H.
P. Grice, St. John’s, OxfTHESAVRVS
GRICEIANVUM
Compiled by H. P. Grice’s Play Group -- Deposited at the Bodelian, Oxford.
Compiled by H. P. Grice’s Play Group -- Deposited at the Bodelian, Oxford.
A
Abderites: the Greek philosophers Leucippus and Democritus, the two earliest exponents of atomism. Even though Abdera, in Thrace (northern Greece), was home to three pre-Socratics – Leucippus, Democritus, and Protagoras – the term ‘Abderites’ and the phrase ‘School of Abdera’ are applied only to Leucippus and Democritus. We can thus distinguish between early Greek atomism and Epicureanism, which is the later version of atomism developed by Epicurus of Athens. This modern usage is in one respect inapt: the corresponding Greek term, Abderites, -ai, was used in antiquity as a synonym of ‘simpleton’ – not in disparagement of any of the three philosophers of Abdera but as a regional slur.
abduction: canons of reasoning for the discovery, as opposed to the justification, of scientific hypotheses or theories. Reichenbach distinguished the context of justification and the context of discovery, arguing that philosophy legitimately is concerned only with the former, which concerns verification and confirmation, whereas the latter is a matter for psychology. Thus he and other logical positivists claimed there are inductive logics of justification but not logics for discovery. Both hypotheticodeductive and Bayesian or other probabilistic inductive logics of justification have been proposed. Close exination of actual scientific practice increasingly reveals justificatory arguments and procedures that call into question the adequacy of such logics. Norwood Russell Hanson distinguished the reasons for accepting a specific hypothesis from the reasons for suggesting that the correct hypothesis will be of a particular kind. For the latter he attempted to develop logics of retroductive or abductive reasoning that stressed analogical reasoning, but did not succeed in convincing many that these logics were different in kind from logics of justification. Today few regard the search for rigorous formal logics of discovery as promising. Rather, the search has turned to looking for “logics” in some weaker sense. Heuristic procedures, strategies for discovery, and the like are explored. Others have focused on investigating rationality in the growth of scientific knowledge, say, by exploring conditions under which research traditions or progrs are progressive or degenerating. Some have explored recourse to techniques from cognitive science or artificial intelligence. Claims of success generally are controversial.
Abderites: the Greek philosophers Leucippus and Democritus, the two earliest exponents of atomism. Even though Abdera, in Thrace (northern Greece), was home to three pre-Socratics – Leucippus, Democritus, and Protagoras – the term ‘Abderites’ and the phrase ‘School of Abdera’ are applied only to Leucippus and Democritus. We can thus distinguish between early Greek atomism and Epicureanism, which is the later version of atomism developed by Epicurus of Athens. This modern usage is in one respect inapt: the corresponding Greek term, Abderites, -ai, was used in antiquity as a synonym of ‘simpleton’ – not in disparagement of any of the three philosophers of Abdera but as a regional slur.
abduction: canons of reasoning for the discovery, as opposed to the justification, of scientific hypotheses or theories. Reichenbach distinguished the context of justification and the context of discovery, arguing that philosophy legitimately is concerned only with the former, which concerns verification and confirmation, whereas the latter is a matter for psychology. Thus he and other logical positivists claimed there are inductive logics of justification but not logics for discovery. Both hypotheticodeductive and Bayesian or other probabilistic inductive logics of justification have been proposed. Close exination of actual scientific practice increasingly reveals justificatory arguments and procedures that call into question the adequacy of such logics. Norwood Russell Hanson distinguished the reasons for accepting a specific hypothesis from the reasons for suggesting that the correct hypothesis will be of a particular kind. For the latter he attempted to develop logics of retroductive or abductive reasoning that stressed analogical reasoning, but did not succeed in convincing many that these logics were different in kind from logics of justification. Today few regard the search for rigorous formal logics of discovery as promising. Rather, the search has turned to looking for “logics” in some weaker sense. Heuristic procedures, strategies for discovery, and the like are explored. Others have focused on investigating rationality in the growth of scientific knowledge, say, by exploring conditions under which research traditions or progrs are progressive or degenerating. Some have explored recourse to techniques from cognitive science or artificial intelligence. Claims of success generally are controversial.
Abélard, Pierre Abailard
o (1079–1144), philosopher whose writings, particularly Theologia Christiana,
constitute one of the more impressive attempts of the medieval period to use
logical techniques to explicate Christian dogmas. He was born of a minor noble
fily in Brittany and studied logic and theology under some of the most notable
teachers of the early twelfth century, including Roscelin, Willi of Chpeaux,
and Anselm of Laon. He rapidly eclipsed his teachers in logic and attracted
students from all over Europe. His forays into theology were less
enthusiastically received. Twice his views on the Trinity were condemned as
heretical. Abelard led a dratic life punctuated by bitter disputes with his
opponents and a dangerous and celebrated love affair with Héloïse (c.1117).
