A Companion to Grice -- in six volumes, vol. VI.

SOCINIANISM. sociobiology.SOCIAL BIOLOGY. sociological jurisprudence.JURISPRUDENCE. sociology of knowledge.MANNHEIM. Socrates (469–399 B.C.), Greek philosopher, the exemplar of the exined life, best known for his dictum that only such a life is worth living. Although he wrote nothing, his thoughts and way of life had a profound impact on many of his contemporaries, and, through Plato’s portrayal of him in his early writings, he bece a major source of inspiration and ideas for later generations of philosophers. His daily occupation was adversarial public conversation with anyone willing to argue with him. A man of great intellectual brilliance, moral integrity, personal magnetism, and physical self-command, he challenged the moral complacency of his fellow citizens, and embarrassed them with their inability to answer such questions as What is virtue? – questions that he thought we must answer, if we are to know how best to live our lives. His ideas and personality won him a devoted following ong the young, but he was far from universally admired. Formal charges were made against him for refusing to recognize the gods of the city, introducing other new divinities, and corrupting the youth. Tried on a single day before a large jury (500 was a typical size), he was found guilty by a small margin: had thirty jurors voted differently, he would have been acquitted. The punishment selected by the jury was death and was administered by means of poison, probably hemlock. Why was he brought to trial and convicted? Part of the answer lies in Plato’s Apology, which purports to be the defense Socrates gave at his trial. Here he says that he has for many years been falsely portrayed as someone whose scientific theories dethrone the traditional gods and put natural forces in their place, and as someone who charges a fee for offering private instruction on how to make a weak argument seem strong in the courtroom. This is the picture of Socrates drawn in a play of Aristophanes, the Clouds, first presented in 423. It is unlikely that Aristophanes intended his play as an accurate depiction of Socrates, and the unscrupulous buffoon found in the Clouds would never have won the devotion of so serious a moralist as Plato. Aristophanes drew together the assorted characteristics of various fifth-century thinkers and ned this alg “Socrates” because the real Socrates was one of several controversial intellectuals of the period. Nonetheless, it is unlikely that the charges against Socrates or Aristophanes’ caricature were entirely without foundation. Both Xenophon’s Memorabilia and Plato’s Euthyphro say that Socrates aroused suspicion because he thought a certain divine sign or voice appeared to him and gave him useful instruction about how to act. By claiming a unique and private source of divine inspiration, Socrates may have been thought to challenge the city’s exclusive control over religious matters. His willingness to disobey the city is admitted in Plato’s Apology, where he says that he would have to disobey a hypothetical order to stop asking his philosophical questions, since he regards them as serving a religious purpose. In the Euthyphro he seeks a rational basis for making sacrifices and performing other services to the gods; but he finds none, and implies that no one else has one. Such a challenge to traditional religious practice could easily have aroused a suspicion of atheism and lent credibility to the formal charges against him. Furthermore, Socrates makes statements in Plato’s early dialogues (and in Xenophon’s Memorabilia) that could easily have offended the political sensibilities of his contemporaries. He holds that only those who have given special study to political matters should make decisions. For politics is a kind of craft, and in all other crafts only those who have shown their mastery are entrusted with public responsibilities. Athens was a democracy in which each citizen had an equal legal right to shape policy, and Socrates’ analogy between the role of an expert in politics and in other crafts may have been seen as a threat to this egalitarianism. Doubts about his political allegiance, though not mentioned in the formal charges against him, could easily have swayed some jurors to vote against him. Socrates is the subject not only of Plato’s early dialogues but also of Xenophon’s Memorabilia, Socinus, Faustus Socrates 859   859 and in many respects their portraits are consistent with each other. But there are also some important differences. In the Memorabilia, Socrates teaches whatever a gentleman needs to know for civic purposes. He is filled with platitudinous advice, and is never perplexed by the questions he raises; e.g., he knows what the virtues are, equating them with obedience to the law. His views are not threatening or controversial, and always receive the assent of his interlocutors. By contrast, Plato’s Socrates presents himself as a perplexed inquirer who knows only that he knows nothing about moral matters. His interlocutors are sometimes annoyed by his questions and threatened by their inability to answer them. And he is sometimes led by force of argument to controversial conclusions. Such a Socrates could easily have made enemies, whereas Xenophon’s Socrates is sometimes too “good” to be true. But it is important to bear in mind that it is only the early works of Plato that should be read as an accurate depiction of the historical Socrates. Plato’s own theories, as presented in his middle and late dialogues, enter into philosophical terrain that had not been explored by the historical Socrates – even though in the middle (and some of the late) dialogues a figure called Socrates remains the principal speaker. We are told by Aristotle that Socrates confined himself to ethical questions, and that he did not postulate a separate realm of imperceptible and eternal abstract objects called “Forms” or “Ideas.” Although the figure called Socrates affirms the existence of these objects in such Platonic dialogues as the Phaedo and the Republic, Aristotle takes this interlocutor to be a vehicle for Platonic philosophy, and attributes to Socrates only those positions that we find in Plato’s earlier writing, e.g. in the Apology, Charmides, Crito, Euthyphro, Hippias Minor, Hippias Major, Ion, Laches, Lysis, and Protagoras. Socrates focused on moral philosophy almost exclusively; Plato’s attention was also devoted to the study of metaphysics, epistemology, physical theory, mathematics, language, and political philosophy. When we distinguish the philosophies of Socrates and Plato in this way, we find continuities in their thought – for instance, the questions posed in the early dialogues receive answers in the Republic – but there are important differences. For Socrates, being virtuous is a purely intellectual matter: it simply involves knowing what is good for human beings; once we master this subject, we will act as we should. Because he equates virtue with knowledge, Socrates frequently draws analogies between being virtuous and having mastered any ordinary subject – cooking, building, or geometry, e.g. For mastery of these subjects does not involve a training of the emotions. By contrast, Plato affirms the existence of powerful emotional drives that can deflect us from our own good, if they are not disciplined by reason. He denies Socrates’ assumption that the emotions will not resist reason, once one comes to understand where one’s own good lies. Socrates says in Plato’s Apology that the only knowledge he has is that he knows nothing, but it would be a mistake to infer that he has no convictions about moral matters – convictions arrived at through a difficult process of reasoning. He holds that the unexined life is not worth living, that it is better to be treated unjustly than to do injustice, that understanding of moral matters is the only unconditional good, that the virtues are all forms of knowledge and cannot be separated from each other, that death is not an evil, that a good person cannot be harmed, that the gods possess the wisdom human beings lack and never act immorally, and so on. He does not accept these propositions as articles of faith, but is prepared to defend any of them; for he can show his interlocutors that their beliefs ought to lead them to accept these conclusions, paradoxical though they may be. Since Socrates can defend his beliefs and has subjected them to intellectual scrutiny, why does he present himself as someone who has no knowledge – excepting the knowledge of his own ignorance? The answer lies in his assumption that it is only a fully accomplished expert in any field who can claim knowledge or wisdom of that field; someone has knowledge of navigational matters, e.g., only if he has mastered the art of sailing, can answer all inquiries about this subject, and can train others to do the se. Judged by this high epistemic standard, Socrates can hardly claim to be a moral expert, for he lacks answers to the questions he raises, and cannot teach others to be virtuous. Though he has exined his moral beliefs and can offer reasons for them – an accomplishment that gives him an overbearing sense of superiority to his contemporaries – he takes himself to be quite distant from the ideal of moral perfection, which would involve a thorough understanding of all moral matters. This keen sense of the moral and intellectual deficiency of all human beings accounts for a great deal of Socrates’ appeal, just as his arrogant disdain for his fellow citizens no doubt contributed to his demise.

Socratic intellectualism, the claim that moral goodness or virtue consists exclusively in a kind of knowledge, with the implication that if one knows what is good and evil, one cannot fail to be a good person and to act in a morally upright way. The claim and the term derive from Socrates; a corollary is another claim of Socrates: there is no moral weakness or akrasia – all wrong action is due to the agent’s ignorance. Socrates defends this view in Plato’s dialogue Protagoras. There are two ways to understand Socrates’ view that knowledge of the good is sufficient for right action. (1) All desires are rational, being focused on what is believed to be good; thus, an agent who knows what is good will have no desire to act contrary to that knowledge. (2) There are non-rational desires, but knowledge of the good has sufficient motivational power to overcome them. Socratic intellectualism was abandoned by Plato and Aristotle, both of whom held that emotional makeup is an essential part of moral character. However, they retained the Socratic idea that there is a kind of knowledge or wisdom that ensures right action – but this knowledge presupposes antecedent training and molding of the passions. Socratic intellectualism was later revived and enjoyed a long life as a key doctrine of the Stoics.  MOTIVATIONAL INTERNALISM, SOCRATES, STOICISM. D.T.D. Socratic irony, a form of indirect communication frequently employed by Socrates in Plato’s early dialogues, chiefly to praise insincerely the abilities of his interlocutors while revealing their ignorance; or, to disparage his own abilities, e.g. by denying that he has knowledge. Interpreters disagree whether Socrates’ self-disparagement is insincere.  PLATO, SOCRATES. W.J.P. Socratic method.SOCRATES. Socratic paradoxes, a collection of theses associated with Socrates that contradict opinions about moral or practical matters shared by most people. Although there is no consensus on the precise number of Socratic paradoxes, each of the following theses has been identified as one. (1) Because no one desires evil things, anyone who pursues evil things does so involuntarily. (2) Because virtue is knowledge, anyone who does something morally wrong does so involuntarily. (3) It is better to be unjustly treated than to do what is unjust. The first two theses are associated with weakness of will or akrasia. It is sometimes claimed that the topic of the first thesis is prudential weakness, whereas that of the second is moral weakness; the reference to “evil things” in (1) is not limited to things that are morally evil. Naturally, various competing interpretations of these theses have been offered.  AKRASIA, PLATO, SOCRATES. A.R.M. soft determinism.FREE WILL PROBLEM. software.COMPUTER THEORY. solipsism, the doctrine that there exists a firstperson perspective possessing privileged and irreducible characteristics, in virtue of which we stand in various kinds of isolation from any other persons or external things that may exist. This doctrine is associated with but distinct from egocentricism. On one variant of solipsism (Thomas Nagel’s) we are isolated from other sentient beings because we can never adequately understand their experience (empathic solipsism). Another variant depends on the thesis that the meanings or referents of all words are mental entities uniquely accessible only to the language user (semantic solipsism). A restricted variant, due to Wittgenstein, asserts that first-person ascriptions of psychological states have a meaning fundentally different from that of second- or thirdperson ascriptions (psychological solipsism). In extreme forms semantic solipsism can lead to the view that the only things that can be meaningfully said to exist are ourselves or our mental states (ontological solipsism). Skepticism about the existence of the world external to our minds is sometimes considered a form of epistemological solipsism, since it asserts that we stand in epistemological isolation from that world, partly as a result of the epistemic priority possessed by firstperson access to mental states. In addition to these substantive versions of solipsism, several variants go under the rubric methodological solipsism. The idea is that when we seek to explain why sentient beings behave in certain ways by looking to what they believe, desire, hope, and fear, we should identify these psychological states only with events that occur inside the mind or brain, not with external events, since the former alone are the proximate and sufficient causal explanations of bodily behavior. Socratic intellectualism solipsism 861   861  DESCARTES, EGOCENTRIC PREDICENT, PHILOSOPHY OF MIND, PRIVATE LANGUAGE ARGUMENT, SKEPTICISM. T.V. Solovyov, Vladimir (1853–1900), Russian philosopher, theologian, essayist, and poet. In addition to major treatises and dialogues in speculative philosophy, Solovyov wrote sensitive literary criticism and influential essays on current social, political, and ecclesiastical questions. His serious verse is subtle and delicate; his light verse is rich in comic invention. The mystical image of the “Divine Sophia,” which Solovyov articulated in theoretical concepts as well as poetic symbols, powerfully influenced the Russian symbolist poets of the early twentieth century. His stress on the human role in the “divine-human process” that creates both cosmic and historical being led to charges of heresy from Russian Orthodox traditionalists. Solovyov’s rationalistic “justification of the good” in history, society, and individual life was inspired by Plato, Spinoza, and especially Hegel. However, at the end of his life Solovyov offered (in Three Conversations on War, Progress, and the End of History, 1900) a contrasting apocalyptic vision of historical and cosmic disaster, including the appearance, in the twenty-first century, of the Antichrist. In ethics, social philosophy, philosophy of history, and theory of culture, Solovyov was both a vigorous ecumenist and a “good European” who affirmed the intrinsic value of both the “individual human person” (Russian lichnost’) and the “individual nation or people” (narodnost’), but he decisively repudiated the perversions of these values in egoism and nationalism, respectively. He contrasted the fruits of English narodnost’ – the works of Shakespeare and Byron, Berkeley and Newton – with the fruits of English nationalism – the repressive and destructive expansion of the British Empire. In opposing ethnic, national, and religious exclusiveness and self-centeredness, Solovyov also, and quite consistently, opposed the growing xenophobia and antiSemitism of his own time. Since 1988 long-suppressed works by and about Solovyov have been widely republished in Russia, and fresh interpretations of his philosophy and theology have begun to appear. 

RUSSIAN PHILOSOPHY. G.L.K. Son Buddhism.KOREAN PHILOSOPHY. sophia.ARISTOTLE. sophismata (singular: sophisma), sentences illustrating semantic or logical issues associated with the analysis of syncategorematic terms, or terms lacking independent signification. Typically a sophisma was used from the thirteenth century into the sixteenth century to analyze relations holding between logic or semantics and broader philosophical issues. For exple, the syncategorematic term ‘besides’ (praeter) in ‘Socrates twice sees every man besides Plato’ is biguous, because it could mean ‘On two occasions Socrates sees every-man-but-Plato’ and also ‘Except for overlooking Plato once, on two occasions Socrates sees every man’. Roger Bacon used this sophisma to discuss the biguity of distribution, in this case, of the scope of the reference of ‘twice’ and ‘besides’. Sherwood used the sophisma to illustrate the applicability of his rule of the distribution of biguous syncategoremata, while Pseudo-Peter of Spain uses it to establish the truth of the rule, ‘If a proposition is in part false, it can be made true by means of an exception, but not if it is completely false’. In each case, the philosopher uses the biguous signification of the syncategorematic term to analyze broader logical problems. The sophisma ‘Every man is of necessity an animal’ has biguity through the syncategorematic ‘every’ that leads to broader philosophical problems. In the 1270s, Boethius of Dacia analyzed this sophisma in terms of its applicability when no man exists. Is the knowledge derived from understanding the proposition destroyed when the object known is destroyed? Does ‘man’ signify anything when there are no men? If we can correctly predicate a genus of a species, is the nature of the genus in that species something other than, or distinct from, what finally differentiates the species? In this case, the sophisma proves a useful approach to addressing metaphysical and epistemological problems central to Scholastic discourse. 

BACON, ROGER; SHERWOOD; SYNCATEGOREMATA. S.E.L. Sophists, any of a number of ancient Greeks, roughly contemporaneous with Socrates, who professed to teach, for a fee, rhetoric, philosophy, and how to succeed in life. They typically were itinerants, visiting much of the Greek world, and gave public exhibitions at Olympia and Delphi. They were part of the general expansion of Greek learning and of the changing culture in which the previous informal educational methods were inadequate. For exple, the growing litigiousness of Athenian society demanded Solovyov, Vladimir Sophists 862   862 instruction in the art of speaking well, which the Sophists helped fulfill. The Sophists have been portrayed as intellectual charlatans (hence the pejorative use of ‘sophism’), teaching their sophistical reasoning for money, and (at the other extreme) as Victorian moralists and educators. The truth is more complex. They were not a school, and shared no body of opinions. They were typically concerned with ethics (unlike many earlier philosophers, who emphasized physical inquiries) and about the relationship between laws and customs (nomos) and nature (phusis). Protagoras of Abdera (c.490–c.420 B.C.) was the most fous and perhaps the first Sophist. He visited Athens frequently, and bece a friend of its leader, Pericles; he therefore was invited to draw up a legal code for the colony of Thurii (444). According to some late reports, he died in a shipwreck as he was leaving Athens, having been tried for and found guilty of impiety. (He claimed that he knew nothing about the gods, because of human limitations and the difficulty of the question.) We have only a few short quotations from his works. His “Truth” (also known as the “Throws,” i.e., how to overthrow an opponent’s arguments) begins with his most fous claim: “Humans are the measure of all things – of things that are, that they are, of things that are not, that they are not.” That is, there is no objective truth; the world is for each person as it appears to that person. Of what use, then, are skills? Skilled people can change others’ perceptions in useful ways. For exple, a doctor can change a sick person’s perceptions so that she is healthy. Protagoras taught his students to “make the weaker argument the stronger,” i.e., to alter people’s perceptions about the value of arguments. (Aristophanes satirizes Protagoras as one who would make unjust arguments defeat just arguments.) This is true for ethical judgments, too: laws and customs are simply products of human agreement. But because laws and customs result from experiences of what is most useful, they should be followed rather than nature. No perception or judgment is more true than another, but some are more useful, and those that are more useful should be followed. Gorgias (c.483–376) was a student of Empedocles. His town, Leontini in Sicily, sent him as an bassador to Athens in 427; his visit was a great success, and the Athenians were azed at his rhetorical ability. Like other Sophists, he charged for instruction and gave speeches at religious festivals. Gorgias denied that he taught virtue; instead, he produced clever speakers. He insisted that different people have different virtues: for exple, women’s virtue differs from men’s. Since there is no truth (and if there were we couldn’t know it), we must rely on opinion, and so speakers who can change people’s opinions have great power – greater than the power produced by any other skill. (In his “Encomium on Helen” he argues that if she left Menelaus and went with Paris because she was convinced by speech, she wasn’t responsible for her actions.) Two paraphrases of Gorgias’s “About What Doesn’t Exist” survive; in this he argues that nothing exists, that even if something did, we couldn’t know it, and that even if we could know anything we couldn’t explain it to anyone. We can’t know anything, because some things we think of do not exist, and so we have no way of judging whether the things we think of exist. And we can’t express any knowledge we may have, because no two people can think of the se thing, since the se thing can’t be in two places, and because we use words in speech, not colors or shapes or objects. (This may be merely a parody of Parmenides’ argument that only one thing exists.) Antiphon the Sophist (fifth century) is probably (although not certainly) to be distinguished from Antiphon the orator (d. 411), some of whose speeches we possess. We know nothing about his life (if he is distinct from the orator). In addition to brief quotations in later authors, we have two papyrus fragments of his “On Truth.” In these he argues that we should follow laws and customs only if there are witnesses and so our action will affect our reputation; otherwise, we should follow nature, which is often inconsistent with following custom. Custom is established by human agreement, and so disobeying it is detrimental only if others know it is disobeyed, whereas nature’s demands (unlike those of custom) can’t be ignored with impunity. Antiphon assumes that rational actions are selfinterested, and that justice demands actions contrary to self-interest – a position Plato attacks in the Republic. Antiphon was also a materialist: the nature of a bed is wood, since if a buried bed could grow it would grow wood, not a bed. His view is one of Aristotle’s main concerns in the Physics, since Aristotle admits in the Categories that persistence through change is the best test for substance, but won’t admit that matter is substance. Hippias (fifth century) was from Elis, in the Peloponnesus, which used him as an basSophists Sophists 863   863 sador. He competed at the festival of Olympus with both prepared and extemporaneous speeches. He had a phenomenal memory. Since Plato repeatedly makes fun of him in the two dialogues that bear his ne, he probably was selfimportant and serious. He was a polymath who claimed he could do anything, including making speeches and clothes; he wrote a work collecting what he regarded as the best things said by others. According to one report, he made a mathematical discovery (the quadratrix, the first curve other than the circle known to the Greeks). In the Protagoras, Plato has Hippias contrast nature and custom, which often does violence to nature. Prodicus (fifth century) was from Ceos, in the Cyclades, which frequently employed him on diplomatic missions. He apparently demanded high fees, but had two versions of his lecture – one cost fifty drachmas, the other one drachma. (Socrates jokes that if he could have afforded the fifty-drachma lecture, he would have learned the truth about the correctness of words, and Aristotle says that when Prodicus added something exciting to keep his audience’s attention he called it “slipping in the fifty-drachma lecture for them.”) We have at least the content of one lecture of his, the “Choice of Heracles,” which consists of banal moralizing. Prodicus was praised by Socrates for his emphasis on the right use of words and on distinguishing between synonyms. He also had a naturalistic view of the origin of theology: useful things were regarded as gods.

 Sorel, Georges (1847–1922), French socialist activist and philosopher best known for his Reflections on Violence (1906), which develops the notion of revolutionary syndicalism as seen through proletarian violence and the interpretation of myth. An early proponent of the quasiMarxist position of gradual democratic reformism, Sorel eventually developed a highly subjective interpretation of historical materialism that, while retaining a conception of proletarian revolution, now understood it through myth rather than reason. He was in large part reacting to the empiricism of the French Enlightenment and the statistical structuring of sociological studies. In contrast to Marx and Engels, who held that revolution would occur when the proletariat attained its own class consciousness through an understanding of its true relationship to the means of production in capitalist society, Sorel introduced myth rather than reason as the correct way to interpret social totality. Myth allows for the necessary reaction to bourgeois rationalism and permits the social theorist to negate the status quo through the authenticity of revolutionary violence. By acknowledging the irrationality of the status quo, myth permits the possibility of social understanding and its necessary reaction, human emancipation through proletarian revolution. Marxism is myth because it juxtaposes the irreducibility of capitalist organization to its negation – violent proletarian revolution. The intermediary stage in this development is radical syndicalism, which organizes workers into groups opposed to bourgeois authority, instills the myth of proletarian revolution in the workers, and allows them in postrevolutionary times to work toward a social arrangement of worker and peasant governance and collaboration. The vehicle through which all this is accomplished is the general strike, whose aim, through the justified violence of its ends, is to facilitate the downfall and ultimate elimination of the bourgeoisie. In doing so the proletariat will lead society to a classless and harmonious stage in history. By stressing the notion of spontaneity Sorel thought he had solved the vexing problems of party and future bureaucracy found in much of the revolutionary literature of his day. In his later years he was interested in the writings of both Lenin and Mussolini. 

sorites, an argument consisting of categorical propositions that can be represented as (or decomposed into) a sequence of categorical syllogisms such that the conclusion of each syllogism except the last one in the sequence is a premise of the next syllogism in the sequence. An exple is ‘All cats are felines; all felines are mmals; all mmals are warm-blooded animals; therefore, all cats are warm-blooded animals’. This sorites may be viewed as composed of the two syllogisms ‘All cats are felines; all felines are mmals; therefore, all cats are mmals’ and ‘All cats are mmals; all mmals are warm-blooded animals; therefore, all cats are warm-blooded animals’. A sorites is valid if and only if each categorical syllogism into which it decomposes is valid. In the exple, the sorites decomposes into two syllogisms in (the mood) Barbara; since any syllogism in Barbara is valid, the sorites is valid. 

sorites paradox (from Greek soros, ‘heap’), any of a number of paradoxes about heaps and their Sorel, Georges sorites paradox 864   864 elements, and more broadly about gradations. A single grain of sand cannot be arranged so as to form a heap. Moreover, it seems that given a number of grains insufficient to form a heap, adding just one more grain still does not make a heap. (If a heap cannot be formed with one grain, it cannot be formed with two; if a heap cannot be formed with two, it cannot be formed with three; and so on.) But this seems to lead to the absurdity that however large the number of grains, it is not large enough to form a heap. A similar paradox can be developed in the opposite direction. A million grains of sand can certainly be arranged so as to form a heap, and it is always possible to remove a grain from a heap in such a way that what is left is also a heap. This seems to lead to the absurdity that a heap can be formed even from just a single grain. These paradoxes about heaps were known in antiquity (they are associated with Eubulides of Miletus, fourth century B.C.), and have since given their ne to a number of similar paradoxes. The loss of a single hair does not make a man bald, and a man with a million hairs is certainly not bald. This seems to lead to the absurd conclusion that even a man with no hairs at all is not bald. Or consider a long painted wall (hundreds of yards or hundreds of miles long). The left-hand region is clearly painted red, but there is a subtle gradation of shades and the right-hand region is clearly yellow. A small double window exposes a small section of the wall at any one time. It is moved progressively rightward, in such a way that at each move after the initial position the left-hand segment of the window exposes just the area that was in the previous position exposed by the right-hand segment. The window is so small relative to the wall that in no position can you tell any difference in color between the exposed areas. When the window is at the extreme left, both exposed areas are certainly red. But as the window moves to the right, the area in the right segment looks just the se color as the area in the left, which you have already pronounced to be red. So it seems that one must call it red too. But then one is led to the absurdity of calling a clearly yellow area red. As some of these cases suggest, there is a connection with dynic processes. A tadpole turns gradually into a frog. Yet if you analyze a motion picture of the process, it seems that there are no two adjacent fres of which you can say the earlier shows a tadpole, the later a frog. So it seems that you could argue: if something is a tadpole at a given moment, it must also be a tadpole (and not a frog) a millionth of a second later, and this seems to lead to the absurd conclusion that a tadpole can never turn into a frog. Most responses to this paradox attempt to deny the “major premise,” the one corresponding to the claim that if you cannot make a heap with n grains of sand then you cannot make a heap with n ! 1. The difficulty is that the negation of this premise is equivalent, in classical logic, to the proposition that there is a sharp cutoff: that, e.g., there is some number n of grains that are not enough to make a heap, where n ! 1 are enough to make a heap. The claim of a sharp cutoff may not be so very implausible for heaps (perhaps for things like grains of sand, four is the smallest number which can be formed into a heap) but is very implausible for colors and tadpoles. There are two main kinds of response to sorites paradoxes. One is to accept that there is in every such case a sharp cutoff, though typically we do not, and perhaps cannot, know where it is. Another kind of response is to evolve a non-classical logic within which one can refuse to accept the major premise without being committed to a sharp cutoff. At present, no such non-classical logic is entirely free of difficulties. So sorites paradoxes are still taken very seriously by contemporary philosophers.

sortal predicate, roughly, a predicate whose application to an object says what kind of object it is and implies conditions for objects of that kind to be identical. Person, green apple, regular hexagon, and pile of coal would generally be regarded as sortal predicates, whereas tall, green thing, and coal would generally be regarded as non-sortal predicates. An explicit and precise definition of the distinction is hard to come by. Sortal predicates are sometimes said to be distinguished by the fact that they provide a criterion of counting or that they do not apply to the parts of the objects to which they apply, but there are difficulties with each of these characterizations. The notion figures in recent philosophical discussions on various topics. Robert Ackermann and others have suggested that any scientific law confirmable by observation might require the use of sortal predicates. Thus ‘all non-black things are non-ravens’, while logically equivalent to the putative scientific law ‘all ravens are black’, is not itself confirmable by observation because ‘non-black’ is not a sortal predicate. David Wiggins and others have discussed the sortal sortal predicate 865   865 idea that all identity claims are sortal-relative in the sense that an appropriate response to the claim a % b is always “the se what as b?” John Wallace has argued that there would be advantages in relativizing the quantifiers of predicate logic to sortals. ‘All humans are mortal’ would be rendered Ex[m]Dx, rather than Ex(MxPDx). Crispin Wright has suggested that the view that natural number is a sortal concept is central to Frege’s (or any other) number-theoretic platonism. The word ‘sortal’ as a technical term in philosophy apparently first occurs in Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Locke argues that the so-called essence of a genus or sort (unlike the real essence of a thing) is merely the abstract idea that the general or sortal ne stands for. But ‘sortal’ has only one occurrence in Locke’s Essay. Its currency in contemporary philosophical idiom probably should be credited to P. F. Strawson’s Individuals. The general idea may be traced at least to the notion of second substance in Aristotle’s Categories. 

Soto, Domingo de (1494–1560), Spanish Dominican theologian and philosopher. Born in Segovia, he studied in Alcalá de Henares and Paris, taught at Segovia and Salanca, and was ned official representative of the Holy Roman Empire at the Council of Trent by Charles V. ong Soto’s many works, his commentaries on Aristotle’s Physics and On the Soul stand out. He also wrote a book on the nature of grace and an important treatise on law. Soto was one of the early members of the school of Spanish Thomism, but he did not always follow Aquinas. He rejected the doctrine of the real distinction between essence and existence and adopted Duns Scotus’s position that the primary object of human understanding is indeterminate being in general. Apart from metaphysics and theology, Soto’s philosophy of law and political theory are historically important. He maintained, contrary to his teacher Vitoria, that law originates in the understanding rather than in the will of the legislator. He also distinguished natural from positive law: the latter arises from the decision of legislators, whereas the former is based on nature. Soto was a founder of the general theory of international law.  AQUINAS, PHILOSOPHY OF LAW. J.J.E.G. soul, also called spirit, an entity supposed to be present only in living things, corresponding to the Greek psyche and Latin anima. Since there seems to be no material difference between an organism in the last moments of its life and the organism’s newly dead body, many philosophers since the time of Plato have claimed that the soul is an immaterial component of an organism. Because only material things are observed to be subject to dissolution, Plato took the soul’s immateriality as grounds for its immortality. Neither Plato nor Aristotle thought that only persons had souls: Aristotle ascribed souls to animals and plants since they all exhibited some living functions. Unlike Plato, Aristotle denied the transmigration of souls from one species to another or from one body to another after death; he was also more skeptical about the soul’s capacity for disembodiment – roughly, survival and functioning without a body. Descartes argued that only persons had souls and that the soul’s immaterial nature made freedom possible even if the human body is subject to deterministic physical laws. As the subject of thought, memory, emotion, desire, and action, the soul has been supposed to be an entity that makes self-consciousness possible, that differentiates simultaneous experiences into experiences either of the se person or of different persons, and that accounts for personal identity or a person’s continued identity through time. Dualists argue that soul and body must be distinct in order to explain consciousness and the possibility of immortality. Materialists argue that consciousness is entirely the result of complex physical processes.

soundness, (1) (of an argument) the property of being valid and having all true premises; (2) (of a logic) the property of being not too strong in a certain respect. A logic L has weak soundness provided every theorem of L is valid. And L has strong soundness if for every set G of sentences, every sentence deducible from G using L is a logical consequence of G.  COMPLETENESS, LOGICAL CONSEQUENCE, LOGICAL FORM, VALID. G.F.S. soundness, strong.SOUNDNESS. soundness, weak.SOUNDNESS. sovereignty, divine.DIVINE ATTRIBUTES. space, an extended manifold of several dimensions, where the number of dimensions corresponds to the number of variable magnitudes Soto, Domingo de space 866   866 needed to specify a location in the manifold; in particular, the three-dimensional manifold in which physical objects are situated and with respect to which their mutual positions and distances are defined. Ancient Greek atomism defined space as the infinite void in which atoms move; but whether space is finite or infinite, and whether void spaces exist, have remained in question. Aristotle described the universe as a finite plenum and reduced space to the aggregate of all places of physical things. His view was preeminent until Renaissance Neoplatonism, the Copernican revolution, and the revival of atomism reintroduced infinite, homogeneous space as a fundental cosmological assumption. Further controversy concerned whether the space assumed by early modern astronomy should be thought of as an independently existing thing or as an abstraction from the spatial relations of physical bodies. Interest in the relativity of motion encouraged the latter view, but Newton pointed out that mechanics presupposes absolute distinctions ong motions, and he concluded that absolute space must be postulated along with the basic laws of motion (Principia, 1687). Leibniz argued for the relational view from the identity of indiscernibles: the parts of space are indistinguishable from one another and therefore cannot be independently existing things. Relativistic physics has defused the original controversy by revealing both space and spatial relations as merely observer-dependent manifestations of the structure of spacetime. Meanwhile, Kant shifted the metaphysical controversy to epistemological grounds by claiming that space, with its Euclidean structure, is neither a “thing-in-itself” nor a relation of thingsin-themselves, but the a priori form of outer intuition. His view was challenged by the elaboration of non-Euclidean geometries in the nineteenth century, by Helmholtz’s arguments that both intuitive and physical space are known through empirical investigation, and finally by the use of non-Euclidean geometry in the theory of relativity. Precisely what geometrical presuppositions are inherent in human spatial perception, and what must be learned from experience, remain subjects of psychological investigation. 

RELATIVITY, SPACE-TIME, TIME. R.D. space, absolute.SPACE. space, life.LEWIN. space, mathematical.SPACE. space, phase.STATE. space, state.STATE. space-time, a four-dimensional continuum combining the three dimensions of space with time in order to represent motion geometrically. Each point is the location of an event, all of which together represent “the world” through time; paths in the continuum (worldlines) represent the dynical histories of moving particles, so that straight worldlines correspond to uniform motions; three-dimensional sections of constant time value (“spacelike hypersurfaces” or “simultaneity slices”) represent all of space at a given time. The idea was foreshadowed when Kant represented “the phenomenal world” as a plane defined by space and time as perpendicular axes (Inaugural Dissertation, 1770), and when Joseph Louis Lagrange (1736–1814) referred to mechanics as “the analytic geometry of four dimensions.” But classical mechanics assumes a universal standard of simultaneity, and so it can treat space and time separately. The concept of space-time was explicitly developed only when Einstein criticized absolute simultaneity and made the velocity of light a universal constant. The mathematician Hermann Minkowski showed in 1908 that the observer-independent structure of special relativity could be represented by a metric space of four dimensions: observers in relative motion would disagree on intervals of length and time, but agree on a fourdimensional interval combining spatial and temporal measurements. Minkowski’s model then made possible the general theory of relativity, which describes gravity as a curvature of spacetime in the presence of mass and the paths of falling bodies as the straightest worldlines in curved space-time. 

spatiotemporal continuity, a property of the careers, or space-time paths, of well-behaved objects. Let a space-time path be a series of possible spatiotemporal positions, each represented (in a selected coordinate system) by an ordered pair consisting of a time (its temporal component) and a volume of space (its spatial component). Such a path will be spatiotemporally continuous provided it is such that, relative to any inertial fre selected as coordinate system, space, absolute spatiotemporal continuity 867   867 (1) for every segment of the series, the temporal components of the members of that segment form a continuous temporal interval; and (2) for any two members ‹ti, Vi( and ‹tj, Vj( of the series that differ in their temporal components (ti and tj), if Vi and Vj (the spatial components) differ in either shape, size, or location, then between these members of the series there will be a member whose spatial component is more similar to Vi and Vj in these respects than these are to each other. This notion is of philosophical interest partly because of its connections with the notions of identity over time and causality. Putting aside such qualifications as quantum considerations may require, material objects (at least macroscopic objects of filiar kinds) apparently cannot undergo discontinuous change of place, and cannot have temporal gaps in their histories, and therefore the path through space-time traced by such an object must apparently be spatiotemporally continuous. More controversial is the claim that spatiotemporal continuity, together with some continuity with respect to other properties, is sufficient as well as necessary for the identity of such objects – e.g., that if a spatiotemporally continuous path is such that the spatial component of each member of the series is occupied by a table of a certain description at the time that is the temporal component of that member, then there is a single table of that description that traces that path. Those who deny this claim sometimes maintain that it is further required for the identity of material objects that there be causal and counterfactual dependence of later states on earlier ones (ceteris paribus, if the table had been different yesterday, it would be correspondingly different now). Since it appears that chains of causality must trace spatiotemporally continuous paths, it may be that insofar as spatiotemporal continuity is required for transtemporal identity, this is because it is required for transtemporal causality. 

specious present, the supposed time between past and future. The term was first offered by E. R. Clay in The Alternative: A Study in Psychology (1882), and was cited by Jes in Chapter XV of his Principles of Psychology (1890). Clay challenges the assumption that the “present” as a “datum” is given as “present” to us in our experience. “The present to which the datum refers is really a part of the past – a recent past – delusively given as benign time that intervenes between the past and the future. Let it be ned the specious present, and let the past that is given as being the past be known as the obvious past.” For Jes, this position is supportive of his contention that consciousness is a stre and can be divided into parts only by conceptual addition, i.e., only by our ascribing past, present, and future to what is, in our actual experience, a seless flow. Jes holds that the “practically cognized present is no knife-edge but a saddleback,” a sort of “ducatum” which we experience as a whole, and only upon reflective attention do we “distinguish its beginning from its end.” Whereas Clay refers to the datum of the present as “delusive,” one might rather say that it is perpetually elusive, for as we have our experience, now, it is always bathed retrospectively and prospectively. Contrary to common wisdom, no single experience ever is had by our consciousness utterly alone, single and without relations, fore and aft.  TIME. J.J.M. speckled hen.

speculative philosophy, a form of theorizing that goes beyond verifiable observation; specifically, a philosophical approach informed by the impulse to construct a grand narrative of a worldview that encompasses the whole of reality. Speculative philosophy purports to bind together reflections on the existence and nature of the cosmos, the psyche, and God. It sets for its goal a unifying matrix and an overarching system wherespeaker’s meaning speculative philosophy 868   868 with to comprehend the considered judgments of cosmology, psychology, and theology. Hegel’s absolute idealism, particularly as developed in his later thought, paradigmatically illustrates the requirements for speculative philosophizing. His system of idealism offered a vision of the unity of the categories of human thought as they come to realization in and through their opposition to each other. Speculative thought tends to place a premium on universality, totality, and unity; and it tends to marginalize the concrete particularities of the natural and social world. In its aggressive use of the systematic principle, geared to a unification of human experience, speculative philosophy aspires to a comprehensive understanding and explanation of the structural interrelations of the culture spheres of science, morality, art, and religion. 

speech act theory, the theory of language use, sometimes called pragmatics, as opposed to the theory of meaning, or semantics. Based on the meaning–use distinction, it categorizes systematically the sorts of things that can be done with words and explicates the ways these are determined, underdetermined, or undetermined by the meanings of the words used. Relying further on the distinction between speaker meaning and linguistic meaning, it aims to characterize the nature of communicative intentions and how they are expressed and recognized. Speech acts are a species of intentional action. In general, one and the se utterance may comprise a number of distinct though related acts, each corresponding to a different intention on the part of the speaker. Beyond intending to produce a certain sequence of sounds forming a sentence in English, a person who utters the sentence ‘The door is open’, e.g., is likely to be intending to perform, in the terminology of J. L. Austin (How to Do Things with Words, 1962), (1) the locutionary act of saying (expressing the proposition) that a certain door is open, (2) the illocutionary act of making the statement (expressing the belief) that it is open, and (3) the perlocutionary act of getting his listener to believe that it is open. In so doing, he may be performing the indirect speech act of requesting (illocutionary) the listener to close the door and of getting (perlocutionary) the hearer to close the door. The primary focus of speech act theory is on illocutionary acts, which may be classified in a variety of ways. Statements, predictions, and answers exemplify constatives; requests, commands and permissions are directives; promises, offers, and bets are commissives; greetings, apologies, and congratulations are acknowledgments. These are all communicative illocutionary acts, each distinguished by the type of psychological state expressed by the speaker. Successful communication consists in the audience’s recognition of the speaker’s intention to be expressing a certain psychological state with a certain content. Conventional illocutionary acts, on the other hand, effect or officially affect institutional states of affairs. Exples of the former are appointing, resigning, sentencing, and adjourning; exples of the latter are assessing, acquitting, certifying, and grading. (See Kent Bach and Robert M. Harnish, Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts, 1979.) The type of act an utterance exemplifies determines its illocutionary force. In the exple ‘The door is open’, the utterance has the force of both a statement and a request. The illocutionary force potential of a sentence is the force or forces with which it can be used literally, e.g., in the case of the sentence ‘The door is open’, as a statement but not as a request. The felicity conditions on an illocutionary act pertain not only to its communicative or institutional success but also to its sincerity, appropriateness, and effectiveness. An explicit performative utterance is an illocutionary act performed by uttering an indicative sentence in the simple present tense with a verb ning the type of act being performed, e.g., ‘I apologize for everything I did’ and ‘You are requested not to smoke’. The adverb ‘hereby’ may be used before the performative verb (‘apologize’ and ‘request’ in these exples) to indicate that the very utterance being made is the vehicle of the performance of the illocutionary act in question. A good test for distinguishing illocutionary from perlocutionary acts is to determine whether a verb ning the act can be used performatively. Austin exploited the phenomenon of performative utterances to expose the common philosophical error of assuming that the primary use of language is to make statements.

Spencer, Herbert (1820–1903), English philosopher, social reformer, and editor of The Economist. In epistemology, Spencer adopted the ninespeculative reason Spencer, Herbert 869   869 teenth-century trend toward positivism: the only reliable knowledge of the universe is to be found in the sciences. His ethics were utilitarian, following Benth and J. S. Mill: pleasure and pain are the criteria of value as signs of happiness or unhappiness in the individual. His Synthetic Philosophy, expounded in books written over many years, assumed (both in biology and psychology) the existence of Larckian evolution: given a characteristic environment, every animal possesses a disposition to make itself into what it will, failing maladaptive interventions, eventually become. The dispositions gain expression as inherited acquired habits. Spencer could not accept that species originate by chance variations and natural selection alone: direct adaptation to environmental constraints is mainly responsible for biological changes. Evolution also includes the progression of societies in the direction of a dynical equilibrium of individuals: the human condition is perfectible because human faculties are completely adapted to life in society, implying that evil and immorality will eventually disappear. His ideas on evolution predated publication of the major works of Darwin; A. R. Wallace was influenced by his writings.

Spinoza, Baruch (1632–77), Dutch metaphysician, epistemologist, psychologist, moral philosopher, political theorist, and philosopher of religion, generally regarded as one of the most important figures of seventeenth-century rationalism. Life and works. Born and educated in the Jewish community of sterd, he forsook his given ne ‘Baruch’ in favor of the Latin ‘Benedict’ at the age of twenty-two. Between 1652 and 1656 he studied the philosophy of Descartes in the school of Francis van den Enden. Having developed unorthodox views of the divine nature (and having ceased to be fully observant of Jewish practice), he was excommunicated by the Jewish community in 1656. He spent his entire life in Holland; after leaving sterd in 1660, he resided successively in Rijnsburg, Voorburg, and the Hague. He supported himself at least partly through grinding lenses, and his knowledge of optics involved him in an area of inquiry of great importance to seventeenth-century science. Acquainted with such leading intellectual figures as Leibniz, Huygens, and Henry Oldenberg, he declined a professorship at the University of Heidelberg partly on the grounds that it might interfere with his intellectual freedom. His premature death at the age of fortyfour was due to consumption. The only work published under Spinoza’s ne during his lifetime was his Principles of Descartes’s Philosophy (Renati Des Cartes Principiorum Philosophiae, Pars I et II, 1663), an attempt to recast and present Parts I and II of Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy in the manner that Spinoza called geometrical order or geometrical method. Modeled on the Elements of Euclid and on what Descartes called the method of synthesis, Spinoza’s “geometrical order” involves an initial set of definitions and axioms, from which various propositions are demonstrated, with notes or scholia attached where necessary. This work, which established his credentials as an expositor of Cartesian philosophy, had its origins in his endeavor to teach Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy to a private student. Spinoza’s TheologicalPolitical Treatise (Tractatus Theologico-Politicus) was published anonymously in 1670. After his death, his close circle of friends published his Posthumous Works (Opera Postuma, 1677), which included his masterpieces, Ethic, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order (Ethica, Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata). The Posthumous Works also included his early unfinished Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect (Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione), his later unfinished Political Treatise (Tractatus Politicus), a Hebrew Grmar, and Correspondence. An unpublished early work entitled Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being (Korte Vorhandelung van God, de Mensch en deszelvs Welstand), in many ways a forerunner of the Ethics, was rediscovered (in copied manuscript) and published in the nineteenth century. Spinoza’s authorship of two brief scientific treatises, On the Rainbow and On the Calculation of Chances, is still disputed. Metaphysics. Spinoza often uses the term ‘God, or Nature’ (“Deus, sive Natura“), and this identification of God with Nature is at the heart of his metaphysics. Because of this identification, his philosophy is often regarded as a version of pantheism and/or naturalism. But although philosophy begins with metaphysics for Spinoza, his metaphysics is ultimately in the service of his ethics. Because his naturalized God has no desires or purposes, human ethics cannot properly be derived from divine command. Rather, Spinozistic ethics seeks to demonstrate, from an adequate understanding of the divine nature and its expression in human nature, the way in which human beings can maximize their advantage. Central to the successful pursuit of this Speusippus Spinoza, Baruch 870   870 advantage is adequate knowledge, which leads to increasing control of the passions and to cooperative action. Spinoza’s ontology, like that of Descartes, consists of substances, their attributes (which Descartes called principal attributes), and their modes. In the Ethics, Spinoza defines ‘substance’ as what is “in itself, and is conceived through itself”; ‘attribute’ as that which “the intellect perceives of a substance as constituting its essence”; and ‘mode’ as “the affections of a substance, or that which is in another through which also it is conceived.” While Descartes had recognized a strict sense in which only God is a substance, he also recognized a second sense in which there are two kinds of created substances, each with its own principal attribute: extended substances, whose only principal attribute is extension; and minds, whose only principal attribute is thought. Spinoza, in contrast, consistently maintains that there is only one substance. His metaphysics is thus a form of substantial monism. This one substance is God, which Spinoza defines as “a being absolutely infinite, i.e., a substance consisting of an infinity of attributes, of which each expresses an eternal and infinite essence.” Thus, whereas Descartes limited each created substance to one principal attribute, Spinoza claims that the one substance has infinite attributes, each expressing the divine nature without limitation in its own way. Of these infinite attributes, however, humans can comprehend only two: extension and thought. Within each attribute, the modes of God are of two kinds: infinite modes, which are pervasive features of each attribute, such as the laws of nature; and finite modes, which are local and limited modifications of substance. There is an infinite sequence of finite modes. Descartes regarded a human being as a substantial union of two different substances, the thinking soul and the extended body, in causal interaction with each other. Spinoza, in contrast, regards a human being as a finite mode of God, existing simultaneously in God as a mode of thought and as a mode of extension. He holds that every mode of extension is literally identical with the mode of thought that is the “idea of” that mode of extension. Since the human mind is the idea of the human body, it follows that the human mind and the human body are literally the se thing, conceived under two different attributes. Because they are actually identical, there is no causal interaction between the mind and the body; but there is a complete parallelism between what occurs in the mind and what occurs in the body. Since every mode of extension has a corresponding and identical mode of thought (however rudimentary that might be), Spinoza allows that every mode of extension is “animated to some degree”; his view is thus a form of panpsychism. Another central feature of Spinoza’s metaphysics is his necessitarianism, expressed in his claim that “things could have been produced . . . in no other way, and in no other order” than that in which they have been produced. He derives this necessitarianism from his doctrine that God exists necessarily (for which he offers several arguments, including a version of the ontological argument) and his doctrine that everything that can follow from the divine nature must necessarily do so. Thus, although he does not use the term, he accepts a very strong version of the principle of sufficient reason. At the outset of the Ethics, he defines a thing as free when its actions are determined by its own nature alone. Only God – whose actions are determined entirely by the necessity of his own nature, and for whom nothing is external – is completely free in this sense. Nevertheless, human beings can achieve a relative freedom to the extent that they live the kind of life described in the later parts of the Ethics. Hence, Spinoza is a compatibilist concerning the relation between freedom and determinism. “Freedom of the will” in any sense that implies a lack of causal determination, however, is simply an illusion based on ignorance of the true causes of a being’s actions. The recognition that all occurrences are causally determined, Spinoza holds, has a positive consolatory power that aids one in controlling the passions. Epistemology and psychology. Like other rationalists, Spinoza distinguishes two representational faculties: the imagination and the intellect. The imagination is a faculty of forming imagistic representations of things, derived ultimately from the mechanisms of the senses; the intellect is a faculty of forming adequate, nonimagistic conceptions of things. He also distinguishes three “kinds of knowledge.” The first or lowest kind he calls opinion or imagination (opinio, imaginatio). It includes “random or indeterminate experience” (experientia vaga) and also “hearsay, or knowledge from mere signs”; it thus depends on the confused and mutilated deliverances of the senses, and is inadequate. The second kind of knowledge he calls reason (ratio); it depends on common notions (i.e., features of things that are “common to all, and equally in the part and in the whole”) or on adequate knowledge of the properties (as opposed to the Spinoza, Baruch Spinoza, Baruch 871   871 essences) of things. The third kind of knowledge he calls intuitive knowledge (scientia intuitiva); it proceeds from adequate knowledge of the essence or attributes of God to knowledge of the essence of things, and hence proceeds in the proper order, from causes to effects. Both the second and third kinds of knowledge are adequate. The third kind is preferable, however, as involving not only certain knowledge that something is so, but also knowledge of how and why it is so. Because there is only one substance – God – the individual things of the world are not distinguished from one another by any difference of substance. Rather, ong the internal qualitative modifications and differentiations of each divine attribute, there are patterns that have a tendency to endure; these constitute individual things. (As they occur within the attribute of extension, Spinoza calls these patterns fixed proportions of motion and rest.) Although these individual things are thus modes of the one substance, rather than substances in their own right, each has a nature or essence describable in terms of the thing’s particular pattern and its mechanisms for the preservation of its own being. This tendency toward self-preservation Spinoza calls conatus (sometimes translated as ‘endeavor’). Every individual thing has some conatus. An individual thing acts, or is active, to the extent that what occurs can be explained or understood through its own nature (i.e., its selfpreservatory mechanism) alone; it is passive to the extent that what happens must be explained through the nature of other forces impinging on it. Thus, every thing, to whatever extent it can, actively strives to persevere in its existence; and whatever aids this self-preservation constitutes that individual’s advantage. Spinoza’s specifically human psychology is an application of this more general doctrine of conatus. That application is made through appeal to several specific characteristics of human beings: they form imagistic representations of other individuals by means of their senses; they are sufficiently complex to undergo increases and decreases in their capacity for action; and they are capable of engaging in reason. The fundental concepts of his psychology are desire, which is conatus itself, especially as one is conscious of it as directed toward attaining a particular object; pleasure, which is an increase in capacity for action; and pain, which is a decrease in capacity for action. He defines other emotions in terms of these basic emotions, as they occur in particular combinations, in particular kinds of circumstances, with particular kinds of causes, and/or with particular kinds of objects. When a person is the adequate cause of his or her own emotions, these emotions are active emotions; otherwise, they are passions. Desire and pleasure can be either active emotions or passions, depending on the circumstances; pain, however, can only be a passion. Spinoza does not deny the phenomenon of altruism: one’s self-preservatory mechanism, and hence one’s desire, can become focused on a wide variety of objects, including the well-being of a loved person or object – even to one’s own detriment. However, because he reduces all human motivation, including altruistic motivation, to permutations of the endeavor to seek one’s own advantage, his theory is arguably a form of psychological egoism. Ethics. Spinoza’s ethical theory does not take the form of a set of moral commands. Rather, he seeks to demonstrate, by considering human actions and appetites objectively – “just as if it were a Question of lines, planes, and bodies” – wherein a person’s true advantage lies. Readers who genuinely grasp the demonstrated truths will, he holds, ipso facto be motivated, to at least some extent, to live their lives accordingly. Thus, Spinozistic ethics seeks to show how a person acts when “guided by reason“; to act in this way is at the se time to act with virtue, or power. All actions that result from understanding – i.e., all virtuous actions – may be attributed to strength of character (fortitudo). Such virtuous actions may be further divided into two classes: those due to tenacity (animositas), or “the Desire by which each one strives, solely from the dictate of reason, to preserve his being”; and those due to nobility (generositas), or “the Desire by which each one strives, solely from the dictate of reason, to aid other men and join them to him in friendship.” Thus, the virtuous person does not merely pursue private advantage, but seeks to cooperate with others; returns love for hatred; always acts honestly, not deceptively; and seeks to join himself with others in a political state. Nevertheless, the ultimate reason for aiding others and joining them to oneself in friendship is that “nothing is more useful to man than man” – i.e., because doing so is conducive to one’s own advantage, and particularly to one’s pursuit of knowledge, which is a good that can be shared without loss. Although Spinoza holds that we generally use the terms ‘good’ and ‘evil’ simply to report subjective appearances – so that we call “good” whatever we desire, and “evil” whatever we seek to avoid – he proposes that we Spinoza, Baruch Spinoza, Baruch 872   872 define ‘good’ philosophically as ‘what we certainly know to be useful to us’, and ‘evil’ as ‘what we certainly know prevents us from being masters of some good’. Since God is perfect and has no needs, it follows that nothing is either good or evil for God. Spinoza’s ultimate appeal to the agent’s advantage arguably renders his ethical theory a form of ethical egoism, even though he emphasizes the existence of common shareable goods and the (instrumental) ethical importance of cooperation with others. However, it is not a form of hedonism; for despite the prominence he gives to pleasure, the ultimate aim of human action is a higher state of perfection or capacity for action, of whose increasing attainment pleasure is only an indicator. A human being whose self-preservatory mechanism is driven or distorted by external forces is said to be in bondage to the passions; in contrast, one who successfully pursues only what is truly advantageous, in consequence of genuine understanding of where that advantage properly lies, is free. Accordingly, Spinoza also expresses his conception of a virtuous life guided by reason in terms of an ideal “free man.” Above all, the free man seeks understanding of himself and of Nature. Adequate knowledge, and particularly knowledge of the third kind, leads to blessedness, to peace of mind, and to the intellectual love of God. Blessedness is not a reward for virtue, however, but rather an integral aspect of the virtuous life. The human mind is itself a part of the infinite intellect of God, and adequate knowledge is an eternal aspect of that infinite intellect. Hence, as one gains knowledge, a greater part of one’s own mind comes to be identified with something that is eternal, and one becomes less dependent on – and less disturbed by – the local forces of one’s immediate environment. Accordingly, the free man “thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation on life, not on death.” Moreover, just as one’s adequate knowledge is literally an eternal part of the infinite intellect of God, the resulting blessedness, peace of mind, and intellectual love are literally aspects of what might be considered God’s own eternal “emotional” life. Although this endows the free man with a kind of blessed immortality, it is not a personal immortality, since the sensation and memory that are essential to personal individuality are not eternal. Rather, the free man achieves during his lifetime an increasing participation in a body of adequate knowledge that has itself always been eternal, so that, at death, a large part of the free man’s mind has become identified with the eternal. It is thus a kind of “immortality” in which one can participate while one lives, not merely when one dies. Politics and philosophical theology. Spinoza’s political theory, like that of Hobbes, treats rights and power as equivalent. Citizens give up rights to the state for the sake of the protection that the state can provide. Hobbes, however, regards this social contract as nearly absolute, one in which citizens give up all of their rights except the right to resist death. Spinoza, in contrast, emphasizes that citizens cannot give up the right to pursue their own advantage as they see it, in its full generality; and hence that the power, and right, of any actual state is always limited by the state’s practical ability to enforce its dictates so as to alter the citizens’ continuing perception of their own advantage. Furthermore, he has a more extensive conception of the nature of an individual’s own advantage than Hobbes, since for him one’s own true advantage lies not merely in fending off death and pursuing pleasure, but in achieving the adequate knowledge that brings blessedness and allows one to participate in that which is eternal. In consequence, Spinoza, unlike Hobbes, recommends a limited, constitutional state that encourages freedom of expression and religious toleration. Such a state – itself a kind of individual – best preserves its own being, and provides both the most stable and the most beneficial form of government for its citizens. In his Theological-Political Treatise, Spinoza also takes up popular religion, the interpretation of Scripture, and their bearing on the well-being of the state. He characterizes the Old Testent prophets as individuals whose vivid imaginations produced messages of political value for the ancient Hebrew state. Using a naturalistic outlook and historical hermeneutic methods that anticipate the later “higher criticism” of the Bible, he seeks to show that Scriptural writers themselves consistently treat only justice and charity as essential to salvation, and hence that dogmatic doxastic requirements are not justified by Scripture. Popular religion should thus propound only these two requirements, which it may imaginatively represent, to the minds of the many, as the requirements for rewards granted by a divine Lawgiver. The few, who are more philosophical, and who thus rely on intellect, will recognize that the natural laws of human psychology require charity and justice as conditions of happiness, and that what the vulgar construe as rewards granted by personal divine intervention are in fact the natural consequences of a virtuous life. Spinoza, Baruch Spinoza, Baruch 873   873 Because of his identificaton of God with Nature and his treatment of popular religion, Spinoza’s contemporaries often regarded his philosophy as a thinly disguised atheism. Paradoxically, however, nineteenth-century Romanticism embraced him for his pantheism; Novalis, e.g., fously characterized him as “the God-intoxicated man.” In fact, Spinoza ascribes to Nature most of the characteristics that Western theologians have ascribed to God: Spinozistic Nature is infinite, eternal, necessarily existing, the object of an ontological argument, the first cause of all things, all-knowing, and the being whose contemplation produces blessedness, intellectual love, and participation in a kind of immortality or eternal life. Spinoza’s claim to affirm the existence of God is therefore no mere evasion. However, he emphatically denies that God is a person or acts for purposes; that anything is good or evil from the divine perspective; or that there is a personal immortality involving memory. In addition to his influence on the history of biblical criticism and on literature (including not only Novalis but such writers as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Heine, Shelley, George Eliot, George Sand, Somerset Maugh, Jorge Luis Borges, and Bernard Malud), Spinoza has affected the philosophical outlooks of such diverse twentieth-century thinkers as Freud and Einstein. Contemporary physicists have seen in his monistic metaphysics an anticipation of twentieth-century field metaphysics. More generally, he is a leading intellectual forebear of twentieth-century determinism and naturalism, and of the mind–body identity theory. 

