason , Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University, 54–70. (Analyses Judah’s doctrine of conjunction with the active intellect.) CATERINA RIGO JUDGMENT, MORAL see MORAL JUDGMENT JUNG, CARL GUSTAV (1875–1961) The Swiss Carl Jung was among the leaders in the development of depth psychology at the beginning of the twentieth century. An early follower of Sigmund Freud, he broke with the founder of psychoanalysis in 1913 and established his own school of analytical psychology. Jung’s theoretical development originated in his work on the word association test and the theory of feeling toned complexes. As he continued to explore the workings of the unconscious, he postulated the existence of instinctual patterns of cognition and behaviour which he termed ‘archetypes’. Archetypal patterns are, according to Jung, common throughout the human species and constitute an inherited ‘collective unconscious’. Jung’s approach to psychology was eclectic. He accepted the psychological importance of any phenomenon, even if it conflicted with current thinking in other fields. This attitude led to a deep investigation of the psychological significance of occult phenomena and alchemy, which Jung viewed as expressions of the unconscious that anticipated modern psychology. Later in life, Jung turned increasingly to considerations of the contemporary cultural
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Page 428 expressions of psychological forces, writing extensively on what he viewed to be a deepening spiritual crisis in Western civilization. See also: PSYCHOANALYSIS, METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES IN; PSYCHOLOGY, THEORIES OF Further reading Brome, V. (1978) Jung , New York: Atheneum. (The most reliable survey of Jung’s life.) Jung, C.G. (1953–91) The Collected Works of C.G. Jung , eds G. Adler, M. Fordham, and H. Read, executive ed. W. McGuire, trans. R. Hull, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, and London: Routledge. (The standard collection of Jung’s works.) GEORGE B. HOGENSON JUNGIUS, JOACHIM (1587–1657) The German mathematician and philosopher Joachim Jungius was one of the most important seventeenth-century reformers of Aristotelian logic. Through critical assessment of Suárez and by recourse to Ramus, Zabarella and Melanchthon, he tried to replace Aristotelian syllogistics with a logic based on empirical judgment. This differed sharply from other contemporary attempts to reform logic in Protestant Europe. Jungius was a pioneer in the development of the modern concept of ‘element’ in chemistry, and made an important contribution to the classification of plants. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM IN THE 17TH CENTURY Further reading Guhrauer, G.E. (1850) Joachim Jungius und dein Zeitalter. Nebst Goethe’s Fragmenten über Jungius (Joachim Jungius and his time; including Goethe’s fragments on Jungius), Stuttgart and TuÈ bingen: J.G. Cotta. (Thorough study of Jungius’ life, work and its reception.) Translated from the German by Peter Schnyder RALPH HÄFNER JURISPRUDENCE, HISTORICAL Historical jurisprudence is the title usually given to a group of theories, which flourished mainly in the nineteenth century, that explain law as the product of predetermined patterns of change based on social and economic change. It is thus opposed both to theories that see law as essentially an expression of the will of those holding political power (positivist theories) and to those that see it as an expression of principles that are part of man’s nature and so applicable in any kind of society (natural law theories). The writers of the Scottish Enlightenment first connected the historical development of law with economic changes. In the nineteenth century, Savigny and Maine postulated grand evolutionary schemes, which purported to be applicable universally. They were, however, based on the development of ancient Roman law and could only with difficulty be applied to other systems. These schemes are now discredited, but in the twentieth century more modest studies have successfully related particular kinds of law to particular sets of social circumstances. See also: EVOLUTIONARY THEORY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE; LAW, PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Stein, P. (1980) Legal Evolution: The Story of an Idea, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (General survey of theories of evolution of law through successive stages.) PETER STEIN JUSTICE The idea of justice lies at the heart of moral and political philosophy. It is a necessary virtue of individuals in their interactions with others, and the principal virtue of social institutions, although not the only one. Just as an individual can display qualities such as integrity, charity and loyalty, so a society can also be more or less economically prosperous, artistically cultivated, and so on. Traditionally defined by the Latin tag ‘ suum cuique tribuere ’ – to allocate to each his own – justice has always been closely connected to the ideas of desert and equality. Rewards and punishments are justly distributed if they go to those who deserve them. But in the absence of different desert claims, justice demands equal treatment. A common division of the topic distinguishes between corrective and distributive justice. Corrective justice covers that which is due to a person as punishment, distributive that which is due by way of benefits and burdens other than punishments. Within the sphere of corrective justice there is disagreement about the justification of punishment itself. But there has been – and is – widespread agreement on the criteria for just punishment: just punishments must be properly imposed and the quantum of punishment must reflect the seriousness of the offence. There has been no such agreement about the content of just principles for the distribution of benefits and (non-punitive) burdens. Conventionalists claim that what is due to each person
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Page 429 is given by the laws, customs and shared understandings of the community of which the person is a member. Teleologists believe that an account can be given of the good for human beings and that justice is the ordering principle through which a society (or humanity) pursues that good. Justice as mutual advantage proposes that the rules of justice can be derived from the rational agreement of each agent to cooperate with others to further their own self-interest. Theorists of what may be called justice as fairness believe that justice is a thin concept which provides a fair framework within which each person is enabled to pursue their own good. See also: CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; DESERT AND MERIT Further reading Rawls, J.B. (1971) A Theory of Justice , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (One of the most notable works on this topic in the twentieth century.) Walzer, M. (1983) Spheres of Justice: A Defence of Pluralism and Equality, New York: Basic Books; London and Oxford: Blackwell. (A detailed statement of conventionalism.) BRIAN BARRY MATT MATRAVERS JUSTICE, EQUITY AND LAW Laws are intended to achieve justice, but the application of an otherwise just law may yield an injustice in the circumstances of a particular case. This is because laws are framed in terms of general rules which cannot adequately provide in advance for all possible variations in relevant circumstances. Equity modifies the rigid application of the law in such cases in order to secure justice in the light of all the relevant circumstances. So, in Aquinas’ example, the law may justly require the closure of the city gates after a certain hour, but officials may equitably decree the opening of the gates during the legal hours of closure in order to save fighters defending the city who are being pursued by an enemy. In this sense, the equitable decision is not distinct from justice, but rather secures justice in the particular case by remedying the deficiencies of positive law retrospectively at the point of application. The question of the proper relationship between justice, equity and law has been explored both by a rich philosophical tradition that finds its classic statement in the writings of Aristotle, and by the world’s major legal traditions. At least two major problems arise for this complex of ideas. First, there is that of the ‘decadence’ of equity. As equity is incorporated into formal processes of legal adjudication, for instance in the form of ‘maxims’ of equity or equitable ‘doctrines’, it comes to acquire the generality of positive law. This creates the problem that the so-called equitable maxims or doctrines may themselves then be applied in a strict way that leads to injustice in the particular case, which is precisely the problem equity is meant to remedy. Second, in securing justice by the deployment of discretion in the particular case, equity also threatens an injustice. For it seems to involve a departure from the principle of legality, that is, the duty to apply pre-existing laws declared beforehand to those subject to them. In being adversely affected by the retrospectively operative discretion of the adjudicator, the party who would have benefited from the strict application of the law may regard the resort to equity as itself unjust. See also: JUSTICE; LAW, PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Lucas, J. (1966) The Principles of Politics , Oxford: Oxford University Press. (A very effective discussion of the inter relations of justice, equity and law.) MacIntyre, A. (1988) Whose Justice? Which Rationality? , Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. (Defends a broadly Aristotelian-Thomistic approach to practical reason and justice.) JOHN TASIOULAS JUSTICE, INTERNATIONAL Although it has been denied (by, for example, F.A. von Hayek) that the concept of distributive justice has application within states, it is not controversial that there can be unjust laws and unjust behaviour by individuals and organizations. It has, however, been argued that it makes no sense to speak of justice and injustice beyond the boundaries of states, either because the lack of an international sovereign entails that the conditions for justice do not exist, or because the state constitutes the maximal moral community. Both arguments are flawed. Without them, we are naturally led to ask what are the implications of the widely-held idea of fundamental human equality, the belief that in some sense human beings are of equal value. This cannot be coherently deployed in a way that restricts its application to within-state relations. In either a utilitarian or Kantian form it
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Page 430 generates extensive international obligations. An objection that is often made to this conclusion is that the obligations derived are so stringent that compliance cannot reasonably be asked under current political conditions. But this shows (if true) that current political conditions are incompatible with international justice. See also: INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Barry, B. (1989) Theories of Justice , vol. 1, A Treatise on Social Justice . Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 183–9. (Discussion of Rawls, with special reference to international justice.) Brown, C. (1992) International Relations Theory: New Normative Approaches, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. (A lucid explanation of the ‘liberal versus communitarian’ theme in relation to international normative issues; good discussion of Kant and Hegel.) BRIAN BARRY MATT MATRAVERS JUSTIFICATION, EPISTEMIC The term ‘justification’ belongs to a cluster of normative terms that also includes ‘rational’, ‘reasonable’ and ‘warranted’. All these are commonly used in epistemology, but there is no generally agreed way of understanding them, nor is there even agreement as to whether they are synonymous. Some epistemologists employ them interchangeably; others distinguish among them. It is generally assumed, however, that belief is the target psychological state of these terms; epistemologists are concerned with what it takes for a belief to be justified, rational, reasonable or warranted. Propositions, statements, claims, hypotheses and theories are also said to be justified, but these uses are best understood as derivative; to say, for example, that a theory is justified for an individual is to say that were that individual to believe the theory (perhaps for the right reasons), the belief would be justified. Historically, the two most important accounts of epistemic justification are foundationalism and coherentism. Foundationalists say that justification has a tiered structure; some beliefs are selfjustifying, and other beliefs are justified in so far as they are supported by these basic beliefs. Coherentists deny that any beliefs are self-justifying and propose instead that beliefs are justified in so far as they belong to a system of beliefs that are mutually supportive. Most foundationalists and coherentists are internalists; they claim that the conditions that determine whether or not a belief is justified are primarily internal psychological conditions (for example, what beliefs and experiences one has). In the last quarter of the twentieth century, externalism emerged as an important alternative to internalism. Externalists argue that one cannot determine whether a belief is justified without looking at the believer’s external environment. The most influential form of externalism is reliabilism. Another challenge to traditional foundationalism and coherentism comes from probabilists, who argue that belief should not be treated as an all-or-nothing phenomenon: belief comes in degrees. Moreover, one’s degrees of beliefs, construed as subjective probabilities, are justified only if they do not violate any of the axioms of the probability calculus. Another approach is proposed by those who advocate a naturalization of epistemology. They fault foundationalists, coherentists and probabilists for an overemphasis on a priori theorizing and a corresponding lack of concern with the practices and findings of science. The most radical naturalized epistemologists recommend that the traditional questions of epistemology be recast into forms that can be answered by science. An important question to ask with respect to any approach to epistemology is, ‘what implications does it have for scepticism?’ Some accounts of epistemic justification preclude, while others do not preclude, one’s beliefs being justified but mostly false. Another issue is the degree to which the beliefs of other people affect what an individual is justified in believing. All theories of epistemic justification must find a way of acknowledging that much of what each of us knows derives from what others have told us. However, some epistemologists insist that the bulk of the history of epistemology is overly individualistic and that social conditions enter into questions of justification in a more fundamental way than standard accounts acknowledge. See also: INDUCTION, EPISTEMIC ISSUES IN; KNOWLEDGE AND JUSTIFICATION, COHERENCE THEORY OF; NATURALIZED EPISTEMOLOGY Further reading Alston, W. (1989) Epistemic Justification, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. (Collection of important essays on foundationalism,
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Page 431 externalism and internalism, reliabilism and other epistemological issues.) Sosa, E. (1991) Knowledge in Perspective , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Collection of essays on justification, knowledge, reliabilism, foundationalism and coherentism.) RICHARD FOLEY JUSTIFICATION, MORAL see MORAL JUSTIFICATION JUSTIFICATION, RELIGIOUS Justification is about the restoration of human beings after Adam’s Fall, by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, and the beginning of a new life that anticipates the glory of heaven. According to the Roman Catholic Church, justification has two aspects: forgiveness of sin and the infusion of grace that makes Christians just (innocent). It is the beginning of a new life of grace, in which the gifts of faith, hope and charity enable one to perform meritorious works. However, the restoration is never complete in this life and concupiscence remains; a fall from the state of grace is thus possible, but this is reversible through penance. A central feature of the Protestant Reformation was a dispute with the Roman Catholic Church over how justification should be understood. According to Luther, one does not become renewed (innocent) in justification. Rather, one is forgiven because the righteousness or justice of Christ is imputed to those who have faith in God’s promise of redemption; however, one remains a sinner. More recent thought, however, has pointed to the fact that in both Lutheran and Catholic conceptions of justification, there is a sense of incompleteness, that it is just part of the process of redemption. There has also been interest in the idea of justification involving an indwelling of God rather than a gift from God to the individual; this has interesting affinities with Eastern Orthodox beliefs. See also: ATONEMENT; FORGIVENESS AND MERCY Further reading Cassirer, H. (1988) Grace and Law , Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. (A study of Paul, Kant and the Hebrew prophets by a Kantian scholar.) Küng, H. (1964) Justification, NewYork: Thomas Nelson & Sons. (A careful comparison of Karl Barth’s work and Roman Catholic teaching on justification; includes an ample bibliography.) DIOGENES ALLEN JUSTINIAN (AD 482–565) There was a late Roman renaissance during Justinian’s reign as Emperor at Constantinople in the sixth century AD. Its high point was the compilation by his minister Tribonian of a huge restatement of Roman law in four works, the Institutes, Digest, Code and Novels, preserving a selection of its achievements. Called by medieval lawyers the Corpus iuris civilis , it is the basic material for studying Roman law and the source of much of Europe’s legal thinking. See also: LAW, PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Stein, P.G. and Lewis, A.D.E. (eds) (1983) Studies in Justinian’s Institutes in Memory of J.A.C. Thomas, London: Sweet and Maxwell. (A collection of detailed studies on aspects of the Institutes .) GRANT McLEOD AL-JUWAYNI, ABU’L MA‘ALI (1028–85) The Persian al-Juwayni rose to great prominence as a theologian in the Islamic world, and his theoretical discussions of philosophical issues played a significant role in the development of Islamic philosophy. He provided a stout defence of the Ash‘arite theory that emphasizes the power of God and the insignificance of human beings. His work on the meaning of scriptural texts provided Muslims with a sophisticated and productive series of concepts with which to discuss issues of interpretation. See also: ASH‘ARIYYA AND MU‘TAZILA Further reading Hourani, G. (1985) ‘Juwayni’s criticisms of Mu‘tazilite ethics’, in G. Hourani (ed.) Reason and Tradition in Islamic Ethics , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 124–34. (Al-Juwayni’s critique of Mu‘tazilite ethics.) OLIVER LEAMAN SALMAN ALBDOUR
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Page 432 K KABBALAH Kabbalah is the body of Jewish mystical writings which became important at the end of the twelfth century in Provence and has been taken up with varying degrees of enthusiasm in an attempt to explore the esoteric side of Judaism. There are two main forms of Kabbalah: one which concentrates on gaining knowledge of God through study of his name, and a theosophical tradition that approaches God through his impact on creation. On both accounts God is linked to the world through ten Sefirot, hypostatic numbers which mediate between the Infinite and this world and thus (among other functions) help to explain how a being who is entirely ineffable can produce so much variety as is observed in nature. God’s willingness to relate to the world gives his creatures the possibility of personal knowledge of him, although this can be acquired only through difficult and strenuous spiritual exercises. The variety of works which the Kabbalists produced are a blend of philosophical and mystical ideas which attempt to explore the inner meaning of faith and represent a creative and influential stream that both draws upon and contributes to Jewish philosophy. See also: HASIDISM; HERMETISM; MYSTICISM, HISTORY OF Further reading Dan, J. (1986a) The Early Kabbalah, New York: Paulist Press. (Standard introduction to the early Kabbalah.) Idel, M. (1988) Kabbalah: New Perspectives , New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. (The best account of the Kabbalah as a whole.) OLIVER LEAMAN KAIBARA EKKEN (1630–1714) Kaibara Ekken was a leading Japanese scholar in the school of neo-Confucianism established by the renowned twelfth century Chinese synthesizer, Zhu Xi. As a thinker and a scholar, Ekken embraced a wide variety of topics from highly specialized neo-Confucian philosophy to the need to popularize Confucian ethics and to assist the society through practical learning ( jitsugaku). See also: CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY, JAPANESE; ZHU XI Further reading Tucker, M.E. (1989) Moral and Spiritual Cultivation in Japanese Neo-Confucianism: The Life and Thought of Kaibara Ekken (1630–1714), Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. (The only book-length work in English on Ekken, this monograph provides an introduction to Ekken’s life, thought and times as well as a translation and discussion of one of his major ethical treatises.) MARY EVELYN TUCKER KALAM see ISLAMIC THEOLOGY KAMES, LORD see HOME, HENRY (LORD KAMES) KANT, IMMANUEL (1724–1804) Immanuel Kant was the paradigmatic philosopher of the European Enlightenment. He eradicated the last traces of the medieval worldview from modern philosophy, joined the key ideas of earlier rationalism and empiricism into a powerful model of the subjective origins of the fundamental principles of both science and morality, and laid the ground for much in the philosophy of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Above all, Kant was the philosopher of human autonomy, the view that by the use of our own reason in its broadest sense human beings can discover and live up to the basic principles of knowledge and action without outside assistance, above all without divine support or intervention. Kant laid the foundations of his theory of knowledge in his monumental Critique of Pure Reason (1781). He described the fundamental principle of morality in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) and the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), in the conclusion of which he famously wrote: Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily reflection is occupied with them: the starry heaven above me and the moral law within me. Neither of them need I
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Page 433 seek and merely suspect as if shrouded in obscurity or rapture beyond my own horizon; I see them before me and connect them immediately with my existence. See also: A PRIORI; KANTIAN ETHICS; NEO-KANTIANISM Further reading Kant, I. (1998) Critique of Pure Reason , ed. and trans. P. Gruyer and A.W. Wood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (In addition to an extensive introduction and cross-references to many relevant notes among Kant’s literary remains, this is the first edition of the Critique to include all of Kant’s notes in his own copy of the first edition of 1781.) Wolff, R.P. (ed.) (1967) Kant: A Collection of Critical Essays, Garden City: Doubleday Anchor. (Includes Lewis White Beck’s papers on the analytic-synthetic distinction.) PAUL GUYER KANTIAN ETHICS Kantian ethics originates in the ethical writings of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), which remain the most influential attempt to vindicate universal ethical principles that respect the dignity and equality of human beings without presupposing theological claims or a metaphysical conception of the good. Kant’s systematic, critical philosophy centres on an account of reasoning about action, which he uses to justify principles of duty and virtue, a liberal and republican conception of justice with cosmopolitan scope, and an account of the relationship between morality and hope. Numerous contemporary writers also advance views of ethics which they, and their critics, think of as Kantian. However, some contemporary work is remote from Kant’s philosophy on fundamental matters such as human freedom and reasoning about action. It converges with Kant’s ethics in claiming that we lack a substantive account of the good (so that teleological or consequentialist ethics are impossible), in taking a strong view of the equality of moral agents and the importance of universal principles of duty which spell out what it is to respect them, and in stressing an account of justice and rights with cosmopolitan scope. Both Kant’s ethics and contemporary Kantian ethics have been widely criticized for preoccupation with rules and duties, and for lack of concern with virtues, happiness or personal relationships. However, these criticisms may apply more to recent Kantian ethics than to Kant’s own ethics. See also: AUTONOMY, ETHICAL; PRACTICAL REASON AND ETHICS Further reading Korsgaard, C.M. (1996) Creating the Kingdom of Ends, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Essays on the categorical imperative and its implications.) Williams, B. (1985) Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and London: Fontana. (Varied and thoughtful criticism of Kantian ethics.) ONORA O’NEILL KAPLAN, MORDECAI (1881–1983) Kaplan argued that Judaism was the evolving religious civilization of the Jewish people. He attempted to recast an inherited faith in rational and natural terms. His advocacy of Jewish communalism, Jewish cultural expression in literature and art, and creativity and experimentation in liturgy had a pronounced impact on wide circles of US Jews. He took seriously the challenge to the traditional interpretation of religious values from science and modernity, and sought to establish a form of religion that was both intellectually respectable and communally responsible. Kaplan’s distinctive analysis of Jewish peoplehood and the Jewish religion responsed to a wide variety of philosophical and theological perspectives and challenges. See also: JEWISH PHILOSOPHY, CONTEMPORARY Further reading Kaplan, M.M. (1934) Judaism as a Civilization: Toward a Reconstruction of American Jewish Life , New York: Schocken, 1967. (This book is Kaplan’s magnum opus and has been reissued many times. It represents his classical synthesis between Jewish tradition and modern civilization.) DAVID ELLENSON KARAISM The Karaites ( qara’im, orbenei miqra ) take their name from the Hebrew word for Scripture. The sect’s scripturalism originated in its rejection of the ‘Oral Law’ embodied in rabbinic literature. Like earlier scripturalist groups – notably the Sadducees – Karaites sought to derive their practices directly from the biblical text. While Karaism is usually traced to mid-eighth-century Iraq, the early history remains murky. The sect crystallized in the Islamic East during the late
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Page 434 ninth and early tenth centuries, calling forth stern reactions from the leaders of mainstream rabbinic Judaism. Although harsh at times, the ensuing polemics stimulated both Karaite and Rabbanite scholarship in the fields of biblical exegesis, Hebrew grammar and lexicography, jurisprudence and religious philosophy. The two groups differed sharply over points of law and practice – the calendar, dietary laws, Sabbath regulations – but typically concurred on questions of theology. See also: THEOLOGY, RABBINIC Further reading Nemoy, L. (1952) Karaite Anthology, New Haven, CN: Yale University Press. (Well-chosen collection illustrating seven hundred years of Karaite thought.) DANIEL FRANK KARMA AND REBIRTH, INDIAN CONCEPTIONS OF The combined beliefs in karma and rebirth, that is, the retributive power of actions and decisions and a beginningless, though not necessarily endless, succession of births and deaths for living beings, constitute a fundamental premise of the great majority of India’s religious and philosophical traditions. The suggestion first made by the great Muslim scholar al-Biruni (973–1048) that they are the fundamental creed of Indian religious thought in general may be questionable, but it is certainly understandable. Although such notions are by no means exclusively Indian, they have played a far more central and pervasive role in India than in any other cultural domain. In a sense, the idea of karmic retribution postulates that the act itself will hold its originator responsible and accountable. Acts of moral or ritual significance will bring about their own reward or punishment, that is, favourable or unfavourable experiences. On the other hand, favourable or unfavourable experiences and conditions are forms of reward or punishment for past actions and decisions. Karmic retribution takes place through a sequence of countless existences and may involve a movement through a vast variety of forms of life. More specifically, this implies that birth into a particular species, physiological and psychological features, sex, social status, life span, exposure to pleasant or unpleasant experiences, and so on, appear as results of previous actions (usually acts committed in previous lives), and that current actions are expected to have a corresponding influence on future existences. In Sanskrit, the realm of rebirth and karmic retribution is known as saṃāra. Its precise scope has been subject to some debate. The most common assumption is that it coincides with sentient existence and includes the entire hierarchy of living organisms from the gods down to the plants. While later Buddhism tends to exclude the plants from this domain, Jainism finds forms of life and sentience even in the elements water, earth, and so forth. Most schools of philosophy view being in saṃāra as a condition of bondage, suffering and alienation; even karmic ascent is ultimately undesirable. The ability to transcend this condition by transforming and eventually eliminating the power of karma is often associated with human existence and considered a rare privilege. Most forms of life are just forms of karmic retribution, without any capacity for karmic initiative. The historical origins of the doctrine of karma and rebirth cannot be determined with certainty and precision. While the Vedas and Brāhmṇas provide significant antecedents, they do not show any clear recognition of the doctrine as such. Even in the older Upaniaads (prior to 500 BC), its formulations are still tentative, partial and more or less isolated. It seems that the teachings of the Buddha added a new and stricter notion of causality and a far more explicit sense of moral responsibility and universal applicability to the older versions. The other important reform movement of this period, Jainism, showed an early commitment to a systematic elaboration of karmic factors and processes. Unlike the Buddhists, the Jainas developed a reified, even substantialist notion of karma. In Hindu literature, such texts as the great epic the Mahābhārata (beginning around 400 BC) give clear evidence of a fully developed and gen erally recognized doctrine of karma and rebirth. Subsequently, the doctrine was adopted and variously interpreted by most schools of philosophical and religious thought. It served, moreover, as a basic premise of law texts, popular narratives and mythologies, and a wide array of traditional ‘sciences’, such as medicine, embryology and astrology. Significant disagreements and debates occurred with regard to the status and character of the karmic agent and the subject of transmigration and rebirth (most conspicuously in connection with the Buddhist denial of a durable ‘self’ or ātman ). The moral relevance and metaphysical qualities of acts and decisions, the nature of karmic causality and the mechanism of rebirth, the possibility of a
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Page 435 transfer of karma, the compatibility of knowledge and action, and the prospects of and problems concerning the elimination of karma and the ultimate transcendence of rebirth provided further topics of debate. In its various contexts and applications, the doctrine of karma and saṃsāra has at least three different yet interrelated functions and dimensions: it is used to provide causal explanations (especially in the realm of life); it serves as a framework for ethical discipline and religious orientation; and it provides the rationale for a fundamental dissatisfaction with worldly existence and a commitment to final liberation from such existence. The ways in which these functions have been balanced or correlated with one another reflect fundamental trends and tensions in the Indian tradition in general. See also: DUTY AND VIRTUE, INDIAN CONCEPTIONS OF Further reading Neufeldt, R.W. (ed.) (1986) Karma and Rebirth: Post-Classical Developments , Albany,NY: State University of New York Press. (A collection of articles discussing reinterpretations of the doctrine in modern Hindu, Buddhist and Western thought.) O’Flaherty, W.D. (ed.) (1980) Karma and Rebirth in Classical Indian Traditions, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. (Twelve representative essays on karma in traditional Indian thought; a revised and updated version of the contribution by W. Halbfass was published in his Tradition and Reflection , Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1991, 291–345.) WILHELM HALBFASS KATHARSIS One of the central concepts of Aristotle’s Poetics, katharsis (‘purgation’ or ‘purification’; often spelled catharsis ) defines the goal of the tragic poet. It involves depicting of human vicissitudes so as to provoke the spectators’ feelings of pity and fear that such emotions in them are finally purged. See also: EMOTION IN RESPONSE TO ART; TRAGEDY Further reading Lucas, D.W. (ed.) (1968) Aristotle: Poetics, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 273–90. (The standard English commentary, with a good discussion of katharsis.) GLENN W. MOST KAUTILYA ( fl. c .321–c .296 BC) Kauṭilya is famous as the author of the Arthaśāstra , a political treatise often compared with Machiavelli’s The Prince. Although its influence on subsequent political and literary writers is noteworthy, tradition has remained somewhat ambivalent about it, especially because of its seemingly ruthless prescriptions for efficacious government. On a closer reading, however, KauTilya is assiduously concerned to secure the welfare and wealth of the citizens of a state under a just government, of which the king, although the sovereign, is just one among seven institutes. Upon the king falls the duty of safeguarding the good of the people in as dharma-sanctioned a way as possible; the ‘rule of the rod’, intrigues and stratagems are reserved for combatting internal and external threats. See also: POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, INDIAN Further reading KauTilya ( c .320 BC) Arthaśāstra , ed. and trans. L.N. Rangarajan, The Arthaśāstras , New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 1992. (This is a substantial reworking of earlier editions and translations in the style of a modern treatise on political economy, and has an informative introduction.) PURUSHOTTAMA BILIMORIA KAUTSKY, KARL JOHANN (1854–1938) Karl Johann Kautsky became the leading German socialist theoretician at the time of the Second International and the authoritative exponent of ‘orthodox Marxism’. He was a close associate of Engels, editor of Die Neue Zeit from 1883 until 1917, and author of numerous political, historical and theoretical works. He clashed with Bernstein in the ‘revisionist debate’ in the late 1890s and with Lenin during the Russian Revolution. See also: MARXISM, WESTERN Further reading Kautsky, K. (1902) Die soziale Revolution ; trans. The Social Revolution , Chicago, IL: Kerr, 1903. (A good statement of Kautsky’s socialist vision of the future at the high point of his career.) Steenson, G.P. (1978) Karl Kautsky 1854–1938: Marxism in the Classical Years, Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. (A good intellectual biography of Kautsky.) H. TUDOR
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Page 436 KAYDRUP GELEK BELSANGBO see MKHAS GRUB DGE LEGS DPAL BZANG PO KECKERMANN, BARTHOLOMEW (1571/3–1609) A German Calvinist philosopher and theologian, Bartholomew Keckermann wrote textbooks in logic, ethics and metaphysics which were widely read and in which he advanced his notion of a system of knowledge. Like so many of his contemporaries in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Keckermann was interested in methodological matters. As professor of philosophy in Danzig, Poland, he implemented a new curriculum intended to give students an encyclopedic education within three years. His proposals had considerable influence on subsequent educators and philosophers, especially in northern Europe. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM IN THE 17TH CENTURY Further reading Schmitt, C. and Skinner, Q. (eds) (1988) The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 632–7. (A brief discussion of Keckermann’s conception of system and its relationship to metaphysics.) CHRISTIA MERCER KELSEN, HANS (1881–1973) Hans Kelsen was one of the foremost (positivist) legal theorists of the twentieth century. He taught in Vienna, Cologne, Geneva and Paris, and finished his life in America, teaching in Chicago, Harvard and Berkeley. He wrote widely, on legal philosophy, constitutional and international law, and political philosophy. Kelsen is best known for his Pure Theory of Law ( Reine Rechtslehre ) (1934). This is the basis of a theory which, with many changes, he espoused till he died. See also: LEGAL POSITIVISM Further reading H. Kelsen (1960) Reine Rechtslehre , completely rewritten and expanded 2nd edn, Vienna: Deuticke; trans. M. Knight, Pure Theory of Law , Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1967. (Rewritten and expanded edition of one of his two major works.) ZENON BAŃKOWSKI KEMP SMITH, NORMAN (1872–1958) The Scottish scholar Norman Kemp Smith is now most widely known for his translation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason . This was begun in 1913 while Kemp Smith was completing his Commentary on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason which, together with his classic studies on Descartes and Hume, established his reputation as the greatest British philosophical scholar of his day. But he was also an outstanding member of the now forgotten British ‘Critical Realist’ movement, much respected by A.N. Whitehead, which also included among others Kemp Smith’s mentor Robert Adamson, Adamson’s English pupil G. Dawes Hicks, James Ward, and his pupil G.F. Stout. Science and scientistic fallacies, psychology, including developmental psychology and the histories of science and philosophy were alike concerns of a group of independent thinkers. Their work was obscured by subsequent English philosophers’ lack of attention, and the prevailing false assumption that the work of those antecedent thinkers was dominated comprehensively by views mistakenly attributed to ‘Hegel’ or ‘Idealism’. Further reading Kemp Smith, N. (1918) A Commentary on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason , London: Macmillan; 2nd enlarged edn, 1923. (Includes a thorough account of previous commentaries; invaluable resource for explication of Kant’s terminology in general.) ROBERT R. CALDER GEORGE DAVIE KEMPIS, THOMAS À see THOMAS À KEMPIS KEPLER, JOHANNES (1571–1630) Kepler was introduced to the work of Copernicus while at the University of Tübingen in Germany. His subsequent mathematical analysis of Brahe’s observations of the motions of Mars enabled him to formulate the descriptive ‘laws’ of planetary motion, thus giving heliocentric astronomy an empirical basis far more accurate than it had before. He insisted that astronomy had to discover the causes of the motions that the laws described, in this way becoming a ‘physics of the sky’. In the pursuit of this goal, he formulated the notion of distance-dependent forces between sun and planet, and guessed that gravity could be explained as an attraction between heavy bodies and their home planets,
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Page 437 analogous to magnetic action, thus pointing the way for Newton’s theory of gravity. See also: COSMOLOGY; NEWTON, I. Further reading Kepler, J. (1618) Harmonice mundi (The Harmony of the World); trans. E.J. Aiton, A.M. Duncan and J.V. Field, Philadelphia, PA: American Philosophical Society, 1995. (With an introduction and notes.) Caspar, M. (1993) Kepler , trans. C.E. Hellman, New York: Dover. (The standard biography of Kepler, with a new introduction and references by O. Gingerich.) ERNAN McMULLIN KEYNES, JOHN MAYNARD (1883–1946) Keynes is best known as an economist but, in the tradition of John Stuart Mill and William Stanley Jevons, he also made significant contributions to inductive logic and the philosophy of science. Keynes’ only book explicitly on philosophy, A Treatise on Probability (1921), remains an important classic on the subject. It develops a non-frequentist interpretation of probability as the key to sound judgment and scientific reasoning. His General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) is the watershed of twentieth-century macroeconomics. While not, strictly speaking, a philosophical work, it nonetheless advances distinct readings of rationality, uncertainty and social justice. See also: ECONOMICS, PHILOSOPHY OF; PROBABILITY, INTERPRETATIONS OF Further reading Moggridge, D.E. (1992) Maynard Keynes, An Economist’s Biography , London: Routledge. (A fine biography with detailed chapters on his probability and economic philosophy.) MARGARET SCHABAS KHAI-DUB see MKHAS GRUB DGE LEGS DPAL BZANG PO KIERKEGAARD, SØREN AABYE (1813–55) Although Kierkegaard’s name has come to be chiefly associated with writings on philosophical themes, his various publications covered a wide range that included contributions to literary criticism, discourses on specifically religious topics and forays into polemical journalism. Born in Copenhagen in 1813, he led an outwardly uneventful existence there until his death in 1855. None the less much that he wrote drew upon crises and turning points in his personal life; even his theoretical works often had an autobiographical flavour. Kierkegaard held that the philosophy of his time, largely owing to the influence of Hegelian idealism, tended to misconstrue the relation of thought to reality, wrongly assimilating the second to the first; in doing so, moreover, it reflected an age in which habits of abstract reflection and passive response had blinded people to their true concerns as self-determining agents ultimately accountable for their own characters and destinies. He sought to counter such trends, exploring different approaches to life with a view to opening his reader’s eyes both to where they themselves stood and to possibilities of opting for radical change. He implied that decisions on the latter score lay beyond the scope of general rules, each being essentially a problem for the individual alone; even so, his portrayal of the religious mode of existence presented it as transcending limitations experienced in alternative forms of life. Kierkegaard, himself an impassioned believer, was at the same time crucially concerned to articulate the Christian standpoint in a fashion that salvaged it from recurrent misconceptions. Rejecting all attempts to provide objective justifications or proofs of religious claims, he endorsed a conception of faith that eschewed rational considerations and consisted instead of subjective self-commitment maintained in the face of intellectual uncertainty or paradox. His account was set within a psychological perspective that laid stress upon freedom as an inescapable condition of action and experience. The complex implications he believed this to possess for the interpretation of pervasive human emotions and attitudes were discussed in works that later proved highly influential, particularly for the growth of twentieth-century existentialism. Here, as in other areas of his writing, Kierkegaard made a significant, though delayed, impact upon the course of subsequent thought. See also: HEGELIANISM; RELIGION AND EPISTEMOLOGY Further reading Kierkegaard, S.A. (1843) Enten-Eller , trans. H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong, Either/Or , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987, 2 vols. (Presents contrasting life-views, one aesthetic and the other ethical, in the form
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Page 438 of papers and letters attributed to two imaginary characters.) Thompson, J. (1974) Kierkegaard, London: Gollancz. (A penetrating critical biography.) PATRICK GARDINER KILVINGTON, RICHARD (d. 1361) Richard Kilvington, an English philosopher and theologian, was born near the beginning of the fourteenth cantury and died in 1361. His academic career in Oxford (1320–38) was followed by diplomatic service and an ecclesiastical career that culminated in his serving as dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, London. His known works (besides a couple of sermons) are commentaries or ‘questions’ (philosophical inquiries) regarding three works by Aristotle, a commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard (a standard academic requirement for theologians in the later Middle Ages) and the Sophismata. Only his Sophismata has been edited, translated and studied. An ordered collection of philosophical puzzles designed to raise and settle issues in natural philosophy and epistemology, it is one of the earliest and subtlest contributions to the literature associated with the Oxford Calculators. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM, MEDIEVAL; OXFORD CALCULATORS Further reading Kretzmann, N. and Kretzmann, B.E. (1990) The Sophismata of Richard Kilvington: Introduction, Translation, and Commentary, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Historical introduction, complete translation and philosophical commentary, with extensive bibliography and indexes.) NORMAN KRETZMANN KILWARDBY, ROBERT (d. 1279) Robert Kilwardby is one of the most remarkable thinkers of the thirteenth century. An English Dominican, he was the champion of the traditional approach to philosophy and theology, which developed the body of doctrines worked out by Augustine. His activity was set in the very crucial period of middle scholasticism, when the diffusion of Aristotle’s philosophical system and its utilization for Christian theology caused a sharp conflict between the followers of the Patristic tradition, such as Kilwardby or the members of the Franciscan school, and the new theologians, such as Thomas Aquinas, who tried to express the contents of divine revelation within the Aristotelian paradigm. Kilwardby used all of his intellectual resources and ecclesiastical authority in fighting against this new trend and in defending Augustinianism, whose main theses (for example, a plurality of substantial forms in composite substances, the presence of seminal reasons in matter, universal hylomorphism, individuation by matter and form, a conceptual distinction between the soul and its faculties, and the necessity of divine illumination in order to grasp the eternal truths) he supports in his writings. Further reading Lewry, P.O. (1983) ‘Robert Kilwardby on Imagination: the Reconciliation of Aristotle and Augustine’, Medioevo IX: 1–42. (A clear account of Kilwardby’s theories of soul and knowledge.) ALESSANDRO D. CONTI AL-KINDI, ABU YUSUF YA‘QUB IBN ISHAQ (d. c .866–73) Practically unknown in the Western world, al-Kindi has an honoured place in the Islamic world as the ‘philosopher of the Arabs’. Today he might be viewed as a bridge between Greek philosophers and Islamic philosophy. Part of the brilliant ninth-century ‘Abbasid court at Baghdad, composed of literati of all types, he served as tutor for the caliph’s son. He gained insights into the thought of Greek philosophers, especially Aristotle, through the translation movement; although he did not make translations himself, he corrected them and used them advantageously in his own thought. Al-Kindi is notable for his work on philosophical terminology and for developing a vocabulary for philosophical thought in Arabic, although his ideas were superseded by Ibn Sina in the eleventh century. The debate about the allowability of philosophy in terms of orthodox Islam also began with al-Kindi, a battle that is usually considered to have been won for religion by al-Ghazali. Like other innovators, his ideas may no longer appear revolutionary, but in his own day, to push for the supremacy of reason and for the importance of a ‘foreign science’ – philosophy – as opposed to an ‘Arab science’ – grammar, Qur’anic studies – was quite astonishing. When the Khalif al-Mutawwakil came to power and sought to restore traditionalism, al-Kindi suffered a reversal of fortunes. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY Further reading al-Kindi (before 873) Fi al-falsafa al-ula (On
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Page 439 First Philosophy), ed. and trans. A.L. Ivry, Al-Kindi’s Metaphysics: A translation of Ya‘qub ibn Ishaq alKindi’s Treatise ‘On First Philosophy’, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1974. (A clear account of al-Kindi’s metaphysics with English translation.) Klein-Franke, F. (1996) ‘Al-Kindi’, in S.H. Nasr and O. Leaman (eds) History of Islamic Philosophy , London: Routledge, ch. 11, 165–77. (Account of the role of al-Kindi as the first Muslim philosopher, and in particular the links between his philosophy and contemporary theology and understanding of Greek thought.) KIKI KENNEDY-DAY KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF see BELIEF AND KNOWLEDGE KNOWLEDGE AND JUSTIFICATION, COHERENCE THEORY OF Coherence theories of justification represent one main alternative to foundationalist theories of justification. If, as has usually been thought, possessing epistemic justification is one necessary condition (along with truth and perhaps others) for a belief to constitute knowledge, then a coherence theory of justification would also provide the basis for a coherence theory of knowledge. While some proponents of coherence theories have restricted the scope of the theory to empirical justification, others have applied it to all varieties of epistemic justification. (There are also coherence theories of meaning and of truth, as well as coherence theories of ethical or moral justification.) The initial contrast between coherence theories and foundationalist theories arises in the context of the epistemic regress problem. It is obvious that the justification of some beliefs derives from their inferential relations to other, putatively justified beliefs, and that the justification of these other beliefs may depend on inferential relations to still further beliefs, and so on, so that a potential regress of epistemic justification looms, with scepticism as the threatened outcome. The foundationalist solution to this problem is that one arrives sooner or later at basic or foundational beliefs: beliefs that are epistemically justified, but whose justification does not derive from inferential relations to any further beliefs and so brings the regress to an end. The defining tenet of a coherence theory of justification is the rejection of this foundationalist solution, the coherentist insisting that any belief (of the kinds to which the theory is applied) depends for its justification on inferential relations to other beliefs and eventually to the overall system of beliefs held by the believer in question. According to the coherentist, the justification of this system of beliefs is logically prior to that of its component beliefs and derives ultimately from the coherence of the system, where coherence is a matter of how tightly unified or interconnected the system is by virtue of inferential connections (including explanatory connections) between its members. Contrary to what this might seem to suggest, coherence theories do not deny that sensory observation or perception plays an important role in justification. What they deny is that this role should be construed in a foundationalist way, insisting instead that the justification of observational beliefs ultimately derives also from considerations of coherence. Specific coherence theories may also add other requirements for justification, thereby departing from a pure coherentism, while still avoiding foundationalism. While the idea of a coherence theory has often played the role of a dialectical foil, developed theories of this kind are relatively rare and are often in serious disagreement among themselves. In this way, coherentism is much less a unified view with standard, generally accepted features, than is foundationalism. See also: JUSTIFICATION, EPISTEMIC; KNOWLEDGE, CONCEPT OF Further reading BonJour, L. (1985) The Structure of Empirical Knowledge , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (A version of coherentism; also contains an appendix discussing the views of the positivists, the absolute idealists, Lehrer, and Rescher.) Lehrer, K. (1974) Knowledge , Oxford: Oxford University Press. (The first statement of Lehrer’s coherentism, somewhat superseded by his later work, but still worth comparing.) LAURENCE BONJOUR KNOWLEDGE BY ACQUAINTANCE AND DESCRIPTION The attempt to distinguish knowledge by acquaintance from knowledge by description is most closely associated with Bertrand Russell. The distinction is also crucial to one way of trying to develop a plausible foundationalist theory of justification and knowledge. According to Russell one can distinguish the two kinds
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Page 440 of knowledge in terms of their respective objects . Put crudely, one has knowledge by acquaintance of things, and one has knowledge by description of propositions (representations of reality that are either true or false). But this crude characterization of the two kinds of knowledge is misleading. Russell also seemed to believe that one can have knowledge by acquaintance of properties and even facts (where a fact is a complex consisting of a thing’s exemplifying a quality or standing in a relation to another thing). The distinction, then, might be better put in terms of a kind of knowledge which has as its object something that is neither true nor false (knowledge by acquaintance) and a kind of knowledge which has as its object a bearer of truth value (knowledge by description). According to Russell, all knowledge of truths ultimately rests on knowledge by acquaintance. The traditional foundationalist in epistemology holds that although I can know one truth by inferring it from something else I know, not everything I know can be inferred in this way. We can avoid a regress of knowledge by holding that at least some truths are known as a result of direct awareness of or acquaintance with those aspects of the world that make the corresponding propositions true. See also: PERCEPTION; SENSE-DATA Further reading BonJour, L. (1985) The Structure of Empirical Knowledge , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Chapter 4 is most relevant. Bonjour presents a clear argument against the doctrine of the given, an argument that includes an attack on the idea that empirical knowledge can be grounded in direct acquaintance.) RICHARD FUMERTON KNOWLEDGE, CAUSAL THEORY OF Epistemologists have always recognized the importance of causal processes in accounting for our knowledge of things. In discussions of perception, memory and reasoning, for example, it is commonly assumed that these ways of coming to know are fundamentally causal. We perceive things and thus come to have knowledge about them via complex causal processes; memory is, at least in part, the retention of previously gained knowledge through some sort of causal process; and reasoning is a causal process that takes beliefs as inputs and generates beliefs as outputs. A causal theory of knowledge is a form of externalism and is based on the fundamental idea that a person knows some proposition, p, only if there is an appropriate causal connection between the state of affairs that makes p true and the person’s belief in p. Although this kind of theory has roots that extend to ancient times, contemporary versions attempt to make more precise the nature of the causal connections required for knowledge. The causal theory is closely related to other forms of externalist theories, such as the conclusive reasons theory, information-theoretic views and the various forms of reliabilism. See also: CAUSALITY AND NECESSITY IN ISLAMIC THOUGHT; INFORMATION THEORY AND EPISTEMOLOGY Further reading Goldman, A. (1986) Epistemology and Cognition , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Some historical tracing of the causal theories, and presentation of the author’s reliabilist views.) Shope, R. (1983) The Analysis of Knowing , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (See especially chapter 5 for a good survey of causal theories of knowing and related theories.) MARSHALL SWAIN KNOWLEDGE, CONCEPT OF The branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and extent of human knowledge is called epistemology (from the Greek epistēmē meaning knowledge, and logos meaning theory). Knowledge seems to come in many varieties: we know people, places and things; we know how to perform tasks; we know facts. Factual knowledge has been the central focus of epistemology. We can know a fact only if we have a true belief about it. However, since only some true beliefs are knowledge (consider, for example, a lucky guess), the central question asked by epistemologists is ‘What converts mere true belief into knowledge?’. There are many, and often conflicting, answers to this question. The primary traditional answer has been that our true beliefs must be based upon sufficiently good reasons in order to be certifiable as knowledge. Foundationalists have held that the structure of reasons is such that our reasons ultimately rest upon basic reasons that have no further reasons supporting them. Coherentists have argued that there are no foundational reasons. Rather, they argue that our beliefs are mutually supporting.
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Page 441 In addition to the constraints upon the overall structure of reasons, epistemologists have proposed various general principles governing reasons. For example, it seems that if my reasons are adequate to affirm some fact, those reasons should be adequate to eliminate other incompatible hypotheses. This initially plausible principle appears to lead directly to some deep puzzles and, perhaps, even to scepticism. Indeed, many of the principles that seem initially plausible lead to various unexpected and unwelcome conclusions. Alternatives to the primary traditional answer to the central epistemic question have been developed, in part because of the supposed failures of traditional epistemology. These alternative views claim that it is something other than good reasons which distinguishes (mere) true beliefs from knowledge. Reliabilists claim that a true belief produced by a sufficiently reliable process is knowledge. Good reasoning is but one of the many ways in which beliefs can be reliably produced. The issue of whether the objections to traditional epistemology are valid or whether the proposed substitutes are better remains unresolved. See also: EPISTEMOLOGY; KNOWLEDGE, INDIAN VIEWS OF Further reading Lucey, K. (1996) On Knowing and the Known, Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books. (A comprehensive and accessible collection of essays on the concept of knowledge.) Pollock, J. (1986) Contemporary Theories of Knowledge , Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield. (Examines various contemporary accounts of knowledge and justification and develops a sophisticated version of the defeasibility theory.) PETER D. KLEIN KNOWLEDGE, DEFEASIBILITY THEORY OF Based upon an analogy with the legal and ethical concept of a defeasible, or prima facie, obligation, epistemic defeasibility was introduced into epistemology as an ingredient in one of the main strategies for dealing with Gettier cases. In these cases, an individual’s justified true belief fails to count as knowledge because the justification is defective as a source of knowledge. According to the defeasibility theory of knowledge, the defect involved can be characterized in terms of evidence that the subject does not possess which overrides, or defeats, the subject’s prima facie justification for belief. This account holds that knowledge is indefeasibly justified true belief. It has significant advantages over other attempts to modify the traditional analysis of knowledge in response to the Gettier examples. Care must be taken, however, in the definition of defeasibility. Further reading Shope, R.K. (1983) The Analysis of Knowing: A Decade of Research , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Chapters 1 and 2 provide a thorough survey of defeasibility theories. The remainder of the book is a survey of attempts to analyse knowledge, and there is an excellent bibliography to 1983.) MARSHALL SWAIN KNOWLEDGE, INDIAN VIEWS OF Classical Indian epistemology centres on a complex of terms for knowledge, knower and the known or knowable, including pramāṇa , ‘means to knowledge’ or ‘source of knowledge’. Views about perception, inference, testimony and a few additional candidate sources are the topics of core proposals of competing epistemological theories. Certain types of scepticism are also addressed, but explaining how it is possible that we know anything has been less central than other issues. Debates about knowledge – and doubt as well – are often caught up in larger war plans concerning the nature of awareness. The various classical schools typically bring views about awareness with them to the epistemological arena, but a neutral, common touchstone for and important constraint on all pramāṇa theorizing is what is called speech behaviour, vyavahāra , reflecting, it is presumed, bits of everyday knowledge. Verbalizations of perception, for example, ‘That is a pot’, of inference, for example, ‘There is fire on yonder mountain’ (made on the basis of the sight of smoke and an understanding of the general rule that wherever there is smoke, there is fire), of information acquired through testimony, and so on, are the givens for which a successful theory has to account. Principal candidate sources proposed in addition to perception and inference are testimony, analogy, circumstantial implication and negative perception. Mystical experience as a pramāṇa for spiritual matters is viewed as a variety of perception by its advocates, and scripture as a variety of testimony. With stock examples of bits of knowledge agreed upon,
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Page 442 disagreement typically centres on what the source is for a particular example and whether admission of any source in addition to perception and inference is ever required. Or, in some cases, a stock example is slightly modified, better to align with a stance taken on a putatively additional pramāṇa . With regard to what the sources make known, some argue that each pramāṇa works within a range of possibilities unique to itself, with no overlap. Thus what is known by perception cannot be known by inference. Others dispute such contentions, although at least a few such restrictions on individual knowledge sources are usually recognized. Buddhists and some others appear to be motivated to deny pramāṇa status to testimony because appeal to testimony is used to justify what they see as objectionable religious theses. Similarly, the Cārvāka materialist denies inference, apparently out of fear of its power to prove the existence of spiritual entities such as God or the soul. The Buddhist Nāgārjuna and others challenge the pramāṇa programmes proffered by epistemologists of all stripes, and provoke what may be called meta-epistemological responses that bring out connections between pramāṇa proposals and a logic of presumption. In particular, the Nyāya response to Nāgārjuna and company is by any light an admirable effort of philosophy. See also: AWARENESS IN INDIAN THOUGHT; ERROR AND ILLUSION, INDIAN CONCEPTIONS OF Further reading Bhattacharyya, S. (1987) Doubt, Belief and Knowledge , New Delhi: Indian Council of Philosophical Research and Allied Publishers. (Contains excellent analyses of a range of cognitive phenomena, drawing on classical views of awareness as an episode in a temporal series; also introduces some of the reflections of the latest New Logicians, including their development of modal and cognitive logics.) Datta, D.M. (1932) Six Ways of Knowing , London: Allen & Unwin. (Lucid exposition of the late Advaita Vedānta understanding of knowledge sources.) STEPHEN H. PHILLIPS KNOWLEDGE, INNATE see INNATE KNOWLEDGE KNOWLEDGE, MORAL see MORAL KNOWLEDGE KNOWLEDGE, SOCIOLOGY OF see SOCIOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE KNOWLEDGE, TACIT Tacit knowledge is a form of implicit knowledge we rely on for both learning and acting. The term derives from the work of Michael Polanyi (1891–1976) whose critique of positivistic philosophy of science grew into a fully developed theory of knowledge. Polanyi believed that the ‘scientific’ account of knowledge as a fully explicit formalizable body of statements did not allow for an adequate account of discovery and growth. In his account of tacit knowledge, knowledge has an ineliminable subjective dimension: we know much more than we can tell. This notion of tacit knowing in science has been developed by Thomas Kuhn, has figured prominently in theoretical linguistics and has also been studied in psychology. See also: INNATE KNOWLEDGE Further reading Polanyi, M. (1958) Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy , Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (The preface to this very expansive work contains brief but important observations on tacit knowledge.) Reber, A. (1993) Implicit Learning and Tacit Knowledge , Oxford: Oxford University Press. (A good overview of recent empirical research bearing on implicit learning and implicit knowledge.) C.F. DELANEY KNUTZEN, MARTIN (1713–51) Born in Germany of Danish parents, Martin Knutzen was a follower of Christian von Wolff. His work is the result of an effort to reconcile Wolff’s system, more persuasively than Wolff himself had, with common sense, Christian faith and the latest results in the natural sciences. Because Wolff had come under fire from Christian Pietists for apparently trying to resurrect Leibniz’ system of pre-established harmony, thereby possibly flirting with Spinozism and therefore atheism, Knutzen argued from Leibnizian premises that real interaction is at work in the world at large and is constitutive of the mind–body union. Knutzen was Kant’s teacher. Further reading Erdmann, B. (1876) Martin Knutzen und seine Zeit , Leipzig: Voss. (A very informative book
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Page 443 about Knutzen, his work and the philosophical and historical context of his work.) ALISON LAYWINE KŌBŌ DAISHI see KŪKAI KOJÈVE, ALEXANDRE (1902–68) Born in Moscow, Alexandre Kojève studied in Berlin and spent his subsequent career in Paris. He developed an idiosyncratic and widely influential reading of G.W.F. Hegel in a seminar in Paris from 1933 to 1939. Kojève read Hegel as having discovered that truth was the product of history, and that history was the product of the human desire and struggle for recognition. Kojève emphasized that once this desire was satisfied, history, properly so-called, was over. He claimed that for all essential purposes this human desire had been satisfied in the modern period, and thus that we had experienced (and Hegel had come to know) the end of history. The notes from this seminar were published in 1947 and continued to have an important impact on French philosophy throughout the post-war period. See also: HEGELIANISM Further reading Kojève, A. (1947) Introduction à la lecture de Hegel , Paris: Gallimard; partly trans. J.H. Nichols, Jr as Introduction to the Reading of Hegel , ed. A. Bloom, New York: Basic Books, 1969. (Text of Kojève’s influential lectures at l’École des Hautes-Études from 1933 to 1939.) MICHAEL S. ROTH KOKORO Kokoro is a comprehensive term in Japanese religion, philosophy and aesthetics often translated as ‘heart’, whose range of meanings includes mind, wisdom, aspiration, essence, attention, sincerity and sensibility. In Buddhist texts and in philosophy, kokoro (or shin in its Sino-Japanese reading) denotes mind, heart or inner nature, the site of human sentience or delusion. By extension, in pre-modern theories of art, kokoro signifies simultaneously the emotional capacity of the artist to respond to the natural world, which ideally catalyzes the act of creation; the parallel ability of an audience to respond to such a work of art and thus indirectly to the experience of the artist; and finally the evaluation of such a work as possessing the ‘right conception’, kokoro ari or alternatively ushin. See also: AESTHETICS, JAPANESE; BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY, JAPANESE Further reading Ueda Makoto (1967) Literary and Art Theories in Japan , Cleveland, OH: The Press of Western Reserve University. (A rich survey of the ideas of thirteen pre-modern theorists of art from such perspectives as literature, theatre, tea ceremony, painting and calligraphy.) MEERA VISWANATHAN KOTARBIŃSKI, TADEUSZ (1886–1981) Kotarbiński was one of the founders and main representatives of the Polish philosophical school known as the Lwów–Warsaw School and akin to, though independent of (and less radical than), the Vienna Circle; an anti-metaphysical, pro-scientific, rationalistic school of philosophy, which was very active and influential between the First and the Second World Wars. Kotarbiński’s programme for philosophy was a minimalistic and a practical one: he stressed the need to purify the field of philosophy of questions and concepts that lack factual content or logical coherence. According to him, the term ‘philosophy’ should be used, if at all, to denote only logic (understood as the philosophy of cognitive thought) and the philosophy of action, including moral philosophy. His numerous (more than 500) works are devoted to logic and philosophy of action in this broad sense. One of his main original ideas is the doctrine of reism or concretism, a special version of nominalism. Kotarbiński was admired by several generations of his pupils for his unusual pedagogical gifts, his integrity and his moral courage. See also: POLAND, PHILOSOPHY IN; VIENNA CIRCLE Further reading Kotarbiński, T. (1929) Elementy teorii poznania, logiki formalnej i metodologii nauk , Lwów: Ossolineum; Wrocøaw, Warsaw and Cracow: Ossolineum, 1961, 2nd edn; trans. Gnosiology: The Scientific Approach to the Theory of Knowledge , Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1966. (Extensive handbook of logic, semantics and theory of knowledge.) B. STANOSZ KOYRÉ, ALEXANDRE (1892–1964) The scope of his research and his effort to give civilization meaning make Alexandre Koyré one of the boldest and most influential of twentieth-century historians of scientific thought. He was Russian of
origin, German by philosophical
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Page 444 training, French by adoption, and chose the USA as his second intellectual homeland. From the mysticism of the Renaissance to Romantic philosophy, from Copernican theory to Newtonian synthesis, he interpreted modern cosmology in the light of ‘the unity of human thought’ and of mathematical realism, as both effect and origin of a ‘spiritual’ revolution. See also: COSMOLOGY Further reading Koyré, A. (1939) Études galiléennes , Paris: Hermann; trans. J. Mepham, Galileo Studies , Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1978; Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1978. (Three essays on the problem of the law of falling bodies and the principle of inertia in Galileo and Descartes’ physics. Arguing polemically, Koyré introduced Galileo’s experiments and the discovery of inertia as belonging to Descartes.) PIETRO REDONDI KRAUSE, KARL CHRISTIAN FRIEDRICH (1781–1832) Krause, who studied mathematics and theology at the University of Jena, sought an overall explanation of reality in the manner of the post-Kantian idealists; the key elements of his thoughts are the concepts of organism and harmony, involving the incorporation of opposing elements rather than their annihilation. Three main themes characterize his philosophy: the doctrine of science, together with the equivalence of knowledge and being, or rational realism; the religious doctrine of panentheism which proclaims, ‘everything in God’; and the social doctrine of the League of Humanity. His writings became especially influential in Spain. See also: GERMAN IDEALISM Further reading Lopez Morillas, J. (1981) The Krausist Movement and Ideological Change in Spain: 1854–1874, trans. J. López Morillas, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Offers an excellent description of the various areas of influence of the Krausean movement in Spain.) Translated from the Spanish by Isabel Venceslá TERESA RODRÍGUEZ DE LECEA KRIPKE, SAUL AARON (1940–) The American Saul Kripke is one of the most important and influential philosophers of the late twentieth century. He is also one of the leading mathematical logicians, having done seminal work in areas including modal logic, intuitionistic logic and set theory. Kripke’s main contributions fall in the areas of metaphysics, philosophy of language, epistemology, philosophy of mind and philosophy of logic and mathematics. He is particularly well known for his views on and discussions of the following topics: the concepts of necessity, identity and ‘possible worlds’; ‘essentialism’ – the idea that things have significant essential properties; the question of what determines the referent of an ordinary proper name and the related question of whether such names have meanings; the relations among the concepts of necessity, analyticity, and the a priori; the concept of belief and its problems; the concept of truth and its problems; and scepticism, the idea of following a rule, and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s ‘private language argument’. This entry will be confined to the topics of identity, proper names, necessity and essentialism. See also: SEMANTIC PARADOXES AND THEORIES OF TRUTH; SEMANTICS Further reading Kripke, S.A. (1980) Naming and Necessity , Oxford: Blackwell, and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (The key source for Kripke’s views on proper names, reference, identity, necessity, essentialism and related topics. Difficult but largely nontechnical.) MICHAEL JUBIEN KRISTEVA, JULIA (1941–) Born in Bulgaria, Kristeva entered the Parisian scene of avant-garde intellectuals in the 1960s. Her earliest work in linguistics was shaped by the post-Stalinist communism of eastern Europe, a political climate that exerts its influence on her entire corpus, even as she distanced herself from it, to embrace an increasingly psychoanalytic perspective. Dissatisfied with scientific models of language, conceived as a mere means of communicating preconceived ideas, where words simply function as isolated symbols that represent discrete concepts, Kristeva analyses language as a signifying process. As such, language is not a static and closed system of signs, but a mobile, fluid process that implicates bodily and vocal rhythms in the generation of symbolic meanings. In La Révolution du language poétique (1974) ( Revolution in Poetic Language, 1984) Kristeva fuses linguistic insights with psychoanalytic inquiry as she presents two distinct yet interrelated aspects of
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Page 445 the signifying process, the semiotic and the symbolic. The semiotic aspect of language is vocal, preverbal, rhythmic, kinetic and bodily. The symbolic aspect of language is social, cultural, and rulegoverned. Focusing on the interplay between the semiotic and the symbolic, Kristeva is able to analyse literary and historical texts, works of art and cultural phenomena in a way that thematizes the complex relationship between materiality and representation. Further reading Kristeva, J. (1974a) La Révolution du language poétique , Paris: Éditions du Seuil; trans. M. Waller, Revolution in Poetic Language, introduction L.S. Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. (Fusing insights from the diverse sources of linguistics, Bahktin, Hegel, Lacan and others, this central text firmly established Kristeva’s reputation as an original theorist, mobilizing the distinction between the semiotic chora as a motile rhythmic sensible aspect of language and the symbolic realm of meaning that has become the hallmark of her work.) Lechte, J. (1990) Julia Kristeva , London and New York: Routledge. (A general introduction, helpful for situating Kristeva’s semiotics in its linguistic context.) TINA CHANTER KROCHMAL, NACHMAN (1785–1840) Nachman Krochmal was leader of the Jewish Enlightenment or Haskalah in Galicia, eastern Europe. An astute observer of the German philosophical environment, Krochmal provided one of the first Jewish responses to, and adaptations of, elements of the philosophical work of Spinoza, Kant, Herder, Schelling and Hegel. His posthumously published Moreh Nevukhei ha-Zeman (Guide to the Perplexed of Today) (1851) adapted Kantian epistemological methods to interpret the Jewish religious sources with an eye to discovering their inner, philosophical meaning. Krochmal argued that at that their deeper level these sources, both ancient and medieval, anticipated the discoveries of the German Idealist philosophers. Thus, for example, the Jewish belief in a personal God who created the world and revealed a desired way of life could remain philosophically fruitful. For, when properly interpreted, such ideas were concrete representations of the truths laid bare in the metaphysics of Hegel and Schelling. Krochmal answered the regnant philosophy of history, which considered Jewish culture to have been sublated, by arguing that Jewish religion, by its apprehension of the absolute, stood outside the historical ‘laws’ that mandate the eventual cultural demise of all nations and states. Although he was an important model for aspiring Jewish intellectuals in eastern Europe, Krochmal’s work was of limited philosophical influence. His lasting contribution may be his implicit exposure of the unstated cultural biases of modern idealist philosophy. For his work shows that alternative cultural assumptions would turn idealist philosophy towards philosophical and religious conclusions significantly different from those of the German Idealists themselves. See also: ENLIGHTENMENT, JEWISH Further reading Harris, J.M. (1991) Nachman Krochmal: Guiding the Perplexed of the Modern Age, New York: New York University Press. (The only book-length treatment of Krochmal’s work; it treats Krochmal’s thought as a response to idealism.) JAY M. HARRIS KRONECKER, LEOPOLD (1823–91) Leopold Kronecker was one of the most influential German mathematicians of the late nineteenth century. He exercised a strong sociopolitical influence on the development of mathematics as an academic institution. From a philosophical point of view, his main significance lies in his anticipation of a new and rigorous epistemological perspective with regard to the foundations of mathematics: Kronecker became the father of intuitionism or constructivism, which stands in strict opposition to the methods of classical mathematics and their canonization by set theory. See also: INTUITIONISM; MATHEMATICS, FOUNDATIONS OF Further reading Biermann, K.-R. (1981) ‘Kronecker, Leopold’, in Dictionary of Scientific Biography , vol. 7, ed. C.C. Gillispie, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1984. (A good, readable biography.) ULRICH MAJER KROPOTKIN, PËTR ALEKSEEVICH (1842–1921) A founder of anarchist communism and guiding spirit of the international anarchist movement after the death of Bakunin, Kropotkin, who came from an aristocratic Russian family, was
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Page 446 also a distinguished geographer, a scientist and a positivist. He saw the development of anarchism as one aspect of the whole movement of modern science towards an integrated philosophy. He believed that the dominant phenomenon in nature was harmony, arrived at by a continuous process of adjustment between contending forces. In human, as in animal societies, the dominant phenomenon was mutual aid: thus once metaphysics, law and state authority had been shaken off, harmony could be realized. See also: ANARCHISM Further reading Miller, M.A. (1976) Kropotkin , Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press. (Well-documented account of life and work.) CAROLINE CAHM KUAN TZU see GUANZI KUHN, THOMAS SAMUEL (1922–96) The early 1960s saw substantial turmoil in the philosophy of science, then dominated by logical empiricism. Most important was the confrontation of the prevailing philosophical tradition with the history of science. Whereas the philosophy of science was mainly normatively oriented, that is it tried to delineate what good science should look like, historical studies seemed to indicate that the practice of science both past and present did not follow those prescriptions. An American, Thomas S. Kuhn was educated as a theoretical physicist but soon turned to the history and philosophy of science. In 1962, he published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions ( SSR). This book was the single most important publication advancing the confrontation between the history and the philosophy of science; it is now a classic in science studies. SSR was most influential not only in the discussion within philosophy but also in various other fields, especially the social sciences. The central concepts of SSR, like scientific revolution, paradigm shift and incommensurability, have been in the focus of philosophical discussion for many years, and the term ‘paradigm’ has even become a household word (although mostly not in Kuhn’s intended sense). After SSR, Kuhn continued to develop his theory; apart from minor modifications it is mainly the explication of SSR’s more intricate philosophical topics, especially of incommensurability, which is characteristic of his later work. See also: INCOMMENSURABILITY Further reading Barnes, B. (1982) T.S. Kuhn and Social Science , London: Macmillan. (A book about the sociology of scientific knowledge taking Kuhn’s work as its point of departure.) Kuhn, T.S. (1962, 1970) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (Kuhn’s classic work; the second edition, to which citations refer, contains an important Postscript.) PAUL HOYNINGEN-HUENE KŪKAI (774–835) Kūkai, also known by his posthumous honorific title Kōbō Daishi, was the founder of Japanese Shingon (‘truth word’ or ‘mantra’) Buddhism and is often considered the first comprehensive philosophical thinker in Japanese history. Building on the Buddhist esoteric tradition first developed in India and then in China, where Kūkai encountered it, he maintained that reality is a cosmic person, the Buddha Dainichi. Dainichi’s cosmic thoughts, words and deeds form microcosmic configurations, resonances and patterns of change. By performing Shingon rituals, one can supposedly accord with the microcosmic constituents and know the foundational structures of reality that compose the sensory world in which we ordinarily live. See also: BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY, JAPANESE Further reading Yamasaki Taikō (1988) Shingon: Japanese Esoteric Buddhism , Yasuyoshi Morimoto and D. Kidd (eds), Boston and London: Shambhala Publications. (Excellent introduction to Shingon doctrine and practise in a readable format for a general audience.) THOMAS P. KASULIS KUKI SHŪZŌ (1888–1941) Kuki studied Western philosophy in Tokyo before going to the West, where he studied under Husserl and Heidegger and was associated with Bergson. Back in Japan, he lectured on Western philosophy at Kyoto Imperial University. His philosophical project was focused on the issues arising from dualistic thinking. He incorporated into his work a cross-cultural, historical perspective, while applying Heidegger’s hermeneutical ontology and exhibiting bold, systematic, speculative acumen.
See also: KYOTO SCHOOL; LOGIC IN JAPAN Further reading Light, S. (ed.) (1987) Shūzō Kuki and Jean-Paul Sartre: Influence and Counter-Influence in the Early History of Existential Phenomenology, Including the Notebook ‘Monsieur Sartre’ and Other Parisian Writings of Shūzō Kuki,
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Page 447 Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. (A recounting of Kuki’s stay in Europe including his association with Sartre, and a commentary on two of his essays in French, ‘La notion du temps et la repreise sur le temps en Orient’ and ‘L’expression de l’infini dans l’art japonais’.) SHIGENORI NAGATOMO KUMAZAWA BANZAN (1610–91) Trained under Nakae Tōju, the founder of the Wang Yangming school (Yōmeigaku) of Confucian idealism during the Tokugawa era in Japan, Kumazawa Banzan is known for his eclectic and pragmatic philosophy emphasizing political and economic reforms. For example, he recommended that the shogunate take greater responsibility for promoting economic equity and prosperity by supporting rice production and storage as well as the use of rice as the medium of exchange. He advocated a form of government dedicated to the Confucian ideal of benevolence. See also: CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY, JAPANESE Further reading Ryūsaku Tsunoda, de Bary, W.T. and Keene, D. (eds) (1958) ‘Kumazawa Banzan, A Samurai Reformer’, in Sources of Japanese Tradition, New York: Columbia University Press, vol. 1, 375–88. (An historical overview with translations of selected passages.) STEVEN HEINE KYOTO SCHOOL The Kyoto school of philosophy pivots around three twentieth-century Japanese thinkers who held chairs of philosophy or religion at Kyoto University: Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945), Tanabe Hajime (1885–1962) and Nishitani Keiji (1900–91). Its principal living representatives, who also held chairs at Kyoto until their retirement, are Takeuchi Yoshinori (1913–) and Ueda Shizuteru (1926–). The keynote of the school was struck by Nishida in his attempt, on the one hand, to offer a distinctively Eastern contribution to the Western philosophical tradition by bringing key Buddhist concepts to bear on traditional philosophical questions, and on the other, to enrich Buddhist self-understanding by submitting it to the rigours of European philosophy. The name ‘Kyoto school’ was coined in 1932 by the Marxist philosopher Tosaka Jun (1900– 45) to denounce what he saw as a bourgeois ideology – which he characterized as ‘hermeneutical, transhistorical, formalistic, romantic, and phenomenological’ – that had grown up around Nishida, Tanabe and their immediate disciples at the time. These latter included Miki Kiyoshi (1897–1945), Kosaka Masaaki (1900–69) and Koyama Iwao (1905–93) as well as the young Nishitani. At the time the Japanese state had taken its first definitive steps in the direction of a militaristic nationalism that would involve it in the ‘fifteen-year war’ with Asia and finally the West over the period 1930–45. As the leading philosophical movement in Japan, the Kyoto school was caught up in this history, although there was little unanimity among the responses of the principal figures. Postwar criticisms and purges of the Japanese intelligentsia attached a certain stigma to the school’s name, but later and more studied examination of those events, as well as the enthusiastic reception of translations of their works into Western languages, has done much to ensure a more balanced appraisal. Today, the philosophy of the Kyoto-school thinkers is recognized as an important contribution to the history of world philosophy whose ‘nationalistic’ elements are best recognized as secondary, or at least as an unnecessary trivialization of its fundamental inspirations. As a school of thought, the common defining characteristics of the Kyoto school may be seen in an overlap of four nodal concerns: self-awareness, the logic of affirmation-in-negation, absolute nothingness and historicity. See also: LOGIC IN JAPAN; NISHIDA KITARŌ; NISHITANI KEIJI; TANABE HAJIME Further reading Heisig, J. and Maraldo, J. (eds) (1994) Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, and the Question of Nationalism, Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press. (A multi-faceted look at the political dimensions of the Kyoto-school philosophers.) J.W. HEISIG
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Page 448 L LA FORGE, LOUIS DE (1632–66) Louis de la Forge, a medical doctor by profession, was an important champion of Cartesian philosophy in mid-seventeenth century France. Through his work on the first published edition of Descartes’ Traité de l’homme, as well as in his own Traité de l’esprit de l’homme, La Forge sought to complete Descartes’ project of giving a full and detailed account of the human being as a union of two essentially distinct substances: mind and body. His analysis of causation introduced occasionalist elements into his otherwise orthodox Cartesian system, and he is credited with being one of the originators of occasionalism. Further reading Balz, A.G.A. (1951) Cartesian Studies , New York: Columbia University Press. (Contains a chapter on La Forge’s critique of substantial forms.) STEVEN NADLER LA METTRIE, JULIEN OFFROY DE (1709–51) La Mettrie is best known as the author of the eighteenth-century materialist manifesto, L’Homme machine (1747). His interest in philosophical issues grew out of his preoccupation with medicine, and he developed a tradition of medical materialism within the French Enlightenment. Born in St Malo, into the family of a prosperous textile merchant, La Mettrie pursued a medical career in Paris. He also studied for two years with the renowned Hermann Boerhaave in Leiden. After a brief period of medical practice, La Mettrie devoted his efforts to his translations and commentaries on Boerhaave’s medical works. He also began to publish the works that made him a pariah to both the Faculty of Medicine of Paris and to the orthodox – that is, his medical satires and his first work of materialist philosophy, L’Histoire naturelle de l’âme (1745). Because of the outrage provoked by these works, he was exiled to Holland in 1745. But L’Homme machine , the text in which he applied his materialism thoroughly and explicitly to human beings, was too radical even for the unusually tolerant Dutch, and La Mettrie was forced to seek asylum at the court of Frederick the Great where he later died. His willingness to publish ideas his contemporaries considered too dangerous led the philosophes to repudiate him. See also: ENLIGHTENMENT, CONTINENTAL; MATERIALISM Further reading Vartainian, A. (1960) La Mettrie’s L’Homme Machine: A Study in the Origins of an Idea , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Critical edition of text with monographic introduction.) KATHLEEN WELLMAN LABRIOLA, ANTONIO (1843–1904) Antonio Labriola was the founder of Italian theoretical Marxism. Generally situated in the Marxism of the Second International, he was more questioning than others in that movement. He profoundly influenced the development of Italian thought, constantly challenging the influential idealism of Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile. His attempt to maintain a place for human creativity within a deterministic Marxist view of history influenced Antonio Gramsci and helped give Italian Eurocommunism its distinctive flexibility. His concepts of ‘genetic method’, ‘social morphology’, ‘philosophy of praxis’ and ‘social pedagogy’ are indications of this attempt. See also: MARXISM, WESTERN Further reading Labriola, A. (1898) Discorrendo di socialismo e di filosofia (Discourse on Socialism and Philosophy), Rome; 3rd essay, trans. in Socialism and Philosophy , trans. and with intro. by P. Piccone, St Louis, MO: Telos Press, 1980. (This innovative essay examining class consciousness comprises letters to Georges Sorel. The translation contains a useful long introduction.) GEOFFREY HUNT LACAN, JACQUES (1901–81) Jacques Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and philosopher whose contribution to philosophy
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Page 449 derives from his consistent and thoroughgoing reinterpretation of Freud’s writings in the light of Heidegger and Hegel as well as structuralist linguistics and anthropology. Whereas Freud himself had disparaged philosophical speculation, claiming for himself the mantle of the natural scientist, Lacan demonstrates psychoanalysis to be a rigorous philosophical position. Specifically, Lacan suggests that the Freudian unconscious is best understood as the effect of language (what he calls, ‘the symbolic’) upon human behaviour. See also: PSYCHOANALYSIS, POST-FREUDIAN Further reading Boothby, R. (1991) Death and Desire: Psychoanalytic Theory in Lacan’s Return to Freud , New York: Routledge. (Boothby’s approach provides an excellent introduction to Lacan; by using the Freudian death drive, he ties together all of Lacan’s work in an extremely convincing and clear way.) Zizek, S. (1991) For They Know not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, London and New York: Verso. (Zizek, perhaps the most brilliant interpreter of Lacan today, uses Lacan as a tool for interpreting political ideology.) THOMAS BROCKELMAN LACHELIER, JULES (1832–1918) Lachelier is, along with Octave Hamelin, one of the foremost French metaphysicians of the nineteenth century. An idealist, he was a major figure in the neo-spiritualist movement, which opposed the materialism dominating scientific thought at the time. For all that, Lachelier did not set up a division between consciousness and life, but, following the example of Maine de Biran and Ravaisson, he rather saw in mind the inwardness of life, at work in the whole of nature. Further reading Lachelier, J. (1960) The Philosophy of Jules Lachelier , The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. (An English translation of Lachelier’s main works.) Translated by Robert Stern MICHEL PICLIN LACOUE-LABARTHE, PHILIPPE (1940–) Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe is Professor of Philosophy at the universities of Strasbourg and Berkeley. At the centre of his thought is philosophy’s ostracism of literature, which in his view characterizes the foundational scene of philosophy itself. Lacoue-Labarthe demonstrates how all Western thought, including Heidegger (perhaps its most faithful deconstructor) lies within a conception of mimesis which is still metaphysical in that it remains bound to the opposition between truth and mimesis: an ‘imitation’ alters (or falsifies) its original, thus contrasting with that which is ‘true’. The non-metaphysical thought of mimesis proposed by Lacoue-Labarthe, by contrast, shows how a mimetic aspect structures the concept of truth itself, making it impossible to distinguish between truth and verisimilitude, model and copy. Thus a new area of investigation is laid open concerning fictional modes of thought: the manner in which myths and figures are produced. See also: HEIDEGGER, M.; NANCY, J.-L. Further reading Lacoue-Labarthe, P. (1979) Le Sujet de la philosophie , Paris: Aubier-Flammarion; trans. The Subject of Philosophy , Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. (Collection of essays on literature and philosophy, music and philosophy, and Nietzsche, Heidegger and Reick.) Translated by William Finley Green GIOVANNI SCIBILIA LAKATOS, IMRE (1922–74) Imre Lakatos made important contributions to the philosophy of mathematics and of science. His ‘Proofs and Refutations’ (1963–4) develops a novel account of mathematical discovery. It shows that counterexamples (‘refutations’) play an important role in mathematics as well as in science and argues that both proofs and theorems are gradually improved by searching for counterexamples and by systematic ‘proof analysis’. His ‘methodology of scientific research programmes’ (which he presented as a ‘synthesis’ of the accounts of science given by Popper and by Kuhn) is based on the idea that science is best analysed, not in terms of single theories, but in terms of broader units called research programmes. Such programmes issue in particular theories, but in a way again governed by clear-cut heuristic principles. Lakatos claimed that his account supplies the sharp criteria of ‘progress’ and ‘degeneration’ missing from Kuhn’s account, and hence captures the ‘rationality’ of scientific development. Lakatos also articulated a ‘meta-methodology’ for appraising rival methodologies of science in terms
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Page 450 of the ‘rational reconstructions’ of history they provide. See also: SCIENTIFIC METHOD; THEORIES, SCIENTIFIC Further reading Lakatos, I. (1976) Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of Mathematical Discovery, ed.J. Worrall and E. Zahar, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (This book contains extra material on Cauchy and uniform convergence as well as the original 1963–4 papers.) Newton-Smith, W.H. (1981) The Rationality of Science , London: Routledge. (Contains a sympathetic, but critical analysis of the views of Lakatos and of related authors on scientific progress.) JOHN WORRALL LAMBDA CALCULUS The lambda calculus presents a delimited formal setting for expressing and studying properties of mathematical operations and computer programs. Its syntactical unit is the term. Application terms tu represent supplying argument u to routine t. Abstraction terms λx.t (in which λx binds x in t) represent the explicit definition of an operation from a routine t. Term computation is by reduction: ( λx.t )(u) reduces to t[x/u], the result of substituting u for x in t; this corresponds to operating with t on u. Terms are equal either when they differ only in bound variables or when one converts to the other via a finite chain of reductions and counter-reductions. There are two main varieties of lambda calculi: typed and untyped (or type-free). Any untyped term is applicable to any other and equality between such terms is undecidable. In the typed case, terms are indexed by types and application is permitted only when types conform. Here, equality is decidable. A. Church proposed formalisms for both varieties during the 1930s. He and his students S. Kleene and J. Rosser proved the early syntactical metatheorems linking the untyped calculus with comput-ability theory. In 1969, D. Scott gave the first set-theoretic construction of a functional model of the untyped calculus; since then, many other models have been devised. As for the typed calculus, Gödel’s Dialectica interpretation inspired many of its applications to proof theory. Also, the idea, due to H. Curry and W. Howard, of using logical formulas as types reveals a close correspondence between typed terms and derivations in intuitionistic formal systems. In the last decades of the twentieth century, the lambda calculus and its models have been put to many uses in computer science, with functional programming and denotational semantics deserving special mention. Further reading Barendregt, H. (1981) The Lambda Calculus: Its Syntax and Semantics, Amsterdam: North Holland, 2nd edn, 1984. (A bible of lambda calculus research; authoritative and detailed.) Hindley, J. and Seldin, J. (1986) Introduction to Combinators and λ-Calculus, London Mathematical Society Student Texts no. 1, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (An excellent brief introduction to the subject. Highly recommended for beginners.) DAVID CHARLES McCARTY LAMBERT, JOHANN HEINRICH (1728–77) Lambert was a German mathematician, physicist, astronomer and philosopher, who was among the leading figures of German intellectual life in the late eighteenth century. As a practising scientist, who made important discoveries in many areas, Lambert was interested in philosophical questions regarding the methods of scientific knowledge. In his philosophical works he sought to reform metaphysics by subjecting it to the procedures and standards of mathematics, advocating a combination of conceptual analysis and deductive construction in philosophy. With Lambert the tradition of German rationalist thought reaches directly into the time of Kant, who had great esteem for his analytic skills. See also: SCIENTIFIC METHOD Further reading Beck, L.W. (1969) Early German Philosophy. Kant and his Predecessors, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 402–12. (Places Lambert in the context of German rationalist tradition in metaphysics.) GÜNTER ZÖLLER LANGE, FRIEDRICH ALBERT (1828–75) A German philosopher, social scientist and political activist, Lange was best known for his study of the history of materialism. He was a leading proponent of Neo-Kantianism, a critic of speculative metaphysics, and a defender of the view that philosophy should incorporate the findings of the exact sciences. As a social scientist, Lange described the emergence of a social Darwinian ‘struggle for existence’ in
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Page 451 modern times due to the rapid advancement of industrialization and a growing conflict of interest among social classes. Cognizant of the scientific trends of his time, Lange anticipated some of the central ideas of pragmatism and adopted a form of conventionalism in regard to scientific principles and concepts. Although sympathetic to materialism, Lange also saw the inevitability of an idealist element in interpretations of natural phenomena and insisted on the importance of projecting ethical, social and aesthetic ideals. See also: NEO-KANTIANISM Further reading Lange, F.A. (1866) Geschichte des Materialismus und Kritik seiner Bedeutung in der Gegenwart, Iserlohn: Baedeker; 2nd edn, Iserlohn and Leipzig: J. Baedeker, 1873– 5, 2 vols; trans. E.C. Thomas, History of Materialism , Boston, MA: Osgood, 1877, 3 vols. (A pioneering work in what was later designated philosophy of science.) Stack, G.J. (1983) Lange and Nietzsche , Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. (A comprehensive study of the influence of Lange on Nietzsche’s philosophical project, as well as on his critique of knowledge.) GEORGE J. STACK LANGER, SUSANNE KATHERINA KNAUTH (1895–1985) With roots in logic, philosophy of language and philosophy of mind, the American Susanne Langer sought to explicate the meaning and cognitive import of art works by developing a theory of symbolism that located works of art at the centre of a network of relations based firmly on semantic theory. Art works were non-discursive, presentational symbols that expressed an artist’s ‘life of feeling’, by which observers, through a process of immediate apprehension (or intuition) came to acquire knowledge. See also: ARTISTIC EXPRESSION Further reading Langer, S.K.K. (1942) Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite and Art, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Art is a nondiscursive symbol that conveys an artist’s expressed ‘ideas of feeling’.) PEG BRAND LANGUAGE, ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY OF The earliest interest in language during the ancient Greek period was largely instrumental: presumed facts about language and its features were pressed into service for the purpose of philosophical argumentation. Perhaps inevitably, this activity gave way to the analysis of language for its own sake. Claims, for example, about the relation between the semantic values of general terms and the existence of universals invited independent inquiry into the nature of the meanings of those general terms themselves. Language thus became an object of philosophical inquiry in its own right. Accordingly, philosophers at least from the time of Plato conducted inquiries proper to philosophy of language. They investigated: how words acquire their semantic values; how proper names and other singular terms refer; how words combine to form larger semantic units; the compositional principles necessary for language understanding; how sentences, statements, or propositions come to be truth-evaluable; and, among later figures of the classical period, how propositions, as abstract, mind- and language-independent entities, are to be (a) characterized in terms of their constituents, (b) related to minds and the natural languages used to express them, and (c) related to the language-independent world. See also: DIALECTICAL SCHOOL; PROPER NAMES; PROPOSITIONS, SENTENCES AND STATEMENTS Further reading Everson, S. (ed.) (1994) Companions to Ancient Thought 3: Language, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (An extremely useful anthology of papers on many aspects of ancient philosophical thought about language, with a special emphasis on continuities between ancient and contemporary concerns. This work should be consulted for additional bibliography.) CHRISTOPHER SHIELDS LANGUAGE AND GENDER How do language and gender interact? This can be interpreted as asking about sexual difference in relation to language-use. How do the sexes
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Page 452 speak, how do we speak of the sexes? And could or should these patterns change? Not surprisingly, understanding language-gender interactions solely in terms of sexual difference yields a static and polarized picture. Men insult and swear, women flatter and wheedle, women draw others out while men monopolize conversations, men are direct and women beat around the bush, women gossip whereas men lecture. Linguistic conventions and familiar vocabulary equate humanity with males (note, for example, so-called generic uses of ‘he’) and sexuality with females (‘hussy’, for instance, once meant ‘housewife’). Men are linguistically represented as actors and women as acted upon, passive. Men control the institutions controlling language – such as schools, churches, publications, legislatures. Children of both sexes, however, learn a ‘mother tongue’ at a mother’s knee. Such generalizations contain a few grains of truth, at least if restricted to so-called mainstream contemporary America or England. But they completely obscure the differences among women and among men and the varied forms of social relations so important to gender. One is never just a woman or a man: sexual classifications are inflected by age, class, race and much else. And gender involves not only women in relation to men as a group but also more specific cross-sex and same-sex relations ranging from egalitarian heterosexual marriages and same-sex partnerships through intense friendships and enmities among adolescent schoolgirls to camaraderie among boys on a football team. All such relations are partly constituted by people using language to and of one another; all are informed by and inform larger social arrangements. On the more linguistic side, these include dictionaries, the language arts curriculum and editorial guidelines; arrangements with a gender focus include marriage, high-school dances and gay rights legislation. Emphasizing large-scale sex difference ignores cross-cultural and historical variation and makes change in language, in gender, or in their interaction appear mysterious. And such an emphasis erases the linguistic dynamics of a particular society’s construction of gender. Yet it is in such dynamics that, for example, language shapes and is shaped by sexual polarization and male dominance. This entry highlights approaches to language and gender that root each in historically situated social practice. Linguistic change and gender change then become inseparable. See also: FEMINISM; LINGUISTIC DISCRIMINATION Further reading Coates, J. (ed.) (1997) Language and Gender: A Reader, Oxford: Blackwell. (Reprints many of the hardto-get ‘classics’ on the topic.) Hall, K. and Bucholtz, M. (eds) (1995) Gender Articulated: Arrangements of Language and the Socially Constructed Self , London and New York: Routledge. (Papers are all written for this volume and include Lakoff’s recent work, an excellent anthropological essay by S. Gal, an essay by Eckert and McConnellGinet developing and applying the theoretical framework introduced in their 1992 article, and many other diverse and detailed studies of language-use.) SALLY McCONNELL-GINET LANGUAGE, CONVENTIONALITY OF When we say that smoke means fire or that those spots mean measles, we are noting how the presence of one thing indicates the presence of another. For these natural relationships to continue, it is enough that the laws of nature remain the same. The connection between the two states is strictly causal. By contrast when we say, ‘In English, “gold” means this stuff’, pointing at some metal, we are insisting on an arbitrary connection between a piece of language and part of the world. We might have used another word, as other languages do, or have used this word for something else. But, for a word to have the literal meaning it does in a language, this arbitrary connection must be sustained on subsequent occasions of use. What is needed to sustain the connection is an intention on our part, not just the continued operation of natural laws. Of course, some connections between words and things are based on natural relations; there is, for example, onomatopoeia. However, few words have this feature. For the majority of words it is quite arbitrary that they have the meanings they do, and this has led many to suppose that the regularities needed to sustain the connections between words and what they stand for are conventional rather than causal. But there are also those who deny that convention is an essential feature of language. See also: LANGUAGE, SOCIAL NATURE OF Further reading Dummett, M.A.E. (1991) The Logical Basis of Metaphysics , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Chapter 4 summarizes Dummett’s views about language, arguing against
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Page 453 Davidson and Chomsky and in favour of a communal conception of language.) BARRY C. SMITH LANGUAGE, EARLY MODERN PHILOSOPHY OF Philosophical interest in language during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was strong but largely derivative. Most thinkers shared Leibniz’s view ‘that languages are the best mirror of the human mind, and that a precise analysis of the significations of words would tell us more than anything else about the operations of the understanding’. The three most important areas of philosophical discussion about language in the modern period were the nature of signification, the origin of human language and the possibility of animal language. Signification was generally viewed as a relation between linguistic signs and ideas. There was no agreement whether signification is entirely conventional or contains a natural element, but the view is that it is entirely natural virtually disappeared. Even those who retained the belief in the possibility of a philosophically perfect language insisted that such a language should be constructed anew, rather than rediscovered as the lost language of Adam. The traditional biblical account of the origin of language was more and more contested but, as more naturalistic theories emerged, the problem of why other animals cannot talk became especially pressing. Debates about language in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were highly speculative; participants in these debates often relied on simplistic biological theories, inadequate grammars or anecdotal evidence from travellers. What makes these discussions important is less their scientific contribution than their engagement with the philosophical problems concerning the relationship between the human mind and the natural world. See also: LANGUAGE, PHILOSOPHY OF; LANGUAGE, RENAISSANCE PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Aarsleff, H. (1982) From Locke to Saussure, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. (Collection of essays on Wilkins, Locke, Leibniz, Condillac, Herder and lesser figures.) Juliard, P. (1970) Philosophies of Language in Eighteenth Century France , The Hague: Mouton. (Discusses the philosophy of language of Condillac, Maupertuis, La Mettrie, Turgot and Rousseau.) Land, S. (1986) The Philosophy of Language in Britain , New York: AMS Press. (Discussion of the philosophy of language of Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Harris, Reid, Monboddo and Smith.) ZOLTAŃ GENDLER SZABÓ LANGUAGE, INDIAN THEORIES OF Language is a much debated topic in Indian philosophy. There is a clear concern with it in the Vedic texts, where efforts are made to describe links between earthly and divine reality in terms of etymological links between words. The earliest surviving Sanskrit grammar, Pāṇini’s intricate Aṣṭādhyāyī (Eight Chapters), dates from about 350 BC, although arguably the first explicitly philosophical reflections on language that have survived are found in Patañjali’s ‘Great Commentary’ on Pāṇini’s work, the Mahābhāṣya ( c .150 BC). Both these thinkers predate the classical systems of Indian philosophy. This is not true of the great fifth-century grammarian Bhartṛhari, however, who in his Vākyapadīya (Treatise on Sentences and Words) draws on these systems in developing his theory of the sphoṭa , a linguistic entity distinct from a word’s sounds that Bhartṛhari takes to convey its meaning. Among the issues debated by these philosophers (although not exclusively by them, and not exclusively with reference to Sanskrit) were what can be described as (i) the search for minimal meaningful units, and (ii) the ontological status of composite linguistic units. With some approximation, the first of these two issues attracted more attention during the early period of linguistic reflection, whereas the subsequent period emphasized the second one. See also: INTERPRETATION, INDIAN THEORIES OF; MEANING, INDIAN THEORIES OF Further reading Coward, H.G. and Raja, K.K. (eds) (1990) Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies , vol. 5, The Philosophy of the Grammarians, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. (Contains bibliography up to 1983.) Matilal, B.K. (1990) The Word and the World: India’s Contribution to the Study of Language, Delhi: Oxford University Press. (Discusses various issues in Indian linguistic philosophy.) JOHANNES BRONKHORST LANGUAGE, INNATENESS OF Is there any innate knowledge? What is it to speak and understand a language? These are old
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Page 454 questions, but it was the twentieth-century linguist, Noam Chomsky, who forged a connection between them, arguing that mastery of a language is, in part, a matter of knowing its grammar, and that much of our knowledge of grammar is inborn. Rejecting the empiricism that had dominated Anglo-American philosophy, psychology and linguistics for the first half of this century, Chomsky argued that the task of learning a language is so difficult, and the linguistic evidence available to the learner so meagre, that language acquisition would be impossible unless some of the knowledge eventually attained were innate. He proposed that learners bring to their task knowledge of a ‘Universal Grammar’, describing structural features common to all natural languages, and that it is this knowledge that enables us to master our native tongues. Chomsky’s position is nativist because it proposes that the inborn knowledge facilitating learning is domain-specific. On an empiricist view, our innate ability to learn from experience (for example, to form associations among ideas) applies equally in any task domain. On the nativist view, by contrast, we are equipped with special-purpose learning strategies, each suited to its own peculiar subject-matter. Chomsky’s nativism spurred a flurry of interest as theorists leaped to explore its conceptual and empirical implications. As a consequence of his work, language acquisition is today a major focus of cognitive science research. See also: CHOMSKY, N.; INNATE KNOWLEDGE Further reading Chomsky, N. (1988) Language and Problems of Knowledge: The Managua Lectures , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (Chomsky’s current views about the innateness of language.) Pinker, S. (1994) The Language Instinct, New York: William Morrow. (An excellent and highly readable summary of the case for linguistic nativism.) FIONA COWIE LANGUAGE, MEDIEVAL THEORIES OF A great deal of theorizing about language took place in western Europe between 1100 and 1400. The usual social context of this theorizing was the teaching of grammar, logic or theology. Rhetoric was traditionally counted as one of the language disciplines ( scientiae sermocinales ) together with grammar and logic, but in practice it received little attention. Medieval thinkers produced a vast literature on aspects of linguistic theory, but they did not write books with such titles as ‘A Theory of Language’. The theories that have come down to us today have been reconstructed from a large number of sources, even when they are attributed to a single person. Although the medieval writers on language were very innovative, they owed some key ideas to ancient Greek and Latin authors, for example: (1) words acquire their meaning by an act of ‘imposition’ when a sound is chosen as the label of some thing; (2) there are three key ingredients in signification: the word, a concept and the thing signified; (3) concepts can be thought of as mental words; (4) the grammaticality of a sentence cannot be explained purely in terms of morphology; and (5) words have different contents when used as predicates of creatures and when predicated of the Creator. The medieval thinkers disagreed as to whether words signify things directly or only through concepts. The latter view ran the danger of making concepts a screen between language and reality, but it had the advantage of being able to explain why different words can signify the same object without being quite synonymous. Many thought that general terms signify universal things, but there were also nominalist schools which held that the general terms themselves are the only universal things. Fourteenth-century nominalists located universality in concepts, also called mental terms, and only secondarily in spoken words. The language of thought had gained priority over that of speech. The theory of grammar known today as modism was developed in the thirteenth century. This theory assumed that there are only two contributors to the sense of an expression, lexical meaning and grammatical features, and that only the latter belong to the province of grammar, which thus became a purely formal science that could claim applicability to all languages irrespective of their surface differences. The problem with modism was that it had no tools for dealing with even slightly deviant, yet intelligible expressions. Thus it would have to reject a statement such as ‘the crowd are rushing’ because of the lack of concord of number. A number of medieval scholars focused on the various forms of metaphorical language and ambiguity, which were more appropriate for dealing with deviant expressions of the type mentioned above. It was realized that speaker, listener and context must be taken into account in order to explain how words can communicate something different from their primary sense,
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Page 455 and how it is possible for a listener to grasp the intended sense of an ambiguous message. One motivation for this study was a need to understand how theological discourse functions. Theology also lay behind a heated debate about the ontological status of the meanings of propositions, and sacramental theology joined grammar in developing a notion of performative locutions. The study of syntax yielded many new concepts, including those of government and dependence. Much less work was done on the evolution of languages, but Roger Bacon and Dante did offer some perceptive observations. Though never creating fully fledged artificial languages, logicians did develop a semi-artificial Latin. See also: LANGUAGE, RENAISSANCE PHILOSOPHY OF; LOGIC, MEDIEVAL Further reading Bursill-Hall, G.L., Ebbesen, S. and Koerner, K. (eds) (1990) De ortu Grammaticae: Studies in medieval grammar and linguistic theory in memory of Jan Pinborg , Studies in the History of the Language Sciences 43, Amsterdam: Benjamins. (Articles on medieval logic and grammar.) Rijk, L.M. de and Braakhuis, H.A.G. (eds.) (1987) Logos and Pragma: Essays on the Philosophy of Language in Honour of Professor Gabriel Nuchelmans, Nijmegen: Ingenium. (Several papers about the meanings of terms and propositions.) STEN EBBESEN LANGUAGE OF THOUGHT The ‘language of thought’ is a formal language that is postulated to be encoded in the brains of intelligent creatures as a vehicle for their thought. It is an open question whether it resembles any ‘natural’ language spoken by anyone. Indeed, it could well be encoded in the brains of people who claim not to ‘think in words’, or even by intelligent creatures (for example, chimpanzees) incapable of speaking any language at all. Its chief function is to be a medium of representation over which the computations posited by cognitive psychologists are defined. Its language-like structure is thought to afford the best explanation of such facts about animals as the productivity, systematicity and (hyper-)intensionality of their thought, the promiscuity of their attitudes, and their ability to reason in familiar deductive, inductive and practical ways. See also: MIND, COMPUTATIONAL THEORIES OF Further reading Fodor, J. (1975) The Language of Thought, New York: Crowell. (The most influential defence of the language of thought hypothesis as a psychological hypothesis.) Rey, G. (1997) Contemporary Philosophy of Mind: A Contentiously Classical Approach , Oxford: Blackwell. (An introduction to recent work and an attempt to show that the language of thought hypothesis handles traditional problems in philosophy of mind.) GEORGES REY LANGUAGE, PHILOSOPHY OF Philosophical interest in language, while ancient and enduring (see LANGUAGE, ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY OF; LANGUAGE, MEDIEVAL THEORIES OF; LANGUAGE, RENAISSANCE PHILOSOPHY OF; LANGUAGE, EARLY MODERN PHILOSOPHY OF), has blossomed anew in the past century. There are three key historical sources of the current interest, and three intellectual concerns which sustain it. Philosophers nowadays often aspire to systematic and even mathematically rigorous accounts of language; these philosophers are in one way or another heirs to Gottlob FREGE, Bertrand RUSSELL, Ludwig WITTGENSTEIN and the logical positivists, who strove to employ rigorous accounts of logic and of meaning in attempts to penetrate, and in some cases to dispel, traditional philosophical questions (see LOGICAL POSITIVISM). Contemporary philosophers, too, are often attentive to the roles that philosophically interesting words (like ‘know’, ‘true’, ‘good’ and ‘free’) play in ordinary linguistic usage; these philosophers inherit from ‘ordinary language philosophers’, including G.E. MOORE, J.L. AUSTIN and again Wittgenstein, the strategy of finding clues to deep philosophical questions through scrutiny of the workaday usage of the words in which the philosophical questions are framed (see ORDINARY LANGUAGE PHILOSOPHY). Philosophical interest in language is maintained by foundational and conceptual questions in linguistics, quintessentially philosophical problems about the connections between mind, language and the world, and issues about philosophical methodology. These springs sustain a rich and fascinating field of philosophy concerned with representation, communication, meaning and truth.
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Page 456 1 Philosophy of linguistics Language is an impressive and fascinating human capacity, and human languages are strikingly powerful and complex systems. The science of this capacity and of these systems is linguistics. Like other sciences, and perhaps to an unusual degree, linguistics confronts difficult foundational, methodological and conceptual issues. When studying a human language, linguists seek systematic explanations of its syntax (the organization of the language’s properly constructed expressions, such as phrases and sentences; see SYNTAX), its semantics (the ways expressions exhibit and contribute to meaning; see SEMANTICS), and its pragmatics (the practices of communication in which the expressions find use; see PRAGMATICS). The study of syntax has been guided since the 1960s by the work of Noam Chomsky, who, in reaction to earlier behaviourist and structuralist movements in linguistics (see BEHAVIOURISM, ANALYTIC; BEHAVIOURISM, METHODOLOGICAL AND SCIENTIFIC; STRUCTURALISM IN LINGUISTICS; SAUSSURE, F. DE), takes an unapologetically cognitivist approach. Human linguistic capacities, he holds, issue from a dedicated cognitive faculty whose structure is the proper topic of linguistics. Indeed, Chomsky construes at least the study of syntax and (large parts of) semantics as attempts to uncover cognitive structures. Finding impressive commonalties among all known natural languages, and noting the paucity of evidence and instruction available to children learning a language, Chomsky suggests that surprisingly many features of natural languages stem from innate characteristics of the language faculty (see CHOMSKY, N.; LANGUAGE, INNATENESS OF). Whereas contemporary philosophers have tended to stay at a remove from work in syntax, discussing rather than doing it, semantics is another matter entirely. Here many of the great strides have been made by philosophers, including Gottlob FREGE, Bertrand RUSSELL, Ludwig WITTGENSTEIN, Rudolf CARNAP, Richard MONTAGUE and Saul KRIPKE. (However, quite a number of linguists and logicians who do not call themselves philosophers also have contributed heavily to semantics.) One major strand in semantics in the past century has consisted in the development and careful application of formal, mathematical models for characterizing linguistic form and meaning (see SEMANTICS, GAMETHEORETIC; SEMANTICS, POSSIBLE WORLDS; SEMANTICS, SITUATION). Pragmatics, at least as much as semantics, has benefited from the contributions of philosophers. Philosophical interest in pragmatics typically has had its source in a prior interest in semantics – in a desire to understand how meaning and truth are situated in the concrete practices of linguistic communication. The later WITTGENSTEIN, for instance, reminds us of the vast variety of uses in which linguistic expressions participate, and warns of the danger of assuming that there is something aptly called their meanings which we might uncover through philosophy. J.L. AUSTIN seeks in subtleties of usage clues to the meanings of philosophically interesting terms like ‘intentional’ and ‘true’. Austin keeps a careful eye to the several different things one does all at once when one performs a ‘speech act’ (for instance: uttering a sound, voicing the sentence ‘J’ai faim’, saying that one is hungry, hinting that one’s companion might share their meal, and causing them to do so). His taxonomy has provided the basis of much subsequent work (see SPEECH ACTS; PERFORMATIVES). H.P. GRICE, while critical of some of Austin’s methods, shared the aim of distilling meaning from the murky waters of use. Grice portrays conversation as a rational, cooperative enterprise, and in his account a number of conceptions of meaning figure as central strategies and tools for achieving communicative purposes. Grice’s main concern was philosophical methodology, but his proposals have proven extremely popular among linguists interested in pragmatics (see COMMUNICATION AND INTENTION; MEANING AND COMMUNICATION). Recently, philosophers and linguists have become increasingly persuaded that pragmatic concerns, far from being mere addenda to semantics, are crucial to the questions of where meaning comes from, in what it consists, and how the many incompletenesses and flexibilities in linguistic meaning are overcome and exploited in fixing what speakers mean by their words on particular occasions (see PRAGMATICS; IMPLICATURE; METAPHOR). Our focus on language should not omit a field of study with a rather broader scope, namely semiotics, which is the study of signs and signification in general, whether linguistic or not. In the view of the scholars in this field, the study of linguistic meaning should be situated in a more general project which encompasses gestural communication, artistic expression, animal signalling, and other varieties of information transfer (see SEMIOTICS; ANIMAL LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT).
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Page 457 2 Meaning: language, mind and world Philosophy aims at intellectually responsible accounts of the most basic and general aspects of reality. Part of what it is to provide an intellectually responsible account, clearly, is for us to make sense of our own place in reality – as, among other things, beings who conceive and formulate descriptions and explanations of it. In framing issues about our roles as describers and explainers, philosophers commonly draw a triangle in which lines connect ‘Language’, ‘Mind’ and ‘World’. The three lines represent relations that are keys to understanding our place in reality. These relations in one or another way constitute the meaningfulness of language. Mind ↔ World . Between Mind and World there are a number of crucial relations studied by philosophers of mind. Among these are perception, action, the mind’s bodily constitution and intentionality (the mind’s ability to think about what is in the world) (see MIND, PHILOSOPHY OF). Mind → Language. Using and understanding language is a heavily mental activity. Further, this activity seems to be what the real existence of meaningful language consists in. In short, mind invests meaning in language. Theorists of language focus on the Mind/ Language connection when they consider understanding to be the cornerstone concept, holding, for instance, that an account of meaning for a given language is simply an account of what constitutes the ability to understand it (see MEANING AND UNDERSTANDING). Philosophy has seen a variety of accounts of wherein understanding consists. Many have been attracted to the view that understanding is a matter of associating the correct ideas or concepts with words (see, for instance, LOCKE, J.; FREGE, G.; LANGUAGE OF THOUGHT). Others have equated understanding with knowing the requirements for accurate or apt use of words and sentences (see, for instance, DAVIDSON, D.; DUMMETT, M.A.E.). Still others find the key to understanding in one’s ability to discern the communicative goals of speakers and writers (see, for instance, GRICE, H.P.), or more directly in one’s ability to ‘pass’ linguistically, without censure (see, for instance, WITTGENSTEIN, L.). Certainly, these approaches do not exclude one another. Some philosophers focus more on production than consumption – on the speaker’s side of things – analysing linguistic meaning in terms of the goals and practices of speakers, and in terms of relations among communities of speakers (see GRICE, H.P.; COMMUNICATION AND INTENTION; LANGUAGE, CONVENTIONALITY OF; LANGUAGE, SOCIAL NATURE OF). Many of the philosophers who see understanding and use as the keys to linguistic meaning have held that the meaningfulness of language in some sense derives from mental content, perhaps including the contents of beliefs, thoughts and concepts. This enhances the interest of cognitive semantics, which is a thriving field of study (see SEMANTICS; SEMANTICS, CONCEPTUAL ROLE; SEMANTICS, INFORMATIONAL; SEMANTICS, TELEOLOGICAL; CONCEPTS). It has not gone unquestioned that mind indeed can assign meaning to language, and in fact scepticism about this has figured quite prominently in philosophical discussions of language. Wittgenstein has been read as at least flirting with scepticism that there is anything our minds can do that would constitute meaning one thing rather than another (see WITTGENSTEIN, L.; MEANING AND RULE-FOLLOWING; PRIVATE STATES AND LANGUAGE). W.V. Quine, starting from the thought that meaning is whatever good translation captures, and on arguments that good translation is not squarely dictated by any real facts, concludes that meaning is highly indeterminate. Quine is not alone in the view that linguistic and mental meaning are best seen not as ‘out there’ to be discovered, but rather as partly constituted or constructed by our practices of interpreting and translating (see QUINE, W.V.; DAVIDSON, D.; DENNETT, D.C.; LEWIS, D.K.; RADICAL TRANSLATION AND RADICAL INTERPRETATION). Language → Mind. If mind assigns meaning to language, so also language enables and channels mind. Acquiring and trafficking in a language brings one concepts, thoughts and habits of thought, with all sorts of consequences (see SAPIR-WHORF HYPOTHESIS; LINGUISTIC DISCRIMINATION; LANGUAGE AND GENDER). Indeed, having language is so crucial to our ability to frame the sophisticated thoughts that appear essential to language-use and understanding, that many doubt whether mind is ‘prior’ to language in any interesting sense (see MEANING AND COMMUNICATION; DAVIDSON, D.). Language ↔ World . Since language is the vehicle of our descriptions and explanations of reality, philosophers are concerned about what if anything makes for a true or apt characterization of reality. Philosophers have these concerns for reasons of philosophical methodology (which we will come to in a moment), but also owing to the naturalness and plausibility of a certain picture of meaning.
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Page 458 According to this picture, the key to meaning is the notion of a truth-condition . A statement’s meaning determines a condition that must be met if it is to be true. For example, my statement ‘Ireland is larger than Manhattan’, given what it means, is true just in case a certain state of affairs obtains (namely, a certain island’s being larger than a certain other island). According to the truth-conditional picture of meaning, the core of what a statement means is its truth-condition – which helps determine the way reality is said to be in it – and the core of what a word means is the contribution it makes to this (perhaps, in the case of certain sorts of word, this would be what the word refers to) (see SEMANTICS; MEANING AND TRUTH; REFERENCE). While the truth-conditional picture of meaning has dominated semantics, a serious challenge has been presented by philosophers, including Michael Dummett, who urge that the key to meaning is a notion of correct use . According to this alternative picture, the core of a sentence’s meaning is the rule for its appropriate utterance. Of course, the two pictures converge if sentences are correctly used exactly when they are true. The interest of the distinction emerges only when (a ‘realist’ conception of) truth is dislodged from this role, whether because of scepticism about truth itself, or because truth is seen as too remote from the crucible of social practice to be the meaning-relevant criterion for correct use (see REALISM AND ANTIREALISM; INTUITIONISTIC LOGIC AND ANTIREALISM; MEANING AND VERIFICATION; DUMMETT, M.A.E.; TRUTH, PRAGMATIC THEORY OF; TRUTH, DEFLATIONARY THEORIES OF; TRUTH, COHERENCE THEORY OF; TRUTH, CORRESPONDENCE THEORY OF). The challenge illustrates a sense in which the Mind/ Language and Language/World connections can seem to place a tension on the notion of meaning (meaning is whatever we cognitively grasp, but the meaning of language just is its bearing on the world). 3 Linguistic philosophy Apart from language’s interest as a target of science and its centrality to our self-conception as describers of reality, language plays a key methodological role in philosophy. It is this role perhaps more than anything else that has explained the continued close attention paid to language in the past century by philosophers working in such varied areas as epistemology, aesthetics, ethics, metaphysics, the philosophy of science and the philosophy of mind. The methodological role of language in philosophy is most easily explained by example. A philosopher is interested in the nature of value; they want to know what goodness is. Language enters when they observe that goodness is what is attributed when we say of a thing that it ‘is good’. So the philosopher focuses on certain statements, and seeks an understanding of what such statements mean and in general of how they work. They explore whether such statements are ever objectively true or false, whether their truth or aptness varies from speaker to speaker, whether a satisfying explanation of them entails that the word ‘good’ refers to or expresses a genuine characteristic (of actions, states of affairs, persons, and so on), and how their meaning relates to the distinctive sorts of endorsement that such statements commonly convey (see ANALYTIC ETHICS; EMOTIVE MEANING). The pattern exhibited in the example of value is apparent throughout philosophy. We are interested in knowledge, fiction, necessity, causation, or sensation, so we find ourselves studying statements about what interests us: statements attributing knowledge, describing fictions, asserting necessities, assigning causes and reporting sensations. Tools from the philosophy of language make available quite a number of views about what these statements mean and in general about how they do their expressive and communicative work; and these views inform and support philosophical positions on the real objects of philosophical interest. There have been dramatic and no doubt exaggerated claims about such techniques – for instance, that philosophy should simply consist in this sort of study of language. But it is if anything an understatement to say that linguistic sophistication has deepened philosophical understanding and has advanced debate in nearly all areas of philosophy (see CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS). See also: FICTION, SEMANTICS OF; LANGUAGE, INDIAN THEORIES OF; LOGIC IN CHINA; MEANING IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY; MOSCOW-TARTU SCHOOL; RELIGIOUS LANGUAGE Further reading Devitt, M. and Sterelny, K. (1987) Language and Reality , Oxford: Blackwell. (A brief and readable introduction to some central issues, with useful references and bibliography.) Martinich, A. (1990) The Philosophy of Language, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2nd edn. (A collection of many key writings – often quite difficult – in philosophy of language.) MARK CRIMMINS
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Page 459 LANGUAGE, RENAISSANCE PHILOSOPHY OF Renaissance philosophy of language is in its essentials a continuation of medieval philosophy of language as it developed in the fourteenth century. However, there were three big changes in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. First, humanism led to a much greater interest in the practical study of languages, including Greek, Hebrew and vernacular languages, as well as classical Latin. Literary analysis and eloquent discourse were emphasized. Second, there was a loss of interest in such medieval developments as supposition theory, which meant that there was little discussion in logic texts of how words relate to each other in propositional contexts, and how sense and reference are affected by the presence of such logical terms as ‘all’, ‘none’, ‘only’, ‘except’ and so on. Only in early sixteenth-century Paris were these issues pursued with any enthusiasm. Third, the fourteenth-century insistence that both words and concepts were signs had several effects. There was a new interest in the classification of different sorts of signs, both linguistic and non-linguistic, particularly in the work of some early sixteenth-century Spaniards. Naturally significant mental language was emphasized in a way that diverted the attention of logicians from spoken languages and their imperfections. Finally, concepts themselves came in for more attention, so that many of the topics discussed by logicians overlapped with what would now count as philosophy of mind, as well as with metaphysics. For instance, philosophers in the late scholastic tradition made much use of an early fourteenth-century distinction between the formal concept, which is a representative act of mind, and the so-called objective concept, which is whatever it is that is represented by a formal concept. The discussion of these issues by such writers as Pedro da Fonseca and Francisco Suárez has an obvious bearing on developments in early modern philosophy. See also: LANGUAGE, MEDIEVAL THEORIES OF; LOGIC, RENAISSANCE Further reading Ashworth, E.J. (1985) Studies in Post-Medieval Semantics, London: Variorum. (A collection of articles including studies of reference in intentional contexts, propositions and mental language.) E.J. ASHWORTH LANGUAGE, SOCIAL NATURE OF Language is mostly used in a social setting. We use it to communicate with others. We depend on others when learning language, and we constantly borrow one another’s uses of expression. Language helps us perform various social functions, and many of its uses have become institutionalized. But none of these reflections settle the question of whether language is an essentially social phenomenon. To address this we must consider the nature of language itself, and then ask which social elements, if any, make an essential contribution to its nature. While many would accept that language is an activity that must take place in a social setting, others have gone further by arguing that language is a social practice. This view commits one to the claim that the meanings of an individual’s words are the meanings they have in the common language. The former view need not accept so strong a claim: meaning depends on social interaction because it is a matter of what one can communicate to others but this does not require the existence of communal languages. A competing conception which rejects the social character of language in either of these versions is the thesis that language is mentally represented in the mind of an individual. See also: LANGUAGE AND GENDER; MEANING AND COMMUNICATION Further reading Chomsky, N. (1986) Knowledge of Language, New York: Praeger. (Chapters 1 and 2 contain a clear statement of Chomsky’s conception of I-language.) Dummett, M.A.E. (1989) ‘Language and Communication’, in A.George (ed.) Reflections on Chomsky, Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. (Includes critical discussions of Davidson and Chomsky.) BARRY C. SMITH LAO TZU/LAOZI see DAODEJING LASSALLE, FERDINAND (1825–64) Ferdinand Lassalle was one of the principal founders of German social democracy and a strong advocate of state socialism. He was involved in the abortive revolution of 1848 and was imprisoned for six months. A restlessly active man, he devoted much of his life to political agitation. He was associated with Marx, although he was not himself a Marxist
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Page 460 but rather a radical philosophical idealist in the Hegelian tradition. See also: SOCIALISM Further reading Bernstein, E. (1893) Ferdinand Lassalle as a Social Reformer , New York: Greenwood Press, 1969. (The most important study of Lassalle available in English.) H. TUDOR LATIN AMERICA, COLONIAL THOUGHT IN ’Colonial’ refers to Spanish and Portuguese sovereignty in America from the arrival of Columbus in 1492 up to the emergence of modern Latin American states in the nineteenth century. The intellectual life of the colonies and their mother countries at that time falls into two phases: traditional and modern. The traditional phase includes the siglo de oro , or the Golden Age of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This was a time when literature and the arts flourished, along with Scholastic philosophy, jurisprudence and theology. During the eighteenth century, traditional thought gradually gave way to modern movements, particularly from France. The universities founded in the mid-sixteenth century, notably those of Mexico and Peru, as well as colleges and seminaries, were impressively productive in the area of philosophy. The pressure of events such as the clash between European and Native American cultures in the sixteenth century and the struggle for independence from Spain and Portugal in the nineteenth century brought about numerous nonacademic works with philosophic content. Authors wrote in both Latin and Spanish or Portuguese and often knew native languages, such as Nahuatl and Quechua as well. Many operated in several different areas, such as the nun, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, one of the greatest poets in the Spanish language, who wrote a book on logic in Latin, which has since been lost. Students studied philosophy first, then specialized in medicine, law, or theology. The core philosophy curriculum was logic, natural philosophy or physics and metaphysics. In the eighteenth century Scholastic logic, similar to what has come to be known as formal logic, was weakened and natural philosophy began to incorporate experimental science. The bulk of philosophy was affected by modern thinkers such as René Descartes. Eighteenth-century savants were critical of Scholasticism and later Latin American intellectuals tended to disavow the entire colonial past. However, historians since the 1940s have stressed the currency of modern scholarship, especially in science and since the 1960s have been rediscovering the sophisticated philosophy of the Golden Age. See also: ARGENTINA, PHILOSOPHY IN; BRAZIL, PHILOSOPHY IN; LATIN AMERICA, PRE-COLUMBIAN AND INDIGENOUS THOUGHT IN Further reading Lanning, J.T. (1940) Academic Culture in the Spanish Colonies, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (A classic study of philosophy theses tracing the prompt arrival of modern ideas in Latin America.) Redmond, W. (1972) Bibliography of the Philosophy in the Iberian Colonies of America , The Hague: Nijhoff. (The standard bibliography of source material and secondary literature.) WALTER B. REDMOND LATIN AMERICA, PHILOSOPHY IN Geographically, Latin America extends from the Mexican–US border to those regions of Antarctica to which various Latin American countries have laid claim. It includes the Spanish-speaking Caribbean. Philosophy in Latin America dates from pre-Columbian (before 1492 in Hispanic America) and precabralian times (before 1500 in Brazil). Autochthonous cultures, particularly the Aztecs, Mayas, Incas and Tupi-Guarani, produced sophisticated thought systems centuries before the arrival of Europeans in America. Academic philosophy began in the sixteenth century when the Catholic church began to establish schools, monasteries, convents and seminaries in Latin America. The seventeenth century saw little philosophical activity as effort was made to use academic thought to maintain the status quo, which reinforced a basically medieval worldview. Intellectually, the eighteenth century perpetuated this calm traditionalism until mid-century when a generation of Jesuits tried to break with the thought of Aristotle in order to modernize it. Political turmoil prevented academic philosophy from broadening in the early part of the nineteenth century. Later in the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, positivism eventually became entrenched in most Latin American countries. In the early twentieth century new intellectual movements began as a backlash against anti-positivism.
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Page 461 1 Latin American philosophy up to the nineteenth century Indigenous cultures, particularly the Aztecs, Mayas, Incas and Tupi-Guarani, produced interesting and sophisticated thought systems centuries before the arrival of Europeans in America. Many cultural artefacts were lost or destroyed so that study of this period involves many challenges in deciphering the subtleties and complexities of the earliest thought in Latin America. Indigenous cosmologies were often linked to phenomena in the natural world (see LATIN AMERICA, PRE-COLUMBIAN AND INDIGENOUS THOUGHT IN; BRAZIL, PHILOSOPHY IN). Academic philosophy grew up in the sixteenth century when the Catholic church began to establish schools, monasteries, convents and seminaries in Latin America. If the encounter with the New World had significant impact on the European mind, this was not initially reflected in the philosophy being taught and written in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which tended to restate and reinforce medieval values. However, intriguing writings on ethics and jurisprudence grew out of the contact between Spain and Latin America. Essentially, these writings analysed the relationship between cultural differences and human rights. The Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas was a pivotal figure who defended the rights of native and African peoples living in the Indies in the sixteenth century (see LATIN AMERICA, COLONIAL THOUGHT IN; MEXICO, PHILOSOPHY IN). With a few notable exceptions, the seventeenth century was largely moribund philosophically because most efforts were directed towards using academic thought to maintain the status quo, which reinforced a fundamentally medieval worldview. The main philosophical task involved justifying and protecting the Catholic faith against Protestantism and science. Scholasticism was the dominant trend. However, there were some exceptions to the dominant practices in the form of several remarkable historical and philosophical figures. Antonio Rubio’s studies on logic are remarkably advanced. Juana Inés de la Cruz had a brilliant philosophical mind and is usually considered one of the earliest feminist thinkers in America (see LATIN AMERICA, COLONIAL THOUGHT IN; FEMINIST THOUGHT IN LATIN AMERICA). Intellectually, the eighteenth century continued this calm traditionalism until mid-century when a generation of Jesuits tried to break with the thought of Aristotle and bring philosophy into ‘modernity’. They were primarily influenced by post-Renaissance Italian and French philosophy. However, the Jesuit order was expelled from the Spanish-speaking world in 1767. This delayed the introduction of protomodern European philosophy in Latin America. The eighteenth century has become the subject of much revisionist philosophical study, particularly in Mexico (see MEXICO, PHILOSOPHY IN). Academic philosophy still did not broaden in the early nineteenth century because of political turmoil both in various Latin American countries and in Europe. Universities occasionally closed. This inhibited academic philosophical progress as universities were the locus of much philosophical activity. A more productive forum for philosophy was often the political arena in which thoughtful essays of ideas were written by nonacademics on themes such as constitutional government, progress and autonomy (see LITERATURE, PHILOSOPHY IN LATIN AMERICAN; ARGENTINA, PHILOSOPHY IN). Later in the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, positivism eventually became entrenched in most Latin American countries. This movement claimed to be an objective methodology of the sciences. It was widely believed that scientific doctrines could provide the most efficient management of society through educational and political reforms. Auguste Comte and Herbert SPENCER were the primary positivist influences in Latin America (see POSITIVIST THOUGHT IN LATIN AMERICA; ANALYTICAL PHILOSOPHY IN LATIN AMERICA; BRAZIL, PHILOSOPHY IN). 2 Latin American philosophy in the twentieth century In the early twentieth century new intellectual movements began. Arising from these was a strong, thoroughgoing anti-positivist backlash. Ideas that positivists had promoted as ‘scientific’ were rejected by anti-positivists for being scientistic (see ANTI-POSITIVIST THOUGHT IN LATIN AMERICA; ARGENTINA, PHILOSOPHY IN). Philosophers entertained idealism, vitalism, pragmatism and various political and social philosophies (see PHENOMENOLOGY IN LATIN AMERICA; EXISTENTIALIST THOUGHT IN LATIN AMERICA). Neo-Thomist thought continued to be widely studied, primarily in the Catholic universities. A focus on regional thought in Latin America was an outgrowth of anti-positivist thought and a consequence of the arrival of Spanish philosophers who were exiled after the fall of Republican Spain. The writings of the Spaniard, José ORTEGA Y GASSET, were widely influential
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Page 462 in shaping Latin American philosophical reflections. Philosophers addressed the question of authenticity as they explored whether Latin Americans were simply adopting European philosophies, or whether they themselves had any authentic philosophy to offer. Many concluded that Latin Americans were adapting, rather than adopting European philosophies to their own reality (see EXISTENTIALIST THOUGHT IN LATIN AMERICA; PHENOMENOLGY IN LATIN AMERICA; ANTI-POSITIVIST THOUGHT IN LATIN AMERICA). This process of critical self-examination, or ‘autognosis’, was twofold. First, philosophers in individual countries and regions of Latin America sought to identify what was unique or distinctive about their thought or being. Later, philosophical contributions made by Latin America as a whole were compared and contrasted with those of other regions in the world (see ARGENTINA, PHILOSOPHY IN; BRAZIL, PHILOSOPHY IN; MEXICO, PHILOSOPHY IN). Studying Latin American thought in comparative perspective engendered a debate of considerable longevity over whether ‘Latin American philosophy’ exists or whether ‘philosophy in Latin America’ is a more accurate denotation. Every Latin American country, including Puerto Rico, can be argued to possess unique philosophical traditions. At the same time there exists an extensive body of argument and commentary on what kind of philosophy, if any, can claim to be ‘universal’. Since analytical philosophy presents perspectives, methods and projects which claim to have universal appeal and applicability, it is often embraced in academic circles and is most frequently entrenched institutionally in Mexico, Brazil and Argentina. Analytical philosophy in these countries, while not obviously a response to immediate regional social, political or economic circumstances, serves to include and validate its adherents in international circles by adopting a style widely practised and accepted by mainstream Anglo-American academic philosophy. Attracted to the linguistic ‘rigour’ of analytical philosophy, some adherents claim that it is the only way to do ‘real philosophy’. The late twentieth century reveals that it is possible to speak of both ‘Latin American philosophy’ and ‘philosophy in Latin America’. Some areas of philosophical research imbued with regional and cosmopolitan appeal are cultural identity, feminist thought, liberation philosophy, marginality and Marxist thought in Latin America (see CULTURAL IDENTITY; FEMINIST THOUGHT IN LATIN AMERICA; LIBERATION PHILOSOPHY; MARGINALITY; MARXIST THOUGHT IN LATIN AMERICA). Many of these areas are profoundly engaged with Latin American realities in historical context. Rather than blindly adopting canonical Western philosophical paradigms, writers in these traditions seek to broaden the definition of what is human by convincingly articulating and incorporating Latin American experience and values into both the crucial discourses of philosophy and the pressing themes of the modern world (see MARGINALITY). Marxist philosophy has been and most likely will continue to be significant in Latin America partly because of continuing problems of economic disparities. Concerns with retributive justice, human rights and issues of power and truth, as well as the belief that Marxist theory more accurately describes reality, contribute to the vitality of this thought. Despite the collapse of the Soviet Union and the passing of Maoism in China, for many the Cuban Revolution of 1959 is still idealized because it continues to threaten the US ‘monster’ to the north, while advancing the notion of a supportive, egalitarian and responsible community. The Peruvian José Carlos Mariátegui was an original Latin American Marxist thinker whose thought has generated interest and respect internationally (see MARXIST THOUGHT IN LATIN AMERICA). One of the best known and most interesting contributions of modern Latin American intellectual life is liberation philosophy. The philosophical movement originated in Argentina, although many of its practitioners reside in other Latin American countries (see ARGENTINA, PHILOSOPHY IN; MEXICO, PHILOSOPHY IN). Philosophy of liberation should not be confused with liberation theology (see LIBERATION THEOLOGY). Philosophy of liberation attempts to explain philosophically the theoretical underpinnings of social and political phenomena, such as dependency, and reinforces theology of liberation. These movements are responses to significant events in twentieth-century Latin America such as the Cuban Revolution (1959), the Argentine ‘Dirty war’ (1976–1983) and repressive regimes which began in Guatemala in 1954, Brazil in 1964 and Chile in 1973. Other political topics for these writers included populism, Marxism and Peronism. Philosophy of liberation differs from theology of liberation, Latin Americanist philosophy and Marxist philosophy especially in terms of its more limited accessibility. Philosophers of liberation employ a complex and specialized vocabulary which requires initiation on the part
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Page 463 of readers. In addition, philosophy of liberation is not a unified movement: it is more appropriate to speak of philosophies of liberation. Such fragmentation in this field can be partly explained by the political orientations of thinkers whose views range from the extreme left to the extreme right. Their philosophical influences vary widely and include Francophone, German and other Latin American thinkers. Philosophical activity in Latin America is characterized by a tremendous diversity of focus and methodologies. Latin Americans are keenly aware of philosophical developments in the rest of the world and thus entertain a variety of philosophical stances: progressive and conservative, pragmatist and idealist, materialist and spiritualist. Numerous philosophical interests and projects exist in Latin America because of a diversified and active philosophical profession, an interested public, some government support, a cultural awareness of other continents among the educated and noneducated alike and a widespread faith in education as a key to development. AMY A. OLIVER LATIN AMERICA, PRE-COLUMBIAN AND INDIGENOUS THOUGHT IN The term ‘pre-Columbian thought’ refers to the set of beliefs and ideas held by the civilizations existing in Latin America prior to the arrival of Columbus in 1492. Research in pre-Columbian thought poses several questions linked to language, interpretation, chronology and cultural diversity. They can roughly be organized according to the three main regions in which the indigenous cultures flourished upon the arrival of the Spanish invaders: Nahuatl/Aztec in central and southern Mexico, Quiché/Maya from Yucatan in southern Mexico to Honduras in central America and Quechua/Inca , from Ecuador to northern Chile. They each correspond to an empire into which previously many diverse, distinguishable peoples were assimilated. Since the Spanish invaders had destroyed most of their ‘heretical’ cultural objects by 1550, the question arises whether an accurate knowledge of their thought can be obtained. Some ethnohistorians believe that each of the aforementioned cultures developed a hieroglyphic system of codification and documentation, called Codices, to preserve their theocosmogony, history and wisdom. Since the sixteenth century, however, it is known with certainty that only the Aztec and Mayan cultures developed such a system. According to some historians, the Incan culture did not use any kind of writing. They probably created ‘paintings’, as the Spaniards called their hieroglyphs, but these were totally destroyed. It is known that all pre-Columbian religions worshipped the events and forces of nature. The term used to name them was translated into Spanish as ‘gods’ when they were acceptable, or ‘demons’ when they seemed heretical – the indigenous peoples were polytheistic. The gods did not dwell in a region beyond our world, but rather populated it and were actively intertwined with it. All pre-Columbian cultures believed the sun to be the highest deity. The universe was conceived as a holistic structure in which human life, society and the gods were parts of an interrelated universe. Beyond these, however, the three cultures believed in an intangible, abstract deity, or principle, which ruled above all others. The sun, being the highest tangible deity, led the priests of these cultures to observe the skies. Based on a highly developed knowledge of astronomy and mathematics, they established an accurate solar calendar. See also: LATIN AMERICA, COLONIAL THOUGHT IN Further reading Coe, D.M. (1993) The Maya , NewYork: Thames & Hudson. (One of the best books in English discussing Mayan culture). León-Portilla, M. (1963) Aztec Thought and Culture: A Study of the Ancient Nahuatl Mind, Oklahoma City, OK: Oklahoma University Press. (The main source for philosophers who do not read Nahuatl and who are interested in interpreting indigenous thought.) LAURA MUES DE SCHRENK LATITUDINARIANISM The term ‘Latitudinarianism’ designated, initially abusively, the attitudes of a group of late seventeenthcentury Anglican clergy who advocated ecclesiastical moderation, voiced broad if heavily qualified support for religious toleration, and emphasized an undogmatic probabilism, ‘moral certainty’, a reasoned faith and moral performance over against infallibility, dogma, ritual performance and ‘unreasoning’ faith. They attempted to construct a ‘reasonable’ faith, with some emphasizing belief in carefully evaluated miracles to attest to the central truths of Christianity. The Latitudinarians had considerable influence on the thought of John Locke, among others, although Locke’s anti-clericalism, tolerationism and reticence on the
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Page 464 Trinity went beyond their positions. The most important of the Latitudinarians, listed from the most eirenic to the least, were Edward Fowler, Benjamin Whichcote, John Wilkins, John Tillotson, Gilbert Burnet, Joseph Glanvill and Edward Stillingfleet; they were particularly influenced by the thought of William Chillingworth, the Cambridge Platonists and Hugo Grotius. Further reading Ashcraft, R., Kroll, R. and Zagorin, P. (eds) (1992) Philosophy, Science and Religion in England 1640– 1700, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Especially useful are essays by Rogers on ignorance and toleration; Ashcraft on Latitudinarians and intolerance; Hutton on Stillingfleet and More; and Marshall on Locke and Latitudinarianism.) JOHN MARSHALL LAVROV, PËTR LAVROVICH (1823–1900) Pëtr Lavrov was one of the main theorists of Russian populism ( narodnichestvo ) – a trend of thought and a movement which crystallized after the abolition of serfdom in Russia in 1861. There were many different currents within this broad trend but all of them concentrated on the possibility and desirability of securing a non-capitalist way of development for Russia. This was so because the populists, having perceived (often with the help of Marx’s Capital) the contradictions of capitalist development, lost their confidence in ‘European’ progress, recognized in capitalism only a regression and chose therefore an adamantly anti-capitalist stand, combined, as a rule, with backwardlooking idealization of the peasant commune. The dominant Western theories of social evolution – from Spencerian liberalism to Marxism – strongly emphasized the ‘objective’ character of the laws of social development and defined capitalism as a necessary phase of progress. Russian populist socialists deeply felt that in Russia’s backward condition such theories offered a convenient tool for apologists of capitalist progress, who sanctioned and justified the suffering of the masses by referring to the ‘objective laws of history’ or ‘the iron laws of political economy’. This led them to a demonstrative rejection of the ‘objectivist’ conception of progress. Lavrov was the first populist theorist who set against ‘objectivism’ a conscious and systematic vindication of ‘subjectivism’. He was supported in this by another populist thinker, Nikolai Mikhailovskii. The common features of their views have been labelled ‘subjective sociology’ or the ‘subjective method’. See also: POSITIVISM, RUSSIAN Further reading Lavrov, P.I. (1870) Istoricheskie pis’ma; trans. and introduced by J.P. Scanlan, Historical Letters , Berkeley, CA, 1967. (Lavrov’s best-known work, first published under the pseudonym P.L. Mirtov.) Hecker, J.F. (1915) Russian Sociology: A Contribution to the History of Sociological Thought and Theory , New York. (A good outline of Lavrov’s philosophical sociology.) ANDRZEJ WALICKI LAWAND MORALITY Within the tradition of natural law thinking which finds its roots in the philosophies of Aristotle and Aquinas, the political community has generally been understood in terms of a fundamental goal: that of fostering the ethical good of citizens. Law, on this conception, should seek to inculcate habits of good conduct, and should support a social environment which will encourage citizens to pursue worthy goals, and to lead valuable lives. Pragmatic considerations may sometimes suggest the wisdom of restraint in the pursuit of these goals, and citizens may therefore, on appropriate occasions, be left free to indulge depraved tastes or otherwise fall short of acceptable standards. Such pragmatic arguments for the freedom to engage in vice, however, do not call into question the legitimacy of the state’s concern with individual morality. By contrast the liberal tradition has tended to place constraints of principle upon the scope and aims of the law. The most influential such attempt was J.S. Mill’s advocacy of ‘the harm principle’: that the law may forbid only such behaviour as is liable to cause harm to persons other than the agent. Many difficulties surround this and other, more recent, attempts to formulate and defend constraining principles. For instance, should one take into account only the immediate effects of behaviour, or more remote and diffuse effects as well? Thus it is argued that immoral behaviour which in the short term ‘harms nobody’ may, in the long run, lead to a decline in morality in society at large and thereby to diffuse harmful effects. See also: LIBERALISM; NATURAL LAW
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Page 465 Further reading Barry, B. (1995) Justice as Impartiality , Oxford: Oxford University Press. (An intelligent development of some recent liberal political theory.) George, R.P. (1993) Making Men Moral, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (A clear and accessible discussion, which could form a good starting point for the beginner, in spite of being written from a standpoint which is quite critical of liberalism.) N.E. SIMMONDS LAWAND RITUAL IN CHINESE PHILOSOPHY The contrast between li , conventionally translated as ‘rites’ or ‘rituals’, and fa , conventionally translated as ‘law’, marks a distinction in Chinese political theory as to the nature of political order and the preferred means of achieving such order. Lizhi , traditionally associated with Confucianism, refers to political order predicated on and achieved primarily by reference to the li or ‘rites’, that is, traditional customs, mores and norms. In contrast, fazhi , associated with Legalism, refers to political order attained primarily through reliance on fa or ‘laws’, that is, publicly promulgated, codified standards of general applicability backed up by the coercive power of the state. The tension between these two dominant strategies for achieving social and political order – lizhi and fazhi – is a theme that began in the classical tradition and has persisted down to the present day, even though the understanding of li and fa and the relation between them has changed andevolved over theyears.For example, some thinkers saw li as contextspecific, flexible norms or standards of a particular culture. Others saw li as more permanent, general standards. Some objected to the codification of li and fa ; others favoured it. Some saw li and fa as interdependent, equally important and mutually reinforcing; others relied predominantly on one to the detriment, if not total exclusion, of the other. Accordingly, it is not possible to speak of a single conception of li ( lizhi) or fa ( fazhi ). Nevertheless, one must extract or highlight certain general or dominant features that tend to characterize lizhi and fazhi and to distinguish the one from the other, if one is to make use of this important contrast as a hermeneutical tool for interpreting, explaining and understanding a central debate in Chinese political philosophy. In reflecting on the importance of the lizhi versus fazhi distinction, five salient points emerge. First, advocates of lizhi have tended to favour less formal means of conflict resolution than advocates of fazhi . The former believe that informal methods foster more particularized justice; the latter believe such methods provide excessive discretionary authority to those in power and thus foster abuse. Accordingly, publicly promulgated rules or laws are necessary. Second, and a corollary to the first, fa or ‘laws’ are more formal norms of greater general applicability than the li , which in most instances consist of the web of informal context- and culture-specific rules that provide guidance for appropriate civil interaction in daily life among the various members of a certain community. Fazhi , therefore, is more of an externally imposed order that requires of the individual compliance more than participation. In contrast, lizhi proponents view order as emerging out of a particular context, a particular community of people. Society is what those who comprise it choose and make it to be. Participation rather than mere compliance is central. Third, and again a corollary, lizhi and fazhi mark a contrast in the goals and aspirations of society. Advocates of lizhi tend to be more optimistic about human kind and the possibility of achieving a harmonious social order in which each person is able to find their place and play their chosen role. They tend to see society, social order, humanity, as an achievement. If human beings are willing to put aside narrowly selfish and provincial concerns, if they are willing to defer to the excellence of others and to cooperate in the project of creating a harmonious social order in which each has a place, then such an order is possible. In the process, one becomes a better person. Put differently, one’s potential for individual and personal growth is inextricably bound up with the fate of society. In contrast, many of the fazhi persuasion take a dimmer view of human nature. Humans are by and large self-interested beings. Left to their own devices, the strong will exploit the weak; the powerful will abuse the powerless. Impartial rules are necessary to limit what one person can do to another. Laws provide this minimum layer of protection, this floor below which society cannot sink and remain a peaceful, and arguably just, society. Of course law may play a more positive role as well; recourse to general laws may simply be an efficient way to ensure an equitable distribution of social resources, for example. At the end of the day, however,
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Page 466 advocates of fazhi have been primarily concerned with the use of fa as a corrective to the abuses and weaknesses of li . Thus law’s role in ensuring a minimal floor of protection, a base equality, has been underscored, explaining in part the rather negative image of law in China through the ages. In contrast, the positive side of law, the empowering aspect of rights, the ability to use law as a vehicle for social change, has been central to many Westerners’ conception of law. Fourth, as might perhaps be expected, there has been no clear victor in the lizhi versus fazhi controversy. No system is perfect; no one has yet achieved the perfect means for realizing social order. Many of the same issues confront every society: how to achieve fairness and justice for all while at the same time recognizing the uniqueness of each person and each situation, and thereby achieve justice for each; how to provide those in power the necessary discretionary authority to mete out a particularized justice without falling prey to personal prejudice, bias, corruption and abuse; how to ensure that individuals have sufficient rights to shield themselves against each other and the state, and yet simultaneously encourage people not to wield those rights as weapons in endless litigation aimed at maximizing one’s own personal interests to the detriment of society’s interests; how to ensure that law will be a tool of the disempowered to effect social change and not simply a tool for exploitation and legitimation by those in power; how to implement a formal rule of law with institutional integrity and independence, overseen by professionals, and yet prevent the institution from becoming overly bureaucratic and law the esoteric province of the professional lawyer. The li versus fa distinction, although not a perfect fit, is useful as a way to organize Chinese thinking on, and approaches to, these and similar issues. A fifth and final introductory point is that both lizhi and fazhi , as they have developed in China, have failed in two important respects. First, they have failed to provide effective restraints on the power of the ruler, especially institutional restraints. Second, they have failed to adequately address the need to protect the individual against the state. Again, this failure is largely institutional, although like the failure to adequately restrain the power of the ruler, it can also be traced back to certain underlying philosophical assumptions common to both the lizhi and fazhi traditions. These assumptions include the rejection of three key assumptions of the western liberal tradition: (1) that someone to treat someone with respect and as one’s equal requires that one refrain from imposing one’s view on them (the normative equality premise); (2) that each person knows what is best for themselves and/or people reasonably disagree about what constitutes the good (the epistemic equality premise); and (3) that the interests of the individual and state may not be, and arguably are not, reconcilable. See also: CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY, CHINESE; LEGALIST PHILOSOPHY, CHINESE Further reading Bodde, D. and Morris, C. (1967) Law in Imperial China , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Survey of the history of law in China.) Li, V.H. (1978) Law Without Lawyers , Boulder, CO: Westview Press. (A look at Chinese attitudes to law and legal practice.) R.P. PEERENBOOM LAW, ECONOMIC APPROACH TO The development of an economic approach to legal practice has been the most important jurisprudential development in the last third of the twentieth century. Economic analysis has been offered as both a positive and a normative jurisprudence: as an analysis of important features of existing legal practices and as an ideal against which these practices ought to be evaluated. For some, economic analysis has a narrow explanatory range (in various fields of private law, corporations and taxation, and anti-trust law, for example), while others make broader claims for its ability to illuminate any area of law. Finally, there is a difference between those who focus on one explanation and those who focus on prediction, but all offer positive economic analysis of law based on the concept of economic efficiency as defined in welfare economics and applied to law by Coase, Posner, Calabresi and others. See also: ECONOMICS AND ETHICS; MARKET, ETHICS OF THE Further reading Coleman, J. and Lange, J. (1992) Law and Economics , Aldershot: Dartmouth. (Wide-ranging collection of essays, including R. Coase’s ‘The Problem of Social Cost’, with an introduction by the editors.) JULES L. COLEMAN LAW, ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY OF One of the principles of Islam which precedes juristic discussion proper is that God, the
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Page 467 creator and lord of the world, has commissioned humanity to believe, confess and act in particular ways. The details of this commission ( taklif ) were handed down through a sequence of prophets, culminating in Muhammad, and were then embedded in two literary structures which together constitute revelation ( wahy ): the Qur’an, which is the word of God, and the hadith , short narratives of the prophet’s life and sayings which give expression to his (and his community’s) ideal practice or sunna . The totality of beliefs and rules that can be derived from these sources constitutes God’s law or shari‘a. Juristic literature has generated two major literary genres. One, known as usul al-fiqh (roots of jurisprudence), deals with hermeneutical principles that can be used for deriving rules from revelation; it represents, in part, something like a philosophy of law. The other, dominant genre, furu‘ al-fiqh (branches of jurisprudence), is an elaboration of rules which govern ritual and social activities. An overall philosophy of law in Islam, not fully articulated in the pre-modern tradition, can only be discovered through consideration of both genres. See also: ETHICS IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY; ISLAMIC THEOLOGY Further reading Masud, M.K., Messick, B. and Powers, D. (1996) Islamic Legal Interpretation: Muftis and their Fatwas , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (An important and wide-ranging collection of articles representing some of the most recent thinking about the theory and practice of Islamic law.) Schacht, J. (1950) Introduction to Islamic Law , Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Still the classic introduction to the subject, with an excellent but now dated bibliography.) NORMAN CALDER LAW, LIMITS OF Questions concerning the proper limits of law are of particular interest to thinkers in the Western political tradition of individualism. In this tradition the law is regarded primarily as an instrument of coercion and the problem is to define the scope of law in such a way that it fulfils its necessary purposes at minimum cost to individual liberty. Debate therefore centres on the proper ends of legal coercion. Two law-limiting strategies are commonly adopted; the practical and the moral. As the most important ends of human life (salvation of the soul, or its secular equivalent, moral integrity) are taken to require the uncoerced, ‘inward’, assent of the individual, the effective scope of the law is significantly limited on practical grounds to the regulation of ‘outward’ behaviour. On the moral question concerning which behaviour ought to fall within the purview of the law, conservatives contend that society has a right to enforce its moral values by criminalizing whatever behaviour its members regard as ‘sinful’. The characteristic strategy of liberals is to respond by arguing that unorthodox or unpopular activities must clearly be shown to be ‘harmful’ before they may properly be outlawed. Much debate focuses upon the interpretation of this principle (the ‘harm principle’), particularly what is to count as ‘harm’ for purposes of legislation, and whose harm is properly in question. Dissatisfaction on these crucial issues has led some liberals to reject what they consider to be the fruitless attempt to draw the line between liberty and law by balancing individual against social harm in favour of various theories of individual rights, while it has led others (communitarians and some feminists) to question the individualist assumptions in terms of which the problem of the limits of law gains its especial urgency. See also: FREEDOM AND LIBERTY; JUSTICE Further reading Devlin, P. (1965) The Enforcement of Morals, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Chapter 1 formulated an influential conservative view concerning the problems facing attempts to specify moral limits to law.) Hart, H.L.A. (1963) Law, Liberty and Morality, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Response to Devlin (1965), arguing that he misrepresents the judicial process and misunderstands the relationship of the individual to society.) G.W. SMITH LAW, PHILOSOPHY OF Law has been a significant topic for philosophical discussion since its beginnings. Attempts to discover the principles of cosmic order, and to discover or secure the principles of order in human communities, have been the wellsprings of inquiry into law. Such inquiry has probed the nature and being of law, and its virtues, whether those that it is considered as intrinsically possessing, or those that ought to be cultivated by lawgivers, judges or engaged citizens. A dialectic of reason and will is to be found in
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Page 468 philosophical speculation about the underpinning principles of law. On the one side, there is the idea that the cosmos itself, and human society too, contain immanent principles of rational or reasonable order, and this order must be capable of discovery or apprehension by rational (or ‘reasonable’) beings. On the other side, there is the view that order, especially in society and in human conduct, is not found but made, not disclosed to reason but asserted by acts of will. Either there is a ‘law of reason – and nature’ or there is a ‘law by command of the sovereign – or of God’. A third possible element in the discussion may then enter, that of custom as the foundation of law. Implicit in the opposition of reason and will is the question of practical reason: does reason have a truly practical role concerning ultimate ends and nonderivative principles of action, or is it only ancillary to pursuit of ends or fulfilment of norms set by will? Alternatively, does reason already presuppose custom and usage, and enter the lists only by way of critique of current custom and usage? In either case, what is at issue is the very existence of such a thing as ‘practical reason’ (see PRACTICAL REASON AND ETHICS). For law is about human practice, about societal order enforced and upheld. If there can be a law of reason, it must be that reason is a practical as well as a speculative faculty. The radically opposed alternative sets will above reason, will oriented to the ends human beings happen to have. Norms and normative order depend then on what is willed in the way of patterns for conduct; reason plays only an ancillary part in the adjustment of means to ends. A further fundamental set of questions concerns the linkage of the legal with the political. If law concerns good order, and if politics aims at good order in a polity, law must be a crucial part of politics; but in this case a subordinate part, for politics determines law, but not law politics. On the other hand, politics may be considered at least as much a matter of actual power-structures as a matter of speculation about their beneficial use for some postulated common good. In the latter case, we may see law as that which can in principle set limits on and control abuses of power. Politics is about power, law about the shaping and the limiting of power-structures. The issue then is how to make law a master of politics rather than its servant. 1 Law as reason In the Republic, Plato depicts Thrasymachus, proponent of the thesis that justice is the will of the powerful, as being refuted comprehensively by Socrates. The refutation postulates a human capability to discern principles of right societal conduct independently of any formal enactment or legislative decision made by somebody with power. These principles in their very nature are normative, not descriptive. In Aristotle, the same general idea emerges in the form of noticing that whereas much that is observed as law is locally variable and arbitrary, there appear to be fundamental common principles across different polities. Some principles may then be legal simply ‘by enactment’, but others seem to be so ‘by nature’. Explorations of the nature of humans as rational and political animals may then help to underpin the idea of that which is right by nature, but that exploration is more the achievement of Aristotle’s successors in the Stoic tradition than of himself. Roman jurists adapted some of the Stoic ideas of natural law in their expositions of the civil law, and subsequently, for medieval and early modern Europe, the existence of the Justinianic (see JUSTINIAN) compilation of the whole body of Roman law was held by many thinkers to embody in large measure the promise of law as ‘written reason’ (see ROMAN LAW; COMPARE GAIUS; BARTOLUS OF SASSOFERRATO; POTHIER, R.J.). In any event, the greatest flowering of the Aristotelian idea came with its fusion into the Christian tradition in the work of Thomas AUINAS, hugely influential as this has been in the developing of Catholic moral theology in the succeeding centuries. After at least a century of relative neglect among legal scholars, especially in the English-speaking world, the last quarter of the twentieth century has seen a strong revival of the Thomistic approach in the philosophy of law (see NATURAL LAW), with contemporary thinkers developing the idea of the basic goods implicit in human nature, and showing both how these can lead to the elaboration of moral principles, and then how positively enacted laws can be understood as concretizations of fundamental principles. In the seventeenth century, other strands of essentially the same idea had led to the belief, for example, of Hugo GROTIUS, thatbasic principles of right conduct and hence of human rights are themselves ascertainable by intuition and reason (compare PUFENDORF, S.; STAIR, J.D.). Kant’s representation of the principles of practical reason is the classical restatement of this position in its most philosophically rigorous form (see KANTIAN ETHICS). In a wide sense, all these approaches may be ascribed to rationalism, as contrasted with voluntarism (see RATIONALISM; VOLUNTARISM).
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Page 469 For they treat law, or its fundamental principles, as discoverable by rational and discursive means, independently of the intervention of any legislative will. They do not, of course, deny the need for legislative, or adjudicative or executive, will. Even if fundamental principles stand to reason, their detailed operationalization in actual societies requires processes of law-stating, law-applying and lawenforcement. But the issue is whether these are fundamentally answerable at the bar of reason and practical wisdom ( prudentia ), or not. To the extent that they are so answerable, we have a concept of some ‘higher law’, some law of reason, by which to justify, to measure and to criticize the actual practice of human legal institutions. If the rational derivation of this depends in some way on a teleological understanding of human nature and its relation to the creator and the rest of the created universe, we may reasonably enough call this a ‘law of nature’ or ‘natural law’. 2 Law as will But there is another possible account of higher law. It can be thought of as a law laid down by God for his creation. The divine will, not the divine reason, must be the source of law. It cannot be for created reason to presume to judge of the creator’s wisdom. The omnipotence of the creator entails that the law will be whatever the creator wills it to be, and to be law by virtue of that will, not by any independent reason and nature of things. Indeed, the nature of things will be just what the creator wills it to be, and the names of things will be matters of convention derived from human linguistic usage. Concepts are not essences that guide us to essential meanings. Nominalism and voluntarism are inevitable bedfellows (see NOMINALISM). It is therefore inaccurate to suppose that the theory of natural law as a kind of higher law presupposes rationalism. There can indeed be a voluntaristic species of ‘natural law’, though the voluntaristic tradition will more likely speak of ‘divine law’ or ‘God’s law’ than of natural law simpliciter (see AUSTIN, J.). Moreover, one element in the religious upheavals associated with the Reformation was an insistence on the need for unmediated regard to the (scripturally revealed) divine law, rather than to the custom or tradition of sinful human institutions such as the Church. It is not for fallen human reason to set itself above or even beside the revealed will of God. But that revealed will must be received as a law binding above all others. In this state of things it becomes questionable whether to accept any human law at all; and, on the voluntarist hypothesis, to see how law other than God’s law can have any obligatory force at all. To the saving of human law there are only two possible moves: either it must be shown that God in fact wills our obedience to the very kings and other superiors we actually have (as in the theory of ‘the divine right of kings’), or it must be the case that the binding will arises from the consent of human beings themselves, expressed through some original social contract. The divine will then enters the picture only to the extent of making obligatory the fulfilment of compacts voluntarily agreed, a point to which may be added a grimly Hobbesian acknowledgement that covenants without swords are but words, so the true binding force of the obligation of the law will derive from the effective might of the very ruler whom the social compact institutes in that office (see HOBBES, T.). In this Hobbesian form, natural law has practically reached a vanishing point (though Locke’s response envisages the state of nature as governed by reason in the form of a law of nature, grounding presocietal rights of human beings to life, liberty and estate. The greatest legal expression of the Lockean vision of law, applied to expounding the English common law, is in the work of Sir William BLACKSTONE. The coup de grâce was administered by Hume and Bentham, the latter having as his particular target Blackstone’s work. They argue that the social contract is a fifth wheel on the carriage in either Hobbesian or Lockean form, since all the reasons that there are for obeying the law that we have supposedly agreed to apply with equal force even if we did not agree to it, and there is no evidence anywhere of any such agreement as a historical phenomenon. 3 Law as custom Whence then comes the law? Hume ascribes it to convention and custom primarily, coupled with reflection upon the pleasing quality (the utility) of rigorous observance of customary norms. Bentham and Austin restrict the role of custom or ‘habit’ to the issue of obedience. Whoever is habitually obeyed by the many in a numerous society is in a position to enforce their commands by effectively coercive sanctions up to and including death. Thus do they differentiate the positive law from other forms of socalled law such as scientific law, laws of honour, or personal moral codes. Law is such by command of a sovereign, the one habitually obeyed who habitually obeys no other (see SOVEREIGNTY).
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Page 470 Legal positivism of this stamp is an easy bedfellow with political utilitarianism, and programmes of legal reform. Codification of law is an associated ambition, justified on utilitarian grounds (see UTILITARIANISM). Codification is also a distinctive phenomenon of the early nineteenth century, product of the Enlightenment critique of the old customs of the ancien régime, though also of spadework in the exposition of civil law partly achieved under the aegis of late legal rationalism. After the Code Napoléon, promulgated in France in 1804, there followed a century of codification and legislative modernization of law in many places, and with this characteristically went approaches in legal philosophy that stress the essential emergence of law from a sovereign’s will, or the will of the state as a rational association (in Hegelian vein; see HEGELIANISM). Nevertheless, this movement produced its own counter-movements, stressing the importance of the spirit of the people as the basis of law (see SAVIGNY, F.K. VON; BRYCE, J.; JURISPRUDENCE, HISTORICAL), or more prosaically locating it primarily in custom, a view particularly popular in the context of the common law (see COMMON LAW; SELDEN, J.). Twentieth-century critics of classical positivism accuse its authors of confusing ‘commands’ with ‘binding commands’ (see KELSEN, H.; compare WEYR, F.) or of mislocating the roots of legislative authority in mere ‘habit’, rather than in the ‘internal point of view’ of those for whom the system within which authority is exercised has normative force (see HART, H.L.A.). The Kelsenian version of positivism rests it on the necessary presuppositions for a value-free science of law, and other thinkers have pursued further the question of ‘legal science’ (see BOBBIO, N.); the Hartian version rests it on the customs of at least the official and political classes in a state, whose practices concerning the recognition of certain criteria for the validity of legal rules define the ultimate ‘living constitution’ of a state, its ‘rule of recognition’ (see LEGAL POSITIVISM). A notable offshoot of or development from positivistic legal study has been the development of evermore rigorous approaches to conceptual analysis (see LEGAL CONCEPTS) and categorization, seeking to account for the use of concepts like ‘duty’, ‘right’, ‘ownership’ and others in the framework of general legal norms (see NORMS, LEGAL). Hohfeld’s analysis of ‘fundamental legal conceptions’ (see HOHFELD, W.N.) hashad many followers and critics, and contemporaries in other traditions have taken a somewhat more psychologistic approach to the task (compare PETRAŻYCKI, L.). Reflection on legal concepts as institutions or ‘institutional facts’ has led to developing an ‘institutional’ theory of law that transforms what was originally a naturalistic conception into a positivistic one (see INSTITUTIONALISM IN LAW; WEINBERGER, O.). 4 Laws and values One way or another, whether in voluntaristic versions or in those that place more weight on customary or institutional aspects of law, nearly all forms of or approaches to legal positivism have insisted on the strong value-relevance of positive law. The matter of doubt has not been ‘ought laws to be just?’, but whether their being just is a condition of their being genuinely legal. The ‘scientific’ character of pure legal analysis has indeed been contrasted with the exercise of moral judgment or moral sentiment, or the engaging in ideological argumentation, that is involved in the critique of law as unjust or otherwise unsatisfactory from the viewpoint of human needs and aspirations. Some, however, have thought that critique itself can have a scientific or at least an objective basis, grounded in the fundamentals of human nature. Classical utilitarianism and nineteenth-century law reform are a case already noted; they had successors in the ‘jurisprudence of interests’ (see JHERING, R. VON; POUND, R.), and, albeit with certain qualifications, in the later twentieth-century ‘economic analysis of law’ (see LAW, ECONOMIC APPROACH TO). The need to subject law to critique is obvious from many points of view, none more urgently than that which takes note of the burdensome impact of legal sanctions on human happiness and liberty. If laws characteristically carry punishments for their infraction, some theory to justify penal institutions is called for (see CRIME AND PUNISHMENT). Whether there are any abstractly stateable limits to the legitimacy of interference with liberty through legal intervention has been another heated debate (see LAW AND MORALITY). Nevertheless, the positivists’ claim that they can combine an a-moralistic conceptual analysis of law and its institutions with a readiness for critique of actual laws on moral and political grounds, and with a lastresort readiness to disobey or defy the law when it is unjust to an extreme, has been doubted by some. Gustav RADBRUCH felt himself driven by his experience of the Nazi years (and also, perhaps, by the implications of the radical voluntarism of Carl SCHMITT) to abandon such a claim and to insist
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Page 471 on a conceptually necessary minimum of basic justice in anything we can recognize as ‘law’ at all. The interpenetration of equity with law, and the interweaving of ideas of justice, equity and law, can be taken to point to a similar moral (see JUSTICE, EQUITY AND LAW), and idealistic approaches to legal theory give a deeper grounding for such an approach (see LEGAL IDEALISM). 5 Law as politics However one takes one’s stand on will against reason, or on natural law against legal positivism, most of the theoretical approaches so far considered give some way of accounting for the independent existence of law as a distinct social phenomenon. Law’s independence, at least when underpinned by an independent judiciary, has been held to promise the possibility of effective control over arbitrary state action while at the same time guaranteeing at least the justice of formal equality to citizens and the degree of predictability allegedly desired by modern rational subjects. Here we have the ‘rule of law’ ideal that demands government under the forms of law and law in the form of clearly identifiable rules (see RULE OF LAW (RECHTSSTAAT); compare DICEY, A.V.; FULLER, L.L.). Yet the mere existence of some body of sacred or secular texts embodying rules of law is not enough for any socially realistic account of law, or for any politically persuasive vision of the rule of law (see SOCIAL THEORY AND LAW; compare MILLAR, J; RENNER, K.). The statute book is not self-applying or self-interpreting (compare WRÓBLEWSKI, J.). To secure the rule of law it is necessary to have prospective rules published to all. But, as L.L. Fuller points out, it is necessary that they be interpreted in a reasonable and purposive way, and faithfully carried into action by the officials of the state whose rules they are. How is this to be secured? Many schools of thought, chief among them the realists (see LEGAL REALISM) in Europe (see OLIVECRONA, K.; ROSS, A.) and in the USA (see HOLMES, O.W., JR; LLEWELLYN, K.N.; FRANK, J.), have stressed the widely discretionary character of legal interpretation, both in relation to the general rules of the law, and in relation to the categorization of fact-situations as subsumable under the law for one purpose or another. On inspection, ‘facts’ can turn out as elusive as ‘laws’, and the study of legal processes of proof assumes a certain urgency (see LEGAL EVIDENCE AND INFERENCE). All in all, it is a serious and difficult question to discern what, if anything, can render decisions reasonably ‘reckonable’ given the broad discretion vested in those who interpret the law. One form of response has been to find that law is reckonable not on the basis of the official rules and standard doctrine, but rather on the basis of the ‘situation sense’ of a judiciary with a common understanding of political and policy objectives underlying law. These insights of the ‘realists’ have been carried forward more boldly by contemporary feminist jurisprudence, one version of which finds social prejudice directing law through the biases of judges. Another version locates an inner masculinity in the legal rules themselves, even and especially at their most abstract; the asserted values of objectivity and impersonality ultimately come under question as presumptions of doubtful desirability (see FEMINIST JURISPRUDENCE). Within more mainstream jurisprudence the developed response to realism has been to work out extended theories of the rule of law, acknowledging that law is more than positive rules but arguing for the existence of other mechanisms within law controlling the role of substantive elements in decisionmaking (see LEGAL REASONING AND INTERPRETATION). Such responses find a certain coherence within law, but by contrast the more developed critical (including critical feminist) approaches argue that there are central fractures and fault lines within the law, reflecting ultimately competing political visions of human association, often summed up as individualism versus community-values (see CRITICAL LEGAL STUDIES). Ronald Dworkin’s argument for coherence and integrity in law evokes the idea of an interpretive community, but seems too readily to assume that for any actual legal order there can be found a single consensual interpretive project, even in principle (see DWORKIN, R.; compare LEGAL HERMENEUTICS). Taking an overall view, the project of establishing the rule of law as an independent base for the critique and control of state action is put in serious doubt, since interpretation is through-and-through political; and appeals to the rule of law can themselves be moves in a political game, expressions of ideology rather than of higher values. It may be that in the end legal philosophy is faced, today as at its beginnings, with this dilemma: either legal reasoning and moral reasoning have that kind of in-principle objectivity proposed by natural law theory in its rationalist versions, or the theatre of law is simply a theatre presenting endlessly the power-play of rival wills and visions of the good. Many
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Page 472 have sought a third way, not yet with acknowledged success. See also: LEGALIST PHILOSOPHY, CHINESE; HALAKHAH; LAW, LIMITS OF; LEGAL DISCOURSE; LAW, ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Harris, J.W. (1980) Legal Philosophies , London: Butterworth. (Straightforward and well-written introduction to issues and schools of thought in philosophy of law.) Hayek, F.A. (1973, 1976, 1979) Law, Legislation and Liberty, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (Threevolume critique of the pretensions of constructivist rationalism, whether of utilitarian positivists or of rationalistic naturalists, in favour of a ‘critical rationalism’ reflecting on the accumulated societal wisdom implicit in an evolved and essentially customary law, and developing an account of the rule of law on this basis.) Kelman, M. (1987) A Guide to Critical Legal Studies , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Readable and sympathetic account of, and contribution to, the ‘critical’ approach that regards all legal activity as intrinsically political – and ideological.) Kingdom, E. (1991) What’s Wrong with Rights?, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. (An interesting collection of essays putting a moderate feminist case against the biases inherent in received legal categories.) Rommen, H. (1947) The Natural Law: a Study in Legal and Social History and Philosophy , St Louis, MO and London: Herder Book Company. (Full and careful statement of implications and applications of natural law theory from a Catholic point of view.) Shiner, R. (1992) Norm and Nature: the Movements of Legal Thought, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (A more challenging text that deals with the tensions in legal thought between positivist – or voluntarist – and anti-positivist approaches, concluding that the dialectic between them contains a truth available from neither on its own; advanced reading.) BEVERLEY BROWN NEIL MacCORMICK LAW, RABBINIC see HALAKHAH LAW, WILLIAM (1686–1761) The English writer William Law is popularly known for a single devotional work, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1728), but was the author of seventeen other treatises concerned with many of the philosophical and theological issues of the earlier eighteenth century in England. Early on he embraced the thought of Nicolas Malebranche, and later the mystical philosophy of Jakob Boehme. Law’s methodology is an awkward mixture of these influences, for he wanted to find reason in the ‘creaturely Spirit’ of the natural life ( The Spirit of Love , 1752). He seems finally to have abandoned reason in favour of Boehme’s ‘metaphysical scheme’, which enables him to discover meaning and coherence in a postEnlightenment world. See also: MALEBRANCHE, N. Further reading Law, W. (1728) A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life , repr. in A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life and The Spirit of Love , ed. P.G. Stanwood, New York: Paulist Press, 1978. (Law’s best-known work.) Rudolph, E.P. (1980) William Law , Boston, MA: Twayne. (Introductory guide to Law’s life and work.) PAUL G. STANWOOD LAWS, NATURAL It is widely supposed that science aims to identify ‘natural laws’. But what are laws of nature? How, if at all, do statements of laws differ from ‘mere’ general truths which include generalizations true only ‘accidentally’? Suppose, for example, it happens to be true that all iron spheres (past, present and future) are less than 1 km in diameter. Contrast this with the truth of ‘all electrons are negatively charged’. There seems to be a clear intuitive distinction between these two truths, but is there any principled distinction between them that can be drawn and defended? This has been the traditional focus of philosophical attention concerning laws of nature, and basically two mutually opposed philosophical accounts have been developed. According to the first account, there are real necessities in nature, over and above the regularities that they allegedly produce (whether or not these regularities are held to be observable), and law-statements are descriptions of these necessities. According to the second account, there are no necessities but only regularities (correlations, patterns) and laws are descriptions of regularities (though perhaps not of any regularity but only of the
most basic or most general ones). There are significantly different variants of each account; and also positions that altogether deny the existence of general laws (or deny that science should aim to describe them).
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Page 473 Any one of these accounts, if it is ultimately to be coherent and defensible, has to successfully address four interrelated issues: the meaning of a law statement – the semantic issue; the fact to which a law statement refers and which makes it true – the metaphysical issue; the basis on which claims to know a law are justified – the epistemological issue; the capacity to explain adequately the variety and roles of scientific laws – the explanatory issue. In attempting this task, each of the available accounts faces its own distinct difficulties. For example, if there are necessities in nature, as the first account claims, how exactly do we identify them: how can we tell which of the inductively confirmed regularities are laws? On the other hand, if there are only regularities, as the second account claims, does this mean that our intuitions and scientific practices are awry and that there really is no distinction between laws and accidental generalizations? The difficulties facing all extant accounts become even more marked when we face up squarely to the surprisingly wide variety of (putative) laws supplied by current science and to the complexity of the relations between those putative laws and regularities and causes. See also: SCIENTIFIC METHOD; THEORIES, SCIENTIFIC Further reading Armstrong, D.M. (1983) What is a Law of Nature?, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Good, readable review and critique of regularity, followed by defence of property nonlogical contingent necessitarian.) C.A. HOOKER LE CLERC, JEAN (1657–1737) The Swiss thinker Le Clerc was not a particularly original philosopher – his position was somewhat eclectic – but his journals and textbooks make him an important historical figure. He acted as an intermediary between English and Continental traditions. In religion he advocated an attitude of toleration. Further reading Barnes, A. (1939) Jean Le Clerc et la République des Lettres , Paris. THEO VERBEEK LE DOEUFF, MICÈLE (1948–) Michèle le Doeuff, who has worked in Paris and Geneva, has created new possibilities for philosophical writing. By working between philosophy and Shakespearean drama, social history and personal letters, she demonstrates how philosophy’s concepts gather meaning by circulating between different forms of discourse. In so doing she takes up many of the main problems of philosophy, including the nature of the self, the possibility of philosophical ethics, and the place of women in society and in philosophy. She shows, too, how philosophy’s proper commitment to critical reasoning represses the role of imagery in its own creative thought; philosophy seems dedicated to achieving theoretical results beyond its means, and imagery is misused to disguise its inevitable incompleteness. The spectre of women, or of some other group typified as ‘irrational’ is used to reassure philosophy of its own integral rationality. See also: FEMINISM; POSTMODERNISM Further reading Deutscher, M. (ed.) (forthcoming) Imagery, Self and Feminism in the Philosophy of Michèle le Doeuff , New York: Humanities Press. Le Doeuff, M. (1989) L’Étude et le rouet , Paris: Éditions du Seuil; trans. T. Selous, Hipparchia’s Choice, Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. (Comprising four ‘notebooks’, deals with the problems for women within philosophy, existentialism as a theory of consciousness and freedom, the possibility of a philosophical politics and ethics, and a role for utopianism.) MAX DEUTSCHER LE GRAND, ANTOINE (1629–99) Le Grand was the foremost expositor and popularizer of Cartesian philosophy in England during the seventeenth century. He wrote on ethics, politics, logic and numerous scientific topics. His Cartesian system is one of the most complete, emphasizing mind–body dualism and interaction, innate ideas, mechanism and method. His theory of signification is important in the Cartesian debate on ideas. Further reading Watson, R.A. (1966) The Downfall of Cartesianism: 1673–1712, a study of epistemological issues in late 17th century Cartesianism, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. (Clear and excellent discussion of the Cartesian controversies regarding the nature of ideas, including Le Grand’s theory of signification.) PATRICIA A. EASTON
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Page 474 LE ROY, ÉDOUARD LOUIS EMMANUEL JULIEN (1870–1954) Le Roy was a French mathematical physicist and Catholic modernist philosopher. Starting from a philosophy of life similar to Henri Bergson’s philosophy of creative evolution, he argued that the capacity for invention was fundamental to human existence. This led him to develop a radical form of conventionalism according to which scientific facts are created rather than discovered. Henri Poincaré attacked this view, arguing that the scientist creates only the language in which facts are expressed. Further reading Miranda, M. do C.T. de (1957) Théorie de la verité chez Édouard Le Roy (The Theory of Truth in Édouard Le Roy), Paris: Lecoffre. (The only extended study of Le Roy’s theory of truth.) DON HOWARD LEARNING Learning is the acquisition of some true belief or skill through experience. Rationalist/idealist philosophers held that the very constitution of thought guarantees that fundamental laws hold of the world we experience, and that our understanding of these laws was therefore innate, not learned. The empiricist tradition, doubtful of these Rationalist claims, denied that much was innate, and held that learning occurred through associations of mental representations. This view was lent support by the nineteenth-century development of physiological psychology, which led to a view of learning as a system of adjustments in a network without any intervening representations, a perspective that led in turn, in the twentieth century, to behaviourist studies of stimulus–response associations, and eventually to contemporary neural net computational models. Empiricism, however, had also invited, especially with Hume, doubts that the correspondence between mental representations and the world could be known. Hume believed people learn, or at least form new habits, but he did not think there could be any normative theory of learning – any way of making it ‘rational’. His scepticism led to the development by Bayes and other statisticians of formal theories of how learning from evidence ought to be done. However, the standards that developed in the form of the theory of subjective probability proved impossible to apply until very fast digital computers became available. The digital computer in turn prompted both novel normative theories of learning not considered by the statistical tradition, and also attempts to describe human learning by computational procedures. At the same time, a revolution in linguistics held that humans have an innate, specialized algorithm for learning language. Applications of computation theory to learning led to an understanding of what computational systems – possibly including people – can and cannot reliably learn. Major issues remain concerning how people acquire the system of distinctions they use to describe the world, and how – and how well – they learn the causal structure of the everyday world. Further reading Gallistel, C.R. (1990) The Organization of Learning, Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press. (Rationalist/nativist treatments of learning.) Watson, J.B. (1919) Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist , Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott. (The early, classic statement of the behaviourist programme.) C.R. GALLISTEL CLARK GLYMOUR LEBENSPHILOSOPHIE In its most general sense Lebensphilosophie denotes a philosophy which asks after the meaning, value and purpose of life, turning away from purely theoretical knowledge towards the undistorted fullness of lived experience. In the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century the concept of ‘life’ assumed a central role in German philosophy. Lebensphilosophie typically opposes rigid abstractions with a philosophy based on feeling and intuition, and seeks to establish the priority of ‘life’ as an all-encompassing whole. The central claim underlying its various manifestations is that life can only be understood from within. See also: ENLIGHTENMENT, CONTINENTAL Further reading Bollnow, O.F. (1958) Die Lebensphilosophie , Berlin/Göttingen/Heidelberg: Springer Verlag. (Comprehensive survey.) Schnädelbach, H. (1984) Philosophy in Germany, 1831–1933, trans. E. Matthews, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Focused history of German philosophy written for an English-speaking audience. Contains a chapter devoted to the concept of ‘life’.) JASON GAIGER
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Page 475 LEEUWIS, DENYS DE see DENYS THE CARTHUSIAN LEFEBVRE, HENRI (1901–91) The Frenchman Henri Lefebvre was a Marxist and existential philosopher, a sociologist and a theorist of the state. His humanistic neo-Marxism has been influential throughout Europe. In the English-speaking world he is best known for his analyses of ‘everyday life’, his work in the sociology of urban and rural life, and his theory of social space. Lefebvre was one of the most prominent early critics of structuralism, and is considered by some to be the first post-structuralist. He was a relentless critic of academic philosophy’s metaphysical tendencies. See also: EXISTENTIALISM Further reading Shields, R. (1997) Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction , London: Routledge. (Intellectual biography with standard bibliography.) ROB SHIELDS LEGAL CONCEPTS Concept-formation is an important component of law-formation. Well-developed legal orders are profoundly conceptual in nature. Throughout Western legal history, legislators have aimed at basing their law-making on concepts of a general scope (such as ‘property’, ‘possession’, ‘usufruct’, ‘criminal intent’ and many others) – and even more so legalscholars in their reconstruction and development of law. Legal thinking makes use of concepts with many different functions and varying logical status. A distinction can be made between concepts that are an integral part of law themselves (here called Lconcepts) and concepts that belong to the professional vocabulary of lawyers and jurists in their handling of the law (J-concepts). Among the L-concepts there are on the one hand concepts whose meaning is totally determined by the rules of one single legal system and on the other hand concepts that pertain to two or more legal systems. The latter concepts have a comparative function. J-concepts provide lawyers with a language enabling them to give an intellectual structure to the legal material, to characterize and discuss the professional-juridical handling of law and the methods used for performing that task, to specify the functions of law and to formulate the underlying values of (the handling of) the legal system. There was a tendency in earlier legal philosophy to hypostasize legal concepts, for example, the concept of ‘right’ in classical natural-law doctrine: that is, to postulate real entities to which our concepts/terms refer. The legal philosophy of the twentieth century has to a large extent been a reaction against this tendency. This reaction has taken three different directions: (1) to reduce the abstract legal concepts to factual phenomena such as certain human behaviour or socio-psychological factors (mainly within US and Scandinavian realism); (2) to assign to legal concepts a normative ontological status, placing them in a world of norms, distinct from the world of facts; and (3) to analyse legal concepts in a contextual setting, that is, to find out how they function in actual legal discourse. See also: CONCEPTS; LAW, PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Hart, H.L.A. (1961) The Concept of Law , Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Contributes to concept-formation within legal morphology by the distinction between primary and (three kinds of) secondary rules.) Hohfeld, W.N. (1923) Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Juridical Reasoning and Other Legal Essays, ed. W.W. Cook, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. (A classic work on different rightconcepts with a contextual approach.) ÅKE FRÄNDBERG LEGAL DISCOURSE ‘Legal discourse’ signifies a strong interplay between law and language, linking together law as like language and law as itself language. However, unlike other linguistically modelled accounts, this approach involves a strong opposition to formalisms and their mirror-image realisms. Language as used cannot be ‘deduced’ from any pregiven matrix or set of propositions but must be studied in terms of its own modalities. The theory of law-as-discourse takes inspiration from the study of legal rhetoric and from socio-legal analyses of the courtroom, but was developed in its own right in the post-structuralist turn in linguistics. Law-as-discourse requires an understanding of the operation of legal talk in different registers, and gestures towards an intertwining of the social, the legal and the linguistic by focusing on the speaker–hearer situation, locution and action. See also: LEGAL REASONING AND INTERPRETATION Further reading
Douzinas, C. and Warrington, R. with McVeigh, S.
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Page 476 (1991) Postmodern Jurisprudence: The Law of Text in the Texts of Law , London: Routledge. (A critical analysis of contemporary mainstream jurisprudence that gives full play to analysing texts by their metaphors. Key text for laws as discourse.) Goodrich, P. (1987) Legal Discourse: Studies in Linguistics, Rhetoric and Legal Analysis , London: Macmillan. (Theorizes legal discourse by reference to a wide range of theories of linguistics. Fundamental for ex-position.) BEVERLEY BROWN LEGAL EVIDENCE AND INFERENCE In the field of law there is a rich legacy of scholarship and experience regarding the properties, uses and discovery of evidence in inferential reasoning tasks. Over the centuries our courts have been concerned about characteristics of evidence that seem necessary in order to draw valid and persuasive conclusions from it. Thus, they have been led to consider such matters as the relevance of evidence, the credibility of the sources from which it comes, and the probative or inferential force of evidence. Court trials usually involve inferences about events in the past. The past can never be completely recovered. In addition, evidence about past events is frequently inconclusive, conflicting or contradictory, and often vague or ambiguous. The result is that inferences about past events are necessarily probabilistic in nature. Our courts have also been concerned about whether the interests of fairness require that, on occasion, evidence might be inadmissible, even though relevant and credible. Evidential and inferential issues such as the ones just mentioned are also of concern to philosophers and persons in other disciplines. This entry concerns several evidential issues of particular interest in legal contexts. See also: LEGAL REASONING AND INTERPRETATION; PROBABILITY, INTERPRETATIONS OF Further reading Cohen, L.J. (1977) The Probable and the Provable , Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Comments on the necessity of alternative formal systems of probability to capture requisites of inference in legal affairs.) Hastie, R., Penrod, S. and Pennington, N. (1983) Inside the Jury , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Empirical studies of the processes jurors employ in drawing conclusions from masses of evidence.) DAVID A. SCHUM LEGAL HERMENEUTICS Legal hermeneutics studies the interpretation and meaning of written law. By way of contrast with the related discipline of forensic rhetoric, the study of oral argumentation and persuasion in court, legal hermeneutics is best defined as a textual discipline which dates back to the classical codifications of Greek and Roman law. While the term hermeneutics is derived from the messenger god Hermes and is used by Aristotle as the title of a work concerned with the logic of interpretation, Peri hermeneias , legal hermeneutics really only developed with the growth and medieval reception of Roman law. The Roman legal tradition was pre-eminently a tradition of ius scriptum or written law, of codes and codifications. The custody, interpretation and transmission of the great texts of Roman law gave rise to an exemplary discipline of hermeneutics. Its task was that of preserving, collating, translating and applying the archaic, foreign (Latin) and fragmentary texts of the legal tradition to contemporary and vernacular circumstances far removed in time and space from the original contexts of the written law. In later eras and particularly in periods of crisis or renewal of the legal tradition, the problems of text, interpretation and meaning in law have led to the revival of the concerns and traditions of legal hermeneutics. See also: HERMENEUTICS Further reading Kelley, D. (1970) Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship: Language, Law, and History in the French Renaissance, New York: Columbia University Press. (Classic study of Renaissance legal humanism and its role in the development of social theory.) Leyh, G. (ed.) (1992) Legal Hermeneutics: History, Theory, and Practice , Los Angeles and Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. (Collection of contemporary essays on legal hermeneutics from a political perspective.) PETER GOODRICH LEGAL IDEALISM The term ‘legal idealism’ has various meanings. These include: the notion that laws, and the rights and duties they confer, genuinely exist, in which legal idealism is opposed to legal realism; the notion that law is intimately connected with
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Page 477 moral or social values, in which legal idealism is opposed to legal positivism; the notion that one can move from certain premises about human reason and will to systematic principles for legal development and decision-making; and the notion that one can derive systematic principles of a similar kind from the requirements of social life. It is also sometimes used to imply too much faith in the capacity of law to solve problems. The enduring issues of legal idealism concern establishing systematic principles for legal development and decision-making. See also: JUSTICE, EQUITY AND LAW Further reading Friedmann, W. (1967) Legal Theory , 5th edn, London: Stevens & Sons. (Especially chapters 15, 16 and 27, which cover most of the important theorists in this field.) ELSPETH ATTWOOLL LEGAL INFERENCE see LEGAL EVIDENCE AND INFERENCE LEGAL INTERPRETATION see LEGAL REASONING AND INTERPRETATION LEGAL NORMS see NORMS, LEGAL LEGAL POSITIVISM Legal positivism is the approach in the philosophy of law which treats ‘positive law’ – law laid down in human societies through human decisions – as a distinct phenomenon, susceptible of analysis and description independently of morality, divine law or mere natural reality. It shares with philosophical positivism the aim of dealing in facts, but these are facts about legality and legal systems. Insistence on the distinctness of positive law has been integral to the ‘rule of law ideal’ because of the aim of clear law applied by neutral legal officials. However, debates about positivism have been marred by a degree of conceptual confusion: positivism often appears to mean something different to its supporters and to its enemies, and many attacks are launched against straw men. Consequently, much depends on the definition of legal positivism that is used. Attempts have been made to put some order into the discussion. Consider, for instance, H.L.A. Hart’s list of meanings of legal positivism (which cumulatively count as features of positivism): (1) law as human commands; (2) absence of any necessary connection between law and morals; (3) the study of law as meaning, as distinct from sociology, history and evaluation; (4) the contention that a legal system is a closed system, sufficient in itself to justify legal decisions; (5) non-cognitivism in ethics (Hart 1958). Norberto Bobbio’s list is shorter and more orderly, but at first sight not too different (Bobbio 1960): legal positivism has been conceived as: (1) a neutral, scientific approach to law; (2) a set of theories depicting the law as the product of the modern state, claiming that the law is a set of positive rules of human origin, and ultimately amounting to a set of statutes, collected in legal systems or orders; (3) an ideology of law that gives a value to positive law as such, implying that it should always be obeyed. However, in this list, unlike Hart’s, the ‘meanings’ cannot be added together, the first and last being incompatible. The connection between the three points is as follows: for positivists the theories of Bobbio’s second point (law is made up of rules produced by the state) yield a scientific and value-free approach to law; for the adversaries of legal positivism they yield only ideology, that is hidden value judgments in favour of the power of the State. The shortest way to understand what is at issue in these abstract discussions is to proceed by contrasting legal positivism with its main critics’ approach to law. It is noteworthy that on this point legal realists and natural law theorists, although starting from different and even opposite points of view, agree in concluding that legal positivism is an ideological, covertly evaluative, thesis. See also: LEGAL CONCEPTS; NORMS, LEGAL Further reading Hart, H.L.A. (1961) The Concept of Law , Oxford: Clarendon Press. (This is a classic and a must; conceived as an introduction to jurisprudence for Oxford students, and apparently plain common-sense reading, it is much more complex than it looks, and has been an outstandingly influential work.) Olivecrona, K. (1971) Law as Fact , London: Stevens & Co., 2nd edn. (A good presentation of the European version of legal realism. Useful introductory reading.) MARIO JORI LEGAL REALISM ‘Legal realism’ is the term commonly used to characterize various currents of twentieth-century legal thought which stand opposed to idealism. (Hence, ‘realism’ in this context ought to be understood not
as a body of thought which opposes nominalism, but as an instance
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Page 478 of nominalism.) In the Scandinavian countries, legal realism was modelled on Axel Hägerström’s critique of idealist metaphysics, and sought ways to account for legal rights and duties without presupposing or postulating the existence of ideal objects or entities. In the USA, legal realism evolved as a critique of the idealism implicit in the vision of the common law which was promoted by C.C. Langdell, first Dean of the Harvard Law School, and in the laissez-faire ideology of the late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury Supreme Court. Realist jurisprudential sentiments – primarily as articulated in terms of the socalled indeterminacy critique – continue to bear an influence on late twentieth-century critical legal thought. See also: REALISM AND ANTIREALISM; SOCIAL THEORY AND LAW Further reading Hägerström, A. (1953) Inquiries Into the Nature of Law and Morals, English trans. C.D. Broad, Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell. (Scandinavian realist critique of rights.) Kalman, L. (1986) Legal Realism at Yale: 1927–1960, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. (Institutional history of US legal realism at the law school with which it is most famously associated.) NEIL DUXBURY LEGAL REASONING AND INTERPRETATION Legal reasoning is the process of devising, reflecting on, or giving reasons for legal acts and decisions or justifications for speculative opinions about the meaning of law and its relevance to action. Many contemporary writers, such as Aulis Aarnio, Robert Alexy, Manuel Atienza and Aleksander Peczenik, propound the view that legal reasoning is a particular instance of general practical reasoning. They suppose, that is to say, that reasoning can link up with action, guiding one what to do, or showing whether or not there are good reasons for a proposed course of action or for something already done. They suppose also that in law reason links up to legal decisions in this way. Both suppositions are well founded. Law regulates what to do and how to respond to what has been done, doing so within an institutional framework of legislatures, law-courts, enforcement agencies and the like. It is a feature of legal institutions that they are expected to have, and usually do give, good reasons for what they do, and to do this in public. Legal reasoning is therefore not only a special case of practical reasoning, but a specially public one. Rationality in action has at least two requirements: first, attention to facts, to the true state of affairs in relation to which one acts; second, attention to reasons for action relevant to the facts ascertained. The former aspect concerns reasoning about evidence; the latter, reasoning about rules or norms as reasons for action. In law, such rules and other norms have an institutional character. But how are these applied – by some kind of deductive reasoning, or nondeductively? Behind the rules of the law, there presumably lie other reasons, reasons for having these rules. What kind of reasons are these, developed through what modes of discourse? A discourse of principles, perhaps – but then how do reasons of principle themselves differ from rules? Reasoning from either rules or principles must always involve some process of interpretation, so how does interpretive reasoning enter into the practical reason of law? Answering such questions is the business of a theory of legal reasoning. Legal reasoning is to be understood as a form of practical reasoning concerning these very issues. See also: LEGAL DISCOURSE Further reading Alexy, R. (1988) Theory of Legal Argumentation , trans. R. Adler and N. MacCormick, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (The best statement of the case for the ‘special case thesis’, namely that legal reasoning is a special case of general practical reasoning; and the best English account of Habermas’ theory of rational discourse as a guide to legal discourse.) Peczenik, A. (1989) On Law and Reason , Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer. (An excellent account of the unity of practical reason and the differences of factual, moral and legal reasoning.) NEIL MacCORMICK LEGALIST PHILOSOPHY, CHINESE Legalist philosophy constitutes one of the three dominant streams of Chinese philosophy along with Confucian and Daoist philosophies. It aims to establish objective, impartial and impersonal standards for human conduct. It sets forth prescriptive models using such metaphors as the builder’s plumb line and carpenter’s L-square. ‘Modelling after’ implies reshaping and remoulding of human behaviour, not by moral suasion but by the application of fa , a term
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Page 479 designating both prescriptive standards and promulgated penal law, designed to achieve public interest. The idea of remoulding by punishment and reward is predicated on the Legalist conception of human nature. Innately self-interested human nature underlies human behaviour of liking reward and disliking punishment. Hence, penal law is both natural and an objective prescriptive technique for behavioural control that seeks to harmonize both the individual and the public interest. Penal law is efficacious in so far as it is issued from an authoritative power ( shi) based on impersonal, institutionalized position of rulership and borne up, however tacitly, by the support of the people. Shi cannot govern effectively, Legalists argue, without the organizational power of bureaucracy under the centralized control of the ruler. For the ruler, controlling bureaucracy means mastering the technique ( shu) of comparing ‘word’ ( ming) and actual ‘performance’ ( xing ), not only through objective mechanisms of empirical verification but also by means of ‘the two handles’ of power over life and death. Hence, the technique holds bureaucracy accountable. The Legalist philosophy of governing by fa , shi and shu was in effect a new model for sociopolitical reorganization. It became increasingly popular during the Warring States period, a time of incessant political struggle and of irreversible systemic disintegration of the Zhou feudal order. Legalists called for a radical systemic transformation through this new model in the name of historical relativism: ‘There are as many situations as there are generations. . . and situations change, so the measures change’ ( Han Feizi 49). Historical relativism notwithstanding, Legalist philosophy envisages a ‘natural’ and ‘automatic’ polity that, once established, accords with dao (that is, the way the natural world operates spontaneously). The ruler practices ‘non-action’, ‘emptiness’ and ‘quiescence’ so as to embody dao, and thereby personifies objective, impersonal standards over subjective, personal preferences. Once this ‘natural’ polity is established, the ruler does not act while his subordinates act according to xingming accountability as noted above. The ruler does not act as the centre point of the scale does not move, and yet he knows which side is heavy and which side light. In the end, the ruler does not act so that he can act, that is, so he can employ ‘the two handles’ to control his subordinates. This seemingly ‘natural’ and ‘automatic’ polity still requires a ‘sage’ ruler extraordinarily adept at covert statecraft. Only such a ‘sage’ ruler can hope to achieve order, wealth and power for himself and for his people. See also: FA; HAN FEIZI; LAW AND RITUAL IN CHINESE PHILOSOPHY Further reading Han Feizi ( c .280–233 BC) Han Feizi , trans. W.K. Liao, The Complete Works of Han Fei Tzu , London: Arthur Probsthain, vol. 1, 1938; vol. 2, 1959; trans. of twelve chapters and notes by B. Watson, Han Fei Tzu: Basic Writings, New York: Columbia University Press, 1964. (A good introduction to Legalist philosophy for upper level undergraduates. Liao is the only complete translation.) Wang, H.P. and Chang, L. (1986) The Philosophical Foundations of Han Fei’s Political Theory , Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press. (An elaboration of the Legalist vision and Daoism.) LEO S. CHANG LEGITIMACY Legitimacy refers to the rightfulness of a powerholder or system of rule. The term originated in controversies over property and succession, and was used to differentiate children born of a lawful marriage from those who were ‘illegitimate’. From thence the term entered political discourse via controversies over the rightful succession to the restored French throne after the Napoleonic period. However, questions about what makes government rightful have been a central issue of philosophical debate since the ancient Greeks, and in this sense the concept, if not the term, ‘legitimacy’ is as old as political philosophy itself. Its significance lies in the moral, as opposed to merely prudential, grounds for obedience which follow for subjects where power is rightfully acquired and exercised, and in the depth of allegiance which such political authorities can call upon in times of difficulty. What, then, makes government legitimate? Most thinkers agree that a necessary condition is that power should be acquired and exercised according to established rules, whether these are conventionally or legally defined. However, legal validity cannot be a sufficient condition of legitimacy, since both the rules and the power exercised under them also have to be morally justifiable. Two broad criteria for moral justifiability can be distinguished: (1) political power should derive from a rightful source of authority; (2) it should satisfy the rightful ends or
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Page 480 purposes of government. Most philosophical disputes about legitimacy take place either within or between these two broad positions; any adequate account of it must embrace both however. Further reading Connolly, W. (ed.) (1984) Legitimacy and the State , Oxford: Blackwell. (Useful introductory collection.) Hobbes, T. (1651) Leviathan, ed.R.Tuck, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. (Controversial but highly influential early modern theory which derives political legitimacy from the authorization of an original social contract.) DAVID BEETHAM LEIBNIZ, GOTTFRIED WILHELM (1646–1716) Leibniz was one of the central figures of seventeenth-century philosophy, indeed, one of the central intellectual figures of his age. Born and educated in Germany, he travelled to Paris in 1672 and quickly entered into its lively intellectual and scientific life, acquainting himself with the most advanced ideas then in circulation. It was there that he invented the infinitesimal calculus, and laid the foundations for the philosophical and scientific programmes that were to occupy him for the rest of his life. He returned to Germany in 1676, entering the service of the House of Hanover where, except for brief absences, he remained until his death. There, along with his court duties, he had time for a wide variety of intellectual activities that eventually gained him an international reputation. Leibniz’s philosophy, particularly his metaphysics, can appear otherworldly and complex. But there are a few simple themes and basic commitments that run through his thought. At root is his philosophical optimism, the commitment that this is the best of all possible worlds, freely created by a rational God who always chooses the best for a good reason. This best of all possible worlds, Leibniz held, is ‘the one which is at the same time the simplest in hypotheses and the richest in phenomena’ ( Discourse on Metaphysics §6). For this reason, the world must be governed by a variety of general principles to which Leibniz appealed in his philosophy: there must be a sufficient reason for everything in the world; there are no jumps in nature; there must be exactly the same power in the full cause as there is in the complete effect, among many others. While such principles do not deductively determine the rest of Leibniz’s philosophy, they do play a major role in shaping it; they constitute a kind of lens through which he viewed the major philosophical issues of his age. One such issue concerns the ultimate make-up of the world. Like many of his contemporaries, Leibniz adopted a mechanistic view, according to which everything in the physical world is explicable in terms of the size, shape and motion of the tiny bodies that make up the grosser bodies of experience. But he rejected the idea that this could be the ultimate explanation for things. Behind the mechanistic world of inanimate bodies in motion, Leibniz saw a world of living things and souls – active, genuinely individual, genuinely different from one another, the true atoms of nature, the true reality – which he eventually called monads. At the deepest level, Leibniz’s world was made up of an infinity of mind-like entities, each with its own perceptions that change from moment to moment according to an internal programme by way of the faculty of appetition, all in harmony with one another so that they all reflect the same world. While the world of physics is mechanistic, it is merely phenomenal, the confused appearance of a deeper reality. A consequence of this was Leibniz’s famous doctrine of pre-established harmony. In contrast to Descartes, for whom mind and body interact, and in contrast to the occasionalists, for whom God is the true cause who brings about motion in the body on the occasion of a volition and a sensation in the mind on the occasion of a stimulation of the appropriate nerves in the body, for Leibniz God created the mind (a single monad) and the body (itself a collection of monads) in perfect harmony with one another so that their mental and physical states would always correspond in the appropriate way. A second set of metaphysical issues of central concern to Leibniz involves the interlocking questions of necessity, contingency and freedom. In response to contemporaries such as Hobbes and Spinoza, Leibniz tried to find room for contingency and freedom in his world. He argued that even though God is, in a sense, constrained to choose the best, he does so freely. Consequently, the world he created, the best of all possible worlds, exists contingently, and at least some features of it are contingent, those whose contraries are not in themselves impossible. So for example, 2 + 3 = 5, true in every possible world, is necessary, while ‘Adam sins’, whose contrary is not impossible, is contingent. But over and above contingency and divine
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Page 481 freedom, Leibniz also wanted to make room for human freedom. According to Leibniz, when God created Adam as a part of this best of all possible worlds, he knew that Adam would sin; it is part of the concept of Adam that he sins, part of his internal ‘programme’ that he will eat the apple, and part of the internal ‘programmes’ of the monads that make up his body that he will actually eat the apple. But, Leibniz argued, what God builds in is that Adam freely chose to sin. God builds into the world the reasons that incline Adam’s will without necessitating it, correctly predicting what Adam will do, and building the rest of the world around the consequences of Adam’s free actions. Important as they are, these two concerns constitute only a small portion of Leibniz’s thought, even within the domain of philosophy. In psychology, he introduced a distinction between conscious and unconscious perceptions and tried to understand the way in which unconscious perceptions (‘petites perceptions’) in part determine conscious perceptions (‘apperceptions’). In epistemology, he is important for his sophisticated version of the innatist hypothesis, and for appreciating the role that a mathematical theory of probability can play in understanding the world. In logic, Leibniz advanced programmes for a new formal logic more powerful than Aristotle’s, and for a universal language. In ethics and political thought, he contributed to the seventeenth-century natural law tradition. In natural philosophy, he emphasized the importance of the notion of force and advanced the broadly Cartesian programme of a physics grounded in conservation laws. Outside philosophy he is well known for his work on the calculus. Though he co-discovered it with Newton, it is his notation that is still used, and his version probably had the greater influence in his day. But he was a major contributor to many other fields, including geology, natural history, linguistics and European history. Though he left no real school of followers, he deeply influenced philosophy after his death, particularly in eighteenth-century Germany. See also: CONTINGENCY; FREEDOM, DIVINE Further reading Aiton, E.J. (1985) Leibniz: A Biography , Bristol: Hilger. (A recent biography in English.) Broad, C.D. (1975) Leibniz: an Introduction , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Though somewhat dated, still a good philosophical introduction to Leibniz’s thought.) Frankfurt, H. (ed.) (1972) Leibniz: A Collection of Critical Essays, New York: Doubleday Anchor. (Contains many classic essays, including those of Russell and Couturat.) Leibniz, G.W. (1989) Leibniz: Philosophical Essays, ed. and trans. R. Ariew and D. Garber, Indianapolis, IN and Cambridge, MA: Hackett Publishing Company. (A widely available translation of a selection of Leibniz’s most important philosophical texts.) DANIEL GARBER LEIBOWITZ, YESHAYAHU (1903–94) Unlike the major intellectual currents that shaped religious thought in the modern world, Leibowitz’s thought is deeply anchored in the Israeli context. Both as philosopher and activist, Leibowitz lived and articulated the paradoxes of modern Israel where he lived and was best known. His reputation as a Socratic gadfly to the establishment reflected his ongoing critique of both Israeli society in the light of Judaism, and Judaism in the light of the revolutionary implications of the creation of the State of Israel. On the one hand, he was a Jewish patriot, a fighter for Jewish independence from all forms of foreign rule; on the other hand, he was a harsh, relentless critic of national and political expressions of chauvinism in the Israeli establishment. A strictly observant Jew, Leibowitz had less impact on traditional religious Jews than on secular Israelis. His central message is that what makes Jews distinctive as a group is neither their theology nor their Bible, but the system of law with which they regulate their lives. Judaism is a communal concept, and there is no point in religious Jews ignoring the State of Israel, or expecting others to bear their civil burdens for them. Religious law has to be reconciled with life in the political reality of the state, and this necessitates changing those attitudes to the law which reflect the historical conditions of life in exile. See also: JEWISH PHILOSOPHY, CONTEMPORARY; ZIONISM Further reading Leibowitz, Y. (1992) Yahdut, Am Yehudi v’Medinat Yisrael , ed. E. Goldman, trans. E. Goldman, Y. Navon, Z. Jacobson, G. Levi and R. Levy, Judaism, Human Values and the Jewish State , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Compilation of Leibowitz’s essays on the meaning of Judaism in the modern worlds and a critique of the political structure in
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Page 482 Israel, where religion has been coopted by the state.) D. HARTMAN LENIN, VLADIMIR IL’ICH (1870–1924) Lenin, leader of the October 1917 Revolution in Russia, wrote mainly about politics and economics, but as a Marxist of his generation he assumed that ideas about society needed to rest on sound philosophical premises. He was a militant atheist. He also regarded any other version of ‘materialism’ than his own as being a perversion of Marxism. Initially his works proposed an epistemology based on a crude analogy with photography. But in the First World War he revised his ideas after studying Hegel, and began to emphasize provisionality in the pursuit of scientific knowledge. Nevertheless he never disowned his earlier writings. And after his death his confused philosophical oeuvre retained axiomatic status in Marxism-Leninism. See also: BOGDANOV, A.A. Further reading Lenin, V.I. (1902) Chto delat’ , in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii , Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1958–69, 5th edn, vol. 5; trans. J. Fineberg, What Is To Be Done? in Collected Works, vol. 5, Moscow: Progress and London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1968–9. Service, R. (1985, 1991, 1995) Lenin: A Political Life , vols 1–3, London. (General analysis of Lenin’s career, involving an examination of the connections between his politics and his philosophy.) ROBERT SERVICE LEONE EBREO see ABRAVANEL, JUDAH BEN ISAAC LEONT’EV, KONSTANTIN NIKOLAEVICH (1831–91) One of the more original and provocative nineteenth-century Russian thinkers, Leont’ev directed a powerful intellectual attack at the dominant historical movement of his time: the process of modernization that was sweeping across Western Europe and making inroads into Russia. Leont’ev resisted the sociopolitical aspects of this process: the spread of democratic, egalitarian and constitutional principles. He also resisted its cultural and psychological aspects: the emergence of a standardized, homogenized mode of life and set of values. Leont’ev defended the traditional values and institutions of monarchy, established Church, aristocracy and – especially – the distinctiveness and variety of national cultures. It was this distinctiveness, based on the isolation of nation states, that he saw as increasingly threatened by the advancing technologies of transport and communication. Further reading Leont’ev, K.N. (1890) ‘Analiz, stil’ i veianie. O romanakh Gr. L.N.Tolstogo’; trans. S.E. Roberts, ‘The Novels of Count L.N. Tolstoy: Analysis, Style, and Atmosphere – a Critical Study’, in Essays on Russian Literature: The Conservative View. Leontiev, Rozanov, Shestov , Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1968, 225–356. (This is the only complete English translation of a Leont’ev work in philosophy or literary criticism.) GEORGE L. KLINE LEŚNIEWSKI, STANIŁAW (1886–1939) Leśniewski was one of the most distinguished members of the Warsaw School of Logic. His scientific development can be divided into two periods. In the first ‘philosophical’ period (1911–16), he worked on problems on the borderline of logic and philosophy. In the second period (1916–39), Leśniewski concentrated on mathematical logic. Together with Łukasiewicz, he established the Warsaw School of Logic. Leśniewski intended to build a comprehensive system of logic which might be the basis for all knowledge. His system, unorthodox in many points, consists of three parts: protothetic (a generalized sentential calculus), ontology (a calculus of names) and mereology (a theory of the whole/part relation). See also: POLAND, PHILOSOPHY IN Further reading Luschei, E. (1962) The Logical Systems of Leśniewski , Amsterdam: North Holland. (A systematic exposition of Leśniewski’s systems.) JAN WOLEŃSKI LESSING, GOTTHOLD EPHRAIM (1729–81) Gotthold Ephraim Lessing occupies a central place in eighteenth-century European belleslettres. He was a significant religious and theological thinker whose work puzzled his contemporaries and still provokes debate. He has been variously called a deist, a concealed theist, a Spinozist–pantheist, a panentheist, and an atheist. He was a significant dramatist whose
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Page 483 major works include Minna von Barnhelm, known as the first modern German comedy, and Nathan the Wise, which places Lessing in the tradition of eighteenth-century toleration and humanism. He was an active promoter of the contemporary German theatre and an influential drama critic and theorist. He had broad classical and antiquarian interests. And he has some claims to being one of the early developers, if not a founding father, of the discipline of philosophical aesthetics. Philosophically, Lessing belongs to the tradition of G.W. von Leibniz and Christian Wolff and was familiar with the post-Wolffian aesthetics being developed by Alexander Baumgarten and his follower Georg Friedrich Meier. Most importantly, perhaps, Lessing was acquainted with Moses Mendelssohn, to whose work his own philosophical writings bear many similarities and who read and commented on Lessing’s aesthetic writings. But Lessing cannot be identified with any of these philosophical sources and influences. His work retains many rationalist presuppositions, but Lessing also consciously sought a more inductive approach. He adhered to neoclassical standards with respect to beauty and the application of rules of art, but severely qualified those standards by justifying them empirically and appealing to emotional effects rather than to ideal forms or Cartesian clarity. Lessing’s aesthetics must be inferred from his work, particularly from his Laocoon, some of the numbers of the Hamburg Dramaturgy, and to a lesser extent from short works such as ‘How the Ancients Represented Death’ and the letter of 26 May 1769 to Friedrich Nikolai. What emerges is a sometimes inconsistent and fragmentary aesthetic, which one might describe as a critical rationalism. See also: POETRY; TRAGEDY Further reading Lessing, G.E. (1766) Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry , trans. E.A. McCormick, Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, Library of Liberal Arts, 1962. (A central aesthetic text; the first part of an uncompleted three-part work.) Wellbery, D.E. (1984) Lessing’s Laocoon: Semiotics and Aesthetics in the Age of Reason , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Theory is heavily semiotic, but also includes very good discussion of philosophical background. Citations from Mendelssohn above are Wellbery’s translations.) DABNEY TOWNSEND LEUCIPPUS (5th century BC) The early Greek philosopher Leucippus was the founder of atomism. Virtually nothing is known of his life, and his very existence was disputed in antiquity, but his role as the originator of atomism is firmly attested by Aristotle and Theophrastus, although the evidence does not allow any distinction between his doctrines and those of his more celebrated successor Democritus. He wrote a comprehensive account of the universe, the Great World-System . The single surviving quotation from his work asserts universal determinism. See also: ATOMISM, ANCIENT Further reading Guthrie, W.K.C. (1962–78) A History of Greek Philosophy , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 6 vols. (The most detailed and comprehensive English-language history of early Greek thought; a review of the evidence for Leucippus can be found in volume 2, pages 383–6, and a comprehensive discussion of atomism in volume 2, pages 389–507.) C.C.W. TAYLOR LEVI BEN GERSHOM see GERSONIDES LEVINAS, EMMANUEL (1906–95) In the 1930s, the Lithuanian-born philosopher Levinas helped to introduce the phenomenological philosophy of Husserl and Heidegger to France. Subsequently his work attained classic status in its own right for his attempt to explore the meaning of ethics from a phenomenological starting-point. In Totalité et infini (1961) ( Totality and Infinity , 1969) Levinas locates the basis of ethics in the face-to-face relation where the Other puts me in question. My obligations to the Other are not contracted by me. They not only precede any debts I incur, but also go beyond anything I could possibly satisfy. In later works, most notably Autrement qu’être (1974) ( Otherwise than Being , 1981) Levinas explores further the preconditions of this account, most especially by investigating the I that was said to be put in question in the encounter with the Other. In analyses that stretch phenomenology to its limits and beyond, Levinas finds alterity within the self. See also: PHENOMENOLOGY, EPISTEMIC ISSUES IN Further reading Levinas, E. (1961) Totalité et infini, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff; trans. A. Lingis, Totality and Infinity ,
Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969. (The classic work that lays
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Page 484 out Levinas’ basic positions on ethics and alterity.) Peperzak, A. (1993) To the Other, West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press. (Best guide to Levinas for beginners.) ROBERT BERNASCONI LÉVI-STRAUSS, CLAUDE (1908–) Lévi-Strauss is one of the outstanding figures of mid-twentieth century intellectual life, influential far beyond the boundaries of France or the French language, and he has continued to write new work well into his eighties. His name is linked above all to the structuralist movement, of which he has been probably the most single-minded and unwavering exponent, and he was one of the key figures in the experiment of applying the insights of linguistics to the material of the social sciences. Through his work, public recognition of the discipline of anthropology grew dramatically to become an important element in discussion of philosophical issues. The philosophical environment in France, in which structuralism developed and against which it reacted, was that of Sartrean humanism. In contrast to the existentialist emphasis on individual subjectivity, structuralism expected to find objective solutions to problems in the study of human beings. It was a form of intellectual modernism, a radical break with previous theoretical models and philosophical traditions, symptomatic of post-war optimism for the global applicability of science. It was hostile to metaphysics, bracketed the search for truth and was indifferent to the human subject. And, in contrast to Bergson’s emphasis on continuity and flux, structuralism took discontinuity as its founding principle. See also: ANTHROPOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY OF; STRUCTURALISM Further reading Lévi-Strauss, C. (1962) La pensee sauvage , Paris: Plon; The Savage Mind, Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1966. (Shows how all human cultures employ the same principles to define and order their environment.) Pace, D. (1983) Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Bearer of Ashes , London: Routledge. (Well-written comprehensive overview of Lévi-Strauss’ work and its philosophical implications.) OLIVIA HARRIS LEWIS, CLARENCE IRVING (1883–1964) The American philosopher C.I. Lewis held that in all knowledge there are two elements: that which is presented to sense and the construction or interpretation which represents the creative activity of the mind. Contrary to Kant, Lewis claimed that what is fixed and unalterable is not the structure that we bring to the sensibly presented, but rather the sensibly presented itself. The categories that mind imposes do not limit experience; they determine the interpretation we place upon experience, and if too much of experience eludes our categorizations, new ones should be established. It is pragmatically necessary that we create interpretive structures which will work in getting us around in sensory experience. This important and novel doctrine, Lewis’ ‘pragmatic a priori’, emerged through the development of ideas which took root during his study of logic. The problems of choosing among alternative logics led him to assert the need for pragmatic criteria. The way we conceptually structure or categorize experience answers to pragmatic criteria of purposes, intents and interests. Only within a context defined by a priori categorizations can empirical judgments be made. These empirical judgments proceed from apprehensions of the sensibly presented to assertions of objectivities. Moral judgments require both judgments of good and decisions of right. Judgments of value are tied to qualitative satisfactions disclosed in experience and are empirical claims. Decisions about the morally right are based on imperatives of reason. See also: INTENTIONALITY Further reading Lewis, C.I. (1929) Mind and the World Order , New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons; repr. New York: Dover, 1956. (Conceptions presented here grew out of his interest in exact logic; includes detailed presentation of his pragmatic a priori.) Schilpp, P.A. (ed.) (1968) The Philosophy of C.I. Lewis , The Library of Living Philosophers, vol. 13, La Salle, IL: Open Court. (Various papers discussing Lewis’ work, with a response by Lewis.) SANDRA B. ROSENTHAL LEWIS, CLIVE STAPLES (1898–1963) C.S. Lewis was a British religious writer. Originally trained as a philosopher at Oxford, he combined literary scholarship and the writing
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Page 485 of fiction with clear and persuasive argumentation for traditional Christianity. His religious works continue to be best sellers, and much of his writing is directly or indirectly of philosophical interest. For the non-philosophical public, he probably remains the best representative of the position that religion is more rational than any alternative. Lewis is regarded by his admirers as more than a philosopher: in the words of Walsh (1949), he is the twentieth century’s ‘apostle to the skeptics’. Further reading Lewis, C.S. (1952) Mere Christianity , London: Geoffrey Bles; New York: Macmillan. (A very popular argument for Christianity.) Walsh, C. (1949) C.S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics, New York: Macmillan. (The first full-length study of Lewis’ works.) RICHARD L. PURTILL LEWIS, DAVID KELLOGG (1941–) The American philosopher David Lewis has made extremely important and influential contributions to many topics in metaphysics, philosophical logic, the philosophy of science, the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of language, the philosophy of probability, rational decision theory, and ethics and social philosophy. His work on counterfactuals and the philosophy of modality has been especially influential. See also: MODAL LOGIC Further reading Lewis, D.K. (1983) Philosophical Papers , New York: Oxford University Press, vol. 1. (Contains Lewis’ most important pre-1981 papers on ontology, the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language. Also includes Postscripts to various of the papers, and a brief but illuminating Introduction in which Lewis discusses his way of doing philosophy.) PETER VAN INWAGEN LI Li means ‘pattern’ or ‘principle’, and as a verb can also refer to the creation of orderly pattern. Mencius believed that the human heart–mind had an inherent taste for and attraction to such ‘good order’. His contemporary, Zhuangzi, was the first to use li to refer to an underlying normative ‘pattern’ structuring and giving order to the entire world. This sense in turn influenced the Confucian thinker Xunzi, who employed and developed the concept to express his understanding of Confucianism. Certain Buddhist thinkers used the notion of li to describe first ‘emptiness’ and later ‘Buddha-nature’, the common underlying characteristic of all phenomena. A version of this idea was adopted by neo-Confucian thinkers, who believed that while each thing manifested its own particular li , it also contained within it the li of all other things. Thus there is a profound metaphysical identity between self and world. See also: NEO-CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY Further reading Graham, A.C. (1992) Two Chinese Philosophers, LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 2nd edn. (Insightful study of the two neo-Confucian thinkers, Cheng Hao and Cheng Yi; helpful discussions of li especially on pages 8–22.) PHILIP J. IVANHOE LI (RITUAL) see LAW AND RITUAL IN CHINESE PHILOSOPHY LIBER DE CAUSIS The Liber de causis (Book of Causes) is a short treatise on Neoplatonist metaphysics, composed in Arabic by an unknown author probably in the ninth century in Baghdad. Through its twelfth-century Latin translation, it greatly influenced mature medieval philosophy in the West. Drawing heavily on the Greek Neoplatonist Proclus, the Liber de causis represents a development of late Neoplatonism along two lines. On the one hand, the author modifies and simplifies Proclus’ theory of causes to accord more closely with the three-part division of ultimate causes advanced by the founder of Neoplatonism, Plotinus. On the other hand, the author introduces some of the metaphysical principles of Qu’ranic or biblical monotheism. The result is a metaphysically provocative reinterpretation of Neoplatonist thought which, because it seemed to accommodate Platonist philosophy to the medieval worldview, made the Liber de causis a natural source text for medieval philosophers. See also: NEOPLATONISM; PLATONISM, MEDIEVAL Further reading Brand, D.J. (1984) The Liber de Causis: Translated From the Latin with an Introduction , Marquette, WI: Marquette University Press. (The best approach to the Liber de causis for the English reader, with a helpful introduction and select bibliography. Aquinas’ analysis of
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Page 486 the contents of the Liber de causis is provided in the introduction.) D’Ancona Costa, C. (1995) Recherches sur le Liber de causis (Research on the Liber de causis), Paris: Vrin. (The most comprehensive and thorough general study, with very extensive bibliography.) HANNES JARKA-SELLERS LIBERALISM Liberal political philosophy explores the foundations of the principles most commonly associated with liberal politics: freedom, toleration, individual rights, constitutional democracy and the rule of law. Liberals hold that political organizations are justified by the contribution they make to the interests of individuals, interests which can be understood apart from the idea of society and politics. They reject both the view that cultures, communities and states are ends in themselves, and the view that social and political organizations should aim to transform or perfect human nature. People have purposes of their own to pursue, either economic or spiritual (or both). Since those purposes do not naturally harmonize with one another, a framework of rules may be necessary so that individuals know what they can count on for their own purposes and what they must concede to the purposes of others. The challenge for political philosophy, then, is to design a social framework that provides this security and predictability, but represents at the same time a safe and reasonable compromise among the disparate demands of individuals. Further reading Manning, D. (1976) Liberalism, London: Dent. (A brief overview of liberal political philosophy.) Rawls, J. (1971) A Theory of Justice , Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Perhaps the most famous construction of liberal theory in modern times, using the idea of a hypothetical contract to explore issues of justice and fairness.) JEREMY WALDRON LIBERALISM, RUSSIAN Unlike early English liberalism which stressed individual freedom from state control and from the ‘tyranny of the majority’, Russian liberalism generally emphasized the importance of legality in government, the state’s positive role as guarantor of civil liberty, and the gradual achievement of social justice through reform. In the century between Peter the Great’s death in 1725 and the Decembrist uprising of 1825 various politicians and thinkers proposed the introduction of representative institutions into the Russian government and recommended that serfdom be abolished in the Empire. These proposals reflected admiration for Western European models of government and the impact of the Enlightenment on Russia’s ruling elite. Because the autocracy ultimately rejected these proposals and made public discussion of them all but impossible, liberalism did not take root in this period. The genesis of Russian liberalism as a philosophically elaborated, politically coherent movement occurred after the death of Tsar Nicholas I in 1855, when the government eased censorship and announced its commitment to peasant emancipation. Mid-nineteenth-century Russian liberalism owed its intellectual inspiration to Hegelianism and French juste-milieu liberalism. Russian liberals argued that social progress in the empire had almost always come about at the state’s initiative; they could scarcely imagine building a just society without the cooperation of a strong state. At the beginning of the twentieth century Russian liberals confronted what proved to be an insuperable challenge: how to establish a viable constitutional order in an empire riven by social and ethnic strife where neither government nor the powerful socialist movement favoured a rule-of-law state. Wrestling with this difficulty, the liberals split into two factions: a ‘left’ or ‘radical’ wing that valued social justice over the sanctity of property rights; and a ‘right’ or ‘conservative’ wing that valued legal equality over social equality, and therefore interpreted socialism as a species of utopianism. Between 1905 and 1917 the liberal movement reached its political zenith, as liberal politicians exercised their influence in the State Duma and opposition movement. Following the October 1917 Bolshevik Revolution liberalism was banned in the Soviet Union. It re-emerged, albeit in altered form, during communism’s collapse when neo-liberals claimed for liberalism a prominent position in the ‘normal’ constellation of Russian political forces. The main goals of post-Soviet liberalism are the defence of civil and political rights, the establishment of the rule of law, the assertion of individual property rights and the gradual construction of a market economy. See also: LIBERALISM Further reading Fischer, G. (1958) Russian Liberalism, from Gentry to Intelligentsia , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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Page 487 (The only book-length overview of post-emancipation liberalism in English; argues that the ‘new liberalism’ was championed by liberal intelligentsia.) Walicki, A. (1979) A History of Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to Marxism, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. (The finest survey of Russian intellectual history with extended treatment of liberalism.) G.M. HAMBURG LIBERATION PHILOSOPHY Philosophy of liberation emerged in Argentina early in the 1970s with the explicit intention of proposing a liberating alternative to the diagnosis of structural dependence offered by the social sciences (particularly the so-called ‘theory of dependence’). Some of the original intentions of liberation philosophy were to make poor and marginalized people the subjects, or authors, of philosophy and to collaborate in the process of distancing philosophy from academia and exclusively professional settings. Social conflict and pressing national needs were topics of debate at that time. All thought started with the recognition and assessment of the experience of alterity. Horacio Cerutti-Guldberg has proposed the phrase ‘philosophies for liberation’ as this kind of reflection deals with multiple philosophical positions and privileges the historical process over philosophy. See also: LIBERATION THEOLOGY Further reading Schutte, O. (1993) Cultural Identity and Social Liberation in Latin American Thought, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. (The best analysis in English of the tradition which spans from Mariátegui to Latin American philosophy and theology of liberation to philosophy of liberation.) HORACIO CERUTTI-GULDBERG LIBERATION THEOLOGY Also known as theology of liberation, liberation theology is simultaneously a social movement within the Christian Church and a school of thought, both of which react against human suffering due to poverty and various forms of oppression. The essence of liberation theology consists in an interpretation of Christian salvation that retains its transcendent eschatological content and draws out its historical dimensions and their implications for personal life, the social sphere and the public action of the Church. Salvation contains various levels of liberation. Liberation theology is most commonly associated with Latin America, where it emerged during the 1960s. As both movement and theology, it is at present a worldwide phenomenon, taking on different characteristics according to culture, situation, the kind of oppression that predominates, and concrete political and social exigencies. Although some liberation theologians have employed Marxist language as a tool for social analysis, the underpinnings of liberation theology lie in Christian faith. Liberation theology is predominately Roman Catholic in Latin America because of the Catholic majority; but as a movement and a school of thought it unites Catholic and mainstream Protestant Churches. Evangelical Christians are often antipathetic to liberation theology because of their individualism and other-worldliness. See also: RELIGION AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY Further reading Gutiérrez, G. (1971) A Theology of Liberation, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1988. (Latin America’s classic statement of liberation theology and still the best introduction.) Hennelly, A.T. (ed.) (1989) Liberation Theology: A Documentary History , Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. (An indispensable collection of texts charting the development of liberation theology in Latin America.) ROGER HAIGHT LIBERTARIANISM In political philosophy, ‘libertarianism’ is a name given to a range of views which take as their central value liberty or freedom. Although occasionally the term is applied to versions of anti-authoritarian Marxist theory (the ‘libertarian left’), more commonly it is associated with a view which champions particularly pure forms of capitalism. Libertarians endorse the free market and unfettered free exchange, and oppose paternalistic or moralistic legislation (for example, laws regulating sexual behaviour or the consumption of alcohol or drugs). Liberty, on such a view, is identified with the absence of interference by the state or by others. The legitimate state exists purely to guard individual rights, protecting people and their property from force, theft and fraud. This is the ‘minimal state’ or ‘night-watchman state’ of classical liberalism. The state has no authority to engage in the redistribution of property
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Page 488 (except to rectify the effects of theft, and so on) or, in certain versions at least, to pursue policies designed to further the common good. Such activities are viewed by the libertarian as illegitimate interferences with an individual’s right to do what they wish with their own person or property. Further reading Nozick, R. (1974) Anarchy, State, and Utopia , Oxford: Blackwell. (Philosophically powerful and entertaining presentation of rights-based libertarianism.) JONATHAN WOLFF LIBERTINS The term ‘libertin’ was first used in France in the late sixteenth century as a term of abuse directed against alleged free-thinkers and atheists who were linked with radical Italian philosophers of the previous century. It subsequently came to be associated with a sceptical literary tradition and a group of scholars, philosophers and antiquarians who discreetly ensured the circulation of such doctrines as Epicureanism, Pyrrhonian scepticism, mechanical philosophy, Baconian empiricism and the ‘new’ astronomy. After the disappearance of this group in the middle years of the century, the term came to connote only debauchery and irreverence. See also: CLANDESTINE LITERATURE Further reading Spink, J.S. (1959) French Free Thought from Gassendi to Voltaire , London: Athlone Press. (Clear and sensible account of its subject.) IAN MacLEAN LIBERTY see FREEDOM AND LIBERTY LICHTENBERG, GEORG CHRISTOPH (1742–99) Lichtenberg was a German mathematician, physicist and astronomer, a highly successful university teacher in the field of experimental physics and a prolific writer of essays on scientific and cultural issues. He was one of the leading public figures of the German late Enlightenment, much admired for his satirical and witty style. Today he is known chiefly for his posthumously published notebooks. In thousands of entries, ranging from a single word to several pages, Lichtenberg recorded observations and thoughts about himself and the world. Only a fraction of those entries belong to the tradition of aphoristic writing developed after Lichtenberg and under his influence. A good proportion of the entries are of philosophical interest. Through the radical form as well as content of the notebooks Lichtenberg has become a contemporary to generations of his philosophical readers. Further reading Lichtenberg, G.C. (1990) Aphorisms , trans. R.J. Hollingdale, London and New York: Penguin. (A good selection from the ‘waste books’ in an excellent translation.) Stern, J.P. (1959) Lichtenberg. A Doctrine of Scattered Occasions , Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. (The most detailed general treatment of Lichtenberg in English.) GÜNTER ZÖLLER LIFE AND DEATH Problems concerning life and death are among the most dramatic and intractable in philosophy and they feature in all fundamental areas of philosophical inquiry, especially ethics. Most basic is the problem of what account to give of the value of life itself. This problem has had two main dimensions. One has been the controversy over what precise account to give of death; this has revolved around the issue of whether death is, as it is commonly perceived, an evil, and premature death a tragedy. The other has been the equally puzzling question of how to explain the positive value of life, and to resolve the problem that the more rich we make our account of the value of life, the more the value of life, and hence the nature of the wrong done by killing someone, seems to vary with the quality of the life of the person concerned. A second set of problems concerns the definition of death and appropriate criteria for death. Death, as the most extreme consequence of violence, also leads one into psychological discussions of aggression and into issues of political violence, terrorism, war and capital punishment in political philosophy. Third, there has been concern with a number of practical moral issues, including abortion and euthanasia. Finally, issues have arisen concerning the relation of the value of the life of persons to other sorts of lives, those of animals, for example, or the life and survival of the ecosystem itself. This discussion will concentrate on the central themes of the value of life and the harm and wrong represented by death. See also: DEATH; MEDICAL ETHICS; SUICIDE, ETHICS OF
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Page 489 Further reading Kleinig, J. (1991) Valuing Life , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (General account of life and death issues.) Steinbock, B. (ed.) (1980) Killing and Letting Die, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. (Excellent collection of essays on life and death.) JOHN HARRIS LIFE, MEANING OF This is an obscure yet central topic in philosophy. Often associated with the question whether human beings are part of a larger or divine purpose, the question,‘What is the meaning of life?’ seems to invite a religious answer. Much philosophical discussion, however, questions the necessity of this association. Attention to the inevitability of death has often seemed to make life’s meaning problematic, but it is not obvious how immortality could make the difference between meaning and its absence. The theme of absurdity runs through much discussion of those who believe the universe to be indifferent. Though our lives have no significance, they argue, we must live as if they do. In the face of this absurdity, some advocate suicide, others defiance, others irony. One may also turn away from the issue of cosmic significance, and look for meaning elsewhere. See also: BUDDHIST CONCEPT OF EMPTINESS; EXISTENTIALISM; NIHILISM Further reading Klemke, E.D. (ed.) (1981) The Meaning of Life , New York: Oxford University Press. (Anthology containing religious and secular accounts of the meaning of life, including portions of the Baier, Camus, Nagel, Taylor and Tolstoi pieces listed here.) Nozick, R. (1981) Philosophical Explanations, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ch. 6. (Wideranging exploration of the idea of a meaning to life, analysing meaning as the transcending of limits in a wider context of value.) SUSAN WOLF LIFE, ORIGIN OF The appearance of maggots on meat or of intestinal tapeworms supported an ancient belief in the spontaneous generation of life. This idea was challenged in the seventeenth century but not abandoned before Pasteur’s experiments. Scientists now agree that terrestrial life had a single origin, but differ in explanations. Some believe that life began with the onset of protein-based metabolism, supported by evidence of spontaneous abiotic amino acid synthesis and theoretical models of self-sustaining and evolving systems of enzymes. Others believe life began with the appearance of nucleic acid-based molecular replicators and have organized their research efforts around the vision of a primordial ‘RNA world’. See also: EVOLUTION, THEORY OF; MOLECULAR BIOLOGY Further reading Crick, F.H.C. (1981) Life Itself, New York: Simon & Schuster. (Crick’s version of the panspermia hypothesis of life on earth derived from extraterrestrial seeds.) Farley, J. (1974) The Spontaneous Generation Controversy: From Descartes to Oparin, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. (Excellent survey of the antecedents, within modern science, to the contemporary debate about the origins of life.) LENNY MOSS LIMBO According to traditional Roman Catholic teaching, limbo is the postmortem destination of those who have not been baptized, but are not guilty of sin. Lack of baptism bars such people from salvation, but their innocence means that they do not deserve the punishment of hell. They were thought to fall into two groups: the righteous of the Old Covenant, prior to the redemption of Christ, and unbaptized children. The former were supposed to have gone to heaven after Christ’s death, but the latter had to stay in limbo forever. The existence of limbo was never dogmatically defined, and it was never given as much attention as heaven, hell or even purgatory, each of which represented a fate which human beings earned in part through personal choice. Nowadays, the possibility that unbaptized babies might be consigned to hell is not widely entertained, and some thinkers hold that the requirement of baptism for salvation is open to interpretation. Consequently, the idea of limbo is not as widely discussed as it once was. See also: HELL; PURGATORY Further reading Dyer, G.J. (1964) Limbo: Unsettled Questions , New York: Sheed & Ward. (A good summary of the
history of the idea of limbo.) LINDA ZAGZEBSKI LIN-CHI see LINJI
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Page 490 LINEAR LOGIC Linear logic was introduced by Jean-Yves Girard in 1987. Like classical logic it satisfies the law of the excluded middle and the principle of double negation, but, unlike classical logic, it has non-degenerate models. Models of logics are often given only at the level of provability, in that they provide denotations of formulas. However, we are also interested in models which provide denotations of deductions, or proofs. Given such a model two proofs are said to be equivalent if their denotations are equal. A model is said to be ‘degenerate’ if there are no formulas for which there exist at least two non-equivalent proofs. It is easy to see that models of classical logic are essentially degenerate because any formula is either true or false and so all proofs of a formula are considered equivalent. The intuitionist approach to this problem involves altering the meaning of the logical connectives but linear logic attacks the very connectives themselves, replacing them with more refined ones. Despite this there are simple translations between classical and linear logic. One can see the need for such a refinement in another way. Both classical and intuitionistic logics could be said to deal with static truths; both validate the rule of modus ponens: if A → B and A, then B; but both also validate the rule if A → B and A, then A B . In mathematics this is correct since a proposition, once verified, remains true – it persists. Many situations do not reflect such persistence but rather have an additional notion of causality. An implication A → B should reflect that a state B is accessible from a state A and, moreover, that state A is no longer available once the transition has been made. An example of this phenomenon is in chemistry where an implication A → B represents a reaction of components A to yield B. Thus if two hydrogen and one oxygen atoms bond to form a water molecule, they are consumed in the process and are no longer part of the current state. Linear logic provides logical connectives to describe such refined interpretations. Further reading Girard, J.-Y., Lafont, Y. and Regnier, L. (eds) (1995) Advances in Linear Logic , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, esp. 1–42, 109–22. (Essentially a collection of research papers but includes an introduction to linear logic by Girard and a survey of decidability results by Lincoln.) G.M. BIERMAN LINGUISTIC DISCRIMINATION ‘Linguistic discrimination’ is a redundancy. Discriminating is at the heart of what languages do. The question, of course, is when they can be said to do it invidiously, or rather when we, in ouruse of language,can be said to be discriminating invidiously. In Aristotelian terms, the proper use of linguistic discriminations is to make the right sort and number of discriminations in the right ways and at the right times – that is, not to discriminate between those things that, for the legitimate purposes at hand, ought to be seen as the same; to discriminate between those things that, for the legitimate purposes at hand, ought to be seen as different; and to discriminate in ways that advance legitimate and not illegitimate purposes. Disputes about what constitutes linguistic discrimination (in the invidious sense) revolve around both the legitimacy of our purposes and, in the light of those purposes, the aptness of particular discriminations. Such disputes presume both that our language shapes our actions (that linguistic discrimination plays a role in maintaining unjust inequalities) and that our actions can shape our language (that acknowledging such discrimination can and should lead to linguistic change). See also: DISCRIMINATION Further reading Shapiro, M. (ed.) (1984) Language and Politics , New York: New York University Press. (Includes Foucault’s ‘The Order of Discourse’ as well as a number of other, methodologically diverse essays on the language of politics and the politics of language.) NAOMI SCHEMAN LINGUISTICS, STRUCTURALISM IN see STRUCTURALISM IN LINGUISTICS LINJI (810/15–67) Linji was one of the most reputed, and influential Chinese Chan masters in the history of East Asian Buddhism. He belonged to a school which advocates sudden enlightenment without dependence on words: there is an extralinguistic reality that can be intuitively apprehended through the rigorous meditative training. A person with this intuition escapes dualistic thinking and has grasped the freedom to act decisively, utilizing creatively whatever is presented before him/her. Linji’s method of teaching is often characterized as ‘thundering shouts and showering sticks’, actions which are used to effect an awakening in his disciples. His
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Page 491 reputation rests primarily on his ability to seize on this opportunity. See also: BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY, CHINESE Further reading Sasaki, R.F. (1975) The Recorded Sayings of Ch’an Master Lin-chi Hui-chao of Chen Prefecture , Kyoto: Institute of Zen Studies, Nanazno College. (A reliable translation of Linji’s collected writings, the Linjilu .) SHIGENORI NAGATOMO LINNAEUS, CARL VON (1707–78) Linnaeus was educated in Sweden, and became a doctor of medicine in Harderwijk, Holland, in 1735. He visited other European countries then, but he never left Sweden after his return in 1738. After practising as a physician in Stockholm, he moved to Uppsala University as professor of medicine and botany in 1741. He articulated four different but complementary ways of understanding nature – through two kinds of classification, and through what can be called developmental and functional/ecological interactions. Linnaeus is best known for his classificatory work, for which he received material from all over the world. His classificatory precepts are elaborated in the Philosophia botanica of 1751, an enlarged version of the 365 aphorisms of his Fundamenta botanica of 1735; the other aspects of his work are diffused through his writings. His artificial classification system, initially very popular, was replaced by the ‘natural’ system, more slowly in botany than in zoology, and more slowly in England than in some other countries. Current biological nomenclature is based on his Species plantarum, edition 1 (for plants), and Systema naturae , edition 10 (for animals). His codification of botanical terms remains influential. Almost 200 dissertations, most written by Linnaeus, were defended by his students. In these and other less well-known works, including the unpublished Nemesis divina (Stories of Divine Retribution), he covered a wide range of subjects. Quinarian thinking is noticeable in Linnaeus’ work – there are five ranks in systems, five years’ growth in flowers – and in some of the occult works that he knew. He also shows a strong combinatorial bent and a tendency to draw close analogies between the parts of animals and plants. See also: SPECIES; TAXONOMY Further reading Blund, W. (1971) The Compleat Naturalist: A Life of Linnaeus , New York: Viking Press. (A general biography.) Larson, J.L. (1971) Reason and Experience: The Representation of Natural Order in the Work of Carl von Linné, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. (The relationship between Linnaeus’ theory and his practice.) P.F. STEVENS LIPS, JOEST see LIPSIUS, JUSTUS LIPSIUS, JUSTUS (1547–1606) Justus Lipsius was a Flemish humanist and classical philologist whose work on Tacitus and Seneca led him to give the first full, formal account of Stoicism as a philosophical system, and also to develop Neostoicism, an influential political and moral theory. His most popular book was De constantia ( On Constancy ), an account of how to maintain steadfastness in the face of public evils. He loved gardens and dogs. See also: STOICISM Further reading Lipsius, J. (1584) De constantia , trans. J. Stradling, Two Bookes of Constancie , ed. R. Kirk, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1939. Saunders, J.L. (1955) Justus Lipsius. The Philosophy of Renaissance Stoicism , New York: The Liberal Arts Press. (Still the standard work on Lipsius.) E.J. ASHWORTH LITERARY CRITICISM, FEMINIST see FEMINIST LITERARY CRITICISM LITERATURE, PHILOSOPHY IN LATIN AMERICAN Within the Latin American intellectual community, the relationship between philosophy and literature constitutes one of the most interesting chapters in its development. Much Latin American literature is characterized by profound philosophical concerns, focusing on the question of identity. From the time of the conquest and colonization of the American continent in the 1500s, a debate regarding the humanity of the recently discovered inhabitants began in Spain. This debate would prove to be one of the most revealing controversies of sixteenth-century Europe. At the point of colonial expansion, Europe projected
a logocentric vision which would incite a unique Latin Americanist philosophical discourse relating to the question of identity. During the nineteenth century, philosophical discourse was formulated principally through
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Page 492 literary expression. At first the quest for a cultural identity was the philosophical focus, although two conflicting positions were evident: the desire to achieve cultural independence from Europe and a yearning for Latin America to become European. This latter position inspired the urge to identify with European culture and from the mid-1900s, with the political and economic success of the USA. In the twentieth century, from the time of the University Reform of 1918, an academic philosophy emerged close to that of Europe and began to diversify the Latin American philosophical panorama. From the various philosophical stances which arose at that time, one that dominated the cultural arena, despite its occasional relegation to a secondary position in academia, was the urge to articulate a Latin Americanist philosophical discourse which would succeed in transcending its own frontiers through liberation philosophy, beginning in the 1960s. See also: FEMINIST THOUGHT IN LATIN AMERICA; LIBERATION PHILOSOPHY Further readings Muñoz, B. (1982) Sons of the Wind: The Search for Identity in Spanish American Indian Literature , New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. (The indigenista novel as a social indicator, which interprets key issues of Latin American cultural development.) Schutte, O. (1993) Cultural Identity and Social Liberation in Latin American Thought, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. (A philosophical approach with an interdisciplinary context. It focuses on cultural identity, liberation and feminist thought and includes a bibliography.) JOSÉLUIS GÓMEZ-MARTÍNEZ LITERATURE, JAPANESE PHILOSOPHY IN MODERN Since the last quarter of the nineteenth century, virtually all major lines of Western thought and the works of both major and minor Western philosophers have been explored and used by Japanese writers in an effort to forge a modern Japanese literature. The history of translation alone reveals a concern to bring over synoptic summaries of Western philosophy, as well as the primary works of specific thinkers. Academic philosophy as a discipline of advanced study was established in the 1880s, the decade which corresponds to the beginnings of widespread literary reform and the often-cited creation of the first modern Japanese novel, Futabatei’s Ukigumo (Floating Cloud) in 1889. However, Japanese novelists, dramatists, poets and critics did not assimilate philosophical influences naïvely or passively, nor was Japanese literature made over in the shape of specific Western ideas regarding the nature and function of the self, society or literary aesthetics. Indeed, the avid translation and discussion of Western ideas frequently provoked a nativist reaction or modification. The revival of traditional tropes, the language of Confucian ethics, Buddhist practice and Shintō legends), itself often reflects the pervasive presence of Western ideas on the modern literary scene. See also: AESTHETICS, JAPANESE Further reading Karatani Kōjin (1994) Origins of Modern Japanese Literature , ed. and trans. B. de Bary, Chapel Hill, NC: Duke University Press. (A study of the impact of Christianity, Marxism and other systems of Western thought on Japanese writing since the late nineteenth century.) Keene, D. (1984) Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature in the Modern Era , New York: Holt Rinehart & Winston. (A comprehensive guide to all forms of modern Japanese literature; see especially the entries under ‘Criticism’.) PAUL ANDERER LLEWELLYN, KARL NICKERSON (1893–1962) Karl Llewellyn was philosophically the most original of the ‘American Realist’ jurists. His line of argument, sometimes misleadingly called ‘rule-scepticism’, casts doubt on received approaches to the formulation of legal rules and traditional assumptions about the part they play in law. His approach to law is an essentially functionalist one, owing much to philosophical pragmatism. See also: CRITICAL LEGAL STUDIES; LEGAL REALISM; SOCIAL THEORY AND LAW Further reading Twining, W. (1985) Karl Llewellyn and the Realist Movement , London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. (An outstanding work of intellectual biography, covering all aspects of Llewellyn’s life and work in a sympathetically critical way, and with comprehensive references and bibliography.) NEIL MacCORMICK WILLIAM TWINING
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Page 493 LLULL, RAMON (1232–1316) One of the most extraordinary figures of thirteenth-century Europe, the Catalan preacher and writer Llull was a self-taught lay theologian and philosopher, chiefly concerned with reforming Christian society and converting unbelievers. Details of his life remain obscure, but over 200 of his writings survive. Most of these expound his personal dialectical system, the Great Universal Art of Finding Truth, an encyclopedic collation of commonplace doctrines that attempts to show how all human knowledge conforms to divine truth. Largely ignored during Llull’s lifetime and denounced as heretical in the later Middle Ages, the Great Art became very popular in the Renaissance as a programme of universal knowledge. Further reading Hillgarth, J.N. (1971) Ramon Lull and Lullism in Fourteenth-Century France , Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Best critical study in English of Llull and his times.) MARK D. JOHNSTON LOCKE, JOHN (1632–1704) John Locke was the first of the empiricist opponents of Descartes to achieve comparable authority among his European contemporaries. Together with Newton’s physics, the philosophy of An Essay concerning Human Understanding gradually eclipsed Cartesianism, decisively redirecting European thought. Neoplatonic innatism was replaced with a modest, naturalistic conception of our cognitive capacities, making careful observation and systematic description the primary task of natural inquiry. Locke saw himself as carrying out just such a descriptive project with respect to the mind itself. Theorizing is the construction of hypotheses on the basis of analogies, not penetration to the essences of things by super-sensory means. In religion Locke took a similarly anti-dogmatic line, advocating toleration and minimal doctrinal requirements, notably in Epistola de tolerantia (A Letter concerning Toleration) and The Reasonableness of Christianity . Through his association with the Earl of Shaftesbury he became involved in government, and then in revolutionary politics against Charles II and James II. The latter involvement led to exile, and to Two Treatises of Government , a rejection of patriarchalism and an argument from first principles for constitutional government in the interests of the governed, and for the right of the misgoverned to rebel. Locke published his main works only after the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688. He undertook important governmental duties for a time, and continued to write on many topics, including economics and biblical criticism, until his death. The Essay, Epistola and Second Treatise remain centrally canonical texts. Locke held that all our ideas are either given in experience, or are complex ideas formed from simple ideas so given, but not that all our knowledge is based on experience. He accepted that geometry, for example, is an a priori science, but denied that the ideas which are the objects of geometrical reasoning are innate. ‘Experience’ includes ‘reflection’, that is reflexive awareness of our own mental operations, which Cartesians treated as a way of accessing innate ideas, but which Locke calls ‘internal sense’. To have ideas before the mind is to be perceiving given or constructed sensory or quasi-sensory images – things as perceived by sense. In abstraction, however, we consider only aspects of what is presented: for example, a geometrical proof may consider only aspects of a drawn figure, allowing generalization to all figures similar in just those respects. Universal knowledge is thus perception of a relation between abstract ideas, but we also have immediate knowledge, in sensation, that particular external things are causing ideas in us. This awareness allows us to use the idea as a sign of its external cause: for example, the sensation of white signifies whatever feature of objects causes that sensation. Representation is thus fundamentally causal: causality bridges the gap between reality and ideas. Consequently we have sensitive knowledge of things only through their powers, knowledge of their existence without knowledge of their essence. Each way in which things act on the senses gives rise to a phenomenally simple idea signifying a quality, or power to affect us, in the object. Some simple ideas, those of the ‘primary qualities’, solidity, extension, figure, motion or rest, and number (the list can vary) can be supposed to resemble their causes. Others, ideas of ‘secondary qualities’, colour, smell, taste and so forth, do not. We also form ideas of the powers of objects to interact. Our idea of any sort of substantial thing is therefore complex, including ideas of all the qualities and powers by which we know and define that ‘substance’. Additionally, the idea includes the ‘general idea of substance’, or possessor of the qualities, a placemarker signifying the unknown underlying cause of their union. Locke distinguishes between the general
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Page 494 substance, matter, and the ‘particular constitution’ of matter from which flow the observable properties by which we define each sort of substance – gold, horse, iron and so on. This ‘real constitution’ or ‘real essence’ is distinguishable only relatively to our definition or ‘nominal essence’ of the species. Locke extends this conceptualist view of classification to individuation in a famous, still influential argument that a person is individuated, not by an immaterial soul, but by unifying and continuous consciousness. Because their real essences are unknown to us, we are capable only of probable belief about substances, not of ‘science’. In mathematics, however, real essences are known, since they are abstract ideas constructible without reference to reality. So too with ideas of ‘mixed modes’ and ‘relations’, including the ideas of social actions, roles and relationships which supply the subject-matter of a priori sciences concerned with law, natural, social and positive. The three legislators are God, public opinion and government. God’s authority derives from his status as creator, and natural or moral law is his benevolent will for us. Locke’s political theory concerns the authority of governments, which he takes to be, at bottom, the right of all individuals to uphold natural law transferred to a central agency for the sake of its power and impartiality. Economic change, he argues, renders this transfer imperative. In a state of nature, individuals own whatever they have worked for, if they can use it and enough is left for others. But with land-enclosure (which benefits everyone by increasing productivity) and the institution of money (which makes it both possible and morally justifiable to enjoy the product of enclosure) this primitive property-right is transcended, and there is need for an authority to ordain and uphold rules of justice for the benefit of all. Any government, therefore, has a specific trust to fulfil, and should be organized so as best to safeguard this role. A ruler who rules in his own interest forfeits all rights, as a criminal at war with his subjects. Then rebellion is justified self-defence. See also: EMPIRICISM; RATIONALISM Further reading Locke, J. (1689/90a) An Essay concerning Human Understanding , ed. P.H. Nidditch, Clarendon Edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. (Originally published in December 1689 but carrying the date 1690. Locke’s chief and greatest work, arguing comprehensively that what we can think and know is limited by the way we experience the world, attacking dogmatic pretensions to grasp the essences of things, and affirming that ‘reason must be our last judge and guide in everything’, including morals and religion.) Lowe, E.J. (1995) Locke on Human Understanding, London: Routledge. (A clear philosophical introduction to the Essay for students, making sensible use of recent scholarship in interpreting Locke’s arguments.) Yolton, J.W. (1956) John Locke and the Way of Ideas, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (This short but informative book, locating Locke’s thought in its English context, was a landmark for historical study of his general philosophy.) MICHAEL AYERS LOGIC, ANCIENT Western antiquity produced two great bodies of logical theory – those of Aristotle and the Stoics. Both aim to explain what distinguishes good arguments from bad. Both see that the best arguments are valid and that an argument’s validity depends on its form. For both, therefore, logic’s business is to identify the valid argument forms. Both theories do this by laying down a small number of basic argument forms – Aristotle’s ‘perfect syllogisms’, the Stoics’ ‘indemonstrables’ – and rigorously deriving other valid forms from them. Both theories also try – though in a less systematic manner – to classify the ways in which an argument can go wrong. Here the similarities between these two logics end. Their most significant differences can be illustrated by comparing basic argument forms from each. The argument ‘Every swan is an animal and every animal is moving, so every swan is moving’ has the same form as the argument ‘Every musician is human and every human is a substance, so every musician is a substance’. The Aristotelian expression of this form is ‘A belongs to all B and B belongs to all C, so A belongs to all C’. In this form the letters ‘A’, ‘B’ and ‘C’ stand for any terms whatever, and ‘A belongs to all B’ replaces ‘Every B is an A’. This represents the Aristotelian approach. Compare it with the following. The argument ‘If it is day then it is light, it is day, so it is light’ has the same form as the argument ‘If Dion walks then Dion moves, Dion walks, so Dion moves’. This form is expressed by the Stoics as ‘If the first then the second, the first, so the second’. Here the expressions ‘the first’ and ‘the
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Page 495 second’ stand for any declarative sentences whatever. In both cases, the validity of the argument form is tantamount to the validity of all arguments having that form (though the Stoics, unlike Aristotle, require that the precise words used in an argument should recur in its form). But the Aristotelian argument form is different in kind from the Stoic one: while it abstracts from terms, the Stoic form abstracts from sentences. Aristotelian logic is a term logic, Stoic logic a sentential one. Further reading Kneale, W. and Kneale, M. (1962) The Development of Logic , Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Good introduction to the subject, including an extensive bibliography.) Mates, B. (1953) Stoic Logic , Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. (A modern interpretation with a good introduction and bibliography.) PAUL THOM LOGIC, FUZZY see FUZZY LOGIC LOGIC IN CHINA Technically, classical China had semantic theory but no logic. Western historians, confusing logic and theory of language, used the term ‘logicians’ to describe those philosophers whom the Chinese called the ‘name school’. The best known of these were Hui Shi (380–305 BC) and Gongsun Lung (b. 380 BC? ). This group now also includes the Later Mohists and the term ‘distinction school’ (translated as ‘dialecticians’) has become common. The importance of the more detailed Mohist work came to light in modern times. The Confucian tradition had lost access to it. Rescuing that text rekindled a long-lost interest in Chinese theories of language. The restored Mohist texts give us a general theory of how words work. A term picks out part of reality. Some terms are more general than others; terms like ‘dobbin’ or ‘horse’ or ‘object’ might pick out the same thing. When we use a term to pick something out, we commit ourselves to using the name to pick out similar things and ‘stopping’ with the dissimilar. Thus, for each term we learn an ‘is this’ and an ‘is not’. ‘Is not’ generates an opposite for each name and marks the point of distinction or discrimination. Chinese doctrine portrays disagreements as arising from different ways of making the distinctions that give rise to opposites. The word bian (distinction/dispute) thus came to stand for a philosophical dispute. The Mohists argued that, in a ‘distinction/dispute’, one party will always be right. For any descriptive term, the thing in question will either be an ‘is this’ or an ‘is not’. Mohists were realistic about descriptions and the world. Real similarities and differences underlie our language. They rejected the claim that words distort reality; to regard all language as ‘perverse’, they noted, was ‘perverse’. The Mohists failed, however, to give a good account of what similarities and differences should count in making a distinction. Mohists also found that combining terms was semantically fickle. In the simplest case, the compound picked out the sum of what the individual terms did. Classical Chinese lacked pluralization so ‘cat–dog’ works like ‘cats and dogs’. Other compound terms (such as ‘white horse’) worked as they do in English. The confusion led Gongsun Long to argue, on Confucian grounds, that we could say ‘white horse is not horse’. Confucius’ linguistics centred on his proposal to ‘rectify names’. Confucius used a code with fixed formulations, and therefore tended to treat moral problems as turning on which terms we use in stating them. The abortion dispute illustrates this well. Both sides agree to the rule ‘do not kill an innocent person’: the dispute becomes one of whether to use the term ‘person’ or ‘foetus’. In contrast, Mohists argued that we should not alter normal term use to get moral results. We simply accept that guiding compounds may not follow normal use. A thief is a person, but killing a thief (executing) is not killing a person (murdering). These results bolstered Daoist scepticism about words. We never will fashion a ‘constant’ dao. According to Zhuangzi, even a realistic theory of language (like that of the Mohists) will not give constant guidance. He drew from Hui Shi’s approach to language, which emphasized relative terms such as ‘large’ and ‘small’. We may talk of a large horse (relative to other horses) or a large horsefly (relative to other flies), but ‘large’ itself has no constant standard of comparison. From the premise, ‘all such distinctions are relative’, Hui Shi fallaciously concluded that ‘reality has no distinctions in itself’. Zhuangzi rejected this conclusion and ridiculed Hui Shi’s monism. If we say ‘everything is one’, then our language attempts to ‘point to’ everything. If it succeeds, then in addition to the ‘one–everything’ there is the reference to it. That makes two. The whole consisting of everything and saying so then makes three. Referring to that whole makes four,
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Page 496 and the fact that we have referred to it makes five, and so on. Zhuangzi shifted Hui Shi’s focus slightly, and concentrated on ‘this’ and ‘that’. These do refer to things, but each use is different. Language, he argued, is not fixed on the world but on our relationships with it. Each existing language (different ways of making guiding distinctions) is equally natural. Human debate is as natural as the chirping of birds. We cannot appeal to nature to settle our disputes about ethics. The standards are not constant; they are historical, variable and diverse in different moral communities. Distinctions are real, but we can never know if we have found the right ones. Zhuangzi accepts a real world in which language works. Thus, he celebrates the endless possible ways of distinguishing ‘this’ from ‘not-this’. Some alternatives will certainly work better (assuming our present values) than the one we have now. The problem is that any standard we could use to decide about that would itself be controversial. The final word came from Xunzi and his student Han Feizi. The former, a Confucian, understood Zhuangzi’s arguments to show that the only standard of correct usage must be convention itself. Thus he renewed Confucian tradition and promoted it politically as the only viable and valid conventional system. He advocated government suppression of dissenting voices who ‘confuse language’ and ‘create new terms’. In the end, only the ruler may change language (and then only the ‘descriptive’ terms). The standards of social assent and dissent come from the Confucian ‘sage-kings’. We must adhere to these as the only acceptable ideals; the alternative is anarchy in moral discourse and, consequently, in society. Han Feizi, seized on Xunzi’s attitude toward coercion while discarding the appeal to ancient tradition. Han Feizi had considerable influence on the draconian Qin emperor who ruthlessly carried out his injunction to stamp out philosophical disputes about ethics. This brought the rich tradition of creative philosophy to an abrupt end; religious thought and scholasticism dominated the rest of Chinese intellectual history. See also: CHINESE PHILOSOPHY; MOHIST PHILOSOPHY Further reading Hansen, C. (1992) A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought, New York: Oxford University Press. (An easy, extended treatment in an account of ancient Chinese philosophy that emphasizes language.) CHAD HANSEN LOGIC IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY Islamic logic was inspired primarily by Aristotle’s logical corpus, the Organon (which according to a late Greek taxonomy also included the Rhetoric and Poetics ). Islamic authors were also familiar with some elements in Stoic logic and linguistic theory, and their logical sources included not only Aristotle’s own works but also the works of the late Greek Aristotelian commentators, the Isagōgēof Porphyry and the logical writings of Galen. However, most of the logical work of the Islamic philosophers remained squarely within the tradition of Aristotelian logic, and most of their writings in this area were in the form of commentaries on Aristotle. For the Islamic philosophers, logic included not only the study of formal patterns of inference and their validity but also elements of the philosophy of language and even of epistemology and metaphysics. Because of territorial disputes with the Arabic grammarians, Islamic philosophers were very interested in working out the relationship between logic and language, and they devoted much discussion to the question of the subject matter and aims of logic in relation to reasoning and speech. In the area of formal logical analysis, they elaborated upon the theory of terms, propositions and syllogisms as formulated in Aristotle’s Categories, De interpretatione and Prior Analytics . In the spirit of Aristotle, they considered the syllogism to be the form to which all rational argumentation could be reduced, and they regarded syllogistic theory as the focal point of logic. Even poetics was considered as a syllogistic art in some fashion by most of the major Islamic Aristotelians. Since logic was viewed as an organon or instrument by which to acquire knowledge, logic in the Islamic world also incorporated a general theory of argumentation focused upon epistemological aims. This element of Islamic logic centred upon the theory of demonstration found in Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics , since demonstration was considered the ultimate goal sought by logic. Other elements of the theory of argumentation, such as dialectics and rhetoric, were viewed as secondary to demonstration, since it was held that these argument forms produced cognitive states inferior in certitude and stability to demonstration. The philosopher’s aim was ultimately to demonstrate necessary and certain truth; the use of dialectical and rhetorical arguments was accounted for as preparatory to demonstration, as defensive of
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Page 497 its conclusions, or as aimed at communicating its results to a broader audience. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY; AL-FARABI; IBN SINA Further reading Abed, S.B. (1991) Aristotelian Logic and the Arabic Language in Al-Farabi , Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. (An excellent consideration of the central issues in al-Farabi’s linguistic philosophy.) Lameer, J. (1994) Al-Farabi and Aristotelian Syllogistics: Greek Theory and Islamic Practice , Leiden: Brill. (A thorough study of al-Farabi’s logical writings and their ancient sources.) DEBORAH L. BLACK LOGIC IN JAPAN ‘Logic’ became an explicit topic in Japanese philosophy only in the twentieth century. Most effort has been directed to developing a dialectical logic in a Hegelian mode rather than a symbolic system. The Japanese term coined for logic in this sense is ronri (the ‘principles of discourse or argument’). The term ronrigaku ( ronri + -ology) is the more common term for formal, symbolic logic. In the twentieth century two Japanese philosophers, Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945) and Tanabe Hajime (1885–1962), developed distinctive dialectical logics that drew on key assumptions from traditional Japanese thought, but followed a Western style of analysis and articulation. Nishida’s logic of basho (place, topos, field) located the contextual premises of empirical and idealist judgments within a trans-judgmental domain called the ‘acting-intuiting’. He related this to his logic of the predicate, which rejected the Aristotelian priority of the grammatical subject as signifier of substance, instead making the subject the qualifier of the predicate, the signifier of the event. Tanabe criticized Nishida’s system as ahistorical and transcultural. His logic of species gave priority to the specificity of cultural and historical embededness, the middle ground between the universal ought and individual freedom. See also: NISHIDA KITARŌ; TANABE HAJIME Further reading Piovesana, G.K. (1968) Contemporary Japanese Philosophical Thought, New York: St. John’s University Press. (Good survey of modern Japanese philosophy including a chapter on Nishida Kitaro and a section on Tanabe Hajime’s logic of species.) Wargo, R.J.J. (1972) The Logic of Basho and the Concept of Nothingness in the Philosophy of Nishida Kitarō , Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms. (A dissertation, this work has never been surpassed as the best Western treatment of Nishida’s logic. It includes a translation of the ‘General Summary’ from Nishida’s Ippansha no jikakuteki taikei (System of Self-consciousness of the Universal).) THOMAS P. KASULIS LOGIC IN THE 17TH AND 18TH CENTURIES Logic in the seventeenth century was characterized by attempts to reconcile older viewpoints, such as those of Ramus and Melanchthon, and by criticism of the nature and scope of traditional logic. Francis Bacon indicated induction, rather than deduction, as the object of logic, thus opening the way for a logic of the empirical sciences. Descartes proposed to replace the complicated precepts of old logic by simple rules of method. However, even the authors of the Port-Royal Logic, who were influenced by Descartes, could not follow him all the way and continued to teach traditional doctrines, albeit with a new attention to the doctrine of ideas. Other logicians, following Locke, tried to modernize logic by concentrating on an analysis of human cognitive faculties, of the idea–word relation and of other than certain knowledge, thus broadening the scope of logic so as to account for probability. Another suggestion for the improvement of logic came from those who thought that logic should assume mathematics as an example either for its axiomatic-deductive method or for the inventive techniques of algebra. The last of these suggestions prompted research in the area of logical calculi. But this kind of research benefited from the doctrines devised by non-mathematically oriented authors who thus provided the logical framework in which algebraic techniques would be tried. This general background accounts not only for the exceptional logic of Leibniz, but also for some logical calculi worked out in the eighteenth century. See also: PORT-ROYAL Further reading Ashworth, E.J. (1974) Language and Logic in the Post-Medieval Period , Dordrecht and Boston, MA: Reidel. (A classic guide to logic 1500–1650.) Kneale, W. and Kneale, M. (1962) The Development of Logic , Oxford: Clarendon Press,
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Page 498 1984. (The most comprehensive introduction to the history of logic.) MIRELLA CAPOZZI LOGIC IN THE 19TH CENTURY The nineteenth century was one of the most active periods for logic in Western philosophy. It is regarded foremost as being the first time logic became ‘symbolic’ and ‘mathematical’. There was tremendous diversity and conflict in logic in this period – indeed there were substantial debates over whether there even is a subject called ‘formal logic’ and over what the most basic logical forms were. There was an explicit discussion in the early part of the century of whether logic should be extensional or intensional, opinion eventually settling on a purely extensional conception. By the end of the century, many of these debates had been resolved or had withered away, and the most widespread conception and practice of logic coalesced in the early twentieth century into a view we now identify with the works of Frege, Russell and Whitehead. The nineteenth century brought, for the first time, from Boole and Frege, distinct proposals on how to symbolize logic that were both extensively developed and had widespread influence. Boole is correctly regarded as the father of modern symbolic logic. Frege shared two concerns of many nineteenth-century mathematicians – avoiding incorrect derivations and providing rigorous and clear foundations for the infinitesimal and derivative calculus – and therefore sought to develop a very clear notion of mathematical ‘proof’. His notation has not been taken up but his influence, especially on the move towards symbolization, has been considerable. De Morgan was the first logician extensively and symbolically to discuss the logic of relations. However, a systematic algebraic notation for relations was provided only later by Peirce, and developed also by Schröder. Further reading Hailperin, T. (1976) Boole’s Logic and Probability: A Critical Exposition from the Standpoint of Contemporary Algebra, Logic and Probability Theory , Amsterdam and New York: North Holland; 2nd edn, 1986. (Perhaps the best secondary monograph on Boole’s logic; unusually sensitive to the integrated aspects of his deductive and inductive logics; possibly the first edition is superior.) Whately, R. (1826) Elements of Logic , Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1975. (A highly intelligent, succinct, non-symbolic work that represents the high-water mark of the non-symbolic English ‘logic textbook’ tradition.) RANDALL R. DIPERT LOGIC IN THE EARLY 20TH CENTURY The creation of modern logic is one of the most stunning achievements of mathematics and philosophy in the twentieth century. Modern logic – sometimes called logistic, symbolic logic or mathematical logic – makes essential use of artificial symbolic languages. Since Aristotle, logic has been a part of philosophy. Around 1850 the mathematician Boole began the modern development of symbolic logic. During the twentieth century, logic continued in philosophy departments, but it began to be seriously investigated and taught in mathematics departments as well. The most important examples of the latter were, from 1905 on, Hilbert at Göttingen and then, during the 1920s, Church at Princeton. As the twentieth century began, there were several distinct logical traditions. Besides Aristotelian logic, there was an active tradition in algebraic logic initiated by Boole in the UK and continued by C.S. Peirce in the USA and Schröder in Germany. In Italy, Peano began in the Boolean tradition, but soon aimed higher: to express all major mathematical theorems in his symbolic logic. Finally, from 1879 to 1903, Frege consciously deviated from the Boolean tradition by creating a logic strong enough to construct the natural and real numbers. The Boole–Schröder tradition culminated in the work of Löwenheim (1915) and Skolem (1920) on the existence of a countable model for any first-order axiom system having a model. Meanwhile, in 1900, Russell was strongly influenced by Peano’s logical symbolism. Russell used this as the basis for his own logic of relations, which led to his logicism: pure mathematics is a part of logic. But his discovery of Russell’s paradox in 1901 required him to build a new basis for logic. This culminated in his masterwork, Principia Mathematica , written with Whitehead, which offered the theory of types as a solution. Hilbert came to logic from geometry, where models were used to prove consistency and independence results. He brought a strong concern with the axiomatic method and a rejection of the metaphysical goal of determin
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Page 499 ing what numbers ‘really’ are. In his view, any objects that satisfied the axioms for numbers were numbers. He rejected the genetic method, favoured by Frege and Russell, which emphasized constructing numbers rather than giving axioms for them. In his 1917 lectures Hilbert was the first to introduce first-order logic as an explicit subsystem of all of logic (which, for him, was the theory of types) without the infinitely long formulas found in Löwenheim. In 1923 Skolem, directly influenced by Löwenheim, also abandoned those formulas, and argued that first-order logic is all of logic. Influenced by Hilbert and Ackermann (1928), Gödel proved the completeness theorem for first-order logic (1929) as well as incompleteness theorems for arithmetic in first-order and higher-order logics (1931). These results were the true beginning of modern logic. Further reading Barwise, J. (ed.) (1977) Handbook of Mathematical Logic , Amsterdam: North Holland. (An excellent survey of modern logic.) Gabbay, D. and Guenthner, F. (eds) (1983–9) Handbook of Philosophical Logic , Dordrecht: Reidel, 4 vols. (A standard modern source on classical and non-classical logics.) GREGORY H. MOORE LOGIC, INTENSIONAL see INTENSIONAL LOGICS LOGIC, LINEAR see LINEAR LOGIC LOGIC MACHINES AND DIAGRAMS By ‘logical diagrams’ we generally mean any two-dimensional representations of logical relationships, such as of class inclusion or consequence. One usually also means representations using nontypographical symbols or geometric figures. Such diagrams were first used in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but gained wide currency only in the nineteenth; the best known are the Euler and Venn diagrams. It is an open question whether logical diagrams are useful only as elementary pedagogical devices, or have implications for advanced logical research. The conception of an organism, the mind, or of the universe as ‘machine’ was not really attractive and useful until machines were widespread, complex and able to perform interesting tasks. This occurred first in the late Renaissance, and initiated ways of thinking that dominated the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was also becoming evident that machines could be used to perform some complex, repetitive or difficult tasks more reliably or faster than human beings. The very idea of machines that can perform ‘symbolic’ tasks, such as mathematical, logical or, eventually, linguistic ones required first a symbolism. For this reason, the idea of computers for mathematical or logical tasks, and systems of mathematical and logical notation, are strongly intertwined: one must have efficient ways of feeding information into a machine, and interpreting the results. See also: COMPUTABILITY THEORY Further reading Eames, C. and Eames, R. (1990) A Computer Perspective: Background to the Computer Age, ed. G. Fleck, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, new edn. (A pictorial and well-researched history of computers that includes pictures, diagrams and facsimiles of Stanhope’s, Jevons’ and Marquand’s logic machines, Peirce’s circuit diagrams, and some post-Second World War work.) Gardner, M. (1982) Logic Machines and Diagrams , Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2nd edn. (A classic discussion of the topic, and the only monograph, but somewhat elementary and superficial.) RANDALL R. DIPERT LOGIC, MEDIEVAL Medieval logic is crucial to the understanding of medieval philosophy, for every educated person was trained in logic, as well as in grammar, and these disciplines provided techniques of analysis and a technical vocabulary that permeate philosophical, scientific and theological writing. At the practical level, logic provided the training necessary for participation in the disputations that were a central feature of medieval instruction, and whose structure – with arguments for and against a thesis, followed by a resolution – is reflected in many written works. At the theoretical level, logic, like other subjects, involved the study of written texts through lectures and written commentaries. The core of the logic curriculum from the twelfth century onwards was provided by the logical works of Aristotle. These provided the material for the study of types of predication, the analysis of simple propositions and their relations of inference and equivalence, the analysis of modal propositions, categorical and modal syllogisms, fallacies, dialectical Topics, and scientific reasoning as captured in the demonstrative
syllogism. Comprehensive as this list might seem, medieval
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Page 500 logicians realized that other logical subjects needed to be investigated, and, again from the twelfth century onward, new techniques and new genres of writing appeared. The main new technique involved the use of ‘sophismata’, or puzzling cases intended to draw attention to weaknesses and difficulties in logical definitions and rules. The new genres of writing especially included works on ‘supposition theory’, which concerned the types of reference that the subjects and predicates of propositions have in different contexts, and works on ‘syncategoremata’, which concerned the effect on sense and reference produced by the presence and placing of such logical terms as ‘all’, ‘some’, ‘not’, ‘if. . . then’, ‘except’, and so on. Other important topics for investigation include ‘insolubles’, or semantic paradoxes, and ‘consequences’, or valid inference forms. These new developments were seen as providing a supplement to Aristotelian logic, rather than an alternative. The only context in which people occasionally suggested that Aristotelian logic was inapplicable was that of Trinitarian theology, and the only logician who deliberately set out to reform logic as a whole was Ramon Llull. The study of medieval logic involves two kinds of difficulty. In the first place, few texts are available in translation, and indeed, many are not even available in printed form. In the second place, there is a problem of interpretation. For a very long time, the specifically medieval contributions to logic were ignored or despised, and when people began to take them more seriously, there was a strong tendency to look at them through the spectacles of modern formal logic. More recently, scholars have come to realize that medieval interests cannot be mapped precisely onto modern interests, and that any attempt, for example, to make a sharp distinction between propositional and quantificational logic is misleading. The first task of the modern reader is to try to understand what the medieval logician was really concerned with. See also: LANGUAGE, MEDIEVAL THEORIES OF; LOGIC, RENAISSANCE Further reading Ashworth, E.J. (1978) The Tradition of Medieval Logic and Speculative Grammar from Anselm to the End of the Seventeenth Century: A Bibliography from 1836 Onwards , Toronto, Ont.: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies. (Annotated bibliography with full indexes.) Pinborg, J. (1984) Medieval Semantics: Selected Studies on Medieval Logic and Grammar, London: Variorum. (A collection of seminal articles, published between 1969 and 1981.) E.J. ASHWORTH LOGIC, MULTIPLE-CONCLUSION see MULTIPLE-CONCLUSION LOGIC LOGIC OF ETHICAL DISCOURSE Logic, as a discipline, is largely concerned with discovering principles and methods for evaluating the evidential strength between the premises and conclusions of arguments. Because the meanings of terms (and the concepts they express) that occur in arguments bear importantly on questions about evidential relations, much of the work on the topic of logic and ethics has been preoccupied with questions about the meanings of moral terms and concepts, and with the correct linguistic analysis of sentences that contain them. Taking logic to include issues about meaning (which has commonly been done by those who refer to the so-called ‘logic of moral discourse’) is to construe the subject broadly. But the field of logic is often construed quite narrowly to refer to the study of formal languages whose syntax, axioms and inference rules are sufficiently determinate to allow decisions about what counts as the theorem in such a language. On the narrower understanding of logic, the intersection of logic and ethics has mainly to do with work in deontic logic. This article takes up issues concerning the intersection of ethics and logic broadly construed. The intersection of logic and ethics concerns questions about the nature of moral reasoning. Some philosophers have attempted to deduce substantive moral conclusions from factual statements – in particular, to derive ‘ought’ statements from ‘is’ statements. If one can successfully carry out such deductions, then moral reasoning is guided properly by consideration of nonmoral facts from which moral conclusions can be derived. However, the eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume is often credited with arguing that no such deductions are correct; that there is a gap between factual ‘is’ statements and moral ‘ought’ statements. There is disagreement over whether or not Hume’s negative claim is correct; but even if it is, there may still be logical features of moral concepts that impose constraints on proper moral reasoning. One such widely discussed constraint is the thesis of universalizability, according to which relevantly similar cases must receive the same moral evaluation. One implication of this thesis
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Page 501 is that moral judgments about particular cases entail universal moral principles and so some have argued that all correct moral reasoning must be understood in terms of subsuming particular cases under general moral principles. Although many philosophers have accepted this subsumptive model of moral reasoning, it has come under attack by philosophers who argue that proper moral reasoning is primarily a matter of sensitively discerning the morally relevant details of a case under consideration and rendering a moral judgment about it without the guidance of principles. See also: ANALYTIC ETHICS Further reading Brink, D.O. (1989) Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (A defender of ethical naturalism who construes moral principles as synthetic necessary truths.) Hudson, W.D. (1969) The Is/Ought Question , London: Macmillan. (A collection of important essays on the is/ought controversy.) MARK TIMMONS LOGIC, PARACONSISTENT see PARACONSISTENT LOGIC LOGIC, PHILOSOPHY OF Philosophy of logic can be roughly characterized as those philosophical topics which have emerged either from the technical development of symbolic (mathematical) logic, or from the motivations that logicians have offered for their technical pursuits. In settling on a list of subjects to classify as philosophy of logic, therefore, there is a certain degree of arbitrariness, since the issues which emerge from the technical development of logic can equally well be assigned to such areas as semantics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, epistemology, and even ethics (see SEMANTICS; LANGUAGE, PHILOSOPHY OF; MATHEMATICS, FOUNDATIONS OF). 1 The impact of modal logic In the broad area of mathematical logic, the biggest philosophical punch is packed by modal logic, including tense logic (see MODAL LOGIC; MODAL LOGIC, PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES IN; TENSE AND TEMPORAL LOGIC). Modal logic has been important since Aristotle (see LOGIC, ANCIENT; LOGIC IN THE 17TH AND 18TH CENTURIES; LOGIC IN THE 19TH CENTURY; LOGIC IN THE EARLY 20TH CENTURY) but has only been put on a rigorous footing in the second half of the twentieth century, by such figures as Hintikka, Kanger, Prior, and most especially Kripke (see SEMANTICS, POSSIBLE WORLDS). The most important philosophical outgrowth of this mathematical work is contained in Kripke’s three lectures from January 1970 published as ‘Naming and Necessity’, in which Kripke draws out some ways in which possible worlds semantics is in tension with then-prevailing orthodoxies in the philosophy of language and mind. Some of Kripke’s views have become new orthodoxies since (see ESSENTIALISM; PROPER NAMES; REFERENCE; for related work by David Lewis, Robert Stalnaker, David Kaplan and others that uses the possible worlds framework, see COUNTERFACTUAL CONDITIONALS; DEMONSTRATIVES AND INDEXICALS; DESCRIPTIONS). To give some flavour of developments here, consider the familiar Fregean view that the relation of reference which holds between a name and its bearer is sustained by the relation of presentation which holds between the sense of the name and the bearer of the name: the name refers to such-and-such an object precisely because it expresses a sense which presents that object (see FREGE, G.; SENSE AND REFERENCE). When pressed for an explanation of what the senses of names are like, the natural Fregean response is to specify them, as Frege himself did in some cases, using definite descriptions (see DESCRIPTION). So, for instance, the sense of the name ‘Aristotle’ might be ‘the pupil of Plato who taught Alexander’. However, though it may well in fact have been Aristotle who taught Alexander, there are many ways things might have gone (many ‘possible worlds’) in which someone other than Aristotle is taught by Plato and teaches Alexander: suppose Aristotle had got the appointment but been killed in an accident before he could take it up, and had been replaced at Philip’s insistence by another pupil of Plato. The description ‘the pupil of Plato who taught Alexander’ is therefore ‘non-rigid’, in Kripke’s terminology. That is, it can pick out different individuals in different possible worlds, and in some worlds may pick out no one (Philip for some reason comes to distrust Platonic pedagogy and fails to conduct an equal opportunity search).But it is clearfromthe formal semantics for modal logic that there is conceptual ‘room’ for a category of expression which is ‘rigid’, in the sense that it picks out the same object in every possible world, or at least in every possible world where it picks out any object at all. So the formal semantics prompts the question whether names in natural language
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Page 502 behave as if their reference is determined by a sense which presents different individuals at different worlds, or whether they behave as if they are rigid designators. With a series of brilliant examples Kripke demonstrates that names are rigid designators and therefore do not express reference-determining senses which are non-rigid (see PROPER NAMES). The idea that a formal semantics for a kind of logic provides an account of a possible semantics for a category of natural-language expression, opening the door to debate on whether it is the right account or not, also captures some of the philosophical bearing of kinds of logic other than modal logic. Thus free logic shows how name-like expressions can function without standard existential commitment (see FREE LOGICS, PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES IN); intuitionistic logic and many-valued logic show how a language can have a compositional semantics even if its sentences are not used to make statements with verification-transcendent truth-conditions which always either obtain or fail to obtain (see COMPOSITIONALITY; INTUITIONISTIC LOGIC AND ANTIREALISM; MANY-VALUED LOGICS, PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES IN; PRESUPPOSITION). And second-order logic offers a particular way of understanding the semantic import of a range of puzzling locutions, such as plural quantifiers (see SECOND-ORDER LOGIC, PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES IN). In all these cases the formal semantics for the logical system prompts debates about how well the semantics carries over to natural language. 2 Logic and language There is also a collection of long-established topics discussion of which can be much improved, in rigour at least, in the light of the development of modern logic. For example, a distinction between propositions (or statements, or sentential contexts) which are de dicto and propositions (and so on) which are de re originates in medieval philosophy. But only contemporary modal logic affords the tools for a precise characterization of this distinction, although it must be granted that the distinction remains a puzzle in epistemic contexts (see DE RE/DE DICTO; DESCRIPTIONS; PROPOSITIONAL ATTITUDE STATEMENTS). Other topics which can be classified in this way include ESSENTIALISM, EXISTENCE, IDENTITY, INDICATIVE CONDITIONALS, MODAL OPERATORS, QUANTIFIERS and VAGUENESS. Again, to give some of the flavour of this kind of work, consider the de re/ de dicto contrast. There is an evident syntactic difference between ‘It is necessary that parents have children’ and ‘Parents are such that it is necessary that they have children’, but just because there is a syntactic difference, it does not follow that there is any interesting difference in meaning. But the difference can be brought out quite precisely in possible worlds semantics. To say that it is necessary that parents have children is to say that in every possible world, the people who are parents in that world have children in that world; and this is an obvious truth. On the other hand, to say that parents are such that it is necessary that they have children is to say that the people who are parents in the actual world are such that they have children in every possible world. This is clearly false, even putting aside contingency of existence of actual parents. For given anyone who is actually a parent, there is a way things could have gone – a possible world – in which that person is childless, hence not a parent (see QUANTIFIERS, SUBSTITUTIONAL AND OBJECTUAL; MODAL OPERATORS). When a formal semantics for a system of logic is applied to a fragment of natural language, a very precise account of the literal content of sentences in that fragment is given. But there may be aspects of the meanings of those sentences which are omitted. Philosophical views may then divide over whether the formal semantics has been shown to be wanting as an account of the semantics of the fragment, or whether instead the aspects of meaning not captured have been shown not to belong to literal content (see PRESUPPOSITION). In the case of indicative conditionals, for instance, the formal semantics that is relevant is the simplest possible kind, namely, the truth-functional account of ‘if. . . then . . . ’. According to this account, ‘If p then q’ is true if p is false or if q is true, regardless of the actual meanings of p and q. So in particular, any indicative conditional with a true consequent is true; examples would include ‘If lead floats in water then lead sinks in water’ and ‘If the solar system has nine planets then the Conservative Party lost the British elections in 1997’. Barring an astrological justification of the latter, both these conditionals look decidedly odd. But oddness is one thing, falsity another. The idea that such conditionals are false is based on the thought that if a conditional is true, then in establishing it in the most direct manner, non-redundant use has to be made of the antecedent. Spelling this out leads to relevance logic (see RELEVANCE LOGIC AND ENTAILMENT; INDICATIVE CONDITIONALS). On the other hand, if we say the conditionals are merely odd, we are led to some theory of
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Page 503 communication to explain the oddness (see GRICE, H.P.; IMPLICATURE). But we should not take away the impression that the traffic is all one way, from logic to language or from pure mathematics to pure philosophy. There is a two-way street here, with the above comments on conditionals representing a common phenomenon; that of a concern in the philosophy of language giving rise to a formal development which in turn feeds back into philosophy. For example, the idea that for a conditional to be true, the most direct way of establishing it must make non-redundant use of its antecedent seems clear enough on the face of it, but familiarity with logic of conditionals literature may well lead one to reconsider. This kind of dialectical interplay should continue to be a fruitful source of philosophical research for the foreseeable future. See also: FALLACIES; FORMAL AND INFORMAL LOGIC; IMPERATIVE LOGIC; INTENSIONALITY; LINEAR LOGIC; LOGIC IN CHINA; LOGIC IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY; LOGIC IN JAPAN; LOGICAL CONSTANTS; LOGICAL FORM; LOGICAL LAWS; PROPOSITIONS, SENTENCES AND STATEMENTS Further reading Hughes, R.I.G. (ed.) (1993) A Philosophical Companion to First-Order Logic , Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company. (New and reprinted papers of varying levels of difficulty.) Tomberlin, J.E. (ed.) (1994) Logic and Language, Philosophical Perspectives 8, Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview. (A collection of new papers on relevant topics.) GRAEME FORBES LOGIC, POLISH see POLISH LOGIC LOGIC, QUANTUM see QUANTUM LOGIC LOGIC, RENAISSANCE Renaissance logic is often identified with humanist logic, which is in some ways closer to rhetoric than to the study of formal argumentation. This is a mistake, for although changes did take place, a hard core of logical teaching remained the same throughout the medieval and Renaissance periods and into the eighteenth century. Logic was embedded in the educational system as the main study of beginning undergraduates, and although institutional changes had an effect on the presentation and use of logic texts, the study of valid arguments was always central. There are two obvious differences between medieval texts and their sixteenth-century successors. The first is a new emphasis on following the order and material of Aristotle’s Organon, with the consequent emphasis on the categorical syllogism as the central type of argument. Such medieval material as survived was strictly subordinated to this end; and even though the humanist logicians Agricola and Ramus had tried to ignore Aristotelian syllogistic and the doctrines propaedeutic to it (such as conversion and opposition), their omissions were rapidly remedied by subsequent textbook writers. The second difference has to do with language and style. Medieval writers treated Latin as a technical, almost artificial language. They were deeply concerned with the effects that different word-orders and the addition of extra logical particles had on both meaning and reference, and they made heavy use of sophismata, deliberately constructed problematic or puzzling sentences. Although Latin remained the language of instruction, the approach of a Renaissance logician, whether humanist or Aristotelian, commentator or textbook writer, is totally different. Sophismata have completely disappeared, and so too has any attempt to treat Latin as a technical language in which different word-orders represent different logical structures. The propositions used for such operations as syllogistic conversion are presented in an already fully standardized form, and they are always relatively simple. Why these changes came about is a difficult question. Humanism coexisted too long with medieval logic for humanism to be the sole explanation, and the fact that Renaissance logicians returned to the commentaries of Averroes and Aquinas on the Organon shows that mere revolt against anything medieval is not a sufficient explanation either. Changes in grammar teaching, changes in the relation of logic to the study of natural science, and changes in other parts of the university curriculum presumably have a good deal to do with the appearance of a new style of logic. In particular, the humanist emphasis on logic as a tool for analysing discourse focused attention on the use of logic in literature, history and biblical studies, and demanded a combination of simplicity and literary elegance, rather than any genuine formal innovation. There was no concurrent move to relate logic to the new developments in mathematics, and logic was not to be seen as a formal system linked with other formal systems until the nineteenth century. See also: LANGUAGE, RENAISSANCE PHILOSOPHY OF; LOGIC, MEDIEVAL
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Page 504 Further reading Ashworth, E.J. (1974) Language and Logic in the Post-Medieval Period , Dordrecht and Boston, MA: Reidel. (A comprehensive account, thematically arranged, and making use of the techniques of modern symbolic logic.) Mack, P. (1993) Renaissance Argument: Valla and Agricola in the Traditions of Rhetoric and Dialectic, Leiden, New York and Cologne: Brill. (Excellent account of humanist logic, including Melanchthon and Ramus.) E.J. ASHWORTH LOGICAL ATOMISM The name ‘logical atomism’ refers to a network of theses about the parts and structure of the world and the means by which language represents the world. Wittgenstein, in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus , expounds a version of logical atomism developed by him around the time of the First World War, as does Russell in works published contemporaneously. It is no accident that their work on logical atomism shares a common surface description since it resulted from their mutual influence at Cambridge. The common theme is that the meaning of our sentences is rooted in a primitive relation between simple expressions and their simple worldly bearers, the logical atoms. In a logically perfect language, atomic sentences describe configurations of these atoms, and complex sentences are combinations of the atomic sentences. But sentences of ordinary language may have a misleading surface form which is revealed as such by analysis. The common theme masks considerable differences of doctrine. In particular, there are differences in the nature of logical atoms and in the arguments for the existence of these atoms. See also: KNOWLEDGE BYACQUAINTANCE AND DESCRIPTION Further reading Griffin, J.P. (1964) Wittgenstein’s Logical Atomism , Oxford: Clarendon Press. (A clear account of Wittgenstein’s logical atomism, emphasizing the influence of Hertz’s ideas about models in natural science.) Russell, B. (1924) ‘Logical Atomism’, in Logic and Knowledge , ed. R.C. Marsh, London: Allen & Unwin, 1956, 323–43. (A review of the principles of Russell’s logical atomism in which sense-data drop out of the picture.) ALEX OLIVER LOGICAL CONSTANTS A fundamental problem in the philosophy of logic is to characterize the concepts of ‘logical consequence’ and ‘logical truth’ in such a way as to explain what is semantically, metaphysically or epistemologically distinctive about them. One traditionally says that a sentence p is a logical consequence of a set S of sentences in a language L if and only if (1) the truth of the sentences of S in L guarantees the truth of p and (2) this guarantee is due to the ‘logical form’ of the sentences of S and the sentence p. A sentence is said to be logically true if its truth is guaranteed by its logical form (for example, ‘2 is even or 2 is not even’). There are three problems presented by this picture: to explicate the notion of logical form or structure; to explain how the logical forms of sentences give rise to the fact that the truth of certain sentences guarantees the truth of others; and to explain what such a guarantee consists in. The logical form of a sentence may be exhibited by replacing nonlogical expressions with a schematic letter. Two sentences have the same logical form when they can be mapped onto the same schema using this procedure (‘2 is even or 2 is not even’ and ‘3 is prime or 3 is not prime’ have the same logical form: ‘p or not-p’). If a sentence is logically true then each sentence sharing its logical form is true. Any characterization of logical consequence, then, presupposes a conception of logical form, which in turn assumes a prior demarcation of the logical constants. Such a demarcation yields an answer to the first problem above; the goal is to generate the demarcation in such a way as to enable a solution of the remaining two. Approaches to the characterization of logical constants and logical consequence are affected by developments in mathematical logic. One way of viewing logical constanthood is as a semantic property; a property that an expression possesses by virtue of the sort of contribution it makes to determining the truth conditions of sentences containing it. Another way is proof-theoretical: appealing to aspects of cognitive or operational role as the defining characteristics of logical expressions. Broadly, prooftheoretic accounts go naturally with the conception of logic as a theory of formal deductive inference; model-theoretic accounts complement a conception of logic as an instrument for the characterization of structure. See also: LOGICAL FORM; LOGICAL LAWS
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Page 505 Constants’, in E. Lepore (ed.) Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson , Oxford and New York: Blackwell, 125–34. (Explains the meaning of logical constants in terms of ‘immediate implications’ and ‘immediate incompatibilities’.) Sher, G. (1991) The Bounds of Logic, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Bradford. (A general discussion of problems in the philosophy of classical logic from a model-theoretic point of view.) TIMOTHY McCARTHY LOGICAL FORM Consider the following argument: All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is mortal. Intuitively, what makes this a valid argument has nothing to do with Socrates, men or mortality. Rather, each sentence in the argument exhibits a certain ‘logical form’ and those forms, taken together, constitute a pattern that guarantees the truth of the conclusion given the truth of the premises. More generally, the logical form of a sentence of natural language is what determines both its logical properties and its logical relations to other sentences. The logical form of a sentence of natural language is typically represented in a theory of logical form by a well-formed formula in a ‘logically pure’ language whose only meaningful symbols are expressions with fixed, distinctly logical meanings (for example, quantifiers). Thus, the logical forms of the sentences in the above argument would be represented in a theory based on pure predicate logic by the formulas ‘ x(Fx → Gx)’, ‘Fy’ and ‘Gy’, respectively, where ‘F’ and ‘G’ are free predicate variables and ‘y’ a free individual variable. The argument’s intuitive validity is then explained by the fact that the logical forms of the premises formally entail the logical form of the conclusion. The primary goal of a theory of logical form is to explain as broad a range of such intuitive logical phenomena as possible in terms of the logical forms that it assigns to sentences of natural language. Further reading Russell, B.A.W. (1914) ‘Logic as the Essence of Philosophy’, in Our Knowledge of the External World , London: Allen & Unwin, 33–53; London: Routledge, 1993. (Perhaps Russell’s strongest statement of his view of the role of logical form in logic and philosophy.) CHRISTOPHER MENZEL LOGICAL LAWS There are at least three different kinds of answer to the question ‘What is a logical law?’ One establishes what it means for something to be a logical law. This answers the semantic question: What is the meaning of ‘logical law’? The second explains what makes something a logical law. This answers the metaphysical question: What is the ground of logical law? The third tells you what the logical laws are. This answers the question: What is the extension of ‘logical law’? Even though logic is often seen as a complete science, the answers to all three questions are disputed. For example, there are at least three different conceptions of what it means for something to be a law of logic. Different conceptions account for logic in terms of necessity, truth in all models, and proof. There are also different answers to the metaphysical question. If truth-preservation is central to logic, then the ground of logic depends on the metaphysics of truth. If logic is a matter of the meanings of terms, then the metaphysics of meaning is important for logic. Unfortunately, there is no widespread agreement on the metaphysics of meaning or truth. Finally, there is no widespread agreement as to what the logical laws are. There are two general disputes here. First, it is not clear what notions count as logical. Does logic contain laws about identity, second-order quantification or modality? Second, given agreement on the scope of logic, there are still questions about the logical laws in that area. Intuitionists, quantum logicians, relevance and paraconsistent logicians each reject things taken as laws by others, even in the language of ‘and’, ‘or’ and ‘not’. See also: LOGICAL FORM Further reading Anderson, A.R. and Belnap, N.D., Jr (1975) Entailment: The Logic of Relevance and Necessity , vol. 1, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Gives the canonical exposition of much of the work on logics of relevance implication and entailment.) GREG RESTALL LOGICAL POSITIVISM Logical positivism (logical empiricism, neo-positivism) originated in Austria and Germany in the 1920s. Inspired by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century revolutions in logic, mathematics and mathematical physics, it aimed to create a similarly revolutionary scientific
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Page 506 philosophy purged of the endless controversies of traditional metaphysics. Its most important representatives were members of the Vienna Circle who gathered around Moritz Schlick at the University of Vienna (including Rudolf Carnap, Herbert Feigl, Kurt Gödel, Hans Hahn, Karl Menger, Otto Neurath and Friedrich Waismann) and those of the Society for Empirical Philosophy who gathered around Hans Reichenbach at the University of Berlin (including Walter Dubislav, Kurt Grelling and Carl Hempel). Although not officially members of either group, the Austrian philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper were, at least for a time, closely associated with logical positivism. The logical positivist movement reached its apogee in Europe in the years 1928–34, but the rise of National Socialism in 1933 marked the effective end of this phase. Thereafter, however, many of its most important representatives emigrated to the USA. Here logical positivism found a receptive audience among such pragmatically, empirically and logically minded American philosophers as Charles Morris, Ernest Nagel and W.V. Quine. Thus transplanted to the English-speaking world of ‘analytic’ philosophy it exerted a tremendous influence – particularly in philosophy of science and the application of logical and mathematical techniques to philosophical problems more generally. This influence began to wane around 1960, with the rise of a pragmatic form of naturalism due to Quine and a historical-sociological approach to the philosophy of science due mainly to Thomas Kuhn. Both of these later trends, however, developed in explicit reaction to the philosophy of logical positivism and thereby attest to its enduring significance. See also: POSITIVISM IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES; THEORIES, SCIENTIFIC Further reading Ayer, A. (ed.) (1959) Logical Positivism , New York: Free Press. (Very useful short collection. Contains, in particular, some of the most important papers from the ‘protocol-sentence’ debate.) Frank P. (1949) Modern Science and its Philosophy , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Classic discussion of the positivist movement by a participant. Contains, in particular, good discussions of the influence of Mach and Poincaré.) MICHAEL FRIEDMAN LOGICAL SYMBOLS, TABLE OF Set theory
x
A
Set abstraction (read: ‘the set of things x such that x has P’) Membership (‘ x is an element of A’) Subset (‘ A is a subset of B ’) Proper subset Superset (‘ A is a superset of B ’) Proper superset
Complement of A A1 × ... × AnCartesian product of A1,..., An Difference of A and B Symmetric difference of A and B Intersection (meet, logical product) of A and B Intersection of the family of sets γ
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Page 508 Russell were the first proponents of such a view; this is inaccurate, in that Frege did not make such a claim for all of mathematics. On the other hand, Richard Dedekind deserves to be mentioned among those who first expressed the conviction that arithmetic is a branch of logic. The logicist claim has two parts: that our knowledge of mathematical theorems is grounded fully in logical demonstrations from basic truths of logic; and that the concepts involved in such theorems, and the objects whose existence they imply, are of a purely logical nature. Thus Frege maintained that arithmetic requires no assumptions besides those of logic; that the concept of number is a concept of pure logic; and that numbers themselves are, as he put it, logical objects. This view of mathematics would not have been possible without a profound transformation of logic that occurred in the late nineteenth century – most especially through the work of Frege. Before that time, actual mathematical reasoning could not be carried out under the recognized logical forms of argument: this circumstance lent considerable plausibility to Immanuel Kant’s teaching that mathematical reasoning is not ‘purely discursive’, but relies upon ‘constructions’ grounded in intuition. The new logic, however, made it possible to represent standard mathematical reasoning in the form of purely logical derivations – as Frege, on the one hand, and Russell, in collaboration with Whitehead, on the other, undertook to show in detail. It is now generally held that logicism has been undermined by two developments: first, the discovery that the principles assumed in Frege’s major work are inconsistent, and the more or less unsatisfying character (or so it is claimed) of the systems devised to remedy this defect; second, the epoch-making discovery by Kurt Gödel that the ‘logic’ that would be required for derivability of all mathematical truths can in principle not be ‘formalized’. Whether these considerations ‘refute’ logicism will be considered further below. See also: ARITHMETIC, PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES IN Further reading Carnap, R. (1939) Foundations of Logic and Mathematics, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (A lucid account of Carnap’s view of the relation of logic to the analysis of language, and of how mathematics – a part of the purely logical aspect of language – acquires relevance for the formulation of propositions of empirical science.) Heijenoort, J. van (ed.) (1967) From Frege to Gödel: A Source Book in Mathematical Logic , 1879–1931, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Includes translations of several of important works, with introductions.) HOWARD STEIN LOGICS, FREE see FREE LOGICS; FREE LOGICS, PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES IN LOGICS, INFINITARY see INFINITARY LOGICS LOGICS, ORDINAL see ORDINAL LOGICS LOGOS The noun logos derives from the Greek verb legein, meaning ‘to say’ something significant. Logos developed a wide variety of senses, including ‘description’, ‘theory’ (sometimes as opposed to ‘fact’), ‘explanation’, ‘reason’, ‘reasoning power’, ‘principle’, ‘ratio’, ‘prose’. Logos emerges as a philosophical term with Heraclitus ( c .540–c .480 BC), for whom it provided the link between rational discourse and the world’s rational structure. It was freely used by Plato and Aristotle and especially by the Stoics, who interpreted the rational world order as immanent deity. Platonist philosophers gave pre-eminence to nous, the intuitive intellect expressed in logos . To Philo of Alexandria and subsequently to Christian theologians it meant ‘the Word’, a derivative divine power, at first seen as subordinate but eventually coordinated with the Father. Further reading Kahn, C.H. (1979) The Art and Thought of Heraclitus , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Authoritative study with texts and translations.) CHRISTOPHER STEAD LOISY, ALFRED (1857–1940) Loisy was a French biblical exegete who worked in the tradition of biblical criticism whose earlier members included D.F. Strauss and Ernest Renan. His critical views involved a sharp separation between the Jesus of history and the Christ of Catholic faith, and he came to regard the doctrine of the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ, a central Christian doctrine, as merely metaphorical and symbolic. He
has been called the father of Catholic modernism. Further reading Loisy, A. (1933) La Naissance du christianisme, trans. L.P. Jacks, The Birth of the Christian Religion,
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Page 509 London: Allen & Unwin, 1948. (Loisy’s account of the origins of Christianity.) KEITH E. YANDELL LOMBARD, PETER (1095/1100–1160) Peter Lombard’s philosophical views are important given the formative role his Sententiae in IV libris distinctae (Four Books of Sentences) played in the education of university theologians in the high Middle Ages, many of whom were also philosophers. Peter staunchly opposes theologies, cosmologies and anthropologies of a Platonic or Neoplatonic type. While conversant with new trends in logic in his day, he is disinclined to treat theological issues as illustrations of the rules of formal logic or natural philosophy, preferring to view them from a metaphysical perspective. In his doctrine of God he deliberately eschews terminology associated with any one philosophical school. In his anthropology and sacramental theology he shows a marked preference for Aristotelianism. The hospitability of his theology to Aristotelianism and to a philosophical treatment of a range of theological questions made his Sentences elastic enough to accommodate the reception of Greco-Arabic thought and to serve as a pedagogical framework usable by philosophers of every persuasion during the succeeding three centuries. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM, MEDIEVAL Further reading Colish, M.L. (1994) Peter Lombard, Leiden: Brill, 2 vols. (The only full-length modern study, covering all aspects of Peter’s thought, with extensive bibliography.) MARCIA L. COLISH LONERGAN, BERNARD JOSEPH FRANCIS (1904–84) The Canadian philosopher and theologian Bernard Lonergan approached the problems of philosophy by inviting his readers to attend to the mental acts in which they engage when they come to know anything. He claimed that these acts are of three fundamental kinds: ‘experience’ of the data of sensation, feeling or mental activity; ‘understanding’ possible explanations of that experience; and ‘judgment’ that one such explanation is in each case certainly or probably so. Denial that we engage in these three types of mental activity is actually self-destructive, since we have to engage in them in the very act of justifying such denial. In getting to grips with what it is to come to know, we also gain a vital clue as to the overall nature of the world which is to be known; and light is thrown on the relation between the natural and the human sciences, and on the questions of ethics and religion. See also: RELIGION AND SCIENCE Further reading Crowe, F.C. (1992) Lonergan, London: Chapman. (A general introduction to Lonergan’s thought, against the background of his life.) Lonergan, B.J.F. (1957) Insight. A Study of Human Understanding , Toronto, Ont.: Toronto University Press, 1992. (Lonergan’s most complete exposition of his philosophy.) HUGO MEYNELL LORENZEN, PAUL (1915–95) Paul Lorenzen, German philosopher of mathematics and sciences, programmatically set about implementing mathematical constructivism in wider philosophical contexts. Trained as a mathematician, he spent the greater part of his teaching career at the University of Erlangen, Germany. Here he assembled what came to be known as the ‘Erlangen school’, which included Wilhelm Kamlah, Kuno Lorenz, Jürgen Mittelstra223;, Peter Janich, Oswald Schwemmer and others. In its heyday, the school also influenced work at the universities of Konstanz and Marburg, and was one of the main alternatives to ‘traditional’ philosophies such as hermeneutics. The school’s interests embraced mathematical logic, the major thinkers of the idealist and hermeneutic traditions (though not Heidegger), and a high level of philological expertise in classical philosophy. Regrettably, though, its encyclopedic initiative has remained incomplete, and the school has largely disbanded in the face of increasing polarization between straight analytical philosophy and a tougher response by existing traditions. To some extent, Lorenzen’s own express interest in left-wing political traditions became a liability in view of the sobriety and retrenchment that characterized the 1980s. Further reading Roberts, J. (1992) The Logic of Reflection , New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. (Relates Lorenzen to Frege, Wittgenstein, Husserl and Habermas.) JULIAN ROBERTS
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Page 510 LOSEV, ALEKSEI FËDOROVICH (1893–1988) A leading Russian philosopher, religious thinker and classical scholar of the twentieth century, Losev made important contributions to the theory of language, myth and symbol, as well as to the understanding of ancient Greek thought and culture. He strongly resisted central aspects of modernization, in particular the spread of what he saw as ‘bourgeois’ and ‘philistine’ secularism, positivism, materialism, atheism, selfish individualism and ‘machine civilization’. A scholar of staggering erudition with a lifelong passion for the ancient world, especially the thought of Plato, Losev could be a fierce, sometimes abusive polemicist. His relation to the Soviet regime ranged from open defiance in the late 1920s (which led to prison and the gulag for almost three years) to at least pro forma acceptance of certain key elements of Marxist ideology and philosophy in the period between 1953 and 1988. Further reading Scanlan, J.P. (1994) ‘A.F. Losev and Mysticism in Russian Philosophy’, in Studies in East European Thought, 46: 263–86. (A detailed study of Losev’s changing views concerning the place of mysticism in the history of Russian thought.) GEORGE L. KLINE LOSSKY, NICHOLAS ONUFRIEVICH (1870–1965) In 1922, the Russian neo-Leibnizian idealist Nicholas Onufrievich Lossky, one of his country’s most distinguished professional philosophers, was banished from Russia along with more than a hundred other non-Marxist intellectuals whose influence the communist authorities feared. A prolific writer before his exile, Lossky continued to write and publish widely abroad, becoming not only the dean of the Russian émigré philosophical community but a thinker well known in Europe and the English-speaking world through many translations of his works. The systematic structure and rationalistic tone of Lossky’s philosophizing set him apart from most of his fellow Russian idealists, but like them he proceeded in his thinking from a strong conviction of the truth of Christianity; he wrote of his commitment to ‘working out a system of metaphysics necessary for a Christian interpretation of the world’ (1951: 266). He adhered to a radical form of theism according to which the created natural order has nothing in common ontologically with the divine order that created it. Lossky is best known for a set of interrelated views in epistemology and metaphysics connected with what he considered his fundamental philosophical insight – the principle that ‘everything is immanent in everything’. According to his doctrine of ‘intuitivism’ in epistemology, all cognition is intuitive; there is an ‘epistemological co-ordination’ of subject and object such that any object, whether sensory, intellectual or mystical, is immediately present in the mind of the knower. As the heir to a Leibnizian tradition in Russian metaphysics represented before him by Aleksei Kozlov and others, Lossky advanced a theory of ‘hierarchical personalism’ in which Leibniz’s monads became interacting ‘substantival agents’ existing at various levels of development; the choices of these ideal beings generate the material world (hence Lossky’s term ‘ideal realism’ for his ontology) and their reconfigurations and reincarnations move the cosmic process towards the perfection of the Kingdom of God. In his ‘ontological theory of values’ Lossky affirms a metaphysical basis for absolute values and attributes all evil – including diseases and natural disasters – to the misuse of free will by substantival agents, both human and subhuman. Further reading Kohanski, A.S. (1936) Lossky’s Theory of Knowledge , Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University. (An exposition and analysis of Lossky’s epistemology and its metaphysical implications; contains bibliographies of works by and about Lossky.) Lossky, N.O. (1951) History of Russian Philosophy , New York: International Universities Press. (Includes Lossky’s summary of his own philosophy and that of the other Russian neo-Leibnizians, 158–62, 251– 66, 381–83.) JAMES P. SCANLAN LOTTERY PARADOX see PARADOXES, EPISTEMIC LOTZE, RUDOLPH HERMANN (1817–81) Lotze was among the pre-eminent figures in German academic philosophy between the demise of Absolute Idealism and the rise of Neo-Kantianism proper. He sought to avoid two extremes: first, that of an idealism which seeks to deduce the world from a single, general
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Page 511 principle; and, second, that of a realism which, by divorcing reality from the mind, splits the world into two utterly separate spheres. The search for knowledge should be tempered by a recognition of the results of natural science and sobered by the awareness that reality will, by necessity, always outstrip thought. Furthermore, our mental life cannot be reduced to purely intellectual functions: feelings and evaluations, for example, are also an integral part of human existence. While there can be no a priori deduction of a metaphysical system, a teleological interpretation, which elucidates the ultimate value of man and the world, must supplement purely naturalistic explanation. The universe has the significance of an unfolding plan, where things are subject to the general laws of order, expressing spiritual import. In this way, Lotze combined a kind of respect for the findings of scientific research with his own peculiar idealistic programme. Further reading Lotze, R.H. (1856–8, 1858–64) Mikrokosmus, Ideen zur Naturgeschichte und Geschichte der Menschheit, Versuch einer Anthropologie , Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 3rd edn, 1876–80; trans. E. Hamilton and E.E.C. Jones Microcosmos: An Essay Concerning Man and his Relation to the World , Edinburgh: T.&T. Clark, 1885. (Lotze’s popular exposition of his views on human nature and on the meaning of human existence.) Woodward, W.R. (1999) From Mechanism to Value. Hermann Lotze: Physician, Philosopher , Psychologist 1817–1881, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. (The definitive study of Lotze in English to date.) DAVID SULLIVAN LOVE Love is usually understood to be a powerful emotion involving an intense attachment to an object and a high evaluation of it. On some understandings, however, love does not involve emotion at all, but only an active interest in the wellbeing of the object. On other accounts, love is essentially a relationship involving mutuality and reciprocity, rather than an emotion. Moreover, there are many varieties of love, including erotic/romantic love, friendly love, and love of humanity. Different cultures also recognize different types of love. Love has, as well, a complicated archaeology: because it has strong links with early experiences of attachment, it can exist in the personality at different levels of depth and articulateness, posing special problems for self-knowledge. It is mistake to try to give too unified an account of such a complex set of phenomena. Love has been understood by many philosophers to be a source of great richness and energy in human life. But even those who praise its contribution have seen it as a potential threat to virtuous living. Philosophers in the Western tradition have therefore been preoccupied with proposing accounts of the reform or ‘ascent’ of love, in order to demonstrate that there are ways of retaining the energy and beauty of this passion while removing its bad consequences. See also: EMOTIONS, NATURE OF; SEXUALITY, PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Murdoch, I. (1993) Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, New York: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press. (Novelist-philosopher discusses the relationship between love and a vision of the good.) Price, A. (1989) Love and Friendship in Plato and Aristotle , Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Excellent treatment of the texts, with subtle insights about the topic.) MARTHA C. NUSSBAUM LÖWENHEIM–SKOLEM THEOREMS AND NONSTANDARD MODELS Sometimes we specify a structure by giving a description and counting anything that satisfies the description as just another model of it. But at other times we start from a conception we try to articulate, and then our articulation may fail to pin down what we had in mind. Sets seem to have had such a fate. For millennia sets lay fallow in logic, but when cultivated by mathematics in the nineteenth century, they seemed to bear both a foundation and a theory of the infinite. The paradoxes of set theory seemed to threaten this promise. With an eye to proving freedom from paradox, versions of set theory were articulated rigorously. But around 1920, Löwenheim and Skolem proved that no such formalized set theory can come out true only in the hugely infinite world it seemed to reveal, for if it is true in such a world, it will also be true in a world of the smallest infinite size. (Versions of this remain true even if we augment the standard expressive devices used to formalize set theory.) But then, Skolem inferred, we cannot articulate sets determinately enough for them to constitute a firm foundation for mathematics.
