A Companion to Grice -- in six volumes, Vol. IV.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770–1831), one of the most influential and systematic of the German idealists, also well known for his philosophy of history and philosophy of religion. Life and works. Hegel, the eldest of three children, was born in Stuttgart, the son of a minor financial official in the court of the Duchy of Württemberg. His mother died when he was eleven. At eighteen, he began attending the theology seminary or Stift attached to the University at Tübingen; he studied theology and classical languages and literature and bece friendly with his future colleague and adversary, Schelling, as well as the great genius of German Romantic poetry, Hölderlin. In 1793, upon graduation, he accepted a job as a tutor for a fily in Bern, and moved to Frankfurt in 1797 for a similar post. In 1799 his father bequeathed him a modest income and the freedom to resign his tutoring job, pursue his own work, and attempt to establish himself in a university position. In 1801, with the help of Schelling, he moved to the university town of Jena, already widely known as the home of Schiller, Fichte, and the Schlegel brothers. After lecturing for a few years, he bece a professor in 1805. Prior to the move to Jena, Hegel’s essays had been chiefly concerned with problems in morality, the theory of culture, and the philosophy of religion. Hegel shared with Rousseau and the German Romantics many doubts about the political and moral implications of the European Enlightenment and modern philosophy in general, even while he still enthusiastically chpioned what he termed the principle of modernity, “absolute freedom.” Like many, he feared that the modern attack on feudal political and religious authority would merely issue in the reformulation of new internalized and still repressive forms of authority. And he was ong that legion of German intellectuals infatuated with ancient Greece and the superiority of their supposedly harmonious social life, compared with the authoritarian and legalistic character of the Jewish and later Christian religions. At Jena, however, he coedited a journal with Schelling, The Critical Journal of Philosophy, and ce to work much more on the philosophic issues created by the critical philosophy or “transcendental idealism” of Kant, and its legacy in the work of Rheinhold, Fichte, and Schelling. His written work bece much more influenced by these theoretical projects and their attempt to extend Kant’s search for the basic categories necessary for experience to be discriminated and evaluated, and for a theory of the subject that, in some non-empirical way, was responsible for such categories. Problems concerning the completeness, interrelation, and ontological status of such a categorial structure were quite prominent, along with a continuing interest in the relation between a free, self-determining agent and the supposed constraints of moral principles and other agents. In his early years at Jena (especially before Schelling left in 1803), he was particularly preoccupied with this problem of a systematic philosophy, a way of accounting for the basic categories of the natural world and for human practical activity that would ground all such categories on commonly presupposed and logically interrelated, even interdeducible, principles. (In Hegel’s terms, this was the problem of the relation between a “Logic” and a “Philosophy of Nature” and “Philosophy of Spirit.”) After 1803, however, while he was preparing his own systematic philosophy for publication, what had been planned as a short introduction to this system took on a life of its own and grew into one of Hegel’s most provocative and influential books. Working at a furious pace, he finished hedonistic paradox Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 365 4065h-l.qxd     365 what would be eventually called The Phenomenology of Spirit in a period of great personal and political turmoil. During the final writing of the book, he had learned that Christina Burkhard would give birth to his illegitimate son. (Ludwig was born in February 1807.) And he is supposed to have completed the text on October 13, 1807, the day Napoleon’s armies captured Jena. It was certainly an unprecedented work. In conception, it is about the human race itself as a developing, progressively more self-conscious subject, but its content seems to take in a vast, heterogeneous range of topics, from technical issues in empiricist epistemology to the significance of burial rituals. Its range is so heterogeneous that there is controversy to this day about whether it has any overall unity, or whether it was pieced together at the last minute. Adding to the interpretive problem, Hegel often invented his own striking language of “inverted worlds,” “struggles to the death for recognition,” “unhappy consciousness,” “spiritual animal kingdoms,” and “beautiful souls.” Continuing his university career at Jena in those times looked out of the question, so Hegel accepted a job at Bberg editing a newspaper, and in the following year began an eight-year stint (1808–16) as headmaster and philosophy teacher at a Gymnasium (or secondary school) at Nürnberg. During this period, at forty-one, he married the twenty-year-old Marie von Tucher. He also wrote what is easily his most difficult work, and the one he often referred to as his most important, a magisterial two-volume Science of Logic, which attempts to be a philosophical account of the concepts necessary in all possible kinds of account-givings. Finally, in 1816, Hegel was offered a chair in philosophy at the University of Heidelberg, where he published the first of several versions of his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, his own systematic account of the relation between the “logic” of human thought and the “real” expression of such interrelated categories in our understanding of the natural world and in our understanding and evaluation of our own activities. In 1818, he accepted the much more prestigious post in philosophy at Berlin, where he remained until his death in 1831. Soon after his arrival in Berlin, he began to exert a powerful influence over German letters and intellectual life. In 1821, in the midst of a growing political and nationalist crisis in Prussia, he published his controversial book on political philosophy, The Philosophy of Right. His lectures at the university were later published as his philosophy of history, of aesthetics, and of religion, and as his history of philosophy. Philosophy. Hegel’s most important ideas were formed gradually, in response to a number of issues in philosophy and often in response to historical events. Moreover, his language and approach were so heterodox that he has inspired as much controversy about the meaning of his position as about its adequacy. Hence any summary will be as much a summary of the controversies as of the basic position. His dissatisfactions with the absence of a public realm, or any forms of genuine social solidarity in the German states and in modernity generally, and his distaste with what he called the “positivity” of the orthodox religions of the day (their reliance on law, scripture, and abstract claims to authority), led him to various attempts to make use of the Greek polis and classical art, as well as the early Christian understanding of love and a renewed “folk religion,” as critical foils to such tendencies. For some time, he also regarded much traditional and modern philosophy as itself a kind of lifeless classifying that only contributed to contemporary fragmentation, myopia, and confusion. These concerns remained with him throughout his life, and he is thus rightly known as one of the first modern thinkers to argue that what had come to be accepted as the central problem of modern social and political life, the legitimacy of state power, had been too narrowly conceived. There are now all sorts of circumstances, he argued, in which people might satisfy the modern criterion of legitimacy and “consent” to the use of some power, but not fully understand the terms within which such issues are posed, or assent in an attenuated, resentful, manipulated, or confused way. In such cases they would experience no connection between their individual will and the actual content of the institutions they are supposed to have sanctioned. The modern problem is as much alienation (Entfremdung) as sovereignty, an exercise of will in which the product of one’s will appears “strange” or “alien,” “other,” and which results in much of modern life, however chosen or willed, being fundentally unsatisfying. However, during the Jena years, his views on this issue changed. Most importantly, philosophical issues moved closer to center stage in the Hegelian dra. He no longer regarded philosophy as some sort of self-undermining activity that merely prepared one for some leap into genuine “speculation” (roughly Schelling’s position) and began to chpion a unique kind of comprehensive, very determinate reflection on the interrelations ong all the various classical alternatives in philosophy. Much more controversially, he also attempted to understand the way in which such relations and transitions were also reflected in the history of the art, politics, and religions of various historical communities. He thus ce to think that philosophy should be some sort of recollection of its past history, a realization of the mere partiality, rather than falsity, of its past attempts at a comprehensive teaching, and an account of the centrality of these continuously developing attempts in the development of other human practices. Through understanding the “logic” of such a development, a reconciliation of sorts with the implications of such a rational process in contemporary life, or at least with the potentialities inherent in contemporary life, would be possible. In all such influences and developments, one revolutionary aspect of Hegel’s position bece clearer. For while Hegel still frequently argued that the subject matter of philosophy was “reason,” or “the Absolute,” the unconditioned presupposition of all human account-giving and evaluation, and thereby an understanding of the “whole” within which the natural world and human deeds were “parts,” he also always construed this claim to mean that the subject matter of philosophy was the history of human experience itself. Philosophy was about the real world of human change and development, understood by Hegel to be the collective self-education of the human species about itself. It could be this, and satisfy the more traditional ideals because, in one of his most fous phrases, “what is actual is rational,” or because some full account could be given of the logic or teleological order, even the necessity, for the great conceptual and political changes in human history. We could thereby finally reassure ourselves that the way our species had come to conceptualize and evaluate is not finite or contingent, but is “identical” with “what there is, in truth.” This identity theory or Absolute Knowledgemeans that we will then be able to be “at home” in the world and so will have understood what philosophers have always tried to understand, “how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.” The way it all hangs together is, finally, “due to us,” in some collective and historical and “logical” sense. (In a much disputed passage in his Philosophy of Religion lectures, Hegel even suggested that with such an understanding, history itself would be over.) Several elements in this general position have inspired a good deal of excitement and controversy. To advance claims such as these Hegel had to argue against a powerful, deeply influential assumption in modern thought: the priority of the individual, self-conscious subject. Such an assumption means, for exple, that almost all social relations, almost all our bonds to other human beings, exist because and only because they are made, willed into existence by individuals otherwise naturally unattached to each other. With respect to knowledge claims, while there may be many beliefs in a common tradition that we unreflectively share with others, such shared beliefs are also taken primarily to be the result of individuals continuously affirming such beliefs, however implicitly or unreflectively. Their being shared is simply a consequence of their being simultaneously affirmed or assented to by individuals. Hegel’s account requires a different picture, an insistence on the priority of some kind of collective subject, which he called human “spirit” or Geist. His general theory of conceptual and historical change requires the assumption of such a collective subject, one that even can be said to be “coming to self-consciousness” about itself, and this required that he argue against the view that so much could be understood as the result of individual will and reflection. Rather, he tried in many different ways to show that the formation of what might appear to an individual to be his or her own particular intention or desire or belief already reflected a complex social inheritance that could itself be said to be evolving, even evolving progressively, with a “logic” of its own. The completion of such collective attempts at self-knowledge resulted in what Hegel called the realization of Absolute Spirit, by which he either meant the absolute completion of the human attempt to know itself, or the realization in human affairs of some sort of extrahuman transcendence, or full expression of an infinite God. Hegel tried to advance all such claims about social subjectivity without in some way hypostatizing or reifying such a subject, as if it existed independently of the actions and thoughts of individuals. This claim about the deep dependence of individuals on one another (even for their very identity), even while they maintain their independence, is one of the best-known exples of Hegel’s attempt at a dialectical resolution of many of the traditional oppositions and antinomies of past thought. Hegel often argued that what appeared to be contraries in philosophy, such as mind/body, freedom/determinism, Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 367 4065h-l.qxd     367 idealism/materialism, universal/particular, the state/the individual, or even God/man, appeared such incompatible alternatives only because of the undeveloped and so incomplete perspective within which the oppositions were formulated. So, in one of his more fous attacks on such dualisms, human freedom according to Hegel could not be understood coherently as some purely rational self-determination, independent of heteronomous impulses, nor the human being as a perpetual opposition between reason and sensibility. In his moral theory, Kant had argued for the latter view and Hegel regularly returned to such Kantian claims about the opposition of duty and inclination as deeply typical of modern dualism. Hegel claimed that Kant’s version of a rational principle, the “categorical imperative,” was so formal and devoid of content as not to be action-guiding (it could not coherently rule in or rule out the appropriate actions), and that the “moral point of view” rigoristically demanded a pure or dutiful motivation to which no human agent could conform. By contrast, Hegel claimed that the dualisms of morality could be overcome in ethical life (Sittlichkeit), those modern social institutions which, it was claimed, provided the content or true “objects” of a rational will. These institutions, the fily, civil society, and the state, did not require duties in potential conflict with our own substantive ends, but were rather experienced as the “realization” of our individual free will. It has remained controversial what for Hegel a truly free, rational self-determination, continuous with, rather than constraining, our desire for happiness and self-actualization, ounted to. Many commentators have noted that, ong modern philosophers, only Spinoza, whom Hegel greatly admired, was as insistent on such a thoroughgoing compatibilism, and on a refusal to adopt the Christian view of human beings as permanently divided against themselves. In his most bitious analysis of such oppositions Hegel went so far as to claim that, not only could alternatives be shown to be ultimately compatible when thought together within some higher-order “Notion” (Begriff) that resolved or “sublated” the opposition, but that one term in such opposition could actually be said to imply or require its contrary, that a “positing” of such a notion would, to maintain consistency, require its own “negating,” and that it was this sort of dialectical opposition that could be shown to require a sublation, or Aufhebung (a term of art in Hegel that simultaneously means in German ‘to cancel’, ‘to preserve’, and ‘to raise up’). This claim for a dialectical development of our fundental notions has been the most severely criticized in Hegel’s philosophy. Many critics have doubted that so much basic conceptual change can be accounted for by an internal critique, one that merely develops the presuppositions inherent in the affirmation of some notion or position or related practice. This issue has especially attracted critics of Hegel’s Science of Logic, where he tries first to show that the attempt to categorize anything that is, simply and immediately, as “Being,” is an attempt that both “negates itself,” or ends up categorizing everything as “Nothing,” and then that this self-negation requires a resolution in the higher-order category of “Becoming.” This analysis continues into an extended argument that purports to show that any attempt to categorize anything at all must ultimately make use of the distinctions of “essence” and “appearance,” and elements of syllogistic and finally Hegel’s own dialectical logic, and both the details and the grand design of that project have been the subject of a good deal of controversy. (Unfortunately, much of this controversy has been greatly confused by the popular association of the terms “thesis,” “antithesis,” and “synthesis” with Hegel’s theory of dialectic. These crude, mechanical notions were invented in 1837 by a less-than-sensitive Hegel expositor, Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus, and were never used as terms of art by Hegel.) Others have argued that the tensions Hegel does identify in various positions and practices require a much broader analysis of the historical, especially economic, context within which positions are formulated and become important, or some more detailed attention to the empirical discoveries or paradoxes that, at the very least, contribute to basic conceptual change. Those worried about the latter problem have also raised questions about the logical relation between universal and particular implied in Hegel’s account. Hegel, following Fichte, radicalizes a Kantian claim about the inaccessibility of pure particularity in sensations (Kant had written that “intuitions without concepts are blind”). Hegel charges that Kant did not draw sufficiently radical conclusions from such an antiempiricist claim, that he should have completely rethought the traditional distinction between “what was given to the mind” and “what the mind did with the given.” By contrast Hegel is confident that he has a theory of a “concrete universal,” concepts that cannot be understood as pale generalizations or abstract representations of given particulars, because they are required for particulars to Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 368 4065h-l.qxd     368 be apprehended in the first place. They are not originally dependent on an immediate acquaintance with particulars; there is no such acquaintance. Critics wonder if Hegel has much of a theory of particularity left, if he does not claim rather that particulars, or whatever now corresponds to them, are only interrelations of concepts, and in which the actual details of the organization of the natural world and human history are deduced as conceptual necessities in Hegel’s Encyclopedia. (This interpretation of Hegel, that he believes all entities are really the thoughts, expressions, or modes of a single underlying mental substance, and that this mind develops and posits itself with some sort of conceptual necessity, has been termed a panlogicism, a term of art coined by Hermann Glockner, a Hegel commentator in the first half of the twentieth century. It is a much-disputed reading.) Such critics are especially concerned with the implications of this issue in Hegel’s political theory, where the great modern opposition between the state and the individual seems subjected to this se logic, and the individual’s true individuality is said to reside in and only in the political universal, the State. Thus, on the one hand, Hegel’s political philosophy is often praised for its early identification and analysis of a fundental, new aspect of contemporary life – the categorically distinct realm of political life in modernity, or the independence of the “State” from the social world of private individuals engaged in competition and private association (“civil society”). But, on the other hand, his attempt to argue for a completion of these domains in the State, or that individuals could only be said to be free in allegiance to a State, has been, at least since Marx, one of the most criticized aspects of his philosophy. Finally, criticisms also frequently target the underlying intention behind such claims: Hegel’s career-long insistence on finding some basic unity ong the many fragmented spheres of modern thought and existence, and his demand that this unity be articulated in a discursive account, that it not be merely felt, or gestured at, or celebrated in edifying speculation. PostHegelian thinkers have tended to be suspicious of any such intimations of a whole for modern experience, and have argued that, with the destruction of the premodern world, we simply have to content ourselves with the disconnected, autonomous spheres of modern interests. In his lecture courses these basic themes are treated in wide-ranging accounts of the basic institutions of cultural history. History itself is treated as fundentally political history, and, in typically Hegelian fashion, the major epochs of political history are claimed to be as they were because of the internal inadequacies of past epochs, all until some final political semiconsciousness is achieved and realized. Art is treated equally developmentally, evolving from symbolic, through “classical,” to the most intensely self-conscious form of aesthetic subjectivity, romantic art. The Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion embody these themes in some of the most controversial ways, since Hegel often treats religion and its development as a kind of picture or accessible “representation” of his own views about the relation of thought to being, the proper understanding of human finitude and “infinity,” and the essentially social or communal nature of religious life. This has inspired a characteristic debate ong Hegel scholars, with some arguing that Hegel’s appropriation of religion shows that his own themes are essentially religious (if an odd, pantheistic version of Christianity), while others argue that he has so Hegelianized religious issues that there is little distinctively religious left. Influence. This last debate is typical of that prominent in the post-Hegelian tradition. Although, in the decades following his death, there was a great deal of work by self-described Hegelians on the history of law, on political philosophy, and on aesthetics, most of the prominent academic defenders of Hegel were interested in theology, and many of these were interested in defending an interpretation of Hegel consistent with traditional Christian views of a personal God and personal immortality. This began to change with the work of “young Hegelians” such as D. F. Strauss (1808–74), Feuerbach (1804–72), Bruno Bauer (1809–82), and Arnold Ruge (1803–80), who emphasized the humanistic and historical dimensions of Hegel’s account of religion, rejected the Old Hegelian tendencies toward a reconciliation with contemporary political life, and began to reinterpret and expand Hegel’s account of the productive activity of human spirit (eventually focusing on labor rather than intellectual and cultural life). Strauss himself characterized the fight as between “left,” “center,” and “right” Hegelians, depending on whether one was critical or conservative politically, or had a theistic or a humanistic view of Hegelian Geist. The most fous young or left Hegelian was Marx, especially during his days in Paris as coeditor, with Ruge, of the Deutsch-französischen Jahrbücher (1844). Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 369 4065h-l.qxd     369 In Great Britain, with its long skeptical, empiricist, and utilitarian tradition, Hegel’s work had little influence until the latter part of the nineteenth century, when philosophers such as Green and Caird took up some of the holistic themes in Hegel and developed a neo-Hegelian reading of issues in politics and religion that began to have influence in the academy. The most prominent of the British neo-Hegelians of the next generation were Bosanquet, McTaggart, and especially Bradley, all of whom were interested in many of the metaphysical implications of Hegel’s idealism, what they took to be a Hegelian claim for the “internally related” interconnection of all particulars within one single, ideal or mental, substance. Moore and Russell waged a hugely successful counterattack in the ne of traditional empiricism and what would be called “analytic philosophy” against such an enterprise and in this tradition largely finished off the influence of Hegel (or what was left of the historical Hegel in these neo-Hegelian versions). In Germany, Hegel has continued to influence a number of different schools of neo-Marxism, sometimes itself simply called “Hegelian Marxism,” especially the Frankfurt School, or “critical theory” group (especially Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse). And he has been extremely influential in France, particularly thanks to the lectures of a brilliant if idiosyncratic Russian émigré, Alexander Kojève, who taught Hegel in the 1930s at the École Pratique des Hautes Études to the likes of Merleau-Ponty and Lacan. Kojève was as much influenced by Marx and Heidegger as Hegel, but his lectures inspired many thinkers to turn again to Hegel’s account of human selfdefinition in time and to the historicity of all institutions and practices and so forged an unusual link between Hegel and postwar existentialism. Hegelian themes continue to resurface in contemporary hermeneutics, in “communitarianism” in ethics, and in the increasing attention given to conceptual change and history in the philosophy of science. This has meant for many that Hegel should now be regarded not only as the origin of a distinctive tradition in European philosophy that emphasizes the historical and social nature of human existence, but as a potential contributor to many new and often interdisciplinary approaches to philosophy. 

Heidegger, Martin (1889–1976), German philosopher whose early works contributed to phenomenology and existentialism (e.g., Sartre) and whose later works paved the way to hermeneutics (Gader) and post-structuralism (Derrida and Foucault). Born in Messkirch in the Black Forest region, Heidegger first trained to be a Jesuit, but switched to mathematics and philosophy in 1911. As an instructor at Freiburg University, he worked with the founder of phenomenology, Husserl. His masterwork, Sein und Zeit (Being and Time, 1927), was published while he was teaching at Marburg University. This work, in opposition to the preoccupation with epistemology dominant at the time, focused on the traditional question of metaphysics: What is the being of entities in general? Rejecting abstract theoretical approaches to this question, Heidegger drew on Kierkegaard’s religious individualism and the influential movement called life-philosophy – Lebensphilosophie, then identified with Nietzsche, Bergson, and Dilthey – to develop a highly original account of humans as embedded in concrete situations of action. Heidegger accepted Husserl’s chair at Freiburg in 1928; in 1933, having been elected rector of the University, he joined the Nazi party. Although he stepped down as rector one year later, new evidence suggests complicity with the Nazis until the end of the war. Starting in the late thirties, his writings started to shift toward the “antihumanist” and “poetic” form of thinking referred to as “later Heidegger.” Heidegger’s lifelong project was to answer the “question of being” (Seinsfrage). This question asks, concerning things in general (rocks, tools, people, etc.), what is it to be an entity of these sorts? It is the question of ontology first posed by ancient Greek philosophers from Anaximander to Aristotle. Heidegger holds, however, that philosophers starting with Plato have gone astray in trying to answer this question because they have tended to think of being as a property or essence enduringly present in things. In other words, they have fallen into the “metaphysics of presence,” which thinks of being as substance. What is overlooked in traditional metaphysics is the background conditions that enable entities to show up as counting or mattering in some specific way in the first place. In his early works, Heidegger tries to bring this concealed dimension of things to light by recasting the question of being: What is the meaning of being? Or, put differently, how do entities come to show up as intelligible to Hegelians, Young Heidegger, Martin 370 4065h-l.qxd     370 us in some determinate way? And this question calls for an analysis of the entity that has some prior understanding of things: human existence or Dasein (the German word for “existence” or “being-there,” used to refer to the structures of humans that make possible an understanding of being). Heidegger’s claim is that Dasein’s pretheoretical (or “preontological”) understanding of being, embodied in its everyday practices, opens a “clearing” in which entities can show up as, say, tools, protons, numbers, mental events, and so on. This historically unfolding clearing is what the metaphysical tradition has overlooked. In order to clarify the conditions that make possible an understanding of being, then, Being and Time begins with an analytic of Dasein. But Heidegger notes that traditional interpretations of human existence have been one-sided to the extent that they concentrate on our ways of existing when we are engaged in theorizing and detached reflection. It is this narrow focus on the spectator attitude that leads to the picture, found in Descartes, of the self as a mind or subject representing material objects – the so-called subjectobject model. In order to bypass this traditional picture, Heidegger sets out to describe Dasein’s “average everydayness,” i.e., our ordinary, prereflective agency when we are caught up in the midst of practical affairs. The “phenomenology of everydayness” is supposed to lead us to see the totality of human existence, including our moods, our capacity for authentic individuality, and our full range of involvements with the world and with others. The analytic of Dasein is also an ontological hermeneutics to the extent that it provides an account of how understanding in general is possible. The result of the analytic is a portrayal of human existence that is in accord with what Heidegger regards as the earliest Greek experience of being as an emerging-into-presence (physis): to be human is to be a temporal event of self-manifestation that lets other sorts of entities first come to “emerge and abide” in the world. From the standpoint of this description, the traditional concept of substance – whether mental or physical – simply has no role to play in grasping humans. Heidegger’s brilliant diagnoses or “de-structurings” of the tradition suggest that the idea of substance arises only when the conditions making entities possible are forgotten or concealed. Heidegger holds that there is no pregiven human essence. Instead, humans, as self-interpreting beings, just are what they make of themselves in the course of their active lives. Thus, as everyday agency, Dasein is not an object with properties, but is rather the “happening” of a life course “stretched out between birth and death.” Understood as the “historicity” of a temporal movement or “becoming,” Dasein is found to have three main “existentials” or basic structures shared by every “existentiell” (i.e., specific and local) way of living. First, Dasein finds itself thrown into a world not of its choosing, already delivered over to the task of living out its life in a concrete context. This “facticity” of our lives is revealed in the moods that let things matter to us in some way or other – e.g., the burdensome feelings of concern that accompany being a parent in our culture. Second, as projection, Dasein is always already taking some stand on its life by acting in the world. Understood as agency, human existence is “ahead of itself” in two senses: (1) our competent dealings with filiar situations sketch out a range of possibilities for how things may turn out in the future, and (2) each of our actions is contributing to shaping our lives as people of specific sorts. Dasein is futuredirected in the sense that the ongoing fulfillment of possibilities in the course of one’s active life constitutes one’s identity (or being). To say that Dasein is “being-toward-death” is to say that the stands we take (our “understanding”) define our being as a totality. Thus, my actual ways of treating my children throughout my life define my being as a parent in the end, regardless of what good intentions I might have. Finally, Dasein is discourse in the sense that we are always articulating – or “addressing and discussing” – the entities that show up in our concernful absorption in current situations. These three existentials define human existence as a temporal unfolding. The unity of these dimensions – being already in a world, ahead of itself, and engaged with things – Heidegger calls care. This is what it means to say that humans are the entities whose being is at issue for them. Taking a stand on our own being, we constitute our identity through what we do. The formal structure of Dasein as temporality is made concrete through one’s specific involvements in the world (where ‘world’ is used in the life-world sense in which we talk about the business world or the world of academia). Dasein is the unitary phenomenon of being-in-the-world. A core component of Heidegger’s early works is his description of how Dasein’s practical dealings with equipment define the being of the entities that show up in the world. In hmering in a workshop, e.g., what ordinarily shows up for us is not a hmer-thing with properties, but rather a web of significance relations shaped by Heidegger, Martin Heidegger, Martin 371 4065h-l.qxd     371 our projects. Hmering is “in order to” join boards, which is “for” building a bookcase, which is “for the sake of” being a person with a neat study. The hmer is encountered in terms of its place in this holistic context of functionality – the “ready-to-hand.” In other words, the being of the equipment – its “ontological definition” – consists of its relations to other equipment and its actual use within the entire practical context. Seen from this standpoint, the brute, meaningless objects assumed to be basic by the metaphysical tradition – the “present-at-hand” – can show up only when there is a breakdown in our ordinary dealings with things, e.g., when the hmer breaks or is missing. In this sense, the ready-to-hand is said to be more primordial than the material objects treated as basic by the natural sciences. It follows, then, that the being of entities in the world is constituted by the frework of intelligibility or “disclosedness” opened by Dasein’s practices. This clearing is truth in the original meaning of the Greek word aletheia, which Heidegger renders as ‘un-concealment’. But it would be wrong to think that what is claimed here is that humans are initially just given, and that they then go on to create a clearing. For, in Heidegger’s view, our own being as agents of specific types is defined by the world into which we are thrown: in my workshop, I can be a craftsman or an ateur, but not a surai paying court to a daimyo. Our identity as agents is made possible by the context of shared forms of life and linguistic practices of a public life-world. For the most part, we exist as the “they” (das Man), participants in the historically constituted “cohappening of a people” (Volk). The embeddedness of our existence in a cultural context explains our inveterate tendency toward inauthenticity. As we become initiated into the practices of our community, we are inclined to drift along with the crowd, doing what “one” does, enacting stereotyped roles, and thereby losing our ability to seize on and define our own lives. Such falling into public preoccupations Heidegger sees as a sign that we are fleeing from the fact that we are finite beings who stand before death (understood as the culmination of our possibilities). When, through anxiety and hearing the call of conscience, we face up to our being-toward-death, our lives can be transformed. To be authentic is to clear-sightedly face up to one’s responsibility for what one’s life is adding up to as a whole. And because our lives are inseparable from our community’s existence, authenticity involves seizing on the possibilities circulating in our shared “heritage” in order to realize a communal “destiny.” Heidegger’s ideal of resolute “taking action” in the current historical situation no doubt contributed to his leap into politics in the 1930s. According to his writings of that period, the ancient Greeks inaugurated a “first beginning” for Western civilization, but centuries of forgetfulness (beginning with the Latinization of Greek words) have torn us away from the primal experience of being rooted in that initial setting. Heidegger hoped that, guided by the insights embodied in great works of art (especially Hölderlin’s poetry), National Socialism would help bring about a world-rejuvenating “new beginning” comparable to the first beginning in ancient Greece. Heidegger’s later writings attempt to fully escape the subjectivism he sees dominating Western thought from its inception up to Nietzsche. “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1935), for exple, shows how a great work of art such as a Greek temple, by shaping the world in which a people live, constitutes the kinds of people that can live in that world. An Introduction to Metaphysics (1935) tries to recover the Greek experience of humans as beings whose activities of gathering and ning (logos) are above all a response to what is more than human. The later writings emphasize that which resists all human mastery and comprehension. Such terms as ‘nothingness’, ‘earth’, and ‘mystery’ suggest that what shows itself to us always depends on a background of what does not show itself, what remains concealed. Language comes to be understood as the medium through which anything, including the human, first becomes accessible and intelligible. Because language is the source of all intelligibility, Heidegger says that humans do not speak, but rather language speaks us – an idea that bece central to poststructuralist theories. In his writings after the war, Heidegger replaces the notions of resoluteness and political activism with a new ideal of letting-be or releasement (Gelassenheit), a stance characterized by meditative thinking, thankfulness for the “gift” of being, and openness to the silent “call” of language. The technological “enfring” (Gestell) of our age – encountering everything as a standing reserve on hand for our use – is treated not as something humans do, but instead as a manifestation of being itself. The “anti-humanism” of these later works is seen in the description of technology (the mobilization of everything for the sole purpose of greater efficiency) as an Heidegger, Martin Heidegger, Martin 372 4065h-l.qxd     372 epochal event in the “history of being,” a way things have come-into-their-own (Ereignis) rather than as a human accomplishment. The history or “sending” (Geschick) of being consists of epochs that have all gone increasingly astray from the original beginning inaugurated by the pre-Socratics. Since human willpower alone cannot bring about a new epoch, technology cannot be ended by our efforts. But a non-technological way of encountering things is hinted at in a description of a jug as a fourfold of earth, sky, mortals, and gods, and Heidegger reflects on forms of poetry that point to a new, non-metaphysical way of experiencing being. Through a transformed relation to language and art, and by abandoning “onto-theology” (the attempt to ground all entities in one supreme entity), we might prepare ourselves for a transformed way of understanding being. 

Hellenistic philosophy, the philosophical systems of the Hellenistic age (323–30 B.C., although 311–87 B.C. better defines it as a philosophical era), notably Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Skepticism. These all emerged in the generation after Aristotle’s death (322 B.C.), and dominated philosophical debate until the first century B.C., during which there were revivals of traditional Platonism and of Aristotelianism. The age was one in which much of the eastern Mediterranean world absorbed Greek culture (was “Hellenized,” hence “Hellenistic”), and recruits to philosophy flocked from this region to Athens, which remained the center of philosophical activity until 87 B.C. Then the Roman sack of Athens drove many philosophers into exile, and neither the schools nor the styles of philosophy that had grown up there ever fully recovered. Very few philosophical writings survive intact from the period. Our knowledge of Hellenistic philosophers depends mainly on later doxography, on the Roman writers Lucretius and Cicero (both mid-first century B.C.), and on what we learn from the schools’ critics in later centuries, e.g. Sextus Empiricus and Plutarch. ’Skeptic’, a term not actually current before the very end of the Hellenistic age, serves as a convenient label to characterize two philosophical movements. The first is the New Academy: the school founded by Plato, the Academy, bece in this period a largely dialectical one, conducting searching critiques of other schools’ doctrines without declaring any of its own, beyond perhaps the assertion (however guarded) that nothing could be known and the accompanying recommendation of “suspension of judgment” (epoche). The nature and vivacity of Stoicism owed much to its prolonged debates with the New Academy. The founder of this Academic phase was Arcesilaus (school head c.268– c.241); its most revered and influential protagonist was Carneades (school head in the mid-second century); and its most prestigious voice was that of Cicero (106–43 B.C.), whose highly influential philosophical works were written mainly from a New Academic stance. But by the early first century B.C. the Academy was drifting back to a more doctrinal stance, and in the later part of the century it was largely eclipsed by a second “skeptic” movement, Pyrrhonism. This was founded by Aenesidemus, a pioneering skeptic despite his claim to be merely reviving the philosophy of Pyrrho, a philosophical guru of the early Hellenistic period. His neo-Pyrrhonism survives today mainly through the writings of Sextus Empiricus (second century A.D.), an adherent of the school who, strictly speaking, represents its post-Hellenistic phase. The Peripatos, Aristotle’s school, officially survived throughout the era, but it is not regarded as a distinctively “Hellenistic” movement. Despite the eminence of Aristotle’s first successor, Theophrastus (school head 322–287), it thereafter fell from prominence, its fortunes only reviving around the mid-first century B.C. It is disputed how far the other Hellenistic philosophers were even aware of Aristotle’s treatises, which should not in any case be regarded as a primary influence on them. Each school had a location in Athens to which it could draw pupils. The Epicurean school was a relatively private institution, its “Garden” outside the city walls housing a close-knit philosophical community. The Stoics took their ne from the Stoa Poikile, the “Painted Colonnade” in central Athens where they gathered. The Academics were based in the Academy, a public grove just outside the city. Philosophers were public figures, a filiar sight around town. Each school’s philosophical identity was further clarified by its absolute loyalty to the ne of its Heidelberg School Hellenistic philosophy 373 4065h-l.qxd     373 founder – respectively Epicurus, Zeno of Citium, and Plato – and by the polarities that developed in interschool debates. Epicureanism is dietrically opposed on most issues to Stoicism. Academic Skepticism provides another antithesis to Stoicism, not through any positions of its own (it had none), but through its unflagging critical cpaign against every Stoic thesis. It is often said that in this age the old Greek political institution of the city-state had broken down, and that the Hellenistic philosophies were an answer to the resulting crisis of values. Whether or not there is any truth in this, it remains clear that moral concerns were now much less confined to the individual city-state than previously, and that at an extreme the boundaries had been pushed back to include all mankind within the scope of an individual’s moral obligations. Our “affinity” (oikeiosis) to all mankind is an originally Stoic doctrine that acquired increasing currency with other schools. This attitude partly reflects the weakening of national and cultural boundaries in the Hellenistic period, as also in the Roman imperial period that followed it. The three recognized divisions of philosophy were ethics, logic, and physics. In ethics, the central objective was to state and defend an account of the “end” (telos), the moral goal to which all activity was subordinated: the Epicureans ned pleasure, the Stoics conformity with nature. Much debate centered on the semimythical figure of the wise man, whose conduct in every conceivable circumstance was debated by all schools. Logic in its modern sense was primarily a Stoic concern, rejected as irrelevant by the Epicureans. But Hellenistic logic included epistemology, where the primary focus of interest was the “criterion of truth,” the ultimate yardstick against which all judgments could be reliably tested. Empiricism was a surprisingly uncontroversial feature of Hellenistic theories: there was little interest in the Platonic-Aristotelian idea that knowledge in the strict sense is non-sensory, and the debate between dogmatists and Skeptics was more concerned with the question whether any proposed sensory criterion was adequate. Both Stoics and Epicureans attached especial importance to prolepsis, the generic notion of a thing, held to be either innate or naturally acquired in a way that gave it a guaranteed veridical status. Physics saw an opposition between Epicurean atomism, with its denial of divine providence, and the Stoic world-continuum, imbued with divine rationality. The issue of determinism was also placed on the philosophical map: Epicurean morality depends on the denial of (both physical and logical) determinism, whereas Stoic morality is compatible with, indeed actually requires, the deterministic causal nexus through which providence operates. 

DOXOGRAPHERS, EPICUREANISM, SKEPTICS, STOICISM. D.N.S. Helmholtz, Hermann von (1821–94), German physiologist and physicist known for groundbreaking work in physics, physiological optics, perceptual psychology, and the philosophy of geometry. Formally trained as a physician, he distinguished himself in physics in 1848 as a codiscoverer of the law of conservation of energy, and by the end of his life was perhaps the most influential figure in German physical research. Philosophically, his most important influence was on the study of space. Intuitionist psychologists held that the geometrical structure of three-dimensional space was given directly in sensation by innate physiological mechanisms; Helmholtz brought this theory to severe empirical trials and argued, on the contrary, that our knowledge of space consists of inferences from accumulated experience. On the mathematical side, he attacked Kant’s view that Euclidean geometry is the a priori form of outer intuition by showing that it is possible to have visual experience of non-Euclidean space (“On the Origins and Meaning of Geometrical Axioms,” 1870). His crucial insight was that empirical geometry depends on physical assumptions about the behavior of measuring instruments. This inspired the view of Poincaré and logical empiricism that the empirical content of geometry is fixed by physical definitions, and made possible Einstein’s use of non-Euclidean geometry in physics.

 PHILOSOPHY OF MATHEMATICS, POINCARÉ. R.D. Helvétius, Claude Adrien (1715–71), French philosopher prominent in the formative phases of eighteenth-century materialism in France. His De l’esprit (1758) was widely discussed internationally, but condemned by the University of Paris and burned by the government. Helvétius attempted to clarify his doctrine in his posthumously published De l’homme. Following Locke’s criticism of the innate ideas, Helvétius stressed the function of experience in our acquisition of knowledge. In accord with the doctrines of d’Holbach, Condillac, and La Mettrie, the materialist Helvétius regarded the sensations as the basis of all our knowledge. Only by Helmholtz, Hermann von Helvétius, Claude Adrien 374 4065h-l.qxd     374 comparison, abstraction, and combination of sensations do we reach the level of concepts. Peculiar to Helvétius, however, is the stress on the social determinations of our knowledge. Specific interests and passions are the starting point of all our striving for knowledge. Egoism is the spring of our desires and actions. The civil laws of the enlightened state enabled egoism to be transformed into social competition and thereby diverted toward public benefits. Like his materialist contemporary d’Holbach and later Condorcet, Helvétius sharply criticized the social function of the church. Priests, he claimed, provided society with wrong moral ideas. He demanded a thorough reform of the educational system for the purpose of individual and social emancipation. In contrast to the teachings of Rousseau, Helvétius praised the further development of science, art, and industry as instruments for the historical progress of mankind. The ideal society consists of enlightened because well-educated citizens living in comfortable and even moderately luxurious circumstances. All people should participate in the search for truth, by means of public debates and discussions. Truth is equated with the moral good. Helvétius had some influence on Marxist historical materialism. H.P. Hempel, Carl G(ustav) (1905–97), eminent philosopher of science associated with the Vienna Circle of logical empiricist philosophers in the early 1930s, before his emigration to the United States; thereafter he bece one of the most influential philosophers of science of his time, largely through groundbreaking work on the logical analysis of the concepts of confirmation and scientific explanation. Hempel received his doctorate under Reichenbach at the University of Berlin in 1934 with a dissertation on the logical analysis of probability. He studied with Carnap at the University of Vienna in 1929–30, where he participated in the “protocol-sentence debate” concerning the observational basis of scientific knowledge raging within the Vienna Circle between Moritz Schlick (1882–1936) and Otto Neurath (1882–1945). Hempel was attracted to the “radical physicalism” articulated by Neurath and Carnap, which denied the foundational role of immediate experience and asserted that all statements of the total language of science (including observation reports or protocol-sentences) can be revised as science progresses. This led to Hempel’s first major publication, “On the Logical Positivists’ Theory of Truth” (1935). He moved to the United States to work with Carnap at the University of Chicago in 1937–38. He also taught at Queens College and Yale before his long career at Princeton (1955–1975). In the 1940s he collaborated with his friends Olaf Helmer and Paul Oppenheim on a celebrated series of papers, the most influential of which are “Studies in the Logic of Confirmation” (1945) and “Studies in the Logic of Explanation” (1948, coauthored with Oppenheim). The latter paper articulated the deductive-nomological model, which characterizes scientific explanations as deductively valid arguments proceeding from general laws and initial conditions to the fact to be explained, and served as the basis for all future work on the subject. Hempel’s papers on explanation and confirmation (and also related topics such as concept formation, criteria of meaningfulness, and scientific theories) were collected together in Aspects of Scientific Explanation (1965), one of the most important works in postwar philosophy of science. He also published a more popular, but extremely influential introduction to the field, Philosophy of Natural Science (1966). Hempel and Kuhn bece colleagues at Princeton in the 1960s. Another fruitful collaboration ensued, as a result of which Hempel moved away from the Carnapian tradition of logical analysis toward a more naturalistic and pragmatic conception of science in his later work. As he himself explains, however, this later turn can also be seen as a return to a similarly naturalistic conception Neurath had earlier defended within the Vienna Circle. 

henotheism, allegiance to one supreme deity while conceding existence to others; also described as monolatry, incipient monotheism, or practical monotheism. It occupies a middle ground between polytheism and radical monotheism, which denies reality to all gods save one. It has been claimed that early Judaism passed through a henotheistic phase, acknowledging other Middle Eastern deities (albeit condemning their worship), en route to exclusive recognition of Yahweh. But the concept of progress from polytheism through henotheism Hempel, Carl G(ustav) henotheism 375 4065h-l.qxd     375 to monotheism is a rationalizing construct, and cannot be supposed to capture the complex development of any historical religion, including that of ancient Israel. A.E.L. Henry of Ghent (c.1217–93), Belgian theologian and philosopher. After serving as a church official at Tournai and Brugge, he taught theology at Paris from 1276. His major writings were Summa quaestionum ordinariarum (Summa of Ordinary Questions) and Quodlibeta (Quodlibetal Questions). He was the leading representative of the neoAugustinian movement at Paris in the final quarter of the thirteenth century. His theory of knowledge combines Aristotelian elements with Augustinian illuminationism. Heavily dependent on Avicenna for his view of the reality enjoyed by essences of creatures (esse essentiae) from eternity, he rejected both real distinction and real identity of essence and existence in creatures, and defended their intentional distinction. He also rejected a real distinction between the soul and its powers and rejected the purely potential character of prime matter. He defended the duality of substantial form in man, the unicity of form in other material substances, and the primacy of will in the act of choice. J.F.W. Hentisberi, Hentisberus.HEYTESBURY. Heraclitus (fl. c.500 B.C.), Greek philosopher. A transition figure between the Milesian philosophers and the later pluralists, Heraclitus stressed unity in the world of change. He follows the Milesians in positing a series of cyclical transformations of basic stuffs of the world; for instance, he holds that fire changes to water and earth in turn. Moreover, he seems to endorse a single source or arche of natural substances, nely fire. But he also observes that natural transformations necessarily involve contraries such as hot and cold, wet and dry. Indeed, without the one contrary the other would not exist, and without contraries the cosmos would not exist. Hence strife is justice, and war is the father and king of all. In the conflict of opposites there is a hidden harmony that sustains the world, symbolized by the tension of a bow or the attunement of a lyre. Scholars disagree about whether Heraclitus’s chief view is that there is a one in the many or that process is reality. Clearly the underlying unity of phenomena is important for him. But he also stresses the transience of physical substances and the importance of processes and qualities. Moreover, his underlying source of unity seems to be a law of process and opposition; thus he seems to affirm both the unity of phenomena and the reality of process. Criticizing his predecessors such as Pythagoras and Xenophanes for doing research without insight, Heraclitus claims that we should listen to the logos, which teaches that all things are one. The logos, a principle of order and knowledge, is common to all, but the many remain ignorant of it, like sleepwalkers unaware of the reality around them. All things come to pass according to the logos; hence it is the law of change, or at least its expression. Heraclitus wrote a single book, perhaps organized into sections on cosmology, politics and ethics, and theology. Apparently, however, he did not provide a continuous argument but a series of epigrmatic remarks meant to reveal the nature of reality through oracular and riddling language. Although he seems to have been a recluse without immediate disciples, he may have stirred Parmenides to his reaction against contraries. In the late fifth century B.C. Cratylus of Athens preached a radical Heraclitean doctrine according to which everything is in flux and there is accordingly no knowledge of the world. This version of Heracliteanism influenced Plato’s view of the sensible world and caused Plato and Aristotle to attribute a radical doctrine of flux to Heraclitus. Democritus imitated Heraclitus’s ethical sayings, and in Hellenistic times the Stoics appealed to him for their basic principles. 

Herbart, Johann Friedrich (1776–1841), German philosopher who significantly contributed to psychology and the theory of education. Rejecting the idealism of Fichte and Hegel, he attempted to establish a form of psychology founded on experience. The task of philosophy is the analysis of concepts given in ordinary experience. Logic must clarify these concepts, Metaphysics should correct them, while Aesthetics and Ethics are to complement them by an analysis of values. Herbart advocated a form of determinism in psychology and ethics. The laws that govern psychological processes are identical with those that govern the heavens. He subordinated ethics to aesthetics, arguing that our moral values originate from certain immediate and involuntary judgments of like and dislike. The five basic ideas of morality are inner freedom, perfection, benevolence, law, and justice or equity. Herbart’s view of education – that it should aim at producing individuals who possess inner freedom and strength of character – was highly influential in nineteenth-century Germany. M.K. Henry of Ghent Herbart, Johann Friedrich 376 4065h-l.qxd     376 Herder, Johann Gottfried von (1744–1803), German philosopher, an intellectual and literary figure central to the transition from the German Enlightenment to Romanticism. He was born in East Prussia and received an early classical education. About 1762, while studying theology at the University of Königsberg, he ce under the influence of Kant. He also began a lifelong friendship with Hann, who especially stimulated his interests in the interrelations ong language, culture, and history. After ordination as a Lutheran minister in 1765, he began his association with the Berlin Academy, earning its prestigious “prize” for his “Essay on the Origin of Language” (1772). In 1776 he was appointed Generalsuperintendent of the Lutheran clergy at Weimar through the intercession of Goethe. He was then able to focus his intellectual and literary powers on most of the major issues of his time. Of particular note are his contributions to psychology in Of the Cognition and Sensation of the Human Soul (1778); to the philosophy of history and culture in Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784–91), perhaps his most influential work; and to philosophy in Understanding and Experience (1799), which contains his extensive Metakritik of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Herder was an intellectual maverick and provocateur, writing when the Enlightenment conception of reason was in decline but before its limited defense by Kant or its total rejection by Romanticism had become entrenched in the German-speaking world. Rejecting any rational system, Herder’s thought is best viewed as a mosaic of certain ideas that reemerge in various guises throughout his writings. Because of these features, Herder’s thought has been compared with that of Rousseau. Herder’s philosophy can be described as involving elements of naturalism, organicism, and vitalism. He rejected philosophical explanations, appealing to the supernatural or divine, such as the concept of the “immortal soul” in psychology, a “divine origin” of language, or “providence” in history. He sought to discern an underlying primordial force to account for the psychological unity of the various “faculties.” He viewed this natural tendency toward “organic formation” as also operative in language and culture, and as ultimately manifested in the dynic development of the various cultures in the form of a universal history. Finally, he often wrote in a way that suggested the dynic process of life itself as the basic metaphor undergirding his thought. His influence can be traced through Humboldt into later linguistics and through Schelling and Hegel in the philosophy of history and later German historicism. He anticipated elements of vitalism in Schopenhauer and Bergson. 

hermeneutics, the art or theory of interpretation, as well as a type of philosophy that starts with questions of interpretation. Originally concerned more narrowly with interpreting sacred texts, the term acquired a much broader significance in its historical development and finally bece a philosophical position in twentieth-century German philosophy. There are two competing positions in hermeneutics: whereas the first follows Dilthey and sees interpretation or Verstehen as a method for the historical and human sciences, the second follows Heidegger and sees it as an “ontological event,” an interaction between interpreter and text that is part of the history of what is understood. Providing rules or criteria for understanding what an author or native “really” meant is a typical problem for the first approach. The interpretation of the law provides an exple for the second view, since the process of applying the law inevitably transforms it. In general, hermeneutics is the analysis of this process and its conditions of possibility. It has typically focused on the interpretation of ancient texts and distant peoples, cases where the unproblematic everyday understanding and communication cannot be assumed. Schleiermacher’s analysis of understanding and expression related to texts and speech marks the beginning of hermeneutics in the modern sense of a scientific methodology. This emphasis on methodology continues in nineteenth-century historicism and culminates in Dilthey’s attempt to ground the human sciences in a theory of interpretation, understood as the imaginative but publicly verifiable reenactment of the subjective experiences of others. Such a method of interpretation reveals the possibility of an objective knowledge of human beings not accessible to empiricist inquiry and thus of a distinct methodology for the human sciences. One result of the analysis of interpretation in the nineteenth century was the recognition of “the hermeneutic circle,” first developed by SchleierHerder, Johann Gottfried von hermeneutics 377 4065h-l.qxd     377 macher. The circularity of interpretation concerns the relation of parts to the whole: the interpretation of each part is dependent on the interpretation of the whole. But interpretation is circular in a stronger sense: if every interpretation is itself based on interpretation, then the circle of interpretation, even if it is not vicious, cannot be escaped. Twentieth-century hermeneutics advanced by Heidegger and Gader radicalize this notion of the hermeneutic circle, seeing it as a feature of all knowledge and activity. Hermeneutics is then no longer the method of the human sciences but “universal,” and interpretation is part of the finite and situated character of all human knowing. “Philosophical hermeneutics” therefore criticizes Cartesian foundationalism in epistemology and Enlightenment universalism in ethics, seeing science as a cultural practice and prejudices (or prejudgments) as ineliminable in all judgments. Positively, it emphasizes understanding as continuing a historical tradition, as well as dialogical openness, in which prejudices are challenged and horizons broadened. 

GADER, HEIDEGGER, HISTORICISM, SCHLEIERMACHER, VERSTEHEN. J.Bo. hermeticism.HERMETISM. hermetism, also hermeticism, a philosophical theology whose basic impulse was the gnostic conviction that human salvation depends on revealed knowledge (gnosis) of God and of the human and natural creations. Texts ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus, a Greco-Egyptian version of the Egyptian god Thoth, may have appeared as early as the fourth century B.C., but the surviving Corpus Hermeticum in Greek and Latin is a product of the second and third centuries A.D. Fragments of the se literature exist in Greek, Armenian, and Coptic as well; the Coptic versions are part of a discovery made at Nag Hmadi after World War II. All these Hermetica record hermetism as just described. Other Hermetica traceable to the se period but surviving in later Arabic or Latin versions deal with astrology, alchemy, magic, and other kinds of occultism. Lactantius, Augustine, and other early Christians cited Hermes but disagreed on his value; before Iblichus, pagan philosophers showed little interest. Muslims connected Hermes with a Koranic figure, Idris, and thereby enlarged the medieval hermetic tradition, which had its first large effects in the Latin West ong the twelfth-century Platonists of Chartres. The only ancient hermetic text then available in the West was the Latin Asclepius, but in 1463 Ficino interrupted his epochal translation of Plato to Latinize fourteen of the seventeen Greek discourses in the main body of the Corpus Hermeticum (as distinct from the many Greek fragments preserved by Stobaeus but unknown to Ficino). Ficino was willing to move so quickly to Hermes because he believed that this Egyptian deity stood at the head of the “ancient theology” (prisca theologia), a tradition of pagan revelation that ran parallel to Christian scripture, culminated with Plato, and continued through Plotinus and the later Neoplatonists. Ficino’s Hermes translation, which he called the Pimander, shows no interest in the magic and astrology about which he theorized later in his career. Trinitarian theology was his original motivation. The Pimander was enormously influential in the later Renaissance, when Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Lodovico Lazzarelli, Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples, Symphorien Chpier, Francesco Giorgi, Agostino Steuco, Francesco Patrizi, and others enriched Western appreciation of Hermes. The first printed Greek Hermetica was the 1554 edition of Adrien Turnebus. The last before the nineteenth century appeared in 1630, a textual hiatus that reflected a decline in the reputation of Hermes after Isaac Casaubon proved philologically in 1614 that the Greek Hermetica had to be post-Christian, not the remains of primeval Egyptian wisdom. After Casaubon, hermetic ideas fell out of fashion with most Western philosophers of the current canon, but the historiography of the ancient theology remained influential for Newton and for lesser figures even later. The content of the Hermetica was out of tune with the new science, so Casaubon’s redating left Hermes to the theosophical heirs of Robert Fludd, whose opponents (Kepler, Mersenne, Gassendi) turned away from the Hermetica and similar fascinations of Renaissance humanist culture. By the nineteenth century, only theosophists took Hermes seriously as a prophet of pagan wisdom, but he was then rediscovered by German students of Christianity and Hellenistic religions, especially Richard Reitzenstein, who published his Poimandres in 1904. The ancient Hermetica are now read in the 1946–54 edition of A. D. Nock and A. J. Festugière.  FICINO. B.P.C. Herzen, Alexander (1812–70), Russian editor, memoirist, and social philosopher, in exile in Western Europe from 1847. Herzen moved in his philosophy of history from an early Hegelian hermeticism Herzen, Alexander 378 4065h-l.qxd     378 rationalism to a “philosophy of contingency,” stressing the “whirlwind of chances” in nature and in human life and the “tousled improvisation” of the historical process. He rejected determinism, emphasizing the “phenomenological fact” of the experienced “sense of freedom.” Anticipating the Dostoevsky of the “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor,” he offered an original analysis of the “escape from freedom” and the cleaving to moral and political authority, and sketched a curiously contemporary-sounding “emotivist” ethical theory. After 1848, disillusioned with “bourgeois” Europe and its “selfenclosed individualism,” but equally disillusioned with what he had come to see as the bourgeois ideal of many European socialists, Herzen turned to the Russian peasant and the peasant village commune as offering the best hope for a humane development of society. In this “Russian socialism” he anticipated a central doctrine of the Russian populists of the 1870s. Herzen stood alone in resisting the common tendency of such otherwise different thinkers as Feuerbach, Marx, and J. S. Mill to undervalue the historical present, to overvalue the historical future, and to treat actual persons as means in the service of remote, merely possible historical ends. Herzen’s own central emphasis fell powerfully and consistently on the freedom, independence, and non-instrumentalizable value of living persons. And he saw more clearly than any of his contemporaries that there are no future persons, that it is only in the present that free human individuals live and move and have their being.  RUSSIAN

PHILOSOPHY. G.L.K. heterological.SET-THEORETIC PARADOXES. heteronomy.KANT. heuristics, a rule or solution adopted to reduce the complexity of computational tasks, thereby reducing demands on resources such as time, memory, and attention. If an algorithm is a procedure yielding a correct solution to a problem, then a heuristic procedure may not reach a solution even if there is one, or may provide an incorrect answer. The reliability of heuristics varies between domains; the resulting biases are predictable, and provide information about system design. Chess, for exple, is a finite ge with a finite number of possible positions, but there is no known algorithm for finding the optimal move. Computers and humans both employ heuristics in evaluating intermediate moves, relying on a few significant cues to ge quality, such as safety of the king, material balance, and center control. The use of these criteria simplifies the problem, making it computationally tractable. They are heuristic guides, reliable but limited in success. There is no guarantee that the result will be the best move or even good. They are nonetheless satisfactory for competent chess. Work on human judgment indicates a similar moral. Exples of judgmental infelicities support the view that human reasoning systematically violates standards for statistical reasoning, ignoring base rates, sple size, and correlations. Experimental results suggest that humans utilize judgmental heuristics in gauging probabilities, such as representativeness, or the degree to which an individual or event resembles a prototypical member of a category. Such heuristics produce reasonable judgments in many cases, but are of limited validity when measured by a Bayesian standard. Judgmental heuristics are biased and subject to systemic errors. Experimental support for the importance of these heuristics depends on cases in which subjects deviate from the normative standard.  BAYESIAN RATIONALITY, EMPIRICAL DECISION THEORY. R.C.R. hexis (Greek, from hexo, ‘to have’, ‘to be disposed’), a (good or bad) condition, disposition, or state. The traditional rendering, ‘habit’ (Latin habitus), is misleading, for it tends to suggest the idea of an involuntary and merely repetitious pattern of behavior. A hexis is rather a state of character or of mind that disposes us to deliberately choose to act or to think in a certain way. The term acquired a quasi-technical status after Aristotle advanced the view that hexis is the genus of virtue, both moral and intellectual. In the Nicomachean Ethics he distinguishes hexeis from passions (pathe) and faculties (dunis) of the soul. If a man fighting in the front ranks feels afraid when he sees the enemy approaching, he is undergoing an involuntary passion. His capacity to be affected by fear on this or other occasions is part of his makeup, one of his faculties. If he chooses to stay where his commanders placed him, this is due to the hexis or state of character we call courage. Likewise, one who is consistently good at identifying what is best for oneself can be said to possess a hexis called prudence. Not all states and dispositions are commendable. Cowardice and stupidity are also hexeis. Both in the sense of ‘state’ and of ‘possession’ hexis plays a role in Aristotle’s Categories. 

Heytesbury, Willi, also called Hentisberus, Hentisberi, Tisberi (before 1313–c.1372), English philosopher and chancellor of Oxford University. He wrote Sophismata (“Sophisms”), Regulae solvendi sophismata (“Rules for Solving Sophisms”), and De sensu composito et diviso (“On the Composite and Divided Sense”). Other works are doubtfully attributed to him. Heytesbury belonged to the generation immediately after Thomas Bradwardine and Kilvington, and was ong the most significant members of the Oxford Calculators, important in the early developemnt of physics. Unlike Kilvington but like Bradwardine, he appealed to mathematical calculations in addition to logical and conceptual analysis in the treatment of change, motion, acceleration, and other physical notions. His Regulae includes perhaps the most influential treatment of the liar paradox in the Middle Ages. Heytesbury’s work makes widespread use of “imaginary” thought experiments assuming physical impossibilities that are yet logically consistent. His influence was especially strong in Italy in the fifteenth century, where his works were studied widely and commented on many times. 

PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE, QUANTUM MECHANICS. hierarchical system.COMPUTER THEORY. hierarchy, a division of mathematical objects into subclasses in accordance with an ordering that reflects their complexity. Around the turn of the century, analysts interested in the “descriptive set theory” of the real numbers defined and studied two systems of classification for sets of reals, the Borel (due to Emil Borel) and the G hierarchies. In the 1940s, logicians interested in recursion and definability (most importantly, Stephen Kleene) introduced and studied other hierarchies (the arithmetic, the hyperarithmetic, and the analytical hierarchies) of reals (identified with sets of natural numbers) and of sets of reals; the relations between this work and the earlier work were made explicit in the 1950s by J. Addison. Other sorts of hierarchies have been introduced in other corners of logic. All these so-called hierarchies have at least this in common: they divide a class of mathematical objects into subclasses subject to a natural well-founded ordering (e.g., by subsethood) that reflects the complexity (in a sense specific to the hierarchy under consideration) of the objects they contain. What follows describes several hierarchies from the study of definability. (For more historical and mathematical information see Descriptive Set Theory by Y. Moschovakis, North-Holland Publishing Co., 1980.) (1) Hierarchies of formulas. Consider a formal language L with quantifiers ‘E’ and ‘D’. Given a set B of formulas in L, we inductively define a hierarchy that treats the members of B as “basic.” Set P0 % S0 % B. Suppose sets Pn and Sn of formulas have been defined. Let Pn!1 % the set of all formulas of the form Q1u1 . . . Qmumw when u1, . . . , um are distinct variables, Q1, . . . , Qm are all ‘E’, m M 1, and w 1 Sn. Let Sn+1 % the set of all formulas of that form for Q1, . . . , Qm all ‘D’, and w 1 Pn. Here are two such hierarchies for languages of arithmetic. Take the logical constants to be truthfunctions, ‘E’ and ‘D’. (i) Let L0 % the first-order language of arithmetic, based on ‘%’, a two-place predicate-constant ‘‹’, an individual-constant for 0, functionconstants for successor, addition, and multiplication; ‘first-order’ means that bound variables are all first-order (ranging over individuals); we’ll allow free second-order variables (ranging over properties or sets of individuals). Let B % the set of bounded formulas, i.e. those formed from atomic formulas using connectives and bounded quantification: if w is bounded so are Eu(u ‹ t / w) and Du(u ‹ t & w). (ii) Let L1 % the second-order language of arithmetic (formed from L0 by allowing bound second-order variables); let B % the set of formulas in which no second-order variable is bound, and take all u1, . . . , um as above to be second-order variables. (2) Hierarchies of definable sets. (i) The Arithmetic Hierarchy. For a set of natural numbers (call such a thing ‘a real’) A : A 1 P0 n [ or S0 n ] if and only if A is defined over the standard model of arithmetic (i.e., with the constant for 0 assigned to 0, etc., and with the first-order variables ranging over the natural numbers) by a formula of L0 in Pn [respectively Sn] as described in (1.i). Set D0 n % P0 n Thus: In fact, all these inclusions are proper. This hierarchy classifies the reals simple enough to be defined by arithmetic formulas. Exple: ‘Dy x % y ! y’ defines the set even of even natural numHeytesbury, Willi hierarchy 380 4065h-l.qxd     380 bers; the formula 1 S1, so even 1 S0 1; even is also defined by a formula in P1; so even 1 P0 1, giving even 1 D0 1. In fact, S0 1 % the class of recursively enumerable reals, and D0 1 % the class of recursive reals. The classification of reals under the arithmetic hierarchy reflects complexity of defining formulas; it differs from classification in terms of a notion of degree of unsolvability, that reflecting a notion of comparative computational complexity; but there are connections between these classifications. The Arithmetic Hierarchy extends to sets of reals (using a free second-order variable in defining sentences). Exple: ‘Dx (Xx & Dy y % x ! x)’ 1 S1 and defines the set of those reals with an even number; so that set 1 S0 1. (ii) The Analytical Hierarchy. Given a real A : A 1 P1 n [S1 1] if and only if A is defined (over the standard model of arithmetic with second-order variables ranging over all sets of natural numbers) by a formula of L1 in Pn (respectively Sn) as described in (1.ii); D1 n % P1 n 3 S1 n. Similarly for a set of reals. The inclusions pictured above carry over, replacing superscripted 0’s by 1’s. This classifies all reals and sets of reals simple enough to have analytical (i.e., second-order arithmetic) definitions. The subscripted ‘n’ in ‘P0 n’, etc., ranged over natural numbers. But the Arithmetic Hierarchy is extended “upward” into the transfinite by the rified-analytical hierarchy. Let R0 % the class of all arithmetical reals. For an ordinal a let Ra!1 % the class of all sets of reals definable by formulas of L1 in which second-order variables range only over reals in Ra – this constraint imposes rification. For a limit-ordinal l, let Rl % Ua where n % m ! 1. So to determine relative possibility in a model, we identify R with a collection of pairs of the form where each of u and v is in W. If a pair is in R, v is possible relative to u, and if is not in R, v is impossible relative to u. The relative possibility relation then enters into the rules for evaluating modal operators. For exple, we do not want to say that at the actual world, it is possible for me to originate from a different sperm and egg, since the only worlds where this takes place are impossible relative to the actual world. So we have the rule that B f is true at a world u if f is true at some world v such that v is possible relative to u. Similarly, Af is true at a world u if f is true at every world v which is possible relative to u. R may have simple first-order properties such as reflexivity, (Ex)Rxx, symmetry, (Ex)(Ey)(Rxy P Ryx), and transitivity, (Ex)(Ey)(Ez)((Rxy & Ryz) P Rxz), and different modal systems can be modal logic modal logic 575    575 obtained by imposing different combinations of these on R (other systems can be obtained from higher-order constraints). The least constrained system is the system K, in which no structural properties are put on R. In K we have B (B & C) X B B, since if B (B & C) holds at w* then (B & C) holds at some world w possible relative to w*, and thus by the truth-function for &, B holds at w as well, so B B holds at w*. Hence any interpretation that makes B (B & C) true (% true at w*) also makes B B true. Since there are no restrictions on R in K, we can expect B (B & C) X B B in every system of modal logic generated by constraining R. However, for K we also have C Z B C. For suppose C holds at w*. B C holds at w* only if there is some world possible relative to w* where C holds. But there need be no such world. In particular, since R need not be reflexive, w* itself need not be possible relative to w*. Concomitantly, in any system for which we stipulate a reflexive R, we will have C X B C. The simplest such system is known as T, which has the se semantics as K except that R is stipulated to be reflexive in every interpretation. In other systems, further or different constraints are put on R. For exple, in the system B, each interpretation must have an R that is reflexive and symmetric, and in the system S4, each interpretation must have an R that is reflexive and transitive. In B we have B C Z B B C, as can be shown by an interpretation with nontransitive R, while in S4 we have B AC Z C, as can be shown by an interpretation with non-symmetric R. Correspondingly, in S4, B C X B B C, and in B, B AC X C. The system in which R is reflexive, transitive, and symmetric is called S5, and in this system, R can be omitted. For if R has all three properties, R is an equivalence relation, i.e., it partitions W into mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive equivalence classes. If Cu is the equivalence class to which u belongs, then the truthvalue of a formula at u is independent of the truth-values of sentence letters at worlds not in Cu, so only the worlds in Cw* are relevant to the truth-values of sentences in an S5 interpretation. But within Cw* R is universal: every world is possible relative to every other. Consequently, in an S5 interpretation, we need not specify a relative possibility relation, and the evaluation rules for B and A need not mention relative possibility; e.g., we can say that B f is true at a world u if there is at least one world v at which f is true. Note that by the characteristics of R, whenever 9 X s in K, T, B, or S4, then 9 X s in S5: the other systems are contained in S5. K is contained in all the systems we have mentioned, while T is contained in B and S4, neither of which is contained in the other. Sentential modal logics give rise to quantified modal logics, of which quantified S5 is the bestknown. Just as, in the sentential case, each world in an interpretation is associated with a valuation of sentence letters as in non-modal sentential logic, so in quantified modal logic, each world is associated with a valuation of the sort filiar in non-modal first-order logic. More specifically, in quantified S5, each world w is assigned a domain Dw – the things that exist at w – such that at least one Dw is non-empty, and each atomic n-place predicate of the language is assigned an extension Extw of n-tuples of objects that satisfy the predicate at w. So even restricting ourselves to just the one first-order extension of a sentential system, S5, various degrees of freedom are already evident. We discuss the following: (a) variability of domains, (b) interpretation of quantifiers, and (c) predication. (a) Should all worlds have the se domain or may the domains of different worlds be different? The latter appears to be the more natural choice; e.g., if neither of of Dw* and Du are subsets of the other, this represents the intuitive idea that some things that exist might not have, and that there could have been things that do not actually exist (though formulating this latter claim requires adding an operator for ‘actually’ to the language). So we should distinguish two versions of S5, one with constant domains, S5C, and the other with variable domains, S5V. (b) Should the truth of (Dn)f at a world w require that f is true at w of some object in Dw or merely of some object in D (D is the domain of all possible objects, 4weWDw)? The former treatment is called the actualist reading of the quantifiers, the latter, the possibilist reading. In S5C there is no real choice, since for any w, D % Dw, but the issue is live in S5V. (c) Should we require that for any n-place atomic predicate F, an n-tuple of objects satisfies F at w only if every member of the n-tuple belongs to Dw, i.e., should we require that atomic predicates be existence-entailing? If we abbreviate (Dy) (y % x) by Ex (for ‘x exists’), then in S5C, A(Ex)AEx is logically valid on the actualist reading of E (%-D-) and on the possibilist. On the former, the formula says that at each world, anything that exists at that world exists at every world, which is true; while on the latter, using the definition of ‘Ex’, it says that at each world, anything that exists at some world or other is such that at every world, it exists at some world or other, which is also true; indeed, the formula stays valid in S5C with possibilist quantifiers even if we make E a primitive logical constant, stipulated to be true at every w of modal logic modal logic 576    576 exactly the things that exist at w. But in S5V with actualist quantifiers, A(Ex)AEx is invalid, as is (Ex)AEx – consider an interpretation where for some u, Du is a proper subset of Dw*. However, in S5V with possibilist quantifiers, the status of the formula, if ‘Ex’ is defined, depends on whether identity is existence-entailing. If it is existenceentailing, then A(Ex)AEx is invalid, since an object in D satisfies (Dy)(y % x) at w only if that object exists at w, while if identity is not existence-entailing, the formula is valid. The interaction of the various options is also evident in the evaluation of two well-known schemata: the Barcan formula, B (Dx)fx P (Dx) B fx; and its converse, (Dx) B fx P B (Dx)fx. In S5C with ‘Ex’ either defined or primitive, both schemata are valid, but in S5V with actualist quantifiers, they both fail. For the latter case, if we substitute -E for f in the converse Barcan formula we get a conditional whose antecedent holds at w* if there is u with Du a proper subset of Dw*, but whose consequent is logically false. The Barcan formula fails when there is a world u with Du not a subset of Dw*, and the condition f is true of some non-actual object at u and not of any actual object there. For then B (Dx)f holds at w* while (Dx) B fx fails there. However, if we require atomic predicates to be existence-entailing, then instances of the converse Barcan formula with f atomic are valid. In S5V with possibilist quantifiers, all instances of both schemata are valid, since the prefixes (Dx) B and B (Dx) correspond to (Dx) (Dw) and (Dw) (Dx), which are equivalent (with actualist quantifiers, the prefixes correspond to (Dx 1 Dw*), and (Dw) (Dx 1 Dw) which are non-equivalent if Dw and Dw* need not be the se set). Finally in S5V with actualist quantifiers, the standard quantifier introduction and elimination rules must be adjusted. Suppose c is a ne for an object that does not actually exist; then - Ec is true but (Dx) - Ex is false. The quantifier rules must be those of free logic: we require Ec & fc before we infer (Dv)fv and Ec P fc, as well as the usual EI restrictions, before we infer (Ev)fv. 

mode (from Latin modus, ‘way’, ‘fashion’), a term used in many senses in philosophy. In Aristotelian logic, it refers either to the arrangement of universal, particular, affirmative, or negative propositions within a syllogism, only certain of which are valid (this is often translated as ‘mood’ in English), or to the property a proposition has by virtue of which it is necessary or contingent, possible or impossible. In Scholastic metaphysics, it was often used in a not altogether technical sense to mean that which characterizes a thing and distinguishes it from others. Micraelius (Lexicon philosophicum, 1653) writes that “a mode does not compose a thing, but distinguishes it and makes it determinate.” It was also used in the context of the modal distinction in the theory of distinctions to designate the distinction that holds between a substance and its modes or between two modes of a single substance. The term ‘mode’ also appears in the technical vocabulary of medieval speculative grmar in connection with the notions of modes of signifying (modi significandi), modes of understanding (modi intelligendi), and modes of being (modi essendi). The term ‘mode’ bece especially important in the seventeenth century, when Descartes, Spinoza, and Locke each took it up, giving it three somewhat different special meanings within their respective systems. Descartes makes ‘mode’ a central notion in his metaphysics in his Principia philosophiae. For Descartes, each substance is characterized by a principal attribute, thought for mind and extension for body. Modes, then, are particular ways of being extended or thinking, i.e., particular sizes, shapes, etc., or particular thoughts, properties (in the broad sense) that individual things (substances) have. In this way, ‘mode’ occupies the role in Descartes’s philosophy that ‘accident’ does in Aristotelian philosophy. But for Descartes, each mode must be connected with the principal attribute of a substance, a way of being extended or a way of thinking, whereas for the Aristotelian, accidents may or may not be connected with the essence of the substance in which they inhere. Like Descartes, Spinoza recognizes three basic metaphysical terms, ‘substance,’ ‘attribute’, and ‘mode’. Recalling Descartes, he defines ‘mode’ as “the affections of a substance, or that which is in another, and which is also conceived through another” (Ethics I). But for Spinoza, there is only one substance, which has all possible attributes. This makes it somewhat difficult to determine exactly what Spinoza means by ‘modes’, whether they are to be construed as being in some sense “properties” of God, the one infinite modal logic of progrs mode 577    577 substance, or whether they are to be construed more broadly as simply individual things that depend for their existence on God, just as Cartesian modes depend on Cartesian substance. Spinoza also introduces somewhat obscure distinctions between infinite and finite modes, and between immediate and mediate infinite modes. Locke uses ‘mode’ in a way that evidently derives from Descartes’s usage, but that also differs from it. For Locke, modes are “such complex Ideas, which however compounded, contain not in them the supposition of subsisting by themselves, but are considered as Dependences on, or Affections of Substances” (Essay II). Modes are thus ideas that represent to us the complex properties of things, ideas derived from what Locke calls the simple ideas that come to us from experience. Locke distinguishes between simple modes like number, space, and infinity, which are supposed to be constructed by compounding the se idea many times, and mixed modes like obligation or theft, which are supposed to be compounded of many simple ideas of different sorts.

model theory, a branch of mathematical logic that deals with the connection between a language and its interpretations or structures. Basic to it is the characterization of the conditions under which a sentence is true in structure. It is confusing that the term ‘model’ itself is used slightly differently: a model for a sentence is a structure for the language of the sentence in which it is true. Model theory was originally developed for explicitly constructed, formal languages, with the purpose of studying foundational questions of mathematics, but was later applied to the semantical analysis of empirical theories, a development initiated by the Dutch philosopher Evert Beth, and of natural languages, as in Montague grmar. More recently, in situation theory, we find a theory of semantics in which not the concept of truth in a structure, but that of information carried by a statement about a situation, is central. The term ‘model theory’ ce into use in the 1930s, with the work on first-order model theory by Tarski, but some of the most central results of the field date from before that time. The history of the field is complicated by the fact that in the 1910s and 1920s, when the first model-theoretic findings were obtained, the separation between first-order logic and its extensions was not yet completed. Thus, in 1915, there appeared an article by Leopold Löwenheim, containing the first version of what is now called the Löwenheim-Skolem theorem. Löwenheim proved that every satisfiable sentence has a countable model, but he did not yet work in firstorder logic as we now understand it. One of the first who did so was the Norwegian logician Thoralf Skolem, who showed in 1920 that a set of first-order sentences that has a model, has a countable model, one form of the LöwenheimSkolem theorem. Skolem argued that logic was first-order logic and that first-order logic was the proper basis for metathematical investigations, fully accepting the relativity of set-theoretic notions in first-order logic. Within philosophy this thesis is still dominant, but in the end it has not prevailed in mathematical logic. In 1930 Kurt Gödel solved an open problem of Hilbert-Ackermann and proved a completeness theorem for first-order logic. This immediately led to another important model-theoretic result, the compactness theorem: if every finite subset of a set of sentences has a model then the set has a model. A good source for information about the model theory of first-order logic, or classical model theory, is still Model Theory by C. C. Chang and H. J. Keisler (1973). When the separation between first-order logic and stronger logics had been completed and the model theory of first-order logic had become a mature field, logicians undertook in the late 1950s the study of extended model theory, the model theory of extensions of first-order logic: first of cardinality quantifiers, later of infinitary languages and of fragments of second-order logic. With so many exples of logics around – where sometimes classical theorems did generalize, sometimes not – Per Lindström showed in 1969 what sets first-order logic apart from its extensions: it is the strongest logic that is both compact and satisfies the LöwenheimSkolem theorem. This work has been the beginning of a study of the relations between various properties logics may possess, the so-called abstract model. 

modularity, the commitment to functionally independent and specialized cognitive systems in psychological organization, or, more generally, in the organization of any complex system. Modularity entails that behavior is the product of components with subordinate functions, that these functions are realized in discrete physical systems, and that the subsystems are minimally interactive. Modular organization varies from simple decomposability to what Herbert Simon calls near decomposability. In the former, component systems are independent, operating according to intrinsically determined principles; system behavior is an additive or aggregative function of these independent contributions. In the latter, the short-run behavior of components is independent of the behavior of other components; the system behavior is a relatively simple function of component contributions. In the early nineteenth century, Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828) defended a modular organization for the mind/brain, holding that the cerebral hemispheres consist of a variety of organs, or centers, each subserving specific intellectual and moral functions. This picture of the brain as a collection of relatively independent organs contrasts sharply with the traditional view that intellectual activity involves the exercise of a general faculty in a variety of domains, a view that was common to Descartes and Hume as well as Gall’s major opponents such as Pierre Flourens (1794–1867). By the middle of the nineteenth century, the French physicians Jean-Baptiste Bouillaud (1796–1881) and Pierre-Paul Broca (1824–80) defended the view that language is controlled by localized structures in the left hemisphere and is relatively independent of other cognitive activities. It was later discovered by Karl Wernicke (1848–1905) that there are at least two centers for the control of language, one more posterior and one more anterior. On these views, there are discrete physical structures responsible for language, which are largely independent of one another and of structures responsible for other psychological functions. This is therefore a modular organization. This view of the neurophysiological organization of language continues to have advocates into the late twentieth century, though the precise characterization of the functions these two centers serve is controversial. Many more recent views have tended to limit modularity to more peripheral functions such as vision, hearing, and motor control and speech, but have excluded so-called higher cognitive processes. 

modus ponens, in full, modus ponendo ponens (Latin, ‘proposing method’), (1) the argument form ‘If A then B; A; therefore, B’, and arguments of this form (compare fallacy of affirming the consequent); (2) the rule of inference that permits one to infer the consequent of a conditional from that conditional and its antecedent. This is also known as the rule of /-elimination or rule of /- detachment.  COUNTERFACTUALS, FORMAL FALLACY. G.F.S. modus tollendo ponens.SYLLOGISM. modus tollens, in full, modus tollendo tollens (Latin, ‘removing method’), (1) the argument form ‘If A then B; not-B; therefore, not-A’, and arguments of this form (compare fallacy of denying the antecedent); (2) the rule of inference that permits one to infer the negation of the antecedent of a conditional from that conditional and the negation of its consequent. 