Spir, Afrikan (1837–90), German philosopher. He served in the Crimean War as a Russian officer. A non-academic, he published books in German and French. His major works are Forschung nach der Gewissheit in der Erkenntnis der Wirklichkeit (Inquiry concerning Certainty in the Knowledge of Actuality, 1869) and the two-volume Denken und Wirklichkeit: Versuch einer Erneuerung der kritischen Philosophie (Thought and Actuality: Attempt at a Revival of Critical Philosophy, 1873). Thought and Actuality presents a metaphysics based on the radical separation of the apparent world and an absolute reality. All we can know about the “unconditioned” is that it must conform with the principle of identity. While retaining the unknowable thing-in-itself of Kant, Spir argued for the empirical reality of time, which is given to us in immediate experience and depends on our experience of a succession of differential states. The aim of philosophy is to reach fundental and immediate certainties. Of the works included in his Gesmelte Schriften (1883– 84), only a relatively minor study, Right and Wrong, was translated into English (in 1954). There are a number of references to Spir in the writings of Nietzsche, which indicate that some of Nietzsche’s central notions were influenced, both positively and negatively, by Spir’s analyses of becoming and temporality, as well as by his concept of the separation of the world of appearance and the “true world.” G.J.S. spirit.SOUL. spirit, Absolute.HEGEL. spissitude.MORE, HENRY. split brain effects, a wide array of behavioral effects consequent upon the severing of the cerebral commisures, and generally interpreted as indicating asymmetry in cerebral functions. The human brain has considerable left–right functional differentiation, or asymmetry, that affects behavior. The most obvious exple is handedness. By the 1860s Bouillaud, Dax, and Broca had observed that the effects of unilateral dage indicated that the left hemisphere was preferentially involved in language. Since the 1960s, this commitment to functional asymmetry has been reinforced by studies of patients in whom communication between the hemispheres has been surgically disrupted. Split brain effects depend on severing the cerebral commisures, and especially the corpus callosum, which are neural structures mediating communication between the cerebral hemispheres. Commisurotomies have been performed since the 1940s to control severe epilepsy. This is intended to leave both hemispheres intact and functioning independently. Beginning in the 1960s, J. E. Bogen, M. S. Gazzaniga, and R. W. Sperry conducted an array of psychological tests to evaluate the distinctive abilities of the different hemispheres. Ascertaining the degree of cerebral asymmetry depends on a carefully controlled experimental design in which access of the disassociated hemispheres to peripheral cues is limited. The result has been a wide array of striking results. For exple, patients are unable to match an object such as a key felt in one hand with a similar object felt in the other; patients are unable to ne an object Spir, Afrikan split brain effects 874   874 held in the left hand, though they can ne an object held in the right. Researchers have concluded that these results confirm a clear lateralization of speech, writing, and calculation in the left hemisphere (for righthanded patients), leaving the right hemisphere largely unable to respond in speech or writing, and typically unable to perform even simple calculations. It is often concluded that the left hemisphere is specialized for verbal and analytic modes of thinking, while the right hemisphere is specialized for more spatial and synthetic modes of thinking. The precise character and extent of these differences in normal subjects are less clear.

square of opposition, a graphic representation of various logical relations ong categorical propositions. (Relations ong modal and even ong hypothetical propositions have also been represented on the square.) Two propositions are said to be each other’s (1) contradictories if exactly one of them must be true and exactly one false; (2) contraries if they could not both be true although they could both be false; and (3) subcontraries if at least one of them must be true although both of them may be true. There is a relation of (4) subalternation of one proposition, called subaltern, to another called superaltern, if the truth of the latter implies the truth of the former, but not conversely. Applying these definitions to the four types of categorical propositions, we find that SaP and SoP are contradictories, and so are SeP and SiP. SaP and SeP are contraries. SiP and SoP are subcontraries. SiP is subaltern to SaP, and SoP is subaltern to SeP. These relations can be represented graphically in a square of opposition: The four relations on the traditional square are expressed in the following theses: Contradictories: SaP S -SoP, SeP S -SiP Contraries: -(SaP & SeP) or SaP P -SeP Subcontraries: SiP 7 SoP Subalterns: SaP P SiP, SeP P SoP For these relations to hold, an underlying existential assumption must be satisfied: the terms serving as subjects of propositions must be satisfied, not empty (e.g., ‘man’ is satisfied and ‘elf’ empty). Only the contradictory opposition remains without that assumption. Modern interpretations of categorical propositions exclude the existential assumption; thus, only the contradictory opposition remains in the square.  SYLLOGISM. I.Bo. square of opposition, modal.

standard model, a term that, like ‘non-standard model’, is used with regard to theories that systematize (part of) our knowledge of some mathematical structure, for instance the structure of natural numbers with addition, multiplication, and the successor function, or the structure of real numbers with ordering, addition, and multiplication. Models isomorphic to this intended mathematical structure are the “standard models” of the theory, while any other, non-isomorphic, model of the theory is a ‘non-standard’ model. Since Peano arithmetic is incomplete, it has consistent extensions that have no standard model. But there are also non-standard, countable models of complete number theory, the set of all true first-order sentences about natural numbers, as was first shown by Skolem in 1934. Categorical theories do not have a non-standard model. It is less clear whether there is a standard model of set theory, although a countable model would certainly count as non-standard. The Skolem paradox is that any first-order formulation of set theory, like ZF, due to Zermelo and Fraenkel, has a countable model, while it seems to assert the existence of non-countable sets. Many other important mathematical structures cannot be characterized by a categorical set of first-order axioms, and thus allow non-standard models. The erican philosopher Putn has argued that this fact has important implications for the debate about realism in the philosophy of language. If axioms cannot capture the spontaneity, liberty of standard model 875   875 “intuitive” notion of a set, what could? Some of his detractors have pointed out that within second-order logic categorical characterizations are often possible. But Putn has objected that the intended interpretation of second-order logic itself is not fixed by the use of the formalism of second-order logic, where “use” is determined by the rules of inference for second-order logic we know about. Moreover, categorical theories are sometimes uninformative.  .

state, the way an object or system basically is; the fundental, intrinsic properties of an object or system, and the basis of its other properties. An instantaneous state is a state at a given time. State variables are constituents of a state whose values may vary with time. In classical or Newtonian mechanics the instantaneous state of an n-particle system consists of the positions and momenta (masses multiplied by velocities) of the n particles at a given time. Other mechanical properties are functions of those in states. Fundental and derived properties are often, though possibly misleadingly, called observables. The set of a system’s possible states can be represented as an abstract phase space or state space, with dimensions or coordinates for (the components of) each state variable. In quantum theory, states do not fix the particular values of observables, only the probabilities of observables assuming particular values in particular measurement situations. For positivism or instrumentalism, specifying a quantum state does nothing more than provide a means for calculating such probabilities. For realism, it does more – e.g., it refers to the basis of a quantum system’s probabilistic dispositions or propensities. Vectors in Hilbert spaces represent possible states, and Hermitian operators on vectors represent observables. 

state of affairs, a possibility, actuality, or impossibility of the kind expressed by a nominalization of a declarative sentence. (The declarative sentence ‘This die comes up six’ can be nominalized either through the construction ‘that this die comes up six’ or through the likes of ‘this die’s coming up six’. The resulting nominalizations might be interpreted as ning corresponding propositions or states of affairs.) States of affairs come in several varieties. Some are possible states of affairs, or possibilities. Consider the possibility of a certain die coming up six when rolled next. This possibility is a state of affairs, as is its “complement” – the die’s not coming up six when rolled next. There is in addition the state of affairs which conjoins that die’s coming up six with its not coming up six. And this (contradictory) state of affairs is of course not a possibility, not a possible state of affairs. Moreover, for every actual state of affairs there is a non-actual one, its complement. For every proposition there is hence a state of affairs: possible or impossible, actual or not. Indeed some consider propositions to be states of affairs. Some take facts to be actual states of affairs, while others prefer to define them as true propositions. If propositions are states of affairs, then facts are of course both actual states of affairs and true propositions. In a very broad sense, events are just possible states of affairs; in a narrower sense they are contingent states of affairs; and in a still narrower sense they are contingent and particular states of affairs, involving just the exemplification of an nadic property by a sequence of individuals of length n. In a yet narrower sense events are only those particular and contingent states of affairs that entail change. A baseball’s remaining round throughout a certain period does not count as an event in this narrower sense but only as a state of that baseball, unlike the event of its being hit by a certain bat. 

statistical explanation, an explanation expressed in an explanatory argument containing premises and conclusions making claims about statistical probabilities. These arguments include deductions of less general from more general laws and differ from other such explanations only insofar as the contents of the laws imply claims about statistical probability. Most philosophical discussion in the latter half of the twentieth century has focused on statistical explanation of events rather than laws. This type of argument was discussed by Ernest Nagel (The Structure of Science, 1961) under the rubric “probabilistic explanation,” and by Hempel (Aspects of Scientific Explanation, 1965) as “inductive statistical” explanation. The explanans contains a statement asserting that a given system responds in one of several ways specified by a sple space of possible outcomes on a trial or experiment of some type, and that the statistical probability of an event (represented by a set of points in the sple space) on the given kind of trial is also given for each such event. Thus, the statement might assert that the statistical probability is near 1 of the relative frequency r/n of heads in n tosses being close to the statistical probability p of heads on a single toss, where the sple space consists of the 2n possible sequences of heads and tails in n tosses. Nagel and Hempel understood such statistical probability statements to be covering laws, so that inductive-statistical explanation and deductivenomological explanation of events are two species of covering law explanation. The explanans also contains a claim that an experiment of the kind mentioned in the statistical assumption has taken place (e.g., the coin has been tossed n times). The explanandum asserts that an event of some kind has occurred (e.g., the coin has landed heads approximately r times in the n tosses). In many cases, the kind of experiment can be described equivalently as an n-fold repetition of some other kind of experiment (as a thousandfold repetition of the tossing of a given coin) or as the implementation of the kind of trial (thousand-fold tossing of the coin) one time. Hence, statistical explanation of events can always be construed as deriving conclusions about “single cases” from assumptions about statistical probabilities even when the concern is to explain mass phenomena. Yet, many authors controversially contrast statistical explanation in quantum mechanics, which is alleged to require a singlecase propensity interpretation of statistical probability, with statistical explanation in statistical mechanics, genetics, and the social sciences, which allegedly calls for a frequency interpretation. The structure of the explanatory argument of such statistical explanation has the form of a direct inference from assumptions about statistical probabilities and the kind of experiment trial which has taken place to the outcome. One controversial aspect of direct inference is the problem of the reference class. Since the early nineteenth century, statistical probability has been understood to be relative to the way the experiment or trial is described. Authors like J. Venn, Peirce, R. A. Fisher, and Reichenbach, ong many others, have been concerned with how to decide on which kind of trial to base a direct inference when the trial under investigation is correctly describable in several ways and the statistical probabilities of possible outcomes may differ relative to the different sorts of descriptions. The most comprehensive discussion of this problem of the reference class is found in the work of H. E. Kyburg (e.g., Probability and the Logic of Rational Belief, 1961). Hempel acknowledged its importance as an “epistemic biguity” in inductive statistical explanation. Controversy also arises concerning inductive acceptance. May the conclusion of an explanatory direct inference be a judgment as to the subjective probability that the outcome event occurred? May a judgment that the outcome event occurred is inductively “accepted” be made? Is some other mode of assessing the claim about the outcome appropriate? Hempel’s discussion of the “nonconjunctiveness of inductivestatistical” explanation derives from Kyburg’s earlier account of direct inference where high probability is assumed to be sufficient for acceptance. Non-conjunctiveness has been avoided by abandoning the sufficiency of high probability (I. Levi, Gbling with Truth, 1967) or by denying that direct inference in inductive-statistical explanation involves inductive acceptance at all (R. C. Jeffrey, “Statistical Explanation vs. Statistical Inference,” in Essays in Honor of C. G. Hempel, 1969).  CAUSATION, EXPLANATION. I.L. statistical independence.

Steiner, Rudolf (1861–1925), Austrian spiritualist and founder of anthroposophy. Trained as a scientist, he edited Goethe’s scientific writings and prepared the standard edition of his complete works from 1889 to 1896. Steiner’s major work, Die Philosophie der Freiheit, was published in 1894. His Friedrich Nietzsche: Ein Kämpfer gegen seine Zeit (1895) was translated in 1960 by Margaret deRis as Friedrich Nietzsche: Fighter for Freedom. Steiner taught at a workingmen’s college and edited a literary journal, Magazin für Literatur, in Berlin. In 1901 he embraced a spiritualism which emphasized a form of knowledge that transcended sensory experience and was attained by the “higher self.” He held that man had previously been attuned to spiritual processes by virtue of a drelike state of consciousness, but was diverted from this consciousness by preoccupation with material entities. Through training, individuals could retrieve their innate capacity to perceive a spiritual realm. Steiner’s writings on this theme are The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (1894), Occult Science: An Outline (1913), On the Riddle of Man (1916), and On the Riddles of the Soul (1917). His last work was his autobiography (1924). To advance his teachings, he founded the Anthroposophical Society (1912) and a school of “spiritual science” called the Goetheanum near Basel, Switzerland. His work inspired the Waldorf School movement, which comprises some eighty schools for children. The anthroposophy movement he established remains active in Europe and the United States. G.J.S. Stephen, Sir Leslie (1832–1904), English literary critic, editor, intellectual historian, and philosopher. He was the first chief editor of the great Dictionary of National Biography, writing hundreds of the entries himself. Brought up in an intensely religious household, he lost his faith and spent much of his time trying to construct a moral and intellectual outlook to replace it. His main works in intellectual history, the two-volume History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1876) and the three-volume English Utilitarians (1900), were undertaken as part of this project. So was his one purely philosophical work, the Science of Ethics (1882), in which he tried to develop an evolutionary theory of morality. Stephen was impatient of philosophical technicalities. Hence his treatise on ethics does very little to resolve the problems – some of them pointed out to him by his friend Henry Sidgwick – with evolutionary ethics, and does not get beyond the several other works on the subject published during this period. His histories of thought are sometimes superficial, and their focus of interest is not ours; but they are still useful because of their scope and the massive scholarship they put to use.  DARWINISM. J.B.S. Stewart, Dugald.SCOTTISH COMMON SENSE PHILOSOPHY. Stillingfleet, Edward (1635–99), English divine and controversialist who first made his ne with Irenicum (1659), using natural-law doctrines to oppose religious sectarianism. His Origines Sacrae (1662), ostensibly on the superiority of the Scriptural record over other forms of ancient history, was for its day a learned study in the moral certainty of historical evidence, the authority of testimony, and the credibility of miracles. In drawing eclectically on philosophy from antiquity to the Cbridge Platonists, he was much influenced by the Cartesian theory of ideas, but later repudiated Cartesianism for its mechanist tendency. For three decades he pphleteered on behalf of the moral certainty of orthodox Protestant belief against what he considered the beliefs “contrary to reason” of Roman Catholicism. This led to controversy with Unitarian and deist writers who argued that mysteries like the Trinity were equally contrary to “clear and distinct” ideas. He was alarmed at the use made of Locke’s “new,” i.e. nonCartesian, way of ideas by John Toland in Christianity not Mysterious (1696), and devoted his last years to challenging Locke to prove his orthodoxy. The debate was largely over the concepts of substance, essence, and person, and of faith and certainty. Locke gave no quarter in the public controversy, but in the fourth edition of his Essay (1700) he silently ended some passages that had provoked Stillingfleet. 

Stirner, Max, pseudonym of Kasper Schmidt (1805–56), German philosopher who proposed a theory of radical individualism. Born in Bayreuth, he taught in Gymnasiums and later at a Berlin academy for women. He translated what bece a standard German version of Smith’s Wealth of Nations and contributed articles to the Rhenische Zeitung. His most important work was statistical probability Stirner, Max 878   878 Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum (1845), translated by Steven T. Byington as The Ego and His Own (1907). His second book was Die Geschichte der Reaktion (1852). Stirner was in reaction to Hegel and was for a time associated with the left Hegelians. He stressed the priority of will and instinct over reason and proposed a radical anarchic individualism. Each individual is unique, and the independent ego is the fundental value and reality. Stirner attacked the state, religious ideas, and abstractions such as “humanity” as “spectres” that are deceptive illusions, remnants of erroneous hypostatizations. His defense of egoism is such that the individual is considered to have no obligations or duties, and especially not to the state. Encouraging an individual “rebellion” against state domination and control, Stirner attracted a following ong nineteenthand twentieth-century anarchists. The sole goal of life is the cultivation of “uniqueness” or “ownness.” Engels and Marx attacked his ideas at length (under the rubric “Saint Marx”) in The German Ideology. Insofar as his theory of radical individualism offers no clearly stated ethical requirements, it has been characterized as a form of nihilistic egoism.  HEGEL. G.J.S. stochastic process, a process that evolves, as time goes by, according to a probabilistic principle rather than a deterministic principle. Such processes are also called random processes, but ‘stochastic’ does not imply complete disorderliness. The principle of evolution governing a stochastic or random process is precise, though probabilistic, in form. For exple, suppose some process unfolds in discrete successive stages. And suppose that given any initial sequence of stages, S1, S2, . . . , Sn, there is a precise probability that the next stage Sn+1 will be state S, a precise probability that it will be SH, and so on for all possible continuations of the sequence of states. These probabilities are called transition probabilities. An evolving sequence of this kind is called a discrete-time stochastic process, or discrete-time random process. A theoretically important special case occurs when transition probabilities depend only on the latest stage in the sequence of stages. When an evolving process has this property it is called a discrete-time Markov process. A simple exple of a discrete-time Markov process is the behavior of a person who keeps taking either a step forward or a step back according to whether a coin falls heads or tails; the probabilistic principle of movement is always applied to the person’s most recent position. The successive stages of a stochastic process need not be discrete. If they are continuous, they constitute a “continuous-time” stochastic or random process. The mathematical theory of stochastic processes has many applications in science and technology. The evolution of epidemics, the process of soil erosion, and the spread of cracks in metals have all been given plausible models as stochastic processes, to mention just a few areas of research. 

Stoicism, one of the three leading movements constituting Hellenistic philosophy. Its founder was Zeno of Citium (334–262 B.C.), who was succeeded as school head by Cleanthes (331– 232). But the third head, Chrysippus (c.280– c.206), was its greatest exponent and most voluminous writer. These three are the leading representatives of Early Stoicism. No work by any early Stoic survives intact, except Cleanthes’ short “Hymn to Zeus.” Otherwise we are dependent on doxography, on isolated quotations, and on secondary sources, most of them hostile. Nevertheless, a remarkably coherent account of the system can be assembled. The Stoic world is an ideally good organism, all of whose parts interact for the benefit of the whole. It is imbued with divine reason (logos), its entire development providentially ordained by fate and repeated identically from one world phase to the next in a never-ending cycle, each phase ending with a conflagration (ekpyrosis). Only bodies strictly “exist” and can interact. Body is infinitely divisible, and contains no void. At the lowest level, the world is analyzed into an active principle, god, and a passive principle, matter, both probably corporeal. Out of these are generated, at a higher level, the four elements air, fire, earth, and water, whose own interaction is analogous to that of god and matter: air and fire, severally or conjointly, are an active rational force called breath (Greek pneuma, Latin spiritus), while earth and water constitute the passive substrate on which these act, totally interpenetrating each other thanks to the non-particulate structure of body and its capacity to be mixed “through and through.” Most physical analysis is conducted at this higher level, and pneuma becomes a key concept in physics and biology. A thing’s qualities are constituted by its pneuma, which has the additional role of giving it cohestochastic process Stoicism 879   879 sion and thus an essential identity. In inanimate objects this unifying pneuma is called a hexis (state); in plants it is called physis (nature); and in animals “soul.” Even qualities of soul, e.g. justice, are portions of pneuma, and they too are therefore bodies: only thus could they have their evident causal efficacy. Four incorporeals are admitted: place, void (which surrounds the world), time, and lekta (see below); these do not strictly “exist” – they lack the corporeal power of interaction – but as items with some objective standing in the world they are, at least, “somethings.” Universals, identified with Plato’s Forms, are treated as concepts (ennoemata), convenient fictions that do not even earn the status of “somethings.” Stoic ethics is founded on the principle that only virtue is good, only vice bad. Other things conventionally assigned a value are “indifferent” (adiaphora), although some, e.g., health, wealth, and honor, are naturally “preferred” (proegmena), while their opposites are “dispreferred” (apoproegmena). Even though their possession is irrelevant to happiness, from birth these indifferents serve as the appropriate subject matter of our choices, each correct choice being a “proper function” (kathekon) – not yet a morally good act, but a step toward our eventual end (telos) of “living in accordance with nature.” As we develop our rationality, the appropriate choices become more complex, less intuitive. For exple, it may sometimes be more in accordance with nature’s plan to sacrifice your wealth or health, in which case it becomes your “proper function” to do so. You have a specific role to play in the world plan, and moral progress (prokope) consists in learning it. This progress involves widening your natural “affinity” (oikeiosis): an initial concern for yourself and your parts is later extended to those close to you, and eventually to all mankind. That is the Stoic route toward justice. However, justice and the other virtues are actually found only in the sage, an idealized perfectly rational person totally in tune with the divine cosmic plan. The Stoics doubted whether any sages existed, although there was a tendency to treat at least Socrates as having been one. The sage is totally good, everyone else totally bad, on the paradoxical Stoic principle that all sins are equal. The sage’s actions, however similar externally to mere “proper functions,” have an entirely distinct character: they are rened ‘right actions’ (katorthomata). Acting purely from “right reason,” he is distinguished by his “freedom from passion” (apatheia): morally wrong impulses, or passions, are at root intellectual errors of mistaking what is indifferent for good or bad, whereas the sage’s evaluations are always correct. The sage alone is happy and truly free, living in perfect harmony with the divine plan. All human lives are predetermined by the providentially designed, all-embracing causal nexus of fate; yet being the principal causes of their actions, the good and the bad alike are responsible for them: determinism and morality are fully compatible. Stoic epistemology defends the existence of cognitive certainty against the attacks of the New Academy. Belief is described as assent (synkatathesis) to an impression (phantasia), i.e. taking as true the propositional content of some perceptual or reflective impression. Certainty comes through the “cognitive impression” (phantasia kataleptike), a self-certifying perceptual representation of external fact, claimed to be commonplace. Out of sets of such impressions we acquire generic conceptions (prolepseis) and become rational. The highest intellectual state, knowledge (episteme), in which all cognitions become mutually supporting and hence “unshakable by reason,” is the prerogative of the wise. Everyone else is in a state of mere opinion (doxa) or of ignorance. Nevertheless, the cognitive impression serves as a “criterion of truth” for all. A further important criterion is prolepseis, also called common conceptions and common notions (koinai ennoiai), often appealed to in philosophical argument. Although officially dependent on experience, they often sound more like innate intuitions, purportedly indubitable. Stoic logic is propositional, by contrast with Aristotle’s logic of terms. The basic unit is the simple proposition (axioma), the primary bearer of truth and falsehood. Syllogistic also employs complex propositions – conditional, conjunctive, and disjunctive – and rests on five “indemonstrable” inference schemata (to which others can be reduced with the aid of four rules called themata). All these items belong to the class of lekta – “sayables” or “expressibles.” Words are bodies (vibrating portions of air), as are external objects, but predicates like that expressed by ‘ . . . walks’, and the meanings of whole sentences, e.g., ‘Socrates walks’, are incorporeal lekta. The structure and content of both thoughts and sentences are analyzed by mapping them onto lekta, but the lekta are themselves causally inert. Conventionally, a second phase of the school is distinguished as Middle Stoicism. It developed largely at Rhodes under Panaetius and Posidonius, both of whom influenced the presentation of Stoicism in Cicero’s influential philosophical treatises (mid-first century B.C.). Panaetius Stoicism Stoicism 880   880 (c.185–c.110) softened some classical Stoic positions, his ethics being more pragmatic and less concerned with the idealized sage. Posidonius (c.135–c.50) made Stoicism more open to Platonic and Aristotelian ideas, reviving Plato’s inclusion of irrational components in the soul. A third phase, Roman Stoicism, is the only Stoic era whose writings have survived in quantity. It is represented especially by the younger Seneca (A.D. c.1–65), Epictetus (A.D. c.55–c.135), and Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 121–80). It continued the trend set by Panaetius, with a strong primary focus on practical and personal ethics. Many prominent Roman political figures were Stoics. After the second century A.D. Stoicism as a system fell from prominence, but its terminology and concepts had by then become an ineradicable part of ancient thought. Through the writings of Cicero and Seneca, its impact on the moral and political thought of the Renaissance was immense.

Stout, George Frederick (1860–1944), British psychologist and philosopher. A student of Ward, he was influenced by Herbart and especially Brentano. He was editor of Mind (1892–1920). He followed Ward in rejecting associationism and sensationism, and proposing analysis of mind as activity rather than passivity, consisting of acts of cognition, feeling, and conation. Stout stressed attention as the essential function of mind, and argued for the goal-directedness of all mental activity and behavior, greatly influencing McDougall’s hormic psychology. He reinterpreted traditional associationist ideas to emphasize primacy of mental activity; e.g., association by contiguity – a passive mechanical process imposed on mind – bece association by continuity of attentional interest. With Brentano, he argued that mental representation involves “thought reference” to a real object known through the representation that is itself the object of thought, like Locke’s “idea.” In philosophy he was influenced by Moore and Russell. His major works are Analytic Psychology (1896) and Manual of Psychology (1899). 

ASSOCIATIONISM, BRENTANO, SENSATIONALISM. T.H.L. St. Petersburg paradox.SAINT PETERSBURG PARADOX. strategy.GE THEORY. Straton.PERIPATETIC SCHOOL.

Strato of Lpsacus (c.335–c.267 B.C.), Greek philosopher and polymath nickned “the Physicist” for his innovative ideas in natural science. He succeeded Theophrastus as head of the Lyceum. Earlier he served as royal tutor in Alexandria, where his students included Aristarchus, who devised the first heliocentric model. Of Strato’s many writings only fragments and summaries survive. These show him criticizing the abstract conceptual analysis of earlier theorists and paying closer attention to empirical evidence. ong his targets were atomist arguments that motion is impossible unless there is void, and also Aristotle’s thesis that matter is fully continuous. Strato argued that no large void occurs in nature, but that matter is naturally porous, laced with tiny pockets of void. His investigations of compression and suction were influential in ancient physiology. In dynics, he proposed that bodies have no property of lightness but only more or less weight.  HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHY, LYCEUM. S.A.W. Strawson, Sir Peter (b.1919), British philosopher who has made major contributions to logic, metaphysics, and the study of Kant. His career has been at Oxford, where he was the leading philosopher of his generation. His first important work, “On Referring” (1950), argues that Russell’s theory of descriptions fails to deal properly with the role of descriptions as “referring expressions” because Russell assumed the “bogus trichotomy” that sentences are true, false, or meaningless: for Strawson, sentences with empty descriptions are meaningful but “neither true nor false” because the general presuppositions governing the use of referring expressions are not fulfilled. One aspect of this argument was Russell’s alleged insensitivity to the ordinary use of definite descriptions. The contrast between the abstract schemata of formal logic and the manifold richness of the inferences inherent in ordinary language is the central theme of Strawson’s first book, Introduction to Logical Theory (1952). In Individuals (1959) Strawson reintroduced metaphysics as a respectable philosophical discipline after decades of positivist rhetoric. But his project is only “descriptive” metaphysics – elucidation of the basic features of our own conceptual scheme – and his arguments are based on the philosophy of language: “basic” particulars Stoicism, Middle Strawson, Sir Peter 881   881 are those which are basic objects of reference, and it is the spatiotemporal and sortal conditions for their identification and reidentification by speakers that constitute the basic categories. Three arguments are especially fous: (1) even in a purely auditory world objective reference on the basis of experience requires at least an analogue of space; (2) because self-reference presupposes reference to others, persons, conceived as bearers of both physical and psychological properties, are a type of basic particular; and (3) “feature-placing” discourse, such as ‘it is snowing here now’, is “the ultimate propositional level” through which reference to particulars enters discourse. Strawson’s next book, The Bounds of Sense (1966), provides a critical reading of Kant’s theoretical philosophy. His aim is to extricate what he sees as the profound truths concerning the presuppositions of objective experience and judgment that Kant’s transcendental arguments establish from the mysterious metaphysics of Kant’s transcendental idealism. Strawson’s critics have argued, however, that the resulting position is unstable: transcendental arguments can tell us only what we must suppose to be the case. So if Kant’s idealism, which restricts such suppositions to things as they appear to us, is abandoned, we can draw conclusions concerning the way the world itself must be only if we add the verificationist thesis that ability to make sense of such suppositions requires ability to verify them. In his next book, Skepticism and Naturalism: Some Varieties (1985), Strawson conceded this: transcendental arguments belong within descriptive metaphysics and should not be regarded as attempts to provide an external justification of our conceptual scheme. In truth no such external justification is either possible or needed: instead – and here Strawson invokes Hume rather than Kant – our reasonings come to an end in natural propensities for belief that are beyond question because they alone make it possible to raise questions. In a fous earlier paper Strawson had urged much the se point concerning the free will debate: defenders of our ordinary attitudes of reproach and gratitude should not seek to ground them in the “panicky metaphysics” of a supra-causal free will; instead they can and need do no more than point to our unshakable commitment to these “reactive” attitudes through which we manifest our attachment to that fundental category of our conceptual scheme – persons. .

structuralism, a distinctive yet extremely wide range of productive research conducted in the social and human sciences from the 1950s through the 1970s, principally in France. It is difficult to describe structuralism as a movement, because of the methodological constraints exercised by the various disciplines that ce to be influenced by structuralism – e.g., anthropology, philosophy, literary theory, psychoanalysis, political theory, even mathematics. Nonetheless, structuralism is generally held to derive its organizing principles from the early twentieth-century work of Saussure, the founder of structural linguistics. Arguing against the prevailing historicist and philological approaches to linguistics, he proposed a “scientific” model of language, one understood as a closed system of elements and rules that account for the production and the social communication of meaning. Inspired by Durkheim’s notion of a “social fact” – that domain of objectivity wherein the psychological and the social orders converge – Saussure viewed language as the repository of discursive signs shared by a given linguistic community. The particular sign is composed of two elements, a phonemic signifier, or distinctive sound element, and a corresponding meaning, or signified element. The defining relation between the sign’s sound and meaning components is held to be arbitrary, i.e., based on conventional association, and not due to any function of the speaking substrict conditional structuralism 882   882 ject’s personal inclination, or to any external consideration of reference. What lends specificity or identity to each particular signifier is its differential relation to the other signifiers in the greater set; hence, each basic unit of language is itself the product of differences between other elements within the system. This principle of differential – and structural – relation was extended by Troubetzkoy to the order of phonemes, whereby a defining set of vocalic differences underlies the constitution of all linguistic phonemes. Finally, for Saussure, the closed set of signs is governed by a system of grmatical, phonemic, and syntactic rules. Language thus derives its significance from its own autonomous organization, and this serves to guarantee its communicative function. Since language is the foremost instance of social sign systems in general, the structural account might serve as an exemplary model for understanding the very intelligibility of social systems as such – hence, its obvious relevance to the broader concerns of the social and human sciences. This implication was raised by Saussure himself, in his Course on General Linguistics(1916), but it was advanced dratically by the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss – who is generally acknowledged to be the founder of modern structuralism – in his extensive analyses in the area of social anthropology, beginning with his Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949). Lévi-Strauss argued that society is itself organized according to one form or another of significant communication and exchange – whether this be of information, knowledge, or myths, or even of its members themselves. The organization of social phenomena could thus be clarified through a detailed elaboration of their subtending structures, which, collectively, testify to a deeper and all-inclusive, social rationality. As with the analysis of language, these social structures would be disclosed, not by direct observation, but by inference and deduction from the observed empirical data. Furthermore, since these structures are models of specific relations, which in turn express the differential properties of the component elements under investigation, the structural analysis is both readily formalizable and susceptible to a broad variety of applications. In Britain, e.g., Edmund Leach pursued these analyses in the domain of social anthropology; in the United States, Chomsky applied insights of structuralism to linguistic theory and philosophy of mind; in Italy, Eco conducted extensive structuralist analyses in the fields of social and literary semiotics. With its acknowledgment that language is a rule-governed social system of signs, and that effective communication depends on the resources available to the speaker from within the codes of language itself, the structuralist approach tends to be less preoccupied with the more traditional considerations of “subjectivity” and “history” in its treatment of meaningful discourse. In the post-structuralism that grew out of this approach, the French philosopher Foucault, e.g., focused on the generation of the “subject” by the various epistemic discourses of imitation and representation, as well as on the institutional roles of knowledge and power in producing and conserving particular “disciplines” in the natural and social sciences. These disciplines, Foucault suggested, in turn govern our theoretical and practical notions of madness, criminality, punishment, sexuality, etc., notions that collectively serve to “normalize” the individual subject to their determinations. Likewise, in the domain of psychoanalysis, Lacan drew on the work of Saussure and Lévi-Strauss to emphasize Freud’s concern with language and to argue that, as a set of determining codes, language serves to structure the subject’s very unconscious. Problematically, however, it is the very dynism of language, including metaphor, metonymy, condensation, displacement, etc., that introduces the social symbolic into the constitution of the subject. Althusser applied the principles of structuralist methodology to his analysis of Marxism, especially the role played by contradiction in understanding infrastructural and superstructural formation, i.e., for the constitution of the historical dialectic. His account followed Marx’s rejection of Feuerbach, at once denying the role of traditional subjectivity and humanism, and presenting a “scientific” analysis of “historical materialism,” one that would be anti-historicist in principle but attentive to the actual political state of affairs. For Althusser, such a philosophical analysis helped provide an “objective” discernment to the historical transformation of social reality. The restraint the structuralists extended toward the traditional views of subjectivity and history dratically colored their treatment both of the individuals who are agents of meaningful discourse and of the linguistically articulable object field in general. This redirection of research interests (particularly in France, due to the influential work of Barthes and Michel Serres in the fields of poetics, cultural semiotics, and communication theory) has resulted in a series of original analyses and also provoked lively debates between the adherents of structuralist structuralism structuralism 883   883 methodology and the more conventionally oriented schools of thought (e.g., phenomenology, existentialism, Marxism, and empiricist and positivist philosophies of science). These debates served as an agency to open up subsequent discussions on deconstruction and postmodernist theory for the philosophical generation of the 1980s and later. These post-structuralist thinkers were perhaps less concerned with the organization of social phenomena than with their initial constitution and subsequent dynics. Hence, the problematics of the subject and history – or, in broader terms, temporality itself – were again engaged. The new discussions were abetted by a more critical appraisal of language and tended to be antiHegelian in their rejection of the totalizing tendency of systematic metaphysics. Heidegger’s critique of traditional metaphysics was one of the major influences in the discussions following structuralism, as was the reexination of Nietzsche’s earlier accounts of “genealogy,” his antiessentialism, and his teaching of a dynic “will to power.” Additionally, many poststructuralist philosophers stressed the Freudian notions of the libido and the unconscious as determining factors in understanding not only the subject, but the deep rhetorical and affective components of language use. An astonishing variety of philosophers and critics engaged in the debates initially fred by the structuralist thinkers of the period, and their extended responses and critical reappraisals formed the vibrant, poststructuralist period of French intellectual life. Such figures as Ricoeur, Emmanuel Levinas, Kristeva, Maurice Blanchot, Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Philippe LacoueLabarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Irigaray inaugurated a series of contemporary reflections that have become international in scope. 

Suárez, Francisco, also known as Doctor Eximius (1548–1617), Spanish Jesuit philosopher and theologian. Born in Granada, he studied at Salanca and taught there and at Rome, Coimbra, and other leading universities. Suárez’s most important works are De legibus (“On Law,” 1612), De Deo uno et trino (“On the Trinity,” 1606), De anima (“On the Soul,” 1621), and the monumental Disputationes metaphysicae (“Metaphysical Disputations,” 1597). The Disputationes has a unique place in philosophy, being the first systematic and comprehensive work of metaphysics written in the West that is not a commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Divided into fifty-four disputations, it discusses every metaphysical issue known at the time. Its influence was immediate and lasting and can be seen in the work of Scholastics in both Europe and Latin erica, and of modern philosophers such as Descartes, Leibniz, Wolff, and Schopenhauer. Suárez’s main contributions to philosophy occurred in metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of law. In all three areas he was influenced by Aristotle and Aquinas, although he also drew inspiration from Ockh, Duns Scotus, and others. In metaphysics, Suárez is known for his views on the nature of metaphysics, being, and individuation. Metaphysics is the science of “being insofar as it is real being” (ens in quantum ens reale), and its proper object of study is the object concept of being. This understanding of the object of metaphysics is often seen as paving the way for early modern metaphysical theory, in which the object of metaphysics is mental. For Suárez the concept of being is derived by analogy from the similarity existing ong things. Existing reality for Suárez is composed of individuals: everything that exists is individual, including substances and their properties, accidents, principles, and components. He understands individuality as incommunicability, nely, the inability of individuals to be divided into entities of the se specific kind as themselves. The principle of individuation is “entity,” which he identifies with “essence as it exists.” This principle applies both to substances and their properties, accidents, principles, and components. In epistemology, two of Suárez’s views stand out: that the intellect knows the individual through a proper and separate concept without structuralism, mathematical Suárez, Francisco 884   884 having to turn to reflection, a position that supports an empiricist epistemology in which, contrary to Thomism, knowledge of the individual is not mediated through universals; and (2) his view of middle knowledge (scientia media), the knowledge God has of what every free creature would freely do in every possible situation. This notion was used by Suárez and Molina to explain how God can control human actions without violating free will. In philosophy of law, Suárez was an innovative thinker whose ideas influenced Grotius. For him law is fundentally an act of the will rather than a result of an ordinance of reason, as Aquinas held. Law is divided into eternal, divine, natural, and human. Human law is based on natural or divine law and is not the result of human creation.

subdoxastic, pertaining to states of mind postulated to account for the production and character of certain apparently non-inferential beliefs. These were first discussed by Stephen P. Stich in “Beliefs and Subdoxastic States” (1978). I may form the belief that you are depressed, e.g., on the basis of subtle cues that I  unable to articulate. The psychological mechanism responsible for this belief might be thought to harbor information concerning these cues subdoxastically. Although subdoxastic states resemble beliefs in certain respects – they incorporate intentional content, they guide behavior, they can bestow justification on beliefs – they differ from fullyfledged doxastic states or beliefs in at least two respects. First, as noted above, subdoxastic states may be largely inaccessible to introspection; I may be unable to describe, even on reflection, the basis of my belief that you are depressed. Second, subdoxastic states seem cut off inferentially from an agent’s corpus of beliefs; my subdoxastic appreciation that your forehead is creased may contribute to my believing that you are depressed, but, unlike the belief that your forehead is creased, it need not, in the presence of other beliefs, lead to further beliefs about your visage. 

subjectivism, any philosophical view that attempts to understand in a subjective manner what at first glance would seem to be a class of judgments that are objectively either true or false – i.e., true or false independently of what we believe, want, or hope. There are two ways of being a subjectivist. In the first way, one can say that the judgments in question, despite first appearances, are really judgments about our own attitudes, beliefs, emotions, etc. In the second way, one can deny that the judgments are true or false at all, arguing instead that they are disguised commands or expressions of attitudes. In ethics, for exple, a subjective view of the second sort is that moral judgments are simply expressions of our positive and negative attitudes. This is emotivism. Prescriptivism is also a subjective view of the second sort; it is the view that moral judgments are really commands – to say “X is good” is to say, details aside, “Do X.” Views that make morality ultimately a matter of conventions (or what we or most people agree to) can also be construed as subjective theories, albeit of the first type. Subjectivism is not limited to ethics, however. According to a subjective view of epistemic rationality, the standards of rational belief are the standards that the individual (or perhaps most members in the individual’s community) would approve of insofar as they are interested in believing those propositions that are true and not believing those propositions that are false. Similarly, phenomenalists can be regarded as proposing a subjective account of material object statements, since according to them, such statements are best understood as complex statements about the course of our experiences. 

subject–object dichotomy, the distinction between thinkers and what they think about. The distinction is not exclusive, since subjects can also be objects, as in reflexive self-conscious thought, which takes the subject as its intended object. The dichotomy also need not be an exhaustive distinction in the strong sense that everything is either a subject or an object, since in a logically possible world in which there are no thinkers, there may yet be mind-independent subaltern subject–object dichotomy 885   885 things that are neither subjects nor objects. Whether there are non-thinking things that are not objects of thought in the actual world depends on whether or not it is sufficient in logic to intend every individual thing by such thoughts and expressions as ‘We can think of everything that exists’. The dichotomy is an interimplicative distinction between thinkers and what they think about, in which each presupposes the other. If there are no subjects, then neither are there objects in the true sense, and conversely. A subject–object dichotomy is acknowledged in most Western philosophical traditions, but emphasized especially in Continental philosophy, beginning with Kant, and carrying through idealist thought in Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer. It is also prominent in intentionalist philosophy, in the empirical psychology of Brentano, the object theory of Meinong, Ernst Mally (1879–1944), and Twardowski, and the transcendental phenomenology of Husserl. Subject–object dichotomy is denied by certain mysticisms, renounced as the philosophical fiction of duality, of which Cartesian mind–body dualism is a particular instance, and criticized by mystics as a confusion that prevents mind from recognizing its essential oneness with the world, thereby contributing to unnecessary intellectual and moral dilemmas. 

sublime, a feeling brought about by objects that are infinitely large or vast (such as the heavens or the ocean) or overwhelmingly powerful (such as a raging torrent, huge mountains, or precipices). The former (in Kant’s terminology) is the mathematically sublime and the latter the dynically sublime. Though the experience of the sublime is to an important extent unpleasant, it is also accompanied by a certain pleasure: we enjoy the feeling of being overwhelmed. On Kant’s view, this pleasure results from an awareness that we have powers of reason that are not dependent on sensation, but that legislate over sense. The sublime thus displays both the limitations of sense experience (and hence our feeling of displeasure) and the power of our own mind (and hence the feeling of pleasure). The sublime was an especially important concept in the aesthetic theory of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Reflection on it was stimulated by the appearance of a translation of Longinus’s Peri hypsous (On the Sublime) in 1674. The “postmodern sublime” has in addition emerged in late twentieth century thought as a basis for raising questions about art. Whereas beauty is associated with that whose form can be apprehended, the sublime is associated with the formless, that which is “unpresentable” in sensation. Thus, it is connected with critiques of “the aesthetic” – understood as that which is sensuously present – as a way of understanding what is important about art. It has also been given a political reading, where the sublime connects with resistance to rule, and beauty connects with conservative acceptance of existing forms or structures of society. 

subsidiarity, a basic principle of social order and the common good governing the relations between the higher and lower associations in a political community. Positively, the principle of subsidiarity holds that the common good, i.e., the ensemble of social resources and institutions that facilitate human self-realization, depends on fostering the free, creative initiatives of individuals and of their voluntary associations; thus, the state, in addition to its direct role in maintaining public good (which comprises justice, public peace, and public morality) also has an indirect role in promoting other aspects of the common good by rendering assistance (subsidium) to those individuals and associations whose activities facilitate cooperative human self-realization in work, play, the arts, sciences, and religion. Negatively, the principle of subsidiarity holds that higher-level (i.e., more comprehensive) associations – while they must monitor, regulate, and coordinate – ought not to absorb, replace, or undermine the free initiatives and activities of lower-level associations and individuals insofar as these are not contrary to the common good. This presumption favoring free individual and social initiative has been defended on various grounds, such as the inefficiency of burdening the state with myriad local concerns, as well as the corresponding efficiency of unleashing the free, creative potential of subordinate groups and individuals who build up the shared economic, scientific, and artistic resources of society. But the deeper ground for this presumption is the view subjunctive conditional subsidiarity 886   886 that human flourishing depends crucially on freedom for individual self-direction and for the self-government of voluntary associations and that human beings flourish best through their own personal and cooperative initiatives rather than as the passive consumers or beneficiaries of the initiatives of others. 

subsistence (translation of German Bestand), in current philosophy, especially Meinong’s system, the kind of being that belongs to “ideal” objects (such as mathematical objects, states of affairs, and abstractions like similarity and difference). By contrast, the kind of being that belongs to “real” (wirklich) objects, things of the sorts investigated by the sciences other than psychology and pure mathematics, is called existence (Existenz). Existence and subsistence together exhaust the realm of being (Sein). So, e.g., the subsistent ideal figures whose properties are investigated by geometers do not exist – they are nowhere to be found in the real world – but it is no less true of them that they have being than it is of an existent physical object: there are such figures. Being does not, however, exhaust the realm of objects or things. The psychological phenomenon of intentionality shows that there are (in some sense of ‘there are’) objects that neither exist nor subsist. Every intentional state is directed toward an object. Although one may covet the Hope Diond or desire the unification of Europe, one may also covet a non-existent material object or desire a non-subsistent state of affairs. If one covets a non-existent diond, there is (in some sense of ‘there is’) something that one covets – one’s state of mind has an object – and it has certain properties: it is, e.g., a diond. It may therefore be said to inhabit the realm of Sosein (‘being thus’ or ‘predication’ or ‘having properties’), which is the category comprising the totality of objects. Objects that do not have any sort of being, either existence or subsistence, belong to non-being (Nichtsein). In general, the properties of an object do not determine whether it has being or non-being. (But there are special cases: the round square, by its very nature, cannot subsist.) Meinong thus maintains that objecthood is ausserseiend, i.e., independent of both existence and subsistence. 

ABSTRACT ENTITY, MEINONG, METAPHYSICS. P.v.I. sub specie aeternitatis.SPINOZA. substance, as defined by Aristotle in the Categories, that which is neither predicable (“sayable”) of anything nor present in anything as an aspect or property of it. The exples he gives are an individual man and an individual horse. We can predicate being a horse of something but not a horse; nor is a horse in something else. He also held that only substances can remain self-identical through change. All other things are accidents of substances and exist only as aspects, properties, or relations of substances, or kinds of substances, which Aristotle called secondary substances. An exple of an accident would be the color of an individual man, and an exple of a secondary substance would be his being a man. For Locke, a substance is that part of an individual thing in which its properties inhere. Since we can observe, indeed know, only a thing’s properties, its substance is unknowable. Locke’s sense is obviously rooted in Aristotle’s but the latter carries no skeptical implications. In fact, Locke’s sense is closer in meaning to what Aristotle calls matter, and would be better regarded as a synonym of ‘substratum’, as indeed it is by Locke. Substance may also be conceived as that which is capable of existing independently of anything else. This sense is also rooted in Aristotle’s, but, understood quite strictly, leads to Spinoza’s view that there can be only one substance, nely, the totality of reality or God. A fourth sense of ‘substance’ is the common, ordinary sense, ‘what a thing is made of’. This sense is related to Locke’s, but lacks the latter’s skeptical implications. It also corresponds to what Aristotle meant by matter, at least proximate matter, e.g., the bronze of a bronze statue (Aristotle analyzes individual things as composites of matter and form). This notion of matter, or stuff, has great philosophical importance, because it expresses an idea crucial to both our ordinary and our scientific understandings of the world. Philosophers such as Hume who deny the existence of substances hold that individual things are mere bundles of properties, nely, the properties ordinarily attributed to them, and usually hold that they are incapable of change; they are series of momentary events, rather than things enduring through time.  BUNDLE THEORY, PROPERTY. P.Bu. substance, primary.ARISTOTLE. substance, secondary.ARISTOTLE. substance causation.AGENT CAUSATION. subsistence substance causation 887   887 substance-function.T’I, YUNG. substantial form.FORM, HYLOMORPHISM.

substantialism, the view that the primary, most fundental entities are substances, everything else being dependent for its existence on them, either as a property of them or a relation between them. Different versions of the view would correspond to the different senses of the word ‘substance’.  SUBSTANCE. P.Bu. substantival causation.CAUSATION. substantivalism.PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE. substantive pluralism.PLURALISM. substitutability salva veritate.

SUBSTITUTIVITY SALVA VERITATE. substitutional quantification.QUANTIFICATION. substitutivity salva veritate, a condition met by two expressions when one is substitutable for the other at a certain occurrence in a sentence and the truth-value (truth or falsity) of the sentence is necessarily unchanged when the substitution is made. In such a case the two expressions are said to exhibit substitutivity or substitutability salva veritate (literally, ‘with truth saved’) with respect to one another in that context. The expressions are also said to be interchangeable or intersubstitutable salva veritate in that context. Where it is obvious from a given discussion that it is the truth-value that is to be preserved, it may be said that the one expression is substitutable for the other or exhibits substitutability with respect to the other at that place. Leibniz proposed to use the universal interchangeability salva veritate of two terms in every “proposition” in which they occur as a necessary and sufficient condition for identity – presumably for the identity of the things denoted by the terms. There are apparent exceptions to this criterion, as Leibniz himself noted. If a sentence occurs in a context governed by a psychological verb such as ‘believe’ or ‘desire’, by an expression conveying modality (e.g., ‘necessarily’, ‘possibly’), or by certain temporal expressions (such as ‘it will soon be the case that’), then two terms may denote the se thing but not be interchangeable within such a sentence. Occurrences of expressions within quotation marks or where the expressions are both mentioned and used (cf. Quine’s exple, “Giorgione was so-called because of his size”) also exhibit failure of substitutivity. Frege urged that such failures are to be explained by the fact that within such contexts an expression does not have its ordinary denotation but denotes instead either its usual sense or the expression itself. 

QUANTIFYING IN, REFERENTIALLY TRANSPARENT. C.A.A. substrate.SUBSTANCE. substratum.BERKELEY, SUBSTANCE. subsumption theory of explanation.COVERING LAW MODEL. sufficient condition.CONDITION. sufficient reason, principle of.LEIBNIZ. Sufism (from Arabic fufi, ‘mystic’), Islic mysticism. The Arabic word is tafawwuf. The philosophically significant aspects of Sufism are its psychology in its early phase and its epistemology and ontology in its later phase. The early practices of asceticism, introspection, and meditation on God and the hereafter as depicted in the Koran eventually developed in classical Sufism (eighth–eleventh centuries) into the spiritual journey of the mystic, the successive stages of which were described with a sophisticated psychological terminology. Sufis differentiated two levels of spiritual attainment: the first was that of “stations” (maqat) that were reached through individual effort, abnegation, and spiritual exercises (e.g., tawakkul, ‘selfless trust in God’, fabr, ‘patience’, etc.). The characteristic they all shared was that the Sufi, through an act of the will and deliberate deeds, suppressed his individual ego and its concomitant attachment to worldly things and emotions in order to become receptive to the following level of “states” (ahwal), which were vouchsafed to him through God’s grace. These culminated in the goal of the mystical quest, the final states of bliss, which were variously identified by Sufis, according to their proclivities, as love (mahabba, later ‘ishq), mystical knowledge (ma‘rifa), and the total loss of ego consciousness and the concomitant absorption and subsistence in and through God (fana’ and baqa’). The language describing these stages and states was allusive and symbolical rather than descriptive. Sufism, which was viewed initially with suspicion by the authorities and the orthodox, was substance-function Sufism 888   888 integrated into mainstre belief in the eleventh century, primarily through the work of al-Ghazali (d.1111). After al-Ghazali, the theoretical and practical aspects of Sufism, which had previously gone hand in hand, developed in different ways. At the popular level, Sufi practices and instruction were institutionalized in fraternities and orders that, ever since, have played a vital role in all Islic societies, especially ong the disenfranchised. Life in the orders revolved around the regimented initiation of the novices to the Sufi path by the master. Although theoretical instruction was also given, the goal of the mystic was primarily achieved by spiritual practices, chiefly the repetition of religious formulas (dhikr). ong the intellectuals, Sufism acquired a philosophical gloss and terminology. All the currents of earlier Sufism, as well as elements of Neoplatonic emanationism drawn from Arabic philosophy, were integrated into a complex and multifaceted system of “theosophy” in the monumental work of Ibn ‘Arabi(d.1240). This system rests on the pivotal concept of “unity of being” (wahdat al-wujud), according to which God is the only being and the only reality, while the entire creation constitutes a series of his dynic and continuous self-manifestations. The individual who combines in himself the totality of these manifestations to become the prototype of creation, as well as the medium through which God can be known, is the Perfect Man, identified with the Prophet Muhmad. The mystic’s quest consists of an experiential (epistemological) retracing of the levels of manifestations back to their origin and culminates in the closest possible approximation to the level of the Perfect Man. Ibn ‘Arabi’s mystical thought, which completely dominated Sufism, found expression in later times primarily in the poetry of the various Islic languages, while certain aspects of it were reintroduced into Arabic philosophy in Safavid times.  AL-GHAZALI, ARABIC PHILOSOPHY. D.Gu. suicide, assisted.

BIOETHICS. summum bonum (Latin, ‘highest good’), that in relation to which all other things have at most instrumental value (value only insofar as they are productive of what is the highest good). Philosophical conceptions of the summum bonum have for the most part been teleological in character. That is, they have identified the highest good in terms of some goal or goals that human beings, it is supposed, pursue by their very nature. These natural goals or ends have differed considerably. For the theist, this end is God; for the rationalist, it is the rational comprehension of what is real; for hedonism, it is pleasure; etc. The highest good, however, need not be teleologically construed. It may simply be posited, or supposed, that it is known, through some intuitive process, that a certain type of thing is “intrinsically good.” On such a view, the relevant contrast is not so much between what is good as an end and what is good as a means to this end, as between what is good purely in itself and what is good only in combination with certain other elements (the “extrinsically good”). Perhaps the best exple of such a view of the highest good would be the position of Moore. Must the summum bonum be just one thing, or one kind of thing? Yes, to this extent: although one could certainly combine pluralism (the view that there are many, irreducibly different goods) with an assertion that the summum bonum is “complex,” the notion of the highest good has typically been the province of monists (believers in a single good), not pluralists. J.A.M. summum genus.GENUS GENERALISSIMUM. Sung Hsing, also called Sung Tzu (c.360–290 B.C.), Chinese philosopher associated with Mohism and the Huang–Lao school. He was a member of the Chi-hsia Academy of Ch’i, a late Warring States center that attracted intellectuals of every persuasion. His Mohist ideas include an emphasis on utility, thrift, meritocracy, and a reluctance to wage war. He is praised by the Taoist Chuang Tzu for his beliefs that one’s essential desires and needs are few and that one should heed internal cultivation rather than social judgments. The combination of internal tranquillity and political activism is characteristic of Huang–Lao thought. 