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Page 512 Further reading Chang, C.C. and Keisler, H.J. (1973) Model Theory , Amsterdam: North Holland, 3rd edn, 1990, 141–2. (The authors present a quick but contemporary version of Skolem functions and hulls.) W.D. HART LU HSIANG-SHAN see LU XIANGSHAN LU XIANGSHAN (1139–93) A leading Chinese philosopher of the twelfth century, Lu Xiangshan was the founder of that dimension of neo-Confucian thought known as the learning of the heart-and-mind. Lu emphasized the necessity for personal responsibility and action in everyday affairs, as opposed to the search for moral understanding through classical texts. See also: SELF-CULTIVATION IN CHINESE PHILOSOPHY Further reading Chan Wing-tsit (1963) A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ch. 33, 572–87. (Selected translations and brief comments; Lu is viewed as an idealist, in contrast to Zhu Xi.) Huang, S. (1944) Lu Hsiang-shan: A Twelfth Century Chinese Idealist Philosopher , New Haven, CN: American Oriental Society. (General introduction to Lu’s thought, context and influence; he is viewed here as a monistic idealist.) ANNE D. BIRDWHISTELL LUCIAN ( c . AD 120–80) Lucian of Samosata (in ancient Syria) was one of the most original and engaging figures of post-classical Greek culture. He produced a diverse and influential corpus comparable in size to that of Plato (consisting of seventy-six authentic libelli). Formally the dialogue (in both Platonic and Cynic forms) dominates (thirty-six of seventy-three prose works), but there are also satiric narratives, tall tales (for example, A True Story), ‘Cynic’ diatribes (for example, On Mourning ), and multifarious lectures, or essays (for example, The Master of Rhetoric ) in his singular oeuvre . David Hume is said to have read Lucian’s comic Dialogue of the Gods on his deathbed. See also: CYNICS Further reading Lucian ( c . AD 140–80) Works, trans. A.M. Harmon, K. Kilburn and M.D. Macleod, Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and London: Heinemann, 1913–17, 8 vols; trans. H.W. Fowler and F.G. Fowler, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905, 4 vols. (The former includes parallel Greek text and English translation; the latter is an almost complete English translation by two masters of English prose.) R. BRACHT BRANHAM LUCRETIUS ( c .94–c .55 BC) Titus Lucretius Carus was a Roman Epicurean philosopher and poet. About his life and personality little can be said with certainty, yet his only known work, ‘ On the Nature of Things’ (De rerum natura), is of considerable size and one of the most brilliant achievements of Latin poetry. A didactic poem in six books, it expounds Epicurean physics. Its manifesto is to abolish the fear of gods and of death by demonstrating that the soul is mortal and the world not governed by gods but by mechanical laws. See also: ATOMISM, ANCIENT Further reading Lucretius ( c .55 BC) On the Nature of Things, ed. C. Bailey, Titi Lucreti Cari De rerum natura libri sex , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 3 vols, 1947; trans. R.E. Latham, revised by J. Godwin, Lucretius On the Nature of the Universe, London: Penguin, 1994. (Bailey is the monumental standard edition, with text, translation and commentary, still highly informative and not fully superseded; Latham offers a serviceable English translation.) MICHAEL ERLER LUKÁCS, GEORG (1885–1971) Lukács’ Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein (History and Class Consciousness) (1923) is, for both its intrinsic merits and its enormous influence, the most important work of Marxist philosophy to have appeared in the twentieth century. It sought to render explicit the dependence of Marx’s thought on Hegel’s dialectic as a means of elucidating both the distinctive character of historical materialism as a form of theoretical inquiry and its revolutionary rejection of the modes of thinking prevailing in capitalist society. Lukács’ general aim had been shared by the authors of the first philosophical reflections on Marx’s project – Engels and Plekhanov, for example, had stressed its debt to Hegel. Lukács, however,
sought to draw Marx
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Page 513 into that broad current of twentieth-century Continental thought which has drawn a sharp distinction between the methods of the physical sciences, suitable at best for analysing inanimate nature, and those of the human sciences, whose aim is to interpret human actions in the light of the thoughts which move them. Thus Lukács sees Marx as the theorist, not of the laws of the dialectic or of inevitable social transformation, but of revolutionary subjectivity, of the proletariat as ‘the identical subject–object’ of history. This was a version of Marxism which suited the times, in the immediate aftermath of the Russian Revolution of October 1917. As the revolutionary tides receded, Lukács found philosophical and political reasons for retreating to a more orthodox historical materialism which laid much greater stress on objective constraints and processes than his version of the early 1920s had. Yet the force of its overall argument and the quality of its individual analyses have made History and Class Consciousness a constant reference-point in subsequent discussions of Marxist theory. See also: FRANKFURT SCHOOL Further reading Lowy, M. (1979) George Lukács – From Romanticism to Bolshevism , London: New Left Books. (A careful, politically shrewd account of Lukács’ formation as an intellectual, culminating in History and Class Consciousness, but also dealing briefly with his later career.) Lukács, G. (1923) Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein, Berlin: Malik-Verlag; trans. R. Livingstone, History and Class Consciousness, London: Merlin, 1971. (The most important single work of twentiethcentury Marxist philosophy; the English edition contains a highly self-critical preface written in 1967.) ALEX CALLINICOS ŁUKASIEWICZ, JAN (1878–1956) Before 1918, the Polish philosopher Łukasiewicz’s interests centred on logic (in the broad sense) and philosophy, and he worked on induction and probability. He also wrote an important historical book on the principle of contradiction in Aristotle. After 1918, Łukasiewicz concentrated almost entirely on mathematical logic and was the main organizer of the Warsaw School of Logic. The discovery of manyvalued systems of logic is perhaps the most important result he achieved. He also invented an ingenious logical symbolism in which brackets (or other punctuation signs) are not necessary (bracket-free or Polish notation). Propositional calculi became a favourite topic of Łukasiewicz’s logical investigations. The history of logic was another subject in which Łukasiewicz achieved important results. See also: POLISH LOGIC Further reading Łukasiewicz, J. (1970) Selected Works, ed. L. Borkowski, Amsterdam and Warsaw: North Holland and PWN. (A selection of the most important logical and philosophical papers of Łukasiewicz.) Woleński, J. (1989) Logic and Philosophy in the Lvov-Warsaw School , Dordrecht: Kluwer. (Chapters 1, 3, 5, 6 and 10 contain information about Łukasiewicz’s views in philosophy as well as his works in logic and philosophy of science.) JAN WOLEŃSKI LULL, RAMON see LLULL, RAMON LUNYU see CONFUCIUS LUSHI CHUNQIU The Lushi chunqiu (Spring and Autumn Annals of Master Lu Buwei), composed 241–238 BC, marks a firm beginning for the eclectic movement in Qin and Han philosophy. It embraces various pre-Qin philosophies such as Lao– Zhuang and Huang–Lao Daoism, Confucianism, Mozi, Legalism, the logicians, the military arts, Agriculturalists, Yang Zhu, Zou Yen and Story Tellers. As a compendium of classical knowledge, the Lushi chunqiu contains cultural and philosophical material on the art of rulership. See also: CHINESE PHILOSOPHY; CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY, CHINESE; DAOIST PHILOSOPHY Further readings Lushi chunqiu (241–238 BC), trans. R. Wilhelm, Frühling und Herbst des Lü Bu We, Düsseldorf: Eugen Diederichs Verlag, 1979. (The first complete translation of the Lushi chunqiu in a Western language.) JAMES D. SELLMANN LÜ-SHIH CH’UN-CH’IU see LUSHI CHUNQIU LUTHER, MARTIN (1483–1546) Martin Luther was a German Augustinian monk who found the theology and penitential practices of his times inadequate for overcoming
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Page 514 fears about his salvation. He turned first to a theology of humility, whereby confession of one’s own utter sinfulness is all that God asks, and then to a theology of justification by faith, in which human beings are seen as incapable of any turning towards God by their own efforts. Without preparation on the part of sinners, God turns to them and destroys their trust in themselves, producing within them trust in his promises made manifest in Jesus Christ. Regarding them in unity with Christ, God treats them as if they had Christ’s righteousness: he ‘justifies’ them. Faith is produced in the sinner by the Word of God concerning Jesus Christ in the Bible, and by the work of the Holy Spirit internally showing the sinner the true subject matter of the Bible. It is not shaped by philosophy, since faith’s perspective transcends and overcomes natural reason. Faith, through the working of God’s Holy Spirit within the believer, naturally produces good works, but justification is not dependent upon them – they are free expressions of faith in love. Nevertheless, secular government with its laws and coercion is still necessary in this world because there are so few true Christians. Luther’s theology brought him into conflict with the Church hierarchy and was instrumental in the instigation of the Reformation, in which the Protestant churches split from Rome. See also: CALVIN, J.; JUSTIFICATION, RELIGIOUS; MELANCHTHON, P. Further reading Luther, M. (1517) Disputatio pro declaratione et vitutis indulgentiarum, in D. Martin Luthers Werke , Harvard University Press. vol. 1; trans. C.M. Jacobs and H.J. Grimm, Ninety-five Theses, or Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences , in Luther’s Works, vol. 31, Career of the Reformer I, ed. H.J. Grimm, Philadelphia, PA: Fortress/Muhlenberg, 1957. (Began the controversy that led to Luther’s break with Rome: a seminal document of the Reformation.) Oberman, H.A. (1986) The Dawn of the Reformation: Essays in Late Medieval and Early Reformation Thought, Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark. (Important and careful articles trying to sort out the precise nature and role of Luther’s innovations and contributions.) M.A. HIGTON LUXEMBURG, ROSA (1871–1919) Rosa Luxemburg, of Polish-Jewish origins, was for most of her life a prominent activist and theorist on the radical left of the German Social Democratic Party. She defended revolutionary Marxism against the ‘revisionist’ critique of Eduard Bernstein, and developed an original and controversial Marxist theory of imperialism. She advocated direct revolutionary action by the masses, as contrasted with Lenin’s insistence on ‘democratic centralism’ and the leading role of the Party. See also: REVOLUTION; MARXISM, WESTERN Further reading Luxemburg, R. (1971) Selected Political Writings of Rosa Luxemburg , ed. D. Howard, New York and London: Monthly Review Press. (A useful selection of her main writings.) Nettl, J.P. (1966) Rosa Luxemburg , London: Oxford University Press. (An excellent and, indeed, authoritative intellectual and political biography.) H. TUDOR LYOTARD, JEAN-FRANÇOIS (1924–) Jean-François Lyotard is a prominent French philosopher who is generally considered the leading theorist of postmodernism. His work constitutes an insistent critique of philosophical closure, historical totalization and political dogmatism and a re-evaluation of the nature of ethics, aesthetics and politics after the demise of totalizing metatheories. In his early works, Lyotard confronts the limitations of dialectical philosophy and structuralist linguistics and analyses the disruptive, extradiscursive force of desire and the nonrepresentational or figurative dimensions of art and literature. In La Condition postmoderne (The Postmodern Condition), he treats narrative pragmatics and language games as the bases for a critical approach to postmodern art and politics, as well as to the problem of justice. Recent texts insist on the obligation of philosophy, politics and writing to bear witness to heterogeneity and to what is repressed or forgotten in all representations of the past. His work questions the limits of philosophy, aesthetics and political theory in terms of problems linked to the irreducible complexities of art and literature and the nonrepresentational affects of historical-political events. See also: POSTMODERNISM Further reading Benjamin, A. (ed.) (1992) Judging Lyotard, London and New York: Routledge. (A good collection of essays from different critical perspectives focused on the implications of Lyotard’s approach to postmodernity, of his
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Page 515 differences with Habermas and of his approach to aesthetic and political judgment.) Lyotard, J.-F. (1979) La Condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir, Paris: Éditions de Minuit; trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge , Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. (A critical approach to the conditions of knowledge which defends the self-legitimating pragmatics of ‘little narratives’ in a postmodern era when the foundational, totalizing metanarratives used to legitimate the sciences and the arts have collapsed and are no longer credible.) DAVID CARROLL
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Page 516 M MACH, ERNST (1838–1916) Mach was an Austrian physicist and philosopher. Though not one of the great philosophers, he was tremendously influential in the development of ‘scientific philosophy’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A vigorous opponent of ‘metaphysics’, he was celebrated as a progenitor of logical positivism. His work is regarded as a limiting case of pure empiricism; he stands between the empiricism of Hume and J.S. Mill, and that of the Vienna Circle. Mach’s positivist conception of science saw its aims as descriptive and predictive; explanation is downgraded. Scientific laws and theories are economical means of describing phenomena. Theories that refer to unobservable entities – including atomic theory – may impede inquiry. They should be eliminated where possible in favour of theories involving ‘direct descriptions’ of phenomena. Mach claimed to be a scientist, not a philosopher, but the ‘Machian philosophy’ was ‘neutral monism’. Close to phenomenalism, it saw the world as functionally related complexes of sensations, and aspired to antimetaphysical neutrality. See also: SCIENCE, NINETEENTH CENTURY PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Blackmore, J. (1972) Ernst Mach – His Life , Work and Influence, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. (Pedestrian, but the only full-length biography.) Mach, E. (1894) Populärwissenschaftliche Vorlesungen , Leipzig; trans. T. McCormack (1894) Popular Scientific Lectures , La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1986. (Exposition of familiar Machian scientific themes for a more general audience.) ANDY HAMILTON MACHIAVELLI, NICCOLÒ (1469–1527) Florentine diplomat, dramatist and political thinker, Machiavelli’s treatise, Il principe (The Prince) (1532), has earned him notoriety as a political immoralist (or at least an amoralist) and a teacher of evil. In The Prince, Machiavelli posits a complex relationship between ethics and politics that associates princely virtù with the capacity to know and act within the political world as it ‘is’, and with the beastly abilities to dispense violence and practise deception. Behind this argument dwells the distinctly Machiavellian insight that politics is a realm of appearances where the practice of moral or Christian virtues often results in a prince’s ruin, while knowing ‘how not to be good’ may result in greater security and wellbeing for both prince and people. Machiavelli warns that the prince’s possibilities for success in this matter are always mediated by fortune; hence the prudent prince is one who is prepared to resist fortune by adapting his procedure to the times and his nature to ‘the necessity of the case’. A less notorious but equally influential text is the Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio (Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livy) (1531), in which Machiavelli offers a defence of popular liberty and republican government that takes the ancient republic of Rome as its model and emphasizes the role of the people in the ‘public administration’ of the city. However, Machiavelli also argues that a republic is only as successful in self-governance as its citizens are infused with civic virtù and therefore not corrupted. Accordingly, he praises the work of political founders who craft republican laws and institutions, and religious founders who fuse God and patria as one in the people’s hearts. The apparent tension between Machiavelli’s republican sympathies in Discourses and his elitist proclivities in The Prince has helped to fuel a vast interpretive literature concerning his political attitudes, his theory of politics, and the nature and meaning of ‘machiavellianism’ in Western political thought. See also: POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, HISTORY OF Further reading Grazia, S. de (1989) Machiavelli in Hell , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Pulitzer Prize-winning biography.) Machiavelli, N. (1532) Il principe (The Prince), in The Prince and The Discourses , trans. L. Ricci, New York: Modern Library, 1950. (The famous treaty on power, conduct, effectiveness and princely virtù in politics that earned Machiavelli his reputation as a political ‘immoralist’.) MARY G. DIETZ
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Page 517 MACINTYRE, ALASDAIR (1929–) Alasdair MacIntyre has contributed to the diverse fields of social, moral and political philosophy. He is one of the leading proponents of a virtue ethical approach in moral philosophy, part of a wider attempt to recover an Aristotelian conception of both morality and politics. His return to ancient sources has been powered by a critical indictment of the modern moral predicament, which MacIntyre regards as theoretically confused and practically fragmented; only a return to a tradition which synthesizes Aristotelian and Augustinian themes will restore rationality and intelligibility to contemporary moral and political life. Further reading MacIntyre, A. (1981) After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory , London: Duckworth, 2nd edn, with Postscript, 1985. (Clearest statement of the whole project and the account of virtue and the good life. Postscript is a valuable clarification.) ALAN THOMAS McTAGGART, JOHN McTAGGART ELLIS (1866–1925) McTaggart was one of the last of the ‘British Idealists’, the group of British philosophers, such as Bernard Bosanquet and F.H. Bradley, who took their inspiration from Hegel. In his early writings from the 1890s, McTaggart gave a critical exposition of themes from Hegel’s logic before advancing his own distinctive idealist positions concerning time, the mind, and reality in general. But in his writings from 1910 he developed an independent account of the structure of existence from which he then argued for the same idealist positions as before. The thesis for which McTaggart is now most famous is that of the unreality of time; what is even more difficult to come to terms with is his thesis that the ultimate reality of the world comprises a community of selves wholly constituted by their loving perceptions of each other. This thesis is a manifestation of a mysticism that is an essential element in McTaggart’s philosophy; yet this mysticism is combined with a rationalist determination, reminiscent of Spinoza, to vindicate mystical insights by the light of pure reason alone. Further reading Dickinson, G.L. (1931) J. McT. E. McTaggart, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (A personal memoir which conveys McTaggart’s strange personality.) McTaggart, J.M.E. (1927) The Nature of Existence , vol. 2, ed. C.D. Broad, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Published post-humously; McTaggart argues that only his idealism satisfies the a priori conditions of vol. 1.) THOMAS BALDWIN MADAME DE STAËL see STAËL-HOLSTEIN, ANNE-LOUISE-GERMAINE, MME DE MĀDHAVA (d. 1386) Mādhava was a minister, scholar and philosopher in India in the fourteenth century. He gave support and advice at the founding of the Vijayanagara Empire in southern India, which lasted 300 years. He is best known for his Sarvadarśanasaṃgraha (Survey of the Major Philosophical Systems). In it, he presented sixteen systems of philosophy, starting with the materialists, discussing the Buddhists, Jainas, several Hindu schools and the school of Logic (Nyāya), and ending with Advaita Vedānta. To him and to many scholars at that time, Advaita Vedānta was the most complete and sophisticated philosophy. Mādhava is often identified with other people, especially Vidyāraṇya, the saint and abbot of a monastery in Sṛngeri. The general view now is that Mādhava may have become a monk, receiving as a religious name that of Vidyāraiyya. This Vidyāraṇya was also an accomplished philosopher. His Pañcadaśī (Fifteen Chapters), a digest of Advaita Vedānta, is still popular today. See also: INDIAN AND TIBETAN PHILOSOPHY Further reading Mādhava (14th century) Sarvadarśanasaṃgraha (Survey of the Major Philosophical Systems), trans. E.B. Cowell and A.E. Gough, The Sarva-darŶana-saṃgraha or Review of the Different Systems of Hindu Philosophy , Chowkhamba Sanskrit Series 10, Varanasi: Chowkhamba, 6th edn, 1961. (An excellent overview of the main ideas of the various philosophical schools. The work exercised considerable influence in the study of Indian philosophies.) EDELTRAUD HARZER CLEAR MADHVA (1238?–1317?) Madhva, Hindu theologian and ascetic, founded the philosophical school commonly called Dvaita Vedānta, but which Madhva and his
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Page 518 followers termed tattvavāda, or realism. The name Dvaita refers to Madhva’s dualistic interpretation of the Hindu canonical texts known as the Upaniṣads, also known as Vedānta. In contrast to the monist and semimonist systems of his two major Vedāntin predecessors, Śankara and Rāmānuja, Madhva asserted the absolute difference between God ( īśvara ) and human souls ( jśva ), claiming that they were uncreated, eternal principles with fundamentally distinct natures. Madhva delineated the respective natures of God and souls so as to assert God’s complete transcendence of the world and to legitimate the practice of devotion as the principal means of attaining liberation from the cycle of rebirth ( saṃsāra). Madhva’s realist epistemology served as the foundation for this ontological emphasis on difference ( bheda ). See also: MONISM, INDIAN; VEDĀNTA Further reading Madhva (1238?–1317?) Srimadvi utattvavinir`aya , trans. S.S. Raghavachar, An Examination of the Truth of Vishnu , Mangalore: Sharada Press, 1971. (Very clear translation of an accessible Madhva text that outlines his basic philosophy; one of the ‘Ten Treatises’.) Sharma, B.N.K. (1961) Sri Madhva’s Teachings in his own Words, Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan. (Provides clear translations of portions of Madhva’s important works in explanatory contexts.) VALERIE STOKER MĀDHYAMIKA BUDDHISM IN INDIA AND TIBET see BUDDHISM, MĀDHYAMIKA: INDIA AND TIBET MAHAĀVĪRA (6th–5th century BC) Mahāvīra’s significance for Jaina philosophy is comparable to that of his contemporary, Buddha, for Buddhist philosophy. Both are regarded as the source of ideas, concepts and categories with farreaching implications for later philosophical activity. In their respective traditions, both Mahāvīra and Buddha are recognized as enlightened or omniscient beings because they grasped the essential nature of reality, human life and the world. The teachings ascribed to them were at first passed on orally and were compiled into their present form several centuries later. See also: JAINA PHILOSOPHY; MANIFOLDNESS, JAINA THEORY OF Further reading Dundas, P. (1992) The Jains, London: Routledge. (An excellent modern survey of the history of Jainism to the present time, based on original sources.) Upadhye, A.N. et al . (eds) (1977) Mahāvīra and his Teachings , Bombay: Bhagavān Mahāvīra 2500th Nirvāṇa Mahotsava Samiti. (Contains a series of articles by eminent scholars, not only on Mahāvāra, but also on Jaina philosophy, religion, literature, history and art.) JAYANDRA SONI MAIMON, ABRAHAM BEN MOSES see MAIMONIDES, ABRAHAM BEN MOSES MAIMON, MOSES BEN see MAIMONIDES, MOSES MAIMON, SALOMON (1753/4–1800) Educated as a rabbi in Lithuania, Shlomo (Salomon) ben Yehoshua migrated to Germany and adopted the surname Maimon in honour of Maimonides. His criticism of Kant’s dualism and his monistic account of the human mind as an imperfect expression of God’s infinite mind influenced Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. Kant regarded him as the critic who understood him best. Maimon’s system combines rational dogmatism with empirical scepticism. As a rational dogmatist, he argues that cognition requires the absolute unity of subject and object. Maimon therefore criticizes Kant’s dualistic divisions between the mental form and extra-mental matter of knowledge, and between the faculties of sensibility and understanding. Experience in Kant’s sense – empirical knowledge – is possible only if these dualisms are merely apparent. Our finite minds must be imperfect expressions of an infinite, divine mind that produces the form and matter of knowledge. Through scientific progress, our minds become more adequate expressions of the infinite mind. Kant has not refuted Hume’s scepticism, which could be refuted only if science became perfect. Perfect science is an ideal for which we must strive but which we will never reach. Maimon is deeply indebted to Maimonides, but he reformulates Maimonidean ideas in light of modern mathematical physics and deploys them within a Kantian investigation of the possibility of experience. The result is a unique encounter between medieval and modern philosophy
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Page 519 that decisively influenced German idealism and remains philosophically interesting. See also: ENLIGHTENMENT, JEWISH; JEWISH PHILOSOPHY IN THE EARLY 19TH CENTURY Further reading Atlas, S. (1965) From Critical to Speculative Idealism: The Philosophy of Salomon Maimon , The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. (A clear and comprehensive account of Maimon’s philosophy.) Bergman, S.H. (1967) The Philosophy of Salomon Maimon , trans. N. Jacobs, Jerusalem: The Magnes Press. (The best comprehensive book on Maimon in English. An excellent introduction.) PAUL FRANKS MAIMONIDES, ABRAHAM BEN MOSES (1186–1237) Jewish theologian, mystical pietist, physician, and the only son of Moses Maimonides, with whom he studied rabbinics, philosophy and medicine. Upon his father’s death, Abraham became the spiritual and temporal head of Egyptian Jewry and a leading rabbinical authority. Using this position, he propagated a form of Jewish pietism, introducing ideas and ritual practices inspired by Islamic mysticism. Moving beyond defence of his father’s legal and philosophical writings, Abraham’s most important work, Kifayat al-‘Abidin (Complete Guide for Devotees) – a monumental compendium of jurisprudence and religious philosophy – develops his own pietist interests. It attracted something of a following in its time but also met with concerted Jewish opposition to its Sufi-inspired ideals. See also: MAIMONIDES, M. Further reading Maimonides, Abraham ben Moses ( c .1230) Kifayat al-‘Abidin (Complete Guide for Devotees), ed. and trans. S. Rosenblatt, The High Ways to Perfection of Abraham Maimonides , New York and Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1927–38. (The Kifayat is a code of laws with pietistic leanings. It is incompletely preserved. Rosenblatt’s edition comprises the Judaeo-Arabic text of the ethical section of the work, with English translation.) PAUL B. FENTON MAIMONIDES, MOSES (1138–1204) Called the Rambam in the Hebrew sources, an acronym on his name, and known in Islamic texts as Musa ibn Maimun, Rabbi Moses ben Maimon is best known in the West as Moses Maimonides and generally recognized as the greatest of the medieval Jewish philosophers. Maimonides lived his mature life in Egypt and earned his living as a physician. He was the author of ten medical works but gained fame in his own lifetime from his work on Jewish law ( halakhah), chiefly the Kitab al-Fara‘id ( Sefer haMitzvot , that is, the Book of the Commandments), cataloguing the traditional 613 commandments of the Pentateuch; Kitab al-Siraj ( Sefer ha-Maor, Perush ha-Mishnah , Commentary on the Mishnah); and, above all, the Mishneh Torah (The Law in Review), a comprehensive and still authoritative code of rabbinic law. The clarity and definitiveness of the Mishneh Torah led to its criticism and (after Maimonides’ death) even condemnation by some rabbis, who prized the ongoing dialectic of Talmudic disputation and felt suspicious of Maimonides’ rationalism. Maimonides’ philosophic masterpiece, the Dalalat al-Ha’irin or Guide to the Perplexed , was written in Arabic, with a view to helping the more intellectually inquisitive readers of the Torah, who were troubled by the apparent disparity between biblical and scientific/philosophical ideas. The work frames a powerful but not supercilious rationalism that locates and accommodates many biblical postulates and profits from the instruction of the rabbinic (Talmudic) sources and from critical appropriation of the achievements of Muslim philosophers and theologians and their Greek predecessors. It defends the doctrine of the world’s creation against the eternalism of Neoplatonic Aristotelians but rejects the notion that creation (or eternity) is subject to proof. Rather, Maimonides argues, creation is preferable to its alternative, and more plausible, because it preserves the idea of divine volition as an explanation for the emergence of complexity from divine simplicity, and because it marks the difference God’s act made to the existence and nature of the world. God is pure perfection and absolute simplicity. The Torah’s anthropomorphisms themselves lead us to that realization, if we follow the dialectic by which prophetic language directs us to ever higher conceptions of divine transcendence. Biblical poetry and the concrete demands of the Law are accommodations to our creaturely limitations. Such accommodations are
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Page 520 made possible by the material side of the prophet’s nature, as manifested in language and imagination, which are, no less than intellect, expressions of God. For matter in general is an expression of God, apprehensible to us through what seems wilful or arbitrary in nature. It is not a positive principle or hypostasis, but it is a necessary concomitant of the act of creation itself. For without it nothing other than God would exist. Our task as humans is to discipline our material natures – not to battle or seek to destroy them but to put them to work in behalf of our self-perfection, through which our inner, intellectual affinity to God will be realized. Maimonides’ synthetic approach, accommodating to one another the insights of reason and the teachings of Scripture and tradition, was highly valued by Aquinas, who frequently cites him, and by other European philosophers such as Jean Bodin. Leibniz warmly appreciated Maimonides’ thought, as his reading notes reveal. Among subsequent Jewish thinkers, Maimonides’ work became the paradigm of Jewish rationalism for his admirers and detractors alike. His philosophy was at the core of the philosophic tradition that Spinoza addressed. Even today practitioners of Jewish philosophy stake out their positions in reference to Maimonides and formulate their own views as appropriations, variants or interpretations of the elements of his thought. See also: BIBLE, HEBREW; HALAKHAH; MIDRASH; NAHMANIDES, M. Further reading Buijs, J. (1988) Maimonides: A Collection of Critical Essays, Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press. (Includes studies by Harry Wolfson, Alexander Altmann, Seymour Feldman, Larry Berman, and others, including some reprinted classics.) Maimonides, M. ( c .1190) Dalalat al-Ha’irin ( Moreh Nevukhim, Guide to the Perplexed), ed. S. Munk, Le Guide des Égarés , Arabic text, critically edited, with annotated French translation, Paris, 1856–66, 3 vols; trans. S. Pines, with an introductory essay by L. Strauss, The Guide of the Perplexed , Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1969; Rambam , extensive selections from the Guide with commentary by L.E. Goodman, New York: Viking, 1976; reissued, Los Angeles, CA: Gee Tee Bee, 1984. (Maimonides’ philosophic masterwork, written in Arabic in the form of a letter to a disciple who has confronted the apparent disparities between philosophic/ scientific and biblical ideas.) L.E. GOODMAN MAINE DE BIRAN, PIERRE-FRANÇOIS (1766–1824) The French philosopher Maine de Biran claimed that the starting point for our understanding of human beings lay in introspective psychology: it was the awareness of willed effort. A proper understanding of the will should be the foundation of all work in psychology, including empirical psychology, as well as in the human sciences in general, which should work together towards a coordinated ‘anthropology’. Contrary to the assumptions of associationist psychology, mental facts were essentially relational, and language was a constitutive feature of them, rather than being a secondary device intended to represent them. But conscious mental life arose from and was influenced by a subconscious underlayer which could be studied only by the joint use of physiological and introspective methods. Biran rejected the view that mental states can be reduced to, or are nothing other than, physical states. There was a partial ‘symbolic’ correspondence between them, which meant that physical accounts and mental accounts could not be translated into each other without loss. Later in his life, though still maintaining the belief that psychology was primary, he held that it was necessary to accommodate questions of meta-physics, morality and religion. He published very little during his lifetime, and many of the ‘works’ found in editions are (sometimes conjectural) editorial restitutions made from a jumbled mass of much corrected manuscripts. His failure to complete a single work on what the eighteenth century had called the ‘Science of Man’ (which he said was the greatest interest of his entire life) reflects the times: this eighteenth-century project was fragmenting into the multiplicity of human sciences which were emerging as the nineteenth century came. But his insistence on the primacy of the will remains a major challenge for the human sciences of today. Further reading Maine de Biran, P.F. (1803) Mémoire sur l’influence de l’habitude sur la faculté de penser , Paris: Henrichs; trans. M.D. Boehm, The influence of habit on the faculty of thinking , Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1970. (A discussion of habit and thought.) Moore, F.C.T. (1970) The Psychology of Maine de biran,
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Page 521 Oxford: Clarendon Press. (A critical review of Biran’s mature position, from a broadly analytic perspective. Contains a useful bibliography.) F.C.T. MOORE MAIR, JOHN see MAJOR, JOHN MAJOR, JOHN (1467–1550) John Major was one of the last great logicians of the Middle Ages. Scottish in origin but Parisian by training, he continued the doctrines and the mode of thinking of fourteenth-century masters like John Buridan and William of Ockham. Using a resolutely nominalist approach, he developed a logic centred on the analysis of terms and their properties, and he applied this method of analysis to discourse in physics and theology. Although he came to oppose excessive dependence on logical subtlety in theology and maintained the authority of Holy Scripture, Major’s work was stubbornly independent of the growing influence of humanism in Europe. Later, he would be regarded as representative of the heavily criticized ‘scholastic spirit’, being referred to disparagingly by Rabelais as well as by later historians such as Villoslada (1938), but at the beginning of the sixteenth century, his teaching influenced an entire generation of students in the fields of logic, physics and theology. See also: LOGIC, MEDIEVAL; LOGIC, RENAISSANCE Further reading Broadie, A. (1985) The Circle of John Mair: Logic and Logicians in Pre-Reformation Scotland , Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Thematic study of logical theories at the time of John Major and his pupils.) Translated from the original French by E.J. Ashworth JOËL BIARD MALEBRANCHE, NICOLAS (1638–1715) Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715), a French Catholic theologian, was the most important Cartesian philosopher of the second half of the seventeenth century. His philosophical system was a grand synthesis of the thought of his two intellectual mentors: Augustine and Descartes. His most important work, De la recherche de la vérité (The Search After Truth), is a wideranging opus that covers various topics in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, physics, the physiology of cognition, and philosophical theology. It was both admired and criticized by many of the most celebrated thinkers of the period (including Leibniz, Arnauld and Locke), and was the focus of several fierce and time-consuming public debates. Malebranche’s philosophical reputation rests mainly on three doctrines. Occasionalism – of which he is the most systematic and famous exponent – is a theory of causation according to which God is the only genuine causal agent in the universe; all physical and mental events in nature are merely ‘occasions’ for God to exercise his necessarily efficacious power. In the doctrine known as ‘vision in God’, Malebranche argues that the representational ideas that function in human knowledge and perception are, in fact, the ideas in God’s understanding, the eternal archetypes or essences of things. And in his theodicy, Malebranche justifies God’s ways and explains the existence of evil and sin in the world by appealing to the simplicity and universality of the laws of nature and grace that God has established and is compelled to follow. In all three doctrines, Malebranche’s overwhelming concern is to demonstrate the essential and active role of God in every aspect – material, cognitive and moral – of the universe. Further reading Malebranche, N. (1674–5) De la recherche de la vérité , in Oeuvres complètrd de Malebranche , vols 1–3, 6th edn, 1712; trans. T. Lennon and P.J. Olscamp as The Search After Truth/ Elucidations of the Search After Truth , Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1980. (Malebranche’s most important philosophical work. Vol. 3 of the Oeuvres contains the Éclaircissements.) Radner, D. (1978) Malebranche: A Study of a Cartesian System , Assen: Van Gorcum. (A useful general and analytical presentation of Malebranche’s doctrines.) STEVEN NADLER MAMARDASHVILI, MERAB KONSTANTINOVICH (1930–90) Merab Mamardashvili was one of the Soviet Union’s most influential thinkers in the fields of phenomenology and philosophy of consciousness. Although he preferred the Socratic genres of the dialogue, interview and philosophical meditation to the abstract rigours of more systematic philosophy, he left substantial published work on Descartes, Hegel, Kant and French literature (especially Proust). Mamardashvili began his career as a historian of philosophy, with a series of close readings of Karl Marx. By the 1970s he had evolved his
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Page 522 own distinctive style of ‘philosophizing out loud’, addressing the foundations of European philosophy based on Descartes and Kant, at the core of which was the search for the ‘free phenomenon’ ( svobodnyi fenomen) or the ‘event of a thought’ ( sobytie mysli). In Kantian fashion, Mamardashvili attended to those a priori conditions of lived experience which govern that moment when reality enters the transcendental realm – but he switched the emphasis: rather than the mental problems presented by the a priori moment, Mamardashvili concentrated on what he called a ‘metaphysics of the a posteriori’, that is, on the actual event, or advent, of a thought. Perhaps the single motivating question of his life was: ‘How is a new thought possible?’ Among his many answers, developed in public lectures and interviews during the last twenty years of his life, was the notion that the very processes of thought provoke ‘hearing a thought’ in another. From this follows his concern with dialogic forms and his interest in the Cartesian dualism of soul and body – not as a necessary truth but as a ‘productive tautology’ that makes internal reason and a ‘grammatical’ analysis of thinking possible on a palpable basis. Further reading Mamardashvili, M.K. (1991) Kartezianskie razmyshleniia (Cartesian Meditations), lectures delivered in Moscow, expanded and published in book form, Moscow, 1993. (On Descartes the man and his masks; the desirability of thinking in the present; thought and epiphany; the responsibilities of becoming conscious.) CARYL EMERSON MANDEVILLE, BERNARD (1670–1733) Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (1714) scandalized contemporaries by arguing that the flourishing commercial society they valued depended on vices they denounced. It resulted not only from the complementary satisfaction of appetites but was also based upon pride, envy and shame, which Mandeville traced to ‘self-liking’. Numerous individuals, driven by their own desires, acted independently to produce goods which required extensive, cooperative operations – an idea central to the economic concept of a market. Mandeville initially appeared to credit ‘skilful politicians’ with originating morality and so-ciety. However, in defending and expounding his views, he set out ‘conjectural histories’ of the gradual development of many complex social activities and institutions, including language and society itself, thereby denying that they had been invented by public spirited heroes. Throughout his works, Mandeville adopted a strict criterion of virtue, repeatedly denying that he was advocating, rather than exposing, the vices he identified as inherent in human society. Further reading Hundert, E.J. (1994) The Enlightenment’s Fable: Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Extensive treatment of both the British and continental Europe intellectual context and and the sources of Mandeville’s views.) Mandeville, B. (1714) The Fable of the Bees: or , Private Vices, Publick Benefits , London: printed for J. Roberts; 2nd edn, enlarged, London: printed for E. Parker, 1723; 3rd edn, enlarged, London: printed for J. Roberts, 1724; reprinted, ed.F.B.Kaye, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924. (Mandeville’s best-known work. Kaye’s classic critical edition includes life, bibliography, annotations, discussions of Mandeville’s thought, its background and influence, brief summaries of contemporary critics and a chronological list of references to Mandeville’s work to 1923.) M.M. GOLDSMITH MANICHEISM Manicheism is a defunct religion, born in Mesopotamia in the third century AD and last attested in the sixteenth century in China. Its founder, Mani ( c .216–76), had some familiarity with Judaism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism and Buddhism, and aimed to supplant them all. He taught a form of dualism, influenced by earlier Gnostics: God is opposed by forces of darkness; they, not God, created human beings, who nevertheless contain particles of light which can be released by abstemious living. Two points of contrast with Catholic Christianity are particularly striking. First, in Manicheism, sinfulness is the natural state of human beings (because of their creators), and does not stem from Adam’s Fall. Second, the Manichean God did not create and does not control the forces of darkness (although he will eventually triumph); hence the problem of evil does not arise in as stark a form as it does for the all-powerful Christian God. Although Mani’s own missionary journeys took him eastwards, it was in the Roman
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Page 523 Empire to the west that the main impact of his teaching was first felt; Augustine of Hippo was an adherent for nine years. The religion was eventually suppressed in the Roman Empire, and driven east by the Arab conquest of Mesopotamia. In the West, various Christian heresies were loosely called Manichean throughout the Middle Ages. See also: EVIL, PROBLEM OF; ILLUMINATION Further reading Allberry, C.R.C. (ed.) (1938) A Manichaean Psalm Book, Part II, Manichaean Manuscripts in the Chester Beatty Collection 2, Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer. (Sumptuous edition with English translation. From the Coptic find.) Lieu, S.N.C. (1992) Manichaeism in the Later Roman Empire and Medieval China: A Historical Survey, Tübingen: Mohr, revised 2nd edn. (An excellent study of the religion’s history, West and East.) CHRISTOPHER KIRWAN MANIFOLDNESS, JAINA THEORY OF The Sanskrit term anekāntavāda literally means ‘not-one-sided doctrine’, and refers to the Jaina epistemological theory of manifold standpoints from which an object may be considered and the manifold predications that can be made with regard to it. It evolved out of Mahāvīra’s ethical emphasis on nonviolence – the multidimensional nature of objects should not be violated by single, absolutist ( ekānta ) predications about them. Respect for life is thus transformed in its philosophical application into a principle of respect for other views. The theory has come to be called the central philosophy of Jainism and was developed in a milieu of intensive debate between the various Indian philosophical schools. Though the theory was based on Mahāvīra’s teaching, it implicitly presupposed, in its later highly developed form, various philosophical alternatives (representing the views of other schools of thought), which it sought to syncretize. Each standpoint and predication presents a partial truth and, according to Jainism, only the theory of manifoldness does justice to the complex nature of entities. While it can be seen as an attempt to practice intellectual nonviolence, it is evident that the Jainas adhered to it zealously and defended it as vehemently as the others did their own views. See also:KNOWLEDGE, INDIAN VIEWS OF Further reading Mookerjee, S. (1978) The Jaina Philosophy of Non-Absolutism , Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2nd edn. (Discusses the theory of manifoldness and allied problems, like universals and particulars, to demonstrate the basic non-absolutist standpoint of the Jainas.) Padmarajiah, Y.J. (1963) A Comparative Study of the Jaina Theories of Reality and Knowledge , Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, repr. 1986. (Discusses Jaina ontology, and to a lesser degree, Jaina epistemology, in comparison with other schools of Indian thought.) JAYANDRA SONI MANY-VALUED LOGICS Many-valued logics may be distinguished from classical logic on purely semantic grounds. One of the simplifying assumptions on which classical logic is based is the thesis of bivalence, which states that there are only two truth-values – true and false – and every sentence must be one or the other. Manyvalued logics reject the thesis of bivalence and permit more than two truth-values. See also: ŁUKASIEWICZ, J.; MODAL LOGIC Further reading Chang, C.C. (1965) ‘Infinite-Valued Logic as a Basis for Set Theory’, in Y. Bar-Hillel (ed.) Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science , Amsterdam: North Holland. (Paradoxes of set theory.) Martin, R.L. (ed.) (1970) The Paradox of the Liar, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. (On manyvalued logics as a response to the liar paradox.) CHARLES G. MORGAN MANY-VALUED LOGICS, PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES IN The first philosophically-motivated use of many-valued truth tables arose with Jan èukasiewicz in the 1920s. What exercised Łukasiewicz was a worry that the principle of bivalence, ‘every statement is either true or false’, involves an undesirable commitment to fatalism. Should not statements about the future whose eventual truth or falsity depends on the actions of free agents be given some third status – ‘indeterminate’, say – as opposed to being (now) regarded as determinately true or determinately false? To implement this idea in the context of the language of sentential logic (with conjunction, disjunction, implication and negation), we need to show – if the usual style of treatment of such connectives in a bivalent setting is to be followed
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Page 524 – how the status of a compound formula is determined by the status of its components. Łukasiewicz’s decision as to how the appropriate three-valued truth-functions should look is recorded in truth tables in which (determinate) truth and falsity are represented by ‘1’ and ‘3’ respectively, with ‘2’ for indeterminacy (see tables in the main body of the entry). Consider the formula A B (‘A or B’), for example, when A has the value 2 and B has the value 1. The value of A B is 1, reasonably enough, since if A’s eventual truth or falsity depends on how people freely act, but B is determinately true already, then A B is already true independently of such free action. There are no constraints as to which values may be assigned to propositional variables. The law of excluded middle is invalidated in the case of indeterminacy: if p is assigned the value 2, then p :p also has the value 2. This reflects Łukasiewicz’s idea that such disjunctions as ‘Either I shall die in a plane crash on January 1, 2030 or I shall not die in a plane crash on January 1, 2030’ should not be counted as logical truths, on pain of incurring the fatalistic commitments already alluded to. Together with the choice of designated elements (which play the role in determining validity played by truth in the bivalent setting), Łukasiewicz’s tables constitute a (logical) matrix. An alternative threeelement matrix, the 1-Kleene matrix, involves putting 2 → 2 = 2, leaving everything else unchanged. And a third such matrix, the 1,2-Kleene matrix, differs from this in taking as designated the set of values {1;2} rather than {1}. The 1-Kleene matrix has been proposed for the semantics of vagueness. In the case of a sentence applying a vague predicate, such as ‘young’, to an individual, the idea is that if the individual is a borderline case of the predicate (not definitely young, and not definitely not young, to use our example) then the value 2 is appropriate, while 1 and 3 are reserved for definite truths and falsehoods, respectively. Łukasiewicz also explored, as a technical curiosity, n-valued tables constructed on the same model, for higher values of n, as well as certain infinitely many-valued tables. Variations on this theme have included acknowledging as many values as there are real numbers, with similar applications to vagueness and approximation in mind. See also: ŁUKASIEWICZ, J.; MANY-VALUED LOGICS Further reading Łukasiewicz, J. (1970) Jan Łukasiewicz: Selected Works, ed. L. Borkowski, Amsterdam: North Holland. (See especially ‘On Three-Valued Logic’ (1920), ‘On Determinism’ (Łukasiewicz’s inaugural address at Warsaw University; 1922) and ‘Philosophical Remarks on Many-Valued Systems of Propositional Logic’ (1930).) Rescher, N. (1969) Many-Valued Logic, New York: McGraw-Hill. (Provides extensive historical information on the subject, including more on the Kleene matrices, which are versions of Kleene’s ‘strong’ three-valued truth tables, the ‘weak’ ones being associated with Bochvar.) LLOYD HUMBERSTONE MAOISM see MARXISM, CHINESE MARCEL, GABRIEL (1889–1973) Marcel was a distinguished French playwright and music critic as well as philosopher. It was he who coined the term ‘existentialism’, although he was reluctant to be pigeon-holed a ‘Christian existentialist’. Born into a well-off family of civil servants, Marcel – never a healthy man – worked for the Red Cross during the First World War, an experience which shaped his view of human relationships and confirmed a religious conviction that led to conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1929. After an early flirtation with F.H. Bradley’s idealism, Marcel independently developed a phenomenology of human existence and a religious conception of being similar, in several respects, to those of Karl Jaspers and Martin Buber. He was much in demand as a lecturer in his later years. See also: EXISTENTIALISM; EXISTENTIALIST THEOLOGY Further reading Gallagher, K.T. (1962) The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel, with a foreword by G. Marcel. New York: Fordham University Press, 3rd edn, 1975. (General and lucid introduction to Marcel’s thought.) Marcel, G. (1963) The Existential Background of Human Dignity , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Marcel’s William James Lectures at Harvard in 1961–2; the most socially and politically aware of Marcel’s works.) DAVID E. COOPER MARCUS AURELIUS (AD 121–80) Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Emperor of Rome, was the author of a book of philosophical reflections written in Greek and known as the Meditations. These reflections are based primarily
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Page 525 on Stoicism, but also reveal the influence of other currents of thought and of his experience as emperor. Marcus was deeply influenced by Epictetus and shares his interest in the inner mental life and the psychology of moral improvement. He combines a deep commitment to the providential cosmology traditional in the Stoic school with a more pronounced religious sensibility and a frequent emphasis on the insignificance of human life in space and time. The Stoic recognition of the irreducibly social character of human nature is obviously pertinent to an emperor whose career consisted largely of selfsacrificing public service. See also: STOICISM Further reading Birley, A. (1987) Marcus Aurelius: A Biography , revised edn, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press. (Reliable biography and history.) Marcus Aurelius (ad 121–80) Meditations in A.S.L. Farquharson, The Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus , Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1944; trans. The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. (Text, translation and commentary.) BRAD INWOOD MARCUSE, HERBERT (1898–1979) Herbert Marcuse endured a brief moment of notoriety in the 1960s, when his best-known book, OneDimensional Man (1964), was taken up by the mass media as the Bible of the student revolts which shook most Western countries in that decade. Though Marcuse’s actual political influence was uneven, his public image was not wholly misleading. On the one hand, he popularized the critique of post-war capitalism that he, with the other theorists of the Frankfurt School, had helped develop: the Western liberal democracies were, they argued, ‘totally administered societies’ permeated by the values of consumerism, in which the manufacture and satisfaction of ‘false needs’ served to prevent the working class from gaining any genuine insight into their situation. On the other hand, Marcuse never fully subscribed to the highly pessimistic version of Marxism developed by the central figures of the Frankfurt School, Adorno and Horkheimer. He hoped that revolts by an underclass of ‘the outcasts and the outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and other colours, the unemployed and unemployable’ would stimulate a broader social transformation. Underlying this affirmation of revolutionary possibilities was a conception of Being as a state of rest in which all conflicts are overcome, where rational thought and sensual gratification are no longer at war with one another, and work merges into play. Intimations of this condition – which could only be fully realized after the overthrow of capitalism (and perhaps not even then) – were, Marcuse believed, offered in art, ‘the possible Form of a free society’. Imagination could thus show politics the way. See also: FRANKFURT SCHOOL Further reading Katz, B. (1982) Herbert Marcuse and the Art of Liberation, London: Verso. (Intellectual biography with a good bibliography.) Marcuse, H. (1964) One-Dimensional Man, Boston, MA: Beacon Press; repr. London: Sphere, 1968. (Marcuse’s best-known work; a critique of contemporary Western society and thought which draws heavily on Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment and is notable for the vigour with which it pursues the natural sciences and anlytical philosophy as instances of one-dimensional ‘positive thinking’.) ALEX CALLINICOS MARGINALITY Traditional definitions of marginal persons include those who live in two worlds, but do not feel well integrated into either and those who live in societies which are in the process of being assimilated and incorporated into an emerging global society. The influence of Anglo-American and European cultures has brought this situation into existence. A broader, more contemporary understanding of marginality is the condition of feeling marginal in relation to various concepts of the centre. This state produces a stigmatized identity, which either aspires to inclusion or assimilation into the centre, or demands recognition of and respect for a separate but equal existence. This condition of marginality can be experienced in varying degrees by many kinds of people. Often gender, sexual preference, age, ethnicity, geography and religion are factors which can influence perceptions of marginality. Those who perceive themselves, or who are perceived by others to be marginal are often female, dark-skinned, very young or elderly, poor, disabled, nonheterosexual, displaced, exiled, immigrant, rural, indigenous, ‘foreign’, outcast, persecuted,
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Page 526 or otherwise ‘different’ from those who occupy positions of privilege in the centre, or the metropolis. Critics of the term ‘marginality’ believe it has become overused to the point of losing descriptive precision because, they argue, almost everyone has experienced some form of marginality. In philosophy, however, the phenomenon of feeling, or being, perceived as peripheral, or on the margin, has generated critical perspectives which have enlightened discourse on social integration and stratification; personal suffering and economic, political, and cultural inequality. In addition, analyses of marginality have called into question notions of the ‘universal’ and the ‘objective’ set forth by many Western philosophers. See also: ALTERITY AND IDENTITY, POSTMODERN THEORIES OF; CULTURAL IDENTITY Further reading Stonequist, E.V. (1937) The Marginal Man: A Study in Personality and Culture Conflict , New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. (Discussion of marginality.) Zea, L. (1992) The Role of the Americas in History , ed. A.A. Oliver, trans. S. Karsen, Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. (Analysis of Latin American marginality.) AMY A. OLIVER MARITAIN, JACQUES (1882–1973) The French writer Maritain was one of the most influential twentieth-century interpreters of the thought of Thomas Aquinas.Hisinterests spanned many aspects of philosophy, including aesthetics, political theory, philosophy of science, metaphysics, education, liturgy and ecclesiology. His acknowledged masterpiece is The Degrees of Knowledge (1932). In this work, Maritain expands on Thomistic thought and seeks to explain the links between philosophy, science and religion as branches of wisdom. Rather than being a close study of Thomism, this work expands on Thomistic ideas and puts them into the context of the modern world. In natural science, for example, he distinguishes between empirical knowledge of nature and philosophy of nature; the latter consists in the knowledge of essence, while the former is concerned with the knowledge of form. In moral philosophy, Maritain expands on Aquinas, holding that no true conception of the human ultimate end is philosophically possible, and that moral philosophy therefore must be subordinated to moral theology. Later in his career, Maritain concentrated more strongly on theology, but throughout his life his Roman Catholic faith informed all of his works. He continues to be read widely today, with a worldwide reputation which is especially strong in France and North America. See also: THOMISM Further reading McInerny, R. (1988) Art and Prudence: Studies in the Thought of Jacques Maritain , Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. (A collection of essays written at various times, dealing chiefly with Maritain’s aesthetic and moral positions.) Maritain, J. (1995–) Complete Works, ed. R. McInerny, B. Doering and F. Crosson, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. (With some exceptions, each volume contains a number of works. Volume 7, The Degrees of Knowledge , was one of those that appeared in 1995. The project should be completed by 2005.) RALPH McINERNY MARIUS VICTORINUS (fl. 4th century AD) Gaius Marius Victorinus was a rhetorician active in Rome in the fourth century AD. Classically educated and with an interest in philosophy, he converted to Christianity late in life and transferred his philosophical interests to Christian works. Strongly influenced by Neo-platonism, particularly by the works of Plotinus and Porphyry, he sought to articulate Christian concepts such as the Trinity in Neoplatonic terms. His writings on the Trinity and the soul influenced Augustine and other patristic philosophers. See also: NEOPLATONISM; PATRISTIC PHILOSOPHY Further reading Markus, R.A. (1967) ‘Marius Victorinus and Augustine’, in A.H. Armstrong (ed.) The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 329–40. (The best overview in English of Victorinus’ thought.) JOHN PETER KENNEY MARKET, ETHICS OF THE Markets are systems of exchange in which people with money or commodities to sell voluntarily trade these for other items which they prefer to have. Most economic transactions in advanced societies are of this kind, and any attempt to
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Page 527 replace markets wholesale with a different form of economic coordination seems destined to fail. But questions about the ethics of markets are still of considerable practical concern, for two reasons at least. First, we need to make collective decisions about the proper scope of markets: are there goods and services which in principle should not be distributed and exchanged through market mechanisms – medical care, for instance? Second, markets work within a framework of property rights which sets the terms on which people can exchange with one another, and this too is subject to collective decision: for instance, should a person’s labour be regarded as a commodity like any other, to be bought and sold on whatever terms the parties can agree, or does labour carry special rights that set limits to these terms? Are employees morally entitled to a share of the profits of the companies they work in, to take a concrete issue? To guide such decisions, we need to apply general ethical principles to market transactions. First, are markets justified on grounds of efficiency, as is often claimed? What criterion of efficiency is being used when such claims are made? Second, can we regard the outcome of market exchanges as just, or, at the other extreme, should we see them as necessarily exploitative? Third, do market exchanges necessarily alienate people from one another and destroy their sense of community? These are very different questions, but an overall assessment of market ethics needs to address each of them, and perhaps others besides. See also: ECONOMICS AND ETHICS Further reading Arnold, N.S. (1994) The Philosophy and Economics of Market Socialism, New York: Oxford University Press. (A critique of market socialism, arguing that opportunities for exploitation are greater under such a system than under capitalism.) Schweickart, D. (1993) Against Capitalism , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Ethical critique of capitalism, and defence of democratic market socialism.) DAVID MILLER MARSILIUS OF INGHEN (1330–96) The theological and philosophical works of Marsilius of Inghen are characterized by a logico-semantical approach in which he followed John Buridan, combined with an eclectic use of older theories, often dating from the thirteenth century. These were sometimes more Aristotelian and sometimes more Neoplatonist. The label ‘Ockhamist’, which is often applied to Marsilius, has therefore limited value. He was influential on Central European philosophy of later centuries, both through his own philosophy and by thewayhestimulated reform of university programmes. In the sixteenth century there were still references to a ‘Marsilian way’ in logic and physics. See also: BURIDAN, J. Further reading Marsilius of Inghen (1362–7) Treatises on the Properties of Terms, ed. and trans. E.P. Bos, Treatises on the Properties of Terms: A First Critical Edition of the Suppositiones, Ampliationes, Appellationes, Restrictiones and Alienationes, Dordrecht: Reidel, 1983. (See this work for Marsilius’ views on semantics.) E.P. BOS MARSILIUS OF PADUA (1275/80–1342/3) Marsilius of Padua’s Defensor pacis (Defender of Peace), written in 1324, is the most revolutionary political treatise of the later Middle Ages. Discourse One of the Defensor pacis can plausibly be read as a complete theory of the secular state. In a much longer second discourse, Marsilius attacks papal and priestly political power, which, especially in the claims to ‘fullness of power’ ( plenitudo potestatis ) sometimes made for the papacy, he presents as a major threat to civic tranquillity. The distinctive features of Marsilian theory are (a) its emphasis on broad participation in the legislative process as a guarantee of sound law, and (b) its insistence that supreme coercive power in any community must be held by a single, secular, popularly authorized ‘ruling part’ ( pars principans). Born in Italy, Marsilius was teaching in Paris when his authorship of the Defensor pacis was discovered. He was forced to go into exile in Germany, where he died. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM, MEDIEVAL; SOVEREIGNTY Further reading Gewirth, A. (1951) Marsilius of Padua and Medieval Political Philosophy , vol. 1 of Marsilius of Padua: The Defender of Peace , New York: Columbia University Press. (Un-matched in depth and analytic precision; the philosopher’s best introduction to medieval political thought in general.) Marsilius of Padua (1324) Defensor pacis (Defender of Peace), ed. C.W. Previté-Orton, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press,
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Page 528 1928; trans. A. Gewirth, vol. 2 of Marsilius of Padua: The Defender of Peace , New York: Columbia University Press, 1956; repr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. (Marsilius’ major contribution to contemporary political debate and to political philosophy.) A.S. McGRADE MARSTON, ROGER ( c .1235–c .1303) Roger Marston, an English Franciscan philosopher–theologian, was a pupil of John Pecham and a fellow student with Matthew of Aquasparta. Following closely in the footsteps of his master, Marston championed the views of Augustine in a conscious effort to counteract the growing fascination with Averroistic Aristotelianism. Of his works, three sets of Quaestiones disputatae (Disputed Questions) and four sets of quodlibetal questions, the Quodlibeta Quatuor (Four Quodlibets), survive. See also: AUGUSTINIANISM; PECHAM, J. Further reading Marston, R. (before 1303) Quodlibeta quatuor (Four Quodlibets), ed. G. Etzkorn and I. Brady, Bibliotheca Franciscana Scholastica Medii Aevi XXVI, 2nd edn, Grottaferrata: Colegii S. Bonaventurae, 1994. (Four sets of quodlibetal questions.) GIRARD J. ETZKORN MARTINEAU, HARRIET (1802–76) Harriet Martineau has been called the first woman sociologist and the first woman journalist in England, both better claims on the attention of posterity than her mostly derivative philosophical writings. Yet she is a revealing – and was in her own time widely influential – instance of the survival of eighteenthcentury determinism and materialism. Although she eventually rejected the Unitarianism in which she had been brought up, the Necessarian philosophy she drew from it merged easily into her mature positivism. Her abridged translation (1853) of the Cours de philosophie positive was the first introduction of this seminal work by Auguste Comte to English-speaking readers. See also: POSITIVISM IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES Further reading Hoecker-Drysdale, S. (1992) Harriet Martineau: First Woman Sociologist, London: Berg. (Brief, biographically structured, analysis of Martineau’s sociology, with excellent bibliographies.) R.K. WEBB MARX, KARL (1818–83) Karl Marx was the most important of all theorists of socialism. He was not a professional philosopher, although he completed a doctorate in philosophy. His life was devoted to radical political activity, journalism and theoretical studies in history and political economy. Marx was drawn towards politics by Romantic literature, and his earliest writings embody a conception of reality as subject to turbulent change and of human beings as realizing themselves in the struggle for freedom. His identification with these elements in Hegel’s thought (and his contempt for what he regarded as Hegel’s apologetic attitude towards the Prussian state) brought Marx to associate himself with the Young Hegelians. The Young Hegelians had come to believe that the implicit message of Hegel’s philosophy was a radical one: that Reason could and should exist within the world, in contrast to Hegel’s explicit claim that embodied Reason already did exist. Moreover, they also rejected Hegel’s idea that religion and philosophy go hand in hand: that religion represents the truths of philosophy in immediate form. On the contrary, the Young Hegelians saw the central task of philosophy as the critique of religion – the struggle (as Marx himself was to put it in his doctoral dissertation) ‘against the gods of heaven and of earth who do not recognize man’s self-consciousness as the highest divinity’. Marx came to be dissatisfied with the assumption that the critique of religion alone would be sufficient to produce human emancipation. He worked out the consequences of this change of view in the years 1843 to 1845, the most intellectually fertile period of his entire career. Hegel’s philosophy, Marx now argued, embodied two main kinds of mistake. It incorporated, first, the illusion that reality as a whole is an expression of the Idea, the absolute rational order governing reality. Against this, Marx’s position (and on this point he still agreed with the Young Hegelians) was that it is Man, not the Idea, who is the true subject. Second, he charged, Hegel believed that the political state – the organs of law and government – had priority in determining the character of a society as a whole. In fact, according to Marx, this is the reverse of the truth: political life and the ideas
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Page 529 associated with it are themselves determined by the character of economic life. Marx claimed that the ‘species-being’ of Man consists in labour, and that Man is ‘alienated’ to the extent that labour is performed according to a division of labour that is dictated by the market. It is only when labour recovers its collective character that men will recognize themselves as what they are – the true creators of history. At this point, the need to represent the essence of human beings in terms of their relation to an alien being – be it the Christian God or Hegelian Geist – will no longer exist. In the mature writings that followed his break with the Young Hegelians, Marx presented a would-be scientific theory of history as a progress through stages. At each stage, the form taken by a society is conditioned by the society’s attained level of productivity and the requirements for its increase. In presocialist societies this entails the division of society into antagonistic classes. Classes are differentiated by what makes them able (or unable) to appropriate for themselves the surplus produced by social labour. In general, to the extent that a class can appropriate surplus without paying for it, it is said to be an ‘exploiting’ class; conversely, a class that produces more than it receives is said to be ‘exploited’. Although the exploiting classes have special access to the means of violence, exploitation is not generally a matter of the use of force. In capitalism, for example, exploitation flows from the way in which the means of production are owned privately and labour is bought and sold just like any other commodity. That such arrangements are accepted without the need for coercion reflects the fact that the ruling class exercises a special influence over ideas in society. It controls the ideology accepted by the members of society in general. In Das Kapital (Capital), the work to which he devoted the latter part of his life, Marx set out to identify the ‘laws of motion’ of capitalism. The capitalist system is presented there as a self-reproducing whole, governed by an underlying law, the ‘law of value’. But this law and its consequences are not only not immediately apparent to the agents who participate in capitalism, indeed they are actually concealed from them. Thus capitalism is a ‘deceptive object’, one in which there is a discrepancy between its ‘essence’ and its ‘appearance’. In Marx’s view, it is inevitable that capitalism should give way to socialism. As capitalism develops, he believed, the increasingly ‘socialized’ character of the productive process will conflict more and more with the private ownership of the means of production. Thus the transition to collective ownership will be natural and inevitable. But Marx nowhere explained how this collective ownership and social control was to be exercised. Indeed, he had remarkably little to say about the nature of this society to the struggle to which he devoted his life. The Critique of the Gotha Programme envisaged two phases of communist society. In the first, production will be carried out on a non-exploitative basis: all who contribute to production will receive back the value of what they have contributed. But this, Marx recognized, is a form of ‘equal right’ that leaves the natural inequalities of human beings unchecked. It is a transitional phase, although inevitable. Beyond it there lies a society in which individuals are no longer ‘slaves’ to the division of labour, one in which labour has become ‘not only a means of life but life’s prime want’. Only then, Marx thought, ‘can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!’ This is the final vision of communism. See also: COMMUNISM; MARXISM, CHINESE; MARXISM, WESTERN; MARXIST PHILOSOPHY, RUSSIAN AND SOVIET; SOCIALISM Further reading Marx, K. (1975–) The Pelican Marx Library , Harmondsworth: Penguin. (Not a complete edition, but a series that contains particularly good translations of Das Kapital, the Grundrisse , and the Early Writings, among others.) Wood, A. (1981) Karl Marx , London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (Places emphasis on the philosophical aspects of Marx’s work. MICHAEL ROSEN MARXISM, CHINESE Chinese Marxism is a mixture of elements from Confucianism, German Marxism, Soviet Leninism and China’s own guerrilla experience. Because Mao Zedong (1893–1976) was in power longer than any other Chinese communist, the phrase ‘Chinese Marxism’ is commonly used to refer to Mao’s own evolving mixture of ideas from these sources. However, the advocates of Chinese Marxism have come from many different factional backgrounds and have tended to emphasize different aspects in their own thinking. Even Maoism reflects many minds. For example, Mao’s two most famous essays, ‘Shijianlun’ (‘On Practice’) and ‘Maodunlun’ (‘On Contradiction’) (1937) drew heavily from
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Page 530 Ai Siqi, the author of the popular philosophical work Dazhong zhexue (Philosophy for the Masses) (1934). The goals of the Chinese Marxists included the salvation of China from its foreign enemies and the strengthening of the country through modernization. Accordingly, they selected from other systematic theories those doctrines that appeared to facilitate those goals, and then paired these doctrines with others from theories that were sometimes incompatible. One should not, therefore, look for logical consistency in the relations between the ideas that the Chinese Marxists drew from these various sources. The foundation of Chinese Marxism was undoubtedly Marx’s materialist conception of history, and the concepts of class struggle and control of the forces of production shaped the thinking of many early Marxists. However, faced with the need to accelerate social change through class struggle rather than waiting for the full flowering of capitalism, Marxists such as Li Dazhao began focusing less on materialism or determinism and more on voluntarism. There also arose a doctrine, based on the ideas of Lenin and Trotsky, that right-minded people could ‘telescope’ the phases of the revolution and hasten the transition through the historical stages. This ultimately led to the doctrine of permanent revolution. First promulgated in China in the late 1920s, it reappeared in the 1950s. After Mao’s death, the ‘subjectivity’ movement within Chinese Marxism sought to move the focus away from classes or groups and onto the individual subject as an active agent. Throughout the evolution of Chinese Marxism, political struggles played a direct role in the formulation and discussion of philosophical positions. Mao’s epistemological essay ‘Shijianlun’ clearly reflects the experience of leaders during the guerrilla period, and his theories of knowledge are analogous to the ‘democracy’ practised by the guerrilla leaders: the people were consulted for their knowledge and opinions, decisions were then made from the centre, and the resulting policies were taken back to the masses through teaching. In the same way, Mao believed, individuals perceive through their senses, form theories in their brains (the centre), and test the resulting theories in a manner analogous to teaching. In China, right minds among the people were thought to arise through officials teaching the people. Here pre-modern Confucian legacy becomes important. It helps to explain the endurance of teaching as an official function in the Chinese Marxist discussion of democratic centralism. In Confucianism, the primary function of government was education, although it certainly had other tasks, such as the collection of taxes. All officials, including the emperor, had the task of transforming the character of the people. The education in which the state involved itself, through control of the curriculum and national examinations for the civil service, was moral education. The ultimate aim of state-controlled Confucian education was a one-minded, hierarchical society, meaning that people of all different strata would think the same on important matters. Maoists also sought to create a one-minded people through officially controlled teaching. If the focus of teaching is on right ideas, which are supposed to motivate people towards socialism, one such idea in later Maoist writing is egalitarianism of social status. This was challenged by others, notably Liu Shaoqi, and following Deng Xiaoping’s assumption of power in 1978 it suffered a further blow with the switch in economic policy from central planning to market forces. An example of the relevance of political struggle to the formulation of ideas was the heightening of the campaign against the philosophy called ‘humanism’, following a dispute in 1957 between Mao and President Liu Shaoqi. Liu made a speech in April of that year saying that capitalists had changed and so class struggle against them could be minimized; this was followed by a Maoist-inspired attack on humanism as a philosophy. The humanism that the Maoists attacked was a Confucian-inspired belief in a class-transcending humaneness or compassion for humankind or humaneness. In contrast, in the postMao years, the content of humanism has altered, and the term has come to refer to a doctrine inspired by both the early Marx and by the Western psychologist Maslow, namely that the goal of society is the individual’s self-realization. This form of humanism is one of several competing positions that claim to carry on the Marxist tradition in new directions, and has been reinforced by one form of the subjectivity movement in the Deng Xiaoping era. See also: MARXISM, WESTERN; THEORIES OF HISTORY, CHINESE Further reading Dirlik, A. (1989) The Origins of Chinese Communism , New York: Oxford University Press. (Ideology and organization in the early years, including the impact of such diverse strands as anarchism and guild socialism.) Schram, S. (1963) The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung,
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Page 531 New York: Praeger. (Topically divided selections from Mao’s writings, preceded by a lengthy interpretive introduction.) DONALD J. MUNRO MARXISM, WESTERN Western Marxism is used here as an umbrella term for the various schools of Marxist thought that have flourished in Western Europe since Marx’s death in 1883. It is sometimes used more narrowly to refer to those Marxist philosophers whose thinking was influenced by the Hegelian idea of dialectics and who focused their attention on the cultural as opposed to the economic aspects of capitalism. In the broader sense, Western Marxism does not denote any specific doctrine, but indicates a range of concerns that have exercised Marxist philosophers in advanced capitalist societies. These concerns primarily have been of three kinds: (1) epistemological – what would justify the claim that Marxist social theory and, in particular, the materialist conception of history are true?; (2) ethical – does the Marxist critique of capitalism require ethical foundations, and if so, where are these to be discovered; and (3) practical – if the economic collapse of capitalism can no longer be regarded as inevitable, who are the agents who can be expected to carry through a socialist transformation? In relation to the first issue, the main debate has been between those who, following Engels, adhere to ‘scientific socialism’ (that is, the view that Marxism is a science in the same sense as the natural sciences), and those who claim that Marxist epistemology relies on a form of dialectics quite distinct from the methods of natural science. The most prominent exponent of this second view was the Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukács, who drew upon the dialectical method of Hegel, with class consciousness replacing Geist (Spirit) as the vehicle of dialectical reason. Thus, for Lukács the truth of historical materialism and the goodness of communism were both established dialectically, through the class consciousness of the revolutionary proletariat. Lukács’ advocacy of dialectics was later taken up and developed by the philosophers of the Frankfurt School. In relation to the second issue, early dissenters from the orthodox Marxism of Engels like Eduard Bernstein looked outside Marxism itself, and especially to the philosophy of Kant, for the ethical principles that would justify socialism. The position changed somewhat with the rediscovery of the young Marx’s Paris Manuscripts (1844) from which later Marxists, and in particular those associated with the Frankfurt School, were able to extract a humanistic ethics centred on the notion of alienation. In relation to the third issue, most Western Marxists continued to look to the proletariat as the agency of revolutionary change, often distinguishing, as did Lukács, between the true consciousness of that class and the false consciousness that reflected the distorting effects of bourgeois ideology. But in the case of the Frankfurt Marxists, the critical theory that pointed the way to a liberated human future was detached from any specific agency and treated merely as critique. The most original contribution was made by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who argued that the working class must use the power of its ideas to establish hegemony over the other classes in bourgeois society, who would then join the proletariat in overthrowing capitalism. The disintegration of Western Marxism began in the 1960s when the French philosopher Louis Althusser attacked both the use of Hegelian dialectics by Marxists and the various forms of Marxist humanism. Althusser insisted that Marxism was a science which required no ethical foundations. His critique was informed by a conviction that human subjectivity, together with the philosophical problems generated by subject–object dualism, are illusions. Althusserian Marxism became fashionable in English-speaking universities, but its cavalier and paradoxical style also led, by reaction, to the rise of analytic Marxism in the late 1970s. Analytic Marxists returned to interrogating Marx’s texts in more conventional ways, using the methods of analytic philosophy and contemporary social science to reformulate them to withstand academic scrutiny by nonMarxists. A tendency rather than a movement, analytic Marxism perhaps marks the final stage of a process that began with Lukács, that of turning Marxism into a purely academic study remote from politics. See also: MARXIM, CHINESE; MARXIST PHILOSOPHY, RUSSIAN AND SOVIET; MARXIST THOUGHT IN LATIN AMERICA Further reading Elster, J. (1985) Making Sense of Marx , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Brilliant and dramatic excision of dead wood by a leading analytic Marxist.) Merquior, J.G. (1986) Western Marxism, London: Paladin. (Readable, sophisticated and
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Page 532 engagingly judgmental account from Lukács and Gramsci to ‘post-Marxism’; full bibliography.) JOHN TORRANCE MARXIST PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE Marx’s approach to science is an intriguing combination of respect for the natural sciences and empirical inquiry, determination to go beyond the description of regularities among observable phenomena, and insistence on the inevitable impact of social circumstances on scientific inquiry. Marx thought that the human sciences and the natural sciences are governed by essentially the same methods, that naturalscientific theories give us enhanced insight into mind-independent reality, and that our most fundamental views are subject to revision through scientific inquiry. Yet Marx rejected the ideal of scientific method according to which rational scientific belief is tied to observational data through a canon of rules as general, timeless and complete as the rules of logical deduction. While traditional empiricists emphasize the economical description of empirical regularities which could, in principle, be used to predict the occurrence of observable phenomena, Marx emphasizes the description of underlying causal structures, employing concepts that are typically irreducible to the vocabulary of mere observation, and causal hypotheses that sometimes do not even sketch means of prediction. Similarly, though Marx shared the optimistic view that science gives rise to long-term improvement in our insight into underlying causes, he disagreed with many epistemic optimists in his insistence that scientific inquiry is inevitably and deeply affected by social interests and relations of social power. Since Marx’s general comments on scientific method are few and scattered, a ‘Marxist philosophy of science’ consists of the further development of this intriguing mixture. See also: NEURATH, O. Further reading Lenin, V.I. (1908) Materialism and Empirico-Criticism, Moscow: Progress Publishers. (Criticisms of Russian followers of Mach, Duhem and other pioneers of modern philosophy of science, with plenty of tiresome invective but some shrewd and sensible thrusts.) Miller, R.W. (1984) Analyzing Marx , Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. (Chapters 3–6 develop the interpretation of Marx’s theories and methodology and their bearing on modern philosophy of science.) RICHARD W. MILLER MARXIST PHILOSOPHY, RUSSIAN AND SOVIET The history of Russian Marxism involves a dramatic interplay of philosophy and politics. Though Marx’s ideas were taken up selectively by Russian populists in the 1870s, the first thoroughgoing Russian Marxist was G.V. Plekhanov, whose vision of philosophy became the orthodoxy among Russian communists. Inspired by Engels, Plekhanov argued that Marxist philosophy is a form of ‘dialectical materialism’ (Plekhanov’s coinage). Following Hegel, Marxism focuses on phenomena in their interaction and development, which it explains by appeal to dialectical principles (for instance, the law of the transformation of quantity into quality). Unlike Hegel’s idealism, however, Marxism explains all phenomena in material terms (for Marxists, the ‘material’ includes economic forces and relations). Dialectical materialism was argued to be the basis of Marx’s vision of history according to which historical development is the outcome of changes in the force of production. In 1903, Plekhanov’s orthodoxy was challenged by a significant revisionist school: Russian empiriocriticism. Inspired by Mach’s positivism, A.A. Bogdanov and others argued that reality is socially organized experience, a view they took to suit Marx’s insistence that objects be understood in their relation to human activity. Empiriocriticism was associated with the Bolsheviks until 1909, when Lenin moved to condemn Bogdanov’s position as a species of idealism repugnant to both Marxism and common sense. Lenin endorsed dialectical materialism, which thereafter was deemed the philosophical worldview of the Bolsheviks. After the Revolution of 1917, Soviet philosophers were soon divided in a bitter controversy between ‘mechanists’ and ‘dialecticians’. The former argued that philosophy must be subordinate to science. In contrast, the Hegelian ‘dialecticians’, led by A.M. Deborin, insisted that philosophy is needed to explain the very possibility of scientific knowledge. The debate was soon deadlocked, and in 1929 the dialecticians used their institutional might to condemn mechanism as a heresy. The following year, the dialecticians were themselves routed by a group of young activists sponsored by Communist Party. Denouncing Deborin and his followers as
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Page 533 ‘Menshevizing idealists’, they proclaimed that Marxist philosophy had now entered its ‘Leninist stage’ and invoked Lenin’s idea of the partiinost’ (‘partyness’) of philosophy to license the criticism of theories on entirely political grounds. Philosophy became a weapon in the class war. In 1938, Marxist-Leninist philosophy was simplistically codified in the fourth chapter of the Istoriia kommunisticheskoi partii sovetskogo soiuza (Bol’sheviki). Kraatkii kurs (History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks). Short Course). The chapter, apparently written by Stalin himself, was declared the height of wisdom, and Soviet philosophers dared not transcend its limited horizons. The ‘new philosophical leadership’ devoted itself to glorifying the Party and its General Secretary. The ideological climate grew even worse in the post-war years when A.A. Zhdanov’s campaign against ‘cosmopolitanism’ created a wave of Russian chauvinism in which scholars sympathetic to Western thought were persecuted. The Party also meddled in the scientific, sponsoring T.D. Lysenko’s bogus genetics, while encouraging criticism of quantum mechanics, relativity theory and cybernetics as inconsistent with dialectical materialism. The Khrushchev ‘thaw’ brought a renaissance in Soviet Marxism, when a new generation of young philosophers began a critical re-reading of Marx’s texts. Marx’s so-called ‘method of ascent from the abstract to the concrete’ was developed, by E.V. Il’enkov and others, into an anti-empiricist epistemology. There were also important studies of consciousness and ‘the ideal’ by Il’enkov and M.K. Mamardashvili, the former propounding a vision of the social origins of the mind that recalls the culturalhistorical psychology developed by L.S. Vygotskii in the 1930s. However, the thaw was short-lived. The philosophical establishment, still populated by the Stalinist old guard, continued to exercise a stifling influence. Although the late 1960s and 1970s saw heartfelt debates in many areas, particularly about the biological basis of the mind and the nature of value (moral philosophy had been hitherto neglected), the energy of the early 1960s was lacking. Marxism-Leninism still dictated the terms of debate and knowledge of Western philosophers remained relatively limited. In the mid-1980s, Gorbachev’s reforms initiated significant changes. Marxism-Leninism was no longer a required subject in all institutions of higher education; indeed, the term was soon dropped altogether. Discussions of democracy and the rule of law were conducted in the journals, and writings by Western and Russian émigré philosophers were published. Influential philosophers such as I.T. Frolov, then editor of Pravda , called for a renewal of humanistic Marxism. The reforms, however, came too late. The numerous discussions of the fate of Marxism at this time reveal an intellectual culture in crisis. While many maintained that Marx’s theories were not responsible for the failings of the USSR, others declared the bankruptcy of Marxist ideas and called for an end to the Russian Marxist tradition. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, it seems their wish has been fulfilled. See also: MARXISM, CHINESE; MARXISM, WESTERN Further reading Frolov, I.T. (1986) Man, Science, Humanism: A New Synthesis , Moscow: Progress; repr. New York: Promethius Books, 1990. (A forthright statement of humanistic Marxism by an influential figure in the Soviet establishment under Gorbachev.) Kolakowski, L. (1978) Main Currents of Marxism, trans P.S. Falla, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 3 vols. (A brilliant and comprehensive study of Marxist thought, containing, in vols 2 and 3, detailed discussion of Russian and Soviet Marxism.) DAVID BAKHURST MARXIST THOUGHT IN LATIN AMERICA Marxism is a theory offering a critique of capitalist political economy. Marxism also views itself as an instrument or means of changing the world from a capitalist to a socialist (and/or communist), economic and political order. Given its interest in economic and political change, Marxism involves a philosophy of history which depicts the possibility of and conditions for change from a capitalist to a socialist order. Marxist intellectuals perform the dual task of analysing the failures or limitations of capitalist economic and political structures. The theory also proposes and evaluates socialist alternatives. Latin American Marxism developed out of its own historical, economic, political and cultural conditions. Influenced by Lenin’s analysis of imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism, it directed the critique of capitalist political economy towards the capitalist world market
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Page 534 and its disadvantageous effects for the countries, particularly the impoverished classes and social sectors, of the Latin American and Caribbean regions. Latin American Marxism-Leninism argues, on political and economic grounds, that national liberation cannot be achieved without liberation from imperialism. Marxists believe that although the protagonists of history’s political projects are the workers (or if Leninist, the workers together with the peasants), in the end the interests of these groups represent the universal interests of humankind. Marxist political discourse often uses broader categories than those of ‘workers’ or ‘peasants’ to designate the agents of political emancipation, employing terms such as ‘the people’, ‘the popular sectors’ or ‘the revolutionary masses’. In this way Marxism attempts to broaden its political base so as to make its goals more effective. The political discourse of the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and the Nicaraguan Sandinista Revolution of 1979 exemplify this practice. There are and have been many differences among Marxists because of the different approaches to criticizing capitalism as well as the different conceptions held by those who profess a commitment to the ultimate Marxist goal of creating a nonexploitative socialist society. Representative issues in Latin American Marxism may be illustrated by focusing on three questions: the problem of orthodoxy, the socialist construction of a national identity and socialism’s relation to ethics, religion and culture. In addressing these issues, this entry draws significantly from the work of Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui, a prominent founder of Latin American Marxism. See also: LIBERATION PHILOSOPHY; MARXISM, WESTERN Further reading Liss, S.B. (1984) Marxist Thought in Latin America, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. (An introductory historical overview of Marxist political thought, classified by countries, from the late nineteenth century up to the 1970s.) Mariátegui, J.C. (1928) Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality , trans. M. Urquidi, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1971. (A clearly written classic in Latin American Marxism, best known for its original treatment of the Indian question. Its contents are the focus of a central portion of this entry.) OFELIA SCHUTTE MASARYK, TOMÁŠ GARRIGUE (1850–1937) Masaryk was a philosopher, sociologist, politician and first president of the Czechoslovak Republic (1918–35). Initially he aimed to change the Habsburg monarchy into a democratic federal state, but during the First World War he began to favour the abolition of the monarchy and, with the help of the Allied powers and the Czechoslovakian foreign armed forces, won independence for his nation. Masaryk’s philosophy of history posited democracy achieving victory over theocracy as a stage in world evolution. He regarded democracy as both a political system and a humanistic world outlook. See also: CZECH REPUBLIC, PHILOSOPHY IN; SLOVAKIA, PHILOSOPHY IN Further reading Masaryk, T.G. (1895) The Meaning of Czech History , trans. P. Kussi, ed. and intro. R. Wellek, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1974. (Anthology of Masaryk’s works including The Czech Question , Palaky’s Idea of the Czech Nation, John Huss and Karel Havlīček.) Translated by G.R.F. Bursa JOSEF ZUMR MASHAM, DAMARIS (1658–1708) Damaris Cudworth, who became Lady Masham on her marriage to Sir Francis Masham in 1685, was an English moral philosopher who published two short treatises on moral philosophy. These show that she became a disciple of John Locke, although her philosophical background was in Cambridge Platonism. She applied Lockean arguments to defend the education of women; her anti-idealism led her to oppose Malebranche and his English followers, John Norris and Mary Astell; and she also corresponded with Leibniz. See also: CAMBRIDGE PLATONISM Further reading Masham, D. (1705) Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian Life , London. (The second printing in 1747, Thoughts on a Christian Life , was misattributed to Locke.) SARAH HUTTON MASS TERMS Mass terms are words and phrases such as ‘water’, ‘wood’ and ‘white wallpaper’. They are
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Page 535 contrasted with count terms such as ‘woman’, ‘word’ and ‘wild wildebeest’. Intuitively, mass terms refer to ‘stuff’; count terms refer to ‘objects’. Mass terms allow for measurement (‘three kilos of wood’, ‘much water’); count terms allow for counting, quantifying and individuating (‘three women’, ‘each word’, ‘that wildebeest over there’). Philosophical problems associated with mass terms include (1) distinguishing mass from count terms, (2) describing the semantics of sentences employing mass terms, and (3) explicating the ontology presupposed by our use of mass versus count terms. Associated with these philosophical issues – especially the third – are the meta-philosophical issues concerning the extent to which any investigation into the linguistic practices of speakers of a language can be used as evidence for how those speakers view ‘reality’. See also: MEREOLOGY Further reading Bunt, H. (1985) Mass Terms and Model-Theoretic Semantics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (This is the longest and possibly most thorough work on mass terms. It is aimed at a computer implementation of a natural language understanding system which will include mass terms. It invokes ‘ensemble theory’, which is a type of atomic mereology.) Pelletier, F.J. (ed.) (1979) Mass Terms: Some Philosophical Problems, Dordrecht: Reidel. (This anthology includes many of the classic articles on the topic of mass terms, especially in the philosophical tradition. It also includes a comprehensive bibliography up to 1978.) JEFFRY PELLETIER MATERIALISM Materialism is a set of related theories which hold that all entities and processes are composed of – or are reducible to – matter, material forces or physical processes. All events and facts are explainable, actually or in principle, in terms of body, material objects or dynamic material changes or movements. In general, the meta-physical theory of materialism entails the denial of the reality of spiritual beings, consciousness and mental or psychic states or processes, as ontologically distinct from, or independent of, material changes or processes. Since it denies the existence of spiritual beings or forces, materialism typically is allied with atheism or agnosticism. The forms of materialism extend from the ancient Greek atomistic materialism through eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scientifically based theories, to recent sophisticated defences of various types of materialism. See also: MAATTER Further reading Armstrong, D.M. (1968) A Materialist Theory of the Mind, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (Thorough analysis of mind and mental states in terms of central state physicalism.) Hobbes, T. (1989) Metaphysical Writings of Thomas Hobbes, ed. M.W. Calkins, La Salle: Open Court. (Includes Hobbes’ views on materialism.) GEORGE J. STACK MATERIALISM, DIALECTICAL see DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM MATERIALISM IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND Materialism – which, for almost all purposes, is the same as physicalism – is the theory that everything that exists is material. Natural science shows that most things are intelligible in material terms, but mind presents problems in at least two ways. The first is consciousness, as found in the ‘raw feel’ of subjective experience. The second is the intentionality of thought, which is the property of being about something beyond itself; ‘aboutness’ seems not to be a physical relation in the ordinary sense. There have been three ways of approaching these problems. The hardest is eliminativism, according to which there are no ‘raw feels’, no intentionality and, in general, no mental states: the mind and all its furniture are part of an outdated science that we now see to be false. Next is reductionism, which seeks to give an account of our experience and of intentionality in terms which are acceptable to a physical science: this means, in practice, analysing the mind in terms of its role in producing behaviour. Finally, the materialist may accept the reality and irreducibility of mind, but claim that it depends on matter in such an intimate way – more intimate than mere causal dependence – that materialism is not threatened by the irreducibility of mind. The first two approaches can be called ‘hard materialism’, the third ‘soft materialism’. The problem for eliminativism is that we find it difficult to credit that any belief that we think and feel is a theoretical speculation. Reductionism’s main difficulty is that there seems to be more to consciousness
than its contribution to
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Page 536 behaviour: a robotic machine could behave as we do without thinking or feeling. The soft materialist has to explain supervenience in a way that makes the mind not epiphenomenal without falling into the problems of interactionism. Further reading Lockwood, M. (1989) Mind, Brain and the Quantum , Oxford, Blackwell. (Is worried by the purely relational scientific conception of matter and makes a serious attempt to rehabilitate Russellian neutral monism as a means to saving materialism. Excellent account of modern science.) Strawson, G. (1994) Mental Reality , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; London: Bradford Books. (An onslaught against any supposed conceptual connection between minds and behaviour.) HOWARD ROBINSON MATERIALISM, INDIAN SCHOOL OF ‘Materialism’ stands here for the Sanskrit term Lokāyata, the most common designation for the materialistic school of classical Indian philosophy. However, at the outset ‘materialism’ and ‘Lokāyata’ were not equivalent: early materialistic doctrines were not associated with Lokāyata, and early Lokāyata was neither materialistic nor even a philosophical school. Classical Lokāyata stands apart from all other Indian philosophical traditions due to its denial of ethical and metaphysical doctrines such as karmic retribution, life after death, and liberation. Its ontology, tailored to support this challenge, allows only four material elements and their various combinations. Further support comes from Lokāyata epistemology: the validity of inference and Scriptures is denied and perception is held to be the only means of valid cognition. As offshoots, a fully fledged scepticism and a theory of limited validity of inference developed in response to criticism by other philosophers. Consistent with Lokāyata ontology and epistemology, its ethics centres on the criticism of all religious and moral ideals which presuppose invisible agents and an afterlife. Hostile sources depict its followers as promulgating unrestricted hedonism. See also: MATERIALISM Further reading MacQueen, G. (1988) A Study of the Śrāmaṇyaphala-sūtra, Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz. (Remarkable for its methodology, this study contains a convincing attempt to determine which heretical views belong to which heretical teachers, notably Ajita Keśakambala, on the basis of Pāli, Tibetan and Chinese versions.) ELI FRANCO KARIN PREISENDANZ MATHEMATICS, FOUNDATIONS OF Conceived of philosophically, the foundations of mathematics concern various metaphysical and epistemological problems raised by mathematical practice, its results and applications. Most of these problems are of ancient vintage; two, in particular, have been of perennial concern. These are its richness of content and its necessity. Important too, though not so prominent in the history of the subject, is the problem of application, or how to account for the fact that mathematics has given rise to such an extensive, important and varied body of applications in other disciplines. The Greeks struggled with these questions. So, too, did various medieval and modern thinkers. The ideas of many of these continue to influence foundational thinking to the present day. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, the most influential ideas have been those of Kant. In one way or another and to a greater or lesser extent, the main currents of foundational thinking during this period – the most active and fertile period in the entire history of the subject – are nearly all attempts to reconcile Kant’s foundational ideas with various later developments in mathematics and logic. These developments include, chiefly, the nineteenth-century discovery of non-Euclidean geometries, the vigorous development of mathematical logic, the development of rigorous axiomatizations of geometry, the arithmetization of analysis and the discovery (by Dedekind and Peano) of an axiomatization of arithmetic. The first is perhaps the most important. It led to widespread acceptance of the idea that space was not merely a Kantian ‘form’ of intuition, but had an independence from our intellect that made it different in kind from arithmetic. This asymmetry between geometry and arithmetic became a major premise of more than one of the main ‘isms’ of twentieth-century philosophy of mathematics. The intuitionists retained Kant’s conception of arithmetic and took the same view of that part of geometry which could be reduced to arithmetic. The logicists maintained arithmetic to be ‘analytic’ but differed over their view of geometry. Hilbert’s formalist view endorsed a greater part of Kant’s conception.
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Page 537 The second development carried logic to a point well beyond where it had been in Kant’s day and suggested that his views on the nature of mathematics were in part due to the relatively impoverished state of his logic. The third indicated that geometry could be completely formalized and that intuition was therefore not needed for the sake of conducting inferences within proofs. The fourth and fifth, finally, provided for the codification of a large part of classical mathematics – namely analysis and its neighbours – within a single axiomatic system – namely (second-order) arithmetic. This confirmed the views of those (for example, the intuitionists and the logicists) who believed that arithmetic had a special centrality within human thinking. It also provided a clear reductive target for such later antiKantian enterprises as Russell’s logicism. The major movements in the philosophy of mathematics during this period all drew strength from postKantian developments in mathematics and logic. Each, however, also encountered serious difficulties soon after gaining initial momentum. Frege’s logicism was defeated by Russell’s paradox; Russell’s logicism, in turn, made use of such questionable (from a logicist standpoint) items as the axioms of infinity and reduction. Both logicism and Hilbert’s formalist programme came under heavy attack from Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. And finally, intuitionism suffered from its inability to produce a body of mathematics comparable in richness to classical mathematics. Despite the failure of these non-Kantian programmes, however, movement away from Kant continued in the mid- and late twentieth century. From the 1930s on this has been driven mainly by a revival of empiricist and naturalist ideas in philosophy, prominent in the writings of both the logical empiricists and the later influential work of Quine, Putnam and Benacerraf. This continues as perhaps the major force shaping work in the philosophy of mathematics. 1 Kant’s views; reactions The ‘ Problematik ’ that KANT established for the epistemology of pure mathematics focused on the reconciliation of two apparently incompatible features of pure mathematics: (1) the problem of necessity, or how to explain the apparent fact that mathematical statements (for example, statements such as that 1 + 1 = 2 or that the sum of the interior angles of a Euclidean triangle is equal to two right angles) should appear to be not only true but necessarily true and independent of empirical evidence; and (2) the problem of cognitive richness, or how to account for the fact that pure mathematics should yield subjects as rich and deep in content and method, as robust in growth and as replete with surprising discoveries as the history of mathematics demonstrates. In mathematics, Kant said, we find a ‘great and established branch of knowledge’ – a cognitive domain so ‘wonderfully large’ and with promise of such ‘unlimited future extension’ that it would appear to arise from sources other than those of pure unaided (human) reason. At the same time, it carries with it a certainty or necessity that is typical of judgments of pure reason. The problem, then, is to explain these apparently conflicting characteristics. Kant’s explanation was that mathematical knowledge arises from certain standing conditions or ‘forms’ which shape our experience of space and time – forms which, though they are part of the innate cognitive apparatus that we bring to experience, none the less shape our experience in a way that goes beyond mere logical processing. To elaborate this hypothesis, Kant sorted judgments/propositions in two different ways: first, according to whether they required appeal to sensory experience for their justification; and, second, according to whether their predicate concepts were ‘contained in’ their subject concepts. A judgment or proposition was ‘a priori’ if it could be justified without appeal to sensory content. If not, it was ‘a posteriori’. It was ‘analytic’ if the very act of thinking the subject concept contained, as a constituent part, the thinking of the predicate concept. If not, it was either false or ‘synthetic’. In synthetic a priori judgment – the type of judgment Kant regarded as characteristic of mathematics – the predicate concept was thought not through the mere thinking of the subject concept, but through its ‘construction in intuition’. He took a similar view of mathematical inference, believing it to involve an intuition that goes beyond the mere logical connection of premises and conclusions. Kant erected his mathematical epistemology upon these distinctions and, famously, maintained that mathematical judgment and inference is synthetic a priori in character. In this way, he intended to account for both the necessity and cognitive richness of mathematics, its necessity reflecting its a priority, its cognitive richness its syntheticity. Kant applied this basic outlook to both arithmetic and geometry (and also to pure mechanics). He did not regard them as entirely identical, however, since he saw them as resting
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Page 538 on different a priori intuitions. Neither did he see them as possessing precisely the same universality (1781/1787: A163–5, 170–1, 717, 734/B204–6, 212, 745, 762). None the less, he regarded their similarities as more important than their differences and therefore took them to be of essentially the same epistemic type – namely, synthetic a priori. In the end, it was this inclusion of geometry and arithmetic within the same basic epistemic type rather than his more central claim concerning the existence of synthetic a priori knowledge that gave rise to the sternest challenges to his views. In the decades following the publication of the first Critique (1781/1787), the principal source of concern regarding its views was the growing evidence for and eventual discovery of non-Euclidean geometries. This led many to question whether geometry and arithmetic are of the same basic epistemic character. The serious possibility of non-Euclidean geometries went back to the work of Lambert and others in the eighteenth century. Building on this work, some – in particular, Gauss – stated their opposition to Kant’s views even before the actual discovery of non-Euclidean geometries by Bolyai and Lobachevskii in the 1820s. Gauss’ reasoning was essentially this: number seems to be purely a product of the intellect and, so, something of which we can have purely a priori knowledge. Space, on the other hand, seems to have a reality external to our minds that prohibits a purely a priori knowledge of it. Arithmetic and geometry are therefore not on an epistemological par with one another. This reasoning became a potent force shaping nineteenth- and twentieth-century foundational thinking. Another such force was the dramatic development of logic and the axiomatic method in the mid- to late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. This included the introduction of algebraic methods by Boole and De Morgan, the improved treatment of relations by Peirce, Schröder and Peano, the replacement of the subject–predicate conception of propositional form with Frege’s more fecund functional conception, and the advances in axiomatization and formalization brought about by the work of Frege, Pasch, Peano, Hilbert and (especially) Whitehead and Russell. Certain developments in mathematics proper also exerted an influence. Chief among these were the arithmetization of analysis by Weierstrass, Dedekind and others, and the axiomatization of arithmetic by Peano and Dedekind. Of somewhat lesser importance, though still significant for their effects on Hilbert’s thinking, were Einstein’s relativistic ideas in physics. 2 Intuitionism A variety of views concerning the asymmetry of geometry and arithmetic emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That of the early intuitionists Brouwer and Weyl retained Kant’s synthetic a priori conception of arithmetic. They responded to the discovery of nonEuclidean geometries, however, by denying the a priori status of that part of geometry that could not be reduced to arithmetic by such means as Descartes’ calculus of coordinates. They retained, none the less, a type of a priori intuition of time as the basis for arithmetical knowledge. They also emphasized the synthetic character of arithmetical judgment and inference, and sharply distinguished them from logical judgment and inference. Brouwer described his intuition of time as consciousness of change per se – the human subject’s primordial inner awareness of the ‘falling apart’ of a life-moment into a part that is passing away and a part that is becoming. He believed that, via a process of abstraction, one could pass from this basal intuition of time to a concept of ‘bare two-oneness’, and from this concept to, first, the finite ordinals, then the transfinite ordinals and, finally, the linear continuum. In this way, parts of classical arithmetic, analysis and set theory could be recaptured intuitionistically. Brouwer thus modified Kant’s intuitional basis for mathematics. He also modified his conception of knowledge of existence. Kant believed that humans could obtain knowledge of existence only through sensible intuition. Only this, he believed, had the type of involuntariness and objectivity that assures us that belief in an object is not a mere compulsion or idiosyncrasy of our subjective selves. Like the postKantian romantic idealists, however, Brouwer (and Weyl, too) believed as well in knowledge of existence via a kind of ‘intellectual intuition’ – an intuition carried by a purely internal type of mental construction. The early intuitionists (especially Brouwer and Poincaré) remained Kantian in their conception of mathematical reasoning and took it to be essentially different in character from ‘discursive’ or logical reasoning. Brouwer believed logical reasoning to mark not patterns in mathematical thinking itself but only patterns in its linguistic representation. It was therefore not indicative of the inferential structure of math
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Page 539 ematical thinking itself and had no place within genuine mathematical reasoning per se. This was essentially the idea expressed in Brouwer’s so-called ‘First Act of Intuitionism’. Thus the early intuitionists (especially Brouwer and Weyl and, to some extent, Poincaré) discarded Kant’s view of geometry, revised his conception of arithmetic and existence claims, and preserved his basic stance on the nature of mathematical reasoning and its relationship to logical reasoning. Later intuitionists (for example, Heyting and Dummett) did not keep to this plan. They rejected Brouwer’s view of the divide between logical and mathematical reasoning and made a significant place for logic in their accounts of mathematical reasoning. Some of them (Dummett and his ‘anti-realist’ followers) even went so far as to make the question ‘What is the logic of mathematical reasoning?’ central to their philosophy of mathematics (see §5 below). 3 Logicism The view of the logicist Frege (and, to some extent, of Dedekind) accepted Kant’s synthetic a priori conception of geometry but maintained arithmetic to be analytic. RUSSELL, another logicist, rejected Kant’s views of both geometry and arithmetic (and also of pure mechanics) and maintained the analyticity of both. (See LOGICISM.) Frege’s logicism differed sharply from intuitionism. First, it differed in the place in mathematical reasoning it assigned to logic. Frege maintained that reasoning is essentially the same everywhere and that even an inference pattern such as that of mathematical induction, which appears to be peculiar to mathematics, is, at bottom, purely logical. Second, it differed in its conception of geometry. Like the early intuitionists, Frege regarded the discovery of non-Euclidean geometries as revealing an important asymmetry between arithmetic and geometry. Unlike them, however, he did not see this as grounds for rejecting Kant’s synthetic a priori conception of geometry, but rather as indicating a fundamental difference between geometry and arithmetic. Frege believed the fundamental concept of arithmetic – magnitude – to be both too pervasive and too abstract to be the product of Kantian intuition. It figured in every kind of thinking and so must, he reasoned, have a basis in thought deeper than that of intuition. It must have its basis in the very core of rational thought itself; the laws of logic. The problem was to account for the cognitive richness of arithmetic on such a view. How could the ‘great tree of the science of number’ have its roots in bare logical or analytical ‘identities’? Frege responded by offering new accounts of both the objectivity and the informativeness of arithmetic. The former he attributed to its subject matter – the so-called ‘logical objects’. The latter he derived from a new theory of content which allowed concepts to contain (tacit) content that was not needed for their grasp. On this view, analytic judgments could have content that was not required for the mere understanding of the concepts contained in them. Consequently, they could yield more than knowledge of transparent logical identities. Unlike Kant, then, Frege maintained an important epistemic asymmetry between geometry and arithmetic – an asymmetry based upon his belief that arithmetic is more basic to human rational thought than is geometry. In addition, he departed from Kant in maintaining a realistic conception of arithmetic knowledge despite its analytic character. He saw it as being about a class of objects – so-called ‘logical objects’ – that are external but intimately related to the mind and therefore not the mere expression of standing traits of human cognition. The differences between arithmetical and geometric necessity were to be accounted for by separating the relationship the mind has to the objects of arithmetic from that which it has to the objects of geometry. Russell’s logicism differed from Frege’s. Perhaps most importantly, Russell did not regard the existence of non-Euclidean geometries as evidence of an epistemological asymmetry between geometry and arithmetic. Rather, he saw the ‘arithmetization’ of geometry and other areas of mathematics as evidence of an epistemological symmetry between arithmetic and the rest of mathematics. Russell thus extended his logicism to the whole of mathematics. The basic components of his logicism were a general methodological ideal of pursuing each science to its greatest level of generality, and a conception of the greatest level of generality in mathematics as lying at that point where all its theorems are of the form ‘ p implies q’, all their constants are logical constants and all their variables of unrestricted range. Theorems of this sort, Russell maintained, would rightly be regarded as logical truths. Russell’s logicism was thus motivated by a view of mathematics which saw it as the science of the most general formal truths; a science whose indefinables are those constants of rational thought (the socalled logical constants) that have the most ubiquitous application, and
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Page 540 whose indemonstrables are those propositions that set out the basic properties of these indefinables (Russell 1903: 8). In his opinion, such a view provided the only precise description of what philosophers have had in mind when they have described mathematics as a necessary or a priori science. Russell thus accounted for the necessity of mathematics by pointing to its logical character. He accounted for its richness principally by invoking a new definition of syntheticity that allowed all but the most trivial logical truths and inferences to be counted as informative or synthetic. Mathematical truths would thus be logical truths, but they would not, for all that, be analytic truths. Similarly for inferences. An inference would count as synthetic so long as its conclusion was a different proposition from its premises. Cognitive richness was conceived primarily as the production of new propositions from old, and, on Russell’s conception (supposing the criterion of propositional identity to be sufficiently strict), even purely logical inference could produce a bounty of new knowledge from old. Russell was thus able to account for both the necessity and the cognitive richness of mathematics while making mathematics part of logic. What had kept previous generations of thinkers and, in particular, Kant from recognizing the possibilities of such a view was the relatively impoverished state of logic before the end of the nineteenth century. The new logic, with its robust stock of new forms, its functional conception of the proposition and the ensuing fuller axiomatization of mathematics which it made possible, changed all this forever and provided for the final refutation of Kant. Such, at any rate, was Russell’s position. 4 Hilbert’s formalism Hilbert accepted the synthetic a priori character of (much of) arithmetic and geometry, but rejected Kant’s account of the supposed intuitions upon which they rest. Overall, Hilbert’s position was more complicated in its relationship to Kant’s epistemology than were those of the intuitionists and logicists. Like Russell, he rejected Kant’s specifically mathematical epistemology – in particular, his conception of the nature and origins of its a priori character. Like Russell, too, he rejected the common post-Kantian belief in the epistemological asymmetry of arithmetic and geometry. Hilbert was, however, unique among those mentioned here in endorsing the framework of Kant’s general critical epistemology and making it a central feature of his mathematical epistemology. Specifically, he adopted Kant’s distinction between the faculty of the understanding and the faculty of reason as the guide for his pivotal distinction between the so-called ‘real’ and ‘ideal’ portions of classical mathematics. Hilbert took ‘real’ mathematics to be ultimately concerned with the shapes or forms ( Gestalten ) of concrete signs or figures, given in intuition and comprising a type of ‘immediate experience prior to all thought’. Hilbert proposed this basic intuition of shape as a replacement for Kant’s two a priori intuitions of space and time. Like Kant’s a priori intuitions, however, Hilbert, too regarded his finitary intuition as an ‘irremissible pre-condition’ of all mathematical (indeed, all scientific) judgment and the ultimate source of all genuine a priori knowledge. The genuine judgments of real mathematics were the judgments of which our mathematical knowledge was constituted. The pseudo-judgments of ideal mathematics, on the other hand, functioned like Kant’s ideas of reason. They neither described things present in the world nor constituted a foundation for our judgments concerning such things. Rather, they played a purely regulative role of guiding the efficient and orderly development of our real knowledge. Hilbert did not, therefore, affirm the necessity of either arithmetic or geometry in any simple, straightforward way. Rather, he distinguished two types of necessity operating within both. One, pertaining to the judgments of real mathematics, consisted in the (presumed) fact that the apprehension of certain elementary spatial and combinatorial features of simple concrete objects is a pre-condition of all scientific thought. The other, pertaining to the ideal parts of mathematics, had a kind of psychological necessity, a necessity borne of the manner in which our minds inevitably or best regulate the development of our real knowledge. This conception of the necessity of mathematics was different from both Kant’s and the logicists’ and intuitionists’. So, too, was Hilbert’s view of the cognitive richness of mathematics,which he attributed both to the objective richness of the shapes and combinatorial features of concrete signs and to the richness of our imaginations in ‘creating’ complementary ideal objects. In its overall structure, Hilbert’s mathematical epistemology thus resembled Kant’s general critical epistemology. This included his so-called ‘consistency’ requirement (that is, the requirement that ideal reasoning not prove anything
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Page 541 contrary to that which may be established by real means), which resembled Kant’s demand that the faculty of reason not produce any judgment of the understanding that could not in principle be obtained solely from the understanding. 5 Modifications During the first four decades of the twentieth century, each of the post-Kantian programmes outlined above came under attack. Frege’s logicism was challenged by Russell’s paradox. Russell’s logicism encountered difficulties concerning its use of certain existence axioms (namely his axioms of reducibility and infinity) which did not appear to be laws of logic . Both were challenged by Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, as was Hilbert’s formalist programme. Finally, the intuitionists were criticized both philosophically, where their idealism was called into question, and mathematically, where their ability to support a significant body of mathematics remained in doubt. Various modifications have been proposed. Modifications of logicism . On the mathematical side, a chastened successor to logicism can perhaps be seen in the model-theoretic work of Abraham Robinson and his followers. They are interested in determining the mathematical content latent in purely ‘logical’ features of various mathematical structures or the extent to which genuinely mathematical problems concerning these structures can be solved by purely logical (that is, model-theoretic) means. They have been particularly successful in their treatment of various algebraic structures. Philosophically, too, there have been attempts to renew logicism. It re-emerged in the 1930s and 1940s as the favoured philosophy of mathematics of the logical empiricists. They did not, however, develop a logicism of their own in the way that Dedekind, Frege and Russell did, but, rather, simply appropriated the technical work of Russell and Whitehead (modulo the usual reservations concerning the axioms of infinity and reducibility) and attempted to embed it in an overall empiricist epistemology. This empiricist turn was a novel development in the history of logicism and represented a serious departure from both the original logicism of LEIBNIZ and the more recent logicism of Frege (and Dedekind). It was less at odds with Russell’s logicism which saw mathematics and the empirical sciences as both making use of an essentially inductive method (the so-called ‘regressive’ method. Like all empiricists, the logical empiricists struggled with the Kantian problem of how to account for the apparent necessity of mathematics while at the same time being able to explain its cognitive richness. Their strategy was to empty mathematics of all non-analytic content while, at the same time, arguing that analytic truth and inference can be substantial and non-self-evident. Their ideas came under heavy attack by W.V. QUINE, who challenged their pivotal distinction between analytic and synthetic truths (1951, 1954). He argued that the basic unit of knowledge – the basic item of our thought that is tested against experience – is science as a whole and that this depends upon empirical evidence for its justification. Mathematics and logic are used to relate empirical evidence to the rest of science and, so, are inextricably interwoven into the whole fabric of science. They are thus part of the total body of science that is tested against experience and there is no clean way of dividing between truths of meaning (analytic truths) and truths of fact (synthetic truths). Within a relatively brief period of time, Quine’s argument became a major influence in the philosophy of mathematics and the logicism of the logical empiricists was largely abandoned. Newer conceptions of logicism have, however, continued to appear from time to time. For example, Putnam addressed the difficult (for a logicist) question of existence claims, arguing that such statements are to be seen as asserting the possible (as opposed to the actual) existence of structures. They are therefore, at bottom, logical claims, and can be established by logical (or metalogical) means. Hodes takes a somewhat different approach, arguing that arithmetic claims can be translated into a second-order logic in which the second-order variables range over functions and concepts (as opposed to objects). In this way, commitment to sets and other specifically mathematical objects can be eliminated and, this done, arithmetic can be considered a part of logic. Field (1980) also presents a kind of logicist view – namely, that mathematical knowledge is (at least largely) logical knowledge. Mathematical knowledge is defined as that knowledge which separates a person who knows a lot of mathematics from a person who knows only a little, and it is then argued that what separates these two kinds of knowers is mainly logical knowledge; that is, knowledge of what follows from what. Modifications of Hilbert’s programme . Hilbert’s programme too has its latter-day adherents. For the most part, these have adopted one
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Page 542 of two basic stances: that of extending the methods available for proving the consistency of classical ideal mathematics; or that of diminishing the scope and strength of classical ideal mathematics so that its consistency (or the consistency of important parts of it) can more nearly be proved by the kinds of elementary means that Hilbert originally envisaged. Some in the first group (for example, Gentzen, Ackermann and Gödel) have argued that there are types of evidence that exceed finitary evidence in strength but which have the same basic epistemic virtues as it. Others argue for a change in our conception of what a consistency proof ought to do. They maintain that its essential obligation is to realize an epistemic gain, and that finitary methods are not the only epistemically gainful methods for proving consistency. Those in the second group – the so-called ‘reverse mathematics’ school of Friedman, Simpson and others – try to isolate the mathematical ‘cores’ of the various areas of classical mathematics and prove the consistency of these ‘reduced’ theories by finitary or related means. So far, significant success has been achieved along these lines. Modifications of intuitionism . Regarding intuitionism, Heyting’s work in the 1930s to formalize intuitionism and to identify its logic has led to a vigorous programme of logical and mathematical investigation. In addition to Heyting and his students, Errett Bishop and his followers have extended a constructivist approach to areas of classical mathematics to which such an approach had previously not been extended. On the more philosophical side, the most important development is the construction by Michael Dummett and his anti-realist followers of a defence of intuitionism based upon – in their view – the best answer to the question ‘What is the logic of mathematics?’. Their answer is based upon what they take to be a proper theory of meaning – a theory which, following certain ideas set out by Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations , equates the meaning of an expression with its canonical use in the practice to which it belongs. They then identify the canonical use of an expression in mathematics with the role it plays in the central activity of proof, and from this they infer an intuitionist treatment of the logical operators. 6 Later developments Along with the modifications of the major post-Kantian viewpoints noted above, two other developments in the second half of the twentieth century are important to note. One of these is the shift towards empiricism that was brought about by Quine’s (following Duhem’s) merging of mathematics and the empirical sciences into a single justificatory unit governed by a basically inductive-empirical method. On this view, mathematics may on the whole be less susceptible to falsification by sensory evidence than is natural science, but this is a difference of degree, not kind. This conception of mathematics dispenses with a ‘datum’ of mathematical epistemology that philosophers of mathematics from Kant on down had struggled to accommodate: namely, the presumed necessity of mathematics. It puts in its place a general empiricist epistemology in which all judgments – those of mathematics and logic as well as those of the natural sciences – are seen as evidentially connected to sensory phenomena and, so, subject to empirical revision. To accommodate the lingering conviction that mathematics is independent of empirical evidence in a way that natural science is not, Quine introduced a pragmatic distinction between them. Rational beliefrevision, he said, is governed by a pragmatic concern to maximize the overall predictive and explanatory power of one’s total system of beliefs. Furthermore, predictive and explanatory power are generally aided by policies of revision which minimize, both in scope and severity, the changes that are made to a previously successful belief-system in response to recalcitrant experience. Because of this, beliefs of mathematics and logic are typically less subject to empirical revision than beliefs of natural science and common sense since revising them generally (albeit, in Quine’s view, not inevitably) does more damage to a belief-system than does revising its common sense and natural scientific beliefs. The necessity of mathematics is thus accommodated in Quine’s epistemology by moving mathematics closer to the centre of a ‘web’ of human beliefs where beliefs are less susceptible to empirical revision than are the beliefs of natural science and common sense that lie closer to the edge of the web. In Quine’s view, merging mathematics and science into a single belief-system also induces a realist conception of mathematics. Mathematical sentences must be treated as true in order to play their role in this system, and the world is to be seen as being populated by those entities that are among the values of the variables of true sentences. Mathematical entities are thus real
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Page 543 because mathematical sentences play an integral part in our best total theory of experience. Quine’s views have been challenged on various grounds. For example, Parsons argues that treating the elementary arithmetical parts of mathematics as being on an epistemological par with the hypotheses of theoretical physics fails to capture an epistemologically important distinction between the different kinds of evidentness displayed by the two. Even highly confirmed physical hypotheses such as ‘The earth moves around the sun’ are more ‘derivative’ (that is, roughly, more theory-laden) than is an elementary arithmetic proposition such as ‘7 + 5 = 12’. It is therefore not plausible to regard the two claims as based on essentially the same type of evidence. Others have challenged different aspects of Quine’s position. Field and Maddy, for example, both question his merging of mathematics and natural science, though in different ways. Field argues that natural science that utilizes mathematics is a conservative extension of it and, so, has no need of its entities. The mathematical part of natural science can thus, in an important sense, be separated from the rest of it. Maddy investigates the possibility that our knowledge of at least certain mathematical objects might not be so diffuse and inextricable from the whole scheme of our natural scientific knowledge as Quine suggests. She argues that perceptual experience can be tied closely and specifically to certain mathematical objects (in particular, to certain sets) in a way that seems out of keeping with Quine’s holism. In addition to Quine, others have suggested different mergings of mathematics and natural sciences. Kitcher, for instance, presents a generally empiricist epistemology for mathematics in which history and community are important epistemological forces. Gödel, on the other hand, argued that mathematics, like the natural sciences, makes use of what is essentially inductive justification when it justifies higherlevel mathematical hypotheses on the grounds of their explanatory or simplificatory effects on lowerlevel mathematical truths and on physics. He allowed, however, that only some of our mathematical knowledge arises from empirical sources and regarded as absurd the idea that all of it might do. Another important influence on recent philosophy of mathematics is Benacerraf’s ‘Mathematical Truth’ (1973), in which he argues that the philosophy of mathematics faces a general dilemma. It must give an account of both mathematical truth and mathematical knowledge. The former seems to demand abstract objects as the referents of singular terms in mathematical discourse. The latter, on the other hand, seems to demand that we avoid such referents. There are mathematical epistemologies (for example, various Platonist ones) that allow for a plausible account of the truth of mathematical sentences. Likewise, there are those (for example, various formalist ones) that allow for a plausible account of how we might come to know mathematical sentences. However, no known epistemology does both. Towards the end of the twentieth century a great deal of work has been devoted to resolving this dilemma. Field, Hellman and Chihara attempt anti-Platonist resolutions. Maddy, on the other hand, attempts a resolution at once Platonist and naturalistic. To date there is no general consensus on which approaches are the more plausible. An earlier argument of Benacerraf’s was similarly influential in shaping later work. It is the chief inspiration of the position known as ‘structuralism’ – the view that mathematical objects are essentially positions in structures and have no important additional internal composition or nature. Apart from the desire for a descriptively more adequate account of mathematics, the chief motivation of structuralism is epistemological. Knowledge of the characteristics of individual abstract objects would seem to require naturalistically inexplicable powers of cognition. Knowledge of at least some structures, on the other hand, would appear to be explicable as the result of applying such classically empiricist means of cognition as abstraction to observable physical complexes. Structures identified via abstraction become part of the general framework of our thinking and can be extended and generalized in a variety of ways as the search for the simplest and most effective overall conceptual scheme is pursued. Structuralism as a general philosophy of mathematics has been criticized by Parsons, who argues that there are important mathematical objects for which structuralism is not an adequate account. These are the ‘quasi-concrete’ objects of mathematics – objects that are directly ‘instantiated’ or ‘represented’ by concrete objects (for example, geometric figures and symbols such as the so-called ‘stroke numerals’ of Hilbert’s finitary arithmetic, where these are construed as types whose instances are written marks or symbols or uttered sounds). Such objects cannot be treated in a purely structuralist way because their ‘representational’ function cannot be reduced to the purely
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Page 544 intrastructural relationships they bear to other objects within a given system. At the same time, however, they are among the most elementary and important mathematical entities there are. See also: ANTIREALISM IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF MATHEMATICS; CONSTRUCTIVISM IN MATHEMATICS; REALISM IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF MATHEMATICA Further reading Beeson, M.J. (1985) Foundations of Constructive Mathematics, Berlin: Springer. (Useful survey of recent logical and mathematical developments in constructive mathematics.) Benacerraf, P. and Putnam, H. (eds) (1964) Philosophy of Mathematics: Selected Readings , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd edn, 1983. (Collection of influential papers in the philosophy of mathematics.) Field, H. (1980) Science Without Numbers , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Defence of the view that mathematical knowledge is, at least in large part, logical knowledge. Also argues, contra Quine and Putnam, that realism with respect to physics does not entail realism with respect to mathematics.) Heijenoort, J. van (ed.) (1967) From Frege to Gödel: A Source Book in Mathematical Logic , 1879–1931, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Collection of basic papers in mathematical logic and the foundations of mathematics. Useful forewords and bibliography.) Kitcher, P. (1983) The Nature of Mathematical Knowledge , Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Develops an empiricist conception of mathematics which emphasizes its similarities to natural science.) Russell, B.A.W. (1903) The Principles of Mathematics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2nd edn, London: Allen & Unwin, 1937; repr. London: Routledge, 1992. (Russell’s first full-length development of his logicist views.) Whitehead, A.N. and Russell, B.A.W. (1910) Principia Mathematica , vol. 1, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd edn, 1925. (The classic symbolic formalization of logic and mathematics; a basis of much of the greatest work in mathematical logic and the foundations of mathematics in the twentieth century.) MICHAEL DETLEFSEN MATTER Viewed as arising within the framework of a more general theory of substance , philosophical treatments of matter have traditionally revolved around two issues: (1) The nature of matter: what are the distinguishing characteristics of matter or material substance(s) that define it and distinguish it from other substances, if any? (2) The problem of elements: do material things consist of elementary substances, or are there always further constituents? One possible view is that there is no fundamental level – that there are always further constituents, ingredients of ingredients. However, the view most often held by both philosophers and scientists has been that there are indeed fundamental elements out of which material things are made. Once this view is adopted, the question arises as to what they are and what properties distinguish them. These two issues were introduced, though only gradually, in ancient Greek philosophy. A significant turn came about in the seventeenth century, in which the work of Descartes and Newton led to a picture of matter as passive, inert and dead as opposed to minds and forces, both of which were conceived as being ‘active’. Many philosophical problems and doctrines have been formulated in terms of this distinction. However, later developments in science, especially in the twentieth century, have brought about such profound changes that classical concepts of matter are no longer viable. These new developments profoundly alter the statements of philosophical doctrines and problems traditionally associated with matter. See also: MATTER, INDIAN CONCEPTIONS OF; SUBSTANCE Further reading McMullin, E. (ed.) (1963) The Concept of Matter, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. (A collection of articles by historians and philosophers; most papers accessible to non-specialists.) Sambursky, S. (1956) The Physical World of the Greeks , London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (Written by a physicist-historian, an excellent survey of Greek ideas about matter. Highly accessible.) DUDLEY SHAPERE MATTER, INDIAN CONCEPTIONS OF During the long and complex history of Indian philosophy, a number of divergent conceptions of matter have been developed and explored. These conceptions diverge both with respect to
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Page 545 the ontological analysis of matter, and with respect to its specific structural characteristics. In terms of ontological conceptions of matter, the rival positions of materialism, idealism and substance-pluralism are all advanced by competing schools of thought. For example, pure materialism is espoused by the Cārvāka school, while absolute idealism is defended by Advaita Vedānta, and varying forms of pluralism are advocated by the Sānkhya, Yoga, Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika schools. Regarding the structural characteristics of matter, the most interesting conceptions are advanced by the pluralistic philosophies. In particular, the Vaiśeṣika and Nyāya schools recognize five physical substances, four of which are held to possess atomic structure. According to this conception, matter is composed of imperceptibly small units or paramāṇaus,which constitute the basic substrate in which perceptible qualities inhere. All macroscopic objects are transient composites of atoms, while the paramāṇeus themselves are indivisible and indestructible. The atoms are held to be naturally at rest, and an external force is required to initiate motion. In contrast, the Sānkhya and Yoga traditions espouse a metaphysical dualism of the two basic categories of matter and consciousness, where the continuity and dynamic transformations of matter are emphasized. All of the diverse phenomena of the physical world result from modifications of a single underlying source known as pradhāna or primal matter, which is said to be continuous, all pervading, indestructible and imperceptible. Pradhāna exists in a balanced and unmanifest state of pralaya until it is disturbed by the presence of consciousness. This disturbance leads to an imbalance between the internal constituents of pradhāna , and the resulting disequilibrium accounts for the evolutionary transformations of the physical world. See also: ONTOLOGY IN INDIAN PHILOSOPHY Further reading Misra, U. (1936) The Conception of Matter According to Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika, Allahabad: M.N. Pandey. (Exposition of the shared view of matter.) PAUL SCHWEIZER MATTHEW OF AQUASPARTA ( c .1238–1302) Matthew, an Italian Franciscan, walked in the footsteps of Bonaventure, which had been widened by his first followers, Walter of Bruges, John Pecham and William of Mare. For them, the knowledge of God’s existence is the first truth implanted in the human mind. God’s existence cannot be proved a priori (from something prior to it), since it is the first truth. It is a truth that is immediately known, not in the sense that there is actual knowledge of God implanted in the mind at birth, but because any judgment we make presupposes that the mind has contact with the Truth that is the measure of all truth. Such a first Truth must exist. See also: GOD, CONCEPTS OF; ETERNITY OF THE World, Medieval Views Of Further reading Hayes, Z. (1964) The General Doctrine of Creation in the Thirteenth Century, with Special Emphasis on Matthew of Aquasparta, Munich: Schöningh. (Matthew’s creation doctrine in its context.) STEPHEN F. BROWN MAUTHNER, FRITZ (1849–1923) The work of Fritz Mauthner helps document the phenomenon of ‘language crisis’ or Sprachkrise in German-Austrian letters at the beginning of the twentieth century. In his Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache (Contributions to a Critique of Language) (1901–2), Mauthner develops a theory of knowledge that draws on empiricism but also redefines certain basic concepts in terms of language. ‘Language’ refers to more than speech; it is the medium of all cognition and, as such, an instrument of knowledge. Mauthner’s reformulation of epistemological questions in linguistic terms does more than replace one topic with another. When language becomes the focus of philosophical debate, the debate cannot help but involve a discussion of the nature and limits of the discussion itself. As epistemology or theory of knowledge gives way to critique of language, it spells the end of philosophy as a foundational discourse for the human sciences. Further reading Mauthner, F. (1901–2) Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache (Contributions to a Critique of Language), Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 3rd edn, 3 vols. (Individual volumes on different topics: psychology of language, concepts in linguistics, grammar and logic.) Weiler, G. (1970) Mauthner’s Critique of Language, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Detailed discussion of philosophical
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Page 546 issues, situates Mauthner in the history of philosophy.) ELIZABETH BREDECK MAXWELL, JAMES CLERK (1831–79) For his two achievements of unifying electricity, magnetism and light, and of inventing statistical dynamics, the Scottish scientist and philosopher James Clerk Maxwell stands as the founding mind of modern theoretical physics. More than any other physicist’s his also was a mind shaped and informed by a training in philosophy, even though, unlike Heinrich Hertz or Ernst Mach, for example, he never wrote a philosophical treatise. Therein lies the point, however. Mach’s and Hertz’s best discoveries seem remote from their metaphysics; Maxwell’s are bound up with his. Particularly important philosophically are his interconnected uses of relation, analogy and classification. He is also responsible for introducing the word ‘relativity’ into physics, and for articulating the scientific problematic that led to Einstein’s theory. Further reading Hendry, J.M. (1986) James Clerk Maxwell and the Theory of the Electromagnetic Field, Bristol: Adam Hilger. (A historical critical overview.) Maxwell, J.C. (1890) The Scientific Papers of J. Clerk Maxwell , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2 vols. (Contains all but fifteen of Maxwell’s published papers.) C.W.F. EVERITT MEAD, GEORGE HERBERT (1863–1931) Together with Charles Peirce, William James and John Dewey, George Herbert Mead is considered one of the classic representatives of American pragmatism. He is most famous for his ideas about the specificities of human communication and sociality and about the genesis of the ‘self’ in infantile development. By developing these ideas, Mead became one of the founders of social psychology and – mostly via his influence on the school of symbolic interactionism – one of the most influential figures in contemporary sociology. Compared to that enormous influence, other parts of his philosophical work are relatively neglected. See also:RAGMATISM Further reading Cook, G.A. (1993) George Herbert Mead. The Making of a Social Pragmatist , Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press. (Careful study of Mead’s biography and intellectual development.) Mead, G.H. (1934) Mind, Self, and Society , ed. Ch. Morris, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (Mead’s social psychology.) HANS JOAS MEANING AND COMMUNICATION The two fundamental facts about language are that we use it to mean things and we use it to communicate. So the philosophy of language tries to explain what it is for words and sentences to mean things and also what it is for us to communicate by using them. Although it cannot be accidental that meaning and communication go together, it is quite easy to see them as fundamentally distinct. Thus on some accounts the meaning of sentences is conceived in terms of a ‘representative’ power whereby they stand for either aspects of the world or ideas in the mind and their use in communication is derived from this property: language serves as a vehicle for meaning, itself thought of in independent terms. An alternative approach seeks to link the two more closely, seeing representation as itself only possible through the use of terms of a common language, used in communication. Further reading Fodor, J.A. (1987) Psychosemantics: The Problem of Meaning in the Philosophy of Mind, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (The classic defence of the theory that meaning is the outcome of computational structures in the mind/brain.) Searle, J.R. (1969) Speech Acts , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (An accessible development of the work of J.L. Austin on the actions that generate meaning.) SIMON BLACKBURN MEANING AND RULE-FOLLOWING Wittgenstein’s discussion of rules and rule-following, and the recent responses to it, have been widely regarded as providing the deepest and most challenging issues surrounding the notions of meaning, understanding and intention – central notions in the philosophy of language and mind. The fundamental issue is what it is for words to have meaning, and for speakers to use words in accordance with their meanings. In Philosophical Investigations and Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, Wittgenstein explores the idea that what could give a word its meaning is a rule for its use, and
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Page 547 that to be a competent speaker is to use words in accordance with these rules. His discussion of the nature of rules and rule-following has been highly influential, although there is no general agreement about his conclusions and final position. The view that there is no objectivity to an individual’s attempt to follow a rule in isolation provides one strand of Wittgenstein’s argument against the possibility of a private language. To some commentators, Wittgenstein’s discussion only leads to the sceptical conclusion that there are no rules to be followed and so no facts about what words mean. Others have seen him as showing why certain models of what it takes for an individual to follow a rule are inadequate and must be replaced by an appeal to a communal linguistic practice. See also: PRIVATE STATES AND LANGUAGE; LANGUAGE, SOCIAL NATURE OF Further reading Budd, M. (1984) Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Psychology , London: Routledge. (Chapter 2 provides a clearly written and careful treatment of Wittgenstein’s views on meaning and understanding.) McGinn, C. (1984) Wittgenstein on Meaning , Oxford: Oxford University Press. (A clear and concise treatment of rule-following and the private language argument.) BARRY C. SMITH MEANING AND TRUTH Analytic philosophy has seen a resurgent interest in the possibility of explaining linguistic meaning in terms of truth, which many philosophers have seen as considerably more tractable than meaning. The core suggestion is that the meaning of a declarative sentence may be given by specifying certain conditions under which it is true. Thus the declarative sentence ‘Venus is red’ is true just in case the condition that Venus is red obtains; and this is exactly what the sentence means. As it stands, however, this suggestion provides us with no explanation of the meanings of the words and phrases that make up sentences, since in general they are not expressions that have truth-conditions. (There are no conditions under which the word ‘Venus’ is true.) Furthermore, it needs to be supplemented by some method of circumscribing the truth-conditions that embody the meanings of declarative sentences, since there are many conditions under which any given sentence is true: ‘Venus is red’ is true not merely when Venus is red, but also, for example, when Venus is red and 7 + 5 = 12; but it does not mean that Venus is red and 7 + 5 = 12. Evidently the first problem can be solved only by finding other semantic properties which indicate the meanings of words and phrases. For example, it is sometimes thought that the meaning of a name can be specified by saying what it refers to; and that of a predicate by saying what it is true of. But notice that since the meaning of a declarative sentence can be grasped by first grasping the meanings of its basic components, meaning-indicating ascriptions of semantic properties to those components must entail a meaning-indicating statement of its truth-conditions. Semantic properties such as ‘referring to’ and ‘being true of’ satisfy this requirement, at least in the context of what is sometimes called a ‘truth theory’ for a language. This still leaves the problem of how to circumscribe the right meaning-indicating statement of truthconditions for declarative sentences. Indeed we now have a further problem. For if the meanings of the components of sentences are not stated directly, but merely in terms of what they refer to or are true of (say), then we must also find a way of determining which of the many ways of specifying what they refer to, or the conditions under which they are true of something, is meaning-indicating. These problems may arguably be solved by placing an appropriate truth theory for a language in a setting that allows us to appeal to the general psychology of its speakers. Attempts to elucidate meaning in terms of truth-conditions induce a plethora of further problems. Many are a matter of detail, concerning the kinds of properties we should associate with particular idioms and constructions or, equivalently, how we are to produce truth theories for them. As a result of Tarski’s work, we have a good idea how to do this for a wide range of categories of expressions. But there are many which, superficially at least, seem to resist straightforward incorporation into such a framework. More general difficulties concern whether truth should be central at all in the analysis or elucidation of meaning; two objections are especially prominent, one adverting to antirealist considerations, the other to the redundancy theory of truth. Further reading Davidson, D. (1984) Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (These essays present the most influential
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Page 548 contemporary defence of a truth-conditional account of meaning; see in particular Essays 2, 9 and 10. Essay 8 discusses the problem of non-declarative sentences.) Lepore, E. (ed.) (1986) Truth and Interpretation, Oxford: Blackwell. (This volume includes important essays on and within the framework of truth-conditional theories of meaning. Particularly helpful are those by Higginbotham, Davidson and Dummett.) STEPHEN G. WILLIAMS MEANING AND UNDERSTANDING The existence of a close connection between the notions of meaning and understanding can hardly be denied. I may be said to understand you, on a given occasion of utterance, when I know what you then meant – or, at least, when I know the meaning of the words that you then uttered. An important and influential school of thought within the philosophy of language goes much further than these platitudes, however. Its members adhere to the view that questions about meaning are essentially questions about understanding: ‘a model of meaning is a model of understanding’. Their approach contrasts with that of those who expect an account of meaning to elucidate the nature of understanding only indirectly – perhaps by explaining meaning in terms of truth, inference, synonymy or self-expression, and only then explaining understanding as the correct recovery of meaning. See also: MEANING AND TRUTH; MEANING AND VERIFICATION Further reading Davidson, D. (1967) ‘Truth and Meaning’, Synthèse 17: 304–23; repr. in D. Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984, 17–36. (The classic statement of Davidson’s earlier conception of a theory of meaning.) Forster, J.A. (1976) ‘Meaning and Truth Theory’, in G. Evans and J. McDowell (eds) Truth and Meaning: Essays in Semantics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1–32. (An influential attack on Davidson’s earlier and later theories.) IAN RUMFITT MEANING AND VERIFICATION The verifiability theory of meaning says that meaning is evidence. It is anticipated in, for example, Hume’s empiricist doctrine of impressions and ideas, but it emerges into full notoriety in twentiethcentury logical positivism. The positivists used the theory in a critique of metaphysics to show that the problems of philosophy, such as the problem of the external world and the problem of other minds, are not real problems at all but only pseudoproblems. Their publicists used the doctrine to argue that religion, ethics and fiction are meaningless, which is how verificationism became notorious among the general public. Seminal criticism of verification from around 1950 argues that no division between sense and nonsense coincides tidily with a division between science and metaphysics, as the positivists had claimed. Quine later developed verificationism into a sort of semantic holism in which metaphysics is continuous with science. In contrast, Dummett argues from a reading of Wittgenstein’s claim that meaning is use to a rejection of any sort of truth surpassing the possibility of knowledge, and thence to a defence of intuitionistic logic. But the claim that all truths can be known yields in an otherwise innocuous setting the preposterous consequence that all truths actually are known. There are ways to tinker with the setting so as to avoid this consequence, but it is best to conclude by reductio that some truths cannot be known and that verificationism is false. That in turn seems to show that the prospects for an empiricist theory of meaning are dim, which might well shake a complacent confidence in meaning. Further reading Ayer, A.J. (1936) Language, Truth and Logic, London: Gollancz, 2nd edn, 1946. (Widely read and highly provocative. The second edition includes a famous introduction in which Ayer wrestles with objections to the verification principle.) Dummett, M. (1975) ‘The Philosophical Basis of Intuitionistic Logic’, Studies in Logic and the Foundations of Mathematics 80: 5–40; repr. in Truth and Other Enigmas , London: Duckworth, 1978. (An authoritative statement of Dummett’s contemporary version of ‘meaning-empiricism’. No easy read, but the most interesting defence of intuitionism in print.) W.D. HART MEANING, EMOTIVE see EMOTIVE MEANING MEANING IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY The discussion of the notion of meaning in Islamic philosophy is heavily influenced by
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Page 549 theological and legal debates about the interpretation of Islam, and about who has the right to pronounce on interpretation. The introduction of Greek philosophy into the Islamic world produced a new set of authorities on how to interpret texts, and this led to arguments over the potential benefits of the new approaches as compared with the traditional Islamic sciences. The discussion came to centre on the nature of ambiguity, equivocation and analogy, with different philosophers adopting diverse theories and thus attaining a variety of conclusions about how to interpret meaning. These variations have powerful implications for the understanding of their thought. Not only do the different approaches result in different conclusions, they also represent different approaches to the whole philosophical enterprise. The topic of meaning is not so much an aspect of Islamic philosophy as an interpretation of how to do Islamic philosophy itself. The main issues focus on identifying the people best qualified to interpret texts, valid interpretations of the texts, and the notion of meaning that should be employed in our understanding of the texts. See also: LOGIC IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY Further reading Abed, A. (1991) Aristotelian Logic and the Arabic Language in Alfarabi , Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. (A detailed and scholarly investigation of the concept of meaning and the logic versus language debate.) OLIVER LEAMAN MEANING, INDIAN THEORIES OF The term artha in Sanskrit is used for the notion of meaning, in the widest sense of the word ‘meaning’; it can be the meaning of words, sentences and scriptures, as well as of non-linguistic gestures and signs. Its meaning ranges from a real object in the external world referred to by a word to a mere concept of an object which may or may not correspond to anything in the external world. The differences regarding what ‘meaning’ is are argued out by the philosophical schools of Nyāya, Vaiśeṣika, Mīmāṃsā, Buddhism, Sanskrit grammar and Sanskrit poetics. Among these, Nyāya, Vaiśeṣika and Mīmāṃsā have realistic ontologies. MīMāṃsā focuses mainly on interpreting the Vedic scriptures. Buddhist thinkers generally depict language as giving a false picture of reality. Sanskrit grammar is more interested in language than in ontology, while Sanskrit poetics focuses on the poetic dimensions of meaning. Generally, the notion of meaning is stratified into three or four types. First there is the primary meaning. If this is inappropriate in a given context, then one moves to a secondary meaning, an extension of the primary meaning. Beyond this is the suggested meaning, which may or may not be the same as the meaning intended by the speaker. Specific conditions under which these different varieties are understood are discussed by the schools. The various Indian theories of meaning are closely related to the overall stances taken by the different schools. Among the factors which influence the notion of meaning are the ontological and epistemological views of a school, its views regarding the role of God and scripture, its focus on a certain type of discourse, and its ultimate purpose in theorizing. See also: INTERPRETATION, INDIAN THEORIES OF; LANGUAGE, INDIAN THEORIES OF Further reading Deshpande, M.M. (1992) The Meaning of Nouns: Semantic Theory in Classical and Medieval India, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. (The bulk of the book is an annotated translation of a seventeenth-century Sanskrit text on the meaning of nouns. The introduction covers the history of a number of semantic theories in Sanskrit grammar and philosophy.) Matilal, B.K. (1971) Epistemology, Logic and Grammar in Indian Philosophical Analysis , The Hague/Paris: Mouton. (Very readable general introduction to Indian approaches to meaning, logic and language.) MADHAV M. DESHPANDE MEANING OF LIFE see LIFE, MEANING OF MEASUREMENT, THEORY OF A conceptual analysis of measurement can properly begin by formulating the two fundamental problems of any measurement procedure. The first problem is that of representation, justifying the assignment of numbers to objects or phenomena. We cannot literally take a number in our hands and ‘apply’ it to a physical object. What we can show is that the structure of a set of phenomena under certain empirical operations and relations is the same as the structure of some set of numbers under corresponding arithmetical operations and relations. Solution of the representation problem for a
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Page 550 theory of measurement does not completely lay bare the structure of the theory, for there is often a formal difference between the kind of assignment of numbers arising from different procedures of measurement. This is the second fundamental problem, determining the scale type of a given procedure. Counting is an example of an absolute scale. The number of members of a given collection of objects is determined uniquely. In contrast, the measurement of mass or weight is an example of a ratio scale. An empirical procedure for measuring mass does not determine the unit of mass. The measurement of temperature is an example of an interval scale. The empirical procedure of measuring temperature by use of a thermometer determines neither a unit nor an origin. In this sort of measurement the ratio of any two intervals is independent of the unit and zero point of measurement. Still another type of scale is one which is arbitrary except for order. Moh’s hardness scale, according to which minerals are ranked in regard to hardness as determined by a scratch test, and the Beaufort wind scale, whereby the strength of a wind is classified as calm, light air, light breeze, and so on, are examples of ordinal scales. A distinction is made between those scales of measurement which are fundamental and those which are derived. A derived scale presupposes and uses the numerical results of at least one other scale. In contrast, a fundamental scale does not depend on others. Another common distinction is that between extensive and intensive quantities or scales. For extensive quantities like mass or distance an empirical operation of combination can be given which has the structural properties of the numerical operation of addition. Intensive quantities do not have such an operation; typical examples are temperature and cardinal utility. A widespread complaint about this classical foundation of measurement is that it takes too little account of the analysis of variability in the quantity measured. One important source is systematic variability in the empirical properties of the object being measured. Another source lies not in the object but in the procedures of measurement being used. There are also random errors which can arise from variability in the object, the procedures or the conditions surrounding the observations. See also: EXPERIMENT; THEORY AND OBSERVATION IN SOCIAL SCIENCES Further reading Taylor, J.R. (1982) An Introduction to Error Analysis , Mill Valley, CA: University Science Books. (An excellent elementary text on uncertainties in physical measurement.) PATRICK SUPPES MECHANICS, ARISTOTELIAN The central feature of Aristotle’s mechanics is his discussion of local motion, a change of place, which he categorizes as either natural or violent. He further divides natural motion into celestial motion, which is uniform, circular and eternal, and terrestrial motion, which is rectilinear (straight up or down), and finite in both time and distance. All motions which are not natural are classified as violent. For all motion Aristotle required a force in direct contact with the object being moved. We may represent the Aristotelian law of motion by the modern formula: Velocity = Force (motive power)/Resistance, or V = kF / R. In applying this law of motion to falling bodies, Aristotle associated the weight of the body with the force, and the resistance of the air (or other medium) with the resistance. Thus, Aristotle believed that heavy bodies fall faster than light ones. The problem of what force is actually in contact with the body, and causes it to fall, posed a serious difficulty for Aristotle. Aristotle concluded that elements were created with a tendency to move to their natural place, barring any hindrance or interference. Projectile motion posed a similar problem for Aristotle. In the case of a thrown object, the force was provided by the hand of the thrower as long as the object was in contact with the hand. But one needed an explanation of why the object continued to move once it had left the thrower’s hand. Aristotle concluded that the medium through which the projectile moved provided the force that kept it moving. Aristotle also regarded both the existence of a void or any motion in it as impossible. A void contains nothing that could sustain the motion of a projectile once it left the projector. In addition, because a void can provide no resistance, the speed of an object in a void would be infinite. See also: ARISTOTLE Further reading Aristotle ( c . mid-4th century BC) Physics (Physica); trans. R.P. Hardie and R.K. Gaye, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930. (Main source text.)
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Page 551 Lang, H.S. (1992) Aristotle’s Physics and its Medieval Varieties , Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. (A detailed discussion of Aristotle’s physics as well as discussion from medieval commentators. Chapter 3 covers the change from potential to actuality.) ALLAN FRANKLIN MECHANICS, CLASSICAL Understood at its most general, ‘classical mechanics’ covers the approach to physical phenomena that dominated science from roughly the time of Galileo until the early decades of the twentieth century. The approach is usually characterized by the assumption that bodies carry an inherent mass and welldefined positions and velocities. Bodies subsist within a three-dimensional absolute space and influence one another through reciprocal forces. These objects obey the three laws of motion articulated by Isaac Newton in 1686 in a deterministic manner: once a mechanical system is assembled, its future behaviour is rigidly fixed. Such ‘classical’ assumptions were eventually rejected by Einstein’s theory of relativity, where the assumption of a three-dimensional Euclidean space is abandoned, and by quantum mechanics, where determinism and well-defined positions and velocity are eschewed. Classical mechanics is frequently characterized as ‘billiard ball mechanics’ or ‘the theory of mechanism’ on the grounds that the science treats its materials in the manner of colliding particles, or clockwork. Such stereotypes should be approached with caution because the basic framework of classical mechanics has long been subject to divergent interpretations that unpack the content of Newton’s ‘three laws’ in remarkably different ways. These differing interpretations provide incompatible catalogues of the basic objects that are supposed to comprise the ‘classical world’ – are they point masses, rigid bodies or flexible substances? Or, as many writers have suggested, should mechanics not be regarded as ‘about’ the world at all, but merely as a source of useful but fictitious idealizations of reality? These foundational disagreements explain why classical mechanics has often found itself entangled in metaphysics. Much of modern philosophy of science is characterized by attitudes that were originally articulated during the nineteenth century’s attempts to clarify the grounds of classical mechanics. See also: CONSERVATION PRINCIPLES; MECHANICS, ARISTOTELIAN Further reading Dugas, R. (1955) A History of Mechanics , London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (Survey with many quotations from original sources.) Mach, E. (1883) Die Mechanik in ihrer Entwicklung historisch-critisch dargestellt, Prague; trans. T. McCormack, 1893; The Science of Mechanics , La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1974. (A history of the evolution of science, including a comprehensive attempt to reconstruct classical mechanics on positivist lines. An influential critique.) MARK WILSON MEDICAL EPISTEMOLOGY, HELLENISTIC see HELLENISTIC MEDICAL EPISTEMOLOGY MEDICAL ETHICS Medical ethics was once concerned with the professional obligations of physicians, spelled out in codes of conduct such as the ancient Hippocratic oath and elaborated by contemporary professional societies. Today this subject is a broad, loosely defined collection of issues of morality and justice in health, health care and related fields. The term ‘bioethics’ is often used interchangeably, though it is also used with its original broad meaning, which included issues in ecology. The range of concerns grouped under ‘medical ethics’ begins with the relationship of doctor to patient, including such issues as consent to treatment, truth-telling, paternalism, confidentiality and the duty to treat. Particular moral uncertainty is engendered by contexts which demand divided allegiances of physicians, such as medical experimentation on human subjects, public health emergencies and forprofit medicine. Issues in medical ethics arise in every stage of life, from the fate of defective newborns to the withholding of lifesustaining therapies from the very old. Medical practices with patients who may not be competent to make their own medical decisions, including paediatrics and psychiatry, raise a distinctive set of ethical issues, as does medical genetics, which involves choices affecting family members, future individuals and offspring in utero . In recent years, medical ethics has broadened its focus beyond the individual physician or nurse to include the organization, 551
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Page 552 operation and financing of the health care system as a whole, including difficult theoretical and practical uncertainties regarding the fair allocation of health care resources. Medical ethics is at once a field of scholarship and a reform movement. The latter has campaigned in many countries on behalf of patients’ rights, better care of the dying and freedom for women in reproductive decisions. As a field of scholarship, medical ethics addresses these and many other issues, but is not defined by positions taken on any of them. Though ethicists often favour an emphasis on informed consent, oppose paternalism, urge permission to end life-sustaining therapy (or choose suicide) and seek protection of humansubjectsof experimentation, a diversity of viewpoints finds expression in the medical ethics literature. See also: BIOETHICS; MEDICINE, PHILOSOPHY OF; NERSING ETHICS Further reading Glover, J. (1977) Causing Deaths and Saving Lives , Harmondsworth: Penguin. (Broad, readable discussion of clinical issues in medical ethics.) Reich, W. (ed.) (1994) Encyclopedia of Bioethics, New York: Macmillan. (Multi-volume, comprehensive set of discussions on major issues in medical ethics.) DANIEL WIKLER MEDICINE, HIPPOCRATIC see HIPPOCRATIC MEDICINE MEDICINE, PHILOSOPHY OF The philosophy of medicine can be generally defined as encompassing those issues in epistemology, axiology, logic, methodology and metaphysics generated by or related to medicine. Issues have frequently focused on the nature of the practice of medicine, on concepts of health and disease, and on understanding the kind of knowledge that physicians employ in diagnosing and treating patients. The history of philosophical reflections concerning medicine reaches back to ancient Greece. Medical knowledge took a further step in the nineteenth century with the introduction of clinical pathological correlations, statistical methods, and systematic experimentation, out of which grew substantive literature exploring the character of medical reasoning and the framing of diagnoses. Debates also developed over contrasting physiological, ontological, nominalist and realist accounts of disease entities. Contemporary philosophy of medicine has been concerned with the nature of medicine in an increasingly scientific context, a concern that has generated several models of medicine, including George Engel’s biopsychosocial model, as well as analyses of the nature of the physician–patient interaction. The longstanding debate over the ontological status of health and disease has been recapitulated and extended by a number of authors, favouring an objective, statistically-based account, while others argue for an irreducible social and valuational element in these concepts. Several approaches to diagnostic logic, including Bayesian and computerbased analyses, have been developed, and sophisticated methods of determining disease causation and therapeutic efficacy, including analyses of the randomized clinical trial, have also been explored. Whether the philosophy of medicine is a distinct discipline or a branch of the philosophy of science has provoked vigorous arguments. See also: HIPPOCRATIC MEDICINE; MEDICAL ETHICS Further reading Engelhardt, H.T., Jr (1996) The Foundations of Bioethics, NewYork: Oxford University Press, 2nd edn. (A systematic exploration of medical explanation and concepts of disease.) Taylor, F.K. (1979) The Concepts of Illness, Disease and Morbus, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (A historical and philosophical overview of concepts of disease.) KENNETH F. SCHAFFNER H. TRISTRAM ENGELHARDT, JR MEDIEVAL ARISTOTELIANISM see ARISTOTELIANISM, MEDIEVAL MEDIEVAL LOGIC see LOGIC, MEDIEVAL MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY Medieval philosophy is the philosophy of Western Europe from about AD 400–1400, roughly the period between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance. Medieval philosophers are the historical successors of the philosophers of antiquity, but they are in fact only tenuously connected with them. Until about 1125, medieval thinkers had access to only a few texts of ancient Greek philosophy (most importantly a portion of Aristotle’s logic). This limitation accounts for the special attention medieval philosophers give to logic and philosophy of language. They gained some acquaintance with other Greek philosophical
forms (particularly
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Page 553 those of later Platonism) indirectly through the writings of Latin authors such as Augustine and Boethius. These Christian thinkers left an enduring legacy of Platonistic metaphysical and theological speculation. Beginning about 1125, the influx into Western Europe of the first Latin translations of the remaining works of Aristotle transformed medieval thought dramatically. The philosophical discussions and disputes of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries record later medieval thinkers’ sustained efforts to understand the new Aristotelian material and assimilate it into a unified philosophical system. The most significant extra-philosophical influence on medieval philosophy throughout its thousand-year history is Christianity. Christian institutions sustain medieval intellectual life, and Christianity’s texts and ideas provide rich subject matter for philosophical reflection. Although most of the greatest thinkers of the period were highly trained theologians, their work addresses perennial philosophical issues and takes a genuinely philosophical approach to understanding the world. Even their discussion of specifically theological issues is typically philosophical, permeated with philosophical ideas, rigorous argument and sophisticated logical and conceptual analysis. The enterprise of philosophical theology is one of medieval philosophy’s greatest achievements. The way in which medieval philosophy develops in dialogue with the texts of ancient philosophy and the early Christian tradition (including patristic philosophy) is displayed in its two distinctive pedagogical and literary forms, the textual commentary and the disputation. In explicit commentaries on texts such as the works of Aristotle, Boethius’ theological treatises and Peter Lombard’s classic theological textbook, the Sentences, medieval thinkers wrestled anew with the traditions that had come down to them. By contrast, the disputation – the form of discourse characteristic of the university environment of the later Middle Ages – focuses not on particular texts but on specific philosophical or theological issues. It thereby allows medieval philosophers to gather together relevant passages and arguments scattered throughout the authoritative literature and to adjudicate their competing claims in a systematic way. These dialectical forms of thought and interchange encourage the development of powerful tools of interpretation, analysis and argument ideally suited to philosophical inquiry. It is the highly technical nature of these academic (or scholastic) modes of thought, however, that provoked the hostilities of the Renaissance humanists whose attacks brought the period of medieval philosophy to an end. 1 Historical and geographical boundaries The terms ‘medieval’ and ‘Middle Ages’ derive from the Latin expression medium aevum (the middle age), coined by Renaissance humanists to refer to the period separating the golden age of classical Greece and Rome from what they saw as the rebirth of classical ideals in their own day. The humanists were writing from the perspective of the intellectual culture of Western Europe, and insofar as their conception of a middle age corresponds to an identifiable historical period, it corresponds to a period in the history of the Latin West. The historical boundaries of medieval intellectual culture in Western Europe are marked fairly clearly: on the one end by the disintegration of the cultural structures of Roman civilization (Alaric sacked Rome in AD 410), and on the other end by the dramatic cultural revolution perpetrated by the humanists themselves (in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries). There is some justification, therefore, for taking ‘medieval philosophy’ as designating primarily the philosophy of the Latin West from about AD 400–1400. There were, of course, significant non-Latin philosophical developments in Europe and the Mediterranean world in this same period, in the Greek-speaking Byzantine empire, for example, and in Arabic-speaking Islamic and Jewish cultures in the Near East, northern Africa and Spain. None of these philosophical traditions, however, was radically cut off from the philosophical heritage of the ancient world in the way the Latin-speaking West was by the collapse of the Roman Empire. For that reason, those traditions are best treated separately from that of western Europe. Accordingly, they are dealt with in this article only to the extent to which they influence developments in medieval philosophy in the Latin West. (See BYZANTINE PHILOSOPHY; HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHY; HUMANISM, RENAISSANCE; ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY; JEWISH PHILOSOPHY; MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY, RUSSIAN; RENAISSANCE PHILOSOPHY.) 2 Beginnings The general character of medieval philosophy in the West is determined to a significant extent by historical events associated with the collapse of Roman civilization. The overrunning of Western Europe by invading Goths, Huns and Vandals brought in its wake not only the military and political defeat of the Roman Empire but also the disintegration of the shared institutions and
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Page 554 culture that had sustained philosophical activity in late antiquity. Boethius, a Roman patrician by birth and a high-ranking official in the Ostrogothic king’s administration, is an eloquent witness to the general decline of intellectual vitality in his own day. He announces his intention to translate into Latin and write Latin commentaries on all the works of Plato and Aristotle, and he gives as his reason the fear that, lacking this sort of remedial aid, his own Latin-speaking and increasingly ill-trained contemporaries will soon lose access altogether to the philosophical legacy of ancient Greece. Boethius’ assessment of the situation appears to have been particularly astute, for in fact in the six centuries following his death (until the midtwelfth century), philosophers in the West depended almost entirely on Boethius himself for what little access they had to the primary texts of Greek philosophy. Moreover, since he had barely begun to carry out his plan when his execution for treason put an end to his work, Boethius’ fears were substantially realized. Having translated only Aristotle’s treatises on logic together with Porphyry’s introduction to Aristotle’s Categories (see AARISTOTLE; PORPHYRY) and having completed commentaries on only some of the texts he translated, Boethius left subsequent generations of medieval thinkers without direct knowledge of most of Aristotle’s thought, including the natural philosophy, metaphysics and ethics, and with no texts of Plato (though a small portion of the Timaeus had been translated and commented on by CALCIDIUS in the fourth century). Medieval philosophy was therefore significantly shaped by what was lost to it. It took root in an environment devoid of the social and educational structures of antiquity, lacking the Greek language and cut off from the rich resources of a large portion of classical thought. Not surprisingly, the gradual reclamation of ancient thought over the course of the Middle Ages had a significant impact on the development of the medieval philosophical tradition. Medieval philosophy, however, was also shaped by what was left to it and, in particular, by two pieces of the cultural legacy of late antiquity that survived the collapse of Roman civilization. The first of these is the Latin language, which remained the exclusive language of intellectual discourse in Western Europe throughout the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Latin provided medieval thinkers with access to some important ancient resources, including CICERO, SENECA, Macrobius, Calcidius, the Latin Church Fathers (see PATRISTIC PHILOSOPHY), Augustine and Boethius. These Latin sources gave early medieval thinkers a general, if not deep, acquaintance with classical ideas. Augustine is far and away the most significant of these Latin sources. His thought, and in particular his philosophical approach to Christianity and his Christianized Neoplatonist philosophical out-look, profoundly affect every period and virtually every area of medieval philosophy (see §5). The second significant piece of late antiquity to survive into the Middle Ages is Christianity. Christianity had grown in importance in the late Roman Empire and, with the demise of the empire’s social structures, the Church remained until the twelfth century virtually the only institution capable of supporting intellectual culture. It sustained formal education in schools associated with its monasteries, churches and cathedrals, and provided for the preservation of ancient texts, both sacred and secular, in its libraries and scriptoriums. Medieval philosophers received at least some of their formal training in ecclesiastical institutions and most were themselves officially attached to the Church in some way, as monks, friars, priests or clerks. In the later Middle Ages, the study of theology was open only to men who had acquired an arts degree, and the degree of Master of Theology constituted the highest level of academic achievement. Consequently, most of the great philosophical minds of the period would have thought of themselves primarily as theologians. Moreover, in addition to providing the institutional basis for medieval philosophy, Christianity was an important stimulus to philosophical activity. Its ideas and doctrines constituted a rich source of philosophical subject matter. Medieval philosophy, therefore, took root in an intellectual world sustained by the Church and permeated with Christianity’s texts and ideas (see §5). (See ARISTOTELIANISM, MEDIEVAL; AUGUSTINE; AUGUSTINIANISM; BOETHIUS, A.M.S.; CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA; LIBER DE CAUSIS; MARIUS VICTORINUS; NEMESIUS; ORIGEN; PATRISTIC PHILOSOPHY; PLATONISM, MEDIEVAL; PSEUDO-DIONYSIUS; STOICISM; TERTULLIAN, Q.S.F.; THEMISTIUS; TRANSLATORS) 3 Historical development The full flowering of the philosophical tradition that grows from these beginnings occurs in the period from 1100 to 1400. Two developments are particularly important for understanding the rapid growth and flourishing of intellectual culture in these centuries. The first is the influx
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Page 555 into the West of a large and previously unknown body of philosophical material newly translated into Latin from Greek and Arabic sources. The second is the emergence and growth of the great medieval universities. Recovery of texts . Medieval philosophers before Peter Abelard had access to only a few texts of ancient Greek philosophy: those comprising ‘the old logic’ (Aristotle’s Categories and De interpretatione and Porphyry’s Isagōgō) and a small part of Plato’s Timaeus . Abelard’s generation witnessed with great enthusiasm the appearance in the Latin West of the remainder of Aristotle’s logical works (‘the new logic’: the Prior and Posterior Analytics, the Topics and the Sophistical Refutations) (see LANGUAGE, MEDIEVAL THEORIES OF; LOGIC, MEDIEVAL). Over the next hundred years, most of Aristotle’s natural philosophy (most importantly the Physics and On the Soul ) and the Metaphysics and Ethics became available for the first time. Not all of these Aristotelian texts were greeted with the same enthusiasm, nor did medieval philosophers find them all equally congenial or accessible (even in Latin translation). However, it is impossible to overstate the impact that the full Aristotelian corpus eventually had on medieval philosophy. The new texts became the subject of increasingly sophisticated and penetrating scholarly commentary; they were incorporated into the heart of the university curriculum, and over time the ideas and doctrines medieval philosophers found in them were woven into the very fabric of medieval thought. Having never before encountered a philosophical system of such breadth and sophistication, philosophers in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries understandably thought it appropriate to speak of Aristotle simply as ‘the Philosopher’. As medieval thinkers were rediscovering Aristotle they were also acquiring for the first time in Latin translation the works of important Jewish philosophers such as Avencebrol (see IBN GABIROL) and MAIMONIDES, and Islamic philosophers such as Avicenna (see IBN SINA) and Averroes (see IBN RUSHD). Some of their works were commentaries on Aristotle (Averroes became known simply as ‘the Commentator’) whereas some (such as Avicenna’s Metaphysics and De anima) were quasi-independent treatises presenting a Neoplatonized Aristotelianism (see ARISTOTELIANISM IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY). Medieval philosophers of this period turned eagerly to these texts for help in understanding the new Aristotle, and they were significantly influenced by them. Averroes’s interpretation of Aristotle’s On the Soul , for example, sparked enormous controversy about the nature of intellect, and Avicenna’s metaphysical views helped shape the famous later medieval debates about universals and about the nature of the distinction between essence and existence. Rise of the universities . As abbot of the monastery at Bec in the 1080s, Anselm of Canterbury addressed his philosophical and theological writings to his monks. By contrast, the great philosophical minds of the next generations, thinkers such as Abelard, Gilbert of Poitiers and Thierry of Chartres, would spend significant parts of their careers in the schools at Paris and Chartres and address a good deal of their work to academic audiences. The growth of these schools and others like them at centres such as Oxford, Bologna and Salerno signals a steady and rapid increase in the vitality of intellectual life in Western Europe. By the middle of the thirteenth century, the universities at Paris and Oxford were the leading centres of European philosophical activity. Virtually all the great philosophers from 1250 to 1350, including Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, studied and taught in the schools at one or both of these centres. It is partly for this reason that early modern philosophers (who were typically not associated with universities) refer to their medieval predecessors in general as ‘the schoolmen’. The migration of philosophical activity to the universities meant not only the centralization of this activity but also its transformation into an increasingly formal and technical academic enterprise. Philosophical education was gradually expanded and standardized, philosophers themselves became highly trained academic specialists and philosophical literature came to presuppose in its audience both familiarity with the standard texts and issues of the university curriculum and facility with the technical apparatus (particularly the technical logical tools) of the discipline. These features of later medieval philosophy make it genuinely scholastic, that is, a product of the academic environment of the schools. The philosophical disciplines narrowly construed – logic, natural philosophy, metaphysics and ethics – occupied the centre of the curriculum leading to the basic university degrees, the degrees of Bachelor and Master of Arts. Most of the great philosophers of this period, however, went beyond the arts curriculum to pursue advanced work in theology. The requirements for the degree of Master of Theology included study of the Bible, the
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Page 556 Church Fathers and (beginning perhaps in the 1220s) Peter Lombard’s Sentences (which was complete by 1158). Designed specifically for pedagogical purposes, the Sentences is rich in quotation and paraphrase from authoritative theological sources, surveying respected opinion on issues central to the Christian understanding of the world. From about 1250, all candidates for the degree of Master of Theology were required to lecture and produce a commentary on Lombard’s text. This requirement offered a formal occasion for scholars nearing their intellectual maturity to develop and present their own positions on a wide variety of philosophical and theological issues guided (often only quite loosely) by the structure of Lombard’s presentation. By virtue of its historical circumstances, medieval philosophical method had from its beginnings consisted largely in commentary on a well defined and fairly small body of authoritative texts and reflection on a canonical set of issues raised by them. Philosophers in the era of the universities took for granted a much larger and more varied intellectual inheritance, but their approach to philosophical issues remained conditioned by an established textual tradition, and they continued to articulate their philosophical views in explicit dialogue with it. Formal commentary on standard texts flourished both as a pedagogical tool and as a literary form. However, other philosophical forms, including the disputation – the most distinctive philosophical form of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries – were essentially dialectical. In the university environment, the disputation became a technical tool ideally suited to the pressing task of gathering together, organizing and adjudicating the various claims of a complex tradition of texts and positions. A disputation identifies a specific philosophical or theological issue for discussion and provides the structure for an informed and reasoned judgment about it. In its basic form, a disputation presents, in order: (1) a succinct statement of the issue to be addressed, typically in the form of a question admitting of a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer; (2) two sets of preliminary arguments, one supporting an affirmative and the other a negative answer to the question; (3) a resolution or determination of the question, in which the master sets out and defends his own position, typically by drawing relevant distinctions, explaining subtle or potentially confusing points, or elaborating the underlying theoretical basis for his answer; and (4) a set of replies specifically addressing the preliminary arguments in disagreement with the master’s stated views. A disputation’s two sets of preliminary arguments allow for the gathering together of the most important relevant passages and arguments scattered throughout the authoritative literature. With the arguments on both sides of the question in hand, the master is then ideally positioned to deal with both the conceptual issues raised by the question and the hermeneutical problems presented by the historical tradition. Academic philosophers held disputations in their classrooms and at large university convocations, and they used the form for the literary expression of their ideas. Aquinas’ Summa theologiae , the individual articles of which are pedagogically simplified disputations, is perhaps the most familiar example of its systematic use as a literary device. The prevalence of the disputational form in later medieval philosophy accounts for its being thought of as embodying ‘the scholastic method’ (see LANGUAGE, MEDIEVAL THEORIES OF; LOGIC, MEDIEVAL). (On the early Middle Ages ( circa 600–1100), see CAROLINGIAN RENAISSANCE; DAMIAN, P.; ENCYCLOPEDISTS, MEDIEVAL; ERIUGENA, J.S.; GERBERT OF AURILLAC; JOHN OF DAMASCUS.) (On the twelfth-century philosophers, see ABELARD, P.; ANSELM OF CANTERBURY; BERNARD OF CLAIRVAUX; BERNARD OF TOURS; CHARTRES, SCHOOL OF; CLAREMBALD OF ARRAS; GERARD OF CREMONA; GILBERT OF POITIERS; HILDEGARD OF BINGEN; HUGH OF ST VICTOR; ISAAC OF STELLA; JOHN OF SALISBURY; LOMBARD, P.; RICHARD OF ST VICTOR; ROSCELIN OF COMPIEÁ GNE; THIERRY OF CHARTRES; WILLIAM OF CHAMPEAUX; WILLIAM OF CONCHES.) (On the thirteenth-century philosophers, see ALBERT THE GREAT; ALEXANDER OF HALES; AQUINAS, T.; AVERROISM; BACON, R.; BOETHIUS OF DACIA; BONAVENTURE; DAVID OF DINANT; GROSSETESTE, R.; HENRY OF GHENT; JOACHIM OF FIORE; JOHN OF LA ROCHELLE; KILWARDBY, R.; NECKHAM, A.; OLIVI, P.J.; PECHAM, J.; PETER OF SPAIN; PHILIP THE CHANCELLOR; PSEUDO-GROSSETESTE; RICHARD RUFUS OF CORNWALL; SIGER OF BRABANT; THOMAS OF YORK; ULRICH OF STRASBOURG; WILLIAM OF AUVERGNE; WILLIAM OF AUXERRE; WILLIAM OF SHERWOOD.) (On the fourteenth-century philosophers, see ALBERT OF SAXONY; ALIGHIERI, DANTE; AUREOL, P.; BRADWARDINE, T.; BRINKLEY, R.; BRITO, R.; BURIDAN, J.; BURLEY, W.; CHATTON, W.; CRATHORN, W.; DIETRICH OF FREIBERG; DUNS SCOTUS, J.; DURANDUS OF ST
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Page 557 POURÇAIN; FRANCIS OF MEYRONNES; GERARD OF ODO; GILES OF ROME; GODFREY OF FONTAINES; GREGORY OF RIMINI; HENRY OF HARCLAY; HERVAEUS NATALIS; HEYTESBURY, W.; HOLCOT, R.; JAMES OF VITERBO; JOHN OF JANDUN; JOHN OF MIRECOURT; JOHN OF PARIS; KILVINGTON, R.; LLULL, R.; MARSILIUS OF KHART; NICHOLAS OF AUTRECOURT; ORESME, N.; OXFORD CALCULATORS; PETER OF AUVERGNE; RICHARD OF MIDDLETON; SUSO, H.; TAULER, J.; VITAL DU FOUR; WILLIAM OF OCKHAM; WODEHAM, A.; WYCLIF, J.) (On the fifteenth-century philosophers, see AILLY, PIERRE D’; DENYS THE CARTHUSIAN; GERSON, J.; HUS, J.; NICHOLAS OF CUSA; PAUL OF VENICE; THOMAS À KEMPIS.) 4 Doctrinal characteristics At the most basic level, medieval philosophers share a common view of the world that underlies and supports the various specific developments that constitute medieval philosophy’s rich detail. Metaphysics. The common metaphysical ground of medieval philosophy holds that at the most general level reality can be divided into substances and accidents. Substances – Socrates and Browny the donkey are the stock examples – are independent existents and therefore ontologically fundamental. Corporeal substances (and perhaps also certain incorporeal substances) are constituted from matter and form (see SUBSTANCE). Matter, which in itself is utterly devoid of structure, is the substrate for form (see MATTER). Form provides a substance’s structure or organization, thereby making a substance the kind of thing it is. Socrates’ soul, for example, is the form that gives structure to Socrates’ matter, constituting it as the living flesh and blood of a human body and making Socrates a particular human being. Accidents – Socrates’ height, for example, or Browny’s colour – are also a kind of form, but they take as their substrate not matter as such but a substance: Socrates or Browny. Accidents depend for their existence on substances and account for substances’ ontologically derivative characteristics. Medieval philosophers recognized matter and form, the fundamental constituents of corporeal substances, as fundamental explanatory principles. A thing’s matter (or material cause) and its form (or formal cause) provide basic explanations of the thing’s nature and behaviour. To these two principles they added two others, the agent (or efficient) cause and the end (or final cause). The agent cause is whatever initiates motion or change; the final cause is the goal or good toward which a particular activity, process, or change is directed. Medieval philosophers disagreed about extensions and qualifications of this fundamental metaphysical view of the world. They debated, for example, whether incorporeal substances are like corporeal substances in being composed ultimately of matter and form, or whether they are subsistent immaterial forms. They also debated whether substances such as Socrates have just one substantial form (Socrates’ rational soul) or many (one form constituting Socrates’ body, another making him a living body with certain capacities for motion and cognition (an animal), and another making him a rational animal (a human being)). However, they never doubted the basic correctness of the metaphysical framework of substance and accidents, form and matter, nor are they in any doubt about whether the analytical tools that framework provides are applicable to philosophical problems generally. (See ARISTOTELIANISM, MEDIEVAL; AUGUSTINIANISM; ETERNITY OF THE WORLD, MEDIEVAL VIEWS OF; PLATONISM, MEDIEVAL.) Psychology and epistemology . Medieval philosophers understood the nature of human beings in terms of the metaphysics of form and matter, identifying the human rational soul, the seat of the capacities specific to human beings, with form. All medieval philosophers, therefore, held broadly dualist positions according to which the soul and body are fundamentally distinct. But only some were also substance dualists (or dualists in the Cartesian sense), holding in addition that the soul and body are themselves substances. Medieval philosophers devote very little attention to what modern philosophers would recognize as the central questions of epistemology (see EPISTEMOLOGY, HISTORY OF). Until very late in the period, they show little concern for sceptical worries and are not primarily interested in stating the necessary and sufficient conditions for the truth of the claim that some person knows a given proposition. For the most part they assume that we have knowledge of various sorts and focus instead on developing an account of the cognitive mechanisms by which we acquire it. They are especially interested in how we are able to acquire knowledge of universals and necessary truths – objects or truths that are immaterial, eternal and un-changing – given that the world around us is populated with particular material objects subject to change. The answers medieval philosophers
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Page 558 give to this question vary considerably, ranging from Platonistic accounts that appeal to our direct intellectual vision (with the aid of divine illumination) of independently existing immutable entities (such as ideas in the divine mind) to naturalistic accounts that appeal to cognitive capacities wholly contained in the human intellect itself that abstract universals from the data provided by sense perception (see UNIVERSALS). (See ARISTOTELIANISM, MEDIEVAL; AUGUSTINIANISM; PLATONISM, MEDIEVAL.) Ethics . Medieval philosophers share a generically Greek framework of ethical theory, extended and modified to accommodate Christianity. Its main features include an objectivist theory of value, a eudaimonistic account of the human good and a focus on the virtues as central to moral evaluation (see EUDAIMONIA; ARETÉ; VIRTUES AND VICES). According to the metaphysics of goodness inherited by medieval philosophers from Greek thought, there is a necessary connection between goodness and being. Things are good to the extent to which they have being. Evil or badness is not a positive ontological feature of things but a privation or lack of being in some relevant respect. The ultimate human good or goal of human existence is happiness or beatitude, the perfection of which most medieval philosophers identified as supernatural union with God after this life. The ultimate human good is attained both through the cultivation of the moral virtues and through divine grace in the form of supernaturally infused states and dispositions such as faith, hope and charity, the so-called theological virtues (see THEOLOGICAL VIRTUES). Within this framework, medieval philosophers debated whether human beatitude is essentially an affective state (a kind of love for God) or a cognitive state (a kind of knowledge or vision of God), and whether the virtues are strictly necessary for the attainment of beatitude. They also debated whether the rightness or wrongness of some actions depends solely on God’s will. Contrary to caricatures of medieval ethics, no one unequivocally endorsed a divine command theory according to which the moral rightness (or wrongness) of all acts consists solely in their being approved (or disapproved) by God (see VOLUNTARISM). (See ARISTOTELIANISM, MEDIEVAL; AUGUSTINIANISM; PLATONISM, MEDIEVAL.) Logic and language . Medieval philosophers devote enormous attention – perhaps more attention than philosophers of any period in the history of philosophy apart from the twentieth century – to logic and philosophy of language. This phenomenon is explained primarily by the uniquely important role played by Aristotle’s logic in the development of medieval thought. Until the early twelfth century, medieval philosophers’ knowledge of Greek philosophy was restricted to a few texts of Aristotelian logic and, by default, those texts largely set the agenda for philosophical discussion. It is a passage from Porphyry’s Isagōgē, for example, that enticed first Boethius and, following him, a long line of commentators to take up the philosophical problem of universals (see UNIVERSALS). The texts of the old logic, which remained a central part of the philosophy curriculum in the later Middle Ages, were eventually supplemented by the remaining treatises of Aristotle’s logic, among which the Topics and the Sophistical Refutations in particular sparked intense interest in the forms of philosophical argument and the nature of meaning. (See ARISTOTELIANISM, MEDIEVAL; LANGUAGE, MEDIEVAL THEORIES OF; LOGIC, MEDIEVAL.) Natural philosophy . Medieval philosophers believed that a complete account of reality must include an account of the fundamental constituents and principles of the natural realm. Their earliest reflections on these matters were inspired primarily by two ancient accounts of the origins and nature of the universe, the biblical story of creation (in Genesis) and Plato’s story of the Demiurge’s fashioning of the world (in the Timaeus ) (see PLATO). The confluence of these ancient sources produced a medieval tradition of speculative cosmological thought paradigmatically expressed in discussions of the six days of creation. This topic in particular gave medieval philosophers opportunity to reflect on the nature of the contents of the universe and the principles governing the created realm. From the late twelfth century, medieval philosophy is profoundly affected by the new Aristotelian natural philosophy and the new scientific treatises by Islamic philosophers. Aristotle’s Physics in particular received enormous attention, and medieval philosophers developed sophisticated tools of logical, conceptual and mathematical analysis to deal with problems raised by Aristotle’s discussions of motion, change, continuity and infinity. Scientific treatises by Islamic thinkers such as Alkindi (see AL-KINDI), Alpetragius, Avicenna (see IBN SINA) and Alhasen provided the material and impetus for significant developments in astronomy, medicine, mathematics and optics.
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Page 559 (See ARISTOTELIANISM, MEDIEVAL; ETERNITY OF THE WORLD, MEDIEVAL VIEWS OF; LANGUAGE, MEDIEVAL THEORIES OF; NATURAL PHILOSOPHY, MEDIEVAL; OXFORD CALCULATORS; PLATONISM, MEDIEVAL.) 5 Philosophical theology Christianity is not in itself a philosophical doctrine, but it profoundly influences the medieval philosophical world-view both from within philosophy and from outside it. On the one hand, Christian texts and doctrine provided rich subject matter for philosophical reflection, and the nature and central claims of Christianity forced medieval intellectuals to work out a comprehensive account of reality and to deal explicitly with deep issues about the aims and methods of the philosophical enterprise. In these ways, Christianity was taken up into philosophy, adding to its content and altering its structure and methods. On the other hand, Christianity imposed external constraints on medieval philosophy. At various times these constraints took institutional form in the official proscription of texts, the condemnation of philosophical positions and the censure of individuals. Augustine laid the foundation for medieval Christian philosophical theology in two respects. First, he provided a theoretical rationale both for Christian intellectuals engaging in philosophical activity generally and for their taking Christian doctrine in particular as a subject of philosophical investigation. According to Augustine, Christian belief is not opposed to philosophy’s pursuit of truth but is an invaluable supplement and aid to philosophy. With revealed truth in hand, Christian philosophers are able to salvage what is true and useful in pagan philosophy while repudiating what is false. Moreover, Augustine argued that Christianity can be strengthened and enriched by philosophy. Christian philosophers should begin by believing (on the authority of the Bible and the church) what Christianity professes and seek (by the use of reason) to acquire understanding of what they initially believed on authority. In seeking understanding, philosophers rely on that aspect of themselves – namely, reason – in virtue of which they most resemble God; and in gaining understanding, they strengthen the basis for Christian belief. The Augustinian method of belief seeking understanding is taken for granted by the vast majority of philosophers in the Middle Ages. Second, Augustine’s writings provide a wealth of rich and compelling examples of philosophical reflection on topics ranging from the nature of evil and sin to the nature of the Trinity. Boethius stands with Augustine in this respect as an important model for later thinkers. He composed several short theological treatises that consciously attempt to bring the tools of Aristotelian logic to bear on issues associated with doctrines of the Christian creed. Inspired by the philosophical analysis and argumentation prominent in these writings, medieval philosophers enthusiastically took up, developed and extended the enterprise of philosophical theology. With the emergence of academic structure in the new European schools and universities of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, theology became the paramount academic discipline in a formal curriculum of higher education. However, the fact that great thinkers of the later Middle Ages typically studied philosophy as preparatory for the higher calling of theology should not be taken to imply that in becoming theologians they left philosophy behind. As a simple matter of fact, later medieval theologians continued throughout their careers to address fundamental philosophical issues in fundamentally philosophical ways. And it is clear why this should be so: those who took up the study of theology were among the most gifted and highly trained philosophical minds of their day, and they brought to theology acute philosophical sensitivities, interests and skills. Moreover, insofar as they viewed Christianity as offering the basic framework for a comprehensive account of the world, they were naturally attracted to the broadly philosophical task of building on that framework, understanding its ramifications and resolving its difficulties. Despite the dominance of the Augustinian view of the relation between Christianity and philosophy, religiously motivated resistance to philosophy in general and to the use of philosophical methods for understanding Christianity in particular emerges in different forms throughout the Middle Ages. In the twelfth century, some influential clerics saw the flourishing study of logic at Paris as a dangerous influence on theology and used ecclesiastical means to attack Peter Abelard and Gilbert of Poitiers. In the thirteenth century the new Aristotelian natural philosophy prompted another period of sustained ecclesiastical reaction. In 1210 and 1215 ecclesiastical authorities proscribed the teaching of Aristotle’s natural philosophy at Paris, and in 1277 the Bishop of Paris issued a condemnation of 219 articles covering a wide range of theological and philosophical topics. The condemnation seems largely
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Page 560 to have been a reaction to the work of radical Averroistic interpreters of Aristotle. It is unclear how effective these actions were in suppressing the movements and doctrines they targeted. (See ARISTOTELIANISM, MEDIEVAL; AUGUSTINIANISM; AVERROISM; ILLUMINATION; NATURAL THEOLOGY.) 6 Scholarship in medieval philosophy Contemporary study of medieval philosophy faces special obstacles. First, a large body of medieval philosophical and theological literature has survived in European libraries, but because many of these collections have not yet been fully catalogued, scholars do not yet have a complete picture of what primary source materials exist. Second, the primary sources themselves – in the form of handwritten texts and early printed editions – can typically be deciphered and read only by those with specialized paleographical skills. Only a very small portion of the known extant material has ever been published in modern editions of a sort that any reader of Latin could easily use. Third, an even smaller portion of the extant material has been translated into English (or any other modern language) or subjected to the sort of scholarly commentary and analysis that might open it up to a wider philosophical audience. For these reasons, scholarship in medieval philosophy is still in its early stages and remains a considerable distance from attaining the sort of authoritative and comprehensive view of its field now possessed by philosophical scholars of other historical periods with respect to their fields. For the foreseeable future, its progress will depend not only on the sort of philosophical and historical analysis constitutive of all scholarship in the history of philosophy but also on the sort of textual archeology necessary for recovering medieval philosophy’s primary texts. See also: ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY; RELIGION, PHILOSOPHY OF; RENAISSANCE PHILOSOPHY Further reading Armstrong, A.H. (ed.) (1967) The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (A useful survey of medieval philosophy’s historical antecedents, including the philosophical movements of late antiquity, and of the main figures of the medieval period through the beginning of the twelfth century.) Dales, R. (1992) The Intellectual Life of Western Europe in the Middle Ages, Leiden: Brill. (A general historical introduction emphasizing philosophy and theology but giving some attention to broader intellectual culture, including literature and science.) Kretzmann, N., Kenny, A. and Pinborg, J. (eds) (1982) The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Forty-six articles providing a wide-ranging view of later medieval philosophy and significant recent developments in scholarship on the period; it gives special attention to the philosophy of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and to developments in logic and philosophy of language; contains a good bibliography and useful bio-bibliographies for later medieval philosophers.) Marenbon, J. (1983) Early Medieval Philosophy (480–1150): An Introduction , London: Routledge, 2nd edn, 1988. (A readable and informative general introduction to the period.) —— (1987) Later Medieval Philosophy (1150–1350): An Introduction , London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (Part One provides a clear and succinct account of the pedagogical, institutional, and intellectual developments that shape later medieval philosophy; Part Two of the book is less successful.) SCOTT MacDONALD NORMAN KRETZMANN MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY, RUSSIAN The term ‘philosophy’ is itself highly problematic in the context of medieval Russia. Even in its most literal sense of love of learning, it was regarded with ambivalence, its devotees risking persecution. At the same time, Russia at any given point in the Middle Ages possessed what can best be described as a self-consciousness, a sense of its own destiny. Arising from the unusual circumstances of its Conversion in 988, this consciousness continues to draw heavily on Byzantium, with Russia at first in a dependent role but later, following Constantinople’s fall, assuming that of the proud successor. The centrality of the Christian element to medieval Russian thought is underlined by the continuing significance both of the monastic movement and of its ancient cradle, Kiev, even as Moscow was being extolled as the Third Rome. See also: BYZANTINE PHILOSOPHY; RUSSIAN PHILOSOPHY Further reading Fedotov, G.P. (1946, 1966) The Russian Religious Mind, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2 vols. (Detailed exploration of the leading figures in medieval Russian
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Page 561 Christianity, including Feodosii, Sergii and the fifteenth-century monastic polemicists.) Franklin, S. and J. Shepard (1996) The Emergence of Rus 750–1200, London and New York: Longman. (Useful chapters on ideology and imagery, both religious and political, during the early period.) CLAIRE FARRIMOND MEDIEVAL SCIENCE see NATURAL PHILOSOPHY, MEDIEVAL MEGARIAN SCHOOL The Megarians were a Greek ‘Socratic’ school of the fourth and early third centuries BC. After their founder Euclides, whose main doctrine was the unity of the good, the leading Megarian was Stilpo, best known for preaching the self-sufficiency of virtue. They propounded various puzzles and found objections to the possible–actual distinction, the copula and universals. See also: SOCRATIC SCHOOLS Further reading Diogenes Laertius ( c . early 3rd century AD) Lives of the Philosophers, trans. R.D. Hicks, Diogenes Laertius Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and London: Heinemann, 1925, 2 vols. (Book II 106–20 in volume 1 is a history of the Megarian school.) DAVID SEDLEY MEINECKE, FRIEDRICH (1862–1954) Friedrich Meinecke was a German historian of moral and political ideas who addressed the problems of his age through critical study of the writings of past thinkers. He studied at the universities of Berlin and Bonn, before becoming a state archivist in Berlin for fourteen years. He went on to hold professorships at Strasbourg, Bonn and Berlin. He contributed to political thought through books on cosmopolitanism and nationalism, on the morality of states and on historicism. In these works he re-examined the European tradition of moral and political thought, attempting especially to find a middle way between the universalist and cosmopolitan ethic of the Enlightenment and the nineteenth-century belief in the particularity and historical uniqueness of national cultures. His life spanned the entire period from Bismarck to Hitler, and he sought to bring his deep historical learning to bear on the ethical dilemmas facing Germans during this time. See also: HISTORICISM Further reading Meinecke, F. (1936) Die Enstehung des Historismus (Historism: The Rise of a New Historical Outlook), trans. J.E. Anderson, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972. (Useful foreword by Isaiah Berlin and introduction by Carl Hinrichs.) ROGER HAUSHEER MEINONG, ALEXIUS (1853–1920) Meinong was an Austrian philosopher and psychologist who taught at the University of Graz. He contributed substantially to psychology, epistemology, value theory, ethics and probability theory, but is best known for his theory of objects, in which he advocates the radical view that there are objects which are wholly outside being, including impossible objects. Meinong influenced Russell and the American ‘new realists’. Though widely rejected, his views have proved difficult to refute decisively and he has found sympathetic support from a number of logicians and philosophers. Further reading Meinong, A. (1902) Über Annahmen, Leipzig: Barth, 2nd, revised edn, 1910; repr. in Gesamtausgabe , vol. 4; trans. anded. J. Heanue, On Assumptions, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983. (The theory of assumptions and objectives. Probably Meinong’s most influential work.) PETER SIMONS MEISTER ECKHART ( c .1260–1327/8) More than any other medieval thinker, the German Dominican Eckhart has received widely divergent interpretations. The controversies stem from the fact that his writings fall into two distinct groups, works written in the vernacular and works written in Latin. The German writings, which were intended for a wide audience, established Eckhart’s long-standing fame as a mystic. Another, more academic Eckhart emerged when his Latin work was rediscovered in 1886. The study of Eckhart’s thought today centres on the unity of the scholastic (Latin) and the popular (German) work. See also: SUSO, H.; TAULER, J. Further reading Clark, J.M. (1957) Meister Eckhart: An Introduction to the study of his works,
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Page 562 London: Nelson. (A good introduction.) JAN A. AERTSEN MELANCHTHON, PHILIPP (1497–1560) Philipp Melanchthon was one of Luther’s closest associates, helping to systematize Lutheran theology, and his Loci communes (Commonplaces) (1521) was one of the most influential early works of Protestant theology. He was often a moderating influence in theological debates between Catholics and Protestants. Melanchthon was also involved in controversy over the relationship between human will and God’s grace in the achievement of salvation. He was responsible for the reform of Protestant German education in the sixteenth century, through the large number of textbooks which he composed, and through his revisions of the statutes of universities (notably Wittenberg) and schools. As a scholar and reformer of education, he was a staunch follower of the humanism of Agricola and Erasmus, committed to teaching the best Latin authors and the Greek language. Many of his works are textbooks (often produced in different versions), frequently based on lecture notes, summarizing or commenting on classical authors or scripture. Although more important as a summarizer and popularizer than as a source of new ideas, Melanchthon nevertheless made important contributions to the development of logic, rhetoric, ethics and psychology, as well as to aspects of Reformation theology. In logic he contributed to the growth of interest in method. In ethics he established a place for classical moral teaching alongside but subordinate to the teaching of the Bible. His favourite philosopher was Aristotle, and he tended to pour scorn on rival ancient schools of philosophy. In psychology he favoured a simplified Aristotelianism, close to medieval faculty psychology, with strong emphasis on links with biology. He opposed scepticism wherever he encountered it. See also: LUTHER, M. Further reading Melanchthon, P. (1988) A Melanchthon Reader, trans.R.Keen, NewYork: PeterLang. (English translation of selected works.) PETER MACK MELISSUS (mid or late 5th century BC) Melissus was a Greek philosopher from the island of Samos. A second-generation representative of Eleatic metaphysics, he published one work, entitled On Nature or On That-Which-Is , which has been partially reconstructed by editors. It defends a version of Parmenides’ monism, but recast with terminology and arguments directly accessible to a readership schooled in the eastern Greek (Ionian) style of physical speculation, as distinct from Parmenides’ western Greek background. Although it is uncertain how important Melissus was to his own contemporaries, his prosaic but clear presentation of Eleatic concepts was more widely adopted by later writers than the enigmatic pronouncements of Parmenides. Melissus argues that that-which-is is: (1) omnitemporal; (2) infinite in extent; (3) one; (4) homogeneous; (5) changeless, that is, without (a) reordering, (b) pain, (c) grief or (d) motion; (6) indivisible; and (7) bodiless. Here (1) – ‘it always was what it was, and always will be’ – is a departure from Parmenides, who had outlawed past and future in favour of a static present. Likewise (2) contrasts with Parmenides’ defence of spatially finite being. The remaining predicates are consonant with Parmenides, although (5)b–c suggest that the being Melissus has in mind is a living one, presumably a deity – an aspect not brought out by Parmenides. Melissus wrote ‘If there were many things, they ought to be such as I say the One is’ – a remark sometimes thought to have inspired his contemporaries the atomists. See also: MONISM Further reading Barnes, J. (1987) Early Greek Philosophy, Harmondsworth: Penguin. (Chapter 10 is a translation of Melissus’ fragments complete with the contexts in which they are preserved.) DAVID SEDLEY MEMORY Memory is central to every way in which we deal with things. One might subsume memory under the category of intellect, since it is our capacity to retain what we sense, enjoy and suffer, and thus to become knowing in our perception and other activities. As intelligent retention, memory cannot be distinguished from our acquisition of skills, habits and customs – our capabilities both for prudence and for deliberate risk. As retention, memory is a vital condition of the formation of language. Amnesia illustrates dramatically the difference between memory as retention of language and skills, and memory as the power to recollect
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Page 563 and to recognize specific things. In amnesia we lose, not our general power of retention, but recall of facts – the prior events of our life, and our power to recognize people and places. Amnesiacs recognize kinds of things. They know it is a wristwatch they are wearing, while unable to recognize it as their own. This recall of events and facts which enables us to recognize things as our own, is more than just the ability to give correctly an account of them. One might accurately describe some part of one’s past inadvertently, or after hypnosis, or by relying on incidental information. Thus, present research on memory both as retention and as recall of specific episodes, attempts to characterize the connection which persists between experience and recall. Neurological or computer models of connectivity owe something to traditional notions of a memory trace, but emphasize also the re-tracing of original memories by later experience and by intervening episodes of recall. See also: MEMORY, EPISTEMOLOGY OF Further reading Aristotle (384–322 BC) On Memory, in J. Barnes (ed.) The Complete Works of Aristotle, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984, 2 vols. (Thorough description of elementary forms of memory, and the development of the idea of a memory trace.) Krell, D. (1990) Of Memory, Reminiscence and Writing, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. (Close, brilliant study of literary phenomenological, deconstructive and scientific sources of ideas of memory. Valuable bibliography.) MAX DEUTSCHER MEMORY, EPISTEMOLOGY OF Memory appears to preserve knowledge, but there are epistemic questions about how this could be. Memory is fallible, and empirical research has identified various ways in which people systematically misremember. Even wholesale error seems possible: Russell (1927) proposed that it is logically possible for the world to have sprung into existence five minutes ago, complete with spurious ostensible memories of earlier times. In light of such possibilities, some sceptics argue that memory cannot yield knowledge. Assuming that memory provides knowledge, there are serious epistemic issues about how it does this. For instance, does some introspectible quality of remembering provide distinctive evidence for what is remembered, or is it some other feature of memory that secures the epistemic justification needed for knowledge? How readily recollectible must a proposition be in order for it to be known while it is not being recalled? Does a full retention in memory of a previous basis for knowing something assure continuing knowledge of it? Does forgetting an original basis for knowing without replacing it imply a loss of knowledge? See also: INNATE KNOWLEDGE; KNOWLEDGE, TACIT; MEMORY Further reading Goldman, A. (1986) Epistemology and Cognition , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Chapter 10 discusses the epistemic significance of some empirical work on the fallibility of memory.) EARL CONEE MENCIUS (4th century BC) Mencius (Mengzi) was a Chinese Confucian philosopher, best known for his claim that human nature is good. He is probably the single most influential philosopher in the Chinese tradition, in that an interpretation of his thought became the basis of the civil service examinations in China in the fourteenth century and remained so for almost 600 years. The primary source for his thought is the collection of his sayings, debates and discussions known as the Mengzi . See also: CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY, CHINESE Further reading Mencius ( c .300 BC) Mengzi , trans. D.C. Lau, Mencius, New York: Penguin Books, 1970; trans. J. Legge, The Works of Mencius, New York: Dover Publications, 1970. (Lau is a good contemporary translation, with helpful appendices. Legge is a reprint of the 1895 translation, including the Chinese text and explanatory notes.) BRYAN W. VAN NORDEN MENDELSSOHN, MOSES (1729–86) A Jewish disciple of Leibniz and Wolff, Mendelssohn strove throughout his life to uphold and strengthen their rationalist metaphysics while sustaining his ancestral religion. His most important philosophic task, as he saw it, was to refine and render more persuasive the philosophical proofs for the existence of God, providence and immortality. His major divergence from Leibniz was in stressing that ‘the
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Page 564 best of all possible worlds’, which God had created, was in fact more hospitable to human beings than Leibniz had supposed. Towards the end of his life, the irrationalism of Jacobi and the critical philosophy of Kant shook Mendelssohn’s faith in the demonstrability of the fundamental metaphysical precepts, but not his confidence in their truth. They would have to be sustained by ‘common sense’, he reasoned, until future philosophers succeeded in restoring metaphysics to its former glory. While accepting Wolff’s teleological understanding of human nature and natural law, Mendelssohn placed far greater value on human freedom and outlined a political philosophy that protected liberty of conscience. His philosophic defence of his own religion stressed that Judaism is not a ‘revealed religion’ demanding acceptance of particular dogmas but a ‘revealed legislation’ requiring the performance of particular actions. The object of this divine and still valid legislation, he suggested, was often to counteract forces that might otherwise subvert the natural religion entrusted to us by reason. To resolve the tension between his own political liberalism and the Bible’s endorsement of religious coercion, Mendelssohn argued that contemporary Judaism, at any rate, no longer acknowledges any person’s authority to compel others to perform religious acts. See also: ENLIGHTENMENT, JEWISH; JEWISH PHILOSOPHY IN THE EARLY19TH CENTURY Further reading Altmann, A. (1973) Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study, Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press. (A magisterial account of Mendelssohn’s life and thought.) Mendelssohn, M. (1997) Philosophical Writings, trans. and ed. D. Dahlstrom, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Collection of Mendelssohn’s early philosophical writings, including those on metaphysics, ethics and aesthetics.) ALLAN ARKUSH MENTAL CAUSATION Both folk and scientific psychology assume that mental events and properties participate in causal relations. However, considerations involving the causal completeness of physics and the apparent nonreducibility of mental phenomena to physical phenomena have challenged these assumptions. In the case of mental events (such as someone’s thinking about Vienna), one proposal has been simply to identify not ‘ types’ (or classes) of mental events with types of physical events, but merely individual ‘ token ’ mental events with token physical ones, one by one (your and my thinking about Vienna may be ‘realized’ by different type physical states). The role of mental properties (such as ‘being about Vienna’) in causation is more problematic. Properties are widely thought to have three features that seem to render them causally irrelevant: (1) they are ‘multiply-realizable’ (they can be realized in an indefinite variety of substances); (2) many of them seem not to supervene on neurophysiological properties (differences in mental properties do not always depend merely on differences in neurophysiological ones, but upon relations people bear to things outside their skin); and (3) many of them (for example, ‘being painful’) seem inherently ‘subjective’ in a way that no objective physical properties seem to be. All of these issues are complicated by the fact that there is no consensus concerning the nature of causal relevance for properties in general. See also: DETERMINISM AND INDETERMINISM; SUPERVENIENCE OF THE MENTAL Further reading Davidson, D. (1984) Essays on Actions and Events, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Davidson’s important papers on philosophy of mind in which he develops the position he calls ‘anomalous monism’.) Kim, J. (1993) Supervenience and Mind, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Important papers exploring the extent to which physicalism can be formulated in terms of supervenience and developing the idea of supervenient causation as a solution to the problem of mental causation.) BARRY LOEWER MENTAL ILLNESS, CONCEPT OF The mad were once thought to be wicked or possessed, whereas now they are generally thought to be sick, or mentally ill. Usually, this is regarded as a benign decision by a more enlightened age, but some see it as a doubleedged sword – one that simultaneously relieved and robbed the mad of responsibility for their actions, eventually delivering more compassionate treatment, but also disguising value-laden judgments as objective science. The issue is made more difficult by the diversity of conditions classified as psychiatric disorders, and by the extent to which their causes are still ill understood. But the difficulty is also conceptual: what, after all, is physical illness? People
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Page 565 usually agree that it involves abnormal body functioning, but how do we decide what is normal functioning? And even supposing that we know what we mean by a sick body, is there a parallel notion of a sick mind that is more than metaphor? See also: PSYCHOANALYSIS, POST-FREUDIAN; RESPONSIBILITY Further reading Feinberg, J. (1981) ‘What Is So Special About Mental Illness?’ Reason and Responsibility: Readings in Some Basic Problems of Philosophy , Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 5th edn, 464–73. (Clear and simple introduction to ethical issues concerning mental illness, competence and responsibility.) Szasz, T. (1961) The Myth of Mental Illness, New York: Hoeber-Harper. (Best known and rather polemical work of the psychiatrist, Thomas Szasz. Argues that we should demedicalize psychiatry.) KAREN NEANDER MENTAL STATES, ADVERBIAL THEORY OF According to the adverbial theory, there are no mental objects of experience, no pains, itches, tickles, after-images, appearances. People certainly feel pains and have after-images; external objects certainly present appearances to people viewing them. But pains, after-images, and appearances are not real things. Statements which purport to be about such mental objects have a misleading grammatical form. In reality, such statements are about the ways in which people experience or sense or feel. See also: PERCEPTION Further reading Chisholm, R.M. (1957) Perceiving, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (Classic early presentation of the adverbial theory.) Tye, M. (1989) The Metaphysics of Mind, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Extension of the adverbial theory to all mental states.) MICHAEL TYE MERCY see FORGIVENESS AND MERCY; RECTIFICATION AND REMAINDERS (§3) MEREOLOGY Mereology is the theory of the part–whole relation and of derived operations such as the mereological sum. (The sum of several things is the smallest thing of which they are all parts.) It was introduced by Leśniewski to avoid Russell’s paradox. Unlike the set-membership relation, the part–whole relation is transitive. This makes mereology much weaker than set theory, but gives the advantage of ontological parsimony. For example, mereology does not posit the proliferation of entities found in set theory, such as Ø, {Ø},{{Ø}},.... Mereology has occasioned controversy: over whether many things really have a mereological sum if they are either scattered or, even worse, of different categories; over the uniqueness of sums; and over Lewis’ claim that the non-empty subsets of a set are literally parts of it. See also: STRUCTURALISM Further reading Srzednicki, J.T.J., Rickey, V.F. and Czelakowski, J. (eds) (1984) Leśniewski’s Systems: Ontology and Mereology, The Hague: Nijhoff. (Reprinted articles by mereologists in the tradition of Leśniewski, including Lejewski, Sĺupecki and Sobociński.) PETER FORREST MERIT see DESERT AND MERIT MERLEAU-PONTY, MAURICE (1908–61) Merleau-Ponty belongs to the group of French philosophers who transformed French philosophy in the early post-war period by introducing the phenomenological methods of the German philosophers Husserl and Heidegger. His central concern was with ‘the phenomenology of perception’ (the title of his major book), and his originality lay in his account of the role of the bodily sense-organs in perception, which led him to develop a phenomenological treatment of the sub-personal perceptions that play a central role in bodily movements. This account of the sub-personal aspects of life enabled him to launch a famous critique of Sartre’s conception of freedom, which he regarded as an illusion engendered by excessive attention to consciousness. None the less, he and Sartre cooperated for many years in French political affairs, until Merleau-Ponty became exasperated by the orthodox Marxism-Leninism of the French Communist Party in a way in which Sartre, who remained a fellow-traveller, did not. As well as several substantial political essays, Merleau-Ponty wrote widely on art, anthropology and, especially,
language. He died leaving some important work incomplete.
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Page 566 Although his work is still esteemed within the French academic establishment, his influence in France has waned, because of a tendency there to study his German forebears almost to the exclusion of all else. But elsewhere, and most notably in the USA, Merleau-Ponty’s work is widely studied, especially now that questions about the distinction between personal and subpersonal aspects of life have become so prominent. See also: PHENOMENOLOGICAL MOVEMENT Further reading Madison, G. (1981) The Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. (A general survey, especially useful in elucidating the significance of themes from Merleau-Ponty’s later writings.) Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945) Phénoménologie de la perception , Paris: Gallimard; trans. C. Smith, The Phenomenology of Perception , London: Routledge, 1962. (Merleau-Ponty’s major work, using psychology to reconstruct classical phenomenology.) THOMAS BALDWIN MERSENNE, MARIN (1588–1648) The French philosopher Marin Mersenne represents a new seventeenth-century perspective on natural knowledge. This perspective elevated the classical mathematical sciences over natural philosophy as the appropriate models of what can be known, of how it can be known and of the cognitive status of that knowledge. His early publications had the apologetic aim not only of combating various forms of heresy, but also of opposing philosophical scepticism, which was widely regarded in Catholic France of the early seventeenth century as undermining the certainty of religious dogma. To that end, Mersenne stressed the certainty of demonstrations in sciences such as optics, astronomy and mechanics, all of which stood as ‘mathematical’ sciences in the classifications of the sciences stemming from Aristotle. Mersenne’s stress on the mathematical sciences contrasted them with natural philosophy in so far as the former concerned only the measurable external properties of things whereas the latter purported to discuss their inner natures, or essences. In accepting the considerable degree of uncertainty attending knowledge of essences, and juxtaposing it to the relative certainty of knowledge of appearances, Mersenne adopted a position (since called ‘mitigated scepticism’) that combated scepticism by lowering the stakes: in accepting that the essences of things cannot be known, he agreed with the sceptics; but in asserting that knowledge of appearances can, by contrast, be had with certainty, he rejected the apparent intellectual paralysis advocated by the sceptics. In furthering this programme, Mersenne embarked on a publication effort relating to the mathematical sciences, combined with a massive lifelong correspondence on largely philosophical as well as religious topics with a wide network of people throughout Europe. See also: SCIENTIFIC METHOD Further reading Lenoble, R. (1943) Mersenne ou la naissance du mécanisme , Paris: Vrin, 1971. (The classic study, presenting Mersenne as something of a proto-positivist.) Popkin, R.H. (1979) The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza , Berkeley,CA: University of California Press. (Contains the influential account of Mersenne’s ‘mitigated scepticism’.) PETER DEAR MESSER LEON, JUDAH ( c .1425–c .1495) Messer Leon was a philosopher, physician, jurist, communal leader, poet and orator. Born in Italy and ordained as a rabbi by 1450, Messer Leon was qualified to adjudicate legal cases among Jews and head an academy ( yeshivah ) for advanced studies in Jewish law. He also came close to embodying the Renaissance ideal of uomo universale . His learning was formally recognized in 1469, when Emperor Frederick III awarded him a doctorate in medicine and philosophy and granted him the unusual privilege of conferring doctoral degrees in those subjects on Jewish students. Messer Leon’s contribution to Jewish philosophy was in the field of logic, the art considered by him to be the key to the proper harmonization of religion and philosophy. He regarded scholastic logic to be superior to Arabic logic and wrote supercommentaries on Averroes’ logical works as well as an encyclopedia of logic, Mikhlal Yofi (Purest Beauty), in an attempt to shift Jewish philosophical education from the Judaeo-Arabic logical tradition to scholastic logic. Although his encyclopedia became a popular textbook, Messer Leon failed to mould the culture of Italian Jewry as he had intended. In particular, he could not curb the spread of Kabbalah, a tradition which he
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Page 567 vehemently opposed because of its underlying Platonic metaphysics. Most importantly, Messer Leon composed the first manual of Hebrew rhetoric, entitled Nofet Tzufim (The Book of the Honeycomb’s Flow). Printed in 1476, this Jewish response to Latin humanism combines the Averroist-Aristotelianism tradition and the Ciceronian-Quintilian one. The appropriation of humanistic rhetoric was given a Jewish meaning when Messer Leon claimed that the Torah, rather than the writings of the pagan, classical orators, exemplified perfect speech because it was a revelation of perfect divine wisdom. By analysing Scripture from the perspective of classical rhetoric, Messer Leon legitimized the study of ancient pagan and Christian orators even as he argued for the supremacy of biblical rhetoric over all merely human eloquence. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM, MEDIEVAL Further reading Ben Yehiel, Judah (1476) Nofet Zufim (The Book of the Honeycomb’s Flow), ed. R. Bonfil, Nofet Zufim on Hebrew Rhetoric , Jerusalem: The Jewish National and University Library Press and Magnes Press, 1981; ed. and trans. I. Rabinowitz, The Book of the Honeycomb’s Flow: Sepher Nophet Suphim by Judah Messer Leon, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983. (Written in Hebrew, Bonfil’s excellent ‘introduction’ to his edition lists all the extant manuscripts of Messer Leon and situates Messer Leon in his socio-cultural context. Rabinowitz’s superb critical edition and English translation has a detailed introduction, which lists most of the pertinent, albeit controversial, information about Messer Leon’s life, as well as giving a partial list of his works extant in manuscripts. Rabinowitz’s elegant English translation and notes are especially valuable for situating this work in the context of Western rhetoric.) HAVA TIROSH-SAMUELSON METAPHOR A standard dictionary definition describes a metaphor as ‘a figure of speech in which a word or phrase literally denoting one kind of object is used in place of another to suggest a likeness between them’. Although the theoretical adequacy of this definition may be questioned, it conveys the standard view that there is a difference between literal and nonliteral language; that figurative speech is nonliteral language and that a metaphor is an instance of figurative speech. The three most influential treatments of metaphor are the comparison, interaction and speech act theories. According to the first, every metaphor involves a comparison; a specific version of this view is that every metaphor is an abbreviated simile. According to the second, every metaphor involves a semantic interaction between some object or concept that is literally denoted by some word, and some concept metaphorically predicated on that word. According to the third, it is not words or sentences that are metaphorical but their use in specific situations; thus, to understand how metaphors function, one must understand how people communicate with language. See also: SPEECH ACTS Further reading Davidson, D. (1979) ‘What Metaphors Mean’, in S. Sacks (ed.) On Metaphor, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 29–45. (Davidson emphasized that words themselves do not have a metaphorical meaning.) Johnson, M. (1980) Philosophical Perspectives on Metaphor, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. (A collection of important articles on metaphor.) A.P. MARTINICH METAPHYSICS Metaphysics is a broad area of philosophy marked out by two types of inquiry. The first aims to be the most general investigation possible into the nature of reality: are there principles applying to everything that is real, to all that is? – if we abstract from the particular nature of existing things that which distinguishes them from each other, what can we know about them merely in virtue of the fact that they exist? The second type of inquiry seeks to uncover what is ultimately real, frequently offering answers in sharp contrast to our everyday experience of the world. Understood in terms of these two questions, metaphysics is very closely related to ontology, which is usually taken to involve both ‘what is existence (being)?’ and ‘what (fundamentally distinct) types of thing exist?’ (see ONTOLOGY). The two questions are not the same, since someone quite unworried by the possibility that the world might really be otherwise than it appears (and therefore regarding the second investigation as a completely trivial one) might still be engaged by the question of whether there
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Page 568 were any general truths applicable to all existing things. But although different, the questions are related: one might well expect a philosopher’s answer to the first to provide at least the underpinnings of their answer to the second. Aristotle proposed the first of these investigations. He called it ‘first philosophy’, sometimes also ‘the science of being’ (more-or-less what ‘ontology’ means); but at some point in antiquity his writings on the topic came to be known as the ‘metaphysics’ – from the Greek for ‘after natural things’, that is, what comes after the study of nature. This is as much as we know of the origin of the word (see ARISTOTLE). IT WOULD, HOWEVER, BE QUITE WRONG TO THINK OF METAPHYSICS AS A UNIQUELY ‘WESTERN’ PHENOMENON. CLASSICAL INDIAN PHILOSOPHY, AND ESPECIALLY BUDDHISM, IS ALSO A VERY RICH SOURCE (SEE BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY, INDIAN; HINDU PHILOSOPHY; JAINA PHILOSOPHY). 1 General metaphysics Any attempt on either question will find itself using, and investigating, the concepts of being and existence (see BEING; EXISTENCE). It will then be natural to ask whether there are any further, more detailed classifications under which everything real falls, and a positive answer to this question brings us to a doctrine of categories (see CATEGORIES). The historical picture here is complex, however. The two main exponents of such a doctrine are Aristotle and Kant. In Aristotle’s case it is unclear whether he saw it as a doctrine about things and their basic properties or about language and its basic predicates; whereas Kant quite explicitly used his categories as features of our way of thinking, and so applied them only to things as they appear to us, not as they really or ultimately are (see KANT, I.). Following on from Kant, Hegel consciously gave his categories both roles, and arranged his answer to the other metaphysical question (about the true underlying nature of reality) so as to make this possible (see HEGEL, G.W.F.). An early, extremely influential view about reality seen in the most general light is that it consists of things and their properties – individual things, often called particulars, and properties, often called universals, that can belong to many such individuals (see PARTICULARS; UNIVERSALS). Very closely allied to this notion of an individual is the concept of substance, that in which properties ‘inhere’ (see SUBSTANCE). This line of thought (which incidentally had a biological version in the concepts of individual creatures and their species) gave rise to one of the most famous metaphysical controversies: whether universals are real entities or not (see SPECIES; NATURAL KINDS). In different ways, PLATO and Aristotle had each held the affirmative view; nominalism is the general term for the various versions of the negative position (see NOMINALISM). The clash between realists and nominalists over universals can serve to illustrate a widespread feature of metaphysical debate. Whatever entities, forces and so on may be proposed, there will be a prima facie option between regarding them as real beings, genuine constituents of the world and, as it were, downgrading them to fictions or projections of our own ways of speaking and thinking (see OBJECTIVITY; PROJECTIVISM). This was, broadly speaking, how nominalists wished to treat universals; comparable debates exist concerning causality (see CAUSATION), moral value (see EMOTIVISM; MORAL REALISM; MORAL SCEPTICISM; VALUE, ONTOLOGICAL STATUS OF) and necessity and possibility (see NECESSARY TRUTH AND CONvention) – to name a few examples. Some have even proposed that the categories (see above) espoused in the Western tradition are reflections of the grammar of IndoEuropean languages, and have no further ontological status (see SAPIR-WHORF HYPOTHESIS). Wittgenstein famously wrote that the world is the totality of facts, not of things, so bringing to prominence another concept of the greatest generality (see FACTS). Presumably he had it in mind that exactly the same things, differently related to each other, could form very different worlds; so that it is not things but the states of affairs or facts they enter into which determine how things are. The apparent obviousness of the formula ‘if it is true that p then it is a fact that p’, makes it seem that facts are in one way or another closely related to truth (see TRUTH, COHERENCE THEORY OF; TRUTH, CORRESPONDENCE THEORY OF) – although it should be said that not every philosophical view of the nature of truth is a metaphysical one, since some see it as just a linguistic device (see TRUTH, DEFLATIONARY THEORIES OF) and some as a reflection, not of how the world is, but of human needs and purposes (see TRUTH, PRAGMATIC THEORY OF; RELATIVISM). Space and time, as well as being somewhat elusive in their own nature, are further obvious candidates for being features of everything that exists (see SPACE; TIME). But that is controversial, as the debate about the existence of abstract objects testifies (see ABSTRACT OBJECTS). We
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Page 569 commonly speak, at least, as if we thought that numbers exist, but not as if we thought that they have any spatio-temporal properties (see REALISM IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF MATHEMATICS). Kant regarded his things-in-themselves as neither spatial nor temporal; and some have urged us to think of God in the same way (see GOD, CONCEPTS OF). There are accounts of the mind which allow mental states to have temporal, but deny them spatial properties (see DUALISM). Be all this as it may, even if not literally everything, then virtually everything of which we have experience is in time. Temporality is therefore one of the phenomena that should be the subject of any investigation which aspires to maximum generality. Hence, so is change (see CHANGE). And when we consider change, and ask the other typically metaphysical question about it (‘what is really going on when something changes?’) we find ourselves faced with two types of answer. One type would have it that a change is an alteration in the properties of some enduring thing (see CONTINUANTS). The other would deny any such entity, holding instead that what we really have is merely a sequence of states, a sequence which shows enough internal coherence to make upon us the impression of one continuing thing (see MOMENTARINESS, BUDDHIST DOCTRINE OF). The former will tend to promote ‘thing’ and ‘substance’ to the ranks of the most basic metaphysical categories; the latter will incline towards events and processes (see EVENTS; PROCESSES). It is here that questions about identity over time become acute, particularly in the special case of those continuants (or, perhaps, processes), which are persons (see IDENTITY; PERSONS; PERSONAL IDENTITY). Two major historical tendencies in metaphysics have been idealism and materialism, the former presenting reality as ultimately mental or spiritual, the latter regarding it as wholly material (see BUDDHISM, YOGĀCĀRA SCHOOL OF; IDEALISM; MATERIALISM; MATERIALISM IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND; MONISM, INDIAN; PHENOMENALISM). In proposing a single ultimate principle both are monistic (see MONISM). They have not had the field entirely to themselves. A minor competitor has been neutral monism, which takes mind and matter to be different manifestations of something in itself neither one nor the other (see NEUTRAL MONISM). More importantly, many metaphysical systems have been dualist, taking both to be fundamental, and neither to be a form of the other (see SĀNṄKHYA). Both traditions are ancient. In modern times idealism received its most intensive treatment in the nineteenth century (see ABSOLUTE, THE; GERMAN IDEALISM); in the second half of the twentieth century, materialism has been in the ascendant. A doctrine is also found according to which all matter, without actually being mental in nature, has certain mental properties (see PANPSYCHISM). 2 Specific metaphysics There is also metaphysics that arises in reference to particular subject matters, this being therefore metaphysical primarily with regard to the second question (what are things ultimately like? – or, what kinds of thing ultimately exist?) rather than the first. One of the most obvious cases, and historically the most prominent, is theology; we have already mentioned the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of mathematics and the theory of values. Less obviously, metaphysical issues also intrude on the philosophy of language and logic, as happens when it is suggested that any satisfactory theory of meaning will have to posit the existence of intensional entities, or that any meaningful language will have to mirror the structure of the world (see INTENSIONAL ENTITIES; LOGICAL ATOMISM). The political theorist or social scientist who holds that successful explanation in the social sphere must proceed from properties of societies not reducible to properties of the individuals who make them up (thereby making a society an entity that is in a sense more basic than its members) raises a metaphysical issue (see HOLISM AND INDIVIDUALISM IN HISTORY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE). Metaphysics, as demarcated by the second question, can pop up anywhere. The relationship with metaphysics is, however, particularly close in the case of science and the philosophy of science. Aristotle seems to have understood his ‘first philosophy’ as continuous with what is now called his physics, and indeeditcan be said that themore fundamental branches of natural science are a kind of metaphysics as it is characterized here. For they are typically concerned with the discovery of laws and entities that are completely general, in the sense that everything is composed of entities and obeys laws. The differences are primarily epistemological ones, the balance of a priori considerations and empirical detail used by scientists and philosophers in supporting their respective ontological claims. The subject matter of these claims can even sometimes coincide: during the 1980s the reality of possible worlds other than the actual
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Page 570 one was maintained by a number of writers for a variety of reasons, some of them recognizably ‘scientific’, some recognizably ‘philosophical’ (see POSSIBLE WORLDS). And whereas we find everywhere in metaphysics a debate over whether claims should be given a realist or an antirealist interpretation, in the philosophy of science we find a parallel controversy over the status of the entities featuring in scientific theories (see REALISM AND ANTIREALISM; SCIENTIFIC REALISM AND ANTIREALISM). It is true that there has been considerable reluctance to acknowledge any such continuity. A principal source of this reluctance has been logical positivism, with its division of propositions into those which are empirically verifiable and meaningful, and those which are not so verifiable and are either analytic or meaningless, followed up by its equation of science with the former and metaphysics with the latter (see DEMARCATION PROBLEM; LOGICAL POSITIVISM; MEANING AND VERIFICATION). When combined with the belief that analytic truths record nothing about the world, but only about linguistic convention, this yields a total rejection of all metaphysics – let alone of any continuity with science. But apart from the fact that this line of thought requires acceptance of the principle about meaninglessness, it also makes a dubious epistemological assumption: that what we call science never uses non-empirical arguments, and that what we regard as metaphysics never draws on empirical premises. Enemies of obscurantism need not commit themselves to any of this; they can recognize the continuity between science and metaphysics without robbing anyone of the vocabulary in which to be rude about the more extravagant, ill-evidenced, even barely meaningful forms which, in the view of some, metaphysics has sometimes taken. Even the philosopher with a low opinion of the prospects for traditional metaphysics can believe that there is a general framework which we in fact use for thinking about reality, and can undertake to describe and explore it. This project, which can claim an illustrious ancestor in Kant, has in the twentieth century sometimes been called descriptive metaphysics, though what it inquires into are our most general patterns of thought, and the nature of things themselves only indirectly, if at all. Though quite compatible with a low estimate of traditional metaphysics as defined by our two primary questions, it does imply that there is a small but fairly stable core of human thought for it to investigate. Hence it collides with the view of those who deny that there is any such thing (see POSTMODERNISM). See also: ARISTOTELIANISM IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY; ARISTOTELIANISM IN THE 17TH CENTURY; ARISTOTELIANISM, MEDIEVAL; ARISTOTELIANISM, RENAISSANCE; BUDDHIST CONCEPT OF EMPTINESS; CAUSALITY AND NECESSITY IN ISLAMIC THOUGHT; CAUSATION, INDIAN THEORIES OF; HEGELIANISM; INFINITY; MATERIALISM, INDIAN SCHOOL OF; MATTER, INDIAN CONCEPTIONS OF; NEO-KANTIANISM;NEOPLATONISM; NEOPLATONISM IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY; NOMINALISM, BUDDHIST DOCTRINE OF; ONTOLOGY IN INDIAN PHILOSOPHY; PLATONISM, EARLY AND MIDDLE; PLATONISM IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY; PLATONISM, MEDIEVAL; PLATONISM, RENAISSANCE; UNIVERSALS, INDIAN Theories Of Further reading Kim, J. and Sosa, E. (eds) (1995) A Companion to Metaphysics, Oxford: Blackwell. (Encyclopedia-style volume with over 250 entries of varying length devoted to terms, theories, movements and individual philosophers. Some coverage of epistemological issues as well as metaphysics.) EDWARD CRAIG METHODOLOGICAL INDIVIDUALISM Methodological individualism is the thesis that certain psychological properties are intrinsic properties, such as ‘being made out of iron’, rather than externally relational properties, such as ‘being an aunt’. It has been challenged by influential ‘anti-individualist’ claims of, for example, Putnam and Burge, according to which the content of an individual’s words or thoughts (beliefs, desires) is determined in part by facts about their social or physical environment. Putnam, for example, imagines a planet, ‘twin earth’, which is identical to the earth in 1750 (prior to modern chemistry) in all respects except that wherever earth had H2O, twin earth had a different but superficially similar chemical, XYZ. Putnam argues that the English word ‘water’ in 1750 referred only to H2O, while the twin word ‘water’ refers only to XYZ. Historically, the term ‘methodological individualism’ has referred to the thesis that all social explanation must be ultimately expressible in terms of facts about individual human beings; not about economic classes, nations and so on. See also: CONTENT: WIDE AND NARROW; SEMANTICS, CONCEPTUAL ROLE
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Page 571 Further reading Grimm, R. and Merrill, D. (eds) (1988) Contents of Thought, Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. (Includes several useful articles, including Loar (1988) and Matthews (1988).) Larson, R. and Segal, G. (1995) Knowledge of Meaning: An Introduction to Semantic Theory , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (A general introduction to formal semantic theory. Chapter 13 defends individualism with respect to the psychological states involved in understanding language.) GABRIEL SEGAL MEXICO, PHILOSOPHY IN Philosophy has been practised in Mexico for centuries, beginning with Nahuatl thought. Such thinking was rediscovered through laborious translation of surviving fragments of a document of exceptional value known as ‘Coloquio de los Doce’ (Debate of the Twelve) (1524). Since then, philosophy has come to enjoy a high degree of professionalization and a high quality of academic production. Generally, Mexican philosophical activity has evolved in accordance with world standards of rigour, information and quality of argumentation. In the twentieth century various philosophical groups have been created, namely the Ateneo de la Juventud, the contemporá neos and the Hyperion group. Leopoldo Zea understood the essence of the Mexican and the Latin American as a historical being with a historically situated consciousness. Zea’s history of ideas involved a philosophy of Latin American history which placed the being, destiny and meaning of the history of Mexico and Latin America in the context of the history of the world. The 1940s and 1950s were unusually productive to this end. In the 1970s small groupings of philosophers gathered to focus on problems, traditions, teaching figures, leaders and spheres of influence. There has been considerable interest in political philosophy, philosophy of history, philosophy of science and ethics. Since the 1980s, works about the history of ideas in Mexico and the history of science and technology have proliferated. See also: LATIN AMERICA, COLONIAL THOUGHT IN; LATIN AMERICA, PRE-COLUMBIAN AND INDIGENOUS THOUGHT IN Further reading Escobar-Valenzuela, G. (1992) Introducción al pensamiento filosófico en Mèxico (Introduction to Philosophical Thought in Mexico), Mexico: Limusa. (A general study of philosophical thought in Mexico.) HORACIO CERUTTI-GULDBERG MEYERSON, ÉMILE (1859–1933) The Polish-born French philosopher Meyerson rejects the positivism of Comte and Mach, insisting that reason demands more of science than the identification of lawful regularities for the purpose of successful prediction. Reason demands an actual representation of reality based on genuine causal explanation, and causal explanation consists of demonstrating an underlying identity behind the apparent diversity of phenomena. If completely successful, however, such explanation would ultimately lead to the unchanging homogeneous and sterile universe of Parmenides. That it does not is due to what Meyerson calls ‘irrationals’: inexplicable elements in reality that can never be reduced to identity. Explanation, therefore, is never complete, and scientific laws are ‘plausible’ rather than universally and necessarily true. Further reading Boas, G. (1930) A Critical Analysis of the Philosophy of Émile Meyerson , Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. (A critical exposition of Meyerson’s first three books, written to call attention to a ‘thinker, whose importance seemed underestimated in America’.) Meyerson, É. (1908) Identité et réalité, Paris: Alcan; 5th edn, Paris: Vrin, 1951; trans. K. Loewenberg, Identity and Reality , New York: Macmillan, 1930. (Meyerson’s classic, most concise statement of his thesis.) DAVID A. SIPFLE MI BSKYOD RDO RJE (1507–54) Mi bskyod rdo rje (Mikyö Dorje) was a Tibetan Buddhist of the Karma bKa’-brgyud (Gagyü) school. Particularly in his earlier thought, he defended the existence of a positive nondual Ultimate Reality (an Absolute) beyond all conceptuality but known in meditation, and apparently understood the purpose of Mādhyamika philosophy as solely the shattering of conceptualization and all philosophical positions as a preparation for this nonconceptual meditation. He was highly critical of Tsong kha pa (Dzongkaba, a notable philosopher of the rival dGe-lugs-pa (Gelukba) school), for being
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Page 572 overly concerned with logical analysis of the foundations of everyday experience. See also: BUDDHISM, MĀDHYAMIKA: INDIA AND TIBET; Further reading Thinley, K. (1980) The History of the Sixteen Karmapas of Tibet , ed. D. Stott, Boulder, CO: PrajñāPress. (Short biographies based on traditional sources.) PAUL WILLIAMS MIDRASH Midrash, a Hebrew word meaning ‘investigation’ or ‘study’, denotes both the method used by the Jewish rabbis of the second to sixth centuries AD to interpret the Bible and the extensive literature that resulted from the application of that method. In rabbinic parlance midrash, or the related term derash, can also designate a homiletic, non-literal way of reading the Bible. Midrash embodies a distinctive hermeneutic which at its most extreme treats the text of Scripture as a set of symbols or signs apparently to be manipulated by the interpreter at will. In recent years midrash has been compared to reader-response literary criticism. It has also been claimed that it represents a ‘Judaic’ as opposed to a ‘Hellenic’ mode of thinking which anticipates postmodernist hermeneutics. See also: BIBLE, HEBREW; HERMENEUTICS, BIBLICAL Further reading Neusner J. (1987) What is Midrash?, Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press. (A readable non-technical introduction to midrash.) PHILIP S. ALEXANDER MIKHAILOVSKII, NIKOLAI KONSTANTINOVICH (1842–1904) Along with Lavrov, N.K. Mikhailovskii, a non-academic social theorist and literary critic, was the most representative and influential thinker of Russian populism. His most distinctive contribution to populist ideology was his attempt to reconcile the ‘principle of individuality’, so dear to the Russian intelligentsia, with the old, communal ‘principles of the people’, represented by the non-Westernized Russian peasantry. Unlike Herzen and Lavrov, Mikhailovskii did not see the principle of individuality as a product of Western progress, that is to say, as something which should be introduced from outside to the archaic world of Russian village commune. He challenged the stereotype which associated individualism with the capitalist West; instead, he tried to prove that the principle of individuality was in fact fully compatible with old Russian communalism, and incompatible with Western-type modernization. He did so by a radical redefinition of the very concept of individuality. For him individuality was not the product of a process of ‘individualization’ in the sense of loosening the communal bonds, making people socially differentiated, functionally specialized and separated from each other. On the contrary, by individuality he meant the ‘inner wholeness’, that is to say, the non-alienated, many-sided and harmonious development of human beings. Following the romantic critics of modernity, he claimed that individuality, so conceived, was being destroyed by capitalist progress. Mikhailovskii’s notion of individuality was similar to the Slavophile ideal of ‘integral personality’. Unlike Slavophilism, however, Mikhailovskii’s ‘sociological romanticism’ was bound up with a secularist worldview and a semi-positivist position in philosophy. For this reason its affinity with Slavophile romantic anticapitalism was relatively inconsequential and remained unnoticed. See also: HERZEN, A.I.; LAVROV, P.L. Further reading Billington, J.H. (1958) Mikhailovsky and Russian Populism , Oxford: Clarendon Press. (The only comprehensive monograph on Mikhailovskii in English.) Edie, J.M., Scanlan, J.P. and Zeldin, M.B. (1965) Russian Philosophy , vol.2, Chicago, IL: Quadrangle Books. (See 170–98 for an English translation of fragments from Mikhailovskii’s philosophical writings including his seminal essay ’What is Progress?’) ANDRZEJ WALICKI MIKI KIYOSHI (1897–1945) A brilliant young philosopher and critic of his times, Miki Kiyoshi embodied in his life and thought Japan’s tortured transition from Westernized modernity to world power. Associated with his teacher, Nishida Kitarō, he is generally regarded as representative of a Marxist group within the Kyoto School. See also: KYOTO SCHOOL Further reading Karaki Junzō (1966) Miki Kiyoshi , Tokyo: Chikuma. (Biography of Miki Kiyoshi, in Japanese. Very little has been written about
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Page 573 Miki in English, and his works have never been translated.) J.W. HEISIG MIKYÖ DORJE see MI BSKYOD RDO RJE MILL, HARRIET see TAYLOR, HARRIET MILL, JAMES (1773–1836) James Mill, who is today remembered mainly as Bentham’s chief disciple and John Stuart Mill’s father, was a British philosopher, political theorist, historian, psychologist, economist, educationist and journalist. He was also largely responsible for clarifying and systematizing Bentham’s utilitarianism, for introducing a distinction between ‘lower’, animal pleasures and ‘higher’, uniquely human ones, and for organizing the small but influential band of Bentham’s followers that became known as the ‘philosophic radicals’. In politics, he favoured representative democracy as the only practicable system of government capable of maximizing individual and communal happiness. See also: UTILITARIANISM Further reading Plamenatz, J. (1958) The English Utilitarians , Oxford: Blackwell, 2nd edn. (A concise account and assessment of key themes and thinkers in the utilitarian tradition, including James Mill.) TERENCE BALL MILL, JOHN STUART (1806–73) John Stuart Mill, Britain’s major philosopher of the nineteenth century, gave formulations of his country’s empiricist and liberal traditions of comparable importance to those of John Locke. He united enlightenment reason with the historical and psychological insights of romanticism. He held that all knowledge is based on experience, believed that our desires, purposes and beliefs are products of psychological laws of association, and accepted Bentham’s standard of the greatest total happiness of all beings capable of happiness – the principle of ‘utility’. This was Mill’s enlightenment legacy; he infused it with high Romantic notions of culture and character. In epistemology Mill’s empiricism was very radical. He drew a distinction between ‘verbal’ and ‘real’ propositions similar to that which Kant made between analytic and synthetic judgments. However, unlike Kant, Mill held that not only pure mathematics but logic itself contains real propositions and inferences, and unlike Kant, he denied that any synthetic, or real, proposition is a priori. The sciences of logic and mathematics, according to Mill, propound the most general laws of nature and, like all other sciences, are in the last resort grounded inductively on experience. We take principles of logic and mathematics to be a priori because we find it inconceivable that they should not be true. Mill acknowledged the facts which underlie our conviction, facts about unthinkability or imaginative unrepresentability, and he sought to explain these facts in associationist terms. He thought that we are justified in basing logical and mathematical claims on such facts about what is thinkable – but the justification is itself a posteriori. What then is the nature and standing of induction? Mill held that the primitive form of induction is enumerative induction, simple generalization from experience. He did not address Hume’s sceptical problem about enumerative induction. Generalization from experience is our primitive inferential practice and remains our practice when we become reflectively conscious of it – in Mill’s view nothing more needs to be said or can be said. Instead he traced how enumerative induction is internally strengthened by its actual success in establishing regularities, and how it eventually gives rise to more searching methods of inductive inquiry, capable of detecting regularities where enumerative induction alone would not suffice. Thus whereas Hume raised sceptical questions about induction, Mill pushed through an empiricist analysis of deduction. He recognized as primitively legitimate only the disposition to rely on memory and the disposition to generalize from experience. The whole of science, he thought, is built from these. In particular, he did not accept that the mere fact that a hypothesis accounts for data can ever provide a reason for thinking it true (as opposed to thinking it useful). It is always possible that a body of data may be explained equally well by more than one hypothesis. This view, that enumerative induction is the only authoritative source of general truths, was also important in his metaphysics. Accepting as he did that our knowledge of supposed objects external to consciousness consists only in the conscious states they excite in us, he concluded that external objects amount only to ‘permanent possibilities of sensation’. The possibilities are ‘permanent’ in the sense that they can be relied on to obtain if an antecedent condition is
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Page 574 realized. Mill was the founder of modern phenomenalism. In ethics, Mill’s governing conviction was that happiness is the sole ultimate human end. As in the case of induction, he appealed to reflective agreement, in this case of desires rather than reasoning dispositions. If happiness was not ‘in theory and in practice, acknowledged to be an end, nothing could ever convince any person that it was so’. But he acknowledged that we can will to do what we do not desire to do; we can act from duty, not desire. And he distinguished between desiring a thing as ‘part’ of our happiness and desiring it as a means to our happiness. The virtues can become a part of our happiness, and for Mill they ideally should be so. They have a natural base in our psychology on which moral education can be built. More generally, people can reach a deeper understanding of happiness through education and experience: some forms of happiness are inherently preferred as finer by those able to experience them fully. Thus Mill enlarged but retained Bentham’s view that the happiness of all, considered impartially, is the standard of conduct. His account of how this standard relates to the fabric of everyday norms was charged with the nineteenth century’s historical sense, but also maintained links with Bentham. Justice is a class of exceptionally stringent obligations on society – it is the ‘claim we have on our fellow-creatures to join in making safe for us the very groundwork of our existence’. Because rights of justice protect this groundwork they take priority over the direct pursuit of general utility as well as over the private pursuit of personal ends. Mill’s doctrine of liberty dovetails with this account of justice. Here he appealed to rights founded on ‘utility in the largest sense, grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being’. The principle enunciated in his essay On Liberty (1859) safeguards people’s freedom to pursue their own goals, so long as they do not infringe on the legitimate interests of others: power should not be exercised over people for their own good. Mill defended the principle on two grounds. It enables individuals to realize their potential in their own distinctive way, and, by liberating talents, creativity and energy, it institutes the social conditions for the moral development of culture and character. See also: ECONOMICS, PHILOSOPHY OF; INDUCTION, EPISTEMIC ISSUES IN; LIBERALISM; Further reading Mill, J.S. (1848) Principles of Political Economy , in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill , London: Routledge, vols 2 and 3, 1991. (A synthesis of classical economics, this work also contains much interesting social philosophy.) —— (1859) On Liberty, in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill , London: Routledge, vol. 18, 213–310, 1991. (One of liberalism’s canonical texts.) Skorupski, J. (1989) John Stuart Mill , London: Routledge. (Comprehensive account of Mill’s philosophy.) JOHN SKORUPSKI MILLAR, JOHN (1735–1801) The Scottish legal scholar John Millar elevated law teaching from mere instruction in technicalities to the level of a genuinely liberal subject, largely by using his teaching to educate students in the science of legislation. A pupil and disciple of Adam Smith, Millar, through his teaching and writing, established his reputation as a key figure in the Scottish Enlightenment movement. See also: ENLIGHTENMENT, SCOTTISH Further reading Lehmann, W.C. (1960) John Millar of Glasgow , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (The standard biography.) MARTIN LOUGHLIN MĪMĀṂSĀ The school of Mīmāṃsā or Pūrva Mīmāṃsā was one of the six systems of classical Hindu philosophy. It grew out of the Indian science of exegesis and was primarily concerned with defending the way of life defined by the ancient scripture of Hinduism, the Veda. Its most important exponents, Śabarasvāmin, Prabhākara and Kumārila, lived in the sixth and seventh centuries AD. It was realist and empiricist in orientation. Its central doctrine was that the Veda is the sole means of knowledge of dharma or righteousness, because it is eternal. All cognition, it held, is valid unless its cause is defective. The Veda being without any fallible author, human or divine, the cognitions to which it gives rise must be true. The Veda must be authorless because there is no recollection of an author or any other evidence of its having been composed; we only observe that it has been handed down from generation to generation. Mīmāṃsā thinkers also defended various metaphysical ideas implied by the Veda – in
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Page 575 particular, the reality of the physical world and the immortality of the soul. However, they denied the existence of God as creator of the world and author of scripture. The eternality of the Veda implies the eternality of language in general. Words and the letters that constitute them are eternal and ubiquitous; it is only their particular manifestations, caused by articulations of the vocal organs, that are restricted to certain times and places. The meanings of words, being universals, are eternal as well. Finally, the relation between word and meaning is also eternal. Every word has an inherent capacity to indicate its meaning. Words could not be expressive of certain meanings as a result of artificial conventions. The basic orientation of Mīmāṃsā was pragmatic and anti-mystical. It believed that happiness and salvation result just from carrying out the prescriptions of the Veda, not from the practice of yoga or insight into the One. It criticized particularly sharply other scriptural traditions (Buddhism and Jainism) that claimed to have originated from omniscient preceptors. See also: DUTY AND VIRTUE, INDIAN CONCEPTIONS OF Further reading Dwivedi, R.C. (ed.) (1994) Studies in Mīmāṃsā, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. (A collection of articles by contemporary scholars.) Śabarasvāmin (6th century) Śābarabhāṣya , trans. G. Jha, Gaekwad’s Oriental Series 66, 70, 73, Baroda: Oriental Institute, 1933–6. (Translation of the Mīmāṃsāsūtra , together with Śabarasvāmin’s commentary.) JOHN A. TABER MIMĒSIS A crucial term in the literary theories of Plato and Aristotle, mimēsis describes the relation between the words of a literary work and the actions and events they recount. In Plato, the term usually means ‘imitation’ and suggests that poetry is derived from and inferior to reality; in Aristotle, it loses this pejorative connotation and tends to mean simply ‘representation’ and to indicate that the world presented in a poem is much like, but not identical with, our own. See also: AESTHETICS Further reading Lucas, D.W. (ed.) (1968) Aristotle: Poetics , Oxford: Clarendon Press, 258–72. (The standard English commentary, with a good discussion of mimēsis.) GLENN W. MOST MIND, BUNDLE THEORY OF This theory owes its name to Hume, who described the self or person (which he assumed to be the mind) as ‘nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement’ ( A Treatise of Human Nature I, IV, §VI). The theory begins by denying Descartes’s Second Meditation view that experiences belong to an immaterial soul; its distinguishing feature is its attempt to account for the unity of a single mind by employing only relations among the experiences themselves rather than their attribution to an independently persisting subject. The usual objection to the bundle theory is that no relations adequate to the task can be found. However, empirical work suggests that the task itself may be illusory. Many bundle theorists follow Hume in taking their topic to be personal identity, but the theory can be disentangled from this additional burden. See also: MODULARITY OF MIND; PERSONS Further reading Stroud, B. (1977) Hume, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, ch. 6. (A very good, but intricate, account of Hume’s treatment of personal identity. Accessible to undergraduates, but not to complete beginners.) STEWART CANDLISH MIND, CHILD’S THEORY OF Knowledge of other minds poses a variety of unusual problems due to the peculiarly private nature of mental states. Some current views, impressed by the contrast between the apparently direct access we have to our own mental states and the inaccessibility of others’ mental states, argue that we understand the mental states of others by imagining that they are our own by ‘simulation’. Other current views propose that we infer both our own mental states and the mental states of others by employing a set of conjectures arrived at through general inductive reasoning over experience: a ‘folk psychology’ or ‘theory of mind’. Experimental studies, by contrast, suggest that we possess an ‘instinct’ for comprehending the informational mental states of other minds. Children develop mental state concepts uni
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Page 576 formly and rapidly in the preschool period when general reasoning powers are limited. For example, children can reason effectively about other people’s beliefs before they can reliably calculate that 2 plus 2 equals 4. In the empirical study of the ‘theory of mind’ instinct there have been three major discoveries so far: first, that normally developing 2-year-olds are able to recognize the informational state of pretending; second, that normally developing children can, by the age of 4 years, solve a variety of false belief problems; and lastly, that this instinct is specifically impaired in children with the neurodevelopmental disorder known as ‘autism’. See also: COGNITION, INFANT; NATIVISM Further reading Frith, U. (1989) Autism: Explaining the Enigma , Oxford: Blackwell. (An outstandingly interesting and readable account of the nature of autistic disorder.) Wellman, H.M. (1990) The Child’s Theory of Mind, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (Major statement by a leading theory-theorist argues for early emergence of a concept of desire and for an early ‘copy theory’ of belief.) ALAN M. LESLIE MIND, COMPUTATIONAL THEORIES OF The computational theory of mind (CTM) is the theory that the mind can be understood as a computer or, roughly, as the ‘software program’ of the brain. It is the most influential form of ‘functionalism’, according to which what distinguishes a mind is not what it is made of, nor a person’s behavioural dispositions, but the way in which the brain is organized. CTM underlies some of the most important research in current cognitive science, for example, theories of artificial intelligence, perception, decision making and linguistics. CTM involves a number of important ideas. (1) Computations can be defined over syntactically specifiable symbols (that is, symbols specified by rules governing their combination) possessing semantic properties (or ‘meaning’). For example, addition can be captured by rules defined over decimal numerals (symbols) that name the numbers. (2) Computations can be analysed into ‘algorithms’, or simple stepby-step procedures, each of which could be carried out by a machine. (3) Computation can be generalized to include not only arithmetic, but deductive logic and other forms of reasoning, including induction, abduction and decision making. (4) Computations capture relatively autonomous levels of ordinary psychological explanation different from neurophysiology and descriptions of behaviour. See also: COGNITIVE ARCHITECTURE Further reading Churchland, P.S. and Sejnowski, T.J. (1992) The Computational Brain , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Bradford Books. (An excellent introduction to the study of neural computation using artificial neural networks.) Rey, G. (1997) Contemporary Philosophy of Mind: A Contentiously Classical Approach , Oxford: Blackwell. (An exposition and defence of CTM as an approach to philosophy of mind quite generally.) NED BLOCK GEORGES REY MIND, IDENTITY THEORY OF We know that the brain is intimately connected with mental activity. Indeed, doctors now define death in terms of the cessation of the relevant brain activity. The identity theory of mind holds that the intimate connection is identity: the mind is the brain, or, more precisely, mental states are states of the brain. The theory goes directly against a long tradition according to which mental and material belong to quite distinct ontological categories – the mental being essentially conscious, the material essentially unconscious. This tradition has been bedevilled by the problem of how essentially immaterial states could be caused by the material world, as would happen when we see a tree, and how they could cause material states, as would happen when we decide to make an omelette. A great merit of the identity theory is that it avoids this problem: interaction between mental and material becomes simply interaction between one subset of material states, namely certain states of a sophisticated central nervous system, and other material states. The theory also brings the mind within the scope of modern science. More and more phenomena are turning out to be explicable in the physical terms of modern science: phenomena once explained in terms of spells, possession by devils, Thor’s thunderbolts, and so on, are now explained in more mundane, physical terms. If the identity theory is right, the same goes for the mind. Neuroscience will in time reveal the secrets of the mind in the same general way that the theory of electricity reveals the secrets of lightning.