Much of this story is told in his autobiographical work, Historia calitatum.
Abelard’s two most important works in logic are his Logica ingredientibus and
his Dialectica. In these treatises and others he is the first medieval Scholastic
to make full use of Aristotle’s On Interpretation and Boethius’s commentaries
on it to produce a sophisticated theory of the signification of words and
sentences. The theory distinguishes the signification of an expression both
from what the expression nes and the idea in the mind of the speaker associated
with the expression. Abelard allows a role for mental images in thinking, but
he carefully avoids claiming that these are what words signify. In this he is
very much aware of the pitfalls of subjectivist theories of meaning. His
positive doctrines on what words signify tie in closely with his views on the
signification of propositions and universals. For Abelard propositions are
sentences that are either true or false; what they say (their dicta) is what
they signify and these dicta are the primary bearers of truth and falsity.
Abelard developed a genuinely propositional logic, the first since the Stoics.
A universal, on the other hand, is a common noun or adjective, and what it
means is what the verb phrase part of a proposition signifies. This is a sort
of truncated dictum, which Abelard variously called a status, nature, or
property. Neither status nor dicta are things, Abelard said, but they are
mind-independent objects of thought. Abelard was particularly devastating in
his attacks on realist theories of universals, but his view that universals are
words was not meant to deny the objectivity of our knowledge of the world.
Abelard’s theories in logic and ontology went far beyond the traditional ideas that
had been handed down from Aristotle through the mediation of the late ancient
commentators, Boethius in particular. They could have formed the basis of a
fundentally new synthesis in Western logic, but when more of the Aristotelian
corpus bece available in Western Europe during the twelfth century,
concentration shifted to assimilating this already fully elaborated system of
ideas. Consequently, Abelard’s influence on later Scholastic thought, though
noticeable, is not nearly as great as one might expect, given the acuteness and
originality of his insights.
abhidharma, the
analytical and systematic presentation of the major conceptual categories
constituting Buddhist doctrine; used as a label for both the texts that contain
such presentations and the content of what is presented. Early abhidharma texts
(up to about the second century A.D.) are catechetical in form, defining key
doctrinal terms schematically through question and answer; later works are more
discursive, often containing extensive discussions of controverted metaphysical
issues such as the existence of past objects or the nature of reference. The
goal of abhidharma is to make a complete inventory of existents and of the
relations that may hold ong them.
abhinivesha, Sanskrit
word meaning ‘self-love’ or ‘will to live’. In Indian philosophy in general and
in the Sankhya-Yoga system in particular, abhinivesha was regarded as an aspect
of avidya (ignorance). Some other manifestations of avidya were said to be
fear, attachment, and aversion, all of which were thought to generate karmic
bondage and prevent one from attaining spiritual liberation. Lumped together
with these, abhinivesha obviously has a negative connotation, even though in
the Indian tradition it was not necessarily wrong, and even commendable at
times, to exhibit self-love and a healthy will to live and prosper in the
material world. So presumably the negative connotation of abhinivesha is an
indication that what may be otherwise permissible can be improper or morally
wrong if pursued in excess or for the wrong reason.
Abrabanel, Isaac ben Judah
(1437–1508), philosopher and statesman. On the periphery between late medieval
Spanish philosophy and Renaissance humanism, Abrabanel concerned himself with
traditional medieval Jewish subjects such as creation, prophecy, and theodicy.
His works include biblical commentaries as well as philosophical and
theological treatises; his most significant writings constitute his critique of
Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed, found in Rosh anah (1505) and Mifalot
Elohim (1503). In his criticism of the Aristotelians, Abrabanel was influenced
by Isaac Ara. Endorsing the rabbinic concept of prophecy, Abrabanel attacks
Maimonides’ naturalistic views of prophecy: he argues that Moses is not to be
distinguished from the other prophets and that the knowledge of the prophets is
not merely scientific and metaphysical, but miraculously produced by God. This
emphasis upon the miraculous as opposed to the natural is developed in his
theory of history and politics. His views about the ideal state reflect
humanist leanings. While Abrabanel does see the civilized state of humans as a
rebellion against God resulting from the fall, he is interested in the best
kind of government under these circumstances. Accordingly, unity of society
does not require a concentrated power but can be achieved through a collective
will. This kind of government, Abrabanel claims, is advocated by the Torah and
shown to be effective by the Italian republics of the period. With the coming
of the Messiah, humankind will realize its spiritual potential, and when the
corporeal universe vanishes, each soul will be able to contemplate eternally
the essence of God. Abrabanel’s political views influenced later Jewish
messianic movements, and his biblical commenabhidharma Abrabanel, Isaac ben
Judah 2 - 2 taries, translated into
Latin, influenced later Christian humanist circles.