MOHISM. R.P.P. & R.T.A. sunyata (Sanskrit, ‘emptiness’), a property said by some Indian Buddhist philosophers to be possessed necessarily by everything that exists. If something is empty it possesses no essential or inherent nature (svabhava), which is to say that both its existence and its nature are dependent on things or events other than itself. The thesis ‘everything is empty’ is therefore approximately equivalent to ‘everything is causally dependent’; the contradictories of these theses were typically argued by defenders of emptiness to be incoherent and thus not worthy of assent. To deny emptiness was also taken to require the affirmasuicide, assisted sunyata 889   889 tion of permanence and non-contingency: if something is non-empty in any respect, it is in just that respect permanent and non-contingent.  BUDDHISM, MADHYIKA, NAGARJUNA. P.J.G. Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925), Chinese statesman, founder of the Republic of China in 1911. Educated as a medical doctor in England, he bece a revolutionary to end the reign of the last dynasty in China. He founded the Nationalist Party and developed the so-called Three People’s Principles: the nationalist, democratic, and socialist principles. He claimed to be transmitting the Confucian Way. Sun adopted a policy of cooperation with the Communists, but his successor Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975) broke with them. He is now also honored on the mainland as a bourgeois social democrat paving the way for the Communist Revolution.  CHINESE PHILOSOPHY. S.-h.L. superaltern.SQUARE OF OPPOSITION. superego.FREUD. supererogation, the property of going beyond the call of duty. Supererogatory actions are sometimes equated with actions that are morally good in the sense that they are encouraged by morality but not required by it. Sometimes they are equated with morally commendable actions, i.e., actions that indicate a superior moral character. It is quite common for morally good actions to be morally commendable and vice versa, so that it is not surprising that these two kinds of supererogatory actions are not clearly distinguished even though they are quite distinct. Certain kinds of actions are not normally considered to be morally required, e.g., giving to charity, though morality certainly encourages doing them. However, if one is wealthy and gives only a small ount to charity, then, although one’s act is supererogatory in the sense of being morally good, it is not supererogatory in the sense of being morally commendable, for it does not indicate a superior moral character. Certain kinds of actions are normally morally required, e.g., keeping one’s promises. However, when the harm or risk of harm of keeping one’s promise is sufficiently great compared to the harm caused by breaking the promise to excuse breaking the promise, then keeping one’s promise counts as a supererogatory act in the sense of being morally commendable. Some versions of consequentialism claim that everyone is always morally required to act so as to bring about the best consequences. On such a theory there are no actions that are morally encouraged but not required; thus, for those holding such theories, if there are supererogatory acts, they must be morally commendable. Many versions of non-consequentialism also fail to provide for acts that are morally encouraged but not morally required; thus, if they allow for supererogatory acts, they must regard them as morally required acts done at such significant personal cost that one might be excused for not doing them. The view that all actions are either morally required, morally prohibited, or morally indifferent makes it impossible to secure a place for supererogatory acts in the sense of morally good acts. This view that there are no acts that are morally encouraged but not morally required may be the result of misleading terminology. Both Kant and Mill distinguish between duties of perfect obligation and duties of imperfect obligation, acknowledging that a duty of imperfect obligation does not specify any particular act that one is morally required to do. However, since they use the term ‘duty’ it is very easy to view all acts falling under these “duties” as being morally required. One way of avoiding the view that all morally encouraged acts are morally required is to avoid the common philosophical misuse of the term ‘duty’. One can replace ‘duties of perfect obligation’ with ‘actions required by moral rules’ and ‘duties of imperfect obligation’ with ‘actions encouraged by moral ideals’. However, a theory that includes the kinds of acts that are supererogatory in the sense of being morally good has to distinguish between that sense of ‘supererogatory’ and the sense meaning ‘morally commendable’, i.e., indicating a superior moral character in the agent. For as pointed out above, not all morally good acts are morally commendable, nor are all morally commendable acts morally good, even though a particular act may be supererogatory in both senses. 

supervenience, a dependence relation between properties or facts of one type, and properties or facts of another type. Moore, for instance, held that the property intrinsic value is dependent in the relevant way on certain non-moral properties (although he did not employ the word ‘supervenience’). As he put it, “if a given thing possesses any kind of intrinsic value in a certain degree, then not only must that se thing possess it, under all circumstances, in the se degree, but also anything exactly like it, must, under all circumstances, possess it in exactly the se degree” (Philosophical Studies, 1922). The concept of supervenience, as a relation between properties, is essentially this: Properties of type A are supervenient on properties of type B if and only if two objects cannot differ with respect to their A-properties without also differing with respect to their B-properties. Properties that allegedly are supervenient on others are often called consequential properties, especially in ethics; the idea is that if something instantiates a moral property, then it does so in virtue of, i.e., as a (non-causal) consequence of, instantiating some lower-level property on which the moral property supervenes. In another, related sense, supervenience is a feature of discourse of one type, vis-à-vis discourse of another type. The term was so used, again in connection with morals, by Hare, who wrote: First, let us take that characteristic of “good” which has been called its supervenience. Suppose that we say, “St. Francis was a good man.” It is logically impossible to say this and to maintain at the se time that there might have been another man placed exactly in the se circumstances as St. Francis, and who behaved in exactly the se way, but who differed from St. Francis in this respect only, that he was not a good man. (The Language of Morals, 1952) Here the idea is that it would be a misuse of moral language, a violation of the “logic of moral discourse,” to apply ‘good’ to one thing but not to something else exactly similar in all pertinent non-moral respects. Hare is a metaethical irrealist: he denies that there are moral properties or facts. So for him, moral supervenience is a feature of moral discourse and judgment, not a relation between properties or facts of two types. The notion of supervenience has come to be used quite widely in metaphysics and philosophy of mind, usually in the first sense explained above. This use was heralded by Davidson in articulating a position about the relation between physical and mental properties, or statetypes, that eschews the reducibility of mental properties to physical ones. He wrote: Although the position I describe denies there are psychophysical laws, it is consistent with the view that mental characteristics are in some sense dependent, or supervenient, on physical characteristics. Such supervenience might be taken to mean that there cannot be two events alike in all physical respects but differing in some mental respects, or that an object cannot alter in some mental respects without altering in some physical respects. Dependence or supervenience of this kind does not entail reducibility through law or definition. (“Mental Events,” 1970) A variety of supervenience theses have been propounded in metaphysics and philosophy of mind, usually (although not always) in conjunction with attempts to formulate metaphysical positions that are naturalistic, in some sense, without being strongly reductionistic. For instance, it is often asserted that mental properties and facts are supervenient on neurobiological properties, and/or on physicochemical properties and facts. And it is often claimed, more generally, that all properties and facts are supervenient on the properties and facts of the kind described by physics. Much attention has been directed at how to formulate the desired supervenience theses, and thus how to characterize supervenience itself. A distinction has been drawn between weak supervenience, asserting that in any single possible world w, any two individuals in w that differ in their A-properties also differ in their B-properties; and strong supervenience, asserting that for any two individuals i and j, either within a single possible world or in two distinct ones, if i and j differ in A-properties then they also differ in Bproperties. It is sometimes alleged that traditional formulations of supervenience, like Moore’s or Hare’s, articulate only weak supervenience, whereas strong supervenience is needed to express the relevant kind of determination or dependence. It is sometimes replied, however, superset supervenience 891   891 that the traditional natural-language formulations do in fact express strong supervenience – and that formalizations expressing mere weak supervenience are mistranslations. Questions about how best to formulate supervenience theses also arise in connection with intrinsic and non-intrinsic properties. For instance, the property being a bank, instantiated by the brick building on Main Street, is not supervenient on intrinsic physical properties of the building itself; rather, the building’s having this social-institutional property depends on a considerably broader range of facts and features, some of which are involved in subserving the social practice of banking. The term ‘supervenience base’ is frequently used to denote the range of entities and happenings whose lowerlevel properties and relations jointly underlie the instantiation of some higher-level property (like being a bank) by some individual (like the brick building on Main Street). Supervenience theses are sometimes formulated so as to smoothly accommodate properties and facts with broad supervenience bases. For instance, the idea that the physical facts determine all the facts is sometimes expressed as global supervenience, which asserts that any two physically possible worlds differing in some respect also differ in some physical respect. Or, sometimes this idea is expressed as the stronger thesis of regional supervenience, which asserts that for any two spatiotemporal regions r and s, either within a single physically possible world or in two distinct ones, if r and s differ in some intrinsic respect then they also differ in some intrinsic physical respect.  NATURALISM, PHILOSOPHY OF MIND,

RESULTANCE. T.E.H. supervenient behaviorism.PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. suppositio (Latin, ‘supposition’), in the Middle Ages, reference. The theory of supposition, the central notion in the theory of proprietates terminorum, was developed in the twelfth century, and was refined and discussed into early modern times. It has two parts (their nes are a modern convenience). (1) The theory of supposition proper. This typically divided suppositio into “personal” reference to individuals (not necessarily to persons, despite the ne), “simple” reference to species or genera, and “material” reference to spoken or written expressions. Thus ‘man’ in ‘Every man is an animal’ has personal supposition, in ‘Man is a species’ simple supposition, and in ‘Man is a monosyllable’ material supposition. The theory also included an account of how the range of a term’s reference is affected by tense and by modal factors. (2) The theory of “modes” of personal supposition. This part of supposition theory divided personal supposition typically into “discrete” (‘Socrates’ in ‘Socrates is a man’), “determinate” (‘man’ in ‘Some man is a Greek’), “confused and distributive” (‘man’ in ‘Every man is an animal’), and “merely confused” (‘animal’ in ‘Every man is an animal’). The purpose of this second part of the theory is a matter of some dispute. By the late fourteenth century, it had in some authors become a theory of quantification. The term ‘suppositio’ was also used in the Middle Ages in the ordinary sense, to mean ‘assumption’, ‘hypothesis’. P.V.S. supposition, material.SUPPOSITIO. supposition, personal.SUPPOSITIO. supposition, simple.SUPPOSITIO. sure-thing principle.

survival, continued existence after one’s biological death. So understood, survival can pertain only to beings that are organisms at some time or other, not to beings that are disembodied at all times (as angels are said to be) or to beings that are embodied but never as organisms (as might be said of computers). Theories that maintain that one’s individual consciousness is absorbed into a universal consciousness after death or that one continues to exist only through one’s descendants, insofar as they deny one’s own continued existence as an individual, are not theories of survival. Although survival does not entail immortality or anything about reward or punishment in an afterlife, many theories of survival incorporate these features. Theories about survival have expressed differing attitudes about the importance of the body. supervenient behaviorism survival 892   892 Some philosophers have maintained that persons cannot survive without their own bodies, typically espousing a doctrine of resurrection; such a view was held by Aquinas. Others, including the Pythagoreans, have believed that one can survive in other bodies, allowing for reincarnation into a body of the se species or even for transmigration into a body of another species. Some, including Plato and perhaps the Pythagoreans, have claimed that no body is necessary, and that survival is fully achieved by one’s escaping embodiment. There is a similar spectrum of opinion about the importance of one’s mental life. Some, such as Locke, have supposed that survival of the se person would require memory of one’s having experienced specific past events. Plato’s doctrine of recollection, in contrast, supposes that one can survive without any experiential memory; all that one typically is capable of recollecting are impersonal necessary truths. Philosophers have tested the relative importance of bodily versus mental factors by means of various thought experiments, of which the following is typical. Suppose that a person’s whole mental life – memories, skills, and character traits – were somehow duplicated into a data bank and erased from the person, leaving a living radical nesiac. Suppose further that the person’s mental life were transcribed into another radically nesiac body. Has the person survived, and if so, as whom?  PERSONAL IDENTITY, SOUL. W.E.M. sustaining cause.CAUSATION. sutra (from Sanskrit sutra, ‘thread’, ‘precept’), a single verse or aphorism of Hindu or Buddhist teaching, or a collection of them. Written to be memorized, they provide a means of encoding and transmitting laws and rules of grmar, ritual, poetic meter, and philosophical disputation. Typically using technical terms and written so as to be mnemonic, they serve well for passing on information in an oral tradition. What makes them serviceable for this purpose also makes them largely unintelligible without commentary. The sutra style is typical in philosophical traditions. The Brahma-Sutras of Badharana are an exple of a set of sutras regarded as authoritative by Vedanta but interpreted in vastly different ways by Shankara, Ranuja, and Madhva. The sutras associated with Buddhism typically are more expansive than those associated with Hinduism, and thus more intelligible on their own. The Tripitaka (“Basket of the Teachings”) is a collection of sutras that Buddhist tradition ascribes to Ananda, who is said to have recited them from memory at the first Buddhist council; each sutra is introduced by the words ‘Thus have I heard’. Sutras are associated with Theravada as well as Mahayana Buddhism and deal with both religious and philosophical topics. K.E.Y. Swedenborgianism, the theosophy professed by a worldwide movement established as the New Jerusalem Church in London in 1788 by the followers of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), a Swedish natural philosopher, visionary, and biblical exegete. Author of geological and cosmological works, he fused the rationalist (Cartesian) and empiricist (Lockean) legacies into a natural philosophy (Principia Rerum Naturalium, 1734) that propounded the harmony of the mechanistic universe with biblical revelation. Inspired by Liebniz, Malebranche, Platonism, and Neoplatonism, he unfolded a doctrine of correspondence (A Hieroglyphic Key, 1741) to account for the relation between body and soul and between the natural and spiritual worlds, and applied it to biblical exegesis. What attracted the wide following of the “Spirit-Seer” were his theosophic speculations in the line of Boehme and the mystical, prophetic tradition in which he excelled (Heavenly Arcana, 1749–56). J.-L.S. Swinburne, Richard (b.1934), British philosopher of religion and of science. In philosophy of science, he has contributed to confirmation theory and to the philosophy of space and time. His work in philosophy of religion is the most bitious project in philosophical theology undertaken by a British philosopher in the twentieth century. Its first part is a trilogy on the coherence and justification of theistic belief and the rationality of living by that belief: The Coherence of Theism (1977), The Existence of God (1979), and Faith and Reason (1981). Since 1985, when Swinburne bece Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion at the University of Oxford, he has written a tetralogy about some of the most central of the distinctively Christian religious doctrines: Responsibility and Atonement (1989), Revelation (1992), The Christian God (1994), and Providence and the Problem of Evil (1998). The most interesting feature of the trilogy is its contribution to natural theology. Using Bayesian reasoning, Swinburne builds a cumulative case for theism by arguing that its probability is raised sustaining cause Swinburne, Richard 893   893 by such things as the existence of the universe, its order, the existence of consciousness, human opportunities to do good, the pattern of history, evidence of miracles, and religious experience. The existence of evil does not count against the existence of God. On our total evidence theism is more probable than not. In the tetralogy he explicates and defends such Christian doctrines as original sin, the Atonement, Heaven, Hell, the Trinity, the Incarnation, and Providence. He also analyzes the grounds for supposing that some Christian doctrines are revealed truths, and argues for a Christian theodicy in response to the problem of evil. 

syllogism, in Aristotle’s words, “a discourse in which, a certain thing being stated, something other than what is stated follows of necessity from being so” (Prior Analytics, 24b 18). Three types of syllogism were usually distinguished: categorical, hypothetical, and disjunctive. Each will be treated in that order. The categorical syllogism. This is an argument consisting of three categorical propositions, two serving as premises and one serving as conclusion. E.g., ‘Some college students are happy; all college students are high school graduates; therefore, some high school graduates are happy’. If a syllogism is valid, the premises must be so related to the conclusion that it is impossible for both premises to be true and the conclusion false. There are four types of categorical propositions: universal affirmative or A-propositions – ‘All S are P’, or ‘SaP’; universal negative or E-propositions – ‘No S are P’, or ‘SeP’; particular affirmative or I-propositions – ‘Some S are P’, or ‘SiP’; and particular negative or O-propositions: ‘Some S are not P’, or ‘SoP’. The mediate basic components of categorical syllogism are terms serving as subjects or predicates in the premises and the conclusion. There must be three and only three terms in any categorical syllogism, the major term, the minor term, and the middle term. Violation of this basic rule of structure is called the fallacy of four terms (quaternio terminorum); e.g., ‘Whatever is right is useful; only one of my hands is right; therefore only one of my hands is useful’. Here ‘right’ does not have the se meaning in its two occurrences; we therefore have more than three terms and hence no genuine categorical syllogism. The syllogistic terms are identifiable and definable with reference to the position they have in a given syllogism. The predicate of the conclusion is the major term; the subject of the conclusion is the minor term; the term that appears once in each premise but not in the conclusion is the middle term. As it is used in various types of categorical propositions, a term is either distributed (stands for each and every member of its extension) or undistributed. There is a simple rule regarding the distribution: universal propositions (SaP and SeP) distribute their subject terms; negative propositions (SeP and SoP) distribute their predicate terms. No terms are distributed in an I-proposition. Various sets of rules governing validity of categorical syllogisms have been offered. The following is a “traditional” set from the popular Port-Royal Logic (1662). R1: The middle term must be distributed at least once. Violation: ‘All cats are animals; some animals do not eat liver; therefore some cats do not eat liver’. The middle term ‘animals’ is not distributed either in the first or minor premise, being the predicate of an affirmative proposition, nor in the second or major premise, being the subject of a particular proposition; hence, the fallacy of undistributed middle. R2: A term cannot be distributed in the conclusion if it is undistributed in the premises. Violation: ‘All dogs are carnivorous; no flowers are dogs; therefore, no flowers are carnivorous’. Here the major, ‘carnivorous’, is distributed in the conclusion, being the predicate of a negative proposition, but not in the premise, serving there as predicate of an affirmative proposition; hence, the fallacy of illicit major term. Another violation of R2: ‘All students are happy individuals; no criminals are students; therefore, no happy individuals are criminals’. Here the minor, ‘happy individuals’, is distributed in the conclusion, but not distributed in the minor premise; hence the fallacy of illicit minor term. R3: No conclusion may be drawn from two negative premises. Violation: ‘No dogs are cats; some dogs do not like liver; therefore, some cats do not like liver’. Here R1 is satisfied, since the middle term ‘dogs’ is distributed in the minor premise; R2 is satisfied, since both the minor term ‘cats’ as well as the major term ‘things that like liver’ are distributed in the premises and thus no violation of distribution of terms occurs. It is only by virtue of R3 that we can proclaim this syllogism to be invalid. R4: A negative conclusion cannot be drawn where both premises are affirmative. Violation: ‘All educated people take good care of their children; all syllogism syllogism 894   894 who take good care of their children are poor; therefore, some poor people are not educated’. Here, it is only by virtue of the rule of quality, R4, that we can proclaim this syllogism invalid. R5: The conclusion must follow the weaker premise; i.e., if one of the premises is negative, the conclusion must be negative, and if one of them is particular, the conclusion must be particular. R6: From two particular premises nothing follows. Let us offer an indirect proof for this rule. If both particular premises are affirmative, no term is distributed and therefore the fallacy of undistributed middle is inevitable. To avoid it, we have to make one of the premises negative, which will result in a distributed predicate as middle term. But by R5, the conclusion must then be negative; thus, the major term will be distributed in the conclusion. To avoid violating R2, we must distribute that term in the major premise. It could not be in the position of subject term, since only universal propositions distribute their subject term and, by hypothesis, both premises are particular. But we could not use the se negative premise used to distribute the middle term; we must make the other particular premise negative. But then we violate R3. Thus, any attempt to make a syllogism with two particular premises valid will violate one or more basic rules of syllogism. (This set of rules assumes that A- and Epropositions have existential import and hence that an I- or an O-proposition may legitimately be drawn from a set of exclusively universal premises.) Categorical syllogisms are classified according to figure and mood. The figure of a categorical syllogism refers to the schema determined by the possible position of the middle term in relation to the major and minor terms. In “modern logic,” four syllogistic figures are recognized. Using ‘M’ for middle term, ‘P’ for major term, and ‘S’ for minor term, they can be depicted as follows: Aristotle recognized only three syllogistic figures. He seems to have taken into account just the two premises and the extension of the three terms occurring in them, and then asked what conclusion, if any, can be derived from those premises. It turns out, then, that his procedure leaves room for three figures only: one in which the M term is the subject of one and predicate of the other premise; another in which the M term is predicated in both premises; and a third one in which the M term is the subject in both premises. Medievals followed him, although all considered the so-called inverted first (i.e., moods of the first figure with their conclusion converted either simply or per accidens) to be legitimate also. Some medievals (e.g., Albalag) and most moderns since Leibniz recognize a fourth figure as a distinct figure, considering syllogistic terms on the basis not of their extension but of their position in the conclusion, the S term of the conclusion being defined as the minor term and the P term being defined as the major term. The mood of a categorical syllogism refers to the configuration of types of categorical propositions determined on the basis of the quality and quantity of the propositions serving as premises and conclusion of any given syllogism; e.g., ‘No animals are plants; all cats are animals; therefore no cats are plants’, ‘(MeP, S /, SeP)’, is a syllogism in the mood EAE in the first figure. ‘All metals conduct electricity; no stones conduct electricity; therefore no stones are metals’, ‘(P, SeM /, SeP)’, is the mood AEE in the second figure. In the four syllogistic figures there are 256 possible moods, but only 24 are valid (only 19 in modern logic, on the ground of a non-existential treatment of A- and E-propositions). As a mnemonic device and to facilitate reference, nes have been assigned to the valid moods, with each vowel representing the type of categorical proposition. Willi Sherwood and Peter of Spain offered the fous list designed to help students to remember which moods in any given figure are valid and how the “inevident” moods in the second and third figures are provable by reduction to those in the first figure: barbara, celarent, darii, ferio (direct Fig. 1); baralipton, celantes, dabitis, fapesmo, frisesomorum (indirect Fig. 1); cesare, cestres, festino, baroco (Fig. 2); darapti, felapton, disis, datisi, bocardo, ferison (Fig. 3). The hypothetical syllogism. The pure hypothetical syllogism is an argument in which both the premises and the conclusion are hypothetical, i.e. conditional, propositions; e.g., ‘If the sun is shining, it is warm; if it is warm, the plants will grow; therefore if the sun is shining, the plants will grow’. Symbolically, this argument form can be represented by ‘A P B, B P C /, A P C’. It was not recognized as such by Aristotle, but Aristotle’s pupil Theophrastus foreshadowed it, even syllogism syllogism 895   895 though it is not clear from his exple of it – ‘If man is, animal is; if animal is, then substance is; if therefore man is, substance is’ – whether this was seen to be a principle of term logic or a principle of propositional logic. It was the MegaricStoic philosophers and Boethius who fully recognized hypothetical propositions and syllogisms as principles of the most general theory of deduction. Mixed hypothetical syllogisms are arguments consisting of a hypothetical premise and a categorical premise, and inferring a categorical proposition; e.g., ‘If the sun is shining, the plants will grow; the sun is shining; therefore the plants will grow’. Symbolically, this is represented by ‘P P Q, P /, Q’. This argument form was explicitly formulated in ancient times by the Stoics as one of the “indemonstrables” and is now known as modus ponens. Another equally basic form of mixed hypothetical syllogism is ‘P P Q, -Q /, ~P’, known as modus tollens. The disjunctive syllogism. This is an argument in which the leading premise is a disjunction, the other premise being a denial of one of the alternatives, concluding to the remaining alternative; e.g., ‘It is raining or I will go for a walk; but it is not raining; therefore I will go for a walk’. It is not always clear whether the ‘or’ of the disjunctive premise is inclusive or exclusive. Symbolic logic removes the biguity by using two different symbols and thus clearly distinguishes between inclusive or weak disjunction, ‘P 7 Q’, which is true provided not both alternatives are false, and exclusive or strong disjunction, ‘P W Q’, which is true provided exactly one alternative is true and exactly one false. The definition of ‘disjunctive syllogism’ presupposes that the lead premise is an inclusive or weak disjunction, on the basis of which two forms are valid: ‘P 7 Q, -P /, Q’ and ‘P 7 Q, -Q /, P’. If the disjunctive premise is exclusive, we have four valid argument forms, and we should speak here of an exclusive disjunctive syllogism. This is defined as an argument in which either from an exclusive disjunction and the denial of one of its disjuncts we infer the remaining disjunct – ’P W Q, -P /,Q’, and ‘P W Q, -Q /, P’ (modus tollendo ponens); or else, from an exclusive disjunction and one of its disjuncts we infer the denial of the remaining disjunct – ’P W Q, P /, -Q’, and ‘P W Q, Q /,-P’ (modus ponendo tollens).

synaesthesia, a conscious experience in which qualities normally associated with one sensory modality are or seem to be sensed in another. Exples include auditory and tactile visions such as “loud sunlight” and “soft moonlight” as well as visual bodily sensations such as “dark thoughts” and “bright smiles.” Two features of synaesthesia are of philosophic interest. First, the experience may be used to judge the appropriateness of sensory metaphors and similes, such as Baudelaire’s “sweet as oboes.” The metaphor is appropriate just when oboes sound sweet. Second, synaesthesia challenges the manner in which common sense distinguishes ong the external senses. It is commonly acknowledged that taste, e.g., is not only unlike hearing, smell, or any other sense, but differs from them because taste involves gustatory rather than auditory experiences. In synaesthesia, however, one might taste sounds (sweet-sounding oboes). G.A.G. syncategoremata, (1) in grmar, words that cannot serve by themselves as subjects or predicates of categorical propositions. The opposite is categoremata, words that can do this. For exple, ‘and’, ‘if’, ‘every’, ‘because’, ‘insofar’, and ‘under’ are syncategorematic terms, whereas ‘dog’, ‘smooth’, and ‘sings’ are categorematic ones. This usage comes from the fifth-century Latin grmarian Priscian. It seems to have been the original way of drawing the distinction, and to have persisted through later periods along syllogism, demonstrative syncategoremata 896   896 with other usages described below. (2) In medieval logic from the twelfth century on, the distinction was drawn semantically. Categoremata are words that have a (definite) independent signification. Syncategoremata do not have any independent signification (or, according to some authors, not a definite one anyway), but acquire a signification only when used in a proposition together with categoremata. The exples used above work here as well. (3) Medieval logic distinguished not only categorematic and syncategorematic words, but also categorematic and syncategorematic uses of a single word. The most important is the word ‘is’, which can be used both categorematically to make an existence claim (‘Socrates is’ in the sense ‘Socrates exists’) or syncategorematically as a copula (‘Socrates is a philosopher’). But other words were treated this way too. Thus ‘whole’ was said to be used syncategorematically as a kind of quantifier in ‘The whole surface is white’ (from which it follows that each part of the surface is white), but categorematically in ‘The whole surface is two square feet in area’ (from which it does not follow that each part of the surface is two square feet in area). (4) In medieval logic, again, syncategoremata were sometimes taken to include words that can serve by themselves as subjects or predicates of categorical propositions, but may interfere with standard logical inference patterns when they do. The most notorious exple is the word ‘nothing’. If nothing is better than eternal bliss and tepid tea is better than nothing, still it does not follow (by the transitivity of ‘better than’) that tepid tea is better than eternal bliss. Again, consider the verb ‘begins’. Everything red is colored, but not everything that begins to be red begins to be colored (it might have been some other color earlier). Such words were classified as syncategorematic because an analysis (called an expositio) of propositions containing them reveals implicit syncategoremata in sense (1) or perhaps (2). Thus an analysis of ‘The apple begins to be red’ would include the claim that it was not red earlier, and ‘not’ is syncategorematic in both senses (1) and (2). (5) In modern logic, sense (2) is extended to apply to all logical symbols, not just to words in natural languages. In this usage, categoremata are also called “proper symbols” or “complete symbols,” while syncategoremata are called “improper symbols” or “incomplete symbols.” In the terminology of modern formal semantics, the meaning of categoremata is fixed by the models for the language, whereas the meaning of syncategoremata is fixed by specifying truth conditions for the various formulas of the language in terms of the models. 

synderesis, in medieval moral theology, conscience. St. Jerome used the term, and it bece a fixture because of Peter Lombard’s inclusion of it in his Sentences. Despite this origin, ‘synderesis’ is distinguished from ‘conscience’ by Aquinas, for whom synderesis is the quasi-habitual grasp of the most common principles of the moral order (i.e., natural law), whereas conscience is the application of such knowledge to fleeting and unrepeatable circumstances. ’Conscience’ is biguous in the way in which ‘knowledge’ is: knowledge can be the mental state of the knower or what the knower knows. But ‘conscience’, like ‘synderesis’, is typically used for the mental state. Sometimes, however, conscience is taken to include general moral knowledge as well as its application here and now; but the content of synderesis is the most general precepts, whereas the content of conscience, if general knowledge, will be less general precepts. Since conscience can be erroneous, the question arises as to whether synderesis and its object, natural law precepts, can be obscured and forgotten because of bad behavior or upbringing. Aquinas held that while great attrition can take place, such common moral knowledge cannot be wholly expunged from the human mind. This is a version of the Aristotelian doctrine that there are starting points of knowledge so easily grasped that the grasping of them is a defining mark of the human being. However perversely the human agent behaves there will remain not only the comprehensive realization that good is to be done and evil avoided, but also the recognition of some substantive human goods.  AQUINAS, ARISTOTLE, ETHICS. R.M. syndicalism.SOREL. synechism.PEIRCE, TYCHISM. synergism, in Christian soteriology, the cooperation within human consciousness of free will and divine grace in the processes of conversion and regeneration. Synergism bece an issue in sixteenth-century Lutheranism during a controversy prompted by Philip Melanchthon (1497– syncategorematic synergism 897   897 1569). Under the influence of Erasmus, Melanchthon mentioned, in the 1533 edition of his Common Places, three causes of good actions: “the Word, the Holy Spirit, and the will.” Advocated by Pfeffinger, a Philipist, synergism was attacked by the orthodox, predestinarian, and monergist party, sdorf and Flacius, who retorted with Gnesio-Lutheranism. The ensuing Formula of Concord (1577) officialized monergism. Synergism occupies a middle position between uncritical trust in human noetic and salvific capacity (Pelagianism and deism) and exclusive trust in divine agency (Calvinist and Lutheran fideism). Catholicism, Arminianism, Anglicanism, Methodism, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century liberal Protestantism have professed versions of synergism. 

systems theory, the transdisciplinary study of the abstract organization of phenomena, independent of their substance, type, or spatial or temporal scale of existence. It investigates both the principles common to all complex entities and the (usually mathematical) models that can be used to describe them. Systems theory was proposed in the 1940s by the biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy and furthered by Ross Ashby (Introduction to Cybernetics, 1956). Von Bertalanffy was both reacting against reductionism and attempting to revive the unity of science. He emphasized that real systems are open to, and interact with, their environments, and that they can acquire qualitatively new properties through emergence, resulting in continual evolution. Rather than reduce an entity (e.g. the human body) to the properties of its parts or elements (e.g. organs or cells), systems theory focuses on the arrangement of and relations ong the parts that connect them into a whole (cf. holism). This particular organization determines a system, which is independent of the concrete substance of the elements (e.g. particles, cells, transistors, people). Thus, the se concepts and principles of organization underlie the different disciplines (physics, biology, technology, sociology, etc.), providing a basis for their unification. Systems concepts include: system– environment boundary, input, output, process, state, hierarchy, goal-directedness, and information. The developments of systems theory are diverse (Klir, Facets of Systems Science, 1991), including conceptual foundations and philosophy (e.g. the philosophies of Bunge, Bahm, and Laszlo); mathematical modeling and information theory (e.g. the work of Mesarovic and Klir); and practical applications. Mathematical systems theory arose from the development of isomorphies between the models of electrical circuits and other systems. Applications include engineering, computing, ecology, management, and fily psychotherapy. Systems analysis, developed independently of systems theory, applies systems principles to aid a decision maker with problems of identifying, reconstructing, optimizing, and controlling a system (usually a socio-technical organization), while taking into account multiple objectives, constraints, and resources. It aims to specify possible courses of action, together with their risks, costs, and benefits. Systems theory is closely connected to cybernetics, and also to system dynics, which models changes in a network of synergy systems theory 898   898 coupled variables (e.g. the “world dynics” models of Jay Forrester and the Club of Rome). Related ideas are used in the emerging “sciences of complexity,” studying self-organization and heterogeneous networks of interacting actors, and associated domains such as far-from-equilibrium thermodynics, chaotic dynics, artificial life, artificial intelligence, neural networks, and computer modeling and simulation. 

T

Ta-hsüeh, a part of the Chinese Confucian classic Book of Rites whose title is standardly translated as Great Learning. Chu Hsi significantly ended the text (composed in the third or second century B.C.) and elevated it to the status of an independent classic as one of the Four Books. He regarded it as a quotation from Confucius and a commentary by Confucius’s disciple Tseng-tzu, but neither his emendations nor his interpretation of the text is beyond dispute. The Ta-hsüeh instructs a ruler in how to bring order to his state by self-cultivation. Much discussion of the text revolves around the phrase ko wu, which describes the first step in self-cultivation but is left undefined. The Ta-hsüeh claims that one’s virtuousness or viciousness is necessarily evident to others, and that virtue manifests itself first in one’s filial relationships, which then serve as an exemplar of order in both filies and the state.  CONFUCIANISM. B.W.V.N.

Tai Chen (1724–77), Chinese philologist, philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer. A prominent member of the K’ao-cheng (evidential research) School, Tai attacked the Neo-Confucian dualism of li (pattern) and ch’i (ether), insisting that li is simply the orderly structure of ch’i. In terms of ethics, li consists of “feelings that do not err.” In his Meng-tzu tzu-yi shu-cheng (“Meanings of Terms in the Mencius Explained and Attested”), Tai argues for the need to move from mere yi-chien (opinions) to pu-te chih-yi (undeviating standards) by applying the Confucian golden rule – not as a formal principle determining right action but as a winnowing procedure that culls out improper desires and allows only proper ones to inform one’s actions. Beginning with tzu jan (natural) desires, one tests their universalizability with the golden rule, thereby identifying those that accord with what is pi-jan (necessary). One spontaneously k’o (approves of) the “necessary,” and Tai claims this is what Mencius describes as the “joy” of moral action.  MENCIUS. P.J.I. t’ai-chi, Chinese term meaning ‘Great Ultimate’, an idea first developed in the “Appended Remarks” of the I-Ching, where it is said that in the system of Change there is the Great Ultimate. It generates the Two Modes (yin and yang); the Two Modes generate the Four Forms (major and minor yin and yang); and the Four Forms generate the Eight Trigrs. In his “Explanation of the Diagr of the Great Ultimate,” Chou Tunyi (1017–73) spoke of “Non-ultimate (wu-chi) and also the Great Ultimate!” He generated controversies. Chu Hsi (1130–1200) approved Chou’s formulation and interpreted t’ai-chi as li (principle), which is formless on the one hand and has principle on the other hand.  CH’IEN, K’UN; CHOU TUN-YI; CHU HSI. S.-h.L.

T’ang Chün-i (1909–78), Chinese philosopher, a leading contemporary New Confucian and cofounder, with Ch’ien Mu, of New Asia College in Hong Kong in 1949. He acknowledged that it was through the influence of Hsiung Shih-li that he could see the true insights in Chinese philosophy. He drafted a manifesto published in 1958 and signed by Carsun Chang (1887–1969), Hsü Fu-kuan, and Mou Tsung-san. They criticized current sinological studies as superficial and inadequate, and maintained that China must learn science and democracy from the West, but the West must also learn human-heartedness and love of harmony and peace from Chinese culture.  CH’IEN MU, CHINESE PHILOSOPHY, HSIUNG SHIH-LI, HSÜ FU-KUAN. S.-h.L. T’an Ssu-t’ung (1864–98), Chinese philosopher of the late Ching dynasty, a close associate of K’ang Yu-wei and Liang Ch’i-ch’ao. He was a syncretist who lumped together Confucianism, Mohism, Taoism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Western science. His book on Jen-hsüeh (philosophy of humanity) identified humanity with ether, a cosmic force, and gave a new interpreta900 T   900 tion to the unity between nature and humanity. Jen for him is the source of all existence and creatures; it is none other than reality itself. He participated in the Hundred Days Reform in 1898 and died a martyr. His personal exple inspired many revolutionaries afterward. 

KANG YU-WEI, LIANG CH’I-CH’AO. S.-h.L. tao, Chinese term meaning ‘path’, ‘way’, ‘account’. From the sense of a literal path, road, or way, the term comes to mean a way of doing something (e.g., living one’s life or organizing society), especially the way advocated by a particular individual or school of thought (“the way of the Master,” “the way of the Mohists,” etc.). Frequently, it refers to the way of doing something, the right way (e.g., “The Way has not been put into practice for a long time”). Tao also ce to refer to the linguistic account that embodies or describes a way. Finally, in some texts the tao is a metaphysical entity. For exple, in Neo-Confucianism, tao is identified with li (principle). In some contexts it is difficult to tell what sense is intended.  LI1, NEO-CONFUCIANISM. B.W.V.N. tao-hsin, jen-hsin, Chinese terms used by NeoConfucian philosophers to contrast the mind according to the Way (tao-hsin) and the mind according to man’s artificial, selfish desires (jenhsin). When one responds spontaneously without making discrimination, one is acting according to the Way. One is naturally happy, sad, angry, and joyful as circumstances require. But when one’s self is alienated from the Way, one works only for self-interest, and the emotions and desires are excessive and deviate from the Mean. In the Confucian tradition sages and worthies take Heaven as their model, while common people are urged to take chün-tzu (the superior men) as their model. 

 Taoism, a Chinese philosophy identified with the Tao-chia (School of the Way), represented by Chuang Tzu and Lao Tzu. The term may also refer to the Huang–Lao School; Neo-Taoists, such as Wang Pi and Kuo Hsiang; and Tao-chiao, a diverse religious movement. Only the Tao-chia is discussed here. The school derives its ne from the word tao (Way), a term used by Chinese thinkers of almost every persuasion. Taoists were the first to use the term to describe the comprehensive structure and dynic of the cosmos. Taoists believe that (1) there is a way the world should be, a way that, in some deep sense, it is; (2) human beings can understand this and need to have and follow such knowledge if they and the world are to exist in harmony; and (3) the world was once in such a state. Most early Chinese thinkers shared similar beliefs, but Taoists are distinct in claiming that the Way is not codifiable, indeed is ineffable. Taoists thus are metaphysical and ethical realists, but epistemological skeptics of an unusual sort, being language skeptics. Taoists further deny that one can strive successfully to attain the Way; Taoist self-cultivation is a process not of accumulation but of paring away. One must unweave the social fabric, forsake one’s cultural conditioning, and abandon rational thought, to be led instead by one’s tzu jan (spontaneous) inclinations. With a hsü (tenuous) mind, one then will perceive the li (pattern) of the cosmos and live by wu wei (non-action). Though sharing a strong fily resemblance, the Taoisms of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu are distinct. Lao Tzu advocates a primitive utopianism in which people enjoy the simple life of small agrarian communities, indifferent to what is happening in the neighboring village. Having abandoned cultural achievements such as writing, they keep accounts by knotting cords. Lao Tzu bles human “cleverness,” which imposes the “human” on the “Heavenly,” for most of what is bad in the world. For him, a notion like beauty gives rise to its opposite and only serves to increase anxiety and dissatisfaction; extolling a virtue, such as benevolence, only encourages people to affect it hypocritically. Lao Tzu advocates “turning back” to the time when intellect was young and still obedient to intuition and instinct. To accomplish this, the Taoist sage must rule and enforce this view upon the clever, if they should “dare to act.” Chuang Tzu emphasizes changing oneself more than changing society. He too is a kind of anti-rationalist and sees wisdom as a “knowing how” rather than a “knowing that.” He invokes a repertoire of skillful individuals as exemplars of the Way. Such individuals engage the world through a knack that eludes definitive description and display all the Taoist virtues. Their minds are hsü (empty) of preconceptions, and so they perceive the li (pattern) in each situation. They respond spontaneously and so are tzu jan; they don’t force things and so practice wu wei. In accord with the tao, they lead a frictionless existence; they “walk without touching the ground.”  NEO-TAOISM, TAO. P.J.I. tao Taoism 901   901 Tao Te Ching.LAO TZU. tao-t’ung, Chinese term meaning ‘the orthodox line of transmission of the Way’. According to Chu Hsi (1130–1200), the first to use this term, the line of transmission can be traced back to ancient sage-emperors, Confucius and Mencius. The line was broken since Mencius and was only revived by the Ch’eng brothers in the Sung dynasty. The interesting feature is that the line has excluded important Confucian scholars such as Hsün Tzu (fl. 298–238 B.C.) and Tung Chungshu (c.179–c.104 B.C.). The idea of tao-t’ung can be traced back to Han Yü (768–824) and Mencius.

 CHU HSI, CONFUCIANISM, CONFUCIUS, HAN YÜ, HSÜN TZU, MENCIUS, NEOCONFUCIANISM, TUNG CHUNG-SHU. S.-h.L. Tarski, Alfred (1901–83), Polish-born erican mathematician, logician, and philosopher of logic fous for his investigations of the concepts of truth and consequence conducted in the 1930s. His analysis of the concept of truth in syntactically precise, fully interpreted languages resulted in a definition of truth and an articulate defense of the correspondence theory of truth. Sentences of the following kind are now known as Tarskian biconditionals: ‘The sentence “Every perfect number is even” is true if and only if every perfect number is even.’ One of Tarski’s major philosophical insights is that each Tarskian biconditional is, in his words, a partial definition of truth and, consequently, all Tarskian biconditionals whose right-hand sides exhaust the sentences of a given formal language together constitute an implicit definition of ‘true’ as applicable to sentences of that given formal language. This insight, because of its penetrating depth and disarming simplicity, has become a staple of modern analytic philosophy. Moreover, it in effect reduced the philosophical problem of defining truth to the logical problem of constructing a single sentence having the form of a definition and having as consequences each of the Tarskian biconditionals. Tarski’s solution to this problem is the fous Tarski truth definition, versions of which appear in virtually every mathematical logic text. Tarski’s second most widely recognized philosophical achievement was his analysis and explication of the concept of consequence. Consequence is interdefinable with validity as applied to arguments: a given conclusion is a consequence of a given premise-set if and only if the argument composed of the given conclusion and the given premise-set is valid; conversely, a given argument is valid if and only if its conclusion is a consequence of its premise-set. Shortly after discovering the truth definition, Tarski presented his “no-countermodels” definition of consequence: a given sentence is a consequence of a given set of sentences if and only if every model of the set is a model of the sentence (in other words, if and only if there is no way to reinterpret the non-logical terms in such a way as to render the sentence false while rendering all sentences in the set true). As Quine has emphasized, this definition reduces the modal notion of logical necessity to a combination of syntactic and semantic concepts, thus avoiding reference to modalities and/or to “possible worlds.” After Tarski’s definitive work on truth and on consequence he devoted his energies largely to more purely mathematical work. For exple, in answer to Gödel’s proof that arithmetic is incomplete and undecidable, Tarski showed that algebra and geometry are both complete and decidable. Tarski’s truth definition and his consequence definition are found in his 1956 collection Logic, Semantics, Metathematics (2d ed., 1983): article VIII, pp. 152–278, contains the truth definition; article XVI, pp. 409–20, contains the consequence definition. His published articles, nearly 3,000 s in all, have been available together since 1986 in the four-volume Alfred Tarski, Collected Papers, edited by S. Givant and R. McKenzie. 

tautology, a proposition whose negation is inconsistent, or (self-) contradictory, e.g. ‘Socrates is Socrates’, ‘Every human is either male or nonmale’, ‘No human is both male and non-male’, ‘Every human is identical to itself’, ‘If Socrates is human then Socrates is human’. A proposition that is (or is logically equivalent to) the negation of a tautology is called a (self-)contradiction. According to classical logic, the property of being Tao Te Ching tautology 902   902 implied by its own negation is a necessary and sufficient condition for being a tautology and the property of implying its own negation is a necessary and sufficient condition for being a contradiction. Tautologies are logically necessary and contradictions are logically impossible. Epistemically, every proposition that can be known to be true by purely logical reasoning is a tautology and every proposition that can be known to be false by purely logical reasoning is a contradiction. The converses of these two statements are both controversial ong classical logicians. Every proposition in the se logical form as a tautology is a tautology and every proposition in the se logical form as a contradiction is a contradiction. For this reason sometimes a tautology is said to be true in virtue of form and a contradiction is said to be false in virtue of form; being a tautology and being a contradiction (tautologousness and contradictoriness) are formal properties. Since the logical form of a proposition is determined by its logical terms (‘every’, ‘some’, ‘is’, etc.), a tautology is sometimes said to be true in virtue of its logical terms and likewise mutatis mutandis for a contradiction. Since tautologies do not exclude any logical possibilities they are sometimes said to be “empty” or “uninformative”; and there is a tendency even to deny that they are genuine propositions and that knowledge of them is genuine knowledge. Since each contradiction “includes” (implies) all logical possibilities (which of course are jointly inconsistent), contradictions are sometimes said to be “overinformative.” Tautologies and contradictions are sometimes said to be “useless,” but for opposite reasons. More precisely, according to classical logic, being implied by each and every proposition is necessary and sufficient for being a tautology and, coordinately, implying each and every proposition is necessary and sufficient for being a contradiction. Certain developments in mathematical logic, especially model theory and modal logic, seem to support use of Leibniz’s expression ‘true in all possible worlds’ in connection with tautologies. There is a special subclass of tautologies called truth-functional tautologies that are true in virtue of a special subclass of logical terms called truthfunctional connectives (‘and’, ‘or’, ‘not’, ‘if’, etc.). Some logical writings use ‘tautology’ exclusively for truth-functional tautologies and thus replace “tautology” in its broad sense by another expression, e.g. ‘logical truth’. Tarski, Gödel, Russell, and many other logicians have used the word in its broad sense, but use of it in its narrow sense is widespread and entirely acceptable. Propositions known to be tautologies are often given as exples of a priori knowledge. In philosophy of mathematics, the logistic hypothesis of logicism is the proposition that every true proposition of pure mathematics is a tautology. Some writers make a sharp distinction between the formal property of being a tautology and the non-formal metalogical property of being a law of logic. For exple, ‘One is one’ is not metalogical but it is a tautology, whereas ‘No tautology is a contradiction’ is metalogical but is not a tautology.

Taylor, Charles (b.1931), Canadian philosopher and historian of modernity. Taylor was educated at McGill and Oxford and has taught primarily at these universities. His work has a broadly analytic character, although he has consistently opposed the naturalistic and reductionist tendencies that were associated with the positivist domination of analytic philosophy during the 1950s and 1960s. He was, for exple, a strong opponent of behaviorism and defended the essentially interpretive nature of the social sciences against efforts to reduce their methodology to that of the natural sciences. Taylor has also done important work on the histiory of philosophy, particularly on Hegel, and has connected his work with that of Continental philosophers such as Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. He has contributed to political theory and written on contemporary political issues such as multiculturalism (in, e.g., The Ethics of Authenticity, 1991), often with specific reference to Canadian politics. He has also taken an active political role in Quebec. Taylor’s most important work, Sources of the Self (1989), is a historical and critical study of the emergence of the modern concept of the self. Like many other critics of modernity, Taylor rejects modern tendencies to construe personal identity in entirely scientific or naturalistic terms, arguing that these construals lead to a view of the self that can make no sense of our undeniable experience of ourselves as moral agents. He develops this critique in a historical mode through discussion of the radical Enlightenment’s (e.g., Locke’s) reduction of the self to an atomic individual, essentially disengaged from everything except its own ideas and desires. But unlike many critics, Taylor also finds in modernity other, richer sources for a conception of the self. These include the idea of the self’s inwardness, traceable as far back as Augustine Taylor, Charles Taylor, Charles 903   903 but developed in a distinctively modern way by Montaigne and Descartes; the affirmation of ordinary life (and of ourselves as participants in it), particularly associated with the Reformation; and the expressivism (of, e.g., the Romantics) for which the self fulfills itself by embracing and articulating the voice of nature present in its depths. Taylor thinks that these sources constitute a modern self that, unlike the “punctual self” of the radical Enlightenment, is a meaningful ethical agent. He suggests, nonetheless, that an adequate conception of the modern self will further require a relation of human inwardness to God. This suggestion so far remains undeveloped. 

Taylor, Harriet (1807–58), English feminist and writer. She was the wife of J. S. Mill, who called her the “most admirable person” he had ever met; but according to her critics, Taylor was “a stupid woman” with “a knack for repeating prettily what J.S.M. said.” Although Mill may have exaggerated her moral and intellectual virtues, her writings on marriage, the enfranchisement of women, and toleration did influence his Subjection of Women and On Liberty. In The Enfranchisement of Women, Taylor rejected the reigning “angel in the house” ideal of woman. She argued that confining women to the house impeded both sexes’ development. Taylor was a feminist philosopher in her own right, who argued even more strongly than Mill that women are entitled to the se educational, legal, and economic opportunities that men enjoy. R.T. te, Chinese term meaning ‘moral charisma’ or ‘virtue’. In its earliest use, te is the quality bestowed on a ruler by Heaven (t’ien) which makes his subjects willingly follow him. Rule by te is traditionally thought to be not just ethically preferable to rule by force but also more effective instrumentally. It is a necessary condition for having te that one be ethically exemplary, but traditional thinkers differ over whether being virtuous is also sufficient for the bestowal of te, and whether the bestowal of te makes one even more virtuous. Te soon ce also to refer to virtue, in the sense of either a disposition that contributes to human flourishing (benevolence, courage, etc.) or the specific excellence of any kind of thing. B.W.V.N. techne (Greek, ‘art’, ‘craft’), a human skill based on general principles and capable of being taught. In this sense, a manual craft such as carpentry is a techne, but so are sciences such as medicine and arithmetic. According to Plato (Gorgias 501a), a genuine techne understands its subject matter and can give a rational account of its activity. Aristotle (Metaphysics I.1) distinguishes technefrom experience on the grounds that techne involves knowledge of universals and causes, and can be taught. Sometimes ‘techne’ is restricted to the productive (as opposed to theoretical and practical) arts, as at Nicomachean Ethics VI.4. Techne and its products are often contrasted with physis, nature (Physics II.1). 

Teichmüller, Gustav (1832–88), German philosopher who contributed to the history of philosophy and developed a theory of knowledge and a metaphysical conception based on these historical studies. Born in Braunschweig, he taught at Göttingen and Basel and was influenced by Lotze and Leibniz. His major works are Aristotelische Forschungen (Aristotelian Investigations, 1867–73) and Die wirkliche und scheinbar Welt (The Actual and the Apparent World, 1882). His other works are Ueber die Unsterblichkeit der Seele (1874), Studien zur Geschichte der Begriffe (1874), Darwinismus und Philosophie (1877), Ueber das Wesen der Liebe (1879), Religionsphilosophie (1886), and the posthumously published Neue Grundlegung der Psychologie und Logik (1889). Teichmüller maintained that the self of immediate experience, the “I,” is the most fundental reality and that the conceptual world is a projection of its constituting activity. On the basis of his studies in the history of metaphysics and his sympathies with Leibniz’s monadology, he held that each metaphysical system contained partial truths and construed each metaphysical standpoint as a perspective on a complex reality. Thinking of both metaphysical interpretations of reality and the subjectivity of individual immediate experience, Teichmüller christened his own philosophical position “perspectivism.” His work influenced later European thought through its impact on the philosophical reflections of Nietzsche, who was probably influenced by him in the development of his perspectival theory of knowledge. 

Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre (1881–1955), French paleontologist, Jesuit priest, and philosopher. His Taylor, Harriet Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre 904   904 philosophical work, while published only posthumously, was vigorously discussed throughout his career. His writings generated considerable controversy within the church, since one of his principal concerns was to bring about a forceful yet generous reconciliation between the traditional Christian dogma and the dratic advances yielded by modern science. His philosophy consisted of systematic reflections on cosmology, biology, physics, anthropology, social theory, and theology – reflections guided, he maintained, by his fascination with the nature of life, energy, and matter, and by his profound respect for human spirituality. Teilhard was educated in philosophy and mathematics at the Jesuit college of Mongré, near Lyons. He entered the Jesuit order at the age of eighteen and was ordained a priest in 1911. He went on to study at Aix-en-Provence, Laval, and Caen, as well as on the Isle of Jersey and at Hastings, England. Returning to Paris after the war, he studied biology, geology, and paleontology at the Museum of Natural History and at the Institut Catholique, receiving a doctoral degree in geology in 1922. In 1923, shortly after appointment to the faculty of geology at the Institut Catholique, he took leave to pursue field research in China. His research resulted in the discovery, in 1929, of Peking man (Sinanthropus pekinensis) – which he saw as “perhaps the next to the last step traceable between the anthropoids and man.” It was during this period that Teilhard began to compose one of his major theoretical works, The Phenomenon of Man (1955), in which he stressed the deep continuity of evolutionary development and the emergence of humanity from the animal realm. He argued that received evolutionary theory was fully compatible with Christian doctrine. Indeed, it is the synthesis of evolutionary theory with his own Christian theology that perhaps best characterizes the broad tenor of his thought. Starting with the very inception of the evolutionary trajectory, i.e., with what he termed the “Alpha point” of creation, Teilhard’s general theory resists any absolute disjunction between the inorganic and organic. Indeed, matter and spirit are two “stages” or “aspects” of the se cosmic stuff. These transitions from one state to another may be said to correspond to those between the somatic and psychic, the exterior and interior, according to the state of relative development, organization, and complexity. Hence, for Teilhard, much as for Bergson (whose work greatly influenced him), evolutionary development is characterized by a progression from the simplest components of matter and energy (what he termed the lithosphere), through the organization of flora and fauna (the biosphere), to the complex formations of sentient and cognitive human life (the noosphere). In this sense, evolution is a “progressive spiritualization of matter.” He held this to be an orthogenetic process, one of “directed evolution” or “Genesis,” by which matter would irreversibly metorphose itself, in a process of involution and complexification, toward the psychic. Specifically, Teilhard’s account sought to overcome what he saw as a prescientific worldview, one based on a largely antiquated and indefensible metaphysical dualism. By accomplishing this, he hoped to realize a productive convergence of science and religion. The end of evolution, what he termed “the Omega point,” would be the full presence of Christ, embodied in a universal human society. Many have tended to see a Christian pantheism expressed in such views. Teilhard himself stressed a profoundly personalist, spiritual perspective, drawn not only from the theological tradition of Thomism, but from that of Pauline Neoplatonism and Christian mysticism as well – especially that tradition extending from Meister Eckhart through Cardinal Bérulle and Malebranche. D.Al. telekinesis.PARAPSYCHOLOGY. teleofunctionalism.FODOR. teleological argument.PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. teleological ethics.ETHICS. teleological explanation.TELEOLOGY. teleological law.CAUSAL LAW. teleological suspension of the ethical

.KIERKEGAARD. teleology, the philosophical doctrine that all of nature, or at least intentional agents, are goaldirected or functionally organized. Plato first suggested that the organization of the natural world can be understood by comparing it to the behavior of an intentional agent – external teleology. For exple, human beings can anticipate the future and behave in ways calculated to realize their telekinesis teleology 905   905 intentions. Aristotle invested nature itself with goals – internal teleology. Each kind has its own final cause, and entities are so constructed that they tend to realize this goal. Heavenly bodies travel as nearly as they are able in perfect circles because that is their nature, while horses give rise to other horses because that is their nature. Natural theologians combined these two teleological perspectives to explain all phenomena by reference to the intentions of a beneficent, omniscient, all-powerful God. God so constructed the world that each entity is invested with the tendency to fulfill its own God-given nature. Darwin explained the teleological character of the living world non-teleologically. The evolutionary process is not itself teleological, but it gives rise to functionally organized systems and intentional agents. Present-day philosophers acknowledge intentional behavior and functional organization but attempt to explain both without reference to a supernatural agent or internal natures of the more metaphysical sort. Instead, they define ‘function’ cybernetically, in terms of persistence toward a goal state under varying conditions, or etiologically, in terms of the contribution that a structure or action makes to the realization of a goal state. These definitions confront a battery of counterexples designed to show that the condition mentioned is either not necessary, not sufficient, or both; e.g., missing goal objects, too many goals, or functional equivalents. The trend has been to decrease the scope of teleological explanations from all of nature, to the organization of those entities that arise through natural selection, to their final refuge in the behavior of human beings. Behaviorists have attempted to eliminate this last vestige of teleology. Just as natural selection makes the attribution of goals for biological species redundant, the selection of behavior in terms of its consequences is designed to make any reference to intentions on the part of human beings unnecessary.  MECHANISTIC EXPLANATION. D.L.H. telepathy.PARAPSYCHOLOGY.

Telesio, Bernardino (1509–88), Italian philosopher whose early scientific empiricism influenced Francis Bacon and Galileo. He studied in Padua, where he completed his doctorate in 1535, and practiced philosophy in Naples and Cosenza without holding any academic position. His major work, the nine volumes of De rerum natura iuxta propria principia (“On the Nature of Things According to Their Principles,” 1586), contains an attempt to interpret nature on the basis of its own principles, which Telesio identifies with the two incorporeal active forces of heat and cold, and the corporeal and passive physical substratum. As the two active forces permeate all of nature and are endowed with sensation, Telesio argues that all of nature possesses some degree of sensation. Human beings share with animals a material substance produced by heat and coming into existence with the body, called spirit. They are also given a mind by God. Telesio knew both the Averroistic and the Alexandrist interpretations of Aristotle. However, he broke with both, criticizing Aristotle’s Physics and claiming that nature is investigated better by the senses than by the intellect. P.Gar. telishment, punishment of one suspected of wrongdoing, but whom the authorities know to be innocent, imposed as a deterrent to future wrongdoers. Telishment is thus not punishment insofar as punishment requires that the recipient’s harsh treatment be deserved. Telishment is classically given as one of the thought experiments challenging utilitarianism (and more broadly, consequentialism) as a theory of ethics, for such a theory seems to justify telishment on some occasions.  PUNISHMENT. M.S.M. telos, ancient Greek term meaning ‘end’ or ‘purpose’. Telos is a key concept not only in Greek ethics but also in Greek science. The purpose of a human being is a good life, and human activities are evaluated according to whether they lead to or manifest this telos. Plants, animals, and even inanimate objects were also thought to have a telos through which their activities and relations could be understood and evaluated. Though a telos could be something that transcends human activities and sensible things, as Plato thought, it need not be anything apart from nature. Aristotle, e.g., identified the telos of a sensible thing with its immanent form. It follows that the purpose of the thing is simply to be what it is and that, in general, a thing pursues its purpose when it endeavors to preserve itself. Aristotle’s view shows that ‘purpose in nature’ need not mean a higher purpose beyond nature. Yet, his immanent purpose does not exclude “higher” purposes, and Aristotelian teleology was pressed into service by medieval thinkers as a frework for understanding God’s agency through nature. Thinkers in the modern period argued against the prominent role accorded to telos by ancient telepathy telos 906   906 and medieval thinkers, and they replaced it with analyses in terms of mechanism and law.