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Page 577 This possibility has received enormous support from advances in computing. We now have at least the glimmerings of an idea of how a purely material or physical system could do some of the things minds can do. Nevertheless, there are many questions to be asked of the identity theory. How could states that seem so different turn out to be one and the same? Would neurophysiologists actually see my thoughts and feelings if they looked at my brain? When we report on our mental states what are we reporting on – our brains? See also: REDUCTIONISM IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND Further reading Borst, C. V. (ed.) (1970) The Mind/Brain Identity Theory , London: Macmillan. (Useful collection of articles for and against the identity theory.) Rosenthal, D.M. (ed.) (1991) The Nature of Mind, London: Oxford University Press. (Large collection of important articles and extracts from books covering the philosophy of mind in general. Contains a comprehensive bibliography.) FRANK JACKSON MIND, INDIAN PHILOSOPHY OF Despite the enormous complexity of the Indian philosophical tradition, all the different schools developed within a common worldview mapped out by the three ideas of saṃsāra, karma and mokṣa (or nirvāṇa the case of Buddhism). This soteriological context, which informs much of Indian philosophy, is of particular importance for the philosophy of mind, giving it a distinctive character unparalleled in the Western tradition. Speculations about the nature of mind originated in Upaniṣadic teachings that salvific knowledge comes from looking inwards. We see in the earlier Upaniṣads (from about the eighth to the fifth centuries BC) a careful classification of normal states of consciousness, but eventually liberation from the cycle of rebirth and suffering was framed in terms of the individual’s ability to manipulate and ultimately transcend such states through the pursuit of a set of ascetic practices known as yoga. These ascetic practices led to a liberating state of consciousness which the Upaniaads equated with the realization of a transcendental Self known as the ātman . With the development of Buddhist thought in India (from the fifth century BC), the philosophical tradition became divided. Generally, Buddhist schools of thought were united in their opposition to the existence of the ātman, whereas the so-called orthodox Hindu schools continued to favour the Upaniaadic position. The practical quest for liberation from suffering remained central, however, to the entire philosophical tradition as the Upaniaads gave way to a more systematic philosophizing. Subsequently, Buddhists and non-Buddhists alike continued to accept the results of meditative practice as being a legitimate concern for philosophical speculation. A dialectical relationship between theory and practice meant that philosophical disagreements created not just differences in the interpretation of meditative experiences, but also shaped such practices themselves in different ways. The apparent empirical vein of the Upaniṣads was also continued in all schools of thought, leading to richer and more detailed phenomenological classifications of experience. This rich ontological landscape is what gives Indian philosophy of mind its distinctive character. See also: AWARENESS IN INDIAN THOUGHT; SELF, INDIAN THEORIES OF Further reading Griffiths, P. (1986) On Being Mindless: Buddhist Meditation And The Mind–Body Problem , La Salle, IL: Open Court. (In discussing the problems raised by a particular type of Buddhist meditative experience, the attainment of cessation, Griffiths also succeeds in giving a comprehensive account of Buddhist theories of the mind.) Matilal, B.K. (1986) Perception: An Essay on Classical Indian Theories of Knowledge , Oxford: Clarendon Press. (A comprehensive account of theories of perception and consciousness in relation to the epistemological theories of the different schools of Indian philosophy.) JOY LAINE MIND, MODULARITY OF see MODULARITY OF MIND MIND, PHILOSOPHY OF ‘Philosophy of mind’, and ‘philosophy of psychology’ are two terms for the same general area of philosophical inquiry: the nature of mental phenomena and their connection with behaviour and, in more recent discussions, the brain. Much work in this area reflects a revolution in psychology that began mid-century. Before then, largely in reaction to traditional claims about the mind being non-physical (see DUALISM; DE
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Page 578 SCARTES), many thought that a scientific psychology should avoid talk of ‘private’ mental states. Investigation of such states had seemed to be based on unreliable introspection (see INTROSPECTION, PSYCHOLOGY OF), not subject to independent checking (see PRIVATE LANGUAGE ARGUMENT), and to invite dubious ideas of telepathy (see PARAPSYCHOLOGY). Consequently, psychologists like B.F. SKINNER and J.B. Watson, and philosophers like W.V. QUINE and Gilbert RYLE argued that scientific psychology should confine itself to studying publicly observable relations between stimuli and responses (see BEHAVIOURISM, METHODOLOGICAL AND SCIENTIFIC; BEHAVIOURISM, ANALYTIC). However, in the late 1950s, several developments began to change all this. (i) The experiments behaviourists themselves ran on animals tended to refute behaviouristic hypotheses, suggesting that the behaviour of even rats had to be understood in terms of mental states (see LEARNING; ANIMAL LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT). (ii) The linguist Noam CHOMSKY drew attention to the surprising complexity of the natural languages that children effortlessly learn, and proposed ways of explaining this complexity in terms of largely unconscious mental phenomena. (iii) The revolutionary work of ALAN TURING (see TURING MACHINES) led to the development of the modern digital computer. This seemed to offer the prospect of creating ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, and also of providing empirically testable models of intelligent processes in both humans and animals. (iv) Philosophers came to appreciate the virtues of realism, as opposed to instrumentalism, about theoretical entities in general. 1 Functionalism and the computational theory of mind These developments led to the emergence in the 1970s of the loose federation of disciplines called ‘cognitive science’, which brought together research from, for example, psychology, linguistics, computer science, neuroscience and a number of sub-areas of philosophy, such as logic, the philosophy of language, and action theory. In philosophy of mind, these developments led to FUNCTIONALISM, according to which mental states are to be characterized in terms of relations they bear among themselves and to inputs and outputs, for example, mediating perception and action in the way that belief and desire characteristically seem to do. The traditional problem of OTHER MINDS then became an exercise in inferring from behaviour to the nature of internal causal intermediaries. This focus on functional organization brought with it the possibility of multiple realizations: if all that is essential to mental states are the roles they play in a system, then, in principle, mental states, and so minds, could be composed of (or ‘realized’ by) different substances: some minds might be carbon-based like ours, some might be computer ‘brains’ in robots of the future, and some might be silicon-based, as in some science fiction stories about ‘Martians’. These differences might also cause the minds to be organized in different ways at different levels, an idea that has encouraged the co-existence of the many different disciplines of cognitive science, each studying the mind at often different levels of explanation. Functionalism has played an important role in debates over the metaphysics of mind. Some see it as a way of avoiding DUALISM and arguing for a version of materialism known as the identity theory of mind (see MIND, IDENTITY THEORY OF). They argue that if mental states play distinctive functional roles, to identify mental states we simply need to find the states that play those roles, which are, almost certainly, various states of the brain. Here we must distinguish identifying mental state tokens with brain state tokens, from identifying mental types with brain types (see TYPE/TOKEN DISTINCTION). Many argue that multiple realizability shows it would be a mistake to identify any particular kind or type of mental phenomenon with a specific type of physical phenomenon (for example, depression with the depletion of norepinepherine in a certain area of the brain). For if depression is a multiply realized functional state, then it will not be identical with any particular type of physical phenomenon: different instances, or tokens, of depression might be identical with tokens of ever different types of physical phenomena (norepinephrine deletion in humans, too little silicon activation in a Martian). Indeed, a functionalist could allow (although few take this seriously) that there might be ghosts who realize the right functional organization in some special dualistic substance. However, some identity theorists insist that at least some mental state types – they often focus on states like pain and the taste of pineapple, states with QUALIA (see also the discussion below) – ought to be identified with particular brain state types, in somewhat the way that lightning is identified with electrical discharge, or water with H2O. They typically think of these identifications as necessary a posteriori. An important example of a functionalist theory, one that has come to dominate much
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Page 579 research in cognitive science, is the computational theory of mind (see MIND, COMPUTATIONAL THEORIES OF), according to which mental states are either identified with, or closely linked to, the computational states of a computer. There have been three main versions of this theory, corresponding to three main proposals about the mind’s COGNITIVE ARCHITECTURE. According to the ‘classical’ theory, particularly associated with Jerry Fodor, the computations take place over representations that possess the kind of logical, syntactic structure captured in standard logical form: representations in a socalled LANGUAGE of THOUGHT, encoded in our brains. A second proposal, sometimes inspired by F.P. RAMSEY’s view that beliefs are maps by which we steer (see BELIEF), emphasizes the possible role in reasoning of maps and mental IMAGERY. A third, recently much-discussed proposal is CONNECTIONISM, which denies that there are any structured representations at all: the mind/brain consists rather of a vast network of nodes whose different and variable excitation levels explain intelligent LEARNING. This approach has aroused interest especially among those wary of positing much ‘hidden’ mental structure not evident in ordinary behaviour (see Ludwig WITTGENSTEIN and Daniel DENNETT). The areas that lend themselves most naturally to a computational theory are those associated with logic, common sense and practical reasoning, and natural language syntax (see COMMONSENSE REASONING, THEORIES OF; RATIONALITY, PRACTICAL; SYNTAX); and research on these topics in psychology and ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE has become deeply intertwined with philosophy (see RATIONALITY OF BELIEF; SEMANTICS; LANGUAGE, PHILOSOPHY OF). A particularly fruitful application of computational theories has been to VISION. Early work in GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY uncovered a number of striking perceptual illusions that demonstrated ways in which the mind structures perceptual experience, and the pioneering work of the psychologist, David Marr, suggested that we might capture these structuring effects computationally. The idea that perception was highly cognitive, along with the functionalist picture that specifies a mental state by its place in a network, led many to holistic conceptions of mind and meaning, according to which parts of a person’s thought and experience cannot be understood apart from the person’s entire cognitive system (see HOLISM: MENTAL AND SEMANTIC; SEMANTICS, CONCEPTUAL ROLE). However, this view has been challenged recently by work of Jerry FODOR. He has argued that perceptual systems are ‘modules’, whose processing is ‘informationally encapsulated’ and hence isolatable from the effects of the states of the central cognitive system (see MODULARITY OF MIND). He has also proposed accounts of meaning that treat it as a local (or ‘atomistic’) property to be understood in terms of certain kinds of causal dependence between states of the brain and the world (see SEMANTICS, INFORMATIONAL). Others have argued further that PERCEPTION, although contentful, is also importantly non-conceptual, as when one sees a square shape as a diamond but is unable to say wherein the essential difference between a square and a diamond shape consists (see CONTENT, NONCONCEPTUAL). 2 Mind and meaning As these last issues indicate, any theory of the mind must face the hard topic of meaning (see SEMANTICS). In the philosophies of mind and psychology, the issue is not primarily the meanings of expressions in natural language, but of how a state of the mind or brain can have meaning or content: what is it to believe, for example, that snow is white or hope that you will win. These latter states are examples of PROPOSITIONAL ATTITUDES: attitudes towards propositions such as that snow is white, or that you will win, that form the ‘content’ of the state of belief or hope. They raise the general issue of INTENTIONALITY, or how a mental state can be about things (for example, snow) and properties (for example, white), and, particularly, ‘about’ things that do not exist or will not happen, as when someone believes in Santa Claus or hopes in vain for victory. There have been three main proposals about mental content. A state might possess a specific content: (i) by virtue of the role it plays in reasoning (see SEMANTICS: CONCEPTUAL ROLE); (ii) by virtue of certain causal and lawful relations the state bears to phenomena in the world (see SEMANTICS: INFORMATIONAL; FUNCTIONALISM); or (iii) by virtue of the function it plays in the evolution and biology of the organism (see SEMANTICS: TELEOLOGICAL; FUNCTIONAL EXPLANATION). Related to these proposals are traditional philosophical interests in CONCEPTS, although this latter topic raises complicating metaphysical concerns with UNIVERSALS, and epistemological concerns with A pRIORI knowledge. Special problems are raised by indexical content, or the content of thoughts involving concepts expressed by, for example, ‘I myself’,
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Page 580 ‘here’, ‘now’, ‘this’, and ‘that’ (see CONTENT, INDEXICAL; DEMONSTRATIVES AND INDEXICALS). Does the thought that it is hot here, had in Maryland, have the same content as the thought that it is hot here, had in Canberra? The conditions under which such thoughts are true obviously depends upon the external context – for example, the time and place – of the thinking. This dependence on external context is thought by many to be a pervasive feature of content. Drawing on recent work on reference (see REFERENCE; PROPER NAMES), Hilary PUTNAM and Tyler Burge have argued that what people think, believe and so on depends not only on how they are, but also upon features of their physical and social environment. This raises the important question of whether an organism’s psychology can be understood in isolation from the external world it inhabits. Defenders of methodological individualism insist that it can be (see METHODOLOGICAL INDIVIDUALISM); Putnam, Burge and their supporters that it can’t. Some theorists respond to the debate by distinguishing between wide and narrow content: narrow content is what ‘from the skin in’ identical individuals would share across different environments, whereas wide content might vary from one environment to the next (see CONTENT: WIDE AND NARROW). These theorists then give distinctive roles to the two notions in theoretical psychology, although this is a matter of great controversy. 3 Alternatives to functionalism Not everyone endorses functional and computational theories of mind. Some, influenced by RYLE and the later WITTGENSTEIN, think that such concern with literally inner processes of the brain betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of mental talk, which, they argue, rests largely on outward CRITRRIA. Others think that computational processes lack the means of capturing the basic properties of CONSCIOUSNESS and INTENTIONALITY that are essential to most mental phenomena. JOHN SEARLE, in particular, regards his CHINESE ROOM ARGUMENT as a devastating objection to computational approaches. He thinks that mental phenomena should be understood not functionally, but directly in biological or physical terms. The hardest challenge for functionalism is posed by QUALIA – the properties that distinguish pain, the look of red, the taste of pineapple, and so on, on the one hand, from mental states like belief and understanding on the other. (See also BODILY SENSATIONS; SENSE-DATA; PERCEPTION). Some argue that unnecessary problems are produced in this area by an excessive reification of inner experience, and recommend instead an adverbial theory of mental states (see MENTAL STATES, ADVERBIAL THEORY OF). However, some problems persist, and can be made vivid by considering the possibility of ‘inverted qualia’. It seems that two people might have colour experiences that are the complements of one another (red for green, yellow for blue, etc.), even though their behaviour and functional organization are identical. This issue is explored in COLOUR AND QUALIA and leads inevitably to the hard problems of CONSCIOUSNESS: What is it? What things have it? How do we tell? What causal role, if any, does it play the world? There is also an issue for functionalists over MENTAL CAUSATION. A principal reason why DUALISM has few adherents today is the problem of explaining how non-physical or non-natural phenomena can causally affect a physical world. And although some dualists retreat to EPIPHENOMENALISM, the view that mental phenomena are caused by, but do not themselves cause any physical phenomena, this is widely seen as implausible. However, functionalists also have a problem. Even though they can and do insist that functional states are realized physically, arguably the functional states per se do no causing; what does the causing would seem to be the underlying physical properties of the physical realization. So, although functionalists avoid giving causal roles to the ‘non-natural’, it seems they must allow that mental properties per se do no causing. Although the view that the mind is a natural phenomenon is now widely accepted (principally because of the causal problem for dualism), what this implies is highly contentious. Some hold that it simply means that mental phenomena supervene on physical nature in the sense that there can be no mental difference without a physical difference (see SUPERVENIENCE OF THE MENTAL). Donald DAVIDSON thinks this can be true without there being any strict laws connecting the physical and the mental (see ANOMALOUS MONISM). Others insist that a naturalist about the mind must reduce the mental to the physical in somewhat the way thermodynamics has been reduced to statistical mechanics, so delivering neat lawful biconditionals linking the mental and the physical (see REDUCTIONISM IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND). Much in this discussion turns on the status of FOLK PSYCHOLOGY, the theory of mind allegedly implicit in ordinary (folk) thought and talk
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Page 581 about the mind. On one view, mental states are simply the states that fill the roles of this implicit theory, and the reduction consists in finding which internal physical states fill the roles and are, thereby, to be identified with the relevant mental states. However, defenders of ELIMINATIVISM, noting that any theory – especially a folk one – can turn out false, argue that we should take seriously the possibility that the mental states postulated by folk psychology do not exist, much as it turned out that there are no witches or phlogiston. 4 Issues in empirical psychology Empirical psychology has figured in philosophy not only because its foundations have been discussed in the above ways, but also because some of its specific findings have been relevant to traditional philosophical claims. Thus, experiments on SPLIT BRAINS have undermined traditional conceptions of PERSONAL IDENTITY (see also MIND, BUNDLE THEORY OF), and research on the reliability of people’s self-attribution of psychological states has cast doubts on introspection as a source of specially privileged knowledge about the mind. The work of FREUD on psychopathology (see MENTAL ILLNESS, CONCEPT OF; PSYCHOANALYSIS, POST-FREUDIAN; PSYCHOANALYSIS, METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES IN) and of CHOMSKY in linguistics, suggests that the states of most explanatory interest are not introspectively accessible (see KNOWLEDGE, TACIT; UNCONSCIOUS MENTAL STATES). Chomsky’s ideas also seem to revive RATIONALISM’s postulation of innate knowledge that was long thought to have been discredited by EMPIRICISM (see also NATIVISM; INNATE KNOWLEDGE; LANGUAGE, INNATENESS OF). And they have stimulated research beyond knowledge of grammar, into infant cognition (see COGNITION, INFANT) generally (some of which treats the MOLYNEUX PROBLEM of whether newly sighted people would be able to recognize shapes that they had previously only touched). Other questions about the basic categories in which people understand the world have benefited from work on how these categories are understood and evolve in childhood (see PIAGET, J.; COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT; MORAL DEVELOPMENT). Aparticularly important issue for the philosophy of mind concerns the origin of our mental concepts, a topic of lively current research (see MIND, CHILD’S THEORY OF) that affects our understanding of FOLK PSYCHOLOGY. 5 Philosophy of action Whether or not it is ultimately vindicated by empirical research, folk psychology is a rich fund of distinctions that are important in human life. The examination of them has tended to focus on issues in the explanation of ACTION, and, in a related vein, on psychological issues relevant to ethics (see MORAL PSYCHOLOGY). The traditional view of action, most famously advocated by DAVID HUME, is that an action needs both a desire and a belief. The desire provides the goal, and the belief the means of putatively achieving it (see also REASONS AND CAUSES; DESIRE; BELIEF). But what then is the role, if any, of INTENTION? Are intentions nothing more than some complex of belief and desire? And how, if at all, do we find a place in the Humean picture for the will? Is it something that can somehow act independently of beliefs and desires, or is it some kind of manifestation of them, some kind of ‘all things considered’ judgment that takes a person from dithering to action? (See WILL, THE.) Notoriously difficult questions in this regard concern whether there actually is anything as FREE WILL, and how it is possible for a person to act against their better judgement, as they seem to do in cases of AKRASIA, or ‘weakness of will’. Beliefs and desires seem intimately connected with many other mental states. Belief about the past is of the essence of MEMORY. PERCEPTION delivers belief about how things are around one, and DREAMING seems to be the having of experiences during sleep akin to (rather fragmented) perceptions in the way they tend to make you believe that certain things are happening. Even emotions and bodily sensations seem to have belief and desire components (see EMOTIONS, NATURE OF; BODILY SENSATIONS): anger involves both a belief that one has been wronged and a desire to do something about it, and pain involves the belief that something is amiss and the desire that it stop. Much contemporary philosophy of mind and action is concerned with teasing out the relationship between beliefs and desires and various other mental states, although approaches in cognitive science often focus upon more computationally active states, such as: noticing, deciding, and ‘on line’ processes of reasoning. See also: AKAN PHILOSOPHICAL PSYCHOLOGY; EMOTIONS, NATURE OF; IMAGINATION; MATERIALISM IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND; MIND, INDIAN PHILOSOPHY OF; PSYCHOLOGY, THEORIES OF; SELFDECEPTION Further reading Braddon-Mitchell, D. and Jackson, F. (1997) Philosophy of Mind and Cognition , Oxford: Blackwell.
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Page 582 (Discusses most of the live positions in the philosophy of mind; sympathetic to analytical functionalism.) Guttenplan, S. (ed.) (1994) A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind, Oxford: Blackwell. (Collection of substantial essays by some the best-known figures in the philosophy of mind.) Rey, G. (1997) Contemporary Philosophy of Mind, Oxford: Blackwell. (Discusses most of the live positions in the philosophy of mind; sympathetic to the representational theory of mind.) Smith, P. and Jones, O.R. (1986) The Philosophy of Mind, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (An excellent, elementary introduction to philosophy of mind and action, from the standpoint more of traditional philosophy than of cognitive science.) FRANK JACKSON GEORGES REY MIR DAMAD, MUHAMMAD BAQIR (d. 1631) The Persian Mir Damad is primarily a gnostic philosopher, arguing that the activity of the mind makes possible the experience of spiritual visions, while visionary experience gives rise to rational thought. He brings together a variety of different traditions in Islamic philosophy, incorporating both the sort of philosophy advocated by Aristotle and its later development by the Neoplatonists, and combining them with the mystical views of Islamic thinkers. The principles of his thought are the backbone of the celebrated ‘School of Isfahan’, which developed this rich mixture of philosophical traditions even further. His approach to the analysis of being was a considerable extension to previous views on this subject, and enabled him to make important contributions to the notion of time. Mir Damad’s philosophical style is characterized by a treatment of abstract concepts behind which lies the living experience of the mystic. See also: MYSTICAL PHILOSOPHY IN ISLAM Further reading Nasr, S.H. (1966) ‘The School of Isfahan’, in M.M. Sharif (ed.) A History of Muslim Philosophy , Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, vol. 2: 904–32. (General account of the intellectual period by the leading expert.) HAMID DABASHI MIRACLES Does God at times miraculously intervene in earthly affairs? That is, do some events occur because God has entered our space-time continuum and directly modified or circumvented the relevant natural laws? Few philosophers today deny that this is possible. But many question whether we could ever justifiably maintain that such intervention has taken place. According to some philosophers, it is not even necessary to grant that the types of events believers label miracles – for instance, healings or resurrections – actually occur as reported. Since the evidence supporting the occurrence of such events is the personal testimony of a few, possibly biased, individuals, while the basis for doubt is the massive amount of objective research upon which the relevant laws are based, it is always justifiable, according to this view, to conclude that such reports are erroneous. Others contend, however, that the presence of some forms of evidence – for instance, independent confirmation from reputable sources – could make it most reasonable in some cases to acknowledge that even the most unexpected of events had actually occurred. Some philosophers also deny that we could ever justifiably conclude that an event could not have been produced by natural causes alone. Since we will never be in a position to identify all that nature can produce, they declare, it will always be most reasonable for the scientist facing a currently unexplainable counterinstance to a natural law to continue to look for a natural explanation. Many believers, however, are quite willing to grant that nature could in principle produce any event, since what they wish to maintain is only that nature does not do so in the case of miraculous interventions. Finally, while many philosophers acknowledge that belief in direct divine intervention may at times be justifiable for those who already believe that God exists, some also argue that no single event or series of events could ever compel all thoughtful individuals to acknowledge the existence of a perfectly good supernatural causal agent, given all we experience – for instance, the tremendous amount of horrific evil in our world. Many believers, though, are also willing to grant this point. See also: REVELATION Further reading Basinger, D. and Basinger, R. (1986) Philosophy and Miracle: The Contemporary Debate , Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press. (An accessible summary and assessment of contemporary
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Page 583 thought on all aspects of the issue.) Larmer, R.A.H. (ed.) (1996) Questions of Miracle, Kingston, Ont.: McGill–Queen’s University Press. (An accessible collection of articles on many key issues.) DAVID BASINGER MKHAS GRUB DGE LEGS DPAL BZANG PO (1385–1438) mKhas grub dge legs dpal bzang po (Kaydrup gelek belsangbo) was one of the early masters of the dGa’-ldan-pa (Gandenba) or dGe-lugs-pa (Gelukba) school of Tibetan Buddhism. His importance derives primarily from his close association with the founder of that school, Tsong kha pa (Dzongkaba, 1357– 1419), whose religious and philosophical tradition he was instrumental in preserving and transmitting. A prolific writer, whose interests ranged across the entire spectrum of Buddhist doctrine, from the exoteric (Sūtra) to the esoteric (Tantra), his work is highly regarded for its ability to encapsulate lucidly entire fields of knowledge (for example, Tantra, the Mādhyamika doctrine of emptiness, and the pramāṇa tradition of logic and epistemology). See also: BUDDHISM, MĀDHYAMIKA: INDIA AND TIBET; TIBETAN PHILOSOPHY Further reading mKhas grub dge legs dpal bzang po (1385– 1438) sTong thun chen mo (The Great Digest on Emptiness), trans. J.I. Cabezón, A Dose of Emptiness: An Annotated Translation of the sTong thun chen mo of mKhas grub dge legs dpal bzang , Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992. (Translation of mKhas grub rje’s great Madhyamaka classic, containing an introduction to his philosophy, a brief biography based on five Tibetan sources and oral traditions of the dGe-lugs-pa school, and a bibliographical survey of literature on him.) JOSÉ IGNACIO CABEZÓN MO TI/MO TZU see MOZI; MOHIST PHILOSOPHY MODAL LOGIC Modal logic, narrowly conceived, is the study of principles of reasoning involving necessity and possibility. More broadly, it encompasses a number of structurally similar inferential systems. In this sense, deontic logic (which concerns obligation, permission and related notions) and epistemic logic (which concerns knowledge and related notions) are branches of modal logic. Still more broadly, modal logic is the study of the class of all possible formal systems of this nature. It is customary to take the language of modal logic to be that obtained by adding one-place operators ‘□’ for necessity and ‘ ’ for possibility to the language of classical propositional or predicate logic. Necessity and possibility are interdefinable in the presence of negation: □A ↔ ¬ A and A ↔ ¬□¬A hold. A modal logic is a set of formulas of this language that contains these biconditionals and meets three additional conditions: it contains all instances of theorems of classical logic; it is closed under modus ponens (that is, if it contains A and A → B it also contains B); and it is closed under substitution (that is, if it contains A then it contains any substitution instance of A; any result of uniformly substituting formulas for sentence letters in A). To obtain a logic that adequately characterizes metaphysical necessity and possibility requires certain additional axiom and rule schemas:
K □(A → B ) → (□A → □B ) T □A → A 5 A→ □ A Necessitation A/□ A. By adding these and one of the □– biconditionals to a standard axiomatization of classical propositional logic one obtains an axiomatization of the most important modal logic, S5, so named because it is the logic generated by the fifth of the systems in Lewis and Langford’s Symbolic Logic (1932). S5 can be characterized more directly by possible-worlds models. Each such model specifies a set of possible worlds and assigns truth-values to atomic sentences relative to these worlds. Truth-values of classical compounds at a world w depend in the usual way on truth-values of their components. □A is true at w if A is true at all worlds of the model; A,if A is true at some world of the model. S5 comprises the
formulas true at all worlds in all such models. Many modal logics weaker than S5 can be characterized by models which specify, besides a set of possible worlds, a relation of ‘accessibility’ or relative possibility on this set. □A is true at a world w if A is true at all worlds accessible from w, that is, at all worlds that would be possible if w were actual. Of the schemas listed above, only K is true in all these
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Page 584 models, but each of the others is true when accessibility meets an appropriate constraint. The addition of modal operators to predicate logic poses additional conceptual and mathematical difficulties. On one conception a model for quantified modal logic specifies, besides a set of worlds, the set Dwof individuals that exist in w, for each world w. For example, x□A is true at w if there is some element of Dwthat satisfies A in every possible world. If A is satisfied only by existent individuals in any given world x□A thus implies that there are necessary individuals; individuals that exist in every accessible possible world. If A is satisfied by non-existents there can be models and assignments that satisfy A, but not xA . Consequently, on this conception modal predicate logic is not an extension of its classical counterpart. The modern development of modal logic has been criticized on several grounds, and some philosophers have expressed scepticism about the intelligibility of the notion of necessity that it is supposed to describe. See also: MODAL LOGIC, PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES IN Further reading Chellas, B.F. (1980) Modal Logic: An Introduction , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Careful and clear introductory text on propositional modal logic, emphasizing completeness and decidability.) Hughes, G.E. and Cresswell, M.J. (1968) An Introduction to Modal Logic, London: Routledge; revised edn, A New Introduction to Modal Logic , London: Routledge, 1996. (The classic modern textbook; still useful.) STEVEN T. KUHN MODAL LOGIC, PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES IN In reasoning we often use words such as ‘necessarily’, ‘possibly’, ‘can’, ‘could’, ‘must’ and so on. For example, if we know that an argument is valid, then we know that it is necessarily true that if the premises are true, then the conclusion is true. Modal logic starts with such modal words and the inferences involving them. The exploration of these inferences has led to a variety of formal systems, and their interpretation is now most often built on the concept of a possible world. Standard non-modal logic shows us how to understand logical words such as ‘not’, ‘and’ and ‘or’, which are truth-functional. The modal concepts are not truth-functional: knowing that p is true (and what ‘necessarily’ means) does not automatically enable one to determine whether ‘Necessarily p’ is true. (‘It is necessary that all people have been people’ is true, but ‘It is necessary that no English monarch was born in Montana’ is false, even though the simpler constituents – ‘All people have been people’ and ‘No English monarch was born in Montana’– are both true.) The study of modal logic has helped in the understanding of many other contexts for sentences that are not truth-functional, such as ‘ought’ (‘It ought to be the case that p’) and ‘believes’ (‘Alice believes that p’); and also in the consideration of the interaction between quantifiers and non-truth-functional contexts. In fact, much workin modern semanticshas benefited from the extension of modal semantics introduced by Richard Montague in beginning the development of a systematic semantics for natural language. The framework of possible worlds developed for modal logic has been fruitful in the analysis of many concepts. For example, by introducing the concept of relative possibility, Kripke showed how to model a variety of modal systems: a proposition is necessarily true at a possible world w if and only if it is true at every world that is possible relative to w. To achieve a better analysis of statements of ability, Mark Brown adapted the framework by modelling actions with sets of possible outcomes. John has the ability to hit the bull’s-eye reliably if there is some action of John’s such that every possible outcome of that action includes John’s hitting the bull’s-eye. Modal logic and its semantics also raise many puzzles. What makes a modal claim true? How do we tell what is possible and what is necessary? Are there any possible things that do not exist (and what could that mean anyway)? Does the use of modal logic involve a commitment to essentialism? How can an individual exist in many different possible worlds? See also: MODAL OPERATORS; MONTAGUE, R.M. Further reading Forbes, G. (1985) The Metaphysics of Modality, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (A discussion of metaphysical issues associated with modal logic.) Montague, R. (1974) Formal Philosophy , New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. (In these papers, Montague developed the semantic framework of possible worlds in beginning to give a more general semantics for natural language.) THOMAS J. McKAY
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Page 585 MODAL OPERATORS Modal logic is principally concerned with the alethic modalities of necessity and possibility, although this branch of logic is applied to a wide range of linguistic and conceptual phenomena, including natural language semantics, proof theory, theoretical computer science and the formal characterization of knowledge and belief. This wide range of application stems from the basic form of modal assertions, such as ‘it is necessarily the case that ’, where an entire statement is embedded within a context possessing rich logical structure. When constructing a formal representation of these embedding contexts, there are several choices concerning their specific symbolic form. The most standard approach symbolizes modal contexts as operators, which combine directly with formulas of the object language to yield new formulas. The primary alternative to this approach is to treat modal contexts as predicates, which attach not to formulas directly, but to names of formulas, and thereby attribute a metalinguistic property to a syntactic object. A variation on the operator approach, which assumes the interpretive framework of possible worlds semantics, is to treat modal contexts as quantifications over possible worlds. Finally, a variation on the predicate approach is to analyse modal contexts as predicates of propositions rather than as predicates of syntactic objects. See also: MODAL LOGIC; POSSIBLE WORLDS Further reading Dowty, P., Wall, R. and Peters, S. (1981) Introduction to Montague Semantics, Dordrecht: Reidel. (Provides an introduction to Montague’s system of intensional type theory.) Gallin, D. (1975) Intensional and Higher-Order Modal Logic , Amsterdam: North Holland. (Gives a treatment of modal operators as quantifiers within the framework of type theory.) PAUL SCHWEIZER MODEL THEORY Model theory studies the relations between sentences of a formal language and the interpretations (or ‘structures’) which make these sentences true or false. It offers precise definitions of truth, logical truth and consequence, meanings and modalities. These definitions and their consequences have revolutionized the teaching of elementary logic. Model theory also forms a branch of mathematics concerned with the ways in which mathematical structures can be classified. This technical work has led to philosophically interesting results in at least two areas: it has thrown light on the nature of the set-theoretic universe, and in nonstandard analysis it has suggested new forms of argument (where we prove something different from what we intended, but then use a general model-theoretic argument to change the result into what we wanted). The word ‘model’ has many other uses. For example, model theory is not about scientific theories as models of the world. It is also a controversial question – not considered here – how model theory is connected with the ‘mental models’ which appear in the psychology of reasoning. Further reading Doets, K. (1996) Basic Model Theory , Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. (A good introduction for readers who know some logic but are not mathematicians.) WILFRID HODGES MODELS Of the many kinds of things that serve as ‘models’, all function fundamentally as representations of what we wish to understand or to be or to do. Model aeroplanes and other scale models share selected structural properties with their originals, while differing in other properties, such as construction materials and size. Analogue models, which resemble their originals in some aspect of structure or internal relations, are important in the sciences, because they can facilitate inferences about complicated or obscure natural systems. A collection of billiard balls in random motion is an analogue model of an ideal gas; the interactions and motions of the billiard balls are taken to represent – to be analogous to – the interactions and motions of molecules in the gas. In mathematical logic, a model is a structure – an arrangement of objects – which represents a theory expressed as a set of sentences. The various terms of the sentences of the theory are mapped onto objects and their relations in the structure; a model is a structure that makes all of the sentences in the theory true. This specialized notion of model has been adopted by philosophers of science; on a ‘structuralist’ or ‘semantic’ conception, scientific theories are understood as structures which are used to represent real systems in nature. Philosophical debates have arisen regarding the precise extent
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Page 586 of the resemblances between scientific models and the natural systems they represent. See also: SCIENTIFIC METHOD; THEORIES, SCIENTIFIC Further reading Black, M. (1962) Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language and Philosophy , Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. (Insightful discussion of philosophical understanding of models and the uses of models in scientific thought; not very technical.) Wartofsky, M. (1979) Models: Representation and the Scientific Understanding , Dordrecht: Reidel. (Original essays discussing the metaphysical, epistemological and social significance of various types of model. Excellent and readable.) ELISABETH A. LLOYD MODERNISM As a period in cultural history, modernism usually denotes advanced or avant-garde European and American art and thought, though it has also been used to describe more general social conditions and attitudes. Most historians of literature and the plastic arts – the fields in which the term has most play – date it from the late 1880s to the Second World War. Modernism is thus distinguished from the ‘modern’ of ‘modern history’ (understood as anything since medieval history), ‘modern life’ (popular contemporary attitudes and difficulties), and other broad uses of the term ‘modern’. In fact, recognition of the ism in modernism is a key to understanding it – intense self-awareness being an essential characteristic or value, allied to modernism’s complex engagement with avant-garde status. Other values that consistently underpin modernism include a propensity to create ‘culture shock’ by abandoning traditional conventions of social behaviour, aesthetic representation, and scientific verification; the celebration of elitist or revolutionary aesthetic and ethical departures; and in general the derogation of the premise of a coherent, empirically accessible external reality (such as Nature or Providence) and the substitution of humanly devised structures or systems which are self-consciously arbitrary and transitory. See also: ART, ABSTRACT; POSTMODERNISM Further reading Bradbury, M. and McFarlane J. (eds) (1976) Modernism: 1890–1930, London: Penguin. (Excellent historical essays.) Eysteinsson, A. (1990) The Concept of Modernism , Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. (A full account of critical usage.) THOMAS VARGISH MODULARITY OF MIND A common view in recent philosophy of science is that there is no principled distinction between theoretical and observational claims, since perception itself is thoroughly contaminated by the beliefs and expectations of the observer. However, recent psychological and neurological evidence casts doubt on this latter claim and suggests, instead, that perceptual processing is to a significant extent ‘cognitively impenetrable’: it takes place in informationally encapsulated ‘modules’ that cannot be rationally influenced by beliefs or other ‘central’ cognitive states, or even other portions of the perceptual system. See also: COGNITIVE ARCHITECTURE; PERCEPTION, EPISTEMIC ISSUES IN Further reading Fodor, J. (1983) The Modularity of Mind: An Essay on Faculty Psychology , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (The main statement of the modularity thesis.) ZENON W. PYLYSHYN MOHIST PHILOSOPHY Mohist philosophy describes the broad-ranging philosophical tradition initiated by Mo Ti or Mozi (Master Mo) in the fifth century BC. Mozi was probably of quite humble origins, perhaps a member of the craft or artisan class. Early in life, he may have studied with followers of Confucius. However, he went on to become the first serious critic of Confucianism. Mozi’s philosophy was part of an organized utopian movement whose members engaged in direct social action. He was a charismatic leader who inspired his followers to dedicate themselves to his unique view of social justice. This required them to lead austere and demanding lives, as he called upon them to participate in such activities as the military defence of states unjustly attacked. Mozi is arguably the first true philosopher of China. He was the first to develop systematic analyses and criticisms of his opponents and present carefully argued positions of his own. This led him and his later followers to develop an interest in and study of the forms and methods of philosophical argumentation, which contributed significantly to the development of early Chinese philosophy.
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Page 587 Mozi saw ideological differences and the factionalism they spawned as the primary source of human suffering, and he hotly criticized the familially-based ethical and political system of Confucius for its inherent partiality. In its place he advocated three basic goods: the wealth, order and the population of the state. Against the Confucians, he argued for jian’ai (impartial care). Jian’ai is often translated as ‘universal love’, but this is misleading. Mozi saw the central ethical problem as an excess of partiality, not a lack of compassion; he was interested not in cultivating emotions or attitudes, but in shaping behaviour. He showed remarkably little interest in moral psychology and embraced an extremely thin picture of human nature, which led him away from the widely observed Chinese concern with selfcultivation. His general lack of appreciation for psychological goods and the need to control desires and shape dispositions and attitudes also led him to reject the characteristic Confucian concern with culture and ritual. Mozi believed human beings possess an extremely plastic and malleable nature, and he advocated a strong form of voluntarism. For several different reasons, he believed that people could be induced to take up almost any form of behaviour. First, he shared a common early Chinese belief in a psychological tendency to respond in kind to the treatment one receives. He further believed that, in order to win the favour of their rulers, many people are inclined to act as their rulers desire. Those who do not respond to either of these influences can be motivated and controlled by a system of strict rewards and punishments, enforced by the state and guaranteed by the support of Heaven, ghosts and spirits. Most important of all, Mozi believed that rational arguments provide extremely strong if not compelling motivation to act: presented with a superior argument, thinking people act accordingly. The social and political movements of the later Mohists lasted until the beginning of the Han Dynasty (206 BC). They continued Mozi’s early interests and developed sophisticated systems of logical analysis, mathematics, optics, physics, defensive warfare technology and strategy and a formal ethic based upon calculations of benefit and harm. All the philosophical concerns of the later Mohists can be found in the early strata of the Mozi, and seem to reflect the teachings of the tradition’s founder. See also: LOGIC IN CHINA; MOZI Further reading Graham, A.C. (1978) Later Mohist Logic, Ethics and Science , Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, and London: School of Oriental and Asian Studies. (A remarkable reconstruction and analysis of the later Mohist sections of the Mozi which concern the systematic study of argumentation, ethics and science.) Schwartz, B.I. (1985) The World of Thought in Ancient China , Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 1985. (An incisive account of the Mohists from a sociological-historical perspective.) PHILIP J. IVANHOE MOLECULAR BIOLOGY Molecular biology is the study of the structure, function and kinetics of biologically important molecules. Historically, molecular biology has often been identified with molecular genetics. Similarly, the chief philosophical concern with molecular biology has been the possibility of the reduction of classical genetics to molecular genetics. The nature and boundaries of molecular biology, however, are themselves disputed. To some, molecular biology seems to be a morass of molecular details without any overarching theory. To others molecular biology is an integrated interlevel theory. How philosophical issues, such as reduction, are addressed can depend importantly on how molecular biology is initially characterized. See also: REDUCTION, PROBLEMS OF; THEORIES, SCIENTIFIC Further reading Judson, H.F. (1979) The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Biology, New York: Simon & Schuster. (A detailed history of molecular biology notable for its attention to the individual contributions and accomplishments of a diverse array of scientists.) MICHAEL R. DIETRICH MOLINA, LUIS DE (1535–1600) A leading figure in sixteenth-century Iberian scholasticism, Molina was one of the most controversial thinkers in the history of Catholic thought. In keeping with the strongly libertarian account of human free choice that marked the early Jesuit theologians, Molina held that God’s causal influence on free human acts does not by its intrinsic nature uniquely determine what those acts will be or whether they will be good or evil. Because of this, Molina asserted against his Dominican rivals that God’s comprehensive
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Page 588 providential plan for the created world and infallible foreknowledge of future contingents do not derive just from the combination of his antecedent ‘natural’ knowledge of metaphysically necessary truths and his ‘free’ knowledge of the causal influence – both natural (general concurrence) and supernatural (grace) – by which he wills to cooperate with free human acts. Rather, in addition to God’s natural knowledge, Molina posited a distinct kind of antecedent divine knowledge, dubbed ‘middle knowledge’, by which God knows pre-volitionally, that is, prior to any free decree of his own will regarding contingent beings, how any possible rational creature would in fact freely choose to act in any possible circumstances in which it had the power to act freely. And on this basis Molina proceeded to forge his controversial reconciliation of free choice with the Catholic doctrines of grace, divine foreknowledge, providence and predestination. In addition to his work in dogmatic theology, Molina was also an accomplished moral and political philosopher who wrote extensive and empirically well-informed tracts on political authority, slavery, war and economics. See also: FREEDOM, DIVINE; MOLINISM Further reading Costello, F. (1974) The Political Philosophy of Luis de Molina, S.J ., Spokane, WA: Gonzaga. (Helpful and clear introduction to Molina’s political thought.) Molina, L. de (1588) Liberi arbitrii cum gratiae donis, divina praescientia, providentia, praedestinatione et reprobatione concordia (A Reconciliation of Free Choice with the Gifts of Grace, Divine Foreknowledge, Providence, Predestination and Reprobation), Lisbon, 1st edn; trans. A.J. Freddoso, On Divine Foreknowledge: Part IV of the ‘Concordia ’, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988. (Translation of and introduction to Molina’s theory of middle knowledge, including references to twentieth-century discussions.) ALFRED J. FREDDOSO MOLINISM Molinism, named after Luis de Molina, is a theological system for reconciling human freedom with God’s grace and providence. Presupposing a strongly libertarian account of freedom, Molinists assert against their rivals that the grace whereby God cooperates with supernaturally salvific acts is not intrinsically efficacious. To preserve divine providence and foreknowledge, they then posit ‘middle knowledge’, through which God knows, prior to his own free decrees, how any possible rational agent would freely act in any possible situation. Beyond this, they differ among themselves regarding the ground for middle knowledge and the doctrines of efficacious grace and predestination. See also: MOLINA, L. DE; PROVIDENCE Further reading Garrigou-Lagrange, R. (1952) Grace, St Louis, MO: Herder. (Chapters 7 and 8 contain a Báñezian assessment of the Molinist and Congruist accounts of efficacious grace.) ALFRED J. FREDDOSO MOLYNEUX PROBLEM The origin of what is known as the Molyneux problem lies in the following question posed by William Molyneux to John Locke: if a man born blind, and able to distinguish by touch between a cube and a globe, were made to see, could he now tell by sight which was the cube and which the globe, before he touched them? The problem raises fundamental issues in epistemology and the philosophy of mind, and was widely discussed after Locke included it in the second edition of his Essay concerning Human Understanding. Further reading Degenaar, M. (1996) The Problem of Molyneux, Dordrecht: Reidel. (A discussion of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century – and more recent – responses to the Molyneux problem, with emphasis on empirical attempts to settle the question; extensive bibliography.) MENNO LIEVERS MOMENTARINESS, BUDDHIST DOCTRINE OF The object of the Buddhist doctrine of momentariness is not the nature of time, but existence within time. Rather than atomizing time into moments, it atomizes phenomena temporally by dissecting them into a succession of discrete momentary entities. Its fundamental proposition is that everything passes out of existence as soon as it has originated and in this sense is momentary. As an entity vanishes, it gives rise to a new entity of almost the same nature which originates immediately afterwards. Thus, there is an uninterrupted flow of causally connected momentary entities of nearly the same nature, the so-called continuum ( santāna). These entities succeed each other so fast that
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Page 589 the process cannot be discerned by ordinary perception. Because earlier and later entities within one continuum are almost exactly alike, we come to conceive of something as a temporally extended entity even though the fact that it is in truth nothing but a series of causally connected momentary entities. According to this doctrine, the world (including the sentient beings inhabiting it) is at every moment distinct from the world in the previous or next moment. It is, however, linked to the past and future by the law of causality in so far as a phenomenon usually engenders a phenomenon of its kind when it perishes, so that the world originating in the next moment reflects the world in the preceding moment. At the root of Buddhism lies the (never questioned) conviction that everything that has originated is bound to perish and is therefore, with the exception of factors conducive to enlightenment, ultimately a source of frustration. There is no surviving textual material that documents how this law of impermanence came to be radicalized in terms of momentariness. It seems that by the fourth century the doctrine of momentariness had already assumed its final form. Characteristically, the debate became more and more dominated by epistemological questions, while the metaphysical aspect faded into the background. See also: POTENTIALITY, INDIAN THEORIES OF Further reading Rospatt, A. von (1995) ‘The Buddhist Doctrine of Momentariness: A Survey of the Origins and Early Phase of this Doctrine up to Vasubandhu’, Alt- und Neu-indische Studien 47, Stuttgart: Steiner. (Deals with the early phase of the doctrine of momentariness and analyses it doctrinal background on the basis of earlier proofs of momentariness; presents the most complete collection of primary sources (all translated into English) available on the subject matter.) ALEXANDERVON ROSPATT MONBODDO, LORD (JAMES BURNETT) (1714–99) Trained as a jurist, Monboddo was one of the most learned figures in eighteenth-century Scotland. In 1767 he was ppointed a law lord or judge on the Scottish Court of Session, from which his title derives. His chief contribution to the history of linguistics and anthropology turns upon two propositions: that language is not natural to man, and that close physical resemblance between species is evidence of biological relation. In speculating that orang-utans’ vocal organs must have been designed for speech, Monboddo was convinced that these creatures were primitive humans who had not yet entered society. See also: HUMAN NATURE, SCIENCE OF IN THE 18TH CENTURY Further reading Monboddo (1773–92) Of the Origin and Progress of Language, Edinburgh: Balfour. ROBERT WOKLER MONISM ‘Monism’ is a very broad term, applicable to any doctrine which maintains either that there is ultimately only one thing, or only one kind of thing; it has also been used of the view that there is only one set of true beliefs. In these senses it is opposed to the equally broad term ‘pluralism’. But it is also often contrasted with ‘dualism’, since so much philosophical debate has focused on the question whether there are two different kinds of thing, mind and matter, or only one. See also: PLURALISM Further reading Bradley, F.H. (1897) Appearance and Reality , London: Allen & Unwin, 2nd edn, Appendix II. (A locus classicus for the argument to monism from the unreality of relations.) EDWARD CRAIG MONISM, INDIAN The prominent classical and modern Indian philosophy known as Advaita Vedānta, which insists on the single reality of Brahman (the Absolute), is often identified as Indian monism. But the monism of Advaita is only a portion, albeit central, of the Advaita view. Furthermore, a monism in theology (Brahman as God) is important to almost all expressions, classical and modern, of Indian theism. The monism of Advaita is principally psychological. Nondual awareness is considered the true self; that is to say, in the self’s native state, the object of awareness and awareness itself are identical. This kind of awareness is claimed to be presupposed by all dualistic consciousness. Moreover, it is said that only self-aware self-awareness itself cannot be revealed by experience to be illusory. And according to Advaita, a supreme mystical experience, popularly called liberation, does in fact, when it occurs, reveal self-awareness to be the sole
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Page 590 reality. A dialectical Advaita adds the further contention that it is impossible to define and explain coherently diverse appearances. This contention is cashed out by long and intricate attacks on the pluralistic ontologies of rival schools, particularly Nyāya-VaiŚeṣika. The monism of Indian theism centres on the reality of God, who is constrained by metaphysical law to create out of the single spiritual substance that God is. The world is commonly said to be God’s body. Various ramifications of God’s being in some way everything can be discerned in Indian theology. See also: BRAHMAN; MONISM Further reading Aurobindo, Sri (1914–20) The Life Divine , Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, revised edn, 1943– 4, 2 vols. (Aurobindo is a modern Indian theist who expresses the logic of theological monism particularly well.) Phillips, S.H. (1995) Classical Indian Metaphysics: Refutations of Realism and the Emergence of ‘New Logic’, La Salle, IL: Open Court. (Focuses on dialectical Advaita and responses provoked.) STEPHEN H. PHILLIPS MONOTHEISM Judaism, Christianity and Islam are usually cited as the major monotheistic religions. These are religions which acknowledge only a single god, and which construe that god as transcendent – that is, as a being who is distinct from the ordinary world and superior to it. They also construe this god as a person or as very much like a person. The polytheistic religions agree with monotheism, for the most part, in construing the gods in personalistic terms, but they acknowledge a plurality of gods. Pantheists, on the other hand, usually accept the singularity of the deity, but reject the transcendence, identifying the deity more closely with the ordinary universe, perhaps as a certain aspect of the universe or as the totality of the universe considered in a certain way. They also are likely to reject the personalistic idea of the deity. This entry will discuss some philosophical aspects of the contrast between monotheism and polytheism. There are different ways of understanding ‘acknowledge’ in the characterization of monotheism given above. One may believe that there exists only one god. Or one may believe that more than one god exists, but worship only one, or hold that it is wrong to worship more than one. A closely related issue concerns the concept of deity that is employed in such beliefs and claims. The ‘high’ Anselmian conception of Christianity’s god – a being than whom no greater can be conceived – is only one account. Perhaps of most philosophical interest is the problem as to whether logical argument can demonstrate polytheism to be false and establish the truth of the Anselmian account. See also: PANTHEISM; TRINITY Further reading Aquinas, T. (1266–73) Summa theologiae , trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (1911), Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1981, 5 vols. (A concise discussion and defence of descriptive monotheism by one of the greatest philosopher-theologians of the medieval period; see particularly Ia, q.11, a.3.) GEORGE I. MAVRODES MONTAGUE, RICHARD MERETT (1930–71) Richard Montague was a logician, philosopher and mathematician. His mathematical contributions include work in Boolean algebra, model theory, proof theory, recursion theory, axiomatic set theory and higher-order logic. He developed a modal logic in which necessity appears as a predicate of sentences, showing how analogues of the semantic paradoxes relate to this notion. Analogously, he (with David Kaplan) argued that a special case of the surprise examination paradox can also be seen as an epistemic version of semantic paradox. He made important contributions to the problem of formulating the notion of a ‘deterministic’ theory in science. See also: MODAL LOGIC; POSSIBLE WORLDS Further reading Montague, R.M. (1974) Formal Philosophy: Selected Papers of Richard Montague, ed. R.H. Thomason, New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press. (Contains most of Montague’s influential writings in philosophy and semantics. Formidable reading for the layman.) TERENCE PARSONS MONTAIGNE, MICHEL EYQUEM DE (1533–92) Montaigne was a sixteenth-century French philosopher and essayist, who became known as the French Socrates. During the religious wars between the Catholics and the Protestants in France, he was a friend and adviser to leaders of both sides, including the Protestant leader
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Page 591 Henri de Navarre, who converted to Catholicism and became King Henri IV. Montaigne counselled general toleration for all believers, a view promulgated by the new king in the Edict of Nantes (1598). His main literary work was in the form of essais (a word originally meaning ‘attempts’), or discussions of various subjects. In these he developed various themes from the sceptical and Stoic literature of antiquity, and in his unique digressive way presented the first full statement in modern times of Pyrrhonian scepticism and cultural relativism. In particular, he presented and modernized the ancient sceptical arguments about the unreliability of information gained by the senses or by reason, about the inability of human beings to find a satisfactory criterion of knowledge, and about the relativity of moral opinions. His advocacy of complete scepticism and relativism was coupled with an appeal to accept religion on the basis of faith alone. His writings became extremely popular, and the English translation by John Florio, first published in 1603, was probably known to Shakespeare and Francis Bacon. Montaigne, whose essays provided the basic vocabulary for modern philosophy written in vernacular languages, was one of the most influential thinkers of the Renaissance, and his works are regarded as classics of literature and philosophy. See also: HUMANISM, RENAISSANCE; SCEPTICISM, RENAISSANCE Further reading Frame, D.M. (1965) Montaigne: A Biography , New York: Harcourt Brace. (Biography by leading Montaigne scholar.) Montaigne, M. de (1563–92) The Complete Works of Montaigne , trans. D.M. Frame, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957. (Includes Montaigne’s letters, as well as the Essais and Journal de Voyage; contains an annotated bibliography and fine introduction.) RICHARD H. POPKIN MONTESQUIEU, CHARLES LOUIS DE SECONDAT, BARON DE (1689–1755) Montesquieu, one of the greatest figures of the Enlightenment, was famous in his own century both in France and in foreign lands, from Russia to the American colonies. Later generations of French philosophes took for granted his concern to reform the criminal laws, to replace the Inquisition with a reign of tolerance, and to repudiate the vicious conquests of the Spaniards in the Americas. They also accepted his finding that Protestant, commercial, and constitutionalist England and Holland represented all the best possibilities of Europe; whereas Catholic, economically backward, and politically absolutist Portugal and Spain represented the worst of the Western world and constituted a warning to the French. Although the findings and specific reforms proposed by Montesquieu were repeated by many another figure of the French Enlightenment, his work in certain respects remained unique in the circles of the most advanced thinkers. In his efforts to think systematically about politics and to do so by employing the comparative method, he stands virtually alone in his age. Other thinkers sharing his commitments resorted to the universalizing language of natural rights when they ventured into the realm of political philosophy. Or, like Voltaire, they tied their thoughts about politics to a succession of specific issues, each essay bearing so indelibly the imprint of specific time and place that there was no room for theory in their writings. Finally, as is true of Diderot or D’Alembert, many of the philosophes were slow to recognize what Montesquieu knew from the outset, that if Enlightenment does not extend to politics it is futile. Steeped in Montaigne’s scepticism, Montesquieu found that in the absence of absolutes there were good reasons to appreciate the ‘more than/less than’ and ‘better than/worse than’ judgments of comparative analysis. In his note-books he commented that the flaw of most philosophers had been to ignore that the terms beautiful, good, noble, grand, and perfect are ‘relative to the beings who use them’. Only one absolute existed for Montesquieu and that was the evil of despotism, which must be avoided at all costs. Montesquieu wrote three great works, each teaching lessons about despotism and freedom, The Persian Letters (1721), the Considerations of the Grandeur of the Romans and the Cause of Their Decline (1734), and The Spirit of the Laws (1748). See also: ENGLIGHTENMENT, CONTINENTAL Further reading Montesquieu, C. Baron de (1721) Lettres persanes , trans. J.R. Loy, The Persian Letters , New York: Meridian Books, 1961. (Includes an introductory essay by Loy.) Shackleton, R. (1961) Montesquieu: a Critical Biography , Oxford: Oxford University Press. (The standard biography.) MARK HULLIUNG
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Page 592 MOORE, GEORGE EDWARD (1873–1958) G.E. Moore was one of the most influential British philosophers of the twentieth century. His early writings are renowned for his rejection of idealist metaphysics and his insistence upon the irreducibility of ethical values, and his later work is equally famous for his defence of common sense and his conception of philosophical analysis. He spent most of his career in Cambridge, where he was a friend and colleague of Russell, Ramsey and Wittgenstein. The best-known thesis of Moore’s early treatise on ethics, Principia Ethica (1903), is that there is a fallacy – the ‘naturalistic fallacy’ – in almost all previous ethical theories. The fallacy is supposed to arise from any attempt to provide a definition of ethical values. The validity of Moore’s arguments is much disputed, but many philosophers still hold that Moore was right to reject the possibility of a reductive definition of ethical values. The book is also renowned for Moore’s affirmation of the pre-eminence of the values of Art and Love. Moore’s later writings concern the nature of the external world and the extent of our knowledge of it. In opposition to idealist doubts about its reality and sceptical doubts concerning our knowledge of it, Moore defends ‘common sense’ by emphasizing the depth of our commitment to our familiar beliefs and criticizing the arguments of those who question them. But although he insists upon the truth of our familiar beliefs, he is remarkably open-minded concerning their ‘analysis’, which is intended to clarify the facts in which their truth consists. See also: ANALYTICAL PHILOSOPHY Further reading Baldwin, T.R. (1990) G.E. Moore, London: Routledge. (The only critical study of all of Moore’s work.) Moore, G.E. (1903) Principia Ethica, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; revised edn, ed. T. Baldwin, 1993. (Moore’s classic work of ethical theory, largely concentrating on the issue of the ‘naturalistic fallacy’.) THOMAS BALDWIN MORAL AGENTS Moral agents are those agents expected to meet the demands of morality. Not all agents are moral agents. Young children and animals, being capable of performing actions, may be agents in the way that stones, plants and cars are not. But though they are agents they are not automatically considered moral agents. For a moral agent must also be capable of conforming to at least some of the demands of morality. This requirement can be interpreted in different ways. On the weakest interpretation it will suffice if the agent has the capacity to conform to some of the external requirements of morality. So if certain agents can obey moral laws such as ‘Murder is wrong’ or ‘Stealing is wrong’, then they are moral agents, even if they respond only to prudential reasons such as fear of punishment and even if they are incapable of acting for the sake of moral considerations. According to the strong version, the Kantian version, it is also essential that the agents should have the capacity to rise above their feelings and passions and act for the sake of the moral law. There is also a position in between which claims that it will suffice if the agent can perform the relevant act out of altruistic impulses. Other suggested conditions of moral agency are that agents should have: an enduring self with free will and an inner life; understanding of the relevant facts as well as moral understanding; and moral sentiments, such as capacity for remorse and concern for others. Philosophers often disagree about which of these and other conditions are vital; the term moral agency is used with different degrees of stringency depending upon what one regards as its qualifying conditions. The Kantian sense is the most stringent. Since there are different senses of moral agency, answers to questions like ‘Are collectives moral agents?’ depend upon which sense is being used. From the Kantian standpoint, agents such as psychopaths, rational egoists, collectives and robots are at best only quasi-moral, for they do not fulfil some of the essential conditions of moral agency. See also: KANTIAN ETHICS; MORAL MOTIVATION Further reading Campbell, C.A. (1957) Selfhood and Godhead, London: Allen & Unwin, 376–85. (A Kantian defence of free will and moral agency.) Haksar, V. (1991) Indivisible Selves and Moral Practice , Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, chaps 2 (section 2), 9 and 10. (Examines the analogy between individuals and collectives.) VINIT HAKSAR
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Page 593 MORAL DEVELOPMENT The concept of moral development has its roots in Plato’s metaphor of ascent from the dark recesses of the cave to the initially blinding sight of the form of the good. Influenced by the developmental theories of Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg proposed a sequence of stages beginning with two stages of egoism, followed by stages of conventionalism, contractarianism, consequentialism, and finally a Kantianism emphasizing the role of universalizable laws. Recent empirical work has not, however, corroborated moral stage theory. There seems not to be a unified mode of thought that applies to all and only moral problems. See also: COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT; FEMINIST ETHICS; MORAL EDUCATION Further reading Kohlberg, L. (1981, 1984) Essays on Moral Development, New York: Harper & Row, 2 vols. (All of Kohlberg’s most important papers covering the empirical evidence for moral stages and his various defences of the philosophical conclusion that the highest stage is the most adequate from the moral point of view.) OWEN FLANAGAN MORAL EDUCATION There are three contemporary approaches to moral learning and education, all of which have roots in the history of philosophy. The first holds that just as children grow, or develop, in a physical sense, so they also develop in their moral dispositions or judgments. A central issue here is whether the concept of development is applicable outside its biological home. The second sees moral learning not as a natural process, but as a deliberate induction into socially approved norms or values. On one version of this view, it is not enough to bring children to follow the rules enshrined in conventional moral codes as they need to learn to sift these in the light of higherorder rational principles. Problems arise here both about moral motivation and about whether morality is wholly to do with rules and principles. For other theorists moral education is more a matter of shaping children’s nature-given desires and emotions into settled dispositions or virtues on Aristotelian lines. While the ‘rational principle’ view focuses on the morally autonomous individual, this view has its roots in communal moral traditions. Despite Plato’s belief that only knowledge is teachable, and therefore that it is doubtful whether moral goodness can be taught at all, the third view of moral learning maintains that it must include the acquisition of relevant knowledge and understanding, and cover the formation of dispositions. All this bears on how moral education should feature in schools – on the role of school ethos, learning by example, and the contribution of the whole curriculum. See also: EDUCATION, PHILOSOPHY OF; LEARNING Further reading Peters, R.S. (1981) Moral Development and Moral Education , London: Allen & Unwin. (A collection of Peters’ essays, including discussions of Piaget and Kohlberg.) Rousseau, J.-J. (1762) Émile: ou, de l’éducation, trans. A. Bloom, Emile: or, On Education , Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991. (An account of an ideal education in accordance with nature.) JOHN WHITE MORAL EXPERTISE Moral experts are best defined as those who have studied moral questions carefully, know the main theories developed in response to such questions, and (where possible) know and are able to offer arguments that would convince reasonable people. In scientific and technical areas, one important feature of a successful answer is that it works, in the sense that it makes accurate predictions. We can say that successful answers to moral questions take the form of arguments which, if examined carefully, would persuade reasonable people and lead to convergence in their moral views. The moral responsibility of individuals for themselves does not preclude the role of moral advisor. Many self-pronounced moral experts might be interfering, condescending and hypocritical, but such characteristics need not accompany moral expertise. Probably no one could claim a high degree of expertise in all areas of ethics. See also: APPLIED ETHICS; THEORY AND PRACTICE Further reading Maclean, A. (1993) The Elimination of Morality: Reflections on Utilitarianism and Bioethics , London: Routledge. (Contends that modern, mainly utilitarian, philosophers have been wrong to claim that they are uniquely qualified to teach moral expertise.)
Plato (c.395–387 BC) Gorgias , trans. W.D. Wood-head, in E. Hamilton and H. Cairns (eds) The Collected Dialogues,
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Page 594 Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961. (Classic discussion of the relationship between possessing virtue and teaching it.) BRAD HOOKER MORAL JUDGMENT The term ‘moral judgment’ can refer to four distinguishable things. First, the activity of thinking about whether a given object of moral assessment (be it an action, person, institution or state of affairs) has a particular moral attribute, either general (such as rightness or badness) or specific (insensitivity, integrity). Second, the state that can result from this activity: the state of judging that the object has the attribute. Third, the content of that state: what is judged by us, rather than our judging it. And fourth, the term can be read as commendatory, referring to a moral virtue that we might also call ‘moral discernment’ or ‘moral wisdom’. There are three principal questions regarding moral judgment. The first asks what kind of state the state of moral judgment is, and in particular whether this state is to be characterized, either wholly or in part, as a state of belief. The second is concerned with the activity of moral judgment, investigating especially the role within this activity that is played by the application of rules. The third examines the conditions under which a person is justified in making a moral judgment with a given content. See also: MORAL JUSTIFICATION; MORAL KNOWLEDGE Further reading Dancy, J. (1993) Moral Reasons, Oxford: Blackwell, chaps 4–6. (A defence of particularism about moral reasons.) GARRETT CULLITY MORAL JUSTIFICATION Questions of justification arise in moral philosophy in at least three ways. The first concerns the way in which particular moral claims, such as claims about right and wrong, can be shown to be correct. Virtually every moral theory offers its own account of moral justification in this sense, and these accounts naturally differ from each other. A second question is about the justification of morality as a whole – about how to answer the question, ‘Why be moral?’ Philosophers have disagreed about this, and about whether an answer is even possible. Finally, some philosophers have claimed that justification of our actions to others is a central aim of moral thinking. They maintain that this aim provides answers to the other two questions of justification by explaining the reasons we have to be moral and the particular form that justification takes within moral argument. See also: FALLIBILISM; MORAL JUDGMENT Further reading Brink, D. (1989) Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, esp. ch. 5. (Critical discussion of issues concerning moral justification, defending a method like that of reflective equilibrium.) T.M. SCANLON MORAL KNOWLEDGE One possesses moral knowledge when, but only when, one’s moral opinions are true and held justifiably. Whether anyone actually has moral knowledge is open to serious doubt, both because moral opinions are so hard to justify and because there is reason to think moral opinions are expressions not of belief (which might be evaluated as true or false) but of taste or preference. A successful defence of the view that people do have moral knowledge requires assuaging these doubts. Attempts in this direction standardly emphasize the respects in which our moral opinions, and the evidence we have for them, are analogous to the opinions and evidence we have concerning nonmoral matters, such as logic, mathematics, science, psychology and history. In the process they attempt to show that we do have good reason to think some of our moral opinions are true. See also: COMMON-SENSE ETHICS; MORAL EXPERTISE Further reading Brink, D. (1989) Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Offers a defence of cognitivism combined with a coherentist epistemology.) Sayre-McCord, G. (ed.) (1988) Essays on Moral Realism, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. (Collection of papers devoted to issues related to noncognitivism and scepticism.) GEOFFREY SAYRE-McCORD MORAL LUCK The term ‘moral luck’ was introduced by Bernard Williams in 1976 to convey the idea that moral status is, to a large extent, a matter of
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Page 595 luck. For example, that Bob grows up to be vicious and Tom to be virtuous depends very much on their different family conditions and educational background. Following Williams, Thomas Nagel widened the scope of moral luck. The position taken by both stands in stark contrast to the widely-held view, influenced by Kant, that one is morally accountable only for what is under one’s control, so that moral accountability is not a matter of luck. This idea is so deeply entrenched in our modern concept of morality that rejecting it would call for a rethinking and reformulation of the most basic notions of morality. Some have argued that the paradox of moral luck provides a strong reason to abandon traditional moral theories, and lends support to virtue ethics. See also: PRAISE AND BLAME Further reading Williams, B. (1976) ‘Moral Luck’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society , supplementary vol. 50: 115–36; repr. in Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973–80 , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, 20– 39. (Introduces the term ‘moral luck’ and explains the central role played by luck in morality, especially in retroactive justification.) DANIEL STATMAN MORAL MOTIVATION Questions about the possibility and nature of moral motivation occupy a central place in the history of ethics. Philosophers disagree, however, about the role that motivational investigations should play within the larger subject of ethical theory. These disagreements surface in the dispute about whether moral thought is necessarily motivating – ‘internalists’ affirming that it is,‘externalists’ denying this. The disagreement between externalists and internalists reflects a basic difference in how the subject matter of ethics is conceived: externalism goes with the view that ethics is primarily about the truth of theories, construed as sets of propositions, while internalists see morality as a set of principles meant to guide the practical deliberations of individual agents. Internalists interpret questions of objectivity in ethics as questions of practical reason, about the authority of moral principles to regulate our activities. Here controversy has centred on whether the authority of practical principles for a given agent must be grounded in that agent’s antecedent desires, or whether, instead, practical reason can give rise to new motivations. There are also important questions about the content of moral motivations. A moral theory should help us to make sense of the fact that people are often moved to do the right thing, by identifying a basic motive to moral behaviour that is both widespread and intelligible, as a serious source of reasons. Philosophers have accounted for moral motivation in terms of self-interest, sympathy, and a higherorder concern to act in accordance with moral principles. But each of these approaches faces difficult challenges. Can egoistic accounts capture the distinctive character of moral motivation? Can impartial sympathy be integrated within a realistic system of human ends? Can we make sense of responsiveness to moral principle, as a natural human incentive? See also: EGOISM AND ALTRUISM Further reading Nagel, T. (1970) The Possibility of Altruism , repr. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978. (Challenging and suggestive argument that practical reason can give rise to new motivations, and that altruism is based in reflection from an impersonal point of view.) Scheffler, S. (1992) Human Morality, New York: Oxford University Press. (Subtle and wide-ranging discussion of naturalistic approaches to moral motivation and their implications for the content and authority of moral demands; contains extensive bibliographic references.) R. JAY WALLACE MORAL PARTICULARISM Moral particularism is a broad set of views which play down the role of general moral principles in moral philosophy and practice. Particularists stress the role of examples in moral education and of moral sensitivity or judgment in moral decision-making, as well as criticizing moral theories which advocate or rest upon general principles. It has not yet been demonstrated that particularism constitutes an importantly controversial position in moral philosophy. See also: SITUATION ETHICS Further reading Ross, W.D. (1930) The Right and the Good, Oxford: Clarendon Press, chaps 1–2. (Has been influential on the development of modern particularism.) ROGER CRISP
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Page 596 MORAL PLURALISM Moral pluralism is the view that moral values, norms, ideals, duties and virtues are irreducibly diverse: morality serves many purposes relating to a wide range of human interests, and it is therefore unlikely that a theory unified around a single moral consideration will account for all the resulting values. Unlike relativism, however, moral pluralism holds that there are rational constraints on what can count as a moral value. One possible, though not necessary, implication of moral pluralism is the existence of real moral dilemmas. Some philosophers have deemed these to be inconceivable; in fact, however, they do not constitute a serious threat to practical reason. Another possible implication of moral pluralism is the existence within a society of radically different but equally permissible moralities. This poses a challenge for political philosophy, and might justify a liberal view that particular conceptions of the good life ought not to be invoked in the formulation of public policy. See also: RELIGIOUS PLURALISM; VALUES Further reading Berlin, I. (1969) Four Essays on Liberty, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (The classic twentieth-century statement of moral pluralism.) DANIEL M. WEINSTOCK MORAL PSYCHOLOGY Moral psychology as a discipline is centrally concerned with psychological issues that arise in connection with the moral evaluation of actions. It deals with the psychological presuppositions of valid morality, that is, with assumptions it seems necessary for us to make in order for there to be such a thing as objective or binding moral requirements: for example, if we lack free will or are all incapable of unselfishness, then it is not clear how morality can really apply to human beings. Moral psychology also deals with what one might call the psychological accompaniments of actual right, or wrong, action, for example, with questions about the nature and possibility of moral weakness or self-deception, and with questions about the kinds of motives that ought to motivate moral agents. Moreover, in the approach to ethics known as ‘virtue ethics’ questions about right and wrong action merge with questions about the motives, dispositions, and abilities of moral agents, and moral psychology plays a more central role than it does in other forms of ethical theory. Further reading Greenspan, P. (1988) Emotions and Reasons: An Inquiry into Emotional Justification, New York: Routledge. (A full-scale examination of the rational status of emotions.) Pears, D. (1984) Motivated Irrationality , Oxford: Oxford University Press. (An extended analysis of weakness of will and other forms of irrationality.) MICHAEL SLOTE MORAL REALISM Moral realism is the view that there are facts of the matter about which actions are right and which wrong, and about which things are good and which bad. But behind this bald statement lies a wealth of complexity. If one is a full-blown moral realist, one probably accepts the following three claims. First, moral facts are somehow special and different from other sorts of fact. Realists differ, however, about whether the sort of specialness required is compatible with taking some natural facts to be moral facts. Take, for instance, the natural fact that if we do this action, we will have given someone the help they need. Could this be a moral fact – the same fact as the fact that we ought to do the action? Or must we think of such a natural fact as the natural ‘ground’ for the (quite different) moral fact that we should do it, that is, as the fact in the world that makes it true that we should act this way? Second, realists hold that moral facts are independent of any beliefs or thoughts we might have about them. What is right is not determined by what I or anybody else thinks is right. It is not even determined by what we all think is right, even if we could be got to agree. We cannot make actions right by agreeing that they are, any more than we can make bombs safe by agreeing that they are. Third, it is possible for us to make mistakes about what is right and what is wrong. No matter how carefully and honestly we think about what to do, there is still no guarantee that we will come up with the right answer. So what people conscientiously decide they should do may not be the same as what they should do. See also: LOGIC OF ETHICAL DISCOURSE; MORAL KNOWLEDGE Further reading Brink, D. (1989) Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (The only book-length presentation of American realism.)
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Page 597 Dancy, J. (1993) Moral Reasons, Oxford: Blackwell. (A recent full-scale expression of British realism.) JONATHAN DANCY MORAL RELATIVISM Often the subject of heated debate, moral relativism is a cluster of doctrines concerning diversity of moral judgment across time, societies and individuals. Descriptive relativism is the doctrine that extensive diversity exists and that it concerns values and principles central to moralities. Meta-ethical relativism is the doctrine that there is no single true or most justified morality. Normative relativism is the doctrine that it is morally wrong to pass judgment on or to interfere with the moral practices of others who have adopted moralities different from one’s own. Much debate about relativism revolves around the questions of whether descriptive relativism accurately portrays moral diversity and whether actual diversity supports metaethical and normative relativism. Some critics also fear that relativism can slide into nihilism. See also: RELATIVISM; SOCIAL RELATIVISM Further reading Foot, P. (1978) Moral Relativism (The Lindley Lectures ), Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press. (Defends a form of moderate relativism.) Mackie, J.L. (1977) Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, Harmondsworth: Penguin. (Defends a sceptical form of relativism under which moral judgments lack the objectivity they purport to have. Hence no standard moral judgments are true.) DAVID B. WONG MORAL SCEPTICISM Scepticism in general is the view that we can have little or no knowledge; thus moral scepticism is the view that we can have little or no moral knowledge. Some moral sceptics argue that we cannot have moral knowledge because we cannot get the evidence necessary to justify any moral judgments. More radical moral sceptics argue that we cannot have moral knowledge because in morality there are no truths to be known. These radical sceptics argue either that moral judgments are all false because they erroneously presuppose the real existence of ‘objective values’, or that moral judgments aim to express feelings or influence behaviour instead of stating truths. Critics of moral scepticism, in turn, argue that in at least some cases moral judgments aim to state truths, some of these judgments are in fact true, and we have enough evidence to say that we know these moral truths. See also: MORAL JUSTIFICATION Further reading Hare, R.M. (1952) The Language of Morals, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (The original, and most influential, presentation of universal prescriptivism.) Sinnott-Armstrong, W. and Timmons, M. (eds) (1996) Moral Knowledge? New Essays in Moral Epistemology, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (A collection of moderately difficult but important essays on moral knowledge and moral scepticism, with a useful annotated bibliography.) MARK T. NELSON MORAL SENSE THEORIES In Leviathan (1651), Thomas Hobbes argued that since good and evil are naturally relative to each individual’s private appetites, and man’s nature is predominantly selfish, then morality must be grounded in human conventions. His views provoked strong reactions among British moral philosophers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Moral sense theories comprise one set of responses. A moral sense theory gives a central role to the affections and sentiments in moral perception, in the appraisal of conduct and character, and in deliberation and motivation. Shaftesbury and Francis Hutcheson argued that we have a unique faculty of moral perception, the moral sense. David Hume and Adam Smith held that we cultivate a moral sensibility when we appropriately regulate our sympathy by an experienceinformed reason and reflection. See also: COMMON-SENSE ETHICS; MORAL MOTIVATION Further reading Hope, V.M. (1989) Virtue by Consensus, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Discusses the moral sense and sympathy in Hutcheson, Hume and Smith.) Schneewind, J.B. (ed.) (1990) Moral Philosophy from Montaigne to Kant , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2 vols. (Useful compilation that places the work of British moralists in a broader European context. Excellent bibliography.) JACQUELINE TAYLOR
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Page 598 MORAL SENTIMENTS Moral sentiments are those feelings or emotions central to moral agency. Aristotle treated sentiments as nonrational conditions, capable of being moulded into virtues through habituation. The moral sense theorists of the Enlightenment took sentiments to provide the psychological basis for our common moral life. Kantian approaches deny the primacy of sentiments in moral personality, and treat moral sentiments as conditioned by our rational grasp of moral principles. A central issue is whether moral sentiments incorporate moral beliefs. Accounts which affirm a connection with moral beliefs point to the complex intentionality (object-directedness) of such states as resentment or indignation. Against this, some observe that moral emotions may be felt inappropriately. Of special interest are the sentiments of guilt and shame. These seem to reflect different orientations towards moral norms, and questions arise about the degree to which these different orientations are culturally local, and whether either orientation is superior to the other. See also: CONSCIENCE; MORAL MOTIVATION Further reading Gibbard, A. (1990) Wise Choices, Apt Feelings: A Theory of Normative Judgment , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Argues that moral sentiments do not rest on moral judgments, and that moral norms are norms for the appropriateness of moral sentiments.) Wallace, R.J. (1994) Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Offers an interpretation of guilt, resentment and indignation, and traces the role of these moral sentiments in our practice of holding people morally responsible.) R. JAY WALLACE MORAL STANDING Towards whom is it appropriate to direct fundamental moral consideration? This is the question of moral standing. Many different answers have been offered: all and only those creatures that are themselves capable of extending moral concern and consideration; all humans, whether capable of functioning as moral agents or not; humans plus certain other ‘higher’ animals (such as gorillas, chimpanzees and porpoises) that can think, reason and be self-aware; creatures capable of feeling sensations such as pain, no matter how otherwise rudimentary their psychological existence; living beings, whether sentient or not; ‘holistic’ entities such as political states, cultural traditions, biological species, natural ecosystems. The moral standing issue has great significance both practically and theoretically. Earnestly reconsidering who, or what, counts morally could change what we eat, how we clothe ourselves, the extent to which we spread out over the land. Even those who believe that only humans count morally must still address the theoretically challenging question of what it is about humans that warrants such exclusive concern. To try to resolve this difficult issue, philosophers have pursued several different strategies. Some work from plausible convictions about particular cases (such as “‘Normal” healthy adult humans have moral standing, if anyone does’) and then, subject to the demand for principled consistency, try to extrapolate to a more general account of what confers moral standing. Others try to articulate a broad view of the general nature of moral consciousness (as involving, for example, the disposition to empathize with others or promote their good) and work back from that to an account of the most basic conditions of the possibility of being conscientiously considered (for instance, having feelings with which others can empathize or a good which they can take into account). See also: RESPECT FOR PERSONS Further reading Bentham, J. (1789) An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ed. J.H. Burns and H.L.A. Hart, revised F. Rosen, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996, ch. 17, section 1. (Classic utilitarian account which insists that moral concern not be limited to rational beings but extended to any creature capable of suffering.) Taylor, P.W. (1986) Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Holds that each living being ought to be taken into respectful consideration; offers some guidelines for resolving conflicts of need and interest that are likely to arise.) ARTHUR KUFLIK MORALISTES The moralistes constitute a tradition of secular French writing about human nature and political and social behaviour principally in the context of the court and the salon. Their
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Page 599 non-systematic observations about mankind are couched in literary forms, such as the maxim and the pen-portrait, appropriate to the social context from which they emerged. The four principal moralistes of the ancien régime were La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyére, Vauvenargues and Chamfort. La Rochefoucauld’s Maximes (1665) constitute a sharp attack on the neo-Stoic moral optimism of the first half of the seventeenth century, and determine self-love to be the mainspring of all human behaviour. La Bruyére’s Caractéres (1688) is a more diverse work in both form and content: it contains a satire of the follies and vices of his age, as well as vivid pen-portraits. There are implicit contradictions in the moral norms governing this often indignant denunciation of men and society. Vauvenargues, writing some fifty years later, expresses more confidence in human nature, rehabilitating the passions and arguing for the moral value of self-love of a certain kind. This optimism is not shared by Chamfort, whose Maximes et pensées (1795) reverts to the cynical tone of his seventeenth-century predecessors in the genre. These writers do not attempt to systematize their thoughts, and they choose to express themselves in urbane and witty ways rather than in sober prose, but they carry out the Cartesian programme of employing ‘common sense’ and native intellectual powers to the end of uncovering aspects of human nature and behaviour accessible to observant people free from moral or religious preconceptions. Further reading La Rochefoucauld, F., duc de (1665) Réflexions ou sentences et maximes morales (Reflections or moral aphorisms and maxims), ed. J. Truchet as Maximes , Paris: Garnier, 1967; trans. L.W. Tancock as Maxims, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959. (The best available scholarly edition.) IAN MacLEAN MORALITY AND ART see ART AND MORALITY MORALITY AND EMOTIONS Emotions such as anger, fear, grief, envy, compassion, love and jealousy have a close connection to morality. Philosophers have generally agreed that they can pose problems for morality in a variety of ways: by impeding judgment, by making attention uneven and partial, by making the person unstable and excessively needy, by suggesting immoral projects and goals. The place of emotions in moral theories depends on whether they are conceived of merely as impulses without thought or intentional content, or as having some sort of cognitive content. Plato argued that emotions form a part of the soul separate from thought and evaluation, and moved, in the course of his writings, from a sceptical view of their contribution to morality to a more positive appraisal. Aristotle connected emotions closely with judgment and belief, and held that they can be cultivated through moral education to be important components of a virtuous character. The Stoics identified emotions with judgments ascribing a very high value to uncontrolled external things and persons, arguing that all such judgments are false and should be removed. Their cognitive analysis of emotion stands independent of this radical normative thesis, and has been adopted by many philosophers who do not accept it. Modern theories of emotion can be seen as a series of responses and counter-responses to the Stoic challenge. Descartes, Spinoza, Kant and Nietzsche all accepted many of the Stoics’ normative arguments in favour of diminishing the role played by emotions in morality; they differed, however, in the accounts of emotion they proposed. Focusing on compassion or sympathy, Hutcheson, Hume, Rousseau, Adam Smith and Schopenhauer all defended the role of some emotions in morality, returning to a normative position closer to Aristotle’s (though not always with a similarly cognitive analysis). Contemporary views of emotion have been preoccupied with the criticism of reductive accounts that derive from behaviourist psychology. By now, it is once again generally acknowledged that emotions are intelligent parts of the personality that can inform and illuminate as well as motivate. Philosophers’ views have been enriched by advances in cognitive psychology, psychoanalysis and anthropology. Feminist accounts of emotion differ sharply, some insisting that we should validate emotions as important parts of moral character, others that emotions shaped by unjust conditions are unreliable guides. See also: EMOTIVISM Further reading Nussbaum, M. (1994) The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Discussion of ancient Graeco-Roman views of passion and morality.) Solomon, R. (1976) The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life,
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Page 600 Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company; repr. 1993. (Influential philosophical account of emotion.) MARTHA C. NUSSBAUM MORALITY AND ETHICS Morality is a distinct sphere within the domain of normative thinking about action and feeling; the whole domain, however, is the subject of ethics. How should the moral sphere be characterized? The three most influential suggestions are that morality should be characterized by its function, by the supremacy of the moral, or by the distinctive moral sentiments. It is plausible that moral codes have a social function, such as that of maintaining beneficial cooperation; but it does not seem an a priori truth. In contrast, it may be true a priori that moral obligations are supreme – accepting an obligation as moral is accepting that it should be carried out whatever else may be said against doing so. But even if this is a priori, it does not provide a criterion for demarcating the moral. A better characterization takes an obligation to be moral if and only if certain sentiments, those invoked in blame, are justified towards an agent who fails to comply with it. This provides a criterion for demarcating the moral, but only if the sentiments can be identified. The sentiment at the core of blame is sometimes held to be a species of anger – indignation, for example. However it seems that one may feel the sentiment involved in guilt or blame without feeling indignation. A view deriving from Hegel’s conception of wrongdoing may be more accurate. Whereas indignation disposes to aggressive restorative action, the sentiment of blame itself disposes to withdrawal of recognition, expulsion from the community. Punishment can then be seen, with Hegel, as a route whereby recognition is restored. Criticisms of morality are broadly of two kinds, though they often overlap: that moral valuation rests on incoherent presuppositions, and that morality is a dysfunctional system. The leading source of the first kind of criticism (and one source of the second) is Nietzsche; in contemporary philosophy related ideas are developed by Bernard Williams. One of Williams’ criticisms centres on something which does indeed seem to be presupposed by moral valuation, at any rate in modern moral thought: that moral obligations exist independently of one’s desires and projects yet of themselves give one a reason to act. Other doubts about the coherence of the moral focus on a conception which, again, may be distinctively modern – being associated particularly with some forms of Protestant Christianity and with Kant; the conception takes it that all are equally autonomous and that the only true worth is moral worth. Criticisms of this conception occur (in different ways) in Nietzsche’s treatment of modern morality and in Hegel’s treatment of what he calls Moralität. The idea that morality is dysfunctional, that blame and guilt deny life or impose pain without securing compensating gains, has considerable influence in contemporary culture (as does the idea that they are compromised by the interests of those who can shape them). Such criticism must come from a conception of ethical value, and assume that there is an alternative to morality. Unless one believes in the possibility of a communal life unmediated by any disciplinary forces at all, the assumption being made must be that there could be a discipline which was better, ethically speaking, than the discipline of guilt and blame. See also: DUTY; UNIVERSALISM IN ETHICS Further reading Dodds, E.R. (1951) The Greeks and the Irrational , London, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. (Influential discussion of ethical concepts in Homeric and classical Greece.) Taylor, G. (1985) Pride, Shame and Guilt: Emotions of Self-Assessment, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Detailed discussion of these related emotions.) JOHN SKORUPSKI MORALITY AND IDENTITY Philosophers have drawn connections between morality and identity in two ways. First, some have argued that metaphysical theories about personal identity – theories about what makes one the same person over time – have important consequences for what ought to matter to a rational agent. Second, others have argued that understanding the concrete identities of persons – the social contexts and personal commitments that give life substance and meaning – is essential if moral philosophy is to address real human concerns. How are metaphysical questions about personal identity supposed to bear on morality? The thought is that what unifies a series of experiences into a single life illuminates what we are, and what we are helps determine how we
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Page 601 ought to live. More broadly, it is natural to seek coherence in our metaphysical and our moral views about persons. This pursuit of a comprehensive account has its dangers; perhaps we will tailor a metaphysical view to fit our moral prejudices, or distort moral philosophy and judgment to fit a false metaphysics. But the pursuit has its attractions too; perhaps we will come to understand what we are, and how we ought to live, in a single package. Philosophers who attend to concrete rather than metaphysical identity characterize persons as committed by social and historical circumstances to a particular range and ordering of values, and as committed by proximity and affection to a particular circle of other persons. These concrete and individual characteristics at least constrain what morality can reasonably demand. But this interpretation suggests that morality stands back from the rich texture of each life, and moderates its demands to accommodate that life. Some philosophers think of morality instead as part of the texture, as intimately connected to, rather than constrained by, concrete identity. See also: SELF-REALIZATION; SELF-RESPECT Further reading Parfit, D. (1984) Reasons and Persons, New York: Oxford University Press, part III. (Elaborates a reductionist view of personal identity, and argues that adopting this view might bring about morally desirable consequences. Parfit’s work has been the most influential recent discussion of the metaphysics of personal identity, and of the connections between metaphysical identity and morality.) Unger, P. (1990) Identity, Consciousness, and Value, New York: Oxford University Press. (A sustained and detailed criticism of Parfit, which argues that our deepest intuitions favour a physical standard of personal identity. This volume contains a useful bibliography about metaphysical identity.) IRA SINGER MORALITY AND LAW see LAW AND MORALITY MORALITY AND RELIGION see RELIGION AND MORALITY MORE, HENRY (1614–87) The English philosopher Henry More was one of the leaders of the movement known as Cambridge Platonism. Like his Cambridge colleague Ralph Cudworth, More elaborated a constructive metaphysics which, although deeply informed by the new philosophy and science of the seventeenth century, recovered what More saw as an ancient truth or ‘cabbala’. The articulation of this truth was an exercise of reason, guided by innate notions or inherent, God-given cognitive propensities. More’s ultimate aim as a philosopher was religious or ethical. His ‘one main Design’, he explained, was ‘The knowledge of God, and therein of true Happiness, so far as Reason can cut her way through those darknesses and difficulties she is encumbred with in this life’ (1662: iv). Among the central themes of the ancient truth More rediscovered and defended were the existence of a God whose leading attributes are wisdom and goodness; the immateriality and immortality of the human soul (the hope of immortality being, as More explained in the Preface to his poem Psychathanasia (1642), ‘the very nerves and sinews’ of religion); a dualism of active spirit and passive matter that differed significantly from the dualism of Descartes, despite More’s early enthusiasm for (and continuing engagement with) Cartesianism; the animation of matter by an immaterial but unthinking spirit of nature; and the existence of an infinite, substantial space, really distinct from matter, in which God is everywhere present and everywhere potentially active. More’s appeals to experiment in defence of the spirit of nature provoked criticism from Robert Boyle. His doctrine of infinite, substantial space was (in the opinion of some historians) an important influence on Isaac Newton. Space seems, on More’s portrayal, to be something divine; this troubled George Berkeley, who thought that by assigning space the ‘incommunicable’ or unshareable attributes of God, More in the end encouraged the atheism he worked so hard to defeat. More is usually represented as a rationalist in religion: ‘ I conceive’, he once wrote, ‘ Christian Religion rational throughout ’ (1662: iv). It is important to distinguish, however, between More’s appeal to reason as a writer defending Christianity, and his appraisal of reason’s role in an ordinary Christian life. More was conscious of living in ‘a Searching, Inquisitive, Rational and Philosophical Age’, and he saw it as his duty to serve God by ‘gaining or retaining the more Rational and Philosophical’ of his contemporaries in the Christian faith. Rational and philosophical genius was not, however, required of every Christian: although More’s accounts of faith vary somewhat from work to work, they
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Page 602 typically call not for a rational assessment of argument and evidence, but for moral purity, and for a belief in (and devotion to) a relatively short list of ‘essentials’. More sought a statement of these essentials that would reach across Protestant sectarian divides. He also defended a liberty of conscience or religion that was, he said, the natural right of every nation and every person. It was, however, a liberty that could be forfeited, and More thought it had been forfeited by some (atheists, for example, and at least some Catholics and Muslims) who might be found claiming its protection. See also: CAMBRIDGE PLATONISM Further reading Hutton, S. (ed.) (1990) Henry More: Tercentenary Studies , Dordrecht: Kluwer. (The single most useful secondary source on More. Among the most valuable contributions are Crocker’s ‘Henry More: A Biographical Essay’ and ‘A Bibliography of Henry More’, Gabbey’s ‘Henry More and the Limits of Mechanism’, Henry’s ‘Henry More versus Robert Boyle: The Spirit of Nature and the Nature of Providence’, and Coudert’s ‘Henry More and Witchcraft’.) More, H. (1662) A collection of several philosophical writings of Dr. Henry More , London and Cambridge; repr. New York: Garland, 1978. (Contains the Antidote and its Appendix, Enthusiasmus triumphatus, the Immortality (with some additions), More’s correspondence with Descartes (introduced by an exchange of letters between More and Claude Clerselier), and the Epistola ad V.C., an appraisal of Cartesianism written around 1658 and first published here.) KENNETH P. WINKLER MOSCOW-TARTU SCHOOL The Moscow-Tartu School of semiotics (theory of signs) was formed when a diverse group of scholars joined informally from the 1950s to 1980s to provide alternatives to the regnant Soviet approaches to language, literature and culture. Their work develops the linguistics of Saussure, elaborated by Trubetzkoi and Hjelmslev, with its central notions of sign as union of signifier and signified, its distinction between language as system ( langue ) and language as utterance ( parole), and its analysis in terms of the significant differences between paired equivalent elements in a system (that is, meaning is a matter not of individual elements, but of the relationship between comparable elements). In its early stages members of the Moscow-Tartu School did intricate analyses of lyric poetry and of highly conventional prose works (such as detective stories) using statistical and linguistic methods. They subsequently came to treat art works and other cultural artefacts as the products of ‘secondary modelling systems’, that is, as elements arranged according to rules that could be seen as language-like and hence accessible to analysis by the procedures of structuralist linguistics. The group shared an interest in Western and pre-Stalinist Russian literary theory – especiallyinthe Russian formalists – and in contemporary linguistics, semiotics and cybernetics. In a time of pervasive intellectual stagnation this loose confederation sought to formulate objective and exact methods for literary scholarship, to republish works of Russian theory that had been repressed from the 1930s to 1950s, and to bring scholarship in the humanities into line with developments in other scholarly fields. During the 1970s prominent members of the group, such as Iu.M. Lotman and B.A. Uspenskii, turned from more theoretical and formalized work to historical studies of culture as a system of semiotic systems. See also: SEMIOTICS; STRUCTURALISM IN LINGUISTICS Further reading Matejka, L. et al ., (eds) (1977) Readings in Soviet Semiotics (Russian Texts) , Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan Slavic Publications. (Excellent selection, especially of the School’s early papers.) Paperno, I. (1988) Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism: A Study in the Semiotics of Behavior , Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. (Highly accessible and intelligent development of the School’s ideas on text, behaviour, modelling and culture.) WILLIAM MILLS TODD III MOSES BEN MAIMON see MAIMONIDES, MOSES MOSES BEN NAHMAN see NAHMANIDES, MOSES MOSES IBN EZRA see IBN EZRA, MOSES BEN JACOB MOSES MAIMONIDES see MAIMONIDES, MOSES
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Page 603 MOTOORI NORINAGA (1730–1801) Motoori Norinaga was a pivotal figure in Japan’s ‘Native Studies’ or ‘National Learning’ ( kokugaku) movement. An accomplished philologist, he helped decipher the idiosyncratic eighth-century orthography of the Japanese chronicle of history and myth, the Kojiki (Records of Ancient Matters). This was part of his broader scholarly project of defining the nature of the ancient Japanese sensitivity or ‘heart-andmind’ ( kokoro). In so doing, he articulated an influential religious philosophy of Shintō and an axiology of traditional Japanese values, which he considered as primarily emotivist and aesthetic. See also: KOKORO; SHINTŌ Further reading Matsumoto Shigeru (1970) Motoori Norinaga 1730–1801, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Helpful intellectual biography examining the connections between Motoori’s life and thought.) THOMAS P. KASULIS MOZI (5th century BC) Mozi was the first philosopher to question the ideas of Confucius. Scholarly debate centres around the issue of whether Mozi was a ‘weak’ or a ‘strong’ utilitarian, an ‘act’ or ‘rule utilitarian’, and whether he was a ‘language utilitarian’ or rather placed the religious authority of a personalized Heaven at the centre of his system. He is noteworthy for being the first thinker to develop a tripartite methodology for verifying claims to knowledge and for attacking the Confucian emphasis on ritual and the centrality of the family as the basis for social and political action. See also: MOHIST PHILOSOPHY Further reading Mozi (5th century BC) Mozi, ed. and trans. Mei Yi-Pao, The Ethical and Political Works of Motse, London: Arthur Probsthain, 1929; ed. and trans. B. Watson, Mo Tzu: Basic Writings, New York: Columbia University Press, 1963. (Watson is an up-to-date English translation.) ROBIN D.S. YATES MUJŌ A Japanese word originating in Buddhism, mujō means impermanence, transience or mutability. It characterizes all phenomena of experience, but is especially significant for human endeavours to achieve happiness. In the Buddhist analysis of existence, all things arise and perish through dependent origination; they are impermanent, without substance and continually subject to change. This presents human beings with an imperative existential problem, for they ignore or fail to realize the pervasiveness of impermanence. Endeavouring to secure lasting satisfaction, they cling to what is transient and mutable. The result is suffering, the unsatisfactory nature of ordinary – unenlightened – human existence. The problem of impermanence is fundamental to Buddhism from its inception, but interpretations of the concept varied with the evolution of other doctrines, most notably the Mahāyāna notion of emptiness. The indigenous Japanese sensitivity to the transience of life and nature interacted with Buddhism to articulate, often in aesthetic terms, not only the threats but also the contributions of impermanence to meaningful human existence. The most thorough examination of mujō is offered by the Zen Buddhist Dōgen, who in his exposition of the radical temporality of existence as being-time identifies the full realization of impermanence with Buddha-nature or enlightenment. See also: DōGEN; MOMENTARINESS, BUDDHIST DOCTRINE OF Further reading Nishitani Kenji (1982) Religion and Nothingness, trans. J. Van Bragt, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. (A Kyoto school philosopher who discusses impermanence together with time and emptiness.) Stambaugh, J. (1990) Impermanence is Buddha-nature: Dōgen’s Understanding of Temporality , Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press. (Interprets and compares Dōgen with Western philosophers.) MONTE S. HULL MULLA SADRA (SADR AL-DIN MUHAMMAD AL-SHIRAZI) (1571/2–1640) Sadr al-Din al-Shirazi (Mulla Sadra) is perhaps the single most important and influential philosopher in the Muslim world in the last four hundred years. The author of over forty works, he was the culminating figure of the major revival of philosophy in Iran in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Devoting himself almost exclusively to metaphysics, he constructed a critical philosophy which brought together Peripatetic, Illuminationist and gnostic philosophy along with Shi‘ite theology within
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Page 604 the compass of what he termed a ‘metaphilosophy’, the source of which lay in the Islamic revelation and the mystical experience of reality as existence. Mulla Sadra’s metaphilosophy was based on existence as the sole constituent of reality, and rejected any role for quiddities or essences in the external world. Existence was for him at once a single unity and an internally articulated dynamic process, the unique source of both unity and diversity. From this fundamental starting point, Mulla Sadra was able to find original solutions to many of the logical, metaphysical and theological difficulties which he had inherited from his predecessors. His major philosophical work is the Asfar (The Four Journeys), which runs to nine volumes in the present printed edition and is a complete presentation of his philosophical ideas. See also: EXISTENCE; ILLUMINATIONIST PHILOSOPHY; ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY, MODERN Further reading Rahman, F. (1975) The Philosophy of Mulla Sadr (Sadr al-Din al-Shirazi) , Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. (To date, the only full-scale study of Mulla Sadra’s philosophy in English.) JOHN COOPER MULTICULTURALISM Multicultural political philosophy explores ways of accommodating cultural diversity fairly. Public policies often have different consequences for members of different cultural groups. For example, given the importance of language to culture, and the role of the modern state in so many aspects of life, the choice of official languages will affect different people very differently. Similar issues arise concerning the cultural content of education and the criminal law, and the choice of public holidays. To avoid policies that create unfair burdens, multicultural theory turns to abstract inquiries about such things as the relation between culture and individual wellbeing, or the relation between a person’s culture and the appropriate standards for judging them. Multiculturalism raises related questions for democratic theory also. Culture may be important to deciding on appropriate units of democratic rule and to the design of special mechanisms for representing minorities within such units. Each of these questions is made more difficult in the context of cultures that reject the demands of liberty or equality. The challenge for philosophers is to develop a principled way of thinking about these issues. See also: CULTURE Further reading Kymlicka, W. (1995) Multicultural Citizenship , Oxford: Clarendon Press. (A defence of liberal approaches to cultural difference.) Taylor, C. (1994) Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition , ed. A. Gutmann, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (A leading essay by Taylor offers cultural survival as a rationale for state policies towards culture. Responses to Taylor’s essay, by Kwame Anthony Appiah, Jürgen Habermas, Stephen Rockefeller, Michael Walzer and Susan Wolf cover most of the theories and issues described in this article.) ARTHUR RIPSTEIN MULTIPLE-CONCLUSION LOGIC Ordinary arguments can have any number of premises but only one conclusion. Multiple-conclusion logic also allows for any number of conclusions in an argument, regarding them as setting out the field of possibilities among which the truth must lie if the premises are true. Such an argument counts as valid if it is impossible for all the premises to be true and all the conclusions false. Anything that can be said about premises can now be said, mutatis mutandis, about conclusions, and much of the interest of the subject comes from exploiting this duality. Putting conclusions on a par with premises reflects the idea that truth and falsity, and likewise acceptance and rejection, are polar notions standing on a par with one another. Further reading Shoesmith, D.J. and Smiley, T.J. (1978) Multiple-Conclusion Logic , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (A systematic treatise, including a discussion of the history of the subject.) TIMOTHY SMILEY AL-MUQAMMAS, DAUD ( fl. 9th century) The Syrian Daud ibn Marwan, called al-Muqammas, is the first Jewish thinker known to have written in Arabic and one of the earliest Arabic speaking theologians whose work is extant. He also wrote on logic, biblical exegesis, doxography and polemical matters. His pioneering efforts toward a systematic Jewish philosophy show the influence both of Muslim
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Page 605 theology ( kalam) and the Aristotelian philosophy taught in the Syriac Christian academies. See also: ISLAMIC THEOLOGY Further reading al-Muqammas, Daud (9th century) ‘ Ishrun maqala (Twenty Chapters), ed. S. Stroumsa, Dawud Ibn Marwan al-Muqammis’s Twenty Chapters [‘Ishrun Maqala] , Leiden: Brill, 1989. (An edition and annotated English translation of al-Muqammas’ Summa .) SARAH STROUMSA MUSIC, AESTHETICS OF The aesthetics of music comprises philosophical reflection on the origin, nature, power, purpose, creation, performance, reception, meaning and value of music. Some of its problems are general problems of aesthetics posed in a musical context; for example, what is the ontological status of the work of art in music, or what are the grounds of value judgments in music? Other problems are more or less peculiar to music, lacking a clear parallel in other arts; for example, what is the nature of the motion perceived in music, or how can the marriage of music and words best be understood? Attempts to define the concept of music generally begin with the fact that music involves sound, but also posit such things as cultural tradition, the fulfilment of a composer’s aims or the expression of emotions as essential features of music. Perhaps any plausible concept, though, has to involve the making of sounds by people for aesthetic appreciation, broadly conceived. In deciding what is meant by a musical work, further considerations come into play, such as might lead to the identification of it with a sound structure as defined by a given composer in a particular musico-historical context. In what sense can a piece of music be said to have meaning? Some hold it has meaning only internally – in its structure as an arrangement of melodies, harmonies, rhythms and timbres, for instance – while others have claimed that its meaning lies in the communication of things not essentially musical – such as emotions, attitudes or the deeper nature of the world. The most popular of these beliefs is that music expresses emotion. This is not to say, however, that the emotion expressed in a work is necessarily experienced by those involved in its composition or performance: composers can create peaceful or furious music without themselves being in those states, and the same goes for the performance of such music by performers. Also, the emotions evoked in listeners seem of a different nature from those directly experienced: negative emotions expressed in music do not preclude the audience’s appreciation, and in fact commonly facilitate it. Ultimately, a work’s expressiveness should be seen as something directly related to the experience of listening to that work. Music is often said to have value primarily in so far as it is beautiful, its beauty being whatever affords pleasure to the listener. But the quality of a work’s expressiveness, its depth, richness and subtlety, for example, also seems to form an important part of any value judgment we make about the work. See also: OPERA, AESTHETICS OF Further reading Budd, M. (1985) Music and the Emotions, London: Routledge. (A masterly critical survey of influential theories of musical expression and evocation.) Robinson, J. (ed.) (1997) Music and Meaning , Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. (A collection of ten recent essays by philosophers and theorists of music.) JERROLD LEVINSON MUSONIUS RUFUS (1st century AD) Gaius Musonius Rufus was a Stoic philosopher who taught in Rome. Active on the margins of political life, he was twice exiled and recalled. His surviving work focuses on practical ethics. Besides his distinctive views on marriage, sexual morality and women’s education, Musonius is important for his influence on Epictetus. He wrote nothing down, but accounts of many of his lectures were taken down and published after his death. Further reading Van Geytenbeek, A.C. (1963) Musonius Rufus and the Greek Diatribe, Assen: Van Gorcum. (A useful treatment of his life, intellectual affiliations and distinctive views.) BRAD INWOOD MU‘TAZILA see ASH‘ARIYYA AND MU‘TAZILA MYSTICAL PHILOSOPHY IN ISLAM Mystical philosophy has an intimate connection with the mainstream of Islamic philosophy. It consists of several main strands, ranging from Isma‘ili thought to the metaphysics of al-Ghazali and Ibn al-‘Arabi, and with a continuing powerful presence in the contemporary Islamic world. Although mystical thinkers
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Page 606 aware that they were advocating an approach to thinking and knowledge which differed from much of the Peripatetic tradition, they constructed a systematic approach which was often continuous with that tradition. On the whole they emphasized the role of intellectual intuition in our approach to understanding reality, and sought to show how such an understanding might be put on a solid conceptual basis. The ideas that they created were designed to throw light on the nature of the inner sense of Islam. See also: ILLUMINATIONIST PHILOSOPHY; MYSTICISM, HISTORY OF Further reading Chittick, W. (1989) The Sufi Path of Knowledge , Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. (The standard account of the nature of mystical knowledge.) Nasr, S.H. (1978) Islamic Life and Thought, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. (General introduction to the role of mysticism in Islamic culture.) SEYYED HOSSEIN NASR MYSTICISM, HISTORY OF Contemporary authors generally associate mysticism with a form of consciousness involving an apparent encounter or union with an ultimate order of reality, however this is understood. Mysticism in this sense, it is argued, can be found in virtually all cultures and religious traditions, and is perhaps as old as humanity itself. None the less, there is no agreement on the identifying characteristics of mystical states; the term ‘mysticism’ and its cognates have undergone long evolution and been used in a bewildering variety of ways. Such ongoing disputes about the nature and significance of mysticism only underscore both the challenge and the importance of studying its history. On the one hand, without consensus on a definition, scholars disagree on which texts and figures merit inclusion in a historical survey of mysticism. On the other hand, arguments about whether mystical experiences are ‘everywhere the same’ can hardly be settled apart from attention to the historical evidence. See also: KABBALAH; RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE Further reading Spencer, S. (1963) Mysticism in World Religions, Baltimore, MD: Penguin. (A good introduction to the major mystical traditions.) STEVEN PAYNE MYSTICISM, JEWISH see KABBALAH MYSTICISM, NATURE OF Mysticism continues to elude easy definition, and its nature and significance remain the subject of intense debate. The terms ‘mystic’, ‘mystical’ and ‘mysticism’ have been used in an astonishing variety of ways by different authors in different eras. Nevertheless, modern philosophical discussions have tended to focus on so-called ‘mystical experiences’, understood as certain states or modes of awareness, allegedly found within (and even outside) virtually all faith-traditions, and variously characterized as ‘consciousness without content’, ‘the experience of absolute oneness’, ‘union with the transcendent’, ‘immediate consciousness of the presence of God’, and so on. Philosophers are particularly interested in whether such experiences constitute a ‘way of knowing’, and whether they provide any support for either traditional religious beliefs or unusual metaphysical claims made by certain mystics (for example, that time is illusory). Some authors argue affirmatively, on the basis of an alleged ‘universal consensus among mystics’, for example, or the parallels between mystical consciousness and other modes of experience accepted as cognitive. Others, however, challenge these views, noting that mystics often appear to disagree precisely along the lines of their prior religious convictions, that mystical awareness seems capable of explanation in terms of natural causes, that mystical claims (like claims about one’s private feelings) do not admit of ordinary testing, or that the alleged ‘ineffability’ of mystical states frustrates any attempt at rational analysis. These concerns, then, tend to shape the kinds of questions typically addressed in contemporary philosophical discussions of mysticism, such as: What is mysticism? What are the identifying characteristics of mystical experience? Is mysticism ‘everywhere the same’, and if so, in what sense? Are there different types of mystical experience? What is the relationship between mystical awareness and its interpretation? Are mystical experiences a ‘way of knowing’? Do they involve some form of union or contact with God? Are mystical experiences ‘ineffable’ or ‘nonlogical’, and in what sense? Can drugs or other natural stimuli induce mystical experiences, and would that affect their cognitive value? Finally, in light of the increasingly technical nature of much of the philosophical debate, in which the
primary mystical sources themselves
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Page 607 often play a relatively minor role (except as mined for brief ‘proof texts’), there have been calls for renewed attention to the larger historical, cultural and religious contexts from which mysticism and mystical literature emerge, and within which they must be interpreted. See also: GOD, ARGUMENTS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF; MYSTICISM, HISTORY OF; RELIGIOUS PLURALISM Further reading Katz, S.T. (ed.) (1978) Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis , New York: Oxford University Press. (Important articles by Katz, Peter Moore and others criticizing the view that mysticism is ‘everywhere the same’, and stressing the role of mystics’ beliefs and expectations in shaping the very quality of their experience.) Woods, R. (ed.) (1980) Understanding Mysticism , Garden City, NY: Doubleday. (Perhaps the best and most comprehensive anthology of notable articles on the nature of mysticism, its various forms in world religions, and its scientific, philosophical and theological appraisal.) STEVEN PAYNE
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Page 608 N NÆSS, ARNE (1912–) As professor of philosophy in Oslo between 1939 and 1970, Arne Næss contributed to a strengthening of the position of philosophy in Norwegian academic life. During the German occupation (1940–5) he played an active part in the resistance movement. In the 1940s and 1950s he was the inspiration for and centre of a group of students of philosophy and social science, the ‘Oslo School’, whose members became influential in the later development of these fields. His philosophical thinking passed through an early ‘scientistic’ period of radical empiricism to ‘possibilist’ and pluralist views, and an undogmatic scepticism. After resigning his professorship in 1970, he became the protagonist of a version of ecological philosophy, ‘deep ecology’. He has always been an admirer of Spinoza and has also sought inspiration in Spinozism for his ecological philosophy. See also: SCANDINAVIA, PHILOSOPHY IN Further reading Næss, A. (1968) Scepticism , London: International Library of Philosophy and Scientific Method. (A thorough discussion of non-dogmatic, Pyrrhonian scepticism, the kind claimed by Nñss to be generally overlooked in modern critiques of scepticism.) Gullvåg, I. and Wetlesen, J. (eds) (1982) In Sceptical Wonder. Inquiries into the Philosophy of Arne Naess on the Occasion of his 70th Birthday , Oslo: Universitetsforlaget and Columbia University Press. INGEMUND GULLVÅG NĀGĀRJUNA ( c . AD 150–200) Nāgārjuna was the first Buddhist philosopher to articulate and seek to defend the claim that all things are empty, that is, devoid of their own essential nature. A native of South India, as the founder of the Madhyamaka school of Mahāyāna Buddhism he exerted a profound influence on the further development of Buddhist thought in South and East Asia. When he claimed that all things are empty, he denied that anything exists solely in virtue of its own inherent nature. If, as all Buddhists hold, existents only arise in dependence on other existents, then nothing may be said to have a determinate nature apart from its relations to other things. Yet prior developments in Buddhist philosophy had presumably shown that anything lacking an independent nature is a conceptual fiction and not ultimately real. Thus if all things are empty, nothing is ultimately real. Still Nāgārjuna claimed not to be a nihilist. Emptiness is rather the defeat of all metaphysical theories, all attempts at grasping the ultimate nature of reality – including nihilism. Insight into emptiness is said to free us from our tendency conceptually to construct an ultimate truth, a tendency that bolsters our sense of self. Thus realization of emptiness is, Nāgārjuna held, required in order to attain full liberation from the suffering caused by clinging. See also: BUDDHISM, MĀDHYAMIKA: INDIA AND TIBET; BUDDHIST CONCEPT OF EMPTINESS Further reading Nāgārjuna ( c . AD 150–200) Mūlamadhyamakak ārikā (Fundamental Treatise on the Middle Path), trans. J.L. Garfield, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. (Contains the chief arguments for the doctrine of emptiness; Madhyamakaśāstra is an alternative title. Garfield supplies a commentary in addition to his translation, which is based largely on the Tibetan text.) Tuck, A.P. (1990) Comparative Philosophy and the Philosophy of Scholarship: On the Western Interpretation of Nāgārjuna, New York: Oxford University Press. (Discusses the variety of interpretive approaches to Nāgārjuna taken by modern scholars.) MARK SIDERITS NAGEL, ERNEST (1901–85) Ernest Nagel was arguably the pre-eminent American philosopher of science from the mid 1930s to the 1960s. He taught at Columbia University for virtually his entire career. Although he shared with Bertrand Russell and with members of the Vienna Circle a respect for and sensitivity to developments in mathematics and the natural sciences, he endorsed a strand in
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Page 609 the thought of Charles S. Peirce and John Dewey that Nagel himself called ‘contextual naturalism’. Among the main features of contextual naturalism is its distrust of reductionist claims that are not the outcomes of scientific inquiries. Nagel’s contextual naturalism infused his influential, detailed and informed essays on probability, explanation in the natural and social sciences, measurement, history of mathematics, and the philosophy of law. It is reflected, for example, in his trenchant critiques of Russell’s reconstruction of the external world and Russell’s epistemology as well as cognate views endorsed at one time or another by members of the Vienna Circle. See also: LOGICAL POSITIVISM Further reading Nagel, E. (1961) The Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation, New York: Harcourt Brace. (Presents Nagel’s classification of types of explanation in science and discussions of them, his conception of theories and their cognitive status, determinism, reduction, teleological, functional and statistical explanation in biology and social science, subjectivity and value in social inquiry, methodological individualism and a chapter on the ‘logic’ of historical inquiry.) ISAAC LEVI NAGEL, THOMAS (1937–) The comprehensiveness of the American philosopher Thomas Nagel’s approach sets him apart among late-twentieth-century analytic philosophers. Nagel develops a compelling analysis of the fundamental philosophical problems, showing how they result from our capacity to take up increasingly objective viewpoints that detach us from our individual subjective viewpoints as well as from the viewpoints of our community, nation and species. Our essentially dual nature, which allows us to occupy objective as well as subjective viewpoints, poses unsolvable problems for us because subjective and objective viewpoints reveal conflicting facts and values. Our ability to undertake increasingly detached viewpoints from which objective facts come into view indicates that we are contained in a world that transcends our minds; similarly, our ability to examine our values and reasons from a detached or impartial objective viewpoint implies that moral values are real in the sense that they transcend our personal motives and inclinations. Yet Nagel also holds that our capacity for objective thought is limited by the fact that we cannot detach ourselves completely from our own natures in our attempts either to know our world or to act morally. Subjective facts are equally a part of reality and our moral outlook is essentially the outlook of individual agents with personal and communal ties. Consequently, Nagel argues against any form of reductionism which holds that only objective facts and values are real or which attempts to explain subjective facts and values in terms of objective ones. Further reading Nagel, T. (1986) The View From Nowhere, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Presents Nagel’s systematic and comprehensive treatment of the fundamental philosophical issues in terms of the essential duality between objective and subjective points of view and the distinctive facts and values that they make available.) SONIA SEDIVY NAHMANIDES, MOSES (1194–1270) One of the most influential medieval Jewish thinkers to engage with the philosophical tradition, Nahmanides was also a leading Talmudist, biblical exegete, and a founding figure of the Jewish mystical tradition (Kabbalah) that emerged in thirteenth-century Spain. Generally critical of Aristotle, he was deeply influenced by predecessors such as Moses Maimonides. As the leading rabbi in Catalonia, Nahmanides played a central role in the ‘Maimonidean controversy’ of 1232–3, a dispute that raged over the permissibility of philosophical study. He was also at the centre of the ‘Barcelona disputation’ of 1263, conducted with the apostate Pablo Christiani over the issue of philosophically motivated allegories. Unlike his Provençal contemporaries, Nahmanides wrote neither free-standing philosophical treatises nor commentaries on Graeco-Arabic philosophical texts. Instead, he developed his original metaphysical views in sermons and his highlt influential biblical commentaries treating such topics as miracles, providence and idolatry. The commentaries proved especially influential through their thematic treatments of philosophical questions raised by the biblical text and for their suggestive expositions of mystical and theosophical ideas. See also: MAIMONIDES, M.; MIDRASH Further reading Nahmanides, Moses (1194–1270) Works, ed. C.B. Chavel, Kitvei Ha-Ramban (Writings
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Page 610 and Discourses of Nahmanides), Jerusalem: Mosad Ha-Rav Kook, 1963, 2 vols; trans. C.B. Chavel, New York: Shilo, 1978. (A collection of Nahmanides’ speculative writings, including his sermons, a record of the ‘Barcelona disputation’, and a commentary onthe Bookof Job, aswell assome misattributed works. The translation is not always sensitive to philosophical usage.) Novak, D. (1992) The Theology of Nahmanides Systematically Presented , Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press. (Exposition of Nahmanides’ thought on the soul, commandments, miracles, eschatology, and other topics, with key texts culled from his works and organized thematically.) JOSEF STERN NANCY, JEAN-LUC (1940–) The French philosopher and academic Jean-Luc Nancy has disclosed significant political and social dimensions to the general project of deconstructing Western philosophy. Existence does not precede essence, according to Nancy; existence is without essence, and it is therefore impossible both to represent existence and to exist alone. Being is always ‘being in common’. The task of philosophy consists in rethinking the commonality of being without relying on any prior conception of identity, unity or wholeness. ‘Being in common’ means that nothing – no substance, no identifiable trait – is held in common. The absence of a common substance or spiritual identity does not then generate a command to make up for this lack by means of socially useful work. As the exposure of each singularity to its ungrounded commonality, ‘being in common’ is the always surprising ‘fact’ upon which all of Nancy’s investigations into philosophy, literature, psychoanalysis and political phenomena are oriented. See also: BEING; EXISTENCE Further reading Nancy, J.-L. (1988) L’Éxpérience de la liberté , Paris: Éditions Galilée; trans. B. McDonald, intro. P. Fenves, The Experience of Freedom, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993. (One of the landmarks of contemporary continental philosophy, this book explores in an interconnected series of essays the modern project of grounding philosophical thought and political practice on the idea of freedom.) Sparks, S., Sheppard, S and Thomas, C. (1997) The Philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy , London: Routledge. (A collection of essays that analyses Nancy’s work, assesses and develops certain lines of his thought.) PETER FENVES NARRATIVE Narrative, in its broadest sense, is the means by which a story is told, whether fictional or not, and regardless of medium. Novels, plays, films, historical texts, diaries and newspaper articles focus, in their different ways, on particular events and their temporal and causal relations; they are all narratives in the above sense. Accounts of mathematical, physical, economic or legal principles are not. A narrower sense of narrative requires the presence of a narrator mediating between audience and action, and contrasts with imitative discourse wherein the action is presented directly, as in drama. The boundary between narration narrowly construed and imitation is disputed, some writers arguing that apparently imitative forms are covertly narrated. Attempts have been made to characterize fictional narratives in linguistic terms; another view is that fictions are things which have certain (intended or actual) effects on the audience. Theorists of narrative have mostly concentrated on narratives of the fictional kind and have developed a complex taxonomy of the various narrative devices, some of which are discussed in more detail below. Recently, pressure has been placed on the distinction between historical and fictional narrative by those who believe that history is nothing distinct from the various and conflicting narrative versions we have. It has also been argued that value accrues to an agent’s life and acts when those acts conform to a conception of that life as exemplifying narrative. See also: STRUCTURALISM IN LITERARY THEORY Further reading Booth, W.C. (1983) The Rhetoric of Fiction, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2nd edn. (A classic study of the forms of narrative, with emphasis on the idea of the implied author. Excellent bibliography.) GREGORY CURRIE NATION AND NATIONALISM No one observing political events in the world today could deny the continuing potency of nationalism. Many of the most intractable conflicts arise when one national community tries to break away from another, or when two
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Page 611 such communities lay claim to the same piece of territory. Yet to outsiders the basis for such conflicts often seems mysterious. People are prepared to fight and die for their nation, yet what exactly is this ‘nation’ that commands such loyalty? Why should it matter so much that a person is governed by leaders drawn from one community rather than from another? Philosophers are often inclined to dismiss nationalism as having no rational basis, but as resting merely on tribal instincts and brute emotions. Such a response overlooks the different forms that nationalism has taken: in particular, the contrast between authoritarian nationalism, which allows national cultures to be imposed by force and which may justify acts of aggression against neighbouring peoples, and liberal nationalism, which upholds the rights of individuals to form political communities with those with whom they feel identified and to protect their common culture. We need to examine carefully the arguments that have been advanced by nationalist thinkers in order to decide which form of nationalism, if any, is rationally defensible. See also: COMMUNITY AND COMMUNITARIANISM; STATE, THE Further reading Greenfeld, L. (1992) Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (A comparative study of the evolution of nationalist ideas in Britain, France, Germany, Russia and the USA.) Kohn, H. (1944) The Idea of Nationalism, New York: Macmillan. (A classic study of the development of nationalist ideas, beginning with ancient Israel.) DAVID MILLER NATIVE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY Native American philosophies are multiple and multiply different, though with some palpable commonalities. Cosmologically, Native American thought posits phased differentiations of form from a primordial void. Form is fundamentally animate, and widespread metaphysical premises indicate a pervasive animism. The relationship between language and reality is grounded in the semiotic manipulation of animate forces. Encompassing force – like Siouan wakan or Iroquoian orenda – is the originating source of human ontology and subjectivity, which are strongly characterized by ideas of consciousness and will. Mind is critically informed by transcendental experience (dreams, visions and so on) as well as by reason. Ethically, the harnessing of individual energies to specified social goals is discursively and dramatically prominent especially in ritual performance. Ethical principles are extended to non-human ‘persons’ (particularly animals and deific forms) who operate within the human moral compass. Native American reason emphasizes analogy (especially in Lévi-Strauss’ interpretations) and aetiology, and there is a central concern with formal composition and decomposition. The latter is strongly evident in the ubiquitous philosopher-figure ‘Trickster’ – a subversive transgressor of constituted order. See also: LATIN AMERICA, PRE-COLUMBIAN AND INDIGENOUS THOUGHT IN Further reading Lévi-Strauss, C. (1963) ‘Do Dual Organizations Exist?’, Structural Anthropology, trans. C. Jacobson and B.G. Schoepf, New York: Basic Books. Tedlock, B. and Tedlock, D.(eds) (1975) Teachings from the American Earth: Indian Religion and Philosophy , New York: Liveright. (A useful collection of interpretations, with discussions of several philosophical perspectives.) PETER M. WHITELEY NATIVISM Traditional empiricism claims that the mind is initially equipped only with the capacity for experience and the mechanisms that make it possible for us to learn from experience. Nativists have argued that this is not enough, and that our innate endowment must be far richer, including information, ideas, beliefs, perhaps even knowledge. Empiricism held the advantage until recently, partly because of a misidentification of nativism with rationalism. Rationalists such as Descartes and Leibniz thought nativism would explain how a priori knowledge of necessary truths is possible. However, the fact that something is innate does not establish that it is true, let alone that it is necessary or a priori. More recently, nativism has been reanimated by Chomsky’s claims that children must have innate language-specific information that mediates acquisition of their native tongue. He argues that, given standard empiricist learning procedures, the linguistic data available to a child underdetermines the grammar on which they converge at a very young age, with relatively little effort or instruction.
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Page 612 The successes in linguistics have led to fruitful research on nativism in other domains of human knowledge: for example, arithmetic, the nature of physical objects, features of persons, and possession of concepts generally. See also: INNATE KNOWLEDGE Further reading Chomsky, N. (1988) Language and Problems of Knowledge , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (One of many recent expositions and defences of nativism that are accessible to the non-specialist – see especially chapters 1, 2, 5.) Pinker, S. (1994) The Language Instinct, New York: William Morrow. (An extremely readable account of the state of the art in our understanding of language; defends the nativist view.) JERRY SAMET NATURAL DEDUCTION, TABLEAU AND SEQUENT SYSTEMS Different presentations of the principles of logic reflect different approaches to the subject itself. The three kinds of system discussed here treat as fundamental not logical truth, but consequence, the relation holding between the premises and conclusion of a valid argument. They are, however, inspired by different conceptions of this relation. Natural deduction rules are intended to formalize the way in which mathematicians actually reason in their proofs. Tableau systems reflect the semantic conception of consequence; their rules may be interpreted as the systematic search for a counterexample to an argument. Finally, sequent calculi were developed for the sake of their metamathematical properties. All three systems employ rules rather than axioms. Each logical constant is governed by a pair of rules which do not involve the other constants and are, in some sense, inverse. Take the implication operator ‘ → ’, for example. In natural deduction, there is an introduction rule for ‘ → ’ which gives a sufficient condition for inferring an implication, and an elimination rule which gives the strongest conclusion that can be inferred from a premise having the form of an implication. Tableau systems contain a rule which gives a sufficient condition for an implication to be true, and another which gives a sufficient condition for it to be false. A sequent is an array г ∆, where г and ∆ are lists (or sets) of formulas. Sequent calculi have rules for introducing implication on the left of the ‘ ’ symbol and on the right. The construction of derivations or tableaus in these systems is often more concise and intuitive than in an axiomatic one, and versions of all three have found their way into introductory logic texts. Furthermore, every natural deduction or sequent derivation can be made more direct by transforming it into a ‘normal form’. In the case of the sequent calculus, this result is known as the cut-elimination theorem. It has been applied extensively in metamathematics, most famously to obtain consistency proofs. The semantic inspiration for the rules of tableau construction suggests a very perspicuous proof of classical completeness, one which can also be adapted to the sequent calculus. The introduction and elimination rules of natural deduction are intuitionistically valid and have suggested an alternative semantics based on a conception of meaning as use. The idea is that the meaning of each logical constant is exhausted by its inferential behaviour and can therefore be characterized by its introduction and elimination rules. Although the discussion below focuses on intuitionistic and classical first-order logic, various other logics have also been formulated as sequent, natural deduction and even tableau systems: modal logics, for example, relevance logic, infinitary and higher-order logics. There is a gain in understanding the role of the logical constants which comes from formulating introduction and elimination (or left and right) rules for them. Some authors have even suggested that one must be able to do so for an operator to count as logical. Further reading Sundholm, G. (1983) ‘Systems of Deduction’, in D. Gabbay and F. Guenthner (eds) Handbook of Philosophical Logic , Dordrecht: Reidel, vol. 1, 133–88. (A more detailed survey of the systems discussed here, with a useful bibliography; recommended as the next thing to read.) A.M. UNGAR NATURAL KINDS Objects belonging to a natural kind form a group of objects which have some theoretically important property in common. For example, rabbits form a natural kind, all samples of gold form another, and so on. Natural kinds are contrasted with arbitrary groups of objects such as the contents of dustbins, or collections of jewels. The latter have no theoretically important property in common: they have no unifying
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Page 613 feature. Natural kinds provide a system for classifying objects. Scientists can then use this system to predict and explain the behaviour of those objects. For these reasons, the topic of natural kinds is of special interest to metaphysics and to the philosophy of science. See also: TAXONOMY Further reading Schwartz, S.P. (ed.) (1977) Naming, Necessity , and Natural Kinds, London and Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. (Collection which reprints important papers by Kripke, Putnam, and others. It also contains a helpful introduction and a comprehensive bibliography.) CHRIS DALY NATURAL LAW When made within the discourse of ethics, political theory, or legal theory or philosophy of law, the claim that there is a natural law is an offer to explain and defend certain claims often made, in different terms, in the discourse of moral argument, politics or law. In pre-theoretical moral discourse, certain choices, actions or dispositions may be asserted to be ‘inhuman’, ‘unnaturally cruel’, ‘perverse’ or ‘morally unreasonable’. In pre-theoretical political discourse, certain proposals, policies or conduct may be described as violations of ‘human rights’. In international law and jurisprudence, certain actions may be described as ‘crimes against humanity’ and citizens may claim immunity from legal liability or obligations by appealing to a ‘higher law’. A natural law theory offers to explain why claims of this sort can be rationally warranted and true. It offers to do so by locating such claims in the context of a general theory of good and evil in human life so far as human life is shaped by deliberation and choice. Such a general theory can also be called a general theory of right and wrong in human choices and actions. It will contain both (1) normative propositions identifying types of choice, action or disposition as right or wrong, permissible, obligatory and so on, and (2) non-normative propositions about the objectivity and epistemological warrant of the normative propositions. See also: GROTIUS, H.; LEGAL IDEALISM; LEGAL POSITIVISM Further reading Finnis, J. (1980) Natural Law and Natural Rights, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (A wide-ranging and fundamental treatment with some, but not exclusive, emphasis on legal philosophical issues; suitable, though difficult, for a first approach to the subject.) JOHN FINNIS NATURAL LAWS see LAWS, NATURAL NATURAL PHILOSOPHY, MEDIEVAL Medieval Latin natural philosophy falls into two main periods, before the rise of the universities (mainly in the twelfth century, when works were produced in connection with aristocratic patrons, monastic institutions or cathedral schools) and after their rise. In the earlier period, the dominant Greek influence is that part of Plato’s Timaeus which had been translated into Latin and commented on by Calcidius. In the university period, the central works are those of Aristotle, often together with commentaries by Averroes. Before the twelfth century, there was very little that could be described as natural philosophy. Such work as existed fell mainly into the genres of natural history (encyclopedic works using Pliny and the like as sources), didactic works (perhaps following a question and answer format on the model of Seneca’s Natural Questions) or biblical commentary (especially commentaries on the Hexaemeron, or six days of creation). In the twelfth century, however, there are a number of original texts that may be considered as natural philosophy; examples include William of Conches’ Philosophia mundi (Philosophy of the World), Bernard Sylvester’s Cosmographia or Hildegard of Bingen’s Scivias (Know the Ways). Greek natural philosophy also reached the Latin West through its influence on medical works and on art, for example on drawings of the cosmos, heaven, angels and hell. The high and late Middle Ages (thirteenth and fourteenth centuries) was perhaps the preeminent period in all of history for natural philosophy. Natural philosophy was an official area of study in the arts faculties of medieval universities, alongside and distinct from the seven liberal arts (the trivium – grammar, rhetoric and logic – and the quadrivium – arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music), moral philosophy or ethics, and first philosophy or metaphysics. As a subject of the arts faculty, natural philosophy was also defined as distinct from the subjects studied in the graduate faculties of theology, medicine and law. The most common approach to natural philosophy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was to comment on, or to dispute
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Page 614 questions arising from, the natural works of Aristotle, especially his Physics, On the Heavens , On Generation and Corruption, Meteorology and On the Soul , as well as his various works in biological areas and the so-called Parva Naturalia , a group of short works on psychological topics. Medieval investigations of the cosmos that were largely mathematical – for example, most of astronomy – were considered in the Middle Ages to belong not to natural philosophy but to the quadrivium or perhaps to the so-called ‘middle sciences’ (such as optics, statics or the newly developed ‘science of motion’). What little medieval experimental science there may have been (for instance that appearing in Peter Peregrinus’ De magnete (On the Magnet), in Frederick II’s De arte venandi cum avibus (On the Art of Hunting with Birds) and perhaps in some works on alchemy) seems not to have been done within the university setting. In the fourteenth century the new methods of medieval logic (supposition theory, propositional analysis or exposition, rules for solving sophismata and so on) are prominently used in natural philosophy. Thirteenth- and fourteenth-century natural philosophy began with the general assumption of the Aristotelian world view, but later medieval natural philosophers did not hold to the Aristotelian view rigidly or dogmatically. In some cases, Christian faith seemed to contradict or to add to Aristotle’s ideas, and natural philosophers tried to resolve these contradictions or to make the appropriate additions, as in the case of heaven and hell and angels. A number of difficulties, inconsistencies and sticking points in Aristotle were special subjects for discussion and received new resolutions as time went on. Within the medieval university, natural philosophy was considered to be a part of general education, but it was also thought to be useful as a tool for theology and medicine. In northern universities such as Paris and Oxford, some of the most fundamental original work in natural philosophy was done in connection with the investigation of theological problems, for which natural philosophy, together with the other disciplines of the arts faculty, served as important aids. In Italian universities, where faculties of theology were less prominent or non-existent, natural philosophy was similarly tied to the resolution of medical questions. European libraries contain many manuscript commentaries on Aristotelian works that still await modern analysis. The medieval university system did not as a rule identify, encourage or reward originality or uniqueness. Many natural philosophers claimed to be explaining Aristotle’s meaning, even when they were introducing a novel interpretation of or variation on his ideas. When they made use of the ideas of earlier commentators, they rarely mentioned them by name. What we now know about medieval natural philosophy is not a mirror reflection of what happened in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, because modern scholars have chosen to study those subjects and individuals relevant to their own present situations: Dominicans have emphasized the history of Dominican natural philosophy in such thinkers as Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, Franciscans have studied Franciscans such as John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, historians of science have studied those individuals who had something to say about the subjects of modern science such as bodies, forces, velocities and resistances, logicians have studied logic, and so on. Because natural philosophy as such is not the focus of attention of many modern philosophers or other scholars, much medieval natural philosophy remains unread, sometimes in large-scale and handsomely produced commentaries on Aristotle’s works, sometimes in hastily scribbled student notebooks. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM, MEDIEVAL; ETERNITY OF THE WORLD, MEDIEVAL VIEW OF; MECHANICS, ARISTOTELIAN; OXFORD CALCULATORS Further reading Grant, E. (1981) Studies in Medieval Science and Natural Philosophy , London: Variorum. (Collected articles especially relevant to cosmology, the impact of the condemnations of 1277, the roles of John Buridan and Nicole Oresme in fourteenth century natural philosophy, and the longevity of the Aristotelian world view.) Sorabji, R. (1983) Time, Creation and the Continuum: Theories in Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. (Wide-ranging discussion of the essential late Hellenistic background to medieval natural philosophy.) EDITH DUDLEY SYLLA NATURAL THEOLOGY Natural theology aims at establishing truths or acquiring knowledge about God (or divine matters generally) using only our natural cognitive resources. The phrase ‘our natural cognitive resources’ identifies both the methods and data for natural theology: it relies on standard techniques of reasoning and facts or
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Page 615 truths in principle available to all human beings just in virtue of their possessing reason and sense perception. As traditionally conceived, natural theology begins by establishing the existence of God, and then proceeds by establishing truths about God’s nature (for example, that God is eternal, immutable and omniscient) and about God’s relation to the world. A precise characterization of natural theology depends on further specification of its methods and data. One strict conception of natural theology – the traditional conception sometimes associated with Thomas Aquinas – allows only certain kinds of deductive argument, the starting points of which are propositions that are either self-evident or evident to sense perception. A broader conception might allow not just deductive but also inductive inference and admit as starting points propositions that fall short of being wholly evident. Natural theology contrasts with investigations into divine matters that rely at least in part on data not naturally available to us as human beings. This sort of enterprise might be characterized as revelationbased theology, in so far as the supernatural element on which it relies is something supernaturally revealed to us by God. Revelation-based theology can make use of what is ascertainable by us only because of special divine aid. Dogmatic and biblical theology would be enterprises of this sort. Critics of natural theology fall generally into three groups. The first group, the majority, argue that some or all of the particular arguments of natural theology are, as a matter of fact, unsuccessful. Critics in the second group argue that, in principle, natural theology cannot succeed, either because of essential limitations on human knowledge that make it impossible for us to attain knowledge of God or because religious language is such as to make an investigation into its truth inappropriate. The third group of critics holds that natural theology is in some way irrelevant or inimical to true religion. They argue in various ways that the objectifying, abstract and impersonal methods of natural theology cannot capture what is fundamentally important about the divine and our relation to it. See also: GOD, CONCEPTS OF; REVELATION Further reading Plantinga, A. and Wolterstorff, N. (eds) (1983) Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God , Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. (A seminal collection of essays presenting the foundations of the anti-evidentialist movement in religious epistemology.) Webb, C.C.J. (1915) Studies in the History of Natural Theology , Oxford: Clarendon Press. (An older but illuminating general study of different historical approaches to natural theology.) SCOTT MacDONALD NATURALISM IN ETHICS Ethical naturalism is the project of fitting an account of ethics into a naturalistic worldview. It includes nihilistic theories, which see no place for real values and no successful role for ethical thought in a purely natural world. The term ‘naturalism’ is often used more narrowly, however, to refer to cognitivist naturalism, which holds that ethical facts are simply natural facts and that ethical thought succeeds in discovering them. G.E. Moore attacked cognitivist naturalism as mistaken in principle, for committing what he called the ‘naturalistic fallacy’. He thought a simple test showed that ethical facts could not be natural facts (the ‘fallacy’ lay in believing they could be), and he took it to follow that ethical knowledge would have to rest on nonsensory intuition. Later writers have added other arguments for the same conclusions. Moore himself was in no sense a naturalist, since he thought that ethics could be given a ‘non-natural’ basis. Many who elaborated his criticisms of cognitivist naturalism, however, have done so on behalf of generic ethical naturalism, and so have defended either ethical nihilism or else some more modest constructive position, usually a version of noncognitivism. Noncognitivists concede to nihilists that nature contains no real values, but deny that it was ever the function of ethical thought to discover such things. They thus leave ethical thought room for success at some other task, such as providing the agent with direction for action. Defenders of cognitivist naturalism deny that there is a ‘naturalistic fallacy’ or that ethical knowledge need rest on intuition; and they have accused Moore and his successors of relying on dubious assumptions in metaphysics, epistemology, the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind. Thus many difficult philosophical issues have been implicated in the debate. See also: MORAL KNOWLEDGE Further reading Foot, P. (1978) Virtues and Vices , Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
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Page 616 (Essays by a prominent defender of cognitivist naturalism. Chaps 7–9 question the autonomy of ethics, 10–13 its rational authority.) Hare, R.M. (1952) The Language of Morals, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (A highly influential presentation of noncognitivism, which attempts to derive the autonomy of ethics from the distinctively action-guiding character of ethical language. Like most writers influenced by Moore, Hare uses the term ‘naturalism’ for what this entry calls cognitivist naturalism.) NICHOLAS L. STURGEON NATURALISM IN SOCIAL SCIENCE Naturalism is a term used in several ways. The more specific meanings of ‘naturalism’ in the philosophy of social sciences rest on the great popular authority acquired by modern scientific methods and forms of explanation in the wake of the seventeenth-century scientific revolution. For many of the thinkers of the European Enlightenment and their nineteenth-century followers the success of science in uncovering the laws governing the natural world was used as an argument for the extension of its methods into the study of morality, society, government and human mental life. Not only would this bring the benefit of consensus in these contested areas, but also it would provide a sound basis for ameliorative social reform. Among the most influential advocates of naturalism, in this sense, was the early nineteenthcentury French philosopher Auguste Comte. The authority of the new mechanical science, even as an account of non-human nature, continued to be resisted by romantic philosophers. However, the more limited task of resisting the scientific ‘invasion’ of human self-understanding was taken up by the Neo-Kantian philosophers of the latter part of the nineteenth century, in Germany. Followers and associates of this tradition (such as Windelband, Rickert, Dilthey and others) insist that there is a radical gulf between scientific knowledge of nature, and the forms of understanding which are possible in the sphere of humanly created meanings and cultures. This view is argued for in several different ways. Sometimes a contrast is made between the regularities captured in laws of nature, on the one hand, and social rules, on the other. Sometimes human consciousness and self-understanding is opposed to the non-conscious ‘behaviour’ of non-human beings and objects, so that studying society is more like reading a book or having a conversation than it is like studying a chemical reaction. See also: POSITIVISM IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES Further reading Bhaskar, R. (1979) The Possibility of Naturalism , Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, 1989. (Argues for an epistemological naturalism that recognizes both methodological and ontological peculiarities of the human sciences.) Wilson, B. (ed.) (1970) Rationality, Oxford: Blackwell. (A classic collection of papers devoted to issues posed by anti-naturalist arguments, centring on the possibility of cross-cultural criteria of rationality, and the intelligibility of ‘alien’ cultures.) TED BENTON NATURALIZED EPISTEMOLOGY The term ‘naturalized epistemology’ was coined by W.V. Quine to refer to an approach to epistemology which he introduced in his 1969 essay ‘Epistemology Naturalized’. Many of the moves that are distinctive of naturalized epistemology were made by David Hume, but Quine’s essay fixes the sense of the term as it is used today. Naturalized epistemology has critical as well as constructive thrusts. In a critical spirit, ‘naturalists’ (theorists who identify with the label ‘naturalized epistemology’) abandon several assumptions that are part of the tradition. They reject Descartes’ vision of epistemology as the attempt to convert our beliefs into an edifice resting on a foundation about which we have complete certainty. Descartes is wrong to equate knowledge with certainty, and wrong to think that knowledge is available through a priori theorizing, through reasoning which makes no use of experience. Nor should epistemology continue as David Hume’s attempt to rest knowledge on an introspective study of the mind’s contents. Moreover, the global sceptic’s claim that there is no way to justify all our views at once, should either be conceded or ignored. On the constructive side, naturalists suggest that in investigating knowledge we rely on the apparatus, techniques and assumptions of natural science. Accordingly, naturalized epistemology will be a scientific (and hence neither indefeasible nor a priori) explanation of how it is that some beliefs come to be knowledge. Issues of scepticism will be addressed only when they come up in the course of a scientific investigation.
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Page 617 Quine’s seminal essay lays out the core of naturalized epistemology, but subsequent naturalists disagree on the appropriate responses to several issues, among them the following: First, may theories be tested on the basis of (independently plausible) theory-neutral observation, or are observations simply more theory? Second, after being naturalized, does epistemology survive as an autonomous discipline? Quine argues that epistemology should become a subfield of natural science, presumably a part of psychology, so that there is no separate field left specifically to philosophers. But can all our questions about knowledge be answered by natural scientists? Third, the claim that epistemology explains how knowledge comes to be suggests that epistemology will merely describe the origins of beliefs we take to be known; but what is the relationship between such descriptive issues and normative issues such as that of how we ought to arrive at our views? Fourth, to what extent is the new approach to epistemology susceptible to sceptical concerns such as those that so plagued traditional epistemologists, and how effective a response can be made to those concerns? See also: KNOWLEDGE, CONCEPT OF; NATURALIZED PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE Further reading BonJour, L. (1985) The Structure of Empirical Knowledge , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Important and highly accessible defence of an internalist approach to the theory of knowledge.) Quine, W.V. (1969) ‘Epistemology Naturalized’, in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays, New York: Columbia University Press. (The definitive essay of naturalized epistemology. Accessible.) STEVEN LUPER NATURALIZED PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE Naturalized philosophy of science is part of a general programme of naturalism in philosophy. Naturalists reject all forms of supernaturalism, holding that reality, including human life and culture, is exhausted by what exists in the causal order of nature. Naturalists also reject any claims to a priori knowledge, including that of principles of inference, holding instead that all knowledge derives from human interactions with the natural world. Philosophically, naturalists identify most closely with empiricism or pragmatism. David Hume was a naturalist, as was John Dewey. The logical empiricists were naturalists regarding fundamental ontological categories such as space, time and causality, but non-naturalists about scientific inference, which they came to regard as a branch of logic. Most naturalists now dismiss searches for ‘philosophical foundations’ of the special sciences, treating the basic principles of any science as part of scientific theory itself. The main objection to naturalism has been at the level of general methodological principles, particularly those regarding scientific inference. Here non-naturalists object that, being limited to ‘describing’ how science is in fact practised, naturalists cannot provide norms for legitimate scientific inferences. And providing such norms is held to be one of the main goals of the philosophy of science. Naturalists reply that the only norms required for science are those connecting specific means with the assumed goals of research. These connections can be established only through further scientific research. And the choice of goals is, for naturalists, not a scientific question but a matter of practical choice guided by an empirical understanding of what can in fact be achieved. Among naturalists, the main differences concern the relative importance of various aspects of the practice of science. These aspects exist at different levels: neurological, biological, psychological, personal, computational, methodological, social and cultural. Each of these levels has its champions among contemporary naturalists, some insisting that everything ultimately be reduced to their favourite level. Perhaps the wisest approach is to allow that influences at all levels are operative in any scientific context, while admitting that some influences may be more important than others in particular cases, depending on what one seeks to understand. There may be no simple, one-level, naturalistic theory of science. Further reading Giere, R.N. (1988) Explaining Science: A Cognitive Approach , Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (A comprehensive naturalistic theory of science emphasizing contributions from the cognitive sciences.) Hatfield, G. (1989) The Natural and the Normative: Theories of Perception from Kant to Helmholtz , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (A masterly though demanding history of naturalism in German philosophy.) RONALD N. GIERE
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Page 618 NATURE, AESTHETIC APPRECIATION OF In the Western world, aesthetic appreciation of nature and its philosophical investigation came to fruition in the eighteenth century. During that time, aestheticians made nature the ideal object of aesthetic experience and analysed that experience in terms of disinterestedness, thereby laying the groundwork for understanding the appreciation of nature in terms of the sublime and the picturesque. This philosophical tradition reached its zenith with Kant, while popular aesthetic appreciation of nature continued primarily in terms of the picturesque. In the late twentieth century, renewed interest in the aesthetics of nature has produced various positions designed to avoid assimilating appreciation of nature with traditional models for aesthetic appreciation of art. Three are especially noteworthy. The first holds that the appreciation of nature is not in fact aesthetic; the second rejects the traditional analysis of aesthetic experience as disinterested, arguing instead that the aesthetic appreciation of nature involves engagement with nature; the third attempts to maintain the traditional analysis, while distinguishing aesthetic appreciation of nature by dependence on scientific knowledge. These positions have a number of ramifications. In freeing aesthetic appreciation of nature from artistic models, they pave the way for a general environmental aesthetics comparable to other areas of philosophy, such as environmental ethics. Moreover, the significance given to scientific knowledge in the third position both explains the aesthetic appreciation associated with environmentalism and provides aesthetic appreciation of nature with a degree of objectivity that may make aesthetic considerations more effectual in environmental assessment. See also: AESTHETIC ATTITUDE; AESTHETICS, JAPANESE Further reading Kemal, S. and Gaskell, I. (eds) (1993) Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (A useful collection of essays by a number of the main contributors to this area of research.) Sepänmaa, Y. (1993) The Beauty of Environment , Denton: Environmental Ethics Books, 2nd edn. (A discussion of a number of key issues in the field, together with a useful bibliography.) ALLEN CARLSON NATURE AND CONVENTION The nature–convention distinction opposes instinctual or ‘spontaneous’ modes of comportment (those which follow from ‘human nature’) to those which are socially instituted or culturally prescribed. Its philosophic interest resides in its use to justify or contest specific forms of human behaviour and social organization. Since the ‘conventional’ is opposed to the ‘natural’ as that which is in principle transformable, the adherents of a particular order in human affairs have standardly sought to prove its ‘naturality’, while its critics have sought to expose its merely ‘conventional’ status. Relatedly, ‘conventions’ may be associated with what is distinctive to ‘human’, as opposed to ‘bestial’ nature, or denounced for their role in repressing our more ‘natural’ impulses. See also: CONVENTIONALISM; CULTURE Further reading Horigan, S. (1988) Nature and Culture in Western Discourses , London: Routledge. (A critical survey of the ways in which the nature–culture divide has been conceptualized in anthropology.) KATE SOPER NATURPHILOSOPHIE Naturphilosophie refers to the philosophy of nature prevalent especially in German philosophy, science and literary movements from around 1790 to about 1830. It pleaded for an organic and dynamic worldview as an alternative to the atomist and mechanist outlook of modern science. Against the Cartesian dualism of matter and mind which had given way to the mechanist materialism of the French Encyclopedists, Spinoza’s dual aspect theory of mind and matter as two modes of a single substance was favoured. The sources of this heterogeneous movement lie in the philosophy of German idealism as well as in late classicism and Romanticism. The leading figure, Schelling, assimilated and stimulated the major trends and ideas through his work. After the death of Hegel (1831) and of Goethe (1832), Naturphilosophie quickly disappeared from the mainstream. Yet it survived in various different forms, especially as an under-current of German culture and science, until the twentieth century. See also: ROMANTICISM, GERMAN; GERMAN IDEALISM Further reading Esposito, J.L. (1977) Schelling’s Idealism and Philosophy of Nature ,
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Page 619 Lewisburg, PA and London: Associated University Presses. (Short account of Schelling’s philosophy of nature. Useful chapter on Schelling’s contemporary critics and on his influence on nineteenth-century America) Poggi, S. and Bossi, M. (eds) (1994) Romanticism in Science: Science in Europe, 1790–1840 , Dordrecht: Kluwer. (Essays on Romanticism and Naturphilosophie in biology, chemistry, psychology, philosophy and mathematics.) MICHAEL HEIDELBERGER NECESSARY BEING Many think that God is perfect, or free from defect, and that being able not to exist is a defect. These infer that God is not able not to exist – that is, that God exists necessarily. Some add that what makes God perfect also makes him exist necessarily, and so trace his necessity to his immateriality (Aristotle), eternity (Plotinus) or simplicity (Aquinas). Others trace God’s necessity to his relation to creatures (Ibn Sina, Anselm). Spinoza and Leibniz held that what makes God necessary explains his very existence. Many have thought that if God exists necessarily, there is a sound ontological argument for God’s existence, or that if there is a sound ontological argument for God’s existence, God exists necessarily. But both claims are false. Some have used philosophical views of the nature of necessity – for example, that all necessity is conventional, a matter of how we choose to use words – to challenge God’s necessary existence. But the theories which best support these challenges have fallen from favour, and in fact, even if one accepts the theories, the challenges fail. See also: GOD, ARGUMENTS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF Further reading Plantinga, A. (1980) Does God Have a Nature? , Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press. (Full, careful treatment of God’s relation to necessity. Includes interesting exegesis of Descartes, with references to important literature.) BRIAN LEFTOW NECESSARY TRUTH AND CONVENTION Necessary truths have always seemed problematic, particularly to empiricists and other naturalisticallyminded philosophers. Our knowledge here is a priori – grounded in appeals to what we can imagine or conceive (or can prove on that basis) – which seems hard to reconcile with such truths being factual, short of appealing to some peculiar faculty of a priori intuition. And what mysterious extra feature do necessary truths possess which makes their falsity impossible? Conventionalism about necessity claims that necessary truths obtain by virtue of rules of language, such as that ‘vixen’ means the same as ‘female fox’. Because such rules govern our descriptions of all cases – including counter-factual or imagined ones – they generate necessary truths (‘All vixens are foxes’), and our a priori knowledge is just knowledge of word meaning. Opponents of conventionalism argue that conventions cannot ground necessary truths, particularly in logic, and have also challenged the notion of analyticity (truth by virtue of meaning). More recent claims that some necessary truths are a posteriori have also fuelled opposition to conventionalism. See also: CONVENTIONALISM Further reading Ayer, A.J. (1936) Language, Truth and Logic, London: Gollancz; repr., New York: Dover, 2nd edn, 1946, 16–18 and ch. 4. (Influential and often cited presentation of conventionalism about necessity (and a priori truth); seen by many as claiming that necessary truths say that there is a convention (but see Broad 1936).) Sidelle, A. (1989) Necessity, Essence and Individuation: A Defense of Conventionalism , Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. (Defends a conventionalist account of necessary a posteriori truths.) ALAN SIDELLE NECKHAM, ALEXANDER (1157–1217) Alexander Neckham is one of the leading thinkers in the English appropriation of the new science made available during the twelfth century. His best-known writings, especially De naturis rerum (On the Natures of Things), show a prodigious acquaintance with natural history. Neckham was most concerned, however, that the study of the natural world be made to serve the purposes of theology. He thus strove not only to draw moral lessons from nature, but to apply to theological method the doctrines of the new logic, especially Aristotle’s Topics . While Neckham cannot be said to have mastered the texts that were flooding into the Latin West, he certainly did realize the challenges and the
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Page 620 possibilities that they offered to inherited theologies. See also: NATURAL PHILOSOPHY, MEDIEVAL Further reading Hunt, R.W. (1984) The Schools and the Cloister: The Life and Writings of Alexander Nequam, ed. and revised M.T. Gibson, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Revised from a doctoral dissertation completed in 1936.) MARK D. JORDAN NÉDELLEC, HERVÉ see HERVAEUS NATALIS NEEDS AND INTERESTS To have an interest in something is to have a stake in how that thing goes. Needs can be thought of as interests instrumental to a specified purpose, as an artist will need paint, or as general essential interests, like the needs associated with physical survival. Both needs and interests can be contrasted with wants, in being more objectively assessable. A concrete specification of needs and interests is better done by means of a list than by a criterion stipulated in terms of goods that would be chosen in a hypothetical situation. The concept of need can be used to justify a claim to economic resources, even though it only states a minimal demand. However, when total resources will not meet all needs, it is necessary to work with the principle of the equal consideration of interests rather than that of needs, as in the case where health care needs may outstrip available resources. The concept of interests can be misused in defence of authoritarian political systems, but does not have to be used in this way. Although citizens may have an interest in performing their duty, it is likely that there will always be a continuing conflict between duty and interests in politics. Further reading Doyal, L. and Gough, I. (1991) A Theory of Human Need , Basingstoke: Macmillan. (Usefully brings together philosophical and social science analyses of needs.) Plant, R. (1991) Modern Political Thought, Oxford: Blackwell. (Has a good discussion of various approaches to the concept of needs.) ALBERT WEALE NEGATIVE FACTS IN CLASSICAL INDIAN PHILOSOPHY Like their European counterparts, the philosophers of classical India were interested in the problem of negative facts. A negative fact may be thought of, at the outset at least, as a state of affairs that corresponds to a negative statement, such as ‘Mr Smith is not in this room’. The question that perplexed the philosophers of India was: How does someone, say Ms Jones, know that Mr Smith is not in the room? There are essentially four possible metaphysical positions to account for what it is that Ms Jones knows when, after entering a room, she comes to know that her friend is not present there. Each of the positions has been adopted and defended by certain classical Indian philosophers. On the one hand, some take the absence of the friend from the room as a brute, negative fact. Of these, some hold knowledge of this fact to be perceptual, while others hold it to be inferential. On the other hand, some hold that the absence of the friend from the room has no real ontic status at all, and believe that what there really is in the situation is just the sum of all the things present in the office. These latter philosophers hold that knowledge of one’s friend’s absence is just knowledge of what is present, though some believe the knowledge results from perception, while others believe it to result from inference. These four positions were maintained by, respectively, the Nyāya philosopher Jayanta, the Mīmāṃsā philosophers Kumārila Bhaṭṭa and Prabhākara, and the Buddhist Dharmakīrti. See also: KNOWLEDGE, INDIAN VIEWS OF Further reading Datta, D.M. (1932) Six Ways of Knowing: A Critical Study of the Vedānta Theory of Knowledge , Calcutta: Calcutta University Press, 2nd rev. edn, 1960. (Book 3, chapter 4 provides a comprehensive modern survey of absences and their knowability.) Gillon, B.S. (1997) ‘Negative Facts and Knowledge of Negative Facts’, in P. Bilmoria and J.N. Mohanty (eds) Relativism, Suffering, and Beyond: Essays in Memory of Bimal K . Matilal , Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1969, 128–49. (A contemporary philosophical treatment of theissue,which takesinto account both Western and Indian views.) BRENDAN S. GILLON
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Page 621 NEGATIVE THEOLOGY The term ‘negative theology’ refers to theologies which regard negative statements as primary in expressing our knowledge of God, contrasted with ‘positive theologies’ giving primary emphasis to positive statements. The distinction was developed within Muslim, Jewish and Christian theism. If the negative way ( via negativa) is taken to its limits, two questions arise: first, whether one may speak of God equally well in impersonal as in personal terms (blurring the distinction between theism and, say, the philosophical Hinduism of Śankara); and second, whether it leads ultimately to rejecting any ultimate being or subject at all (blurring the distinction between theism and, say, the atheism of Mahāyāna Buddhism). However, within their original theistic context, positive and negative statements about God are interdependent, the second indispensably qualifying the first, the negative statements taken alone useless. Negative qualifications on positive statements attributing so-called ‘perfections’ to God – for example, existence, life, goodness, knowledge, love or active power (‘strength’) – are obviously necessary if God is unimaginable. If his presence is always of his whole being and life all at once, in each place in space and time, he must be non-spatial and non-temporal in being and nature, and clearly he must be unimaginable. However, his supposed ‘simplicity’ and ‘infinity’ imply that he is much more radically outside the reach of understanding or ‘comprehension’, imposing the negative way at a deeper level than mere unimaginability. This unimaginability and incomprehensibility are key to theistic accounts of prayer and the mystical life. See also: RELIGION AND EPISTEMOLOGY; RELIGIOUS LANGUAGE Further reading Mitchell, B. (ed.) (1971) The Philosophy of Religion, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (On the meaning of religious assertions: papers 1 (parts A and C), 2 and 3 present or discuss some modern cognitive approaches; papers 1 (part B), 4 and 7 present some modern noncognitive ones.) Tanner, N.P. (ed.) (1990) Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 1, London: Sheed & Ward, and Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. (This standard, widely available work provides both original text and translation.) DAVID BRAINE NEMESIUS ( fl. c. 390–400 AD) Nemesius’ treatise De natura hominis (On the Nature of Man) is the first work by a Christian thinker dedicated to articulating a comprehensive philosophical anthropology. Like many of his pagan and Christian contemporaries, Nemesius employs Platonic, Aristotelian and Stoic ethical psychologies in developing his views, but he also provides remarkably detailed accounts of the physiological structure and function of the sense-faculties based on extensive medical knowledge. See also: PATRISTIC PHILOSOPHY Further reading Nemesius ( c .390–400) De natura hominis (On the Nature of Man), ed. M. Morani, Leipzig: Teubner, 1987; trans. W. Telfer in Cyril of Jerusalem and Nemesius of Emesa , Library of Christian Classics vol. 4, London: SCM Press, 1955. (This is the standard critical edition of the Greek text of De natura hominis .) JOHN BUSSANICH NEO-CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY Chinese neo-Confucian philosophy, or ‘neo-Confucianism’, is a term which refers to a wide variety of substantially different Chinese thinkers from the Song dynasty (960–1279) through the Qing dynasty (1644–1911). In at least one respect the term is misleading, for unlike Neoplatonists, most neoConfucians saw themselves as reviving, not revising, the earlier Confucian tradition. What united all these thinkers was a common allegiance to Confucius and his thought. Many of the central debates within the tradition concern the issue of who could claim to be Confucius’ legitimate heir. Despite their shared dedication to Confucius’ legacy, a number of the central beliefs of neo-Confucians were unknown to Confucius and his early followers and appear to be at odds with early Confucian views. Many of these beliefs were part of a novel, elaborate and comprehensive metaphysical scheme linking human beings (as microcosm) to the universe (as macrocosm). Such cosmological theories provided a new ground for Confucian ethical claims and strengthened a tendency towards the mystical identification of the self with the universe. These changes also helped to transform the earlier Confucian concern with self-cultivation and steady moral improvement to a more dramatic quest for spiritual enlightenment, replete with a distinctly Confucian style of meditation. One widely accepted account of the rise of
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Page 622 neo-Confucianism sees it as a reaction on the part of Confucian scholars to the perceived dominance of Buddhist thought. On this view, Confucians had become complacent in the period between the end of the Han dynasty, in the early third century AD, to the beginnings of the neo-Confucian movement late in the ninth century. Fearing that their way of life was in peril, these later Confucians resolved to overcome their Buddhist competitors and revive their tradition. Purportedly, these later Confucians realized that in order to accomplish these goals they would need to develop and deploy an account of the Confucian tradition that could compete with and overcome the complex metaphysical schemes the Buddhists had used to argue against them. For these strategic reasons, early neo-Confucians focused their attention on texts like the Mengzi (Mencius), Daxue (Great Learning) and Zhongyong (Doctrine of the Mean) and began to evolve a version of Confucianism that was supported by the kind of comprehensive and complex metaphysical system described above. A different account of the rise of neo-Confucianism can be given, however, in which the selection of certain texts and the development of new styles and practices of reasoning are not seen as selfconscious strategic borrowings from Buddhism and Daoism. Rather, these characteristic features of neoConfucianism are consequences of the profound and pervasive effect that Buddhist and Daoist thought had exerted for centuries upon Chinese intellectuals. There was no organized or distinct group of thinkers who identified and thought of themselves as Confucians in the centuries immediately prior to the neo-Confucian revival. Rather, Chinese intellectuals had come to accept a wide range of philosophical ideas and spiritual practices as part and parcel of literati culture. When certain of these broadly read and eclectically trained individuals began looking back to the writings of early Confucian figures, they did so through the categories and with the concerns and approaches of their age. Their angle of vision had changed, and as a result they saw these earlier sources differently. This new orientation led them to elevate certain texts to canonical status; in some cases, these were texts that were unknown to the sages they claimed to follow. Moreover, these later Confucians developed particular aspects of the classical writings in ways that would have been unrecognizable to the founding figures of the tradition they so adamantly defended. The great impetus for the revival of Confucianism came with a series of social and political crises that came to a head roughly in the middle of the eighth century. Under the dual pressures of internal rebellion and economic distress and external attack on a number of different fronts, Chinese intellectuals began to question their fundamental beliefs and practices. Rather than calling for reform or progress, such reflection led them back to their roots. Increasingly, they came to believe that the primary source of their troubles was that they had lost their Way. Like the foreign enemies who plagued them from without, they were being undermined by a foreign force from within: the non-Chinese religion of Buddhism and its spiritual cousin Daoism. These had led them to abandon the true source of their strength and former glory: the culture of classical China. Their course was clear. They must retrieve and revive the classical culture that was their very essence. In so doing they would replay the roles their most revered sages, Confucius and Mencius, had played in their own degenerate ages. This call to defend and promote ‘this culture’ served as the rallying point for the neo-Confucian movement. Towards the end of the neo-Confucian period, Chinese Confucians themselves began to recognize the degree to which earlier neo-Confucians had incorporated beliefs and styles of reasoning that were alien to Confucius’ way of thinking, specifically ideas drawn from Buddhism and Daoism, into the tradition. A number of these Qing dynasty thinkers saw their task primarily in terms of purging the tradition of these foreign elements in an effort to reconstitute a purer form of Confucius’ original vision. See also: CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY, CHINESE; ZHU XI Further reading Chan Wing-tsit (1963) A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Selective translations and brief introductions of most of the major neo-Confucian thinkers.) Metzger, T.A. (1977) Escape From Predicament , New York: Columbia University Press. (An insightful study of neo-Confucianism. One of the few works that shows the proper appreciation of their metaphysical commitments and the relationship of these to their ethical views.) PHILIP J. IVANHOE
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Page 623 NEO-KANTIANISM In contrast to earlier research, which chose to distinguish up to seven schools of thought within the field of Neo-Kantianism, more recent scholarship takes two basic movements as its starting point: the Marburg School and the Southwest German School, which are based respectively on systematically oriented works on Kant published during the 1870s and 1880s by Hermann Cohen and Wilhelm Windelband. Cohen held that Kant’s concern in all three Critiques was to reveal those a priori moments which above all give rise to the domains of scientific experience, morality and aesthetics. Windelband on the other hand held that Kant’s achievement lay in the attempt to create a critical science of norms which, instead of giving a genetic explanation of the norms of logic, morality and aesthetics, aimed instead to elucidate their validity. In both approaches, an initial phase during which Kant’s doctrines were appropriated subsequently developed into the production of systems. Thus Cohen published a ‘System of Philosophy’ during the early years of the twentieth century, which consisted of the Logik der reinen Erkenntnis (Logic of Pure Knowledge) (1902), the Ethik des reinen Willens (Ethics of Pure Will) (1904) and the Ästhetik des reinen Gefühls (Aesthetics of Pure Feeling) (1912) and which radicalized the operative approach of his work on Kant. Later, Cohen conceived a Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums ( Religion of Reason from the Sources of Judaism ) (1919). Windelband, on the other hand, who made a name for himself primarily in the sphere of the history of philosophy, understood philosophy to be essentially concerned with value, anchored in transcendental consciousness. He emphatically linked the classical division of philosophy into logic, ethics and aesthetics to the values of Truth, Goodness and Beauty and also tried to situate the philosophy of religion in this context. Apart from Cohen, the Marburg School is represented by Paul Natorp and Ernst Cassirer, whose early works followed Cohen’s philosophical views (compare Natorp’s interpretation of the Platonic doctrine of ideas and Cassirer’s history of the problem of knowledge), but whose later works modified his approach. Nevertheless, their extensions and developments can also be explained within the framework of the original Marburg doctrines. The ontological turn which Natorp undertook in his later years can be seen as a radicalization of Cohen’s principle of origin, which Natorp believed could not be expressed in terms of pure intellectual positing, and the operative moment introduced by Cohen lives on as a theory of creative formation in Cassirer’s theory of symbolic forms. In addition to Windelband, the Southwest German school of Neo-Kantianism is represented by Heinrich Rickert, Emil Lask, Jonas Cohn and Bruno Bauch. Windelband instigated the systematic approach of the Southwest School, but it was left to Rickert to develop it fully. Unlike Windelband, who traced the difference between history and science back to the difference between the idiographic and the nomothetic methods, Rickert distinguished between the individualizing concepts of history and the generalizing concepts of science. During his middle period he turned his attention to the problem of articulating a system of values. In his later works, Rickert also turned towards ontology, a development which should not necessarily be interpreted as a break with the constitutional theories of his early years. In concrete terms, building on his earlier theories concerning the constitutive role of concepts in experience, Rickert henceforth distinguishes not only the realm of scientific and cultural objects and the sphere of values, but also the further ontological domains of the world of the free subject and the metaphysical world, which is the object of faith and which can only be comprehended by thinking in symbols. Lask’s theoretical philosophy was characterized by a turn to objectivism. In contrast to the classical NeoKantian conception of knowledge, according to which everything given is determined by the forms of cognition, Lask sees matter as that element which determines meaning. Accordingly, at the centre of his theory of knowledge is not the subject’s activity in constituting the object, but the subject’s openness to the object. In the final stage of his philosophy, however, he once more attributed to the subject an autonomous role in the actualization of knowledge. Cohn contributed to Southwest German NeoKantianism not only his Allgemeine Ästhetik (General Theory of Aesthetics) (1901), but also works on the philosophy of culture and education as well as on the systematic articulation of values and the problem of reality. During the 1920s Cohn moved towards dialectics. In contrast to Hegel, however, he understood this to mean critical dialectics inasmuch as it does not aim to sublate or overcome opposition, but merely sets itself the unending task of attempting to resolve irreconcilable contradictions.
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Page 624 Finally, Bauch can be regarded as the most essentially synthetic thinker of the Southwest German NeoKantian school. He tried to demonstrate the inseparable connectedness of individual problems which had generally been treated separately. Apart from his great Kantian monographs, these ideas are also put forward in his systematic works on the questions of theoretical and practical philosophy, such as his study Wahrheit, Wert und Wirklichkeit (Truth, Value and Reality) (1923) and his Grundzüge der Ethik (Fundamentals of Ethics) (1935). Despite the one-sidedness of its reception of Kant’s doctrines, Neo-Kantianism was important for the momentum it gave to research into Kantian philosophy during the twentieth century. Its systematic achievement lies in its development of the normative concept of validity and its programmatic outline for a philosophy of culture. See also: NEO-KANTIANISM, RUSSIAN Further reading Flach, W. and Holzhey, H. (1980) Erkenntnistheorie und Logik im Neukantianismus (Theory of Knowledge and Logic in Neo-Kantianism), Hildesheim: Olms. (Contains, apart from a collection of important source texts, an introduction to the theoretical philosophy of Neo-Kantianism.) Willey, T. (1987) Back to Kant. The Revival of Kantianism in German Social and Historical Thought 1860–1914, Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. (Casts light on the return to Kant in its contemporary context.) Translated from the German by Jane Michael and Nicholas Walker HANS-LUDWIG OLLIG NEO-KANTIANISM, RUSSIAN A rather amorphous movement, Russian Neo-Kantianism, in the first decades of the twentieth century, found its most visible and enduring representatives in A. Vvedenskii and his student/ disciple I. Lapshin, both of St Petersburg University, who together took a distinct stance within the movement as a whole. Both were chiefly concerned with epistemological issues although their respective publications revealed a much wider field of interests. Both maintained an allegiance to the spirit of Kantian philosophy while devoting little attention to the intricacies of the three Kantian Critiques . In addition, at Moscow University G. Chelpanov adhered to the ideality of the Kantian categories although he upheld an ultimate realism. In the social sciences P. Novgorodtsev and B. Kistiakovskii defended positions revealing a significant debt to the Baden School of German Neo-Kantianism, and as such they were deeply involved in methodological investigations. Several others (N. Berdiaev, P. Struve, G. Shpet) within Russia also briefly espoused a Neo-Kantianism after abandoning Marxism and before moving on to a usually more idealistic stance. Still another, younger group a decade later, centred chiefly around the journal Logos , maintained an idiosyncratic, though not fully articulated, amalgam of Kantian and Hegelian doctrines. The Bolshevik Revolution led to a decimation of what remained of the movement within Russia and a dispersal of its members, who became increasingly isolated from current philosophical trends and issues. Further reading Vucinich, A. (1976) Social Thought in Tsarist Russia , Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 106–52. (Incisive and highly informative particularly on Kistiakovskii.) THOMAS NEMETH NEOPLATONISM Neoplatonism was the final flowering of ancient Greek thought, from the third to the sixth or seventh century AD. Building on eight centuries of unbroken philosophical debate, it addressed questions such as: What is the true self? What is consciousness and how does it relate to reality? Can intuition be reconciled with reason? What are the first causes of reality? How did the universe come into being? How can an efficient cause retain its identity and yet be distributed among its effects? Why does the soul become embodied? What is the good life? There were several flavours of Neoplatonism, reflecting the concerns and backgrounds of its practitioners, who ranged from Plotinus and his circle of freelance thinkers to the heads of the university schools of the Roman Empire, Proclus, Ammonius and Damascius. In the later, more analysed form, we see a rich scheme of multi-layered metaphysics, epistemology and ethics, but also literary theory, mathematics, physics and other subjects, all integrated in one curriculum. Neoplatonism was not just a philosophy but the higher education system of its age. The Neoplatonism that came to dominate the ancient world from the fourth century was an inseparable mixture of inspired thought and
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Page 625 scholastic order. To this may be traced some of its internal conceptual conflicts: for example, the free individual soul versus the ranks of being, personal experience versus demonstrative knowledge. To this may also be traced its appeal to polar audiences: mystics and mathematizing scientists, romantics and rationalists. To the Neoplatonist, knowledge consists of degrees of completion. Take the example of tutor and student. Both study the same things, but the tutor has a wider and more intimate knowledge. The tutor opens the student’s mind to the breadth and intricacies of the study-matter, and corrects the student’s deliberations. So it is with the Neoplatonic levels of knowledge. Everylevel hasaccesstothe entire spectrum of what there is to know, but each with its appropriate adverbial modifier. At the ‘lower’ level an individual comprehends things ‘particularly’ and is concerned with the ‘images’ or presentations of mind and sense-impressions of the qualities of physical things. At the ‘higher’ level, an individual apprehends things ‘wholly’, as universal statements (often called ’laws’ and ‘canons’). The concern is with propositions about what is true or false, self-grounded and logically necessary. Thus the higher level corrects and supplies the ‘criterion’ for the lower level. Knowledge, however, is not an end in itself, but a means to salvation. Increasing awareness puts us in touch with the levels of reality of which we ourselves are part. The ultimate reality is none other than the fundamental unity out of which all came into being: God. In this union we recover our true good. As the summation of ancient Greek philosophy, Neoplatonism was transmitted to Byzantium, Islam and western Europe. It was the prime intellectual force behind the protagonists of the Italian Renaissance, and its influence was felt until the nineteenth century. See also: NEOPLATONISM IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY; PLATONISM, EARLY AND MIDDLE; PLATONISM, MEDIEVAL; RENAISSANCE PHILOSOPHY Further reading Gersh, S. (1986) Middle Platonism and Neo-platonism: The Latin Tradition, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. (Two source volumes for Latin Platonism from Cicero to medieval period; volume two covers Neoplatonism.) Wallis, R.T. (1972) Neoplatonism, London: Duckworth. (Compact but thorough account suitable for a newcomer to the subject.) LUCAS SIORVANES NEOPLATONISM IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY Islamic Neoplatonism developed in a milieu already saturated with the thought of Plotinus and Aristotle. The former studied in Alexandria, and the Alexandrine philosophical syllabus included such figures as Porphyry of Tyre and Proclus. Associated with these scholars were two major channels of Islamic Neoplatonism, the so-called Theology of Aristotle and the Liber de Causis (Book of Causes). Other cities beloved of the philosophers at the time of the rise of Islam in the first century AH (seventh century AD) included Gondeshapur and Harran. Islamic Neoplatonism stressed one aspect of the Qur’anic God, the transcendent, and ignored another, the creative. For the Neoplatonists, all things emanated from the deity. Islamic philosophers were imbued to a greater or lesser degree with either Aristotelianism or Neoplatonism or, as was often the case, with both. Al-Kindi, the father of Islamic philosophy, has a Neoplatonic aspect, but the doctrine reaches its intellectual fruition in the complex emanationist hierarchies developed by al-Farabi and Ibn Sina. Their views are later developed (or metamorphosed) by later thinkers into an emanative hierarchy of lights, as with Shihab al-Din al-Suhrawardi, or the doctrine of the Unity of Being espoused by Ibn al‘Arabi. While al-Ghazali and Ibn Rushd both vigorously opposed Neoplatonic views, the latter attacked the former for his general opposition to the philosophers. Neoplatonism itself had a major impact on that sectarian grouping of Muslims known as the Isma‘ilis, and became the substratum for its theology. Historically, Neoplatonism in Islam achieved its climax with the Fatimid Isma‘ili conquest of Egypt towards the end of the fourth century AH (tenth century AD). While Neoplatonism later declined in philosophical importance in the face of rampant Aristotelianism and Hanbalism, it may be said to have bequeathed an important religious, historical and cultural legacy to the Islamic world, which in the Isma‘ili movement endures to this day. See also: GREEK PHILOSOPHY: IMPACT ON ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY Further reading Fakhry, M. (1983) A History of Islamic Philosophy , 2nd edn, London: Longmans; New York: Columbia University Press. (A superb introduction to the whole field.) Shayegan, Y. (1996) ‘The Transmission of Greek Philosophy into the Islamic World’, in S.H.
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Page 626 Nasr and O. Leaman (eds) History of Islamic Philosophy , London: Routledge, ch. 6, 98–104. (Detailed account of how the transmission took place, paying particular attention to the Persian background.) IAN RICHARD NETTON NEO-PYTHAGOREANISM Neo-Pythagoreanism is a term used by modern scholars to refer to the revival of Pythagorean philosophy and way of life in the first century BC. It coincides with the redevelopment of Platonic thought known as Middle Platonism. Neo-Pythagoreans elaborated a mathematical metaphysics in which the highest level of being was occupied by a transcendent principle, equated with ‘the One’ or ‘the Monad’ and regarded as the source of all reality. Neo-Pythagorean anthropology reaffirmed the ancient Pythagorean belief in the immortality of the soul. Although Neo-Pythagoreanism is often indistinguishable from Middle Platonism, it is characterized by a tendency to see Pythagoras as the father of all true philosophers, including Plato. In the third century AD Neo-Pythagoreanism was absorbed into Neoplatonism. See also: PYTHAGOREANISM Further reading O’Meara, D.J. (1989) Pythagoras Revived: Mathematics and Philosophy in Late Antiquity , Oxford: Oxford University Press. (A short introduction to Neo-Pythagoreanism is followed by an account of the Neoplatonic adaptation of Pythagorean philosophy, particularly the mathematization of reality, by Iamblichus, Hierocles, Syrianus and Proclus.) HERMANN S. SCHIBLI NEUMANN, JOHN VON (1903–57) Von Neumann, born in Hungary and later emigrating to the USA, was one of the great mathematical minds of the twentieth century. His work has affected philosophy on several fronts, including logic and the philosophy of science. He also had great influence upon developments in the philosophy of mind: the computer model of mind employed during the middle-to-late twentieth century was explicitly based upon the von Neumann computer architecture. Although late twentieth-century philosophy of mind has largely rejected the von Neumann machine as a model of brain activity, his pioneering work in cellular automata has provided a basis for subsequent development in ‘distributed’ or ‘connectionist’ computer architectures. Further reading Nuemann, J. von (1958) The Computer and the Brain , New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. (The text of the 1956 Mrs Hepsa Ely Silliman memorial lectures, which von Neumann was too ill to deliver at Yale University; accessible to a general audience.) BRIAN ROSMAITA NEURATH, OTTO (1882–1945) An Austrian socialist philosopher, economist, sociologist and historian, Neurath was a charismatic orator and an energetic cultural activist. Deeply concerned with education as a tool for social progress and cooperation, he founded museums and created the Isotype language for visual education. During the Bavarian Revolution he headed a plan for the centralized socialization of the Bavarian economy. A determined supporter of the scientific attitude and opponent of metaphysics (which he believed to have pernicious political and social consequences), he was a founder member of the Vienna Circle and a heterodox proponent of logical empiricism. He spearheaded the Unity of Science Movement that launched the project of an encyclopedia of unified science. See also: VIENNA CIRCLE Further reading Cartwright, N., Cat J., Fleck, K. and Uebel, T. (1995) Between Science and Politics: The Philosophy of Otto Neurath , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (A study of the joint development of Neurath’s social science, his political activities and his philosophical point of view.) Neurath, O. (1983) Philosophical Papers 1913–1946, ed. R.S. Cohen and M. Neurath, Dordrecht: Reidel. (Selection of philosophical writings, predominantly from Neurath’s Vienna Circle period.) JORDI CAT NANCY CARTWRIGHT NEUTRAL MONISM Neutral monism is a theory of the relation of mind and matter. It holds that both are complex constructions out of more primitive elements that are ‘neutral’ in the sense that they are neither mental nor material. Mind and matter, therefore, do not differ in the intrinsic nature of their constituents but in the manner in which the
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Page 627 constituents are organized. The theory is monist only in claiming that all the basic elements of the world are of the same fundamental type (in contrast to mind–body dualism); it is, however, pluralist in that it admits a plurality of such elements (in contrast to metaphysical monism). See also: MONISM Further reading Russell, B. (1921) The Analysis of Mind, London: Routledge, 1995. (Russell’s first full statement of his neutral monism.) NICHOLAS GRIFFIN NEUTRALITY, POLITICAL The principle of political neutrality, which requires the state to remain neutral on disputed questions about the good, is an extension of traditional liberal principles of toleration and religious disestablishment. However, since neutrality is itself a contested concept, the principle remains indeterminate: is it, for example, a requirement of neutral reasons for legislation (or neutral legislative intentions) or is it a more exacting requirement of equal impact in so far as legislative consequences are concerned? The answer must surely reflect the deeper values that are used to justify the neutrality principle. This raises further problems, however. If the principle is based upon certain value commitments – such as the importance of equality or individual autonomy – then it cannot require us to be neutral about all values. It requires some sort of distinction between principles of right (of which neutrality is one) and conceptions of the good (among which neutrality is required). Critics believe that liberal principles of right are symptomatic of a deeper liberal bias in favour of individuality as a way of life. Perhaps liberals should embrace this point, and accept that the neutrality they advocate is quite superficial compared to the depth of their own value commitments. Further reading Goodin, R. and Reeve, A. (eds) (1989) Liberal Neutrality , London: Routledge. (A collection of original essays on the subject of neutrality, applied to various institutions of liberal society, such as the law, the market and the university.) JEREMY WALDRON NEWMAN, JOHN HENRY (1801–90) A Catholic convert, John Henry Newman was the principal architect of the Catholic revival (the Oxford or Tractarian movement) within the Church of England in the 1830s, and went on to become probably the most seminal of modern Roman Catholic thinkers. Although primarily a theologian, Newman regarded his defence of religious belief in terms of a philosophical justification of non-demonstrable certainty as his most important life work. Further reading Mitchell, B. (1990) ‘Newman as a Philosopher’, in Newman after a Hundred Years, ed. I. Ker and A.G. Hill, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 223– 46. (An extremely readable and important account of Newman’s philosophical significance.) IAN KER NEWTON, ISAAC (1642–1727) Newton is best known for having invented the calculus and formulated the theory of universal gravity – the latter in his Principia , the single most important work in the transformation of natural philosophy into modern physical science. Yet he also made major discoveries in optics, and put no less effort into alchemy and theology than into mathematics and physics. Throughout his career, Newton maintained a sharp distinction between conjectural hypotheses and experimentally established results. This distinction was central to his claim that the method by which conclusions about forces were inferred from phenomena in the Principia made it ‘possible to argue more securely concerning the physical species, physical causes, and physical proportions of these forces’. The law of universal gravity that he argued for in this way nevertheless provoked strong opposition, especially from such leading figures on the Continent as Huygens and Leibniz: they protested that Newton was invoking an occult power of action-at-a-distance insofar as he was offering no contact mechanism by means of which forces of gravity could act. This opposition led him to a tighter, more emphatic presentation of his methodology in the second edition of the Principia , published twenty-six years after the first. The opposition to the theory of gravity faded during the fifty to seventy-five years after his death as it fulfilled its promise on such issues as the non-spherical shape of the earth, the precession of the equinoxes, comet trajectories (including the return of ‘Halley’s Comet’ in 1758), the vagaries of lunar motion and other deviations from Keplerian motion. During this period the point mass mechanics of the Principia
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Page 628 was extended to rigid bodies and fluids by such figures as Euler, forming what we know as ‘Newtonian’ mechanics. See also: COSMOLOGY; THEORIES, SCIENTIFIC Further reading Newton, I. (1997) Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy , trans. I.B. Cohen and A. Whitman, Los Angeles: University of California Press. (The first entirely new English translation of Newton’s Principia since Andrew Motte’s of 1729.) Westfall, R.S. (1980) Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (The most thorough intellectual biography of Newton, also available abridged as The Life of Isaac Newton, 1993.) WILLIAM L. HARPER GEORGE E. SMITH NICHIREN (1222–82) Fiery prophet, religious reformer, founder of a major religious movement, brilliant preacher and erudite writer, Nichiren is one of Japan’s most controversial religious figures. His thought derived from the Tendai tradition, from which he inherited both his veneration of the Lotus Sutra and the idea of an eternal Buddha woven into the stuff of all reality. See also: BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY, JAPANESE Further reading Anesaki Masaharu (1966) Nichiren: The Buddhist Prophet, Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith. (The classic source in English for the life and thought of Nichiren, written in easy prose for the non-specialist.) J.W. HEISIG NICHOLAS OF AUTRECOURT ( c .1300–69) Unlike most of his late medieval contemporaries, the French scholar Nicholas of Autrecourt did not subscribe to Aristotelianism. Instead, he radically challenged the foundations of Aristotle’s metaphysics and epistemology by asking two questions: first, how are we supposed to explain the basic constituents of the world, given that the Aristotelian categories are mere theoretical constructions and not immediately perceivable? Second, what can we know with absolute certitude, given that sense perception – the starting point in Aristotelian epistemology – is fallible and unreliable? Focusing on these two questions, Nicholas elaborated an atomistic metaphysics and defended an epistemology that emphasizes knowledge of a logical principle (the principle of non-contradiction), dismissing all knowledge based on inductive reasoning as uncertain. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM, MEDIEVAL Further reading Nicholas of Autrecourt ( c .1300–69) Exigit ordo executionis (The Universal Treatise), ed. J.-R. O’Donnell in ‘Nicholas of Autrecourt’, Mediaeval Studies 1, 1939: 179–280; trans. L. Kennedy, R. Arnold and A. Millward, The Universal Treatise of Nicholas of Autrecourt , Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1971. (This edition is taken from the single incomplete manuscript which has survived.) DOMINIK PERLER NICHOLAS OF CUSA (1401–64) Also called Nicolaus Cusanus, this German cardinal takes his distinguishing name from the city of his birth, Kues (or Cusa, in Latin), on the Moselle river between Koblenz and Trier. Nicholas was influenced by Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, Ramon Llull, Ricoldo of Montecroce, Master Eckhart, Jean Gerson and Heimericus de Campo, as well as by more distant figures such as Plato, Aristotle, Proclus, Pseudo-Dionysius and John Scottus Eriugena. His eclectic system of thought pointed in the direction of a transition between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. In his own day as in ours, Nicholas was most widely known for his early work De docta ignorantia (On Learned Ignorance). In it, he gives expression to his view that the human mind needs to discover its necessary ignorance of what the Divine Being is like, an ignorance that results from the infinite ontological and cognitive disproportion between Infinity itself (that is, God) and the finite human or angelic knower. Correlated with the doctrine of docta ignorantia is that of coincidentia oppositorum in deo, the coincidence of opposites in God. All things coincide in God in the sense that God, as undifferentiated being, is beyond all opposition, beyond all determination as this rather than that . Nicholas is also known for his rudimentary cosmological speculation, his prefiguring of certain metaphysical and epistemological themes found later in Leibniz, Kant and Hegel, his ecclesiological teachings regarding the controversy over papal versus conciliar authority, his advocacy of a religious ecumenism of sorts, his interest in purely mathematical topics and his influence on the theologian Paul
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Page 629 the twentieth century. A striking tribute to Nicholas’ memory still stands today: the hospice for elderly, indigent men that he caused to be erected at Kues between 1452 and 1458 and that he both endowed financially and invested with his personal library. This small but splendid library, unravaged by the intervening wars and consisting of some three hundred volumes, includes manuscripts written in Nicholas’ own hand. See also: GOD, CONCEPTS OF Further reading Nicholas of Cusa (1440) De docta ignorantia (On Learned Ignorance), trans. J. Hopkins, Nicholas of Cusa on Learned Ignorance , Minneapolis, MN: Banning, 1985. (Nicholas’ best-known work, setting out his doctrine of ‘learned ignorance’.) Sigmund, P. (1963) Nicholas of Cusa and Medieval Political Thought, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (A balanced examination of Nicholas’ theory of conciliar and papal authority.) JASPER HOPKINS NIEBUHR, HELMUT RICHARD (1894–1962) After early writings interpreting the social dimensions of US religious life from a Protestant point of view, Helmut Richard Niebuhr came increasingly to focus on theology, the interpretation of the Word and experience of God, and ethics, the attempt to live a responsible life grounded in the deepest values. More successfully than any contemporary, he brought into creative tension two major strands of modern Christian thought. From the liberal tradition, he came to stress the relativity of all statements about God and accented the situation of the believer who makes them. Niebuhr matched or countered this perspectival approach with an inheritance from ‘neo-orthodoxy’ which stressed the otherness of God, the distance between God and all human experiences, statements and perspectives. While preoccupied with witness to ‘God beyond the gods’, Niebuhr was also devoted to understanding the human in the light of the experience of God. He developed comprehensive views of the responsible self as the focus of ethics and emphasized the communal dimensions of human life. Further reading Irish, J.A. (1983) The Religious Thought of H. Richard Niebuhr , Atlanta, GA: John Knox Press. (A reliable popular interpretation, and the best introduction to the main themes of Niebuhr’s thought.) Niebuhr, H.R. (1951) Christ and Culture, New York: Harper & Bros. (A classic typology of the ways in which Christianity relates to its surrounding culture.) MARTIN MARTY NIEBUHR, REINHOLD (1892–1971) Reinhold Niebuhr is widely regarded as the foremost public theologian in twentieth-century America. A ‘public’ theologian is one who is responsive to the biblical tradition and responsible to the Christian Church, but who also responds to the social and political concerns of the world and seeks to effect change in that world. In the case of Niebuhr, this meant being attuned to life in the USA as it passed through times of prosperity, depression, war, cold war and cultural complacency. It also meant that he had to be as alert to the secular philosophy and expression of the times as to the biblical and creedal traditions of the Church, and he managed to correlate and connect these in ever-changing ways. Niebuhr is known as a developer of a school of thought often called ‘Christian realism’. Though shaped first by the more optimistic liberal thought of his teachers’ generation, which stressed the immanence of God and the potential for goodness in human beings, Niebuhr came to witness to the otherness of God and the drastic limits of human potential. He even helped resurrect the term ‘original sin’ to describe the human condition, well aware that the term was scorned by most philosophers of his time. Yet over the decades, his realism came to be seen as so appropriate to descriptions of human actions, especially in situations of power, that he attracted a following far beyond Church communities. Niebuhr thus influenced both domestic and international policies. He was seen both as a self-critical theologian who uttered judgments on the Christian Church and the American nation, and as a theologian of the Cold War who issued devastating critiques of Soviet Communism. In the time before the Second World War, when most of the more notable Protestant clerics leaned towards pacifism, Niebuhr let his realistic vision and his opposition to totalitarian powers lead him to argue for ‘preparedness’ for war and to scold those who refused to see with him a need for military response to the threat of dictators.
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Page 630 Further reading Fox, R. (1985) Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography , New York: Pantheon. (The most comprehensive biography, essential for understanding the career, though criticized by some for slighting the theology.) Niebuhr, R. (1949) Faith and History: A Comparison of Christian and Modern Views of History , New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. (Philosophy of history on a grand scale, stressing distinctively Christian aspects.) MARTIN MARTY NIETZSCHE, FRIEDRICH (1844–1900) Appointed professor of classical philology at the University of Basel when he was just 24 years old, Nietzsche was expected to secure his reputation as a brilliant young scholar with his first book, Die Geburt der Tragödie (The Birth of Tragedy ) (1872). But that book did not look much like a work of classical scholarship. Bereft of footnotes and highly critical of Socrates and modern scholarship, it spoke in rhapsodic tones of ancient orgiastic Dionysian festivals and the rebirth of Dionysian tragedy in the modern world. Classical scholars, whose craft and temperament it had scorned, greeted the book with scathing criticism and hostility; even Nietzsche eventually recognized it as badly written and confused. Yet it remains one of the three most important philosophical treatments of tragedy (along with those of Aristotle and Hegel) and is the soil out of which Nietzsche’s later philosophy grew. By 1889, when he suffered a mental and physical collapse that brought his productive life to an end, Nietzsche had produced a series of thirteen books which have left a deep imprint on most areas of Western intellectual and cultural life, establishing him as one of Germany’s greatest prose stylists and one of its most important, if controversial, philosophers. Nietzsche appears to attack almost everything that has been considered sacred: not only Socrates and scholarship, but also God, truth, morality, equality, democracy and most other modern values. He gives a large role to the will to power and he proposes to replace the values he attacks with new values and a new ideal of the human person (the Übermensch meaning ‘overhuman’ or ‘superhuman’). Although Nazi theoreticians attempted to associate these ideas with their own cause, responsible interpreters agree that Nietzsche despised and unambiguously rejected both German nationalism and anti-Semitism. Little else in his thought is so unambiguous, at least in part because he rarely writes in a straightforward, argumentative style, and because his thought changed radically over the course of his productive life. The latter is especially true of his early criticism of Socrates, science and truth. Nietzsche’s philosophizing began from a deep sense of dissatisfaction with modern Western culture, which he found superficial and empty in comparison with that of the ancient Greeks. Locating the source of the problem in the fact that modern culture gives priority to science (understood broadly, including all forms of scholarship and theory), whereas Presocratic Greece had given priority to art and myth, he rested his hopes for modern culture on a return to the Greek valuation of art, calling for a recognition of art as ‘the highest task and the truly metaphysical activity of this life’. He soon turned his back on this early critique of science. In the works of his middle period he rejects metaphysical truth but celebrates the valuing of science and empirical truth over myth as a sign of high culture. Although he had earlier considered it destructive of culture, he now committed his own philosophy to a thoroughgoing naturalistic understanding of human beings. He continued to believe that naturalism undermines commitment to values because it destroys myths and illusions, but he now hoped that knowledge would purify human desire and allow human beings to live without preferring or evaluating. In the works of his final period, Nietzsche rejects this aspiration as nihilistic. In his final period, he combined a commitment to science with a commitment to values by recognizing that naturalism does not undermine all values, but only those endorsed by the major ideal of value we have had so far, the ascetic ideal. This ideal takes the highest human life to be one of self-denial, denial of the natural self, thereby treating natural or earthly existence as devoid of intrinsic value. Nietzsche saw this life-devaluing ideal at work in most Western (and Eastern) religion and philosophy. Values always come into existence in support of some form of life, but they gain the support of ascetic religions and philosophies only if they are given a life-devaluing interpretation. Ascetic priests interpret acts as wrong or ‘sinful’ because the acts are selfish or ‘animal’ – because they affirm natural instincts – and ascetic philosophers interpret whatever they value – truth, knowledge, philosophy, virtue – in nonnatural terms because they share the assumption that anything truly valuable must have a source outside the world of
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Page 631 nature, the world accessible to empirical investigation. Only because Nietzsche still accepted this assumption of the ascetic ideal did naturalism seem to undermine all values. According to his later thought, the ascetic ideal itself undermines values. First it deprives nature of value by placing the source of value outside nature. Then, by promoting the value of truth above all else, it leads to a denial that there is anything besides nature. Among the casualties of this process are morality and belief in God, as Nietzsche indicated by proclaiming that ‘God is dead’ and that morality will gradually perish. Morality is not the only possible form of ethical life, however, but a particular form that has been brought about by the ascetic ideal. That ideal has little life left in it, according to Nietzsche, as does the form of ethical life it brought about. Morality now has little power to inspire human beings to virtue or anything else. There is no longer anything to play the essential role played by the ascetic ideal: to inspire human beings to take on the task of becoming more than they are, thereby inducing them to internalize their will to power against themselves. Modern culture therefore has insufficient defences against eruptions of barbarism, which Nietzsche predicted as a large part of the history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. But Nietzsche now saw that there was no way to go back to earlier values. His hope rested instead with ‘new philosophers’ who have lived and thought the values of the ascetic ideal through to their end and thereby recognized the need for new values. His own writings are meant to exhibit a new ideal, often by exemplifying old virtues that are given a new, life-affirming interpretation. See also: NIETZSCHE: IMPACT ON RUSSIAN THOUGHT Further reading Nietzsche (1888c) Der Antichrist, 1895; trans. W. Kaufmann as The Antichrist, in The Portable Nietzsche , New York: Viking, 1954. (Nietzsche’s version of ‘Why I am not a Christian’. Distinguishes original Christianity from the Pauline version and gives a relatively sympathetic portrait of the former and of the one who lived it. Fairly straightforward and accessible.) Schacht, R. (1983) Nietzsche , London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (Careful and detailed survey of all the main themes of Nietzsche’s philosophy. Its Nietzsche has a basically naturalistic orientation, but nevertheless accepts the will to power as the basic principle of life.) MAUDEMARIE CLARK NIETZSCHE: IMPACT ON RUSSIAN THOUGHT Nietzsche’s thought had a massive influence on Russian literature and the arts, religious philosophy and political culture. His popularizers were writers, artists and political radicals who read his works through the prism of their own culture, highlighting the moral, psychological and mythopoetic aspects of his thought and their sociopolitical implications, and appropriating them for their own agendas. Literature addressed to a mass readership disseminated crude notions of a master morality and an amoral Superman. Russians discovered Nietzsche in the early 1890s. His admirers regarded him as a proponent of selffulfilment and an enemy of the ‘slave morality’ of Christianity. Two of them, Dmitri Merezhkovskii (1865– 1941) and Maksim Gor’kii (real name Aleksei Peshkov, 1868–1936), were the progenitors of the two main streams of Nietzsche appropriation – the religious and the secular. Merezhkovskii was the initiator of Russian Symbolism. In 1896 he began trying to reconcile Nietzsche and Christianity; this attempt led him to propound an apocalyptic Christianity in 1900 and to found the Religious-Philosophical Society of St Petersburg (1901–3, 1906–17). Its members, the so-called God-seekers, included artists and intellectuals who were also attracted to Nietzsche. As for Gor’kii, his early short stories featured vagrant protagonists who personified crude versions of the slave and the master morality. In 1895 Gor’kii began to dream of a Russian Superman who would lead the masses in a struggle for liberation and imbue them with respect for Man, which he always wrote with a capital letter. During the Revolution of 1905, he and Anatolii Lunacharskii (1875–1933), a Bolshevik admirer of Nietzsche, constructed a Marxist surrogate religion to inspire heroism and self-sacrifice. They believed, as did most Symbolists and some philosophers, that art could transform human consciousness. New literary schools emerged after 1909. The Futurists exaggerated Nietzsche’s anti-rationalism, antihistoricism and cultural iconoclasm. The Acmeists propounded a non-tragic Apollonian Christianity and idealized classical antiquity and ‘world culture’. After the Bolshevik
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Page 632 Revolution, Nietzsche was considered an ideologue of reaction and his books were removed from the People’s Libraries, but his ideas, not identified as such, continued to circulate and pervaded Soviet literature, the arts and political culture. See also: RUSSIAN RELIGIOUS-PHILOSOPHICAL RENAISSANCE Further reading Clowes, E. (1988) The Revolution of Moral Consciousness: Nietzsche and Russian Literature, 1890–1914 , De Kalb, IL:Northern Illinois University Press. (Treats popularizers and vulgarizers of Nietzsche, mystical Symbolists and revolutionary Romantics.) Rosenthal, B.G. (ed.) (1986) Nietzsche in Russia , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Multi-author work. Chapters on Symbolism, religious philosophy, Bolshevism, popular literature, Bakhtin; list of publications by and about Nietzsche 1892–1919; historical introduction by the editor.) BERNICE GLATZER ROSENTHAL NIFO, AGOSTINO ( c .1470–1538) Agostino Nifo was an Italian university teacher, medical doctor and extremely prolific writer. His books included many commentaries on Aristotle’s logic, natural philosophy and metaphysics, as well as original works on topics ranging from elementary logic to beauty and love. However, his most important works had to do with the human intellect, and with Averroes’ view that there is just one intellect shared by all human beings. Although he never accepted Averroes’ position as true, he did initially believe that Averroes correctly interpreted Aristotle on this point. He also entered into public controversy with Pomponazzi on the question whether human immortality could be proved. Nifo’s Aristotelianism reflects his interest in many different traditions of commentary on Aristotle, including medieval Latin commentators, especially Thomas Aquinas, medieval Arab commentators and their Latin followers, especially John of Jandun, but most of all the Greek commentators. Here he shows the strong influence of Renaissance humanism, which made the Greek texts available. It was when Nifo himself learned Greek that he came to abandon the notion that Averroes was an accurate interpreter of Aristotle. Nifo was also very interested in Plato and Platonism, particularly as presented by Marsilio Ficino. His careful presentations of other people’s doctrines were popular in university circles for much of the sixteenth century. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM, RENAISSANCE; AVERROISM Further reading Ashworth, E.J. (1976) ‘Agostino Nifo’s Reinterpretation of Medieval Logic’, Rivista critica distoria della filosofia 31: 354–74. (A study of Nifo’s logic textbook, the Dialectica ludicra (1520), and how it modified medieval doctrines.) EDWARD P. MAHONEY NIHILISM As its name implies (from Latin nihil, ‘nothing’), philosophical nihilism is a philosophy of negation, rejection, or denial of some or all aspects of thought or life. Moral nihilism, for example, rejects any possibility of justifying or criticizing moral judgments, on grounds such as that morality is a cloak for egoistic self-seeking, and therefore a sham; that only descriptive claims can be rationally adjudicated and that moral (prescriptive) claims cannot be logically derived from descriptive ones; or that moral principles are nothing more than expressions of subjective choices, preferences or feelings of people who endorse them. Similarly, epistemological nihilism denies the possibility of justifying or criticizing claims to knowledge, because it assumes that a foundation of infallible, universal truths would be required for such assessments, and no such thing is available; because it views all claims to knowledge as entirely relative to historical epochs, cultural contexts or the vagaries of individual thought and experience, and therefore as ultimately arbitrary and incommensurable; because it sees all attempts at justification or criticism as useless, given centuries of unresolved disagreement about disputed basic beliefs even among the most intelligent thinkers; or because it notes that numerous widely accepted, unquestioned beliefs of the past are dismissed out of hand today and expects a similar fate in the future for many, if not all, of the most confident present beliefs. Political nihilism calls for the complete destruction of existing political institutions, along with their supporting outlooks and social structures, but has no positive message of what should be put in their place. Cosmic nihilism regards nature as either wholly unintelligible and starkly indifferent to basic human concerns, or as knowable only in the sense of being
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Page 633 amenable to scientific description and explanation. In either case, the cosmos is seen as giving no support to distinctively human aims or values, and it may even be regarded as actively hostile to human beings. Existential nihilism negates the meaning of human life, judging it to be irremediably pointless, futile and absurd. Cosmic and existential nihilism are the focus of this entry. See also: ANARCHISM; SCEPTICISM Further reading Crosby, D.A. (1988) The Specter of the Absurd: Sources and Criticisms of Modern Nihilism, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. (Explicates and critically examines arguments for moral, epistemological, cosmic and existential nihilism, with an emphasis on existential nihilism and ways the other types relate to it; moderately difficult.) Levin, D.M. (1988) The Opening of Vision: Nihilism and the Postmodern Situation, New York and London: Routledge. (Argues that the advent of nihilism is both cause and consequence of a corrupted egocentric and patriarchical vision; pleads for a new metaphysical and social vision that draws on the thought of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault and others; difficult.) DONALD A. CROSBY NIHILISM, RUSSIAN The term ‘Nihilist’, although it was first used in Russian as early as 1829, only acquired its present significance in Turgenev’s novel Ottsy i deti ( Fathers and Sons) (1862), where it is applied to the central character, Bazarov. Thereafter Nihilism quickly became the subject of polemical debate in the journal press and in works of literature. The Nihilists were the generation of young, radical, non-gentry intellectuals who espoused a thoroughgoing materialism, positivism and scientism. The major theorists of Russian Nihilism were Nikolai Chernyshevskii and Dmitrii Pisarev, although their authority and influence extended well beyond the realm of theory. Nihilism was a broad social and cultural movement as well as a doctrine. Russian Nihilism negated not the normative significance of the world or the general meaning of human existence, but rather a particular social, political and aesthetic order. Despite their name, the Russian Nihilists did hold beliefs – most notably in themselves and in the power of their doctrine to effect social change. It is, however, the vagueness of their positive programmes that distinguishes the Nihilists from the revolutionary socialists who followed them. Russian Nihilism is perhaps best regarded as the intellectual pool of the period 1855–66 out of which later radical movements emerged; it held the potential for both Jacobinism and anarchism. See also: NIHILISM; POSITIVISM, RUSSIAN Further reading Chernyshevskii, N.G. (1863) Chto delat’, St Petersburg; trans. B.R. Tucker, What Is To Be Done?, New York: Vintage Books, 1961. (An English translation of Chernyshevskii’s famous and highly influential novel.) Paperno, I. (1988) Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism: A Study in the Semiotics of Behavior , Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. (An important study of the cultural significance of Chernyshevskii’s What Is To Be Done?) STEPHEN LOVELL NIRVĀṆA The aim of the spiritual life was already described as nirvāṇa before the rise of Buddhism around the fifth century BC, but it is in the Buddhist context that it is most well known. In earlier Buddhist works and in popular usage to the present day it refers to the goal of Buddhist discipline, reached by systematic training in morality, meditation and intellect. That goal consists of the final removal of the disturbing mental elements which obstruct a peaceful and clear state of mind, together with a state of awakening from the mental sleep which they induce. Such an awakening (often referred to in English as ‘enlightenment’) enables a clear perception of fundamental truths, the understanding of which is essential to mental freedom. Later, the term was often applied more narrowly to a specific aspect of the awakened condition – that aspect of this experience which was considered to be unchanging, that is, an element which is not the product of either mental construction in particular, or of causes and conditions in general. See also: BUDDHISM, ĀBHIDHARMIKA SCHOOLS OF; MOMENTARINESS, BUDDHIST DOCTRINE OF Further reading Harvey, P. (1995) The Selfless Mind: Personality, Consciousness and Nirvāna in Early Buddhism , Richmond: Curzon Press. (Analyses most of the early sources.) Rahula, W. (1967) What the Buddha Taught, Bedford: Gordon Fraser, 2nd edn, 1959. (An
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Page 634 influential account of the basic issues by a Sinhalese Buddhist monk.) L.S. COUSINS NISHI AMANE (1829–97) Among the campaigners for Japanese enlightenment in the early Meiji era, Nishi Amane was prominent for his philosophical achievements. He introduced European philosophy into Japan, especially the positivism of Auguste Comte and the utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill. The academic philosophy of modern Japan owes its origins to him. See also: LOGIC IN JAPAN Further reading Havens, T.R.H. (1970) Nishi Amane and Modern Japanese Thought, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (A detailed argument about Nishi’s contribution to the Japanese revolution of ideas in the latter half of the nineteenth century.) HIMI KIYOSHI NISHIDA KITARŌ (1870–1945) Considered Japan’s first original modern philosopher, Nishida not only transmitted Western philosophical problems to his contemporaries but also used Buddhist philosophy and his own methods to subvert the basis of traditional dichotomies and propose novel integrations. His developmental philosophy began with the notion of unitary or pure experience before the split between subject and object. It developed to challenge other traditional opposites such as intuition and reflection, fact and value, art and morality, individual and universal, and relative and absolute. In its organic development, Nishida’s philosophy reacted to critiques that it neglected the social dimension with political essays that sometimes aligned it with Japanese imperialism. It culminated in the ‘logic of place’, a form of thinking that would do justice to the contradictory world of human actions. See also: JAPANESE PHILOSOPHY; KYOTO SCHOOL; LOGIC IN JAPAN Further reading Nishitani Keiji (1991) Nishida Kitarō , trans. Yamamoto Seisaku and J. Heisig, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. (Clearly translated essays on Nishida’s person and thought, by a renowned student and successor.) JOHN C. MARALDO NISHITANI KEIJI (1900–90) Nishitani Keiji is generally regarded as the leading light of the ‘second generation’ Kyoto School of modern Japanese philosophy. Influenced by Zen thinkers from Chinese and Japanese Buddhism as well as by figures from the Western mystical and existential traditions, he is a pre-eminent voice in East– West comparative philosophy and late twentieth-century Buddhist–Christian dialogue. Primarily a philosopher of religion, Nishitani strove throughout his career to formulate existential responses to the problem of nihilism. See also: KYOTO SCHOOL; NIHILISM Further reading Nishitani Keiji (1961) Shūkyōto wa nani ka? (What is Religion?), trans. J. Van Bragt, Religion and Nothingness, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985. (The excellent translator’s introduction includes a brief biographical account.) GRAHAM PARKES NOMINALISM ‘Nominalism’ refers to a reductionist approach to problems about the existence and nature of abstract entities; it thus stands opposed to Platonism and realism. Whereas the Platonist defends an ontological framework in which things like properties, kinds, relations, propositions, sets and states of affairs are taken to be primitive and irreducible, the nominalist denies the existence of abstract entities and typically seeks to show that discourse about abstract entities is analysable in terms of discourse about familiar concrete particulars. In different periods, different issues have provided the focus for the debate between nominalists and Platonists. In the Middle Ages, the problem of universals was pivotal. Nominalists like Abelard and Ockham insisted that everything that exists is a particular. They argued that talk of universals is talk about certain linguistic expressions – those with generality of application – and they attempted to provide an account of the semantics of general terms rich enough to accommodate the view that universals are to be identified with them. The classical empiricists followed medieval nominalists in being particularists, and they sought to identify the kinds of mental representations associated with general terms. Locke argued that these
representations have a special content. He called them abstract ideas and
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Page 635 claimed that they are formed by removing from ideas of particulars those features peculiar to the particulars in question. Berkeley and Hume, however, attacked Locke’s doctrine of abstraction and insisted that the ideas corresponding to general terms are ideas whose content is fully determinate and particular, but which the mind uses as proxies for other particular ideas of the same sort. A wider range of issues has dominated recent ontological discussion, and concern over the existence and status of things like sets, propositions, events and states of affairs has come to be every bit as significant as concern over universals. Furthermore, the nature of the debate has changed. While there are philosophers who endorse a nominalist approach to all abstract entities, a more typical brand of nominalism is that which recognizes the existence of sets and attempts to reduce talk about other kinds of abstract entities to talk about set-theoretical structures whose ultimate constituents are concrete particulars. See also: NOMINALISM BUDDHIST DOCTRINE OF; UNIVERSALS Further reading Armstrong, D. (1978) Universals and Scientific Realism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2 vols. (Contains useful discussions of nominalism.) Ockham, William of ( c .1329) ‘Summa Logicae’, part I, in M.J. Loux, Ockham’s Theory of Terms , Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1974. (A translation of the clearest formulation of Ockham’s approach to ontology.) MICHAEL J. LOUX NOMINALISM, BUDDHIST DOCTRINE OF Buddhist nominalism refers to the nominalist ontology and semantics developed especially by the Indian Buddhist philosophers Dignāga and Dharmakīrti. Elaborating on the arguments of their Buddhist predecessor Vasubandhu, they critically examine the notions of spatial and temporal extension. For Dignāga and Dharmakīrti, spatially and temporally composite entities are constructed through concepts and language and as such those entities exist only nominally or conventionally. Their semantics rejects the realist position that expressions refer to real, extra-mental universals that are instantiated in each particular of the class formed by the respective universal. Instead, these philosophers developed the unique theory of ‘exclusion’ whereby expressions convey meaning by the exclusion of some particulars from those which do not have the expected causal capacities. Dharmakīrti’s nominalism is credited with a greater impact on Indian philosophy than Dignāga’s. Further reading Dreyfus, G. (1997) Recognizing Reality: Dharmakīrti’s Philosophy and its Tibetan Interpretations, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. (An important work that offers some competing interpretations on these issues.) JOHN DUNNE NOMOS see PHYSIS AND NOMOS NON-CONSTRUCTIVE RULES OF INFERENCE For some theoretical purposes, generalized deductive systems (or, ‘semi-formal’ systems) are considered, having rules with an infinite number of premises. The best-known of these rules is the ‘ ωrule’, or rule of infinite induction. This rule allows the inference of nФ(n) from the infinitely many premises Ф(0), Ф(1), . . . that result from replacing the numerical variable n in Ф(n) with the numeral for each natural number. About 1930, in part as a response to Gödel’s demonstration that no formal deductive system had as theorems all and only the true formulas of arithmetic, several writers (most notably, Carnap) suggested considering the semi-formal systems obtained, from some formulation of arithmetic, by adding this rule. Since no finite notation can provide terms for all sets of natural numbers, no comparable rule can be formulated for higher-order arithmetic. In effect, the ω-rule is valid just in case the relevant quantifier can be interpreted substitutionally; looked at from the other side, the validity of some analogue of the ω-rule is the essential mathematical characteristic of sub-stitutional quantification. Further reading Aczel, P. (1977) ‘An Introduction to Inductive Definitions’, in J. Barwise (ed.) Handbook of Mathematical Logic, Amsterdam: North Holland, 739–82. (A survey of results on inductive definability.) A.P. HAZEN
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Page 636 NON-MONOTONIC LOGIC A relation of inference is ‘monotonic’ if the addition of premises does not undermine previously reached conclusions; otherwise the relation is non-monotonic. Deductive inference, at least according to the canons of classical logic, is monotonic: if a conclusion is reached on the basis of a certain set of premises, then that conclusion still holds if more premises are added. By contrast, everyday reasoning is mostly non-monotonic because it involves risk: we jump to conclusions from deductively insufficient premises. We know when it is worthwhile or even necessary (for example, in medical diagnosis) to take the risk. Yet we are also aware that such inference is ‘defeasible’ – that new information may undermine old conclusions. Various kinds of defeasible but remarkably successful inference have traditionally captured the attention of philosophers (theories of induction, Peirce’s theory of abduction, inference to the best explanation, and so on). More recently logicians have begun to approach the phenomenon from a formal point of view. The result is a large body of theories at the interface of philosophy, logic and artificial intelligence. Further reading Brewka, G. (1991) Non-Monotonic Reasoning: Logical Foundations of Commonsense, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (A concise introduction to the topic.) ANDRÉ FUHRMANN NORMATIVE EPISTEMOLOGY There are three kinds of normative work in epistemology. The first is the provision of epistemic advice, which offers guidance towards improving the cognitive condition of an individual or community. This advice often concerns science. Philosophers in the tradition of Francis Bacon have sought to identify and advocate proper forms of scientific research and explanation. More generally, according to some philosophers, a principal epistemological task is that of finding and recommending ways to improve the whole range of our individual and collective cognitive activities. A second kind of epistemology is classified as normative because evaluative concepts figure in explanations. For example, A.J. Ayer explains knowledge partly in terms of having a right to be sure. Other evaluative notions enter into work in this category, such as intellectual duties, responsibilities and virtues. Some of these are specifically ethical notions; some are non-ethical evaluative notions such as proper cognitive functioning and intellectual excellence. Epistemic concepts such as justification and rationality appear to be normative, or at least evaluative, in a way that contrasts with purely desciptive concepts. One tendency in naturalistic epistemology is to seek either to explain away this appearance or to reconcile it with a scientific worldview. Non-naturalistic efforts in epistemology commonly find no reason to undertake this project, and are consequently often counted as normative. Most historical epistemology is normative by this standard. See also: EPISTEMOLOGY AND ETHICS Further reading Ayer, A.J. (1956) The Problem of Knowledge , London: Macmillan. (Employs the evaluative primitive of having a right to be sure in an analysis of knowledge. See especially chapter 1.) Chisholm, R. (1966) Theory of Knowledge , New York: Prentice Hall, 2nd edn, 1977. (Classic effort in analytical epistemology, one that makes irreducible use of a notion of intellectual duty.) EARL CONEE NORMS, LEGAL A legal norm sets a standard of behaviour. As a norm, it thus can remain in existence even though it is broken. Norms can be distinguished from causal laws which need to be reinterpreted if an exception is found. Linguistic signals help us determine what the norm is. Thus ‘ought’, ‘must’, ‘shall’, ‘have to’, ‘right’, ‘wrong’, ‘good’, ‘bad’, and so on, characteristically belong to the statement of norms, whereas words like ‘is’, ‘are’, ‘were’, ‘will be’, ‘possible’, ‘impossible’ tend to show descriptive rules. These linguistic signals reflect a difference, they do not constitute it. There are many counterexamples: thus ‘swimming is forbidden’ and ‘we ought to be at the col now’ express normativity and description respectively. Whatever is for someone a standard for their conduct is normative for them. One might say that the idea stems from the notion of measurement. That we ‘run the rule’ over someone or ‘get the measure of them’ stems from the idea of measuring, of imposing a standard on them or on oneself. Where does the legal norm stem from? There are two main views: the practice theory holds that norms are expressions or articulations of
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Page 637 people’s behaviour; the interpretive theory holds that norms are not connected to behaviour in the way the practice theory holds but are the means whereby we make sense of such behaviour. But the connection between the two groups is much closer than appears at first sight. See also: LEGAL POSITIVISM Further reading Hart, H.L.A. (1961) The Concept of Law, 2nd edn, with postscript, P. Bullock and J. Raz (eds), Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. (The locus classicus in English of the practice theory.) Hayek, F. (1969) Law, Legislation and Liberty, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (A customary theory of law.) ZENON BAŃKOWSKI NORRIS, JOHN (1657–1711) John Norris was a philosopher in the Platonic tradition of the seventeenth century. His philosophy combines elements from both the French and English aspects of that tradition: he was an admirer of Henry More and was the leading English disciple of Malebranche, whose philosophy he did much to popularize in England. A churchman by profession, much of his writing is concerned with the practical application of divinity. Central to Norris’ thought is his theory that the proper and immediate object of both human knowledge and human love is God, who is identified with truth. Thus necessary truths are known directly in God and, conversely, to know eternal and necessary truth is to know God. Further reading Acworth, R. (1979) The Philosophy of John Norris of Bemerton (1657–1712) , Hildesheim: Olms. (A comprehensive study of Norris’ life, theology and philosophy.) Norris, J. (1688) The Theory and Regulation of Love, a Moral Essay, Oxford. (His brief correspondence with Henry More was appended to this work, published as Letters Philosophical and Moral.) SARAH HUTTON NOUS Commonly translated as ‘mind’ or ‘intellect’, the Greek word nous is a key term in the philosophies of Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus. What gives nous its special significance there is not primarily its dictionary meaning – other nouns in Greek can also signify the mind – but the value attributed to its activity and to the metaphysical status of things that are ‘noetic’ (intelligible and incorporeal) as distinct from being perceptible and corporeal. In Plato’s later dialogues, and more systematically in Aristotle and Plotinus, nous is not only the highest activity of the human soul but also the divine and transcendent principle of cosmic order. Further reading Everson, S. (ed.) (1991) Companions to Ancient Thought 2: Psychology , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Includes chapters on Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus.) A.A. LONG NOZICK, ROBERT (1938–) Although the American philosopher and academic Robert Nozick has published on an enormous range of topics, he is best known as a political philosopher, and especially for his powerful and entertaining statement of libertarianism. In Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), Nozick presents an image of a fully voluntary society, in which people cooperate only on terms which violate no one’s rights. Nozick’s other major contributions to philosophy include an analysis of knowledge, and an accompanying response to scepticism, an account of personal identity and contributions to decision theory and the theory of rationality. See also: LIBERTARIANISM Further reading Nozick, R. (1974) Anarchy, State, and Utopia , Oxford: Blackwell. (Powerful statement of libertarianism.) Wolff, J. (1991) Robert Nozick , Cambridge: Polity Press. (Critical analysis of Nozick’s libertarianism.) JONATHAN WOLFF NUMBERS Numbers are, in general, mathematical entities whose function is to express the size, order or magnitude of something or other. Historically, starting from the most basic kind of number, the positive integers (1, 2, 3, . . .), which appear in the earliest written records, the notion of number has been generalized and extended in several different directions – often in the face of considerable opposition. Other than the positive integers, the most venerable are the rational numbers (fractions), which were known to the Egyptians and Mesopotamians. The discovery, by Pythagorean mathematicians, that there are lengths that cannot be expressed as fractions occasioned the
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Page 638 introduction of irrational numbers, such as the square root of 2, though the Greeks managed only a geometric understanding of these. The number zero was recognized, first in Indian mathematics, by the seventh century; the use of negative numbers evolved after this time; and complex numbers, such as the square root of −1, appeared first at the end of the Middle Ages. Infinitesimal numbers were developed by the founders of the calculus, Newton and Leibniz, in the seventeenth century (and were later to disappear from mathematics – for a time); and infinite numbers (ordinals and cardinals) were introduced by the founder of modern set theory, Cantor, in the nineteenth century. The introductions of three of these kinds of number, in particular, occasioned crises in the foundations of mathematics. The first (concerning irrational numbers) was finally resolved in the nineteenth century by the work of Cauchy and Weierstrass. The second (concerning infinitesimals) was also resolved then, by the work of Weierstrass and Dedekind. The third (concerning infinite numbers), which involves paradoxes such as Russell’s, still awaits a convincing solution. It is seemingly impossible to give a rigorous definition of what it is to be a number. The closest one can get is a family-resemblance notion, with very ill-defined boundaries. See also: ARITHMETIC, PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES IN Further reading Boyer, C.B. and Merzbach, U.C. (1968) A History of Mathematics, New York and London: Wiley & Sons; 2nd edn, 1989, repr. 1991. (An excellent reference on the history of mathematics, recently updated.) Dedekind, R. (1963) Essays on the Theory of Numbers , New York: Dover. (Includes English translations of two of the most important essays on numbers ever written.) GRAHAM PRIEST NUMENIUS ( fl. c. mid 2nd century AD) Numenius was a Platonist philosopher. He came from Apamea (Syria) and wrote in Greek. His work – now lost – is usually considered Neo-Pythagorean in tendency, and exercised a major influence on the emergence of Neoplatonism in the third century. A radical dualist, he postulated the twin principles of god – a transcendent and changeless intellect, equated with the Good of Plato’s Republic – and matter, identified as the Pythagorean Indefinite Dyad: god is good, matter evil. In addition to this supreme god, he added at a secondary level a creator-god, one of whose aspects is the world-soul, itself further distinguished into a good and an evil worldsoul. He had a strong interest in Oriental wisdom, especially Judaic, and famously called Plato ‘Moses speaking Attic’. See also: NEO-PYTHAGOREANISM; PLATONISM, EARLY AND MIDDLE Further reading Dodds, E.R. (1960) ’Numenius and Ammonius’, Entretiens Fondation Hardt 5: 3–32. (Good discussion of the problem of Numenius’ influence on Ammonius Saccas.) JOHN DILLON NURSING ETHICS Nursing ethics may be defined simply in relation to what nurses do that doctors and others do not characteristically do; or in relation to the nursing perspective on any issues in health care and medicine. More radically, it claims to employ a distinctive conceptual framework, regarding care, rather than cure, as fundamental. Nursing ethics concerns itself with the relationship between ‘carer’ and ‘cared for’ and the meanings embedded in that relationship. It is the moral exploration of an illness or disability as a personal life crisis rather than an instance of a biomedical generalization. See also: APPLIED ETHICS; HELP AND BENEFICENCE Further reading Hunt, G. (1994) Ethical Issues in Nursing, London: Routledge. (Attempts to identify obstacles to good practice rather than formulate a theory of good practice as such.) GEOFFREY HUNT NYĀYA-VAIŚEṢIKA The Nyāya school of philosophy developed out of the ancient Indian tradition of debate; its name, often translated as ‘logic’, relates to its original and primary concern with the method ( nyāya) of proof. The fully fledged classical school presents its interests in a list of sixteen categories of debate, of which the first two are central: the means of valid cognition (perception, inference, analogy and verbal testimony) and the soteriologically relevant objects of valid cognition (self, body, senses, sense objects, cognition, and so on). The latter reflect an early philosophy of nature added to an original eristic-dialectic tradition. On the whole, classical Nyāya adopts, affirms and further develops,
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Page 639 next to its epistemology and logic, the ontology of Vaiśeṣika. The soteriological relevance of the school is grounded in the claim that adequate knowledge of the sixteen categories, aided by contemplation, yogic exercises and philosophical debate, leads to release from rebirth. Vaiśeṣika, on the other hand, is a philosophy of nature most concerned with the comprehensive enumeration and identification of all distinct and irreducible world constituents, aiming to provide a real basis for all cognitive and linguistic acts. This endeavour for distinction ( viśeṣa) may well account for the school’s name. Into the atomistic and mechanistic worldview of Vaiśeṣika a soteriology and orthodox ethics are fitted, but not without tensions; still later the notion of a supreme god, whose function is at first mainly regulative but later expanded to the creation of the world, is introduced. In the classical period the Vaiśeṣika philosophy of nature, including the highly developed doctrine of causality, is cast into a rigorous system of six, later seven, categories (substance, quality, motion, universal, particularity, inherence, nonexistence). Nyāya epistemology increasingly influences that of Vaiśeṣika. The interaction and mutual influences between Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika finally led to the formation of what may be styled a syncretistic school, called Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika in modern scholarly publications. This step, facilitated by the common religious affiliation to Śaivism, occurs with Udayana (eleventh century), who commented on texts of both schools. Subsequently, numerous syncretistic manuals attained high popularity. Udayana also inaugurated the period of Navya-Nyāya, ‘New Logic’, which developed and refined sophisticated methods of philosophical analysis. See also: ONTOLOGY IN INDIAN PHILOSOPHY Further reading Faddegon, B. (1918) The Vaiçeṣika-System , Described with the Help of the Oldest Texts , Verhandelingen der Koninklijke Akademie van Wetenschappen te Amsterdam, Afdeeling Letterkunde, Nieuwe Reeks XVIII 2, Amsterdam: Johannes MuÈ ller. (The most comprehensive classic on all aspects of Vaiśeṣika; contains copious translations from the Vaiśeṣikasūtra, detailed discussions of the Padārthadharmasangraha and important extracts from Śrīdhara’s Nyāyakandalī . Although written before the discovery of Candrānanda’s commentary, it is still a valuable and thoughtful exposition.) Nyāyasūtra ( c .400 AD), trans. G. Jha, The Nyāya-Sūtras of Gautama with the Bhāṣya of Vātsyāyana and the Vārtika of Uddyotakara , Indian Thought 4–11, 1912–19; repr. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 4 vols, 1984. (Complete translation together with the first preserved commentary and its subcommentary; contains profuse notes from further commentaries. However, the translation of the basic text is heavily influenced by the commentaries.) ELI FRANCO KARIN PREISENDANZ NYGREN, ANDERS (1890–1978) The Swedish theologian and philosopher Nygren, who taught at the University of Lund, hoped to recover the uniqueness of Christianity from the impurities introduced by the attempts of nineteenth-century liberal theology to free it from metaphysical speculation and confessional dogmatism. He aimed to do this by grounding all religion in an analytic philosophy of religion which would enable him to stress the objective character of Christian theology in contrast to the arbitrariness of confessional theology. He achieved international influence by his claim in Agapē and Eros (1930–6) that the uniqueness of Christianity is love in the sense of agapē, as opposed to Platonic eros . Further reading Hall, T. (1978) Anders Nygren, Waco, TX: Word. (A general introduction.) Nygren, A. (1972) Meaning and Method, Philadelphia, PA: Fortress. (A systematic account of Nygren’s integration of theology and philosophy of religion.) DIOGENES ALLEN
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Page 640 O OAKESHOTT, MICHAEL JOSEPH (1901–90) Although Michael Oakeshott was in his own time a lone figure in a philosophical world dominated by Oxford analysis, he has come to be recognized as the most notable British political philosopher of the twentieth century. He is best known for his view that political activity is neither purely empirical nor the application of ideas, but ‘the pursuit of intimations’. His image of culture as a conversation between different kinds of understanding has been widely accepted. Oakeshott first became celebrated in attacking what he called ‘rationalism’ in the Cambridge Journal (which he edited) in 1947. Oakeshott’s rationalist is a restless political meddler who believes that politics is putting ideas into effect. The fullest statement of his political philosophy is On Human Conduct (1975), in which the modern state is understood as a tension between civil and enterprise association. Exploring the idea of a civil association is perhaps Oakeshott’s most notable contribution to political philosophy. See also: POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, HISTORY OF Further reading Grant, R. (1990) Thinkers of Our Time: Oakeshott , London: Claridge Press. (An excellent short account with some attention to Oakeshott’s life and circumstances.) Oakeshott, M.J. (1975a) On Human Conduct, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Oakeshott’s last major work of political philosophy, exploring the relation between civil and enterprise association.) KENNETH MINOGUE OBJECTIVITY Objectivity is one of the central concepts of metaphysics. Philosophers distinguish between objectivity and agreement: ‘Ice-cream tastes nice’ is not objective merely because there is widespread agreement that it is true. But if objectivity is not mere agreement, what is it? We often think that some sorts of claim are less objective than others, so that a different metaphysical account is required of each. For example, ethical claims are often held to be less objective than claims about the shapes of middle-sized physical objects: ‘Murder is wrong’ is held to be less objective than ‘The table is square’. Philosophers disagree about how to capture intuitive differences in objectivity. Those known as non-cognitivists say that ethical claims are not, strictly speaking, even apt to be true or false; they do not record facts but, rather, express some desire or inclination on the part of the speaker. Others, dubbed subjectivists, say that ethical statements are in some sense about human desires or inclinations. Unlike the noncognitivist, the subjectivist views ethical claims as truth-apt, but as being true in virtue of facts about human desires or inclinations. Some philosophers, referred to as anti-realists, disagree with both noncognitivism and subjectivism, and attempt to find different ways of denying objectivity. Quietists, on the other hand, think that there are no interesting ways of distinguishing discourses in point of objective status. See also: PROJECTIVISM; REALISM AND ANTIREALISM Further reading Dummett, M. (1978) Truth and Other Enigmas , London: Duckworth. (Influential anti-realist book which contains much discussion about the objectivity of truth.) Leiter, B. (ed.) (1997) Objectivity in Law and Morals, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Collection of articles on the nature and role of objectivity in law and morality.) ALEXANDER MILLER OBLIGATION, POLITICAL The problem of political obligation has been one of the central concerns of political philosophy throughout the history of the subject. Political obligations are the moral obligations of citizens to support and comply with the requirements of their political authorities; and the problem of political obligation is that of understanding why (or if) citizens in various kinds of states are bound by such obligations. Most theorists conservatively assume that typical citizens in reasonably just states are in fact bound by these obligations. They take the problem to be that of
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Page 641 advancing an account of the ground(s) or justification(s) of political obligation that is consistent with affirming widespread obligations. Other theorists, however, anarchists prominent among them, do not accept the conservative assumption, leaving open the possibility that the best theory of political obligation may entail that few, if any, citizens in actual states have political obligations. Much of the modern debate about political obligation consists of attempts either to defend or to move beyond the alleged defects of voluntarist theories. Voluntarists maintain that only our own voluntary acts (such as freely consenting to the authority of our governments) can bind us to obedience. Because actual political societies appear not to be voluntary associations, however, voluntarism seems unable to satisfy conservative theoretical ambitions. Some individualists turn as a result to non-voluntarist theories of political obligation, attempting to ground obligations in the receipt by citizens of the benefits governments supply or in the moral quality of their political institutions. Others reject individualism altogether, defending communitarian theories that base our political obligations in our social and political roles or identities. Individualist anarchists reject instead the conservative ambitions of such theories, embracing a voluntarism which entails that most citizens simply have no political obligations. See also: CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE Further reading Horton, J. (1992) Political Obligation , Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. (The most thorough recent discussion of all aspects of the problem; comprehensive bibliography.) Pateman, C. (1979) The Problem of Political Obligation , Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. (Discusses the history of the problem and defends a Rousseauian approach.) A. JOHN SIMMONS OBSERVATION Observation is of undeniable importance in the empirical sciences. As the source of information from the world itself, observation has the role of both motivating and testing theories. Playing this role requires more than just opening our eyes and letting nature act upon us. It requires a careful attention to the information conveyed from the world so that an observation is meaningful. Scientific observation, in other words, is more than a physical act of sensation; it must be an epistemic act as well, with sufficient meaning and credibility to contribute to knowledge. A report of an observation, therefore, must be more than a ‘Yes, I see’. It must describe just what is seen, ‘I see that ——’. This obligation to make observation relevant to theory suggests that there is an essential influence of background theories on the observations themselves. The theories we believe or wish to test tell us which observations to make. And describing the results of observations, that is, bringing out their informational content, will always be done in the language of the conceptual and theoretical system already in place. For these reasons, observation is said to be indelibly theory-laden. And the influence of background beliefs is even greater in cases of indirect observation where machines, like microscopes and particle detectors, are used to produce images of the objects of observation. Here, the reliability of the machines, and hence the credibility of the observation, must be based on a theoretical understanding of the interactions that are the links in the chain of information. The influence of theory on observation is often seen as a threat to the objectivity of the process of testing and verification of theories, and hence of science in general. If theories are allowed to, indeed required to, select their own evidence and then to give meaning and credibility to the observations, the testing process seems to be unavoidably circular and self-serving. Observation that is theory-laden would guarantee success. But a look at the history of science shows that it does not. There are plenty of cases of observations that are used to disconfirm theories or at least undermine the theorist’s confidence. Perhaps there is a kind of observation that is not influenced by scientific theory and can serve as a common, objective source of information to put theories to a rigorous and meaningful test. Or perhaps all scientific observation does bear the influence of background scientific theories, but not necessarily of the theory the observation is being used to test. This independence between the theories that support an observation and the theory for which the observation serves as evidence can break the circle in the process of testing and perhaps restore objectivity. See also: MEASUREMENT, THEORY OF; THEORY AND OBSERVATION IN SOCIAL SCIENCES Further reading Fraassen, B. van (1980) The Scientific Image ,
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Page 642 Oxford: Oxford University Press. (An empiricist account of the distinction between observable and unobservable entities.) Hanson, N.R. (1958) Patterns of Discovery, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; repr. 1961. (The origin of the phrase ‘theory-laden observation’.) PETER KOSSO OCCASIONALISM Occasionalism is often thought of primarily as a rather desperate solution to the problem of mind–body interaction. Mind and body, it maintains, do not in fact causally affect each other at all; rather, it is God who causes bodily movements to occur ‘on the occasion of’ appropriate mental states (for example, volitions), and who causes mental states, such as sensations, on the occasion of the corresponding bodily states (for example, sensory stimulation). This characterization, while correct so far as it goes, is seriously incomplete. Occasionalists have seen the lack of real causal influence between mind and body as merely a special case of the more general truth that no two created beings ever causally affect each other. The one and only ‘true cause’ is God, with created beings serving as the occasions for his causal and creative activity, but never as causes in their own right. (The one possible exception to this is that created agents may themselves bring about their own acts of will; this is necessary if they are to be in any sense free agents.) Occasionalism has always been held primarily for religious reasons, in order to give God the honour due to him as the Lord and ruler of the universe. It has never, however, been a majority view among philosophical theists. See also: MIRACLES; RELIGION AND SCIENCE Further reading Fakhry, M. (1958) Islamic Occasionalism and its Critique by Averroes and Aquinas , London: Allen & Unwin. (Sets out al-Ghazali’s occasionalism in its historical context, and develops the Thomistic answer to occasionalism.) Nadler, S. (ed.) (1993) Causation in Early Modern Philosophy: Cartesianism, Occasionalism, and Preestablished Harmony, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. (Several of the articles discuss early modern occasionalism.) WILLIAM HASKER OCKHAM, WILLIAM OF see WILLIAM OF OCKHAM OGYŪ SORAI (1666–1728) Ogyū Sorai (1666–1728) was one of the greatest, most erudite and most Sinocentric kogaku, or ‘Ancient Learning’, philosophers of Tokugawa Japan. Sorai’s call for a return to the most ancient philosophical classics of the Chinese tradition, the Six Classics, voiced the logical conclusion of kogaku tendencies. However, Sorai’s ideas also inspired kokugaku, or ‘National Learning’, a literary movement advocating a return to the ancient writings of Japan which most purely expressed the Japanese soul prior to its distortion by Chinese philosophy. See also: CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY, JAPANESE Further reading Lidin, O. (1973) The Life of Ogyū Sorai , Lund: Studentlitteratur. (The only biography of Sorai in English.) JOHN ALLEN TUCKER OKEN, LORENZ (1779–1851) In the early nineteenth century, Oken was one of several German scientists who developed views about the metaphysical presuppositions of science, promoted by Kant and especially by Schelling in order to forge links between their scientific investigations and the prevailing Romantic style of thought. Oken’s particular concern was with biology, where he introduced bold taxonomic principles drawing on analogies with mathematical polarities and with our sensory and emotional capacities. See also: ROMANTICISM, GERMAN Further reading Oken, L. (1809–11) Lehrbuch des Systems der Naturphilosophie (Textbook of Systematic Philosophy of Nature), Jena: Friedrich Frommann, 3 vols; 2nd edn, 1831; 3rd edn, Zürich, F. Schulthess, 1843; trans. A. Tulk, Elements of Physiophilosophy , London, Ray Society, 1847. (A widely-read exposition of Oken’s metaphysical philosophy of nature.) BARRY GOWER OLIVECRONA, KARL (1897–1980) Olivecrona was a Swedish jurist of the ‘realist’ school, and from 1933 Professor of Procedural Law in the University of Lund. He regards law as a body of ‘independent imperatives’ effective in bringing about
certain patterns of behaviour in society. The reality of law is psychological and behavioural, not dependent on some metaphysical world of norms.
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Page 643 Further reading Olivecrona, K. (1971) Law as Fact , London: Stevens, 2nd edn. (Totally revised work, drawing much more on modern linguisticanalytical theory, especially that of J.L. Austin.) ALEKSANDER PECZENIK OLIVI, PETER JOHN (1247/8–98) Condemned repeatedly by religious authorities, Peter John Olivi is one of scholasticism’s most original and colourful figures. Although better known forhis involvement in social and political debates within the Franciscan order, Olivi also took up the leading epistemological and metaphysical concerns of his day. His outright scorn for Aristotle and cautious rapport with Augustine combine to produce an exciting, insightful body of philosophical work. See also: AUGUSTINIANISM Further reading Burr, D. (1989) Olivi and Franciscan Poverty: The Origins of the Usus Pauper Controversy , Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. (Up-to-date biographical details, and a thorough discussion of Olivi’s role in controversies within the Franciscan order.) ROBERT PASNAU OMAN, JOHN WOOD (1860–1939) Born in the Orkneys and educated in Edinburgh and Heidelberg, John Wood Oman was a clergyman and teacher. A central theme of his writings is the possibility and actuality of knowledge that is not gained through science. He rejects as too simplistic the mechanistic view of the world. His belief in God rests not on the arguments of natural theology, but on the force and content of religious experience. The source of religion is to be found in our sense of the supernatural, from which stems also our moral dependence on God. Further reading Bevons, S.B. (1992) John Oman and his Doctrine of God , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Discussion of Oman’s particular monotheistic emphases.) Oman, J.W. (1931) The Natural and the Supernatural , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Offers an account of the relations between the natural and the supernatural with reference to the history of religions.) KEITH E. YANDELL OMNIPOTENCE Traditional theism understands God to be the greatest being possible. According to the traditional conception, God possesses certain greatmaking properties or perfections, including necessary existence, omniscience, perfect goodness, and omnipotence. Philosophical reflection upon the notion of omnipotence raises many puzzles and apparent paradoxes. Could an omnipotent agent create a stone so massive that that agent could not move it? It might seem that however this question is answered, it turns out that, paradoxically, an omnipotent agent is not truly all-powerful. Could such an agent have the power to create or overturn necessary truths of logic and mathematics? Could an agent of this kind bring about or alter the past? Is the notion of an omnipotent agent other than God an intelligible one? Could two omnipotent agents exist at the same time? If there are states of affairs which an omnipotent agent is powerless to bring about, then how is the notion of omnipotence to be intelligibly defined? Yet if the notion of omnipotence is unintelligible, then traditional theism must be false. Another obstacle to traditional theism arises if it is impossible for God to be both perfectly good, and omnipotent. If an omnipotent God is powerless to do evil, then how can God be omnipotent? See also: FREEDOM, DIVINE; GOD, CONCEPTS OF Further reading Plantinga, A. (1974) God, Freedom, and Evil , New York: Harper & Row. (Important free-will defence of theism against the problem of evil.) Wierenga, E. (1989) The Nature of God , Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. (Wide-ranging discussion of recent work on omnipotence.) JOSHUA HOFFMAN GARY ROSENKRANTZ OMNIPRESENCE Western Scripture and religious experience find God present everywhere. Western thinkers make sense of this as their concepts of God dictate. Pantheists hold that God’s being everywhere is every bit of matter’s being a part or an aspect of God. Panentheists say that as God is the soul of the universe, God’s being everywhere is his enlivening the whole universe as souls enliven bodies. But most theists
reject these views, as most think that if God is perfect, he cannot be, be made of, or be embodied in a flawed and material universe. Most theists think God
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Page 644 intrinsically spaceless, that is, able to exist even if no space exists. Still, theists argue that God’s knowledge of and power over creation make him present within it without occupying space or being embodied in matter. Some add that God is present in space not just by power and knowledge but in his very being. These try to explain a spaceless God’s presence in space by likening it to the presence of a universal attribute like hardness. Hardness is not spread over hard surfaces, occupying them by having parts of itself in parts of them. Each part of a hard surface is hard. So all of hardness is in each part of a hard surface. So too, theists say, God is not spread out over space, filling parts of it with parts of himself. Rather, all of God is wholly present at each point in space and in each spatial thing. See also: OCCASIONALISM Further reading Koyré, A. (1957) From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press. (Valuable study of interaction between views of divine omnipresence and developing views of space.) Swinburne, R. (1993) The Coherence of Theism, revised edn, New York: Oxford University Press. (Clear treatment of many issues in philosophical theology; discusses omnipresence, disembodied agency and partial divine embodiment.) BRIAN LEFTOW OMNISCIENCE The concept of omniscience has received great attention in the history of Western philosophy, principally because of its connections with the Western religious tradition, which views God as perfect in all respects, including as a knower. Omniscience has often been understood as knowledge of all true propositions, and though several objections to any simple propositional account of omniscience have been offered, many philosophers continue to endorse such an analysis. Advocates of divine omniscience have discussed many problems connected with both the extent of omniscience and the relation between this property and other alleged divine attributes. Three such issues are: can an omniscient being properly be viewed as immutable? Would an omniscient being have knowledge of the future, and is such knowledge consistent with our future actions’ being genuinely free? And should omniscience be thought of as including middle knowledge? That is, would an omniscient being know (but have no control over) what other free beings would in fact freely do if placed in various different situations? See also: GOD, CONCEPTS OF THOMAS P. FLINT ONTOLOGICAL COMMITMENT A person may believe in the existence of God, or numbers or ghosts. Such beliefs may be asserted, perhaps in a theory. Assertions of the existence of specific entities or kinds of entities are the intuitive source of the notion of ontological commitment, for it is natural to think of a person who makes such an assertion as being ‘committed’ to an ‘ontology’ that includes such entities. So ontological commitment appears to be a relation that holds between persons or existence assertions (including theories), on the one hand, and specific entities or kinds of entities (or ontologies), on the other. Ontological commitment is thus a very rich notion – one in which logical, metaphysical, linguistic and epistemic elements are intermingled. The main philosophical problem concerning commitment is whether there is a precise criterion for detecting commitments in accordance with intuition. It once seemed extremely important to find a criterion, for it promised to serve as a vital tool in the comparative assessment of theories. Many different criteria have been proposed and a variety of problems have beset these efforts. W.V. Quine has been the central figure in the discussion and we will consider two of his formulations below. Many important philosophical topics are closely connected with ontological commitment. These include: the nature of theories and their interpretation; interpretations of quantification; the nature of kinds; the question of the existence of merely possible entities; extensionality and intensionality; the general question of the nature of modality; and the significance of Occam’s razor. See also: ONTOLOGY Further reading Quine, W.V. (1939) ‘A Logistical Approach to the Ontological Problem’, presented at the fifth International Congress for the Unity of Science, Cambridge, MA; repr. in The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays, New York: Random House, 1966, 64–9. (An early discussion of naming, reference and ontology. The source of ‘To be is to be a value of a variable’.) MICHAEL JUBIEN
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Page 645 ONTOLOGY The word ‘ontology’ is used to refer to philosophical investigation of existence, or being. Such investigation may be directed towards the concept of being, asking what ‘being’ means, or what it is for something to exist; it may also (or instead) be concerned with the question ‘what exists?’, or ‘what general sorts of thing are there?’ It is common to speak of a philosopher’s ontology, meaning the kinds of thing they take to exist, or the ontology of a theory, meaning the things that would have to exist for that theory to be true. See also: ONTOLOGY IN INDIAN PHILOSOPHY; VALUE, ONTOLOGICAL STATUS OF Further reading Nozick, R. (1981) Philosophical Explanations, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Chapter 2, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ is at times a little bewildering, but good fun – for the more experienced reader.) EDWARD CRAIG ONTOLOGY IN INDIAN PHILOSOPHY All Indian philosophical traditions are deeply engaged with ontology, the study of being, since clarity about the nature of reality is at the heart of three intimately connected goals: knowledge, proper conduct and liberation from the continued suffering that is part of all human existence. The formulation of a list of ontological categories, a classification of reality by division into several fundamental objective kinds, however, is less widespread. There is little room for a doctrine of distinct, if related, ontological categories in a philosophical school that takes reality as one, even less if that one lies beyond description. If the phenomenal world is but illusory appearance, as, for example, in the Vedānta of Śankara, then a determination of kinds of entities does not recommend itself as a means to adequate analysis of the world. Even the Sānnkhya tradition’s realism reduces the world to an evolution from two fundamental entities, spirit and matter. Categories make sense within the context of a pluralistic realism, an analysis of the world that finds it to be composed of a multiplicity of real entities. Such a view is found to some extent in Jaina philosophy, but is primarily defended and developed in the NyāyaVaiśeṣika school. The Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika categories are seven: substance, quality, motion, universal, particular, inherence and not-being. While all are understood as real entities and objects of knowledge, substance is most fundamental as each of the others in some way depends on substance. Substances are nine: earth, water, fire, air, ether, time, space, self and mind. The first four are atomic: they may combine to form macroscopic substance, such as a clay pot, but in incomposite form they are indestructible atoms, as are the last two. Ether, time and space, likewise indestructible, are unitary and pervade all. In its irreducible parts, all substance is eternal; every composite whole is a destructible substance. A relation of containment, called inherence, structures the categories. The qualities, actions and universals by which we might characterize a pot inhere in it. They are distinct entities from the pot, yet cannot exist apart from their underlying substrate. Composite substances like a pot are also contained in their parts by inherence, but the smallest parts, eternal substances, exist independently as receptacles that contain nothing. A whole, greater than the sum of its parts, is said to inhere in the parts while the parts are the inherence cause of the whole. Eternal substance, the ultimate substrate of all, is a bare particular. An entity that is nothing but a receptacle for other entities, it furnishes criteria for separability and individuality, but cannot be defined in itself apart from others. This aspect of the concept of substance leads later Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika into extensive analysis of relations and negation. See also: NYāYA-VAIśEṣIKA; UNIVERSALS, INDIAN THEORIES OF Further reading Halbfass, W. (1992) On Being and What there Is , Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. (An excellent, informed, very readable account of classical Vaiśeṣika.) DAVID AMBUEL OPERA, AESTHETICS OF Opera, which may be defined as a dramatic action set in large part to music, is an inherently unstable art form, more so than any other. It has been characteristic of its practitioners and critics to call it periodically to order, in idioms which vary but carry much the same message: the music exists to further the drama. This has often been taken to be a matter of settling the priority of two elements: music and text. But in fact three are involved: music, text and plot (or action). Opera began very abruptly in Northern Italy at the end of the sixteenth century, partly as the
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Page 646 result of discussions about its possibility. To begin with, familiar Greek myths were employed, set in the vernacular, with simple accompaniments so that every word could be heard. This led to pre-eminence for the singers and for spectacle. After each wave of excess – vocal prowess, dance interludes, stilted plots and texts, then once again, in the nineteenth century, empty display, and later gargantuan orchestras – there was a movement of revolt. Philosophers rarely took part in these aesthetic disputes, most of them being uninterested in music, and possibly more relevantly, being uninterested in any subject which can only be studied in historical terms. But it is fruitless to think about opera apart from its manifestations; every great operatic composer makes his own treaty between the potentially warring elements, Wagner being the most passionate propagandist for his own conception. In the twentieth century the aesthetics of opera have become pluralistic, as has, to an unprecedented degree, the form itself. The perpetual danger is that opera should degenerate into entertainment, and it is always the same message that recalls it to its original function – one which most spectators and listeners are happy to ignore: opera is a form of drama. See also: MUSIC, AESTHETICS OF; PERFORMING ART Further reading Kerman, J. (1956) Opera as Drama, New York: Oxford University Press; 2nd edn, 1989. (The most influential account of opera to have been published this century.) MICHAEL TANNER OPERATIONALISM The term ‘operationalism’, coined by the physicist Percy W. Bridgman (1927), has come to designate a loosely connected body of similar but conflicting views about how scientific theories or concepts are connected to reality or observation via various measurement and other procedures. Examples of an operation would be the procedure of laying a standard yardstick along the edge of a surface to measure length or using psychometric tests to measure sexual orientation. In the 1920–50s different versions of operationalism were produced by, amongst others: Bridgman, who was concerned with the ontology of basic units in physics; behaviourists such as E.C. Tolman, S.S. Stevens, who were concerned with the measurement of intervening variables or hypothetical constructs not accessible to direct observation, as well as B.F. Skinner, who sought to eliminate such nonobservables; and positivistic philosophers of science who were analysing the meaning of terms in scientific language. Conflation of their different operationalist philosophies has led to a great deal of nonsense about operational definition, methodology of observation and experiment, and the meaning of scientific concepts. Operationalist doctrines were most influential in the social sciences, and today the primary legacy is the practice of operationally defining abstract social science concepts as measurable variables. See also: BEHAVIOURISM IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES; SCIENTIFIC METHOD Further reading Bridgman, P.W. (1927) The Logic of Modern Physics , New York: Macmillan. (Original statement of his operationalism.) FREDERICK SUPPE OPTICS Optics as physics concerned with the manipulation and study of light and, more recently, the general study of electromagnetic radiation, has a history back to ancient Egypt, and systematic study to classical Greece. But physics has proved better able to manipulate light than to explain its fundamental nature. ‘Geometrical optics’ treats light as a bundle of discrete rays, tracing their rectilinear paths reflected from surfaces and refracted through transparent media. ‘Physical optics’ treats light as a wave. It explains the dispersion of white light into spectral colours, the bands and colour patterns of diffraction phenomena, and aspects of the absorption and scattering of light. Characterizing the way in which the physical aspects of light become the perceptual aspects of shape and colour joins physics, physiology and philosophy in the perennial question of the correspondence of our perceptions to the physical world itself. A modern view of light describes it in terms of massless particulate photons. This ‘quantum optics’ treats the absorption and emission of light by matter; providing precise knowledge of matter’s inner structure, and the technology of lasers. Philosophically, quantum optics has led to the fundamental question: what is light? What is this natural entity which is created and destroyed in a particle-like way and yet propagates through space – and lenses, holes and slits – in a wave-like way? Experiments in which
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Page 647 individual photons interfere with themselves make it hard to think of them as having unique paths. Experiments involving the correlation of photon properties threaten attempts to describe photons as having individual properties and interacting only locally. Further reading Hecht, E. and Zajac, A. (1974) Optics, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. (A good undergraduate text, accessibly written. Strong on manipulations of all kinds, from Maxwellian electrodynamics to lasers.) Zajonc, A. (1993) Catching the Light: The Entwined History of Light and Mind, New York: Bantam. (An unusual history, with quantum optics through 1991, written by a physicist.) ROGER JONES ORDINAL LOGICS By an ordinal logic is meant any uniform effective means of associating a logic (that is, an effectively generated formal system) with each effective ordinal representation. This notion was first introduced and studied by Alan Turing in 1939 as a means to overcome the incompleteness of sufficiently strong consistent formal systems, established by Kurt Gödel in 1931. The first ordinal logic to consider, in view of Gödel’s results, would be that obtained by iterating into the constructive transfinite the process of adjoining to each system the formal statement expressing its consistency. For that ordinal logic, Turing obtained a completeness result for the class of true statements of the form that all natural numbers have a given effectively decidable property. However, he also showed that any ordinal logic (such as this) which is strictly increasing with increasing ordinal representation cannot have the property of invariance: in general, different representations of the same ordinal will have different sets of theorems attached to them. This makes the choice of representation a crucial one, and without a clear rationale as to how that is to be made, the notion of ordinal logic becomes problematic for its intended use. Research on ordinal logics lapsed until the late 1950s, when it was taken up again for more systematic development. Besides leading to improvements of Turing’s results in various respects (both positive and negative), the newer research turned to restrictions of ordinal logics by an autonomy (or ‘boot-strap’) condition which limits the choice of ordinal representations admitted, by requiring their recognition as such in advance. Further reading Davis, M. (ed.) (1965) The Undecidable: Basic Papers on Undecidable Propositions, Unsolvable Problems and Computable Functions , Hewlett, NY: Raven Press. (Includes a reprinting of Turing’s 1939 paper on ordinal logics, among other fundamental papers by Gödel, Church, Kleene, Turing and Post.) SOLOMON FEFERMAN ORDINARY LANGUAGE PHILOSOPHY Ordinary language philosophy is a method of doing philosophy, rather than a set of doctrines. It is diverse in its methods and attitudes. It belongs to the general category of analytic philosophy, which has as its principal goal the analysis of concepts rather than the construction of a metaphysical system or the articulation of insights about the human condition. The method is to use features of certain words in ordinary or non-philosophical contexts as an aid to doing philosophy. The uses in non-philosophical contexts are taken to be paradigmatic; it is in them that meaning lives and moves and has its being. All ordinary language philosophers agree that classical philosophy suffered from an inadequate methodology that accounts for the lack of progress. But proponents of the method do not agree about whether philosophical problems are solved or dissolved; that is, they do not agree about whether philosophical problems are genuine problems for which there are solutions or whether they are merely pseudoproblems, which can at best be diagnosed. See also: ORDINARY LANGUAGE PHILOSOPHY, SCHOOL OF Further reading Flew, A. (ed.) (1965) Logic and Language (first and second series), Garden City, NY: Anchor Books; repr. Oxford: Blackwell, first series, 1978; second series, 1973. (Classic essays in ordinary language philosophy.) Wittgenstein, L. (1953) Philosophical Investigations , Oxford: Blackwell, 2nd edn, 1958; repr. 1973. (The most famous work of ordinary language philosophy.) A.P. MARTINICH ORDINARY LANGUAGE PHILOSOPHY, SCHOOL OF The label ‘ordinary language philosophy’ was more often used by the enemies than by the
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Page 648 alleged practitioners of what it was intended to designate. It was supposed to identify a certain kind of philosophy that flourished, mainly in Britain and therein mainly in Oxford, for twenty years or so, roughly after 1945. Its enemies found it convenient to group the objects of their hostility under a single name, while the practitioners thus aimed at were more conscious of divergences among themselves, and of the actual paucity of shared philosophical doctrine; they might have admitted to being a ‘group’ perhaps, but scarcely a ‘school’. The sharp hostility which this group aroused was of two quite different sorts. On the one hand, among certain (usually older) philosophers and more commonly among the serious-minded public, it was labelled as philistine, subversive, parochial and even deliberately trivial; on the other hand, some philosophers (for instance, Russell, Popper and Ayer), while ready enough to concede the importance in philosophy of language, saw a concern with ordinary language in particular as a silly aberration, or even as a perversion and betrayal of modern work in the subject. How, then, did ‘ordinary language’ come in? It was partly a matter of style. Those taken to belong to the school were consciously hostile to the lofty, loose rhetoric of old-fashioned idealism; also to the ‘deep’ paradoxes and mystery-mongering of their continental contemporaries; but also to any kind of academic jargon and neologism, to technical terms and aspirations to ‘scientific’ professionalism. They preferred to use, not necessarily without wit or elegance, ordinary language. (Here G.E. Moore was an important predecessor.) Besides style, however, there were also relevant doctrines, though less generally shared. Wittgenstein, perhaps the most revered philosopher of the period, went so far as to suggest that philosophical problems in general actually consisted in, or arose from, distortions and misunderstandings of ordinary language, a ‘clear view’ of which would accomplish their dissolution; many agreed that there was some truth in this, though probably not the whole truth. Then it was widely held that ordinary language was inevitably fundamental to all our intellectual endeavours – it must be what one starts from, supplying the familiar background and terms in which technical sophistications have to be introduced and understood; it was therefore not to be neglected or carelessly handled. Again it was urged, notably by J.L. Austin, that our inherited everyday language is, at least in many areas, a long-evolved, complex and subtle instrument, careful scrutiny of which could be expected to be at least a helpful beginning in the pursuit of philosophical clarity. It was probably this modest claim– overstated and even caricatured by its detractors– which was most frequently supposed to be the credo of ordinary language philosophers. It was important that Russell – like, indeed, Wittgenstein when composing his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) – firmly believed, on the contrary, that ordinary language was the mere primitive, confused and confusing surface beneath which theorists were to seek the proper forms of both language and logic. See also: ORDINARY LANGUAGE PHILOSOPHY Further reading Caton, C.E. (ed.) (1963) Philosophy and Ordinary Language, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois. (Contains a number of representative articles, including ‘Ordinary Language’ by Ryle, and Strawson’s ‘On Referring’. It also has a good bibliography.) Magee, B. (ed.) (1971) Modern British Philosophy , London: Secker & Warburg. (A series of dialogues both with and about contemporary philosophers, originally done for radio; clear and useful, and with a valuable appendix of suggested reading.) GEOFFREY WARNOCK ORESME, NICOLE ( c .1325–82) Nicole Oresme, a French thinker active in the third quarter of the fourteenth century, occupies an important position in late medieval natural philosophy. He was especially notable for his mathematical approach, in which he represented the intensities of qualities and of speeds by geometrical straight lines, which allowed them to be ‘plotted’ in principle against both distance and time. He held that the shapes of the resulting graphs would then have explanatory force in the manner of ancient atomism, but, like the latter, his doctrine had a weak empirical basis. His graphical representations of speed have been compared to those later given by Galileo, but there are no grounds for positing influence. He was prominent in developing a particular mathematical language of ratios, which had earlier been used by Thomas Bradwardine to propose a ‘law’ relating speeds to forces and resistances, and Oresme likewise applied the language to cosmological and physical questions. He was a firm opponent of much of astrology and of magic, and to this end he employed both naturalistic and sceptical arguments. He gave many strong arguments in
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Page 649 favour of a daily rotation of the earth, but finally concluded that it was at rest: his gambit had primarily a sceptical and fideistic purpose. See also: MECHANICS, ARISTOTELIAN; NATURAL PHILOSOPHY, MEDIEVAL Further reading Grant, E. (1981) Studies in Medieval Science and Natural Philosophy , London: Variorum Reprints. (Several of the chapters relate to Oresme.) Oresme, N. (1377) Le livre du ciel et du monde (Book on the Heavens and the World), ed. A.D. Menut and A.J. Denomy, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. (Edition and English translation of Oresme’s French translation of and commentary on Aristotle’s On the Heavens .) GEORGE MOLLAND ORIENTALISM AND ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY Orientalism is the concept that there is something very special and different about the thought of those living in the East, which can be discovered through the methods of scholarship current in the West. It is a reflection of the relationship of imperial and intellectual domination of a West which feels it is superior to an ‘inferior’ East. This often results in an understanding of Islamic philosophy which sees the latter as essentially unoriginal, derivative and of only historical interest. While orientalists have produced interesting and important work, most fail to appreciate the independent status of the material which they analyse. See also: ISLAM, CONCEPT OF PHILOSOPHY IN Further reading Said, E. (1978) Orientalism, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (A key work on the subject of Orientalism by the writer who really started the controversy.) UBAI NOORUDDIN ORIGEN ( c .185–c .254) An ascetic Christian, prodigious scholar and dedicated teacher, Origen devoted his life to exploring God’s revelation. Most of his career was spent teaching in Alexandria. Much of his work takes the form of commentaries on Scripture. He argued that Scripture has three levels: the literal, the moral and the spiritual. The literal level veils the others, and we need God’s help to find the divine mysteries behind the veil. His commentaries directly or indirectly influenced the practice of exegesis throughout the patristic period and the Middle Ages. Origen used his spiritual exegesis, as well as arguments, concepts and models drawn from philosophy, to tackle the theological problems of his day: the compatibility of providence and freedom, the relation of the Father, Son and HolySpirit to eachotherand to rational creatures, the problem of evil, and the origin and destiny of the soul. He is famous – or infamous – for arguing that the souls of angels, demons and human beings enjoyed a previous heavenly existence, but that they sinned and fell. God created the world to punish and remedy their faults. See also: PATRISTIC PHILOSOPHY Further reading Origen (248) Kata Kelsou (Against Celsus; in Latin, Contra Celsus), ed. P. Koetschau in Origenes werke , Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1899; trans. H. Chadwick, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965. (A defence of Christianity against pagan attacks, together with counter-attacks against paganism.) Daniélou, J. (1955) Origen, trans. W. Mitchell, London: Sheed & Ward. (Useful and readable introduction to Origen’s thought.) JEFFREY HAUSE ORPHISM Orphism, a speculative trend within Greek religion, claimed the mythical singer Orpheus as founder and prophet. In changing forms, it is in evidence from the 6th century BC to the end of antiquity. Hexameter poems were attributed to Orpheus, especially a theogony about the origin of gods, world and mankind, and sectarian groups led an ‘Orphic life’, practising mystery cults supposedly founded by Orpheus. The main goal was salvation of the soul from evil, traced to ‘ancient guilt’, with a view to a blessed existence after death; this usually included the doctrine of transmigration Further reading Most, G.W. and Laks, A. (eds) (1997) Studies on the Derveni Papyrus, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Additions to the text, English translation, interpretative studies.) WALTER BURKERT ORTEGA Y GASSET, JOSÉ (1883–1955) The Spanish philosopher Ortega borrowed themes from early twentieth-century German philosophy and
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Page 650 and urgency to his own context. Calling his philosophy ‘vital reason’ or ‘ratiovitalism’, he employed it initially to deal with the problem of Spanish decadence and later with European cultural issues, such as abstract art and the mass revolt against moral and intellectual excellence. Vital reason is more a method for coping with concrete historical problems than a system of universal principles. But the more disciplined the method became, the deeper Ortega delved into Western history to solve the theoretical and practical dilemmas facing the twentieth century. See also: SPAIN, PHILOSOPHY IN Further reading Ortega y Gasset, J. (1925) La deshumanización del arte e ideas sobre la novela , Madrid: Revista de Occidente; trans. H. Weyl, The Dehumanization of Art: Ideas on the Novel , Princeton, NJ, 1948. (Ortega’s best-known works of aesthetics, combining an appraisal of the state of art in the early twentieth-century Europe with a characteristically energetic exposition of how aesthetic experience functions.) NELSON R. ORRINGER OSWALD, JAMES (1703–93) James Oswald, Scottish theological writer, used the philosophy of ‘common sense’ to try to found religious and moral conviction on principles that were impervious to scepticism. In a long running controversy over Church discipline, he defended the right of individual parishes to choose their ministers, seeing the prevailing system of patronage as favouring the advocates of a fashionable kind of civility that was too tolerant of scepticism and intellectual innovation, and too indifferent to the Church’s traditional concerns with public and private morality. Though never part of the Aberdeen philosophical community, Oswald corresponded with Reid, and late in life collaborated with him in charitable work for the sons of clergy. See also: COMMON SENSE SCHOOL Further reading Oswald, J. (1766–72) An Appeal to Common Sense in behalf of Religion, vol. 1, Edinburgh: Kincaid and Bell; vol. 2, Edinburgh: Kincaid and Creech; German translation by F.E. Wilmsen, Appelation an den gemeinen Menschenverstand zum Vortheil der Religion, Leipzig, 1774, 2 vols. (Issued anonymously.) M.A. STEWART OTHER MINDS It has traditionally been thought that the problem of other minds is epistemological: how is it that we know other people have thoughts, experiences and emotions? After all, we have no direct knowledge that this is so. We observe their behaviour and their bodies, not their thoughts, experiences and emotions. The task is seen as being to uncover the justification for our belief in other minds. It has also been thought that there is a conceptual problem: how can we manage to have any conception of mental states other than our own? It is noteworthy that there is as yet no standard view on either of these problems. One answer to the traditional (epistemological) problem has been the analogical inference to other minds, appealing to the many similarities existing between ourselves and others. This answer, though it is no longer in general favour among philosophers, still has its defenders. Probably the favoured solution is to view other minds as logically on a par with the unobservable, theoretical entities of science. That other people have experiences, like us, is seen as the best explanation of their behaviour. See also: MIND, CHILD’S THEORY OF Further reading Buford, T.O. (ed.) (1970) Essays on Other Minds, Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press. (A useful, varied collection, including some classical items, particularly two by N. Malcolm expounding Wittgenstein.) ALEC HYSLOP OTTO, RUDOLF (1869–1937) Rudolf Otto, an early and leading student of religious experience, was a devout Christian thinker (part theologian, part philosopher, part phenomenologist of religious experience) who was strongly influenced by the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Born in Germany, he travelled widely and was an early figure in the effort to make South Asian and Indian thought accessible to a European audience. He held that numinous experience – experience of the uncanny that is strongest and most important in cases in which it seems to its subject to be experience of God – is unique in kind. Such experience of God, he held, occurred in both Semitic and South Asian monotheistic traditions. Recognizing the intellectual or doctrinal content of numinous experience, but influenced by Kant’s thesis that knowledge-giving
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Page 651 experience, Otto tried to remain faithful to both numinous experience and Kantian philosophy by talking about ‘ideograms’ that express the content of numinous experience but, allegedly at least, are not concepts. Further reading Almond, P.C. (1984) Rudolph Otto: An Introduction to His Philosophical Theology , Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. (Good, accessible discussion of Otto’s thought and influence.) Otto, R. (1917) Das Heilige , Munich: Beck, 25th edn, 1936; trans. J.W. Harvey, The Idea of the Holy , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923. (Otto’s magnum opus, in which he develops his account of numinous experience.) KEITH E. YANDELL OVERTON, RICHARD (d. circa 1665) Overton was one of the leading figures of the radical Leveller movement in England in the 1640s. He fought for the equality of all men before the law and for complete religious and political toleration, often by appealing to notions such as the social contract and the natural law. In metaphysics he denied that the soul is a separate immaterial and immortal substance, arguing that immortality is not achieved until the resurrection. His views on the soul may have influenced Milton. See also: SOUL, NATURE AND IMMORTALITY OF THE Further reading Overton, R. (1643) Mans Mortalitie ; ed. H. Fisch, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1968. (A reprint of the 1643 edition, with textual notes and a brief introduction by the editor. The most impotant differences between this and the revised 1655 edition are noted.) UDO THIEL OWEN, GWILYM ELLIS LANE (1922–82) The British philosopher and academic G.E.L. Owen led the reorientation in ancient philosophy that began in the 1950s in Britain and North America. He approached the texts with a profound knowledge of classical scholarship, but also as an analytic philosopher, understanding them as conceptual investigations of live philosophical interest. Concerned primarily with the logic of argumentation, philosophy of science and metaphysics, he wrote influential articles on Parmenides, Plato and Aristotle. Equally important were his classes at Oxford (1953–66), at Harvard (1966–73) and finally at Cambridge, in which he constantly developed and tested his ideas and methods. Further reading Owen, G.E.L. (1986) Logic, Science and Dialectic, ed. M.C. Nussbaum, London: Duckworth. (A collection of all Owen’s published scholarly papers, with the exception of six book reviews and one commentary.) JOHN M. COOPER OXFORD CALCULATORS ‘Oxford Calculators’ is a modern label for a group of thinkers at Oxford in the mid-fourteenth century, whose approach to problems was noticed in the immediately succeeding centuries because of their tendency to solve by ‘calculations’ all sorts of problems previously addressed by other methods. If for example the question was, what must a monk do to obey the precept of his abbot to pray night and day, a ‘calculator’ might immediately rephrase the question to ask whether there is a minimum time spent in prayer that would be sufficient to fulfil the abbot’s precept, or a maximum time spent that would be insufficient to fulfil the precept. Or, if grace was supposed to be both what enables a Christian to act meritoriously and a reward for having so acted, then a calculator might ask whether the degree of grace correlated with a meritorious act occurs at the moment of the meritorious act, before the act when the decision to act is being made, or after the act when the reward of increased grace is given. If a body was hot at one end but cold at the other, then a calculator might ask not whether it is to be labelled hot or cold, but how hot it is as a whole. Finally, if it was asked whether a heavy body acts as a whole or as the sum of its parts, then a calculator might take the case of a long thin rod falling through a tunnel pierced through the centre of the earth and attempt to calculate how the rod’s velocity would decrease as parts of the rod passed the center of the cosmos, if it acted as the sum of its parts. Of these four questions, the last two were asked by Richard Swineshead, a mid-fourteenth century fellow of Merton College, Oxford, whose Liber calculationum (Book of Calculations) led to his being given the name ‘Calculator’. By association with Richard Swineshead, other Oxford masters including Thomas Bradwardine, Richard Kilvington, William Heytesbury, Roger Swineshead and John Dumbleton have been labelled the ‘Oxford Calculators’.