Abrabanel, Judah, also
called Leone Ebreo or Leo Hebraeus (c.1460–c.1523), Spanish Jewish philosopher,
poet, and physician. The oldest son of Isaac Abrabanel, Judah Abrabanel was,
philosophically, a representative of Italian Platonism. He wrote his
predominantly Neoplatonic philosophical work Dialoghi d’ore (Dialogues of Love)
in 1535. The original Italian manuscript was translated into French, Latin,
Spanish, and Hebrew between 1551 and 1560. The interlocutors of this
Platonic-style dialogue, Sophia and Philo, explore the nature of cosmic love.
This love not only exists between God and creatures, but also operates in
matter and form, the four elements, and the entire universe; it reflects both
sensuous and intellectual beauty; in short it is transformed from a relation
between God and the universe into a fundental force around which all things are
ordered. There is a mystical aspect to Abrabanel’s account of love, and it is
not surprising that reflections on mysticism, in addition to astrology,
astronomy, and aesthetics, emerge throughout the work. Although primarily
reflecting medieval Platonism and Neoplatonism, Abrabanel was also influenced
by Marcilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Maimonides, and Ibn Gabirol. His
dialogue was read by many philosophers, including Giordano Bruno and Spinoza.
His concept of love may be found in lyrical poetry of the period in Italy,
France, and Spain, as well as in Michelangelo’s Sonnets and Torquato Tasso’s
Minturno.
absolute, the, term used
by idealists to describe the one independent reality of which all things are an
expression. Kant used the adjective ‘absolute’ to characterize what is unconditionally
valid. He claimed that pure reason searched for absolute grounds of the
understanding that were ideals only, but that practical reason postulated the
real existence of such grounds as necessary for morality. This apparent
inconsistency led his successors to attempt to systematize his view of reason.
To do this, Schelling introduced the term ‘the Absolute’ for the unconditioned
ground (and hence identity) of subject and object. Schelling was criticized by
Hegel, who defined the Absolute as spirit: the logical necessity that embodies
itself in the world in order to achieve self-knowledge and freedom during the
course of history. Many prominent nineteenthcentury British and erican
idealists, including Bosanquet, Royce, and Bradley, defended the existence of a
quasi-Hegelian absolute.
abstractum: an object
lacking spatiotemporal properties, but supposed to have being, to exist, or (in
medieval Scholastic terminology) to subsist. Abstracta, sometimes collected
under the category of universals, include mathematical objects, such as
numbers, sets, and geometrical figures, propositions, properties, and
relations. Abstract entities are said to be abstracted from particulars. The
abstract triangle has only the properties common to all triangles, and none
peculiar to any particular triangles; it has no definite color, size, or
specific type, such as isosceles or scalene. Abstracta are admitted to an
ontology by Quine’s criterion if they must be supposed to exist (or subsist) in
order to make the propositions of an accepted theory true. Properties and
relations may be needed to account for resemblances ong particulars, such as
the redness shared by all red things. Propositions as the abstract contents or
meanings of thoughts and expressions of thought are sometimes said to be
necessary to explain translation between languages, and other semantic
properties and relations. Historically, abstract entities are associated with
Plato’s realist ontology of Ideas or Forms. For Plato, these are the abstract
and only real entities, instantiated or participated in by spatiotemporal
objects in the world of appearance or empirical phenomena. Aristotle denied the
independent existence of abstract entities, and redefined a diluted sense of
Plato’s Forms as the Abrabanel, Judah abstract entity 3 - 3 secondary substances that inhere in
primary substances or spatiotemporal particulars as the only genuine existents.
The dispute persisted in medieval philosophy between realist metaphysicians,
including Augustine and Aquinas, who accepted the existence of abstracta, and
nominalists, such as Ockh, who maintained that similar objects may simply be
referred to by the se ne without participating in an abstract form. In modern
philosophy, the problem of abstracta has been a point of contention between
rationalism, which is generally committed to the existence of abstract
entities, and empiricism, which rejects abstracta because they cannot be
experienced by the senses. Berkeley and Hume argued against Locke’s theory of
abstract ideas by observing that introspection shows all ideas to be
particular, from which they concluded that we can have no adequate concept of
an abstract entity; instead, when we reason about what we call abstracta we are
actually thinking about particular ideas delegated by the mind to represent an
entire class of resemblant particulars, from which we may freely substitute
others if we mistakenly draw conclusions peculiar to the exple chosen. Abstract
propositions were defended by Bolzano and Frege in the nineteenth century as
the meanings of thought in language and logic. Dispute persists about the need
for and nature of abstract entities, but many philosophers believe they are
indispensable in metaphysics.
academy, the: school established
by Plato at his villa outside Athens
near the public park and gymnasium known by that ne. Although it may not have
maintained a continuous tradition, the many and varied philosophers of the
Academy all considered themselves Plato’s successors, and all of them
celebrated and studied his work. The school survived in some form until A.D.