IDENTITY. tense logic, an extension of classical logic introduced by Arthur Prior (Past, Present, and Future, 1967), involving operators P and F for the past and future tenses, or ‘it was the case that . . .’ and ‘it will be the case that . . .’. Classical or mathematical logic was developed as a logic of unchanging mathematical truth, and can be applied to tensed discourse only by artificial regimentation inspired by mathematical physics, introducing quantification over “times” or “instants.” Thus ‘It will have been the case that p,’ which Prior represents simply as FPp, classical logic represents as ‘There [exists] an instant t and there [exists] an instant tH such that t [is] later than the present and tH [is] earlier than t, and at tH it [is] the case that pH, or DtDtH (t o‹t8tH ‹t8p(tH)), where the brackets indicate that the verbs are to be understood as tenseless. Prior’s motives were in part linguistic (to produce a formalization less removed from natural language than the classical) and in part metaphysical (to avoid ontological commitment to such entities as instants). Much effort was devoted to finding tense-logical principles equivalent to various classical assertions about the structure of the earlier–later order ong instants; e.g., ‘Between any two instants there is another instant’ corresponds to the validity of the axioms Pp P PPp and Fp P FFp. Less is expressible using P and F than is expressible with explicit quantification over instants, and further operators for ‘since’ and ‘until’ or ‘now’ and ‘then’ have been introduced by Hans Kp and others. These are especially important in combination with quantification, as in ‘When he was in power, all who now condemn him then praised him.’ As tense is closely related to mood, so tense logic is closely related to modal logic. (As Kripke models for modal logic consist each of a set X of “worlds” and a relation R of ‘x is an alternative to y’, so for tense logic they consist each of a set X of “instants” and a relation R of ‘x is earlier than y’: Thus instants, banished from the syntax or proof theory, reappear in the semantics or model theory.) Modality and tense are both involved in the issue of future contingents, and one of Prior’s motives was a desire to produce a formalism in which the views on this topic of ancient, medieval, and early modern logicians (from Aristotle with his “sea fight tomorrow” and Diodorus Cronos with his “Master Argument” through Ockh to Peirce) could be represented. The most important precursor to Prior’s work on tense logic was that on many-valued logics by Lukasiewicz, which was motivated largely by the problem of future contingents. Also related to tense and mood is aspect, and modifications to represent this grmatical category (evaluating formulas at periods rather than instants of time) have also been introduced. Like modal logic, tense logic has been the object of intensive study in theoretical computer science, especially in connection with attempts to develop languages in which properties of progrs can be expressed and proved; variants of tense logic (under such labels as “dynic logic” or “process logic”) have thus been extensively developed for technological rather than philosophical motives. 

Teresa of Ávila, Saint (1515–82), Spanish religious, mystic, and author of spiritual treatises. Having entered the Carmelite order at Ávila at twenty-two, Teresa spent the next twenty-five years seeking guidance in the practice of prayer. Despite variously inept spiritual advisers, she seems to have undergone a number of mystical experiences and to have made increasingly important discoveries about interior life. After 1560 Teresa took on a public role by attaching herself to the reforming party within the Spanish Carmelites. Her remaining years were occupied with the reform, in which she was associated most fously with John of the Cross. She also composed several works, including a spiritual autobiography (the Vida) and two masterpieces of spirituality, the Way of Perfection and the Interior Castle. The latter two, but especially the Castle, offer philosophical suggestions about the soul’s passions, activities, faculties, and ground. Their principal motive is to teach the reader how to progress, by successive surrender, toward the divine Trinity dwelling at the soul’s center. M.D.J. term.RELATION, RUSSELL, SYLLOGISM. term, major.SYLLOGISM. temperance term, major 907   907 term, minor.SYLLOGISM. term, observation.PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE. term, transcendental.TRANSCENDENTALS. terminist logic, a school of logic originating in twelfth-century Europe and dominant in the universities until its demise in the humanistic reforms. Its chief goal was the elucidation of the logical form (the “exposition”) of propositions advanced in the context of Scholastic disputation. Its central theory concerned the properties of terms, especially supposition, and did the work of modern quantification theory. Important logicians in the school include Peter of Spain, Willi Sherwood, Walter Burley, Willi Heytesbury, and Paul of Venice.  BURLEY, HEYTESBURY, PAUL OF VENICE, PETER OF SPAIN, SHERWOOD. J.Lo. terminus ad quem.TERMINUS A QUO.

 terminus a quo (Latin, ‘term from which’), the starting point of some process. The terminus ad quem is the ending point. For exple, change is a process that begins from some state (the terminus a quo) and proceeds to some state at which it ends (the terminus ad quem). In particular, in the ripening of an apple, the green apple is the terminus a quo and the red apple is the terminus ad quem. A.P.M. tertiary qualities.QUALITIES. Tertullian (A.D. c.155–c.240), Latin theologian, an early father of the Christian church. A layman from Carthage, he laid the conceptual and linguistic basis for the doctrine of the Trinity. Though appearing hostile to philosophy (“What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”) and to rationality (“It is certain because it is impossible”), Tertullian was steeped in Stoicism. He denounced all eclecticism not governed by the normative tradition of Christian doctrine, yet commonly used philosophical argument and Stoic concepts (e.g., the corporeality of God and the soul). Despite insisting on the sole authority of the New Testent apostles, he joined with Montanism, which taught that the Holy Spirit was still inspiring prophecy concerning moral discipline. Reflecting this interest in the Spirit, Tertullian pondered the distinctions (to which he gave the neologism trinitas) within God. God is one “substance” but three “persons”: a plurality without division. The Father, Son, and Spirit are distinct, but share equally in the one Godhead. This threeness is manifest only in the “economy” of God’s temporal action toward the world; later orthodoxy (e.g. Athanasius, Basil the Great, Augustine), would postulate a Triunity that is eternal and “immanent,” i.e., internal to God’s being. 

MONTANISM, STOICISM, TRINITARIANISM. A.E.L. testability, in the sciences, capacity of a theory to undergo experimental testing. Theories in the natural sciences are regularly subjected to experimental tests involving detailed and rigorous control of variable factors. Not naive observation of the workings of nature, but disciplined, designed intervention in such workings, is the hallmark of testability. Logically regarded, testing takes the form of seeking confirmation of theories by obtaining positive test results. We can represent a theory as a conjunction of a hypothesis and a statement of initial conditions, (H • A). This conjunction deductively entails testable or observational consequences O. Hence, (H • A) P O. If O obtains, (H • A) is said to be confirmed, or rendered probable. But such confirmation is not decisive; O may be entailed by, and hence explained by, many other theories. For this reason, Popper insisted that the testability of theories should seek disconfirmations or falsifications. The logical schema (H • A) P O not-O not-(H • A) is deductively valid, hence apparently decisive. On this view, science progresses, not by finding the truth, but by discarding the false. Testability becomes falsifiability. This deductive schema (modus tollens) is also employed in the analysis of crucial tests. Consider two hypotheses H1 and H2, both introduced to explain some phenomenon. H1 predicts that for some test condition C, we have the test result ‘if C then e1’, and H2, the result ‘if C then e2’, where e1 and e2 are logically incompatible. If experiment falsifies ‘if C then e1’ (e1 does not actually occur as a test result), the hypothesis H1 is false, which implies that H2 is true. It was originally supposed that the experiments of J. B. L. Foucault constituted a decisive falsification of the corpuscular theory of the nature of light, and thus provided a decisive establishment of the truth of its rival, the wave theory of light. This account of crucial experiments neglects certain points in logic and also the role of auxiliary hypotheses in science. As Duhem pointed term, minor testability 908   908 out, rarely, if ever, does a hypothesis face the facts in isolation from other supporting assumptions. Furthermore, it is a fact of logic that the falsification of a conjunction of a hypothesis and its auxiliary assumptions and initial conditions (not-(H • A)) is logically equivalent to (not-H or not-A), and the test result itself provides no warrant for choosing which alternative to reject. Duhem further suggested that rejection of any component part of a complex theory is based on extra-evidential considerations (factors like simplicity and fruitfulness) and cannot be forced by negative test results. Acceptance of Duhem’s view led Quine to suggest that a theory must face the tribunal of experience en bloc; no single hypothesis can be tested in isolation. Original conceptions of testability and falsifiability construed scientific method as hypothetico-deductive. Difficulties with these reconstructions of the logic of experiment have led philosophers of science to favor an explication of empirical support based on the logic of probability.  CRUCIAL EXPERIMENT, DUHEM, HYPOTHETICO-DEDUCTIVE METHOD, PROBABILITY. R.E.B.

testimony, an act of telling, including all assertions apparently intended to impart information, regardless of social setting. In an extended sense personal letters and messages, books, and other published material purporting to contain factual information also constitute testimony. Testimony may be sincere or insincere, and may express knowledge or baseless prejudice. When it expresses knowledge, and it is rightly believed, this knowledge is disseminated to its recipients, near or remote. Secondhand knowledge can be passed on further, producing long chains of testimony; but these chains always begin with the report of an eyewitness or expert. In any social group with a common language there is potential for the sharing, through testimony, of the fruits of individuals’ idiosyncratic acquisition of knowledge through perception and inference. In advanced societies specialization in the gathering and production of knowledge and its wider dissemination through spoken and written testimony is a fundental socioepistemic fact, and a very large part of each person’s body of knowledge and belief stems from testimony. Thus the question when a person may properly believe what another tells her, and what grounds her epistemic entitlement to do so, is a crucial one in epistemology. Reductionists about testimony insist that this entitlement must derive from our entitlement to believe what we perceive to be so, and to draw inferences from this according to filiar general principles. (See e.g., Hume’s classic discussion, in his Enquiry into Human Understanding, section X.) On this view, I can perceive that someone has told me that p, but can thereby come to know that p only by means of an inference – one that goes via additional, empirically grounded knowledge of the trustworthiness of that person. Anti-reductionists insist, by contrast, that there is a general entitlement to believe what one is told just as such – defeated by knowledge of one’s informant’s lack of trustworthiness (her mendacity or incompetence), but not needing to be bolstered positively by empirically based knowledge of her trustworthiness. Anti-reductionists thus see testimony as an autonomous source of knowledge on a par with perception, inference, and memory. One argument adduced for anti-reductionism is transcendental: We have many beliefs acquired from testimony, and these beliefs are knowledge; their status as knowledge cannot be accounted for in the way required by the reductionist – that is, the reliability of testimony cannot be independently confirmed; therefore the reductionist’s insistence on this is mistaken. However, while it is perhaps true that the reliability of all the beliefs one has that depend on past testimony cannot be simultaneously confirmed, one can certainly sometimes ascertain, without circularity, that a specific assertion by a particular person is likely to be correct – if, e.g.,one’s own experience has established that that person has a good track record of reliability about that kind of thing.  EPISTEMOLOGY, HUME, INFERENTIAL KNOWLEDGE. E.F. Tetens, Johann Nicolas (1736–1807), German philosopher and psychologist, sometimes called the German Locke. After his studies in Rostock and Copenhagen, he taught at Bützow and Kiel (until 1789). He had a second successful career as a public servant in Denmark (1790–1807) that did not leave him time for philosophical work. Tetens was one of the most important German philosophers between Wolff and Kant. Like Kant, whom he significantly influenced, Tetens attempted to find a middle way between empiricism and rationalism. His most important work, the Philosophische Versuche über die menschliche Natur und ihre Entwicklung (“Philosophical Essays on Human Nature and its Development,” 1777), is indicative of the state of philosophical discustestimony Tetens, Johann Nicolas 909   909 sion in Germany before Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Tetens, who followed the “psychological method” of Locke, tended toward a naturalism, like that of Hume. However, Tetens made a more radical distinction between reason and sensation than Hume allowed and attempted to show how basic rational principles guarantee the objectivity of human knowledge. M.K. Tetractys.

PYTHAGORAS. Thales of Miletus (fl. c.585 B.C.), Greek philosopher who was regarded as one of the Seven Sages of Greece. He was also considered the first philosopher, founder of the Milesians. Thales is also reputed to have been an engineer, astronomer, mathematician, and statesman. His doctrines even early Greek sources know only by hearsay: he said that water is the arche, and that the earth floats on water like a raft. The magnet has a soul, and all things are full of the gods. Thales’ attempt to explain natural phenomena in natural rather than exclusively supernatural terms bore fruit in his follower Anaximander.  PRE-SOCRATICS. D.W.G. thema (plural: themata), in Stoic logic, a ground rule used to reduce argument forms to basic forms. The Stoics analyzed arguments by their form (schema, or tropos). They represented forms using numbers to represent claims; for exple, ‘if the first, the second; but the first; therefore the second’. Some forms were undemonstrable; others were reduced to the undemonstrable argument forms by ground rules (themata); e.g., if R follows from P & Q, -Q follows from P & -R. The five undemonstrable arguments are: (1) modus ponens; (2) modus tollens; (3) not both (P and Q), P, so not-Q; (4) P or Q but not both, P, so not-Q; and (5) disjunctive syllogism. The evidence about the four ground rules is incomplete, but a sound and consistent system for propositional logic can be developed that is consistent with the evidence we have. (See Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers, 776–81, for an introduction to the Stoic theory of arguments; other evidence is more scattered.)

 DOXOGRAPHERS, FORMAL LOGIC, LOGICAL FORM, STOICISM. H.A.I. Themistius.COMMENTARIES ON ARISTOTLE. theodicy (from Greek theos, ‘God’, and dike, ‘justice’), a defense of the justice or goodness of God in the face of doubts or objections arising from the phenomena of evil in the world (‘evil’ refers here to bad states of affairs of any sort). Many types of theodicy have been proposed and vigorously debated; only a few can be sketched here. (1) It has been argued that evils are logically necessary for greater goods (e.g., hardships for the full exemplification of certain virtues), so that even an omnipotent being (roughly, one whose power has no logically contingent limits) would have a morally sufficient reason to cause or permit the evils in order to obtain the goods. Leibniz, in his Theodicy (1710), proposed a particularly comprehensive theodicy of this type. On his view, God had adequate reason to bring into existence the actual world, despite all its evils, because it is the best of all possible worlds, and all actual evils are essential ingredients in it, so that omitting any of them would spoil the design of the whole. Aside from issues about whether actual evils are in fact necessary for greater goods, this approach faces the question whether it assumes wrongly that the end justifies the means. (2) An important type of theodicy traces some or all evils to sinful free actions of humans or other beings (such as angels) created by God. Proponents of this approach assume that free action in creatures is of great value and is logically incompatible with divine causal control of the creatures’ actions. It follows that God’s not intervening to prevent sins is necessary, though the sins themselves are not, to the good of created freedom. This is proposed as a morally sufficient reason for God’s not preventing them. It is a major task for this type of theodicy to explain why God would permit those evils that are not themselves free choices of creatures but are at most consequences of such choices. (3) Another type of theodicy, both ancient and currently influential ong theologians, though less congenial to orthodox traditions in the major theistic religions, proposes to defend God’s goodness by abandoning the doctrine that God is omnipotent. On this view, God is causally, rather than logically, unable to prevent many evils while pursuing sufficiently great goods. A principal sponsor of this approach at present is the movement known as process theology, inspired by Whitehead; it depends on a complex metaphysical theory about the nature of causal relationships. (4) Other theodicies focus more on outcomes than on origins. Some religious beliefs suggest that God will turn out to have been very good to created persons by virtue of gifts (especially religious gifts, such as communion with God as supreme Good) that may be bestowed in a life Tetractys theodicy 910   910 after death or in religious experience in the present life. This approach may be combined with one of the other types of theodicy, or adopted by people who think that God’s reasons for permitting evils are beyond our finding out. 

DIVINE ATTRIBUTES, FREE WILL PROBLEM, PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION, PROCESS THEOLOGY. R.M.A. Theodorus.CYRENAICS. theologia naturalis (Latin, ‘natural theology’), theology that uses the methods of investigation and standards of rationality of any other area of philosophy. Traditionally, the central problems of natural theology are proofs for the existence of God and the problem of evil. In contrast with natural theology, supernatural theology uses methods that are supposedly revealed by God and accepts as fact beliefs that are similarly outside the realm of rational acceptability. Relying on a prophet or a pope to settle factual questions would be acceptable to supernatural, but not to natural, theology. Nothing prevents a natural theologian from analyzing concepts that can be used sanguinely by supernatural theologians, e.g., revelation, miracles, infallibility, and the doctrine of the Trinity. Theologians often work in both areas, as did, e.g., Anselm and Aquinas. For his brilliant critiques of traditional theology, Hume deserves the title of “natural anti-theologian.” 

PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. A.P.M. theological creationism.PREEXISTENCE. theological naturalism, the attempt to develop a naturalistic conception of God. As a philosophical position, naturalism holds (1) that the only reliable methods of knowing what there is are methods continuous with those of the developed sciences, and (2) that the application of those methods supports the view that the constituents of reality are either physical or are causally dependent on physical things and their modifications. Since supernaturalism affirms that God is purely spiritual and causally independent of physical things, naturalists hold that either belief in God must be abandoned as rationally unsupported or the concept of God must be reconstituted consistently with naturalism. Earlier attempts to do the latter include the work of Feuerbach and Comte. In twentieth-century erican naturalism the most significant attempts to develop a naturalistic conception of God are due to Dewey and Henry Nelson Wieman (1884–1975). In A Common Faith Dewey proposed a view of God as the unity of ideal ends resulting from human imagination, ends arousing us to desire and action. Supernaturalism, he argued, was the product of a primitive need to convert the objects of desire, the greatest ideals, into an already existing reality. In contrast to Dewey, Wieman insisted on viewing God as a process in the natural world that leads to the best that humans can achieve if they but submit to its working in their lives. In his earlier work he viewed God as a cosmic process that not only works for human good but is what actually produced human life. Later he identified God with creative interchange, a process that occurs only within already existing human communities. While Wieman’s God is not a human creation, as are Dewey’s ideal ends, it is difficult to see how love and devotion are appropriate to a natural process that works as it does without thought or purpose. Thus, while Dewey’s God (ideal ends) lacks creative power but may well qualify as an object of love and devotion, Wieman’s God (a process in nature) is capable of creative power but, while worthy of our care and attention, does not seem to qualify as an object of love and devotion. Neither view, then, satisfies the two fundental features associated with the traditional idea of God: possessing creative power and being an appropriate object of supreme love and devotion. 

theoretical reason, in its traditional sense, a faculty or capacity whose province is theoretical knowledge or inquiry; more broadly, the faculty concerned with ascertaining truth of any kind (also sometimes called speculative reason). In Book 6 of his Metaphysics, Aristotle identifies mathematics, physics, and theology as the subject matter of theoretical reason. Theoretical reason is traditionally distinguished from practical reason, a faculty exercised in determining guides to good conduct and in deliberating about proper courses of action. Aristotle contrasts it, as well, with productive reason, which is concerned with “making”: shipbuilding, sculpting, healing, and the like. Kant distinguishes theoretical reason not only from practical reason but also (sometimes) from the faculty of understanding, in which the categories originate. Theoretical reason, possessed of its own a priori concepts (“ideas of reason”), regulates the activities of the understanding. It presupposes a systematic unity in nature, sets the goal for scientific inquiry, and determines the “criterion of empirical truth” (Critique of Pure Reason). Theoretical reason, on Kant’s conception, seeks an explanatory “completeness” and an “unconditionedness” of being that transcend what is possible in experience. Reason, as a faculty or capacity, may be regarded as a hybrid composed of theoretical and practical reason (broadly construed) or as a unity having both theoretical and practical functions. Some commentators take Aristotle to embrace the former conception and Kant the latter. Reason is contrasted sometimes with experience, sometimes with emotion and desire, sometimes with faith. Its presence in human beings has often been regarded as constituting the primary difference between human and non-human animals; and reason is sometimes represented as a divine element in human nature. Socrates, in Plato’s Philebus, portrays reason as “the king of heaven and earth.” Hobbes, in his Leviathan, paints a more sobering picture, contending that reason, “when we reckon it ong the faculties of the mind, . . . is nothing but reckoning – that is, adding and subtracting – of the consequences of general nes agreed upon for the marking and signifying of our thoughts.” 

PRACTICAL REASON, RATIONALITY. A.R.M. theoretical reasoning.PRACTICAL REASONING. theoretical term, a term occurring in a scientific theory that purports to make reference to an unobservable entity (e.g., ‘electron’), property (e.g., ‘the monatomicity of a molecule’), or relation (‘greater electrical resistance’). The qualification ‘purports to’ is required because instrumentalists deny that any such unobservables exist; nevertheless, they acknowledge that a scientific theory, such as the atomic theory of matter, may be a useful tool for organizing our knowledge of observables and predicting future experiences. Scientific realists, in contrast, maintain that at least some of the theoretical terms (e.g., ‘quark’ or ‘neutrino’) actually denote entities that are not directly observable – they hold, i.e., that such things exist. For either group, theoretical terms are contrasted with such observational terms as ‘rope’, ‘smooth’, and ‘louder than’, which refer to observable entities, properties, or relations. Much philosophical controversy has centered on how to draw the distinction between the observable and the unobservable. Did Galileo observe the moons of Jupiter with his telescope? Do we observe bacteria under a microscope? Do physicists observe electrons in bubble chbers? Do astronomers observe the supernova explosions with neutrino counters? Do we observe ordinary material objects, or are sense-data the only observables? Are there any observational terms at all, or are all terms theory-laden? Another important meaning of ‘theoretical term’ occurs if one regards a scientific theory as a semiformal axiomatic system. It is then natural to think of its vocabulary as divided into three parts, (i) terms of logic and mathematics, (ii) terms drawn from ordinary language or from other theories, and (iii) theoretical terms that constitute the special vocabulary of that particular theory. Thermodynics, e.g., employs (i) terms for numbers and mathematical operations, (ii) such terms as ‘pressure’ and ‘volume’ that are common to many branches of physics, and (iii) such special thermodynical terms as ‘temperature’, ‘heat’, and ‘entropy’. In this second sense, a theoretical term need not even purport to refer to unobservables. For exple, although special equipment is necessary for its precise quantitatheoretical entity theoretical term 912   912 tive measurement, temperature is an observable property. Even if theories are not regarded as axiomatic systems, their technical terms can be considered theoretical. Such terms need not purport to refer to unobservables, nor be the exclusive property of one particular theory. In some cases, e.g., ‘work’ in physics, an ordinary word is used in the theory with a meaning that departs significantly from its ordinary use. Serious questions have been raised about the meaning of theoretical terms. Some philosophers have insisted that, to be meaningful, they must be given operational definitions. Others have appealed to coordinative definitions to secure at least partial interpretation of axiomatic theories. The verifiability criterion has been invoked to secure the meaningfulness of scientific theories containing such terms. A theoretical concept (or construct) is a concept expressed by a theoretical term in any of the foregoing senses. The term ‘theoretical entity’ has often been used to refer to unobservables, but this usage is confusing, in part because, without introducing any special vocabulary, we can talk about objects too small to be perceived directly – e.g., spheres of gboge (a yellow resin) less than 10–6 meters in dieter, which figured in a historically important experiment by Jean Perrin. 

theory-laden, dependent on theory; specifically, involving a theoretical interpretation of what is perceived or recorded. In the heyday of logical empiricism it was thought, by Carnap and others, that a rigid distinction could be drawn between observational and theoretical terms. Later, N. R. Hanson, Paul Feyerabend, and others questioned this distinction, arguing that perhaps all observations are theory-laden either because our perception of the world is colored by perceptual, linguistic, and cultural differences or because no attempt to distinguish sharply between observation and theory has been successful. This shift brings a host of philosophical problems. If we accept the idea of radical theoryladenness, relativism of theory choice becomes possible, for, given rival theories each of which conditions its own observational evidence, the choice between them would seem to have to be made on extra-evidential grounds, since no theory-neutral observations are available. In its most perplexing form, relativism holds that, theory-ladenness being granted, one theory is as good as any other, so far as the relationship of theory to evidence is concerned. Relativists couple the thesis of theory-ladenness with the alleged fact of the underdetermination of a theory by its observational evidence, which yields the idea that any number of alternative theories can be supported by the se evidence. The question becomes one of what it is that constrains choices between theories. If theory-laden observations cannot constrain such choices, the individual subjective preferences of scientists, or rules of fraternal behavior agreed upon by groups of scientists, become the operative constraints. The logic of confirmation seems to be intrinsically continated by both idiosyncratic and social factors, posing a threat to the very idea of scientific rationality. 

 theory of appearing, the theory that to perceive an object is simply for that object to appear (present itself) to one as being a certain way, e.g., looking round or like a rock, smelling vinegary, sounding raucous, or tasting bitter. Nearly everyone would accept this formulation on some interpretation. But the theory takes this to be a rock-bottom characterization of perception, and not further analyzable. It takes “appearing to subject S as so-and-so” as a basic, irreducible relation, one readily identifiable in experience but not subject to definition in other terms. The theory preserves the idea that in normal perception we are directly aware of objects in the physical environment, not aware of them through non-physical sense-data, sensory impressions, or other intermediaries. When a tree looks to me a certain way, it is the tree and nothing else of which I  directly aware. That involves “having” a sensory experience, but that experience just consists of the tree’s looking a certain way to me. After enjoying a certain currency early in this century the theory was largely abandoned under the impact of criticisms by Price, Broad, and Chisholm. The most widely advertised difficulty theoretical underdetermination theory of appearing 913   913 is this. What is it that appears to the subject in completely hallucinatory experience? Perhaps the greatest strength of the theory is its fidelity to what perceptual experience seems to be. 

theory of descriptions, an analysis, initially developed by Peano and Russell, of sentences containing descriptions. Descriptions include indefinite descriptions such as ‘an elephant’ and definite descriptions such as ‘the positive square root of four’. On Russell’s analysis, descriptions are “incomplete symbols” that are meaningful only in the context of other symbols, i.e., only in the context of the sentences containing them. Although the words ‘the first president of the United States’ appear to constitute a singular term that picks out a particular individual, much as the ne ‘George Washington’ does, Russell held that descriptions are not referring expressions, and that they are “analyzed out” in a proper specification of the logical form of the sentences in which they occur. The grmatical form of ‘The first president of the United States is tall’ is simply misleading as to its logical form. According to Russell’s analysis of indefinite descriptions, the sentence ‘I saw a man’ asserts that there is at least one thing that is a man, and I saw that thing – symbolically, (Ex) (Mx & Sx). The role of the apparent singular term ‘a man’ is taken over by the existential quantifier ‘(Ex)’ and the variables it binds, and the apparent singular term disappears on analysis. A sentence containing a definite description, such as ‘The present king of France is bald’, is taken to make three claims: that at least one thing is a present king of France, that at most one thing is a present king of France, and that that thing is bald – symbolically, (Ex) {[Fx & (y) (Fy / y % x)] & Bx}. Again, the apparent referring expression ‘the present king of France’ is analyzed away, with its role carried out by the quantifiers and variables in the symbolic representation of the logical form of the sentence in which it occurs. No element in that representation is a singular referring expression. Russell held that this analysis solves at least three difficult puzzles posed by descriptions. The first is how it could be true that George IV wished to know whether Scott was the author of Waverly, but false that George IV wished to know whether Scott was Scott. Since Scott is the author of Waverly, we should apparently be able to substitute ‘Scott’ for ‘the author of Waverly’ and infer the second sentence from the first, but we cannot. On Russell’s analysis, ‘George IV wished to know whether Scott was the author of Waverly’ does not, when properly understood, contain an expression ‘the author of Waverly’ for which the ne ‘Scott’ can be substituted. The second puzzle concerns the law of excluded middle, which rules that either ‘The present king of France is bald’ or ‘The present king of France is not bald’ must be true; the problem is that neither the list of bald men nor that of non-bald men contains an entry for the present king of France. Russell’s solution is that ‘The present king of France is not bald’ is indeed true if it is understood as ‘It is not the case that there is exactly one thing that is now King of France and is bald’, i.e., as -(Ex) {Fx & (y) {[Fy / y % x)] & Bx}. The final puzzle is how ‘There is no present king of France’ or ‘The present king of France does not exist’ can be true – if ‘the present king of France’ is a referring expression that picks out something, how can we truly deny that that thing exists? Since descriptions are not referring expressions on Russell’s theory, it is easy for him to show that the negation of the claim that there is at least and at most (i.e., exactly) one present king of France, -(Ex) [Fx & (y) (Fy / y % x)], is true. Strawson offered the first real challenge to Russell’s theory, arguing that ‘The present king of France is bald’ does not entail but instead presupposes ‘There is a present king of France’, so that the former is not falsified by the falsity of the latter, but is instead deprived of a truth-value. Strawson argued for the natural view that definite descriptions are indeed referring expressions, used to single something out for predication. More recently, Keith Donnellan argued that both Russell and Strawson ignored the fact that definite descriptions have two uses. Used attributively, a definite description is intended to say something about whatever it is true of, and when a sentence is so used it conforms to Russell’s analysis. Used referentially, a definite description is intended to single something out, but may not correctly describe it. For exple, seeing an inebriated man in a policeman’s uniform, one might say, “The cop on the corner is drunk!” Donnellan would say that even if the person were a drunken actor dressed as a policeman, the speaker would have referred to him and truly said of him that he was drunk. If it is for some reason crucial that the description be correct, as it might be if one said, “The cop on the corner has the authority to issue speeding tickets,” the use is attributive; and because ‘the cop on the corner’ does not describe anyone correctly, no one has been said to have the authority to issue speeding tickets. Donnellan criticized Russell for overlooking referential uses of theory of descriptions theory of descriptions 914   914 descriptions, and Strawson for both failing to acknowledge attributive uses and maintaining that with referential uses one can refer to something with a definite description only if the description is true of it. Discussion of Strawson’s and Donnellan’s criticisms is ongoing, and has provoked very useful work in both semantics and speech act theory, and on the distinctions between semantics and pragmatics and between semantic reference and speaker’s reference, ong others. 

CAUSAL THEORY OF PROPER NES, PRESUPPOSITION, RUSSELL. R.B. theory of effluxes.DEMOCRITUS. theory of Forms.PLATO. theory of frequency.PROBABILITY. theory of relativity.RELATIVITY. theory of signs, the philosophical and scientific theory of information-carrying entities, communication, and information transmission. The term ‘semiotic’ was introduced by Locke for the science of signs and signification. The term bece more widely used as a result of the influential work of Peirce and Charles Morris. With regard to linguistic signs, three areas of semiotic were distinguished: pragmatics – the study of the way people, animals, or machines such as computers use signs; semantics – the study of the relations between signs and their meanings, abstracting from their use; and syntax – the study of the relations ong signs themselves, abstracting both from use and from meaning. In Europe, the near-equivalent term ‘semiology’ was introduced by Ferdinand de Saussure, the Swiss linguist. Broadly, a sign is any information-carrying entity, including linguistic and animal signaling tokens, maps, road signs, diagrs, pictures, models, etc. Exples include smoke as a sign of fire, and a red light at a highway intersection as a sign to stop. Linguistically, vocal aspects of speech such as prosodic features (intonation, stress) and paralinguistic features (loudness and tone, gestures, facial expressions, etc.), as well as words and sentences, are signs in the most general sense. Peirce defined a sign as “something that stands for something in some respect or capacity.” ong signs, he distinguished symbols, icons, and indices. A symbol, or conventional sign, is a sign, typical of natural language forms, that lacks any significant relevant physical correspondence with or resemblance to the entities to which the form refers (manifested by the fact that quite different forms may refer to the se class of objects), and for which there is no correlation between the occurrence of the sign and its referent. An index, or natural sign, is a sign whose occurrence is causally or statistically correlated with occurrences of its referent, and whose production is not intentional. Thus, yawning is a natural sign of sleepiness; a bird call may be a natural sign of alarm. Linguistically, loudness with a rising pitch is a sign of anger. An icon is a sign whose form corresponds to or resembles its referent or a characteristic of its referent. For instance, a tailor’s swatch is an icon by being a sign that resembles a fabric in color, pattern, and texture. A linguistic exple is onomatopoeia – as with ‘buzz’. In general, there are conventional and cultural aspects to a sign being an icon. 

GRMAR, MEANING, PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE, SEMIOSIS. W.K.W. theory of types.TYPE THEORY. theory theory.SIMULATION THEORY. theosophy, any philosophical mysticism, especially those that purport to be mathematically or scientifically based, such as Pythagoreanism, Neoplatonism, or gnosticism. Vedic Hinduism, and certain aspects of Buddhism, Taoism, and Islic Sufism, can also be considered theosophical. In narrower senses, ‘theosophy’ may refer to the philosophy of Swedenborg, Steiner, or Made Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–91). Swedenborg’s theosophy originally consisted of a rationalistic cosmology, inspired by certain elements of Cartesian and Leibnizian philosophy, and a Christian mysticism. Swedenborg labored to explain the interconnections between soul and body. Steiner’s theosophy is a reaction to standard scientific theory. It purports to be as rigorous as ordinary science, but superior to it by incorporating spiritual truths about reality. According to his theosophy, reality is organic and evolving by its own resource. Genuine knowledge is intuitive, not discursive. Made Blavatsky founded the Theosophical Society in 1875. Her views were eclectic, but were strongly influenced by mystical elements of Indian philosophy.  MYSTICISM, STEINER, SWEDENBORGIANISM. A.P.M. theory of effluxes theosophy 915   915 Theravada Buddhism.BUDDHISM. thermodynics, first law of.ENTROPY. thermodynics, second law of.ENTROPY. thesis.HEGEL. theurgy.NEOPLATONISM. thing.METAPHYSICS. thing-in-itself.KANT. Third Man argument.PLATO. thirdness.PEIRCE. thisness.HAECCEITY. Thomas Aquinas.AQUINAS.

Thomism, the theology and philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. The term is applied broadly to various thinkers from different periods who were heavily influenced by Aquinas’s thought in their own philosophizing and theologizing. Here three different eras and three different groups of thinkers will be distinguished: those who supported Aquinas’s thought in the fifty years or so following his death in 1274; certain highly skilled interpreters and commentators who flourished during the period of “Second Thomism” (sixteenth–seventeenth centuries); and various late nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers who have been deeply influenced in their own work by Aquinas. Thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Thomism. Although Aquinas’s genius was recognized by many during his own lifetime, a number of his views were immediately contested by other Scholastic thinkers. Controversies ranged, e.g., over his defense of only one substantial form in human beings; his claim that prime matter is purely potential and cannot, therefore, be kept in existence without some substantial form, even by divine power; his emphasis on the role of the human intellect in the act of choice; his espousal of a real distinction betweeen the soul and its powers; and his defense of some kind of objective or “real” rather than a merely mind-dependent composition of essence and act of existing (esse) in creatures. Some of Aquinas’s positions were included directly or indirectly in the 219 propositions condemned by Bishop Stephen Tempier of Paris in 1277, and his defense of one single substantial form in man was condemned by Archbishop Robert Kilwardby at Oxford in 1277, with renewed prohibitions by his successor as archbishop of Canterbury, John Peckh, in 1284 and 1286. Only after Aquinas’s canonization in 1323 were the Paris prohibitions revoked insofar as they touched on his teaching (in 1325). Even within his own Dominican order, disagreement about some of his views developed within the first decades after his death, notwithstanding the order’s highly sympathetic espousal of his cause. Early English Dominican defenders of his general views included Willi Hothum (d.1298), Richard Knapwell (d.c.1288), Robert Orford (b. after 1250, fl.1290–95), Thomas Sutton (d. c.1315?), and Willi Macclesfield (d.1303). French Dominican Thomists included Bernard of Trilia (d.1292), Giles of Lessines in present-day Belgium (d.c.1304?), John Quidort of Paris (d. 1306), Bernard of Auvergne (d. after 1307), Hervé Nédélec (d.1323), Armand of Bellevue (fl. 1316–34), and Willi Peter Godin (d.1336). The secular master at Paris, Peter of Auvergne (d. 1304), while remaining very independent in his own views, knew Aquinas’s thought well and completed some of his commentaries on Aristotle. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Thomism. Sometimes known as the period of Second Thomism, this revival gained impetus from the early fifteenth-century writer John Capreolus (1380–1444) in his Defenses of Thomas’s Theology (Defensiones theologiae Divi Thomae), a commentary on the Sentences. A number of fifteenth-century Dominican and secular teachers in German universities also contributed: Kaspar Grunwald (Freiburg); Cornelius Sneek and John Stoppe (in Rostock); Leonard of Brixental (Vienna); Gerard of Heerenberg, Lbert of Heerenberg, and John Versor (all at Cologne); Gerhard of Elten; and in Belgium Denis the Carthusian. Outstanding ong various sixteenth-century commentators on Thomas were Tommaso de Vio (Cardinal) Cajetan, Francis Sylvester of Ferrara, Francisco de Vitoria (Salanca), and Francisco’s disciples Domingo de Soto and Melchior Cano. Most important ong early seventeenth-century Thomists was John of St. Thomas, who lectured at Piacenza, Madrid, and Alcalá, and is best known for his Cursus philosophicus and his Cursus theologicus. Theravada Buddhism Thomism 916   916 The nineteenth- and twentieth-century revival. By the early to mid-nineteenth century the study of Aquinas had been largely abandoned outside Dominican circles, and in most Roman Catholic colleges and seminaries a kind of Cartesian and Suarezian Scholasticism was taught. Long before he bece Pope Leo XIII, Joachim Pecci and his brother Joseph had taken steps to introduce the teaching of Thomistic philosophy at the diocesan seminary at Perugia in 1846. Earlier efforts in this direction had been made by Vincenzo Buzzetti (1778–1824), by Buzzetti’s students Serafino and Domenico Sordi, and by Taparelli d’Aglezio, who bece director of the Collegio Romano (Gregorian University) in 1824. Leo’s encyclical Aeterni Patris(1879) marked an official effort on the part of the Roman Catholic church to foster the study of the philosophy and theology of Thomas Aquinas. The intent was to draw upon Aquinas’s original writings in order to prepare students of philosophy and theology to deal with problems raised by contemporary thought. The Leonine Commission was established to publish a critical edition of all of Aquinas’s writings; this effort continues today. Important centers of Thomistic studies developed, such as the Higher Institute of Philosophy at Louvain (founded by Cardinal Mercier), the Dominican School of Saulchoir in France, and the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto. Different groups of Roman, Belgian, and French Jesuits acknowledged a deep indebtedness to Aquinas for their personal philosophical reflections. There was also a concentration of effort in the United States at universities such as The Catholic University of erica, St. Louis University, Notre De, Fordh, Marquette, and Boston College, to mention but a few, and by the Dominicans at River Forest. A great weakness of many of the nineteenthand twentieth-century Latin manuals produced during this effort was a lack of historical sensitivity and expertise, which resulted in an unreal and highly abstract presentation of an “Aristotelian-Thomistic” philosophy. This weakness was largely offset by the development of solid historical research both in the thought of Aquinas and in medieval philosophy and theology in general, chpioned by scholars such as H. Denifle, M. De Wulf, M. Grabmann, P. Mandonnet, F. Van Steenberghen, E. Gilson and many of his students at Toronto, and by a host of more recent and contemporary scholars. Much of this historical work continues today both within and without Catholic scholarly circles. At the se time, remarkable diversity in interpreting Aquinas’s thought has emerged on the part of many twentieth-century scholars. Witness, e.g., the heavy influence of Cajetan and John of St. Thomas on the Thomism of Maritain; the much more historically grounded approaches developed in quite different ways by Gilson and F. Van Steenberghen; the emphasis on the metaphysics of participation in Aquinas in the very different presentations by L. Geiger and C. Fabro; the emphasis on existence (esse) promoted by Gilson and many others but resisted by still other interpreters; the movement known as Transcendental Thomism, originally inspired by P. Rousselot and by J. Marechal (in dialogue with Kant); and the long controversy about the appropriateness of describing Thomas’s philosophy (and that of other medievals) as a Christian philosophy. An increasing number of non-Catholic thinkers are currently directing considerable attention to Aquinas, and the varying backgrounds they bring to his texts will undoubtedly result in still other interesting interpretations and applications of his thought to contemporary concerns.  AQUINAS,

GILSON, JOHN OF SAINT THOMAS, MARITAIN, NEO-THOMISM. J.F.W. Thomson, Judith Jarvis (b.1929), erican analytic philosopher best known for her contribution to moral philosophy and for her paper “A Defense of Abortion” (1971). Thomson has taught at M.I.T. since 1964. Her work is centrally concerned with issues in moral philosophy, most notably questions regarding rights, and with issues in metaphysics such as the identity across time of people and the ontology of events. Her Acts and Other Events (1977) is a study of human action and provides an analysis of the part– whole relation ong events. “A Defense of Abortion” has not only influenced much later work on this topic but is one of the most widely discussed papers in contemporary philosophy. By appeal to imaginative scenarios analogous to pregnancy, Thomson argues that even if the fetus is assumed to be a person, its rights are in many circumstances outweighed by the rights of the pregnant woman. Thus the paper advances an argument for a right to abortion that does not turn upon the question of whether the fetus is a person. Several of Thomson’s essays, including “Preferential Hiring” (1973), “The Right to Privacy” (1975), and “Killing, Letting Die, and the Trolley Problem” (1976), address the questions of what constitutes Thomson, Judith Jarvis Thomson, Judith Jarvis 917   917 an infringement of rights and when it is morally permissible to infringe a right. These are collected in Rights, Restitution, and Risk: Essays in Moral Theory (1986). Thomson’s The Realm of Rights (1990) offers a systematic account of human rights, addressing first what it is to have a right and second which rights we have. Thomson’s work is distinguished by its exceptionally lucid style and its reliance on highly inventive exples. The centrality of exples to her work reflects a methodological conviction that our views about actual and imagined cases provide the data for moral theorizing.  ACTION THEORY, ETHICS, RIGHTS. A.E.B.

Thoreau, Henry David (1817–62), erican naturalist and writer. Born in Concord, Massachusetts, he attended Harvard (1833–37) and then returned to Concord to study nature and write, making a frugal living as a schoolteacher, land surveyor, and pencil maker. Commentators have emphasized three aspects of his life: his love and penetrating study of the flora and fauna of the Concord area, recorded with philosophical reflections in Walden (1854); his continuous pursuit of simplicity in the externals of life, thus avoiding a life of “quiet desperation”; and his acts of civil disobedience. The last item has been somewhat overemphasized; not paying a poll tax by way of protest was not original with Thoreau. However, his essay “Resistance to Civil Government” immortalized his protest and influenced people like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., in later years. Thoreau eventually helped runaway slaves at considerable risk; still, he considered himself a student of nature and not a reformer. 

TRANSCENDENTALISM. E.H.M. thought, language of.MEANING, MENTALESE, PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE. thought experiment, a technique for testing a hypothesis by imagining a situation and what would be said about it (or more rarely, happen in it). This technique is often used by philosophers to argue for (or against) a hypothesis about the meaning or applicability of a concept. For exple, Locke imagined a switch of minds between a prince and a cobbler as a way to argue that personal identity is based on continuity of memory, not continuity of the body. To argue for the relativity of simultaneity, Einstein imagined two observers – one on a train, the other beside it – who observed lightning bolts. And according to some scholars, Galileo only imagined the experiment of tying two five-pound weights together with a fine string in order to argue that heavier bodies do not fall faster. Thought experiments of this last type are rare because they can be used only when one is thoroughly filiar with the outcome of the imagined situation. J.A.K. Thrasymachus (fl. 427 B.C.), Greek Sophist from Bithynia who is known mainly as a character in Book I of Plato’s Republic. He traveled and taught extensively throughout the Greek world, and was well known in Athens as a teacher and as the author of treatises on rhetoric. Innovative in his style, he was credited with inventing the “middle style” of rhetoric. The only surviving fragment of a speech by Thrasymachus was written for delivery by an Athenian citizen in the assembly, at a time when Athens was not faring well in the Peloponnesian War; it shows him concerned with the efficiency of government, pleading with the Athenians to recognize their common interests and give up their factionalism. Our only other source for his views on political matters is Plato’s Republic, which most scholars accept as presenting at least a half-truth about Thrasymachus. There, Thrasymachus is represented as a foil to Socrates, claiming that justice is only what benefits the stronger, i.e., the rulers. From the point of view of those who are ruled, then, justice always serves the interest of someone else, and rulers who seek their own advantage are unjust. 

three-valued logic.MANY-VALUED LOGIC. Three Ways.BONAVENTURE. threshold, absolute.FECHNER. threshold, relative.FECHNER. t’i, yung, Chinese terms often rendered into English as ‘substance’ and ‘function’, respectively. Ch’eng Yi (1033–1107), in the preface to his Commentary to the Book of Changes, says: “Substance (t’i) and function (yung) come from the se source, and there is no gap between the manifest and the hidden.” Such thought is characteristic of the Chinese way of thinking. Chu Hsi (1130–1200) applied the pair of concepts to his theory of human nature; he maintained that jen (humanity) is nature, substance, while love is Thoreau, Henry David t’i, yung 918   918 feeling, function. In the late Ch’ing dynasty (1644–1912) Chang Chih-tung (1837–1909) advocated Chinese learning for t’i and Western learning for yung.  CHINESE PHILOSOPHY, CHU HSI. S.-h.L. t’ien, Chinese term meaning ‘heaven’, ‘sky’. T’ien has a range of uses running from the most to the least anthropomorphic. At one extreme, t’ien is identified with shang ti. T’ien can be spoken of as having desires and engaging in purposive actions, such as bestowing the Mandate of Heaven (t’ien ming). T’ien ming has a political and an ethical use. It can be the mandate to rule given to a virtuous individual. It can also be the moral requirements that apply to each individual, especially as these are embodied in one’s nature. At the other extreme, thinkers such as Hsün-Tzu identify t’ien with the natural order. Even in texts where t’ien is sometimes used anthropomorphically, it can also be used as synonymous with ming (in the sense of fate), or simply refer to the sky. After the introduction of Buddhism into China, the phrase ‘Hall of Heaven’ (t’ien t’ang) is used to refer to the paradise awaiting some souls after death.

 CHUNG-YUNG, HSING, MING, SHANG TI. B.W.V.N. t’ien-jen ho-i, Chinese term for the relationship between t’ien (Heaven) and human beings. Most ancient Chinese philosophers agreed on the ideal t’ien-jen ho-i: the unity and harmony of Heaven or the natural order of events and human affairs. They differed on the means of achieving this ideal vision. The Taoists, Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu, focused on adaptability to all natural occurrences without human intervention. The Confucians stressed the cultivation of virtues such as jen (benevolence), i (rightness), and li (propriety), both in the rulers and the people. Some later Confucians, along with Mo Tzu, emphasized the mutual influence and response or interaction of Heaven and humans. Perhaps the most distinctive Confucian conception is Hsün Tzu’s thesis that Heaven provides resources for completion by human efforts. A.S.C. t’ien li, jen-yü, Chinese terms literally meaning ‘heavenly principles’ and ‘human desires’, respectively. Sung–Ming Neo-Confucian philosophers believed that Heaven enables us to understand principles and to act according to them. Therefore we must try our best to preserve heavenly principles and eliminate human desires. When hungry, one must eat; this is acting according to t’ien li. But when one craves gourmet food, the only thing one cares about is gratification of desire; this is jen-yü. Neo-Confucian philosophers were not teaching asceticism; they only urged us not to be slaves of our excessive, unnatural, artificial, “human” desires. 

 t’ien ming.MING. Tillers.HSü HSING. Tillich, Paul (1886–1965), German-born erican philosopher and theologian. Born in Starzeddel, eastern Germany, he was educated in philosophy and theology and ordained in the Prussian Evangelical Church in 1912. He served as an army chaplain during World War I and later taught at Berlin, Marburg, Dresden, Leipzig, and Frankfurt. In November 1933, following suspension from his teaching post by the Nazis, he emigrated to the United States, where he taught at Columbia and Union Theological Seminary until 1955, and then at Harvard and Chicago until his death. A popular preacher and speaker, he developed a wide audience in the United States through such writings as The Protestant Era (1948), Systematic Theology (three volumes: 1951, 1957, 1963), The Courage to Be (1952), and Dynics of Faith (1957). His sometimes unconventional lifestyle, as well as his syncretic yet original thought, moved “on the boundary” between theology and other elements of culture – especially art, literature, political thought, and depth psychology – in the belief that religion should relate to the whole extent, and the very depths, of human existence. Tillich’s thought, despite its distinctive “ontological” vocabulary, was greatly influenced by the voluntaristic tradition from Augustine through Schelling, Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. It was a systematic theology that sought to state fresh Christian answers to deep existential questions raised by individuals and cultures – his method of correlation. Every age has its distinctive kairos, “crisis” or “fullness of time,” the right time for creative thought and action. In Weimar Germany, Tillich found the times ripe for religious socialism. In post–World War II erica, he focused more on psychological themes: in the midst of anxiety over death, meaninglessness, and guilt, everyone seeks the courage to be, which comes only by avoiding the abyss of non-being (welling up in the demonic) and by placing one’s unconditional faith – ultit’ien Tillich, Paul 919   919 mate concern – not in any particular being (e.g. God) but in Being-Itself (“the God above God,” the ground of being). This is essentially the Protestant principle, which prohibits lodging ultimate concern in any finite and limited reality (including state, race, and religious institutions and symbols). Tillich was especially influential after World War II. He represented for many a welcome critical openness to the spiritual depths of modern culture, opposing both demonic idolatry of this world (as in National Socialism) and sectarian denial of cultural resources for faith (as in Barthian neo-orthodoxy). 

time, “a moving image of eternity” (Plato); “the number of movements in respect of the before and after” (Aristotle); “the Life of the Soul in movement as it passes from one stage of act or experience to another” (Plotinus); “a present of things past, memory, a present of things present, sight, and a present of things future, expectation” (Augustine). These definitions, like all attempts to encapsulate the essence of time in some neat formula, are unhelpfully circular because they employ temporal notions. Although time might be too basic to admit of definition, there still are many questions about time that philosophers have made some progress in answering by analysis both of how we ordinarily experience and talk about time, and of the deliverances of science, thereby clarifying and deepening our understanding of what time is. What follows gives a sple of some of the more important of these issues. Temporal becoming and the A- and B-theories of time. According to the B-theory, time consists in nothing but a fixed “B-series” of events running from earlier to later. The A-theory requires that these events also form an “A-series” going from the future through the present into the past and, moreover, shift in respect to these determinations. The latter sort of change, commonly referred to as “temporal becoming,” gives rise to well-known perplexities concerning both what does the shifting and the sort of shift involved. Often it is said that it is the present or now that shifts to ever-later times. This quickly leads to absurdity. ‘The present’ and ‘now’, like ‘this time’, are used to refer to a moment of time. Thus, to say that the present shifts to later times entails that this very moment of time – the present – will become some other moment of time and thus cease to be identical with itself! Sometimes the entity that shifts is the property of nowness or presentness. The problem is that every event has this property at some time, nely when it occurs. Thus, what must qualify some event as being now simpliciter is its having the property of nowness now; and this is the start of an infinite regress that is vicious because at each stage we are left with an unexpurgated use of ‘now’, the very term that was supposed to be analyzed in terms of the property of nowness. If events are to change from being future to present and from present to past, as is required by temporal becoming, they must do so in relation to some mysterious transcendent entity, since temporal relations between events and/or times cannot change. The nature of the shift is equally perplexing, for it must occur at a particular rate; but a rate of change involves a comparison between one kind of change and a change of time. Herein, it is change of time that is compared to change of time, resulting in the seeming tautology that time passes or shifts at the rate of one second per second, surely an absurdity since this is not a rate of change at all. Broad attempted to skirt these perplexities by saying that becoming is sui generis and thereby defies analysis, which puts him on the side of the mystically inclined Bergson who thought that it could be known only through an act of ineffable intuition. To escape the clutches of both perplexity and mysticism, as well as to satisfy the demand of science to view the world non-perspectivally, the B-theory attempted to reduce the A-series to the B-series via a linguistic reduction in which a temporal indexical proposition reporting an event as past, present, or future is shown to be identical with a non-indexical proposition reporting a relation of precedence or simultaneity between it and another event or time. It is generally conceded that such a reduction fails, since, in general, no indexical proposition is identical with any non-indexical one, this being due to the fact that one can have a propositional attitude toward one of them that is not had to the other; e.g., I can believe that it is now raining without believing that it rains (tenselessly) at t 7. The friends of becoming have drawn the wrong moral from this failure – that there is a mysterious Mr. X out there doing “The Shift.” They have overlooked the fact that two sentences can express different propositions and yet report one and the se event or state of affairs; e.g., ‘This time time 920   920 is water’ and ‘this is a collection of H2O molecules’, though differing in sense, report the se state of affairs – this being water is nothing but this being a collection of H2O molecules. It could be claimed that the se holds for the appropriate use of indexical and non-indexical sentences; the tokening at t 7 of ‘Georgie flies at this time (at present)’ is coreporting with the non-synonymous ‘Georgie flies (tenselessly) at t 7’, since Georgie’s flying at this time is the se event as Georgie’s flying at t 7, given that this time is t 7. This effects the se ontological reduction of the becoming of events to their bearing temporal relations to each other as does the linguistic reduction. The “coreporting reduction” also shows the absurdity of the “psychological reduction” according to which an event’s being present, etc., requires a relation to a perceiver, whereas an event’s having a temporal relation to another event or time does not require a relation to a perceiver. Given that Georgie’s flying at this time is identical with Georgie’s flying at t 7, it follows that one and the se event both does and does not have the property of requiring relation to a perceiver, thereby violating Leibniz’s law that identicals are indiscernible. Continuous versus discrete time. Assume that the instants of time are linearly ordered by the relation R of ‘earlier than’. To say that this order is continuous is, first, to imply the property of density or infinite divisibility: for any instants i 1 and i 2 such that Ri1i 2, there is a third instant i 3, such that Ri1i 3 and Ri3i 2. But continuity implies something more since density allows for “gaps” between the instants, as with the rational numbers. (Think of R as the ‘less than’ relation and the i n as rationals.) To rule out gaps and thereby assure genuine continuity it is necessary to require in addition to density that every convergent sequence of instants has a limit. To make this precise one needs a distance measure d( , ) on pairs of instants, where d(i m, i n) is interpreted as the lapse of time between i m and i n. The requirement of continuity proper is then that for any sequence i l , i 2, i 3, . . . , of instants, if d(i m i n) P 0 as m, n P C, there is a limit instant i ø such that d(i n, iø ) P 0 as n P C. The analogous property obviously fails for the rationals. But taking the completion of the rationals by adding in the limit points of convergent sequences yields the real number line, a genuine continuum. Numerous objections have been raised to the idea of time as a continuum and to the very notion of the continuum itself. Thus, it was objected that time cannot be composed of durationless instants since a stack of such instants cannot produce a non-zero duration. Modern measure theory resolves this objection. Leibniz held that a continuum cannot be composed of points since the points in any (finite closed) interval can be put in one-to-one correspondence with a smaller subinterval, contradicting the axiom that the whole is greater than any proper part. What Leibniz took to be a contradictory feature is now taken to be a defining feature of infinite collections or totalities. Modern-day Zenoians, while granting the viability of the mathematical doctrine of the continuum and even the usefulness of its employment in physical theory, will deny the possibility of its applying to real-life changes. Whitehead gave an analogue of Zeno’s paradox of the dichotomy to show that a thing cannot endure in a continuous manner. For if (i 1, i 2) is the interval over which the thing is supposed to endure, then the thing would first have to endure until the instant i 3, halfway between i 1 and i 2; but before it can endure until i 3, it must first endure until the instant i 4 halfway between i 1 and i 3, etc. The seductiveness of this paradox rests upon an implicit anthropomorphic demand that the operations of nature must be understood in terms of concepts of human agency. Herein it is the demand that the physicist’s description of a continuous change, such as a runner traversing a unit spatial distance by performing an infinity of runs of ever-decreasing distance, could be used as an action-guiding recipe for performing this feat, which, of course, is impossible since it does not specify any initial or final doing, as recipes that guide human actions must. But to make this anthropomorphic demand explicit renders this deployment of the dichotomy, as well as the arguments against the possibility of performing a “supertask,” dubious. Anti-realists might deny that we are committed to real-life change being continuous by our acceptance of a physical theory that employs principles of mathematical continuity, but this is quite different from the Zenoian claim that it is impossible for such change to be continuous. To maintain that time is discrete would require not only abandoning the continuum but also the density property as well. Giving up either conflicts with the intuition that time is one-dimensional. (For an explanation of how the topological analysis of dimensionality entails that the dimension of a discrete space is 0, see W. Hurewicz, Dimension Theory, 1941.) The philotime time 921   921 sophical and physics literatures contain speculations about a discrete time built of “chronons” or temporal atoms, but thus far such hypothetical entities have not been incorporated into a satisfactory theory. Absolute versus relative and relational time. In a scholium to the Principia, Newton declared that “Absolute, true and mathematical time, of itself and from its own nature, flows equably without relation to anything external.” There are at least five interrelated senses in which time was absolute for Newton. First, he thought that there was a fre-independent relation of simultaneity for events. Second, he thought that there was a fre-independent measure of duration for non-simultaneous events. He used ‘flows equably’ not to refer to the above sort of mysterious “temporal becoming,” but instead to connote the second sense of absoluteness and partly to indicate two further kinds of absoluteness. To appreciate the latter, note that ‘flows equably’ is modified by ‘without relation to anything external’. Here Newton was asserting (third sense of ‘absolute’) that the lapse of time between two events would be what it is even if the distribution and motions of material bodies were different. He was also presupposing a related form of absoluteness (fourth sense) according to which the metric of time is intrinsic to the temporal interval. Leibniz’s philosophy of time placed him in agreement with Newton as regards the first two senses of ‘absolute’, which assert the non-relative or fre-independent nature of time. However, Leibniz was very much opposed to Newton on the fourth sense of ‘absolute’. According to Leibniz’s relational conception of time, any talk about the length of a temporal interval must be unpacked in terms of talk about the relation of the interval to an extrinsic metric standard. Furthermore, Leibniz used his principles of sufficient reason and identity of indiscernibles to argue against a fifth sense of ‘absolute’, implicit in Newton’s philosophy of time, according to which time is a substratum in which physical events are situated. On the contrary, the relational view holds that time is nothing over and above the structure of relations of events. Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity have direct bearing on parts of these controversies. The special theory necessitates the abandonment of fre-independent notions of simultaneity and duration. For any pair of spacelike related events in Minkowski space-time there is an inertial fre in which the events are simultaneous, another fre in which the first event is temporally prior, and still a third in which the second event is temporally prior. And the temporal interval between two timelike related events depends on the worldline connecting them. In fact, for any e ( 0, no matter how small, there is a worldline connecting the events whose proper length is less than e. (This is the essence of the so-called twin paradox.) The general theory of relativity abandons the third sense of absoluteness since it entails that the metrical structure of space-time covaries with the distribution of mass-energy in a manner specified by Einstein’s field equations. But the heart of the absolute–relational controversy – as focused by the fourth and fifth senses of ‘absolute’ – is not settled by relativistic considerations. Indeed, opponents from both sides of the debate claim to find support for their positions in the special and general theories. 

time slice, a temporal part or stage of any concrete particular that exists for some interval of time; a three-dimensional cross section of a fourdimensional object. To think of an object as consisting of time slices or temporal stages is to think of it as related to time in much the way that it is related to space: as extending through time as well as space, rather than as enduring through it. Just as an object made up of spatial parts is thought of as a whole made up of parts that exist at different locations, so an object made up of time slices is thought of as a whole made up of parts or stages that exist at successive times; hence, just as a spatial whole is only partly present in any space that does not include all its spatial parts, so a whole made up of time slices is only partly present in any stretch of time that does not include all its temporal parts. A continuant, by contrast, is most commonly understood to be a particular that endures through time, i.e., that is wholly present at each moment at which it exists. To conceive of an object as a continuant is to conceive of it as related to time in a very different way from that in which it is related to space. A continuant does not extend through time as well as space; it does not exist at different times by virtue of the existence of successive parts of it at those times; it is the continuant itself that is wholly present at each such time. To conceive an object as a continuant, therefore, is to conceive it as not made time lag argument time slice 922   922 up of temporal stages, or time slices, at all. There is another, less common, use of ‘continuant’ in which a continuant is understood to be any particular that exists for some stretch of time, regardless of whether it is the whole of the particular or only some part of it that is present at each moment of the particular’s existence. According to this usage, an entity that is made up of time slices would be a kind of continuant rather than some other kind of particular. Philosophers have disputed whether ordinary objects such as cabbages and kings endure through time (are continuants) or only extend through time (are sequences of time slices). Some argue that to understand the possibility of change one must think of such objects as sequences of time slices; others argue that for the se reason one must think of such objects as continuants. If an object changes, it comes to be different from itself. Some argue that this would be possible only if an object consisted of distinct, successive stages; so that change would simply consist in the differences ong the successive temporal parts of an object. Others argue that this view would make change impossible; that differences ong the successive temporal parts of a thing would no more imply the thing had changed than differences ong its spatial parts would. 

 token-reflexive, an expression that refers to itself in an act of speech or writing, such as ‘this token’. The term was coined by Reichenbach, who conjectured that all indexicals, all expressions whose semantic value depends partly on features of the context of utterance, are tokenreflexive and definable in terms of the phrase ‘this token’. He suggested that ‘I’ means the se as ‘the person who utters this token’, ‘now’ means the se as ‘the time at which this token is uttered’, ‘this table’ means the se as ‘the table pointed to by a gesture accompanying this token’, and so forth. (Russell made a somewhat similar suggestion in his discussion of egocentric particulars.) Reichenbach’s conjecture is widely regarded as false; although ‘I’ does pick out the person using it, it is not synonymous with ‘the person who utters this token’. If it were, as David Kaplan observes, ‘If no one were to utter this token, I would not exist’ would be true.  EGOCENTRIC PARTICULAR, INDEXICAL. R.B.

token-token identity.PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. Toletus, Francisco (1532–96), Spanish Jesuit theologian and philosopher. Born in Córdoba, he studied at Valencia, Salanca, and Rome, and bece the first Jesuit cardinal in 1594. He composed commentaries on several of Aristotle’s works and a commentary on Aquinas’s Summa theologiae. Toletus followed a Thomistic line, but departed from Thomism in some details. He held that individuals are directly apprehended by the intellect and that the agent intellect is the se power as the possible intellect. He rejected the Thomistic doctrines of the real distinction between essence and existence and of individuation by designated matter; for Toletus individuation results from form.  AQUINAS. J.J.E.G. tonk, a sentential connective whose meaning and logic are completely characterized by the two rules (or axioms) (1) [P P (P tonk Q)] and (2) [(P tonk Q) P Q]. If (1) and (2) are added to any normal system, then every Q can be derived from any P. Arthur Prior invented ‘tonk’ to show that deductive validity must not be conceived as depending solely on arbitrary syntactically defined rules or axioms. We may prohibit ‘tonk’ on the ground that it is not a natural, independently meaningful notion, but we may also prohibit it on purely syntactical grounds. E.g., we may require that, for every connective C, the C-introduction rule [(xxx) P (. . . C . . .)] and the C-elimination rule [( - - - C - - -) P (yyy)] be such that the (yyy) is part of (xxx) or is related to (xxx) in some other syntactical way.  .

topic-neutral, noncommittal between two or more ontological interpretations of a term. J. J. C. Smart (in 1959) suggested that introspective reports can be taken as topic-neutral: composed of terms neutral between “dualistic metaphysics” and “materialistic metaphysics.” When one asserts, e.g., that one has a yellowish-orange afterimage, this is tantount to saying ‘There is something going on that is like what is going on when I have my eyes open,  awake, and there is an orange illuminated in good light in front of me, i.e., when I really see an orange’. The italicized phrase is, in Smart’s terms, topic-neutral; it refers to an event, while remaining noncommittal about whether it is material or immaterial. The term has not always been restricted to neutrality regarding dualism and materialism. Smart suggests that topic-neutral descriptions are composed of “quasi-logical” words, and hence would be suitable for any occasion where a relatively noncommittal expression of a view is required. 

PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. D.C.D. topics, the analysis of common strategies of argumentation, later a genre of literature analyzing syllogistic reasoning. Aristotle considered the analysis of types of argument, or “topics,” the best means of describing the art of dialectical reasoning; he also used the term to refer to the principle underlying the strategy’s production of an argument. Later classical commentators on Aristotle, particularly Latin rhetoricians like Cicero, developed Aristotle’s discussions of the theory of dialectical reasoning into a philosophical form. Boethius’s work on topics exemplifies the later classical expansion of the scope of topics literature. For him, a topic is either a self-evidently true universal generalization, also called a “maximal proposition,” or a differentia, a member of the set of a maximal proposition’s characteristics that determine its genus and species. Man is a rational animal is a maximal proposition, and like from genus, the differentia that characterizes the maximal proposition as concerning genera, it is a topic. Because he believed dialectical reasoning leads to categorical, not conditional, conclusions, Boethius felt that the discovery of an argument entailed discovering a middle term uniting the two, previously unjoined terms of the conclusion. Differentiae are the genera of these middle terms, and one constructs arguments by choosing differentiae, thereby determining the middle term leading to the conclusion. In the eleventh century, Boethius’s logical structure of maximal propositions and differentiae was used to study hypothetical syllogisms, while twelfth-century theorists like Abelard extended the applicability of topics structure to the categorical syllogism. By the thirteenth century, Peter of Spain, Robert Kilwardby, and Boethius of Dacia applied topics structure exclusively to the categorical syllogism, principally those with non-necessary, probable premises. Within a century, discussion of topics structure to evaluate syllogistic reasoning was subsumed by consequences literature, which described implication, entailment, and inference relations between propositions. While the theory of consequences as an approach to understanding relations between propositions is grounded in Boethian, and perhaps Stoic, logic, it bece prominent only in the later thirteenth century with Burley’s recognition of the logical significance of propositional logic. 

toxin puzzle, a puzzle about intention and practical rationality posed by Gregory Kavka. A trustworthy billionaire offers you a million dollars for intending tonight to drink a certain toxin tomorrow. You are convinced that he can tell what you intend independently of what you do. The toxin would make you painfully ill for a day, but you need to drink it to get the money. Constraints on the formation of a prize-winning intention include prohibitions against “gimmicks,” “external incentives,” and forgetting relevant details. For exple, you will not receive the money if you have a hypnotist “implant the intention” or hire a hit man to kill you should you not drink the toxin. If, by midnight tonight, without violating any rules, you form an intention to drink the toxin tomorrow, you will find a million dollars in your bank account when you awake tomorrow morning. You probably would drink the toxin for a million dollars. But can you, without violating the rules, intend tonight to drink it tomorrow? Apparently, you have no reason to drink it and an excellent reason not to drink it. Seemingly, you will infer from this that you will eschew drinking the toxin, and believing that you will top-down toxin puzzle 924   924 eschew drinking it seems inconsistent with intending to drink it. Even so, there are several reports in the philosophical literature of (possible) people who struck it rich when offered the toxin deal! 

transcendence, broadly, the property of rising out of or above other things (virtually always understood figuratively); in philosophy, the property of being, in some way, of a higher order. A being, such as God, may be said to be transcendent in the sense of being not merely superior, but incomparably superior, to other things, in any sort of perfection. God’s transcendence, or being outside or beyond the world, is also contrasted, and by some thinkers combined, with God’s immanence, or existence within the world. In medieval philosophy of logic, terms such as ‘being’ and ‘one’, which did not belong uniquely to any one of the Aristotelian categories or types of predication (such as substance, quality, and relation), but could be predicated of things belonging to any (or to none) of them, were called transcendental. In Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, principles that profess (wrongly) to take us beyond the limits of any possible experience are called transcendent; whereas anything belonging to non-empirical thought that establishes, and draws consequences from, the possibility and limits of experience may be called transcendental. Thus a transcendental argument (in a sense still current) is one that proceeds from premises about the way in which experience is possible to conclusions about what must be true of any experienced world. Transcendentalism was a philosophical or religious movement in mid-nineteenth-century New England, characterized, in the thought of its leading representative, Ralph Waldo Emerson, by belief in a transcendent (spiritual and divine) principle in human nature.  

transcendental argument, an argument that elucidates the conditions for the possibility of some fundental phenomenon whose existence is unchallenged or uncontroversial in the philosophical context in which the argument is propounded. Such an argument proceeds deductively, from a premise asserting the existence of some basic phenomenon (such as meaningful discourse, conceptualization of objective states of affairs, or the practice of making promises), to a conclusion asserting the existence of some interesting, substantive enabling conditions for that phenomenon. The term derives from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, which gives several such arguments. The paradigmatic Kantian transcendental argument is the “Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts of Understanding.” Kant argued there that the objective validity of certain pure, or a priori, concepts (the “categories”) is a condition for the possibility of experience. ong the concepts allegedly required for having experience are those of substance and cause. Their apriority consists in the fact that instances of these concepts are not directly given in sense experience in the manner of instances of empirical concepts such as red. This fact gave rise to the skepticism of Hume concerning the very coherence of such alleged a priori concepts. Now if these concepts do have objective validity, as Kant endeavored to prove in opposition to Hume, then the world contains genuine instances of the concepts. In a transcendental argument concerning the conditions for the possibility of experience, it is crucial that some feature entailed by the having of experience is identified. Then it is argued that experience could not have this feature without satisfying some substantive conditions. In the Transcendental Deduction, the feature of experience on which Kant concentrates is the ability of a subject of experience to be aware of several distinct inner states as all belonging to a single consciousness. There is no general agreement on how Kant’s argument actually unfolded, though it seems clear to most that he focused on the role of the categories in the synthesis or combination of one’s inner states in judgments, where such synthesis is said to be required for one’s awareness of the states as being all equally one’s own states. Another fous Kantian transcendental argument – the “Refutation of Idealism” in the CriToynbee, Arnold transcendental argument 925   925 tique of Pure Reason – shares a noteworthy trait with the Transcendental Deduction. The Refutation proceeds from the premise that one is conscious of one’s own existence as determined in time, i.e., knows the temporal order of some of one’s inner states. According to the Refutation, a condition for the possibility of such knowledge is one’s consciousness of the existence of objects located outside oneself in space. If one is indeed so conscious, that would refute the skeptical view, formulated by Descartes, that one lacks knowledge of the existence of a spatial world distinct from one’s mind and its inner states. Both of the Kantian transcendental arguments we have considered, then, conclude that the falsity of some skeptical view is a condition for the possibility of some phenomenon whose existence is acknowledged even by the skeptic (the having of experience; knowledge of temporal facts about one’s own inner states). Thus, we can isolate an interesting subclass of transcendental arguments: those which are anti-skeptical in nature. Barry Stroud has raised the question whether such arguments depend on some sort of suppressed verificationism according to which the existence of language or conceptualization requires the availability of the knowledge that the skeptic questions (since verificationism has it that meaningful sentences expressing coherent concepts, e.g., ‘There are tables’, must be verifiable by what is given in sense experience). Dependence on a highly controversial premise is undesirable in itself. Further, Stroud argued, such a dependence would render superfluous whatever other content the anti-skeptical transcendental argument might embody (since the suppressed premise alone would refute the skeptic). There is no general agreement on whether Stroud’s doubts about anti-skeptical transcendental arguments are well founded. It is not obvious whether the doubts apply to arguments that do not proceed from a premise asserting the existence of language or conceptualization, but instead conform more closely to the Kantian model. Even so, no anti-skeptical transcendental argument has been widely accepted. This is evidently due to the difficulty of uncovering substantive enabling conditions for phenomena that even a skeptic will countenance.  KANT, SKEPTICISM. A.B. transcendental deduction.KANT. transcendental dialectic.DIALECTIC. transcendental ego.KANT. transcendentalia.TRANSCENDENTALS. transcendental idealism.KANT.

transcendentalism, a religious-philosophical viewpoint held by a group of New England intellectuals, of whom Emerson, Thoreau, and Theodore Parker were the most important. A distinction taken over from Suel Taylor Coleridge was the only bond that universally united the members of the Transcendental Club, founded in 1836: the distinction between the understanding and reason, the former providing uncertain knowledge of appearances, the latter a priori knowledge of necessary truths gained through intuition. The transcendentalists insisted that philosophical truth could be reached only by reason, a capacity common to all people unless destroyed by living a life of externals and accepting as true only secondhand traditional beliefs. On almost every other point there were disagreements. Emerson was an idealist, while Parker was a natural realist – they simply had conflicting a priori intuitions. Emerson, Thoreau, and Parker rejected the supernatural aspects of Christianity, pointing out its unmistakable parochial nature and sociological development; while Jes Marsh, Frederick Henry Hedge, and Caleb Henry remained in the Christian fold. The influences on the transcendentalists differed widely and explain the diversity of opinion. For exple, Emerson was influenced by the Platonic tradition, German Romanticism, Eastern religions, and nature poets, while Parker was influenced by modern science, the Scottish realism of Reid and Cousin (which also emphasized a priori intuitions), and the German Higher Critics. Emerson, Thoreau, and Parker were also bonded by negative beliefs. They not only rejected Calvinism but Unitarianism as well; they rejected the ordinary concept of material success and put in its place an Aristotelian type of selfrealization that emphasized the rational and moral self as the essence of humanity and decried idiosyncratic self-realization that admires what is unique in people as constituting their real value.  EMERSON, THOREAU. E.H.M. transcendental number.

MATHEMATICAL ANALYSIS. transcendentals, also called transcendentalia, terms or concepts that apply to all things regardless of the things’ ontological kind or category. transcendental deduction transcendentals 926   926 Terms or concepts of this sort are transcendental in the sense that they transcend or are superordinate to all classificatory categories. The classical doctrine of the transcendentals, developed in detail in the later Middle Ages, presupposes an Aristotelian ontology according to which all beings are substances or accidents classifiable within one of the ten highest genera, the ten Aristotelian categories. In this scheme being (Greek on, Latin ens) is not itself one of the categories since all categories mark out kinds of being. But neither is it a category above the ten categories of substance and accidents, an ultimate genus of which the ten categories are species. This is because being is homonymous or equivocal, i.e., there is no single generic property or nature shared by members of each category in virtue of which they are beings. The ten categories identify ten irreducible, most basic ways of being. Being, then, transcends the categorial structure of the world: anything at all that is ontologically classifiable is a being, and to say of anything that it is a being is not to identify it as a member of some kind distinct from other kinds of things. According to this classical doctrine, being is the primary transcendental, but there are other terms or concepts that transcend the categories in a similar way. The most commonly recognized transcendentals other than being are one (unum), true (verum), and good (bonum), though some medieval philosophers also recognized thing (res), something (aliquid), and beautiful (pulchrum). These other terms or concepts are transcendental because the ontological ground of their application to a given thing is precisely the se as the ontological ground in virtue of which that thing can be called a being. For exple, for a thing with a certain nature to be good is for it to perform well the activity that specifies it as a thing of that nature, and to perform this activity well is to have actualized that nature to a certain extent. But for a thing to have actualized its nature to some extent is just what it is for the thing to have being. So the actualities or properties in virtue of which a thing is good are precisely those in virtue of which it has being. Given this account, medieval philosophers held that transcendental terms are convertible (convertuntur) or extensionally equivalent (idem secundum supposita). They are not synonymous, however, since they are intensionally distinct (differunt secundum rationem). These secondary transcendentals are sometimes characterized as attributes (passiones) of being that are necessarily concomitant with it. In the modern period, the notion of the transcendental is associated primarily with Kant, who made ‘transcendental’ a central technical term in his philosophy. For Kant the term no longer signifies that which transcends categorial classification but that which transcends our experience in the sense of providing its ground or structure. Kant allows, e.g., that the pure forms of intuition (space and time) and the pure concepts of understanding (categories such as substance and cause) are transcendental in this sense. Forms and concepts of this sort constitute the conditions of the possibility of experience. 

transfinite number, in set theory, an infinite cardinal or ordinal number. 

transformational grmar.GRMAR. transformation rule, an axiom-schema or rule of inference. A transformation rule is thus a rule for transforming a (possibly empty) set of wellformed formulas into a formula, where that rule operates only upon syntactic information. It was this conception of an axiom-schema and rule of inference that was one of the keys to creating a genuinely rigorous science of deductive reasoning. In the 1950s, the idea was imported into linguistics, giving rise to the notion of a transformational rule. Such a rule transforms tree structures into tree structures, taking one from the deep structure of a sentence, which determines its semantic interpretation, to the surface structure of that sentence, which determines its phonetic interpretation.  GRMAR, LOGISTIC SYSTEM. G.F.S. transitive.RELATION. transitive closure.ANCESTRAL. translation, radical

.INDETERMINACY OF TRANSLATION. transcendental subjectivity translation, radical 927   927 transparent.REFERENTIALLY TRANSPARENT. transparent context.REFERENTIALLY TRANSPARENT. transubstantiation, change of one substance into another. Aristotelian metaphysics distinguishes between substances and the accidents that inhere in them; thus, Socrates is a substance and being snub-nosed is one of his accidents. The Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches appeal to transubstantiation to explain how Jesus Christ becomes really present in the Eucharist when the consecration takes place: the whole substances of the bread and wine are transformed into the body and blood of Christ, but the accidents of the bread and wine such as their shape, color, and taste persist after the transformation. This seems to commit its adherents to holding that these persisting accidents subsequently either inhere in Christ or do not inhere in any substance. Luther proposed an alternative explanation in terms of consubstantiation that avoids this hard choice: the substances of the bread and wine coexist in the Eucharist with the body and blood of Christ after the consecration; they are united but each remains unchanged. P.L.Q. transvaluation of values.NIETZSCHE.

transversality, transcendence of the sovereignty of identity or self-seness by recognizing the alterity of the Other as Unterschied – to use Heidegger’s term – which signifies the sense of relatedness by way of difference. An innovative idea employed and appropriated by such diverse philosophers as Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, transversality is meant to replace the Eurocentric formulation of truth as universal in an age when the world is said to be rushing toward the global village. Universality has been a Eurocentric idea because what is particular in the West is universalized, whereas what is particular elsewhere remains particularized. Since its center is everywhere and its circumference nowhere, truth is polycentric and correlative. Particularly noteworthy is the erican phenomenologist Calvin O. Schrag’s attempt to appropriate transversality by splitting the difference between the two extremes of absolutism and relativism on the one hand and modernity’s totalizing practices and postmodernity’s fragmentary tendencies on the other.  HEIDEGGER, MERLEAU-PONTY, PHENOMENOLOGY, SARTRE. H.Y.J. tree of Porphyry, a structure generated from the logical and metaphysical apparatus of Aristotle’s Categories, as systematized by Porphyry and later writers. A tree in the category of substance begins with substance as its highest genus and divides that genus into mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive subordinate genera by means of a pair of opposites, called differentiae, yielding, e.g., corporeal substance and incorporeal substance. The process of division by differentiae continues until a lowest species is reached, a species that cannot be divided further. The species “human being” is said to be a lowest species whose derivation can be recaptured from the formula “mortal, rational, sensitive, animate, corporeal substance.”  ARISTOTLE, INFIMA SPECIES, PORPHYRY. W.E.M. trichotomous.RELATION. trichotomy, law of.CHOICE SEQUENCE, RELATION. Trinitarianism, the theological doctrine that God consists of three persons. The persons who constitute the Holy Trinity are the Father; the Son, who is Jesus Christ; and the Holy Spirit (or Holy Ghost). The doctrine states that each of these three persons is God and yet they are not three Gods but one God. According to a traditional formulation, the three persons are but one substance. In the opinion of Aquinas, the existence of God can be proved by human reason, but the existence of the three persons cannot be proved and is known only by revelation. According to Christian tradition, revelation contains information about the relations ong the three persons, and these relations ground proper attributes of each that distinguish them from one another. Thus, since the Father begets the Son, a proper attribute of the Father is paternity and a proper attribute of the Son is filiation. Procession transparent Trinitarianism 928   928 (or spiration) is a proper attribute of the Holy Spirit. A disagreement about procession has contributed to dividing Eastern and Western Christianity. The Eastern Orthodox church teaches that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son. A theory of double procession according to which the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son has been widely accepted in the West. This disagreement is known as the filioque (‘and the Son’) controversy because it arose from the fact that adding this Latin phrase to the Nicene Creed bece acceptable in the West but not in the East. Unitarianism denies that God consists of three persons and so is committed to denying the divinity of Jesus. The monotheistic faiths of Judaism and Isl are unitarian, but there are unitarians who consider themselves Christians.  PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. P.L.Q. Trinity.TRINITARIANISM.

Troeltsch, Ernst (1865–1923), German philosopher and historian whose primary aim was to provide a scientific foundation for theology. Educated at Erlangen, Göttingen (under Ritschl and Lagarde), and Berlin, he initially taught theology at Heidelberg and later philosophy in Berlin. He launched the school of history of religion with his epoch-making “On Historical and Dogmatical Method in Theology” (1896). His contributions to theology (The Religious Apriori, 1904), philosophy, sociology, and history (Historicism and Its Problems, 1922) were vastly influential. Troeltsch claimed that only a philosophy of religion drawn from the history and development of religious consciousness could strengthen the standing of the science of religion ong the sciences and advance the Christian strategy against materialism, naturalism, skepticism, aestheticism, and pantheism. His historical masterpiece, Protestantism and Progress (1906), argues that early Protestantism was a modified medieval Catholicism that delayed the development of modern culture. As a sociologist, he addressed, in The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches (1912), the twofold issue of whether religious beliefs and movements are conditioned by external factors and whether, in turn, they affect society and culture. From Christian social history he inferred three types of “sociological self-formation of the Christian idea”: the church, the sect, and the mystic. J.-L.S.

trope, in recent philosophical usage, an “abstract particular”; an instance of a property occurring at a particular place and time, such as the color of the cover of this book or this . The whiteness of this  and the whiteness of the previous  are two distinct tropes, identical neither with the universal whiteness that is instantiated in both s, nor with the  itself; although the whiteness of this  cannot exist independently of this , this  could be dyed some other color. A number of writers, perhaps beginning with D. C. Willis, have argued that tropes must be included in our ontology if we are to achieve an adequate metaphysics. More generally, a trope is a figure of speech, or the use of an expression in a figurative or nonliteral sense. Metaphor and irony, e.g., fall under the category of tropes. If you are helping someone move a glass table but drop your end, and your companion says, “Well, you’ve certainly been a big help,” her utterance is probably ironical, with the intended meaning that you have been no help. One important question is whether, in order to account for the ironical use of this sentence, we must suppose that it has an ironical meaning in addition to its literal meaning. Quite generally, does a sentence usable to express two different metaphors have, in addition to its literal meaning, two metaphorical meanings – and another if it can be hyperbolic, and so forth? Many philosophers and other theorists from Aristotle on have answered yes, and postulated such figurative meanings in addition to literal sentence meaning. Recently, philosophers loath to multiply sentence meanings have denied that sentences have any non-literal meanings.Their burden is to explain how, e.g., a sentence can be used ironically if it does not have an ironical sense or meaning. Such philosophers disagree on whether tropes are to be explained semantically or pragmatically. A semantic account might hypothesize that tropes are generated by violations of semantical rules. An important pragmatic approach is Grice’s suggestion that tropes can be subsumed under the more general phenomenon of conversational implicature.

truth, the quality of those propositions that accord with reality, specifying what is in fact the case. Whereas the aim of a science is to discover which of the propositions in its domain are true i.e., which propositions possess the property of Trinity truth 929   929 truth – the central philosophical concern with truth is to discover the nature of that property. Thus the philosophical question is not What is true? but rather, What is truth? – What is one saying about a proposition in saying that it is true? The importance of this question stems from the variety and depth of the principles in which the concept of truth is deployed. We are tempted to think, e.g., that truth is the proper aim and natural result of scientific inquiry, that true beliefs are useful, that the meaning of a sentence is given by the conditions that would render it true, and that valid reasoning preserves truth. Therefore insofar as we wish to understand, assess, and refine these epistemological, ethical, semantic, and logical views, some account of the nature of truth would seem to be required. Such a thing, however, has been notoriously elusive. The belief that snow is white owes its truth to a certain feature of the external world: the fact that snow is white. Similarly, the belief that dogs bark is true because of the fact that dogs bark. Such trivial observations lead to what is perhaps the most natural and widely held account of truth, the correspondence theory, according to which a belief (statement, sentence, proposition, etc.) is true provided there exists a fact corresponding to it. This Aristotelian thesis is unexceptionable in itself. However, if it is to provide a complete theory of truth – and if it is to be more than merely a picturesque way of asserting all instances of ‘the belief that p is true if and only if p’ – then it must be supplemented with accounts of what facts are, and what it is for a belief to correspond to a fact; and these are the problems on which the correspondence theory of truth has foundered. A popular alternative to the correspondence theory has been to identify truth with verifiability. This idea can take on various forms. One version involves the further assumption that verification is holistic – i.e., that a belief is verified when it is part of an entire system of beliefs that is consistent and “harmonious.” This is known as the coherence theory of truth and was developed by Bradley and Brand Blanchard. Another version, due to Dummett and Putn, involves the assumption that there is, for each proposition, some specific procedure for finding out whether one should believe it or not. On this account, to say that a proposition is true is to say that it would be verified by the appropriate procedure. In mathematics this ounts to the identification of truth with provability and is sometimes referred to as intuitionistic truth. Such theories aim to avoid obscure metaphysical notions and explain the close relation between knowability and truth. They appear, however, to overstate the intimacy of that link: for we can easily imagine a statement that, though true, is beyond our power to establish as true. A third major account of truth is Jes’s pragmatic theory. As we have just seen, the verificationist selects a prominent property of truth and considers it to be the essence of truth. Similarly the pragmatist focuses on another important characteristic – nely, that true beliefs are a good basis for action – and takes this to be the very nature of truth. True assumptions are said to be, by definition, those that provoke actions with desirable results. Again we have an account with a single attractive explanatory feature. But again the central objection is that the relationship it postulates between truth and its alleged analysans – in this case, utility – is implausibly close. Granted, true beliefs tend to foster success. But often actions based on true beliefs lead to disaster, while false assumptions, by pure chance, produce wonderful results. One of the few fairly uncontroversial facts about truth is that the proposition that snow is white is true if and only if snow is white, the proposition that lying is wrong is true if and only if lying is wrong, and so on. Traditional theories of truth acknowledge this fact but regard it as insufficient and, as we have seen, inflate it with some further principle of the form ‘X is true if and only if X has property P’ (such as corresponding to reality, verifiability, or being suitable as a basis for action), which is supposed to specify what truth is. A collection of radical alternatives to the traditional theories results from denying the need for any such further specification. For exple, one might suppose (with Rsey, Ayer, and Strawson) that the basic theory of truth contains nothing more than equivalences of the form, ‘The proposition that p is true if and only if p’ (excluding instantiation by sentences such as ‘This proposition is not true’ that generate contradiction). This so-called deflationary theory is best presented (following Quine) in conjunction with an account of the raison d’être of our notion of truth: nely, that its function is not to describe propositions, as one might naively infer from its syntactic form, but rather to enable us to construct a certain type of generalization. For exple, ‘What Einstein said is true’ is intuitively equivalent to the infinite conjunction ‘If Einstein said that nothing goes faster than light, then nothing goes faster than light; and if Einstein said truth truth 930   930 that nuclear weapons should never be built, then nuclear weapons should never be built; . . . and so on.’ But without a truth predicate we could not capture this statement. The deflationist argues, moreover, that all legitimate uses of the truth predicate – including those in science, logic, semantics, and metaphysics – are simply displays of this generalizing function, and that the equivalence schema is just what is needed to explain that function. Within the deflationary cp there are various competing proposals. According to Frege’s socalled redundancy theory, corresponding instances of ‘It is true that p’ and ‘p’ have exactly the se meaning, whereas the minimalist theory assumes merely that such propositions are necessarily equivalent. Other deflationists are skeptical about the existence of propositions and therefore take sentences to be the basic vehicles of truth. Thus the disquotation theory supposes that truth is captured by the disquotation principle, ‘p’ is true if and only if p’. More bitiously, Tarski does not regard the disquotation principle, also known as Tarski’s (T) schema, as an adequate theory in itself, but as a specification of what any adequate definition must imply. His own account shows how to give an explicit definition of truth for all the sentences of certain formal languages in terms of the referents of their primitive nes and predicates. This is known as the semantic theory of truth.  .

truthlikeness, a term introduced by Karl Popper in 1960 to explicate the idea that one theory may have a better correspondence with reality, or be closer to the truth, or have more verisimilitude, than another theory. Truthlikeness, which combines truth with information content, has to be distinguished from probability, which increases with lack of content. Let T and F be the classes of all true and false sentences, respectively, and A and B deductively closed sets of sentences. According to Popper’s qualitative definition, A is more truthlike than B if and only if B 3 T 0 A 3 T and A 3 F 0 B 3 F, where one of these setinclusions is strict. In particular, when A and B are non-equivalent and both true, A is more truthlike than B if and only if A logically entails B. David Miller and Pavel Tichý proved in 1974 that Popper’s definition is not applicable to the comparison of false theories: if A is more truthlike than B, then A must be true. Since the mid-1970s, a new approach to truthlikeness has been based upon the concept of similarity: the degree of truthlikeness of a statement A depends on the distances from the states of affairs allowed by A to the true state. In Grah Oddie’s Likeness to Truth (1986), this dependence is expressed by the average function; in Ilkka Niiniluoto’s Truthlikeness (1987), by the weighted average of the minimum distance and the sum of all distances. The concept of verisimilitude is also used in the epistemic sense to express a rational evaluation of how close to the truth a theory appears to be on available evidence.  CONFIRMATION, INFORMATION THEORY, INSTRUMENTALISM, PROBABILITY. I.N. truthmaker principle.ARMSTRONG. truth predicate.

SEMANTIC PARADOXES. truth table, a tabular display of one or more truth-functions, truth-functional operators, or representatives of truth-functions or truth-functional operators (such as well-formed formulas of propositional logic). In the tabular display, each row displays a possible assignment of truthvalues to the arguments of the truth-functions or truth-functional operators. Thus, the collection of all rows in the table displays all possible assignments of truth-values to these arguments. The following simple truth table represents the truth-functional operators negation and conjunction: truth, coherence theory of truth table 931   931 Because a truth table displays all possible assignments of truth-values to the arguments of a truth-function, truth tables are useful devices for quickly ascertaining logical properties of propositions. If, e.g., all entries in the column of a truth table representing a proposition are T, then the proposition is true for all possible assignments of truth-values to its ultimate constituent propositions; in this sort of case, the proposition is said to be logically or tautologically true: a tautology. If all entries in the column of a truth table representing a proposition are F, then the proposition is false for all possible assignments of truth-values to its ultimate constituent propositions, and the proposition is said to be logically or tautologically false: a contradiction. If a proposition is neither a tautology nor a contradiction, then it is said to be a contingency. The truth table above shows that both Not-P and Pand-Q are contingencies. For the se reason that truth tables are useful devices for ascertaining the logical qualities of single propositions, truth tables are also useful for ascertaining whether arguments are valid or invalid. A valid argument is one such that there is no possibility (no row in the relevant truth table) in which all its premises are true and its conclusion false. Thus the above truth table shows that the argument ‘P-and-Q; therefore, P’ is valid. 

truth-value, most narrowly, one of the values T (for ‘true’) or F (for ‘false’) that a proposition may be considered to have or take on when it is regarded as true or false, respectively. More broadly, a truth-value is any one of a range of values that a proposition may be considered to have when taken to have one of a range of different cognitive or epistemic statuses. For exple, some philosophers speak of the truth-value I (for ‘indeterminate’) and regard a proposition as having the value I when it is indeterminate whether the proposition is true or false. Logical systems employing a specific number n of truthvalues are said to be n-valued logical systems; the simplest sort of useful logical system has two truth-values, T and F, and accordingly is said to be two-valued. Truth-functions are functions that take truth-values as arguments and that yield truth-values as resultant values. The truthtable method in propositional logic exploits the idea of truth-functions by using tabular displays. 

TRUTH TABLE. R.W.B. truth-value gaps.MANY-VALUED LOGIC, PRESUPPOSITION. truth-value semantics, interpretations of formal systems in which the truth-value of a formula rests ultimately only on truth-values that are assigned to its atomic subformulas (where ‘subformula’ is suitably defined). The label is due to Hugues Leblanc. On a truth-value interpretation for first-order predicate logic, for exple, the formula atomic ExFx is true in a model if and only if all its instances Fm, Fn, . . . are true, where the truth-value of these formulas is simply assigned by the model. On the standard Tarskian or objectual interpretation, by contrast, ExFx is true in a model if and only if every object in the domain of the model is an element of the set that interprets F in the model. Thus a truth-value semantics for predicate logic comprises a substitutional interpretation of the quantifiers and a “non-denotational” interpretation of terms and predicates. If t 1, t 2, . . . are all the terms of some first-order language, then there are objectual models that satisfy the set {Dx-Fx, Ft1, Ft2 . . . .}, but no truth-value interpretations that do. One can ensure that truth-value semantics delivers the standard logic, however, by suitable modifications in the definitions of consistency and consequence. A set G of formulas of language L is said to be consistent, for exple, if there is some G' obtained from G by relettering terms such that G' is satisfied by some truth-value assignment, or, alternatively, if there is some language L+ obtained by adding terms to L such that G is satisfied by some truth-value assignment to the atoms of L+. Truth-value semantics is of both technical and philosophical interest. Technically, it allows the completeness of first-order predicate logic and a variety of other formal systems to be obtained in a natural way from that of propositional logic. Philosophically, it dratizes the fact that the formulas in one’s theories about the world do not, in themselves, determine one’s ontological commitments. It is at least possible to interpret first-order formulas without reference to special truth-table method truth-value semantics 932   932 domains of objects, and higher-order formulas without reference to special domains of relations and properties. The idea of truth-value semantics dates at least to the writings of E. W. Beth on first-order predicate logic in 1959 and of K. Schütte on simple type theory in 1960. In more recent years similar semantics have been suggested for secondorder logics, modal and tense logics, intuitionistic logic, and set theory. 

Tsou Yen (350?–270? B.C.), Chinese cosmologist, a member of the Chi-hsia Academy and influential political figure who applied yin–yang fivephases thinking to dynastic cycles. Tsou Yen believed that the natural order, the human order, and the relation between the two were all governed and made intelligible by the dynic interplay ong yin–yang and the five phases (wu-hsing: earth, wood, metal, fire, and water). He gained political fe for his idea that the rise and fall of dynasties are correlated with the five phases and accord with the se cyclical pattern: earth, wood, metal, fire, and water. Thus, the reign of the Yellow Emperor, correlated with the earth phase, was followed by the Hsia (wood), the Shang (metal), and the Chou (fire) dynasties. Tsou Yen predicted that the ascendancy of the water phase would signal the end of the Chou and the beginning of a new dynasty. 

CHINESE PHILOSOPHY. R.P.P. & R.T.A. Tung Chung-shu (c.179–c.104 B.C.), Chinese philosopher, a Han scholar fous for his answers to questions by Emperor Wu, which were instrumental in making Confucianism the state doctrine in 136 B.C. He wrote Ch’un-ch’iu fan-lu (“Luxuriant Gems of the Spring and Autumn Annals”), in which he read moral messages from historical events recorded in the classic in such a way that they could be applied to future history. Tung’s teachings were actually quite different from those of Confucius and Mencius. He believed that Heaven and the Way do not change, and he taught the so-called Three Bonds, according to which the ruler, the father, and the husband are to be the standards of the ruled, the son, and the wife. These added a conservative ring to Confucianism, so that the rulers were happy to use it in combination with Legalist practice to create a state Confucianism. He also incorporated many ideas from the yin–yang school in his philosophy. He believed that history goes in cycles, the five powers (wood, fire, earth, metal, water) succeed each other, and there is a strict correlation between natural affairs and human affairs. He saw natural disasters as warning signs for the rulers to cultivate virtues and not to abuse their powers.  CONFUCIANISM, CONFUCIUS, MENCIUS. S.-h.L. tu quoque.INFORMAL FALLACY. Turing degree.DEGREE OF UNSOLVABILITY. Turing machine, an abstract automaton or imagined computer consisting of a finite automaton operating an indefinitely long storage tape. The finite automaton provides the computing power of the machine. The tape is used for input, output, and calculation workspace; in the case of the universal Turing machine, it also specifies another Turing machine. Initially, only a finite number of squares of the tape are marked with symbols, while the rest are blank. The finite automaton part of the machine has a finite number of internal states and operates discretely, at times t % 0, 1, 2, . . . . At each time-step the automaton exines the tape square under its tape head, possibly changes what is there, moves the tape left or right, and then changes its internal state. The law governing this sequence of actions is deterministic and is defined in a state table. For each internal state and each tape symbol (or blank) under the tape head, the state table describes the tape action performed by the machine and gives the next internal state of the machine. Since a machine has only a finite number of internal states and of tape symbols, the state table of a machine is finite in length and can be stored on a tape. There is a universal Turing machine Mu that can simulate every Turing machine (including itself): when the state table of any machine M is written on the tape of Mu, the universal machine Mu will perform the se input-output computation that M performs. Mu does this by using the state table of M to calculate M’s complete history for any given input. Turing machines may be thought of as conceptual devices for enumerating the elements of an infinite set (e.g., the theorems of a formal language), or as decision machines (e.g., deciding of any truth-functional formula whether it is a tautology). A. M. Turing showed that there are welldefined logical tasks that cannot be carried out by any machine; in particular, no machine can solve the halting problem. Tsou Yen Turing machine 933   933 Turing’s definition of a machine was theoretical; it was not a practical specification for a machine. After the modern electronic computer was invented, he proposed a test for judging whether there is a computer that is behaviorally equivalent to a human in reasoning and intellectual creative power. The Turing test is a “black box” type of experiment that Turing proposed as a way of deciding whether a computer can think. Two rooms are fitted with the se input-output equipment going to an outside experimenter. A person is placed in one room and a progrmed electronic computer in the other, each in communication with the experimenter. By issuing instructions and asking questions, the experimenter tries to decide which room has the computer and which the human. If the experimenter cannot tell, that outcome is strong evidence that the computer can think as well as the person. More directly, it shows that the computer and the human are equivalent for all the behaviors tested. Since the computer is a finite automaton, perhaps the most significant test task is that of doing creative mathematics about the non-enumerable infinite. 

Turnbull, George (1698–1748), Scottish moral sense philosopher and educational theorist. He was briefly a philosophy regent at Aberdeen (1721–27) and a teacher of Reid. His Principles of Moral and Christian Philosophy (1740) and Discourse upon the Nature and Origin of Moral and Civil Laws (1741) show him as the most systematic of those who aimed to recast moral philosophy on a Newtonian model, deriving moral laws “experimentally” from human psychology. In A Treatise on Ancient Painting (1740), Observations Upon Liberal Education (1742), and some smaller works, he extolled history and the arts as propaedeutic to the teaching of virtue and natural religion.  MORAL SENSE THEORY. M.A.St. Twardowski.ACT-OBJECT PSYCHOLOGY, POLISH LOGIC. Twin-Earth, a fictitious planet first visited by Hilary Putn in a thought experiment designed to show, ong other things, that “ ‘meanings’ just ain’t in the head” (“The Meaning of ‘Meaning’,” 1975). Twin-Earth is exactly like Earth with one notable exception: ponds, rivers, and ice trays on Twin-Earth contain, not H2O, but XYZ, a liquid superficially indistinguishable from water but with a different chemical constitution. According to Putn, although some inhabitants of Twin-Earth closely resemble inhabitants of Earth, ‘water’, when uttered by a Twin-Earthling, does not mean water. Water is H2O, and, on Twin-Earth, the word ‘water’ designates a different substance, XYZ, Twin-water. The moral drawn by Putn is that the meanings of at least some of our words, and the significance of some of our thoughts, depend, in part, on how things stand outside our heads. Two “molecular duplicates,” two agents with qualitatively similar mental lives, might mean very different things by their utterances and think very different thoughts. Although Twin-Earth has become a popular stopping-off place for philosophers en route to theories of meaning and mental content, others regard Twin-Earth as hopelessly remote, doubting that useful conclusions can be drawn about our Earthly circumstances from research conducted there. 

tychism (from Greek tyche, ‘chance’), Peirce’s doctrine that there is absolute chance in the universe and its fundental laws are probabilistic and inexact. Peirce’s tychism is part of his evolutionary cosmology, according to which all regularities of nature are products of growth and development, i.e., results of evolution. The laws of nature develop over time and become increasingly rigid and exact; the apparently deterministic laws of physics are limiting cases of the basic, probabilistic laws. Underlying all other laws is “the tendency of all things to take habits”; Peirce calls this the Law of Habit. In his cosmology his tychism is associated with synechism, the doctrine of the continuity of nature. His synechism involves the doctrine of the continuity of mind and matter; Peirce sometimes expressed this view by saying that “matter is effete mind.” R.Hi. type.ACTION THEORY,

type theory, broadly, any theory according to which the things that exist fall into natural, perhaps mutually exclusive, categories or types. In most modern discussions, ‘type theory’ refers to the theory of logical types first sketched by Russell in The Principles of Mathematics (1903). It is a theory of logical types insofar as it purports only to classify things into the most general categories that must be presupposed by an adequate logical theory. Russell proposed his theory in response to his discovery of the now-fous paradox that bears his ne. The paradox is this. Common sense suggests that some classes are members of themselves (e.g., the class of all classes), while others are not (e.g., the class of philosophers). Let R be the class whose membership consists of exactly those classes of the latter sort, i.e., those that are not members of themselves. Is R a member of itself? If so, then it is a member of the class of all classes that are not members of themselves, and hence is not a member of itself. If, on the other hand, it is not a member of itself, then it satisfies its own membership conditions, and hence is a member of itself after all. Either way there is a contradiction. The source of the paradox, Russell suggested, is the assumption that classes and their members form a single, homogeneous logical type. To the contrary, he proposed that the logical universe is stratified into a regimented hierarchy of types. Individuals constitute the lowest type in the hierarchy, type 0. (For purposes of exposition, individuals can be taken to be ordinary objects like chairs and persons.) Type 1 consists of classes of individuals, type 2 of classes of classes of individuals, type 3 classes of classes of classes of individuals, and so on. Unlike the homogeneous universe, then, in the type hierarchy the members of a given class must all be drawn from a single logical type n, and the class itself must reside in the next higher type n ! 1. (Russell’s sketch in the Principles differs from this account in certain details.) Russell’s paradox cannot arise in this conception of the universe of classes. Because the members of a class must all be of the se logical type, there is no such class as R, whose definition cuts across all types. Rather, there is only, for each type n, the class Rn of all non-self-membered classes of that type. Since Rn itself is of type n ! 1, the paradox breaks down: from the assumption that Rn is not a member of itself (as in fact it is not in the type hierarchy), it no longer follows that it satisfies its own membership conditions, since those conditions apply only to objects of type n. Most formal type theories, including Russell’s own, enforce the class membership restrictions of simple type theory syntactically such that a can be asserted to be a member of b only if b is of the next higher type than a. In such theories, the definition of R, hence the paradox itself, cannot even be expressed. Numerous paradoxes remain unscathed by the simple type hierarchy. Of these, the most prominent are the semantic paradoxes, so called because they explicitly involve semantic notions like truth, as in the following version of the liar paradox. Suppose Epimenides asserts that all the propositions he asserts today are false; suppose also that that is the only proposition he asserts today. It follows immediately that, under those conditions, the proposition he asserts is true if and only if it is false. To address such paradoxes, Russell was led to the more refined and substantially more complicated system known as rified type theory, developed in detail in his 1908 paper “Mathematical Logic as Based on the Theory of Types.” In the rified theory, propositions and properties (or propositional functions, in Russell’s jargon) come to play the central roles in the type-theoretic universe. Propositions are best construed as the metaphysical and semantical counterparts of sentences – what sentences express – and properties as the counterparts of “open sentences” like ‘x is a philosopher’ that contain a variable ‘x’ in place of a noun phrase. To distinguish linguistic expressions from their semantic counterparts, the property expressed by, say, ‘x is a philosopher’, will be denoted by ‘x ^ is a philosopher’, and the proposition expressed by ‘Aristotle is a philosopher’ will be denoted by ‘Aristotle is a philosopher’. A property . . .x ^ . . . is said to be true of an individual a if . . . a . . . is a true proposition, and false of a if . . . a . . . is a false proposition (where ‘. . . a . . .’ is the result of replacing ‘x ^ ’ with ‘a’ in ‘. . . x ^ . . .’). So, e.g., x ^ is a philosopher is true of Aristotle. The range of significance of a property P is the collection of objects of which P is true or false. a is a possible argument for P if it is in P’s range of significance. In the rified theory, the hierarchy of classes is supplanted by a hierarchy of properties: first, properties of individuals (i.e., properties whose range of significance is restricted to individuals), then properties of properties of individuals, and so on. Parallel to the simple theory, then, the type of a property must exceed the type of its possible arguments by one. Thus, Russell’s paradox with R now in the guise of the property x ^ is a property that is not true of itself – is avoided along analogous lines. Following the French mathematician Henri Poincaré, Russell traced the type theory type theory 935   935 source of the semantic paradoxes to a kind of illicit self-reference. So, for exple, in the liar paradox, Epimenides ostensibly asserts a proposition p about all propositions, p itself ong them, nely that they are false if asserted by him today. p thus refers to itself in the sense that it – or more exactly, the sentence that expresses it – quantifies over (i.e., refers generally to all or some of the elements of) a collection of entities ong which p itself is included. The source of semantic paradox thus isolated, Russell formulated the vicious circle principle (VCP), which proscribes all such self-reference in properties and propositions generally. The liar proposition p and its ilk were thus effectively banished from the realm of legitimate propositions and so the semantic paradoxes could not arise. Wedded to the restrictions of simple type theory, the VCP generates a rified hierarchy based on a more complicated form of typing. The key notion is that of an object’s order. The order of an individual, like its type, is 0. However, the order of a property must exceed the order not only of its possible arguments, as in simple type theory, but also the orders of the things it quantifies over. Thus, type 1 properties like x ^ is a philosopher and x ^ is as wise as all other philosophers are first-order properties, since they are true of and, in the second instance, quantify over, individuals only. Properties like these whose order exceeds the order of their possible arguments by one are called predicative, and are of the lowest possible order relative to their range of significance. Consider, by contrast, the property (call it Q) x ^ has all the (first-order) properties of a great philosopher. Like those above, Q also is a property of individuals. However, since Q quantifies over first-order properties, by the VDP, it cannot be counted ong them. Accordingly, in the rified hierarchy, Q is a second-order property of individuals, and hence non-predicative (or impredicative). Like Q, the property x ^ is a (first-order) property of all great philosophers is also second-order, since its range of significance consists of objects of order 1 (and it quantifies only over objects of order 0); but since it is a property of first-order properties, it is predicative. In like manner it is possible to define third-order properties of individuals, third-order properties of first-order properties, third-order properties of second-order properties of individuals, third-order properties of secondorder properties of first-order properties, and then, in the se fashion, fourth-order properties, fifth-order properties, and so on ad infinitum. A serious shortcoming of rified type theory, from Russell’s perspective, is that it is an inadequate foundation for classical mathematics. The most prominent difficulty is that many classical theorems appeal to definitions that, though consistent, violate the VCP. For instance, a wellknown theorem of real analysis asserts that every bounded set of real numbers has a least upper bound. In the rified theory, real numbers are identified with certain predicative properties of rationals. Under such an identification, the usual procedure is to define the least upper bound of a bounded set S of reals to be the property (call it b) some real number in S is true of x ^ , and then prove that this property is itself a real number with the requisite characteristics. However, b quantifies over the real numbers. Hence, by the VCP, b cannot itself be taken to be a real number: although of the se type as the reals, and although true of the right things, b must be assigned a higher order than the reals. So, contrary to the classical theorem, S fails to have a least upper bound. Russell introduced a special axiom to obviate this difficulty: the axiom of reducibility. Reducibility says, in effect, that for any property P, there is a predicative property Q that is true of exactly the se things as P. Reducibility thus assures that there is a predicative property bH true of the se rational numbers as b. Since the reals are predicative, hence of the se order as bH, it turns out that bH is a real number, and hence that S has a least upper bound after all, as required by the classical theorem. The general role of reducibility is thus to undo the draconian mathematical effects of rification without undermining its capacity to fend off the semantic paradoxes. 

type–token distinction, as drawn by Peirce, the contrast between a category and a member of that category. An individual or token is said to exemplify a type; it possesses the property that characterizes that type. In philosophy this distinction is often applied to linguistic expressions and to mental states, but it can be applied also to objects, events, properties, and states of affairs. Related to it are the distinctions between type and token individuation and between qualitative and numerical identity. Distinct tokens of the se type, such as two ants, may be qualitatively identical but cannot be numerically identical. Irrespective of the controversial metaphysical view that every individual has an essence, a type type theory, rified type–token distinction 936   936 to which it belongs essentially, every individual belongs to many types, although for a certain theoretical or practical purpose it may belong to one particularly salient type (e.g., the entomologist’s Formicidae or the picnicker’s buttinsky). The type–token distinction as applied in the philosophy of language marks the difference between linguistic expressions, such as words and sentences, which are the subject of linguistics, and the products of acts of writing or speaking (the subject of speech act theory). Confusing the two can lead to conflating matters of speaker meaning withmatters of word or sentence meaning (as noted by Grice). An expression is a linguistic type and can be used over and over, whereas a token of a type can be produced only once, though of course it may be reproduced (copied). A writer composes an essay (a type) and produces a manuscript (a token), of which there might be many copies (more tokens). A token of a type is not the se as an occurrence of a type. In the previous sentence there are two occurrences of the word ‘type’; in each inscription of that sentence, there are two tokens of that word. In philosophy of mind the type–token distinction underlies the contrast between two forms of physicalism, the type–type identity theory or type physicalism and the token–token identity theory or token physicalism.  ACTION THEORY, PEIRCE, PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. K.B. type-type identity.PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. tzu jan, Chinese term meaning ‘naturally’, ‘spontaneity’, or ‘so-of-itself’. It is a Taoist term of art describing the ideal state of agents and quality of actions. A coordinate concept is wu wei (nonaction), particularly in the Tao Te Ching. Taoists seek to eliminate the rational “human” perspective and return to spontaneous “Heavenly” inclinations. Actions then will be unself-conscious, and we and what we do will be tzu jan (spontaneous). Wang Ch’ung presents an early critique of this Taoist notion in chapter 54 of his Lun Heng. Later thinkers appropriate the term to support their own positions. For exple, Neo-Confucians regard particular filial and social obligations as tzu jan, as are certain virtuous inclinations.  NEO-TAOISM, TAOISM. P.J.I.

Ununo, Miguel de (1864–1936), Spanish philosopher, scholar, and writer. Born in Bilbao, he studied in Bilbao and Madrid and taught Greek and philosophy in Salanca. His open criticism of the Spanish government led to dismissal from the university and exile (1924–30) and, again, to dismissal from the rectorship in 1936. Ununo is an important figure in Spanish letters. Like Ortega y Gasset, his aim was to capture life in its complex emotional and intellectual dimensions rather than to describe the world scientifically. Thus, he favored fiction as a medium for his ideas and may be considered a precursor of existentialism. He wrote several philosophically significant novels, a commentary on Don Quijote (1905), and some poetry and dra; his philosophical ideas are most explicitly stated in Del sentimiento trágico de la vida (“The Tragic Sense of Life,” 1913). Ununo perceived a tragic sense permeating human life, a sense arising from our desire for immortality and from the certainty of death. In this predicent man must abandon all pretense of rationalism and embrace faith. Faith characterizes the authentic life, while reason leads to despair, but faith can never completely displace reason. Torn between the two, we can find hope only in faith; for reason deals only with abstractions, while we are “flesh and bones” and can find fulfillment only through commitment to an ideal. J.J.E.G. unary quantifier.

unexpected exination paradox, a paradox about belief and prediction. One version is as follows: It seems that a teacher could both make, and act on, the following announcement to his class: “Sometime during the next week I will set you an exination, but at breakfast time on the day it will occur, you will have no good reason to expect that it will occur on that day.” If he announces this on Friday, could he not do what he said he would by, say, setting the exination on the following Wednesday? The paradox is that there is an argument purporting to show that there could not be an unexpected exination of this kind. For let us suppose that the teacher will carry out his threat, in both its parts; i.e., he will set an exination, and it will be unexpected. Then he cannot set the exination on Friday (assuming this to be the last possible day of the week). For, by the time Friday breakfast arrives, and we know that all the previous days have been exination-free, we would have every reason to expect the exination to occur on Friday. So leaving the exination until Friday is inconsistent with setting an unexpected exination. For similar reasons, the exination cannot be held on Thursday. Given our previous conclusion that it cannot be delayed until Friday, we would know, when Thursday morning ce, and the previous days had been exination-free, that it would have to be held on Thursday. So if it were held on Thursday it would not be unexpected. So it cannot be held on Thursday. Similar reasoning sup938 U   938 posedly shows that there is no day of the week on which it can be held, and so supposedly shows that the supposition that the teacher can carry out his threat must be rejected. This is paradoxical, for it seems plain that the teacher can carry out his threat.  PARADOX. R.M.S. unified science.UNITY OF SCIENCE.

uniformity of nature, a state of affairs thought to be required if induction is to be justified. For exple, inductively strong arguments, such as ‘The sun has risen every day in the past; therefore, the sun will rise tomorrow’, are thought to presuppose that nature is uniform in the sense that the future will resemble the past, in this case with respect to the diurnal cycle. The Scottish empiricist Hume was the first to make explicit that the uniformity of nature is a substantial assumption in inductive reasoning. Hume argued that, because the belief that the future will resemble the past cannot be grounded in experience – for the future is as yet unobserved – induction cannot be rationally justified; appeal to it in defense of induction is either question-begging or illicitly metaphysical. Francis Bacon’s “induction by enumeration” and J. S. Mill’s “five methods of experimental inquiry” presuppose that nature is uniform. Whewell appealed to the uniformity of nature in order to account for the “consilience of inductions,” the tendency of a hypothesis to explain data different from those it was originally introduced to explain. For reasons similar to Hume’s, Popper holds that our belief in the uniformity of nature is a matter of faith. Reichenbach held that although this belief cannot be justified in advance of any instance of inductive reasoning, its presupposition is vindicated by successful inductions. It has proved difficult to formulate a philosophical statement of the uniformity of nature that is both coherent and informative. It appears contradictory to say that nature is uniform in all respects, because inductive inferences always mark differences of some sort (e.g., from present to future, from observed to unobserved, etc.), and it seems trivial to say that nature is uniform in some respects, because any two states of nature, no matter how different, will be similar in some respect. Not all observed regularities in the world (or in data) are taken to support successful inductive reasoning; not all uniformities are, to use Goodman’s term, “projectible.” Philosophers of science have therefore proposed various rules of projectibility, involving such notions as simplicity and explanatory power, in an attempt to distinguish those observed patterns that support successful inductions (and thus are taken to represent genuine causal relations) from those that are accidental or spurious. 

unity in diversity, in aesthetics, the principle that the parts of the aesthetic object must cohere or hang together while at the se time being different enough to allow for the object to be complex. This principle defines an important formal requirement used in judging aesthetic objects. If an object has insufficient unity (e.g., a collection of color patches with no recognizable patterns of any sort), it is chaotic or lacks harmony; it is more a collection than one object. But if it has insufficient diversity (e.g., a canvas consisting entirely of one color with no internal differentiations), it is monotonous. Thus, the formal pattern desired in an aesthetic object is that of complex parts that differ significantly from each other but fit together to form one interdependent whole such that the character or meaning of the whole would be changed by the change of any part. 