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Page 652 Their work contains a distinctive combination of logical and quantitative techniques, which results from the fact that it was often utilized in disputations on sophismata ( de sophismatibus ). This same group of thinkers, with emphasis on their mathematical rather than logical work, has been called the ‘Merton School’, because many but not all of the Calculators were associated with Merton College, Oxford. Besides calculatory works, the same authors wrote works in which calculatory techniques are not so prominent, including commentaries on Aristotle, mathematical compendia and commentaries on Peter Lombard’s Sentences. See also: NATURAL PHILOSOPHY, MEDIEVAL Further reading Clagett, M. (1959) The Science of Mechanics in the Middle Ages, Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press. (Text, translations and commentaries. Provides the context, within medieval mechanics, of the work of the Oxford Calculators.) Sylla, E. (1991) The Oxford Calculators and the Mathematics of Motion, 1320–1350 , New York: Garland. (Contains chapters on the physics of motion in the categories of quality and place, on measurement by proportionalities and latitudes, and on the wider calculatory tradition, as well as extensive outlines in Latin of several key calculatory works.) EDITH DUDLEY SYLLA
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Page 653 P PAINE, THOMAS (1737–1809) Thomas Paine, born in Norfolk, England, spent his early years as an undistinguished artisan and later excise officer. In 1774 he emigrated to America and settled in Philadelphia where he became a journalist and essayist. His Common Sense (1776) and sixteen essays on The Crisis (1776–83) were stunning examples of political propaganda and theorizing. In the late 1780s, in Europe, Paine wrote The Rights of Man (1791–2) and attacked the English political system. During the French Revolution he was a Girondin in the French Convention and wrote The Age of Reason (1794, 1796), savagely criticizing Christianity. He died in New York in 1809, an important figure in the sweep of the revolutionary politics in America, England, and France at the end of the eighteenth century. See also: AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY IN THE 18TH AND 19TH CENTURIES; FRANKLIN, B. Further reading Paine, T. (1947) Complete Writings of Thomas Paine , ed. P.S. Foner, New York: Library of America, 2 vols. ( Four Letters on Interesting Subjects (1776) and Old Truths and Established Facts: Being an Answer to a Very New Pamphlet Indeed (1792), both probably written by Paine, are not included.) BRUCE KUKLICK PALEY, WILLIAM (1743–1805) William Paley, theologian and moral philosopher, expressed and codified the views and arguments of orthodox Christianity and the conservative moral and political thought of eighteenth-century England. Paley says that his works form a unified system based on natural religion. Like others during this period, Paley thought that reason alone, unaided by revelation, would establish many Christian theses. He is confident that a scientific understanding of nature will support the claim that God is the author of nature. Paley belongs to the anti-deist tradition that holds that revelation supplements natural religion. The most important revelation is God’s assurance of an afterlife in which the virtuous are rewarded and the vicious are punished. Natural and revealed religion, in turn, provide the foundation for morality. God’s will determines what is right and his power to reward and punish us in the afterlife provide the moral sanctions. On the whole, Paley is concerned with sustaining Christian faith, and ensuring that people known what their duties are and do them. See also: DEISM PROVIDENCE Further reading Paley, W. (1785) The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy , Dublin: Exshaw, White. (Based on lectures Paley gave while teaching at Cambridge.) LeMahieu, D. (1976) The Mind of William Paley , Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. (A general, thematic study of Paley’s theology and philosophy.) CHARLOTTE R. BROWN PANAETIUS ( c .185–c .110 BC) Panaetius, a Greek philosopher from Rhodes, brought new vitality to Stoicism in the second century BC by shifting the focus of its ethical theory from the idealized sage to the practical problems of ordinary people. Working a century after Chrysippus had systematized Stoicism, Panaetius is often labelled the founder of ‘Middle Stoicism’ for defending new and generally more moderate positions on several issues. Because none of his writings survive, his influence is hard to gauge precisely and easily underrated. But his impact, especially in Rome where he was closely associated with many in the ruling elite, was profound. His emphasis on public service and the obligations imposed by power and high station probably helped shape the ideology of Roman imperialism. Through Cicero, whose writings preserve many of his ideas, he had lasting influence, especially on early modern moral and political thought. See also: STOICISM Further reading Dawson, D. (1992) Cities of the Gods: Communist Utopias in Greek Thought, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Chapter 5 argues that Panaetius dramatically shifted Stoic
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Page 654 political and social thought in conservative directions.) STEPHEN A. WHITE PAN-AFRICANISM Pan-Africanism covers a wide range of intellectual positions which share the assumption of some common cultural or political projects for both Africans and people of African descent. The political project is the unification of all Africans into a single African state, sometimes thought of as providing a homeland for the return of those in the African diaspora. More vaguely, many self-identified panAfricanists have aimed to pursue projects of solidarity – some political, some literary or artistic – in Africa or the African diaspora. The Pan-Africanist movement was founded in the nineteenth century by intellectuals of African descent in the Caribbean and North America, who saw themselves as belonging to a single negro race. As a result the Africa of pan-Africanism has sometimes been limited to those regions of sub-Saharan Africa largely inhabited by darker-skinned peoples, thus excluding those lighterskinned north Africans, most of whom speak Arabic as a first language. In the twentieth century this racialized understanding of African identity has been challenged by many of the African intellectuals who took over the movement’s leadership in the period after the Second World War. Founders of the Organization of African Unity, such as Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana had a notion of Africa that was continental. However, the movement’s intellectual roots lie firmly in the racial understanding of Africa in the thought of the African-American and AfroCaribbean intellectuals who founded it. Pan-Africanism began as a movement in the diaspora among the descendants of the slave populations of the New World and spread to Africa itself. As a result the forms of solidarity it articulated aimed to challenge anti-black racism on two fronts: racial domination in the diaspora and racialized colonial domination in the African continent. The movement’s fissures have occurred where these two clearly distinguishable projects have pulled it in different directions. Further reading Geiss, I. (1974) The Pan-African Movement: A History of Pan-Africanism in America, Europe and Africa, New York: Africana Publishing Company; London: Methuen. (A solid scholarly survey of key figures in the movement and of its antecedents.) Hooker, J.R. (1967) Black Revolutionary: George Padmore’s Path from Communism to Pan-Africanism , New York: Praeger. K. ANTHONY APPIAH PANPSYCHISM Panpsychism is the thesis that physical nature is composed of individuals each of which is to some degree sentient. It is somewhat akin to hylozoism, but in place of the thesis of the pervasiveness of life in nature substitutes the pervasiveness of sentience, experience or, in a broad sense, consciousness. There are two distinct grounds on which panpsychism has been based. Some see it as the best explanation of the emergence of consciousness in the universe to say that it is, in fact, universally present, and that the high-level consciousness of humans and animals is the product of special patterns of that low-level consciousness or feeling which is universally present. The other ground on which panpsychism is argued for is that ordinary knowledge of the physical world is only of its structure and sensory effects on us, and that the most likely inner content which fills out this structure and produces these experiences is a system of patterns of sentient experience of a low level. Further reading Sprigge, T.L.S. (1983) The Vindication of Absolute Idealism , Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. (The first half of this book provides a defence of panpsychism.) T.L.S. SPRIGGE PAN-SLAVISM The historian B.H. Sumner has commented that Pan-Slavism was not so much an organized policy or creed, but a state of mind and set of feelings. At the time, it was difficult to assess the power of PanSlavism; today, it remains correspondingly difficult to analyse its different elements’ (Sumner 1937). Logically and philosophically weak, and in fact usually deficient in any kind of intellectual structure, this identification with, preference for, and emphasis on the Slavs has, nevertheless, been a presence in European (and to a much lesser extent world) history ever since its emergence in early nineteenth century. See also: SOUTH SLAVS, PHILOSOPHY OF
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Page 655 Further reading Kohn, H. (1953) Pan-Slavism: Its History and Ideology , Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. (Provides a rich and varied picture. Professor Kohn also published several other books related to the topic of this article.) NICHOLAS V. RIASANOVSKY PANTHEISM Pantheism contrasts with monotheism (there is one God), polytheism (there are many gods), deism (God created the world in such a way that it is capable of existing and operating on its own, which God then allows it to do) and panentheism (in God there is a primordial and unchanging nature, and a consequent nature that changes and develops). Etymologically, pantheism is the view that Deity and Cosmos are identical. Theologically, it embraces divine immanence while rejecting divine transcendence. If atheism is the denial that anything is divine, pantheism is not atheism; if atheism is the claim that there is no Creator, Providence, transcendent Deity, or personal God, pantheism is atheistic. Spinoza, perhaps the paradigm figure for pantheism, was described by some as ‘a God-intoxicated man’ and by others as an atheist. On his account, only God or Nature exists, a single, necessarily existing substance whose modes and qualities exhaust reality. Conceivable equally properly as physical or as mental, God or Nature is no proper object of worship, creates nothing, grants freedom to none, hears no prayer, and does not act in history. Personal immortality, on Spinoza’s view, not only does not occur, but is logically impossible. It is one thing to value nature so highly that one calls it a divinity, another to believe in God in any monotheistic sense. This much said, it must be admitted that ‘pantheism’ is not easy to define precisely. As conceived here, pantheism need not be a variety of materialism, and if it is materialistic it includes a high view of the worth of matter. Yet ‘pantheism’ has served as a term of abuse, and as another term for ‘atheism’ and ‘materialism’ and ‘deism’, terms bearing quite different senses. See also: GOD, CONCEPTS OF Further reading Thomas, G.F. (1965) Religious Philosophies of the West , New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. (A critical analysis of religious thinkers from Plato to Tillich; see chapter 7.) KEITH E. YANDELL PARACELSUS (PHILIPPUS AUREOLUS THEOPHRASTUS BOMBASTUS VON HOHENHEIM) (1493–1541) Paracelsus (pseudonym of Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim) was an itinerant Swiss surgeon and physician who formulated a new philosophy of medicine based on a combination of chemistry, Neoplatonism and the occult, all within a Christian framework. His works, usually in German rather than Latin, were mostly published after his death. His importance for medical practice lay in his insistence on observation and experiment, and his use of chemical methods for preparing drugs. He rejected Galen’s explanation of disease as an imbalance of humours, along with the traditional doctrine of the four elements. He saw the human being as a microcosm that reflected the structure and elements of the macrocosm, thus presenting a unified view of human beings and a universe in which everything was interconnected and full of vital powers. Paracelsian chemical medicine was very popular in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, largely due to its presentation as part of a general theory. See also: HERMETISM; MEDICINE, PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Pagel, W. (1982) Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance, revised 2nd edn, Basle and New York: Karger. (The standard account of Paracelsus’ life and works.) Paracelsus ( c .1520–1541) The Hermetic and Alchemical Writings of Aureolus Philippus Theophrastus Bombast , trans. A.E. Waite, London: J. Elliott, 1894; repr. Berkeley, CA: Shambhala and New York: Random House, 1976. (Good translations of selected works on alchemy and hermetic medicine.) E.J. ASHWORTH PARACONSISTENT LOGIC A logic is paraconsistent if it does not validate the principle that from a pair of contradictory sentences, A and ~A, everything follows, as most orthodox logics do. If a theory has a paraconsistent underlying logic, it may be inconsistent without being trivial (that is, entailing everything). Sustained work in formal paraconsistent logics started in the early 1960s. A major motivating thought was that there are important naturally occurring inconsistent but non-trivial theories. Some logicians have gone further and claimed that some of these theories may be true. By the mid-1970s, details of the
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Page 656 semantics and proof-theories of many paraconsistent logics were well understood. More recent research has focused on the applications of these logics and on their philosophical underpinnings and implications. Further reading Priest, G. (1984) ‘Paraconsistent Logic’, in D. Gabbay and F. Guenthner (eds) Handbook of Philosophical Logic, vol. 2, Dordrecht: Reidel, 2nd edn, forthcoming. (The best reference work on paraconsistent logic currently available. It has a thorough overview of the technical aspects, with some philosophical comment and references to the literature.) GRAHAM PRIEST PARADOXES, EPISTEMIC The four primary epistemic paradoxes are the lottery, preface, knowability, and surprise examination paradoxes. The lottery paradox begins by imagining a fair lottery with a thousand tickets in it. Each ticket is so unlikely to win that we are justified in believing that it will lose. So we can infer that no ticket will win. Yet we know that some ticket will win. In the preface paradox, authors are justified in believing everything in their books. Some preface their book by claiming that, given human frailty, they are sure that errors remain. But then they justifiably believe both that everything in the book is true, and that something in it is false. The knowability paradox results from accepting that some truths are not known, and that any truth is knowable. Since the first claim is a truth, it must be knowable. From these claims it follows that it is possible that there is some particular truth that is known to be true and known not to be true. The final paradox concerns an announcement of a surprise test next week. A Friday test, since it can be predicted on Thursday evening, will not be a surprise yet, if the test cannot be on Friday, it cannot be on Thursday either. For if it has not been given by Wednesday night, and it cannot be a surprise on Friday, it will not be a surprise on Thursday. Similar reasoning rules out all other days of the week as well; hence, no surprise test can occur next week. On Wednesday, the teacher gives a test, and the students are taken completely by surprise. See also: EPISTEMIC LOGIC; SCEPTICISM Further reading Kyburg, H. (1961) ‘Conjunctivitis’, Probability and the Logic of Rational Belief, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. (The original source of the lottery paradox.) JONATHAN L. KVANVIG PARADOXES OF SET AND PROPERTY Emerging around 1900, the paradoxes of set and property have greatly influenced logic and generated a vast literature. A distinction due to Ramsey in 1926 separates them into two categories: the logical paradoxes and the semantic paradoxes. The logical paradoxes use notions such as set or cardinal number, while the semantic paradoxes employ semantic concepts such as truth or definability. Both often involve self-reference. The best known logical paradox is Russell’s paradox concerning the set S of all sets x such that x is not a member of x. Russell’s paradox asks: is S a member of itself? A moment’s reflection shows that S is a member of itself if and only if S is not a member of itself – a contradiction. Russell found this paradox by analysing the paradox of the largest cardinal. The set U of all sets has the largest cardinal number, since every set is a subset of U. But there is a cardinal number greater than that of any given set M, namely the cardinal of the power set, or set of all subsets, of M. Thus the cardinal of the power set of U is greater than that of U, a contradiction. (The paradox of the largest ordinal, discussed below, is similar in structure.) Among the semantic paradoxes, the best known is the liar paradox, found by the ancient Greeks. A man says that he is lying. Is what he says true or false? Again, either conclusion leads to its opposite. Although this paradox was debated in medieval Europe, its modern interest stems from Russell, who placed it in the context of a whole series of paradoxes, including his own. Further reading Beth, E.W. (1964) The Foundations of Mathematics, Amsterdam: North Holland. (Part 6 has an older, but still useful, summary of the paradoxes.) Fraenkel, A.A., Bar-Hillel, Y. and Levy, A. (1973) Foundations of Set Theory , Amsterdam: North Holland. (A careful analysis of the various solutions of the logical paradoxes, including axiomatic set theory, the theory of types, and metamathematics.) GREGORY H. MOORE
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Page 657 PARANORMAL PHENOMENA The term ‘paranormal phenomena’ refers to the class of anomalous events studied within the field of parapsychology. Parapsychology’s principal areas of investigation are extrasensory perception (ESP), psychokinesis (PK), and cases suggesting that personal consciousness survives the death of one’s body. ESP phenomena are apparent instances of anomalous transfer of information. They divide into telepathy, clairvoyance and precognition. PK phenomena are forms, roughly speaking, of apparent mind-overmatter. Survival research deals primarily with cases of ostensible reincarnation and mediumship (or ‘channelling’). The data of parapsychology raise a number of deep philosophical issues. Cases suggesting survival challenge materialist theories of the mind, and (according to some) provide good evidence for Cartesian dualism. ESP and PK challenge assumptions about the nature and temporal direction of causal relations, and also suggest the intimidating possibility that we have direct access to and influence on the thoughts and bodily states of others. See also: PARAPSYCHOLOGY Further reading Braude, S.E. (1986) The Limits of Influence: Psychokinesis and the Philosophy of Science , New York & London: Routledge & Kegan Paul; revised edn, Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1997. (A presentation, defence and philosophical assessment of the evidence for large-scale psychokinesis (PK), focusing on nineteenth- and twentieth-century cases of physical mediumship. Also contains detailed examinations of apparitions and precognition, including a discussion of retrocausation.) STEPHEN E. BRAUDE PARAPSYCHOLOGY Tales of dreams that come true, ‘mind over matter’ and other such oddities are both familiar and old. Parapsychology investigates such things, attempting to use scientific and, especially, experimental methods to investigate whether and in what circumstances humans can glean information without using ordinary perceptual means (that is, by extrasensory perception or ESP) or can alter the physical environment simply by willing it (that is, by psychokinesis). Such phenomena, if they exist, are often grouped under the heading psi(-phenomena). It is sometimes claimed that parapsychology presents a challenge to physicalism. However, ostensible psi-phenomena are known through their physical effects and are studied within parapsychology by ordinary scientific methods. In fact, models intended to explain psi-phenomena by known physical processes have been seriously discussed within parapsychology. In any case, parapsychology alone could not show that psi-phenomena have no physical explanation; that is a judgment for physics itself. More important, physicalism is a very broad doctrine that should not simply be equated with the requirement that everything be explained within physics. It is very unclear what we would gain by denying that psi-phenomena are physical. See also: PARANORMAL PHENOMENA Further reading Broughton, R.S. (1991) Parapsychology: The Controversial Science , New York: Ballentine Books. (An introduction to parapsychology intended for a general audience.) Flew, A. (ed.) (1987) Readings in the Philosophical Problems of Parapsychology , Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books. (A useful collection of classic and recent articles on parapsychology. The essay by Irving Thalberg, ‘Are Paranormal Events Non-Physical?’, is a useful discussion of parapsychology and physicalism.) ALLEN STAIRS PARETO PRINCIPLE A social state is said to be Pareto-efficient when there is no feasible alternative to it in which at least one individual is better off while no individual is worse off. The Pareto principle tells us to move from Pareto-inefficient to Pareto-efficient states. Suppose a large basket of fruit is shared among a group in some way or another – one apple, two peaches, a dozen cherries each, for instance. If the fruit can be exchanged so that at least some people get more enjoyment from what they have, and no one gets less, the Pareto principle instructs us to do so; indeed, it instructs us to carry on exchanging until no more improvements of this kind are possible. Further reading Pareto, V. (1906) Manual of Political Economy , trans. A.S. Schwier, London: Macmillan, 1972. (The original source of the Pareto principle.) DAVID MILLER
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Page 658 PARMENIDES (early to mid 5th century BC) Parmenides of Elea, a revolutionary and enigmatic Greek philosophical poet, was the earliest defender of Eleatic metaphysics. He argued for the essential homogeneity and changelessness of being, rejecting as spurious the world’s apparent variation over space and time. His one poem, whose first half largely survives, opens with the allegory of an intellectual journey by which Parmenides has succeeded in standing back from the empirical world. He learns, from the mouth of an unnamed goddess, a dramatically new perspective on being. The goddess’s disquisition, which fills the remainder of the poem, is divided into two parts; the Way of Truth and the Way of Seeming. The Way of Truth is the earliest known passage of sustained argument in Western philosophy. First a purportedly exhaustive choice is offered between two ‘paths’ – that of being, and that of not-being. Next the not-being path is closed off: the predicate expression ‘ . . . is not’ could never be supplied with a subject, since only that-which-is can be spoken of and thought of. Nor, on pain of self-contradiction, can a third path be entertained, one which would conflate being with not-being – despite the fact that just such a path is implicit in the ordinary human acceptance of an empirical world bearing a variety of shifting predicates. All references, open or covert, to not-being must be outlawed. Only ‘ . . . is’ (or perhaps ‘ . . . is. . . ’) can be coherently said of anything. The next move is to seek the characteristics of that-which-is. The total exclusion of not-being leaves us with something radically unlike the empirical world. It must lack generation, destruction, change, distinct parts, movement and an asymmetric shape, all of which would require some not-being to occur. Thatwhich-is must, in short, be a changeless and undifferentiated sphere. In the second part of the poem the goddess offers a cosmology – a physical explanation of the very world which the first half of the poem has banished as incoherent. This is based on a pair of ultimate principles or elements, the one light and fiery, the other heavy and dark. It is presented as conveying the ‘opinions of mortals’. It is deceitful, but the goddess nevertheless recommends learning it, ‘so that no opinion of mortals may outstrip you’. The motive for the radical split between the two halves of the poem has been much debated in modern times. In antiquity the Way of Truth was taken by some as a challenge to the notion of change, which physics must answer, by others as the statement of a profound metaphysical truth, while the Way of Seeming was widely treated as in some sense Parmenides’ own bona fide physical system. See also: PRESOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY Further reading Gallop, D. (1984) Parmenides of Elea , Toronto, Ont.: University of Toronto Press. (Contains text, translation and notes; a basic and clear exposition.) Stokes, M.C. (1971) One and Many in Presocratic Philosophy , Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. (Locates Parmenides in a historical context.) DAVID SEDLEY PARTICULARS Particulars are to be understood by contrasting them with universals, that term being used to comprise both properties and relations. Often the term ‘individuals’ is used interchangeably with ‘particulars’, though some restrict the term ‘individuals’ to those particulars whose existence has more than momentary duration. It is sometimes taken as a distinctive feature of particulars that they cannot be in more than one place at a time, whereas universals are capable of being wholly present in more than one place at a given time: if you have a white thing here and a white thing there, then you have two particulars but only one property. This way of distinguishing between particulars and universals may help us to focus on apt paradigm cases of each, but arguably this does not get us to the heart of the matter. On the one hand, some think it is possible, at least in principle, for a magician, or Pythagoras, or a time traveller, or a subatomic particle to be in two places at once, even though each is a particular. On the other hand, some think that there are properties which could not possibly be manifested in two different places at the same time, and yet which nonetheless are universals: think, for instance, of the divine property of absolute perfection, or of the conjunction of all intrinsic properties of a Leibnizian monad (or possible world); or of Judas’ property of simply being Judas. Particulars are things which have properties and which stand in relations – particulars ‘instantiate’ properties and relations. By itself, however, this does not distinguish particulars from universals since universals, too, are
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Page 659 naturally thought to have properties and to stand in relations. What distinguishes particulars is the fact that, while a particular instantiates properties and relations, nothing instantiates a particular. Universals both ‘have’ (properties and relations) and are ‘had’; particulars ‘have’ but are not ‘had’. Since a particular is not instantiated by another thing, it is sometimes said to exist ‘in itself’, whereas a universal exists ‘in’ something else. For this reason, the term ‘particular’ is related to the term ‘substance’, which is traditionally used to mean something capable of independent existence. See also: IDENTITY; UNIVERSALS Further reading Campbell, K. (1989) Abstract Particulars , Oxford: Blackwell. (An accessible defence of properties particularized. Useful for further references.) Strawson, P.F. (1959) Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics , London: Methuen. (A transcendental justification of a roughly Kantian sort, for a common-sense theory of individuals as irreducible to properties.) JOHN C. BIGELOW PARTIINOST’ Partiinost’ (Russian for partyness, often translated as party-mindedness, partisanship or party spirit) was long the controlling principle of Soviet Marxism. Though commonly identified with thought control, partiinost’ originally signified social analysis of thought joined with moral judgment, an ancient combination that can work against the powers that be as well as for them. Lenin’s version changed from revolt to thought control after his party came to power in 1917, but especially after Stalin’s ‘revolution from above’ twelve years later. In 1950 Stalin began a restriction of partiinost’ by declaring ‘science’ separate from ‘ideology’. Such reform accelerated after his death in 1953, but slowed down from the mid-1960s to the late 1980s. Then a new burst of reform set off the collapse of the Soviet system and of partiinost’, though the problems that engendered it – the entanglement of group interests and claims of truth – persist. See also: MARXIST PHILOSOPHY, RUSSIAN AND SOVIET Further reading Joravsky, D. (1961) Soviet Marxism and Natural Science 1917–1932, New York: Columbia University Press and London: Routledge. (See especially ‘Lenin and the Partyness of Philosophy’ and ’The Great Break, 1929– 1932’.) DAVID JORAVSKY PASCAL, BLAISE (1623–62) Blaise Pascal, the son of a government official from the Auvergne in France, was a mathematical prodigy who numbered among his early achievements an essay on conic sections and the invention of a calculating machine. In his early twenties he engaged in the vigorous European debate about the vacuum, undertaking, or causing to be undertaken, a series of experiments which helped to refute the traditional view that nature abhors a vacuum and setting out clearly the methodology of the new science. In 1646 he came under the influence of Jansenism; this he seems to have rejected for a short time in the early 1650s, but he then underwent a profound spiritual experience which transformed his life and drew him into close association with leading Jansenists, with whom he collaborated in producing the polemical Lettres provinciales (1656–7). At the same time he planned to write an apology for the Christian religion, but ill-health so affected his final years that this only survives in the fragmentary form of the Pensées (1670). He made significant contributions to mathematics, especially in the fields of geometry, number theory and probability theory, and he also helped to describe the ‘ esprit géométrique’ which characterized the new science of the 1650s. He argued that geometry was superior to logic in that it could provide not only demonstrative procedures but also axioms from which to work; and he set down appropriate rules of argument. His religious writings were published shortly after his death; many attempts have been made to reconstruct the apology which they encapsulate. It seems most likely that this would have fallen into two parts, the first setting out the wretchedness of humans without God, the second demonstrating the truth of Christianity and the felicity of the religious life. Humans are portrayed in Augustinian terms as corrupt, vapid creatures, prey to their passions and the delusions of imagination; but they are also shown to possess greatness through their reason and self-awareness, which can bring them to recognize that Christianity alone has represented their predicament accurately, and that they should turn to religion, even if initially they lack the instinctive faith which is the hallmark of the saved. In the ‘wager’ fragment, Pascal
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Page 660 employs his mathematical insights to revivify an old apologetic argument (that it is wiser to bet on God existing rather than on his not existing) and to link it to an existential imperative (that we all are obliged to choose between these alternatives). The adroit interplay between scepticism, rationalism and faith of the first part is succeeded by a second part which argues the veracity of Christianity from Biblical interpretation, prophecies and miracles. Pascal concedes that this cannot carry absolute conviction; but he insists that the rejection of such arguments is caused not by man’s rational powers but by his corrupt passions. Pascal’s Pensées are written for the most part in terse aphoristic form; he aspired to a style that was so accessible that the reader would believe he was experiencing as his own the thoughts that he read. Although Pascal said at the end of his life that he considered his mathematical pursuits a quite separate enterprise from his religious writings, a common epistemology can be found in both, together with a scientific outlook which Pascal saw as superior to the philosophical alternatives of his day. Further reading Krailsheimer, A. (1980) Pascal, Oxford: Past Masters. (A good general introduction.) Pascal, B. (1656–7) Lettres provinciales , trans. A.J. Krailsheimer as The Provincial Letters , Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967. (The French first editions of the various letters are without imprint.) IAN MacLEAN PASSMORE, JOHN ARTHUR (1914–) John Passmore was born in New South Wales and studied at the University of Sydney. He taught there before moving to Otago in New Zealand and then to the Australian National University. He is perhaps best known for A Hundred Years of Philosophy which has been widely recognized as a major feat of philosophical scholarship. He has contributed widely to topics in the history of philosophy, philosophy of education, philosophy of science and philosophy of the environment. He is one of the pioneers of what has come to be called applied philosophy. See also: AUSTRALIA, PHILOSOPHY IN Further reading Passmore, J.A. (1957) A Hundred Years of Philosophy , London: Duckworth. FRANK JACKSON PATAÑJALI ( c . 2nd century BC) The grammarian Patañjali lived in the second century BC, before the appearance of the classical systems of Indian philosophy. The aspects of his thought that we would call philosophical are concerned primarily with questions of meaning and meaning-bearers in language. In discussing the meanings of words, Patañjali distinguished between two possible meanings, the form and the individual object. Both of these can constitute meaning. See also: MEANING, INDIAN THEORIES OF Further reading Bronkhorst, J. (1987) Three Problems Pertaining to the Mahābhāṣya, Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute. (Especially chapter 3, ‘The Mahābhāṣya and the development of Indian philosophy’.) JOHANNES BRONKHORST PATERNALISM Restriction of people’s liberty of action is paternalistic when it is imposed for the good of those whose liberty is restricted and against their will. The argument in favour of paternalism is that, if one can prevent people from harming themselves, there is no reason not to do so. Versions of the ethical creed of liberalism tend to oppose paternalism. One argument is that as a practical matter the policy of permitting paternalism tends to do more harm than good in the long run, or at least less good than a strict refusal to countenance paternalism would achieve. Another argument appeals to a right of autonomy which paternalism is held to violate whether or not its consequences on the whole are undesirable. Paternalist advocacy can be ‘hard’ or ‘soft’; soft paternalism is the doctrine that paternalism can only be justifiable when the individual action that is being restricted was not chosen in a substantially voluntary way. See FREEDOM AND LIBERTY; RESPECT FOR PERSONS Further reading Feinberg, J. (1986) The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law , vol. 2, Harm to Self , Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Most comprehensive recent treatment of the issue of paternalistic restriction of liberty.) Mill, J.S. (1859) On Liberty, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1978. (Classic statement of a liberal utilitarian argument
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Page 661 against paternalism in the context of a broad defence of individual freedom.) RICHARD ARNESON PATOČKA, JAN (1907–77) Patočka was a Czech philosopher, one of the last pupils of Husserl. From the mid-1930s he developed his own approach to philosophical problems of the life-world ( Lebenswelt ), its structures and human activities in it. After 1945 he expanded this theme to incorporate other phenomenological problems (movement, freedom, aesthetics). He also paid much attention to the history of philosophy since antiquity, particularly to Comenius. After 1972, when the Communist system deprived him of his academic position, he elaborated his philosophical concept of History in his ‘Heretical Essays’. He was one of the authors of the political manifesto of the Czechoslovak political opposition, Charter 77, and his name became a symbol of moral resistance against totalitarian power. See also: CZECH REPUBLIC, PHILOSOPHY IN Further reading Kohak, E. (1989) Jan Patočka: Philosophy and Selected Writings, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (A study with English translations of some important works by Patočka.) Translated by G.R.F. Bursa JOSEF ZUMR PATRISTIC PHILOSOPHY Early Christian writers used terminology and ideas drawn from Graeco-Roman philosophical literature in their theological writings, and some early Christians also engaged in more formal philosophical reflection. The term ‘patristic philosophy’ covers all of these activities by the ‘fathers’ ( patres) of the Church. The literature of nascent Christianity thus contains many concepts drawn from Graeco-Roman philosophy, and this early use of classical ideas by prominent Christians provided an authoritative sanction for subsequent philosophical discussion and elaboration. Early Christians were drawn to philosophy for many reasons. Philosophy held a preeminent place in the culture of the late Hellenistic and Roman world. Its schools provided training in logical rigour, systematic accounts of the cosmos and directions on how to lead a good and happy life. While philosophical movements of the period, such as Neoplatonism or Stoicism, varied widely in their doctrines, most presented accounts of reality that included some representation of the divine. These rationally articulated accounts established the theological and ethical discourse of Graeco-Roman culture. As such, philosophy had a natural appeal to Hellenistic Jewish and early Christian thinkers. It provided a ready language in which to refine ideas about the God of the ancient Hebrew scriptures, and to elaborate the trinitarian God of Christianity. It also helped to bring conceptual coherence to the ideas found in the scriptures of both religions. Finally, it provided the common intellectual discourse that those communities required in order to present their central tenets to the majority culture of the Roman empire. To a considerable extent, the notion of ‘philosophy’ suggested to the ancients a way of life as much as an intellectual discipline. This too drew Christians to the teachings of the philosophers. While there were doctrines and prescriptions of behaviour specific to the major schools, philosophers in general tended to advocate an ethically reflective and usually rather ascetic life, one which conjoined intellectual with moral discipline. This ethical austerity was prized by early Christians as an allied phenomenon within Graeco-Roman culture to which they could appeal in debates about the character of their new movement. The tacit validation that philosophy offered to the Christian movement was thus multifaceted, and, while it was sometimes thought to be associated with unacceptable aspects of pagan religious culture, philosophy provided some educated Christians with a subtle social warrant for their new life and beliefs. It should be noted that ancient Christianity was itself a complex movement. Like Graeco-Roman philosophy, Christianity included a broad spectrum of beliefs and practices. Thus those early Christians who developed their beliefs with reference to philosophy endorsed a wide range of metaphysical and ethical doctrines, ranging from materialism to extreme transcendentalism, from asceticism to spiritual libertinism. Yet, while diversity is evident, it is also true that the Christian movement came to develop a rough set of central beliefs and some early forms of community organization associated with those beliefs. This incipient ‘orthodoxy’ came to value some sorts of philosophy, especially Platonism, which seemed best suited to its theological agenda. This tacit alliance with Platonism was fraught with ambiguity and uncertainty, and it was never a reciprocal relationship. Nonetheless, in the second and third centuries a type of Christian philosophical theology emerged which owed much to the
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Page 662 Platonic school and became increasingly dominant among orthodox Christian authors. It was this trajectory that defined the character of patristic philosophy. Early Christian thought had its origins in Hellenistic Judaism, and its initial character was defined by the dominant patterns of that tradition. This early phase extended through the first half of the second century AD, as Christianity began to define its distinctive themes associated with the nature and historical mission of Jesus Christ. Throughout the second century, Christianity became increasingly a movement made up of gentile converts; some of these new members had educations that had included philosophy and a few were even trained as philosophers. Thus Christian thought began to show increased contact with the Graeco-Roman philosophical schools, a trend no doubt reinforced by the critical need for Christians – as a proscribed religious minority – to defend their theology, ritual practices and ethics in the face of cultural and legal hostility. This so-called ‘age of the apologists’ lasted throughout the second and third centuries, until Christianity began to enjoy toleration early in the fourth century. However, it would be a mistake to consider Christian philosophical thought in that period as primarily directed towards the surrounding pagan society. In many respects philosophy, as the intellectual discourse of Graeco-Roman culture, offered gentile Christians a means to clarify, articulate and assimilate the tenets of their new faith. This process of intellectual appropriation appears to have been of considerable personal importance to many GraecoRoman converts. Christian philosophical theology helped them to recover ideas familiar from their school training and to find unfamiliar concepts defended with the rigour much prized within Graeco-Roman culture. After Christianity became a licit religion in the fourth century, philosophical activity among Christians expanded. The task of theological self-articulation became increasingly significant as Christianity grew in the fourth and fifth centuries towards majority status within the Empire, with imperial support. In this later period the range and sophistication of Christian thought increased significantly, due in part to the influence of pagan Neoplatonism, a movement that included a number of the finest philosophers active since the classical period of Plato and Aristotle. Later patristic philosophy had a defining influence upon medieval Christian thought through such figures as Augustine and Dionysius the pseudo-Areopagite, establishing both the conceptual foundations and the authoritative warrant for the scholasticism of the Latin West and Greek East. See also: BYZANTINE PHILOSOPHY; ENCYCLOPEDISTS; GNOSTICISM; MANICHEISM; NEOPLATONISM; PELAGIANISM Further reading Rist, J.M. (1994) Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Augustine’s thought reviewed in reference to later classical philosophy.) Wolfson, H.A. (1956) The Philosophy Of The Church Fathers , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Dated, but comprehensive.) JOHN PETER KENNEY PATRIZI DA CHERSO, FRANCESCO (1529–97) Francesco Patrizi was an Italian humanist and anti-Aristotelian who took up a newly-founded chair of Platonic philosophy at Ferrara in 1578, the first such chair in Europe. Through his various writings he contributed to poetic theory, rhetoric, and historiography, as well as to military history and hydraulics. His two most influential works were his Discussiones Peripateticae (1581) and his Nova de universis philosophia (New Philosophy of Universes) (1591). Patrizi cast doubt on the authenticity of many of the works attributed to Aristotle, and argued that Aristotle’s philosophy was incompatible with Christianity. He believed it should be replaced with his own synthesis of Platonism, Neoplatonism, and Hermeticism (or Hermetism). Patrizi saw light as the basic metaphysical principle, and interpreted the universe in terms of the diffusion of light ( lumen ) from God, the primary light ( prima lux ). His most influential doctrine concerned space, which he argued to be infinite, three-dimensional, and distinct from the bodies it contained. See also: HERMETISM; PLATONISM, RENAISSANCE Further reading Kristeller, P.O. (1964) Eight Philosophers of the Italian Renaissance, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. (Contains a readable introduction to Patrizi’s thought.) E.J. ASHWORTH PAUL OF VENICE (1369/72–1429) Like other teachers in fifteenth-century Italian universities, Paul of Venice focused on logic and natural philosophy in an undergraduate programme directed toward the education of
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Page 663 medical students. Despite Paul’s theological training and important position in the order of Augustinian friars, nearly all his works are non-theological. His prolific writings popularized the achievements of Oxford logic and Parisian physics in a framework derived from Aristotle and Averroes. As a philosopher he is best known for his Averroist position on the human soul, and for his moderate realism with respect to universals. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM, MEDIEVAL; AVERROISM Further reading Perreiah, A.R. (1986) Paul of Venice: A Bibliographical Guide , Bowling Green, OH: Philosophy Documentation Center. (A bibliography of manuscripts only; also includes a biography of Paul and a contentious discussion of the authorship of the Logica magna.) E.J. ASHWORTH PAULUS VENETUS see PAUL OF VENICE PECHAM, JOHN ( c .1230–92) John Pecham, an English Franciscan, taught at Paris and Oxford, and died as Archbishop of Canterbury. His philosophical career represents a concentrated effort to defend the traditional views of Augustine and Anselm (among other theologians) against what was perceived as a growing tendency toward heterodox Aristotelianism, exemplified in such doctrines as the eternity of the world, a single intellect for all humankind and a divinity that had no knowledge of individual beings. See also: AUGUSTINIANISM Further reading Etzkorn, G. (1989) ‘John Pecham, O.F.M.: A Career of Controversy’, in E.B. King et al . (eds) Monks, Nuns, and Friars in Mediaeval Society , Sewanee, TN: The Press of the University of the South, 71–82. (Pecham opposing the secular masters and Aquinas.) GIRARD J. ETZKORN PECKHAM, JOHN see PECHAM, JOHN PEIRCE, CHARLES SANDERS (1839–1914) Peirce was an American philosopher, probably best known as the founder of pragmatism and for his influence upon later pragmatists such as William James and John Dewey. Personal and professional difficulties interfered with his attempts to publish a statement of his overall philosophical position, but, as the texts have become more accessible, it has become clear that he was a much more wide-ranging and important thinker than his popular reputation suggests. He claimed that his pragmatism was the philosophical outlook of an experimentalist, of someone with experience of laboratory work. His account of science was vigorously anti-Cartesian: Descartes was criticized for requiring an unreal ‘pretend’ doubt, and for adopting an individualist approach to knowledge which was at odds with scientific practice. ‘Inquiry’ is a cooperative activity, whereby fallible investigators progress towards the truth, replacing real doubts by settled beliefs which may subsequently be revised. In ‘The Fixation of Belief’ (1877), he compared different methods for carrying out inquiries, arguing that only the ‘method of science’ can be self-consciously adopted. This method makes the ‘realist’ assumption that there are real objects, existing independently of us, whose nature will be discovered if we investigate them for long enough and well enough. Peirce’s ‘pragmatist principle’ was a rule for clarifying concepts and hypotheses that guide scientific investigations. In the spirit of laboratory practice, we can completely clarify the content of a hypothesis by listing the experiential consequences we would expect our actions to have if it were true: if an object is fragile, and we were to drop it, we would probably see it break. If this is correct, propositions of a priori metaphysics are meaningless. Peirce applied his principle to explain truth in terms of the eventual agreement of responsible inquirers: a proposition is true if it would be accepted eventually by anyone who inquired into it. His detailed investigations of inductive reasoning and statistical inference attempted to explain how this convergence of opinion was achieved. Taken together with his important contributions to formal logic and the foundations of mathematics, this verificationism encouraged early readers to interpret Peirce’s work as an anticipation of twentiethcentury logical positivism. The interpretation is supported by the fact that he tried to ground his logic in a systematic account of meaning and reference. Much of his most original work concerned semiotic, the general theory of signs, which provided a novel framework for understanding of language, thought and all other kinds of representation. Peirce hoped to show that his views about science, truth and pragmatism were all consequences of his semiotic. Doubts about
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Page 664 the positivistic reading emerge, however, when we note his insistence that pragmatism could be plausible only to someone who accepted a distinctive form of metaphysical realism. And his later attempts to defend his views of science and meaning bring to the surface views which would be unacceptable to an anti-metaphysical empiricist. From the beginning, Peirce was a systematic philosopher whose work on logic was an attempt to correct and develop Kant’s philosophical vision. When his views were set out in systematic order, positions came to the surface which, he held, were required by his work on logic. These include the theory of categories which had long provided the foundations for his work on signs: all elements of reality, thought and experience can be classified into simple monadic phenomena, dyadic relations and triadic relations. Peirce called these Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness. He also spoke of them as quality, reaction and mediation, and he insisted that the error of various forms of empiricism and nominalism was the denial that mediation (or Thirdness) was an irreducible element of our experience. Peirce’s ‘synechism’ insisted on the importance for philosophy and science of hypotheses involving continuity, which he identified as ‘ultimate mediation’. This emphasis upon continuities in thought and nature was supposed to ground his realism. Furthermore, his epistemological work came to focus increasingly upon the requirements for rational self-control, for our ability to control our inquiries in accordance with norms whose validity we can acknowledge. This required a theory of norms which would explain our attachment to the search for truth and fill out the details of that concept. After 1900, Peirce began to develop such an account, claiming that logic must be grounded in ethics and aesthetics. Although pragmatism eliminated a priori speculation about the nature of reality, it need not rule out metaphysics that uses the scientific method. From the 1880s, Peirce looked for a system of scientific metaphysics that would fill important gaps in his defence of the method of science. This led to the development of an evolutionary cosmology, an account of how the world of existent objects and scientific laws evolved out of a chaos of possibilities through an evolutionary process. His ‘tychism’ insisted that chance was an ineliminable component of reality, but he argued that the universe was becoming more governed by laws or habits through time. Rejecting both physicalism and dualism, he defended what he called a form of ‘Objective Idealism’: matter was said to be a form of ‘effete mind’. See also: PRAGMATISM; SCIENCE, 19TH CENTURY PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Brent, J. (1993) Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life , Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. (A fascinating study of Peirce’s career and of his troubled personal life.) Peirce, C.S. (1992–4) The Essential Peirce , ed. N. Houser, and C. Kloesel, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. (An excellent two-volume selection which contains reliable texts of all of Peirce’s most important published and unpublished works.) CHRISTOPHER HOOKWAY PELACANI DA PARMA, BIAGIO see BLASIUS OF PARMA PELAGIANISM Pelagius, a Christian layman, was active around AD 400. The thesis chiefly associated with his name is that (i) human beings have it in their own power to avoid sin and achieve righteousness. Critics objected that this derogates from human dependence on the grace of God. Pelagius did not deny that the power to avoid sin is itself a gift of God, an enabling grace; but he was understood to deny the need for cooperative grace, divine aid in using the power rightly, or at least to assert that (ii) such aid is a reward for human effort, and so not an act of grace. Later thinkers who held that God’s aid, though not a reward, goes only to those who do make an effort, were accused of believing that (iii) there is no need of prevenient grace in causing the effort in the first place. So Pelagianism is a tendency to magnify human powers: its defenders saw it as a (frightening) challenge to humans, its detractors as an insult to God. It was hard without Pelagianism to find a place for free will, or with it for original sin. See also: GRACE Further reading Ferguson, J. (1957) Pelagius: An Historical and Theological Study, Cambridge: Heffer. (Remains the most readable attempt at a full appraisal.) CHRISTOPHER KIRWAN PERCEPTION Sense perception is the use of our senses to acquire information about the world around us
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Page 665 and to become acquainted with objects, events, and their features. Traditionally, there are taken to be five senses: sight, touch, hearing, smell and taste. Philosophical debate about perception is ancient. Much debate focuses on the contrast between appearance and reality. We can misperceive objects and be misled about their nature, as well as perceive them to be the way that they are: you could misperceive the shape of the page before you, for example. Also, on occasion, it may seem to us as if we are perceiving, when we do not perceive at all, but only suffer hallucinations. Illusions and hallucinations present problems for a theory of knowledge: if our senses can mislead us, how are we to know that things are as they appear, unless we already know that our senses are presenting things as they are? But the concern in the study of perception is primarily to explain how we can both perceive and misperceive how things are in the world around us. Some philosophers have answered this by supposing that our perception of material objects is mediated by an awareness of mind-dependent entities or qualities: typically called sense-data, ideas or impressions. These intermediaries allegedly act as surrogates or representatives for external objects: when they represent aright, we perceive; when they mislead, we misperceive. An alternative is to suppose that perceiving is analogous to belief or judgment: just as judgment or belief can be true or false, so states of being appeared to may be correct or incorrect. This approach seeks to avoid intermediary objects between the perceiver and the external objects of perception, while still taking proper account of the possibility of illusion and hallucination. Both responses contrast with that of philosophers who deny that illusions and hallucinations have anything to tell us about the nature of perceiving proper, and hold to a form of naïve, or direct, realism. The account of perception one favours has a bearing on one’s views of other aspects of the mind and world: the nature and existence of secondary qualities, such as colours and tastes; the possibility of giving an account of the mind as part of a purely physical, natural world; how one should answer scepticism concerning our knowledge of the external world. See also: PERCEPTION, EPISTEMIC ISSUES IN; VISION Further reading Cornman, J. (1975) Perception, Common Sense and Science , New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. (A very comprehensive presentation of the debate and its implications for metaphysics and theory of knowledge.) Yolton, J. (1984) Perceptual Acquaintance from Descartes to Reid, Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press. (A discussion of the history of philosophy of perception which questions the popular attribution of representative theories of perception to various early modern philosophers, including Descartes and Locke.) M.G.F. MARTIN PERCEPTION, EPISTEMIC ISSUES IN We learn about the world through our five senses: by seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and feeling. Sense perception is a primary means by which we acquire knowledge of contingent matters of fact. We can also acquire such knowledge by, for instance, conscious reasoning and through the written and spoken testimony of others; but knowledge so acquired is derivative, in that it must be based, ultimately, on knowledge arrived at in more primary ways, such as by sense perception. We can perceive something without acquiring any knowledge about it; for knowledge requires belief, and we can perceive something without having any beliefs about it. Viewing any but the most simple visual scenes we see many things we form no beliefs about. However, when we perceive something, we are acquainted with it by its sensorially appearing (looking, sounding, smelling and so on) some way to us. For we see something if and only if it looks some way to us, hear something if and only if it sounds some way to us, and so on. When, based on how they appear, we form true beliefs about things we perceive, the beliefs sometimes count as knowledge. Often the way something appears is the way it is. The red, round tomato looks red and round; the sour milk tastes sour. But the senses are fallible. Sometimes the way something appears is different from the way it is. Appearances can fail to match reality, as happens to various extents in cases of illusion. There are, for instance, optical illusions (straight sticks look bent at the water line) and psychological ones (despite being exactly the same length, the Müller-Lyer arrows drawings look different in length). In such cases, looks are misleading. The ever-present logical possibility of illusion makes beliefs acquired by perception fallible: there is no absolute guarantee that they are true.
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Page 666 But that does not prevent them from sometimes counting as knowledge – albeit fallible knowledge. Recognitional abilities enable us to obtain knowledge about things from how they perceptually appear. Sense perception thus acquaints us with things in a way that contributes to positioning us to acquire knowledge about them. The central epistemic issues about sense perception concern its role in so positioning us. See also: FALLIBILISM; SENSE-DATA Further reading Dancy, J. (ed.) (1988) Perceptual Knowledge , Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Contains several seminal papers on epistemic issues in perception.) Perkins, M. (1984) Sensing the World , London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (Contains a detailed, empirically well-informed discussion of sounds, odours, tastes and coloured surfaces; argues that we are directly sensorially conscious of such things as the colours of surfaces, the loudness of sounds, the saltiness of tastes and the putridness of odours.) BRIAN P. McLAUGHLIN PERFECTIONISM Perfectionism is a moral theory according to which certain states or activities of human beings, such as knowledge, achievement and artistic creation, are good apart from any pleasure or happiness they bring, and what is morally right is what most promotes these human ‘excellences’ or ‘perfections’. Some versions of perfectionism hold that the good consists, at bottom, in the development of properties central to human nature, so that if knowledge and achievement are good, it is because they realize aspects of human nature. With or without this view, perfectionisms can differ about what in particular is good, for example, about the relative merits of knowing and doing. The most plausible versions of perfectionism affirm both self-regarding duties to seek the excellences in one’s own life and otherregarding duties to promote them in other people. Some critics argue that the latter duties, when applied to political questions, are hostile to liberty and equality, but certain versions of perfectionism endorse liberty and equality. Perfectionist ideas can also figure in a pluralist morality where they are weighed against other, competing moral ideas. See also: CONSEQUENTIALISM; SELF-REALIZATION Further reading Attfield, R. (1987) A Theory of Value and Obligation , London: Croom Helm. (Narrow perfectionism extended beyond humans to all living organisms.) Hurka, T. (1993) Perfectionism, New York: Oxford University Press. (Survey of narrow and broad perfectionism.) THOMAS HURKA PERFORMATIVES There are certain things one can do just by saying what one is doing. This is possible if one uses a verb that names the very sort of act one is performing. Thus one can thank someone by saying ‘Thank you’, fire someone by saying ‘You’re fired’ and apologize by saying ‘I apologize’. These are examples of ‘explicit performative utterances’, statements in form but not in fact. Or so thought their discoverer, J.L. Austin, who contrasted them with ‘constatives’. Their distinctive self-referential character might suggest that their force requires special explanation, but it is arguable that performativity can be explained by the general theory of speech acts. See also: SPEECH ACTS Further reading Austin, J.L. (1962) How to Do Things with Words, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Formulates the distinction between performative and constative utterances and proposes a convention-based account of their successful felicitous performance.) KENT BACH PERFORMING ART see ART, PERFORMING PERIPATETICS The title ‘Peripatetics’ designates followers of the philosophical tradition founded by Aristotle: at first those who continued his inquiries, and in the Roman period those who interpreted and commented on his writings. The distinctive Peripatetic tradition was eventually absorbed into Neoplatonism. The adjective ‘Peripatetic’ is often used as an equivalent of ‘Aristotelian’. Peripatetic doctrines were marked by a rejection of the extreme views characteristic of Stoicism. See also: ARISTOTLE
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Page 667 London: Routledge. (A general account of the history of the school, with bibliography.) R.W. SHARPLES PERSONAL IDENTITY What is it to be the same person today as one was in the past, or will be in the future? How are we to describe cases in which (as we might put it) one person becomes two? What, if anything, do the answers to such questions show about the rationality of the importance we attach to personal identity? Is identity really the justifier of the special concern which we have for ourselves in the future? These are the concerns of this entry. In order to answer the question about the persistence-conditions of persons we must indulge in some thought experiments. Only thus can we tease apart the strands that compose our concept of personal identity, and thereby come to appreciate the relative importance of each strand. There are plausible arguments against attempts to see the relation of personal identity as constitutively determined by the physical relations of same body, or same brain. I can survive with a new body, and a new brain. But it does not follow; nor is it true, that a person’s identity over time can be analysed exclusively in terms of psychological relations (relations of memory, belief, character, and so on). To the contrary, the most plausible view appears to be a mixed view, according to which personal identity has to be understood in terms of both physical and psychological relations. This is the view which can be extracted from our core (that is, minimally controversial) set of common-sense beliefs about personal identity. The possibility of the fission of persons – the possibility that, for example, a person’s brain hemispheres might be divided and transplanted into two new bodies – shows that the mixed view has to incorporate a non-branching or uniqueness clause in its analysis. The concept of personal identity, contrary to what we might first be inclined to believe, is an extrinsic concept (that is, whether a given person exists can depend upon the existence of another, causally unrelated, person). Some philosophers have recently tried to forge an important connection between theories of personal identity and value theory (ethics and rationality). The possibility of such a connection had not previously been investigated in any detail. It has been argued that, on the correct theory of personal identity, it is not identity that matters but the preservation of psychological relations such as memory and character. These relations can hold between one earlier person and two or more later persons. They can also hold to varying degrees (for example, I can acquire a more or less different character over a period of years). This view of what matters has implications for certain theories of punishment. A now reformed criminal may deserve less or no punishment for the crimes of their earlier criminal self. Discussions of personal identity have also provided a new perspective on the debate between utilitarianism and its critics. See also: ALTERITY AND IDENTITY, POSTMODERN THEORIES OF; CONSCIOUSNESS; MORALITY AND IDENTITY Further reading Noonan, H. (1989) Personal Identity , London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (First-rate historical and contemporary survey.) Unger, P. (1992) Persons, Consciousness and Value, New York: Oxford University Press. (Thorough and imaginative contemporary discussion. Defence of the physical criterion of personal identity.) BRIAN GARRETT PERSONALISM Personalism is the thesis that only persons (self-conscious agents) and their states and characteristics exist, and that reality consists of a society of interacting persons. Typically, a personalist will hold that finite persons depend for their existence and continuance on God, who is the Supreme Person, having intelligence and volition. Personalists are usually idealists in metaphysics and construct their theories of knowledge by inference from the data of self-awareness. They tend to be nonutilitarian in ethics and to place ultimate value in the person as a free, self-conscious, moral agent, rather than in either mental states or in apersonal states of affairs. Typically, holding that a good God will not allow what has intrinsic value to lose existence, they believe in personal survival of death. The term ‘personalism’, even as a term for philosophical systems, has myriad uses. There is said to be, for example, atheistic personalism (as in the case of McTaggart, famous for embracing both atheism and the immortality of the soul), absolute idealistic personalism (Hegel, Royce, Calkins), and theistic personalism (Bowne, Brightman, Bertocci). Leibniz and Berkeley are seen as early personalists; both were theists and
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Page 668 idealists. Kant, while not strictly a personalist, was influential in personalism’s history. In particular, B.P. Bowne (1847–1910) borrowed freely from Kant, while refusing to accept a Kantian transcendentalism in which our basic concepts or categories apply in a knowledge-giving way only to appearances and not to reality. R.H. Lotze made personality and value central to his worldview, and was a European precursor of American personalism. See also: IDEALISM Further reading Flewelling, R.T. (1915) Personalism and the Problems of Philosophy , New York: Methodist Book Concern. (A sympathetic discussion of personalism that concentrates on Bowne’s position, which it sets in philosophical context.) KEITH E. YANDELL PERSONS We are all persons. But what are persons? This question is central to philosophy and virtually every major philosopher has offered an answer to it. For two thousand years many philosophers in the Western tradition believed that we were immaterial souls or Egos, only contingently attached to our bodies. The most well-known advocates of this view were Plato and Descartes. Few philosophers accept this view now, largely because it is thought to face a number of intractable metaphysical and epistemological problems (for example: how can an immaterial soul or mind interact with the material world? How can I know that you have a soul?). The recoil from Cartesianism has been in three different directions. One direction (the animalist) emphasizes the fact that persons are human beings, evolved animals of a certain sort. A second direction (the reductionist) is represented by David Hume: the self or person is not a Cartesian entity, it is a ‘bundle of perceptions’. Finally, there is a theory of persons influenced by the views of John Locke, according to which persons are neither essentially animals nor reducible to their bodies or experiences. See also: MIND, BUNDLE THEORY OF; REDUCTIONISM IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND Further reading Cassam, Q. (1992) ‘Reductionism and First-Person Thinking’, in D. Charles and K. Lennon (eds) Reduction, Explanation, and Realism, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (A useful critique of reductionism.) BRIAN GARRETT PETER OF AILLY see AILLY, PIERRE D’ PETER OF AUVERGNE (d. 1304) Peter of Auvergne, a thirteenth-century Parisian master, wrote extensively on logic, natural philosophy and theology. His thought progresses from modism in logic to an independent synthesis of Aristotelian philosophy along the lines begun by Thomas Aquinas, culminating in a theology reconciling the ideas of his teachers Henry of Ghent and Godfrey of Fontaines. His reputation has been based largely on his association with Aquinas, but recent investigations have shown the independence of his thought. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM, MEDIEVAL Further reading Roensch, F.J. (1964) Early Thomistic School , Dubuque, IA: The Priory Press, 92–8. (Summary of Peter’s life and works.) ROBERT ANDREWS PETER OF SPAIN ( c .1205–77) For hundreds of years, a number of works in philosophical psychology, medicine and logic have been attributed to a single thirteenth-century author known as Peter of Spain. According to the latest research, however, there were actually two authors of that name. One, who later became Pope John XXI, wrote on medicine and on the soul. In his writings on the soul, this Peter argued for an independent material form that prepared the body for the soul, its substantial form, and he took an Augustinian view of God’s role in illuminating the intellect in ordinary cognition. The second Peter of Spain was a Spanish Dominican who wrote the logical works. He is chiefly known for his Tractatus , an influential textbook of logic written before 1250, expounding both traditional topics and the theory of supposition, concerning reference in sentential contexts. See also: AUGUSTINIANISM; LOGIC, MEDIEVAL Further reading De Libera, A. (1982) ‘The Oxford and Paris traditions in Logic’, in N. Kretzmann, A. Kenny and J. Pinborg (eds) The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Places
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Page 669 Peter’s logical work in the context of his time.) JOHN LONGEWAY PETRARCA, FRANCESCO (1304–74) With Dante and Boccaccio, Petrarca (known as Petrarch) made the fourteenth century the most memorable in Italian literature. He was also the first great humanist of the Italian Renaissance. He brilliantly and self-consciously exemplified humanism’s classical, rhetorical, literary, and historical interests; with him the movement came of age. He was a proponent not only of classical Rome (‘What else is history,’ he once asked, ‘than the praise of Rome?’), but also of contemporary Rome, constantly calling for the popes at Avignon to return to their proper See and urging restoration of Rome as the seat of the Empire, even if that meant supporting the visionary Roman revolutionary Cola di Rienzo. He came to see himself also as a moral philosopher. His ethical interests were closely tied to his cultural interests and personal situation as a lay moralist (though technically he was a cleric). His outlook and method differed from that of contemporary Aristotelians, whom he attacked on a broad cultural front, sounding many of the themes that would become common in subsequent conflicts between humanism and scholasticism in the Renaissance. See also: HUMANISM, RENAISSANCE Further reading Wilkins, E.H. (1961) Life of Petrarch, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (The best biography in English by a master of Petrarchan scholarship.) JOHN MONFASANI PETRARCH see PETRARCA, FRANCESCO PETRAŻYCKI, LEON (1867–1931) A Polish nobleman, Leon Petraźycki studied in Kiev and taught in Berlin, St Petersburg and Warsaw. He was a strikingly original philosopher of law whose theoretical system ranged over moral and legal philosophy, theory of science, psychology and sociology. The aim of his philosophy of law is ‘Legal Policy’, that is, social engineering through law directed at the ‘social ideal of love’. See also: LAW, PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Petraźycki, L. (1955) Law and Morality, trans. H.W. Babb, 20th Century Legal Philosophy Series, vol. 7, Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press. (This is the only version available in English of Petraźycki’s work; it gives an account of all his main ideas.) ALEKSANDER PECZENIK PHENOMENALISM On its most common interpretation, phenomenalism maintains that statements asserting the existence of physical objects are equivalent in meaning to statements describing sensations. More specifically, the phenomenalist claims that to say that a physical object exists is to say that someone would have certain sequences of sensations were they to have certain others. For example, to say that there is something round and red behind me might be to say, in part, that if I were to have the visual, tactile and kinaesthetic (movement) sensations of turning my head I would seem to see something round and red. If I were to have the sensations of seeming to reach out and touch that thing, those sensations would be followed by the familiar tactile sensations associated with touching something round. Rather than talk about the meanings of statements, phenomenalists might hold that the fact that something red and round exists just is the fact that a subject would have certain sequences of sensations following certain others. The phenomenalist’s primary motivation is a desire to avoid scepticism with respect to the physical world. Because many philosophers tied the meaningfulness of statements to their being potentially verifiable, some phenomenalists further argued that it is only by reducing claims about the physical world to claims about possible sensations that we can preserve the very intelligibility of talk about the physical world. There are very few contemporary philosophers who embrace phenomenalism. Many reject the foundationalist epistemological framework which makes it so difficult to avoid scepticism without phenomenalism. But the historical rejection of the view had more to do with the difficulty of carrying out the promised programme of translation. See also: EMPIRICISM; PERCEPTION, EPISTEMIC ISSUES IN Further reading Lewis, C.I. (1946) An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation, La Salle, IL: Open Court. (Despite his reservations about the word, Lewis in this
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Page 670 book presents the most sophisticated and detailed defence of phenomenalism. The book is accessible to students.).) RICHARD FUMERTON PHENOMENOLOGICAL MOVEMENT The phenomenological movement is a century-old international movement in philosophy that has penetrated most of the cultural disciplines, especially psychiatry and sociology. It began in Germany with the early work of Edmund Husserl, and spread to the rest of Europe, the Americas and Asia. In contrast with a school, a movement does not have a body of doctrine to which all participants agree; rather, there is a broad approach that tends to be shared. The phenomenological approach has at least four components. First, phenomenologists tend to oppose naturalism. Naturalism includes behaviourism in psychology and positivism in social sciences and philosophy, and is a worldview based on the methods of the natural sciences. In contrast, phenomenologists tend to focus on the sociohistorical or cultural lifeworld and to oppose all kinds of reductionism. Second, they tend to oppose speculative thinking and preoccupation with language, urging instead knowledge based on ‘intuiting’ or the ‘seeing’ of the matters themselves that thought is about. Third, they urge a technique of reflecting on processes within conscious life (or human existence) that emphasizes how such processes are directed at (or ‘intentive to’) objects and, correlatively, upon these objects as they present themselves or, in other words, as they are intended to. And fourth, phenomenologists tend to use analysis or explication as well as the seeing of the matters reflected upon to produce descriptions or interpretations both in particular and in universal or ‘eidetic’ terms. In addition, phenomenologists also tend to debate the feasibility of Husserl’s procedure of transcendental epoché or ‘bracketing’ and the project of transcendental first philosophy it serves, most phenomenology not being transcendental. Beyond these widely shared components of method, phenomenologists tend to belong to one or another of four intercommunicating and sometimes overlapping tendencies. These tendencies are ‘realistic phenomenology’, which emphasizes the seeing and describing of universal essences; ‘constitutive phenomenology’, which emphasizes accounting for objects in terms of the consciousness of them; ‘existential phenomenology’, which emphasizes aspects of human existence within the world; and ‘hermeneutical phenomenology’, which emphasizes the role of interpretation in all spheres of life. All tendencies go back to the early work of Husserl, but the existential and hermeneutical tendencies are also deeply influenced by the early work of Martin Heidegger. Other leading figures are Nicolai Hartmann, Roman Ingarden, Adolf Reinach and Max Scheler in realistic phenomenology, Dorion Cairns, Aron Gurwitsch and Alfred Schutz in constitutive phenomenology, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Simone de Beauvoir in existential phenomenology, and Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur in hermeneutical phenomenology. See also: PHENOMENOLOGY IN LATIN AMERICA; PHENOMENOLOGY OF RELIGION Further reading Embree, L. et al . (1996) The Encyclopedia of Phenomenology , Dordrecht: Kluwer. (Reviews the whole movement and can be used to approach particular figures, national traditions, and tendencies in it.) Husserl, E. (1900–1) Logische Untersuchungen , Halle: Max Niemeyer; trans. J.N. Findlay, Logical Investigations , London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970. (Epoch-making source of the phenomenological movement in which the reflective-descriptive approach was radicalized and extended beyond the original epistemology of logic and mathematics.) LESTER EMBREE PHENOMENOLOGY, EPISTEMIC ISSUES IN Phenomenology is not a unified doctrine. Its main proponents – Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and MerleauPonty – interpret it differently. However, it is possible to present a broad characterization of what they share. Phenomenology is a method of philosophical investigation which results in a radical ontological revision of Cartesian Dualism. It has implications for epistemology: the claim is that, when the foundations of empirical knowledge in perception and action are properly characterized, traditional forms of scepticism and standard attempts to justify knowledge are undermined. Phenomenological method purports to be descriptive and presuppositionless. First, one adopts a reflective attitude towards one’s experience of the world by putting aside assumptions about the world’s existence
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Page 671 and character. Second, one seeks to describe particular, concrete phenomena. Phenomena are not contents of the mind; they all involve an experiencing subject and an experienced object. Phenomenological description aims to make explicit essential features implicit in the ‘lived-world’ – the world as we act in it prior to any theorizing about it. The phenomenological method reveals that practical knowledge is prior to propositional knowledge – knowing that arises from knowing how . The key thesis of phenomenology, drawn from Brentano, is that consciousness is intentional, that is, directed onto objects. Phenomenologists interpret this to mean that subjects and objects are essentially interrelated, a fact which any adequate account of subjects and objects must preserve. Phenomenological accounts of subjects emphasize action and the body; accounts of objects emphasize the significance they have for us. The aim to be presuppositionless involves scrutinizing scientific and philosophical theories (Galileo, Locke and Kant are especially challenged). Phenomenology launches a radical critique of modern philosophy as overinfluenced by the findings of the natural sciences. In particular, epistemology has adopted from science its characterization of the basic data of experience. The influence of phenomenology on the analytic tradition has been negligible. The influence on the Continental tradition has been greater. The phenomenological critique of modern science and philosophy has influenced postmodern thought which interprets the modernist worldview as having the status of master narrative rather than truth. Postmodern thought also criticizes the positive phenomenological claim that there are essential features of the lived-world. See also: CONSCIOUSNESS; KNOWLEDGE, TACIT; PERCEPTION, EPISTEMIC ISSUES IN Further reading Dreyfus, H.L. (1982) Husserl, Intentionality and Cognitive Science , Cambridge, MA:MIT Press. (Applications of phenomenology to recent developments in philosophy.) Hammond, M., Howarth, J. and Keat, R. (1991) Understanding Phenomenology , Oxford: Blackwell. (Clear and readable introduction to phenomenology through analyses of writings by Husserl, MerleauPonty and Sartre.) JANE HOWARTH PHENOMENOLOGY IN LATIN AMERICA The Latin American struggle against the positivism of the nineteenth century was the primordial endeavour of the founders of Latin American thought, such as José Enrique Rodó (1872– 1917), José Vasconcelos (1882–1959), Alejandro Korn (1860–1936), Carlos Vaz Ferreira (1871– 1958), Alejandro Deústua (1849–1945), Enrique Molina (1871–1956) and Antonio Caso (1883–1946). These thinkers fought to win their philosophical freedom in a battle against continuing such European currents as NeoKantianism and the existential-phenomenological movement, on the one hand and on the other, developing a philosophy that was purely Latin American. In all of this the influence of the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) was fundamental. Ortega y Gasset was mainly interested in the problems of history and culture. His famous apothegm, ‘I am myself and my circumstance’, was the justification for a phenomenological movement axiological in nature, as well as being the point of departure for the affirmation of Latin American circumstance. Few have cultivated the Husserlian style of phenomenology in Latin America outside the classroom. Latin American thinkers have preferred to apply the phenomenological method to the different fields of knowledge. In particular, those dealing with sociocultural aspects, literary criticism, socio-economic structures and juridical axiology. In all works related to axiology the thought of the philosophers Nicolai Hartmann (1882–1950) and Max Scheler (1874–1928) were enormously influential. Many of those originally inclined towards phenomenology drifted from the 1970s onwards, towards analytic philosophy, philosophy of science and logical neopositivism. See also: EXISTENTIALIST THOUGHT IN LATIN AMERICA; PHENOMENOLOGICAL MOVEMENT Further reading Gallardo, H. (1993) 500 años: fenomenología del mestizo: violencia y resistencia (500 Years: Phenomenolgy of the Mestizo: Violence and Resistance), San José: Editorial Departamento Ecuménico de Investigaciones. (A search for a philosophy rooted in Latin American social problems.) Maturo, G. (1991) Imagen y expresión: hermeneútica y teoría literaria desde America Latina (Image and Expression: Hermeneutics and Literary Theory from Latin America), Buenos Aires: F. Garcia Cambeiro. (A
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Page 672 literary theoretical approach to hermeneutics.) MARÍA TERESA BERTELLONI PHENOMENOLOGY OF RELIGION The phenomenology of religion is a descriptive approach to the philosophy of religion. Instead of debating whether certain religious beliefs are true, it asks the question ‘What is religion?’ It seeks to deepen our understanding of the religious life by asking what (if anything) the phenomena we normally take to be religious have in common that distinguishes them from art, ethics, magic or science. Since the search for what is common presupposes difference and brings to light an astonishing array of divergent beliefs and practices, the quest for the essence of religion unfolds quite naturally into questions of typology ‘What are the most illuminating ways of classifying religious differences?’ Sometimes the phenomenology of religion is motivated by a desire for quasi-scientific objectivity, combined with at least a soft scepticism about metaphysical speculation; if we cannot decisively resolve the metaphysical mysteries of life, people with this approach argue, at least we can give an unbiased description of those interpretations of the world we normally designate religious. At other times the phenomenology of religion has a more existential orientation: whether or not our arguments can settle questions about the ultimate shape of being, we have to choose our own mode of being-in-the-world; and if we are to decide intelligently whether or not to be religious, we need to be as clear as we can about what it means to be religious – ineluctable uncertainty may make faith something of a leap, but the leap need not be blind. See also: EXISTENTIALIST THEOLOGY; RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE Further reading James, W. (1902) The Varieties of Religious Experience, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985. (A classic study that includes a dyadic typology along with studies of conversion, saintliness and mysticism.) Westphal, M. (1984) God, Guilt, and Death: An Existential Phenomenology of Religion, Bloo mington, IN: Indiana University Press. (A comprehensive, introductory study that includes discussion of methodology and the essence of religion along with a triadic typology.) MEROLD WESTPHAL PHILIP THE CHANCELLOR (1160/85–1236) Philip occupies a pivotal place in the development of medieval philosophy. He is among the very first in the Latin West to have a fairly complete picture of both the newly available natural philosophy and metaphysics of Aristotle and the work of the great Muslim thinkers, Avicenna and Averroes. His Summa de bono , composed sometime between 1225 and 1236, shows the broadening of philosophical interests and the growth of philosophical sophistication that accompanied reflection on these new materials. Philip’s Summa had a major impact on subsequent thirteenth-century thinkers, particularly Albert the Great, whose own Summa de bono is closely modelled on that of Philip. See also: ALBERT THE GREAT Further reading Wicki, N. (1985) Philippi Cancellarii Summa de bono vol. 1, Berne: Francke, especially ch. 1, ‘Vie de Philippe le Chancelier’ and ch. 3, ‘Données de la tradition manuscrite et problèmes d’histoire littéraire’. (Succinct, authoritative account of Philip’s life and work and a useful survey of the important secondary literature.) SCOTT MacDONALD PHILO JUDAEUS see PHILO OF ALEXANDRIA PHILO OF ALEXANDRIA ( c .15 BC–c . AD 50) Philo of Alexandria is the leading representative of Hellenistic-Jewish thought. Despite an unwavering loyalty to the religious and cultural traditions of his Jewish community, he was also strongly attracted to Greek philosophy, in which he received a thorough training. His copious writings – in Greek – are primarily exegetical, expounding the books of Moses. This reflects his apologetic strategy of presenting the Jewish lawgiver Moses as the sage and philosopher par excellence, recipient of divine inspiration, but not at the expense of his human rational faculties. In his commentaries Philo makes extensive use of the allegorical method earlier developed by the Stoics. Of contemporary philosophical movements, Philo is most strongly attracted to Platonism. His method is basically eclectic, but with a clear rationale focused on the figure of Moses. Philo’s thought is strongly theocentric. God is conceived in terms of being. God’s essence is unreachable for human knowledge (negative
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Page 673 theology), but his existence should be patent to all (natural theology). Knowledge of God is attained through his powers and, above all, through his Logos (‘Word’ or ‘Reason’), by means of which he stands in relation to what comes after him. In his doctrine of creation Philo leans heavily on Platonist conceptions drawn from reflection on Plato’s Timaeus . The conception of a creation ex nihilo (‘from nothing’) is not yet consciously worked out. Philo’s doctrine of human nature favours the two anthropological texts in Genesis 1–2, interpreting creation ‘according to the image’ in relation to the human intellect. With regard to ethics, both Stoic concepts and peculiarly Jewish themes emerge in Philo’s beliefs. Ethical ideals are prominent in the allegorical interpretation of the biblical patriarchs. Philo’s influence was almost totally confined to the Christian tradition, which preserved his writings. He was unknown to medieval Jewish thinkers such as Maimonides. Further reading Philo (20–50 AD) The Contemplative Life , trans. D. Winston, Philo of Alexandria: The Contemplative Life, The Giants and Selections , New York and Toronto, Ont.: Paulist Press, 1981. (The best anthology of Philo’s writings, containing many of his more interesting philosophical passages.) Runia, D.T. (1993) Philo in Early Christian Literature , Assen: Van Gorcum and Minneapolis, MN: Fortress. (On Philo’s reception and preservation in the Christian tradition.) DAVID T. RUNIA PHILO OF LARISSA ( c .159–c .83 BC) Philo, head of the Academy from 110 to 88 BC, likened philosophy to medicine. No doubt he was a conscientious therapist himself; but we know little enough about his methods and practices. For most of his life he seems to have been a happy sceptic, and an unremarkable one. But towards the end of his career he introduced – or was deemed to have introduced – startling innovations into the Academy: in particular, by rejecting or modifying the reigning definition of knowledge he was able to separate himself from the scepticism of his school and to rewrite its history. See also: ACADEMY Further reading Tarrant, H. (1985) Scepticism or Platonism? The Philosophy of the Fourth Academy , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (An account of the philosophical orientation of Philo’s Academy.) JONATHAN BARNES PHILO THE DIALECTICIAN (late 4th–early 3rd centuries BC) A member of the Dialectical school, Philo was a Greek philosopher whose claim to fame is twofold. First, he maintained that one proposition implies another if and only if either the former is false or the latter is true, however irrelevant the two propositions may be to one another. Second, he maintained that some things are necessarily prevented from happening and are nevertheless possible: the water around them prevents shells at the bottom of the ocean from ever being actually perceived; nevertheless, such things are perceptible. As often happened with Dialecticians’ ideas, these ideas of Philo elicited (and perhaps were meant to elicit) notoriety rather than agreement. See also: DIALECTICAL SCHOOL; LOGIC, ANCIENT Further reading Kneale, W. and Kneale, M. (1962) The Development of Logic , Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Chapter 3, sections 1, 2 and 3, discusses Philo.) NICHOLAS DENYER PHILODEMUS ( c .110–c .40 BC) Philodemus of Gadara, a Greek epigrammatic poet, was also an influential Epicurean philosopher. Scrolls containing many of his works, buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79, have been partially recovered and deciphered. Their themes include epistemology, theology, ethics, philosophical history, poetics, rhetoric and music. He energetically defends Epicureanism against other philosophies, and his own interpretation of Epicureanism against rival factions. Although not a notably original thinker, Philodemus became highly regarded in educated Roman circles. See also: EPICUREANISM Further reading Obbink, D. (ed.) (1995) Philodemus and Poetry , Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Important collection of essays, with extensive bibliography.) MICHAEL ERLER
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Page 674 PHILOLAUS ( c .470–380/9 BC) The Greek philosopher Philolaus of Croton, a contemporary of Democritus and Socrates, was a preeminent Pythagorean. His book counts as the first written treatise in the history of Pythagoreanism. Surviving in fragments, it constitutes an important source for our knowledge of fifth-century Pythagoreanism and supplements the picture given by Aristotle of Pythagorean doctrine. Like earlier Presocratics Philolaus sought to furnish a comprehensive cosmology. Arguing from logical propositions, he posited two preexisting principles: ‘unlimited things’ and ‘limiting things’. United by harmony these two principles account for the formation of the cosmos and its phenomena. Since Philolaus also invokes number as an all-powerful explanatory concept, it is likely that he associated his first principles and the things originating from them with numbers. The emphasis on harmony and number accords with early Pythagoreanism. Philolaus also wrote on musical theory and astronomy. A noteworthy feature of his astronomy is the displacement of the earth from the centre of the cosmos by fire, pictured as the ‘hearth’ of the universe. The fragments further attest Philolaus’ interest in embryology, the causes of diseases, and physiology combined with psychological functions. It was not unusual for early Greek philosophers to treat such a wide variety of topics. The distinctive elements of the thought of Philolaus are the logical arguments evinced in the fragments and the epistemological role of number for understanding the structure of reality. See also: NEO-PYTHAGOREANISM; PRESOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY Further reading Huffman, C.A. (1993) Philolaus of Croton: Pythagorean and Presocratic, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Contains all the authentic as well as the spurious fragments and testimonia, with English translations, commentaries and readable interpretative essays; also includes a comprehensive bibliography. Argues that the One in fragment 7 does not refer to number but rather to a paradigmatic unity as found in much of Presocratic thought.) HERMANN S. SCHIBLI PHILOPONUS ( c . AD 490–c .570) John Philoponus, also known as John the Grammarian or John of Alexandria, was a Christian philosopher, scientist and theologian. Philoponus’ life and work are closely connected to the city of Alexandria and its famous Neoplatonic school. In the sixth century, this traditional centre of pagan Greek learning became increasingly insular, located as it was at the heart of an almost entirely Christian community. The intense philosophical incompatibilities between pagan and Christian beliefs come to the surface in Philoponus’ work. His œuvre comprised at least forty items on such diverse subjects such as grammar, logic, mathematics, physics, psychology, cosmology, astronomy, theology and church politics; even medical treatises have been attributed to him. A substantial body of his work has come down to us, but some treatises are known only indirectly through quotations or translations. Philoponus’ fame rests predominantly on the fact that he initiated the liberation of natural philosophy from the straitjacket of Aristotelianism, through his non-polemical commentaries on Aristotle as well as his theological treatises deserve to be appreciated in their own right. Philoponus’ intellectual career began as a pupil of the Neoplatonic philosopher Ammonius, son of Hermeas, who had been taught by Proclus and was head of the school at Alexandria. Some of his commentaries profess to be based on Ammonius’ lectures, but others give more room to Philoponus’ own ideas. Eventually, he transformed the usual format of apologetic commentary into open criticism of fundamental Aristotelian-Neoplatonic doctrines, most prominently the tenet of the eternity of the world. This renegade approach to philosophical tradition, as well as the conclusions of his arguments, antagonized Philoponus’ pagan colleagues; they may have compelled him to abandon his philosophical career. Philoponus devoted the second half of his life to influencing the theological debates of his time; the orthodox clergy condemned him posthumously as a heretic, because of his Aristotelian interpretation of the trinitarian dogma, which led him to enunciate three separate godheads (tritheism). The style of Philoponus’ writing is often circuitous and rarely entertaining. However, he combines an almost pedantic rigour of argument and exposition with a remarkable freedom of spirit, which allows him to cast off the fetters of authority, be they philosophical or
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Page 675 theological. Although his mode of thinking betrays a strong Aristotelian influence, it also displays a certain doctrinal affinity to Plato, stripped of the ballast of Neoplatonic interpretation. His works were translated into Arabic, Latin and Syriac, and he influenced later thinkers such as Bonaventure, Gersonides, Buridan, Oresme and Galileo. See also: NEOPLATONISM Further reading Sorabji, R.R. (ed.) (1987) Philoponus and the Rejection of Aristotelian Science , London: Duckworth. (A collection of twelve articles on Philoponus’ physical theories, his theology and historical influence; extensive bibliography.) CHRISTIAN WILDBERG PHOTOGRAPHY, AESTHETICS OF Claims that photography is aesthetically different from and, in many versions of the argument, inferior to the arts of painting and drawing have taken various forms: that photography is a mechanical process and therefore not an artistic medium; that it is severely limited in its capacity to express the thoughts and emotions of the artist; that its inability to register more than an instantaneous ‘slice’ of events restricts its representational capacity; that it is not a representational medium at all. Some of these arguments are thoroughly mistaken, while others have an interesting core of truth that will emerge only after some clarification. Central to this clarification is an account of the precise sense in which photography is mechanical, and an explication of our intuition that a photograph puts us ‘in touch with’ its subject in a way that a painting or drawing cannot. Both these ideas need to be separated from the mistaken view that it is the nature of photography to provide images that are superlatively faithful to the objects they represent. See also: FILM, AESTHETICS OF Further reading Bazin, A. (1967) ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’, in What is Cinema?, vol. 1, Berkeley, CA, and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, a translation of selected essays from Qu-est-ce que le cinéma? 4 vols, 1958–65, Paris: Éditions du Cerf. (Advocates a version of the reality thesis.) Scruton, R. (1981) ‘Photography and Representation’, Critical Inquiry 7: 577–603; repr. in The Aesthetic Understanding, New York: Methuen, 1983. (Argues that photography is a representationally and expressively impoverished form.) GREGORY CURRIE PHYSIS AND NOMOS In the fifth and fourth centuries BC a vigorous debate arose in Greece centred on the terms physis (nature) and nomos (law or custom). It became the first ethical debate in Western philosophy. Is justice simply a matter of obeying the laws, or does it have some basis in nature? If the laws conflict with my natural needs and desires, why should I submit to them? Is society itself ‘natural’, and what difference might the answer make to our evaluation of it? Both nomos and physis had their supporters, while some tried to dissolve the antithesis altogether. Further reading McKirahan, R.D. (1994) Philosophy Before Socrates , Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. (A helpful collection of translated texts with a lucid commentary; for the nomos/physis debate see chapter 19.) ANGELA HOBBS PIAGET, JEAN (1896–1980) The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget was the founder of the field we now call cognitive development. His own term for the discipline was ‘genetic epistemology’, reflecting his deep philosophical concerns. Among Piaget’s most enduring contributions were his remarkably robust and surprising observations of children. Time after time, in a strikingly wide variety of domains, and at every age from birth to adolescence, he discovered that children understood the world in very different ways from adults. But Piaget was really only interested in children because he thought they exemplified basic epistemological processes. By studying children we could discover how biological organisms acquire knowledge of the world around them. The principles of genetic epistemology could then be applied to other creatures, from molluscs to physicists. Piaget’s other enduring legacy is the idea that apparently foundational kinds of knowledge were neither given innately nor directly derived from experience. Rather, knowledge was constructed as a result of the complex interplay between organisms and their environment. Piaget saw this view
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Page 676 as an alternative to both classical rationalism and empiricism. See also: COGNITION, INFANT; COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT Further reading Flavell, J. (1968) The Developmental Psychology of Jean Piaget , Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand. (One of the first and still the best account of Piaget’s psychological theory. Piaget himself has a Kantian style that can be very rough-going. Flavell is the best way to get a clear sense of the general view.) Piaget, J. (1929) The Child’s Conception of the World , London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co; New York: Harcourt, Brace. ALISON GOPNIK PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA, GIOVANNI (1463–94) Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, today the best known of Renaissance philosophers, was a child prodigy and gentleman scholar who studied humanities, Aristotelianism and Platonism with the greatest teachers of his day. He claimed to have mastered, by the age of twenty-four, all known theological systems, Christian and non-Christian, from Moses to his own time. He was the first important Christian student of the Jewish mystical theology known as Kabbalah. The purpose of Pico’s philosophical and theological studies was to produce a grand synthesis of religious wisdom which would both deepen understanding of Christian truth and also serve as an apologetic weapon against non-Christians. This was the project outlined in Pico’s most famous work, De dignitate hominis ( On the Dignity of Man) (1486), and further illuminated by his Conclusiones (1486) and Apologia (1487). As part of this larger project, Pico planned to write a concord of Plato and Aristotle, of which only a fragment, the treatise De ente et uno ( On Being and the One) (1491), was ever finished. Although he proposed to found a new theological school based on an esoteric reading of all theologies past and present, he did not believe that these theologies were the same in substance, differing only in expression. He insisted on the differences between Platonism and Christianity, while holding that every major theological tradition did contain some elements of truth. In addition to other, non-philosophical works, Pico wrote the Commento (1486), a commentary on a Neoplatonic poem that in effect constituted a critique of Marsilio Ficino’s most famous work, the dialogue De amore ( On Love ) (1469). He criticized Ficino as too literary and defended the use of precise technical language in philosophy. Pico used Neoplatonic metaphysics to rediscover the ‘secret mysteries’ of pagan theology (though he sometimes criticized the reliability of the Neoplatonists as guides to Plato’s thought) and offered a fresh interpretation of the metaphysics of love based on his own reading of Platonic sources, seeing human erotic love as a psychological process distinct from cosmic love. See also: KABBALAH; PLATONISM, RENAISSANCE Further reading Pico della Mirandola, G. (1486) De dignitate hominis , in E. Garin (ed.) De dignitate hominis , Heptaplus, De ente et uno e scritti vari, Florence: Vallecchi, 1942; trans. C.G. Wallis, P.J.W. Miller and D. Carmichael, Pico della Mirandola: On the Dignity of Man, On Being and the One, Heptaplus , Indianapolis, IN, and New York: Library of Liberal Arts, 1965. (An overview of Pico’s concordism.) Wirszubski, C. (1989) Pico della Mirandola’s Encounter with Jewish Mysticism , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (On Pico and Kabbalism.) JAMES HANKINS PIETISM ‘Pietism’ refers to a Protestant reform movement, arising in the late 1600s in Lutheran Germany, which turned away from contests over theological and dogmatic identity in Protestant confessionalism and urged renewed attention to questions of personal piety and devotion. As such, it has only the most tenuous historical connections to the Christocentric piety of the devotio moderna or the northern humanist piety of Erasmus or Zwingli. It found its first major voice in P.J. Spener and A.H. Francke, and established its principal centres of influence at the state university at Halle in 1691 and the Moravian community at Herrnhut in 1722. Pietism found followers and allies in the European Reformed churches, in the Church of England (especially through the example of John and Charles Wesley and through the Moravian exile community in England), and in Britain’s English-speaking colonies. In the colonies, pietism not only found Lutheran and Reformed colonial hosts, but also saw in New England Puritanism a movement of similar aspirations. Pietism’s impact on the spirituality of western Europe and America was clearly felt
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Page 677 in the eighteenth-century Protestant Awakenings, and continues to have an influence in the shape of Anglo-American evangelicalism. Further reading Erb, P.C. (ed.) (1983) Pietists: Selected Writings, New York: Paulist Press. (Anthology of major pietist writings, including excerpts from Spener, Francke, Tersteegen and Zinzendorf, with introduction.) Stoeffler, F.E. (ed.) (1976) Continental Pietism and Early American Christianity , Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. (Essays on the influence of pietism on various early American religious communities, including German Lutheran, Dutch Reformed and Moravians.) ALLEN C. GUELZO PLANCK, MAX KARL ERNST LUDWIG (1858–1947) Planck was a German theoretical physicist and leader of the German physics community in the first half of the twentieth century. Famous for his introduction of the quantum hypothesis in physics, Planck was also a prolific writer on popular-scientific and philosophical topics. Even more so than his younger contemporary Albert Einstein, Planck was well-known in his day for his defence of a realist conception of science and his explicit criticism of the positivism of Ernst Mach and the Vienna Circle. Further reading Heilbron, J.L. (1986) The Dilemmas of an Upright Man: Max Planck as Spokesman for German Science , Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. (Definitive recent biography focusing on the personal and institutional setting of Planck’s work.) Planck, M. (1925) A Survey of Physics: A Collection of Lectures and Essays, trans. R. Jones and D.H. Williams, London: Methuen; repr. A Survey of Physical Theory , New York: Dover, 1960. (An early collection of Planck’s popular and philosophical essays in English translation.) DON HOWARD PLATFORM SUTRA The Platform Sutra is the single most important work of early Chinese Chan Buddhism, perhaps of the entire Chan/Sôn/Zen tradition. It purports to contain the teachings of the Sixth Patriarch Huineng (638– 713), whom it celebrates as an illiterate but enlightened sage. The centrepiece is an exchange of verses attributed to Shenxiu (606?–706) and Huineng, generally taken to represent, respectively, a gradual or progressive self-cultivation leading to perfect enlightenment and a sudden or subitist style of practice in which enlightenment is attained all at once. The Platform Sutra was actually composed around 780, more than a century after the events it describes. Its reportage is demonstrably inaccurate and its traditional interpretation problematic, but this does not alter the profound mythopoeic importance of the text. See also: BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY, CHINESE Further reading Yampolsky, P.B. (ed. and trans.) (1967) The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch , New York: Columbia University Press. (The most widely used translation of the Dunhuang text, with a long introduction on the history of the text.) JOHN R. McRAE PLATO (427–347 BC) Plato was an Athenian Greek of aristocratic family, active as a philosopher in the first half of the fourth century BC. He was a devoted follower ofSocrates,ashis writingsmake abundantly plain. Nearly all are philosophical dialogues – often works of dazzling literary sophistication – in which Socrates takes centre stage. Socrates is usually a charismatic figure who outshines a whole succession of lesser interlocutors, from sophists, politicians and generals to docile teenagers. The most powerfully realistic fictions among the dialogues, such as Protagoras and Symposium , recreate a lost world of exuberant intellectual selfconfidence in an Athens not yet torn apart by civil strife or reduced by defeat in the Peloponnesian War. Some of Plato’s earliest writings were evidently composed in an attempt to defend Socrates and his philosophical mission against the misunderstanding and prejudice which – in the view of his friends – had brought about his prosecution and death. Most notable of these are Apology , which purports to reproduce the speeches Socrates gave at his trial, and Gorgias , a long and impassioned debate over the choice between a philosophical and a political life. Several early dialogues pit Socrates against practitioners of rival disciplines, whether rhetoric (as in Gorgias ) or sophistic education ( Protagoras) or expertise in religion ( Euthyphro ), and were clearly designed as invitations to philosophy as well as warnings against the
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Page 678 pretensions of the alternatives. Apologetic and protreptic concerns are seldom entirely absent from any Platonic dialogue in which Socrates is protagonist, but in others among the early works the emphasis falls more heavily upon his ethical philosophy in its own right. For example, Laches (on courage) and Charmides (on moderation) explore these topics in characteristic Socratic style, relying mostly on his method of elenchus (refutation), although Plato seems by no means committed to a Socratic intellectualist analysis of the virtues as forms of knowledge. That analysis is in fact examined in these dialogues (as also, for example, in Hippias Minor ). In dialogues of Plato’s middle period like Meno, Symposium and Phaedo a rather different Socrates is presented. He gives voice to positive positions on a much wider range of topics: not just ethics, but metaphysics and epistemology and psychology too. And he is portrayed as recommending a new and constructive instrument of inquiry borrowed from mathematics, the method of hypothesis. While there are continuities between Plato’s early and middle period versions of Socrates, it is clear that an evolution has occurred. Plato is no longer a Socratic, not even a critical and original Socratic: he has turned Socrates into a Platonist. The two major theories that make up Platonism are the theory of Forms and the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. The notion of a Form is articulated with the aid of conceptual resources drawn from Eleatic philosophy. The ultimate object of a philosopher’s search for knowledge is a kind of being that is quite unlike the familiar objects of the phenomenal world: something eternal and changeless, eminently and exclusively whatever – beautiful or just or equal – it is, not qualified in time or place or relation or respect. An account of the Form of Beautiful will explain what it is for something to be beautiful, and indeed other things are caused to be beautiful by their participation in the Beautiful. The middle period dialogues never put forward any proof of the existence of Forms. The theory is usually presented as a basic assumption to which the interlocutors agree to subscribe. Plato seems to treat it as a very general high-level hypothesis which provides the framework within which other questions can be explored, including the immortality of the soul. According to Phaedo , such a hypothesis will only stand if its consequences are consistent with other relevant truths; according to Republic its validity must ultimately be assured by its coherence with the unhypothetical first principle constituted by specification of the Good. The Pythagorean doctrine of the immortality of the soul, by contrast, is something for which Plato presents explicit proofs whenever he introduces it into discussion. It presupposes the dualist idea that soul and body are intrinsically distinct substances, which coexist during our life, but separate again at death. Its first appearance is in Meno , where it is invoked in explanation of how we acquire a priori knowledge of mathematical truths. Socrates is represented as insisting that nobody imparts such truths to us as information: we work them out for ourselves, by recollecting them from within, where they must have lain untapped as latent memory throughout our lives. But innate forgotten knowledge presupposes a time before the soul entered the body, when it was in full conscious possession of truth. Phaedo holds out the promise that the souls of philosophers who devote their lives to the pursuit of wisdom will upon death be wholly freed from the constraints and contaminations of the body, and achieve pure knowledge of the Forms once again. Republic, Plato’s greatest work, also belongs to this major constructive period of his philosophizing. It gives the epistemology and metaphysics of Forms a key role in political philosophy. The ideally just city (or some approximation to it),and thecommunist institutions which control the life of its elite governing class, could only become a practical possibility if philosophers were to acquire political power or rulers to engage sincerely and adequately in philosophy. This is because a philosopher-ruler whose emotions have been properly trained and disciplined by Plato’s reforming educational programme, and whose mind has been prepared for abstract thought about Forms by rigorous and comprehensive study of mathematics, is the only person with the knowledge and virtue necessary for producing harmony in society. Understanding of Forms, and above all of the Good, keystone of the system of Forms, is thus the essential prerequisite of political order. It remains disputed how far Plato’s vision of a good society ruled by philosopher-statesmen (of both sexes) was ever really conceived as a blueprint for practical implementation. Much of his writing suggests a deep pessimism about the prospects for human happiness. The most potent image in Republic is the analogy of the cave, which depicts ordinary humanity as so shackled by illusions several times removed from the illumination of truth that only radical
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Page 679 moral and intellectual conversion could redeem us. And its theory of the human psyche is no less dark: the opposing desires of reason, emotion and appetite render it all too liable to the internal conflict which constitutes moral disease. While Republic is for modern readers the central text in Plato’s œuvre, throughout much of antiquity and the medieval period Timaeus was the dialogue by which he was best known. In this late work Plato offers an account of the creation of an ordered universe by a divine craftsman, who invests pre-existing matter with every form of life and intelligence by the application of harmonious mathematical ratios. This is claimed to be only a ‘likely story’, the best explanation we can infer for phenomena which have none of the unchangeable permanence of the Forms. None the less Timaeus is the only work among post-Republic dialogues, apart from a highly-charged myth in Phaedrus , in which Plato was again to communicate the comprehensive vision expressed in the Platonism of the middle period dialogues. Many of these dialogues are however remarkable contributions to philosophy, and none more so than the self-critical Parmenides. Here the mature Parmenides is represented as mounting a powerful set of challenges to the logical coherence of the theory of Forms. He urges not abandonment of the theory, but much harder work in the practice of dialectical argument if the challenges are to be met. Other pioneering explorations were in epistemology ( Theaetetus) and philosophical logic ( Sophist). Theaetetus mounts a powerful attack on Protagoras’ relativist theory of truth, before grappling with puzzles about false belief and problems with the perennially attractive idea that knowledge is a complex built out of unknowable simples. Sophist engages with the Parmenidean paradox that what is not cannot be spoken or thought about. It forges fundamental distinctions between identity and predication and between subject and predicate in its attempt to rescue meaningful discourse from the absurdities of the paradox. In his sixties Plato made two visits to the court of Dionysius II in Sicily, apparently with some hopes of exercising a beneficial influence on the young despot. Both attempts were abysmal failures. But they did not deter Plato from writing extensively on politics in his last years. Statesman explores the practical knowledge the expert statesman must command. It was followed by the longest, even if not the liveliest, work he ever wrote, the twelve books of Laws , perhaps still unfinished at his death. See also: PLATONISM, EARLY AND MIDDLE; PLATONISM, MEDIEVAL; PLATONISM, RENAISSANCE Further reading Friedländer, P. (1958, 1964, 1969) Plato, trans. H. Meyerhoff, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 3 vols. (An account of the dialogues particularly recommended for its treatment of the philosophical significance of their literary characteristics.) Grube, G. (1980) Plato’s Thought, London: Athlone Press. (Accessible introductory account of Plato’s thought, with new introduction and bibliography by D. Zeyl.) Plato (390s–347 BC) Plato: Complete Works, ed. J.M. Cooper, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997. (The most complete one-volume collection, with translations by various hands; includes Spuria and Dubia, introductions and bibliography; many dialogues are also available separately in paperback editions.) MALCOLM SCHOFIELD PLATONISM, EARLY AND MIDDLE Platonism is the body of doctrine developed in the school founded by Plato, both before and (especially) after his death in 347 BC. The first phase, usually known as ‘Early Platonism’ or the ‘Early Academy’, ran until the 260s BC, and is represented above all by the work of Plato’s first three successors, Speusippus, Xenocrates and Polemo. After an interval of nearly two centuries during which the Academy became anti-doctrinal in tendency, doctrinal Platonism re-emerged in the early first century BC with Antiochus, whose school the ‘Old Academy’ claimed to be a revival of authentic Platonism, although its selfpresentation was largely in the terminology forged by the Stoics. The phase from Antiochus to Numenius is conventionally known as Middle Platonism, and prepared the ground for the emergence of Neoplatonism in the work of Plotinus. Its leading figures are Antiochus, Eudorus, Plutarch of Chaeronea, Atticus, Alcinous, Albinus, Calvenus Taurus and Numenius. Its influence is also visible in major contemporary thinkers like the Jewish exegete Philo of Alexandria and the doctor Galen. Like Neoplatonism, Early and Middle Platonism were founded on a very close reading of the text of Plato, especially the Timaeus , often facilitated by commentaries, and further
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Page 680 supplemented by knowledge of his ‘unwritten doctrines’. However, Early and Middle Platonists did not develop nearly so elaborate a metaphysics as the Neoplatonists, and there was a much greater concentration on ethics. Most Middle Platonists regarded Aristotle as an ally, and incorporated significant parts of his thought into Platonism, especially in ethics and logic. Some were Neo-Pythagorean in tendency, and most claimed in some sense to be able to trace Platonic thought back to Pythagoras. The Platonists developed the dualism of the One (an active, defining principle) and the Indefinite Dyad (an indeterminate, material principle), bequeathed by Plato, especially through his oral teachings. These eventually emerged as, respectively, God and matter, supplemented by the Platonic Forms, which Middle Platonists typically identified with God’s thoughts. The world-soul was distinguished from the demiurge or creator, who was in turn either distinguished from or collapsed into the primary divinity, a supreme intellect. Some, notably Plutarch, postulated in addition a counterbalancing evil world-soul. As regards the human soul, Plato’s division of it into a rational plus two irrational parts was maintained, along with his doctrine of transmigration. There was also an increasing focus on the intermediary role played by daemons in the functioning of the world. In ethics, most Middle Platonists came to effect an assimilation between Plato’s and Aristotle’s views. All agreed with Plato and Aristotle, against the Stoics, that as well as moral there are also non-moral goods, such as health and wealth. While there was a consensus that the latter are not necessary for happiness, some, notably Antiochus, defended the view that non-moral goods are indispensable, at least to supreme happiness. In addition, Aristotle’s doctrine that virtue lies in a ‘mean’ became a central feature of Platonist ethics. As for the ‘goal’ or ‘end’ ( telos ) of life, this came from the first century BC onwards, perhaps starting with Eudorus, to be specified by Platonists as ‘likeness to God’. Finally, the issue of determinism was, in the wake of Hellenistic philosophy, recognized as important by Middle Platonists, who defended the existence of free will. Platonism never developed its own logic, but adopted Peripatetic logic, including both syllogistic and the theory of categories, both of which, it was claimed, had been anticipated by Plato. See also: NEOPLATONISM Further reading Dillon, J. (1977), The Middle Platonists , London: Duckworth. (A full introduction to Middle Platonism; has much on Early Platonism also.) Glucker, J. (1978) Antiochus and the Late Academy , Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. (Important rewriting of the history of the Platonic ‘school’.) JOHN DILLON PLATONISM IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY Plato seems to have been more an icon and an inspiration than an authentic source for Islamic philosophers. So far as is known, the only works available to them in Arabic translation were the Laws, the Sophist, the Timaeus and the Republic. His name was often invoked as a sage and an exemplar of that wisdom available to human-kind among the Greeks before the revelation of the Qur’an. This in itself could represent a kind of affront to orthodox Islam, which tended to view the human situation before the Qur’an’s ‘coming down’ as one of pervasive ignorance ( jahaliyya).However,the rise of humanist culture in Baghdad during the ninth and tenth centuries AD, which involved Syriac Christian translators, presupposed a gradual acceptance of Greek wisdom in which Plato figured paradigmatically, even though far fewer of his works were made available in translation than those of Aristotle. See also: GREEK PHILOSOPHY: IMPACT ON ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY Further reading Rosenthal, F. (1975) The Classical Heritage in Islam, trans. E. and J. Marmorstein, London: Routledge. (A rich description of Plato’s heritage in the Islamic world.) DAVID BURRELL PLATONISM, MEDIEVAL Medieval Platonism includes the medieval biographical tradition, the transmission of the dialogues, a general outlook spanning commitment to extramental ideas, intellectualism in cognition, emphasis on self-knowledge as the source of philosophizing, and employment of the dialogue form. Platonism permeated the philosophy of the Church Fathers, the writings of Anselm and Abelard, the twelfthcentury renaissance, the Italian Renaissance and the northern renaissance. Indeed the mathematical
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Page 681 treatment of nature, which inspired the birth of modern science in the works of Kepler and Galileo, stems in part from late medieval Pythagorean Platonism. The term ‘Platonism’ is of seventeenth-century origin. Medieval authors spoke not of Platonism but rather of Plato and of Platonists ( platonici), applying the term ‘Platonist’ to an extreme extramental realism about universals, or a commitment to the extramental existence of the Ideas. Thus John of Salisbury characterized Bernard of Chartres as ‘the foremost Platonist of our time’ in regard to his theory of ideas. For Aquinas, Platonists hold an overly intellectualist account of human knowledge, ignoring the mediation of the senses. In general, medieval writers agreed with Cassiodorus’ maxim, Plato theologus, Aristoteles logicus . Plato was primarily a theologian, an expert on the divine, eternal, immaterial and intelligible realm, a classifier of the orders of angelic and demonic beings, whereas Aristotle was primarily a logician and classifier of the forms of argument. Medieval Platonism combines elements drawn from Middle Platonism and Neoplatonism. It generally assumes a dualistic opposition of the divine and temporal worlds, with the sensible world patterned on unchanging immaterial forms, often expressed as numbers. It also affirms the soul’s immortality and direct knowledge of intelligible truths, combined with a suspicion of the mortal body and a distrust of the evidence of the senses. Neoplatonists sympathized with Porphyry’s aim (in his lost De harmonia Platonis et Aristotelis ) of harmonizing Plato with Aristotle. A Platonic outlook (largely inspired by the Timaeus ) dominates the early Middle Ages from the sixth to twelfth centuries, whereas the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the age of scholasticism, witnessed an explosion in the knowledge of Aristotelian texts, often transmitted through Arabic intermediaries. The new interest in Aristotle was such that, although the Timaeus was widely lectured on during the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, by 1255 it was no longer required reading at the University of Paris. Interest in Plato reemerged in the Italian Renaissance with the availability of genuine works of Plato, Plotinus and Proclus. Nevertheless, through Pseudo-Dionysius in particular, Platonism reverberates in many thirteenth-century authors, especially in theology. See also: CHARTRES, SCHOOL OF; PLATONISM, RENAISSANCE Further reading Klibansky, R. (1982) The Continuity of the Platonic Tradition during the Middle Ages, London: The Warburg Institute; Millwood, NY: Kraus International Publications. (Reissue of 1939 edition with supplementary chapters. The classic study on the transmission of Platonism in the Middle Ages focusing on the knowledge of the original texts and the history of their translation.) Little, A. (1950) The Platonic Heritage of Thomism, Dublin: Golden Eagle Press. (Survey of Platonic influence on Thomas.) DERMOT MORAN PLATONISM, RENAISSANCE Though it never successfully challenged the dominance of Aristotelian school philosophy, the revival of Plato and Platonism was an important phenomenon in the philosophical life of the Renaissance and contributed much to the new, more pluralistic philosophical climate of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Medieval philosophers had had access only to a few works by Plato himself, and, while the indirect influence of the Platonic tradition was pervasive, few if any Western medieval philosophers identified themselves as Platonists. In the Renaissance, by contrast, Western thinkers had access to the complete corpus of Plato’s works as well as to the works of Plotinus and many late ancient Platonists; there was also a small but influential group of thinkers who identified themselves as Christian Platonists. In the fifteenth century, the most important of these were to be found in the circles of Cardinal Bessarion (1403–72) in Rome and of Marsilio Ficino (1433–99) in Florence. Platonic themes were also central to the philosophies of Nicholas of Cusa (1401–64) and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–94), the two most powerful and original thinkers of the Quattrocento. While the dominant interpretation of the Platonic dialogues throughout the Renaissance remained Neoplatonic, there was also a minority tradition that revived the sceptical interpretation of the dialogues that had been characteristic of the early Hellenistic Academy. In the sixteenth century Platonism became a kind of ‘countercultural’ phenomenon, and Plato came to be an important authority for scientists and cosmologists who wished to challenge the Aristotelian mainstream: men like Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, Francesco Patrizi and Galileo. Nevertheless, the Platonic dialogues were rarely taught in the humanistic schools of fifteenth-century Italy. Plato was first established as an important school author in the
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Page 682 sixteenth century, first at the University of Paris and later in German universities. In Italy chairs of Platonic philosophy began to be established for the first time in the 1570s. Though the hegemony of Aristotelianism was in the end broken by the new philosophy of the seventeenth century, Plato’s authority did much to loosen the grip of Aristotle on the teaching of natural philosophy in the universities of late Renaissance Europe. See also: HUMANISM, RENAISSANCE; PLATONISM, MEDIEVAL Further reading Hankins, J. (1990) Plato in the Italian Renaissance, London, Leiden and Copenhagen: Brill, 2 vols. (A detailed account of the reception of Plato in the fifteenth century.) Kristeller, P.O. (1956) Studies in Renaissance Thought and Letters , Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura. (Important for the context of Ficino and for the later influence of Ficinian Platonism.) JAMES HANKINS PLEASURE From Plato and beyond, pleasure has been thought to be a basic, and sometimes the only basic, reason for doing anything. Since there are many forms that pleasure can take and many individual views of what pleasure consists in, much attention has been given to how pleasures may be distinguished, what their motivational and moral significance might be, and whether there may not be some objective determination of them, whether some may be good or bad, or some better as pleasures than others. But first there is the question of what pleasure is. It has been variously thought to be a state of mind like distress only of the opposite polarity; merely the absence or cessation of or freedom from pain; a kind of quiescence like contentment; or the experiencing of bodily sensations which, unlike sensations of pain, one does not want to stop. We also identify and class together particular sources of pleasure and call them pleasures of the table, company, sex, conversation, solitude, competition, contemplation or athletic pleasures. In this sense there may be some pleasures which we do not enjoy. But most generally pleasure is what we feel and take when we do enjoy something. This raises the questions of what is encompassed by ‘something’, what it is to enjoy anything, and the extent to which theories of pleasure can accommodate both our passivity and activity in pleasure. The most influential theories have been those of Plato, Aristotle and empiricists such as Hume and Bentham. Further reading Freud, S. (1920) Beyond the Pleasure Principle ; repr. in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , trans. and ed. J. Strachey, London: Hogarth Press, vol. 18. (Characteristically inventive and contentious.) Gosling, J.C.B. and Taylor, C.C.W. (eds) (1982) The Greeks on Pleasure , Oxford: Clarendon Press. (A scholarly and informative discussion of an immense topic.) GRAEME MARSHALL PLEKHANOV, GEORGII VALENTINOVICH (1857–1918) Known as ‘the Father of Russian Marxism’, Plekhanov was the chief popularizer and interpreter of Marxism in Russia in the 1880s. His interest in the philosophical aspects of Marxism made him influential outside as well as inside Russia. He was a prolific writer, and dealt with several aspects of Marxist thought. Plekhanov was an important figure in the Russian revolutionary movement. He was a founder member of the Russian Social Democratic Party, and a leading figure in its Menshevik wing after it split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in 1903. As a politician, Plekhanov was constantly involved in polemics with political and ideological opponents. Most of his theoretical works are to some degree polemical, and it was the conflicts among Russian revolutionary groups that shaped Plekhanov’s interpretation of Marx’s thought. A basic feature of this interpretation was that Russia’s historical development was like that of Western European countries, and would pass through a capitalist phase before progressing to socialism. Accordingly, Plekhanov gave prominence to those of Marx’s writings which could be presented in a deterministic way. Plekhanov insisted that Marxism was a materialist doctrine (as opposed to an idealist one) and as such recognized the primacy of matter in all spheres of existence. Plekhanov was in many ways an innovator, being the writer who first coined the term ‘dialectical materialism’, and who drew attention to the Hegelian origins of Marx’s system. His writings were quickly translated into several European languages. His interpretation of Marxism was much admired by Lenin, and
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Page 683 was to form the basis of the official ideology of the Soviet Union. The conception of Marxism that Plekhanov propounded continues to exercise a profound influence on conceptions of Marxism throughout the world. See also: DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM; MARXIST PHILOSOPHY, RUSSIAN AND SOVIET Further reading Baron, S. (1963) Plekhanov: The Father of Russian Marxism, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. (The fullest biography of Plekhanov in English.) Plekhanov, G.V. (1956–8) G.V. Plekhanov: Izbrannye filosofskie proizvedeniia , Moscow: Gosizdat, 5 vols; trans. B. Trifonov, G. Plekhanov: Selected Philosophical Works, Moscow: Progress, 1974–81, 5 vols. (This edition contains most of Plekhanov’s main theoretical writings.) JAMES D. WHITE PLOTINUS (AD 204/5–70) Plotinus was the founder of Neoplatonism, the dominant philosophical movement of the Graeco-Roman world in late antiquity, and the most significant thinker of the movement. He is sometimes described as the last great pagan philosopher. His writings, the so-called Enneads, are preserved as a whole. While an earnest follower of Plato, he reveals other philosophical influences as well, in particular those of Aristotle and Stoicism. Plotinus developed a metaphysics of intelligible causes of the sensible world and the human soul. The ultimate cause of everything is ‘the One’ or ‘the Good’. It is absolutely simple and cannot be grasped by thought or given any positive determination. The One has as its external act the universal mind or ‘Intellect’. The Intellect’s thoughts are the Platonic Forms, the eternal and unchanging paradigms of which sensible things are imperfect images. This thinking of the forms is Intellect’s internal activity. Its external act is a level of cosmic soul, which produces the sensible realm and gives life to the embodied organisms in it. Soul is thus the lowest intelligible cause that immediately is immediately in contact with the sensible realm. Plotinus, however, insists that the soul retains its intelligible character such as nonspatiality and unchangeability through its dealings with the sensible. Thus he is an ardent soul–body dualist. Human beings stand on the border between the realms: through their bodily life they belong to the sensible, but the human soul has its roots in the intelligible realm. Plotinus sees philosophy as the vehicle of the soul’s return to its intelligible roots. While standing firmly in the tradition of Greek rationalism and being a philosopher of unusual abilities himself, Plotinus shares some of the spirit of the religious salvation movements characteristic of his epoch. See also: NEOPLATONISM Further reading O’Meara, D.J. (1993) Plotinus: An Introduction to the Enneads, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Highly recommended introduction to Plotinus; contains a good bibliography.) Plotinus ( c .AD 205–66) Enneads, trans. A.H. Armstrong, Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and London: Heinemann, 1966–88. (Based on the authoritative editions of P. Henry and H.-R. Schwyzer, with minor modifications; Greek text with English translation.) EYJÓLFUR KJALAR EMILSSON PLURALISM ‘Pluralism’ is a broad term, applicable to any doctrine which maintains that there are ultimately many things, or many kinds of thing; in both these senses it is opposed to ‘monism’. Its commonest use in late twentieth-century philosophy is to describe views which recognize many sets of equally correct beliefs or evaluative standards; and in this sense it is akin to ‘relativism’. Societies are sometimes called ‘pluralistic’, meaning that they incorporate a variety of ways of life, moral standards and religions; one who sees this not as undesirable confusion but a proper state of things, espouses pluralism. See also: MONISM; RELATIVISM Further reading James, W. (1904) ‘Humanism and Truth’, Mind 13 (October): 457–75; repr. in Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth , ed. A.J. Ayer, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978. (Readable statement of the pragmatic view of the nature of truth, from which a pluralism naturally emerges.) EDWARD CRAIG PLUTARCH OF CHAERONEA ( c . AD 45–c .120) The Greek biographer and philosopher Plutarch of Chaeronea is the greatest Greek literary figure of the first century AD. He is properly called Plutarch of Chaeronea, to distinguish him from
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Page 684 the minor fourth-century AD Platonist Plutarch of Athens. His fame rests not so much on his contributions to philosophy as on those to history and biography. Indeed, despite the survival of a large body of philosophical and semi-philosophical writings known under the collective title Moralia, most of hismore technical philosophical treatises have perished. Nevertheless, his importance for our understanding of the development of Middle Platonism is great. Plutarch is a reasonably orthodox Platonist (in so far as that expression has any meaning), although his Platonism has some distinctive features. Against Antiochus, he accepts the sceptical New Academy as part of the Platonic tradition, but he also exhibits a degree of cosmic dualism (postulating a pre-cosmic evil soul) which goes rather beyond the Platonist norm. It is misleading, however, to oppose him to a supposed tradition of ‘schoolPlatonism’. As the ethical ‘end’ or ‘goal’ ( telos ), he adopts the normal later Platonist one of ‘likeness to god’. In ethics, as in logic, he tends to favour Aristotelianism rather than Stoicism (advocating, for example, moderation of the passions rather than their extirpation, and appropriating as authentically Platonic the Aristotelian categories and syllogistic). A tendency to favour New Academic scepticism seems indicated in the titles of some of his lost works, but is not very evident in the surviving ones. As first principles, he postulates a pair consisting of God – who is one, the Good, and really existent – and the Platonic-Pythagorean Indefinite Dyad, which is a principle of multiplicity, and ultimately material. As secondary principles, he seems to adopt a logos , or active reason-principle of god, although the evidence for this is not copious, and a worldsoul, which is essentially irrational but desirous of ‘impregnation’ with reason by the logos . There is also in the universe, however, an active principle of disorder, which can never be entirely mastered by the divinity. A hint of Persian dualism seems to enter here into Plutarch’s thought. Such a system is derivable above all from his essay On Isis and Osiris, which may not be entirely typical. Other distinctive features include a tendency to triadic divisions of the universe, a developed demonology, and an interesting combination of Aristotelian and Stoic logics. Further reading Dillon, J. (1977) The Middle Platonists , London: Duckworth. (Chapter 4 is an introductory account of Plutarch.) Plutarch (late 1st–early 2nd century AD) Moralia, ed. F.C. Babbitt et al ., Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and London: Heinemann, 1927–76, 16 vols. (Greek text with facing translation: essays, speeches and treatises on a wide range of issues, largely philosophical. Of particular importance are volumes 5, 7 and 12–13.) JOHN DILLON PNEUMA Pneuma, ‘spirit’, derives from the Greek verb pneo, which indicates blowing or breathing. Since breathing is necessary for life and consciousness, pneuma came to denote not only wind and breath but various vital functions, including sensation and thought, and was understood by some philosophers as a cosmological principle. It became especially important in Stoicism, which explained the world in terms of matter and the rational structure exhibited in all its forms; this is established by rhythmical variations in the tonos or ‘tension’ of the pneuma. In Hebrew tradition, where Greek was used, pneuma stood for life, consciousness, and for invisible conscious agents, angels or demons. In Christian thought it denotes divine inspiration, in particular the Holy Spirit acknowledged as a divine Person. At John 4:24 it is used, unusually, to describe God himself. See also: QI Further reading Kittel, G.F. (ed.) (1968) Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, ∏ µα ( pneuma) and ∏ µα, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, vol. 6, 334–451. (Full scale survey, including pneuma in the Greek world, besides biblical and Gnostic usage; English translation from the German.) CHRISTOPHER STEAD POETRY Though poetry today seems a relatively marginal topic in philosophy, it was crucial for philosophy’s own initial self-definition. In ancient Greece, poetry was revered as the authoritative expression of sacred myth and traditional wisdom. With Socrates and Plato, philosophy began by distinguishing itself from poetry as a new, superior form of knowledge which could provide better guidance for life and even superior pleasure. Just as the sophists were attacked for relativism and deception, so were poets stridently criticized for irrationality and
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Page 685 falsehood. For Plato, not only did poetry stem from and appeal to the emotional, unreasoning aspects of human nature; it was also far removed from truth, being only an imitation of our world of appearances which itself was but an imitation of the real world of ideas or forms. He therefore insisted that poets be banished from his ideal state because they threatened its proper governance by reason and philosophy. Subsequent philosophy of poetry has been devoted to overcoming Plato’s condemnatory theory, while tending to confirm philosophy’s superiority. This task, begun by Aristotle, was for a long time pursued primarily under Plato’s general model of poetry (and indeed all art) as imitation or mimesis. The main strategy here was to argue that what poetry imitates or represents is more than mere superficial appearance, but rather general essences or the ideas themselves. For such theories, poetry’s relation to truth is crucial. Other theories were later developed that preferred to define and justify poetry in terms of formal properties or expression, or its distinctively beneficial effects on its audience. These strategies became increasingly influential from the time of Romanticism, but can be traced back to more ancient sources. The vast majority of theories follow Plato in treating poetry as a distinct domain, separate from and subordinate to philosophy. But since Romanticism, some have argued for the essential unity of these two enterprises. Great philosophy is here seen as the poetic creation of new ways of thinking and new forms of language, while the role of poetry as uniting and gathering things together so that the truth and presence of being shines forth. See also: STRUCTURALISM IN LITERARY THEORY Further reading Aristotle ( c . mid 4th century BC) Poetics , trans. R. Janko, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987. (Aristotle’s famous examination of the nature of poetry and tragedy.) Eliot, T.S. (1933) The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, London: Faber & Faber, 1964. (A very readable mix of English literary history and theory based on Eliot’s Norton lectures at Harvard.) RICHARD M. SHUSTERMAN POINCARÉ, JULES HENRI (1854–1912) Although primarily a mathematician, Henri Poincaré wrote and lectured extensively on astronomy, theoretical physics, philosophy of science and philosophy of mathematics at the turn of the century. In philosophy, Poincaré is famous for the conventionalist thesis that we may choose either Euclidean or non-Euclidean geometry in physics, claiming that space is neither Euclidean nor non-Euclidean and that geometry is neither true nor false. However, Poincaré’s conventionalism was not global, as some have claimed. Poincaré held that only geometry and perhaps a few principles of mechanics are conventional, and argued that science does discover truth, despite a conventional element. Poincaré followed new developments in mathematics and physics closely and was involved in discussion of the foundations of mathematics and in the development of the theory of relativity. He was an important transitional figure in both of these areas, sometimes seeming ahead of his time and sometimes seeming very traditional. Perhaps because of the breadth of his views or because of the way in which philosophers focused on issues or small pieces of his work rather than on accurate history, interpretations of Poincaré vary greatly. Frequently cited by the logical positivists as a precursor, and widely discussed in the philosophy of science and the philosophy of mathematics, Poincaré’s writings have had a strong impact on English-language philosophy. See also: CONVENTIONALISM Further reading Folina, J. (1992) Poincaré and the Philosophy of Mathematics, London: Macmillan. (A study of Poincaré’s philosophy of mathematics.) Poincaré, H. (1913) The Foundations of Science: Science and Hypothesis, The Value of Science , Science and Method; Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1982. (Single volume-edition of his collected philosophical and popular scientific papers.) DAVID J. STUMP POLAND, PHILOSOPHY IN Philosophy in Poland has developed largely along the same lines as its Western European counterpart. Yet it also has many aspects which are peculiar to itself. Historically, the founding of the University of Cracow in 1364 marks the formal beginning of Polish philosophy as an academic discipline: prior to this, philosophy was taught at numerous smaller schools, and many Poles were educated abroad, which
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Page 686 accounts for the early influence of Western scholars and literature. In the medieval period, philosophy in Poland followed four chronologically successive currents of thought: the via moderna, which attached itself to the nominalism of Ockham and his disciples; the via communis, which sought to find a compromise between the old ways and these new ideas; the via antiqua, which marked a return to earlier philosophical trends; and a period of early humanism. The thought of Aristotle became dominant during the fifteenth century, as was the case at practically all universities of Central and Western Europe, and although this prevailed until the eighteenth century, philosophy did not remain stagnant – variations were numerous (including Protestant Aristotelianism). The prominence of political thought in the sixteenth century reflects the fact that Poland developed a new constitutional order at this time, the ‘democracy of nobles’ (the nobility accounted for about ten per cent of the total population). Nicholas Copernicus, prominent in modern astronomy and natural science, played a fundamental role in the development of philosophy during this period. The eighteenth-century Polish Enlightenment was shaped mainly by the clergy and hence was initially Christian in outlook. A more radical Enlightenment programme was propagated at a later stage. The following century saw the loss of Polish independence, and Polish thinkers were more prominent in exile than in their own country. At home, this coincided with a period of Romanticism and mystical philosophy (‘Messianism’), with influences of Kant and particularly of Hegel. The end of the nineteenth century saw a variety of old and new philosophical orientations, ranging from medieval thought to positivism and Marxism, while 1895 saw the beginning of the Lwów School of philosophy which was to become prominent in the twentieth century. After Polish independence in 1918, logic and methodology flourished under the influence of the Lwów School. However, elements of a variety of other Western schools of thought were also present, including that of British analytical philosophy. After the Second World War, administrative strictures were imposed in order to give prominence to Marxism. A certain liberalization took place after 1956, but its effects were dampened by a highly intrusive censorship. Despite this, philosophy in Poland continued to build upon the pre-Communist trends of Thomism and phenomenology, and to incorporate the new modes of thought emerging in the West. Since 1989–90, Marxism has lost its politico-administrative supports and censorship has disappeared, so that contemporary philosophy in Poland is entering a new phase of development. See also: POLISH LOGIC Further reading Skolimowski, H. (1967) Polish Analytical Philosophy , London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (Review of the main features.) Woleński, J. (1989) Logic and Philosophy in the Lwów–Warsaw School , Dodrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. (This is the English version of the first extensive monograph on the Lwów–Warsaw School.) JAN CZERKAWSKI ANTONI B. STĘPIEŃ STANISŁAW WIELGUS POLANYI, MICHAEL (1891–1976) Michael Polanyi was almost unique among philosophers in not only fully acknowledging but in arguing from the tacit dimensions of our knowledge which concern the many things which we know but cannot state nor even identify. He argued that our knowledge is a tacit, personal integration of subsidiary clues into a focal whole, and he elaborated this structure of knowing into a corresponding ontology and cosmology of a world of comprehensive entities and actions which are integrations of lower levels into higher ones. Polanyi used these accounts of knowing and being to argue against the ‘critical’ demands for impersonal, wholly objective and fully explicit knowledge, against reductionist attempts to explain higher levels in terms of lower ones, and to defend the freedom of scientific research and a free society generally. Further reading Allen, R.T. (1990) Polanyi , London: Claridge Press. (A general introduction). Polanyi, M. (1966) The Tacit Dimension, London: Routledge. (The structure of tacit integration and its implications.) R.T. ALLEN POLISH LOGIC The term ‘Polish logic’ was coined by McCall to signal the important contributions to modern logic by logicians from Poland between the wars. There were several centres of research, of which the Warsaw school, which grew out of the earlier
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Page 687 Lwów–Warsaw philosophical movement, was the most significant. Its development was closely connected with the Warsaw school of mathematics, which gave it its characteristic mathematical bent. Polish logic took as its point of departure the main trends in logical research of the time and it has influenced both subsequent logical research and subsequent work in the Western analytic tradition of philosophy. Its chief contributions were: (1) an enrichment of existing logical theory (including work on Boolean algebras, the sentential calculus, set theory, the theory of types); (2) new logical theories (for example, Leśniewski’s systems, Łukasiewicz’s many-valued logics, Tarski’s theory of truth, theory of the consequence operation and the calculus of systems); (3) new methods and tools as well as improvements of existing methods (for example, the matrix method of constructing sentential calculi, axiomatizability of logical matrices, algebraic and topological interpretations of deductive systems, permutation models for set theory, the application of quantifier elimination to decidability and definability problems); and (4) the application of formal methods to the study of the history of logic, resulting in a new understanding of the logics of Aristotle, the Stoics and the medievals. Further reading McCall, S. (ed.) (1967) Polish Logic 1920–1939, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Classic anthology of papers by Ajdukiewicz, Chwistek, Jaśkowski, Leśniewski, Łukasiewicz, Słupecki and Wajsberg, with notes by Kotarbiński on the development of formal logic in Poland in the years 1900–39; includes part of Jordan (1945).) Woleński, J. (1989) Logic and Philosophy in the Lvov–Warsaw School , Dordrecht: Kluwer. (An authoritative and comprehensive treatise with an excellent bibliography.) JAN ZYGMUNT POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY Political philosophy can be defined as philosophical reflection on how best to arrange our collective life – our political institutions and our social practices, such as our economic system and our pattern of family life. (Sometimes a distinction is made between political and social philosophy, but I shall use ‘political philosophy’ in a broad sense to include both.) Political philosophers seek to establish basic principles that will, for instance, justify a particular form of state, show that individuals have certain inalienable rights, or tell us how a society’s material resources should be shared among its members. This usually involves analysing and interpreting ideas like freedom, justice, authority and democracy and then applying them in a critical way to the social and political institutions that currently exist. Some political philosophers have tried primarily to justify the prevailing arrangements of their society; others have painted pictures of an ideal state or an ideal social world that is very different from anything we have so far experienced (see UTOPIANISM). Political philosophy has been practised for as long as human beings have regarded their collective arrangements not as immutable and part of the natural order but as potentially open to change, and therefore as standing in need of philosophical justification. It can be found in many different cultures, and has taken a wide variety of forms. There are two reasons for this diversity. First, the methods and approaches used by political philosophers reflect the general philosophical tendencies of their epoch. Developments in epistemology and ethics, for instance, alter the assumptions on which political philosophy can proceed. But second, the political philosopher’s agenda is largely set by the pressing political issues of the day. In medieval Europe, for instance, the proper relationship between Church and State became a central issue in political philosophy; in the early modern period the main argument was between defenders of absolutism and those who sought to justify a limited, constitutional state. In the nineteenth century, the social question – the question of how an industrial society should organize its economy and its welfare system – came to the fore. When we study the history of political philosophy, therefore, we find that alongside some perennial questions – how can one person ever justifiably claim the authority to govern another person, for instance? – there are some big changes: in the issues addressed, in the language used to address them, and in the underlying premises on which the political philosopher rests his or her argument. (For the development of the Western tradition of political philosophy, see POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, HISTORY OF; for other traditions, see POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY IN CLASSICAL ISLAM; POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, INDIAN; AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY, ANGLOPHONE; MARXISM, CHINESE; BUSHI PHILOSOPHY; SHŌTOKU CONSTITUTION; SUNZI; MARXIST THOUGHT IN LATIN AMERICA.) One question that immediately arises is
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Page 688 whether the principles that political philosophers establish are to be regarded as having universal validity, or whether they should be seen as expressing the assumptions and the values of a particular political community. This question about the scope and status of political philosophy has been fiercely debated in recent years (see POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, NATURE OF). It is closely connected to a question about human nature (see HUMAN NATURE). In order to justify a set of collective arrangements, a political philosophy must say something about the nature of human beings, about their needs, their capacities, about whether they are mainly selfish or mainly altruistic, and so forth. But can we discover common traits in human beings everywhere, or are people’s characters predominantly shaped by the particular culture they belong to? If we examine the main works of political philosophy in past centuries, they can be divided roughly into two categories. On the one hand there are those produced by philosophers elaborating general philosophical systems, whose political philosophy flows out of and forms an integral part of those systems. Leading philosophers who have made substantial contributions to political thought include PLATO, ARISTOTLE, AUGUSTINE, AQUINAS, HOBBES, LOCKE, HUME, HEGEL and J.S. MILL. On the other hand there are social and political thinkers whose contribution to philosophy as a whole has had little lasting significance, but who have made influential contributions to political philosophy specifically. In this category we may include CICERO, MARSILIUS OF PADUA, MACHIAVELLI, GROTIUS, ROUSSEAU, BENTHAM, FICHTE and MARX. Two important figures whose work reflects non-Western influences are IBN KHALDHUN and KAUTILYA. Among the most important twentieth-century political thinkers are ARENDT, BERLIN, DEWEY, FOUCAULT, GANDHI, GRAMSCI, HABERMAS, HAYEK, OAKESHOTT, RAWLS, SARTRE and TAYLOR. Political institutions and ideologies What are the issues that, historically and today, have most exercised political philosophers? To begin with, there is a set of questions about how political institutions should be arranged. Today we would think of this as an enquiry into the best form of state, though we should note that the state itself is a particular kind of political arrangement of relatively recent origin – for most of their history human beings have not been governed by states (see STATE, THE). Since all states claim AUTHORITY over their subjects, two fundamental issues are the very meaning of authority, and the criteria by which we can judge forms of political rule legitimate (see LEGITIMACY; CONTRACTARIANISM; GENERAL WILL; POWER; TRADITION AND TRADITIONALISM). Connected to this is theissue of whether individual subjects have a moral obligation to obey the laws of their state (see OBLIGATION, POLITICAL), and of the circumstances under which politically-inspired disobedience is justifiable (see CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE; REVOLUTION). Next there is a series of questions about the form that the state should take: whether authority should be absolute or constitutionally limited (see ABSOLUTISM; CONSTITUTIONALISM); whether its structure should be unitary or federal (see FEDERALISM AND CONFEDERALISM); whether it should be democratically controlled, and if so by what means (see DEMOCRACY; REPRESENTATION, POLITICAL). Finally here there is the question of whether any general limits can be set to the authority of the state – whether there are areas of individual freedom or privacy that the state must never invade on any pretext (see LAW, LIMITS OF; FREEDOM OF SPEECH; COERCION; PROPERTY; SLAVERY), and whether there are subjects such as religious doctrine on which the state must adopt a strictly neutral posture (see NEUTRALITY, POLITICAL; TOLERATION). Beyond the question of how the state itself should be constituted lies the question of the general principles that should guide its decisions. What values should inform economic and social policy for instance? Part of the political philosopher’s task is to examine ideas that are often appealed to in political argument but whose meaning remains obscure, so that they can be used by politicians from rival camps to justify radically contrasting policies. Political philosophers try to give a clear and coherent account of notions such as EQUALITY, FREEDOM AND LIBERTY, JUSTICE, NEEDS AND INTERESTS, PUBLIC INTEREST, RIGHTS AND WELFARE. And they also try to determine whether these ideas are consistent with, or conflict with, one another – whether, for instance, equality and liberty are competing values, or whether a society might be both free and equal at once. Further questions arise about the principles that should guide one state in its dealings with other states. May states legitimately pursue what they regard as their national interests, or are they bound to recognize ethical obligations towards one another (see DEVELOPMENT ETHICS)? More widely, should we be seeking a cosmopolitan alternative under which principles
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Page 689 of justice would be applied at global level? (see INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, PHILOSOPHY OF; JUSTICE, INTERNATIONAL). When, if ever, are states justified in going to war with each other? (See WAR AND PEACE, PHILOSOPHY OF.) Over about the last two centuries, political debate has most often been conducted within the general frameworks supplied by rival ideologies. We can think of an ideology as a set of beliefs about the social and political world which simultaneously makes sense of what is going on, and guides our practical responses to it (see IDEOLOGY). Ideologies are often rather loosely structured, so that two people who are both conservatives, say, may reach quite different conclusions about some concrete issue of policy. Nevertheless they seem to be indispensable as simplifying devices for thinking about a political world of ever-increasing complexity. No political philosopher can break free entirely from the grip of ideology, but political philosophy must involve a more critical scrutiny of the intellectual links that hold ideologies together, and a bringing to light of the unstated assumptions that underpin them. The most influential of these ideologies have been LIBERALISM, CONSERVATISM, SOCIALISM, nationalism (see NATION AND NATIONALISM; EURASIAN MOVEMENT; PAN-SLAVISM; ZIONISM; PAN-AFRICANISM) and Marxism (see MARXISM, WESTERN; MARXIST PHILOSOPHY, RUSSIAN AND SOVIET; MARXISM, CHINESE). Other ideologies are of lesser political significance, either because they have drawn fewer adherents or because they have been influential over a shorter period of time: these include ANARCHISM, COMMUNISM, FASCISM, LIBERTARIANISM, REPUBLICANISM, SOCIAL DEMOCRACY AND TOTALITARIANISM. Contemporary political philosophy The last quarter of the twentieth century has seen a powerful revival of political philosophy, which in Western societies at least has mostly been conducted within a broadly liberal framework. Other ideologies have been outflanked: Marxism has gone into a rapid decline, and conservatism and socialism have survived only by taking on board large portions of liberalism. Some have claimed that the main rival to liberalism is now communitarianism (see COMMUNITY AND COMMUNITARIANISM); however on closer inspection the so-called liberal–communitarian debate can be seen to be less a debate about liberalism itself than about the precise status and form that a liberal political philosophy should take – whether, for example, it should claim universal validity, or should present itself simply as an interpretation of the political culture of the Western liberal democracies. The vitality of political philosophy is not to be explained by the emergence of a new ideological revival to liberalism, but by the fact that a new set of political issues has arisen whose resolution will stretch the intellectual resources of liberalism to the limit. What are these issues? The first is the issue of social justice, which in one form or another has dominated political philosophy for much of the century. Most of the many liberal theories of justice on offer have had a broadly egalitarian flavour, demanding at least the partial offsetting of the economic and social inequalities thrown up by an unfettered market economy (see MARKET, ETHICS OF THE; JUSTICE; RAWLS, J.; DWORKIN, R.; though for dissenting views see HAYEK, F.A. VON; NOZICK, R.). These theories rested on the assumption that social and economic policy could be pursued largely within the borders of a self-contained political community, sheltered from the world market. This assumption has become increasingly questionable, and it presents liberals with the following dilemma: if the pursuit of social justice is integral to liberalism, how can this be now be reconciled with individual freedoms to move, communicate, work, and trade across state boundaries? The second issue is posed by feminism, and especially the feminist challenge to the conventional liberal distinction between public and private spheres (see FEMINIST POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY). In many respects feminism and liberalism are natural allies, but when feminists argue for fundamental changes in the way men and women conduct their personal relationships, or advocate affirmative action policies for employment that seems to contravene firmly-entrenched liberal principles of desert and merit, they pose major challenges to liberal political philosophy (see DESERT AND MERIT). Third, there is a set of issues arising from what we might call the new politics of cultural identity. Many groups in contemporary societies now demand that political institutions should be altered to reflect and express their distinctive cultures; these include, on the one hand, nationalist groups asserting that political boundaries should be redrawn to give them a greater measure of self-determination, and on the other cultural minorities whose complaint is that public institutions fail to show equal respect for those attributes that distinguish them
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Page 690 from the majority (for instance their language or religion) (see NATION AND NATIONALISM; MULTICULTURALISM; POSTCOLONIALISM). These demands once again collide with long-established liberal beliefs that the state should be culturally neutral, that citizens should receive equal treatment under the law, and that rights belong to individuals, not groups (see CITIZENSHIP; AFFIRMATIVE ACTION; DISCRIMINATION). It remains to be seen whether liberalism is sufficiently flexible to incorporate such demands. Finally, liberalism is challenged by the environmental movement, whose adherents claim that liberal political principles cannot successfully address urgent environmental concerns, and more fundamentally that the liberal image of the self-sufficient, self-directing individual is at odds with the ecological picture of humanity’s subordinate place in the system of nature as a whole (see GREEN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY; ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS). Liberalism, it is said, is too firmly wedded to the market economy and to consumption as the means of achieving personal well-being, to be able to embrace the radical policies needed to avoid environmental disaster. None of these problems is capable of easy solution, and we can say with some confidence that political philosophy will continue to flourisheven in aworldin whichthe sharp ideological divisions of the midtwentieth century no longer exist. We may also expect a renewal of non-Western traditions of political philosophy as free intellectual enquiry revives in those countries where for half a century or more it has been suppressed by the state. Political questions that have concerned philosophers for two millennia or more will be tackled using new languages and new techniques, while the everaccelerating pace of technological and social change will generate new problems whose solution we can barely begin to anticipate. See also: CIVIL SOCIETY; LIBERALISM, RUSSIAN; POSTMODERNISM AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY; PARTIINOST’; ANTI-SEMITISM; RELIGION AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY; SOVEREIGNTY Further reading Goodin, R. and Pettit, P. (1993) A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy , Oxford: Blackwell. (A comprehensive guide to current thinking in political philosophy, this book focuses especially on normative issues.) Hampsher-Monk, I.W. (1992) A History of Modern Political Thought, Major Political Thinkers from Hobbes to Marx , Oxford: Blackwell. (Contextualized studies of the political theories of Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, The Federalist, Burke, Bentham, Mill, Hegel and Marx.) Kymlicka, W. (1990) Contemporary Political Philosophy , Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Each chapter covers a major school of contemporary political thought.) Wolff, J. (1996) An Introduction to Political Philosophy , Oxford: Oxford University Press. (An accessible general introduction which discusses the arguments of both historical and contemporary political philosophers.) DAVID MILLER POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, AFRICAN see AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY, ANGLOPHONE POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, HISTORY OF The history of political philosophy attempts to yield a connected account of past speculation on the character of human association at its most inclusive level. ‘History’ or ‘philosophy’ may be stressed depending on whether the organizing principle is the temporal sequence or conceptual framework of political thought. Anglophone work has increasingly been organized around distinctive political ‘languages’ defined by specific vocabularies, syntaxes and problems, for example, classical republicanism, Roman law, natural law, utilitarianism. Chronologically it has been usual to observe divisions between ancient, medieval, Renaissance, early modern and modern periods of study. Ancient Greece is the source of the earliest political reflection, with a continuous history in the West. Here reflection on the nature and proper organization of political community stimulated inquiry into the difference between nature and convention, the public and the domestic realm, the distinctive character of political rule, the relationship between political life and philosophy, the identity of justice, and the taxonomy of state-forms – as well as a more sociological investigation of the stability and decline of political regimes. Greek political vocabulary was adapted to existing Roman republican practice (by Polybius and Cicero for example), which soon gave way to an imperial constitution stressing peace, order and unity. Rome thus generated two contrasting political ideals – that of the virtuous active republican citizen, and that of the unified empire governed by Roman law. Together with questions about the causes of its own rise and
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Page 691 decline, Rome thus provided political values and historical material for subsequent philosophical and historical reflection. Christianity undermined the pagan autonomy of politics in the name of a higher, transcendent ideal. However, it adapted much of Greek rationalism and the political vocabulary of classical culture in elaborating a creed and an institutional form. In turn it lent legitimacy to imperial and royal officeholders of Rome and barbarian successor-kingdoms. Medieval political philosophy was characteristically preoccupied with the relationship between pope and king, church and regnum , but philosophy as a discipline was subordinated to theology. This was challenged by the rediscovery of Aristotle’s self-sufficiently secular political ideal, a challenge met for a while by Aquinas’ synthesis. However, the autonomy of secular politics was continually reasserted by a sequence of writers – Bartolus of Sassoferrato, Marsilius of Padua, Bruni and Machiavelli – who revived and reformulated classical republicanism using both Roman law and new Renaissance techniques and insights. The Reformation, although initially politically quiescent, gave rise to new conflicts between secular and sacred rule. In particular, radical claims about the responsibility of all believers for their own salvation fed through in various ways into more individualistic political philosophies. In early modern Europe, using the strikingly new (and originally Catholic) vocabulary of natural right, Hugo Grotius aspired to provide a common secular basis for a shared political morality, on the basis of individual rights derived from a universal right of self-preservation. This was widely explored by seventeenth and eighteenth century thinkers, notably Hobbes and Locke, and culminated politically in the American and French Revolutions. In the aftermath of the French Revolution, language of natural rights was rejected both by conservative thinkers, such as Burke, and by a new, utilitarian radicalism largely forged by Bentham. Attempts to grasp the political character of economic transformations and Empire in early modern Europe resulted in a growing engagement with the essentially historical character of politics, the dynamic of which republican discourse was particularly well suited to exploring. Avoiding the loss of liberty which the acquisition of Empire had seemed to entail in Rome involved rethinking possible patterns of politicoeconomic development, providing a new definition of liberty which stressed personal and economic over political freedom, and proposing that impersonal institutional devices could replace virtuous motives in guaranteeing political liberty and stability. Such possibilities were explored by Montesquieu and Constant in France, Hume and Smith in Britain and ‘Publius’ (Madison, Hamilton and Jay) in America. They were rejected outright by Rousseau, for whom only the active citizen could guarantee rights, civic or civil. The French Revolution was not only an event in which political philosophy played an important if hotly contested role; it also, like the rise and fall of Rome, provided a central topic for subsequent political reflection. The character of modernity, the nature of revolution, the relationship of political ideas to political action, the strength or weakness of rationalism as an informing principle, the viability and desirability of the Revolutionary ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity, all became topics of philosophical speculation by post-Revolutionary thinkers such as Constant, Cabet, de Tocqueville, Burke, de Maistre, Saint-Simon, Owen and Coleridge, as well as a later generation including Comte, Carlyle and Marx. In contrast to his predecessors’ use of Lockean psychology and the conditioning effects of experience and association to understand the processes of socio-economic change, Kant’s postulation of the transcendent self initiated a new vocabulary of idealism. This culminated in Hegel’s attempt to show how philosophical and historical (including political) change could be understood as the development and realization of a trans-historical consciousness or Geist , seeking to overcome internal tensions through a process of projection and transcendence. The notion that human self-understanding and practices are to be understood historically immensely influenced subsequent political thinking, being central to the ideas of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud (as well as shaping many of J.S. Mill’s modifications of classical utilitarianism). All three of the former owed insights to Hegel’s claims about the crucial and emblematic character of the master–slave struggle. However, while for Hegel and Marx the slave’s insights represent the transition to a higher form of consciousness – mediated in Marx’s case by a class revolution – for Nietzsche (despairingly) and Freud (resignedly) repression was a constitutive and self-perpetuating feature of modern politics. While nineteenth century political thought was preoccupied with the historical conditioning of political sensibilities, Freud’s discovery of the
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Page 692 unconscious was accompanied by the emergence of a mass, irrationalist politics, characteristic of the twentieth century, and more suited to sociological than philosophical analysis. Nevertheless rationalist political theory, deriving from utilitarianism, and frequently drawing on (and contributing to) economic thought, remains the dominant accent in contemporary political philosophy. See also: BUSHI PHILOSOPHY; MARXISM, CHINESE; POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, INDIAN; POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY IN CLASSICAL ISLAM; SHŌTOKU CONSTITUTION; ZIONISM Further reading Burns, J. (ed.) (1988) The Cambridge History of Political Thought, c.350–1450 , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burns, J. and Goldie, M. (eds) (1991) The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (A collection of essays by individual authors, with an extensive bibliography.) IAIN HAMPSHER-MONK POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY IN CLASSICAL ISLAM Political philosophy in Islam is the application of Greek political theorizing upon an understanding of Muhammad’s revelation as legislative in intent. In lieu of Aristotle’s Politics , unknown in medieval Islam, Plato’s political philosophy assumed the primary role in an explanation of the nature and purpose of the Islamic state. Al-Farabi conceived of the prophet as a latter day philosopher-king, Ibn Bajja and Ibn Tufayl took their cue from Socrates’ fate and cautioned the philosopher against the possibility of successfully engaging in a philosophical mission to the vulgar masses, and Ibn Rushd presented philosophy as a duty enjoined by the law upon those able to philosophize. See also: LAW, ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY OF; PLATONISM IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY Further reading Butterworth, C.E. (ed.) (1992) The Political Aspects of Islamic Philosophy , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (An up-to-date collection of essays on, among others, al-Kindi, al-Razi, al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, Ibn Bajja, Ibn Tufayl and Ibn Rushd.) Lerner, R. and Mahdi, M. (eds) (1963) Medieval Political Philosophy: A Sourcebook , Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. (Important collection of primary texts in translation, including al-Farabi’s al-Siyasa almadaniyya (The Political Regime) and Tahsil al-sa‘ada, Ibn Bajja’s Tadbir al-mutawahhid, Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan and Ibn Rushd’s Fasl al-maqal.) DANIEL H. FRANK POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, INDIAN While Western political theory has been framed as the struggle between the state and the individual, Indian political philosophy has been more concerned with issues of self-liberation, morality and leadership. Until recently, with the advent of institutionalized or syndicated Hinduism, Indian society made a softer distinction between state and religion. Classical Indian political theory, as with Kauṭilya, centred on axioms on how to maintain and expand power. Kauṭilya argued that reason, the edicts of the king, and his own rules of governance, the Arthaśāstra , were as important for decision-making as the ancient religious treatises, which defined social structure and one’s duty to family, caste and God. With the exception of the Arthaśāstra , politics was expressed through the ability not so much to govern as to define social and moral responsibility, what one could or could not do and who could oversee these rules. Like all civilizations, India had periods of rule by accumulators of capital and traders, warriors and kings, and Brahmans and monks; there were also revolts by peasants. Still, philosophy was in the hands of the Brahmans, the priestly class. This philosophy was primarily not about artha (economic gain) or kāma (pleasure), but about dharma (virtue) and mokṣa (liberation from the material world). The attainment of salvation, of release from the bonds of karma, was far more important than the relationship between the individual and the sovereign, as was the case in Western political philosophy. See also: DUTY AND VIRTUE, INDIAN CONCEPTIONS OF; POSTCOLONIALISM Further reading Dhawan, G. (1957) The Political Philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi , Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House. (Excellent summary of Gandhi’s life and thoughts; easy to follow.) Nandy, A. (1967) Traditions, Tyranny and Utopias, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. (Brilliant, difficult, but very important book that touches on politics, culture and history.) SOHAIL INAYATULLAH
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Page 693 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, NATURE OF Political philosophy developed as a central aspect of philosophy generally in the world of ancient Greece, and the writings of Plato and Aristotle made a basic and still important contribution to the subject. Central to political philosophy has been a concern with the justification or criticism of general political arrangements such as democracy, oligarchy or kingship, and with the ways in which the sovereignty of the state is to be understood; with the relationship between the individual and the political order, and the nature of the individual’s obligation to that order; with the coherence and identity of the political order from the point of view of the nation and groups within the nation, and with the role of culture, language and race as aspects of this; with the basis of different general political ideologies and standpoints such as conservatism, socialism and liberalism; and with the nature of the basic concepts such as state, individual, rights, community and justice in terms of which we understand and argue about politics. Because it is concerned with the justification and criticism of existing and possible forms of political organization a good deal of political philosophy is normative; it seeks to provide grounds for one particular conception of the right and the good in politics. In consequence many current controversies in political philosophy are methodological; they have to do with how (if at all) normative judgments about politics can be justified. See also: POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, HISTORY OF Further reading Plant, R. (1991) Modern Political Thought, Oxford: Blackwell. (An overview of many aspects of post-war political thought.) RAYMOND PLANT POLITICAL THEOLOGY see THEOLOGY, POLITICAL POMPONAZZI, PIETRO (1462–1525) The Italian Pietro Pomponazzi was the leading Aristotelian philosopher in the first quarter of the sixteenth century. His treatise De immortalitate animae ( On the Immortality of the Soul ) (1516) argues that although faith teaches immortality, natural reason and Aristotelian principles cannot prove it. In De incantationibus (On Incantations) (first published in 1556), Pomponazzi attempts to demonstrate on rational grounds that all reported miraculous suspensions or reversals of natural laws can be explained by forces within nature itself. Separating faith and reason once again, Pomponazzi proclaims his belief in all canonical miracles of the Church. These arguments cast doubt on morality, for without an afterlife, humanity is deprived of rewards for virtue and punishment for evil; and nature itself appears to be governed by impersonal forces unconcerned with human affairs. However, morality is restored to the universe by the human powers of rational reflection which lead to the pursuit of virtue. Yet in De fato (On Fate) (first published in 1567), Pomponazzi challenges the very basis of his own ethical doctrine by arguing that all activity of insentient and sentient beings is directed to preordained ends by environmental factors. Unable to justify human freedom on rational grounds, he then seeks to reestablish it using arguments derived from Christian natural theology, thus reversing his usual separation of faith and reason. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM, RENAISSANCE Further reading Pine, M.L. (1986) Pietro Pomponazzi: Radical Philosopher of the Renaissance, Padua: Antenore. (A full discussion of the evolution of the doctrine of immortality is presented, as well as a complete analysis of the immortality controversy. De incantationibus and De fato are thoroughly examined. An attempt is made to find textual basis for the insincerity of Pomponazzi’s assertions of Christian faith.) Pomponazzi, P. (1516) De immortalitate animae , trans. W.H. Hay II, On the Immortality of the Soul , in E. Cassirer, P.O. Kristeller and J.H. Randall, Jr (eds) The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1948. (A reliable English translation of Pomponazzi’s best known treatise. It provoked the immortality controversy, arguing for the philosophic doctrine of mortality while accepting immortality on faith alone. Excellent footnotes by Kristeller and a useful introductory essay by Randall.) MARTIN L. PINE POPPER, KARL RAIMUND (1902–94) Born in Austria, Popper belongs to a generation of Central European émigré scholars that profoundly influenced thought in the English-speaking countries in this century. His greatest contributions are in philosophy of science and in political and social philosophy. Popper’s
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Page 694 ‘falsificationism’ reverses the usual view that accumulated experience leads to scientific hypotheses; rather, freely conjectured hypotheses precede, and are tested against, experience. The hypotheses that survive the testing process constitute current scientific knowledge. His general epistemology, ‘critical rationalism’, commends the Socratic method of posing questions and critically discussing the answers offered to them. He considers knowledge in the traditional sense of certainty, or in the modern sense of justified true belief, to be unobtainable. After the Anschluss, Popper was stimulated by the problem of why democracies had succumbed to totalitarianism and applied his critical rationalism to political philosophy. Since we have no infallible ways of getting or maintaining good government, Plato’s question ‘Who should rule?’ is misdirected. To advocate the rule of the best, the wise or the just invites tyranny disguised under those principles. By contrast, a prudently constructed open society constructs institutions to ensure that any regime can be ousted without violence, no matter what higher ends it proclaims itself to be seeking. Couched in the form of extended critiques of Plato and Platonism as well as of Marx and Marxism, Popper’s political philosophy has had considerable influence in post-war Europe, East and West. See also: EXPLANATION IN HISTORY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE; SCIENTIFIC REALISM AND ANTIREALISM Further reading Magee, B. (1973) Popper , London: Fontana/Collins. (The first comprehensive exposition for the general reader.) Popper, K.R. (1957) The Poverty of Historicism, London: Routledge. (States and rebuts the arguments for belief in inexorable laws of human destiny.) IAN C. JARVIE POPULATION AND ETHICS Ethical concern with population policies and with the issue of optimal population size is, generally speaking, a modern phenomenon. Although the first divine injunction of the Bible is ‘be fertile and multiply’, systematic theoretical interest in the normative aspects of demography has become associated largely with recent developments which have provided humanity with unprecedented control over population size, mainly through medical and economic means. Once the determination of the number of people in the world is no longer a natural given fact, but rather a matter of individual or social choice, it becomes subject to moral evaluation. However, the extension of traditional ethical principles to issues of population policies is bedevilled by paradoxes. The principle of utility, the ideal of self-perfection, the idea of a contract as a basis for political legitimacy and social justice, the notion of natural or human rights, and the principle of respect for persons – all these presuppose the existence of human beings whose interests, welfare, rights and dignity are to be protected and promoted. But population policies deal with the creation of people and the decision concerning their number. They relate to the creation of the very conditions for the application of ethical principles. Further reading Sikora, R.I. and Barry, B. (eds) (1979) Obligations to Future Generations , Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. (The best collection of essays on the subject.) DAVID HEYD PORNOGRAPHY There are three main questions about pornography. (1) How is pornography to be defined? Some definitions include the contention that it is morally wrong, while others define it neutrally in terms of its content and function. (2) Why is it wrong? Some accounts see the moral wrong of pornography in its tendency to corrupt individuals or to have detrimental effects on the morality of society; other accounts declare pornography to be objectionable only in so far as it causes physical harm to those involved in its production, or offence to unwilling observers. (3) Should pornography be restricted by law? Controversy here centres around whether the law should be used to discourage immorality, and whether the importance of free speech and individual autonomy are such as to rule out legislating against pornography. Here, the pornography debate raises very general questions about law and about autonomy in liberal societies. See also: LAW, LIMITS OF; SEXUALITY, PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Dworkin, A. (1981) Pornography: Men Possessing Women, New York: Putnam. (The most influential statement of important feminist objections to pornography.) SUSAN MENDUS
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Page 695 PORPHYRY ( c .233–309 AD) The late ancient philosopher Porphyry was one of the founders of Neoplatonism. He edited the teachings of Plotinus into the form in which they are now known, clarified them with insights of his own and established them in the thought of his time. But, in reaction to Plotinus, he also advanced the cause of Aristotle’s philosophical logic. Indeed, Porphyry is responsible for the resurgence of interest in Aristotle, which continued to the Middle Ages and beyond. Because of Porphyry, later Greek philosophy recovered both its Platonic and its Aristotelian roots, and Neoplatonism aimed to combine inspired thought with academic precision. He was a scholar of great learning, with interests ranging from literary criticism and history to religion. An example is his defence of vegetarianism, which anticipated the modern debate on ecological preservation. Humans and animals belong to the same family. Seeking to preserve life is a matter of extending philanthropy and respect to all living species, which are our natural siblings. Ideally we ought to display ‘harmlessness’ even towards plants, except that our bodies, being composite and mortal, need to consume something else for food. Thus we should be ever conscious of the destructive effect that our eating habits and consumerism have on the creation of which we are part, and should try to keep to a simple lifestyle. Porphyry’s attention to logic, metaphysics and all other topics was driven by his firm belief that reason exercised by pure mind leads to the true essence of things, the One God. Intellectual activity detaches the soul from passions and confusions, and concentrates its activity on the real things. Porphyry attacked Christianity and Gnosticism because he thought they appealed to the irrational. Mysteries and rituals are fitted for those who are unable to practise inward contemplation. Salvation comes to those leading the life of the philosopher-priest. See also: NEOPLATONISM Further reading Porphyry (mid 3rd century AD) Introduction ( Isagōgē ) ed. A. Busse, Isagoge et in Aristotelis categorias commentarium, CAG 4.1, Berlin: Reimer, 1887; trans. E. Warren, Porphyry the Phoenician: Isagōgē , Toronto, Ont: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1975. (English translation.) Smith, A. (1974) Porphyry’s Place in the Neoplatonic Tradition. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. (Classic study of Porphyry in relation to Plotinus.) LUCAS SIORVANES PORT-ROYAL The reform of the abbey of Port-Royal-des-Champs in 1608 coincided with the vast movement of monastic reform which characterized the Counter-Reformation. In 1624 a second abbey was created, Port-Royal-de-Paris and, after some rivalry among spiritual leaders of the day, this was directed by Jean Duvergier de Hauranne, abbot of Saint-Cyran and one of the leaders of the parti dévot hostile to Richelieu. In 1640 the abbot’s friend Jansenius published the Augustinus , a résumé of Augustine’s doctrine, of which five propositions on divine grace were condemned by the Vatican. Ecclesiastics in France were obliged to accept this condemnation, and the resistance of the nuns of Port-Royal brought about persecution, imprisonment and finally the destruction of the abbey in 1710. The intellectual history of the abbey extends far beyond theological quibblings, however. In 1626, Saint-Cyran defended Charron against the Jesuit Garasse and formed a firm alliance between the Pyrrhonism of Montaigne and the philosophy of Augustine. In the 1640s, Antoine Arnauld played an important role in the diffusion of Cartesianism, confirmed by the publication of the Logique de Port-Royal (1662). The 1670 publication of Pascal’s Pensées can be interpreted as a symptom of the rivalry between Descartes and Gassendi in contemporary apologetics and, in the following years, the polemics between Arnauld and Malebranche played an important role in the definition of Christian rationalism. See also: LOGIC IN THE 17TH AND 18TH CENTURIES Further reading Lesaulnier, J. (1992) Port-Royal insolite: édition critique du Recueil de choses diverses , Paris, Klincksieck. (Critical edition of conversations in 1670–71, between friends of Port-Royal in the circle of Jean Deslyons, who was often to be found at the hôtel de Liancourt.) Nadler, S. (1989) Arnauld and the Cartesian Philosophy of Ideas, Manchester: Manchester University Press. (Good study of Arnauld’s philosophy which is readily comprehensible to the non-specialist.) ANTONY McKENNA
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Page 696 POSIDONIUS ( c .135–c .50 BC) Posidonius of Apamea (Syria) was a Stoic philosopher and student of Panaetius. He taught in Rhodes. He combined a passion for detailed empirical research with a general commitment to the basic systematics of Stoic philosophy (which, however, he was willing to revise where necessary). As such he was probably the most ‘scientific’ of the Stoics. His wide-ranging investigations of all kinds of physical phenomena (especially in the areas of physical astronomy and meteorology) became particularly renowned, the best known case being his explanation of Atlantic tides as connected with the motions of the moon. His most original philosophical contributions are to be located in the connected areas of psychology and ethics. Posidonius appears to have been committed to a slightly Platonizing version of Stoic psychology, according to which the passions are no longer regarded as a malfunctioning of the rational faculty, but as motions of the soul which take their origin in two separate irrational faculties (anger and appetite). This revised moral psychology is accompanied by some corresponding revisions in ethics such as the conception of moral education as the blunting of the motions of the irrational faculties. See also: STOICISM Further reading Kidd, I.G. (1988), Posidonius II: The Commentary, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2 vols. (Richcommentary, full of further references.) KEIMPE A. ALGRA POSITIVISM IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES Positivism originated from separate movements in nineteenth-century social science and early twentiethcentury philosophy. Key positivist ideas were that philosophy should be scientific, that metaphysical speculations are meaningless, that there is a universal and a priori scientific method, that a main function of philosophy is to analyse that method, that this basic scientific method is the same in both the natural and social sciences, that the various sciences should be reducible to physics, and that the theoretical parts of good science must be translatable into statements about observations. In the social sciences and the philosophy of the social sciences, positivism has supported the emphasis on quantitative data and precisely formulated theories, the doctrines of behaviourism, operationalism and methodological individualism, the doubts among philosophers that meaning and interpretation can be scientifically adequate, and an approach to the philosophy of social science that focuses on conceptual analysis rather than on the actual practice of social research. Influential criticisms have denied that scientific method is a priori or universal, that theories can or must be translatable into observational terms, and that reduction to physics is the way to unify the sciences. These criticisms have undercut the motivations for behaviourism and methodological individualism in the social sciences. They have also led many to conclude, somewhat implausibly, that any standards of good social science are merely matters of rhetorical persuasion and social convention. See also: POSITIVISM, RUSSIAN Further reading Kincaid, H. (1996) Philosophical Foundations of the Social Sciences: Analyzing Controversies in Social Research , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Discusses positivism and methodological individualism in the social sciences.) HAROLD KINCAID POSITIVISM, RUSSIAN Positivism in Russia was not a separate, well-defined philosophical school but, rather, a broad, multidisciplinary current of thought, characterized by a cult of ‘positive science’, commitment to scientific, empirical methods and rejection of the metaphysical tradition in philosophy. As a rule, Russian positivists sympathized with materialism, although distanced themselves from the metaphysical assumptions of materialist philosophy. Their philosophical aspirations were usually limited to the investigation of specific problems, but their optimistic belief in the power of science could push them in the direction of an all-embracing ‘scientific philosophy’. In accordance with the naturalistic evolutionism of the second half of the nineteenth century, scientific philosophy involved the conception of objective laws of development and biological and/or sociological relativism – both incompatible with the ethicist standpoint. Many Russian thinkers, especially the socalled ‘subjective sociologists’, tried to combine positivist scientism with ethicism, claiming an independent status for moral values. Their efforts, however, could be successful only at the expense of
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Page 697 abandoning the scientific rigour demanded by consistent positivists. Hence their views were semipositivist rather than positivist. Through undermining the arrogant self-confidence and monopolistic claims of the crude forms of positivistic scientism, they paved the way for the outspoken revolt against positivism at the end of the 1890s. See also: POSITIVISM IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES Further reading Walicki, A. (1980) A History of Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to Marxism, trans. H. AndrewsRusiecka, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press and Oxford: Clarendon Press. (General account in English.) ANDRZEJ WALICKI POSITIVIST THOUGHT IN LATIN AMERICA Between 1850 and the 1920s European positivism became a major intellectual movement in Latin America. It asserted that all knowledge came from experience; that scientific thinking was the model for philosophizing and that the search for first causes or ultimate reason typical of religion and metaphysics, was an obsolete mode of thinking. Positivism set out to discover the most general features of experience. Its tasks were to use them to explain and predict phenomena, to develop a social science that would furnish objective grounds for moral choice and to help create the best society possible. In Latin America, positivism became a social philosophy which represented a cogent alternative to romanticism, eclecticism, Catholicism and traditional Hispanic values. It offered the prospect of a secular society in which the knowledge gained from science and industry would bring the benefits of order and progress. It assumed that the social sciences had the power to improve the human condition and it demanded political action. Three main currents were in evidence: autochthonous positivism indigenous to the region and concerned with local social and political issues, social positivism derived from Auguste Comte and stressing the historical nature of social change, and evolutionary positivism influenced by Herbert Spencer and asserting the biological nature of society. Autochthonous positivism emerged in the 1830s from the influx of liberal ideas which followed the wars of independence fought on the US continent by those wishing to gain freedom from Spain. Urging an intellectual revolution, swift social change and material progress, autochthonous positivism paved the way for European positivism proper. Social positivism appeared around the 1850s and argued for the necessity of educational reforms to solve the continent’s problems. It required participation in political life and became a radical force in spite of opposition from supporters of the status quo. By the 1880s evolutionary positivism had steered the movement in a conservative direction in support of laissez-faire policies, individualism and gradual change. See also: ANTI-POSITIVIST THOUGHT IN LATIN AMERICA Further reading Cruz C.J. (1964) A History of Ideas in Brazil , trans. S. Macedo, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. (Good account of the development of positivism in Brazil.) Woodward, R.L. (ed.) (1971) Positivism in Latin America, Lexington, MA: Heath. (An adequate anthology in English.) OSCAR R. MARTÍ POSSIBLE WORLDS The concept of possible worlds arises most naturally in the study of possibility and necessity. It is relatively uncontroversial that grass might have been red, or (to put the point another way) that there is a possible world in which grass is red. Though we do not normally take such talk of possible worlds literally, doing so has a surprisingly large number of benefits. Possible worlds enable us to analyse and help us understand a wide range of problematic and difficult concepts. Modality and modal logic, counterfactuals, propositions and properties are just some of the concepts illuminated by possible worlds. Yet, for all this, possible worlds may raise more problems than they solve. What kinds of things are possible worlds? Are they merely our creations or do they exist independently of us? Are they concrete objects, like the actual world, containing flesh and blood people living in alternative realities, or are they abstract objects, like numbers, unlocated in space and time and with no causal powers? Indeed, since possible worlds are not the kind of thing we can ever visit, how could we even know that such things exist? These are but some of the difficult questions which must be faced by anyone who wishes to use possible worlds. See also: MODAL LOGIC
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Page 698 Further reading Loux, M.J. (1979) The Possible and the Actual , Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. (A comprehensive collection of essays covering all theories of possible worlds.) JOSEPH MELIA POST, EMIL LEON (1897–1954) The Polish-born American mathematician Emil Post was a pioneer in the theory of computation, which investigates the solution of problems by algorithmic methods. An algorithmic method is a finite set of precisely defined elementary directions for solving a problem in a finite number of steps. More specifically, Post was interested in the existence of algorithmic decision procedures that eventually give a yes or no answer to a problem. For instance, in his dissertation, Post introduced the truth-table method for deciding whether or not a formula of propositional logic is a tautology. Post developed a notion of ‘canonical systems’ which was intended to encompass any algorithmic procedure for symbol manipulation. Using this notion, Post partially anticipated, in unpublished work, the results of Gödel, Church and Turing in the 1930s. This showed that many problems in logic and mathematics are algorithmically unsolvable. Post’s ideas influenced later research in logic, computer theory, formal language theory and other areas. See also: COMPUTABILITY THEORY Further reading Post, E.L. (1993) Solvability, Provability, Definability: The Collected Works of Emil L. Post, ed. M. Davis, Basle: BirkhaÈ user. (This is a complete collection of work published in Post’s lifetime, plus a posthumously published. The editor’s introduction is a comprehensive survey of Post’s life and work.) MICHAEL SCANLAN POSTCOLONIAL PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE Are there laws of nature that today’s modern sciences are ill-designed to discover? Does the universal use of these modern sciences require their value-neutrality, or are their social values and interests an important cause of their universality? What resources for scientific knowledge can other cultures’ science projects provide? Such questions are raised by recent postcolonial global histories that focus analyses on the role of European expansion in the advance of modern science and in the decline of other cultures’ science traditions. These accounts challenge philosophers to re-evaluate unsuspected strengths in other scientific traditions and identify modern science’s borrowings from them. They also identify European cultural features that have, for better and worse, constituted modern sciences and their representations of nature and thus seek to develop more realistic and useful accounts of the values, interests, methods, universality, objectivity and rationality of science. See also: RATIONALITY AND CULTURAL RELATIVISM Further reading Hess, D. (1994) Science and Technology in a Multicultural World: The Cultural Politics of Facts and Artifacts, New York: Columbia University Press. (How scientific ‘facts and artifacts’ are culturally constructed in valuable ways for different cultures in the past and present. Challenges conventional assumptions about immunization of scientific facts from cultural influences.) Needham, J. (1969) The Grand Titration: Science and Society in East and West , Toronto, Ont.: University of Toronto Press. (Comparisons and analyses of Chinese and Western sciences by the bestknown (scientist–) historian of Chinese sciences. Identifies Eurocentric assessments of European and of Chinese sciences by leading histories of science – ones that philosophies of science assume.) SANDRA G. HARDING POSTCOLONIALISM The term ‘postcolonialism’ is sometimes spelled with a hyphen – post-colonial – and sometimes without. There is no strict general practice, but the hyphenated version is often used to refer to the condition of life after the end of colonialism while the non-hyphenated version denotes the theory that attempts to make sense of this condition. The term is regularly used to denote both colonialism and imperialism even though these refer to different historical realities. Like postmodernism and poststructuralism, postcolonialism designates a critical practice that is highly eclectic and difficult to define. It involves a studied engagement with the experience of colonialism and its past and present effects at the levels of material culture and of representation. Postcolonialism often involves
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Page 699 the discussion of experiences such as those of slavery, migration, suppression and resistance, difference, race, gender, place and analysis of the responses to the discourses of imperial Europe, such as history, philosophy, anthropology and linguistics. Since conditions under imperialism and colonialism proper are as much the subject of postcolonialism as those coming after the historical end of colonialism, postcolonialism allows for a wide range of applications and a constant interplay between the sense of a historical transition, a cultural location and an epochal condition. Postcolonialism is seen to pertain as much to conditions of existence in former colonies as to conditions in diaspora. Both are frequently linked to the continuing power and authority of the West in the global political, economic and symbolic spheres and the ways in which resistance to, appropriation of and negotiation with the West’s order are prosecuted. However the term is construed, there is as much focus on the discourse and ideology of colonialism as on the material effects of colonial subjugation. Because it has its source in past and continuing oppression, postcolonialism furthermore has affinities with multicultural, feminist, and gay and lesbian studies. Further reading Fanon, F. (1952) Black Skin, White Masks, trans C.L. Markham, New York: Grove Press, 1967. (Seminal work in postcolonial theory dealing with the question of subjectivity under brutal colonial domination; engaging and stimulating.) Said, E.W. (1978) Orientalism, London: Chatto & Windus. (Seminal work taken to have inaugurated postcolonial studies; immensely readable.) ATO QUAYSON POSTMODERN THEOLOGY The term ‘postmodernism’ is loosely used to designate a wide variety of cultural phenomena from architecture through literature and literary theory to philosophy. The immediate background of philosophical postmodernism is the French structuralism of Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, Lacan and Barthes. But like existentialism, it has roots that go back to the critique by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche of certain strong knowledge claims in the work of Plato, Descartes and Hegel. If the quest for absolute knowledge is the quest for meanings that are completely clear and for truths that are completely certain, and philosophy takes this quest as its essential goal, then postmodernism replaces Nietzsche’s announcement of the death of God with an announcement of the end of philosophy. This need not be construed as the death of God in a different vocabulary. The question of postmodern theology is the question of the nature of a discourse about deity that would not be tied to the metaphysical assumptions post-modern philosophy finds untenable. One candidate is the negative theology tradition of Pseudo-Dionysius and Meister Eckhart. It combines a vigorous denial of absolute knowledge with a theological import that goes beyond the critical negations of postmodern philosophy. A second possibility, the a/theology of Mark C. Taylor, seeks to find religious meaning beyond the simple opposition of theism and atheism, but without taking the mystical turn. Finally, Jean-Luc Marion seeks to free theological discourse from the horizon of all philosophical theories of being, including Heidegger’s own postmodern analysis of being. See also: FEMINIST THEOLOGY; NEGATIVE THEOLOGY Further reading Lowe, W. (1993) Theology and Difference: The Wound of Reason , Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. (Derridean reflections on theology in relation to Karl Barth, among others.) Marion, J.-L. (1982) Dieu sans l’être: Hors-texte , Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard; trans. T.A. Carlson, God Without Being , Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (A classic post-modern theology with a sustained critique of Heidegger’s ontology.) MEROLD WESTPHAL POSTMODERNISM The term ‘postmodernism’ appears in a range of contexts, from academic essays to clothing advertisements in the New York Times. Its meaning differs with context to such an extent that it seems to function like Lévi-Strauss’ ‘floating signifier’: not so much to express a value as to hold open a space for that which exceeds expression. This broad capacity of the term ‘postmodernism’ testifies to the scope of the cultural changes it attempts to compass. Across a wide range of cultural activity there has been a sustained and multivalent challenge to various founding assumptions of Western European culture since at least the fifteenth
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Page 700 century and in some cases since the fifth century BC: assumptions about structure and identity, about transcendence and particularity, about the nature of time and space. From physics to philosophy, from politics to art, the description of the world has changed in ways that upset some basic beliefs of modernity. For example, phenomenology seeks to collapse the dualistic distinction between subject and object; relativity physics shifts descriptive emphasis from reality to measurement; the arts move away from realism; and consensus politics confronts totalitarianism and genocide. These and related cultural events belong to seismic changes in the way we register the world and communicate with each other. To grasp what is at stake in postmodernism it is necessary to think historically and broadly, in the kind of complex terms that inevitably involve multidisciplinary effort. This multilingual impetus, this bringing together of methods and ideas long segregated both in academic disciplines and in practical life, particularly characterizes postmodernism and largely accounts for such resistance as it generates. Although diverse and eclectic, postmodernism can be recognized by two key assumptions. First, the assumption that there is no common denominator – in ‘nature’ or ‘truth’ or ‘God’ or ‘the future’ – that guarantees either the Oneness of the world or the possibility of neutral or objective thought. Second, the assumption that all human systems operate like language, being self-reflexive rather than referential systems – systems of differential function which are powerful but finite, and which construct and maintain meaning and value. See also: DECONSTRUCTION; PHENOMENOLOGY, EPISTEMIC ISSUES Further reading Ermarth, E.D. (1992) Sequel to History: Post-modernism and the Crisis of Representational Time, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Accessible interdisciplinary discussion of the main theoretical and historical issues of postmodernism; bibliography.) Harvey, D. (1992) The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry , Oxford, Blackwell. (Sensible and wideranging cultural analysis.) Hutcheon, L. (1989) The Politics of Postmodernism , London and New York: Routledge. (Thorough and intelligent introductory survey of discussion; bibliography.) ELIZABETH DEEDS ERMARTH POSTMODERNISM AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY Just as there is much disagreement over both what is meant by ‘postmodernism’ and which thinkers fall under this rubric, so also is there disagreement over its implications for political philosophy. The claim of postmodernists that raises the most significant issues is that Western modernity’s fundamental moral and political concepts function in such a way as to marginalize, denigrate and discipline ‘others’; that is, categories of people who in some way are found not to measure up to prevailing criteria of rationality, normality and responsibility, and so on. The West’s generally self-congratulatory attitude towards liberal democracy and its traditions obscures this dynamic. Postmodernism aims to disrupt this attitude, and its proponents typically see their efforts as crucial to a radicalization of democracy. See also: PPOSTMODERNISM Further reading White, S.K. (1991) Political Theory and Post-modernism , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (An overview of the controversy between postmodernists and their critics.) STEPHEN K. WHITE POSTMODERNISM, FRENCH CRITICS OF French anti-postmodernism emerged with the generation of philosophers that came of age in the late 1970s and early 1980s and counts among its ranks some of the most visible and prolific young scholars in France. Unlike schools of thought such as phenomenology, existentialism or Marxism, French antipostmodernism has no founding figure, central text or core doctrine; anti-postmodernism (a term seldom, if ever, used by the French) therefore is less a philosophical school than a characterization for a diverse group of thinkers who react against those trends that have dominated French intellectual life since the Second World War, especially Marxism, structuralism, existentialism and deconstruction. These trends, grouped together under the heading of ‘postmodernism’, are seen by anti-postmodernists as the last episodes in a failed intellectual adventure whose origins go back at least to the French Revolution. Critical of nineteenth-century philosophy as having produced, on the one hand, totalizing, speculative philosophies such as those of Hegel and Marx, and, on the other hand, the anti-rationalism of Nietzsche and his postmodernscions,
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Page 701 anti-postmodernists (or neo-moderns as the French prefer to say) represent a return to the concept of the individual and of history as the product of free human agency. Reaffirming the efficacy of public, rational discourse, they tend to be interested in political philosophy, taking democracy and its ideals as a model for raising and addressing philosophical issues. Pluralist in their outlook, they value the disciplinary structure of scholarly work; fields such as epistemology, theology, philosophy of science and the history of ideas which were neglected or marginalized by much postmodern thought have enjoyed renewed prestige and interest among the anti-postmodernists. See also: ALTERITY AND IDENTITY, POSTMODERN THEORIES OF; SUBJECT, POSTMODERN CRITIQUE OF THE Further reading Descombes, V. (1980) Modern French Philosophy , trans. L. Scott-Fox and J.M. Harding, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (One of the earliest and best overviews of French postmodern philosophy from an anti-postmodernist point of view.) Lilla, M. (ed.) (1994) New French Thought: Political Philosophy , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University.Press. (A representative selection of articles by anti-postmodernists focusing on political thought.) REGINALD LILLY POST-STRUCTURALISM Post-structuralism is a late-twentieth-century development in philosophy and literary theory, particularly associated with the work of Jacques Derrida and his followers. It originated as a reaction against structuralism, which first emerged in Ferdinand de Saussure’s work on linguistics. By the 1950s structuralism had been adapted in anthropology (Lévi-Strauss), psychoanalysis (Lacan) and literary theory (Barthes), and there were hopes that it could provide the framework for rigorous accounts in all areas of the human sciences. Although structuralism was never formulated as a philosophical theory in its own right, its implicit theoretical basis was a kind of Cartesianism, but without the emphasis on subjectivity. It aimed, like Descartes, at a logically rigorous system of knowledge based on sharp explicit definitions of fundamental concepts. The difference was that, for structuralism, the system itself was absolute, with no grounding in subjectivity. Post-structuralist critiques of structuralism typically challenge the assumption that systems are self-sufficient structures and question the possibility of the precise definitions on which systems of knowledge must be based. Derrida carries out his critique of structuralist systems by the technique of deconstruction. This is the process of showing, through close textual and conceptual analysis, how definitions of fundamental concepts (for example, presence versus absence, true versus false) are undermined by the very effort to formulate and employ them. Derrida’s approach has particularly influenced literary theory and criticism in the USA. In addition, Richard Rorty, developing themes from pragmatism and recent analytic philosophy, has put forward a distinctively American version of post-structuralism. See also: POSTMODERNISM Further reading Culler, J. (1982) On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism, Ithaca,NY: Cornell University Press. (Excellent discussion of Derrida’s views and of their impact on literary criticism.) Dews, P. (1987) Logics of Disintegration: Post-structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory, London: Verso. (Analytic and critical essays on Derrida, Lacan, Foucault and Lyotard.) GARY GUTTING POST-STRUCTURALISM IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES Structuralism was a twentieth-century approach in various social scientific disciplines (the ‘human sciences’) that promised to put them on a solid scientific basis. The origin and model of structuralism was Saussure’s work in linguistics. Saussure’s approach was later adapted in anthropology (by LéviStrauss), in psychoanalysis (by Lacan), and in literary theory (by Barthes). The core of structuralism was the treatment of distinctively human domains as formal structures in which meanings were constituted not by conscious subjects but by relations among the elements of a formal system. Post-structuralism comprises a variety of reactions to structuralism, primarily by philosophers such as Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, and Lyotard. The first stage of post-structuralist reflection on the social sciences, best represented by Foucault’s discussion at the end of The Order of Things, accepted the structuralist approach and drew from it the philosophical
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Page 702 consequences for our understanding of the social sciences. A later stage (including Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and Lyotard’s writings from the 1970s on) sought to transform our conception of the human sciences through a critique of structuralist presuppositions. In this later stage, post-structuralists continued to accept structuralism’s elimination of the conscious subject but maintained that human existence could not be adequately understood without taking account of non-structural causal factors such as power (Foucault) and desire (Lyotard). Foucault argued for the inextricable tie between our knowledge of society and society’s power structures. Lyotard maintained that Lacan’s structuralist version of psychoanalysis ignored the way that desire corresponds to a reality that escapes the boundaries of any formal structure. He also developed a political and ethical stance based on the fundamental value of a plurality of desires. See also: POST-STRUCTURALISM; STRUCTURALISM IN SOCIAL SCIENCE Further reading Foucault, M. (1966) Les mots et les choses: une archéologie des sciences humaines, Paris: Gallimard; trans. A. Sheridan, The Order of Things, New York: Random House, 1970. (A critical history of the origins of the modern social sciences.) Readings, B. (1991) Introducing Lyotard, London: Routledge. (A comprehensive survey of Lyotard’s thought, emphasizing his work on art and politics.) GARY GUTTING POTENTIALITY, INDIAN THEORIES OF Indian philosophers wrote a great deal about potential ( śakti ) and capacity ( sāmarthya); both of these words may also be translated as ‘power’ or ‘force’. The Sanskrit word śakti , like the English word ‘potential’, derives from a modal verb meaning ‘to be able’, so one might also see the study of potential as being the study of ability. The principal issue about which Indians debated was that of where exactly potential or ability is located. If, for example, it can be said that a person has a potential to compose a poetic masterpiece, then it can be asked where exactly that potential is located. Is it located entirely within the potential poet, or is it distributed somehow between the poet and the circumstances in which the person functions? If one says it is located entirely within the person, then it can be asked why they produce the masterpiece only at one specific time in their life instead of earlier or later. In other words, it seems that if circumstances were required to enable the person to realize their potential, then the potentiality would belong as much to external circumstances as to the person. This may not seem an interesting question in the abstract, but it became of interest to philosophers in particular contexts. It was generally agreed, for example, that nothing happens without a prior potential that becomes actualized. If this is so, then the question naturally arises, to what did the potential belong out of the actualization of which the universe ‘happened’? Other questions that Indian philosophers debated were: To whom does the potential to become wise belong? How is the potential of a supposedly eternal language actualized to convey meaning? Attempting to answer such questions was a preoccupation of philosophers of every Indian school. See also: GOD, INDIAN CONCEPTIONS OF; KARMA AND REBIRTH, INDIAN CONCEPTIONS OF Further reading Jackson, R. (1993) Is Enlightenment Possible?, Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion. (Contains a discussion and translation of Dharmakīrti’s arguments concerning the possibility of divine action in general and God’s potential to create the world in particular.) RICHARD P. HAYES POTHIER, ROBERT JOSEPH (1699–1772) The French legal scholar Robert Joseph Pothier was one of the most influential of modern civilian jurists. At the end of a long period of rationalistic natural law thought, he produced a rational reconstruction of the civil law on the basis of which the transition from law as reason based on custom to law as product of the rational legislative will could be accomplished. See also: LAW, PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Pothier, R.J. (1806) A Treatise on the Law of Obligations or Contracts, trans. W.D. Evans, London: Butterworth. (A well-known translation of the part of Pothier’s work that was most influential in the English-speaking world, particularly in relation to the general theory of contracts.) NEIL MacCORMICK
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Page 703 POUND, ROSCOE (1870–1964) Roscoe Pound was a legal thinker who exercised profound influence in the USA in the first half of the twentieth century. He was for many years Dean of the country’s leading law school, Harvard. The approach he advocated, under the banner ‘sociological jurisprudence’, was to present law as essentially an instrument for the pursuit and reconciliation of human interests. See also: SOCIAL THEORY AND LAW Further reading Pound, R. (1922) An Introduction to the Philosophy of Law , New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. (Well-written statement of Pound’s basic position, containing discussions of, for example, processes of legal argumentation, that retain contemporary relevance and remain much-quoted.) NEIL MacCORMICK POWER The general notion of power involves the capacity to produce or prevent change. In social and political philosophy, narrower conceptions of power specify the nature of these changes. Social power is the capacity to affect the interests of agents. Normative power is the capacity to affect their normative relations, such as their rights or duties. There are long-standing conceptual disputes about the nature of power. Some emphasize the role of actual or potential conflicts of interest in defining power relations, others take legitimacy and consensus about norms as the basis. There is also a dispute, involving the nature of social explanation, about whether power must rest with agents or with social structures or forces of some kind. The lack of consensus on these matters raises the overarching question of whether the concept of power, which seems to function as a descriptive term, in some way involves evaluation. Further reading Morris, P. (1987) Power: A Philosophical Analysis , Manchester: Manchester University Press. (A good survey of the philosophical issues.) LESLIE GREEN PRACTICAL RATIONALITY see RATIONALITY, PRACTICAL PRACTICAL REASON AND ETHICS Practical reason is reasoning which is used to guide action, and is contrasted with theoretical reason, which is used to guide thinking. Sometimes ‘practical reason’ refers to any way of working out what to do; more usually it refers to proper or authoritative, hence reasoned, ways of working out what to do. On many accounts practical reasoning is solely instrumental: it identifies ways of reaching certain results or ends, but has nothing to say about which ends should be pursued or which types of action are good or bad, obligatory or forbidden. Instrumental reasoning is important not only for ethics and politics, but for all activities, for example, in working out how to travel to a given destination. Other accounts of practical reason insist that it is more than instrumental reasoning: it is concerned not only with working out how to achieve given ends, but with identifying the ethically important ends of human activity, or the ethically important norms or principles for human lives, and provides the basis for all ethical judgment. No account of objective ethical values can be established without showing how we can come to know them, that is, without showing that some form of ethical cognitivism is true. However, ethical cognitivism is not easy to establish. Either we must show that some sort of intuition or perception provides direct access to a realm of values; or we must show that practical reasoning provides less direct methods by which objective ethical claims can be established. So anybody who thinks that there are directly objective values, but doubts whether we can intuit them directly, must view a plausible account of practical reason as fundamental to philosophical ethics. See also: MORAL EXPERTISE Further reading O’Neill, O. (1989) Constructions of Reason: Explorations of Kant’s Practical Philosophy , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Papers on Kant’s vindication of reason and on patterns of ethical reasoning that start from the categorical imperative.) Rawls, J. (1993) Political Liberalism, New York: Columbia University Press. (Reformulation of his earlier political philosophy basing it on a conception of public reason.) ONORA O’NEILL PRAGMATICS Analytic philosophers have made lasting contributions to the scientific study of language. Semantics (the
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Page 704 pragmatics (the study of language in use) are two important areas of linguistic research which owe their shape to the groundwork done by philosophers. Although the two disciplines are now conceived of as complementary, the philosophical movements out of which they grew were very much in competition. In the middle of the twentieth century, there were two opposing ‘camps’ within the analytic philosophy of language. The first – ‘ideal language philosophy’, as it was then called – was that of the pioneers, Frege, Russell and the logical positivists. They were, first and foremost, logicians studying formal languages and, through these formal languages, ‘language’ in general. Work in this tradition (especially that of Frege, Russell, Carnap, Tarski and later Montague) gave rise to contemporary formal semantics, a very active discipline developed jointly by logicians, philosophers and grammarians. The other camp was that of so-called ‘ordinary language philosophers’, who thought important features of natural language were not revealed, but hidden, by the logical approach initiated by Frege and Russell. They advocated a more descriptive approach, and emphasized the ‘pragmatic’ nature of natural language as opposed to, for example, the ‘language’ of Principia Mathematica . Their own work (especially that of Austin, Strawson, Grice and the later Wittgenstein) gave rise to contemporary pragmatics, a discipline which (like formal semantics) has developed successfully within linguistics in the past thirty years. From the general conception put forward by ordinary language philosophers, four areas or topics of research emerged, which jointly constitute the core of pragmatics: speech acts; indexicality and contextsensitivity; non-truth-conditional aspects of meaning; and contextual implications. In the first half of this entry, we look at these topics from the point of view of ordinary language philosophy; the second half presents the contemporary picture. From the first point of view, pragmatics is seen as an alternative to the truth-conditional approach to meaning associated with ideal language philosophy (and successfully pursued within formal semantics). From the second point of view, pragmatics merely supplements that approach. Further reading Davis, S. (ed.) (1991) Pragmatics: A Reader, New York: Oxford University Press. (An inclusive collection, containing many influential papers.) Levinson, S. (1983) Pragmatics , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (The standard textbook.) FRANÇOIS RECANATI PRAGMATISM Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition founded by three American philosophers: Charles Sanders Peirce, William James and John Dewey. Starting from Alexander Bain’s definition of belief as a rule or habit of action, Peirce argued that the function of inquiry is not to represent reality, but rather to enable us to act more effectively. He was critical of the ‘copy theory’ of knowledge which had dominated philosophy since the time of Descartes, and especially of the idea of immediate, intuitive self-knowledge. He was also a prophet of the linguistic turn, one of the first philosophers to say that the ability to use signs is essential to thought. Peirce’s use of Bain was extended by James, whose The Principles of Psychology (1890) broke with the associationism of Locke and Hume. James went on, in Pragmatism (1907) to scandalize philosophers by saying that ‘ “The true” . . . is only the expedient in our way of thinking’. James and Dewey both wanted to reconcile philosophy with Darwin by making human beings’ pursuit of the true and the good continuous with the activities of the lower animals – cultural evolution with biological evolution. Dewey criticized the Cartesian notion of the self as a substance which existed prior to language and acculturation, and substituted an account of the self as a product of social practices (an account developed further by George Herbert Mead). Dewey, whose primary interests were in cultural, educational and political reform rather than in specifically philosophical problems (problems which he thought usually needed to be dissolved rather than solved), developed the implications of pragmatism for ethics and social philosophy. His ideas were central to American intellectual life throughout the first half of the twentieth century. All three of the founding pragmatists combined a naturalistic, Darwinian view of human beings with a deep distrust of the problems which philosophy had inherited from Descartes, Hume and Kant. They hoped to save philosophy from metaphysical idealism, but also to save moral and religious ideals from empiricist or positivist scepticism. Their naturalism has been combined with an anti-foundationalist, holist account of meaning by Willard van
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Page 705 Orman Quine, Hilary Putnam and Donald Davidson – philosophers of language who are often seen as belonging to the pragmatist tradition. That tradition also has affinities with the work of Thomas Kuhn and the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. See also: PRAGMATISM IN ETHICS Further reading Murphy, J.P. (1990) Pragmatism: From Peirce to Davidson , Boulder, CO: Westview Press. (An introductory textbook. Murphy sees Quine and Davidson as continuing the pragmatist tradition. Contains a substantial bibliography.) Scheffler, I. (1974) Four Pragmatists: A Critical Introduction to Peirce, James, Mead and Dewey , London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (Combines sympathetic presentation with detailed criticism.) RICHARD RORTY PRAGMATISM IN ETHICS Two components of the pragmatist outlook shape its ethical philosophy. It rejects certainty as a legitimate intellectual goal; this generates a nondogmatic attitude to moral precepts and principles. It holds, secondly, that thought (even that exercised in scientific inquiry) is essentially goal-directed in a way that makes the refinement of the control we exercise over how we act (for example, in drawing conclusions) integral to achieving any cognitive goal such as that of truth. This makes it possible to treat scientific inquiry as a model of how we might respond to moral problems and the reasonableness and impartiality required of a scientific inquirer as a paradigm of what may be expected in reaching moral judgments. This view of the nature of thought also inclines pragmatists to assess proposed solutions to moral conflicts in terms of consequences. But although human desires are taken as the raw material with which moral thinking must deal, it is not assumed that people’s desires (what they take pleasure in) are fixed and can be used as a standard by which to assess consequences. Pragmatism is thus free to revert to a classical mode of thought (such as Aristotelianism) in which claims about human nature function as norms – a use which is made, for example, of the claim that humans are essentially social creatures. See also: AXIOLOGY; PRAGMATISM Further reading Gouinlock, J. (1972) John Dewey’s Philosophy of Value, New York: Humanities Press. (Comprehensive philosophical background to Dewey’s general ethical theory.) Myers, G.E. (1986) William James: His Life and Thought, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ch. 13. (Deals with morality and includes James’ social views.) J.E. TILES PRAISE AND BLAME Praise and blame are philosophically interesting partly because, despite appearances, they are not simple opposites, but mainly because there are significant disagreements about whether, and when, they can be justified. The issue of justification connects praise and blame with some of philosophy’s most central concerns: justice, desert and free will. Disagreements about the justification of praise and blame tend to take two forms. In one the disagreement is about whether praise and blame can be justified without being deserved. Utilitarians, who argue that the rightness of praise and blame does not depend on desert, but on their contributing to the level of happiness, are opposed by those who believe that justice is of overriding value. In its second form, the disagreement is about the essential requirements for deserving praise and blame. Among the conditions which have been proposed as essential are voluntariness (outlined originally by Aristotle), acting from the motive of duty (for praiseworthiness), and (usually in connection with blameworthiness) being free in a sense which is incompatible with determinism (the thesis that every event has a necessitating cause). Kant, who argued for both of the last two requirements, is a key figure in this debate. See also: DESERT AND MERIT Further reading Klein, M. (1990) Determinism, Blameworthiness and Deprivation , Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Examines the free will/determinism debate and its relevance to blameworthiness. Appendix contains a commentary on an argument of Kant’s which links morality and moral accountability with the existence of a desire-independent ability to act.) MARTHA KLEIN PRAXEOLOGY Praxeology belongs to the pragmatic tradition and thus emphasizes that concepts – and the world –
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Page 706 practices. Praxeology is not a school but rather a movement, originating in Denmark and Norway in the 1960s and 1970s, with internal debates and disagreements. Praxeologists stress that good conceptual and ontological analyses proceed by (and are presented in the form of) careful analyses of particular examples or cases. They emphasize the situatedness of the philosopher in the world. The inspiration comes primarily from the early Heidegger and the later Wittgenstein. See also: HERMENEUTICS Further reading Skirbekk, G. (ed.) (1983) Praxeology: An Anthology, Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. (The classical Scandinavian texts, also good as introductory reading.) BENGT MOLANDER PRAYER The concept of prayer is now most commonly applied to any sort of communication which is addressed to God. That is, prayer is that activity in which believers take themselves to be speaking to God. One may ask God to do something (petitionary prayer), but that need not be the only sort of content that prayer may have. There are prayers in which one thanks God for something, and others in which one praises God and expresses one’s adoration. A worshipper may also pray to express (or to make) a commitment to God, or to make a vow. Penitents pray to confess their sins, to express their repentance, and to ask for divine mercy and forgiveness. In general, any sort of speech-act which might be addressed by one human being to another could also be addressed to God, and thus be a prayer. Some such acts (such as, perhaps, commanding) might be thought inappropriate when addressed to God, but no doubt there can be inappropriate prayers. And some prayers may even be tentative and unsure about the existence of the addressee, prayers which might be thought of as beginning ‘O God, if there is a God . . . ’. Some writers, principally from within a tradition of mysticism, also apply the notion of prayer in a somewhat broader sense – in, for example, expressions like ‘prayer of quiet’ and ‘prayer of union’. Here ‘prayer’ seems to mean any intentional state – worship, adoration, enjoyment of the divine presence and love, and so forth – which the worshipper believes to be associated with a genuine contact with the divine, regardless of whether it contains an element of communication addressed to God. In the sense of a communication addressed to the divine, prayer seems to fit best with the theistic religions, which construe God as a person, or as something like a person. Here the addressee is taken to be someone who is an appropriate recipient of a communicative act. The fit seems rather more awkward in those religions which construe the divine reality in impersonal terms. With reference to prayer in the theistic religions, a principal topic of philosophical interest involves the omniscience and benevolence of God – if he knows all my needs and desires, why inform him of them through prayer? And will he not satisfy all my needs regardless of whether I pray? If divine benevolence is conditional on prayer, it seems less than perfect. A response to the first question is to point out that not all speech-acts need be construed as conveying information; a response to the second is to argue that our having to ask for things on behalf of ourselves and others might make for a better world than if this were not the case. Another issue is the way in which God responds to prayer. Some argue that God responds through miracles; others suggest that God, knowing our future prayers, providentially created a world that would satisfy them – thus prayer causally influences earlier events. See also: PROVIDENCE Further reading Lewis, C.S. (1964) Letters to Malcolm , New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. (Highly readable, but careful, discussions of many aspects of the practice of prayer.) GEORGE I. MAVRODES PREDESTINATION Predestination appears to be a religious or theological version of universal determinism, a version in which the final determining factor is the will or action of God. It is most often associated with the theological tradition of Calvinism, although some theologians outside the Calvinist tradition, or prior to it (for example, Augustine and Thomas Aquinas), profess similar doctrines. The idea of predestination also plays a role in some religions other than Christianity, perhaps most notably in Islam. Sometimes the idea of predestination is formulated in a comparatively restricted way, being applied only to the manner in which the divine grace of salvation is said to be extended
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Page 707 to some human beings and not to others. John Calvin, for example, writes: We call predestination God’s eternal decree, by which he compacted with himself what he willed to become of each man. For all are not created in equal condition; rather, eternal life is foreordained for some, eternal damnation for others. Therefore, as any man has been created to one or the other of these ends, we speak of him as predestined to life or to death. ( Institutes , bk 3, ch. 21, sec. 5) At other times, however, the idea is applied more generally to the whole course of events in the world; whatever happens in the world is determined by the will of God. Philosophically, the most interesting aspects of the doctrine are not essentially linked with salvation. For instance, if God is the first cause of all that happens, how can people be said to have free will? One answer may be that people are free in so far as they act in accordance with their own motives and desires, even if these are determined by God. Another problem is that the doctrine seems to make God ultimately responsible for sin. A possible response here is to distinguish between actively causing something and passively allowing it to happen, and to say that God merely allows people to sin; it is then human agents who actively choose to sin and God is therefore not responsible. See also: OMNISCIENCE; SALVATION Further reading Boettner, L. (1948) The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination , Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 6th edn. (This is a very extensive and useful discussion of this topic by a strong defender of the Calvinist tradition.) Calvin, J. (1559) Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. F.L. Battles, Philadelphia, PA: The Westminster Press, 1960. (This is the major theological work by one of the most prominent Protestant reformers of the sixteenth century.) GEORGE I. MAVRODES PREDICATE CALCULUS The predicate calculus is the dominant system of modern logic, having displaced the traditional Aristotelian syllogistic logic that had been the previous paradigm. Like Aristotle’s, it is a logic of quantifiers – words like ‘every’, ‘some’ and ‘no’ that are used to express that a predicate applies universally or with some other distinctive kind of generality, for example ‘everyone is mortal’, ‘someone is mortal’, ‘no one is mortal’. The weakness of syllogistic logic was its inability to represent the structure of complex predicates. Thus it could not cope with argument patterns like ‘everything Fs and Gs, so everything Fs’. Nor could it cope with relations, because a logic of relations must be able to analyse cases where a quantifier is applied to a predicate that already contains one, as in ‘someone loves everyone’. Remedying the weakness required two major innovations. One was a logic of connectives – words like ‘and’, ‘or’ and ‘if’ that form complex sentences out of simpler ones. It is often studied as a distinct system: the propositional calculus. A proposition here is a true-or-false sentence and the guiding principle of propositional calculus is truth-functionality, meaning that the truth-value (truth or falsity) of a compound proposition is uniquely determined by the truthvalues of its components. Its principal connectives are negation, conjunction, disjunction and a ‘material’ (that is, truth-functional) conditional. Truth-functionality makes it possible to compute the truth-values of propositions of arbitrary complexity in terms of their basic propositional constituents, and so develop the logic of tautology and tautological consequence (logical truth and consequence in virtue of the connectives). The other invention was the quantifier-variable notation. Variables are letters used to indicate things in an unspecific way; thus ‘ x is mortal’ is read as predicating of an unspecified thing x what ‘Socrates is mortal’ predicates of Socrates. The connectives can now be used to form complex predicates as well as propositions, for example ‘ x is human and x is mortal’; while different variables can be used in different places to express relational predicates, for example ‘ x loves y’. The quantifier goes in front of the predicate it governs, with the relevant variable repeated beside it to indicate which positions are being generalized. These radical departures from the idiom of quantification in natural languages are needed to solve the further problem of ambiguity of scope. Compare, for example, the ambiguity of ‘someone loves everyone’ with the unambiguous alternative renderings ‘there is an x such that for every y, x loves y’ and ‘for every y, there is an x such that x loves y’. The result is a pattern of formal language based on a non-logical vocabulary of names of things and primitive predicates expressing properties and relations of things. The logical constants are the truthfunctional connectives and the universal and existential quantifiers,
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Page 708 plus a stock of variables construed as ranging over things. This is ‘the’ predicate calculus. A common option is to add the identity sign as a further logical constant, producing the predicate calculus with identity. The first modern logic of quantification, Frege’s of 1879, was designed to express generalizations not only about individual things but also about properties of individuals. It would nowadays be classified as a second-order logic, to distinguish it from the first-order logic described above. Second-order logic is much richer in expressive power than first-order logic, but at a price: firstorder logic can be axiomatized, second-order logic cannot. Further reading Church, A. (1956) Introduction to Mathematical Logic, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (An influential, exceptionally rigorous introduction to the predicate calculus, with a wealth of historical information.) Lemmon, E.J. (1965) Beginning Logic , London: Nelson. (An exceptionally user-friendly exposition of a natural deduction system for the predicate calculus.) TIMOTHY SMILEY PREDICATION Some sentences have a very simple structure, consisting only of a part which serves to pick out a particular object and a part which says something about the object picked out. Expressions which can be used to say something about objects picked out are called predicates. Thus ‘smokes’ in ‘Sam smokes’ is a predicate. But ‘predication’ may refer either to the activity of predicating or to what is predicated. To understand either, we need to know what predicates are and how they combine with other expressions. See also: PROPER NAMES Further reading Parsons, T. (1990) Events in the Semantics of English , Cambridge MA: MIT Press. (Elegantly defends the controversial view that many sentences involve quantification over and predication of events and states.) KEVIN MULLIGAN PRESCRIPTIVISM Prescriptivism is a theory about moral statements. It claims that such statements contain an element of meaning which serves to prescribe or direct actions. The history of prescriptivism includes Socrates, Aristotle, Hume, Kant and Mill, and it has been influential also in recent times. Moral statements also contain a factual or descriptive element. The descriptive element of morality differs between persons and cultures, but the prescriptive element remains constant. Prescriptivism can allow for moral disagreement, and explain moral weakness. It can also explain better than other theories the rationality and objectivity of moral thinking. Further reading Hare, R.M. (1997) Sorting Out Ethics , Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Includes critical discussion of various ethical theories from a prescriptivist point of view.) Stevenson, C.L. (1944) Ethics and Language, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. (The fullest exposition of emotivism.) R.M. HARE PRESOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY The Presocratics were the first Western philosophers. The most celebrated are Thales, Anaximander, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Zeno of Elea, Empedocles, Anaxagoras and Democritus. Active in Greece throughout the sixth and fifth centuries BC, they concentrated on cosmogony and cosmology – the tasks of explaining the world’s origin and order, without recourse to mythology. See also: ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY Further reading Kirk, G.S., Raven, J.E. and Schofield, M. (1983) The Presocratic Philosophers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd edn. (A valuable survey of Presocratic philosophy, including texts and translations.) DAVID SEDLEY PRESUPPOSITION There are various senses in which one statement may be said to ‘presuppose’ another, senses which are in permanent danger of being confused. Prominent among them are Strawsonian presupposition, a relation which obtains between statements when the falsity of one deprives the other of truth-value (for example, ‘There was such a person as Kepler’ is a Strawsonian presupposition of ‘Kepler died in misery’); semantic presupposition, which obtains between a statement and a particular use of a sentence type, when the falsity of the statement means that that use will not after all constitute the
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Page 709 making of a statement (for example, ‘The name “Kepler” has a bearer’ is a semantic presupposition of ‘Kepler died in misery’); and pragmatic presupposition, a broader notion exemplified by the legitimate presumption that accepting or denying the statement ‘Fred knows that the earth moves’ means accepting ‘The earth moves’. See also: DESCRIPTIONS; IMPLICATURE Further reading Strawson, P.F. (1952) Introduction to Logical Theory , London: Methuen. (Defines (Strawsonian) ‘presupposition’.) IAN RUMFITT PRICE, RICHARD (1723–91) Richard Price was a Welsh dissenting minister who contributed widely to philosophy and public life in latter-eighteenth-century Britain. The leading British ethical rationalist of the period, Price did much to establish intuitionistic and deontological traditions in ethics. He put forward searching criticisms of alternative empiricist conceptions, arguing that they could not account for morality’s necessity and that they lacked an adequate theory of moral agency. More constructively, he argued that, contrary to the empiricists, all knowledge depends on the contribution of reason, and that rationalistic moral knowledge is no more problematic in principle than ordinary empirical knowledge. He also articulated a normative ethics of integrity that stressed the duty diligently to search out moral truth and then to act on the truth as one sees it. As a political philosopher, Price made fundamental contributions through his doctrine of liberty as selfdetermination. The moral duty individuals have to determine themselves by their best moral judgment, Price believed, ultimately grounds the values of political liberty, independence, and democracy as well. Price’s radicalism on these scores earned him the famous opposition of Edmund Burke. Nor was Price’s sponsorship of these ideas simply theoretical. He was an important friend of the American Revolution, and his pamphlets analysing and defending it were taken seriously by proponents and opponents alike. Price also did important work on the mathematical theory of probability and in proposing and instituting various social and economic reforms and practices upon its basis. He was instrumental in making Thomas Bayes’ ideas about probability accessible to the learned world, and in making use of these and other probabilistic theories in developing insurance, self-help, and other financial schemes. See also: MORAL REALISM Further reading Price, R. (1776–89) Political Writings, ed. D.O. Thomas, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. (A fine selection of Price’s political philosophical writings includes selections from Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty and Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution .) Thomas, D.O. (1977) The Honest Mind: the Thought and Work of Richard Price , Oxford: Clarendon Press. (The best introduction to Price’s life and works – comprehensive and philosophically astute.) STEPHEN DARWALL PRICHARD, HAROLD ARTHUR (1871–1947) One of the most influential Oxford philosophers of the twentieth century, Prichard was White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy there from 1928 to 1937. His work combines epistemological realism and moral intuitionism. From 1906 onwards Prichard was active with the Oxford realists, who held, against idealists, that reality exists independently of mind, that knowledge is of reality, and that common-sense realism is correct. In ethics, he was the leader of the Oxford intuitionists who held, against utilitarianism, that common-sense morality is correct, its duties are known non-inferentially, and are an irreducible plurality of distinct kinds of act. His philosophical style displays concentration on specific problems, carefully using ordinary language to make precise distinctions in the absence of general theory. He influenced Oxford’s next generation of Austin, Ryle, Hart and Berlin, who attended his classes and, occasionally, his ‘philosophers’ teas’. See also: ORDINARY LANGUAGE PHILOSOPHY, SCHOOL OF Further reading Hornsby, J. (1980) Actions, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (Hornsby provides the most plausible interpretation of Prichard’s account of action.) Prichard, H.A. (1950) Knowledge and Perception, Essays and Lectures , ed. and with a preface by W.D. Ross, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (A collection containing Prichard’s most important nonmoral texts.) JIM MacADAM
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Page 710 PRIESTLEY, JOSEPH (1733–1804) A major figure of the British Enlightenment, Joseph Priestley is best known as a scientist and for his discovery of oxygen, though he was by profession a theologian, and also wrote on politics and education – more, indeed, than on science or metaphysics. His philosophical speculations were generally brought to support his theological arguments and were usually structured in a rhetorical rather than in a formal, systematic mode. He was a Unitarian in theology, an associationist, determinist and monist, with a curiously spiritualized materialism dependent, in part at least, on his scientific studies. Further reading Gibbs, F.W. (1965) Joseph Priestley: Adventurer in Science and Champion of Truth , London: Nelson. (Standard full biography, but lacks complete documentation.) ROBERT E. SCHOFIELD PRIMARY–SECONDARY DISTINCTION The terminology of ‘primary and secondary qualities’ is taken from the writings of John Locke. It has come to express a position on the nature of sensory qualities – those which we attribute to physical objects as a result of the sensuous character of sensations they produce when they are perceived correctly by us. Since our senses can be differentiated from each other by the type of sensations they produce, sensory qualities are what Aristotle called ‘proper sensibles’ – those perceptible by one sense only. Colours, sounds, scents and tastes are always regarded as proper to their respective senses. What are the proper sensibles of touch, and whether there is similarly a single family of them, is a matter of controversy; but temperature at least is standardly regarded as proper to this sense. It is such sensory qualities that are candidates for being given the status of secondary qualities. To regard sensory qualities as secondary is to hold that an object’s possession of one is simply a matter of its being disposed to occasion a certain type of sensation when perceived; the object in itself possesses no sensuous character. Primary qualities, by contrast, are those which characterize the fundamental nature of the physical world as it is in itself. They are always taken to include geometrical attributes, and often some space-occupying feature; Locke’s candidate for this latter was solidity. Although the terminology dates from the seventeenth century, this general doctrine goes back to the Greek atomists. See also: SECONDARY QUALITIES Further reading Alexander, P. (1985) Ideas, Qualities and Corpuscles, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Detailed, scholarly treatment of the aspects of Locke’s philosophy relevant to this topic.) A.D. SMITH PRIOR, ARTHUR NORMAN (1914–69) The New Zealand philosopher Arthur Prior is most often thought of as the creator of tense logic. (Tense logic examines operators such as ‘It will be the case that’ in the way that modal logic examines ‘It must be the case that’.) But his first book was on ethics, and his views on metaphysical topics such as determinism, thinking, intentionality, change, events, the nature of time, existence, identity and truth are of central importance to philosophy. Using methods akin to Russell’s in his Theory of Descriptions, he showed that times, events, facts, propositions and possible worlds were logical constructions. For example, we get rid of events by recognizing among other things that to say that the event of Caesar’s crossing the Rubicon took place later than the event of Caesar’s invading Britain is to say that it has been the case that both Caesar is crossing the Rubicon and it has been the case that Caesar is invading Britain. The title of the posthumous work, Worlds, Times and Selves (1977), indicates the breadth and depth of his thought. He is also fun to read. He died at the age of fifty-four, at the height of his powers. Further reading Copeland, J. (ed.) (1996) Logic and Reality: Essays in Applied Logic in Memory of Arthur Prior, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Proceedings of a conference held in New Zealand in 1992 to commemorate Prior’s work.) Prior, A.N. (1967) Past, Present and Future, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (One of the main expositions of tense logic as Prior invented it.) C.J.F. WILLIAMS PRIVACY The distinction between private and public is both central to much legal and political thought and subject to serious challenge on philosophical, practical and political grounds by critics of the status quo. Privacy – the state of being withdrawn from the world, free from public
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Page 711 attention, interference or intrusion – is a cherished social value that is being offered ever more protection. Increasingly, laws require people to respect the privacy of others: privacy is recognized as a fundamental right in international documents and national constitutions, and recent customs and social norms forbid intrusions that were once accepted. The concept of privacy is also widely abused: it has been used to justify private racial discrimination and state neglect of domestic violence, as well as social abdication of general economic welfare through laissez-faire policies and the so-called privatization of social services. Critique of the public–private distinction is an important part of many critical theories, especially feminism and critical legal theory. These critics object that the public–private distinction is exaggerated, manipulable or incoherent. Further reading Benn, S.I. and Gaus, G.F. (eds) (1983) Public and Private in Social Life , London: Croom Helm. (Collection of essays examining the public–private distinction in several contexts.) Schoeman, F. (ed) (1984) Philosophical Dimensions of Privacy: An Anthology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Collection of essays on privacy from a philosophical perspective.) FRANCES OLSEN PRIVATE LANGUAGE ARGUMENT Ludwig Wittgenstein argued against the possibility of a private language in his 1953 book Philosophical Investigations , where the notion is outlined at §243: ‘The words of this language are to refer to what can be known only to the speaker; to his immediate, private, sensations. So another cannot understand the language.’ The idea attacked is thus of a language in principle incomprehensible to more than one person because the things which define its vocabulary are necessarily inaccessible to others; cases such as personal codes where the lack of common understanding could be remedied are hence irrelevant. Wittgenstein’s attack, now known as the private language argument (although just one of many considerations he deploys on the topic), is important because the possibility of a private language is arguably an unformulated presupposition of standard theory of knowledge, metaphysics and philosophy of mind from Descartes to much of the cognitive science of the late twentieth century. The essence of the argument is simple. It is that a language in principle unintelligible to anyone but its user would necessarily be unintelligible to the user also, because no meanings could be established for its signs. But, because of the difficulty of Wittgenstein’s text and the tendency of philosophers to read into it their own concerns and assumptions, there has been extensive and fundamental disagreement over the details, significance and even intended conclusion of the argument. Some, thinking it obvious that sensations are private, have supposed that the argument is meant to show that we cannot talk about them; some that it commits Wittgenstein to behaviourism; some that the argument, selfdefeatingly, condemns public discourse as well; some that its conclusion is that language is necessarily social in a strong sense, that is, not merely potentially but actually. Much of the secondary (especially the older) literature is devoted to disputes over these matters. An account of the argument by the influential American philosopher Saul Kripke has spurred a semiautonomous discussion of it. But Kripke’s version involves significant departures from the original and relies on unargued assumptions of a kind Wittgenstein rejected in his own treatment of the topic. See also: PRIVATE STATES AND LANGUAGE Canfield, J.V. (ed.) (1986) The Philosophy of Wittgenstein , vol. 9, The Private Language Argument , New York: Garland. (An extensive collection of papers exhibiting the variety of interpretations of the argument.) Kenny, A. (1973) Wittgenstein , London: Allen Lane: The Penguin Press, ch. 10. (One of the clearest accounts of the argument.) STEWART CANDLISH PRIVATE STATES AND LANGUAGE Something is ‘private’ if it can be known to one person only. Many have held that perceptions and bodily sensations are in this sense private, being knowable only by the person who experiences them. (You may know, it is often said, that we both call the same things ‘green’; but whether they really look the same to me as they do to you, you have no means of telling.) Regarding the relation between private states and language two main questions have arisen: (1) Could there be a ‘private language’, that is, a language in which a person communicates to themselves, or records for their own use, information about their own private states –
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Page 712 this language being in principle incomprehensible to others, who do not know the nature of the events it is used to record. This question is primarily associated with Ludwig Wittgenstein. (2) Can the nature of our private states affect the meaning of expressions in the public language, that is, the language we use for communicating with each other? Or must everything that affects the meaning of expressions in the public language be something which is itself public, and knowable in principle by anyone? Michael Dummett has argued that we must accept the second of these alternatives, and that this has far-reaching consequences in logic and metaphysics. See also: PRIVATE LANGUAGE ARGUMENT Further reading Kripke, S.A. (1982) Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, Oxford: Blackwell. (Expounds the considerations leading to the ‘consensus’ principle. A particularly fine piece of writing.) EDWARD CRAIG PROBABILITY, INTERPRETATIONS OF The term ‘probability’ and its cognates occur frequently in both everyday and philosophical discourse. Unlike many other concepts, it is unprofitable to view ‘probability’ as having a unique meaning. Instead, there exist a number of distinct, albeit related, concepts, of which we here mention five: the classical or equiprobable view, the relative frequency view, the subjectivist or personalist view, the propensity view, and the logical probability view. None of these captures all of our legitimate uses of the term ‘probability’, which range from the clearly subjective, as in our assessment of the likelihood of one football team beating another, through the inferential, as when one set of sentences lends a degree of inductive support to another sentence, to the obviously objective, as in the physical chance of a radioactive atom decaying in the next minute. It is often said that what all these interpretations have in common is that they are all described by the same simple mathematical theory – ‘the theory of probability’ to be found in most elementary probability textbooks – and it has traditionally been the task of any interpretation to conform to that theory. But this saying does not hold up under closer examination, and it is better to consider each approach as dealing with a separate subject matter, the structure of which determines the structure of the appropriate calculus. See also: PROBABILITY THEORY AND EPISTEMOLOGY; RATIONAL CHOICE THEORY Further reading Feller, W. (1968) An Introduction to Probability Theory and Its Applications , New York: John Wiley & Sons. (Still the best introduction to the mathematical theory of probability. Volume 1 treats discrete outcome spaces; volume 2 (2nd edition) 1971 deals with continuous outcome spaces.) Kahneman, D., Slovic, P. and Tversky, A. (eds) (1982) Judgement under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (A collection of papers by psychologists describing how individuals reason probabilistically.) PAUL HUMPHREYS PROBABILITY THEORY AND EPISTEMOLOGY The primary uses of probability in epistemology are to measure degrees of belief and to formulate conditions for rational belief and rational change of belief. The degree of belief a person has in a proposition A is a measure of their willingness to act on A to obtain satisfaction of their preferences. According to probabilistic epistemology, sometimes called ‘Bayesian epistemology’, an ideally rational person’s degrees of belief satisfy the axioms of probability. For example, their degrees of belief in A and −A must sum to 1. The most important condition on changing degrees of belief given new evidence is called ‘conditionalization’. According to this, upon acquiring evidence E a rational person will change their degree of belief assigned to A to the conditional probability of A given E. Roughly, this rule says that the change should be minimal while accommodating the new evidence. There are arguments, ‘Dutch book arguments’, that are claimed to demonstrate that failure to satisfy these conditions makes a person who acts on their degrees of belief liable to perform actions that necessarily frustrate their preferences. Radical Bayesian epistemologists claim that rationality is completely characterized by these conditions. A more moderate view is that Bayesian conditions should be supplemented by other conditions specifying rational degrees of belief. Support for Bayesian epistemology comes from the fact that various aspects of scientific method can be grounded in satisfaction of Bayesian conditions. Further, it can be shown that there is a close connection between having
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Page 713 true belief as an instrumental goal and satisfaction of the Bayesian conditions. Some critics of Bayesian epistemology reject the probabilistic conditions on rationality as unrealistic. They say that people do not have precise degrees of belief and even if they did it would not be possible in general to satisfy the conditions. Some go further and reject the conditions themselves. Others claim that the conditions are much too weak to capture rationality and that in fact almost any reasoning can be characterized so as to satisfy them. The extent to which Bayesian epistemology contributes to traditional epistemological concerns of characterizing knowledge and methods for obtaining knowledge is controversial. See also: LEARNING; COMMON-SENSE REASONING, THEORIES OF Further reading Kahneman, D., Slovic, P. and Tversky, A. (eds) (1982) Judgement under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Collection of articles concerning the psychology of probabilistic inference and decision reasoning.) Rosenkrantz, R. (1977) Inference, Method, and Decision, Boston, MA: Reidel. (The best overall introduction to Bayesian philosophy of science and approaches to statistics.) BARRY LOEWER PROBLEM OF EVIL see EVIL, PROBLEM OF PROCESS PHILOSOPHY In the broad sense, the term ‘process philosophy’ refers to all worldviews holding that process or becoming is more fundamental than unchanging being. For example, an anthology titled Philosophers of Process (1965) includes selections from Samuel Alexander, Henri Bergson, John Dewey, William James, Lloyd Morgan, Charles Peirce and Alfred North Whitehead, with an introduction by Charles Hartshorne. Some lists include Hegel and Heraclitus. The term has widely come to refer in particular, however, to the movement inaugurated by Whitehead and extended by Hartshorne. Here, process philosophy is treated in this narrower sense. Philosophy’s central task, process philosophers hold, is to develop a metaphysical cosmology that is selfconsistent and adequate to all experienced facts. To be adequate, it cannot be based solely on the natural sciences, but must give equal weight to aesthetic, ethical and religious intuitions. Philosophy’s chief importance, in fact, derives from its integration of science and religion into a rational scheme of thought. This integration is impossible, however, unless exaggerations on both sides are overcome. On the side of science, the main exaggerations involve ‘scientific materialism’ and the ‘sensationalist’ doctrine of perception. On the side of religion, the chief exaggeration has been the idea of divine omnipotence. Process philosophy replaces these ideas with a ‘panexperientialist’ ontology, a doctrine of perception in which nonsensory ‘prehension’ is fundamental, and a doctrine of divine power as persuasive rather than coercive. See also: PROCESS THEISM; PROCESSES Further reading Browning, D. (1965) Philosophers of Process , New York: Random House. (Readable selection of writings of a number of ‘process philosophers’ in the broad sense.) Whitehead, A.N. (1933) Adventures of Ideas, New York: Free Press, 1967. (Besides being one of Whitehead’s most readable books, it provides the best insight into his overall position, including his philosophy of culture.) DAVID RAY GRIFFIN PROCESS THEISM Process theism is a twentieth-century school of theological thought that offers a nonclassical understanding of the relationship between God and the world. Classical Christian theists maintain that God created the world out of nothing and that God not only can, but does, unilaterally intervene in earthly affairs. Process theists, in contrast, maintain that God and the basic material out of which the rest of reality is composed are coeternal. Moreover, process theists believe that all actual entities always possess some degree of self-determination. God, it is held, does present to every actual entity at every moment the best available course of action. And each entity does feel some compulsion to act in accordance with this divine lure. But process theists deny that God possesses the capacity to control unilaterally the activity of any entity. Thus, what occurs in relation to every aspect of reality involving a multiplicity of entities – for example, what happens in relation to every earthly state of affairs – is always a cooperative effort. This understanding of the God–world relationship has significant theological implications. For instance,
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Page 714 horrific evils, process theists face no such challenge since the God of process thought cannot unilaterally control any earthly state of affairs. On the other hand, while most classical Christians maintain that God at times unilaterally intervenes in our world primarily because divine assistance has been requested, process theists naturally deny that God can be petitioned efficaciously in this sense since they believe that God is already influencing all aspects of reality to the greatest possible extent. Moreover, while most Christian theists believe that God will at some point in time unilaterally bring our current form of existence to an end, process theists maintain that the same co-creative process now in place will continue indefinitely. Not everyone finds the process characterization of the God–world relationship convincing or appealing. But few deny that process theism has become a significant force in modern American theology. See also: POSTMODERN THEOLOGY; PROCESS PHILOSOPHY Further reading Cobb, J.B., Jr and Griffin, D.R. (1976) Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition, Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press. (A very accessible introduction to process thought.) Hartshorne, C. (1948) The Divine Relativity: A Social Conception of God , New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. (A good introduction to Hartshorne’s understanding of the interdependent relationship between God and the world.) DAVID BASINGER PROCESSES A process is a course of change with a direction and internal order, where one stage leads on to the next. Processes can be physical (such as atomic decay), biological (such as the growth of living things), artificial (such as building a house) and social (such as carrying out a criminal investigation). Much of what is said about processes can be said about sequences of events. The concept of event, however, suggests a separate occurrence, whereas that of a process suggests something which is ongoing. There are matters, such as development in organisms, where to see what is happening as part of a process has an advantage over thinking of it as an event. Causes are generally spoken of as events, but the more dynamic concept of causal processes may get nearer to expressing the transition between cause and effect. Moreover, to explain something as a stage in a process can take account not only of what has happened in the past, but of what might happen in the future. This may (but need not) involve purpose; with organisms it involves development through functionally interrelated activities. In some social processes there can be a practical, moral significance in seeing a situation as a stage in a process, since this can encourage us to look to a further stage where something constructive might be brought out of what could otherwise be seen as simply an untoward event or an unhappy situation. See also: CAUSATION; EVENTS; PROCESS PHILOSOPHY Further reading Emmet, D. (1992) The Passage of Nature , London: Macmillan; Philadelphia, PA: Temple University. (A fuller treatment of the subject.) DOROTHY EMMET PROCLUS ( c . AD 411–85) The Greek Neoplatonist Proclus aimed to find a logical and metaphysical structure in which unity embraces but does not stifle diversity. He assumed the underlying unity of reality and of self, but was anxious to maintain the diversity of thought and existence. This led him to conceive of things as different species of one general whole, each part comprehending the rest but in its own specific, limited way. There are successive levels of awareness, thought and existence, ranging from that of ordinary experience, where we continuously have a passing understanding of the equally fleeting world, to that of ultimate unity, where we see the first principles and the total whole unqualified, as if by superintuition. Reason, aided by imagination, and exercised by philosophy and science, elevates us towards that supreme state, which is at once the foundation of religious and of ethical values. Proclus was interested in an integrated account of the nature of things. Asking questions about how and what we know, our perceptions and beliefs, prompts questions of the sort: what is the origin of knowledge? What is the nature of mind? Of the things we think and perceive? Of existence? For Proclus even questions about virtue, moral judgment and action, God, faith and salvation are all clarified by referring them to questions about their origins and nature. No subject escaped his attention, including the interpretation of poetic
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Page 715 works by literary figures such as Homer, where Proclus saw language as a mediator to deeper truths. Philosophical inquiry leads to asking what order of reality substantiates things, whether in the field of mind, values, science or literature. Proclus’ system is complex, and he uses highly technical terms (most of which have their roots in Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus). But for him this is only appropriate to the richness of our conceptual world. We have complex and varied concepts about our surroundings and selves, not because humans necessarily have flamboyant fancies but because reality itself is complex. That we have glimpses of knowledge means that there is some unity between our mind and the objects of thought. Moreover, unity is essential to the identity of things, and without it they would be unintelligible, and conceptually unreal. The ‘One’ is a primitive absolute, and is fundamental to intelligibility and existence. Thinker, thoughts and realities are in some way one. Things are not disconnected but share layers of ever-increasing unity. Consequently questions about different kinds of being, knowledge, good, and so on, become questions about degrees. Studying all this was not just a cerebral affair. To the Neoplatonist, understanding the scheme of things provided a guide on leading a good life and achieving what since Plato’s days had been praised as the goal of human endeavour, ‘true happiness’ or eudaimonia . See also: NEOPLATONISM Further reading Proclus (mid 5th century AD) The Elements of Theology, ed. and trans. E.R. Dodds, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2nd edn, 1963; repr. 1992. (Systematic study manual of Proclus’ Neo-platonism.) Siorvanes, L. (1996) Proclus: Neo-Platonic Philosophy and Science , Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. (Comprehensive account of Proclus, including analysis of his metaphysics and theory of knowledge, suitable for the newcomer.) LUCAS SIORVANES PRODICUS ( fl. late 5th century BC) Prodicus was a Greek Sophist from the island of Ceos; he was active in Athens. He served his city as ambassador and also became prominent as a professional educator. He taught natural philosophy, ethics, and of course rhetoric, but he is best known as an authority on correct language, specializing in fine verbal distinctions. Prodicus’ greatest influence was due to his naturalistic interpretation of the traditional Greek gods; as a result, he later figured on the short list of famous atheists. See also: SOPHISTS Further reading Guthrie, W.K.C. (1969) A History of Greek Philosophy , vol. 3, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; part of vol. 3 repr. as The Sophists, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971. (Full and scholarly account.) CHARLES H. KAHN PROFESSIONAL ETHICS Professional ethics is concerned with the values appropriate to certain kinds of occupational activity, such as medicine and law, which have been defined traditionally in terms of a body of knowledge and an ideal of service to the community; and in which individual professionals have a high degree of autonomy in their practice. The class of occupations aiming to achieve recognition as professions has increased to include, for example, nursing, while at the same time social and political developments have led to criticism of and challenge to the concepts of professions and professionalism. Problems in professional ethics include both regulation of the professional-client relationship and the role and status of professions in society. A central question for ethics is whether there are values or virtues specific to particular professions or whether the standards of ordinary morality are applicable. See also: BUSINESS ETHICS; ENGINEERING AND ETHICS; JOURNALISM, ETHICS OF; MEDICAL ETHICS Further reading Freidson, E. (1994) Professionalism Reborn: Theory, Prophecy and Policy , Oxford: Polity Press. (On the concept of profession and the future of professionalism.) Koehn, D. (1994) The Ground of Professional Ethics , London: Routledge. (Attempts to justify trust in the professions with reference to medicine, law and the ministry.) RUTH CHADWICK PROFIAT DURAN see DURAN, PROFIAT PROJECTIVISM ‘Projectivism’ is used of philosophies that agree with Hume that ‘the mind has a great propensity
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Page 716 to spread itself on the world’, that what is in fact an aspect of our own experience or of our own mental organization is treated as a feature of the objective order of things. Such philosophies distinguish between nature as it really is, and nature as we experience it as being. The way we experience it as being is thought of as partly a reflection or projection of our own natures. The projectivist might take as a motto the saying that beauty lies in the eye of the beholder, and seeks to develop the idea and explore its implications. The theme is a constant in the arguments of the Greek sceptics, and becomes almost orthodox in the modern era. In Hume it is not only beauty that lies in the eye (or mind) of the beholder, but also virtue, and causation. In Kant the entire spatio-temporal order is not read from nature, but read into it as a reflection of the organization of our minds. In the twentieth century it has been especially non-cognitive and expressivist theories of ethics that have adopted the metaphor, it being fairly easy to see how we might externalize or project various sentiments and attitudes onto their objects. But causation, probability, necessity, the stances we take towards each other as persons, even the temporal order of events and the simplicity of scientific theory have also been candidates for projective treatment. See also: RELATIVISM Further reading Hume, D. (1748) Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed.L.A. Selby-Bigge, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978. (Eminently readable, and the classic introduction of the metaphor of gilding and staining the world. See especially the first Appendix.) SIMON BLACKBURN PROMISING Promising is often seen as a social practice with specific rules, determining when a promise has been made and requiring that duly made promises be kept. Accordingly, many philosophers have sought to explain the obligation to keep a promise by appealing to a duty to abide by such rules, whether because of the social benefits of the practice or because fairness requires one to abide by it. Others see breaking a promise as a direct wrong to the person whose expectations are disappointed. See also: TRUST Further reading Fried, C. (1981) Contract as Promise, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (An account of the law of contracts, seen as based on a prior moral idea of promises.) T.M. SCANLON PROOF THEORY Proof theory is a branch of mathematical logic founded by David Hilbert around 1920 to pursue Hilbert’s programme. The problems addressed by the programme had already been formulated, in some sense, at the turn of the century, for example, in Hilbert’s famous address to the First International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris. They were closely connected to the set-theoretic foundations for analysis investigated by Cantor and Dedekind – in particular, to difficulties with the unrestricted notion of system or set; they were also related to the philosophical conflict with Kronecker on the very nature of mathematics. At that time, the central issue for Hilbert was the ‘consistency of sets’ in Cantor’s sense. Hilbert suggested that the existence of consistent sets, for example, the set of real numbers, could be secured by proving the consistency of a suitable, characterizing axiom system, but indicated only vaguely how to give such proofs model-theoretically. Four years later, Hilbert departed radically from these indications and proposed a novel way of attacking the consistency problem for theories. This approach required, first of all, a strict formalization of mathematics together with logic; then, the syntactic configurations of the joint formalism would be considered as mathematical objects; finally, mathematical arguments would be used to show that contradictory formulas cannot be derived by the logical rules. This two-pronged approach of developing substantial parts of mathematics in formal theories (set theory, second-order arithmetic, finite type theory and still others) and of proving their consistency (or the consistency of significant sub-theories) was sharpened in lectures beginning in 1917 and then pursued systematically in the 1920s by Hilbert and a group of collaborators including Paul Bernays, Wilhelm Ackermann and John von Neumann. In particular, the formalizability of analysis in a secondorder theory was verified by Hilbert in those very early lectures. So it was possible to focus on the second prong, namely to establish the consistency of ‘arithmetic’ (second-order number theory and set theory) by elementary mathematical, ‘finitist’ means. This part of the task proved to be much more recalcitrant than expected, and only limited results were obtained.
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Page 717 That the limitation was inevitable was explained in 1931 by Gödel’s theorems; indeed, they refuted the attempt to establish consistency on a finitist basis – as soon as it was realized that finitist considerations could be carried out in a small fragment of first-order arithmetic. This led to the formulation of a general reductive programme. Gentzen and Gödel made the first contributions to this programme by establishing the consistency of classical first-order arithmetic – Peano arithmetic (PA) – relative to intuitionistic arithmetic – Heyting arithmetic. In 1936 Gentzen proved the consistency of PA relative to a quantifier-free theory of arithmetic that included transfinite recursion up to the first epsilon number, 0; in his 1941 Yale lectures, Gödel proved the consistency of the same theory relative to a theory of computable functionals of finite type. These two fundamental theorems turned out to be most important for subsequent prooftheoretic work. Currently it is known how to analyse, in Gentzen’s style, strong subsystems of secondorder arithmetic and set theory. The first prong of proof-theoretic investigations, the actual formal development of parts of mathematics, has also been pursued – with a surprising result: the bulk of classical analysis can be developed in theories that are conservative over (fragments of) first-order arithmetic. See also: HILBERT’S PROGRAMME AND FORMALISM Further reading Davis, M. (ed.) (1965) The Undecidable: Basic Papers on Undecidable Propositions, Unsolvable Problems and Computable Functions , Hewlett, NY: Raven Press. (Anthology of the fundamental papers on the subject by Gödel, Church, Turing, Kleene, Rosser and Post.) WILFRIED SIEG PROPER NAMES The Roman general Julius Caesar was assassinated on 14 March 44 BC by conspirators led by Brutus and Cassius. It is a remarkable fact that, in so informing or reminding the reader, the proper names ‘Julius Caesar’, ‘Brutus’ and ‘Cassius’ are used to refer to three people each of whom has been dead for about two thousand years. Our eyes could not be used to see any of them, nor our voices to talk to them, yet we can refer to them with our words. The central philosophical issue about proper names is how this sort of thing is possible: what exactly is the mechanism by which the user of a name succeeds in referring with the name to its bearer? As the example indicates, whatever the mechanism is, it must be something that can relate the use of a name to its bearer even after the bearer has ceased to exist. In modern philosophy of language there are two main views about the nature of the mechanism. On one account, which originated withFrege,a useofa name expressesa conception or way of thinking of an object, and the name refers to whatever object fits, or best fits, that conception or way of thinking. Thus with ‘Cassius’, for example, I may associate the conception ‘the conspirator whom Caesar suspected because of his size’ (recalling a famous speech in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar). Conception theories are usually called ‘sense’ theories, after Frege’s term ‘ Sinn ’. The other account is the ‘historical chain’ theory, due to Kripke and Geach. In Geach’s words, ‘ for the use of a word as a proper name there must in the first instance e someone acquainted with the object named . . . . But . . . the use of a given name for a given object . . . can be handed on from one generation to another. . . Plato knew Socrates, and Aristotle knew Plato, and Theophrastus knew Aristotle, and so on in apostolic succession down to our own times. That is why we can legitimately use “Socrates” as a name the way we do’ (1969–70: 288–9). See also: DE RE/DE DICTO Further reading Geach, P.T. (1969–70) ‘The Perils of Pauline’, Review of Metaphysics 23: 287–300; repr. in Logic Matters, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1972, 153–65. (States the historical chain view and discusses the use of names in intentional contexts.) Kripke, S.A. (1972) ‘Naming and Necessity’, in D. Davidson and G. Harman (eds) Semantics of Natural Language, Dordrecht: Reidel, 252–355. (One of the most influential and widely discussed works in postwar philosophy.) GRAEME FORBES PROPERTY Most of the great philosophers have expressed views on property, its justification and limits, and especially on the justification of having private property. Generally, one must understand these views against the background of the economic and social conditions of their times. Notable theories include first possession (roughly, ‘whoever gets his or her hands on it justifiably owns it’), labour (‘whoever
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Page 718 deserves to own it’), utility and/or efficiency (‘allowing people to own things is the most effective way of running society’) and personality (‘owning property is necessary for personal development’). Few thinkers now defend the first possession theory but all the other three have their contemporary supporters. Some philosophers combine two or more theories into multi-principled or ‘pluralist’ justifications of property ownership. Many express concern about wide gaps between rich and poor and argue for constraints on inequalities in property holdings. Further reading Becker, L.C. (1977) Property Rights: Philosophic Foundations, London, Henley and Boston, MA: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (Admirably concise introduction.) Ryan, A. (1984) Property and Political Theory , Oxford: Blackwell . (Elegantly written historical survey.) STEPHEN R. MUNZER PROPERTY THEORY Traditionally, a property theory is a theory of abstract entities that can be predicated of things. A theory of properties in this sense is a theory of predication – just as a theory of classes or sets is a theory of membership. In a formal theory of predication, properties are taken to correspond to some (or all) oneplace predicate expressions. In addition to properties, it is usually assumed that there are n-ary relations that correspond to some (or all) n-place predicate expressions (for n 2). A theory of properties is then also a theory of relations. In this entry we shall use the traditional labels ‘realism’ and ‘conceptualism’ as a convenient way to classify theories. In natural realism, where properties and relations are the physical, or natural, causal structures involved in the laws of nature, properties and relations correspond to only some predicate expressions, whereas in logical realism properties and relations are generally assumed to correspond to all predicate expressions. Not all theories of predication take properties and relations to be the universals that predicates stand forintheir role as predicates.The universals of conceptualism, for example, are unsaturated concepts in the sense of cognitive capacities that are exercised (saturated) in thought and speech. Properties and relations in the sense of intensional Platonic objects may still correspond to predicate expressions, as they do in conceptual intensional realism , but only indirectly as the intensional contents of the concepts that predicates stand for in their role as predicates. In that case, instead of properties and relations being what predicates stand for directly, they are what nominalized predicates denote as abstract singular terms. It is in this way that concepts – such as those that the predicate phrases ‘is wise’, ‘is triangular’ and ‘is identical with’ stand for – are distinguished from the properties and relations that are their intensional contents – such as those that are denoted by the abstract singular terms ‘wisdom’, ‘triangularity’ and ‘identity’, respectively. Once properties are represented by abstract singular terms, concepts can be predicated of them, and, in particular, a concept can be predicated of the property that is its intensional content. For example, the concept represented by ‘is a property’ can be predicated of the property denoted by the abstract noun phrase ‘being a property’, so that ‘Being a property is a property’ (or, ‘The property of being a property is a property’) becomes well-formed. In this way, however, we are confronted with Russell’s paradox of (the property of) being a non-self-predicable property, which is the intensional content of the concept represented by ‘is a non-self-predicable property’. That is, the property of being a non-self-predicable property both falls and does not fall under the concept of being a non-self-predicable property (and therefore both falls and does not fall under the concept of being self-predicable). NINO B. COCCHIARELLA PROPHECY Most people associate prophecy with prognostication. However, an understanding of philosophical theories of prophecy requires that we recognize the full range of functions that a prophet may serve: oracle, cognizer of the divine, moral and social critic, teacher, political leader, legislator, miracle-worker. A recurring and fundamental issue, dating to ancient times, is whether prophecy is to be explained naturally or supernaturally. The Muslim philosopher al-Farabi and the Jewish philosopher Maimonides exemplify the naturalist orientation. They understood prophecy as an imaginative ‘imitation’ or translation of scientific and philosophical truths. Their accounts emphasize not only the intellectual but also the political, legislative and educational functions of prophecy. The Muslim al-Ghazali and the
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Page 719 Christian Thomas Aquinas illustrate the super-natural approach, albeit in greatly different ways. The proposition that biblical prophetic experiences convey scientific and metaphysical knowledge was attacked in varied ways in the modern period. In religious traditions, prophets have been replaced as sources of religious knowledge by either mystics, or books and authoritative interpreters. However, theories of prophecy are linked to important issues about religious language, miracles, the nature of God, the ends of life, and the character of religion. See also: MYSTICISM, NATURE OF; REVELATION Further reading Aquinas, T. (1256–9) Disputed Questions on Truth , Chicago, IL: Regnery, 1952. (Treats prophecy in the course of a discussion of predestination and foreknowledge.) Rahman, F. (1958) Prophecy in Islam, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (Contains significant material, including extended quotations, on Islamic thinkers, especially al-Farabi, Ibn Sina and their ‘orthodox’ critics.) DAVID SHATZ PROPOSITIONAL ATTITUDE STATEMENTS Propositional attitude statements – statements about our beliefs, desires, hopes and fears – exhibit certain logical peculiarities. For example, in apparent violation of Leibniz’s law of the indiscernibility of identicals, we cannot freely substitute expressions which designate the same object within such statements. According to Leibniz’s law, every instance of the following scheme is valid: a=b F( a ) Therefore, F( b) The validity of Leibniz’s law seems beyond question. It says, in effect, that if an object has a certain property, then anything identical to that object also has that property. Valid instances abound. But consider the following apparently invalid instance: Hesperus is Phosphorus Hammurabi believed that Hesperus often rose in the evening Therefore, Hammurabi believed that ‘Phosphorus’ often rose in the evening. If we take ‘Hammurabi believed that . . . often rose in the evening’ to serve as the predicate F and ‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus’ to be a and b respectively, this argument appears to be an instance of Leibniz’s law. Yet (3) apparently fails to follow from (1) and (2). Hammurabi believed that Hesperus and Phosphorus were two heavenly bodies not one. And he believed that Hesperus did, but that Phosphorus did not rise in the evening. We have derived a false conclusion from true premises and an apparently valid law. If that law is really valid, then our argument had better not be a genuine instance of the law. The tempting conclusion, widely accepted, is that we were wrong to construe propositional attitude statements as simple predications. We should not, that is, construe ‘Hammurabi believed that . . . often rose in the evening’ to be just a long predicate with the semantic function of attributing some property to the object commonly denoted by ‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus’. But then the question arises: if attitude reports are not simple predications, what are they? Philosophers have disagreed sharply in their answers. Moreover, their disagreements are intimately connected to a wide range of deep issues about the nature of meaning and reference. See also: DEMONSTRATIVES AND INDEXICALS; PROPOSITIONAL ATTITUDES Further reading Richard, M. (1990) Propositional Attitudes: an Essay on Thoughts and How We Ascribe Them , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Argues that propositional attitude statements express relations to Russellian annotated matrices – a version of the structured complex approach; also defends the view that belief reports are indexical.) KENNETH A. TAYLOR PROPOSITIONAL ATTITUDES Examples of propositional attitudes include the belief that snow is white, the hope that Mt Rosea is twelve miles high, the desire that there should be snow at Christmas, the intention to go to the snow tomorrow, and the fear that one shall be killed in an avalanche. As these examples show, we can distinguish the kind of attitude – belief, desire, intention, fear and so on – from the content of the attitude – that snow is white, that there will be snow at Christmas, to go to the snow, and so forth. The term ‘propositional attitudes’ comes from Bertrand Russell and derives from the fact that we can think of the content of an attitude as the proposition the attitude is towards. It can be typically captured by a
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Page 720 ‘that’, though sometimes at the cost of a certain linguistic awkwardness: it is more natural, for example, to talk of the intention to go to the snow rather than the intention that one go to the snow. The most frequently discussed kinds of propositional attitudes are belief, desire and intention, but there are countless others: hopes, fears, wishes, regrets, and so on. Some sentences which contain the verbs of propositional attitude – believes, desires, intends, and so on – do not make ascriptions of propositional attitudes. For example: ‘Wendy believes me’, ‘John fears this dog’, and ‘He intends no harm’. However, while these sentences are not, as they stand, ascriptions of propositional attitudes, it is arguable – though not all philosophers agree – that they can always be analysed as propositional attitude ascriptions. So, for example, Wendy believes me just in case there is some p such that Wendy believes that p because I tell her that p; John fears this dog just in case there is some X such that John fears that this dog will do X and so on. Discussions of propositional attitudes typically focus on belief and desire, and, sometimes, intention, because of the central roles these attitudes play in the explanation of rational behaviour. For example: Mary’s visit to the supermarket is explained by her desire to purchase some groceries, and her belief that she can purchase groceries at the supermarket; Bill’s flicking the switch is explained by his desire to illuminate the room, and his belief that he can illuminate the room by flicking the switch; and so on. It is plausible – though not uncontroversial – to hold that rational behaviour can always be explained as the outcome of a suitable belief together with a suitable desire. Some philosophers (examples are Grice and Schiffer) have used the propositional attitudes to explain facts about meaning. They hold that the meanings of sentences somehow derive from the contents of relevantly related beliefs and intentions. Roughly, what I mean by a sentence S is captured by the content of, say, the belief that I express by saying S. One fundamental question which divides philosophers turns on the ontological status of the propositional attitudes and of their contents. It is clear that we make heavy use of propositional attitude ascriptions in explaining and interpreting the actions of ourselves and others. But should we think that in producing such ascriptions, we attempt to speak the truth – that is should we think that propositional attitude ascriptions are truth-apt – or should we see some other purpose, such as dramatic projection, in this usage? Or, even more radically, should we think that there is nothing but error and confusion – exposed by modern science and neurophysiology – in propositional attitude talk? See also: DESIRE; PROPOSITIONAL ATTITUDE STATEMENTS Further reading Harman, G. (1972) Thought, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Early, clear, exposition of a functionalist account of the mind and, in particular, the propositional attitudes.) Salmon, N. and Soames, S. (eds) (1988) Propositions and Attitudes, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Excellent collection of papers about the semantics of propositional attitude ascriptions. Good reading list.) GRAHAM OPPY PROPOSITIONAL CALCULUS see PREDICATE CALCULUS PROPOSITIONS, SENTENCES AND STATEMENTS A sentence is a string of words formed according to the syntactic rules of a language. But a sentence has semantic as well as syntactic properties: the words and the whole sentence have meaning. Philosophers have tended to focus on the semantic properties of indicative sentences, in particular on their being true or false. They have called the meanings of such sentences ‘propositions’, and have tied the notion of proposition to the truth-conditions of the associated sentence. The term ‘proposition’ is sometimes assimilated to the sentence itself; sometimes to the linguistic meaning of a sentence; sometimes to ‘what is said’; sometimes to the contents of beliefs or other ‘propositional’ attitudes. But however propositions are defined, they must have two features: the capacity to be true or false; and compositional structure (being composed of elements which determine their semantic properties). See also: INTENSIONAL ENTITIES Further reading Cartwright, R. (1962) ‘Propositions’, in R.J. Butler (ed.) Analytical Philosophy, First Series , Oxford: Blackwell, 81–103. (A classical discussion of the main issues.) Salmon, N. and Soames, S. (eds) (1988) Propositions and Attitudes, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (A good anthology on the
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Page 721 semantics of propositional attitudes, focused on the Russellian view.) PASCAL ENGEL PROTAGORAS ( c .490–c .420 BC) Protagoras was the first and most eminent of the Greek Sophists. Active in Athens, he pioneered the role of professional educator, training ambitious young men for a public career and popularizing the new rationalist worldview that was introduced from Ionian natural philosophy. But unlike his contemporary Anaxagoras, Protagoras was sceptical of the dogmatic claims of the new science. His famous formula – ‘Man is the measure of all things, of things that are, that they are, and of things that are not, that they are not’ (fr. 1) – makes him the father of relativism and even, on some interpretations, of subjectivism. He was also considered the first theological agnostic: ‘Concerning the gods, I am unable to know either that they exist or that they do not exist or what form they have’ (fr.4). He was sometimes associated with the claim ‘to make the weaker argument ( logos ) the stronger’. See also: SOPHISTS Further reading Guthrie, W.K.C. (1969) A History of Greek Philosophy , vol. 3, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; part of vol. 3 repr. as The Sophists, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971. (Full scholarly account.) CHARLES H. KAHN PROUDHON, PIERRE-JOSEPH (1809–65) Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was a French social theorist, political activist and journalist. Claiming to be the first person to adopt the label ‘anarchist’, he developed a vision of a cooperative society conducting its affairs by just exchanges and without political authority. In his lifetime he exercised considerable influence over both militants and theorists of the European left, and he is remembered today as one of the greatest exponents of libertarian socialism. His last writings, though still strongly libertarian, advocated a federal state with minimal functions. See also: ANARCHISM; SOCIALISM Further reading Proudhon, P.J. (1840) Qu’est-ce que la propriété? ou Recherche sur le principe du droit et du gouvernement , Paris: Brocard; trans. B. Tucker, What is Property?, New York: Dover, 1970. (The most accessible statement of his basic position.) Woodcock, G. (1956) Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: His Life and Work, New York: Schocken. (The standard English-language biography. Contains a bibliography.) RICHARD VERNON PROVABILITY LOGIC Central to Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem is his discovery that, in a sense, a formal system can talk about itself. Provability logic is a branch of modal logic specifically directed at exploring this phenomenon. Consider a sufficiently rich formal theory T. By Gödel’s methods we can construct a predicate in the language of T representing the predicate ‘is formally provable in T’. It turns out that T is able to prove statements of the form If A is provable in T, then it is provable in T that A is provable in T. In modal logic, predicates such as ‘it is unavoidable that’ or ‘I know that’ are considered as modal operators, that is, as non-truthfunctional propositional connectives. In provability logic, ‘is provable in T’ is similarly treated. We write □A for ‘A is provable in T’. This enables us to rephrase (1) as follows: (1′) □A → □□ A. This is a well-known modal principle amenable to study by the methods of modal logic. Provability logic produces manageable systems of modal logic precisely describing all modal principles for □A that T itself can prove. The language of the modal system will be different from the language of the system T under study. Thus the provability logic of T (that is, the insights T has about its own provability predicate as far as visible in the modal language) is decidable and can be studied by finitistic methods. T, in contrast, is highly undecidable. The advantages of provability logic are: (1) it yields a very perspicuous representation of certain arguments in a formal theory T about provability in T; (2) it gives us a great deal of control of the principles for provability in so far as these can be formulated in the modal language at all; (3) it gives us a direct way to compare notions such as knowledge with the notion of formal provability; and (4) it is a fully worked-out syntactic approach to necessity in the sense of Quine.