Mohism, a school of classical Chinese thought founded by Mo Tzu (fl. 479–438 B.C.). Mo Tzu was the first major philosopher to challenge Confucius. Whereas Confucius believed a moral life was an end in itself, Mo Tzu advocated a form of utilitarianism wherein the test of moral rightness (yi) was the ount of benefit (li) to the gods, state, and people. Accordingly, Mo Tzu condemned war as harmful, criticized Confucians for their elaborate funerals and wasteful indulgence in music, and promoted a hierarchical meritocracy dominated by a powerful ruler as the most efficient way to unify the conflicting moral views and interests of the people, and thereby achieve social order. Mo Tzu also attacked fatalism, and unlike the agnostic Confucius, firmly believed in spirits and an anthropomorphic Heaven (t’ien) that rewarded those who benefited others and punished those who did not. He is most fous for his doctrine of chien ai or impartial concern (often translated as universal love). Whereas Confucius espoused a relational morality in which one’s obligations modernism Mohism 579    579 varied depending on the status of the parties and the degree of closeness, Mo Tzu insisted that each person be treated equally as an object of moral concern. During the Warring States period (403–221 B.C.), the Mohists split into three factions. The Later Mohist Canons, most of which were written as late as the third century B.C., are characterized by analytical reasoning and logical sophistication. Later Mohists sought to provide a rational rather than a religious basis for Mo Tzu’s utilitarianism based upon logical (and causal) necessity (pi). Treating a wide variety of subjects from politics to optics to economics, the Canons are organized around four topics: discourse, or knowledge of the relation between nes and objects; ethics, or knowledge of how to act; sciences, or knowledge of objects; and argumentation, or knowledge of nes. As Confucianism emerged to become the state ideology, the Mohists disappeared sometime in the early Han dynasty (206 B.C.–A.D. 220), having been in important measure co-opted by the leading interpreter of Confucianism of the period, Hsün Tzu (c.298–238 B.C.).  CONFUCIANISM, LI3, MO TZU, YI. R.P.P. & R.T.A. Mohist School.MOHISM, MO TZU. moksha.MAYA. Molina, Luis de (1535–1600), Spanish Jesuit theologian and philosopher. He studied and taught at Coimbra and Évora and also taught in Lisbon and Madrid. His most important works are the Concordia liberi arbitrii cum gratiae donis(“Free Will and Grace,” 1588), Commentaria in prim divi Thomae partem (“Commentary on the First Part of Thomas’s Summa,” 1592), and De justitia et jure (“On Justice and Law,” 1592–1613). Molina is best known for his doctrine of middle knowledge (scientia media). Its aim was to preserve free will while maintaining the Christian doctrine of the efficacy of divine grace. It was opposed by Thomists such as Bañez, who maintained that God exercises physical predetermination over secondary causes of human action and, thus, that grace is intrinsically efficacious and independent of human will and merits. For Molina, although God has foreknowledge of what human beings will choose to do, neither that knowledge nor God’s grace determine human will; the cooperation (concursus) of divine grace with human will does not determine the will to a particular action. This is made possible by God’s middle knowledge, which is a knowledge in between the knowledge God has of what existed, exists, and will exist, and the knowledge God has of what has not existed, does not exist, and will not exist. Middle knowledge is God’s knowledge of conditional future contingent events, nely, of what persons would do under any possible set of circumstances. Thanks to this knowledge, God can arrange for certain human acts to occur by prearranging the circumstances surrounding the choice without determining the human will. Thus, God’s grace is concurrent with the act of the will and does not predetermine it, rendering the Thomistic distinction between sufficient and efficacious grace superfluous.  AQUINAS, FREE WILL PROBLEM, FUTURE CONTINGENTS, MIDDLE KNOWLEDGE. J.J.E.G. Molyneux question, also called Molyneux’s problem, the question that, in correspondence with Locke, Willi Molyneux (or Molineux, 1656– 98), a Dublin lawyer and member of the Irish Parlient, posed and Locke inserted in the second edition of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1694; book 2, chap. 9, section 8): Suppose a Man born blind, and now adult, and taught by his touch to distinguish a Cube, and a Sphere of the se metal, and nighly of the se bigness, so as to tell, when he felt one and t’other, which is the Cube, which the Sphere. Suppose then the Cube and Sphere placed on a Table, and the Blind Man to be made to see. Quære, Whether by his sight, before he touch’d them, he could now distinguish, and tell, which is the Globe, which the Cube. Although it is tempting to regard Molyneux’s question as straightforwardly empirical, attempts to gauge the abilities of newly sighted adults have yielded disappointing and biguous results. More interesting, perhaps, is the way in which different theories of perception answer the question. Thus, according to Locke, sensory modalities constitute discrete perceptual channels, the contents of which perceivers must learn to correlate. Such a theory answers the question in the negative (as did Molyneux himself). Other theories encourage different responses. 

NON-MONOTONIC LOGIC. Montague grmar.GRMAR. Montaigne, Michel de (1533–92), French essayist and philosopher who set forth the Renaissance version of Greek skepticism. Born and raised in Bordeaux, he bece its mayor, and was an adviser to leaders of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. In 1568 he translated the work of the Spanish rationalist theologian Raimund Sebond on natural theology. Shortly thereafter he began writing essais, attempts, as the author said, to paint himself. These, the first in this genre, are rbling, curious discussions of various topics, suggesting tolerance and an undogmatic Stoic morality. The longest essai, the “Apology for Raimund Sebond,” “defends” Sebond’s rationalism by arguing that since no adequate reasons or evidence could be given to support any point of view in theology, philosophy, or science, one should not ble Sebond for his views. Montaigne then presents and develops the skeptical arguments found in Sextus Empiricus and Cicero. Montaigne related skeptical points to thencurrent findings and problems. Data of explorers, he argues, reinforce the cultural and ethical relativism of the ancient Skeptics. Disagreements between Scholastics, Platonists, and Renaissance naturalists on almost everything cast doubt on whether any theory is correct. Scientists like Copernicus and Paracelsus contradict previous scientists, and will probably be contradicted by future ones. Montaigne then offers the more theoretical objections of the Skeptics, about the unreliability of sense experience and reasoning and our inability to find an unquestionable criterion of true knowledge. Trying to know reality is like trying to clutch water. What should we then do? Montaigne advocates suspending judgment on all theories that go beyond experience, accepting experience undogmatically, living according to the dictates of nature, and following the rules and customs of one’s society. Therefore one should remain in the religion in which one was born, and accept only those principles that God chooses to reveal to us. Montaigne’s skepticism greatly influenced European thinkers in undermining confidence in previous theories and forcing them to seek new ways of grounding knowledge. His acceptance of religion on custom and faith provided a way of living with total skepticism. His presentation of skepticism in a modern language shaped the vocabulary and the problems of philosophy in modern times.

 SKEPTICISM, SKEPTICS. R.H.P. Montanism, a charismatic, schismatic movement in early Christianity, originating in Phrygia in the late second century. It rebuked the mainstre church for laxity and apathy, and taught moral purity, new, i.e. postbiblical, revelation, and the imminent end of the world. Traditional accounts, deriving from critics of the movement, contain exaggerations and probably some fabrications. Montanus himself, abetted by the prophetesses Maximilla and Prisca, announced in ecstatic speech a new, final age of prophecy. This fulfilled the biblical promises that in the last days the Holy Spirit would be poured out universally (Joel 2: 28ff.; Acts 2: 16ff.) and would teach “the whole truth” (Jon. 14:26; 16:13). It also empowered the Montanists to enjoin more rigorous discipline than that required by Jesus. The sect denied that forgiveness through baptism covered serious subsequent sin; forbade remarriage for widows and widowers; practiced fasting; and condemned believers who evaded persecution. Some later followers may have identified Montanus with the Holy Spirit itself, though he claimed only to be the Spirit’s mouthpiece. The “new prophecy” flourished for a generation, especially in North Africa, gaining a fous convert in Tertullian. But the church’s bishops repudiated the movement’s criticisms and innovations, and turned more resolutely against postapostolic revelation, apocalyptic expectation, and ascetic extremes. A.E.L. Montanus.MONTANISM. Monte Carlo fallacy.GBLER’s FALLACY. Montesquieu, Baron de La Brède et de, title of Charles-Louis de Secondat (1689–1755), French political philosopher, the political philosophe of the Enlightenment. He was born at La Brède, educated at the Oratorian Collège de Juilly (1700–05), and received law degrees from the University of Bordeaux (1708). From his uncle he inherited the barony of Montesquieu (1716) and the office of Président à Mortier at the Parlient of Guyenne at Bordeaux. Fe, national monism Montesquieu 581    581 and international, ce suddenly (1721) with the Lettres persanes (“The Persian Letters”), published in Holland and France, a landmark of the Enlightenment. His Réflexions sur la monarchie universelle en Europe, written and printed (1734) to remind the authorities of his qualifications and availability, delivered the wrong message at the wrong time (anti-militarism, pacifism, free trade, while France supported Poland’s King Stanislas, dethroned by Russia and Austria). Montesquieu withdrew the Réflexions before publication and substituted the Considerations on the Romans: the se thesis is expounded here, but in the exclusively classical context of ancient history. The stratagem succeeded: the sterd edition was freely imported; the Paris edition appeared with a royal privilège (1734). A few months after the appearance of the Considerations, he undertook L’Esprit des lois, the outline of a modern political science, conceived as the foundation of an effective governmental policy. His optimism was shaken by the disasters of the War of Austrian Succession (1740–48); the Esprit des lois underwent hurried changes that upset its original plan. During the very printing process, the author was discovering the true essence of his philosophie pratique: it would never culminate in a final, invariable progr, but in an orientation, continuously, intelligently adapting to the unpredictable circumstances of historical time in the light of permanent values. According to L’Esprit des lois, governments are either republics, monarchies, or despotisms. The principles, or motivational forces, of these types of government are, respectively, political virtue, honor, and fear. The type of government a people has depends on its character, history, and geographical situation. Only a constitutional government that separates its executive, legislative, and judicial powers preserves political liberty, taken as the power to do what one ought to will. A constitutional monarchy with separation of powers is the best form of government. Montesquieu influenced the authors of the U.S. Constitution and the political philosophers Burke and Rousseau. 

Moore, G(eorge) E(dward) (1873–1958), English philosopher who spearheaded the attack on idealism and was a major supporter of realism in all its forms: metaphysical, epistemological, and axiological. He was born in Upper Norwood, a suburb of London; did his undergraduate work at Cbridge University; spent 1898–1904 as a fellow of Trinity College; returned to Cbridge in 1911 as a lecturer; and was granted a professorship there in 1925. He also served as editor of Mind. The bulk of his work falls into four categories: metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and philosophical methodology. Metaphysics. In this area, Moore is mainly known for his attempted refutation of idealism and his defense thereby of realism. In his “The Refutation of Idealism” (1903), he argued that there is a crucial premise that is essential to all possible arguments for the idealistic conclusion that “All reality is mental (spiritual).” This premise is: “To be is to be perceived” (in the broad sense of ‘perceive’). Moore argued that, under every possible interpretation of it, that premise is either a tautology or false; hence no significant conclusion can ever be inferred from it. His positive defense of realism had several prongs. One was to show that there are certain claims held by non-realist philosophers, both idealist ones and skeptical ones. Moore argued, in “A Defense of Common Sense” (1925), that these claims are either factually false or self-contradictory, or that in some cases there is no good reason to believe them. ong the claims that Moore attacked are these: “Propositions about (purported) material facts are false”; “No one has ever known any such propositions to be true”; “Every (purported) physical fact is logically dependent on some mental fact”; and “Every physical fact is causally dependent on some mental fact.” Another major prong of Moore’s defense of realism was to argue for the existence of an external world and later to give a “Proof of an External World” (1933). Epistemology. Most of Moore’s work in this area dealt with the various kinds of knowledge we have, why they must be distinguished, and the problem of perception and our knowledge of an external world. Because he had already argued for the existence of an external world in his metaphysics, he here focused on how we know it. In many papers and chapters (e.g., “The Nature and Reality of Objects of Perception,” 1906) he exined and at times supported three main positions: naive or direct realism, representative or indirect realism, and phenomenalism. Although he seemed to favor direct realism at first, in the majority of his papers he found representative realism to be the most supportable position despite its problems. It should also be noted that, in connection with his leanings mood toward representative realism, Moore maintained the existence of sense-data and argued at length for an account of just how they are related to physical objects. That there are sense-data Moore never doubted. The question was, What is their (ontological) status? With regard to the various kinds of knowledge (or ways of knowing), Moore made a distinction between dispositional (or non-actualized) and actualized knowledge. Within the latter Moore made distinctions between direct apprehension (often known as knowledge by acquaintance), indirect apprehension, and knowledge proper (or propositional knowledge). He devoted much of his work to finding the conditions for knowledge proper. Ethics. In his major work in ethics, Principia Ethica (1903), Moore maintained that the central problem of ethics is, What is good? – meaning by this, not what things are good, but how ‘good’ is to be defined. He argued that there can be only one answer, one that may seem disappointing, nely: good is good, or, alternatively, ‘good’ is indefinable. Thus ‘good’ denotes a “unique, simple object of thought” that is indefinable and unanalyzable. His first argument on behalf of that claim consisted in showing that to identify good with some other object (i.e., to define ‘good’) is to commit the naturalistic fallacy. To commit this fallacy is to reduce ethical propositions to either psychological propositions or reportive definitions as to how people use words. In other words, what was meant to be an ethical proposition, that X is good, becomes a factual proposition about people’s desires or their usage of words. Moore’s second argument ran like this: Suppose ‘good’ were definable. Then the result would be even worse than that of reducing ethical propositions to non-ethical propositions – ethical propositions would be tautologies! For exple, suppose you defined ‘good’ as ‘pleasure’. Then suppose you maintained that pleasure is good. All you would be asserting is that pleasure is pleasure, a tautology. To avoid this conclusion ‘good’ must mean something other than ‘pleasure’. Why is this the naturalistic fallacy? Because good is a non-natural property. But even if it were a natural one, there would still be a fallacy. Hence some have proposed calling it the definist fallacy – the fallacy of attempting to define ‘good’ by any means. This argument is often known as the open question argument because whatever purported definition of ‘good’ anyone offers, it would always be an open question whether whatever satisfies the definition really is good. In the last part of Principia Ethica Moore turned to a discussion of what sorts of things are the greatest goods with which we are acquainted. He argued for the view that they are personal affection and aesthetic enjoyments. Philosophical methodology. Moore’s methodology in philosophy had many components, but two stand out: his appeal to and defense of common sense and his utilization of various methods of (philosophical/conceptual) analysis. “A Defense of Common Sense” argued for his claim that the commonsense view of the world is wholly true, and for the claim that any view which opposed that view is either factually false or self-contradictory. Throughout his writings Moore distinguished several kinds of analysis and made use of them extensively in dealing with philosophical problems. All of these may be found in the works cited above and other essays gathered into Moore’s Philosophical Studies(1922) and Philosophical Papers (1959). These have been referred to as refutational analysis, with two subforms, showing contradictions and “translation into the concrete”; distinctional analysis; decompositional analysis (either definitional or divisional); and reductional analysis. Moore was greatly revered as a teacher. Many of his students and colleagues have paid high tribute to him in very warm and grateful terms. 

ANALYSIS, DEFINITION, EPISTEMOLOGY, ETHICS, MALCOLM, NATURALISM. E.D.K.

Moore’s paradox, as first discussed by G. E. Moore, the perplexity involving assertion of what is expressed by conjunctions such as ‘It’s raining, but I believe it isn’t’ and ‘It’s raining, but I don’t believe it is’. The oddity of such presenttense first-person uses of ‘to believe’ seems peculiar to those conjunctions just because it is assumed both that, when asserting – roughly, representing as true – a conjunction, one also asserts its conjuncts, and that, as a rule, the assertor believes the asserted proposition. Thus, no perplexity arises from assertions of, for instance, ‘It’s raining today, but I (falsely) believed it wasn’t until I ce out to the porch’ and ‘If it’s raining but I believe it isn’t, I have been misled by the weather report’. However, there are reasons to think that, if we rely only on these assumptions and exples, our characterization of the problem is unduly narrow. First, assertion seems relevant only because we are interested in what the assertor believes. Secondly, those conjunctions are disturbing only insofar as they show that Moore’s paradox Moore’s paradox 583    583 some of the assertor’s beliefs, though contingent, can only be irrationally held. Thirdly, autobiographical reports that may justifiably be used to charge the reporter with irrationality need be neither about his belief system, nor conjunctive, nor true (e.g., ‘I don’t exist’, ‘I have no beliefs’), nor false (e.g., ‘It’s raining, but I have no evidence that it is’). So, Moore’s paradox is best seen as the problem posed by contingent propositions that cannot be justifiably believed. Arguably, in forming a belief of those propositions, the believer acquires non-overridable evidence against believing them. A successful analysis of the problem along these lines may have important epistemological consequences. 

CONTINGENT, EPISTEMOLOGY, EVIDENCE, JUSTIFICATION, MOORE, PARADOX, PROPOSITION, RATIONALITY, REASONS FOR BELIEF. C.d.A. moral argument for God’s existence.PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. moral certainty.

moral dilemma. (1) Any problem where morality is relevant. This broad use includes not only conflicts ong moral reasons but also conflicts between moral reasons and reasons of law, religion, or self-interest. In this sense, Abrah is in a moral dilemma when God commands him to sacrifice his son, even if he has no moral reason to obey. Similarly, I  in a moral dilemma if I cannot help a friend in trouble without forgoing a lucrative but morally neutral business opportunity. ’Moral dilemma’ also often refers to (2) any topic area where it is not known what, if anything, is morally good or right. For exple, when one asks whether abortion is immoral in any way, one could call the topic “the moral dilemma of abortion.” This epistemic use does not imply that anything really is immoral at all. Recently, moral philosophers have discussed a much narrower set of situations as “moral dilemmas.” They usually define ‘moral dilemma’ as (3) a situation where an agent morally ought to do each of two acts but cannot do both. The bestknown exple is Sartre’s student who morally ought to care for his mother in Paris but at the se time morally ought to go to England to join the Free French and fight the Nazis. However, ‘ought’ covers ideal actions that are not morally required, such as when someone ought to give to a certain charity but is not required to do so. Since most common exples of moral dilemmas include moral obligations or duties, or other requirements, it is more accurate to define ‘moral dilemma’ more narrowly as (4) a situation where an agent has a moral requirement to do each of two acts but cannot do both. Some philosophers also refuse to call a situation a moral dilemma when one of the conflicting requirements is clearly overridden, such as when I must break a trivial promise in order to save a life. To exclude such resolvable conflicts, ‘moral dilemma’ can be defined as (5) a situation where an agent has a moral requirement to adopt each of two alternatives, and neither requirement is overridden, but the agent cannot fulfill both. Another common move is to define ‘moral dilemma’ as (6) a situation where every alternative is morally wrong. This is equivalent to (4) or (5), respectively, if an act is morally wrong whenever it violates any moral requirement or any non-overridden moral requirement. However, we usually do not call an act wrong unless it violates an overriding moral requirement, and then (6) rules out moral dilemmas by definition, since overriding moral requirements clearly cannot conflict. Although (5) thus seems preferable, some would object that (5) includes trivial requirements and conflicts, such as conflicts between trivial promises. To include only tragic situations, we could define ‘moral dilemma’ as (7) a situation where an agent has a strong moral obligation or requirement to adopt each of two alternatives, and neither is overridden, but the agent cannot adopt both alternatives. This definition is strong enough to raise the important controversies about moral dilemmas without being so strong as to rule out their possibility by definition.

moral epistemology, the discipline, at the intersection of ethics and epistemology, that studies the epistemic status and relations of moral judgments and principles. It has developed out of an interest, common to both ethics and epistemology, in questions of justification and justifiability – in epistemology, of statements or beliefs, and in ethics, of actions as well as judgments of actions and also general principles of judgment. Its most prominent questions include the following. Can normative claims be true or false? If so, how can they be known to be true or false? If not, what status do they have, and are they capable of justification? If they are capable of moral argument for God’s existence moral epistemology 584    584 justification, how can they be justified? Does the justification of normative claims differ with respect to particular claims and with respect to general principles? In epistemology recent years have seen a tendency to accept as valid an account of knowledge as entailing justified true belief, a conception that requires an account not just of truth but also of justification and of justified belief. Thus, under what conditions is someone justified, epistemically, in believing something? Justification, of actions, of judgments, and of principles, has long been a central element in ethics. It is only recently that justification in ethics ce to be thought of as an epistemological problem, hence ‘moral epistemology’, as an expression, is a fairly recent coinage, although its problems have a long lineage. One long-standing linkage is provided by the challenge of skepticism. Skepticism in ethics can be about the existence of any genuine distinction between right and wrong, or it can focus on the possibility of attaining any knowledge of right and wrong, good or bad. Is there a right answer? is a question in the metaphysics of ethics. Can we know what the right answer is, and if so how? is one of moral epistemology. Problems of perception and observation and ones about observation statements or sense-data play an important role in epistemology. There is not any obvious parallel in moral epistemology, unless it is the role of prereflective moral judgments, or commonsense moral judgments – moral judgments unguided by any overt moral theory – which can be taken to provide the data of moral theory, and which need to be explained, systematized, coordinated, or revised to attain an appropriate relation between theory and data. This would be analogous to taking the data of epistemology to be provided, not by sense-data or observations but by judgments of perception or observation statements. Once this step is taken the parallel is very close. One source of moral skepticism is the apparent lack of any observational counterpart for moral predicates, which generates the question how moral judgments can be true if there is nothing for them to correspond to. Another source of moral skepticism is apparently constant disagreement and uncertainty, which would appear to be explained by the skeptical hypothesis denying the reality of moral distinctions. Noncognitivism in ethics maintains that moral judgments are not objects of knowledge, that they make no statements capable of truth or falsity, but are or are akin to expressions of attitudes. Some other major differences ong ethical theories are largely epistemological in character. Intuitionism maintains that basic moral propositions are knowable by intuition. Empiricism in ethics maintains that moral propositions can be established by empirical means or are complex forms of empirical statements. Ethical rationalism maintains that the fundental principle(s) of morality can be established a priori as holding of necessity. This is exemplified by Kant’s moral philosophy, in which the categorical imperative is regarded as synthetic a priori; more recently by what Alan Gewirth (b.1912) calls the “principle of generic consistency,” which he claims it is selfcontradictory to deny. Ethical empiricism is exemplified by classical utilitarianism, such as that of Benth, which aspires to develop ethics as an empirical science. If the consequences of actions can be scientifically predicted and their utilities calculated, then ethics can be a science. Situationism is equivalent to concrete case intuitionism in maintaining that we can know immediately what ought to be done in specific cases, but most ethical theories maintain that what ought to be done is, in J. S. Mill’s words, determined by “the application of a law to an individual case.” Different theories differ on the epistemic status of these laws and on the process of application. Deductivists, either empiricistic or rationalistic, hold that the law is essentially unchanged in the application; non-deductivists hold that the law is modified in the process of application. (This distinction is explained in F. L. Will [1909–98], Beyond Deduction, 1988.) There is similar variation about what if anything is selfevident, Sidgwick maintaining that only certain highly abstract principles are self-evident, Ross that only general rules are, and Prichard that only concrete judgments are, “by an act of moral thinking.” Other problems in moral epistemology are provided by the fact–value distinction – and controversies about whether there is any such distinction – and the is–ought question, the question how a moral judgment can be derived from statements of fact alone. Naturalists affirm the possibility, non-naturalists deny it. Prescriptivists claim that moral judgments are prescriptions and cannot be deduced from descriptive statements alone. This question ultimately leads to the question how an ultimate principle can be justified. If it cannot be deduced from statements of fact, that route is out; if it must be deduced from some other moral principle, then the principle deduced cannot be ultimate and in any case this process is either circular or leads to an infimoral epistemology moral epistemology 585    585 nite regress. If the ultimate principle is self-evident, then the problem may have an answer. But if it is not it would appear to be arbitrary. The problem of the justification of an ultimate principle continues to be a leading one in moral epistemology. Recently there has been much interest in the status and existence of “moral facts.” Are there any, what are they, and how are they established as “facts”? This relates to questions about moral realism. Moral realism maintains that moral predicates are real and can be known to be so; anti-realists deny this. This denial links with the view that moral properties supervene on natural ones, and the problem of supervenience is another recent link between ethics and epistemology. Pragmatism in ethics maintains that a moral problem is like any problem in that it is the occasion for inquiry and moral judgments are to be regarded as hypotheses to be tested by how well they resolve the problem. This ounts to an attempt to bypass the is–ought problem and all such “dualisms.” So is constructivism, a development owing much to the work of Rawls, which contrasts with moral realism. Constructivism maintains that moral ideas are human constructs and the task is not epistemological or metaphysical but practical and theoretical – that of attaining reflective equilibrium between considered moral judgments and the principles that coordinate and explain them. On this view there are no moral facts. Opponents maintain that this only replaces a foundationalist view of ethics with a coherence conception. The question whether questions of moral epistemology can in this way be bypassed can be regarded as itself a question of moral epistemology. And the question of the foundations of morality, and whether there are foundations, can still be regarded as a question of moral epistemology, as distinct from a question of the most convenient and efficient arrangement of our moral ideas. 

ETHICAL CONSTRUCTIVISM, ETHICS, INTUITION, MORAL REALISM, REFLECTIVE EQUILIBRIUM. M.G.S. moral evil.PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. morality, an informal public system applying to all rational persons, governing behavior that affects others, having the lessening of evil or harm as its goal, and including what are commonly known as the moral rules, moral ideals, and moral virtues. To say that it is a public system means that all those to whom it applies must understand it and that it must not be irrational for them to use it in deciding what to do and in judging others to whom the system applies. Ges are the paradigm cases of public systems; all ges have a point and the rules of a ge apply to all who play it. All players know the point of the ge and its rules, and it is not irrational for them to be guided by the point and rules and to judge the behavior of other players by them. To say that morality is informal means that there is no decision procedure or authority that can settle all its controversial questions. Morality thus resembles a backyard ge of basketball more than a professional ge. Although there is overwhelming agreement on most moral matters, certain controversial questions must be settled in an ad hoc fashion or not settled at all. For exple, when, if ever, abortion is acceptable is an unresolvable moral matter, but each society and religion can adopt its own position. That morality has no one in a position of authority is one of the most important respects in which it differs from law and religion. Although morality must include the commonly accepted moral rules such as those prohibiting killing and deceiving, different societies can interpret these rules somewhat differently. They can also differ in their views about the scope of morality, i.e., about whether morality protects newborns, fetuses, or non-human animals. Thus different societies can have somewhat different moralities, although this difference has limits. Also within each society, a person may have his own view about when it is justified to break one of the rules, e.g., about how much harm would have to be prevented in order to justify deceiving someone. Thus one person’s morality may differ somewhat from another’s, but both will agree on the overwhelming number of non-controversial cases. A moral theory is an attempt to describe, explain, and if possible justify, morality. Unfortunately, most moral theories attempt to generate some simplified moral code, rather than to describe the complex moral system that is already in use. Morality does not resolve all disputes. Morality does not require one always to act so as to produce the best consequences or to act only in those ways that one would will everyone to act. Rather morality includes both moral rules that no one should transgress and moral ideals that all are encouraged to follow, but much of what one does will not be governed by morality. moral evil morality 586    586 

APPLIED ETHICS, ETHICS, JUSTICE, MORALITY, UTILITARIANISM. B.Ge. morality, slave.NIETZSCHE. moral patient.MORAL STATUS. moral point of view.ETHICS. moral psychology, (1) the subfield of psychology that traces the development over time of moral reasoning and opinions in the lives of individuals (this subdiscipline includes work of Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg, and Carol Gilligan); (2) the part of philosophy where philosophy of mind and ethics overlap, which concerns all the psychological issues relevant to morality. There are many different psychological matters relevant to ethics, and each may be relevant in more than one way. Different ethical theories imply different sorts of connections. So moral psychology includes work of many and diverse kinds. But several traditional clusters of concern are evident. Some elements of moral psychology consider the psychological matters relevant to metaethical issues, i.e., to issues about the general nature of moral truth, judgment, and knowledge. Different metaethical theories invoke mental phenomena in different ways: noncognitivism maintains that sentences expressing moral judgments do not function to report truths or falsehoods, but rather, e.g., to express certain emotions or to prescribe certain actions. So some forms of noncognitivism imply that an understanding of certain sorts of emotions, or of special activities like prescribing that may involve particular psychological elements, is crucial to a full understanding of how ethical sentences are meaningful. Certain forms of cognitivism, the view that moral (declarative) sentences do express truths or falsehoods, imply that moral facts consist of psychological facts, that for instance moral judgments consist of expressions of positive psychological attitudes of some particular kind toward the objects of those judgments. And an understanding of psychological phenomena like sentiment is crucial according to certain sorts of projectivism, which hold that the supposed moral properties of things are mere misleading projections of our sentiments onto the objects of those sentiments. Certain traditional moral sense theories and certain traditional forms of intuitionism have held that special psychological faculties are crucial for our epistemic access to moral truth. Particular views in normative ethics, particular views about the moral status of acts, persons, and other targets of normative evaluation, also often suggest that an understanding of certain psychological matters is crucial to ethics. Actions, intentions, and character are some of the targets of evaluation of normative ethics, and their proper understanding involves many issues in philosophy of mind. Also, many normative theorists have maintained that there is a close connection between pleasure, happiness, or desiresatisfaction and a person’s good, and these things are also a concern of philosophy of mind. In addition, the rightness of actions is often held to be closely connected to the motives, beliefs, and other psychological phenomena that lie behind those actions. Various other traditional philosophical concerns link ethical and psychological issues: the nature of the patterns in the long-term development in individuals of moral opinions and reasoning, the appropriate form for moral education and punishment, the connections between obligation and motivation, i.e., between moral reasons and psychological causes, and the notion of free will and its relation to moral responsibility and autonomy. Some work in philosophy of mind also suggests that moral phenomena, or at least normative phenomena of some kind, play a crucial role in illuminating or constituting psychological phenomena of various kinds, but the traditional concern of moral psychology has been with the articulation of the sort of philosophy of mind that can be useful to ethics. 

AKRASIA, ETHICS, PRACTICAL REASONING, SELF-DECEPTION. J.R.M. moral rationalism, the view that the substance of morality, usually in the form of general moral principles, can be known a priori. The view is defended by Kant in Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, but it goes back at least to Plato. Both Plato and Kant thought that a priori moral knowledge could have an impact on what we do quite independently of any desire that we happen to have. This motivational view is also ordinarily associated with moral rationalism. It comes in two quite different forms. The first is that a priori moral knowledge consists in a sui generis mental state that is both belief-like and desire-like. This seems to have been Plato’s view, for he held that the belief that something is good is itself a disposition to promote that thing. The second is that a priori moral knowledge consists in a belief that is capable of rationally producing a distinct desire. morality, slave moral rationalism 587    587 Rationalists who make the first claim have had trouble accommodating the possibility of someone’s believing that something is good but, through weakness of will, not mustering the desire to do it. Accordingly, they have been forced to assimilate weakness of will to ignorance of the good. Rationalists who make the second claim about reason’s action-producing capacity face no such problem. For this reason, their view is often preferred. The best-known anti-rationalist about morality is Hume. His Treatise of Human Nature denies both that morality’s substance can be known by reason alone and that reason alone is capable of producing action.  AKRASIA, ETHICS, HUME, KANT, MORAL SENSE THEORY, MOTIVATIONAL INTERNALISM, RATIONALISM. M.Sm. moral realism, a metaethical view committed to the objectivity of ethics. It has (1) metaphysical, (2) semantic, and (3) epistemological components. (1) Its metaphysical component is the claim that there are moral facts and moral properties whose existence and nature are independent of people’s beliefs and attitudes about what is right or wrong. In this claim, moral realism contrasts with an error theory and with other forms of nihilism that deny the existence of moral facts and properties. It contrasts as well with various versions of moral relativism and other forms of ethical constructivism that make moral facts consist in facts about people’s moral beliefs and attitudes. (2) Its semantic component is primarily cognitivist. Cognitivism holds that moral judgments should be construed as assertions about the moral properties of actions, persons, policies, and other objects of moral assessment, that moral predicates purport to refer to properties of such objects, that moral judgments (or the propositions that they express) can be true or false, and that cognizers can have the cognitive attitude of belief toward the propositions that moral judgments express. These cognitivist claims contrast with the noncognitive claims of emotivism and prescriptivism, according to which the primary purpose of moral judgments is to express the appraiser’s attitudes or commitments, rather than to state facts or ascribe properties. Moral realism also holds that truth for moral judgments is non-epistemic; in this way it contrasts with moral relativism and other forms of ethical constructivism that make the truth of a moral judgment epistemic. The metaphysical and semantic theses imply that there are some true moral propositions. An error theory accepts the cognitivist semantic claims but denies the realist metaphysical thesis. It holds that moral judgments should be construed as containing referring expressions and having truth-values, but insists that these referring expressions are empty, because there are no moral facts, and that no moral claims are true. Also on this theory, commonsense moral thought presupposes the existence of moral facts and properties, but is systematically in error. In this way, the error theory stands to moral realism much as atheism stands to theism in a world of theists. (J. L. Mackie introduced and defended the error theory in his Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, 1977.) (3) Finally, if moral realism is to avoid skepticism it must claim that some moral beliefs are true, that there are methods for justifying moral beliefs, and that moral knowledge is possible. While making these metaphysical, semantic, and epistemological claims, moral realism is compatible with a wide variety of other metaphysical, semantic, and epistemological principles and so can take many different forms. The moral realists in the early part of the twentieth century were generally intuitionists. Intuitionism combined a commitment to moral realism with a foundationalist moral epistemology according to which moral knowledge must rest on self-evident moral truths and with the nonnaturalist claim that moral facts and properties are sui generis and not reducible to any natural facts or properties. Friends of noncognitivism found the metaphysical and epistemological commitments of intuitionism extravagant and so rejected moral realism. Later moral realists have generally sought to defend moral realism without the metaphysical and epistemological trappings of intuitionism. One such version of moral realism takes a naturalistic form. This form of ethical naturalism claims that our moral beliefs are justified when they form part of an explanatorily coherent system of beliefs with one another and with various non-moral beliefs, and insists that moral properties are just natural properties of the people, actions, and policies that instantiate them. Debate between realists and anti-realists and within the realist cp centers on such issues as the relation between moral judgment and action, the rational authority of morality, moral epistemology and methodology, the relation between moral and non-moral natural properties, the place of ethics in a naturalismoral realism moral realism 588    588 tic worldview, and the parity of ethics and the sciences.  EMOTIVISM, ETHICAL CONSTRUCTIVISM, ETHICAL OBJECTIVISM, ETHICS, NATURALISM. D.O.B. Moral Rearment Movement.BUCHMANISM. moral sense theory, an ethical theory, developed by eighteenth-century British philosophers – notably Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Hume – according to which the pleasure or pain a person feels upon thinking about (or “observing”) certain character traits is indicative of the virtue or vice, respectively, of those features. It is a theory of “moral perception,” offered in response to moral rationalism, the view that moral distinctions are derived by reason alone, and combines Locke’s empiricist doctrine that all ideas begin in experience with the belief, widely shared at the time, that feelings play a central role in moral evaluation and motivation. On this theory, our emotional responses to persons’ characters are often “perceptions” of their morality, just as our experiences of an apple’s redness and sweetness are perceptions of its color and taste. These ideas of morality are seen as products of an “internal” sense, because they are produced in the “observer” only after she forms a concept of the conduct or trait being observed (or contemplated) – as when a person realizes that she is seeing someone intentionally harm another and reacts with displeasure at what she sees. The moral sense is conceived as being analogous to, or possibly an aspect of, our capacity to recognize varying degrees of beauty in things, which modern writers call “the sense of beauty.” Rejecting the popular view that morality is based on the will of God, Shaftesbury maintains rather that morality depends on human nature, and he introduces the notion of a sense of right and wrong, possessed uniquely by human beings, who alone are capable of reflection. Hutcheson argues that to approve of a character is to regard it as virtuous. For him, reason, which discovers relations of inanimate objects to rational agents, is unable to arouse our approval in the absence of a moral sense. Ultimately, we can explain why, for exple, we approve of someone’s temperate character only by appealing to our natural tendency to feel pleasure (sometimes identified with approval) at the thought of characters that exhibit benevolence, the trait to which all other virtues can be traced. This disposition to feel approval (and disapproval) is what Hutcheson identifies as the moral sense. Hume emphasizes that typical human beings make moral distinctions on the basis of their feelings only when those sentiments are experienced from a disinterested or “general” point of view. In other words, we turn our initial sentiments into moral judgments by compensating for the fact that we feel more strongly about those to whom we are emotionally close than those from whom we are more distant. On a widely held interpretation of Hume, the moral sense provides not only judgments, but also motives to act according to those judgments, since its feelings may be motivating passions or arouse such passions. Roderick Firth’s (1917–87) twentieth-century ideal observer theory, according to which moral good is designated by the projected reactions of a hypothetically omniscient, disinterested observer possessing other ideal traits, as well as Brandt’s contemporary moral spectator theory, are direct descendants of the moral sense theory. 

BUTLER, HUME, HUTCHESON, SHAFTESBURY. E.S.R. moral skepticism, any metaethical view that raises fundental doubts about morality as a whole. Different kinds of doubts lead to different kinds of moral skepticism. The primary kinds of moral skepticism are epistemological. Moral justification skepticism is the claim that nobody ever has (any or adequate) justification for believing any substantive moral claim. Moral knowledge skepticism is the claim that nobody ever knows that any substantive moral claim is true. If knowledge implies justification, as is often assumed, then moral justification skepticism implies moral knowledge skepticism. But even if knowledge requires justification, it requires more, so moral knowledge skepticism does not imply moral justification skepticism. Another kind of skeptical view in metaethics rests on linguistic analysis. Some emotivists, expressivists, and prescriptivists argue that moral claims (like “Cheating is morally wrong”) resemble expressions of emotion or desire (like “Boo, cheating”) or prescriptions for action (like “Don’t cheat”), which are neither true nor false, so moral claims themselves are neither true nor false. This linguistic moral skepticism, which is sometimes called noncognitivism, implies moral knowledge skepticism if knowledge implies truth. Even if such linguistic analyses are rejected, Moral Rearment Movement moral skepticism 589    589 one can still hold that no moral properties or facts really exist. This ontological moral skepticism can be combined with the linguistic view that moral claims assert moral properties and facts to yield an error theory that all positive moral claims are false. A different kind of doubt about morality is often raised by asking, “Why should I be moral?” Practical moral skepticism answers that there is not always any reason or any adequate reason to be moral or to do what is morally required. This view concerns reasons to act rather than reasons to believe. Moral skepticism of all these kinds is often seen as immoral, but moral skeptics can act and be motivated and even hold moral beliefs in much the se way as non-skeptics. Moral skeptics just deny that their or anyone else’s moral beliefs are justified or known or true, or that they have adequate reason to be moral.  EMOTIVISM, ETHICS, JUSTIFICATION, MORAL EPISTEMOLOGY, PRESCRIPTIVISM, SKEPTICISM. W.S.-A. moral status, the suitability of a being to be viewed as an appropriate object of direct moral concern; the nature or degree of a being’s ability to count as a ground of claims against moral agents; the moral standing, rank, or importance of a (kind of) being; the condition of being a moral patient; moral considerability. Ordinary moral reflection involves considering others. But which others ought to be considered? And how are the various objects of moral consideration to be weighed against one another? Anything might be the topic of moral discussion, but not everything is thought to be an appropriate object of direct moral concern. If there are any ethical constraints on how we may treat a ceric plate, these seem to derive from considerations about other beings, not from the interests or good or nature of the plate. The se applies, presumably, to a clod of earth. Many philosophers view a living but insentient being, such as a dandelion, in the se way; others have doubts. According to some, even sentient animal life is little more deserving of moral consideration than the clod or the dandelion. This tradition, which restricts significant moral status to humans, has come under vigorous and varied attack by defenders of animal liberation. This attack criticizes speciesism, and argues that “humanism” is analogous to theories that illegitimately base moral status on race, gender, or social class. Some philosophers have referred to beings that are appropriate objects of direct moral concern as “moral patients.” Moral agents are those beings whose actions are subject to moral evaluation; analogously, moral patients would be those beings whose suffering (in the sense of being the objects of the actions of moral agents) permits or demands moral evaluation. Others apply the label ‘moral patients’ more narrowly, just to those beings that are appropriate objects of direct moral concern but are not (also) moral agents. The issue of moral status concerns not only whether beings count at all morally, but also to what degree they count. After all, beings who are moral patients might still have their claims outweighed by the preferred claims of other beings who possess some special moral status. We might, with Nozick, propose “utilitarianism for animals, Kantianism for people.” Similarly, the bodily autonomy argument in defense of abortion, made fous by Thomson, does not deny that the fetus is a moral patient, but insists that her/his/its claims are limited by the pregnant woman’s prior claim to control her bodily destiny. It has often been thought that moral status should be tied to the condition of “personhood.” The idea has been either that only persons are moral patients, or that persons possess a special moral status that makes them (morally) more important than nonpersons. Personhood, on such theories, is a minimal condition for moral patiency. Why? Moral patiency is said to be “correlative” with moral agency: a creature has both or neither. Alternatively, persons have been viewed not as the only moral patients, but as a specially privileged elite ong moral patients, possessing rights as well as interests.  ETHICS, KANT, PERSONAL IDENTITY, PERSONHOOD, RIGHTS. E.J. moral subjectivism.ETHICS. More, Henry (1614–87), English philosopher, theologian, and poet, the most prolific of the Cbridge Platonists. In 1631 he entered Christ’s College, where he spent the rest of his life after becoming Fellow in 1641. He was primarily an apologist of anti-Calvinist, latitudinarian stp whose inalienable philosophico- theological purpose was to demonstrate the existence and immortality of the soul and to cure “two enormous distempers of the mind,” atheism and “enthusiasm.” He described himself as “a Fisher for Philosophers, desirous to draw them to or retain them in the Christian Faith.” His eclectic method deployed Neoplatonism (notably Plotinus and Ficino), mystical theologies, caboral status More, Henry 590    590 listic doctrines (as More misconceived them), empirical findings (including reports of witchcraft and ghosts), the new science, and the new philosophy, notably the philosophy of Descartes. Yet he rejected Descartes’s beast-machine doctrine, his version of dualism, and the pretensions of Cartesian mechanical philosophy to explain all physical phenomena. Animals have souls; the universe is alive with souls. Body and spirit are spatially extended, the former being essentially impenetrable, inert, and discerpible (divisible into parts), the latter essentially penetrable, indiscerpible, active, and capable of a spiritual density, which More called essential spissitude, “the redoubling or contracting of substance into less space than it does sometimes occupy.” Physical processes are activated and ordered by the spirit of nature, a hylarchic principle and “the vicarious power of God upon this great automaton, the world.” More’s writings on natural philosophy, especially his doctrine of infinite space, are thought to have influenced Newton. More attacked Hobbes’s materialism and, in the 1660s and 1670s, the impieties of Dutch Cartesianism, including the perceived atheism of Spinoza and his circle. He regretted the “enthusiasm” for and conversion to Quakerism of Anne Conway, his “extrural” tutee and assiduous correspondent. More had a partiality for coinages and linguistic exotica. We owe to him ‘Cartesianism’ (1662), coined a few years before the first appearance of the French equivalent, and the substantive ‘materialist’ (1668). 

BOYLE, CBRIDGE PLATONISTS, DESCARTES, NEOPLATONISM. A.G. More, Sir Thomas (1477 or 1478–1535), English humanist, statesman, martyr, and saint. A lawyer by profession, he entered royal service in 1517 and bece lord chancellor in 1529. After refusing to swear to the Act of Supremacy, which ned Henry VIII the head of the English church, More was beheaded as a traitor. Although his writings include biography, poetry, letters, and anti-heretical tracts, his only philosophical work, Utopia (published in Latin, 1516), is his masterpiece. Covering a wide variety of subjects including government, education, punishment, religion, fily life, and euthanasia, Utopia contrasts European social institutions with their counterparts on the imaginary island of Utopia. Inspired in part by Plato’s Republic, the Utopian communal system is designed to teach virtue and reward it with happiness. The absence of money, private property, and most social distinctions allows Utopians the leisure to develop the faculties in which happiness consists. Because of More’s love of irony, Utopia has been subject to quite different interpretations. J.W.A. Mosca, Gaetano (1858–1941), Italian political scientist who made pioneering contributions to the theory of democratic elitism. Combining the life of a university professor with that of a politician, he taught such subjects as constitutional law, public law, political science, and history of political theory; at various times he was also an editor of the Parlientary proceedings, an elected member of the Chber of Deputies, an under-secretary for colonial affairs, a newspaper columnist, and a member of the Senate. For Mosca ‘elitism’ refers to the empirical generalization that every society is ruled by an organized minority. His democratic commitment is embodied in what he calls juridical defense: the normative principle that political developments are to be judged by whether and how they prevent any one person, class, force, or institution from dominating the others. His third main contribution is a frework consisting of two intersecting distinctions that yield four possible ideal types, defined as follows: in autocracy, authority flows from the rulers to the ruled; in liberalism, from the ruled to the rulers; in democracy, the ruling class is open to renewal by members of other classes; in aristocracy it is not. He was influenced by, and in turn influenced, positivism, for the elitist thesis presumably constitutes the fundental “law” of political “science.” Even deeper is his connection with the tradition of Machiavelli’s political realism. There is also no question that he practiced an empirical approach. In the tradition of elitism, he may be compared and contrasted with Pareto, Michels, and Schumpeter; and in the tradition of Italian political philosophy, to Croce, Gentile, and Grsci.  CROCE, GENTILE, GRSCI, MACHIAVELLI, WEBER. M.A.F. Moses ben Maimon.MAIMONIDES. Mo Ti.MO TZU. motion.NEWTON. motivation, a property central in motivational explanations of intentional conduct. To assert that Ann is driving to Boston today because she wants to see the Red Sox play and believes that they are playing today in Boston is to offer a More, Sir Thomas motivation 591    591 motivational explanation of this action. On a popular interpretation, the assertion mentions a pair of attitudes: a desire and a belief. Ann’s desire is a paradigmatic motivational attitude in that it inclines her to bring about the satisfaction of that very attitude. The primary function of motivational attitudes is to bring about their own satisfaction by inducing the agent to undertake a suitable course of action, and, arguably, any attitude that has that function is, ipso facto, a motivational one. The related thesis that only attitudes having this function are motivational – or, more precisely, motivation-constituting – is implausible. Ann hopes that the Sox won yesterday. Plainly, her hope cannot bring about its own satisfaction, since Ann has no control over the past. Even so, the hope seemingly may motivate action (e.g., Ann’s searching for sports news on her car radio), in which case the hope is motivation-constituting. Some philosophers have claimed that our beliefs that we are morally required to take a particular course of action are motivation-constituting, and such beliefs obviously do not have the function of bringing about their own satisfaction (i.e., their truth). However, the claim is controversial, as is the related claim that beliefs of this kind are “besires” – that is, not merely beliefs but desires as well. 

ACCIDIE, ACTION THEORY, MOTIVATIONAL EXPLANATION, MOTIVATIONAL INTERNALISM. A.R.M. motivational explanation, a type of explanation of goal-directed behavior where the explanans appeals to the motives of the agent. The explanation usually is in the following form: Smith sw hard in order to win the race. Here the description of what Smith did identifies the behavior to be explained, and the phrase that follows ‘in order to’ identifies the goal or the state of affairs the obtaining of which was the moving force behind the behavior. The general presumption is that the agent whose behavior is being explained is capable of deliberating and acting on the decisions reached as a result of the deliberation. Thus, it is dubious whether the explanation contained in ‘The plant turned toward the sun in order to receive more light’ is a motivational explanation. Two problems are thought to surround motivational explanations. First, since the state of affairs set as the goal is, at the time of the action, non-existent, it can only act as the “moving force” by appearing as the intentional object of an inner psychological state of the agent. Thus, motives are generally desires for specific objects or states of affairs on which the agent acts. So motivational explanation is basically the type of explanation provided in folk psychology, and as such it inherits all the alleged problems of the latter. And second, what counts as a motive for an action under one description usually fails to be a motive for the se action under a different description. My motive for saying “hello” may have been my desire to answer the phone, but my motive for saying “hello” loudly was to express my irritation at the person calling me so late at night.  ACTION THEORY, EXPLANATION, FOLK PSYCHOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. B.E. motivational internalism, the view that moral motivation is internal to moral duty (or the sense of duty). The view represents the contemporary understanding of Hume’s thesis that morality is essentially practical. Hume went on to point out the apparent logical gap between statements of fact, which express theoretical judgments, and statements about what ought to be done, which express practical judgments. Motivational internalism offers one explanation for this gap. No motivation is internal to the recognition of facts. The specific internal relation the view affirms is that of necessity. Thus, motivational internalists hold that if one sees that one has a duty to do a certain action or that it would be right to do it, then necessarily one has a motive to do it. For exple, if one sees that it is one’s duty to donate blood, then necessarily one has a motive to donate blood. Motivational externalism, the opposing view, denies this relation. Its adherents hold that it is possible for one to see that one has a duty to do a certain action or that it would be right to do it yet have no motive to do it. Motivational externalists typically, though not universally, deny any real gap between theoretical and practical judgments. Motivational internalism takes either of two forms, rationalist and anti-rationalist. Rationalists, such as Plato and Kant, hold that the content or truth of a moral requirement guarantees in those who understand it a motive of compliance. Anti-rationalists, such as Hume, hold that moral judgment necessarily has some affective or volitional component that supplies a motive for the relevant action but that renders morality less a matter of reason and truth than of feeling or commitment. It is also possible in the abstract to motivational explanation motivational internalism 592    592 Mo Tzu mysticism 593 draw an analogous distinction between two forms of motivational externalism, cognitivist and noncognitivist, but because the view springs from an interest in assimilating practical judgment to theoretical judgment, its only influential form has been cognitivist. 

EMOTIVISM, ETHICS, HUME. J.D. Mo Tzu, also known as Master Mo, Mo Ti (fifth century B.C.), Chinese philosopher and founder of the Mohist school of thought, which was a major rival to Confucianism in ancient China. The text Mo Tzu contains different versions of his teachings as well as subsequent developments of his thought. Mo Tzu regarded rightness (yi) as determined by what benefits (li) the public, where benefit is understood in terms of such things as order and increased resources in society. He opposed the musical activities and ritual practices of the Confucians on the ground that such practices are detrimental to the public good. He is probably best known for advocating the ideal of an equal concern to benefit and avoid harm to every human being. Practicing this ideal is to the public good, since strife and disorder stem from partiality toward oneself or one’s fily or social group. Also, it being the will of Heaven (t’ien) that people have equal concern for all, one will be rewarded or punished by Heaven according to whether one practices this ideal. In response to worries about the practicability of the ideal, Mo Tzu insisted that it was simple and easy to put the ideal into practice, leaving himself open to the charge that he neglected the complexities of emotional management.  CONFUCIANISM, MOHISM. K.-l.S. Mou Tsung-san (1909–95), Chinese philosopher, perhaps the most original thinker ong contemporary Neo-Confucians. Educated at Peking University, he first studied Western philosophy but was converted to Chinese philosophy under the influence of Hsiung Shih-li. He made a great breakthrough in his study of Sung–Ming NeoConfucian philosophy, arguing that Chu Hsi was really a side branch that took the position of the orthodoxy. He maintained that all three major Chinese traditions, Confucian, Taoist, and Buddhist, assert that humans have the endowment for intellectual intuition, meaning personal participation in tao (the Way). 

CHINESE PHILOSOPHY, HSIUNG SHIH-LI, HSÜ FU-KUAN, NEO-CONFUCIANISM, T’ANG CHÜN-I. S.-h.L. moving rows paradox.ZENO’s PARADOXES. multiple realizability.FUNCTIONALISM. multiple-relation theory.PERCEPTION. mystical experience, an experience alleged to reveal some aspect of reality not normally accessible to sensory experience or cognition. The experience – typically characterized by its profound emotional impact on the one who experiences it, its transcendence of spatial and temporal distinctions, its transitoriness, and its ineffability – is often but not always associated with some religious tradition. In theistic religions, mystical experiences are claimed to be brought about by God or by some other superhuman agent. Theistic mystical experiences evoke feelings of worshipful awe. Their content can vary from something no more articulate than a feeling of closeness to God to something as specific as an item of revealed theology, such as, for a Christian mystic, a vision of the Trinity. Non-theistic mystical experiences are usually claimed to reveal the metaphysical unity of all things and to provide those who experience them with a sense of inner peace or bliss.  MYSTICISM. W.E.M. mysticism, a doctrine or discipline maintaining that one can gain knowledge of reality that is not accessible to sense perception or to rational, conceptual thought. Generally associated with a religious tradition, mysticism can take a theistic form, as it has in Jewish, Christian, and Islic traditions, or a non-theistic form, as it has in Buddhism and some varieties of Hinduism. Mystics claim that the mystical experience, the vehicle of mystical knowledge, is usually the result of spiritual training, involving some combination of prayer, meditation, fasting, bodily discipline, and renunciation of worldly concerns. Theistic varieties of mysticism describe the mystical experience as granted by God and thus not subject to the control of the mystic. Although theists claim to feel closeness to God during the mystical experience, they regard assertions of identity of the self with God as heretical. Non-theistic varieties are more apt to describe the experience as one that can be induced and controlled by the mystic and in which distinctions between the self and reality, or subject and object, are revealed to be illusory. Mystics claim that, although veridical, their experiences cannot be adequately described in language, because ordinary communication is based on sense experience and conceptual differentiation: mystical writings are thus characterized by metaphor and simile. It is con   593 troversial whether all mystical experiences are basically the se, and whether the apparent diversity ong them is the result of interpretations influenced by different cultural traditions.  MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE, PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. W.E.M. myth of Er, a tale at the end of Plato’s Republic dratizing the rewards of justice and philosophy by depicting the process of reincarnation. Complementing the main argument of the work, that it is intrinsically better to be just than unjust, this longest of Plato’s myths blends traditional lore with speculative cosmology to show that justice also pays, usually in life and certainly in the afterlife. Er, a warrior who revived shortly after death, reports how judges assign the souls of the just to heaven but others to punishment in the underworld, and how most return after a thousand years to behold the celestial order, to choose their next lives, and to be born anew.  PLATO. S.A.W. myth of the given.SELLARS, WILFRID. myth of Er myth of the given 594    594 Nagarjuna (fl. early second century A.D.), Indian Mahayana Buddhist philosopher, founder of the Madhyika view. The Mulanadhyakarika Prajña (“The Fundental Verses on the Middle Way”) and the Sunyatasaptati (“The Septuagint on Emptiness”) are perhaps his major works. He distinguishes between “two truths”: a conditional truth, which is provisional and reflects the sort of distinctions we make in everyday speech and find in ordinary experience; and a final truth, which is that there exists only an ineffable independent reality. Overcoming acceptance of the conventional, conditional truth is requisite for seeing the final truth in enlightenment.  MADHYIKA. K.E.Y. Nagel, Ernest (1901–85), Czech-born erican philosopher, the preeminent erican philosopher of science in the period from the mid-1930s to the 1960s. Arriving in New York as a ten-yearold immigrant, he earned his B.S. degree from the College of the City of New York and his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1931. He was a member of the Philosophy Department at Columbia from 1930 to 1970. He coauthored the influential An Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method with his former teacher, M. R. Cohen. His many publications include two well-known classics: Principles of the Theory of Probability (1939) and Structure of Science (1960). Nagel was sensitive to developments in logic, foundations of mathematics, and probability theory, and he shared with Russell and with members of the Vienna Circle like Carnap and Phillip Frank a respect for the relevance of scientific inquiry for philosophical reflection. But his writing also reveals the influences of M. R. Cohen and that strand in the thinking of the pragmatism of Peirce and Dewey which Nagel himself called “contextualist naturalism.” He was a persuasive critic of Russell’s views of the data of sensation as a source of non-inferential premises for knowledge and of cognate views expressed by some members of the Vienna Circle. Unlike Frege, Russell, Carnap, Popper, and others, he rejected the view that taking account of context in characterizing method threatened to taint philosophical reflection with an unacceptable psychologism. This stance subsequently allowed him to oppose historicist and sociologist approaches to the philosophy of science. Nagel’s contextualism is reflected in his contention that ideas of determinism, probability, explanation, and reduction “can be significantly discussed only if they are directed to the theories or formulations of a science and not its subject matter” (Principles of the Theory of Probability, 1939). This attitude infused his influential discussions of covering law explanation, statistical explanation, functional explanation, and reduction of one theory to another, in both natural and social science. Similarly, his contention that participants in the debate between realism and instrumentalism should clarify the import of their differences for (context-sensitive) scientific methodology served as the core of his argument casting doubt on the significance of the dispute. In addition to his extensive writings on scientific knowledge methodology, Nagel wrote influential essays on measurement, the history of mathematics, and the philosophy of law. 