529, when it was dissolved, along with the other pagan schools, by the Eastern
Roman emperor Justinian I. The history of the Academy is divided by some
authorities into that of the Old Academy (Plato, Speusippus, Xenocrates, and
their followers) and the New Academy (the Skeptical Academy of the third and
second centuries B.C.). Others speak of five phases in its history: Old (as
before), Middle (Arcesilaus), New (Carneades), Fourth (Philo of Larisa), and
Fifth (Antiochus of Ascalon). For most of its history the Academy was devoted
to elucidating doctrines associated with Plato that were not entirely explicit
in the dialogues. These “unwritten doctrines” were apparently passed down to
his immediate successors and are known to us mainly through the work of
Aristotle: there are two opposed first principles, the One and the Indefinite
Dyad (Great and Small); these generate Forms or Ideas (which may be identified
with numbers), from which in turn come intermediate mathematicals and, at the
lowest level, perceptible things (Aristotle, Metaphysics I.6). After Plato’s
death in 347, the Academy passed to his nephew Speusippus (c.407–339), who led
the school until his death. Although his written works have perished, his views
on certain main points, along with some quotations, were recorded by surviving
authors. Under the influence of late Pythagoreans, Speusippus anticipated
Plotinus by holding that the One transcends being, goodness, and even
Intellect, and that the Dyad (which he identifies with matter) is the cause of
all beings. To explain the gradations of beings, he posited gradations of
matter, and this gave rise to Aristotle’s charge that Speusippus saw the
universe as a series of disjointed episodes. Speusippus abandoned the theory of
Forms as ideal numbers, and gave heavier emphasis than other Platonists to the
mathematicals. Xenocrates (396–314), who once went with Plato to Sicily,
succeeded Speusippus and led the Academy till his own death. Although he was a
prolific author, Xenocrates’ works have not survived, and he is known only
through the work of other authors. He was induced by Aristotle’s objections to
reject Speusippus’s views on some points, and he developed theories that were a
major influence on Middle Platonism, as well as on Stoicism. In Xenocrates’
theory the One is Intellect, and the Forms are ideas in the mind of this divine
principle; the One is not transcendent, but it resides in an intellectual space
above the heavens. While the One is good, the Dyad is evil, and the sublunary
world is identified with Hades. Having taken Forms to be mathematical entities,
he had no use for intermediate mathematicals. Forms he defined further as
paradigmatic causes of regular natural phenomena, and soul as self-moving
number. Polemon (c.350–267) led the Academy from 314 to 267, and was chiefly
known for his fine character, which set an exple of self-control for his
students. The Stoics probably derived their concept of oikeiosis (an
accommodation to nature) from his teaching. After Polemon’s death, his
colleague Crates led the Academy until the accession of Arcesilaus. The New
Academy arose when Arcesilaus bece the leader of the school in about 265 B.C.
and turned the dialectical tradition of Plato to the Skeptical aim of
suspending belief. The debate between the New Academy and Stoicism dominated
philosophical discussion for the next century and a half. On the Academic side
the most prominent spokesman was Carneades (c.213– 129 B.C.). In the early
years of the first century B.C., Philo of Larisa attempted to reconcile the Old
and the New Academy. His pupil, the former Skeptic Antiochus of Ascalon, was
enraged by this and broke away to refound the Old Academy in about 87 B.C. This
was the beginning of Middle Platonism (c.80 B.C.–A.D. 220). Antiochus’s school
was eclectic in combining elements of Platonism, Stoicism, and Aristotelian
philosophy, and is known to us mainly through Cicero’s Academica. Middle
Platonism revived the main themes of Speusippus and Xenocrates, but often used
Stoic or neo-Pythagorean concepts to explain them. The influence of the Stoic
Posidonius (135–50/51 B.C.) was strongly felt on the Academy in this period,
and Platonism flourished at centers other than the Academy in Athens, most notably
in Alexandria, with Eudorus (first century B.C.) and Philo of Alexandria (fl.