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Page 722 Further reading Boolos, G. (1993) The Logic of Provability, New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (A very readable textbook; includes an up-to-date introduction to predicate provability logic.) Smorynski, C. (1985) Self-Reference and Modal Logic, New York: Springer. (A well-written and elegant textbook; includes good discussions of multi-modal provability logic and of non-extensional selfreference.) ALBERT VISSER PROVIDENCE Divine providence is God’s care, provision, foresight and direction of the universe in such a way that the universe as a whole and individual creatures within it fulfil God’s purposes. Belief in providence was affirmed by some Greek philosophers (especially the Stoics), and is a fundamental tenet of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In modern times, questions have arisen about the possibility of divine intervention in worldly affairs; this creates a difficulty for belief in providence, because it makes it hard to see how God can shape events so as to carry out his providential purposes. Theories of providence differ with regard to the extent to which God has direct and specific control over earthly events, as opposed to guiding the course of affairs in a general way towards his overall goals. The strongest affirmation of divine control comes from Calvinism, which accepts a compatibilist view of free will (that is, that free will is compatible with determinism) and affirms God’s absolute control over everything that happens. Other views affirm libertarian free will for creatures; some place limitations on God’s knowledge of the future, and process theology places stringent limits on God’s power to affect worldly events. These limitations tend to give creatures a limited degree of independence over against God,and lessen God’sdirectand specific control over events. See also: GRACE; PREDESTINATION Further reading Farley, B.W. (1988) The Providence of God , Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House. (A useful historical discussion of the doctrine of providence, informed by a Reformed theological perspective.) Hasker, W. (1989) God, Time and Knowledge , Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. (A sustained argument against Molinism and simple foreknowledge, and in favour of freewill theism.) WILLIAM HASKER PRUDENCE The word ‘prudence’ is used in several ways in contemporary English, and its different philosophical senses to some extent reflect that variety. Traditionally, prudence is the ability to make morally discerning choices in general; but the term is also used to denote a habit of cautiousness in practical affairs; most recently, attempts have also been made to identify prudence with practical rationality, perhaps even with the pursuit of the agent’s own interests, without any specifically moral implications. Further reading Nagel, T. (1970) ‘Desires, Prudential Motives, and the Present’, in The Possibility of Altruism , Oxford: Clarendon Press; repr. in J. Raz (ed.) Practical Reasoning, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978, 153– 67. (A modern account of prudence interpreted as rational choice.) GERARD J. HUGHES PSEUDO-DIONYSIUS ( fl. c . AD 500) ‘Pseudo-Dionysius’ was a Christian Neoplatonist who wrote in the late fifth or early sixth century and who presented himself as Dionysius the Areopagite, an Athenian converted by St Paul. This pretence – or literary device – was so convincing that Pseudo-Dionysius acquired something close to apostolic authority, giving his writings tremendous influence throughout the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance. The extant four treatises and ten letters articulate a metaphysical view of the cosmos, as well as a religious path of purification and perfection, that are grounded in the Neoplatonism developed in the Platonic Academy in Athens. Although this strand of Neoplatonist thought, in contrast to that developed at the school in Alexandria, was deliberately pagan in its religious orientation, Pseudo-Dionysius used its conceptual resources (drawing especially on Proclus) to give precision and depth to the philosophical principles of a Christian world view. Cardinal points of Pseudo-Dionysius’ thought are the transcendence of a first cause of the universe, the immediacy of divine causality in the world and a hierarchically ordered cosmos. See also: PLATONISM, MEDIEVAL
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Page 723 Further reading Rorem, P. (1993) Pseudo-Dionysius: A Commentary on the Texts and an Introduction to their Influence, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (The most accessible and informative general introduction to PseudoDionysius in English, with considerable attention to theological dimensions of Pseudo-Dionysius’ thought. Extensive bibliography.) HANNES JARKA-SELLERS PSEUDO-GROSSETESTE ( fl. c .1265–75) ‘Pseudo-Grosseteste’ is the name given to the unidentified author of a philosophic encyclopedia written in England in the third quarter of the thirteenth century. Like other encyclopedias of that time, the Summa philosophiae (Summa of Philosophy) marshals an astonishing array of facts, principles and arguments in every field of philosophic interest, from accounts of truth or cosmologies through analyses of rational and animal souls to the properties of minerals. The Summa is distinguished not by its range of interests, but by its clear sense of its own purposes. The author intends to arrange the history and the particular doctrines of philosophy within a hierarchy built according to Augustinian principles. See also: AUGUSTINIANISM Further reading McKeon, C.G. (1948) A Study of the Summa Philosophiae of the Pseudo-Grosseteste , New York: Columbia University Press. (A detailed retelling of the Summa ’s doctrine according to the order of the original, with frequent comparisons to other thirteenth-century authors.) MARK D. JORDAN PSYCHĒ Conventionally translated ‘soul’, psychē is the standard word in classical Greek for the centre of an animal’s, and especially a human being’s, ‘life’. In its earliest usage (in Homer) psychē is a breath-like material persisting after death as a mere ghost. Its precise reference to the locus of thought and emotion only began under the influence of philosophy. From the beginning of the fourth century BC it became normal to pair and contrast psychē with ‘body’ ( soma). The term generated sophisticated discussions. Leading questions include: Is psychē immortal? Is it corporeal or incorporeal? What are its parts or functions? See also: SOUL, NATURE AND IMMORTALITY OF THE Further reading Aristotle ( c . mid 4th century BC) On the Soul , trans. H. Lawson-Tancred, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986. (Book I discusses and criticizes Aristotle’s predecessors; Books II–III present his own doctrines.) A.A. LONG PSYCHOANALYSIS, METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES IN Philosophers have subjected psychoanalysis to an unusual degree of methodological scrutiny for several interconnected reasons. Even a cursory look at the Freudian corpus reveals a slender base of evidence: eleven ‘case histories’, including those published jointly with Breuer. On the other hand, the theoretical claims have broad scope: all psychopathology can be traced to repressed sexuality. Further, Freud and his followers have disdained the most widely accepted means of establishing theories – experimental confirmation – while allowing themselves to appeal to such apparently dubious sources of support as dream interpretation, literature and everyday life. Together, these factors conjure a picture of a ‘science ‘ with a large gap between theory and evidence that has not and cannot be filled by solid data. The central methodological question about psychoanalysis is whether there is now or ever has been any evidence supporting its truth. Popper rejected psychoanalysis as a science on the grounds that there could be no possible evidence against it which could test its truth. More recently, Grünbaum has objected that there are serious logical difficulties with appealing to cures as evidence of truth. GruÈ nbaum and others have attacked both the theory of dreams and the use of dream interpretation as evidence. Sulloway and Kitcher have argued that several tenets of psychoanalysis were supported by their nineteenth-century scientific context, particularly certain aspects of Darwinian biology, but that those crucial supports have been eroded by later scientific developments. Eysenck and Wilson have examined experimental results that have been offered in support of various claims of psychoanalysis and rejected them as inadequate to establish any specifically psychoanalytic claims. By contrast, Glymour (and others) have explained how even single case histories could provide evidence in favour of psychoanalysis. Other philosophers have argued that psychoanalysis is continuous with ‘common-sense’ psychology and is supported by the continual reaffirmation
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Page 724 of the essential correctness of common-sense psychological prediction and explanation. See also: FREUD, S.; PSYCHOANALYSIS, POST-FREUDIAN Further reading Eysenck, H.J. and Wilson, G.D. (1973) The Experimental Study of Freudian Theories , London: Methuen. (Still the best review of attempts to verify psychoanalysis experimentally.) Grünbaum, A. (1984) The Foundations of Psychoanalysis , Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. (One of the most important studies of Freud’s methodology.) PATRICIA KITCHER PSYCHOANALYSIS, POST-FREUDIAN The basic concepts of psychoanalysis are due to Sigmund Freud. After establishing psychoanalysis Freud worked in Vienna until he and other analysts fled the Nazi occupation. Post-Freudian psychoanalysis has evolved in distinct ways in different countries, often in response to influential analysts who settled there. Freud’s patients were mainly adults who suffered from neurotic rather than psychotic disturbances. He found their psychological difficulties to be rooted in conflict between love and hate, caused by very disparate, often fantastic, images deriving from the same parental figure. These images provided the basic representations of the self and others, formed by processes of projection (representing the other via images from the self) and introjection (representing the self via images from the other). The internalized image of a parent could be used to represent the self as related to some version of the other, as in the formation of the punitive super-ego, or as like the other, as in the identification with the parent of the same sex through which the Oedipus complex was dissolved. Later analysts, including Anna Freud and Melanie Klein, observed that the uninhibited play of children could be seen to express fantasies involving such images, often with striking clarity. This made it possible to analyse children, and to see that their representations of the self were regularly coordinated with fantastic representations of others, with both organized into systematically interacting systems of good and bad. Emotional disturbance was marked by a fantasy world in which the self and idealized good figures engaged in conflict with hateful bad objects, unmitigated by any sense that all derived from the same self and parental figures. Such observations made it possible to confirm, revise and extend Freud’s theories. Klein saw that symptoms, character and personality could be understood in terms of relations to internalized fantasyfigures, laid down in early childhood; and this extended to psychotic disturbances, such as schizophrenia and manicdepressive illness, which turned on the particular nature of the figures involved. This gave rise to the British object-relations approach to psycho-analysis. It also influenced the development of egopsychology and self-psychology by Hartmann, Kohut and others in the United States, and Lacan’s attempt to relate psychoanalysis to language, in France. See also: FEMINISM AND PSYCHOANALYSIS PSYCHOANALYSIS, METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES IN Further reading Laplanche, J. and Pontalis, J.B. (1973) The Language of Psycho-Analysis , London: Hogarth Press. (Clear and scholarly exposition of basic psychoanalytic concepts, including some of Lacan’s.) Segal, H. (1989) Klein , London: Fontana Modern Masters. (Lucid introduction to Klein’s work.) JAMES HOPKINS PSYCHOLOGY, THEORIES OF The object of study in psychology is the experience and behaviour of organisms, particularly human organisms. Psychology resembles the other sciences in employing methods appropriate to material phenomena but, unlike them, the mind (sometimes held to be immaterial) is among its objects of study. If the mind were immaterial it is difficult to see how psychology could proceed. Psychology differs from the other sciences in that understanding may not permit prediction and/or control of the phenomena. This is a consequence of the fact that human organisms may become aware of causal factors that would otherwise have determined their experience or behaviour. Being aware, they have a choice. (This is not, of course, to deny that the choice may itself be determined by more remote factors.) In the seventeenth century, Descartes proposed that the mind (or soul), though immaterial, was nevertheless capable of two-way causal interaction with the material body. It is often held that what is immaterial cannot interact with what is material but Descartes’ proposal
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Page 725 was, in its context, so valuable that it has ever since exercised a profound influence on philosophy and on what most of us take for granted (for example, the unexamined belief that the mind/soul is, in some sense, immaterial but does, in some sense, interact with the body). The possibility of scientific psychology was preserved by Leibniz’s hypothesis of psycho-physical parallelism (according to which the deity keeps mind and body running in parallel, though there is no causal interaction between them). This view did not survive the passing of an era of universal (and largely unquestioned) religious belief. At the beginning of the twentieth century behaviourism tried to do without mind, it also tried to avoid surreptitious appeal to the lay person’s unexamined ‘mind’ concept. In the 1960s, the cognitive revolution in psychology substantially broadened the range of phenomena under investigation but at the cost of allowing appeals to an unexamined ‘mind of last resort’. The headlong advance of the computer, which has taken over many functions previously reserved to members of the human species, leaves open the question whether it will, one day, take over all of them – or will be permitted to do so. See also: FREUD, S. JUNG, C.G. Further reading Humphrey, G. (1951) Thinking , London: Methuen. (Described by the author as ‘an introduction to its experimental psychology’ which it is. It is probably also the best single work on psychological theory.) Wolman, B.B. (1980) Contemporary Theories and Systems in Psychology , New York and London: The Plenum Press, 2nd edn. (A detailed and critical account of movements in psychological theory in the first three-quarters of the twentieth century.) N.E. WETHERICK PTOLEMY ( c . AD 100–70) The astronomer Ptolemy was one of the leading scientific figures of Graeco-Roman antiquity. His contributions to philosophy lie in his reflections on scientific activity. In knowledge, he distinguishes a perceptual stage, which provides the natural link between knowledge and things, from a further, rational stage, governing the transition to science. The move towards science consists of the progressive distinction between concepts, initially acquired through experience and methodical observation. Many components of his thought are derived from earlier philosophy, but he excludes those aspects which bear on more general philosophical issues. Further reading Ptolemy ( c .AD 140–70) On the Criterion and Commanding-Faculty , trans. various authors in P. Huby and G. Neale (eds) The Criterion of Truth , Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1989, 179–230. (Parallel text and English translation, including notes.) Taub, L.C. (1993) Ptolemy’s Universe, La Salle, IL: Open Court. (Readable treatment of the philosophical motivations underlying Ptolemy’s astronomy.) FERRUCCIO FRANCO REPELLINI PUBLIC INTEREST The concept of the public interest can be used in a wide variety of ways, and this has led many to say that it is devoid of meaning. However, the concept enables us to evaluate the tendency of policies and institutions to promote the interests of the members of a society considered in their broadest relations, for example in connection with policies to promote public health. In this sense it has significance. Historically, the concept of the public interest has drawn upon three main traditions of thought: the utilitarian idea of utility maximization; the tradition of civic republicanism; and Rousseau’s idea of the general will. Today, three main ways of meeting the public interest are distinguishable: the supply of certain indivisible goods like clean air; the preservation of identity-conferring social goods like a distinctive language;and the balancing of competing considerations in the making of public policy. Although the provision of goods in the public interest may be associated with injustice, there is no reason in general to think that justice and the public interest must conflict. See also: WELFARE Further reading Hargreaves Heap, S., Hollis, M., Lyons, B., Sugden, R. and Weale, A. (1992) The Theory of Choice, Oxford: Blackwell. (Provides an account of public goods, the free rider problem and references for further reading.) ALBERT WEALE PUFENDORF, SAMUEL (1632–94) Pufendorf was the first university professor of the law of nature and nations. His De iure
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Page 726 naturae et gentium (On the Law of Nature and Nations) (1672) and De officio hominis et civis iuxta legem naturalem (On the Duty of Man and Citizen according to Natural Law) (1673) greatly influenced the handling of that subject in the eighteenth century. As a result, Pufendorf has been recognized as an important figure in the development of the conception of international law as a body of norms commonly agreed to have universal validity by sovereign states. He regarded himself as an exponent of a new moral science founded by Hugo Grotius which transformed the natural law tradition by starting from identifiable traits of human nature rather than ideas about what human beings ought to be. See also: DESCARTES, R.; GROTIUS, H. Further reading Pufendorf, S. (1673) De officio hominis et civis iuxta legem naturalem (On the Duty of Man and Citizen according to Natural Law), trans. F.G. Moore, New York: Clarendon Press, 1927. (A highly influential epitome of Pufendorf’s major work.) Krieger, L. (1969) The Politics of Discretion, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (The only booklength study of Pufendorf’s life and thought in English.) J.D. FORD PUNISHMENT see CRIME AND PUNISHMENT PURGATORY According to Roman Catholic teaching, purgatory is the place or state of purification after death in which those who die in a state of grace (and hence are assured of being saved) make expiation for unforgiven venial sins or endure temporal punishment for mortal and venial sins already forgiven. The concept evolved to resolve the theological confusion about the state of souls between personal death and the general resurrection and Last Judgment, to explain what happens to those persons who repent before death but do not live long enough to do penance for their sins, and to make intelligible the widespread practice of praying for the souls of the departed. The doctrine developed in conjunction with a ‘high’ Eucharistic theology, according to which all the faithful departed take part in the liturgy of the Church. The idea of purgatory is therefore intimately connected with Christian ideas of sin, judgment, retributive punishment, the communion of saints and the idea that salvation occurs in history. It was rejected by the Reformers and, in the second half of the twentieth century, interest from Catholic theologians has waned. Nevertheless, some modern Protestant thinkers have defended the concept as an intermediate phase in salvation. See also: HELL; LIMBO Further reading Le Goff, J. (1981) The Birth of Purgatory , trans. A. Goldhammer, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (An important book on the historical development of the concept of purgatory; includes a discussion of Dante’s Il Purgatorio.) LINDA ZAGZEBSKI PUTNAM, HILARY (1926–) The American philosopher Hilary Putnam’s work spans a broad spectrum of interests, yet nonetheless reflects thematic unity in its concern over the question of realism. A critic of logical positivism, Putnam opposed verificationism and conventionalism, arguing for a realist understanding of scientific theories. He rejected the traditional conception of meaning according to which speakers’ mental states determine meaning and consequently, reference, and put forward a conception of meaning on which external reality, for example, what one talks about, contributes essentially to meaning. Further, citing what he called the division of linguistic labour, Putnam saw the conferring of meaning as a social rather than an individual enterprise. In response to the relativistic challenge that the incommensurability of different theories precludes any possibility of intertheoretical dialogue, Putnam invoked a causal theory of reference construing reference as relatively insensitive to theoretical variation, so that the continuity and rationality of science and communication are upheld. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics posed yet another difficulty for realism. Putnam saw quantum logic as an alternative which was compatible with realism, and argued that logic, like geometry, can be revised on the basis of empirical considerations. In the philosophy of mind, Putnam proposed functionalism, the view that mental states are characterized by function rather than material constitution. Putnam also made a substantial contribution to mathematics through his work on the insolvability of Hilbert’s tenth problem. In 1976, Putnam launched an attack on the coherence of the view he termed ‘metaphysical realism’. Arguing that relativism and scepticism are disguised forms of metaphysical realism, and
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Page 727 likewise incoherent, he suggested an alternative, referred to as ‘internal realism’. Clarification of this position and its viability as a third way between realism and relativism is the focus of Putnam’s later writings, and of much of the criticism they have incurred. See also: PRAGMATISM QUANTUM LOGIC Further reading Putnam, H. (1971) Philosophy of Logic , New York: Harper & Row. (Putnam argues for a realist position on the problem of the existence of mathematical objects.) Clark, P. and Hale, B. (eds) (1994) Reading Putnam, Oxford: Blackwell. (Essays by S. Blackburne, G. Boolos, M. Dummett, M. Hallett, C. Fuhl and C. Glymour, M. Red-head, T. Ricketts, D. Wiggins, and C. Wright, and replies by Putnam.) YEMIMA BEN-MENAHEM PYRRHO ( c .365–c .275 BC) The Greek philosopher Pyrrho of Elis gave his name first to the most influential version of ancient scepticism (Pyrrhonism), and later to scepticism as such (pyrrhonism). Like Socrates, he wrote nothing, despite which – or thanks to which – he too became one of the great figures of philosophy. Although he has vanished behind his own legend, he must have helped nurture that legend: his unique personality palpably exercised an unequalled fascination on his acquaintances, and through them, on many others. We possess, thanks especially to Sextus Empiricus, extensive documentation of what can be called ‘NeoPyrrhonian’ scepticism, because from the time of Aenesidemus (first century BC) it invoked Pyrrho as its patron saint. But Pyrrho’s own thought is hard to recover. The documentary evidence for him is mainly anecdotal, and the principal doxography is more or less directly dependent on his leading disciple Timon of Phlius, who managed to present himself as Pyrrho’s mere ‘spokesman’, but who was in fact perhaps rather more than that. The main question, which is still unanswered, is whether Pyrrho was primarily or even solely a moralist, the champion of an ethical outlook based on indifference and insensibility, or whether he had already explicitly set up the weaponry of the sceptical critique of knowledge which underlies the epistemological watchword ‘suspension of judgment’. Further reading Hankinson, R.J. (1995) The Sceptics , London and New York: Routledge. (The best modern book-length study.) JACQUES BRUNSCHWIG PYRRHONISM Pyrrhonism was the name given by the Greeks to one particular brand of scepticism, that identified (albeit tenuously) with Pyrrho of Elis, who was said (by his disciple Timon of Phlius) to have declared that everything was indeterminable and accordingly to have suspended judgment about the reality of things – in particular whether they were really good or bad. After Timon’s death Pyrrhonism lapsed, until revived by Aenesidemus. Aenesidemus held that it was inadmissible either to affirm or to deny that anything was really the case, and in particular to hold, with the Academic sceptics, that certain things really were inapprehensible. Instead, the Sceptic (the capital letter denotes the Pyrrhonists, who adopted the term, literally ‘inquirer’, as one of the designations for their school) should only allow that things were no more the case than not, or only so under certain circumstances and not under others. Aenesidemean Scepticism took the form of emphasizing the disagreement among both lay people and theoreticians as to the nature of things, and the fact that things appear differently under different circumstances (the various ways of doing this were systematized into the Ten Modes of Scepticism); the result was meant to be suspension of judgment about such matters, which would in turn lead to tranquillity of mind. Thus ‘Scepticism’ denotes a particular philosophical position, not simply, as in modern usage, that of any philosopher inclined towards doubt. Later Pyrrhonists, notably Agrippa, refined the Sceptical method and concentrated on undermining the dogmatic (that is, anti-Sceptical) notion of the criterion – there is no principled way to settle such disputes without resorting to mere assertion, infinite regress or circularity. We owe to Sextus Empiricus our most complete account of Pyrrhonian argument and the clearest exposition of the Pyrrhonian attitude. Faced with endemic dispute, Sceptics reserve judgment; but this does not render life impossible for them, since they will still react to the way things appear to be, although without believing in any strong sense that things really are as they seem. Furthermore, when Pyrrhonians describe their affective states, they do so undogmatically – and the Sceptical slogans (‘I determine nothing’, ‘nothing is apprehended’, and so on) are to be understood in a similar way, as merely reporting
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Page 728 a state of mind and not expressing a commitment. Thus the slogans apply to themselves, and like cathartic drugs are themselves purged along with the noxious humour of dogmatism. See also: SCEPTICISM Annas, J. and Barnes, J. (1985) The Modes of Scepticism , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Translation and detailed philosophical study of our sources for the Ten Modes of Scepticism.) Hankinson, R.J. (1995) The Sceptics , London: Routledge. (Full philosophical treatment of the history and development of Greek scepticism.) R.J. HANKINSON PYTHAGORAS ( c .570–c .497 BC) Pythagoras of Samos was an early Greek sage and religious innovator. He taught the kinship of all life and the immortality and transmigration of the soul. Pythagoras founded a religious community of men and women in southern Italy that was also of considerable political influence. His followers, who became known as Pythagoreans, went beyond these essentially religious beliefs of the master to develop philosophical, mathematical, astronomical, and musical theories with which they tended to credit Pythagoras himself. The tradition established by Pythagoras weaves through much of Greek philosophy, leaving its mark particularly on the thought of Empedocles, Plato, and later Platonists. See also: NEO-PYTHAGOREANISM; PRESOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY; PYTHAGOREANISM Further reading Burkert, W. (1972) Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism, trans. E.L. Minar, Jr, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (A scholarly and critical examination of the sources; Pythagoras the religious figure is sharply distinguished from Pythagorean philosophy and science which become identifiable only in the late fifth century BC.) HERMANN S. SCHIBLI PYTHAGOREANISM Pythagoreanism refers to a Greek religious-philosophical movement that originated with Pythagoras in the sixth century BC. Although Pythagoreanism in its historical development embraced a wide range of interests in politics, mysticism, music, mathematics and astronomy, the common denominator remained a general adherence among Pythagoreans to the name of the founder and his religious beliefs. Pythagoras taught the immortality and transmigration of the soul (reincarnation) and recommended a way of life that through ascetic practices, dietary rules and ethical conduct promised to purify the soul and bring it into harmony with the surrounding universe. Thereby the soul would become godlike since Pythagoras believed that the cosmos, in view of its orderly and harmonious workings and structure, was divine. Pythagoreanism thus has from its beginnings a cosmological context that saw further evolution along mathematical lines in the succeeding centuries. Pythagorean philosophers, drawing on musical theories that may go back to Pythagoras, expressed the harmony of the universe in terms of numerical relations and possibly even claimed that things are numbers. Notwithstanding a certain confusion in Pythagorean number philosophy between abstract and concrete, Pythagoreanism represents a valid attempt, outstanding in early Greek philosophy, to explain the world by formal, structural principles. Overall, the combination of religious, philosophical and mathematical speculations that characterizes Pythagoreanism exercised a significant influence on Greek thinkers, notably on Plato and his immediate successors as well as those Platonic philosophers known as Neo-Pythagoreans and Neoplatonists. See also: NEO-PYTHAGOREANISM; ORPHISM; PRESOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY Further reading Burkert, W. (1972) Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism, trans. E.L. Minar, Jr, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (A scholarly examination of the sources of Pythagoreanism and a critical analysis of Pythagorean teachings; a prerequisite for all serious work on the subject.) Guthrie, W.K.C. (1962–78) A History of Greek Philosophy , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 6 vols. (A comprehensive and readable discussion of early Pythagoreanism can be found in volume 1, pages 146–340; emphasizes the harmony between its religious and philosophical-scientific elements.) HERMANN S. SCHIBLI
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Page 729 Q QI A difficult term to contextualize within Western conceptual frameworks, qi is variously rendered as ‘hylozoistic vapours’, ‘psychophysical stuff’, ‘the activating fluids in the atmosphere and body’, and, perhaps most appropriately, ‘vital energizing field’. In the earlier texts, before the notion came to be adapted to the speculative constructions of the Han cosmologists, it had a significance not unlike the Greek pneuma (‘breath’ or ‘animating fluid’). In the ‘cosmological’ speculations of the Han dynasty (206 BC–AD 220), qi came to be understood as the vital stuff constitutive of all things and was characterized in terms of the active and passive dynamics of yang and yin. See also: PNEUMA; YIN–YANG Further reading Mengzi ( c .4th century BC?), trans. D.C. Lau, Mencius, Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1970. (An authoritative translation.) DAVID L. HALL ROGER T. AMES QUALIA The terms ‘quale’ and ‘qualia’ (plural) are most commonly understood to mean the qualitative, phenomenal or ‘felt’ properties of our mental states, such as the throbbing pain of my current headache, or the peculiar blue of the afterimage I am experiencing now. Though it seems undeniable that at least some of our mental states have qualia, their existence raises a number of philosophical problems. The first problem regards their nature or constitution. Many theorists have noted great differences between our intuitive conceptions of qualia and those of typical physical properties such as mass or length, and have asked whether qualia could nonetheless be identical with physical properties. Another problem regards our knowledge of qualia, in particular, whether our beliefs about them can be taken to be infallible, or at least to have some kind of special authority. See also: CONSCIOUSNESS; SENSE-DATA Further reading Searle, J. (1992) The Rediscovery of the Mind, Cambridge, MA: MIT. (Argues that intentional states must have qualitative character.) JANET LEVIN QUANTIFICATION AND INFERENCE Quantificational reasoning in natural languages contains occurrences of expressions which, though name-like from a syntactic perspective, intuitively seem to be importantly different from ordinary names. For example, in attempting to argue that every F is G, we might consider an ‘arbitrary’ F, give ‘it’ the ‘name’ ‘n’, and go on to argue that n is G. That such an occurrence of ‘n’ is somehow different from occurrences of ordinary names can be seen by noting, for example, that arguing from the claim that Bertrand Russell is F to the claim that Bertrand Russell is G in general does not suffice for drawing the conclusion that every F is G. Similarly, given that some F is G, in general we do not think it legitimate to assert that Bertrand Russell is F and G, and continue reasoning from that claim. It seems that such occurrences of ‘n’ differ semantically from similar occurrences of ordinary names. Thus the question arises as to the semantics of occurrences of such expressions. An adequate semantic account must justify appropriate inferences to and from sentences containing these terms. Further reading Leisenring, A.C. (1969) Mathematical Logic and Hilbert’s -Symbol, New York: Gordon & Breach. (The best English introduction to formal systems containing -terms; technical, but self-contained.) JEFFREY C. KING QUANTIFIERS The quantifiers ‘some’ and ‘every’ were the object of the very first logical theory, Aristotelian syllogistic. An example of a syllogism is ‘Every Spartan is Greek, every Greek is European, therefore every Spartan is European’. In such inferences, no quantifier is governed by another one. Contrast this with ‘Everybody loves somebody’. Modern logic is often taken to have begun when Frege systematized for the
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Page 730 first time the logic of quantifiers, including such dependent ones. In general, much of what has passed as logic over the centuries is in effect the study of quantifiers. This is especially clear with the area of logic variously known as quantification theory, lower predicate calculus or elementary logic. Some philosophers have even sought to limit the scope of logic to such a study of quantifiers. Yet the nature of quantifiers is a delicate matter which is captured incompletely by the logic initiated by Frege and Russell. See also: LOGICAL CONSTANTS; QUANTIFICATION AND INFERENCE Further reading Westerståhl, D. (1989) ‘Quantifiers in Formal and Natural Languages’, in D. Gabbay and F. Guenthner (eds) Handbook of Philosophical Logic, Dordrecht: Reidel, vol. 4, 1–131. (A survey of the theory of generalized quantifiers.) JAAKKO HINTIKKA GABRIEL SANDU QUANTIFIERS, GENERALIZED Generalized quantifiers are logical tools with a wide range of uses. As the term indicates, they generalize the ordinary universal and existential quantifiers from first-order logic, ‘ x’ and ‘ x’, which apply to a formula A(x), binding its free occurrences of x. xA ( x) says that A(x) holds for all objects in the universe and xA( x) says that A(x) holds for some objects in the universe, that is, in each case, that a certain condition on A(x) is satisfied. It is natural then to consider other conditions, such as ‘for at least five’, ‘at most ten’, ‘infinitely many’ and ‘most’. So a quantifier Q stands for a condition on A(x), or, more precisely, for a property of the set denoted by that formula, such as the property of being nonempty, being infinite, or containing more than half of the elements of the universe. The addition of such quantifiers to a logical language may increase its expressive power. A further generalization allows Q to apply to more than one formula, so that, for example, Qx(A(x),B(x)) states that a relation holds between the sets denoted by A(x) and B(x), say, the relation of having the same number of elements, or of having a non-empty intersection. One also considers quantifiers binding more than one variable in a formula. Qxy,zu(R(-x,y),S(z,u)) could express, for example, that the relation (denoted by) R(x,y) contains twice as many pairs as S(z,u), or that R(x,y) and S(z,u) are isomorphic graphs. In general, then, a quantifier (the attribute ‘generalized’ is often dropped) is syntactically a variablebinding operator, which stands semantically for a relation between relations (on individuals), that is, a second-order relation. Quantifiers are studied in mathematical logic, and have also been applied in other areas, notably in the semantics of natural languages. This entry first presents some of the main logical facts about generalized quantifiers, and then explains their application to semantics. Further reading Barwise, J. and Feferman, S. (eds) (1985) Model-Theoretic Logics, Berlin: Springer. (Classical, handbook-style reference for abstract model theory and the mathematics of quantifiers.) DAG WESTERSTÅHL QUANTIFIERS, SUBSTITUTIONAL AND OBJECTUAL Understood substitutionally, ‘Something is F’ is true provided one of its substitution instances (a sentence of the form ‘a is F’) is true. This contrasts with the objectual understanding, on which it is true provided ‘is F’ is true of some object in the domain of the quantifier. Substitutional quantifications have quite different truth-conditions from objectual ones. For instance, ‘Something is a mythological animal’ is true if understood substitutionally, since the substitution instance ‘Pegasus is a mythological animal’ is true. But understood objectually, the sentence is not true, since there are no mythological creatures to make up a domain for the quantifier. Since substitutional quantifiers do not need domains over which they range, it is easy to introduce substitutional quantifiers which bind predicate or sentential variables, even variables within quotation marks. One reason for interest in substitutional quantification is the hope that it may provide a way to understand discourse which appears to be about numbers, properties, propositions and other ‘troublesome’ sorts of entities as being free of exceptional ontological commitments. Whether natural language quantification is sometimes plausibly construed as substitutional is not, however, clear. See also: ONTOLOGICAL COMMITMENT Further reading Gottlieb, D. (1980) Ontological Economy: Sub-stitutional Quantification and Mathematics, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Expounds and defends a substitutional interpretation of
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Page 731 number theory. Includes a useful discussion of ontological commitment.) Quine, W.V. (1973) The Roots of Reference, La Salle, IL: Open Court. (Contains a subtle discussion of substitutional quantification, mathematical discourse and the conceptual priority of substitutional quantification.) MARK RICHARD QUANTUM FIELD THEORY see FIELD THEORY, QUANTUM QUANTUM LOGIC The topic of quantum logic was introduced by Birkhoff and von Neumann (1936), who described the formal properties of a certain algebraic system associated with quantum theory. To avoid begging questions, it is convenient to use the term ‘logic’ broadly enough to cover any algebraic system with formal characteristics similar to the standard sentential calculus. In that sense it is uncontroversial that there is a logic of experimental questions (for example, ‘Is the particle in region R?’ or ‘Do the particles have opposite spins?’) associated with any physical system. Having introduced this logic for quantum theory, we may ask how it differs from the standard sentential calculus, the logic for the experimental questions in classical mechanics. The most notable difference is that the distributive laws fail, being replaced by a weaker law known as orthomodularity. All this can be discussed without deciding whether quantum logic is a genuine logic, in the sense of a system of deduction. Putnam argued that quantum logic was indeed a genuine logic, because taking it as such solved various problems, notably that of reconciling the wave-like character of a beam of, say, electrons, as it passes through two slits, with the thesis that the electrons in the beam go through one or other of the two slits. If Putnam’s argument succeeds this would be a remarkable case of the empirical defeat of logical intuitions. Subsequent discussion, however, seems to have undermined his claim. See also: LOGICAL AND MATHEMATICAL TERMS, GLOSSARY OF Further reading Hughes, R. (1989) The Structure and Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (An excellent introduction to quantum theory and its interpretation, including a nottoo-technical discussion of quantum logic generally and the partial Boolean algebra approach in particular.) Redhead, M. (1987) Incompleteness, Nonlocality , and Realism: A Prolegomenon to the Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Careful and not-too-technical introduction to, among other things, quantum logic, with a discussion of Putnam’s argument.) PETER FORREST QUANTUM MEASUREMENT PROBLEM In classical mechanics a measurement process can be represented, in principle, as an interaction between two systems, a measuring instrument M and a measured system S, during which the classical states of M and S evolve dynamically, according to the equations of motion of the theory, in such a way that the ‘pointer’ or indicator quantity of M becomes correlated with the measured quantity of S. If a similar representation is attempted in quantum mechanics, it can be shown that, for certain initial quantum states of M and S, the interaction will result in a quantum state for the combined system in which neither the pointer quantity of M nor the measured quantity of S has a determinate value. On the orthodox interpretation of the theory, propositions assigning ranges of values to these quantities are neither true nor false. Since we require that the pointer readings of M are determinate after a measurement, and presumably also the values of the correlated S-quantities measured by M , it appears that the orthodox interpretation cannot accommodate the dynamical representation of measurement processes. The problem of how to do so is the quantum measurement problem. See also: QUANTUM MECHANICS, INTERPRETATION OF Further reading Fraassen, B. van (1991) Quantum Mechanics: An Empiricist View , Oxford: Clarendon Press. (A discussion of the conceptual problems of the theory and a development of the original version of the modal interpretation.) JEFFREY BUB QUANTUM MECHANICS, INTERPRETATION OF Quantum mechanics developed in the early part of the twentieth century in response to the discovery that energy is quantized, that is, comes in discrete units. At the microscopic level this
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Page 732 leads to odd phenomena: light displays particle-like characteristics and particles such as electrons produce wave-like interference patterns. At the level of ordinary objects such effects are usually not evident, but this generalization is subject to striking exceptions and puzzling ambiguities. The fundamental quantum mechanical puzzle is ‘superposition of states’. Quantum states can be added together in a manner that recalls the superposition of waves, but the effects of quantum superposition show up only probabilistically in the statistics of many measurements. The details suggest that the world is indefinite in odd ways; for example, that things may not always have well-defined positions or momenta or energies. However, if we accept this conclusion, we have difficulty making sense of such straightforward facts as that measurements have definite results. Interpretations of quantum mechanics are, in one way or another, attempts to understand the superposition of quantum states. The range of interpretations stretches from the metaphysically daring to the seemingly innocuous. But, so far, no single interpretation has commanded anything like universal agreement. Further reading Healey, R. (1989) The Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics: An Interactive Interpretation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (An extended development of a modal interpretation of quantum theory. Healey refers to his view as an interactive approach.) Jammer, M. (1974) The Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics, New York: John Wiley & Sons. (Still one of the most comprehensive introductions to the foundations of quantum mechanics.) ALLEN STAIRS QUESTIONS Some theorists hold that a question is an interrogative sentence; others that a question is what is meant or expressed by an interrogative sentence. Most theorists hold that each question has two or more answers, and that the point of asking a question is to have the respondent reply with one of the answers. Most hold that each question has an assertive core or presupposition that is implied by each of the answers; if it is false, then no answer is true, so we say that the question commits the fallacy of many questions and we regard the negation of the presupposition as a corrective reply to the question (it corrects the question). For example, consider the question ‘Has Adam stopped sinning?’ Its answers are ‘Adam has stopped sinning’ and ‘Adam has not stopped sinning’. It presupposes ‘Adam has sinned’; thus ‘Adam has not sinned’ is a corrective reply. The ‘safe’ way to ask this question is via the conditional ‘If Adam has sinned, then has Adam stopped sinning?’ We can construct formal systems for asking whether and which questions in an effective way. Other types of question (for example, who and why) are still problematic. It can be proved that some questions are reducible to others, some questions raise others, and some systems for the logic of questions can never be complete in certain ways. Further reading Belnap, N.D., Jr and Steel, T.B., Jr (1976) The Logic of Questions and Answers, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. (Presents many useful concepts.) Kiefer, F. (ed.) (1983) Questions and Answers, Dordrecht: Reidel. (Papers presenting several approaches and discussing many aspects.) DAVID HARRAH QUINE, WILLARD VAN ORMAN (1908–) Born in the USA, Quine is the foremost representative of naturalism in the second half of the twentieth century. His naturalism consists of an insistence upon a close connection or alliance between philosophical views and those of the natural sciences. Philosophy so construed is an activity within nature wherein nature examines itself. This contrasts with views which distinguish philosophy from science and place philosophy in a special transcendent position for gaining special knowledge. The methods of science are empirical; so Quine, who operates within a scientific perspective, is an empiricist, but with a difference. Traditional empiricism, as in Locke, Berkeley, Hume and some twentieth-century forms, takes impressions, ideas or sense-data as the basic units of thought. Quine’s empiricism, by contrast, takes account of the theoretical as well as the observational facets of science. The unit of empirical significance is not simple impressions (ideas) or even isolated individual observation sentences, but systems of beliefs. The broad theoretical constraints for choice between theories, such as explanatory power, parsimony, precision and so on, are foremost in this empiricism. He is a fallibilist,
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Page 733 since he holds that each individual belief in a system is in principle revisable. Quine proposes a new conception of observation sentences, a naturalized account of our knowledge of the external world, including a rejection of a priori knowledge, and he extends the same empiricist and fallibilist account to our knowledge of logic and mathematics. Quine confines logic to first-order logic and clearly demarcates it from set theory and mathematics. These are all empirical subjects when empiricism is understood in its Quinian form. They are internal to our system of beliefs that make up the natural sciences. The language of first-order logic serves as a canonical notation in which to express our ontological commitments. The slogan ‘To be is to be the value of a variable’ (1953: 15) encapsulates this project. Deciding which ontology to accept is also carried out within the naturalistic constraints of empirical science – our ontological commitments should be to those objects to which the best scientific theories commit us. On this basis Quine’s own commitments are to physical objects and sets. Quine is a physicalist and a Platonist, since the best sciences require physical objects and the mathematics involved in the sciences requires abstract objects, namely, sets. The theory of reference (which includes notions such as reference, truth and logical truth) is sharply demarcated from the theory of meaning (which includes notions such as meaning, synonymy, the analytic–synthetic distinction and necessity). Quine is the leading critic of notions from the theory of meaning, arguing that attempts to make the distinction between merely linguistic (analytic) truths and more substantive (synthetic) truths has failed. They do not meet the standards of precision which scientific and philosophical theories adhere to and which are adhered to in the theory of reference. He explores the limits of an empirical theory of language and offers a thesis of the indeterminacy of translation as further criticism of the theory of meaning. See also: NATURALIZED EPISTEMOLOGY Further reading Orenstein, A. (1977) Willard Van Orman Quine , Boston, MA: G.K. Hall. (An introduction to Quine’s thought and its place in twentieth-century philosophy.) Quine, W.V. (1953) From a Logical Point of View , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, revised, 1961. (An early collection of some of his most famous essays, including ‘New Foundations for Mathematical Logic’, ‘On What There Is’ and ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’. The 1961 edition incorporates many important revisions.) ALEX ORENSTEIN
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Page 734 R RABBINIC LAW see HALAKHAH RABBINIC THEOLOGY see THEOLOGY, RABBINIC RABELAIS, FRANÇOIS ( c .1483–1553) Rabelais, a French humanist and comic writer of the Renaissance, is best known for his chronicles of Gargantua and Pantagruel, in which coarse popular humour, fine Lucianic irony and staggering erudition are uniquely blended, and which claim to reveal, first appearances not-withstanding, ‘certain very high sacraments and dread mysteries, concerning not only our religion, but also our public and private life’. Rabelais has been subjected to the most contradictory interpretations and judgments. Like Erasmus, whom he admired, Rabelais was attacked in his own time by schismatic Protestants (most notably Calvin) and by reactionary Catholics (most notably the faculty of theology at Paris), as an obscene Lucianic atheist and a heretic. At the same time he was admired and supported by high-minded patrons including Francis I, the king’s devout sister Marguerite de Navarre, and Cardinal Jean Du Bellay. Even today Rabelais’ religion and philosophy are the subject of debate among scholars, while his work is known to non-specialists more for the ‘Rabelaisian’ ribaldry of a few pages than for the complex irony and profoundly humanistic design that characterize his works as a whole. See also: HUMANISM, RENAISSANCE Further reading Rabelais, F. (1532–52) Gargantua and Pantagruel , trans. J.M. Cohen, London and New York: Penguin, 1955. (The most accessible and faithful of modern English versions, unfortunately virtually unannotated. Like all editions includes the posthumous Cinquiesme Livre (1564) along with the authentic four books, Pantagruel (1532), Gargantua ( c .1534), Tiers Livre (1546) and Quart Livre (1552).) Screech, M.A. (1979) Rabelais , London, Duckworth and Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. (A useful, accessible episode-by-episode commentary on all of Rabelais’ literary works, distilling the fruits of a lifetime of scholarship by the most learned of modern Rabelais scholars.) EDWIN M. DUVAL RACE, THEORIES OF The first theories of race were attempts to explain why the peoples of Europe (or sometimes particular peoples within Europe) had developed a higher civilization than the peoples of other regions. They attributed inequality in development to different biological inheritance, undervaluing the importance of the learning process. Between the world wars social scientists demonstrated how many apparently natural differences, and attitudes towards other groups, were not inherited but learned behaviour. They asked instead why people should entertain false ideas about members of other groups. As the twentieth century comes to an end, it is claimed on the one hand that processes of racial group formation can be explained in the same terms as those used for explaining group phenomena in general. On the other hand it is maintained that the only possible theories are those explaining why, in particular societies and at particular times, racism assumes a given form. See also: ANTI-SEMITISM; MULTICULTURALISM Further reading Banton, M. (1983) Racial and Ethnic Competition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; repr. Aldershot: Gregg Revivals, 1992. (Pages 15–31 for the development of ideas on race in the New World, 42–50 and 78–99 for early social science theories.) MICHAEL BANTON RADBRUCH, GUSTAV (1878–1949) Gustav Radbruch is an emblematic figure in twentieth-century German legal philosophy and legal science. His particular blending of legal philosopher, dogmatist and politician, and his personal history, interwoven with the tragedy of the Weimar Republic and the rebirth of a democratic Germany after the Nazi horror, have given him special prestige and influence on both constitutional and ordinary jurisprudence in Germany. Some of Radbruch’s theses, like the one in his well-known article ‘Gesetzliches
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Page 735 Unrecht und übergesetzliches Recht’ (1946 – translatable as ‘Statutory Non-law and Suprastatutory Law’), remain highly topical in German universities and courts. See also: LAW, PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Stone, J. (1965) Human Law and Human Justice , London: Stevens and Sons. (A thoughtful account of Radbruch’s work, especially on justice in relation to law, is to be found at pp. 231–57, with further useful references.) MASSIMO LA TORRE RADHAKRISHNAN, SARVEPALLI (1888–1975) As a modern interpreter of Indian thought to Western scholars and a major influence on later Indian thinkers, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan’s teaching, writing and worldwide lecturing introduced the West to Indian religion and philosophy as essentially an all-inclusive monism. He was actively committed to participation in Indian and international society as an educator, statesman and leader of the Indian republic and defended Hinduism against Western critics as essentially tolerant, world-affirming, progressive and socially and politically conscious. Radhakrishnan’s neo-Advaita was based on one major strand of Indian monism with modifications based on assumptions from his education in Christian institutions. While maintaining that the Absolute is identical with one’s true self, he emphasized the reality of the universe. The truly religious person, he argued, does not flee the world but withdraws to attain personal realization and returns to apply the insight thereby gained to better society. See also: MONISM, INDIAN Further reading Minor, R.N. (1987) Radhakrishnan: A Religious Biography , Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. (Introduces his thought by placing it in the context of his life with a complete bibliography of Radhakrishnan’s writings and secondary literature.) Radhakrishnan, S. (1929) An Idealist View of Life , London: Allen & Unwin. (Collected lectures which present his most systematic argument.) ROBERT N. MINOR RADICAL ARISTOTELIANISM see AVERROISM RADICAL TRANSLATION AND RADICAL INTERPRETATION Radical translation is the setting of a thought experiment conceived by W.V. Quine in the late 1950s. In that setting a linguist undertakes to translate into English some hitherto unknown language – one which is neither historically nor culturally linked to any known language. It is further supposed that the linguist has no access tobilinguals versed in thetwo languages, English and (what Quine called) ‘Jungle’. Thus, the only empirical data the linguist has to go on in constructing a ‘Jungle-to-English’ translation manual are instances of the native speakers’ behaviour in publicly recognizable circumstances. Reflecting upon the fragmentary nature ofthese data,Quine drawsthe following conclusions: It is very likely that the theoretical sentences of ‘Jungle’ can be translated as wholes into English in incompatible yet equally acceptable ways. In other words, translation of theoretical sentences is indeterminate. On the assumption that a sentence and its translation share the same meaning, the import of indeterminacy of translation is indeterminacy of meaning: the meanings of theoretical sentences of natural languages are not fixed by empirical data. The fact is, the radical translator is bound to impose about as much meaning as they discover. This result (together with the dictum ‘no entity without identity’) undermines the idea that propositions are meanings of sentences. Neither the question of which ‘Jungle’ expressions are to count as terms nor the question of what object(s), if any, a ‘Jungle’ term refers to can be answered by appealing merely to the empirical data. In short, the empirical data do not fix reference. The idea of radical interpretation was developed by Donald Davidson in the 1960s and 1970s as a modification and extension of Quine’s idea of radical translation. Quine is concerned with the extent to which empirical data determine the meanings of sentences of a natural language. In the setting of radical interpretation, Davidson is concerned with a different question, the question of what a person could know that would enable them to interpret another’s language. For example, what could one know that would enable the interpretation of the German sentence ‘Es regnet’ as meaning that it is raining? The knowledge required
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Page 736 for interpretation differs from the knowledge required for translation, for one could know that ‘Es regnet’ is translated as ‘Il pleut’ without knowing the meaning (the interpretation) of either sentence. Beginning with the knowledge that the native speaker holds certain sentences true when in certain publicly recognizable circumstances, Davidson’s radical interpreter strives to understand the meanings of those sentences. Davidson argues that this scenario reveals that interpretation centres on one’s having knowledge comparable to an empirically verified, finitely based, recursive specification of the truthconditions for an infinity of sentences – a Tarski-like truth theory. Thus, Quine’s radical translation and Davidson’s radical interpretation should not be regarded as competitors, for although the methodologies employed in the two contexts are similar, the two contexts are designed to answer different questions. Moreover, interpretation is broader than translation; sentences that cannot be translated can still be interpreted. See also: DAVIDSON, D.; QUINE, W.V. Further reading Davidson, D. (1984a) Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (A collection containing some of Davidson’s key essays on radical interpretation.) Quine, W.V. (1960) Word and Object, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (See Chapter 2, ‘Translation and meaning’, for discussion of radical translation.) ROGER F. GIBSON AL-RAHIM, QUTB AL-DIN AHMAD see SHAH WALI ALLAH (QUTB AL-DIN AHMAD AL-RAHIM) RAHNER, KARL (1904–84) The German theologian Karl Rahner sought to offer an account of the Christian faith that would be credible to the modern mind. His early philosophical works lay the foundation for this theological project. Using both the method and categories of the early Heidegger, Rahner placed the thought of the medieval philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas in conversation with modern philosophy. He asked of Aquinas’ epistemology Kant’s question about the conditions of human subjectivity which make knowledge possible. Rahner argued that Aquinas’ description of knowledge and human freedom requires, as its necessary condition, that the subject possess an openness to a universal horizon of being, an openness to God. There is, in the structure of subjectivity, a constitutive, experiential, a priori relationship with the divine mystery. While this openness occurs within an individual’s self-awareness, it is always mediated by and interpreted through the objects, people, language and ideas that make up one’s historical context (the categorical). In his theology, Rahner argued that the true nature of humanity’s relationship with God had been revealed by Jesus to be one of absolute nearness. Rahner rendered Christian doctrines credible by correlating them with the transcendental experience of a God who is near. Further reading Rahner, K. (1975) A Rahner Reader, ed. G. McCool, New York: Seabury. (An anthology, with excellent introductions by the editor, of Rahner’s philosophical and theological works.) Vorgrimler, H. (1986) Understanding Karl Rahner: An Introduction to His Life and Thought, New York: Crossroad. (An excellent introduction to Rahner’s thought.) JACK A. BONSOR RAMAKRISHNA MOVEMENT Although the Ramakrishna Movement was born in Bengal and influenced by Christian missionary activity and Western Orientalism, its understanding of Hinduism has become the standard for modern educated Indians. Drawing on the spiritual inspiration of its guru, Sri Ramakrishna (1836–86), and the dynamic preaching of his main disciple, Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902), the Ramakrishna Order has founded centres throughout India and the West. Calling his system ‘Practical Vedānta’, Vivekananda laid claim to the classical Advaita Vedānta associated with Śankara. Unlike Śankara, though, Vivekananda elevated selfless social work to a spiritual path equal in value to meditation, devotion and gnosis. The swamis of the order combine traditional Hindu religious practice with the administration of educational and medical institutions on the model of Christian missions. Vivekananda’s vision of Indian culture as united and renewed by his humanistic Hinduism has inspired other gurus as well as Hindu nationalists. See also: VEDĀNTA Further reading Chatterjee, P. (1993) The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
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Page 737 (Secular Indian view of Vivekananda as a cultural nationalist.) Müller, F.M. (1899) Ramakrishna: His Life and Sayings, Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1984. (Reprint of MuÈ ller’s understanding and digest of the movement as it was forming in the 1890s.) THOMAS L. BRYSON RĀMĀNUJA (d. circa 1137) A south Indian Brahman, Rāmānuja was the theistic exegete of the Vedānta who propounded a doctrine which came to be known as viśiṣṭādvaita or ‘qualified monism’. As such, he is often said to be the founder of the most prominent of the four schools of the Vaishnava religion, the Śrīsampradāya, although in fact he considered himself to be a participant in an already ancient tradition. Rāmānuja’s version of Vedānta challenges the uncompromising non-dualism of Śaṇkara. See also: MONISM, INDIAN; VEDĀNTA Further reading Radhakrishnan, S. (1928) The Vedānta According to Śaṇkara and Rāmānuja, London: Allen & Unwin. (Useful for comparison; though dated, this book has not lost its value.) JAN K. BRZEZINSKI RAMÉE, PIERRE DE LA see RAMUS, PETRUS RAMSEY, FRANK PLUMPTON (1903–30) Before the British mathematician Frank Ramsey died at the age of 26 he did an extraordinary amount of pioneering work, in economics and mathematics as well as in logic and philosophy. His major contributions to the latter are as follows. (1) He produced the definitive version of Bertrand Russell’s attempted reduction of mathematics to logic. (2) He produced the first quantitative theory of how we make decisions, for example about going to the station to catch a train. His theory shows how such decisions depend on the strengths of our beliefs (that the train will run) and desires (to catch it), and uses this dependence to define general measures of belief and desire. This theory also underpins his claim that what makes induction reasonable is its being a reliable way of forming true beliefs, and it underpins his equation of knowledge generally with reliably formed true beliefs. (3) He used the equivalence between believing a proposition and believing that it is true to define truth in terms of beliefs. These in turn he proposed to define by how they affect our actions and whether those actions fulfil our desires. (4) He produced two theories of laws of nature. On the first of these, laws are the generalizations that would be axioms and theorems in the simplest true theory of everything. On the second, they are generalizations that lack exceptions and would if known be used to support predictions (‘I’ll starve if I don’t eat’) and hence decisions (‘I’ll eat’). (5) He showed how established, for example optical, phenomena can be explained by theories using previously unknown terms, like ‘photon’, which they introduce. (6) He showed why no grammatical distinction between subjects like ‘Socrates’ and predicates like ‘is wise’ entails any intrinsic difference between particulars and universals. See also: BELIEF; PROBABILITY THEORY AND EPISTEMOLOGY Further reading Ramsey, F.P. (1990a) Philosophical Papers , ed. D. H. Mellor, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Contains all Ramsey’s major philosophical papers. By permission of Cambridge University Press, this entry draws on the editor’s Introduction to this book. Page references for the quotations from Ramsey’s work refer to this edition; the dates given are those of first publication or, if published posthumously, of composition.) D.H. MELLOR RAMSEY, IAN THOMAS (1915–72) Ramsey was a British clergyman and theologian, who was appointed Bishop of Durham in 1966. His work developed within two parameters. One concerned God and language: he held that no literal statement could be true of God; all language concerning God must be metaphorical. Another concerned his epistemology: knowledge, he held, comes ultimately from experience – sensory, introspective, but also religious. Evidence that God exists comes from experience, and claims about God must be cast in nonliteral terms. Further reading Edwards, D.L. (1973) Ian Ramsey, Bishop of Durham , London: Oxford University Press. (A memoir.) Ramsey, I. (ed.) (1961) Prospect for Metaphysics , New York: The Philosophical Library. (An excellent collection of essays, including one by Ramsey on the prospects of metaphysical theology.) KEITH E. YANDELL
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Page 738 RAMUS, PETRUS (1515–72) Petrus Ramus, for many years a professor of philosophy and eloquence at the University of Paris, wrote textbooks and controversial works in grammar, logic, rhetoric, mathematics, physics and philosophy. He was also a university reformer. His followers were prolific with commentaries, Ramist analyses of classical texts and handbooks of their own. His logical works and those of his school exercised a large influence between 1550 and 1650. His formation was humanist, in that he attacked scholasticism and encouraged the study (and logical analysis) of classical texts, as Agricola, Sturm and Melanchthon had done. But he was far more independent-minded than them, a stern critic of the textbooks of Aristotle and Cicero, as well as an admirer of their style and intellect. His most important innovation was the method, a theory of organization which he used to simplify his textbooks. He emphasized the need for learning to be comprehensible and useful, with a particular stress on the practical aspect of mathematics. His critics would say he oversimplified. He was also a student of Gaulish pseudo-antiquities and an important proponent of the French language. His Dialectique (1555) was the first book on dialectic in French. See also: LOGIC, RENAISSANCE Further reading Mack, P. (1993) Renaissance Argument: Valla and Agricola in the Traditions of Rhetoric and Dialectic, Leiden: Brill, 334–55. (Details Agricola’s influence on Ramus.) PETER MACK RAND, AYN (1905–82) Ayn Rand was a Russian-born US novelist and philosopher who exerted considerable influence in the conservative and libertarian intellectual movements in the post-war USA. Rand’s ideas were expressed mainly through her novels; she set forth a view of morality as based in rational self-interest and in political philosophy defended an unrestrained form of capitalism. Further reading Den Uyl, D.J. and Rasmussen, D. (eds) (1984) The Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand , Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press. CHANDRAN KUKATHAS RANDOMNESS The fundamental intuition underlying randomness is the absence of order or pattern. To cash out this intuition, philosophers and scientists employ five approaches to randomness. (1) Randomness as the output of a chance process. Thus an event is random if it is the output of a chance process. Moreover, a sequence of events constitutes a random sample if all events in the sequence derive from a single chance process and no event in the sequence is influenced by the others. (2) Randomness as mimicking chance. Statisticians frequently wish to obtain a random sample (in the sense of (1)) according to some specified probability distribution. Unfortunately, a chance process corresponding to this probability distribution may be hard to come by. In this case a statistician may employ a computer simulation to mimic the desired chance process (for example, a random number generator). Randomness qua mimicking chance is also known as pseudo-randomness. (3) Randomness via mixing. Consider the following situation: particles are concentrated in some corner of a fluid; forces act on the fluid so that eventually the particles become thoroughly mixed throughout the fluid, reaching an equilibrium state. Here randomness is identified with the equilibrium state reached via mixing. (4) Randomness as a measure of computational complexity. Computers are ideally suited for generating bit strings. The length of the shortest program that generates a given bit string, as well as the minimum time it takes for a program to generate the string, both assign measures of complexity to the strings. The higher the complexity, the more random the string. (5) Randomness as pattern-breaking. Given a specified collection of patterns, an object is random if it breaks all the patterns in the collection. If, on the other hand, it fits at least one of the patterns in the collection, then it fails to be random. Further reading Hacking, I. (1965) Logic of Statistical Inference , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (A good discussion of what statisticians mean by randomness in the sense of chance.) WILLIAM A. DEMBSKI RASHDALL, HASTINGS (1858–1924) Hastings Rashdall lectured in theology at Oxford before becoming Dean of Carlisle. He was a utilitarian in ethics, an idealist in metaphysics and a Christian monotheist in religion. His history of medieval
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Page 739 important part of the development of that ethical theory beyond its original version in Bentham and Mill. His religious metaphysic strongly opposed the influential nonmonotheistic idealism of F.H. Bradley. Further reading Rashdall, H. (1930) God and Man, Oxford: Blackwell. (Chapters, historical and systematic, on various issues in philosophical theology.) KEITH E. YANDELL RATIONAL BELIEFS To the extent that a belief is rational, it ought to be held, other things being equal; irrational beliefs should not be held. From traditional epistemological perspectives, the obligation here is narrow, concerning only good reasons for acceptance that constitute sufficient justification or warrant. Recent epistemological trends broaden the viewpoint to include also practical considerations that enter into other rational decisions, such as best use of the agent’s limited resources. A related but weaker conception of rationality appears in philosophy of mind as a necessary coherence requirement on personal identity – roughly, ‘No rationality, no agent’. Such agent-constitutive rationality standards are more lenient than normative epistemic standards, since agents’ belief sets can and often do fall short of epistemically uncriticizable rationality without the agents thereby ceasing to qualify as having minds. Finally, at the widest perspective, long-standing sceptical lines of challenge to rationality of the entire structure of human belief-forming procedures conclude that we can never have the slightest good reason to accept even our most central beliefs. Recent approaches that ‘naturalize’ epistemology into a branch of science tend to exclude such general doubts as insignificant or meaningless; but if distinctively philosophical questions in fact do not fully reduce to regular scientific ones, sceptical-type rationality challenges may instead remain a permanent part of the human condition. See also: NATURALIZED EPISTEMOLOGY; REASONS FOR BELIEF Further reading Stich, S. (1990) The Fragmentation of Reason , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (A relativist theory of rationality; a good overview.) CHRISTOPHER CHERNIAK RATIONAL CHOICE THEORY Rational choice theory is the descendant of earlier philosophical political economy. Its core is the effort to explain and sometimes to justify collective results of individuals acting from their own individual motivations – usually their own self interest, but sometimes far more general concerns that can be included under the rubric of preferences. The resolute application of the assumption of self-interest to social actions and institutions began with Hobbes and Machiavelli, who are sometimes therefore seen as the figures who divide modern from early political philosophy. Machiavelli commended the assumption of self interest to the prince; Hobbes applied it to everyone. Their view of human motivation went on to remake economics through the work of Mandeville and Adam Smith. And it was plausibly a major factor in the decline of virtue theory, which had previously dominated ethics for many centuries. Game theory was invented almost whole by the mathematician von Neumann and the economist Morgenstern during the Second World War. Their theory was less a theory that made predictions or gave explanations than a framework for viewing complex social interactions. It caught on with mathematicians and defence analysts almost immediately, with social psychologists much later, and with economists and philosophers later still. But it has now become almost necessary to state some problems game theoretically in order to keep them clear and to relate them to other analyses. The game-theory framework represents ranges of payoffs that players can get from their simultaneous or sequential moves in games in which they interact. Moves are essentially choices of strategies, and outcomes are the intersections of strategy choices. If you and I are in a game, both of us typically depend on our own and on the other’s choices of strategies for our payoffs. The most striking advance in economics in the twentieth century is arguably the move from cardinal to ordinal value theory. The change had great advantages for resolving certain classes of problems but it also made many tasks more difficult. For example, the central task of aggregation from individual to collective preferences or utility could be done – at least in principle – as a matter of mere arithmetic in the cardinal system. In that system, Benthamite utilitarianism was the natural theory for welfare economics. In the ordinal system, however, there was no obvious way to aggregate from individual to collective preferences. We could do what
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Page 740 Pareto said was all that could be done: we could optimize by making those (Pareto) improvements that made at least one person better off but no one worse off. But we could not maximize. In his impossibility theorem, Arrow (1951) showed that, under reasonable conditions, there is no general method for converting individual to collective orderings. After game theory and the Arrow impossibility theorem, the next major contribution to rational choice theory was the economic theory of democracy of Downs. Downs assumed that everyone involved in the democratic election system is primarily self interested. Candidates are interested in their own election; citizens are interested in getting policies adopted that benefit themselves. From this relatively simple assumption, however, he deduced two striking results that ran counter to standard views of democracy. In a two-party system, parties would rationally locate themselves at the centre of the voter distribution; and citizens typically have no interest in voting or in learning enough to vote in their interests even if they do vote. The problem of the rational voter can be generalized. Suppose that I am a member of a group of many people who share an interest in having some good provided but that no one of us values its provision enough to justify paying for it all on our own. Suppose further that, if every one of us pays a proportionate share of the cost, we all benefit more than we pay. Unfortunately, however, my benefit from my contribution alone might be less than the value of my contribution. Hence, if our contributions are strictly voluntary, I may prefer not to contribute a share and merely to enjoy whatever follows from the contributions of others. I am then a free-rider. If we all rationally attempt to be free-riders, our group fails and none of us benefits. A potentially disturbing implication of the game theoretic understanding of rationality in interactive choice contexts, of the Arrow impossibility theorem, of the economic theory of democracy and of the logic of collective action is that much of philosophical democratic theory, which is usually normative, is irrelevant to our possibilities. The things these theories often tell us we should be doing cannot be done. See also: DECISION AND GAME THEORY; SOCIAL CHOICE Further reading Arrow, K.J. (1951) Social Choice and Individual Values , New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2nd edn, 1963. (The master’s presentation, with responses to early criticisms and extensions.) Taylor, M. (1987) The Possibility of Cooperation , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Rationalchoice vision of anarchy, collective action, and the state with discussions of Hobbes and other classical thinkers.) RUSSELL HARDIN RATIONALISM Rationalism is the view that reason, as opposed to, say, sense experience, divine revelation or reliance on institutional authority, plays a dominant role in our attempt to gain knowledge. Different forms of rationalism are distinguished by different conceptions of reason and its role as a source of knowledge, by different descriptions of the alternatives to which reason is opposed, by different accounts of the nature of knowledge, and by different choices of the subject matter, for example, ethics, physics, mathematics, metaphysics, relative to which reason is viewed as the major source of knowledge. The common application of the term ‘rationalist’ can say very little about what two philosophers have in common. Suppose we mean by reason our intellectual abilities in general, including sense experience. To employ reason is to use our individual intellectual abilities to seek evidence for and against potential beliefs. To fail to employ reason is to form beliefs on the basis of such non-rational processes as blind faith, guessing or unthinking obedience to institutional authority. Suppose too that we conceive of knowledge as true, warranted belief, where warrant requires that a belief be beyond a reasonable doubt though not beyond the slightest doubt. Here, then, is a version of rationalism: reason is the major source of knowledge in the rational sciences. This is a weak version of rationalism which simply asserts that our individual intellectual abilities, as opposed to blind faith and so on, are the major source of knowledge in the natural sciences. It is clearly not very controversial and is widely accepted. Suppose, however, we take reason to be a distinct faculty of knowledge distinguished from sense experience in particular. To employ reason is to grasp self-evident truths or to deduce additional conclusions from them. Suppose we conceive of knowledge as true, warranted belief, where warrant now requires that a belief be beyond even the slightest doubt. Let us also extend our attention to metaphysics and issues
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Page 741 such as the existence of God, human free will and immortality. Here is a much stronger version of rationalism which asserts that the intellectual grasp of self-evident truths and the deduction of ones that are not self-evident is the major source of true beliefs warranted beyond even the slightest doubt in the natural sciences and metaphysics. Clearly it is highly controversial and not very widely accepted. The term ‘rationalism’ has been used to cover a range of views. Scholars of the Enlightenment generally have in mind something like the first example – a general confidence in the powers of the human intellect, in opposition to faith and blind acceptance of institutional authority, as a source of knowledge – when they refer to the rationalist spirit of the period and the work of such philosophers as Voltaire. Most frequently, the term ‘rationalism’ is used to refer to views, like the second one above, which introduce reason as a distinct faculty of knowledge in contrast to sense experience. Rationalism is then opposed to empiricism, the view that sense experience provides the primary basis for knowledge. This entry concentrates on this still very general form of rationalism, reserving the term ‘rationalism’ for it alone. See also: EMPIRICISM; ENLIGHTENMENT, CONTINENTAL Further reading Chisholm, R. (1966) Theory of Knowledge , Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 3rd edn, 1989. (General introduction to epistemology containing a detailed analysis of the rationalist view that reason alone can provide knowledge of the external world.) Stich, S. (1975) Innate Ideas, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. (A discussion of innate ideas and related topics.) PETER J. MARKIE RATIONALITY AND CULTURAL RELATIVISM Under what conditions may we judge the practices or beliefs of another culture to be rationally deficient? Is it possible that cultures can differ so radically as to embody different and even incommensurable modes of reasoning? Are norms of rationality culturally relative, or are there cultureindependent norms of rationality that can be used to judge the beliefs and practices of all human cultures? In order to be in a position to make judgments about the rationality of another culture, we must first understand it. Understanding a very different culture itself raises philosophical difficulties. How do we acquire the initial translation of the language of the culture? Can we use our categories to understand the social practices of another culture, for instance, our categories of science, magic and religion? Or would the mapping of our categories on to the practices of culturally distant societies yield a distorted picture of how they construct social practices and institutions? A lively debate has revolved around these questions. Part of the debate involves clarifying the difficult concepts of rationality and relativism. What sort of judgments of rationality are appropriate? Judgments about how agents’ reasons relate to their actions? Judgments about how well agents’ actions and social practices conform to the norms of their culture? Or judgments about the norms of rationality of cultures as such? Can relativism be given a coherent formulation that preserves the apparent disagreements for which it is meant to account? Can there be incommensurable cultures, such that one culture could not understand the other? According to Donald Davidson’s theory of interpretation, radical translation requires the use of a principle of charity that in effect rules out the possibility of incommensurable cultures. If this result is accepted, then a strong form of cultural relativism concerning norms of rationality is also ruled out. Davidson’s theory, some argue, does not eliminate the possibility of attributing irrational beliefs and practices to agents in other cultures, and thus still leaves some room for debate about how to understand and evaluate such beliefs and practices. Three positions frame the debate. The intellectualist position holds that judgments of rationality are in order across cultures. The symbolist and functionalist positions, here taken together, try to avoid such judgments by attributing functions or symbolic meanings to cultural practices that are generally not understood as such by the agents. The fideist position, wary of too easily being ethnocentric, assumes a more relativist stance with regard to crosscultural judgments of rationality. See also: EPISTEMIC RELATIVISM; MORAL RELATIVISM Further reading Davidson, D. (1984) Truth and Interpretation, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (A collection including most of Davidson’s important essays on radical interpretation.) Hollis, M. and Lukes, S. (eds) (1982) Rationality and Relativism, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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Page 742 (An important collection including papers by Hollis, Taylor, Sperber, Horton and Lukes. Good bibliography.) LAWRENCE H. SIMON RATIONALITY OF BELIEF Humans, claimed Aristotle, are rational animals. However, recent psychological studies purport to show that people systematically deviate from canons of logic, probability theory, decision theory and statistics. Interpretations of these studies differ about the nature of the errors: on some views, there are no real errors at all; on others, subjects are distracted from applying the proper formal rules by, for example, the influence of conversational expectations. A common suggestion is that the reasoning subjects display is nearly optimal, once we take account of our severe cognitive limits in realistic circumstances or in our evolutionary history. These diverse views reveal two opposed tendencies in constructing a theory of rationality. One favours the formal rules which, if violated in real life, could have serious consequences. The other holds that people’s actual practice provides the only standard. A popular model, incorporating both tendencies, holds that those principles or norms are justified that yield the best balance between our reasoning intuitions and the demands of theory or system. See also: RATIONAL BELIEFS; RATIONALITY AND CULTURAL RELATIVISM Further reading Moser, P. (ed.) (1990) Rationality in Action: Contemporary Approaches, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Includes some of the most important early and recent essays on the nature and applicability of decision theory and related problems, including the prisoner’s dilemma, Newcomb’s problem, and the Arrow-Sen results on social choice.) Nisbett, R. and Ross, L. (1980) Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgment , Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. (Highly readable. A classic and comprehensive account of social judgment research, including work on heuristics, attribution and limits on our self-knowledge. Extensive references.) JONATHAN E. ADLER RATIONALITY, PRACTICAL Whereas theoretical reason is that form of reason that is authoritative over belief, practical reason is that form of reason that applies, in some way, to action: by either directing it, motivating it, planning it, evaluating it or predicting it. Accounts of practical reason include theories of how we should determine means to the ends we have; how we should define the ends themselves; how we should act given that we have a multiplicity of ends; how requirements of consistency should govern our actions; and how moral considerations should be incorporated in our deliberations about how to act. Economics has provided, in recent times, what many regard as the most compelling portrait of practical reason, called ‘expected utility theory’ (hereafter ‘EU theory’). On this theory, rational action is that action which yields the highest expected utility, which is calculated by measuring the utility – or the ‘goodness’ or ‘badness’ – of the possible outcomes of the action, multiplying the utility of each outcome by the probability that it will occur, and, finally, adding together the results for all the possible outcomes of each action. The action that has the highest expected utility is the rational action. Other technical representations of practical reason have been explored in the branch of social science called ‘game theory’, which studies ‘strategic’ situations in which the action that is rational for any agent depends in part on what other agents do. A theory of practical reason can have one or more of several different goals. If it sets out how human beings actually reason, it functions as a descriptive theory of reasoning. If it sets out a conception of how our reasoning ought to proceed, it functions as a normative theory of reasoning. Theories of reason can also be about actions themselves: if a theory presents a conception of the way our actions should be intelligible or consistent or useful (regardless of the quality of the deliberation that preceded it), it functions as a (normative) theory of behavioural rationale. If it merely presents an account of consistent action that allows us to predict the behaviour of an agent whose previous actions fit this account of consistency, it functions as a descriptive theory. One might say that whereas theoretical reason is supposed to pursue truth, practical reason is supposed to pursue some sort of good or value in human action. Theories that take rational action to be that which achieves, furthers or maximizes (what is regarded as) good, are consequentialist or teleological theories. Theories that believe rational action must sometimes be understood as action that has an
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Page 743 intrinsic value or ‘rightness’ regardless of how much good it will accomplish or manifest, are nonconsequentialist or non-teleological conceptions of reason. If the theory defines reason as that which serves ends defined by something other than itself, it is an instrumental conception. If it allows reason to have a non-instrumental role, itself capable of establishing at least some of our ends of action, it is setting out a non-instrumental conception. Theories of practical reason that recognize the existence of a special moral reasoning procedure tend to represent that procedure as non-instrumental. Philosophers have disagreed about whether practical reason gives us a way of reasoning prior to choice that can actually motivate us to behave in the way that it directs. Many believe it lacks motivational power, so that it can only give us authoritative directives that must be motivated by something else (for example, by our desires). Finally, the study of practical reason also considers the variety of ways in which one can fall short of being rational; and issues about the nature and possibility of irrational ‘weakness of will’ have been central to this discussion. See also: IMPERATIVE LOGIC; RATIONALITY AND CULTURAL RELATIVISM Further reading Gardenfors, P. and Sahlin, N. (1988) Decision, Probability and Utility: Selected Readings , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (A collection of classic essays in rational choice theory, including works by Allais, Ellsberg, Savage, Ramsey and later theorists. An excellent resource.) Parfit, D. (1984) Reasons and Persons, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (A wide-ranging discussion of practical reason that explores instrumental and prudential reasoning, and personal identity.) JEAN HAMPTON RAVAISSON-MOLLIEN, JEAN-GASPARD FÉLIX LACHER (1813–1900) Félix Ravaisson was a French philosopher, born in Namur. Apart from his three main works – Rapport sur la philosophie en France au dix-neuvième siècle (Report on Philosophy in France in the Nineteenth Century) (1863), Mètaphysique d’Aristote (Metaphysics of Aristotle) (1837, 1846) and De l’habitude (On Habit) (1838) – his ideas can mainly be found in articles, fragments and short passages, such as those collected in Testament philosophique (Philosophical Testament) (1901) or others that are still unpublished. None the less, Henri-Louis Bergson, who succeeded him at the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, according to custom gave a synthetic account of Ravaisson’s work, in his Notice sur la vie et les oeuvres de M. Fèlix Ravaisson-Mollien (Account of the Life and Works of Mr Fèlix RavaissonMollien) (1934). Bergson insisted on the importance of artistic research in Ravaisson’s thought, and one can indeed explain his philosophy as beginning from a meditation on works of art and on beauty. The importance of this starting point can be seen in the privileged role he gives to synthesis in all explanation, for in an artistic masterpiece, it is the whole that allows for comprehension of the parts. Ravaisson gave this idea a metaphysical dimension. See also: BEAUTY Further reading Ravaisson, F. (1901) Testament philosophique , ed. X. Léon, in Revue de métaphysique et de morale , 1– 31. (This work consolidates the fragments of Ravaisson’s thought and brings to light the philosophical importance of free will, emotion and love.) Translated from the French by Robert Stern PIERRETTE BONET RAWLS, JOHN (1921–) The British philosopher Rawls’ main work, A Theory of Justice (1971), presents a liberal, egalitarian, moral conception – ‘justice as fairness’ – designed to explicate and justify the institutions of a constitutional democracy. The two principles of justice outlined in this text affirm the priority of equal basic liberties over other political concerns, and require fair opportunities for all citizens, directing that inequalities in wealth and social positions maximally benefit the least advantaged. Rawls develops the idea of an impartial social contract to justify these principles: Free persons, equally situated and ignorant of their historical circumstances, would rationally agree to them in order to secure their equal status and independence, and to pursue freely their conceptions of the good. In Political Liberalism (1993), his other major text, Rawls revises his original argument for justice as fairness to make it more compatible with the pluralism of liberalism. He argues that, assuming that different philosophical, religious and ethical views are inevitable in liberal society, the most reasonable basis for
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Page 744 social unity is a public conception of justice based in shared moral ideas, including citizens’ common comception of themselves as free and equal moral persons. The stability of this public conception of justice is provided by an overlapping consensus; all the reasonable comprehensible philosophical, religious and ethical views can endorse it, each for their own specific reasons. See also: EQUALITY; RIGHTS Further reading Daniels, N. (ed.) (1989) Reading Rawls, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. (Collection of the major critical reactions to A Theory of Justice in the early 1970s by Hart, Dworkin, Daniels, Scanlon, Nagel, Hare, Sen and others.) Rawls, J. (1971) A Theory of Justice , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Rawls’ major work.) SAMUEL FREEMAN AL-RAZI, ABU BAKR MUHAMMAD IBN ZAKARIYYA’ (d. 925) Perhaps the most famous and widely respected Islamic authority on medicine in the medieval period, alRazi also aspired to a comparable achievement in philosophy and the other sciences such as alchemy. His success in these other subjects, however, was seldom recognized either in his own time or later; in philosophy, for example, more writers cite him for purposes of rejection and refutation than for admiration and emulation. However, his ideas were and are important. Chief among his positive contributions is his advocacy of a doctrine of equal aptitude in all humans, which grants no special role for unique and divinely favoured prophets and which recognizes the possibility of future progress in the advancement of knowledge. Philosophically, al-Razi was by his own admission a disciple of Socrates and Plato, much of whose teaching he knew on the basis of the latter’s Timaeus . Accordingly, he was noted for upholding the eternity of five primary principles, God, soul, time, matter and space, and for a concept of pleasure that sees it as the return to a normal harmony following a serious deviation or disruption which is itself pain. Further reading Goodman, L. (1996) ‘Muhammad ibn Zakariyya’ al-Razi’, in S.H. Nasr and O. Leaman (eds) History of Islamic Philosophy , London: Routledge, ch. 13, 198–215. (Description of the life and thought of the thinker, and the wider relevance of his ideas.) PAUL E. WALKER AL-RAZI, FAKHR AL-DIN (1149–1209) Imam Fakhr al-Din al-Razi was one of the outstanding figures in Islamic theology. Living in the second half of the sixth century AH (twelfth century AD), he also wrote on history, grammar, rhetoric, literature, law, the natural sciences and philosophy, and composed one of the major works of Qur’anic exegesis, the only remarkable gap in his output being politics. He travelled widely in the eastern lands of Islam, often engaging in heated polemical confrontations. His disputatious character, intolerant of intellectual weakness, frequently surfaces in his writings, but these are also marked by a spirit of synthesis and a profound desire to uncover the truth, whatever its source. A number of his metaphysical positions became well known in subsequent philosophical literature, being cited more often than not for the purposes of refutation. His prolixity and pedantic argumentation were often criticized, but he was widely considered the reviver of Islam in his century. See also; ISLAMIC THEOLOGY Further reading Kholeif, F. (1966) A Study on Fakhr al-Din al-Razi and His Controversies in Transoxania , Pensée Arabe et Musulmane 31, Beirut: Dar al-Machreq Éditeurs. (Arabic text and English translation of al-Razi’s text of sixteen questions (philosophical, logical, legal) broached with scholars in Transoxania; gives a good idea of al-Razi’s style. Also contains a list of al-Razi’s works.) JOHN COOPER REALISM AND ANTIREALISM The basic idea of realism is that the kinds of thing which exist, and what they are like, are independent of us and the way in which we find out about them; antirealism denies this. Most people find it natural to be realists with respect to physical facts: how many planets there are in the solar system does not depend on how many we think there are, or would like there to be, or how we investigate them; likewise, whether electrons exist or not depends on the facts, not on which theory we favour. However, it seems natural to be antirealist about humour: something’s being funny is very much a matter of whether we find it funny, and the idea that something might really be funny even though
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Page 745 nobody ever felt any inclination to laugh at it seems barely comprehensible. The saying that ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ is a popular expression of antirealism in aesthetics. An obviously controversial example is that of moral values; some maintain that they are real (or ‘objective’), others that they have no existence apart from human feelings and attitudes. This traditional form of the distinction between realism and its opposite underwent changes during the 1970s and 1980s, largely due to Michael Dummett’s proposal that realism and antirealism (the latter term being his own coinage) were more productively understood in terms of two opposed theories of meaning. Thus, a realist is one who would have us understand the meanings of sentences in terms of their truth-conditions (the situations that must obtain if they are to be true); an antirealist holds that those meanings are to be understood by reference to assertability-conditions (the circumstances under which we would be justified in asserting them). Further reading Dummett, M.A.E. (1963) ‘Realism’, in Truth and Other Enigmas , London: Duckworth, 145–65. (Seminal – and fairly difficult – paper.) Wright, C.J.G. (1987) Realism, Meaning and Truth , Oxford: Blackwell, 1–43. (The Introduction provides a wide-ranging survey of the issues, with antirealist slant; at times quite intricate. Useful bibliography.) EDWARD CRAIG REALISM IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF MATHEMATICS Mathematical realism is the view that the truths of mathematics are objective, which is to say that they are true independently of any human activities, beliefs or capacities. As the realist sees it, mathematics is the study of a body of necessary and unchanging facts, which it is the mathematician’s task to discover, not to create. These form the subject matter of mathematical discourse: a mathematical statement is true just in case it accurately describes the mathematical facts. An important form of mathematical realism is mathematical Platonism, the view that mathematics is about a collection of independently existing mathematical objects. Platonism is to be distinguished from the more general thesis of realism, since the objectivity of mathematical truth does not, at least not obviously, require the existence of distinctively mathematical objects. Realism is in a fairly clear sense the ‘natural’ position in the philosophy of mathematics, since ordinary mathematical statements make no explicit reference to human activities, beliefs or capacities. Because of the naturalness of mathematical realism, reasons for embracing anti-realism typically stem from perceived problems with realism. These potential problems concern our knowledge of mathematical truth, and the connection between mathematical truth and practice. The antirealist argues that the kinds of objective facts posited by the realist would be inaccessible to us, and would bear no clear relation to the procedures we have for determining the truth of mathematical statements. If this is right, then realism implies that mathematical knowledge is inexplicable. The challenge to the realist is to show that the objectivity of mathematical facts does not conflict with our knowledge of them, and to show in particular how our ordinary proof-procedures can inform us about these facts. See also: ANTIREALISM IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF MATHEMATICS; REALISM AND ANTIREALISM Further reading Benacerraf, P. and Putnam, H. (eds) (1964) Philosophy of Mathematics: Selected Readings , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd edn, 1983. (A useful collection of central papers in the field.) Field, H. (1980) Science Without Numbers , Oxford: Blackwell. (An argument that the usefulness of mathematics in physical science is no reason to hold that mathematical statements are true.) PATRICIA A. BLANCHETTE REASONS AND CAUSES Imagine being told that someone is doing something for a reason. Perhaps they are reading a spy novel, and we are told that their reason for doing so is that they desire to read something exciting and believe that spy novels are indeed exciting. We then have an explanation of the agent’s action in terms of the person’s reasons. Those who believe that reasons are causes think that such explanations have two important features. First, they enable us to make sense of what happens. Reading a spy novel is the rational thing for an agent to do if they have that particular desire and belief. Second, such explanations tell us about the causal origins of what happens. They tell us that the desires and
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Page 746 beliefs that allow us to make sense of actions cause those actions as well. The idea that reasons are causes has evident appeal. We ordinarily suppose that our reasons make a difference to what we do. In the case just described, for example, we ordinarily suppose that had the agent had appropriately different desires and beliefs then they would have acted differently: had the person desired to read something romantic instead of exciting, or had the person believed that spy novels are not exciting, a spy novel would not have been chosen. But if what they desire and believe makes a difference to what they do then the desires and beliefs that are those reasons must, it seems, be the cause of the person’s actions. Despite its evident appeal, however, the view that reasons are causes is not without its difficulties. These all arise because of the manifest differences between explanations in terms of reasons and causal explanations. See also: ACTION; INTENTION Further reading Davidson, D. (1963) ‘Actions, Reasons and Causes’, repr. in D. Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981. (Classic statement and defence of the claim that reasons are causes.) Dennett, D.C. (1987) The Intentional Stance , Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books. (Argues that we rationalize behaviour in order to make sense of what happens, but not in order to find out about the causal origins of what we do.) MICHAEL SMITH REASONS FOR BELIEF Reasons for believing something are one or another kind of ground for believing it. Some grounds provide evidence for a belief; others explain it; some are consciously known, others not. Philosophers are concerned with these and other aspects of reason, including the questions of whether reasons are also causes, whether they yield beliefs only by inference, and whether, by suitable reflection, believers can always become aware of the reasons for a belief they hold. See also: BELIEF; RATIONALITY OF BELIEF Further reading Moser, P.K. (1989) Knowledge and Evidence, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (A theory of the nature of reasons and evidence, how they justify, and how justification is connected with explanation.) ROBERT AUDI RECIPROCITY To reciprocate is to return good in proportion to the good one has received, or to retaliate proportionately for harms. The central, contested philosophical issues surrounding reciprocity are whether reciprocity is a fundamental moral principle or a subsidiary one; how we are to measure fittingness and proportionality; and whether the norm of reciprocity requires that we reciprocate for all the goods we receive, or only for the ones we invite. While most philosophers believe that reciprocity is a subsidiary principle which is unproblematic only in the context of fully voluntary transactions, there are significant minority views on this matter. See also: DESERT AND MERIT; EGOISM AND ALTRUISM Further reading Becker, L. (1986) Reciprocity , Boston, MA and London: Routledge; repr. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990. (Argues for the ‘wide’ view of reciprocity, namely that one owes a fitting and proportional return for all the good one receives, and not merely for the good actually accepted or invited.) LAWRENCE C. BECKER RECOGNITION The concept of recognition has played an important role in philosophy since ancient times, when the good life was thought to depend partly on being held in regard by others. Only Hegel, however, made recognition fundamental to his practical philosophy. He claimed that human self-consciousness depends on recognition, and that there are different levels of recognition: legal or moral recognition, and the forms of recognition constituted by love and the state. A similar tripartite distinction can be used to ground a plausible modern account of ethics. See also: FRIENDSHIP; MORAL AGENTS Further reading Williams, R. (1992) Recognition: Fichte and Hegel on the Other, Albany, NY: Sate University of New York Press. (An analysis of the concept of recognition in Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes as it
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Page 747 things right between us. Guilt is a moral remainder, a residue acknowledging an unexpiated wrong. Remainders offer us a limited redemption in revealing our appreciation that not everything has been made right. Forgiveness manifests compassion for wrongdoers, who may or may not deserve it. Questions arise about when, what and whom we can forgive, what forgiving achieves, and when we ought or ought not to forgive. Forgiveness has special value in personal relationships, enabling their renewal. Connections among punishment, repentance, forgiveness and regret (another remainder) are complex, sometimes paradoxical. Mercy often manifests forgiveness, as in pardons and amnesties. Yet we can also show mercy in administering rules where there has been no wrong. Is mercy unjust? Answers vary according to whether the case resembles a criminal offence or a civil suit. Grounded in others’ sufferings rather than their deeds, mercy has us see ourselves in them, but the value of doing so can be qualified by considerations of justice and of self-respect. Mercy and forgiveness sometimes evoke gratitude, appreciative acknowledgement of another’s goodwill. Gratitude can be deserved or misplaced. Debts of gratitude are paradoxical, giving rise to ethical questions. When do we owe more than emotional response? What does reciprocity require between unequals? Some paradoxes may be solved by understanding obligations of gratitude as like those of a trustee rather than those of a debtor. Guilt is emotional self-punishment (often relievable by forgiveness) which continues even after compensation, restitution or punishment by others. Questions arise about when it is rational and how it is related to shame, remorse, regret and repentance, which are also remainders. See also: FORGIVENESS Further reading Morris, H. (ed.) (1971) Guilt and Shame , Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. (Selections by Dostoevskii, Jaspers, Freud, Buber, Fingarette, Nietzsche, Rawls, Piers and Singer, Erikson, and Lynd; excellent place to begin.) Shakespeare, W. (1596/7) The Merchant of Venice , New York: Bantam, 1988, act IV, scene 1. (See Portia’s speech, beginning ‘The quality of mercy is not strained’, on the elective nature of showing mercy.) CLAUDIA FALCONER CARD RECURSION-THEORETIC HIERARCHIES In mathematics, a hierarchy is a ‘bottom up’ system classifying entities of some particular sort, a system defined inductively, starting with a ‘basic’ class of such entities, with further (‘higher’) classes of such entities defined in terms of previously defined (‘lower’) classes. Such a classification reflects complexity in some respect, one entity being less complex than another if it appears ‘earlier’ (‘lower’) then that other. Many of the hierarchies studied by logicians construe complexity as complexity of definition, placing such hierarchies within the purview of model theory; but even such notions of complexity are closely tied to species of computational complexity, placing them also in the purview of recursion theory. Further reading Hinman, P. (1978) Recursion-Theoretic Hierarchies , Berlin: Springer-Verlag. (A good text introducing a lot of this subject to the novice.) HAROLD HODES REDUCTION, PROBLEMS OF Reduction is a procedure whereby a given domain of items (for example, objects, properties, concepts, laws, facts, theories, languages, and so on) is shown to be either absorbable into, or dispensable in favour of, another domain. When this happens, the one domain is said to be ‘reduced’ to the other. For example, it has been claimed that numbers can be reduced to sets (and hence number theory to set theory), that chemical properties like solubility in water or valence have been reduced to properties of molecules and atoms, and that laws ofoptics arereducible to principles of electromagnetic theory. When one speaks of ‘reductionism’, one has in mind a specific claim to the effect that a particular domain (for example, the mental) is reducible to another (for example, the biological, the computational). The expression is sometimes used to refer to a global thesis to the effect that all the special sciences, for example chemistry, biology, psychology, are reducible ultimately to fundamental physics. Such a view is also known as the doctrine of the ‘unity of science’. See also: REDUCTIONISM IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND; SIMPLICITY (IN SCIENTIFIC THEORIES)
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Page 748 Further reading Causey, R.L. (1977) Unity of Science , Dordrecht: Reidel. (A useful and comprehensive account of reduction in science.) JAEGWON KIM REDUCTIONISM IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND Reductionism in the philosophy of mind is one of the options available to those who think that humans and the human mind are part of the natural physical world. Reductionists seek to integrate the mind and mental phenomena – fear, pain, anger and the like – with the natural world by showing them to be natural phenomena. Their inspirations are the famous reductions of science: of the heat of gases to molecular motion, of lightning to electric discharge, of the gene to the DNA molecule and the like. Reductionists hope to show a similar relationship between mental kinds and neurophysiological kinds. See also: REDUCTION, PROBLEMS OF Further reading Lycan, W.G. (1987) Consciousness, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (A fine and very clearly written example of contemporary functionalism.) KIM STERELNY REFERENCE It is usual to think that referential relations hold between language and thoughts on one hand, and the world on the other. The most striking example of such a relation is the naming relation, which holds between the name ‘Socrates’ and the famous philosopher Socrates. Indeed, some philosophers in effect restrict the vague word ‘reference’ to the naming relation, or something similar. Others use ‘reference’ broadly (as it is used in this entry) to cover a range of semantically significant relations that hold between various sorts of terms and the world: between ‘philosopher’ and all philosophers, for example. Other words used for one or other of these relations include ‘designation’, ‘denotation’, ‘signification’, ‘application’ and ‘satisfaction’. Philosophers often are interested in reference because they take it to be the core of meaning. Thus, the fact that ‘Socrates’ refers to that famous philosopher is the core of the name’s meaning and hence of its contribution to the meaning of any sentence – for example, ‘Socrates is wise’ – that contains the name. The name’s referent contributes to the sentence’s meaning by contributing to its truth-condition: ‘Socrates is wise’ is true if and only if the object referred to by ‘Socrates’ is wise. The first question that arises about the reference of a term is: what does the term refer to? Sometimes the answer seems obvious – for example, ‘Socrates’ refers to the famous philosopher – although even the obvious answer has been denied on occasions. On other occasions, the answer is not obvious. Does ‘wise’ refer to the property wisdom, the set of wise things, or each and every wise thing? Clearly, answers to this should be influenced by one’s ontology, or general view of what exists. Thus, a nominalist who thinks that properties do not really exist, and that talk of them is a mere manner of speaking, would not take ‘wise’ to refer to the property wisdom. The central question about reference is: in virtue of what does a term have its reference? Answering this requires a theory that explains the term’s relation to its referent. There has been a great surge of interest in theories of reference in this century. What used to be the most popular theory about the reference of proper names arose from the views of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell and became known as ‘the description theory’. According to this theory, the meaning of a name is given by a definite description – an expression of the form ‘the F ’ – that competent speakers associate with the name; thus, the meaning of ‘Aristotle’ might be given by ‘the last great philosopher of antiquity’. So the answer to our central question would be that a name refers to a certain object because that object is picked out by the name’s associated description. Around 1970, several criticisms were made of the description theory by Saul Kripke and Keith Donnellan; in particular, they argued that a competent speaker usually does not have sufficient knowledge of the referent to associate a reference-determining description. Under their influence, many adopted ‘the historical–causal theory’ of names. According to this theory, a name refers to its bearer in virtue of standing in an appropriate causal relation to the bearer. Description theories are popular also for words other than names. Similar responses were made to many of these theories in the 1970s. Thus, Kripke and Hilary Putnam rejected description theories of naturalkind terms like ‘gold’ and proposed historical–causal replacements. Many other words (for example, adjectives,
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Page 749 adverbs and verbs) seem to be referential. However we need not assume that all other words are. It seems preferable to see some words as syncategorematic, contributing structural elements rather than referents to the truthconditions and meanings of sentences. Perhaps this is the right way to view words like ‘not’ and the quantifiers (like ‘all’, ‘most’ and ‘few’). The referential roles of anaphoric (crossreferential) terms are intricate. These terms depend for their reference on other expressions in their verbal context. Sometimes they are what Peter Geach calls ‘pronouns of laziness’, going proxy for other expressions in the context; at other times they function like bound variables in logic. Geach’s argument that every anaphoric term can be treated in one of these two ways was challenged by Gareth Evans. Finally, there has been an interest in ‘naturalizing’ reference, explaining it in scientifically acceptable terms. Attempted explanations have appealed to one or more of three causal relations between words and the world: historical, reliable and teleological. See also: SEMANTICS Further reading Devitt, M. and Sterelny, K. (1998) Language and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Language, Oxford: Blackwell, 2nd edn. (Provides an introductory discussion of reference and of its significance for issues such as realism. Also includes an annotated guide to further reading.) Neale, S. (1990) Descriptions, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (A thorough defence of the Russellian approach to definite descriptions. Includes an excellent bibliography.) MICHAEL DEVITT RÉGIS, PIERRE-SYLVAIN (1632–1707) The French philosopher Régis helped to define and disseminate Cartesianism. He proselytized on its behalf, defended it against its critics and innovators, and wrote the systematic textbook for which Descartes had hoped. Although primarily an expositor of Descartes’ views, he sometimes developed them in creative ways that tended towards empiricism. He seems to have been led in this direction by Robert Desgabets who, while adhering to Descartes’ principles, consciously departed from what Descartes actually said in order to be ‘more Cartesian than Descartes himself’. The same may often be said of Régis. Further reading Watson, R.A. (1988) The Breakdown of Cartesian Metaphysics , Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 89–93. (Sees Régis as sharing the Cartesian failure to reconcile dualism with causal and epistemological likeness principles.) THOMAS M. LENNON REICHENBACH, HANS (1891–1953) Philosophy of science flourished in the twentieth century, partly as a result of extraordinary progress in the sciences themselves, but mainly because of the efforts of philosophers who were scientifically knowledgeable and who remained abreast of new scientific achievements. Hans Reichenbach was a pioneer in this philosophical development; he studied physics and mathematics in several of the great German scientific centres and later spent a number of years as a colleague of Einstein in Berlin. Early in his career he followed Kant, but later reacted against his philosophy, arguing that it was inconsistent with twentiethcentury physics. Reichenbach was not only a philosopher of science, but also a scientific philosopher. He insisted that philosophy should adhere to the same standards of precision and rigour as the natural sciences. He unconditionally rejected speculative metaphysics and theology because their claims could not be substantiated either a priori, on the basis of logic and mathematics, or a posteriori, on the basis of sense-experience. In this respect he agreed with the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle, but because of other profound disagreements he was never actually a positivist. He was, instead, the leading member of the group of logical empiricists centred in Berlin. Although his writings span many subjects, Reichenbach is best known for his work in two main areas: induction and probability, and the philosophy of space and time. In the former he developed a theory of probability and induction that contained his answer to Hume’s problem of the justification of induction. Because of his view that all our knowledge of the world is probabilistic, this work had fundamental epistemological significance. In philosophy of physics he offered epoch-making contributions to the foundations of the theory of relativity, undermining space and time as Kantian synthetic a priori categories. See also: SCIENTIFIC METHOD
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Page 750 Further reading Reichenbach, H. (1978) Hans Reichenbach: Selected Writings, 1909–1953 , ed. R. Cohen and M. Reichenbach, Dordrecht: Reidel. (All works appear in English; contains an excellent bibliography of Reichenbach’s writings.) Salmon, W. (ed.) (1979) Hans Reichenbach: Logical Empiricist, Dordrecht: Reidel. (A collection of critical essays on Reichenbach, with an extended introductory essay, ‘The Philosophy of Hans Reichenbach’, by the editor.) WESLEY C. SALMON REID, THOMAS (1710–1796) Thomas Reid, born at Strachan, Aberdeen, was the founder of the Scottish school of Common Sense philosophy. Educated at Marishal College, Aberdeen, he taught at King’s College, Aberdeen until appointed professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow. He was the co-founder of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society or ‘Wise Club’, which counted among its members George Campbell, John Stewart, Alexander Gerard and James Beattie. His most noteworthy early work, An Inquiry into the Human Mind: Or the Principles of Common Sense attracted the attention of David Hume and secured him his professorship. Other important works are Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785) and Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind (1788). Reid is not the first philosopher to appeal to common sense; Berkeley and Butler are notable British predecessors in this respect, in the discussions of perception and of free will respectively. It fell to Reid, however, to collect and systematize the deliverances of common sense – the first principles, upon the acceptance of which all justification depends – and to provide adequate criteria for that status. Reid insists we rightly rely on our admittedly fallible faculties of judgment, including the five senses, as well as memory, reason, the moral sense and taste, without need of justification. After all, we have no other resources for making judgments, to call upon in justification of this reliance. We cannot dispense with our belief that we are continually existing and sometimes fully responsible agents, influenced by motives rather than overwhelmed by passions or appetites. In Reid’s view major sceptical errors in philosophy arise from downgrading the five senses to mere inlets for mental images – ideas – of external objects, and from downgrading other faculties to mere capacitiesfor having such images or for experiencing feelings. This variety of scepticism ultimately reduces everything to a swirl of mental images and feelings. However we no more conceive such images than perceive or remember them; and our discourse, even in the case of fiction, is not about them either. Names signify individuals or fictional characters rather than images of them; when I envisage a centaur it is an animal I envisage rather than the image of an animal. In particular the information our five senses provide in a direct or noninferential manner is, certainly in the case of touch, about bodies in space. Reid thus seems to be committed to the position that our individual perceptual judgments are first principles in spite of his admission that our perceptual faculties are fallible. Moreover, moral and aesthetic judgments cannot be mere expressions of feeling if they are to serve their purposes; a moral assessor is not a ‘feeler’. Reid is therefore sure that there are first principles of morals, a view that scarcely fits the extent and degree of actual moral disagreement. Reid offers alternative direct accounts of perception, conception, memory and moral and aesthetic judgment. He stoutly defends our status as continuing responsible agents, claiming that the only genuine causality is agency and that although natural regularities are held to be causes they cannot be full-blooded causes. Continuing persons are not reducible to material entities subject to laws of nature, (pace Priestley); nor does the proper study of responsible agents belong within natural philosophy. Morals may be adequately systematized on a human rights basis according to which private property is not sacrosanct, once moral judgment is recognised to be based on first principles of morals. Judgments of beauty likewise rest on a body of first principles, even though Reid readily allows that there are no properties that all beautiful objects must have in common. See also: ABERDEEN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY; COMMON SENSE SCHOOL; ENLIGHTENMENT, SCOTTISH Further reading Dalgarno, M. and Matthews, E. (eds) (1989) The Philosophy of Thomas Reid, Dordrecht, Boston, MA and London: Kluwer. (Contains useful papers on perception, sensation, common sense, mind and action, aesthetics, moral and political obligation, as well as material on the historical context and a helpful bibliography. Invaluable for the serious student.)
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Page 751 Reid, T. (1788) Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind, Edinburgh. ROGER GALLIE REINACH, ADOLF (1883–1917) Adolf Reinach, a German philosopher of Jewish extraction, was born in Mainz and died on the battlefield in Flanders. He is of principal note as the inventor, in 1913, of a theory of speech acts (or ‘social acts’ to use Reinach’s own terminology) which in some respects surpasses the later work of thinkers such as J.L. Austin and Searle. Reinach was a leading member of the so-called Munich–Göttingen school of phenomenologists who were inspired by Husserl’s early realism and who rejected Husserl’s subsequent turn to ‘transcendental idealism’, drawing their inspiration rather from the more analytic orientation of thinkers such as Franz Brentano and other Austrian philosophers. See also: PHENOMENOLOGICAL MOVEMENT Further reading Mulligan, K. (ed.) (1987) Speech Act and Sachverhalt: Reinach and the Foundations of Realist Phenomenology , The Hague: Nijhoff. (Essays on Reinach’s work, particularly on his philosophy of language and law, with extensive bibliography.) BARRY SMITH REINCARNATION The doctrine of reincarnation teaches that each human being has been born and died, and again been born and died, over and over again in a beginningless process that will never end unless they become enlightened. The doctrine of karma asserts that right and wrong actions bring, respectively, positive and negative consequences. For monotheistic religious traditions that accept reincarnation and karma, each person beginninglessly depends on God, and karmic consequences are under God’s providential control; repentance and faith may lead to God graciously cancelling negative consequences. Nonmonotheistic religious traditions that embrace reincarnation and karma doctrine see karma as operating in terms of what is, in effect, a moral version of natural or causal law. Both sorts of religious tradition view escape from the reincarnation cycle – ‘the wheel’ – as the ultimate goal of one’s existence and as possible only if one can escape from having karmic consequences still coming at one of one’s deaths. Monotheistic traditions see escape as continuance of personal identity, and living in the presence of God (as in monotheistic Hinduism). Nonmonotheistic traditions range from seeing escape as continuance of personal identity in a disembodied condition of omniscience (Jainism, an atheistic religion), loss of all personal identity in entering a changeless nirvāṇa , or annihilation of all undesirable states but continued existence composed of only desirable states (as in different Buddhist traditions), or simply the realization of identity with a qualityless ultimate reality, so that there only apparently are either persons or reincarnations (as in Mahāyāna voidism and Advaita Vedānta). See also: KARMA AND REBIRTH, INDIAN CONCEPTIONS OF; SOUL, NATURE AND IMMORTALITY OF THE Further reading O’Flaherty, W.D. (1985) Karma and Rebirth in Classical Indian Traditions, Berkeley,CA: University of California Press. (Collection on the historical, social, religious and philosophical settings of reincarnation and karma doctrines; includes a long bibliography.) KEITH E. YANDELL REINHOLD, KARL LEONHARD (1757–1823) A catalyst in the rise of post-Kantian idealism, Reinhold popularized Kant’s critical philosophy by systematizing it in the form of a theory of consciousness. Reinhold shifted from one position to another, however, each time declaring his latest philosophical creed as ultimate. For this he was ridiculed by his more famous contemporaries, including Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, and his historical reputation suffered accordingly. Recent re-evaluations, however, suggest that there was considerable coherence to his philosophical wanderings. A sometime priest who converted to Protestantism, active freemason and popular teacher, Reinhold advocated political intervention in the promotion of enlightened practices. He steadfastly defended the French Revolution. See also: ENLIGHTENMENT, CONTINENTAL; GERMAN IDEALISM Further reading Reinhold, K.L. (1791) Über das Fundament des philosophischen Wissens (Concerning the Foundation of Philosophical Knowledge), Jena: Mauke; republished 1978, ed. W.H. Schrader, Hamburg, Meiner. (The translation of a substantial excerpt is included in G. di Giovanni and H.S. Harris (1985) Between Kant and Hegel: Texts in the Development of Post-Kantian Idealism ,
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Page 752 Albany,NY:State University of New York.) GEORGE DI GIOVANNI RELATIVISM Someone who holds that nothing is simply good, but only good for someone or from a certain point of view, holds a relativist view of goodness. Protagoras, with his dictum that ‘man is the measure of all things’, is often taken to be an early relativist. Quite common are relativism about aesthetic value, about truth in particular areas such as religious truth, and (arising from anthropological theory) about rationality. There are also a number of ways of answering the question ‘relative to what?’ Thus something might be said to be relative to the attitudes or faculties of each individual, or to a cultural group, or to a species. Relativism therefore has many varieties; some are very plausible, others verge on incoherence. See also: EPISTEMIC RELATIVISM; MORAL RELATIVISM; SOCIAL RELATIVISM Further reading Barnes, J. (1979) The Presocratic Philosophers, London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982. (Chapters 23 and 24 discuss some ancient forms of relativism, moral and epistemic, including that ascribed to Protagoras.) Morton, A. (1996) Philosophy in Practice: An Introduction to the Main Questions , Oxford: Blackwell. (Written in quite an unusual style for a philosophy textbook, with ‘reader-participation’. See pages 105– 23 for an introduction to moral relativism.) EDWARD CRAIG RELATIVITY THEORY, PHILOSOPHICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF There are two parts to Albert Einstein’s relativity theory, the special theory published in 1905 and the general theory published in its final mathematical form in 1915. The special theory is a direct development of the Galilean relativity principle in classical Newtonian mechanics. This principle affirms that Newton’s laws of motion hold not just when the motion is described relative to a reference frame at rest in absolute space, but also relative to any reference frame in uniform translational motion relative to absolute space. The class of frames relative to which Newton’s law of motion are valid are referred to as inertial frames. It follows that no mechanical experiment can tell us which frame is at absolute rest, only the relative motion of inertial frames is observable. The Galilean relativity principle does not hold for accelerated motion, and also it does not hold for electromagnetic phenomena, in particular the propagation of light waves as governed by Maxwell’s equations. Einstein’s special theory of relativity reformulated the mathematical transformations for space and time coordinates between inertial reference frames, replacing the Galilean transformations by the so-called Lorentz transformations (they had previously been discovered in an essentially different way by H.A. Lorentz in 1904) in such a way that electromagnetism satisfied the relativity principle. But the classical laws of mechanics no longer did so. Einstein next reformulated the laws of mechanics so as to make them conform to his new relativity principle. With Galilean relativity, spatial intervals, the simultaneity of events and temporal durations, did not depend on the inertial frame, although, of course, velocities were frame-dependent. In Einstein’s relativity the first three now become frame-dependent, or ‘relativized’ as we may express it, while for the fourth, namely velocity, there exists a unique velocity, that of the propagation of light in vacuo , whose magnitude c is invariant, that is, the same for all inertial frames. It can be argued that c also represents the maximum speed with which any causal process can be propagated. Moreover in Einstein’s new mechanics inertial mass m becomes a relative notion and is associated via the equation m = E/c2 with any form of energy E. Reciprocally inertial mass can be understood as equivalent to a corresponding energy m c2. In the general theory, Einstein ostensibly sought to extend the relativity principle to accelerated motions of the reference frame by employing an equivalence principle which claimed that it was impossible to distinguish observationally between the presence of a gravitational field and the acceleration of a reference frame. Einstein here elevated into a fundamental principle the known but apparently accidental numerical equality of the inertial and the gravitational mass of a body (which accounts for the fact that bodies move with the same acceleration in a gravitational field, independent of their inertial mass). By extending the discussion to gravitational fields which could be locally, but not globally, transformed away by a change of reference frame, Einstein was led to a new theory of gravitation, modifying Newton’s theory of gravitation, which could explain a number of observed phenomena for which the Newtonian
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Page 753 theory was inadequate. This involved a law (Einstein’s field equations) relating the distribution of matter in spacetime to geometrical features of spacetime associated with its curvature, considered as a fourdimensional manifold. The path of an (uncharged spinless) particle moving freely in the curved spacetime was a geodesic (the generalized analogue in a curved manifold of a straight line in a flat manifold). Einstein’s theories have important repercussions for philosophical views on the nature of space and time, and their relation to issues of causality and cosmology, which are still the subject of debate. See also: GENERAL RELATIVITY, PHILOSOPHICAL RESPONSES TO Further reading Earman, J. (1995) Bangs, Crunches, Whimpers and Shrieks: Singularities and Acausality in Relativistic Spacetimes, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Discussion of spacetime singularities and their significance.) Perrett, W. and Jeffery, G.B. (1923) The Principle of Relativity: A Collection of Original Memoirs on the Special and General Theory of Relativity , London: Methuen; repr. New York: Dover, 1952. (Useful collection of English translations of the classic papers on relativity theory.) MICHAEL REDHEAD RELEVANCE LOGIC AND ENTAILMENT ‘Relevance logic’ came into being in the late 1950s, inspired by Wilhelm Ackermann, who rejected certain formulas of the form A → B on the grounds that ‘the truth of A has nothing to do with the question whether there is a logical connection between B and A’. The central idea of relevance logic is to give an account of logical consequence, or entailment, for which a connection of relevance between premises and conclusion is a necessary condition. In both classical and intuitionistic logic, this condition is missing, as is highlighted by the validity in those logics of the ‘spread law’, A & A → B ; a contradiction ‘spreads’ to every proposition, and simple inconsistency is equivalent to absolute inconsistency. In relevance logic the spread law fails, and the simple inconsistency of a theory (that a set of formulas entails a contradiction) is distinguished from absolute inconsistency (or triviality: that a set of formulas entails every proposition). The programme of relevance logic is to characterize a logic, or a range of logics, satisfying the relevance condition, and to study theories based on such logics, such as relevant arithmetic and relevant set theory. See also: CONSEQUENCE, CONCEPTIONS OF Further reading Read, S. (1988) Relevant Logic, Oxford: Blackwell. (An elementary presentation of the philosophical basis of relevance logic and a formal system for a range of relevance logics.) Sylvan, R. and Norman, J. (eds) (1989) Directions in Relevant Logic , Dordrecht: Kluwer. (A collection of papers including those given at a memorial conference for Alan Anderson in 1974, some updated and others additional.) STEPHEN READ RELIABILISM Reliabilism is an approach to the nature of knowledge and of justified belief. Reliabilism about justification, in its simplest form, says that a belief is justified if and only if it is produced by a reliable psychological process, meaning a process that produces a high proportion of true beliefs. A justified belief may itself be false, but its mode of acquisition (or the way it is subsequently sustained) must be of a kind that typically yields truths. Since random guessing, for example, does not systematically yield truths, beliefs acquired by guesswork are not justified. By contrast, identifying middle-sized physical objects by visual observation is presumably pretty reliable, so beliefs produced in this manner are justified. Reliabilism does not require that the possessor of a justified belief should know that it was reliably produced. Knowledge of reliability is necessary for knowing that a belief is justified, but the belief can be justified without the agent knowing that it is. A similar reliabilist account is offered for knowledge, except that two further conditions are added. First, the target belief must be true and, second, its mode of acquisition must rule out all serious or ‘relevant’ alternatives in which the belief would be false. Even an accurate visual identification of Judy does not constitute knowledge unless it is acute enough to exclude the possibility that it is her twin sister Trudy instead. One major virtue of reliabilism is its ability to secure knowledge against threats of scepticism. In place of excessive requirements often proposed by sceptics, reliabilism substitutes more moderate conditions. People do not need infallible or certainty-producing processes to
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Page 754 have justified beliefs, according to reliabilism, only fairly reliable ones. Processes need not exclude radical alternatives like Descartes’ evil demon in order to generate knowledge; they need only exclude realistic possibilities like the presence of an identical twin. See also: JUSTIFICATION, EPISTEMIC; NORMATIVE EPISTEMOLOGY Further reading Alston, W.P. (1989) Epistemic Justification: Essays in the Theory of Knowledge , Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. (Contains several essays defending a form of reliabilism and discussing background meta-epistemological issues.) Schmitt, F.F. (1992) Knowledge and Belief, London: Routledge. (The historical section examines reliabilist themes in the epistemologies of Plato, Descartes and Hume.) ALVIN I. GOLDMAN RELIGION AND EPISTEMOLOGY Epistemology is theory of knowledge; one would therefore expect epistemological discussions of religion to concentrate on the question as to whether one could have knowledge of religious beliefs. However, discussions of religious belief have tended to focus on arguments for and against the existence of God: the traditional theistic arguments on the one hand and, on the other, such arguments against the existence of God as the argument from evil. To see why, we must think about evidentialism with respect to religious belief (‘evidentialism’ for short), the doctrine that a religious believer must have evidence for their beliefs if they are to be rationally justified. In particular, they must have propositional evidence: evidence from other things they believe, evidence that can be put forward in the form of argument. And going with evidentialism is the evidentialist objection to religious belief: the objection that religious belief is unjustified because there is not enough evidence for it. Evidentialism begins with the classical foundationalists René Descartes and (especially) John Locke. According to Descartes and Locke, some beliefs are certain for us. There are two kinds of certain belief: first, self-evident beliefs, such as ‘2 + 1 = 3’, and second, beliefs about one’s own mental life, such as ‘it now seems to me that I see a hand’. According to Locke, I am, of course, clearly justified in accepting those beliefs that are certain; indeed, it is not within my power to reject them. For any belief that is not certain, however, I am justified in accepting it only if I can see that it is probable or likely with respect to beliefs that are certain for me. What is this ‘justification’ and why does it matter whether or not my beliefs have it? Locke believed that human beings are rational creatures: creatures capable of forming, holding and criticizing beliefs. And rational creatures, he thought, have an intellectual duty to believe only those propositions they can see to be probable with respect to beliefs that are certain for them. This is our duty as rational agents. And justification, as Locke thinks of it, is simply the condition of being within your rights, of not having gone against your duties. You are justified in doing a given thing if it is not contrary to duty for you to do it. Locke’s view of this matter has been extremely influential among epistemologists in general and among those who think about the epistemology of religious belief in particular. Furthermore, given his views it is easy to see why there should be so much concern with proofs or arguments for the existence of God. It is not self-evident that God exists – otherwise there would be no atheists and agnostics – and of course the belief that God exists is not about one’s own mental life. But then, according to this Lockean way of thinking, anyone who accepts this belief must see that it is probable with respect to what is certain for them, else they will be going contrary to their duty and deserve blame and disapprobation. And proofs or arguments are just the vehicles by means of which one sees (and shows) that a given belief is probable with respect to what is certain. Evidentialism has come to seem less compelling. First, the whole history of Western philosophy from Descartes to Hume shows that there is little one can really see to be probable with respect to what is certain. If we may only believe propositions that meet that condition, then most of what we believe – that there is an external world, that there are other people, that there has been a past – will not be (or will not clearly be) justified. And second, on sober reflection it just does not seem that there really is a duty to restrict belief to what is probable with respect to what is certain. If we step back for a broader look, we can distinguish two different kinds of question about religious belief, and two corresponding kinds of criticism or objection. First, there are the claims that religious belief – Christianity, say – is not true: it simply is not true, for example, that there is such a person as God, or that Jesus Christ is the divine son of God. We may call
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Page 755 such an objection a de facto objection: the claim is that the religious belief in question is false, is not factual. But there is another kind of criticism or objection as well. Here the claim is not that religious belief is false, but that whether or not it is false, it is in some way improper – unjustified, irrational or in some way not worthy of belief. The evidentialist objection to religious belief is one version of such a de jure criticism of religious belief, and it has been the most prominent objection. But there is another de jure objection that has been increasingly important. This is the objection, raised by Freud, Marx and Nietzsche, that religious belief is irrational. What does that mean? According to Freud, religious belief arises out of illusion or wish-fulfilment: we find ourselves confronted by a cruel and heartless nature that delivers pain, fear and hurt, and in the end demands our death. As a response, we (subconsciously) invent a father in heaven who loves us and is really in charge of nature; otherwise we would sink into depression, stupor and death. According to Freud, therefore, religious belief arises out of illusion. And the reason this constitutes a criticism of such belief is that this mechanism of illusion is not aimed at the production of true belief, but rather at belief that has some other, non-truth-related property – in this case, the property of enabling us to carry on in this otherwise discouraging world. It is for this reason that religious belief, on this account, is irrational. This is an intriguing criticism of religious belief. But perhaps the most important thing to see about it is that while it is an allegedly de jure objection to religious belief, it is not really independent of the de facto question. For if Christianity is true, then Christian belief pretty clearly is not irrational in Freud’s sense at all. If it is true, then indeed there is such a person as God, who intends that we should have knowledge of him; and the cognitive processes that produce belief in God and in the other truths of the Christian religion very likely have as their function the production of true belief in us. On the other hand, if Christianity is false, then it is very likely that Christian belief is not produced by cognitive processes whose purpose it is to produce true belief. This de jure criticism of Christian belief, therefore, presupposes that Christian belief is not true; it is viable only if Christian belief is false. If it is intended as a reason for rejecting Christian belief, it is question-begging. More generally, it seems that there is no sensible de jure epistemic criticism of religious belief that is independent of the de facto question as to the truth of the belief in question. (The evidentialist criticism is a failure and Freud’s complaint is not independent of the de facto question whether the religious belief in question is true.) One fairly common critical attitude towards religious belief can be expressed as follows: ‘As to whether religious belief is true I am completely agnostic – but I do know this: religious belief is irrational.’ The above considerations show that this attitude is at best problematic. See also: EPISTEMOLOGY, HISTORY OF; NATURAL THEOLOGY Further reading Gale, R. (1991) On the Nature and Existence of God , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (An inquiry into the question as to whether there are any good arguments for or against the existence of God. Technical in places.) Wolterstorff, N. and Plantinga, A. (eds) (1983) Faith and Rationality, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. (An influential collection of essays by the editors and others on the rationality or justification of Christian and theistic belief; for the most part the essays reject classical foundationalism with respect to theistic belief.) ALVIN PLANTINGA RELIGION AND MORALITY The relationship between religion and morality has been of special and long-standing concern to philosophers. Not only is there much overlap between the two areas, but how to understand their proper relationship is a question that has stimulated much debate. Of special interest in philosophical discussions has been the question of divine authority and the moral life. If there is a God, how are we to understand the moral status of his commands? Are there moral standards that even God must acknowledge? Or does God’s commanding something make it morally binding? Secular thinkers have insisted that these questions pose a serious dilemma for any religiously based ethic: either the moral standards are independent of God’s will, with the result that God’s authority is not supreme, or God’s will is arbitrary, which means that what appears to be a morality is really a worship of brute power. Many religious ethicists have refused to acknowledge the dilemma, arguing for an understanding of divine moral directives as expressions of the complexities and excellences of God’s abiding attributes.
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Page 756 The impact of religion on moral selfhood has also been much disputed. Secularists of various stripes have insisted that religion is not conducive to moral maturity. Religious thinkers have responded by exploring the ways in which one’s notion of moral maturity is shaped by one’s larger worldview. If we believe that there is a God who has provided us with important moral information, then this will influence the ways we understand what is to count as a ‘mature’ and ‘rational’ approach to moral decision making. Religious ethicists have had a special interest in the ways in which worldviews shape our understandings of moral questions. This interest has been necessitated by the fact of diversity within religious communities. Different moral traditions coexist in Christianity, for example, corresponding to the rich diversity of theological perspectives and the plurality of cultural settings in which Christian beliefs have taken shape. This complexity has provided some resources for dealing with the ‘postmodern’ fascination with moral relativism and moral scepticism. The relationship between religion and morality is also important for questions of practical moral decision. Religious ethical systems have often been developed with an eye to their ‘preachability’, which means that religious ethicists have a long record of attempting to relate theory to practice in moral discussion. The ability of a moral system to provide practical guidance is especially important during times of extensive moral confusion. See also: HALAKHAH; MORALITY AND ETHICS Further reading Adams, R.M. (1987) The Virtue of Faith and Other Essays in Philosophical Theology , New York: Oxford University Press. (Includes several essays that have been highly influential in discussions of religion and morality.) Mitchell, B. (1980) Morality: Religious and Secular , Oxford: Clarendon Press. (A broad-ranging discussion of philosophical and theological themes in ethics.) RICHARD J. MOUW RELIGION AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY Political philosophy began in Athens, but the large-scale impact of religion upon it had to await Christianity. Biblical Christianity portrays human beings as subjects of a kingdom of God, destined for a supernatural end and bound to love one another. This view is potentially in tension with the demands of the various political societies to which Christians belong. The requirement of devotion to God might conflict with the allegiance that temporal government demands; human beings’ attempts to attain their supernatural end can bring them into conflict with civil laws. The power and structure of the Church in the Middle Ages opened the possibility of tensions between the authority of the institutional Church and of various national states. These tensions, potential and actual, set much of political philosophy’s agenda from the fourth to the fourteenth century. The tension between membership of the kingdom of God and of an earthly polity was forcefully described by Augustine. He likened faithful Christians to pilgrims journeying through the world, who avail themselves of the peace temporal authority provides. Political thinkers of the early Middle Ages examined the conditions under which war, regicide and disobedience were permissible, and queried whether the Pope had authority over temporal rulers. Thomas Aquinas elaborated a theory of natural law according to which valid human law cannot conflict with the dictates of morality. Temporal rulers, he argued, are responsible for promoting their subjects’ common good and eternal salvation. Since the sixteenth century, political philosophy has been concerned with problems set by the religious developments that ushered in the modern period. The Reformation brought religious diversity to European nations on a large scale. It thereby raised questions about how policy could be set and unity maintained without a shared religion to provide common goals and social bonds. The seventeenthcentury philosopher Thomas Hobbes opposed the toleration of religious diversity and argued that states could remain unified only if their religious unity were maintained by an absolute sovereign. John Locke, on the other hand, argued for the right to religious liberty. Locke and other liberals associated with the movement of thought known as the Enlightenment were opposed by classical conservatives such as Edmund Burke. Burke argued that human society depended upon willing adherence to traditional customs and social institutions, including an established national Church. More recently, liberalism has also been opposed by Marxism. Marxists argue that religion helps to maintain social stability under modern conditions by masking the exploitation of the working class.
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Page 757 Contemporary political philosophy in the English-speaking world is descended from the Enlightenment liberalism of Locke. John Rawls argues that social cooperation must be based only upon what citizens of liberal democracies can reasonably affirm under ideal conditions. Religious critics of contemporary liberalism argue that it unduly restricts religiously inspired political argument and activism. See also: LIBERATION THEOLOGY; RELIGION AND MORALITY Further reading Carlyle, R.W. (1950) A History of Medieval Political Theory in the West , New York: Barnes & Noble. (Accessible and thorough history of medieval political philosophy.) Skinner, Q. (1978) The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (A history of political philosophy from the late middle ages to the seventeenth century. Contains an excellent bibliography.) PAUL J. WEITHMAN RELIGION AND SCIENCE Philosophical discussion of the relation between modern science and religion has tended to focus on Christianity, because of its dominance in the West. The relations between science and Christianity have been too complex to be described by the ‘warfare’ model popularized by A.D. White and J.W. Draper. An adequate account of the past two centuries requires a distinction between conservative and liberal positions. Conservative Christians tend to see theology and science as partially intersecting bodies of knowledge. God is revealed in ‘two books’: the Bible and nature. Ideally, science and theology ought to present a single, consistent account of reality; but in fact there have been instances where the results of science have (apparently) contradicted Scripture, in particular with regard to the age of the universe and the origin of the human species. Liberals tend to see science and religion as complementary but non-interacting, as having concerns so different as to make conflict impossible. This approach can be traced to Immanuel Kant, who distinguished sharply between pure reason (science) and practical reason (morality). More recent versions contrast science, which deals with the what and how of the natural world, and religion, which deals with meaning, or contrast science and religion as employing distinct languages. However, since the 1960s a growing number of scholars with liberal theological leanings have taken an interest in science and have denied that the two disciplines can be isolated from one another. Topics within science that offer fruitful points for dialogue with theology include Big Bang cosmology and its possible implications for the doctrine of creation, the ‘fine-tuning’ of the cosmological constants and the possible implications of this for design arguments, and evolution and genetics, with their implications for a new understanding of the human individual. Perhaps of greater import are the indirect relations between science and theology. Newtonian physics fostered an understanding of the natural world as strictly determined by natural laws; this in turn had serious consequences for understanding divine action and human freedom. Twentieth-century developments such as quantum physics and chaos theory call for a revised view of causation. Advances in the philosophy of science in the second half of the twentieth century provide a much more sophisticated account of knowledge than was available earlier, and this has important implications for methods of argument in theology. See also: RELIGION AND EPISTEMOLOGY; SCIENCE IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY Further reading Barbour, I. (1966) Issues in Science and Religion, New York: Harper & Row. (Very accessible survey of relations between science and Christianity, beginning in the modern period.) Draper, J.W. (1874) History of the Conflict between Religion and Science , New York: D. Appleton. (A once-popular denunciation of Catholicism for its interference with scientific development.) NANCEY MURPHY RELIGION, CRITIQUE OF During the Enlightenment a new philosophy of religion arose, one which was not connected with metaphysics or philosophical theology. It asked to what extent religion could be legitimated philosophically, and to what extent it could be shown to be reasonable. The reasonableness of religion was taken to be significant for the political as well as the confessional clash between Christian denominations in Europe, all of which tried to justify their conflicting religious doctrines by reference to a supernatural revelation. The philosophical debate that began in the Enlightenment with
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Page 758 regard to the criteria and arguments for a religion connected either to human nature or to public reason can be called a ‘critique of religion’ ( Religionskritik ), although the expression is not common before the critical philosophy of Kant and his school. Hegel followed the programme of Kant’s philosophy, maintaining a philosophical concept of religion as falling ‘within the limits of reason alone’. The radical left-wing school of Hegelianism transformed Hegel’s approach, which was a critical legitimation of religion, into its destruction. Presupposing materialism in ontology and atheism, Feuerbach held that religion should be interpreted as a kind of anthropology. Marx claimed that religion is an expression of a certain sort of ideology and a necessary illusion within a class-structured society. In twentieth-century philosophy, the critique of religion can be found in two positions. The first is a rational reconstruction of the practical intentions or semantic content of religious belief; the second is a continuation of the interpretation of religion as ideological or illusory. In addition, we can identify certain other varieties of the critique of religion, including the theological critique of religion (found, for example, in the work of Barth and Bonhoeffer) and the philosophical critique of particular religious traditions (found, for example, in the romantic and postmodern rejections of Christian monotheism by Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Klages and Heidegger). See also: DEISM; ENLIGHTENMENT, CONTINENTAL Further reading Kant, I. (1781) Critique of Pure Reason , trans. N. Kemp Smith, New York: St Martin’s Press, 1965. (The most important work of modern German philosophy, in which Kant intended to construct a critical metaphysics on the basis of a critique of human understanding.) Marx, K. (1844) Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law , in Collected Works of Marx and Engels, vol. 3, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975–. (The introduction to this book contains Marx’s critique of religion.) MATTHIAS LUTZ-BACHMANN RELIGION, HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY OF The philosophy of religion comprises any philosophical discussion of questions arising from religion. This has primarily consisted in the clarification and critical evaluation of fundamental beliefs and concepts from one or another religious tradition. Major issues of concern in the philosophy of religion include arguments for and against the existence of God, problems about the attributes of God, the problem of evil, and the epistemology of religious belief. Of arguments for the existence of God, the most prominent ones can be assigned to four types. First, cosmological arguments, which go back to Plato and Aristotle, explain the existence of the universe by reference to a being on whom all else depends for its existence. Second, teleological arguments seek to explain adaptation in the world, for example, the way organisms have structures adapted to their needs, by positing an intelligent designer of the world. Third, ontological arguments, first introduced by Anselm, focus on the concept of a perfect being and argue that it is incoherent to deny that such a being exists. Finally, moral arguments maintain that objective moral statuses, distinctions or principles presuppose a divine being as the locus of their objectivity. Discussions of the attributes of God have focused on omniscience and omnipotence. These raise various problems, for example, whether complete divine foreknowledge of human actions is compatible with human free will. Moreover, these attributes, together with God’s perfect goodness give rise to the problem of evil. If God is all-powerful, all-knowing and perfectly good, how can there be wickedness, suffering and other undesirable states of affairs in the world? This problem has been repeatedly discussed from ancient times to the present. The epistemology of religious belief has to do with the questions of what is the proper approach to the assessment of religious belief (for rationality, justification, or whatever) and with the carrying out of such assessments. Much of the discussion has turned on the contrast between the roles of human reason and God’s revelation to us. A variety of views have been held on this. Many, such as Aquinas, have tried to forge a synthesis of the two; Kant and his followers have sought to ground religion solely on reason; others, most notably Kierkegaard, have held that the subjecting of religious belief to rational scrutiny is subversive of true religious faith. Recently, a group of ‘Reformed epistemologists’ (so-called because of the heavy influence of the Reformed theology of Calvin and his followers on their thinking) has attacked ‘evidentialism’ and has argued that religious beliefs can be rationally justified even if one has no reasons or evidence for them. See also: GOD, ARGUMENTS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF; GOD, CONCEPTS OF
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Page 759 Further reading Kant, I. (1793) Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone , trans. T.H. Greene and H.H. Hudson, New York: Harper & Row, 1960. (Kant’s major philosophical treatment of religion.) Plato (366–360 BC; 360–347 BC) Laws and Timaeus , in E.Hamilton andH.Cairns (eds.) The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961. (The main sources for Plato’s conception of God and arguments for the existence of God.) WILLIAM P. ALSTON RELIGION, PHILOSOPHY OF Philosophy of religion is philosophical reflection on religion. It is as old as philosophy itself and has been a standard part of Western philosophy in every period (see RELIGION, HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY OF). In the last half of the twentieth century, there has been a great growth of interest in it, and the range of topics philosophers of religion have considered has also expanded considerably. Philosophy of religion is sometimes divided into philosophy of religion proper and philosophical theology. This distinction reflects the unease of an earlier period in analytic philosophy, during which philosophers felt that reflection on religion was philosophically respectable only if it confined itself to mere theism and abstracted from all particular religions; anything else was taken to be theology, not philosophy. But most philosophers now feel free to examine philosophically any aspect of religion, including doctrines or practices peculiar to individual religions. Not only are these doctrines and practices generally philosophically interesting in their own right, but often they also raise questions that are helpful for issues in other areas of philosophy. Reflection on the Christian notion of sanctification, for example, sheds light on certain contemporary debates over the nature of freedom of the will (see SANCTIFICATION). 1 Philosophy and belief in God As an examination of mere theism, the core of beliefs common to Western monotheisms, philosophy of religion raises and considers a number of questions. What would anything have to be like to count as God? Is it even possible for human beings to know God’s attributes (see GOD, CONCEPTS OF; NEGATIVE THEOLOGY)? And if so, what are they? Traditionally, God has been taken to be a necessary being, who is characterized by omniscience, omnipotence, perfect goodness, immutability and eternity (see NECESSARY BEING; OMNISCIENCE; OMNIPOTENCE; GOODNESS, PERFECT; IMMUTABILITY; ETERNITY), who has freely created the world (see CREATION AND CONSERVATION, RELIGIOUS DOCTRINE OF; FREEDOM, DIVINE), and who is somehow specially related to morality (see RELIGION AND MORALITY). This conception of God takes God to be unique (see MONOTHEISM), unlike anything else in the world. Consequently, the question arises whether our language is capable of representing God. Some thinkers, such as Moses MAIMONIDES, have argued that it is not and that terms applied to God and creatures are equivocal. Others have argued that our language can be made to apply to God, either because some terms can be used univocally of God and creatures, or because some terms used of creatures can be applied to God in an analogical sense (see RELIGIOUS LANGUAGE). Not everyone accepts the traditional characterization of God, of course. Pantheists, for example, reject the distinction between God and creation (see PANTHEISM). Certain philosophers have objected to the traditional conception on the grounds that it leaves certain philosophical problems, such as the problem of evil, insoluble (see PROCESS THEISM). And many feminists reject it as patriarchal (see FEMINIST THEOLOGY). Given the traditional conception of God, can we know by reason that such a God exists? There are certain arguments that have been proposed to demonstrate the existence of God so understood (see GOD, ARGUMENTS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF; NATURAL THEOLOGY). The ontological argument tries to show that a perfect being must exist (see ANSELM OF CANTERBURY). The cosmological argument argues that the existence of the world demonstrates the existence of a transcendent cause of the world. And the teleological argument argues from design in nature to the existence of a designer. Some philosophers have maintained that the widespread phenomenon of religious experience also constitutes an argument for the existence of a supernatural object of such experience (see RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE; MYSTICISM, HISTORY OF; MYSTICISM, NATURE OF). Most contemporary philosophers regard these arguments as unsuccessful (see ATHEISM; AGNOSTICISM). But what exactly is the relation between reason and religious belief? Do we need arguments? Or is faith without argument rational? What is faith? Is it opposed to reason? Some
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Page 760 philosophers have argued that any belief not based on evidence is defective or even culpable. This position is not much in favour any more. On the other hand, some contemporary philosophers have suggested that evidence of any sort is unnecessary for religious belief. This position is also controversial (see FAITH; RELIGION AND EPISTEMOLOGY). Some philosophers have supposed that these questions are obviated by the problem of evil (see EVIL, PROBLEM OF), which constitutes an argument against God’s existence. In their view, God and evil cannot coexist, or at any rate the existence of evil in this world is evidence which disconfirms the existence of God. In response to this challenge to religious belief, some philosophers have held that religious belief can be defended only by a theodicy, an attempt to give a morally sufficient reason for God’s allowing evil to exist. Others have thought that religious belief can be defended without a theodicy, by showing the weaknesses in the versions of the argument from evil against God’s existence. Finally, some thinkers have argued that only a practical and political approach is the right response to evil in the world (see LIBERATION THEOLOGY). Those who use the existence of evil to argue against the existence of God assume that God, if he existed, could and should intervene in the natural order of the world. Not everyone accepts this view (see DEISM). But supposing it is right, how should we understand God’s intervention? Does he providentially intervene to guide the world to certain ends (see PROVIDENCE)? Would an act of divine intervention count as a miracle? What is a miracle, and is it ever rational to believe that a miracle has occurred (see MIRACLES)? Some people have supposed that a belief that miracles occur is incompatible with or undermined by a recognition of the success of science. Many people also think that certain widely accepted scientific views cast doubt on particular religious beliefs (see RELIGION AND SCIENCE). 2 Philosophy and religious doctrines and practices In addition to the issues raised by the traditional conception of God, there are others raised by doctrines common to the Western monotheisms. These include the view that the existence of a human being does not end with the death of the body but continues in an afterlife (see SOUL, NATURE AND IMMORTALITY OF THE; REINCARNATION; RESURRECTION). Although there is wide variation in beliefs about the nature of the afterlife, typically the afterlife is taken to include heaven and hell. For some groups of Christians, it also includes limbo and purgatory. All of these doctrines raise an array of philosophical questions (see HEAVEN; HELL; LIMBO; PURGATORY). There is equally great variation in views on what it takes for a human being to be accepted into heaven (see SALVATION). Christians generally suppose that faith is a necessary, if not a sufficient, requirement (see JUSTIFICATION, RELIGIOUS). But they also suppose that faith is efficacious in this way because of the suffering and death of Jesus Christ (see INCARNATION AND CHRISTOLOGY; TRINITY). Christians take sin to be an obstacle to union with God and life in heaven, and they suppose that Christ’s atonement is the solution to this problem (see SIN; ATONEMENT). Because of Christ’s atonement, divine forgiveness and mercy are available to human beings who are willing to accept it (see FORGIVENESS AND MERCY). Most Christians have supposed that this willingness is itself a gift of God (see GRACE), but some have supposed that human beings unassisted by grace are able to will or even to do what is good (see PELAGIANISM). How to interpret these doctrines, or whether they can even be given a consistent interpretation, has been the subject of philosophical discussion. The religious life is characterized not only by religious belief and experience but by many other things as well (see PHENOMENOLOGY OF RELIGION). Formany believers, ritual and prayer structure religious life (see RITUAL; PRAYER). Christians also suppose that sacraments are important, although Protestants and Catholics differ on the nature and number of the sacraments (see SACRAMENTS). For Christians, the heart of the religious life, made possible by the atonement and the believer’s acceptance of grace, consists in the theological virtues – faith, hope, and charity (see THEOLOGICAL VIRTUES). Many religious believers suppose they know that these and other things are essential to the religious life because God has revealed them (see REVELATION). This revelation includes or is incorporated in a book, the Qur’an for Muslims, the Hebrew Bible for Jews, and the Old and New Testaments for Christians. How the texts in this book are to be understood and the way in which religious texts are to be interpreted raise a host of philosophical issues (see HERMENEUTICS, BIBLICAL). Certain thinkers who are not themselves philosophers are none the less important for the philosophy of religion and so are also
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Page 761 included here. These include, for example, John CALVIN and MARTIN LUTHER, whose views on such issues as justification and atonement significantly influenced the understanding of these notions, and Jacques MARITAIN and Pierre TEILHARD DE CHARDIN, whose influence on contemporary philosophical theology has been significant. See also: AFRICAN TRADITIONAL RELIGIONS; BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY, INDIAN; ESCHATOLOGY; EXISTENTIALIST THEOLOGY; GNOSTICISM; GOD, INDIAN CONCEPTIONS OF; ILLUMINATION; ISLAMIC THEOLOGY; JEWISH PHILOSOPHY; MANICHEISM; OCCASIONALISM; PERSONALISM; PIETISM; POSTMODERN THEOLOGY; RELIGION AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY; RELIGION, CRITIQUE OF; SRELIGIOUS PLURALISM; SHINTŌ; VOLUNTARISM; ZOROASTRIANISM Further reading Murray, M. and Stump, E. (eds) (1999) Philosophy of Religion: The Big Questions , Oxford: Blackwell. (A broad and inclusive anthology of readings in philosophy of religion.) Quinn, P. and Taliaferro, C. (1997) A Companion to Philosophy of Religion, Oxford: Blackwell. (A helpful and comprehensive reference work for philosophy of religion.) ELEONORE STUMP RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE Philosophy is interested in religious experience as a possible source of knowledge of the existence, nature and doings of God. The experiences in question seem to their possessors to be direct, perceptual awarenesses of God. But they may be wrong about this, and many philosophers think they are. Many philosophers think that such experiences are never what they seem, and that no one has a veridical experience of the presence and/or activity of God. The main philosophical reason for supposing that such experiences are in fact sometimes veridical is a principle according to which any apparent experience of something is to be regarded as veridical unless we have sufficient reasons to the contrary. Experiences are innocent until proven guilty. If we do not accept that principle, we will never have sufficient grounds for taking any experience to be veridical – religious, sensory or whatever. There are critics who think that we do have sufficient reasons to the contrary in the case of religious experience. For one thing, we do not havethe same capacity forintersubjective checks of religious experiences that we have with sense perceptions. But to this it can be replied that we should not suppose that sense perception represents the only way in which we can achieve genuine cognitive contact with objective reality. For another thing, it is widely supposed that religious experience can be adequately explained by psychological and social factors, without bringing God into the picture. But even if this-worldly factors are the only immediate causes of the experience, God could figure as a cause farther back in the causal chain. Finally, the disagreements between alleged experiences of God, especially across different religions, provide a reason for doubting the deliverances of religious experience. But it is possible for a number of people to be genuinely experiencing the same thing, even though they disagree as to what it is like. This is a common occurrence in sense perception. See also: MYSTICISM, NATURE OF; REVELATION Further reading James, W. (1902) The Varieties of Religious Experience, New York: Penguin, 1982. (The classic work on the subject. Very readable, as always with James.) Poulain, A. (1950) The Graces of Interior Prayer , trans. L.Y. Smith and J.V. Bainvel, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (A classic of Catholic mystical theology which presents a strong case for the veridicality of mystical perception. Very readable.) WILLIAM P. ALSTON RELIGIOUS LANGUAGE The main philosophical interest in religious language is in the understanding of what purport to be statements about God. Can they really be what they seem to be – claims to say something true about a divine reality? There are several reasons for denying this. The most prominent of these stems from the verifiability criterion of meaning, according to which an utterance can be a statement that is objectively true or false only if it is possible to verify or falsify it empirically. It is claimed that this is not possible for talk about God. However, the verifiability criterion itself has been severely criticized. Moreover, many religious beliefs do have implications that are, in principle, empirically testable, though not conclusively. If one is moved to reject the idea that statements about God are what they seem to be, they can be taken as expressions of feelings and attitudes, and/or as guides to a life orientation. To be sure, religious utterances
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Page 762 can have these functions even if they are also genuine statements of fact. If one believes there to be genuine true-or-false statements about God, there are still problems as to how to understand them. We can focus on the construal of the predicates of such statements – for example, ‘made the heavens and the earth’ and ‘commissioned Moses to lead the Israelites out of Egypt’. There is a serious problem here because of two basic features of the situation. First, the terms we apply to God got their meaning from their application to creatures, particularly human beings. Second, God is so radically different from us that it seems that these terms cannot have the same meaning in the two uses. One possibility here is that all these terms are used metaphorically when applied to God, which obviously often happens (‘The Lord is my shepherd’). But are there some terms that can be literally true of God? This may be the case if some abstract aspect of the creaturely meaning of a term can be literally applied to God. For example, if one aspect of the meaning of ‘makes’ when applied to one of us is ‘brings about some state of affairs by an act of will’, the term ‘makes’ with that particular meaning might be truly applied to God. See also: NEGATIVE THEOLOGY Further reading Barbour, I.G. (1974) Myths, Models, and Paradigms , New York: Harper & Row. (Religious belief as based on models. Very readable.) McFague, S. (1982) Metaphorical Theology , Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press. (A stimulating presentation.) WILLIAM P. ALSTON RELIGIOUS PLURALISM Religion displays a luxuriant diversity of beliefs and practices. Crusades and colonialism, preaching and proselytizing, argument and apologetics have failed to produce worldwide agreement. In order to understand this situation, four possibilities are worth considering. The first is reductive naturalism. On this view, religious beliefs about a supernatural or transcendent dimension of existence are all false. They are to be explained as products of a merely human projection mechanism. The writings of such naturalistic philosophers and scientists as Feuerbach, Marx, Freud, and Durkheim suggest ways in which such projections might occur. A second possibility is exclusivism. Doctrinal exclusivism is the view that the doctrines of one religion are completely true; the doctrines of all others are false whenever there is conflict. Soteriological exclusivism is the view that only one religion offers an effective path to salvation or liberation. Though the two kinds of exclusivism are logically independent, they are usually held together. A third option, which has found increasing favour in the second half of the twentieth century, is inclusivism: one religion contains the final truth and others contain only approaches to or approximations of it; the privileged religion offers the most effective path to salvation, but those outside it can somehow be saved or liberated. The final option, pluralism, is a relative newcomer. According to pluralism, a single ultimate religious reality is being differently experienced and understood in all the major religious traditions; they all, as far as we can tell, offer equally effective paths to salvation or liberation. These options raise interesting questions. What accounts for the growing popularity of inclusivism and pluralism? How are we to articulate pluralism? Does exclusivism remain a rational option in spite of what is known about the whole range of religious traditions? Is pluralism, once clearly stated, a rational option? Further reading Hick, J. (1989) An Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press. (Detailed presentation of the pluralistic hypothesis..) Plantinga, A. (1995) ‘Pluralism: A Defense of Religious Exclusivism’, in T. Senor (ed.) The Rationality of Belief and the Plurality of Faith, Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. (Presents a critique of Hick’s religious pluralism. The volume also contains interesting essays on religious pluralism by George Mavrodes, Peter van Inwagen and William Wainwright.) PHILIP L. QUINN RENAISSANCE PHILOSOPHY The term ‘Renaissance’ means rebirth, and was originally used to designate a rebirth of the arts and literature that began in mid-fourteenth century Italy (see HUMANISM, RENAISSANCE). Here the term is simply used to refer to the period from 1400 to 1600, but there are ways in which Renaissance philosophy can be seen as a rebirth, for it encompasses the rediscovery of Plato and Neoplatonism (see PLATONISM, RENAISSANCE), the revival of such ancient
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Page 763 systems as Stoicism and scepticism (see SCEPTICISM, RENAISSANCE; STOICISM), and a renewed interest in magic and the occult. Continuity with the Middle Ages is equally important. Despite the attacks of humanists and Platonists, Aristotelianism predominated throughout the Renaissance, and many philosophers continued to work within the scholastic tradition (see ARISTOTELIANISM, RENAISSANCE). 1 Historical and social factors Three historical events were of particular importance. First is the Turkish advance, culminating in the capture of Constantinople in 1453. This advance produced a migration of Greek scholars (like GEORGE OF TREBIZOND) and Greek texts into the Latin-speaking West (see HUMANISM, RENAISSANCE; PLATONISM, RENAISSANCE). It also led to a search for new trade routes. The European discovery of the Americas and the first voyages to China and Japan widened intellectual horizons through an awareness of new languages, religions and cultures (see SCEPTICISM, RENAISSANCE). New issues of colonialism, slavery and the rights of non-Christian peoples had an impact on legal and political philosophy (see LATIN AMERICA, COLONIAL THOUGHT IN; VITORIA, F. DE; SOTO, D. DE; SUÁREZ, F.). The study of mathematics and science (especially astronomy) was also affected by developments in navigation, trade and banking, by new technology such as the telescope and other instruments (see KEPLER, J.; GALILEI, GALILEO), as well as by the recovery of Greek mathematics and the favourable attitude of Plato towards mathematical studies (see PLATONISM, RENAISSANCE). Second is the development of printing in the mid-fifteenth century (see HUMANISM, RENAISSANCE). This allowed for the publication of scholarly text editions, for the expansion of learning beyond the universities, and for the increased use of vernacular languages for written material (see HUMANISM, RENAISSANCE). These changes particularly affected women, who were most often literate only in the vernacular. CHRISTINE DE PIZAN, PARACELSUS, RAMUS, MONTAIGNE, BRUNO and CHARRON are among those who used vernacular languages in at least some of their works. Third is the Protestant reformation in the first part of the sixteenth century (see LUTHER, M.; CALVIN, J.). Protestant insistence on Bible reading in the vernacular strengthened both the use of the vernacular and the spread of literacy (see MELANCHTHON, P.). The Catholic Counter-Reformation also affected education, particularly through the work of the Jesuit Order (founded 1540), which set up educational institutions throughout Europe, including the Collegio Romano in Rome (founded 1553) and the secondary school at La Fléche, where DESCARTES was educated (for further examples, see COLLEGIUM CONIMBRICENSE; ARISTOTELIANISM IN THE 17TH CENTURY). Political philosophy took new directions (see HOOKER, R., for example) and theological studies changed. As the Protestants abandoned the Sentences of PETER LOMBARD and emphasized the church fathers, so the Catholics replaced the Sentences with the Summa theologiae of Thomas AQUINAS. In turn, these changes affected the undergraduate curriculum, which (for other reasons as well) became less technically demanding, especially in relation to logic studies (see LOGIC, RENAISSANCE). Personal liberties, too, were affected. Both Catholics and Protestants censored undesirable views, and the first Roman Catholic Index of Prohibited Books was drawn up in 1559. BRUNO was burnt for heresy, and CAMPANELLA was imprisoned. Calls for tolerance by such men as MONTAIGNE and LIPSIUS were not always favourably received. The books of all these men, and others such as ERASMUS, MACHIAVELLI and RABELAIS, were placed on the Index or required to be revised. At the same time, Calvinist Geneva prohibited the printing of Thomas AQUINAS and RABELAIS. Social factors also affected philosophy which, as an academic discipline, was tied to the universities. These continued to accept only male students, and to teach in Latin, the universal language of learning and of the Roman Catholic Church, but more students came from higher social classes than during the Middle Ages. They expected a curriculum with less emphasis on technical logic and natural science and more on rhetoric, modern languages, history and other practical disciplines. Such curricular changes owed much to humanism, as did the spread of new secondary schools (see HUMANISM, RENAISSANCE; MONTAIGNE, M. dE). The Renaissance was also notable for the spread of learning outside the university. Some men largely relied on the patronage of nobles, princes and popes (among them VALLA, FICINO, PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA and ERASMUS), some were medical practitioners (including PARACELSUS and CARDANO), some had private resources (like MONTAIGNE). Nor was it only men that were involved: CHRISTINE DE PIZAN, for example, was a court poet.
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Page 764 2 Humanism and the recovery of ancient texts Humanism was primarily a cultural and educational programme (see HUMANISM, RENAISSANCE; PETRARCA, F.; AGRICOLA, R.; ERASMUS, D.; VIVES, J.L.; RABELAIS, F.). Humanists were very much concerned with classical scholarship, especially the study of Greek, and with the imitation of classical models. Despite their frequent criticisms of scholastic jargon and techniques, they were not direct rivals of scholastic philosophers, except in so far as changes to the university curriculum brought about by the influence of humanist ideals diluted or squeezed out scholastic subjects. It was humanism that led to the rediscovery of classical texts, and their dissemination in printed form, in Greek and in Latin translation. Plato is the most notable example, but he was rediscovered with the Neoplatonists, and was often read through Neoplatonic eyes (see FICINO, M.; PLATONISM, RENAISSANCE). The so-called ancient wisdom of Hermeticism (also known as Hermetism) was also recaptured within a Neoplatonic framework (see PATRIZI DA CHERSO, F.), and, along with the Kabbalah (see KABBALAH), led to a revived interest in magic and the occult (see ALCHEMY; AGRIPPA VON NETTESHEIM, H.C.). These streams also fed into the new vitalistic philosophy of nature (in such thinkers as PARACELSUS, BRUNO, CAMPANELLA, CARDANO and TELESIO). Other ancient schools of thought that were revived include Epicureanism (see VALLA, L.), scepticism (see SANCHES, F.; MONTAIGNE, M. DE; CHARRON, P.) and Stoicism (see LIPSIUS, J.). Some humanists wrote important works on education, including the education of women (see ERASMUS, D.; VIVES, J.L.). The Lutheran Aristotelian MELANCHTHON was also an educational reformer; and the Jesuits drew up the Ratio Studiorum (Plan of Studies) which prescribed texts for all Jesuit institutions (see COLLEGIUM CONIMBRICENSE; FONSECA, P. DA). Humanism also affected Bible studies (see ERASMUS, D.; LUTHER, M.; HUMANISM, RENAISSANCE) and Aristotelianism itself (see ARISTOTELIANISM, RENAISSANCE). 3 Scholasticism and Aristotle Scholastic philosophy was the philosophy of the schools, the philosophy which was taught in institutions of higher learning, whether the secular universities or the institutions of religious orders. The association of late scholastic philosophy with institutions of higher learning carried with it a certain method of presentation, one which is both highly organized and argumentative, with a clear account of views for and against a given thesis. It also carried with it a focus on Aristotle, for it was Aristotle who provided most of the basic textbooks in the sixteenth- and even the seventeenth-century university. Nor was the study of Aristotle necessarily carried on in a rigidly traditional manner, for many different Aristotelianisms were developed (see ARISTOTELIANISM, RENAISSANCE). Moreover, particularly within the Jesuit order, there was a strong inclination to include new developments in mathematics and astronomy within the framework of Aristotelian natural philosophy (see ARISTOTELIANISM IN THE 17TH CENTURY). Aristotelians include PAUL OF VENICE, GEORGE OF TREBIZOND, VERNIA, NIFO, POMPONAZZI, MELANCHTHON, ZABARELLA and the Thomists (see below). Anti-Aristotelians include Petrarch (see PETRARCA, F.), BLASIUS OF PARMA, VALLA, RAMUS, SANCHES, TELESIO, PATRIZI DA CHERSO AND CAMPANELLA. Some philosophers sought to reconcile Platonism and Aristotelianism (see PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA, G.; PLATONISM, RENAISSANCE). A very important characteristic of late scholastic philosophy is its use of medieval terminology, along with its continued, explicit, concern both with problems stemming from medieval philosophy and with medieval philosophers themselves. There are fashions here as elsewhere. Albertism (the philosophy of ALBERT THE GREAT) was important in the fifteenth century (see ARISTOTELIANISM, MEDIEVAL); nominalism more or less disappeared after a final flowering in the early sixteenth-century (see BIEL, G.; MAJOR, J.). Scotism declined significantly, but was still present in the seventeenth century (see ARISTOTELIANISM IN THE 17TH CENTURY; LATIN AMERICA, COLONIAL THOUGHT IN). Thomism underwent a strong revival especially through the work of the Dominicans (CAPREOLUS, CAJETAN, SILVESTRI, Vitoria, Soto, BÁÑEZ and JOHN OF ST THOMAS) and the Jesuits (FONSECA, TOLETUS, SUÁREZ and Rubio). 4 Philosophical themes It is difficult to map the interests of Renaissance philosophers on to the interests of contemporary philosophers, especially as the main form of writing remained the commentary, whether on Aristotle or Aquinas. SUÁREZ is the first well-known author to write a major systematic work of metaphysics that is not a commentary, though earlier authors (such as NIFO and POMPONAZZI) had written shorter works on
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Page 765 particular themes. Nonetheless, certain general themes can be isolated: 4.1 Logic and language . Logic was basic to the curriculum of all educational institutions, and many Renaissance philosophers wrote on logic (see LOGIC, RENAISSANCE; LANGUAGE, RENAISSANCE PHILOSOPHY OF; ARISTOTELIANISM, RENAISSANCE; LOGIC IN THE 17TH AND 18TH CENTURIES). Individual humanists who worked in this field include VALLA, AGRICOLA, VIVES; MELANCHTHON and RAMUS; individual scholastics include SOTO, TOLETUS and FONSECA. Theories of logic and language were often closely related to metaphysics and philosophy of mind, as well as to science. 4.2 Metaphysics and philosophy of mind. Among the themes that overlapped with theories of logic and language were: (i) mental language; (ii) analogy; (iii) objective and formal concepts; and (iv) beings of reason. A specifically Thomistic theme in metaphysics was the relation between essence and existence. Other metaphysical issues include: (i) universals; (ii) individuation; and (iii) the Great Chain of Being. Issues in the philosophy of mind included the existence of an agent sense and of intelligible species. 4.3 Immortality. The biggest single issue was the nature of the intellectual soul, whether it was immortal, and if so, whether its immortality could be proved. 4.4 Free will. Free will was a topic closely connected with the religious issues of grace, predestination and God’s foreknowledge. 4.5 Science and philosophy of nature. The discussion of scientific method also overlaps with logic. Themes include (i) traditional Aristotelian discussions about the object of natural philosophy; (ii) AntiAristotelian materialism; (iii) the new philosophies of nature which saw the universe as full of life or as explicable in terms of light-metaphysics; and (iv) tentative approaches to empiricism. Finally, there are the thinkers who set science on a new path by using a combination of mathematical description and experiment (such as COPERNICUS, KEPLER and GALILEO). 4.6 Moral and political philosophy . Humanists were deeply concerned with moral and political philosophy, as were Protestant reformers. Although the central focus remained on Aristotle, Epicurean moral philosophy was taken up by VALLA and Stoic moral philosophy was also influential (see LIPSIUS, J.; CHARRON, P.). Major political thinkers included MACHIAVELLI, VITORIA and BODIN. Many discussions of forms of government, the status of law, and the notion of a just war grew out of the Aristotelian–Thomistic tradition – prominent contributors to this tradition include CHRISTINE DE PIZAN, VITORIA, SOTO, TOLETUS, SUÁREZ, MOLINA and HOOKER. Other significant types of Renaissance political philosophy include: (i) conciliarism; (ii) utopianism (see UTOPIANISM); and (iii) Neostoicism (see LIPSIUS, J.). (See also POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, HISTORY OF; RELIGION AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY; NATURAL LAW.) 4.7 The human being. Themes related to the human being that were prominent in the Renaissance include: (i) the distinction between microcosm and macrocosm; (ii) love; and (iii) the ability to shape one’s own nature. E.J. ASHWORTH RENNER, KARL (1870–1950) Karl Renner was a leading contributor to democratic-socialist legal theory within the Neo-Kantian ‘Austro-Marxist’ interpretation of socialism that developed in late nineteenth-century Vienna. For Renner and his associates, law is a fundamental and universal institution in any ordered human society. Given the universal necessity of law, the development of socialism may well proceed in an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary manner – and certainly, within the context of Viennese social democracy, it would proceed better by evolution. See also: LAW, PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Renner, K. (1949) The Institutions of Private Law and their Social Functions , trans. A. Schwarzschild, ed. with intro. O. Kahn-Freund, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (An excellent and clear translation of Renner’s magnum opus, his only substantial work available in English. Kahn-Freund’s introduction, though somewhat dated, remains of real value for the contemporary reader with an English-speaking or common-law background and approach.) RICHARD KINSEY NEIL MacCORMICK RENOUVIER, CHARLES BERNARD (1815–1903) Charles Renouvier is the main representative of French Neo-Kantianism in the nineteenth century. Following Kant, he delimited the conditions for the legitimate exercise of the faculty of knowledge, and denounced the illusions of past metaphysics. Wishing to go further than Kant in this direction, he criticized
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Page 766 the notions of substance and of actual infinity. According to him, relation is the basis of all our representations, reality is finite, and certainty rests on liberty. In ethics, he took into consideration, beyond the ideal of duty, the existence of the desires and interests to which history testifies. See also: NEO-KANTIANISM Further reading Séailles, G. (1905) La philosophie de Renouvier (Renouvier’s Philosophy), Paris: Alcan. (A critical study that has become a reference work.) Translated from the French by Robert Stern LAURENT FEDI REPRESENTATION, POLITICAL Political representation – the designation of a small group of politically active citizens to serve as representatives of the political community as a whole – is a central feature of contemporary states, especially of those that claim to be democratic. But what does it mean to say that one person or one group of people represents a larger group? Representatives are sometimes understood as agents of those they represent, sometimes symbolizing them, sometimes typifying their distinctive qualities or attitudes. Although political representation has something in common with each of these, it has its own special character. The missing idea here may be that the group represented authorizes the representative to make decisions on its behalf. This still leaves open one crucial question, however: how far should political representatives remain answerable to those they represent, and how far should they have the freedom to act on their own judgment? See also: DEMOCRACY Further reading Birch, A.H. (1993) Concepts and Theories of Modern Democracy , London: Routledge. (Relates representative government to the development of political science; especially useful for those without a background in political science.) Dunn, J. (ed.) (1993) Democracy – The Unfinished Journey 508 BC to AD 1993, corrected edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (An excellent collection of essays with enormous historical sweep) ANDREW REEVE REPROBATION Reprobation is an eternal decision by God that results in everlasting death and punishment for some persons. The doctrine of reprobation typically takes one of three forms: (1) that God from eternity decreed to elect some without regard to faith or works and to reprobate others without regard to sin or unbelief, both to display his glory and for reasons we do not know (sometimes called double predestination); (2) that God from eternity decreed to elect some, despite their sin, and to abandon the rest, with the cause of their reprobation being sin and unbelief; or (3) that God from eternity elected those he foreknew would believe in Christ and reprobated those he foreknew would persist in sin and unbelief. Reprobation doctrine was developed by Augustine and appears in the theology of Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther and John Calvin, who were deeply indebted to Augustine’s thought. Although some Lutheran and Roman Catholic theologians have defended reprobation doctrine since the sixteenth century, Reformed theologians have stressed it and made it the occasion of controversy. See also: ETERNITY; HELL Further reading Klooster, F.H. (1984) Calvin’s Doctrine of Predestination , Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2nd edn. (Includes a good summary of Calvin’s views on reprobation.) William of Ockham ( c .1320–3) Predestination, God’s Foreknowledge, and Future Contingents, trans. and ed. M.M. Adams and N. Kretzmann, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. (Both the introduction and the translated material deal with reprobation.) RONALD J. FEENSTRA REPRODUCTION AND ETHICS The first reproductive issue debated extensively by philosophers was abortion. Debates about its morality were, and still are, dominated by the issue of the moral status of the foetus, on which a wide variety of views has been defended. The most ‘conservative’ view is usually associated with very restrictive abortion policies, inconsistent with ‘a woman’s right to choose’ (though the connection has been challenged by Judith Jarvis Thomson). However, all but the most conservative find it hard to ground prevailing moral intuitions concerning the newer issue of using human embryos for research
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Page 767 importance in the context of methods for overcoming infertility (artificial insemination by donor (AID), egg and embryo donation involving in vitro fertilization (IVF), surrogacy) where issues about rights and ownership may arise. Considerations of ‘the welfare of the child’, often used to settle surrogacy disputes, also bear on questions of what should, or may, be done to avoid bringing a child with a genetic abnormality into the world. Current philosophical literature on reproductive issues is largely limited to a vocabulary of rights and little attention is paid to the social and familial contexts in which reproductive decisions are usually made See also: BIOETHICS Further reading Alpern, K.D. (1992) The Ethics of Reproductive Technology, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (A wide range of readings, not exclusively modern, with useful case studies.) Feinberg, J. (1984) The Problem of Abortion , Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2nd edn. (Still the most comprehensive collection of articles on the topic, including Judith Jarvis Thomson’s and Michael Tooley’s, with a helpful introduction.) ROSALIND HURSTHOUSE REPUBLICANISM Significant divisions exist in all societies and communities of any size. The expression of these divisions in politics takes many forms, one of them republican. The hallmark of republican politics is the subordination of different interests to the common weal, or what is in the interest of all citizens. To ensure this outcome, government in a republic can never be the exclusive preserve of one interest or social order; it must always be controlled jointly by representatives of all major groups in a society. The degree of control exercised by representatives of different social elements may not be equal, and different styles of government are compatible with republican objectives. However, all republican governments involve power-sharing in some way. Even in a democratic republic political majorities must share power with minorities for the common good to be realized. Maintaining an appropriate balance of political power is the chief problem of republicans. One or another faction may obtain control of government and use it to further its own interests, instead of the common weal. To prevent this republicans have developed a variety of strategies. Some rely on constitutional ‘checks and balances’ to cure the mischief of factionalism. Others seek to minimize factionalization itself by regulating the causes of faction – for example, the distribution of land and other forms of property. Still others promote civic religions in order to bind diverse people together. All these methods accept the inevitability of conflicting interests, and see the need to accommodate them politically. Hence, civic life is at the heart of republicanism. Further reading Fontana, B. (ed.) (1994) The Invention of the Modern Republic, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Intellectual historians discuss the adaptation of republicanism in revolutionary America and France, and its subsequent emergence in large, commercial societies in western European nations; complements Rahe (1994).) Skinner, Q. (1978) The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2 vols. (A treatise on political thinking in Europe during the Renaissance and Reformation, with particular stress on the evolution of republicanism and notions of the state.) RUSSELL L. HANSON RESPECT FOR PERSONS The idea that one should treat persons with due respect is an important part of common sense morality, but opinions differ about when respect is called for, what it requires, and why. Respect for persons is also a central concept in many ethical theories. Some theories even hold respect for persons to be the foundation of all other moral duties and obligations. Respect is distinguished commonly, on one side, from fear and submission, and on another, from admiration, liking and affection. Respect for all persons as such is distinguished normally from esteem or special regard for persons of unusual merit. Some philosophers identify respect with agapē, a special kind of love, but respect is perhaps most often regarded as a distinct attitude that should constrain and complement the promptings of love. Kant, for example, held that the requirements of respect and love are different, though compatible, and that both are dependent upon the more general and fundamental idea that humanity in every person is an end in itself. Other key issues in discussions of respect for persons include: what moral requirement, if
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Page 768 any, there is to respect all persons; what the grounds, scope, and theoretical status are of that requirement; whether one can forfeit all claim to respect as a person; what ‘respect for persons’ demands with regard to specific problems, such as conflicts rooted in race and gender differences; and whether there is the same ground and obligation to respect oneself as to respect others. See also: SELF-RESPECT Further reading Downie, R.S. and Telfer, E. (1969) Respect for Persons, London: Allen & Unwin. (Develops the idea of the supreme worth of the individual person as the basis for a comprehensive requirement of respect.) Green, O.H. (ed.) (1982) Respect for Persons, Tulane Studies in Philosophy, vol. 31, New Orleans, LA: Tulane University. (A collection of twelve short essays on respect for persons in relation to moral theory, self-respect, and various moral problems.) THOMAS E. HILL, JR RESPONSIBILITIES OF SCIENTISTS AND INTELLECTUALS Do scientists and intellectuals bear responsibilities peculiar to them? If an ‘intellectual’ is whoever has a committed interest in the truth or validity of ideas for their own sake and a ‘scientist’ anyone possessing a special competence in the natural or social sciences, they may indeed be more likely to find themselves in certain characteristic positions of responsibility. In the case of intellectuals, the importance of providing checkable justification of claims made in their pursuit of truth brings certain responsibilities. Scientists may be said to have responsibilities for pursuing truth in their own areas of competence, for wielding their social power appropriately, for making their results generally accessible and for using resources properly. But these apparently special responsibilities are nevertheless to be understood as rooted ultimately in those which any human being may, in the relevant circumstances, be thought to bear to their fellows. See also: APPLIED ETHICS Further reading Havel, V. (1985) The Power of the Powerless, London: Hutchinson. (A remarkable analysis of the pervasively demoralizing effects on society of a ruthless totalitarian insistence on lip service to the ‘truth’ of what all concerned know to be false.) MacLean, I., Montefiore, A. and Winch, P. (eds) (1990) The Political Responsibility of Intellectuals , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (A collection of essays by writers from a number of different countries.) ALAN MONTEFIORE RESPONSIBILITY To be responsible for something is to be answerable for it. We have prospective responsibilities, things it is up to us to attend to: these may attach to particular roles (the responsibilities of, for instance, parents or doctors), or be responsibilities we have as moral agents, or as human beings. We have retrospective responsibilities, for what we have done or failed to do, for the effects of our actions or omissions. Such responsibilities are often (but not always) moral or legal responsibilities. The scope of our retrospective moral responsibilities is controversial. We are responsible for the intended results of our actions, but how far we are responsible for their foreseen effects, or for harms that we do not prevent when we could, depends on how we should define our prospective responsibilities, that is, on how far we should regard such foreseen effects, or such preventable harms, as our business. To say that I am responsible for some foreseen effect, or for a harm which I did not prevent, is to say that I should have attended to that effect or to that harm in deciding how to act; our retrospective responsibilities are partly determined by our prospective responsibilities. I am responsible for something only if it is within my control. It is sometimes argued that I am therefore not responsible for that whose occurrence is a matter of luck; but it is not clear that we can or should try to make responsibility wholly independent of matters of luck. We have responsibilities not merely as individuals, but also as members of organizations (organizations themselves have responsibilities in so far as they can be seen as agents). This raises the question of how far we are responsible for the actions of groups or organizations to which we belong. See also: ACTION; LEGAL CONCEPTS Further reading Lucas, J.R. (1993) Responsibility, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Analyses responsibility as answerability; discusses omissions, the responsibilities attaching to roles, and collective responsibility.) Zimmerman, M.J. (1988) An Essay on Moral Responsibility,
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Page 769 Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield. (An exhaustive analysis of retrospective moral responsibility, with a useful bibliography.) R.A. DUFF RESURRECTION The Judaeo-Christian belief in a future general resurrection of the dead arose in late second-temple Judaism (see, for example, Daniel 12: 2 and John 11: 24). (Whether there would be a resurrection of the dead was one of the main points that divided the Pharisees and the Sadducees.) When the new Christian movement appeared – before it was clearly something other than a party or sect within Judaism – it centred on the belief that the crucified Jesus of Nazareth had been, in a literal, bodily sense, raised from the dead ( resurrectus) and that his resurrection was, in some way, the means by which the expected general resurrection of the dead would be accomplished. Indeed, resurrection was so pervasive a theme in early Christian preaching that it was apparently sometimes thought that Christians worshipped two gods called ‘Jesus’ and ‘Resurrection’ ( Anastasis). The early Christians generally said that ‘God raised Jesus from the dead’. In post-New Testament times, it became more common for Christians to say that ‘Jesus rose from the dead’. Belief in the resurrection of Jesus and a future general resurrection continue to be central to Christianity. Christians have always insisted that resurrection is not a mere restoration of what the resurrected person had before death (as in the story in the fourth Gospel of the raising of Lazarus) but is rather a doorway into a new kind of life. The status of a belief in the general resurrection in rabbinic Judaism is difficult to summarize. It should be noted, however, that a belief in the resurrection of the dead is one of Maimonides’ ‘thirteen principles’, which some Jews regard as a summary of the essential doctrines of Judaism. A belief in a general resurrection of the dead is one of many Judaeo-Christian elements that have been incorporated into Islam. See also: ESCHATOLOGY; SOUL, NATURE AND IMMORTALITY OF THE Further reading Cullmann, O. (1958) Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead? , London: Epworth; also in K. Stendahl (ed.) Immortality and Resurrection , New York: Macmillan, 1965. (A classic and much discussed essay that contrasts the two concepts of its title and argues that the concept of the immortality of the soul is foreign to the New Testament.) Edwards, P. (ed.) (1992) Immortality, New York: Macmillan. (A very useful collection, which contains an extensive bibliographical essay. Includes the relevant passages from Plato’s Phaedo and Thomas Aquinas’ Summa theologiae .) PETERVAN INWAGEN REVELATION All major theistic religions have claimed that God has revealed himself in some way, both by showing something of himself in events and also by providing some true, important and otherwise unknowable propositions. Event-revelation may include both general revelation (God revealing himself in very general events, observable by all, such as the existence of the universe and its conformity to natural laws), and special revelation (God revealing himself in certain particular historical events). The events are a revelation in the sense that God has brought them about and they show something of his character. Thus Judaism teaches that God manifested his nature and his love for Israel when he brought his people out of Egypt and led them to the promised land through the agency of Moses. Christianity traditionally affirms that God has revealed himself in a much fuller sense in Jesus Christ – because Jesus did not merely show us something of the character of God but was God himself. God reveals propositions by some chosen prophet or society telling us truths orally or in writing which we would not have adequate grounds for believing unless they had been announced to us by persons who showed some mark of God-given authority. Thus Islam teaches that God inspired Muhammad to write the Qur’an in the seventh century AD, and that its success (its proclamation throughout a large part of the civilized world), content and style (deep thoughts expressed in a beautiful way, not to be expected of an uneducated person) show its divine origin. See also: PROPHECY; RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE Further reading Aquinas, T. (1259–65) Summa contra gentiles I, trans. A.C. Pegis, On the Truth of the Catholic Faith, bk I, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955. (Statement of Aquinas’ distinctions between natural and revealed theology; see chapters 2–13.)
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Page 770 Dulles, A. (1983) Models of Revelation , Dublin: Gill & Macmillan. (A survey of twentieth-century theological accounts of revelation.) RICHARD SWINBURNE REVOLUTION There have been revolutions in politics, science, philosophy and most other spheres of human life. This entry discusses revolution mainly through concepts pertaining especially to the political realm. Attempts to define political revolution have been controversial; as a consequence there is dispute about whether specific occurrences were revolutions, rebellions, coups d’état or reformations. If we define revolution as the illegal introduction of a radically new situation and order for the sake of obtaining or increasing individual or communal freedom, we may list those characteristics most often ascribed to it. These characteristics distinguish it from its earlier use where revolution referred to the return of an original state of affairs, as in astronomy; they also allow its distinction from related concepts such as reformation. At least at a superficial level this definition can do justice to early modern (seventeenth and eighteenth) as well as late modern (nineteenth and twentieth century) revolutions. Through these periods there has, however, been sufficient change in concepts closely related to revolution to require the definition’s openness to nuances for it to apply to both periods. It is unclear whether even such a nuanced definition can apply in postmodern thought. Further reading Calvert, P. (1990) Revolution and Counter-Revolution , Milton Keynes: Open University Press. (Useful general introduction to theoretical accounts of the concept.) Dunn, J. (1989) Modern Revolutions: An Introduction to the Analysis of a Political Phenomenon , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd edn. (An important theoretical introduction followed by an analysis of eight twentieth-century revolutions; provides an extensive bibliography.) PETER A. SCHOULS RGYALTSHABDAR MA RINCHEN (1364–1432) rGyal tshab dar ma rin chen (Gyeltsap darma rinchen) was a disciple of the great Tsong kha pa. Like much Tibetan philosophy, his work is commentarial in style. In his commentaries on the work of Dharmakīrti he developed a moderate realist position with regard to abstract entities, claiming that this was what Dharmakīrti (apparently an antirealist) really intended. Properties, rGyal tshab maintained, do exist, but not independently of things; universals are separable from particulars in thought, but never in perception. Perception straightforwardly presents us with real objects; inference, on the other hand, tends to present reality in a distorted way. See also: TIBETAN PHILOSOPHY Further reading rGyal tshab dar ma rin chen (1364–1432) tshad ma rnam ’grel gyi tshig le’ur byas pa’i rnam bshad thar lam phyin ci ma log par gsal bar byed pa (The Faultless Revealing of the Path to Liberation, a Complete Explanation of the Stanzas of [Dharmakīrti’s] Pramāṇavārttika), Varanasi: Ge-luk-ba Press, 1974–5; second chapter trans. R. Jackson, Is Enlightenment Possible? Dharmakīrti and rGyal tshab on Knowledge, Rebirth, No-Self and Liberation, Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion Publications, 1993. (rGyal tshab’s major commentary on Dharmakīrti’s main work on epistemology and logic, the ‘Commentary on Valid Cognition’.) GEORGES B.J. DREYFUS RHAZES see AL-RAZI, ABU BAKR MUHAMMAD IBN ZAKARIYYA’ RHETORIC Rhetoric is the power to persuade, especially about political or public affairs. Sometimes philosophy has defined itself in opposition to rhetoric – Plato invented the term ‘rhetoric’ so that philosophy could define itself by contrast, and distinctions like that between persuasion and knowledge have been popular ever since. Sometimes philosophy has used rhetorical techniques or materials to advance its own projects. Some of its techniques, especially topics of invention, the classification of issues, and tropes or figures of speech, are occasionally employed by philosophers. The philosophical question is whether these techniques have any interest beyond efficacy. What is the relation between techniques effective in persuading others and methods for making up one’s own mind? Is there any connection between the most persuasive case and the best decision? Is there a relation between the judgments of appropriateness and decorum exercised by the rhetorician, and the judgments of appropriateness exercised by the person of
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Page 771 practical wisdom? Do judgments about probability, ambiguity and uncertainty, and judgments under constraints of time or the need for decision, aspire to the ideal of perfect rationality, to which they are doomed to fall short, or do these kinds of judgment have an integrity of their own? Apart from supplying useful techniques, an art of persuasion also raises philosophic questions concerning the relation between rhetoric and logic, rhetoric and ethics, and rhetoric and poetics. See also: LANGUAGE, MEDIEVAL THEORIES OF; LEGAL REASONING AND INTERPRETATION Further reading Garver, E. (1994) Aristotle’s Rhetoric: An Art of Character , Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (A philosophical analysis of Aristotle’s Rhetoric.) McKeon, R. (1987) Rhetoric: Essays in Invention and Discovery, Woodbridge, CT: Oxbow Press. (Contains the influential ‘Rhetoric in the Middle Ages’ and other articles by an important but difficult historian and philosopher of rhetoric.) EUGENE GARVER RICHARD OF MIDDLETON ( c .1249–1302) Richard was a Franciscan philosopher and theologian. In general he followed the tradition flowing from Bonaventure, although on some questions he sided with Thomas Aquinas. However, there is also a strong anti-Thomist reaction in his work. Many of the questions raised in the condemnations of 1277 at Paris and Oxford are central in Richard’s works. His answers often echo Bonaventure, William of Ware and Matthew of Aquasparta; yet his argumentation carries his personal stamp and shows him deeply engaged with the definitions and arguments of the authors of his own era. See also: BONAVENTURE Further reading Sharp, D.E. (1930) ‘Richard of Middleton’, Franciscan Philosophy at Oxford in the Thirteenth Century, London: Oxford University Press; repr. Farnborough: Gregg Press, 1966, 211–76. (Summarizes the main doctrinal positions.) STEPHEN F. BROWN RICHARD OF ST VICTOR (d. 1173) A native of Scotland or Ireland, Richard became an Augustinian canon at the Abbey of St Victor in Paris, where he was a student of Hugh of St Victor. He is most famous for his contemplative doctrine, which is based on a biblical anthropology that involves a philosophical psychology and noetic theory. Richard’s writings should be understood in the context of Hugh of St Victor’s programme for a complete theological pedagogy, organized according to the threefold sense of Scripture (literal, allegorical, tropological). Richard’s specifically exegetical works include an encyclopedic introduction to the methods of interpreting Scripture, the Liber exceptionum, and important commentaries on the Apocalypse and Ezekiel. Like Hugh, he stresses that the literal sense of Scripture is the foundation of its spiritual senses. See also: HUGH OF ST VICTOR Further reading Richard of St Victor (before 1173) De duodecim patriarchis (The Twelve Patriarchs) or Benjamin minor , trans. G.A. Zinn, The Twelve Patriarchs, The Mystical Ark, Book Three of The Trinity , New York: Paulist Press, 1979. (A reliable English translation, with a good introduction to Richard’s spiritual teaching.) KENT EMERY, JR RICHARD RUFUS OF CORNWALL (d. after 1259) A thirteenth-century philosopher and theologian, Rufus was among the first Western medieval authors to study Aristotelian metaphysics, physics and epistemology; his lectures on Aristotle’s Physics are the earliest known surviving Western medieval commentary. In 1238, after writing treatises against Averroes and lecturing on Aristotle – at greatest length on the Metaphysics – he joined the Franciscan Order, left Paris and became a theologian. Rufus’ lectures on Peter Lombard’s Sentences were the first presented by an Oxford bachelor of theology. Greatly influenced by Robert Grosseteste, Rufus’ Oxford lectures were devoted in part to a refutation of Richard Fishacre, the Dominican master who first lectured on the Sentences at Oxford. Though much more sophisticated philosophically than Fishacre, Rufus defended the more exclusively biblical theology recommended by Grosseteste against Fishacre’s more modern scholasticism. Rufus’ Oxford lectures were employed as a source by Bonaventure, whose lectures on the Sentences were vastly influential. Returning to Paris shortly after Bonaventure lectured there,
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Page 772 Rufus took Bonaventure’s lectures as a model for his own Parisian Sentences commentary. Rufus’ Paris lectures made him famous. According to his enemy Roger Bacon, when he returned to Oxford after 1256 as the Franciscan regent master, his influence increased steadily. It was at its height forty years later in the 1290s, when John Duns Scotus was a bachelor of theology. Early versions of many important positions developed by Duns Scotus can be found in Rufus’ works. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM, MEDIEVAL Further reading Raedts, P. (1987) Richard Rufus of Cornwall and the Tradition of Oxford Theology , Oxford: Clarendon Press. (A survey of the literature on Rufus’ life and works published before 1987, this book deals chiefly with Rufus’ Oxford lectures. Rufus is compared with Richard Fishacre and Robert Grosseteste; no notice is taken of another major source, Alexander of Hales.) REGA WOOD RICOEUR, PAUL (1913–) Paul Ricoeur is one of the leading French philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century. Along with the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, Ricoeur is one of the main contemporary exponents of philosophical hermeneutics: that is, of a philosophical orientation which places particular emphasis on the nature and role of interpretation. While his early work was strongly influenced by Husserl’s phenomenology, he became increasingly concerned with problems of interpretation and developed – partly through detailed inquiries into psychoanalysis and structuralism – a distinctive hermeneutical theory. In his later writings Ricoeur explores the nature of metaphor and narrative, which are viewed as ways of creating new meaning in language. See also: HERMENEUTICS Further reading Clarke, S.H. (1990) Paul Ricoeur, London: Routledge. (A general and accessible introduction to Ricoeur’s work, placing particular emphasis on its relevance to debates in literary theory.) Ricoeur, P. (1981) Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation, ed. and trans. J.B. Thompson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. JOHN B. THOMPSON RIGHT AND GOOD ‘Right’ and ‘good’ are the two basic terms of moral evaluation. In general, something is ‘right’ if it is morally obligatory, whereas it is morally ‘good’ if it is worth having or doing and enhances the life of those who possess it. Acts are often held to be morally right or wrong in respect of the action performed, but morally good or bad in virtue of their motive: it is right to help a person in distress, but good to do so from a sense of duty or sympathy, since no one can supposedly be obliged to do something (such as acting with a certain motive) which cannot be done at will. Henry Sidgwick distinguished between two basic conceptions of morality. The ‘attractive’ conception, favoured by the ancient Greeks, views the good as fundamental, and grounds the claims of morality in the self-perfection to which we naturally aspire. The ‘imperative’ conception, preferred in the modern era, views the right as fundamental, and holds that we are subject to certain obligations whatever our wants or desires. See also: GOOD, THEORIES OF THE Further reading Ross, W.D. (1930) The Right and the Good, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (A classic work containing an acute analysis of the moral notions of right and good.) Sidgwick, H. (1874) The Methods of Ethics , Macmillan: London; 7th edn, 1907; repr. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1981, bk I, ch. 9. (Contains his insightful contrast between ancient and modern ethics.) CHARLES LARMORE RIGHTS There is widespread consensus that rights are ways of acting or of being treated that are beneficial to the rightholder. Controversy begins, however, when one attempts to specify the notion of rights further. (1) It is sometimes said, perhaps too casually, that all rights carry with them correlated obligations – things that other persons are supposed to do or refrain from doing when some given person is said to have a right to something. The question is: how is it best to state this relationship between rights and correlated obligations? (2) Most people think that rights are, in some sense, justified. But there is considerable controversy as
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Page 773 of justification. Some say that rights are practices (certain ways of acting or of being treated) that are established, typically socially established. Thus, the issue for them is whether the fact of social recognition and enforcement is justified (or could be). Others say that rights themselves are claims; hence a right is a justified claim or principle of some sort (whether the practice identified in that claim exists or not). This dispute, between rights as justified practices and rights as justified claims, needs to be explored and, if possible, resolved. Other topics need addressing beyond the question of the initial characterization of rights. One of them is the question of the function of rights: what good are they anyway? what can one do with rights? Another is the question of how best to justify particular kinds of rights, such as human rights and basic constitutional rights. Is there a substantive theory of critical morality that can do the job? Many people are concerned, especially, with whether utilitarianism (one of the dominant ethical theories in the West today) is up to this task. Finally, mention should be made of one other issue much talked about of late: what kinds of beings can have rights, and under what conditions of possession and dispossession? See also: LAW, LIMITS OF Further reading Held, V. (1984) Rights and Goods: Justifying Social Action, New York and London: Free Press. (Wellwritten book, with many interesting examples.) Tuck, R. (1979) Natural Rights Theories: Their Origins and Development, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (A major study – provides a brief early history of rights and an indispensable background to seventeenth-century thought, in particular Hobbes.) REX MARTIN RISK Every day persons face threats from natural disasters such as hurricanes and from technological hazards such as exposure to more than 60,000 different chemicals. The increase of pervasive, human-caused hazards raises a number of philosophical issues, most notably in the areas of ethics and epistemology. There are three main classes of ethical issue associated with risk. (1) Who should define risk, and how should it be defined? (2) Who should evaluate risk, and according to which rules? (3) What are the conditions under which it is ethically acceptable to impose societal risk? Societal risks (such as those from liquefied natural gas facilities) tend to be involuntarily imposed, whereas individual risks (such as those from dietary consumption of saturated fats) are more voluntarily chosen. This discussion addresses societal, rather than individual, risks because they involve less individual choice and hence more ethical controversy. See also: PUBLIC INTEREST Further reading Douglas, M. and Wildavsky, A. (1982) Risk and Culture, Berkeley, CA: University of California. (Provides arguments that risk is a social construct.) Rescher, N. (1983) Risk: A Philosophical Introduction , Washington, DC: University Press of America. (Readable philosophical survey of problems related to risk.) KRISTIN SHRADER-FRECHETTE RISK ASSESSMENT Probabilistic or quantitative risk assessment (QRA) aims to identify, estimate and evaluate a variety of threats to human health and safety. These threats arise primarily from particular technologies (such as commercial nuclear fission) or from environmental impacts (such as deforestation). Defined in terms of the probability that some consequence will occur, ‘risk’ typically is expressed as the average annual probability of fatality that a particular activity imposes on one individual. For example, because of normal lifetime exposure to dichloromethane (DCM), a multipurpose solvent, the average member of the public has an annual probability of dying from cancer of 0:0000041 or (4:1 × 10−6). Or, for every million persons exposed to DCM throughout their lifetimes, on average the chemical will cause four cancer deaths each year. Although risks may be individual (such as those from consuming saturated fats) or societal (such as those from liquified natural gas facilities), government typically regulates only societal risks. By definition, they are largely involuntarily imposed, whereas individual risks affect only the persons voluntarily choosing them. Most QRAs address societal risks, either because a government seeks a scientific basis for particular risk regulations, because some industry wishes to determine possible liability for its processes or products, or because actual or potential victims want to protect themselves
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Page 774 or to allocate risks by means other than market mechanisms. Philosophical contributions to QRA are of three main types: assessments of particular risks, criticisms of existing assessments, and clarifications of important QRA concepts, methods or theories. Such contributions usually focus on either epistemology (including philosophy of science) or ethics. Epistemological analyses address, for example, the adequacy and appropriateness of some scientific, probabilistic or policy technique used in QRA; the status of a specific causal hypothesis about risk; or the rationality of alternative decision rules for evaluating risks. Ethical analyses investigate, for instance, the equity of the risk distributions presupposed in a specific QRA or by general QRA methodology; the degree to which a particular method of risk evaluation accounts for crucial social values, such as free informed consent and due process; and the extent to which a given QRA technique, such as discounting the future, begs important ethical questions such as rights of future generations. See also: PROBABILITY THEORY AND EPISTEMOLOGY; RISK Further reading Humber, J. and Almeder, R. (eds) (1987) Quantitative Risk Assessment, Clifton, NJ: Humana Press. (An early philosophical analysis of some key issues in risk assessment.) Shrader-Frechette, K. (1985) Risk Analysis and Scientific Method , Boston, MA: Kluwer. (Analysis of some of the main epistemological, scientific and ethical problems in quantative risk assessment.) KRISTIN SHRADER-FRECHETTE RITUAL Ritual, present throughout human affairs and central to many religious and cultural traditions, presents perplexities. One important question concerns the worth of such repetition and fixety – for example, in prayer, in human interaction, sometimes even in eating and drinking. To consider prayer, why not encourage the direct expression of religious thought and affect – from the heart, as it were, rather than in prescribed ways? It is sometimes suggested, and tempting to suppose, that to regularize such expression is to constrict it, ultimately to demean it. It is difficult to locate value in such apparently unnecessary regulation of human affairs. In the context of philosophy the question becomes striking. None of the prevailing approaches to ethics makes it easy to see how ritual might possess ethical value or figure crucially in the ethical life. Yet this is precisely how ritualized ways are often seen within communities of practitioners. See also: LAW AND RITUAL IN CHINESE PHILOSOPHY; PRAYER; SACRAMENTS Further reading Douglas, M. (1970) Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology, New York: Pantheon Books. (An argument for the indispensability of ritual.) Durkheim, É. (1912) Elementary Forms of the Religious Life , trans. J.W. Swain, London: Allen & Unwin, 1915. (Classic discussion of the ritual nature of society and religion.) HOWARD WETTSTEIN ROHAULT, JACQUES (1617–72) The French philosopher Rohault belongs (with Régis and de Cordemoy) to a generation which did much to consolidate the position of Cartesian physics in France. He is particularly famous for his experimental attitude. He contributed to the debate over the physical interpretation of the Eucharist. Further reading Rohault, J. (1670) Traité de physique, Paris; Latin trans. Tractus physicus, 1674; English trans. J. Clarke as Rohault’s System of physics , London, 1728–9, 2 vols; repr. with intro. L. Laudan, New York and London, 1969. THEO VERBEEK ROMAN LAW Law was Rome’s greatest gift to the intellect of modern Europe. Even today the Roman law library, and the achievements of the jurists who built it up, live on in the law of the Continental jurisdictions and of other countries farther afield. It is true that over the past two centuries codification has largely interrupted the long tradition of direct recourse to the Roman materials, but the concepts applied in civilian jurisdictions and the categories of legal thought which they use are still in large measure those of the Roman jurists. In England, perhaps for no better reason than that from the late thirteenth century the judges of the King’s Bench and Common Pleas happened to come from a background which cut them off from the clerical education which had given their predecessors access to the Roman library, there was no
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Page 775 reception of Roman law. Post-Norman England thus became the second Western society to set about building up a mature law library from scratch. The common law (being the law common to the whole realm of England) and the civil law (being the ius civile, the law pertaining to the civis, the citizen, initially of course the Roman citizen) thus became the two principal families within the Western legal tradition. It is wrong, however, to suppose that the development of the common law was constantly isolated. There have on the contrary been important points of contact at almost all periods. One result is that the categories of English legal thought are not in fact dissimilar to those of the jurisdictions of continental Europe. The study of Roman law has contributed immeasurably to the idea of a rational normative order, an idea fundamental to legal philosophy as indeed to all practical philosophy. See also: COMMON LAW; LAW, PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Honoré, T. (1981) Emperors and Lawyers , 2nd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. (This is a detailed study of the transition from the juristic tradition of classical Roman law to the bureaucratic lawmaking of the post-classical period, when jurists became anonymous civil servants in the ministry of justice.) Nicholas, B. (1962) Introduction to Roman Law , 3rd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. (This is a marvellous introduction not only to Roman law but to law in general. Read with the Institutes it provides the best foundation for further study of Roman law and legal thought and, incidentally, the best point from which any aspiring lawyer can get to know the concepts which law school takes for granted.) P.B.H. BIRKS ROMANO, JUDAH see JUDAH BEN MOSES OF ROME ROMANTICISM, GERMAN Because Romanticism has many meanings which vary according to time and place, it is best to examine the movement in a specific culture and period. Of all the phases of Romanticism, early German Romanticism is of special importance in the history of Western philosophy. The early German Romantics – Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich von Hardenberg, Schleiermacher and Schelling – developed influential ideas in the fields of metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics and politics. The aim of their movement was essentially social and political: to overcome the alienation and disenchantment created by modernity, and to restore unity with oneself, others and nature. In accord with this aim, the Romantics advocated an ethics of love and self-realization, in opposition to hedonism and the Kantian ethic of duty. They championed an ideal of community against the competitive egoism of modern society; and, finally, they developed an organic concept of nature against the mechanistic worldview of Cartesian physics. Romantic ethics, politics and aesthetics should all be seen in the light of their essential cultural goal: to cure humanity of homesickness and to make people feel at home in the world again. Further reading Bowie, A. (1997) From Romanticism to Critical Theory , London: Routledge. (Explores the origin of German Romanticism and the development of Romantic literary theory, tracing its continuation into the work of Heidegger, Benjamin and Adorno.) Silz, W. (1929) Early German Romanticism, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (A clear and straightforward account of early Romanticism that exposes many anachronistic interpretations.) FREDERICK BEISER RORTY, RICHARD McKAY (1931–) Richard Rorty is a leading US philosopher and public intellectual, and the best-known contemporary advocate of pragmatism. Trained in both analytic and traditional philosophy, he has followed Dewey in attacking the views of knowledge, mind, language and culture that have made both approaches attractive, drawing on arguments and views of the history of philosophy from sources ranging from Heidegger and Derrida to Quine and Wilfrid Sellars. He takes pragmatism to have moved beyond Dewey by learning from analytical philosophy to make ‘the linguistic turn’, and from Thomas Kuhn that there is no such thing as ‘scientific method’. Language and thought are tools for coping, not representations mirroring reality. Rorty’s characteristic philosophical positions are what might be called ‘anti-isms’, positions defined primarily by what they deny. In epistemology he endorses anti-foundationalism, in philosophy of language anti-representationalism, in metaphysics anti-essentialism and anti- both realism and anti-realism, in meta-ethics ironism. He extols pragmatism as the philosophy that can best
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Page 776 clear the road for new ways of thinking which can be used to diminish suffering and to help us find out what we want and how to get it. In the public arena, he is a leading exponent of liberalism and critic of both left and right. See also: LIBERALISM PRAGMATISM Further reading Rorty, R. (1979) Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (His major work.) MICHAEL DAVID ROHR ROSCELIN OF COMPIÈGNE (c.1050–after 1120) The French scholar Roscelin of Compiègne was one of a group of logicians in late eleventh and early twelfth-century Europe who, in defiance of most of their predecessors in the field, treated logic as dealing with the concrete physical things that serve as verbal signs of realities rather than the realities those signs signified. This meant that although the things logic talks about are part of the physical world, it talks about them not as things referred to by language but as parts of language itself. All the technical notions of Aristotelian logic, for example ‘universal’, ‘individual’, ‘category’, ‘genus’ and ‘species’, apply only to those linguistic signs themselves qua signs. See also: ABELARD, P.; LOGIC, MEDIEVAL Further reading Tweedale, M.M. (1988) ‘Logic(i): From the Late Eleventh Century to the Time of Abelard’, in P. Dronke (ed.) A History of Twelfth Century Western Philosophy , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 196– 226. (Gives an overview of the trends in logic and grammar at the time Roscelin taught.) MARTIN M. TWEEDALE ROSENZWEIG, FRANZ (1886–1929) An outstanding Hegel scholar – his Hegel und der Staat (Hegel and the State) (1920) remains a standard work on Hegel’s political philosophy – Franz Rosenzweig elaborated, in Der Stern der Erlösung (The Star of Redemption) (1921) and several articles – notably, his 1925 article ‘Das neue Denken’ (‘The New Thinking’) – a philosophyof revelation that breakswith the systematic and rationalistic premises of German Idealism. The nisus of Rosenzweig’s New Thinking was formulated as early as 1917, in a letter containing the germ ( Urzelle ) of Der Stern : ‘after reason, “philosophical reason”, has absorbed everything in itself’, Rosenzweig writes, ‘after it has proclaimed its sole existence, man suddenly discovers that he is still here, although he was digested long ago. . . . I am still here, I – plain, private subject, with first and last name, I – dust and ashes. . . . Individuum ineffabile triumphans ’. How can this be? The human being, Rosenzweig explains, can acquire personal identity as an individual only through the call, that is, the revelation of the Other: God – but also, some other human being. Dialogue, communication in language, comes to the fore in this philosophy, developed around the same time as Martin Buber’s Ich und Du (I and Thou) (1923). Often treated as a common ground and basis for understanding between Jews and Christians, Der Stern der Erlösung is a major source of inspiration for such contemporary philosophers as Lévinas and is widely regarded as a masterpiece of Jewish philosophy. See also: HEGELIANISM; JEWISH PHILOSOPHY IN THE EARLY 19TH CENTURY Further reading Glatzer, N.N. (1953) Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought, New York: Schocken; 2nd edn, 1961. (The classic English introduction to Rosenzweig. Contains extracts from Rosenzweig’s works in English translation.) Rosenzweig, F. (1921) Der Stern der Erlösung (The Star of Redemption), Frankfurt: Kauffmann; trans. W.W. Hallo, New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970; paperback edn, Boston: Beacon Press, 1972. (Rosenzweig’s main work, in which he sets out a ‘new thinking’ to outline a history of culture and proposes a philosophical theology of Judaism and Christianity.) MYRIAM BIENENSTOCK ROSMINI-SERBATI, ANTONIO (1797–1855) In the reactionary, anti-Enlightenment, spiritualistic climate of Italy and Europe in the first decades of the nineteenth century, the Italian philosopher Rosmini set out to elaborate a Christian, Catholic system of philosophy which drew elements from Platonic, Augustinian and Thomist thought, while also taking account of recent philosophical developments, especially Kantian ones, as well as of the new liberal political trends in the culture of the time. His aim was to restore the principle of objectivity in the field of gnoseology, as well as in ethics, law and political thought. See also: ITALY, PHILOSOPHY IN
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Page 777 Further reading Rosmini-Serbati, A. (1830) Nuovo saggio sull’origine delle idee (New Essay On The Origin Of Ideas), ed. F. Orestano, Rome: Anonima Romana Editoriale, 1934. (Rosmini’s central work, this forms the basis for his entire theoretic, metaphysical, moral and legal-political system of philosophy. Vols 3–4 of the Complete Works.) Translated from the Italian by Virginia Cox GUIDO VERUCCI ROSS, ALF (1899–1979) Famous for his contribution to Scandinavian legal realism, Alf Niels Christian Ross was among the major philosophers of the latter half of the twentieth century. He was Kelsen’s ideal successor and on a par with H.L.A. Hart in terms of notoriety and international influence. He opposed both natural law theories and formalistic legal positivism, and insisted that the central questions of law were epistemological. See also: LEGAL REALISM Further reading Ross, A. (1958) On Law and Justice , London: Stevens and Sons. (Readable statement of ethical noncognitivism coupled with legal realism, reducing legal statements in the last resort to predictions of behaviour and emotive utterances tending to affect behaviour.) ENRICO PATTARO ROSS, WILLIAM DAVID (1877–1971) W.D. Ross was a British ancient and moral philosopher. In terms of his moral thinking, he was a pluralist, who held that there are several distinct moral considerations which bear on the rightness of an action. Among the things we need to take into account are promises we have made, the need to avoid harming others, gratitude to benefactors, and the amount of good our action will produce. That these considerations are morally relevant is something we can know, but which action is the right one is a matter of fallible judgment, because that will depend upon how these considerations are to be weighed against each other in the particular case. Ross’ contributions to the study of ancient philosophy mainly concerned Aristotle. He is now best known, however, for his moral philosophy. See also: INTUITIONISM IN ETHICS Further reading Ross, W.D. (1930) The Right and the Good, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (The finest modern systematic exposition of a moderate deontology.) DAVID McNAUGHTON ROUSSEAU, JEAN-JACQUES (1712–78) Rousseau was born in Geneva, the second son of Isaac Rousseau, watchmaker. His mother died a few days after his birth. From this obscure beginning he rose to become one of the best known intellectual figures of the eighteenth-century French Enlightenment, taking his place alongside Diderot, Voltaire and others as one of the emblematic figures of this period, for all that he came to differ violently in view from them. He died in 1778 and in 1794 his body was transferred to the Panthéon in Paris. Rousseau always maintained that he regretted taking up a career of letters. His first love was music and he composed a number of operas in the 1740s with some success. The turning point in his life occurred in July 1749. He was on his way to see his then friend Diderot who was imprisoned at Vincennes. He read in the newspaper a prize essay question, asking whether advances in the sciences and arts had improved morals. So overcome was he by the flood of ideas that this question aroused in him the realization that he had to break his journey. The rest of his life’s work was, he claimed, determined for him at that moment. Rousseau’s primary claim to fame depends on his ideas about morals, politics and society. Perhaps his best-known remark is ‘Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains’; this reveals his preoccupation with issues of freedom in the state. In answer to the prize essay question Rousseau argued that men and morals were corrupted and debilitated by advances in higher learning. The goal of prestigious distinction is substituted for that of doing useful work for the good of all. This theme, of people seeking invidious ascendancy by doing others down – the effect of exacerbated amour-propre – pervades Rousseau’s social theorizing generally. His essay, Discourse on the Sciences and Arts (1750), won the prize; related concerns shape the more profound Discourse on the Origin of Inequality of 1755. In his most famous work of political theory, The Social Contract (1762), Rousseau presents an alternative approach to how we might achieve a just and legitimate civil order. All members of society should take an equal place as members of the sovereign authority and societal laws should come from the general will by which a people gives rules to itself. Only
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Page 778 under such a system, Rousseau argues, will humankind live on equal terms bound by fraternal ties, enjoying as much freedom and rights of self-determination as is possible in a stable community. Speaking up in this way for the equal political standing of all, regardless of birth or wealth, Rousseau points the way towards the dissolution of the ancien régime and the emergence of more democratically based polities. Precisely what influence his ideas had on the French Revolution is impossible to determine, although his name was often invoked. Rousseau also wrote extensively on education. In his Émile (subtitled On Education , 1762) he tries to show how a child could be brought up free of the aggressive desire to dominate others. Instead that child can be caused to want to cooperate with others on a footing of mutual respect. He hopes by this to show that his social proposals are not an unrealizable dream. In this work there are also criticisms of religious dogma and church practices which brought severe condemnation onto Rousseau. He had to flee Paris in 1762 to avoid imprisonment. This, and other related experiences, plunged him into a protracted period of mental distress in which he feared he was the object of the plotting of others. These others came to include David Hume, with whom Rousseau had hoped to find refuge in England in 1766. Still troubled in mind, Rousseau returned to France the next year, and during the last decade of his life he wrote several works of self-explanation and self-justification. The greatest of these is his autobiography, Confessions (written between 1764 and 1775, published posthumously), but there are other more prolix writings. After an accident in 1776, the worst of Rousseau’s mental disturbance seems to have cleared and his last substantive work, an album of miscellaneous reflections on his life, ideas and experiences ( Reveries of the Solitary Walker, written 1776–8), has a clarity and balance which had been absent for so long. See also: CONTRACTARIANISM ENLIGHTENMENT, CONTINENTAL Further reading Grimsley, R. (1973) The Philosophy of Rousseau, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (The best short introduction to Rousseau’s work overall.) Rousseau, J.-J. (1762) The Social Contract , in G.D.H. Cole (ed. and trans.) The Social Contract and Discourses , London: Dent, 1973; also in R.D. Masters (ed.) On the Social Contract with Geneva Manuscript and Political Economy , New York: St Martin’s Press, 1978; also in M. Cranston (ed.) The Social Contract , Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968. NICHOLAS DENT ROYCE, JOSIAH (1855–1916) Josiah Royce rose from a humble background in the California of the Gold Rush period to become Professor of the History of Philosophy at Harvard University and one of the most influential American philosophers of the so-called ‘period of classical American philosophy’ from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. He was also (along with F.H. Bradley) one of the two most important Englishspeaking philosophers of the period who defended philosophical idealism: the doctrine that in some sense or other all things either are minds or else are the contents of minds. Royce remained loyal to his own idealist commitments throughout his life, despite the fact that his friend and Harvard colleague William James was extremely hostile to idealism, and that his intellectual environment was increasingly dominated by the ‘pragmatism’ of which James was an outspoken champion. In later years, however, under the influence of another pragmatist, Charles S. Peirce, Royce gave the themes of his idealist thought a naturalistic social foundation rather than the abstract metaphysical foundation of his earliest writings. Royce’s entire corpus is perhaps best seen as representing a bridge from the German world of Neo-Kantianism and various varieties of philosophical idealism to the American world of pragmatism and of philosophical naturalism. See also: IDEALISM; LOGIC IN THE 19TH CENTURY Further reading Clendenning, J. (1985) The Life and Thought of Josiah Royce , Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. (The definitive biography of Royce, very carefully and elegantly presented. It is a natural starting place for anyone interested in Royce’s life, times and thinking.) McDermott, J.J. (ed.) (1969) The Basic Writings of Josiah Royce , Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2 vols. (An extensive anthology of Royce’s writings.) ROBERT W. BURCH ROZANOV, VASILII VASIL’EVICH (1856–1919) Vasilii Rozanov, a prominent spokesman of the Russian Religious-Philosophical Renaissance, is
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Page 779 known for his writings on sex, marriage and the family, his attacks on Christian asceticism, and his love– hate attitude to Judaism. He termed Judaism a religion of life because it sanctified sex and the family, and Christianity a religion of death because it exalted celibacy. But Rozanov also charged that Judaism mandated ritual murder and that Jews were feeding off Russians. In Apokalypsis nashego vremeni (The Apocalypse of Our Time) (1917–18), he apologized for his anti-Semitic pronouncements and blamed the Bolshevik Revolution on Christian other-worldliness and sexlessness. In private life, Rozanov was a pillar of the Church, which he regarded as a haven of beauty, warmth, and spiritual succour. Rozanov’s writings contain brilliant insights, contradictions, distortions and outright lies. ‘Falsehood never tormented me’, he wrote, ‘and for a strange reason. What business is it of yours precisely what I think? ’ He championed conservative policies in articles published under his own name and radical policies under a pseudonym. It is clear, however, that Rozanov was deeply religious and that he associated sex and the family with God. ‘Dirty diapers and a naked wife: this is the truth of Bethlehem around you.’ Rozanov’s interpretations of Dostoevskii, Gogol’ and other Russian authors were original and perceptive. His collections of aphorisms Solitaria (1912) and Opavshie list’ia ( Fallen Leaves, 2 vols ) (1913b, 1915), are considered masterpieces of Russian style. See also: RUSSIAN RELIGIOUS-PHILOSOPHICAL RENAISSANCE Further reading Roberts, S. (1978) Four Faces of Rozanov: Christianity, Sex, Jews, and the Russian Revolution , New York: Philosophical Library. (Introductory and concluding essays by the editor; translation of ‘On Sweetest Jesus’, excerpts from Liudi lunnogo sveta and Apokalypsis nashego vremeni.) BERNICE GLATZER ROSENTHAL RUFUS, RICHARD see RICHARD RUFUS OF CORNWALL RUGE, ARNOLD (1802–80) Arnold Ruge was the most influential liberal writer and activist of the radical wing of Young Hegelianism. For him philosophy was a challenge to translate the humanist ideals of emancipation and selfdetermination into the realities of moral, cultural and political practice. As editor of powerful intellectual journals such as Hallesche und Deutsche Jahrbuecher (1838–43) with Theodor Echtermeyer, ‘Anekdota zur neuesten deutschen Philosophie und Publizistik’ (1843), ‘Deutsch-Franzoesische Jahrbuecher’ (1844) with Karl Marx, and ‘Die Akademie’ (1850), he became the leading promotor of liberal philosophy and civic emancipation in Germany. Ruge represented the citizens of Breslau in the Frankfurt Paulskirche parliament in 1848–9 and worked briefly with Alexandre Ledru-Rollin and Guizeppe Mazzini in establishing a short-lived ‘European Democratic Committee’ in London in 1849. Ruge understood his critical educational, cultural and political activities as a direct calling from the heritage of European enlightenment and German idealism, thus transforming idealistic theory and vision into the realities of political practice and agitation. In this manner he promoted such radical figures as Bruno Bauer, Max Stirner, David Friedrich Strauss and Ludwig Feuerbach. See also: HEGELIANISM Further reading Brazill, W.J. (1970) The Young Hegelians , New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press. (Concentrates on the interpretation of the ‘young Hegelian metaphysic’ (27–70) and Ruge’s role in promoting Young Hegelian politics (227–60); includes a bibliographical essay (283–96).) HANS-MARTIN SASS RULE OF LAW (RECHTSSTAAT) The ‘rule of law’ most simply expresses the idea that everyone is subject to the law, and should therefore obey it. Governments in particular are to obey law – to govern under, or in accordance with, law. The rule of law thus requires constitutional government, and constitutes a shield against tyranny or arbitrary rule: political rulers and their agents (police and so on) must exercise power under legal constraints, respecting accepted constitutional limits. The British and US conceptions of this ideal find a parallel in the Germanic concept of the Rechtsstaat, or ‘state-under-law’, where the state as an organized entity is conceived to be limited by laws and by fundamental principles of legality, rather than being a purely political organization that can dispense with law in the interests of policy. Such concepts play an essential part in the political philosophy of liberalism; yet, characteristically, their more detailed exposition and
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Page 780 indeed their nature and meaning are contested and controversial. In a wider sense, the rule of law articulates values of procedural fairness or due process which affect the form of legal rules and govern the manner of their application. Those values both enhance the utility of legal regulation and also acknowledge underlying ideas of human dignity and autonomy. In a further sense, the rule of law refers to the faithful application of those rules and principles which constitute the law of a particular legal system. It expresses the idea that legal obligation should always be determined in particular cases by analysis of existing law – as opposed to ad hoc legislation by judges – even where disagreement may exist about the true meaning or content of the law. The connection between the rule of law and justice is complex. The rule of law cannot itself guarantee justice, but it forms an essential precondition. In so far as it imposes formal constraints on the laws enacted or enforced, which ensure that they are capable of being obeyed and that they are fairly administered, the rule of law assumes a conception of moral personality – of how individuals should be treated, as responsible human beings, capable of a sense of justice – which links the idea with the values of freedom and autonomy, and the ideal of equality. See also: LAW, PHILOSOPHY OF; SOCIAL THEORY AND LAW Further reading Dworkin, R. (1985) A Matter of Principle , Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Essays on various aspects of legal philosophy which, though closely argued, do not generally assume specialized knowledge.) Fuller, L. (1969) The Morality of Law , revised edn, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. (Very readable and easily understood explanation of procedural legality.) T.R.S. ALLAN RUSSELL, BERTRAND ARTHUR WILLIAM (1872–1970) Bertrand Russell divided his efforts between philosophy and political advocacy on behalf of a variety of radical causes. He did his most important philosophical work in logic and the philosophy of mathematics between 1900 and 1913, though later he also did important work in epistemology, metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, and continued to contribute to philosophy until the late 1950s. He wrote relatively little on ethics. His political work went on until his death. In the philosophy of mathematics his position was logicism, the view that all of mathematics can be derived from logical premises, which he attempted to establish in detail byactual derivations, creating in the process what is essentially now the standard formulation of classical logic. Early in this work he discovered the self-referential paradoxes which posed the main difficulty for logicism and which he eventually overcame by the ramified theory of types. Logic was central to Russell’s philosophy from 1900 onwards, and much of his fertility and importance as a philosopher came from his application of the new logic to old problems. Among his most important logical innovations were the modern theory of relations and the theory of descriptions. The latter enabled him to reparse sentences containing the phrase ‘the so-and-so’ into a form in which the phrase did not appear. The importance of this theory for subsequent philosophy was that it enabled one to recast sentences which apparently committed one to the existence of the so-and-so into sentences in which no such commitment was suggested. This laid the basis for a new method in metaphysics (widely pursued by Russell and others in the first half of the century) in which theories about items of a given kind are reformulated so as to avoid reference to items of that kind. Logicism itself offers just such a treatment of mathematics and in his later work Russell used the method repeatedly, though the reformulations he suggested were rarely so explicit as the ones he had offered in mathematics. In 1914 he proposed a solution to the problem of the external world by constructing matter out of sensibilia. After 1918 he proposed to construct both mind and matter out of events. After 1940 he treated all particulars as bundles of qualities. In each case his motivation was to avoid postulating anything that could be constructed, thereby eliminating ontological commitments which had no independent evidential support. Outside mathematics, his starting-point was the empirically given and he attempted to make his constructions depend as little as possible upon items not given in experience. He was not, however, a strict empiricist, since he did not think that empirical evidence alone would be sufficient for the constructions and he was always prepared to supplement it in order to obtain them. He wanted to construct, not those items which were empirically warranted, but
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Page 781 those which were required by the relevant scientific theories, for he regarded science as the best available, though by no means an infallible, source of truth. The task, in each case, was therefore to reveal the least amount of apparatus that would have to be assumed in addition to the empirical data in order for the constructions required by science to be possible. This methodology, which he pursued throughout his career, gives an underlying unity to what, more superficially, appears as a series of abrupt changes of position. See also ANALYTICAL PHILOSOPHY; LOGICISM Further reading Clark, R.W. (1975) The Life of Bertrand Russell, London: Cape and Weidenfeld & Nicolson. (The standard biography.) Jager, R. (1972) The Development of Bertrand Russell’s Philosophy , London: Allen & Unwin. (The most comprehensive book on Russell – including his social and political thought. Sometimes superficial, but a useful survey for the beginner.) Whitehead, A.N. and Russell, B.A.W. (1910–13) Principia Mathematica , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 3 vols; 2nd edn, 1925–7. (The definitive statement of Russell’s logicism, containing detailed derivations of cardinal and ordinal arithmetic including Cantor.) NICHOLAS GRIFFIN RUSSIAN EMPIRIOCRITICISM Russian empiriocriticism was an ephemeral movement within Russian Marxism of the early twentieth century. Its brief existence and deep involvement in politics invite the judgment, ‘of historic interest only’. But that pat phrase dodges the problem of comprehending history and acting appropriately, which obsessed such thinkers as A.A. Bogdanov (1873–1928) and A.V. Lunacharskii (1875–1933), the bestremembered of the Russians who looked to Mach and Avenarius for philosophic support of Marx. In its German origins empiriocriticism was an academic effort to avoid metaphysics while analysing experience as the source of knowledge. In Russia the focus moved outside of academic cloisters. How is one to relate action to social understanding, if one knows that action and understanding shape each other within an overwhelming process of socioeconomic transformations? Analysis of ‘experience’ or ‘practice’ in the Russian context – a ‘backward’ society under a tyrannical state in an age of total war – nullified the academic calm of Mach and Avenarius. Their Russian admirers wanted to justify Marx’s claims of social knowledge that would be both scientific and revolutionary; they rejected philosophies that merely interpret the world in different ways, while the task, described in Marx’s final ‘Thesis on Feuerbach’, is to change it. Further reading Read, C. (1979) Religion, Revolution and the Russian Intelligentsia, 1900–1912 , London: Macmillan. (Includes Marxist issues in larger debates about religion.) Tait, A.L. (1984) Lunacharskii, Poet of the Revolution , 1875–1907, Birmingham: University of Birmingham Press. (Richly informed analysis of Lunacharskii’s early development.) DAVID JORAVSKY RUSSIAN LITERARY FORMALISM Russian literary Formalism, an active movement in Russian literary criticism from about 1915 to 1929, approached the literary work as a self-referential, formed artefact rather than as an expression of reality or experience outside the work. It asked the question, ‘How is the work made?’ rather than ‘What does the work say?’ Its founding assumption, that poetic language differs from the language of ordinary communication, spawned numerous investigations of what the Formalists called ‘literariness’ – the qualities that make a work artistic. This distinction between practical and poetic language also allowed the Formalists to argue that literature was an autonomous branch of human activity, evolving according to its own immanent laws rather than as a consequence or reflection of historical events. Proceeding from this theoretical model, the Formalists viewed literary works as responses to previous literature rather than to the outside world. In their literary theory and their interpretations of particular literary works, the Formalists were reacting to the predominant tendency of Russian literary criticism to draw direct correspondences between lived experience and the literary work. Boris Eikhenbaum, Roman Jakobson, Viktor Shklovskii, Boris Tomashevskii, Iurii Tynianov and other Formalists questioned accepted correspondences between life and art, casting doubt upon realist interpretations of Russian authors such as Gogol’ and Tolstoi, and examining the narrative structure of non-Russian works such as Tristram Shandy and O. Henry’s short stories. Their analyses showed
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Page 782 how intonation, word order, rhythm and referential meaning interact within a literary work, and they argued that literary works are less a reflection of life than an attempt to refresh conventional perceptions. The influence of Russian literary Formalism is felt in more recent theoretical schools such as semiotics, structuralism, deconstruction, feminist criticism and new historicism, in so far as all of these take account of the particular use of language in any literary work. See also: DECONSTRUCTION; STRUCTURALISM IN LITERARY THEORY Further reading Bennett, T. (1979) Formalism and Marxism, London: Methuen. (Examines Formalism with respect to Saussure, Bakhtin, Althusser and post-Althusserians.) Erlich, V. (1981) Russian Formalism: History – Doctrine , New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. (Fourth edn of Erlich’s definitive 1955 work on Russian Formalism, with full bibliography.) CAROL ANY RUSSIAN MATERIALISM: ‘THE 1860s’ No tradition of philosophical materialism existed in Russia until the years conventionally called ‘the 1860s’ – roughly, the period from the death of Tsar Nicholas I in 1855 to the attempted assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1866. During that time philosophical freethinking, under the delayed influence of the French Enlightenment and the contemporaneous influence of post-Hegelian German materialism, came together with political radicalism to create a major social and intellectual movement with a broadly materialist philosophical foundation. The theoretical underpinnings of the movement were elaborated in Russia (as far as tsarist censorship would permit) by Nikolai Chernyshevskii, Dmitrii Pisarev, Nikolai Dobroliubov, Ivan Sechenov and others, and more freely in emigration by Mikhail Bakunin. Their ‘materialism’ was less a precisely articulated ontological position than a grand, science-worshipping worldview that sought to undermine both religion and the state; its elements included naturalism and universal causal determinism in metaphysics, empiricism in epistemology, reductionism in the philosophy of mind, ‘rational egoism’ in ethics, revolutionary socialism in political philosophy and realism in aesthetics. Because of their extreme opposition to established authority and traditional values, the representatives of this movement came to be called ‘nihilists’, and under that name they were portrayed in best-selling novels of the day by Ivan Turgenev and Fëdor Dostoevskii. Government repression after 1866 put an end to the open development of this materialist movement, but the writings of its leaders proved to be an inspiration to Georgii Plekhanov and Vladimir Lenin, the founders of Russian Marxism. Under Communism, the materialists of ‘the 1860s’ were honoured in Russia as great philosophers and important precursors of Marx. See also: NIHILISM, RUSSIAN Further reading Edie, J.M. et al . (eds) (1965) Russian Philosophy , Chicago, IL: Quadrangle Books, 3 vols. (A comprehensive anthology of Russian philosophy containing extensive selections from the writings of the thinkers discussed in this entry, as well as bibliographies of their works.) Lampert, E. (1965) Sons against Fathers: Studies in Russian Radicalism and Revolution , Oxford: Clarendon Press. (A highly readable and thorough study of the Nihilist movement, with major chapters on Chernyshevskii, Pisarev and Dobroliubov.) JAMES P. SCANLAN RUSSIAN PHILOSOPHY Russian thought is best approached without fixed preconceptions about the nature and proper boundaries of philosophy. Conditions of extreme political oppression and economic backwardness are not conducive to the flowering of philosophy as a purely theoretical discipline; academic philosophy was hence a latecomer on the Russian scene, and those (such as the Neo-Kantians of the end of the nineteenth century: see NEO-KANTIANISM, RUSSIAN) who devoted themselves to questions of ontology and epistemology were widely condemned for their failure to address the country’s pressing social problems. Since Peter the Great’s project of Westernization, Russian philosophy has been primarily the creation of writers and critics who derived their ideals and values from European sources and focused on ethics, social theory and the philosophy of history, in the belief that (as Marx put it in the first ‘Thesis on Feuerbach’) philosophers had hitherto merely interpreted the world: the task was now to change it. This passionate social commitment
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Page 783 generated much doctrinaire fanaticism, but it also inspired the iconoclastic tendency made philosophically respectable by Nietzsche: the revaluation of values from an ironic outsider’s perspective. The principal contribution of Russian thinkers to world culture has so far consisted not in systems, but in experiments in the theory and practice of human emancipation. Some of these led to the Russian Revolution, while others furnished remarkably accurate predictions of the nature of utopia in power. Like Dostoevskii’s character Shigalëv who, starting from the ideal of absolute freedom, arrived by a strict logical progression at the necessity of absolute despotism, Russian philosophers have specialized in thinking through (and sometimes acting out) the practical implications of the most seductive visions of liberty that Europe has produced over the last 200 hundred years. 1 The development of Russian philosophy What Berdiaev called the ‘Russian Idea’ – the eschatological quest that is the most distinctive feature of Russian philosophy – can be explained in terms of Russian history. The Mongol yoke from the twelfth to the fourteenth century cut Russia off from Byzantium (from which it had received Christianity) and from Europe: it had no part in the ferment of the Renaissance. Its rise as a unified state under the Moscow Tsardom followed closely on the fall of the Orthodox Byzantine Empire, and the emerging sense of Russian national identity incorporated a messianic element in the form of the monk Philotheus’ theory of Moscow as the ‘Third Rome’, successor to Rome and Constantinople as guardian of Christ’s truth in its purity (see MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY, RUSSIAN). ‘There will not be a fourth’, ran the prophecy: the Russian Empire would last until the end of the world. Russian thought remained dominated by the Greek patristic tradition until the eighteenth century, when the Kievan thinker SKOVORODA (sometimes described as Russia’s first philosopher) developed a religious vision based on a synthesis of ancient and patristic thought. He had no following; by the mid-century Russia’s intellectual centre was St Petersburg, where Catherine the Great, building on the achievements of her predecessor Peter, sought to promote a Western secular culture among the educated elite with the aid of French Enlightenment ideas. But representatives of the ‘Russian Enlightenment’ were severely punished when they dared to cite the philosophes’ concepts of rationality and justice in criticism of the political status quo (see ENLIGHTENMENT, RUSSIAN). The persecution of advanced ideas (which served to strengthen the nascent intelligentsia’s self-image as the cultural and moral leaders of their society) reached its height under Nicolas I (1825–55), when philosophy departments were closed in the universities, and thought went underground. Western ideas were the subject of intense debate in small informal circles of students, writers and critics, the most famous of which in Moscow and St Petersburg furnished the philosophical education of such intellectual leaders as the future socialists Herzen and Bakunin, the novelist and liberal Ivan Turgenev, the literary critic Belinskii (from whose ‘social criticism’ Soviet Socialist Realism claimed descent), and the future Slavophile religious philosophers Kireevskii and Khomiakov (see Slavophilism). As a critic has noted: ‘In the West there is theology and there is philosophy; Russian thought, however, is a third concept’; one which (in the tsarist intellectual underground as in its Soviet successor) embraced novelists, poets, critics, religious and political thinkers – all bound together by their commitment to the goals of freedom and justice. In the 1830s these beleaguered individuals encountered German Idealism: an event of decisive significance for the future development of Russian thought. The teleological structures of idealist thought provided Russian intellectuals with a redemptive interpretation of their conflicts and struggles as a necessary stage in the dialectical movement of history towards a transcendent state of harmony. Idealism (notably in its Hegelian forms: see HEGELIANISM, RUSSIAN) left its mark on the vocabulary of subsequent Russian philosophy, but its principal legacy was the belief, shared by the vast majority of Russian thinkers, that an ‘integral worldview’, a coherent and unified vision of the historical process and its goal, was the essential framework both for personal moral development and social theorizing. The question of history’s goal became a matter for intense debate among the intelligentsia with the publication in 1836 of Chaadaev’s ‘Philosophical Letter’, which posed Russia’s relationship to the West as a central philosophical problem, maintaining that Russia’s historical separation from the culture of Western Christianity precluded its participation in the movement of history towards the establishment of a universal Christian society. Chaadaev’s version of the march of progress was much indebted to French Catholic
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Page 784 conservatism, while the nationalist riposte to his ideas drew heavily on the Romantics’ critique of the Age of Reason and Schelling’s organic conception of nationhood: the Slavophiles held that Western culture was in a state of terminal moral and social decline, suffering from an excess of rationalism, which had led to social atomization and the fragmentation of the individual psyche (see CHAADAEV, P.I.; SCHELLINGIANISM). These divisions could be healed only by religious faith in its purest form, Russian Orthodoxy, whose spirit of organic ‘togetherness’, uncontaminated by Western rationalism, they presented as a model for Russian society and a beacon for mankind. They thereby laid the foundations of a distinctively Russian tradition of cultural and religious messianism which includes Dostoevskii’s political writings, the Pan-Slavist and Eurasian movements (see DOSTOEVSKII, F.M.; PAN-SLAVISM AND EURASIAN MOVEMENT), and the apocalyptic vision of Berdiaev, whose philosophy was highly popular among the Soviet underground. Secular and Westernist thinkers tended to be scarcely less messianic in their response to Chaadaev’s pessimism. The first philosophers of Russian liberalism (see LIBERALISM, RUSSIAN) interpreted their country’s past and future development in the light of Hegel’s doctrine of the necessary movement of all human societies towards theincarnation of Reason in the modern constitutional state, while the Russian radical tradition was shaped successively by the eschatological visions of the French utopian socialists, the Young Hegelians and Karl Marx. Herzen defined the distinctive characteristic of Russian radical thought as the ‘implacable spirit of negation’ with which, unrestrained by the European’s deference to the past, it applied itself to the task of freeing mankind from the transcendent authorities invented by religion and philosophy; and the radical populist tradition that he founded argued that the ‘privilege of backwardness’, by permitting Russia to learn both from the achievements and the mistakes of the West, had placed it in the vanguard of mankind’s movement towards liberty. Russian religious philosophers tended to see themselves as prophets, pointing the way to the regeneration of human societies through the spiritual transformation of individuals. Vladimir SOLOV’ËV (regarded by many Russians as their greatest philosopher) believed that his country’s mission was to bring into being the Kingdom of God on Earth in the form of a liberal theocracy, which would integrate knowledge and social practice and unite the human race under the spiritual rule of the Pope and the secular rule of the Russian tsar. His metaphysics of ‘All-Unity’ was a dominant force in the revival of religious and idealist philosophy in Russia in the early twentieth century, inspiring an entire generation of thinkers who sought to reinterpret Christian dogma in ways that emphasized the links of spiritual culture and religious faith with institutional and social reform, and progress in all other aspects of human endeavour. Among them were leading Russian émigré philosophers after 1917, such as Semën FRANK, BULGAKOV (who sought to create a new culture in which Orthodox Christianity would infuse every area of Russian life), BERDIAEV (who was strongly influenced by the messianic motifs in Solov’ëv), and HESSEN, who offered a Neo-Kantian and Westernist interpretation of the notion of ‘All-Unity’. A number of émigré philosophers (notably IL’IN and VYSHESLAVTSEV) interpreted Bolshevism as the expression of a spiritual crisis in modern industrialized cultures. Many blamed the Russian Revolution on infection from a culturally bankrupt West which (echoing the Slavophiles, Dostoevskii and LEONT’EV) they presented as corrupted by rationalism, positivism, atheism and self-centred individualism (although few have gone as far as the fiercely polemical LOSEV who, up until his death in the Soviet Union in 1988, maintained that electric light expressed the spiritual emptiness of ‘Americanism and machine-production’). Most maintained a historiosophical optimism throughout the catastrophes of the first half of the twentieth century, which Berdiaev saw as a precondition for messianic regeneration, while Hessen believed that religious and cultural values would emerge triumphant from the carnage in a dialectical Aufhebung . 2 Major themes in Russian philosophy The main impetus of Russian philosophy has always been towards the future, as its representatives strained to discern the features of the ‘new man’ (the term favoured by the left from the 1860s, with the addition of the adjective ‘Soviet’ after 1917), or the ‘integral personality’, as Slavophiles and neoidealists preferred to describe the individual who would one day be free from the cognitive and moral defects that had hitherto prevented mankind from realizing its potential. The nature of these flaws and the specifications of the regenerated human being were the subject of bitter disputes between rival movements. Even on the left, models of the ‘new man’ varied widely, from the narrow rationalist
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Page 785 who was the ideal of the ‘nihilists’ of the 1860s (see NIHILISM, RUSSIAN; RUSSIAN MATERIALISM: ‘THE 1860S’) and subsequently of LENIN and PLEKHANOV, to Bakunin’s eternal rebel, who would embody the spontaneous spirit of freedom in defiance of all established authorities and orders. At the end of the nineteenth century, in the cultural ferment produced by new movements in philosophy and the arts emanating from the West, radical thinkers began en masse to renounce their predominantly rationalist models of the individual and society (see RUSSIAN RELIGIOUS-PHILOSOPHICAL RENAISSANCE). Nietzsche’s Superman had a pervasive influence on the ensuing ‘revaluation of values’, undertaken with the aim of formulating moral and social ideals that would embrace the manysidedness of human creativity (see NIETZSCHE: IMPACT ON RUSSIAN THOUGHT). Some radical philosophers (such as Berdiaev and Frank), in the process of moving from Marxism to neo-idealism, sought to reconcile Nietzsche’s aesthetic immoralism with Christian ethics, while the ‘Empiriocriticist’ group of Bolsheviks attempted to inject Russian Marxist philosophy with an element of heroic voluntarism by synthesizing it with Nietzschean self-affirmation and the pragmatism of Ernst Mach (see RUSSIAN EMPIRIOCRITICISM). Nietzschean influences combined with the mechanistic scientism of Soviet Marxism in the Soviet model of the ‘new man’ (whose qualities Lysenko’s genetics suggested could be inherited by successive generations). In the post-Stalin ‘thaw’ some Soviet philosophers, including IL’ENKOV and MAMARDASHVILI, began a critical rereading of Marx’s texts from an anthropocentric standpoint which emphasized the unpredictable and limitless potential of human consciousness (see MARXIST PHILOSOPHY, RUSSIAN AND SOVIET). This open-ended view of progress (officially encouraged in the Gorbachev period) is uncommon in Russian philosophy, where epistemological scepticism is more often to be encountered in uneasy combinations with eschatological faith. Like other rootless groups, Russian intellectuals were drawn to compensating certainties that seemed capable of resisting their corrosive critique. The radical humanism of much Russian thought placed it at the forefront of the developing critical insistence on the contextdependent nature of truth; but many thinkers who attacked the claims of systems and dogmas to encompass and explain the experience and creative needs of living individuals in specific historical contexts, nevertheless retained a belief in a final, ideal state of being in which the fragmentation of knowledge would be overcome and all human purposes would coincide: a condition for whose principles some looked to science, others to religious revelation. The nihilists, who rejected metaphysics and all that could not be proven by rational and empirical methods, fervently believed that progress would inevitably lead to the restoration of a natural state of harmony between the individual and society. The empiriocriticist movement within Russian Marxism opposed the idolatry of formulas with the claim that experience and practice were the sole criteria of truth, but the group’s leading philosopher, BOGDANOV, looked forward to a metascience that would unify the fragmented world of knowledge by reducing ‘all the discontinuities of our experience to a principle of continuity’, predicting that under communism, when all would share the same modes of organizing experience, the phenomenon of individuals with separate mental worlds would cease to exist. Solov’ëv’s pervasive influence on subsequent Russian religious idealism owed much to the charms of his vision of ‘integral knowledge’ and ‘integral life’ in an ‘integral society’. Religious and socialist motifs were combined in some visions of an earthly paradise, such as Bulgakov’s ‘Christian Socialism’, or Gorkii’s and Lunarcharskii’s creed of ‘God-building’, which called for worship of the collective humanity of the socialist future. In the revolutionary ferment of the first two decades of the twentieth century many religious and radical philosophers, together with Symbolist writers and poets, envisaged the leap to the harmonious future in apocalyptic terms: the novelist and critic Merezhkovskii prophesied the coming of a ‘New Christianity’ which would unite Christian faith with pagan self-affirmation in a morality beyond good and evil (see NIETZSCHE: IMPACT ON RUSSIAN THOUGHT; RUSSIAN RELIGIOUS-PHILOSOPHICAL RENAISSANCE). In the aftermath of 1917 some thinkers (notably Berdiaev and members of the Eurasian movement) found consolation in apocalyptic fantasies of a new light from the East shining on the ruins of European culture. Herzen memorably ascribed such doctrinaire utopianism to the Russian tendency to march ‘in fearless ranks to the very limit and beyond it, in step with the dialectic, but out of step with the truth’. The most original and subversive Russian thinker, he was the first of a significant minority who directed the iconoclastic thrust of Russian philosophy against all forms, without exception, of messianic faith. Contending that there was no
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Page 786 basis in experience for the belief in a purposeful universe on which the great optimistic systems of the nineteenth century were built, he urged his contemporaries to adapt their categories to the flow of life, to accept (and even welcome) the dominant role of contingency in human existence, on the grounds that individual freedom and responsibility were possible only in an unprogrammed world. Herzen’s critique of the claims of metaphysical systems to predict or regulate the course of history was echoed by the ‘subjective sociology’ developed by MIKHAILOVSKII and LAVROV in opposition to the deterministic scientism of the dominant Russian radical tradition. TOLSTOI pointed to the chanciness of life and history in order to demonstrate the inadequacy of all attempts to formulate general rules for human societies; Dostoevskii confronted the systematizers with the lived experience of human freedom as the ability to be unpredictable; in their symposium of 1909 (frequently cited in the West as a pioneering analysis of the psychology of political utopianism) the neo-idealists of the Signposts movement explored the ways in which obsession with an ideal future impoverishes and distorts perception of the historical present (see SIGNPOSTS MOVEMENT). Under the Soviet system a few representatives of this anti-utopian tradition ingeniously evaded the pressure on philosophers (backed up by the doctrine of the ‘partyness’ of truth – see PARTIINOST’) to endorse the official myths of utopia in power. The history of the novel form was the vehicle for Bakhtin’s reflections on the ‘unfinalizability’ of human existence (see BAKHTIN, M.M.); similar insights were expressed by the cultural-historical school of psychology established by VYGOTSKII, who drew on Marx to counter the mechanistic determinism of Soviet Marxist philosophy with a view of consciousness as a cultural artefact capable of self-transcendence and self-renewal. In the 1960s Soviet psychologists and philosophers such as Il’enkov helped to revive an interest in ethics with their emphasis on the individual as the centre of moral agency, while in its historical studies of culture as a system of semiotic signs, the MOSCOW-TARTU SCHOOL brought a richly documented and undoctrinaire approach to important moral and political topics. The insights of some of these individuals and movements into the attractions and delusions of utopian thought are lent added conviction by their own often spectacularly unsuccessful efforts to overcome what Nietzsche called ‘the craving for metaphysical comfort’. Tolstoi was torn all his life beween his pluralist vision and his need for dogmatic moral certainties, while Dostoevskii in his last years preached an astonishingly crude variety of religio-political messianism. The humanism of some later religious philosophers (including the Signposts authors Berdiaev and Bulgakov) is hard to reconcile with their eschatological impatience. See also: POSITIVISM, RUSSIAN; RUSSIAN LITERARY FORMALISM Further reading Berlin, I. (1978) Russian Thinkers , London: The Hogarth Press. (Essays in nineteenth-century Russian thinkers, including Tolstoi, Herzen, Bakunin and Belinskii.) Edie, J.M., Scanlan, J.P. and Zeldin, M.B. (eds) (1966) Russian Philosophy , Chigaco, IL: Quadrangle Books, 3 vols. (A selection of texts, well annotated and introduced, from the beginnings of Russian philosophy until the Soviet period.) Masaryk, T.G. (1955) The Spirit of Russia. Studies in History, Literature and Philosophy , trans. E. and C. Paul, with additional chapters and bibliographies by J. Slavik, London: Allen & Unwin, 3 vols. (First published in German in 1913, and still an excellent introduction to Russian philosophy.) Walicki, A. (1980) Russian Thought From the Enlightenment to Marxism, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Covers the main movements in Russian thought from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century.) Zenkovsky, V. (1948–50) Istoriia russkoi filosofii , Paris: YMCA-Press, 2 vols; 2nd edn 1989; trans. G.L. Kline, A History of Russian Philosophy , London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul and Columbia University Press, 1953. (A general history.) AILEEN KELLY RUSSIAN RELIGIOUS-PHILOSOPHICAL RENAISSANCE The Russian Religious-Philosophical Renaissance was created by lay intellectuals who found rationalism, positivism and Marxism inadequate as explanations of the world or guides to life. They were deeply engaged in finding solutions to the problems of their time, which they saw as moral or spiritual/cultural in nature. Some were already devout Christians; others became so later on. Collectively known as the God-seekers, they propounded their ideas in numerous publications and in the Religious-Philosophical Societies of St Petersburg and
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Page 787 Moscow. The meetings of these societies attracted capacity audiences and helped disassociate religion from reaction. Branches were founded in Kiev and Vladimir. The founding members were mainly Symbolist writers and idealist philosophers. Both groups sought a new understanding of Christianity, but the Symbolists emphasized psychological and literary/ aesthetic issues and the idealists focused on ethics, epistemology and political and social reform. The Revolution of 1905 was a watershed for all of them. The hitherto apolitical Symbolists perceived it as the start of the apocalypse and championed anarchistic political doctrines. The idealists continued to champion reform. After the revolution, some of them called for a new religious intelligentsia that respected culture and the creation of wealth, spiritual/cultural and material. Both groups began to talk about national identity and destiny. The Bolshevik Revolution signalled the end of the Religious-Philosophical Renaissance. In 1922–3, over 160 non-Marxist intellectuals were forced into exile, where they continued their work. Inside Russia private religious-philosophic study circles carried on illegally. The Religious-Philosophical Renaissance had a profound impact on Russian thought and culture. It inspired attempts to ground metaphysics and political doctrines in Christianity, demands for church reform, visions of a new culture, sophiology, religious existentialism and new interpretations of Orthodox ritual and dogma. Its proponents made people aware of the needs of the ‘inner man’, the soul or the psyche, and the importance of art and myth. Symbolism became the dominant aesthetic, shaping literature, poetry, painting and theatre. Theorists of Symbolism tried to make it the basis of a new cosmological worldview. The Religious-Philosophical Renaissance was rediscovered by Soviet intellectuals in the 1960s, nourished the dissident movement from then on, and is extensively discussed in Russia today. Further reading Pyman, A. (1994) A History of Russian Symbolism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Analyses the works of the major Symbolists from a literary perspective; includes some discussion of underlying philosophical and religious issues.) Rosenthal, B.G. and Chomiak, M.B. (eds) (1990) A Revolution of the Spirit: Crisis of Value in Russia, 1890–1924, Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press. (Translations of Merezhkovskii’s ‘Revolution and Religion’, Belyi’s ‘Revolution and Culture’, Ivanov’s ‘The Crisis of Individualism’, Berdiaev’s ‘Socialism as Religion’, Bulgakov’s ‘An Urgent Task’, Novgorodtsev’s ‘The Essence of the Russian Orthodox Consciousness’ and other important essays.) BERNICE GLATZER ROSENTHAL RYLE, GILBERT (1900–76) Alongside Wittgenstein and Austin, the English philosopher Gilbert Ryle was one of the dominant figures in that middle period of twentieth-century English language philosophy which became known as ‘Linguistic Analysis’. His views in philosophy of mind led to his being described as a ‘logical behaviourist’ and his major work in that area, The Concept of Mind (1949), both by reason of its style and content, has become one of the modern classics of philosophy. In it Ryle attacked what he calls ‘Cartesian dualism’ or the myth of ‘the Ghost in the Machine’, arguing that philosophical troubles over the nature of mind and its relation with the body arose from a ‘category mistake’ which led erroneously to treating statements about mental phenomena in the same way as those about physical phenomena. For Ryle, to do something was not to perform two separate actions – one mental, one physical – but to behave in a certain way. Much of Ryle’s work had a similar theme: philosophical confusion arose through the assimilation or misapplication of categorically different terms, and could only be cleared up by a careful analysis of the logic and use of language. He later became preoccupied with the nature of reflective thinking, since this stood as an example of an activity which seemed to evade the behaviouristic analysis that he recommended. Ryle was also a considerable Plato scholar, though his work in this area has been less influential. Further reading Lyons, W. (1980) Gilbert Ryle: An Introduction to His Philosophy , Brighton: Harvester Press, and Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. (This is a critical introduction and guide, written for students, to the central themes in Ryle’s philosophical work. It contains also a short biographical chapter plus a bibliography of works which discuss topics in Ryle’s philosophy.) Ryle, G. (1949) The Concept of Mind, London:Hutchinson. (In this, his magnum opus, Ryle
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Page 789 S SA SKYA PAṆḌTA (1182–1251) The philosophical importance of Sa skya Paṇḍita (Sagya Paṇḍita) lies in his clarification of the tradition of logic and epistemology established by Dharmakīrti. He actively promoted the study of Dharmakīrti’s thought in Tibet as a propaedeutic to the study of other systems of Buddhist philosophy as well as to a Buddhist account of knowledge; knowledge is a crucial element in the Buddhist tradition, for ignorance is considered the main obstacle to liberation, the summum bonum of the tradition. Like Dharmakīrti, Sa skya Paṇḍita held that the only two types of knowledge are perception and inference. Perception presents us with real individual objects, while inference enables us to consider these individuals in a conceptual way, in terms of universals; however, it is a mistake to regard these universals as real. See also: TIBETAN PHILOSOPHY Further reading Jackson, D. (1987) The Entrance Gate for the Wise, Vienna: Arbeitkreis für Tibetische und Buddhistische Studien. (No complete study of Sa skya Paṇḍita’s work is available, but this is the best historical overview. Also contains a translation of part of Sa skya Paṇḍita’s work on scholarship.) GEORGES B.J. DREYFUS SAADIAH GAON ( fl. early 10th century) Saadiah Gaon al-Fayyumi was the first systematic philosopher of Judaism and a pioneering exegete, grammarian, lexicographer, liturgist and chronologist. His Kitab al-mukhtar fi ’lamanat wa-’l-’i‘tiqadat (Book of Critically Chosen Beliefs and Convictions) uses reason, experience and tradition to elaborate a monotheistic theology and pluralistic ethics. Organized in ten thematic treatises, the work, familiarly known by the title of its Hebrew translation, Sefer Emunot ve-De‘ot (The Book of Beliefs and Convictions), opens with a striking epistemological prelude laying out the sources of knowledge in sense experience, reason and (for the recipients of Scripture) tradition. Saadiah defends sense experience on the grounds that scepticism is selfundermining. He defends reason as the basis of critical and scientific knowledge; and he defends the Jewish sources of traditional learning on the grounds of the continuity and trustworthiness of their transmission. He treats tradition not as an independent source of knowledge but as a means of preserving primary knowledge acquired in the past. The ten treatises of the work defend creation against alternative cosmological theories, argue for God’s unity and incorporeality, explain the human situation as a trial designed to test and reward human goodness, defend God’s justice and the substantiality and immortality of the soul, affirm the national restoration promised by the prophets of Israel, and lay out the constituents of the good life, which Saadiah argues is undermined by excessive attention to any one of the varied goods available to us. Committed to reason, science, free will and God’s ultimate justice, Saadiah champions the veracity of Scripture using his formidable philological skills and learning to find appropriable interpretations of biblical language whenever the apparent textual sense to be ruled out by reason, science, another text, or a sound tradition. In keeping with the Rabbinical and Biblical outlook, he upholds the value of this life on the grounds that only here are authentic choices possible. Saadiah’s philosophy profoundly influenced Maimonides and later Jewish thinkers; his biblical commentaries are still consulted for their philosophical and philological insights. See also: BIBLE, HEBREW Further reading Saadiah Gaon (early 10th century) Kitab almukhtar fi ’l-amanat wa ’l-’i‘tiqadat (The Book of Critically Chosen Beliefs and Opinions), trans. J. Kafih, Sefer ha-Nivar ba-Emunot uva-De‘ot, Jerusalem: Sura, 1970; trans. S. Rosenblatt, The Book of Beliefs and Opinions , New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1948. (Kafih provides Arabic text with a modern Hebrew translation. Rosenblatt’s English translation is in need of reworking.) Malter, H. (1969) Saadiah Gaon: His Life and Works, New York: Hermon Press. (Reprint of the edition of 1926.) L.E. GOODMAN
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Page 790 AL-SABZAWARI, AL-HAJJ MULLA HADI (1797/8–1873) Al-Sabzawari was the most influential nineteenth-century Iranian philosopher. His reputation rests in part on his Sharh al-manzuma, a commentary on his own Ghurar al-fara’id (The Blazes of the Gems), a didactic poem ( manzuma) encapsulating in a systematic fashion an exposition of the existentialist philosophy of Mulla Sadra. He was also the most sought-after teacher of philosophy in his day, and many students travelled to Sabzavar to be taught by him. Famous for his saintliness as well as his erudition, he set the tone for much of twentieth-century Iranian philosophy. See also: ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY, MODERN Further reading Izutsu Toshihiko and Mohaghegh, M. (1983) The Metaphysics of Sabzawari , Delmar, NY: Caravan. (An English translation of the first section of the Ghurar al-fara’id .) JOHN COOPER SACRAMENTS The Christian theory of ‘sacraments’ underlies ideas of a general ‘sacramentality’ in the universe whereby ordinary things have religious significance by their own nature or by virtue of some hidden power within them. The pre-Christian Latin word sacramentum meant a non-returnable gift marking the taking on of some binding obligation; more informally it meant an oath, and later a secret or mystery. Latin theology turned it to Christian use, initially in rough translation of the Greek mysterion , applied to the Church, to the Scriptures and to Old as well as New Testament rites. The word then became the predominant medieval and modern term specifically designating those rites in permanent use in the Church which human authority was conceived not to be free to abolish, add to or change in their essentials. Each such rite presupposes that the creaturely things used have some aptitude which allows or invites the particular ritual use concerned, that is, which presupposes some more general sacramental potential in natural things. The conceptual tools developed in Catholic theology – ‘effective sign’, ‘matter and form’, ‘sacrifice’, ‘authority’, ‘power’ and ‘institution’ – sharpen enquiry into the phenomenology of rituals within many different religious traditions. See also: GRACE; RITUAL Further reading Baillie, D. (1957) The Theology of the Sacraments , London: Faber & Faber. (Part II gives an eirenic Protestant view – in Lecture 1, of the general sacramentality of the universe, in Lecture 2, of the rooting of Christian sacraments in the Incarnation and in Lecture 4, of the meaning of the Eucharist.) Schillebeekx, E. (1968) The Eucharist , London: Sheed & Ward. (An attempt to give a phenomenological interpretation of a realist view of the Eucharist.) DAVID BRAINE SAGYA PAṆḌITA/SAGYPAṆḌITA see SA SKYA PANṆḌITA SAINT-SIMON, CLAUDE-HENRI DE ROUVROY, COMTE DE (1760–1825) An influential French social theorist, Saint-Simon propounded a philosophy of history and an account of the future organization of industrial society. He predicted a ‘golden age’, where harmony between individual capacities and social structures, reflected in a reordering of ‘temporal’ and ‘spiritual’ power, would overcome disorder and banish idleness. He has been variously portrayed as a utopian socialist, the founder of sociology and a prescient madman. See also: HISTORY, PHILOSOPHY OF; UTOPIANISM Further reading Saint-Simon, C.-H. de R., Comte de (1976) The Political Thought of Saint-Simon ed. G. Ionescu, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (A selection of excerpts in translation from Saint-Simon’s writings focusing on his political ideas.) DAVID LEOPOLD SALVATION For there to be such a thing as salvation, there must be someone to be saved, something from which they need to be saved, and some way in which they can be saved from it. ‘Salvation’ is primarily a religious term, and religious traditions typically assume that there is some basic religious problem that all people face. Monotheistic religions (for example, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Viśiṣṭādvaita and Dvaita Hinduism) whose central doctrine concerns God conceived as Creator and Providence take this basic problem to lie in the fact of sin. Human persons have sinned (knowingly acted against the will of God) and sinning has become habitual. Thus there is need for forgiveness and
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Page 791 reformation, which are available only in God’s gracious pardon and restorative power. People can receive forgiveness and reformation through repentance and faith. Salvation by sheer self-effort is impossible. Nonmonotheistic traditions (for example, Buddhism, Jainism, Advaita Vedānta Hinduism) take a particular sort of ignorance to be the basic problem. The ignorance in question involves having false beliefs about the nature of persons and their cosmic environment. The proper treatment and cure is the achievement of an esoteric religious experience in which calm and bliss are accompanied by an understanding of the true nature of reality. The different traditions give very different accounts of what this nature is. Thus religious traditions differ greatly in the ways in which they conceive persons, their basic religious problem, and the proper treatment and cure. Secular notions of salvation, as in classical Marxism, tend to be secularizations of one or another religious conception – in the Marxist case, of the notion of the Kingdom of God. See also: HEAVEN; REINCARNATION Further reading Brandon, S.F.G. (1962) Man and his Destiny in the Great Religions, Manchester: Manchester University Press. (Brandon’s Wilde Lectures, delivered 1954–7 at Oxford, dealing widely with notions of salvation.) Lott, E. (1980) Vedantic Approaches to God , London: Macmillan. (Excellent discussion of Indian monotheism.) KEITH E. YANDELL ŚAṂKARA see ŚAṄKARA SĀṂKHYA see SĀṄKHY SANCHES, FRANCISCO (1551–1623) Francisco Sanches was a sceptical philosopher and a professor of medicine at the University of Toulouse in southern France in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. He was born in Spain to a family of Jewish ancestry that had been forcibly converted to Catholicism, but he was brought up in France. Though he was a distant cousin of the sceptic Michel de Montaigne, he independently advanced what was perhaps the strongest sceptical critique of Aristotelianism and Platonism. In addition he developed a scepticism about mathematical knowledge claims. At the same time, he offered the first form of constructive scepticism, a way of solving intellectual problems without antecedently overcoming the sceptical challenge to traditional kinds of knowledge. He thus presented science as a way of dealing with experience, rather than as a way of gaining knowledge, and in this his views anticipate some twentiethcentury philosophies. Sanches was also an important empirical medical practitioner, who presented the newest medical findings in his courses at Toulouse. His sceptical-critical views were influential in the first half of the seventeenth century, and were still being studied in Leibniz’s time. See also: SCEPTICISM, RENAISSANCE Further reading Sanches, F. (1581) Quod nihil scitur , ed. and trans. E. Limbrick and D.F.S. Thomson, Franciscus Sanches: That Nothing is Known, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. (A systematic sceptical critique of Aristotelian epistemology; Sanches’ most important work. Includes Limbrick’s excellent introduction.) RICHARD H. POPKIN SANCTIFICATION Sanctification, the process of becoming holy, is closely connected to justification, although Roman Catholic and Protestant theologians differ on how closely. According to the Roman Catholic Church, sanctification takes place in justification. In justification, sins are forgiven and there is an infusion of sanctifying grace, whereby one is made just and holy; this is what it is to be sanctified. In this state of grace, one merits heaven. Nonetheless, there is room for spiritual growth in the Christian life (though this is not called sanctification, as it would be in Protestantism) because concupiscence remains and appetites are still not fully under control. Justification is the beginning of a new life (the life of grace) in which we may grow towards integrity, the proper use of appetites; moreover, the gifts of faith, hope and charity, which enable one to perform meritorious works, can also increase. The state of grace, which is the result of justification, can be lost by mortal sin, but can be fully restored through the sacrament of penance. Protestants teach that in justification one’s sins are forgiven and one is fully reconciled to God, but that one is not wholly sanctified (that is, renewed or made holy). Luther’s formula that we are simul iustus et peccator (both just and sinner) is widely accepted by Protestants. Justification is only the beginning of
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Page 792 completed in this life. The exceptions are Methodists and members of some holiness churches (groups that either broke away from Methodism or were influenced by it). See also: GRACE; JUSTIFICATION, RELIGIOUS Further reading Berkouwer, G.C. (1952) Faith and Sanctification, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. (A major Reformed study from Calvin to Barth, with comparisons to Lutheranism.) Veith, G.E., Jr (1985) Reformation Spirituality , Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. (A valuable study of sanctification, through the poetry of George Herbert.) DIOGENES ALLEN ŚAṄKARA (early 8th century) Śankara has been a highly influential figure in Hindu philosophy and religion from his lifetime (early eighth century; traditionally 788–820) to the present day. He is the most renowned teacher of nondualist (Advaita) Vedānta, which emphasizes realizing the nondual reality, Brahman, through hearing and contemplating the Upaniṣads, sacred knowledge which reveals the nature of human existence and the cosmos. Unlike many Western thinkers, who consider themselves forward-looking individuals putting forth new insights, Śankara is self-consciously part of an ongoing tradition committed to scriptural exegesis. He honours prior teachers (such as Gauḍapāda), and his own writings are primarily explanatory commentaries on sacred Vedānta texts. Śankara also requires certain purifying qualifications to pursue liberation, and vigorously contests other views prevailing in his time. See also: BRAHMAN; VEDĀNTA Further reading Śankara (early 8th century) Brahmasūtrabhāṣya, in G.F.W. Thibaut (trans.) The Vedānta Sūtras of Bādarāyaṇa with the Commentary of Śaṃkara , Sacred Books of the East 34, 38, New York: Dover, repr. 1962; trans. Swami Gambhirananda, Brahmasūtrabhāṣaya of ŚrīŚaṃkarācārya , Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1965. (Thibaut’s is the standard translation, with a good introduction comparing Śankara’s and Rāmānuja’s commentaries; however, Gambhirananda’s largely accurate translation is more lucid than Thibaut’s.) Clooney, F.X. (1993) Theology After Vedanta, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. (Includes an exceptionally informative close reading of Śankara’s Brahmasūtrabhāṣaya.) ANDREW O. FORT SĀṄKHYA Considered one of the oldest classical Hindu schools by Indian tradition, Sānkhya is most famous in Indian philosophy for its atheism, its dualist model of puruṣa (passive, individual consciousness) and prakṛti (nonconscious, cognitive-sentient body) and its theory that effects pre-exist in their cause. In its classical formulation the puruṣa-prakṛti model is analysed into twenty-five components ( tattva) intended to encompass entire metaphysical, cognitive, psychological, ethical and physical worlds in terms of their embodiment as individual constituents and the creative and interpretive projection of those worlds as experience by and for individuals. Both the world and the individual, in other words, are considered a phenomenological refraction and projection of the underlying and constitutive components of the conscious body. Falsely identifying with the cognitive and sensory components of prakṛti (which according to orthodox Sānkhya performs cognitive and sentient operations, but is bereft of consciousness; puruṣa alone is conscious), Sānkhyans believe themselves to be the agents of their actions, rather than recognizing that actions are processes lacking any selfhood. Sānkhyans claim that liberation from the suffering of repeated rebirths can only be achieved through a profound understanding of the distinction between puruṣa and prakṛti. The latter is not abandoned after liberation, but continues to operate, observed with detachment by puruṣa. However, according to some versions of Sānkhya, prakṛti eventually becomes dormant. Puru ṣa and prakṛti both are considered to be eternal and to have no beginning. Since liberation is achieved through knowledge, Sānkhya stresses the importance and efficacy of knowledge over ritual and other religious endeavours. Sānkhya is cognate to sankhyā, meaning ‘to count’ or ‘enumerate’. Thus Sānkhya seeks to enumerate the basic facts of reality so that people will understand them and find liberation. Basic Sānkhyan models and terms appear in some Upaniaads and underlie important portions of the epic Mahābhārata , especially the Bhagavad Gītā and Mokṣdharma. No distinct Sānkhyan text prior to Īśvarakṛṣṇa’s Sānkhya kārikā ( c .350–c.450) is extant. It enumerates and explains the twenty-five components and a subsidiary list of sixty topics ( ṣaṣtitantra), which
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Page 793 are then subdivided into further enumerative lists. Most of the subsequent Sānkhyan literature consists of commentaries and expositions of the Sāṃkhyakārikā and its ideas, which continued to be refined without major alterations well into the eighteenth century. Sānkhyan models strongly influenced numerous other Indian schools, including Yoga, Vedānta, Kashmir Shaivism and Buddhism. See also: KARMA AND REBIRTH, INDIAN CONCEPTIONS OF; SELF, INDIAN THEORIES OF Further reading Chapple, C. (1986) Karma and Creativity , Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. (Deals with Sānkhyan models found in several texts, including the Mahābhārata and Yogavāsiṣṭha in an insightful and lucid manner.) Larson, G. (1979) Classical S&3257;ṃkhya, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. (Includes review of earlier scholarship, an analysis of Sānkhyakārikā with romanized Sanskrit text and translation in an appendix.) DAN LUSTHAUS SANTAYANA, GEORGE (1863–1952) George Santayana was a philosopher, essayist, novelist and poet. Born in Spain, he moved to America as a child and attended Harvard, studying under William James and Josiah Royce. The philosophical world first took note of Santayana for his work in aesthetics. The Sense of Beauty (1896), his attempt to give a naturalistic account of the beautiful, remains influential. He wrote exquisitely crafted essays on literature and religion, viewing both as articulating important symbolic truths about the human condition. His mature philosophical system is a classical edifice constructed out of positions adopted from Plato and Aristotle, which he modified in light of the naturalistic insights of his beloved Lucretius and Spinoza and steeped in pessimism reminiscent of Schopenhauer. Although in close touch with the philosophical developments of his day, he always viewed human life and its problems in a calming cosmic perspective. See also: SPAIN, PHILOSOPHY IN Further reading Lachs, J. (1988) George Santayana, New York; Macmillan. (Introduction to Santayana’s system of philosophy.) Santanyana, G. (1927–40) Realms of Being , New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 4 vols. (Full development of Santayana’s mature ontology.) JOHN LACHS SAPIR, EDWARD see SAPIR-WHORF HYPOTHESIS SAPIR-WHORF HYPOTHESIS The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is a widely used label for the linguistic relativity hypothesis, that is, the proposal that the particular language we speak shapes the way we think about the world. The label derives from the names of American anthropological linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, who persuasively argued for this idea during the 1930s and 1940s – although they never actually characterized their ideas as an ‘hypothesis’. In contrast to earlier European scholarship concerned with linguistic relativity, their approach was distinguished by first-hand experience with native American languages and rejection of claims for the superiority of European languages. See also: LANGUAGE, PHILOSOPHY OF; RELATIVISM Further reading Sapir, E. (1921) Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech, New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co. (Classic treatment of language from an anthropological perspective.) Whorf, B.L. (1956) Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, ed. and intro. J. Carroll, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (The basic source for Whorf’s writings on language and thought.) JOHN A. LUCY SARTRE, JEAN-PAUL (1905–80) Sartre was a philosopher of paradox: an existentialist who attempted a reconciliation with Marxism, a theorist of freedom who explored the notion of predestination. From the mid-1930s to the late-1940s, Sartre was in his ‘classical’ period. He explored the history of theories of imagination leading up to that of Husserl, and developed his own phenomenological account of imagination as the key to the freedom of consciousness. He analysed human emotions, arguing that emotion is a freely chosen mode of relationship to the outside world. In his major philosophical work, L’Être et le Néant ( Being and Nothingness) (1943), Sartre distinguished between consciousness and all other beings: consciousness is always at least tacitly conscious of itself, hence it is essentially
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Page 794 ‘for itself’ ( pour-soi ) – free, mobile and spontaneous. Everything else, lacking this self-consciousness, is just what it is ‘in-itself’ ( en-soi ); it is ‘solid’ and lacks freedom. Consciousness is always engaged in the world of which it is conscious, and in relationships with other consciousnesses. These relationships are conflictual: they involve a battle to maintain the position of subject and to make the other into an object. This battle is inescapable. Although Sartre was indeed a philosopher of freedom, his conception of freedom is often misunderstood. Already in Being and Nothingness human freedom operates against a background of facticity and situation. My facticity is all the facts about myself which cannot be changed – my age, sex, class of origin, race and so on; my situation may be modified, but it still constitutes the starting point for change and roots consciousness firmly in the world. Freedom is not idealized by Sartre; it is always within a given set of circumstances, after a particular past, and against the expectations of both myself and others that I make my free choices. My personal history conditions the range of my options. From the 1950s onwards Sartre became increasingly politicized and was drawn to attempt a reconciliation between existentialism and Marxism. This was the aim of the Critique de la raison dialectique ( Critique of Dialectical Reason ) (1960) which recognized more fully than before the effect of historical and material conditions on individual and collective choice. An attempt to explore this interplay in action underlies both his biography of Flaubert and his own autobiography. See also: EXISTENTIALISM; EXISTENTIALIST ETHICS Further reading Cohen-Solal, A. (1987) Sartre: A Life, New York: Pantheon, and London: Heinemann. (Much the best biography of Sartre so far; well-informed and not uncritical.) Sartre, J.-P. (1943) L’Être et le Néant. Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique , Paris: Gallimard; trans. H.E. Barnes, Being and Nothingness: An Essay of Phenomenological Ontology , New York: Philosophical Library, 1956; London: Methuen, 1957. (Sartre’s major philosophical work: a study of the relationship between consciousness and the world, and between consciousness and other consciousnesses.) CHRISTINA HOWELLS SAUSSURE, FERDINAND DE (1857–1913) Though he made a major contribution to the comparative and historical studies which dominated nineteenth-century linguistics, the French philosopher Saussure is best known today for the development of a radically different conception of language and of the methodology of linguistics which became central to twentieth-century structural linguistics. According to this conception a language is a system of signs which are radically arbitrary, so that their significations are determined only by the historically constituted systems of conventions to which they belong – such a system Saussure called ‘ la langue ’. It follows, therefore, that a linguistic study is first and foremost one of la langue , that is, of the conventional relations obtaining at a given time between signs belonging to the same system, rather than one of the development of linguistic forms over time, as the comparativists had maintained. See also: STRUCTURALISM IN SOCIAL SCIENCE; STRUCTURALISM IN LITERARY THEORY Further reading Culler, J. (1976) Saussure, Glasgow: Fontana/ Collins. (A good general introduction, with an excellent account of Saussure’s impact on structuralist thought.) Saussure, F. de (1916) Cours de linguistique générale, ed. C. Bally and A. Sechehaye, with the collaboration of A. Riedlinger, Lausanne and Paris: Payot; trans. W. Baskin, Course in General Linguistics, Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1977. (The key source of Saussure’s ideas.) DAVID HOLDCROFT SAVIGNY, FRIEDRICH KARL VON (1779–1861) The German Friedrich Karl von Savigny was a powerfully influential student of Roman law both in its medieval manifestations and in the contemporary ‘ Pandektenrecht’ (law based on Justinian’s Pandects , or Digest ) of nineteenth-century Germany. His contributions to the philosophy of law are in the spirit of the Romantic movement, and lay stress on the organic character of the legal experience of a people, hence favouring customary law over statute law, and opposing the contemporary movement towards codification. A founder of what is sometimes called the ‘historical school’ in the philosophy of law, he argues that law is to be understood always in its historical setting,
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Page 795 the result of a process of historical development, not simply as the arbitrary command of a – perhaps transitory – sovereign power. See also: JURISPRUDENCE, HISTORICAL; ROMAN LAW Further reading Rattigan, W.H. (1884) Jural Relations, or the Roman Law of Persons as Subjects of Jural Relations , London: Sweet. (Translation of book 2 of Savigny’s System of Modern Roman Law ; this gives Savigny’s view on the nature of personhood in law.) Savigny, F.K. von (1815–21) Geschichte des römischen Rechts in Mittelalter , trans. E. Cathcart, The History of the Roman Law during the Middle Ages, repr. West Port, CT: Hyperion Press, 1979. (Reprint provides an accessible modern edition.) NEIL MacCORMICK SCANDINAVIA, PHILOSOPHY IN The three countries of Scandinavia – Sweden, Denmark and Norway – share much of their history and culture with Finland and Iceland, and it is natural to treat all five Nordic countries together in any philosophical survey. The first universities in this region were founded more than 500 years ago, in Sweden at Uppsala in 1477, and in Copenhagen, the Danish capital, two years later. Over the years, the main trends of philosophical thought, from Descartes and Locke to Hegelianism, existentialism and logical positivism have all impinged upon philosophy in these countries. A unique feature of philosophy in Norway and Iceland, and until 1971 also in Denmark, is that all university students, including students in law, medicine and dentistry, spend all or most of their first semester preparing for a compulsory exam in philosophy which comprises some philosophy of science and philosophy of language, and some history of philosophy and history of science. This requirement has meant much for recruiting and employment opportunities for philosophers. Thus, for example, the University of Oslo has sixty-five tenured philosophers, while Denmark has suffered a dramatic reduction in the number of philosophical positions since the requirement was abolished. In Sweden philosophy is a compulsory subject in some branches of study in secondary schools. That philosophers from the Nordic countries have gained a reputation for broad interests and familiarity with several philosophical traditions may largely be due to two factors: small countries increase the likelihood that they will get involved in popularization and public affairs, and small language communities induce the learning of other languages, notably English, German and French, which makes developments in other countries more accessible. Further reading Bostad, I. and Svenneby, E. (1994) Gender – an Issue for Philosophy? , Oslo: Nordic network for women in philosophy. (Articles by women philosophers from the Nordic countries, with a roster of Nordic women philosophers and their work.) Olson, R.E. and Paul, A.M. (1972) Contemporary Philosophy in Scandinavia , Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. (Articles by Scandinavian philosophers, with an excellent survey of philosophy in Scandinavia by Georg Henrik von Wright.) DAGFINN FØLLESDAL SCEPTICISM Simply put, scepticism is the view that we fail to know anything. More generally, the term ‘scepticism’ refers to a family of views, each of which denies that some term of positive epistemic appraisal applies to our beliefs. Thus, sceptical doctrines might hold that none of our beliefs is certain, that none of our beliefs is justified, that none of our beliefs is reasonable, that none of our beliefs is more reasonable than its denial, and so on. Sceptical doctrines can also vary with respect to the kind of belief they target. Scepticism can be restricted to beliefs produced in certain ways: for example, scepticism concerning beliefs based on memory, on inductive reasoning or even on any reasoning whatsoever. And sceptical views can be restricted to beliefs about certain subjects: for example, scepticism concerning beliefs about the external world, beliefs about other minds, beliefs about value and so on. Solipsism – the view that all that exists is the self and its states – can be seen as a form of scepticism based on the claim that there are no convincing arguments for the existence of anything beyond the self. The philosophical problem of scepticism derives from what appear to be very strong arguments for sceptical conclusions. Since most philosophers are unwilling to accept those conclusions, there is a problem concerning how to respond to the arguments. For example, one kind of sceptical argument attempts to show that we have no knowledge of the world around us. The argument hinges on the claim that we
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Page 796 are not in a position to rule out the possibility that we are brains-in-a-vat being artificially stimulated to have just the sensory experience we are actually having. We have no basis for ruling out this possibility since if it were actual, our experience would not change in any way. The sceptic then claims that if we cannot rule out the possibility that we are brains-in-a-vat, then we cannot know anything about the world around us. Responses to this argument often fall into one of two categories. Some philosophers argue that we can rule out the possibility that we are brains-in-a-vat. Others argue that we do not need to be able to rule out this possibility in order to have knowledge of the world around us. See also: FALLIBILISM; PERCEPTION, EPISTEMIC ISSUES IN; PYRRHONISM; SCEPTICISM, RENAISSANCE Further reading Cornman, J. (1980) Scepticism, Justification, and Explanation, Dordrecht: Reidel. (Defends inference to the best explanation response.) Unger, P. (1975) Ignorance , New York: Oxford University Press. (Influential defence of scepticism.) STEWART COHEN SCEPTICISM, RENAISSANCE Ancient Greek scepticism was revived during the Renaissance, and played an important role in the religious and philosophical controversies of the time. There is little evidence that ancient scepticism was known directly during the Middle Ages, or that its perplexing questions played any significant role in medieval thought. It was indirectly known from the writings of Augustine; some manuscripts of the texts of Cicero and Sextus Empiricus were available; and occasionally vague reference to some sceptical details appears in medieval discussions. However, the interests of scholastic philosophers were, by and large, far removed from the questions about the sources, reliability and certainty of knowledge claims that concerned the ancient sceptics. With the humanistic revival of interest in ancient literature there came a rediscovery of scepticism as presented in the writings of Cicero, Sextus Empiricus and Diogenes Laertius. Cicero’s Academics ( Academica ) was read from the fourteenth century on; Life of Pyrrho by Diogenes Laertius was rediscovered in the early fifteenth century; and Greek manuscripts of the writings of Sextus were brought from Constantinople into Italy in the mid-fifteenth century. These treasuries of sceptical argumentation were used in many ways in the Renaissance. At first they were seen largely as sources of information about the ancient world, but gradually more attention was paid to the actual arguments they contained. Some saw these arguments as a basis for rejecting Aristotelian philosophy, as well as other ancient dogmatic claims about nature and humanity. Others used them as ammunition in the great religious controversies between Catholics and Protestants. A full-fledged scepticism about knowledge claims was developed in the second part of the sixteenth century, through the work of Sanches and Montaigne. Montaigne was particularly inspired by the first published Latin translations of the writings of Sextus Empiricus. Scepticism in all its forms was closely associated with fideism. If it is impossible to acquire knowledge of anything through the senses and reason, then it is impossible to acquire knowledge of God in these ways, and one can argue that religious truth must be accepted on the basis of faith in divine revelation. The weak recommendation of ancient sceptics to suspend belief while accepting local customs as the guide for conduct was thus turned into a strong recommendation to adopt Christian beliefs. Only later did epistemological scepticism become associated with scepticism about religious beliefs themselves. Renaissance scepticism in its various guises was a major intellectual force in the transition from scholasticism to modern thought. See also: HUMANISM, RENAISSANCE; MONTAIGNE, M. DE; SCEPTICISM Further reading Popkin, R.H. (1979) The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza , Berkeley,CA: University of California Press. (Basic study of the development of scepticism from the early sixteenth century on; substantial bibliography.) Popkin, R.H. and Schmitt, C.B. (eds) (1987) Scepticism from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, Wolfenbütteler Forschungen Band 35, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. (Several relevant articles, including Schmitt on the development of the historiography of scepticism.) RICHARD H. POPKIN SCHELER, MAX FERDINAND (1874–1928) Max Scheler, usually called a phenomenologist, was probably the best known German philosopher of the 1920s. Always an eclectic thinker, he
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Page 797 was a pupil of the neo-idealist Rudolph Eucken, but was also strongly influenced by the life-philosophies of Dilthey and Bergson. While teaching at Jena he regularly met Husserl, the founder of the phenomenological movement, and his mature writings have a strongly phenomenological, as well as a Catholic, stamp. Later he turned towards metaphysics and the philosophical problems raised by modern science. Scheler’s interests were very wide. He tried to do justice to all aspects of experience – ethical, religious, personal, social, scientific, historical – without doing away with the specific nature of each. Above all, he took the emotional foundations of thought seriously. Many of his insights are striking and profound, and sometimes his arguments are very telling, but his power to organize his material consistently and to attend conscientiously to the business of justification is poorly developed. Scheler is best known for his anti-Kantian ethics, based on an a priori emotional grasp of a hierarchy of objective values, which precedes all choice of goods and purposes. He himself describes his ethics as ‘personalist’, and makes personal values supreme, sharply distinguishing the ‘person’ from the ‘ego’, and linking this with his analysis of different types of social interaction. In epistemology he defends a pragmatist approach to science and perception; thus philosophy, as the intuition of essences, requires a preparatory ascetic discipline. His philosophy of religion is an attempt to marry the Augustinian approach through love with the Thomist approach through reason. In his later work, to which his important work on sympathy provides the transition, he defends a dualist philosophical anthropology and metaphysics, interpreting the latter in activist terms as a resolution of the tensions between spiritual love and vital impulse. Further reading Dunlop, F. (1991) Scheler , in Thinkers of our Time series, London: The Claridge Press. (A short, clear and untechnical introduction to Scheler’s life and thought.) Scheler, M.F. (1926) Die Wissensformen und die Gesellschaft (Society and the Forms of Knowledge), Leipzig: Neue Geist; in Gesammelte Werke , vol. 8. (Contains ‘Probleme einer Soziologie des Wissens’, trans. M.S. Frings, ed. K.W. Stikkers, Problems of a Sociology of Knowledge , London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980. Also contains the important ‘Knowledge and Work: the limits of the pragmatic approach in our world-knowledge’.) FRANCIS DUNLOP SCHELLING, FRIEDRICH WILHELM JOSEPH VON (1775–1854) Like the other German Idealists, Schelling began his philosophical career by acknowledging the fundamental importance of Kant’s grounding of knowledge in the synthesizing activity of the subject, while questioning his establishment of a dualism between appearances and things in themselves. The other main influences on Schelling’s early work are Leibniz, Spinoza, J.G. Fichte and F.H. Jacobi. While adopting both Spinoza’s conception of an absolute ground, of which the finite world is the consequent, and Fichte’s emphasis on the role of the I in the constitution of the world, Schelling seeks both to overcome the fatalism entailed by Spinoza’s monism, and to avoid the sense in Fichte that nature only exists in order to be subordinated to the I. After adopting a position close to that of Fichte between 1794 and 1796, Schelling tried in his various versions of Naturphilosophie from 1797 onwards to find new ways of explicating the identity between thinking and the processes of nature, claiming that in this philosophy ‘Nature is to be invisible mind, mind invisible nature’. In his System des transcendentalen Idealismus (System of Transcendental Idealism) (1800) he advanced the idea that art, as the ‘organ of philosophy’, shows the identity of what he terms ‘conscious’ productivity (mind) and ‘unconscious’ productivity (nature) because it reveals more than can be understood via the conscious intentions that lead to its production. Schelling’s ‘identity philosophy’, which is another version of his Naturphilosophie, begins in 1801, and is summarized in the assertion that ‘Existence is the link of a being as One, with itself as a multiplicity’. Material nature and the mind that knows it are different aspects of the same ‘Absolute’ or ‘absolute identity’ in which they are both grounded. In 1804 Schelling becomes concerned with the transition between the Absolute and the manifest world in which necessity and freedom are in conflict. If freedom is not to become inexplicable, he maintains, Spinoza’s assumption of a logically necessary transition from God to the world cannot be accepted. Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit und die damit zusammenhängenden Gegenstände (Of Human Freedom) (1809) tries to explain how God
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Page 798 could create a world involving evil, suggesting that nature relates to God somewhat as the later Freud’s ‘id’ relates to the developed autonomous ‘ego’ which transcends the drives which motivate it. The philosophy of Die Weltalter (The Ages of the World), on which Schelling worked during the 1810s and 1820s, interprets the intelligible world, including ourselves, as the result of an ongoing conflict between expansive and contractive forces. He becomes convinced that philosophy cannot finally give a reason for the existence of the manifest world that is the product of this conflict. This leads to his opposition, beginning in the 1820s, to Hegel’s philosophical system, and to an increasing concern with theology. Hegel’s system claims to be without presuppositions, and thus to be self-grounding. While Schelling accepts that the relations of dependence between differing aspects of knowledge can be articulated in a dynamic system, he thinks that this only provides a ‘negative’ philosophy, in which the fact of being is to be enclosed within thought. What he terms ‘positive’ philosophy tries to come to terms with the facticity of ‘being which is absolutely independent of all thinking’ (2 (3): 164). Schelling endeavours in his Philosophie der Mythologie (Philosophy of Mythology) and Philosophie der Offenbarung (Philosophy of Revelation) of the 1830s and 1840s to establish a complete philosophical system by beginning with ‘that which just exists. . . in order to see if I can get from it to the divinity’ (2 (3): 158), which leads to a historical account of mythology and Judeo-Christian revelation. This system does not, though, overcome the problem of the ‘alterity’ of being, its irreducibility to a philosophical system, which his critique of Hegel reveals. The direct and indirect influence of this critique on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Rosenzweig, Levinas, Derrida and others is evident, and Schelling must be considered as the key transitional figure between Hegel and approaches to ‘post-metaphysical’ thinking. See also: GERMAN IDEALISM; ROMANTICISM, GERMAN Further reading Bowie, A. (1993) Schelling and Modern European Philosophy: An Introduction , London: Routledge. (The first full-length account of Schelling in English to consider him as a major philosopher in his own right, rather than as a pendant to Hegel. Connects Schelling to issues in contemporary analytical and European philosophy.) Schelling, F.W.J. (1809) Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit und die damit zusammenhängenden Gegenstände , trans. and with critical notes by J. Gutmann, Of Human Freedom, Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1936. (The text which inaugurates a major change in Schelling’s thought, which is concerned with the question of evil and its relation to human freedom, and with God’s relationship to nature.) ANDREW BOWIE SCHELLINGIANISM Schelling’s philosophy, spread by German professors teaching at Russian universities and by Russians who had studied in Germany, some with Schelling himself, had an early and lasting influence in Russia. It was greatest in aesthetic theory and in the philosophy of history, but it was noticeable even in the natural sciences. Schelling appealed especially to Russians who were inclined to reconcile a modern scientific worldview with religious faith or with an exalted view of art. Particularly prominent figures were Odoevskii, Belinskii, Chaadaev, Venevitinov and Solov’ëv. Further reading Solov’ëv [Solovyov], V. (1952) A Solovyov Anthology, arranged by S. Frank, trans. N. Duddington, New York: Scribner. (Compiled from a broad range of Solov’ëv’s works.) VICTOR TERRAS SCHILLER, FERDINAND CANNING SCOTT (1864–1937) F.C.S. Schiller was the outstanding exponent of pragmatism in Britain. His views, which he referred to at various times as humanism, voluntarism and personalism, as well as pragmatism, were strongly influenced by William James, to whom he paid great tribute, although he claimed to have arrived at his opinions independently. Schiller pursued the subjective and personal aspects of James’s psychology, whereas Dewey built on its objective and social elements. In taking the process of knowing as central to reality, Schiller was also influenced by Hegel. Schiller’s philosophy may be best approached in terms of his opposition to the absolute idealism of the then-dominant British Hegelians (particularly F.H. Bradley, his bête noire ); Schiller thought their monism, rationalism, authoritarianism and intellectualism denied
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Page 799 the basic insight of Protagoras that it is man who is the measure of all things. See also: PERSONALISM; PRAGMATISM Further reading Abel, R. (1955) The Pragmatic Humanism of F.C.S. Schiller , New York: King’s Crown Press of Columbia University. (A critical study of Schiller’s philosophy, with an exhaustive bibliography.) Schiller, F.C.S. (1934) Must Philosophers Disagree?, London: Macmillan. (Collection of essays in popular philosophy. In the title essay Schiller argues that philosophy should be concerned with human actions, not with ‘word games’.) REUBEN ABEL SCHILLER, JOHANN CHRISTOPH FRIEDRICH (1759–1805) Schiller was an artist first – a major poet and the leading dramatist of eighteenth-century Germany – and an aesthetician second. At the height of his involvement in aesthetics, he calls the philosopher ‘a caricature’ beside ‘the poet, the only true human being’. But reflection had deep roots in his nature, to the point where he felt it inhibited his creativity, yet would also have to be the means to restore it. He eventually came to terms with this paradox by devising a typology of ‘naõÈve’ and ‘reflective’ artists that explained his problem – and incidentally the evolution of modern European literature ( On Naïve and Reflective Poetry , 1796). Schiller was also driven by a passionate belief in the humanizing and social function of art. His early speech The Effect of Theatre on the People (1784; later title The Stage considered as a Moral Institution) celebrated the one meeting-place where our full humanity could be restored. In the mature essays of the 1790s, an immensely more complex argument cannot hide the ultimate simplicity of his faith in art, even and especially in the midst of historical crisis: his culminating statement on beauty, On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795) is at the same time a considered response to events in France, where a ‘rational’ Revolution had turned into a Reign of Terror. Schiller proposes an education for humane balance as the only sufficiently radical answer to the violent excesses of impulse, and argues that art is its only possible agent. Schiller’s ideas are imaginative, generous and intuitively appealing as an account of what art is and might do. With the authority of his poetic standing and the high eloquence of his prose, they are powerful cultural criticism. Arguably they could have been more effective still and less vulnerable if he had not tried to make them something else by giving them a systematic quasi-Kantian form, as a result of which philosophical commentators have often patronized him while the Common Reader has been scared off. See also: AESTHETICS AND ETHICS; GOETHE, J.W. VON Further reading Reed, T.J. (1991) Schiller , Past Masters series, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (A concise introduction with emphasis on the historical context and connections in the history of ideas.) Schiller, J.C.F. (1795) On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters , trans and with intro. by E.M. Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby, Oxford, 1967; repr. in paperback 1982. (German text with facing English translation. Editorial apparatus includes a glossary of concepts, diagrammatic representations of Schiller’s thought, and an extensive bibliography.) T.J. REED SCHLEGEL, FRIEDRICH VON (1772–1829) Schlegel was the major aesthetician of the Romantic movement in Germany during its first formative period (1797–1802). In these years he developed his influential concepts of Romantic poetry and irony, created an original approach to literary criticism and edited the journal of the early Romantic circle, Athenäum. Along with F. von Hardenberg (Novalis), F.W.J. Schelling and F.D.E. Schleiermacher, he was also a guiding spirit in the development of a Romantic metaphysics, ethics and politics. His metaphysics attempted to synthesize Fichte’s idealism and Spinoza’s naturalism. His ethics preached radical individualism and love against the abstract formalism of Kant’s ethics. In his early politics Schlegel was very radical, defending the right of revolution and democracy against Kant. In his later years, however, he became much more conservative. His final works are a defence of his neo-Catholic mysticism. See also: ROMANTICISM, GERMAN Further reading Eichner, H. (1970) Friedrich Schlegel , Twayne World Author Series 98, New York: Twayne. (A useful introduction to all aspects of Schlegel’s thought.)