COVERING LAW MODEL, PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE, REDUCTION, VIENNA CIRCLE. I.L. Nagel, Thomas (b.1937), erican professor of philosophy and of law at New York University, known for his important contributions in the fields of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and political philosophy. Nagel’s work in these areas is unified by a particular vision of perennial philosophical problems, according to which they emerge from a clash between two perspectives from which human beings can view themselves and the world. From an impersonal perspective, which results from detaching ourselves from our particular viewpoints, we strive to achieve an objective view of the world, whereas from a personal perspective, we see the world from our particular point of view. According to Nagel, dominance of the impersonal perspective in trying to understand reality leads to implausible philosophical views because it fails to accommodate facts about the self, minds, agency, and values that are revealed through engaged personal perspectives. In the philosophy of mind, for instance, Nagel criticizes various reductive accounts of mentality 595 N    595 resulting from taking an exclusively impersonal standpoint because they inevitably fail to account for the irreducibly subjective character of consciousness. In ethics, consequentialist moral theories (like utilitarianism), which feature strong impartialist demands that stem from taking a detached, impersonal perspective, find resistance from the personal perspective within which individual goals and motives are accorded an importance not found in strongly impartialist moral theories. An exination of such problems in metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics is found in his Moral Questions (1979) and The View from Nowhere (1986). In Equality and Partiality (1990) Nagel argues that the impersonal standpoint gives rise to an egalitarian form of impartial regard for all people that often clashes with the goals, concerns, and affections that individuals experience from a personal perspective. Quite generally, then, as Nagel sees it, one important philosophical task is to explore ways in which these two standpoints on both theoretical and practical matters might be integrated. Nagel has also made important contributions regarding the nature and possibility of reason or rationality in both its theoretical and its practical uses. The Possibility of Altruism (1970) is an exploration of the structure of practical reason in which Nagel defends the rationality of prudence and altruism, arguing that the possibility of such behavior is connected with our capacities to view ourselves respectively persisting through time and recognizing the reality of other persons. The Last Word (1998) is a defense of reason against skeptical views, according to which reason is a merely contingent, locally conditioned feature of particular cultures and hence relative. 

naturalism, the twofold view that (1) everything is composed of natural entities – those studied in the sciences (on some versions, the natural sciences) – whose properties determine all the properties of things, persons included (abstracta like possibilia and mathematical objects, if they exist, being constructed of such abstract entities as the sciences allow); and (2) acceptable methods of justification and explanation are continuous, in some sense, with those in science. Clause (1) is metaphysical or ontological, clause (2) methodological and/or epistemological. Often naturalism is formulated only for a specific subject matter or domain. Thus ethical naturalism holds that moral properties are equivalent to or at least determined by certain natural properties, so that moral judgments either form a subclass of, or are (non-reductively) determined by the factual or descriptive judgments, and the appropriate methods of moral justification and explanation are continuous with those in science. Aristotle and Spinoza sometimes are counted ong the ancestors of naturalism, as are Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius, and Hobbes. But the major impetus to naturalism in the last two centuries comes from advances in science and the growing explanatory power they signify. By the 1850s, the synthesis of urea, reflections on the conservation of energy, work on “animal electricity,” and discoveries in physiology suggested to Feuerbach, L. Buchner, and others that all aspects of human beings are explainable in purely natural terms. Darwin’s theory had even greater impact, and by the end of the nineteenth century naturalist philosophies were making inroads where idealism once reigned unchallenged. Naturalism’s ranks now included H. Spencer, J. Tyndall, T. H. Huxley, W. K. Clifford, and E. Haeckel. Early in the twentieth century, Santayana’s naturalism strongly influenced a number of erican philosophers, as did Dewey’s. Still other versions of naturalism flourished in erica in the 1930s and 1940s, including those of R. W. Sellars and M. Cohen. Today most erican and other philosophers of mind naive realism naturalism 596    596 are naturalists of some stripe, largely because of what they see as the lessons of continuing scientific advances, some of them spectacular, particularly in the brain sciences. Nonetheless, twentieth-century philosophy has been largely anti-naturalist. Both phenomenology in the Husserlian tradition and analytic philosophy in the Fregean tradition, together with their descendants, have been united in rejecting psychologism, a species of naturalism according to which empirical discoveries about mental processes are crucial for understanding the nature of knowledge, language, and logic. In order to defend the autonomy of philosophy against inroads from descriptive science, many philosophers have tried to turn the tables by arguing for the priority of philosophy over science, hence over any of its alleged naturalist implications. Many continue to do so, often on the ground that philosophy alone can illuminate the normativity and intentionality involved in knowledge, language, and logic; or on the ground that philosophy can evaluate the normative and regulative presuppositions of scientific practice which science itself is either blind to or unequipped to analyze; or on the ground that phi- losophy understands how the language of science can no more be used to get outside itself than any other, hence can no more be known to be in touch with the world and ourselves than any other; or on the ground that would-be justifications of fundental method, naturalist method certainly included, are necessarily circular because they must employ the very method at issue. Naturalists may reply by arguing that naturalism’s methodological clause (2) entails the opposite of dogmatism, requiring as it does an uncompromising fallibilism about philosophical matters that is continuous with the open, selfcritical spirit of science. If evidence were to accumulate against naturalism’s metaphysical clause (1), (1) would have to be revised or rejected, and there is no a priori reason such evidence could in principle never be found; indeed many naturalists reject the a priori altogether. Likewise, (2) itself might have to be revised or even rejected in light of adverse argument, so that in this respect (2) is self-referentially consistent. Until then, (2)’s having survived rigorous criticism to date is justification enough, as is the case with hypotheses in science, which often are deployed without circularity in the course of their own evaluation, whether positive or negative (H. I. Brown, “Circular Justifications,” 1994). So too can language be used without circularity in expressing hypotheses about the relations between language and the prelinguistic world (as illustrated by R. Millikan’s Language, Thought and Other Biological Categories, 1984; cf. Post, “Epistemology,” 1996). As for normativity and intentionality, naturalism does not entail materialism or physicalism, according to which everything is composed of the entities or processes studied in physics, and the properties of these basic physical affairs determine all the properties of things (as in Quine). Some naturalists deny this, holding that more things than are dret of in physics are required to account for normativity and intentionality – and consciousness. Nor need naturalism be reductive, in the sense of equating every property with some natural property. Indeed many physicalists themselves explain how the physical, hence natural, properties of things might determine other, non-natural properties without being equivalent to them (G. Hellman, T. Horgan, D. Lewis; see J. Post, The Faces of Existence, 1987). Often the determining physical properties are not all properties of the thing x that has the non-natural properties, but include properties of items separated from x in space and time or in some cases bearing no physical relation to x that does any work in determining x’s properties (Post, “ ‘Global’ Supervenient Determination: Too Permissive?” 1995). Thus naturalism allows a high degree of holism and historicity, which opens the way for a non-reductive naturalist account of intentionality and normativity, such as Millikan’s, that is immune to the usual objections, which are mostly objections to reduction. The alternative psychosemantic theories of Dretske and Fodor, being largely reductive, remain vulnerable to such objections. In these and other ways non-reductive naturalism attempts to combine a monism of entities – the natural ones of which everything is composed – with a pluralism of properties, many of them irreducible or emergent. Not everything is nothing but a natural thing, nor need naturalism accord totalizing primacy to the natural face of existence. Indeed, some naturalists regard the universe as having religious and moral dimensions that enjoy a crucial kind of primacy; and some offer theologies that are more traditionally theist (as do H. N. Wieman, C. Hardwick, J. Post). So far from exhibiting “reptilian indifference” to humans and their fate, the universe can be an enchanted place of belonging. 

naturalistic epistemology, an approach to epistemology that views the human subject as a natural phenomenon and uses empirical science to study epistemic activity. The phrase was introduced by Quine (“Epistemology Naturalized,” in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays, 1969), who proposed that epistemology should be a chapter of psychology. Quine construed classical epistemology as Cartesian epistemology, an attempt to ground all knowledge in a firmly logical way on immediate experience. In its twentieth-century embodiment, it hoped to give a translation of all discourse and a deductive validation of all science in terms of sense experience, logic, and set theory. Repudiating this dre as forlorn, Quine urged that epistemology be abandoned and replaced by psychology. It would be a scientific study of how the subject takes sensory stimulations as input and delivers as output a theory of the three-dimensional world. This formulation appears to eliminate the normative mission of epistemology. In later writing, however, Quine has suggested that normative epistemology can be naturalized as a chapter of engineering: the technology of predicting experience, or sensory stimulations. Some theories of knowledge are naturalistic in their depiction of knowers as physical systems in causal interaction with the environment. One such theory is the causal theory of knowing, which says that a person knows that p provided his belief that p has a suitable causal connection with a corresponding state of affairs. Another exple is the information-theoretic approach developed by Dretske (Knowledge and the Flow of Information, 1981). This says that a person knows that p only if some signal “carries” this information (that p) to him, where information is construed as an objective commodity that can be processed and transmitted via instruments, gauges, neurons, and the like. Information is “carried” from one site to another when events located at those sites are connected by a suitable lawful dependence. The normative concept of justification has also been the subject of naturalistic construals. Whereas many theories of justified belief focus on logical or probabilistic relations between evidence and hypothesis, naturalistic theories focus on the psychological processes causally responsible for the belief. The logical status of a belief does not fix its justificational status. Belief in a tautology, for instance, is not justified if it is formed by blind trust in an ignorant guru. According to Goldman (Epistemology and Cognition, 1986), a belief qualifies as justified only if it is produced by reliable belief-forming processes, i.e., processes that generally have a high truth ratio. Goldman’s larger progr for naturalistic epistemology is called “epistemics,” an interdisciplinary enterprise in which cognitive science would play a major role. Epistemics would seek to identify the subset of cognitive operations available to the human cognizer that are best from a truth-bearing standpoint. Relevant truth-linked properties include problem-solving power and speed, i.e., the abilities to obtain correct answers to questions of interest and to do so quickly. Close connections between epistemology and artificial intelligence have been proposed by Clark Glymour, Gilbert Harman, John Pollock, and Paul Thagard. Harman stresses that principles of good reasoning are not directly given by rules of logic. Modus ponens, e.g., does not tell you to infer q if you already believe p and ‘if p then q’. In some cases it is better to subtract a belief in one of the premises rather than add a belief in q. Belief revision also requires attention to the storage and computational limitations of the mind. Limits of memory capacity, e.g., suggest a principle of clutter avoidance: not filling one’s mind with vast numbers of useless beliefs (Harman, Change in View, 1986). Other conceptions of naturalistic epistemology focus on the history of science. Larry Laudan conceives of naturalistic epistemology as a scientific inquiry that gathers empirical evidence concerning the past track records of various scientific methodologies, with the aim of determining which of these methodologies can best advance the chosen cognitive ends. Naturalistic epistemology need not confine its attention to individual epistemic agents; it can also study communities of agents. This perspective invites contributions from sciences that address the social side of the knowledge-seeking enterprise. If naturalistic epistemology is a normative inquiry, however, it must not simply naturalism, biological naturalistic epistemology 598    598 describe social practices or social influences; it must analyze the impact of these factors on the attainment of cognitive ends. Philosophers such as David Hull, Nicholas Rescher, Philip Kitcher, and Alvin Goldman have sketched models inspired by population biology and economics to explore the epistemic consequences of alternative distributions of research activity and different ways that professional rewards might influence the course of research.  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, EPISTEMOLOGY,

NATURALISM, RELIABILISM. A.I.G. naturalistic fallacy.MOORE. natural kind, a category of entities classically conceived as having modal implications; e.g., if Socrates is a member of the natural kind human being, then he is necessarily a human being. The idea that nature fixes certain sortals, such as ‘water’ and ‘human being’, as correct classifications that appear to designate kinds of entities has roots going back at least to Plato and Aristotle. Anil Gupta has argued that sortals are to be distinguished from properties designated by such predicates as ‘red’ by including criteria for individuating the particulars (bits or ounts for mass nouns) that fall under them as well as criteria for sorting those particulars into the class. Quine is salient ong those who find the modal implications of natural kinds objectionable. He has argued that the idea of natural kinds is rooted in prescientific intuitive judgments of comparative similarity, and he has suggested that as these intuitive classifications are replaced by classifications based on scientific theories these modal implications drop away. Kripke and Putn have argued that science in fact uses natural kind terms having the modal implications Quine finds so objectionable. They see an important role in scientific methodology for the capacity to refer demonstratively to such natural kinds by pointing out particulars that fall under them. Certain inferences within science – such as the inference to the charge for electrons generally from the measurement of the charge on one or a few electrons – seem to be additional aspects of a role for natural kind terms in scientific practice. Other roles in the methodology of science for natural kind concepts have been discussed in recent work by Ian Hacking and Thomas Kuhn.  COUNT NOUN, ESSENTIALISM, PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE, QUALITATIVE PREDICATE. W.Har. natural language.FORMAL LANGUAGE, PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE. natural law, also called law of nature, in moral and political philosophy, an objective norm or set of objective norms governing human behavior, similar to the positive laws of a human ruler, but binding on all people alike and usually understood as involving a superhuman legislator. Ancient Greek and Roman thought, particularly Stoicism, introduced ideas of eternal laws directing the actions of all rational beings and built into the very structure of the universe. Roman lawyers developed a doctrine of a law that all civilized peoples would recognize, and made some effort to explain it in terms of a natural law common to animals and humans. The most influential forms of natural law theory, however, arose from later efforts to use Stoic and legal language to work out a Christian theory of morality and politics. The aim was to show that the principles of morals could be known by reason alone, without revelation, so that the whole human race could know how to live properly. The law of nature applies, on this understanding, only to rational beings, who can obey or disobey it deliberately and freely. It is thus different in kind from the laws God laid down for the inanimate and irrational parts of creation. Natural law theorists often saw continuities and analogies between natural laws for humans and those for the rest of creation but did not confuse them. The most enduringly influential natural law writer was Aquinas. On his view God’s eternal reason ordains laws directing all things to act for the good of the community of the universe, the declaration of His own glory. Human reason can participate sufficiently in God’s eternal reason to show us the good of the human community. The natural law is thus our sharing in the eternal law in a way appropriate to our human nature. God lays down certain other laws through revelation; these divine laws point us toward our eternal goal. The natural law concerns our earthly good, and needs to be supplemented by human laws. Such laws can vary from community to community, but to be binding they must always stay within the limits of the law of nature. God engraved the most basic principles of the natural law in the minds of all people alike, but their detailed application takes reasoning powers that not everyone may have. Opponents of Aquinas – called voluntarists – argued that God’s will, not his intellect, is the source of law, and that God could have laid down different natural laws for us. Hugo Grotius naturalistic fallacy natural law 599    599 rejected their position, but unlike Aquinas he conceived of natural law as meant not to direct us to bring about some definite common good but to set the limits on the ways in which each of us could properly pursue our own personal aims. This Grotian outlook was developed by Hobbes, Pufendorf, and Locke along voluntarist lines. Thomistic views continued to be expounded by Protestant as well as Roman Catholic writers until the end of the seventeenth century. Thereafter, while natural law theory remained central to Catholic teaching, it ceased to attract major new non-Catholic proponents. Natural law doctrine in both Thomistic and Grotian versions treats morality as basically a matter of compliance with law. Obligation and duty, obedience and disobedience, merit and guilt, reward and punishment, are central notions. Virtues are simply habits of following laws. Though the law is suited to our distinctive human nature and can be discovered by the proper use of reason, it is not a self-imposed law. In following it we are obeying God. Since the early eighteenth century, philosophical discussions of whether or not there is an objective morality have largely ceased to center on natural law. The idea remains alive, however, in jurisprudence. Natural law theories are opposed to legal positivism, the view that the only binding laws are those imposed by human sovereigns, who cannot be subject to higher legal constraints. Legal theorists arguing that there are rational objective limits to the legislative power of rulers often think of these limits in terms of natural law, even when their theories do not invoke or imply any of the religious aspects of earlier natural law positions. 

AQUINAS, GROTIUS, HOBBES, PHILOSOPHY OF LAW, PUFENDORF. J.B.S. natural light.DESCARTES. natural meaning.MEANING. naturalness.JUAN CHI. natural number.MATHEMATICAL ANALYSIS, MATHEMATICAL INDUCTION. natural philosophy, the study of nature or of the spatiotemporal world. This was regarded as a task for philosophy before the emergence of modern science, especially physics and astronomy, and the term is now only used with reference to premodern times. Philosophical questions about nature still remain, e.g., whether materialism is true, but they would usually be placed in metaphysics or in a branch of it that may be called philosophy of nature. Natural philosophy is not to be confused with metaphysical naturalism, which is the metaphysical view (no part of science itself) that all that there is is the spatiotemporal world and that the only way to study it is that of the empirical sciences. It is also not to be confused with natural theology, which also may be considered part of metaphysics.  METAPHYSICS. P.Bu. natural religion, a term first occurring in the second half of the seventeenth century, used in three related senses, the most common being (1) a body of truths about God and our duty that can be discovered by natural reason. These truths are sufficient for salvation or (according to some orthodox Christians) would have been sufficient if Ad had not sinned. Natural religion in this sense should be distinguished from natural theology, which does not imply this. A natural religion may also be (2) one that has a human, as distinct from a divine, origin. It may also be (3) a religion of human nature as such, as distinguished from religious beliefs and practices that have been determined by local circumstances. Natural religion in the third sense is identified with humanity’s original religion. In all three senses, natural religion includes a belief in God’s existence, justice, benevolence, and providential government; in immortality; and in the dictates of common morality. While the concept is associated with deism, it is also sympathetically treated by Christian writers like Clarke, who argues that revealed religion simply restores natural religion to its original purity and adds inducements to compliance. 

necessitarianism, the doctrine that necessity is an objective feature of the world. Natural language permits speakers to express modalities: a state of affairs can be actual (Paris’s being in France), merely possible (chlorophyll’s making things blue), or necessary (2 ! 2 % 4). Anti-necessitarians believe that these distinctions are not grounded in the nature of the world. Some of them claim that the distinctions are merely verbal. Others, e.g., Hume, believed that psychological facts, like our expectations of future events, explain the idea of necessity. Yet others contend that the modalities reflect epistemic considerations; necessity reflects the highest level of an inquirer’s commitment. Some necessitarians believe there are different modes of metaphysical necessity, e.g., causal and logical necessity. Certain proponents of idealism believe that each fact is necessarily connected with every other fact so that the ultimate goal of scientific inquiry is the discovery of a completely rigorous mathematical system of the world.  DETERMINISM, FREE WILL PROBLEM. B.B. necessity, a modal property attributable to a whole proposition (dictum) just when it is not possible that the proposition be false (the proposition being de dicto necessary). Narrowly construed, a proposition P is logically necessary provided P satisfies certain syntactic conditions, nely, that P’s denial is formally self-contradictory. More broadly, P is logically necessary just when P satisfies certain semantic conditions, nely, that P’s denial is false, and P true, in all possible worlds. These semantic conditions were first suggested by Leibniz, refined by Wittgenstein and Carnap, and fully developed as the possible worlds semantics of Kripke, Hintikka, et al., in the 1960s. Previously, philosophers had to rely largely on intuition to determine the acceptability or otherwise of formulas involving the necessity operator, A, and were at a loss as to which of various axiomatic systems for modal logic, as developed in the 1930s by C. I. Lewis, best captured the notion of logical necessity. There was much debate, for instance, over the characteristic (NN) thesis of Lewis’s system S4, nely, AP / A AP (if P is necessary then it is necessarily necessary). But given a Leibnizian account of the truth conditions for a statement of the form Aa nely (R1) that Aa is true provided a is true in all possible worlds, and (R2) that Aa is false provided there is at least one possible world in which a is false, a proof can be constructed by reductio ad absurdum. For suppose that AP / AAP is false in some arbitrarily chosen world W. Then its antecedent will be true in W, and hence (by R1) it follows (a) that P will be true in all possible worlds. But equally its consequent will be false in W, and hence (by R2) AP will be false in at least one possible world, from which (again by R2) it follows (b) that P will be false in at least one possible world, thus contradicting (a). A similar proof can be constructed for the characteristic thesis of S5, nely, -A-P / A-A-P (if P is possibly true then it is necessarily possible). Necessity is also attributable to a property F of an object O provided it is not possible that (there is no possible world in which) O exists and lacks F – F being de re necessary, internal or essential to O. For instance, the non-repeatable (haecceitist) property of being identical to O is de re necessary (essential) to O, and arguably the repeatable property of being extended is de re necessary to all colored objects.  CONTINGENT, ESSENTIALISM, HAECCEITY, MODAL LOGIC, POSSIBLE WORLDS. R.D.B. necessity, metaphysical

.NECESSITY, PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. necessity, nomic.LAWLIKE GENERALIZATION. negation, the logical operation on propositions that is indicated, e.g., by the prefatory clause ‘It is not the case that . . .’. Negation is standardly distinguished sharply from the operation on predicates that is called complementation and that is indicated by the prefix ‘non-’. Because negation can also be indicated by the adverb ‘not’, a distinction is often drawn between external negation, which is indicated by attaching the prefatory ‘It is not the case that . . .’ to an assertion, and internal negation, which is indicated by inserting the adverb ‘not’ (along with, perhaps, nature, right of negation 601    601 grmatically necessary words like ‘do’ or ‘does’) into the assertion in such a way as to indicate that the adverb ‘not’ modifies the verb. In a number of cases, the question arises as to whether external and internal negation yield logically equivalent results. For exple, ‘It is not the case that Santa Claus exists’ would seem obviously to be true, whereas ‘Santa Claus does not exist’ seems to some philosophers to presuppose what it denies, on the ground that nothing could be truly asserted of Santa Claus unless he existed. 

Nemesius of Emesa (fl. c.390–400), Greek Christian philosopher. His treatise on the soul, On the Nature of Man, translated from Greek into Latin by Alphanus of Salerno and Burgundio of Pisa (c.1160), was attributed to Gregory of Nyssa in the Middle Ages, and enjoyed some authority; the treatise rejects Plato for underplaying the unity of soul and body, and Aristotle for making the soul essentially corporeal. The soul is selfsubsistent, incorporeal, and by nature immortal, but naturally suited for union with the body. Nemesius draws on monius Saccas and Porphyry, as well as analogy to the union of divine and human nature in Christ, to explain the incorruptible soul’s perfect union with the corruptible body. His review of the powers of the soul draws especially on Galen on the brain. His view that rational creatures possess free will in virtue of their rationality influenced Maximus the Confessor and John of Dascus. J.Lo. Neo-Confucianism, Confucianism as revived in China during the late tenth to mid-seventeenth centuries. It has also been called Tao-hsüeh (learning of the Way) or Li-hsüeh (learning of principles) in the broader sense. It is without any doubt Confucianism, since Sung–Ming Confucianists also found their ultimate commitment in jen (humanity or human-heartedness) and regulated their behavior by li (propriety). But it acquired new features, since it was a movement in response to the challenges from Buddhism and Neo-Taoism. Therefore it developed sophisticated theories of human mind and nature and also cosmology and metaphysics far beyond the scope of Pre-Ch’in Confucianism. If the Confucian ideal may be characterized by nei-sheng-waiwang (inward sageliness and outward kingliness), then the Neo-Confucianists certainly made greater contributions to the nei-sheng side, as they considered wei-chi-chih-hsüeh (learning for one’s self) as their primary concern, and developed sophisticated discipline of the mind comparable to the kind of transcendental meditation practiced by Buddhists and Taoists. They put emphasis on finding resources within the self. Hence they moved away from the Han tradition of writing extensive commentaries on the Five Classics. Instead, they looked for guidance to the so-called Four Books: the Analects, the Mencius, The Great Learning, and The Doctrine of the Mean. They also believed that they should put what they had learned from the words of the sages and worthies into practice in order to make themselves better. This was to start a new trend in sharp contrast to the earlier Five Dynasties period (907–60), when moral standards had fallen to a new low. According to Chu Hsi, the movement started with Chou Tun-yi (1017–73), who, along with Chang Tsai (1020–77), gave new interpretations to the I-Ching (the Book of Changes) and The Doctrine of the Mean in combination with the Analects and the Mencius so as to develop new cosmologies and metaphysics in response to the challenges from Buddhism and Taoism. The ne of Shao Yung (1011–77), an expert on the I-Ching, was excluded, as his views were considered too Taoistic. But the true founders and leaders of the movement were the two Ch’eng brothers – Ch’eng Hao (1032–85) and Ch’eng Yi (1033– 1107). Onetime pupils of Chou, they developed li (principle) into a philosophical concept. Even though Hua-yen Buddhism had used the term first, the Ch’eng brothers gave it a totally new interpretation from a Confucian perspective. Later scholars find that the thoughts of the two brothers differed both in style and in substance. Ch’eng Hao believed in i-pen (one foundation), while Ch’eng Yi developed a dualistic metaphysics of li (principle) and ch’i (material force). On the surface Chu Hsi was the follower of the Ch’eng brothers, but in fact he was only following the lead of Ch’eng Yi, and promoted the socalled Li-hsüeh (learning of principles) in the narrower sense. His younger contemporary negation-complete Neo-Confucianism 602    602 Lu Hsiang-shan (1139–93) objected to Chu’s method of looking for principles ong things. He urged us to realize principle within one’s own mind, went back to Mencius’s teaching to establish the greater part of the self first, and promoted the so-called hsin-hsüeh (learning of the mind). But Chu Hsi’s commentaries on the Four Books were adopted as the basis of civil service exinations in the Yüan dynasty; Lu’s views were largely ignored until there were revived in the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) by Wang Yang-ming (1472–1529), who identified the mind with principle and advocated that knowledge and action are one. Since Lu–Wang’s thoughts were closer to Mencius, who was honored to have represented the orthodox line of transmission of the Way, Mou Tsung-san advanced the theory that Chu Hsi was the side branch taking over the orthodoxy; he also believed that Hu Hung (1100–55) and Liu Tsung-chou (1578–1645) developed a third branch of Neo-Confucianism in addition to that of Ch’eng and Chu and that of Lu and Wang. His views have generated many controversies. Sung–Ming Neo-Confucianism was hailed as creating the second golden period of Chinese philosophy since the late Chou. Huang Tsung-hsi (1610–95), a pupil of Liu Tsung-chou and the last important figure in Sung–Ming Neo-Confucianism, extensively studied the movement and wrote essential works on it. 

neo-Kantianism, the diverse Kantian movement that emerged within German philosophy in the 1860s, gained a strong academic foothold in the 1870s, reached its height during the three decades prior to World War I, and disappeared with the rise of Nazism. The movement was initially focused on renewed study and elaboration of Kant’s epistemology in response to the growing epistemic authority of the natural sciences and as an alternative to both Hegelian and speculative idealism and the emerging materialism of, ong others, Ludwig Büchner (1824–99). Later neo-Kantianism explored Kant’s whole philosophy, applied his critical method to disciplines other than the natural sciences, and developed its own philosophical systems. Some originators and/or early contributors were Kuno Fischer (1824–1907), Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–94), Friedrich Albert Lange (1828–75), Eduard Zeller (1814–1908), and Otto Liebmann (1840–1912), whose Kant und die Epigonen (1865) repeatedly stated what bece a neoKantian motto, “Back to Kant!” Several forms of neo-Kantianism are to be distinguished. T. K. Oesterreich (1880–1949), in Friedrich Ueberwegs Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie (“F.U.’s Compendium of the History of Philosophy,” 1923), developed the standard, somewhat chronological, classification: (1) The physiological neo-Kantianism of Helmholtz and Lange, who claimed that physiology is “developed or corrected Kantianism.” (2) The metaphysical neo-Kantianism of the later Liebmann, who argued for a Kantian “critical metaphysics” (beyond epistemology) in the form of “hypotheses” about the essence of things. (3) The realist neo-Kantianism of Alois Riehl (1844–1924), who emphasized the real existence of Kant’s thing-in-itself. (4) The logistic-methodological neo-Kantianism of the Marburg School of Hermann Cohen (1842–1918) and Paul Natorp (1854–1924). (5) The axiological neo-Kantianism of the Baden or Southwest German School of Windelband (1848–1915) and Heinrich Rickert (1863–1936). (6) The relativistic neo-Kantianism of Georg Simmel (1858–1918), who argued for Kantian categories relative to individuals and cultures. (7) The psychological neo-Kantianism of Leonard Nelson (1882–1927), originator of the Göttingen School; also known as the neo-Friesian School, after Jakob Friedrich Fries (1773–1843), Nelson’s self-proclaimed precursor. Like Fries, Nelson held that Kantian a priori principles cannot be transcendentally justified, but can be discovered only through introspection. Oesterreich’s classification has been narrowed or modified, partly because of conflicting views on how distinctly “Kantian” a philosopher must have been to be called “neo-Kantian.” The very term ‘neo-Kantianism’ has even been called into question, as suggesting real intellectual commonality where little or none is to be found. There is, however, growing consensus that Marneo-Euclidean geometry neo-Kantianism 603    603 burg and Baden neo-Kantianism were the most important and influential. Marburg School. Its founder, Cohen, developed its characteristic Kantian idealism of the natural sciences by arguing that physical objects are truly known only through the laws of these sciences and that these laws presuppose the application of Kantian a priori principles and concepts. Cohen elaborated this idealism by eliminating Kant’s dualism of sensibility and understanding, claiming that space and time are construction methods of “pure thought” rather than a priori forms of perception and that the notion of any “given” (perceptual data) prior to the “activity” of “pure thought” is meaningless. Accordingly, Cohen reformulated Kant’s thing-in-itself as the regulative idea that the mathematical description of the world can always be improved. Cohen also emphasized that “pure thought” refers not to individual consciousess – on his account Kant had not yet sufficiently left behind a “subject–object” epistemology – but rather to the content of his own system of a priori principles, which he saw as subject to change with the progress of science. Just as Cohen held that epistemology must be based on the “fact of science,” he argued, in a decisive step beyond Kant, that ethics must transcendentally deduce both the moral law and the ideal moral subject from a humanistic science – more specifically, from jurisprudence’s notion of the legal person. This analysis led to the view that the moral law demands that all institutions, including economic enterprises, become democratic – so that they display unified wills and intentions as transcendental conditions of the legal person – and that all individuals become colegislators. Thus Cohen arrived at his frequently cited claim that Kant “is the true and real originator of German socialism.” Other important Marburg Kantians were Cohen’s colleague Natorp, best known for his studies on Plato and philosophy of education, and their students Karl Vorländer (1860–1928), who focused on Kantian socialist ethics as a corrective of orthodox Marxism, and Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945). Baden School. The basic task of philosophy and its transcendental method is seen as identifying universal values that make possible culture in its varied expressions. This focus is evident in Windelband’s influential insight that the natural sciences seek to formulate general laws – nomothetic knowledge – while the historical sciences seek to describe unique events – idiographic knowledge. This distinction is based on the values (interests) of mastery of nature and understanding and reliving the unique past in order to affirm our individuality. Windelband’s view of the historical sciences as idiographic raised the problem of selection central to his successor Rickert’s writings: How can historians objectively determine which individual events are historically significant? Rickert argued that this selection must be based on the values that are generally recognized within the cultures under investigation, not on the values of historians themselves. Rickert also developed the transcendental argument that the objectivity of the historical sciences necessitates the assumption that the generally recognized values of different cultures approximate in various degrees universally valid values. This argument was rejected by Weber, whose methodological work was greatly indebted to Rickert. 

Neoplatonism, that period of Platonism following on the new impetus provided by the philosophical speculations of Plotinus (A.D. 204–69). It extends, as a minimum, to the closing of the Platonic School in Athens by Justinian in 529, but maximally through Byzantium, with such figures as Michael Psellus (1018–78) and Pletho (c.1360–1452), the Renaissance (Ficino, Pico, and the Florentine Academy), and the early modern period (the Cbridge Platonists, Thomas Taylor), to the advent of the “scientific” study of the works of Plato with Schleiermacher (1768–1834) at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The term was formerly also used to characterize the whole period from the Old Academy of Plato’s immediate successors, Speusippus and Xenocrates, through what is now termed Middle Platonism (c.80 B.C.–A.D. 220), down to Plotinus. This account confines itself to the “minimum” interpretation. Neoplatonism proper may be divided into three main periods: that of Plotinus and his immediate followers (third century); the “Syrian” School of Iblichus and his followers (fourth century); and the “Athenian” School begun by Plutarch of Athens, and including Syrianus, Proclus, and their successors, down to Dascius (fifth–sixth centuries). Plotinus and his school. Plotinus’s innovations in Platonism (developed in his essays, the Enneads, collected and edited by his pupil Porphyry after his death), are mainly two: (a) above Neoplatonism Neoplatonism 604    604 the traditional supreme principle of earlier Platonism (and Aristotelianism), a self-thinking intellect, which was also regarded as true being, he postulated a principle superior to intellect and being, totally unitary and simple (“the One”); (b) he saw reality as a series of levels (One, Intelligence, Soul), each higher one outflowing or radiating into the next lower, while still remaining unaffected in itself, and the lower ones fixing themselves in being by somehow “reflecting back” upon their priors. This eternal process gives the universe its existence and character. Intelligence operates in a state of non-temporal simultaneity, holding within itself the “forms” of all things. Soul, in turn, generates time, and receives the forms into itself as “reason principles” (logoi). Our physical three-dimensional world is the result of the lower aspect of Soul (nature) projecting itself upon a kind of negative field of force, which Plotinus calls “matter.” Matter has no positive existence, but is simply the receptacle for the unfolding of Soul in its lowest aspect, which projects the forms in three-dimensional space. Plotinus often speaks of matter as “evil” (e.g. Enneads II.8), and of the Soul as suffering a “fall” (e.g. Enneads V.1, 1), but in fact he sees the whole cosmic process as an inevitable result of the superabundant productivity of the One, and thus “the best of all possible worlds.” Plotinus was himself a mystic, but he arrived at his philosophical conclusions by perfectly logical means, and he had not much use for either traditional religion or any of the more recent superstitions. His immediate pupils, elius (c.225–90) and Porphyry (234–c.305), while somewhat more hospitable to these, remained largely true to his philosophy (though elius had a weakness for triadic elaborations in metaphysics). Porphyry was to have wide influence, both in the Latin West (through such men as Marius Victorinus, Augustine, and Boethius), and in the Greek East (and even, through translations, on medieval Isl), as the founder of the Neoplatonic tradition of commentary on both Plato and Aristotle, but it is mainly as an expounder of Plotinus’s philosophy that he is known. He added little that is distinctive, though that little is currently becoming better appreciated. Iblichus and the Syrian School. Iblichus (c.245–325), descendant of an old Syrian noble fily, was a pupil of Porphyry’s, but dissented from him on various important issues. He set up his own school in Apea in Syria, and attracted many pupils. One chief point of dissent was the role of theurgy (really just magic, with philosophical underpinnings, but not unlike Christian sacrental theology). Iblichus claimed, as against Porphyry, that philosophical reasoning alone could not attain the highest degree of enlightenment, without the aid of theurgic rites, and his view on this was followed by all later Platonists. He also produced a metaphysical scheme far more elaborate than Plotinus’s, by a Scholastic filling in, normally with systems of triads, of gaps in the “chain of being” left by Plotinus’s more fluid and dynic approach to philosophy. For instance, he postulated two Ones, one completely transcendent, the other the source of all creation, thus “resolving” a tension in Plotinus’s metaphysics. Iblichus was also concerned to fit as many of the traditional gods as possible into his system, which later attracted the attention of the Emperor Julian, who based himself on Iblichus when attempting to set up a Hellenic religion to rival Christianity, a project which, however, died with him in 363. The Athenian School. The precise links between the pupils of Iblichus and Plutarch (d.432), founder of the Athenian School, remain obscure, but the Athenians always retained a great respect for the Syrian. Plutarch himself is a dim figure, but Syrianus (c.370–437), though little of his writings survives, can be seen from constant references to him by his pupil Proclus (412– 85) to be a major figure, and the source of most of Proclus’s metaphysical elaborations. The Athenians essentially developed and systematized further the doctrines of Iblichus, creating new levels of divinity (e.g. intelligibleintellectual gods, and “henads” in the realm of the One – though they rejected the two Ones), this process reaching its culmination in the thought of the last head of the Athenian Academy, Dascius (c.456–540). The drive to systematize reality and to objectivize concepts, exhibited most dratically in Proclus’s Elements of Theology, is a lasting legacy of the later Neoplatonists, and had a significant influence on the thought, ong others, of Hegel. 

neo-Scholasticism, the movement given impetus Neoplatonism, Islic neo-Scholasticism 605    605 by Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879), which, while stressing Aquinas, was a general recommendation of the study of medieval Scholasticism as a source for the solution of vexing modern problems. Leo assumed that there was a doctrine common to Aquinas, Bonaventure, Albertus Magnus, and Duns Scotus, and that Aquinas was a preeminent spokesman of the common view. Maurice De Wulf employed the phrase ‘perennial philosophy’ to designate this common medieval core as well as what of Scholasticism is relevant to later times. Historians like Mandonnet, Grabmann, and Gilson soon contested the idea that there was a single medieval doctrine and drew attention to the profound differences between the great medieval masters. The discussion of Christian philosophy precipitated by Brehier in 1931 generated a variety of suggestions as to what medieval thinkers and later Christian philosophers have in common, but this was quite different from the assumption of Aeterni Patris. The pedagogical directives of this and later encyclicals brought about a revival of Thomism rather than of Scholasticism, generally in seminaries, ecclesiastical colleges, and Catholic universities. Louvain’s Higher Institute of Philosophy under the direction of Cardinal Mercier and its Revue de Philosophie Néoscolastique were ong the first fruits of the Thomistic revival. The studia generalia of the Dominican order continued at a new pace, the Saulchoir publishing the Revue thomiste. In graduate centers in Milan, Madrid, Latin erica, Paris, and Rome, men were trained for the task of teaching in colleges and seminaries, and scholarly research began to flourish as well. The Leonine edition of the writings of Aquinas was soon joined by new critical editions of Bonaventure, Duns Scotus, and Ockh, as well as Albertus Magnus. Medieval studies in the broader sense gained from the quest for manuscripts and the growth of paleography and codicology. Besides the historians mentioned above, Jacques Maritain (1882–1973), a layman and convert to Catholicism, did much both in his native France and in the United States to promote the study of Aquinas. The Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies at Toronto, with Gilson regularly and Maritain frequently in residence, bece a source of college and university teachers in Canada and the United States, as Louvain and, in Rome, the Jesuit Gregorianum and the Dominican Angelicum already were. In the 1940s ericans took doctorates in theology and philosophy at Laval in Quebec and soon the influence of Charles De Koninck was felt. Jesuits at St. Louis University began to publish The Modern Schoolman, Dominicans in Washington The Thomist, and the erican Catholic Philosophical Association The New Scholasticism. The School of Philosophy at Catholic University, long the primary domestic source of professors and scholars, was complemented by graduate progrs at St. Louis, Georgetown, Notre De, Fordh, and Marquette. In the golden period of the Thomistic revival in the United States, from the 1930s until the end of the Vatican Council II in 1965, there were varieties of Thomism based on the variety of views on the relation between philosophy and science. By the 1960s Thomistic philosophy was a prominent part of the curriculum of all Catholic colleges and universities. By 1970, it had all but disappeared under the mistaken notion that this was the intent of Vatican II. This had the effect of releasing Aquinas into the wider philosophical world. 

Neo-Taoism, in Chinese, hsüan-hsüeh (‘Profound Learning’, ‘Mysterious Learning’, or ‘Dark Learning’), a broad, multifaceted revival of Taoist learning that dominated Chinese philosophy from the third to the sixth century A.D. Literally ‘dark red’, hsüan is used in the Lao Tzu (Tao Te Ching) to describe the sublime mystery of the tao. Historically, hsüan-hsüeh formed a major topic of “Pure Conversation” (ch’ing-t’an), where scholars in a time of political upheaval sought to arrest the perceived decline of the tao. When the Wei dynasty replaced the Han in A.D. 220, a first wave of Neo-Taoist philosophers represented by Ho Yen (c.190–249) and Wang Pi (226–49) radically reinterpreted the classical heritage to bring to light its profound meaning. The Confucian orthodoxy – as distinguished from the original teachings of Confucius – was deemed ineffectual and an obstacle to renewal. One of the most important debates in Profound Learning – the debate on “words and meaning” – criticizes Han scholarship for its literal imagination and confronts the question of interpretation. Words are necessary but not sufficient for understanding. The ancient sages had a unified view of the Tao, articulated most clearly in the I-Ching, Lao Tzu, and Chuang Tzu, but distorted by Han scholars. Most Neo-Taoists concentrated on these “Three Profound Treatises” (san-hsüan). Wang Pi is best known for his commentaries on the I-Ching and the Lao Tzu; and Kuo Hsiang (d.312), another Neo-Taoism Neo-Taoism 606    606 leading Neo-Taoist, is arguably the most important Chuang Tzu commentator in Chinese history. The tao is the source of all being, but against identifying the tao with a creator “heaven” or an original “vital energy” (ch’i), Wang Pi argues that being originates from “non-being” (wu). The concept of non-being, taken from the Lao Tzu, brings out the transcendence of the tao. Neless and without form, the tao as such can be described only negatively as wu, literally “not having” any characteristics. In contrast, for Kuo Hsiang, non-being does not explain the origin of being because, as entirely conceptual, it cannot create anything. If non-being cannot bring forth being, and if the idea of a creator remains problematic, the only alternative is to regard the created order as coming into existence spontaneously. This implies that being is eternal. Particular beings can be traced to contingent causes, but ultimately the origin of being can be understood only in terms of a process of “selftransformation.” Chinese sources often contrast Wang Pi’s “valuing non-being” (kuei-wu) with Kuo Hsiang’s “exaltation of being” (ch’ung-yu). In ethics and politics, Wang stresses that the tao is manifest in nature as constant principles (li). This is what the classics mean by tzu-jan, naturalness or literally what is of itself so. The hierarchical structure of sociopolitical relations also has a basis in the order of nature. While Wang emphasizes unity, Kuo Hsiang chpions diversity. The principle of nature dictates that everyone has a particular “share” of vital energy, the creative power of the tao that determines one’s physical, intellectual, and moral capacity. Individual differences ought to be accepted, but do not warrant value discrimination. Each individual is in principle complete in his/her own way, and constitutes an indispensable part in a larger whole. Taoist ethics thus consists in being true to oneself, and nourishing one’s nature. In government, naturalness finds expression in non-action (wu-wei), which may be contrasted with Legalist policies emphasizing punishment and control. For Wang Pi, wu-wei aims at preserving the natural order so that the myriad things can flourish. Practically, it involves the elimination of willful intervention and a return to “emptiness and quiescence”; i.e., freedom from the dictates of desire and a life of guileless simplicity. Not to be confused with total inaction, according to Kuo Hsiang, wu-weisignifies a mode of being that fully uses one’s natural endowment. When one is guided by inherent moral principles, there is no place for artificiality or self-deception in the Taoist way of life. Ethical purity does not entail renunciation. Though the sage finds himself along the corridors of power, he safeguards his nature and remains empty of desire. In government, the sage ruler naturally reduces arbitrary restrictions, adjusts policies to suit changing needs, identifies the right people for office, and generally creates an environment in which all under heaven can dwell in peace and realize their potential. Ho Yen died a victim of political intrigue, at the close of the Cheng-shih reign period (240–49) of the Wei dynasty. Wang Pi died later in the se year. Historians refer to “Cheng-shih hsüanhsüeh” to mark the first phase of Neo-Taoism. Later, political power was controlled by the Ssuma fily, who eventually founded the Chin dynasty in A.D. 265. During the Wei–Chin transition, a group of intellectuals, the “Seven Worthies of the Bboo Grove,” ce to represent the voice of Profound Learning. ong them, Hsi K’ang (223–62), Juan Chi (210–63), and Hsiang Hsiu (c.227–80) are of particular interest to philosophy. In different ways, they look to naturalness as a basis for renewal. Debates in Profound Learning often revolve around the relationship between “orthodox teachings” (ming-chiao) and tzu-jan. For Wang Pi and Kuo Hsiang, government and society should ideally conform to nature. Both Hsi K’ang and Juan Chi found ming-chiao impinging on naturalness. This also gave impetus to the development of a counterculture. Central to this is the place of emotion in the ethical life. Ho Yen is credited with the view that sages are without emotions (ch’ing), whose exceptional ch’i-endowment translates into a purity of being that excludes emotional disturbance. Hsi K’ang also values dispassion, and Hsiang Hsiu urges putting passion under the rule of ritual; but many appreciated strong emotion as a sign of authenticity, which often contravened orthodox teachings. As Pure Conversation gained currency, it bece fashionable to give free rein to one’s impulses; and many hoped to establish a reputation by opposing orthodoxy. The debate on naturalness raises the further question of talent or capacity (ts’ai) and its relationship to human nature (hsing). In Profound Learning, four distinct positions have been proposed: that talent and nature are identical (t’ung); different (i); harmonious (ho); and separate (li). This is important because the right talent must be identified to serve political ends. In the early fourth century, the Chin dynasty had to flee its capital and rebuild in south China. As the literati resettled, they looked back to the Neo-Taoism Neo-Taoism 607    607 time of Ho Yen and Wang Pi as the golden age of Profound Learning. Although Pure Conversation continued with undiminished vigor, it did not introduce many new ideas. As it entered its last phase, another Taoist work, the Lieh-tzu, ce to rival the “Three Profound Treatises.” Chang Chan (c.330–400) wrote an important commentary on the work, which not only recapitulated many of the ideas that spanned the spectrum of Neo-Taoist philosophy but also borrowed Buddhist ideas. From the fourth century onward, Buddhist masters frequently engaged in Pure Conversation and challenged hsüan-hsüeh scholars at their own ge. 

BUDDHISM, CHINESE LEGALISM, CHINESE PHILOSOPHY. A.K.L.C. Neo-Thomism, a philosophical-theological movement in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries manifesting a revival of interest in Aquinas. It was stimulated by Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879) calling for a renewed emphasis on the teaching of Thomistic principles to meet the intellectual and social challenges of modernity. The movement reached its peak in the 1950s, though its influence continues to be seen in organizations such as the erican Catholic Philosophical Association. ong its major figures are Joseph Kleutgen, Désiré Mercier, Joseph Maréchal, Pierre Rousselot, Réginald Garrigou-LaGrange, Martin Grabmann, M.-D. Chenu, Jacques Maritain, Étienne Gilson, Yves R. Simon, Josef Pieper, Karl Rahner, Cornelio Fabro, Emerich Coreth, Bernard Lonergan, and W. Norris Clarke. Few, if any, of these figures have described themselves as NeoThomists; some explicitly rejected the designation. Neo-Thomists have little in common except their commitment to Aquinas and his relevance to the contemporary world. Their interest produced a more historically accurate understanding of Aquinas and his contribution to medieval thought (Grabmann, Gilson, Chenu), including a previously ignored use of the Platonic metaphysics of participation (Fabro). This richer understanding of Aquinas, as forging a creative synthesis in the midst of competing traditions, has made arguing for his relevance easier. Those Neo-Thomists who were suspicious of modernity produced fresh readings of Aquinas’s texts applied to contemporary problems (Pieper, Gilson). Their influence can be seen in the revival of virtue theory and the work of Alasdair MacIntyre. Others sought to develop Aquinas’s thought with the aid of later Thomists (Maritain, Simon) and incorporated the interpretations of Counter-Reformation Thomists, such as Cajetan and Jean Poinsot, to produce more sophisticated, and controversial, accounts of the intelligence, intentionality, semiotics, and practical knowledge. Those Neo-Thomists willing to engage modern thought on its own terms interpreted modern philosophy sympathetically using the principles of Aquinas (Maréchal, Lonergan, Clarke), seeking dialogue rather than confrontation. However, some readings of Aquinas are so thoroughly integrated into modern philosophy that they can seem assimilated (Rahner, Coreth); their highly individualized metaphysics inspired as much by other philosophical influences, especially Heidegger, as Aquinas. Some of the labels currently used ong Neo-Thomists suggest a division in the movement over critical, postKantian methodology. ‘Existential Thomism’ is used for those who emphasize both the real distinction between essence and existence and the role of the sensible in the mind’s first grasp of being. ‘Transcendental Thomism’ applies to figures like Maréchal, Rousselot, Rahner, and Coreth who rely upon the inherent dynism of the mind toward the real, rooted in Aquinas’s theory of the active intellect, from which to deduce their metaphysics of being.  AQUINAS, GILSON, MARITAIN, MERCIER, THOMISM. D.W.H. Neumann, John von.VON NEUMANN. neural net.CONNECTIONISM. neural network modeling.CONNECTIONISM. Neurath, Otto.VIENNA CIRCLE. neurophilosophy.CHURCHLAND, PATRICIA. neuroscience.COGNITIVE SCIENCE. neustic.

PRESCRIPTIVISM. neutrality.LIBERALISM. neutral monism.PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. New Academy, the ne given the Academy, the school founded by Plato in Athens, during the time it was controlled by Academic Skeptics after about 265 B.C. Its principal leaders in this period were Arcesilaus (315–242) and Carneades (219– 129); our most accessible source for the New Academy is Cicero’s Academica. A master of logical techniques such as sorites Neo-Thomism New Academy 608    608 (which he learned from Diodorus), Arcesilaus attempted to revive the dialectic of Plato, using it to achieve the suspension of belief he learned to value from Pyrrho. Later, and especially under the leadership of Carneades, the New Academy developed a special relationship with Stoicism: as the Stoics found new ways to defend their doctrine of the criterion, Carneades found new ways to refute it in the Stoics’ own terms. Carneades’ visit to Rome in 155 B.C. with a Stoic and a Peripatetic marks the beginning of Rome’s interest in Greek philosophy. His anti-Stoic arguments were recorded by his successor Clitomachus (d. c.110 B.C.), whose work is known to us through summaries in Cicero. Clitomachus was succeeded by Philo of Larisa (c.160–79 B.C.), who was the teacher of Antiochus of Ascalon (c.130–c.67 B.C.). Philo later attempted to reconcile the Old and the New Academy by softening the Skepticism of the New and by fostering a Skeptical reading of Plato. Angered by this, Antiochus broke away in about 87 B.C. to found what he called the Old Academy, which is now considered to be the beginning of Middle Platonism. Probably about the se time, Aenesidemus (dates unknown) revived the strict Skepticism of Pyrrho and founded the school that is known to us through the work of Sextus Empiricus. Academic Skepticism differed from Pyrrhonism in its sharp focus on Stoic positions, and possibly in allowing for a weak assent (as opposed to belief, which they suspended) in what is probable; and Pyrrhonians accused Academic Skeptics of being dogmatic in their rejection of the possibility of knowledge. The New Academy had a major influence on the development of modern philosophy, most conspicuously through Hume, who considered that his brand of mitigated skepticism belonged to this school.  ACADEMY, ISLIC NEOPLATONISM, SKEPTICS. P.Wo. Newcomb’s paradox, a conflict between two widely accepted principles of rational decision, arising in the following decision problem, known as Newcomb’s problem. Two boxes are before you. The first contains either $1,000,000 or nothing. The second contains $1,000. You may take the first box alone or both boxes. Someone with uncanny foresight has predicted your choice and fixed the content of the first box according to his prediction. If he has predicted that you will take only the first box, he has put $1,000,000 in that box; and if he has predicted that you will take both boxes, he has left the first box empty. The expected utility of an option is commonly obtained by multiplying the utility of its possible outcomes by their probabilities given the option, and then adding the products. Because the predictor is reliable, the probability that you receive $1,000,000 given that you take only the first box is high, whereas the probability that you receive $1,001,000 given that you take both boxes is low. Accordingly, the expected utility of taking only the first box is greater than the expected utility of taking both boxes. Therefore the principle of maximizing expected utility says to take only the first box. However, the principle of dominance says that if the states determining the outcomes of options are causally independent of the options, and there is one option that is better than the others in each state, then you should adopt it. Since your choice does not causally influence the contents of the first box, and since choosing both boxes yields $1,000 in addition to the contents of the first box whatever they are, the principle says to take both boxes. Newcomb’s paradox is ned after its formulator, Willi Newcomb. Nozick publicized it in “Newcomb’s Problem and Two Principles of Choice” (1969). Many theorists have responded to the paradox by changing the definition of the expected utility of an option so that it is sensitive to the causal influence of the option on the states that determine its outcome, but is insensitive to the evidential bearing of the option on those states. 

Newman, John Henry (1801–90), English prelate and philosopher of religion. As fellow at Oriel College, Oxford, he was a prominent member of the Anglican Oxford Movement. He bece a Roman Catholic in 1845, took holy orders in 1847, and was made a cardinal in 1879. His most important philosophical work is the Grmar of Assent (1870). Here Newman explored the difference between formal reasoning and the informal or natural movement of the mind in discerning the truth about the concrete and historical. Concrete reasoning in the mode of natural inference is implicit and unreflective; it deals not with general principles as such but with their employment in particular circumstances. Thus a scientist must judge whether the phenomenon he confronts is a novel significant datum, a coincidence, or merely an insignificant variation in the data. The acquired capacity to make judgments of Newcomb’s paradox Newman, John Henry 609    609 this sort Newman called the illative sense, an intellectual skill shaped by experience and personal insight and generally limited for individuals to particular fields of endeavor. The illative sense makes possible a judgment of certitude about the matter considered, even though the formal argument that partially outlines the process possesses only objective probability for the novice. Hence probability is not necessarily opposed to certitude. In becoming aware of its tacit dimension, Newman spoke of recognizing a mode of informal inference. He distinguished such reasoning, which, by virtue of the illative sense, culminates in a judgment of certitude about the way things are (real assent), from formal reasoning conditioned by the certainty or probability of the premises, which assents to the conclusion thus conditioned (notional assent). In real assent, the proposition functions to “image” the reality, to make its reality present. In the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845), Newman analyzed the ways in which some ideas unfold themselves only through historical development, within a tradition of inquiry. He sought to delineate the common pattern of such development in politics, science, philosophy, and religion. Although his focal interest was in how religious doctrines develop, he emphasizes the general character of such a pattern of progressive articulation. F.J.C. New Realism, an early twentieth-century revival, both in England and in the United States, of various forms of realism in reaction to the dominant idealisms inherited from the nineteenth century. In erica this revival took a cooperative form when six philosophers (Ralph Barton Perry, Edwin Holt, Willi Pepperell Montague, Walter Pitkin, Edward Spaulding, and Walter Marvin) published “A Progr and First Platform of Six Realists” (1910), followed two years later by the cooperative volume The New Realism, in which each authored an essay. This volume gave rise to the designation ‘New Realists’ for these six philosophers. Although they clearly disagreed on many particulars, they concurred on several matters of philosophical style and epistemological substance. Procedurally they endorsed a cooperative and piecemeal approach to philosophical problems, and they were constitutionally inclined to a closeness of analysis that would prepare the way for later philosophical tendencies. Substantively they agreed on several epistemological stances central to the refutation of idealism. ong the doctrines in the New Realist platform were the rejection of the fundental character of epistemology; the view that the entities investigated in logic, mathematics, and science are not “mental” in any ordinary sense; the view that the things known are not the products of the knowing relation nor in any fundental sense conditioned by their being known; and the view that the objects known are immediately and directly present to consciousness while being independent of that relation. New Realism was a version of direct realism, which viewed the notions of mediation and representation in knowledge as opening gbits on the slippery slope to idealism. Their refutation of idealism focused on pointing out the fallacy of moving from the truism that every object of knowledge is known to the claim that its being consists in its being known. That we are obviously at the center of what we know entails nothing about the nature of what we know. Perry dubbed this fact “the egocentric predicent,” and supplemented this observation with arguments to the effect that the objects of knowledge are in fact independent of the knowing relation. New Realism as a version of direct realism had as its primary conceptual obstacle “the facts of relativity,” i.e., error, illusion, perceptual variation, and valuation. Dealing with these phenomena without invoking “mental intermediaries” proved to be the stumbling block, and New Realism soon gave way to a second cooperative venture by another group of erican philosophers that ce to be known as Critical Realism. The term ‘new realism’ is also occasionally used with regard to those British philosophers (principal ong them Moore and Russell) similarly involved in refuting idealism. Although individually more significant than the erican group, theirs was not a cooperative effort, so the group term ce to have primarily an erican referent.  CRITICAL REALISM, IDEALISM, PERCEPTION. C.F.D. new riddle of induction.GRUE PARADOX. new theory of reference.

Newton, Sir Isaac (1642–1727), English physicist and mathematician, one of the greatest scientists of all time. Born in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, he attended Cbridge University, receiving the B.A. in 1665; he bece a fellow of Trinity in New Realism Newton, Sir Isaac 610    610 1667 and Lucasian Professor of Mathematics in 1669. He was elected fellow of the Royal Society in 1671 and served as its president from 1703 until his death. In 1696 he was appointed warden of the mint. In his later years he was involved in political and governmental affairs rather than in active scientific work. A sensitive, secretive person, he was prone to irascibility – most notably in a dispute with Leibniz over priority of invention of the calculus. His unparalleled scientific accomplishments overshadow a deep and sustained interest in ancient chronology, biblical study, theology, and alchemy. In his early twenties Newton’s genius asserted itself in an astonishing period of mathematical and experimental creativity. In the years 1664– 67, he discovered the binomial theorem; the “method of fluxions” (calculus); the principle of the composition of light; and fundentals of his theory of universal gravitation. Newton’s masterpiece, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (“The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy”), appeared in 1687. This work sets forth the mathematical laws of physics and “the system of the world.” Its exposition is modeled on Euclidean geometry: propositions are demonstrated mathematically from definitions and mathematical axioms. The world system consists of material bodies (masses composed of hard particles) at rest or in motion and interacting according to three axioms or laws of motion: (1) Every body continues in its state of rest or of uniform motion in a straight line unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it. (2) The change of motion is proportional to the motive force impressed and is made in the direction of the straight line in which that force is impressed. [Here, the impressed force equals mass times the rate of change of velocity, i.e., acceleration. Hence the filiar formula, F % ma.] (3) To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction; or, the mutual action of two bodies upon each other is always equal and directed to contrary parts. Newton’s general law of gravitation (in modern restatement) is: Every particle of matter attracts every other particle with a force varying directly as the product of their masses and inversely as the square of the distance between them. The statement of the laws of motion is preceded by an equally fous scholium in which Newton enunciates the ultimate conditions of his universal system: absolute time, space, place, and motion. He speaks of these as independently existing “quantities” according to which true measurements of bodies and motions can be made as distinct from relative “sensible measures” and apparent observations. Newton seems to have thought that his system of mathematical principles presupposed and is validated by the absolute frework. The scholium has been the subject of much critical discussion. The main problem concerns the justification of the absolute frework. Newton commends adherence to experimental observation and induction for advancing scientific knowledge, and he rejects speculative hypotheses. But absolute time and space are not observable. (In the scholium Newton did offer a renowned experiment using a rotating pail of water as evidence for distinguishing true and apparent motions and proof of absolute motion.) It has been remarked that conflicting strains of a rationalism (anticipating Kant) and empiricism (anticipating Hume) are present in Newton’s conception of science. Some of these issues are also evident in Newton’s Optics (1704, especially the fourth edition, 1730), which includes a series of suggestive “Queries” on the nature of light, gravity, matter, scientific method, and God. The triumphant reception given to Newton’s Principia in England and on the Continent led to idealization of the man and his work. Thus Alexander Pope’s fous epitaph: Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night; God said, “Let Newton be!” and all was light. The term ‘Newtonian’, then, denoted the view of nature as a universal system of mathematical reason and order divinely created and administered. The metaphor of a “universal machine” was frequently applied. The view is central in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, inspiring a religion of reason and the scientific study of society and the human mind. More narrowly, ‘Newtonian’ suggests a reduction of any subject matter to an ontology of individual particles and the laws and basic terms of mechanics: mass, length, and time.  FIELD THEORY, PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE, QUANTUM MECHANICS, SPACE, TIME. H.S.T. Newtonian.NEWTON. Newton, Sir Isaac Newtonian 611    611 Nicholas Kryfts.NICHOLAS OF CUSA. Nicholas of Autrecourt (c.1300–after 1350), French philosopher and theologian. Born in Autrecourt, he was educated at Paris and earned bachelor’s degrees in theology and law and a master’s degree in arts. After a list of propositions from his writings was condemned in 1346, he was sentenced to burn his works publicly and recant, which he did in Paris the following year. He was appointed dean of Metz cathedral in 1350. Nicholas’s ecclesiastical troubles arose partly from nine letters (two of which survive) which reduce to absurdity the view that appearances provide a sufficient basis for certain and evident knowledge. On the contrary, except for “certitude of the faith,” we can be certain only of what is equivalent or reducible to the principle of noncontradiction. He accepts as a consequence of this that we can never validly infer the existence of one distinct thing from another, including the existence of substances from qualities, or causes from effects. Indeed, he finds that “in the whole of his natural philosophy and metaphysics, Aristotle had such [evident] certainty of scarcely two conclusions, and perhaps not even of one.” Nicholas devotes another work, the Exigit ordo executionis (also known as The Universal Treatise), to an extended critique of Aristotelianism. It attacks what seemed to him the blind adherence given by his contemporaries to Aristotle and Averroes, showing that the opposite of many conclusions alleged to have been demonstrated by the Philosopher – e.g., on the divisibility of continua, the reality of motion, and the truth of appearances – are just as evident or apparent as those conclusions themselves. Because so few of his writings are extant, however, it is difficult to ascertain just what Nicholas’s own views were. Likewise, the reasons for his condemnation are not well understood, although recent studies have suggested that his troubles might have been due to a reaction to certain ideas that he appropriated from English theologians, such as Ad de Wodeh. Nicholas’s views elicited comment not only from church authorities, but also from other philosophers, including Buridan, Marsilius of Inghen, Albert of Saxony, and Nicholas of Oresme. Despite a few surface similarities, however, there is no evidence that his teachings on certainty or causality had any influence on modern philosophers, such as Descartes or Hume.  .

Nicholas of Cusa, also called Nicolaus Cusanus, Nicholas Kryfts (1401–64), German philosopher, an important Renaissance Platonist. Born in Kues on the Moselle, he earned a doctorate in canon law in 1423. He bece known for his De concordantia catholica, written at the Council of Basel in 1432, a work defending the conciliarist position against the pope. Later, he decided that only the pope could provide unity for the church in its negotiations with the East, and allied himself with the papacy. In 1437–38, returning from a papal legation to Constantinople, he had his fous insight into the coincidence of opposites (coincidentia oppositorum) in the infinite, upon which his On Learned Ignorance is based. His unceasing labor was chiefly responsible for the Vienna Concordat with the Eastern church in 1448. He was made cardinal in 1449 as a reward for his efforts, and bishop of Brixen (Bressanone) in 1450. He traveled widely in Germany as a papal legate (1450–52) before settling down in his see. Cusa’s central insight was that all oppositions are united in their infinite measure, so that what would be logical contradictions for finite things coexist without contradiction in God, who is the measure of (i.e., is the form or essence of) all things, and identical to them inasmuch as he is identical with their reality, quiddity, or essence. Considered as it is contracted to the individual, a thing is only an image of its measure, not a reality in itself. His position drew on mathematical models, arguing, for instance, that an infinite straight line tangent to a circle is the measure of the curved circumference, since a circle of infinite dieter, containing all the being possible in a circle, would coincide with the tangent. In general, the measure of a thing must contain all the possible being of that sort of thing, and so is infinite, or unlimited, in its being. Cusa attacked Aristotelians for their unwillingness to give up the principle of non-contradiction. His epistemology is a form of Platonic skepticism. Our knowledge is never of reality, the infinite measure of things that is their essence, but only of finite images of reality corresponding to the finite copies with which we must deal. These images are constructed by our own minds, and do not represent an immediate grasp of any reality. Their highest form is found in mathematics, and it is only through mathematics that reason can understand the world. In relation to the infinite real, these images and the contracted realities they enable us to know have only an infinitesimal reality. Our knowledge is only a mass of conjectures, i.e., assertions that are true insofar as Nicholas Kryfts Nicholas of Cusa 612    612 they capture some part of the truth, but never the whole truth, the infinite measure, as it really is in itself. Cusa was much read in the Renaissance, and is somethimes said to have had significant influence on German thought of the eighteenth century, in particular on Leibniz, and German idealism, but it is uncertain, despite the considerable intrinsic merit of his thought, if this is true.  