A.D. 39). After the death of Philo, the center of interest returned to Athens,
where Plutarch of Chaeronia (A.D. c.45–c.125) studied with monius at the
Academy, although Plutarch spent most of his career at his home in nearby
Boeotia. His many philosophical treatises, which are rich sources for the
history of philosophy, are gathered under the title Moralia; his interest in
ethics and moral education led him to write the Parallel Lives (paired
biographies of fous Romans and Athenians), for which he is best known. After
this period, the Academy ceased to be the ne for a species of Platonic
philosophy, although the school remained a center for Platonism, and was
especially prominent under the leadership of the Neoplatonist Proclus (c.410–
85). .
accidents, sumbebekos: a
feature or property of a substance (e.g., an organism or an artifact) without
which the substance could still exist. According to a common essentialist view
of persons, Socrates’ size, color, and integrity are ong his accidents, while
his humanity is not. For Descartes, thinking is the essence of the soul, while
any particular thought a soul entertains is an accident. According to a common
theology, God has no accidents, since all truths about him flow by necessity
from his nature. These exples suggest the diversity of traditional uses of the
notion of accident. There is no uniform conception; but the Cartesian view,
according to which the accidents are modes of (ways of specifying) the essence
of a substance, is representative. An important biguity concerns the identity
of accidents: if Plato and Aristotle have the se weight, is that weight one
accident (say, the property of weighing precisely 70 kilogrs) or two (one
accident for Plato, one for Aristotle)? Different theorists give different
answers (and some have changed their minds). Issues about accidents have become
peripheral in this century because of the decline of traditional concerns about
substance. But the more general questions about necessity and contingency are
very much alive.
accidentalism, the
metaphysical thesis that the occurrence of some events is either not
necessiaccent, fallacy of accidentalism tated or not causally determined or not
predictable. Many determinists have maintained that although all events are
caused, some nevertheless occur accidentally, if only because the causal laws
determining them might have been different. Some philosophers have argued that
even if determinism is true, some events, such as a discovery, could not have
been predicted, on grounds that to predict a discovery is to make the
discovery. The term may also designate a theory of individuation: that
individuals of the se kind or species are numerically distinct in virtue of
possessing some different accidental properties. Two horses are the se in
essence but numerically distinct because one of them is black, e.g., while the
other is white. Accidentalism presupposes the identity of indiscernibles but
goes beyond it by claiming that accidental properties account for numerical
diversity within a species. Peter Abelard criticized a version of accidentalism
espoused by his teacher, Willi of Chpeaux, on the ground that accidental
properties depend for their existence on the distinct individuals in which they
inhere, and so the properties cannot account for the distinctness of the individuals.
accidie (also acedia),
apathy, listlessness, or ennui. This condition is problematic for the
internalist thesis that, necessarily, any belief that one morally ought to do
something is conceptually sufficient for having motivation to do it. Ann has
long believed that she ought, morally, to assist her ailing mother, and she has
dutifully acted accordingly. Seemingly, she may continue to believe this, even
though, owing to a recent personal tragedy, she now suffers from accidie and is
wholly lacking in motivation to assist her mother.
acosmism, a term formed
in analogy to ‘atheism,’ meaning the denial of the ultimate reality of the
world. Ernst Platner used it in 1776 to describe Spinoza’s philosophy, arguing
that Spinoza did not intend to deny “the existence of the Godhead, but the
existence of the world.” Maimon, Fichte, Hegel, and others make the se claim.
By the time of Feuerbach it was also used to characterize a basic feature of
Christianity: the denial of the world or worldliness. .
action theory, the study
of the ontological structure of human action, the process by which it
originates, and the ways in which it is explained. Most human actions are acts
of commission: they constitute a class of events in which a subject (the agent)
brings about some change or changes. Thus, in moving one’s finger, one brings
it about that one’s finger moves. When the change brought about is an ongoing
process (e.g., the continuing appearance of words on a ), the behavior is
called an activity (writing). An action of omission occurs when an agent
refrains from performing an action of commission. Since actions of commission
are events, the question of their ontology is in part a matter of the general
ontology of change. An important issue here is whether what occurs when an
action is performed should be viewed as abstract or concrete. On the first
approach, actions are understood either as proposition-like entities (e.g.,
Booth’s moving a finger), or as a species of universal – nely, an act-type
(moving a finger). What “occurred” when Booth moved his finger in Ford’s
Theater on April 14, 1865, is held to be the abstract entity in question, and
the entity is viewed as repeatable: that is, precisely the se entity is held to
have occurred on every other occasion of Booth’s moving his finger. When
actions are viewed as concrete, on the other hand, Booth’s moving his finger in
Ford’s Theater is understood to be a non-repeatable particular, accidental
property action theory 6 - 6 and the
movement of the finger counts as an acttoken, which instantiates the
corresponding acttype. Concrete actions are time-bound: each belongs to a
single behavioral episode, and other instantiations of the se act-type count as
distinct events. A second important ontological issue concerns the fact that by
moving his finger, Booth also fired a gun, and killed Lincoln. It is common for
more than one thing to be accomplished in a single exercise of agency, and how
such doings are related is a matter of debate. If actions are understood as
abstract entities, the answer is essentially foregone: there must be as many
different actions on Booth’s part as there are types exemplified. But if actions
are viewed as particulars the se token can count as an instance of more than
one type, and identity claims become possible. Here there is disagreement.