AESTHETICS, ORGANIC. J.A.K. unity of science, a situation in which all branches of empirical science form a coherent system called unified science. Unified science is sometimes extended to include formal sciences (e.g., branches of logic and mathematics). ‘Unity of science’ is also used to refer to a research progr aimed at unified science. Interest in the unity of science has a long history with many roots, including ancient atomism and the work of the French Encyclopedists. In the twentieth century this interest was prominent in logical empiricism (see Otto Neurath et al., International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, vol. I, 1938). Logical empiricists originally conceived of unified science in terms of a unified language of science, in particular, a universal observation language. All laws and theoretical statements in any branch of science were to be translatable into such an observation language, or else be appropriately related to sentences of this language. In unified science unity of science 939   939 addition to encountering technical difficulties with the observational–theoretical distinction, this conception of unified science also leaves open the possibility that phenomena of one branch may require special concepts and hypotheses that are explanatorily independent of other branches. Another concept of unity of science requires that all branches of science be combined by the intertheoretic reduction of the theories of all non-basic branches to one basic theory (usually assumed to be some future physics). These reductions may proceed stepwise; an oversimplified exple would be reduction of psychology to biology, together with reductions of biology to chemistry and chemistry to physics. The conditions for reducing theory T2 to theory T1 are complex, but include identification of the ontology of T2 with that of T1, along with explanation of the laws of T2 by laws of T1 together with appropriate connecting sentences. These conditions for reduction can be supplemented with conditions for the unity of the basic theory, to produce a general research progr for the unification of science (see Robert L. Causey, Unity of Science, 1977). Adopting this research progr does not commit one to the proposition that complete unification will ever be achieved; the latter is primarily an empirical proposition. This progr has been criticized, and some have argued that reductions are impossible for particular pairs of theories, or that some branches of science are autonomous. For exple, some writers have defended a view of autonomous biology, according to which biological science is not reducible to the physical sciences. Vitalism postulated non-physical attributes or vital forces that were supposed to be present in living organisms. More recent neovitalistic positions avoid these postulates, but attempt to give empirical reasons against the feasibility of reducing biology. Other, sometimes a priori, arguments have been given against the reducibility of psychology to physiology and of the social sciences to psychology. These disputes indicate the continuing intellectual significance of the idea of unity of science and the broad range of issues it encompasses. 

universal instantiation, also called universal quantifier elimination. (1) The argument form ‘Everything is f; therefore a is f’, and arguments of this form. (2) The rule of inference that permits one to infer that any given thing is f from the premise that everything is f. In classical logic, where all terms are taken to denote things in the domain of discourse, the rule says simply that from (v)A[v] one may infer A[t], the result of replacing all free occurrences of v in A[v] by the term t. If non-denoting terms are allowed, however, as in free logic, then the rule would require an auxiliary premise of the form (Du)u % t to ensure that t denotes something in the range of the variable v. Likewise in modal logic, which is sometimes held to contain terms that do not denote “genuine individuals” (the things over which variables range), an auxiliary premise may be required. (3) In higher-order logic, the rule of inference that says that from (X)A[X] one may infer A[F], where F is any expression of the grmatical category (e.g., n-ary predicate) appropriate to that of X (e.g., n-ary predicate variable).

universalizability. (1) Since the 1920s, the moral criterion implicit in Kant’s first formulation of the categorical imperative: “Act only on that maxim that you can at the se time will to be a universal law,” often called the principle of universality. A maxim or principle of action that satisfies this test is said to be universalizable, hence morally acceptable; one that does not is said to be not universalizable, hence contrary to duty. (2) A second sense developed in connection with the work of Hare in the 1950s. For Hare, universalizability is “common to all judgments which carry descriptive meaning”; so not only normative claims (moral and evaluative judgments) but also empirical statements are universalizable. Although Hare describes how such universalizuniversal universalizability 940   940 ability can figure in moral argument, for Hare “offenses against . . . universalizability are logical, not moral.” Consequently, whereas for Kant not all maxims are universalizable, on Hare’s view they all are, since they all have descriptive meaning. (3) In a third sense, one that also appears in Hare, ‘universalizability’ refers to the principle of universalizability: “What is right (or wrong) for one person is right (or wrong) for any similar person in similar circumstances.” This principle is identical with what Sidgwick (The Methods of Ethics) called the Principle of Justice. In Generalization in Ethics (1961) by M. G. Singer (b.1926), it is called the Generalization Principle and is said to be the formal principle presupposed in all moral reasoning and consequently the explanation for the feature alleged to hold of all moral judgments, that of being generalizable. A particular judgment of the form ‘A is right in doing x’ is said to imply that anyone relevantly similar to A would be right in doing any act of the kind x in relevantly similar circumstances. The characteristic of generalizability, of presupposing a general rule, was said to be true of normative claims, but not of all empirical or descriptive statements. The Generalization Principle (GP) was said to be involved in the Generalization Argument (GA): “If the consequences of everyone’s doing x would be undesirable, while the consequences of no one’s doing x would not be, then no one ought to do x without a justifying reason,” a form of moral reasoning resembling, though not identical with, the categorical imperative (CI). One alleged resemblance is that if the GP is involved in the GP, then it is involved in the CI, and this would help explain the moral relevance of Kant’s universalizability test. (4) A further extension of the term ‘universalizability’ appears in Alan Gewirth’s Reason and Morality (1978). Gewirth formulates “the logical principle of universalizability”: “if some predicate P belongs to some subject S because S has the property Q . . . then P must also belong to all other subjects S1, S2, . . . , Sn that have Q.” The principle of universalizability “in its moral application” is then deduced from the logical principle of universalizability, and is presupposed in Gewirth’s Principle of Generic Consistency, “Act in accord with the generic rights of your recipients as well as yourself,” which is taken to provide an a priori determinate way of determining relevant similarities and differences, hence of applying the principle of universalizability. The principle of universalizability is a formal principle; universalizability in sense (1), however, is intended to be a substantive principle of morality. 

universe of discourse, the usually limited class of individuals under discussion, whose existence is presupposed by the discussants, and which in some sense constitutes the ultimate subject matter of the discussion. Once the universe of a discourse has been established, expressions such as ‘every object’ and ‘some object’ refer respectively to every object or to some object in the universe of discourse. The concept of universe of discourse is due to De Morgan in 1846, but the expression was coined by Boole eight years later. When a discussion is formalized in an interpreted standard first-order language, the universe of discourse is taken as the “universe” of the interpretation, i.e., as the range of values of the variables. Quine and others have emphasized that the universe of discourse represents an ontological commitment of the discussants. In a discussion in a particular science, the universe of discourse is often wider than the domain of the science, although economies of expression can be achieved by limiting the universe of discourse to the domain.   

Upanishads, a group of ancient Hindu philosophical texts, or the esoteric sacred doctrines contained in them. ‘Upanishad’ includes the notion of the student “sitting near” the guru. In the eighth century A.D., Shankara identified certain Upanishads as the official source of Vedanta teachings: Aitreya, Brhadaranyaka, Chandogya, Isa, Katha, Kaufitaki, Kena, Maitri, Mupdaka, Prasna, Svetasvatara, and Taittiriya. These are the classic universalizability, principle of Upanishads 941   941 Upanishads; together with the Vedanta Sutras, they constitute the doctrinally authoritative sources for Vedanta. The Vedanta Sutras are a series of aphorisms, composed somewhere between 200 B.C. and A.D. 200, attributed to Badarayana. Practically unintelligible without commentary, these sutras are interpreted in one way by Shankara, in another by Ranuja, and in a third way by Madhva (though Madhva’s reading is closer to Ranuja’s than to Shankara’s). For Vedanta, the Upanishads are “the end of the Vedas,” both in the sense of completing the transcript of the immutable source of truth and articulating the foundational wisdom that the Vedas presuppose. While the Upanishads agree on the importance of religious knowledge, on the priority of religious over other sorts of wellbeing, and on the necessity of religious discipline, they contain radically disparate cosmologies that differ regarding agent, modality, and product of the creative process and offer various notions of Brahman and Atman.

use–mention distinction, two ways in which terms enter into discourse – used when they refer to or assert something, mentioned when they are exhibited for consideration of their properties as terms. If I say, “Mary is sad,” I use the ne ‘Mary’ to refer to Mary so that I can predicate of her the property of being sad. But if I say, “ ‘Mary’ contains four letters,” I  mentioning Mary’s ne, exhibiting it in writing or speech to predicate of that term the property of being spelled with four letters. In the first case, the sentence occurs in what Carnap refers to as the material mode; in the second, it occurs in the formal mode, and hence in a metalanguage (a language used to talk about another language). Single quotation marks or similar orthographic devices are conventionally used to disbiguate mentioned from used terms. The distinction is important because there are fallacies of reasoning based on use–mention confusions in the failure to observe the use– mention distinction, especially when the referents of terms are themselves linguistic entities. Consider the inference: (1) Some sentences are written in English. (2) Some sentences are written in English. Here it looks as though the argument offers a counterexple to the claim that all arguments of the form ‘P, therefore P’ are circular. But either (1) asserts that some sentences are written in English, or it provides evidence in support of the conclusion in (2) by exhibiting a sentence written in English. In the first case, the sentence is used to assert the se truth in the premise as expressed in the conclusion, so that the argument remains circular. In the second case, the sentence is mentioned, and although the argument so interpreted is not circular, it is no longer strictly of the form ‘P, therefore P’, but has the significantly different form, ‘ “P” is a sentence written in English, therefore P’. 

 utilitarianism, the moral theory that an action is morally right if and only if it produces at least as much good (utility) for all people affected by the action as any alternative action the person could do instead. Its best-known proponent is J. S. Mill, who formulated the greatest happiness principle (also called the principle of utility): always act so as to produce the greatest happiness. Two kinds of issues have been central in debates about whether utilitarianism is an adequate or true moral theory: first, whether and how utilitarianism can be clearly and precisely formulated and applied; second, whether the moral implications of utilitarianism in particular cases are acceptable, or instead constitute objections to it. Issues of formulation. A central issue of formulation is how utility is to be defined and whether it can be measured in the way utilitarianism requires. Early utilitarians often held some form of hedonism, according to which only pleasure and the absence of pain have utility or intrinsic value. For something to have intrinsic value is for it to be valuable for its own sake and apart from its consequences or its relations to other things. Something has instrumental value, on the other hand, provided it brings about what has intrinsic value. Most utilitarians have held that hedonism is too narrow an account of utility because there are many things that people value intrinsically besides pleasure. Some nonhedonists define utility as happiness, and ong them there is considerable debate about the proper account of happiness. Happiness has also been criticized as too narrow to exhaust utility or intrinsic value; e.g., many people value accomplishments, not just the happiness that may use–mention distinction utilitarianism 942   942 accompany them. Sometimes utilitarianism is understood as the view that either pleasure or happiness has utility, while consequentialism is understood as the broader view that morally right action is action that maximizes the good, however the good is understood. Here, we take utilitarianism in this broader interpretation that some philosophers reserve for consequentialism. Most utilitarians who believe hedonism gives too narrow an account of utility have held that utility is the satisfaction of people’s informed preferences or desires. This view is neutral about what people desire, and so can account for the full variety of things and experiences that different people in fact desire or value. Finally, ideal utilitarians have held that some things or experiences, e.g. knowledge or being autonomous, are intrinsically valuable or good whether or not people value or prefer them or are happier with them. Whatever account of utility a utilitarian adopts, it must be possible to quantify or measure the good effects or consequences of actions in order to apply the utilitarian standard of moral rightness. Happiness utilitarianism, e.g., must calculate whether a particular action, or instead some possible alternative, would produce more happiness for a given person; this is called the intrapersonal utility comparison. The method of measurement may allow cardinal utility measurements, in which numerical units of happiness may be assigned to different actions (e.g., 30 units for Jones expected from action a, 25 units for Jones from alternative action b), or only ordinal utility measurements may be possible, in which actions are ranked only as producing more or less happiness than alternative actions. Since nearly all interesting and difficult moral problems involve the happiness of more than one person, utilitarianism requires calculating which ong alternative actions produces the greatest happiness for all people affected; this is called the interpersonal utility comparison. Many ordinary judgments about personal action or public policy implicitly rely on interpersonal utility comparisons; e.g., would a fily whose members disagree be happiest overall taking its vacation at the seashore or in the mountains? Some critics of utilitarianism doubt that it is possible to make interpersonal utility comparisons. Another issue of formulation is whether the utilitarian principle should be applied to individual actions or to some form of moral rule. According to act utilitarianism, each action’s rightness or wrongness depends on the utility it produces in comparison with possible alternatives. Even act utilitarians agree, however, that rules of thumb like ‘keep your promises’ can be used for the most part in practice because following them tends to maximize utility. According to rule utilitarianism, on the other hand, individual actions are evaluated, in theory not just in practice, by whether they conform to a justified moral rule, and the utilitarian standard is applied only to general rules. Some rule utilitarians hold that actions are right provided they are permitted by rules the general acceptance of which would maximize utility in the agent’s society, and wrong only if they would be prohibited by such rules. There are a number of forms of rule utilitarianism, and utilitarians disagree about whether act or rule utilitarianism is correct. Moral implications. Most debate about utilitarianism has focused on its moral implications. Critics have argued that its implications sharply conflict with most people’s considered moral judgments, and that this is a strong reason to reject utilitarianism. Proponents have argued both that many of these conflicts disappear on a proper understanding of utilitarianism and that the remaining conflicts should throw the particular judgments, not utilitarianism, into doubt. One important controversy concerns utilitarianism’s implications for distributive justice. Utilitarianism requires, in individual actions and in public policy, maximizing utility without regard to its distribution between different persons. Thus, it seems to ignore individual rights, whether specific individuals morally deserve particular benefits or burdens, and potentially to endorse great inequalities between persons; e.g., some critics have charged that according to utilitarianism slavery would be morally justified if its benefits to the slaveowners sufficiently outweighed the burdens to the slaves and if it produced more overall utility than alternative practices possible in that society. Defenders of utilitarianism typically argue that in the real world there is virtually always a better alternative than the action or practice that the critic charges utilitarianism wrongly supports; e.g., no system of slavery that has ever existed is plausibly thought to have maximized utility for the society in question. Defenders of utilitarianism also typically try to show that it does take account of the moral consideration the critic claims it wrongly ignores; for instance, utilitarians commonly appeal to the declining marginal utility of money – equal marginal increments of money tend to produce less utility (e.g. happiness) for persons, the more money they already utilitarianism utilitarianism have – as giving some support to equality in income distribution. Another source of controversy concerns whether moral principles should be agent-neutral or, in at least some cases, agent-relative. Utilitarianism is agent-neutral in that it gives all people the se moral aim – act so as to maximize utility for everyone – whereas agent-relative principles give different moral aims to different individuals. Defenders of agent-relative principles note that a commonly accepted moral rule like the prohibition of killing the innocent is understood as telling each agent that he or she must not kill, even if doing so is the only way to prevent a still greater number of killings by others. In this way, a non-utilitarian, agent-relative prohibition reflects the common moral view that each person bears special moral responsibility for what he or she does, which is greater than his or her responsibility to prevent similar wrong actions by others. Common moral beliefs also permit people to give special weight to their own projects and commitments and, e.g., to favor to some extent their own children at the expense of other children in greater need; agent-relative responsibilities to one’s own fily reflect these moral views in a way that agent-neutral utilitarian responsibilities apparently do not. The debate over neutrality and relativity is related to a final area of controversy about utilitarianism. Critics charge that utilitarianism makes morality far too demanding by requiring that one always act to maximize utility. If, e.g., one reads a book or goes to a movie, one could nearly always be using one’s time and resources to do more good by aiding fine relief. The critics believe that this wrongly makes morally required what should be only supererogatory – action that is good, but goes beyond “the call of duty” and is not morally required. Here, utilitarians have often argued that ordinary moral views are seriously mistaken and that morality can demand greater sacrifices of one’s own interests for the benefit of others than is commonly believed. There is little doubt that here, and in many other cases, utilitarianism’s moral implications significantly conflict with commonsense moral beliefs – the dispute is whether this should count against commonsense moral beliefs or against utilitarianism. 

vagueness, a property of an expression in virtue of which it can give rise to a “borderline case.” A borderline case is a situation in which the application of a particular expression to a (ne of) a particular object does not generate an expression with a definite truth-value; i.e., the piece of language in question neither unequivocally applies to the object nor fails to apply. Although such a formulation leaves it open what the pieces of language might be (whole sentences, individual words, nes or singular terms, predicates or general terms), most discussions have focused on vague general terms and have considered other types of terms to be nonvague. (Exceptions to this have called attention to the possibility of vague objects, thereby rendering vague the designation relation for singular terms.) The formulation also leaves open the possible causes for the expression’s lacking a definite truth-value. If this indeterminacy is due to there being insufficient information available to determine applicability or non-applicability of the term (i.e., we are convinced the term either does or does not apply, but we just do not have enough information to determine which), then this is sometimes called epistemic vagueness. It is somewhat misleading to call this vagueness, for unlike true vagueness, this epistemic vagueness disappears if more information is brought into the situation. (‘There are between 1.89 $ 106 and 1.9 $ 106 stars in the sky’ is epistemically vague but is not vague in the generally accepted sense of the term.) ’Vagueness’ may also be used to characterize non-linguistic items such as concepts, memories, and objects, as well as such semilinguistic items as statements and propositions. Many of the issues involved in discussing the topic of vagueness impinge upon other philosophical topics, such as the existence of truth-value gaps – (declarative sentences that are neither true nor false) – and the plausibility of many-valued logic. There are other related issues such as the nature of propositions and whether they must be either true or false. We focus here on linguistic vagueness, as it manifests itself with general terms; for it is this sort of indeterminacy that defines what most researchers call vagueness, and which has led the push in some schools of thought to “eliminate vagueness” or to construct languages that do not manifest vagueness. Linguistic vagueness is sometimes confused with other linguistic phenomena: generality, biguity, and open texture. Statements can be general (‘Some wheelbarrows are red’, ‘All insects have antennae’) and if there is no other vagueness infecting them, they are true or false – and not borderline or vague. Terms can be general (‘person’, ‘dog’) without being vague. Those general terms apply to many different objects but are not therefore vague; and furthermore, the fact that they apply to different kinds of objects (‘person’ applies to both men and women) also does not show them to be vague or biguous. A vague term admits of borderline cases – a completely determinate situation in which there just is no correct answer as to whether the term applies to a certain object or not – and this is not the case with generality. biguous linguistic items, including structurally biguous sentences, also do not have this feature (unless they also contain vague terms). Rather, an biguous sentence allows there to be a completely determinate situation in which one can simultaneously correctly affirm the sentence and also deny the sentence, depending on which of the claims allowed by the biguities is being affirmed or denied. Terms are considered open-textured if they are precise along some dimensions of their meaning but where other possible dimensions simply have not been considered. It would therefore not be clear what the applicability of the term would be were objects to vary along these other dimensions. Although related to vagueness, open texture is a different notion. Friedrich Waismann, who coined the term, put it this way: “Open texture . . . is something like the possibility of vagueness.” Vagueness has long been an irritant to philosophers of logic and language. ong the oldest of the puzzles associated with vagueness is the sorites (‘heap’) paradox reported by Cicero (Academica 93): One grain of sand does not make a heap, and adding a grain of sand to something that is not a heap will not create a heap; there945 V   945 fore there are no heaps. This type of paradox is traditionally attributed to Zeno of Elea, who said that a single millet seed makes no sound when it falls, so a basket of millet seeds cannot make a sound when it is dumped. The term ‘sorites’ is also applied to the entire series of paradoxes that have this form, such as the falakros (‘bald man’, Diogenes Laertius, Grmatica II, 1, 45): A man with no hairs is bald, and adding one hair to a bald man results in a bald man; therefore all men are bald. The original version of these sorites paradoxes is attributed to Eubulides (Diogenes Laertius II, 108): “Isn’t it true that two are few? and also three, and also four, and so on until ten? But since two are few, ten are also few.” The linchpin in all these paradoxes is the analysis of vagueness in terms of some underlying continuum along which an imperceptible or unimportant change occurs. Almost all modern accounts of the logic of vagueness have assumed this to be the correct analysis of vagueness, and have geared their logics to deal with such vagueness. But we will see below that there are other kinds of vagueness too. The search for a solution to the sorites-type paradoxes has been the stimulus for much research into alternative semantics. Some philosophers, e.g. Frege, view vagueness as a pervasive defect of natural language and urge the adoption of an artificial language in which each predicate is completely precise, without borderline cases. Russell too thought vagueness thoroughly infected natural language, but thought it unavoidable – and indeed beneficial – for ordinary usage and discourse. Despite the occasional argument that vagueness is pragmatic rather than a semantic phenomenon, the attitude that vagueness is inextricably bound to natural language (together with the philosophical logician’s self-ascribed task of formalizing natural language semantics) has led modern writers to the exploration of alternative logics that might adequately characterize vagueness – i.e., that would account for our pretheoretic beliefs concerning truth, falsity, necessary truth, validity, etc., of sentences containing vague predicates. Some recent writers have also argued that vague language undermines realism, and that it shows our concepts to be “incoherent.” Long ago it was seen that the attempt to introduce a third truth-value, indeterminate, solved nothing – replacing, as it were, the sharp cutoff between a predicate’s applying and not applying with two sharp cutoffs. Similar remarks could be made against the adoption of any finitely manyvalued logic as a characterization of vagueness. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, fuzzy logic was introduced into the philosophic world. Actually a restatement of the Tarski-Lukasiewicz infinitevalued logics of the 1930s, one of the side benefits of fuzzy logics was claimed to be an adequate logic for vagueness. In contrast to classical logic, in which there are two truth-values (true and false), in fuzzy logic a sentence is allowed to take any real number between 0 and 1 as a truthvalue. Intuitively, the closer to 1 the value is, the “more true” the sentence is. The value of a negated sentence is 1 minus the value of the unnegated sentence; conjuction is viewed as a minimum function and disjunction as a maximum function. (Thus, a conjunction takes the value of the “least true” conjunct, while a disjunction takes the value of the “most true” disjunct.) Since vague sentences are maximally neither true nor false, they will be valued at approximately 0.5. It follows that if F is maximally vague, so is the negation -F; and so are the conjunction (F & -F) and the disjunction (~F 7 -F). Some theorists object to these results, but defenders of fuzzy logic have argued in favor of them. Other theorists have attempted to capture the elusive logic of vagueness by employing modal logic, having the operators AF (meaning ‘F is definite’) and B F (meaning ‘F is vague’). The logic generated in this way is peculiar in that A (F & Y)P(AF & AY) is not a theorem. E.g., (p & -p) is definitely false, hence definite; hence A (p & -p). Yet neither p nor -p need be definite. (Technically, it is a non-Kripke-normal modal logic.) Some other peculiarities are that (AF Q A -F) is a theorem, and that (AFPBF) is not. There are also puzzles about whether ((B FP ABF) should be a theorem, and about iterated modalities in general. Modal logic treatments of vagueness have not attracted many advocates, except as a portion of a general epistemic logic (i.e., modal logics might be seen as an account of so-called epistemic vagueness). A third direction that has been advocated as a logical account of vagueness has been the method of supervaluations (sometimes called “supertruth”). The underlying idea here is to allow the vague predicate in a sentence to be “precisified” in an arbitrary manner. Thus, for the sentence ‘Friar Tuck is bald’, we arbitrarily choose a precise number of hairs on the head that will demarcate the bald/not-bald border. In this valuation Friar Tuck is either definitely bald or definitely not bald, and the sentence either is true or is false. Next, we alter the valuation so that there is some other bald/not-bald bordervagueness vagueness 946   946 line, etc. A sentence true in all such valuations is deemed “really true” or “supertrue”; one false in all such valuations is “really false” or “superfalse.” All others are vague. Note that, in this conception of vagueness, if F is vague, so is -F. However, unlike fuzzy logic ‘F & -F’ is not evaluated as vague – it is false in every valuation and hence is superfalse. And ‘F 7 -F’ is supertrue. These are seen by some as positive features of the method of supervaluations, and as an argument against the whole fuzzy logic enterprise. In fact there seem to be at least two distinct types of (linguistic) vagueness, and it is not at all clear that any of the previously mentioned logic approaches can deal with both. Without going into the details, we can just point out that the “sorites vagueness” discussed above presumes an ordering on a continuous underlying scale; and it is the indistinguishability of adjacent points on this scale that gives rise to borderline cases. But there are exples of vague terms for which there is no such scale. A classic exple is ‘religion’: there are a number of factors relevant to determining whether a social practice is a religion. Having none of these properties guarantees failing to be a religion, and having all of them guarantees being one. However, there is no continuum of the sorites variety here; for exple, it is easy to distinguish possessing four from possessing five of the properties, unlike the sorites case where such a change is imperceptible. In the present type of vagueness, although we can tell these different cases apart, we just do not know whether to call the practice a religion or not. Furthermore, some of the properties (or combinations of properties) are more important or salient in determining whether the practice is a religion than are other properties or combinations. We might call this fily resemblance vagueness: there are a number of clearly distinguishable conditions of varying degrees of importance, and fily resemblance vagueness is attributed to there being no definite answer to the question, How many of which conditions are necessary for the term to apply? Other exples of fily resemblance vagueness are ‘schizophrenia sufferer’, ‘sexual perversion’, and the venerable ‘ge’. A special subclass of fily resemblance vagueness occurs when there are pairs of underlying properties that normally co-occur, but occasionally apply to different objects. Consider, e.g., ‘tributary’. When two rivers meet, one is usually considered a tributary of the other. ong the properties relevant to being a tributary rather than the main river are: relative volume of water and relative length. Normally, the shorter of the two rivers has a lesser volume, and in that case it is the tributary of the other. But occasionally the two properties do not co-occur and then there is a conflict, giving rise to a kind of vagueness we might call conflict vagueness. The term ‘tributary’ is vague because its background conditions admit of such conflicts: there are borderline cases when these two properties apply to different objects. To conclude: the fundental philosophical problems involving vagueness are (1) to give an adequate characterization of what the phenomenon is, and (2) to characterize our ability to reason with these terms. These were the problems for the ancient philosophers, and they remain the problems for modern philosophers. 

Vaihinger, philosopher best known for Die Philosophie des Als Ob (1911; translated by C. K. Ogden as The Philosophy of “As If” in 1924). A neo-Kantian, he was also influenced by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. His commentary on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (2 vols., 1881) is still a standard work. Vaihinger was a cofounder of both the Kant Society and Kant-Studien. The “philosophy of the as if” involves the claim that values and ideals ount only to “fictions” that serve “life” even if they are irrational. We must act “as if” they were true because they have biological utility. M.K. Vair, Guillaume du.DU VAIR.

Valentinianism, a form of Christian gnosticism of Alexandrian origin, founded by Valentinus in the second century and propagated by Theodotus in Eastern, and Heracleon in Western, Christianity. To every gnostic, pagan or Christian, knowledge leads to salvation from the perishable, material world. Valentinianism therefore prompted fous refutations by Tertullian (Adversus Valentinianos) and Irenaeus (Adversus haereses). The latter accused the Valentinians of maintaining “creatio ex nihilo.” Valentinus is believed to have authored the Peri trion phuseon, the Evangelium veritatis, and the Treatise on the Resurrection. Since only a few fragments of these remain, his Neoplatonic cosmogony is accessible mainly through his opponents and critics (Hippolytus, Clement of Alexandria) and in the Nag Hmadi codices. To explain the origins of creation and of evil, Valentinus separated God (primal Father) from the Creator (Demiurge) and attributed the cruVaihinger, Hans Valentinianism 947   947 cial role in the processes of emanation and redemption to Sophia. 

Valentinus (A.D. 100–65), Christian gnostic teacher. He was born in Alexandria, where he taught until he moved to Rome in 135. A dualist, he constructed an elaborate cosmology in which God the Father (Bythos, or Deep Unknown) unites the the feminine Silence (Sige) and in the overflow of love produces thirty successive divine emanations (or aeons) constituting the Pleroma (fullness of the Godhead). Each emanation is arranged hierarchically with a graded existence, becoming progressively further removed from the Father and hence less divine. The lowest emanation, Sophia (wisdom), yields to passion and seeks to reach, beyond her ability, to the Father, which causes her fall. In the process, she causes the creation of the material universe (wherein resides evil) and the loss of divine sparks from the Pleroma. The divine elements are embodied in those humans who are the elect. Jesus Christ is an aeon close to the Father and is sent to retrieve the souls into the heavenly Pleroma. Valentinus wrote a gospel. His sect stood out in the early church for ordaining women priests and prophetesses. 

valid, having the property that a well-formed formula, argument, argument form, or rule of inference has when it is logically correct in a certain respect. A well-formed formula is valid if it is true under every admissible reinterpretation of its non-logical symbols. (If truth-value gaps or multiple truth-values are allowed, ‘true’ here might be replaced by ‘non-false’ or takes a “designated” truth-value.) An argument is valid if it is impossible for the premises all to be true and, at the se time, the conclusion false. An argument form (schema) is valid if every argument of that form is valid. A rule of inference is valid if it cannot lead from all true premises to a false conclusion. 

Valla, Lorenzo (c.1407–57), Italian humanist and historian who taught rhetoric in Pavia and was later secretary of King Alfonso I of Aragona in Naples, and apostolic secretary in Rome under Pope Nicholas V. In his dialogue On Pleasure or On the True Good (1431–34), Stoic and Epicurean interlocutors present their ethical views, which Valla proceeds to criticize from a Christian point of view. This work is often regarded as a defense of Epicurean hedonism, because Valla equates the good with pleasure; but he claims that Christians can find pleasure only in heaven. His description of the Christian pleasures reflects the contemporary Renaissance attitude toward the joys of life and might have contributed to Valla’s reputation for hedonism. In the later work, On Free Will (between 1435 and 1448), Valla discusses the conflict between divine foreknowledge and human freedom and rejects Boethius’s then predominantly accepted solution. Valla distinguishes between God’s knowledge and God’s will, but denies that there is a rational solution of the apparent conflict between God’s will and human freedom. As a historian, he is fous for The Donation of Constantine (1440), which denounces as spurious the fous document on which medieval jurists and theologians based the papal rights to secular power.

value, the worth of something. Philosophers have discerned these main forms: intrinsic, instrumental, inherent, and relational value. Intrinsic value may be taken as basic and many of the others defined in terms of it. ong the many attempts to explicate the concept of intrinsic value, some deal primarily with the source of value, while others employ the concept of the “fittingness” or “appropriateness” to it of certain kinds of emotions and desires. The first is favored by Moore and the second by Brentano. Proponents of the first view hold that the intrinsic value of X is the value that X has solely in virtue of its intrinsic nature. Thus, the state of affairs, Smith’s experiencing pleasure, has intrinsic value provided it has value solely in virtue of its intrinsic nature. Followers of the second approach explicate intrinsic value in terms of the sorts of emotions and desires appropriate to a thing “in and for itself” (or “for its own sake”). Thus, one might say X has intrinsic value (or is intrinsically good) if and only if X is worthy of desire in and for itself, or, alternatively, it is fitting or appropriate for anyone to favor X in and for itself. Thus, the state of affairs of Smith’s experiencing pleasure is intrinsically valuable provided that state of affairs is worthy of desire for its own sake, or it is fitting for anyone to favor that state of affairs in and for itself. Concerning the other forms of value, we may say that X has instrumental value if and only if it is a means to, or causally contributes to, something that is intrinsically valuable. If Smith’s experiencing pleasure is intrinsically valuable and his taking a warm bath is a means to, or Valentinus value 948   948 causally contributes to, his being pleased, then his taking a warm bath is instrumentally valuable or “valuable as a means.” Similarly, if health is intrinsically valuable and exercise is a means to health, then exercise is instrumentally valuable. X has inherent value if and only if the experience, awareness, or contemplation of X is intrinsically valuable. If the experience of a beautiful sunset is intrinsically valuable, then the beautiful sunset has inherent value. X has contributory value if and only if X contributes to the value of some whole, W, of which it is a part. If W is a whole that consists of the facts that Smith is pleased and Brown is pleased, then the fact that Smith is pleased contributes to the value of W, and Smith’s being pleased has contributory value. Our exple illustrates that something can have contributory value without having instrumental value, for the fact that Smith is pleased is not a means to W and, strictly speaking, it does not bring about or causally contribute to W. Given the distinction between instrumental and contributory value, we may say that certain sorts of experiences and activities can have contributory value if they are part of an intrinsically valuable life and contribute to its value, even though they are not means to it. Finally, we may say that X has relational value if and only if X has value in virtue of bearing some relation to something else. Instrumental, inherent, and contributory value may be construed as forms of relational value. But there are other forms of relational value one might accept, e.g. one might hold that X is valuable for S in virtue of being desired by S or being such that S would desire X were S “fully informed” and “rational.” Some philosophers defend the organicity of intrinsic value. Moore, for exple, held that the intrinsic value of a whole is not necessarily equal to the sum of the intrinsic values of its parts. According to this view, the presence of an intrinsically good part might lower the intrinsic value of a whole of which it is a part and the presence of an intrinsically bad part might raise the intrinsic value of a whole to which it belongs. Defenders of organicity sometimes point to exples of Mitfreude (taking joy or pleasure in another’s joy) and Schadenfreude (taking joy or pleasure in another’s suffering) to illustrate their view. Suppose Jones believes incorrectly that Smith is happy and Brown believes incorrectly that Gray is suffering, but Jones is pleased that Smith is happy and Brown is pleased that Gray is suffering. The former instance of Mitfreude seems intrinsically better than the latter instance of Schadenfreude even though they are both instances of pleasure and neither whole has an intrinsically bad part. The value of each whole is not a “mere sum” of the values of its parts.  ETHICS, HEDONISM, MOORE, PROPERTY, UTILITARIANISM, VALUE THEORY. N.M.L. value, cognitive.FREGE. value, contributive.VALUE. value, inherent.VALUE.

value theory, also called axiology, the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of value and with what kinds of things have value. Construed very broadly, value theory is concerned with all forms of value, such as the aesthetic values of beauty and ugliness, the ethical values of right, wrong, obligation, virtue, and vice, and the epistemic values of justification and lack of justification. Understood more narrowly, value theory is concerned with what is intrinsically valuable or ultimately worthwhile and desirable for its own sake and with the related concepts of instrumental, inherent, and contributive value. When construed very broadly, the study of ethics may be taken as a branch of value theory, but understood more narrowly value theory may be taken as a branch of ethics. In its more narrow form, one of the chief questions of the theory of value is, What is desirable for its own sake? One traditional sort of answer is hedonism. Hedonism is roughly the view that (i) the only intrinsically good experiences or states of affairs are those containing pleasure, and the only instrinsically bad experiences or states of affairs are those containing pain; (ii) all experiences or states of affairs that contain more pleasure than pain are intrinsically good and all experiences or states of affairs that contain more pain than pleasure are intrinsically bad; and (iii) any experience or state of affairs that is intrinsically good is so in virtue of being pleasant or containing pleasure and any experience or state of affairs that is intrinsically bad is so in virtue of being painful or involving pain. Hedonism has value, cognitive value theory 949   949 been defended by philosophers such as Epicurus, Benth, Sidgwick, and, with significant qualifications, J. S. Mill. Other philosophers, such as C. I. Lewis, and, perhaps, Brand Blanshard, have held that what is intrinsically or ultimately desirable are experiences that exhibit “satisfactoriness,” where being pleasant is but one form of being satisfying. Other philosophers have recognized a plurality of things other than pleasure or satisfaction as having intrinsic value. ong the value pluralists are Moore, Rashdall, Ross, Brentano, Hartmann, and Scheler. In addition to certain kinds of pleasures, these thinkers count some or all of the following as intrinsically good: consciousness and the flourishing of life, knowledge and insight, moral virtue and virtuous actions, friendship and mutual affection, beauty and aesthetic experience, a just distribution of goods, and self-expression. Many, if not all, of the philosophers mentioned above distinguish between what has value or is desirable for its own sake and what is instrumentally valuable. Furthermore, they hold that what is desirable for its own sake or intrinsically good has a value not dependent on anyone’s having an interest in it. Both of these claims have been challenged by other value theorists. Dewey, for exple, criticizes any sharp distinction between what is intrinsically good or good as an end and what is good as a means on the ground that we adopt and abandon ends to the extent that they serve as means to the resolution of conflicting impulses and desires. Perry denies that anything can have value without being an object of interest. Indeed, Perry claims that ‘X is valuable’ means ‘Interest is taken in X’ and that it is a subject’s interest in a thing that confers value on it. Insofar as he holds that the value of a thing is dependent upon a subject’s interest in that thing, Perry’s value theory is a subjective theory and contrasts sharply with objective theories holding that some things have value not dependent on a subject’s interests or attitudes. Some philosophers, dissatisfied with the view that value depends on a subject’s actual interests and theories, have proposed various alternatives, including theories holding that the value of a thing depends on what a subject would desire or have an interest in if he were fully rational or if desires were based on full information. Such theories may be called “counterfactual” desire theories since they take value to be dependent, not upon a subject’s actual interests, but upon what a subject would desire if certain conditions, which do not obtain, were to obtain. Value theory is also concerned with the nature of value. Some philosophers have denied that sentences of the forms ‘X is good’ or ‘X is intrinsically good’ are, strictly speaking, either true or false. As with other forms of ethical discourse, they claim that anyone who utters these sentences is either expressing his emotional attitudes or else prescribing or commending something. Other philosophers hold that such sentences can express what is true or false, but disagree about the nature of value and the meaning of value terms like ‘good’, ‘bad’, and ‘better’. Some philosophers, such as Moore, hold that in a truth of the form ‘X is intrinsically good’, ‘good’ refers to a simple, unanalyzable, non-natural property, a property not identical with or analyzable by any “natural” property such as being pleasant or being desired. Moore’s view is one form of non-naturalism. Other philosophers, such as Brentano, hold that ‘good’ is a syncategorematic expression; as such it does not refer to a property or relation at all, though it contributes to the meaning of the sentence. Still other philosophers have held that ‘X is good’ and ‘X is intrinsically good’ can be analyzed in natural or non-ethical terms. This sort of naturalism about value is illustrated by Perry, who holds that ‘X is valuable’ means ‘X is an object of interest’. The history of value theory is full of other attempted naturalistic analyses, some of which identify or analyze ‘good’ in terms of pleasure or being the object of rational desire. Many philosophers argue that naturalism is preferable on epistemic grounds. If, e.g., ‘X is valuable’ just means ‘X is an object of interest’, then in order to know whether something is valuable, one need only know whether it is the object of someone’s interest. Our knowledge of value is fundentally no different in kind from our knowledge of any other empirical fact. This argument, however, is not decisive against non-naturalism, since it is not obvious that there is no synthetic a priori knowledge of the sort Moore takes as the fundental value cognition. Furthermore, it is not clear that one cannot combine non-naturalism about value with a broadly empirical epistemology, one that takes certain kinds of experience as epistemic grounds for beliefs about value.   

Vanini, philosopher, a Renaissance Aristotelian who studied law and theology. He bece a monk and traveled all over Europe. After abjuring, he taught and practiced medicine. He was burned at the stake by the Inquisition. His major work is four volumes of dialogues, De admirandis naturae reginae deaeque mortalium arcanis (“On the Secrets of Nature, Queen and Goddess of Mortal Beings,” 1616). He was influenced by Averroes and Pietro Pomponazzi, whom he regarded as his teacher. Vanini rejects revealed religion and claims that God is immanent in nature. The world is ruled by a necessary natural order and is eternal. Like Averroes, he denies the immortality and the immateriality of the human soul. Like Pomponazzi, he denies the existence of miracles and claims that all apparently extraordinary phenomena can be shown to have natural causes and to be predetermined. Despite the absence of any original contribution, from the second half of the seventeenth century Vanini was popular as a symbol of free and atheist thought.

variable, in logic and mathematics, a symbol interpreted so as to be associated with a range of values, a set of entities any one of which may be temporarily assigned as a value of the variable. An occurrence of a variable in a mathematical or logical expression is a free occurrence if assigning a value is necessary in order for the containing expression to acquire a semantic value – a denotation, truth-value, or other meaning. Suppose a semantic value is assigned to a variable and the se value is attached to a constant as meaning of the se kind; if an expression contains free occurrences of just that variable, the value of the expression for that assignment of value to the variable is standardly taken to be the se as the value of the expression obtained by substituting the constant for all the free occurrences of the variable. A bound occurrence of a variable is one that is not free. 

FORMAL LOGIC, LOGICAL SYNTAX, QUANTIFICATION, WELLFORMED FORMULA. C.A.A. variable, bound.ONTOLOGICAL COMMITMENT, VARIABLE. variable, free.VARIABLE. variable, regressor.REGRESSION ANALYSIS. variable, response.REGRESSION ANALYSIS. variable, state.STATE. variable, value of.ONTOLOGICAL COMMITMENT, VARIABLE. variable sum ge.GE THEORY. vasana, Buddhist philosophical term meaning ‘tendency’. It is an explanatory category, designed to show how it is possible to talk of tendencies or capacities in persons on the basis of a metaphysic that denies that there are any enduring existents in the continua of events conventionally called “persons.” According to this metaphysic, when we speak of the tendency of persons understood in this way to do this or that – to be jealous, lustful, angry – we are speaking of the presence of karmic seeds in continua of events, seeds that may mature at different times and so produce tendencies to engage in this or that action.  ALAYA-VIJÑANA. P.J.G. Vasubandhu (fourth–fifth century A.D.), Indian philosopher, a Mahayana Buddhist of the Yogacara or Sarvastivada school. He wrote the Abhidharmakosá (“Treasure Chber of the Abhidharma,” the Abhidharma being a compilation of Buddhist philosophy and psychology) and the Vimcatika (“Proof in Twenty Verses That Everything Is Only Conception”). He held that the mind is only a stre of ideas and that there is nothing non-mental. In contrast to Buddhist direct and representational realists, he argued that dre experience seems to be of objects located in space and existing independent of the dreer without their actually doing so. 

Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers de (1715–47), French army officer and secular moralist. Discovering Plutarch at an early age, he critically adopted Stoic idealism. Poverty-stricken, obscure, and solitary, he was bitious for glory. Though eventful, his military career brought little reward. In poor health, he resigned in 1744 to write. In 1747, he published Introduction to the Knowledge of the Human Mind, followed by Reflections and Maxims. Voltaire and Mirabeau praised his vigorous and eclectic thought, which aimed at teaching people how to live. Vauvenargues was a deist and an optimist who equally rejected Bossuet’s Christian pessimism and La Rochefoucauld’s secular pessimism. He asserted human freedom and natural goodness, but denied social and political equality. A lover of martial virtues and noble passions, Vauvenargues crafted memVardhana Jnatrputra Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers de 951   951 orable maxims and excelled in character depiction. His complete works were published in 1862. 

Vázquez, Gabriel (1549–1604), Spanish Jesuit theologian and philosopher. Born in Villaescusa de Haro, he studied at Alcalá de Henares and taught at Ocaña, Madrid, Alcalá, and Rome. He was a prolific writer; his philosophically most important work is a commentary on Aquinas’s Summa theologiae. Vázquez was strongly influenced by Aquinas, but he differed from him in important ways and showed marked leanings toward Augustine. He rejected the Thomistic doctrine of the real distinction between essence and existence and the position that matter designated by quantity (materia signata quantitate) is the principle of individuation. Instead of Aquinas’s five ways for proving the existence of God, he favored a version of the moral argument similar to the one later used by Kant and also favored the teleological argument. Following Augustine, he described the union of body and soul as a union of two parts. Finally, Vázquez modified the doctrine of formal and objective concepts present in Toletus and Suárez in a way that facilitated the development of idealism in early modern philosophy. He accomplished this by identifying the actual being (esse) of the thing that is known (conceptus objectivus) with the act (conceptus formalis) whereby it is known. 

Vedanta, also called Uttara Mimsa (‘the end of the Vedas’), the most influential of the six orthodox schools of Hinduism. Much of the philosophical content of other schools has been taken up into it. It claims to present the correct interpretation of the Vedas and Upanishads, along with the Bhagavad Gita, sacred texts within Indian culture. Much of the dispute over these texts is religious as well as philosophical in nature; it concerns whether or not they are best read theistically or monistically. To read these texts theistically is to see them as teaching the existence of an omnipotent and omniscient personal Brahman, who in sport (not out of need, but not without moral seriousness) everlastingly sustains the material world and conscious selves in existence; the ultimate good of the conscious selves then consists in being rightly related to Brahman. To read these texts monistically is to see them as teaching the existence of a qualityless ineffable Brahman who appears to the unenlightened to be manifested in a multiplicity of bodies and minds and in a personal deity; critics naturally ask to whom such an appearance appears. Two great thinkers in the theistic Vedantic tradition are Ranuja (traditional dates: 1017– 1137) and Madhva (b.1238). Shankara (788– 820?) represents Advaita Vedanta (‘Advaita’ meaning ‘non-dual’) and defends the view that the sacred texts ought to be read monistically; his view is often compared to the absolute idealism embraced by Bradley; for Shankara what appears as a pluralistic world is really a seless unity. Madhva is a leading proponent of Dvaita Vedanta, an uncompromisingly theistic reading of the se texts; for him, what appears as a pluralistic world is a pluralistic world that exists distinct from, though dependent on, Brahman. Ranuja is a leading exponent of Visistadvaita Vedanta, often called “qualified non-dualism” because Ranuja, in contrast to Madhva, views the pluralistic world that appears as the body of Brahman but, in contrast to Shankara, views that body as real and distinct from Brahman conceived as an omnicompetent person. 

Vedas, the earliest Hindu sacred texts. ‘Veda’ literally means a text that contains knowledge, in particular sacred knowledge concerning the nature of ultimate reality and the proper human ways of relating thereto. Passed down orally and then composed over a millennium beginning around 1400 B.C., there are four collections of Vedas: the Rg Veda (1,028 sacred songs of praise with some cosmological speculations), the Sa Veda (chants to accompany sacrifices), Yajur Veda (sacrificial formulas and mantras), and Atharva Veda (magical formulas, myths, and legends). The term ‘Veda’ also applies to the Brahmanas (ritual and theological commentaries on the prior Vedas); the Aranyakas(mainly composed by men who have passed through their householder stage of life and retired to the forest to meditate), and the Upanishads, which more fully reflect the idea of theoretical sacred knowledge, while the early Vedas are more practice-oriented, concerned with ritual and sacrifice. All these texts are regarded as scripture (sruti), “heard” in an oral tradition believed to be handed down by sages by whom their content was “seen.” The content is held to express a timeless and uncreated wisdom produced by neither God nor human. It contains material ranging from instructions concerning the proper sacriVázquez, Gabriel Vedas 952   952 fices to make and how to make them properly, through hymns and mantras, to accounts of the nature of Brahman, humankind, and the cosmos. Sruti contrasts with smrti (tradition), which is humanly produced commentary on scripture. The Bhagavad Gita, perhaps strictly smrti, typically has the de facto status of sruti. K.E.Y. veil of ignorance.RAWLS. velleity.VOLITION. Venn diagr, a logic diagr invented by the logician John Venn in which standard form statements (the four kinds listed below) are represented by two appropriately marked overlapping circles, as follows: Syllogisms are represented by three overlapping circles, as in the exples below. If a few simple rules are followed, e.g. “diagr universal premises first,” then in a valid syllogism diagrming the premises automatically gives a diagr in which the conclusion is represented. In an invalid syllogism diagrming the premises does not automatically give a diagr in which the conclusion is represented, as below. Venn diagrs are less perspicuous for the beginner than Euler diagrs.  EULER DIAGR, SYLLOGISM. R.P.

verificationism, a metaphysical theory about what determines meaning: the meaning of a statement consists in its method(s) of verification. Verificationism thus differs radically from the account that identifies meaning with truth conditions, as is implicit in Frege’s work and explicit in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and throughout the writings of Davidson. On Davidson’s theory, e.g., the crucial notions for a theory of meaning are truth and falsity. Contemporary verificationists, under the influence of the Oxford philosopher Michael Dummett, propose what they see as a constraint on the concept of truth rather than a criterion of meaningfulness. No foundational place is generally assigned in modern verificationist semantics to corroboration by observation statements; and modern verificationism is not reductionist. Thus, many philosophers read Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” as rejecting verificationism. This is because they fail to notice an important distinction. What Quine rejects is not verificationism but “reductionism,” nely, the theory that there is, for each statement, a corresponding range of verifying conditions determinable a priori. Reductionism is inherently localist with regard to verification; whereas verificationism, as such, is neutral on whether verification is holistic. And, lastly, modern verificationism is, veil of ignorance verificationism 953   953 whereas traditional verificationism never was, connected with revisionism in the philosophy of logic and mathematics (e.g., rejecting the principle of bivalence).  LOGICAL POSITIVISM, MEANING, PRINCIPLE OF VERIFIABILITY, VIENNA CIRCLE. E.L.

Verstehen (German, ‘understanding’, ‘interpretation’), a method in the human sciences that aims at reconstructing meanings from the “agent’s point of view.” Such a method makes primary how agents understand themselves, as, e.g., when cultural anthropologists try to understand symbols and practices from the “native’s point of view.” Understanding in this sense is often contrasted with explanation, or Erklärung. Whereas explanations discover causes in light of general laws and take an external perspective, understanding aims at explicating the meaning that, from an internal perspective, an action or expression has for the actor. This distinction often is the basis for a further methodological and ontological distinction between the natural and the human sciences, the Natur- and the Geisteswissenschaften. Whereas the data of the natural sciences may be theory-dependent and in that sense interpretive, the human sciences are “doubly” interpretive; they try to interpret the interpretations that human subjects give to their actions and practices. The human sciences do not aim at explaining events but at understanding meanings, texts, and text analogues. Actions, artifacts, and social relations are all like texts in that they have a significance for and by human subjects. The method of Verstehen thus denies the “unity of science” thesis typical of accounts of explanation given by empiricists and positivists. However, other philosophers such as Weber argue against such a dichotomy and assert that the social sciences in particular must incorporate features of both explanation and understanding, and psychoanalysis and theories of ideology unify both approaches. Even ong proponents of this method, the precise nature of interpretation remains controversial. While Dilthey and other neo-Kantians proposed that Verstehen is the imaginative reexperiencing of the subjective point of view of the actor, Wittgenstein and his following propose a sharp distinction between reasons and causes and understand reasons in terms of relating an action to the relevant rules or norms that it follows. In both cases, the aim of the human sciences is to understand what the text or text analogue really means for the agent. Following Heidegger, recent German hermeneutics argues that Verstehen does not refer to special disciplinary techniques nor to merely cognitive and theoretical achievements, but to the practical mode of all human existence, its situatedness in a world that projects various possibilities. All understanding then becomes interpretation, itself a universal feature of all human activity, including the natural sciences. The criteria of success in Verstehen also remain disputed, particularly since many philosophers deny that it constitutes a method. If all understanding is interpretation, then there are no presuppositionless, neutral data that can put them to an empirical test. Verstehen is therefore not a method but an event, in which there is a “fusion of horizons” between text and interpreter. Whether criteria such as coherence, the capacity to engage in a tradition, or increasing dialogue apply depends on the type, purpose, and context of various interpretations.  DILTHEY, EXPLANATION, HEIDEGGER, HERMENEUTICS, UNITY OF SCIENCE. J.Bo. verum.Appendix of Special Symbols.

vicious regress, regress that is in some way unacceptable, where a regress is an infinite series of items each of which is in some sense dependent on a prior item of a similar sort, e.g. an infinite series of events each of which is caused by the next prior event in the series. Reasons for holding a regress to be vicious might be that it is either impossible or that its existence is inconsistent with things known to be true. The claim that something would lead to a vicious regress is often made as part of a reductio ad absurdum argument strategy. An exple of this can be found in Aquinas’s argument for the existence of an uncaused cause on the ground that an infinite regress of causes is vicious. Those responding to the argument have sometimes contended that this regress is not in fact vicious and hence that the argument fails. A more convincing exple of a regress is generated by the principle that one’s coming to know the meaning of a word must always be based on a prior understanding of other words. If this principle is correct, then one can know the meaning of a word w1 only on the basis of previously understanding the meanings of other words (w2 and w3). But a further application of the principle yields the result that one can understand these words (w2 and w3) only on the basis of understanding still other words. This leads to an infinite regress. Since no one understands any words at birth, the regress implies that no one ever comes to understand any words. But this is clearly false. Since the existence of this regress is inconsistent with an obvious truth, we may conclude that the regress is vicious and consequently that the principle that generates it is false.  EPISTEMIC REGRESS ARGUMENT, REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM.

Vico, Philosopher who founded modern philosophy of history, philosophy of culture, and philosophy of mythology. He was born and lived all his life in or near Naples, where he taught eloquence. The Inquisition was a force in Naples throughout Vico’s lifetime. A turning point in his career was his loss of the concourse for a chair of civil law (1723). Although a disappointment and an injustice, it enabled him to produce his major philosophical work. He was appointed royal historiographer by Charles of Bourbon. Vico’s major work is “La scienza nuova”  completely revised in a second, definitive version in 1730. In the 1720s, he published three connected works in Latin on jurisprudence, under the title Universal Law; one contains a sketch of his conception of a “new science” of the historical life of nations. Vico’s principal works preceding this are On the Study Methods of Our Time (1709), comparing the ancients with the moderns regarding human education, and On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians (1710), attacking the Cartesian conception of metaphysics. His Autobiography inaugurates the conception of modern intellectual autobiography. Basic to Vico’s philosophy is his principle that “the true is the made” (“verum ipsum factum”), that what is true is convertible with what is made. This principle is central in his conception of “science” (scientia, scienza). A science is possible only for those subjects in which such a conversion is possible. There can be a science of mathematics, since mathematical truths are such because we make them. Analogously, there can be a science of the civil world of the historical life of nations. Since we make the things of the civil world, it is possible for us to have a science of them. As the makers of our own world, like God as the maker who makes by knowing and knows by making, we can have knowledge per caussas (through causes, from within). In the natural sciences we can have only conscientia (a kind of “consciousness”), not scientia, because things in nature are not made by the knower. Vico’s “new science” is a science of the principles whereby “men make history”; it is also a demonstration of “what providence has wrought in history.” All nations rise and fall in cycles within history (corsi e ricorsi) in a pattern governed by providence. The world of nations or, in the Augustinian phrase Vico uses, “the great city of the human race,” exhibits a pattern of three ages of “ideal eternal history” (storia ideale eterna). Every nation passes through an age of gods (when people think in terms of gods), an age of heroes (when all virtues and institutions are formed through the personalities of heroes), and an age of humans (when all sense of the divine is lost, life becomes luxurious and false, and thought becomes abstract and ineffective); then the cycle must begin again. In the first two ages all life and thought are governed by the primordial power of “imagination” (fantasia) and the world is ordered through the power of humans to form experience in terms of “imaginative universals” (universali fantastici). These two ages are governed by “poetic wisdom” (sapienza poetica). At the basis of Vico’s conception of history, society, and knowledge is a conception of mythical thought as the origin of the human world. Fantasia is the original power of the human mind through which the true and the made are converted to create the myths and gods that are at the basis of any cycle of history. Michelet was the primary supporter of Vico’s ideas in the nineteenth century; he made them the basis of his own philosophy of history. Coleridge is the principal disseminator of Vico’s views in England. Jes Joyce used the New Science as a substructure for Finnegans Wake, making plays on Vico’s ne, beginning with one in Latin in the first sentence: “by a commodius vicus of recirculation.” Croce revives Vico’s philosophical thought, wishing to conceive Vico as the Italian Hegel. Vico’s ideas have been the subject of analysis by such prominent philosophical thinkers as Horkheimer and Berlin, by anthropologists such as Edmund Leach, and by literary critics such as René Wellek and Herbert Read. 