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm (1844–1900), German philosopher and cultural critic. Born in a small town in the Prussian province of Saxony, Nietzsche’s early education emphasized religion and classical languages and literature. After a year at the university at Bonn he transferred to Leipzig, where he pursued classical studies. There he happened upon Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, which profoundly influenced his subsequent concerns and early philosophical thinking. It was as a classical philologist, however, that he was appointed professor at the Swiss university at Basel, before he had even received his doctorate, at the astonishingly early age of twenty-four. A mere twenty years of productive life remained to him, ending with a mental and physical collapse in January 1889, from which he never recovered. He held his position at Basel for a decade, resigning in 1879 owing to the deterioration of his health from illnesses he had contracted in 1870 as a volunteer medical orderly in the Franco-Prussian war. At Basel he lectured on a variety of subjects chiefly relating to classical studies, including Greek and Roman philosophy as well as literature. During his early years there he also bece intensely involved with the composer Richard Wagner; and his fascination with Wagner was reflected in several of his early works – most notably his first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), and his subsequent essay Richard Wagner in Bayreuth (1876). His later break with Wagner, culminating in his polemic The Case of Wagner(1888), was both profound and painful to him. While at first regarding Wagner as a creative genius showing the way to a cultural and spiritual renewal, Nietzsche ce to see him and his art as epitomizing and exacerbating the fundental problem with which he bece increasingly concerned. This problem was the pervasive intellectual and cultural crisis Nietzsche later characterized in terms of the “death of God” and the advent of “nihilism.” Traditional religious and metaphysical ways of thinking were on the wane, leaving a void that modern science could not fill, and endangering the health of civilization. The discovery of some life-affirming alternative to Schopenhauer’s radically pessimistic response to this disillusionment bece Nietzsche’s primary concern. In The Birth of Tragedy he looked to the Greeks for clues and to Wagner for inspiration, believing that their art held the key to renewed human flourishing for a humanity bereft both of the consolations of religious faith and of confidence in reason and science as substitutes for it. In his subsequent series of Untimely Meditations (1873–76) he expanded upon his theme of the need to reorient human thought and endeavor to this end, and criticized a variety of tendencies detrimental to it that he discerned ong his contemporaries. Both the deterioration of Nietzsche’s health and the shift of his interest away from his original discipline prevented retention of his position at Basel. In the first years after his retirement, he completed his transition from philologist to philosopher and published the several parts of Human, All-Too-Human (1878–90), Daybreak (1881), and the first four parts of The Gay Science (1882). These aphoristic writings sharpened and extended his analytical and critical assessment of various human tendencies and social, cultural, and intellectual phenomena. During this period his thinking bece much more sophisticated; and he developed the philosophical styles and concerns that found mature expression in the writings of the final years of his brief active life, following the publication of the four parts of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–85). These last remarkably productive years saw the appearance of Beyond Good and Evil (1886), a fifth part of The Gay Science, On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), The Case of Wagner (1888), and a series of prefaces to his earlier works (1886–87), as well as the completion of several books published after his collapse – Twilight of the Idols (1889), The Antichrist (1895), and Ecce Homo (1908). He was also assing a great deal of material in notebooks, of which a selection was later published under the title The Will to Power. (The status and significance of this mass of Nachlass material are matters of continuing controversy.) In the early 1880s, when he wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche arrived at a conception of human life and possibility – and with it, of value and meaning – that he believed could overcome the Schopenhauerian pessimism and nihilism that he saw as outcomes of the collapse of traditional modes of religious and philosophical interNietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm 613    613 pretation. He prophesied a period of nihilism in the aftermath of their decline and fall; but this prospect deeply distressed him. He was convinced of the untenability of the “God hypothesis,” and indeed of all religious and metaphysical interpretations of the world and ourselves; and yet he was well aware that the very possibility of the affirmation of life was at stake, and required more than the mere abandonment of all such “lies” and “fictions.” He took the basic challenge of philosophy now to be to reinterpret life and the world along more tenable lines that would also overcome nihilism. What Nietzsche called “the death of God” was both a cultural event – the waning and impending demise of the “Christian-moral” interpretation of life and the world – and also a philosophical development: the abandonment of anything like the God-hypothesis (all demidivine absolutes included). As a cultural event it was a phenomenon to be reckoned with, and a source of profound concern; for he feared a “nihilistic rebound” in its wake, and worried about the consequences for human life and culture if no countermovement to it were forthcoming. As a philosophical development, on the other hand, it was his point of departure, which he took to call for a radical reconsideration of everything from life and the world and human existence and knowledge to value and morality. The “de-deification of nature,” the “translation of man back into nature,” the “revaluation of values,” the tracing of the “genealogy of morals” and their critique, and the elaboration of “naturalistic” accounts of knowledge, value, morality, and our entire “spiritual” nature thus ce to be his main tasks. His published and unpublished writings contain a wealth of remarks, observations, and suggestions contributing importantly to them. It is a matter of controversy, even ong those with a high regard for Nietzsche, whether he tried to work out positions on issues bearing any resemblance to those occupying other philosophers before and after him in the mainstre of the history of philosophy. He was harshly critical of most of his predecessors and contemporaries; and he broke fundentally with them and their basic ideas and procedures. His own writings, moreover, bear little resemblance to those of most other philosophers. Those he himself published (as well as his reflections in his notebooks) do not systematically set out and develop views. Rather, they consist for the most part in collections of short paragraphs and sets of aphorisms, often only loosely if at all connected. Many deal with philosophical topics, but in very unconventional ways; and because his remarks about these topics are scattered through many different works, they are all too easily taken in isolation and misunderstood. On some topics, moreover, much of what he wrote is found only in his very rough notebooks, which he filled with thoughts without indicating the extent of his reflected commitment to them. His language, furthermore, is by turns coolly analytical, heatedly polemical, sharply critical, and highly metaphorical; and he seldom indicates clearly the scope of his claims and what he means by his terms. It is not surprising, therefore, that many philosophers have found it difficult to know what to make of him and to take him seriously – and that some have taken him to repudiate altogether the traditional philosophical enterprise of seeking reasoned conclusions with respect to questions of the kind with which philosophers have long been concerned, heralding the “death” not only of religious and metaphysical thinking, but also of philosophy itself. Others read him very differently, as having sought to effect a fundental reorientation of philosophical thinking, and to indicate by both precept and exple how philosophical inquiry might better be pursued. Those who regard Nietzsche in the former way take his criticisms of his philosophical predecessors and contemporaries to apply to any attempt to address such matters. They seize upon and construe some of his more sweeping negative pronouncements on truth and knowledge as indicating that he believed we can only produce fictions and merely expedient (or possibly creative) perspectival expressions of our needs and desires, as groups or as individuals. They thus take him as a radical nihilist, concerned to subvert the entire philosophical enterprise and replace it with a kind of thinking more akin to the literary exploration of human possibilities in the service of life – a kind of artistic play liberated from concern with truth and knowledge. Those who view him in the latter way, on the other hand, take seriously his concern to find a way of overcoming the nihilism he believed to result from traditional ways of thinking; his retention of recast notions of truth and knowledge; and his evident concern – especially in his later writings – to contribute to the comprehension of a broad range of phenomena. This way of understanding him, like the former, remains controversial; but it permits an interpretation of his writings that is philosophically more fruitful. Nietzsche indisputably insisted upon the inter pretive character of all human thought; and he called for “new philosophers” who would follow him in engaging in more self-conscious and intellectually responsible attempts to assess and improve upon prevailing interpretations of human life. He also was deeply concerned with how these matters might better be evaluated, and with the values by which human beings live and might better do so. Thus he made much of the need for a revaluation of all received values, and for attention to the problems of the nature, status, and standards of value and evaluation. One form of inquiry he took to be of great utility in connection with both of these tasks is genealogical inquiry into the conditions under which various modes of interpretation and evaluation have arisen. It is only one of the kinds of inquiry he considered necessary in both cases, however, serving merely to prepare for others that must be brought to bear before any conclusions are warranted. Nietzsche further emphasized the perspectival character of all thinking and the merely provisional character of all knowing, rejecting the idea of the very possibility of absolute knowledge transcending all perspectives. However, because he also rejected the idea that things (and values) have absolute existence “in themselves” apart from the relations in which he supposes their reality to consist, he held that, if viewed in the multiplicity of perspectives from which various of these relations come to light, they admit of a significant measure of comprehension. This perspectivism thus does not exclude the possibility of any sort of knowledge deserving of the ne, but rather indicates how it is to be conceived and achieved. His kind of philosophy, which he characterizes as fröhliche Wissenschaft (cheerful science), proceeds by way of a variety of such “perspectival” approaches to the various matters with which he deals. Thus for Nietzsche there is no “truth” in the sense of the correspondence of anything we might think or say to “being,” and indeed no “true world of being” to which it may even be imagined to fail to correspond; no “knowledge” conceived in terms of any such truth and reality; and, further, no knowledge at all – even of ourselves and the world of which we are a part – that is absolute, non-perspectival, and certain. But that is not the end of the matter. There are, e.g., ways of thinking that may be more or less well warranted in relation to differing sorts of interest and practice, not only within the context of social life but also in our dealings with our environing world. Nietzsche’s reflections on the reconceptualization of truth and knowledge thus point in the direction of a naturalistic epistemology that he would have replace the conceptions of truth and knowledge of his predecessors, and fill the nihilistic void seemingly left by their bankruptcy. There is, moreover, a good deal about ourselves and our world that he bece convinced we can comprehend. Our comprehension may be restricted to what life and the world show themselves to be and involve in our experience; but if they are the only kind of reality, there is no longer any reason to divorce the notions of truth, knowledge, and value from them. The question then becomes how best to interpret and assess what we find as we proceed to explore them. It is to these tasks of interpretation and “revaluation” that Nietzsche devoted his main efforts in his later writings. In speaking of the death of God, Nietzsche had in mind not only the abandonment of the Godhypothesis (which he considered to be utterly “unworthy of belief,” owing its invention and appeal entirely to naïveté, error, all-too-human need, and ulterior motivation), but also the demise of all metaphysical substitutes for it. He likewise criticized and rejected the related postulations of substantial “souls” and self-contained “things,” taking both notions to be ontological fictions merely reflecting our artificial (though convenient) linguistic-conceptual shorthand for functionally unitary products, processes, and sets of relations. In place of this cluster of traditional ontological categories and interpretations, he conceived the world in terms of an interplay of forces without any inherent structure or final end. It ceaselessly organizes and reorganizes itself, as the fundental disposition he called will to power gives rise to successive arrays of power relationships. “This world is the will to power – and nothing besides,” he wrote; “and you yourselves are also this will to power – and nothing besides!” Nietzsche’s idea of the eternal return (or eternal recurrence) underscores this conception of a world without beginning or end, in which things happen repeatedly in the way they always have. He first introduced this idea as a test of one’s ability to affirm one’s own life and the general character of life in this world as they are, without reservation, qualification, or appeal to anything transcending them. He later entertained the thought that all events might actually recur eternally in exactly the se sequence, and experimented in his unpublished writings with arguments to this effect. For the most part, however, he restricted himself to less problematic    615 Neitzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm 616 uses of the idea that do not presuppose its literal truth in this radical form. His rhetorical embellishments and experimental elaborations of the idea may have been intended to make it more vivid and compelling; but he employed it chiefly to depict his conception of the radically non-linear character of events in this world and their fundental homogeneity, and to provide a way of testing our ability to live with it. If we are sufficiently strong and well disposed to life to affirm it even on the supposition that it will only be the se sequence of events repeated eternally, we have what it takes to endure and flourish in the kind of world in which Nietzsche believed we find ourselves in the aftermath of disillusionment. Nietzsche construed human nature and existence naturalistically, in terms of the will to power and its rifications in the establishment and expression of the kinds of complex systems of dynic quanta in which human beings consist. “The soul is only a word for something about the body,” he has Zarathustra say; and the body is fundentally a configuration of natural forces and processes. At the se time, he insisted on the importance of social arrangements and interactions in the development of human forms of awareness and activity. He also emphasized the possibility of the emergence of exceptional human beings capable of an independence and creativity elevating them above the level of the general human rule. So he stressed the difference between “higher men” and “the herd,” and through Zarathustra proclaimed the Übermensch (‘overman’ or ‘superman’) to be “the meaning of the earth,” employing this image to convey the ideal of the overcoming of the “all-too-human” and the fullest possible creative “enhancement of life.” Far from seeking to diminish our humanity by stressing our animality, he sought to direct our efforts to the emergence of a “higher humanity” capable of endowing existence with a human redemption and justification, above all through the enrichment of cultural life. Notwithstanding his frequent characterization as a nihilist, therefore, Nietzsche in fact sought to counter and overcome the nihilism he expected to prevail in the aftermath of the collapse and abandonment of traditional religious and metaphysical modes of interpretation and evaluation. While he was highly critical of the latter, it was not his intention merely to oppose them; for he further attempted to make out the possibility of forms of truth and knowledge to which philosophical interpreters of life and the world might aspire, and espoused a “Dionysian value-standard” in place of all non-naturalistic modes of valuation. In keeping with his interpretation of life and the world in terms of his conception of will to power, Nietzsche fred this standard in terms of his interpretation of them. The only tenable alternative to nihilism must be based upon a recognition and affirmation of the world’s fundental character. This meant positing as a general standard of value the attainment of a kind of life in which the will to power as the creative transformation of existence is raised to its highest possible intensity and qualitative expression. This in turn led him to take the “enhancement of life” and creativity to be the guiding ideas of his revaluation of values and development of a naturalistic value theory. This way of thinking carried over into Nietzsche’s thinking about morality. Insisting that moralities as well as other traditional modes of valuation ought to be assessed “in the perspective of life,” he argued that most of them were contrary to the enhancement of life, reflecting the all-too-human needs and weaknesses and fears of less favored human groups and types. Distinguishing between “master” and “slave” moralities, he found the latter to have become the dominant type of morality in the modern world. He regarded present-day morality as a “herd-animal morality,” well suited to the requirements and vulnerabilities of the mediocre who are the human rule, but stultifying and detrimental to the development of potential exceptions to that rule. Accordingly, he drew attention to the origins and functions of this type of morality (as a social-control mechanism and device by which the weak defend and avenge and assert themselves against the actually or potentially stronger). He further suggested the desirability of a “higher morality” for the exceptions, in which the contrast of the basic “slave/herd morality” categories of “good and evil” would be replaced by categories more akin to the “good and bad” contrast characteristic of “master morality,” with a revised (and variable) content better attuned to the conditions and attainable qualities of the enhanced forms of life such exceptional human beings can achieve. The strongly creative flavor of Nietzsche’s notions of such a “higher humanity” and associated “higher morality” reflects his linkage of both to his conception of art, to which he attached great importance. Art, for Nietzsche, is fundentally creative (rather than cognitive), serving to prepare for the emergence of a sensi   616 bility and manner of life reflecting the highest potentiality of human beings. Art, as the creative transformation of the world as we find it (and of ourselves thereby) on a small scale and in particular media, affords a glimpse of a kind of life that would be lived more fully in this manner, and constitutes a step toward emergence. In this way, Nietzsche’s mature thought thus expands upon the idea of the basic connection between art and the justification of life that was his general theme in his first major work, The Birth of Tragedy. 

EXISTENTIALISM, HEGEL, KANT, SCHOPENHAUER. R.Sc. Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu (Latin, ‘Nothing is in the understanding that had not previously been in the senses’), a principal tenet of empiricism. A weak interpretation of the principle maintains that all concepts are acquired from sensory experience; no concepts are innate or a priori. A stronger interpretation adds that all propositional knowledge is derived from sense experience. The weak interpretation was held by Aquinas and Locke, who thought nevertheless that we can know some propositions to be true in virtue of the relations between the concepts involved. The stronger interpretation was endorsed by J. S. Mill, who argued that even the truths of mathematics are inductively based on experience.  EMPIRICISM. W.E.M. Nihil ex nihilo fit (Latin, ‘Nothing arises from nothing’), an intuitive metaphysical principle first enunciated in the West by Parmenides, often held equivalent to the proposition that nothing arises without a cause. Creation ex nihilo is God’s production of the world without any natural or material cause, but involves a supernatural cause, and so it would not violate the principle. J.Lo. nihilism, ethical.RELATIVISM. nihilism, philosophical.NIETZSCHE, RUSSIAN NIHILISM. nihilism, Russian.RUSSIAN NIHILISM. nihilism, semantic.SEMANTIC HOLISM. nirodha-sapatti, also known as sjnavedayita-nirodha (Sanskrit, ‘attainment of cessation’), a term used by Indian Buddhists to denote a state produced by meditation in which no mental events of any kind occur. What ceases in nirodha-sapatti is all the operations of the mind; all that remains is the mindless body. Some Buddhists took this state to have salvific significance, and so likened it to Nirvana. But its principal philosophical interest lies in the puzzle it produced for Buddhist theorists: What causal account can be given that will make sense of the reemergence of mental events from a continuum in which none exist, given the pan-Buddhist assumption that all existents are momentary? P.J.G. NN thesis.NECESSITY. noema.HUSSERL, NOETIC. noemata moralia.MORE, THOMAS. noematic analysis.HUSSERL. noesis.DIVIDED LINE, HUSSERL. noetic (from Greek noetikos, from noetos, ‘perceiving’), of or relating to apprehension by the intellect. In a strict sense the term refers to nonsensuous data given to the cognitive faculty, which discloses their intelligible meaning as distinguished from their sensible apprehension. We hear a sentence spoken, but it becomes intelligible for us only when the sounds function as a foundation for noetic apprehension. For Plato, the objects of such apprehension (noetá) are the Forms (eide) with respect to which the sensible phenomena are only occasions of manifestation: the Forms in themselves transcend the sensible and have their being in a realm apart. For empiricist thinkers, e.g., Locke, there is strictly speaking no distinct noetic aspect, since “ideas” are only faint sense impressions. In a looser sense, however, one may speak of ideas as independent of reference to particular sense impressions, i.e. independent of their origin, and then an idea can be taken to signify a class of objects. Husserl uses the term to describe the intentionality or dyadic character of consciousness in general, i.e. including both eidetic or categorial and perceptual knowing. He speaks of the correlation of noesis or intending and noema or the intended object of awareness. The categorial or eidetic is the perceptual object as intellectually cognized; it is not a realm apart, but rather what is disclosed or made present (“constituted”) Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu noetic 617    617 when the mode of appearance of the perceptual object is intended by a categorial noesis.  HUSSERL, NOÛS. F.J.C. noetic analysis.HUSSERL. noise.INFORMATION THEORY. nomic.LAWLIKE GENERALIZATION. nomic necessity.LAWLIKE GENERALIZATION. nominal definition.DEFINITION. nominal essence.ESSENTIALISM. nominalism.METAPHYSICAL REALISM, PROPERTY. nominalization.STATE OF AFFAIRS. nominatum.OBLIQUE CONTEXT. nomological.LAWLIKE

GENERALIZATION. nomothetic.WINDELBAND. non-action.WU WEI. non causa pro causa.INFORMAL FALLACY. noncognitivism.EMOTIVISM, ETHICS. non-contradiction, principle of.PRINCIPLE OF CONTRADICTION. non-duplication principle.PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. non-embodiment.DISEMBODIMENT. non-epistemic.PERCEPTION. non-Euclidean geometry, those axiomatized versions of geometry in which the parallel axiom of Euclidean geometry is rejected, after so many unsuccessful attempts to prove it. As in so many branches of mathematics, C. F. Gauss had thought out much of the matter first, but he kept most of his ideas to himself. As a result, credit is given to J. Bolyai and N. Lobachevsky, who worked independently from the late 1820s. Instead of assuming that just one line passes through a point in a plane parallel to a non-coincident coplanar line, they offered a geometry in which a line admits more than one parallel, and the sum of the “angles” between the “sides” of a “triangle” lies below 180°. Then in mid-century G. F. B. Riemann conceived of a geometry in which lines always meet (so no parallels), and the sum of the “angles” exceeds 180°. In this connection he distinguished between the unboundedness of space as a property of its extent, and the special case of the infinite measure over which distance might be taken (which is dependent upon the curvature of that space). Pursuing the (published) insight of Gauss, that the curvature of a surface could be defined in terms only of properties dependent solely on the surface itself (and later called “intrinsic”), Riemann also defined the metric on a surface in a very general and intrinsic way, in terms of the differential arc length. Thereby he clarified the ideas of “distance” that his non-Euclidean precursors had introduced (drawing on trigonometric and hyperbolic functions); arc length was now understood geodesically as the shortest “distance” between two “points” on a surface, and was specified independent of any assumptions of a geometry within which the surface was embedded. Further properties, such as that pertaining to the “volume” of a three-“dimensional” solid, were also studied. The two main types of non-Euclidean geometry, and its Euclidean parent, may be summarized as follows: Reaction to these geometries was slow to develop, but their impact gradually emerged. As mathematics, their legitimacy was doubted; but in 1868 E. Beltri produced a model of a Bolyai-type two-dimensional space inside a planar circle. The importance of this model was to show that the consistency of this geometry depended upon that of the Euclidean version, thereby dispelling the fear that it was an inconsistent flash of the imagination. During the last thirty years of the nineteenth century a variety of variant geometries were proposed, and the relationships between them were studied, together with consequences for projective geometry. On the empirical side, these geometries, and especially Riemann’s approach, affected the understanding of the relationship between geometry and space; in particular, it posed the question whether space is curved or not (the latnoetic analysis non-Euclidean geometry 618    618 non-monotonic logic nonviolence 619 ter being the Euclidean answer). The geometries thus played a role in the emergence and articulation of relativity theory, especially the differential geometry and tensorial calculus within which its mathematical properties could be expressed. Philosophically the new geometries stressed the hypothetical nature of axiomatizing, in contrast to the customary view of mathematical theories as true in some (usually) unclear sense. This feature led to the ne ‘metageometry’ for them; it was intended (as an ironical proposal of opponents) to be in line with the hypothetical character of metaphysics in philosophy. They also helped to encourage conventionalist philosophy of science (with Poincaré, e.g.), and put fresh light on the age-old question of the (im)possibility of a priori knowledge.  EUCLIDEAN GEOMETRY, PHILOSOPHY OF MATHEMATICS. I.G.-G. non-monotonic logic, a logic that fails to be monotonic, i.e., in proof-theoretic terms, fails to meet the condition that for all statements u1, . . . un,f,y, if ‘u1, . . . un Yf’, then, for any y, ‘u1 , . . . un, y Y f’. (Equivalently, let Γ represent a collection of statements, u1 . . . un, and say that in monotonic logic, if ‘Γ Y f’, then, for any y, ‘Γ, y Y f’ and similarly in other cases.) A non-monotonic logic is any logic with the following property: For some Γ, f, and y, ‘ΓNML f’ but ‘Γ, y K!NML f’. This is a weak non-monotonic logic. In a strong non-monotonic logic, we might have, again for some Γ, f, y, where Γ is consistent and Γ 8 f is consistent: ‘Γ, y YNML > f’. A primary motivation (ong AI researchers) for non-monotonic logic or defeasible reasoning, which is so evident in commonsense reasoning, is to produce a machine representation for default reasoning or defeasible reasoning. The interest in defeasible reasoning readily spreads to epistemology, logic, and ethics. The exigencies of practical affairs requires leaping to conclusions, going beyond available evidence, making assumptions. In doing so, we often err and must leap back from our conclusions, undo our assumptions, revise our beliefs. In the literature’s standard exple, Tweety is a bird and all birds fly, except penguins and ostriches. Does Tweety fly? If pressed, we may need to form a belief about this matter. Upon discovering that Tweety is a penguin, we may have to retract our conclusion. Any representation of defeasible reasoning must capture the nonmonotonicity of this reasoning. Non-monotonic logic is an attempt to do this within logic itself – by adding rules of inference that do not preserve monotonicity. Although practical affairs require us to reason defeasibly, the best way to achieve non-monotonicity may not be to add non-monotonic rules of inference to standard logic. What one gives up in such systems may well not be worth the cost: loss of the deduction theorem and of a coherent notion of consistency. Therefore, the challenge of non-monotonic logic (or defeasible reasoning, generally) is to develop a rigorous way to represent the structure of non-monotonic reasoning without losing or abandoning the historically hard-won properties of monotonic (standard) logic.  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, DEFAULT LOGIC, DEFEASIBILITY. F.A. non-natural properties.MOORE. non-predicative property.

TYPE THEORY. non-propositional knowledge.EPISTEMOLOGY. non-reductive materialism.PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. non-reductive physicalism.KIM. non-reflexive.RELATION. non-standard analysis.MATHEMATICAL ANALYSIS. non-standard interpretation.FORMAL SEMANTICS. non-standard model.STANDARD MODEL. non-standard semantics.SECOND-ORDER LOGIC. non-symmetric.RELATION. non-transitive.RELATION. nonviolence, the renunciation of violence in personal, social, or international affairs. It often includes a commitment (called active nonviolence or nonviolent direct action) actively to oppose violence (and usually evil or injustice as well) by nonviolent means. Nonviolence may renounce physical violence alone or both physical and psychological violence. It may represent a purely personal commitment or be intended to be normative for others as well. When unconditional – absolute    619 norm normative relativism 620 nonviolence – it renounces violence in all actual and hypothetical circumstances. When conditional – conditional nonviolence – it concedes the justifiability of violence in hypothetical circumstances but denies it in practice. Held on moral grounds (principled nonviolence), the commitment belongs to an ethics of conduct or an ethics of virtue. If the former, it will likely be expressed as a moral rule or principle (e.g., One ought always to act nonviolently) to guide action. If the latter, it will urge cultivating the traits and dispositions of a nonviolent character (which presumably then will be expressed in nonviolent action). As a principle, nonviolence may be considered either basic or derivative. Either way, its justification will be either utilitarian or deontological. Held on non-moral grounds (pragmatic nonviolence), nonviolence is a means to specific social, political, economic, or other ends, themselves held on non-moral grounds. Its justification lies in its effectiveness for these limited purposes rather than as a way of life or a guide to conduct in general. An alternative source of power, it may then be used in the service of evil as well as good. Nonviolent social action, whether of a principled or pragmatic sort, may include noncooperation, mass demonstrations, marches, strikes, boycotts, and civil disobedience – techniques explored extensively in the writings of Gene Sharp. Undertaken in defense of an entire nation or state, nonviolence provides an alternative to war. It seeks to deny an invading or occupying force the capacity to attain its objectives by withholding the cooperation of the populace needed for effective rule and by nonviolent direct action, including civil disobedience. It may also be used against oppressive domestic rule or on behalf of social justice. Gandhi’s cpaign against British rule in India, Scandinavian resistance to Nazi occupation during World War II, and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s actions on behalf of civil rights in the United States are illustrative. Nonviolence has origins in Far Eastern thought, particularly Taoism and Jainism. It has strands in the Jewish Talmud, and many find it implied by the New Testent’s Sermon on the Mount.  CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE, GANDHI, PACIFISM. R.L.H. norm.BASIC NORM. normal form, a formula equivalent to a given logical formula, but having special properties. The main varieties follow. Conjunctive normal form. If D1 . . . Dn are disjunctions of sentential variables or their negations, such as (p 7 -q 7 r), then a formula F is in conjunctive normal form provided F % D1 & D2 & . . & Dn. The following are in conjunctive normal form: (-p 7 q); (p 7 q 7 r) & (-p 7 -q 7 -r) & (-q 7 r). Every formula of sentential logic has an equivalent conjunctive normal form; this fact can be used to prove the completeness of sentential logic. Disjunctive normal form. If C1 . . . Cn are conjunctions of sentential variables or their negations, such as p & -q & -r, then a formula F is in disjunctive normal form provided F % C1 7 C27 . . Cn. The following are thus in disjunctive normal form: (p & -q) 7 (-p & q); (p & q & -r) 7 (-p & -q & -r). Every formula of sentential logic has an equivalent disjunctive normal form. Prenex normal form. A formula of predicate logic is in prenex normal form if (1) all quantifiers occur at the beginning of the formula, (2) the scope of the quantifiers extends to the end of the formula, and (3) what follows the quantifiers contains at least one occurrence of every variable that appears in the set of quantifiers. Thus, (Dx)(Dy)(Fx / Gy) and (x)(Dy)(z)((Fxy 7 Gyz) / Dxyz) are in prenex normal form. The formula may contain free variables; thus, (Dx)(y) (Fxyz / Gwyx) is also in prenex normal form. The following, however, are not in prenex normal form: (x)(Dy) (Fx / Gx); (x)(y) Fxy / Gxy. Every formula of predicate logic has an equivalent formula in prenex normal form. Skolem normal form. A formula F in predicate logic is in Skolem normal form provided (1) F is in prenex normal form, (2) every existential quantifier precedes any universal quantifier, (3) F contains at least one existential quantifier, and (4) F contains no free variables. Thus, (Dx)(Dy) (z)(Fxy / Gyz) and (Dx)(Dy)(Dz)(w)(Fxy 7 Fyz 7 Fzw) are in Skolem normal form; however, (Dx) (y) Fxyz and (x) (y) (Fxy 7 Gyx) are not. Any formula has an equivalent Skolem normal form; this has implications for the completeness of predicate logic.  COMPLETENESS. V.K. normative.DEFINIST. normative ethics.ETHICS. normative reason.REASONS FOR ACTION, REASONS FOR BELIEF. normative relativism.RELATIVISM.    620 notation, logical Nozick, Robert 621 notation, logical.LOGICAL NOTATION. notion.BERKELEY. notional assent.NEWMAN. notum per se (Latin, ‘known through itself’), self-evident. This term corresponds roughly to the term ‘analytic’. In Thomistic theology, there are two ways for a thing to be self-evident, secundum se (in itself) and quoad nos (to us). The proposition that God exists is self-evident in itself, because God’s existence is identical with his essence; but it is not self-evident to us (humans), because humans are not directly acquainted with God’s essence.Aquinas’s Summa theologiae I, q.2,a.1,c. 

noûs, Greek term for mind or the faculty of reason. Noûs is the highest type of thinking, the kind a god would do. Sometimes called the faculty of intellectual intuition, it is at work when someone understands definitions, concepts, and anything else that is grasped all at once. Noûs stands in contrast with another intellectual faculty, dianoia. When we work through the steps of an argument, we exercise dianoia; to be certain the conclusion is true without argument – to just “see” it, as, perhaps, a god might – is to exercise noûs. Just which objects could be apprehended by noûs was controversial. E.C.H. Novalis, pseudonym of Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772–1801), German poet and philosopher of early German Romanticism. His starting point was Fichte’s reflective type of transcendental philosophy; he attempted to complement Fichte’s focus on philosophical speculation by including other forms of intellectual experience such as faith, love, poetry, and religion, and exhibit their equally autonomous status of existence. Of special importance in this regard is his analysis of the imagination in contrast to reason, of the poetic power in distinction from the reasonable faculties. Novalis insists on a complementary interaction between these two spheres, on a union of philosophy and poetry. Another important aspect of his speculation concerns the relation between the inner and the outer world, subject and object, the human being and nature. Novalis attempted to reveal the correspondence, even unity between these two realms and to present the world as a “universal trope” or a “symbolic image” of the human mind and vice versa. He expressed his philosophical thought mostly in fragments.  FICHTE. E.Beh. Nozick, Robert (b.1938), erican philosopher currently at Harvard University, best known for Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), which defends the libertarian position that only a minimal state (limited to protecting rights) is just. Nozick argues that a minimal state, but not a more extensive state, could arise without violating rights. Drawing on Kant’s dictum that people may not be used as mere means, Nozick says that people’s rights are inviolable, no matter how useful violations might be to the state. He criticizes principles of redistributive justice on which theorists base defenses of extensive states, such as the principle of utility, and Rawls’s principle that goods should be distributed in favor of the least well-off. Enforcing these principles requires eliminating the cumulative effects of free exchanges, which violates (permanent, bequeathable) property rights. Nozick’s own entitlement theory says that a distribution of holdings is just if people under that distribution are entitled to what they hold. Entitlements, in turn, would be clarified using principles of justice in acquisition, transfer, and rectification. Nozick’s other works include Philosophical Explanations (1981), The Exined Life (1989), The Nature of Rationality (1993), and Socratic Puzzles (1997). These are contributions to rational choice theory, epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of religion, and ethics. Philosophical Explanations features two especially important contributions. The first is Nozick’s (reliabilist, causal) view that beliefs that constitute knowledge must track the truth. My belief that (say) a cat is on the mat tracks the truth only if (a) I would not believe this if a cat were not on the mat, and (b) I would believe this if a cat were there. The tracking account positions Nozick to reject the principle that people know all of the things they believe via deductions from things they know, and to reject versions of skepticism based on this principle of closure. The second is Nozick’s closest continuer theory of identity, according to which A’s identity at a later time can depend on facts about other existing things, for it depends on (1) what continues A closely enough to be A and (2) what    621 n-tuple Nussbaum, Martha C(raven) 622 continues A more closely than any other existing thing. Nozick’s 1969 essay “Newcomb’s Problem and Two Principles of Choice” is another important contribution. It is the first discussion of Newcomb’s problem, a problem in decision theory, and presents many positions prominent in subsequent debate. 

null class.SET THEORY. null relation.RELATION. number.MATHEMATICAL ANALYSIS, PHILOSOPHY OF MATHEMATICS, QUALITIES. number, natural.MATHEMATICAL ANALYSIS, MATHEMATICAL INDUCTION. number, rational.MATHEMATICAL ANALYSIS. number, real.MATHEMATICAL ANALYSIS. number, transcendental.MATHEMATICAL ANALYSIS. numbers, law of large.BERNOULLI’s THEOREM. number theory.PHILOSOPHY OF MATHEMATICS. Numenius of Apea (fl. mid-second century A.D.), Greek Platonist philosopher of neoPythagorean tendencies. Very little is known of his life apart from his residence in Apea, Syria, but his philosophical importance is considerable. His system of three levels of spiritual reality – a primal god (the Good, the Father), who is almost supra-intellectual; a secondary, creator god (the demiurge of Plato’s Timaeus); and a world soul – largely anticipates that of Plotinus in the next century, though he was more strongly dualist than Plotinus in his attitude to the physical world and matter. He was much interested in the wisdom of the East, and in comparative religion. His most important work, fragments of which are preserved by Eusebius, is a dialogue On the Good, but he also wrote a polemic work On the Divergence of the Academics from Plato, which shows him to be a lively controversialist. J.M.D. numerical identity.

IDENTITY. nung chia.HSÜ HSING. Nussbaum, Martha C(raven) (b.1947), erican philosopher, classicist, and public intellectual with influential views on the human good, the emotions and their place in practical reasoning, and the rights of women and homosexuals. After training at Harvard in classical philology, she published a critical edition, with translation and commentary, of Aristotle’s Motion of Animals (1978). Its essays formulated ideas that she has continued to articulate: that perception is trainable, imagination interpretive, and desire a reaching out for the good. Via provocative readings of Plato, Aristotle, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, The Fragility of Goodness (1986) argues that many true goods succumb to fortune, lack any common measure, and demand finetuned discernment. The essays in Love’s Knowledge (1990) – on Proust, Dickens, Beckett, Henry Jes, and others – explore the emotional implications of our fragility and the particularism of practical reasoning. They also undertake a brief against Plato’s ancient criticism of the poets, an argument that Nussbaum carried on years later in debates with Judge Richard Posner. The Therapy of Desire (1994) dissects the Stoics’ conviction that our vulnerability calls for philosophical therapy to extirpate the emotions. While Nussbaum holds that the Stoics were mistaken about the good, she has adopted and strengthened their view that emotions embody judgments – most notably in her Gifford Lectures of 1993, Upheavals of Thought. A turning point in Nussbaum’s career ce in 1987, when she bece a part-time research adviser at the United Nations–sponsored World Institute for Development Economics Research. She there adapted her Aristotelian account of the human good to help ground the “capabilities approach” that the economist and philosopher artya Sen was developing for policymakers to use in assessing individuals’ well-being. Nussbaum spells out the human capabilities essential to leading a good life, integrating them within a nuanced liberalism of universalist appeal. This view has rified: Poetic Justice (1996) argues that its legal realization must avoid the oversimplifications that utilitarianism and economics encourage and instead balance generality with emotionally sensitive imagination. Sex and Social Justice (1998) explores her view’s implications for problems of sexual inequality, gay rights, and sexual objectification. Feminist Internationalism, her 1998 Seeley Lec   622 tures, argues that an effective international feminism must chpion rights, eschew relativism, and study local traditions sufficiently closely to see their diversity. 

Nyaya-Vaishesika, one of the orthodox schools of Hinduism. It holds that earth, air, fire, and water are the four types of atoms. Space is a substance and a container of atoms. The atoms are everlasting and eternal, though their combinations are neither. Properties of complexes are explained in terms of the properties of their components. There are emergent properties the causation of which does not require that something come from nothing; one need only grant brute causal connections. Nyaya is a monotheistic perspective and Nyaya philosopher Udana wrote a text – Kusmañjali (“The Handful of Flowers”) – in natural theology; this tenth-century work is an Indian classic on the subject. In addition to material things composed of atoms, there are immaterial persons. Each person is an enduring, substantial self whose nature is to be conscious and who is capable of love and aversion, of feeling pleasure and pain, and of making choices; selves differ from one another even when not embodied by virtue of being different centers of consciousness, not merely in terms of having had diverse transmigratory biographies. Nyaya-Vaishesika is the Hindu school most like Anglo-erican philosophy, as evidenced in its studies of inference and perception.  HINDUISM. K.E.Y. Nyaya-Vaishesika Nyaya-Vaishesika 623    623 Oakeshott, Michael (1900–91), British philosopher and political theorist trained at Cbridge and in Germany. He taught first at Cbridge and Oxford; from 1951 he was professor of political science at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His works include Experience and Its Modes (1933), Rationalism in Politics (1962), On Human Conduct (1975), and On History (1983). Oakeshott’s misleading general reputation, based on Rationalism in Politics, is as a conservative political thinker. Experience and Its Modes is a systematic work in the tradition of Hegel. Human experience is exclusively of a world of ideas intelligible insofar as it is coherent. This world divides into modes (historical, scientific, practical, and poetic experience), each being partly coherent and categorially distinct from all others. Philosophy is the never entirely successful attempt to articulate the coherence of the world of ideas and the place of modally specific experience within that whole. His later works exine the postulates of historical and practical experience, particularly those of religion, morality, and politics. All conduct in the practical mode postulates freedom and is an “exhibition of intelligence” by agents who appropriate inherited languages and ideas to the generic activity of self-enactment. Some conduct pursues specific purposes and occurs in “enterprise associations” identified by goals shared ong those who participate in them. The most estimable forms of conduct, exemplified by “conversation,” have no such purpose and occur in “civil societies” under the purely “adverbial” considerations of morality and law. “Rationalists” illicitly use philosophy to dictate to practical experience and subordinate human conduct to some master purpose. Oakeshott’s distinctive achievement is to have melded holistic idealism with a morality and politics radical in their affirmation of individuality.

POLITICAL THEORY. R.E.F. obiectum quo (Latin, ‘object by which’), in medieval and Scholastic epistemology, the object by which an object is known. It should be understood in contrast with obiectum quod, which refers to the object that is known. For exple, when a person knows what an apple is, the apple is the obiectum quod and his concept of the apple is the obiectum quo. That is, the concept is instrumental to knowing the apple, but is not itself what is known. Human beings need concepts in order to have knowledge, because their knowledge is receptive, in contrast with God’s which is productive. (God creates what he knows.) Human knowledge is mediated; divine knowledge is immediate. Scholastic philosophers believe that the distinction between obiectum quod and obiectum quo exposes the crucial mistake of idealism. According to idealists, the object of knowledge, i.e., what a person knows, is an idea. In contrast, the Scholastics maintain that idealists conflate the object of knowledge with the means by which human knowledge is made possible. Humans must be connected to the object of knowledge by something (obiectum quo), but what connects them is not that to which they are connected. A.P.M. object, intentional.BRENTANO. object, propositional.PROPOSITION. objective body.EMBODIMENT. objective probability.PROBABILITY. objective reality.DESCARTES, REALITY. objective reason.REASONS FOR ACTION. objective rightness. In ethics, an action is objectively right for a person to perform (on some occasion) if the agent’s performing it (on that occasion) really is right, whether or not the agent, or anyone else, believes it is. An action is subjectively right for a person to perform (on some occasion) if the agent believes, or perhaps justifiably believes, of that action that it is (objectively) right. For exple, according to a version of utilitarianism, an action is objectively right provided the action is optimific in the sense that the consequences that would result from its per624 O    624 formance are at least as good as those that would result from any alternative action the agent could instead perform. Were this theory correct, then an action would be an objectively right action for an agent to perform (on some occasion) if and only if that action is in fact optimific. An action can be both objectively and subjectively right or neither. But an action can also be subjectively right, but fail to be objectively right, as where the action fails to be optimific (again assuming that a utilitarian theory is correct), yet the agent believes the action is objectively right. And an action can be objectively right but not subjectively right, where, despite the objective rightness of the action, the agent has no beliefs about its rightness or believes falsely that it is not objectively right. This distinction is important in our moral assessments of agents and their actions. In cases where we judge a person’s action to be objectively wrong, we often mitigate our judgment of the agent when we judge that the action was, for the agent, subjectively right. This se objective–subjective distinction applies to other ethical categories such as wrongness and obligatoriness, and some philosophers extend it to items other than actions, e.g., emotions.

obligationes, the study of inferentially inescapable, yet logically odd arguments, used by late medieval logicians in analyzing inferential reasoning. In Topics VIII.3 Aristotle describes a respondent’s task in a philosophical argument as providing answers so that, if they must defend the impossible, the impossibility lies in the nature of the position, and not in its logical defense. In Prior Analytics I.13 Aristotle argues that nothing impossible follows from the possible. Burley, whose logic exemplifies early fourteenth-century obligationes literature, described the resulting logical exercise as a contest between interlocutor and respondent. The interlocutor must force the respondent into maintaining contradictory statements in defending a position, and the respondent must avoid this while avoiding maintaining the impossible, which can be either a position logically incompatible with the position defended or something impossible in itself. Especially interesting to Scholastic logicians were the paradoxes of disputation inherent in such disputes. Assuming that a respondent has successfully defended his position, the interlocutor may be able to propose a commonplace position that the respondent can neither accept nor reject, given the truth of the first, successfully defended position. Roger Swineshead introduced a controversial innovation to obligationes reasoning, later rejected by Paul of Venice. In the traditional style of obligation, a premise was relevant to the argument only if it followed from or was inconsistent with either (a) the proposition defended or (b) all the premises consequent to the former and prior to the premise in question. By admitting any premise that was either consequent to or inconsistent with the proposition defended alone, without regard to intermediate premises, Swineshead eliminated concern with the order of sentences proposed by the interlocutor, making the respondent’s task harder.  

oblique context. As explained by Frege in “Über Sinn und Bedeutung” (1892), a linguistic context is oblique (ungerade) if and only if an expression (e.g., proper ne, dependent clause, or sentence) in that context does not express its direct (customary) sense. For Frege, the sense of an expression is the mode of presentation of its nominatum, if any. Thus in direct speech, the direct (customary) sense of an expression designates its direct (customary) nominatum. For exple, the context of the proper ne ‘Kepler’ in (1) Kepler died in misery. is non-oblique (i.e., direct) since the proper ne expresses its direct (customary) sense, say, the sense of ‘the man who discovered the elliptical planetary orbits’, thereby designating its direct (customary) nominatum, Kepler himself. Moreover, the entire sentence expresses its direct sense, nely, the proposition that Kepler died in misery, thereby designating its direct nominatum, a truth-value, nely, the true. By contrast, objectivism oblique context 625    625 in indirect speech an expression neither expresses its direct sense nor, therefore, designates its direct nominatum. One such sort of oblique context is direct quotation, as in (2) ‘Kepler’ has six letters. The word appearing within the quotation marks neither expresses its direct (customary) sense nor, therefore, designates its direct (customary) nominatum, Kepler. Rather, it designates a word, a proper ne. Another sort of oblique context is engendered by the verbs of propositional attitude. Thus, the context of the proper ne ‘Kepler’ in (3) Frege believed Kepler died in misery. is oblique, since the proper ne expresses its indirect sense, say, the sense of the words ‘the man widely known as Kepler’, thereby designating its indirect nominatum, nely, the sense of ‘the man who discovered the elliptical planetary orbits’. Note that the indirect nominatum of ‘Kepler’ in (3) is the se as the direct sense of ‘Kepler’ in (1). Thus, while ‘Kepler’ in (1) designates the man Kepler, ‘Kepler’ in (3) designates the direct (customary) sense of the word ‘Kepler’ in (1). Similarly, in (3) the context of the dependent clause ‘Kepler died in misery’ is oblique since the dependent clause expresses its indirect sense, nely, the sense of the words ‘the proposition that Kepler died in misery’, thereby designating its indirect nominatum, nely, the proposition that Kepler died in misery. Note that the indirect nominatum of ‘Kepler died in misery’ in (3) is the se as the direct sense of ‘Kepler died in misery’ in (1). Thus, while ‘Kepler died in misery’ in (1) designates a truthvalue, ‘Kepler died in misery’ in (3) designates a proposition, the direct (customary) sense of the words ‘Kepler died in misery’ in (1).  INDIRECT DISCOURSE, MEANING, QUANTIFYING IN. R.F.G. oblique intention.INTENTION. observation.PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE. observation language.

obversion, a sort of immediate inference that allows a transformation of affirmative categorical A-propositions and I-propositions into the corresponding negative E-propositions and O-propositions, and of E- and O-propositions into the corresponding A- and I-propositions, keeping in each case the order of the subject and predicate terms, but changing the original predicate into its complement, i.e., into a negated term. For exple, ‘Every man is mortal’ – ’No man is non-mortal’; ‘Some students are happy’ – ‘Some students are not non-happy’; ‘No dogs are jealous’ – ‘All dogs are non-jealous’; and ‘Some bankers are not rich’ – ‘Some bankers are not non-rich’.  SQUARE OF OPPOSITION, SYLLOGISM. I.Bo. obviousness.SELF-EVIDENCE. Occ, Willi.OCKH. occasionalism, a theory of causation held by a number of important seventeenth-century Cartesian philosophers, including Johannes Clauberg (1622–65), Géraud de Cordemoy (1626– 84), Arnold Geulincx (1624–69), Louis de la Forge (1632–66), and Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715). In its most extreme version, occasionalism is the doctrine that all finite created entities are devoid of causal efficacy, and that God is the only true causal agent. Bodies do not cause effects in other bodies nor in minds; and minds do not cause effects in bodies nor even within themselves. God is directly, immediately, and solely responsible for bringing about all phenomena. When a needle pricks the skin, the physical event is merely an occasion for God to cause the relevant mental state (pain); a volition in the soul to raise an arm or to think of something is only an occasion for God to cause the arm to rise or the ideas to be present to the mind; and the impact of one billiard ball upon another is an occasion for God to move the second ball. In all three contexts – mind–body, body–body, and mind alone – God’s ubiquitous causal activity proceeds in accordance with certain general laws, and (except for miracles) he acts only when the requisite material or psychic conditions obtain. Less thoroughgoing forms of occasionalism limit divine causation (e.g., to mind–body or body–body alone). Far from being an ad hoc solution to a Cartesian mind–body problem, as it is often considered, occasionalism is argued for from general philosophical considerations regarding the nature of causal relations (considerations that later appear, modified, in Hume), from an analysis of the Cartesian concept of matoblique intention occasionalism 626    626 ter and of the necessary impotence of finite substance, and, perhaps most importantly, from theological premises about the essential ontological relation between an omnipotent God and the created world that he sustains in existence. Occasionalism can also be regarded as a way of providing a metaphysical foundation for explanations in mechanistic natural philosophy. Occasionalists are arguing that motion must ultimately be grounded in something higher than the passive, inert extension of Cartesian bodies (emptied of the substantial forms of the Scholastics); it needs a causal ground in an active power. But if a body consists in extension alone, motive force cannot be an inherent property of bodies. Occasionalists thus identify force with the will of God. In this way, they are simply drawing out the implications of Descartes’s own metaphysics of matter and motion. 

Ockh, Willi (c.1285–1347), also written Willi Occ, known as the More than Subtle Doctor, English Scholastic philosopher known equally as the father of nominalism and for his role in the Franciscan dispute with Pope John XXII over poverty. Born probably in the village of Ockh near London, Willi Ockh entered the Franciscan order at an early age and studied at Oxford, attaining the rank of baccalarius formatus. His brilliant but controversial career was cut short when John Lutterell, former chancellor of Oxford University, presented the pope with a list of fifty-six allegedly heretical theses extracted from Ockh’s writings. The papal commission studied them for two years and found fifty-one open to censure, but none was formally condemned. While in Avignon, Ockh researched previous papal concessions to the Franciscans regarding collective poverty, eventually concluding that John XXII contradicted his predecessors and hence was “no true pope.” After committing these charges to writing, Ockh fled with Michael of Cesena, then minister general of the order, first to Pisa and ultimately to Munich, where he lived until his death, writing many treatises about church–state relations. Although departures from his eminent predecessors have combined with ecclesiastical difficulties to make Ockh unjustly notorious, his thought remains, by current lights, philosophically and theologically conservative. On most metaphysical issues, Ockh fancied himself the true interpreter of Aristotle. Rejecting the doctrine that universals are real things other than nes or concepts as “the worst error of philosophy,” Ockh dismissed not only Platonism, but also “modern realist” doctrines according to which natures enjoy a double mode of existence and are universal in the intellect but numerically multiplied in particulars. He argues that everything real is individual and particular, while universality is a property pertaining only to nes and that by virtue of their signification relations. Because Ockh understands the primary nes to be mental (i.e., naturally significant concepts), his own theory of universals is best classified as a form of conceptualism. Ockh rejects atomism, and defends Aristotelian hylomorphism in physics and metaphysics, complete with its distinction between substantial and accidental forms. Yet, he opposes the reifying tendency of the “moderns” (unned contemporary opponents), who posited a distinct kind of thing (res) for each of Aristotle’s ten categories; he argues that – from a purely philosophical point of view – it is indefensible to posit anything besides particular substances and qualities. Ockh followed the Franciscan school in recognizing a plurality of substantial forms in living things (in humans, the forms of corporeity, sensory soul, and intellectual soul), but diverged from Duns Scotus in asserting a real, not a formal, distinction ong them. Aristotle had reached behind regular correlations in nature to posit substance-things and accident-things as primitive explanatory entities that essentially are or give rise to powers (virtus) that produce the regularities; similarly, Ockh distinguishes efficient causality properly speaking from sine qua non causality, depending on whether the correlation between A’s and B’s is produced by the power of A or by the will of another, and explicitly denies the existence of any sine qua non causation in nature. Further, Ockh insists, in Aristotelian fashion, that created substance- and accident-natures are essentially the causal powers they are in and of themselves and hence independently of their relations to anything else; so that not even God can make heat naturally a coolant. Yet, if God cannot change, He shares with created things the occurrent ability to obstruct such “Aristotelian” productive powers and prevent their normal operation. Ockh’s nominalistic conceptualism about universals does not keep him from endorsing the uniformity of nature principle, because he holds that individual natures are powers and hence that co-specific things are maximally similar powers. Likewise, he is conventional in appealing to several other a priori causal principles: “Everything that is in motion is moved by something,” “Being cannot come from non-being,” “Whatever is produced by something is really conserved by something as long as it exists.” He even recognizes a kind of necessary connection between created causes and effects – e.g., while God could act alone to produce any created effect, a particular created effect could not have had another created cause of the se species instead. Ockh’s main innovation on the topic of causality is his attack on Duns Scotus’s distinction between “essential” and “accidental” orders and contrary contention that every genuine efficient cause is an immediate cause of its effects. Ockh is an Aristotelian reliabilist in epistemology, taking for granted as he does that human cognitive faculties (the senses and intellect) work always or for the most part. Ockh infers that since we have certain knowledge both of material things and of our own mental acts, there must be some distinctive species of acts of awareness (intuitive cognitions) that are the power to produce such evident judgments. Ockh is matter-of-fact both about the disruption of human cognitive functions by created obstacles (as in sensory illusion) and about divine power to intervene in many ways. Such facts carry no skeptical consequences for Ockh, because he defines certainty in terms of freedom from actual doubt and error, not from the logical, metaphysical, or natural possibility of error. In action theory, Ockh defends the liberty of indifference or contingency for all rational beings, created or divine. Ockh shares Duns Scotus’s understanding of the will as a self-determining power for opposites, but not his distaste for causal models. Thus, Ockh allows that (1) unfree acts of will may be necessitated, either by the agent’s own nature, by its other acts, or by an external cause; and that (2) the efficient causes of free acts may include the agent’s intellectual and sensory cognitions as well as the will itself. While recognizing innate motivational tendencies in the human agent – e.g., the inclination to seek sensory pleasure and avoid pain, the affectio commodi (tendency to seek its own advantage), and the affectio iustitiae (inclination to love things for their own intrinsic worth) – he denies that these limit the will’s scope. Thus, Ockh goes beyond Duns Scotus in assigning the will the power, with respect to any option, to will for it (velle), to will against it (nolle), or not to act at all. In particular, Ockh concludes that the will can will against (nolle) the good, whether ignorantly or perversely – by hating God or by willing against its own happiness, the good-in-general, the enjoyment of a clear vision of God, or its own ultimate end. The will can also will (velle) evils – the opposite of what right reason dictates, unjust deeds qua unjust, dishonest, and contrary to right reason, and evil under the aspect of evil. Ockh enforces the traditional division of moral science into non-positive morality or ethics, which directs acts apart from any precept of a superior authority and draws its principles from reason and experience; and positive morality, which deals with laws that oblige us to pursue or avoid things, not because they are good or evil in themselves, but because some legitimate superior commands them. The notion that Ockh sponsors an unmodified divine command theory of ethics rests on conflation and confusion. Rather, in the area of non-positive morality, Ockh advances what we might label a “modified right reason theory,” which begins with the Aristotelian ideal of rational self-government, according to which morally virtuous action involves the agent’s free coordination of choice with right reason. He then observes that suitably informed right reason would dictate that God, as the infinite good, ought to be loved above all and for his own sake, and that such love ought to be expressed by the effort to please him in every way (ong other things, by obeying all his commands). Thus, if right reason is the primary norm in ethics, divine commands are a secondary, derivative norm. Once again, Ockh is utterly unconcerned about the logical possibility opened by divine liberty of indifference, that these twin norms might conflict (say, if God commanded us to act contrary to right reason); for him, their de facto congruence suffices for the moral life. In the area of soteriological merit and demerit (a branch of positive morality), things are the other way around: divine will is the primary norm; yet because God includes following the dictates of right reason ong the criteria for divine acceptance (thereby giving the moral life eternal significance), right reason becomes a secondary and derivative norm there. 

Ockh’s razor, also called the principle of parsimony, a methodological principle commending a bias toward simplicity in the construction of theories. The pareters whose simplicity is singled out for attention have varied considerably, from kinds of entities to the number of presupposed axioms to the nature of the curve drawn between data points. Found already in Aristotle, the tag “entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity” bece associated with Willi Ockh (although he never states that version, and even if non-contradiction rather than parsimony is his favorite weapon in metaphysical disputes), perhaps because it characterized the spirit of his philosophical conclusions. Opponents, who thought parsimony was being carried too far, formulated an “anti-razor”: where fewer entities do not suffice, posit more! 

Olivi, Peter John (c.1247–98), French philosopher-theologian whose views on the theory and practice of Franciscan poverty led to a long series of investigations of his orthodoxy. Olivi’s preference for humility, as well as the suspicion with which he was regarded, prevented his becoming a master of theology at Paris. After 1285, he was effectively vindicated and permitted to teach at Florence and Montpellier. But after his death, probably in part because his remains were venerated and his views were chpioned by the Franciscan Spirituals, his orthodoxy was again exined. The Council of Vienne (1311–12) condemned three unrelated tenets associated with Olivi. Finally, in 1326, Pope John XXII condemned a series of statements based on Olivi’s Apocalypse commentary. Olivi thought of himself chiefly as a theologian, writing copious biblical commentaries; his philosophy of history was influenced by Joachim of Fiore. His views on poverty inspired the leader of the Franciscan Observant reform movement, St. Bernardino of Siena. Apart from his views on poverty, Olivi is best known for his philosophical independence from Aristotle, whom he condemned as a materialist. Contrary to Aristotle’s theory of projectile motion, Olivi advocated a theory of impetus. He undermined orthodox views on Aristotelian categories. His attack on the category of relation was thought to have dangerous implications in Trinitarian theology. Ockh’s theory of quantity is in part a defense of views presented by Olivi. Olivi was critical of Augustinian as well as Aristotelian views; he abandoned the theories of seminal reason and divine illumination. He also argued against positing impressed sensible and intelligible species, claiming that only the soul, not perceptual objects, played an active role in perception. Bold as his philosophical views were, he presented them tentatively. A voluntarist, he emphasized the importance of will. He claimed that an act of understanding was not possible in the absence of an act of will. He provided an important experiential argument for the freedom of the will. His treatises on contracts revealed a sophisticated understanding of economics. His treatise on evangelical poverty includes the first defense of a theory of papal infallibility. R.W. Olympiodorus.NEOPLATONISM. omega, the last letter of the Greek alphabet (w). Following Cantor (1845–1911), it is used in lowercase as a proper ne for the first infinite ordinal number, which is the ordinal of the natural ordering of the set of finite ordinals. By extension it is also used as a proper ne for the set of finite ordinals itself or even for the set of natural numbers. Following Gödel (1906–78), it is used as a prefix in nes of various logical properties of sets of sentences, most notably omega-completeness and omega-consistency. Omega-completeness, in the original sense due to Tarski, is a syntactical property of sets of sentences in a formal arithmetic language involving a symbol ‘0’ for the number zero and a symbol ‘s’ for the so-called successor function, resulting in each natural number being ned by an expression, called a numeral, in the following series: ‘0’, ‘s0’, ‘ss0’, and so on. For exple, five is denoted by ‘sssss0’. A set of sentences is said to be omegacomplete if it (deductively) yields every universal sentence all of whose singular instances it yields. In this frework, as usual, every universal sentence, ‘for every n, n has P’ yields each and every one of its singular instances, ‘0 has P’, ‘s0 has P’, ‘ss0 has P’, etc. However, as had been known by logicians at least since the Middle Ages, the converse is not true, i.e., it is not in general the case that a universal sentence is deducible from the set of its singular instances. Thus one should not expect to find omega-completeness except in exceptional sets. The set of all true sentences of arithmetic is such an exceptional set; the reason is the semantic fact that every universal sentence (whether or not in arithmetic) is materially equivalent to the set of all its singular instances. A set of sentences that is not omega-complete is Ockh’s razor omega 629    629 said to be omega-incomplete. The existence of omega-incomplete sets of sentences is a phenomenon at the core of the 1931 Gödel incompleteness result, which shows that every “effective” axiom set for arithmetic is omega-incomplete and thus has as theorems all singular instances of a universal sentence that is not one of its theorems. Although this is a remarkable fact, the existence of omega-incomplete sets per se is far from remarkable, as suggested above. In fact, the empty set and equivalently the set of all tautologies are omega-incomplete because each yields all singular instances of the non-tautological formal sentence, here called FS, that expresses the proposition that every number is either zero or a successor. Omega-consistency belongs to a set that does not yield the negation of any universal sentence all of whose singular instances it yields. A set that is not omega-consistent is said to be omega-inconsistent. Omega-inconsistency of course implies consistency in the ordinary sense; but it is easy to find consistent sets that are not omega-consistent, e.g., the set whose only member is the negation of the formal sentence FS mentioned above. Corresponding to the syntactical properties just mentioned there are analogous semantic properties whose definitions are obtained by substituting ‘(semantically) implies’ for ‘(deductively) yields’. The Greek letter omega and its English ne have many other uses in modern logic. Carnap introduced a non-effective, non-logical rule, called the omega rule, for “inferring” a universal sentence from its singular instances; adding the omega rule to a standard axiomatization of arithmetic produces a complete but non-effective axiomatization. An omega-valued logic is a many-valued logic whose set of truth-values is or is the se size as the set of natural numbers.  .

one–many problem, also called one-and-many problem, the question whether all things are one or many. According to both Plato and Aristotle this was the central question for pre-Socratic philosophers. Those who answered “one,” the monists, ascribed to all things a single nature such as water, air, or oneness itself. They appear not to have been troubled by the notion that numerically many things would have this one nature. The pluralists, on the other hand, distinguished many principles or many types of principles, though they also maintained the unity of each principle. Some monists understood the unity of all things as a denial of motion, and some pluralists advanced their view as a way of refuting this denial. To judge from our sources, early Greek metaphysics revolved around the problem of the one and the many. In the modern period the dispute between monists and pluralists centered on the question whether mind and matter constitute one or two substances and, if one, what its nature is.  PRE-SOCRATICS, SPINOZA. E.C.H. one over many, a universal; especially, a Platonic Form. According to Plato, if there are, e.g., many large things, there must be some one largeness itself in respect of which they are large; this “one over many” (hen epi pollon) is an intelligible entity, a Form, in contrast with the sensible many. Plato himself recognizes difficulties explaining how the one character can be present to the many and why the one and the many do not together constitute still another many (e.g., Parmenides 131a–133b). Aristotle’s sustained critique of Plato’s Forms (Metaphysics A 9, Z 13–15) includes these and other problems, and it is he, more than Plato, who regularly uses ‘one over many’ to refer to Platonic Forms.  ARISTOTLE, ONE–MANY PROBLEM, PLATO. E.C.H. omega, order type one over many 630    630 one-way reduction sentence.REDUCTION SENTENCE. ontological argument.

ontological commitment, the object or objects common to the ontology fulfilling some (regimented) theory (a term fashioned by Quine). The ontology of a (regimented) theory consists in the objects the theory assumes there to be. In order to show that a theory assumes a given object, or objects of a given class, we must show that the theory would be true only if that object existed, or if that class is not empty. This can be shown in two different but equivalent ways: if the notation of the theory contains the existential quantifier ‘(Ex)’ of first-order predicate logic, then the theory is shown to assume a given object, or objects of a given class, provided that object is required ong the values of the bound variables, or (additionally) is required ong the values of the domain of a given predicate, in order for the theory to be true. Thus, if the theory entails the sentence ‘(Ex)(x is a dog)’, then the values over which the bound variable ‘x’ ranges must include at least one dog, in order for the theory to be true. Alternatively, if the notation of the theory contains for each predicate a complementary predicate, then the theory assumes a given object, or objects of a given class, provided some predicate is required to be true of that object, in order for the theory to be true. Thus, if the theory contains the predicate ‘is a dog’, then the extension of ‘is a dog’ cannot be empty, if the theory is to be true. However, it is possible for different, even mutually exclusive, ontologies to fulfill a theory equally well. Thus, an ontology containing collies to the exclusion of spaniels and one containing spaniels to the exclusion of collies might each fulfill a theory that entails ‘(Ex) (x is a dog)’. It follows that some of the objects a theory assumes (in its ontology) may not be ong those to which the theory is ontologically committed. A theory is ontologically committed to a given object only if that object is common to all of the ontologies fulfilling the theory. And the theory is ontologically committed to objects of a given class provided that class is not empty according to each of the ontologies fulfilling the theory. 

open formula, also called open sentence, a sentence with a free occurrence of a variable. A closed sentence, sometimes called a statement, has no free occurrences of variables. In a language whose only variable-binding operators are quantifiers, an occurrence of a variable in a formula is bound provided that occurrence either is within the scope of a quantifier employing that variable or is the occurrence in that quantifier. An occurrence of a variable in a formula is free provided it is not bound. The formula ‘xy ( O’ is open because both ‘x’ and ‘y’ occur as free variables. In ‘For some real number y, xy ( O’, no occurrence of ‘y’ is free; but the occurrence of ‘x’ is free, so the formula is open. The sentence ‘For every real number x, for some real number y, xy ( O’ is closed, since none of the variables occur free. Semantically, an open formula such as ‘xy ( 0’ is neither true nor false but rather true of or false of each assignment of values to its free-occurring variables. For exple, ‘xy ( 0’ is true of each assignment of two positive or two negative real numbers to ‘x’ and to ‘y’ and it is false of each assignment of 0 to either and false at each assignment of a positive real to one of the variables and a negative to the other.  QUANTIFICATION, SCOPE. C.S. open loop.CYBERNETICS. open question argument.MOORE. open sentence.OPEN FORMULA. open society.POPPER. open texture, the possibility of vagueness. Frieone-way reduction sentence open texture 631    631 drich Waismann (“Verifiability,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1945) introduced the concept, claiming that open texture is a universal property of empirical terms. Waismann claimed that an inexhaustible source of vagueness remains even after measures are taken to make an expression precise. His grounds were, first, that there are an indefinite number of possibilities for which it is indeterminate whether the expression applies (i.e., for which the expression is vague). There is, e.g., no definite answer whether a catlike creature that repeatedly vanishes into thin air, then reappears, is a cat. Waismann’s explanation is that when we define an empirical term, we fre criteria of its applicability only for foreseeable circumstances. Not all possible situations in which we may use the term, however, can be foreseen. Thus, in unanticipated circumstances, real or merely possible, a term’s criteria of applicability may yield no definite answer to whether it applies. Second, even for terms such as ‘gold’, for which there are several precise criteria of application (specific gravity, X-ray spectrograph, solubility in aqua regia), applying different criteria can yield divergent verdicts, the result being vagueness. Waismann uses the concept of open texture to explain why experiential statements are not conclusively verifiable, and why phenomenalist attempts to translate material object statements fail. 

operationalism, a progr in philosophy of science that aims to interpret scientific concepts via experimental procedures and observational outcomes. P. W. Bridgman introduced the terminology when he required that theoretical concepts be identified with the operations used to measure them. Logical positivism’s criteria of cognitive significance incorporated the notion: Bridgman’s operationalism was assimilated to the positivistic requirement that theoretical terms T be explicitly defined via (logically equivalent to) directly observable conditions O. Explicit definitions failed to accommodate alternative measurement procedures for the se concept, and so were replaced by reduction sentences that partially defined individual concepts in observational terms via sentences such as ‘Under observable circumstances C, x is T if and only if O’. Later this was weakened to allow ensembles of theoretical concepts to be partially defined via interpretative systems specifying collective observable effects of the concepts rather than effects peculiar to single concepts. These cognitive significance notions were incorporated into various behaviorisms, although the term ‘operational definition’ is rarely used by scientists in Bridgman’s or the explicit definition senses: intervening variables are theoretical concepts defined via reduction sentences and hypothetical constructs are definable by interpretative systems but not reduction sentences. In scientific contexts observable terms often are called dependent or independent variables. When, as in science, the concepts in theoretical assertions are only partially defined, observational consequences do not exhaust their content, and so observational data underdetermines the truth of such assertions in the sense that more than one theoretical assertion will be compatible with maximal observational data. 

BEHAVIORISM, REDUCTION, REDUCTION SENTENCE, THEORETICAL TERM. F.S. operator, a one-place sentential connective; i.e., an expression that may be prefixed to an open or closed sentence to produce, respectively, a new open or closed sentence. Thus ‘it is not the case that’ is a (truth-functional) operator. The most thoroughly investigated operators are the intensional ones; an intensional operator O, when prefixed to an open or closed sentence E, produces an open or closed sentence OE, whose extension is determined not by the extension of E but by some other property of E, which varies with the choice of O. For exple, the extension of a closed sentence is its truth-value A, but if the modal operator ‘it is necessary that’ is prefixed to A, the extension of the result depends on whether A’s extension belongs to it necessarily or contingently. This property of A is usually modeled by assigning to A a subset X of a domain of possible worlds W. If X % W then ‘it is necessary that A’ is true, but if X is a proper subset of W, it is false. Another exple involves the epistemic operator ‘it is plausible that’. Since a true sentence may be either plausible or implausible, the truth-value of ‘it is plausible that A’ is not fixed by the truth-value of A, but rather by the body of evidence that supports A relative to a thinker in a given context. This may also be modeled in a possible worlds frework, by operant conditioning operator 632    632 stipulating, for each world, which worlds, if any, are plausible relative to it. The topic of intensional operators is controversial, and it is even disputable whether standard exples really are operators at the correct level of logical form. For instance, it can be argued that ‘it is necessary that’, upon analysis, turns out to be a universal quantifier over possible worlds, or a predicate of expressions. On the former view, instead of ‘it is necessary that A’ we should write ‘for every possible world w, A(w)’, and, on the latter, ‘A is necessarily true’. 

operator theory of adverbs, a theory that treats adverbs and other predicate modifiers as predicate-forming operators on predicates. The theory expands the syntax of first-order logic by adding operators of various degrees, and makes corresponding additions to the semantics. Romane Clark, Terence Parsons, and Richard Montague (with Hans Kp) developed the theory independently in the early 1970s. For exple: ‘John runs quickly through the kitchen’ contains a simple one-place predicate, ‘runs’ (applied to John); a zero-place operator, ‘quickly’, and a one-place operator, ‘through ()’ (with ‘the kitchen’ filling its place). The logical form of the sentence becomes [O1 1(a) [O2 0 [P(b)]]], which can be read: [through (the kitchen) [quickly [runs (John)]]]. Semantically ‘quickly’ will be associated with an operation that takes us from the extension of ‘runs’ to a subset of that extension. ‘John runs quickly’ will imply ‘John runs’. ‘Through (the kitchen)’ and other operators are handled similarly. The wide variety of predicate modifiers complicates the inferential conditions and semantics of the operators. ‘John is finally done’ implies ‘John is done’. ‘John is nearly done’ implies ‘John is not done’. Clark tries to distinguish various types of predicate modifiers and provides a different semantic analysis for operators of different sorts. The theory can easily characterize syntactic aspects of predicate modifier iteration. In addition, after being modified the original predicates remain as predicates, and maintain their original degree. Further, there is no need to force John’s running into subject position as might be the case if we try to make ‘quickly’ an ordinary predicate. T.J.D. O-proposition.SYLLOGISM. oratio obliqua.INDIRECT DISCOURSE. order, the level of a logic as determined by the type of entity over which the free variables of that logic range. Entities of the lowest type, usually called type O, are known as individuals, and entities of higher type are constructed from entities of lower type. For exple, type 1 entities are (i) functions from individuals or n-tuples of individuals to individuals, and (ii) n-place relations on individuals. First-order logic is that logic whose variables range over individuals, and a model for first-order logic includes a domain of individuals. The other logics are known as higher-order logics, and the first of these is second-order logic, in which there are variables that range over type 1 entities. In a model for second-order logic, the first-order domain determines the second-order domain. For every sentence to have a definite truth-value, only totally defined functions are allowed in the range of second-order function variables, so these variables range over the collection of total functions from n-tuples of individuals to individuals, for every value of n. The second-order predicate variables range over all subsets of n-tuples of individuals. Thus if D is the domain of individuals of a model, the type 1 entities are the union of the two sets {X: Dn: X 0 Dn$D}, {X: Dn: X 0 Dn}. Quantifiers may bind second-order variables and are subject to introduction and elimination rules. Thus whereas in first-order logic one may infer ‘Someone is wise, ‘(Dx)Wx’, from ‘Socrates is wise’, ‘Ws’, in second-order logic one may also infer ‘there is something that Socrates is’, ‘(DX)Xs’. The step from first- to second-order logic iterates: in general, type n entities are the domain of n ! 1th–order variables in n ! 1th– order logic, and the whole hierarchy is known as the theory of types.  TYPE THEORY. G.Fo. ordered n-tuple.SET THEORY. ordered pair.