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Page 800 Schlegel, F. von (1996) Early Political Writings of the German Romantics, trans. and ed. F. Beiser, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Contains ‘Essay on the Concept of Republicanism’ (1796), Athenäums Fragments and parts of Lectures on Transcendental Philosophy .) FREDERICK BEISER SCHLEIERMACHER, FRIEDRICH DANIEL ERNST (1768–1834) Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher was the most notable German-speaking Protestant theologian of the nineteenth century. He gave significant impetus to the re-orientation of theology after the Age of Enlightenment (see his speeches Über die Religion ( On Religion) (1799), and also Kurze Darstellung des theologischen Studiums ( Brief Outline of Theology as a Field of Study) (1811a)) and he enjoyed a wide audience in Berlin both as preacher and Professor of Theology and Philosophy. Throughout his life he was a fervent advocate of the union between the Lutheran and the Reformed Church established in the so-called Old Prussian Union, and his compendium Der christliche Glaube ( The Christian Faith) (1821, 1822) is held to be the first dogmatics transcending the denominational boundaries between the Reformation Churches. His translation of Plato attained the status of a classic. In his university lectures and academic speeches on philosophy he made a profound and lasting impression on his audience, both in his historical and systematic thought. He also had an important hand in the reform of the German Universities. In theology and philosophy he strove to find an independent and intermediate position between the Enlightenment, German Idealism and Romanticism. Further reading Sorrentino, S. (ed.) (1992) Schleiermacher’s Philosophy and the Philosophical Tradition , Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press. (Contains essays on various philosophical themes.) Translated from the German by J.G. Finlayson GÜNTER MECKENSTOCK SCHLICK, FRIEDRICH ALBERT MORITZ (1882–1936) Moritz Schlick is usually remembered as the leader of the Vienna Circle, a group that flourished from the late 1920s to the mid-1930s, and made an important contribution to the philosophical movement known as ‘logical empiricism’. Yet many of Schlick’s most original contributions to philosophy antedated the heyday of the Circle, providing the foundations for much of its subsequent development. He started his academic career as a physicist, and his early contributions to philosophy include an influential conventionalist interpretation of general relativity and a new account of the definitions of the basic terms of theoretical science. In the debates that flourished within the Vienna Circle he is famous for his commitment to the Principle of Verifiability and his defence of a correspondence theory of truth. In addition, his works during the final years of the Vienna Circle represent some of the most sober reflections on the problems that vexed the early logical empiricists. Although few of the views identified with logical empiricism currently find favour among philosophers, their approach to philosophy, especially their identification of its central perplexities, still wields enormous influence among contemporary thinkers. Since Schlick contributed significantly to the form logical empiricism assumed during its period of dominance, there can be little doubt that his thought continues to inspire much philosophical thinking today. See also: LOGICAL POSTIVISM Further reading Schlick, M. (1918) Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre , Berlin: Springer. A revised, second edition appeared in 1925 and was translated into English by A. Blumberg and H. Feigl as General Theory of Knowledge , New York and Vienna: Springer, 1974. (This is a classic text – truly a ‘must read’ for anyone interested in the origins of analytic philosophy.) THOMAS OBERDAN SCHMITT, CARL (1888–1985) Carl Schmitt was a conservative critic of the Weimar Republic’s liberal-democratic constitution. After Hitler’s rise to power, he allied himself briefly to Nazism, and despite having fallen from favour and having revised his position even before the war, was never able to rehabilitate himself from the Nazi taint. Interned at Nuremberg in 1945, he was never brought to trial, but was banned from teaching thereafter. His critique of liberalism lay in liberalism’s alleged inability to deal with the nature of politics. Schmitt continues to exert a vast influence on German public law, legal theory and political philosophy, as well as on
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Page 801 European right-wing thought. His work remains important for liberals and opponents of liberalism for the challenges it poses to the neutrality of the liberal state and its legal order. See also: LIBERALISM Further reading Bendersky, J. (1983) Carl Schmitt: Theorist for the Reich , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (A political biography of Schmitt.) Schmitt, C. (1923) Die geistesgeschichtliche Lage des Heutigen Parlamentarismus , trans. and intro. E. Kennedy, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998. (Here Schmitt explores an alleged contradiction between liberalism and democracy.) DAVID LUDOVIC DYZENHAUS SCHOPENHAUER, ARTHUR (1788–1860) Schopenhauer, one of the great prose writers among German philosophers, worked outside the mainstream of academic philosophy. He wrote chiefly in the first half of the nineteenth century, publishing Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung ( The World as Will and Representation ), Volume 1 in 1818 and Volume 2 in 1844, but his ideas became widely known only in the half-century from 1850 onwards. The impact of Schopenhauer’s philosophy may be seen in the work of many artists of this period, most prominently Wagner, and in some of the themes of psychoanalysis. The philosopher most influenced by him was Nietzsche, who originally accepted but later opposed many of his ideas. Schopenhauer considered himself a follower of Kant, and this influence shows in Schopenhauer’s defence of idealism and in many of his central concepts. However, he also departs radically from Kant. His dominant idea is that of the will: he claims that the whole world is will, a striving and mostly unconscious force with a multiplicity of manifestations. Schopenhauer advances this as a metaphysical account of the world as it is in itself, but believes it is also supported by empirical evidence. Humans, as part of the world, are fundamentally willing beings, their behaviour shaped by an unchosen will to life which manifests itself in all organisms. His account of the interplay between the will and the intellect has been seen as a prototype for later theories of the unconscious. Schopenhauer is a pessimist: he believes that our nature as willing beings inevitably leads to suffering, and that a life containing suffering is worse than nonexistence. These doctrines, conveyed in a literary style which is often profound and moving, are among his most influential. Equally important are his views on ‘salvation’ from the human predicament, which he finds in the denial of the will, or the will’s turning against itself. Although his philosophy is atheist, Schopenhauer looks to several of the world religions for examples of asceticism and self-renunciation. His thought was partially influenced by Hinduism at an early stage, and he later found Buddhism sympathetic. Aesthetic experience assumes great importance in Schopenhauer’s work. He suggests that it is a kind of will-less perception in which one suspends one’s attachments to objects in the world, attaining release from the torment of willing (desire and suffering), and understanding the nature of things more objectively. The artistic genius is the person abnormally gifted with the capacity for objective, will-free perception, who enables similar experiences in others. Here Schopenhauer adopts the Platonic notion of Ideas, which he conceives as eternally existing aspects of reality: the genius discerns these Ideas, and aesthetic experience in general may bring us to comprehend them. Music is given a special treatment: it directly manifests the nature of the will that underlies the whole world. In ethics Schopenhauer makes thorough criticisms of Kant’s theory. He bases his own ethical views on the notion of compassion or sympathy, which he considers a relatively rare quality, since human beings, as organic, willing beings, are egoistic by nature. Nevertheless, compassion, whose worldview minimizes the distinctness of what are considered separate individuals, is the only true moral impulse for Schopenhauer. See also: ART, VALUE OF; WILL, THE Further reading Janaway, C. (1994) Schopenhauer, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Written at an introductory level for non-specialists.) Schopenhauer, A. (1818, 1844) Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, trans. E.F.J. Payne, The World as Will and Representation , New York: Dover, 2 vols, 1969; ed. D. Berman, trans. J. Berman as The World as Will and Idea: abridged in one volume , London: Everyman, 1995. (The main work of Schopenhauer’s life, from whose central doctrines he never deviated. The only work containing his whole
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Page 802 system of thought. The abridged version is greatly condensed and loses the grand sweep of the original, but makes the remaining argument more accessible to the general reader.) CHRISTOPHER JANAWAY SCHUMPETER, JOSEPH ALOIS (1883–1950) Schumpeter is best known for his seminal work in economics, but he also made important contributions to the fields of political science and sociology. He aimed to create a broad economic science that he called ‘social economics’ ( Sozialökonomik ), which was to include not only economic theory but also economic history, statistics and economic sociology. Inspiration for this project came in particular from his colleague Max Weber. As an economist Schumpeter is primarily remembered for his theory of the entrepreneur and for his emphasis on the dynamic aspects of economic reality: capitalism, as he saw it, meant first and foremost change. But Schumpeter also made a number of interesting observations about theorizing in economics and the role that vision plays in the work of the economist. His trenchant critique of the conventional theory of democracy and advocacy of a more realistic theory is generally recognized as a major contribution to political theory. Many of Schumpeter’s most important ideas on economics and politics can be found in his book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942), which has become something of a classic in the social sciences. See also: ECONOMICS, PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Schumpeter, J.A. (1911) Theorie der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung , Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot; trans. of 2nd edn from 1926 by R. Opie, The Theory of Economic Development, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934. (Schumpter’s most famous work in economics, containing his well-known theory of entrepreneurship. Opie’s translation is the standard text, although considerably shorter.) Swedberg, R. (1991) Joseph A. Schumpeter: His Life and Work, Cambridge: Polity Press. (An intellectual biography of Schumpeter which emphasizes his vision of economics as a very broad kind of science.) RICHARD SWEDBERG SCHURMAN, ANNA MARIA VAN (1607–78) The first woman to attend a Dutch university, Schurman studied ancient languages and theology. Her Latin treatise on the expedience of scholarship for women made this ‘Star of Utrecht’ the most famous female intellectual in seventeenth-century Europe. She was among the few women to publish views on Counter-Reformation controversies concerning predestination and transubstantiation. Her autobiography served as an apology for the Pietist sect, Labadism. Further reading Birch (Pope-Henessy), U. (1909) A nna van Schurman: Artist, Scholar, Saint , London: Longmans, Green & Company. (The most comprehensive discussion in English.) EILEEN O’NEILL SCHÜTZ, ALFRED (1899–1959) Alfred Schütz was an Austrian-American philosopher and social scientist. Combining ideas from Weber, Bergson and Husserl, SchuÈ tz developed a methodology for social science that integrated subjectivist, phenomenological elements with the causal-explanatory aspects of traditional objectivist approaches. See also: PHENOMENOLOGICAL MOVEMENT Further reading Wagner, H.R. (1983) Alfred Schuütz: An Intellectual Biography , Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (Combines biography with a comprehensive treatment of the intellectual influences upon Schütz. Includes a good bibliography.) FINN COLLIN SCIENCE AND GENDER see GENDER AND SCIENCE SCIENCE AND RELIGION see RELIGION AND SCIENCE SCIENCE IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY Islam attempts to synthesize reason and revelation, knowledge and values, in its approach to the study of nature. Knowledge acquired through rational human efforts and through the Qur’an are seen as complementary: both are ‘signs of God’ that enable humanity to study and understand nature. Between the second and eighth centuries AH (eighth and fifteenth centuries AD), when Muslim civilization was at its
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Page 803 zenith, metaphysics, epistemology and empirical studies of nature fused to produce an explosion of ‘scientific spirit’. Scientists and scholars such as Ibn al-Haytham, al-Razi, Ibn Tufayl, Ibn Sina and alBiruni superimposed Plato’s and Aristotle’s ideas of reason and objectivity on their own Muslim faith, thus producing a unique synthesis of religion and philosophy. They also placed great emphasis on scientific methodology, giving importance to systematic observation, experimentation and theory building. Initially, scientific inquiry was directed by everyday practices of Islam. For example, developments in astronomy were influenced by the fact that the times of Muslim prayer were defined astronomically and its direction was defined geographically. In the later stage, the quest for truth for its own sake became the norm, leading to numerous new discoveries and innovations. Muslim scientists did not recognize disciplinary boundaries between the ‘two cultures’ of science and humanities, and individual scholars tended as a general rule to be polymaths. Recently, Muslim scholars have started to develop a contemporary Islamic philosophy of science by combining such basic Islamic concepts as ‘ ilm (knowledge), khilafa (trusteeship of nature) and istisla (public interest) in an integrated science policy framework. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY; NEOPLATONISM IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY Further reading Hill, D. (1993) Islamic Science and Engineering , Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. (The classic work on the practical aspects of Islamic science.) Hourani, G. (1975) Essays on Islamic Philosophy and Science , Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. (An important collection of articles on particular theoretical issues in the philosophy of science.) ZIAUDDIN SARDAR SCIENCE, MEDIEVAL see NATURAL PHILOSOPHY, MEDIEVAL SCIENCE, 19TH CENTURY PHILOSOPHY OF In the nineteenth century, science was organized, it tested and confirmed positive knowledge of the natural world and achieved remarkable theoretical development and hitherto unimagined practical application. Science drove industry and free enterprise, and became a powerful catalyst in the battle between defenders of knowledge as power and advocates of knowledge as love. Fruitful scientific theories and observations were plentiful. Darwin, Wallace and Spencer caused a revolution in biology. Faraday, Maxwell and Hertz contributed seminal ideas in electromagnetic theory. Hermann von Helmholtz studied the physiology of tones and discovered a principle of the conservation of force. Lyell’s efforts established geology as a science. Ernst Mach argued for the elimination of absolute space in favour of a space and time consisting of observable relations between things, thus providing incentive for Einstein’s theory of relativity. Sir John Herschel added many observed double stars to the growing catalogue of celestial bodies. These and other observational, theoretical and applied achievements in nineteenth-century science were replete with philosophical consequences. Until the nineteenth century natural philosophy and science coexisted as a single discipline. Now science and traditional philosophy drew apart. Some held that henceforth science would deal with the world revealed in experience, and philosophy with the world existing (if any does) beyond what we experience. Others (including prominent scientists) were unwilling to yield to philosophy licence to speculate beyond the limits of what could be ascertained by means of observation and experimentation: even if science and philosophy were no longer one unified intellectual enterprise, philosophy had a substantial role to play in philosophizing about science. To satisfy changing expectations, a new intellectual discipline was created in the nineteenth century: the philosophy of science. Unlike previous philosophy, whose subject matter was everything that is (or is not), the philosophy of science had a distinct and determinate subject matter: theoretical texts and experimental and observational reports of scientists (the word ‘scientist’ having been invented by William Whewell). Theoretical scientific systems and their logical structure were one focus of attention. Science was also said to discover laws. Were such laws timeless and exceptionless truths about nature, or simply convenient, economical ways of cataloguing information? These laws were discovered (or invented) generalizations that provided tested information about nature. This discovery and confirmation relied upon the method of induction – thought by most nineteenth-century philosophers of science to have a
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Page 804 logic – to involve decisions concerning the validity or invalidity of inferences based on knowledge from experience. Was this alleged logic trustworthy? These questions exemplify the complex problems concerning the epistemic reliability of scientific explanation. See also: DARWIN, C.R.; GEOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Giere, R. and Westfall, R.S. (eds) (1973) Foundations of Scientific Method: The Nineteenth Century, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. (A conference volume, including papers on Whewell, Peirce, Maxwell, Darwin and Bernard. Nontechnical, good bibliographies.) Mandelbaum, M. (1971) History, Man, and Reason. A Study in Nineteenth-century Thought, Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. (An indispensable guide to the history of nineteenthcentury ideas. Presupposes some knowledge of the history of philosophy.) ROBERT E. BUTTS SCIENCE, PHILOSOPHY OF 1 Historical background and introduction Science grew out of philosophy; and, even after recognizable, if flexible, interdisciplinary boundaries developed, the most fruitful philosophical investigations have often been made in close connection with science and scientific advance. The major modern innovators – Bacon, Descartes, Leibniz and Locke among them – were all centrally influenced by, and in some cases significantly contributed to, the science of their day. Kant’s fundamental epistemological problem was generated by the success of science: we have obtained certain knowledge, both in mathematics and – principally due to Newton – in science, how was this possible? Unsurprisingly, many thinkers who are principally regarded as great scientists, had exciting and insightful views on the aims of science and the methods of obtaining scientific knowledge. One can only wonder why the epistemological views of Galileo and of Newton, for example, are not taught along with those of Bacon and Locke, say, in courses on the history of modern philosophy. Certainly it can be argued very convincingly that the former two had at least as much insight into the aims and methods of science, and into how scientific knowledge is gained and accredited as the latter two (see GALILEI, G.; NEWTON, I.; also see BOYLE, R.; COPERNICUS, N.; KEPLER, J.). In the nineteenth century, MAXWELL, HERTZ and HELMHOLZ all had interesting views about explanation and the foundations of science, while POINCARÉ who was undoubtedly one of the greatest mathematicians and mathematical physicists, was arguably also one of the greatest philosophers of science – developing important and influential views about, amongst other things, the nature of theories and hypotheses, explanation, and the role of probability theory both within science and as an account of scientific reasoning (also see DUHEM, P.M.M.; FRENCH PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE; LE ROY, É.; MEYERSON, É.; SCIENCE, 19TH CENTURY PHILOSOPHY OF). The period from the 1920s to 1950s is sometimes seen as involving a movement towards more formal issues to the exclusion of detailed concern with the scientific process itself (see Logical positivism). While this has been over-exaggerated – CARNAP, HEMPEL, POPPER and especially REICHENBACH for example all show sophisticated awareness of a range of issues from contemporary science (also see BRIDGMAN, P.W.; OPERATIONALISM) – there is no doubt that general attention in philosophy of science has been redirected back to the details of science,and in particularof itshistorical development, by ‘postpositivist’ philosophers such as HANSON, FEYERABEND, KUHN, LAKATOS and others. Current philosophy of science has developed this great tradition, addressing many of the now standard philosophical issues – about knowledge, the nature of reality, determinism and indeterminism and so on – but by paying very close attention to science both as an exemplar of knowledge and as a source of (likely) information about the world. This means that there is inevitably much overlap with other areas of philosophy – notably epistemology (the theory of scientific knowledge is of course a central concern of philosophy of science) and metaphysics (which philosophers of science often shun as an attempted a priori discipline but welcome when it is approached as an investigation of what current scientific theories and practices seem to be telling us about the likely structure of the universe). Indeed one way of usefully dividing up the subject would see scientific epistemology and what might be called scientific metaphysics as two of the main branches of the subject (these two together in turn forming what might be called general philosophy of science), with the third branch consisting of more detailed, specific investigations into foundational issues concerned with
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Page 805 particular scientific fields or particular scientific theories (especial, though by no means exclusive, attention having been paid of late to foundational and interpretative issues in quantum theory and the Darwinian theory of evolution). Again not surprisingly, important contributions have been made in this third sub-field by scientists themselves who have reflected carefully and challengingly on their own work and its foundations (see BOHR, N.; DARWIN, C.R.; EINSTEIN, A.; HEISENBERG, W.; PLANCK, M.), as well as by those who are more usually considered philosophers. 2 Contemporary philosophy of science: the theory of scientific knowledge Scientists propose theories and assess those theories in the light of observational and experimental evidence; what distinguishes science is the careful and systematic way in which its claims are based on evidence (see SCIENTIFIC METHOD).These simple claims, which I suppose would win fairly universal agreement, hide any number of complex issues. First, concerning theories: how exactly are these best represented? Is Newton’s theory of gravitation, or the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution, or the general theory of relativity, best represented – as logical empiricists such as Carnap supposed – as sets of (at least potentially) formally axiomatized sentences, linked to their observational bases by some sort of correspondence rules? Or are they best represented, as various recent ‘semantic theorists’ have argued, as sets of models (see MODELS; THEORIES, SCIENTIFIC)? Is this simply a representational matter or does the difference between the two sorts of approach matter scientifically and philosophically? This issue ties in with the increasingly recognized role of idealizations in science and of the role of models as intermediates between fundamental theory and empirical laws (see CAMPBELL, N.R.; IDEALIZATIONS). It also relates to an important issue about how best to think of the state of a scientific field at a given time: is a scientist best thought of as accepting (in some sense or other) a single theory or set of such theories or rather as accepting some sort of more general and hierarchically-organized set of assumptions and techniques in the manner of Kuhnian paradigms or Lakatosian research programmes? It seems likely that arriving at the correct account of scientific development and in particular of theory-change in science will depend on identifying the ‘right’ account of theories. Next concerning the evidence : it has long been recognized that many of the statements that scientists are happy to regard as ‘observation sentences’ in fact presuppose a certain amount of theory, and that all observation sentences, short perhaps of purely subjective reports of current introspection, depend on some sort of minimal theory (even ‘the needle points to around 5 on the scale’ presupposes that the needle and the scale exist independently of the observer and that the observer’s perception of them is not systematically deluded by a Cartesian demon). Does this mean that there is no real epistemic distinction between observational and theoretical claims? Does it mean that there is no secure basis or foundation for science in the form of observational and experimental results (see OBSERVATION)? If so, what becomes of the whole empiricist idea of basing scientific theories on the evidence? It can be argued that those who have drawn dire consequences from these considerations have confused fallibility with (serious) corrigibility: that there are observation statements, such as reports of meter readings and the like, of a sufficiently low level as to be, once independently and intersubjectively verified, not seriously corrigible despite being trivially strictly fallible (see MEASUREMENT, THEORY OF). Aside from this issue, experiment was for a long time regarded as raising barely any independent, philosophical or methodological concern – experiments being thought of as very largely simply means for testing theories (see EXPERIMENT). More recently, there has been better appreciation of the extent to which experimental science has a life of its own, independent of fundamental theory, and of the extent to which philosophical issues concerning testing, realism, underdetermination and so on can be illuminated by studying experiments. Suppose that we have characterized scientific theories and drawn a line between theoretical and observational statements, what exactly is involved in ‘basing’ theoretical claims ‘systematically and carefully’ on the evidence? This question has of course been perhaps the central question of general philosophy of science in this century. We have known at least since David Hume that the answer cannot be that the correct theories are deducible from observation results. Indeed not only do our theories universally generalize the (inevitably finite) data as Hume pointed out, they also generally ‘transcend’ the data by explaining that data in terms of underlying, but non-observable, theoretical entities. This means that there must always in principle be (indefinitely) many theories that clash with
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Page 806 one another at the theoretical level but yet entail all the same observational results (see UNDERDETERMINATION). What extra factors then are involved over and beyond simply having the right observational consequences? What roles do such factors as simplicity (see SIMPLICITY (IN SCIENTIFIC THEORIES)), and explanatory power (see EXPLANATION), play in accrediting theories on the basis of evidence? Moreover what status do these factors have – are they purely pragmatic (the sorts of features we like theories to have) or are they truth-indicating, and if so why? Some have argued that the whole process can be codified in probabilistic terms – the theories that we see as accredited by the evidence being the ones that are at any rate more probable in the light of that evidence than any of their rivals (see CONFIRMATION THEORY; INDUCTIVE INFERENCE; PROBABILITY THEORY AND EPISTEMOLOGY). Finally, suppose we have characterized the correct scientific way of reasoning to theories from evidence, what exactly does this tell us about the theories that have been thus ‘accredited’ by the evidence? And what does it tell us about the entities – such as electrons, quarks, and the rest – apparently postulated by such theories? Is it reasonable to believe that these accredited theories are true descriptions of an underlying reality, that their theoretical terms refer to real, though unobservable entities? (Or at least to believe that they are probably true? or approximately true? or perhaps probably approximately true?) More strongly still, is any one of these beliefs the uniquely rational one? Or is it instead more, or at least equally, reasonable – at least equally explanatory of the way that science operates – to hold that these ‘accredited’ theories are no more than empirically adequate, even that they are simply instruments for prediction, the theoretical ‘entities’ they involve being no more than convenient fictions (see CONVENTIONALISM; FICTIONALISM; INCOMMENSURABILITY; PUTNAM, H.; SCIENTIFIC REALISM AND ANTIREALISM)? One major problem faced by realists is to develop a plausible response to once accepted theories that are now rejected either by arguing that they were in some sense immature – not ‘fully scientific’ – or that, despite having been rejected, they nonetheless somehow live on as ‘limiting cases’ of current theories (see ALCHEMY; CHEMISTRY, PHILOSOPHICAL ASPECTS OF; FIELD THEORY, CLASSICAL; MECHANICS, ARISTOTELIAN; MECHANICS, CLASSICAL; OPTICS; VITALISM). Clearly an antirealist view of theories would be indicated if it could convincingly be argued that the accreditation of theories in science is not simply a function of evidential and other truth-related factors or even of epistemic pragmatic factors, but also of broader cultural and social matters. Although such arguments are heard increasingly often, many remain unconvinced – seeing those arguments as based either on confusion of discovery with validational issues or on fairly naïve views of evidential support (see CONSTRUCTIVISM; DISCOVERY, LOGIC OF; GENDER AND SCIENCE; MARXIST PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE). 3 Contemporary philosophy of science: ‘scientific metaphysics’ Suppose that we take a vaguely realist view of current science, what does it tell us about the general structure of reality? Does a sensible interpretation of science require the postulation, for example, of natural kinds (see NATURAL KINDS) or universals? Does it require the postulation of a notion of physical necessity to distinguish natural laws from ‘mere’ regularities (see LAWS, NATURAL)? What is the nature of probability (see PROBABILITY, INTERPRETATIONS OF) – is a probabilistic claim invariably an expression of (partial) ignorance or are there real, irreducible ‘objective chances’ in the world? What exactly is involved in the claim that a particular theory (or a particular system described by such a theory) is deterministic (see DETERMINISM AND INDETERMINISM), and what would it mean for the world as a whole to be deterministic? Does even ‘deterministic’ science eschew the notion of cause (as Russell argued)? Does this notion come into its own in more ‘mundane’ contexts, involving what might be called ‘causal factors’ and probabilistic causation? What exactly is the relationship between causal claims – such as ‘smoking causes heart disease’ – and statistical data (see CAUSATION)? How should spacetime be interpreted (see SPACETIME): as substantive or as ‘merely’ relational? Does current science plus whatever ideas of causality are associated with it unambiguously rule out the possibility of time travel (see TIME TRAVEL), or does this remain at least logically possible given current science? Finally, and most generally, what is science (or, perhaps more significantly, the direction of scientific development) telling us about the overall structure of the universe – that it is one simple system governed at the fundamental level by one unified set of general laws, or rather that it is a ‘patchwork’ of interconnected but separate, mutually irreducible principles (see UNITY OF SCIENCE; REDUCTION, PROBLEMS
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Page 807 OF)? Although it is of course true – despite some exaggerated claims on behalf of ‘theories of everything’ – that science is very far from reducing everything to a common fundamental basis, and although it is of course true that, even in cases where reduction is generally agreed to have been achieved, such as that of chemistry to physics, the reduction is ontological (that is, chemistry has been shown to need no essential, non-physical primitive notions) rather than epistemological (no one would dream of trying actually to derive a full description of any chemical reaction from the principles of quantum mechanics), some would nonetheless still argue that the overall tendency of science is in the reductionist direction (see CHEMISTRY, PHILOSOPHICAL ASPECTS OF). These are examples of the more or less general, and impressively varied, ‘metaphysical’ issues informed by science that have attracted recent philosophical attention. 4 Contemporary philosophy of science: foundational issues from current science Many of the most interesting issues in current philosophy of science are closely tied to foundational or methodological concerns about current scientific theory. One fertile source of such concerns is quantum theory. How much of a revolutionary change in our general metaphysical view of the world does it require? Is the theory irreducibly indeterministic or do ‘hidden variable’ interpretations of some sort remain possible despite the negative results? What does quantum mechanics tell us about the notion of cause? Does quantum mechanics imply a drastic breakdown of ‘locality’, telling us that the properties of even vastly spatially separated systems are fundamentally interconnected – so that we can no longer think of, for example ‘two’ spatially separated electrons as separate, independent ‘particles’? More directly, is there, in view of the ‘measurement problem’ a coherent interpretation of quantum mechanics at all? (It has been argued that when the theory is interpreted universally so that all systems, including ‘macroscopic’ ones, such as measuring apparatuses, are assigned a quantum state then the two fundamental principles of quantum theory – the Schrödinger equation and the projection postulate – come into direct contradiction (see BELL’S THEOREM; FIELD THEORY, QUANTUM; QUANTUM MEASUREMENT PROBLEM; QUANTUM MECHANICS, INTERPRETATION OF; also see RANDOMNESS; STATISTICS). Although perhaps attracting relatively less attention than quantum theory, the other two great theories that form the triumvirate at the heart of contemporary physics – relativity (both special and general) and thermodynamics – pose similarly fascinating problems. In the case of relativity theory, philosophers have raised both ontological issues (for example, concerning the nature of spacetime) and epistemological issues (concerning for example the real role played in Einstein’s development of the theory by Machian empiricism, the role of allegedly crucial experiments such as that of Michelson and Morley (see CRUCIAL EXPERIMENTS), and the evidential impact on the general theory of the Eddington star-shift experiment). There are also important issues about the consistency of relativity and quantum theory – issues that in turn feed into the more general questions concerning the unity of science and realism (see GENERAL RELATIVITY, PHILOSOPHICAL RESPONSES TO; RELATIVITY THEORY, PHILOSOPHICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF). Thermodynamics raises issues about, amongst other things, probability and the testing of probabilistic theories, about determinism and indeterminism, and about the direction of time (see THERMODYNAMICS; DETERMINISM AND INDETERMINISM; DUHEM, P.M.M.; TIME). Other current areas of physics, too, raise significant foundational issues (see CHAOS THEORY, COSMOLOGY). For a long time, philosophy of science meant in effect philosophy of physics . A welcome broadening-out has occurred recently – especially in the direction of philosophy of biology. The central concern here has been with foundational issues in the Darwinian theory of evolution (or more accurately the neoDarwinian synthesis of natural selection and genetics). Questions have been raised about the testability and, more generally, the empirical credentials of that theory, about the scope of the theory (in particular what it can tell us about humans and human societies), about the appropriate ‘unit of selection’ (individual, gene, group), about what exactly are genes and what exactly are species, and about whether evolutionary biology involves distinctive – perhaps even in some sense ‘teleological’ – modes of explanation (see DARWIN, C.R.; ECOLOGY; EVOLUTION, THEORY OF; FUNCTIONAL EXPLANATION; GENETICS; HUXLEY, T.H.; LIFE, ORIGIN OF; LINNAEUS, C. VON; SOCIOBIOLOGY; SPECIES; TAXONOMY; WALLACE, A.R.). More recently philosophy of biology has started to widen its own scope by considering issues outside of evolutionary theory (see MOLECULAR BIOLOGY; MEDICINE, PHILOSOPHY OF), where, however, issues of
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Page 808 reductionism and of the possibility of distinctive modes of explanation still loom large. See also: ARCHAEOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY OF; COMPUTER SCIENCE; ELECTRODYNAMICS; GEOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY OF; HEIDEGGERIAN PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE; NATURALIZED PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE; POSTCOLONIAL PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE; RELIGION AND SCIENCE; SCIENCE IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY; SCIENTIFIC REALISM AND SOCIAL SCIENCE; TECHNOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Kitcher, P. (1993) The Advancement of Science: Science without Legend, Objectivity without Illusions, New York, and Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Thorough and illuminating account of the general issues surrounding theory-change in science; also useful as an introduction to the methodological issues raised by Darwinian theory.) Maudlin, T. (1994) Quantum Non-Locality and Relativity , Oxford, and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. (Given its subject matter, an exceptionally clear, accessible account of some of the foundational issues in quantum theory, especially concerning its reconcilability with relativity theory.) Papineau, D. (ed.) (1996) The Philosophy of Science , Oxford Readings in Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Recent collection of articles, especially on the realism/antirealism issue, but also on issues of empirical support.) Salmon, M.H. et al. (1992) Introduction to the Philosophy of Science , Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. (A text written by members of the internationally celebrated History and Philosophy of Science Department at the University of Pittsburgh and covering general philosophy of science, as well as philosophy of physics, of biology, and of the behavioural and social sciences.) JOHN WORRALL SCIENTIFIC METHOD Procedures for attaining scientific knowledge are known as scientific methods. These methods include formulating theories and testing them against observation or experiment. Ancient and medieval thinkers called any systematic body of knowledge a ‘science’, and their methods were aimed at knowledge in general. According to the most common model for scientific knowledge, formulated by Aristotle, induction yields universal propositions from which all knowledge in a field can be deduced. This model was refined by medieval and early modern thinkers, and further developed in the nineteenth century by Whewell and Mill. As Kuhn observed, idealized accounts of scientific method must be distinguished from descriptions of what scientists actually do. The methods of careful observation and experiment have been in use from antiquity, but became more widespread after the seventeenth century. Developments in instrument making, in mathematics and statistics, in terminology, and in communication technology have altered the methods and the results of science. See also: CRUCIAL EXPERIMENTS; DISCOVERY, LOGIC OF; OBJECTIVITY Further reading Hanson, N.R. (1958) Patterns of Discovery, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Important study of fundamental concepts in science, with reference to actual historical cases.) GARY HATFIELD SCIENTIFIC REALISM AND ANTIREALISM Traditionally, scientific realism asserts that the objects of scientific knowledge exist independently of the minds or acts of scientists and that scientific theories are true of that objective (mind-independent) world. The reference to knowledge points to the dual character of scientific realism. On the one hand it is a metaphysical (specifically, an ontological) doctrine, claiming the independent existence of certain entities. On the other hand it is an epistemological doctrine asserting that we can know what individuals exist and that we can find out the truth of the theories or laws that govern them. Opposed to scientific realism (hereafter just ‘realism’) are a variety of antirealisms, including phenomenalism and empiricism. Recently two others, instrumentalism and constructivism, have posed special challenges to realism. Instrumentalism regards the objects of knowledge pragmatically, as tools for various human purposes, and so takes reliability (or empirical adequacy) rather than truth as scientifically central. A version of this, fictionalism, contests the existence of many of the objects favoured by the realist and regards them as merely expedient means to useful ends. Constructivism maintains that scientific knowledge is socially constituted, that ‘facts’ are made by us. Thus it challenges
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Page 809 the objectivity of knowledge, as the realist understands objectivity, and the independent existence that realism is after. Conventionalism, holding that the truths of science ultimately rest on man-made conventions, is allied to constructivism. Realism and antirealism propose competing interpretations of science as a whole. They even differ over what requires explanation, with realism demanding that more be explained and antirealism less. Further reading Papineau, D. (ed.) (1996) The Philosophy of Science , Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Essays by leading figures touching on many of the themes related to realism.) ARTHUR FINE SCIENTIFIC REALISM AND SOCIAL SCIENCE A central issue in the philosophy of the social sciences is the possibility of naturalism: whether disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, economics and psychology can be ‘scientific’ in broadly the same sense in which this term is applied to physics, chemistry, biology and so on. In the long history of debates about this issue, both naturalists and anti-naturalists have tended to accept a particular view of the natural sciences – the ‘positivist’ conception of science. But the challenges to this previously dominant position in the philosophy of science from around the 1960s made this shared assumption increasingly problematic. It was no longer clear what would be implied by the naturalist requirement that the social sciences should be modelled on the natural sciences. It also became necessary to reconsider the arguments previously employed by anti-naturalists, to see whether these held only on the assumption of a positivist conception of science. If so, a non-positivist naturalism might be defended: a methodological unity of the social and natural sciences based on some alternative to positivism. That this is possible has been argued by scientific realists in the social sciences, drawing on a particular alternative to positivism: the realist conception of science developed in the 1970s by Harré and others. See also: NATURALISM IN SOCIAL SCIENCE; POSITIVISM IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES Further Reading Harré, R. (1970) The Principles of Scientific Thinking , London: Macmillan. (A key statement of the realist alternative to positivism in the natural sciences.) Outhwaite, W. (1987) New Philosophies of Social Science , London: Macmillan. (A succinct and informative comparison of realism, hermeneutics and critical theory.) RUSSELL KEAT SCIENTIFIC THEORIES see THEORIES, SCIENTIFIC SCIENTISTS, RESPONSIBILITIES OF see RESPONSIBILITIES OF SCIENTISTS AND INTELLECTUALS SCOPE Scope is a notion used by logicians and linguists in describing artificial and natural languages. It is best introduced in terms of the languages of formal logic. Consider a particular occurrence of an operator in a sentence – say, that of ‘→’ in (1) below, or that of the universal quantifier ‘ ’ in (2) below. A → (B & C) x(Bxy → yAxy) Speaking intuitively, the scope of the operator is that part of the sentence which it governs. The scope of ‘→’ in (1) is the whole sentence; this renders the whole sentence a conditional. The scope of ‘&’, on the other hand, is just ‘(B & C)’. In (2), the scope of the quantifier ‘ ’ is the whole sentence, which allows it to bind every occurrence of x. The scope of ‘ ’ is only ‘ yAxy’. Since ‘Bxy’ is outside its scope, the ‘y’ in ‘Bxy’ is left unbound. See also: DESCRIPTIONS Further reading Neale, S. (1990) Descriptions, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (Discusses and defends Russell’s account of descriptions. Also discusses contemporary accounts of binding and anaphoric relations. A good introduction to these topics.) MARK RICHARD SEARLE, JOHN (1932–) John Searle was a pupil of J.L. Austin at Oxford in the 1950s. He is the Mills Professor of Mind and Language at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught philosophy since 1959. According to Searle, the primary objects of analysis in the philosophy of language are not expressions but the production of expressions, speech acts, in accordance with rules. Learning a
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Page 810 language involves (often unconsciously) internalizing rules that govern the performance of speech acts in that language. Speech-act theory aims to discover these rules and is itself a part of action theory, which concerns intentional states directed at or about something. It follows that speech-act theory is part of a more comprehensive theory of intentionality. See also: ANALYTICAL PHILOSOPHY; SPEECH ACTS Further reading Searle, J.R. (1969) Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Develops a theory of how language is an expression of thought.) ERNIE LEPORE SECOND- AND HIGHER-ORDER LOGICS In first-order predicate logic there are symbols for fixed individuals, relations and functions on a given universe of individuals and there are variables ranging over the individuals, with associated quantifiers. Second-order logic adds variables ranging over relations and functions on the universe of individuals, and associated quantifiers, which are called second-order variables and quantifiers. Sometimes one also adds symbols for fixed higher-order relations and functions among and on the relations, functions and individuals of the original universe. One can add third-order variables ranging over relations and functions among and on the relations, functions and individuals on the universe, with associated quantifiers, and so on, to yield logics of even higher order. It is usual to use proof systems for higherorder logics (that is, logics beyond first-order) that include analogues of the first-order quantifier rules for all quantifiers. An extensional n-ary relation variable in effect ranges over arbitrary sets of n-tuples of members of the universe. (Functions are omitted here for simplicity: remarks about them parallel those for relations.) If the set of sets of n-tuples of members of a universe is fully determined once the universe itself is given, then the truthvalues of sentences involving second-order quantifiers are determined in a structure like the ones used for first-order logic. However, if the notion of the set of all sets of n-tuples of members of a universe is specified in terms of some theory about sets or relations, then the universe of a structure must be supplemented by specifications of the domains of the various higher-order variables. No matter what theory one adopts, there are infinitely many choices for such domains compatible with the theory over any infinite universe. This casts doubt on the apparent clarity of the notion of ‘all n-ary relations on a domain’: since the notion cannot be defined categorically in terms of the domain using any theory whatsoever, how could it be well-determined? See also: SECOND-ORDER LOGIC, PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES IN Further reading Church, A. (1956) Introduction to Mathematical Logic , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (An influential introduction to second-(and first-) order logic.) Shapiro, S. (1991) Foundations without Foundationalism , Oxford: Clarendon Press. (A comprehensive work on basics of second-order logic and the ways in which it is relied on in much of ordinary mathematical practice. Extensive bibliography.) SHAUGHAN LAVINE SECONDARY QUALITIES Primary qualities are generally defined as those properties that objects have independently of being perceived. Standard examples would include properties of shape, weight, position, electric charge, atomic structure. These properties characterize the way the world is in itself, separately from mind. Secondary qualities, by contrast, are defined as those properties that incorporate sensory responses in their conditions of application, so that the idea of a perceiver is built into their nature. It is more controversial which properties, if any, belong to this category, since not all philosophers agree that the standard alleged examples of secondary qualities – colours, sounds, tastes, smells, feels – are really correctly so classified. Some thinkers hold that objects have only primary qualities. Let us note the significance of the question, concentrating on the case of colour, which is the one most frequently discussed. Objects appear to have both shape and colour in equal measure, but is this really how things are? Depending upon how we answer this question, we get very different pictures of the relation between appearance and reality. If both sorts of property are equally out there, equally objective, then what appears to us in perception is reality itself. When we see a material object we see something that exists independently of our seeing it, and we see the object as it is whether or not there are (or even could be) any perceivers. But if the colour of the object is inherently
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Page 811 dependent upon our sensory responses, then the question arises as to whether what we see is really in some way itself mental. If colour is a secondary quality, in other words, do we see things as they really are? What is it that bears colour if colours are in some way mentally constituted? Do we indeed see anything at all, as distinct from introspecting the features of our own subjective states? See also: PRIMARY–SECONDARY DISTINCTION Further reading McGinn, C. (1983) The Subjective View , Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Sets the discussion in the context of the relationship between the world as it is independently of the mind and the world as it is presented to the mind.) COLIN McGINN SECOND-ORDER LOGIC, PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES IN Typically, a formal language has variables that range over a collection of objects, or domain of discourse. A language is ‘second-order’ if it has, in addition, variables that range over sets, functions, properties or relations on the domain of discourse. A language is third-order if it has variables ranging over sets of sets, or functions on relations, and so on. A language is higher-order if it is at least secondorder. Second-order languages enjoy a greater expressive power than first-order languages. For example, a set S of sentences is said to be categorical if any two models satisfying S are isomorphic, that is, have the same structure. There are second-order, categorical characterizations of important mathematical structures, including the natural numbers, the real numbers and Euclidean space. It is a consequence of the Löwenheim–Skolem theorems that there is no first-order categorical characterization of any infinite structure. There are also a number of central mathematical notions, such as finitude, countability, minimal closure and well-foundedness, which can be characterized with formulas of second-order languages, but cannot be characterized in first-order languages. Some philosophers argue that second-order logic is not logic. Properties and relations are too obscure for rigorous foundational study, while sets and functions are in the purview of mathematics, not logic; logic should not have an ontology of its own. Other writers disqualify second-order logic because its consequence relation is not effective – there is no recursively enumerable, sound and complete deductive system for second-order logic. The deeper issues underlying the dispute concern the goals and purposes of logical theory. If a logic is to be a calculus, an effective canon of inference, then second-order logic is beyond the pale. If, on the other hand, one aims to codify a standard to which correct reasoning must adhere, and to characterize the descriptive and communicative abilities of informal mathematical practice, then perhaps there is room for second-order logic. See also: SECOND- AND HIGHER-ORDER LOGICS Further reading Barwise, J. and Feferman, S. (eds) (1985) Model-Theoretic Logics, New York: Springer. (Extensive treatment of many logics, some of which are intermediate between first-order and second-order. Quite technical, for the most part. Extensive bibliography.) Church, A. (1956) Introduction to Mathematical Logic , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Still an excellent introduction to both first-order and second-order logic.) STEWART SHAPIRO SELDEN, JOHN (1584–1654) Antiquarian, philologist, parliamentarian, legal historian and practising lawyer, the Englishman John Selden was a major figure in the renaissance and systematization of common law. In jurisprudence, his importance lies in his attempt to develop certain elements of an epistemology of common law. He made use of history to criticize current legal doctrines, and developed a philosophical methodology in relation to the interpretation of precedent. See also: COMMON LAW Further reading Kelley, D.R. (1990) ‘English Developments: The Common Law’, in The Human Measure: Social Thought in the Western Legal Tradition, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. (This contains a discussion of Selden’s part in giving relatively early definition to common law and the character of common law thinking.) Selden, J. (1610) Jani Anglorum facies altera (The Other Face of the English Janus), trans. R. Westcot, London: T. Bassett, 1683. (Study of the other face or ‘backface’ of English law, concerned particularly with fragments and evidence of female rule and female lawgivers.)
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Page 812 SELF, INDIAN THEORIES OF Hindu thought traces its different conceptions of the self to the earliest extant Vedic sources composed in the Sanskrit language. The words commonly used in Hindu thought and religion for the self are jīva (life), ātman (breath), jīvātman (life-breath), puruṣa (the essence that lies in the body), and kṣetrajña (one who knows the body). Each of these words was the culmination of a process of inquiry with the purpose of discovering the ultimate nature of the self. By the end of the ancient period, the personal self was regarded as something eternal which becomes connected to a body in order to exhaust the good and bad karma it has accumulated in its many lives. This self was supposed to be able to regain its purity by following different spiritual paths by means of which it can escape from the circle of births and deaths forever. There is one more important development in the ancient and classical period. The conception of Brahman as both immanent and transcendent led to Brahman being identified with the personal self. The habit of thought that tried to relate every aspect of the individual with its counterpart in the universe ( Ṛg Veda X. 16) had already prepared the background for this identification process. When the ultimate principle in the subjective and objective spheres had arrived at their respective ends in the discovery of the ātman and Brahman, it was easy to equate the two as being the same spiritual ‘energy’ that informs both the outer world and the inner self. This equation had important implications for later philosophical growth. The above conceptions of the self-identity question find expression in the six systems of Hindu thought. These are known as āstikadarśanas or ways of seeing the self without rejecting the authority of the Vedas. Often, one system or the other may not explicitly state their allegiance to the Vedas, but unlike Buddhism or Jainism, they did not openly repudiate Vedic authority. Thus they were āstikadarśanas as opposed to the others who were nāstikadarśanas. The word darśana for philosophy is also significant if one realizes that philosophy does not end with only an intellectual knowing of one’s self-identity but also culminates in realizing it and truly becoming it. See also: AWARENESS IN INDIAN THOUGHT; MIND, INDIAN PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Chatterjee S. and Datta, D. (1960) An Introduction to Indian Philosophy , Calcutta: University of Calcutta. (A good introduction to the six schools.) Hiriyanna, M. (1952) Outlines of Indian Philosophy , London: George Allen & Unwin. (One of the best books in Indian philosophy both for undergraduate and graduate students.) T.S. RUKMANI SELF-CONTROL A human person or self possesses powers that can come into conflict. Reason may have to struggle to overcome contrary desire. Self-control may be characterized as the ability to regulate or resolve such conflict correctly. A well-ordered self has self-control; a disordered self lacks it. When an agent lacks self-control, inner conflict often results in the victory of evil over good. Philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, and Kant have painted portraits of the disordered self. They are alike in portraying its actions as stemming from appetites or desires that are not properly ruled by some ‘higher part’ of the self. These philosophers have also proposed accounts of the well-ordered self. They are alike in depicting it as a self in which a part of the self connected with reason or wisdom governs a ‘lower part’ associated with appetites or desires. See also: EMOTIONS, PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Plato ( c .380s–370s BC) Phaedrus, trans. R. Hackforth, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952; repr. in The Collected Dialogues including Letters , ed. E. Hamilton and H. Cairns, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. (Compares the human psyche to a charioteer and two horses.) PHILIP L. QUINN SELF-CULTIVATION IN CHINESE PHILOSOPHY Chinese philosophy may be viewed as disciplined reflections on the insights of self-cultivation. Etienne Balazs asserted that all Chinese philosophy is social philosophy and that, even if Chinese thinkers dwell upon metaphysical speculation, they will sooner or later return to the practical issues of the world here and now. This concern for the concreteness of the life-world gives the impression that the social dimension of the human condition features so prominently in the Chinese world of thought that the idea of the group takes precedence over conceptions of the individual self. The anthropological studies
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Page 813 that contrast the Chinese sense of shame with the Western sense of guilt further enhance the impression that external social approval, rather than internal psychological sanction, defines the moral fabric of Chinese society. The prevalent sociological literature on the mechanism of ‘saving face’ as a key to understanding Chinese interpersonal relationships also stresses the centrality of external conditioning in Chinese ethics. If we follow this line of thinking, it is easy to assume that Chinese philosophers are preoccupied with neither the transcendent referent nor the inner psyche. They are not particularly interested in questions of ultimate reality such as the creator, the origin of the cosmos or the existence of God. Nor are they engrossed in problems of the mind such as consciousness, self-identity or moral choice. Indeed, Chinese philosophy as social philosophy seems exclusively immersed in issues of correct behaviour, familial harmony, political order and world peace. Even strands of thought that emphasize the aesthetic experience of the self are all intimately bound up with the highly ritualized world of human-relatedness. Actually the spirit of spontaneity, as a liberation from social constraints, should be appreciated in terms of a conscious reflection on and critique of society and thus inherently sociological. However, this widely held opinion of Chinese philosophy is seriously flawed. While it offers a commonsense picture of where the strength of Chinese thought lies, it does not address the underlying reasons or the actual processes that define the main trajectory of the Chinese modes of thinking. Wing-tsit Chan suggests a more comprehensive characterization of Chinese philosophy as humanism: ‘not the humanism that denies or slights a Supreme Power, but one that professes the unity of man and Heaven’ (Chan 1963: 3). It is crucial to note that ‘humanism’ so conceived is diametrically opposed to secular humanism as a distinctive feature of the Enlightenment mentality of the modern West. Western humanism emerged as a thorough critique of spiritualism and a radical departure from naturalism, or a sense of affinity with nature; it was the result of secularization. Chinese humanism, on the other hand, tends to incorporate the spiritual and naturalist dimensions in a comprehensive and integrated vision of the nature and function of humanity in the cosmos. The advantage of characterizing Chinese philosophy as humanistic rather than sociological is to open the possibility of allowing aesthetic, religious and metaphysical as well as ethical, historical and political perspectives to shape the contours of the Chinese reflective mind. This synthetic approach better captures the spirit of Chinese thought because it was historical and social change, rather than speculation, which was instrumental in the out-growth of humanism as a defining characteristic of Chinese philosophy. See also: CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY, CHINESE; XIN (HEART-AND-MIND) Further reading Chan Wing-tsit (ed. and trans.) (1963) A Source Book of Chinese Philosophy , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (A survey of original sources in translation.) Ivanhoe, P.J. (1993) Confucian Moral Self Cultivation , New York: Peter Lang. (A study of major Confucian thinkers that aims to provide a philosophically sensitive account of Confucian moral selfcultivation.) TU WEI-MING SELF-DECEPTION Philosophical work on self-deception revolves around a trio of questions. What is self-deception? Is selfdeception possible? How are cases of self-deception to be explained? The extent to which self-deception is analogous to interpersonal deception is controversial, partly because certain analogies threaten to render the possibility of self-deception deeply problematic. The problems concern both the mental state of self-deceived individuals at a particular time (static problems) and the dynamics of self-deception (dynamic problems). For example, in normal interpersonal deception the deceivers know something, p, or at least believe truly that p, while getting their victims to believe the opposite, ~p. So if selfdeception is strictly analogous to (normal) interpersonal deception, self-deceivers know or believe truly that p while getting themselves to believe that ~p. If this entails simultaneously believing that p and believing that ~p, self-deception may seem impossible. (For example, how can I believe that someone will read this entry while also believing that no one will read it?) Moreover, even if this state is possible, the suggestion that people can get themselves into it by deceiving themselves is problematic. It may seem, for instance, that any project describable as ‘getting myself to believe what I now know to be false’
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Page 814 is bound to be self-defeating. Self-deception may be dynamically impossible. See also: ACTION; SELF-DECEPTION, ETHICS OF Further reading Fingarette, H. (1969) Self-Deception , London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (Emphasizes the dynamic nature of self-deception and develops an action-oriented response to familiar worries about the possibility of self-deception.) Martin, M. (ed.) (1985) Self-Deception and Self-Understanding , Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press. (Useful collection of philosophical and psychological literature; extensive bibliography.) ALFRED R. MELE SELF-DECEPTION, ETHICS OF Self-deception is complicated and perplexing because it concerns all major aspects of human nature, including consciousness, rationality, motivation, freedom, happiness, and value commitments. In a wide sense, ‘self-deception’ refers to intentional activities and motivated processes of avoiding unpleasant truths or topics and the resulting mental states of ignorance, false belief, unwarranted attitudes, and inappropriate emotions. Deceiving oneself, like deceiving other people, raises a host of questions about immorality. These include whether self-deception is always immoral or only when it conceals and supports wrongdoing; whether self-deception about wrongdoing and character faults compounds or mitigates guilt for causing harm; how important the value of authenticity is, and whether it can be sacrificed in an attempt to cope with reality; what the relation is between self-deception and responsibility; and whether groups can be self-deceived. Ultimately, the moral status of any instance of self-deception depends on the particular facts of the case. Further reading Ames, R.T. and Dissanayake, W. (eds) (1996) Self and Deception , Albany, NY: State University of New York. (Essays contrasting Western and non-Western views of self-deception.) Haight, M.R. (1980) A Study of Self-Deception , London: Humanities Press. (Explores paradoxes of freedom, determinism, and the divided self.) MIKE W. MARTIN SELF-REALIZATION ‘Self-realization’ is the development and expression of characteristic attributes and potentials in a fashion which comprehensively discloses their subject’s real nature. Usually, the ‘self’ in question is the individual person, but the concept has also been applied to corporate bodies held to possess a unitary identity. What constitutes the self’s ‘real nature’ is the key variable generating the many conceptions of selfrealization. These can be grouped broadly into two types: (1) the ‘collectivist’, in which the self-realizing lifestyle, being either the same for all or specific to a person or subgroup of people, is ultimately definable only in the context, and perhaps with reference to the common purposes, of a collective social body; (2) the ‘individualist’, in which a person’s self-realization has no necessary connection with the ends of a particular community. As an ethic, self-realization can be proposed as the means to achieve a life identified as good by some criterion independent of the self-realizing process, or held to be that which actually defines the good. Its critics typically argue that human nature is such that any equation of ‘self-realization’ and ‘goodness’ is implausible or undesirable. See also: HAPPINESS; LIFE, MEANING OF; SELF-CULTIVATION IN CHINESE PHILOSOPHY Further reading Lasch, C. (1978) The Culture of Narcissism , New York: W.W. Norton. (Attacks what it considers to be a pervasive and overly indulgent, narrow-minded obsession with oneself which self-realization has been accused of promoting.) Taylor, C. (1979) Hegel and Modern Society , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (A compact discussion not only of the Hegelian but also the Romantic and Marxist versions of self-realizationist theory.) MARK EVANS SELF-RESPECT Persons are said to respect themselves when they have an appropriate sense of their own worth either as persons generally or as individuals occupying particular roles. In respecting themselves as persons, people may recognize their worth as persons (‘recognition’ self-respect) or value the positive aspects of their character (‘evaluative’ or ‘appraisal’ self-respect). On the ‘subjective’ view of self-respect, persons have self-respect so long as they value themselves according to their own standards of worthiness. On
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Page 815 regardless of whether the agents exhibiting them are conforming to their own standards. Self-respect plays a central role in the ethical philosophy of Kant and the political philosophy of Rawls. Kant maintains that persons have a duty to respect themselves, which consists in regarding themselves as equal in moral status to other persons. Rawls holds that a just society must provide the social bases of self-respect for all citizens, for without self-respect, their lives are severely diminished. In this same spirit, some critiques of oppression emphasize the injustice of robbing people of their self-respect, which is often a consequence, it is claimed, of being oppressed. See also: AUTONOMY, ETHICAL; EQUALITY Further reading Rawls, J. (1971) A Theory of Justice , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Presents a theory of distributive justice according to which self-respect is a prominent social good.) CYNTHIA A. STARK SELLARS, WILFRID STALKER (1912–89) Wilfrid Sellars was among the most systematic and innovative of post-war American philosophers. His critical destruction of the ‘Myth of the Given’ established him as a leading voice in the Anglo-American critique of ‘the Cartesian concept of mind’ and in the corresponding shift of attention from the categories of thought to public language. His own positive views were naturalistic, combining a robust scientific realism with a thoroughgoing nominalism which rejected both traditional abstract entities and ontologically primitive meanings. In their place, Sellars elucidated linguistic meaning and the content of thought in terms of a sophisticated theory of conceptual roles, instantiated in the linguistic conduct of speakers and transmitted by modes of cultural inheritance. He combined this theory with a form of ‘verbal behaviourism’ to produce the first version of functionalism in the contemporary philosophy of mind. Besides his profoundly original philosophical contributions, his long career as a distinguished teacher and influential editor earned him justified acclaim as one of the definitive figures of the post-war period. See also: NOMINALISM; ONTOLOGY Further reading Sellars, W.S. (1963) Science, Perception and Reality , London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul; repr. Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview, 1991. (Contains Sellars’ best-known essays, including his classical critique of the ‘Myth of the Given’, ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’, and his metaphilosophical manifesto, ‘Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man’.) JAY F. ROSENBERG SEMANTIC PARADOXES AND THEORIES OF TRUTH The Cretan philosopher Epimenides said that Cretans always lie. Assuming, for the sake of argument, the mendacity of all other statements by Cretans, we get a paradox: if what Epimenides said was true, it must have been a lie, whereas if what he said was a lie, it would have made his statement true. The citizens of Crete have long since forgiven the insult, but semantics has never recovered. Alfred Tarski perceived the consequences of Epimenides’ paradox with particular clarity. Our commonsense intuitions about truth follow the paradigm: ‘Snow is white’ is true if and only if snow is white. As Tarski rigorously shows, if the language we are describing (the object language) is the same as the language in which we are formulating our theory (the metalanguage), this paradigm will be inconsistent with the rudimentary laws of syntax. The conclusion Tarski drew was that, if we are to develop a satisfactory theory of truth, our metalanguage must be essentially richer in expressive power than the object language. Since there is no human language essentially richer than English (or any other natural language), there can be no satisfactory theory of truth for English. One earnestly hopes that this is not the end of the matter. Tarski’s analysis leaves open the prospect that we can develop a fully satisfactory theory of truth for a substantial fragment of English; also the prospect that we can develop a theory of truth for English as a whole which, while not fully satisfying our intuitions, is none the less useful and illuminating. Both prospects have been substantially advanced by Saul Kripke’s ‘Outline of a Theory of Truth’, which exploits the idea that there are truth-value gaps, statements which are neither true nor false, and that Epimenides’ insult was one of them. Invocation of truth-value gaps does not resolve the paradox in any straightforward way. If we let the phrase ‘the simple liar sentence’ refer to the sentence ‘The simple
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Page 816 liar sentence is false’, we see that we can readily account for the paradoxical features of the sentence by declaring the sentence neither true nor false; but if we let the strengthened liar sentence be ‘The strengthened liar sentence is not true’, we get a sentence we cannot dispose of so tidily. If the strengthened liar is neither true nor false, then it is not true; but that it is not true is precisely what the sentence says. Truth-value gaps have not vanquished the liar paradox. Nor have any of the alternatives, the most prominent of which are a contextualist account, which sees the English word ‘true’ as radically ambiguous, and so-called ‘revision theory’, which investigates the cyclic reasoning that occurs when we try to evaluate the simple liar sentence: if the sentence is true, then it must be false; but if, then, it is false, it must be true; and so on. While these approaches have not eliminated the paradox, they have opened new approaches that have greatly improved our prospects for finding a comfortable way to live with it. See also: PARADOXES OF SET AND PROPERTY; TARSKI’S DEFINITION OF TRUTH Further reading Kleene, S.C. (1952) Introduction to Metamathematics , New York: Elsevier, 1971. (An invaluable textbook. Three-valued logic is in §54.) Martin, R. (ed.) (1984) Recent Essays on Truth and the Liar Paradox, New York: Oxford University Press. (A collection of the most important papers.) VANN McGEE SEMANTICS Semantics is the systematic study of meaning. Current work in this field builds on the work of logicians and linguists as well as of philosophers. Philosophers are interested in foundational issues in semantics because these speak to the nature of meaning, as it embeds in our thinking and in our relations to each other and to the world. Of special interest are questions about how a semantic theory should respect the connections of meaning to truth and to understanding. In addition, numerous semantic problems concerning particular linguistic constructions bear philosophical interest, sometimes because the problems are important to resolving foundational semantical issues, sometimes because philosophical problems of independent interest are expressed using the constructions, and sometimes because clarity about the semantic function of the constructions enables clarity in the development of philosophical theories and analyses. See also: LANGUAGE, PHILOSOPHY OF; MEANING AND COMMUNICTION; QUESTIONS Further reading Chierchia, G. and McConnell-Ginet, S. (1995) Meaning and Grammar, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (An excellent introduction to semantics in the tradition of Montague grammar.) MARK CRIMMINS SEMANTICS, CONCEPTUAL ROLE According to conceptual role semantics (CRS), the meaning of a representation is the role of that representation in the cognitive life of the agent, for example, in perception, thought and decisionmaking. It is an extension of the well-known ‘use’ theory of meaning, according to which the meaning of a word is its use in communication and, more generally, in social interaction. CRS supplements external use by including the role of a symbol inside a computer or a brain. The uses appealed to are not just actual, but also counterfactual: not only what effects a thought does have, but what effects it would have had if stimuli or other states had differed. Of course, so defined, the functional role of a thought includes all sorts of causes and effects that are non-semantic, for example, perhaps happy thoughts can bolster one’s immunity, promoting good health. Conceptual roles are functional roles minus such nonsemantic causes and effects. The view has arisen separately in philosophy (where it is sometimes called ‘inferential’ or ‘functional’ role semantics) and in cognitive science (where it is sometimes called ‘procedural semantics’). See also: CONCEPTS Further reading Peacocke, C. (1992) A Theory of Concepts , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (A CRS-oriented account of the nature of concepts.) NED BLOCK SEMANTICS, GAME-THEORETIC Game-theoretic semantics (GTS) uses concepts from game theory to study how the truth and falsity of the sentences of a language depend upon the truth and falsity of the language’s atomic sentences (or upon its sub-sentential expressions). Unlike the Tarskian method (which uses recursion clauses to
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Page 817 in terms of the satisfaction conditions of their component sentences, then defines truth in terms of satisfaction), GTS associates with each sentence its own semantic game played on sentences of the language. This game defines truth in terms of the existence of a winning strategy for one of the players involved. The structure of the game is determined by the sentence’s structure, and thus the semantic properties of the sentence in question can be studied by attending to the properties of its game. See also: DECISION AND GAME THEORY Further reading Saarinen, E. (1979) Game-Theoretical Semantics, Dordrecht: Reidel. (A collection of early papers in GTS, including Hintikka’s influential discussions of branching quantification, Hintikka and Carlson’s original discussion of subgames in the semantics of conditionals, Saarinen on backward-looking operators and intentional identity, and Rantala’s urn models.) MICHAEL HAND SEMANTICS, INFORMATIONAL Information-theoretic semantics (ITS) attempts to provide a naturalistic account of the conditions under which a psychological state such as a belief or desire has a particular mental content: what it is by virtue of which, say, a psychological state is a belief ‘that it is raining’ or a desire ‘that it stop raining’. Because of the complexities of an entirely general account, ITS typically attempts to provide merely a sufficient naturalistic condition for a belief content of the sort normally acquired by perception (for example, that it is raining). It is expected that other sorts of mental contents may require that ITS be supplemented in various ways. ITS was inspired by Claude Shannon’s theory of ‘information’, which provided a mathematical measure of the amount of information carried by a signal. Employing a notion of ‘natural meaning’ discussed by Peirce and Grice, Dretske supplemented Shannon’s work with an account of what information a signal carries. The intuitive idea is that a signal carries the information ‘that p’ if and only if it naturally means (that is, indicates) that p, as when smoke ‘means’ there is fire. Natural indication is a key ingredient in ITS accounts of mental content. In their accounts, Stampe and Stalnaker appeal to the notion of what a state indicates under ‘optimal’ conditions. Fodor appeals to ‘asymmetric dependencies’ between the meaning-forming and the non-meaning-forming indication conditions in the causation of psychological states. Dretske appeals to the idea that, via operant conditioning, a state can acquire a functional role vis-á-vis behaviour because it naturally indicates ‘that p’ and thereby can acquire the natural function of indicating ‘that p’. See also: INFORMATION THEORY; SEMANTICS Further reading Dretske, F. (1981) Knowledge and the Flow of Information, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Bradford Books. (Dretske’s original proposal of information-theoretic semantics.) Shannon, C.E. (1948) ‘The Mathematical Theory of Communication’, repr. in C.E. Shannon and W. Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication , Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1949. (Presents a mathematical theory of quantity of information.) BRIAN P. McLAUGHLIN GEORGES REY SEMANTICS, POSSIBLE WORLDS Possible worlds semantics (PWS) is a family of ideas and methods that have been used to analyse concepts of philosophical interest. PWS was originally focused on the important concepts of necessity and possibility. Consider: Necessarily, 2 + 2 = 4. Necessarily, Socrates had a snub nose. Intuitively, (a) is true but (b) is false. There is simply no way that 2 and 2 can add up to anything but 4, so (a) is true. But although Socrates did in fact have a snub nose, it was not necessary that he did; he might have had a nose of some other shape. So (b) is false. Sentences (a) and (b) exhibit a characteristic known as intensionality: sentences with the same truthvalue are constituent parts of otherwise similar sentences, which nevertheless have different truthvalues. Extensional semantics assumed that sentences stand for their truth-values, and that what a sentence stands for is a function of what its constituent parts stand for and how they are arranged. Given these assumptions, it is not easy to explain the difference in truth-value between (a) and (b), and hence not easy to give an account of necessity. PWS takes a sentence to stand for a function from worlds to truth-values. For each world, the function yields the truth-value the sentence
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Page 818 would have if that world were actual. ‘2 + 2 = 4’ stands for a function that yields the truth-value ‘true’ for every world, while ‘Socrates had a snub nose’ stands for a different function that yields ‘true’ for some worlds and ‘false’ for others, depending on what Socrates’ nose is like in the world. Since these two sentences stand for different things, sentences that have them as constituents, such as (a) and (b), can also stand for different things. This basic idea, borrowed from Leibniz and brought into modern logic by Carnap, Kripke and others, has proven extremely fertile. It has been applied to a number of intensional phenomena in addition to necessity and possibility, including conditionals, tense and temporal adverbs, obligation and reports of informational and cognitive content. PWS spurred the development of philosophical logic and led to new applications of logic in computer science and artificial intelligence. It revolutionized the study of the semantics of natural languages. PWS has inspired analyses of many concepts of philosophical importance, and the concept of a possible world has been at the heart of important philosophical systems. See also: POSSIBLE WORLDS Further reading Benthem, J. van (1983) The Logic of Time, Dordrecht: Reidel. (Important contributions to a wide range of issues in tense logic.) Hintikka, J. (1962) Knowledge and Belief: An Introduction to the Logic of the Two Notions , Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. (Explores the logic of knowledge and belief within a version of the possible worlds framework.) JOHN R. PERRY SEMANTICS, SITUATION Situation semantics attempts to provide systematic and philosophically coherent accounts of the meanings of various constructions that philosophers and linguists find important. It is based on the old idea that sentences stand for facts or something like them. As such, it provides an alternative to extensional semantics, which takes sentences to stand for truth-values, and to possible worlds semantics, which takes them to stand for sets of possible worlds. Situations are limited parts or aspects of reality, while states of affairs (or infons) are complexes of properties and objects of the sort suitable to constitute a fact. Consider the issue of whether Jackie, a dog, broke her leg at a certain time T. There are two states of affairs or possibilities, that she did or she did not. The situation at T, in the place where Jackie was then, determines which of these states of affairs (infons) is factual (or is the case or is supported). Situation theory , the formal theory that underlies situation semantics, focuses on the nature of the supports relation. Situation semantics sees meaning as a relation among types of situations . The meaning of ‘I am sitting next to David’, for example, is a relation between types of situations in which someone A utters this sentence referring with the name ‘David’ to a certain person B, and those in which A is sitting next to B. This relational theory of meaning makes situation semantics well-suited to treat indexicality, tense and other similar phenomena. It has also inspired relational accounts of information and action. Further reading Barwise, J. (1989) The Situation In Logic , Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information. (The papers in the collection developed many of the basic ideas of later versions of situation theory.) Devlin, K. (1991) Logic and Information, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Devlin’s book explains the basics of the current version of situation theory and applies it to a number of problems in linguistics and psychology.) JOHN R. PERRY SEMANTICS, TELEOLOGICAL Teleological/biological theories of meaning use a biological concept of function to explain how the internal states of organisms like ourselves can represent conditions in the world. These theories are controversial, as they have the consequence that an organism’s history affects the content of its present thoughts. These theories have advantages over other naturalistic theories of meaning in the task of explaining the possibility of error and unreliable representation. See also: FUNCTIONAL EXPLANATION Further reading Millikan, R.G. (1984) Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (The most sophisticated teleological theory.) PETER GODFREY-SMITH
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Page 819 SEMIOTICS As the study of signification, semiotics takes as its central task that of describing how one thing can mean another. Alternatively, since this philosophical problem is also a psychological one, its job could be said to be that of describing how one thing can bring something else to mind, how on seeing ‘x’ someone can be induced to think about ‘y’ even though ‘y’ is absent. A person in whose head ‘y’ has been brought to mind may be responding to an ‘x’ someone else has transmitted with the intention of its signifying ‘y’; or, mistakenly, responding to an ‘x’ someone has transmitted in the guileless expectation of its signifying some ‘z’; or, often, responding to an ‘x’ that comes to his notice without anybody’s apparent intention at all. Words, for example, generally signify because someone intends them to, and ideally (though not always) they signify what is intended; whereas clouds signify – a coming storm, a whale – because we so interpret them, not because they shaped themselves to convey some meaning. Obviously the study of signification forms an integral part of the study of thinking, since no object can itself enter the brain, barring fatal mischance, and so it must be represented by some mental (that is, neural) ‘x’ that signifies it. Signifiers are equally essential for creatures far lower than humans, as when a chemical signal ‘x’ emitted by some bacterium signifies to one of its colleagues some ‘y’ such as ‘there’s a dearth of food hereabouts’. There are a number of ways in which an ‘x’ can signify some ‘y’, but for humans these are chiefly: by physical association; by physical resemblance; and/or by arbitrary convention. When we take some ‘x’ as signifying some ‘y’ we are often guessing; our guess is subject to checking by interpretative (re)appraisal. See also: LANGUAGE, PHILOSOPHY OF; MOSCOWTARTU SCHOOL Further reading Eschbach, A. and Trabant, J. (eds) (1983) History of Semiotics, Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. (The study of signs from Plato to Wittgenstein.) Sebeok, T.A. (1989) The Sign and Its Masters , Lanham, MD: University Press of America. (Authoritative account of modern semiotics.) W.C. WATT SENECA, LUCIUS ANNAEUS (4/1 BC–AD 65) Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Roman statesman and Stoic philosopher, is the earliest Stoic of whose writings any have survived intact. Seneca wrote, in Latin, tragedies and a wide range of philosophical works. His philosophical and literary work was carried out in the intervals of an active political career. He is most important for his ethics and psychology, although natural philosophy was not neglected. Unlike many Stoics he showed little interest in logic or dialectic. His most influential work was on the psychology of the passions, the nature of the human will and techniques of moral education; he also wrote extensively on social and political issues from a distinctively Stoic perspective. Further reading Griffin, M. (1992) Seneca: A Philosopher in Politics , Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2nd edn. (Definitive historical treatment; offers a likely order of composition for Seneca’s works.) Seneca, L.A. ( c . AD early 60s) Letters , trans. R.M. Gummere, Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and London: Heinemann, 1917–25, 10 vols. (Latin text with facing translation.) BRAD INWOOD SENGZHAO (AD 384?–414) Sengzhao was one of the first native Chinese thinkers to develop a distinctive version of Buddhist philosophy. He blended the dialectical logic of Indian Mādhyamika Buddhism with ideas and terms often borrowed from Chinese Daoism. His collected treatises, the Zhaolun , argued that language is inadequate for capturing reality. There is a need for an intuitive insight to penetrate reality in its nonlinguistic form as a means to understanding the process and limitations of subsequent conceptualization. See also: BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY, CHINESE Further reading Robinson, R.H. (1965) Early Mādhyamika in India and China , Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. (Good scholarly study of the Mādhyamika tradition, including a chapter on Sengzhao and a translation of three fascicles of the Zhaolun .) THOMAS P. KASULIS SENG-CHAO see SENG ZHAO
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Page 820 SENSE AND REFERENCE The ‘reference’ of an expression is the entity the expression designates or applies to. The ‘sense’ of an expression is the way in which the expression presents that reference. For example, the ancients used ‘the morning star’ and ‘the evening star’ to designate what turned out to be the same heavenly body, the planet Venus. These two expressions have the same reference, but they clearly differ in that each presents that reference in a different way. So, although coreferential, each expression is associated with a different ‘sense’. The distinction between sense and reference helps explain the cognitive puzzle posed by identity statements. ‘The morning star is the evening star’ and ‘The morning star is the morning star’ are both true, yet the sentences differ in cognitive significance, since the former may be informative, whereas the latter definitely is not. That difference in cognitive significance cannot be explained just by appeal to the references of the terms, for those are the same. It can, however, be naturally accounted for by appeal to a difference in sense. The terms ‘the morning star’ and ‘the evening star’ used in the first sentence, having different senses, present the referent in different ways, whereas no such difference occurs in the second sentence. The distinction between sense and reference applies to all well-formed expressions of a language. It is part of a general theory of meaning that postulates an intermediate level of sense between linguistic terms and the entities the terms stand for. Senses give significance to expressions, which in and of themselves are just noises or marks on a surface, and connect them to the world. It is because linguistic terms have a sense that they can be used to express judgments, to transmit information and to talk about reality. See also: INTENSIONAL ENTITIES Further reading Dummett, M. (1981) Frege: Philosophy of Language, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (A comprehensive discussion of various aspects of the theory of sense and reference.) Sluga, H. (ed.) (1993) The Philosophy of Frege, vol. 4, Sense and Reference in Frege’s Philosophy, New York: Garland. (Large collection of articles about the topic.) GENOVEVA MARTÍ SENSE PERCEPTION, INDIAN VIEWS OF Sense perception is considered in classical Indian thought in the context of epistemological issues – in particular, perception as a source of knowledge – and of psychological and metaphysical issues, for example, the relations of sense experiences to objects, to language and to the perceiving self or subject. The Sanskrit word used most commonly in philosophical investigations of sense perception is pratyakṣa , a compound of prati , ‘before’, and akṣa, ‘eye’ or any ‘organ of sense’; thus it should be understood as ‘being before the eyes’ or ‘experientially evident’ as an adjective, and ‘immediate experience’ or ‘sense experience’ as a noun. The meaning ‘sense perception’ is normal within philosophical inquiries. But just how many sense modalities there are is not to be taken for granted. In addition to the five types of sense experience commonly identified, ‘mental’ perception (as of pleasures, pains and desires), apperception (awareness of awareness) and extraordinary or yogic perception are sometimes counted as pratyakṣa . Views about the psychology of perception or, more broadly, about perception considered as part of the world are developed in religious and soteriological literature (literature about enlightenment and liberation) predating classical philosophical discussions. In Upaniṣadic, Buddhist and Jaina texts over two millennia old, perception is painted in broad strokes within spiritual theories of self and world that promote ideas of the supreme value of a mystical experience. Sense perception is usually devalued comparatively. Later, the psychology of perception becomes very advanced and is treated in some quarters independently of soteriological teachings. Classical Indian philosophy proper is marked by tight argumentation and self-conscious concern with evidence. The justificational value of perception is recognized from the outset, in so far as any justifiers, or knowledge sources, are admitted at all. Nāgārjuna and others challenge the epistemological projects of Nyāya and other positive approaches to knowledge, prompting deep probing of perception’s epistemic role. Views about veridicality, fallibility and meaningful doubt become greatly elaborated. What do we perceive? Throughout classical thought, sharp disagreements occur over the perceptibility of universals, relations, absences or negative facts (such as Devadatta’s not being at home), parts versus wholes, and the self or awareness itself. Issues about perceptual media
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Page 821 (such as light and ether, ākāśa , the purported medium of sound), about occult or spiritual perceptibles and about the very existence of objects independently of consciousness are hotly debated. A Buddhist phenomenalism is polemically matched by a Mīmāṃsā and Nyāya realism on a range of concerns. Probably through the influence of mysticism, verbalization of experience, however simple and direct, becomes suspect in comparison with experience itself; this suspicion is evident in concerns over the value of each in presenting reality, as well as in other, sometimes rather indefinite, ways. The judgment is prevalent that what prevents a person from living in an enlightened or liberated state is thinking – verbalizing experience, calculating, planning, and so on – instead of having pure experience, perceptual and otherwise, and thus living with a ‘silent mind’. This attitude emerges in treatments of sense experience, reinforcing what is perhaps a natural tendency among philosophers to find the relations of experience and language problematic. Even in the root text of Nyāya, where the influence of yoga and mysticism is not so strong, perception is said to be a cognition that is nonverbal, avyapadeśya, although there is considerable dispute about precisely what this means. The relations between various modes of experience and the language used with respect to them remains an ongoing concern of the very latest and most complex classical Indian philosophy. Further reading Bhattacharya, G. (trans.) (1976) Tarkasaṃgraha-dīpikāon Tarkasaṃgraha by Annaṃbhaṭ&37789;a , Calcutta: Progressive Publishers. (Lucid presentation of Nyāya views related to perception – through the vehicle of translation and explanation of a Nyāya textbook.) Matilal, B.K. (1986) Perception: An Essay on Classical Indian Theories of Knowledge , Oxford: Oxford University Press. (A modern classic by a premier scholar and philosopher.) STEPHEN H. PHILLIPS SENSE-DATA A philosophical theory of perception must accommodate this obvious fact: when someone perceives, or seems to perceive something, how things appear may differ from how they are. A circular coin tilted will look elliptical. A stick partially immersed in water will look bent. Noting that appearance and reality do not always coincide, some philosophers have given the following account of the contrast between the two. Suppose someone seems to see a book with a red cover. Whether or not there is any book to be seen, the individual seeming to see the red book will be aware of something red. What they are aware of is called a sense-datum. According to a sense-datum theory, any perceptual experience involves awareness of a sensedatum whether or not it is an experience of a physical object. Some philosophers link a sense-datum theory with certain views about knowledge. According to foundationalists all knowledge of the external world must rest on a foundation of beliefs that are beyond doubt. We can always be mistaken about what physical objects are like. On the other hand, we cannot be mistaken about what sense-data are like. So, all knowledge about the external world rests on beliefs about sense-data. In this way a sense-datum theory is supposed to do double duty in contributing towards an account of perception, and an account of knowledge based on perception. See also: FOUNDATIONALISM; PERCEPTION, EPISTEMIC ISSUES IN Further reading Price, H.H. (1932) Perception , London: Methuen. (A classic and detailed exposition of a sense datum theory.) Swartz, R.J. (ed.) (1965) Perceiving, Sensing, and Knowing , New York: Doubleday. (A collection on perception which includes an excellent selection of pieces on sense data in section II entitled Sensing, Sense Data, and Appearing.) ANDRÉ GALLOIS SENTENCES see PROPOSITIONS, SENTENCES AND STATEMENTS SERGEANT, JOHN (1623–1704) John Sergeant was the last of the Blackloists – the faction of English Catholics who followed the thought of Thomas White in the middle decades of the seventeenth century. As such his major philosophical concern was with a refutation of scepticism, and to that end he adopted a synthesis of Aristotelianism and aspects of the new philosophy. Sergeant is now best remembered as the main Catholic protagonist in the theological ‘rule of faith’ debates, when he engaged with such eminent Anglicans as Tillotson and Stillingfleet to argue the cause of religious certainty, attainable only through Catholic tradition. Turning later to the need for certainty in philosophy and science, he
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Page 822 formulated his own ‘solid philosophy’: within an essentially Aristotelian framework, he incorporated aspects of the new thought that had been earlier adopted by Thomas White and Kenelm Digby. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM IN THE 17TH CENTURY Further reading Krook, D. (1993) John Sergeant and his Circle: A Study of Three Seventeenth Century English Aristotelians, ed. and intro. B.C. Southgate, Leiden: E.J. Brill. (Analyses Sergeant’s philosophy as essentially Aristotelian; includes bibliography.) Sergeant, J. (1697) Solid Philosophy Asserted against the Fancies of the Ideists , London; repr. New York: Garland, 1984. (An anti-sceptical treatise, which includes in particular a criticism of Locke’s Essay.) BEVERLEY SOUTHGATE SET THEORY In the late nineteenth century, Georg Cantor created mathematical theories, first of sets or aggregates of real numbers (or linear points), and later of sets or aggregates of arbitrary elements. The relationship of element a to set A is written a A; it is to be distinguished from the relationship of subset B to set A, which holds if every element of B is also an element of A, and which is written B A. Cantor is most famous for his theory of transfinite cardinals, or numbers of elements in infinite sets. A subset of an infinite set may have the same number of elements as the set itself, and Cantor proved that the sets of natural and rational numbers have the same number of elements, which he called 0; also that the sets of real and complex numbers have the same number of elements, which he called c. Cantor proved 0 to be less than c. He conjectured that no set has a number of elements strictly between these two. In the early twentieth century, in response to criticism of set theory, Ernst Zermelo undertook its axiomatization; and, with amendments by Abraham Fraenkel, his have been the accepted axioms ever since. These axioms help distinguish the notion of a set, which is too basic to admit of informative definition, from other notions of a one made up of many that have been considered in logic and philosophy. Properties having exactly the same particulars as instances need not be identical, whereas sets having exactly the same elements are identical by the axiom of extensionality. Hence for any condition Ф there is at most one set {x|Ф(x)} whose elements are all and only those x such that Ф( x) holds, and {x|Ф( x)} = {x|σ( x)} if and only if conditions Ф and σ hold of exactly the same x. It cannot consistently be assumed that {x|Ф( x)} exists for every condition Ф. Inversely, the existence of a set is not assumed to depend on the possibility of defining it by some condition Ф as {x|Ф( x)} One set x0 may be an element of another set x1 which is an element of x2 and so on, x0 x1 x2 ..., but the reverse situation, ... y2 y1 y0, may not occur, by the axiom of foundation. It follows that no set is an element of itself and that there can be no universal set y = {x|x = x}. Whereas a part of a part of a whole is a part of that whole, an element of an element of a set need not be an element of that set. Modern mathematics has been greatly influenced by set theory, and philosophies rejecting the latter must therefore reject much of the former. Many set-theoretic notations and terminologies are encountered even outside mathematics, as in parts of philosophy: pair {a, b}{x|x = a or x = b} singleton {a } {x|x = a } empty set {x|x ≠ x} union X {a|a A for some A X } binary union A B {a|a A or a B } intersection ∩ X {a|a A for all A X } binary intersectionA ∩ B {a|a A and a B } difference A − B {a|a A and not a B } complement A−B power set ( A) {B|B A} (In contexts where only subsets of A are being considered, A − B may be written −B and called the complement of B.) While the accepted axioms suffice as a basis for the development not only of set theory itself, but of modern mathematics generally, they leave some questions about transfinite cardinals unanswered. The status of such questions remains a topic of logical research and philosophical controversy. See also: CANTOR’S THEOREM Further reading Barwise, J. (ed.) (1977) Handbook of Mathematical Logic , Amsterdam: North Holland, 317–522. (A
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Page 823 branches of set theory, with attribution of results to their original authors and references to the original technical literature.) Cantor, G. (1895, 1897) ‘Beiträge zur Begründung der transfiniten Mengenlehre’, Mathematische Annalen 46: 481–512, 49: 207–46; trans. P.E.B. Jourdain (1915), Contributions to the Founding of the Theory of Transfinite Numbers , New York: Dover, 1955. (The original source for set theory, with an introduction setting the work in its historical context.) JOHN P. BURGESS SET THEORY, DIFFERENT SYSTEMS OF To begin with we shall use the word ‘collection’ quite broadly to mean anything the identity of which is solely a matter of what its members are (including ‘sets’ and ‘classes’). Which collections exist? Two extreme positions are initially appealing. The first is to say that all do. Unfortunately this is inconsistent because of Russell’s paradox: the collection of all collections which are not members of themselves does not exist. The second is to say that none do, but to talk as if they did whenever such talk can be shown to be eliminable and therefore harmless. This is consistent but far too weak to be of much use. We need an intermediate theory. Various theories of collections have been proposed since the start of the twentieth century. What they share is the axiom of ‘extensionality’, which asserts that any two sets which have exactly the same elements must be identical. This is just a matter of definition: objects which do not satisfy extensionality are not collections. Beyond extensionality, theories differ. The most popular among mathematicians is Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory (ZF). A common alternative is von Neumann–Bernays–Gödel class theory (NBG), which allows for the same sets but also has proper classes, that is, collections whose members are sets but which are not themselves sets (such as the class of all sets or the class of all ordinals). Two general principles have been used to motivate the axioms of ZF and its relatives. The first is the iterative conception, according to which sets occur cumulatively in layers, each containing all the members and subsets of all previous layers. The second is the doctrine of limitation of size, according to which the ‘paradoxical sets’ (that is, the proper classes of NBG) fail to be sets because they are in some sense too big. Neither principle is altogether satisfactory as a justification for the whole of ZF: for example, the replacement schema is motivated only by limitation of size; and ‘foundation’ is motivated only by the iterative conception. Among the other systems of set theory to have been proposed, the one that has received widespread attention is Quine’s NF (from the title of an article, ‘New Foundations for Mathematical Logic’), which seeks to avoid paradox by means of a syntactic restriction but which has not been provided with an intuitive justification on the basis of any conception of set. It is known that if NF is consistent then ZF is consistent, but the converse result has still not been proved. Further reading Fraenkel, A.A., Bar-Hillel, Y. and Levy, A. (1958) Foundations of Set Theory , Amsterdam: North Holland; revised 2nd edn, 1973. (Detailed discussions of most of the systems of set theory mentioned here and a wealth of historical information and references.) Quine, W.V. (1963) Set Theory and its Logic , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; revised edn, 1969. (Rather idiosyncratic but extremely clear and well written.) MICHAEL POTTER SEUSE, HEINRICH see SUSO, HENRY SEXTUS EMPIRICUS ( fl. c . AD 200) Sextus Empiricus is our major surviving source for Greek scepticism. Little is known about his life, but he is known to have belonged to the Empirical school, a sceptically-minded medical sect. Three works of his survive: a general sceptical handbook ( Outlines of Pyrrhonism ), a partly lost longer treatment of the same material, and a series of self-contained essays questioning the utility of the individual liberal arts. Further reading Sextus Empiricus ( c . AD 200) Outlines of Pyrrhonism , trans. J. Annas and J. Barnes, Outlines of Scepticism , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. (Fine translation with introduction and notes.) R.J. HANKINSON SEXUALITY, PHILOSOPHY OF The philosophy of sexuality, like the philosophy of science, art or law, is the study of the concepts and propositions surrounding its central protagonist, in this case ‘sex’. Its practitioners focus
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Page 824 on conceptual, metaphysical and normative questions. Conceptual philosophy of sex analyses the notions of sexual desire, sexual activity and sexual pleasure. What makes a feeling a sexual sensation? Manipulation of and feelings in the genitals are not necessary, since other body parts yield sexual pleasure. What makes an act sexual? A touch on the arm might be a friendly pat, an assault, or sex; physical properties alone do not distinguish them. What is the conceptual link between sexual pleasure and sexual activity? Neither the intention to produce sexual pleasure nor the actual experience of pleasure seems necessary for an act to be sexual. Other conceptual questions have to do not with what makes an act sexual, but with what makes it the type of sexual act it is. How should ‘rape’ be defined? What the conceptual differences are, if any, between obtaining sex through physical force and obtaining it by offering money is an interesting and important issue. Metaphysical philosophy of sex discusses ontological and epistemological matters: the place of sexuality in human nature; the relationships among sexuality, emotion and cognition; the meaning of sexuality for the person, the species, the cosmos. What is sex all about, anyway? That sexual desire is a hormonedriven instinct implanted by a god or nature acting in the service of the species, and that it has a profound spiritual dimension, are two – not necessarily incompatible – views. Perhaps the significance of sexuality is little different from that of eating, breathing and defecating; maybe, or in addition, sexuality is partially constitutive of moral personality. Normative philosophy of sex explores the perennial questions of sexual ethics. In what circumstances is it morally permissible to engage in sexual activity or experience sexual pleasure? With whom? For what purpose? With which body parts? For how long? The historically central answers come from Thomist natural law, Kantian deontology, and utilitarianism. Normative philosophy of sex also addresses legal, social and political issues. Should society steer people in the direction of heterosexuality, marriage, family? May the law regulate sexual conduct by prohibiting prostitution or homosexuality? Normative philosophy of sex includes nonethical value questions as well. What is good sex? What is its contribution to the good life? The breadth of the philosophy of sex is shown by the variety of topics it investigates: abortion, contraception, acquaintance rape, pornography, sexual harassment, and objectification, to name a few. The philosophy of sex begins with a picture of a privileged pattern of relationship, in which two adult heterosexuals love each other, are faithful to each other within a formal marriage, and look forward to procreation and family. Philosophy of sex, as the Socratic scrutiny of our sexual practices, beliefs and concepts, challenges this privileged pattern by exploring the virtues, and not only the vices, of adultery, prostitution, homosexuality, group sex, bestiality, masturbation, sadomasochism, incest, paedophilia and casual sex with anonymous strangers. Doing so provides the same illumination about sex that is provided when the philosophies of science, art and law probe the privileged pictures of their own domains. See also: FAMILY, ETHICS AND THE; LOVE; REPRODUCTION AND ETHICS Further reading Price, A.W. (1989) Love and Friendship in Plato and Aristotle , Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Of the vast writings on love, sex and friendship in Plato and Aristotle, this absorbing treatise is one of the best places to start.) Verene, D. (ed.) (1972) Sexual Love and Western Morality, New York: Harper & Row; 2nd edn, Boston, MA: Jones and Bartlett, 1995. (Introductory textbook; 2nd edn includes Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Hegel, Sartre, Freud, Sade and Foucault.) ALAN SOBLE SHAFTESBURY, THIRD EARL OF (ANTHONY ASHLEY COOPER) (1671–1713) Shaftesbury, whose influence on eighteenth-century thought was enormous, was the last great representative of the Platonic tradition in England. He argued that by natural reason we can see that the world is an intelligible, harmonious system. In reflecting on our character traits we will inevitably approve of those which contribute to the good of humanity and of the whole system. These same personal qualities are also needed for a happy life, so virtue and happiness go hand in hand. Shaftesbury is often seen as the founder of the moral sense or ‘sentimentalist’ school in ethics, whose members held that morality was based on human feeling rather than on reason. Although leading sentimentalists, such as Hutcheson and Hume, made use of many of his ideas, Shaftesbury himself has more in common with the rationalists, who held that there are eternal
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Page 825 moral truths which we can know by the use of reason. Further reading Shaftesbury (1711) Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. J.M. Robertson, London: Grant Richards, 1900, 2 vols; repr. in The Shaftesbury Collection , vols 1 and 2, Bristol: Thoemmes, 1995. (Contains all important works published by Shaftesbury in his lifetime.) Voitle, R. (1984) The Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press. (The definitive biography, with an excellent bibliography.) DAVID McNAUGHTON SHAH WALI ALLAH (QUTB AL-DIN AHMAD AL-RAHIM) (1703–62) Shah Wali Allah of Delhi, the greatest Muslim scholar of eighteenth-century India, made an immense contribution to the intellectual, economic, social, political and religious life of the Muslim community in India, the effects of which persist to the present day. He lived during a time when the Muslim empire was losing ground on the Indian subcontinent, with the Muslim community divided and at odds. Seeking to give theological and metaphysical issues a new rational interpretation and labouring to harmonize reason and revelation, he tried to reconcile the various factions of the Indian Muslims, thereby protecting the empire from collapse. Shah Wali Allah contended that the root cause of the downfall of the Indian Muslims was their ignorance of the sacred scripture of Islam. He initiated a movement with the theme ‘Back to the Qur’an’, and translated the Qur’an into Persian to facilitate its understanding among all the Muslims of India. It is believed to be the first complete translation of the Qur’an from the Arabic by an Indian Muslim scholar. See also: ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY, MODERN; ISLAMIC THEOLOGY Further reading Rizvi, S. (1980) Shah Wali Allah and His Times, Canberra: Ma‘rifat Publishing House. (A discussion of the links between Shah Wali Allah’s philosophical views and the renewal movement in India.) Shah Wali Allah (1703–62) Lamahat (Flashes of Lightning), Hyderabad: Shah Wali Allah Academy, 1963; trans. G. Jalbani, Sufism and the Islamic Tradition: the Lamahat and Sata‘at of Shah Waliullah, London, 1980. (One of the important writings on Sufism.) HAFIZ A. GHAFFAR KHAN SHAO YONG (1012–77) One of the founders of neo-Confucianism, Shao Yong was a Chinese philosopher best known for his use of numerical ideas to illustrate natural patterns of change. His thought encompassed a variety of concerns including knowledge, language and self-cultivation, and has received differing interpretations. See also: NEO-CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY Further reading Birdwhistell, A.D. (1989) Transition to Neo-Confucianism: Shao Yung on Knowledge and Symbols of Reality , Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. (General comments on historical context and extensive bibliography.) ANNE D. BIRDWHISTELL SHAO YUNG see SHAO YONG SHEM TOV FAMILY The ibn Shem Tov family included four Jewish intellectuals of fifteenth century Spain whose philosophical, theological, homiletical and polemical works followed the persecution of 1391 and the ensuing mass apostasy of Jews. Responding to these traumatic events, the Shem Tovs rethought the place of philosophy in traditional Judaism. Although the pater familias reacted sharply to the spiritual crisis by criticizing Maimonides and endorsing Kabbalah, his offspring charted a more moderate course that enabled Jewish intellectuals to cultivate philosophy and the kindred arts and sciences while asserting the ultimate primacy of their revealed faith over philosophy, and its philosophical superiority to Christianity. See also: KABBALAH; MAIMONIDES, M. Further reading Sirat, C. (1985) A History of Jewish Philosophy in the Middle Ages, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 381–4. (The chapter on Jewish philosophy in the fifteenth century includes important summaries of Joseph and Isaac ibn Shem Tov’s chief works and ideas.) HAVA TIROSH-SAMUELSON SHESTOV, LEV (YEHUDA LEIB SHVARTSMAN) (1866–1938) A major though atypical figure of the Russian Religious-Philosophical Renaissance, Shestov
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Page 826 taught that reason and science can neither explain tragedy and suffering, nor answer the questions that matter most. A maximalist, a subjectivist and an anti-dogmatist, Shestov regarded philosophical idealism as an attempt to gloss over the ‘horrors of life’ and attacked morality and ethics as inherently coercive. He maintained that science ignores the contingent, the unique and the ineffable, that philosophy cannot be a science, and that necessity depersonalizes and dehumanizes the individual. Philosophy and revelation are incompatible because God is not bound by reason, nature or autonomous ethics. To God ‘all things are possible’, even undoing what has already happened. God even restored Job’s dead children to him – the same children, not new ones, Shestov insisted. In Dobro v uchenii gr. Tolstogo i Fr. Nitshe ( The Good in the Teaching of Tolstoy and Nietzsche ) (1900) and Dostoevskii i Nitshe ( Dostoevsky and Nietzsche ) (1903) Shestov attacked philosophical idealism and attributed his subjects’ philosophies to a defining personal experience: Tolstoi’s horror at urban poverty, Nietzsche’s illness, and Dostoevskii’s Siberian exile, respectively. These books established Shestov as a major literary critic and interpreter of Nietzsche. Around 1910 he turned to philosophy and religion. In his magnum opus Athènes et Jerusalem (1938) Shestov preached a religious existentialism centred on the living God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and argued that evil came into the world with knowledge. Adam and Socrates were fallen men because they opted for knowledge over life and faith. Socrates, Aristotle, the Scholastics, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel and Husserl were all faith-destroying. Shestov preferred the anti-rationalism of Dostoevskii, Nietzsche, Tertullian, Luther, Pascal and Kierkegaard. He wanted to restore the primordial freedom of Adam before the Fall. Although Shestov quoted the Gospels and certain Christian theologians approvingly, he was not a Christian. Neither was he an adherent of traditional Judaism. A brilliant stylist, Shestov used reason and knowledge to combat reason and knowledge. He distinguished between the empirical realm where they applied and the metaphysical realm where they did not. But since he philosophized only about the metaphysical realm he comes across as an irrationalist. See also: NIETZSCHE: IMPACT ON RUSSIAN THOUGHT; RUSSIAN RELIGIOUS-PHILOSOPHICAL RENAISSANCE Further reading Shein, L. (1991) The Philosophy of Lev Shestov (1866–1938), A Russian Religious Existentialist , Lewiston, NY: Mellen. (Published post-humously. Shestov’s early works, including Sola fidei. Vol. 2 would have included works written in emigration.) BERNICE GLATZER ROSENTHAL SHINRAN (1173–1263) Shinran lived in thirteenth-century Japan, an age of socio-political turmoil, when the old order represented by imperial rule, aristocratic culture and monastic Buddhism was in the process of internal disintegration, and a vibrant age of military clans, popular culture and new schools of Buddhism, appealing to the disenfranchised, was beginning to emerge. Although Shinran’s name is not found in the historical records of the period, he left many writings, including original works, commentaries, poetry and letters that contain religious and philosophical insights which had a great impact on subsequent Japanese life. His place in history was secured when in 1921 a collection of his wife’s letters, attesting to their relationship over the years, was discovered in the archives of Nishi Hongwanji in Kyoto. See also: BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY, JAPANESE Further reading Ueda Yoshifumi and Hirota, D. (1989) Shinran: An Introduction to His Thought, Kyoto: Hongwani International Center. (Outline of Shinran’s thought, including original text and interpretations, based on the publications of the Shin Buddhism Translation Series.) TAITETSU UNNO SHINTŌ Shintō means the ‘way of the kami (gods)’ and is a term that was evolved about the late sixth or early seventh centuries – as Japan entered an extended period of cultural borrowing from China and Korea – to distinguish the amalgam of native religious beliefs from Buddhism, a continental import. Shintō embraces the most ancient and basic social and religious values of Japan. It is exclusively Japanese, showing no impulse to spread beyond Japan. The exportation of Shintō would in any case be exceedingly difficult since its mythology is so closely bound to the creation of Japan and the Japanese people, and since many of its deities are believed to make their homes in the mountains, rivers,
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Page 827 trees, rocks and other natural features of the Japanese islands. Shintō comprises both great and little traditions. The great tradition, established in the mythology that was incorporated into Japan’s two oldest extant writings, Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters) and Nihon Shoki (Chronicle of Japan), both dating from the early eighth century, is centred on the imperial institution. According to the mythology the emperorship was ordained by the sun goddess, Amaterasu, who sent her grandson from heaven to earth (Japan) to found a dynasty ‘to rule eternally’. The present emperor is the 125th in a line of sovereigns officially regarded, until Japan’s defeat in the Second World War, as descended directly from Amaterasu. Shintō’s little tradition is a mixture of polytheistic beliefs about kami , manifested in nature worship (animism), ancestor worship, agricultural cults, fertility rites, shamanism and more. Lacking a true scriptural basis, Shintō derives from the faith of the people, and from earliest times has had its roots firmly planted in particularistic, localistic practices. Thus it has always been strongest in its association with such entities as families, villages and locales (for example, mountains thought to be the homes of certain kami or, indeed, to be the kami themselves). See also: AESTHETICS, JAPANESE; JAPANESE PHILOSOPHY Further reading Ono Sokyo (1962) Shintō, the Kami Way, Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle Co. (More detailed description of Shintō.) Varley, H.P. (trans.) (1980) A Chronicle of Gods and Sovereigns: The Jinnō Shōtōki of Kitabatake Chikafusa , New York: Columbia University Press. (Translation of Kitabatake’s history of Japan.) PAUL VARLEY AL-SHIRAZI, SADR AL-DIN MUHAMMAD see MULLA SADRA (SADR AL-DIN MUHAMMAD AL-SHIRAZI SHŌTOKU CONSTITUTION The Shōtoku Constitution is the earliest fundamental political document of Japan. Promulgated in AD 604, it is ascribed to the regent Shōtoku, who was also a devout Buddhist and philosopher. The document reflects the influences of Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism and Legalism in its various provisions; it is strongly marked by Chinese thought rather than being influenced by Shintō. Not a constitution in the modern sense, the document is rather a set of ideals, guiding principles and basic requirements for those in government. As well as helping to lay the foundation for a unified Japan, the Constitution also marks the beginning of a period of assimilation of Chinese culture and philosophy. See also: JAPANESE PHILOSOPHY Further reading Anesaki, M. (1930) History of Japanese Religion, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 57–65. (Sees the Constitution, an expression of Shōtoku’s political philosophy, as an application of Buddhist ideals.) YUKIO KACHI SHPET, GUSTAV GUSTAVOVICH (1879–1937) Gustav Shpet was the first Russian philosopher to take up Edmund Husserl’s idea of pure phenomenology as prima philosophia and develop it in several directions. Thus, in his most important phenomenological work Iavlenie i smysl (Appearance and Sense) (1914), he outlined his ‘phenomenology of hermeneutic reason’ on the basis of Husserl’s Ideas 1. In this theoretical framework he formulated, between 1914 and 1918, hermeneutic and semiotic problems, which in the 1920s he elaborated more specifically within the fields of philosophy of language and theory of art. In doing so he took up ideas from other philosophical movements, particularly Dilthey’s hermeneutics and Wilhelm von Humboldt’s philosophy of language. Shpet’s reception of phenomenology has to be seen in the context of Russian intellectual and cultural life during the first two decades of the twentieth century. The Platonic ‘Moscow Metaphysical School’ (which included V. Solov’ëv and S. Trubetskoi) provided the intellectual atmosphere in which his turn to Husserl’s phenomenology took place, and his ideas on theories of language and signs are close to ideas of the contemporary movement of Russian Formalism. Through his phenomenological and structural theories he influenced Prague structuralism via the ‘Moscow Linguistic Circle’, and is seen as a precursor to Soviet Semiotics. See also: PHENOMENOLOGY Further reading Shpet, G. (1914) Iavlenie i smysl. Fenomenologiiakak osnovnaia nauka i eë problemy , Moscow; trans. T. Nemeth, Appearance and Sense.
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Page 828 Phenomenology as the Fundamental Science and its Problems, Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic Publisher, 1991. (Shpet outlines his ‘phenomenology of hermeneutical reason’.) Translated from the German by P. Schnyder ALEXANDER HAARDT SIDDHĀRTHA GAUTAMA see BUDDHA SIDGWICK, HENRY (1838–1900) Henry Sidgwick was a Cambridge philosopher, psychic researcher and educational reformer, whose works in practical philosophy, especially The Methods of Ethics (1874), brought classical utilitarianism to its peak of theoretical sophistication and drew out the deep conflicts within that tradition, perhaps within the age of British imperialism itself. Sidgwick was profoundly influenced by J.S. Mill, but his version of utilitarianism – the view that those social or individual actions are right that maximize aggregate happiness – also revived certain Benthamite doctrines, though with more cogent accounts of ultimate good as pleasure, of total versus average utility, and of the analytical or deductive method. Yet Sidgwick was a cognitivist in ethics who sought both to ground utilitarianism on fundamental intuitions and to encompass within it the principles of common-sense ethics (truthfulness, fidelity, justice, etc.); his highly eclectic practical philosophy assimilated much of the rationalism, social conservatism and historical method of rival views, reflecting such influences as Butler, Clarke, Aristotle, Bagehot, Green, Whewell and Kant. Ultimately, Sidgwick’s careful academic inquiries failed to demonstrate that one ought always to promote the happiness of all rather than one’s own happiness, and this dualism of practical reason, along with his doubt about the viability of religion, led him to view his results as largely destructive and potentially deleterious in their influence. See also: COMMON-SENSE ETHICS; ETHICS Further reading Schultz, B. (1998) Eye of the Universe: Henry Sidgwick and the Victorian Quest for Certainty . (The only comprehensive treatment of Sidgwick’s practical and theoretical philosophy, this book brings out the overall unity of Sidgwick’s writings and the central role of scepticism and the dualism of practical reason in his life and work.) Sidgwick, H. (1874) The Methods of Ethics , London: Macmillan; later edns, 1877, 1884, 1890, 1893, 1901, 1907. (Sidgwick’s masterpiece, in which classical utilitarianism is given its most sophisticated formulation and reconciled with common-sense morality, though not with egoism.) BART SCHULTZ SIGER OF BRABANT ( c .1240–c .1284) Born probably circa 1240 in the Duchy of Brabant, Siger of Brabant studied philosophy in the arts faculty at the University of Paris and became regent master there in the 1260s. Various positions which he defended were included in Bishop Etienne Tempier’s condemnations of 1270 and 1277, and he appears to have fled France when cited to appear before the French inquisition. He probably spent his final days in Italy, and died there before November 1284. As a professional teacher of philosophy, Siger regarded it as his primary mission to lecture on Aristotle and other philosophers and to present their views on the points at issue. Early in his career he defended some of the positions condemned by Bishop Tempier, but after 1270 he often nuanced his exposition of such views by noting that he was only presenting the views of the philosophers or of Aristotle, or that he was proceeding philosophically in these discussions. Often regarded as a leading Latin ‘Averroist’, he agreed with Averroes that there is only one human intellect, though he eventually reversed his view on this. His personal philosophy is strongly Aristotelian, but with various elements derived from Neoplationism. On the relationship between essence and existence in created beings, Siger denies that existence is something added to a thing’s essence and holds that the existence of such entities belongs to their essence. He holds that one can demonstrate God’s existence, but insists that Aristotle’s physical argument for a First Mover must be completed by metaphysical argumentation. While denying that human beings in this life enjoy any direct knowledge of the divine essence, he seems open to Averroes’ view that they can reach some knowledge thereof. See also: AVERROISM Further reading Van Steenberghen, F. (1977) Maître Siger de Brabant (Master Siger of Brabant), Louvain: Publications universitaires, Paris: Vander-Oyez. (The most definitive work yet to appear on Siger’s life, career, works and doctrine.)
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Page 829 Wippel, J.F. (1995) Medieval Reactions to the Encounter Between Faith and Reason , Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press. (See pages 14–18 on Siger’s implication in the 1270 and 1277 condemnations at Paris, and pages 33–59 on Siger’s views on the faith–reason issue.) JOHN F. WIPPEL SIGNPOSTS MOVEMENT The symposium Signposts ( Vekhi, sometimes translated Landmarks), published in 1909, was a succés de scandale which provoked a long debate of extraordinary intensity and scope on the nature and outlook of the Russian intelligentsia. The discussion continued after the 1917 Revolution among intellectuals in exile, and was resumed in Russia with the republication of the volume in the Gorbachev era. The contributors to Signposts were the philosophers N.A. Berdiaev (1874–1948), S.N. Bulgakov (1871– 1944) and S.L. Frank (1877–1950); M.O. Gershenzon (1869–1925), a well-known critic and historian of literature; A.S. Izgoev (pseudonym of A.S. Lande, 1872–1935), a journalist active in the liberal Constitutional Democratic (Kadet) Party; B.A. Kistiakovskii (1868–1920), a specialist in constitutional law; and P.B. Struve (1870–1944), an eminent economist and editor, and a member of the Kadet Party’s Central Committee. They argued that the 1905 Revolution had revealed the despotic potential in the intelligentsia’s traditional materialist faith, and urged it to reexamine its values, which were based on a misunderstanding of human nature and threatened the existence of Russian culture. The shock caused by the volume owed much to the fact that, unlike most of the intelligentsia’s critics, the authors were not of the political right. The majority were former Marxists who had moved to forms of liberalism based on idealist positions in philosophy. But although many intelligentsia groups were also reassessing their values in the wake of the 1905 Revolution, for political reasons liberals closed ranks with the left in an overwhelming condemnation of Sign-posts as a betrayal of the cause of freedom. The famous Signposts debate (which was pursued in exile after 1917 as a discussion on the meaning of the Russian Revolution) was not a dialogue, but rather a succession of dogmatic professions of faith by mutually hostile political groups. Western historians have commonly stressed the symposium’s significance as a prophetic indictment of Russian radical messianism from the standpoint of liberal pragmatism. But Signposts was not an ideological unity: as well as its dominant liberal Westernism it contained a strong strand of nationalistic messianism which had affinities with traditions on both the Russian left and the right. In this respect the volume reflects a fundamental tension in Russian thought between dogmatic utopianism and radical humanism. See also: LIBERALISM, RUSSIAN Further reading Kindersley, R. (1962) The First Russian Revisionists, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (On the early thought of the Signposts authors.) Vekhi. Sbornik statei o russkoi intelligentsii (1909) Moscow: I.N. Kushnerev; 5th edn, 1910; trans. M.S. Shatz and J.E. Zimmerman, Signposts. A Collection of Articles on the Russian Intelligentsia , Irvine, CA: Charles Schlacks Jr, 1986. (Contains an informative introduction and a bibliography of the debate.) AILEEN KELLY AL-SIJISTANI, ABU SULAYMAN MUHAMMAD ( c .932–c .1000) Al-Sijistani was one of the great figures of Baghdad in the fourth century AD (tenth century AD). He assembled around him a circle of philosophers and litterateurs who met regularly in sessions to discuss topics related to philosophy, religion and language. As a philosopher with a humanistic orientation, his concerns went beyond subjects of strictly philosophical nature. His philosophical ideas displayed Aristotelian and Neoplatonic motifs. He considered philosophy and religion to be totally different in nature and method, so that the two could not be reconciled. God is only prior to the world in essence, rank and nobility, not in time. Al-Sijistani insisted that in no way should one attribute to God the imperfections of created things. According to him, the soul is simple by nature and natural reason is capable of attaining a state of pure knowledge that enables one to distinguish between good and evil. Reason, if taken as a guide, could ensure happiness. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY; NEOPLATONISM IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY Further reading Kraemer, J.L. (1986) Philosophy in the Renaissance of Islam, Abu Sulayman al-Sijistani and His Circle , Leiden: Brill. (Major work which examines the extent to which al-Sijistani and
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Page 830 his circle were conversant with technical discussions of philosophical issues treated in Greek and late antiquity.) GEORGE N. ATIYEH SILVESTRI, FRANCESCO (1474–1528) A Thomist philosopher and theologian, Silvestri composed, along with Aristotelian commentaries and polemical works, a vast commentary on Aquinas’ Summa Contra Gentiles which, from the first, has been recognized as its classic exposition. Silvestri imitated the method ( expositio formalis) of Cajetan’s commentary on Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae , but disagreed with Cajetan on key points of Thomistic doctrine and proposed interpretations generally closer to the letter of Aquinas. Chief among these are the doctrines of analogy, abstraction and the rational demonstrability of the soul’s immortality. See also: AQUINAS, T.; ARISTOTELIANISM, RENAISSANCE Further reading Sestili, G. (1923) ‘Francesco Silvestri’, Gli scienziati italiani, Rome: Nardecchia, vol. 1, 128–37. (Most thorough bio-bibliography, not entirely reliable.) MICHAEL TAVUZZI SILVESTRIS, BERNARDUS see BERNARD OF TOURS SIMMEL, GEORG (1858–1918) Georg Simmel was a prolific German philosopher and sociologist, who was one of the principal founders of sociology in Germany. His philosophy and social theory had a major impact in the early decades of the twentieth century, both among professional philosophers and sociologists and within the cultural and artistic spheres. This is true of his foundation for sociology, his philosophy of art and culture, his philosophy of life and his philosophy of money. His thought ranged from substantive issues within the philosophical tradition to a concern with the everyday world and its objects. Further reading Frisby, D. (ed.) (1994) Georg Simmel. Critical Assessments, London: Routledge, 3 vols. (Assessments of most aspects of Simmel’s work and key early reviews.) DAVID FRISBY SIMPLICITY (IN SCIENTIFIC THEORIES) In evaluating which of several competing hypotheses is most plausible, scientists often use simplicity as a guide. This raises three questions: what makes one hypothesis simpler than another? Why should a difference in simplicity make a difference in what we believe? And how much weight should simplicity receive, compared with other considerations, in judging a hypothesis’ plausibility? These may be termed the descriptive, the normative, and the weighting problems, respectively. The aesthetic and pragmatic appeal of more simple theories is transparent; the puzzle is how simplicity can be a guide to truth. See also: INFERENCE TO THE BEST EXPLANATION; SCIENTIFIC REALISM AND ANTIREALISM Further reading Rosenkrantz, R. (1977) Inference, Method, and Decision, Dordrecht: Reidel. (A Bayesian proposal in which simplicity is connected with the idea of average likelihood.) ELLIOTT SOBER SIMPLICITY, DIVINE To be complex is to have many parts. To be simple is to have few. Theists of all religious traditions have asserted that God is completely simple – that is, has no parts of any sort. A contemporary statement of this doctrine of divine simplicity would add that God is identical with each of his intrinsic attributes. Thus if God is omnipotent and omniscient, for example, then he is identical with omnipotence and omniscience (and so these attributes are also identical). The doctrine’s popularity across traditions may rest on theists’ shared convictions that God is the ultimate reality, perfect, and creator of all that is not himself, and on the fact that many theists have thought that each of these claims entails the doctrine of divine simplicity. It may also rest on strands of mystical experience common to many traditions. The doctrine has played an important part in ontological arguments for the existence of God because of its assertion of the identity of God with God’s nature (if the latter in some sense exists, so must the former). Indeed, divine simplicity is near the conceptual core of classical theism; it is one chief reason classical theists think God immutable, impassible, timeless and wholly distinct from the universe. Many who oppose divine simplicity do so because of these other doctrines it entails. Other recent critics
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Page 831 have charged that divine simplicity makes God a mere abstract entity or requires him to have all his attributes necessarily or all contingently. See also: NATURAL THEOLOGY; NEGATIVE THEOLOGY Further reading Hughes, C. (1989) On a Complex Theory of a Simple God , Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. (Excellent extended critique of divine simplicity. Rigorous but not technical.) Miller, B. (1996) A Most Unlikely God , Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press. (Defends divine simplicity, skilful but idiosyn cratic.) BRIAN LEFTOW SIMPLICIUS ( fl. first half 6th century AD) Simplicius of Cilicia, a Greek Neoplatonic philosopher and polymath, lived in the eastern part of the Roman Empire. He is the author of the most learned commentaries on Aristotle produced in antiquity, works which rest upon the accumulated accomplishments of ancient Greek philosophy and science. In them he gives numerous illuminating references and explanations that not only lead to a fuller understanding of Aristotle, but also allow one to reconstruct the history of the interpretation and criticism of Aristotelian doctrines in antiquity. The main principle that guides Simplicius’ exegesis is the conviction that most Greek philosophers, including some Presocratics, can be brought into agreement with Neoplatonism. Simplicius adduces copious quotations to prove his point, thereby supplying us with substantial fragments from lost works of thinkers like Parmenides, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Eudemus and the Stoics. A devout pagan, Simplicius sought to defend traditional Greek religion and philosophy against the oppressive dominance of Christianity. His commentaries have influenced the reception and interpretation of Aristotle’s philosophy ever since. See also: NEOPLATONISM Further reading Hadot, I. (1990) ‘The Life and Work of Simplicius in Greek and Arabic Sources’ , in R.R.K. Sorabji (ed.) Aristotle Transformed, London: Duckworth, 275–303. (This article owes much to the pioneering work by Michel Tardieu; the whole volume is an excellent guide to philosophy in late antiquity, offering an extensive bibliography.) CHRISTIAN WILDBERG SIN The most archaic conception of human fault may be the notion of defilement or pollution, that is, a stain or blemish which somehow infects a person from without. All the major religious traditions offer accounts of human faults and prescriptions for dealing with them. However, it is only when fault is conceived within the context of a relationship to a personal deity that it makes sense to speak of it as an offence against the divine will. The concept of sin is the concept of a human fault that offends a good God and brings with it human guilt. Its natural home is in the major theistic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. These religious traditions share the idea that actual or personal sins are individual actions contrary to the will of God. In the Hebrew Bible, sin is understood within the context of the covenantal relation between Yahweh and his chosen people. To be in covenant with Yahweh is to exist in holiness, and so sin is a deviation from the norms of holiness. In the Christian New Testament, Jesus teaches that human wrongdoing offends the one whom he calls Father. The Qur’an portrays sin as opposition to Allah rooted in human pride. According to Christian tradition, there is a distinction to be drawn between actual sin and original sin. The scriptural warrant for the doctrine of original sin is found in the Epistles of Paul, and the interpretation of Paul worked out by Augustine in the course of his controversy with the Pelagians has been enormously influential in Western Christianity. On the Augustinian view, which was developed by Anselm and other medieval thinkers with considerable philosophical sophistication, the Fall of Adam and Eve had catastrophic consequences for their descendants. All the progeny of the first humans, except for Jesus and his mother, inherit from them guilt for their first sin, and so all but two humans are born bearing a burden of guilt. The Augustinian doctrine of original sin is morally problematic just because it attributes innate guilt to humans. It was criticized by John Locke and Immanuel Kant. See also: HELL; PURGATORY Further reading Pagels, E. (1988) Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, New York: Random House. (A readable historical and critical study of Augustine’s doctrine of original sin.) Williams, N.P. (1927) The Ideas of the Fall and of Original Sin ,
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Page 832 London: Longmans, Green & Co. (A classic historical and critical study of the doctrine of original sin.) PHILIP L. QUINN SIRHAK Sirhak refers to the reformist scholarship and thought in Korea during the latter half of the Chosôn (Yi) Dynasty (1392–1910). The term was coined in the twentieth century to refer to the writings of individual scholars from the eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries who were critical of the existing political, social and economic conditions. See also: CHÔNG YAGYONG Further reading Palais, J.B. (1996) Confucian Statecraft and Korean Institutions: Yu Hyôngwôn and the Late Chosôn Dynasty, Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. (A massive study of a representative sirhak scholar, Yu Hyôngwôn, examining comprehensively various ideas of Yu with a comparative perspective in traditional East Asian history.) YÔNG-HO CH’OE SITUATION ETHICS ‘Situation ethics’ accords morally decisive weight to particular circumstances in judging whether an action is right or wrong. Thus we should examine critically all traditional rules prohibiting kinds of actions. Proponents of these views have exerted their greatest influence in Europe and North America in the twentieth century, although such influence waned by 1980. The views received extensive scrutiny in Christian communities. Three quite different warrants were offered for privileging discrete situations. First, we should remain dispositionally open to God’s immediate command in a particular time and place (theological contextualism). Second, we should take the actual consequences of particular actions as morally decisive (empirical situationism). Third, we should be ready to perform actions that compromise moral ideals when doing so improves matters in ways a given situation, with its distinctive constraints, makes viable (mournful realism). See also: INTUITIONISM IN ETHICS; MORAL SENSE THEORIES Further reading Fletcher, J. (1966) Situation Ethics , Philadelphia, PA: The Westminster Press. (A popular summary of key propositions.) GENE OUTKA SITUATIONAL SEMANTICS see SEMANTICS, SITUATION SKINNER, BURRHUS FREDERICK (1904–90) B.F. Skinner advocated a philosophy of psychology, called ‘radical behaviourism’, as well as a substantive psychological theory, ‘scientific behaviourism’. Radical behaviourism restricted psychology to establishing lawful links between the environment and behaviour, rejecting the ‘mind’ as a ‘needless way station’ mediating the two. Scientific behaviourism proposed specific links, the laws of ‘operant conditioning’, whereby behaviours are ‘reinforced’ by the consequences they have had in an animal’s past. Although Skinner brought to psychology new standards of experimental rigour, and managed to train animals to do remarkable things, there are serious limits to the range of behaviours scientific behaviourism can explain. Both it and radical behaviourism have been obviated by the development of a computational theory of mind. See also: BEHAVIOURISM, ANALYTIC; BEHAVIOURISM, METHODOLOGICAL AND SCIENTIFIC Further reading Pavlov, I. (1927) Conditioned Reflexes , Oxford: Oxford University Press. (The theory of ‘classical conditioning’, on which Skinner’s theory of ‘operant conditioning’ was partly based.) Skinner, B.F. (1953) Science and Human Behavior , New York: Macmillan. (An early popular presentation of behaviourism.) OWEN FLANAGAN GEORGES REY SKOVORODA, HRYHORII SAVYCH (1722–94) Skovoroda was the first truly independent philosopher produced by Ukraine, and the last brilliant exponent of its Baroque culture. Departing from the Aristotelian tradition of the Kiev Academy, he constructed an original synthesis of ancient and patristic thought. Because of his classical aloofness from history, the sociopolitical trauma of Ukraine’s absorption by Russia, which he witnessed, is hardly reflected in his writings. His worldview fore-shadows the Romantic and religious tendencies in nineteenth-century Ukrainian and Russian thought.
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Page 833 Further reading Bird, T. and Marshall, R. Jr. (eds) (1994) Hryhorij Savyc Skovoroda: An Anthology of Critical Articles, Edmonton and Toronto: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press. (Recent studies of Skovoroda’s language, style, literary influence and philosophical ideas, with bibliography.) TARAS D. ZAKYDALSKY SLAVERY The moral, economic and political value of slavery has been hotly disputed by philosophers from ancient times. It was defended as an institution by Plato and Aristotle, but became increasingly subject to attack in the modern period, until its general abolition in the Western world in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century our belief that slavery is fundamentally unjust has become a benchmark against which moral and political philosophies may be tested. Both utilitarians and contractarian philosophers have argued against slavery in general and the enforceability of slavery contracts more specifically, although for very different moral reasons. Others have argued that only by viewing slavery from the standpoint of the slave can its moral significance be understood. Further reading Davis, D.B. (1966) The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. (Comprehensively reviews the history of the idea and practice of slavery in the West.) STEPHEN L. ESQUITH NICHOLAS D. SMITH SLAVOPHILISM In the Slav countries outside Russia the term ‘Slavophilism’ is a generic name for all advocates of the ‘Slav idea’, irrespective of their philosophical views and political commitments. In Russia, however, this term is used, as a rule, to denote one specific ideology, elaborated in the 1840s by the former members of the Schellingian circle of ‘Lovers of Wisdom’: Ivan Kireevskii (1806–56) and Aleksei Khomiakov (1804– 60). Among its other followers, the most creative were the former Hegelians Konstantin Aksakov (1817– 60) and Iurii Samarin (1819– 76). Despite some individual differences, all these thinkers shared a coherent view of the world which was expressed in their philosophical, theological and historical ideas. Their importance was not immediately recognized, but after Dostoevskii and Solov’ëv it became clear that they were the most important part of Russia’s ‘philosophical awakening’ in the first half of the nineteenth century. The words ‘Slavophiles’ and ‘Slavophilism’ were originally intended as gibes. The same was true of the words ‘Westernizers’ and ‘Westernism’. All these terms, however, could be interpreted positively and were finally accepted by both sides of the ‘Slavophile–Westernizer’ controversy. But in the case of the Slavophiles it was a very reluctant acceptance: they felt that the term ‘Slavophilism’ failed to express the essential nature of their philosophical and religious position. In addition, this term contained a rather misleading suggestion as to their solidarity with non-Russian Slavs: in fact they focused their attention on the ‘truly Christian’ and ‘purely Slav’ spiritual heritage of pre-Petrine Russia. An interest in the fates of non-Russian Slavs began to play a role in their ideology only at the time of the Crimean War. This shift of focus transformed the original Slavophilism into a form of imperial Russian Pan-Slavism. See also: ENLIGHTENMENT, RUSSIAN Further reading Leatherbarrow, W.J. and Offord, D.C. (eds) (1987) A Documentary History of Russian Thought From the Enlightenment to Marxism, Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis. (Includes selections from the prominent Russian Slavophiles.) Walicki, A. (1975) The Slavophile Controversy: History of a Conservative Utopia in Nineteenth-Century Russian Thought, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Analyses the Slavophile philosophy from a comparative European perspective; it deals also with the antecedents of Slavophilism, with the confrontation of Slavophilism and Westernism, and with the different continuations of the Slavophile thought.) ANDRZEJ WALICKI SLOVAKIA, PHILOSOPHY IN Until as late as 1918, social and national circumstances were not favourable to the development of philosophy in Slovakia. The enforced retardation of the country had an obviously negative impact on intellectual and cultural life, and stood in the way of the possibility of diversity. That is why the first important Slovak philosophers such as Bayer and Caban emerged only as recently as the seventeenth century. Following this, philosophers of the
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Page 834 Enlightenment such as Karlovský, Laurentzy, Steigel and Feješ started to criticize the anti-scientific ideas which still survived. In the first phase of the National Revival Movement, Jan Kollár created a new philosophy of history by postulating the cultural unity of the Slavs. A specific contribution to this theory came from L. Štúr and his followers (Hurban, Hodža, Kellner) who applied it to practical conditions and stressed the necessity of national emancipation for the Slovak nation. Their influence is evident in all further developments of the national movement and its philosophy. The end of the nineteenth century saw the replacement of this idea by the philosophy of Thomas Masaryk. Slovak cultural life and philosophy, however, only began to develop fully in the context of an independent Czechoslovak Republic after 1918. The mainstream philosophy of the time was rationalistic, evident in the thought of such thinkers as Sv. Štúr, Koreň and Osuský. Philosophy after 1945 was marked by the achievements of Hrušovský, his students and colleagues, whose initial form of neopositivism took on a Marxist dialectical structurology. The importance of Marxism has recently been gradually declining and the Slovak philosophic scene is independently evolving in an atmosphere more in line with other European countries, particularly since the formation of the Slovak Republic in 1993. See also: CZECH REPUBLIC, PHILOSOPHY IN Further reading Pichler, Tibor and Gašparíková, Jana (eds) (1993) ‘Language, Values and the Slovak Nation’, Slovak Philosophical Studies I, Cultural Heritage and Contemporary Change IV, Washington, DC: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy. (The history of the development of the sense of national identity, written by a team of authors.) JOSEF ZUMR SMART, JOHN JAMIESON CARSWELL (1920–) J.J.C. (Jack) Smart was born in England and studied at Glasgow and Oxford universities before moving to Australia to take up the Chair of Philosophy at Adelaide University. He was one of the earliest and most influential advocates of the mind-brain identity theory, the view that mental states are identical with brain states. He also played a major role in articulating and defending realism in science, the fourdimensional view of time and act utilitarianism in ethics. See also: AUSTRALIA, PHILOSOPHY IN Further reading Smart, J.J.C. (1963) Philosophy and Scientific Realism, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (One chapter of this book is largely based on ‘Sensations and Brain Processes’.) FRANK JACKSON SMITH, ADAM (1723–90) Despite his reputation as the founder of political economy, Adam Smith was a philosopher who constructed a general system of morals in which political economy was but one part. The philosophical foundation of his system was a Humean theory of imagination that encompassed a distinctive idea of sympathy. Smith saw sympathy as our ability to understand the situation of the other person, a form of knowledge that constitutes the basis for all assessment of the behaviour of others. Our spontaneous tendency to observe others is inevitably turned upon ourselves, and this is Smith’s key to understanding the moral identity of the individual through social interaction. On this basis he suggested a theory of moral judgment and moral virtue in which justice was the key to jurisprudence. Smith developed an original theory of rights as the core of ‘negative’ justice, and a theory of government as, primarily, the upholder of justice. But he maintained the political significance of ‘positive’ virtues in a public, nongovernmental sphere. Within this framework he saw a market economy developing as an expression of humanity’s prudent self-interest. Such self-interest was a basic feature of human nature and therefore at work in any form of society; but commercial society was special because it made the pursuit of selfinterest compatible with individual liberty; in the market the poor are not personally dependent upon the rich. At the same time, he recognized dangers in commercial society that needed careful institutional and political management. Smith’s basic philosophy is contained in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), but a major part concerning law and government was never completed to Smith’s satisfaction and he burnt the manuscript before he died. Consequently the connection to the Wealth of Nations (1776) can only be partially reconstructed from two sets of students’ notes (1762–3 and 1763–4) from his Lectures on Jurisprudence at Glasgow (Smith [1762–6] 1978). These writings are
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Page 835 complemented by a volume of essays and student-notes from lectures on rhetoric and belles-lettres. Although a philosopher of public life and in some measure a public figure, Adam Smith adhered to the Enlightenment ideal of privacy to a degree rarely achieved by his contemporaries. He left no autobiographical accounts and, given his national and international fame, the surviving correspondence is meagre. The numerous eyewitness reports of him mostly relate particular episodes and individual traits of character. Just as there are only a few portraits of the man’s appearance, there are no extensive accounts of the personality, except Dugald Stewart’s ‘Life of Adam Smith’ (1793), written after Smith’s death and designed to fit Stewart’s eclectic supplementation of common sense philosophy. While Smith was a fairly sociable man, his friendships were few and close only with men who respected his desire for privacy. David Hume was pre-eminent among them. See also: ECONOMICS AND ETHICS; ECONOMICS, PHILOSOPHY OF; MARKET, ETHICS OF THE; MORAL SENSE THEORIES Further reading Raphael, D.D. (1985) Adam Smith , Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Introductory survey of the whole of Smith’s life and works.) Smith, A. (1776) An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R.H. Campbell and A.S. Skinner, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976, vol. 2. (The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith.) KNUD HAAKONSSEN SOCIAL ACTION Most of our actions take place in a social context and are, accordingly, in one way or another, dependent on the existence of other persons and their relevant actions, social institutions, conventions, or the like (for example, saluting, voting, drawing money from one’s bank account, using lipstick, buying something). But people also perform actions jointly or collectively, to achieve some joint goal. Thus they may jointly sing a duet, play tennis, build a house, or conserve energy. This is collective social action in its most central sense. Such action is based on the participants’ mutually known joint intention (‘joint plan’) to perform it. In weaker kinds of collective social action the participants are interdependent – as to their actions or thoughts – in some other ways. See also: ACTION; SOCIAL NORMS References and further reading Coleman, J. (1990) Foundations of Social Theory , Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. (Gives a comprehensive classification of social action using conceptual and mathematical tools familiar from economics.) RAIMO TUOMELA SOCIAL CHOICE Social choice theory is the branch of economics concerned with the relationships between individual values, preferences and rights and collective decision making and evaluation. Social choice theory therefore provides connections between the formal analysis of rational choice, the debate on political process, and ethics. A central theme in social choice theory has been the aggregation of individual preferences into either a social decision rule or a social evaluation rule. The most famous result in social choice theory – Arrow’s impossibility theorem – is that such aggregation is impossible if individual preferences are conceived as ordinal in nature, and if the aggregation procedure is to satisfy certain apparently reasonable conditions. This result implies that neither a voting system nor a system of moral evaluation can be found that satisfies all of the required conditions. Further impossibility theorems arise from attempts to model the role of individual rights. Much of social choice theory is concerned with interpreting, extending and questioning these impossibility theorems in a variety of contexts. This discussion has generated an extensive interchange at the margins of economics and ethics on topics such as the commensurability of values and the relationship between morality and rationality. See also: RATIONAL CHOICE THEORY; WELFARE Further reading Arrow, K.J. (1951) Social Choice and Individual Values , New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, rev. edn, 1963. (Classic source for the Arrow impossibility theorem.) Rowley, C.K. (ed.) (1993) Social Choice Theory , Aldershot: Edward Elgar. (A three volume collection of major contributions to social choice theory.) ALAN HAMLIN
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Page 836 SOCIAL DEMOCRACY The idea of social democracy is now used to describe a society the economy of which is predominantly capitalist, but where the state acts to regulate the economy in the general interest, provides welfare services outside of it and attempts to alter the distribution of income and wealth in the name of social justice. Originally ‘social democracy’ was more or less equivalent to ‘socialism’. But since the midtwentieth century, those who think of themselves as social democrats have come to believe that the old opposition between capitalism and socialism is outmoded; many of the values upheld by earlier socialists can be promoted by reforming capitalism rather than abolishing it. Although it bases itself on values like democracy and social justice, social democracy cannot really be described as a political philosophy: there is no systematic statement or great text that can be pointed to as a definitive account of social democratic ideals. In practical politics, however, social democratic ideas have been very influential, guiding the policies of most Western states in the post-war world. See also: DEMOCRACY; JUSTICE Further reading Bernstein, E. (1899) Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie (The Premises of Socialism and the Tasks of Social Democracy), Dietz: Stuttgart; trans. and ed. H. Tudor, The Preconditions of Socialism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. (Seminal text for the earlier generation of social democrats.) Vaisey, J. (1971) Social Democracy , London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. (An introductory survey of social democratic ideas and movements.) DAVID MILLER SOCIAL EPISTEMOLOGY Social epistemology is the conceptual and normative study of the relevance to knowledge of social relations, interests and institutions. It is thus to be distinguished from the sociology of knowledge, which is an empirical study of the contingent social conditions or causes of what is commonly taken to be knowledge. Social epistemology revolves around the question of whether knowledge is to be understood individualistically or socially. Epistemology has traditionally ascribed a secondary status to beliefs indebted to social relations – to testimony, expert authority, consensus, common sense and received wisdom. Such beliefs could attain the status of knowledge, if at all, only by being based on first-hand knowledge – that is, knowledge justified by the experience or reason of the individual knower. Since the work of the common sense Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid in the mid-eighteenth century, epistemologists have from time to time taken seriously the idea that beliefs indebted to social relations have a primary and not merely secondary epistemic status. The bulk of work in social epistemology has, however, been done since Thomas Kuhn depicted scientific revolutions as involving social changes in science. Work on the subject since 1980 has been inspired by the ‘strong programme’ in the sociology of science, by feminist epistemology and by the naturalistic epistemology of W.V. Quine. These influences have inspired epistemologists to rethink the role of social relations – especially testimony – in knowledge. The subject that has emerged may be divided into three branches: the place of social factors in the knowledge possessed by individuals; the organization of individuals’ cognitive labour; and the nature of collective knowledge, including common sense, consensus and common, group, communal and impersonal knowledge. See also: FEMINIST EPISTEMOLOGY; NATURALIZED EPISTEMOLOGY Further reading Craig, E. (1990) Knowledge and the State of Nature: An Essay in Conceptual Synthesis , Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Explains various features of the concept of knowledge by deriving it from the notion of a good informant.) Lehrer, K. and Wagner, C. (1981) Rational Consensus in Science and Society , Dordrecht: Reidel. (Contains an account of the conditions in which an individual is committed to accepting the consensus of a group.) FREDERICK F. SCHMITT SOCIAL LAWS Social science has always aspired to be like natural science. And since natural science claims to discover laws of nature, social science has always claimed to discover laws of society. There are two important problems raised by such social laws. What makes the laws social in the appropriate sense? And if they really obtain, does that mean that human beings are not as autonomous as one might
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Page 837 have thought: that we are pawns in a game that the laws control? See also: SOCIAL SCIENCES, PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Hawthorn, G. (1976) Enlightenment and Despair: A History of Sociology , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Discusses the aspiration of social science to be science and discover genuine laws.) PHILIP PETTIT SOCIAL NORMS A social norm may be defined as the rule of a particular social group. That men are to open doors for women, for instance, may be the rule of a particular group. But what is it for a group to have a rule, according to our everyday understanding? Philosophers have disagreed on this point. An important general issue is whether a group’s having a rule is a matter of some or all of its members individually conforming to the rule or individually accepting the rule as a standard of behaviour for the group. An alternative type of account invokes the idea of the group’s members jointly, rather than individually, accepting the rule, in effect agreeing to conform to it. It can be argued that this less individualistic account better explains the way in which people criticize deviations from social norms. See also: SOCIAL LAWS Further reading Hart, H.L.A. (1961) The Concept of Law , Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2nd edn with postscript, 1994. (A classic account of the nature of law in terms of a union of primary and secondary rules, with special reference to the nature of social rules in general.) Raz, J. (1975) Practical Reason and Norms, London: Hutchinson; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. (Chapter 2 focuses on ‘mandatory norms’, offers a critique of Hart, and argues in relation to the role of norms in practical reasoning that mandatory norms are ‘exclusionary reasons’, that is, roughly, reasons to disregard other reasons.) MARGARET GILBERT SOCIAL RELATIVISM People in different societies have very different beliefs and systems of belief. To understand such diversity is a prime task of the student of society. The task is especially pressing when alien beliefs seem obviously mistaken, unreasonable or otherwise peculiar. A popular response is social relativism. Perhaps beliefs which seem mistaken, unreasonable or peculiar viewed from our perspective, are by no means mistaken, unreasonable or peculiar viewed from the perspective of the society in which they occur. Different things are not just thought true (reasonable, natural) in different societies – rather, they are true (reasonable, natural) in different societies. Relativism recognizes diversity and deals with it evenhandedly. Relativism has absurd results. Consider the view that what is true in society A need not be true in society B. So if society A believes in witches while society B does not, there are witches in A but not in B. Relativism regarding truth drives us to different ‘worlds’, one with witches in it and another without. This seems absurd: people who live in different societies do not in any literal sense live in different worlds. The challenge is to do justice to social diversity without falling into absurdities such as this. See also: EPISTEMIC RELATIVISM; MORAL RELATIVISM Further reading Hollis, M. and Lukes, S. (eds) (1982) Rationality and Relativism, Oxford: Blackwell. (A useful collection of readings, containing a bibliography.) ALAN MUSGRAVE SOCIAL SCIENCE, CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY OF Some philosophers think that the study of social phenomena must apply methods from natural science. Researchers should discover causal regularities (whenever C operates, E occurs) and fit them into systematic theories. Some philosophers hold that social phenomena call for an entirely different approach, in which researchers seek to interpret fully the meaning of people’s actions, including their efforts to communicate and cooperate. On this view, the nearest that researchers will come to regularities will be to discover rules (whenever the situation is S, everyone must do A). The nearest that they will get to systematic theories will be systematic expositions of rules, like the rules of a kinship system. Besides the naturalistic school and the interpretive school, the philosophy of social science harbours a critical school. This finds researches endorsed by the other two schools shot through with bias. It inclines to agree with the interpretive school in resisting naturalistic methods.
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Page 838 However, its charges against naturalistic researches extend to interpretations. For interpretations may give untroubled pictures of societies in deep trouble, or picture the trouble in ways that serve the interests of the people who profit from it, for example, by leaving current rules about taking workers on and laying them off unquestioned. Here the critical school may itself use naturalistic methods. If it contends that ignoring ways of reassigning authority over employment increases the chances of private enterprises’ retaining their present authority, the critical school is talking about a causal connection. There is no rule that says anyone must increase the chances. Yet the researches sponsored by the three schools are complementary to the degree that researches into regularities and into rules are complementary. Settled social rules have counterparts in causal regularities, which may be expressed in similar terms, although the evidence for regularities need not include intended conformity. Some regularities are not counterparts of rules, but involve rules notwithstanding. If the proportion of marriages in Arizona ending in divorce is regularly one-third, that is not (as it happens) because one-third of Arizonans who marry must divorce. Yet marriage and divorce are actions that fall under rules. The three schools do more than endorse studies of rules or regularities. The critical school denies that any study of social phenomena can be value-free, in particular on the point of emancipating people from the oppressions of current society. Either researchers work with the critical school to expose oppression; or they work for the oppressors. The interpretive school brings forward subjective features of human actions and experiences that overflow the study of rules. These features, too, may be reported or ascribed correctly or incorrectly; however, the truth about them may be best expressed in narrative texts more or less elaborate. Postmodernism has generalized these themes in a sceptical direction. Every text can be read in multiple, often conflicting, ways, so there are always multiple, often conflicting, interpretations of whatever happens. Every interpretation serves a quest for power, whether or not it neatly favours or disfavours an oppressive social class. Such contentions undermine assumptions that the three schools make about seeking truth regarding social phenomena. They do even more to undermine any assumption that the truths found will hold universally. The assumption about universality, however, is a legacy of the positivist view of natural science. Positivism has given way to the modeltheoretic or semantic view that science proceeds by constructing models to compare with real systems. A model – in social science, a model of regularities or one of rules – that fits any real system for a time is a scientific achievement empirically vindicated. Renouncing demands for universality, the philosophy of social science can make a firm stand on issues raised by postmodernism. It can accept from postmodernists the point that scientific success happens in local contexts and only for a time; but resist any further-reaching scepticism. See also: HOLISM AND INDIVIDUALISM IN HISTORY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE; NATURALISM IN SOCIAL SCIENCE; STRUCTURALISM IN SOCIAL SCIENCE Further reading Braybrooke, D. (1987) Philosophy of Social Science , Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. (Expounds in detail the distinction between the three-schools and their relations.) Hollis, M. (1994) The Philosophy of Social Science: An Introduction , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Explores in a lively and imaginative way the relations between naturalistic and interpretive social science.) DAVID BRAYBROOKE SOCIAL SCIENCE, HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY OF The history of social science can conveniently be divided into four uneven periods, starting with the beginnings of both western science and philosophy in the ancient Greek polis (city or state). It is fair to say, with qualifications, that the debate generated by the so-called Sophists, professional teachers of rhetoric in fifth-century Athens, established what would become the central questions for the future. The fundamental issue could be put thus: is society ‘natural’ or is it ‘conventional’, a historical product of human activities which vary across time and space? The Sophists, often abused in our standard histories, supported the conventional view. They held that even if it was anthropologically necessary that Homo sapiens live in societies, nature was silent about the character and ends of society. They thus defended what might be called ‘cultural relativism’. By contrast Aristotle argued that some men were ‘naturally’ slaves and that all women were ‘naturally’ inferior; therefore slavery and patriarchy were dictated by nature, a view that prevailed well into the early modern period.
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Page 839 Beginning in the sixteenth century we find a host of thinkers who reconceived the problem first raised by the Sophists. Many of them, for example, Hobbes, Rousseau and Adam Smith, held that ‘by nature’ humans had similar capacities and powers. Inequalities of power were ‘artificial’, wholly the result of historically established conventions. These writers also rejected the idea that society was a kind of natural community. For many of them, society existed by consent, the result of a contract. The rejection of Aristotelianism was inspired by the Copernican revolution and the new physics of Galileo and Newton. This produced a self-conscious effort by early modern writers to articulate the idea of human science, modelled on the new physics. This critical idea was well put by the physiocrat Francois Quesnay: ‘All social facts are linked together in the bond of eternal, immutable, ineluctable, inevitable laws, which individuals and government would obey if they were once known to them’. The third period, roughly the nineteenth century, is then a battleground over both the idea of science and the idea of a human science. The paradigm provided by celestial mechanics was nearly overwhelming; even so, there was disagreement as regards its character, especially as regards the question of causality and explanation. Until very recently, ‘positivists’ have tended to prevail. That is, writers have followed Auguste Comte, who gave us the terms ‘positivism’ and ‘sociology’, and who held there were social laws which were to be analysed as ‘relations of invariable succession’: whenever this, then that. As regards the possibility of a human science, consciousness and the problem of a free will raised the biggest questions. Materialists found nothing special about either; idealists did. Indeed a surprising amount of the most recent debates in the philosophy of the social sciences have their roots in these issues. If, as positivists insist, activity is governed by law, then what of human freedom? On the other hand, if humans have collectively made society and thus can remake it, then what is the nature of a human science? See also: HOLISM AND INDIVIDUALISM IN HISTORY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE; SOCIAL SCIENCE, CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Berlin, I. (1976) Vico and Herder , New York: Viking. (An accessible and sensitive comparison.) Natanson, M. (ed.) (1963) Philosophy of the Social Sciences , New York: Random House. (The editor made his selections based on the assumption that there were two polar positions underlying the social sciences, an ‘objective’ versus a ‘subjective’ point of view. Contains most of the most important essays which define this debate. Very influential.) PETER T. MANICAS SOCIAL SCIENCE, METHODOLOGY OF Each of the sciences, the physical, biological, social and behavioural, have emerged from philosophy in a process that began in the time of Euclid and Plato. These sciences have left a legacy to philosophy of problems that they have been unable to deal with, either as nascent or as mature disciplines. Some of these problems are common to all sciences, some restricted to one of the four general divisions mentioned above, and some of these philosophical problems bear on only one or another of the special sciences. If the natural sciences have been of concern to philosophers longer than the social sciences, this is simply because the former are older disciplines. It is only in the last century that the social sciences have emerged as distinct subjects in their currently recognizable state. Some of the problems in the philosophy of social science are older than these disciplines, in part because these problems have their origins in nineteenth-century philosophy of history. Of course the full flowering of the philosophy of science dates from the emergence of the logical positivists in the 1920s. Although the logical positivists’ philosophy of science has often been accused of being satisfied with a one-sided diet of physics, in fact their interest in the social sciences was at least as great as their interest in physical science. Indeed, as the pre-eminent arena for the application of prescriptions drawn from the study of physics, social science always held a place of special importance for philosophers of science. Even those who reject the role of prescription from the philosophy of physics, cannot deny the relevance of epistemology and metaphysics for the social sciences. Scientific change may be the result of many factors, only some of them cognitive. However, scientific advance is driven by the interaction of data and theory. Data controls the theories we adopt and the direction in which we refine them. Theory directs and constrains both the sort of experiments that are done to collect data and the apparatus with which they are undertaken: research design is
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Page 840 driven by theory, and so is methodological prescription. But what drives research design in disciplines that are only in their infancy, or in which for some other reason, there is a theoretical vacuum? In the absence of theory how does the scientist decide on what the discipline is trying to explain, what its standards of explanatory adequacy are, and what counts as the data that will help decide between theories? In such cases there are only two things scientists have to go on: successful theories and methods in other disciplines which are thought to be relevant to the nascent discipline, and the epistemology and metaphysics which underwrites the relevance of these theories and methods. This makes philosophy of special importance to the social sciences. The role of philosophy in guiding research in a theoretical vacuum makes the most fundamental question of the philosophy of science whether the social sciences can, do, or should employ to a greater or lesser degree the same methods as those of the natural sciences? Note that this question presupposes that we have already accurately identified the methods of natural science. If we have not yet done so, the question becomes largely academic. For many philosophers of social science the question of what the methods of natural science are was long answered by the logical positivist philosophy of physical science. And the increasing adoption of such methods by empirical, mathematical, and experimental social scientists raised a second central question for philosophers: why had these methods so apparently successful in natural science been apparently far less successful when self-consciously adapted to the research agendas of the several social sciences? One traditional answer begins with the assumption that human behaviour or action and its consequences are simply not amenable to scientific study, because they are the results of free will, or less radically, because the significant kinds or categories into which social events must be classed are unique in a way that makes nontrivial general theories about them impossible. These answers immediately raise some of the most difficult problems of metaphysics and epistemology: the nature of the mind, the thesis of determinism, and the analysis of causation. Even less radical explanations for the differences between social and natural sciences raise these fundamental questions of philosophy. Once the consensus on the adequacy of a positivist philosophy of natural science gave way in the late 1960s, these central questions of the philosophy of social science became far more difficult ones to answer. Not only was the benchmark of what counts as science lost, but the measure of progress became so obscure that it was no longer uncontroversial to claim that the social sciences’ rate of progress was any different from that of natural science. See also: SOCIAL SCIENCE, CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Durkheim, É. (1951) The Rules of the Sociological Method , New York: Free Press. (Arguments presented for holism and functionalism by the founder of empirical sociology.) Rosenberg, A. (1988) The Philosophy of Social Science , Boulder, CO: Westview Press. (An introduction to the philosophy of social science.) ALEX ROSENBERG SOCIAL SCIENCES, PHILOSOPHY OF Although some of the topics and issues treated in the philosophy of social science are as old as philosophy itself (for example, the contrast between nature and convention and the idea of rationality are dealt with by Aristotle), the explicit emergence of a subdiscipline of philosophy with this name is a very recent phenomenon, which in turn may itself have stimulated greater philosophical activity in the area. Clearly, this emergence is tied to the development and growth of the social sciences themselves. 1 Historical approach There are, perhaps, four distinct ways in which to gain an understanding of the subdiscipline. These ways are, of course, complementary. First, just as with most other areas of philosophy, one might approach the philosophy of the social sciences historically, by studying major schools or philosophers of an earlier period. There is much to recommend this approach (see SOCIAL SCIENCE, HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY OF). There are a number of classical texts (by Weber and Durkheim, for example) of which any interested student of the philosophy of the social sciences should be aware, much as there is in epistemology or ethics. This provides an interesting contrast with the philosophy of the natural sciences; far less could be said in favour of gaining an understanding of the latter in this way. Compared with other areas of philosophy, the history of the philosophy of the social sciences is somewhat truncated, since it can only begin properly with the earliest attempts at social
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Page 841 science, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, first in the Scottish Enlightenment and subsequently in Germany. Prior to this period, there had been speculation about the nature of society, some of it quite rich and rewarding (Hobbes and Vico provide two examples of this), but it is only in the period of the Scottish Enlightenment and after that writers begin to reflect the first systematic attempts to study and understand society. There is no clear line of demarcation between philosophers of social science and of society on the one hand and social theorists on the other, especially in this early period. Conventionally, to select only a few examples, G.W.F. Hegel, Wilhelm Dilthey, F.H. Bradley and T.H. Green are considered to be examples of the former, and Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, and Max Weber, are considered as examples of the latter, but the line is sometimes somewhat arbitrary (see HEGEL, G.W.F.; MARX, K.; DILTHEY, W.; BRADLEY, F.H.; GREEN, T.H.; SMITH, A.; DURKHEIM, É.; WEBER, M.). 2 Problems A second way in which to gain an understanding of the philosophy of social science is through the study of the issues and problems that these writers, and their contemporary counterparts, address (see SOCIAL SCIENCE, METHODOLOGY OF). Many of these problems arise in ordinary as well as in more scientific discussions of and thought about the social realm. It is not only social scientists who think about the social world; all of us do, a great deal of the time. Even in those cases in which the social scientist introduces neologisms, for example, ‘demand curves’ or ‘anomie’, they seem closely connected to, and sometimes only a refinement of, concepts already grasped by the lay person. This nonscientific reflection arises quite apart from any specialized scientific work. It is, to a certain extent, misleading to think of the field as only the philosophy of the social sciences . Since so much of the motivation for critical discussion of the problems in this area comes from philosophical reflection on these quite ordinary modes of thought and understanding, the field should perhaps be called ‘the philosophy of society’, to reflect this nonscientific, as well as the scientific, interest in those problems. Most of the things that social science is about, social structures (like families or society itself), norms and rules of behaviour, conventions, specific sorts of human action, and so on, are items that find a place in the discourse of the ordinary lay person who has as good a grasp of common talk about social class and purchase, voting and banking, as does the social scientist. This raises, in a direct way, metaphysical questions about the nature of these things. Are these social structures anything more than just individuals and their interrelations? Many philosophers, in the grip of the ideal of the unity of science, have held out the prospect that social science can be derived from, and is therefore reducible to, psychology (the latter eventually being reducible to chemistry and physics). For such thinkers, the world is ultimately a simple place, with only many different ways in which to speak about it. Other thinkers have been struck by the reality and integrity of the social world, and how it seems to impress itself on the individual willy-nilly (see SOCIETY, CONCEPT OF; SOCIAL NORMS; HOLISM AND INDIVIDUALISM IN HISTORY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE). What is an action, and how does it differ from the mere movement of one’s body? It seems hard to say in what this difference consists in a way that remains plausible and true to what action is like. Whatever an action is, what makes some actions social actions? One might think that an action is social in virtue of its causal consequences on others. Another line of thought holds that an action is social in virtue of its intrinsic character, quite apart from the question of its effects. Much of the philosophical discussion of action arose in the philosophy of history, over the explanation of historically important action, but has now been absorbed into a separate area of philosophy, the theory of action (see HISTORY, PHILOSOPHY OF; ACTION; SOCIAL ACTION). The alleged contrast between nature and convention occurs to those who think about humankind and its development, whether they be scientists and philosophers or not. Anyone who has travelled widely and noticed the social differences between peoples and cultures may have wondered whether all social practice was rational in its own terms, wherever found and no matter how apparently peculiar by our home-grown lights. Or perhaps, on the other hand, there are some universal standards of rationality, in the light of which evaluation of social practices and criticism of some of them can be mounted (see NATURE AND CONVENTION; RATIONALITY AND CULTURAL RELATIVISM; SOCIAL RELATIVISM). The relationship between scientific theory and ordinary modes of thought is, of course, interactive, since many of the concepts or issues that have become part of ordinary lore have
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Page 842 their roots in earlier scientific theory (our modern, and by most accounts, confused, concept of race might be an example of this; see RACE, THEORIES OF). Another set of problems arise in thinking through the nature of the social scientific enterprise itself. What standards must full explanation in social science meet? Causal explanation is a mode of explanation in natural science that is, relatively speaking, well understood. Explanations of a ritual or practice in society do not appear to be causal explanations, nor do explanations of human action. The first are often functional explanations (for example, a certain ritual exists because it produces such-andsuch) and this appears to be an explanation of something by its effects rather than by its causes. Explanations of human action are intentional explanations, whereby an action is explained by the goal or end at which it is directed. This also appears not to be causal. But perhaps appearances are deceptive, and these can be recast as causal explanations after all (see EXPLANATION IN HISTORY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE; FUNCTIONALISM IN SOCIAL SCIENCE). Natural scientists believe that their work is ethically neutral. To be sure, their work can be put to good and bad uses, but this presumably reflects on the users rather than on the content of the science itself. The relationship between social science and the values of the social scientist seems far more immediate and direct than this, and this alleged contrast has been the subject for continuing discussion and debate (see VALUE JUDGMENTS IN SOCIAL SCIENCE). Is social science like natural science in important ways? In the developed natural sciences, there are controlled experiments and predictions. Neither seem available to the social scientist. Natural scientists attempt to formulate the laws that govern the phenomena they study. Is this a reasonable goal for the social scientist? Certainly, there are not many candidate laws for the social sciences one can think of. Does the social scientist use statistical evidence in the same way as the natural scientist? (See EXPERIMENTS IN SOCIAL SCIENCE; SOCIAL SCIENCE, PREDICTION IN; SOCIAL LAWS; STATISTICS AND SOCIAL SCIENCE.) Finally, in natural science, we distinguish between theory and observation in a relatively sharp way, and we believe that a rational person should accept that theory which is best confirmed by observations. It is not clear that we can make the same distinction in the social sciences, nor that theory is supported by observation in just the same way. Our observations of the social world seem even more coloured by the theory we employ than is the case in the natural sciences (see THEORY AND OBSERVATION IN SOCIAL SCIENCES.) 3 Contemporary movements A third way in which to approach the subject is through the study of either contemporary movements and schools of philosophy, or specific philosophers, who bring a specific slant to the subdiscipline. Controversy marks the natural as well as the social sciences, but observers have noted that there seems to be even less consensus, even less of an agreed paradigm at any particular time, in the latter than in the former. Critical reflection on society, or on social science, or both, is very different in France and Germany from the way it is in the English-speaking world. The problems are the same, but the traditions and the manner in which the discussions proceed are markedly distinctive. The hope is that each tradition may learn something from the other (see SOCIAL SCIENCE, CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY OF; BEHAVIOURISM IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES; CRITICAL REALISM; EVOLUTIONARY THEORY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE; LÉVI-STRAUSS, C.; NATURALISM IN SOCIAL SCIENCE; POSITIVISM IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES; POST-STRUCTURALISM IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES; SCIENTIFIC REALISM AND SOCIAL SCIENCE; SOCIOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE; STRUCTURALISM IN SOCIAL SCIENCE; SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM; SYSTEMS THEORY IN SOCIAL SCIENCE; BOURDIEU, P.; MACINTYRE, A.; SCHÜTZ, A.). 4 Specific social sciences Fourth and finally, one might approach the philosophy of the social sciences by studying the philosophical problems that arise specifically within each of the social sciences. Some, although not all, of the social sciences have thrown up philosophical industries all their own. Economics is the most salient example. In many ways, it is the most developed of all the social sciences, and this may be the reason why some of the best-defined controversies in the philosophy of social science arise from within it. Questions about the philosophical foundations of economics touch on the philosophically central issues of rationality, choice and the nature of wants or desires and their connection with action (see ECONOMICS, PHILOSOPHY OF; SOCIAL CHOICE; RATIONAL CHOICE THEORY). But other social sciences have also given rise to specific problems, including history, psychology, sociology, and anthropology (see PSYCHOLOGY,
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Page 843 THEORIES OF; SOCIOLOGY, THEORIES OF; ANTHROPOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY OF). See also: FEMINISM AND SOCIAL SCIENCE Further reading Martin, M. and McIntyre, L. (eds) (1994) Readings in the Philosophy of Social Science , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (A useful collection of recent and contemporary articles, grouped around some of the main issues in the philosophy of social science.) Root, M. (1993) Philosophy of Social Science , Oxford: Blackwell. (Argues that some of the most prominent research programmes in the social sciences flout the ideal of moral and political philosophy.) Ruben, D.-H. (1998) ‘The Philosophy of Social Sciences’, in A. Grayling (ed.), Philosophy 2: Further Through the Subject , Oxford: Oxford University Press, vol. 2. (A discussion of the main problems in the philosophy of social science, intended for the philosophy student. Assumes some prior knowledge of philosophy.) DAVID-HILLEL RUBEN SOCIAL SCIENCES, PREDICTION IN Prediction is important in science for two reasons. First human beings have a practical interest in knowing the future. Therefore, all science is potentially predictive in the sense that its results may be used as a basis for expectations. Second, a test of our beliefs is the truth of the predictions we can derive from them. In the social sciences, however, predictions are often supposed to create specific philosophical and methodological problems, the roots of which are the following: the phenomena studied in the social sciences are so complex and so interrelated that it is practically impossible to formulate lawlike generalizations about them; human beings are supposed to possess free will; and the predictions may themselves modify the phenomena predicted. See also: EXPLANATION IN HISTORY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE Further reading Goldman, A. (1970) A Theory of Human Action, Pinceton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Chapter 6 provides an excellent discussion of the problems of prediction of human actions.) EERIK LAGERSPETZ SOCIAL THEORY AND LAW Social theory embodies the claim that philosophical analyses, reflections on specific historical experience and systematic empirical observations of social conditions may be combined to construct theoretical explanations of the nature of society – that is, of patterned human social association in general and of the conditions that make this association possible and define its typical character. Social theory, in this sense, can be defined broadly as theory seeking to explain systematically the structure and organization of society and the general conditions of social order or stability and of social change. Since law as a system of ideas can also be thought of as purporting to specify, reflect and systematize fundamental normative structures of society, it has appeared as both a focus of interest for social theory and, in some sense, a source of competition with social theory in explaining the character of social existence. The relation of legal thought to social theory is, thus, in important respects, a confrontation between competing general modes of understanding social relationships and the conditions of social order. In one sense, this confrontation is as old as philosophy itself. But as an element in modern philosophical consciousness it represents a gradual working-out in Western thought, over the past two centuries, of the implications of various ‘scientific’ modes of interpreting social experience, all in one way or another the legacy of Enlightenment ideas. From the late eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century, criteria of ‘scientific’ rationality were carried into the interpretation of social phenomena through the development of social theory. These criteria also significantly influenced the development of modern legal thought. The classic social theory of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which established an enduring vocabulary of concepts for the interpretation of social phenomena, treated law as an object of social inquiry within its scope. It sought scientific understanding of the nature of legal phenomena in terms of broad systems of explanation of the general nature of social relationships, structures and institutions. In the late twentieth century the relationship between social theory and law has been marked by fundamental changes both in the outlook of social theory and in forms of contemporary regulation. On the one hand, social theory has been subjected to wide-ranging challenges to its modern scientific pretensions. It has had to
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Page 844 respond to scepticism about claims that social life can usefully be analysed in terms of historical laws, or authoritatively interpreted and explained in terms of founding theoretical principles. On the other hand, the inexorable expansion of Western law’s regulatory scope and detail appears, sociologically, as largely uncontrollable by moral systems and relatively unguided by philosophical principles. Hence, in some postmodern interpretations, contemporary law is presented as a system of knowledge and interpretation of social life of great importance, yet one that has ultimately evaded the Enlightenment ambition systematically to impose reason and principle – codified by theory – on agencies of political and social power. See also: LAW, PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Kelly, D.R. (1990) The Human Measure: Social Thought in the Western Legal Tradition , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Explores interpretations of the character of society developed through the traditions of Western legal thought.) Weber, M. (1922) Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft ( Economy and Society ), trans. E. Fischoff et al., Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978. (Weber’s posthumous magnum opus, including his extensive writings on sociology of law.) ROGER COTTERRELL SOCIALISM While socialist ideas may retrospectively be identified in many earlier forms of protest and rebellion against economic injustice and political oppression, socialism both as a relatively coherent theoretical doctrine and as an organized political movement had its origins in early nineteenth-century Europe, especially in Britain, France and Germany. It was, above all, a critical response to early industrial capitalism, to an unregulated market economy in which the means of production were privately owned and propertyless workers were forced to sell their labour power to capitalists for often meagre wages. The evils of this system seemed manifest to its socialist critics. Not only was the relationship between workers and capitalists inherently exploitative, and the commodification of labour an affront to human dignity, but it generated widespread poverty and recurrent unemployment, massive and unjust inequalities of wealth and economic power, degrading and soul-destroying work, and an increasingly atomized and individualistic society. Socialists were not alone in criticizing some of these features of industrial capitalism and its accompanying ideology of economic liberalism. In particular, antipathy towards individualism was also a characteristic of conservative thought. But whereas conservatives found their inspiration in the hierarchically structured organic communities of the past, and were deeply hostile to the political radicalism of the French Revolution, socialists looked forward to new forms of community consistent with the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity. For them, the evils of capitalism could be overcome only by replacing private with public or common ownership of the means of production, abolishing wage labour and creating a classless society where production geared to capitalist profits gave way to socially organized production for the satisfaction of human needs. In such a society, the human potential for a genuinely ‘social’ mode of existence would be realized, with mutual concern for others’ wellbeing rather than unbridled pursuit of self-interest, with cooperation for common ends rather than competition for individual ones, and with generosity and sharing rather than greed and acquisitiveness – a truly human community. For most nineteenth-century socialist theorists, the historic task of creating such a society was assigned to the organized industrial working class; most notably by Marx, the preeminent figure in the history of socialism. It was Marx who (along with Engels) provided the socialist movement not only with a theoretically sophisticated economic analysis of capitalism and a biting critique of its social consequences, but also, through his scientific, materialist theory of historical development, with the confident belief that the inherent contradictions and class antagonisms of capitalism would eventually give birth to a socialist society. In marked contrast to such earlier optimism, contemporary socialists are faced with the continued resilience of capitalist societies and the collapse of at least nominally socialist regimes in the USSR and elsewhere, regimes in which state ownership and centralized planning have been accompanied by political repression and economic failure. For those who reject the idea that a suitably regulated form of welfare capitalism is the most that can be hoped for, the task is to construct some alternative model of a socialist economy which is preferable to
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Page 845 this yet avoids the evils of centralized state socialism. See also: MARKET, ETHICS OF THE; MARXISM, WESTERN; MARXIST PHILOSOPHY, RUSSIAN AND SOVIET Further reading Fried, A. and Sanders, R. (eds) (1992) Socialist Thought: A Documentary History , New York: Columbia University Press. (An extensive collection of extracts from the work of major nineteenth- and twentiethcentury socialist theorists, including non-European writers.) Wright, A. (1987) Socialisms: Theories and Practices , Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Perhaps the best brief introduction, emphasizing the diversity of socialist thought and sympathetic to the ethical socialism of the British tradition.) RUSSELL KEAT JOHN O’NEILL SOCIETY, CONCEPT OF The term ‘society’ is broader than ‘human society’. Many other species are described as possessing a social way of life. Yet mere gregariousness, of the kind found in a herd of cattle or a shoal of fish, is not enough to constitute a society. For the biologist, the marks of the social are cooperation (extending beyond cooperation between parents in raising young) and some form of order or division of labour. In assessing the merits of attempts to provide a more precise definition of society, we can ask whether the definition succeeds in capturing our intuitive understanding of the term, and also whether it succeeds in identifying those features of society which are most fundamental from an explanatory point of view – whether it captures the Lockean ‘real essence’ of society. One influential approach seeks to capture the idea of society by characterizing social action, or interaction, in terms of the particular kinds of awareness it involves. Another approach focuses on social order, seeing it as a form of order that arises spontaneously when rational and mutually aware individuals succeed in solving coordination problems. Yet another approach focuses on the role played by communication in achieving collective agreement on the way the world is to be classified and understood, as a precondition of coordination and cooperation. See also: ANTHROPOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY OF; CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY, CHINESE Further reading Durkheim, É. (1895) Rules of Sociological Method , trans. W.D. Halls, New York: Free Press, 1982. (The classic statement of Durkheim’s position.) ANGUS ROSS SOCINIANISM Socinianism was both the name for a sixteenth-and seventeenth-century theological movement which was a forerunner of modern unitarianism, and, much less precisely, a polemic term of abuse suggesting positions in common with that ‘heretical’ movement. Socinianism was explicitly undogmatic but centred on disbelief in the Trinity, original sin, the satisfaction, and the natural immortality of the soul. Some Socinians were materialists. Socinians focused on moralism and Christ’s prophetic role; the elevation of reason in interpreting Scripture against creeds, traditions and church authority; and support for religious toleration. The term was used polemically against many theorists, including Hugo Grotius, William Chillingworth, the Latitudinarians, and John Locke, who emphasized free will, moralism, the role and capacity of reason, and that Christianity included only a very few fundamental doctrines necessary for salvation. See also: DEISM; NATURAL LAW Further reading McLachlan, H. (1951) Socinianism in Seventeenth Century England , London: Oxford University Press. (Broad account of the influence of Socinianism in England.) Williams, G.H. (1980) The Polish Brethren, Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 2 vols. (Collection of Socinian documents.) JOHN MARSHALL SOCIOBIOLOGY Following Darwin, biologists and social scientists have periodically been drawn to the theory of natural selection as the source of explanatory insights about human behaviour and social institutions. The combination of Mendelian genetics and Darwinian theory, which did so much to substantiate the theory of evolution in the life sciences, however, has made recurrent adoption of a biological approach to the social sciences controversial. Excesses and errors in social Darwinism, eugenics and mental testing have repeatedly exposed evolutionary approaches in the human sciences to criticism.
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Page 846 prominent in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Philosophical problems of sociobiology include challenges to the explanatory relevance of Darwinian theory for human behaviour and social institutions, controversies about whether natural selection operates at levels of organization above or below the individual, questions about the meaning of the nature–nurture distinction, and disputes about Darwinism’s implications for moral philosophy. See also: EVOLUTIONARY THEORY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE Further reading Richarson, P. and Boyd, R. (1985) Culture and the Evolutionary Process , Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (A sophisticated treatment of the interaction of environment, heredity and learning in human social evolution.) Wilson, E.O. (1976) Sociobiology: The New Synthesis , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Introduction to sociobiology among both humans and infrahuman species.) ALEX ROSENBERG SOCIOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE Sociologists of knowledge contribute to the enterprise of generating a naturalistic account of knowledge by describing and explaining the observed characteristics of shared cultures. They assume that knowledge can be treated as an object of empirical investigation (rather than mere celebration or condemnation). Because science is understandably taken as our best example of knowledge, the sociology of scientific knowledge plays a pivotal role in the field. It is argued that our natural reasoning capacities, and our sense experience, are necessary but not sufficient conditions for scientific knowledge. Sociologists looking for the causes of its content and style focus on the contribution of conventions and institutions. See also: FEMINIST EPISTEMOLOGY; NATURALISM IN SOCIAL SCIENCE Further reading Bloor, D. (1991) Knowledge and Social Imagery, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (A defence of the strong programme with a discussion of some of the main philosophical objections.) DAVID BLOOR SOCIOLOGY, THEORIES OF Throughout the history of sociology, three types of theorizing have co-existed, sometimes uneasily. ‘Theories of’ provide abstract models of empirical processes; they function both as guides for sociological research and as sources for covering laws whose falsification or validation is intended to provide the basis for a cumulative science. ‘Presuppositional studies’ abstract away from particular empirical processes, seeking instead to articulate the fundamental properties of social action and order; metamethodological warrants for the scientific investigation of societies; and normative foundations for moral evaluations of contemporary social life. ‘Hermeneutical theory’ addresses these basic sociological questions more indirectly, by interpreting the meanings and intentions of classical texts. The relation between these three forms of theorizing varies historically. In the post-war period, under the institutional and intellectual influence of US sociologists like Parsons and Merton, presuppositional and hermeneutical issues seemed to be settled; ‘theories of’ proliferated and prospects seemed bright for a cumulative, theoretically-organized science of society. Subsequent social and intellectual developments undermined this brief period of relative consensus. In the midst of the crises of the 1960s and 1970s, presuppositional and hermeneutical studies gained much greater importance, and became increasingly disarticulated from empirical ‘theories of’. Confronting the prospect of growing fragmentation, in the late 1970s and early 1980s there appeared a series of ambitious, synthetical works that sought to reground the discipline by providing coherent examples of how the different forms of sociological theory could once again be intertwined. While widely read inside and outside the discipline, these efforts failed in their foundational ambitions. As a result of this failure, over the last decade sociological theory has had diminishing influence both inside the discipline and without. Inside social science, economic and anthropological theories have been much more influential. In the broader intellectual arena, the most important presuppositional and hermeneutical debates have occurred in philosophy and literary studies. Sociological theorists are now participating in these extra-disciplinary debates even as they have returned to the task of developing ‘theories of’ particular institutional domains. The future of specifically sociological theory
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Page 847 depends on reviving coherent relationships between these different theoretical domains. Further reading Geertz, C. (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures, New York: Basic Books. (Collection of essays forwarding a view of what culture is, what role it plays in social life and how it ought to be properly studied.) Mouzelis, N. (1995) Sociological Theory: What Went Wrong? Diagnoses and Remedies , London: Routledge. (Analysis of the central problems of sociological theory and the means to resolve them.) JEFFREY C. ALEXANDER SOCRATES (469–399 BC) Socrates, an Athenian Greek of the second half of the fifth century BC, wrote no philosophical works but was uniquely influential in the later history of philosophy. His philosophical interests were restricted to ethics and the conduct of life, topics which thereafter became central to philosophy. He discussed these in public places in Athens, sometimes with other prominent intellectuals or political leaders, sometimes with young men, who gathered round him in large numbers, and other admirers. Among these young men was Plato. Socrates’ philosophical ideas and – equally important for his philosophical influence – his personality and methods as a ‘teacher’ were handed on to posterity in the ‘dialogues’ that several of his friends wrote after his death, depicting such discussions. Only those of Xenophon ( Memorabilia , Apology , Symposium ) and the early dialogues of Plato survive (for example Euthyphro , Apology , Crito ). Later Platonic dialogues such as Phaedo , Symposium and Republic do not present the historical Socrates’ ideas; the ‘Socrates’ appearing in them is a spokesman for Plato’s own ideas. Socrates’ discussions took the form of face-to-face interrogations of another person. Most often they concerned the nature of some moral virtue, such as courage or justice. Socrates asked what the respondent thought these qualities of mind and character amounted to, what their value was, how they were acquired. He would then test their ideas for logical consistency with other highly plausible general views about morality and goodness that the respondent also agreed to accept, once Socrates presented them. He succeeded in showing, to his satisfaction and that of the respondent and any bystanders, that the respondent’s ideas were not consistent. By this practice of ‘elenchus’ or refutation he was able to prove that politicians and others who claimed to have ‘wisdom’ about human affairs in fact lacked it, and to draw attention to at least apparent errors in their thinking. He wanted to encourage them and others to think harder and to improve their ideas about the virtues and about how to conduct a good human life. He never argued directly for ideas of his own, but always questioned those of others. None the less, one can infer, from the questions he asks and his attitudes to the answers he receives, something about his own views. Socrates was convinced that our souls – where virtues and vices are found – are vastly more important for our lives than our bodies or external circumstances. The quality of our souls determines the character of our lives, for better or for worse, much more than whether we are healthy or sick, or rich or poor. If we are to live well and happily, as he assumed we all want to do more than we want anything else, we must place the highest priority on the care of our souls. That means we must above all want to acquire the virtues, since they perfect our souls and enable them to direct our lives for the better. If only we could know what each of the virtues is we could then make an effort to obtain them. As to the nature of the virtues, Socrates seems to have held quite strict and, from the popular point of view, paradoxical views. Each virtue consists entirely in knowledge, of how it is best to act in some area of life, and why: additional ‘emotional’ aspects, such as the disciplining of our feelings and desires, he dismissed as of no importance. Weakness of will is not psychologically possible: if you act wrongly or badly, that is due to your ignorance of how you ought to act and why. He thought each of the apparently separate virtues amounts to the same single body of knowledge: the comprehensive knowledge of what is and is not good for a human being. Thus his quest was to acquire this single wisdom: all the particular virtues would follow automatically. At the age of 70 Socrates was charged before an Athenian popular court with ‘impiety’ – with not believing in the Olympian gods and corrupting young men through his constant questioning of everything. He was found guilty and condemned to death. Plato’s Apology , where Socrates gives a passionate defence of his life and philosophy, is one of the classics of Western literature. For different groups of later Greek philosophers he was the model both of a sceptical inquirer who never claims to know the truth, and of a ‘sage’ who knows the whole truth about human life and the human good.
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Page 848 Among modern philosophers, the interpretations of his innermost meaning given by Montaigne, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche are especially notable. Further reading Grote, G. (1875) Plato and the Other Companions of Socrates , London: Murray, 3 vols. (Judicious, perceptive older account of Socrates in Plato’s works and of the other Socratics; still valuable.) Reeve, C.D.C. (1989) Socrates in the Apology , Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. (Commentary on Plato’s Apology in the light of Socrates’ general philosophy; accessible to the general reader.) JOHN M. COOPER SOCRATIC DIALOGUES After Socrates’ death in 399 BC, a number of his followers composed imaginary dialogues between Socrates and various persons, usually historical. In addition to the dialogues of Plato there were works by Antisthenes, Aeschines, Phaedo, Euclides and, somewhat later, Xenophon. Only the writings of Plato and Xenophon have survived intact. The portrayal of Socrates varied from author to author, but the charismatic personality and skilful questioner is recognizable in each version. The connection between love and Socratic philosophy was frequently illustrated in Socrates’ relationship to Alcibiades. The erotic theme was also represented in the role played by Aspasia, Pericles’ mistress, in at least four authors, including Plato. Historical fact and even chronological possibility were regularly disregarded. This was essentially a genre of fiction. See also: SOCRATES Further reading Kahn, C.H. (1996) Plato and the Socratic Dialogue , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Chapter 1 discusses Plato’s relationship to the Socratic literary genre.) Momigliano, A. (1971) The Development of Greek Biography , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Best discussion in English of the nonhistorical character of the Socratic literature.) CHARLES H. KAHN SOCRATIC SCHOOLS For approximately one and a half centuries after Socrates’ death in 399 BC, several Greek philosophical schools and sects each claimed to be the true intellectual heirs of Socrates. Later doxographers emphasized the Socratic pedigree of each of these schools by establishing an uninterrupted succession ( diadochē ) between its alleged founder, who was invariably a member of Socrates’ own entourage, and the philosophers who succeeded him as leaders of the school. Leaving aside Plato, the founder of the Academy, the members of the Socratic circle who left a succession behind them are Antisthenes, Aristippus of Cyrene, Euclides of Megara, and Phaedo of Elis, considered respectively the founders of Cynicism, and of the Cyrenaic, Megarian and Elian schools. It is these groupings, plus several of their offshoots, that are conventionally known as the ‘Socratic schools’. All can be seen as, in their own ways, developing Socrates’ ethical outlook, and several were concerned with exploring the logical and metaphysical implications of his dialectical principles. See also: PLATO; XENOPHON Further reading Diogenes Laertius ( c . early 3rd century AD) Lives of the Philosophers, trans. R.D. Hicks, Diogenes Laertius Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925, 2 vols. (Greek text with English translation; see especially book II on the Socratics and book VI on Antisthenes and the Cynics.) Vander Waerdt, P. (1994) The Socratic Movement , Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. (Collection of essays.) VOULA TSOUNA SOLIDARITY Solidarity exists among a group of people when they are committed to abiding by the outcome of some process of collective decision-making, or to promoting the wellbeing of other members of the group, perhaps at significant cost to themselves. Many regard solidarity as an important political ideal on the grounds that it is related to community and fraternity, and conducive to social cohesion and stability. Some individualists, however, believe that it is incompatible with autonomy on the grounds that full autonomy requires one always to take the final decision oneself about what one should do. See also: FAMILY, ETHICS AND THE; HONOUR Further reading Benn, S.I. (1988) A Theory of Freedom, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ch. 12.
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Page 849 (Traces the connections between notions such as comradeship, mutual concern, community and autonomy, and raises the question in what sort of relationships each of these can be realized.) ANDREW MASON SOLIPSISM ‘Solipsism’ (from the Latin solus ipse – oneself alone) is the doctrine that only oneself exists. This formulation covers two doctrines, each of which has been called solipsism, namely (1) that one is the only self, the only centre of consciousness, and, more radically, (2) that nothing at all exists apart from one’s own mind and mental states. These are not always distinguished from corresponding epistemic forms: for all we know, (1) or (2) might be true. A more recent coinage is ‘methodological solipsism’, which has a quite different meaning: that the content of an individual’s thoughts is fully determined by facts about them, and is independent of facts about their environment. Further reading Russell, B. (1948) Human Knowledge: its Scope and its Limits , London: George Allen & Unwin. (Part III Chapter 2, ‘Solipsism’, introduces a radical version of solipsism and considers reasons against it.) EDWARD CRAIG SOLOMON IBN GABIROL see IBN GABIROL, SOLOMON SOLOVEITCHIK, JOSEPH B. (1903–93) Joseph B. Soloveitchik was a Jewish philosopher in the fullest sense. For such thinkers, the task of building intellectual and spiritual bridges between their particular traditions and other cultures permeates and shapes all their philosophic commitments and endeavours. Medieval philosophers sought to integrate the competing knowledge claims of natural reason and authoritative revelation. Soloveitchik, by contrast, ignored metaphysics and epistemology, focusing instead on refuting the alleged incompatibility between Judaism and the active, human-centred ethos of modernity. His major concern was not the truth of religion but the relevance and significance of religious human types and ideals in modern Western culture. See also: HALAKHAH; JEWISH PHILOSOPHY, CONTEMPORARY Further reading Hartman, D. (1985) A Living Covenant , New York: Free Press, 60–109, 150–60. (A critique of Soloveitchik’s halakhic anthropology.) Soloveitchik, J. (1944) Ish ha-Halakhah , trans. L. Kaplan, Halakhic Man, Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publications Society, 1983. (His early analysis of the notion of the halakhic individual as hero.) D. HARTMAN SOLOV’ËV, VLADIMIR SERGEEVICH (1853–1900) It has been widely acknowledged that Vladimir Solov’ëv is the greatest Russian philosopher of the nineteenth century; his significance for Russian philosophy is often compared to the significance of Aleksandr Pushkin for Russian poetry. His first works marked the beginning of the revolt against positivism in Russian thought, followed by a revival of metaphysical idealism and culminating in the socalled Religious-Philosophical Renaissance of the early twentieth century. Unlike the Russian idealists of the Romantic epoch, Solov’ëv was a professional, systematic philosopher. He created the first all-round philosophical system in Russia and thus inaugurated the transition to the construction of systems in Russian philosophical thought. At the same time he remained faithful to the Russian intellectual tradition of reluctance to engage in purely theoretical problems; his ideal of ‘integrality’ postulated that theoretical philosophy be organically linked to religion and social practice. He saw himself not as an academic philosopher, but rather as a prophet, discovering the way to universal regeneration. One of the main themes of Solov’ëv’s philosophy of history was Russia’s mission in universal history. Owing to this he was interested in the ideas of the Slavophiles and, in the first period of his intellectual evolution, established close relations with the Slavophile and Pan-Slavic circle of Ivan Aksakov. He was close also to Dostoevskii, on whom he made a very deep impression. At the beginning of the 1880s he began to dissociate himself from the epigones of Slavophilism; his final break with them came in 1883, when he became a contributor to the liberal and Westernizing Vestnik Evropy (European Messenger). The main reason for this was the pro-Catholic tendency of his thought, which led him to believe that Russia had to acknowledge the primacy of the Pope. In his view, this was a necessary condition of fulfilling Russia’s
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Page 850 universal mission, defined as the unification of the Christian Churches and the establishment of a theocratic Kingdom of God on earth. In the early 1890s Solov’ëv abandoned this utopian vision and concentrated on working out an autonomous ethic and a liberal philosophy of law. This reflected his optimistic faith in liberal progress and his confidence that even the secularization of ethics was essentially a part of the divine–human process of salvation. In the last year of his life, however, historiosophical optimism gave way to a pessimistic apocalypticism, as expressed in his philosophical dialogue Tri razgovora (Three Conversations) (1900), and especially the ‘Tale of the Antichrist’ appended to it. See also: SLAVOPHILISM Further reading Solov’ëv, V.S. (1877–81) Chteniia o bogochelovechestve ; trans. P. Zouboff, Lectures on Godmanhood , London: Dennis Dobson, 1948. Stremoukhoff, D. (1979) Vladimir Soloviev and His Messianic work , Belmont: Nordland. (Translated from the French edition of 1935, this is the most comprehensive monograph in English.) ANDRZEJ WALICKI SOPHISTS The Sophists were itinerant educators, the first professors of higher learning, who appeared in Greece in the middle and later fifth century BC. The earliest seems to have been Protagoras, who was personally associated with the statesman Pericles. The next most eminent was Gorgias, an influential author and prose stylist. The Sophists succeeded in earning very large sums for their instruction. They lectured on many subjects, including the new natural philosophy, but their most important teaching was in rhetoric, the art of influencing political assemblies and law courts by persuasive speech. In conservative circles their great influence was regarded with hostility, as corrupting the young. See also: DISSOI LOGOI Further reading Guthrie, W.K.C. (1969) A History of Greek Philosophy , vol. 3, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; part of vol. 3 repr. as The Sophists, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971. (A full, scholarly account.) Sprague, R.K. (ed.) (1972) The Older Sophists, Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press. (Full English translation of the fragments and testimonia.) CHARLES H. KAHN SOREL, GEORGES (1847–1922) The French social theorist Georges Sorel is best known for his controversial work Réflexions sur la violence ( Reflections on Violence), first published in 1908. He here argued that the world could be saved from ‘barbarism’ through acts of proletarian violence, most notably the general strike. This, he believed, would not only establish an ethic of the producers but would also serve to secure the economic foundations of socialism. Moreover the inspiration for these heroic deeds would be derived from a series of ‘myths’ that encapsulated the highest aspirations of the working class. More broadly Sorel should be seen as an innovator in Marxist theory and the methodology of the social sciences. See also: REVOLUTION; SOCIALISM Further reading Sorel, G. (1976) From Georges Sorel: Essays in Socialism and Philosophy , ed. J.L. Stanley, New York: Oxford University Press. (An excellent selection of Sorel’s writings.) JEREMY JENNINGS SÔSAN HYUJÔNG (1520–1604) Sôsan was a Korean Sôn Buddhist monk who sought to establish the equality of various ideas and systems. His philosophical perspective conferred equality on Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism alike, and within Buddhism he denied there was any inherent conflict between the Kyo and Sôn schools. However, he viewed Sôn (meditation) as being the most advanced form of practice. See also: BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY, KOREAN Further reading Han’guk pulgyo chônsô (The Collected Works of Korean Buddhism), Seoul: Dongguk University press, 1979, vol. 7, 616–751; trans. in P.H. Lee (ed.) Source Book of Korean Civilization , vol. 1, From Early Times to the Sixteenth Century, New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. (Lee’s translation is not entirely complete, but does include all the important intellectual works; a well-written, comprehensive anthology of Korean civilization.) SUNG BAE PARK
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Page 851 SOTO, DOMINGO DE (1494–1560) The sixteenth-century Spanish Dominican, Domingo de Soto, was a mainstay of the Thomistic revival begun at Salamanca by Vitoria. After study at Paris (where he was taught by the nominalist John Major) and Alcalá, Soto taught both philosophy and theology. He was influential within the Dominican Order and the Catholic Church; he served as Emperor Charles V’s theologian at the Council of Trent and played an active role in the development of the Council of Trent’s teaching on original sin. Besides his theological writings, Soto composed philosophical works chiefly in logic, natural philosophy and juridical theory. In logic, he authored an exposition of the Summulae of Peter of Spain and a commentary, by way of questions, on three of Aristotle’s works. His natural philosophy anticipated later scientific approaches, while in his philosophy of law Soto presented a basically Thomistic doctrine updated to confront sixteenth-century issues. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM, RENAISSANCE Further reading Ashworth, E.J. (1974) Language and Logic in the Post-Medieval Period , Dordrecht and Boston, MA: Reidel. (A general study which includes extensive discussion of Soto’s logical doctrine.) Hamilton, B. (1963) Political thought in sixteenth-century Spain: A Study of the Political Ideas of Vitoria, Soto, Suarez and Molina, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Soto’s political theory treated in the course of a wider study.) JOHN P. DOYLE SOUL IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY The discussion of the human soul, its existence, nature, ultimate objective and eternity, occupies a highly important position in Islamic philosophy and forms its main focus. For the most part Muslim philosophers agreed, as did their Greek predecessors, that the soul consists of non-rational and rational parts. The non-rational part they divided into the plant and animal souls, the rational part into the practical and the theoretical intellects. All believed that the non-rational part is linked essentially to the body, but some considered the rational part as separate from the body by nature and others that all the parts of the soul are by nature material. The philosophers agreed that, while the soul is in the body, its non-rational part is to manage the body, its practical intellect is to manage worldly affairs, including those of the body, and its theoretical intellect is to know the eternal aspects of the universe. They thought that the ultimate end or happiness of the soul depends on its ability to separate itself from the demands of the body and to focus on grasping the eternal aspects of the universe. All believed that the non-rational soul comes into being and unavoidably perishes. Some, like al-Farabi, believed that the rational soul may or may not survive eternally; others, like Ibn Sina, believed that it has no beginning and no end; still others, such as Ibn Rushd, believed that the soul with all its individual parts comes into existence and is eventually destroyed. See also: EPISTEMOLOGY IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY; SOUL, NATURE AND IMMORTALITY OF THE Further reading Inati, S.C. (1996) A Study of Ibn Sina’s Mysticism , London: Kegan Paul International. (Includes a detailed analysis of Ibn Sina’s notion of the soul and a translation of the fourth part of al-Isharat wa-’ltanbihat (Remarks and Admonitions).) SHAMS C. INATI SOUL, NATURE AND IMMORTALITY OF THE For the Greeks, the soul is what gives life to the body. Plato thought of it as a thing separate from the body. A human living on earth consists of two parts, soul and body. The soul is the essential part of the human – what makes me me. It is the part to which the mental life of humans pertains – it is the soul which thinks and feels and chooses. Soul and body interact. Bodily states often cause soul states, and soul states often cause bodily states. This view is known as substance dualism. It normally includes the view that the soul is simple, that it does not have parts. If an object has parts, then one of those parts can have properties which another part does not. But for any experience that I have, an auditory or visual sensation or thought, it happens to the whole me. Plato also held that at death, soul and body are separated; the body decays while the soul departs to live another life. Aristotle, by contrast, thought of the soul simply as a ‘form’, that is, as a way of behaving and thinking; a human having a soul just is the human behaving (by moving parts of the body) and thinking in certain characteristic human ways. And just as there cannot be a dance without people dancing, so there cannot be ways of behaving without embodied humans
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Page 852 to behave in those ways. Hence, for Aristotle, the soul does not exist without the body. Christian theology, believing in life after death, found it natural to take over Plato’s conception of the soul. But in the thirteenth century, St Thomas Aquinas sought to develop an Aristotelian conception modified to accommodate Christian doctrine. The soul, Aquinas taught, was indeed a form, but a special kind of form, one which could temporarily exist without the body to which it was naturally fitted. It has always been difficult to articulate this view in a coherent way which makes it distinct from Plato’s. Descartes restated Plato’s view. In more modern times, the view that humans have souls has always been understood as the view that humans have an essential part, separable from the body, as depicted by Plato and Aquinas. The pure Aristotelian view has more normally been expressed as the view that humans do not have souls; humans consist of matter alone, though it may be organized in a very complicated way and have properties that inanimate things do not have. In other words, Aristotelianism is a kind of materialism. If, however, one thinks of the soul as a thing separable from the body, it could still cease to exist at death, when the body ceases to function. Plato had a number of arguments designed to show that the soul is naturally immortal; in virtue of its own nature, because of what it is, it will continue to exist forever. Later philosophers have developed some of these arguments and produced others. Even if these arguments do not show it (and most philosophers think that they do not), the soul may still be naturally immortal; or it may be immortal because God or some other force keeps it in being forever, either by itself or joined to a new body. If there is an omnipotent God, he could keep it in existence forever; and he might have revealed to us that he is going to do so. See also: PSYCHĒ; SALVATION Further reading Aristotle ( c . mid 4th century BC) On the Soul ( De Anima ) 412a–418a; bks 2–3 trans. and notes by D.W. Hamlyn, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968. (Aristotle’s account of the nature and attributes of the soul. Fairly difficult for those unfamiliar with Greek philosophy.) Swinburne, R. (1986) The Evolution of the Soul , Oxford: Clarendon Press; revised edn, 1997. (A full modern statement of the dualist position.) RICHARD SWINBURNE SOUTH AMERICA, PHILOSOPHY IN see LATIN AMERICA, PHILOSOPHY IN SOUTH SLAVS, PHILOSOPHY OF Philosophy as a distinct intellectual activity emerged in the coastal towns of the Adriatic during the Renaissance. Philosophers from this area wrote in Latin and taught philosophy in Italy, Germany and Austria. The first popular philosophical works in the vernacular did not appear until late in the eighteenth century, and it was almost one hundred years later that the first chairs in logic and philosophy were founded in the universities. Academic philosophy, usually derived from German or British models, was thus brought into the intellectual life of South Slavs. Local academic philosophers, mostly educated in Germany, brought home a variety of philosophical approaches, and by the early twentieth century many schools of thought flourished: Neo-Kantianism flourished in Beograd, while Neo-Thomism was particularly strong in Ljubljana and Zagreb (until 1941 the Meinongian phenomenological approach also flourished in Ljubljana). In their quest for originality, local philosophers constructed various eclectic philosophical systems. The Soviet Marxism-Leninism, imposed in all Yugoslav universities after 1945, was replaced in the late 1950s by a Neo-Marxist approach based on the concept of praxis. This was a concept of a purposeful human activity which, among other things, results in social change (for example, the development of socialism). These Neo-Marxists engaged in vigorous debates on the nature of truth and knowledge, on human freedom, alienation, socialism and humanism as well as on social and political issues. Their work reached an international audience through the international journal Praxis, published in Zagreb, and through their international summer school of philosophy at Korčula. As their support for the Yugoslav communist regime turned into open criticism, the regime halted the publication of Praxis and in 1974 forced the Beograd Neo-Marxists from their teaching posts. The Neo-Marxist interest in non-Marxist philosophy facilitated the reception of various non-Marxist approaches. From the early 1960s, existentialism, structuralism, hermeneutics and phenomenology – in particular the philosophy of Heidegger – exerted considerable influence on Neo-Marxists as well as on philosophers who had gradually abandoned this approach. In the early 1970s, a younger generation of thinkers in Beograd, Zagreb, Ljubljana and Zadar developed an interest in analytic philosophy. Since
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Page 853 that time no approach or trend in philosophy has emerged as the dominant one in any of the academic centres in the countries which were formerly part of Yugoslavia. See also: MARXIST PHILOSOPHY, RUSSIAN AND SOVIET Further reading Pavković, A. (ed.) (1988) Contemporary Yugoslav Philosophy: The Analytic Approach , Dordrecht and New York: Kluwer. (Seventeen essays by Yugoslav analytic philosophers; includes a short historical introduction and a select bibliography.) Stojanović, S. (1973) Between Ideals and Reality: A Critique of Socialism and its Future, New York: Oxford University Press. (A prominent Beograd Praxis philosopher presents his vision of socialism.) ŽIVAN LAZOVIĆ ALEKSANDAR PAVKOVICĆ SOVEREIGNTY In legal and political philosophy sovereignty is the attribute by which a person or institution exercises ultimate authority over every other person or institution in its domain. Traditionally, the existence of a final arbiter or legislator is said to be essential if people are to live together in peace and security. The example brought most readily to mind by the word ‘sovereign’ is the individual monarch, and the theory of sovereignty was at one time closely linked with the defence of monarchy. But leading theorists of sovereignty, like Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes, recognize that authority can be exercised by sovereign bodies of people; and later writers, like Rousseau and Austin, locate sovereignty in the people, to whom the officials of more democratic institutions are ultimately accountable. Traditionally, too, it is deduced from the nature of the state or law that the sovereign’s authority must be absolute, not limited by conditions; perpetual, not merely delegated for a time; and indivisible, not distributed between different persons or institutions. It is further deduced that the sovereign must be independent from external domination as well as internally supreme. All these inferences have been subjected to criticism, not least because they can be difficult to reconcile with the actual practice of states and legal systems. See also: AUTHORITY; CONSTITUTIONALISM; RULE OF LAW (RECHTSSTAAT) Further reading Jouvenel, B. de (1957) Sovereignty, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Develops a philosophical thesis about the place of sovereignty in political science, providing historical observations along the way.) Merriam, C.E. (1900) History of the Theory of Sovereignty since Rousseau , New York: Columbia University Press. (Provides a more detailed survey than Hinsley of the history of the theory in the nineteenth century.) J.D. FORD SPACE In some of its uses, the word ‘space’ designates an empty or potentially empty expanse among things, for example, when a driver finds a space in a crowded parking lot, or when a typesetter increases the space between words on a page. In other uses, ‘space’ is meant to stand for a boundless extension which supposedly contains everything, or every thing of a certain sort. The former sense is wellgrounded in ordinary experience and can be traced back to the etymology of the word (from the Latin word spatium, meaning ‘race-track’, or generally ‘distance’, ‘interval’, ‘terrain’). The latter sense originated in scholarly circles – possibly as late as the fourteenth century – by a bold extrapolation of the former; it does not refer to anything that can be exhibited in sense-perception; and yet, through the influence of Newtonian science on Euro-American common sense, it has become so entrenched in ordinary usage that it is normally viewed as the primary meaning of ‘space’, from which all others are derived. According to Cornford, the ‘invention of space’ as a boundless, all-encompassing container happened in the fifth century BC. However, it is more likely to have occurred in the late Middle Ages. At any rate, the idea was rampant in Cambridge in the 1660s, when Newton made it a fundamental ingredient in his framework for the description of the phenomena of motion. In a posthumous paper, Newton stressed that space evades the traditional classification of entities into substances and attributes, and has ‘its own manner of existence’. Until the publication of this paper in 1962, philosophers took Newtonian space for a substance, and most of them thought this to be utterly absurd. In view of the role of allencompassing space in Newtonian physics, Kant opted for regarding it as a precondition of human knowledge, contributed once and for all by the human mind. Newton had written that the points of space owe their
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Page 854 individual identity to the relational system in which they are set. Nineteenth-century mathematicians vastly extended this concept of space by conceiving many such relational systems. They thus made it possible for relativity theory to substitute four-dimensional spacetime for Newtonian space and time, and for current string theory to countenance a ten-dimensional physical space. These developments confirm the productivity, but not the fixity, of the knowing mind. See also: GEOMETRY, PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES IN Further reading Cornford, F.M. (1936) ‘The Invention of Space’, in Essays in Honour of Gilbert Murray , London: Allen & Unwin, 215–35; repr. in M. Capek (ed.) The Concepts of Space and Time, Dordrecht: Reidel, 1976, 3– 16. (According to Cornford, boundless all-encompassing space was invented in Greece during the fifth century BC.) Koyré, A. (1957) From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. (A lively narrative of the emergence of space.) ROBERTO TORRETTI SPACETIME Spacetime is the four-dimensional manifold proposed by current physics as the arena for Nature’s show. Although Newtonian physics can very well be reformulated in a spacetime setting, the idea of spacetime was not developed until the twentieth century, in connection with Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity. Due to the success of special relativity in microphysics and of general relativity in astronomy and cosmology, every advanced physical theory is now a spacetime theory. Spacetime is undoubtedly an artificial concept, which our hominid ancestors did not possess, but the same is true of Newtonian space and time. Further reading Ciufolini, I. and Wheeler, J.A. (1995) Gravitation and Inertia , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (A recent, quick-paced exposition of general relativity, with all the brilliance and keen sense of essentials which are normal in books coauthored by Wheeler.) ROBERTO TORRETTI SPAIN, PHILOSOPHY IN Historians have argued about precisely when to date the commencement of Spanish history proper, rendering dubious any reference to Spain as such in the period prior to the official constitution of nationality. If this is the case, one can not really speak of philosophy in Spain before 1474, although it remains a fact that philosophy had been practised on the Iberian Peninsula from the earliest times. During the period of the Roman Empire, distinguished philosophical figures included Lucius Annqeus Seneca; under Visigothic rule, Saint Isidore of Seville came to the fore; and the Islamic Empire featured some of the most eminent philosophers of the Arabic and Judaic traditions, such as Ibn Hazm, Averroes, Ibn Gabirol, Yehuda Ha-Levi and Maimonides. There is no doubt that the centre of philosophical activity within the peninsula during the Middle Ages was the so-called School of Translators of Toledo, where numerous thinkers from many countries gathered. Together with Spanish scholars such as Domingo Gundisalvo and Juan Hispano, they collaborated in making Greek philosophy available to the countries of Europe; instrumental in this process were Gerard of Cremona, Daniel of Morlay, Alexander Neckham and Michael Scot. After Spanish nationality was constituted under the Catholic Monarchs (1474–1516) on the basis of a single, unified faith, philosophy was destined to become closely linked with religion. During the sixteenth century, this gave rise to a burgeoning of philosophy of the very highest order, which followed two separate paths: that of the Erasmian-style Renaissance, featuring Luis Vives, which developed in line with the vanguard of the European Renaissance; and that of Spanish Scholasticism, which was fuelled by the thrust of the Counter-Reformation on the one hand, and by the discovery of America on the other. After the reigns of Charles I and Philip II (the chief protagonists in the creation of the empire ‘in which the sun never set’), the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed a relentless decline which, towards the beginning of the twentieth, seemed to come to an end. The Generation of 1898, with its revolutionary secular theories, provided the catalyst for a philosophical recovery whose greatest protagonists were Miguel de Unamuno, José Ortega y Gasset and Xavier Zubir. These thinkers were succeeded by the philosophers who went into exile after the Civil War of 1936–9: José Ferrater Mora, José Gaos, María Zambrano, Joaquín Xirau, and Juan David García Bacca. See also: COLLEGIUM CONIMBRICENSE; MOLINISM
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Page 855 Further reading Abellán, J.L. (1979–92) Historia Crítica del Pensamiento Español (A Critical History of Spanish Thought), Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 7 vols. (Spanish philosophy from the Middle Ages up to the present, from the perspective of the history of ideas.) Grice-Hutchinson, M. (1952) The School of Salamanca. Readings in Spanish Monetary Theory , Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Serious studies and investigations of the monetary discoveries of sixteenth-century Spanish theologians.) Translated by Dominic Moran and Gemma Belmonte Talero JOSÉ LUIS ABELLÁN SPECIES The diversity of life is not seamless but comes in relatively discrete packages, species. Is that packaging real, or an artefact of our limited temporal perspective on the history of life? If all living forms are descended from one or a few ancestors, there may be no real distinction between living and ancestral forms, or between closely related living animals. Received wisdom holds that species are the ‘units of evolution’, for it is they that evolve. They are the upshot of evolutionary processes, but, if species and not just their component organisms compete with one another, they are also important agents in the evolutionary process. If so, species are real units in nature, not arbitrary segmentations of seamless variation. The ‘species problem’ has been approached from two angles. One focus has been on specific taxa of the tree of life. What would settle whether some arbitrarily chosen organism is a member of homo sapiens or canis familiaris? This is sometimes known as the ‘species taxon’ problem. An alternate way of approaching diversity has been to ask what all species have in common. What do all the populations we think of as species share? This is the ‘species category’ problem. One idea is to group organisms into species by appealing to the overall similarity. This ‘phenetic’ conception is in retreat. Most contemporary species definitions are relational, the animals that compose pan troglodytes are a species, not because they are all very similar (they are very like the pygmy chimps as well) but because of their relations amongst themselves and with their ancestors. The most famous relational definition is the ‘biological species concept’, according to which conspecific organisms are organisms that can interbreed, however different they look. Relational species definitions aim to define a category of theoretical and explanatory interest to evolutionary and ecological theory. Given that there are many explanatory interests, one problem in evaluating these accounts is to determine whether they are genuinely rivals. See also: EVOLUTION, THEORY OF; TAXONOMY Further reading Ereshevsky, M. (ed.) (1992) The Units of Evolution: Essays on the Nature of Species, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (An excellent collection of most of the central papers on the species problem.) Mayr, E. (1988) Towards a New Philosophy of Biology, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Mayr is the most famous defender of the biological species concept. Parts VI and VII defends his views on species and speciation against all comers.) KIM STERELNY SPEECH ACTS Making a statement may be the paradigmatic use of language, but there are all sorts of other things we can do with words. We can make requests, ask questions, give orders, make promises, give thanks, offer apologies and so on. Moreover, almost any speech act is really the performance of several acts at once, distinguished by different aspects of the speaker’s intention; there is the act of saying something, what one does in saying it, such as requesting or promising, and how one is trying to affect one’s audience. The theory of speech acts is partly taxonomic and partly explanatory. It must systematically classify types of speech acts and the ways in which they can succeed or fail. It must reckon with the fact that the relationship between the words being used and the force of their utterance is often oblique. For example, the sentence ‘This is a pig sty’ might be used nonliterally to state that a certain room is messy, and further to demand indirectly that it be tidied up. Even when this sentence is used literally and directly, say to describe a certain area of a farmyard, the content of its utterance is not fully determined by its linguistic meaning – in particular, the meaning of the word ‘this’ does not determine which area is being referred to. A major task for the theory of speech acts is to account for how speakers can succeed in what
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Page 856 they do despite the various ways in which linguistic meaning underdetermines use. In general, speech acts are acts of communication. To communicate is to express a certain attitude, and the type of speech act being performed corresponds to the type of attitude being expressed. For example, a statement expresses a belief, a request expresses a desire, and an apology expresses a regret. As an act of communication, a speech act succeeds if the audience identifies, in accordance with the speaker’s intention, the attitude being expressed. Some speech acts, however, are not primarily acts of communication and have the function not of communicating but of affecting institutional states of affairs. They can do so in either of two ways. Some officially judge something to be the case, and others actually make something the case. Those of the first kind include judges’ rulings, referees’ decisions and assessors’ appraisals, and the latter include sentencing, bequeathing and appointing. Acts of both kinds can be performed only in certain ways under certain circumstances by those in certain institutional or social positions. See also: LANGUAGE, PHILOSOPHY OF; SEMANTICS Further reading Austin, J.L. (1962) How to Do Things with Words, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Develops the distinction between performative and constative utterances into the first systematic account of speech acts.) Tsohatzidis, S.L. (ed.) (1994) Foundations of Speech Act Theory: Philosophical and Linguistic Perspectives , London: Routledge. (Collection of original essays on outstanding problems in the field, with useful bibliography.) KENT BACH SPENCER, HERBERT (1820–1903) The British philosopher Herbert Spencer is chiefly remembered for his classical liberalism and his evolutionary theory. His fame was considerable during the mid- to late-nineteenth century, especially in the USA, which he visited in 1882 to be lionized by New York society as the prophetic philosopher of capitalism. In Britain, however, Spencer’s reputation suffered two fatal blows towards the end of his life. First, collectivist legislation was introduced to protect citizens from the ravages of the industrial revolution, and Spencer’s spirited defence of economic laissez-faire became discredited. Second, his evolutionary theory, which was based largely on the Lamarckian principle of the inheritance of organic modifications produced by use and disuse, was superseded by Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Nearly a century after his death, however, there is renewed interest in his ideas, partly because the world has become more sympathetic to market philosophies, and partly because the application of evolutionary principles to human society has become fashionable once more. See also: EVOLUTION, THEORY OF; EVOLUTIONARY THEORY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE Further reading Peel, J.D.Y. (1971) Herbert Spencer, The Evolution of a Sociologist , London: Heinemann. (This scholarly book is by far the best critical study of Spencer’s ideas. Peel sets these ideas in their historical and intellectual context, and shows their enduring influence.) Spencer, H. (1890) Essays: Scientific, Political and Speculative, London: Williams & Norgate, 3 vols, revised edition. (A collection of highly accessible articles published by Spencer in leading Victorian periodicals, ranging over science, philosophy, aesthetics, ethics, psychology and politics. Contains ‘The Development Hypothesis’ (1852) and ‘Progress: its Law and Cause’ (1857) in vol. 1.) TIM S. GRAY SPEUSIPPUS ( c .410–339 BC) The Greek philosopher Speusippus was the second head of the Platonic Academy. Succeeding his uncle Plato on the latter’s death, he developed his thought in interesting directions. He pursued further the tendency in the Academy to mathematicize reality that so annoyed Aristotle, postulating a complicated metaphysics, which started from a ‘One’ superior to being and all other qualities, and a material principle, ‘multiplicity’, from the union of which arose, first number, then geometrical entities, and then soul and the material world. In his hands, Plato’s doctrines of first principles, of Forms, and of the union of Forms with matter, suffered transformations of which we have only imperfect reports. His later influence was greater on Neo-Pythagoreanism than on ‘orthodox’ Platonism, until Plotinus. Further reading Dillon, J. (1977) The Middle Platonists , London: Duckworth. (Introductory account of Speusippus is given at pages 11–22.) JOHN DILLON
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Page 857 SPINOZA, BENEDICT DE (1632–77) A Dutch philosopher of Jewish origin, Spinoza was born Baruch de Spinoza in Amsterdam. Initially given a traditional Talmudic education, he was encouraged by some of his teachers to study secular subjects as well, including Latin and modern philosophy. Perhaps as a result of this study, he abandoned Jewish practices and beliefs and, after receiving stern warnings, he was excommunicated from the synagogue in 1656. Alone and without means of support, he Latinized his name and took up the trade of lens grinder with the intention of devoting his life to philosophy. He remained in Amsterdam until 1660, lived for the next decade in nearby villages, and in The Hague from 1670 until his death from consumption in 1677. During these years he worked continuously on his philosophy and discussed it with a small circle of friends and correspondents. His masterpiece, Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata ( Ethics Demonstrated in a Geometrical Manner), was completed in 1675; but because of its radical doctrines, it was only published after his death. The full scope of Spinoza’s Ethics is not indicated by its title. It begins with a highly abstract account of the nature of substance, which is identified with God, and culminates in an analysis of human beings, their nature and place in the universe, and the conditions of their true happiness. Written in a geometrical form modelled after Euclid, each of its five parts contains a set of definitions, axioms and propositions which are followed by their demonstrations and frequently by explanatory scholia. The defining feature of Spinoza’s thought is its uncompromising rationalism. Like other philosophers of the time, Spinoza is a rationalist in at least three distinct senses: metaphysical, epistemological and ethical. That is to say, he maintains that the universe embodies a necessary rational order; that, in principle, this order is knowable by the human mind; and that the true good for human beings consists in the knowledge of this order and a life governed by this knowledge. What is distinctive of Spinoza’s brand of rationalism, however, is that it allows no place for an inscrutable creator-God distinct from his creation, who acts according to hidden purposes. Instead, Spinoza boldly identifies God with nature, albeit with nature regarded as this necessary rational order rather than as the sum-total of particular things. In its identification of God with nature, Spinoza’s philosophy is also thoroughly naturalistic and deterministic. Since nature (as infinite and eternal) is all-inclusive and all-powerful, it follows that nothing can be or even be conceived apart from it: this means that everything, including human actions and emotions, must be explicable in terms of nature’s universal and necessary laws. Moreover, given this identification, it also follows that knowledge of the order of nature specified through these laws is equivalent to the knowledge of God. Thus, in sharp opposition to the entire Judaeo-Christian tradition, Spinoza claims that the human mind is capable of adequate knowledge of God. The attainment of such knowledge is, however, dependent on the use of the correct method. In agreement with Descartes and Thomas Hobbes (the two modern philosophers who exerted the greatest influence on his thought) and thoroughly in the spirit of the scientific revolution, Spinoza held that the key to this method lies in mathematics. This conviction is obviously reflected in the geometrical form of the Ethics ; but it actually runs much deeper, determining what for Spinoza counts as genuine knowledge as opposed to spurious belief. More precisely, it means that an adequate understanding of anything consists in seeing it as the logical consequence of its cause, just as the properties of a geometrical figure are understood by seeing them as the logical consequence of its definition. This, in turn, leads directly to the complete rejection of final causes, that is, the idea that things in nature (or nature as a whole) serve or have an end, and that understanding them involves understanding their end. Not only did Spinoza reject final causes as unscientific, a view which he shared with most proponents of the new science, he also regarded it as the source of superstition and a major obstacle to the attainment of genuine knowledge. The same spirit underlies Spinoza’s practical philosophy, which is marked by his clinical, dispassionate analysis of human nature and behaviour. In contrast to traditional moralists (both religious and secular), he rejects any appeal to a set of absolute values that are independent of human desire. Since the basic desire of every being is self-preservation, virtue is identified with the capacity to preserve one’s being, the good with what is truly useful in this regard and the bad with what is truly harmful. In the case of human beings, however, what is truly useful is knowledge; so virtue consists essentially in knowledge. This is because knowledge is both the major weapon against the passions (which are the chief sources of human
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Page 858 misery) and, in so far as it is directed to God or the necessary order of nature, the source of the highest satisfaction. Apart from the Ethics, Spinoza is best known for his contributions to the development of an historical approach to the Bible and to liberal political theory. The former is contained in the Tractatus Theologicopoliticus ( Theological-Political Treatise ), which he published anonymously in 1670 as a plea for religious toleration and freedom of thought. The latter is contained both in that work and in the unfinished Tractatus Politicus ( Political Treatise ) of 1677, in which Spinoza attempts to extend his scientific approach to questions in political philosophy. See also: ETHICS; WILL, THE Further reading Donagan, A. (1989) Spinoza, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (Good, scholarly introduction to Spinoza’s thought.) Spinoza, B. de (1677) Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata (Ethics Demonstrated in a Geometrical Manner), in The Collected Works of Spinoza , vol. 1, ed. and trans. E. Curley, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985. (Spinoza’s major systematic work.) HENRY E. ALLISON SPLIT BRAINS Severing the direct neural connections between the two cerebral hemispheres produces a ‘split brain’. Does it also multiply minds? The most extensive tests of the psychological results of this operation were conducted by Roger Sperry and his colleagues. He concluded that split-brain patients have ‘Two separate spheres of conscious awareness, two separate conscious entities or minds, running in parallel in the same cranium, each with its own sensations, cognitive processes, learning processes, memories and so on’. Sperry’s view faces both conservative and radical challenges. The conservative challenge is that the results of the tests do not imply that split-brain patients have two minds and are two persons. The radical challenge is that the operation does not multiply minds but, instead, reveals a startling fact: human beings with intact commissures already have two spheres of consciousness, house two minds, and are two persons. See also: MIND, BUNDLE THEORY OF; CONSCIOUSNESS Further reading Travarthen, C. (ed.) (1990) Brain Circuits and Functions of the Mind: Essays in Honor of Roger W. Sperry, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (A representative sample of the psychological and neuroscientific work inspired, in part, by the split-brain phenomena; some of the articles require some advanced technical knowledge.) CHARLES MARKS SPORT AND ETHICS Ethical controversies have formed some of the liveliest debate in the philosophy of sport. Some of the issues arise out of the very nature of sport as a rule-governed activity, especially since the breaking of those rules often presents opportunities for competitive advantage. Other debates concern overemphasis on winning, which can lead to various forms of cheating. The ‘problem of winning’ is clearly related to the larger problem of competition itself, which has led to lively dialogue over whether competition in athletics inevitably causes alienation. Finally, one of the most provocative controversies has been over the question of performance-enhancing drugs and whether they should be banned. See also: SPORT, PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Fraleigh, W. (1984) Right Actions in Sport: Ethics for Contestants , Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics Publishers. (A comprehensive look at problems in sport ethics) DREWA. HYLAND SPORT, PHILOSOPHY OF The philosophy of sport as a separate area of philosophy is largely a phenomenon of the second half of the twentieth century, although previous philosophers, back to the ancient Greeks, occasionally made reference to sport or used it as an example in a larger point. Within the philosophy of sport, a number of sub-areas have emerged as important: sport and ethics, questions concerning sport and society, the issue of self-knowledge in sport, the mind–body problem as it relates to sport, sport and art, and the controversy over the possibility of defining certain key terms within sport, such as sport, game, play and athletics. Within the area of sport and society, several major debates have arisen. The first is about whether sport teaches values and, if so, whether the values taught are desirable or not. Second, considerable attention
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Page 859 sport. Third, attention has been directed to the phenomenon of the athlete as cultural hero. The relevance to sport of the age-old philosophical issue of self-knowledge is manifest, with a number of different construals of what counts as self-knowledge emerging as important. Attention has been paid to self-knowledge in the psychological sense, self-knowledge as manifested in Zen thought and selfknowledge in the Socratic sense, among others. The mind– body problem, also an old philosophic issue, has clear relevance within the domain of sport. Dualism, physicalism and phenomenological accounts have all been represented, the latter being the most dominant and persuasive so far. Further reading Herrigel, E. (1953) Zen in the Art of Archery, New York: Vintage Books. (This is the first and best of those books that relate Zen teachings to sport experience.) Weiss, P. (1969) Sport: A Philosophic Inquiry , Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. (The first book by a major philosopher devoted explicitly to the philosophy of sport. Both widely praised and criticized, the book did much to get philosophy of sport established as a discipline.) DREWA. HYLAND SRI AUROBINDO see AUROBINDO GHOSE STAËL, GERMAINE, MME DE see STAËL-HOLSTEIN, ANNE-LOUISE-GERMAINE, MME DE STAËL-HOLSTEIN, ANNELOUISE-GERMAINE, MME DE (1766–1817) Staël was a French woman of letters, whose corpus includes novels, plays, memoirs, criticism and works of historical and sociological observation. As a novelist and critic, Staël is perhaps best known as a forerunner of the Romantic movement in French literature, and for her typology of European culture. However, her extensive body of work also included a perfectibilist philosophy of history; an account of German character and literature containing an influential survey of contemporary philosophy; and a liberal defence of the French Revolution, in which Staël had been an active participant. See also: GERMAN IDEALISM Further reading Herold, J.C. (1959) Mistress to an Age. A Life of Madame de Staël, London: Hamish Hamilton. (A biographical introduction.) Staël-Holstein, A.-L.-G., Mme de (1987) Major Writings of Madame de Staël, trans. and with intro. by V. Folkenflik, New York: Columbia University Press. (Translated excerpts from a wide variety of Staël’s works.) DAVID LEOPOLD STAIR, JAMES DALRYMPLE, VISCOUNT (1619–95) An outstanding lawyer, senior judge, politician, and the founding father of modern Scots Law, Stair is also an interesting, if minor, philosopher of law of the seventeenth century. Stair believed that law is an inherently rational discipline and that its content can be derived from the principles of natural law which are self-evident to all humans. Stair led an active life at the heart of public affairs in seventeenthcentury Scotland, finishing up as the chief judge of the supreme civil court. Born in Ayrshire, Scotland, he became a teacher at Glasgow University in 1641, was called to the Bar in 1648, became Judge in the Scots Cromwellian Court 1657, Vice President of the Court of Session 1660, Lord President of the Court of Session (Scotland’s most senior judge) 1671, exiled to Holland 1682, and reappointed Lord President in 1689 subsequent to the ‘Glorious Revolution’. Further reading Campbell, A.H. (1954) The Structure of Stair’s Institutions , David Murray Lecture, no. 98, Glasgow: Glasgow University Publications. (Influence of Aristotle and Pufendorf in Stair’s thought.) Stair, J.D. (1681) Institutions of the Law of Scotland , 2nd edn, substantially revised, 1693; ed. D.M. Walker Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981. (D.M. Walker’s standard modern edition based on the 1693 edition, not on later revisions by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century editors.) SCOTT C. STYLES STATE, THE States are inescapable, powerful and fundamentally important in the modern world. They spend a substantial portion of their members’ wealth; they tax, confiscate or compulsorily purchase private property; conscript; impose punishments, including capital punishment; defend their members from aggression and
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Page 860 protect their rights; and provide educational, health and other essential social services. States are also central to modern political philosophy, and figure in its main topics. For instance, the various theories of social justice concern which principle or principles of justice should be followed by states. Again, discussions of the rights of individuals, or of groups, presuppose states to make the preferred rights effective. The answers to traditional questions, such as whether one is morally obliged to obey the laws of a state, or whether freedom is reduced by the state or made possible by it, must depend in part on what a state is taken to be. The principal features of the modern state are basically agreed upon (population, territory, effective and legitimate government, independence). But there are underlying assumptions needing notice, and many questions about the state, especially concerning its proper activities, are controversial and disputed. Moreover, the value of the state can be challenged, and its future doubted, especially in the light of increasing economic and political globalization and moral cosmopolitanism. Further reading d’Entréves, A.P. (1967, 1969) The Notion of the State: An Introduction to Political Theory , Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Useful systematic survey of the basic ideas and issues, set in the perspective of the history of political thought.) Hoffman, J. (1995) Beyond the State: An Introductory Critique , Cambridge: Polity Press. (Valuably sceptical discussion of the worth of and need for states, investigating alternatives ‘beyond’ them.) PETER P. NICHOLSON STATISTICS The discipline of statistics encompasses an extremely broad and heterogeneous set of problems and techniques. We deal here with the problems of statistical inference, which have to do with inferring from a body of sample data (for example, the observed results of tossing a coin or of drawing a number of balls at random from an urn containing balls of different colours) to some feature of the underlying distribution from which the sample is drawn (for example, the probability of heads when the coin is tossed, or the relative proportion of red balls in the urn). There are two conflicting approaches to the foundations of statistical inference. The classical tradition derives from ideas of Ronald Fisher, Jerzy Neyman and Egon Pearson and embodies the standard treatments of hypothesis testing, confidence intervals and estimation found in many statistics textbooks. Classicists adopt a relative-frequency conception of probability and, except in special circumstances, eschew the assignment of probabilities to hypotheses, seeking instead a rationale for statistical inference in facts about the error characteristics of testing procedures. By contrast, the Bayesian tradition, socalled because of the central role it assigns to Bayes’ theorem, adopts a subjective or degree-of-belief conception of probability and represents the upshot of a statistical inference as a claim about how probable a statistical hypothesis is in the light of the evidence. See also: INDUCTION, EPISTEMIC ISSUES; STATISTICS AND SOCIAL SCIENCE Further reading Hodges, J.L. and Lehmann, E.L. (1970) Basic Concepts of Probability and Statistics , San Francisco, CA: Holden-Day. (Well-known textbook at a relatively elementary level which describes basic ideas in probability theory and statistical inference from a classical perspective.) Lindley, D.V. (1956) Introduction to Probability and Statistics from a Bayesian Viewpoint, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Systematic exposition of the Bayesian approach by one of its best-known defenders.) JAMES WOODWARD STATISTICS AND SOCIAL SCIENCE There are a number of distinct uses for statistics in the social sciences. One use is simply to provide a summary description of complicated features in a population. A second use of statistics is to predict (some) features of a unit or group in a population, given other features of the unit or group. For example, a company may charge lower health insurance rates for people who do not smoke, because smokers have a lower risk of lung cancer. Some companies could also charge lower health insurance rates for people who do not have a heavy cough, because the probability of having lung cancer is lower for such people. Predictions can be made by developing a probabilistic model of the joint distribution of incidence of smoking, lung cancer, and incidence of heavy coughs in the population. A third use of statistics is to help predict the probable effects of adopting different policies.
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Page 861 For example, the government may consider a number of alternative policies for reducing the rate of lung cancer. One policy would ban smoking. Another policy would make everyone who coughs take cough medicine. Both smoking and coughing are predictors of lung cancer. But because smoking is a cause of lung cancer, while coughing is an effect of lung cancer, the first policy seems as if it might achieve the desired effect, while the second does not. In order to answer policy questions we need to know not only how the variables are distributed in the actual population, but also how they are causally related. A causal model specifies the causal relations between features in a population, as well as specifying a probability distribution of the features. Statistical information together with causal information can be used to predict the effects of adopting a certain policy. A fourth use of statistics is in helping decide which policies should be adopted in order to achieve specific goals. Such decisions are based not only on the probable effects of each policy, but also on assigning different utilities to each possible outcome. This use of statistics is a branch of decision theory. See also: STATISTICS Further reading Blalock, H.M. (1969) Theory Construction: From Verbal to Mathematical Formulations, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. (An elementary introduction to formulation social science models.) Fisher, R. (1990) Statistical Methods, Experimental Design, and Scientific Inference , Oxford: Oxford University Press. (A collection of classic works on experimental design.) PETER SPIRTES STEINER, RUDOLF (1861–1925) The German theosophist Rudolf Steiner held that humanity has passed through an astral and an etheric stage and has possessed intuitive and clairvoyant modes of consciousness. People, he held, once enjoyed psychic powers and existed in forms of matter more rarefied than those that characterize their current successors. Nevertheless, people still exist on four levels, the physical, the etheric, the astral and the spiritual, and earlier psychic skills are retrievable. Steiner, who called this theory ‘anthroposophy’, was particularly influenced by Goethe and theosophy. See also: THEOSOPHY Further reading Steiner, R. (1984) The Essential Steiner , ed. R.A. McDermott, San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row. (Steiner’s publication list contains over two hundred and fifty items; this selection offers a manageable starting point and information as to how to proceed in following up various topics on which he wrote.) KEITH E. YANDELL STEVENSON, CHARLES LESLIE (1908–79) Charles Stevenson’s major contribution to philosophy was his development of emotivism, a theory of ethical language according to which moral judgments do not state any sort of fact, but rather express the moral emotions of the speaker and attempt to influence others. His main argument for his theory was that ‘[a] person who recognizes X to be ‘’good” must ipso facto acquire a stronger tendency to act in its favour than he otherwise would have had’ (1963: 13). Following Hume, Stevenson thought this showed that the belief that something is good must really be no belief at all, but an emotive attitude. See also: EMOTIVE MEANING; MORAL SCEPTICISM Further reading Stevenson, C.L. (1963) Facts and Values: Studies in Ethical Analysis , New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. (A collection of papers. Essay 2 is especially useful as an introduction; essay 11 contains the most mature version of the theory.) JAMES DREIER STEWART, DUGALD (1753–1828) Dugald Stewart was, after Thomas Reid, the most influential figure in the Common Sense School; he was a major influence on Victor Cousin and Théodore Jouffroy in France and on most academic philosophers in the United States. Along with Reid and Cousin, Stewart made the Scottish tradition the dominant philosophy in America for half a century. His Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind and Philosophy of the Active and Moral Powers of Man were his most important works and went through a number of printings. The abridged edition of his Active and Moral Powers was reprinted ten times from 1849 to 1868. Stewart followed Reid in claiming that any philosophy which contravenes the principles of common sense must be false, and the problem
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Page 862 is to discover and eliminate the premise which yields such results. He added the requirement that philosophical propositions must not change the meanings of concepts in ordinary life, and he also added a new dimension to Reid’s agency theory. More than any other writer he emphasized correctly the epistemic similarities between Reid and Immanuel Kant, but he followed Reid in avoiding Kant’s distinction between phenomena and noumena. Stewart disagreed with Reid in avoiding the phrase ‘principles of common sense’ as misleading, rejected his mentor’s realistic interpretation of universals and provided his own nominalistic alternative. He also modified to some extent, though quite cautiously, Reid’s rigid inductivism and made some concessions to a realistic interpretation of scientific hypotheses. Stewart was equipped to discuss issues in the philosophy of science since he was well versed in mathematics and physics, having been professor of mathematics at Edinburgh for ten years before being named professor of moral philosophy. Stewart was arguably the first and finest philosopher of science in the Scottish tradition. See also: COMMON SENSE SCHOOL Further reading Meyer, D.H. (1974) The Instructed Conscience , Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. (Portrays Stewart as ‘the great systematizer’ and shows the impact of the Scottish tradition in shaping the American national ethic.) Stewart, D. (1868) Philosophy of the Active and Moral Powers of Man , ed. J. Walker, Boston, MA: Phillips Sampson. (Walker, of Harvard, abridged Stewart’s book and improved it pedagogically by placing the long appendix on agency theory appropriately in volume 1, book 2.) EDWARD H. MADDEN STIRNER, MAX (1806–56) Max Stirner is the author of Der Einzige und sein Eigentum ( The Ego and Its Own ), first published in Germany in 1844 and best known for its idiosyncrasies of argument and idiom. Stirner condemns modernity as entrenched in religious modes of thought and envisages a positive egoistic future in which individuals are liberated from the tyranny of those ideas and social arrangements which restrict autonomy. The Ego and Its Own was an impulse to the decline of the Hegelian left as a coherent intellectual movement, and played an important role in the genesis of Marxism; Stirner has also been variously portrayed as a precursor of Nietzsche, an individualist anarchist and a forerunner of existentialism. See also: ANARCHISM; EGOISM AND ALTRUISM Further reading Paterson, R.W.K. (1971) The Nihilistic Egoist: Max Stirner, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (An introductory study, especially helpful on the relation between Stirner and later thinkers.) Stirner, M. (1844) Der Einzige und sein Eigentum , trans. S.T. Byington, The Ego and Its Own , ed. D. Leopold, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. (This excellent edition contains a translation of Stirner’s most important work, extensive annotations and a most substantial annotation.) DAVID LEOPOLD STOICISM Stoicism is the Greek philosophical system founded by Zeno of Citium c .300 BC and developed by him and his successors into the most influential philosophy of the Hellenistic age. It views the world as permeated by rationality and divinely planned as the best possible organization of matter. Moral goodness and happiness are achieved, if at all, by replicating that perfect rationality in oneself, and by finding out and enacting one’s own assigned role in the cosmic scheme of things. The leading figures in classical, or early, Stoicism are the school’s first three heads: Zeno of Citium, Cleanthes and Chrysippus. It is above all the brilliant and indefatigable Chrysippus who can be credited with building Stoicism up into a truly comprehensive system. ‘Early Stoicism’ is in effect largely identical with his philosophy. No formal philosophical writings of the early Stoics survives intact. We are mainly dependent on isolated quotations and secondary reports, many of them hostile. Nevertheless, the system has been reconstructed in great detail, and, despite gaps and uncertainties, it does live up to its own selfdescription as a unified whole. It is divided into three main parts: physics, logic and ethics. The world is an ideally good organism, whose own rational soul governs it for the best. Any impression of imperfection arises from misleadingly viewing its parts (including ourselves) in isolation, as if one were to consider the interests
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Page 863 of the foot in isolation from the needs of the whole body. The entire sequence of cosmic events is preordained in every detail. Being the best possible sequence, it is repeated identically from one world phase to the next, with each phase ending in a conflagration followed by cosmic renewal. The causal nexus of ‘fate’ does not, however, pre-empt our individual responsibility for our actions. These remain ‘in our power’, because we, rather than external circumstances, are their principal causes, and in some appropriate sense it is ‘possible’ for us to do otherwise, even though it is predetermined that we will not. At the lowest level of physical analysis, the world and its contents consist of two coextensive principles: passive ‘matter’ and active ‘god’. At the lowest observable level, however, these are already constituted into the four elements earth, water, air and fire. Air and fire form an active and pervasive life force called pneuma or ‘breath’, which constitutes the qualities of all bodies and, in an especially rarefied form, serves as the souls of living things. ‘Being’ is a property of bodies alone, but most things are analysed as bodies – even moral qualities, sounds, seasons and so forth – since only bodies can causally interact. For example, justice is the soul in a certain condition, the soul itself being pneuma and hence a body. A scheme of four ontological categories is used to aid this kind of analysis. In addition, four incorporeals are acknowledged: place, void, time and the lekton (roughly, the expressed content of a sentence or predicate). Universals are sidelined as fictional thought constructs, albeit rather useful ones. The world is a physical continuum, infinitely divisible and unpunctuated by any void, although surrounded by an infinite void. Its perfect rationality, and hence the existence of an immanent god, are defended by various versions of the Argument from Design, with apparent imperfections explained away, for example, as blessings in disguise or unavoidable concomitants of the best possible structure. ‘Logic’ includes not only dialectic, which is the science of argument and hence logic in its modern sense, but also theory of knowledge, as well as primarily linguistic disciplines like rhetoric and grammar. Stoic inferential logic takes as its basic units not individual terms, as in Aristotelian logic, but whole propositions. Simple propositions are classified into types, and organized into complex propositions (for example, conditionals) and complete arguments. All arguments conform to, or are reducible to, five basic ‘indemonstrable’ argument formats. The study of logical puzzles is another central area of Stoic research. The Stoics doggedly defended, against attacks from the sceptical Academy, the conviction that cognitive certainty is achieved through ordinary sensory encounters, provided an entirely clear impression ( phantasia ) is attained. This, the ‘cognitive impression’ ( phantasia katalēptikē ), is one of such a nature that the information it conveys could not be false. These self-certifying impressions, along with the natural ‘preconceptions’ ( prolēpseis) which constitute human reason, are criteria of truth, on which fully scientific knowledge ( epistēmē) – possessed only by the wise – can eventually be built. Stoic ethics starts from oikeiōsis , our natural ‘appropriation’ first of ourselves and later of those around us, which makes other-concern integral to human nature. Certain conventionally prized items, like honour and health, are commended by nature and should be sought, but not for their own sake. They are instrumentally preferable, because learning to choose rationally between them is a step towards the eventual goal of ‘living in agreement with nature’. It is the coherence of one’s choices, not the attainment of their objects, that matters. The patterns of action which promote such a life were systematically codified as kathēkonta , ‘proper functions’. Virtue and vice are intellectual states. Vice is founded on ‘passions’: these are at root false value judgments, in which we lose rational control by overvaluing things which are in fact indifferent. Virtue, a set of sciences governing moral choice, is the one thing of intrinsic worth and therefore genuinely ‘good’. The wise are not only the sole possessors of virtue and happiness, but also, paradoxically, of the things people conventionally value – beauty, freedom, power, and so on. However geographically scattered, the wise form a true community or ‘city’, governed by natural law. The school’s later phases are the ‘middle Stoicism’ of Panaetius and Posidonius (second to first century BC) and the ‘Roman’ period (first to second century AD) represented for us by the predominantly ethical writings of Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. See also: CLEOMEDES; EPICTETUS; MUSONIUS RUFUS Further reading Long, A.A. and Sedley, D.N. (1987) The Hellenistic Philosophers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Volume 1 contains
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Page 864 Stoic sources in translation with commentary; volume 2 has the original texts.) Sandbach, F.H. (1975) The Stoics , London: Chatto & Windus. (An outstandingly accessible introduction.) DAVID SEDLEY STRATO (d. c .269 BC) The third head of Aristotle’s school, from c.287 to c .269 BC, Strato has been regarded as substituting materialism for Aristotelian metaphysics, mechanism for teleology, atheism for theology and empiricism for intuition; and he has been blamed for the decline of Aristotle’s school, or (less often) praised for his adoption of a more scientific outlook, especially in psychology. However, on some issues at least it may be more a matter of a selective emphasis of certain parts of Aristotle’s teachings than of conscious and deliberate anti-Aristotelianism. None of Strato’s writings survives. Further reading Annas, J.E. (1992) Hellenistic Philosophy of Mind, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. (Discusses Strato’s doctrine of soul and pneuma.) R.W. SHARPLES STRAUSS, DAVID FRIEDRICH (1808–74) The Christian faith rests upon two major beliefs: the existence of a God who created the universe, and the claim that in the historical person of Jesus of Nazareth this God in a unique way entered into world history. Like the two foci of an ellipse, these beliefs, which may be designated the metaphysical and the historical, constitute the fundamental foundation of the Christian faith. Th German theologian Strauss was the first major theological figure to openly challenge this foundation. The revolutionary Das Leben Jesu ( Life of Jesus ), which appeared in 1835, was Strauss’ attempt to disprove these two fundamental beliefs from a point of view which no longer accepted the old orthodox dogmas. As an alternative explanation to a divine Christ, Strauss posited a mythological Jesus; in his lifelong search to find a substitute for theism, Strauss moved through a philosophy of nature to Hegelianism, atheism and finally Darwinism. Further reading Cromwell, R.S. (1974) David Friedrich Strauss and his Place in Modern Thought, Fairlawn, NJ: Burdick. (A well-written account of Strauss’ life and historical background.) Strauss, D.F. (1835–6) Das Leben Jesu , Tübingen: Osiander; trans. M.A. Evans (George Eliot, 1846), Life of Jesus , Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, 1972. (The work which made Strauss famous and initiated the ‘quest’ for the historical Jesus. Translation reprinted 1892, 1898 and 1972, the last with an introduction by Peter C. Hodgson.) HORTON HARRIS STRAUSS, LEO (1899–1973) Leo Strausswas a German-Jewish émigré political philosopher and historian of political thought, who wrote some fifteen books and eighty articles on the history of political thought from Socrates to Nietzsche. Strauss was no ordinary historian of ideas; he used the history of thought as a vehicle for expressing his own ideas. In his writings, he contrasted the wisdom of ancient philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle with the foolhardiness of modern philosophers such as Hobbes and Locke. He thought that the loss of ancient wisdom was the reason for the ‘crisis of the West’ – an expression that was in part a reference to the barbarities of the Holocaust. He therefore sought to recover the lost wisdom. He studied the classics and was a great devotee of Plato and Aristotle. However, he developed unusual interpretations of classical texts. Further reading Bloom, A. (1987) The Closing of the American Mind, New York: Simon & Schuster. (This best-selling book is a popularization of Strauss’ thought by one of his students.) Strauss, L. (1952) Persecution and the Art of Writing , Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (His best account of the esoteric/ exoteric thesis.) SHADIA B. DRURY STRAWSON, PETER FREDERICK (1919–) Strawson taught at the University of Oxford from 1947, becoming Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy in 1968, and retiring in 1987. A sequence of influential books and articles established him as one of the leading philosophers in Oxford during that period. He had a crucial role in the transition there from the dominance of Austin and linguistic philosophy in the 1950s to the more liberal and metaphysical approaches in the 1960s and later. The principal topics about which he has written
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Page 865 are the philosophy of language, metaphysics, epistemology and the history of philosophy. Strawson became famous with ‘On Referring’ (1950), in which he criticized Russell for misconstruing our ordinary use of definite descriptions. Strawson endorses the slogan ‘ordinary language has no exact logic’, a viewpoint which is explored in Introduction to Logical Theory (1952). He argues that the utility of formal logic in its application to ordinary speech does not imply that the meaning of ordinary language is captured by the semantics of standard formal systems. In Individuals (1959), Strawson’s most discussed work, his task is descriptive metaphysics. He attempts to describe the referentially basic subject matter of our thought. They are relatively enduring, perceptible and reidentifiable bodies. The other element in the basic framework is what Strawson calls persons, enduring entities with both material and psychological features. In The Bounds of Sense (1966), Strawson continued the development of his metaphysical and epistemological ideas, by combining a critical study of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason , with the defence of some transcendental claims similar to Kant’s. To think of oneself as an enduring subject of experience requires that one recognize objects which are independent of oneself. So the major epistemological problem in the empiricist tradition, of building up to the external world from private experiences, cannot arise. Skepticism and Naturalism; Some Varieties (1985a) studies the conflicts between fundamental opinions which are natural to us, such as that we know things, and philosophical viewpoints claiming that these opinions are mistaken. Strawson argues that scepticism about these natural views can and should be resisted. Throughout his career, Strawson has tried to describe the basic content of our thoughts and experiences, to counter scepticism about or revisions of such thoughts, to illuminate them by making analytical connections between their basic elements, as well as investigating language, our vehicle for expressing these thoughts. He has linked his explorations to the insights of philosophers of the past, while engaging in critical debate with the period’s other leading philosophers, such as Austin, Quine, Davidson and Dummett. Further reading Sen, P.B. and Verma, R.R. (eds) (1995) The Philosophy of P.F. Strawson , NewDelhi: Indian Council of Philosophical Research. (A collection of articles on Strawson by, among others, Putnam, Dummett, Platts and Cassam, with replies by Strawson.) Strawson, P.F. (1959) Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics , London: Methuen. (Strawson’s highly original essay in descriptive metaphysics. Part 1 tries to determine the role of bodies and of persons in our thought, and Part 2 links the subject–prediacte distinction to these roles.) PAUL F. SNOWDON STRUCTURALISM The term ‘structuralism’ can be applied to any analysis that emphasizes structures and relations, but it usually designates a twentieth-century European (especially French) school of thought that applies the methods of structural linguistics to the study of social and cultural phenomena. Starting from the insight that social and cultural phenomena are not physical objects and events but objects and events with meaning, and that their signification must therefore be a focus of analysis, structuralists reject causal analysis and any attempt to explain social and cultural phenomena one-by-one. Rather, they focus on the internal structure of cultural objects and, more importantly, the underlying structures that make them possible. To investigate neckties, for instance, structuralism would attempt to reconstruct (1) the internal structure of neckties (the oppositions – wide/narrow, loud/subdued – that enable different sorts of neckties to bear different meanings for members of a culture) and (2) the underlying ‘vestimentary’ structures or system of a given culture (how do neckties relate to other items of clothing and the wearing of neckties to other socially-coded actions). Ferdinand de Saussure, the founder of structural linguistics, insists that to study language, analysts must describe a linguistic system, which consists of structures, not substance. The physical sound of a word or sign is irrelevant to its linguistic function: what counts are the relations, the contrasts, that differentiate signs. Thus in Morse code a beginner’s dot may be longer than an expert’s dash: the structural relation, the distinction, between dot and dash is what matters. For structuralism, the crucial point is that the object of analysis is not the corpus of utterances linguists might collect, that which Saussure identifies as parole (speech), but the underlying system ( la langue ), a set of formal elements defined in relation to each other and
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Page 866 which can be variously combined to form sentences. Arguing that the analysis of systems of relation is the appropriate way to study human phenomena, that our world consists not of things but of relations, structuralists often claim to provide a new paradigm for the human sciences. In France, structuralism displaced existentialism in the 1960s as a public philosophical movement. Philosophically, proponents of structuralism have been concerned to distinguish it from phenomenology. See also: STRUCTURALISM IN LINGUISTICS; STRUCTURALISM IN LITERARY THEORY; STRUCTURALISM IN SOCIAL SCIENCE Further reading Caws, P. (1988) Structuralism: The Art of the Intelligible , Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. (An account of the foundations of structuralism, with specific reflection on structuralism as philosophy. Clear and disinterested.) Culler, J. (1975) Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature , London: Routledge. (Discussion of the linguistic model and its applicability to literary and other domains. Presumes no prior knowledge of linguistics or philosophy.) JONATHAN CULLER STRUCTURALISM IN LINGUISTICS The term structural linguistics can be used to refer to two movements which developed independently of each other. The first is European and can be characterized as post-Saussurean, since Saussure is generally regarded as its inspiration. The central claim of this movement is that terms of a language of all kinds (sounds, words, meanings) present themselves in Saussure’s phrase ‘as a system’, and can only be identified by describing their relations to other terms of the same language; one cannot first identify the terms of a language and then ask which system they belong to. Moreover, because a language is a system of signs, one cannot identify expression-elements (sounds, words) independently of the contentelements (meanings), so that a study of language cannot be divorced from one of meaning. The second movement is an American one, which developed from the work of Leonard Bloomfield and dominated American linguistics in the 1940s and 1950s. It attached great importance to methodological rigour and, influenced by behaviourist psychology, was hostile to mentalism (any theory which posits an independent category of mental events and processes). As a result, unlike the first movement, it excluded the study of meaning from that of grammar, and tried to develop a methodology to describe any corpus in terms of the distribution of its expression-elements relative to each other. Whereas the first movement provided a model for structuralist thought in general, and had a significant impact on such thinkers as Barthes, Lacan and Lévi-Strauss, the second made a major contribution to the development of formal models of language, however inadequate they may seem now in the light of Chomsky’s criticisms. See also: RUSSIAN LITERARY FORMALISM; STRUCTURALISM IN LITERARY THEORY Further reading Harris, Z.S. (1951) Structural Linguistics, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (A classic; Chapter 2 on methodology is an important statement.) Vahek, J. (1966) The Linguistic School of Prague: An Introduction to its Theory and Practice , Bloomington, IN, and London: Indiana University Press. (An impressive introduction by a member of the School, with a detailed bibliography.) DAVID HOLDCROFT STRUCTURALISM IN LITERARY THEORY ‘Structuralism’ is a term embracing a family of theories that between them address all phenomena of the human world – notably language, literature, cookery, kinship relations, dress, human self-perception. In all these domains, structuralists claim, the observable, apparently separate elements are rightly understood only when seen as positions in a structure or system of relations. The linguist Ferdinand de Saussure is generally recognized as the founder of the structuralist movement. For him semiology – the science of the meaning of natural languages – consists in determining the formal place of any signe within the inclusive system of signs that is language ( langue ), that is, to see it as a ‘difference’ among the system of inseparably linked ‘differences’. Literary significance is treated in a similar way. But both in linguistic and literary studies the existence of a complete and closed system has been largely anticipated, presupposed rather than confirmed, where no more than fragments of the supposed system could ever really be collected.
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Page 867 This itself is a point of serious contention: for one thing, the meaning of any fragment of a would-be system seems, on the structuralist view, not to be defined if the full system is not accessible; for another, there is no way to approximate to the inclusive system to which apparent fragments belong. But if that is so, it is asked, then can structuralism – whether applied to literature or to language in general – be a science at all? See also: STRUCTURALISM; STRUCTURALISM IN LINGUISTICS Further reading Caws, P. (1988) Structuralism: The Art of the Intelligible , Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International. (A reliable overview of the entire movement.) Saussure, F. de (1983) Course in General Linguistics, trans. R. Harris, La Salle, IL: Open Court. (The essential source of structuralism.) JOSEPH MARGOLIS STRUCTURALISM IN SOCIAL SCIENCE Any school of thought in the social sciences that stresses the priority of order over action is ‘structural’. In the twentieth century, however, ‘structuralism’ has been used to denote a European, largely French language, school of thought that applied methods and conceptions of order developed in structural linguistics to a wide variety of cultural and social phenomena. Structuralism aspired to be a scientific approach to language and social phenomena that, in conceiving of them as governed by autonomous law-governed structures, minimized consideration of social-historical context and individual as well as collective action. Structural linguistics was developed in the early part of the twentieth century primarily by the Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure. After the Second World War, it fostered roughly three phases of structural approaches to social phenomena. Under the lead of above all the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, classical structuralism applied structural linguistic conceptions of structure with relatively little transformation to such social phenomena as kinship structures, myths, cooking practices, religion and ideology. At the same time, the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan appropriated Saussure’s conceptual apparatus to retheorize the Freudian unconscious. In the 1960s, a second phase of structural thought, neo-structuralism, extended structural linguistic notions of order to a fuller spectrum of social phenomena, including knowledge, politics and society as a whole. Many of Saussure’s trademark conceptions were abandoned, however, during this phase. Since the 1970s, a third phase of structuralism has advanced general theories of social life that centre on how structures govern action. In so refocusing structural theory, however, the new structuralists have broken with the conception of structure that heretofore reigned in structural thought. See also: POST-STRUCTURALISM IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES Further reading Lévi-Strauss, C. (1958) Anthropologie structurale , Paris: Librairie Plon; trans. C. Jacobson and B.G. Schoepf, Structural Anthropology, New York: Basic Books, 1963. (An accessible and recommended introduction to the dimensions and concerns of classical structuralism.) Robey, D. (ed.) (1973) Structuralism: An Introduction , Oxford: Clarendon Press. (A useful multidisciplinary overview of the subject.) THEODORE R. SCHATZKI SUÁREZ, FRANCISCO (1548–1617) The Spanish Dominican Francisco Suárez was the main channel through which medieval philosophy flowed into the modern world. He was educated first in law and, after his entry into the Jesuits, in philosophy and theology. He wrote on all three subjects. His philosophical writing was principally in the areas of metaphysics, psychology and philosophy of law, but in both his philosophical and theological works he treated many related epistemological, cosmological and ethical issues. While his basic outlook is that of a very independent Thomist, his metaphysics follows along a line earlier drawn by Avicenna (980–1037) and Duns Scotus (1266–1308) to treat as its subject ‘being in so far as it is real being’. By the addition of the word ‘real’ to Aristotle’s formula, Suárez emphasized Aristotle’s division of being into categorial being and ‘being as true’, as well as Aristotle’s exclusion of the latter from the object of metaphysics. Divided into a general part dealing with the concept of being as such, its properties and causes, and a second part which considers particular beings (God and creatures) in addition to the categories of being, Suárez’s metaphysics ends with a notable treatment of mind-dependent beings, or ‘beings of reason’. These last encompass negations, privations and
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Page 868 relations of reason, but Suárez’s treatment centres on those negations which are ‘impossible’ or selfcontradictory. Inasmuch as such beings of reason cannot exist outside the mind, they are excluded from the object of metaphysics and relegated to the status of ‘being as true’. In philosophy of law he was a proponent of natural law and of a theory of government in which power comes from God through the people. He was important for the early development of modern international law and the doctrine of just war. While his brand of Thomism was opposed in his own time and after by some scholastics, especially Dominicans, he had great authority among his fellow Jesuits, as well as other Catholic and Protestant authors. Outside scholasticism, he has influenced a variety of modern thinkers. See also: AQUINAS, T.; ARISTOTELIANISM, RENAISSANCE Further reading Gilson, E. (1952) Being and Some Philosophers, Toronto, Ont.: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2nd edn, 96–107. (Presents Suárez as developing the ‘essentialism’ which he inherited from the metaphysics of Avicenna and Duns Scotus.) Suárez, F. (1597) Disputatio V: Individual Unity and its Principle , trans. J.J.E. Gracia, in Suárez on Individuation, Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1982. (In addition to its own intrinsic worth, this disputation is important for its possible influence on the young Leibniz.) JOHN P. DOYLE SUBJECT, POSTMODERN CRITIQUE OF The critique of the subject in late twentieth-century continental philosophy is associated primarily with the work of Foucault, Derrida, Lacan and Deleuze. Driven by philosophical, political and therapeutic concerns, these thinkers question the subject’s ability to declare itself self-evidently independent of the external conditions of its own possibility, such as the language in which it expresses clear and distinct ideas, the body whose deceptions it fears, and the historical or cultural conditions in which it perceives reason or tyranny. Moreover, they fear that the ethical price of such insistence upon absolute selfpossession is the exclusion and oppression of social groups whose supposed irrationality or savagery represent the self’s own rejected possibilities for change and discovery. Their work draws upon Marxist, Freudian and Nietzschean insights concerning the dependence of consciousness upon its material conditions, unconscious roots, or constituting ‘outside’. However, their use of these influences is guided by a common fidelity to Kant’s search for the ‘conditions of possibility’ underlying subjective experience, as well as his scepticism regarding our capacity to know the self and its motivations as objects ‘in themselves’. See also: ALTERITY AND IDENTITY, POSTMODERN THEORIES OF; POSTMODERNISM Further reading Butler, J. (1987) Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth Century France , New York: Columbia University Press. (Considers desire as a major Hegelian theme adapted into twentieth-century French thought by Kojève and Sartre and radically transformed by Lacan, Deleuze and Foucault.) Fraser, N. (1989) Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory , Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. (Presents debates regarding possible political implications of philosophical critiques of the subject). LAURA HENGEHOLD SUBLIME, THE The origin of the term ‘the sublime’ is found in ancient philosophy, where, for example, Longinus linked it with a lofty and elevated use of literary language. In the eighteenth century, the term came into much broader use, when it was applied not only to literature but also to the experience of nature, whereafter it became one of the most hotly debated subjects in the cultural discourse of that age. The theories of Addison, Burke and Kant are especially significant. Addison developed and extended the Longinian view of the sublime as a mode of elevated self-transcendence, while Burke extended John Dennis’s insight concerning sublimity’s connection with terror and a sense of self-preservation. While Addison and Burke encompassed both art and nature in their approaches, Kant confined the experience of the sublime to our encounters with nature. In his theory, the sublime is defined as a pleasure in the way that nature’s capacity to overwhelm our powers of perception and imagination is contained by and serves to vivify our powers of rational comprehension. It is a distinctive aesthetic experience. In the 1980s and 1990s Kant’s and (to a much
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Page 869 lesser extent) Burke’s theories of the sublime became the objects of a massive revival of interest, in the immediate context of a more general discussion of postmodern society. Kant’s theory, for example, has been used by J.-F. Lyotard and others to explain the sensibility – orientated towards the enjoyment of complexity, rapid change and a breakdown of categories – that seems to characterize that society. See also: NATURE, AESTHETIC APPRECIATION OF Further reading Burke, E. (1757) A Philosophical Inquiry to the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, Oxford: Blackwell, 1987. (A basic and straightforward text.) Weiskel, T. (1976) The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence , Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. (A reasonably accessible discussion of the sublime in relation to literature.) PAUL CROWTHER SUBSTANCE For Aristotle, ‘substances’ are the things which exist in their own right, both the logically ultimate subjects of predication and the ultimate objects of scientific inquiry. They are the unified material objects, as well as the natural stuffs, identifiable in sense-experience, each taken to be a member of a natural species with its ‘form’ and functional essence. Entities in other categories – qualities, actions, relations and so forth – are treated as dependent on, if not just abstracted aspects of, these independent realities. With the rise of mechanistic physics in the seventeenth century, the Aristotelian multiplicity of substances was reduced to universal matter mechanically differentiated. This move sharpened the issue of the relation of mind to the physical world. The consequent variety of ways in which the notion of substance was manipulated by materialists, dualists, immaterialists and anti-dogmatists encouraged later scepticism about the distinction between independent realities and human abstractions, and so idealism. Twentieth-century conceptualism, like some earlier versions of idealism, rejects the distinction altogether, commonly ascribing the logical priority of material things in natural language to the utility of a folk physics, as if they were the theoretical entities of everyday life. As such, their identity and existence are determined only through applications of a theory outdated by modern science. Yet this ‘top-down’, holistic philosophy of language is belied by the detailed insights of traditional logic, which point clearly to a ‘bottom-up’ account of classification and identity, that is an account which recognizes the possibility of perceptually picking out material objects prior to knowledge of their kind or nature, and of subsequently classifying them. The idea that material things are theoretical entities, and that their individuation is accordingly kind-dependent, is a hangover from an atomistic approach to perception which calls on theory to tie sensory information together. A more accurate understanding of sensation as the already integrated presentation of bodies in spatial relations to one another and to the perceiver is consonant with the possibility denied by the idealist– namely, that, with respect to its primitive referents, language and thought are shaped around reality itself, the independent objects given in active sense-experience. That the coherence or discrete unity of material objects has a physical explanation does not mean that physics explains it away. See also: BEING; MATTER Further reading Aristotle ( c . mid 4th century BC) Categories, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, (Revised Oxford Translation), ed. J. Barnes, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, vol. 1, 1984. (Sets out the logical doctrine of substance.) Rorty, R. (1980) Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature , Oxford: Blackwell. (An extreme version of relativistic conceptualism, with sympathetic interpretations of many modern exponents; widely read and influential.) MICHAEL AYERS SUCHON, GABRIELLE (1631–1703) A seventeenth-century French rationalist feminist philosopher and author of two books dealing with many moral, social and political issues, Suchon advocated liberty, knowledge, authority and the possibility of an unmarried life for women. In this she did not employ any ready-made philosophy but created her own. Freedom and knowledge are everyone’s natural rights, understood as rights that get their strength from themselves only and are to be observed everywhere alike. Further reading Bertolini, S. (1977) Gabrielle Suchon: une Écrivaine engagée pour une vie sans engagement (A writer committed to a life without commitment), unpublished dissertation,
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Page 870 Geneva, Faculté des Lettres. (A scholarly essay on Suchon’s Of voluntary single life, containing findings about her life and family background.) MICHÉLE LE DOEUFF SUFFERING Although sometimes identified with pain, suffering is better understood as a highly unpleasant emotional state associated with considerable pain or distress. Whether and how much one suffers can vary in accordance with any meaning attached to the associated pain or distress, or with expectations regarding the future. Because suffering can be affected by thoughts of meaning or of the future, some have focused on this dimension of suffering and asserted that only humans can suffer. But there is a very strong empirical case that many nonhuman animals suffer. The fact of suffering provokes moral concern, especially when suffering is caused unnecessarily, and raises ethical questions, mainly regarding the nature and extent of our obligations to those who suffer. Suffering is also an important source of personal or religious meaning in many people’s lives. See also: EVIL, PROBLEM OF; SUFFERING, BUDDHIST VIEWS OF ORIGINATION OF Further reading Cassell, E. (1991) The Nature of Suffering and the Goals of Medicine, New York: Oxford University Press. (An insightful and well-informed discussion of suffering and its relation to the goals of medicine.) DAVID DeGRAZIA SUFFERING, BUDDHIST VIEWS OF ORIGINATION OF The Sanskrit term pratītyasamutpāda (Pāli, paṭiccasamuppāda) literally translates as ‘arising [of a thing] after encountering [its causes and conditions]’. This term, conventionally translated as ‘dependent origination’, ‘conditioned co-arising’ or ‘interdependent arising’, signifies the Buddhist doctrine of causality. This doctrine is usually applied to explain the origin of suffering ( duhkha) as well as the means of liberation from it. According to the Buddhist tradition, the Buddha discovered the law of dependent origination during his meditation on the night he attained his awakening. According to traditional accounts, he saw all his former lives and the lives of all other beings, understood the principle governing transmigration, and found the way of liberation. He then formulated the so-called Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Noble Path and the Law of Dependent Origination. The twelve elements of the chain of dependent origination were designed to explain the mechanism of entanglement of a sentient being in a wheel of consecutive lives, and, at the same time, to explain how this entanglement is possible without admitting the concept of a permanent principle, like ‘self’, ‘ego’, and the like. These twelve members are: (1) ignorance, (2) formations (volitional dispositions), (3) consciousness, (4) name and form, (5) six bases of cognition, (6) contact, (7) feeling, (8) desire, (9) attachment, (10) existence, (11) rebirth, (12) ageing and death. In addition to the twelvefold formula, there is also the so-called ‘general formula’ of dependent origination, which goes ‘when this is, that arises; when this is not, that does not arise.’ See also: BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY, INDIAN; NIRVĀṆA Further reading Kalupahana, D.J. (1975) Causality: The Central Philosophy of Buddhism , Honolulu, HI: University Press of Hawaii. (A thorough study of the Buddhist concept of causality in the context of non-Buddhist doctrines, with a chapter devoted to the exposition of dependent origination based mostly on Pāli sources.) Murti, T.R.V. (1955) The Central Philosophy of Buddhism: A Study of the Mādhyamika System , London: Unwin, 2nd edn, 1980. (A classic study of the Madhyamaka system of thought; contains discussion of the interpretation of the pratītyasamutpāda doctrine.) MAREK MEJOR AL-SUHRAWARDI, SHIHAB AL-DIN YAHYA (1154–91) Al-Suhrawardi, whose life spanned a period of less than forty years in the middle of the twelfth century AD, produced a series of highly assured works which established him as the founder of a new school of philosophy in the Muslim world, the school of Illuminationist philosophy ( hikmat al-ishraq). Although arising out of the peripatetic philosophy developed by Ibn Sina, alSuhrawardi’s Illuminationist philosophy is critical of several of the positions taken by Ibn Sina, and radically departs from the latter through the creation of a symbolic language to give expression to his metaphysics and cosmology, his ‘science of lights’. The fundamental
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Page 871 constituent of reality for al-Suhrawardi is pure, immaterial light, than which nothing is more manifest, and which unfolds from the Light of Lights in emanationist fashion through a descending order of lights of ever diminishing intensity; through complex interactions, these in turn give rise to horizontal arrays of lights, similar in concept to the Platonic Forms, which govern the species of mundane reality. AlSuhrawardi also elaborated the idea of an independent, intermediary world, the imaginal world ( alam almithal ). His views have exerted a powerful influence down to this day, particularly through Mulla Sadra’s adaptation of his concept of intensity and gradation to existence, wherein he combined Peripatetic and Illuminationist descriptions of reality. See also: ILLUMINATIONIST PHILOSOPHY Further reading Amin Razavi, M. (1997) Suhrawardi and the School of Illumination , Richmond: Curzon. (Clear and intelligent account of the main principles of his thought.) al-Suhrawardi (1186–91) Kitab hikmat al-ishraq (The Philosophy of Illumination), trans H. Corbin, ed. and intro. C. Jambet, Le livre de la sagesse orientale: Kitab Hikmat al-Ishraq , Lagrasse: Verdier, 1986. (Corbin’s translation of the Prologue and the Second Part (The Divine Lights), together with the introduction of Shams al-Din al-Shahrazuri and liberal extracts from the commentaries of Qutb al-Din alShirazi and Mulla Sadra. Published after Corbin’s death, this copiously annotated translation gives to the reader without Arabic immediate access to al-Suhrawardi’s illuminationist method and language.) JOHN COOPER SUICIDE, ETHICS OF Suicide has been condemned as necessarily immoral by most Western religions and also by many philosophers. It is argued that suicide defies the will of God, that it is socially harmful and that it is opposed to ‘nature’. According to Kant, those who commit suicide ‘degrade’ humanity by treating themselves as things rather than as persons; furthermore, since they are the subject of moral acts, they ‘root out’ morality by removing themselves from the scene. In opposition to this tradition the Stoics and the philosophers of the Enlightenment maintained that there is nothing necessarily immoral about suicide. It is sometimes unwise, causing needless suffering, but it is frequently entirely rational and occasionally even heroic. Judging by the reforms in laws against suicide and the reactions to the suicides of prominent persons in recent decades, it appears that the Enlightenment position is becoming very generally accepted. See also: DEATH; MEDICAL ETHICS Further reading Alvarez, A. (1971) The Savage God: A Study of Suicide, London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson. (Historical account of religious and secular attitudes towards suicide, as well as a survey of theories about the causation of suicide.) Battin, M.P. (1982) Ethical Issues in Suicide, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. (Critical survey of all major religious and secular arguments against the justifiability of suicide.) PAUL EDWARDS SUN BIN/SUN PIN/SUN TZU/SUN WU see SUNZI SUNZI Sunzi: The Art of Warfare (or Sunzi bingfa), a text traditionally ascribed to Sun Wu, a contemporary of Confucius, is the most widely read military classic in human history. Although it provides counsel on military strategy and tactics, it is fundamentally a philosophical text, reflecting a way of thinking and living that is distinctively Chinese. The received text has thirteen ‘core’ chapters, but in 1972 an additional six chapters of the original eighty-two-chapter text was recovered from a Han dynasty tomb. In the same tomb, a text called Sun Bin (or Sun Bin bingfa), ascribed to a later descendent of Sun Wu, was also recovered. This work elaborates on the substance of the Sunzi’s military philosophy. See also: CHINESE PHILOSOPHY; WAR AND PEACE, PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Ames, R.T. (1993) Sun-tzu: The Art of Warfare , New York: Ballantine. (A translation and philosophical introduction to this classic based upon a 1972 archaeological find, including the lost six chapters and encyclopedic references.) ROGER T. AMES SUPEREROGATION Supererogatory actions are usually characterized as ‘actions above and beyond the call of duty’. Historically, Catholic thinkers defended
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Page 872 the doctrine of supererogation by distinguishing what God commands from what he merely prefers, while Reformation thinkers claimed that all actions willed by God are obligatory. In contemporary philosophy, it is often argued that if morality is to permit us to pursue our own personal interests, it must recognize that many self-sacrificing altruistic acts are supererogatory rather than obligatory. The need for some category of the supererogatory is particularly urgent if moral obligations are thought of as rationally overriding. There are three main contemporary approaches to defining the supererogatory. The first locates the obligatory/supererogatory distinction within positive social morality, holding that the former are actions we are blameworthy for failing to perform, while the latter are actions we may refrain from performing without blame. The second holds that obligatory actions are supported by morally conclusive reasons, while supererogatory actions are not. On this approach the personal sacrifice sometimes involved in acting altruistically counts against it from the moral point of view, making some altruistic actions supererogatory rather than obligatory. The third approach appeals to virtue and vice, holding that obligatory actions are those failure to perform which reveals some defect in the agent’s character, while supererogatory actions are those that may be omitted without vice. Further reading Heyd, D. (1982) Supererogation: Its Status in Ethical Theory , London: Cambridge University Press. (Avery useful and accessible survey of historical and philosophical issues concerning supererogation.) GREGORY VELAZCO Y TRIANOSKY SUPERVENIENCE Supervenience is used of the relationship between two kinds of properties that things may have. It refers to the way in which one kind of property may only be present in virtue of the presence of some other kind: a thing can only possess a property of the first, supervening kind because it has properties of the underlying kind, but once the underlying kind is fixed, then the properties of the first kind are fixed as well. The supervening features exist only because of the underlying, or ‘subjacent’ properties, and these are sufficient to determine how the supervening features come out. For example, a person can only be good in virtue of being kind, or generous, or possessing some other personal qualities, and an animal can only be alive in virtue of possessing some kind of advanced physical organization. Equally, a painting can onlyrepresent a subject invirtue of the geometrical arrangement of light-reflecting surfaces, and its representational powers supervene on this arrangement. A melody supervenes on a sequence of notes, and the dispositions and powers of a thing may supervene on its physical constitution. Although the word supervenience first appears in twentieth-century philosophy, the concept had previously appeared in discussion of the ‘emergence’ of life from underlying physical complexity. The central philosophical problem lies in understanding the relationship between the two levels. We do not want the relationship to be entirely mysterious, as if it is just a metaphysical accident that properties of the upper level arise when things are suitably organized at the lower level. On the other hand, if the relationship becomes too close so that, for instance, it is a logical truth that once the lower-level properties are in place the upper-level ones emerge, the idea that there are two genuinely distinct levels becomes problematic: perhaps the upper-level properties are really nothing but lower-level ones differently described. If this problem is dealt with, there may still remain difficulties in thinking about the upper-level properties. For example, can they be said to cause things, or explain things, or must these notions be reserved for the lower-level properties? Supposing that only lower-level properties really do any work leads to epiphenomenalism – the idea that the upper-level properties really play no role in determining the course of events. This seems to clash with common-sense belief in the causal powers of various properties that undoubtedly supervene on others, and also leads to a difficult search for some conception of the final, basic or lowest level of fact on which all else supervenes. See also: CAUSATION; SUPERVENIENCE OF THE MENTAL Further reading Hare, R.M. (1952) The Language of Morals, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (The standard introduction of the notion of supervenience into modern debate.) SIMON BLACKBURN SUPERVENIENCE OF THE MENTAL Phenomena of one kind ‘supervene on’ phenomena of another kind just in case differences
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Page 873 with respect to the first kind require differences with respect to the second. G.E. Moore claimed that beauty supervenes on non-aesthetic properties: if one painting is beautiful and another is not, there must be some relevant non-aesthetic difference between them. Supervenience seems to offer the possibility that a property may depend on other properties, without being explicable in terms of them. Contemporary philosophers of mind have employed the idea to capture the relation that appears to obtain between mental and physical properties. Further reading Kim, J. (1993) Supervenience and Mind, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (The most comprehensive treatments of the use of supervenience to formulate non-reductive physicalism.) BARRY LOEWER SUSO, HENRY ( c .1295–1366) Suso was a German Dominican friar and mystic and, with his friend John Tauler, a student of Master Eckhart. The three form the nucleus of the Rhineland school of mysticism. As a lyric poet and troubadour of divine wisdom, Suso explored with psychological intensity the spiritual truths of Eckhart’s mystical philosophy. His devotional works were extremely popular in the later Middle Ages. See also: MEISTER ECKHART Further reading Suso, H. (1328) Das Büchlein der Wahrheit (The Little Book of Truth), ed. K. Bihlmeyer, Heinrich Seuse. Deutsche Schriften , 1907; trans. F. Tobin, The Exemplar, with Two German Sermons , New York: Paulist Press, 1989. (Suso’s first work, an introduction to Meister Eckhart’s mysticism and speculative theology.) JOHN BUSSANICH SWEDENBORG, EMANUEL (1688–1772) Swedenborg was an eighteenth-century Swedish dignitary of considerable learning who believed that he had the power to communicate with spirits and angels and that these beings would help him fulfil the task allotted to him by God, namely to reveal the hidden meaning of Scripture and to usher in the new Church. His thought attracted the critical attention of no less a figure than Immanuel Kant. See also: MYSTICISM, HISTORY OF Further reading Toksvig, S. (1948) Emanuel Swedenborg, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. (An informative and sympathetic intellectual and spiritual biography.) ALISON LAYWINE SYLVESTER, FRANCIS, OF FERRARA see SILVESTRI, FRANCESCO SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM Symbolic interactionism is in the main a US sociological and social psychological perspective that has focused on the reciprocal relationship between language, identity and society. Philosophically it has largely been associated with pragmatists such as James, Mead, Dewey and Pierce, although in the European context it has affinities with hermeneutics and phenomenology. In addition, it has links with various ‘dramaturgical’ approaches to communication that emphasize the interactive processes underpinning the construction, negotiation, presentation and affirmation of the self. In brief, symbolic interactionism is premised on the supposition that human beings are ‘active’ and not ‘reactive’. Although it is not easy to spell out the central propositions of symbolic interactionism in a systematic way, nevertheless, most of its proponents are committed to an interactive view of self and society, that is, they take issue with those views that see the social world as a seamless unity that completely encapsulates and determines individual conduct. See also: MEAD, G.H. Further reading Blumer, H. (1969) Symbolic Interaction, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. (A key text.) Mead, G.H. (1934) Mind, Self and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviourist , Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (Perhaps the most important text in the symbolic interactionist canon.) ARTHUR BRITTAN SYNTAX Syntax (more loosely, ‘grammar’) is the study of the properties of expressions that distinguish them as members of different linguistic categories, and ‘well-formedness’, that is, the ways in which expressions belonging to these categories may be combined to form larger units. Typical syntactic categories include noun, verb and sentence. Syntactic properties have played an
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Page 874 important role not only in the study of ‘natural’ languages (such as English or Urdu) but also in the study of logic and computation. For example, in symbolic logic, classes of well-formed formulas are specified without mentioning what formulas (or their parts) mean, or whether they are true or false; similarly, the operations of a computer can be fruitfully specified using only syntactic properties, a fact that has a bearing on the viability of computational theories of mind. The study of the syntax of natural language has taken on significance for philosophy in the twentieth century, partly because of the suspicion, voiced by Russell, Wittgenstein and the logical positivists, that philosophical problems often turned on misunderstandings of syntax (or the closely related notion of ‘logical form’). Moreover, an idea that has been fruitfully developed since the pioneering work of Frege is that a proper understanding of syntax offers an important basis for any understanding of semantics, since the meaning of a complex expression is compositional, that is, built up from the meanings of its parts as determined by syntax. In the mid-twentieth century, philosophical interest in the systematic study of the syntax of natural language was heightened by Noam Chomsky’s work on the nature of syntactic rules and on the innateness of mental structures specific to the acquisition (or growth) of grammatical knowledge. This work formalized traditional work on grammatical categories within an approach to the theory of computability, and also revived proposals of traditional philosophical rationalists that many twentiethcentury empiricists had regarded as bankrupt. Chomskian theories of grammar have become the focus of most contemporary work on syntax. See also: ANALYTICAL PHILOSOPHY; LANGUAGE OF THOUGHT; LOGICAL FORM Further reading Chomsky, N. (1957) Syntactic Structures, The Hague: Mouton. (Early statement of the formal limitations of various approaches to syntax, mathematical properties of different types of grammars, and the theory of transformational grammar. Very readable.) Sells, P. (1985) Lectures on Contemporary Syntactic Theories , Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University. (Accessible overview and exposition of competing approaches to generative grammar.) STEPHEN NEALE SYSTEMS THEORY IN SOCIAL SCIENCE ‘Systems theory’ is a label for two very different approaches to social analysis. The first was a post-1945 successor to traditional organicist theories of society that for some twenty years dominated US sociology and political science. It was never very popular outside the USA, and is now of largely historical interest; social scientists who aspire to develop a positive science of social interaction have for the past two decades rested their hopes on the individualist analyses provided by rational choice theory. Systems theory in the first sense of the term flourished in US sociology and political science from the late 1940s to the late 1960s, and is especially associated with the names of Talcott Parsons in sociology and David Easton and Gabriel Almond in political science. A systems approach to social analysis was commonly, though not universally, associated with some form of functionalism, especially in the work of Parsons, the leading structural-functionalist of his day. It fell into disrepute along with functionalism, a victim of the changed political climate of the 1960s as much as of its purely intellectual weaknesses. The second form of systems theory is associated especially with the name of Niklas Luhmann, and its leading critic is Jürgen Habermas. The second form is in vigorous life, but not well known in the USA. See also: FUNCTIONALISM IN SOCIAL SCIENCE; STRUCTURALISM IN SOCIAL SCIENCE Further reading Bohman, J. (1991) New Philosophy of Social Science: Problems of Indeterminacy , Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Polity/MIT Press. (Includes introduction to issues concerning collective explanations in the social sciences, including systems theory, with examples.) Parsons, T. (1950) The Social System , London: Routledge, 1991. (The classical statement of Parsonian systems theory; new edition with introduction by Brian Turner.) ALAN RYAN JAMES BOHMAN
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Page 875 T TA HSÜEH see DAXUE TACIT KNOWLEDGE see KNOWLEDGE, TACIT TAGORE, RABINDRANATH (1886–1941) In the flurry of intellectual activity in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Bengal, Rabindranath Tagore became one of the best-known playwrights, poets, novelists, educators and philosophers, winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913. His thought drew on the English Romantics as well as Sanskrit and Bengali writers and movements. Tagore was not a systematic philosopher. He termed his position ‘a poet’s religion’ which valued imagination above reason. He moved between the personal warmth of human relationships to a theistic Divine and belief in an Absolute as a unifying principle. He advocated a thoughtful but active life, criticizing asceticism and ritualism. See also: HINDU PHILOSOPHY; MONISM, INDIAN Further reading Naravane, V. (1977) An Introduction to Rabindranath Tagore , Delhi: Macmillan. (A standard introduction to Tagore from the perspective of a monist philosopher.) Tagore, R. (1931) The Religion of Man, London: Allen & Unwin. (The Hibbert lectures delivered at Manchester University which survey the full range of Tagore’s thought.) ROBERT N. MINOR TAI CHEN see DAI ZHEN TAINE, HIPPOLYTE-ADOLPHE (1828–93) Hippolyte Taine dominated the intellectual life of France in the second half of the nineteenth century. He was seen as the leader of the positivist, empiricist, anti-clerical forces in a period characterized by dramatic advances in science and technology and inspired by the hope that scientific method could be applied to human affairs. Yet at the heart of his life and work was the rationalist, essentialist imperative of Spinoza and of Hegel: to demonstrate the world as system, as necessity, to ‘banish contingency’. The story of his life is the story of the abandonment of this project: it is a long, painful learning experience ending in the acceptance of loss; his richly varied works can be seen as the products of this philosophical journey. See also: HEGELIANISM Further reading Weinstein, L. (1972) Hippolyte Taine, New York: Twayne. (The best full treatment of Taine’s thought in English.) COLIN EVANS TANABE HAJIME (1885–1962) Tanabe Hajime was a central figure of the so-called Kyoto School, and is generally acknowledged to be one of the most important philosophers of modern Japan. He held Kant in high esteem, and used a Neo-Kantian critical methodology in his early studies in epistemology. In the 1920s he was chiefly influenced by Nishida Kitarō’s original cosmological system. He adapted Nishida’s idea of ‘absolute nothingness’ to political situations and, in so doing, contributed much to establishing the foundations of what became the most influential philosophical school in Japan up until the end of the Second World War. See also: KYOTO SCHOOL; LOGIC IN JAPAN Further reading Unno Taitetsu and Heisig, J.W. (eds) (1990) The Religious Philosophy of Tanabe Hajime: The Metanoetic Imperative , Berkeley, CA: Asian Humanities Press. (Record of the International Symposium on Tanabe’s Metanoetics held in Massachusetts, 1989.) HIMI KIYOSHI TAO see DAO TAO TE CHING see DAODEJING TAOIST PHILOSOPHY see DAOIST PHILOSOPHY
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Page 876 foundations of geometry. Some of his logical works, in particular his definition of truth, were also significant contributions to philosophy. He was a successful teacher and a master of writing simply and with great clarity about complicated matters. ROMAN MURAWSKI TARSKI’S DEFINITION OF TRUTH Alfred Tarski’s definition of truth is unlike any that philosophers have given in their long struggle to understand the concept of truth. Tarski’s definition is more clear and precise than any previous definition, but it is also unusual in character and more restricted in scope. Tarski does not provide a general definition of truth. He provides instead a method of constructing, for a range of formalized languages L, definitions of the notions ‘true sentence of L’. A remarkable feature of Tarski’s work on truth is his ‘Criterion T’, which lays down a general condition that any definition of ‘true sentence of L’ must satisfy. Tarski’s ideas have exercised an enormous influence in philosophy. They have played an important role in the formulation and defence of a range of views in logic, semantics and metaphysics. Further reading Quine, W.V. (1970) Philosophy of Logic , Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. (Presents a Tarskian truth definition in detail.) Tarski, A. (1933) Pojęcie prawdy w językach nauk dedukcyjnych , Warsaw; trans. J.H. Woodger (1956), ‘The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages’, in Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics: Papers from 1923 to 1938, ed. J. Corcoran, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 2nd edn, 1983, 152–278. (One of the most fundamental of Tarski’s works, including his famous definition of truth.) ANIL GUPTA TASAN see CHÔNG YAGYONG TAULER, JOHN ( c .1300–1361) Tauler was a Dominican preacher and mystic, the author of seventy-nine vernacular sermons which presented the Neoplatonic speculative mysticism of his teacher Eckhart in more personal and concrete terms. Tauler greatly influenced late medieval mendicant spirituality, Luther, and the German pietists and romantics. His primary aims were to inculcate the spiritual virtues and devotion to God. See also: MEISTER ECKHART Further reading Ozment, S.E. (1969) Homo Spiritualis: A Comparative Study of the Anthropology of Johannes Tauler, Jean Gerson and Martin Luther (1509–16) , Leiden: Brill. (Valuable exploration of Tauler’s mysticism and its influence.) JOHN BUSSANICH AL-TAWHIDI, ABU HAYYAN ( c .930–1023) Al-Tawhidi was an Arabic litterateur and philosopher, probably of Persian origin, and author of numerous books which reflect all the main themes of debate and reflection in the cultivated circles of his time. His basic outlook could be defined as a kind of simplified and vulgarized Neoplatonism, influenced by Gnostic elements, with four hypostases: God, Intellect, Soul and Nature. He also has a strong interest in moral questions on both the individual and social level. See also: NEOPLATONISM IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY Further reading Berge, M. (1979) Pour un humanisme vécu: Abu Hayyan al-Tawhidi (Towards a Living Humanism: Abu Hayyan al-Tawhidi), Damascus: Institut Français de Damas, 1979. (A general study of Tawhidi’s life, works and thought, the only such in a European language.) CHARLES GENEQUAND TAXONOMY The fundamental elements of any classification are its theoretical commitments, basic units and the criteria for ordering these basic units into a classification. Two fundamentally different sorts of classification are those that reflect structural organization and those that are systematically related to historical development. In biological classification, evolution supplies the theoretical orientation. The goal is to make the basic units of classification (taxonomic species) identical to the basic units of biological evolution (evolutionary species). The principle of order is supplied by phylogeny. Species splitting successively through time produce a phylogenetic tree. The primary goal of taxonomy since Darwin has been to reflect these successive splittings in a hierarchical classification made up of species, genera, families, and so on.