Fine-grained theories of act individuation tend to confine identity claims to
actions that differ only in ways describable through different modifications of
the se main verb – e.g., where Placido both sings and sings loudly. Otherwise,
different types are held to require different tokens: Booth’s action of moving
his finger is held to have generated or given rise to distinct actions of
firing the gun and killing Lincoln, by virtue of having had as causal
consequences the gun’s discharge and Lincoln’s death. The opposite,
coarse-grained theory, however, views these causal relations as grounds for claiming
Booth’s acts were precisely identical. On this view, for Booth to kill Lincoln
was simply for him to do something that caused Lincoln’s death – which was in
fact nothing more than to move his finger – and similarly for his firing the
gun. There is also a compromise account, on which Booth’s actions are related
as part to whole, each consisting in a longer segment of the causal chain that
terminates with Lincoln’s death. The action of killing Lincoln consisted, on
this view, in the entire sequence; but that of firing the gun terminated with
the gun’s discharge, and that of moving the finger with the finger’s motion.
When, as in Booth’s case, more than one thing is accomplished in a single
exercise of agency, some are done by doing others. But if all actions were
performed by performing others, an infinite regress would result. There must,
then, be a class of basic actions – i.e., actions fundental to the performance
of all others, but not themselves done by doing something else. There is
disagreement, however, on which actions are basic. Some theories treat bodily
movements, such as Booth’s moving his finger, as basic. Others point out that
it is possible to engage in action but to accomplish less than a bodily
movement, as when one tries to move a limb that is restrained or paralyzed, and
fails. According to these accounts, bodily actions arise out of a still more
basic mental activity, usually called volition or willing, which is held to
constitute the standard means for performing all overt actions. The question of
how bodily actions originate is closely associated with that of what
distinguishes them from involuntary and reflex bodily events, as well as from
events in the inanimate world. There is general agreement that the crucial
difference concerns the mental states that attend action, and in particular the
fact that voluntary actions typically arise out of states of intending on the
part of the agent. But the nature of the relation is difficult, and there is
the complicating factor that intention is sometimes held to reduce to other
mental states, such as the agent’s desires and beliefs. That issue aside, it
would appear that unintentional actions arise out of more basic actions that
are intentional, as when one unintentionally breaks a shoelace by intentionally
tugging on it. But how intention is first translated into action is much more
problematic, especially when bodily movements are viewed as basic actions. One
cannot, e.g., count Booth’s moving his finger as an intentional action simply
because he intended to do so, or even on the ground (if it is true) that his
intention caused his finger to move. The latter might have occurred through a
strictly autonomic response had Booth been nervous enough, and then the moving
of the finger would not have counted as an action at all, much less as
intentional. Avoiding such “wayward causal chains” requires accounting for the
agent’s voluntary control over what occurs in genuinely intentional action – a
difficult task when bodily actions are held to be basic. Volitional accounts
have greater success here, since they can hold that movements are intentional
only when the agent’s intention is executed through volitional activity. But
they must sidestep another threatened regress: if we call for an activity of
willing to explain why Booth’s moving his finger counts as intentional action,
we cannot do the se for willing itself. Yet on most accounts volition does have
the characteristics of intentional behavior. Volitional theories of action
must, then, provide an alternative account of how mental activity can be
intentional. Actions are explained by invoking the agent’s reasons for
performing them. Characteristically, a reason may be understood to consist in a
positive attitude of the agent toward one or another action theory action
theory 7 - 7 outcome, and a belief to
the effect that the outcome may be achieved by performing the action in
question. Thus Emily might spend the summer in France out of a desire to learn
French, and a belief that spending time in France is the best way to do so.
Disputed questions about reasons include how confident the agent must be that
the action selected will in fact lead to the envisioned outcome, and whether
obligation represents a source of motivation that can operate independently of
the agent’s desires. Frequently, more than one course of action is available to
an agent. Deliberation is the process of searching out and weighing the reasons
for and against such alternatives. When successfully concluded, deliberation
usually issues in a decision, by which an intention to undertake one of the
contemplated actions is formed. The intention is then carried out when the time
for action comes. Much debate has centered on the question of how reasons are
related to decisions and actions. As with intention, an agent’s simply having a
reason is not enough for the reason to explain her behavior: her desire to
learn French notwithstanding, Emily might have gone to France simply because
she was transferred there. Only when an agent does something for a reason does
the reason explain what is done. It is frequently claimed that this bespeaks a
causal relation between the agent’s strongest reason and her decision or
action. This, however, suggests a determinist stance on the free will problem,
leading some philosophers to balk. An alternative is to treat reason
explanations as teleological explanations, wherein an action is held to be
reasonable or justified in virtue of the goals toward which it was directed.