SET THEORY. operator, deontic ordered pair 633    633 ordering, an arrangement of the elements of a set so that some of them come before others. If X is a set, it is useful to identify an ordering R of X with a subset R of X$X, the set of all ordered pairs with members in X. If ‹ x,y ( 1 R then x comes before y in the ordering of X by R, and if ‹ x,y ( 2 R and ‹ y,x ( 2 R, then x and y are incomparable. Orders on X are therefore relations on X, since a relation on a set X is any subset of X $ X. Some minimal conditions a relation must meet to be an ordering are (i) reflexivity: (Ex)Rxx; (ii) antisymmetry: (Ex)(Ey)((Rxy & Ryx) / x % y); and (iii) transitivity: (Ex)(Ey)(Ez)((Rxy & Ryz) / Rxz). A relation meeting these three conditions is known as a partial order (also less commonly called a semi-order), and if reflexivity is replaced by irreflexivity, (Ex)-Rxx, as a strict partial order. Other orders are strengthenings of these. Thus a tree-ordering of X is a partial order with a distinguished root element a, i.e. (Ex)Rax, and that satisfies the backward linearity condition that from any element there is a unique path back to a: (Ex)(Ey)(Ez)((Ryx & Rzx) / (Ryz 7 Rzy). A total order on X is a partial order satisfying the connectedness requirement: (Ex)(Ey)(Rxy 7 Ryx). Total orderings are sometimes known as strict linear orderings, contrasting with weak linear orderings, in which the requirement of antisymmetry is dropped. The natural number line in its usual order is a strict linear order; a weak linear ordering of a set X is a strict linear order of levels on which various members of X may be found, while adding antisymmetry means that each level contains only one member. Two other important orders are dense (partial or total) orders, in which, between any two elements, there is a third; and well-orders. A set X is said to be well-ordered by R if R is total and every non-empty subset of Y of X has an R-least member: (EY 0 X)[Y & / / (Dz 1 Y)(Ew 1 Y)Rzw]. Well-ordering rules out infinite descending sequences, while a strict well-ordering, which is irreflexive rather than reflexive, rules out loops. The best-known exple is the membership relation of axiomatic set theory, in which there are no loops such as x 1 y 1 x or x 1 x, and no infinite descending chains . . . x2 1 x1 1 x0. 

order type omega, in mathematics, the order type of the infinite set of natural numbers. The last letter of the Greek alphabet, w, is used to denote this order type; w is thus the first infinite ordinal number. It can be defined as the set of all finite ordinal numbers ordered by magnitude; that is, w % {0,1,2,3 . . . }. A set has order type w provided it is denumerably infinite, has a first element but not a last element, has for each element a unique successor, and has just one element with no immediate predecessor. The set of even numbers ordered by magnitude, {2,4,6,8 . . . }, is of order type w. The set of natural numbers listing first all even numbers and then all odd numbers, {2,4,6,8 . . .; 1,3,5,7 . . . }, is not of order type w, since it has two elements, 1 and 2, with no immediate predecessor. The set of negative integers ordered by magnitude, { . . . –3,–2,–1}, is also not of order type w, since it has no first element. V.K. ordinal logic, any means of associating effectively and uniformly a logic (in the sense of a formal axiomatic system) Sa with each constructive ordinal notation a. This notion and term for it was introduced by Alan Turing in his paper “Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals” (1939). Turing’s aim was to try to overcome the incompleteness of formal systems discovered by Gödel in 1931, by means of the transfinitely iterated, successive adjunction of unprovable but correct principles. For exple, according to Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem, for each effectively presented formal system S containing a modicum of elementary number theory, if S is consistent then S does not prove the purely universal arithmetical proposition Cons expressing the consistency of S (via the Gödelnumbering of symbolic expressions), even though Cons is correct. However, it may be that the result S’ of adjoining Cons to S is inconsistent. This will not happen if every purely existential statement provable in S is correct; call this condition (E-C). Then if S satisfies (E-C), so also does S; % S ! Cons ; now S; is still incomplete by Gödel’s theorem, though it is more complete than S. Clearly the passage from S to S; can be iterated any finite number of times, beginning with any S0 satisfying (E-C), to form S1 % S; 0, S2 % S; 1, etc. But this procedure can also be extended into the transfinite, by taking Sw to be the union of the systems Sn for n % 0,1, 2 . . . and then Sw!1 % S;w, Sw!2 % S;w!1, etc.; condition (EC) is preserved throughout. To see how far this and other effective extension procedures of any effectively presented system S to another S; can be iterated into the transfinite, one needs the notion of the set O of constructive ordinal notations, due to Alonzo Church and Stephen C. Kleene in 1936. O is a set ordering ordinal logic 634    634 of natural numbers, and each a in O denotes an ordinal a, written as KaK. There is in O a notation for 0, and with each a in O is associated a notation sc(a) in O with Ksc(a)K % KaK ! 1; finally, if f is a number of an effective function {f} such that for each n, {f}(n) % an is in O and KanK < Kan!1K, then we have a notation ø(f) in O with Kø(f)K % limnKanK. For quite general effective extension procedures of S to S; and for any given S0, one can associate with each a in O a formal system Sa satisfying Ssc(a) % S;a and Sø(f) % the union of the S{f}(n) for n % 0,1, 2. . . . However, as there might be many notations for each constructive ordinal, this ordinal logic need not be invariant, in the sense that one need not have: if KaK % KbK then Sa and Sb have the se consequences. Turing proved that an ordinal logic cannot be both complete for true purely universal statements and invariant. Using an extension procedure by certain proof-theoretic reflection principles, he constructed an ordinal logic that is complete for true purely universal statements, hence not invariant. (The history of this and later work on ordinal logics is traced by the undersigned in “Turing in the Land of O(z),” in The Universal Turing Machine: A Half Century Survey, edited by Rolf Herken [1988].)

ordinary language philosophy, a loosely structured philosophical movement holding that the significance of concepts, including those central to traditional philosophy – e.g., the concepts of truth and knowledge – is fixed by linguistic practice. Philosophers, then, must be attuned to the actual uses of words associated with these concepts. The movement enjoyed considerable prominence chiefly ong English-speaking philosophers between the mid-1940s and the early 1960s. It was initially inspired by the work of Wittgenstein, and later by John Wisdom, Gilbert Ryle, Norman Malcolm, and J. L. Austin, though its roots go back at least to Moore and arguably to Socrates. Ordinary language philosophers do not mean to suggest that, to discover what truth is, we are to poll our fellow speakers or consult dictionaries. Rather, we are to ask how the word ‘truth’ functions in everyday, nonphilosophical settings. A philosopher whose theory of truth is at odds with ordinary usage has simply misidentified the concept. Philosophical error, ironically, was thought by Wittgenstein to arise from our “bewitchment” by language. When engaging in philosophy, we may easily be misled by superficial linguistic similarities. We suppose minds to be special sorts of entity, for instance, in part because of grmatical parallels between ‘mind’ and ‘body’. When we fail to discover any entity that might plausibly count as a mind, we conclude that minds must be nonphysical entities. The cure requires that we remind ourselves how ‘mind’ and its cognates are actually used by ordinary speakers. 

organic, having parts that are organized and interrelated in a way that is the se as, or analogous to, the way in which the parts of a living animal or other biological organism are organized and interrelated. Thus, an organic unity or organic whole is a whole that is organic in the above sense. These terms are primarily used of entities that are not literally organisms but are supposedly analogous to them. ong the applications of the concept of an organic unity are: to works of art, to the state (e.g., by Hegel), and to the universe as a whole (e.g., in absolute idealism). The principal element in the concept is perhaps the notion of an entity whose parts cannot be understood except by reference to their contribution to the whole entity. Thus to describe something as an organic unity is typically to imply that its properties cannot be given a reductive explanation in terms of those of its parts; rather, at least some of the properties of the parts must themselves be explained by reference to the properties of the whole. Hence it usually involves a form of holism. Other features sometimes attributed to organic unities include a mutual dependence between the existence of the parts and that of the whole and the need for a teleological explanation of properties of the parts in terms of some end or purpose associated with the whole. To what extent these characteristics belong to genuine biological organisms is disputed.  ORGANICISM, ORGANISM. P.Mac. organicism, a theory that applies the notion of an organic unity, especially to things that are not literally organisms. G. E. Moore, in Principia Ethica, proposed a principle of organic unities, concerning intrinsic value: the (intrinsic) value of a whole need not be equivalent to the sum of the (intrinsic) values of its parts. Moore applies the principle in arguing that there is no systematic relation between ordinal utility organicism 635    635 the intrinsic value of an element of a complex whole and the difference that the presence of that element makes to the value of the whole. E.g., he holds that although a situation in which someone experiences pleasure in the contemplation of a beautiful object has far greater intrinsic goodness than a situation in which the person contemplates the se object without feeling pleasure, this does not mean that the pleasure itself has much intrinsic value. 

HOLISM, REDUCTION, VALUE. P.Mac. organic unity.ORGANIC. organism, a carbon-based living thing or substance, e.g., a parecium, a tree, or an ant. Alternatively, ‘organism’ can mean a hypothetical living thing of another natural kind, e.g., a silicon-based living thing. Defining conditions of a carbon-based living thing, x, are as follows. (1) x has a layer made of m-molecules, i.e., carbonbased macromolecules of repeated units that have a high capacity for selective reactions with other similar molecules. x can absorb and excrete through this layer. (2) x can metabolize m-molecules. (3) x can synthesize m-molecular parts of x by means of activities of a proper part of x that is a nuclear molecule, i.e., an m-molecule that can copy itself. (4) x can exercise the foregoing capacities in such a way that the corresponding activities are causally interrelated as follows: x’s absorption and excretion causally contribute to x’s metabolism; these processes jointly causally contribute to x’s synthesizing; and x’s synthesizing causally contributes to x’s absorption, excretion, and metabolism. (5) x belongs to a natural kind of compound physical substance that can have a member, y, such that: y has a proper part, z; z is a nuclear molecule; and y reproduces by means of z’s copying itself. (6) x is not possibly a proper part of something that satisfies (1)–(6). The last condition expresses the independence and autonomy of an organism. For exple, a part of an organism, e.g., a heart cell, is not an organism. It also follows that a colony of organisms, e.g., a colony of ants, is not an organism.  LIFE, ORGANIC, ORGANICISM. J.Ho. & G.Ro. Organon.ARISTOTLE. Origen (A.D. 185–253), Christian theologian and biblical scholar in the Alexandrian church. Born in Egypt, he bece head of the catechetical school in Alexandria. Like his mentor, Clement of Alexandria, he was influenced by Middle Platonism. His principal works were Hexapla, On First Principles, and Contra Celsum. The Hexapla, little of which survives, consisted of six Hebrew and two Greek versions of the Old Testent with Origen’s commentary. On First Principles sets forth the most systematic Christian theology of the early church, including some doctrines subsequently declared heretical, such as the subordination of the Son (“a secondary god”) and Spirit to the Father, preexisting human souls (but not their transmigration), and a premundane fall from grace of each human soul. The most fous of his views was the notion of apocatastasis, universal salvation, the universal restoration of all creation to God in which evil is defeated and the devil and his minions repent of their sins. He interpreted hell as a temporary purgatory in which impure souls were purified and made ready for heaven. His notion of subordination of the Son of God to the Father was condemned by the church in 533. Origen’s Contra Celsum is the first sustained work in Christian apologetics. It defends Christianity before the pagan world. Origen was a leading exponent of the allegorical interpretation of the Scriptures, holding that the text had three levels of meaning corresponding to the three parts of human nature: body, soul, and spirit. The first was the historical sense, sufficient for simple people; the second was the moral sense; and the third was the mystical sense, open only to the deepest souls. L.P.P. original position.LIBERALISM, RAWLS. Orpheus.ORPHISM. Orphism, a religious movement in ancient Greece that may have influenced Plato and some of the pre-Socratics. Neither the nature of the movement nor the scope of its influence is adequately understood: ancient sources and modern scholars tend to confuse Orphism with Pythagoreanism and with ancient mystery cults, especially the Bacchic or Dionysiac mysteries. “Orphic poems,” i.e., poems attributed to Orpheus (a mythic figure), circulated as early as the mid-sixth century B.C. We have only indirect evidence of the early Orphic poems; but we do have a sizable body of fragments from poems composed in later antiquity. Central to both early and later versions is a theogonic-cosmogonic narrative that posits Night as the primal entity – ostensibly a revision of the account offered by Hesiod – and gives major emphasis to organic unity Orphism 636    636 Ortega y Gasset, José outer converse 637 the birth, death through dismemberment, and rebirth of the god Dionysus. Plato gives us clear evidence of the existence in his time of itinerant religious teachers who, drawing on the “books of Orpheus,” performed and taught rituals of initiation and purification intended to procure divine favor either in this life or in an afterlife. The extreme skepticism of such scholars as Ulrich von Wilowitz-Moellendorff and I. M. Linforth concerning the importance of early Orphism for Greek religion and Greek philosophy has been undermined by archaeological findings in recent decades: the Derveni papyrus, which is a fragment of a philosophical commentary on an Orphic theogony; and inscriptions with Orphic instructions for the dead, from funerary sites in southern Italy, mainland Greece, and the Crimea. A.P.D.M. Ortega y Gasset, José (1883–1955), Spanish philosopher and essayist. Born in Madrid, he studied there and in Leipzig, Berlin, and Marburg. In 1910 he was ned professor of metaphysics at the University of Madrid and taught there until 1936, when he was forced to leave because of his political involvement in and support for the Spanish Republic. He returned to Spain in 1945. Ortega was a prolific writer whose works fill nine thick volumes. ong his most influential books are Meditaciones del Quijote (“Meditations on the Quixote,” 1914), El tema de nuestro tiempo (“The Modern Theme,” 1923), La revolución de las masas (“The Revolt of the Masses,” 1932), La deshumanización del arte (“The Dehumanization of Art,” 1925), Historia como sistema (“History as a System,” 1941), and the posthumously published El hombre y la gente (“Man and People,” 1957) and La idea de principio en Leibniz(“The Idea of Principle in Leibniz,” 1958). His influence in Spain and Latin erica was enormous, in part because of his brilliant style of writing and lecturing. He avoided jargon and rejected systematization; most of his works were first written as articles for newspapers and magazines. In 1923 he founded the Revista de Occidente, a cultural magazine that helped spread his ideas and introduced German thought into Spain and Latin erica. Ortega ventured into nearly every branch of philosophy, but the kernel of his views is his metaphysics of vital reason (rasón vital) and his perspectival epistemology. For Ortega, reality is identified with “my life”; something is real only insofar as it is rooted and appears in “my life.” “My life” is further unpacked as “myself” and “my circumstances” (“yo soy yo y mi circumstancia“). The self is not an entity separate from what surrounds it; there is a dynic interaction and interdependence of self and things. These and the self together constitute reality. Because every life is the result of an interaction between self and circumstances, every self has a unique perspective. Truth, then, is perspectival, depending on the unique point of view from which it is determined, and no perspective is false except one that claims exclusivity. This doctrine is known as Ortega’s perspectivism. J.J.E.G. ostensive definition.DEFINITION. Ostwald, Wilhelm.ENERGETICISM. other minds, problem of.PROBLEM OF OTHER MINDS. ought–is problem.

FACT–VALUE DISTINCTION. ousia, ancient Greek term traditionally translated as ‘substance’. Formed from the participle for ‘being’, the term ousia refers to the character of being, beingness, as if this were itself an entity. Just as redness is the character that red things have, so ousia is the character that beings have. Thus, the ousia of something is the character that makes it be, its nature. But ousia also refers to an entity that possesses being in its own right; for consider a case where the ousia of something is just the thing itself. Such a thing possesses being by virtue of itself; because its being depends on nothing else, it is self-subsistent and has a higher degree of being than things whose being depends on something else. Such a thing would be an ousia. Just which entities meet the criteria for ousia is a question addressed by Aristotle. Something such as redness that exists only as an attribute would not have being in its own right. An individual person is an ousia, but Aristotle also argues that his form is more properly an ousia; and an unmoved mover is the highest type of ousia. The traditional rendering of the term into Latin as substantia and English as ‘substance’ is appropriate only in contexts like Aristotle’s Categories where an ousia “stands under” attributes. In his Metaphysics, where Aristotle argues that being a substrate does not characterize ousia, and in other Greek writers, ‘substance’ is often not an apt translation.  SUBSTANCE. E.C.H. outer converse.CONVERSE, OUTER AND INNER.    637 outer domain semantics.FREE LOGIC. overdetermination.CAUSATION. overman.NIETZSCHE. overriding reason.REASONS FOR ACTION. Oxford Calculators, a group of natural philosophers, mathematicians, and logicians who flourished at Oxford University in the second quarter of the fourteenth century. The ne derives from the Liber calculationum (Book of Calculations), written some time before 1350. The author of this work, often called “Calculator” by later Continental authors, was probably ned Richard Swineshead. The Book of Calculations discussed a number of issues related to the quantification or measurement of local motion, alteration, and augmentation (for a fuller description, see John Murdoch and Edith Sylla, “Swineshead, Richard,” in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, Vol. 13, 1976). The Book of Calculations has been studied mainly by historians of science and grouped together with a number of other works discussing natural philosophical topics by such authors as Thomas Bradwardine, Willi Heytesbury, and John Dumbleton. In earlier histories many of the authors now referred to as Oxford Calculators are referred to as the Merton School, since many of them were fellows of Merton College. But since some authors whose work appears to fit into the se intellectual tradition (e.g., Richard Kilvington, whose Sophismata represents an earlier stage of the tradition later epitomized by Willi Heytesbury’s Sophismata) have no known connection with Merton College, the ne ‘Oxford Calculators’ would appear to be a more accurate appellation. The works of the Oxford Calculators were produced in the context of education in the Oxford arts faculty (see Edith Sylla, “The Oxford Calculators,” in Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny, and Jan Pinborg, eds., The Cbridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, 1982). In Oxford at this time logic was the centerpiece of the early years of undergraduate education. After logic, Oxford ce to be known for its work in mathematics, astronomy, and natural philosophy. Students studying under the Oxford faculty of arts not only heard lectures on the liberal arts and on natural philosophy, moral philosophy, and metaphysics; they were also required to take part in disputations. Willi Heytesbury’s Regule solvendi sophismatum (Rules for Solving Sophismata) explicitly and Swineshead’s Book of Calculations implicitly are written to prepare students for these disputations. The three influences most formative on the work of the Oxford Calculators were (1) the tradition of commentaries on the works of Aristotle; (2) the developments in logical theory, particularly the theories of categorematic and syncategorematic terms and the theory of logical supposition; and (3) developments in mathematics, particularly the theory of ratios as developed in Thomas Bradwardine’s De proportionibus velocitatum in motibus (On the Ratios of Velocities in Motions). In addition to Richard Swineshead, Heytesbury, Bradwardine, Dumbleton, and Kilvington, other authors and works related to the work of the Oxford Calculators are Walter Burley, De primo et ultimo instanti, Tractatus Primus (De formis accidentalibus), Tractatus Secundus (De intensione et remissione formarum); Roger Swineshead, Descriptiones motuum; and John Bode, A est unum calidum. These and other works had a considerable later influence on the Continent. 

pacifism, (1) opposition to war, usually on moral or religious grounds, but sometimes on the practical ground (pragmatic pacifism) that it is wasteful and ineffective; (2) opposition to all killing and violence; (3) opposition only to war of a specified kind (e.g., nuclear pacifism). Not to be confused with passivism, pacifism usually involves actively promoting peace, understood to imply cooperation and justice ong peoples and not merely absence of war. But some (usually religious) pacifists accept military service so long as they do not carry weapons. Many pacifists subscribe to nonviolence. But some consider violence and/or killing permissible, say, in personal self-defense, law enforcement, abortion, or euthanasia. Absolute pacifism rejects war in all circumstances, hypothetical and actual. Conditional pacifism concedes war’s permissibility in some hypothetical circumstances but maintains its wrongness in practice. If at least some hypothetical wars have better consequences than their alternative, absolute pacifism will almost inevitably be deontological in character, holding war intrinsically wrong or unexceptionably prohibited by moral principle or divine commandment. Conditional pacifism may be held on either deontological or utilitarian (teleological or sometimes consequentialist) grounds. If deontological, it may hold war at most prima facie wrong intrinsically but nonetheless virtually always impermissible in practice because of the absence of counterbalancing right-making features. If utilitarian, it will hold war wrong, not intrinsically, but solely because of its consequences. It may say either that every particular war has worse consequences than its avoidance (act utilitarianism) or that general acceptance of (or following or compliance with) a rule prohibiting war will have best consequences even if occasional particular wars have best consequences (rule utilitarianism).  NONVIOLENCE. R.L.H.

Paine, Thomas (1737–1809), erican political philosopher, revolutionary defender of democracy and human rights, and chpion of popular radicalism in three countries. Born in Thetford, England, he emigrated to the erican colonies in 1774; he later moved to France, where he was made a French citizen in 1792. In 1802 he returned to the United States, where he was rebuffed by the public because of his support for the French Revolution. Paine was the bestknown polemicist for the erican Revolution. In many incendiary pphlets, he called for a new, more democratic republicanism. His direct style and uncompromising egalitarianism had wide popular appeal. In Common Sense (1776) Paine asserted that commoners were the equal of the landed aristocracy, thus helping to spur colonial resentments sufficiently to support independence from Britain. The sole basis of political legitimacy is universal, active consent; taxation without representation is unjust; and people have the right to resist when the contract between governor and governed is broken. He defended the French Revolution in The Rights of Man (1791–92), arguing against concentrating power in any one individual and against a property qualification for suffrage. Since natural law and right reason as conformity to nature are accessible to all rational persons, sovereignty resides in human beings and is not bestowed by membership in class or nation. Opposed to the extremist Jacobins, he helped write, with Condorcet, a constitution to secure the Revolution. The Age of Reason (1794), Paine’s most misunderstood work, sought to secure the social cohesion necessary to a well-ordered society by grounding it in belief in a divinity. But in supporting deism and attacking established religion as a tool of enslavement, he alienated the very laboring classes he sought to enlighten. A lifelong adversary of slavery and supporter of universal male suffrage, Paine argued for redistributing property in Agrarian Justice (1797). 

Paley, Willi, (1743–1805), English moral philosopher and theologian. He was born in Peterborough and educated at Cbridge, 639 P    639 where he lectured in moral philosophy, divinity, and Greek New Testent before assuming a series of posts in the Church of England, the last as archdeacon of Carlisle. The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785) first introduced utilitarianism to a wide public. Moral obligation is created by a divine command “coupled” with the expectation of everlasting rewards or punishments. While God’s commands can be ascertained “from Scripture and the light of nature,” Paley emphasizes the latter. Since God wills human welfare, the rightness or wrongness of actions is determined by their “tendency to promote or diminish the general happiness.” Horae Pauline: Or the Truth of the Scripture History of St Paul Evinced appeared in 1790, A View of the Evidences of Christianity in 1794. The latter defends the authenticity of the Christian miracles against Hume. Natural Theology (1802) provides a design argument for God’s existence and a demonstration of his attributes. Nature exhibits abundant contrivances whose “several parts are fred and put together for a purpose.” These contrivances establish the existence of a powerful, wise, benevolent designer. They cannot show that its power and wisdom are unlimited, however, and “omnipotence” and “omniscience” are mere “superlatives.” Paley’s Principles and Evidences served as textbooks in England and erica well into the nineteenth century. 

panpsychism, the doctrine that the physical world is pervasively psychical, sentient or conscious (understood as equivalent). The idea, usually, is that it is articulated into certain ultimate units or particles, momentary or enduring, each with its own distinct charge of sentience or consciousness, and that some more complex physical units possess a sentience emergent from the interaction between the charges of sentience pertaining to their parts, sometimes down through a series of levels of articulation into sentient units. Animal consciousness is the overall sentience pertaining to some substantial part or aspect of the brain, while each neuron may have its own individual charge of sentience, as may each included atom and subatomic particle. Elsewhere the only sentient units may be at the atomic and subatomic level. Two differently motivated versions of the doctrine should be distinguished. The first implies no particular view about the nature of matter, and regards the sentience pertaining to each unit as an extra to its physical nature. Its point is to explain animal and human consciousness as emerging from the interaction and perhaps fusion of more pervasive sentient units. The better motivated, second version holds that the inner essence of matter is unknown. We know only structural facts about the physical or facts about its effects on sentience like our own. Panpsychists hypothesize that the otherwise unknown inner essence of matter consists in sentience or consciousness articulated into the units we identify externally as fundental particles, or as a supervening character pertaining to complexes of such or complexes of complexes, etc. Panpsychists can thus uniquely combine the idealist claim that there can be no reality without consciousness with rejection of any subjectivist reduction of the physical world to human experience of it. Modern versions of panpsychism (e.g. of Whitehead, Hartshorne, and Sprigge) are only partly akin to hylozoism as it occurred in ancient thought. Note that neither version need claim that every physical object possesses consciousness; no one supposes that a te of conscious cricketers must itself be conscious. 

HYLOZOISM, WHITEHEAD. T.L.S.S. pantheism, the view that God is identical with everything. It may be seen as the result of two tendencies: an intense religious spirit and the belief that all reality is in some way united. Pantheism should be distinguished from panentheism, the view that God is in all things. Just as water might saturate a sponge and in that way be in the entire sponge, but not be identical with the sponge, God might be in everything without being identical with everything. Spinoza is the most distinguished pantheist in Western philosophy. He argued that since substance is completely self-sufficient, and only God is self-sufficient, God is the only substance. In other words, God is everything. Hegel is also sometimes considered a pantheist since he identifies God with the totality of being. Many people think that pantheism is tantount to atheism, because they believe that theism requires that God transcend ordinary, sensible reality at least to some degree. It is not obvious that theism requires a transcendent or Panaetius pantheism 640    640 personal notion of God; and one might claim that the belief that it does is the result of an anthropomorphic view of God. In Eastern philosophy, especially the Vedic tradition of Indian philosophy, pantheism is part of a rejection of polytheism. The apparent multiplicity of reality is illusion. What is ultimately real or divine is Brahman. 

Pantheismusstreit (German, ‘dispute over pantheism’), a debate primarily between the German philosophers Jacobi and Mendelssohn, although it also included Lessing, Kant, and Goethe. The basic issue concerned what pantheism is and whether all pantheists are atheists. In particular, it concerned whether Spinoza was a pantheist, and if so, whether he was an atheist; and how close Lessing’s thought was to Spinoza’s. The standard view, propounded by Bayle and Leibniz, was that Spinoza’s pantheism was a thin veil for his atheism. Lessing and Goethe did not accept this harsh interpretation of him. They believed that his pantheism avoided the alienating transcendence of the standard Judeo-Christian concept of God. It was debated whether Lessing was a Spinozist or some form of theistic pantheist. Lessing was critical of dogmatic religions and denied that there was any revelation given to all people for rational acceptance. He may have told Jacobi that he was a Spinozist; but he may also have been speaking ironically or hypothetically. 

SPINOZA. A.P.M. Paracelsus, pseudonym of Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim (1493–1541), Swiss chemist, physician, and natural philosopher. He pursued medical studies at various German and Austrian universities, probably completing them at Ferrara (1513–16). Thereafter he had little to do with the academic world, apart from a brief and stormy period as professor of medicine at Basle (1527–28). Instead, he worked first as a military surgeon and later as an itinerant physician in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. His works were mainly in German rather than Latin, and only a few were published during his lifetime. His importance for medical practice lay in his insistence on observation and experiment, and his use of chemical methods for preparing drugs. The success of Paracelsian medicine and chemistry in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was, however, largely due to the theoretical background he provided. He firmly rejected the classical medical inheritance, particularly Galen’s explanation of disease as an imbalance of humors; he drew on a combination of biblical sources, German mysticism, alchemy, and Neoplatonic magic as found in Ficino to present a unified view of humankind and the universe. He saw man as a microcosm, reflecting the nature of the divine world through his immortal soul, the sidereal world through his astral body or vital principle, and the terrestrial world through his visible body. Knowledge requires union with the object, but because elements of all the worlds are found in man, he can acquire knowledge of the universe and of God, as partially revealed in nature. The physician needs knowledge of vital principles (called astra) in order to heal. Disease is caused by external agents that can affect the human vital principle as well as the visible body. Chemical methods are employed to isolate the appropriate vital principles in minerals and herbs, and these are used as antidotes. Paracelsus further held that matter contains three principles, sulfur, mercury, and salt. As a result, he thought it was possible to transform one metal into another by varying the proportions of the fundental principles; and that such transformations could also be used in the production of drugs.  ALCHEMY, MYSTICISM. E.J.A. paraconsistency, the property of a logic in which one cannot derive all statements from a contradiction. What is objectionable about contradictions, from the standpoint of classical logic, is not just that they are false but that they imply any statement whatsoever: one who accepts a contradiction is thereby committed to accepting everything. In paraconsistent logics, however, such as relevance logics, contradictions are isolated inferentially and thus rendered relatively harmless. The interest in such logics stems from the fact that people sometimes continue to work in inconsistent theories even after the inconsistency has been exposed, and do so without inferring everything. Whether this phenomenon can be explained satisfactorily by the classical logician or shows instead that the underlying logic of, e.g., science and mathematics is some non-classical paraconsistent logic, is disputed. 

 paradigm, as used by Thomas Kuhn (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962), a set of scientific and metaphysical beliefs that make up a theoretical frework within which scientific theories Pantheismusstreit paradigm 641    641 can be tested, evaluated, and if necessary revised. Kuhn’s principal thesis, in which the notion of a paradigm plays a central role, is structured around an argument against the logical empiricist view of scientific theory change. Empiricists viewed theory change as an ongoing smooth and cumulative process in which empirical facts, discovered through observation or experimentation, forced revisions in our theories and thus added to our ever-increasing knowledge of the world. It was claimed that, combined with this process of revision, there existed a process of intertheoretic reduction that enabled us to understand the macro in terms of the micro, and that ultimately aimed at a unity of science. Kuhn maintains that this view is incompatible with what actually happens in case after case in the history of science. Scientific change occurs by “revolutions” in which an older paradigm is overthrown and is replaced by a frework incompatible or even incommensurate with it. Thus the alleged empirical “facts,” which were adduced to support the older theory, become irrelevant to the new; the questions asked and answered in the new frework cut across those of the old; indeed the vocabularies of the two freworks make up different languages, not easily intertranslatable. These episodes of revolution are separated by long periods of “normal science,” during which the theories of a given paradigm are honed, refined, and elaborated. These periods are sometimes referred to as periods of “puzzle solving,” because the changes are to be understood more as fiddling with the details of the theories to “save the phenomena” than as steps taking us closer to the truth. A number of philosophers have complained that Kuhn’s conception of a paradigm is too imprecise to do the work he intended for it. In fact, Kuhn, fifteen years later, admitted that at least two distinct ideas were exploited by the term: (i) the “shared elements [that] account for the relatively unproblematic character of professional communication and for the relative unanimity of professional judgment,” and (ii) “concrete problem solutions, accepted by the group [of scientists] as, in a quite usual sense, paradigmatic” (Kuhn, “Second Thoughts on Paradigms,” 1977). Kuhn offers the terms ‘disciplinary matrix’ and ‘exemplar’, respectively, for these two ideas. 

paradigm case argument, an argument designed to yield an affirmative answer to the following general type of skeptically motivated question: Are A’s really B? E.g., Do material objects really exist? Are any of our actions really free? Does induction really provide reasonable grounds for one’s beliefs? The structure of the argument is simple: in situations that are “typical,” “exemplary,” or “paradigmatic,” standards for which are supplied by common sense, or ordinary language, part of what it is to be B essentially involves A. Hence it is absurd to doubt if A’s are ever B, or to doubt if in general A’s are B. (More commonly, the argument is encountered in the linguistic mode: part of what it means for something to be B is that, in paradigm cases, it be an A. Hence the question whether A’s are ever B is meaningless.) An exple may be found in the application of the argument to the problem of induction. (See Strawson, Introduction to Logical Theory, 1952.) When one believes a generalization of the form ‘All F’s are G’ on the basis of good inductive evidence, i.e., evidence constituted by innumerable and varied instances of F all of which are G, one would thereby have good reasons for holding this belief. The argument for this claim is based on the content of the concepts of reasonableness and of strength of evidence. Thus according to Strawson, the following two propositions are analytic: (1) It is reasonable to have a degree of belief in a proposition that is proportional to the strength of the evidence in its favor. (2) The evidence for a generalization is strong in proportion as the number of instances, and the variety of circumstances in which they have been found, is great. Hence, Strawson concludes, “to ask whether it is reasonable to place reliance on inductive procedures is like asking whether it is reasonable to proportion the degree of one’s convictions to the strength of the evidence. Doing this is what ‘being reasonable’ means in such a context” (p. 257). In such arguments the role played by the appeal to paradigm cases is crucial. In Strawson’s version, paradigm cases are constituted by “innumerable and varied instances.” Without such an appeal the argument would fail completely, for it is clear that not all uses of induction are reasonable. Even when this appeal is made clear though, the argument remains questionable, for it fails to confront adequately the force of the word ‘really’ in the skeptical challenges.

paradox, a seemingly sound piece of reasoning based on seemingly true assumptions that leads to a contradiction (or other obviously false conclusion). A paradox reveals that either the principles of reasoning or the assumptions on which it is based are faulty. It is said to be solved when the mistaken principles or assumptions are clearly identified and rejected. The philosophical interest in paradoxes arises from the fact that they sometimes reveal fundentally mistaken assumptions or erroneous reasoning techniques. Two groups of paradoxes have received a great deal of attention in modern philosophy. Known as the semantic paradoxes and the logical or settheoretic paradoxes, they reveal serious difficulties in our intuitive understanding of the basic notions of semantics and set theory. Other well-known paradoxes include the barber paradox and the prediction (or hangman or unexpected exination) paradox. The barber paradox is mainly useful as an exple of a paradox that is easily resolved. Suppose we are told that there is an Oxford barber who shaves all and only the Oxford men who do not shave themselves. Using this description, we can apparently derive the contradiction that this barber both shaves and does not shave himself. (If he does not shave himself, then according to the description he must be one of the people he shaves; if he does shave himself, then according to the description he is one of the people he does not shave.) This paradox can be resolved in two ways. First, the original claim that such a barber exists can simply be rejected: perhaps no one satisfies the alleged description. Second, the described barber may exist, but not fall into the class of Oxford men: a woman barber, e.g., could shave all and only the Oxford men who do not shave themselves. The prediction paradox takes a variety of forms. Suppose a teacher tells her students on Friday that the following week she will give a single quiz. But it will be a surprise: the students will not know the evening before that the quiz will take place the following day. They reason that she cannot give such a quiz. After all, she cannot wait until Friday to give it, since then they would know Thursday evening. That leaves Monday through Thursday as the only possible days for it. But then Thursday can be ruled out for the se reason: they would know on Wednesday evening. Wednesday, Tuesday, and Monday can be ruled out by similar reasoning. Convinced by this seemingly correct reasoning, the students do not study for the quiz. On Wednesday morning, they are taken by surprise when the teacher distributes it. It has been pointed out that the students’ reasoning has this peculiar feature: in order to rule out any of the days, they must assume that the quiz will be given and that it will be a surprise. But their alleged conclusion is that it cannot be given or else will not be a surprise, undermining that very assumption. Kaplan and Montague have argued (in “A Paradox Regained,” Notre De Journal of Formal Logic, 1960) that at the core of this puzzle is what they call the knower paradox – a paradox that arises when intuitively plausible principles about knowledge (and its relation to logical consequence) are used in conjunction with knowledge claims whose content is, or entails, a denial of those very claims. 

paradoxes of omnipotence, a series of paradoxes in philosophical theology that maintain that God could not be omnipotent because the concept is inconsistent, alleged to result from the intuitive idea that if God is omnipotent, then God must be able to do anything. (1) Can God perform logically contradictory tasks? If God can, then God should be able to make himself simultaneously omnipotent and not omnipotent, which is absurd. If God cannot, then it appears that there is something God cannot do. Many philosophers have sought to avoid this consequence by claiming that the notion of performing a logically contradictory task is empty, and that question (1) specifies no task that God can perform or fail to perform. (2) Can God cease to be omnipotent? If God can and were to do so, then at any time thereparadox paradoxes of omnipotence 643    643 after, God would no longer be completely sovereign over all things. If God cannot, then God cannot do something that others can do, nely, impose limitations on one’s own powers. A popular response to question (2) is to say that omnipotence is an essential attribute of a necessarily existing being. According to this response, although God cannot cease to be omnipotent any more than God can cease to exist, these features are not liabilities but rather the lack of liabilities in God. (3) Can God create another being who is omnipotent? Is it logically possible for two beings to be omnipotent? It might seem that there could be, if they never disagreed in fact with each other. If, however, omnipotence requires control over all possible but counterfactual situations, there could be two omnipotent beings only if it were impossible for them to disagree. (4) Can God create a stone too heavy for God to move? If God can, then there is something that God cannot do – move such a stone – and if God cannot, then there is something God cannot do – create such a stone. One reply is to maintain that ‘God cannot create a stone too heavy for God to move’ is a harmless consequence of ‘God can create stones of any weight and God can move stones of any weight.’

paradox of analysis, an argument that it is impossible for an analysis of a meaning to be informative for one who already understands the meaning. Consider: ‘An F is a G’ (e.g., ‘A circle is a line all points on which are equidistant from some one point’) gives a correct analysis of the meaning of ‘F’ only if ‘G’ means the se as ‘F’; but then anyone who already understands both meanings must already know what the sentence says. Indeed, that will be the se as what the trivial ‘An F is an F’ says, since replacing one expression by another with the se meaning should preserve what the sentence says. The conclusion that ‘An F is a G’ cannot be informative (for one who already understands all its terms) is paradoxical only for cases where ‘G’ is not only synonymous with but more complex than ‘F’, in such a way as to give an analysis of ‘F’. (‘A first cousin is an offspring of a parent’s sibling’ gives an analysis, but ‘A dad is a father’ does not and in fact could not be informative for one who already knows the meaning of all its words.) The paradox appears to fail to distinguish between different sorts of knowledge. Encountering for the first time (and understanding) a correct analysis of a meaning one already grasps brings one from merely tacit to explicit knowledge of its truth. One sees that it does capture the meaning and thereby sees a way of articulating the meaning one had not thought of before.  ANALYSIS, DEFINITION, MEANING. C.G. paradox of omniscience, an objection to the possibility of omniscience, developed by Patrick Grim, that appeals to an application of Cantor’s power set theorem. Omniscience requires knowing all truths; according to Grim, that means knowing every truth in the set of all truths. But there is no set of all truths. Suppose that there were a set T of all truths. Consider all the subsets of T, that is, all members of the power set 3T. Take some truth T1. For each member of 3T either T1 is a member of that set or T1 is not a member of that set. There will thus correspond to each member of 3T a further truth specifying whether T1 is or is not a member of that set. Therefore there are at least as many truths as there are members of 3T. By the power set theorem, there are more members of 3T than there are of T. So T is not the set of all truths. By a parallel argument, no other set is, either. So there is no set of all truths, after all, and therefore no one who knows every member of that set. The objection may be countered by denying that the claim ‘for every proposition p, if p is true God knows that p’ requires that there be a set of all true propositions. 

parapsychology, the study of certain anomalous phenomena and ostensible causal connections neither recognized nor clearly rejected by traditional science. Parapsychology’s principal areas of investigation are extrasensory perception (ESP), psychokinesis (PK), and cases suggesting the survival of mental functioning following bodily death. The study of ESP has traditionally focused on two sorts of ostensible phenomena, telepathy (the apparent anomalous influence of one person’s mental states on those of another, commonly identified with apparent communication between two minds by extrasensory means) and clairvoyance (the apparent anomalous influence of a physical state of affairs on a person’s mental states, commonly identified with the supposed ability to perceive or know of objects or events not present to the senses). The forms of ESP may be viewed either as types of cognition (e.g., the anomalous knowledge of another person’s mental states) or as merely a form of anomalous causal influence (e.g., a distant burning house causing one to have – possibly incongruous – thoughts about fire). The study of PK covers the apparent ability to produce various physical effects independently of filiar or recognized intermediate sorts of causal links. These effects include the ostensible movement of remote objects, materializations (the apparently instantaneous production of matter), apports (the apparently instantaneous relocation of an object), and (in laboratory experiments) statistically significant non-random behavior of normally random microscopic processes (such as radioactive decay). Survival research focuses on cases of ostensible reincarnation and mental mediumship (i.e., “channeling” of information from an apparently deceased communicator). Cases of ostensible precognition may be viewed as types of telepathy and clairvoyance, and suggest the causal influence of some state of affairs on an earlier event (an agent’s ostensible precognitive experience). However, those opposed to backward causation may interpret ostensible precognition either as a form of unconscious inference based on contemporaneous information acquired by ESP, or else as a form of PK (possibly in conjunction with telepathic influence) by which the precognizer brings about the events apparently precognized. The data of parapsychology raise two particularly deep issues. The evidence suggesting survival poses a direct challenge to materialist theories of the mental. And the evidence for ESP and PK suggests the viability of a “magical” worldview associated usually with so-called primitive societies, according to which we have direct and intimate access to and influence on the thoughts and bodily states of others. 

Pareto efficiency, also called Pareto optimality, a state of affairs in which no one can be made better off without making someone worse off. The Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923) referred to optimality rather than efficiency, but usage has drifted toward the less normative term. Pareto supposed that utilitarian addition of welfare across individuals is meaningless. He concluded that the only useful aggregate measures of welfare must be ordinal. One state of affairs is Pareto-superior to another if we cannot move to the second state without making someone worse off. Although the Pareto criteria are generally thought to be positive rather than normative, they are often used as normative principles for justifying particular changes or refusals to make changes. For exple, some economists and philosophers take the Pareto criteria as moral constraints and therefore oppose certain government policies. In market and voluntary exchange contexts, it makes sense to suppose every exchange will be Pareto-improving, at least for the direct parties to the exchange. If, however, we fail to account for external effects of our exchange on other people, it may not be Pareto-improving. Moreover, we may fail to provide collective benefits that require the cooperation or coordination of many individuals’ efforts. Hence, even in markets, we cannot expect to achieve Pareto efficiency. We might therefore suppose we should invite government intervention to help us. But in typical social contexts, it is often hard to believe that significant policy changes can be Paretoimproving: there are sure to be losers from any change.  PERFECT COMPETITION, SOCIAL CHOICE THEORY, UTILITARIANISM. R.Har. Pareto optimality.PARETO EFFICIENCY. Pareto-superior.PARETO EFFICIENCY. parallel distributed processing Pareto-superior 645    645 Parfit, Derek (b.1942), British philosopher internationally known for his major contributions to the metaphysics of persons, moral theory, and practical reasoning. Parfit first rose to prominence by challenging the prevalent view that personal identity is a “deep fact” that must be all or nothing and that matters greatly in rational and moral deliberations. Exploring puzzle cases involving fission and fusion, Parfit propounded a reductionist account of personal identity, arguing that what matters in survival are physical and psychological continuities. These are a matter of degree, and sometimes there may be no answer as to whether some future person would be me. Parfit’s magnum opus, Reasons and Persons (1984), is a strikingly original book brimming with startling conclusions that have significantly reshaped the philosophical agenda. Part One treats different theories of morality, rationality, and the good; bleless wrongdoing; moral immorality; rational irrationality; imperceptible harms and benefits; harmless torturers; and the self-defeatingness of certain theories. Part Two introduces a critical present-aim theory of individual rationality, and attacks the standard selfinterest theory. It also discusses the rationality of different attitudes to time, such as caring more about the future than the past, and more about the near than the remote. Addressing the age-old conflict between self-interest and morality, Parfit illustrates that contrary to what the self-interest theory demands, it can be rational to care about certain other aims as much as, or more than, about our own future well-being. In addition, Parfit notes that the self-interest theory is a hybrid position, neutral with respect to time but partial with respect to persons. Thus, it can be challenged from one direction by morality, which is neutral with respect to both persons and time, and from the other by a present-aim theory, which is partial with respect to both persons and time. Part Three refines Parfit’s views regarding personal identity and further criticizes the self-interest theory: personal identity is not what matters, hence reasons to be specially concerned about our future are not provided by the fact that it will be our future. Part Four presents puzzles regarding future generations and argues that the moral principles we need when considering future people must take an impersonal form. Parfit’s arguments deeply challenge our understanding of moral ideals and, some believe, the possibility of comparing outcomes. Parfit has three forthcoming manuscripts, tentatively titled Rediscovering Reasons, The Metaphysics of the Self, and On What Matters. His current focus is the normativity of reasons. A reductionist about persons, he is a non-reductionist about reasons. He believes in irreducibily normative beliefs that are in a strong sense true. A realist about reasons for acting and caring, he challenges the views of naturalists, noncognitivists, and constructivists. Parfit contends that internalists conflate normativity with motivating force, that contrary to the prevalent view that all reasons are provided by desires, no reasons are, and that Kant poses a greater threat to rationalism than Hume. Parfit is Senior Research Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and a regular visiting professor at both Harvard and New York University. Legendary for monograph-length criticisms of book manuscripts, he is editor of the Oxford Ethics Series, whose goal is to make definite moral progress, a goal Parfit himself is widely believed to have attained. 

Parmenides (early fifth century B.C.), Greek philosopher, the most influential of the preSocratics, active in Elea (Roman and modern Velia), an Ionian Greek colony in southern Italy. He was the first Greek thinker who can properly be called an ontologist or metaphysician. Plato refers to him as “venerable and awesome,” as “having magnificent depth” (Theaetetus 183e– 184a), and presents him in the dialogue Parmenides as a searching critic – in a fictional and dialectical transposition – of Plato’s own theory of Forms. Nearly 150 lines of a didactic poem by Parmenides have been preserved, assembled into about twenty fragments. The first part, “Truth,” provides the earliest specimen in Greek intellectual history of a sustained deductive argument. Drawing on intuitions concerning thinking, knowing, and language, Parmenides argues that “the real” or “what-is” or “being” (to eon) must be ungenerable and imperishable, indivisible, and unchanging. According to a Plato-inspired tradition, Parmenides held that “all is one.” But the phrase does not occur in the fragments; Parmenides does not even speak of “the One”; and it is possible that either a holistic One or a plurality of absolute monads might conform to Parmenides’ deduction. Nonetheless, it is difficult to resist the impression that the argument converges on a unique entity, which may indifferParfit, Derek Parmenides 646    646 ently be referred to as Being, or the All, or the One. Parmenides embraces fully the paradoxical consequence that the world of ordinary experience fails to qualify as “what-is.” Nonetheless, in “Opinions,” the second part of the poem, he expounds a dualist cosmology. It is unclear whether this is intended as candid phenomenology – a doctrine of appearances – or as an ironic foil to “Truth.” It is noteworthy that Parmenides was probably a physician by profession. Ancient reports to this effect are borne out by fragments (from “Opinions”) with embryological themes, as well as by archaeological findings at Velia that link the memory of Parmenides with Romanperiod remains of a medical school at that site. Parmenides’ own attitude notwithstanding, “Opinions” recorded four major scientific breakthroughs, some of which, doubtless, were Parmenides’ own discoveries: that the earth is a sphere; that the two tropics and the Arctic and Antarctic circles divide the earth into five zones; that the moon gets its light from the sun; and that the morning star and the evening star are the se planet. The term Eleatic School is misleading when it is used to suggest a common doctrine supposedly held by Parmenides, Zeno of Elea, Melissus of Sos, and (anticipating Parmenides) Xenophanes of Colophon. The fact is, many philosophical groups and movements, from the middle of the fifth century onward, were influenced, in different ways, by Parmenides, including the “pluralists,” Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and Democritus. Parmenides’ deductions, transformed by Zeno into a repertoire of full-blown paradoxes, provided the model both for the eristic of the Sophists and for Socrates’ elenchus. Moreover, the Parmenidean criteria for “whatis” lie unmistakably in the background not only of Plato’s theory of Forms but also of salient features of Aristotle’s system, notably, the priority of actuality over potentiality, the unmoved mover, and the man-begets-man principle. Indeed, all philosophical and scientific systems that posit principles of conservation (of substance, of matter, of matter-energy) are inalienably the heirs to Parmenides’ deduction.  ELEATIC SCHOOL, MELISSUS OF SOS, PRE-SOCRATICS. A.P.D.M. parousia.PLATO. parse tree.PARSING. parsimony, principle of.OCKH’S RAZOR.

parsing, the process of determining the syntactic structure of a sentence according to the rules of a given grmar. This is to be distinguished from the generally simpler task of recognition, which is merely the determination of whether or not a given string is well-formed (grmatical). In general, many different parsing strategies can be employed for grmars of a particular type, and a great deal of attention has been given to the relative efficiencies of these techniques. The most thoroughly studied cases center on the contextfree phrase structure grmars, which assign syntactic structures in the form of singly-rooted trees with a left-to-right ordering of “sister” nodes. Parsing procedures can then be broadly classified according to the sequence of steps by which the parse tree is constructed: top-down versus bottom-up; depth-first versus breadthfirst; etc. In addition, there are various strategies for exploring alternatives (agendas, backtracking, parallel processing) and there are devices such as “charts” that eliminate needless repetitions of previous steps. Efficient parsing is of course important when language, whether natural or artificial (e.g., a progrming language), is being processed by computer. Human beings also parse rapidly and with apparently little effort when they comprehend sentences of a natural language. Although little is known about the details of this process, psycholinguists hope that study of mechanical parsing techniques might provide insights.  GRMAR. R.E.W. partial belief.PROBABILITY. partial function.MATHEMATICAL FUNCTION. partial order.RELATION. partial ordering.ORDERING. participation.PLATO. particular.CONCEPTUALISM, INDIVIDUATION, METAPHYSICS. particular, bare.METAPHYSICS. particular, basic.STRAWSON. particularism.PROBLEM OF THE CRITERION.

particular proposition.SYLLOGISM. partition, division of a set into mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive subsets. Derivatively, parousia partition 647    647 ‘partition’ can mean any set P whose members are mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive subsets of set S. Each subset of a partition P is called a partition class of S with respect to P. Partitions are intimately associated with equivalence relations, i.e. with relations that are transitive, symmetric, and reflexive. Given an equivalence relation R defined on a set S, R induces a partition P of S in the following natural way: members s1 and s2 belong to the se partition class of P if and only if s1 has the relation R to s2. Conversely, given a partition P of a set S, P induces an equivalence relation R defined on S in the following natural way: members s1 and s2 are such that s1 has the relation R to s2 if and only if s1 and s2 belong to the se partition class of P. For obvious reasons, then, partition classes are also known as equivalence classes.  RELATION, SET THEORY. R.W.B. Parva naturalia.

ARISTOTLE. Pascal, Blaise (1623–62), French philosopher known for his brilliance as a mathematician, physicist, inventor, theologian, polemicist, and French prose stylist. Born at Clermont-Ferrand in the Auvergne, he was educated by his father, Étienne, and first gained note for his contribution to mathematics when at sixteen he produced, under the influence of Desargues, a work on the projective geometry of the cone. This was published in 1640 under the title Essai pour les coniques and includes what has since become known as Pascal’s theorem. Pascal’s other mathematical accomplishments include the original development of probability theory, worked out in correspondence with Fermat, and a method of infinitesimal analysis to which Leibniz gave credit for inspiring his own development of the calculus. Pascal’s early scientific fe rests also on his work in physics, which includes a treatise on hydrostatics (Traités de l’équilibre des liqueurs et de la pesanteur de la masse de l’air) and his experiments with the barometer, which attempted to establish the possibility of a vacuum and the weight of air as the cause of the mercury’s suspension. Pascal’s fe as a stylist rests primarily on his Lettres provinciales (1656–57), which were an anonymous contribution to a dispute between the Jansenists, headed by Arnauld, and the Jesuits. Jansenism was a Catholic religious movement that emphasized an Augustinian position on questions of grace and free will. Pascal, who was not himself a Jansenist, wrote a series of scathing satirical letters ridiculing both Jesuit casuistry and the persecution of the Jansenists for their purported adherence to five propositions in Jansen’s Augustinus. Pascal’s philosophical contributions are found throughout his work, but primarily in his Pensées (1670), an intended apology for Christianity left incomplete and fragmentary at his death. The influence of the Pensées on religious thought and later existentialism has been profound because of their extraordinary insight, passion, and depth. At the time of Pascal’s death some of the fragments were sewn together in clusters; many others were left unorganized, but recent scholarship has recovered much of the original plan of organization. The Pensées raise skeptical arguments that had become part of philosophical parlance since Montaigne. While these arguments were originally raised in order to deny the possibility of knowledge, Pascal, like Descartes in the Meditations, tries to utilize them toward a positive end. He argues that what skepticism shows us is not that knowledge is impossible, but that there is a certain paradox about human nature: we possess knowledge yet recognize that this knowledge cannot be rationally justified and that rational arguments can even be directed against it (fragments 109, 131, and 110). This peculiarity can be explained only through the Christian doctrine of the fall (e.g., fragment 117). Pascal extends his skeptical considerations by undermining the possibility of demonstrative proof of God’s existence. Such knowledge is impossible on philosophical grounds because such a proof could be successful only if an absurdity followed from denying God’s existence, and nature furnishes us with no knowledge incompatible with unbelief (fragments 429 and 781). Furthermore, demonstrative proof of God’s existence is incompatible with the epistemological claims of Christianity, which make God’s personal agency essential to religious knowledge (fragments 460, 449). Pascal’s use of skepticism and his refusal to admit proofs of God’s existence have led some commentators, like Richard Popkin (“Fideism,” 1967) and Terence Penelhum (“Skepticism and Fideism,” 1983) to interpret Pascal as a fideist, i.e., one who denies that religious belief can be based on anything other than pragmatic reasons. But such an interpretation disregards Pascal’s attempts to show that Christian belief is rational because of the explanatory power of its doctrines, particularly its doctrine of the fall (e.g., fragments 131, 137, 149, 431, 449, and 482). These purported demonstrations of the explanatory superiority of Christianity prepare Parva naturalia Pascal, Blaise 648    648 the way for Pascal’s fous “wager” (fragment 418). The wager is ong the fragments that Pascal had not classified at the time of his death, but textual evidence shows that it would have been included in Section 12, entitled “Commencement,” after the demonstrations of the superior explanatory power of Christianity. The wager is a direct application of the principles developed in Pascal’s earlier work on probability, where he discovered a calculus that could be used to determine the most rational action when faced with uncertainty about future events, or what is now known as decision theory. In this case the uncertainty is the truth of Christianity and its claims about afterlife; and the actions under consideration are whether to believe or not. The choice of the most rational action depends on what would now be called its “expected value.” The expected value of an action is determined by (1) assigning a value, s, to each possible outcome of the action, (2) subtracting the cost of the action, c, from this value, and (3) multiplying the difference by the probability of the respective outcomes and adding these products together. Pascal invites the reader to consider Christian faith and unbelief as if they were acts of wagering on the truth of Christianity. If one believes, then there are two possible outcomes – either God exists or not. If God does exist, the stake to be gained is infinite life. If God does not exist, there are no winnings. Because the potential winnings are infinite, religious belief is more rational than unbelief because of its greater expected value. The wager has been subjected to numerous criticisms. Willi Jes argued that it is indecisive, because it would apply with equal validity to any religion that offers a promise of infinite rewards (The Will to Believe, 1897). But this ignores Pascal’s careful attempt to show that only Christianity has adequate explanatory power, so that the choice is intended to be between Christianity and unbelief. A stronger objection to the wager arises from contemporary work in decision theory that prohibits the introduction of infinite values because they have the counterintuitive result of making even the slightest risk irrational. But while these objections are valid, they do not refute Pascal’s strategy in the Pensées, in which the proofs of Christianity’s explanatory power and the wager have only the preliminary role of inducing the reader to seek the religious certainty that comes only from a saving religious experience which he calls “inspiration” (fragments 110, 381, 382, 588, 808).

paternalism, interference with the liberty or autonomy of another person, with justifications referring to the promotion of the person’s good or the prevention of harm to the person. More precisely, P acts paternalistically toward Q if and only if (a) P acts with the intent of averting some harm or promoting some benefit for Q; (b) P acts contrary to (or is indifferent to) the current preferences, desires or values of Q; and (c) P’s act is a limitation on Q’s autonomy or liberty. The presence of both autonomy and liberty in clause (c) is to allow for the fact that lying to someone is not clearly an interference with liberty. Notice that one can act paternalistically by telling people the truth (as when a doctor insists that a patient know the exact nature of her illness, contrary to her wishes). Note also that the definition does not settle any questions about the legitimacy or illegitimacy of paternalistic interventions. Typical exples of paternalistic actions are (1) laws requiring motorcyclists to wear helmets; (2) court orders allowing physicians to transfuse Jehovah’s Witnesses against their wishes; (3) deception of a patient by physicians to avoid upsetting the patient; (4) civil commitment of persons judged dangerous to themselves; and (5) laws forbidding swimming while lifeguards are not on duty. Soft (weak) paternalism is the view that paternalism is justified only when a person is acting non-voluntarily or one needs time to determine whether the person is acting voluntarily or not. Hard (strong) paternalism is the view that paternalism is sometimes justified even when the person being interfered with is acting voluntarily. The analysis of the term is relative to some set of problems. If one were interested in the orgaPascal’s wager paternalism 649    649 nizational behavior of large corporations, one might adopt a different definition than if one were concerned with limits on the state’s right to exercise coercion. The typical normative problems about paternalistic actions are whether, and to what extent, the welfare of individuals may outweigh the need to respect their desire to lead their own lives and make their own decisions (even when mistaken). J. S. Mill is the best exple of a virtually absolute antipaternalism, at least with respect to the right of the state to act paternalistically. He argued that unless we have reason to believe that a person is not acting voluntarily, as in the case of a man walking across a bridge that, unknown to him, is about to collapse, we ought to allow adults the freedom to act even if their acts are harmful to themselves. 

patristic authors, also called church fathers, a group of early Christian authors originally so ned because they were considered the “fathers” (patres) of the orthodox Christian churches. The term is now used more broadly to designate the Christian writers, orthodox or heterodox, who were active in the first six centuries or so of the Christian era. The chronological division is quite flexible, and it is regularly moved several centuries later for particular purposes. Moreover, the study of these writers has traditionally been divided by languages, of which the principal ones are Greek, Latin, and Syriac. The often sharp divisions ong patristic scholarships in the different languages are partly a reflection of the different histories of the regional churches, partly a reflection of the sociology of modern scholarship. Greeks. The patristic period in Greek is usually taken as extending from the first writers after the New Testent to such figures as Maximus the Confessor (579/580–662) or John of Dascus (c.650–c.750). The period is traditionally divided around the Council of Nicea (325). PreNicean Greek authors of importance to the history of philosophy include Irenaeus (130/140– after 198?), Clement of Alexandria (c.150–after 215), and Origen (c.180–c.254). Important Nicean and post-Nicean authors include Athanasius (c.295–373); the Cappadocians, i.e., Gregory of Nazianzus (c.330–90), Basil of Cesarea (c.330–79), and his brother, Gregory of Nyssa (335/340–c.394); and John Chrysostom (c.350– 407). Philosophical topics and practices are constantly engaged by these Greek authors. Justin Martyr (second century), e.g., describes his conversion to Christianity quite explicitly as a transit through lower forms of philosophy into the true philosophy. Clement of Alexandria, again, uses the philosophic genre of the protreptic and a host of ancient texts to persuade his pagan readers that they ought to come to Christianity as to the true wisdom. Origen devotes his Against Celsus to the detailed rebuttal of one pagan philosopher’s attack on Christianity. More importantly, if more subtly, the major works of the Cappadocians appropriate and transform the teachings of any number of philosophic authors – Plato and the Neoplatonists in first place, but also Aristotle, the Stoics, and Galen. Latins. The Latin churches ce to count four post-Nicean authors as its chief teachers: brose (337/339–97), Jerome (c.347–419), Augustine (354–430), and Gregory the Great (c.540–604). Other Latin authors of philosophical interest include Tertullian (fl. c.195–c.220), Lactantius (c.260–c.330), Marius Victorinus (280/285–before 386), and Hilary of Poitiers (fl. 356–64). The Latin patristic period is typically counted from the second century to the fifth or sixth, i.e., roughly from Tertullian to Boethius. The Latin authors share with their Greek contemporaries a range of relations to the pagan philosophic schools, both as rival institutions and as sources of useful teaching. Tertullian’s Against the Nations and Apology, for exple, take up pagan accusations against Christianity and then counterattack a number of pagan beliefs, including philosophical ones. By contrast, the writings of Marius Victorinus, brose, and Augustine enact transformations of philosophic teachings, especially from the Neoplatonists. Because philosophical erudition was generally not as great ong the Latins as ong the Greeks, they were both more eager to accept philosophical doctrines and freer in improvising variations on them. 

Paul of Venice (c.1368–1429), Italian philosopher and theologian. A Hermit of Saint Augustine (O.E.S.A.), he spent three years as a student patriarchalism Paul of Venice 650    650 in Oxford (1390–93) and taught at the University of Padua, where he bece a doctor of arts and theology in 1408. He also held appointments at the universities of Parma, Siena, and Bologna. He was active in the administration of his order, holding various high offices. Paul of Venice wrote commentaries on several logical, ethical, and physical works of Aristotle, but his ne is connected especially with an extremely popular textbook, Logica parva (over 150 manuscripts survive, and more than forty printed editions of it were made), and with a huge Logica magna. These Oxford-influenced works contributed to the favorable climate enjoyed by the English logic in northern Italian universities from the late fourteenth century through the fifteenth century.

Peano postulates, also called Peano axioms, a list of assumptions from which the integers can be defined from some initial integer, equality, and successorship, and usually seen as defining progressions. The Peano postulates for arithmetic were produced by G. Peano in 1889. He took the set N of integers with a first term 1 and an equality relation between them, and assumed these nine axioms: 1 belongs to N; N has more than one member; equality is reflexive, symmetric, and associative, and closed over N; the successor of any integer in N also belongs to N, and is unique; and a principle of mathematical induction applying across the members of N, in that if 1 belongs to some subset M of N and so does the successor of any of its members, then in fact M % N. In some ways Peano’s formulation was not clear. He had no explicit rules of inference, nor any guarantee of the legitimacy of inductive definitions (which Dedekind established shortly before him). Further, the four properties attached to equality were seen to belong to the underlying “logic” rather than to arithmetic itself; they are now detached. It was realized (by Peano himself) that the postulates specified progressions rather than integers (e.g., 1, ½, ¼, 1 /8, . . . , would satisfy them, with suitable interpretations of the properties). But his work was significant in the axiomatization of arithmetic; still deeper foundations would lead with Russell and others to a major role for general set theory in the foundations of mathematics. In addition, with O. Veblen, T. Skolem, and others, this insight led in the early twentieth century to “non-standard” models of the postulates being developed in set theory and mathematical analysis; one could go beyond the ‘. . .’ in the sequence above and admit “further” objects, to produce valuable alternative models of the postulates. These procedures were of great significance also to model theory, in highlighting the property of the non-categoricity of an axiom system. A notable case was the “non-standard analysis” of A. Robinson, where infinitesimals were defined as arithmetical inverses of transfinite numbers without incurring the usual perils of rigor associated with them. 

Peirce, Charles S(anders) (1839–1914), erican philosopher, scientist, and mathematician, the founder of the philosophical movement called pragmatism. Peirce was born in Cbridge, Massachusetts, the second son of Benjin Peirce, who was professor of mathematics and astronomy at Harvard and one of erica’s leading mathematicians. Charles Peirce studied at Harvard University and in 1863 received a degree in chemistry. In 1861 he began work with the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, and remained in this service for thirty years. Simultaneously with his professional career as a scientist, Peirce worked in logic and philosophy. He lectured on philosophy and logic at various universities and institutes, but was never able to obtain a permanent academic position as a teacher of philosophy. In 1887 he retired to Milford, Pennsylvania, and devoted the rest of his life to philosophical work. He earned a meager income from occasional lectures and by writing articles for periodicals and dictionaries. He spent his last years in extreme poverty and ill health. Pragmatism. Peirce formulated the basic principles of pragmatism in two articles, “The Fixation of Belief” and “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (1877–78). The title of the latter paper refers to Descartes’s doctrine of clear and distinct ideas. According to Peirce, the criteria of clarity and distinctness must be supplemented by a third condition of meaningfulness, which states that the meaning of a proposition or an “intellectual conception” lies in its “practical consequences.” In his paper “Pragmatism” (1905) he formulated the “Principle of Pragmatism” or the “Pragmatic Maxim” as follows: In order to ascertain the meaning of an intellectual conception we should consider what Peano, Giuseppe Peirce, Charles S(anders) 651    651 practical consequences might conceivably result by necessity from the truth of that conception; and the sum of these consequences will constitute the entire meaning of the conception. By “practical consequences” Peirce means conditional propositions of the form ‘if p, then q’, where the antecedent describes some action or experimental condition, and the consequent describes an observable phenomenon or a “sensible effect.” According to the Pragmatic Maxim, the meaning of a proposition (or of an “intellectual conception”) can be expressed as a conjunction of such “practical conditionals.” The Pragmatic Maxim might be criticized on the ground that many meaningful sentences (e.g., theoretical hypotheses) do not entail any “practical consequences” in themselves, but only in conjunction with other hypotheses. Peirce anticipated this objection by observing that “the maxim of pragmatism is that a conception can have no logical effect or import differing from that of a second conception except so far as, taken in connection with other conceptions and intentions, it might conceivably modify our practical conduct differently from that of the second conception” (“Pragmatism and Abduction,” 1903). Theory of inquiry and philosophy of science. Peirce adopted Bain’s definition of belief as “that which a man is prepared to act upon.” Belief guides action, and as a content of belief a proposition can be regarded as a maxim of conduct. According to Peirce, belief is a satisfactory and desirable state, whereas the opposite of belief, the state of doubt, is an unsatisfactory state. The starting point of inquiry is usually some surprising phenomenon that is inconsistent with one’s previously accepted beliefs, and that therefore creates a state of doubt. The purpose of inquiry is the replacement of this state by that of belief: “the sole aim of inquiry is the settlement of opinion.” A successful inquiry leads to stable opinion, a state of belief that need not later be given up. Peirce regarded the ultimate stability of opinion as a criterion of truth and reality: “the real . . . is that which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of you and me.” He accepted, however, an objectivist conception of truth and reality: the defining characteristic of reality is its independence of the opinions of individual persons. In “The Fixation of Belief” Peirce argued that the scientific method, a method in which we let our beliefs be determined by external reality, “by something upon which our thinking has no effect,” is the best way of settling opinion. Much of his philosophical work was devoted to the analysis of the various forms of inference and argument employed in science. He studied the concept of probability and probabilistic reasoning in science, criticized the subjectivist view of probability, and adopted an objectivist conception, according to which probability can be defined as a relative frequency in the long run. Peirce distinguished between three main types of inference, which correspond to three stages of inquiry: (i) abduction, a tentative acceptance of an explanatory hypothesis which, if true, would make the phenomenon under investigation intelligible; (ii) deduction, the derivation of testable consequences from the explanatory hypothesis; and (iii) induction, the evaluation of the hypothesis in the light of these consequences. He called this method of inquiry the inductive method; in the contemporary philosophy of science it is usually called the hypothetico-deductive method. According to Peirce, the scientific method can be viewed as an application of the pragmatic maxim: the testable consequences derived from an explanatory hypothesis constitute its concrete “meaning” in the sense of the Pragmatic Maxim. Thus the Maxim determines the admissibility of a hypothesis as a possible (meaningful) explanation. According to Pierce, inquiry is always dependent on beliefs that are not subject to doubt at the time of the inquiry, but such beliefs might be questioned on some other occasion. Our knowledge does not rest on indubitable “first premises,” but all beliefs are dependent on other beliefs. According to Peirce’s doctrine of fallibilism, the conclusions of science are always tentative. The rationality of the scientific method does not depend on the certainty of its conclusions, but on its self-corrective character: by continued application of the method science can detect and correct its own mistakes, and thus eventually lead to the discovery of truth. Logic, the theory of signs, and the philosophy of language. In “The Logic of Relatives,” published in 1883 in a collection of papers by himself and his students at the Johns Hopkins University (Studies in Logic by Members of the Johns Hopkins University), Peirce formalized relational statements by using subscript indices for individuals (individual variables), and construed the quantifiers ‘some’ and ‘every’ as variable binding operators; thus Peirce can be regarded (together Peirce, Charles S(anders) Peirce, Charles S(anders) 652    652 with the German logician Frege) as one of the founders of quantification theory (predicate logic). In his paper “On the Algebra of Logic – A Contribution to the Philosophy of Notation” (1885) he interpreted propositional logic as a calculus of truth-values, and defined (logically) necessary truth (in propositional logic) as truth for all truth-value assignments to sentential letters. He studied the logic of modalities and in the 1890s he invented a system of logical graphs (called “existential graphs”), based on a diagrmatic representation of propositions, in which he anticipated some basic ideas of the possible worlds semantics of modal logic. Peirce’s letters and notebooks contain significant logical and philosophical insights. For exple, he exined three-valued truth tables (“Triadic Logic”), and discovered (in 1886) the possibility of representing the truth-functional connectives of propositional logic by electrical switching circuits. Peirce regarded logic as a part of a more general area of inquiry, the theory of signs, which he also called semeiotic (nowadays usually spelled ‘semiotic(s)’). According to Peirce, sign relations are triadic, involving the sign itself, its object (or what the sign stands for), and an interpretant which determines how the sign represents the object; the interpretant can be regarded as the meaning of the sign. The interpretant of a sign is another sign which in turn has its own interpretant (or interpretants); such a sequence of interpretants ends in an “ultimate logical interpretant,” which is “a change of habit of conduct.” On the basis of the triadic character of the sign relation Peirce distinguished three divisions of signs. These divisions were based on (i) the character of the sign itself, (ii) the relation between the sign and its object, and (iii) the way in which the interpretant represents the object. These divisions reflect Peirce’s system of three fundental ontological categories, which he termed Quality or Firstness, Relation or Secondness, and Representation or Thirdness. Thus, according to the first division, a sign can be (a) a qualisign, a mere quality or appearance (a First); (b) a sinsign or token, an individual object, or event (a Second); or (c) a legisign or a general type (a Third). Secondly, signs can be divided into icons, indices, and symbols on the basis of their relations to their objects: an icon refers to an object on the basis of its similarity to the object (in some respect); an index stands in a dynic or causal relation to its object; whereas a symbol functions as a sign of an object by virtue of a rule or habit of interpretation. Peirce’s third division divides signs into rhemes (predicative signs), propositional signs (propositions), and arguments. Some of the concepts and distinctions introduced by Peirce, e.g., the distinction between “types” and “tokens” and the division of signs into “icons,” “indices,” and “symbols,” have become part of the standard conceptual repertoire of philosophy and semiotics. In his philosophy of language Peirce made a distinction between a proposition and an assertion, and studied the logical character of assertive speech acts. Metaphysics. In spite of his critical attitude toward traditional metaphysics, Peirce believed that metaphysical questions can be discussed in a meaningful way. According to Peirce, metaphysics studies the most general traits of reality, and “kinds of phenomena with which every man’s experience is so saturated that he usually pays no particular attention to them.” The basic categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness mentioned above occupy a central position in Peirce’s metaphysics. Especially in his later writings he emphasized the reality and metaphysical irreducibility of Thirdness, and defended the view that general phenomena (for exple, general laws) cannot be regarded as mere conjunctions of their actual individual instances. This view was associated with Peirce’s synechism, the doctrine that the world contains genuinely continuous phenomena. He regarded synechism as a new form of Scholastic realism. In the area of modalities Peirce’s basic categories appear as possibility, actuality, and necessity. Here he argued that reality cannot be identified with existence (or actuality), but comprises real (objective) possibilities. This view was partly based on his realization that many conditional statements, for instance the “practical” conditionals expressing the empirical import of a proposition (in the sense of the Pragmatic Maxim), cannot be construed as material or truth-functional conditionals, but must be regarded as modal (subjunctive) conditionals. In his cosmology Peirce propounded the doctrine of tychism, according to which there is absolute chance in the universe, and the basic laws of nature are probabilistic and inexact. Peirce’s position in contemporary philosophy. Peirce had few disciples, but some of his students and colleagues bece influential figures in erican philosophy and science, e.g., the philosophers Jes, Royce, and Dewey and the economist Thorstein Veblen. Peirce’s pragmatism Peirce, Charles S(anders) Peirce, Charles S(anders) 653    653 bece widely known through Jes’s lectures and writings, but Peirce was dissatisfied with Jes’s version of pragmatism, and rened his own form of it ‘pragmaticism’, which term he considered to be “ugly enough to keep it safe from kidnappers.” Pragmatism bece an influential philosophical movement during the twentieth century through Dewey (philosophy of science and philosophy of education), C. I. Lewis (theory of knowledge), Rsey, Ernest Nagel, and Quine (philosophy of science). Peirce’s work in logic influenced, mainly through his contacts with the German logician Ernst Schröder, the model-theoretic tradition in twentieth-century logic. There are three comprehensive collections of Peirce’s papers: Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (1931–58), vols. 1–6 edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, vols. 7–8 edited by Arthur Burks; The New Elements of Mathematics by Charles S. Peirce (1976), edited by Carolyn Eisele; and Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition (1982–).  DEWEY, JES, PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE, PRAGMATISM, TRUTH, TYCHISM. R.Hi.