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Page 877 The major point of contention in taxonomy is epistemological. A recurrent complaint against classifications that attempt to reflect phylogeny is that phylogeny cannot be ‘known’ with certainty sufficient to warrant using it as the object of classification. Instead, small but persistent groups of taxonomists have insisted that classifications be more ‘operational’. Instead of attempting to reflect something as difficult to infer as phylogeny, advocates of this position contend that systematists should stick more closely to observational reality. See also: THEORIES, SCIENTIFIC Further reading Ridley, M. (1986) Evolution and Classification: The Reformation of Cladism, London and New York: Longman. (A philosophical critique of cladistic analysis.) DAVID L. HULL TAYLOR, CHARLES (1931–) Among the most influential of late twentieth-century philosophers, Taylor has written on human agency, identity and the self; language; the limits of epistemology; interpretation and explanation in social science; ethics; and democratic politics. His work is distinctive because of his innovative treatments of long-standing philosophical problems, especially those deriving from applications of Enlightenment epistemology to theories of language, the self and political action, and his unusually thorough integration of ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’ philosophical concerns and approaches. Taylor’s work is shaped by the view that adequate understanding of philosophical arguments requires an appreciation of their origins, changing contexts and transformed meanings. Thus it often takes the form of historical reconstructions that seek to identify the paths by which particular theories and languages of understanding or evaluation have been developed. This reflects both Taylor’s sustained engagement with Hegel’s philosophy and his resistance to epistemological dichotomies such as ‘truth’ and ‘falsehood’ in favour of a notion of ‘epistemic gain’ influenced by H.G. Gadamer. Further reading Taylor, C. (1989) Sources of the Self , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Taylor’s investigation of the genesis of modern Western constructions of the self, emphasizing that agency is only constituted within frameworks of ‘strong evaluation’, and studying how these change with attempts to resolve moral and religious problems.) CRAIG CALHOUN TAYLOR, HARRIET (1807–58) Harriet Taylor was John Stuart Mill’s intellectual collaborator and great love. Married to John Taylor in 1826, Harriet met Mill in 1830 and they began a brazenly unconventional intimacy which lasted throughout her life. Her thoughts on poetry, equality, liberty and individuality shaped Mill’s work on these topics. Further reading Rossi, A. (ed.) (1970) Essays on Sex Equality, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (Contains Taylor’s essays on marriage, ‘The Enfranchisement of Women’ (1851) and ‘The Subjection of Women’ (1869) with an excellent critical preface by Alice Rossi.) CANDACE VOGLER TE see DE TECHNOLOGY AND ETHICS Only within the modern period have philosophers made a direct and sustained study of ethics and technology. Their work follows two philosophical traditions, each marked by distinct styles: the Continental or phenomenological tradition, and the Anglo-American or analytical tradition. Hans Jonas (1979) articulated one of the basic premises of Continental approaches when he argued for technology as a special subject of ethics: because technology has fundamentally transformed the human condition, generating problems of global magnitude extending into the indefinite future, it calls for a new approach to ethics. Jonas’ basic premise is expressed variously in the works of Karl Marx, Max Scheler, José Ortega y Gasset, Martin Heidegger and others. Work within the Anglo-American tradition tends not to deal with technology as a whole but to be organized around particular technologies, such as computing, engineering, and medical and biological sciences. It draws on concepts and principles of traditional ethical theory at least as a starting point for analyses. Although each of the technologies has a unique set of problems, certain themes, such as responsibility, risk, equity and autonomy, are common to almost all. Social scientists have also raised important issues for the field of ethics and technology.
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Page 878 Their work has yielded two dominant schools of thought: technological determinism and social constructivism. Further reading Jonas, H. (1979) The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age, trans. H. Jonas and D. Herr, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984. (Enlargements of human power through technology carry with them expansions of human moral responsibility.) Marcuse, H. (1964) One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society , Boston, MA: Beacon Press. (Important Marxist presentation of technological determinism and moral protest.) CARL MITCHAM HELEN NISSENBAUM TECHNOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY OF The philosophy of technology deals with the nature of technology and its effects on human life and society. The increasing influence of modern technology on human existence has triggered a growing interest in a philosophical analysis of technology. Nevertheless, the philosophy of technology as a coherent field of research does not yet exist. The subject covers studies from almost every branch of thinking in philosophy and deals with a great variety of topics because of a lack of consensus about the primary meaning of the term ‘technology’, which may, among others, refer to a collection of artifacts, a form of human action, a form of knowledge or a social process. Among the most fundamental issues are two demarcation problems directly related to the definition of technology. The first concerns the distinction between technological (artificial) and natural objects. It involves the relation between man, nature and culture. The second pertains to the distinction between science and technology as types of knowledge. The science–technology relationship has become of central importance because of the widespread assumption that the distinguishing feature of modern technology, as compared to traditional forms of technology, is that it is science-based. Another much discussed issue is the autonomy of technology. It deals with the question of whether technology follows its own inevitable course of development, irrespective of its social, political, economic and cultural context. See also: RISK ASSESSMENT Further reading Heidegger, M. (1977) The Question Concerning Technology and other Essays, trans. W. Lovitt, New York: Harper & Row. (Generally considered to be the most outstanding metaphysical analysis of technology.) Rapp, F. (ed.) (1974) Contributions to a Philosophy of Technology, Dordrecht: Reidel. (This anthology marks the beginning of the analytical philosophy of technology and addresses mainly methodological and epistemological issues.) PETER KROES TEILHARD DE CHARDIN, PIERRE (1881–1955) The French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin taught that the evolutionary process is governed by a ‘law of complexification’ which dictates that inorganic matter will reach ever more complex forms, resulting in inorganic matter being followed by organic matter and organic matter being followed by conscious life forms. Viewed by observers, humans are material systems within a larger physical system. Viewed introspectively, a human being is a self-conscious creature possessed of freedom and rationality, with the capacity for action and inquiry. Each element in the world has some form of this dual ‘exterior’ aspect and ‘interior’ aspect, though consciousness arises only late in the evolutionary history. Teilhard de Chardin saw neither reason to doubt that matter can give rise to mind, nor any basis for reducing mind to matter. The prospects for humanity are gratifying, as evolution, following the law of complexification with the cooperation of human choice, moves to an Omega point at which Christ’s fullness will include as his ‘body’ a unified humanity that is at peace. Scientific critics of Teilhard de Chardin’s theory have charged that his optimism involves extrapolation far beyond what the present evidence warrants. Theological critics have argued that he does not sufficiently consider the degree of evil in the world; optimism can only be justified if we assume that evil can be redeemed by transcendent divine action, because immanent evolutionary processes may not suffice. See also: RELIGION AND SCIENCE Further reading Cuenot, C. (1965) Teilhard de Chardin , London and Baltimore, MD: Burns, Oates & Helicon. (A
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Page 879 Teilhard de Chardin, P. (1955) Le Phénomène humaine, Paris: Éditions de Seuil; trans. B. Wall, The Phenomenon of Man, London: Collins, 1959. (This is Teilhard de Chardin’s magnum opus, in which he endeavours to unify the data of science and the data of the Christian revelation.) KEITH E. YANDELL TEL QUEL SCHOOL Tel Quel was a review published in Paris from 1960 to 1982. Under the direction of Philippe Sollers, it became a key source of avant-garde work in literature and critical theory. Concerned with the relations between art and politics, the Tel Quel group drew on semiotics, psychoanalysis and Marxism as the bases for an overall theory that would establish writing – écriture – as having itsown specific and necessary revolutionary force. Influential in its emphasis on literary practices seen as breaking with the given social ordering of ‘reality’ and ‘subject’ (the ‘limit-texts’ of writers such as Sade or Artaud), the review emphasized textuality, the condition of all fields of knowledge as textual productions. Less a coherent school of thought than a site of shifting theoretical-political interventions and new explorations in writing, Tel Quel was at its most powerful in the late 1960s and early 1970s. See also: SEMIOTICS; STRUCTURALISM Further reading Kauppi, N. (1990) The Making of an Avant-Garde: Tel Quel , trans. A.R Epstein, Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1994. (A critical examination of the socio-cultural conditions of the review’s appearance, development and importance.) STEPHEN HEATH TELEOLOGICAL ETHICS The Greek telos means final purpose; a teleological ethical theory explains and justifies ethical values by reference to some final purpose or good. Two different types of ethical theory have been called teleological, however. Ancient Greek theories are ‘teleological’ because they identify virtue with the perfection of human nature. Modern utilitarianism is ‘teleological’ because it defines right conduct as that which promotes the best consequences. See also: UTILITARIANISM Further reading Muirhead, J.H. (1932) Rule and End in Morals, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Muirhead was the first to divide ethical theories into the categories ‘teleological’ and ‘deontological’. In this book he discusses the debate between the two types of theories, and urges the onesidedness of both positions.) CHRISTINE M. KORSGAARD TELEOLOGY Teleology is the study of purposes, goals, ends and functions. Intrinsic or immanent teleology is concerned with cases of aiming or striving towards goals; extrinsic teleology covers cases where an object, event or characteristic serves a function for something. Teleological explanations attempt to explain X by saying that X exists or occurs for the sake of Y. Since the question ‘For what purpose. . . ?’ may be construed either intrinsically or extrinsically, such explanations split into two broad types: those that cite goals of an agent, and those that cite functions. The history of Western philosophy and science has been characterized by major debates about the logic, legitimacy and proper domains of these types of explanation. They still raise problems in contemporary biology and psychology. The modern debates have progressed considerably from the earlier ones, although continuities do exist. See also: FUNCTIONAL EXPLANATION Further reading Woodfield, A. (1976) Teleology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Monograph defending a unified analysis of teleological language.) Wright, L. (1976) Teleological Explanations, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. (Monograph arguing that such explanations are a special kind of causal explanation.) ANDREW WOODFIELD TELESIO, BERNARDINO (1509–88) Bernardino Telesio was a philosopher from southern Italy. He was one of the Renaissance philosophers who developed a new philosophy of nature: his most important book was called De rerum natura iuxta propria principia (On the Nature of Things According to Their Own Principles). Telesio approached natural philosophy empirically, and regarded it as a separate field of study from theology and metaphysics. He believed that all natural beings were animate; and, by arguing that the two general principles of heat and cold affected the whole
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Page 880 universe, he resisted the Aristotelian division between the corruptible earth and the eternal heavens. However, despite his apparent anti-Aristotelianism and his sympathy for the Presocratics, Telesio owed much to Aristotle, and tried to transform rather than destroy Aristotle’s work. Telesio became the head of a Calabrian school, and was influential and widely discussed in his own time. Francesco Patrizi criticized him, but with respect; Tommaso Campanella followed him in his early works; and Thomas Hobbes drew inspiration from him. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM, RENAISSANCE Further reading Telesio, B. (1565) De natura iuxta propria principia liber primus et secundus (On Nature According to Its Own Principles), Rome: Antonius Bladus Impressor Cameralis. (The first version of Telesio’s natural philosophy.) Van Deusen, N.C. (1932) Telesio: The first of the moderns , New York: Columbia University Press. (On the life, cosmology, psychology, theology and fortunes of Telesio.) ECKHARD KESSLER TEMPLE, WILLIAM (1881–1944) William Temple became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1942, at the height of the Second World War. He was concerned to unite personal Christian religion and social action, finding in the doctrine of the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ the basis for human dignity. He held that while the universe long existed without finite minds, and finite thought has its origin in the functioning of physical organisms, thought transcends its origins, creating ideas not occasioned by or referring to its physical environment, and purposively affecting that environment. Our capacities to seek truth, appreciate beauty and recognize duty are best explained by a purposive creative Mind using physical creation to bring other minds into existence. Created minds continually depend for their existence on God’s continuing to sustain them. Further reading Iremonger, F. (1948) William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury, London: Oxford University Press. (The standard biography.) Temple, W. (1934) Nature, Man, and God , London: Macmillan. (Gifford Lectures that present a monotheistic and Christian understanding of the development of human beings and the fact of evil.) KEITH E. YANDELL TENNANT, FREDERICK ROBERT (1866–1957) A prolific writer on religion and philosophical theology, Tennant, who was educated and taught at Cambridge, produced book-length studies of topics as diverse as the philosophy of science and the origin of sin. He is best known by philosophers for his two-volume Philosophical Theology (1928, 1930), which offered the most sophisticated version then available of the argument from design for the existence of God. Tennant’s philosophical legacy consists primarily in the influence his methodology has exerted on later philosophical theologians. Further reading Tennant, F.R. (1928, 1930) Philosophical Theology , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2 vols. (Immensely detailed and fairly technical but still readable philosophy of self and soul, of religious experience and knowledge, and the idea of God.) STEPHEN MAITZEN TENSE AND TEMPORAL LOGIC A special kind of logic is needed to represent the valid kinds of arguments involving tensed sentences. The first significant presentation of a tense logic appeared in Prior (1957). Sentential tense logic, in its simplest form, adds to classical sentential logic two tense operators, P and F. The basic idea is to analyse past and future tenses in terms of prefixes ‘It was true that’ and ‘It will be true that’, attached to present-tensed sentences. (Present-tensed sentences do not need present tense operators, since ‘It is true that Jane is walking’ is equivalent to ‘Jane is walking’.) Translating the symbols into English is merely a preliminary to a semantics for tense logic; we may translate ‘P’ as ‘it was true that’ but we still have the question of the meaning of ‘it was true that’. There are at least two versions of the tensed theory of time – the minimalist version and the maximalist version – that can be used for the interpretation of the tense logic symbols. The minimalist version implies that there are no past or future particulars, and thus no things or events that have properties of pastness or futurity. What exists are the things, with their
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Page 881 properties and relations, that can be mentioned in certain present-tensed sentences. If ‘Jane is walking’ is true, then there is a thing, Jane, which possesses the property of walking. ‘Socrates was discoursing’, even if true, does not contain a name that refers to a past thing, Socrates, since there are no past things. The ontological commitments of past and future tensed sentences are merely to propositions, which are sentence-like abstract objects that are the meanings or senses of sentences. ‘Socrates was discoursing’ merely commits us to the proposition expressed by the sentence ‘It was true that Socrates is discoursing’. The maximalist tensed theory of time, by contrast, implies that there are past, present and future things and events; that past items possess the property of pastness, present items possess the property of presentness, and future items possess the property of being future. ‘Socrates was discoursing’ involves a reference to a past thing, Socrates, and implies that the event of Socrates discoursing has the property of being past. See also: INTENSIONAL LOGICS Further reading Prior, A.N. (1957) Time and Modality, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (This classic is the primary source for modern tense logic.) Smith, Q. (1993) Language and Time, New York: Oxford University Press. (An explication and defence of the maximalist tensed theory of time, and criticism of the minimalist tensed theory and the tenseless theory of time.) QUENTIN SMITH TERTULLIAN, QUINTUS SEPTIMUS FLORENS ( c . AD 160–c . AD 220) Tertullian, who was born in Carthage, was the first Christian theological author to write in Latin, and is responsible for initiating the Latin vocabulary of Christian theology, including such important terms as persona (person) and substantia (substance). His early works, including the Apologeticum , refute pagan misconceptions about Christianity and argue on philosophical and juridical grounds for religious freedom. His later theological treatises, such as De anima (On the Soul) and Adversus Marcionem (Against Marcion) reflect Tertullian’s adherence, in about AD 205–6, to Montanism, a Christian sect which emphasized asceticism, apocalypticism and prophecy. These lengthy works represent an effort to oppose those forms of Christianity that sought to ally themselves with Platonism, such as Gnosticism. After these defences of apocalyptic Christianity, Tertullian fades from historical view around AD 220, leaving a legacy of charismatic truculence. See also: GNOSTICISM; PATRISTIC PHILOSOPHY Further reading Sider, R.D. (1971) Ancient Rhetoric and the Art of Tertullian , London: Oxford University Press. (Tertullian and ancient rhetorical traditions.) Tertullian, Q.S.F. ( c . AD 207–12) Adversus Marcionem (Against Marcion), Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum vol. 47, ed. A. Kroymann, Vienna: F. Tempsky, 1906; ed. and trans E. Evans, Adversus Marcionem, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972, 2 vols. (A lengthy refutation of the Gnostic heresy of Marcion.) JOHN PETER KENNEY TESTIMONY Philosophical treatment of the problems posed by the concept of knowledge has been curiously blind to the role played by testimony in the accumulation and validation of knowledge or, for that matter, justified belief. This is all the more surprising, given that an enormous amount of what any individual can plausibly claim to know, whether in everyday affairs or in theoretical pursuits, is dependent in various ways upon what others have to say. The idea that someone can only really attain knowledge if they get it entirely by the use of their own resources provides a seductive ideal of autonomous knowledge that may help explain the way epistemologists have averted their gaze from the topic of testimony. But, unless they are prepared to limit the scope of knowledge dramatically, theorists who support this individualist ideal of autonomy need to explain how our wide-ranging reliance upon what we are told is consistent with it. Characteristically, those who consider the matter acknowledge the reliance, but seek to show that the individual cognizer can ‘justify’ dependence upon testimony by sole resort to the individual’s resources of observation, memory and inference. Testimony is thus viewed as a second-order source of knowledge. But this reductionist project is subject to major difficulties, as can be seen in David Hume’s version. It has problems with the way the proposed justification is structured, with its assumptions about language and with the way the individual’s epistemic resources are already enmeshed with testimony. The success or failure
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Page 882 of the reductionist project has significant implications for other areas of inquiry. See also: SOCIAL EPISTEMOLOGY; TESTIMONY IN INDIAN PHILOSOPHY Further reading Coady, C.A.J. (1992) Testimony: A Philosophical Study, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Extended treatment of the topic that defends a non-reductionist approach to the epistemology of testimony.) Matilal, B.K. and Chakrabarti, A. (1994) Knowing from Words: Western and Indian Philosophical Analysis of Understanding and Testimony, Dordrecht: Kluwer. (Collection of papers discussing issues about testimony from Western and Indian perspectives. In addition to the essays by Dummett and Strawson listed separately here, there are, among others, chapters by Coady, Fricker, Lehrer, Sosa and Welbourne.) C.A.J. COADY TESTIMONY IN INDIAN PHILOSOPHY A prominent topic in Indian epistemology is śābdapramāṇa, knowledge derived from linguistic utterance or testimony. The classical material is extensive and varied, initially concerned with providing grounds for accepting the wisdom of śruti or ‘the heard word’, that is, the canonical scriptures. The Buddhists, however, saw no need for śābdajñāna (information gained through words) as an independent source of knowledge, because any utterance (including the Buddha’s) that has not been tested in one’s own experience cannot be relied upon; and in any case, the operation of such knowledge can be accounted for in terms of inference and perception. The Nyāya, following the Mīmāṃsā, developed sophisticated analyses and a spirited defence of the viability and autonomy of testimony. The problem is recast thus: is śābdapramāṇa linguistic knowledge eo ipso , or does verbal understanding amount to knowledge only when certain specifiable conditions, in addition to the generating conditions, are satisfied? The more usual answer is that where the speaker is reliable and sincere, and there is no evidence to the contrary, the generating semantic and phenomenological conditions suffice to deliver valid knowledge. If doubt arises, then other resources can be utilized for checking the truth or falsity of the understanding, or the reliability of the author (or nonpersonal source), and for overcoming the defects. See also: LANGUAGE, INDIAN THEORIES OF; MEANING, INDIAN THEORIES OF Further readings Matilal, B.K. (1990) The Word and the World: India’s Contribution to the Study of Language, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (The last book to be published before the author succumbed to cancer in Oxford is an eclectic set of reflections on the problem of language and knowledge across Indian thought, from Nyāya–Bhartṛhari holism to Derridean deconstructionism.) Mohanty, J.N. (1992) Reason and Tradition in Indian Thought: An Essay on the Nature of Indian Philosophical Thinking , Oxford: Clarendon Press. (This is about the most authoritative philosophical work to date on reason, rationality and responses to the question of tradition in Indian thought, and is written in a highly accessible style combining analytical and phenomenological idiom.) PURUSHOTTAMA BILIMORIA TETENS, JOHANN NICOLAUS (1736–1807) Tetens was a German philosopher, mathematician and physicist, with a second career as a Danish government official, who was active in Northern Germany and Denmark during the second half of the eighteenth century. Together with Johann Heinrich Lambert and Moses Mendelssohn, Tetens forms the transition from the German school philosophy of Leibniz, Wolff and Crusius to the new, critical philosophy of Kant. Tetens’ philosophical work reflects the combined influence of contemporary German, British and French philosophical currents. His main contribution to philosophy is a detailed descriptive account of the principal operations of the human mind that combines psychological, epistemological and metaphysical considerations. While showing a strong empiricist leaning, Tetens rejected the associationist and materialist accounts of the mind, favoured in Britain and France, and insisted on the active, spontaneous role of the mind in the formation and processing of mental contents. See also: LAMBERT, J.H.; MENDELSSOHN, M. Further reading Beck, L.W. (1969) Early German Philosophy: Kant and his Predecessors, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 412–25. (Contrasts Tetens with Kant.) Kuehn, M. (1987) Scottish Common-sense in Germany, Kingston, NY, and Montreal: McGill University Press,
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Page 883 119–40. (An account of Tetens’ relation to Thomas Reid, James Oswald and James Beattie.) GÜNTER ZÖLLER THALES ( fl. c .585 BC) Known as the first Greek philosopher, Thales initiated a way of understanding the world that was based on reason and nature rather than tradition and mythology. He held that water is in some sense the basic material, that all things are full of gods and (purportedly) that all things possess soul. He predicted an eclipse of the sun and was considered the founder of Greek astronomy and mathematics. See also: DOXOGRAPHY; HESIOD Further reading McKirahan, R.D. (1994) Philosophy before Socrates , Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. (Translation and discussion of source materials; chapter 4 covers Thales.) RICHARD MCKIRAHAN THEMISTIUS ( c . AD 317–c . AD 388) As a pagan philosopher and adviser to Christian Roman emperors, Themistius aimed at making the celebrated writings of his heroes Plato and Aristotle more accessible through explanatory paraphrase. An apostle of cultural Hellenism to his contemporaries, in the Middle Ages he was widely known as an important epitomizer of Aristotle. He taught classical philosophy in Constantinople, and also served in the city’s administration. See also: ARISTOTLE COMMENTATORS; PLATONISM, EARLY AND MIDDLE Further reading Schroeder, F.M. and Todd, R.B. (1990) Two Greek Aristotelian Commentators on the Intellect: The De Intellectu Attributed to Alexander of Aphrodisias and Themistius’ Paraphrase of Aristotle De Anima, 3.4– 8, Toronto, Ont.: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies. (Introduction, translation and commentary.) JOHN BUSSANICH THEOLOGICAL VIRTUES The three theological virtues of faith, hope and love, referred to frequently by the apostle Paul in his letters, play an indispensable role in Christian theorizing about a person’s duties with respect to God. Thomas Aquinas is responsible for the most thorough and influential philosophical theory of the theological virtues. According to him, faith, hope and love are virtues because they are dispositions whose possession enables a person to act well to achieve a good thing – in this case, the ultimate good of salvation and beatitude. Without them, people would have neither the awareness of nor the will to strive for salvation. Despite the fact that they are infused in persons by God’s grace, one can wilfully and culpably fail to let them develop. Faith for Aquinas is the voluntary assent to propositions about God that cannot be known by the evidence available to the natural capacities of humans. Other theologians, such as Martin Luther and Søren Kierkegaard, deny the assumption that faith is primarily cognitive or propositional in nature, insisting instead that it is trust in God. Kierkegaard even challenges the presupposition that faith is logically continuous with natural knowledge. There has been much debate in the second half of the twentieth century as to whether it is ever rationally permissible to believe something on the basis of insufficient evidence. According to Aquinas, hope for one’s salvation requires that one already have faith. Hope requires that one remain steadfast in the face of despair on the one hand and presumption on the other. Aquinas models the virtue of love on one strand of Aristotle’s notion of friendship. Love of God entails desiring the good that God has to offer, seeking to advance God’s goals, and communicating one’s love to God. Love for others follows from the realization that they are also created with good natures by God. See also: FAITH; VIRTUES AND VICES Further reading Augustine (c.423) Faith, Hope and Charity, trans. and with introduction by B.M. Peebles, The Fathers of the Church, vol. 2, Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1947, 355–472. (Often referred to as the Enchiridion , this is perhaps the first sustained treatise on the theological virtues.) Pieper, J. (1986) On Hope, trans.M.F. McCarthy, San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press. (An elementary presentation of Aquinas’ views.) WILLIAM E. MANN THEOLOGY, EXISTENTIALIST see EXISTENTIALIST THEOLOGY THEOLOGY, ISLAMIC see ISLAMIC THEOLOGY
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Page 884 THEOLOGY, POLITICAL The concept of political theology was the subject of important controversies in European, and especially German, philosophy, social science and jurisprudence in the twentieth century. After the First World War, a debate took place between the jurist Carl Schmitt, an influential right-wing critic of parliamentary democracy in the Weimar Republic, and the theologian Erik Peterson. Another debate was occasioned by a new, leftist political interpretation of biblical texts in the years after 1960. In that context, ‘political theology’ designates philosophical positions influenced by neo-Marxist philosophies, such as the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. The earlier controversy between Schmitt and Peterson played a role in this later debate as well. Johann Baptist Metz is probably the most important representative of political theology in the later controversy. See also: RELIGION AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY Further reading Bendersky, J.W. (1983) Carl Schmitt, Theorist for the Reich , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (General introduction with bibliography.) MATTHIAS LUTZ-BACHMANN THEOLOGY, RABBINIC The Talmud, a shelf of folio volumes built up out of the expansive reflections of generations of scholar/thinkers whose discourse formed a commentary or complement (Gemara) to the ancient legal code of the Mishnah, encapsulates rabbinic sayings and discussions dating from before the first century to around 600. The monotheistic idea of God affords a key perspective on the Talmud’s variegated themes: God’s uniqueness and ultimacy preclude any easy direct commerce between the human and the divine. Literal contact may be endlessly deferred; yet God remains ever present and ever active in human life. Rabbinic thought, textually represented in the Talmud and in the institutions it fosters, seeks to mediate God’s ‘absent presence’ to a community of believers in a way that renders manifest the penetration of divine concern into every cranny of human consciousness without compromising God’s transcendence or explanatory uniqueness. See also: HALAKHAH; MIDRASH Further reading Kaddushin, M. (1972) The Rabbinic Mind, New York: Bloch, 3rd edn. (Focuses on ‘normal mysticism’ – the rabbinic theological approach that domesticates divine distance and integrates it into a fabric of daily living.) ARYEH BOTWINICK THEOPHRASTUS ( c .372–c .287 BC) Theophrastus, the pupil and successor of Aristotle, shared all the latter’s interests, and produced a large number of works on the same topics. Some, like the extant botanical works, went far beyond Aristotle, and Theophrastus is known as the Father of Botany; others amplified and criticized what Aristotle had done. The short Metaphysics, also extant, raises many questions about the nature and the possibility of metaphysics, but most of his work on logic, science, psychology, ethics, politics and religion survives only in fragments, some material coming from the Arabs, and some only from medieval Latin sources. His developments of modal logic and various forms of the syllogism were regarded as important, and his amplification of Aristotle’s account of the human intellect was studied in the Middle Ages in the West. His little Characters , an entertaining set of sketches of human peculiarities, has had considerable influence on later literature, and his surveys of earlier opinions, of which his On the Senses survives, influenced later doxographers. He was an older contemporary of Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, but his influence on Stoicism remains uncertain, and we also know little of his relationship with Epicurus. Further reading Theophrastus ( c .372–287 BC) On the Senses, trans. in G.M. Stratton, Theophrastus and the Greek Physiological Psychology before Aristotle , London: Allen & Unwin, 1917; repr. Amsterdam: Grüner, 1964. (A study of earlier theories of perception. Greek text, translation and notes by an eminent cognitive psychologist) PAMELA M. HUBY THEORETICAL (EPISTEMIC) VIRTUES When two competing theories or hypotheses explain or accommodate just the same data (and both are unrefuted), which should be preferred? According to a classical, purely formal confirmation theory, neither – each is confirmed to the same degree, and so the two hypotheses are precisely equal in epistemic status, warrant or credibility. Yet in real life, one of the two may be preferred very strongly, for any of a number of pragmatic reasons: it
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Page 885 may be simpler, more readily testable, more fruitful or less at odds with what we already believe. The philosophical question is whether such pragmatic virtues are of no specifically epistemic, truth-conducing value, or are instead genuine reasons for accepting a theory as more likely to be true than is a competitor that lacks them. See also: JUSTIFICATION, EPISTEMIC Further reading Quine, W.V. (1960) Word and Object, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (Seminal work in which Quine brings his own brand of empiricism to bear on epistemic issues.) WILLIAM G. LYCAN THEORIES, SCIENTIFIC The term ‘theory’ is used variously in science to refer to an unproven hunch, a scientific field (as in ‘electromagnetic theory’), and a conceptual device for systematically characterizing the state-transition behaviour of systems. Philosophers of science have tended to view the latter as the most fundamental, and most analyses of theories focus on it. The Einsteinian revolution involved the rejection of the chemical ether on experimental grounds. It thus prompted philosophers and scientists to examine closely the nature of scientific theories and their connections to observation. Many sought normative analyses that precluded the introduction of ‘fictitious’ theoretical entities such as the ether. Such analyses amounted to criteria for demarcating scientific or cognitively significant claims from unscientific or metaphysical claims. Logical positivism sought to develop an ideal language for science that would guarantee cognitive significance. The language was symbolic logic with the nonlogical vocabulary bifurcated into observational and theoretical subvocabularies. Observation terms directly designated observable entities and attributes, and the truth of statements using them was unproblematic. To prevent postulation of fictitious unobservable entities, theoretical terms were allowed only in the context of a theory which guaranteed the cognitive significance of theoretical assertions. Theories were required to contain correspondence rules that interpret theoretical terms by coordinating them in some way with observational conditions. In the 1960s this ‘received view’ was attacked on grounds that the observational–theoretical distinction was untenable; that the correspondence rules were a heterogeneous confusion of meaning relationships, experimental design, measurement and causal relationships; that the notion of partial interpretation associated with more liberal requirements on correspondence rules was incoherent; that theories are not axiomatic systems; that symbolic logic is an inappropriate formalism; and that theories are not linguistic entities. Alternative analyses of theories were suggested – construing theories as answers to scientific problems or as paradigms or conceptual frameworks. Gradually analyses that construe theories as extra-linguistic set-theoretic structures came to dominate post-positivistic thought. The semantic conception identifies theories with abstract theory structures like configurated state spaces that stand in mapping relations to phenomena and are the referents of linguistic theory formulations. Depending on the sort of mapping relationship required for theoretical adequacy, realist, quasi-realist or antirealist versions are obtained. Correspondence rules are avoided and some versions eschew observational–nonobservational distinctions altogether. Development of the semantic conception has tended to focus on the mediation of theories and phenomena via observation or experiment, the relations between models and theories, confirmation of theories, their ontological commitments, and semantic relations between theories, phenomena and linguistic formulations. The structuralist approach also analyses theories settheoretically as comprised of a theory structure and a set of intended applications, but is neopositivistic in spirit and in its reliance on a relativized theoretical–nontheoretical term distinction. It has been used to explore theoreticity, the dynamics of theories as they undergo development, and incommensurability notions. One’s analysis of theories tends to influence strongly the position one takes on issues such as such as observation, confirmation and testing, and realism versus instrumentalism versus anti-realism. See also: EXPERIMENT; MODELS; SCIENTIFIC REALISM AND ANTIREALISM Further reading Giere, R. (1979) Understanding Scientific Reasoning, New York: Holt. (Elementary textbook that presents a clear nontechnical discussion of the semantic conception of theories.) Sneed, J. (1971) The Logical Structure of Mathematical Physics , Dordrecht: Reidel. (Basic
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Page 886 work presenting the structuralist analysis of theories.) FREDERICK SUPPE THEORY AND OBSERVATION IN SOCIAL SCIENCES The concept of observation has received relatively little systematic attention in the social sciences, with the important exceptions of social psychology, social anthropology and some areas of sociological methodology such as ‘participant observation’. In a broader sense, however, concern with the relation between theory and ‘reality’, ‘data’, ‘empirical research’ and so on, has been a pervasive theme in the philosophy of social science and in the methodological self-reflection of the individual social sciences. See also: HERMENEUTICS Further reading Skinner, Q. (ed.) (1985) The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Documents the revival of ‘theory’ with essays on a number of influential recent philosophers and social and political thinkers.) WILLIAM OUTHWAITE THEORY AND PRACTICE Questions concerning the relation of ‘theory’ to ‘practice’ include whether there is a role for theory in the practical realm of ethics and politics; if so, how it can guide or provide justificatory reasons for practice; how reference to ethical practices might enter into the justification of theory; and whether theory can play a role in the critical appraisal of social practice. In responding to these issues, different conceptions of theory and practice need to be distinguished. Justifiable scepticism about ambitious claims for ethical theory need not rule out a more modest role for theoretical reflection on practice. See also: APPLIED ETHICS; CASUISTRY; Further reading Oakeshott, M. (1962) Rationalism in Politics , London: Methuen. (A clearly stated conservative defence of the primacy of practical knowledge in political and social life.) JOHN O’NEILL THEORY OF TYPES The theory of types was first described by Bertrand Russell in 1908. He was seeking a logical theory that could serve as a framework for mathematics, and, in particular, a theory that would avoid the socalled ‘vicious-circle’ antinomies, such as his own paradox of the property of those properties that are not properties of themselves – or, similarly, of the class of those classes that are not members of themselves. Such paradoxes can be thought of as resulting when logical distinctions are not made between different types of entities, and, in particular, between different types of properties and relations that might be predicated of entities, such as the distinction between concrete objects and their properties, and the properties of those properties, and so on. In ‘ramified’ type theory, the hierarchy of properties and relations is, as it were, two-dimensional, where properties and relations are distinguished first by their order, and then by their level within each order. In ‘simple’ type theory properties and relations are distinguished only by their orders. Further reading Copi, I. (1971) The Theory of Logical Types, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (A good, elementary introduction.) NINO B. COCCHIARELLA THEOSOPHY Etymologically, ‘theosophy’ means wisdom concerning God or divine things, from the Greek ‘theos’ (God) and ‘sophia’ (wisdom). Seventeenth-century philosophers and speculative mystics used ‘theosophy’ to refer to a knowledge of nature based on mystical, symbolical or intuitive knowledge of the divine nature and its manifestations. It referred also to an analogical knowledge of God’s nature obtained by deciphering correspondences between the macrocosm and God. In the late nineteenth century, ‘theosophy’ became associated with the doctrines of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, the founder of the popular Theosophical Society. She drew on Buddhist and Hindu philosophy and fragments from the Western esoteric tradition, especially Neoplatonism. She espoused an absolutist metaphysics in which there is a single, ultimate, eternal principle which remains unchanged and undiminished, despite manifesting itself partially in the periodic emanation and reabsorption of universes. Her cosmology included a spiritual account of the evolution of material bodies, which serve as the necessary vehicles by which individuals gradually perfect themselves through cyclic rebirth. See also: GNOSTICISM; HERMETISM
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Page 887 Further reading Blavatsky, H.P. (1889) The Key to Theosophy, London: Theosophical Publishing Company; repr. London: Theosophical Publishing House, 1968. (An accessible introduction to the tenets of the Theosophical Society.) Weeks, A. (1993) German Mysticism from Hildegard of Bingen to Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Literary and Intellectual History , Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. (Accessible intellectual history of German mysticism and theosophy.) MICHAEL B. WAKOFF THERMODYNAMICS Thermodynamics began as the science that elucidated the law-like order present in the behaviour of heat and in its transformations to and from mechanical work. It became of interest to philosophers of science when the nature of heat was discovered to be that of the hidden energy of motion of the microscopic constituents of matter. Attempts at accounting for the phenomenological laws of heat that make up thermodynamics on the basis of the so-called kinetic theory of heat gave rise to the first fundamental introduction into physics of probabilistic concepts and of probabilistic explanation. This led to so-called statistical mechanics. Some of the issues of thermodynamics with importance to philosophers are: the meaning of the probabilistic claims made in statistical mechanics; the nature of the probabilistic explanations it proffers for the observed macroscopic phenomena; the structure of the alleged reduction of thermodynamic theory to the theory of the dynamics of the underlying microscopic constituents of matter; the place of cosmological posits in explaining the behaviour of local systems; and the alleged reducibility of our very notion of the asymmetry of time to thermodynamic asymmetries of systems in time. Further reading Brush, S. (ed.) (1965) Kinetic Theory , Oxford: Pergamon Press. (Collection of important original papers in kinetic theory and statistical mechanics.) Prigogine, I. (1980) From Being to Becoming, San Francisco: W.H. Freeman. (Nontechnical discussion of foundational issues.) LAWRENCE SKLAR THIELICKE, HELMUT (1908–86) The German Lutheran theologian Helmut Thielicke presented a systematic Christian theology with particular reference to concrete issues and situations within the world. He held that statements about God are inevitably conditioned by the fact that God reveals himself to and through humanity; they thus always have an anthropological aspect. Similarly, while theology arises from transcendent revelation, it necessarily belongs to a particular historical context. Thielicke maintained that the notion of a ‘perennial theology’ is therefore mistaken. This raises the question as to whether it is a perennial truth that there is no perennial theology, and, if so, how Thielicke could, on his grounds, know this. Further reading Thielicke, H. (1968, 1973, 1978) Der evangelische Glaube, Tübingen: Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 3 vols; trans. anded. G.W. Bromiley, The Evangelical Faith, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, vols 1–2, 1974, 1977, and Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, vol. 3, 1982. (Relates Christian theology to modern forms of thought.) KEITH E. YANDELL THIERRYOF CHARTRES ( fl. c .1130–50) Thierry of Chartres, who taught at Paris and Chartres in the mid-twelfth century, was a polymath and a Platonist. The Heptateuchon , a large and ambitious collection of texts for teaching the liberal arts, testifies to the range of his interests from grammar, logic and rhetoric to mathematics and astronomy; they also stretched to theology. To Thierry is attributed an explanation of the account of creation in Genesis, after God’s initial action, in physical terms. He also used arithmetical analogies to illustrate the Trinity and, drawing on a variety of Platonic and Neoplatonic sources, analysed the relationship between God and his creation. See also: CHARTRES, SCHOOL OF Further reading Southern, R.W. (1970) ‘Humanism and the school of Chartres’, Medieval Humanism and Other Studies , Oxford: Blackwell, 61–85. (The canon of Thierry’s works and its relation to twelfth-century Platonism.) JOHN MARENBON THOMAS À KEMPIS (1379/80–1471) Thomas Hemerken was born in Kempen, Germany. He spent his life in foundations of
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Page 888 the Modern Devotion ( Devotio Moderna ), a spiritual movement of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that originated in the Low Countries and spread throughout northern Europe. In 1406 he entered the monastery of Mount Saint Agnes in Windesheim (St Agnietenberg, the Netherlands), the origin and centre of a reformed congregation of Augustinian Canons Regular, which disseminated the Modern Devotion in the Low Countries and Germany. Thomas was ordained a priest in 1413, and was the novice master in the monastery for many years. He is generally recognized as the author of De imitatione Christi (The Imitation of Christ), perhaps the most popular work on the spiritual life ever written. See also: MYSTICISM, HISTORY OF Further reading Van Engen, J. (1988) Devotio Moderna: Basic Writings, New York: Paulist Press. (Translations of typical writings by the Devout, with an excellent introduction to the spirituality of the movement. The notes contain extensive bibliography.) KENT EMERY, JR THOMAS, CHRISTIAN see THOMASIUS, CHRISTIAN THOMAS OF YORK ( fl. c .1255) A philosopher of remarkably wide reading in the works of Western and non-Western thinkers, the English Franciscan friar Thomas of York attempted to assemble, and to some extent to synthesize, the views he had encountered. Whatever the eventual judgement on Thomas’ thought, the Sapientiale (Wisdom), a lengthy metaphysical work, certainly reflects the intellectual ferment brought about in the thirteenth century by the influx of new works by Aristotle and by Jewish and Islamic philosophers and commentators. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM, MEDIEVAL; Further reading Sharp, D.E. (1930) Franciscan Philosophy at Oxford in the Thirteenth Century, London: Oxford University Press, 49–112. (The only detailed treatment of the whole of the Sapientiale available in English. A full list of works cited by Thomas appears on pages 53–5.) FIONA SOMERSET THOMASIUS (THOMAS), CHRISTIAN (1655–1728) Christian Thomasius’ stature as the ‘founder’ of the German Enlightenment has been the source of much debate. His many essays dealing with issues in moral enlightenment and law reform (bigamy, witchcraft, torture, heresy, adultery, the use of the vernacular and so on) certainly single him out from other seventeenth-century writers. He was the public philosopher par excellence, a suitable match for August Hermann Francke, the great public theologian. Both men spent most of their career in Halle (in Brandenburg), and it was there that Francke institutionalized pietism, just as Thomasius propagated secular natural law theory. Despite many tensions, pietism and modern natural law thereby fused into a social duty-ethics that was of the greatest importance in shaping the modern Prussian state. The basis for natural law was God’s will and it was the attempt to follow this law that made humanity a moral species. Since humankind could not have any certain knowledge of the content of God’s law, the natural powers of the mind would have to be relied upon, and Thomasius’ thought was an investigation into the nature and social effect of these powers. His best-known result was a series of linked divisions between law and morality, between public and private spheres, between external and internal obligation, and between action and intention. See also: ENLIGHTENMENT, CONTINENTAL Further reading Schmidt, W. (1995) Ein vergessener Rebell. Leben und Wirken des Christian Thomasius (A forgotten rebel. The life and work of Christian Thomasius), Munich: Diedrichs. (General biography.) KNUD HAAKONSSEN THOMISM Deriving from Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, Thomism is a body of philosophical and theological ideas that seeks to articulate the intellectual content of Catholic Christianity. In its nineteenth and twentieth-century revivals Thomism has often characterized itself as the ‘perennial philosophy’. This description has several aspects: first, the suggestion that there is a set of central and enduring philosophical questions about reality, knowledge and value; second, that Thomism offers an everrelevant set of answers to these; and third,
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Page 889 that these answers constitute an integrated philosophical system. In its general orientation Thomism is indeed preoccupied with an ancient philosophical agenda and does claim to offer a comprehensive, non-sceptical and realist response based on a synthesis of Greek thought – in particular that of Aristotle – and Judaeo-Christian religious doctrines. However, in their concern to emphasize the continuity of their tradition, Thomists have sometimes overlooked the extent to which it is reinterpretative of its earlier phases. The period from the original writings of Thomas Aquinas to late twentieth-century neo-scholastic and ‘analytical’ Thomism covers eight centuries and a stretch of intellectual history more varied in its composition than any other comparable period. Not only have some self-proclaimed Thomists held positions with which Aquinas would probably have taken issue, some have advanced claims that he would not have been able to understand. Examples of the first are found in Neo-Kantian treatments of epistemology and ethics favoured by some twentiethcentury Thomists. Examples of the second include attempts to reconcile Aquinas’ philosophy of nature with modern physics, and his informal Aristotelian logic with quantified predicate calculus and possible world semantics. The term ‘Thomism’ is sometimes used narrowly to refer to the thought of Aquinas, and to its interpretation and elaboration by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century commentators such as Cajetan, Sylvester of Ferrara, Domingo Bañez and John of St Thomas. At other times it is employed in connection with any view that takes its central ideas from Aquinas but which may depart from other of his doctrines, or which combines his ideas with those of other philosophers and philosophies. Prominent examples of Thomists in this wider sense include Francisco Suárez (1548–eix i="N067p1.32"> 1617) who also drew on the epistemology and metaphysics of another great medieval thinker Duns Scotus; and, more recently, Joseph Marechal (1878–1944) whose ‘Transcendental Thomism’ accepted as its starting point the Kantian assumption that experience is of phenomena and not of reality as it is in itself. An example drawn from the ranks of contemporary analytical philosophers is Peter Geach who draws in equal measure from Aquinas, Frege and Wittgenstein. In the twentieth century there have been two major proponents of the philosophy of Aquinas, namely Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson, both of whom contributed significantly to the development of NeoThomism in North America. Interestingly, both men were French, neither had been trained in a Thomistic tradition and both were drawn into philosophy by attending lectures by Henri Bergson at the Collège de France in Paris. The Neo-Thomism they inspired declined following the Second Vatican Council (1962–5) as Catholics looked to other philosophical movements, including existentialism and phenomenology, or away from philosophy altogether. Today Thomists tend to be close followers and interpreters of the writings of Aquinas, but there is also a growing interest among mainstream Englishlanguage philosophers in some of his central ideas. While not a movement, this approach has been described as ‘analytical’ Thomism. See also: GARRIGOU-LAGRANGE, R.; MARITAIN, J. Further reading Gilson, E. (1964) The Spirit of Thomism, New York: P.J. Kennedy & Sons. (A short account of the nature and condition of neo-Thomism in relation to the religious philosophy of Aquinas. Useful on the question of how basic Thomist principles should be applied in challenging modern philosophies.) McInerny, R. (1968) Thomism in an Age of Renewal, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. (A study of central features of Thomistic thought in relation to developments in Catholic theology following the Second Vatican Council.) JOHN J. HALDANE THOREAU, HENRY DAVID (1817–62) Thoreau was one of the founders of the new literature that emerged within the fledgling culture of the United States in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. He inherited an education in the classics and in the transcendentalism of his older friend and teacher Ralph Waldo Emerson. Thoreau forged a means of writing which was dedicated to recording particular events in all their transience but capable of rendering graphic the permanent laws of nature and conscience. His incorporation of both confidence and self-questioning into the texture of his writing forms the ground of his standpoint as an observer of human lives and other natural histories. Thoreau’s relation to philosophy goes beyond his inheritance from Plato, Kant, Emerson and Eastern thought. Above all, his quest for philosophy is evident in the ways his writing seeks its own foundations. It is in the act of writing that
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Page 890 Thoreau locates the perspectives within which to give an account of the humanness of a life. His project is to report sincerely and unselfconsciously a life of passion and simplicity, using himself as a representative of basic human needs and projects. Influenced by Plato’s Republic, Thoreau gives an account of some basic human needs, such as food, shelter and society. But also, like Plato, he shows that the particular institutions by which human needs are met are very far from being necessary. Tracing the relationship between need and necessity is one of the primary goals of Thoreau’s work. See also: AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY IN THE EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES Further reading Thoreau, H.D. (1981) Walden and other Writings, ed. W. Howarth, New York: Random House. (Good selection of writings including Walden, ‘Walking’, ‘Civil Disobedience’ and ‘A Plea for Captain John Brown’.) Richardson, R., Jr. (1986) Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. (Intellectual biography which maps Thoreau’s background of reading and some central themes of his writing against the major events of his life.) TIMOTHY GOULD THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS Thought experiments are strange: they have the power to present surprising results and can profoundly change the way we view the world, all without requiring us to examine the world in the way that ordinary scientific experiments do. Philosophers who view all hypothetical reasoning as a form of thought experimentation regard the method as being as old as philosophy itself. Others maintain that truly informative thought experiments are found only in mathematics and the natural sciences. These emerged in the seventeenth century when the new experimental science of Bacon, Boyle, Galileo, Newton and others forced a distinction between the passive observation of Aristotelian mental narratives and the active interventions of real-world experiment. The new science gave rise to a philosophical puzzle: how can mere thought be so informative about the world? Rationalists argue that thought experiments are exercises in which thought apprehends laws of nature and mathematical truths directly. Empiricists argue that thought experiments are not exercises of ‘mere thought’ because they actually rely upon hidden empirical information – otherwise they would not count as experiments at all. More recently it has been argued that thought experiments are not mysterious because they are constructed arguments that are embedded in the world so as to combine logical and conceptual analysis with relevant features of the world. See also: EXPERIMENT; SCIENTIFIC METHOD Further reading Brown, J.R. (1991) The Laboratory of the Mind: Thought Experiments in the Natural Sciences , London: Routledge. (An accessible account of influential thought experiments in physics and mathematics; defends the rationalist interpretation advanced by Koyré.) Sorensen, R.A. (1992) Thought Experiments, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (An accessible comprehensive study, containing many examples, which develops an empiricist explanation of the efficacy of thought experiments as limiting cases of ordinary experiments.) DAVID C. GOODING THOUGHT, LANGUAGE OF see LANGUAGE OF THOUGHT THRASYMACHUS (late 5th century BC) Thrasymachus, a Greek Sophist and orator, is known principally for his role in book 1 of Plato’s Republic, in which he argues that justice is simply a social institution created by rulers to further their own interests. It is intended solely for the subjects; the rulers themselves need not practise it. Since justice thus consists in promoting another’s advantage rather than one’s own, injustice is far more profitable. Apart from issues of internal coherence, his claims raise many questions. What, for example, are our true interests? And what are the actual and ideal operations of power? See also: SOPHISTS Further reading Kerferd, G.B. (1981) The Sophistic Movement , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (The best introductory handbook to the Sophists in general; for Thrasymachus, see especially pages 120–3.) ANGELA HOBBS THUCYDIDES ( fl. c .400 BC) A Greek historian with philosophical interests, Thucydides wrote about the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta (431–404 BC). He
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Page 891 elaborates on the decisions of war in brilliantly reconstructed debates and speeches, reflecting his training under various Sophists. Many of these speeches take for granted that people care less for justice than for their own narrow interests. This dark view of human nature influenced Hobbes, while the style of the debates and speeches has had an enduring effect on public rhetoric. His account of Athenian democracy in action is cautionary, and his conservative political views anticipated Aristotle’s in some respects. Further reading Connor, W.R. (1984) Thucydides , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (The most thorough modern treatment.) Thucydides ( fl. c .400 BC) History of the Peloponnesian War , trans. R. Crawley, London, 1876, revised by R. Feetham, Chicago, IL, 1910; trans. B. Jowett, Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War , 1881, revised by S. Hornblower, 3rd edn, 1995. (Crawley is the most admired and widely used translation; the Jowett translation reflects recent scholarship.) PAUL WOODRUFF TI AND YONG Ti and yong (literally ‘body’ or ‘substance’ and ‘use’ or ‘function’) are technical terms in Chinese philosophy. Ti often is used to denote the essence or fundamental nature of a given thing, for example, ‘the substance/true essence of the Way’. As a verb, it can also mean to ‘embody’ or ‘instantiate’ a given characteristic or virtue, for example ‘to embody/fully realize humanity’. A thing’s yong is its characteristic activity in accordance with its nature. See also: DAODEJING; Further reading Levenson, J.R. (1965) Confucianism and Its Modern Fate , Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. (Contains an excellent discussion of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Chinese attempts to apply the notions of ti and yong to meet the challenges posed by Western imperialism; see in particular Chapter 4, pages 59–78.) PHILIP J. IVANHOE TIAN Tian , conventionally translated as ‘Heaven’, is both what our world is and how it is. The myriad things are not the creatures of tian or disciplined by a tian which stands independent of what is ordered; rather, they are constitutive of it. Tian is both creator and the field of creatures. There is no apparent distinction between the order itself and what orders it. This absence of superordination is a condition made familiar in related notions of the Daoist dao and the Buddhist dharma, which also refer to concrete phenomena and the order that obtains among them. On this basis, tian can be described as an inhering, emergent order negotiated out of the dispositioning of the particulars that are constitutive of it. In the human world, tian is the experience of meaningful context felt differently by each person in the fellowship of family and community. See also: DAOIST PHILOSOPHY; HEAVEN DAVID L. HALL ROGER T. AMES TIBETAN PHILOSOPHY Tibetan philosophy – if we can make a rough separation between what is predominantly argumentoriented and analytical and what is more a question of ritual, devotion or vision – is best characterized as a form of scholasticism. It exhibits marked parallels with philosophy in Western medieval contexts, including a heavy emphasis on logic, philosophy of language and metaphysics, all in the service of exegesis of religious doctrine found in root texts. Just as in Western scholasticism, there is a reliance upon scripture, but within that traditional context there is also ample room for rational analysis and synthesis of potentially disparate doctrines, as well as a considerable quantity of argumentation which is a type of ‘fine tuning’ of Indian issues. Tibetan thinkers explored matters which are often of genuine importance in our understanding of Indian texts. In particular, in Mādhyamika Buddhist philosophy we find an important synthesis of Indian Yogācāra ideas with a relatively natural interpretation of key ideas in the literature on the Buddha-nature ( tathāgatagarbha); we also find important debates on the nature of the two truths, the status of means of valid cognition ( pramāṇas ), and on questions of philosophical method, such as the possibility or impossibility of Mādhyamikas holding theses and themselves defending positions. Beginning with the Great Debate of bSam-yas (Samyay) in the latter part of the eighth century, we find constantly recurring reflection on questions concerning the nature of spiritual realizations and the role of conceptual and analytic thought in leading to such insights. In the logico-
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Page 892 hotly debated issues generally centre around the problem of universals, the Indian Buddhist philosophy of language and the theory of the triply characterized logical reason ( trirūpahetu ). In addition, the Tibetans developed an elaborate logic of debate, an indigenous system containing many original elements unknown in or even alien to Indian Buddhist logic. See also: BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY, INDIAN; BUDDHISM, MĀDHYAMIKA: INDIA AND TIBET Further reading Karmay, Samten Gyaltsen (1988) The Great Perfection: A Philosophical and Meditative Training of Tibetan Buddhism , Leiden: Brill. (A reference work on the history and principal doctrines of the Great Perfection school and on issues concerning the Subitist school in the Great Debate.) Tucci, G. (1980) The Religions of Tibet, trans. G. Samuel, London: Routledge. (Tucci’s work remains one of the best introductions to Tibetan religions.) TOM J.F. TILLEMANS T’IEN see TIAN TILLICH, PAUL (1886–1965) Tillich was one of the most influential Christian theologians of the twentieth century. Notable for his effort to translate the language of the Western religious tradition into terms comprehensible to modernity, he drew upon various secular philosophies, including Marxism, existentialism and psychoanalysis, as well as literature and the arts. In his view, these contemporary secular expressions contain the questions which theology must address. He was sometimes criticized for losing one or another aspect of Christian orthodoxy, but more often praised for making it possible to be both Christian and modern. He fled Germany in 1933, in the early days of Nazism. As an expatriated German who became an American citizen, Tillich came to understand his life as one standing ‘on the boundary’. He saw himself as an interpreter, occupying the boundary between the Old World and the New, between philosophy and theology, between religious orthodoxy and humanistic secularity, and between university and church. Tillich was an intellectual who achieved widespread popular acclaim. Even though his lectures and publications were strewn with allusions to obscure thinkers, he gained a substantial following and was frequently quoted in the popular press. His courses were immensely popular, and his sermons – delivered mostly in college chapels – met with great public approbation. Two of Tillich’s themes stand out as most influential. First was his advocacy of a broadened category of the religious. By defining religion as a person’s ‘ultimate concern’, he was able to maintain that virtually everyone has some religious commitment. Through this conceptualization it became possible to view such twentieth-century ideologies as Nazism and Communism – as well as Americanism – as in significant respects religious perspectives. This broadened definition of religion gained wide acceptance, with sociopolitical and even judicial implications. (The US Supreme Court’s definition of conscientious objection was influenced by Tillich’s formulation.) Second, Tillich’s persistent claim that all language about God is symbolic had great impact. Objecting to views of religious language as merely symbolic, he contended that efforts to be literal in one’s talk of God are seriously deficient. By the same token, he argued that the mythic quality of religious narratives cannot be removed without detriment. Finding much American religion strongly literalistic, Tillich persistently argued the contrary view. Further reading Hopper, D. (1967) Tillich: A Theological Portrait, Philadelphia, PA: J.P. Lippincott. (A summary view of the man and his work for the non-specialist.) Tillich, P. (1957) Dynamics of Faith, NewYork: Harper & Row. (Analysis of what faith is and is not; valuable as an introduction to Tillich’s thought.) GUYTON B. HAMMOND TIME Time is the single most pervasive component of our experience and the most fundamental concept in our physical theories. For these reasons time has received intensive attention from philosophy. Reflection on our ordinary-tensed language of time has led many to posit a relation of metaphysical importance between time and existence. Closely connected with such intuitions are claims to the effect that time is unlike space, and in deep and important ways. The development of physical theories from Newtonian dynamics through relativistic theories, statistical mechanics, and quantum mechanics has had a profound effect on philosophical views about time. Relativity
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Page 893 threatens the notion of a universal, global present, and with it the alleged connections of time to existence. The connection between temporal order and causal order in relativity theories, and between the asymmetry of time and entropic asymmetry in statistical mechanics, suggest various ‘reductive’ accounts of temporal phenomena. Finally, the radical differences between time as it appears in our physical theory and time as it appears in our immediate experience, show important and difficult problems concerning the relation of the time of ‘theory’ to the time of ‘our immediate awareness’. See also: CONTINUANTS Further reading Grünbaum, A. (1973) Philosophical Problems of Space and Time, Dordrecht: Reidel, 2nd edn. (Time in physics and philosophy.) Sherover, C. (1975) The Human Experience of Time, New York: New York University Press. (Historical survey of philosophical views on the place of time in human experience.) LAWRENCE SKLAR TIME TRAVEL The prospect of a machine in which one could be transported through time is no longer mere fantasy, having become in this century the subject of serious scientific and philosophical debate. From Einstein’s special theory of relativity we have learned that a form of time travel into the future may be accomplished by moving quickly, and therefore ageing slowly (exploiting the time dilation effect). And in 1949 Kurt Gödel announced his discovery of (general relativistic) spacetimes whose global curvature allows voyages into the past as well. Since then the study of time travel has had three main strands. First, there has been research by theoretical physicists into the character and plausibility of structures, beyond those found by Gödel, that could engender closed timelike lines and closed causal chains. These phenomena include rotating universes, black holes, traversable wormholes and infinite cosmic strings. Second, there has been concern with the semantic issue of whether the terms ‘cause’, ‘time’ and ‘travel’ are applicable, strictly speaking, to such bizarre models, given how different they are from the contexts in which those terms are normally employed. However, one may be sceptical about the significance of this issue, since the questions of primary interest – focused on the nature and reality of the Gödel-style models – seem independent of whether their description requires a shift in the meanings of those words. And, third, there has been considerable discussion within both physics and philosophy of various alleged paradoxes of time travel, and of their power to preclude the spacetime models in which time travel could occur. See also: RELATIVITY THEORY, PHILOSOPHICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF; SPACETIME Further reading Earman, J. (1995) ‘Recent Work on Time Travel’, S. Savitt (ed.), in Time’s Arrow Today , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Includes a comprehensive, critical review of the physics literature.) Yourgrau, P. (1993) The Disappearance of Time, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Argues that the import of Gödel’s results is the non-existence of time rather than the possibility of time travel.) PAUL HORWICH TIMON ( c .315–c .225 BC) Timon was a Greek philosopher-poet. The formative influence on his life was his meeting with Pyrrho, who was later hailed as the founder of Scepticism. He devoted his literary talents to eulogizing Pyrrho, and his satirical vigour to criticizing other philosophers. He, more than anyone else, carved the image of Pyrrho into what was to become its traditional form and placed it on its pedestal. In this, Timon seems to have been not only a fervent propagandist but also a major philosophical figure, exerting a decisive influence on the history and the very definition of neo-Pyrrhonian scepticism. Further reading Long, A.A. and Sedley, D.N. (1987) The Hellenistic Philosophers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2 vols. (Includes Timon’s main philosophical fragments, with English translation and brief but excellent commentary.) JACQUES BRUNSCHWIG TINDAL, MATTHEW (1657–1733) Matthew Tindal was one of the last and most learned exponents of English deism. His most famous work is Christianity as Old as the Creation (1730), a comprehensive apology for natural religion. In it, he argued that God’s law is imprinted on the nature of all things, including the human soul, and is accessible to
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Page 894 reason. Revealed religion merely restates this universal law – the will of God – in a different form. Religion enables us to act in accordance with this natural order, and its end is happiness. However, Tindal was scathingly critical of the clergy, and cast doubt on the reliability of the Bible. Although Tindal’s work was severely criticized by William Law, it exerted a considerable influence on the English and Continental Enlightenment. See also: DEISM Further reading Tindal, M. (1730) Christianity as Old as the Creation or, the Gospel, a Republication of the Religion of Nature, London, vol. 1 (no more published); facs. edn ed. J.V. Price, London: Thoemmes, 1995. (Tindal’s most famous work, which provoked some 150 published replies in the years following.) JEAN-LOUP SEBAN TOCQUEVILLE, ALEXIS DE (1805–59) The French liberal Alexis de Tocqueville once observed that his temperament was the ‘least philosophical’ imaginable. He meant that his mind was governed by passionate commitment, a determination to defend civil and political liberty against threats resulting from social levelling and the growth of state power. Thus, Tocqueville’s most famous work, De la démocratie en Amérique ( Democracy in America) (1835, 1840), did not spring from detached curiosity about US institutions. It was rather an attempt to draw lessons from US society and government which could be used to reform French institutions. His belief in local autonomy – he called the New England township a ‘school for citizens’ – led him to develop a distinctive conception of liberty that combined elements of ancient citizenship and modern autonomy. That conception also shaped his own political career and later writings. In L’Ancien régime et la révolution ( The Old Regime and the French Revolution ) (1856) Tocqueville traced bitter class conflicts in France to the destruction of local autonomy long before 1789. See also: LIBERALISM Further reading Siedentop, L. (1994) Tocqueville, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (An intellectual biography and survey of his thought.) Tocqueville, A. de (1835, 1840) De la démocratieen Amérique ( Democracy in America), trans G. Lawrence, ed. J.P. Mayer and M. Lerner, London: Fontana, 1966. L.A. SIEDENTOP TODOROV, TZVETAN (1936–) Tzvetan Todorov is a Bulgarian thinker and literary theorist who lives and works in France. His thought is ‘structuralist’ in that it seeks stable abstract principles explanatory of, but not directly given in, phenomena of literature and history. His thought is not only a milestone in the history of structuralism but is ‘negatively’ important to the development of post-structuralist thought: the rules and oppositions conveyed by structuralist typologies such as those of Todorov constitute much of what thinkers such as Jacques Derrida seek to ‘deconstruct’. See also: STRUCTURALISM IN LITERARY THEORY Further reading Todorov, T. (1977) Théorie du symbole , Paris: Éditions du Seuil; trans. C. Porter, Theories of the Symbol, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982. (A history of semiotics through one of its key concepts – that of the symbol – this work constitutes a major irruption of history into the supposedly atemporal features uncovered by structuralist analysis.) FRANÇOISE LIONNET T’OEGYE see YI HWANG TOLAND, JOHN (1670–1722) Deist, freethinker and political republican, the Irishman John Toland’s reputation is closely associated with the radical attack on Christian metaphysics and institutions in the Augustan period. His philosophical achievement was to turn the more erudite thinking of Spinoza, Hobbes and Locke into a popular polemic against the shibboleths of orthodox religious belief. In Christianity Not Mysterious (1696), burnt in Dublin by Parliamentary command in 1697, he exploited and extended the epistemology of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding into a revision of Christian descriptions of the relationship between faith and knowledge, and a consequent defence of liberty of thought and belief. Further reading Sullivan, R.E. (1982) John Toland and the Deist Controversy , Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. (The best intellectual biography of Toland, which locates him within the broader intellectual and religious
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Page 895 Toland, J. (1696) Christianity not Mysterious , London: Samuel Buckley. (The work was condemned and prosecuted in London and Dublin. There are various modern reprints.) J.A.I. CHAMPION TOLEDO, FRANCISCO DE see TOLETUS, FRANCISCUS TOLERATION Toleration emerged as an important idea in the seventeenth century, receiving its fullest defence in John Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689). Initially developed in the context of attempts to restore peace in a Europe convulsed by religious conflicts, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it came to be extended to the accommodation of disputes about racial, sexual and social differences. Toleration is widely thought to be an essential element of a free society, especially one marked by moral and cultural pluralism, and it figures particularly prominently in the political theory of liberalism. The paradigm example of toleration is the deliberate decision to refrain from prohibiting, hindering or otherwise coercively interfering with conduct of which one disapproves, although one has the power to do so. The principal components of the concept of toleration are: a tolerating subject and a tolerated subject (either may be an individual, group, organization or institution); an action, belief or practice which is the object of toleration; a negative attitude (dislike or moral disapproval) on the part of tolerator toward the object of toleration; and a significant degree of restraint in acting against it. Philosophical arguments have mostly concerned: the range of toleration (what things should or should not be tolerated?); the degree of restraint required by toleration (what forms of opposition are consistent with toleration?); and, most importantly, the justification of toleration (why should some things be tolerated?). See also: FREEDOM OF SPEECH; MULTICULTURALISM Further reading Horton, J. (ed.) (1993) Liberalism, Multiculturalism and Toleration, London: Macmillan. (Essays on multiculturalism and toleration with particular reference to the ‘Rushdie Affair’.) Locke, J. (1689) A Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. R. Kilbansky, trans. J.W. Gough, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968. (An accurate modern translation of Locke’s letter.) JOHN HORTON TOLETUS, FRANCISCUS (1533–96) Toletus had an independent, somewhat eclectic, but fundamentally Thomistic outlook. In philosophy his most important works were his commentaries on Aristotle in the areas of logic and natural philosophy. In these commentaries he drew upon the whole previous scholastic tradition to raise and answer questions which were debated in his time and later. In theology he commented upon the greater part of Aquinas’ Summa theologiae . Here again he drew upon scholastic philosophers to raise and discuss a wide variety of metaphysical, epistemological and ethical topics. Far from being a slavish follower of Aquinas or Aristotle, he expressed his respectful disagreement with them wherever reason compelled it. See also: AQUINAS, T.; ARISTOTELIANISM, RENAISSANCE Further reading Ashworth, E.J. (1974) Language and Logic in the Post-Medieval Period , Dordrecht and Boston, MA: Reidel. (A general study which includes discussion of Toletus.) JOHN P. DOYLE TOLSTOI, COUNT LEV NIKOLAEVICH (1828–1910) Tolstoi expressed philosophical ideas in his novels Voina i mir ( War and Peace ) (1865–9) and Anna Karenina (1875–7), which are often regarded as the summit of realism, as well as in shorter fictional works, such as Smert’ Ivana Il’icha (The Death of Ivan Il’ich) (1886), often praised as the finest novella in European literature. In addition, he wrote numerous essays and tracts on religious, moral, social, educational and aesthetic topics, most notably ‘Chto takoe iskusstvo?’ (What Is Art?) (1898), Tsarstvo Bozhie vnutri vas ( The Kingdom of God Is Within You) (1893) and his autobiographical meditation ‘Ispoved’ ’ (A Confession) (1884). Tolstoi apparently used his essays, letters and diaries to explore ideas by stating them in their most extreme form, while his fiction developed them with much greater subtlety. Critics have discerned a sharp break in his work: an earlier period, in which he produced the two great novels, is dominated by deep scepticism; and a later period following the existential trauma
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Page 896 and subsequent conversion experience described in ‘Ispoved’ ’. Tolstoi stressed the radical contingency of events, valued practical over theoretical reasoning, and satirized any and all overarching systems. After 1880, he assumed the role of a prophet, claiming to have found the true meaning of Christianity. He ‘edited’ the Gospels by keeping only those passages containing the essence of Christ’s teaching and dismissed the rest as so many layers of falsification imposed by ecclesiastics. Tolstoi preached pacifism, anarchism, vegetarianism, passive resistance to evil (a doctrine that influenced Gandhi), a radical asceticism that would have banned sex even within marriage, and a theory of art that rejected most classic authors, including the plays of Shakespeare and Tolstoi’s own earlier novels. Further reading Berlin, I. (1970) The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History , New York: Simon & Schuster. (Views Tolstoi as torn between scepticism and dogmatism.) Tolstoi [Tolstoy], L. (1969) What Is Art? and Essays on Art, trans. A. Maude, London: Oxford University Press. (Anthology containing What Is Art? (1898); ‘Introduction to the Works of Guy de Maupassant’ (1894); Tolstoi’s ‘Afterword’ (1905) to Chekhov’s story ‘Darling’; and other essays on art.) GARY SAUL MORSON TOMINAGA NAKAMOTO (1715–46) Tominaga Nakamoto was a leading representative of what some scholars have called the eighteenthcentury ‘enlightenment’ movement in Tokugawa thought. Nakamoto’s philological critiques of the historical development of Buddhist, Confucian and ShintŌdoctrines are noteworthy for their modern, empiricist tendencies. His advocacy of makoto no michi , or ‘the True Way’, a quotidian ethics advocating practical morality, gained no real following during Nakamoto’s brief life. See also: JAPANESE PHILOSOPHY Further reading Najita Tetsuo (1987) Visions of Virtue in Tokugawa Japan: The KaitokudŌ Merchant Academy of Osaka , Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (Examines Nakamoto in the context of the KaitokudŌ academy, the kogaku movement and kokugaku thought.) JOHN ALLEN TUCKER TONGHAK Tonghak is an indigenous religion in Korea. Founded by Ch’oe Cheu (1824–64), it presently flourishes under the new name of Ch’ôndogyo. An eclectic religion, Tonghak borrowed from Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism, Christianity, shamanism and other folk beliefs. Its central tenet is founded on the concept of In nae ch’ôn (Man is God). God is not a supernatural God who exists outside or beyond man, but is an immanent God who is present within every man. See also: RELIGION, PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Weems, B.B. (1964) Reform, Rebellion and the Heavenly Way, Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. (A still useful English history of Tonghak from its beginnings until 1950.) YÔNG-HO CH’OE TOTALITARIANISM A term adopted in the 1920s by the Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile to describe the ideal fascist state, ‘totalitarianism’ quickly acquired negative connotations as it was applied to the regimes of Hitler in Germany and Stalin in the USSR. Within political science it has generally been used to refer to a distinctively modern form of dictatorship based not only on terror but also on mass support mobilized behind an ideology prescribing radical social change. Controversially, the specific content of the ideology is considered less significant than the regime’s determination to form the minds of the population through control of all communications. Totalitarianism has attracted the attention of philosophers as well as political scientists because a number of classic philosophical systems have been suspected of harbouring totalitarian aspirations, and also because the model of total power exercised through discourse has been used by critical theorists to mount an attack on modernity in general. Further reading Arendt, H. (1951) The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York: Harcourt Brace. (A classic text of the theory of totalitarianism.) Popper, K. (1945) The Open Society and Its Enemies, London: Routledge, 2 vols. (A denunciation of Plato, Hegel and Marx as proto-totalitarians.) MARGARET CANOVAN
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Page 897 TRADITION AND TRADITIONALISM Tradition is that body of practice and belief which is socially transmitted from the past. It is regarded as having authority in the present simply because it comes from the past, and encapsulates the wisdom and experience of the past. For some, the very idea of tradition is anathema. It is characteristic of modernity to reject the authority of the past in favour of the present deployment of reason, unencumbered by tradition or prejudice. While prior to the seventeenth century tradition was largely unquestioned as a source of insight, and in need of no defence, since the Enlightenment the notion of tradition has been defended by traditionalists such as Burke and, more recently, Hayek. Upon inspection, however, traditionalism, if not indefensibly irrational, turns out to be a demonstration of the overlooked rationality contained within traditions. Traditions often turn out upon inspection to be not so much irrational as subtle and flexible deployments of reason in particular spheres. See also: CONSERVATISM Further reading Burke, E. (1790) Reflections on the Revolution in France , London, Dent, 1967. (The classic statement of the argument for tradition.) Hayek, F.A. (1988) The Fatal Conceit , London, Routledge. (Gives an evolutionary account of the importance of apparently unthinking traditions.) ANTHONY O’HEAR TRAGEDY Tragedy is primarily a type of drama, though non-dramatic poetry (‘lyric tragedy’) and some novels (for example, Moby Dick) have laid claim to the description. As a genre, it began in ancient Greece and forms a part of the western European tradition. Historically, it has carried prestige for playwrights and actors because it dealt with persons, generally men, of ‘high’ or noble birth, who, by virtue of their stature, represented the most profound sufferings and conflicts of humanity, both morally and metaphysically. The history of the genre is part of the history of how art and culture reflect views about class and gender. Tragic theory has concentrated primarily on how to define the genre. A persistent feature is the tragic hero, who begins by occupying a position of power or nobility, but comes to a catastrophic end through some action of his own. According to the Aristotelian tradition, the audience is supposed to experience pity and fear in response to the sufferings of the tragic hero, and perhaps pleasure from its cathartic effects. Hegel initiated a paradigm shift in tragic theory in proposing that tragic plots essentially involve conflicts of duty rather than suffering. Greek tragedy and Shakespearean tragedy provide two different exemplars of the genre. The tradition inspired by Greek tragedy emphasized a rigidly defined genre of dramatic poetry; French neoclassic tragedy is part of this tradition. Shakespearean tragedy, on the other hand, is written partly in prose, and includes comic elements and characters who are not nobly born. Lessing and Ibsen also resisted restraints imposed on the genre in terms of its representation of social class and gender in favour of drama that was more realistic and relevant to a bourgeois audience. Twentieth-century criticism has questioned the viability of the genre for modern times. Further reading Steiner, G. (1961) The Death of Tragedy, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. (Proposes that tragedy arises in cultures that see indomitable and implacable forces as limiting and thwarting human power and reason, leading to suffering and destruction.) Williams, R. (1966) Modern Tragedy, London: Chatto & Windus. (A poet and critic, he argues that our understanding of the history of tragedy and tragic theory is coloured by our own perspectives, and this helps us to resolve the conflict between what is accepted as tradition and our own ordinary notion of a tragic event.) SUSAN L. FEAGIN TRANSCENDENTAL ARGUMENTS Transcendental arguments seek to answer scepticism by showing that the things doubted by a sceptic are in fact preconditions for the scepticism to make sense. Hence the scepticism is either meaningless or false. A transcendental argument works by finding the preconditions of meaningful thought or judgment. For example, scepticism about other minds suggests that only the thinker themselves might have sensations. A transcendental argument which answered this scepticism would show that a precondition for thinking oneself to have sensations is that others do so as well. Expressing the scepticism involves thinking oneself to have sensations; and the argument shows that if this thought is expressible, then it is also false.
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Page 898 Arguments with such powerful consequences have, unsurprisingly, been much criticized. One criticism is that it is not possible to discover the necessary conditions of judgment. Another is that transcendental arguments can only show us how we have to think, whereas defeating scepticism involves showing instead how things really are. See also: SCEPTICISM Further reading Davidson, D. (1984) Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Rather elliptical, at times technical, but very stimulating. Essays 11 and 13 contain examples of transcendental arguments.) Peacocke, C. (1989) Transcendental Arguments in the Theory of Content , Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Exhibits his work on mental content as a transcendental argument; at times over-condensed.) ROSS HARRISON TRANSLATORS Translators played a crucial role in the history of medieval philosophy. Since multilingualism was generally restricted to places in which a direct contact between different languages was possible, such as Byzantium, the Near East, southern Italy or Spain, the dissemination of knowledge into foreign cultures was mainly brought about by means of translation. In this conversion process various kinds of writings were involved, including the Bible, the Qur’an and liturgical and hagiographic works as well as literary and historiographic texts. See also: ENCYCLOPEDISTS; ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY: TRANSMISSION INTO WESTERN EUROPE Further reading Haskins, C.H. (1924) Studies in the History of Mediaeval Science , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Despite its age, still valuable as a source of information about translators of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.) JOZEF BRAMS TRINITY The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is a central and essential element of Christian theology. The part of the doctrine that is of special concern in the present entry may be stated in these words: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are each God; they are distinct from one another; and yet (in the words of the Athanasian Creed), ‘they are not three Gods, but there is one God’. This is not to be explained by saying that ‘the Father’, ‘the Son’ and ‘the Holy Spirit’ are three names that are applied to the one God in various circumstances; nor is it to be explained by saying that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are parts or aspects of God (like the leaves of a shamrock or the faces of a cube). In the words of St Augustine: Thus there are the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and each is God and at the same time all are one God; and each of them is a full substance, and at the same time all are one substance. The Father is neither the Son nor the Holy Spirit; the Son is neither the Father nor the Holy Spirit; the Holy Spirit is neither the Father nor the Son. But the Father is the Father uniquely; the Son is the Son uniquely; and the Holy Spirit is the Holy Spirit uniquely. ( De doctrina christiana I, 5, 5) The doctrine of the Trinity seems on the face of it to be logically incoherent. It seems to imply that identity is not transitive – for the Father is identical with God, the Son is identical with God, and the Father is not identical with the Son. There have been two recent attempts by philosophers to defend the logical coherency of the doctrine. Richard Swinburne has suggested that the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit be thought of as numerically distinct Gods, and he has argued that, properly understood, this suggestion is consistent with historical orthodoxy. Peter Geach and various others have suggested that a coherent statement of the doctrine is possible on the assumption that identity is ‘always relative to a sortal term’. Swinburne’s formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity is certainly free from logical incoherency, but it is debatable whether it is consistent with historical orthodoxy. As to ‘relative identity’ formulations of the doctrine, not all philosophers would agree that the idea that identity is always relative to a sortal term is even intelligible. See also: INCARNATION AND CHRISTOLOGY Further reading Hill, E. (1985) The Mystery of the Trinity, London: Geoffrey Chapman. (A very useful exposition of Augustine and Aquinas on the Trinity.) McGrath, A.E. (1994) Christian Theology: An Introduction , Oxford: Blackwell. (Recom
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Page 899 mended for readers with no background in theology or church history. Clear and reliable.) PETER VAN INWAGEN TROELTSCH, ERNST PETER WILHELM (1865–1923) Born in Germany, Ernst Troeltsch was a theologian, sociological historian, and philosopher of religion and history. He aimed to reconcile theology with modern scientific culture by grounding his philosophy of religion on historical analysis, and is regarded as the systematician of the ‘history of religion school’. He is famous for his critical appraisal of the Protestant Reformation, which, he argued, had retarded the development of modern culture. Further reading Troeltsch, E. (1912) Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen, Gesammelte Schriften I, Tübingen: Mohr; trans. O. Wyon, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches , London: Allen & Unwin, 1949. (Troeltsch’s favourite of his own works, in which he develops his famous typology of social forms of Christian institution.) JEAN-LOUP SEBAN TROTSKY, LEON (1879–1940) Trotsky’s chief claim to attention is as the leader of the Russian Revolution who opposed the consolidation of the Stalin regime in the Soviet Union and sought to dissociate the classical Marxist tradition from that regime and its official ideology. In doing so, however, he developed a version of Marxism which sought to give proper place to the ‘subjective factor’ in history, and at the same time to integrate Marx’s social theory into a broader, dialectical theory of nature. See also: MARXIST PHILOSOPHY, RUSSIAN AND SOVIET Further reading Trotsky, L. (1942) In Defence of Marxism, New York: Pathfinder, 1973. (Trotsky’s last thoughts on Stalinism and the future of Marxism; also contains his most celebrated defence of the dialectic.) ALEX CALLINICOS TRUST Most people writing on trust accept the following claims: trust involves risk; trusters do not constantly monitor those they trust; trust enhances the effectiveness of agency; and trust and distrust are selfconfirming. Three further claims are widely accepted: trust and distrust are contraries but not contradictories; trust cannot be willed; and trust has noninstrumental value. Accounts of trust divide into three families: risk-assessment accounts, which are indifferent to the reasons why one trusts; will-based accounts, which stress the importance of the motives of those who are trusted; and affective attitude accounts, which claim that trust is a feeling as well as a judgment and a disposition to act. One of the central questions concerns when trust is justified, and, in particular, whether justified trusting can outstrip evidence for the belief that the person trusted is trustworthy. If trust can leap ahead of evidence of trustworthiness, then trust poses a problem for evidentialism, or the view that one should never believe anything without sufficient evidence. Further central questions include whether trusting is a virtue and trustworthiness morally required, while a final set of questions concerns the role of trust in politics and the connection between interpersonal trust and trust in institutions. See also: PROMISING; TRUTHFULNESS; XIN (TRUSTWORTHINESS) Further reading Gambetta, D. (ed.) (1988) Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations , New York: Blackwell. (A collection of essays most of which provide risk-assessment accounts of trust. Contains articles by Patrick Bateson, Partha Dasgupta, John Dunn, Ernest Gellner, Keith Hart, Geoffrey Hawthorn, Edward Lorenz, Niklas Luhmann, Anthony Pagden and Bernard Williams. Dunn’s contribution, ‘Trust and Political Agency’, is an especially useful discussion of the role of trust in politics.) KAREN JONES TRUTH AND MEANING see MEANING AND TRUTH TRUTH, COHERENCE THEORY OF The term ‘coherence’ in the phrase ‘coherence theory of truth’ has never been very precisely defined. The most we can say by way of a general definition is that a set of two or more beliefs are said to cohere if they ‘fit’ together or ‘agree’ with one another. Typically, then, a coherence theory of truth would claim that the beliefs of a given individual are true to the extent that the set of all their beliefs is coherent. Such theories, thus, make truth a matter of a truth bearer’s relations
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Page 900 to other truth bearers rather than its relations to reality. This latter implication is the chief hindrance to plausibility faced by coherence theories, and most coherence theorists try to escape the problem by denying that there is any extra-mental reality. See also: TRUTH, DEFLATIONARY THEORIES OF; TRUTH, PRAGMATIC THEORY OF Further reading Kirkham, R.L. (1992) Theories of Truth: A Critical Introduction , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (An introduction to theories of truth.) RICHARD L. KIRKHAM TRUTH, CORRESPONDENCE THEORY OF The two oldest theories of truth in Western philosophy, those of Plato and Aristotle, are both correspondence theories. And if the non-philosopher can be said to subscribe to a theory of truth, it would most likely be to a correspondence theory; so called because such theories are often summed up with the slogans ‘truth is correspondence with the facts’ or ‘truth is agreement with reality’. Aristotle puts it thus: ‘to say that [either] that which is is not or that which is not is, is a falsehood; and to say that that which is is and that which is not is not, is true’. In epistemology, such theories offer an analysis of that at which, supposedly, investigation aims: truth. But correspondence theories are also now thought to play important roles in philosophical semantics and in the physicalist programme, which is the task of reducing all non-physical concepts to the concepts of logic, mathematics, and physics. See also: MEANING AND TRUTH Kirkham, R.L. (1992) Theories of Truth: A Critical Introduction , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (An introduction to theories of truth; see Chapter 4.) RICHARD L. KIRKHAM TRUTH, DEFLATIONARY THEORIES OF So-called deflationary theories of truth, of which the best known are the redundancy, performative and prosentential theories, are really theories of truth ascriptions. This is because they are not theories of what truth is; rather, they are theories of what we are saying when we make utterances like “‘Routledge editors are fine folks” is true’. The surface grammar of such utterances suggests that we use them to predicate a property, truth, of sentences or propositions; but the several deflationary theories all deny this. Indeed, they all endorse the Deflationary Thesis that there is no such property as truth and thus there is no need for, or sense to, a theory of truth distinct from a theory of truth ascriptions. Thus, for deflationists, the classical theories of truth, such as correspondence, coherence and pragmatic, are not wrong. They are something worse: they are wrong-headed from the start, for they are attempting to analyse something which simply is not there. See also: JUSTIFICATION, EPISTEMIC; MEANING AND TRUTH Further reading Kirkham, R.L. (1992) Theories of Truth: A Critical Introduction , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (An introduction to theories of truth; see Chapter 10.) RICHARD L. KIRKHAM TRUTH, PRAGMATIC THEORY OF Two distinctly different kinds of theories parade under the banner of the ‘pragmatic theory of truth’. First, there is the consensus theory of C.S. Peirce, according to which a true proposition is one which would be endorsed unanimously by all persons who had had sufficient relevant experiences to judge it. Second, there is the instrumentalist theory associated with William James, John Dewey, and F.C.S. Schiller, according to which a proposition counts as true if and only if behaviour based on a belief in the proposition leads, in the long run and all things considered, to beneficial results for the believers. (Peirce renamed his theory ‘pragmaticism’ when his original term ‘pragmatism’ was appropriated by the instrumentalists.) Unless they are married to some form of ontological anti-realism, which they usually are, both theories imply that the facts of the matter are not relevant to the truth-value of the proposition. See also: MEANING AND TRUTH; PRAGMATISM Further reading James, W. (1909) The Meaning of Truth , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975. (A collection of essays on truth, mainly written in the last few years before the author’s death, in an excellent critical edition.) RICHARD L. KIRKHAM TRUTHFULNESS Humans are the only species capable of speech and thus of lies. Choices regarding truthfulness
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Page 901 and deceit are woven into all that they say and do. From childhood on, everyone knows the experience of being deceived and of deceiving others, of doubting someone’s word and of being thought a liar. Throughout life, no moral choice is more common than that of whether to speak truthfully, equivocate, or lie – whether to flatter, get out of trouble, retaliate, or gain some advantage. All societies, as well as all major moral, religious and legal traditions have condemned forms of deceit such as bearing false witness; but many have also held that deceit can be excusable or even mandated under certain circumstances, as, for instance, to deflect enemies in war or criminals bent on doing violence to innocent victims. Opinions diverge about such cases, however, as well as about many common choices about truthfulness and deceit. How open should spouses be to one another about adultery, for example, or physicians to dying patients? These are quandaries familiar since antiquity. Others, such as those involving the backdating of computerized documents, false claims on résumés in applying for work, or misrepresenting one’s HIV-positive status to sexual partners, present themselves in new garb. Hard choices involving truthfulness and lying inevitably raise certain underlying questions. How should truthfulness be defined? Is lying ever morally justified, and if so under what conditions? How should one deal with borderline cases between truthfulness and clear-cut falsehood, and between more and less egregious forms of deceit? And how do attitudes towards truthfulness relate to personal integrity and character? The rich philosophical debate of these issues has focused on issues of definition, justification, and line-drawing, and on their relevance to practical moral choice. See also: SELF-DECEPTION; VIRTUES AND VICES Further reading Bok, S. (1978) Lying: Moral Choices in Public and Private Life , New York: Pantheon. (A contemporary treatment of the ethics of lying and truthfulness and of the traditions of debate on these subjects. Appendix has selections from Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Grotius, Kant, Sidgwick, Ross and others.) Ross, W.D. (1930) The Right and the Good, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Contains Ross’ specifications of the duty not to tell lies as a prima facie duty of fidelity.) SISSELA BOK TSCHIRNHAUS, EHRENFRIED WALTHER VON (1651–1708) The German natural philosopher E.W. von Tschirnhaus emphasized bodily and mental health, was a friend of Spinoza and correspondent of Leibniz. He perfected the construction of concave mirrors (used to generate extremely high temperatures) and was probably the first European to produce porcelain. Hoping to make scientific progress more predictable, Tschirnhaus devised a method of inquiry orientated to mathematics and experimentation. See also: ENLIGHTENMENT, CONTINENTAL Further reading Wollgast, S. (1988) Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus und die deutsche Frühaufklärung (Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus and the Early German Enlightenment), Berlin: Akademieverlag. (Tschirnhaus’ role in the early German Enlightenment, as interpreted through the Marxist categories of historical materialism.) MARTIN SCHÖNFELD TSONG KHA PA BLO BZANG GRAGS PA (1357–1419) Tsong kha pa Blo bzang grags pa (Dzongkaba Losang dragba), the founder of the dGa’-ldanpa (Gandenba) school of Tibetan Buddhism, was born in Tsong-kha, in the extreme northeastern region of Tibet. He is often depicted as a type of reformer, putting great emphasis on moral precepts and interpreting Tantra in a way which would not create any conflict with the traditional Mahāyāna doctrines found in the sūtras and treatises. He was also an eclectic, drawing upon and synthesizing numerous different currents of Indian Buddhism – for example, he put forth a version of *Prāsangika-Mādhyamika which was inextricably bound up with the logical tradition of Dignāga and Dharmakīrti. On the Tibetan side, one of his major philosophical debts was undoubtedly to the gSang-phu (Sangpu) traditions stemming from the highly original thinker Phya pa Chos kyi seng ge (Chaba Chögyi sengge, 1109–69). Finally, his dGa’-ldan-pa school subsequently became the dGe-lugs-pa (Gelukba), a predominantly monastic tradition which in time became the dominant current of Buddhism in Tibet. Tsong kha pa thus had, in addition to his philosophical influence, a long-term impact on the Tibetan political situation, contributing to the transfer of power from the southern
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Page 902 provinces to the Lhasa region and laying the groundwork for the peculiarly Tibetan synthesis of religion and political power which was to be embodied in the institution of the Dalai Lamas. See also: BUDDHISM, MĀDHYAMIKA: INDIA AND TIBET; TIBETAN PHILOSOPHY Further reading Napper, E. (1989) Dependent-Arising and Emptiness, London: Wisdom Publications, 1989. (An introduction to Tsong kha pa’s Mādhyamika with a translation of parts of the Lam rim chen mo .) Tsong kha pa (1357–1419) Yid dang kun gzhidka’ ba’i gnas , trans. G. Sparham, Ocean of Eloquence: Tsong kha pa’s Commentary on the Yogācāra Doctrine of Mind, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993. (An excellent translation of Tsong kha pa’s text on the mental faculty and the storehouse consciousness.) TOM J.F. TILLEMANS TSUNG-MI see ZONGMI TUCKER, ABRAHAM (1705–74) Like many of his eighteenth-century British contemporaries, Abraham Tucker was an empiricist follower of John Locke. Tucker held that the mind begins as a blank slate and remains nothing more than a passive receptacle for ‘trains’ of ideas with ‘a motion of their own’. In his moral philosophy Tucker proposed that the motive of all our actions is the prospect of our own satisfaction, and that the maximization of everyone’s satisfaction is the ultimate moral good. (The latter view became a central tenet of the utilitarians who followed him.) According to Tucker, God ensures that our self-interested motivation will be congruent with morality, for God has arranged that we will be rewarded for good and punished for evil – either in this world or in the next. Among those most influenced by his work was the utilitarian and philosophical theologian William Paley. See also: LOCKE, J. Further reading Tucker, A. (1777) The Light of Nature Pursued, 7 vols; 2nd edn, 1805; repr. London: Garland, 1977. (Tucker’s major work, written in a discursive and painstaking style. Includes a short biography of the author. The first edition was published under the pseudonym Edward Search.) T. McNAIR TUNG CHUNG-SHU see DONG ZHONGSHU TURING, ALAN MATHISON (1912–54) Alan Turing was a mathematical logician who made fundamental contributions to the theory of computation. He developed the concept of an abstract computing device (a ‘Turing machine’) which precisely characterizes the concept of computation, and provided the basis for the practical development of electronic digital computers beginning in the 1940s. He demonstrated both the scope and limitations of computation, proving that some mathematical functions are not computable in principle by such machines. Turing believed that human behaviour might be understood in terms of computation, and his views inspired contemporary computational theories of mind. He proposed a comparative test for machine intelligence, the ‘Turing test’, in which a human interrogator tries to distinguish a computer from a human by interacting with them only over a teletypewriter. Although the validity of the Turing test is controversial, the test and modifications of it remain influential measures for evaluating artificial intelligence. Further reading Hodges, A. (1983) Alan Turing: The Enigma , New York: Simon & Schuster. (Excellent biography.) JAMES H. MOOR TURING MACHINES Turing machines are abstract computing devices, named after Alan Mathison Turing. A Turing machine operates on a potentially infinite tape uniformly divided into squares, and is capable of entering only a finite number of distinct internal configurations. Each square may contain a symbol from a finite alphabet. The machine can scan one square at a time and perform, depending on the content of the scanned square and its own internal configuration, one of the following operations: print or erase a symbol on the scanned square or move on to scan either one of the immediately adjacent squares. These elementary operations are possibly accompanied by a change of internal configuration. Turing argued that the class of functions calculable by means of an algorithmic procedure (a mechanical, stepwise, deterministic procedure) is to be identified with the class of functions computable by Turing
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Page 903 later became known as Turing’s thesis; an equivalent claim, Church’s thesis, had been advanced independently by Alonzo Church. Most crucially, mathematical results stating that certain functions cannot be computed by any Turing machine are interpreted, by Turing’s thesis, as establishing absolute limitations of computing agents. Further reading Herken, R. (ed.) (1988) The Universal Turing Machine: A Half-Century Survey, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (See especially Kleene’s and Gandy’s articles. Feferman’s article reviews the ideas leading to the notion of oracle machine.) GUGLIELMO TAMBURRINI TURING REDUCIBILITY AND TURING DEGREES A reducibility is a relation of comparative computational complexity (which can be made precise in various non-equivalent ways) between mathematical objects of appropriate sorts. Much of recursion theory concerns such relations, initially between sets of natural numbers (in so-called classical recursion theory), but later between sets of other sorts (in so-called generalized recursion theory). This article considers only the classical setting. Also Turing first defined such a relation, now called Turing- (or just T-) reducibility; probably most logicians regard it as the most important such relation. Turing- (or T-) degrees are the units of computational complexity when comparative complexity is taken to be Treducibility. Further reading Odifreddi, P. (1989) Classical Recursion Theory , Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing, Elsevier Science Publishers. (A very good introductory text, emphasising breadth, up-to-date as of 1989; the author plans to extend this with at least one further volume.) HAROLD HODES TURNBULL, GEORGE (1698–1748) George Turnbull studied in Edinburgh and became regent at Marischal College, Aberdeen. He was an early champion of the use of empirical methods in the moral sciences. Involved in contemporary religious debate, he favoured religious toleration and the use of rational argument in defence of Christian belief. He also made contributions to educational theory and practice. See also: ENLIGHTENMENT, SCOTTISH Further reading Turnbull, G. (1740) The Principles of Moral Philosophy , London: Noon, 2 vols; repr. Hildesheim: Olms, 1976. (Based on Turnbull’s moral philosophy lectures at Marischal College, and incorporating ideas taken from Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Butler, Berkeley, Pope, Newton and John Clark among others.) PAUL WOOD AL-TUSI, KHWAJAH NASIR (1201–74) While philosophical activity in the Islamic west virtually ceased after Ibn Rushd at the close of the sixth century AH (twelfth century AD), it experienced renewed vigour in the east through the intellectual efforts and political involvement of Nasir al-Din al-Tusi. Although primarily a reviver of the peripatetic tradition of Ibn Sina, he was also possibly influenced by the ideas of al-Suhrawardi. He defended Ibn Sina from the criticisms levelled against him from the direction of theology, notably by Fakhr al-Din alRazi, made a significant contribution to the acceptance of metaphysical argumentation and terminology in Twelver Shi‘i theology, brought the ethical tradition of Ibn Miskawayh and the philosophers into the centre of Islamic ethical discourse, and had a lasting effect on the study of the exact sciences in Islam through both his original contributions to mathematics and astronomy and the observatory at Maraghah which the Mongol Khan Hülegü established for him. See also: IBN SINA Further reading Al-Tusi (1235, 1265) Akhlaq-i Nasiri (The Nasirean Ethics), trans. G.M. Wickens, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1964. (An excellent, meticulous translation of the Akhlaq-e Nasiri , with a brief introduction and notes.) JOHN COOPER TWARDOWSKI, KAZIMIERZ (1866–1938) Twardowski, one of the most distinguished of Brentano’s students, became famous for his distinction between the content and object of presentations. Twardowski, after his appointment as a professor of philosophy at the University of Lwów (Lvov), considerably limited
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Page 904 his own philosophical research for the sake of teaching activities. He set himself an ambitious task: to create a scientific philosophy in Poland. Twardowski fully realized his aim, giving the first step towards the so-called Lwów–Warsaw School, a group of philosophers working in analytic philosophy – in particular, logic, philosophy of science, and philosophy of language. In spite of his concentration on teaching, Twardowski also made remarkable contributions to philosophy after coming to Lwów. See also: POLAND, PHILOSOPHY IN Further reading Twardowski, K. (1998) Selected Papers , eds J. Brandl and J. Wolenski, Amsterdam: Rodopi. (This collection contains Twardowski’s most important papers.) JAN WOLEŃSKI TYPE/TOKEN DISTINCTION The type/token distinction is related to that between universals and particulars. C.S. Peirce introduced the terms ‘type’ and ‘token’, and illustrated the distinction by pointing to two senses of ‘word’: in one, there is only one word ‘the’ in the English language; in the other, there are numerous words ‘the’ on the physical page you are now looking at. The latter are spatiotemporal objects composed of ink; they are said to be word tokens of the former, which is said to be the word type and is abstract. Phonemes, letters and sentences also come in types and tokens. See also: ABSTRACT OBJECTS; Tocqueville, A. de (1835, 1840) De la démocratie en Amérique ( Democracy in America), trans G. Lawrence, ed. J.P. Mayer and M. Lerner, London: Fontana, 1966. Further reading Hale, R.J. (1987) Abstract Objects, Oxford and New York: Blackwell. (An excellent discussion about abstract objects generally, including types, and our reasons for being justified in concluding they exist.) LINDA WETZEL
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Page 905 U UDAYANA (11th century) Perhaps the most important philosopher of the Nyāya school, Udayana authored several works in the eleventh century which brought to a close the long-standing debate between Nyāya and Buddhist philosophers. The realist Nyāya philosophers had argued for the existence of an enduring self ( ātman ), a thesis denied by their Buddhist opponents. Such was the importance of this disagreement that it pervaded all other areas of philosophical contention between them. In the Ātmatattvaviveka (On the Discrimination of the Reality of the Self), Udayana systematically clarified the connections between the ātman debate and many other areas of philosophical dispute, with the result that, in defending ātman, he also produced a masterly defence of Nyāya realism. Udayana is also credited with giving the definitive defence of theism in the Nyāyakusumāñjali (A Handful of Nyāya-Tree Flowers). Further reading Tachikawa, M. (1981) The Structure of the World in Udayana’s Realism, Dordrecht: Reidel. (Contains translations of the La kṣaṇāvalī and the Kira?āvalī .) JOY LAINE UDDYOTAKARA (6th century) Uddyotakara, a philosopher of the Nyāya school, wrote the Nyāyavārttika , a lengthy commentary on the Nyāyasuūtra. Hismost urgent task was to re-establish the authority of the Nyāya school in the face of extensive criticism from the great Buddhist logician Dignāga. Dignāga had been particularly critical of the logical work of Vātsyāyana, Uddyotakara’s predecessor. In response, Uddyotakara incorporated Dignāga’s logical work into the Nyāya school, and added his own interpretation. He was less receptive to Dignāga’s other views, especially his account of perception and its relation to language. See also: NYĀYA–VAIŚEṢIKA Further reading Sastri, D.N. (1964) The Philosophy of Nyāya-Vaiśeṣaika and its Conflict with the Buddhist Dignāga School , Delhi: BharatiyaVidya Prakashan. (A detailed account of the defence of Nyāya realism in the face of Buddhist opposition. There are frequent references to Uddyotakara and his role in this long philosophical dispute.) JOY LAINE ÛISANG (605–702) Ûisang was the founder of the Korean branch of the Flower Garland (Hwaôm; in Chinese, Huayan) school of East Asian Buddhism which emerged as the main scholastic tradition within Korean Buddhism, thanks in large measure to Ûisang himself. His works emphasize the unimpeded interpenetration that Hwaôm posits to pertain between all phenomena in the universe. See also: BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY, KOREAN Further reading Odin, S. (1982) Process Metaphysics and Huayen Buddhism: A Critical Study of Cumulative Penetration vs. Interpenetration , Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. (The expository section includes a comparative treatment of Ûisang and Whitehead.) ROBERT E. BUSWELL, JR ULRICH OF STRASBOURG ( c .1220/5–1277) A Dominican theologian and philosopher and a student of Albert The Great, Ulrich was well known for a widely studied summa theologiae , De summo bono (On the Supreme Good), which represents an advance over previous summae in plan and organization. Ulrich provides a rich synthesis of Christian Neoplatonic theology and mysticism by systematizing the Aristotelianized Neoplatonic philosophical theologies of Albert the Great, Pseudo-Dionysius’ De divinis nominibus and the Liber de causis. He exercised a notable influence on the Rhineland mystics. See also: ALBERT THE GREAT Further reading Lescoe, F.J. (1979) God as First Principle in Ulrich of Strasbourg , New York: Alba House. (As well as the edited but untranslated text of Book 4 tractate 1, Lescoe provides a comprehensive discussion of the authenticity and
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Page 906 contents of the entire treatise, a detailed study of the central metaphysical themes in Ulrich’s thought, and an extensive bibliography.) JOHN BUSSANICH UNAMUNO Y JUGO, MIGUEL DE (1864–1936) The Spanish philosopher-poet Miguel de Unamuno upheld a heterodoxical Catholicism, resembling much nineteenth-century Liberal Protestantism, which viewed reason and faith as antagonistic. By ‘reason’, he understood scientific induction and deduction; by ‘faith’, a sentiment varying with his readings and personal experiences. Adolescent scepticism led him to reconcile science with religion by grafting Spencer’s positivism onto various German idealisms, but a family tragedy brought this period of experimentation to an abrupt end. Obsessed with mortality, Unamuno achieved philosophical maturity with a blend of Liberal Protestant theology and the philosophies of James and Kierkegaard in his conception of the ‘tragic sense of life’ – the theme of his essays, novels, dramas, poetry and journalism. He acquired deep and intense insights into the quest for immortality. Unamuno was a professional in neither philosophy nor theology. See also: SPAIN, PHILOSOPHY IN Further reading Nozick, M. (1971) Miguel de Unamuno, New York: Twayne. (The deepest, most concise and comprehensive treatment of Unamuno’s philosophy.) Valdés, M.J. and Elena, M. (1973) An Unamuno source book: A Catalogue of Readings and Acquisitions with an Introductory Essay on Unamuno’s Dialectical Enquiry , Toronto, Ont.: University of Toronto Press. (Indispensable list of holdings and annotations in Unamuno’s personal library at the Casa-Museo Unamuno, Salamanca.) NELSON R. ORRINGER UNCONSCIOUS MENTAL STATES Unconscious phenomena are those mental phenomena which their possessor cannot introspect, not only at the moment at which the phenomenon occurs, but even when prompted (‘Do you think/want/ . . . ? ’). There are abundant allusions to many kinds of unconscious phenomena from classical times to Freud. Most notably, Plato in his Meno defended a doctrine of anamnesis according to which a priori knowledge of, for example, geometry is ‘recollected’ from a previous life. But the notion of a rich, unconscious mental life really takes hold in nineteenth-century writers, such as Herder, Hegel, Helmholtz and Schopenhauer. It is partly out of this latter tradition that Freud’s famous postulations of unconscious, ‘repressed’ desires and memories emerged. Partly in reaction to the excesses of introspection and partly because of the rise of computational models of mental processes, twentieth-century psychology has often been tempted by Lashley’s view that ‘no activity of mind is ever conscious’ (1956). A wide range of recent experiments do suggest that people can be unaware of a multitude of sensory cognitive factors (for example, pupillary dilation, cognitive dissonance, subliminal cues to problemsolving) that demonstrably affect their behaviour. And Weiskrantz has documented cases of ‘blindsight’ in which patients with damage to their visual cortex can be shown to be sensitive to visual material they sincerely claim they cannot see. The most controversial cases of unconscious phenomena are those which the agent could not possibly introspect, even in principle. Chomsky ascribes unconscious knowledge of quite abstract principles of grammar to adults and even newborn children that only a linguist could infer. Many philosophers have found these claims about the unconscious unconvincing, even incoherent. However, they need to show how the evidence cited above could be otherwise explained, and why appeals to the unconscious have seemed so perfectly intelligible throughout history. See also: CONSCIOUSNESS; PSYCHOANALYSIS, METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES IN Further reading Grünbaum, A. (1984) The Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique , Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. (A standard philosophical critique of Freudian theories.) Ryle, G. (1949) The Concept of Mind, London: Hutcheson. (Historical source of the suggestion that much unconscious knowledge may be merely ‘know how’, not ‘knowledge that’.) GEORGES REY UNDERDETERMINATION The term underdetermination refers to a broad family of arguments about the relations between
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Page 907 theory and evidence. All share the conclusion that evidence is more or less impotent to guide choice between rival theories or hypotheses. In one or other of its guises, underdetermination has probably been the most potent and most pervasive idea driving twentieth-century forms of scepticism and epistemological relativism. It figures prominently in the writing of diverse influential philosophers. It is a complex family of doctrines, each with a different argumentative structure. Most, however, suppose that only the logical consequences of a hypothesis are relevant to its empirical support. This supposition can be challenged. See also: INDUCTIVE INFERENCE Further reading Hempel, C.G. (1965) Aspects of Explanation, New York: Free Press. (The principal formulation and critique of the qualitative theory of confirmation.) LARRY LAUDAN UNITY OF SCIENCE How should our scientific knowledge be organized? Is scientific knowledge unified and, if so, does it mirror a unity of the world as a whole? Or is it merely a matter of simplicity and economy of thought? Either way, what sort of unity is it? If the world can be decomposed into elementary constituents, must our knowledge be in some way reducible to, or even replaced by, the concepts and theories describing such constituents? Can economics be reduced to microphysics, as Einstein claimed? Can sociology be derived from molecular genetics? Might the sciences be unified in the sense of all following the same method, whether or not they are all ultimately reducible to physics? Considerations of the unity problem begin at least with Greek cosmology and the question of the one and the many. In the late twentieth century the increasing tendency is to argue for the disunity of science and to deny reducibility to physics. Further reading Schaffner, K. (1993) Discovery and Explanation in Biology and Medicine, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (Presents a survey of the literature and a discussion of the applicability of different notions of reductionism in the biomedical sciences, especially his own; it includes a very helpful bibliography with essential primary sources.) JORDI CAT UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE Most often associated with attempts to establish an international language such as Esperanto, the idea of a universal language is rooted in the biblical claim of an original language common to all human beings. The idea received its most thorough investigation during the seventeenth century. Drawing on the example of Chinese characters, early schemes involved a system of written signs that would allow communication between speakers of different languages. Later thinkers argued for the importance of an ideal ‘philosophical language’ in which the structure of signs exactly mirrored the structure of reality. While such projects fell short of their authors’ expectations, their influence can be discerned in the formalisms of modern logic and science. See also: FORMAL LANGUAGES AND SYSTEMS Further reading Knowlson, J. (1975) Universal Language Schemes in England and France 1600–1800, Toronto, Ont.: University of Toronto Press. (The best survey of the topic; contains a valuable checklist of universal language schemes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.) DONALD RUTHERFORD UNIVERSALISM IN ETHICS The claim that ethical standards or principles are universal is an ancient commonplace of many ethical traditions and of contemporary political life, particularly in appeals to universal human rights. Yet it remains controversial. There are many sources of controversy. Universalism in ethics may be identified with claims about the form, scope or content of ethical principles, or with the very idea that ethical judgment appeals to principles, rather than to particular cases. Or it may be identified with various claims to identify a single fundamental universal principle, from which all other ethical principles and judgments derive. These disagreements can be clarified, and perhaps in part resolved, by distinguishing a number of different conceptions of universalism in ethics. See also: INTUITIONISM IN ETHICS Further reading Williams, B. (1985) Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and London: Fontana. (Particularist criticism of aspects of ethical universalism.)
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Page 908 UNIVERSALS In metaphysics, the term ‘universals’ is applied to things of two sorts: properties (such as redness or roundness), and relations (such as kinship relations like sisterhood, or the causal relation, or spatial and temporal relations). Universals are to be understood by contrast with particulars. Few universals, if any, are truly ‘universal’ in the sense that they are shared by all individuals – a universal is characteristically the sort of thing which some individuals may have in common, and others may lack. Universals have been conceived to be things which enable us intellectually to grasp a permanent, underlying order behind the changing flux of experience. Some of the gods of ancient mythologies correspond roughly to various important underlying universals – social relations for instance, as for example if Hera is said to be the goddess of Marriage and Ares (or Mars) is said to be the god of War. Many traditions, East and West, have dealt with the underlying problem which generates theories of universals; nevertheless the term ‘universals’ is closely tied to the Western tradition, and the agenda has been set largely by the work of Plato and Aristotle. The term often used in connection with Plato is not ‘universals’ but ‘Forms’ (or ‘Ideas’, used in the sense of ideals rather than of thoughts), the term ‘universals’ echoing Aristotle more than Plato. Other terms cognate with universals include not only properties and relations, but also qualities, attributes, characteristics, essences and accidents (in the sense of qualities which a thing has not of necessity but only by accident), species and genus, and natural kinds. Various arguments have been advanced to establish the existence of universals, the most memorable of which is the ‘one over many’ argument. There are also various arguments against the existence of universals. There are, for instance, various vicious regress arguments which derive from Aristotle’s socalled ‘third man argument’ against Plato. Another family of arguments trades on what is called Ockham’s razor: it is argued that we can say anything we need to say, and explain everything we need to explain, without appeal to universals; and if we can, and if we are rational, then we should. Those who believe in universals are called realists, those who do not are called nominalists. See also: PARTICULARS; UNIVERSALS, INDIAN THEORIES OF Further reading Armstrong, D.M. (1978) Universals and Scientific Realism, London: Cambridge University Press, 2 vols. (A groundbreaking resuscitation of a broadly Aristotelian realism about universals as extra ‘objects’ in Frege’s sense.) Spade, P.V. (trans. and ed.) (1994) Five Texts on the Medieval Problem of Universals , Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. (Great works from the heyday of the problem of universals; requires no formal logic, but both historically and conceptually difficult.) JOHN C. BIGELOW UNIVERSALS, INDIAN THEORIES OF Indian philosophers postulated universals for two principal reasons: to serve as the ‘eternal’ meanings of words, upon which the eternality of language – in particular, the Hindu scriptures, the Veda – is based, and to account for why we conceive of things as being of certain types. However, universals were seen as problematic in various ways. How can something exist simultaneously in numerous individuals without being divided into parts? How can a universal, which is supposed to be eternal, continue to exist if all its substrata are destroyed? In what sense can a universal be said to ‘exist’ at all? Is a universal distinct from or identical with the individuals in which it inheres? In light of such difficulties, it is not surprising that certain other Indian philosophers – specifically Buddhist philosophers, who did not accept the doctrine of the eternality of the Veda – rejected universals and took up a nominalist stance. They held that general terms refer to mentally constructed ‘exclusion classes’, apohas . The use of the term ‘cow’, for example, is grounded not on some positive entity common to all cows but on the idea of the class of things that are different from all things that are not cows. This proposal, which originated with Dignāga in the sixth century AD, was debated vigorously until the eleventh century. See also: LANGUAGE, INDIAN THEORIES OF; ONTOLOGY IN INDIAN PHILOSOPHY Further reading Dravid, R.R. (1972) The Problem of Universals in Indian Philosophy , Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. (A comprehensive treatment of the views of all schools.) JOHN A. TABER
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Page 909 USE/MENTION DISTINCTION AND QUOTATION Speakers ‘use’ the expressions they utter and ‘mention’ the individuals they talk about. Connected with the roles of used expressions and mentioned individuals is a way of uniting them and a characteristic mistake involving them. Usually the expression used in an utterance will not be the same as the individual mentioned, but the two can be made to converge. The means is quotation. Quotation is a special usage in which an expression is used to mention itself. A failure to distinguish between the roles of used expressions and mentioned individuals can lead to mistakes. Such mistakes are called use/mention confusions. In themselves use/mention confusions are a minor linguistic faux pas , but under unfavourable conditions, they have the potential to cause greater problems. See also: DE RE/DE DICTO Further reading Quine, W.V. (1940) Mathematical Logic , New York: Norton; repr. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951, 23–37. (A careful discussion of the use/mention distinction, quotation and quasi-quotation.) COREY WASHINGTON UTILITARIANISM Utilitarianism is a theory about rightness, according to which the only good thing is welfare (wellbeing or ‘utility’). Welfare should, in some way, be maximized, and agents are to be neutral between their own welfare, and that of other people and of other sentient beings. The roots of utilitarianism lie in ancient thought. Traditionally, welfare has been seen as the greatest balance of pleasure over pain, a view discussed in Plato. The notion of impartiality also has its roots in Plato, as well as in Stoicism and Christianity. In the modern period, utilitarianism grew out of the Enlightenment, its two major proponents being Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. Hedonists, believing that pleasure is the good, have long been criticized for sensualism, a charge Mill attempted to answer with a distinction between higher and lower pleasures. He contended that welfare consists in the experiencing of pleasurable mental states, suggesting, in contrast to Bentham, that the quality, not simply the amount, of a pleasure is what matters. Others have doubted this conception, and developed desire accounts, according to which welfare lies in the satisfaction of desire. Ideal theorists suggest that certain things are just good or bad for people, independently of pleasure and desire. Utilitarianism has usually focused on actions. The most common form is act-utilitarianism, according to which what makes an action right is its maximizing total or average utility. Some, however, have argued that constantly attempting to put utilitarianism into practice could be self-defeating, in that utility would not be maximized by so doing. Many utilitarians have therefore advocated non-utilitarian decision procedures, often based on common sense morality. Some have felt the appeal of common sense moral principles in themselves, and sought to reconcile utilitarianism with them. According to ruleutilitarianism, the right action is that which is consistent with those rules which would maximize utility if all accepted them. There have been many arguments for utilitarianism, the most common being an appeal to reflective belief or ‘intuition’. One of the most interesting is Henry Sidgwick’s argument, which is ultimately intuitionist, and results from sustained reflection on common sense morality. The most famous argument is Mill’s ‘proof’. In recent times, R.M. Hare has offered a logical argument for utilitarianism. The main problems for utilitarianism emerge out of its conflict with common sense morality, in particular justice, and its impartial conception of practical reasoning. See also: GOOD, THEORIES OF THE; TELEOLOGICAL ETHICS Further reading Mill, J.S. (1861) Utilitarianism , ed. R. Crisp, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. (One of the most important and widely studied works in moral philosophy. Contains argument that pleasures can be seen as higher and lower.) Scarre, G. (1996) Utilitarianism, London: Routledge. (Useful introduction, including history. Contains bibliography.) ROGER CRISP TIM CHAPPELL UTOPIANISM Utopianism is the general label for a number of different ways of dreaming or thinking about, describing or attempting to create a better society. Utopianism is derived from the word utopia, coined by Thomas More. In his book Utopia (1516) More described a society significantly better than England as it existed at the
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Page 910 time, and the word utopia (good place) has come to mean a description of a fictional place, usually a society, that is better than the society in which the author lives and which functions as a criticism of the author’s society. In some cases it is intended as a direction to be followed in social reform, or even, in a few instances, as a possible goal to be achieved. The concept of utopianism clearly reflects its origins. In Utopia More presented a fictional debate over the nature of his creation. Was it fictional or real? Was the obvious satire aimed primarily at contemporary England or was it also aimed at the society described in the book? More important for later developments, was it naïvely unrealistic or did it present a social vision that, whether achievable or not, could serve as a goal to be aimed at? Most of what we now call utopianism derives from the last question. In the nineteenth century Robert Owen in England and Charles Fourier, Henri Saint-Simon and Étienne Cabet in France, collectively known as the utopian socialists, popularized the possibility of creating a better future through the establishment of small, experimental communities. Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and others argued that such an approach was incapable of solving the problems of industrial society and the label ‘utopian’ came to mean unrealistic and naïve. Later theorists, both opposed to and supportive of utopianism, debated the desirability of depicting a better society as a way of achieving significant social change. In particular, Christian religious thinkers have been deeply divided over utopianism. Is the act of envisaging a better life on earth heretical, or is it a normal part of Christian thinking? Since the collapse of communism in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, a number of theorists have argued that utopianism has come to an end. It has not; utopias are still being written and intentional communities founded, hoping that a better life is possible. See also: SAINT-SIMON, COMTE DE Further reading Kateb, G. (1963) Utopia and Its Enemies, New York: Free Press. (Early study of utopian and anti-utopian thinkers.) More, T. (1516) Utopia , ed. G.M. Logan and R.M. Adams, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. (The origin of the word utopia and an early statement of communism and religious toleration.) LYMAN TOWER SARGENT
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Page 911 V VAGUENESS It seems obvious that there are vague ways of speaking and vague ways of thinking – saying that the weather is hot, for example. Common sense also has it that there is vagueness in the external world (although this is not the usual view in philosophy). Intuitively, clouds, for example, do not have sharp spatiotemporal boundaries. But the thesis that vagueness is real has spawned a number of deeply perplexing paradoxes and problems. There is no general agreement among philosophers about how to understand vagueness. Further reading Williamson, T. (1994) Vagueness, London: Routledge. (Clear defence of the view that vagueness is ignorance.) MICHAEL TYE VAIHINGER, HANS (1852–1933) Hans Vaihinger was a German philosopher and historian of philosophy. Much of his work was a response to Kant’s philosophy, and he contributed to the revival of interest in Kant at the end of the nineteenth century both in his published commentaries and in founding a journal and society for the discussion of Kant’s thought. He developed his own philosophy, the philosophy of ‘as-if’, which was derived from the Kantian notion of ‘heuristic fictions’. Further reading Vaihinger, H. (1911) Die Philosophie des als-ob , Berlin: Reuther & Reichard; 10th edn, 1927; trans. C.K. Ogden, The Philosophy of As-If , London: Harcourt, Brace, 1924. (A lengthy and rather difficult work in which Vaihinger sets out his notion of fiction, based on his reading of Kant and Nietzsche.) CHRISTOPHER ADAIR-TOTEFF VAIŚEṢIKA see NYĀYA-VAIŚEṢIKA VALLA, LORENZO (1407–57) Unlike most Renaissance humanists, the Roman-born scholar Valla took a special interest in philosophy. However, his most influential writing was a work of grammar, Elegantiae Linguae Latinae ( The Fine Points of the Latin Language); he had no comprehensive philosophy, nor did he write mainly on philosophy. Valla considered himself to be a revolutionary overturning received opinions, bragging that through his works he was ‘overturning all the wisdom of the ancients’. His preference for Quintilian over Cicero and criticism of classical authors shocked older humanists, and religious authorities were upset by his views on the Trinity and on papal authority, but Valla never sought the overthrow of classical studies – or the papacy for that matter. He sought rather to destroy the Aristotelianism then reigning in the universities. In De Vero Falsoque Bono (On the True and False Good) (1431), he argued for the superiority of Epicureanism over Stoic and Aristotelian ethics. In De Libero Arbitrio (On Free Will) (1439), he corrected Boethius’ treatment of free will and predestination. In the Dialectica (1438–9) he set out to reform logic and philosophy because he believed Aristotle had corrupted them. Asserting that Aristotle had falsified thought because he had falsified language, Valla was determined to show how logic rightly conformed to the linguistic usage of the classical literary authors; essentially Valla had aggressively revived the ancient competition between the rhetorical and philosophical traditions. The first great humanist, Francesco Petrarca (better known in English as Petrarch), had attempted something similar in the fourteenth century, but Valla’s knowledge of philosophy was greater than Petrarch’s and he had access to more sources. Furthermore, Valla knew Greek and could read texts which the medieval Aristotelians knew only in Latin translation. See also: HUMANISM, RENAISSANCE Further reading Mack, P. (1993) Renaissance Argument: Valla and Agricola in the Traditions of Rhetoric and Dialectic, Leiden: Brill. (The best and most thorough study to date of Valla’s logic.) Valla, L. (1439) De Libero Arbitrio (On Free Will), trans. C. Trinkaus, in E. Cassirer et al ., The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 1948, 147–82. JOHN MONFASANI
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Page 912 VALLABHĀCĀRYA (1479–1531) A pivotal figure in the history of Indian philosophy and religion, Vallabhācārya was the last of the classical Vedānta philosophers, as well as the originator of a religious community which called for the worship of Kṛṣṇa through acts of devotion, in return for grace and deliverance from rebirth. He proposed a modification to Śankara’s philosophy of nondualism, claiming his ‘pure nondualism’ better explained the relationship between the Supreme Being and the soul. For the laity, he offered a practical religious regimen called the ‘path of fulfilment’, through which the devotee is initiated into an individual relationship with Kṛṣṇa before proceeding to fulfil the relationship through specific personal acts of devotional worship. See also: VEDAĀNTA Further reading Barz, R. (1976) The Bhakti Sect of Vallabhācārya, Faridabad: Thomson Press (India). (A trustworthy historical treatment of Vallabhācārya’s life and work.) RICHARD J. COHEN VALUE JUDGMENTS IN SOCIAL SCIENCE Leading theorists in the social sciences have insisted that value judgments should be strictly separated from scientific judgments, which should be value-free. Yet these same thinkers recognize that social scientists are often committed to values in carrying out their work and may be motivated by moral goals of removing or remedying social conditions. From this perspective, scientific conclusions (one sort of fact) and moral commitments (one sort of value) are intertwined in scientific practices, and the question arises whether a social scientist qua scientist makes value judgments or only makes such judgments in a nonscientific capacity. Related questions concern the role played by moral, social, and political values in the pursuit of scientific knowledge and the impact of these values on scientific theories and methods. See also: ECONOMICS AND ETHICS; SOCIAL SCIENCES, PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Beauchamp, T.L., Faden, R.R., Wallace, Jr, R.J. and Walters, L. (eds) (1983) Ethical Issues in Social Science Research , Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. (An anthology of original essays by leading figures in social science methodology and moral theory.) Myrdal, G. (1958) Value in Social Theory , ed. P. Streeten, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (A comprehensive treatment by a leading spokesman for the value-impregnation of the social sciences.) TOM L. BEAUCHAMP VALUE, ONTOLOGICAL STATUS OF We evaluate persons, characters, mental states, actions, inanimate objects and situations using very abstract terms such as ‘good’, ‘unjust’ and ‘beautiful’, and more concrete terms, such as ‘courageous’, ‘cruel’ and ‘crass’, drawn from fields such as aesthetics, ethics, politics and religion. Do these evaluations ascribe value properties to the entities evaluated? If so, what are these properties like? If not, what are we doing when we evaluate? See also: MORAL REALISM Further reading Sayre-McCord, G. (ed.) (1988) Essays on Moral Realism, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. (An excellent collection of papers both for and against the existence of ethical value, including a reprint of McDowell’s paper and the relevant passages from Mackie.) ALEX OLIVER VALUES The theory of value has three main traditions: subjectivism, which holds that the only valuable goods are subjective states of sentient beings; objectivism, which claims that while values must be humanrelated, they exist independently of us; and Neo-Kantian rationalism, which suggests that value is postulated on the basis of practical reason. Central distinctions in the theory of value are between subjective and objective values, instrumental and final values, intrinsic and extrinsic values, organic unities and the idea of an ultimate or architectonic value. There are also distinctions drawn between different types of value, such as moral and aesthetic value. See also: ART, VALUE OF; FACT/VALUE DISTINCTION; VALUE, ONTOLOGICAL STATUS OF Further reading Grice, P. (1991) The Conception of Value, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (A foundational work in value theory, suggestively parallel to the Korsgaard but drawing inspiration as much from Aristotle as from Kant.)
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Page 913 Wiggins, D. (1987) Needs, Values, Truth , Oxford: Blackwell; revised edn, 1991. (Contains many seminal papers which present the view that moral properties are tied to our evaluative interests and thus anthropocentric, but none the less real.) ALAN THOMAS VAN HELMONT, FRANCISCUS MERCURIUS see HELMONT, FRANCISCUS MERCURIUS VAN VASUBANDHU (4th or 5th century AD) An Indian Buddhist philosopher of the fourth or fifth century, Vasubandhu was a prolific author of treatises and commentaries. Best known for his synthesis of the Sarvāstivāda school of Abhidharma, he was sympathetic with the Sautrāntika school and frequently criticized Sarvāstivāda theory from that perspective. Vasubandhu eventually became an eminent exponent of the Yogaācāra school. He also wrote short treatises on logic that influenced Dignāga, traditionally said to have been his disciple. Probably the most original of Vasubandhu’s philosophical works are his two short works in verse, known as the Viṃśatikākārikāvṛtti (Twenty-Verse Treatise) and the Tiṃśikākārikāvṛtti (Thirty-Verse Treatise). In these two works, he argues that one can never have direct awareness of external objects, but can be aware only of images within consciousness. Given that some of these images, such as those in dreams and hallucinations, are known to occur without being representations of external objects, one can never be certain whether a given image in awareness corresponds to an external object. Because one can never be sure of what is externally real but can be sure of internal experiences, he concludes, a person seeking nirvāṇa should focus attention on the workings of the mind rather than on the external world. See also: BUDDHISM, ĀBHIDHARMIKA SCHOOLS OF; BUDDHISM, YOGĀCĀRA SCHOOL OF Further reading Anacker, S. (1984) Seven Works of Vasubandhu, the Buddhist Psychological Doctor, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. (Contains well-annotated translations, along with good introductions, of seven key works. Also has a general introduction and short biography of Vasubandhu, with discussion of Frauwallner’s hypothesis of two Vasubandhus.) RICHARD P. HAYES MAREK MEJOR VĀTSYĀYANA (5th century) Vātsyāyana belonged to the Nyāya school of Indian philosophy, and his Nyāyabhāṣya is the first extant commentary on the Nyāyasūtra, the foundational text of that school. In it, he emphasized the distinctive epistemological and logical character of the topics he deemed appropriate for treatment by Nyāya philosophers. In so doing, he helped both to establish the authority of the Nyāya school in matters related to logical reasoning, and to demarcate the enterprise of the Nyāya school from that of the earlier, more traditional, soteriological approach of the Upaniaads. His commentary on the Nyāyasūtra set the agenda for succeeding generations of Nyāya commentators and their Buddhist opponents. In particular, Vātsyāyana initiated arguments that were to become crucial in the Nyāya defence of its characteristic brand of realism. See also: KNOWLEDGE, INDIAN VIEWS OF Further reading Nyāyasūtra ( c .400 AD) trans. G. Jha, The Nyāya-Sūtras of Gautama with the Bhāṣya of Vātsyāyana and the Vārttika of Uddyotakara, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 4 vols, 1984. (Complete translation with detailed notes.) JOY LAINE VEDĀNTA Indian philosophical speculation burgeoned in texts called Upaniaads (from 800 BC), where views about a true Self ( ātman ) in relation to Brahman, the supreme reality, the Absolute or God, are propounded and explored. Early Upaniṣads were appended to an even older sacred literature, the Veda (‘Knowledge’), and became literally Vedānta, ‘the Veda’s last portion’. Classical systems of philosophy inspired by Upaniṣadic ideas also came to be known as Vedānta, as well as more recent spiritual thinking. Classical Vedānta is one of the great systems of Indian philosophy, extending almost two thousand years with hundreds of authors and several important subschools. In the modern period, Vedānta in the folk sense of spiritual thought deriving from Upaniṣads is a major cultural phenomenon. Understood broadly, Vedānta may even be said to be the philosophy of Hinduism, although in the classical period there are other schools (notably Mīmāṃsā) that purport to articulate right views and conduct for what may be called a Hindu community (the terms ‘Hindu’ and ‘Hinduism’ gained currency only after the
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Page 914 Muslim invasion of the South Asian subcontinent, beginning rather late in classical times). Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902), the great popularizer of Hindu ideas to the West, spoke of Vedānta as an umbrella philosophy of a Divine revealed diversely in the world’s religious traditions. Such inclusivism is an important theme in some classical Vedānta, but there are also virulent disputes about how Brahman should be conceived, in particular Brahman’s relation to the individual. In the twentieth century, philosophers such as Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, K.C. Bhattacharyya and T.M.P. Mahadevan have articulated idealist worldviews largely inspired by classical and pre-classical Vedānta. The mystic philosopher Sri Aurobindo propounds a theism and evolutionary theory he calls Vedānta, and many others, including political leaders such as Gandhi and spiritual figures as well as academics, have developed or defended Vedāntic views. See also: HINDU PHILOSOPHY Further reading Deutsch, E. and Buitenen, J.A.B. van (eds) (1971) A Source Book of Advaita Vedānta, Honolulu, HI: University Press of Hawaii. (The editors’ introductions are excellent, explaining the positions and context of pre-classical Vedānta and the Brahmasūtra, as well as classical Advaita.) Potter, K.H. (ed.) (1981) Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies , vol. 3, Advaita Vedānta, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Contains an excellent introduction to Advaita philosophy, as well as summaries of works in the early Advaita school.) STEPHEN H. PHILLIPS VENN, JOHN (1834–1923) John Venn was a British symbolic logician and methodologist of science. He is known for having invented the method of Venn diagrams for judging the validity of categorical syllogisms and for advocating the ‘compartmental’ conception of categorical propositions which they display. He strongly defended Boole’s algebraic methods in logic by giving them clear logical meanings. He provided the first systematic formulation of the frequency theory of probability, and he showed the uncertainties inherent in the use of J.S. Mill’s inductive methods. See also: LOGIC IN THE 19TH CENTURY Further reading Copi, I. and Cohen, C. (1994) Introduction to Logic , New York: Macmillan, 9th edn, 235–42, 251–61. (An introduction to Venn diagrams in a standard textbook.) Venn, J. (1889) The Principles of Empirical or Inductive Logic , London: Macmillan, 2nd edn, 1907. (A systematic analysis of scientific method, based upon, yet critical of, Mill’s inductive methods.) DANIEL D. MERRILL VERNIA, NICOLETTO (d. 1499) Nicoletto Vernia was a celebrated Aristotelian philosopher during the second half of the fifteenth century. His acquaintances included such personalities as Ermolao Barbaro, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Pietro Pomponazzi and Agostino Nifo. His special interests were in natural philosophy and psychology, but he also revealed interests in logic. Although usually characterized as a rigid Averroist, he moved from a clear commitment to Averroes as the true interpreter of Aristotle to a preference for the Greek commentators, especially Themistius and Simplicius. Nonetheless, throughout his career he also maintained a noteworthy interest in Albert the Great. After first attempting to conciliate Albert with Averroes as much as possible, he later attempted to conciliate Albert with the Greek commentators. He was one of the first Renaissance Aristotelians to use the commentary on Aristotle’s On the Soul that is attributed to Simplicius, and also to cite Plato, Plotinus and their translator and expositor, Marsilio Ficino. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM, RENAISSANCE Further reading Mahoney, E.P. (1976) ‘Nicoletto Vernia on the Soul and Immortality’, in E.P. Mahoney (ed.) Philosophy and Humanism: Renaissance Ess ays in Honor of Paul Oskar Kristeller , New York: Columbia University Press and Leiden: Brill, 144–63. (Examines Vernia’s early treatise in favour of Averroes’ doctrine of the unity of the intellect and his later work attacking that doctrine.) EDWARD P. MAHONEY VICES see VIRTUES AND VICES VICO, GIAMBATTISTA (1668–1744) Born in Naples, Vico lived in a period in which the successes of the natural sciences were frequently attributed to the Cartesian method of a priori demonstration. His own first interest, however, was in the
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Page 915 method was irrelevant. Initially, therefore, he sought a methodology for these values in the techniques of persuasion and argument used in political and legal oratory. But he soon came to believe that the Cartesian method was too limited to explain even the advances in the natural sciences and developed an alternative constructivist theory of knowledge by which to establish the degree of certainty of the different sciences. Wisdom and prudence, however, came low on this scale. Through certain historical studies in law, he became convinced that, although there were no eternal and universal standards underlying law at all times and places, the law appropriate to any specific historical age was dependent upon an underlying developmental pattern of social consciousness and institutions common to all nations except the Jews after the Fall. His New Science (1725, 1730 and 1744) was a highly original attempt to establish this pattern, originating in a primeval mythic consciousness and concluding in a fully rational, but ultimately corrupt, consciousness. He believed that knowledge of the pattern would enable us to interpret a wide range of historical evidence to provide continuous and coherent accounts of the histories of all actual gentile nations. The primacy of consciousness in the pattern led him to claim that there must be a necessary sequence of ideas upon which institutions rested, which would provide the key to the historical interpretation of meaning in all the different gentile languages. He supported this conception by extensive comparative anthropological, linguistic and historical enquiries, resulting most famously in his interpretation of the Homeric poems. He also advanced a more developed account of his earlier theory of knowledge, in which the work of philosopher and historian were mutually necessary, to show how this conception of ‘scientific history’ was to be achieved. Vico believed that the knowledge that wisdom and prudence vary in different historical ages in accordance with an underlying pattern could provide us with a higher insight into those of our own age and enable us to avoid a collapse into barbarism which, in an over rational age in which religious belief must decline, was more or less inevitable. Unfortunately, the metaphysical status of his pattern rendered this impossible. Much of his thought was expressed in a context of theological assumptions which conflict with important aspects of his work. This has given rise to continuous controversy over his personal and theoretical commitment to these assumptions. Despite this, however, his conceptions of the historical development of societies, of the relation between ideas and institutions, of social anthropology, comparative linguistics and of the philosophical and methodological aspects of historical enquiry in general, remain profoundly fruitful. See also: ANTHROPOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY OF; HISTORY, PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Adams, H.P. (1935) The Life and Writings of Giambattista Vico , London: Allen & Unwin. (An excellent simple historical introduction to the development of Vico’s thought.) Vico, G. (1725) Principi Di Una Scienza Nuova Intorno Alla Natura Delle Nazioni Per La Quale Si Ritruovano I Principi Di Altro Sistema Del Diritto Naturale Delle Genti (Principles of a New Science of the Nature of Nations Leading to the Discovery of the Natural Law of the Gentes), trans. L. Pompa in Vico: Selected Writings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. (With notes by L. Pompa.) LEON POMPA VIENNA CIRCLE The Vienna Circle was a group of about three dozen thinkers drawn from the natural and social sciences, logic and mathematics who met regularly in Vienna between the wars to discuss philosophy. The work of this group constitutes one of the most important and most influential philosophical achievements of the twentieth century, especially in the development of analytic philosophy and philosophy of science. The Vienna Circle made its first public appearance in 1929 with the publication of its manifesto, The Scientific Conception of the World: The Vienna Circle (Carnap, Hahn and Neurath 1929). At the centre of this modernist movement was the so-called ‘Schlick Circle’, a discussion group organized in 1924 by the physics professor Moritz Schlick. Friedrich Waismann, Herbert Feigl, Rudolf Carnap, Hans Hahn, Philipp Frank, Otto Neurath, Viktor Kraft, Karl Menger, Kurt Gödel and Edgar Zilsel belonged to this inner circle. Their meetings in the Boltzmanngasse were also attended by Olga Taussky-Todd, Olga Hahn-Neurath, Felix Kaufmann, Rose Rand, Gustav Bergmann and Richard von Mises, and on some occasions by visitors from abroad such as Hans Reichenbach, Alfred Ayer, Ernest Nagel, Willard Van Orman Quine and Alfred Tarski. This discussion circle was pluralistic and committed to the
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Page 916 ideals of the Enlightenment. It was unified by the aim of making philosophy scientific with the help of modern logic on the basis of scientific and everyday experience. At the periphery of the Schlick Circle, and in a more or less strong osmotic contact with it, there were loose discussion groups around Ludwig Wittgenstein, Heinrich Gomperz, Richard von Mises and Karl Popper. In addition the mathematician Karl Menger established in the years 1926–36 an international mathematical colloquium, which was attended by Kurt Gödel, John von Neumann and Alfred Tarski among others. Thus the years 1924–36 saw the development of an interdisciplinary movement whose purpose was to transform philosophy. Its public profile was provided by the Ernst Mach Society through which members of the Vienna Circle sought to popularize their ideas in the context of programmes for national education in Vienna. The general programme of the movement was reflected in its publications, such as the journal Erkenntnis (‘Knowledge’, later called The Journal for Unified Science), and the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science . Given this story of intellectual success, the fate of the Vienna Circle was tragic. The Ernst Mach Society was suspended in 1934 for political reasons, Moritz Schlick was murdered in 1936, and around this time many members of the Vienna Circle left Austria for racial and political reasons; thus soon after Schlick’s death the Circle disintegrated. As a result of the emigration of so many of its members, however, the characteristic ideas of the Vienna Circle became more and more widely known, especially in Scandinavia, Britain and North America where they contributed to the emergence of modern philosophy of science. In Germany and Austria, however, the philosophical and mathematical scene was characterized by a prolongation of the break that was caused by the emigration of the members of the Vienna Circle. See also: ANALYTICAL PHILOSOPHY LOGICAL POSITIVISM Further reading Hanfling, O. (1981) Logical Positivism , Oxford: Blackwell. (A systematic survey of the themes and topics central to the Vienna Circle.) Stadler, F. (ed.) (1993) Scientific Philosophy: Origins and Developments , Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook 1, Dordrecht, Boston and London: Kluwer. (A contemporary look at scientific philosophy and philosophy of science by former members of the Vienna Circle and their students.) Translated from the German by C. Piller FRIEDRICH STADLER VILLEY, MICHEL (1914–88) Michel Villey was France’s leading post-war philosopher of law in the ‘natural law’ mode. He aimed to rediscover a distinctively philosophical approach to law rooted in the history both of legal ideas and of legal institutions. Legal institutions he considered to have been uniquely a gift of Greco-Roman civilization to the world. They represent a distinctive domain of human activity, concerned with an objectively just ordering of human relationships as these affect external conduct and the possession and use of things. Villey has in common with legal positivism a belief in the differentiation of the legal, concerned with objective interpersonal relations in their ‘external’ concern with a distribution of things, from morality and from religion with their distinctively ‘internal’ and ‘spiritual’ concerns. In opposition to legal positivism, however, he holds that justice is a concept implicit in the legal, and discountenances positivists’ tendency to reduce law to a simple aggregation of enacted statutes. See also: NATURAL LAW; ROMAN LAW Further reading Villey, M. (1991) ‘Law in Things’, in P. Amselek and N. MacCormick (eds), Controversies About Law’s Ontology , Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, ch. 1. (A relatively short and witty statement of the author’s view about the objectivity of right and its essential reference to ‘things’, in a quite wide sense; one of the regrettably few statements available in English.) NEIL MacCORMICK VIOLENCE Violence is a central concept for much discussion of moral and political life, but lots of debate employing the concept is confused by the lack of clarity about its meaning and about the moral status it should have in our development of public policy. Wide understandings of the term – for instance, structural violence – not only include too much under the name of violence, but also put an excessively negative moral loading into the concept. This is also a problem for some other definitions of violence, such as legitimist definitions, which treat violence as essentially the illegitimate use of force.
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Page 917 It is better to confront directly the important and disturbing claim that violence is sometimes morally permissible than to settle it by definitional fiat. See also: CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE; WAR AND PEACE, PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Grundy, K.W. and Weinstein, M.A. (1974) The Ideologies of Violence, Columbus, OH: Charles Merrill, 8– 13. (A useful introductory discussion of some definitions of violence.) C.A.J. COADY VIRTUE EPISTEMOLOGY ‘Virtue epistemology’ is the name of a class of theories that analyse fundamental epistemic concepts such as justification or knowledge in terms of properties of persons rather than properties of beliefs. Some of these theories make the basic concept constitutive of justification or knowledge that of a reliable belief-forming process, or a reliable belief-forming faculty or, alternatively, a properly functioning faculty. Others make the fundamental concept that of an epistemic or intellectual virtue in the sense of virtue used in ethics. In all these theories, epistemic evaluation rests on some virtuous quality of the person that enables them to act in a cognitively effective and commendable way, although not all use the term ‘virtue’. The early, simple forms of process reliabilism are best treated as precursors to virtue epistemology since the latter arose out of the former and has added requirements for knowledge intended to capture the idea of epistemic behaviour that is subjectively responsible as well as objectively reliable. Proponents of virtue epistemology claim a number of advantages. It is said to bypass disputes between foundationalists and coherentists on proper cognitive structure, to avoid sceptical worries, to avoid the impasse between internalism and externalism, and to broaden the range of epistemological inquiry in a way that permits the recovering of such neglected epistemic values as understanding and wisdom. See also: JUSTIFICATION, EPISTEMIC; NORMATIVE EPISTEMOLOGY Further reading Sosa, E. (1991) Knowledge in Perspective , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (This collection of essays is a valuable source on reliabilism and Sosa’s own version of virtue epistemology.) Zagzebski, L. (1996) Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Presents a virtue theory that is designed to handle both moral evaluation and epistemic evaluation within a single theory. It includes a theory of knowledge based on intellectual virtue.) LINDA ZAGZEBSKI VIRTUE ETHICS Virtue ethics has its origin in the ancient world, particularly in the writings of Plato and Aristotle. It has been revived following an article by G.E.M. Anscombe critical of modern ethics and advocating a return to the virtues. Some have argued that virtue ethics constitutes a third option in moral theory additional to utilitarianism and Kantianism. Utilitarians and Kantians have responded vigorously, plausibly claiming that their views already incorporate many of the theses allegedly peculiar to virtue ethics. Virtue theory , the study of notions, such as character, related to the virtues, has led to the recultivation of barren areas. These include: What is the good life, and what part does virtue play in it? How stringent are the demands of morality? Are moral reasons independent of agents’ particular concerns? Is moral rationality universal? Is morality to be captured in a set of rules, or is the sensitivity of a virtuous person central in ethics? From virtue ethics, and the virtue theory of which it is a part, have emerged answers to these questions at once rooted in ancient views and yet distinctively modern. See also: DUTY AND VIRTUE, INDIAN CONCEPTIONS OF; MORAL JUDGMENT Further reading Crisp, R. and Slote, M. (1997) Virtue Ethics , Oxford: Oxford University Press. (A collection of well-known papers on the virtues, with introductory essay. Includes bibliography on various topics.) MacIntyre, A. (1981) After Virtue, London: Duckworth. (Influential critique of modern ethics, and advocacy of Thomistic virtue ethics.) ROGER CRISP VIRTUES AND VICES The concept of a virtue can make an important contribution to a philosophical account of ethics, but virtue theory should not be seen as
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Page 918 parallel to other ‘ethical theories’ in trying to provide a guide to action. Modern accounts of the virtues typically start from Aristotle, but they need to modify his view substantially, with respect to the grounding of the virtues in human nature; the question of what virtues there are; their unity; and their psychological identity as dispositions of the agent. In particular, one must acknowledge the historical variability of what have been counted as virtues. Aristotle saw vices as failings, but modern opinion must recognize more radical forms of viciousness or evil. It may also need to accept that the good is more intimately connected with its enemies than traditional views have allowed. Virtue theory helps in the discussion of such questions by offering greater resources of psychological realism than other approaches. See also: SELF-CONTROL; TRUTHFULNESS Further reading French, P.A., Uehling, T.E. and Wettstein, H.K. (eds) (1988) Ethical Theory: Character and Virtue, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. 13, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. (A useful collection of papers on contemporary virtue theory.) Sherman, N. (1989) The Fabric of Character: Aristotle’s Theory of Virtue, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (A useful philosophical and interpretative discussion.) BERNARD WILLIAMS VISION Vision is the most studied sense. It is our richest source of information about the external world, providing us with knowledge of the shape, size, distance, colour and luminosity of objects around us. Vision is fast, automatic and achieved without conscious effort; however, the apparent ease with which we see is deceptive. Since Kepler characterized the formation of the retinal image in the early seventeenth century, vision theorists have known that objects do not look the way they appear on the retina. The retinal image is two-dimensional, yet we see three dimensions; the size and shape of the image that an object casts on the retina varies with the distance and perspective of the observer, yet we experience objects as having constant size and shape. The primary task of a theory of vision is to explain how useful information about the external world is recovered from the changing retinal image. Theories of vision fall roughly into two classes. Indirect theories characterize the processes underlying visual perception in psychological terms, as, for example, inference from prior data or construction of complex percepts from basic sensory components. Direct theories tend to stress the richness of the information available in the retinal image, but, more importantly, they deny that visual processes can be given any correct psychological or mental characterization. Direct theorists, while not denying that the processing underlying vision may be very complex, claim that the complexity is to be explicated merely by reference to non-psychological, neural processes implemented in the brain. The most influential recent work in vision treats it as an information-processing task, hence as indirect. Computational models characterize visual processing as the production and decoding of a series of increasingly useful internal representations of the distal scene. These operations are described in computational accounts by precise algorithms. Computer implementations of possible strategies employed by the visual system contribute to our understanding of the problems inherent in complex visual tasks such as edge detection or shape recognition, and make possible the rigorous testing of proposed solutions. See also: COLOUR AND QUALIA; PERCEPTION Further reading Marr, D. (1982) Vision, New York: Freeman Press. (Somewhat technical, but includes a clear account of the rationale behind the computational approach to vision.) Schwartz, R. (1994) Vision: Variations on Some Berkelian Themes, Oxford: Blackwell. (A useful discussion of historical work on the problems of vision. Also includes a chapter on Gibson’s theory.) FRANCES EGAN VITAL DU FOUR ( c .1260–1327) A French Franciscan philosopher and theologian, Vital du Four was noted for denying the distinction between a thing’s essence and its existence, for expounding an Augustinian theory of perception and for emphasizing the absolute power and contingency of God’s will in creating the universe. One interpretation of his views holds that created things have no intrinsic goodness, only that which has been conferred upon them by God. See also: CREATION AND CONSERVATION, RELIGIOUS DOCTRINE OF
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Page 919 Further reading Lynch, J.E. (1972) The Theory of Knowledge of Vital du Four, St Bonaventure, NY: The Franciscan Institute. (Useful on du Four’s theory of knowledge of particulars, along with the theories of other Franciscan thinkers.) WILLIAM E. MANN VITALISM Vitalists hold that living organisms are fundamentally different from non-living entities because they contain some non-physical element or are governed by different principles than are inanimate things. In its simplest form, vitalism holds that living entities contain some fluid, or a distinctive ‘spirit’. In more sophisticated forms, the vital spirit becomes a substance infusing bodies and giving life to them; or vitalism becomes the view that there is a distinctive organization among living things. Vitalist positions can be traced back to anti-quity. Aristotle’s explanations of biological phenomena are sometimes thought of as vitalistic, though this is problematic. In the third century BC, the Greek anatomist Galen held that vital spirits are necessary for life. Vitalism is best understood, however, in the context of the emergence of modern science during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Mechanistic explanations of natural phenomena were extended to biological systems by Descartes and his successors. Descartes maintained that animals, and the human body, are ‘automata’, mechanical devices differing from artificial devices only in their degree of complexity. Vitalism developed as a contrast to this mechanistic view. Over the next three centuries, numerous figures opposed the extension of Cartesian mechanism to biology, arguing that matter could not explain movement, perception, development or life. Vitalism has fallen out of favour, though it had advocates even into the twentieth century. The most notable is Hans Driesch (1867–1941), an eminent embryologist, who explained the life of an organism in terms of the presence of an entelechy , a substantial entity controlling organic processes. Likewise, the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1874–1948) posited an élan vital to overcome the resistance of inert matter in the formation of living bodies. See also: LIFE, ORIGIN OF Further reading Driesch, H. (1914) The History and Theory of Vitalism, London: Macmillan. (Driesch’s synoptic discussion of vitalism, from its leading twentieth-century proponent.) Mayr, E. (1982) The Growth of Biological Thought, Harvard, NY: Harvard University Press. (An excellent general introduction, covering the span of biological thought from early Greek thought through to the twentieth century.) WILLIAM BECHTEL ROBERT C. RICHARDSON VITORIA, FRANCISCO DE ( c .1486–1546) Francisco de Vitoria, who spent most of his working life as Prime Professor of Theology at Salamanca, Spain, was one of the most influential political theorists in sixteenth-century Catholic Europe. By profession he was a theologian, but like all theologians of the period he regarded theology as the ‘mother of sciences’, whose domain covered everything governed by divine or natural, rather than human, law; everything, that is, which belonged to what we would describe as jurisprudence. Vitoria’s writings covered a wide variety of topics, from the possibility of magic to the acceptability of suicide. But it is on those which deal with the most contentious juridical issues of the period – the nature of civil power and of kingship, the power of the papacy and, above all, the legitimacy of the Spanish conquest of America – that his fame chiefly rests. Further reading Hamilton, B. (1963) Political Thought in Sixteenth-Century Spain, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Although unsophisticated in many respects, this is still a useful summary of Vitoria’s political thought.) Vitoria, F. de (1991) Francisco de Vitoria, Political Writings, ed. A. Pagden and J. Lawrance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ANTHONY PAGDEN VIVES, JUAN LUIS (1493–1540) Vives, Spanish humanist and educational reformer, was an eclectic but independent thinker, blending Aristotelianism and Stoicism with Christianity. He wrote on philosophy and psychology, religion and social concerns, and a wide range of subjects related to education. He was known by his contemporaries both for his lively attack on scholastic logic and for his practical judgment, or common sense. Familiar with classical, Christian and contemporary literature, he believed, with the Stoics, that
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Page 920 learning should be applied for the common good. His original contributions are associated with an empirical approach to the sciences and the observation of nature, and his interest in the practical arts and inventions. His social concerns included international politics (in which he is always a pacifist), and the relief of the poor in cities. His most scholarly work was an edition, with commentaries, of Augustine’s De civitate Dei (The City of God) (1522), but he is best known for his pioneer work on psychology and educational reform. De anima et vita (On the Soul and Life) (1538) offers the first empirical study of the emotions and their relations with the body, based on Galen’s theory of humours, and enriched with insights from Vives’ lifelong observation of human nature and conduct. De disciplinis (On Instruction) (1531), the outstanding work on education in the sixteenth century, is nothing less than a programme for education from infancy to old age, with due emphasis on moral training and, in the case of the study of nature, reverence for its creator. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM, RENAISSANCE; HUMANISM, RENAISSANCE Further reading Bonilla y San Martin, A. (1903) Luis Vives y la filosofia del Rinacimiento (Luis Vives and Renaissance Philosophy), Madrid: Imp. del Asilo de Huésfanos. (The first full-scale modern work on Vives.) RITA GUERLAC VLASTOS, GREGORY (1907–91) A leading figure in the study of ancient Greek philosophy, who studied and taught in both England and the USA, Vlastos was a pioneer in the application to ancient philosophers of the techniques of analytic philosophy. Concentrating on figures of early Greek philosophy, he made major contributions to the understanding of the Presocratics, Socrates and Plato. He saw the Presocratics as applying ethical concepts to nature which ultimately rendered nature intelligible. He distinguished between the early dialogues of Plato, which represent the philosophy of Plato’s master Socrates – a philosophy the earlyPlato shared – and themiddle dialogues in which Plato develops a transcendental metaphysics and rationalist epistemology to ground Socratic ethical concepts. Vlastos’s work played a major role in bringing the history of philosophy into the mainstream of philosophical research. Further reading Vlastos, G. (1995) Studies in Ancient Philosophy , ed. D.W. Graham, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2 vols. (Collects those of Vlastos’s major essays which do not appear in Platonic Studies, Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher and Socratic Studies . Volume 1: studies in the Presocratics; volume 2: studies on Socrates, Plato and later figures. Contains a complete bibliography of Vlastos’s work.) DANIEL W. GRAHAM VOEGELIN, ERIC (1901–85) Throughout his career, the German political scientist Eric Voegelin was concerned with modernity; unlike his contemporaries he sought the explanation of its character and deformities (especially totalitarianism) in the restoration of ‘political science’ as Plato and Aristotle understood it. He therefore explored order in the individual’s soul, political society, history and the universe, and its source in God. He did so by studying the representation of order in philosophy (Eastern as well as Western) and in revelation and myth. Voegelin concluded that ‘gnosticism’, the misinterpretation of the insights of myth, philosophy and revelation as descriptions of some future perfected society, and the wilful denial of transcendence and human limitation, represented the essence of modernity. Further reading Voegelin, E. (1952) The New Science of Politics , Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press. (The most widely known of Voegelin’s writings, now superseded by later work but still a useful introduction to Voegelin’s themes of representation, modernity and gnosticism. Often reprinted.) H.M. HÖPFL VOLTAIRE (FRANÇOIS-MARIE AROUET) (1694–1778) Voltaire remains the most celebrated representative of the reformers and free-thinkers whose writings define the movement of ideas in eighteenth-century France known as the Enlightenment. He was not, however, a systematic philosopher with an original, coherently argued world-view, but a philosophe who translated, interpreted and vulgarized the work of other philosophers. His own writings on philosophical matters were deeply influenced by English
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Page 921 empiricism and deism. His thought is marked by a pragmatic rationalism that led him, even in his early years, to view the world of speculative theorizing with a scepticism that was often expressed most effectively in his short stories. As a young man, Voltaire was particularly interested in Locke and Newton, and it was largely through his publications in the 1730s and 1740s that knowledge of Lockean epistemology and Newtonian cosmology entered France and eventually ensured the eclipse of Cartesianism. After his stay in England Voltaire became interested in philosophical optimism, and his thinking reflected closely Newton’s view of a divinely ordered human condition, to which Alexander Pope gave powerful poetic expression in the Essay on Man (1733–4). This was reinforced for the young Voltaire by Leibnizian optimism, which offered the view that the material world, being necessarily the perfect creation of an omnipotent and beneficent God, was the ‘best of all possible worlds’, that is to say the form of creation chosen by God as being that in which the optimum amount of good could be enjoyed at the cost of the least amount of evil. Voltaire’s later dissatisfaction with optimistic theory brought with it a similar loss of faith in the notion of a meaningful order of nature, and his earlier acceptance of the reality of human freedom of decisiontaking and action was replaced after 1748 with a growing conviction that such freedom was illusory. The 1750s witness Voltaire’s final abandonment of optimism and providentialism in favour of a more deterministically orientated position in which a much bleaker view of human life and destiny predominates. Pessimistic fatalism was a temporary phase in his thinking, however, and was replaced in turn by a melioristic view in which he asserted the possibilities of limited human action in the face of a hostile and godless condition. See also: ENGLIGHTENMENT, CONTINENTAL Further reading Spink, J. (1960) French Free Thought from Gassendi to Voltaire , London: University of London Press. (A well-documented overview of the key stages in the development of sceptical traditions of thought in France. On Voltaire, see particularly pages 312–24. For the general reader.) Wade, I. (1969) The Intellectual Development of Voltaire , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (A rich intellectual biography. Part IV deals with Voltaire’s philosophical thought and development and has special sections on Newton, Locke, Leibniz, Spinoza and Male-branche relevant to Voltaire’s position on cosmology, optimism and freedom. For the general reader.) DAVID WILLIAMS VOLUNTARISM Voluntarism is a theory of action. It traces our actions less to our intellects and natural inclinations than to simple will or free choice. Applied to thinking about God’s actions, voluntarism led late medieval philosophers to see the world’s causal and moral orders as finally rooted in God’s sheer free choice, and to take God’s commands as the source of moral obligation. Medieval voluntarism helped pave the way for empiricism, Cartesian doubt about the senses, legal positivism and Reformation theology. See also: FREEDOM, DIVINE Further reading Courtenay, W.J. (1984) Covenant and Causality in Medieval Thought, London: Variorum. (Discusses voluntarism, the absolute/ordained power distinction, causation and theology.) BRIAN LEFTOW VOLUNTARISM, JEWISH Voluntarism with respect to humanity and divinity became a powerful current in medieval Jewish philosophy, partly in response to the Neoplatonic doctrine of eternal and necessary emanation, which seemed to rob God of the freedom to create, and partly in response to predestinarianism. Solomon ibn Gabirol and Hasdai Crescas were among the Jewish philosophers whose metaphysics gave pride of place to the divine will over intellect, like medieval Christian voluntarists. For many other Jewish thinkers, the centrality of actions sets voluntarism firmly into the context of moral responsibility rather than of metaphysics. Predestinarian arguments like those of Abner of Burgos seemed to Jewish thinkers to rob human beings of moral responsibility. Among the typical defenders of Jewish voluntarism against these arguments was Abraham Bibago. See also: FREE WILL; NEOPLATONISM Further reading Goodman, L.E. (ed.) (1992) Neoplatonism and Jewish Thought, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. (A collection of eighteen essays, including three on Ibn Gabirol and
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Page 922 three on Maimonides, that pay attention to the divine will, as does the editor’s introduction.) ALLAN LAZAROFF VON CIEZKOWSKI, AUGUST see CIEZKOWSKI, AUGUST VON VON HARTMANN, EDOUARD see HARTMANN, EDOUARD VON VON HELMHOLTZ, HERMANN see HELMHOLTZ, HERMANN VON VON HUMBOLDT, WILHELM see HUMBOLDT, WILHELM VON VON JHERING, RUDOLF see JHERING, RUDOLF VON VON WRIGHT, GEORG HENRIK (1916–) G.H. von Wright is one of the most influential analytic philosophers of the twentieth century. Born in Helsinki, Finland, von Wright did his early work on logic, probability and induction under the influence of logical empiricism. In 1948–51 he served as Ludwig Wittgenstein’s successor at Cambridge, but returned to his homeland and later became a member of the Academy of Finland. He did pioneering work on the new applications of logic: modal logic, deontic logic, the logic of norms and action, preference logic, tense logic, causality and determinism. In the 1970s his ideas about the explanation and understanding of human action helped to establish new links between the analytic tradition and Continental hermeneutics. Von Wright’s later works, which are eloquent books and essays written originally in his two native languages (Swedish and Finnish), deal with issues of humanism and human welfare, history and future, technology and ecology. See also: DEONTIC LOGIC; MODAL LOGIC; SCANDINAVIA, PHILOSOPHY IN Further reading Von Wright, G.H. (1951a) A Treatise on Induction and Probability, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (On eliminative induction.) Schilpp, P.A. and Hahn, L.E. (eds.) (1989) The Philosophy of Georg Henrik von Wright, La Salle, IL: Open Court. (Includes an intellectual autobiography, thirty-two critical essays and replies, and a complete bibliography up to 1988.) ILKKA NIINILUOTO VULNERABILITY AND FINITUDE Power has always been a central category of political thought and theory; its counterparts, powerlessness or vulnerability, and more generally finitude, have seemingly been much less discussed. Yet finitude has been a theme for many writers, particularly on metaphysical and epistemological topics, who emphasize that claims about human knowledge cannot presuppose that we command a God’s-eye view of ourselves or the world; while vulnerability has been a theme in ethical and political philosophy, challenging idealized ‘models of man’ that take exaggerated views of human capacities and autonomy, and which overlook the mundane realities of dependence, poverty and frailty. See also: GOD, CONCEPTS OF Further reading O’Neill, O. (1996) Towards Justice and Virtue: A Constructive Account of Practical Reasoning, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Argues for a conception of practical reasoning which does not presuppose a transcendent vantage point and can support linked accounts of justice and virtue which take account of human vulnerabilities.) ONORA O’NEILL VYGOTSKII, LEV SEMËNOVICH (1896–1934) Vygotskii was a Soviet psychologist, the most comprehensive in creative reach and the most influential. Trained in literary studies and originally active as a critic, he took a post in a pedagogical institute and came thus to psychological science, with a special interest in child development. That was the period of foundational debates between rival schools of psychology, intensified in the Russian case by the Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent campaign for a Marxist school. Vygotskii became the major theorist at the central Institute of Psychology. While dying of tuberculosis he worked his intensive way through contested claims to know what mind is and how it acts. His profuse reflections on that large contest remained largely unpublished for decades, while disciples echoed his call for a ‘cultural-historical’ approach to a unified science of the mind, and actually worked on the mental development of children and the neuropsychology of brain damage. The concept of ‘activity’, which was supposed to resolve
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Page 923 Among Western cognitive psychologists Vygotskii acquired a tardy reputation as a pioneer who emphasized social interaction in the mental development of children. The publication of his major works in the 1970s and 1980s revealed a much broader theorist. His central theme was the obvious truth at the basis of each artistic and psychological school, the lure of an effort to unify all of them, and the present impossibility of achieving such unification within science, outside philosophical speculation. See also: PIAGET, J. Further reading Vygotskii, L.S. (1934) Myshlenie i rech’ (Thinking and Speech); trans. Thought and Language, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1962; revised and ed. by A. Kozulin, 1986. (An expanded translation, with an illuminating introduction.) Kozulin, A. (1990) Vygotskii’s Psychology: A Biography of Ideas, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Vygotskii’s development, by a thoughtful, well-informed psychologist.) DAVID JORAVSKY VYSHESLAVTSEV, BORIS PETROVICH (1877–1954) Boris Petrovich Vysheslavtsev, Russian idealist philosopher and religious thinker, was exiled from his homeland in 1922 because of his anti-Marxism (which he later elaborated in a full-fledged philosophical critique). In western Europe he became a leading figure in the Russian émigré philosophical community, lecturing and writing on questions of metaphysics, ethics, philosophical psychology and social philosophy. Vysheslavtsev was particularly noted for his study (begun in an early work on the ethics of Fichte) of the irrational as the sphere of human contact with the Absolute. Subsequently he developed this theme through the application of concepts of depth psychology to ethics and to the interpretation of Christian doctrine. Further reading Zenkovsky, V.V. (1948–50) Istoriia russkoi filosofii , Paris: YMCA-Press, 2 vols; 2nd edn 1989; trans. G.L. Kline, A History of Russian Philosophy , 2 vols, London:Routledge & Kegan Paul and New York: Columbia University, 1953, vol. 2, 814–19. (Summary of Vysheslavtsev’s thought by the authoritative historian of Russian philosophy.) JAMES P. SCANLAN
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Page 924 W WALLACE, ALFRED RUSSEL (1823–1913) Co-discoverer with Charles Darwin of the theory of natural selection, the British naturalist Alfred Wallace travelled to the Amazon in 1848. Four years of collecting specimens there for sale in Europe revealed patterns of geographical distribution among animals. Unfortunately, much of his South American collection was lost in a fire at sea during the voyage home, which forced him to begin his collecting anew. This led to eight more years of travel (1854–62), this time in the Malay Archipelago, where he made his own momentous discovery of the theory of natural selection in 1858. An exceptionally clear thinker, he made many valuable contributions to evolutionary thought. See also: EVOLUTION, THEORY OF; SPECIES Further reading Beddall, B.G. (ed.) (1969) Wallace and Bates in the Tropics: An Introduction to the Theory of Natural Selection , London: Macmillan. (Aimed at the nonprofessional.) BARBARA G. BEDDALL WANG CHONG (AD 27–c .90) The Han philosopher Wang Chong wrote a text called Lunheng (Disquisitions or Discourses Weighed in the Balance), one of the most exceptional and original documents in Chinese thought, compiled as it was during a crucial transitional period. Wang’s main approach can be defined as a rational scepticism, questioning accepted history, the contents of canonical texts and philosophical claims about reality. His writings on fate develop ideas such as necessity, cause and uncertainty. See also: CHINESE CLASSICS Further reading Wang Chong (AD 27– c .90) Lunheng (Disquisitions or Discourses Weighed in the Balance), ed. Huang Hui, 1938; repr. Taiwan: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1983; trans. A. Forke, Lun-heng: Philosophical Essays of Wang Ch’ung, Berlin, 1907; repr. New York: Paragon, 1962, 2 vols. (The standard translation of most but not all of the text.) AGNES CHALIER WANG CHUANSHAN/WANG FU-CHIH see WANG FUZHI WANG CH’UNG see WANG CHONG WANG FUZHI (1619–92) A seventeenth-century neo-Confucian and Ming loyalist, Wang Fuzhi is best known for his nationalism and his theories of historical and metaphysical change. His classical commentaries and other writings, not published until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, present an exceptionally comprehensive and vigorously argued synthesis and critique of China’s intellectual tradition. His ideas on topics such as politics, cosmology and knowledge have fascinated readers of widely differing philosophic persuasions. See also: NEO-CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY Further reading Black, A.H. (1989) Man and Nature in the Philosophical Thought of Wang Fu-chih, Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. (Develops expressionist interpretation of Wang’s philosophy–cosmology, epistemology and theory of poetry – against Western creationist background.) ALISON H. BLACK WANG YANGMING (1472–1529) Wang Yangming was an influential Confucian thinker in sixteenth-century China who, like other Confucian thinkers, emphasized social and political responsibilities and regarded cultivation of the self as the basis for fulfilling such responsibilities. While sometimes drawing on ideas and metaphors from Daoism and Chan Buddhism, he criticized these schools for their neglect of family ties and social relations. And, in opposition to a version of Confucianism which emphasized learning, he advocated di
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Page 925 rectly attending to the mind in the process of self-cultivation. See also: CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY, CHINESE Further reading Wang Yangming (1472–1529) Quanxilu (Instructions for Practical Living), trans. Chan Wing-tsit, Instructions for Practical Living and Other Neo-Confucian Writings by Wang Yangming , New York: Columbia University Press, 1963. (Translation of main work containing Wang’s philosophical ideas, with introduction by translator giving summary of Wang’s biography and philosophy.) SHUN KWONG-LOI WAR AND PEACE, PHILOSOPHY OF The war/peace dichotomy is a recurrent one in human thought and the range of experience it interprets is vast. Images of war and peace permeate religion, literature and art. Wars, battles, pacts and covenants appear as outcomes and antecedents in historical narratives. Recurrent patterns of warlike and pacific behaviour invite scientific explanations in terms of underlying biological, psychological or economic processes. War and peace are also often matters of practical concern, predicaments or opportunities that call for individual or collective action. While philosophers have explored all these ways of looking at war and peace, they have paid most attention to the practical aspects of the subject, making it part of moral and political philosophy. Practical concern with war and peace can go in either of two main directions, one focusing on war and the other on peace. Those who doubt that war can be abolished naturally worry about how it can be regulated. So long as war is possible, there will be principles for waging it. Whether such principles should limit war-making to ends like self-defence or leave the choice to the discretion of political and military leaders is a matter of continuing dispute. Nor is there agreement regarding restrictions on the conduct of war, some holding that belligerents need only avoid disproportionate damage, others that it is morally wrong to harm innocents (for example, noncombatants). In situations of emergency both limits may give way, and moralists have debated whether this relaxation of standards is defensible. Disputes over the principles governing war raise difficult questions about action, intention and the character of morality itself. If we think that wars can be prevented, it becomes important to focus on the conditions of permanent peace. Some who do this conclude that peace depends on the conversion of individuals to an ethic of nonviolence, others that it requires strengthening the rule of law. According to a powerful version of the latter argument, the absence of law creates a condition in which persons and communities are at liberty to invade one another: a condition that, in Hobbes’s classic metaphor, is a ‘state of nature’ which is also a perpetual state of war. While treaties of peace may terminate particular wars, only political institutions that establish the rule of law within and between communities can provide security and guarantee peace. See also: BUSHI PHILOSOPHY; INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Ceadel, M. (1987) Thinking about War and Peace , Oxford: Oxford University Press. (A clear introduction to a wide range of positions in twentieth-century debates about war and peace.) Gray, J.G. (1959) The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle , New York: Harcourt Brace. (Readable war memoir by a philosopher.) TERRY NARDIN WATSUJI TETSURŌ (1890–1960) Watsuji Tetsurō stands out as the leading thinker on ethics in twentieth century Japanese philosophy. He is regarded as a peripheral member of the ‘Kyoto School’ of philosophers centring around the thought of Nishida Kitarō. Like Nishida and the Kyoto School, the thought of Watsuji can be characterized by the effort to formulate a syncretic East–West philosophy developed within the framework of a Buddhist metaphysic of ‘emptiness’. At the same time, Watsuji established his own highly distinctive system of ethics. He must rank as one of the most creative and profound thinkers in modern Japanese philosophy. See also: BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY, JAPANESE; KYOTO SCHOOL Further reading Dilworth, D.A. (1974) ‘Watsuji Tetsurō : Cultural Phenomenologist and Ethician’, Philosophy East and West 24 (1). (Looks at his ethical and cultural works.) STEVE ODIN
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Page 926 WEBER, MAX (1864–1920) Max Weber, German economist, historian, sociologist, methodologist, and political thinker, is of philosophical significance for his attempted reconciliation of historical relativism with the possibility of a causal social science; his notion of a verstehende (understanding) sociology; his formulation, use and epistemic account of the concept of ‘ideal types’; his views on the rational irreconcilability of ultimate value choices, and particularly his formulation of the implications for ethical political action of the conflict between ethics of conviction and ethics of responsibility; and his sociological account of the causes and uniqueness of the western rationalization of life. These topics are closely related: Weber argued that the explanatory interests of the historian and social scientist vary historically and that the objects of their interest were constituted in terms of cultural points of view, and that consequently their categories are ultimately rooted in evaluations, and hence subjective. But he also argued that social science cannot dispense with causality, and that once the categories were chosen, judgments of causality were objective. The explanatory interests of the sociologist, as he defined sociology, were in understanding intentional action causally, but in terms of categories that were culturally significant, such as ‘rational action’. Much of his influence flowed from his formulation of the cultural situation of the day, especially the idea that the fate of the time was to recognize that evaluations were inescapably subjective and that the world had no inherent ‘meaning’. The existential implications of this novel situation for politics and learning were strikingly formulated by him: science could not tell us how to live; politics was as a choice between warring Gods. Weber’s scholarly work and his politics served as a model for Karl Jaspers, and a subject of criticism and analysis for other philosophers, such as Karl Löwith, Max Scheler, and the Frankfurt School. Further reading Gerth, H.H. and Mills, C.W. (1946) From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology , NewYork: Oxford University Press. (The standard translation of Weber’s major essays.) Weber, M. (1904–5) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism , trans. and ed. T. Parsons, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958. (Presents Weber’s account of the role of the Protestant theology of salvation in producing the rationalistic individuals who could bring about the capitalistic rationalization of labour.) STEPHEN P. TURNER REGIS A. FACTOR WEIL, SIMONE (1909–43) Simone Weil’s life and work represent an unusual mixture of political activism, religious mysticism and intense speculative work on a wide range of topics, including epistemology, ethics and social theory. Much of her most important writing survives in fragmentary form, in notebooks published after her untimely death. Though Jewish by family, her attitude to Judaism was largely hostile; and despite a deep commitment in the later part of her life to Christian ideas and symbols, she consistently refused to be baptized. Her religious views are eclectic in many ways, drawing on Plato and on Hindu sources. In everything she wrote, she was preoccupied with the dehumanizing effects of economic unfreedom and the servile labour required by industrial capitalism; but this is only one instance, for her, of the experience of ‘necessity’ or ‘gravity’ that dominates material transactions. The essence of moral and spiritual action is the complete renunciation of any privileged position for an ego outside the world of ‘necessity’. Such renunciation is the only escape from necessity, in fact: what she calls ‘decreation’ becomes our supremely creative act, since only in the ego’s absence is love, or an apprehension of nonself-oriented goods, possible. Marx, Kant and the gospels are all in evidence here. Born in France, Weil died in London while working for the Free French in 1943. Further reading Petrement, S. (1976) Simone Weil, A Life , trans. R. Rosenthal, New York: Pantheon, and London/Oxford: Mowbray. (The most comprehensive biography, by a former fellow student of Weil’s.) Winch, P. (1989) Simone Weil: ‘The Just Balance’, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Incomparably the best philosophical study, drawing out parallels with Wittgenstein.) ROWAN WILLIAMS WEINBERGER, OTA (1919–) The Czech philosopher Ota Weinberger is noted as a proponent of ‘institutionalist positivism’ in legal theory. By contrast with earlier forms of so-called ‘institutionalism’ in law, Weinberger
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Page 927 advances a theory in which norms are ideal entities linked by logical relations inter se, while being at the same time social realities identifiable in terms of the effect they exercise in guiding human social behaviour. The institutions which make possible this duality of ideal entity and social reality have themselves to be understood as structured by norms. Hence, in contrast with earlier proponents of institutionalism, who denied the foundation of law in norms, Weinberger is normativist in his approach; and for the metaphysical vitalism of precursors, he substitutes a social realism. See also: INSTITUTIONALISM IN LAW Further reading Weinberger, O. with MacCormick, N. (1986) An Institutional Theory of Law , Dordrecht: Reidel. (A collection of essays by two authors, with a joint introductory essay, explaining the development and implications of an ‘institutionalist’ theory of law, and its relationship to legal positivism.) NEIL MacCORMICK WELFARE Notions of welfare occur widely in political philosophy and political argument. For example, utilitarianism is a social ethic that may be interpreted as giving a pre-eminent place to the idea that the welfare of society should be the overriding goal of public policy. Discussion of the ethics of redistribution focuses upon the institutions and practices of the so-called welfare state. Even those not convinced that we can validly speak of animal rights will often accept that considerations of animal welfare should play a part in legislation and morals. Moreover, the concept of welfare is clearly related to, and indeed overlaps with, concepts like ‘needs’ or ‘interests’, which are also central to public decision making and action. Welfare can be thought of in three ways. Firstly, there is a subjective sense, in which to say that something contributes to a person’s welfare is to say that it makes for the satisfaction of a preference. However, people can adapt their preferences to their circumstances, and happy slaves might be better off changing their preferences than having them satisfied. This thought leads on to the second sense of welfare as doing well according to some objective measure, like the possession of property. However, this conception can ignore subjective differences between people and fail to account for their capacity to take advantage of their objective circumstances. Hence, a third conception of welfare would make the capacity to take advantage of one’s possessions an essential element of welfare. A satisfactory overall conception will have to bring these ideas together. See also: HAPPINESS Further reading Arrow, K.J. (1963) Social Choice and Individual Values , New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2nd edn. (States the idea that interpersonal comparisons in the preference view of welfare might be based on extended sympathy.) Rawls, J. (1971) A Theory of Justice , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (States the idea of primary goods.) ALBERT WEALE WEYL, HERMANN (1885–1955) A leading mathematician of the twentieth century, the German-born Weyl made fundamental contributions to theoretical physics, to philosophy of mathematics, and to philosophy of science. Weyl wrote authoritative works on the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, as well as a classic philosophical examination of mathematics and science. He was briefly a follower of Brouwer’s intuitionism in philosophy of mathematics. Upon moving closer to Hilbert’s finitism, he articulated a conception of mathematics and physics as related species of ‘symbolic construction’. See also: GENERAL RELATIVITY, PHILOSOPHICAL RESPONSES TO Further reading Weyl, H. (1918a) Raum-Zeit-Materie , Berlin: Springer; 4th edn, 1921, trans. H. Brose, Space-TimeMatter, London: Methuen, 1922; repr. New York: Dover, 1952. (The third and later editions present Weyl’s generalization of Reimannian geometry.) T.A. RYCKMAN WEYR, FRANTIŠEK (1879–1951) František (Franz) Weyr was Professor in Legal Philosophy and Public Law in Brno, Czechoslovakia, and a main author of the Czechoslovakian Constitution of 1920. His influence on Czechoslovakian jurisprudence was exceptional. He advocated the ‘Pure Theory of Law’, demanding that law be studied in a methodologically distinct way, pure of natural-scientific or ideological inputs. He was founder and leader of the ‘Brno School’ of Pure Theory (or ‘Norma
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Page 928 tive Theory’, in his preferred terminology). This school stands close to the Vienna School of Hans Kelsen. See also: LEGAL POSITIVISM Further reading Kubeš, V. and Weinberger, O. (1980) Die Brünner rechtstheoretische Schule (The Brno School of Legal Theory), Vienna: Manz Verlag. (Weyr’s work is almost inaccessible in English or even in French; but this collection of essays in German, by Czech authors, gives a rounded account of the work of Weyr and his school.) OTA WEINBERGER WHEWELL, WILLIAM (1794–1886) William Whewell’s two seminal works, History of the Inductive Science, from the Earliest to the Present Time (1837) and The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Founded upon their History (1840), began a new era in the philosophy of science. Equally critical of the British ‘sensationalist’ school, which founded all knowledge on experience, and the German Idealists, who based science on a priori ideas, Whewell undertook to survey the history of all known sciences in search of a better explanation of scientific discovery. His conclusions were as bold as his undertaking. All real knowledge, he argued, is ‘antithetical’, requiring mutually irreducible, ever-present, and yet inseparable empirical and conceptual components. Scientific progress is achieved not by induction, or reading-out theories from previously collected data, but by the imaginative ‘superinduction’ of novel hypotheses upon known but seemingly unrelated facts. He thus broke radically with traditional inductivism – and for nearly a century was all but ignored. In the Philosophy the antithetical structure of scientific theories and the hypotheticodeductive account of scientific discovery form the basis for novel analyses of scientific and mathematical truth and scientific methodology, critiques of rival philosophies of science, and an account of the emergence and refinement of scientific ideas. See also: SCIENCE, 19TH CENTURY PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Butts, R.E. (ed.) (1968) William Whewell’s Theory of Scientific Method , Pittsburgh, IL: University of Pittsburgh Press. (A short selection of Whewell’s philosophical writings.) Fisch, M. and Schaffer, S. (eds) (1991) William Whewell: A Composite Portrait, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (A collection of 13 authoritative studies of the content and context of Whewell’s life, work and impact. Contains a useful bibliography.) MENACHEM FISCH THOMAS WHITE (1593–1676) The English Catholic scholar Thomas White’s reputation has suffered unmerited decline since he was described by John Evelyn in 1651 as ‘a learned priest and famous philosopher’. His works embrace theology, metaphysics, natural philosophy and political theory. The leader of a minority faction of English Catholics, known after his alias as ‘Blackloists’, White’s overall intellectual position is determinedly antisceptical, characterized by a certainty-seeking synthesis of old and new. The traditional Aristotelianism of his own education is blended with aspects of the ‘new philosophy’ which he encountered in the 1640s; and in this respect White stands as an important representative of the intellectually turbulent times in which he lived. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM IN THE 17TH CENTURY Further reading Southgate, B.C. (1993) ‘Covetous of Truth’: The Life and Work of Thomas White, 1593–1676, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. (Includes bibliography.) BEVERLEY SOUTHGATE WHITEHEAD, ALFRED NORTH (1861–1947) Whitehead, a British mathematician and philosopher, made fundamental contributions to modern logic and created one of the most controversial metaphysical systems of the twentieth century. He drew out what he took to be the revolutionary consequences for philosophy of the new discoveries in mathematics, logic and physics, developing these consequences first in logic and then in the philosophy of science and speculative metaphysics. His work constantly returns to the question: what is the place of the constructions of mathematics, science and philosophy in the nature of things? Whitehead collaborated with Bertrand Russell on Principia Mathematica (1910–13), which argues that all pure mathematics is derivable from a small number of logical principles. He went on in his philosophy of science to describe nature in terms of overlapping series of events and to argue that scientific explanations are
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Page 929 constructed on that basis. He finally expanded and redefined his work by developing a new kind of speculative metaphysics. Stated chiefly in Process and Reality (1929), his metaphysics is both an extended reflection on the character of philosophical inquiry and an account of the nature of all things as a self-constructing ‘process’. On this view, reality is incomplete, a matter of the becoming of ‘occasions’ which are centres of activity in a multiplicity of serial processes whereby the antecedent occasions are taken up in the activities of successor occasions. Further reading Lowe, V. (1985, 1990) Alfred North Whitehead: The Man and His Work, Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2 vols. (A detailed biography of Whitehead, with analyses of his works.) Whitehead, A.N. and Russell, B.A.W. (1910–13) Principia Mathematica , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 3 vols; 2nd edn, 1927. (One of the central works in modern logic and the philosophy of mathematics.) JAMES BRADLEY WILL, THE As traditionally conceived, the will is the faculty of choice or decision, by which we determine which actions we shall perform. As a faculty of decision, the will is naturally seen as the point at which we exercise our freedom of action – our control of how we act. It is within our control or up to us which actions we perform only because we have a capacity to decide which actions we shall perform, and it is up to us which such decisions we take. We exercise our freedom of action through freely taken decisions about how we shall act. From late antiquity onwards, many philosophers took this traditional conception of the will very seriously, and developed it as part of a general theory of specifically human action. Human action, on this theory, is importantly different from animal action. Not only do humans have a freedom of or control over their action which animals lack; but this freedom supposedly arises because humans can act on the basis of reason, while animal action is driven by appetite and instinct. Both this freedom and rationality involve humans possessing what animals are supposed to lack: a will or rational appetite – a genuine decision making capacity. From the sixteenth century on, this conception of the will and its role in human action met with increasing scepticism. There was no longer a consensus that human action involved mental capacities radically unlike those found in animals. And the idea that free actions are explained by free decisions of the will came to be seen as viciously regressive: if our freedom of action has to come from a prior freedom of will, why shouldn’t that freedom of will have to come from some yet further, will-generating form of freedom – and so on ad infinitum? Yet it is very natural to believe that we do have a decision making capacity, and that it is up to us how we exercise that capacity – that it is indeed up to us which actions we decide to perform. The willscepticism of early modern Europe, which persists in much modern Anglophone philosophy of action, may then have involved abandoning a model of human action and human rationality that is deeply part of common sense. We need to understand this model far better before we can conclude that its abandonment by so many philosophers really was warranted. See also: FREE WILL; INTENTION Further reading Kent, B. (1996) Virtues of the Will: The Transformation of Ethics in the Late Thirteenth Century, Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press. (Describes the medieval conflict between intellectualist and voluntarist views of the will.) Pink, T. (1996) The Psychology of Freedom, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (The book explains how common sense psychology conceives of decision making as a second-order, action-generating action; and how our freedom of action depends on a freedom specifically of decision-making.) THOMAS PINK WILLIAM OF AUVERGNE ( c .1180–1249) Active in Paris during the third and fourth decades of the thirteenth century, when universities were emerging as centres of Western European intellectual life, William played a decisive role in the early development of high medieval philosophy. His writing reveals a familiarity with Aristotle, all of whose major works except the Metaphysics were readily available in Latin translation, and with the Islamic philosophers, most especially Avicenna but also Averroes, whose commentaries on Aristotle were just beginning to circulate. William looked back to the Neoplatonic traditions of the twelfth century, but he also looked ahead to the late-thirteenth-century Aristotelia
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Page 930 nizing that he and his contemporary, Robert Grosseteste, did so much to promote. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM, MEDIEVAL Further reading Marrone, S.P. (1983) William of Auvergne and Robert Grosseteste: New Ideas of Truth in the Early Thirteenth Century, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Emphasizes William’s epistemology and relation to Aristotelian ‘science’.) STEVEN P. MARRONE WILLIAM OF AUXERRE (1140/50–1231) William’s career spans the decades at the end of the twelfth century and the beginning of the thirteenth century during which the newly recovered Aristotelian natural philosophy, metaphysics and ethics and the newly available works of great Muslim thinkers such as Avicenna and Averroes brought enormous energy and upheaval to intellectual culture. William’s own views are traditional, owing their largest debts to Augustine, Boethius and Anselm. However, his major work, Summa aurea, is an influential precursor of the monumental systematic theological treatises that followed half a century later. See also: ALBERT THE GREAT; PHILIP THE CHANCELLOR Further reading Ribaillier, J. (1967) ‘Guillaume d’Auxerre’, Dictionnaire de Spiritualité vol. 6, ed. Gabriel-Guzman, Paris: Beauchesne, cols. 1192–9. (A fuller account of William’s life and work than that provided by the editors in the introductory material in Ribaillier’s edition of Summa aurea.) SCOTT MacDONALD WILLIAM OF CHAMPEAUX ( c .1070–c .1120) William studied under Anselm of Laon and became one of a number of famous teachers of logic, rhetoric, grammar and theology in early twelfth-century France, teachers who helped to establish the schools which eventually turned into the University of Paris. He is perhaps best known for his dispute with his young pupil Peter Abelard over the reality of universals, a debate which William lost so badly that most of his students elected to be taught by Abelard instead. See also: ABELARD, P. Further reading Tweedale, M. (1976) Abailard on Universals , Amsterdam: North Holland, 95–111. (An analysis of William’s view of universals and Abelard’s critique.) MARTIN M. TWEEDALE WILLIAM OF CONCHES ( fl. c .1130) William of Conches – whom many historians have attached to the School of Chartres – was one of the early twelfth century’s keenest commentators on Platonic texts, and wrote also on natural science. He believed in the harmony of Platonism and Christianity. He thought that the ostensibly pagan texts of Plato and his followers contained Christian truths which the interpreter needed to uncover, while Platonic (and more recent) science could help towards an understanding of the account of creation in Genesis. See also: CHARTRES, SCHOOL OF; PLATONISM, MEDIEVAL Further reading Elford, E. (1988) ‘William of Conches’, in P. Dronke (ed.) A History of Twelfth-Century Western Philosophy , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 308–27. (Mainly on William’s scientific thought.) JOHN MARENBON WILLIAM OF OCKHAM ( c .1287–1347) William of Ockham is a major figure in late medieval thought. Many of his ideas were actively – sometimes passionately – discussed in universities all across Europe from the 1320s up to the sixteenth century and even later. Against the background of the extraordinarily creative English intellectual milieu of the early fourteenth century, in which new varieties of logical, mathematical and physical speculation were being explored, Ockham stands out as the main initiator of late scholastic nominalism, a current of thought further exemplified – with important variants – by a host of authors after him, from Adam Wodeham, John Buridan and Albert of Saxony to the school of John Mair far into the sixteenth century. As a Franciscan friar, Ockham taught theology and Aristotelian logic and physics from approximately 1317 to 1324, probably in Oxford and London. He managed to develop in this short period an original and impressive theological and philosophical system. However, his academic career was interrupted by a summons to the Papal Court at Avignon for theological
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Page 931 scrutiny of his teachings. Once there, he became involved in the raging quarrel between Pope John XXII and the Minister General of the Franciscan Order, Michael of Cesena, over the poverty of the church. Ockham was eventually excommunicated in 1328. Having fled to Munich, where he put himself under the protection of the Emperor Ludwig of Bavaria, he fiercely continued the antipapal struggle, devoting the rest of his life to the writing of polemical and politically-oriented treatises. Because he never was officially awarded the title of Doctor in Theology, Ockham has been traditionally known as the venerabilis inceptor , the ‘venerable beginner’, a nickname which at the same time draws attention to the seminal character of his thought. As a tribute to the rigour and strength of his arguments, he has also been called the ‘Invincible Doctor’. The core of his thought lies in his qualified approach to the old problem of universals, inherited by the Christian world from the Greeks through Porphyry and Boethius. Ockham’s stand is that only individuals exist, generality being but a matter of signification. This is what we call his nominalism. In the mature version of his theory, species and genera are identified with certain mental qualities called concepts or intentions of the mind. Ontologically, these are individuals too, like everything else: each individual mind has its own individual concepts. Their peculiarity, for Ockham, lies in their representative function: a general concept naturally signifies many different individuals. The concept ‘horse’, for instance, naturally signifies all singular horses and the concept ‘white’ all singular white things. They are not arbitrary or illusory for all that: specific and generic concepts, Ockham thought, are the results of purely natural processes safely grounded in the intuitive acquaintance of individual minds with real singular objects; and these concepts do cut the world at its joints. The upshot of Ockham’s doctrine of universals is that it purports to validate science as objective knowledge of necessary connections, without postulating mysterious universal entities ‘out there’. Thought, in this approach, is treated as a mental language. Not only is it composed of signs, but these mental signs, natural as they are, are also said to combine with each other into propositions, true or false, just as extra-mental linguistic signs do; and in so doing, to follow rules of construction very similar to those of spoken languages. Ockham thus endowed mental discourse with grammatical categories. However, his main innovation in this respect is that he also adapted and transposed to the fine-grained analysis of mental language a relatively new theoretical apparatus that had been emerging in Europe since the twelfth century: the theory of the ‘properties of terms’ – the most important part of the logica modernorum, the ‘logic of the moderns’ – which was originally intended for the semantical analysis of spoken languages. Ockham, in effect (along with some of his contemporaries, such as Walter Burley) promoted this new brand of semantical analysis to the rank of philosophical method par excellence. In a wide variety of philosophical and theological discussions, he made sustained use of the technical notions of ‘signification’, ‘connotation’ and, above all, ‘supposition’ (or reference) and all their cognates. His distinctive contribution to physics, for example, consists mainly in semantical analyses of problematic terms such as ‘void’, ‘space’ or ‘time’, in order to show how, in the end, they refer to nothing but singular substances and qualities. Ockham’s rejection of universals also had a theological aspect: universals, if they existed, would unduly limit God’s omnipotence. On the other hand, he was convinced that pure philosophical reasoning suffices anyway for decisively refuting realism regarding universals, since all its variants turn out to be ultimately self-contradictory, as he endeavoured to show by detailed criticism. On the whole, Ockham traced a sharper dividing line than most Christian scholastics before him between theological speculation based on revealed premises and natural sciences in the Aristotelian sense, which are based on empirical evidence and self-evident principles. He wanted to maintain this clear-cut distinction in principle through all theoretical and practical knowledge, including ethics and political reasoning. In this last field, in particular, to which Ockham devoted thousands of pages in the last decades of his life, he strenuously defended the independence of secular power from ecclesiastical power, stressing whenever he could the autonomy of right reason in human affairs. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM, MEDIEVAL; LANGUAGE, MEDIEVAL THEORIES OF; NOMINALISM Further reading Adams, M.M. (1987) William Ockham , Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2 vols. (The best overall book on Ockham’s philosophy and theology; a must for any serious study. Leaves out the political works.) McGrade, A.S. (1974) The Political Thought of William of Ockham,
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Page 932 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Avery useful and illuminating synthesis of a large body of material.) William of Ockham (1322–7) Expositio in libros Physicorum Aristotelis (Commentary on the Physics of Aristotle), in Opera Philosophica, St Bonaventure, NY: The Franciscan Institute, vols IV–V. (Ockham’s largest and most important work on physics.) CLAUDE PANACCIO WILLIAM OF SHERWOOD ( c .1200/5 – c .1266/75) William of Sherwood, an English logician of the mid-thirteenth century, is most noted for his theories of supposition and syncategorematic terms. In application, these theories enable us to express the true logical form of sentences with misleading grammatical forms. William’s Insolubilia (Insolubles) deals with paradoxes of self-reference, such as ‘I am now uttering a falsehood’. See also: LANGUAGE, MEDIEVAL THEORIES OF Further reading William of Sherwood( c .1250?) Syncategoremata (Treatise on Syncategorematic Words), ed. R. O’Donnell, Medieval Studies 3 (1941): 46–93; trans. N. Kretzmann, Treatise on Syncategorematic Words, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1968. (Kretzmann’s translation contains extensive analytical notes.) JOHN LONGEWAY WILLIAMS, BERNARD ARTHUR OWEN (1929–) The British philosopher Bernard Williams has written on the philosophy of mind, especially personal identity, and political philosophy; but the larger and later part of his published work is on ethics. He is hostile to utilitarianism, and also attacks a view of morality associated in particular with Kant: people may only be properly blamed for what they do voluntarily, and what we should do is the same for all of us, and discoverable by reason. By contrast Williams holds that luck has an important role in our evaluation of ourselves and others; in the proper attribution of responsibility the voluntary is less central than the Kantian picture implies. Williams thinks shame a more important moral emotion than blame. Instead of there being an independent set of consistent moral truths, discoverable by reason, how we should live depends on the emotions and desires that we happen to have. These vary between people, and are typically plural and conflicting. Hence for Williams ethical judgment could not describe independent or real values – by contrast with the way in which he thinks that scientific judgment may describe a real independent world. See also: MORALITY AND IDENTITY Further reading Altham, J.E.J. and Harrison, R. (eds) (1995) World, Mind, and Ethics: Essays on the Ethical Philosophy of Bernard Williams , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Critical essays of varying difficulty.) Williams, B.A.O. (1972) Morality, Harmondsworth: Penguin; repr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976. (Simple, introductory account, with useful treatments of subjectivism and amoralism.) ROSS HARRISON WISDOM In ancient times, wisdom was thought of as the type of knowledge needed to discern the good and live the good life. Philosophy takes its name from it ( philosophía means love of wisdom). But wisdom is little evident as a subject of contemporary philosophical discussion. It is interesting to ask how the concept of wisdom has come to vanish almost entirely from the philosophical map. See also: EUDAIMONIA; VIRTUE EPISTEMOLOGY Further reading Sternberg, R.J. (ed.) (1990) Wisdom. Its Nature, Origins, and Development, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Collection of essays on wisdom by psychologists.) NICHOLAS D. SMITH WITHERSPOON, JOHN (1723–94) John Witherspoon, Scottish-American clergyman, political leader and educator, was born at Gifford, East Lothian, educated at Edinburgh University and ordained Presbyterian minister. In his mid-forties he went to America as president of the College of New Jersey, later Princeton University. He held political office for New Jersey and played a major role in organizing the Presbyterian Church in America and improving the College at Princeton. Witherspoon was representative of eighteenth-century Scottish and American Calvinists who tried to reconcile their orthodox theological doctrines with the Enlightenment’s philosophical currents of empiricism, scepticism, and utilitarianism by
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Page 933 harmonizing reason and revelation. Although Witherspoon was a philosophical eclectic, Francis Hutcheson’s moral sense philosophy was the major source of his utilitarian ethics and republican politics. Witherspoon was not an original thinker, but his popularization of Scottish common sense and moral sense philosophy through his forceful personality and effective teaching laid the foundation for its dominance of nineteenth-century American academic philosophy. See also: AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY IN THE 18TH AND 19TH CENTURIES Further reading Noll, M. (1989) Princeton and the Republic, 1768–1822, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 16– 58. (A skilful weaving together of several strands of Witherspoon’s thought in its academic and religious contexts.) Witherspoon, J. (1768) Lectures on Moral Philosophy , in The Works of the Rev. John Witherspoon, Philadelphia, PA: Woodward, vol. 3. (Not published until 1800.) R.J. FECHNER WITTGENSTEIN, LUDWIG JOSEF JOHANN (1889–1951) Ludwig Wittgenstein was born in Vienna on 26 April 1889 and died in Cambridge on 29 April 1951. He spent his childhood and youth in Austria and Germany, studied with Russell in Cambridge from 1911 to 1914 and worked again in Cambridge (with some interruptions) from 1929 to 1947. His first book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus , was published in 1921. It presents a logical atomist picture of reality and language. The world consists of a vast number of independent facts, each of which is in turn composed of some combination of simple objects. Each object has a distinctive logical shape which fits it to combine only with certain other objects. These objects are named by the basic elements of language. Each name has the same logical shape, and so the same sort of possibilities of combination, as the object it names. An elementary sentence is a combination of names and if it is true it will be a picture of the isomorphic fact formed by the combination of the named objects. Ordinary sentences, however, are misleading in their surface form and need to be analysed before we can see the real complexity implicit in them. Other important ideas in the Tractatus are that these deep truths about the nature of reality and representation cannot properly be said but can only be shown. Indeed Wittgenstein claimed that pointing to this distinction was central to his book. And he embraced the paradoxical conclusion that most of the Tractatus itself is, strictly, nonsense. He also held that other important things can also be shown but not said, for example, about there being a certain truth in solipsism and about the nature of value. The book is brief and written in a simple and elegant way. It has inspired writers and musicians as well as being a significant influence on logical positivism. After the Tractatus Wittgenstein abandoned philosophy until 1929, and when he returned to it he came to think that parts of his earlier thought had been radically mistaken. His later ideas are worked out most fully in the Philosophical Investigations , published in 1953. One central change is from presenting language as a fixed and timeless framework to presenting it as an aspect of vulnerable and changeable human life. Wittgenstein came to think that the idea that words name simple objects was incoherent, and instead introduced the idea of ‘language games’. We teach language to children by training them in practices in which words and actions are interwoven. To understand a word is to know how to use it in the course of the projects of everyday life. We find our ways of classifying things and interacting with them so natural that it may seem to us that they are necessary and that in adopting them we are recognizing the one and only possible conceptual scheme. But if we reflect we discover that we can at least begin to describe alternatives which might be appropriate if certain very general facts about the world were different or if we had different interests. A further aspect of the change in Wittgenstein’s views is the abandonment of solipsism. On the later view there are many selves, aware of and co-operating with each other in their shared world. Wittgenstein explores extensively the nature of our psychological concepts in order to undermine that picture of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ which makes it so difficult for us to get a satisfactory solution to the socalled ‘mind–body problem’. Although there are striking contrasts between the earlier and later views, and Wittgenstein is rightly famous for having developed two markedly different philosophical outlooks, there are also continuities. One of them is Wittgenstein’s belief that traditional philosophical puzzles often arise from deeply gripping but misleading pictures of the workings of language. Another is
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Page 934 his conviction that philosophical insight is not to be gained by constructing quasi-scientific theories of puzzling phenomena. Rather it is to be achieved, if at all, by seeking to be intellectually honest and so to neutralize the sources of confusion. See also: LOGIC, PHILOSOPHY OF; MATHEMATICS, PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Monk, R. (1990) Ludwig Wittgenstein , London: Jonathan Cape. (A full and illuminating biography.) Wittgenstein, L.J.J. (1922) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus , trans. C.K. Ogden and F.P. Ramsey, London: Routledge; trans. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness, London: Routledge, 1961. (The major work of Wittgenstein’s early period and the only book published during his lifetime. The first English translation was revised and approved by Wittgenstein himself, though the later version is now standard. The German version was published in 1921 in Annalen der Naturphilosophie.) JANE HEAL WITTGENSTEINIAN ETHICS Although the strict ‘fact-value distinction’ of Wittgenstein’s early period has shaped much subsequent work on ethics, his most profound influence on the subject stems from the later Philosophical Investigations and associated writings. Of particular significance have been, first, the concept of a ‘language game’, and second, the discussion of following a rule. The vision of morality itself as a language game – a complex of speech and action ordered in a way that makes sense to the participants – has seemed to diminish the urgency of traditional questions about the ‘foundations’ of ethics, and has promoted acceptance of moral experience and consciousness as natural (human) phenomena. More recently there has been a growing interest in how Wittgenstein’s general reflections on rule-governed practices might apply to the specific case of moral understanding. Further reading Johnston, P. (1989) Wittgenstein and Moral Philosophy , London: Routledge. (Monograph providing useful orientation and guide to sources.) Pitkin, H.F. (1972) Wittgenstein and Justice , Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. (Extended discussion of the significance of the later Wittgenstein for political theory.) SABINA LOVIBOND WODEHAM, ADAM ( c .1298–1358) An English Franciscan theologian, Wodeham was preoccupied with logical and semantic questions. He lectured for about a decade on Peter Lombard’s Sentences, first at London, then at Norwich and finally at Oxford. His lectures emphasized the dependence of the created world on God and the contingency of nature and salvation. John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham exerted the most important influences on Wodeham. He regarded Scotus as a vigorous thinker and respected him enough to accept his opinion in case of doubt. Proud to have learned logic from Ockham, Wodeham devoted considerable time to defending Ockham’s views from Walter Chatton, whom he saw as someone whose errors in logic arose from malice as well as ignorance. However, despite Wodeham’s reservations about Chatton, he was considerably influenced by him. Similarly, Wodeham modified his own opinion about sensory illusions in response to Peter Aureol, whom he saw as skilled and prudent but often mistaken, sometimes as a result of faulty logic. See also: CHATTON, W.; LANGUAGE, MEDIEVAL THEORIES OF; WILLIAM OF OCKHAM Further reading Courtenay, W. (1978) Adam Wodeham , Leiden: Brill. (The most complete introduction to Wodeham’s life and times.) REGA WOOD WOLFF, CHRISTIAN (1679–1754) Christian Wolff was a rationalistic school philosopher in the German Enlightenment. During the period between the death of Leibniz (1714) and the publication of Kant’s critical writings (1780s), Wolff was perhaps the most influential philosopher in Germany. There are many reasons for this, including Wolff’s voluminous writings in both German and Latin in nearly every field of philosophy known to his time, their unvarying employment of a strict rationalistic method to establish their conclusions, the attention directed to Wolff and his views as a result of bitter controversies with some theological colleagues, his banishment from Prussia by King Frederick Wilhelm I in 1723 and triumphant return from Hesse–Cassel in 1740 after Frederick the Great assumed the
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Page 935 throne, and his active teaching at the Universities of Halle and Marburg for nearly 50 years. Through his work as a university professor, his prolific writings, and the rigour and comprehensiveness of his philosophy, Wolff influenced a very large group of followers, educators and other writers. Even after his influence had begun to wane, Kant still referred to ‘the celebrated Wolff’ and spoke of ‘the strict method of the celebrated Wolff, the greatest of all dogmatic philosophers’. Wolff thought of philosophy as that discipline which provides reasons to explain why things exist or occur and why they are even possible. Thus, he included within philosophy a much broader range of subjects than might now be recognized as ‘philosophical’. Indeed, for Wolff all human knowledge consists of only three disciplines: history, mathematics and philosophy. The reasons provided by Wolff’s philosophy were to be established through unfailing adherence to a strict demonstrative method. Like Descartes, Wolff first discovered this method in mathematics, but he concluded that both mathematical and philosophical methods had their ultimate origins in a ‘natural logic’ prescribed to the human mind by God. In fact, the heart of Wolff’s philosophical method is a deductive logic making use of syllogistic arguments. For Wolff, the immediate objective of philosophical method is to achieve certitude by establishing an order of truths within each discipline and a system within human knowledge as a whole. The ultimate goal is to establish a reliable foundation for the conduct of human affairs and the enlargement of knowledge. Wolff applied his philosophical method unfailingly in each of the three principal parts of philosophy: metaphysics – knowledge of those things which are possible through being in general, the world in general, human souls, and God; physics – knowledge of those things which are possible through bodies; and practical philosophy – knowledge of those things which are concerned with human actions. Wolff’s philosophical system also includes logic, an art of discovery (to guide the investigation of hidden truth and the production of new insights), some experiential disciplines (for example, empirical psychology) and several bodies of philosophical knowledge that were not well developed in Wolff’s time concerning law, medicine, and both the practical and liberal arts. See also: ENLIGHTENMENT, CONTINENTAL Further reading Gerlach, H.-M., Schenk, G. and Thaler, B. (eds) (1980) Christian Wolff als Philosoph der Aufklärung in Deutschland (Christian Wolff as Philosopher of the Enlightenment in Germany), Halle: Wissenschaftliche Beiträge der Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg. (Proceedings of a colloquium held at Halle in 1979 on the 300th anniversary of Wolff’s birth; contains some two dozen contributions.) Wolff, C. (1728) Discursus praeliminaris de philosophia in genere, trans. R.J. Blackwell, Preliminary Discourse on Philosophy in General , Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963. (Originally published together with the Philosophia rationalis sive Logica.) CHARLES A. CORR WOLLASTON, WILLIAM (1660–1724) William Wollaston, a popular eighteenth-century English moral philosopher, is often grouped with Samuel Clarke as a staunch defender of the kind of moral rationalism that David Hume later opposed. Wollaston’s project, as he describes it, is to find a rule to distinguish right actions from wrong. He complains that previous philosophers have either overlooked this task or proposed rules which are imprecise, incomplete or misleading. The rule he proposes is fidelity to truth. Actions, he argues, express propositions and so may be true or false. Moral actions express truths and immoral actions express falsehoods. He thinks this rule explains other widely held views about morality, for example, that we should live in accordance with nature, right reason or the will of God. His most remembered (and most misunderstood) claim is that an evildoer ‘lives a lie’. Further reading Wollaston, W. (1722) The Religion of Nature Delineated, printed privately; repr. London: Samuel Palmer, 1724. The ‘Life of Wollaston’ is prefixed to the 6th edn, London, 1738. 10 more editions by 1750. (Wollaston’s philosophically important work; argues that as moral creatures we should aim to mirror truth, representing the way things are in our conduct.) CHARLOTTE R. BROWN WOLLSTONECRAFT, MARY (1759–97) Wollstonecraft used the rationalist and egalitarian ideas of late eighteenth-century radical liberalism to attack the subjugation of women
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Page 936 and to display its roots in the social construction of gender. Her political philosophy draws on Rousseau’s philosophical anthropology, rational religion, and an original moral psychology which integrates reason and feeling in the production of virtue. Relations between men and women are corrupted by artificial gender distinctions, just as political relations are corrupted by artificial distinctions of rank, wealth and power. Conventional, artificial morality distinguishes between male and female virtue; true virtue is gender-neutral, consists in the imitation of God, and depends on the unimpeded development of natural faculties common to both sexes, including both reason and passion. Political justice and private virtue are interdependent: neither can advance without an advance in the other. See also: FEMINISM Further reading Sapiro, V. (1992) A Vindication of Political Virtue: the Political Theory of Mary Wollstonecraft, Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press. (The first book-length study of Wollstonecraft’s philosophy; generally reliable.) Wollstonecraft, M. (1792) A Vindication of the Rights of Woman with Strictures on Moral and Political Subjects , in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, London: William Pickering, vol. 5, 1989. (Attacks conventional female education, morality and gender role as presented by various contemporary authors of educational and conduct books, principally by Rousseau in Émile.) SUSAN KHIN ZAW WÛNCH’ŪK (613–96) Wônch’ćk, a Korean monk-scholar, was head of the Ximing Monastery in Tang China. Neglected by history, research has now recovered this prolific writer, whose commentaries on Yogācāra texts influenced later Buddhist scholars in China and also in Tibet, notably Tsong kha pa. See also: BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY, CHINESE; TSONG KHA PA Further reading Thurman, R.A.F. (1984) Tsong Khapa’s Speech of Gold in the Essence of True Eloquences: Reason and Enlightenment in the Central Philosophy of Tibet, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Translation with an introduction.) SHOTARO IIDA WÔNHYO (617–86) Wônhyo is one of the most important figures in Korean Buddhism, and a significant influence on the development of East Asian Buddhism in general. His lifework was the reconciliation of ideological conflicts among the various Buddhist schools. His goal was to create an all-inclusive, non-sectarian Buddhist doctrine. To do this he utilized the all-embracing, systematic metaphysics of the Hwaôm school of Buddhism, deriving both a guiding theoretical principle – hwajaeng or ‘the harmonization of all disputes’ – and a powerful dialectical method for the examination of Buddhist doctrinal conflicts. See also: BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY, KOREAN Further reading Lee, P.H. (ed.) (1993) Sourcebook of Korean Civilization , vol. 1, From Early Times to the Sixteenth Century, New York: Columbia University Press. (Contains selected English translations of important Korean texts reflecting the culture and civilization of Korea, including excerpts from Wônhyo on pages 145–59.) SUNG BAE PARK WORK, PHILOSOPHY OF Unlike play, work is activity that has to involve significant expenditure of effort and be directed toward some goal beyond enjoyment. The term ‘work’ is also used to signify an individual’s occupation, the means whereby they gain their livelihood. In modern market economies individuals contract to work for other individuals on specified terms. Beyond noting this formal freedom to choose how one shall work, critics of market economies have maintained that one’s occupation should be a realm of substantive freedom, in which work is freely chosen self-expression. Against this unalienated labour norm, others have held that the freedom of self-expression is one good among others that work can provide, such as lucrative pay, friendly social contact and the satisfaction of the self-support norm, and that none of these various work-related goods necessarily should have priority over others. Some philosophers place responsibility on society for providing opportunities for good work for all members of society; others hold that the responsibility for the quality of one’s occupational life appropriately
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Page 937 falls on each individual alone. Finally, some theorists of work emphasize that performance of hard work renders one deserving of property ownership (John Locke) or enhances one’s spiritual development (Mahatma Gandhi). Further reading Nozick, R. (1974) Anarchy, State, and Utopia, New York: Basic Books. (Expresses a libertarian view that repudiates any positive obligations on the part of society to provide desirable work opportunities for members of society.) RICHARD ARNESON WRÓBLEWSKI, JERZY (1926–90) Jerzy Wróblewski was a leading representative of analytical legal theory in Poland in the second half of the twentieth century. Leon Petrażycki and the school of logical thought of Lwów and Warsaw provided his background inspiration. His approach to legal theory and legal science belongs, in philosophical terms, to minimalism, relativism and moderate reconstructivism. See also: LAW, PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Wróblewski, J. (1992) The Judicial Application of Law , ed. Z. Bankowski and N. MacCormick, Dordrecht, Boston, MA, and London: Kluwer. (This is Wróblewski’s major work available in English.) MAREK ZIRK-SADOWSKI WUNDT, WILHELM (1832–1920) The German philosopher, psychologist and physician Wilhelm Wundt founded the world’s first psychological laboratory in Leipzig in 1879 – at a time when psychology was still generally regarded as a theoretical and institutional part of philosophy. This event typified his life’s work and its reception in many respects. On the one hand Wundt tried to develop psychology as an independent science by defining its subject matter and methodology; on the other, he wanted to integrate psychology into the context of philosophy, cultural theory and history. With both attempts he acquired world fame and at the same time became a most controversial figure. Systematizing his approach, Wundt worked on a great amount of material in very different disciplines. He has been called the last philosophical ‘polyhistor’ in the tradition of Leibniz and Hegel, as well as the first modern scientist in psychology. See also: DUALISM; INTROSPECTION, PSYCHOLOGY OF; PSYCHOLOGY, THEORIES OF Further reading Wundt, W. (1863–) Vorlesung über die Menschenund Thierseele , Leipzig: Voß; trans. J.E. Creighton and E.B. Titchener, Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology , New York: Macmillan, 1894. (Wundt’s first systematic treatment of the traditional philosophical field of ‘mind’, ‘soul’ and ‘thought’ from the point of view of an experimental and quantitative psychology.) JENS BROCKMEIER WYCLIF, JOHN ( c .1330–84) John Wyclif was a logician, theologian and religious reformer. A Yorkshireman educated at Oxford, he was first prominent as a logician; he developed some technical notions of the Oxford Calculators, but reacted against their logic of terms to embrace with fervour the idea of the real existence of universal ideas. He expounded his view as a theologian, rejecting the notion of the annihilation of substance (including the eucharistic elements) and treating time as merely contingent. The proper understanding of universals became his touchstone of moral progress; treating scripture as a universal idea, he measured the value of human institutions, including the Church and its temporal property, by their conformity with its absolute truth. These views, though temporarily favoured by King Edward III, were condemned by Pope Gregory XI in 1377 and by the English ecclesiastical hierarchy in 1382, forcing him into retirement but leaving him the inspirer of a clandestine group of scholarly reformers, the Lollards. See also: LANGUAGE, MEDIEVAL THEORIES OF; UNIVERSALS Further reading Kenny, A. (1985) Wyclif , Oxford: Clarendon Press. (An admirably clear exposition of Wyclif’s philosophy.) Workman, H.B. (1926) John Wyclif , Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2 vols. (The most modern biography and a comprehensive study.) JEREMY CATTO
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Page 938 X XENOCRATES (396–314 BC) The Greek philosopher Xenocrates was the third head of the Platonic Academy. Like his predecessor Speusippus, he further developed Plato’s philosophy, but along more orthodox lines. Indeed, Xenocrates contributed much to the formalization of Plato’s philosophy into dogma. Starting from a metaphysical system of Monad and Dyad, the former being a self-contemplating intellect on the Aristotelian model and the latter a material principle, he systematically derived the rest of creation, postulating first the generation of number, and then soul, defined as ‘self-moving number’. He is notable for a tendency towards triadic divisions of the universe, and a developed theory of daemons. He was probably responsible for the first definitive edition of Plato’s works. Further reading Dillon, J. (1977) The Middle Platonists , London: Duckworth. (See pages 22–39 for an introductory account of Xenocrates.) JOHN DILLON XENOPHANES ( c .570–c .478 BC) Xenophanes was a philosophically minded poet who lived in various cities of ancient Greece. He is best remembered for an early comment on the limits of knowledge, a critique of anthropomorphism in religion and an advance towards monotheism. The surviving fragments of his poems span a wide range of topics, from proper behaviour at symposia and the measures of personal excellence to the nature of the divine, the forces that rule nature and how much can be discovered by mortals concerning matters in either realm. Both Plato and Aristotle characterized him as the founder of Eleatic philosophy, a view echoed in the pseudo-Aristotelian treatise, On Melissus, Xenophanes and Gorgias , and in ancient doxographical summaries. But in many of his poems Xenophanes speaks as a civic counsellor and inquirer into nature in the tradition of the philosopher-scientists of Miletus. While his one, unmoving, whole and eternal divinity bears some resemblance to Parmenides’ ‘being’, in other teachings he anticipates the views of Heraclitus and Empedocles. His comments on divine perfection, the limited utility of the victorious athlete and the need to restrict poetic expression all foreshadow views expressed by Plato in the Republic. Further reading Lesher, J. H. (1992) Xenophanes of Colophon: Fragments, Toronto, Ont.: University of Toronto Press. (A full-length study of Xenophanes in English; contains Greek texts of fragments with English translations, notes and commentaries, translations of ancient testimonia and essays on various aspects of Xenophanes’ philosophy.) J.H. LESHER XENOPHON ( c .427–355/50 BC) The Greek historian and philosophical writer Xenophon was a companion of Socrates, and is second in importance only to Plato as a source for our knowledge of him. He was also a penetrating and influential political thinker in his own right. He left Athens to embark on a spectacular military career in 401 BC, two years before Socrates’ execution, and his military experiences had a deep impact on his thought and writings. An important historian and an innovator in literary forms, Xenophon limited his philosophical interests to political and ethical themes. Two questions are especially prominent: (1) What are the psychological roots of human virtue, and how can it be taught? (2) What are the limits of and the prospects for human attainment of self-sufficiency? He develops these themes most fully in two major works that present two competing models of the best human being. His Memoirs (usually referred to by the Latin title Memorabilia ) presents the model of the philosophical life, mainly by recounting conversations between Socrates and a wide variety of human types. His The Education of Cyrus (often referred to by its Latin title Cyropaedia) presents the model of the political life, mainly by giving a fictionalized account of the rise to power of Cyrus the Great, founder of the Persian empire. Generally speaking, Xenophon seems in these works less willing than Plato and Aristotle to privilege the claims of philosophy over the claims of politics, and
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Page 939 less optimistic about the power of reason to produce happiness. His works were highly esteemed by the Romans, as well as by such moral thinkers as Machiavelli, Montaigne and Rousseau. Further reading Xenophon ( c . 360s BC) Memorabilia , trans. E.C. Marchant, Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and London: Heinemann, 1923. (Parallel Greek text and English translation.) Tatum, J. (1989) Xenophon’s Imperial Fiction, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (A stimulating literary examination of the Cyropaedia.) DAVID K. O’CONNOR XIN (HEART-AND-MIND) In the West, questions of the distinguishability of mind and matter and of rationality and emotion or sentiment are central issues within the philosophy of mind. Neither of these topics is of much interest, however, to the mainstream of Chinese thought. On the one hand, the notion of qi , the vital energizing field that constitutes all natural processes, renders discussions of the relevance of any psychophysical dualism moot. On the other hand, xin , normally translated as ‘heart-and-mind’, preludes the assumption of distinctions between thinking and feeling, or idea and affect. Xin is often translated simply as ‘heart’, but since it is the seat of thinking and judgment, the notion of mind must be included in its characterization if the term is to be properly understood. Indeed, what we often think of as ‘will’ or ‘intention’ is likewise included in the notion of xin . See also: SELF-CULTIVATION IN CHINESE PHILOSOPHY Further reading Analects ( c . 4th–2nd century BC?), trans. D.C. Lau, Confucius: The Analects, Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1979. (An authoritative translation.) DAVID L. HALL ROGER T. AMES XIN (TRUSTWORTHINESS) The earliest and basic sense of xin is ‘being true to one’s word’. While one’s words can be xin (that is, worthy of trust), in most cases xin indicates an excellence of character; it is thought to be the central virtue governing the relationship between friends. Since xin is primarily a virtue, its exercise involves practical reasoning and not a mechanical adherence to one’s promises. Xin later was added to an original list of four cardinal Confucian virtues, though its status as a distinct disposition remained controversial. Buddhist thinkers broadened the sense of the term to include religious faith. This innovation in turn influenced certain neo-Confucian thinkers who then talked about the need to xin (have faith in) one’s innate moral faculty. See also: CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY, CHINESE PHILIP J. IVANHOE XING Xing is conventionally translated as ‘nature’ or ‘human nature’. Some read xing as meaning a heavenly endowed tendency, directionality, or potentiality of growth in the individual. On this essentialistic reading, xing is an innate and unchanging ‘given’, a defining condition of all human beings. Others have given a historicist interpretation of xing , reading it as an achievement concept rather than as a given. In this view, xing is derived from, and is a refinement on, sheng , denoting the entire process of birth, growth and ultimate demise that constitutes the life of a living creature. See also: HUMAN NATURE; TIAN Further reading Graham, A.C. (1990) ‘The Background of the Mencian Theory of Human Nature’, in A.C. Graham (ed.) Studies in Chinese Philosophy and Philosophical Literature , Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. (A rejection of the innatist position.) DAVID L. HALL ROGER T. AMES XUN KUANG see XUNZI XUN QING see XUNZI XUNZI ( fl. 298–238 BC) Xunzi is one of the most brilliant Confucian thinkers of ancient China. His works display wide-ranging interest in such topics as the relation between morality and human nature, the ideal of the good human life, the nature of ethical discourse and argumentation, the ethical uses of history, moral education and
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Page 940 dao, the Confucian ideal of the good human life. He criticized other philosophers not because of their mistakes, but because of their preoccupation with one aspect of dao to the exclusion of others. See also: CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY, CHINESE Further reading Xunzi ( c .298–238 BC) Xunzi, ed. Li Disheng, Xunzi chishi, Taibei: Xuesheng, 1979; ed. and trans. J. Knoblock, Xunzi: A Translation and Study of the Complete Works, 3 vols, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988, 1990, 1994. (Li is a good modern Chinese annotated edition. The Knoblock edition contains long, valuable introductions in volumes 1 and 2, and extensive bibliographies in volumes 1 and 3.) A.S. CUA
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Page 941 Y YANG see YIN-YANG YANG CHU see YANGZHU YANG HSIUNG see YANG XIONG YANG XIONG (53 BC–AD 18) Master Yang Xiong, the first Confucian classicist and the greatest of the pre-Song metaphysicians, is best known for two major philosophical works, the Taixuanjing (Canon of Supreme Mystery) and the Fayan (Model Sayings). Both works explore the interaction between significant cosmic and social patterns by explicit reference to earlier canonical traditions. Further reading Knechtges, D. (1981) The Han shu Biography of Yang Xiong (53 B.C.–A.D. 18), Tempe, AZ: Arizona State University. (Translates Yang’s Hanshu biography, based on his autobiography.) MICHAEL NYLAN YANGZHU (5th–4th century BC) Yangzhu, detested by the Confucians, is important in the Chinese tradition for initiating the explicit discussion of human nature. He focuses on the thesis that human nature has no inherent ethical or mystical qualities; instead, there is simply an innate tendency to live a long life, a tendency that must be carefully nurtured by a rational regulation of sense stimulation and by the avoidance of any of the entanglements incumbent in a life of working for the good of human society. See also: CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY, CHINESE Further reading Fung Yu-lan (1952) A History of Chinese Philosophy , trans. D. Bodde, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 132–43. (Presents a detailed but rather difficult analysis of the ideas of Yangzhu, valuable for its discussion of possible links between him and early Daoists.) H.D. ROTH YI HWANG (1501–70) Yi Hwang, also known by his honorific name T’oegye, is one of the two most honoured thinkers of the Korean neo-Confucian tradition. His fully balanced and integral grasp of the complex philosophical neoConfucian synthesis spun by Zhu Xi during China’s Song dynasty marks the tradition’s arrival at full maturity in Korea. His ‘Four–Seven Debate’ with Ki Taesûng established a distinctive problematic that strongly oriented Korean neo-Confucian thought towards exacting investigation of critical issues regarding the juncture of metaphysics and their all-important application in describing the inner life of the human heart-and-mind. See also: CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY, KOREAN Further reading Yi Hwang [T’oegye] (1569) Sônghak sipdo (Ten Diagrams on Sage Learning), ed. and trans. M.C. Kalton, To Become a Sage: The Ten Diagrams on Sage Learning by Yi T’oegye, New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. (A translation of the Sônghak sipdo , his most famous work. Includes a long introduction dealing with Yi Hwang’s life, times and work.) MICHAEL C. KALTON YI I see YI YULGOK YI KAN (1677–1727) Yi Kan was a major Korean neo-Confucian thinker. He is best remembered as a major protagonist in the Horak controversy where he opposed Han Wônjin, championing the position of the school of Yi Yulgok against Han’s novel tri-level theory of nature. See also: CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY, KOREAN MICHAEL C. KALTON YI YULGOK (1536–84) Yulgok was one of the foremost neo-Confucian scholars in Korea during the Yi (Chosôn) dynasty. He is considered one of two pillars, along with Yi T’oegye, of the Korean neo-Confucian tradition. Yulgok, an active statesman and educator as well as scholar, not only compiled the theories of previous Confucian scholars of China and Korea but, more
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Page 942 mportantly, developed his own interpretations of them. See also: CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY, KOREAN Further reading Chung, E.Y.J. (1995) The Korean Neo-Confucianism of Yi T’oegye and Ti Yulgok , Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. (A comparative study of Yi T’oegye (Yi Hwang) and Yi Yulgok; a very good introduction to Korean Confucianism.) YOUNG-CHAN RO YIJING The Yijing (Book of Changes) or Zhouyi (Changes of the Zhou) was originally a divination manual, which later gradually acquired the status of a book of wisdom. It consists of sixty-four hexagrams ( gua ) and related texts. By the time the Yijing became a coherent text in the ninth century BC, hexagram divination had changed from a means of consulting and influencing gods and spirits to a method of penetrating moments of the cosmic order to learn the shape and flow of the dao and determine one’s own place in it. By doing so, one avoids wrong decisions, failure and misfortune and achieves their contrary. Tradition has it that the Yijing can only be successfully approached through humility, honesty and an open mind. Through interaction with it, one gains ever increasing self-knowledge and sensitivity to one’s relations to others and to one’s situation in life. ‘Good fortune’, ‘happiness’ and ‘success’ are but by-products of such self-knowledge and sensitivity. See also: CHINESE CLASSICS Further reading Yijing ( c .9th–2nd century BC), trans. R.J. Lynn, The Classic of Changes: A New Translation of the I Ching as Interpreted by Wang Bi , New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. (An integral translation of the Yijing along with the commentary by Wang Bi. Where Wang’s interpretation differs significantly from the later readings of Cheng Yi and Zhu Xi, references to and translated excerpts from their commentaries are provided for purposes of comparison.) RICHARD JOHN LYNN YIN see YIN-YANG YIN–YANG Yin and yang always describe the relationships that obtain among unique particulars. Originally these terms designated the shady side and the sunny side of a hill, and gradually came to suggest the way in which one thing ‘overshadows’ another in some particular aspect of their relationship. Any comparison between two or more unique particulars on any given topic is necessarily hierarchical: one side is yang and the other is yin. The nature of the opposition captured in this pairing expresses the mutuality, interdependence, hierarchical relationship, diversity and creative efficacy of the dynamic relationships that are immanent in and give value to the world. The full range of difference in the world is deemed explicable through this pairing. See also: DAO Further reading Hall, D.L. and Ames, R.T. (1995) Anticipating China: Thinking Through the Narratives of Chinese and Western Culture, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. (A comparative study of the uncommon assumptions that ground the Chinese and Western philosophical traditions.) ROGER T. AMES YOGĀCĀRA SCHOOL OF BUDDHISM see BUDDHISM, YOGĀCĀRA SCHOOL OF YONG AND TI see TI AND YONG YORUBA EPISTEMOLOGY The Yoruba of west Africa have articulated systematic criteria that are used to assign varying degrees of epistemic certainty to experience. What one views with one’s own eyes and experiences at first-hand ( ìmò) are judged as reliable ways of knowing the truth, providing there is conscious comprehension of what one is perceiving. Only propositions describing such experiences are regarded as true, or òótó . Less reliable is information received via books, other people, the media and the oral tradition. If such comparatively second-hand information, or ìgbàgbó , can be experimentally tested and accordingly verified, it has the potential to become ìmò. If verification cannot be attested, discussion, analysis and good judgment are essential tools for distinguishing the more reliable information from the less reliable. Further reading
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Page 943 Knowledge Belief and Witchcraft: Analytic Experiments in African Philosophy , London: Ethnographica. (Chapter two expands on Yoruba epistemology and draws comparisons with English-language epistemological equivalents.) BARRY HALLEN YOU–WU In the Western metaphysical tradition, ‘being’ has most generally been thought to denote either a common property of things or a container which relates things by placing them within its own structure. Metaphysical notions of being are generally associated with the concept of ground. By contrast, the Chinese existential verb you (being) overlaps with the sense of ‘having’ rather than the copula, and therefore you (to be) means ‘to be present’ or ‘to be around’ while wu (not to be) means ‘not to be present’ or ‘not to be around’. This means that wu does not indicate strict opposition or contradiction, but absence. Thus, the you–wu distinction suggests mere contrast in the sense of either the presence or absence of x, rather than an assertion of the existence or nonexistence of x. See also: BEING; CHINESE PHILOSOPHY Further reading Daodejing ( c .350–250 BC?), trans. D.C. Lau, Tao te Ching, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963. (The being– nonbeing relation, expressed through the yin–yang pairing, is a principal theme of the Daodejing .) Hall, D.L. and Ames, R.T. (1995) Anticipating China: Thinking Through the Narratives of Chinese and Western Culture, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. (A comparative study of the uncommon assumptions that ground the Chinese and Western philosophical traditions.) DAVID L. HALL ROGER T. AMES
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Page 944 Z ZABARELLA, JACOPO (1533–89) Jacopo Zabarella was a professor of philosophy at the University of Padua. His work shows conclusively not only that it was possible to philosophize creatively within the limits of the Aristotelian tradition but also that this was still being done towards the end of the Renaissance period. Zabarella’s aim was not to overthrow Aristotle’s doctrines, but to expound them as clearly as possible. He produced an extensive body of work on the nature of logic, arguing that it was neither an art nor a science, but rather an instrumental intellectual discipline which arose from the philosopher’s practice of philosophizing or forming secondary notions. He also worked extensively on scientific method. He gives an account of order as disposing what we come to know through method, and he divides method into the method of composition, which moves from cause to effect, and the method of resolution, which moves from effect to cause. He also discussed regressus (a method for uniting composition and resolution) and thought that it would enable the scientist to discover new causal relations at the same time as proving conclusions with absolute necessity. Zabarella’s work was instrumental in a renewal of natural philosophy, methodology and the theory of knowledge; and it had a major impact on seventeenthcentury philosophy textbooks, especially in the Protestant countries of northern Europe. See also: ARISTOTELIANISM, RENAISSANCE; LOGIC, RENAISSANCE Further reading Mikkeli, H. (1992) An Aristotelian Response to Renaissance Humanism. Jacopo Zabarella on the Nature of Arts and Sciences , Studia Historica 41, Helsinki: Societas Historica Finlandiae. (Basic exposition of Zabarella’s conception of the arts and the sciences; good bibliography.) ECKHARD KESSLER ZEAMI (1363–1443) Zeami was one of the leading innovators in the art of Nō , at a time when Zen Buddhism dominated the Japanese intellectual and cultural order. He practised Zen Buddhism (Sōtō branch), and found in Zen teachings the epistemology that gave Nō its aesthetic foundations. While his Nō treatises are buttressed by his observation of the nature and the workings of the mind, they also reveal Shintō sensibility in their view that the origin of entertainment is sacred. See also: AESTHETICS, JAPANESE; BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY, JAPANESE Further reading Rimer, J.T. and Yamazaki, M. (ed. and trans.) (1984) On the Art of the Nō Drama: The Major Treatises of Zeami, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (English translation of eight treatises written by Zeami plus the Sarugaku dangi.) MICHIKO YUSA ZEN see BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY, JAPANESE; BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY, CHINESE ZENO OF CITIUM (334–262 BC) Zeno of Citium, a Greek philosopher from Cyprus, founded the Stoic school in Athens c .300 BC. His background and training lay in various branches of the Socratic tradition, including the Platonic Academy, but especially Cynicism. His controversial Republic was a utopian treatise, founded on the abolition of most civic norms and institutions. He laid the main foundations of Stoic doctrine in all areas except perhaps logic. See also: CLEANTHES Further reading Schofield, M. (1991) The Stoic Idea of the City, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Outstanding reconstruction of Zeno’s Republic and its place in Stoic political thought.) DAVID SEDLEY ZENO OF ELEA ( fl. c .450 BC) The Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea was celebrated for his paradoxes. Aristotle called him the ‘founder of dialectic’. He wrote in order to defend the Eleatic metaphysics of his fellow citizen and friend Parmenides, according to whom reality is single, changeless and homo
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Page 945 geneous. Zeno’s strength was the production of intriguing arguments which seem to show that apparently straightforward features of the world – most notably plurality and motion – are riddled with contradiction. At the very least he succeeded in establishing that hard thought is required to make sense of plurality and motion. His paradoxes stimulated the atomists, Aristotle and numerous philosophers since to reflect on unity, infinity, continuity and the structure of space and time. Although Zeno wrote a book full of arguments, very few of his actual words have survived. Secondary reports (some from Plato and Aristotle) probably preserve accurately the essence of Zeno’s arguments. Even so, we know only a fraction of the total. According to Plato the arguments in Zeno’s book were of this form: if there are many things, then the same things are both F and not-F; since the same things cannot be both F and not-F, there cannot be many things. Two instances of this form have been preserved: if there were many things, then the same things would be both limited and unlimited; and the same things would be both large (that is, of infinite size) and small (that is, of no size). Quite how the components of these arguments work is not clear. Things are limited (in number), Zeno says, because they are just so many, rather than more or less, while they are unlimited (in number) because any two of them must have a third between them, which separates them and makes them two. Things are of infinite size because anything that exists must have some size: yet anything that has size is divisible into parts which themselves have some size, so that each and every thing will contain an infinite number of extended parts. On the other hand, each thing has no size: for if there are to be many things there have to be some things which are single, unitary things, and these will have no size since anything with size would be a collection of parts. Zeno’s arguments concerning motion have a different form. Aristotle reports four arguments. According to the Dichotomy, motion is impossible because in order to cover any distance it is necessary first to cover half the distance, then half the remainder, and so on without limit. The Achilles is a variant of this: the speedy Achilles will never overtake a tortoise once he has allowed it a head start because Achilles has an endless series of tasks to perform, and each time Achilles sets off to catch up with the tortoise it will turn out that, by the time Achilles arrives at where the tortoise was when he set off, the tortoise has moved on slightly. Another argument, the Arrow, purports to show that an arrow apparently in motion is in fact stationary at each instant of its ‘flight’, since at each instant it occupies a region of space equal in size to itself. The Moving Rows describes three rows (or streams) of equal-sized bodies, one stationary and the other two moving at equal speeds in opposite directions. If each body is one metre long, then the time taken for a body to cover two metres equals the time taken for it to cover four metres (since a moving body will pass two stationary bodies while passing four bodies moving in the opposite direction), and that might be thought impossible. Zeno’s arguments must be resolvable, since the world obviously does contain a plurality of things in motion. There is little agreement, however, on how they should be resolved. Some points can be identified which may have misled Zeno. It is not true, for example, that the sum of an infinite collection of parts, each of which has size, must itself be of an infinite size (it will be false if the parts are of proportionally decreasing size); and something in motion will pass stationary bodies and moving bodies at different velocities. In many other cases, however, there is no general agreement as to the fallacy, if any exists, of Zeno’s argument. Further reading Barnes, J. (1987) Early Greek Philosophy , Harmondsworth: Penguin. (Chapter 11 translates Plato’s account of Zeno, and the passages relevant to all Zeno’s extant arguments, along with their original contexts.) Sainsbury, M. (1988) Paradoxes , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Chapter 1 is a philosophically lively discussion of a selection of Zeno’s arguments; and includes a number of footnoted questions, designed to draw the reader into the problems Zeno raises.) STEPHEN MAKIN ZERMELO, ERNST (1871–1953) The German mathematician Ernst Zermelo is today best known for his axiomatization of set theory, presented in the spirit of Hilbert’s early axiomatic programme. Originally working in the calculus of variations and mathematical physics, Zermelo concentrated on set theory after proving that every set can be well-ordered. His proof, based on the axiom of choice, provoked a lively controversy. In the 1930s Zermelo worked on infinitary logic, trying to overcome Gödel’s incompleteness results. See also: SET THEORY
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Page 946 Further reading Moore, G.H. (1982) Zermelo’s Axiom of Choice: Its Origins, Development, and Influence, Studies in the History of Mathematics and Physical Sciences, 8, New York, Heidelberg and Berlin: Springer. (Despite its title, a full account of Zermelo’s writings on set theory, their historical context and their influences in contemporary set theory.) VOLKER PECKHAUS ZHANG ZAI (1020–77) Zhang Zai was a seminal neo-Confucian cosmologist and ethical thinker. Like Zhou Dunyi and Shao Yong, he was inspired by the Yijing (Book of Changes) and its commentaries; unlike them, he worked out a conception based solely on the concept of qi (cosmic vapour). He espoused an ethical vision, global in spirit, that greatly enhanced the moral significance of Confucianism. See also: NEO-CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY Further reading Kasoff, I. (1984) The Thought of Chang Tsai (1020–1070), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Systematic overview of Zhang’s philosophy; clear and accessible.) KIRILL OLE THOMPSON ZHENG XUAN (AD 127–200) Zheng Xuan, perhaps the most influential commentator on the Confucian classics, is widely credited with constructing both a compelling unitary vision of Chinese civilization and a hierarchy of written authorities which upheld the supremacy of the five Confucian classics as infallible guides to morality and history. Inevitably, scholars (including Zheng’s many critics) have ‘read’ early Chinese society through the filter of Zheng’s surviving commentaries, which ultimately superseded earlier divergent scholastic traditions. See also: CHINESE CLASSICS Further reading Kramers, R.P. (1949) K’ung tzu chia yü: The School Sayings of Confucius , Leiden: Brill, 77–98. (Outlines the major controversy between Zheng Xuan and Wang Su.) MICHAEL NYLAN ZHI In classical Chinese philosophy, zhi, conventionally translated as ‘knowing’, is not so much a knowing ‘what’, which provides some understanding of the natural world, as it is a knowing ‘how’ to be adept in relationships, and ‘how’, in optimizing the possibilities that these relations provide, to develop trust in their viability. The cluster of terms that define knowing are thus programmatic and exhortative, encouraging the quality of the roles and associations that define us. Propositions may be true, but it is more important that husbands and friends be so. See also: DAO Further reading Hall, D.L. and Ames, R.T. (1995) Anticipating China: Thinking Through the Narratives of Chinese and Western Culture, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. (A comparative study of the uncommon assumptions that ground the Chinese and Western traditions.) DAVID L. HALL ROGER T. AMES ZHI DUN (AD 314–66) Buddhist monk and specialist on the Zhuangzi, Zhi Dun was active in the xuanxue or ‘learning of the mysterious’ salons of the Eastern Jin regime in southeastern China. For him, the sage described by the Zhuangzi and Buddhist texts alike was a great man who knows the ways of heaven triumphantly and responds to beings in perfect freedom. Zhi Dun was also known for his interpretation of emptiness and his expansion of the concept of li (‘order’ or ‘pattern’) into an underlying metaphysical principle. See also: BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY, CHINESE; Further reading Zürcher, E. (1959) The Buddhist Conquest of China: The Spread and Adaptation of Buddhism in Early Medieval China , Leiden: Brill. (The best treatment of the earliest phase of Chinese Buddhism in any language.) JOHN R. McRAE ZHIYI (538–97) The Chinese Buddhist monk Zhiyi is revered as the chief architect of the Tiantai school of Buddhism, one of the most distinctive and influential systems of Mahāyāna Buddhist thought and practice to take shape on East Asian soil. His systematization of the Tientai teachings marked the emergence of the first major
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Page 947 of the East Asian Buddhist tradition, for it effectively brought to a close some five centuries of Chinese dependence on Indian Buddhist traditions of exegesis and opened the way to creation of the distinctive forms of scriptural hermeneutics and motifs of religious life that we regard as representative of East Asian Buddhism today. See also: BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY, CHINESE Further reading Swanson, P. (1989) Foundations of T’ien-t’ai Philosophy , Berkeley, CA: Asian Humanities Press. DANIEL B. STEVENSON ZHONGYONG The Zhongyong (Doctrine of the Mean) has traditionally been ascribed to Zisi, the grandson of Confucius and the indirect teacher of Mencius. Although this ascription has been challenged by modern critical scholarship since the turn of the twentieth century, recent archaeological finds indicate that the traditional view is not without textual base. If the Zhongyong actually predated the Mengzi , it seems that a significant portion of the Liji (Book of Rites), of which the Daxue (Great Learning) and Zhongyong are chapters, contains documents of the fifth century BC. This fact alone merits a fundamental restructuring of classical Confucian chronology and reinterpretation of the Mencian line of the Confucian tradition. See also: CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY, CHINESE Further reading Chan Wing-tsit (1963) A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (A translation and commentary on this text translated as The Doctrine of the Mean .) TU WEI-MING ZHOU DUNYI (1017–73) Zhou Dunyi was the father of Chinese neo-Confucianism. His oracular presentation of the notions of supreme polarity ( taiji), yin and yang , and the five phases to explain the formation of the cosmos and sagehood became enshrined by Zhu Xi as the authoritative neo-Confucian view. See also: NEO-CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY Further reading Zhou Dunyi (1017–73) Taiji tushuo (Diagram Explaining the Supreme Ultimate), trans. Wing-tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963, 463–80. (This essay is a rather oracular presentation of Zhou’s metaphysics and ethics; thus, the supporting notes and discussion are required reading.) KIRILL OLE THOMPSON ZHU XI (1130–1200) The Chinese neo-Confucian philosopher Zhu Xi was a consummate scholar and classicist as well as a superb critical and synthetic thinker. He fused the ideas of the seminal eleventh-century thinkers Shao Yong, Zhou Tunyi, Zhang Zai, Cheng Hao and Cheng Yi into a grand philosophical synthesis. In addition, by effectively editing and annotating the essential classical Confucian texts – the Analects of Confucius – the Mengzi of Mencius, the Daxue (Great Learning) and the Zhongyong (Doctrine of the Mean) – as the Four Books, Zhu worked out a lasting renewal of the Confucian project. See also: NEO-CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY Further reading Chan Wing-tsit (ed.) (1986) Chu Hsi and Neo-Confucianism, Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press. (Anthology of essays by prominent Zhu Xi scholars; contains Zhu’s biography and authoritative articles on all aspects of Zhu’s thought and scholarship.) KIRILL OLE THOMPSON ZHUANGZI The Zhuangzi is a Daoist text usually associated with ‘Master Zhuang’ (fourth century BC), also known as Zhuang Zhou. Scholarly consensus regards the thirty-three chapters of this text to be composite, containing passages that offer different and sometimes even contradictory interpretations of basic Daoist tenets. The opening seven ‘inner chapters’ are traditionally thought to be from the hand of Master Zhuang himself, while the remaining ‘outer’ and ‘miscellaneous’ chapters are taken to be later elaborations and commentary by members of what retrospectively can be called a Master Zhuang school, or better, lineage. As a philosophical text, the Zhuangzi is for the most part addressed to the project of personal realization, and only derivatively concerned about social and political order. As one of the finest pieces of literature in the classical Chinese corpus, the Zhuangzi is itself an object lesson in marshalling every trope and literary device available to provide rhetorically charged flashes of insight
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Page 948 into the most creative way to live one’s life in the world. See also: DAOIST PHILOSOPHY Further readings Zhuangzi ( c .4th century BC?), trans. B. Watson, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu , New York: Columbia University Press, 1968; trans. A.C. Graham, Chuang-tzu: The Inner Chapters , London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981. (Watson is the standard translation of the Zhuangzi which takes advantage of the Japanese translation by Fukunaga Mitsuji. Graham is a philosophically sophisticated translation of about 85 per cent of the original text.) ROGER T. AMES ZIONISM Zionism, the idea of Jewish nationality in its modern form, emerged towards the end of the nineteenth century, several decades after nationalism had taken hold among most European peoples. The term denotes the ideology as well as the movement(s) whose goal is re-establishment of the Jewish people as a nation in its homeland in Palestine. Unlike many other movements of national liberation, Zionism seeks not the removal of a colonial regime but the return of a people to its land. The most ancient roots of this aspiration were religious, but many forms of modern Zionism shed the messianic and eschatological elements of the two-thousand-year-old hope in favour of more immediate political and social aims that were often philosophically shaped. See also: JEWISH PHILOSOPHY, CONTEMPORARY; NATION AND NATIONALISM Further reading Cohen, I. (1946) The Zionist Movement , New York: The Zionist Organization of America. (History and issues of Zionism, with a supplementary chapter on the Zionist movement in America.) Hertzberg, A. (ed.) (1970) The Zionist Idea, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. (Anthology about the intellectual history of the Zionist movement.) ZE’EV LEVY ZONGMI (780–841) Zongmi was a Chinese Buddhist Chan (Zen) and Huayan scholar, traditionally reckoned as the fifth ‘patriarch’ both in the Heze line of Southern Chan and in the Huayan scholastic tradition. He is important for his revision of Huayan doctrine, his commentaries to the Yuanjuejing (Scripture of Perfect Enlightenment), his accounts of Chan teachings and his contribution to the theory of the essential unity of the three teachings of Buddhism, Confucianism and Daoism. See also: BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY, CHINESE Further reading Zongmi (780–841) Yuanrenlun (Inquiry into the Origin of Humanity), ed. and trans. P.N. Gregory, Inquiry into the Origin of Humanity: An Annotated Translation of Tsung-mi’s Yüan jen lun with a Modern Commentary, Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1995. (Uses a translation and commentary to Zongmi’s Yuanrenlun as a means of presenting medieval Chinese Buddhist thought to the nonspecialist.) PETER N. GREGORY ZOROASTRIANISM Zarathushtra, better known to the Classical and modern world in the Greek form of his name ‘Zoroaster’, revealed his vision of truth, wisdom and justice in the verse texts known as the Gāthās ( c .1200–1000 BC) and is revered by Zoroastrians as their holy prophet. The religion is correctly described as mazdāyasna , ‘the worship of Ahura (‘Lord’) Mazdā, creator of the world and source of all goodness. Since the Avestan word mazdā means ‘wise, wisdom’, Zoroastrians see their prophet as the original philosophos , ‘lover of wisdom’. Zarathushtra’s message is primarily ethical and rationalistic. Zoroastrianism teaches a life based on (1) the avoidance of evil, through rigorous discrimination between good and evil, and (2) the service of wisdom through the cherishing of seven ideals. These latter are personified as seven immortal, beneficent spirits: Ahura Mazdāhimself, conceived as the creative ‘holy’ spirit; Sublime Truth; Virtuous Power; Good Purpose/Mind; Beneficent Piety; Wholeness/Health and, finally, Immortality. Evil originates neither from God nor from his creatures, but from a wholly other source, personified as Angra Mainyu, the ‘Hostile Spirit’, whose existence is ritually and doctrinally rejected as being pretended and parasitic. Real existence is solely the domain of Ahura Mazdāand his creation; Angra Mainyu and his demons are actually states of negativity, denial or, as the religion puts it, ‘the Lie’. Thus the charge that the religion is ontologically dualistic is no more true
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Page 949 than it is of other systems which conceive of good and evil as being in fundamental opposition. Equally, the allegation that its theology is ditheistic or polytheistic is a misunderstanding of the Zoroastrian theological and ritual tradition. The influence which this religion has exerted on classical philosophy and the thought and practice of Judaism, Christianity and Islam is being reappraised by scholars in modern times. See also: ILLUMINATION; RELIGION, PHILOSOPHY OF Further reading Boyce, M. (1975–) A History of Zoroastrianism, Leiden: Brill. (The most authoritative scholarly treatment of the subject to date. Volumes 1, 2 and 3 have been published.) —— (1984) Textual Sources for the Study of Zoroastrianism, Manchester: Manchester University Press. (New, reliable translations of major texts.) ALAN WILLIAMS
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Page 951 Index a posteriori 1 see also a priori a priori 1 see also a posteriori; necessary truth; Eleatic philosophy 33; science (Carnap, R.) 123 Abelard, Peter 2 logic 2 Abellán, José Luis Spain, philosophy in 854–5 Aberdeen Philosophical Society 2 Ābhidharmika Schools of Buddhism (Abhidharma) 106 Abhinavagupta 2 Indian and Tibetan philosophy 389 abolitionism punishment 181 Abravanel, Isaac 3 Abravanel, Judah ben Isaac 3 Absolute, the 3 absolute immanentism epistemology (Lossky, N.O.) 510 absolute scales measurement theory 550 absolutism 4 see also sovereignty abstract objects 4 metaphysics 568–9; rGyal tshab dar ma rin chen 770 abstraction experience (Locke, J.) 493; legal (Holmes, O.W.) 360 abstractive cognition Duns Scotus, J. 220–1 absurd, the meaning of life 489 Academic scepticism 34 see also Academy Antiochus 40; Arcesilaus 44; Carneades 124; Plutarch of Chaeronea 684 Academy 4–5 see also Academic scepticism Speusippus 856 accessibility modal logic 583–4 accidents medieval metaphysics 557 accountability moral 594 Achilles argument Zeno of Elea 945 Achinstein, Peter crucial experiments 183 acquaintance knowledge by 439
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action 5 see also karma; moral motivation akrasia 19; decision theory (Ramsey, F.P.) 737; events distinction 5; fatalism 274; holism 359; mental causation 581; motivation 205–6; passions (Hume, D.) 367; practical reason 703; prescriptivism 708; reasons 745; social 841; supererogation 871; will 929 Active Intellect ethics 259 actual entities process theism 713 actualism Gentile, G. 309 Adam Kadmon 349 Adams, Marilyn McCord evil, problem of 262; hell 342 adaptation natural selection 263 Adler, J.E. 742 Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund 5 critical theory 182; negative dialectics 5 Advaita Vedānta School of Hindu philosophy God 318; Mādhava 517; monism 589–90; Ramakrishna Movement 736; reincarnation 751; salvation 791; Śankara 792; self-certificationalism 251 adverbs 6 Aenesidemus 6 Aertsen, Jan A. Meister Eckhart 561–2 aesthetics African 10; appreciation 7; attitude 8; Baumgarten, A.G. 78; Belinskii, V.G. 83; characteristics/relation distinction (Anderson, J.) 36–7; Chinese 11; common-sense philosophy (Reid, T.) 750; concepts 8; ethics relationship 10; immediacy (Santayana, G.) 793; Islamic philosophy 11; Japanese 12–13; katharsis 435;
mimēsis 575; theological (Edwards, J.) 233 affection for the just Duns Scotus, J. 221 el-Affendi, Abdel Wahab Islamic theology 411 affirmative action 13 al-Afghani, Jamal al-Din 13
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Page 952 Afghanistan al-Afghani 13 Africa 13–15 aesthetics 10; Akan philosophical psychology 19; Amo, A.W. 27; Anglophone philosophy 15; Augustine of Hippo 63; Cabral, A. 118; Carneades 124; Egyptian philosophy, ancient 234; ethical systems in 255; Ethiopian philosophy 259; ethnophilosophy 259–60; Fanon, F. 272; Francophone philosophy 16–17; Marius Victorinus 526; pan-Africanism 654; Tertullian, Q.S.F. 881; traditional religions in 17; Yoruba epistemology 942 afterlife 760 agape Christian theology 131 aggregation social choice 835 agnosticism 17 Protagoras 721 Agricola, Rudolph 17–18 agricultural ethics 18 see also bioethics; environmental ethics; green political philosophy Agrippa 18 Agrippa von Nettesheim, Henricus Cornelius 18–19 Ahura Mazdā 948 Ailly, Pierre d’ 19 air as primary substance (Anaximenes) 32 Ajdukiewicz, Kazimierz 19 Akan philosophical psychology 19 akrasia 19–20 see also self-control; will, weakness of Albdour, Salman Ibn Hazm 374–5; al-Juwayni 431 Albert the Great 20 Aristotelianism 49 Albert of Saxony (Albert of Rickmersdorf) 20
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Albo, Joseph 21 Jewish philosophy 421 alchemy 21 Alcibiades 848 Alcinous 21–2 Alcmaeon 22 Alemanno, Yohanan ben Isaac 22 Alembert, Jean le Rond d’ 22–3 Enlightenment 22 Alexander of Aphrodisias 23 Alexander of Hales 23–4 John of La Rochelle 424 Alexander, P.S. midrash 572 Alexandria Ammonius, son of Hermeas 27; Hellenistic philosophy 34; Hypatia 371; Philo of Alexandria 672–3; Philoponus 674 algebra analytic geometry (Descartes, R.) 203 Algeria Augustine of Hippo 63 algorithms computability 140 Algra, Keimpe Posidonius 696 alienation 24 Alighieri, Dante 24 Alison, Archibald 25 Allan, T.R.S. rule of law 779–80 Allen, Diogenes justification, religious 431; Nygren, A. 639; sanctification 791–2 Allen, R.T. Polanyi, M. 686 Allison, Henry E. Eberhard, J.A. 229; Spinoza, B. de 857 Allison, J.W.F. 428 Allistel, C. learning 474 Almond, Brenda applied ethics 42 Alston, William P. empiricism 239; internalism-externalism distinction 399; religious experience 761; religious language 761–2 alterity heterology (Certeau, M. de) 130; Latin American liberation philosophy 487; postmodern theories of 25
Althusser, Louis Pierre 25 Altman, Andrew 780 altruism 233–4 Amaterasu 827 Ambedkar, Bhimrao Ramji 26 Indian and Tibetan philosophy 389 ambiguity 26 de re/de dicto 194; medieval language theories 454–5 Ambuel, David ontology in Indian philosophy 645 Ames, Roger T. Chinese philosophy 136–8; dao 190; Daoist philosophy 190–2; de 193–4; East Asian Philosophy 225; qi 729; Sunzi 871; tian 891; xin (heart-and-mind) 939; xing 939; yinyang 942; you-wu 943; zhi 946; Zhuangzi 947–8 al-‘Amiri, Abu’l Hasan Muhammad ibn Yusuf 27 Ammonius, son of Hermeas 27 amnesia 562–3 Amo, Anton Wilhelm 14–15 analogy Aquinas, T. 118; knowledge of God (Browne, P.) 103
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< previous page Page 953 analysis 28 see also philosophical analysis nonstandard 27–8 analytic ethics 28–9 analytic geometry Descartes, R. 203 analytic psychology Jung, C.G. 427 analytical philosophy 29 see also ordinary language philosophy classical Greek philosophy (Vlastos, G.) 920; Latin America 29–30 analyticity 30 anaphora 30–1 see also pronouns reference 749 anarchism 31 Kropotkin, P.A. 445; philosophical (Godwin, W.) 320; political obligation 641 Anaxagoras 31–2 mind as first cause 31 Anaxarchus 32 Anaximander 32 Anaximenes 33 ancient logic 494–5 ancient philosophy 33–6 see also Egypt; Greek philosophy, ancient; Roman philosophy language 451; Patristic philosophy distinction 35–6 Ancient Studies ( kogaku) Confucianism, Japanese 164 Anderer, Paul Japanese philosophy in modern literature 492 Anderson, John 36–7 Australia, philosophy in 67 Andrews, Robert Brinkley, R. 102; Peter of Auvergne 668 androcentrism scientific research 307 Andronicus of Rhodes 51 Angra Manyu (Hostile Spirit) Zoroastrianism 948 animalism persons 668 animals ethics 37; language and thought 37; sociobiology 845 Annas, J. Pyrrhonism 728
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anomalous monism 37–8 Anscombe, Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret 38 Anselm of Canterbury 38–9 atonement 63; Cur deus homo 38–9; Incarnation 39; necessary being 619; Proslogion 38; satisfaction doctrine 39 anthropology philosophy of 39–40; theological (Brunner, E.) 103 anthroposophy 861 anti-Aristotelianism Patrizi, F. 662 anti-humanism Marxism 25 anti-individualism mental content, wide 570 Antilles, French Fanon, Frantz 272 Antiochus of Ascalon 40 Antiphon 40 anti-positivism Latin America 40–1 anti-postmodernism 700 antirealism Dummett, M.A.E. 219; mathematics 41; metaphysics 569–70; objectivity 640; scientific 808 anti-Semitism 41 see also Holocaust anti-slavery movement 27 Antisthenes 42 Antonelli, Gian Aldo definition 197 Any, Carol Russian literary formalism 781 Apamea (Syria) Numenius 638 apatheia emotion 238 apeiron (infinite matter) 32 Apel, Karl-Otto communicative rationality 154 apologists Tertullian, Q.S.F. 881 Appiah, Kwame Anthony Africa 13–15; Cabral, A. 118; Fanon, F. 272; pan-Africanism 654 applied ethics 42 applied philosophy Passmore, J.A. 660 Apuleius 33 Aquinas, Thomas 43
see also Thomism Aristotelianism 49; Aristotle 43; faith 271; immutability 385; Islamic/Jewish philosophy 43; justice, equity and law 429; knowledge (Rahner, K.) 736; Maritain, J. 526; necessary being 619; perfect goodness 322; prophecy 718–19; soul 852; theological virtue 883; Thomism 889 Arama, Isaac ben Moses 44 Arcesilaus 44 Academic scepticism 34 archaeological method of knowledge Foucault, M. 290 archaeology 44–5 archē (principle) 45 etymology of 45
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< previous page Page 954 archetypes theory of (Jung, C.G.) 427 architecture aesthetics of 9; cognitive 145–6 Archytas 45–6 Arendt, Hannah 46 phenomenological movement 670 aretā (virtue) 46 Argentina philosophy in 46 argument disputation in medieval scholasticism 556; rational (Anselm of Canterbury) 39; transcendental 897; twofold ( dissoilogoi) 214 argumentation Islamic philosophy 496–7 Ariew, Roger Aristotelianism in the seventeenth century 48 Aristippus the Elder 47 Ariston of Chios 47 Aristotelianism Alexander of Aphrodisias 23; impartiality 385; Islamic philosophy 48; logic (Abelard, P.) 2; medieval 48; Platonism synthesis (Abravanel, J.) 3; Renaissance 49–50; seventeenth century 48 Aristotle 50 Albert the Great 20; altruism and egoism 231; Ammonius, son of Hermeas 27; Aquinas, T. 43; arrow argument (Zeno of Elea) 945; Boethius, A.M.S. 92; Bonaventure 619; categories 125; commentaries on 51–2; conservatism 170; educational philosophy 231; emotions 238; immutability 385; John of Jandun 424; katharsis 435; logic 494; mechanics 550; moral sentiments 598; nature and convention 838; necessary existence 619; perfect goodness 322; Platonism 35; proper sensibles 710; Themistius 883; virtues and vices 918;
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women 276 arithmetic 52 geometry distinction 536 Arkush, A. Mendelssohn, M. 563 Armstrong, David Malet 52 Arnauld, Antoine 52 Arneson, Richard J. paternalism 660 Arrighetti, G. 245 arrow argument Zeno of Elea 945 art aesthetics 7–8; Chinese 11; emotion in response to 9; ethics 10; expression 9; politics relationship (Belinskii, V.G.) 83; and truth 54; value of 8 artha (meaning) 549 artificial intelligence (AI) 58 see also Chinese room argument; computation computational models of vision 918; computational theories of mind 145–6 Arya Samaj (The Association of Nobles) 61 asceticism 61 Ikhwan al-Safa’ 382 Ash‘ariyya 61–2 emergence 411; al-Juwayni 431 Asher, Nicholas anaphora 30–1; discourse semantics 213 Ashworth, E.J. Bruno, G. 104; Lipsius, J. 491; Paracelsus 655; Patrizi, F. 662; Paul of Venice 662–3; Renaissance philosophy 762–5 Asian philosophy, East 225 Asmus, Valentin Ferdinandovich 62 Aspasia 848 Astell, Mary 62 astronomy Galilei, G. 304; geometric modelling (Eudoxus) 260; Islam 803; mathematical (Copernicus, N.) 177; Philolaus 674; Stoicism (Cleomedes) 144 Athanasian Creed Incarnation 386; Trinity 898 atheism 62–3 definition of 62–3; justification for 63 Athens Antisthenes 42;
Epicurus 245; philosophical centre 34; Plato 677; Socrates 847; Thucydides 890–1; Xenophon 938–9 Atiyeh, George N. Ibn Massara 375–6; al-Sijistani 829–30 atomic physics quantum theory (Bohr, N.) 94–5 atomism Gassendi, P. 305–6; Gestalt psychology 313; meaning/belief content 360; Nyāya 702; Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika 639 atomism, ancient 63 see also Democritus chemistry 133; Epicureanism 244; Leucippus 483 atonement 63 see also justification, religious doctrine of Attwooll, Elspeth Jhering, R. von 423; legal idealism 476–7 Audi, Robert epistemological belief 746 Augustine of Hippo 63 African philosophy 14; Augustinianism 65–6; educational philosophy 231; illuminationism 383; immutability 385; Manicheism 522–3; original sin 831 Augustinianism 65 Aristotelianism conflict 66; Kilwardby, R. 438 Aureol, Peter 66
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< previous page Page 955 Aurobindo Ghose 66 Austin, John 66–7 Austin, John Langshaw 67 performatives 666; speech acts 456 Australia 67 Anderson, J. 36–7; Armstrong, D.M. 52; environmental philosophy 68; materialism 68; Passmore, J.A. 660; Smart, J.J.C. 834 Austria Buber, M. 104; Feyerabend, P.K. 283; Freud, S. 298; Hayek, F.A. 335; Kelsen, H. 436; Neurath, O. 626; Popper, K.R. 693; Renner, K. 765; Schlick, F.A.M. 800; Shütz, A. 802; Twardowski, K. 903; Vienna Circle 915; Wittgenstein, L. 933 authenticity existentialism 265 authority 68 absolute 4; Chinese Legalism 478–9; political 688 autism child’s theory of mind 576; folk psychology 287–8 autognosis Latin America 462 autonomy citizenship (Tocqueville, A. de) 894; ethical 69; paternalism 660; reason (Kant, I.) 432; solidarity conflict 848 Averroism 69–70 Jewish 70; Vernia, N. 914 Awakening of Faith in Mahāyāna 70 awareness Indian philosophy 70 axiology 71 axioms of constructibility 171 Ayer, Alfred Jules 72 verificationism 72 Ayers, Michael R. Burthogge, R. 115; Locke, J. 493–4;
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substance 869 Aztec (Nahuatl) civilization philosophcal methodology 571; thought 571 Bach, Kent ambiguity 26; performatives 666; speech acts 855–6 Bachelard, Gaston French philosophy of science 297 Bacon, Francis 73 crucial experiments 183; induction 73 Bacon, Roger 74 Badhwar, Neera K. friendship 299 Baert, Patrick Bourdieu, P. 98 al-Baghdadi, Abu‘l-Barakat 74 Bahti, Timothy Man, P. de 194 Baier, Annette C. Hume, D. 366 Baker, A.J. Anderson, J. 36–7 Baker, Judith Grice, H.P. 325–6 Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich 74 dialogue 74; novels, theories of 74–5 Bakhurst, David Asmus, V.F. 62; Il’enkov, E.V. 382; Marxist philosophy, Russian and Soviet 532 Bakunin, Mikhail Aleksandrovich 75 Balazs, Etienne 812 Baldwin, Thomas analytic philosophy 29; McTaggart, J.M.E. 517; Merleau-Ponty, M. 565–6; Moore, G.E. 592 Ball, Terence green political philosophy 324–5 Báñez, Domingo 75 Bañkowski, Zenon Kelsen, H. 436; legal norms 636–7 baptism 489 Bar Hayya, Abraham 75 Barker, Peter Hertz, H.R. 350 Barnes, Jonathan Academy 4–5; Antiochus 40; Arcesilaus 44; Carneades 124; Philo of Larissa 673; Pyrrhonism 728 Barnish, Samuel
Encyclopedists, medieval 240–1 Barry, Brian justice 428–9 Barth, Karl 76 dialectical theology 76; theology of the Word 76 Barthes, Roland 76 Bartolus of Sassoferrato 76 Basinger, David miracles 582–3; process theism 713–14 Bataille, Georges 77 Baudrillard, Jean 77 Baumgardt, David 78 Jewish philosophy 422 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb 78 Bayesian confirmation theory subjectivity 860 Bayesian epistemology criticisms of 713; rational belief 712–13 Bayle, Pierre 78 Baynes, K. Habermas, J. 328 Bealer, G. analyticity 30 Bealer, George intensional entities 397–8
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Page 956 beatific vision heaven 335 Beattie, James 79 Beatty, John ecology 229–30 beauty African aesthetics 10; connoisseurs (Kant, I.) 10; of God (Edwards, J.) 233; Islamic philosophy 11; Japanese aesthetics 12; supervenience 873 Beauvoir, Simone de 80 Bechtel, William vitalism 919 Becker, Lawrence C. reciprocity 746 Beddall, B.G. Wallace, A.R. 924 Beer, John George Eliot 236 Beetham, David legitimacy 479–80 behaviour communication (Mead, G.H.) 546; rational choice theory 739 behaviourism analytic 80; methodological 80; scientific 81; verbal (Sellars, W.S.) 815 being 81–2 see also categories; Dasein ; existence; God; metaphysics; ontology changelessness (Parmenides) 658; in common (Nancy, J.-L.) 610; fictional characters 284; Stoicism 863 being for-itself consciousness (Sartre, J.-P.) 793–4 being in-itself consciousness (Sartre, J.-P.) 793–4 Beiser, Frederick C. Cambridge Platonism 120; Culverwell, N. 186; Eberhard, J.A. 229; Hamann, J.G. 330–1; Herder, J.G. 348; Romanticism, German 775 Beitz, Charles R. international relations 400–1 Belgium Denys the Carthusian 201–2; Geulincx, A. 314; Godfrey of Fontaines 319–20; Helmont, F.M. van 343; Henry of Ghent 345; Irigaray, L. 405;
Lipsius, J. 491; Man, P. de 194 belief 82 see also a posteriori; a priori; cognitive pluralism; cognitivism; faith; foundationalism; justification, epistemic; probabilism; religious belief; web of belief analytic behaviourism (Dennett, D.C.) 201; certainty 129; commonsensism 153; conceptual content 173; de re/de dicto 194; degrees of 712; epistemic relativism 246; induction 391; knowledge relationship 82; moral sentiments 598; rational 739; rationality of 742; reasons for 746; social relativism 837 Belinskii, Vissorion Grigorievich 83 Bell, John L. Boolean algebra 97 Bellamy, Richard Croce, B. 183; Gentile, G. 309–10; Gramsci, A. 323–4 Beller, Mara Bohr, N. 94–5; Heisenberg, W. 342 Bell’s theorem 83 Belsey, Andrew journalism ethics 427 Belzer, Marvin deontic logic 202 Benakis, L.G. Byzantine philosophy 116 Bencivenga, E. free logic 293 beneficence 344 benevolence moral sense (Hutcheson, F.) 370 Benfield, David Chisholm, R.M. 138 Ben-Menahem, Yemima Putnam, H. 726 Bentham, Jeremy 83–4 legislation 84; punishment and reward 84; utility principle 83–4 Bentley, Richard 84 Berdiaev, Nikolai Aleksandrovich 84 Bergson, Henri-Louis 85 Berkeley, George 85 idealism 85–6 Berlin, Isaiah 86 liberty 86; value pluralism 86 Bernard of Clairvaux 87 Bernard of Tours (Bernardus Silvestris) 87 Bernasconi, Robert Levinas, E. 483–4
Bernier, François 87 Bernstein, Eduard 87 Bernstein, J.M. Adorno, T.W. 5; Horkheimer, M. 362–3 Berry, Christopher J. Enlightenment, Scottish 243; human nature, eighteenth-century science of 364 Beth’s theorem 87–8 Beuchot, Mauricio Báñez, D. 75 Bhagavad Gītā duty and virtue 223 Bhargava, Rajeev holism and individualism in history and social science 359–60 Bhartṛhari 88 Indian and Tibetan philosophy 389; sentential understanding 354
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Page 957 Bhaskar, Roy critical realism 182 Bhattacharyya, Sibajiban God, Indian conceptions of 318 Biard, Joël Albert of Saxony 20; Major, J. 521 Bible hell 342; hermeneutics 348–9; scientific reality 757; sin 831 Bible, Hebrew 88–9 midrash 572; sin 831 Bicchieri, Cristina decision and game theory 195 Biel, Gabriel 89 Bienenstock, M. Rosenzweig, F. 776 Bierman, G.M. linear logic 490 Bigelow, John C. functionalism in social science 301; particulars 658; universals 908 Bilimoria, Purushottama Kauṭilya 435; testimony in Indian philosophy 882 bioethics 89 see also animals, ethics; ecology; environmental ethics; medical ethics; nursing ethics Jewish 89–90; Singer, P. 68 biology molecular 587; species 855 biotic community 325 Birdwhistell, Anne D. Lu Xiangshan 512; Shao Yong 825 Birkhoff, G. 731 Birks, Peter B.H. Roman law/civilian tradition 774 bivalence intuitionistic logic 404; truth conditions 404 Black, Alison H. Wang Fuzhi 924 Black, Deborah L. aesthetics in Islamic Philosophy 11; logic in Islamic philosophy 496–7 Blackburn, Simon Collingwood, R.G. 148; projectivism 715; supervenience 872 Blackloism 821 Blackstone, William 90 Blair, Hugh 90
Enlightenment, Scottish 90 Blake, J. 696 blame 705 see also rectification; remainders moral sentiments 600 Blanchette, Patricia A. realism, mathematics 745 Blanchot, Maurice 90–1 Bland, K.P. Delmedigo, E. 199 Blasius of Parma (Blasius de Pelacanis) 91 Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna 886 blindness Molyneux problem 588 blindsight unconscious mental states (Weiskrantz, L.) 906 Bloch, Ernst Simon 91 hope 362 Block, Ned computational theories of mind 576; conceptual role semantics 816 Bloomfield, Leonard 866 Bloor, David sociology of knowledge 846 Bobbio, Norberto 91 legal positivism 477 Boden, M.A. artificial intelligence 58 bodies Epicureanism 244; motion (Hobbes, T.) 357 bodily sensations 91–2 see also pain; pleasure Bodin, Jean 92 Boehme, Jakob 92 Boeotia Plutarch of Chaeronea 683 Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus 92 Aristotle 48–9; De consolatione philosophiae (On the Consolation of Philosophy) 92; eternity 255; immutability 385; Valla, L. 92 Boethius of Dacia 94 Bogdanov, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich 94 Bohemia Hus, J. 369 Bohman, James systems theory in social science 874 Bohr, Niels 94–5 Bok, Sissela truthfulness 900 Bold, Samuel 95 Bolshevism empiriocriticism 532–3 Bolt, John Dooyeweerd, H. 215 Bonaventure 95–6 happiness 95; mysticism 95–6 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 96 BonJour, Laurence coherence theory of justification and knowledge 439
Bonnet, Charles 96 Bonsor, Jack Rahner, K. 736 Boolean algebra 97 Borsellino, Patrizia Bobbio, N. 91 Bos, Egbert Peter Marsilius of Inghen 527 Bostick, Curtis V. Hus, J. 369
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< previous page Page 958 botany Linnaeus, C. von 491; Theophrastus 884 Botwinick, A. Rabbinic theology 884 Bourdieu, Pierre 98 Bowler, Peter J. Darwin, C.R. 192 Bowne, Borden Parker 98 personalism 668 Boxill, Bernard affirmative action 13 Boyle, Robert 98 Braddon-Mitchell, David analytic behaviourism 80; belief 82 Bradley, Francis Herbert the Absolute 3–4 Bradley, James Whitehead, A.N. 928 Brahman 100 ātman relationship 812; monism 589 Brahmanism Brahmo Samaj movement 100 Brahmo Samaj (Society of Brahma) 100–1 Braine, David grace 323; negative theology 621; sacraments 790 brain-in-a-vat thought experiment 795–6 Brams, Jozef translators 898 Branham, R.B. Cynics 186–7; Diogenes of Sinope 212; Lucian 512 Braude, Stephen E. paranormal phenomena 657 Brazil 101 Breazeale, D. Fichte, J.G. 283 Bredeck, E. Mauthner, F. 545–6 Brennan, Andrew environmental ethics 243–4 Bridgman, Percy William 102 operationalism 646 Brinkley, Richard 102 Brito, Radulphus 102 Brittan, Arthur symbolic interactionism 873 Broad, Charlie Dunbar 102–3 Brockelman, Thomas Lacan, J. 448–9 Bronkhorst, Johannes Bhartṛhari 88;
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Patañjali 660 Brown, Beverley A. legal discourse 475 Brown, Charlotte common-sense ethics 152–3; Paley, W. 653; Wollaston, W. 935 Brown, Mark 584 Brown, Stephen F. Chatton, W. 133; Clarembald of Arras 143; Gregory of Rimini 325; Matthew of Aquasparta 545; Richard of Middleton 771 Brown, Stuart Helmont, F.M. van 343 Brown, Thomas 103 substance dualism 103 Browne, Peter 103 Brueckner, Anthony deductive closure principle 196 Brunner, Emil 103 Bruno, Giordano 104 Brunschwig, Jacques Anaxarchus 32; Pyrrho 727; Timon 893 Bryant, C.J. Brown, T. 103 Bryce, James 104 Bryson, Thomas L. Ramakrishna Movement 736 Brzezinski, Jan Gauḑīya Vaiṣṇavism 306; Rāmānuja 737 Bub, Jeffrey quantum measurement 731 Buber, Martin 104 mysticism 105 Buchanan, Allen E. communitarianism 155 BuÈ chner, Friedrich Karl Christian Ludwig (Louis) 105 Buchwald, J.Z. 235 Buddha 105 central teachings 109–10; Indian and Tibetan philosophy 389; Yogācāra Buddhism 107 buddha-nature li 485 Buddhist philosophy Chinese 108–9; East Asian Philosophy 228; emotions 238; Indian 109; Japanese 110; Korean 111–12; nirvāṇa 633; renunciation 223; Tibetan 891 Buffier, Claude 112
Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de 112 evolutionary theory 112 Buldt, Bernd infinitary logic 394 Bulgakov, Sergei Nikolaevich 112 Bulgaria Kristeva, J. 444; Todorov, T. 894 Bultmann, Rudolf 113 bundle theory of mind 575 Bunge, Mario 29–30 Burch, Robert W. Royce, J. 778 bureaucracy Chinese Legalism 479 Burgess, John P. constructible universe 171; forcing 288; set theory 822 Buridan, John 113–14 Albert of Saxony 20
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Page 959 Burke, Edmund 114 conservatism 170; party politics 114; religious conservatism 756; the sublime 114 Burkert, Walter Orphism 649 Burley, Walter 114 Burnett, Charles Islamic philosophy, transmission into Western Europe 410–11 Burnyeat, M.F. dissoi logoi (twofold argument) 214 Burrell, David B. causality and necessity in Islamic thought 127; Platonism in Islamic philosophy 680 Burrows, Mark S. Gerson, J. 312 Burthogge, Richard 115 bushi philosophy 115 business ethics 115–16 Bussanich, John Nemesius 621; Suso, H. 873; Tauler, J. 876; Themistius 883; Ulrich of Strasbourg 905–6 Buswell, Robert E., Jr Chinul 138; Ûisang 905 Butler, Joseph 116 deism 116; system of parts 116 Butterfield, Jeremy determinism and indeterminism 206 Butts, Robert E. science, nineteenth century philosophy of 803 Byzantine philosophy 116 Byzantium Diogenes Laertius 212; Proclus 714 Cabanis, Pierre-Jean 118 Cabet, Étienne utopianism 910 Cabezón, José Ignacio mKhas grub dge legs dpal bzang po 583 Cabral, Amílcar 118 African philosophy 15 Cahm, Caroline Kropotkin, P.A. 445–6 Caitanya 306 Cajetan (Cardinal Thomas de Vio) 118–19 Calcidius 119 calculus Leibniz, G.W. 481 Calder, Norman law, Islamic philosophy of 466
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Calder, Robert R. Kemp Smith, N. 436 Calhoun, C. Taylor, C. 877 Callicles 119 calligraphy Chinese 11 Callinicos, Alex Althusser, L.P. 25; Lukács, G. 512; Marcuse, Herbert 525; Trotsky, L. 899 Calude, Christian computability and information 156 Calvin, John 119–20 predestination 119 Calvinism Dooyeweerd, H. 215; predestination 706; providence 722 Cambridge Platonism 120 see also Latitudinarianism Cudworth, R. 184 Campanella, Tommaso 120–1 Campbell, George 121 Aberdeen Philosophical Society 2; Enlightenment, Scottish 121 Campbell, Keith epiphenomenalism 245–6 Campbell, Norman Robert 121 Camus, Albert 121 Canada Lonergan, B.J.F. 509; Taylor, C. 877 Candlish, Stewart bundle theory of mind 575; private language argument 711 Canguilhem, Georges 297 canonical system (Post, E.L.) 698 Canovan, Margaret totalitarianism 896 Cantor, Georg 121 continuum hypothesis 175; set theory 822 Cantor’s theorem 122 capitalism social democracy 836 Capozzi, Mirella logic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries 497–8 Capreolus, Johannes 122 Card, Claudia rectification and remainders 746–7 Cardano, Girolamo 122 cardinality of the continuum 122; value theory 739 care nursing ethics 638 Carmichael, Gershom 123 Carnap, Rudolf 123–4
confirmation theory 162; propositional attitude statements 719 Carneades 124 Academic scepticism 34 Carolingian renaissance 124 Carroll, David Lyotard, J.-F. 514 Carter, R.E. 497 Cartesian Circle 204 Cartesianism Clauberg, J. 144; Cordemoy, G. de 177; demonstration (Vico, G.) 914–15;
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Page 960 Desgabets, R. 205; Fardella, M. 273; La Forge, L. de 448; Le Grand, A. 473; persons 668; Port-Royal 695 Cartwright, Nancy causation 127–8; Neurath, O. 626 Cārvāka causation 128; inference 442 Casati, Roberto dreaming 217 Cassirer, Ernst 124–5 caste duty, Indian concepts of 223; social emancipation (Ambedkar, B.R.) 26 Castellanos, Rosario 281 casuistry 125 Cat, Jordi Neurath, O. 626; unity of science 907 Catalonia Llull, R. 493; Nahmanides, M. 609 categories 125 see also classification Aristotelian 125; concepts 159; Graham, A.C. 125; Kant, I. 125; metaphysics 568; Ryle, G. 125 category theory 126 Catholic Modernism 508 Catto, Jeremy Wyclif, J. 937 causa sui (self-caused) 294 causality 127–8 see also dependent origination; determinism; end cause; mental causation; occasionalism Buddhism 110; four causes (Galen) 304; Islamic philosophy 127; miracles 582; voluntarism 921 Cavell, Stanley 129 Cavendish, Margaret Lucas 129 Celsus of Alexandria 129 certainty 129 see also belief; doubt; scepticism cogito argument (Descartes, R.) 204; divine illumination 96; doubt 216; perception (Nicholas of Autrecourt) 628; propositional 129; religious 754 Certeau, Michel de 130
Cerutti-Guldberg, Horacio liberation philosophy 487; Mexico, philosophy in 571 Chaadaev, Pëtr Iakovlevich 130 Russian Idea 783–4 Chadwick, Henry Boethius, A.M.S. 92; Clement of Alexandria 144 Chalcedon Xenocrates 938 Chalcedon Council 387 Chalcis Iamblichus 372 Chaldaean Oracles 130–1 Chalier, Agnes Wang Chong 924 Champion, J.A.I. Toland, J. 894–5 Chan Buddhism Platform Sutra 677 Chan Wing-tsit self-cultivation 813 chance randomness 738 Chang, Leo S. Chinese Legalist philosophy 478–9; Han Feizi 331 change 131 see also immutability; impermanence;momentariness cognitive development 146; cycle of (Empedocles) 239; metaphysics 569; power 703; time 131 Chanter, Tina Irigaray, L. 405; Kristeva, J. 444 chaos theory 131 Chappell, T.D.J. utilitarianism 909 charity 131–2 Christian love 131 charity, principle of 132 Charleton, Walter 132 Charron, Pierre 132 Chartres, School of 133 Clarembald of Arras 143 Chatton, Walter 133 Wodeham, A. 934 chemistry 133 cheng (integrity or sincerity) 134 Cheng Hao 134 Cheng Yi 134 Cherniak, Christopher rational beliefs 739 Chernyshevskii, Nicolai Gavrilovich 134 Russian Marxism 135 Chevalley, Catherine Helmholtz, H. von 343 child development
child’s theory of mind 575; false beliefs 575–6; infant cognition 145; moral 593; Piaget, J. 675; pretend play 575–6 child’s theory of mind 575 Chillingworth, William 135 China 136–8 aesthetics 11; art 11; Buddhism 108–9; Cheng Hao 134; Cheng Yi 134; Christianity 225; classics 135–6; Confucianism 162–3; Confucius 166; Dai Zhen 189; dao 190; Dong Zhongshu 215; Fazang 274; Han Feizi 331; Han Yu 332; history, philosophy of 355–6; Huainanzi 363; Jia Yi 423; law and ritual 465–6; Legalist philosophy 478–9; Linji 490; logic 495–6; Lu Xiangshan 512;
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< previous page Page 961 Manicheism 522; Mencius 563; Mohist philosophy 586–7; Mozi 603; neo-Confucianism 621–2; Offical Histories 355–6; self-cultivation 812–13; Sengzhao 819; Shao Yong 825; Sunzi 871; Wang Chong 924; Wang Fuzhi 924; Wang Yangming 924–5; Western philosophy comparison 225; Xunzi 939–40; Yang Xiong 941; Yangzhu 941; Yogācāra Buddhism 936; Zhang Zai 946; Zheng Xuan 946; zhi 946; Zhi Dun 946; Zhiyi 946; Zhou Dunyi 947; Zhu Xi 947; Zongmi 948 Chinese room argument 138 Chinul 138 Chisholm, Roderick Milton 138 commonsensism 153 Ch’oe Che-u 896 Ch’oe, Yông-Ho Chông Yagyong 139; sirhak 832; Tonghak 896 Chogye School of Buddhism 138 choice existentialism 265; rational choice theory 739 choice, axiom of 71 forcing 288 Chomsky, Noam 138 syntax 456 Chông Yagyong (Tasan) 139 Choueiri, Youssef Islamic fundamentalism 406 Christian realism (Niebuhr, R.) 629 Christian socialism (Barth, K.) 76 Christianity atonement 63; Averroism conflict 69; charity 131; China 225; clandestine literature 143; defence (More, H.) 601–2; ethics (Bonhoeffer, D.) 96; Eusebius 261;
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faith 271; heaven 335; hell 342; hope 362; Incarnation and Christology 386–7; Judaism comparison (Ibn Kammuna) 375; Kabbalism (Pico della Mirandola, G.) 676; liberation theology 487; medieval philosophy relationship 553; natural religion (Paley, W.) 653; Nietzsche, F.W. reconciliation (Merezhkovskii, D.) 631; Philoponus 674; pietism 676–7; political influence of 756; process theism 713–14; purgatory 726; sacraments 790; science 757; sin 831; supererogation 871–2; Trinity 898–9; virtues 883 Christine de Pizan 139–40 Christmas, Simon intensionality 398 Christodoulidis, Emilios A. Dworkin, R. 223 Christology 386–7 see also Incarnation; Jesus Christ orthodox doctrine 386 Chrysippus 140 Stoicism 862 Chunqiu (Spring and Autumn Annals) 136 see also Gongyangzhuan; Guliangzhuan ; Zuozhuan Church, Alonzo 140 see also Church’s theorem Church of England Farrer, A.M. 273 Church’s theorem decision problem 140 Cicero, Marcus Tullius 33 Cilicia Chrysippus 140; Simplicius 831 citizenship 142 see also community; nation; obligation, political; society democratic theory 142; identity 142 civil disobedience 142 definition 142; justification 142 civil law origins of 775; rationalization of (Pothier, R.J.) 702 civil society 142–3 Cixous, Hélène 143 clairvoyance Steiner, R. 861 clandestine literature 143 Clapiers, L. de, Marquis de Vauvenargues 599
Clarembald of Arras 143 Clark, Maudemarie Nietzsche, F.W. 630–1 Clarke, Samuel 143 classification Linnaeus, C. von 491; natural kinds 612; species 855 Clauberg, Johannes 144 Cleanthes 144 Clement of Alexandria 144 Cleomedes 144 closure clauses inductive definitions and proofs 392 Coady, C.A.J. Australia, philosophy in 67; testimony 881; violence 916 Coase’s Theorem economics and law 466 Cocchiarella, Nino B. property theory 718; theory of types 886 Cockburn, Catharine 144–5 codes of practice engineering ethics 241 coercion 145 cogito ergo sum Descartes, R. 204 cognition cognitive architecture 145–6; Gangeśa 305; intuition (Lossky, N.O.) 510; language of thought hypothesis 455; learning 474;
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Page 962 medieval attitudes to 557–8; mental imagery 384; modularity of mind 586 cognitive architecture 145–6 cognitive development 146 see also child development; infant cognition innate predispositions 146; Piaget, J. 675 cognitive pluralism 146 descriptive 146; evaluative-concept 146; normative 146 cognitive psychology visual perception 918 cognitive significance sense and reference 820 cognitivism analytic ethics 28–9; naturalism in ethics 615; practical reason 703 Cohen, Arthur A. 361 Cohen, Hermann 146 Jewish philosophy 422 Cohen, Jean L. civil society 142–3 Cohen, Paul J. forcing 288 Cohen, Richard J. Vallabhācārya 912 Cohen, Stewart scepticism 795 Cohn-Sherbok, D. Hebrew Bible 88–9 coincidentia oppositorum in deo (coincidence of opposites in God) 628 Coleman, Jules economics and law 466 Colish, Marcia L. Peter Lombard 509 collective action rational choice theory 739 collectivity moral agents 592; self-realization 814; solidarity 848 Collegium Conimbricense 147–8 Collier, Andrew critical realism 182 Collier, Arthur 148 Collin, Finn Alfred Schütz 802 Collingwood, Robin George 148 Collins, Anthony 148 colonialism African ethical systems 255; African philosophy 15; anti-slavery arguments (Amo, A.W.) 27; ethnophilosophy 259–60;
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Latin America 460; postcolonialism comparison 699; Renaissance philosophy 763 colour 149 objective 149; scientific-perceptual conflict 150; secondary qualities 810–11; subjective 149–50 combinatory logic 150–1 comedy Epicharmus 244 Comenius, John Amos 151 commentators Bartolist school 76 common law 152 change/continuity paradox 152; as custom 152; history of 775 common nature individuation (Duns Scotus, J.) 220 common sense philosophy ethics 152–3 Common Sense School 152 Aberdeen Philosophical Society 2; Beattie, J. 79; ethics 152; Oswald, J. 650; Stewart, D. 861 commonality, of being (Nancy, J.-L.) 610 commonsensism 153 commonwealth civil philosophy (Hobbes, T.) 357–8; Harrington, J. 333 communalism Feuerbach, L.A. 283; Jewish (Kaplan, M.) 433 communication intention 153; Mead, G.H. 546; and meaning 546; mind-language connection 457; speech acts 855–6 communicative action Habermas, J. 328 communicative rationality 154 Apel, K.-O. 154 communism 154–5 see also Marx, K.; Marxism; socialism; Stalinism religious perspective of 892 communitarianism 155 definition of 155; obligations to future generations 302; political obligation 641 community 155 see also citizenship; communitarianism socialism 844 compatibilism causation (Ayer, A.J.) 72 competence medical ethics 551 complementarity
Bohr, N. 94 complexity computational 155; information-theoretic 156; recursion-theoretic 747 compositionality 156 compound terms Mohism 495 computability theory 157 and information 156; Post, E.L. 698; Turing machines 902 computation human behaviour 902
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Page 963 computer science 157–8 Neumann, J. von 626 computers architecture 145; Chinese room argument 138; dynamic logics 224 Comstock, Gary L. agricultural ethics 18 Comte, Isidore-Auguste-Marie-François-Xavier 158 logic of systems 158; positivism 158 concepts 159 see also ideas; intensional entities; language aesthetic 8; conceptual analysis 160; confusion elimination(Wittgenstein, L.) 350; definition 159; formal 459; legal 475; proper names 717 Conceptual Analysis movement 160 see also ordinary language philosophy conceptual role semantics 816 conceptualism property theory 718; substance 869 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de 160 language 161; sensation 160–1 conditionalization degrees of belief 712–13 conditionals consequence (Diodorus Cronus) 211; logic 502 Condorcet, Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas Caritat de 161 social arithmetic 161 Conee, Earl normative epistemology 636 confederalism 275 confirmation holism Quine, W.V. 159 confirmation theory science 162; theoretical/epistemic virtues 884; truth (Hempel, C.G.) 344–5 Confucianism 137 Confucius; see also neo-Confucianism aesthetics 11; cheng 134; Cheng Hao 134; Cheng Yi 134; Chinese 162–3; Chinese classics 135; Daoism distinction 190; de 193; Dong Zhongshu 215; East Asian Philosophy 227–8; education 530; Han
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Yu 332; harmony 227–8; Japanese 163–4; Korean 164; Mencius 563; Mozi 587; Wang Yangming 447; Yang Xiong 941; Zheng Xuan 946 Confucius Five Classics 136; rectifying names 495; Shijing 135–6; Shujing 135 conjunction Ibn Bajja 373; linear logic 490 Conley, Tom Certeau, M. de 130 Conley, Verena Andermatt Cixous, H. 143 connectionism 166 computation 166; computational models of vision 918 conscience 167 consciousness 167–8 see also cognition; experience; mental states; mind; perception; unconscious mental states eliminativism 168; intentionality 671; moral standing 598; mysticism 606; noema (Husserl, E.) 370; panpsychism 654; phenomenology 168; qualia 168 consensus gentium (universal consent) Cudworth, R. 184–5 consent 168–9 government 252 consequence conceptions of 169; multiple-conclusion logic 604 consequentialism 169 act-consequentialism 169; instrumentalism (Dewey, J.) 705; punishment 180–1 conservation principles 169 conservation (religious doctrine of) 180 conservatism 170 consistency constructible universe 171 conspiracy theories Illuminati 383 Constant de Rebecque, Henri-Benjamin 171 Constantinople capture of 763 constants logical 504–5 constitutionalism 171 see also sovereignty utilitarian government (Bentham, J.) 84
constructible universe 171 constructive existence constructivism in mathematics 172 constructivism 171 ethical 172; mathematics 172–3 contemplation Richard of St Victor 771 content externalism 580; indexical 173; informational semantics 817; meaning 579; thought 579–80; wide and narrow 173 context indexical content 173 contextualism epistemological 174; scepticism 174 Conti, Alessandro D. Kilwardby, R. 438 contingency 174 divine freedom (Leibniz, G.W.) 480–1; of history 826; of human nature (Bakhtin, M.) 75 continuants 174–5 continuity common law 152
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Page 964 continuum hypothesis 175 contractarianism 175–6 see also social contract civil society (Rousseau, J.-J.) 777–8; human nature 306 contractualism moral (Scanlon, T.M.) 176 convention and nature 618; necessary truth 619 conventionalism 176 justice 428–9; language 452–3; science (Duhem, P.M.M.) 219 Conway, Anne 176–7 Cook, Francis H. Fazang 274 Cooper, David E. existentialist ethics 265; Marcel, G. 524 Cooper, John al-Dawani 193; Mulla Sadra 603; al-Razi, Fakhr al-Din 744; al-Sabzawari 790; al Suhrawardi 870–1; al-Tusi 903 Cooper, John M. Owen, G.E.L. 651; Socrates 847 Copernicus, Nicolaus 177 see also Copernican astronomy; Copernicanism Cordemoy, Géraud de 177 corpuscularianism Boyle, R. 98–9 Corr, Charles Wolff, C. 934 corruption 177 cosmogony Anaximenes 33; cycle of change (Empedocles) 239; Indian theories of 178 cosmology 177 see also cosmogony; creation; universe; worldview Anaximander 32; Anaximenes 33; Ash‘ariyya 62; East Asian Philosophy 226; ‘ever-living fire’ (Heraclitus) 346; Galilei, G. 304; Greek pre-Socratic 907; Indian theories of 178; Kepler, J. 436; Mu‘tazalia 62; Native American philosophy 611; palingenesis (Bonnet, C.) 96; rationalism 22–3; unlimiteds/limiters 674;
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Way of Seeming (Parmenides) 658 cosmopolitanism Meinecke, F. 561 Cotterrell, Roger social theory and law 843 Cottingham, John impartiality 385 count terms mass terms contrast 534 counterfactual conditionals 178–9 Counter-Reformation Italy 412 coup d’état revolution distinction 770 Cousin, Victor 179 Cousins, L.S. Buddha 105; nirvāṇa 633 covering-law model of explanation 268 Cowie, F. innateness of language 313 Cox, Collett Ābhidharmika Schools of Buddhism 106 Craig, Edward fatalism 274; metaphysics 567–7; monism 589; ontology 645; pluralism 683; private states and language 711–12; realism/antirealism 744; relativism 752; solipsism 849 Craig’s theorem 87–8 Crane, Tim intentionality 399 Crathorn, William 179 Cratylus 180 Creath, Richard Carnap, R. 123–4 creation 180 see also cosmogony; cosmology; emanationism; evolutionary theory; life, origin of deism 198; eschatological cosmology 96; mystical structure (Bonaventure) 95–6; nature relationship (Eriugena, J.S.) 252–3; Plato 679 creatures moral standing 598 Crescas, Hasdai 180 critique of Aristotle 180; Jewish philosophy 421 Crete Delmedigo, E. 199 Cridos Eudoxus 260 crime 180–1 see also punishment civil disobedience 142 Crimmins, Mark language 455–8; semantics 816
Crisp, Roger ethics 256–8; fact/value distinction 270; moral particularism 595; utilitarianism 909; virtue ethics 917 criteria 181 scepticism 181 Critical Legal Studies 181 United States of America 181 critical rationalism Popper, K.R. 694 critical realism 182 Kemp Smith, N. 436 critical reasoning role of imagery (Le Doeuff, M.) 473 critical theory 182 see also Frankfurt School Adorno, T.W. 5; Horkheimer, M. 362
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< previous page Page 965 criticism textual (Bentley, R.) 84 Croce, Benedetto 183 historicism 355; pure concepts 183 Crocker, David development ethics 206–7 Crosby, Donald A. nihilism 632 Crowder, George anarchism 31 crucial experiments 183 Duhem, P.M.M. 218–19 Crusius, Christian August 184 Cua, A.S. Chinese Confucianism 162–3; Xunzi 939–40 Cuba Latin American Marxism 534 Cudworth, Ralph 184 Culler, Jonathan structuralism 865–6 Cullity, Garrett moral judgment 594 cultural evolution 264 cultural relativism and rationality 741–2 culture 185–6 definition 185; history of 375; multiculturalism 604; postmodernism 699–700; science of ( ilm al-umran ) 375; symbolic forms (Cassirer, E.) 124–5 Culverwell, Nathanial 186 Cumberland, Richard 186 Curren, R. educational philosophy 232 Curry, H. combinatory logic 150–1 Cushing, James T. conservation principles 169; electrodynamics 235 custom common law 152 cut-elimination theorem Gentzen, G.K.E. 310; sequent calculus 612 Cutrofello, Andrew Derrida, J. 203 Cuvier, Georges 734 Cynics 186–7 human nature 186 Cyprus Zeno of Citium 944 Cyrenaics 187 Aristippus the Elder 47
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Cyrene Aristippus the Elder 47 Czech Republic 187–8 Reformation 187; Weyr, F. 927 Czechoslovak Republic 534 see also Czech Republic; Slovakia Comenius, J.A. 151; Hus, J. 369; Husserl, E. 369–70; Mazaryk, T.G. 534; Patočka, J. 661; Weinberger, O. 926; Weyr, F. 927 Czerkawski, Jan Poland 685–6 Dabashi, Hamid Mir Damad, Muhammad Baqir 582 Dahlquist, Thorild Hägerström, A.A.T. 329 Daly, Chris natural kinds 612–13 Damascius 189 Damian, Peter 189 damnation reprobation 766 dao (Way) 190 Daoism Confucianism distinction 190; Daodejing 190; East Asian Philosophy 228; language theories 495–6; Zhuangzi 947–8 Darden, Lindley genetics 308 Darwall, S. Price, R. 709 Darwin, Charles Robert 192 see also Darwinism Huxley, T.H. 371; On the Origin of Species 192 Darwinism pragmatism 704 Dasein (being-in-the-world) disclosure 341; entity 340–1; Heidegger, M. 340–1; temporality 340–1 David of Dinant 192 Davidson, Donald 193 anomalous monism 37; rationality and cultural relativism 741 Davie, George Kemp Smith, N. 436 Davis, Michael engineering ethics 241 Davis, Stephen T. eschatology 254 Davis, Wayne A.