But positions that treat reason explanations as non-causal require an
alternative account of what it is to decide or act for one reason rather than
another.
action verb, a verb
applied to an agent and describing an activity, an action, or an attempt at or
a culmination of an action. Verbs applying to agents may be distinguished in
two basic ways: by whether they can take the progressive (continuous) form and
by whether or not there is a specific moment of occurrence/completion of the
action ned by the verb. An activity verb is one describing something that goes
on for a time but with no inherent endpoint, such as ‘drive’, ‘laugh’, or
‘meditate’. One can stop doing such a thing but one cannot complete doing it.
Indeed, one can be said to have done it as soon as one has begun doing it. An
accomplishment verb is one describing something that goes on for a time toward
an inherent endpoint, such as ‘paint’ (a fence), ‘solve’ (a problem), or
‘climb’ (a mountain). Such a thing takes a certain time to do, and one cannot
be said to have done it until it has been completed. An achievement verb is one
describing either the culmination of an activity, such as ‘finish’ (a job) or
‘reach’ (a goal); the effecting of a change, such as ‘fire’ (an employee) or
‘drop’ (an egg); or undergoing a change, such as ‘hear’ (an explosion) or
‘forget’ (a ne). An achievement does not go on for a period of time but may be
the culmination of something that does. Ryle singled out achievement verbs and
state verbs (see below) partly in order to disabuse philosophers of the idea
that what psychological verbs ne must invariably be inner acts or activities
modeled on bodily actions or activities. A task verb is an activity verb that
implies attempting to do something ned by an achievement verb. For exple, to
seek is to attempt to find, to sniff is to attempt to smell, and to treat is to
attempt to cure. A state verb is a verb (not an action verb) describing a
condition, disposition, or habit rather than something that goes on or takes
place. Exples include ‘own’, ‘weigh’, ‘want’, ‘hate’, ‘frequent’, and
‘teetotal’. These differences were articulated by Zeno Vendler in Linguistics
and Philosophy. Taking them into account, linguists have classified verbs (and
verb phrases) into four main aspectual classes, which they distinguish in
respect to the availability and interpretation of the simple present tense, of
the perfect tenses, of the progressive construction, and of various temporal
adverbials, such as adverbs like ‘yesterday’, ‘finally’, and ‘often’, and
prepositional phrases like ‘for a long time’ and ‘in a while’. Many verbs
belong to more than one category by virtue of having several related uses. For
exple, ‘run’ is both an activity and an accomplishment verb, and ‘weigh’ is
both a state and an accomplishment verb. Linguists single out a class of
causative verbs, such as ‘force’, ‘inspire’, and ‘persuade’, some of which are
achievement and some accomplishment verbs. Such causative verbs as ‘break’,
‘burn’, and ‘improve’ have a correlative intransitive use, so that, e.g., to
break something is to cause it to break.
act-object psychology,
also called act-contentobject psychology, a philosophical theory that
identifies in every psychological state a mental act, a lived-through
phenomenological content, such as a mental image or description of properties,
and an intended object that the mental act is about or toward which it is
directed by virtue of its content. The distinction between the act, content,
and object of thought originated with Alois Höfler’s Logik (1890), written in
collaboration with Meinong. But the theory is historically most often
associated with its development in Kazimierz Twardowski’s Zur Lehre vom Inhalt
und Gegenstand der Vorstellung (“On the Content and Object of Presentations,”
1894), despite Twardowski’s acknowledgment of his debt to Höfler. Act-object
psychology arose as a reaction to Franz Brentano’s immanent intentionality
thesis in his influential Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt (“Psychology
from an Empirical Standpoint,” 1874), in which Brentano maintains that
intentionality is “the mark of the mental,” by contrast with purely physical
phenomena. Brentano requires that intended objects belong immanently to the
mental acts that intend them – a philosophical commitment that laid Brentano
open to charges of epistemological idealism and psychologism. Yet Brentano’s
followers, who accepted the intentionality of thought but resisted what they ce
to see as its detachable idealism and psychologism, responded by distinguishing
the act-immanent phenomenological content of a psychological state from its
act-transcendent intended object, arguing that Brentano had wrongly and
unnecessarily conflated mental content with the external objects of thought.
Twardowski goes so far as to claim that content and object can never be identical,
an exclusion in turn that is vigorously challenged by Husserl in his Logische
Untersuchungen (“Logical Investigations,” 1913, 1922), and by others in the
phenomenological tradition who acknowledge the possibility that a
self-reflexive thought can sometimes be about its own content as intended
object, in which content and object are indistinguishable. Act-object
psychology continues to be of interest to contemporary philosophy because of
its relation to ongoing projects in phenomenology, and as a result of a
resurgence of study of the concept of intentionality and qualia in philosophy
of mind, cognitive psychology, and Gegenstandstheorie, or existent and
non-existent intended object theory, in philosophical logic and semantics.