Peirce’s law, the principle ‘((A P B) P A) P A’, which holds in classical logic but fails in the eyes of relevance logicians when ‘ P’ is read as ‘entails’. 

Pelagianism, the doctrine in Christian theology that, through the exercise of free will, human beings can attain moral perfection. A broad movement devoted to this proposition was only loosely associated with its eponymous leader. Pelagius (c.354–c.425), a lay theologian from Britain or Ireland, taught in Rome prior to its sacking in 410. He and his disciple Celestius found a forceful adversary in Augustine, whom they provoked to stiffen his stance on original sin, the bondage of the will, and humanity’s total reliance upon God’s grace and predestination for salvation. To Pelagius, this constituted fatalism and encouraged moral apathy. God would not demand perfection, as the Bible sometimes suggested, were that impossible to attain. Rather grace made the struggle easier for a sanctity that would not be unreachable even in its absence. Though in the habit of sinning, in consequence of the fall, we have not forfeited the capacity to overcome that habit nor been released from the imperative to do so. For all its moral earnestness this teaching seems to be in conflict with much of the New Testent, especially as interpreted by Augustine, and it was condemned as heresy in 418. The bondage of the will has often been reaffirmed, perhaps most notably by Luther in dispute with Erasmus. Yet Christian theology and practice have always had their sympathizers with Pelagianism and with its reluctance to attest the loss of free will, the inevitability of sin, and the utter necessity of God’s grace. A.E.L. Pelagius.

per accidens (Latin, ‘by accident’), by, as, or being an accident or non-essential feature. A per accidens predication is one in which an accident is predicated of a substance. (The terminology is medieval. Note that the accident and substance themselves, not words standing for them, are the terms of the predication relation.) An ens (entity) per accidens is either an accident or the “accidental unity” of a substance and an accident (Descartes, e.g., insists that a person is not a per accidens union of body and mind.)

perception, the extraction and use of information about one’s environment (exteroception) and one’s own body (interoception). The various external senses – sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste – though they overlap to some extent, are distinguished by the kind of information (e.g., about light, sound, temperature, pressure) they deliver. Proprioception, perception of the self, concerns stimuli arising within, and carrying information about, one’s own body – e.g., acceleration, position, and orientation of the limbs. There are distinguishable stages in the extraction and use of sensory information, one (an earlier stage) corresponding to our perception of objects (and events), the other, a later stage, to the perception of facts about these objects. We see, e.g., both the cat on the sofa (an object) and that the cat is on the sofa (a fact). Seeing an object (or event) – a cat on the sofa, a person on the street, or a vehicle’s movement – does not require that the object (event) be identified or recognized in any particular way (perhaps, though this is controversial, in any way whatsoever). One can, e.g., see a cat on the sofa and mistake it for a rumpled sweater. Airplane lights are often misidentified as stars, and one can see the movement of an object either as the movement of oneself or (under some viewing conditions) as Peirce’s law perception 654    654 expansion (or contraction). Seeing objects and events is, in this sense, non-epistemic: one can see O without knowing (or believing) that it is O that one is seeing. Seeing facts, on the other hand, is epistemic; one cannot see that there is a cat on the sofa without, thereby, coming to know that there is a cat on the sofa. Seeing a fact is coming to know the fact in some visual way. One can see objects – the fly in one’s soup, e.g., – without realizing that there is a fly in one’s soup (thinking, perhaps, it is a bean or a crouton); but to see a fact, the fact that there is a fly in one’s soup is, necessarily, to know it is a fly. This distinction applies to the other sense modalities as well. One can hear the telephone ringing without realizing that it is the telephone (perhaps it’s the TV or the doorbell), but to hear a fact, that it is the telephone (that is ringing), is, of necessity, to know that it is the telephone that is ringing. The other ways we have of describing what we perceive are primarily variations on these two fundental themes. In seeing where (he went), when (he left), who (went with him), and how he was dressed, e.g., we are describing the perception of some fact of a certain sort without revealing exactly which fact it is. If Martha saw where he went, then Martha saw (hence, ce to know) some fact having to do with where he went, some fact of the form ‘he went there’. In speaking of states and conditions (the condition of his room, her injury), and properties (the color of his tie, the height of the building), we sometimes, as in the case of objects, mean to be describing a non-epistemic perceptual act, one that carries no implications for what (if anything) is known. In other cases, as with facts, we mean to be describing the acquisition of some piece of knowledge. One can see or hear a word without recognizing it as a word (it might be in a foreign language), but can one see a misprint and not know it is a misprint? It obviously depends on what one uses ‘misprint’ to refer to: an object (a word that is misprinted) or a fact (the fact that it is misprinted). In exining and evaluating theories (whether philosophical or psychological) of perception it is essential to distinguish fact perception from object perception. For a theory might be a plausible theory about the perception of objects (e.g., psychological theories of “early vision”) but not at all plausible about our perception of facts. Fact perception, involving, as it does, knowledge (and, hence, belief) brings into play the entire cognitive system (memory, concepts, etc.) in a way the former does not. Perceptual relativity – e.g., the idea that what we perceive is relative to our language, our conceptual scheme, or the scientific theories we have available to “interpret” phenomena – is quite implausible as a theory about our perception of objects. A person lacking a word for, say, kumquats, lacking this concept, lacking a scientific way of classifying these objects (are they a fruit? a vegetable? an animal?), can still see, touch, smell, and taste kumquats. Perception of objects does not depend on, and is therefore not relative to, the observer’s linguistic, conceptual, cognitive, and scientific assets or shortcomings. Fact perception, however, is another matter. Clearly one cannot see that there are kumquats in the basket (as opposed to seeing the objects, the kumquats, in the basket) if one has no idea of, no concept of, what a kumquat is. Seeing facts is much more sensitive (and, hence, relative) to the conceptual resources, the background knowledge and scientific theories, of the observer, and this difference must be kept in mind in evaluating claims about perceptual relativity. Though it does not make objects invisible, ignorance does tend to make facts perceptually inaccessible. There are characteristic experiences associated with the different senses. Tasting a kumquat is not at all like seeing a kumquat although the se object is perceived (indeed, the se fact – that it is a kumquat – may be perceived). The difference, of course, is in the subjective experience one has in perceiving the kumquat. A causal theory of perception (of objects) holds that the perceptual object, what it is we see, taste, smell, or whatever, is that object that causes us to have this subjective experience. Perceiving an object is that object’s causing (in the right way) one to have an experience of the appropriate sort. I see a bean in my soup if it is, in fact (whether I know it or not is irrelevant), a bean in my soup that is causing me to have this visual experience. I taste a bean if, in point of fact, it is a bean that is causing me to have the kind of taste experience I  now having. If it is (unknown to me) a bug, not a bean, that is causing these experiences, then I  (unwittingly) seeing and tasting a bug – perhaps a bug that looks and tastes like a bean. What object we see (taste, smell, etc.) is determined by the causal facts in question. What we know and believe, how we interpret the experience, is irrelevant, although it will, of course, determine what we say we see and taste. The se is to be said, with appropriate changes, for our perception of facts (the most significant change being the replacement of belief for experience). I see that there is a bug in my soup if the fact that there is a bug in my soup causes me to perception perception 655    655 believe that there is a bug in my soup. I can taste that there is a bug in my soup when this fact causes me to have this belief via some taste sensation. A causal theory of perception is more than the claim that the physical objects we perceive cause us to have experiences and beliefs. This much is fairly obvious. It is the claim that this causal relation is constitutive of perception, that necessarily, if S sees O, then O causes a certain sort of experience in S. It is, according to this theory, impossible, on conceptual grounds, to perceive something with which one has no causal contact. If, e.g., future events do not cause present events, if there is no backward causation, then we cannot perceive future events and objects. Whether or not future facts can be perceived (or known) depends on how liberally the causal condition on knowledge is interpreted. Though conceding that there is a world of mind-independent objects (trees, stars, people) that cause us to have experiences, some philosophers – traditionally called representative realists – argue that we nonetheless do not directly perceive these external objects. What we directly perceive are the effects these objects have on us – an internal image, idea, or impression, a more or less (depending on conditions of observation) accurate representation of the external reality that helps produce it. This subjective, directly apprehended object has been called by various nes: a sensation, percept, sensedatum, sensum, and sometimes, to emphasize its representational aspect, Vorstellung (German, ‘representation’). Just as the images appearing on a television screen represent their remote causes (the events occurring at some distant concert hall or playing field), the images (visual, auditory, etc.) that occur in the mind, the sensedata of which we are directly aware in normal perception, represent (or sometimes, when things are not working right, misrepresent) their external physical causes. The representative realist typically invokes arguments from illusion, facts about hallucination, and temporal considerations to support his view. Hallucinations are supposed to illustrate the way we can have the se kind of experience we have when (as we commonly say) we see a real bug without there being a real bug (in our soup or anywhere else) causing us to have the experience. When we hallucinate, the bug we “see” is, in fact, a figment of our own imagination, an image (i.e., sense-datum) in the mind that, because it shares some of the properties of a real bug (shape, color, etc.), we might mistake for a real bug. Since the subjective experiences can be indistinguishable from that which we have when (as we commonly say) we really see a bug, it is reasonable to infer (the representative realist argues) that in normal perception, when we take ourselves to be seeing a real bug, we are also directly aware of a buglike image in the mind. A hallucination differs from a normal perception, not in what we are aware of (in both cases it is a sense-datum) but in the cause of these experiences. In normal perception it is an actual bug; in hallucination it is, say, drugs in the bloodstre. In both cases, though, we are caused to have the se thing: an awareness of a buglike sense-datum, an object that, in normal perception, we naively take to be a real bug (thus saying, and encouraging our children to say, that we see a bug). The argument from illusion points to the fact that our experience of an object changes even when the object that we perceive (or say we perceive) remains unchanged. Though the physical object (the bug or whatever) remains the se color, size, and shape, what we experience (according to this argument) changes color, shape, and size as we change the lighting, our viewing angle, and distance. Hence, it is concluded, what we experience cannot really be the physical object itself. Since it varies with changes in both object and viewing conditions, what we experience must be a causal result, an effect, of both the object we commonly say we see (the bug) and the conditions in which we view it. This internal effect, it is concluded, is a sense-datum. Representative realists have also appealed to the fact that perceiving a physical object is a causal process that takes time. This temporal lag is most dratic in the case of distant objects (e.g., stars), but it exists for every physical object (it takes time for a neural signal to be transmitted from receptor surfaces to the brain). Consequently, at the moment (a short time after light leaves the object’s surface) we see a physical object, the object could no longer exist. It could have ceased to exist during the time light was being transmitted to the eye or during the time it takes the eye to communicate with the brain. Yet, even if the object ceases to exist before we become aware of anything (before a visual experience occurs), we are, or so it seems, aware of something when the causal process reaches its climax in the brain. This something of which we are aware, since it cannot be the physical object (it no longer exists), must be a sense-datum. The representationalist concludes in this “time-lag argument,” therefore, that even when the physperception perception 656    656 ical object does not cease to exist (this, of course, is the normal situation), we are directly aware, not of it, but of its (slightly later-occurring) representation. Representative realists differ ong themselves about the question of how much (if at all) the sense-data of which we are aware resemble the external objects (of which we are not aware). Some take the external cause to have some of the properties (the so-called primary properties) of the datum (e.g., extension) and not others (the so-called secondary properties – e.g., color). Direct (or naive) realism shares with representative realism a commitment to a world of independently existing objects. Both theories are forms of perceptual realism. It differs, however, in its view of how we are related to these objects in ordinary perception. Direct realists deny that we are aware of mental intermediaries (sensedata) when, as we ordinarily say, we see a tree or hear the telephone ring. Though direct realists differ in their degree of naïveté about how (and in what respect) perception is supposed to be direct, they need not be so naive (as sometimes depicted) as to deny the scientific facts about the causal processes underlying perception. Direct realists can easily admit, e.g., that physical objects cause us to have experiences of a particular kind, and that these experiences are private, subjective, or mental. They can even admit that it is this causal relationship (between object and experience) that constitutes our seeing and hearing physical objects. They need not, in other words, deny a causal theory of perception. What they must deny, if they are to remain direct realists, however, is an analysis of the subjective experience (that objects cause us to have) into an awareness of some object. For to understand this experience as an awareness of some object is, given the wholly subjective (mental) character of the experience itself, to interpose a mental entity (what the experience is an awareness of) between the perceiver and the physical object that causes him to have this experience, the physical object that is supposed to be directly perceived. Direct realists, therefore, avoid analyzing a perceptual experience into an act (sensing, being aware of, being acquainted with) and an object (the sensum, sense-datum, sensation, mental representation). The experience we are caused to have when we perceive a physical object or event is, instead, to be understood in some other way. The adverbial theory is one such possibility. As the ne suggests, this theory takes its cue from the way nouns and adjectives can sometimes be converted into adverbs without loss of descriptive content. So, for instance, it comes to pretty much the se thing whether we describe a conversation as animated (adjective) or say that we conversed animatedly (an adverb). So, also, according to an adverbialist, when, as we commonly say, we see a red ball, the red ball causes in us (a moment later) an experience, yes, but not (as the representative realist says) an awareness (mental act) of a sense-datum (mental object) that is red and circular (adjectives). The experience is better understood as one in which there is no object at all, as sensing redly and circularly (adverbs). The adverbial theorist insists that one can experience circularly and redly without there being, in the mind or anywhere else, red circles (this, in fact, is what the adverbialist thinks occurs in dres and hallucinations of red circles). To experience redly is not to have a red experience; nor is it to experience redness (in the mind). It is, says the adverbialist, a way or a manner of perceiving ordinary objects (especially red ones seen in normal light). Just as dancing gracefully is not a thing we dance, so perceiving redly is not a thing – and certainly not a red thing in the mind – that we experience. The adverbial theory is only one option the direct realist has of acknowledging the causal basis of perception while, at the se time, maintaining the directness of our perceptual relation with independently existing objects. What is important is not that the experience be construed adverbially, but that it not be interpreted, as representative realists interpret it, as awareness of some internal object. For a direct realist, the appearances, though they are subjective (mind-dependent) are not objects that interpose themselves between the conscious mind and the external world. As classically understood, both naive and representative realism are theories about object perception. They differ about whether it is the external object or an internal object (an idea in the mind) that we (most directly) apprehend in ordinary sense perception. But they need not (although they usually do) differ in their analysis of our knowledge of the world around us, in their account of fact perception. A direct realist about object perception may, e.g., be an indirect realist about the facts that we know about these objects. To see, not only a red ball in front of one, but that there is a red ball in front of one, it may be necessary, even on a direct theory of (object) perception, to infer (or in some way derive) this fact from facts that are known more directly perception perception about one’s experiences of the ball. Since, e.g., a direct theorist may be a causal theorist, may think that seeing a red ball is (in part) constituted by the having of certain sorts of experience, she may insist that knowledge of the cause of these experiences must be derived from knowledge of the experience itself. If one is an adverbialist, e.g., one might insist that knowledge of physical objects is derived from knowledge of how (redly? bluely? circularly? squarely?) one experiences these objects. By the se token, a representative realist could adopt a direct theory of fact perception. Though the objects we directly see are mental, the facts we come to know by experiencing these subjective entities are facts about ordinary physical objects. We do not infer (at least at no conscious level) that there is a bug in our soup from facts (known more directly) about our own conscious experiences (from facts about the sensations the bug causes in us). Rather, our sensations cause us, directly, to have beliefs about our soup. There is no intermediate belief; hence, there is no intermediate knowledge; hence, no intermediate fact perception. Fact perception is, in this sense, direct. Or so a representative realist can maintain even though committed to the indirect perception of the objects (bug and soup) involved in this fact. This merely illustrates, once again, the necessity of distinguishing object perception from fact perception.  DIRECT REALISM, EPISTEMOLOGY, METAPHYSICAL REALISM, PHILOSOPHY OF MIND, SKEPTICISM,

Percival, Thomas (1740–1804), English physician and author of Medical Ethics (1803). He was central in bringing the Western traditions of medical ethics from prayers and oaths (e.g., the Hippocratic oath) toward more detailed, modern codes of proper professional conduct. His writing on the normative aspects of medical practice was part ethics, part prudential advice, part professional etiquette, and part jurisprudence. Medical Ethics treated standards for the professional conduct of physicians relative to surgeons and apothecaries (pharmacists and general practitioners), as well as hospitals, private practice, and the law. The issues Percival addressed include privacy, truth telling, rules for professional consultation, human experimentation, public and private trust, compassion, sanity, suicide, abortion, capital punishment, and environmental nuisances. Percival had his greatest influence in England and erica. At its founding in 1847, the erican Medical Association used Medical Ethics to guide its own first code of medical ethics.

perdurance, in one common philosophical use, the property of being temporally continuous and having temporal parts. There are at least two conflicting theories about temporally continuous substances. According to the first, temporally continuous substances have temporal parts (they perdure), while according to the second, they do not. In one ordinary philosophical use, endurance is the property of being temporally continuous and not having temporal parts. There are modal versions of the aforementioned two theories: for exple, one version of the first theory is that necessarily, temporally continuous substances have temporal parts, while another version implies that possibly, they do not. Some versions of the first theory hold that a temporally continuous substance is composed of instantaneous temporal parts or “object-stages,” while on other versions these object-stages are not parts but boundaries.  IDENTITY, METAPHYSICS, PERSONAL

perfect competition, the state of an ideal market under the following conditions: (a) every consumer in the market is a perfectly rational maximizer of utility; (b) every producer is a perfect maximizer of profit; (c) there is a very large (ideally infinite) number of producers of the good in question, which ensures that no producer can set the price for its output (otherwise, an imperfect competitive state of oligopoly or monopoly obtains); and (d) every producer provides a product perfectly indistinguishable from that of other producers (if consumers could distinguish products to the point that there was no longer a very large number of producers for each distinguishable good, competition would again be imperfect). Under these conditions, the market price is equal to the marginal cost of producing the last unit. This in turn determines the market supply of the good, since each producer will gain by increasing production when price exceeds marginal cost and will generally cut losses by decreasing production when marginal cost exceeds price. Perfect competition is sometimes perceptual realism perfect competition 658    658 thought to have normative implications for political philosophy, since it results in Pareto optimality. The concept of perfect competition becomes extremely complicated when a market’s evolution is considered. Producers who cannot equate marginal cost with the market price will have negative profit and must drop out of the market. If this happens very often, then the number of producers will no longer be large enough to sustain perfect competition, so new producers will need to enter the market.  PHILOSOPHY OF ECONOMICS, PRODUCTION

perfectionism, an ethical view according to which individuals and their actions are judged by a maximal standard of achievement – specifically, the degree to which they approach ideals of aesthetic, intellectual, emotional, or physical “perfection.” Perfectionism, then, may depart from, or even dispense with, standards of conventional morality in favor of standards based on what appear to be non-moral values. These standards reflect an admiration for certain very rare levels of human achievement. Perhaps the most characteristic of these standards are artistic and other forms of creativity; but they prominently include a variety of other activities and emotional states deemed “noble” – e.g., heroic endurance in the face of great suffering. The perfectionist, then, would also tend toward a rather non-egalitarian – even aristocratic – view of humankind. The rare genius, the inspired few, the suffering but courageous artist – these exples of human perfection are genuinely worthy of our estimation, according to this view. Although no fully worked-out system of “perfectionist philosophy” has been attempted, aspects of all of these doctrines may be found in such philosophers as Nietzsche. Aristotle, as well, appears to endorse a perfectionist idea in his characterization of the human good. Just as the good lyre player not only exhibits the characteristic activities of this profession but achieves standards of excellence with respect to these, the good human being, for Aristotle, must achieve standards of excellence with respect to the virtue or virtues distinctive of human life in general. 

Peripatetic School, also called Peripatos, the philosophical community founded by Aristotle at a public gymnasium (the Lyceum) after his return to Athens in c.335 B.C. The derivation of ‘Peripatetic’ from the alleged Aristotelian custom of “walking about” (peripatein) is probably wrong. The ne should be explained by reference to a “covered walking hall” (peripatos) ong the school facilities. A scholarch or headmaster presided over roughly two classes of members: the presbyteroi or seniors, who probably had some teaching duties, and the neaniskoi or juniors. No evidence of female philosophers in the Lyceum has survived. During Aristotle’s lifetime his own lectures, whether for the inner circle of the school or for the city at large, were probably the key attraction and core activity; but given Aristotle’s knack for organizing group research projects, we may assume that young and old Peripatetics spent much of their time working on their own specific assignments either at the library, where they could consult works of earlier writers, or at some kind of repository for specimens used in zoological and botanical investigations. As a resident alien, Aristotle could not own property in Athens and hence was not the legal owner of the school. Upon his final departure from Athens in 322, his longtime collaborator Theophrastus of Eresus in Lesbos (c.370–287) succeeded him as scholarch. Theophrastus was an able Aristotelian who wrote extensively on metaphysics, psychology, physiology, botany, ethics, politics, and the history of philosophy. With the help of the Peripatetic dictator Demetrius of Phaleron, he was able to secure property rights over the physical facilities of the school. Under Theophrastus, the Peripatos continued to flourish and is said to have had 2,000 students, surely not all at the se time. His successor, Strato of Lpsakos (c.335–269), had narrower interests and abandoned key Aristotelian tenets. With him a progressive decline set in, to which the early loss of Aristotle’s personal library, taken to Asia Minor perfect duty Peripatetic School 659    659 by Neleus of Skepsis, certainly contributed. By the first century B.C. the Peripatos had ceased to exist. Philosophers of later periods sympathetic to Aristotle’s views have also been called Peripatetics. 

Perry, Ralph Barton (1876–1957), erican philosopher who taught at Harvard University and wrote extensively in ethics, social philosophy, and the theory of knowledge. He received a Pulitzer Prize in 1936 for The Thought and Character of Willi Jes, a biography of his teacher and colleague. Perry’s other major works include: The Moral Economy (1909), General Theory of Value (1926), Puritanism and Democracy (1944), and Realms of Value (1954). He is perhaps best known for his views on value. He writes in General Theory of Value, “Any object, whatever it be, acquires value when any interest, whatever it be, is taken in it; just as anything whatsoever becomes a target when anyone whosoever aims at it.” Something’s having value is nothing but its being the object of some interest, and to know whether it has value one need only know whether it is the object of someone’s interest. Morality aims at the promotion of the moral good, which he defines as “harmonious happiness.” This consists in the reconciliation, harmonizing, and fulfillment of all interests. Perry’s epistemological and metaphysical views were part of a revolt against idealism and dualism. Along with five other philosophers, he wrote The New Realism (1912). The “New Realists” held that the objects of perception and memory are directly presented to consciousness and are just what they appear to be; nothing intervenes between the knower and the external world. The view that the objects of perception and memory are presented by means of ideas leads, they argued, to idealism, skepticism, and absurdity. Perry is also known for having developed, along with E. B. Holt, the “specific response” theory, which is an attempt to construe belief and perception in terms of bodily adjustment and behavior. 

personal identity, the (numerical) identity over time of persons. The question of what personal identity consists in is the question of what it is (what the necessary and sufficient conditions are) for a person existing at one time and a person existing at another time to be one and the se person. Here there is no question of there being any entity that is the “identity” of a person; to say that a person’s identity consists in such and such is just shorthand for saying that facts about personal identity, i.e., facts to the effect that someone existing at one time is the se as someone existing at another time, consist in such and such. (This should not be confused with the usage, common in ordinary speech and in psychology, in which persons are said to have identities, and, sometimes, to seek, lose, or regain their identities, where one’s “identity” intimately involves a set of values and goals that structure one’s life.) The words ‘identical’ and ‘se’ mean nothing different in judgments about persons than in judgments about other things. The problem of personal identity is therefore not one of defining a special sense of ‘identical,’ and it is at least misleading to characterize it as defining a particular kind of identity. Applying Quine’s slogan “no entity without identity,” one might say that characterizing any sort of entity involves indicating what the identity conditions for entities of that sort are (so, e.g., part of the explanation of the concept of a set is that sets having the se members are identical), and that asking what the identity of persons consists in is just a way of asking what sorts of things persons are. But the main focus in traditional discussions of the topic has been on one kind of identity judgment about persons, nely those asserting “identity over time”; the question has been about what the persistence of persons over time consists in. What has made the identity (persistence) of persons of special philosophical interest is partly its epistemology and partly its connections with moral and evaluative matters. The crucial epistemological fact is that persons have, in memory, an access to their own past histories that is unlike the access they have to the histories of other things (including other persons); when one remembers doing or experiencing something, one normally has no need to employ any criterion of identity in order to know that the subject of the remembered action or experience is (i.e., is identical with) oneself. The moral and evaluative matters include moral responsibility (someone can be held responsible for a past action only Peripatos personal identity if he or she is identical to the person who did it) and our concern for our own survival and future well-being (since it seems, although this has been questioned, that what one wants in wanting to survive is that there should exist in the future someone who is identical to oneself). The modern history of the topic of personal identity begins with Locke, who held that the identity of a person consists neither in the identity of an immaterial substance (as dualists might be expected to hold) nor in the identity of a material substance or “animal body” (as materialists might be expected to hold), and that it consists instead in “se consciousness.” His view appears to have been that the persistence of a person through time consists in the fact that certain actions, thoughts, experiences, etc., occurring at different times, are somehow united in memory. Modern theories descended from Locke’s take memory continuity to be a special case of something more general, psychological continuity, and hold that personal identity consists in this. This is sometimes put in terms of the notion of a “person-stage,” i.e., a momentary “time slice” of the history of a person. A series of person-stages will be psychologically continuous if the psychological states (including memories) occurring in later members of the series grow out of, in certain characteristic ways, those occurring in earlier members of it; and according to the psychological continuity view of personal identity, person-stages occurring at different times are stages of the se person provided they belong to a single, non-branching, psychologically continuous series of person-stages. Opponents of the Lockean and neo-Lockean (psychological continuity) view tend to fall into two cps. Some, following Butler and Reid, hold that personal identity is indefinable, and that nothing informative can be said about what it consists in. Others hold that the identity of a person consists in some sort of physical continuity – perhaps the identity of a living human organism, or the identity of a human brain. In the actual cases we know about (putting aside issues about non-bodily survival of death), psychological continuity and physical continuity go together. Much of the debate between psychological continuity theories and physical continuity theories has centered on the interpretation of thought experiments involving brain transplants, brain-state transfers, etc., in which these come apart. Such exples make vivid the question of whether our fundental criteria of personal identity are psychological, physical, or both. Recently philosophical attention has shifted somewhat from the question of what personal identity consists in to questions about its importance. The consideration of hypothetical cases of “fission” (in which two persons at a later time are psychologically continuous with one person at an earlier time) has suggested to some that we can have survival – or at any rate what matters in survival – without personal identity, and that our self-interested concern for the future is really a concern for whatever future persons are psychologically continuous with us. 

personalism, a version of personal idealism that flourished in the United States (principally at Boston University) from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. Its principal proponents were Borden Parker Bowne (1847– 1910) and three of his students: Albert Knudson (1873–1953); Ralph Flewelling (1871–1960), who founded The Personalist; and, most importantly, Edgar Sheffield Brightman (1884–1953). Their personalism was both idealistic and theistic and was influential in philosophy and in theology. Personalism traced its philosophical lineage to Berkeley and Leibniz, and had as its foundational insight the view that all reality is ultimately personal. God is the transcendent person and the ground or creator of all other persons; nature is a system of objects either for or in the minds of persons. Both Bowne and Brightman considered themselves empiricists in the tradition of Berkeley. Immediate experience is the starting point, but this experience involves a fundental knowledge of the self as a personal being with changing states. Given this pluralism, the coherence, order, and intelligibility of the universe are seen to derive from God, the uncreated person. Bowne’s God is the eternal and omnipotent being of classical theism, but Brightman argued that if God is a real person he must be construed as both temporal and finite. Given the fact of evil, God is seen as gradually gaining control over his created world, with regard to which his will is intrinsically limited. Another version of personalism developed in France out of the neo-Scholastic tradition. E. Mounier (1905–50), Maritain, and Gilson identified themselves as personalists, inasmuch as they viewed the infinite person (God) and finite persons as the source and locus of intrinsic value. They did not, however, view the natural order as intrinsically personal. 

personhood, the condition or property of being a person, especially when this is considered to entail moral and/or metaphysical importance. Personhood has been thought to involve various traits, including (moral) agency; reason or rationality; language, or the cognitive skills language may support (such as intentionality and self-consciousness); and ability to enter into suitable relations with other persons (viewed as members of a self-defining group). Buber emphasized the difference between the I-It relationship holding between oneself and an object, and the IThou relationship, which holds between oneself and another person (who can be addressed). Dennett has construed persons in terms of the “intentional stance,” which involves explaining another’s behavior in terms of beliefs, desires, intentions, etc. Questions about when personhood begins and when it ends have been central to debates about abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia, since personhood has often been viewed as the mark, if not the basis, of a being’s possession of special moral status. 

Peter Lombard (c.1095–1160), Italian theologian and author of the Book of Sentences (Liber sententiarum), a renowned theological sourcebook in the later Middle Ages. Peter was educated at Bologna, Reims, and Paris before teaching in the school of Notre De in Paris. He bece a canon at Notre De in 1144–45 and was elected bishop of Paris in 1159. His extant works include commentaries on the Psalms (written in the mid-1130s) and on the epistles of Paul (c.1139–41); a collection of sermons; and his one-volume summary of Christian doctrine, the Sentences (completed by 1158). The Sentences consists of four books: Book I, On the Trinity; Book II, On the Creation of Things; Book III, On the Incarnation; and Book IV, On the Doctrine of Signs (or Sacrents). His discussion is organized around particular questions or issues e.g., “On Knowledge, Foreknowledge, and Providence” (Book I), “Is God the Cause of Evil and Sin?” (Book II). For a given issue Peter typically presents a brief summary, accompanied by short quotations, of main positions found in Scripture and in the writings of the church fathers and doctors, followed by his own determination or adjudication of the matter. Himself a theological conservative, Peter seems to have intended this sort of compilation of scriptural and ancient doctrinal teaching as a counter to the popularity, fueled by the recent recovery of important parts of Aristotle’s logic, of the application of dialectic to theological matters. The Sentences enjoyed wide circulation and admiration from the beginning, and within a century of its composition it bece a standard text in the theology curriculum. From the midthirteenth through the mid-fourteenth century every student of theology was required, as the last stage in obtaining the highest academic degree, to lecture and comment on Peter’s text. Later medieval thinkers often referred to Peter as “the Master” (magister), thereby testifying to the Sentences’ preeminence in theological training. In lectures and commentaries, the greatest minds of this period used Peter’s text as a frework in which to develop their own original positions and debate with their contemporaries. As a result the Sentences-commentary tradition is an extraordinarily rich repository of later medieval philosophical and theological thought. S.Ma. Peter of Spain. It is now thought that there were two Peters of Spain. The Spanish prelate and philosopher (c.1205–77) was born in Lisbon, studied at Paris, and taught medicine at Siena (1248–50). He served in various ecclesiastical posts in Portugal and Italy (1250–73) before being elected pope as John XXI in 1276. He wrote several books on philosophical psychology and compiled the fous medical work Thesaurus pauperum. The second Peter of Spain was a Spanish Dominican who lived during the first half of the thirteenth century. His Tractatus, later called Summulae logicales, received over 166 printings during subsequent centuries. The Tractatus presents the essentials of Aristotelian logic (propositions, universals, categories, syllogism, dialectical topics, and the sophistical fallacies) and improves on the mnemonic verses of Willi Sherwood; he then introduces the subjects of the so-called parva logicalia (supposition, relatives, pliation, personality Peter of Spain 662    662 appellation, restriction, distribution), all of which were extensively developed in the later Middle Ages. There is not sufficient evidence to claim that Peter wrote a special treatise on consequences, but his understanding of conditionals as assertions of necessary connection undoubtedly played an important role in the rules of simple, as opposed to as-of-now, consequences. I.Bo. petitio principii.

phantasia (Greek, ‘appearance’, ‘imagination’), (1) the state we are in when something appears to us to be the case; (2) the capacity in virtue of which things appear to us. Although frequently used of conscious and imagistic experiences, ‘phantasia’ is not limited to such states; in particular, it can be applied to any propositional attitude where something is taken to be the case. But just as the English ‘appears’ connotes that one has epistemic reservations about what is actually the case, so ‘phantasia’ suggests the possibility of being misled by appearances and is thus often a subject of criticism. According to Plato, phantasia is a “mixture” of sensation and belief; in Aristotle, it is a distinct faculty that makes truth and falsehood possible. The Stoics take a phantasia to constitute one of the most basic mental states, in terms of which other mental states are to be explained, and in rational animals it bears the propositional content expressed in language. This last use becomes prominent in ancient literary and rhetorical theory to designate the ability of language to move us and convey subjects vividly as well as to range beyond the bounds of our immediate experience. Here lie the origins of the modern concept of imagination (although not the Romantic distinction between fancy and imagination). Later Neoplatonists, such as Proclus, take phantasia to be necessary for abstract studies such as geometry, by enabling us to envision spatial relations. 

IMAGINATION. V.C. phase space.STATE. phenomena.KANT. phenomenal body.EMBODIMENT. phenomenalism, the view that propositions asserting the existence of physical objects are equivalent in meaning to propositions asserting that subjects would have certain sequences of sensations were they to have certain others. The basic idea behind phenomenalism is compatible with a number of different analyses of the self or conscious subject. A phenomenalist might understand the self as a substance, a particular, or a construct out of actual and possible experience. The view also is compatible with any number of different analyses of the visual, tactile, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, and kinesthetic sensations described in the antecedents and consequents of the subjunctive conditionals that the phenomenalist uses to analyze physical object propositions (as illustrated in the last paragraph). Probably the most common analysis of sensations adopted by traditional phenomenalists is a sense-datum theory, with the sense-data construed as mind-dependent entities. But there is nothing to prevent a phenomenalist from accepting an adverbial theory or theory of appearing instead. The origins of phenomenalism are difficult to trace, in part because early statements of the view were usually not careful. In his Dialogues, Berkeley hinted at phenomenalism when he had Philonous explain how he could reconcile an ontology containing only minds and ideas with the story of a creation that took place before the existence of people. Philonous imagines that if he had been present at the creation he should have seen things, i.e., had sensations, in the order described in the Bible. It can also be argued, however, that J. S. Mill in An Exination of Sir Willi Hilton’s Philosophy was the first to put forth a clearly phenomenalistic analysis when he identified matter with the “permanent possibility of sensation.” When Mill explained what these permanent possibilities are, he typically used conditionals that describe the sensations one would have if one were placed in certain conditions. The attraction of classical phenomenalism grew with the rise of logical positivism and its acceptance of the verifiability criterion of meaning. Phenomenalists were usually foundationalists who were convinced that justified belief in the physical world rested ultimately on our noninferentially justified beliefs about our sensations. Implicitly committed to the view that only deductive and inductive inferences are legitimate, and further assuming that to be justified in believing one proposition P on the basis of another E, one must be justified in believing both E and that E makes P probable, the phenomenalist saw an insuperable difficulty in justifying belief in ordinary statements about the physical world given prevalent conceptions of physical petitio principii phenomenalism 663    663 objects. If all we ultimately have as our evidence for believing in physical objects is what we know about the occurrence of sensation, how can we establish sensation as evidence for the existence of physical objects? We obviously cannot deduce the existence of physical objects from any finite sequence of sensations. The sensations could, e.g., be hallucinatory. Nor, it seems, can we observe a correlation between sensation and something else in order to generate the premises of an inductive argument for the conclusion that sensations are reliable indicators of physical objects. The key to solving this problem, the phenomenalist argues, is to reduce assertions about the physical world to complicated assertions about the sequences of sensations a subject would have were he to have certain others. The truth of such conditionals, e.g., that if I have the clear visual impression of a cat, then there is one before me, might be mind-independent in the way in which one wants the truth of assertions about the physical world to be mind-independent. And to the phenomenalist’s great relief, it would seem that we could justify our belief in such conditional statements without having to correlate anything but sensations. Many philosophers today reject some of the epistemological, ontological, and metaphilosophical presuppositions with which phenomenalists approached the problem of understanding our relation to the physical world through sensation. But the argument that was historically most decisive in convincing many philosophers to abandon phenomenalism was the argument from perceptual relativity first advanced by Chisholm in “The Problem of Perception.” Chisholm offers a strategy for attacking any phenomenalistic analysis. The first move is to force the phenomenalist to state a conditional describing only sensations that is an alleged consequence of a physical object proposition. C. I. Lewis, e.g., in An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation, claims that the assertion (P) that there is a doorknob before me and to the left entails (C) that if I were to seem to see a doorknob and seem to reach out and touch it then I would seem to feel it. Chisholm argues that if P really did entail C then there could be no assertion R that when conjoined with P did not entail C. There is, however, such an assertion: I  unable to move my limbs and my hands but  subject to delusions such that I think I  moving them; I often seem to be initiating a grasping motion but with no feeling of contacting anything. Chisholm argues, in effect, that what sensations one would have if one were to have certain others always depends in part on the internal and external physical conditions of perception and that this fact dooms any attempt to find necessary and sufficient conditions for the truth of a physical object proposition couched in terms that describe only connections between sensations. 

phenomenology, in the twentieth century, the philosophy developed by Husserl and some of his followers. The term has been used since the mideighteenth century and received a carefully defined technical meaning in the works of both Kant and Hegel, but it is not now used to refer to a homogeneous and systematically developed philosophical position. The question of what phenomenology is may suggest that phenomenology is one ong the many contemporary philosophical conceptions that have a clearly delineated body of doctrines and whose essential characteristics can be expressed by a set of wellchosen statements. This notion is not correct, however. In contemporary philosophy there is no system or school called “phenomenology,” characterized by a clearly defined body of teachings. Phenomenology is neither a school nor a trend in contemporary philosophy. It is rather a movement whose proponents, for various reasons, have propelled it in many distinct directions, with the result that today it means different things to different people. While within the phenomenological movement as a whole there are several related currents, they, too, are by no means homogeneous. Though these currents have a common point of departure, they do not project toward the se destination. The thinking of most phenomenologists has changed so greatly that their respective views can be presented adequately only by showing them in their gradual development. This is true not only for Husserl, founder of the phenomenological movement, but also for such later phenomenologists as Scheler, N. Hartmann, Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. To anyone who studies the phenomenological movement without prejudice the differences ong its many currents are obvious. It has been phenomenal property phenomenology 664    664 said that phenomenology consists in an analysis and description of consciousness; it has been claimed also that phenomenology simply blends with existentialism. Phenomenology is indeed the study of essences, but it also attempts to place essences back into existence. It is a transcendental philosophy interested only in what is “left behind” after the phenomenological reduction is performed, but it also considers the world to be already there before reflection begins. For some philosophers phenomenology is speculation on transcendental subjectivity, whereas for others it is a method for approaching concrete existence. Some use phenomenology as a search for a philosophy that accounts for space, time, and the world, just as we experience and “live” them. Finally, it has been said that phenomenology is an attempt to give a direct description of our experience as it is in itself without taking into account its psychological origin and its causal explanation; but Husserl speaks of a “genetic” as well as a “constitutive” phenomenology. To some people, finding such an abundance of ideas about one and the se subject constitutes a strange situation; for others it is annoying to contemplate the “confusion”; and there will be those who conclude that a philosophy that cannot define its own scope does not deserve the discussion that has been carried on in its regard. In the opinion of many, not only is this latter attitude not justified, but precisely the opposite view defended by Thevenaz should be adopted. As the term ‘phenomenology’ signifies first and foremost a methodical conception, Thevenaz argues that because this method, originally developed for a very particular and limited end, has been able to branch out in so many varying forms, it manifests a latent truth and power of renewal that implies an exceptional fecundity. Speaking of the great variety of conceptions within the phenomenological movement, Merleau-Ponty remarked that the responsible philosopher must recognize that phenomenology may be practiced and identified as a manner or a style of thinking, and that it existed as a movement before arriving at a complete awareness of itself as a philosophy. Rather than force a living movement into a system, then, it seems more in keeping with the ideal of the historian as well as the philosopher to follow the movement in its development, and attempt to describe and evaluate the many branches in and through which it has unfolded itself. In reality the picture is not as dark as it may seem at first sight. Notwithstanding the obvious differences, most phenomenologists share certain insights that are very important for their mutual philosophical conception as a whole. In this connection the following must be mentioned: (1) Most phenomenologists admit a radical difference between the “natural” and the “philosophical” attitude. This leads necessarily to an equally radical difference between philosophy and science. In characterizing this difference some phenomenologists, in agreement with Husserl, stress only epistemological issues, whereas others, in agreement with Heidegger, focus their attention exclusively on ontological topics. (2) Notwithstanding this radical difference, there is a complicated set of relationships between philosophy and science. Within the context of these relationships philosophy has in some sense a foundational task with respect to the sciences, whereas science offers to philosophy at least a substantial part of its philosophical problematic. (3) To achieve its task philosophy must perform a certain reduction, or epoche, a radical change of attitude by which the philosopher turns from things to their meanings, from the ontic to the ontological, from the realm of the objectified meaning as found in the sciences to the realm of meaning as immediately experienced in the “life-world.” In other words, although it remains true that the various phenomenologists differ in characterizing the reduction, no one seriously doubts its necessity. (4) All phenomenologists subscribe to the doctrine of intentionality, though most elaborate this doctrine in their own way. For Husserl intentionality is a characteristic of conscious phenomena or acts; in a deeper sense, it is the characteristic of a finite consciousness that originally finds itself without a world. For Heidegger and most existentialists it is the human reality itself that is intentional; as Being-in-the-world its essence consists in its ek-sistence, i.e., in its standing out toward the world. (5) All phenomenologists agree on the fundental idea that the basic concern of philosophy is to answer the question concerning the “meaning and Being” of beings. All agree in addition that in trying to materialize this goal the philosopher should be primarily interested not in the ultimate cause of all finite beings, but in how the Being of beings and the Being of the world are to be constituted. Finally, all agree that in answering the question concerning the meaning of Being a privileged position is to be attributed to subjectivity, i.e., to that being which questions the Being of beings. Phenomenologists differ, phenomenology phenomenology 665    665 however, the moment they have to specify what is meant by subjectivity. As noted above, whereas Husserl conceives it as a worldless monad, Heidegger and most later phenomenologists conceive it as being-in-the-world. Referring to Heidegger’s reinterpretation of his phenomenology, Husserl writes: one misinterprets my phenomenology backwards from a level which it was its very purpose to overcome, in other words, one has failed to understand the fundental novelty of the phenomenological reduction and hence the progress from mundane subjectivity (i.e., man) to transcendental subjectivity; consequently one has remained stuck in an anthropology . . . which according to my doctrine has not yet reached the genuine philosophical level, and whose interpretation as philosophy means a lapse into “transcendental anthropologism,” that is, “psychologism.” (6) All phenomenologists defend a certain form of intuitionism and subscribe to what Husserl calls the “principle of all principles”: “whatever presents itself in ‘intuition’ in primordial form (as it were in its bodily reality), is simply to be accepted as it gives itself out to be, though only within the limits in which it then presents itself.” Here again, however, each phenomenologist interprets this principle in keeping with his general conception of phenomenology as a whole. Thus, while phenomenologists do share certain insights, the development of the movement has nevertheless been such that it is not possible to give a simple definition of what phenomenology is. The fact remains that there are many phenomenologists and many phenomenologies. Therefore, one can only faithfully report what one has experienced of phenomenology by reading the phenomenologists. 

Philo Judaeus (c.20 B.C.–A.D. 40), Jewish Hellenistic philosopher of Alexandria who composed the bulk of his work in the form of commentaries and discourses on Scripture. He made the first known sustained attempt to synthesize its revealed teachings with the doctrines of classical philosophy. Although he was not the first to apply the methods of allegorical interpretation to Scripture, the number and variety of his interpretations make Philo unique. With this interpretive tool, he transformed biblical narratives into Platonic accounts of the soul’s quest for God and its struggle against passion, and the Mosaic commandments into specific manifestations of general laws of nature. Philo’s most influential idea was his conception of God, which combines the personal, ethical deity of the Bible with the abstract, transcendentalist theology of Platonism and Pythagoreanism. The Philonic deity is both the loving, just God of the Hebrew Patriarchs and the eternal One whose essence is absolutely unknowable and who creates the material world by will from primordial matter which He creates ex nihilo. Besides the intelligible realm of ideas, which Philo is the earliest known philosopher to identify as God’s thoughts, he posited an intermediate divine being which he called, adopting scriptural language, the logos. Although the exact nature of the logos is hard to pin down – Philo variously and, without any concern for consistency, called it the “first-begotten Son of the uncreated Father,” “Second God,” “idea of ideas,” “archetype of human reason,” and “pattern of creation” – its main functions are clear: to bridge the huge gulf between the transcendent deity and the lower world and to serve as the unifying law of the universe, the ground of its order and rationality. A philosophical eclectic, Philo was unknown to medieval Jewish philosophers but, beyond his anticipations of Neoplatonism, he had a lasting impact on Christianity through Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and brose. 

HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHY. J.Ste. Philolaus (470?–390? B.C.), pre-Socratic Greek philosopher from Croton in southern Italy, the first Pythagorean to write a book. The surviving fragments of it are the earliest primary texts for Pythagoreanism, but numerous spurious fragments have also been preserved. Philolaus’s book begins with a cosmogony and includes astronomical, medical, and psychological doctrines. His major innovation was to argue that the cosmos and everything in it is a combination not just of unlimiteds (what is structured and ordered, e.g. material elements) but also of limiters (structural and ordering elements, e.g. shapes). These elements are held together in a harmonia (fitting together), which comes to be in accord with perspicuous mathematical relationships, such as the whole number ratios that correspond to the harmonic intervals (e.g. octave % phenotext Philolaus 666    666 1 : 2). He argued that secure knowledge is possible insofar as we grasp the number in accordance with which things are put together. His astronomical system is fous as the first to make the earth a planet. Along with the sun, moon, fixed stars, five planets, and counter-earth (thus making the perfect number ten), the earth circles the central fire (a combination of the limiter “center” and the unlimited “fire”). Philolaus’s influence is seen in Plato’s Philebus; he is the primary source for Aristotle’s account of Pythagoreanism.  PYTHAGORAS. C.A.H. Philo of Larisa.ACADEMY. Philoponus, John.JOHANNES PHILOPONUS. philosopher’s stone.

philosophia perennis, a supposed body of truths that appear in the writings of the great philosophers, or the truths common to opposed philosophical viewpoints. The term is derived from the title of a book (De perenni philosophia) published by Agostino Steuco of Gubbio in 1540. It suggests that the differences between philosophers are inessential and superficial and that the common essential truth emerges, however partially, in the major philosophical schools. Aldous Huxley employed it as a title. L. Lavelle, N. Hartmann, and K. Jaspers also employ the phrase. M. De Wulf and many others use the phrase to characterize Neo-Thomism as the chosen vehicle of essential philosophical truths. R.M. philosophical anthropology, philosophical inquiry concerning human nature, often starting with the question of what generally characterizes human beings in contrast to other kinds of creatures and things. Thus broadly conceived, it is a kind of inquiry as old as philosophy itself, occupying philosophers from Socrates to Sartre; and it embraces philosophical psychology, the philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, and existentialism. Such inquiry presupposes no immutable “essence of man,” but only the meaningfulness of distinguishing between what is “human” and what is not, and the possibility that philosophy as well as other disciplines may contribute to our self-comprehension. It leaves open the question of whether other kinds of naturally occurring or artificially produced entity may possess the hallmarks of our humanity, and countenances the possibility of the biologically evolved, historically developed, and socially and individually variable character of everything about our attained humanity. More narrowly conceived, philosophical anthropology is a specific movement in recent European philosophy associated initially with Scheler and Helmuth Plessner, and subsequently with such figures as Arnold Gehlen, Cassirer, and the later Sartre. It initially emerged in the late 1920s in Germany, simultaneously with the existential philosophy of Heidegger and the critical social theory of the Frankfurt School, with which it competed as German philosophers turned their attention to the comprehension of human life. This movement was distinguished from the outset by its attempt to integrate the insights of phenomenological analysis with the perspectives attainable through attention to human and comparative biology, and subsequently to social inquiry as well. This turn to a more naturalistic approach to the understanding of ourselves, as a particular kind of living creature ong others, is reflected in the titles of the two works published in 1928 that inaugurated the movement: Scheler’s Man’s Place in Nature and Plessner’s The Levels of the Organic and Man. For both Scheler and Plessner, however, as for those who followed them, our nature must be understood by taking further account of the social, cultural, and intellectual dimensions of human life. Even those like Gehlen, whose Der Mensch (1940) exhibits a strongly biological orientation, devoted much attention to these dimensions, which our biological nature both constrains and makes possible. For all of them, the relation between the biological and the social and cultural dimensions of human life is a central concern and a key to comprehending our human nature. One of the common themes of the later philosophical-anthropological literature – e.g., Cassirer’s An Essay on Man (1945) and Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) as well as Plessner’s Contitio Humana (1965) and Gehlen’s Early Man and Late Culture (1963) – is the plasticity of human nature, made possible by our biological constitution, and the resulting great differences in the ways human beings live. Yet this is not taken to preclude saying anything meaningful about human nature generally; rather, it merely requires attention to the kinds of general features involved and reflected in human diversity and variability. Critics of the very idea and possibility of a philosophical anthropology (e.g., Althusser and Foucault) typically either deny that there are any Philo of Larisa philosophical anthropology 667    667 such general features or maintain that there are none outside the province of the biological sciences (to which philosophy can contribute nothing substantive). Both claims, however, are open to dispute; and the enterprise of a philosophical anthropology remains a viable and potentially significant one. 

philosophy of biology, the philosophy of science applied to biology. On a conservative view of the philosophy of science, the se principles apply throughout science. Biology supplies additional exples but does not provide any special problems or require new principles. For exple, the reduction of Mendelian genetics to molecular biology exemplifies the se sort of relation as the reduction of thermodynics to statistical mechanics, and the se general analysis of reduction applies equally to both. More radical philosophers argue that the subject matter of biology has certain unique features; hence, the philosophy of biology is itself unique. The three features of biology most often cited by those who maintain that philosophy of biology is unique are functional organization, embryological development, and the nature of selection. Organisms are functionally organized. They are capable of maintaining their overall organization in the face of fairly extensive variation in their envisonments. Organisms also undergo ontogenetic development resulting from extremely complex interactions between the genetic makeup of the organism and its successive environments. At each step, the course that an organism takes is determined by an interplay between its genetic makeup, its current state of development, and the environment it happens to confront. The complexity of these interactions produces the nature–nurture problem. Except for human artifacts, similar organization does not occur in the non-living world. The species problem is another classic issue in the philosophy of biology. Biological species have been a paradigm exple of natural kinds since Aristotle. According to nearly all pre-Darwinian philosophers, species are part of the basic makeup of the universe, like gravity and gold. They were held to be as eternal, immutable, and discrete as these other exples of natural kinds. If Darwin was right, species are not eternal. They come and go, and once gone can no more reemerge than Aristotle can once again walk the streets of Athens. Nor are species immutable. A sple of lead can be transmuted into a sple of gold, but these elements as elements remain immutable in the face of such changes. However, Darwin insisted that species themselves, not merely their instances, evolved. Finally, because Darwin thought that species evolved gradually, the boundaries between species are not sharp, casting doubt on the essentialist doctrines so common in his day. In short, if species evolve, they have none of the traditional characteristics of species. Philosophers and biologists to this day are working out the consequences of this radical change in our worldview. The topic that has received the greatest attention by philosophers of biology in the recent literature is the nature of evolutionary theory, in particular selection, adaptation, fitness, and the population structure of species. In order for selection to operate, variation is necessary, successive generations must be organized genealogically, and individuals must interact differentially with their environments. In the simplest case, genes pass on their structure largely intact. In addition, they provide the information necessary to produce organisms. Certain of these organisms are better able to cope with their environments and reproduce than are other organisms. As a result, genes are perpetuated differentially through successive generations. Those characteristics that help an organism cope with its environments are termed adaptations. In a more restricted sense, only those characteristics that arose through past selective advantage count as adaptations. Just as the notion of IQ was devised as a single measure for a combination of the factors that influence our mental abilities, fitness is a measure of relative reproductive success. Claims about the tautological character of the principle philosophical behaviorism philosophy of biology of the survival of the fittest stem from the blunt assertion that fitness just is relative reproductive success, as if intelligence just is what IQ tests measure. Philosophers of biology have collaborated with biologists to analyze the notion of fitness. This literature has concentrated on the role that causation plays in selection and, hence, must play in any adequate explication of fitness. One important distinction that has emerged is between replication and differential interaction with the environment. Selection is a function of the interplay between these two processes. Because of the essential role of variation in selection, all the organisms that belong to the se species either at any one time or through time cannot possibly be essentially the se. Nor can species be treated adequately in terms of the statistical covariance of either characters or genes. The populational structure of species is crucial. For exple, species that form numerous, partially isolated demes are much more likely to speciate than those that do not. One especially controversial question is whether species themselves can function in the evolutionary process rather than simply resulting from it. Although philosophers of biology have played an increasingly important role in biology itself, they have also addressed more traditional philosophical questions, especially in connection with evolutionary epistemology and ethics. Advocates of evolutionary epistemology argue that knowledge can be understood in terms of the adaptive character of accurate knowledge. Those organisms that hold false beliefs about their environment, including other organisms, are less likely to reproduce themselves than those with more accurate beliefs. To the extent that this argument has any force at all, it applies only to humansized entities and events. One common response to evolutionary epistemology is that sometimes people who hold manifestly false beliefs flourish at the expense of those who hold more realistic views of the world in which we live. On another version of evolutionary epistemology, knowledge acquisition is viewed as just one more instance of a selection process. The issue is not to justify our beliefs but to understand how they are generated and proliferated. Advocates of evolutionary ethics attempt to justify certain ethical principles in terms of their survival value. Any behavior that increases the likelihood of survival and reproduction is “good,” and anything that detracts from these ends is “bad.” The main objection to evolutionary ethics is that it violates the is–ought distinction. According to most ethical systems, we are asked to sacrifice ourselves for the good of others. If these others were limited to our biological relatives, then the biological notion of inclusive fitness might be adequate to account for such altruistic behavior, but the scope of ethical systems extends past one’s biological relatives. Advocates of evolutionary ethics are hard pressed to explain the full range of behavior that is traditionally considered as virtuous. Either biological evolution cannot provide an adequate justification for ethical behavior or else ethical systems must be drastically reduced in their scope. 

. philosophy of economics, the study of methodological issues facing positive economic theory and normative problems on the intersection of welfare economics and political philosophy. Methodological issues. Applying approaches and questions in the philosophy of science specifically to economics, the philosophy of economics explores epistemological and conceptual problems raised by the explanatory aims and strategy of economic theory: Do its assumptions about individual choice constitute laws, and do they explain its derived generalizations about markets and economies? Are these generalizations laws, and if so, how are they tested by observation of economic processes, and how are theories in the various compartments of economics – microeconomics, macroeconomics – related to one another and to econometrics? How are the various schools – neoclassical, institutional, Marxian, etc. – related to one another, and what sorts of tests might enable us to choose between their theories? Historically, the chief issue of interest in the development of the philosophy of economics has been the empirical adequacy of the assumptions of rational “economic man”: that all agents have complete and transitive cardinal or ordinal utility rankings or preference orders and that they always choose that available option which maximizes their utility or preferences. Since the actual behavior of agents appears to disconfirm these assumptions, the claim that they constitute causal laws governing economic behavior is difficult to sustain. On the other hand, the assumption of preference-maximizing behavior is indispensable to twentieth-century economics. These two considerations jointly undermine the claim that economic theory honors criteria on explanatory power and evidential probity drawn philosophy of economics philosophy of economics 669    669 from physical science. Much work by economists and philosophers has been devoted therefore to disputing the claim that the assumptions of rational choice theory are false or to disputing the inference from this claim to the conclusion that the cognitive status of economic theory as empirical science is thereby undermined. Most frequently it has been held that the assumptions of rational choice are as harmless and as indispensable as idealizations are elsewhere in science. This view must deal with the allegation that unlike theories embodying idealization elsewhere in science, economic theory gains little more in predictive power from these assumptions about agents’ calculations than it would secure without any assumptions about individual choice. Normative issues. Both economists and political philosophers are concerned with identifying principles that will ensure just, fair, or equitable distributions of scarce goods. For this reason neoclassical economic theory shares a history with utilitarianism in moral philosophy. Contemporary welfare economics continues to explore the limits of utilitarian prescriptions that optimal economic and political arrangements should maximize and/or equalize utility, welfare, or some surrogate. It also exines the adequacy of alternatives to such utilitarian principles. Thus, economics shares an agenda of interests with political and moral philosophy. Utilitarianism in economics and philosophy has been constrained by an early realization that utilities are neither cardinally measurable nor interpersonally comparable. Therefore the prescription to maximize and/or equalize utility cannot be determinatively obeyed. Welfare theorists have nevertheless attempted to establish principles that will enable us to determine the equity, fairness, or justice of various economic arrangements, and that do not rely on interpersonal comparisons required to measure whether a distribution is maximal or equal in the utility it accords all agents. Inspired by philosophers who have surrendered utilitarianism for other principles of equality, fairness, or justice in distribution, welfare economists have explored Kantian, social contractarian, and communitarian alternatives in a research progr that cuts clearly across both disciplines. Political philosophy has also profited as much from innovations in economic theory as welfare economics has benefited from moral philosophy. Theorems from welfare economics that establish the efficiency of markets in securing distributions that meet minimal conditions of optimality and fairness have led moral philosophers to reexine the moral status of free-market exchange. Moreover, philosophers have come to appreciate that coercive social institutions are sometimes best understood as devices for securing public goods – goods like police protection that cannot be provided to those who pay for them without also providing them to free riders who decline to do so. The recognition that everyone would be worse off, including free riders, were the coercion required to pay for these goods not imposed, is due to welfare economics and has led to a significant revival of interest in the work of Hobbes, who appears to have prefigured such arguments. 