Vienna Circle – vide ayerism -- a group of philosophers and scientists who met periodically for discussions in Vienna from 1922 to 1938 and who proposed a self-consciously revolutionary conception of scientific knowledge. The Circle was initiated by the mathematician Hans Hahn to continue a prewar forum with the physicist Philip Frank and the social scientist Otto Neurath after the arrival in Vienna of Moritz Schlick, a philosopher who had studied with Max Planck. Carnap joined in 1926 (from 1931 in Prague); other members included Herbert Feigl (from 1930 in Iowa), Friedrich Waismann, Bergmann, Viktor Kraft, and Bela von Juhos. Viennese associates of the Circle included Kurt Gödel, Karl Menger, Felix Kaufmann, and Edgar Zilsel. (Popper was not a member or associate.) During its formative period the Circle’s activities were confined to discussion meetings (many on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus). In 1929 the Circle entered its public period with the formation of the Verein Ernst Mach, the publication of its manifesto Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung: Der Wiener Kreis by Carnap, Hahn, and Neurath (translated in Neurath, Empiricism and Sociology, 1973), and the first of a series of philosophical monographs edited by Frank and Schlick. It also began collaboration with the independent but broadly like-minded Berlin “Society of Empirical Philosophy,” including Reichenbach, Kurt Grelling, Kurt Lewin, Friedrich Kraus, Walter Dubislav, Hempel, and Richard von Mises: the groups together organized their first public conferences in Prague and Königsberg, acquired editorship of a philosophical journal rened Erkenntnis, and later organized the international Unity of Science congresses. The death and dispersion of key members from 1934 onward (Hahn died in 1934, Neurath left for Holland in 1934, Carnap left for the United States in 1935, Schlick died in 1936) did not mean the extinction of Vienna Circle philosophy. Through the subsequent work of earlier visitors (Ayer, Ernest Nagel, Quine) and members and collaborators who emigrated to the United States (Carnap, Feigl, Frank, Hempel, and Reichenbach), the logical positivism of the Circle (Reichenbach and Neurath independently preferred “logical empiricism”) strongly influenced the development of analytic philosophy. The Circle’s discussions concerned the philosophy of formal and physical science, and even though their individual publications ranged much wider, it is the attitude toward science that defines the Circle within the philosophical movements of central Europe at the time. The Circle rejected the need for a specifically philosophical epistemology that bestowed justification on knowledge claims from beyond science itself. In this, the Circle may also have drawn on a distinct Austrian tradition (a thesis of its historian Neurath): in most of Germany, science and philosophy had parted ways during the nineteenth century. Starting with Helmholtz, of course, there also arose a movement that sought to distinguish the scientific respectability of the Kantian tradition from the speculations of German idealism, yet after 1880 neo-Kantians insisted on the autonomy of epistemology, disparaging earlier fellow travelers as “positivist.” Yet the progr of reducing the knowledge claim of science and providing legitimations to what’s left found wide favor with the more empirical-minded like Mach. Comprehensive description, not explanation, of natural phenomena bece the task for theorists who no longer looked to philosophy for foundations, but found them in the utility of their preferred empirical procedures. Along with the positivists, the Vienna Circle thought uneconomical the Kantian answer to the question of the possibility of objectivity, the synthetic a priori. Moreover, the Vienna Circle and its conventionalist precursors Poincaré and Duhem saw them contradicted by the results of formal science. Riemann’s geometries showed that questions about the geometry of physical space were open to more than one answer: Was physical space Euclidean or non-Euclidean? It fell to Einstein and the pre-Circle Schlick (Space and Time in Contemporary Physics, 1917) to argue that relativity theory showed the untenability of Kant’s conception of space and time as forever fixed synthetic a priori forms of intuition. Yet Frege’s anti-psychologistic critique had also shown empiricism unable to account for knowledge of arithmetic and the conventionalists had ended the positivist dre of a theory of experiential elements that bridged the gap between descriptions of fact and general principles of science. How, then, could the Vienna Circle defend the claim – under attack as just one worldview ong others – that science provides knowledge? The Circle confronted the problem of constitutive conventions. As befitted their self-image beyond Kant and Mach, they found their paraVienna Circle Vienna Circle 956   956 digmatic answer in the theory of relativity: they thought that irreducible conventions of measurement with wide-ranging implications were sharply separable from pure facts like point coincidences. Empirical theories were viewed as logical structures of statements freely created, yet accountable to experiential input via their predictive consequences identifiable by observation. The Vienna Circle defended empiricism by the reconceptualization of the relation between a priori and a posteriori inquiries. First, in a manner sympathetic to Frege’s and Russell’s doctrine of logicism and guided by Wittgenstein’s notion of tautology, arithmetic was considered a part of logic and treated as entirely analytical, without any empirical content; its truth was held to be exhausted by what is provable from the premises and rules of a formal symbolic system. (Carnap’s Logical Syntax of Language, 1934, assimilated Gödel’s incompleteness result by claiming that not every such proof could be demonstrated in those systems themselves which are powerful enough to represent classical arithmetic.) The synthetic a priori was not needed for formal science because all of its results were non-synthetic. Second, the Circle adopted verificationism: supposedly empirical concepts whose applicability was indiscernible were excluded from science. The terms for unobservables were to be reconstructed by logical operations from the observational terms. Only if such reconstructions were provided did the more theoretical parts of science retain their empirical character. (Just what kind of reduction was aimed for was not always clear and earlier radical positions were gradually weakened; Reichenbach instead considered the relation between observational and theoretical statements to be probabilistic.) Empirical science needed no synthetic a priori either; all of its statements were a posteriori. Combined with the view that the analysis of the logical form of expressions allowed for the exact determination of their combinatorial value, verificationism was to exhibit the knowledge claims of science and eliminate metaphysics. Whatever meaning did not survive identification with the scientific was deemed irrelevant to knowledge claims (Reichenbach did not share this view either). Since the Circle also observed the then long-discussed ban on issuing unconditional value statements in science, its metaethical positions may be broadly characterized as endorsing noncognitivism. Its members were not simply emotivists, however, holding that value judgments were mere expressions of feeling, but sought to distinguish the factual and evaluative contents of value judgments. Those who, like Schlick (Questions of Ethics, 1930), engaged in metaethics, distinguished the expressive component (x desires y) of value judgments from their implied descriptive component (doing zfurthers aim y) and held that the demand inherent in moral principles possessed validity if the implied description was true and the expressed desire was endorsed. This analysis of normative concepts did not render them meaningless but allowed for psychological and sociological studies of ethical systems; Menger’s formal variant (Morality, Decision and Social Organization, 1934) proved influential for decision theory. The semiotic view that knowledge required structured representations was developed in close contact with foundational research in mathematics and depended on the “new” logic of Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein, out of which quantification theory was emerging. Major new results were quickly integrated (albeit controversially) and Carnap’s works reflect the development of the conception of logic itself. In his Logical Syntax he adopted the “Principle of Tolerance” vis-à-vis the question of the foundation of the formal sciences: the choice of logics (and languages) was conventional and constrained, apart from the demand for consistency, only by pragmatic considerations. The proposed language form and its difference from alternatives simply had to be stated as exactly as possible: whether a logico-linguistic frework as a whole correctly represented reality was a cognitively meaningless question. Yet what was the status of the verifiability principle? Carnap’s suggestion that it represents not a discovery but a proposal for future scientific language use deserves to be taken seriously, for it not only characterizes his own conventionalism, but also plifies the Circle’s linguistic turn, according to which all philosophy concerned ways of representing, rather than the nature of the represented. What the Vienna Circle “discovered” was how much of science was conventional: its verificationism was a proposal for accommodating the creativity of scientific theorizing without accommodating idealism. Whether an empirical claim in order to be meaningful needed to be actually verified or only potentially verifiable, or fallible or only potentially testable, and whether so by current or only by future means, bece matters of discussion during the 1930s. Equally important for the question whether the Circle’s conventionalism avoided idealism and metaphysics were the issues of the status of theoretical discourse about Vienna Circle Vienna Circle 957   957 unobservables and the nature of science’s empirical foundation. The view suggested in Schlick’s early General Theory of Knowledge (1918, 2d. ed. 1925) and Frank’s The Causal Law and its Limitations (1932) and elaborated in Carnap’s “Logical Foundations of the Unity of Science” (in Foundations of the Unity of Science I.1, 1938) characterized the theoretical language as an uninterpreted calculus that is related to the fully interpreted observational language only by partial definitions. Did such an instrumentalism require for its empirical anchor the sharp separation of observational from theoretical terms? Could such a separation even be maintained? Consider the unity of science thesis. According to the methodological version, endorsed by all members, all of science abides by the se criteria: no basic methodological differences separate the natural from the social or cultural sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) as claimed by those who distinguish between ‘explanation’ and ‘understanding’. According to the metalinguistic version, all objects of scientific knowledge could in principle be comprehended by the se “universal” language. Physicalism asserts that this is the language that speaks of physical objects. While everybody in the Circle endorsed physicalism in this sense, the understanding of its importance varied, as bece clear in the socalled protocol sentence debate. (The nomological version of the unity thesis was only later clearly distinguished: whether all scientific laws could be reduced to those of physics was another matter on which Neurath ce to differ.) Ostensively, this debate concerned the question of the form, content, and epistemological status of scientific evidence statements. Schlick’s unrevisable “affirmations” talked about phenomenal states in statements not themselves part of the language of science (“The Foundation of Knowledge,” 1934, translated in Ayer, ed., Logical Positivism). Carnap’s preference changed from unrevisable statements in a primitive methodologically solipsistic protocol language that were fallibly translatable into the physicalistic system language (1931; see Unity of Science, 1934), via arbitrary revisable statements of that system language that are taken as temporary resting points in testing (1932), to revisable statements in the scientific observation language (1935; see “Testability and Meaning,” Philosophy of Science, 1936–37). These changes were partly prompted by Neurath, whose own revisable “protocol statements” spoke, ongst other matters, of the relation between observers and the observed in a “universal slang” that mixed expressions of the physicalistically cleansed colloquial and the high scientific languages (“Protocol Statements,” 1932, translated in Ayer, ed., Logical Positivism). Ultimately, these proposals answered to different projects. Since all agreed that all statements of science were hypothetical, the questions of their “foundation” concerned rather the very nature of Vienna Circle philosophy. For Schlick philosophy bece the activity of meaning determination (inspired by Wittgenstein); Carnap pursued it as the rational reconstruction of knowledge claims concerned only with what Reichenbach called the “context of justification” (its logical aspects, not the “context of discovery”); and Neurath replaced philosophy altogether with a naturalistic, interdisciplinary, empirical inquiry into science as a distinctive discursive practice, precluding the orthodox conception of the unity of science. The Vienna Circle was neither a monolithic nor a necessarily reductionist philosophical movement, and quick assimilation to the tradition of British empiricism mistakes its struggles with the form–content dichotomy for foundationalism, when instead sophisticated responses to the question of the presuppositions of their own theories of knowledge were being developed. In its time and place, the Circle was a minority voice; the sociopolitical dimension of its theories – stressed more by some (Neurath) than others (Schlick) – as a renewal of Enlightenment thought, ultimately against the rising tide of Blutund-Boden metaphysics, is gaining recognition. After the celebrated “death” of reductionist logical positivism in the 1960s the historical Vienna Circle is reemerging as a multifaceted object of the history of analytical philosophy itself, revealing in nuce different strands of reasoning still significant for postpositivist theory of science.  MEANING, OPERATIONALISM, PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE, REDUCTION, UNITY OF SCIENCE. T.U.

Vijñanavada, an idealist school of Buddhist thought in India in the fourth century A.D. It engaged in lively debates on important epistemological and metaphysical issues with the Buddhist Madhyika school (known for its relativistic and nihilistic views), with Buddhist realist schools, and with various Hindu philosophical systems of its time. Madhyika philosophy used effective dialectic to show the contradictions in our everyday philosophical notions such as cause, substance, self, etc., but the Vijñanavada school, while agreeing with the Madhyikas on this point, went further and Vijñanavada Vijñanavada 958   958 gave innovative explanations regarding the origin and the status of our mental constructions and of the mind itself. Unlike the Madhyikas, who held that reality is “emptiness” (sunyata), the Vijñanavadins held that the reality is consciousness or the mind (vijñana). The Vijñanavada school is also known as Yogacara. Its idealism is remarkably similar to the subjective idealism of Berkeley. Consistent with the process ontology of all the Buddhist schools in India, Vijñanavadins held that consciousness or the mind is not a substance but an ever-changing stre of ideas or impressions.  BUDDHISM. D.K.C. vijñapti, Indian Buddhist term meaning ‘representation’, used by some philosophers as a label for a mental event that appears, phenomenally, to have an intentional object and to represent or communicate to its possessor some information about extrental reality. The term was used mostly by Buddhists with idealist tendencies who claimed that there is nothing but representation, nothing but communicative mental events, and that a complete account of human experience can be given without postulating the existence of anything extrental. This view was not uncontroversial, and in defending it Indian Buddhists developed arguments that are in important ways analogous to those constructed by Western idealists.

violence, (1) the use of force to cause physical harm, death, or destruction (physical violence); (2) the causing of severe mental or emotional harm, as through humiliation, deprivation, or brainwashing, whether using force or not (psychological violence); (3) more broadly, profaning, desecrating, defiling, or showing disrespect for (i.e., “doing violence” to) something valued, sacred, or cherished; (4) extreme physical force in the natural world, as in tornados, hurricanes, and earthquakes. Physical violence may be directed against persons, animals, or property. In the first two cases, harm, pain, suffering, and death figure prominently; in the third, illegality or illegitimacy (the forceful destruction of property is typically considered violence when it lacks authorization). Psychological violence applies principally to persons. It may be understood as the violation of beings worthy of respect. But it can apply to higher animals as well (as in the daging mental effects of some experimentation, e.g., involving isolation and deprivation). Environmentalists sometimes speak of violence against the environment, implying both destruction and disrespect for the natural world. Sometimes the concept of violence is used to characterize acts or practices of which one morally disapproves. To this extent it has a normative force. But this prejudges whether violence is wrong. One may, on the other hand, regard inflicting harm or death as only prima facie wrong (i.e., wrong all other things being equal). This gives violence a normative character, establishing its prima facie wrongness. But it leaves open the ultimate moral justifiability of its use. Established practices of physical or psychological violence – e.g., war, capital punishment – constitute institutionalized violence. So do illegal or extralegal practices like vigilantism, torture, and state terrorism (e.g., death squads). Anarchists sometimes regard the courts, prisons, and police essential to maintaining the state as violence. Racism and sexism may be considered institutional violence owing to their associated psychological as well as physical violence.  NONVIOLENCE. R.L.H. vipassana (Pali, ‘insight’, ‘discernment’), Indian Buddhist term used to describe both a particular kind of meditational practice and the states of consciousness produced by it. The meditational practice is aimed at getting the practitioner to perceive and cognize in accord with the major categories of Buddhist metaphysics. Since that metaphysics is constitutively deconstructive, being concerned with parts rather than wholes, the method too is analytic and deconstructive. The practitioner is encouraged to analyze the perceived solidities and continuities of her everyday experience into transitory events, and so to cultivate the perception of such events until she experiences the world no longer in terms of medium-sized physical objects that endure through time, but solely in terms of transitory events. Arriving at such a condition is called the attainment of vipassana. P.J.G. virtù.CLASSICAL REPUBLICANISM, MACHIAVELLI. virtue, epistemic.VIRTUE EPISTEMOLOGY.

virtue epistemology, the subfield of epistemology that takes epistemic virtue to be central to understanding justification or knowledge or both. An epistemic virtue is a personal quality conducive to the discovery of truth, the avoidance of error, or some other intellectually valuable goal. Following Aristotle, we should distinguish these virtues from such qualities as wisdom or good judgment, which are the intellectual basis of practical – but not necessarily intellectual – success. The importance, and to an extent, the very definition, of this notion depends, however, on larger issues of epistemology. For those who favor a naturalist conception of knowledge (say, as belief formed in a “reliable” way), there is reason to call any truth-conducive quality or properly working cognitive mechanism an epistemic virtue. There is no particular reason to limit the epistemic virtues to recognizable personal qualities: a high mathematical aptitude may count as an epistemic virtue. For those who favor a more “normative” conception of knowledge, the corresponding notion of an epistemic virtue (or vice) will be narrower: it will be tied to personal qualities (like impartiality or carelessness) whose exercise one would associate with an ethics of belief.  RELIABILISM, VIRTUE ETHICS.

virtue ethics, also called virtue-based ethics and agent-based ethics, conceptions or theories of morality in which virtues play a central or independent role. Thus, it is more than simply the account of the virtues offered by a given theory. Some take the principal claim of virtue ethics to be about the moral subject – that, in living her life, she should focus her attention on the cultivation of her (or others’) virtues. Others take the principal claim to be about the moral theorist – that, in mapping the structure of our moral thought, she should concentrate on the virtues. This latter view can be construed weakly as holding that the moral virtues are no less basic than other moral concepts. In this type of virtue ethics, virtues are independent of other moral concepts in that claims about morally virtuous character or action are, in the main, neither reducible to nor justified on the basis of underlying claims about moral duty or rights, or about what is impersonally valuable. It can also be construed strongly as holding that the moral virtues are more basic than other moral concepts. In such a virtue ethics, virtues are fundental, i.e., claims about other moral concepts are either reducible to underlying claims about moral virtues or justified on their basis. Forms of virtue ethics predominated in Western philosophy before the Renaissance, most notably in Aristotle, but also in Plato and Aquinas. Several ancient and medieval philosophers endorsed strong versions of virtue ethics. These views focused on character rather than on discrete behavior, identifying illicit behavior with vicious behavior, i.e., conduct that would be seriously out of character for a virtuous person. A virtuous person, in turn, was defined as one with dispositions relevantly linked to human flourishing. On these views, while a person of good character, or someone who carefully observes her, may be able to articulate certain principles or rules by which she guides her conduct (or to which, at least, it outwardly conforms), the principles are not an ultimate source of moral justification. On the contrary, they are justified only insofar as the conduct they endorse would be in character for a virtuous person. For Aristotle, the connection between flourishing and virtue seems conceptual. (He conceived moral virtues as dispositions to choose under the proper guidance of reason, and defined a flourishing life as one lived in accordance with these virtues.) While most accounts of the virtues link them to the flourishing of the virtuous person, there are other possibilities. In principle, the flourishing to which virtue is tied (whether causally or conceptually) may be either that of the virtuous subject herself, or that of some patient who is a recipient of her virtuous behavior, or that of some larger affected group – the agent’s community, perhaps, or all humanity, or even sentient life in general. For the philosophers of ancient Greece, it was human nature, usually conceived teleologically, that fixed the content of this flourishing. Medieval Christian writers reinterpreted this, stipulating both that the flourishing life to which the virtues lead extends past death, and that human flourishing is not merely the fulfillment of capacities and tendencies inherent in human nature, but is the realization of a divine plan. In late twentieth-century versions of virtue ethics, some theorists have suggested that it is neither to a teleology inherent in human nature nor to the divine will that we should look in determining the content of that flourishing to which the virtues lead. They understand flourishing more as a matter of a person’s living a life that meets the standards of her cultural, historical tradition. In his most general characterization, Aristotle called a thing’s virtues those features of it that made it and its operation good. The moral virtues were what made people live well. This use of ‘making’ is biguous. Where he and other premodern thinkers thought the connection between virtues and living well to be conceptual, moral theorists of the modernist era have usually virtue ethics virtue ethics understood it causally. They commonly maintain that a virtue is a character trait that disposes a person to do what can be independently identified as morally required or to effect what is best (best for herself, according to some theories; best for others, according to different ones). Benjin Franklin, e.g., deemed it virtuous for a person to be frugal, because he thought frugality was likely to result in her having a less troubled life. On views of this sort, a lively concern for the welfare of others has moral importance only inasmuch as it tends to motivate people actually to perform helpful actions. In short, benevolence is a virtue because it conduces to beneficent conduct; veracity, because it conduces to truth telling; fidelity, because it conduces to promise keeping; and so on. Reacting to this aspect of modernist philosophy, recent proponents of virtue ethics deny that moral virtues derive from prior determinations of what actions are right or of what states of affairs are best. Some, especially certain theorists of liberalism, assign virtues to what they see as one compartment of moral thought and duties to a separate, and only loosely connected compartment. For them, the life (and theory) of virtue is autonomous. They hold that virtues and duties have independent sources of justification, with virtues chiefly concerned with the individual’s personal “ideals,” self-image, or conception of her life goals, while duties and rights are thought to derive from social rules regulating interpersonal dealings. Proponents of virtue ethics maintain that it has certain advantages over more modern alternatives. They argue that virtue ethics is properly concrete, because it grounds morality in facts about human nature or about the concrete development of particular cultural traditions, in contrast with modernist attempts to ground morality in subjective preference or in abstract principles of reason. They also claim that virtue ethics is truer to human psychology in concentrating on the less conscious aspects of motivation – on relatively stable dispositions, habits, and long-term goals, for exple – where modern ethics focuses on decision making directed by principles and rules. Virtue ethics, some say, offers a more unified and comprehensive conception of moral life, one that extends beyond actions to comprise wants, goals, likes and dislikes, and, in general, what sort of person one is and aims to be. Proponents of virtue ethics also contend that, without the sensitivity and appreciation of their situation and its opportunities that only virtues consistently make available, agents cannot properly apply the rules that modernist ethical theories offer to guide their actions. Nor, in their view, will the agent follow those rules unless her virtues offer her sufficient clarity of purpose and perseverance against temptation. Several objections have been raised against virtue ethics in its most recent forms. Critics contend that it is antiquarian, because it relies on conceptions of human nature whose teleology renders them obsolete; circular, because it allegedly defines right action in terms of virtues while defining virtues in terms of right action; arbitrary and irrelevant to modern society, since there is today no accepted standard either of what constitutes human flourishing or of which dispositions lead to it; of no practical use, because it offers no guidance when virtues seem to conflict; egoistic, in that it ultimately directs the subject’s moral attention to herself rather than to others; and fatalistic, in allowing the morality of one’s behavior to hinge finally on luck in one’s constitution, upbringing, and opportunities. There may be versions of virtue ethics that escape the force of all or most of the objections, but not every form of virtue ethics can claim for itself all the advantages mentioned above.  AQUINAS, ARISTOTLE, ETHICS, PLATO. J.L.A.G. virtues, cardinal.CARDINAL VIRTUES. virtues, theological.AQUINAS.

Vishnu (from Sanskrit Vifpu), major Hindu god and Supreme Lord for his devotees, the Vaishpavites. Vaishpavite philosophers regard Vishnu as the referent of the term ‘Brahman’ in the Vedic texts. Later texts attempt a synthesis of Vishnu with two other deities into a trimurti (‘three forms’ of the Absolute), with Brahma as Creator, Vishnu as Preserver, and Siva as Destroyer. This relatively unpopular idea is used by modern thinkers to speak of these gods as three forms of the formless Absolute. Madhva and Ranuja regard Vishnu as the Highest Lord, possessed of infinite good qualities and superior to the qualityless Absolute of the nondualist thinkers. Vaishpavite thinkers identify Vishnu with the Purusa, the primeval, cosmic person, and Prajapati, Creator god, of the Vedas, and give him epithets that identify Vishnu with other representatives of a Supreme Being. He is Creator, Preserver, and Destroyer of the Universe. Vishnu is best known for the doctrine of avatar, his “descents” into the world in various virtues, cardinal forms to promote righteousness. Through this and the concept of vyuhas, aspects or fragments, Vaishpavites incorporated other deities, hero cults, and savior myths into their fold. He was a minor deity in the early Vedic literature, known for his “three strides” across the universe, which indicate that he pervades all. During the epic period (400 B.C.–A.D. 400), Vishnu bece one of the most popular gods in India, represented iconographically as dark-complexioned and holding a conch and discus. His consort is usually Laksmi and his vehicle the bird Garuda. 

Visistadvaita Vedanta, a form of Hinduism for which Brahman is an independently existing, omnipotent, omniscient personal deity. In creative, morally serious sport, Brahman everlastingly sustains in existence a world of both minds and physical things, these together being the body of Brahman in the sense that Brahman can act on any part of the world without first acting on some other part and that the world manifests (though in some ways it also hides) Brahman’s nature. In response to repentance and trust, Brahman will forgive one’s sins and bring one into a gracious relationship that ends the cycle of rebirths.  HINDUISM.

vitalism.PHILOSOPHY OF BIOLOGY. vital lie, (1) an instance of self-deception (or lying to oneself) when it fosters hope, confidence, self-esteem, mental health, or creativity; (2) any false belief or unjustified attitude that helps people cope with difficulties; (3) a lie to other people designed to promote their wellbeing. For exple, self-deceiving optimism about one’s prospects for success in work or personal relationships may generate hope, mobilize energy, enrich life’s meaning, and increase chances for success. Henrik Ibsen dratized “life-lies” as essential for happiness (The Wild Duck, 1884), and Eugene O’Neill portrayed “pipe dres” as necessary crutches (The Iceman Cometh, 1939). Nietzsche endorsed “pious illusions” or “holy fictions” about the past that liberate individuals and societies from she and guilt (On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, 1874). Schiller praised normal degrees of vanity and self-conceit because they support selfesteem (Problems of Belief, 1924).  BAD FAITH, FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS.  

Vitoria, Dominican jurist, political philosopher, and theologian who is regarded as the founder of modern international law. Born in Vitoria or Burgos, he studied and taught at the College of SaintJacques in Paris, where he met Erasmus and Vives. He also taught at the College of San Gregorio in Valladolid and at Salanca. His most fous works are the notes (relectiones) for twelve public addresses he delivered at Salanca, published posthumously in 1557. Two relectiones stand out: De Indis and De jure belli. They were responses to the legal and political issues raised by the discovery and colonization of erica. In contrast with Mariana’s contract Arianism, Vitoria held that political society is our natural state. The aim of the state is to promote the common good and preserve the rights of citizens. Citizenship is the result of birthplace (jus solis) rather than blood (jus sanguini). The authority of the state resides in the body politic but is transferred to rulers for its proper exercise. The best form of government is monarchy because it preserves the unity necessary for social action while safeguarding individual freedoms. Apart from the societies of individual states, humans belong to an international society. This society has its own authority and laws that establish the rights and duties of the states. These laws constitute the law of nations (jus gentium). J.J.E.G. Vives, Juan Luis (1492?–1540), Spanish humanist and teacher. Born in Valencia, he attended the University of Paris (1509–14) and lived most of his life in Flanders. With his friend Erasmus he prepared a widely used commentary (1522) of Augustine’s De civitate Dei. From 1523 to 1528 Vives visited England, taught at Oxford, befriended More, and bece Catherine of Aragon’s confidant. While in Paris, Vives repudiated medieval logic as useless (Adversus pseudodialecticos, 1520) and proposed instead a dialectic emphasizing resourceful reasoning and clear and persuasive exposition (De tradendis disciplinis, 1532). His method was partially inspired by Rudolph Agricola and probably influential upon Peter Rus. Less interested in theology than Erasmus or More, he surpassed both in philosophical depth. As one of the great pedagogues of his age, Vives proposed a plan of education that substituted the Aristotelian ideal of speculative certainty for a pragmatic probability capable of guiding action. Vives enlarged the scope of women’s education (De institutione feminae Christianae, 1524) and contributed to the teaching of classical Latin (Exercitatio linguae latinae, 1538). A chpion of EuroVisistadvaita Vedanta Vives, Juan Luis 962   962 pean unity against the Turks, he professed the belief that international order (De concordia, 1526) depended upon the control of passion (De anima et vita, 1538). As a social reformer, Vives pioneered the secularization of welfare (De subventione pauperum, 1526) and opposed the abuse of legal jargon (Aedes legum, 1520). Although his Jewish parents were victimized by the Inquisition, Vives remained a Catholic and managed to write an apology of Christianity without taking sides in controversial theological matters (De veritate fidei, 1543). C.G.Nore.

volition, cf. desideratum. a mental event involved with the initiation of action. ‘To will’ is sometimes taken to be the corresponding verb form of ‘volition’. The concept of volition is rooted in modern philosophy; contemporary philosophers have transformed it by identifying volitions with ordinary mental events, such as intentions, or beliefs plus desires. Volitions, especially in contemporary guises, are often taken to be complex mental events consisting of cognitive, affective, and conative elements. The conative element is the impetus – the underlying motivation – for the action. A velleity is a conative element insufficient by itself to initiate action. The will is a faculty, or set of abilities, that yields the mental events involved in initiating action. There are three primary theories about the role of volitions in action. The first is a reductive account in which action is identified with the entire causal sequence of the mental event (the volition) causing the bodily behavior. J. S. Mill, for exple, says: “Now what is action? Not one thing, but a series of two things: the state of mind called a volition, followed by an effect. . . . [T]he two together constitute the action” (Logic). Mary’s raising her arm is Mary’s mental state causing her arm to rise. Neither Mary’s volitional state nor her arm’s rising are themselves actions; rather, the entire causal sequence (the “causing”) is the action. The primary difficulty for this account is maintaining its reductive status. There is no way to delineate volition and the resultant bodily behavior without referring to action. There are two non-reductive accounts, one that identifies the action with the initiating volition and another that identifies the action with the effect of the volition. In the former, a volition is the action, and bodily movements are mere causal consequences. Berkeley advocates this view: “The Mind . . . is to be accounted active in . . . so far forth as volition is included. . . . In plucking this flower I  active, because I do it by the motion of my hand, which was consequent upon my volition” (Three Dialogues). In this century, Prichard is associated with this theory: “to act is really to will something” (Moral Obligation, 1949), where willing is sui generis (though at other places Prichard equates willing with the action of mentally setting oneself to do something). In this sense, a volition is an act of will. This account has come under attack by Ryle (Concept of Mind, 1949). Ryle argues that it leads to a vicious regress, in that to will to do something, one must will to will to do it, and so on. It has been countered that the regress collapses; there is nothing beyond willing that one must do in order to will. Another criticism of Ryle’s, which is more telling, is that ‘volition’ is an obscurantic term of art; “[volition] is an artificial concept. We have to study certain specialist theories in order to find out how it is to be manipulated. . . . [It is like] ‘phlogiston’ and ‘animal spirits’ . . . [which] have now no utility” (Concept of Mind). Another approach, the causal theory of action, identifies an action with the causal consequences of volition. Locke, e.g., says: “Volition or willing is an act of the mind directing its thought to the production of any action, and thereby exerting its power to produce it. . . . [V]olition is nothing but that particular determination of the mind, whereby . . . the mind endeavors to give rise, continuation, or stop, to any action which it takes to be in its power” (Essay concerning Human Understanding). This is a functional account, since an event is an action in virtue of its causal role. Mary’s arm rising is Mary’s action of raising her arm in virtue of being caused by her willing to raise it. If her arm’s rising had been caused by a nervous twitch, it would not be action, even if the bodily movements were photographically the se. In response to Ryle’s charge of obscurantism, contemporary causal theorists tend to identify volitions with ordinary mental events. For exple, Davidson takes the cause of actions to be beliefs plus desires and Wilfrid Sellars takes volitions to be intentions to do something here and now. Despite its plausibility, however, the causal theory faces two difficult problems: the first is purported counterexples based on wayward causal chains connecting the antecedent mental event and the bodily movements; the second is provision of an enlightening account of these mental events, e.g. intending, that does justice to the conative element.  ACTION THEORY, FREE WILL PROBLEM, PRACTICAL REASONING, WAYWARD CAUSAL CHAIN. M.B. volition volition

Voltaire, pen ne of François-Marie Arouet (1694–1778), French philosopher and writer who won early fe as a playwright and poet and later was an influential popularizer of Newtonian natural philosophy. His enduring reputation rests on his acerbically witty essays on religious and moral topics (especially the Philosophical Letters, 1734, and the Philosophical Dictionary, 1764), his brilliant stories, and his passionate polemics against the injustices of the ancien régime. In Whitehead’s phrase, he was more “a philosophe than a philosopher” in the current specialized disciplinary sense. He borrowed most of his views on metaphysics and epistemology from Locke, whose work, along with Newton’s, he ce to know and extravagantly admire during his stay (1726–28) in England. His is best placed in the line of great French literary moralists that includes Montaigne, Pascal, Diderot, and Cus. Voltaire’s position is skeptical, empirical, and humanistic. His skepticism is not of the radical sort that concerned Descartes. But he denies that we can find adequate support for the grand metaphysical claims of systematic philosophers, such as Leibniz, or for the dogmatic theology of institutional religions. Voltaire’s empiricism urges us to be content with the limited and fallible knowledge of our everyday experience and its development through the methods of empirical science. His humanism makes a plea, based on his empiricist skepticism, for religious and social tolerance: none of us can know enough to be justified in persecuting those who disagree with us on fundental philosophical and theological matters. Voltaire’s positive view is that our human condition, for all its flaws and perils, is meaningful and livable strictly in its own terms, quite apart from any connection to the threats and promises of dubious transcendental realms. Voltaire’s position is well illustrated by his views on religion. Although complex doctrines about the Trinity or the Incarnation strike him as gratuitous nonsense, he nonetheless is firmly convinced of the reality of a good God who enjoins us through our moral sense to love one another as brothers and sisters. Indeed, it is precisely this moral sense that he finds outraged by the intolerance of institutional Christianity. His deepest religious thinking concerns the problem of evil, which he treated in his “Poem of the Lisbon Earthquake” and the classic tales Zadig (1747) and Candide (1759). He rejects the Panglossian view (held by Candide’s Dr. Pangloss, a caricature of Leibniz) that we can see the hand of providence in our daily life but is prepared to acknowledge that an all-good God does not (as an extreme deism would hold) let his universe just blindly run. Whatever metaphysical truth there may be in the thought that “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds,” Voltaire insists that this idea is ludicrous as a practical response to evil and recommends instead concrete action to solve specific local problems: “We must cultivate our garden.” Voltaire was and remains an immensely controversial figure. Will Durant regarded him as “the greatest man who ever lived,” while Joseph de Maistre maintained that “admiration for Voltaire is an infallible sign of a corrupt soul.” Perhaps it is enough to say that he wrote with unequaled charm and wit and stood for values that are essential to, if perhaps not the very core of, our humanity.  

voluntarism, any philosophical view that makes our ability to control the phenomena in question an essential part of the correct understanding of those phenomena. Thus, ethical voluntarism is the doctrine that the standards that define right and wrong conduct are in some sense chosen by us. Doxastic voluntarism is the doctrine that we have extensive control over what we believe; we choose what to believe. A special case of doxastic voluntarism is theological voluntarism, which implies that religious belief requires a substantial element of choice; the evidence alone cannot decide the issue. This is a view that is closely associated with Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Jes. Historical voluntarism is the doctrine that the human will is a major factor in history. Such views contrast with Marxist views of history. Metaphysical voluntarism is the doctrine, linked with Schopenhauer, that the fundental organizing principle of the world is not the incarnation of a rational or a moral order but rather the will, which for Schopenhauer is an ultimately meaningless striving for survival, to be found in all of nature.  EPISTEMOLOGY. R.Fo. voluntarism, doxastic.VOLUNTARISM. voluntarism, ethical.NATURAL LAW. voluntarism, metaphysical.VOLUNTARISM. voluntarism, theological.VOLUNTARISM. voluntary act.ACTION THEORY. voluntary euthanasia.EUTHANASIA. Voltaire voluntary euthanasia 964   964

von Neumann, John (1903–57), Hungarian-born erican mathematician, physicist, logician, economist, engineer, and computer scientist. Born in Budapest and trained in Hungary, Switzerland, and Germany, he visited Princeton University in 1930 and bece a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in 1933. His most outstanding work in pure mathematics was on rings of operators in Hilbert spaces. In quantum mechanics he showed the equivalence of matrix mechanics to wave mechanics, and argued that quantum mechanics could not be embedded in an underlying deterministic system. He established important results in set theory and mathematical logic, and worked on Hilbert’s Progr to prove the consistency of mathematics within mathematics until he was shocked by Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. He established the mathematical theory of ges and later showed its application to economics. In these many different areas, von Neumann demonstrated a remarkable ability to analyze a subject matter and develop a mathematical formalism that answered basic questions about that subject matter; formalization in logic is the special case of this process where the subject matter is language and reasoning. With the advent of World War II von Neumann turned his great analytical ability to more applied areas of hydrodynics, ballistics, and nuclear explosives. In 1945 he began to work on the design, use, and theory of electronic computers. He later bece a leading scientist in government. Von Neumann contributed to the hardware architecture of the modern electronic computer, and he invented the first modern progr language. A progr in this language could change the addresses of its own instructions, so that it bece possible to use the se subroutine on different data structures and to write progrs to process progrs. Von Neumann proposed to use a computer as a research tool for exploring very complex phenomena, such as the discontinuous nature of shock waves. He began the development of a theory of automata that would cover computing, communication, and control systems, as well as natural organisms, biological evolution, and societies. To this end, he initiated the study of probabilistic automata and of selfreproducing and cellular automata.  COGNITIVE SCIENCE, COMPUTER THEORY, CYBERNETICS, PHILOSOPHY OF MIND, SELF-REPRODUCING AUTOMATON. A.W.B.

von Wright, G. H., Finnish philosopher, one of the most influential analytic philosophers of the twentieth century. His early work, influenced by logical empiricism, is on logic, probability, and induction, including contributions in modal and deontic logic, the logic of norms and action, preference logic, tense logic, causality, and determinism. In the 1970s his ideas about the explanation of action helped to link the analytic tradition to Continental hermeneutics. His most important contribution is A Treatise on Induction and Probability (1951), which develops a system of eliminative induction using the concepts of necessary and sufficient condition. In 1939 von Wright went to Cbridge to meet Broad, and he attended Wittgenstein’s lectures. Regular discussions with Moore also had an impact on him. In 1948 von Wright succeeded Wittgenstein as professor at Cbridge University. After Wittgenstein’s death in 1951, von Wright returned to Helsinki. Together with Anscombe and Rush Rhees, he bece executor and editor of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass. The study, organization, systematization, and publication of this exceptionally rich work bece a lifelong task for him. In his Cbridge years von Wright bece interested in the logical properties of various modalities: alethic, deontic, epistemic. An Essay in Modal Logic (1951) studies, syntactically, various deductive systems of modal logic. That year he published his fous article “Deontic Logic” in Mind. It made him the founder of modern deontic logic. These logical works profoundly influenced analytic philosophy, especially action theory. Von Wright distinguishes technical oughts (means-ends relationships) from norms issued by a norm-authority. His Norm and Action (1963) discusses philosophical problems concerning the existence of norms and the truth of normative statements. His main work on metaethics is The Varieties of Goodness (1963). In Explanation and Understanding (1971) he turned to philosophical problems concerning the human sciences. He defends a manipulation view of causality, where the concept of action is basic for that of cause: human action cannot be explained causally by laws, but must be understood intentionally. The basic model of intentionality is the practical syllogism, which explains action by a logical connection with wants and beliefs. This work, sometimes characterized as anti-positivist analytical hermeneutics, bridges analytic and Continental philosophy. His studies in truth, knowledge, modality, lawlikeness, causality, determinism, norms, and practical inference were published in 1983–84 in his Philosophical Papers. von Neumann, John von Wright, G. H. 965   965 In 1961 von Wright bece a member of the Academy of Finland, the highest honor Finland gives to its scientists. Over many years he has written, in Swedish and Finnish, eloquent essays in the history of ideas and the philosophy of culture. He has become increasingly critical of the modern scientific-technological civilization, its narrowly instrumental concept of rationality, and its myth of progress. His public pleas for peace, human rights, and a more harmonious coexistence of human beings and nature have made him the most esteemed intellectual in the Scandinavian countries.  ACTION THEORY, DEONTIC LOGIC, EPISTEMIC LOGIC, PRACTICAL REASONING.

voting paradox, the possibility that if there are three candidates, A, B, and C, for democratic choice, with at least three choosers, and the choosers are asked to make sequential choices ong pairs of candidates, A could defeat B by a majority vote, B could defeat C, and C could defeat A. (This would be the outcome if the choosers’ preferences were ABC, BCA, and CAB.) Hence, although each individual voter may have a clear preference ordering over the candidates, the collective may have cyclic preferences, so that individual and majoritarian collective preference orderings are not analogous. While this fact is not a logical paradox, it is perplexing to many analysts of social choice. It may also be morally perplexing in that it suggests majority rule can be quite capricious. For exple, suppose we vote sequentially over various pairs of candidates, with the winner at each step facing a new candidate. If the candidates are favored by cyclic majorities, the last candidate to enter the fray will win the final vote. Hence, control over the sequence of votes may determine the outcome. It is easy to find cyclic preferences over such candidates as movies and other matters of taste. Hence, the problem of the voting paradox is clearly real and not merely a logical contrivance. But is it important? Institutions may block the generation of evidence for cyclic majorities by making choices pairwise and sequentially, as above. And some issues over which we vote provoke preference patterns that cannot produce cycles. For exple, if our issue is one of unidimensional liberalism versus conservatism on some major political issue such as welfare progrs, there may be no one who would prefer to spend both more and less money than what is spent in the status quo. Hence, everyone may display single-peaked preferences with preferences falling as we move in either direction (toward more money or toward less) from the peak. If all important issues and combinations of issues had this preference structure, the voting paradox would be unimportant. It is widely supposed by many public choice scholars that collective preferences are not single-peaked for many issues or, therefore, for combinations of issues. Hence, collective choices may be quite chaotic. What order they display may result from institutional manipulation. If this is correct, we may wonder whether democracy in the sense of the sovereignty of the electorate is a coherent notion.  ARROW’S PARADOX, DECISION THEORY, SOCIAL CHOICE THEORY.

Vorstellung voting paradox 966   966 wang, pa, Chinese political titles meaning ‘king’ and ‘hegemon’, respectively. A true wang has the Mandate of Heaven and rules by te rather than by force. The institution of the pa developed during a period in which the kings of China lacked any real power. In order to bring an end to political chaos, the most powerful of the nobles was appointed pa, and effectively ruled while the wang reigned. During the Warring States period in China (403–221 B.C.), rulers began to assume the title of wang regardless of whether they had either the power of a pa or the right to rule of a wang. After this period, the title of Emperor (ti or huang-ti) replaced wang.  

Wang Ch’ung (A.D. 27–100?), Chinese philosopher, commonly regarded as the most independent-minded thinker in the Later Han period (25–220). He wrote the Lun-heng (“Balanced Inquiries”). Since Tung Chung-shu, Confucian doctrine of the unity of man and nature had degenerated into one of mutual influence, with talk of strange phenomena and calities abounding. Wang Ch’ung cast serious doubts on such superstitions. He even dared to challenge the authority of Confucius and Mencius. His outlook was naturalistic. According to him, things in the world are produced by the interaction of material forces (ch’i). He rejected the teleological point of view and was fatalistic.  Wang Fu-chih (1619–92), Chinese philosopher and innovative Confucian thinker. Wang attacked the Neo-Confucian dualism of li (pattern) and ch’i (ether), arguing that li is the orderly structure of individual ch’i (implements/things and events), which are composed of ch’i (ether). Wang rejected all transcendental ontology and believed society evolves and improves over time. He is touted as a “materialist” by Marxist thinkers in contemporary China, though the term is hardly applicable, as is clear from his criticisms of Shao Yung. Wang attacked Shao’s overly “objective” account of the world, arguing that all such formal descriptions fail because they disregard intuition, our only access to the lively, shen (spiritual) nature of the universe. 

Wang Pi (A.D. 226–49), Chinese philosopher of the Hsüan hsüeh (Mysterious Learning) School. He is described, along with thinkers like Kuo Hsiang, as a Neo-Taoist. Unlike Kuo, who believed the world to be self-generated, Wang claimed it arose from a mysterious unified state called wu (non-being). But like Kuo, Wang regarded Confucius as the one true sage, arguing that Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu only “talked about” non-being, whereas Confucius embodied it. Wang is important for his development of the notion li (pattern) and his pioneering use of the paired concepts t’i (substance) and yung (function). His commentary on the Tao Te Ching, the oldest known, has had a profound and persistent influence on later Chinese thought.  Wang Yang-ming (1472–1529), Chinese philosopher known for his doctrines of the unity of knowledge and action (chih-hsing ho-i) and liangchih (innate knowledge of the good). Wang was also known as a sort of metaphysical idealist, anticipated by Lu Hsiang-shan, for his insistence on the quasi-identity of mind and li (principle, reason). The basic concern of Wang’s philosophy is the question, How can one become a Confucian sage (sheng)? This is a question intelligible only in the light of understanding and commitment to the Confucian vision of jen or ideal of the universe as a moral community. Wang reminded his students that the concrete significance of such a vision in human life cannot be exhausted with any claim to finality. He stressed that one must get rid of any selfish desires in the pursuit of jen. Unlike Chu Hsi, Wang showed little interest in empirical inquiry concerning the rationales of existing things. For him, “things” are the objectives of moral will. To investigate things is to rectify one’s mind, to get rid of evil thoughts and to do good. Rectification of the mind involves, in particular, an acknowledgment of the unity of moral knowledge and action (chihhsing ho-i), an enlargement of the scope of moral concern in the light of the vision of jen, rather than extensive acquisition of factual knowledge. 

Ward, Jes (1843–1925), English philosopher and psychologist. Influenced by Lotze, Herbart, and Brentano, Ward sharply criticized Bain’s associationism and its allied nineteenth-century reductive naturalism. His psychology rejected the associationists’ sensationism, which regarded mind as passive, capable only of sensory receptivity and composed solely of cognitive presentations. Ward emphasized the mind’s inherent activity, asserting, like Kant, the prior existence of an inferred but necessarily existing ego or subject capable of feeling and, most importantly, of conation, shaping both experience and behavior by the willful exercise of attention. Ward’s psychology stresses attention and will. In his metaphysics, Ward resisted the naturalists’ mechanistic materialism, proposing instead a teleological spiritualistic monism. While his criticisms of associationism and naturalism were telling, Ward was a transitional figure whose positive influence is limited, if we except H. P. Grice who follows him to a T. Although sympathetic to scientific psychology – he founded scientific psychology in Britain by establishing a psychology laboratory  – he, with his student Stout, represented the beginning of armchair psychology at Oxford, which Grice adored. Through Stout he influenced the hormic psychology of McDougall, and Grice who calls himself a Stoutian (“until Prichard converted me”). Ward’s major work is “Psychology” (Encyclopedia Britannica, 9th ed., 1886), reworked as Psychological Principles (1918). 

wayward causal chain, a causal chain, referred to in a proposed causal analysis of a key concept, that goes awry. Causal analyses have been proposed for key concepts – e.g., reference, action, explanation, knowledge, artwork. There are two main cases of wayward (or deviant) causal chains that defeat a causal analysis: (1) those in which the prescribed causal route is followed, but the expected event does not occur; and (2) those in which the expected event occurs, but the prescribed causal route is not followed. Consider action. One proposed analysis is that a person’s doing something is an action if and only if what he does is caused by his beliefs and desires. The possibility of wayward causal chains defeats this analysis. For case (1), suppose, while climbing, John finds he is supporting another man on a rope. John wants to rid himself of this danger, and he believes that he can do so by loosening his grip. His belief and desire unnerve him, causing him to loosen his hold. The prescribed causal route was followed, but the ensuing event, his grip loosening, is not an action. For case (2), suppose Harry wants to kill his rich uncle, and he believes that he can find him at home. His beliefs and desires so agitate him that he drives recklessly. He hits and kills a pedestrian, who, by chance, is his uncle. The killing occurs, but without following the prescribed causal route; the killing was an accidental consequence of what Harry did.  ACTION THEORY.  

Weber, Max (1864–1920), German social theorist and sociologist. Born in Berlin in a liberal and intellectual household, he taught economics in Heidelberg, where his circle included leading sociologists and philosophers such as Simmel and Lukacs. Although Weber gave up his professorship after a nervous breakdown in 1889, he remained important in public life, an adviser to the commissions that drafted the peace treaty at Versailles and the Weimar constitution. Weber’s social theory was influenced philosophically by both neo-Kantianism and Nietzsche, creating tensions in a theorist who focused much of his attention on Occidental rationalism and yet was a noncognitivist in ethics. He wrote many comparative studies on topics such as law and urbanization and a celebrated study of the cultural factors responsible for the rise of capitalism, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904). But his major, synthetic work in social theory is Economy and Society (1914); it includes a methodological introduction to the basic concepts of sociology that has been treated by many philosophers of social science. One of the main theoretical goals of Weber’s work is to understand how social processes become “rationalized,” taking up certain themes want-belief model Weber, Max  968 of the German philosophy of history since Hegel as part of social theory. Culture, e.g., bece rationalized in the process of the “disenchantment of worldviews” in the West, a process that Weber thought had “universal significance.” But because of his goal-oriented theory of action and his noncognitivism in ethics, Weber saw rationalization exclusively in terms of the spread of purposive, or means–ends rationality (Zweckrationalität). Rational action means choosing the most effective means of achieving one’s goals and implies judging the consequences of one’s actions and choices. In contrast, value rationality (Wertrationalität) consists of actions oriented to ultimate ends, where considerations of consequences are irrelevant. Although such action is rational insofar as it directs and organizes human conduct, the choice of such ends or values themselves cannot be a matter for rational or scientific judgment. Indeed, for Weber this meant that politics was the sphere for the struggle between irreducibly competing ultimate ends, where “gods and demons fight it out” and charismatic leaders invent new gods and values. Professional politicians, however, should act according to an “ethics of responsibility” (Verantwortungsethik) aimed at consequences, and not an “ethics of conviction” (Gesinnungsethik) aimed at abstract principles or ultimate ends. Weber also believed that rationalization brought the separation of “value spheres” that can never again be unified by reason: art, science, and morality have their own “logics.” Weber’s influential methodological writings reject positivist philosophy of science, yet call for “value neutrality.” He accepts the neo-Kantian distinction, common in his day under the influence of Rickert, between the natural and the human sciences, between the Natur- and the Geisteswissenschaften. Because human social action is purposive and meaningful, the explanations of social sciences must be related to the values (Wertbezogen) and ideals of the actors it studies. Against positivism, Weber saw an ineliminable element of Verstehen, or understanding of meanings, in the methodology of the human sciences. For exple, he criticized the legal positivist notion of behavioral conformity for failing to refer to actors’ beliefs in legitimacy. But for Weber Verstehen is not intuition or empathy and does not exclude causal analysis; reasons can be causes. Thus, explanations in social science must have both causal and subjective adequacy. Weber also thought that adequate explanations of large-scale, macrosocial phenomena require the construction of ideal types, which abstract and summarize the common features of complex, empirical phenomena such as “sects,” “authority,” or even “the Protestant ethic.” Weberian ideal types are neither merely descriptive nor simply heuristic, but come at the end of inquiry through the successful theoretical analysis of diverse phenomena in various historical and cultural contexts. Weber’s analysis of rationality as the disenchantment of the world and the spread of purposive reason led him to argue that reason and progress could turn into their opposites, a notion that enormously influenced critical theory. Weber had a critical “diagnosis of the times” and a pessimistic philosophy of history. At the end of The Protestant Ethic Weber warns that rationalism is desiccating sources of value and constructing an “iron cage” of increasing bureaucratization, resulting in a loss of meaning and freedom in social life. According to Weber, these basic tensions of modern rationality cannot be resolved. 

Weil, Simone (1909–43), French religious philosopher and writer. Born in Paris, Weil was one of the first women to graduate from the École Normale Supérieure, having earlier studied under the philosopher Alain. While teaching in various French lycées Weil bece involved in radical leftist politics, and her early works concern social problems and labor. They also show an attempt to work out a theory of action as fundental to human knowing. This is seen first in her diploma essay, “Science and Perception in Descartes,” and later in her critique of Marx, capitalism, and technocracy in “Reflections concerning the Causes of Social Oppression and Liberty.” Believing that humans cannot escape certain basic harsh necessities of embodied life, Weil sought to find a way by which freedom and dignity could be achieved by organizing labor in such a way that the mind could understand that necessity and thereby come to consent to it. After a year of testing her theories by working in three factories in 1934–35, Weil’s early optimism was shattered by the discovery of what she called “affliction” (malheur), a destruction of the human person to which one cannot consent. Three important religious experiences, however, caused her to attempt to put the problem into a Weber’s law Weil, Simone 969   969 larger context. By arguing that necessity obeys a transcendent goodness and then by using a kenotic model of Christ’s incarnation and crucifixion, she tried to show that affliction can have a purpose and be morally enlightening. The key is the renunciation of any ultimate possession of power as well as the social personality constituted by that power. This is a process of “attention” and “decreation” by which one sheds the veil that otherwise separates one from appreciating goodness in anything but oneself, but most especially from God. She understands God as a goodness that is revealed in self-emptying and in incarnation, and creation as an act of renunciation and not power. During her last months, while working for the Free French in London, Weil’s social and religious interests ce together, especially in The Need for Roots. Beginning with a critique of social rights and replacing it with obligations, Weil sought to show, on the one hand, how modern societies had illegitimately become the focus of value, and on the other hand, how cultures could be reconstructed so that they would root humans in something more ultimate than themselves. Returning to her earlier themes, Weil argued that in order for this rootedness to occur, physical labor must become the spiritual core of culture. Weil died of tuberculosis while this book was in progress. Often regarded as mystical and syncretistic, Weil’s philosophy owes much to an original reading of Plato (e.g., in Intimations of Christianity ong the Ancient Greeks) as well as to Marx, Alain, and Christianity. Recent studies, however, have also seen her as significantly contributing to social, moral, and religious philosophy. Her concern with problems of action and persons is not dissimilar to Wittgenstein’s.  MARX, PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.

well-formed formula, a grmatically wellformed sentence or (structured) predicate of an artificial language of the sort studied by logicians. A well-formed formula is sometimes known as a wff (pronounced ‘woof’) or simply a formula. Delineating the formulas of a language involves providing it with a syntax or grmar, composed of both a vocabulary (a specification of the symbols from which the language is to be built, sorted into grmatical categories) and formation rules (a purely formal or syntactical specification of which strings of symbols are grmatically well-formed and which are not). Formulas are classified as either open or closed, depending on whether or not they contain free variables (variables not bound by quantifiers). Closed formulas, such as (x) (Fx / Gx), are sentences, the potential bearers of truth-values. Open formulas, such as Fx / Gx, are handled in any of three ways. On some accounts, these formulas are on a par with closed ones, the free variables being treated as nes. On others, open formulas are (structured) predicates, the free variables being treated as place holders for terms. And on still other accounts, the free variables are regarded as implicitly bound by universal quantifiers, again making open formulas sentences.  FORMAL LOGIC, LOGICAL CONSTANT, LOGICAL SYNTAX, QUANTIFICATION.

Westermarck: philosopher who spent his life studying the mores and morals of cultures. His main works, The Origin and Development of Moral Ideas and Ethical Relativity, attack the idea that moral principles express objective value. In defending ethical relativism, he argued that moral judgments are based not on intellectual but on emotional grounds. He admitted that cultural variability in itself does not prove ethical relativism, but contended that the fundental differences are so comprehensive and deep as to constitute a strong presumption in favor of relativism.  ETHICAL OBJECTIVISM, RELATIVISM.

wheel of rebirth.BUDDHISM, SSARA. Whewell, Willi (1794–1866), English historian, astronomer, and philosopher of science. He was a master of Trinity College, Cbridge (1841–66). Francis Bacon’s early work on induction was furthered by Whewell, J. F. W. Herschel, and J. S. Mill, who attempted to create a logic of welfare economics Whewell, Willi 970   970 induction, a methodology that can both discover generalizations about experience and prove them to be necessary. Whewell’s theory of scientific method is based on his reading of the history of the inductive sciences. He thought that induction began with a non-inferential act, the superimposition of an idea on data, a “colligation,” a way of seeing facts in a “new light.” Colligations generalize over data, and must satisfy three “tests of truth.” First, colligations must be empirically adequate; they must account for the given data. Any number of ideas may be adequate to explain given data, so a more severe test is required. Second, because colligations introduce generalizations, they must apply to events or properties of objects not yet given: they must provide successful predictions, thereby enlarging the evidence in favor of the colligation. Third, the best inductions are those where evidence for various hypotheses originally thought to cover unrelated kinds of data “jumps together,” providing a consilience of inductions. Consilience characterizes those theories achieving large measures of simplicity, generality, unification, and deductive strength. Furthermore, consilience is a test of the necessary truth of theories, which implies that what many regard as merely pragmatic virtues of theories like simplicity and unifying force have an epistemic status. Whewell thus provides a strong argument for scientific realism. Whewell’s exples of consilient theories are Newton’s theory of universal gravitation, which covers phenomena as seemingly diverse as the motions of the heavenly bodies and the motions of the tides, and the undulatory theory of light, which explains both the polarization of light by crystals and the colors of fringes. There is evidence that Whewell’s methodology was employed by Maxwell, who designed the influential Cavendish Laboratories at Cbridge. Peirce and Mach favored Whewell’s account of method over Mill’s empiricist theory of induction.  EXPLANATION, PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE. R.E.B. Whichcote, Benjin.CBRIDGE PLATONISTS.