implicature 386 al-Dawani, Jalal al-Din 193 Dawson, John W. Jr. Gödel, K. 318–19 Dayanand Saraswati 61 de dicto 194 see also de re modal logic 502 de facto question religious belief 755 de jure question religious belief 755 De Man, Paul 194 de re 194 see also de dicto modal logic 502
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Page 966 Dear, Peter Aristotelianism in the seventeenth century 48; Mersenne, M. 566 death 195 see also eschatology; life, and death body/soul distinction 195; heaven 335; hell 342; infinity 394; limbo 489; meaning of life 195; mystery of 195; purgatory 726; reincarnation 751; reprobation 766; resurrection 275; suicide 871; survival of 195 Deborin, A.M. 532–3 debt gratitude relationship 747 deception truthfulness contrast 900 decision problem computability theory 157 decision theory 195 see also game theory; practical reasoning; rational choice theory degrees of belief (Ramsey, F.P.) 737; medical ethics 551; solidarity 848 deconstruction 196 closure of metaphysics (Nancy, J.-L.) 610 Dedekind, Julius Wilhelm Richard 196 deduction natural theology 615 deductive closure principle 196 definability theory Beth’s theorem and Craig’s interpolation theorem 87–8 definite descriptions Strawson, P.F. 865 definition 197 Indian concepts of 197; reduction by 747 DeGrazia, David suffering 870 deism 198 afterlife (Butler, J.) 116; definition 198; polemical (Tindal, M.) 893–4 deities pre-Columbian religions 463 Del Punta, Francesco Giles of Rome 315 Delaney, C.F. tacit knowledge 442 Deleuze, Gilles 198–9 Delmedigo, Elijah 199 Jewish philosophy 422
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demarcation problem scientific-nonscientific 199 Dembski, William A. randomness 738 democracy 199–200 see also constitutionalism; majoritarianism; political representation citizenship 142; journalism ethics 427; Masaryk, T.G. 534; multiculturalism 604; postmodernism 700; rational choice theory 740; social 836 Democritus 33 atomism 200; Leucippus 483 demonstration Cartesianism (Vico, G.) 914–15; Islamic philosophy 496–7; method (Wolff, C.) 935 demonstratives 201 see also indexicals demythologization New Testament 113 Denmark Boethius of Dacia 94; Bohr, N. 94–5; Ross, A. 777 Dennett, Daniel Clement 201 Dent, N.J.H. conscience 167; Rousseau, J.-J. 777 Denyer, Nicholas Diodorus Cronus 211–12; Philo the Dialectician 673 Denys the Carthusian 201–2 deontic logic 202 deontological ethics 202 see also Kantian ethics moral pluralism (Ross, W.D.) 777 dependence Latin American liberation philosophy 487 dependent origination, Buddhist doctrine of 870 Derrida, Jacques 203 post-structuralism 701 Descartes, René 203–5 Arnauld, A. 52; cogito argument 204; dualism 204; Elisabeth of Bohemia 236; introspection 402; mind-body problem 724–5; persons 668; voluntarism 921 descriptions 205 see also definite descriptions; reference knowledge by 439; mental imagery 384 desert 205 see also blame; merit; praise Desgabets, Robert 205 de-Shalit, Avner obligations to future generations 301
desire 205–6 action (Freud, S.) 298; analytic behaviourism (Dennett, D.C.) 201; self-control 812; sexual 824; utilitarianism 909 determinism 206 see also fatalism; free will; indeterminism; predestination Bakhtin, M.M. 75; Edwards, J. 233; environmental 344; freedom 294; nature-nurture debate 309; pessimistic (Voltaire) 921 Detlefsen, Michael Gödel’s theorems 319; Hilbert’s programme and formalism 352 Deutsch, Harry demonstratives and indexicals 201 Deutscher, Max Le Doeuff, M. 473; memory 562–3
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Page 967 development cognitive 146 development ethics 206–7 see also postcolonialism developmental psychology infant cognition 145; Piaget, J. 675; Vygotskii, L.S. 922 Devitt, Michael reference 748 Dewey, John 207 habits of inquiry 207; moral life 207; pragmatism 704 Dews, Peter communicative rationality 154 dGa’-ldan-pa (Gandeba) School of Buddhism mKhas grub dge legs dpal bzang po 583; rGyal tshab dar ma rin chen 770; Tsong kha pa Blo bzang grags pa 901 dharma 223 Dharmakīrti 207 Buddhist nominalism 635; Indian and Tibetan philosophy 389 Dharmaśāstras duty and virtue 223; interpretation 401 Di Gregorio, Mario A. Huxley, T.H. 371 dialectic negative (Adorno, T.W.) 5; theology (Barth, K.) 76 dialectical materialism 208 Gramsci, A. 323 Dialectical school 208 see also Philo the Dialectician Diodorus Cronus 211 dialecticals Marxism (Lukács, G.) 531 Dialecticians Asmus, V.F. 62 dialogical logic 209 dialogue ‘I-Thou’ relationship (Buber, M.) 105; language as (Bakhtin, M.M.) 74 Dicey, Albert Venn 209 Dichotomy Argument Zeno of Elea 945 Diderot, Denis 209 Encyclopedists, eighteenth century 240 Dietrich of Freiberg 210 Dietrich, Michael R. molecular biology 587 Dietz, Mary G. Machiavelli, N. 516 Digby, Kenelm 210 Dignāga 210 Indian and Tibetan philosophy 389 Dillon, J.M.
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Alcinous 21–2; Apuleius 42–3; Calcidius 119; Celsus 129; Damascius 189; Numenius 638; Platonism, Early and Middle 679; Plutarch of Chaeronea 683; Speusippus 856; Xenocrates 938 Dilthey, Wilhelm 211 descriptive psychology 211; hermeneutics 211; worldview 211 Dinnerstein, D. 276 Diodorus Cronus 211–12 Diogenes of Apollonia 212 Diogenes Laertius 212 doxography 35 Diogenes of Oenoanda 212 Epicureanism 212 Diogenes of Sinope 212 Dipert, Randall R. logic machines and diagrams 499; logic, nineteenth century 498 discourse Latin American literature 491 discovery logic of 213 discretion judicial 429 discrimination 214 see also anti-Semitism; race; racism; sexism affirmative action 13; linguistic 490 disputation Japanese Buddhism 111 dissoi logoi (twofold argument) 214 divination Yijing 135 divine authority morality 755 divine election Judaism 88 divine freedom 295–6 Leibniz, G.W. 480–1 divine intervention 760 see also miracles; providence classical Christian theism 713–14; process theism 714 divine law Islamic philosophy 466–7 divine revelation secular learning relationship (Damian, P.) 189 divine truth Llull, R. 493 divisibility arguments against (Zeno of Elea) 945 Dobbs-Weinstein, I. Abravanel, J. 3 docta ignorantia (learned ignorance)
Nicholas of Cusa 628 Dodgson, Charles Lutwidge (Lewis Carroll) 214 Dōgen Kigen 214 dogmatism idealism contrast (Fichte, J.G.) 283 Dolník, Peter Church, A. 140
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< previous page Page 968 Dominicans Albert the Great 20; Aquinas, T. 43; Báñez, D. 75; Boethius of Dacia 94; Crathorn, W. 179; Dietrich of Freiberg 210; Durandus of St Pourçain 221; GarrigouLagrange, R. 297; Hervaeus Natalis 350; Holcot, R. 358; Kilwardby, R. 438; Meister Eckhart 561; Suso, H. 873; Tauler, J. 876; Ulrich of Strasbourg 905 Dooyeweerd, Herman 215 Döring, Frank counterfactual conditionals 178–9 Dostoevskii, Fëdor Mikhailovich 215 double effect, principle of 216 double predestination reprobation 766 doubt 216 see also certainty; scepticism Descartes, R. 204; reasonable 216 Downes, Stephen constructivism 171 Downs, A. 740 doxography 216–17 ancient philosophy 35 Doyle, John P. Collegium Conimbricense 147–8; Fonseca, P. da 288; John of St Thomas 425–6; Renaissance Aristotelianism 49–50; Soto, D. de 851; Suárez, F. 867–8; Toletus, F. 895 dreaming 217 Dreier, James Stevenson, C.L. 861 Dreyfus, Georges rGyal tshab dar ma rin chen 770; Sa skya paṇḍi 789 Driesch, H. 919 Drury, Shadia B. Strauss, L. 864 Du Châtelet-Lomont, Émilie 217 dualism 217–18 Christianity 523; death 195; introspection 402; Manicheism 522; mental states 217–18; metaphysics 569;
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Plato 851–2; Western (Cixous, H.) 143 Ducasse, Curt John 218 Duff, R.A. crime and punishment 180–1; responsibility 768 Duhem, Pierre Maurice Marie 218 crucial experiments 183–4; underdetermination 218–19 Dummett, Michael Anthony Eardley 219 bivalence 404; meaning 458 Dumont, Stephen D. Duns Scotus, J. 219–21 Dunn, R. intention 399 Dunne, John D. Buddhist nominalism 635 Duns Scotus, John 219–21 individuation 220 Duran, Profiat 221 Duran, Simeon ben Tzemach 221 Durandus of St Pourçain 221–2 Durkheim, Émile 222 sociological method 222 duty 222 see also dharma; supererogation deontological ethics 202; Indian conceptions of 223; perfectionism 666; right and good 772; self-respect (Kant, I.) 815 Duval, Edwin M. Rabelais, F. 734 Duxbury, Neil Frank, J. 291; legal realism 477–8 Dvaita Vedānta Madhva 517 Dworkin, Ronald 223 dynamic logics 224 Dyzenhaus, David Ludovic Schmitt, C. 800 East Asian philosophy 225 Easton, Patricia Desgabets, R. 205; Le Grand, A. 473 Eatwell, Roger fascism 273–4 Ebbesen, Sten Averroism 69–70; Boethius of Dacia 94; Brito, R. 102; language, medieval theories of 454–5 Eberhard, Johann August 229 Eckardt, B. von introspection, psychology of 402 ecological philosophy 229 ecology 229–30 see also environmental ethics; green political philosophy
economic efficiency 466 economics 230–1 see also market economy efficiency 230; and ethics 230; general (Bataille, G.) 77; law 466; rational choice theory 739 education equality (Diderot, D.) 209; Marxism, Chinese 530; moral 593; Neoplatonic curriculum 624; rational enlightenment (Comenius, J.A.) 151; social conditioning (Rousseau, J.-J.) 778 educational philosophy 232 history of 231–2 Edwards, D.L. 737 Edwards, Jonathan theological aesthetics 233; theological determinism 233 Edwards, Paul suicide 871
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Page 969 efficiency Pareto principle 230; property 717–18 efficient causes medieval metaphysical doctrine 557 egalitarianism Chinese Marxism 530; Jewish bioethics 90 Egan, F. vision 918 ego persons 668; renunciation of (Weil, S.) 926 egoism 233–4 see also self-interest; self-love Egypt ‘Abduh, M. 1; Clement of Alexandria 144; cosmology, ancient 234; Hermetism 349; influence on ancient Greek thought 14; Maimonides, A. 519; Maimonides, M. 519; Origen 649; Philo of Alexandria 672–3; Plotinus 683; Ptolemy 725; Saadiah Gaon 789 Ehrenfels, Christian von 313 Einstein, Albert 234 see also Einstein field equations; Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen experiment quantum theory 235; relativity theory 752–3 Einstein field equations (EFE) 854 Eisen Murphy, Claudia Hildegard of Bingen 353 Eisen Murphy, Sean Bernard of Clairvaux 87; Joachim of Fiore 424 Elea Parmenides 658; Zeno 944–5 Eleatic philosophy a priori reasoning 33; Anaxagoras 31; Melissus 562; radical monism 33; Xenophanes 938 electrodynamics 235 electromagnetism field theory, classical 286 electronic technology ethics 395 elements harmonization/dissolution of (Empedocles) 239 Eliade, Mircea 235 the sacred 235
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eliminativism 236 see also materialism belief and knowledge 82; colour 149–50; phenomenal consciousness 168 Elior, R. Hasidism 334 Eliot, George 236 Elis Hippias 354; Pyrrho 727 Elisabeth of Bohemia 236 Ellenson, D. Kaplan, M. 433 emanationism divine word (Judah Halevi) 330 Embree, Lester phenomenological movement 670 Emerson, Caryl Mamardashvili, M.K. 521–2 Emerson, R.L. Home, H. 361 Emery, Kent, Jr Denys the Carthusian 201–2; Richard of St Victor 771; Thomas à Kempis 887 Emilsson, Eyjolfur K. Plotinus 683 Emmet, Dorothy processes 714 emotions 237 see also passions; pleasure art 9; love 511; meaning 238; reason relationship 238 emotivism 238 Ayer, A.J. 72; Hägerström, A.A.T. 329; meaning 238; Stevenson, C.L. 861 Empedocles 33 empiricism 239 see also logical empiricism a posteriori 1; analytic-synthetic distinction (Quine, W.V.) critique 732–3; Berkeley, G. 85; critiques of 240; global 240; nativism contrast 611; phenomenalist 240; public 240; Russell, B.A.W. 780–1; stratified form of 239–40; thought experiments 890; voluntarism 921 empiriocriticism Russian 532 emptiness Buddhism 108 Encyclopedists eighteenth century 240; medieval 240–1
end cause medieval metaphysical doctrine 557 Engel, Pascal propositions, sentences and statements 720–1 Engelhardt, H. Tristram, Jr medicine, philosophy of 552 Engels, Friedrich dialectical materialism 208; utopianism 910 engineering ethics 241 see also professional ethics; technology, ethics enjoyment pleasure 682 enlightenment Linji 490; rational (Comenius, J.A.) 151 Enlightenment absolutism 4; educational philosophy 232; social theory 843; suicide 871 Enlightenment, continental 241 Enlightenment, French 22 Enlightenment, German Thomasius, C. 888
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Page 970 Enlightenment, Jewish 242 Enlightenment, Russian 242 Enlightenment, Scottish 243 Blair, H. 90; Campbell, G. 121; historical jurisprudence 428; Millar, J. 574 Ensoph (the Infinite) 349 entailment belief and knowledge 82; relevance logic 753 enthusiasm 243 entities being distinction (Heidegger, M.) 340; extensional 398 environmental ethics 243–4 see also ecology; green political philosophy liberalism conflict 690 Epicharmus 244 Epictetus 244 Epicureanism 244 atomism 63; death 245; Diogenes of Oenoanda 212; Epicurus 245; free will 244; god 244; Lucretius 512; Philodemus 673; physics 244 Epicurus 34 see also Epicureanism death 195 epiphenomenalism 245–6 epistemic logic 246 epistemic regress problem 439 epistemic relativism 146 see also cognitive pluralism epistemological contextualism 174 epistemology 246 see also knowledge; normative epistemology; religious epistemology; social epistemology advisory 636; Chinese Marxism 530; empiricism 239; ethics compared 249; Helmholtz effect 343; history of 250; illumination theories 383; Indian 250; information theory 396; internalism-externalism distinction 399; Islamic philosophy 250; justification 430; mathematical 541–2; memory 563; Native American philosophy 611; non-naturalistic 636; probability theory 712–13; realism (Prichard, H.A.) 709; risk assessment 774;
virtue 917 epoché Husserl, E. 370 equality 251–2 property 718; social contract theory (Rousseau, J.-J.) 777–8 equity 429 see also fairness; justice discretion/legality problem 429; legality conflict 429; positive law 429 Er Ya 136 Erasmus, Desiderius 252 Ericsson, K.A. introspection, psychology of 402 Eriugena, Johannes Scottus 252–3 Carolingian renaissance 124; divisions of nature 252–3 Erlangen School 509 Erler, Michael Diogenes of Oenoanda 212; Lucretius 512; Philodemus 673 Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds postmodernism 699–700 error Indian philosophy 253; measurement theory 550 eschatology 254 see also afterlife; death; immortality; reincarnation; resurrection Russian Idea (Berdiaev, N.A.) 783 esotericism theosophy 886 Esquith, Stephen L. slavery 833 essence common nature (Duns Scotus, J.) 220; eidos ( Wesen ) (Husserl, E.) 370; existence without (Nancy, J.-L.) 610; substance distinction (Locke, J.) 493–4 essence-existence relationship Giles of Rome 315; Godfrey of Fontaines 320; Ibn Sina 378 essentialism 254 eternity 254–5 ether scientific theories 885 ethic of belief Mīmāṃsā 251 ethical constructivism 172 ethical discourse logic of 500 ethical intuitionism 403 pluralism relationship 403; Prichard, H.A. 709; utilitarianism relationship 909 ethical pragmatism 705 ethical universalism 907 logic of ethical discourse 500–1 ethico-aesthetics
Chinese art 11 ethics 256–8 see also agricultural ethics; analytic ethics; economics, and ethics; emotivism; environmental ethics; ethical; good; Kantian ethics; meta-ethics; moral; morality; prescriptivism; right; value pluralism Abelard, P. 2; aesthetics relationship 10; African 255; agricultural 18; animals 37; applied 42; aretē 46; bioethics 89; business 115–16; common-sense 152–3; conceptual scope (Aristotle) 51; consequentialism 169; constructivism 172; deontological 202; Duns Scotus, J. 221; engineering 241; epistemology compared 249;
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< previous page Page 971 evolution 262–3; examples in 264; existentialist 265; fallibilism 271; genetics 309; hedonism 336; human values shift (Socrates) 33–4; information technology 395; intuitionism 403; Islamic philosophy 259; journalism 427; medical 551–2; medieval concepts of 558; moral psychology 596; Native American philosophy 611; naturalism 615; naturalistic fallacy (Moore, G.E.) 592; nomoi (laws and customs) (Antiphon) 40; nursing 638; objectivity 640; particularism 595; personal identity 667; physis and nomos debate 675; Plutarch of Chaeronea 684; population 694; pragmatism 704; professional 715; reproduction 766–7; risk assessment 774; situation 832; sport 858; Stoicism 863; teleology 879; universalism 907; utilitarianism 909; vital motion (Hobbes, T.) 357–8; Wittgensteinian 934 Ethiopian philosophy 259 ethnophilosophy 259–60 Etruria Musonius Rufus 605 Etzkorn, Girard J. Marston, R. 528; Pecham, J. 663 Euclides 561 eudaimonia (happiness) 260 medieval ethics 558 Eudoxus 260 Eurasian Movement 260 European positivism Latin America 697 Eusebius 261 evaluative hedonism 336 evangelicalism Llull, R. 493; pietism 676–7 Evans, C. Stephen
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existentialist theology 266 Evans, Gareth 261 Evans, Mark self-realization 814 events 261–2 action distinction 5; continuants 174–5; processes 714 Everitt, C.W. Francis Maxwell, J.C. 546 evidence legal 476; scientific 805–6 evidentialism religious belief 758; trust 899 evil 262 see also evil, problem of death 195; evolution (Teilhard de Chardin, P.) 878; knowledge relationship (Shestov, L.) 826; Zoroastrianism 948–9 evil, problem of 262 see also theodicy hell 342; Holocaust 360; Manicheism 522; process theism 713–14 evolution ethics 262–3 evolution theory cosmogony (Empedocles) 239; Huxley, T.H. 371 evolutionary positivism Latin America 697 evolutionary theory 263 see also natural selection; sociobiology Buffon, G.L.L. 112; Darwin, C.R. 192; élan vital (Bergson, H.-L.) 85; language development (Monboddo) 589; natural selection (Wallace, A.R.) 924; optimism (Teilhard de Chardin, P.) 878; origins of life 489; philosophy of science 807–8; social science 263–4; species 855 examples in ethics 264 excellence ideals 380 excluded middle, law of the many-valued logics 524 exclusivism doctrinal 762 existence 264–5 see also being; Dasein ; essence-existence relationship; ontological commitment being in common (Nancy, J.-L.) 610; ontology 645 existential phenomenology French philosophy of science 297–8 existentialism 265 Berdiaev, N.A. 85;
Dostoevskii, F.M. 215; ethics 265; Herzen, A.I. 350; Latin America 266–7; Marcel, G. 524; religion (Shestov, L.) 826; Sartre, J.-P. 793; self-realization (Jaspers, K.) 417 existentialist theology 266 phenomenology of religion 672; Tillich, P. 892 experience a posteriori knowledge 1; adverbial theory of mental states 565; bodily sensations 91; empiricism 239; ideas (Locke, J.) 493; numinous (Otto, R.) 650–1; of the Other (Buber, M.) 105 experiments 267 see also verification Boyle, R. 98–9; Bridgman, P.W. 102; crucial 183; in social science 267–8; theory relationship 267; thought experiments 890 expertise moral 593–4 explanation in history and social science 268; scientific 268; social science 268; structural 268–9; teleological 879 explicit definition 197 extension intensional logic 398 extensional entities 398
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Page 972 extensionality set theory 822 external world denial (Collier, A.) 148; sensation (Descartes, R.) 204 externalism epistemic 399 extrasensory perception (ESP) paranormal phenomena 657; parapsychology 657
fa (norm or standard) 270 fa zhi (law) 465–6 Fackenheim, Emil Ludwig 270 Holocaust 361; Jewish philosophy 422 fact/value distinction 270–1 factionalism republicanism 767 Factor, Regis A. Weber, M. 926 facts 270 see also negative facts fairness justice as 429 faith 271 see also religious belief existentialist theology 266; justification by (Luther, M.) 513–14; nature of 271; rationality of 271 Fakhry, Majid impact of Greek philosophy on 324 Fall, The Islamic philosophy (Iqbal, M.) 404; original sin 831 fallacies 271 naturalistic (Moore, G.E.) 592 fallibilism 271 ethics 271; holistic criteria (Quine, W.V.) 732–3 falsificationism scientific hypotheses 693–4 family ethics 272 Fann, K.T. Johnson, A.B. 426 Fanon, Frantz 272 African philosophy 15 al-Farabi, Abu Nasr 272–3 emanation 127; epistemology 250; Platonism 273; prophecy 718 Fardella, Michelangelo 273 Farrer, Austin Marsden 273 Farrimond, Claire Russian medieval philosophy 560 Farthing, John L.
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Biel, G. 89 fascism 273–4 Gentile, G. 309; totalitarianism 896 fatalism 274 Indian 274 fate Stoicism 863 Fazang 274 Fechner, C. Witherspoon, J. 932 federalism 275 Fëdorov, Nikolai Fëdorovich 275 Feenstra, Ronald J. Calvin, J. 119–20; reprobation 766 Feferman, Solomon ordinal logics 647 Feinberg, Joel coercion 145; freedom and liberty 295 Feldman, F. death 195 Feldman, Richard charity, principle of 132; epistemology and ethics 249 Feldman, Seymour Crescas, H. 180; Gersonides 313 feminist jurisprudence 278–9 parity model 278–9; subversionist critique of 279; transformative model 278–9 feminist philosophy 275 see also gender aesthetics 8; écriture feminine (feminine writing) (Cixous, H.) 143; ethics 278; gender politics (Cavendish, M.L.) 129; Latin America 281; literary criticism 279–80; political philosophy 280; psychoanalysis 276; radical 280; science 307; and social science 276; Wollstonecraft, M. 935 feminist theology 280–1 Fénelon, François de Salignac de la Mothe 281–2 Fenton, Paul B. Ibn Ezra, M. 374; Maimonides, A. 519 Fenves, Peter alterity and identity, postmodern theories of 25; Nancy, J.-L. 610 Ferguson, Adam 282 Feuerbach, Ludwig Andreas 282 see also Young Hegelians Feyerabend, Paul Karl 283 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 283 Absolute 3;
Wissenschaftslehre (theory of science) 283 Ficino, Marsilio 284 critique by Pico della Mirandola, G. 676 fiction semantics of 284; Socratic dialogues 848 fictional entities aesthetics 9 fictionalism 285 entities 747 field theory quantum 286 filiality Confucius 136 Filmer, Sir Robert 286–7
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Page 973 Fine, Arthur Bell’s theorem 83; Einstein, A. 234–5; fictionalism 285; scientific realism and antirealism 808 finitude 922 see also mortality Heidegger, M. 340 Finland Wright, G.H. von 922 fire Heraclitus 346 first philosophy Hobbes, T. 357–8 first possession theory property 717 first principles common-sense philosophy (Reid, T.) 750 first-order logic Beth’s theorem and Craig’s interpolation theorem 87–8; decidability of 140; early twentieth century 499; infinitary logic 394 Flanagan, Owen moral development 593; Skinner, B.F. 832 Flanders Henry of Ghent 345 Flint, Thomas P. omniscience 644 Florence Alighieri, Dante 24; Ficino, M. 284; Machiavelli, N. 516; Petrarca, F. 669 Florenskii, Pavel Aleksandrovich 287 Floridi, Luciano Fardella, M. 273; Huet, P.-D. 363 Flower Garland Buddhism Ûisang 905 Fludd, Robert 287 flux 180 Fodor, Jerry Alan 287 modularity of mind 579 Foley, Richard epistemic justification 430 folk philosophy Africa 14 folk psychology 287 child’s theory of mind 575 Føllesdal, Dagfinn Husserl, E. 369; Scandinavia, philosophy in 795 Fonseca, Pedro da 288 Fontenelle, Bernard de 288 Forbes, Graeme
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logic, philosophy 503; proper names 717 forcing method of 288 Ford, John D. Grotius, H. 327; Pufendorf, S. 725; sovereignty 853 forgiveness 288–9 self-respect 289 form logical 289; medieval metaphysical doctrine 557 Form of the Good 322 formal languages 289 dynamic logics 224 formal logic 289 see also mathematical logic application to ordinary speech (Strawson, P.F.) 865; languages 289; Leibniz, G.W. 481; speech relationship (Strawson, P.F.) 865 formalism Hilbert, D. 352; nominalism conflict (Gerson, J.) 312 Forms, Platonic 678 universals 908 Forrest, Peter mereology 565; quantum logic 731 Fort, Andrew O. Śankara 792 Foucault, Michel 290 archaeological method of knowledge 290; genealogy 290 Foucher, Simon 290 foundation, axiom of 822 foundationalism 247 commonsensism 153; definition 430; knowledge by acquaintance/description 440; sense-data 821 Fourier, Charles 910 Four-Seven Debate 165 France Abelard, P. 2; Ailly, P. d’ 19; Alemanno, Y. 22; Alembert, J. le R. d’ 22–3; Althusser, L.P. 25; Anselm of Canterbury 38–9; anti-postmodernism 700; Arnauld, A. 52; Aureol, P. 66; Barthes, R. 76; Bataille, G. 77; Baudrillard, J. 77; Bayle, P. 78; Beauvoir, S. de 80; Bergson, H.L. 85;
Bernard of Clairvaux 87; Bernard of Tours 87; Bernier, F. 87; Blanchot, M. 90–1; Bodin, J. 92; Bourdieu, P. 98; Brito, R. 102; Brunschvicg, L. 104; Buffier, C. 112; Buffon, G.L.L. 112; Buridan, J. 113–14; Cabanis, P.-J. 118; Calvin, J. 119–20; Camus, A. 121; Capreolus, J. 122; Certeau, M. de 130; Charron, P. 132; Cixous, H. 143; Clarembald of Arras 143; Comte, A. 158; Condillac, É.B. de 160; Condorcet, M.J.A.N. 161; Cordemoy, G. de 177; Cousin, V. 179; David of Dinant 192; Deleuze, G. 198–9; Derrida, J. 203; Descartes, R. 203–5; Desgabets, R. 205; Diderot, D. 209; Du Châtelet-Lomont, É. 217; Ducasse, C.J. 218; Duhem, P.M.M. 218; Durandus of St Pourçain 221–2; Durkheim, É. 222; Eriugena, J.S. 252–3; Fénelon, F. 281–2; Fontenelle, B. de 288; Foucault, M. 290; Foucher, S. 290; Francis of Meyronnes 291;
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< previous page Page 974 Garrigou-Lagrange, R. 305; Gassendi, P. 305; Gerson, J. 312; Gersonides 313; Gilbert of Poitiers 314–15; Helvétius, C.-A. 344; Hervaeus Natalis 350; Huet, P.-D. 363; Hugh of St Victor 363–4; John of Jandun 424; John of La Rochelle 424–5; John of Mirecourt 425; John of Paris 425; La Forge, L. de 448; La Mettrie, J.O. de 448; Lacan, J. 448–9; Le Doeuff, M. 473; Le Grand, A. 473; Le Roy, É.L.E.J. 474; Lefebvre, H. 475; libertins 488; Loisy, A. 508–9; Lyotard, J.-F. 514; Maine de Biran, P.-F. 521; Malebranche, N. 521; Marcel, G. 524; Maritain, J. 526; Merleau-Ponty, M. 565–6; Mersenne, M. 566; Meyerson, É. 571; Montaigne, M.E. de 590–1; Montesquieu, C.L. 591; moralistes 598–9; Nancy, J.-L. 610; Nicholas of Autrecourt 628; Olivi, P.J. 643; Oresme, N. 648–9; Pascal, B. 659–60; Peter of Auvergne 668; Philip the Chancellor 672; Pizan, C. de 139–40; Poincaré, J.H. 685; Port-Royal 695; Pothier, R.J. 702; Rabelais, F. 734; Ramus, P. 738; Régis, P.-S. 749; Richard of St Victor 771; Ricoeur, P. 772; Rohault, J. 774; Roscelin of Compiègne 776; Rousseau, J.-J. 777; Sanches, F. 791; Sartre, J.-P. 793–4; Savigny, F.K. von 794; science, philosophy of 297; Siger of Brabant 828;
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Suchon, G. 869; Teilhard de Chardin, P. 878–9; Thierry of Chartres 887; Tocqueville, A. de 894; Ulrich of Strasbourg 905–6; Villey, M. 916; Vital du Four 918–19; Voltaire 920; Weil, S. 926; William of Auvergne 929–30; William of Auxerre 930; William of Champeaux 930; William of Conches 930 Francis of Meyronnes 291 Franciscan religious order Alexander of Hales 23; Aureol, P. 66; Bacon, R. 74; Bonaventure 95; Brinkley, R. 102; Chatton, W. 133; Duns Scotus, J. 219; Francis of Meyronnes 291; Gerard of Odo 311; Grosseteste, R. 326; Henry of Ghent 345; John of La Rochelle 424; Marston, R. 528; Matthew of Aquasparta 545; medieval natural philosophy 614; Olivi, P.J. 643; Pecham, J. 663; Richard of Middleton 771; Richard Rufus of Cornwall 771; Thomas of York 888; Vital du Four 918; William of Ockham 930; Wodeham, A. 934 Franco, Eli Gautama, A. 306; materialism, Indian school of 536; Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika 638 Frändberg, Åoke legal concepts 475 Frank, Daniel H. Albo, J. 21; Ibn Gabirol, S. 374; political philosophy in classical Islam 692 Frank, Jerome 291 Frank, Semën Liudvigovich 291 Frankfurt School 292 capitalism critique (Marcuse, H.) 525 Franklin, Benjamin 293 Franklin, Julian H. Bodin, J. 92 Franks, Paul German idealism 312; Maimon, S. 518 Frazier, Robert L. duty 222;
intuitionism in ethics 403 Freddoso, Alfred J. Molina, L. de 587–8; Molinism 588 Frederici Vescovini, Graziella Blasius of Parma 91 free logics 293 free rider problem rational choice theory 740 free will 293 see also autonomy; determinism; freedom ‘Abduh, M. 1; compatibilism 294; divine foreknowledge conflict 758; Epicureanism 244; fatalism 274; incompatibilism 294; moral psychology 596; Pelagianism 664; pessimism 294; Renaissance philosophy 765 Freeden, Michael ideology 381–2 freedom 295 see also autonomy; divine freedom; free will; liberty astrological causality (Blasius of Parma) 91; autonomy 295; conditioning dichotomy (Sartre, J.-P.) 794; nature relationship (Kant, I.) 432; optionality 295; paternalism 660; revolution 770; of speech 296; will (Duns Scotus, J.) 221 Freeman, Samuel contractarianism 175–6; Rawls, J. 743–4 freemasonry Illuminati 383 Frege, Gottlob 296 abstract objects 4; predicate calculus 708; proper names 717; reference 748; singular terms 261 Frei, Hans 297 French Antilles Fanon, Frantz 272 French Revolution responses to 691; Tocqueville, A. de 894 Freud, Anna 724 Freud, Sigmund 298 feminist response to 276; political philosophy 691–2; religion and epistemology 755; unconscious mental states 906 Frey, R.G. bioethics 89; Butler, J. 116 Friedman, Michael
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Page 975 Friedrichsdorf, U. dynamic logics 224 friendship 299 Fuhrmann, André non-monotonic logic 636 Fujiwara Seika 299 Fuller, Lon Louvois 299–300 Fumagalli Beonio-Brocchieri, Mariateresa Durandus of St Pourçain 221–2 Fumerton, Richard knowledge by acquaintance and description 439; phenomenalism 669 functional explanation 300 teleology 879 functionalism 300–1 computational theories of mind 576; identity theory of mind 576; mental causation 580; qualia 300; social science 268; teleological 301 functions mathematical analysis 28 fundamentalism Islamic 406 furu‘ al-fiqh (branches of jurisprudence) 467 future knowledge of 392–3 future generations obligations to 301 fuzzy logic 302 see also vagueness Gadādhara 303 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 303 Gaiger, Jason Lebensphilosophie 474 Gaius 303–4 Gál, Gedeon Alexander of Hales 23–4 Galen 304 ancient philosophy 36 Galicia Krochmal, N. 445 Galilei, Galileo 304 Gallie, Roger Reid, T. 750 Gallois, André de re/de dicto 194; sense-data 821 game theory 195 see also decision theory; games; rational choice theory practical reasoning 742 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand 304 Ganeri, Jonardon Gadādhara 303 Gangeśa 305
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Indian and Tibetan philosophy 389 Garber, Daniel Clauberg, J. 144; Descartes, R. 203–5; Leibniz, G.W. 480–1; Regius, H. 345 Garrett, Brian personal identity 667; persons 668 Garrigou-Lagrange, Réginald 305 Garson, James W. intensional logics 398 Garver, Eugene rhetoric 770–1 Gaskill, Thomas E. al-‘Amiri 27 Gassendi, Pierre 305 atomism 305–6; Christianized Epicureanism 305–6; civil society 306 Gauḍīya Vaiaiṣṇavism 306 Gaukroger, Stephen Clarke, S. 143; Fludd, R. 287 Gautama, Akṣapāda 306 gay-lesbian studies 279–80 feminist literary criticism 279–80 Geach, Peter T. historical chain theory of reference 717 gender ethics 278; and science 307; social construction of (Wollstonecraft, M.) 935–6 genealogy 307 Foucault, M. 290 Genequand, Charles al-Tawhidi 876 general economy 77 general will 308 see also social choice generalization laws of nature 737 genetics genetic drift 263; Mendelian 308–9; molecular 309; nature-nurture debate 309 Gentile, Giovanni 309–10 totalitarianism 896 Gentzen, Gerhard Karl Erich 310 Geoghegan, Vincent Bloch, E.S. 91 geology 310 geometry 310–11 arithmetic distinction 536; Hobbes, T. 357; Oresme, N. 648–9; Pascal, B. 659 George of Trebizond 311 George, Alexander
Frege, G. 296 Gerard of Cremona 311 Gerard of Odo 311–12 Gerbert of Aurillac 312 Gerdil, Giancinto Sigismondo 312 German idealism Hegel, G.W.F. (Rosenzweig, F.) 776; influence on Russian philosophy 783 German Romanticism 775 Germany Adorno, T.W. 5; Agrippa von Nettesheim, H.C. 18–19; Albert the Great 20; Albert of Saxony 20; Arendt, H. 46; Barth, K. 76;
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< previous page Page 976 Baumgardt, D. 78; Bernstein, E. 87; Biel, G. 89; Bloch, E.S. 91; Bonhoeffer, D. 96; Büchner, L. 105; Bultmann, R. 113; Cantor, G. 121; Carnap, R. 123–4; Cassirer, E. 124–5; Clauberg, J. 144; Cohen, H. 146; Crusius, C.A. 184; Dedekind, J.W.R. 196; Dietrich of Freiberg 210; Dilthey, W. 211; Eberhard, J.A. 229; Einstein, A. 234; Elisabeth of Bohemia 236; Fackenheim, E.L. 270; Feuerbach, L.A. 282; Fichte, J.G. 283; Frankfurt School 182; Frege, G. 296; Gadamer, H.-G. 303; Gentzen, G.K.E. 310; Gödel, K. 318–19; Habermas, J. 328; Hamann, J.G. 330–1; Hartmann, N. 334; Heidegger, M. 340; Heisenberg, W. 342; Helmholtz, H. von 343; Hempel, C.G. 344; Herder, J.G. 348; Hertz, H.R. 350; Hildegard of Bingen 353; Hölderlin, J.C.F. 358; Horkheimer, M. 362–3; Jacobi, F.H. 413; Jaspers, K. 417; Jhering, R. von 423; Jungius, J. 428; Kant, I. 432; Kautsky, K.J. 435; Kepler, J. 436; Knutzen, M. 442–3; Kronecker, L. 445; Lambert, J.H. 450; Lassalle, F. 459; Lebensphilosophie 474; Leibniz, G.W. 480–1; Lichtenberg, G.C. 488; Lorenzen, P. 509; Luther, M. 513–14; Luxemburg, R. 514; Maimon, S. 518;
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Marcuse, H. 525; Marsilius of Inghen 527; Mauthner, F. 545–6; Meinecke, F. 561; Meister Eckhart 561–2; Melanchthon, P. 562; Mendelssohn, M. 563; Nicholas of Cusa 628–9; Nietzsche, F.W. 630–1; Otto, R. 650–1; Planck, M.K.E.L. 677; Pufendorf, S. 725; Radbruch, G. 734–5; Rahner, K. 736; Reichenbach, H. 749; Reinach, A. 751; Romanticism 775; Rosenzweig, F. 776; Ruge, A. 779; Schmitt, C. 800; Steiner, R. 861; Strauss, L. 864; Suso, H. 873; Tauler, J. 876; Tetens, J.N. 882; Thielicke, H. 887; Thomas à Kempis 887; Thomasius, C. 888; Troeltsch, E.P.W. 899; Tschirnhaus, E.W. von 901; Ulrich of Strasbourg 905–6; Voegelin, E. 920; Weber, M. 926; Weyl, H. 927; Wolff, C. 934; Zermelo, E. 945–6 Gerson, Jean 312 Gersonides 313 Jewish philosophy 421 Gestalt psychology 313 Gettier problems 313 defeasibility theory of knowledge 441; epistemology 247–8 Geulincx, Arnold 314 Geuss, Raymond critical theory 182 Ghaffar Khan, Hafiz A. Shah Wali Allah 825 Ghana Akan philosophical psychology 19; Amo, Anton Wilhelm 27 al-Ghazali, Abu Hamid 314 necessity 127; prophecy 718–19; Sufism 314 Gibson, Roger F. radical translation and radical interpretation 735 Gilbert of Poitiers 314–15 Gilbert, Margaret social norms 837 Giles of Rome 315
essence-existence debate 315; natural philosophy 315 Gillon, Brendan S. negative facts in classical Indian philosophy 620 Gilson, Étienne Neo-Thomism 889; Thomism 889 Giovanni, George di Jacobi, F.H. 413 Given, Myth of the 815 Glanvill, Joseph 316 global politics development ethics 206 Glymour, Clark learning 474 gnosis Gnosticism 316 Gnosticism 316 see also mysticism Mir Damad, Muhammad Baqir 582; Voegelin, E. 920 goals teleological 879 God atonement 63; attributes of 758; beauty of 233; concepts of 317–18; creation 180; eternity 255; evil, problem of 262; grace 323; as a human projection 282; human relationship with 323; illumination 96; immutability 385; Incarnation 386–7; as infinite space (More, H.) 601; justification by faith (Luther, M.) 514; monotheistic view of 590; moral authority of 755; perfect goodness 322; possible worlds (Leibniz, G.W.) 480; reprobation 766; union with 558; voluntarism 921 Gödel, Kurt 318–19 see also Gödel’s axiom; Gödel’s theorems constructible universe 171 Gödel’s theorems 319 Hilbert, D. 352; incompleteness 319 Godfrey of Fontaines 319–20 Godfrey-Smith, Peter Fodor, J.A. 287 Godwin, William 320 Goldbach’s conjecture intuitionism 52
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Page 977 Goldie, Mark Harrington, J. 333 Goldsmith, M.M. Mandeville, B. 522 Gómez-Martínez, José Luis Latin America literature, philosophy in 491 Gongyangzhuan (Gongyang Annals) 136 good 321 see also consequentialism; eudaimonia ; evil; goodness; hedonism; intuitionism; perfectionism; summum bonum; utilitarianism; virtue ethics egoism 233; medieval conceptions of 558; theories of the 257 Gooding, David thought experiments 890 Goodman, Lenn E. Ibn Paquda 376–7; Jewish philosophy 417; Judah Halevi 330; Maimonides, M. 519; Saadiah Gaon 789 Goodman, Russell B. American philosophy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries 26 goodness perfect 322 Goodrich, Peter legal hermeneutics 476; Selden, J. 811 Gopnik, Alison infant cognition 145; Piaget, J. 675 Gordon, William M. Bartolus of Sassoferrato 76 Goré, J.-L. 282 Gorgias 322–3 Sophists 850 Gor’kii, Maksim (Gorky, Maxim) 631 Gosling, J.C.B. hedonism 336 Gottschalk, H.B. Heraclides of Pontus 346 Gouhier, Henri Fénelon, F. 282 Gouinlock, James Dewey, John 207 Gould, Timothy Thoreau, H.D. 889 government absolutism 4; authority (Locke, J.) 494; contractarianism 175; democratic 199; Filmer, R. 286–7; Kau9ilya 435; monarchy (Abravanel, I.) 3; rights (Bentham, J.) 84; Shōtoku Constitution 827 grace 323
justification doctrine 431; Pelagianism 664; personal relationship with God 323 Graeco-Roman culture influence on early Christianity 661–2 Graham, Angus C. categories 125 Graham, Daniel W. Vlastos, G. 920 grammarians Bhartṛhari 88 Gramsci, Antonio 323–4 Marxism 531 gratitude 747 Grattan-Guinness, I. analysis 28 gravity Kepler, J. 436–7 Great Britain Aberdeen Philosophical Society 2; Alexander of Hales 23–4; Alison, A. 25; Anscombe, G.E.M. 38; Anselm of Canterbury 38–9; Astell, M. 62; Austin, J. 66–7; Austin, J.L. 67; Ayer, A.J. 72; Bacon, F. 73; Bacon, R. 74; Beattie, J. 79; Bentham, J. 83–4; Bentley, R. 84; Berlin, I. 86; Blackstone, W. 90; Blair, H. 90; Bold, S. 95; Boyle, R. 98; Brinkley, R. 102; Broad, C.D. 102–3; Brown, T. 103; Bryce, J. 104; Burke, E. 114; Burley, W. 114; Burthogge, R. 115; Butler, J. 116; Cambridge Platonism 120; Campbell, G. 121; Campbell, N.R. 121; Carmichael, G. 123; Cavendish, M.L. 129; Charleton, W. 132; Chatton, W. 133; Chillingworth, W. 135; Clarke, S. 143; Cockburn, C. 144–5; Collier, A. 148; Collingwood, R.G. 148; Collins, A. 148; Conway, A. 176–7;
Crathorn, W. 179; Cudworth, R. 184; Culverwell, N. 186; Cumberland, R. 186; Darwin, C.R. 192; Dicey, A.V. 209; Digby, K. 210; Dodgson, C.L. 214; Dummett, M.A.E. 219; Duns Scotus, J. 219–21; Eliot, G. 236; Evans, G. 261; Farrer, A.M. 273; Ferguson, A. 282; Filmer, R. 286–7; Fludd, R. 287; Gerard, A. 311; Glanvill, J. 316; Godwin, W. 320; Grice, H.P. 325–6; Grosseteste, R. 326; Hare, R.M. 333; Hart, H.L.A. 333; Hartley, D. 333–4; Hayek, F.A. 335; Henry of Harclay 345–6; Herbert, E. 347; Heytesbury, W. 352; Hobbes, T. 357; Holcot, R. 358; Home, H. 361; Hume, D. 366; Hutcheson, F. 370; Huxley, T.H. 371; Inge, W.R. 396–7; Isaac of Stella 405; John of Salisbury 425; Johnson, A.B. 426; Johnson, S. 426; Kemp Smith, N. 436; Keynes, J.M. 437; Kilvington, R. 438; Kilwardby, R. 438; Latitudinarianism 463–4; Law, W. 472; Lewis, C.S. 484–5; Locke, J. 493–4; McTaggart, J.M.E. 517; Major, J. 521; Mandeville, B. 522; Marston, R. 528; Masham, D. 534; Maxwell, J.C. 546; Monboddo, Lord (James Burnett) 589; Moore, G.E. 592; More, H. 601; Neckham, A. 619–20; Newton, I. 627; Norris, J. 637; Oakeshott, M.J. 640;
< previous page Page 978 ordinary language philosophy 647–8; Ordinary Language School 647–8; Oswald, J. 650; Overton, R. 651; Owen, G.E.L. 651; Paine, T. 653; Paley, W. 653; Pecham, J. 663; Popper, K.R. 693; Price, R. 709; Prichard, H.A. 709; Priestley, J. 710; Pseudo-Grosseteste 723; Ramsey, F.P. 737; Ramsey, I.T. 737; Rashdall, H. 738–9; Reid, T. 750; Richard of Middleton 771; Richard Rufus of Cornwall 771; Ross, W.D. 777; Russell, B.A.W. 780–1; Ryle, G. 787–8; Selden, J. 811; Sergeant, J. 821; Shaftesbury, Third Earl of 824–5; Smith, A. 834; Stewart, D. 861–2; Strawson, P.F. 864–5; Temple, W. 880; Tennant, F.R. 880; Thomas of York 888; Tindal, M. 893–4; Tucker, A. 902; Turing, A.M. 902; Turnbull, G. 903; Wallace, A.R. 924; White, T. 928; Whitehead, A.N. 928; William of Ockham 930; William of Sherwood 932; Williams, B.A.O. 932; Witherspoon, J. 932; Wittgenstein, L. 933; Wodeham, A. 934; Wollaston, W. 935; Wollstonecraft, M. 935–6; Wyclif, J. 937 Greece Alcmaeon 22; Alexander of Aphrodisias 23; Ammonius 27; Anaxarchus 32; Anaximander 32; Anaximenes 32–3; Antiochus 40; Antiphon 40; Antisthenes 42;
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Aristippus the Elder 47; Ariston of Chios 47; Aristotle 50; Callicles 119; Carneades 121; Celsus of Alexandria 129; Cleomedes 144; Cratylus 180; Delmedigo, E. 199; Democritus 200; Diodorus Cronus 211–12; Diogenes of Apollonia 212; Epictetus 244; Epicurus 245; Eudoxus 260; Galen 304; Heraclitus 346; Hesiod 351; Hippias of Elis 354; Homer 361; Leucippus 483; Melissus 562; Panaetius 653–4; Parmenides of Elea 658; Philo the Dialectician 673; Philo of Larissa 673; Philodemus 673; Plato 677; Plutarch of Chaeronea 683; Prodicus 715; Protagoras 721; Pseudo-Dionysius 722; Pyrrho 727; Pythagoras 728; Socrates 847; Speusippus 856; Thales 883; Theophrastus 884; Thrasymachus 890; Thucydides 890–1; Timon of Philius 893; Xenocrates 938; Xenophanes 938; Xenophon 938–9; Zeno of Elea 944–5 Greek philosophy, ancient 33–6 see also Aristotelianism; Neoplatonism; Platonism Academy 4–5; Aenesidemus 6; Agrippa 18; Alcinous 21–2; Alcmaeon 22; Alexander of Aphrodisias 23; Ammonius 27; analytic interpretation of (Vlastos, G.) 920; Anaxagoras 31–2; Anaxarchus 32; Anaximander 32; Anaximenes 32–3; Antiochus 40;
Antiphon 40; Antisthenes 42; Apuleius 42–3; Arcesilaus 44; archē 45; Archytas 45–6; aretē 46; Aristippus the Elder 47; Ariston of Chios 47; Aristotle 50; Aristotle commentators 51–2; atomism 63; Calcidius 119; Callicles 119; Carneades 124; Celsus 129; Chaldaean Oracles 130–1; Chrysippus 140; Cleanthes 144; Cleomedes 144; Cratylus 180; Cynics 186–7; Cyrenaics 187; Damascius 189; Democritus 200; Dialectical school 208; Diodorus Cronus 211–12; Diogenes of Apollonia 212; Diogenes Laertius 212; Diogenes of Oenoanda 212; Diogenes of Sinope 212; dissoi logoi (twofold argument) 214; doxography 216–17; dualism 851–2; Egyptian influence upon 234; Empedocles 239; Epicharmus 244; Epictetus 244; Epicurus 245; eudaimonia 260; Eudoxus 260; Galen 304; Gorgias 322–3; Hellenistic philosophy 343; Heraclides of Pontus 346; Heraclitus 346; Hermetism 349; Hesiod 351; Hierocles 352; Hippias 354; Hippocratic medicine 354; Homer 361; Hypatia 371; Iamblichus 372; katharsis 435; language 451; Leucippus 483; logic 494–5; logos 508; Lucian 512;
medicine 552; Megarian school 561; Melissus 562; mimēsis 575; Neoplatonism 624; Neo-Pythagoreanism 626; nous 637; Numenius 638; optics 646; Orphism 649; Panaetius 653–4; Parmenides 658; perfect goodness concept 322; Peripatetics 666–7; Philo of Alexandria 672–3; Philo the Dialectician 673; Philo of Larissa 673; Philodemus 673; Philolaus 674; Philoponus 674; physis and nomos debate 675; Plato 677; Plutarch of Chaeronea 683; pneuma (spirit) 684; political 690; Posidonius 696; Presocratics 708; Proclus 714; Prodicus 715; Protagoras 721; psychē (soul) 723; Ptolemy 725; Pyrrho 727; Pyrrhonism 727; Pythagoras 728; Pythagoreanism 728; Sextus Empiricus 823; Simplicius 831; Socrates 847; Socratic dialogues 848; Socratic schools 848; Sophists 850; Speusippus 856; Stoicism 862; Strato 864; Strauss, L. 864; Thales 883; Theophrastus 884; Thrasymachus 890; Thucydides 890–1; Timon 893; Xenocrates 938; Xenophanes 938; Xenophon 938–9; Zeno of Citium 944; Zeno of Elea 944–5 Green, Leslie authority 68; power 703 Green, Mitchell S.
imperative logic 385
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Page 979 green political philosophy 324–5 see also ecology; environment; environmental ethics Greenawalt, Kent civil disobedience 142 Gregory of Rimini 325 Gregory, Peter N. Awakening of Faith in Mahāyāna 70; Zongmi 948 Grice, Herbert Paul 325–6 communication and intention 153; pragmatics 456 Grier, Philip T. Il’in, I.A. 382 Griffin, David Ray process philosophy 713 Griffin, James P. happiness 332 Griffin, Nicholas neutral monism 626–7; Russell, B.A.W. 780–1 Grosseteste, Robert 326 translation of John of Damascus 424 Grothendiek, A. 126 Grotius, Hugo 327 natural law 691 groups rational choice theory 740; social 375; solidarity 848 Guanzi (Book of the Master Guan) 327 Guelzo, Allen C. pietism 676–7 Guerlac, Rita Vives, J.L. 919–20 Guignon, Charles existentialism 265 guilt 747 original sin 831 Guliangzhuan (Guliang Annals) 136 Gullvåg, Ingemund Næss, A. 608 Gunton, Colin E. atonement 63 Gupta, Anil Tarski’s definition of truth 876 Gutheil, G. cognitive development 146 Gutting, Gary Foucault, M. 290; French philosophy of science 297; post-structuralism 701 Haakonssen, Knudd Cumberland, R. 186; Smith, A. 834; Thomasius, C. 888 Ha’am, Ahad 328
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Jewish philosophy 422 Haardt, Alexander Shpet, G.G. 827 Habermas, Jürgen 328 communicative action 328; communicative rationality 154; Frankfurt School 292 Häfner, Ralph Jungius, J. 428 Hägerström, Axel Anders Theodor 329 legal realism 477–8 Haight, Roger liberation theology 487 hairgrease, Gothic 92 Haksar, Vinit moral agents 592 halakhah 329 Jewish bioethics 89 Haldane, John Thomism 888 Hale, Robert J. abstract objects 4 Halevi, Judah 330 Jewish philosophy 420 Hall, David L. Chinese philosophy 136–8; dao 190; Daoist philosophy 190–2; de 193–4; qi 729; tian 891; xin (heart-and-mind) 939; xing 939; you-wu 943; zhi 946 Hallen, Barry African aesthetics 10 Halonen, Ilpo epistemic logic 246 Hamann, Johann Georg 330–1 Enlightenment, German 330–1; Sturm und Drang 331 Hamlin, Alan social choice 835 Hammond, Guyton B. Tillich, P. 892 Hampsher-Monk, Iain Burke, E. 114; political philosophy 690 Hampton, Jean practical reasoning 742 Han Feizi 331 language 496 Han Wônjin 331 Hand, Michael game-theoretic semantics 816–17 Hankins, James Ficino, M. 284; Pico della Mirandola, G. 676 Hankinson, R.J.
Aenesidemus 6; Agrippa 18; Galen 304; Hellenistic medical epistemology 342; Hippocratic medicine 354; Pyrrhonism 727; Sextus Empiricus 823 Hanna, Robert conceptual analysis 160 Hansen, Chad logic in China 495–6 Hanson, Norwood Russell 332 Hanson, Russell L. republicanism 767
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Page 980 happiness 332 see also eudaimonia ; pleasure as divine union (Bonaventure) 95; medieval ethics 558; motivation (Tucker, A.) 902 Hardin, R. rational choice theory 739–40 Harding, Sandra gender and science 307 Hare, E.M. 633 Hare, Richard Mervyn 333 prescriptivism 708 harm 467 Harper, W.L. Newton, I. 627 Harrah, David questions 732 Harré, Rom Bentley, R. 84 Harrington, James 333 Harris, Jay M. Jewish Enlightenment 242; Krochmal, N. 445 Harris, John life and death 488–9 Harris, Olivia Lévi-Strauss, C. 484 Harrison, Ross Bentham, J. 83–4; democracy 199–200; transcendental arguments 897; Williams, B.A.O. 932 Hart, Herbert Lionel Adolphus 333 legal positivism 477 Hart, W.D. Löwenheim-Skolem theorems and nonstandard models 511; meaning and verification 548 Hartley, David 333–4 Hartman, Charles Han Yu 332 Hartman, David Leibowitz, Y. 481; Soloveitchik, J.B. 849 Hartmann, Nicolai 334 Harzer Clear, Edeltraud cosmology and cosmogony, Indian theories of 178; Hindu philosophy 353; MaÅdhava 517 Hasidism 334 Hasker, William creation and conservation 180; occasionalism 642; providence 722 Hassan, Riffat Iqbal, M. 404–5 Hatfield, Gary scientific method 808
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Hause, Jeffrey Francis of Meyronnes 291; Origen 649 Hausheer, Roger Meinecke, F. 561 Hawthorne Effect 267 Hayek, Friedrich August von 335 Hayes, Richard P. Buddhist philosophy in India 109; Dignāga 210; Indian and Tibetan philosophy 387; potentiality 702; Vasubandhu 913 Hazen, Allen non-constructive rules of inference 635 Headley, John M. Campanella, T. 120–1 Heal, Jane Wittgenstein, L. 933 health nursing ethics 638; risk assessment 773 Heath, Peter Dodgson, C.L. 214 Heath, Stephen Tel Quel school 879 heaven 335 beatific vision 335; Indian concepts of 335 Heck, Richard G. Frege, G. 296 hedonism 336 see also evaluative hedonism; psychological hedonism; reflective hedonism Charleton, W. 132; utilitarianism 909 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich alienation 24; anti-Semitism 41; conservatism 170; Hegelianism 338–9; historicism 355; metaphysics 568 Hegelian idealism Croce, B. 183 Hegelian Marxism post-Stalin (Il’enkov, E.V.) 382 Hegelianism 338–9 see also Hegelian idealism; neo-Hegelianism; Young Hegelians Hegel, G.W.F. 338–9; history, end of (Kojève, A.) 443; Russian 339 Heidegger, Martin 340 Dasein 341; disclosure 341; hermeneutics 348 Heideggerian philosophy of science 341 Heidelberger, Michael Büchner, L. 105; Naturphilosophie 618 Heine, Steve Kumazawa Banzan 447 Heisenberg, Werner 342
Heisig, James W. Kyoto School 447; Miki Kiyoshi 572–3; Nichiren 628 hell 342 Hellenistic philosophy 343 see also Epicureanism; Stoicism characteristics of 34; Egyptian influence on 234; medical epistemology 342; Stoicism 862; Themistius 883 Helmholtz, Hermann von 343 epistemology 343 Helmont, Franciscus Mercurius van 343 help 344
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Page 981 Helvétius, Claude-Adrien 344 philosophes 344 Hempel, Carl Gustav 344 Henricus Regius 345 Henry of Ghent 345 Duns Scotus, J. 220; illuminationism 220 Henry of Harclay 345–6 Henschen-Dahlquist, Ann-Mari Hägerström, A.A.T. 329 Heraclides of Pontus 346 Heraclitus 33 cosmology 346; Cratylus 180; logos 508 Herbert, Edward (Baron Herbert of Cherbury) 347 Herbrand’s theorem 347–8 Herder, Johann Gottfried 348 culture 185; historicism 355; naturalism 348 heresy David of Dinant 192 hermeneutic circle 348 hermeneutics 348 see also interpretation; legal hermeneutics Islamic philosophy 431; sociological theories 846 Hermetism 349 Renaissance 764 Herre, Heinrich formal languages and systems 289 Herrera, Abraham Cohen de 349 Hertz, Heinrich Rudolf 350 Herzen, Aleksandr Ivanovich 350 Russian philosophy 785–6 Heschel, Abraham Joshua 351 Jewish philosophy 422 Hesiod 351 Hessen, Sergei Iosifovich 351 Neo-Kantianism 351; rule of law socialism 352 heterology alterity (Certeau, M. de) 130 Heyd, David population ethics 694 Heytesbury, William 352 hiddenness Heidegger, M. 341 Hierapolis Epictetus 244 Hierocles 352 hieroglyphics 463 hierophanies 235 Higginbotham, James adverbs 6 higher-order logics 810 Higton, Michel
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Luther, M. 513–14 Hilbert, David computability theory 157; Gödel’s theorems 319 Hilbert, David R. colour, theories of 150 Hilbert’s programme 352 proof theory 716 Hildegard of Bingen 353 natural philosophy 613 Hill, R. Kevin genealogy 307 Hill, Thomas E., Jr respect for persons 767–8 Himi Kiyoshi Nishi Amane 634; Tanabe Hajime 875 Hindu philosophy 353 see also Advaita Vedānta; Brahmanism; Cārv āka; Dharmaśāstras; Mīmāṃsā; Neo-Hinduism; Nyāya; Śaivism; Sānkhya; Vaiśeṣika; Veda; Vedānta; Yoga Arya Samaj movement 61; Brahmo Samaj movement 100; cosmology and cosmogony 178; critiques of (Ambedkar, B.R.) 26; duty 223; Indian and Tibetan 387–8; Madhva 517; Ramakrishna Movement 736; reincarnation 751; renunciation 223; Śankara 792 Hintikka, Jaakko confirmation theory 162; quantifiers 729–30 Hippias 354 Hippocratic medicine 354 historical chain theory 717 historical jurisprudence 428 historical materialism Chinese Marxism 530; Marxism 844 historicism 355 absolute (Croce, B.) 183; metaphysics (Collingwood, R.G.) 148 history Chinese philosophy of 355–6; explanation in 268; vital reason relationship (Ortega y Gasset, J.) 650 history, philosophy of 356 see also historicism al-Afghani 13; eschatology 254; holism 359; Ibn Khaldun 375; individualism 359; methodology 356; Russian Hegelianism 783–4; Russian-Western contrast (Chaadaev, P.I.) 130 Hobbes, Thomas 357 conservatism 170;
contractarianism 175; ethics 357–8; first philosophy 357–8; geometry 357; rational choice theory 739; religious authority 756 Hobbs, Angela Antiphon 40; Callicles 119; physis and nomos debate 675; Thrasymachus 890 Hodes, Harold recursion-theoretic hierarchies 747; Turing reducibility and Turing degrees 903 Hodges, Wilfrid model theory 585 Hoffman, Frank J. Gandhi, M.K. 304
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< previous page Page 982 Hoffman, Joshua omnipotence 643 Hogenson, George B. Jung, C.G. 427 Hohfeld, Wesley Newcomb 358 Holcot, Robert 358 Holdcroft, David Saussure, F. de 794; structuralism in linguistics 866 Hölderlin, Johann Christian Friedrich 358 holism in history and social science 359–60; individualism debate 359; mental and semantic 360 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr 360 Holmes, R.W. 310 Holocaust 360 atheism (Rubenstein, R.L.) 361; Jewish philosophy (Fackenheim, E.L.) 422; process theology (Cohen, A.A.) 361 Home, Henry (Lord Kames) 361 Homer 33 Honneth, Axel Frankfurt School 292; recognition 746 honour 361–2 Hooker, Brad moral expertise 593–4 Hooker, C.A. laws, natural 472 Hoose, Bernard charity 131–2; innocence 397 hope 362 theological virtue 883 Höpfl, H.M. Voegelin, E. 920 Hopkins, James Freud, Sigmund 298 Hopkins, Jasper Anselm of Canterbury 38–9; Nicholas of Cusa 628–9 Horak controversy 331 Horkheimer, Max 362–3 critical theory 182; Frankfurt School 292 Hornsby, Jennifer action 5 Hornstein, Norbert Chomsky, N. 138 Horton, John toleration 895 Horty, J.F. common-sense reasoning 153 Horwich, Paul conventionalism 176; time travel 893
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Howard, Don Duhem, P.M.M. 218; Einstein, A. 234–5; Le Roy, É.L.E.J. 474; Planck, M.K.E.L. 677 Howell, Robert fiction, semantics of 284 Howells, Christina Sartre, J.-P. 793–4 Hoyningen-Huene, Paul Kuhn, T.S. 446 Hrušovský, Igor 834 Huainanzi 363 Huayan (Flower Garland) Buddhism Fazang 274; Zongmi 948 Huby, Pamela M. Theophrastus 884 Huet, Pierre-Daniel 363 Hugh of St Victor 363–4 Hughes, Gerard J. prudence 722 Hughes, John A. experiments in social science 267–8 Hui Shi 495–6 Huineng Platform Sutra 677 Hull, David L. taxonomy 876 Hull, Monte mujō 603 Hulliung, M. Helvétius, C.-A. 344; Montesquieu, C.L. 591 human condition theology (Pascal, B.) 659 human nature 364 see also Dasein ; humanity; nature-nurture debate cultural identity 185; Cynics 186; evil 262; harmonious development (Comenius, J.A.) 151; ‘I-Thou’ mode (Buber, M.) 105; moralistes 598; psychological egoism 233; respect for persons (Kant, I.) 767; self-preservation (Spinoza, B. de) 857–8; self-realization 814; system of parts (Butler, J.) 116; unfinalizability (Bakhtin, M.M.) 75 human relationships East Asian Philosophy 227 humanism 365 see also anti-humanism Chinese Marxism 530; Masaryk, T.G. 534; pragmatic 365; Renaissance 365–6 humanity end of history (Kojève, A.) 443 Humberstone, Lloyd
many-valued logics 523 Hume, David 366 see also Hume’s law bundle theory of mind 575; causation 127; introspection 402; meaning and verification 548; morality 367; reason 366; science of man 364 Hume’s law logic of ethical discourse 500 Hundred Schools 137 Hungary 368–9 Lakatos, I. 449–50; Lukács, G. 512; Neumann, J. von 626; Polanyi, M. 686
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Page 983 Hunt, Geoffrey nursing ethics 638 Hurka, Thomas perfectionism 666 Hursthouse, Rosalind reproduction ethics 766–7 Hus, Jan 187 Husserl, Edmund 369 influence on Latin American phenomenology 671; influence on Shpet, G.G. 827; noema 369–70 Hutcheson, Francis 370 moral sense 370–1 Hutton, Sarah Cockburn, C. 144–5; Conway, A. 176–7; Cudworth, R. 184; Masham, D. 534; Norris, J. 637 Huxley, Thomas Henry 371 hwajaeng (harmonization) 936 Hyland, Drew A. sport 858–9; sport ethics 858 hyle 369–70 hylomorphism Jewish philosophy (Ibn Gabirol, S.) 374; rejection of (Campanella, T.) 120 Hypatia 371 hypostasis Enlightenment, German 330 Hyslop, A. other minds 650 Iamblichus 372 Ibn ‘Adi, Yahya 372 Ibn al-‘Arabi, Muhyi al-Din 372–3 Ibn ar-Rawandi 377 Ibn Bajja, Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Yahya ibn as-Say’igh 373 Ibn Daud, Abraham (Avendauth/Avendaugh) 373 Jewish philosophy 420 Ibn Ezra, Abraham 373 Jewish philosophy 419–20 Ibn Ezra, Moses ben Jacob 374 Ibn Falaquera, Shem Tov 374 Ibn Gabirol, Solomon 374 voluntarism 419 Ibn Hazm, Abu Muhammad ‘Ali 374–5 Ibn Kammuna 375 Ibn Massara, Muhammad ibn ‘Abd Allah 375–6 Ibn Miskawayh, Ahmad ibn Muhammad 376 Ibn Paquda, Bahya 376 Jewish philosophy 420 Ibn Rushd, Abu’l Walid Muhammad 377 see also Averroism Delmedigo, E. 199; epistemology 250; Latin scholasticism 70;
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Siger of Brabant 828 Ibn Sab‘in, Muhammad Ibn‘Abd al-Haqq 377–8 Ibn Sina, Abu‘Ali al-Husayn 378 common nature 220; epistemology 250; Ibn Kammuna 420; medieval philosophy 555; necessary being 619 Ibn Tufayl, Abu Bakr Muhammad 379 Ibn Tzaddik, Joseph ben Jacob 379 ideal language philosophy 704 ideal realism Lossky, N.O. 510 idealism 379 see also actualism; German idealism; Hegelian idealism; immaterialism; legal idealism; personalism Berkeley, G. 85–6; Burthogge, R. 115; McTaggart, J.M.E. 517; materialism contrast 682 idealizations 380 ideals 380 substantive/deliberative distinction 380 ideas archetypes 426; experience (Locke, J.) 493; Hume, D. 367 identity cultural 185; logical 381 identity theory of mind 576–7 identity thesis belief and knowledge 82 identity thinking negative dialectics (Adorno, T.W.) 5 ideology 381–2 totalitarianism 46 ìgbàgbó Yoruba epistemology 942 Iida, Shotaro Wônch’ūk 936 Ikhwan Al-Safa’ (Brethren of Purity) 382 Il’enkov, Eval’d Vasil’evich 382 Il’in, Ivan Aleksandrovich 382 illegality revolution 770 illness mental 564–5 Illuminati 383 illumination 383 epistemological 383; Neoplatonism 383 illuminationism 383 Bonaventure 96; Duns Scotus, J. 220 Illuminationist philosophy, Islamic 383–4 illusion Indian concepts of 253; sensory 665–6 ‘ilm al-kalam 411 imagery mental 384
imagination 384 Immanuel ben Solomon of Rome 384–5 immaterialism Berkeley, G. 85–6; Collier, A. 148 immortality desire for (Unamuno y Jugo, M. De) 906; infinity 394; Renaissance Aristotelianism (Pomponazzi, P.) 693 immutability 385 see also change impartiality 385
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< previous page Page 984 imperative logic 385 satisfaction-preservation 386; truth-preservation 385–6 implicature 386 imposition medieval theories of 455 impossibility theorems Arrow, K.J. 740 In nae ch’ôn (Man is God) 896 in vitro fertilization (IVF) 766–7 Inati, Shams C. Ibn ‘Adi 372; Ibn Bajja 373; Ibn arRawandi 377; Ibn Tufayl 379 Inca (Quechua) civilization thought 463 Incarnation 386–7 see also Christology necessity for (Anselm of Canterbury) 39; orthodox doctrine 386 inclusivism doctrinal 762 incommensurability 387 incompatibilism belief and knowledge 82; freedom 294 incompleteness theorems Gödel, K. 319 indestructibility of real universals 937 indeterminacy Critical Legal Studies 181–2 indeterminism 206 see also determinism indexicals 201 see also demonstratives India Abhinavagupta 2; Ambedkar, B.R. 26; Arya Samaj movement 61; Aurobindo Ghose 66; Bhartṛhari 88; Brahmo Samaj movement 100–1; Buddha 105; Dharmakīrti 207; Dignāga 210; Gadādhara 303; Gandhi, M.K. 304; Gangeśa 305; Hindu philosophy 353; Iqbal, M. 404–5; Kauṭilya 435; Mādhava 517; Madhva 517; Mādhyamika Buddhism 106;
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Mahāvīra 518; Nāgārjuna 608; Patañjali 660; Radhakrishnan, S. 735; Ramakrishna Movement 736; Rāmānuja 737; Śankara 792; Shah Wali Allah 825; Tagore, R. 875; Udayana 905; Uddyotakara 905; Vallabhācārya 912; Vasubandhu 913; Vātsyāyana 913 Indian philosophy 387 see also Tibetan philosophy Ābhidharmika Schools of Buddhism 106; awareness 70; Brahman 100; causation 128; cosmology and cosmogony 178; definition 197; duty and virtue 223; emptiness, Buddhist concept of 108; epistemology 250; error and illusion 253; fatalism 274; Gauḍīya Vaiaiiavism 306; inference 393; interpretation 401; Jainism 413; karma and rebirth 434; knowledge 441; language 453; Mādhyamika School of Buddhism 106; manifoldness, Jaina theory of 523; materialism 536; matter 544; meaning 549; Mīmāṃsā 574; mind 577; momentariness 588; monism 589; nirvāna 633; Nyāya-VaiŚeṣika 638; ontology 645; political 692; potentiality 702; Sānnkhya 792; testimony 882; Vedānta 913; Yogācāra School of Buddhism 107 indicative conditionals 391 indigenous peoples Latin America 463 indignation moral blame 600 indirect discourse 391 individualism in history and social science 359–60;
holism debate 359; methodological 580; methodological (MI) 570–1; Russian communalism (Mikhailovskii, N.K.) 572 individuals particulars 658 individuation continuous consciousness (Locke, J.) 493–4; Duns Scotus, J. 220 induction 391 see also inductive inference eliminative (Bacon, F.) 73; mathematical 52; problem of (Hume, D.) 367 inductive definitions and proofs 392 inductive inference 392–3 see also inference natural theology 615; structures of 392 industry capitalism 844 infallibility introspection 402 infant cognition 145 see also child development; developmental psychology inference causal (Hume, D.) 367; deductive closure principle 196; Indian theories of 393; instantial terms 729; Jainism 413; legal evidence 476; multiple-conclusion logic 604; naturalized philosophy of science 617; non-constructive rules of 635; non-monotonic 636; to the best explanation 394 infinitary logic 394 infinite being Duns Scotus, J. 220 infinite numbers 638 infinitesimals 638 nonstandard analysis 27 infinity 394–5 see also finitude and continuity (Henry of Harclay) 345–6 informal logic 289
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Page 985 information computability 156; mutual 396 information technology ethics 395 information theory 395 and epistemology 396 Ingarden, Roman Witold 396 Inge, William Ralph 396–7 innateness of knowledge 397; of language 313 innocence 397 inquiry habits of (Dewey, J.) 207 institutionalism legal 397; Weinberger, O. 926–7 instrumentalism 808 see also antirealism; scientific antirealism fictionalism 285; pragmatic theory of truth 900 intellect intuitive/abstractive cognition (Duns Scotus, J.) 220–1 intellectuals responsibilities of 768 intelligence artificial 58 intension 398 see also extensionality; intersubstitutability; sense and reference intensional logics 398 intensional entities 397–8 intensional logics 398 see also conditionals; modal logic; temporal logic intention 399 action 5; communication 153; hope 362; individualism/holism debate 359 intentionality 399 cognition (Hervaeus Natalis) 350; of consciousness 671; noema (Husserl, E.) 369–70 interests 620 see also needs; public interest; welfare rational choice theory 739 internalism epistemic 399 international law Grotius, H. 327; Pufendorf, S. 725–6 international relations 400–1 see also federalism; international law; justice, international interpretation charity principle 132; cultural relativism 741; Indian theories of 401;
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legal hermeneutics 476; legal reasoning 478; radical 735 intersubstitutability 391 indirect discourse 391 introspection consciousness 167; epistemology of 401–2; Maine de Biran, P.-F. 520; phenomenal consciousness 168 intuition Bergson, H.-L. 85; justification relationship 403 intuitionism antirealism 403–4; ethical 403; logic 403–4; mathematics 402; meaning (Dummett, M.A.E.) 548 intuitivism cognition (Lossky, N.O.) 510 invention subversion (Certeau, M. de) 130 inverted spectrum argument 149 Inwood, Brad Epictetus 244; Hierocles 352; Marcus Aurelius 524–5; Musonius Rufus 605; Seneca, L.A. 819 Inwood, Michael Hartmann, N. 334; hermeneutics 348 Iqbal, Muhammad 404–5 Self 404 Iran al-‘Amiri 27; al-Dawani 193; Ibn Miskawayh 376; al-Juwayni 431; Mir Damad, Muhammad Baqir 582; Mulla Sadra 603; al-Razi, Abu Bakr 744; al-Razi, Fakhr al-Din 744; al-Sabzawari 790; al-Sijistani 829–30; al-Suhrawardi 870–1; al-Tawhidi 876; al-Tusi 903 Iraq al-Baghdadi 74; al-Ghazali 314; Ibn ‘Adi 372; Ibn Kammuna 375; Ibn ar-Rawandi 377; al-Kindi 438–9; al-Sijistani 829–30 Ireland Berkeley, G. 85; Boyle, R. 98;
Browne, P. 103; Burke, E. 114; Eriugena, J.S. 252–3; Hutcheson, F. 370; Richard of St Victor 771; Toland, J. 894–5 Irigaray, Luce 405 psychoanalytic feminism 276 irrationals thermodynamics (Meyerson, É.) 571 Irwin, Terence H. Aristotle 50 Isaac of Stella 405 Isfahan, School of 582 Islam Christianity comparison (Ibn Kammuna) 375; creation 127; fundamentalism 406; Judaism comparison (Ibn Kammuna) 375; mysticism 605–6; philosophy relationship 411; political philosophy in 692; resurrection 769; science 802; sin 831; theology 411 Islamic philosophy 406–1 ‘Abduh, M. 1; aesthetics 11; al-Afghani 13; al-‘Amiri 27; Ash‘ariyya 61–2; causality 127; al-Dawani 193; early history 406–7;
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< previous page Page 986 epistemology 250; ethics 259; al-Farabi 272–3; al-Ghazali 314; Ibn al-‘Arabi 372–3; Ibn Hazm 374–5; Ibn Khaldun 375; Ibn Massara 375–6; Ibn Miskawayh 376; Ibn ar-Rawandi 377; Ibn Rushd 377; Ibn Sab‘in 377–8; Ibn Sina 378; Ibn Taymiyya 378–9; Ibn Tufayl 379; Ikhwan al-Safa’ 382; Illuminationist philosophy 383–4; Iqbal, M. 404–5; al-Juwayni 431; al-Kindi 438–9; law 466; logic 409; meaning 408–9; Mir Damad, Muhammad Baqir 582; Mulla Sadra 603; Mu‘tazila 61–2; mystical philosophy 408; necessity 127; Neoplatonism 272–3; Orientalism 649; Platonism 406–7; poetics 11; political philosophy 408; al-Razi, Fakhr al-Din 744; al-Sabzawari 790; Shah Wali Allah 825; al-Sijistani 829–30; soul 851; al-Suhrawardi 870–1; al-Tawhidi 876; transmission into Western Europe 410–11; al-Tusi 903 Isma‘ilism Neoplatonism 625 is-ought distinction logic of ethical discourse 500 Israel Leibowitz, Yeshayahu 481; state/religion relationship (Leibowitz, Y.) 481; Zionism 948 Israeli, Isaac Ben Solomon 411 Issawi, Charles Ibn Khaldun 375 Italy 412 Alemanno, Y. 22; Alighieri, Dante 24; Aquinas, T. 43;
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Archytas 45–6; Bartolus of Sassoferrato 76; Blasius of Parma 91; Bobbio, N. 91; Boethius, A.M.S. 92; Bonaventure 95–6; Bruno, G. 104; Cajetan 118–19; Campanella, T. 120–1; Cardano, G. 122; Cicero, M.T. 141; Counter-Reformation 412; Croce, B. 183; Damian, P. 189; Delmedigo, E. 199; Empedocles 239; Fardella, M. 273; Ficino, M. 284; Galilei, G. 304; Gentile, G. 309–10; George of Trebizond 311; Gerard of Cremona 311; Gerdil, G.S. 312; Giles of Rome 315; Gorgias 322–3; Gramsci, A. 323–4; Gregory of Rimini 325; Herrera, A. Cohen de 349; Hillel ben Samuel of Verona 353; Immanuel ben Solomon of Rome 384–5; James of Viterbo 414; Joachim of Fiore 424; Judah ben Moses of Rome 427; Machiavelli, N. 516; Marcus Aurelius 524–5; Marius Victorinus 526; Marsilius of Padua 527; Matthew of Aquasparta 545; Messer Leon 566; Musonius Rufus 605; Nifo, A. 632; Parmenides 658; Patrizi, F. 662; Paul of Venice 662–3; Peter Lombard 509; Petrarca, F. 669; Philolaus 674; Pico della Mirandola, G. 676; Pomponazzi, P. 693; Silvestri, F. 830; Telesio, B. 879–80; Tertullian, Quintus Septimus Florens 881; Valla, L. 911; Vernia, N. 914; Vico, G. 914; Zabarella, J. 944 iterative conception set theory 823 I-Thou relationship Buber, M. 105
Itō Jinsai 412 Ivanhoe, Philip J. cheng 134; Chinese philosophy of history 355–6; li 485; Mohist philosophy 586–7; neo-Confucianism 621–2; ti/yong 891; xin 939 Jackson, Frank Armstrong, D.M. 52; belief 82; identity theory of mind 576–7; indicative conditionals 391; mind, philosophy of 577–8; Passmore, J.A. 660; Smart, J.J.C. 834 Jacob, Margaret C. Illuminati 383 Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich 413 Jacobi, Klaus Gilbert of Poitiers 314–15 Jaina philosophy 413 cosmology 178; Indian and Tibetan 387–8; Mahāvīra 518; manifoldness 523; reincarnation 751; renunciation 223; salvation 791 James of Viterbo 414 James, Susan feminism 275 James, William instrumentalism 900 Jamieson, D. animal language and thought 37 Japan 415 aesthetics 12–13; Buddhist philosophy 110; bushi philosophy 115; Confucian philosophy 163–4; Dōgen 214; Fujiwara Seika 299; Itō Jinsai 412; Kaibara Ekken 432; kokoro 443; Kūkai 446; Kuki Shūzō 446; Kumazawa Banzan 447; Kyoto School 447; logic 497; Miki Kiyoshi 572–3; modern literature 492; Motoori Norinaga 603; Nichiren 628; Nishi Amane 634; Nishida Kitarō 634;
Nishitani Keiji 634; Ogyū Sorai 642; Shinran 826; Shintō 826; Shōtoku Constitution 827; Tanabe Hajime 875; Tominaga Nakamoto 896; Watsuji Tetsurō 925; Zeami 944 Jarka-Sellers, Hannes Liber de causis 485–6; Pseudo-Dionysius 722 Jarvie, I.C. Popper, K.R. 693 Jaspers, Karl 417 Jefferson, Thomas 417
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Page 987 Jeffrey, Richard Hempel, C.G. 344 Jesuits (Society of Jesus) Collegium Conimbricense 147; Fonseca, P. da 288; Teilhard de Chardin, P. 878 Jesus Christ atonement 63; justification by faith (Luther, M.) 514; salvation 760; unification of humanity (Teilhard de Chardin, P.) 878 Jewish bioethics 89–90 Jewish philosophy 417 see also Judaism Abravanel, I. 3; Abravanel, J. 3; Albo, J. 21; Alemanno, Y. 22; Arama, I. 44; Averroism 70; al-Baghdadi 74; Bar Hayya, A. 75; Baumgardt, D. 78; Buber, M. 104; Cohen, H. 146; contemporary 422; Crescas, H. 180; Delmedigo, E. 199; Duran, P. 221; Duran, S. 221; early nineteenth century 423; Enlightenment 242; Fackenheim, E.L. 270; Gersonides 313; Ha’am, Ahad 328; halakhah 329; Herrera, A. Cohen de 349; Heschel, A.J. 351; Hillel ben Samuel of Verona 353; Holocaust 360; Ibn Daud, A. 373; Ibn Ezra, A. 373; Ibn Ezra, M. 374; Ibn Falaquera 374; Ibn Gabirol, S. 374; Ibn Kammuna 375; Ibn Paquda 376–7; Ibn Tzaddik, J. 379; Immanuel ben Solomon of Rome 384–5; Israeli, I. 411; Judah ben Moses of Rome 427; Judah Halevi 330; Kaplan, M. 433; Krochmal, N. 445; Leibowitz, Y. 481; Maimon, S. 518; Maimonides, A. 519;
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Maimonides, M. 519; Mendelssohn, M. 563; Messer Leon 566; midrash 572; al-Muqammas, D. 604; Nahmanides, M. 609; Philo of Alexandria 672–3; pneuma (spirit) 684; Rosenzweig, F. 776; Saadiah Gaon 789; Shem Tov family 825; Soloveitchik, J.B. 849; strengths 419; voluntarism 921; weaknesses 418–19; Zionism 948 Jhering, Rudolf von 423 Jia Yi 423 jian’ai (impartial care) 587 Joas, Hans Mead, G.H. 546 John of Damascus 424 John of Jandun 424 John of Mirecourt 425 John of Paris 425 John of St Thomas 425–6 John of Salisbury 425 John XXII, Pope 931 Johnson, Alexander Bryan 426 Johnson, P.F. Alembert, J. le R. d’ 22–3; Condillac, É.B. de 160 Johnson, Samuel 426–7 Johnson, Dr Samuel 426 Johnston, Mark D. Llull, R. 493 joint action social action 835 Jones, Karen trust 899 Jones, Peter freedom of speech 296 Jones, Roger optics 646 Jones, W. Gareth Russian Enlightenment 242 Joravsky, David Bogdanov, A.A. 94; partiinost’ 659; Russian empiriocriticism 781; Vygotskii, L.S. 922 Jordan, Mark D. Augustinianism 65; Gerard of Cremona 311; Hugh of St Victor 363–4; John of La Rochelle 424–5; John of Paris 425; John of Salisbury 425; Neckham, A. 619–20; Pseudo-Grosseteste 723
Jori, Mario legal positivism 477 Jospe, Raphael Ibn Ezra, A. 373; Ibn Falaquera 374 journalism ethics of 427 Jubien, Michael Kripke, S.A. 444 Judaeo-Christian thought Philo of Alexandria 672 Judah ben Moses of Rome 421 Judaism anti-Semitism 41; family (Rozanov, V.V.) 779; Hasidism 334; Hebrew Bible 88–9; Islam comparison (Ibn Kammuna) 375; Kabbalah 432; Karaism 433; mysticism 432; philosophy relationship 418; pietism (Ibn Paquda) 376; pluralism 762; Rabbinic theology 884; resurrection 769; revelation 769; sin 831; state relationship (Leibowitz, Y.) 481 judgment common-sense philosophy (Reid, T.) 750; empirical knowledge (Lewis, C.I.) 484; mathematical (Kant, I.) 537 Jung, Carl Gustav 427 Jungius, Joachim 428 jurisprudence feminist 278–9; historical 428; liberal 279; Roman law/civilian tradition 774; sociological (Pound, R.) 703 justice 428–9 see also fairness; injustice; law; mercy conventionalism 428–9; corrective 428; crime and punishment 180; distributive 428; divine (Ash‘ariyya/Mu‘tazila) 61; equity and law 429; as fairness 429; Rawls, J. 743; as implicit concept in law (Villey, M.) 916;
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Page 988 international 429–30; mercy 289; mutual advantage 429; Rawlsian account 743; rule of law 780; teleology 429 justification duty 222; epistemic 430; trust 899 justification, religious doctrine of 431 see also atonement; salvation belief 754–5; Luther, M. 513–14; Luther, M. 431; religious knowledge 758; Roman Catholicism 431; sanctification 790–1 Justinian 431 pagan philosophy ban 33 al-Juwayni, Abu’l Ma‘ali 431 Kabbalah 419 Hasidism 334; Herrera, A. Cohen de 349 Kahn, C.H. Gorgias 322–3; Hippias 354; Prodicus 715; Protagoras 721; Socratic dialogues 848; Sophists 850 Kaibara Ekken 432 Kalton, Michael C. Korean Confucian philosophy 164 Kant, Immanuel 432 see also Kantian ethics; Kantian fiction; Neo-Kantianism analytic philosophy 30; anti-Semitism 41; categories 125; causation 127; impartiality 385; Kemp Smith, N. 436; moral law/laws of nature distinction 432; personalism 667–8; respect for persons 767; self-respect 815 Kantian ethics 433 see also practical reasoning moral sentiments 598 Kaplan, Mark induction 391 Kaplan, Mordecai 433 Jewish philosophy 422 Karaism 433 Jewish philosophy 419 karma
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fatalism 274; Indian conceptions of 434 Karma bKa’-brgyud (Kagyü) School of Buddhism 571 Karp, Ivan ethnophilosophy, African 259–60 Kasulis, Thomas P. Dōgen 214; fa 270; Japanese philosophy 415; Kūkai 446; Motoori Norinaga 603; Sengzhao 819 katharsis (purgation) 435 Katz, Steven T. Holocaust 360 Kaunda, Kenneth 15 Kauṭilya 388 Arthaśāstra 435; political philosophy 692 Kautsky, Karl Johann 435 Kawamura, Leslie S. Mādhyamika Buddhism in India and Tibet 106 Keat, Russell socialism 844–5 Keckermann, Bartholomew 436 Keefer, Michael H. Agrippa von Nettesheim, H.C. 18–19 Keil, F.C. cognitive development 146 Kekes, John evil 262 Kellert, Stephen H. chaos theory 131 Kellner, Menahem Duran, P. 221; Duran, S. 221 Kelly, Aileen Bakunin, M.A. 75; Herzen, A.I. 350; Russian philosophy 782–6; Signposts movement 829 Kelsen, Hans 436 Kemal, Salim Ibn Sina 378 Kemp Smith, Norman 436 Kennedy-Day, Kiki Aristotelianism in Islamic philosophy 48; al-Kindi 438–9 Kenney, John Peter Marius Victorinus 526; patristic philosophy 661; Tertullian, Q.S.F. 881 Kenny, Anthony private language argument 711 Kent, Bonnie Bonaventure 95–6; Gerard of Odo 311–12 Kepler, Johannes 436 kerygma 113 Kessler, Eckhard
Cardano, G. 122; Telesio, B. 879–80; Zabarella, J. 944 Kettler, David Ferguson, A. 282 Keynes, John Maynard 437 Khin Zaw, Susan Wollstonecraft, M. 935–6 al-Khumayni, Imam Ruhollah 406 Kilvington, Richard 438 Kilwardby, Robert 438 Kim, Jaegwon reduction, problems of 747 Kincaid, Harold positivism in the social sciences 696 al-Kindi, Abu Yusuf Ya‘qub ibn Ishaq 438–9 ethics 259; Neoplatonism 625 kinds natural 612–13 King, Jeffrey C. quantifiers and inference 729 Kingdom, Elizabeth F. feminist jurisprudence 278–9
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Page 989 Kinsey, Richard Renner, K. 765 Kirwan, Christopher Manicheism 522–3; Pelagianism 664 Kitcher, Philip mathematics 543 Klein, Martha praise and blame 705 Klein, Melanie 724 Klein, Peter D. certainty 129; epistemology 246 Kline, George L. Leont’ev, K.N. 482; Losev, A.F. 510 knowability paradox 656 knowledge 440–1 see also belief; epistemology; gnōsis ; justification, epistemic; moral knowledge; religious knowledge a posteriori 1; a priori 1; by acquaintance/description 439; adequate (Spinoza, B. de) 857; anti-scepticism (Saadiah Gaon) 789; archaeology of (Foucault, M.) 290; belief relationship 82; causal theory of 440; deductive closure principle 196; defeasibility theory of 441; evil relationship (Shestov, L.) 826; faculties (Ibn Sina) 378; genealogies (Foucault, M.) 290; geometrical method (Spinoza, B. de) 857; idealism (Burthogge, R.) 115; Indian philosophy 250; infant cognition 145; innateness of 397; intuitive 741; memory 562; misperception 665; naturalistic account 396; naturalized philosophy of science 617; observation sentences (Quine, W.V.) 732–3; perceptual 665; sociology 846; tacit 442; testimony 881; Tibetan philosophy 388; zhi 946 Knutzen, Martin 442–3 kogaku (Ancient Learning) Itō Jinsai 412; Ogyū Sorai 642 Kohlberg, Lawrence moral stage theory 593 Kojève, Alexandre 443 kokoro (‘heart’) 443
kokugaku (Native Studies School) Motoori Norinaga 603; Ogyū Sorai 642 König, Julius 175 Korea Buddhist philosophy 111–12; Chinul 138; Chông Yagyong 139; Confucianism 164; Han Wônjin 331; sirhak movement 832; Sôsan Hyujông 850; Tonghak 896; Ûisang 905; Wônch’ūk 936; Wônhyo 936; Yi Hwang 941; Yi Kan 941; Yi Yulgok 941 Kornblith, Hilary introspection 401–2 Korsgaard, Christine M. good, theories of the 321; teleological ethics 879 Kosso, Peter observation 641 Kotarbiński, Tadeusz 443 Koyré, Alexandre 443 Krabbe, Erik C.W. dialogical logic 209 Kramer, Matthew H. Holmes, O.W. 360 Kraut, Richard egoism and altruism 233–4 Kremer, E.J. 53 Kremer-Marietti, Angèle Comte, A. 158 Kretzmann, Norman Aquinas, T. 43; eternity 254–5; Kilvington, R. 438 Kripke, Saul Aaron 444 modal logic 501; private language argument 711; proper names 717; semantic paradoxes and theories of truth 815–16 Kristeva, Julia 444 Krochmal, Nachman 445 Jewish philosophy 422 Kroes, Peter technology, philosophy of 878 Kropotkin, Pëtr Alekseevich 445–6 Krygier, Martin common law/custom 152 Kuflik, Arthur moral standing 598 Kuhn, Steven T. modal logic 583–4 Kuhn, Thomas Samuel 446 incommensurability 387
Kuipers, Theo A.F. confirmation theory 162 Kukathas, Chandran Hayek, F.A. 335; Rand, A. 738 Kuki Shōzū 446 Kuklick, Bruce Paine, T. 653 Kumar, Shikha Arya Samaj 61; Brahmo Samaj 100–1 Kumazawa Banzan 447 Kvanvig, Jonathan L. epistemic paradoxes 656 Kymlicka, Will citizenship 142; political philosophy 690 Kyo Buddhism 138 Kyoto School 447 East Asian Philosophy 228; Miki Kiyoshi 572; Nishitani Keiji 634; Tanabe Hajime 875; Watsuji Tetsurō 925 La Bruyère, Jean de 599 La Forge, Louis de 448 La Mettrie, Julien Offroy de 448 La Torre, Massimo Fuller, L.L. 299–300; Radbruch, G. 734–5
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Page 990 labour alienated 24; property 717–18; unalienated 936 Lacan, Jacques 448–9 Lacey, A.R. Bergson, H.-L. 85 Lachs, John Santayana, G. 793 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 449 LaFargue, Michael Daodejing 190 Laine, Joy Udayana 905; Uddyotakara 905; Vātsyāyana 913 Lakatos, Imre 449–50 lambda calculus 450 Lambert, Johann Heinrich 450 Langermann, Y. Tzvi al-Baghdadi 74; Ibn Kammuna 375 language 455–8 see also communication; discourse; grammar; grammarians; ideal language philosophy; language of thought; legal discourse; linguistics; moral language; ordinary language philosophy; private language argument; reference; semantics; sense; utterances agreement ( Verständigung) 154; ancient philosophy of 451; animal 37; anthropology (Monboddo) 589; author relationship (Barthes, R.) 76; Buddhist nominalism 635; Chinese philosophy 495–6; compositionality 156; consumer culture (Baudrillard, J.) 77; conventionality of 452–3; conversational implicature (Grice, H.P.) 325–6; criteria 181; deflationary theories of truth 900; discrimination 490; fine distinctions in (Prodicus) 715; Frege, G. 296–7; gender 451–2; Indian theories of 453; innateness of 313; intention 153; knowledge relationship (Condillac, É.B. de) 161; logic and 502–3; logical analysis of 4; logical atomism (Wittgenstein, L.) 933; medieval theories of 454–5; Moscow-Tartu school 602; noematic meaning (Husserl, E.) 369; ontology of 4; pragmatics 703; private states 711–12; proper names 717;
Renaissance philosophy of 459; rhetoric 194; Sanskrit 389–90; self-presence (Derrida, J.) 203; semiotic-symbolic dialectic (Kristeva, J.) 445; social nature of 459; Tibetan 390; universal 907; use/mention distinction 909 language games Wittgenstein, L. 933; Wittgensteinian ethics 934 language of thought 455 Fodor, J.A. 287 la langue 794 Larmore, Charles E. Bayle, P. 78; right and good 772 Lashley, K. 906 Lasker, Daniel J. Israeli, I. 411 Lassalle, Ferdinand 459 Latin Renaissance logic 503 Latin America analytical philosophy 29–30; anti-positivist thought 40–1; colonial philosophy 460; existentialism 266–7; feminist philosophy 281; liberation philosophy 487; liberation theology 487; marginality 525; Marxism 533–4; phenomenology 671–2; philosophy in 460; positivism 697; pre-Columbian and indigenous thought 463 Latitudinarianism 463–4 see also Cambridge Platonism Laudan, Larry underdetermination 906 Lavine, Shaughan second- and higher-order logics 810 Lavrov, Pëtr Lavrovich 464 Law, William 472 law Chinese philosophy 465–6; civil disobedience 142; crime and punishment 180–1; as discourse 475; economic approach to 466; equity 429; historical theory of (Vico, G.) 915; as independent imperatives (Olivecrona, K.) 642; Islamic 466; justice 429; limits of 467; as male bias 278–9; morality 464;
postmodernism 844; and religion (Hooker, R.) 362; Roman 774; social theory 843; social utility (Jhering, R. von) 423 law of excluded middle (LEM) intuitionistic logic 403–4; many-valued logics 524 laws of logic 505; social 836–7 Laymon, Ronald idealizations 380 Laywine, A. Knutzen, M. 442–3; Swedenborg, E. 873 Lazaroff, A. Jewish voluntarism 921 Le Clerc, Jean 473 Le Doeuff, Michèle 473 Suchon, G. 869 Le Grand, Antoine 473 Le Poidevin, Robin change 131; continuants 174–5 Le Roy, Édouard Louis Emmanuel Julien 474 Leaman, Oliver Abravanel, I. 3; al-Afghani 13; anti-Semitism 41; Duran, P. 221; Ibn Hazm 374–5; Ibn Khaldun 375;
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Page 991 Ibn Miskawayh 376; Ibn Rushd 377; Islamic philosophy 406–1; Jewish Averroism 70; al-Juwayni 431; Kabbalah 432; al-Tawhidi 876 learning 474 see also developmental psychology; education; educational philosophy connectionism 166 learning of the heart-and-mind Lu Xiangshan 512 Lebanon Porphyry 695 Lebensphilosophie 474 Lebenswelt (lifeworld) Patočka, J. 661 Lefebvre, Henri 475 Lefkowitz, Mary R. Egyptian philosophy, influence on Greek thought 234 Leftow, Brian divine simplicity 830–1; God, concepts of 317–18; immutability 385; necessary being 619; omnipresence 643–4; voluntarism 921 legal concepts 475 juridical 475 legal discourse 475 courtroom studies 475 legal evidence 476 see also proof legal hermeneutics 476 legal idealism 476–7 see also legal norms; legal realism legal institutionalism 397 see also neo-institutionalism legal norms 636–7 see also legal idealism interpretive theory 636–7; legal reasoning 478; logic (Weinberger, O.) 926–7 legal obligations rule of law 780 legal positivism 477 constitutional law (Dicey, A.V.) 209; institutionalist (Weinberger, O.) 926–7; linguistic-analytical (Hart, H.L.A.) 333 legal realism 477–8 see also legal idealism fact scepticism (Frank, J.) 291; legal concepts 475; Scandinavian 477–8; United States 478 legal reasoning 478 legal theory
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democratic-socialist (Renner, K.) 765 Legalist philosophy Chinese 478–9 legality equity 429 legitimacy 479–80 see also authority lei 11 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 480–1 individual essences 658; natural philosophy 480; necessary being 619; philosophical optimism 480; psychophysical parallelism 725 Leibniz’s Law 381 propositional attitude statements 719 Leibowitz, Yeshayahu 481 Jewish philosophy 422 Lenin, Vladimir Il’ich 482 see also Marxism-Leninism dialectical materialism 208 Lennon, Thomas M. Bernier, F. 87; Régis, P.-S. 749 Leont’ev, Konstantin Nikolaevich 482 Leopold, David Cousin, V. 179 LePore, Ernest Searle, J. 809–10 Lesbos Theophrastus 884 Lesher, J.H. Xenophanes 938 Leslie, A.M. child’s theory of mind 575 Leśniewski, Stanisøaw 482 Leucippus 483 Levi, Isaac Nagel, E. 608 Levin, J. qualia 729 Levinas, Emmanuel 483–4 Levine, Joseph colour and qualia 149 Levinson, H.S. Jewish philosophy, contemporary 422 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 484 postmodernism 699 Levy, Z. Baumgardt, D. 78; Ha’am, Ahad 328; Zionism 948 Lewis, Clarence Irving 484 Lewis, Clive Staples 484–5 Lewis, David Kellogg 485 li (pattern or principle) 485 see also i; ri li zhi (ritual) 465–6 liar paradox 656 Liber de causis 485–6
Libera, Alain de Albert the Great 20; William of Sherwood 932 Liberal Protestantism Unamuno y Jugo, M. De 906 liberalism 486 see also individualism Hayek, F.A. 335; metapolitical (Croce, B.) 183; moral judgment 464; political philosophy 689–90; religion 756–7; Russian 486; toleration 895
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Page 992 liberation philosophy 487 Latin America 462–3 liberation theology 487 libertarianism 487–8 freedom 294 libertins 488 liberty 295 see also autonomy; freedom Jewish philosophy (Mendelssohn, M.) 564; paternalism 660; of religion (More, H.) 602; self-determination (Price, R.) 709 Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph 488 Lievers, Menno Molyneux problem 588 life and death 488–9; meaning of 489; origin of 489; resurrection (Fëdorov, N.F.) 275; thought relationship (Fackenheim, E.L.) 270 light corporeal reality (Grosseteste, R.) 326; metaphysical principle of (Patrizi, F.) 662; optics 646 Liji (Book of Rites) 136 Lijing (Classic of Rites) 136 see also Liji; Yili ; Zhouli Lilly, Reginald French anti-postmodernism 700 limbo 489 of the children 489; of the fathers 489 linear logic 490 linguistic discrimination 490 linguistic units Indian theories of 453 linguistics 456 see also language; phonology; semantics; semiotics; structuralism, linguistics testimony in Indian philosophy 882; type/token distinction 904 Linji 490 Linnaeus, Carl von 491 Lionnet, Françoise Todorov, T. 894 Lipsius, Justus 491 literary theory Barthes, R. 76; Belinskii, V.G. 83; katharsis 435; novels (Bakhtin, M.M.) 74–5; rhetoricity (Man, P. de) 194; Russian literary formalism 781 literature clandestine 143; Latin America 491; mimēsis 575;
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philosophy assimilation (Man, P. de) 194; scriptor (Barthes, R.) 76; Socratic dialogues 848; Tel Quel school 879 Lithuania Levinas, E. 483–4; Maimon, S. 518 Lloyd, Elisabeth A. evolution, theory of 263; models 585 Llull, Ramon 493 Locke, John 493–4 Bold, S. 95; Condillac, É.B. de 160–1; contractarianism 175; educational philosophy 231–2; faith 271; ideas 493; Molyneux problem 588; personal identity 493; Toland, J. 894 Loewer, Barry mental causation 564; probability theory and epistemology 712–13; supervenience of the mental 872 logic 503 see also Boolean algebra; combinatory logic; dialectic; first-order logic; formal logic; fuzzy logic; imperative logic; logicism; many-valued logics; mathematical logic; modal logic; predicate calculus; predicate logic; second-order logic; temporal logic; tense logic Abelard, P. 2; ancient 494–5; Aristotelian 494; China 495–6; deontic 202; dialogical 209; of discovery 213; eighteenth century 497–8; epistemic 246; of ethical discourse 500; is-ought question 500; universalism 500–1; free 293; higher- order 810; infinitary 394; informal 289; intuitionistic 403–4; Jainism 413–14; Japanese philosophy 497; laws of 505; linear 490; medieval 499–500; multiple conclusion 604; multiple-conclusion 604; naturalized epistemology (Quine, W.V.) 733; nineteenth century 498; non-monotonic 636; paraconsistent 655; Paul of Venice 662–3; pragmatic a priori (Lewis, C.I.) 484; provability 721;
quantum 731; reism (Kotarbiński, T.) 443; relevance 753; Renaissance 503–4; seventeenth century 497–8; tense 710; twentieth century, early 498 logic machines 499 logic of systems Comte, A. 158 logical atomism 504 logical consequence logical constants 504 logical constants 504–5 logical truth 504 logical empiricism chemistry 133; postmodernism (Hempel, C.G.) 344–5; Reichenbach, H. 749 logical form 505 logical positivism 505 see also logical empiricism; Vienna Circle Ayer, A.J. 72; logic of discovery 213; meaning and verification 548; metaphysics 570; philosophical analysis 29; science 804 logical realism property theory 718 logical truth logical constants 504 logicism 507–8 mathematics 539–40
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Page 993 logos 508 see also Jesus Christ Stoicism 508 Loi, Maurice Brunschvicg, L. 104 Loisy, Alfred 508–9 Lokāyata 536 Lombard, Peter 509 Sentences 509 Long, A.A. Cratylus 180; Heraclitus 346; nous 637; psychē (soul) 723 Longeway, John Heytesbury, W. 352; John of Damascus 424; William of Sherwood 932 Longeway, John L. Peter of Spain 668–9 Lorenzen, Paul 509 Lormand, Eric consciousness 167–8 Losev, Aleksei Fëdorovich 510 Lossky, Nicholas Onufrievich 510 absolutism 510; ideal realism 510; intuitivism 510 Lottery paradox 656 Lotze, Rudolph Hermann personalism 668 Louden, Robert B. examples in ethics 264 Loughlin, Martin Dicey, A.V. 209; Millar, J. 574 Loughney, John A. cultural identity 185 Loux, Michael J. nominalism 634 love 511 see also agape; eros nature of (Abravanel, J.) 3; theological virtue 883 Lovell, Stephen Russian nihilism 633 Lovibond, Sabina Wittgensteinian ethics 934 Löwenheim, Leopold Löwenheim-Skolem theorem and nonstandard models 511 Löwenheim-Skolem theorems nonstandard models 511 luck moral 594–5 Lucretius 33 Lucy, John A. Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis 793
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Luik, John C. humanism 365 Lukács, Georg 512 Łukasiewicz, Jan 513 many-valued logics 523 Lunacharskii, Anatolii Nietzsche, F.W.: impact on Russian thought 631 Lundgren-Gothlin, Eva Beauvoir, S. de 80 Luper, Steven belief and knowledge 82; naturalized epistemology 616 Lushi chunqiu 513 Lusthaus, Dan Sānkhya 792; Yogācāra School of Buddhism 107 Luther, Martin 513–14 faith 883; justification 431; theology of humility 513–14 Lutz-Bachmann, Matthias religion, critique of 757; theology, political 884 Luxemburg, Rosa 514 Lvóv-Warsaw School 443 Lycan, William G. Dennett, D.C. 201; theoretical/epistemic virtues 884 Lyceum Aristotle 34; Strato 864 Lycia Diogenes of Oenoanda 212 Lynn, Richard John Yijing 942 Lyons, William Ryle, G. 787–8 Lyotard, Jean-François 514 Mac Lane, S. 126 Macadam, Jim Prichard, H.A. 709 McCarthy, Timothy logical constants 504–5 McCarty, David Charles combinatory logic 150–1; constructivism in mathematics 172–3; intuitionism 402; lambda calculus 450 McConnell-Ginet, Sally language and gender 451–2 MacCormick, Neil Frank, J. 291; Hart, H.L.A. 333; Hohfeld, W.N. 358; Llewellyn, K.N. 492; Pothier, R.J. 702; Pound, R. 703; Renner, K. 765;
Savigny, F.K. von 794; Villey, M. 916; Weinberger, O. 926 McCracken, Charles J. Johnson, S. 426–7 Macdonald, Graham Ayer, A.J. 72 MacDonald, Scott Grosseteste, Robert 326; illumination 383; medieval philosophy 552–6; natural theology 614–15; Philip the Chancellor 672; William of Auxerre 930
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< previous page Page 994 McDowell, John Evans, G. 261 Macedon Aristotle 50 McGee, Vann inductive definitions and proofs 392; semantic paradoxes and theories of truth 815 McGinn, Colin secondary qualities 810–11 McGinn, Marie criteria 181 McGrade, A.S. Marsilius of Padua 527 Machiavelli, Niccolò 516 rational choice theory 739; republicanism 516; virtù 516 Machover, Moshé nonstandard analysis 27–8 McInerny, Ralph Garrigou-Lagrange, R. 305; Maritain, J. 526 MacIntyre, Alasdair C. 517 virtue ethics 517 McIntyre, L. 843 Mack, Peter Agricola, R. 17–18; Melanchthon, P. 562; Ramus, P. 738 McKay, Thomas J. modal logic 584 McKenna, Antony clandestine literature 143; Port-Royal 695 Mackie, Penelope existence 264–5 MacKinnon, Edward Hanson, N.R. 332 McKirahan, Richard D. Anaximander 32; Anaximenes 32–3; archē 45; Thales 883 McLarty, Colin category theory 126 McLaughlin, Brian P. anomalous monism 37–8; connectionism 166; perception 665 Maclean, Ian libertins 488; moralistes 598–9; Pascal, B. 659–60 McLeod, Grant Gaius 303–4; Justinian 431 McMullin, Ernan
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Copernicus, N. 177; cosmology 177; Galilei, G. 304; Kepler, J. 436 McNair, T. Tucker, A. 902 McNaughton, David consequentialism 169; deontological ethics 202; Ross, W.D. 777; Shaftesbury, Third Earl of 824–5 McPherson, Michael economics and ethics 230 McRae, John R. Platform Sutra 677; Zhi Dun 946 McTaggart, John McTaggart Ellis 517 Madaura Apuleius 42–3 Madden, Edward H. Common Sense School 152; Ducasse, C.J. 218; Stewart, D. 861–2 Maddy, P. 543 Mādhava 517 Indian and Tibetan philosophy 389 Madhva 517 Indian and Tibetan philosophy 389 Mādhyamika (Madhyamaka) School of Buddhism 106 Indian philosophy 389; Nāgārjuna 608; Tibetan philosophy 389 magic Renaissance 764 Mahāvīra 518 manifoldness, Jaina theory of 523 Mahāyāna School of Buddhism Awakening of Faith in Mahāyāna 70; Japan 110 Maher, Patrick inductive inference 392–3 Mahoney, Edward P. Cajetan 118–19; James of Viterbo 414; John of Jandun 424; Nifo, A. 632; Renaissance Aristotelianism 49–50; Vernia, N. 914 Maimon, Salomon 518 Jewish philosophy 422 Maimonides, Abraham ben Moses 519 Jewish philosophy 420 Maimonides, Moses 519 Abravanel, I. 3; Albo, J. 21; Dalalat al-ha’irin (Guide to the Perplexed) 519; influenced by (Ibn Paquda) 376–7; Jewish philosophy 420; prophecy 718; religious language 759;
resurrection 769 Maine de Biran, Pierre-François 521 introspection 520 Maine, H.S. 428 Maistre, Comte Joseph de 170 Maitzen, Stephen Tennant, F.R. 880 Majer, Ulrich Cantor, G. 121; Kronecker, L. 445 Major, John 521 Makin, Stephen Zeno of Elea 944–5 Makkreel, Rodolf Dilthey, W. 211 Malebranche, Nicolas 521 Arnauld, A. 52–3; occasionalism 521 Malino, J.W. Jewish philosophy, contemporary 422 Malinowski, B. 301 Mamardashvili, Merab Konstantinovich 521–2 Mandeville, Bernard 522
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< previous page Page 995 Mani 522–3 Manicheism 522–3 manifoldness ( anekāntavāda ) Jaina theory of 523 Mann, William E. Damian, P. 189; David of Dinant 192; theological virtues 883; Vital du Four 918–19 Manning, Richard N. functional explanation 300 Manns, James W. Buffier, C. 112 many-valued logics 523 intuitionistic 524 Mao Zedong humanism 530 Maraldo, John C. Japanese Buddhism 110; Nishida Kitarō 634 Marburg School of Neo-Kantianism 146 Marcel, Gabriel 524 Marcus Aurelius 34 Marcuse, Herbert 525 critical theory 182 Maréchal, Joseph Transcendental Thomism 889 Marenbon, John Carolingian renaissance 124; Chartres school 133; Thierry of Chartres 887; William of Conches 930 marginal philosophy 526 marginality 525 Latin America 487 Mariátegui, José Carlos 462 Maritain, Jacques 526 Neo-Thomism 889 Marius Victorinus 526 market economy self-interest (Smith, A.) 834 Markie, Peter J. rationalism 740 Marks, C.E. split brains 858 marriage contractarianism (Astell, M.) 62 Marrone, Steven P. Henry of Ghent 345; William of Auvergne 929–30 Marshall, Graeme pleasure 682 Marshall, John Latitudinarianism 463–4; Socinianism 845 Marsilius of Inghen 527 Marsilius of Padua 527
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Marston, Roger 528 Marti, Genoveva sense and reference 820 Martin, M.G.F. bodily sensations 91–2; perception 664–5 Martin, Mike W. self-deception, ethics of 814 Martin, Rex rights 772–3 Martinich, A.P. metaphor 567; ordinary language philosophy 647 Marty, Martin E. Niebuhr, H.R. 629; Niebuhr, R. 629–30 Marx, Karl Althusser, L.P. 25; dialectical materialism 208; humanism 365; utopianism 910 Marxism adaptation of (Cabral, A.) 118; aesthetics and ethics 10; Bloch, E.S. 91; Chinese 529–31; Frankfurt School 292; Gramsci, A. 323; Hegelian (Il’enkov, E.V.) 382; humanism 365; Kautsky, K.J. 435; Latin America 462; liberation theology 487; Lukács, G. 512–13; Luxemburg, R. 514; orthodox (Kautsky, K.J.) 435; philosophy of science 532; religious policy 756; revisionist debate (Bernstein, E.) 87; Russian/Soviet 532; Slovakia 834; Trotsky, L. 899; Western 531 Marxism-Leninism 532–3 Masaryk, Tomáš Garrigue 534 Czechoslovak Republic 188; Russian philosophy 786 Masham, Damaris 534 Maskit, Jonathan Bataille, G. 77 Masolo, Dismas ethnophilosophy, African 259–60 Mason, Andrew solidarity 848–9 Mason, J.H. Encyclopedists, eighteenth century 240 mass terms 534–5 count terms distinction 534 materialism 535 see also immaterialism; physicalism
Aristotelianism 851–2; Australian philosophy 68; death 195; eliminativism 535; human nature (Cabanis, P.-J.) 118; Indian school of 536; metaphysics 569; mind, philosophy of 535–6; reductionism 535; soft versus hard 535 mathematical logic early twentieth century 498; scientific theories 885 mathematicization Aristotle’s objections to (Speusippus) 856 mathematics abstract objects 4; analysis 28; astronomy (Eudoxus) 260; calculus (Leibniz, G.W.) 481; chaos theory 131; constructivism 172–3; Eudoxus 260; foundations of 536–4; geometric spirit (Pascal, B.) 659; infinity 394; intuitionistic logic 404;
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Page 996 nature (Alembert, J. le R. d’) 22–3; ratios (Oresme, N.) 648–9; second-order logic 811; social analysis (Condorcet, M.J.A.N.) 161 Matravers, Matt justice 428–9 matter 544 see also divisibility; indivisibility addition of thought (Bold, S.) 95; human vulnerability (Maimonides, M.) 519–20; Indian conceptions of 544; Scientific Revolution 544 Matthew of Aquasparta 545 Matthews, Freya ecological philosophy 229 Matthews, Gareth B. Augustine of Hippo 63 Mauthner, Fritz 545–6 Mavrodes, George I. monotheism 590; prayer 706; predestination 706 al-Mawdudi, Abu al-‘Ala 406 Maxwell, James Clerk 546 Hertz, H.R. 350 Mayan (Quiché) civilization thought 463 Mead, George Herbert 546 meaning ambiguity 26; antirealism (Dummett, M.A.E.) 219; biological theories of 818; and communication 546; compositionality 156; conventionality 452–3; emotive 238; ethical discourse 500; implicature 386; indexicals 201; Indian theories of 549; Islamic philosophy 408–9; language-mind-world connections 457–8; logical atomism 504; mental content 579; noema (Husserl, E.) 369; propositional attitudes 720; Putnam, H. 726; rule-following 546; sense and reference distinction 820; syntax 874; teleological 818; and truth 547–8; utterances (Grice, H.P.) 325–6 meaning of life 489 measurement 549 error 550; ordinal scales 550;
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scales of 550 mechanics Aristotelian 550; classical 551 mechanism Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika 639; vitalism 919 medical ethics 551–2 see also bioethics; genetics; Jewish bioethics; medicine; nursing ethics doctor/patient relationship 551 medicine 552 see also medical ethics Hellenistic methodology 342; Hippocratic 354; Renaissance (Paracelsus) 655 medieval philosophy 552–6 see also Aristotelianism, medieval ancient philosophy influence 35–6; ethics 558; heaven 335; historical development 553–7; language theories 454; logic 499–500; metaphysics 557; natural philosophy 558–9; perfect goodness concept 322; political 691; Russian 560; theology relationship 559–60; translators 898 meditation mahāmudrā (Mi bskyod rdo rje) 571 Megarian school 561 Meinecke, Friedrich 561 Meister Eckhart 561–2 Mejor, Marek Vasubandhu 913 Melamed, A. Alemanno, Y. 22 Melanchthon, Philipp 562 Mele, Alfred R. self-deception 813–14 Melia, Joseph possible worlds 697–8 Melissus 33 Eleatic monism 562; Parmenides 562 Mellor, D.H. Campbell, N.R. 121; events 261–2; Ramsey, F.P. 737 Meltzoff, A.N. infant cognition 145 memory 562–3 epistemology of 563 Mencius 563 Mendelian genetics 308–9 Mendelssohn, Moses 563 Jewish philosophy 422 Mendus, Susan
feminist political philosophy 280; pornography 694 mental causation 564 Brown, T. 103; dualism 218; functionalism 580; identity theory of mind 576 mental events anomalous monism 37 mental illness concepts of 564–5 mental imagery 384 descriptionalism 384; imagination 384; pictorial conception 384 mental representations criticism of functionalism 301 mental states adverbial theory of 565; analytic behaviourism 80; child’s theory of mind 575–6; consciousness 167; dualism 217–18; epiphenomenalism 245; functionalism 300–1; happiness 332; intentionality 399;
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Page 997 other minds 650; qualia 729; unconscious 906 mention/use distinction 909 Menzel, Christopher logical form 505 Mercer, Christia Digby, K. 210; Keckermann, B. 436 mercy 288–9 justice 289 mereology 565 merit 205 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 565–6 Mersenne, Marin 566 Mesopotamia Manicheism 522–3 Messer Leon, Judah 566 Jewish philosophy 421 Messiah Hebrew Bible 88 meta-ethics 256 see also analytic ethics rationalism (Price, R.) 709 metalanguage Tarski, A. 815 metaphilosophy Mulla Sadra 603–4 metaphor 567 comparison theory 567; interaction theory 567; medieval language theory 454–5; speech act theory 567 metaphysics 567–7 see also categories; existence; experience; first philosophy; realism; speculative metaphysics; time the Absolute 3; being 81–2; conceptual role semantics 816; descriptive 570; essential properties 254; history relationship (Collingwood, R.G.) 148; idealism 379; infinity 394–5; introspection 402; materialism 535–6; monism 589; ontology 567–8; pluralism 683; quantum mechanics 807; science 569–70; supervenience 872; universals 908 method demonstrative (Wolff, C.) 935; Descartes, R. 203; eliminative induction (Bacon, F.) 73; geometrical (Spinoza, B. de) 857
methodological individualism (MI) 570 methodological solipsism 849 methodology ordo doctrinae/methodus distinction (Zabarella, J.) 944; of regressus (Zabarella, J.) 944; social science 839–40 Mexico colonial philosophy 460; philosophy in 571 Meyerson, Émile 571 Meynell, Hugo Lonergan, B.J.F. 509 Mi bskyod rdo rje (Mikyö Dorje) 571 Middle Stoicism Panaetius 653 midrash 572 Mikhailovskii, Nikolai Konstantinovich 572 Miki Kiyoshi 572–3 Milchman, Alan Blanchot, M. 90–1 Miletus Thales 883 Mill, John Stuart hedonism 909 Millar, John 574 Miller, Alexander objectivity 640 Miller, David desert and merit 205; nationalism 610–11; Pareto principle 657; political philosophy 687–9; social democracy 836 Miller, Richard W. Marxist philosophy of science 532 Milton, J.R. Bacon, F. 73; Chillingworth, W. 135 Mīmāṃsā Indian and Tibetan philosophy 388; Veda interpretation 318 mimēsis (imitation) 575 verisimulitude (Lacoue-Labarthe, P.) 449; adverbial theory of mental states 565; analytic behaviourism 80; anomalous monism 37–8; belief 82; bodily sensations 91–2; bundle theory of 575; child’s theory of 575; computational theories of 576; concepts 159; dualism 217–18; eliminativism 535; epiphenomenalism 245–6; as first cause (Anaxagoras) 31; functionalism 300–1; holism 360; idealism 379; identity theory of 576–7;
imagination 384; Indian philosophy of 577; intention 399; introspection 401–2; logical behaviourism (Ryle, G.) 787; memory 562–3; mental content 579–80; modularity of 586; naturalism 580; neutral monism 626; perception 664–5; philosophy of 577–8; property supervenience 873; propositional attitudes 719; reductionism 748; substance dualism (Brown, T.) 103 mind-body problem Descartes, R. 204; occasionalism 642; organic theory (Herder, J.G.) 348; sport 859 minima Epicureanism 244 Minogue, Kenneth Oakeshott, M.J. 640 Minor, Robert N. Radhakrishnan, S. 735; Tagore, R. 875 minorities marginality 525 Mir Damad, Muhammad Baqir 582 time 582
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Page 998 miracles 582–3 divine intervention 760; evidence for (Campbell, G.) 121; natural explanation (Pomponazzi, P.) 693 misperception knowledge 665 Mitcham, Carl technology and ethics 877–8 Mitchell, J. 276 mKhas grub dge legs dpal bzang po 583 modal logic 583–4 see also deontic logic; modal operators impact on philosophy of logic 501–2; modal operators 585; provability logic 721 modal operators 585 models 585 nonstandard 511 modernism 586 see also postmodernism modernity revolution 770 modism 454 modularity mind 586 Mohist philosophy 586–7 see also Mozi language theories 495 Molander, Bengt praxeology 705 molecular biology 587 molecular genetics 309 molecularism semantic/mental 360 Moles, Robert N. Austin, J. 66 Molina, Luis de 587–8 see also Molinism Molinism 588 Molland, A. George Henry of Harclay 345–6; Oresme, Nicole 648–9 Molyneux problem 588 momentariness Buddhist doctrine of 588 Monad Indefinite Dyad opposition (Plutarch of Chaeronea) 684 monads Leibniz, G.W. 480; Russian Neo-Leibnizianism (Lossky, N.O.) 510 monarchy Judaism (Abravanel, I.) 3 Monboddo, Lord (James Burnett) 589 Monfasani, John George of Trebizond 311; Petrarca, F. 669; Renaissance humanism 365–6; Valla, L. 911
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monism 589 see also atomism; dualism; materialism; pluralism anomalous 37–8; Eleatic (Melissus) 562; Indian 589; metaphysics 569 monotheism 590 see also God; polytheism reincarnation 751; salvation 790–1 Montague, Richard Merett 590 Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de 590–1 Montefiore, Alan responsibilities of scientists and intellectuals 768 Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de 591 Moor, James Turing, A.M. 902 Moore, A.W. infinity 394–5 Moore, F.C.T. Bonnet, C. 96; Cabanis, P.-J. 118; Maine de Biran, P.-F. 521 Moore, George Edward 592 naturalistic fallacy 615; philosophical analysis 592; supervenience 873 Moore, Gregory H. axiom of choice 71; logic, early twentieth century 498; paradoxes of set and property 656 Moore, J. Carmichael, G. 123 moral agents responsibility 768 moral contractualism Scanlon, T.M. 176 moral development 593 see also moral education moral education 593 see also moral development role of examples 264 moral expertise 593–4 moral health Ibn Miskawayh 376 moral judgment 594 see also moral reasoning analytic ethics 28–9; emotivism 238; first principles (Reid, T.) 750; liberalism 464; practical reason 703 moral justification 594 see also moral reasoning epistemic justification contrast 249; intuitionism in ethics 403; praise and blame 705 moral knowledge 594 see also moral scepticism moral language
emotivism (Stevenson, C.L.) 861; meaning 238 moral laxism casuistry 125
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< previous page Page 999 moral life Dewey, J. 207 moral luck 594–5 see also blame; praise moral motivation 595 see also moral psychology internalism/externalism debate 595 moral particularism 595 moral philosophy Thomism (Maritain, J.) 526 moral pluralism 596 see also value pluralism intuitionism relationship 403; Ross, W.D. 777 moral principles particularism 595 moral psychology 596 see also moral motivation moral realism 596–7 moral reasoning casuistry 125; logic of ethical discourse 500 moral reasons obligation/supererogation distinction 872 moral relativism 597 see also social relativism moral rules action (Wollaston, W.) 935 moral scepticism 597 see also moral knowledge moral sense 597 see also moral sentiments; sentimentalism human nature (Hutcheson, F.) 370–1 moral sentiments 598 blame 600 moral stage theory moral development 593 moral standing 598 moralistes 598–9 morality 256 see also ethical; ethics; good; herd morality; moral; positive morality; right attractive conception 772; concrete identity 601; critiques of 600; death of God (Camus, A.) 121; double effect principle 216; and emotions 599–600; and ethics 600; as functional term 600; and identity 600–1; imperative conception 772; international 400–1; justification 594; law 464; motion (Hobbes, T.) 357–8; natural law (Thomasius, C.) 888;
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Nietzsche, F.W. 631; power of the will (Gerard of Odo) 311; Rand, A. 738; religion 755–6; science relationship (Rousseau, J.-J.) 777; self-deception 814; suffering 870; supremacy of 600 Moran, Dermot Eriugena, J. S. 252–3; medieval Platonism 680 More, Henry 601 More, Thomas utopianism 909–10 Morgan, Charles G. fuzzy logic 302; many-valued logics 523 Morgan, M.L. Fackenheim, E.L. 270 Morrison, Margaret experiment 267 Morson, Gary Saul Bakhtin, M.M. 74; Dostoevskii, F.M. 215; Tolstoi, L.N. 895 mortality Heidegger, M. 340; meaning of life 489 Moscow-Tartu school 602 Moser, Paul K. a posteriori 1; a priori 1 Moss, Lenny life, origin of 489 Most, Glenn W. Epicharmus 244; Hesiod 351; Homer 361; katharsis 435; mimēsis 575 motion first philosophy (Hobbes, T.) 357–8; Moving Rows (Zeno of Elea) 945; paradox (Bergson, H.-L.) 85 motivation desire 205–6; Freud, S. 298; happiness (Tucker, A.) 902 Motoori Norinaga 603 Mouw, Richard J. religion and morality 755–6 movement trajectory distinction (Bergson, H.-L.) 85 Mozi 603 Mohist philosophy 586 Mues de Schrenk, Laura pre-Columbian and indigenous thought 463 mujō (impermanence) 603 Mulhall, S. Cavell, S. 129
Mulla Sadra (Sadr al-Din Muhammad al-Shirazi) 603 al-Sabzawari 790 Muller-Ortega, Paul E. Abhinavagupta 2 Mulligan, Kevin predication 708 multiculturalism 604 see also race; toleration multiple-conclusion logic 604 Mundici, Daniele primitive recursive functions 157 Munro, C.R. Bryce, J. 104 Munzer, Stephen R. 717–18 al-Muqammas, Daud 419 Murawski, Roman Tarski, A. 875–6 Murphey, M.G. Franklin, B. 293; Jefferson, T. 417 Murphy, Jeffrie G. forgiveness and mercy 288–9
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Page 1000 Murphy, Liam B. help and beneficence 344 Murphy, Nancey religion and science 757 Musgrave, Alan social relativism 837 Musonius Rufus 605 Mu‘tazila 61–2 see also Mu‘tazilites ‘ilm al-kalam 411 Mu‘tazilites moral philosophy 259 mysticism divine creation (Bonaventure) 95–6; experiences 761; Hildegard of Bingen 353; history of 606; Islamic 408; nature of 606; Rhineland school 873; science relationship (Certeau, M. de) 130; Suso, H. 873; Swedenborg, E. 873; Tauler, J. 876; theosophy 886 myth Bible (Frei, H.) 297; symbolic forms (Cassirer, E.) 124–5 Nadler, Steven Arnauld, A. 52; Cordemoy, G. de 177; Foucher, S. 290; La Forge, L. de 448; Malebranche, N. 521 Næss, Arne 608 Nagamoto Shigenori Linji 490–1 Nāgārjuna 608 Indian philosophy 389; Mādhyamika Buddhism in India and Tibet 106–7; Tibetan philosophy 389 Nagatomo Shigenori Kuki Shūzō 446–7 Nagel, Ernest 608 Nagel, Thomas 609 Nahmanides, Moses 420 Nakamura Kojiro al-Ghazali 314 names Chinese theory of language 495; rectifying (Confucius) 495 Names, School of 495 Nancy, Jean-Luc 610 Naples James of Viterbo 414 Nardin, Terry
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war and peace 925 narrative aesthetics 9; Bible 297 Nasr, Seyyed Hossein mystical 605–6 nation 610–11 see also community; international relations; nationalism; state nationalism 610–11 see also fascism; nation; Zionism authoritarian 611; liberal 611 Native American philosophy 611 nativism 611 see also innateness; language, innateness language acquisition 313; linguistic (Chomsky, N.) 611 natural deduction 612 natural history evolutionary theory (Buffon, G.L.L.) 112; theology (Neckham, A.) 619–20 natural indication informational semantics 817 natural law 613 see also divine law Cumberland, R. 186; English law (Blackstone, W.) 90; procedural (Fuller, L.L.) 299; reason-faith relationship (Culverwell, N.) 186 natural philosophy mathematical science contrast (Mersenne, M.) 566; medieval 558–9 natural science empirical approach (Buridan, J.) 113–14; first philosophy (Hobbes, T.) 357–8; mathematics relation 542–3; miracles 582 natural selection Darwin, C.R. 192; evolutionary theory 263; sociobiology 845; Wallace, A.R. 924 natural theology 614–15 critiques of 615 naturalism anti-religious (Hume, D.) 366; contextual (Nagel, E.) 608–9; mind 580; reductive 762; social science 616 naturalized epistemology 616 naturalized philosophy of science 617 nature classification of (Linnaeus, C. von) 491; and convention 618; cycle of change (Empedocles) 239; divisions of (Eriugena, J.S.) 252–3; first principles of (Telesio, B.) 879–80; freedom relationship (Kant, I.) 432; mathematical principles (Alembert, J. le R. d’) 22–3; necessitarian theories 472;
sociobiology 845 nature-nurture debate genetic determinism 309 Naturphilosophie 618 see also German idealism Navya-Nyāya (New Logic) 389 see also Nyāya Gangeśa 305; Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika School 639 Neale, Stephen descriptions 205; syntax 873 necessary being ontological argument 619 necessary truth a posteriori 619; conventionalism 619; as knowledege of God (Norris, J.) 637;
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< previous page Page 1001 medieval epistemology 557–8 necessitarianism nature 472 necessity divine freedom (Leibniz, G.W.) 480–1; Islamic philosophy 127; materialism (Weil, S.) 926; mathematical arguments 537; modal logic 583–4; modal operators 585 Neckham, Alexander 619–20 needs 620 see also interests negative facts Indian philosophy 620 negative theology 621 négritude 16 Nelson, Mark T. moral scepticism 597 Nemesius 621 neo-Confucianism China 621–2; Japan 416; li 485 neo-institutionalism 397 Neo-Kantianism Russian 624 Neoplatonism 624 see also Cambridge Platonism; Neo-Pythagoreanism; Platonism Chaldaean Oracles 130; critique of (Judah Halevi) 330; Damascius 189; Hypatia 371; Iamblichus 372; illuminationism 383; Islamic philosophy 406–7; Liber de causis 485; Plotinus 683; Porphyry 695; Proclus 714; Simplicius 831 Neo-Pythagoreanism 626 Neostoicism Lipsius, J. 491 Netherlands Agricola, R. 17–18; Dooyeweerd, H. 215; Erasmus, D. 252; Grotius, H. 327; Regius, H. 345; Schurman, A.M. van 802; Spinoza, B. de 857; Thomas à Kempis 887 Netton, Ian Richard al-Farabi 272–3; Ikhwan al-Safa’ 382;
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Neoplatonism in Islamic philosophy 625–6 Neumann, John von 626 Neurath, Otto 626 neutral monism definition 626–7 neutrality political 627 New Testament demythologization (Bultmann, R.) 113; faith 271; sin 831 New Thinking Jewish philosophy (Rosenzweig, F.) 776 New Zealand Prior, A.N. 710 Newton, Isaac 627 see also Newtonian physics Bentley, R. 84; space 853 Newtonian physics divine action 757 Nicaragua 534 Nicene Creed 387 see also Athanasian Creed Nicholas of Autrecourt 628 Nicholas of Cusa 628–9 Nicholson, P.P. general will 308; state 859–60 Nickel, James W. discrimination 214 Niebuhr, Helmut Richard 629 Niebuhr, Reinhold 629–30 Christian realism 629; public theology 629 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm 630–1 Christianity reconciliation (Merezhkovskii, D.) 631; morality 631 Nifo, Agostino 632 Aristotelianism 632 nihilism 632 see also moral scepticism cosmic 632–3; epistemological 632; metaphysics (Heidegger, M.) 340; moral 632; Parmenidian ontology (Gorgias) 323; political 632; Russian 633 Niiniluoto, Ilkka Wright, G.H. von 922 nirvāṇa 633 see also enlightenment; liberation Nisbett, R.E. introspection, psychology of 402 Nishi Amane 634 Nishida Kitarō 634 influence of (Miki Kiyoshi) 572; logic 497 Nishitani Keiji 634
Kyoto School 447 Nissenbaum, Helen information technology and ethics 395; technology and ethics 877–8 Nkrumah, Kwame 15 Nō 944 noema Husserl, E. 369–70 nominalism 634–5 see also conventionalism; Platonism; realism abstract objects 4; Buddhist doctrine of 635; classical empiricism 634–5; universals 908 nominalism, scholastic formalism conflict (Gerson, J.) 312; propositional logic (Buridan, J.) 113; universals 454; William of Ockham 931 non-constructive rules of inference 635 non-monotonic logic 153 nonstandard analysis 27–8 Nooruddin, Ubai Orientalism in Islamic philosophy 649 Norman, Wayne federalism and confederalism 275 normative concepts deontic logic 202
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Page 1002 normative epistemology 636 epistemic advice 636; evaluative concepts 636; historical epistemology 636; non-naturalistic 636 normative relativism morality 597 normativity legal 636–7 norms social 837 Norrie, Alan Critical Legal Studies 181 Norris, Christopher deconstruction 196 Norris, John 637 North Africa Apuleius 42–3; Islamic philosophy 407–8 Norton, David Fate Hutcheson, F. 370 Norton, John D. Einstein, A. 234 Norway Næss, A. 608 Nosco, Peter Confucianism, Japanese 163–4 not-being impossibility of (Parmenides) 658 nothingness Gorgias 323 nouns descriptions 205; mass terms 534–5 nous (intellect) 637 Novak, J. Heschel, A.J. 351 novels theories of (Bakhtin, M.M.) 74–5 Nozick, Robert 637 numbers 637–8 see also arithmetic; cardinal; infinite; numerology; ordinal numinous experience Otto, R. 650–1 nursing ethics 638 see also bioethics; medical ethics Nussbaum, Martha C. love 511; morality and emotions 599–600 Nyāya Akṣapāda Gautama 306–7; Buddhism debate (Vātsyāyana) 913; Indian and Tibetan philosophy 388–9; substance-pluralism 545; testimony 882; Udayana 905; Uddyotakara 905
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Nyāyasūtra 306 Vātsyāyana commentary on 913 Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika 638 see also Nyāya; Nyāyasūtra; Vaiśeṣika Indian and Tibetan philosophy 388 Nyerere, Julius K. African philosophy 15 Nygren, Anders 639 Nylan, Michael Dong Zhongshu 215; Jia Yi 423–4; Yang Xiong 941; Zheng Xuan 946 Nyman, C. anti-Semitism 41 Oakeshott, Michael Joseph 640 Oberdan, T. Schlick, F.A.M. 800 object intuitive cognition (Duns Scotus, J.) 220–1 object permanence child development 145 objectivism phenomenology (Ingarden, R.W.) 396 objectivity 640 see also intersubjectivity anti-realism 640; East Asian philosophy 226–7; non-cognitivism 640; pure (Fichte, J.G.) 283; quietism 640; subjectivism 640; theory-laden observation 641 objects abstract 4; continuants 174–5; Indian concepts of 197; intentional (Hervaeus Natalis) 350 obligation engineering ethics 241; to future generations 301; to the Other (Levinas, E.) 483; political 640–1; promises 716; supererogation distinction 872 observation 641 coherence theory of justification 439; indirect 641; information 641; operationalism 646; social sciences 886 occasionalism 642 Malebranche, N. 521 occasions actual (Whitehead, A.N.) 929 Ockham’s Razor Durandus of St Pourçain 222; ontological commitment 644; universals 908
O’Connor, David K. Xenophon 938–9 Odin, Steve Watsuji Tetsurō 925 Ogyū Sorai 642 O’Hear, Anthony conservatism 170; culture 185–6; tradition and traditionalism 897 oikeiōsis (affiliation) 352 Okrent, Mark being 81–2 O’Leary-Hawthorne, J. imagination 384 Olivecrona, Karl 642 Oliver, Alex facts 270; logical atomism 504; ontological status of value 912
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< previous page Page 1003 Oliver, Amy A. marginality 525 Olivi, Peter John 643 Olkowski, Dorothea Deleuze, G. 198–9 Olsen, Frances privacy 710 Oman, John Wood 643 Omega rule 635 omnipotence 643 omnipresence 643–4 divine spatiality 643–4 omniscience 644 Omran, Elsayed al-Afghani 13; Ibn Sab‘in 377–8 One, the that-which-is (Melissus) 562 O’Neill, Eileen Astell, M. 62; Cavendish, M.L. 129; Elisabeth of Bohemia 236; Schurman, A.M. van 802 O’Neill, John socialism 844–5; theory and practice 886 O’Neill, Onora vulnerability and finitude 922 Ono, Sokyo 827 ontological commitment 644 criterion of 644; Quine, W.V. 733 ontological difference entity-being distinction (Heidegger, M.) 340 ontology 645 see also being; metaphysics abstract objects 4; Hartmann, N. 334; Indian philosophy 645 operant conditioning scientific behaviourism (Skinner, B.F.) 832 operationalism 646 Oppy, G. propositional attitudes 719 optics 646 see also light optimism Leibniz, G.W. 480 optionality freedom as 295 ordinal logics 647 ordinal theory measurement 550; rational choice theory 739–40 ordinary language philosophy 647 analytic philosophy 29; pragmatics 704
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Orenstein, Alex Quine, W.V. 732–3 Oresme, Nicole 648–9 organisms species 855 Organization of African Unity 654 organizations responsibility 768 Orientalism Islamic philosophy 649 Origen 649 Celsus 129 original sin 831 Niebuhr, R. 629; Pelagianism 664 Orphism 649 Orringer, Nelson R. Ortega y Gasset, J. 649–50; Unamuno y Jugo, M. De 906 Orrú, Marco Durkheim, É. 222 Ortega y Gasset, José 649–50 existentialism 266; phenomenology 671 Osler, Margaret J. Gassendi, P. 305 Oslo School 608 Oswald, James 650 Other ethical obligation to (Levinas, E.) 483; ‘I-Thou’ relationship (Buber, M.) 105; woman as (Irigaray, L.) 405 other minds child’s theory of mind 575; criteria 181 Otto, Rudolf 650–1 Outka, Gene situation ethics 832 Overton, Richard 651 Owen, Gwilym Ellis Lane 651 Owen, Robert 910 ownership socialism 844 Oxford Calculators 651–2 see also ratios Swineshead, Richard 651 pacification mental function (Freud, S.) 298 pacifism Erasmus, D. 252; Jainism 414 paganism banning of 33 Pagden, Anthony absolutism 4; Vitoria, F. de 919 Pagin, Peter intuitionistic logic 403–4 Pailin, David A.
Herbert, Edward 347 pain Epicureanism 245; utilitarianism (Bentham, J.) 83–4 Paine, Thomas 653 painting Chinese 11 Pakistan Vasubandhu 913 Palacký, František 188 Palestine Eusebius 261; Zionism 948
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Page 1004 Paley, William 653 natural religion 653 Panaccio, Claude William of Ockham 930 Panaetius 653–4 pan-Africanism 654 Pandektenrecht 794 panentheism 318 definition 318; omnipresence 643 panpsychism 654 see also process philosophy consciousness 654; metaphysics 569 Pan-Slavism 654 pantheism definition 318; omnipresence 643; vitalist (Herder, J.G.) 348 papal authority resistance to (Marsilius of Padua) 527; William of Ockham 930–1 Papineau, David functionalism 300–1 Paracelsus (Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim) 655 paradoxes Diodorus Cronus 211; epistemic 656; motion (Bergson, H.-L.) 85; semantic 656; set and property 656; set theory 656; time travel 893; Zeno 944 paranormal phenomena 657 psychokinesis 657 parapsychology 657 Parekh, Bhikhu Arendt, H. 46 Pareto principle 657 welfare economics 230 Pareto, Vilfredo rational choice theory 739–40 Parikh, Rohit Church’s theorem and the decision problem 140 Park Sung Bae Sôsan Hyujông 850; Wônhyo 936 Parkes, Graham Nishitani Keiji 634 Parmenides 33 cosmology 658; influence of (Melissus) 562 parody Cynics 186 Parra, Teresa de la 281 Parsons, Terence
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Montague, R.M. 590 particularism moral 595 particulars 658 see also universals metaphysics 568 particulate matter quantum field theory 286 Pascal, Blaise 659–60 see also Pascal’s wager Pascal’s wager 659–60 Pasnau, Robert Aureol, P. 66; Crathorn, W. 179; Holcot, R. 358; Olivi, P.J. 643 passions human nature (Hume, D.) 367; Hume, D. 367 Passmore, John A. 660 Patañjali 660 Indian and Tibetan philosophy 388–9; language 453 paternalism 660 pathé (subjectivism) Cyrenaics 187 Patočka, Jan 661 patristic philosophy 661 ancient philosophy distinction 35–6; Tertullian 881 Patrizi da Cherso, Francesco 662 Pattaro, Enrico Ross, A. 777 Paul the Apostle original sin 831 Paul of Venice 662–3 Pavlin, James Ibn Taymiyya 378–9 Payne, Steven mysticism 606 peace 925 see also pacifism Peckhaus, Volker Gentzen, G.K.E. 310; Zermelo, E. 945–6 Peczenik, Aleksander Olivecrona, K. 642; Petrażycki, L. 669 pedagogy humanist (Vives, J.L.) 920 Peerenboom, R.P. law and ritual in Chinese philosophy 465–6 Peirce, Charles Sanders fallibilism 271 Pelagianism 664 original sin 831 Pelletier, Francis Jeffry mass terms 534–5 perception 664–5 see also experience; misperception; sensation; sense perception; senses
autonomy from cognitive inference 586; bodily sensations 91–2; cognitive contamination of 586; conscious/unconscious distinction (Leibniz, G.W.) 481; epistemic issues 665; fallibility 666; Gestalt psychology 313; modularity of mind 586; Molyneux problem 588; noema (Husserl, E.) 369–70; secondary qualities 810–11; substance 869 perceptual beliefs empiricism 239–40 perceptual knowledge 665
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< previous page Page 1005 perceptual recognition knowledge acquisition 666 Perecz, László Hungary, philosophy in 368–9 Pereira, Michela alchemy 21 perfectionism 666 private judgment (Godwin, W.) 320 performatives 455 Austin, J.L. 67; speech acts 666 performing arts aesthetics 9 Peripateticism Islamic philosophy 406–7 Peripatetics 666–7 see also Peripateticism Alexander of Aphrodisias 23; Carneades 124; Diogenes Laertius 212; Strato 864; Theophrastus 884 Perler, Dominik Alighieri, Dante 24; Hervaeus Natalis 350; Nicholas of Autrecourt 628 permanent revolution Chinese Marxism 530 Perry, John possible worlds semantics 817; situation semantics 818 Persia al-‘Amiri 27; al-Baghdadi 74; al-Dawani 193; al-Ghazali 314; Ibn Miskawayh 376; al-Juwayni 431; Mir Damad, Muhammad Baqir 582; Mulla Sadra 603; al-Razi, Abu Bakr 744; al-Razi, Fakhr al-Din 744; al-Sabzawari 790; al-Sijistani 829–30; al-Suhrawardi 870–1; al-Tawhidi 876; al-Tusi 903 personal identity 667 see also identity; self concrete 601; continuous consciousness (Locke, J.) 493; ethics 667; fission of persons thought experiment 667; Locke, J. 493; morality 600–1; reincarnation 751 personalism 667–8 Bowne, B.P. 98;
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definition 667 personality Akan philosophical psychology 19; property 717–18 persons 668 see also personal identity Akan philosophical psychology 19; East Asian Philosophy 227; fission problem 667; intentions (Sellars, W.S.) 815; respect for 767–8; self-respect 814; sociality (Il’enkov, E.V.) 382 Peru colonial philosophy 460 pessimism freedom 294 Peter of Auvergne 668 Peter of Spain 668–9 Peterson, Erik 884 Petrarca, Francesco 669 Petrażycki, Leon 669 Pettit, Philip desire 205–6; political philosophy 690; social laws 836–7 phenomena paranormal 657 phenomenal consciousness 167 see also qualia introspection 168; physicalism 168 phenomenalism 669 see also antirealism empiricism 240; physical object statements 669 phenomenology 670 epistemic issues in 670; Latin America 671–2; methods (Ingarden, R.W.) 396; perception (Merleau-Ponty, M.) 565; of religion 672; descriptive 672; existential 672; scientific 672; Shpet, G.G. 827 Philip the Chancellor 672 Phillips, David emotive meaning 238 Phillips, Stephen H. Aurobindo Ghose 66; Brahman 100; Gangeśa 305; monism, Indian 589; Vedānta School 913 Philo of Alexandria 672–3 Jewish philosophy 36 Philo the Dialectician 673 Philo of Larissa 673 Philodemus 673
Philolaus 674 cosmology 674 Philoponus 674 philosopher-rulers Plato 678–9 philosophes Helvétius, C.-A. 344; influence on Russian Enlightenment 242 philosophical analysis Moore, G.E. 592 Philp, Mark corruption 177; Godwin, W. 344 physical world idealism 379; knowledge of 402; panpsychism 654 physicalism parapsychology relationship 657 physics computability and information 156; determinism and indeterminism 206; divine action theories 757; optics 646; Stoicism 863 Piaget, Jean 675 moral development 593 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni 676 pietism 676–7
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< previous page Page 1006 Pine, Martin L. Pomponazzi, P. 693 Pink, Thomas will 929 Pintore, Anna institutionalism in law 397 Planck, Max Karl Ernst Ludwig 677 Plant, Raymond political philosophy 693 Platform Sutra 677 Plato 677 see also Neoplatonism; Platonism Academy 4; akrasia 20; Callicles 119; cave analogy 678–9; commentaries on (Calcidius) 119; conservatism 170; death 195; dualism 851–2; educational philosophy 231; emotions 238; Form of the Good 322; illumination 383; immutability 385; Islamic political philosophy 692; Parmenidean paradox 679; perfect goodness 322; persons 668; philosopher-rulers 678–9; politics 679; scope of works 34; Socratic dialogues 847; unconscious mental states 906; universals 908; vocabulary 33 Plato of Tivoli 420 Platonism Academy 4; Alcinous 21; Apuleius 42; Aquinas, T. 43; Cambridge 120; Early 679; Islamic philosophy 680; mathematical 745; medieval 680; Middle 679; Numenius 638; Renaissance 681–2; Speusippus 856 Platti, E. 372 plausibility 124 play child’s theory of mind 575–6 pleasure 682 Epicureanism 245;
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hedonism 336; sexual 824; utilitarianism 909 Plekhanov, Georgii Valentinovich 682 dialectical materialism 208; Marxism, Russian 532 Plotinus 683 ancient philosophy 33; necessary being 619 pluralism 683 see also cognitive pluralism; moral pluralism;multiculturalism; religious pluralism; substance-pluralism; value pluralism cognitive 146; culture 683; relativism 683 plurality Zeno of Elea 944–5 Pluta, Olaf Ailly, P. d’ 19 Plutarch of Chaeronea 683 ethics 684; first principles 684 pneuma (spirit) 684 poetry Chinese 11; Hesiod 351; Homer 361; Islamic philosophy 11; Lucretius 512; Parmenides 658; Philodemus 673; Timon of Philius 893; Xenophanes 938 Poincaré, Jules Henri 685 Poland 685–6 Ajdukiewicz, K. 19; Boehme, J. 92; Copernicus, N. 177; Heschel, A.J. 351; Ingarden, R.W. 396; Keckermann, B. 436; Kotarbiń ski, T. 443; Krochmal, N. 445; Leśniewski, S. 482; logic 686–7; Łukasiewicz, J. 513; Luxemburg, R. 514; medieval period 686; Meyerson, É. 571; Petrażycki, L. 669; Post, E.L. 698; Tarski, A. 875–6; Twardowski, K. 903; Wróblewski, J. 937 Polanyi, Michael 686 tacit knowledge 442 polemic anti-Christian (Celsus) 129 political authority 68 Marsilius of Padua 527;
religious authority conflict 756 political philosophy 687–9 see also government; law; politics; state Alighieri, Dante 24; anarchism 31; anarchism (Godwin, W.) 320; commonwealth (Hobbes, T.) 357–8; communism 154–5; communitarianism 155; confederalism 275; conservatism 170; constitutionalism 171; contractarianism 175–6; democracy 199–200; fascism 273–4; federalism 275; feminist 280; government (Kauṭilya) 435; green 324–5; history of 690–2; human nature (Arendt, H.) 46; Indian 692; interference with individual morality 464; Islam 408; liberalism 486; libertarianism 487–8; market economy (Smith, A.) 834; Mohism 587; Montesquieu, C.L. 591; moral pluralism 596; nationalism 610–11; nature of 693; religion 756–7; Renaissance 765; republicanism 767; revolution 770; social democracy 836; socialism 844–5; totalitarianism 896; value pluralism (Berlin, I.) 86; William of Ockham 931 political realism international relations 400 political representation 766 see also democracy; government; state political theology 884 politics art relationship (Belinskii, V.G.) 83; party (Burke, E.) 114 polytheism pre-Columbian religions 463 Pompa, L. Vico, G. 914 Pomponazzi, Pietro 693 Popkin, Richard H. Charron, P. 132; Montaigne, M.E. de 590–1;
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Page 1007 Sanches, F. 791; scepticism, Renaissance 796 Popper, Karl Raimund 693 falsificationism 693–4; logic of discovery 213 population ethics 694; genetics 308–9 populism Russian (Mikhailovskii, N.K.) 572 pornography 694 Porphyry 695 Porter, R. Hartley, D. 333–4; Johnson, S. 426 Port-Royal 695 see also Arnauld, A.; Jansenism Portugal Abravanel, I. 3; Abravanel, J. 3; Collegium Conimbricense 147–8; Fonseca, P. da 288; John of St Thomas 425–6; Molina, L. de 587–8; Peter of Spain 668–9 Posidonius 696 positivism autochthonous 697; Comte, A. 158; Condorcet, M.J.A.N. 161; Russian 696; in the social sciences 696 possibility master argument (Diodorus Cronus) 211–12; modal logic 583–4; modal operators 585 possible worlds 697–8 counterfactual conditionals 179; intensionaln logics 398; modal logic 501–2 Post, Emil Leon 698 postcolonialism 698–9 see also development ethics philosophy of science 698 Poster, Mark Baudrillard, J. 77 postmodern theology 699 postmodernism 699–700 alterity and identity 25; anti-postmodernism 700; assumptions 700; consumer culture (Baudrillard, J.) 77; functionalism contrast 301; logical empiricism (Hempel, C.G.) 344–5; Lyotard, J.-F. 514; political philosophy 700; reflexiveness 700;
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revolution 770; social theory and law 844 post-structuralism 701 consumer culture (Baudrillard, J.) 77; in the social sciences 701–2 potentiality Indian theories of 702 Pothier, Robert Joseph 702 Potter, Michael D. arithmetic 52; set theory 823 Pound, Roscoe 703 poverty development ethics 206 power 703 see also authority republicanism 767 practical reasoning 742 ethics 703; expected utility theory 742; Game theory 742; motivational power 743; rational action 742–3; theoretical reason contrast 742; theories of 742 practice theory relationship 886 pradhāna (primal matter) 545 pragmatic a priori Lewis, C.I. 484 pragmatics 456 see also implicature; semantics pragmatism 704 see also instrumentalism American (Mead, G.H.) 546; conversational implicature (Grice, H.P.) 325–6; humanism 365; truth 900 praise 705 see also merit; moral luck; rectification; remainders prakṛti Sānkhya 792 praxeology 705 prayer 706 for the dead 726; ritual 774 pre-Columbian thought 463 Mexican philosophy 571 predestination 706 see also divine election; reprobation Calvin, J. 119 predetermination Islamic moral philosophy 259 predicate calculus 707 notation 707–8 predicate logic free logics 293 predicate operators adverbs 6 predicates
adverbs 6; modal operators as 585 predication 708 see also predicates manifoldness, Jaina theory of 523; property theory 718 prediction in the social sciences 843 preface paradox 656 preference rational choice theory 739 Preisendanz, Karin Gautama, A. 306; Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika 638 prescriptivism 708 presence logocentricity (Derrida, J.) 203 Presocratics 708 Alcmaeon 22; Anaxagoras 31; Anaximander 32; Anaximenes 32;
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Page 1008 Archytas 45; Cratylus 180; Democritus 200; Diogenes of Apollonia 212; dominant concerns of 33; Empedocles 239; Gorgias 322; Heraclitus 346; Hesiod 351; Leucippus 483; Melissus 562; Parmenides 658; Philolaus 674; Pythagoras 728; Thales 883; Thucydides 890; Xenophanes 938; Zeno of Elea 944–5 presupposition 708 semantic 708–9; sociological theories 846; Strawsonian 708 Preuß, Ulrich K. constitutionalism 171 Price, A.W. Hare, R.M. 333 Price, Richard 709 ethical rationalism 709 Prichard, Harold Arthur 709 Priest, Graham numbers 637–8; paraconsistent logic 655 Priestley, Joseph 710 primary linguistic data (PLD) 139 primates language experiments 37 printing 763 Prior, Arthur Norman 710 privacy 710 see also private language argument journalism ethics 427 private language argument private states 712 probabilism 430 see also Bayesian epistemology; confirmation theory probability interpretations of 712; science of man (Condorcet, M.J.A.N.) 161; scientific reasoning (Keynes, J.M.) 437 probability theory epistemology 712–13 procedural natural law Fuller, L.L. 299 process philosophy 713 central task 713 process theism 713–14 classical theism comparison 713–14;
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providence 722 process theology Holocaust 361 processes 714 see also change events 714 Proclus 714 Liber de causis 485 Procopé, John Hermetism 349 Prodicus 715 professional ethics 715 see also business ethics; engineering ethics; medical ethics; nursing ethics progress evolutionary theory 263; human nature (Condorcet, M.J.A.N.) 161 projectivism 715 promising 716 see also honour; trust pronouns reference 749 proof Lakatos, I. 449 proof theory 716–17 proper names 717 see also names; nouns descriptions 748; fictional characters 284; historical-causal theory 717; modal logic 501–2 properties aesthetic 8; essentialism 254; indiscernibility of identicals 381; numbers 658–9; universals 908 property 717–18 see also ownership anarchism 31; communism 154 property theory 718 see also properties prophecy 718–19 naturalistic 718; supernatural 718–19 proportion punishment 181; reciprocity 746 propositional attitude statements 719 see also propositional attitudes intensional logics 398 propositional attitudes analytic behaviourism (Dennett, D.C.) 201; phenomenology 671 propositional certainty 129 propositional S5 modal logic 583–4 propositions 720–1 see also intensional entities; propositional attitude statements; propositional attitudes prosaics
poetics comparison (Bakhtin, M.M.) 74–5 Protagoras 721 relativism 752; Sophists 850 Protestantism Calvin, J. 119; enthusiasm 243; Liberal (Unamuno y Jugo, M. De) 906; pietism 676; purgatory 726; sanctification 791–2 provability logic 721 providence 722 see also predestination Molinism 588 providentialism deistic (Voltaire) 921 prudence 722 cultivation of (Vico, G.) 914–15
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< previous page Page 1009 Pseudo-Dionysius 722 Pseudo-Grosseteste 723 psi(-phenomena) physicalism 657 psychē (soul) 723 psychoanalysis Freud, S. 298; methodological issues in 723; post-Freudian 724 psychokinesis paranormal phenomena 657 psychological certainty epistemic 129 psychological hedonism 336 psychologism Frege, G. 297 psychology analytical (Jung, C.G.) 427; artificial intelligence 58; behaviourism 81; child’s theory of mind 575; cognitive development (Piaget, J.) 675; common-sense reasoning 153; connectionism 166; consciousness 167–8; eliminativism 236; folk 287; indexical content of thought 173; infant cognition 145; influence on philosophy of mind 581; learning 474; mental causation 564; mental imagery 384; methodological individualism (MI) 570; modularity of mind 586; moral development 593; nativism 611; parapsychology 657; split brains 858; theories of 724–5; vision 918; Vygotskii, L.S. 922 psycho-physical parallelism 725 see also mind-body problem psychophysics introspection 402 Ptolemy 725 ancient philosophy 36 public private distinction 710 public interest 725 see also general will public theology Niebuhr, R. 629 Pufendorf, Samuel 725 punishment abolitionism 181;
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actual sin 831; blame 600; censure 181; consequentialism 180–1; crime 180; purgatorial 726; retributivism 181; social control (Mozi) 587; soul (al-‘Amiri) 27; utilitarianism (Bentham, J.) 84 Pure Land Buddhism Shinran 826; Zhi Dun 946 pure theory of law Weyr, F. 927–8 purgatory 726 purification purgatory 726 Puritanism pietism 676 Purtill, Richard L. Lewis, C.S. 484–5 puruṣa Sānkhya 792 Putnam, Hilary 726 meaning 726 Pye, J. 737 Pylyshyn, Zenon cognitive architecture 145–6; modularity of mind 586 Pyrrho of Elis 727 see also Pyrrhonian scepticism Timon 893 Pyrrhonian Scepticism 34 see also Pyrrho of Elis Aenesidemus 6; Agrippa 18; Sextus Empiricus 823 Pythagoras 728 see also Neo-Pythagoreanism; Pythagoras’ theorem; Pythagoreanism school of 35 Pythagoreanism 728 see also Neo-Pythagoreanism; Orphism Archytas 45; Philolaus 674; school of 33
qi (material force) 729 see also ki qualia 580 see also phenomenal consciousness; sense-data colour 149; consciousness 168; functionalism 300 qualities secondary 810–11 quantification Herbrand’s theorem 347; inference 729 quantifiers 729–30
count nouns 535; generalized 730; substitutional/objectual 730–1 quantum logic 731 quantum mechanics Bell’s theorem 83; Bohr, N. 94–5; Copenhagen interpretation (Bohr, N. 94–5 Putnam, H. 726); Einstein, A. 235; field theory 286; interpretation of 731; metaphysics 807; religion 757; uncertainty principle (Heisenberg, W.) 342 Quayson, Ato postcolonialism 698–9 Queen, S. 215 Quesnay, Francois 839 questions 732 quietism objectivity 640 Quine, Willard Van Orman 732–3 analytic philosophy 29; radical translation 457; set theory 823; verificationism 548
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Page 1010 Quinn, Philip L. asceticism 61; religion, philosophy of 761; religious pluralism 762; self-control 812; sin 831–2 quotation use/mention distinction 909 Qur’an creation of 127; divine law 467; Persian translation (Shah Wali Allah) 825; revelation 769; sin 831 Qutb, Sayyid paganism 406 Rabbinic theology 884 halakhah 329; Karaism 433–4 Rabelais, François 734 race 734 see also discrimination; multiculturalism; racism Rachels, James animals and ethics 37 racism affirmative action 13; pan-Africanism 654; sport 858–9 Radbruch, Gustav 734–5 Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli 735 radical conventionalism Ajdukiewicz, K. 19 radical interpretation 735 radical novelty revolution 770 radical translation 735 cultural relativism (Davidson, D.) 741; Quine, W.V. 733 Rahner, Karl 736 Railton, Peter analytic ethics 28–9 Ramakrishna Movement 736 Rāmānuja 737 Indian and Tibetan philosophy 389 Ramsey, Frank Plumpton 737 see also Ramsey sentences decision theory 737 Ramsey, Ian Thomas 737 Ramsey sentences 737 Ramus, Petrus 738 Rand, Ayn 738 randomness 738 see also chaos theory chance 738; computability and information 155 Raphals, Lisa
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Chinese classics 135–6 Rashdall, Hastings 738–9 ratio scales measurement theory 550 rational argument Anselm of Canterbury 39 rational beliefs 739 see also justification rational choice theory 739–40 see also decision theory; game theory democracy 740; game theory 739 rational justification Frege, G. 296 rationalism 740 Abelard, P. 2; critical (Popper, K.R.) 694; Mu‘tazila 411; nativism 611; thought experiments 890 rationality of belief 742; and cultural relativism 741–2; economics 230; practical 742; tradition 897 ratios language of (Oresme, N.) 648–9 Rawls, John 743–4 contractarianism 175–6 al-Razi, Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariyya’ 744 al-Razi, Fakhr al-Din 744 Read, Stephen relevance logic and entailment 753 realism 744 see also antirealism; critical realism; legal realism; logical realism; moral realism; nominalism; political realism; scientific antirealism; scientific realism; systematic realism bivalence 404; colour, theories of 150; ideal (Lossky, N.O.) 510; Nyāya (Vātsyāyana) 913; Prichard, H.A. 709; sophisticated (Ayer, A.J.) 72; universals 908 reality flux (Cratylus) 180; science, philosophy of 806–7 reason autonomy (Kant, I.) 432; development of (Ibn Tufayl) 379; Native American philosophy 611; scripture (Ibn Hazm) 375; theoretical-practical integration (Fichte, J.G.) 283; traditionalism 897; validation (Descartes, R.) 204 reasonableness ethical inquiry (Peirce, C.S.) 705 reasoning belief acquisition 742; epistemic relativism 246; holism 360; inductive (Broad, C.D.) 102;
medical 552; rational 739; role of imagery (Le Doeuff, M.) 473 reasons and causes 745–6 rebirth Indian conceptions of 434 Recanati, François pragmatics 703 reciprocity 746 recognition 746 communication (Grice, H.P.) 154; Hegelian historical development (Kojève, A.) 443; moral punishment 600
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Page 1011 rectification 746–7 see also blame; praise; punishment; remainders forgiveness 747; gratitude 747; mercy 747 recursion-theoretic hierarchies 747 Redmond, Walter Latin America, colonial thought in 460 Redondi, Pietro Koyré, A. 443 reduction 747 eidetic (Husserl, E.) 370; transcendental (Husserl, E.) 370 reductionism philosophy of mind 748; realism relationship (Nagel, T.) 609 reductive naturalism religious pluralism 762 reductive programme proof theory 717 Reeve, Andrew political representation 766 reference 748 see also descriptions; extensionality; sense; sense and reference; signification; supposition cognitive significance 820; Frege, G. 205; Evans, G. 261; fictional characters 284; intensionality 398; modal logic 501–2; proper names 717; Quine, W.V. 733 reflection internal sense (Locke, J.) 493; Ryle, G. 787 reflective hedonism 336 Reformation Calvin, J. 119; critique of (Troeltsch, E.P.W.) 899; educational philosophy 231; Erasmus, D. 252; justification doctrine 431 reformation revolution distinction 770 Reformed epistemology 758 Régis, Pierre-Sylvain 749 regularities laws of nature 472 Reichenbach, Hans 749 Reid, Thomas 750 Aberdeen Philosophical Society 2; common-sense philosophy 861–2; commonsense ethics 152 conception first principles 750; social epistemology 836 Reinach, Adolf 751
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reincarnation 751 see also rebirth enlightenment 751; Pythagoreanism (Empedocles) 239; theosophy 886 relation ‘I-Thou’ mode (Buber, M.) 105; mystical union as aim of (Buber, M.) 105 relational theories colour, perception of 150 relations ontological commitment 644; particulars 658–9; property theory 718 relativism 752 see also cultural relativism; epistemic relativism; meta-ethics; moral relativism; normativerelativism; social relativism linguistic (Zhuangzi) 495–6; pluralism 683; scientific constructivism 172; truth 752 relativity theory general 308; philosophical significance of 807; special 752; time travel 893 relevance logic 169 reliabilism 753 cognition (Wodeham, A.) 934; Gangeśa 305; Nyāya 251; virtue epistemology 917 religion ancient philosophy relationship 35; asceticism 61; causes of (Hume, D.) 367; certainty (Sergeant, J.) 821; critiques of 757; culture 185; deism (Butler, J.) 116; enthusiasm 243; and epistemology 754–5; morality 755–6; phenomenology of 672; philosophy of 759; political philosophy 756–7; pre-Columbian America 463; science and 757; traditional African 17; typology 672 religious belief certainty 754; de facto/de jure question 755; evidentialism 754 religious epistemology 758 Calvin, J. 119; illumination theories 383; justification 758; physics 757 religious existentialism Shestov, L. 826
religious experience 761 mysticism 606; numinous (Otto, R.) 650–1; supernatural (Oman, J.W.) 643; visions (Hildegard of Bingen) 353 religious knowledge Calvin, J. 119; illumination theories 383; justification of 758; personal experience (Bowne, B.P.) 98 religious language 759 predicates 762; Ramsey, I.T. 737; terminology 762 religious philosophy history of 758–9 religious pluralism 762 remainders 746–7 see also rectification; regret guilt 747 Renaissance ancient philosophy influence 35–6; Aristotelianism 49–50; language 459; logic 503–4; philosophy 762–5; Platonism 681–2; scepticism 796 renaissance, Carolingian 124 Renner, Karl 765
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Page 1012 Rennie, Bryan Stephenson Eliade, M. 235 Repellini, Ferruccio Franco Ptolemy 725 representation political 766; saying/showing (Wittgenstein, L.) 933 representational art truth 54 reprobation 766 reproduction ethics 766–7 republicanism 767 Harrington, J. 333; Machiavelli, N. 516; social contract theory (Rousseau, J.-J.) 777–8 Rescher, Nicholas fallibilism 271 research embryonic and foetal 766; social sciences 839–40 responsibilities of scientists and intellectuals 768 see also bioethics; engineering ethics; technology, ethics responsibility 768 causa sui 294; faith 271; incompatibilism 294 Restall, Greg logical laws 505 resurrection 769 Fëdorov, N.F. 275; heaven 335 retributivism punishment 181 revelation 760 see also religious experience divine/human action 273; naturalt heology 615; philosophy incompatibility (Shestov, L.) 826; propositional 769; secular learning relationship 189; transcendent (Thielicke, H.) 887 revolution 770 see also communism; Marxism; socialism Luxemburg, R. 514; social (Marcuse, H.) 525 revolutions, scientific chemistry 133; experiment 267; Kuhn, T.S 387; matter 544 reward social control (Mozi) 587; of the soul (al‘Amiri) 27 Rey, Georges computational theories of mind 576; concepts 159;
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eliminativism 236; folk psychology 287; language of thought hypothesis 455; mind, philosophy of 577–8; Skinner, B.F. 832; unconscious mental states 906 Ṛg Veda Brahman 100 rGyal tshab dar ma rin chen (Gyeltsap darma rinchen) 770 rhetoric 770–1 human nature (Campbell, G.) 121; Islamic philosophy 11; Renaissance humanism 365 Rhineland school of mysticism 873 rhizome Deleuze, G. 198 Rhodes Panaetius 653–4 Riasanovsky, Nicholas V. Eurasian Movement 260; Pan-Slavism 654 Richard of Middleton 771 Richard of St Victor 771 Richard Rufus of Cornwall 771 Richard, Mark compositionality 156; scope 809; substitutional/objectual quantifers 730–1 Richardson, Robert C. vitalism 919 Ricoeur, Paul 772 rights 772–3 feminist jurisprudence 279; justification 772–3; as legal relations (Hohfeld, W.N.) 358; natural law 613 Rigo, Caterina Hillel ben Samuel of Verona 353; Immanuel ben Solomon of Rome 384–5; Judah ben Moses of Rome 427 Riley, Patrick Fénelon, F. 281–2; Gerdil, G.S. 312 Ripstein, Arthur multiculturalism 604 risk 773 Risser, James Barthes, R. 76 ritual 774 see also sacraments ethical value 774; sacraments 790 Ro Youngchan Yi Yulgok 941 Roberts, Julian honour 361–2; Lorenzen, P. 509 Robinet, Isabelle Guanzi 327 Robinson, Howard
materialism 535–6 Robinson, Neal ‘Abduh, M. 1; Ash‘ariyya and Mu‘tazila 61–2; Ibn al-‘Arabi 372–3 Rochefoucauld, François, Duc de la 599 Rogers, G.A.J. Bold, S. 95; Charleton, W. 132; Glanvill, J. 316 Rohault, Jacques 774 Rohr, Michael David Rorty, R. 775 Roman Catholicism Aristotelianism conciliation (White, T.) 928; justification doctrine 431; killing of innocents 397; liberation theology 487; limbo 489; purgatory 726; Russia (Solov’ëv, V.S.) 849–50;
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< previous page Page 1013 sacraments 790; sanctification 791 Roman Empire Manicheism 522–3 Roman law 774 civilian tradition 775; Gaius 303; Justinian 431 Roman philosophy Alexander of Aphrodisias 23; Ammonius 27; Celsus of Alexandria 129; Cicero, M.T. 141; Galen 304; Lucretius 512; Marcus Aurelius 524–5; Musonius Rufus 605; Neoplatonism 624; Plotinus 683; Porphyry 695; Seneca, L.A. 819 Romania Eliade, M. 235 Romanticism German 775 Rome Augustine of Hippo 63; Boethius, A.M.S. 92; Cicero, M.T. 141; Gaius 303–4; Galen 304; Immanuel ben Solomon of 384–5; Judah ben Moses of 427; Justinian 431; Lucretius 512; Marcus Aurelius 524–5; Marius Victorinus 526; Musonius Rufus 605; Tertullian, Q.S.F. 881; Themistius 883 Rorty, Richard 775 post-structuralism 701; pragmatism 704 Rosati, Connie S. ideals 380 Roscelin of Compiègne 776 Rosenberg, Alan Blanchot, M. 90–1 Rosenberg, Alex sociobiology 845 Rosenberg, Jay F. Sellars, W.S. 815 Rosenkrantz, Gary omnipotence 643 Rosenthal, Bernice Glatzer Bulgakov, S.N. 112; Rozanov, V.V. 778;
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Russian religious-philosophical Renaissance 786; Shestov, L. 825 Rosenthal, David M. dualism 217–18 Rosenthal, Sandra B. Lewis, C.I. 484 Rosenzweig, Franz 776 German Idealism 776; Jewish philosophy 422; New Thinking 776 Rosicrucianism 287 Rosmaita, Brian Neumann, J. von 626 Ross, Alf 777 Ross, William David 777 Roth, H.D. Huainanzi 363; Yangzhu 941 Roth, Michael S. Kojève, A. 443 Rouse, Joseph Heideggerian philosophy of science 341 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 777 civil society 777–8; contractarianism 175–6; education 232; education 778; general will 308 Rowe, William L. agnosticism 17; atheism 62–3; deism 198; divine freedom 295–6 Rowson, E.K. al-Tawhidi 876 Royce, Josiah 778 Rozanov, Vasilii Vasil’evich 778 Ruben, David-Hillel explanation in history and social science 268 Rubenstein, Richard L. 361 Rudavsky, T.M. Ibn Tzaddik, J. 379 Ruge, Arnold 779 rule of law 779–80 judicial obligation 780; justice 780; socialism (Hessen, S.I.) 352 rule-following meaning 546 rulers philosopher-rulers (Plato) 678–9 rules sport ethics 858 rule-scepticism Llewellyn, K.N. 492 Rumfitt, Ian meaning and understanding 548; presupposition 708 Rummel, Erika Erasmus, D. 252
Runia, David T. Diogenes Laertius 212; doxography 216–17; Philo of Alexandria 672–3 Russell, Bertrand Arthur William 780–1 see also Russell’s paradox descriptions 205; Frege, G. 296; ordinary language philosophy 648 Russell’s paradox 656 Russia 782–6 see also Soviet Union; Ukraine Bakhtin, M.M. 74; Bakunin, M.A. 75; Belinskii, V.G. 83; Bogdanov, A.A. 94; Bulgakov, S.N. 112; Chaadaev, P.I. 130; Chernyshevskii, N.G. 134; Dostoevskii, F.M. 215; Eurasian movement 260; Fëdorov, N.F. 275; Florenskii, P.A. 287; Frank, S.L. 291; Hegelianism 339; Herzen, A.I. 350; Hessen, S.I. 351; Il’in, I.A. 382; Kojève, Alexandre 443; Koyré, A. 443; Kropotkin, P.A. 445–6; Lavrov, P.L. 464; Lenin, V.I. 482; Leont’ev, K.N. 482; liberalism 486; Russian philosophy 784; literary formalism 781; Losev, A.F. 510; Lossky, N.O. 510; medieval philosophy 560;
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Page 1014 Mikhailovskii, N.K. 572; Neo-Kantianism 624; Nietzsche: impact on Russian thought 631; Plekhanov, G.V. 682; populism (Lavrov, P.L.) 464; positivism 696; religious-philosophical renaissance 786; Rozanov, V.V. 778; Schellingianism 798; Signposts movement 829; Solov’ëv, V.S. 849; Tolstoi, L. N. 895; Trotsky, L. 899 Russian empiriocriticism 781 Marxism 532 ‘Russian Idea’ Berdiaev, N.A. 783 Russian Materialism 782 Russian Symbolism religious-philosophical Renaissance 787 Rutherford, Donald universal language 907 Ryan, Alan systems theory in social science 874 Ryckman, T.A. general relativity, philosophical responses to 308; geometry 310–11; Weyl, H. 927 Ryle, Gilbert 787–8 categories 125 Sa skya panḍita Kun dga’ rgyal mtshan (Sakya Panḍita) 789 Saadiah Gaon 789 Jewish philosophy 419 śābdapramāṇa (knowledge through words) 882 al-Sabzawari, al-Hajj Mulla Hadi 790 sacramentality of the universe 790 sacraments 790 see also baptism; Eucharist; marriage the sacred Eliade, M. 235 sacrifice killing prohibition (Empedocles) 239 Saint-Simon, Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de utopianism 910 Śaivism 2 Salamun, Kurt Jaspers, K. 417 Salmon, Wesley C. Reichenbach, H. 749 salvation 790–1 see also justification, religious doctrine of; predestination Advaita Vedānta 791; Gnosticism 316; Ikhwan al-Safa’ 382; Jainism 791;
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through Jesus Christ 760; limbo 489; monotheism 790–1; pluralism 762; predestination 706–7; purgatory 726 Samos Melissus 562; Pythagoras 728 saṃsāra (cycles of existence) scope of 434 Samuelson, Norbert M. Ibn Daud, A. 373 Sanches, Francisco 791 sanctification 791–2 see also justification, religious doctrine of Roman Catholicism 791 Sandu, Gabriel quantifiers 729–30 Śankara 792 Indian and Tibetan philosophy 389 Sānkhya (Sāṃkhya) 792 see also Sānkhya-Yoga Indian and Tibetan philosophy 388; puruṣal prakṛti 792 Sānkhya-Yoga substance-pluralism 545 Sanskrit pronunciation 389–90 Santayana, George 793 epiphenomenalism 246 Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis 793 metaphysics 568 Sargent, Lyman Tower communism 154–5; utopianism 909–10 Sargent, Rose-Mary Boyle, R. 98 Sartre, Jean-Paul 793–4 anti-Semitism 41; L’Etre et le Néant ( Being and Nothingness) 793–4 Sass, Hans-Martin Feuerbach, L.A. 282; Ruge, A. 779 satire Lucian 512 satisfaction Incarnation (Anselm of Canterbury) 39 satisfaction-preservation imperative logic 386 Saussure, Ferdinand de 794 structuralism 865 Savigny, Friedrich Karl von 794 historical jurisprudence 428 Savoy Gerdil, G.S. 312 Saxony Crusius, C.A. 184 Sayre, Kenneth M. information theory 395 Sayre-McCord, Geoffrey
moral knowledge 594 Scandinavia 795 see also Denmark; Finland; Norway; Sweden legal realism 477–8; praxeology 705 Scanlan, James P. Berdiaev, N.A. 84; Lossky, N.O. 510; Russian materialism: ‘The 1860s’ 782; Russian philosophy 786; Vysheslavtsev, B.P. 923 Scanlan, Michael J. Post, E.L. 698 Scanlon, Thomas M. contractarianism 176; promising 716
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Page 1015 scepticism 795 see also Academic scepticism; certainty; doubt;fideism; moral scepticism; Pyrrhonian Scepticism contextualism 174; deductive closure principle 197; epistemology 248–9; fact (Frank, J.) 291; Greek 34; Holcot, R. 358; Oresme, N. 648–9; other minds 181; rational beliefs 739; reliabilist alternative 753–4; Renaissance 796; rul e(Llewellyn, K.N.) 492; solipsism 849; transcendental arguments 897 Schabas, Margaret Keynes, J.M. 437 Schaffner, Kenneth F. medicine, philosophy of 552 Schatzki, Theodore R. structuralism in social science 867 Scheler, Max Ferdinand Latin American phenomenology 671 Schellingianism 798 Scheman, Naomi linguistic discrimination 490 Schibli, Hermann S. Archytas 45–6; Neo-Pythagoreanism 626; Philolaus 674; Pythagoras 728; Pythagoreanism 728 Schlick, Friedrich Albert Moritz 800 Vienna Circle 800 Schmitt, Carl 800 theology, political 884 Schofield, Malcolm Alcmaeon 22; Anaxagoras 31–2; Antisthenes 42; Diogenes of Apollonia 212; Empedocles 239; Plato 677 Schofield, Robert E. Priestley, J. 710 scholasticism Alexander of Hales 23; historical development of 555–6; Iberian (Molina, L. de) 587; Olivi, P.J. 643 Schönfeld, Martin Fontenelle, B. de 288; Tschirnhaus, E.W. von 901 Schönfinkel, M. 150 School of Translators of Toledo 854 Schouls, Peter A.
revolution 770 Schrader-Frechette, Kristin risk assessment 773 Schroeder-Heister, Peter formal languages and systems 289 Schum, David A. legal evidence and inference 476 Schumpeter, Joseph Alois 802 Schütz, Alfred 802 Schweizer, Paul modal operators 585 Scibilia, Giovanni Lacoue-Labarthe, P. 449 science Alighieri, Dante 24; archaeology 44–5; Bohr, N. 94–5; Campbell, N.R. 121; chaos theory 131; chemistry 133; colour-perception conflict 150; computer 157–8; conservation principles 169; constructivism 171; Copernicus, N. 177; cosmology 177; critiques (Nietzsche, F.W.) 630; Darwin, C.R. 192; demarcation problem 199; determinism and indeterminism 206; Duhem, P.M.M. 218; ecology 229–30; Einstein, A. 234; electrodynamics 235; empiricism (Neurath, O.) 626; experiments 267; fallibilism 271; Feyerabend, P.K. 283; fictionalism 285; functional explanation 300; Galilei, G. 304; gender 307; general relativity 308; genetics 308; geology 310; Heideggerian philosophy of 341; Heisenberg, W. 342; Helmholtz, H. von 343; Hertz, H.R. 350; hierarchy of (Comte, A.) 158; Huxley, T.H. 371; incommensurability 387; information theory 395; Kepler, J. 436; Kuhn, T.S. 446; Le Roy, É.L.E.J. 474; Linnaeus, C. von 491; Marxist philosophy of 532; matter 544; Maxwell, J.C. 546;
medicine, philosophy of 552; metaphysics relationship 569–70; molecular biology 587; natural laws 472; naturalized philosophy of 617; Newton, I. 627; nineteenth century philosophy of 803; observation 641; operationalism 646; optics 646; Planck, M.K.E.L. 677; Poincaré, J.H. 685; quantum measurement problem 731; randomness 738; religion and 757; sociobiology 845; space 853; species 855; taxonomy 876; theories 885; thermodynamics 887; thought experiments 890; time 892; time travel 893; unityof 907; vitalism 919; Wallace, A.R. 924; Weyl, H. 927 science, philosophy of 804 French 297; postcolonial philosophy 698 scientific antirealism 808 entities 747; fictionalism 285 scientific method 808 experiment (Boyle, R.) 98–9; gender bias 276; logic of discovery 213; naturalized philosophy of science 617; theories 805–6 scientific philosophy feminism 307 scientific realism entities 747; Planck, M.K.E.L. 677; Putnam, H. 726; social science 809 scientists responsibilities of 768 scope 809 Scotland Aberdeen Philosophical Society 2;
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< previous page Page 1016 Alison, A. 25; Beattie, J. 79; Blair, H. 90; Brown, T. 103; Campbell, G. 121; Carmichael, G. 123; Common Sense School 152; Duns Scotus, J. 219–21; Eriugena, J.S. 252–3; Ferguson, A. 282; Gerard, A. 311; Home, H. 361; Hume, D. 366; Kemp Smith, Norman 436; Major, J. 521; Millar, J. 574; Monboddo, Lord (James Burnett) 589; Oswald, J. 650; Reid, T. 750; Richard of St Victor 771; Smith, A. 834; Stair, J.D. 859; Stewart, D. 861–2; Turnbull, G. 903; Witherspoon, J. 932 Scott, D.S. lambda calculus 450 Scripture church authority (Wyclif, J.) 937; commentaries on (Origen) 649 Searle, John Rogers 809–10 Chinese room argument 138 Seban, Jean-Loup Barth, K. 76; Boehme, J. 92; Bonhoeffer, D. 96; Brunner, E. 103; Bultmann, R. 113; Tindal, M. 893–4; Troeltsch, E.P.W. 899 second-order logic 810 mathematics 811 secularism political authority (Marsilius of Padua) 527 secularization salvation concept 791 Sedivy, Sonia Nagel, T. 609 Sedley, David N. ancient philosophy 33–6; aretē 46; Ariston of Chios 47; atomism, ancient 63; Chrysippus 140; Cleanthes 144; Dialectical school 208; Epicureanism 244;
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Epicurus 245; Megarian school 561; Melissus 562; Parmenides 658; Presocratics 708; Stoicism 862; Zeno of Citium 944 Sefirot Kabbalah 432 Segal, Gabriel indirect discourse 391; methodological individualism 570 Segerberg, Krister dynamic logics 224 Seidler, M.J. Crusius, C.A. 184 seiza (quiet-sitting) 299 Selden, John 811 self cogito argument (Descartes, R.) 204; continuity of 812; disordered (Kant, I.) 812; efficient/appreciativeaspects(Iqbal,M.) 404; enduring 402; finitude (Fichte, J.G.) 283–4; indexicals 201; Indian theories of 812; postmodern critique of subject 868; pragmatism 704; self-control 812; symbolic interactionism 873 self-certificationalism Mīmāṃsā 251 self-control 812 see also akrasia self-cultivation Chinese philosophy 812–13; East Asian Philosophy 228 self-deception 813–14 ethics of 814 self-improvement introspection 402 self-interest rational choice theory 739 self-knowledge sport 859 self-realization 814 self-respect 814–15 forgiveness 289 Sellars, Wilfrid Stalker 815 Sellmann, James D. Lushi chunqiu 513 selves, community of McTaggart, J.M.E. 517 semantics 456 see also meaning; possible worlds; pragmatics;reference; truth-conditions adverbs 6; anaphora 30–1; bivalence 404; cognitive 457;
compositionality 156; concepts 159; conceptual role 816; descriptions 205; discourse 213; fiction 284; game-theoretic 816–17; holism 360; ideal language philosophy 704; indexicals 201; Indian philosophy 453; modal logic 584; predication 708; situation 818; teleological 818 semiotics 456 see also signification; signs literary theory (Barthes, R.) 76; Moscow-Tartu school 602 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus 33 sensation bodily 91–2; external world (Descartes, R.) 204; perception distinction (Bergson, H.-L.) 85; phenomenalism 669; qualia 729 sense perception fallibility of 628 sense and reference 820 see also meaning; sense cognitive significance 820; proper names 717 sense-data 821 see also qualia; sense perception; senses perception 665 senses Molyneux problem 588 sensory experience religious 761
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Page 1017 sensualism Feuerbach, L.A. 283 sentences 720–1 logical atomism (Wittgenstein, L.) 933 sentencing penal theory 181 sentience panpsychism 654 sentimentalism Shaftesbury, Third Earl of 824–5 separability thesis belief and knowledge 82 sequent calculus 612 Sergeant, John 821 seriality Whitehead, A.N. 928–9 Service, Robert Lenin, V.I. 482 set theory 822 see also sets; Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory axiom of choice 71; Cantor, G. 121; mereology distinction 565; paradoxes 656; systems of 823 sets elementary theory of the category of (ETCS) 126; extensionality 398 sexism sport 858–9 Sextus Empiricus 823 sexuality 823 see also pornography; reproduction; sex concepts 824; difference (Irigaray, L.) 405; metaphysics 824; normative analysis 824 Shaftesbury, Third Earl of (Anthony Ashley Cooper) 824–5 Shah Wali Allah (Qutb al-Din Ahmad ibn ‘Abd alRahim) 825 Shannon, Claude E. information theory 395 Shapere, Dudley incommensurability 387; matter 544 Shapiro, Ian human nature 364 Shapiro, Stewart Church’s thesis 140–1 shari‘a (God’s law) 466–7 Sharples, R.W. Alexander of Aphrodisias 23; Peripatetics 666–7; Strato 864 Shatz, David prophecy 718–19 Shaver, Robert enthusiasm 243
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Sheehan, Thomas Heidegger, M. 340 Shem Tov family 421 Shenxiu 677 Sher, R.B. Blair, H. 90 Shestov, Lev (Yehuda Leib Shvartsman) 825 religious existentialism 826 shi (authoritative power) 479 Shields, Rob Lefebvre, H. 475 Shijing (Book of Songs) 135–6 Shintō 826 East Asian Philosophy 228; influence of Japanese philosophy 416; Motoori Norinaga 603 Shope, Robert K. Gettier problems 313 showing meaning (Wittgenstein, L.) 933 Shpet, Gustav Gustavovich 827 Shrader-Frechette, Kristin risk 773 Shujing (Book of Documents) 135 Shun Kwong-Loi Wang Yangming 924–5 Sicily Empedocles 239; Gorgias 322–3 Sidelle, Alan necessary truth and convention 619 Siderits, Mark Nāgārjuna 608 Siedentop, L.A. Tocqueville, A. de 894 Sieg, Wilfried primitive recursive functions 157; proof theory 716–17 Siger of Brabant 828 signals information theory 396 signification imposition 454; linguistic rhythms (Kristeva, J.) 444; medieval theories of 454 Signposts movement 829 neo-idealism 786 signs demythologization of (Barthes, R.) 76; Renaissance theories of 459 al-Sijistani, Abu Sulayman Muhammad 829–30 Silverthorne, M. Carmichael, G. 123 Silvestri, Francesco 830 similarity species classification 855 Simmonds, N.E. Blackstone, W. 90; law and morality 464 Simmons, A. John
consent 168–9 Simon, Herbert A. introspection, psychology of 402 Simon, Lawrence H. rationality and cultural relativism 741–2 Simons, Peter identity of indiscernibles 381 simples logical atomism (Wittgenstein, L.) 933
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< previous page Page 1018 simplicity in scientific theories 830 Simplicius 831 simulation child’s theory of mind 575 sin 831–2 see also original sin; sinners; vices actual 831; hell 342; Manicheism 522; Pelagianism 664; predestination 707; purgatory 726; reprobation 766 Singer, Ira morality and identity 600–1 Singer, L. 80 Single Circular System 178 Sinkler, Georgette Bacon, R. 74 Siorvanes, L. Chaldaean Oracles 130–1; Hypatia 371; Iamblichus 372; Neoplatonism 624; Porphyry 695; Proclus 714 Sipfle, David A. Meyerson, É. 571 sirhak (practical learning) 139 situation ethics 832 situation semantics 818 Skinner, Burrhus Frederick 832 Sklar, Lawrence thermodynamics 887; time 892 Skorupski, John morality and ethics 600 Skovoroda, Hryhorii Savych 783 slavery 833 see also anti-slavery movement anti-slavery movement 27 Slavophilism 833 Solov’ëv, V.S. 849–50 Slesinski, Robert Florenskii, P.A. 287 Slote, Michael moral psychology 596 Slovakia 833–4 National Revival movement 834 Smart, John Jamieson Carswell 834 reductionism, philosophy of mind 748 Smiley, Timothy J. consequence 169; multiple-conclusion logic 604 Smith, A.D. primary-secondary distinction 710
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Smith, Adam 834 Smith, Barry Gestalt psychology 313; Reinach, A. 751 Smith, Barry C. meaning and rule-following 546 Smith, George E. Newton, I. 627 Smith, G.W. limits of law 467 Smith, Michael emotivism 238; reasons and causes 745–6 Smith, Nicholas D. slavery 833; wisdom 932 Smith, Nicholas J.J. epiphenomenalism 245–6 Smith, Peter Broad, C.D. 102–3 Smith, Quentin tense and temporal logic 880–1 Snowdon, Paul F. Strawson, P.F. 864–5 Sober, Elliott innate knowledge 397; simplicity (in scientific theories) 830 Soble, Alan sexuality 823 social action 835 joint action 835 social arithmetic Condorcet, M.J.A.N. 161 social choice 835 aggregation 835 social contract equality condition (Rawls, J.) 743; Hobbes, T. 175–6 social control Mozi 587 social democracy 836 social epistemology 836 social facts holism in social science 359 social functionalism 301 social interaction sympathy (Smith, A.) 834 social justice liberalism 689 social laws 836–7 see also social theory definition 836 social norms 837 definition 837; reciprocity 746 social positivism Latin America 697 social psychology behaviourism in 80 social recognition
rights 773 social relativism 837 see also cultural relativism; moral relativism social revolution Marcuse, H. 525 social science 840 see also anthropology; society; sociology behaviourism in 80–1; contemporary philosophy of 837–8; development ethics 206; evolutionary theory 263–4; experiments in 267–8; explanation in 268; feminism 276; functionalism in 301; history of philosophy of 838–9; holism in 359–60; individualism in 359–60; methodology of 839–40; natural science comparison 842;
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Page 1019 naturalism 616; operationalism 646; positivism 696; post-structuralism 701–2; prediction in 843; scientific realism 809; statistics 860–1; structuralism in 867; systems theory 874; technology and ethics 877–8; theory and observation 886; value judgments in 912 social theory Bourdieu, P. 98; communicative action (Habermas, J.) 328; law 843 socialism 844–5 see also communism; Marxism African 16; Bernstein, E. 87; Christian (Barth, K.) 76; feminism 280; Kautsky, K.J. 435; Lassalle, F. 459; Latin America 534; legal theory (Renner, K.) 765; populist (Lavrov, P.L.) 464; rule-of-law (Hessen, S.I.) 352; social democracy 836; utopian 910 sociality human communication (Mead, G.H.) 546; person (Il’enkov, E.V.) 382 society artificial distinctions (Wollstonecraft, M.) 935–6; commercial (Smith, A.) 834; concept of 845; critical theory 182; India (Kauṭilya) 435; Islamic sociology (Ibn Khaldun) 375; lawful behaviour (Hobbes, T.) 358; public interest 725; risk 773; social contract theory (Rousseau, J.-J.) 777–8; symbolic interactionism 873 Socinianism 845 sociobiology 263–4 see also Darwinism; evolution socioeconomics development ethics 206 sociological jurisprudence Pound, R. 703 sociology hermeneutical theory 846; of knowledge 846; method (Durkheim, É.) 222; presuppositional studies 846;
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theories of 846–7 Socrates 847 see also Socratic dialogues; Socratic schools akrasia 20; influence of 33–4; self-knowledge 859; trial of 847 Socratic dialogues 848 see also Plato, Socratic dialogues; Xenophon background to 847 Socratic schools 848 ancient philosophy 34; Megarian 561 solidarity 848–9 solipsism 849 see also methodological solipsism; other minds; physical world, knowledge of definition 795; Wittgenstein, L. 181 solitude of philosophers (Ibn Bajja) 373 Solomon, Robert C. emotions 237 Soloveitchik, Joseph B. 849 Solov’ëv, Vladimir Sergeevich 849 All-Unity 784 Somerset, Fiona Dietrich of Freiberg 210; Gerbert of Aurillac 312; John of Mirecourt 425; Thomas of York 888 Sommerville, Johann P. Filmer, R. 286 Soni, Jayandra Jaina philosophy 413; manifoldness 523; Mahāvīra 518 Soper, Kate nature and convention 618 sophismata 500 Kilvington, R. 438 Sophists 33 Antiphon 40; dissoi logoi (twofold argument) 214; Gorgias 322; Hippias 354; Prodicus 715; Socrates 847; Thrasymachus 890 Sorell, Tom business ethics 115–16; Hobbes, T. 357 Sosa, Ernest foundationalism 290–1 soteriological exclusivism definition 762 Soto, Domingo de 851 Sōtō Zen Buddhism Zeami 944 soul 851–2 see also Physical Soul; psychē
body relationship 851–2; importance of (Socrates) 847; Islamic philosophy 851; Madhva 518; persons 668 South, James Renaissance Aristotelianism 49–50 Southgate, Beverley Sergeant, J. 821; White, T. 928 sovereignty 853 commonwealth (Hobbes, T.) 357–8; Erasmus, D. 252 Soviet Union (USSR) Asmus, V.F. 62; Il’enkov, E.V. 382; Mamardashvili, M.K. 521–2; Moscow-Tartu school 602; Vygotskii, L.S. 922; Vysheslavtsev, B.P. 923 space 853 spacetime 854 Spain 854–5 Abravanel, I. 3; Albo, J. 21; Arama, I. 44; Báñez, D. 75; Bar Hayya, A. 75; Crescas, H. 180; Duran, P. 221; Duran, S. 221; Generation of 1898 854; Halevi, J. 330; Ibn al-‘Arabi 372–3; Ibn Bajja 373; Ibn Daud, A. 373; Ibn Ezra, A. 373; Ibn Ezra, M. 374; Ibn Falaquera 374; Ibn Gabirol, S. 374;
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Page 1020 Ibn Hazm 374–5; Ibn Massara 375–6; Ibn Paquda, Bahya 376; Ibn Rushd 377; Ibn Sab‘in 377–8; Ibn Tufayl 379; Ibn Tzaddik, J. 379; Islamic philosophy 407–8; Judah Halevi 330; Llull, R. 493; Maimonides, M. 519; Nahmanides, M. 609; Ortega y Gasset, J. 649–50; Peter of Spain 668–9; Santayana, G. 793; School of Translators of Toledo 854; Seneca, L.A. 819; Shem Tov family 825; Soto, D. de 851; Suárez, F. 867–8; Toletus, F. 895; Unamuno y Jugo, M. De 906; Vitoria, F. de 919; Vives, J.L. 919–20 Spanish Netherlands Lipsius, J. 491 spatial concepts infinite (More, H.) 601; Molyneux problem 588 special relativity theory Einstein, A. 234; philosophical significance of 752 species 855 see also Darwin, Charles; evolutionary theory; speciesism biological concept 855; procreative ability (Buffon, G.L.L.) 112 speciesism animals and ethics 37 speculative metaphysics Whitehead, A.N. 929 speech freedom of 296 Spencer, Herbert Latin American philosophy 461 Sperry, R.W. 858 Speusippus 856 Spinoza, Benedict de 857 biblical authority 858; geometrical method 857; necessary being 619 spirit Hegelian idealism (Croce, B.) 183; pneuma 684 spirits communication with (Swedenborg, E.) 873 spirituality nirvāna 633
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Spirtes, Peter statistics and social science 860–1 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty feminist literary criticism 279–80 split brains 858 Sponberg, Alan Ambedkar, B.R. 26 spontaneous generation 489 sport 858–9 ethics 858; mind-body problem 859; self-knowledge 859; society 858–9 Sprigge, T.L.S. the Absolute 3; idealism 379; panpsychism 654 Sprintzen, David A. Camus, A. 121 örīsampradāya School of Vaishnava 737 Stack, George J. materialism 535 Stadler, F. Vienna Circle 915–16 Stair, James Dalrymple, Viscount 859 Stairs, Allen parapsychology 657; quantum mechanics, interpretation of 731 stakeholders business ethics 115–16 Stalinism Trotsky, L. opposition to 899 Stalnaker, Robert propositional attitudes 720 standpoints ( nayavāda ) manifoldness, Jaina theory of 523 Stanosz, B. Kotarbiński, T. 443 Stanwood, P.G. Law, W. 472 Stark, Cynthia A. self-respect 814–15 state 859–60 see also government; nation; obligation, political; political representation; politics; sovereignty anarchism 31; Islamic philosophy 408; libertarianism 487; morality 400–1; neutrality 627 state of nature war 925 statements 720–1 religious 761–2 statistical mechanics 887 statistics 860 and social science 860–1 Statman, Daniel moral luck 594–5 Stead, Christopher Eusebius 261;
Gnosticism 316; logos 508; pneuma (spirit) 684 Stein, Howard Dedekind, J.W.R. 196; logicism 507–8 Stein, Peter historical jurisprudence 428 Steiner, Rudolf 861 Steinkellner, Ernst Dharmakīrti 207 Stępień, Antoni B. Ingarden, R.W. 396; Poland 685 Sterelny, Kim reductionism, philosophy of mind 748; species 855 stereotypes discrimination 214 Stern, Josef Arama, I. 44; Nahmanides, M. 609
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< previous page Page 1021 Stern, Robert Hegelianism 338–9 Stevens, P.F. Linnaeus, C. von 491 Stevenson, Charles Leslie 861 Stevenson, Dan Zhiyi 946 Steward, H. akrasia 19–20 Stewart, Dugald 861–2 Stewart, M.A. Oswald, J. 650 Stich, Stephen P. cognitive pluralism 146; epistemic relativism 246 Stoicism 34 see also neostoicism Ariston of Chios 47; Chrysippus 140; Cleanthes 144; emotions 238; Epictetus 244; Hierocles 352; logic 494–5; logos 508; Marcus Aurelius 524; Middle (Panaetius) 653; Musonius Rufus 605; pneuma (spirit) 684; Posidonius 696; Seneca, L.A. 819; vocabulary development 33; Zeno of Citium 944 Stoker, Valerie Madhva 517 Stone, M.W.F. casuistry 125 Strato 864 Lyceum decline 864 Stratton-Lake, Philip hope 362 Strauss, Leo 864 Strawson, Galen free will 293 Strawson, Peter Frederick 864–5 Ströker, E. 370 Stroumsa, Sarah al-Muqammas, D. 604 structuralism 865–6 see also post-structuralism Lévi-Strauss, C. 484; linguistic 865; mathematical (Benacerraf, P.) 543–4 Stump, David J. Poincaré, J.H. 685 Stump, Eleonore Aquinas, T. 43;
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Boethius, A.M.S. 94; eternity 254–5 Sturgeon, Nicholas L. naturalism in ethics 615 Sturm und Drang 331 Styles, Scott C. Stair, J.D. 859 subject imagery (Le Doeuff, M.) 473; postmodern critique of 868 subjective colour 149–50 subjectivism objectivity 640 subjectivity Chinese Marxism 530; free (Fichte, J.G.) 283 sublime, the power of (Burke, E.) 114 substance 869 see also matter; properties; substance-pluralism conceptualism 869; essence distinction (Locke, J.) 493–4; extension (Descartes, R.) 204; ideas (Locke, J.) 493–4; medieval doctrines of 557; particulars 659 substance-pluralism Nyāya 545; Sānkhya-Yoga 545; Vaiśeṣika 545 substantia Trinity 898 substitution of identities, law of 398 subversion invention (Certeau, M. de) 130 Suchocki, Marjorie feminist theology 280–1 Suchon, Gabrielle 869 Suderman, J.M. Campbell, G. 121 suffering 870 Buddhism 870 Sufism al-Ghazali 314; Ibn Sab‘in 377 al-Suhrawardi, Shihab al-Din Yahya 870–1 modern Islamic philosophy 410 suicide 871 Sumner, Claude Ethiopian philosophy 259 sun pre-Columbian religions 463 Sun Bin Sunzi 871 Sun Wu 871 Sungtaek Cho Buddhism, Korea 111–12 Sunzi (The Art of Warfare) 871 supererogation 871 supernatural
miracles 582–3; prophecy 718–19; religious experience (Oman, J.W.) 643 supervenience 872 of the mental 872 Suppe, Frederick Bridgman, P.W. 102; operationalism 646; scientific theories 885 Suppes, Patrick measurement, theory of 549 supposition theory medieval logic 500; Renaissance 459 surprise examination paradox 656 surrogacy 766–7 Suso, Henry 873 sustainability green political philosophy 325 Swain, Marshall defeasibility theory of 441
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Page 1022 Swedberg, Richard Schumpeter, J.A. 802 Sweden Hägerström, A.A.T. 329; Linnaeus, C. von 491; Nygren, A. 639; Olivecrona, K. 642; Swedenborg, E. 873 Swedenborg, Emanuel 873 Swijtink, Zeno Beth’s theorem and Craig’s interpolation theorem 87–8 Swinburne, Richard eschatology 254; revelation 769–70; soul 851–2; Trinity 898 Swineshead, Richard 651 Switzerland Barth, K. 76; Bonnet, C. 96; Brunner, E. 103; Constant de Rebecque, H.-B. 171; Einstein, A. 234; Jung, C.G. 427; Le Clerc, J. 473; Paracelsus 655; Piaget, J. 675; Rousseau, J.-J. 777; Saussure, F. de 794 Swoboda, Philip Frank, S.L. 291 Sylla, Edith Burley, W. 114; medieval natural philosophy 613–14; Oxford Calculators 651–2 symbolic forms Cassirer, E. 124–5 symbolic interactionism 873 self 873; society 873 symbols semiology dialectic (Kristeva, J.) 445 sympathy social interaction (Smith, A.) 834 syncategorematic terms adverbs 6; medieval logic 500 syntax 873 see also grammar Chomsky, N. 456; meaning 874; predication 708 synthetic/analytic distinction Kant, I. 30 Syria Antiochus 40; Damascius 189;
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al-Farabi 272–3; Ibn Taymiyya 378–9; John of Damascus 424; Lucian 512; al-Muqammas, Daud 604; Nemesius 621; Numenius 638; Posidonius 696 systems theory in social science 874 Taber, John A. Mīmāṃsā 574 tableau systems 612 tacit knowledge Polanyi, M. 686 Tagore, Rabindranath 875 Taliaferro, C. 761 Talmud Rabbinic theology 884 Tamburrini, Guglielmo Turing machines 902–3 Tanabe Hajime 875 Tanner, Michael aesthetics and ethics 10 Tarentum Archytas 45–6 Tarski, Alfred 875–6 see also Tarskian paradigm; Tarski’s definition of truth Tarski’s definition of truth 876 Tasioulas, John justice, equity and law 429 Taub, Liba Eudoxus 260 Tauler, John 876 Tavuzzi, Michael Capreolus, J. 122; Silvestri, F. 830 al-Tawhidi, Abu Hayyan 876 taxonomy 876 see also classification; species Taylor, Barry Dummett, M.A.E. 219 Taylor, C.C.W. Democritus 200; eudaimonia 260; Leucippus 483 Taylor, Charles 877 Taylor, Jacqueline A. moral sense theories 597 Taylor, Kenneth A. propositional attitude statements 719 Taylor, Paul art and truth 54 technology 878 see also computer science; computers; engineering ethics; information technology ethics 877–8 Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre 761 Tel Quel school 879 teleological ethics 879
see also consequentialism; hedonism; perfectionism; utilitarianism teleological semantics 818 teleology 879 see also teleological ethics justice 429 Telesio, Bernardino 879–80 Teller, Paul field theory, quantum 286 Temple, William 880 temporal logic 880–1 see also tense conditionals (Diodorus Cronus) 211 Ten Modes of Scepticism Aenesidemus 6 Tennant, Frederick Robert 880 tense logic 710 terms logico-linguistic signs 521
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< previous page Page 1023 Terras, Victor Belinskii, V.G. 83; Schellingianism 798 Terrasson, Jean 234 Tertullian, Quintus Septimus Florens 881 testimony 881 epistemology 248; Indian philosophy 882 Tetens, Johann Nicolaus 882 textual analysis medieval scholastic method 553 Thales 33 theism Christian (Lewis, C.S.) 484; evil, problem of 262; natural philosophy (Cudworth, R.) 184–5; philosophy relationship 759–60; Supracosmic principle (Lossky, N.O.) 510 Themistius 883 theodicy Malebranche, N. 521 theological virtues 883 faith 883; hope 883; love 883 theology agnosticism 721; anthropological 103; Barth, K. 76; common sense 650; concordism (Pico della Mirandola, G.) 676; existentialist 266; faith (Luther, M.) 513–14; human condition (Pascal, B.) 659; Islamic 411; liberation 487; medieval philosophy 553; natural 614–15; natural history 619–20; perfect-being 317–18; philosophy relationship 759; political 884; postmodern 699; public 629; rule of faith debates 821; scholastic (Biel, G.) 89; science 757; Socinianism 845 Theophrastus 884 theoreticism Ramsey sentences 737; scientific 885 theory observation relation 842; social sciences 886 theory-ladenness observation 641
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theosophy 886–7 Steiner, R. 861 thermodynamics 887 Thessaly Philo of Larissa 673 Thiel, Udo Overton, R. 651 Thielicke, Helmut 887 Thierry of Chartres 887 Thom, Paul ancient logic 494–5 Thomas à Kempis 887 Thomas of York 888 Thomas, Alan MacIntyre, A. 517; values 912 Thomas, Barry Smithalan axiology 71 Thomasius, Christian 888 Thomason, R.H. modal logic 584 Thomism 888 see also Aquinas, Thomas; Neo-Thomism Durandus of St Pouçain 221–2; John of St Thomas 425–6; Maritain, J. 526; Neo-Thomism 889; Roman Catholicism 888; Silvestri, F. 830; Soto, D. de 851; Suárez, F. 868 Thompson, J.B. Ricoeur, P. 772 Thompson, Kirill Ole Zhang Zai 946; Zhou Dunyi 947; Zhu Xi 947 Thompson, Michael Anscombe, G.E.M. 38 Thoreau, Henry David 889 Thornhill, Christopher historicism 355 thought absolute prepositions 148; addition to matter 95; animals 37; concepts 159; content 579–80; indexical content of 173; language 455; life relationship 270; mental language 931 thought experiments 890 Thrace Protagoras 721 Thrasymachus 890 Thucydides 890–1 ti (substance) Chinese philosophy 891 tian (Heaven)
Chinese philosophy 891 Tiantai School of Buddhism Zhiyi 946–7 Tibawi, A.L. 382 Tibet Mi bskyod rdo rje 571; mKhas grub dge legs dpal bzang po 583; rGyal tshab dar ma rin chen 770; Sa skya paṇḍita 789; Tsong kha pa Blo bzang grags pa 901 Tibetan philosophy 387 Mādhyamika School of Buddhism 106 Tiles, J.E. pragmatism in ethics 705 Tiles, Mary E. Cantor’s theorem 122; continuum hypothesis 175 Tillemans, Tom J.F. Tibetan philosophy 891; Tsong kha pa Blo bzang grags pa 901 Tillich, Paul 892 Tillman, Hoyt Cleveland Cheng Hao 134; Cheng Yi 134 time 892 see also change; duration; samsāra; spacetime abstract objects 4; continuants 174–5; eternity 254–5; metaphysics 568–9; multiplicity 198; sacred 235; trilateral conception (Mir Damad, Muhammad Baqir) 582
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Page 1024 time travel 893 Timmons, Mark logic of ethical discourse 500 Timon 893 Pyrrhonism 727 Tindal, Matthew 893–4 Tipton, Ian Berkeley, G. 85 Tirosh-Samuelson, Hava (neé Tirosh-Rothschild) Messer Leon 566; Shem Tov family 825 Tocqueville, Alexis de 894 Todd, Robert B. Cleomedes 144 Todd, William Mills III Moscow-Tartu school 602 Todorov, Tzvetan 894 Toland, John 894–5 Toledo, School of Translators of 854 tolerance logical 123 toleration 895 see also freedom, of speech; multiculturalism; neutrality, political law and morality 464 Toletus, Franciscus 895 Tolstoi, Lev Nikolaevich 895 Tominaga Nakamoto 896 Tong, Rosemarie feminist ethics 278 Tonghak (Eastern Learning) 896 Torah halakhah 329; rhetoric 567 Torchia Estrada, Juan Carlos Argentina, philosophy in 46 Torretti, Roberto space 853; spacetime 854 totalitarianism 896 see also fascism; Nazism; Stalinism Arendt, H. 46; Hayek, F.A. 335; Plato 694 Townsend, Dabney Alison, A. 25; Gerard, A. 311 tradition 897 traditionalism 897 tragedy katharsis (Aristotle) 435; Nietzsche, F.W. 630 transcendence imagery relationship 473 transcendental arguments 897 transgenics ethics 309 translation
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cultural relativism (Davidson, D.) 741; indeterminacy of (Quine, W.V.) 733; radical 735 translators 898 Gerard of Cremona 311 transubstantiation Wyclif, J. 937 triage Jewish bioethics 90 Trickster Native American philosophy 611 Trifogli, Cecilia Giles of Rome 315 Trinity 898–9 see also God; Jesus Christ Neoplatonic conception of 526 Tristán, Flora 281 tropes rhetoric 770 Trotsky, Leon 899 trust 899 see also promising; reciprocity truth a priori 1; analyticity 30; art 54; belief theory 737; coherence theory of 899–900; confirmation theory (Hempel, C.G.) 344–5; correspondence theory of 900; dao 190; deflationary theories of 900; game-theoretic semantics 817; Gandhi, M.K. 305; inference to the best explanation 394; logical 505; ‘metaphysics of presence’ (Derrida, J.) 203; mimēsis 449; relativism 752; religious 761–2; Tarski, A. 876 truth bearers 720 truth-conditions intuitionistic logic 404; language-world connection 458; meaning 547 truthfulness 900 deception contrast 900 truth-functionality many-valued logic 524 truth-preservation imperative logic 385–6 truth tables intuitionistic logic 404; æukasiewicz, J. 523 truth-value gaps Kripke, S. 815–16 Tschirnhaus, Ehrenfried Walther von 901 Tsong kha pa Blo bzang grags pa (Dzongkaba) Mi bskyod rdo rje critique of 571–2
Tsouna, Voula Aristippus the Elder 47; Cyrenaics 187; Socratic schools 848 Tu Wei-ming Daxue 193; self-cultivation 812–13; Zhongyong 947 Tucker, Abraham 902 motivation 902 Tucker, John Allen Fujiwara Seika 299; Itō Jinsai 412; Ogyū Sorai 642; Tominaga Nakamoto 896 Tucker, Mary Evelyn Kaibara Ekken 432 Tudor, Henry Bernstein, E. 87; Kautsky, K.J. 435; Lassalle, F. 459; Luxemburg, R. 514 Tunisia Ibn Khaldun 375; Israeli, Isaac ben Solomon 411;
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Page 1025 Tertullian, Q.S.F. 881; Themistius 883 Tuomela, Raimo social action 835 Turing, Alan Mathison 902 see also Turing degrees; Turing machines;Turing’s thesis ordinal logics 647 Turing degrees 903 Turing machines 902 Church’s thesis 141 Turing reducibility 903 Turing’s thesis 902–3 Turkestan al-Farabi 272–3 Turkey Anaxagoras 31–2; Arcesilaus 44; Chrysippus 140; Cleanthes 144; Diodorus Cronus 211–12; Diogenes Laertius 212; Diogenes of Oenoanda 212; Galen 304; Heraclides of Pontus 346; Heraclitus 346; Simplicius 831; Thales 883 Turner, Stephen P. Weber, M. 926 al-Tusi, Khwajah Nasir 903 Twardowski, Kazimierz 903 Tweedale, Martin M. Abelard, P. 2; Roscelin of Compiègne 776; William of Champeaux 930 Twining, William Llewellyn, K.N. 492 two-factor theories concepts 159–60 Tye, Michael adverbial theory of mental states 565; mental imagery 384; vagueness 911 type/token distinction 904 Tyre Porphyry 695 Tzimtzum creation of worlds 349 Udayana 905 Indian and Tibetan philosophy 389; Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika 639 Uddyotakara 905 Indian and Tibetan philosophy 389 Ûisang 905 Ukraine Berdiaev, N.A. 84;
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Ha’am, Ahad 328; Shestov, L. 825; Shpet, G.G. 827; Skovoroda, H.S. 832–3 Ulrich of Strasbourg 905–6 ultimate causes Liber de causis 485 ultimate reality emptiness 571; Nāgārjuna 608; religious pluralism 762 Unamuno y Jugo, Miguel de 906 unconscious mental states 906 see also dreaming undecidability method of forcing 288 underdetermination 906 Duhem, P.M.M. 218–19 understanding common notions 347; meaning 548; mindlanguage connection 457; objective spirit 211 Ungar, A.M. Herbrand’s theorem 347–8; natural deduction, tableau and sequent systems 612 Unger, Roberto 182 Uniacke, Suzanne double effect principle 216 uniformitarianism geology 310 United Nations (UN) decade of the woman 281 United States of America Baumgardt, D. 78; Bowne, B.P. 98; Bridgman, P.W. 102; Cavell, S. 129; Chisholm, R.M. 138; Chomsky, N. 138; Church, A. 140; Critical Legal Studies 181; Davidson, D. 193; Dennett, D.C. 201; Dewey, J. 207; Dworkin, R. 223; Edwards, J. 233; eighteenth and nineteenth century 26; Einstein, A. 234; Fodor, J.A. 287; Frank, J. 291; Franklin, B. 293; Frei, H. 297; Fuller, L.L. 299–300; Hanson, N.R. 332; Hohfeld, W.N. 358; Holmes, O.W. 360; Jefferson, T. 417; Johnson, A.B. 426; Johnson, S. 426–7;
Kaplan, M. 433; Kripke, S.A. 444; Kuhn, T.S. 446; legal realism 478; Lewis, C.I. 484; Lewis, D.K. 485; Llewellyn, K.N. 492; Mead, G.H. 546; Nagel, E. 608; Nagel, T. 609; Native American philosophy 611; Niebuhr, H.R. 629; Niebuhr, R. 629–30; Nozick, R. 637; Paine, T. 653; Post, E.L. 698; post-structuralism 701; Pound, R. 703; pragmatism 704; Putnam, H. 726; Quine, W.V. 732–3; Rand, A. 738; Rawls, J. 743–4; Rorty, R. 775; Royce, J. 778; Santayana, G. 793; Searle, J. 809–10; Sellars, W.S. 815; Shütz, A. 802; Skinner, B.F. 832; Soloveitchik, J.B. 849; Strauss, L. 864; Thoreau, H.D. 889; unity of opposites 346; of science 907 Universal Grammar (UG) Chomsky, N. 139 universal language 907 universal specification, principle of free logics 293
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< previous page Page 1026 universals 908 see also nominalism existence of 908; individuation 220; intensional entities 398; medieval epistemology 557–8; metaphysics 568; nominalism 634; particulars 658–9; William of Champeaux 930 universe Anaximenes 32–3; Indian theories of 178; sacramentality of 790 univocity 762 Unno, Taitetsu Shinran 826 Upaniṣads Brahman 100; causation 128; mind 577 Urmson, J.O. Austin, J.L. 67 Urquhart, Alasdair computational complexity 155 Uruguay feminism 281 use/mention distinction 909 usul al-fiqh (roots of jurisprudence) Islamic law 467 utilitarianism 909 see also Mill, J.S.; utility Bentham, J. 83–4; common good 186; obligations to future generations 302; rational choice theory 739 utility property 717–18 utopianism 909–10 Campanella, T. 120 utterances locutionary force (Austin, J.L.) 67; performatory (Austin, J.L.) 67 vacuum scientific method (Pascal, B.) 659 vagueness 911 Vahid, S.A. 405 Vaiśeṣika atomism 545 Vaishnava 737 Vallabhācārya 912 Indian and Tibetan philosophy 389 value artistic 8; fact distinction 270–1; ontological status of 912
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value judgments in social science 912 value pluralism Berlin, I. 86 value theory personal identity 667 values 912 absolutism (Lossky, N.O.) 510; ascetic ideal (Nietzsche, F.W.) 630–1; axiology 71; sport 858 Van Gulick, R. Chinese room argument 138 Van Inwagen, Peter Incarnation and Christology 386; Lewis, D.K. 485; resurrection 769; Trinity 898–9 Van Norden, Bryan W. Mencius 563 Vargish, T. modernism 586 variability measurement theory 550 Varley, Paul bushi philosophy 115; Shintō 826 Vasubandhu 913 cosmology 178; Indian and Tibetan philosophy 389 Vātsyāyana 913 Indian and Tibetan philosophy 389 Veda Arya Samaj 61; causation 128; interpretation 401; Mīmāṃsā 574–5 Vedānta Indian and Tibetan philosophy 388; Rāmānuja 737; Śankara 792; Vallabhācārya 912 vegetarianism Porphyry 695 Veitch, J. 123 Velazco y Trianosky, Gregory supererogation 871 Verbeek, Theo Geulincx, A. 314; Le Clerc, J. 473; Rohault, J. 774 Verene, Donald Philip Cassirer, E. 124–5 verificationism 548 Ayer, A.J. 72; critiques of 548; logical positivism 548 Vernia, Nicoletto 914 Verona Hillel ben Samuel of 353
Verständigung (agreement) language 154 vices evil 262; supererogation 872; and virtues 917 Vico, Giambattista 914 Vienna Circle 915–16 see also Ayer, A.J.; Carnap, R.; Lvóv-Warsaw School; Neurath, O.; Schlick, Friedrich; Wittgenstein, L. logical positivism 506 Villey, Michel 916 violence 916 virtú princely (Machiavelli, N.) 516 virtue human nature relationship (Butler, J.) 116; Indian conceptions of 223; knowledge (Spinoza, B. de) 857–8;
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Page 1027 unity of (Ariston of Chios) 47 virtue epistemology 249 virtue ethics 917 MacIntyre, A. 517 virtues medieval ethics 558; nature of (Socrates) 847; negative 834; soul relationship (Socrates) 847; theological 883; theoretical/epistemic 884; and vices 917 vision 918 computational theories 579; Epicureanism 244–5; Molyneux problem 588; perceptual processing 918 vision in God doctrine Malebranche, N. 521 visions religious (Hildegard of Bingen) 353 Viśiṣṭādvaita 318 Visser, Albert provability logic 721 Viswanathan, Meera Japanese aesthetics 12–13; kokoro 443 Vital du Four 918–19 vital reason Ortega y Gasset, J. 650 vitalism 919 Vitoria, Francisco de 919 Vivekananda 736 Vives, Juan Luis 919–20 Vlastos, Gregory 920 Voegelin, Eric 920 Vogel, Jonathan inference to the best explanation 394 void Aristotelian mechanics 550 volition action 5 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) 920 voluntarism 921 Gerard of Odo 311; Jewish 419; Mohist philosophy 587 von Neumann-Bernays-Gödel class theory 823 voting systems 740 vulnerability 922 Vygotskii, Lev Semënovich 922 Vysheslavtsev, Boris Petrovich 923 Wainwright, William J. Edwards, J. 233 Wakoff, Michael B. theosophy 886–7 Waldron, Jeremy
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liberalism 486 Wales Price, R. 709 Walicki, Andrzej Chaadaev, P.I. 130; Chernyshevskii, N.G. 134; Hessen, S.I. 351; Lavrov, P.L. 464; Mikhailovskii, N.K. 572; Russian philosophy 786; Slavophilism 833; Solov’ëv, V.S. 849 Walker, Nicholas Hegelianism 338–9; Hölderlin, J.C.F. 358 Walker, Paul E. al-Razi, Abu Bakr 744 Walker, Ralph C.S. contingency 174 Wallace, Alfred Russel 924 Wallace, R. Jay moral motivation 595; moral sentiments 598 Walters, R.L. Du Chätelet-Lomont, É. 217 Walton, Douglas N. fallacies 271; formal and informal logic 289 Waltz, K. 874 Wang Chong 924 Wang Yangming 924–5 Wang, Zhouming 424 war 925 state of nature (Hobbes, T.) 358 Wardy, R. categories 125 Warnock, G.J. ordinary language philosophy 647–8 Warsaw school of logic 686–7 Washington, Corey use/mention distinction 909 Watson, J.B. scientific behaviourism 81 Watsuji Tetsurō 925 Watt, W.C. semiotics 819 Weale, Albert equality 251–2; needs and interests 620; welfare 927 web of belief mental/semantic holism 360 Weber, Max 926 Weier, W. 144 Weil, Simone 926 Weinberger, Ota 926 Weyr, F. 927 Weinstock, Daniel M. moral pluralism 596 Weithman, Paul J.
religion and political philosophy 756–7 welfare 927 see also interests; needs; wellbeing as capabilities 927; objective accounts 927; utilitarianism 909 wellbeing happiness relationship 332–3 Wellman, K. La Mettrie, J.O. de 448 Western philosophy Chinese philosophy comparison 136–7; East Asian Philosophy comparison 225–6; Orientalism 649
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Page 1028 Westphal, Merold phenomenology of religion 672; postmodern theology 699 Wetherbee, Winthrop Bernard of Tours 87; Isaac of Stella 405 Wettstein, Howard ritual 774 Wetzel, Linda type/token distinction 904 Weyl, Hermann 927 Weyr, František 927 White, James D. Plekhanov, G.V. 682 White, John moral education 593 White, Stephen A. Cicero, M.T. 141; Panaetius 653–4 White, Stephen K. postmodernism and political philosophy 700 White, Thomas 928 Whitehead, Alfred North 928 speculative metaphysics 929 Whiteley, Peter Native American philosophy 611 Whitford, Margaret 276 Wielgus, Stanisław Poland, philosophy in 685 Wigoder, Geoffrey Bar Hayya, A. 75 Wikler, Daniel medical ethics 551–2 Wildberg, Christian Ammonius, son of Hermeas 27; Philoponus 674; Simplicius 831 will 929 see also akrasia; free will; self-control; volition; voluntarism introspection (Maine de Biran, P.-F.) 520; as a power for opposites (Duns Scotus, J.) 221; voluntarism 921 Willard, Charity Cannon Pizan, C. de 139–40 William of Auvergne 929–30 William of Auxerre 930 William of Champeaux 930 William of Conches 930 William of Ockham 930 see also Ockham’s Razor Aristotelianism 49; poverty controversy 931; universals 220; Wodeham, A. 934 William of Sherwood 932 Williams, Alan Zoroastrianism 948
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Williams, Bernard Arthur Owen 932 Berlin, I. 86; death 195; morality 600; virtues and vices 917 Williams, C.J.F. Prior, A.N. 710 Williams, D. Condorcet, M.J.A.N. 161; Voltaire 920 Williams, Michael doubt 216; Feyerabend, P.K. 283 Williams, Paul Mi bskyod rdo rje 571 Williams, R. Weil, S. 926 Williams, S.G. truth and meaning 547–8 Williams, Thomas Farrer, A.M. 273 Williamson, Timothy identity 381 Wilson, Mark field theory, classical 285–6; mechanics, classical 551 Wilson, T.D. introspection, psychology of 402 Winkler, Kenneth P. Browne, P. 103; Collier, A. 148; Collins, A. 148; More, H. 601 Winnie, John computer science 157–8 winning sport ethics 858 Wippel, John F. Godfrey of Fontaines 319–20; Siger of Brabant 828 Wiredu, Kwasi Akan philosophical psychology 19 wisdom 932 cultivation of (Vico, G.) 914–15 Wissenschaftslehre (theory of science) 283 witchcraft natural phenomena 316 Witherspoon, John 932 Wittgenstein, Ludwig Josef Johann 933 see also Wittgensteinian ethics facts 568; family resemblances 159; Australian philosophy 67; pragmatics 456; private language argument 711 Wittgensteinian ethics 934 Wodeham, Adam 934 Wokler, R. Buffon, G.L.L. 112; Diderot, D. 209;
Enlightenment, continental 241; Monboddo 589 Woleński, J. Ajdukiewicz, K. 19; Kotarbiński, T. 443; Leśniewski, S. 482; Łukasiewicz, J. 513; Twardowski, K. 903 Wolf, Susan meaning of life 489 Wolff, Christian 934 Knutzen, M. 442; method 935 Wolff, Jonathan libertarianism 487–8; Nozick, R. 637; political philosophy 690 Wollaston, William 935 Wollstonecraft, Mary 935–6
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Page 1029 Wolterstorff, Nicholas faith 271; Frei, H. 297 women feminist ethics 278; sexual differences (Irigaray, L.) 405; theology 280–1 Wônch’ūk 936 Wong, David B. moral relativism 597 Wônhyo 936 Wood, Allen W. alienation 24; dialectical materialism 208 Wood, Dennis Constant de Rebecque, H.-B. 171 Wood, Paul Aberdeen Philosophical Society 2; Beattie, J. 79; Turnbull, G. 903 Wood, Rega Richard Rufus of Cornwall 771; Wodeham, A. 934 Woodfield, Andrew teleology 879 Woodruff, Paul Thucydides 890–1 Woods, Julian F. Indian fatalism 274 Woodward, James statistics 860 work philosophy of 936–7 world contingency of 174; immaterialism 148; macrocosm/microcosm doctrine (Paracelsus) 655; mechanistic view 480; pantheism 655 worlds possible 697–8 worldview morality 756 Worrall, John Lakatos, I. 449–50; science, philosophy of 804 Wright, Crispin J.G. constructivism 173 Wright, John S. Amo, A.W. 27 Wright, Kathleen Gadamer, H.-G. 303 Wright, Tamra Buber, M. 104 writing language relationship (Barthes, R.) 76 Wróblewski, Jerzy 937
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wrongdoing forgiveness 747; mercy 747 Wyclif, John 937 Hus, J. 369 Wylie, Alison archaeology 44–5; feminism and social science 276 Xenocrates 938 Xenophanes 938 Xenophon 938–9 Socratic dialogues 847 Xiaojing (Book of Filial Piety) 136 xin (heart-and-mind) 939 xin (trustworthiness) 939 cheng 134 xing (human nature) Chinese philosophy 939 Xunzi language theories 496 Yablo, Stephen essentialism 254 Yan Shoucheng, W.F. 924 Yandell, Keith E. Bowne, B.P. 98; Hastings 738–9; Inge, W.R. 396–7; Loisy, A. 508–9; Oman, J.W. 643; Otto, R. 650–1; pantheism 655; personalism 667–8; Ramsey, I.T. 737; reincarnation 751; salvation 790–1; Steiner, R. 861; Teilhard de Chardin, P. 878–9; Temple, W. 880; Thielicke, H. 887 Yang Xiong 941 Yangzhu 941 Yates, Robin D.S. Mozi 603 Yi Hwang 941 Four-Seven Debate 165 Yi Kan 941 Yi, Urho 139 Yi Yulgok 941 Four-Seven Debate 165 Yijing (Book of Changes) 942 Chinese classics 135; dao 190 Yili (Ceremony and Rites) 136 yin-yang 942 East Asian Philosophy 227; qi 729 yoga duty 223
Yoga self-realization 318 Yogācāra School of Buddhism 107 see also Yogācāra-Vijñānavāda School epistemology 251 yong (function) 891 Yoruba philosophy aesthetics 10; epistemology 942 Yosha, N. Herrera, A. Cohen de 349 Young, George M. Fëdorov, N.F. 275 Young Hegelians 338 see also Feuerbach, L.; Strauss, D.F. Ruge, A. 779 Yu Ying shi (Yü Ying-shih) Dai Zhen 189 Yukio Kachi Shōtoku Constitution 827
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< previous page Page 1030 Yusa, Michiko Zeami 944 Zabarella, Jacopo 944 Zagzebski, Linda goodness, perfect 322; heaven 335; limbo 489; purgatory 726; virtue epistemology 917 Zakydalsky, Taras D. Skovoroda, H.S. 832–3 Zank, M. Cohen, H. 146 Zar’a Ya‘ecob African philosophy 14 Zarathushtra Zoroastrianism 948 Zeami 944 Zedler, B. 236 Zen Buddhism Dōgen 214; Nishida Kitarō 634; Nishitani Keiji 634; sport 859 Zenkovsky, V.V. Russian philosophy 786 Zeno of Citium 944 Ariston of Chios 47; Stoicism 34 Zeno of Elea 33 motion paradox (Bergson, H.-L.) 85 Zermelo, Ernst 945–6 see also Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory 822 ETCS distinction 126 Zheng Xuan 946 zhi 946 Zhi Dun 946 Zhouli (Rites of Zhou) 136 Zhu Xi Daxue 193 Zhuangzi 947–8 language theories 495–6; li 485; Zhuangzi 947 Ziai, Hossein Illuminationist philosophy 383–4 Zionism 948 cultural (Ha’am, Ahad) 328; Jewish philosophy 419; Judah Halevi 330 Zirk-Sadowski, Marek Wróblewski, J. 937 Zisi 947 Zohar, N. halakhah 329;
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Jewish bioethics 89–90 Zöller, G. Lambert, J.H. 450; Lichtenberg, G.C. 488; Tetens, J.N. 882 Zongmi 948 Zoroastrianism 948 Zumr, Josef Comenius, J.A. 151; Czech Republic, philosophy in 187–8; Masaryk, T.G. 534; Patočka, J. 661; Slovakia, philosophy in 833–4 Zuozhuan (Zuo Annals) 136 Zupko, Jack Buridan, J. 113–14 Zuriff, G.E. 81 Zygmunt, Jan Polish logic 686–7
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