. philosophy of education, a branch of philosophy concerned with virtually every aspect of the educational enterprise. It significantly overlaps other, more mainstre branches (especially epistemology and ethics, but even logic and metaphysics). The field might almost be construed as a “series of footnotes” to Plato’s Meno, wherein are raised such fundental issues as whether virtue can be taught; what virtue is; what knowledge is; what the relation between knowledge of virtue and being virtuous is; what the relation between knowledge and teaching is; and how and whether teaching is possible. While few people would subscribe to Plato’s doctrine (or convenient fiction, perhaps) in Meno that learning by being taught is a process of recollection, the paradox of inquiry that prompts this doctrine is at once the root text of the perennial debate between rationalism and empiricism and a profoundly unsettling indication that teaching passeth understanding. Mainstre philosophical topics considered within an educational context tend to take on a decidedly genetic cast. So, e.g., epistemology, which analytic philosophy has tended to view as a justificatory enterprise, becomes concerned if not with the historical origins of knowledge claims then with their genesis within the mental economy of persons generally – in consequence of their educations. And even when philosophers of education come to endorse something akin to Plato’s classic account of knowledge as justified true belief, they are inclined to suggest, then, that the conveyance of knowledge via instruction must somehow provide the student with the justification along with the true philosophy of education philosophy of education 670    670 belief – thereby reintroducing a genetic dimension to a topic long lacking one. Perhaps, indeed, analytic philosophy’s general (though not universal) neglect of philosophy of education is traceable in some measure to the latter’s almost inevitably genetic perspective, which the former tended to decry as armchair science and as a threat to the autonomy and integrity of proper philosophical inquiry. If this has been a basis for neglect, then philosophy’s more recent, postanalytic turn toward naturalized inquiries that reject any dichotomy between empirical and philosophical investigations may make philosophy of education a more inviting area. Alfred North Whitehead, himself a leading light in the philosophy of education, once remarked that we are living in the period of educational thought subject to the influence of Dewey, and there is still no denying the observation. Dewey’s instrumentalism, his special brand of pragmatism, informs his extraordinarily comprehensive progressive philosophy of education; and he once went so far as to define all of philosophy as the general theory of education. He identifies the educative process with the growth of experience, with growing as developing – where experience is to be understood more in active terms, as involving doing things that change one’s objective environment and internal conditions, than in the passive terms, say, of Locke’s “impression” model of experience. Even traditionalistic philosophers of education, most notably Maritain, have acknowledged the wisdom of Deweyan educational means, and have, in the face of Dewey’s commanding philosophical presence, refred the debate with progressivists as one about appropriate educational ends – thereby insufficiently acknowledging Dewey’s trenchant critique of the means–end distinction. And even some recent analytic philosophers of education, such as R. S. Peters, can be read as if translating Deweyan insights (e.g., about the aim of education) into an analytic idiom. Analytic philosophy of education, as charted by Peters, Israel Scheffler, and others in the Anglo-erican philosophical tradition, has used the tools of linguistic analysis on a wide variety of educational concepts (learning, teaching, training, conditioning, indoctrinating, etc.) and investigated their interconnections: Does teaching entail learning? Does teaching inevitably involve indoctrinating? etc. This careful, subtle, and philosophically sophisticated work has made possible a much-needed conceptual precision in educational debates, though the debaters who most influence public opinion and policy have rarely availed themselves of that precisification. Recent work in philosophy of education, however, has taken up some major educational objectives – moral and other values, critical and creative thinking – in a way that promises to have an impact on the actual conduct of education. Philosophy of education, long isolated (in schools of education) from the rest of the academic philosophical community, has also been somewhat estranged from the professional educational mainstre. Dewey would surely have approved of a change in this status quo. 

philosophy of history, the philosophical study of human history and of attempts to record and interpret it. ‘History’ in English (and its equivalent in most modern European languages) has two primary senses: (1) the temporal progression of large-scale human events and actions, primarily but not exclusively in the past; and (2) the discipline or inquiry in which knowledge of the human past is acquired or sought. This has led to two senses of ‘philosophy of history’, depending on which “history” has been the object of philosophers’ attentions. Philosophy of history in the first sense is often called substantive (or speculative), and placed under metaphysics. Philosophy of history in the second sense is called critical (or analytic) and can be placed in epistemology. Substantive philosophy of history. In the West, substantive philosophy of history is thought to begin only in the Christian era. In the City of God, Augustine wonders why Rome flourished while pagan, yet fell into disgrace after its conversion to Christiantity. Divine reward and punishment should apply to whole peoples, not just to individuals. The unfolding of events in history should exhibit a plan that is intelligible rationally, morally, and (for Augustine) theologically. As a believer Augustine is convinced that there is such a plan, though it may not always be evident. In the modern period, philosophers such as Vico and Herder also sought such intelligibility in history. They also believed in a long-term direction or purpose of history that is often opposed to and makes use of the purposes of individuals. The most elaborate and best-known exple of this approach is found in Hegel, who thought that the gradual realization of human freedom could be discerned in history even if much slavery, tyranny, and suffering are necessary in the philosophy of history philosophy of history 671    671 process. Marx, too, claimed to know the laws – in his case economic – according to which history unfolds. Similar searches for overall “meaning” in human history have been undertaken in the twentieth century, notably by Arnold Toynbee (1889–1975), author of the twelve-volume Study of History, and Oswald Spengler (1880–1936), author of Decline of the West. But the whole enterprise was denounced by the positivists and neo-Kantians of the late nineteenth century as irresponsible metaphysical speculation. This attitude was shared by twentieth-century neopositivists and some of their heirs in the analytic tradition. There is some irony in this, since positivism, explicitly in thinkers like Comte and implicitly in others, involves belief in progressively enlightened stages of human history crowned by the modern age of science. Critical philosophy of history. The critical philosophy of history, i.e., the epistemology of historical knowledge, can be traced to the late nineteenth century and has been dominated by the paradigm of the natural sciences. Those in the positivist, neopositivist, and postpositivist tradition, in keeping with the idea of the unity of science, believe that to know the historical past is to explain events causally, and all causal explanation is ultimately of the se sort. To explain human events is to derive them from laws, which may be social, psychological, and perhaps ultimately biological and physical. Against this reductionism, the neo-Kantians and Dilthey argued that history, like other humanistic disciplines (Geisteswissenschaften), follows irreducible rules of its own. It is concerned with particular events or developments for their own sake, not as instances of general laws, and its aim is to understand, rather than explain, human actions. This debate was resurrected in the twentieth century in the English-speaking world. Philosophers like Hempel and Morton White (b.1917) elaborated on the notion of causal explanation in history, while Collingwood and Willi Dray (b.1921) described the “understanding” of historical agents as grasping the thought behind an action or discovering its reasons rather than its causes. The comparison with natural science, and the debate between reductionists and antireductionists, dominated other questions as well: Can or should history be objective and valuefree, as science purportedly is? What is the significance of the fact that historians can never perceive the events that interest them, since they are in the past? Are they not limited by their point of view, their place in history, in a way scientists are not? Some positivists were inclined to exclude history from science, rather than make it into one, relegating it to “literature” because it could never meet the standards of objectivity and genuine explanation; it was often the anti-positivists who defended the cognitive legitimacy of our knowledge of the past. In the non-reductionist tradition, philosophers have increasingly stressed the narrative character of history: to understand human actions generally, and past actions in particular, is to tell a coherent story about them. History, according to W. B. Gallie (b.1912), is a species of the genus Story. History does not thereby become fiction: narrative remains a “cognitive instrument” (Louis Mink, 1921–83) just as appropriate to its domain as theory construction is to science. Nevertheless, concepts previously associated with fictional narratives, such as plot structure and beginning-middle-end, are seen as applying to historical narratives as well. This tradition is carried further by Hayden White (b.1928), who analyzes classical nineteenth-century histories (and even substantive philosophies of history such as Hegel’s) as instances of romance, comedy, tragedy, and satire. In White’s work this mode of analysis leads him to some skepticism about history’s capacity to “represent” the reality of the past: narratives seem to be imposed upon the data, often for ideological reasons, rather than drawn from them. To some extent White’s view joins that of some positivists who believe that history’s literary character excludes it from the realm of science. But for White this is hardly a defect. Some philosophers have criticized the emphasis on narrative in discussions of history, since it neglects search and discovery, deciphering and evaluating sources, etc., which is more important to historians than the way they “write up” their results. Furthermore, not all history is presented in narrative form. The debate between pro- and anti-narrativists ong philosophers of history has its parallel in a similar debate ong historians themselves. Academic history in recent times has seen a strong turn away from traditional political history toward social, cultural, and economic analyses of the human past. Narrative is associated with the supposedly outmoded focus on the doings of kings, popes, and generals. These are considered (e.g. by the French historian Fernand Braudel, 1902–85) merely surface ripples compared to the deeper-lying and slower-moving currents of social and economic change. It is the methods and concepts of the social sciences, not philosophy of history philosophy of history 672    672 the art of the storyteller, on which the historian must draw. This debate has now lost some of its ste and narrative history has made something of a comeback ong historians. ong philosophers Paul Ricoeur has tried to show that even ostensibly non-narrative history retains narrative features. Historicity. Historicity (or historicality: Geschichtlichkeit) is a term used in the phenomenological and hermeneutic tradition (from Dilthey and Husserl through Heidegger and Gader) to indicate an essential feature of human existence. Persons are not merely in history; their past, including their social past, figures in their conception of themselves and their future possibilities. Some awareness of the past is thus constitutive of the self, prior to being formed into a cognitive discipine. Modernism and the postmodern. It is possible to view some of the debates over the modern and postmodern in recent Continental philosophy as a new kind of philosophy of history. Philosophers like Lyotard and Foucault see the modern as the period from the Enlightenment and Romanticism to the present, characterized chiefly by belief in “grand narratives” of historical progress, whether capitalist, Marxist, or positivist, with “man” as the triumphant hero of the story. Such belief is now being (or should be) abandoned, bringing modernism to an end. In one sense this is like earlier attacks on the substantive philosophy of history, since it unmasks as unjustified moralizing certain beliefs about large-scale patterns in history. It goes even further than the earlier attack, since it finds these beliefs at work even where they are not explicitly expressed. In another sense this is a continuation of the substantive philosophy of history, since it makes its own grand claims about largescale historical patterns. In this it joins hands with other philosophers of our day in a general historicization of knowledge (e.g., the philosophy of science merges with the history of science) and even of philosophy itself. Thus the later Heidegger – and more recently Richard Rorty – view philosophy itself as a large-scale episode in Western history that is nearing or has reached its end. Philosophy thus merges with the history of philosophy, but only thanks to a philosophical reflection on this history as part of history as a whole. 

philosophy of language, the philosophical study of natural language and its workings, particularly of linguistic meaning and the use of language. A natural language is any one of the thousands of various tongues that have developed historically ong populations of human beings and have been used for everyday purposes – including English, Italian, Swahili, and Latin – as opposed to the formal and other artificial “languages” invented by mathematicians, logicians, and computer scientists, such as arithmetic, the predicate calculus, and LISP or COBOL. There are intermediate cases, e.g., Esperanto, Pig Latin, and the sort of “philosophese” that mixes English words with logical symbols. Contemporary philosophy of language centers on the theory of meaning, but also includes the theory of reference, the theory of truth, philosophical pragmatics, and the philosophy of linguistics. The main question addressed by the theory of meaning is: In virtue of what are certain physical marks or noises meaningful linguistic expressions, and in virtue of what does any particular set of marks or noises have the distinctive meaning it does? A theory of meaning should also give a comprehensive account of the “meaning phenomena,” or general semantic properties of sentences: synonymy, biguity, entailment, and the like. Some theorists have thought to express these questions and issues in terms of languageneutral items called propositions: ‘In virtue of what does a particular set of marks or noises express the proposition it does?’; cf. ‘ “La neige est blanche” expresses the proposition that snow is white’, and ‘Synonymous sentences express the se proposition’. On this view, to understand a sentence is to “grasp” the proposition expressed by that sentence. But the explanatory role and even the existence of such entities are disputed. It has often been maintained that certain special sentences are true solely in virtue of their meanings and/or the meanings of their component expressions, without regard to what the nonlinguistic world is like (‘No bachelor is married’; ‘If a thing is blue it is colored’). Such vacuously true sentences are called analytic. However, Quine and others have disputed whether there really is such a thing as analyticity. Philosophers have offered a number of sharply competing hypotheses as to the nature of meaning, including: (1) the referential view that words mean by standing for things, and that a sentence means what it does because its parts correspond referentially to the elements of an actual or possible state of affairs in the world; (2) ideational or mentalist theories, according to philosophy of language philosophy of language 673    673 which meanings are ideas or other psychological phenomena in people’s minds; (3) “use” theories, inspired by Wittgenstein and to a lesser extent by J. L. Austin: a linguistic expression’s “meaning” is its conventionally assigned role as a ge-piece-like token used in one or more existing social practices; (4) Grice’s hypothesis that a sentence’s or word’s meaning is a function of what audience response a typical utterer would intend to elicit in uttering it.(5) inferential role theories, as developed by Wilfrid Sellars out of Carnap’s and Wittgenstein’s views: a sentence’s meaning is specified by the set of sentences from which it can correctly be inferred and the set of those which can be inferred from it (Sellars himself provided for “language-entry” and “language-exit” moves as partly constitutive of meaning, in addition to inferences); (6) verificationism, the view that a sentence’s meaning is the set of possible experiences that would confirm it or provide evidence for its truth; (7) the truth-conditional theory: a sentence’s meaning is the distinctive condition under which it is true, the situation or state of affairs that, if it obtained, would make the sentence true; (8) the null hypothesis, or eliminativist view, that “meaning” is a myth and there is no such thing – a radical claim that can stem either from Quine’s doctrine of the indeterminacy of translation or from eliminative materialism in the philosophy of mind. Following the original work of Carnap, Alonzo Church, Hintikka, and Richard Montague in the 1950s, the theory of meaning has made increasing use of “possible worlds”–based intensional logic as an analytical apparatus. Propositions (sentence meanings considered as entities), and truth conditions as in (7) above, are now commonly taken to be structured sets of possible worlds – e.g., the set of worlds in which Aristotle’s maternal grandmother hates broccoli. And the structure imposed on such a set, corresponding to the intuitive constituent structure of a proposition (as the concepts ‘grandmother’ and ‘hate’ are constituents of the foregoing proposition), accounts for the meaning-properties of sentences that express the proposition. Theories of meaning can also be called semantics, as in “Gricean semantics” or “Verificationist semantics,” though the term is sometimes restricted to referential and/or truth-conditional theories, which posit meaning-constitutive relations between words and the nonlinguistic world. Semantics is often contrasted with syntax, the structure of grmatically permissible ordering relations between words and other words in well-formed sentences, and with pragmatics, the rules governing the use of meaningful expressions in particular speech contexts; but linguists have found that semantic phenomena cannot be kept purely separate either from syntactic or from pragmatic phenomena. In a still more specialized usage, linguistic semantics is the detailed study (typically within the truth-conditional format) of particular types of construction in particular natural languages, e.g., belief-clauses in English or adverbial phrases in Kwakiutl. Linguistic semantics in that sense is practiced by some philosophers of language, by some linguists, and occasionally by both working together. Montague grmar and situation semantics are common formats for such work, both based on intensional logic. The theory of referenceis pursued whether or not one accepts either the referential or the truthconditional theory of meaning. Its main question is: In virtue of what does a linguistic expression designate one or more things in the world? (Prior to theorizing and defining of technical uses, ‘designate’, ‘denote’, and ‘refer’ are used interchangeably.) Denoting expressions are divided into singular terms, which purport to designate particular individual things, and general terms, which can apply to more than one thing at once. Singular terms include proper nes (‘Cindy’, ‘Bangladesh’), definite descriptions (‘my brother’, ‘the first baby born in the New World’), and singular pronouns of various types (‘this’, ‘you’, ‘she’). General terms include common nouns (‘horse’, ‘trash can’), mass terms (‘water’, ‘graphite’), and plural pronouns (‘they’, ‘those’). The twentieth century’s dominant theory of reference has been the description theory, the view that linguistic terms refer by expressing descriptive features or properties, the referent being the item or items that in fact possess those properties. For exple, a definite description does that directly: ‘My brother’ denotes whatever person does have the property of being my brother. According to the description theory of proper nes, defended most articulately by Russell, such nes express identifying properties indirectly by abbreviating definite descriptions. A general term such as ‘horse’ was thought of as expressing a cluster of properties distinctive of horses; and so forth. But the description theory ce under heavy attack in the late 1960s, from Keith Donnellan, Kripke, and Putn, and was generally abandoned on each of several grounds, in favor of the causal-historical theory of reference. The causal-historical idea is that a particular use of a linguistic expression denotes by being etiologically grounded in the thing or philosophy of language philosophy of language 674    674 group that is its referent; a historical causal chain of a certain shape leads backward in time from the act of referring to the referent(s). More recently, problems with the causal-historical theory as originally formulated have led researchers to backpedal somewhat and incorporate some features of the description theory. Other views of reference have been advocated as well, particularly analogues of some of the theories of meaning listed above – chiefly (2)–(6) and (8). Modal and propositional-attitude contexts create special problems in the theory of reference, for referring expressions seem to alter their normal semantic behavior when they occur within such contexts. Much ink has been spilled over the question of why and how the substitution of a term for another term having exactly the se referent can change the truth-value of a containing modal or propositional-attitude sentence. Interestingly, the theory of truth historically predates articulate study of meaning or of reference, for philosophers have always sought the nature of truth. It has often been thought that a sentence is true in virtue of expressing a true belief, truth being primarily a property of beliefs rather than of linguistic entities; but the main theories of truth have also been applied to sentences directly. The correspondence theory maintains that a sentence is true in virtue of its elements’ mirroring a fact or actual state of affairs. The coherence theory instead identifies truth as a relation of the true sentence to other sentences, usually an epistemic relation. Pragmatic theories have it that truth is a matter either of practical utility or of idealized epistemic warrant. Deflationary views, such as the traditional redundancy theory and D. Grover, J. Cp, and N. D. Belnap’s prosentential theory, deny that truth comes to anything more important or substantive than what is already codified in a recursive Tarskian truth-definition for a language. Pragmatics studies the use of language in context, and the context-dependence of various aspects of linguistic interpretation. First, one and the se sentence can express different meanings or propositions from context to context, owing to biguity or to indexicality or both. An biguous sentence has more than one meaning, either because one of its component words has more than one meaning (as ‘bank’ has) or because the sentence admits of more than one possible syntactic analysis (‘Visiting doctors can be tedious’, ‘The mouse tore up the street’). An indexical sentence can change in truth-value from context to context owing to the presence of an element whose reference fluctuates, such as a demonstrative pronoun (‘She told him off yesterday’, ‘It’s time for that meeting now’). One branch of pragmatics investigates how context determines a single propositional meaning for a sentence on a particular occasion of that sentence’s use. Speech act theory is a second branch of pragmatics that presumes the propositional or “locutionary” meanings of utterances and studies what J. L. Austin called the illocutionary forces of those utterances, the distinctive types of linguistic act that are performed by the speaker in making them. (E.g., in uttering ‘I will be there tonight’, a speaker might be issuing a warning, uttering a threat, making a promise, or merely offering a prediction, depending on conventional and other social features of the situation. A crude test of illocutionary force is the “hereby” criterion: one’s utterance has the force of, say, a warning, if it could fairly have been paraphrased by the corresponding “explicitly performative” sentence beginning ‘I hereby warn you that . . .’.).Speech act theory interacts to some extent with semantics, especially in the case of explicit performatives, and it has some fairly dratic syntactic effects as well. A third branch of pragmatics (not altogether separate from the second) is the theory of conversation or theory of implicature, founded by Grice. Grice notes that sentences, when uttered in particular contexts, often generate “implications” that are not logical consequences of those sentences (‘Is Jones a good philosopher?’ – ’He has very neat handwriting’). Such implications can usually be identified as what the speaker meant in uttering her sentence; thus (for that reason and others), what Grice calls utterer’s meaning can diverge sharply from sentence-meaning or “timeless” meaning. To explain those non-logical implications, Grice offered a now widely accepted theory of conversational implicature. Conversational implicatures arise from the interaction of the sentence uttered with mutually shared background assumptions and certain principles of efficient and cooperative conversation. The philosophy of linguistics studies the academic discipline of linguistics, particularly theoretical linguistics considered as a science or purported science; it exines methodology and fundental assumptions, and also tries to incorporate linguists’ findings into the rest of philosophy of language. Theoretical linguistics concentrates on syntax, and took its contempophilosophy of language philosophy of language 675    675 rary form in the 1950s under Zellig Harris and Chomsky: it seeks to describe each natural language in terms of a generative grmar for that language, i.e., a set of recursive rules for combining words that will generate all and only the “well-formed strings” or grmatical sentences of that language. The set must be finite and the rules recursive because, while our informationprocessing resources for recognizing grmatical strings as such are necessarily finite (being subagencies of our brains), there is no limit in any natural language either to the length of a single grmatical sentence or to the number of grmatical sentences; a small device must have infinite generative and parsing capacity. Many grmars work by generating simple “deep structures” (a kind of tree diagr), and then producing multiple “surface structures” as variants of those deep structures, by means of rules that rearrange their parts. The surface structures are syntactic parsings of natural-language sentences, and the deep structures from which they derive encode both basic grmatical relations between the sentences’ major constituents and, on some theories, the sentences’ main semantic properties as well; thus, sentences that share a deep structure will share some fundental grmatical properties and all or most of their semantics. As Paul Ziff and Davidson saw in the 1960s, the foregoing syntactic problem and its solution had semantic analogues. From small resources, human speakers understand – compute the meanings of – arbitrarily long and novel sentences without limit, and almost instantaneously. This ability seems to require semantic compositionality, the thesis that the meaning of a sentence is a function of the meanings of its semantic primitives or smallest meaningful parts, built up by way of syntactic compounding. Compositionality also seems to be required by learnability, since a normal child can learn an infinitely complex dialect in at most two years, but must learn semantic primitives one at a time. A grmar for a natural language is commonly taken to be a piece of psychology, part of an explanation of speakers’ verbal abilities and behavior. As such, however, it is a considerable idealization: it is a theory of speakers’ linguistic “competence” rather than of their actual verbal performance. The latter distinction is required by the fact that speakers’ considered, reflective judgments of grmatical correctness do not line up very well with the class of expressions that actually are uttered and understood unreflectively by those se speakers. Some grmatical sentences are too hard for speakers to parse quickly; some are too long to finish parsing at all; speakers commonly utter what they know to be formally ungrmatical strings; and real speech is usually fragmentary, interspersed with vocalizations, false starts, and the like. Actual departures from formal grmaticality are ascribed by linguists to “performance limitations,” i.e., psychological factors such as memory failure, weak computational capacity, or heedlessness; thus, actual verbal behavior is to be explained as resulting from the perturbation of competence by performance limitations. 

philosophy of law, also called general jurisprudence, the study of conceptual and theoretical problems concerning the nature of law as such, or common to any legal system. Problems in the philosophy of law fall roughly into two groups. The first contains problems internal to law and legal systems as such. These include (a) the nature of legal rules; the conditions under which they can be said to exist and to influence practice; their normative character, as mandatory or advisory; and the (in)determinacy of their language; (b) the structure and logical character of legal norms; the analysis of legal principles as a class of legal norms; and the relation between the normative force of law and coercion; (c) the identity conditions for legal systems; when a legal system exists; and when one legal system ends and another begins; (d) the nature of the reasoning used by courts in adjudicating cases; (e) the justification of legal decisions; whether legal justification is through a chain of inferences or by the coherence of norms and decisions; and the relation between intralegal and extralegal justification; (f) the nature of legal validity and of what makes a norm a valid law; the relation between validity and efficacy, the fact that the norms of a legal system are obeyed by the norm-subjects; (g) properties of legal systems, including comprehensiveness (the claim to regulate any behavior) and completeness (the absence of gaps in the law); (h) legal rights; under what conditions citizens possess them; and their analytical structure as protected normative positions; (i) legal interpretation; whether it is a pervasive feature of law or is found only in certain kinds of adjudication; its rationality or otherwise; and its essentially ideological character or otherwise. The second group of problems concerns the philosophy of law philosophy of law 676    676 relation between law as one particular social institution in a society and the wider political and moral life of that society: (a) the nature of legal obligation; whether there is an obligation, prima facie or final, to obey the law as such; whether there is an obligation to obey the law only when certain standards are met, and if so, what those standards might be; (b) the authority of law; and the conditions under which a legal system has political or moral authority or legitimacy; (c) the functions of law; whether there are functions performed by a legal system in a society that are internal to the design of law; and analyses from the perspective of political morality of the functioning of legal systems; (d) the legal concept of responsibility; its analysis and its relation to moral and political concepts of responsibility; in particular, the place of mental elements and causal elements in the assignment of responsibility, and the analysis of those elements; (e) the analysis and justification of legal punishment; (f) legal liberty, and the proper limits or otherwise of the intrusion of the legal system into individual liberty; the plausibility of legal moralism; (g) the relation between law and justice, and the role of a legal system in the maintenance of social justice; (h) the relation between legal rights and political or moral rights; (i) the status of legal reasoning as a species of practical reasoning; and the relation between law and practical reason; (j) law and economics; whether legal decision making in fact tracks, or otherwise ought to track, economic efficiency; (k) legal systems as sources of and embodiments of political power; and law as essentially gendered, or imbued with race or class biases, or otherwise. Theoretical positions in the philosophy of law tend to group into three large kinds – legal positivism, natural law, and legal realism. Legal positivism concentrates on the first set of problems, and typically gives formal or content-independent solutions to such problems. For exple, legal positivism tends to regard legal validity as a property of a legal rule that the rule derives merely from its formal relation to other legal rules; a morally iniquitous law is still for legal positivism a valid legal rule if it satisfies the required formal existence conditions. Legal rights exist as normative consequences of valid legal rules; no questions of the status of the right from the point of view of political morality arise. Legal positivism does not deny the importance of the second set of problems, but assigns the task of treating them to other disciplines – political philosophy, moral philosophy, sociology, psychology, and so forth. Questions of how society should design its legal institutions, for legal positivism, are not technically speaking problems in the philosophy of law, although many legal positivists have presented their theories about such questions. Natural law theory and legal realism, by contrast, regard the sharp distinction between the two kinds of problem as an artifact of legal positivism itself. Their answers to the first set of problems tend to be substantive or content-dependent. Natural law theory, for exple, would regard the question of whether a law was consonant with practical reason, or whether a legal system was morally and politically legitimate, as in whole or in part determinative of the issue of legal validity, or of whether a legal norm granted a legal right. The theory would regard the relation between a legal system and liberty or justice as in whole or in part determinative of the normative force and the justification for that system and its laws. Legal realism, especially in its contemporary politicized form, sees the claimed role of the law in legitimizing certain gender, race, or class interests as the prime salient property of law for theoretical analysis, and questions of the determinacy of legal rules or of legal interpretation or legal right as of value only in the service of the project of explaining the political power of law and legal systems.

philosophy of literature, literary theory. However, while the literary theorist, who is often a literary critic, is primarily interested in the conceptual foundations of practical criticism, philosophy of literature, usually done by philosophers, is more often concerned to place literature in the context of a philosophical system. Plato’s dialogues have much to say about poetry, mostly by way of aligning it with Plato’s metaphysical, epistemological, and ethico-political views. Aristotle’s Poetics, the earliest exple of literary theory in the West, is also an attempt to accommodate the practice of Greek poets to Aristotle’s philosophical system as a whole. Drawing on the thought of philosophers like Kant and Schelling, Suel Taylor Coleridge offers in his Biographia philosophy of liberation philosophy of literature 677    677 Literaria a philosophy of literature that is to Romantic poetics what Aristotle’s treatise is to classical poetics: a literary theory that is confirmed both by the poets whose work it legitimates and by the metaphysics that recommends it. Many philosophers, ong them Hume, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, and Sartre, have tried to make room for literature in their philosophical edifices. Some philosophers, e.g., the German Romantics, have made literature (and the other arts) the cornerstone of philosophy itself. (See Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute, 1988.) Sometimes ‘philosophy of literature’ is understood in a second sense: philosophy and literature; i.e., philosophy and literature taken to be distinct and essentially autonomous activities that may nonetheless sustain determinate relations to each other. Philosophy of literature, understood in this way, is the attempt to identify the differentiae that distinguish philosophy from literature and to specify their relationships to each other. Sometimes the two are distinguished by their subject matter (e.g., philosophy deals with objective structures, literature with subjectivity), sometimes by their methods (philosophy is an act of reason, literature the product of imagination, inspiration, or the unconscious), sometimes by their effects (philosophy produces knowledge, literature produces emotional fulfillment or release), etc. Their relationships then tend to occupy the area(s) in which they are not essentially distinct. If their subject matters are distinct, their effects may be the se (philosophy and literature both produce understanding, the one of fact and the other of feeling); if their methods are distinct, they may be approaching the se subject matter in different ways; and so on. For Aquinas, e.g., philosophy and poetry may deal with the se objects, the one communicating truth about the object in syllogistic form, the other inspiring feelings about it through figurative language. For Heidegger, the philosopher investigates the meaning of being while the poet nes the holy, but their preoccupations tend to converge at the deepest levels of thinking. For Sartre, literature is philosophy engagé, existential-political activity in the service of freedom. ’Philosophy of literature’ may also be taken in a third sense: philosophy in literature, the attempt to discover matters of philosophical interest and value in literary texts. The philosopher may undertake to identify, exine, and evaluate the philosophical content of literary texts that contain expressions of philosophical ideas and discussions of philosophical problems – e.g., the debates on free will and theodicy in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karazov. Many if not most college courses on philosophy of literature are taught from this point of view. Much interesting and important work has been done in this vein; e.g., Santayana’s Three Philosophical Poets (1910), Cavell’s essays on Emerson and Thoreau, and Nussbaum’s Love’s Knowledge (1989). It should be noted, however, that to approach the matter in this way presupposes that literature and philosophy are simply different forms of the se content: what philosophy expresses in the form of argument literature expresses in lyric, dratic, or narrative form. The philosopher’s treatment of literature implies that he is uniquely positioned to explicate the subject matter treated in both literary and philosophical texts, and that the language of philosophy gives optimal expression to a content less adequately expressed in the language of literature. The model for this approach may well be Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, which treats art (along with religion) as imperfect adumbrations of a truth that is fully and properly articulated only in the conceptual mode of philosophical dialectic. Dissatisfaction with this presupposition (and its implicit privileging of philosophy over literature) has led to a different view of the relation between philosophy and literature and so to a different progr for philosophy of literature. The self-consciously literary form of Kierkegaard’s writing is an integral part of his polemic against the philosophical imperialism of the Hegelians. In this century, the work of philosophers like Derrida and the philosophers and critics who follow his lead suggests that it is mistaken to regard philosophy and literature as alternative expressions of an identical content, and seriously mistaken to think of philosophy as the master discourse, the “proper” expression of a content “improperly” expressed in literature. All texts, on this view, have a “literary” form, the texts of philosophers as well as the texts of novelists and poets, and their content is internally determined by their “means of expression.” There is just as much “literature in philosophy” as there is “philosophy in literature.” Consequently, the philosopher of literature may no longer be able simply to extract philosophical matter from literary form. Rather, the modes of literary expression confront the philosopher with problems that bear on the presuppositions of his own enterprise. E.g., fictional mimesis (especially in the works of postmodern writers) raises questions about the possibility and the prephilosophy of literature philosophy of literature 678    678 philosophy of logic philosophy of logic 679 sumed normativeness of factual representation, and in so doing tends to undermine the traditional hierarchy that elevates “fact” over “fiction.” Philosophers’ perplexity over the truth-value of fictional statements is an exple of the kind of problems the study of literature can create for the practice of philosophy (see Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, 1982, ch. 7). Or again, the self-reflexivity of contemporary literary texts can lead philosophers to reflect critically on their own undertaking and may seriously unsettle traditional notions of self-referentiality. When it is not regarded as another, attractive but perhaps inferior source of philosophical ideas, literature presents the philosopher with epistemological, metaphysical, and methodological problems not encountered in the course of “normal” philosophizing.  AESTHETICS, LITERARY THEORY, POSTMODERN. L.H.M. philosophy of logic, the arena of philosophy devoted to exining the scope and nature of logic. Aristotle considered logic an organon, or foundation, of knowledge. Certainly, inference is the source of much human knowledge. Logic judges inferences good or bad and tries to justify those that are good. One need not agree with Aristotle, therefore, to see logic as essential to epistemology. Philosophers such as Wittgenstein, additionally, have held that the structure of language reflects the structure of the world. Because inferences have elements that are themselves linguistic or are at least expressible in language, logic reveals general features of the structure of language. This makes it essential to linguistics, and, on a Wittgensteinian view, to metaphysics. Moreover, many philosophical battles have been fought with logical weaponry. For all these reasons, philosophers have tried to understand what logic is, what justifies it, and what it tells us about reason, language, and the world. The nature of logic. Logic might be defined as the science of inference; inference, in turn, as the drawing of a conclusion from premises. A simple argument is a sequence, one element of which, the conclusion, the others are thought to support. A complex argument is a series of simple arguments. Logic, then, is primarily concerned with arguments. Already, however, several questions arise. (1) Who thinks that the premises support the conclusion? The speaker? The audience? Any competent speaker of the language? (2) What are the elements of arguments? Thoughts? Propositions? Philosophers following Quine have found these answers unappealing for lack of clear identity criteria. Sentences are more concrete and more sharply individuated. But should we consider sentence tokens or sentence types? Context often affects interpretation, so it appears that we must consider tokens or types-in-context. Moreover, many sentences, even with contextual information supplied, are biguous. Is a sequence with an biguous sentence one argument (which may be good on some readings and bad on others) or several? For reasons that will become clear, the elements of arguments should be the primary bearers of truth and falsehood in one’s general theory of language. (3) Finally, and perhaps most importantly, what does ‘support’ mean? Logic evaluates inferences by distinguishing good from bad arguments. This raises issues about the status of logic, for many of its pronouncements are explicitly normative. The philosophy of logic thus includes problems of the nature and justification of norms akin to those arising in metaethics. The solutions, moreover, may vary with the logical system at hand. Some logicians attempt to characterize reasoning in natural language; others try to systematize reasoning in mathematics or other sciences. Still others try to devise an ideal system of reasoning that does not fully correspond to any of these. Logicians concerned with inference in natural, mathematical, or scientific languages tend to justify their norms by describing inferential practices in that language as actually used by those competent in it. These descriptions justify norms partly because the practices they describe include evaluations of inferences as well as inferences themselves. The scope of logic. Logical systems meant to account for natural language inference raise issues of the scope of logic. How does logic differ from semantics, the science of meaning in general? Logicians have often treated only inferences turning on certain commonly used words, such as ‘not’, ‘if’, ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘all’, and ‘some’, taking them, or items in a symbolic language that correspond to them, as logical constants. They have neglected inferences that do not turn on them, such as My brother is married. Therefore, I have a sister-in-law. Increasingly, however, semanticists have used ‘logic’ more broadly, speaking of the logic of belief, perception, abstraction, or even kinship.  Such uses seem to treat logic and semantics as coextensive. Philosophers who have sought to maintain a distinction between the semantics and logic of natural language have tried to develop non-arbitrary criteria of logical constancy. An argument is valid provided the truth of its premises guarantees the truth of its conclusion. This definition relies on the notion of truth, which raises philosophical puzzles of its own. Furthermore, it is natural to ask what kind of connection must hold between the premises and conclusion. One answer specifies that an argument is valid provided replacing its simple constituents with items of similar categories while leaving logical constants intact could never produce true premises and a false conclusion. On this view, validity is a matter of form: an argument is valid if it instantiates a valid form. Logic thus becomes the theory of logical form. On another view, an argument is valid if its conclusion is true in every possible world or model in which its premises are true. This conception need not rely on the notion of a logical constant and so is compatible with the view that logic and semantics are coextensive. Many issues in the philosophy of logic arise from the plethora of systems logicians have devised. Some of these are deviant logics, i.e., logics that differ from classical or standard logic while seeming to treat the se subject matter. Intuitionistic logic, for exple, which interprets the connectives and quantifiers non-classically, rejecting the law of excluded middle and the interdefinability of the quantifiers, has been supported with both semantic and ontological arguments. Brouwer, Heyting, and others have defended it as the proper logic of the infinite; Dummett has defended it as the correct logic of natural language. Free logic allows non-denoting referring expressions but interprets the quantifiers as ranging only over existing objects. Many-valued logics use at least three truthvalues, rejecting the classical assumption of bivalence – that every formula is either true or false. Many logical systems attempt to extend classical logic to incorporate tense, modality, abstraction, higher-order quantification, propositional quantification, complement constructions, or the truth predicate. These projects raise important philosophical questions. Modal and tense logics. Tense is a pervasive feature of natural language, and has become important to computer scientists interested in concurrent progrs. Modalities of several sorts – alethic (possibility, necessity) and deontic (obligation, permission), for exple – appear in natural language in various grmatical guises. Provability, treated as a modality, allows for revealing formalizations of metathematics. Logicians have usually treated modalities and tenses as sentential operators. C. I. Lewis and Langford pioneered such approaches for alethic modalities; von Wright, for deontic modalities; and Prior, for tense. In each area, many competing systems developed; by the late 1970s, there were over two hundred axiom systems in the literature for propositional alethic modal logic alone. How might competing systems be evaluated? Kripke’s semantics for modal logic has proved very helpful. Kripke semantics in effect treats modal operators as quantifiers over possible worlds. Necessarily A, e.g., is true at a world if and only if A is true in all worlds accessible from that world. Kripke showed that certain popular axiom systems result from imposing simple conditions on the accessibility relation. His work spawned a field, known as correspondence theory, devoted to studying the relations between modal axioms and conditions on models. It has helped philosophers and logicians to understand the issues at stake in choosing a modal logic and has raised the question of whether there is one true modal logic. Modal idioms may be biguous or indeterminate with respect to some properties of the accessibility relation. Possible worlds raise additional ontological and epistemological questions. Modalities and tenses seem to be linked in natural language, but attempts to bring tense and modal logic together remain young. The sensitivity of tense to intra- and extralinguistic context has cast doubt on the project of using operators to represent tenses. Kp, e.g., has represented tense and aspect in terms of event structure, building on earlier work by Reichenbach. Truth. Tarski’s theory of truth shows that it is possible to define truth recursively for certain languages. Languages that can refer to their own sentences, however, permit no such definition given Tarski’s assumptions – for they allow the formulation of the liar and similar paradoxes. Tarski concluded that, in giving the semantics for such a language, we must ascend to a more powerful metalanguage. Kripke and others, however, have shown that it is possible for a language permitting self-reference to contain its own truth    680 predicate by surrendering bivalence or taking the truth predicate indexically. Higher-order logic. First-order predicate logic allows quantification only over individuals. Higher-order logics also permit quantification over predicate positions. Natural language seems to permit such quantification: ‘Mary has every quality that John admires’. Mathematics, moreover, may be expressed elegantly in higher-order logic. Peano arithmetic and Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory, e.g., require infinite axiom sets in firstorder logic but are finitely axiomatizable – and categorical, determining their models up to isomorphism – in second-order logic. Because they quantify over properties and relations, higher-order logics seem committed to Platonism. Mathematics reduces to higher-order logic; Quine concludes that the latter is not logic. Its most natural semantics seems to presuppose a prior understanding of properties and relations. Also, on this semantics, it differs greatly from first-order logic. Like set theory, it is incomplete; it is not compact. This raises questions about the boundaries of logic. Must logic be axiomatizable? Must it be possible, i.e., to develop a logical system powerful enough to prove every valid argument valid? Could there be valid arguments with infinitely many premises, any finite fragment of which would be invalid? With an operator for forming abstract terms from predicates, higher-order logics easily allow the formulation of paradoxes. Russell and Whitehead for this reason adopted type theory, which, like Tarski’s theory of truth, uses an infinite hierarchy and corresponding syntactic restrictions to avoid paradox. Type-free theories avoid both the restrictions and the paradoxes, as with truth, by rejecting bivalence or by understanding abstraction indexically.

philosophy of mathematics, the study of ontological and epistemological problems raised by the content and practice of mathematics. The present agenda in this field evolved from critical developments, notably the collapse of Pythagoreanism, the development of modern calculus, and an early twentieth-century foundational crisis, which forced mathematicians and philosophers to exine mathematical methods and presuppositions. Greek mathematics. The Pythagoreans, who represented the height of early demonstrative Greek mathematics, believed that all scientific relations were measureable by natural numbers (1, 2, 3, etc.) or ratios of natural numbers, and thus they assumed discrete, atomic units for the measurement of space, time, and motion. The discovery of irrational magnitudes scotched the first of these beliefs. Zeno’s paradoxes showed that the second was incompatible with the natural assumption that space and time are infinitely divisible. The Greek reaction, ultimately codified in Euclid’s Elements, included Plato’s separation of mathematics from empirical science and, within mathematics, distinguished number theory – a study of discretely ordered entities – from geometry, which concerns continua. Following Aristotle (and employing methods perfected by Eudoxus), Euclid’s proofs used only “potentially infinite” geometric and arithmetic procedures. The Elements’ axiomatic form and its constructive proofs set a standard for future mathematics. Moreover, its dependence on visual intuition (whose consequent deductive gaps were already noted by Archimedes), together with the challenge of Euclid’s infous fifth postulate (about parallel lines), and the fous unsolved problems of compass and straightedge construction, established an agenda for generations of mathematicians. The calculus. The two millennia following Euclid saw new analytical tools (e.g., Descartes’s geometry) that wedded arithmetic and geometric considerations and toyed with infinitesimally small quantities. These, together with the demands of physical application, tempted mathematicians to abandon the pristine Greek dichotomies. Matters ce to a head with Newton’s and Leibniz’s (almost simultaneous) discovery of the powerful computational techniques of the calculus. While these unified physical science in an unprecedented way, their dependence on unclear notions of infinitesimal spatial and temporal increments emphasized their shaky philosophical foundation. Berkeley, for instance, condemned the calculus for its unintuitability. However, this time the power of the new methods inspired a decidedly conservative response. Kant, in particular, tried to anchor the new mathematics in intuition. Mathematicians, he claimed, construct their objects in the “pure intuitions” of space and time. And these mathematical objects are the a priori forms of transcendentally ideal empirical objects. For Kant this combination of epistemic empiricism and ontological idealism explained the physical philosophy of mathematics philosophy of mathematics 681    681 applicability of mathematics and thus granted “objective validity” (i.e., scientific legitimacy) to mathematical procedures. Two nineteenth-century developments undercut this Kantian constructivism in favor of a more abstract conceptual picture of mathematics. First, Jànos Bolyai, Carl F. Gauss, Bernhard Riemann, Nikolai Lobachevsky, and others produced consistent non-Euclidean geometries, which undid the Kantian picture of a single a priori science of space, and once again opened a rift between pure mathematics and its physical applications. Second, Cantor and Dedekind defined the real numbers (i.e., the elements of the continuum) as infinite sets of rational (and ultimately natural) numbers. Thus they founded mathematics on the concepts of infinite set and natural number. Cantor’s set theory made the first concept rigorously mathematical; while Peano and Frege (both of whom advocated securing rigor by using formal languages) did that for the second. Peano axiomatized number theory, and Frege ontologically reduced the natural numbers to sets (indeed sets that are the extensions of purely logical concepts). Frege’s Platonistic conception of numbers as unintuitable objects and his claim that mathematical truths follow analytically from purely logical definitions – the thesis of logicism – are both highly anti-Kantian. Foundational crisis and movements. But antiKantianism had its own problems. For one thing, Leopold Kronecker, who (following Peter Dirichlet) wanted mathematics reduced to arithmetic and no further, attacked Cantor’s abstract set theory on doctrinal grounds. Worse yet, the discovery of internal antinomies challenged the very consistency of abstract foundations. The most fous of these, Russell’s paradox (the set of all sets that are not members of themselves both is and isn’t a member of itself), undermined Frege’s basic assumption that every well-formed concept has an extension. This was a full-scale crisis. To be sure, Russell himself (together with Whitehead) preserved the logicist foundational approach by organizing the universe of sets into a hierarchy of levels so that no set can be a member of itself. (This is type theory.) However, the crisis encouraged two explicitly Kantian foundational projects. The first, Hilbert’s Progr, attempted to secure the “ideal” (i.e., infinitary) parts of mathematics by formalizing them and then proving the resultant formal systems to be conservative (and hence consistent) extensions of finitary theories. Since the proof itself was to use no reasoning more complicated than simple numerical calculations – finitary reasoning – the whole metathematical project belonged to the untainted (“contentual”) part of mathematics. Finitary reasoning was supposed to update Kant’s intuition-based epistemology, and Hilbert’s consistency proofs mimic Kant’s notion of objective validity. The second project, Brouwer’s intuitionism, rejected formalization, and was not only epistemologically Kantian (resting mathematical reasoning on the a priori intuition of time), but ontologically Kantian as well. For intuitionism generated both the natural and the real numbers by temporally ordered conscious acts. The reals, in particular, stem from choice sequences, which exploit Brouwer’s epistemic assumptions about the open future. These foundational movements ultimately failed. Type theory required ad hoc axioms to express the real numbers; Hilbert’s Progr foundered on Gödel’s theorems; and intuitionism remained on the fringes because it rejected classical logic and standard mathematics. Nevertheless the legacy of these movements – their formal methods, indeed their philosophical agenda – still characterizes modern research on the ontology and epistemology of mathematics. Set theory, e.g. (despite recent challenges from category theory), is the lingua franca of modern mathematics. And formal languages with their precise semantics are ubiquitous in technical and philosophical discussions. Indeed, even intuitionistic mathematics has been formalized, and Michael Dummett has recast its ontological idealism as a semantic antirealism that defines truth as warranted assertability. In a similar semantic vein, Paul Benacerraf proposed that the philosophical problem with Hilbert’s approach is inability to provide a uniform realistic (i.e., referential, non-epistemic) semantics for the allegedly ideal and contentual parts of mathematics; and the problem with Platonism is that its semantics makes its objects unknowable. Ontological issues. From this modern perspective, the simplest realism is the outright Platonism that attributes a standard model consisting of “independent” objects to classical theories expressed in a first-order language (i.e., a language whose quantifiers range over objects but not properties). But in fact realism admits variations on each aspect. For one thing, the Löwenheim-Skolem theorem shows that formalized theories can have non-standard models. There are expansive non-standard models: Abrah Robinson, e.g., used infinitary non-stanphilosophy of mathematics philosophy of mathematics 682    682 dard models of Peano’s axioms to rigorously reintroduce infinitesimals. (Roughly, an infinitesimal is the reciprocal of an infinite element in such a model.) And there are also “constructive” models, whose objects must be explicitly definable. Predicative theories (inspired by Poincaré and Hermann Weyl), whose stage-by-stage definitions refer only to previously defined objects, produce one variety of such models. Gödel’s constructive universe, which uses less restricted definitions to model apparently non-constructive axioms like the axiom of choice, exemplifies another variety. But there are also views (various forms of structuralism) which deny that formal theories have unique standard models at all. These views – inspired by the fact, already sensed by Dedekind, that there are multiple equivalid realizations of formal arithmetic – allow a mathematical theory to characterize only a broad fily of models and deny unique reference to mathematical terms. Finally, some realistic approaches advocate formalization in secondorder languages, and some eschew ordinary semantics altogether in favor of substitutional quantification. (These latter are still realistic, for they still distinguish truth from knowledge.) Strict finitists – inspired by Wittgenstein’s more stringent epistemic constraints – reject even the open-futured objects admitted by Brouwer, and countenance only finite (or even only “feasible”) objects. In the other direction, A. A. Markov and his school in Russia introduced a syntactic notion of algorithm from which they developed the field of “constructive analysis.” And the erican mathematician Errett Bishop, starting from a Brouwer-like disenchantment with mathematical realism and with strictly formal approaches, recovered large parts of classical analysis within a non-formal constructive frework. All of these approaches assume abstract (i.e., causally isolated) mathematical objects, and thus they have difficulty explaining the wide applicability of mathematics (constructive or otherwise) within empirical science. One response, Quine’s “indispensability” view, integrates mathematical theories into the general network of empirical science. For Quine, mathematical objects – just like ordinary physical objects – exist simply in virtue of being referents for terms in our best scientific theory. By contrast Hartry Field, who denies that any abstract objects exist, also denies that any purely mathematical assertions are literally true. Field attempts to recast physical science in a relational language without mathematical terms and then use Hilbert-style conservative extension results to explain the evident utility of abstract mathematics. Hilary Putn and Charles Parsons have each suggested views according to which mathematics has no objects proper to itself, but rather concerns only the possibilities of physical constructions. Recently, Geoffrey Hellman has combined this modal approach with structuralism. Epistemological issues. The equivalence (proved in the 1930s) of several different representations of computability to the reasoning representable in elementary formalized arithmetic led Alonzo Church to suggest that the notion of finitary reasoning had been precisely defined. Church’s thesis (so ned by Stephen Kleene) inspired Georg Kreisel’s investigations (in the 1960s and 70s) of the general conditions for rigorously analyzing other informal philosophical notions like semantic consequence, Brouwerian choice sequences, and the very notion of a set. Solomon Feferman has suggested more recently that this sort of piecemeal conceptual analysis is already present in mathematics; and that this rather than any global foundation is the true role of foundational research. In this spirit, the relative consistency arguments of modern proof theory (a continuation of Hilbert’s Progr) provide information about the epistemic grounds of various mathematical theories. Thus, on the one hand, proofs that a seemingly problematic mathematical theory is a conservative extension of a more secure theory provide some epistemic support for the former. In the other direction, the fact that classical number theory is consistent relative to intuitionistic number theory shows (contra Hilbert) that his view of constructive reasoning must differ from that of the intuitionists. Gödel, who did not believe that mathematics required any ties to empirical perception, suggested nevertheless that we have a special nonsensory faculty of mathematical intuition that, when properly cultivated, can help us decide ong formally independent propositions of set theory and other branches of mathematics. Charles Parsons, in contrast, has exined the place of perception-like intuition in mathematical reasoning. Parsons himself has investigated models of arithmetic and of set theory composed of quasi-concrete objects (e.g., numerals and other signs). Others (consistent with some of Parsons’s observations) have given a Husserlstyle phenomenological analysis of mathematical intuition. Frege’s influence encouraged the logical positivists and other philosophers to view mathematical knowledge as analytic or conventional. philosophy of mathematics philosophy of mathematics 683    683 Poincaré responded that the principle of mathematical induction could not be analytic, and Wittgenstein also attacked this conventionalism. In recent years, various formal independence results and Quine’s attack on analyticity have encouraged philosophers and historians of mathematics to focus on cases of mathematical knowledge that do not stem from conceptual analysis or strict formal provability. Some writers (notably Mark Steiner and Philip Kitcher) emphasize the analogies between empirical and mathematical discovery. They stress such things as conceptual evolution in mathematics and instances of mathematical generalizations supported by individual cases. Kitcher, in particular, discusses the analogy between axiomatization in mathematics and theoretical unification. Penelope Maddy has investigated the intrathematical grounds underlying the acceptance of various axioms of set theory. More generally, Imre Lakatos argued that most mathematical progress stems from a concept-stretching process of conjecture, refutation, and proof. This view has spawned a historical debate about whether critical developments such as those mentioned above represent Kuhn-style revolutions or even crises, or whether they are natural conceptual advances in a uniformly growing science. 

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philosophy of mind, the branch of philosophy that includes the philosophy of psychology, philosophical psychology, and the area of metaphysics concerned with the nature of mental phenomena and how they fit into the causal structure of reality. Philosophy of psychology, a branch of the philosophy of science, exines what psychology says about the nature of psychological phenomena; exines aspects of psychological theorizing such as the models used, explanations offered, and laws invoked; and exines how psychology fits with the social sciences and natural sciences. Philosophical psychology investigates folk psychology, a body of commonsensical, protoscientific views about mental phenomena. Such investigations attempt to articulate and refine views found in folk psychology about conceptualization, memory, perception, sensation, consciousness, belief, desire, intention, reasoning, action, and so on. The mind–body problem, a central metaphysical one in the philosophy of mind, is the problem of whether mental phenomena are physical and, if not, how they are related to physical phenomena. Other metaphysical problems in the philosophy of mind include the free will problem, the problem of personal identity, and the problem of how, if at all, irrational phenomena such as akrasia and self-deception are possible. Mind–body dualism Cartesian dualism. The doctrine that the soul is distinct from the body is found in Plato and discussed throughout the history of philosophy, but Descartes is considered the father of the modern mind–body problem. He maintained that the essence of the physical is extension in space. Minds are unextended substances and thus are distinct from any physical substances. The essence of a mental substance is to think. This twofold view is called Cartesian dualism. Descartes was well aware of an intimate relationship between mind and the brain. (There is no a priori reason to think that the mind is intimately related to the brain; Aristotle, e.g., did not associate them.) Descartes (mistakenly) thought the seat of the relationship was in the pineal gland. He maintained, however, that our minds are not our brains, lack spatial location, and can continue to exist after the death and destruction of our bodies. Cartesian dualism invites the question: What connects the mind and brain? Causation is Descartes’s answer: states of our minds causally interact with states of our brains. When bodily sensations such as aches, pains, itches, and tickles cause us to moan, wince, scratch, or laugh, they do so by causing brain states (events, processes), which in turn cause bodily movements. In deliberate action, we act on our desires, motives, and intentions to carry out our purposes; and acting on these mental states involves their causing brain states, which in turn cause our bodies to move, thereby causally influencing the physical world. The physical world, in turn, influences our minds through its influence on our brains. Perception of the physical world with five senses – sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch – involves causal transactions from the physical to the mental: what we perceive (i.e., see, hear, etc.) causes a sense experience (i.e., a visual experience, aural experience, etc.). Thus, Descartes held that there is two-way psychophysical causal interaction: from the mental to the physical (as in action) and from the physical to the mental (as in perception). The conjunction of Cartesian dualism and the doctrine of two-way psychophysical causal interaction is called Cartesian interactionism. philosophy of mind philosophy of mind 684    684 Perhaps the most widely discussed difficulty for this view is how states of a non-spatial substance (a mind) can causally interact with states of a substance that is in space (a brain). Such interactions have seemed utterly mysterious to many philosophers. Mystery would remain even if an unextended mind is locatable at a point in space (say, the center of the pineal gland). For Cartesian interactionism would still have to maintain that causal transactions between mental states and brain states are fundental, i.e., unmediated by any underlying mechanism. Brain states causally interact with mental states, but there is no answer to the question of how they do so. The interactions are brute facts. Many philosophers, including many of Descartes’s contemporaries, have found that difficult to accept. Parallelism. Malebranche and Leibniz, ong others, rejected the possibility of psychophysical causal interaction. They espoused versions of parallelism: the view that the mental and physical realms run in parallel, in that types of mental phenomena co-occur with certain types of physical phenomena, but these co-occurrences never involve causal interactions. On all extant versions, the parallels hold because of God’s creation. Leibniz’s parallelism is preestablished harmony: the explanation of why mental types and certain physical types co-occur is that in the possible world God actualized (i.e., this world) they co-occur. In discussing the relation between the mental and physical realms, Leibniz used the analogy of two synchronized but unconnected clocks. The analogy is, however, somewhat misleading; suggesting causal mechanisms internal to each clock and intrental and intraphysical (causal) transactions. But Leibniz’s monadology doctrine excludes the possibility of such transactions: mental and physical phenomena have no effects even within their own realms. Malebranche is associated with occasionalism, according to which only God, through his continuous activities, causes things to happen: non-divine phenomena never cause anything. Occasionalism differs from preestablished harmony in holding that God is continually engaged in acts of creation; each moment creating the world anew, in such a way that the correlations hold. Both brands of parallelism face formidable difficulties. First, both rest on highly contentious, obscure theological hypotheses. The contention that God exists and the creation stories in question require extensive defense and explanation. God’s relationship to the world can seem at least as mysterious as the relationship Descartes posits between minds and brains. Second, since parallelism denies the possibility of psychophysical interaction, its proponents must offer alternatives to the causal theory of perception and the causal theory of action or else deny that we can perceive and that we can act intentionally. Third, since parallelism rejects intrental causation, it must either deny that reasoning is possible or explain how it is possible without causal connections between thoughts. Fourth, since parallelism rejects physical transactions, it is hard to see how it can allow, e.g., that one physical thing ever moves another; for that would require causing a change in location. Perhaps none of these weighty difficulties is ultimately insuperable; in any case, parallelism has been abandoned. Epiphenomenalism. Empirical research gives every indication that the occurrence of any brain state can, in principle, be causally explained by appeal solely to other physical states. To accommodate this, some philosophers espoused epiphenomenalism, the doctrine that physical states cause mental states, but mental states do not cause anything. (This thesis was discussed under the ne ‘conscious automatism’ by Huxley and Hogeson in the late nineteenth century. Willi Jes was the first to use the term ‘epiphenomena’ to mean phenomena that lack causal efficacy. And Jes Ward coined the term ‘epiphenomenalism’ in 1903.) Epiphenomenalism implies that there is only one-way psychophysical action – from the physical to the mental. Since epiphenomenalism allows such causal action, it can embrace the causal theory of perception. However, when combined with Cartesian dualism, epiphenomenalism, like Cartesian interactionism, implies the problematic thesis that states of an extended substance can affect states of an unextended substance. An epiphenomenalist can avoid this problem by rejecting the view that the mind is an unextended substance while maintaining that mental states and events are nonetheless distinct from physical states and events. Still, formidable problems would remain. It is hard to see how epiphenomenalism can allow that we are ever intentional agents. For intentional agency requires acting on reasons, which, according to the causal theory of action, requires a causal connection between reasons and actions. Since epiphenomenalism denies that such causal connections are possible, it must either maintain that our sense of agency is illusory or offer an alternative to the causal theory of action. Similarly, it must explain how thinking is possible philosophy of mind philosophy of mind 685    685 given that there are no causal connections between thoughts. Monism The dual-aspect theory. Many philosophers reject Descartes’s bifurcation of reality into mental and physical substances. Spinoza held a dualattribute theory – also called the dual-aspect theory – according to which the mental and the physical are distinct modes of a single substance, God. The mental and the physical are only two of infinitely many modes of this one substance. Many philosophers opted for a thoroughgoing monism, according to which all of reality is really of one kind. Materialism, idealism, and neutral monism are three brands of monism. Hobbes, a contemporary of Descartes, espoused materialism, the brand of monism according to which everything is material or physical. Berkeley is associated with idealism, the brand of monism according to which everything is mental. He held that both mental and physical phenomena are perceptions in the mind of God. For Hegel’s idealism, everything is part of the World Spirit. The early twentieth-century British philosophers Bradley and McTaggart also held a version of idealism. Neutral monism is the doctrine that all of reality is ultimately of one kind, which is neither mental nor physical. Hume was a neutral monist, maintaining that mental and physical substances are really just bundles of the neutral entities. Versions of neutral monism were later held by Mach and, for a short time, Russell. Russell called his neutral entities sensibilia and claimed that minds and physical objects are logical constructions out of them. Phenomenalism. This view, espoused in the twentieth century by, ong others, Ayer, argues that all empirical statements are synonymous with statements solely about phenomenal appearances. While the doctrine is about statements, phenomenalism is either a neutral monism or an idealism, depending on whether phenomenal appearances are claimed to be neither mental nor physical or, instead, mental. The required translations of physical statements into phenomenal ones proved not to be forthcoming, however. Chisholm offered a reason why they would not be: what appearances a physical state of affairs (e.g., objects arrayed in a room) has depends both on physical conditions of observation (e.g., lighting) and physical conditions of the perceiver (e.g., of the nervous system). At best, a statement solely about phenomenal appearances is equivalent to one about a physical state of affairs, only when certain physical conditions of observation and certain physical conditions of the perceiver obtain. Materialism. Two problems face any monism: it must characterize the phenomena it takes as basic, and it must explain how the fundental phenomena make up non-basic phenomena. The idealist and neutral monist theories proposed thus far have faltered on one or both counts. Largely because of scientific successes of the twentieth century, such as the rebirth of the atomic theory of matter, and the successes of quantum mechanics in explaining chemistry and of chemistry in turn in explaining much of biology, many philosophers today hold that materialism will ultimately succeed where idealism and neutral monism apparently failed. Materialism, however, comes in many different varieties and each faces formidable difficulties. Logical behaviorism. Ryle ridiculed Cartesianism as the view that there is a ghost in the machine (the body). He claimed that the view that the mind is a substance rests on a category mistake: ‘mind’ is a noun, but does not ne an object. Cartesianism confuses the logic of discourse about minds with the logic of discourse about bodies. To have a mind is not to possess a special sort of entity; it is simply to have certain capacities and dispositions. (Compare the thesis that to be alive is to possess not a certain entity, an entelechy or élan vital, but rather certain capacities and dispositions.) Ryle maintained, moreover, that it was a mistake to regard mental states such as belief, desire, and intention as internal causes of behavior. These states, he claimed, are dispositions to behave in overt ways. In part in response to the dualist point that one can understand our ordinary psychological vocabulary (‘belief’, ‘desire’, ‘pain’, etc.) and know nothing about the physical states and events in the brain, logical behaviorism has been proposed as a materialist doctrine that explains this fact. On this view, talk of mental phenomena is shorthand for talk of actual and potential overt bodily behavior (i.e., dispositions to overt bodily behavior). Logical behaviorism was much discussed from roughly the 1930s until the early 1960s. (While Ryle is sometimes counted as a logical behaviorist, he was not committed to the thesis that all mental talk can be translated into behavioral talk.) The translations promised by logical behaviorism appear unachievable. As Putn and others pointed out, one can fake being in pain and one can be in pain and yet not behave or be disposed to behave as if one were in pain (e.g., one might philosophy of mind philosophy of mind 686    686 be paralyzed or might be a “super-spartan”). Logical behaviorism faces similar difficulties in translating sentences about (what Russell called) propositional attitudes (i.e., beliefs that p, desires that p, hopes that p, intentions that p, and the like). Consider the following sple proposal (similar to one offered by Carnap): one believes that the cat is on the mat if and only if one is disposed to assent to ‘The cat is on the mat’. First, the proposed translation meets the condition of being purely behavioral only if assenting is understandable in purely behavioral terms. That is doubtful. The proposal also fails to provide a sufficient or a necessary condition: someone may assent to ‘The cat is on the mat’ and yet not believe the cat is on the mat (for the person may be trying to deceive); and a belief that the cat is on the mat will dispose one to assent to ‘The cat is on the mat’ only if one understands what is being asked, wants to indicate that one believes the cat is on the mat, and so on. But none of these conditions is required for believing that the cat is on the mat. Moreover, to invoke any of these mentalistic conditions defeats the attempt to provide a purely behavioral translation of the belief sentence. Although the project of translation has been abandoned, in recent years Dennett has defended a view in the spirit of logical behaviorism, intentional systems theory: belief-desire talk functions to characterize overall patterns of dispositions to overt behavior (in an environmental context) for the purposes of predicting overt behavior. The theory is sometimes characterized as supervenient behaviorism since it implies that whether an individual has beliefs, desires, intentions and the like supervenes on his dispositions to overt behavior: if two individuals are exactly alike in respect of their dispositions to overt behavior, the one has intentional states if and only if the other does. (This view allows, however, that the contents of an individual’s intentional states – what the individual believes, desires, etc. – may depend on environmental factors. So it is not committed to the supervenience of the contents of intentional states on dispositions to overt behavior.the discussion of content externalism below.) One objection to this view, due to Ned Block, is that it would mistakenly count as an intentional agent a giant look-up table – “a Blockhead” – that has the se dispositions to peripheral behavior as a genuine intentional agent. (A look-up table is a simple mechanical device that looks up preprogrmed responses.) Identity theories. In the early 1950s, Herbert Feigl claimed that mental states are brain states. He pointed out that if mental properties or state types are merely nomologically correlated with physical properties or state types, the connecting laws would be “nomological danglers”: irreducible to physical laws, and thus additional fundental laws. According to the identity theory, the connecting laws are not fundental laws (and so not nomological danglers) since they can be explained by identifying the mental and physical properties in question. In the late 1950s and the early 1960s, the philosopher Smart and the psychologist U. T. Place defended the materialist view that sensations are identical with brain processes. Smart claimed that while mental terms differ in meaning from physical terms, scientific investigation reveals that they have the se referents as certain physical terms. (Compare the fact that while ‘the Morning Star’ and ‘the Evening Star’ differ in meaning empirical investigation reveals the se referent: Venus.) Smart and Place claimed that feeling pain, e.g., is some brain process, exactly which one to be determined by scientific investigation. Smart claimed that sensation talk is paraphraseable in topic-neutral terms; i.e., in terms that leave open whether sensational properties are mental or physical. ‘I have an orange afterimage’ is paraphraseable (roughly) as: ‘There is something going on 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 description is topic-neutral since it leaves open whether what is going on is mental or physical. Smart maintained that scientific investigation reveals that what in fact meets the topic-neutral description is a brain process. He held that psychophysical identity statements such as ‘Pain is C-fiber firing’ are contingent, likening these to, e.g., ‘Lightning is electrical discharge’, which is contingent and knowable only through empirical investigation. Central state materialism. This brand of materialism was defended in the late 1960s and the early 1970s by Armstrong and others. On this view, mental states are states that are apt to produce a certain range of behavior. Central state materialists maintain that scientific investigation reveals that such states are states of the central nervous system, and thus that mental states are contingently identical with states of the central nervous system. Unlike logical behaviorism, central state materialism does not imply that mental sentences can be translated into physical sentences. Unlike both logical behaviorism and philosophy of mind philosophy of mind 687    687 intentional systems theory, central state materialism implies that mental states are actual internal states with causal effects. And unlike Cartesian interactionism, it holds that psychophysical interaction is just physical causal interaction. Some central state materialists held in addition that the mind is the brain. However, if the mind were the brain, every change in the brain would be a change in the mind; and that seems false: not every little brain change ounts to a change of mind. Indeed, the mind ceases to exist when brain death occurs, while the brain continues to exist. The moral that most materialists nowadays draw from such considerations is that the mind is not any physical substance, since it is not a substance of any sort. To have a mind is not to possess a special substance, but rather to have certain capacities – to think, feel, etc. To that extent, Ryle was right. However, central state materialists insist that the properly functioning brain is the material seat of mental capacities, that the exercise of mental capacities consists of brain processes, and that mental states are brain states that can produce behavior. Epistemological objections have been raised to identity theories. As self-conscious beings, we have a kind of privileged access to our own mental states. The exact avenue of privileged access, whether it is introspection or not, is controversial. But it has seemed to many philosophers that our access to our own mental states is privileged in being open only to us, whereas we lack any privileged access to the states of our central nervous systems. We come to know about central nervous system states in the se way we come to know about the central nervous system states of others. So, against central state materialism and the identity theory, it is claimed that mental states cannot be states of our central nervous systems. Taking privileged access to imply that we have incorrigible knowledge of our conscious mental states, and despairing of squaring privileged access so understood with materialism, Rorty advocated eliminative materialism, the thesis that there actually are no mental phenomena. A more common materialist response, however, is to deny that privileged access entails incorrigibility and to maintain that privileged access is compatible with materialism. Some materialists maintain that while certain types of mental states (e.g., sensations) are types of neurological states, it will be knowable only by empirical investigation that they are. Suppose pain is a neural state N. It will be only a posteriori knowable that pain is N. Via the avenue of privileged access, one comes to believe that one is in a pain state, but not that one is in an N-state. One can believe one is in a pain state without believing that one is in an N-state because the concept of pain is different from the concept of N. Nevertheless, pain is N. (Compare the fact that while water is H2O, the concept of water is different from that of H2O. Thus, while water is H2O, one can believe there is water in the glass without believing that there is H2O in it. The avenue of privileged access presents N conceptualized as pain, but never as neurological state N. The avenue of privileged access involves the exercise of mental, but not neurophysiological, concepts. However, our mental concepts answer to – apply in virtue of – the se properties (state types) as do certain of our neurophysiological concepts. The identity theory and central state materialism both hold that there are contingent psychophysical property and type identities. Some theorists in this tradition tried to distinguish a notion of theoretical identity from the notion of strict identity. They held that mental states are theoretically, but not strictly, identical with brain states. Against any such distinction, Kripke argued that identities are metaphysically necessary, i.e., hold in every possible world. If A % B, then necessarily A % B. Kripke acknowledged that there can be contingent statements of identity. But such statements, he argued, will employ at least one term that is not a rigid designator, i.e., a term that designates the se thing in every world in which it designates anything. Thus, since ‘the inventor of bifocals’ is a non-rigid designator, ‘Benjin Franklin is the inventor of bifocals’ is contingent. While Franklin is the inventor of bifocals, he might not have been. However, statements of identity in which the identity sign is flanked by rigid designators are, if true, metaphysically necessary. Kripke held that proper nes are rigid designators, and hence, the true identity statement ‘Cicero is Tully’ is metaphysically necessary. Nonetheless, a metaphysically necessary identity statement can be knowable only a posteriori. Indeed, ‘Cicero is Tully’ is knowable only a posteriori. Both ‘water’ and ‘H2O’, he maintained, are rigid designators: each designates the se kind of stuff in every possible world. And he thus maintained that it is metaphysically necessary that water is H2O, despite its not being a priori knowable that water is H2O. On Kripke’s view, any psychophysical identity statement that employs mental terms and physical terms that are rigid designators will also be metaphysically necessary, if true. philosophy of mind philosophy of mind 688    688 Central state materialists maintain that mental concepts are equivalent to concepts whose descriptive content is the state that is apt to produce such-and-such behavior in such-and-such circumstances. These defining descriptions for mental concepts are intended to be meaning-giving, not contingent reference-fixing descriptions; they are, moreover, not rigid designators. Thus, the central state materialists can concede that all identities are necessary, but maintain that psychophysical claims of identity are contingent claims of identity since the mental terms that figure in those statements are not rigid designators. However, Kripke maintained that our concepts of sensations and other qualitative states are not equivalent to the sorts of descriptions in question. The term ‘pain’, he maintained, is a rigid designator. This position might be refuted by a successful functional analysis of the concept of pain in physical and/or topic-neutral terms. However, no successful analysis of this sort has yet been produced. (See the section on consciousness below.) A materialist can grant Kripke that ‘pain’ is a rigid designator and claim that a statement such as ‘Pain is C-fiber firing’ will be metaphysically necessary if true, but only a posteriori knowable. However, Kripke raised a formidable problem for this materialism. He pointed out that if a statement is metaphysically necessary but only a posteriori knowable, its appearance of contingency calls for explanation. Despite being metaphysically necessary, ‘Water is H2O’ appears contingent. According to Kripke, we explain this appearance by noting that one can coherently imagine a world in which something has all the phenomenal properties of water, and so is an “epistemic counterpart” of it, yet is not H2O. The fact that we can coherently imagine such epistemic counterparts explains why ‘Water is H2O’ appears contingent. But no such explanation is available for (e.g.) ‘Pain is C-fiber firing’. For an epistemic counterpart of pain, something with the phenomenal properties of pain – the feel of pain – is pain. Something can look, smell, taste, and feel like water yet not be water. But whatever feels like pain is pain: pain is a feeling. In contrast, we can explain the apparent contingency of claims like ‘Water is H2O’ because water is not constituted by its phenomenal properties; our concept of water allows that it may have a “hidden essence,” i.e., an essential microstructure. If Kripke is right, then anyone who maintains that a statement of identity concerning a type of bodily sensation and a type of physical state is metaphysically necessary yet a posteriori, must explain the appearance of contingency in a way that differs from the way Kripke explains the appearance of contingency of ‘Water is H2O’. This is a formidable challenge. (The final section, on consciousness, sketches some materialist responses to it.) The general issue of property and state type identity is controversial. The claim that water is H2O despite the fact that the concept of water is distinct from the concept of H2O seems plausible. However, property or state type identity is more controversial than the identity of types of substances. For properties or state types, there are no generally accepted “non-duplication principles” – to use a phrase of David Lewis’s. (A nonduplication principle for A’s will say that no two A’s can be exactly alike in a certain respect; e.g., no two sets can have exactly the se members.) It is widely denied, for instance, that no two properties can be possessed by exactly the se things. Two properties, it is claimed, can be possessed by the se things; likewise, two state types can occur in the se space-time regions. Even assuming that mental concepts are distinct from physical concepts, the issue of whether mental state types are physical state types raises the controversial issue of the non-duplication principle for state types. Token and type physicalisms. Token physicalism is the thesis that every particular is physical. Type physicalism is the thesis that every type or kind of entity is physical; thus, the identity thesis and central state materialism are type physicalist theses since they imply that types of mental states are types of physical states. Type physicalism implies token physicalism: given the former, every token falls under some physical type, and therefore is token-token identical with some token of a physical type. But token physicalism does not imply type physicalism; the former leaves open whether physical tokens fall under non-physical types. Some doctrines billed as materialist or physicalist embrace token epiphenomenalism, but reject type physicalism. Non-reductive materialism. This form of materialism implies token physicalism, but denies type physicalism and, as well, that mental types (properties, etc.) are reducible to physical types. This doctrine has been discussed since at least the late nineteenth century and was widely discussed in the first third of the twentieth century. The British philosophers George Henry Lewes, Suel Alexander, Lloyd Morgan, and C. D. Broad all held or thought plausible a certain version of non-reductive materialism. They held or sympathized with the view that every substance philosophy of mind philosophy of mind 689    689 either is or is wholly made up of physical particles, that the well-functioning brain is the material seat of mental capacities, and that token mental states (events, processes, etc.) are token neurophysiological states (events, processes, etc.). However, they either held or thought plausible the view that mental capacities, properties, etc., emerge from, and thus do not reduce to, physical capacities, properties, etc. Lewes coined the term ‘emergence’; and Broad later labeled the doctrine emergent materialism. Emergent materialists maintain that laws correlating mental and physical properties are irreducible. (These laws would be what Feigl called nomological danglers.) Emergentists maintain that, despite their untidiness, such laws must be accepted with natural piety. Davidson’s doctrine of anomalous monism is a current brand of non-reductive materialism. He explicitly formulates this materialist thesis for events; and his irreducibility thesis is restricted to intentional mental types – e.g., believings, desirings, and intendings. Anomalous monism says that every event token is physical, but that intentional mental predicates and concepts (ones expressing propositional attitudes) do not reduce, by law or definition, to physical predicates or concepts. Davidson offers an original argument for this irreducibility thesis. Mental predicates and concepts are, he claims, governed by constitutive principles of rationality, but physical predicates and concepts are not. This difference, he contends, excludes the possibility of reduction of mental predicates and concepts to physical ones. Davidson denies, moreover, that there are strict psychological or psychophysical laws. He calls the conjunction of this thesis and his irreducibility thesis the principle of the anomalism of the mental. His argument for token physicalism (for events) appeals to the principle of the anomalism of the mental and to the principle of the nomological character of causality: when two events are causally related, they are subsumed by a strict law. He maintains that all strict laws are physical. Given that claim, and given the principle of the nomological character of causality, it follows that every event that is a cause or effect is a physical event. On this view, psychophysical causation is just causation between physical events. Stephen Schiffer has also maintained a non-reductive materialism, one he calls ontological physicalism and sentential dualism: every particular is physical, but mental truths are irreducible to physical truths. Non-reductive materialism presupposes that mental state (event) tokens can fall under physical state types and, thereby, count as physical state tokens. This presupposition is controversial; no uncontroversial non-duplication principle for state tokens settles the issue. Suppose, however, that mental state tokens are physical state tokens, despite mental state types not being physical state types. The issue of how mental state types and physical state types are related remains. Suppose that some physical token x is of a mental type M (say, a belief that the cat is on the mat) and some other physical token y is not of type M. There must, it seems, be some difference between x and y in virtue of which x is, and y is not, of type M. Otherwise, it is simply a brute fact that x is and y is not of type M. That, however, seems implausible. The claim that certain physical state tokens fall under mental state types simply as a matter of brute fact would leave the difference in question utterly mysterious. But if it is not a brute fact, then there is some explanation of why a certain physical state is a mental state of a certain sort. The non-reductive materialist owes us an explanation that does not imply psychophysical reduction. Moreover, even though the non-reductive materialist can claim that mental states are causes because they are physical states with physical effects, there is some question whether mental state types are relevant to causal relations. Suppose every state is a physical state. Given that physical states causally interact in virtue of falling under physical types, it follows that whenever states causally interact they do so in virtue of falling under physical types. That raises the issue of whether states are ever causes in virtue of falling under mental types. Type epiphenomenalism is the thesis that no state can cause anything in virtue of falling under a mental type. Token epiphenomenalism, the thesis that no mental state can cause anything, implies type epiphenomenalism, but not conversely. Nonreductive materialists are not committed to token physicalism. However, token epiphenomenalism may be false but type epiphenomenalism true since mental states may be causes only in virtue of falling under physical types, never in virtue of falling under mental types. Broad raised the issue of type epiphenomenalism and discussed whether emergent materialism is committed to it. Ted Honderich, Jaegwon Kim, Ernest Sosa, and others have in recent years raised the issue of whether non-reductive materialism is committed to type epiphenomenalism. Brian McLaughlin has argued that the claim that an event acts as a cause in virtue of falling under a certain physical type is consistent with the philosophy of mind philosophy of mind 690    690 claim that it also acts as a cause in virtue of falling under a certain mental type, even when the mental type is not identical with the physical type. But even if this is so, the relationship between mental types and physical types must be addressed. Ernest LePore and Barry Loewer, Frank Jackson and Philip Pettit, Stephen Yablo, and others have attempted to characterize a relation between mental types and physical types that allows for the causal relevance of mental types. But whether there is a relation between mental and physical properties that is both adequate to secure the causal relevance of mental properties and available to non-reductive materialists remains an open question. Davidson’s anomalous monism may appear to be a kind of dual-aspect theory: there are events and they can have two sorts of autonomous aspects, mental and physical. However, while Davidson holds that mental properties (or types) do not reduce to physical ones, he also holds that the mental properties of an event depend on its physical properties in that the former supervene on the latter in this sense: no two events can be exactly alike in every physical respect and yet differ in some mental respect. This proposal introduced the notion of supervenience into contem- porary philosophy of mind. Often nonreductive materialists argue that mental properties (types) supervene on physical properties (types). Kim, however, has distinguished various supervenience relations, and argues that some are too weak to count as versions of materialism (as opposed to, say, dual-aspect theory), while other supervenience relations are too strong to use to formulate non-reductive materialism since they imply reducibility. According to Kim, non-reductive materialism is an unstable position. Materialism as a supervenience thesis. Several philosophers have in recent years attempted to define the thesis of materialism using a global supervenience thesis. Their aim is not to formulate a brand of non-reductive materialism; they maintain that their supervenience thesis may well imply reducibility. Their aim is, rather, to formulate a thesis to which anyone who counts as a genuine materialist must subscribe. David Lewis has maintained that materialism is true if and only if any non-alien possible worlds that are physically indiscernible are mentally indiscernible as well. Non-alien possible worlds are worlds that have exactly the se perfectly natural properties as the actual world. Frank Jackson has offered this proposal: materialism is true if and only if any minimal physical duplicate of the actual world is a duplicate simpliciter of the actual world. A world is a physical duplicate of the actual world if and only if it is exactly like the actual world in every physical respect (physical particular for physical particular, physical property for physical property, physical relation for physical relation, etc.); and a world is a duplicate simpliciter of the actual world if and only if it is exactly like the actual world in every respect. A minimal physical duplicate of the actual world is a physical duplicate that contains nothing else (by way of particulars, kinds, properties, etc.) than it must in order to be a physical duplicate of the actual world. Two questions arise for any formulation of the thesis of materialism. Is it adequate to materialism? And, if it is, is it true? Functionalism. The nineteenth-century British philosopher George Henry Lewes maintained that while not every neurological event is mental, every mental event is neurological. He claimed that what makes certain neurological events mental events is their causal role in the organism. This is a very early version of functionalism, nowadays a leading approach to the mind–body problem. Functionalism implies an answer to the question of what makes a state token a mental state of a certain kind M: nely, that it is an instance of some functional state type identical with M. There are two versions of this proposal. On one, a mental state type M of a system will be identical with the state type that plays a certain causal role R in the system. The description ‘the state type that plays R in the system’ will be a nonrigid designator; moreover, different state types may play R in different organisms, in which case the mental state is multiply realizable. On the second version, a mental state type M is identical with a second-order state type, the state of being in some first-order state that plays causal role R. More than one first-order state may play role R, and thus M may be multiply realizable. On either version, if the relevant causal roles are specifiable in physical or topic-neutral terms, then the functional definitions of mental state types will be, in principle, physically reductive. Since the roles would be specified partly in topic-neutral terms, there may well be possible worlds in which the mental states are realized by non-physical states; thus, functionalism does not imply token physicalism. However, functionalists typically maintain that, on the empirical evidence, mental states are realized (in our world) only by physical states. Functionalism comes in many varieties. philosophy of mind philosophy of mind 691    691 Smart’s topic-neutral analysis of our talk of sensations is in the spirit of functionalism. And Armstrong’s central state materialism counts as a kind of functionalism since it maintains that mental states are states apt to produce a certain range of behavior, and thus identifies states as mental states by their performing this causal role. However, functionalists today typically hold that the defining causal roles include causal roles vis-à-vis input state types, as well as output state types, and also vis-à-vis other internal state types of the system in question. In the 1960s David Lewis proposed a functionalist theory, analytical functionalism, according to which definitions of mental predicates such as ‘belief’, ‘desire’, and the like (though not predicates such as ‘believes that p’ or ‘desires that q’) can be obtained by conjoining the platitudes of commonsense psychology and formulating the Rsey sentence for the conjunction. The relevant Rsey sentence is a second-order quantificational sentence that quantifies over the mental predicates in the conjunction of commonsense psychological platitudes, and from it one can derive definitions of the mental predicates. On this view, it will be analytic that a certain mental state (e.g., belief) is the state that plays a certain causal role vis-à-vis other states; and it is a matter of empirical investigation what state plays the role. Lewis claimed that such investigation reveals that the state types that play the roles in question are physical states. In the early 1960s, Putn proposed a version of scientific functionalism, machine state functionalism: according to this view, mental states are types of Turing machine table states. Turing machines are mechanical devices consisting of a tape with squares on it that either are blank or contain symbols, and an executive that can move one square to the left, or one square to the right, or stay where it is. And it can either write a symbol on a square, erase a symbol on a square, or leave the square as it is. (According to the Church-Turing thesis, every computable function can be computed by a Turing machine.) Now there are two functions specifying such a machine: one from input states to output states, the other from input states to input states. And these functions are expressible by counterfactuals (e.g., ‘If the machine is in state s 1 and receives input I, it will emit output O and enter state s2’). Machine tables are specified by the counterfactuals that express the functions in question. So the main idea of machine state functionalism is that any given mental type is definable as the state type that participates in certain counterfactual relationships specified in terms of purely formal, and so not semantically interpreted, state types. Any system whose inputs, outputs, and internal states are counterfactually related in the way characterized by a machine table is a realization of that table. This version of machine state functionalism has been abandoned: no one maintains that the mind has the architecture of a Turing machine. However, computational psychology, a branch of cognitive psychology, presupposes a scientific functionalist view of cognitive states: it takes the mind to have a computational architecture. (See the section on cognitive psychology below.) Functionalism – the view that what makes a state a realization of a mental state is its playing a certain causal role – remains a leading theory of mind. But functionalism faces formidable difficulties. Block has pinpointed one. On the one hand, if the input and output states that figure in the causal role alleged to define a certain mental state are specified in insufficient detail, the functional definition will be too liberal: it will mistakenly classify certain states as of that mental type. On the other hand, if the input and output states are specified in too much detail, the functional definition will be chauvinistic: it will fail to count certain states as instances of the mental state that are in fact such instances. Moreover, it has also been argued that functionalism cannot capture conscious states since types of conscious states do not admit of functional definitions. Cognitive psychology, content, and consciousness Cognitive psychology. Many claim that one aim of cognitive psychology is to provide explanations of intentional capacities, capacities to be in intentional states (e.g., believing) and to engage in intentional activities (e.g., reasoning). Fodor has argued that classical cognitive psychology postulates a cognitive architecture that includes a language of thought: a system of mental representation with a combinatorial syntax and semantics, and computational processes defined over these mental representations in virtue of their syntactic structures. On this view, cognition is rule-governed symbol manipulation. Mental symbols have meanings, but they participate in computational processes solely in virtue of their syntactic or formal properties. The mind is, so to speak, a syntactic engine. The view implies a kind of content parallelism: syntaxsensitive causal transitions between symbols will preserve semantic coherence. Fodor has mainphilosophy of mind philosophy of mind 692    692 tained that, on this language-of-thought view of cognition (the classical view), being in a beliefthat-p state can be understood as consisting in bearing a computational relation (one that is constitutive of belief) to a sentence in the language of thought that means that p; and similarly for desire, intention, and the like. The explanation of intentional capacities will be provided by a computational theory for mental sentences in conjunction with a psychosemantic theory, a theory of meaning for mental sentences. A research progr in cognitive science called connectionism postulates networks of neuron-like units. The units can be either on or off, or can have continuous levels of activation. Units are connected, the connections have various degrees of strength, and the connections can be either inhibitory or excitatory. Connectionism has provided fruitful models for studying how neural networks compute information. Moreover, connectionists have had much success in modeling pattern recognition tasks (e.g., facial recognition) and tasks consisting of learning categories from exples. Some connectionists maintain that connectionism will yield an alternative to the classical language-of-thought account of intentional states and capacities. However, some favor a mixed-models approach to cognition: some cognitive capacities are symbolic, some connectionist. And some hold that connectionism will yield an implementational architecture for a symbolic cognitive architecture, one that will help explain how a symbolic cognitive architecture is realized in the nervous system. Content externalism. Many today hold that Twin-Earth thought experiments by Putn and Tyler Burge show that the contents of a subject’s mental states do not supervene on intrinsic properties of the subject: two individuals can be exactly alike in every intrinsic respect, yet be in mental states with different contents. (In response to Twin-Earth thought experiments, some philosophers have, however, attempted to characterize a notion of narrow content, a kind of content that supervenes on intrinsic properties of thinkers.) Content, externalists claim, depends on extrinsic-contextual factors. If externalism is correct, then a psychosemantic theory must exine the relation between mental symbols and the extrinsic, contextual factors that determine contents. Stephen Stich has argued that psychology should eschew psychosemantics and concern itself only with the syntactic properties of mental sentences. Such a psychology could not explain intentional capacities. But Stich urges that computational psychology also eschew that explanatory goal. If, however, psychology is to explain intentional capacities, a psychosemantic theory is needed. Dretske, Fodor, Ruth Millikan, and David Papineau have each independently attempted to provide, in physicalistically respectable terms, foundations for a naturalized externalist theory of the content of mental sentences or internal physical states. Perhaps the leading problem for these theories of content is to explain how the physical and functional facts about a state determine a unique content for it. Appealing to work by Quine and by Kripke, some philosophers argue that such facts will not determine unique contents. Both causal and epistemic concerns have been raised about externalist theories of content. Such theories invite the question whether the property of having a certain content is ever causally relevant. If content is a contextual property of a state that has it, can states have effects in virtue of their having a certain content? This is an important issue because intentional states figure in explanations not only in virtue of their intentional mode (whether they are beliefs, or desires, etc.) but also in virtue of their contents. Consider an everyday belief-desire explanation. The fact that the subject’s belief was that there was milk in the refrigerator and the fact that the subject’s desire was for milk are both essential to the belief and desire explaining why the subject went to the refrigerator. Dretske, who maintains that content depends on a causal-historical context, has attempted to explain how the property of having a certain content can be causally relevant even though the possession of the property depends on causal-historical factors. And various other philosophers have attempted to explain how the causal relevance of content can be squared with the fact that it fails to supervene on intrinsic properties of the subject. A further controversial question is whether externalism is consistent with our having privileged access to what we are thinking. Consciousness. Conscious states such as pain states, visual experiences, and so on, are such that it is “like” something for the subject of the state to be in them. Such states have a qualitative aspect, a phenomenological character. The what-it-is-like aspects of experiences are called qualia. Qualia pose a serious difficulty for physicalism. Broad argued that one can know all the physical properties of a chemical and how it causally interacts with other physical phenomena and yet not know what it is like to smell it. He concluded that the smell of the chemical is philosophy of mind philosophy of mind 693    693 not itself a physical property, but rather an irreducible emergent property. Frank Jackson has recently defended a version of the argument, which has been dubbed the knowledge argument. Jackson argues that a super-scientist, Mary, who knows all the physical and functional facts about color vision, light, and matter, but has never experienced redness since she has spent her entire life in a black and white room, would not know what it is like to visually experience red. He concludes that the physical and functional (topic-neutral) facts do not entail all the facts, and thus materialism is false. In response, Lawrence Nemirow, David Lewis, and others have argued that knowing what it is like to be in a certain conscious state is, in part, a matter of know-how (e.g., to be able to imagine oneself in the state) rather than factual knowledge, and that the failure of knowledge of the physical and functional facts to yield such know-how does not imply the falsity of materialism. Functionalism seems unable to solve the problem of qualia since qualia seem not to be functionally definable. In the 1970s, Fodor and Ned Block argued that two states can have the se causal role, thereby realizing the se functional state, yet the qualia associated with each can be inverted. This is called the problem of inverted qualia. The color spectrum, e.g., might be inverted for two individuals (a possibility raised by Locke), despite their being in the se functional states. They further argued that two states might realize the se functional state, yet the one might have qualia associated with it and the other not. This is called the problem of absent qualia. Sydney Shoemaker has argued that the possibility of absent qualia can be ruled out on functionalist grounds. However, he has also refined the inverted qualia scenario and further articulated the problem it poses for functionalism. Whether functionalism or physicalism can avoid the problems of absent and inverted qualia remains an open question. Thomas Nagel claims that conscious states are subjective: to fully understand them, one must understand what it is like to be in them, but one can do that only by taking up the experiential point of view of a subject in them. Physical states, in contrast, are objective. Physical science attempts to characterize the world in abstraction from the experiential point of view of any subject. According to Nagel, whether phenomenal mental states reduce to physical states turns on whether subjective states reduce to objective states; and, at present, he claims, we have no understanding of how they could. Nagel has suggested that consciousness may be explainable only by appeal to as yet undiscovered basic nonmental, non-physical properties – “proto-mental properties” – the idea being that experiential points of view might be constituted by protomental properties together with physical properties. He thus claims that panphysicism is worthy of serious consideration. Frank Jackson, Jes Van Cleve, and David Chalmers have argued that conscious properties are emergent, i.e., fundental, irreducible macro-properties; and Chalmers sympathizes with a brand of panphysicism. Colin McGinn claims that while conscious properties are likely reductively explainable by brain properties, our minds seem conceptually closed to the explaining properties: we are unable to conceptualize them, just as a cat is unable to conceptualize a square root. Dennett attempts to explain consciousness in supervenient behaviorist terms. David Rosenthal argues that consciousness is a special case of intentionality – more specifically, that conscious states are just states we can come in a certain direct way to believe we are in. Dretske, Willi Lycan, and Michael Tye argue that conscious properties are intentional properties and physicalistically reducible. Patricia Churchland argues that conscious phenomena are reducible to neurological phenomena. Brian Loar contends that qualia are identical with either functional or neurological states of the brain; and Christopher Hill argues specifically that qualia are identical with neurological states. Loar and Hill attempt to explain away the appearance of contingency of psychophysical identity claims, but in a way different from the way Kripke attempts to explain the appearance of contingency of ‘Water is H2O’, since they concede that that mode of explanation is unavailable. They appeal to differences in the conceptual roles of neurological and functional concepts by contrast with phenomenal concepts. They argue that while such concepts are different, they answer to the se properties. The nature of consciousness thus remains a matter of dispute. 