Whitehead, A. N. (1861–1947), English mathematician, logician, philosopher of science, and metaphysician. Educated first at the Sherborne School in Dorsetshire and then at Trinity College, Cbridge, Whitehead emerged as a first-class mathematician with a rich general background. In 1885 he bece a fellow of Trinity College and remained there in a teaching role until 1910. In the early 1890s Bertrand Russell entered Trinity College as a student in mathematics; by the beginning of the new century Russell had become not only a student and friend but a colleague of Whitehead’s at Trinity College. Each had written a first book on algebra (Whitehead’s A Treatise on Universal Algebra won him election to the Royal Society in 1903). When they discovered that their projected second books largely overlapped, they undertook a collaboration on a volume that they estimated would take about a year to write; in fact, it was a decade later that the three volumes of their ground-breaking Principia Mathematica appeared, launching symbolic logic in its modern form. In the second decade of this century Whitehead and Russell drifted apart; their responses to World War I differed radically, and their intellectual interests and orientations diverged. Whitehead’s London period (1910–24) is often viewed as the second phase of a three-phase career. His association with the University of London involved him in practical issues affecting the character of working-class education. For a decade (1914–24) Whitehead held a professorship at the Imperial College of Science and Technology and also served as dean of the Faculty of Science in the University, chair of the Academic Council (which managed educational affairs in London), and chair of the council that managed Goldsmith’s College. His book The Aims of Education (1928) is a collection of essays largely growing out of reflections on the experiences of these years. Intellectually, Whitehead’s interests were moving toward issues in the philosophy of science. In the years 1919–22 he published An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge, The Concept of Nature, and The Principle of Relativity – the third led to his later (1931) election as a fellow of the British Academy. In 1924, at the age of sixty-three, Whitehead made a dratic move, both geographically and intellectually, to launch phase three of his career: never having formally studied philosophy in his life, he agreed to become professor of philosophy at Harvard University, a position he held until retirement in 1937. The accompanying intellectual shift was a move from philosophy of science to metaphysics. The earlier investigations had assumed the self-containedness of nature: “nature is closed to mind.” The philosophy of nature exined nature at the level of abstraction entailed by this assumption. Whitehead had come to regard philosophy as “the critic of abstractions,” a notion introduced in Science and the Modern World (1925). This book traced the intertwined emergence of Newtonian science and its philosophical presuppositions. It noted that with the development of the theory of relativity in the twentieth century, scientific understanding had left behind the Newtonian conceptuality that had generated the still-dominant philosophical assumptions, and that those philosophical assumptions considered in themselves had become inadequate to explicate our full concrete experience. Philosophy as the critic of abstractions must recognize the limitations of a stance that assumes that nature is closed to mind, and must push deeper, beyond such an abstraction, to create a scheme of ideas more in harmony with scientific developments and able to do justice to human beings as part of nature. Science and the Modern World merely outlines what such a philosophy might be; in 1929 Whitehead published his magnum opus, titled Process and Reality. In this volume, subtitled “An Essay in Cosmology,” his metaphysical understanding is given its final form. It is customary to regard this book as the central document of what has become known as process philosophy, though Whitehead himself frequently spoke of his system of ideas as the philosophy of organism. Process and Reality begins with a sentence that sheds a great deal of light upon Whitehead’s metaphysical orientation: “These lectures are based upon a recurrence to that phase of philosophic thought which began with Descartes and ended with Hume.” Descartes, adapting the classical notion of substance to his own purposes, begins a “phase of philosophic thought” by assuming there are two distinct, utterly different kinds of substance, mind and matter, each requiring nothing but itself in order to exist. This assumption launches the reign of epistemology within philosophy: if knowing begins with the experiencing of a mental substance capable of existing by itself and cut off from everything external to it, then the philosophical challenge is to try to justify the claim to establish contact with a reality external to it. The phrase “and ended with Hume” expresses Whitehead’s conviction that Hume (and more elegantly, he notes, Santayana) showed that if one begins with Descartes’s metaphysical assumptions, skepticism is inevitable. Contemporary philosophers have talked about the end of philosophy. From Whitehead’s perspective such talk presupposes a far too narrow view of the nature of philosophy. It is true that a phase of philosophy has ended, a phase dominated by epistemology. Whitehead’s response is to offer the dictum that all epistemological difficulties are at bottom only couflaged metaphysical difficulties. One must return to that moment of Cartesian beginning and replace the substance metaphysics with an orientation that avoids the epistemological trap, meshes harmoniously with the scientific understandings that have displaced the much simpler physics of Descartes’s day, and is consonant with the facts of evolution. These are the considerations that generate Whitehead’s fundental metaphysical category, the category of an actual occasion. An actual occasion is not an enduring, substantial entity. Rather, it is a process of becoming, a process of weaving together the “prehensions” (a primitive form of ‘apprehension’ meant to indicate a “taking account of,” or “feeling,” devoid of conscious awareness) of the actual occasions that are in the immediate past. Whitehead calls this process of weaving together the inheritances of the past “concrescence.” An actual entity is its process of concrescence, its process of growing together into a unified perspective on its immediate past. (The seeds of Whitehead’s epistemological realism are planted in these fundental first moves: “The philosophy of organism is the inversion of Kant’s philosophy. . . . For Kant, the world emerges from the subject; for the philosophy of organism, the subject emerges from the world.”) It is customary to compare an actual occasion with a Leibnizian monad, with the caveat that whereas a monad is windowless, an actual occasion is “all window.” It is as though one were to take Aristotle’s system of categories and ask what would result if the category of substance were displaced from its position of preeminence by the category of relation – the result would, mutatis mutandis, be an understanding of being somewhat on the model of a Whiteheadian actual occasion. In moving from Descartes’s dualism of mental substance and material substance to his own notion of an actual entity, Whitehead has been doing philosophy conceived of as the critique of abstractions. He holds that both mind and matter are abstractions from the concretely real. They are important abstractions, necessary for everyday thought and, of supreme importance, absolutely essential in enabling the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries to accomplish their magnificent advances in scientific thinking. Indeed, Whitehead, in his philosophy of science phase, by proceeding as though “nature is closed to mind,” was operating with those selfse abstractions. He ce to see that while these abstractions were indispensable for certain kinds of investigations, they were, at the philosophical level, as Hume had demonstrated, a disaster. In considering mind and matter to be ontological ultimates, Descartes had committed what Whitehead termed the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. The category of an actual occasion designates the fully real, the fully concrete. The challenge for such an orientation, the challenge that Process and Reality is designed to meet, is so to describe actual occasions that it is intelligible how collections of actual occasions, termed “nexus” or societies, emerge, exhibiting the characteristics we find associated with “minds” and “material structures.” Perhaps most significantly, if this challenge is met successfully, biology will be placed, in the eyes of philosophy, on an even footing with physics; metaphysics will do justice both to human beings and to human beings as a part of nature; and such vexing contemporary problem areas as animal rights and environmental ethics will appear in a new light. Whitehead’s last two books, Adventures of Ideas (1933) and Modes of Thought (1938), are less technical and more lyrical than is Process and Reality. Adventures of Ideas is clearly the more significant of these two. It presents a philosophical study of the notion of civilization. It holds that the social changes in a civilization are driven by two sorts of forces: brute, senseless agencies of compulsion on the one hand, and formulated aspirations and articulated beliefs on the other. (These two sorts of forces are epitomized by barbarians and Christianity in the ancient Roman world and by ste and democracy in the world of the industrial revolution.) Whitehead’s focal point in Adventures of Ideas is aspirations, beliefs, and ideals as instruments of change. In particular, he is concerned to articulate the ideals and aspirations appropriate to our own era. The character of such ideals and aspirations at any moment is limited by the philosophical understandings available at that moment, because in their struggle for release and efficacy such ideals and aspirations can appear only in the forms permitted by the available philosophical discourse. In the final section of Adventures of Ideas Whitehead presents a statement of ideals and aspirations fit for our era as his own philosophy of organism allows them to take shape and be articulated. The notions of beauty, truth, adventure, zest, Eros, and peace are given a content drawn from the technical understandings elaborated in Process and Reality. But in Adventures of Ideas a less technical language is used, a language reminiscent of the poetic imagery found in the style of Plato’s Republic, a language making the ideas accessible to readers who have not mastered Process and Reality, but at the se time far richer and more meaningful to those who have. Whitehead notes in Adventures of Ideas that Plato’s later thought “circles round the interweaving of seven main notions, nely, The Ideas, The Physical Elements, The Psyche, The Eros, The Harmony, The Mathematical Relations, The Receptacle. These notions are as important for us now, as they were then at the dawn of the modern world, when civilizations of the old type were dying.” Whitehead uses these notions in quite novel and modern ways; one who is unfiliar with his metaphysics can get something of what he means as he speaks of the Eros of the Universe, but if one is filiar from Process and Reality with the notions of the Primordial Nature of God and the Consequent Nature of God then one sees much deeper into the meanings present in Adventures of Ideas. Whitehead was not religious in any narrow, doctrinal, sectarian sense. He explicitly likened his stance to that of Aristotle, dispassionately considering the requirements of his metaphysical system as they refer to the question of the existence and nature of God. Whitehead’s thoughts on these matters are most fully developed in Chapter 11 of Science and the Modern World, in the final chapter of Process and Reality, and in Religion in the Making (1926). These thoughts are expressed at a high level of generality. Perhaps because of this, a large part of the interest generated by Whitehead’s thought has been within the community of theologians. His ideas fairly beg for elaboration and development in the context of particular modes of religious understanding. It is as though many modern theologians, recalling the relation between the theology of Aquinas and the metaphysics of Aristotle, cannot resist the temptation to play Aquinas to Whitehead’s Aristotle. Process theology, or Neo-Classical Theology as it is referred to by Hartshorne, one of its leading practitioners, has been the arena within which a great deal of clarification and development of Whitehead’s ideas has occurred. Whitehead was a gentle man, soft-spoken, never overbearing or threatening. He constantly encouraged students to step out on their own, to develop their creative capacities. His concern not to inhibit students made him a notoriously easy grader; it was said that an A-minus in one of his courses was equivalent to failure. Lucien Price’s Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead chronicles many evenings of discussion in the Whitehead household. He there described Whitehead as follows: Whitehead, Alfred North Whitehead, Alfred North 973   973 his face, serene, luminous, often smiling, the complexion pink and white, the eyes brilliant blue, clear and candid as a child’s yet with the depth of the sage, often laughing or twinkling with humour. And there was his figure, slender, frail, and bent with its lifetime of a scholar’s toil. Always benign, there was not a grain of ill will anywhere in him; for all his formidable arment, never a wounding word.  LEIBNIZ, METAPHYSICS, PROCESS THEOLOGY, RUSSELL.

Alnwick -- (d. 1333), English Franciscan theologian. Willi studied under Duns Scotus at Paris, and wrote the Reportatio Parisiensia, a central source for Duns Scotus’s teaching. In his own works, Willi opposed Scotus on the univocity of being and haecceitas. Some of his views were attacked by Ockh.  DUNS SCOTUS, HAECCEITY.

Willi of Auvergne (c.1190–1249), French philosopher who was born in Aurillac, taught at Paris, and bece bishop of Paris in 1228. Critical of the new Aristotelianism of his time, he insisted that the soul is an individual, immortal form of intellectual activity alone, so that a second form was needed for the body and sensation. Though he rejected the notion of an agent intellect, he described the soul as a mirror that reflects both exemplary ideas in God’s mind and sensible singulars. He conceived being as something common to everything that is, after the manner of Duns Scotus, but rejected the Avicennan doctrine that God necessarily produces the universe, arguing that His creative activity is free of all determination. He is the first exple of the complex of ideas we call Augustinianism, which would pass on through Alexander of Hales to Bonaventure and other Franciscans, forming a point of departure for the philosophy of Duns Scotus.  AUGUSTINE, DUNS SCOTUS.

Willi of Auxerre (c.1140–1231), French theologian and renowned teacher of grmar, arts, and theology at the University of Paris. In 1231 he was appointed by Pope Gregory IX to a commission charged with editing Aristotle’s writings for doctrinal purity. The commission never submitted a report, perhaps partly due to Willi’s death later that se year. Willi’s major work, the Summa aurea (1215–20), represents one of the earliest systematic attempts to reconcile the Augustinian and Aristotelian traditions in medieval philosophy. Willi tempers, e.g., the Aristotelian concession that human cognition begins with the reception in the material intellect of a species or sensible representation from a corporeal thing, with the Augustinian idea that it is not possible to understand the principles of any discipline without an interior, supernatural illumination. He also originated the theological distinction between perfect happiness, which is uncreated and proper to God, and imperfect happiness, which pertains to human beings. Willi was also one of the first to express what bece, in later centuries, the important distinction between God’s absolute and ordained powers, taking, with Gilbert of Poitiers, the view that God could, absolutely speaking, change the past. The Summa aurea helped shape the thought of several important philosophers and theologians who were active later in the century, including Albertus Magnus, Bonaventure, and Aquinas. Willi remained an authority in theological discussions throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.  ARISTOTLE, AUGUSTINE.

Willi of Moerbeke (c.1215–1286), French scholar who was the most important thirteenth century translator from Greek into Latin of works in philosophy and natural science. Having joined the Dominicans and spent some time in Greek-speaking territories, Willi served at the papal court and then as (Catholic) archbishop of Corinth (1278–c.1286). But he worked from the 1260s on as a careful and literal-minded translator. Willi was the first to render into Latin white horse paradox Willi of Moerbeke 974   974 some of the most important works by Aristotle, including the Politics, Poetics, and History of Animals. He retranslated or revised earlier translations of several other Aristotelian works. Willi also provided the first Latin versions of commentaries on Aristotle by Alexander of Aphrodisias, Themistius, monius, John Philoponus, and Simplicius, not to mention his efforts on behalf of Greek optics, mathematics, and medicine. When Willi provided the first Latin translation of Proclus’s Elements of Theology, Western readers could at last recognize the Liber de causis as an Arabic compilation from Proclus rather than as a work by Aristotle.  

Willis: B. A. O. London-born Welsh philosopher who has made major contributions to many fields but is primarily known as a moral philosopher. His approach to ethics, set out in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985), is characterized by a wide-ranging skepticism, directed mainly at the capacity of academic moral philosophy to further the aim of reflectively living an ethical life. One line of skeptical argument attacks the very idea of practical reason. Attributions of practical reasons to a particular agent must, in Willis’s view, be attributions of states that can potentially explain the agent’s action. Therefore such reasons must be either within the agent’s existing set of motivations or within the revised set of motivations that the agent would acquire upon sound reasoning. Willis argues from these minimal assumptions that this view of reasons as internal reasons undermines the idea of reason itself being a source of authority over practice. Willis’s connected skepticism about the claims of moral realism is based both on his general stance toward realism and on his view of the nature of modern societies. In opposition to internal realism, Willis has consistently argued that reflection on our conception of the world allows one to develop a conception of the world maximally independent of our peculiar ways of conceptualizing reality – an absolute conception of the world. Such absoluteness is, he argues, an inappropriate aspiration for ethical thought. Our ethical thinking is better viewed as one way of structuring a form of ethical life than as the ethical truth about how life is best lived. The pervasive reflectiveness and radical pluralism of modern societies makes them inhospitable contexts for viewing ethical concepts as making knowledge available to groups of concept users. Modernity has produced at the level of theory a distortion of our ethical practice, nely a conception of the morality system. This view is reductionist, is focused centrally on obligations, and rests on various fictions about responsibility and ble that Willis challenges in such works as She and Necessity (1993). Much academic moral philosophy, in his view, is shaped by the covert influence of the morality system, and such distinctively modern outlooks as Kantianism and utilitarianism monopolize the terms of contemporary debate with insufficient attention to their origin in a distorted view of the ethical. Willis’s views are not skeptical through and through; he retains a commitment to the values of truth, truthfulness in a life, and individualism. His most recent work, which thematizes the long-implicit influence of Nietzsche on his ethical philosophy, explicitly offers a vindicatory “genealogical” narrative for these ideals.  EXTERNALISM, MORALITY, MORAL REALISM, NIETZSCHE, PRACTICAL REASON.

Wilson, J. C. Oxonian philosopher, like Grice. Cook Wilson studied with T. H. Green before becoming Wykeh Professor of Logic at Oxford and leading the Oxford reaction against the then entrenched absolute idealism. More influential as a tutor than as a writer, his major oeuvre, Statement and Inference, was posthumously reconstructed from drafts of papers, philosophical correspondence, and an extensive set of often inconsistent lectures for his logic courses. A staunch critic of Whitehead’s mathematical logic, Wilson conceived of logic as the study of thinking, an activity unified by the fact that thinking either is knowledge or depends on knowledge (“What we know we kow”). Wilson claims that knowledge involves apprehending an object that in most cases is independent of the act of apprehension and that knowledge is indefinable without circularity, views he defended by appealing to common usage. Many of Wilson’s ideas are disseminated by H. W. B. Joseph, especially in his “Logic.” Rejecting “symbolic logic,” Joseph attempts to reinvigorate traditional logic conceived along Wilsonian lines. To do so Joseph combined a careful exposition of Aristotle with insights drawn from idealistic logicians. Besides Joseph, Wilson decisively influenced a generation of Oxford philosophers including Prichard and Ross, and Grice who explores the ‘interrogative subordination’ in the account of ‘if.’ (“Who killed Cock Robin”).

Windelband, Wilhelm (1848–1915), German philosopher and originator of Baden neoKantianism. He studied under Kuno Fischer (1824–1907) and Lotze, and was professor at Zürich, Freiburg, Strasbourg, and Heidelberg. Windelband gave Baden neo-Kantianism its distinctive mark of Kantian axiology as the core of critical philosophy. He is widely recognized for innovative work in the history of philosophy, in which problems rather than individual philosophers are the focus and organizing principle of exposition. He is also known for his distinction, first drawn in “Geschichte und Naturwissenschaft” (“History and Natural Science,” 1894), between the nomothetic knowledge that most natural sciences seek (the discovery of general laws in order to master nature) and the idiographic knowledge that the historical sciences pursue (description of individual and unique aspects of reality with the aim of self-affirmation). His most important student, and successor at Heidelberg, was Heinrich Rickert (1863– 1936), who made lasting contributions to the methodology of the historical sciences.  NEO-KANTIANISM. H.v.d.L. wisdom, an understanding of the highest principles of things that functions as a guide for living a truly exemplary human life. From the preSocratics through Plato this was a unified notion. But Aristotle introduced a distinction between theoretical wisdom (sophia) and practical wisdom (phronesis), the former being the intellectual virtue that disposed one to grasp the nature of reality in terms of its ultimate causes (metaphysics), the latter being the ultimate practical virtue that disposed one to make sound judgments bearing on the conduct of life. The former invoked a contrast between deep understanding versus wide information, whereas the latter invoked a contrast between sound judgment and mere technical facility. This distinction between theoretical and practical wisdom persisted through the Middle Ages and continues to our own day, as is evident in our use of the term ‘wisdom’ to designate both knowledge of the highest kind and the capacity for sound judgment in matters of conduct.  ARISTOTLE, PRACTICAL REASON, THEORETICAL REASON.

Vitters, Ludwig (1889–1951), Vienna-born philosopher (trained as an enginner at Manchester), one of the most original and challenging philosophical writers of the twentieth century. Born in Vienna into an assimilated fily of Jewish extraction, he went to England as a student and eventually bece a protégé of Russell’s at Cbridge. He returned to Austria at the beginning of The Great War I, but went back to Cbridge in 1928 and taught there as a fellow and professor. Despite spending much of his professional life in England, Wittgenstein never lost contact with his Austrian background, and his writings combine in a unique way ideas derived from both the insular and the continental European tradition. His thought is strongly marked by a deep skepticism about philosophy, but he retained the conviction that there was something important to be rescued from the traditional enterprise. In his Blue Book (1958) he referred to his own work as “one of the heirs of the subject that used to be called philosophy.” What strikes readers first when they look at Wittgenstein’s writings is the peculiar form of their composition. They are generally made up of short individual notes that are most often numbered in sequence and, in the more finished writings, evidently selected and arranged with the greatest care. Those notes range from fairly technical discussions on matters of logic, the mind, meaning, understanding, acting, seeing, mathematics, and knowledge, to aphoristic observations about ethics, culture, art, and the meaning of life. Because of their wide-ranging character, their unusual perspective on things, and their often intriguing style, Wittgenstein’s writings have proved to appeal to both professional philosophers and those interested in philosophy in a more general way. The writings as well as his unusual life and personality have already produced a large body of interpretive literature. But given his uncompromising stand, it is questionable whether his thought will ever be fully integrated into academic philosophy. It is more likely that, like Pascal and Nietzsche, he will remain an uneasy presence in philosophy. From an early date onward Wittgenstein was greatly influenced by the idea that philosophical problems can be resolved by paying attention to the working of language – a thought he may have gained from Fritz Mauthner’s Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache (1901–02). Wittgenstein’s affinity to Mauthner is, indeed, evident in all phases of his philosophical development, though it is particularly noticeable in his later thinking.Until recently it has been common to divide Wittgenstein’s work into two sharply distinct phases, separated by a prolonged period of dormancy. According to this schema the early (“Tractarian”) period is that of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), which Wittgenstein wrote in the trenches of World War I, and the later period that of the Philosophical Investigations (1953), which he composed between 1936 and 1948. But the division of his work into these two periods has proved misleading. First, in spite of obvious changes in his thinking, Wittgenstein remained throughout skeptical toward traditional philosophy and persisted in channeling philosophical questioning in a new direction. Second, the common view fails to account for the fact that even between 1920 and 1928, when Wittgenstein abstained from actual work in philosophy, he read widely in philosophical and semiphilosophical authors, and between 1928 and 1936 he renewed his interest in philosophical work and wrote copiously on philosophical matters. The posthumous publication of texts such as The Blue and Brown Books, Philosophical Grmar, Philosophical Remarks, and Conversations with the Vienna Circle has led to acknowledgment of a middle period in Wittgenstein’s development, in which he explored a large number of philosophical issues and viewpoints – a period that served as a transition between the early and the late work. Early period. As the son of a greatly successful industrialist and engineer, Wittgenstein first studied engineering in Berlin and Manchester, and traces of that early training are evident throughout his writing. But his interest shifted soon to pure mathematics and the foundations of mathematics, and in pursuing questions about them he bece acquainted with Russell and Frege and their work. The two men had a profound and lasting effect on Wittgenstein even when he later ce to criticize and reject their ideas. That influence is particularly noticeable in the Tractatus, which can be read as an attempt to reconcile Russell’s atomism with Frege’s apriorism. But the book is at the se time moved by quite different and non-technical concerns. For even before turning to systematic philosophy Wittgenstein had been profoundly moved by Schopenhauer’s thought as it is spelled out in The World as Will and Representation, and while he was serving as a soldier in World War I, he renewed his interest in Schopenhauer’s metaphysical, ethical, aesthetic, and mystical outlook. The resulting confluence of ideas is evident in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and gives the book its peculiar character. Composed in a dauntingly severe and compressed style, the book attempts to show that traditional philosophy rests entirely on a misunderstanding of “the logic of our language.” Following in Frege’s and Russell’s footsteps, Wittgenstein argued that every meaningful sentence must have a precise logical structure. That structure may, however, be hidden beneath the clothing of the grmatical appearance of the sentence and may therefore require the most detailed analysis in order to be made evident. Such analysis, Wittgenstein was convinced, would establish that every meaningful sentence is either a truth-functional composite of another simpler sentence or an atomic sentence consisting of a concatenation of simple nes. He argued further that every atomic sentence is a logical picture of a possible state of affairs, which must, as a result, have exactly the se formal structure as the atomic sentence that depicts it. He employed this “picture theory of meaning” – as it is usually called – to derive conclusions about the nature of the world from his observations about the structure of the atomic sentences. He postulated, in particular, that the world must itself have a precise logical structure, even though we may not be able to determine it completely. He also held that the world consists primarily of facts, corresponding to the true atomic sentences, rather than of things, and that those facts, in turn, are concatenations of simple objects, corresponding to the simple nes of which the atomic sentences are composed. Because he derived these metaphysical conclusions from his view of the nature of language, Wittgenstein did not consider it essential to describe what those simple objects, their concatenations, and the facts consisting of them are actually like. As a result, there has been a great deal of uncertainty and disagreement ong interpreters about their character. The propositions of the Tractatus are for the most part concerned with spelling out Wittgenstein’s account of the logical structure of language and the world and these parts of the book have understandably been of most interest to philosophers who are primarily concerned with questions of symbolic logic and its applications. But for Wittgenstein himself the most important part of the book consisted of the negative conclusions about philosophy that he reaches at the end of his text: in particular, that all sentences that are not atomic pictures of concatenations of objects or truth-functional composites of such are strictly speaking meaningless. ong these he included all the propositions of ethics and aesthetics, all propositions dealing with the meaning of life, all propositions of logic, indeed all philosophical propositions, and finally all the propositions of the Tractatus itself. These are all strictly meaningless; they aim at saying something important, but what they try to express in words can only show itself. As a result Wittgenstein concluded that anyone who understood what the Tractatus was saying would finally discard its propositions as senseless, that she would throw away the ladder after climbing up on it. Someone who reached such a state would have no more temptation to pronounce philosophical propositions. She would see the world rightly and would then also recognize that the only strictly meaningful propositions are those of natural science; but those could never touch what was really important in human life, the mystical. That would have to be contemplated in silence. For “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,” as the last proposition of the Tractatus declared. Middle period. It was only natural that Wittgenstein should not embark on an academic career after he had completed that work. Instead he trained to be a school teacher and taught primary school for a number of years in the mountains of lower Austria. In the mid-1920s he also built a house for his sister; this can be seen as an attempt to give visual expression to the logical, aesthetic, and ethical ideas of the Tractatus. In those years he developed a number of interests seminal for his later development. His school experience drew his attention to the way in which children learn language and to the whole process of enculturation. He also developed an interest in psychology and read Freud and others. Though he remained hostile to Freud’s theoretical explanations of his psychoanalytic work, he was fascinated with the analytic practice itself and later ce to speak of his own work as therapeutic in character. In this period of dormancy Wittgenstein also bece acquainted with the members of the Vienna Circle, who had adopted his Tractatus as one of their key texts. For a while he even accepted the positivist principle of meaning advocated by the members of that Circle, according to which the meaning of a sentence is the method of its verification. This he would later modify into the more generous claim that the meaning of a sentence is its use. Wittgenstein’s most decisive step in his middle period was to abandon the belief of the Tractatus that meaningful sentences must have a precise (hidden) logical structure and the accompanying belief that this structure corresponds to the logical structure of the facts depicted by those sentences. The Tractatus had, indeed, proceeded on the assumption that all the different symbolic devices that can describe the world must be constructed according to the se underlying logic. In a sense, there was then only one meaningful language in the Tractatus, and from it one was supposed to be able to read off the logical structure of the world. In the middle period Wittgenstein concluded that this doctrine constituted a piece of unwarranted metaphysics and that the Tractatus was itself flawed by what it had tried to combat, i.e., the misunderstanding of the logic of language. Where he had previously held it possible to ground metaphysics on logic, he now argued that metaphysics leads the philosopher into complete darkness. Turning his attention back to language he concluded that almost everything he had said about it in the Tractatus had been in error. There were, in fact, many different languages with many different structures that could meet quite different specific needs. Language was not strictly held together by logical structure, but consisted, in fact, of a multiplicity of simpler substructures or language ges. Sentences could not be taken to be logical pictures of facts and the simple components of sentences did not all function as nes of simple objects. These new reflections on language served Wittgenstein, in the first place, as an aid to thinking about the nature of the human mind, and specifically about the relation between private experience and the physical world. Against the existence of a Cartesian mental substance, he argued that the word ‘I’ did not serve as a ne of anything, but occurred in expressions meant to draw attention to a particular body. For a while, at least, he also thought he could explain the difference between private experience and the physical world in terms of the existence of two languages, a primary language of experience and a secondary language of physics. This duallanguage view, which is evident in both the Philosophical Remarks and The Blue Book, Wittgenstein was to give up later in favor of the assumption that our grasp of inner phenomena is dependent on the existence of outer criteria. From the mid-1930s onward he also renewed his interest in the philosophy of mathematics. In contrast to Frege and Russell, he argued strenuously that no part of mathematics is reducible purely to logic. Instead he set out to describe mathematics as part of our natural history and as consisting of a number of diverse language ges. He also insisted that the meaning of those ges depended on the uses to which the mathematical formulas were put. Applying the principle of verification to mathematics, he held that the meaning of a mathematical formula lies in its proof. These remarks on the philosophy of mathematics have remained ong Wittgenstein’s most controversial and least explored writings. Later period. Wittgenstein’s middle period was characterized by intensive philosophical work on a broad but quickly changing front. By 1936, however, his thinking was finally ready to settle down once again into a steadier pattern, and he now began to elaborate the views for which he bece most fous. Where he had constructed his earlier work around the logic devised by Frege and Russell, he now concerned himself mainly with the actual working of ordinary language. This brought him close to the tradition of British common sense philosophy that Moore had revived and made him one of the godfathers of the ordinary language philosophy that was to flourish in Oxford in the 1950s. In the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein emphasized that there are countless different uses of what we call “symbols,” “words,” and “sentences.” The task of philosophy is to gain a perspicuous view of those multiple uses and thereby to dissolve philosophical and metaphysical puzzles. These puzzles were the result of insufficient attention to the working of language and could be resolved only by carefully retracing the linguistic steps by which they had been reached. Wittgenstein thus ce to think of philosophy as a descriptive, analytic, and ultimately therapeutic practice. In the Investigations he set out to show how common philosophical views about meaning (including the logical atomism of the Tractatus), about the nature of concepts, about logical necessity, about rule-following, and about the mind–body problem were all the product of an insufficient grasp of how language works. In one of the most influential passages of the book he argued that concept words do not denote sharply circumscribed concepts, but are meant to mark fily resemblances between the things labeled with the concept. He also held that logical necessity results from linguistic convention and that rules cannot determine their own applications, that rule-following presupposes the existence of regular practices. Furthermore, the words of our language have meaning only insofar as there exist public criteria for their correct application. As a consequence, he argued, there cannot be a completely private language, i.e., a language that in principle can be used only to speak about one’s own inner experience. This private language argument has caused much discussion. Interpreters have disagreed not only over the structure of the argument and where it occurs in Wittgenstein’s text, but also over the question whether he meant to say that language is necessarily social. Because he said that to speak of inner experiences there must be external and publicly available criteria, he has often been taken to be advocating a logical behaviorism, but nowhere does he, in fact, deny the existence of inner states. What he says is merely that our understanding of someone’s pain is connected to the existence of natural and linguistic expressions of pain. In the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein repeatedly draws attention to the fact that language must be learned. This learning, he says, is fundentally a process of inculcation and drill. In learning a language the child is initiated in a form of life. In Wittgenstein’s later work the notion of form of life serves to identify the whole complex of natural and cultural circumstances presupposed by our language and by a particular understanding of the world. He elaborated those ideas in notes on which he worked between 1948 and his death in 1951 and which are now published under the title On Certainty. He insisted in them that every belief is always part of a system of beliefs that together constitute a worldview. All confirmation and disconfirmation of a belief presuppose such a system and are internal to the system. For all this he was not advocating a relativism, but a naturalism that assumes that the world ultimately determines which language ges can be played. Wittgenstein’s final notes vividly illustrate the continuity of his basic concerns throughout all the changes his thinking went through. For they reveal once more how he remained skeptical about all philosophical theories and how he understood his own undertaking as the attempt to undermine the need for any such theorizing. The considerations of On Certainty are evidently directed against both philosophical skeptics and those philosophers who want to refute skepticism. Against the philosophical skeptics Wittgenstein insisted that there is real knowledge, but this knowledge is always dispersed and not necessarily reliable; it consists of things we have heard and read, of what has been drilled into us, and of our modifications of this inheritance. We have no general reason to doubt this inherited Wittgenstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ludwig 979   979 body of knowledge, we do not generally doubt it, and we are, in fact, not in a position to do so. But On Certainty also argues that it is impossible to refute skepticism by pointing to propositions that are absolutely certain, as Descartes did when he declared ‘I think, therefore I ’ indubitable, or as Moore did when he said, “I know for certain that this is a hand here.” The fact that such propositions are considered certain, Wittgenstein argued, indicates only that they play an indispensable, normative role in our language ge; they are the riverbed through which the thought of our language ge flows. Such propositions cannot be taken to express metaphysical truths. Here, too, the conclusion is that all philosophical argumentation must come to an end, but that the end of such argumentation is not an absolute, self-evident truth, but a certain kind of natural human practice. 

wodeh: Oxonian philosopher, like Grice. Ad de (c. 1295–1358), English Franciscan philosopher-theologian who lectured on Peter Lombard’s Sentences at London, Norwich, and Oxford. His published works include the Tractatus de indivisibilibus; his Lectura secunda (Norwich lectures); and an abbreviation of his Oxford lectures by Henry Totting of Oyta, published by John Major in 1512. Wodeh’s main work, the Oxford lectures, themselves remain unpublished. A brilliant interpreter of Duns Scotus, whose original manuscripts he consulted, Wodeh deemed Duns Scotus the greatest Franciscan doctor. Willi Ockh, Wodeh’s teacher, was the other great influence on Wodeh’s philosophical theology. Wodeh defended Ockh’s views against attacks mounted by Walter Chatton; he also wrote the prologue to Ockh’s Summa logicae. Wodeh’s own influence rivaled that of Ockh. ong the authors he strongly influenced are Gregory of Rimini, John of Mirecourt, Nicholas of Autrecourt, Pierre d’Ailly, Peter Ceffons, Alfonso Vargas, Peter of Candia (Alexander V), Henry Totting of Oyta, and John Major. Wodeh’s theological works were written for an audience with a very sophisticated understanding of current issues in semantics, logic, and medieval mathematical physics. Contrary to Duns Scotus and Ockh, Wodeh argued that the sensitive and intellective souls were not distinct. He further develops the theory of intuitive cognition, distinguishing intellectual intuition of our own acts of intellect, will, and memory from sensory intuition of external objects. Scientific knowledge based on experience can be based on intuition, according to Wodeh. He distinguishes different grades of evidence, and allows that sensory perceptions may be mistaken. Nonetheless, they can form the basis for scientific knowledge, since they are reliable; mistakes can be corrected by reason and experience. In semantic theory, Wodeh defends the view that the immediate object of scientific knowledge is the complexe significabile, that which the conclusion is designed to signify. 

wolff, Christian (1679–1754), German philosopher and the most powerful advocate for secular rationalism in early eighteenth-century Germany. Although he was a Lutheran, his early education in Catholic Breslau made him filiar with both the Scholasticism of Aquinas and Suárez and more modern sources. His later studies at Leipzig were completed with a dissertation on the application of mathematical methods to ethics (1703), which brought him to the attention of Leibniz. He remained in correspondence with Leibniz until the latter’s death (1716), and bece known as the popularizer of Leibniz’s philosophy, although his views did not derive from that source alone. Appointed to teach mathematics in Halle in 1706 (he published mathematical textbooks and compendia that dominated German universities for decades), Wolff began lecturing on philosophy as well by 1709. His rectoral address On the Practical Philosophy of the Chinese (1721) argued that revelation and even belief in God were unnecessary for arriving at sound principles of moral and political reasoning; this brought his uneasy relations with the Halle Pietists to a head, and in 1723 they secured his dismissal and indeed banishment. Wolff was immediately welcomed in Marburg, where he bece a hero for freedom of thought, and did not return to Prussia until the ascension of Frederick the Great in 1740, when he resumed his post at Halle. Wolff published an immense series of texts on logic, metaphysics, ethics, politics, natural theology, and teleology (1713–24), in which he created the philosophical terminology of modern German; he then published an even more extensive series of works in Latin for the rest of his life, expanding and modifying his German works but also adding works on natural and positive law and economics (1723–55). He accepted the traWodeh, Ad de Wolff, Christian 980   980 ditional division of logic into the doctrines of concepts, judgment, and inference, which influenced the organization of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781–87) and even Hegel’s Science of Logic(1816). In metaphysics, he included general ontology and then the special disciplines of rational cosmology, rational psychology, and rational theology (Kant replaced Wolff’s general ontology with his transcendental aesthetic and analytic, and then demolished Wolff’s special metaphysics in his transcendental dialectic). Wolff’s metaphysics drew heavily on Leibniz, but also on Descartes and even empiricists like Locke. Methodologically, he attempted to derive the principle of sufficient reason from the logical law of identity (like the unpublished Leibniz of the 1680s rather than the published Leibniz of the 1700s); substantively, he began his German metaphysics with a reconstruction of Descartes’s cogito argument, then argued for a simple, immaterial soul, all of its faculties reducible to forms of representation and related to body by preestablished harmony. Although rejected by Crusius and then Kant, Wolff’s attempt to found philosophy on a single principle continued to influence German idealism as late as Reinhold, Fichte, and Hegel, and his exple of beginning metaphysics from the unique representative power of the soul continued to influence not only later writers such as Reinhold and Fichte but also Kant’s own conception of the transcendental unity of apperception. In spite of the academic influence of his metaphysics, Wolff’s importance for German culture lay in his rationalist rather than theological ethics. He argued that moral worth lies in the perfection of the objective essence of mankind; as the essence of a human is to be an intellect and a will (with the latter dependent on the former), which are physically embodied and dependent for their well-being on the well-being of their physical body, morality requires perfection of the intellect and will, physical body, and external conditions for the well-being of that combination. Each person is obliged to perfect all instantiations of this essence, but in practice does so most effectively in his own case; duties to oneself therefore precede duties to others and to God. Because pleasure is the sensible sign of perfection, Wolff’s perfectionism resembles contemporary utilitarianism. Since he held that human perfection can be understood by human reason independently of any revelation, Wolff joined contemporary British enlighteners such as Shaftesbury and Hutcheson in arguing that morality does not depend on divine commands, indeed the recognition of divine commands depends on an antecedent comprehension of morality (although morality does require respect for God, and thus the atheistic morality of the Chinese, even though sound as far as it went, was not complete). This was the doctrine that put Wolff’s life in danger, but it had tremendous repercussions for the remainder of his century, and certainly in Kant.   

wollaston, Willi (1659–1724), English moralist notorious for arguing that the immorality of actions lies in their implying false propositions. An assistant headmaster who later took priestly orders, Wollaston maintains in his one published work, The Religion of Nature Delineated (1722), that the foundations of religion and morality are mutually dependent. God has preestablished a harmony between reason (or truth) and happiness, so that actions that contradict truth through misrepresentation thereby frustrate human happiness and are thus evil. For instance, if a person steals another’s watch, her falsely representing the watch as her own makes the act wrong. Wollaston’s views, particularly his taking morality to consist in universal and necessary truths, were influenced by the rationalists Ralph Cudworth and Clarke. ong his many critics the most fous was Hume, who contends that Wollaston’s theory implies an absurdity: any action concealed from public view (e.g., adultery) conveys no false proposition and therefore is not immoral.

Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759–97), English author and feminist whose A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) is a central text of feminist philosophy. Her chief target is Rousseau: her goal is to argue against the separate and different education Rousseau provided for girls and to extend his recommendations to girls as well as boys. Wollstonecraft saw such an improved education for women as necessary to their asserting their right as “human creatures” to develop their faculties in a way conducive to human virtue. She also wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), an attack on Edmund Burke’s pphlet on the French Revolution, as well as novels, essays, an account of her travels, and books for children. 

wright, C: philosopher. His philosophical discussions are stimulating and attracted many, including Peirce, Jes, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who thinks of him as their “intellectual boxing master.” Wright eventually accepted empiricism, especially that of J. S. Mill, though under Darwinian influence he modified Mill’s view considerably by rejecting the empiricist claim that general propositions merely summarize particulars. Wright claims instead that scientific theories are hypotheses to be further developed, and insisted that a moral rule is irreducible and needs no utilitarian “proof.” Though he denied the “summary” view of universals, he is not strictly a pragmatist, since for him a low-level empirical proposition like Peirce’s ‘this diond is hard’ is not a hypothesis but a self-contained irreducible statement.  PEIRCE, PRAGMATISM.  

wu.YU, WU. wu-hsing, Chinese term meaning ‘five phases, processes, or elements’. The five phases – earth, wood, metal, fire, and water – along with yin and yang, were the basis of Chinese correlative cosmologies developed in the Warring States period (403–221 B.C.) and early Han dynasty (206 B.C.– A.D. 220). These cosmologies posited a relation between the human world and the natural order. Thus the five phases were correlated to patterns in human history such as the cyclical rise and fall of dynasties, to sociopolitical order and the monthly rituals of rulers, to musical notes and tastes, even to organs of the body. Whereas the goal of early cosmologists such as Tsou Yen was to bring the human order into harmony with the natural order via the five phases, Han dynasty cosmologists and immortality seekers sought to control nature and prolong life by manipulating the five phases, particularly within the body. R.P.P. & R.T.A.

Wundt: Wilhelm Maximilien (1832–1920), German philosopher and psychologist, a founder of scientific psychology. Although trained as a physician, he turned to philosophy and in 1879, at the University of Leipzig, established the first recognized psychology laboratory. For Wundt, psychology was the science of conscious experience, a definition soon overtaken by behaviorism. Wundt’s psychology had two departments: the so-called physiological psychology (Grundzuge der physiologischen Psychologie, 3 vols., 1873– 74; only vol. 1 of the fifth edition, 1910, was translated into English), primarily the experimental study of immediate experience broadly modeled on Fechner’s psychophysics; and the Volkerpsychologie (Volkerpsychologie, 10 vols., 1900–20; fragment translated as The Language of Gestures, 1973), the non-experimental study of the higher mental processes via their products, language, myth, and custom. Although Wundt was a prodigious investigator and author, and was revered as psychology’s founder, his theories, unlike his methods, exerted little influence. A typical German scholar of his time, he also wrote across the whole of philosophy, including logic and ethics. .

wu wei, Chinese philosophical term often translated as ‘non-action’ and associated with Taoism. It is actually used in both Taoist and non-Taoist texts to describe an ideal state of existence or ideal form of government, interpreted differently in different texts. In the Chuang Tzu, it describes a state of existence in which one is not guided by preconceived goals or projects, including moral ideals; in the Lao Tzu, it refers to the absence of striving toward worldly goals, and also describes the ideal form of government, which does not teach or impose on the people standards of behavior, including those of conventional morality. In other texts, it is sometimes used to describe the effortlessness of moral action, and sometimes used to refer to the absence of any need for active participation in government by the ruler, resulting either from the appointment of worthy and able officials inspired by the moral exple of the ruler, or from the establishment of an effective machinery of government presided over by a ruler with prestige.  TAOISM. K.-l.S. Wyclif, John (c.1330–84), English theologian and religious reformer. He worked for most of his life in Oxford as a secular clerk, teaching philosophy and later theology and writing extensively in both fields. The mode of thought expressed in his surviving works is one of extreme realism, and in this his thought fostered the split of Bohemian, later Hussite, philosophy from that of the German masters teaching in Prague. His worldline Wyclif, John 982   982 philosophical summa was most influential for his teaching on universals, but also dealt extensively with the question of determinism; these issues underlay his later handling of the questions of the Eucharist and of the identity of the church respectively. His influence on English philosophy was severely curtailed by the growing hostility of the church to his ideas, the condemnation of many of his tenets, the persecution of his followers, and the destruction of his writings. A.Hu. Wyclif, John Wyclif, John 983   983 Xenocrates.ACADEMY. Xenophanes (c.570–c.475 B.C.), Greek philosopher, a proponent of an idealized conception of the divine, and the first of the pre-Socratics to propound epistemological views. Born in Colophon, an Ionian Greek city on the coast of Asia Minor, he emigrated as a young man to the Greek West (Sicily and southern Italy). The formative influence of the Milesians is evident in his rationalism. He is the first of the pre-Socratics for whom we have not only ancient reports but also quite a few verbatim quotations – fragments from his “Lpoons” (Silloi) and from other didactic poetry. Xenophanes attacks the worldview of Homer, Hesiod, and traditional Greek piety: it is an outrage that the poets attribute moral failings to the gods. Traditional religion reflects regional biases (blond gods for the Northerners; black gods for the Africans). Indeed, anthropomorphic gods reflect the ultimate bias, that of the human viewpoint (“If cattle, or horses, or lions . . . could draw pictures of the gods . . . ,” frg. 15). There is a single “greatest” god, who is not at all like a human being, either in body or in mind; he perceives without the aid of organs, he effects changes without “moving,” through the sheer power of his thought. The rainbow is no sign from Zeus; it is simply a special cloud formation. Nor are the sun or the moon gods. All phenomena in the skies, from the elusive “Twin Sons of Zeus” (St. Elmo’s fire) to sun, moon, and stars, are varieties of cloud formation. There are no mysterious infernal regions; the filiar strata of earth stretch down ad infinitum. The only cosmic limit is the one visible at our feet: the horizontal border between earth and air. Remarkably, Xenophanes tempers his theological and cosmological pronouncements with an epistemological caveat: what he offers is only a “conjecture.” In later antiquity Xenophanes ce to be regarded as the founder of the Eleatic School, and his teachings were assimilated to those of Parmenides and Melissus. This appears to be based on nothing more than Xenophanes’ emphasis on the oneness and utter immobility of God. 

Xenophon (c.430–c.350 B.C.), Greek soldier and historian, author of several Socratic dialogues, along with important works on history, education, political theory, and other topics. He was interested in philosophy, and he was a penetrating and intelligent “social thinker” whose views on morality and society have been influential over many centuries. His perspective on Socrates’ character and moral significance provides a valuable supplement and corrective to the better-known views of Plato. Xenophon’s Socratic dialogues, the only ones besides Plato’s to survive intact, help us obtain a broader picture of the Socratic dialogue as a literary genre. They also provide precious evidence concerning the thoughts and personalities of other followers of Socrates, such as Antisthenes and Alcibiades. Xenophon’s longest and richest Socratic work is the Memorabilia, or “Memoirs of Socrates,” which stresses Socrates’ self-sufficiency and his beneficial effect on his companions. Xenophon’s Apology of Socrates and his Symposium were probably intended as responses to Plato’s Apology and Symposium. Xenophon’s Socratic dialogue on estate management, the Oeconomicus, is valuable for its underlying social theory and its evidence concerning the role and status of women in classical Athens.  SOCRATES. D.R.M. 984 X   984

yang.YIN, YANG. Yang Chu, also called Yang Tzu (c.370–319 B.C.), Chinese philosopher most fous for the assertion, attributed to him by Mencius, that one ought not sacrifice even a single hair to save the whole world. Widely criticized as a selfish egotist and hedonist, Yang Chu was a private person who valued bodily integrity, health, and longevity over fe, fortune, and power. He believed that because one’s body and lifespan were bestowed by Heaven (t’ien), one has a duty (and natural inclination) to maintain bodily health and live out one’s years. Far from sanctioning hedonistic indulgence, this Heavenimposed duty requires discipline. R.P.P. & R.T.A. Yang Hsiung (53 B.C.–A.D. 18), Chinese philosopher who wrote two books: Tai-hsüan ching (“Classic of the Supremely Profound Principle”), an imitation of the I-Ching, and Fa-yen (“Model Sayings”), an imitation of the Analects. The former was ignored by his contemporaries, but the latter was quite popular in his time. His thoughts were eclectic. He was the first in the history of Chinese thought to advance the doctrine of human nature as a mixture of good and evil in order to avoid the extremes of Mencius and Hsün Tzu.  HSÜN TZU, MENCIUS. S.-h.L.

Yen Yuan (1635–1704), Chinese traditionalist and social critic. Like Wang Fu-chih, he attacked Neo-Confucian metaphysical dualism, regarding the Neo-Confucians’ views as wild speculations obscuring the true nature of Confucianism. Chu Hsi interpreted ko wu (investigating things) as discovering some transcendent “thing” called li (pattern), and Wang Yang-ming understood ko wu as rectifying one’s thoughts, but Yen argued it meant a kind of knowledge by acquaintance: the “hands-on” practice of traditional rituals and disciplines. As “proof” that Sung–Ming Confucians were wrong, Yen pointed to their social and political failures. Like many, he believed Confucianism was not only true but efficacious as well; failure to reform the world could be understood only as a personal failure to grasp and implement the Way.  CONFUCIANISM, WANG FUCHIH.

yi, Chinese term probably with an earlier meaning of ‘sense of honor’, subsequently used to refer to the fitting or right way of conducting oneself (when so used, it is often translated as ‘rightness’ or ‘duty’), as well as to a commitment to doing what is fitting or right (when so used, it is often translated as ‘righteousness’ or ‘dutifulness’). For Mohists, yi is determined by what benefits (li) the public, where benefit is understood in terms of such things as order and increased resources in society. For Confucians, while yi behavior is often behavior in accordance with traditional norms, it may also call for departure from such norms. Yi is determined not by specific rules of conduct, but by the proper weighing (chüan) of relevant considerations in a given context of action. Yi in the sense of a firm commitment to doing what is fitting or right, even in adverse circumstances, is an important component of the Confucian ethical ideal.  CONFUCIANISM, MO TZU. K.-l.S. Yi Ching.I-CHING.

yin, yang, metaphors used in the classical tradition of Chinese philosophy to express contrast and difference. Originally they designated the shady side and the sunny side of a hill, and gradually ce to suggest the way in which one thing “overshadows” another in some particular aspect of their relationship. Yin and yang are not “principles” or “essences” that help classify things; rather, they are ad hoc explanatory categories that report on relationships and interactions ong immediate concrete things of the world. Yin and yang always describe the relationships that are constitutive of unique particulars, and provide a vocabulary for “reading” the distinctions that obtain ong them. The complementary nature of the opposition captured in this pairing expresses the mutuality, interdependence, diversity, and creative efficacy of the dynic relationships that are deemed immanent in and valorize the world. The full range of difference in the world is deemed explicable 985 Y   985 through this pairing. 

yü, Chinese term meaning ‘desire’. One can feel yü toward sex objects or food, but one can also yü to be a more virtuous person. Yü is paired contrastively with wu (aversion), which has a similarly broad range of objects. After the introduction of Buddhism into China, some thinkers contended that the absence of yü and wu was the goal of self-cultivation. Generally, however, the presence of at least some yü and wu has been thought to be essential to moral perfection. B.W.V.N. yu, wu, Chinese terms literally meaning ‘having’ and ‘nothing’, respectively; they are often rendered into English as ‘being’ and ‘non-being’. But the Chinese never developed the mutually contradictory concepts of Being and Non-Being in Parmenides’ sense. In chapter 2 of Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu says that “being (yu) and non-being (wu) produce each other.” They appear to be a pair of interdependent concepts. But in chapter 40 Lao Tzu also says that “being comes from non-being.” It seems that for Taoism non-being is more fundental than being, while for Confucianism the opposite is true. The two traditions were seen to be complementary by later scholars. 

 yung, Chinese term usually translated as ‘courage’ or ‘bravery’. Different forms of yung are described in Chinese philosophical texts, such as a readiness to avenge an insult or to compete with others, or an absence of fear. Confucians advocate an ideal form of yung guided by rightness (yi). A person with yung of the ideal kind is fully committed to rightness, and will abide by rightness even at the risk of death. Also, realizing upon self-exination that there is no fault in oneself, the person will be without fear or uncertainty.

Zabarella, Jacopo (1532–89), Italian Aristotelian philosopher who taught at the University of Padua. He wrote extensive commentaries on Aristotle’s Physics and On the Soul and also discussed other interpreters such as Averroes. However, his most original contribution was his work in logic, Opera logica (1578). Zabarella regards logic as a preliminary study that provides the tools necessary for philosophical analysis. Two such tools are order and method: order teaches us how to organize the content of a discipline to apprehend it more easily; method teaches us how to draw syllogistic inferences. Zabarella reduces the varieties of orders and methods classified by other interpreters to compositive and resolutive orders and methods. The compositive order from first principles to their consequences applies to theoretical disciplines. The resolutive order from a desired end to means appropriate to its achievement applies to practical disciplines. This much was already in Aristotle. Zabarella offers an original analysis of method. The compositive method infers particular consequences from general principles. The resolutive method infers originating principles from particular consequences, as in inductive reasoning or in reasoning from effect to cause. It has been suggested that Zabarella’s terminology might have influenced Galileo’s mechanics.

Zeigarnik effect, the selective recall of uncompleted tasks in comparison to completed tasks. The effect was ned for Bluma Zeigarnik, a student of K. Lewin, who discovered it and described it in a paper published in the Psychologische Forschung in 1927. Subjects received an array of short tasks, such as counting backward and stringing beads, for rapid completion. Performance on half of these was interrupted. Subsequent recall for the tasks favored the interrupted tasks. Zeigarnik concluded that recall is influenced by motivation and not merely associational strength. The effect was thought relevant to Freud’s claim that unfulfilled wishes are persistent. Lewin attempted to derive the effect from field theory, suggesting that an attempt to reach a goal creates a tension released only when that goal is reached; interruption of the attempt produces a tension favoring recall. Conditions affecting the Zeigarnik effect are incompletely understood, as is its significance.

Zeno’s paradoxes, four paradoxes relating to space and motion attributed to Zeno of Elea (fifth century B.C.): the racetrack, Achilles and the tortoise, the stadium, and the arrow. Zeno’s work is known to us through secondary sources, in particular Aristotle. The racetrack paradox. If a runner is to reach the end of the track, he must first complete an infinite number of different journeys: getting to the midpoint, then to the point midway between the midpoint and the end, then to the point midway between this one and the end, and so on. But it is logically impossible for someone to complete an infinite series of journeys. Therefore the runner cannot reach the end of the track. Since it is irrelevant to the argument how far the end of the track is – it could be a foot or an inch or a micron away – this argument, if sound, shows that all motion is impossible. Moving to any point will involve an infinite number of journeys, and an infinite number of journeys cannot be completed. The paradox of Achilles and the tortoise. Achilles can run much faster than the tortoise, so when a race is arranged between them the tortoise is given a lead. Zeno argued that Achilles can never catch up with the tortoise no matter how fast he runs and no matter how long the race goes on. For the first thing Achilles has to do is to get to the place from which the tortoise started. But the tortoise, though slow, is unflag987 Z   987 ging: while Achilles was occupied in making up his handicap, the tortoise has advanced a little farther. So the next thing Achilles has to do is to get to the new place the tortoise occupies. While he is doing this, the tortoise will have gone a little farther still. However small the gap that remains, it will take Achilles some time to cross it, and in that time the tortoise will have created another gap. So however fast Achilles runs, all that the tortoise has to do, in order not to be beaten, is not to stop. The stadium paradox. Imagine three equal cubes, A, B, and C, with sides all of length l, arranged in a line stretching away from one. A is moved perpendicularly out of line to the right by a distance equal to l. At the se time, and at the se rate, C is moved perpendicularly out of line to the left by a distance equal to l. The time it takes A to travel l/2 (relative to B) equals the time it takes A to travel to l (relative to C). So, in Aristotle’s words, “it follows, he [Zeno] thinks, that half the time equals its double” (Physics 259b35). The arrow paradox. At any instant of time, the flying arrow “occupies a space equal to itself.” That is, the arrow at an instant cannot be moving, for motion takes a period of time, and a temporal instant is conceived as a point, not itself having duration. It follows that the arrow is at rest at every instant, and so does not move. What goes for arrows goes for everything: nothing moves. Scholars disagree about what Zeno himself took his paradoxes to show. There is no evidence that he offered any “solutions” to them. One view is that they were part of a progr to establish that multiplicity is an illusion, and that reality is a seless whole. The argument could be reconstructed like this: if you allow that reality can be successively divided into parts, you find yourself with these insupportable paradoxes; so you must think of reality as a single indivisible One. 

Zoroastrianism, the national religion of ancient Iran. Zoroastrianism suffered a steep decline after the seventh century A.D. because of conversion to Isl. Of a remnant of roughly 100,000 adherents today, three-fourths are Parsis (“Persians)” in or from western India; the others are Iranian Zoroastrians. The tradition is identified with its prophet; his ne in Persian, Zarathushtra, is preserved in German, but the ancient Greek rendering of that ne, Zoroaster, is the form used in most other modern European languages. Zoroaster’s hymns to Ahura Mazda (“the Wise Lord”), called the Gathas, are interspersed ong ritual hymns to other divine powers in the collection known as the Avesta. In them, Zoroaster seeks reassurance that good will ultimately triumph over evil and that Ahura Mazda will be a protector to him in his prophetic mission. The Gathas expect that humans, by aligning themselves with the force of righteousness and against evil, will receive bliss and benefit in the next existence. The dating of the texts and of the prophet himself is an elusive matter for scholars, but it is clear that Zoroaster lived somewhere in Iran sometime prior to the emergence of the Achaemenid empire in the sixth century B.C. His own faith in Ahura Mazda, reflected in the Gathas, ce to be integrated with other strains of old Indo-Iranian religion. We see these in the Avesta’s hymns and the religion’s ritual practices. They venerate an array of Iranian divine powers that resemble in function the deities found in the Vedas of India. A common Indo-Iranian heritage is indicated conclusively by similarities of language and of content between the Avesta and the Vedas. Classical Zoroastrian orthodoxy does not replace the Indo-Iranian divinities with Ahura Mazda, but instead incorporates them into its thinking more or less as Ahura Mazda’s agents. The Achaemenid kings from the sixth through the fourth centuries B.C. mention Ahura Mazda in their inscriptions, but not Zoroaster. The Parthians, from the third century B.C. to the third century A.D., highlighted Mithra ong the Indo-Iranian pantheon. But it was under the Sasanians, who ruled Iran from the third to the seventh centuries, that Zoroastrianism bece the established religion. A salient doctrine is the teaching concerning the struggle between good and evil. The time fre from the world’s creation to the final resolution or judgment finds the Wise Lord, Ahura Mazda (or Ohrmazd, in the Pahlavi language of Sasanian times), locked in a struggle with the evil spirit, Angra Mainyu (in Pahlavi, Ahriman). The teaching expands on an implication in the text of the Gathas, particularly Yasna 30, that the good and evil spirits, coming together in the beginning and establishing the living and inanimate realms, determined that at the end benefit would accrue to the righteous but not the wicked. In Sasanian times, there was speculative concern to assert Ahura Mazda’s infinity, omnipotence, and omniscience, qualities that may indicate an impact of Mediterranean philosophy. For exple, the Bundahishn, a Pahlavi cosmological and eschatological narrative, portrays Ahura Mazda as infinite in all four compass directions but the evil spirit as limited in one and therefore doomed to ultimate defeat. Such doctrine has been termed by some dualistic, in that it has (at least in Sasanian times) seen the power of God rivaled by that of an evil spirit. Zoroastrians today assert that they are monotheists, and do not worship the evil spirit. But to the extent that the characterization may hold historically, Zoroastrianism has manifested an “ethical” dualism, of good and evil forces. Although capable of ritual pollution through waste products and decay, the physical world, God’s creation, remains potentially morally good. Contrast “ontological” dualism, as in gnostic and Manichaean teaching, where the physical world itself is the result of the fall or entrapment of spirit in matter. In the nineteenth century, Zoroastrian texts newly accessible to Europe produced an awareness of the prophet’s concern for ethical matters. Nietzsche’s values in his work Thus Spake Zarathustra, however, are his own, not those of the ancient prophet. The title is arresting, but the connection of Nietzsche with historical Zoroastrianism is a connection in theme only, in that the work advances ideas about good and evil in an oracular style.