philosophy of psychology, the philosophical study of psychology. Psychology began to separate from philosophy with the work of the ninephilosophy of organism philosophy of psychology 694    694 teenth-century German experimentalists, especially Fechner (1801–87), Helmholtz (1821– 94), and Wundt (1832–1920). In the first half of the twentieth century, the separation was completed in this country insofar as separate psychology departments were set up in most universities, psychologists established their own journals and professional associations, and experimental methods were widely employed, although not in every area of psychology (the first experimental study of the effectiveness of a psychological therapy did not occur until 1963). Despite this achievement of autonomy, however, issues have remained about the nature of the connections, if any, that should continue between psychology and philosophy. One radical view, that virtually all such connections should be severed, was defended by the behaviorist John Watson in his seminal 1913 paper “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It.” Watson criticizes psychologists, even the experimentalists, for relying on introspective methods and for making consciousness the subject matter of their discipline. He recommends that psychology be a purely objective experimental branch of natural science, that its theoretical goal be to predict and control behavior, and that it discard all reference to consciousness. In making behavior the sole subject of psychological inquiry, we avoid taking sides on “those time-honored relics of philosophical speculation,” nely competing theories about the mind–body problem, such as interactionism and parallelism. In a later work, published in 1925, Watson claimed that the success of behaviorism threatened the very existence of philosophy: “With the behavioristic point of view now becoming dominant, it is hard to find a place for what has been called philosophy. Philosophy is passing – has all but passed, and unless new issues arise which will give a foundation for a new philosophy, the world has seen its last great philosopher.” One new issue was the credibility of behaviorism. Watson gave no argument for his view that prediction and control of behavior should be the only theoretical goals of psychology. If the attempt to explain behavior is also legitimate, as some anti-behaviorists argue, then it would seem to be an empirical question whether that goal can be met without appealing to mentalistic causes. Watson and his successors, such as B. F. Skinner, cited no credible empirical evidence that it could, but instead relied primarily on philosophical arguments for banning postulation of mentalistic causes. As a consequence, behaviorists virtually guaranteed that philosophers of psychology would have at least one additional task beyond wrestling with traditional mind– body issues: the analysis and criticism of behaviorism itself. Although behaviorism and the mind–body problem were never the sole subjects of philosophy of psychology, a much richer set of topics developed after 1950 when the so-called cognitive revolution occurred in erican psychology. These topics include innate knowledge and the acquisition of transformational grmars, intentionality, the nature of mental representation, functionalism, mental imagery, the language of thought, and, more recently, connectionism. Such topics are of interest to many cognitive psychologists and those in other disciplines, such as linguistics and artificial intelligence, who contributed to the emerging discipline known as cognitive science. Thus, after the decline of various forms of behaviorism and the consequent rise of cognitivism, many philosophers of psychology collaborated more closely with psychologists. This increased cooperation was probably due not only to a broadening of the issues, but also to a methodological change in philosophy. In the period roughly between 1945 and 1975, conceptual analysis dominated both erican and English philosophy of psychology and the closely related discipline, the philosophy of mind. Many philosophers took the position that philosophy was essentially an a priori discipline. These philosophers rarely cited the empirical studies of psychologists. In recent decades, however, philosophy of psychology has become more empirical, at least in the sense that more attention is being paid to the details of the empirical studies of psychologists. The result is more interchanges between philosophers and psychologists. Although interest in cognitive psychology appears to predominate in recent erican philosophy of psychology, the new emphasis on empirical studies is also reflected in philosophic work on topics not directly related to cognitive psychology. For exple, philosophers of psychology have written books in recent years on the clinical foundations of psychoanalysis, the foundations of behavior therapy and behavior modification, and self-deception. The emphasis on empirical data has been taken one step further by naturalists, who argue that in epistemology, at least, and perhaps in all areas of philosophy, philosophical questions should either be replaced by questions from empirical psychology or be answered by appeal to empirical studies in psychology and related disciplines. It is philosophy of psychology philosophy of psychology 695    695 still too early to predict the fruitfulness of the naturalist approach, but this new trend might well have pleased Watson. Taken to an extreme, naturalism would make philosophy dependent on psychology instead of the reverse and thus would further enhance the autonomy of psychology that Watson desired. 

philosophy of religion, the subfield of philosophy devoted to the study of religious phenomena. Although religions are typically complex systems of theory and practice, including both myths and rituals, philosophers tend to concentrate on evaluating religious truth claims. In the major theistic traditions, Judaism, Christianity, and Isl, the most important of these claims concern the existence, nature, and activities of God. Such traditions commonly understand God to be something like a person who is disembodied, eternal, free, all-powerful, all-knowing, the creator and sustainer of the universe, and the proper object of human obedience and worship. One important question is whether this conception of the object of human religious activity is coherent; another is whether such a being actually exists. Philosophers of religion have sought rational answers to both questions. The major theistic traditions draw a distinction between religious truths that can be discovered and even known by unaided human reason and those to which humans have access only through a special divine disclosure or revelation. According to Aquinas, e.g., the existence of God and some things about the divine nature can be proved by unaided human reason, but such distinctively Christian doctrines as the Trinity and Incarnation cannot be thus proved and are known to humans only because God has revealed them. Theists disagree about how such divine disclosures occur; the main candidates for vehicles of revelation include religious experience, the teachings of an inspired religious leader, the sacred scriptures of a religious community, and the traditions of a particular church. The religious doctrines Christian traditions take to be the content of revelation are often described as matters of faith. To be sure, such traditions typically affirm that faith goes beyond mere doctrinal belief to include an attitude of profound trust in God. On most accounts, however, faith involves doctrinal belief, and so there is a contrast within the religious domain itself between faith and reason. One way to spell out the contrast – though not the only way – is to imagine that the content of revelation is divided into two parts. On the one hand, there are those doctrines, if any, that can be known by human reason but are also part of revelation; the existence of God is such a doctrine if it can be proved by human reason alone. Such doctrines might be accepted by some people on the basis of rational argument, while others, who lack rational proof, accept them on the authority of revelation. On the other hand, there are those doctrines that cannot be known by human reason and for which the authority of revelation is the sole basis. They are objects of faith rather than reason and are often described as mysteries of faith. Theists disagree about how such exclusive objects of faith are related to reason. One prominent view is that, although they go beyond reason, they are in harmony with it; another is that they are contrary to reason. Those who urge that such doctrines should be accepted despite the fact that, or even precisely because, they are contrary to reason are known as fideists; the fous slogan credo quia absurdum (‘I believe because it is absurd’) captures the flavor of extreme fideism. Many scholars regard Kierkegaard as a fideist on account of his emphasis on the paradoxical nature of the Christian doctrine that Jesus of Nazareth is God incarnate. Modern philosophers of religion have, for the most part, confined their attention to topics treatable without presupposing the truth of any particular tradition’s claims about revelation and have left the exploration of mysteries of faith to the theologians of various traditions. A great deal of philosophical work clarifying the concept of God has been prompted by puzzles that suggest some incoherence in the traditional concept. One kind of puzzle concerns the coherence of individual claims about the nature of God. Consider the traditional affirmation that God is allpowerful (omnipotent). Reflection on this doctrine raises a fous question: Can God make a stone so heavy that even God cannot lift it? No matter how this is answered, it seems that there is at least one thing that even God cannot do, i.e., make such a stone or lift such a stone, and so it appears that even God cannot be all-powerful. Such puzzles stimulate attempts by philosophers to analyze the concept of omnipotence in a way that specifies more precisely the scope of the powers coherently attributable to an omnipotent being. To the extent that such attempts succeed, they foster a deeper understanding of the concept of God and, if God exists, of the divine nature. Another sort of puzzle concerns the consistency of attributing two or more properties to philosophy of religion philosophy of religion 696    696 God. Consider the claim that God is both immutable and omniscient. An immutable being is one that cannot undergo internal change, and an omniscient being knows all truths, and believes no falsehoods. If God is omniscient, it seems that God must first know and hence believe that it is now Tuesday and not believe that it is now Wednesday and later know and hence believe that it is now Wednesday and not believe that it is now Tuesday. If so, God’s beliefs change, and since change of belief is an internal change, God is not immutable. So it appears that God is not immutable if God is omniscient. A resolution of this puzzle would further contribute to enriching the philosophical understanding of the concept of God. It is, of course, one thing to elaborate a coherent concept of God; it is quite another to know, apart from revelation, that such a being actually exists. A proof of the existence of God would yield such knowledge, and it is the task of natural theology to evaluate arguments that purport to be such proofs. As opposed to revealed theology, natural theology restricts the assumptions fit to serve as premises in its arguments to things naturally knowable by humans, i.e., knowable without special revelation from supernatural sources. Many people have hoped that such natural religious knowledge could be universally communicated and would justify a form of religious practice that would appeal to all humankind because of its rationality. Such a religion would be a natural religion. The history of natural theology has produced a bewildering variety of arguments for the existence of God. The four main types are these: ontological arguments, cosmological arguments, teleological arguments, and moral arguments. The earliest and most fous version of the ontological argument was set forth by Anselm of Canterbury in chapter 2 of his Proslogion. It is a bold attempt to deduce the existence of God from the concept of God: we understand God to be a perfect being, something than which nothing greater can be conceived. Because we have this concept, God at least exists in our minds as an object of the understanding. Either God exists in the mind alone, or God exists both in the mind and as an extrental reality. But if God existed in the mind alone, then we could conceive of a being greater than that than which nothing greater can be conceived, nely, one that also existed in extrental reality. Since the concept of a being greater than that than which nothing greater can be conceived is incoherent, God cannot exist in the mind alone. Hence God exists not only in the mind but also in extrental reality. The most celebrated criticism of this form of the argument was Kant’s, who claimed that existence is not a real predicate. For Kant, a real predicate contributes to determining the content of a concept and so serves as a part of its definition. But to say that something falling under a concept exists does not add to the content of a concept; there is, Kant said, no difference in conceptual content between a hundred real dollars and a hundred imaginary dollars. Hence whether or not there exists something that corresponds to a concept cannot be settled by definition. The existence of God cannot be deduced from the concept of a perfect being because existence is not contained in the concept or the definition of a perfect being. Contemporary philosophical discussion has focused on a slightly different version of the ontological argument. In chapter 3 of Proslogion Anselm suggested that something than which nothing greater can be conceived cannot be conceived not to exist and so exists necessarily. Following this lead, such philosophers as Charles Hartshorne, Norman Malcolm, and Alvin Plantinga have contended that God cannot be a contingent being who exists in some possible worlds but not in others. The existence of a perfect being is either necessary, in which case God exists in every possible world, or impossible, in which case God exists in no possible worlds. On this view, if it is so much as possible that a perfect being exists, God exists in every possible world and hence in the actual world. The crucial premise in this form of the argument is the assumption that the existence of a perfect being is possible; it is not obviously true and could be rejected without irrationality. For this reason, Plantinga concedes that the argument does not prove or establish its conclusion, but maintains that it does make it rational to accept the existence of God. The key premises of various cosmological arguments are statements of obvious facts of a general sort about the world. Thus, the argument to a first cause begins with the observation that there are now things undergoing change and things causing change. If something is a cause of such change only if it is itself caused to change by something else, then there is an infinitely long chain of causes of change. But, it is alleged, there cannot be a causal chain of infinite length. Therefore there is something that causes change, but is not caused to change by anything else, i.e., a first cause. Many critics of this form of the arguphilosophy of religion philosophy of religion 697    697 ment deny its assumption that there cannot be an infinite causal regress or chain of causes. This argument also fails to show that there is only one first cause and does not prove that a first cause must have such divine attributes as omniscience, omnipotence, and perfect goodness. A version of the cosmological argument that has attracted more attention from contemporary philosophers is the argument from contingency to necessity. It starts with the observation that there are contingent beings – beings that could have failed to exist. Since contingent beings do not exist of logical necessity, a contingent being must be caused to exist by some other being, for otherwise there would be no explanation of why it exists rather than not doing so. Either the causal chain of contingent beings has a first member, a contingent being not caused by another contingent being, or it is infinitely long. If, on the one hand, the chain has a first member, then a necessary being exists and causes it. After all, being contingent, the first member must have a cause, but its cause cannot be another contingent being. Hence its cause has to be non-contingent, i.e., a being that could not fail to exist and so is necessary. If, on the other hand, the chain is infinitely long, then a necessary being exists and causes the chain as a whole. This is because the chain as a whole, being itself contingent, requires a cause that must be noncontingent since it is not part of the chain. In either case, if there are contingent beings, a necessary being exists. So, since contingent beings do exist, there is a necessary being that causes their existence. Critics of this argument attack its assumption that there must be an explanation for the existence of every contingent being. Rejecting the principle that there is a sufficient reason for the existence of each contingent thing, they argue that the existence of at least some contingent beings is an inexplicable brute fact. And even if the principle of sufficient reason is true, its truth is not obvious and so it would not be irrational to deny it. Accordingly, Willi Rowe (b.1931) concludes that this version of the cosmological argument does not prove the existence of God, but he leaves open the question of whether it shows that theistic belief is reasonable. The starting point of teleological arguments is the phenomenon of goal-directedness in nature. Aquinas, e.g., begins with the claim that we see that things which lack intelligence act for an end so as to achieve the best result. Modern science has discredited this universal metaphysical teleology, but many biological systems do seem to display remarkable adaptations of means to ends. Thus, as Willi Paley (1743–1805) insisted, the eye is adapted to seeing and its parts cooperate in complex ways to produce sight. This suggests an analogy between such biological systems and human artifacts, which are known to be products of intelligent design. Spelled out in mechanical terms, the analogy grounds the claim that the world as a whole is like a vast machine composed of many smaller machines. Machines are contrived by intelligent human designers. Since like effects have like causes, the world as a whole and many of its parts are therefore probably products of design by an intelligence resembling the human but greater in proportion to the magnitude of its effects. Because this form of the argument rests on an analogy, it is known as the analogical argument for the existence of God; it is also known as the design argument since it concludes the existence of an intelligent designer of the world. Hume subjected the design argument to sustained criticism in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. If, as most scholars suppose, the character Philo speaks for Hume, Hume does not actually reject the argument. He does, however, think that it warrants only the very weak conclusion that the cause or causes of order in the universe probably bear some remote analogy to human intelligence. As this way of putting it indicates, the argument does not rule out polytheism; perhaps different minor deities designed lions and tigers. Moreover, the analogy with human artificers suggests that the designer or designers of the universe did not create it from nothing but merely imposed order on already existing matter. And on account of the mixture of good and evil in the universe, the argument does not show that the designer or designers are morally admirable enough to deserve obedience or worship. Since the time of Hume, the design argument has been further undermined by the emergence of Darwinian explanations of biological adaptations in terms of natural selection that give explanations of such adaptations in terms of intelligent design stiff competition. Some moral arguments for the existence of God conform to the pattern of inference to the best explanation. It has been argued that the hypothesis that morality depends upon the will of God provides the best explanation of the objectivity of moral obligations. Kant’s moral argument, which is probably the best-known specimen of this type, takes a different tack. According to Kant, the complete good consists of perfect virtue rewarded with perfect happiness, and philosophy of religion philosophy of religion 698    698 virtue deserves to be rewarded with proportional happiness because it makes one worthy to be happy. If morality is to command the allegiance of reason, the complete good must be a real possibility, and so practical reason is entitled to postulate that the conditions necessary to guarantee its possibility obtain. As far as anyone can tell, nature and its laws do not furnish such a guarantee; in this world, apparently, the virtuous often suffer while the vicious flourish. And even if the operation of natural laws were to produce happiness in proportion to virtue, this would be merely coincidental, and hence finite moral agents would not have been made happy just because they had by their virtue made themselves worthy of happiness. So practical reason is justified in postulating a supernatural agent with sufficient goodness, knowledge, and power to ensure that finite agents receive the happiness they deserve as a reward for their virtue, though theoretical reason can know nothing of such a being. Critics of this argument have denied that we must postulate a systematic connection between virtue and happiness in order to have good reasons to be moral. Indeed, making such an assumption might actually tempt one to cultivate virtue for the sake of securing happiness rather than for its own sake. It seems therefore that none of these arguments by itself conclusively proves the existence of God. However, some of them might contribute to a cumulative case for the existence of God. According to Richard Swinburne, cosmological, teleological, and moral arguments individually increase the probability of God’s existence even though none of them makes it more probable than not. But when other evidence such as that deriving from providential occurrences and religious experiences is added to the balance, Swinburne concludes that theism becomes more probable than its negation. Whether or not he is right, it does appear to be entirely correct to judge the rationality of theistic belief in the light of our total evidence. But there is a case to be made against theism too. Philosophers of religion are interested in arguments against the existence of God, and fairness does seem to require admitting that our total evidence contains much that bears negatively on the rationality of belief in God. The problem of evil is generally regarded as the strongest objection to theism. Two kinds of evil can be distinguished. Moral evil inheres in the wicked actions of moral agents and the bad consequences they produce. An exple is torturing the innocent. When evil actions are considered theologically as offenses against God, they are regarded as sins. Natural evils are bad consequences that apparently derive entirely from the operations of impersonal natural forces, e.g. the human and animal suffering produced by natural catastrophes such as earthquakes and epidemics. Both kinds of evil raise the question of what reasons an omniscient, omnipotent, and perfectly good being could have for permitting or allowing their existence. Theodicy is the enterprise of trying to answer this question and thereby to justify the ways of God to humans. It is, of course, possible to deny the presuppositions of the question. Some thinkers have held that evil is unreal; others have maintained that the deity is limited and so lacks the power or knowledge to prevent the evils that occur. If one accepts the presuppositions of the question, the most promising strategy for theodicy seems to be to claim that each evil God permits is necessary for some greater good or to avoid some alternative to it that is at least as bad if not worse. The strongest form of this doctrine is the claim made by Leibniz that this is the best of all possible worlds. It is unlikely that humans, with their cognitive limitations, could ever understand all the details of the greater goods for which evils are necessary, assuming that such goods exist; however, we can understand how some evils contribute to achieving goods. According to the soul-making theodicy of John Hick (b.1922), which is rooted in a tradition going back to Irenaeus, admirable human qualities such as compassion could not exist except as responses to suffering, and so evil plays a necessary part in the formation of moral character. But this line of thought does not seem to provide a complete theodicy because much animal suffering occurs unnoticed by humans and child abuse often destroys rather than strengthens the moral character of its victims. Recent philosophical discussion has often focused on the claim that the existence of an omniscient, omnipotent, and perfectly good being is logically inconsistent with the existence of evil or of a certain quantity of evil. This is the logical problem of evil, and the most successful response to it has been the free will defense. Unlike a theodicy, this defense does not speculate about God’s reasons for permitting evil but merely argues that God’s existence is consistent with the existence of evil. Its key idea is that moral good cannot exist apart from libertarian free actions that are not causally determined. If God aims to produce moral good, God must create free creatures upon whose cooperation he must depend, philosophy of religion philosophy of religion 699    699 and so divine omnipotence is limited by the freedom God confers on creatures. Since such creatures are also free to do evil, it is possible that God could not have created a world containing moral good but no moral evil. Plantinga extends the defense from moral to natural evil by suggesting that it is also possible that all natural evil is due to the free actions of non-human persons such as Satan and his cohorts. Plantinga and Swinburne have also addressed the probabilistic problem of evil, which is the claim that the existence of evil disconfirms or renders improbable the hypothesis that God exists. Both of them argue for the conclusion that this is not the case. Finally, it is worth mentioning three other topics on which contemporary philosophers of religion have worked to good effect. Important studies of the meaning and use of religious language were stimulated by the challenge of logical positivism’s claim that theological language is cognitively meaningless. Defenses of such Christian doctrines as the Trinity, Incarnation, and Atonement against various philosophical objections have recently been offered by people committed to elaborating an explicitly Christian philosophy. And a growing appreciation of religious pluralism has both sharpened interest in questions about the cultural relativity of religious rationality and begun to encourage progress toward a comparative philosophy of religions. Such work helps to make philosophy of religion a lively and diverse field of inquiry. 

philosophy of science, the branch of philosophy that is centered on a critical exination of the sciences: their methods and their results. One branch of the philosophy of science, methodology, is closely related to the theory of knowledge. It explores the methods by which science arrives at its posited truths concerning the world and critically explores alleged rationales for these methods. Issues concerning the sense in which theories are accepted in science, the nature of the confirmation relation between evidence and hypothesis, the degree to which scientific claims can be falsified by observational data, and the like, are the concern of methodology. Other branches of the philosophy of science are concerned with the meaning and content of the posited scientific results and are closely related to metaphysics and the philosophy of language. Typical problems exined are the nature of scientific laws, the cognitive content of scientific theories referring to unobservables, and the structure of scientific explanations. Finally, philosophy of science explores specific foundational questions arising out of the specific results of the sciences. Typical questions explored might be metaphysical presuppositions of space-time theories, the role of probability in statistical physics, the interpretation of measurement in quantum theory, the structure of explanations in evolutionary biology, and the like. Concepts of the credibility of hypotheses. Some crucial concepts that arise when issues of the credibility of scientific hypotheses are in question are the following: Inductivism is the view that hypotheses can receive evidential support from their predictive success with respect to particular cases falling under them. If one takes the principle of inductive inference to be that the future will be like the past, one is subject to the skeptical objection that this rule is empty of content, and even self-contradictory, if any kind of “similarity” of cases is permitted. To restore content and consistency to the rule, and for other methodological purposes as well, it is frequently alleged that only natural kinds, a delimited set of “genuine” properties, should be allowed in the formulation of scientific hypotheses. The view that theories are first arrived at as creative hypotheses of the scientist’s imagination and only then confronted, for justificatory purposes, with the observational predictions deduced from them, is called the hypotheticodeductive model of science. This model is contrasted with the view that the very discovery of hypotheses is somehow “generated” out of accumulated observational data. The view that hypotheses are confirmed to the degree that they provide the “best explanatory account” of the data is often called abduction and sometimes called inference to the best explanation. The alleged relation that evidence bears to hypothesis, warranting its truth but not, generally, guaranteeing that truth, is called confirmation. Methodological accounts such as inductivism countenance such evidential warrant, frequently speaking of evidence as making a hypothesis probable but not establishing it with certainty. Probability in the confirmational context is supposed to be a relationship holding between propositions that is quantitative and is described philosophy of science philosophy of science 700    700 by the formal theory of probability. It is supposed to measure the “degree of support” that one proposition gives to another, e.g. the degree of support evidential statements give to a hypothesis allegedly supported by them. Scientific methodologists often claim that science is characterized by convergence. This is the claim that scientific theories in their historical order are converging to an ultimate, final, and ideal theory. Sometimes this final theory is said to be true because it corresponds to the “real world,” as in realist accounts of convergence. In pragmatist versions this ultimate theory is the defining standard of truth. It is sometimes alleged that one ground for choosing the most plausible theory, over and above conformity of the theory with the observational data, is the simplicity of the theory. Many versions of this thesis exist, some emphasizing formal elements of the theory and others, e.g., emphasizing paucity of ontological commitment by the theory as the measure of simplicity. It is sometimes alleged that in choosing which theory to believe, the scientific community opts for theories compatible with the data that make minimal changes in scientific belief necessary from those demanded by previously held theory. The believer in methodological conservatism may also try to defend such epistemic conservatism as normatively rational. An experiment that can decisively show a scientific hypothesis to be false is called a crucial experiment for the hypothesis. It is a thesis of many philosophers that for hypotheses that function in theories and can only confront observational data when conjoined with other theoretical hypotheses, no absolutely decisive crucial experiment can exist. Concepts of the structure of hypotheses. Here are some of the essential concepts encountered when it is the structure of scientific hypotheses that is being explored: In its explanatory account of the world, science posits novel entities and properties. Frequently these are alleged to be not accessible to direct observation. A theory is a set of hypotheses positing such entities and properties. Some philosophers of science divide the logical consequences of a theory into those referring only to observable things and features and those referring to the unobservables as well. Various reductionist, eliminationist, and instrumentalist approaches to theory agree that the full cognitive content of a theory is exhausted by its observational consequences reported by its observation sentences, a claim denied by those who espouse realist accounts of theories. The view that the parts of a theory that do not directly relate observational consequences ought not to be taken as genuinely referential at all, but, rather, as a “mere linguistic instrument” allowing one to derive observational results from observationally specifiable posits, is called instrumentalism. From this point of view terms putatively referring to unobservables fail to have genuine reference and individual non-observational sentences containing such terms are not individually genuinely true or false. Verificationism is the general ne for the doctrine that, in one way or another, the semantic content of an assertion is exhausted by the conditions that count as warranting the acceptance or rejection of the assertion. There are many versions of verificationist doctrines that try to do justice both to the empiricist claim that the content of an assertion is its totality of empirical consequences and also to a wide variety of anti-reductionist intuitions about meaning. The doctrine that theoretical sentences must be strictly translatable into sentences expressed solely in observational terms in order that the theoretical assertions have genuine cognitive content is sometimes called operationalism. The “operation” by which a magnitude is determined to have a specified value, characterized observationally, is taken to give the very meaning of attributing that magnitude to an object. The doctrine that the meanings of terms in theories are fixed by the role the terms play in the theory as a whole is often called semantic holism. According to the semantic holist, definitions of theoretical terms by appeal to observational terms cannot be given, but all of the theoretical terms have their meaning given “as a group” by the structure of the theory as a whole. A related doctrine in confirmation theory is that confirmation accrues to whole theories, and not to their individual assertions one at a time. This is confirmational holism. To see another conception of cognitive content, conjoin all the sentences of a theory together. Then replace each theoretical term in the sentence so obtained with a predicate variable and existentially quantify over all the predicate variables so introduced. This is the Rsey sentence for a (finitely axiomatized) theory. This sentence has the se logical consequences frable in the observational vocabulary alone as did the original theory. It is often claimed that the Rsey sentence for a theory exhausts the cognitive content of the theory. The Rsey senphilosophy of science philosophy of science 701    701 tence is supposed to “define” the meaning of the theoretical terms of the original theory as well as have empirical consequences; yet by asserting the existence of the theoretical properties, it is sometimes alleged to remain a realist construal of the theory. The latter claim is made doubtful, however, by the existence of “merely representational” interpretations of the Rsey sentence. Theories are often said to be so related that one theory is reducible to another. The study of the relation theories bear to one another in this context is said to be the study of intertheoretic reduction. Such reductive claims can have philosophical origins, as in the alleged reduction of material objects to sense-data or of spatiotemporal relations to causal relations, or they can be scientific discoveries, as in the reduction of the theory of light waves to the theory of electromagnetic radiation. Numerous “models” of the reductive relation exist, appropriate for distinct kinds and cases of reduction. The term scientific realism has many and varied uses. ong other things that have been asserted by those who describe themselves as scientific realists are the claims that “mature” scientific theories typically refer to real features of the world, that the history of past falsifications of accepted scientific theories does not provide good reason for persistent skepticism as to the truth claims of contemporary theories, and that the terms of theories that putatively refer to unobservables ought to be taken at their referential face value and not reinterpreted in some instrumentalistic manner. Internal realism denies irrealist claims founded on the past falsification of accepted theories. Internal realists are, however, skeptical of “metaphysical” claims of “correspondence of true theories to the real world” or of any notion of truth that can be construed in radically non-epistemic terms. While theories may converge to some ultimate “true” theory, the notion of truth here must be understood in some version of a Peircian idea of truth as “ultimate warranted assertability.” The claim that any theory that makes reference to posited unobservable features of the world in its explanatory apparatus will always encounter rival theories incompatible with the original theory but equally compatible with all possible observational data that might be taken as confirmatory of the original theory is the claim of the underdetermination thesis. A generalization taken to have “lawlike force” is called a law of nature. Some suggested criteria for generalizations having lawlike force are the ability of the generalization to back up the truth of claims expressed as counterfactual conditions; the ability of the generalization to be confirmed inductively on the basis of evidence that is only a proper subset of all the particular instances falling under the generality; and the generalization having an appropriate place in the simple, systematic hierarchy of generalizations important for fundental scientific theories of the world. The application of a scientific law to a given actual situation is usually hedged with the proviso that for the law’s predictions to hold, “all other, unspecified, features of the situation are normal.” Such a qualifying clause is called a ceteris paribus clause. Such “everything else being normal” claims cannot usually be “filled out,” revealing important problems concerning the “open texture” of scientific claims. The claim that the full specification of the state of the world at one time is sufficient, along with the laws of nature, to fix the full state of the world at any other time, is the claim of determinism. This is not to be confused with claims of total predictability, since even if determinism were true the full state of the world at a time might be, in principle, unavailable for knowledge. Concepts of the foundations of physical theories. Here, finally, are a few concepts that are crucial in discussing the foundations of physical theories, in particular theories of space and time and quantum theory: The doctrine that space and time must be thought of as a fily of spatial and temporal relations holding ong the material constituents of the universe is called relationism. Relationists deny that “space itself” should be considered an additional constituent of the world over and above the world’s material contents. The doctrine that “space itself” must be posited as an additional constituent of the world over and above ordinary material things of the world is substantivalism. Mach’s principle is the demand that all physical phenomena, including the existence of inertial forces used by Newton to argue for a substantivalist position, be explainable in purely relationist terms. Mach speculated that Newton’s explanation for the forces in terms of acceleration with respect to “space itself” could be replaced with an explanation resorting to the acceleration of the test object with respect to the remaining matter of the universe (the “fixed stars”). In quantum theory the claim that certain philosophy of science philosophy of science 702    702 “conjugate” quantities, such as position and momentum, cannot be simultaneously “determined” to arbitrary degrees of accuracy is the uncertainty principle. The issue of whether such a lack of simultaneous exact “determination” is merely a limitation on our knowledge of the system or is, instead, a limitation on the system’s having simultaneous exact values of the conjugate quantities, is a fundental one in the interpretation of quantum mechanics. Bell’s theorem is a mathematical result aimed at showing that the explanation of the statistical correlations that hold between causally noninteractive systems cannot always rely on the positing that when the systems did causally interact in the past independent values were fixed for some feature of each of the two systems that determined their future observational behavior. The existence of such “local hidden variables” would contradict the correlational predictions of quantum mechanics. The result shows that quantum mechanics has a profoundly “non-local” nature. Can quantum probabilities and correlations be obtained as averages over variables at some deeper level than those specifying the quantum state of a system? If such quantities exist they are called hidden variables. Many different types of hidden variables have been proposed: deterministic, stochastic, local, non-local, etc. A number of proofs exist to the effect that positing certain types of hidden variables would force probabilistic results at the quantum level that contradict the predictions of quantum theory. Complementarity was the term used by Niels Bohr to describe what he took to be a fundental structure of the world revealed by quantum theory. Sometimes it is used to indicate the fact that magnitudes occur in conjugate pairs subject to the uncertainty relations. Sometimes it is used more broadly to describe such aspects as the ability to encompass some phenomena in a wave picture of the world and other phenomena in a particle picture, but implying that no one picture will do justice to all the experimental results. The orthodox formalization of quantum theory posits two distinct ways in which the quantum state can evolve. When the system is “unobserved,” the state evolves according to the deterministic Schrödinger equation. When “measured,” however, the system suffers a discontinuous “collapse of the wave packet” into a new quantum state determined by the outcome of the measurement process. Understanding how to reconcile the measurement process with the laws of dynic evolution of the system is the measurement problem. Conservation and symmetry. A number of important physical principles stipulate that some physical quantity is conserved, i.e. that the quantity of it remains invariant over time. Early conservation principles were those of matter (mass), of energy, and of momentum. These bece assimilated together in the relativistic principle of the conservation of momentum-energy. Other conservation laws (such as the conservation of baryon number) arose in the theory of elementary particles. A symmetry in physical theory expressed the invariance of some structural feature of the world under some transformation. Exples are translation and rotation invariance in space and the invariance under transformation from one uniformly moving reference fre to another. Such symmetries express the fact that systems related by symmetry transformations behave alike in their physical evolution. Some symmetries are connected with space-time, such as those noted above, whereas others (such as the symmetry of electromagnetism under socalled gauge transformations) are not. A very important result of the mathematician Emma Noether shows that each conservation law is derivable from the existence of an associated underlying symmetry. Chaos theory and chaotic systems. In the history of the scientific study of deterministic systems, the paradigm of explanation has been the prediction of the future states of a system from a specification of its initial state. In order for such a prediction to be useful, however, nearby initial states must lead to future states that are close to one another. This is now known to hold only in exceptional cases. In general deterministic systems are chaotic systems, i.e., even initial states very close to one another will lead in short intervals of time to future states that diverge quickly from one another. Chaos theory has been developed to provide a wide range of concepts useful for describing the structure of the dynics of such chaotic systems. The theory studies the features of a system that will determine if its evolution is chaotic or non-chaotic and provides the necessary descriptive categories for characterizing types of chaotic motion. Randomness. The intuitive distinction between a sequence that is random and one that is orderly plays a role in the foundations of probability theory and in the scientific study of philosophy of science philosophy of science 703    703 dynical systems. But what is a random sequence? Subjectivist definitions of randomness focus on the inability of an agent to determine, on the basis of his knowledge, the future occurrences in the sequence. Objectivist definitions of randomness seek to characterize it without reference to the knowledge of any agent. Some approaches to defining objective randomness are those that require probability to be the se in the original sequence and in subsequences “mechanically” selectable from it, and those that define a sequence as random if it passes every “effectively constructible” statistical test for randomness. Another important attempt to characterize objective randomness compares the length of a sequence to the length of a computer progr used to generate the sequence. The basic idea is that a sequence is random if the computer progrs needed to generate the sequence are as long as the sequence itself. 

philosophy of the social sciences, the study of the logic and methods of the social sciences. Central questions include: What are the criteria of a good social explanation? How (if at all) are the social sciences distinct from the natural sciences? Is there a distinctive method for social research? Through what empirical procedures are social science assertions to be evaluated? Are there irreducible social laws? Are there causal relations ong social phenomena? Do social facts and regularities require some form of reduction to facts about individuals? What is the role of theory in social explanation? The philosophy of social science aims to provide an interpretation of the social sciences that answers these questions. The philosophy of social science, like that of natural science, has both a descriptive and a prescriptive side. On the one hand, the field is about the social sciences – the explanations, methods, empirical arguments, theories, hypotheses, etc., that actually occur in the social science literature. This means that the philosopher needs extensive knowledge of several areas of social science research in order to be able to formulate an analysis of the social sciences that corresponds appropriately to scientists’ practice. On the other hand, the field is epistemic: it is concerned with the idea that scientific theories and hypotheses are put forward as true or probable, and are justified on rational grounds (empirical and theoretical). The philosopher aims to provide a critical evaluation of existing social science methods and practices insofar as these methods are found to be less truth-enhancing than they might be. These two aspects of the philosophical enterprise suggest that philosophy of social science should be construed as a rational reconstruction of existing social science practice – a reconstruction guided by existing practice but extending beyond that practice by identifying faulty assumptions, forms of reasoning, and explanatory freworks. Philosophers have disagreed over the relation between the social and natural sciences. One position is naturalism, according to which the methods of the social sciences should correspond closely to those of the natural sciences. This position is closely related to physicalism, the doctrine that all higher-level phenomena and regularities – including social phenomena – are ultimately reducible to physical entities and the laws that govern them. On the other side is the view that the social sciences are inherently distinct from the natural sciences. This perspective holds that social phenomena are metaphysically distinguishable from natural phenomena because they are intentional – they depend on the meaningful actions of individuals. On this view, natural phenomena admit of causal explanation, whereas social phenomena require intentional explanation. The anti-naturalist position also maintains that there is a corresponding difference between the methods appropriate to natural and social science. Advocates of the Verstehen method hold that there is a method of intuitive interpretation of human action that is radically distinct from methods of inquiry in the natural sciences. One important school within the philosophy of social science takes its origin in this fact of the meaningfulness of human action. Interpretive sociology maintains that the goal of social inquiry is to provide interpretations of human conduct within the context of culturally specific meaningful arrangements. This approach draws an analogy between literary texts and social phenomena: both are complex systems of meaningful elements, and the goal of the interpreter is to provide an interpretation of the elements that makes sense of them. In this respect social science involves a hermeneutic inquiry: it requires that the interpreter should tease out the meanings underlying a particular complex of social behavior, much as a literary critic pieces together an interpretation of the meaning of a complex philosophy of the social sciences philosophy of the social sciences 704    704 literary text. An exple of this approach is Weber’s treatment of the relation between capitalism and the Protestant ethic. Weber attempts to identify the elements of western European culture that shaped human action in this environment in such a way as to produce capitalism. On this account, both Calvinism and capitalism are historically specific complexes of values and meanings, and we can better understand the emergence of capitalism by seeing how it corresponds to the meaningful structures of Calvinism. Interpretive sociologists often take the meaningfulness of social phenomena to imply that social phenomena do not admit of causal explanation. However, it is possible to accept the idea that social phenomena derive from the purposive actions of individuals without relinquishing the goal of providing causal explanations of social phenomena. For it is necessary to distinguish between the general idea of a causal relation between two events or conditions and the more specific idea of “causal determination through strict laws of nature.” It is true that social phenomena rarely derive from strict laws of nature; wars do not result from antecedent political tensions in the way that earthquakes result from antecedent conditions in plate tectonics. However, since non-deterministic causal relations can derive from the choices of individual persons, it is evident that social phenomena admit of causal explanation, and in fact much social explanation depends on asserting causal relations between social events and processes – e.g., the claim that the administrative competence of the state is a crucial causal factor in determining the success or failure of a revolutionary movement. A central goal of causal explanation is to discover the conditions existing prior to the event that, given the law-governed regularities ong phenomena of this sort, were sufficient to produce this event. To say that C is a cause of E is to assert that the occurrence of C, in the context of a field of social processes and mechanisms F, brought about E (or increased the likelihood of the occurrence of E). Central to causal arguments in the social sciences is the idea of a causal mechanism – a series of events or actions leading from cause to effect. Suppose it is held that the extension of a trolley line from the central city to the periphery caused the deterioration of public schools in the central city. In order to make out such a claim it is necessary to provide some account of the social and political mechanisms that join the antecedent condition to the consequent. An important variety of causal explanation in social science is materialist explanation. This type of explanation attempts to explain a social feature in terms of features of the material environment in the context of which the social phenomenon occurs. Features of the environment that often appear in materialist explanations include topography and climate; thus it is sometimes maintained that banditry thrives in remote regions because the rugged terrain makes it more difficult for the state to repress bandits. But materialist explanations may also refer to the material needs of society – e.g., the need to produce food and other consumption goods to support the population. Thus Marx holds that it is the development of the “productive forces” (technology) that drives the development of property relations and political systems. In each case the materialist explanation must refer to the fact of human agency – the fact that human beings are capable of making deliberative choices on the basis of their wants and beliefs – in order to carry out the explanation; in the banditry exple, the explanation depends on the fact that bandits are prudent enough to realize that their prospects for survival are better in the periphery than in the core. So materialist explanations too accept the point that social phenomena depend on the purposive actions of individuals. A central issue in the philosophy of social science involves the relation between social regularities and facts about individuals. Methodological individualism is the position that asserts the primacy of facts about individuals over facts about social entities. This doctrine takes three forms: a claim about social entities, a claim about social concepts, and a claim about social regularities. The first version maintains that social entities are reducible to ensembles of individuals – as an insurance company might be reduced to the ensemble of employees, supervisors, managers, and owners whose actions constitute the company. Likewise, it is sometimes held that social concepts must be reducible to concepts involving only individuals – e.g., the concept of a social class might be defined in terms of concepts pertaining only to individuals and their behavior. Finally, it is sometimes held that social regularities must be derivable from regularities of individual behavior. There are several positions opposed to methodological individualism. At the extreme there is methodological holism – the doctrine that social entities, facts, and laws are autonomous and irreducible; for exple, that social structures such as the state have dynic properties independent of the beliefs and purphilosophy of the social sciences philosophy of the social sciences poses of the particular persons who occupy positions within the structure. A third position intermediate between these two holds that every social explanation requires microfoundations – an account of the circumstances at the individual level that led individuals to behave in such ways as to bring about the observed social regularities. If we observe that an industrial strike is successful over an extended period of time, it is not sufficient to explain this circumstance by referring to the common interest that members of the union have in winning their demands. Rather, we need information about the circumstances of the individual union member that induce him or her to contribute to this public good. The microfoundations dictum does not require, however, that social explanations be couched in non-social concepts; instead, the circumstances of individual agents may be characterized in social terms. Central to most theories of explanation is the idea that explanation depends on general laws governing the phenomena in question. Thus the discovery of the laws of electrodynics permitted the explanation of a variety of electromagnetic phenomena. But social phenomena derive from the actions of purposive men and women; so what kinds of regularities are available on the basis of which to provide social explanations? A fruitful research frework in the social sciences is the idea that men and women are rational, so it is possible to explain their behavior as the outcome of a deliberation about means of achieving their individual ends. This fact in turn gives rise to a set of regularities about individual behavior that may be used as a ground for social explanation. We may explain some complex social phenomenon as the aggregate result of the actions of a large number of individual agents with a hypothesized set of goals within a structured environment of choice. Social scientists have often been inclined to offer functional explanations of social phenomena. A functional explanation of a social feature is one that explains the presence and persistence of the feature in terms of the beneficial consequences the feature has for the ongoing working of the social system as a whole. It might be held, e.g., that sports clubs in working-class Britain exist because they give working-class people a way of expending energy that would otherwise go into struggles against an exploitative system, thus undermining social stability. Sports clubs are explained, then, in terms of their contribution to social stability. This type of explanation is based on an analogy between biology and sociology. Biologists explain species traits in terms of their contribution to reproductive fitness, and sociologists sometimes explain social traits in terms of their contribution to “social” fitness. However, the analogy is misleading, because there is a general mechanism establishing functionality in the biological realm that is not present in the social realm. This is the mechanism of natural selection, through which a species arrives at a set of traits that are locally optimal. There is no analogous process at work in the social realm, however; so it is groundless to suppose that social traits exist because of their beneficial consequences for the good of society as a whole (or important subsystems within society). So functional explanations of social phenomena must be buttressed by specific accounts of the causal processes that underlie the postulated functional relationships. 

physicalism, in the widest sense of the term, materialism applied to the question of the nature of mind. So construed, physicalism is the thesis – call it ontological physicalism – that whatever exists or occurs is ultimately constituted out of physical entities. But sometimes ‘physicalism’ is used to refer to the thesis that whatever exists or occurs can be completely described in the vocabulary of physics. Such a view goes with either reductionism or eliminativism about the mental. Here reductionism is the view that psychological explanations, including explanations in terms of “folk-psychological” concepts such as those of belief and desire, are reducible to explanations formulable in a physical vocabulary, which in turn would imply that entities referred to in psychological explanations can be fully described in physical terms; and elminativism is the view that nothing corresponds to the terms in psychological explanations, and that the only correct explanations are in physical terms. The term ‘physicalism’ appears to have originated in the Vienna Circle, and the reductionist Philo the Megarian physicalism 706    706 physical realization pi 707 version initially favored there was a version of behaviorism: psychological statements were held to be translatable into behavioral statements, mainly hypothetical conditionals, expressible in a physical vocabulary. The psychophysical identity theory held by Herbert Feigl, Smart, and others, sometimes called type physicalism, is reductionist in a somewhat different sense. This holds that mental states and events are identical with neurophysiological states and events. While it denies that there can be analytic, meaning-preserving translations of mental statements into physicalistic ones, it holds that by means of synthetic “bridge laws,” identifying mental types with physical ones, mental statements can in principle be translated into physicalistic ones with which they are at least nomologically equivalent (if the terms in the bridge laws are rigid designators, the equivalence will be necessary). The possibility of such a translation is typically denied by functionalist accounts of mind, on the grounds that the se mental state may have indefinitely many different physical realizations, and sometimes on the grounds that it is logically possible, even if it never happens, that mental states should be realized non-physically. In his classic paper “The ‘mental’ and the ‘physical’ “ (1958), Feigl distinguishes two senses of ‘physical’: ‘physical1’ and ‘physical2’. ‘Physical1’ is practically synonymous with ‘scientific’, applying to whatever is “an essential part of the coherent and adequate descriptive and explanatory account of the spatiotemporal world.” ‘Physical2’ refers to “the type of concepts and laws which suffice in principle for the explanation and prediction of inorganic processes.” (It would seem that if Cartesian dualism were true, supposing that possible, then once an integrated science of the interaction of immaterial souls and material bodies had been developed, concepts for describing the former would count as physical1.) Construed as an ontological doctrine, physicalism says that whatever exists or occurs is entirely constituted out of those entities that constitute inorganic things and processes. Construed as a reductionist or elminativist thesis about description and explanation, it is the claim that a vocabulary adequate for describing and explaining inorganic things and processes is adequate for describing and explaining whatever exists. While the second of these theses seems to imply the first, the first does not imply the second. It can be questioned whether the notion of a “full” description of what exists makes sense. And many ontological physicalists (materialists) hold that a reduction to explanations couched in the terminology of physics is impossible, not only in the case of psychological explanations but also in the case of explanations couched in the terminology of such special sciences as biology. Their objection to such reduction is not merely that a purely physical description of (e.g.) biological or psychological phenomena would be unwieldy; it is that such descriptions necessarily miss important laws and generalizations, ones that can only be formulated in terms of biological, psychological, etc., concepts. If ontological physicalists (materialists) are not committed to the reducibility of psychology to physics, neither are they committed to any sort of identity theory claiming that entities picked out by mental or psychological descriptions are identical to entities fully characterizable by physical descriptions. As already noted, materialists who are functionalists deny that there are typetype identities between mental entities and physical ones. And some deny that materialists are even committed to token-token identities, claiming that any psychological event could have had a different physical composition and so is not identical to any event individuated in terms of a purely physical taxonomy. 

physis, Greek term for nature, primarily used to refer to the nature or essence of a living thing (Aristotle, Metaphysics V.4). Physis is defined by Aristotle in Physics II.1 as a source of movement and rest that belongs to something in virtue of itself, and identified by him primarily with the form, rather than the matter, of the thing. The term is also used to refer to the natural world as a whole. Physis is often contrasted with techne, art; in ethics it is also contrasted with nomos, convention, e.g. by Callicles in Plato’s Gorgias (482e ff.), who distinguishes natural from conventional justice.  ARISTOTLE, PLATO, TECHNE. W.J.P. pi, Chinese term meaning ‘screen’, ‘shelter’, or ‘cover’. Pi is Hsün Tzu’s metaphor for an obscuration or blindness of mind. In this condition the mind is obstructed in its proper functioning, e.g., thinking, remembering, imagining, and judging. In short, a pi is anything that obstructs the mind’s    707 Piaget, Jean Plantinga, Alvin 708 cognitive task. When the mind is in the state of pi, reason is, so to speak, not operating properly. The opposite of pi is clarity of mind, a precondition for the pursuit of knowledge. A.S.C. Piaget, Jean (1896–1980), Swiss psychologist and epistemologist who profoundly influenced questions, theories, and methods in the study of cognitive development. The philosophical interpretation and implications of his work, however, remain controversial. Piaget regarded himself as engaged in genetic epistemology, the study of what knowledge is through an empirical investigation of how our epistemic relations to objects are improved. Piaget hypothesized that our epistemic relations are constructed through the progressive organization of increasingly complex behavioral interactions with physical objects. The cognitive system of the adult is neither learned, in the Skinnerian sense, nor genetically preprogrmed. Rather, it results from the organization of specific interactions whose character is shaped both by the features of the objects interacted with (a process called accommodation) and by the current cognitive system of the child (a process called assimilation). The tendency toward equilibrium results in a change in the nature of the interaction as well as in the cognitive system. Of particular importance for the field of cognitive development were Piaget’s detailed descriptions and categorizations of changes in the organization of the cognitive system from birth through adolescence. That work focused on changes in the child’s understanding of such things as space, time, cause, number, length, weight, and morality. ong his major works are The Child’s Conception of Number (1941), Biology and Knowledge (1967), Genetic Epistemology (1970), and Psychology and Epistemology (1970).

Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni (1463–94), Italian philosopher who, in 1486, wrote a series of 900 theses which he hoped to dispute publicly in Rome. Thirteen of these were criticized by a papal commission. When Pico defended himself in his Apology, the pope condemned all 900 theses. Pico fled to France, but was briefly imprisoned there in 1488. On his release, he returned to Florence and devoted himself to private study. He hoped to write a Concord of Plato and Aristotle, but the only part he was able to complete was On Being and the One (1492), in which he uses Aquinas and Christianity to reconcile Plato’s and Aristotle’s views about God’s being and unity. He is often described as a syncretist, but in fact he made it clear that the truth of Christianity has priority over the prisca theologia or ancient wisdom found in the hermetic corpus and the cabala. Though he was interested in magic and astrology, he adopts a guarded attitude toward them in his Heptaplus (1489), which contains a mystical interpretation of Genesis; and in his Disputations Against Astrology, published posthumously, he rejects them both. The treatise is largely technical, and the question of human freedom is set aside as not directly relevant. This fact casts some doubt on the popular thesis that Pico’s philosophy was a celebration of man’s freedom and dignity. Great weight has been placed on Pico’s most fous work, On the Dignity of Man (1486). This is a short oration intended as an introduction to the disputation of his 900 theses, and the title was invented after his death. Pico has been interpreted as saying that man is set apart from the rest of creation, and is completely free to form his own nature. In fact, as the Heptaplus shows, Pico saw man as a microcosm containing elements of the angelic, celestial, and elemental worlds. Man is thus firmly within the hierarchy of nature, and is a bond and link between the worlds. In the oration, the emphasis on freedom is a moral one: man is free to choose between good and evil.

pien, Chinese Mohist technical term for disputation, defined as ‘contending over converse claims’. It involves discrimination between what does and does not “fit the facts.” In Hsün Tzu, pien as discrimination pertains especially to the ability to distinguish mental states (such as anger, grief, love, hate, and desires) as well as proper objects of different senses. Pien is significantly used in the context of justification as a phase in ethical argumentation. ong other things, pien as justification pertains to projection of the significance of comparable past ethical experiences to present “hard cases” of human life

Plantinga, Alvin (b.1932), one of the most important twentieth-century erican philosophers    708 of religion. His ideas have determined the direction of debate in many aspects of the discipline. He has also contributed substantially to analytic epistemology and the metaphysics of modality. Plantinga is currently director of the Center for Philosophy of Religion and John O’Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre De. Plantinga’s philosophy of religion has centered on the epistemology of religious belief. His God and Other Minds (1967) introduced a defining claim of his career – that belief in God may be rational even if it is not supported by successful arguments from natural theology. This claim was fully developed in a series of articles published in the 1980s, in which he argued for the position he calls “Reformed Epistemology.” Borrowing from the work of theologians such as Calvin, Bavinck, and Barth, Plantinga reasoned that theistic belief is “properly basic,” justified not by other beliefs but by immediate experience. This position was most thoroughly treated in his article “Reason and Belief in God” (Plantinga and Wolterstorff, eds., Faith and Rationality, 1983). In early work Plantinga assumed an internalist view of epistemic justification. Later he moved to externalism, arguing that basic theistic belief would count as knowledge if true and appropriately produced. He developed this approach in “Justification and Theism” (Faith and Philosophy, 1987). These ideas led to the development of a full-scale externalist epistemological theory, first presented in his 1989 Gifford Lectures and later published in the two-volume set Warrant: The Current Debate and Warrant and Proper Function (1993). This theory has become the focal point of much contemporary debate in analytic epistemology. Plantinga is also a leading theorist in the metaphysics of modality. The Nature of Necessity (1974) developed a possible worlds semantics that has become standard in the literature. His analysis of possible worlds as maximally consistent states of affairs offers a realist compromise between nominalist and extreme reificationist conceptions. In the last two chapters, Plantinga brings his modal metaphysics to bear on two classical topics in the philosophy of religion. He presented what many consider the definitive version of the free will defense against the argument from evil and a modal version of the ontological argument that may have produced more response than any version since Anselm’s original offering.