Adelard of Bath (c.1070–c.1145),
English Benedictine philosopher notable for his contributions to the
introduction of Arabic science in the West. After studying at Tours, he taught
at Laon, then spent seven years traveling in Italy, possibly Spain, and Cilicia
and Syria, before returning to England. In his dialogue On the Se and the
Different, he remarks, concerning universals, that the nes of individuals,
species, and genera are imposed on the se essence regarded in different
respects. He also wrote Seventy-six Questions on Nature, based on Arabic
learning; works on the use of the abacus and the astrolabe; a work on falconry;
and translations of Abu Ma’shar’s Arabic active euthanasia Adelard of Bath 9
- 9 Shorter Introduction to Astronomy,
al-Khwarizmi’s (fl. c.830) astronomical tables, and Euclid’s Elements.
adhyatman (Sanskrit,
‘relating to or belonging to the self’), in early Hindu texts concerning such
topics as knowledge of the self, meditating on that which appertains to the
self, or spiritual exercise related to the self (adhyatma-yoga). Later, it bece
a term for the Supreme Spirit, the Supreme Self, or the soul, which, in Indian
thought, is other than the ego. In monistic systems, e.g. Advaita Vedanta, the
adhyatman is the one Self that is the impersonal Absolute (Brahman), a state of
pure consciousness, ultimately the only Real. In dualist systems, e.g. Dvaita
Vedanta, it is the true self or soul of each individual. R.N.Mi.
adiaphora.STOICISM. adicity.DEGREE. adjunction.
Adorno, Theodor
Wiesengrund (1903–69), German philosopher and aesthetic theorist, one of the
main philosophers of the first generation of the Frankfurt School of critical
theory. With Horkheimer, Adorno gave philosophical direction to the Frankfurt
School and its research projects in its Institute for Social Research. An
accomplished musician and composer, Adorno first focused on the theory of
culture and art, working to develop a non-reductionist but materialist theory
of art and music in many essays from the 1930s. Under the influence of Walter
Benjin, he turned toward developing a “micrological” account of cultural
artifacts, viewing them as “constellations” of social and historical forces. As
his collaboration with Horkheimer increased, Adorno turned to the problem of a
selfdefeating dialectic of modern reason and freedom. Under the influence of
the seemingly imminent victory of the Nazis in Europe, this analysis focused on
the “entwinement of myth and Enlightenment.” The Dialectic of Enlightenment
(1941) argues that instrumental reason promises the subject autonomy from the
forces of nature only to enslave it again by its own repression of its impulses
and inclinations. The only way around this self-domination is “non-identity
thinking,” found in the unifying tendencies of a non-repressive reason. This
self-defeating dialectic is represented by the striking image of Ulysses tied
to the mast to survive his encounter with the Sirens. Adorno initially hoped
for a positive analysis of the Enlightenment to overcome this genealogy of
modern reason, but it is never developed. Instead, he turned to an increasingly
pessimistic analysis of the growing reification of modern life and of the
possibility of a “totally administered society.” Adorno held that “autonomous
art” can open up established reality and negate the experience of reification.
Aesthetic Theory (1970) develops this idea of autonomous art in terms of
aesthetic form, or the capacity of the internal organization of art to
restructure existing patterns of meaning. Authentic works of art have a “truth-value”
in their capacity to bring to awareness social contradictions and antinomies.
In Negative Dialectics (1966) Adorno provides a more general account of social
criticism under the “fragmenting” conditions of modern rationalization and
domination. These and other writings have had a large impact on cultural
criticism, particularly through Adorno’s analysis of popular culture and the
“culture industry.”
Advaita, also called
Uttara Mimsa, in Hinduism, the non-dualistic form of Vedanta. Advaita Vedanta
makes an epistemological distinction (not a metaphysical one) between the level
of appearance and the level of reality. This marks off how things appear versus
how they are; there appear to be a multitude of distinct persons and physical
objects, and a personal deity, whereas there is only ineffable Brahman. This
doctrine, according to Advaita, is taught in the Upanishads and realized in an
esoteric enlightenment experience called moksha. The opposing evidence provided
by all experiences that (a) have a subject-consciousness-object structure
(e.g., seeing a sunset) and evidence a distinction between what one experiences
and oneself, or (b) have a subject/content structure (e.g., feeling pain) and
evidence a distinction between oneself and one’s states, is dismissed on
adequacy, analytic Advaita 10 - 10 the
ground that these experiences involve “the making of distinctions.” Critics
claim that moksha itself, as an experience in which something allegedly is
learned or grasped, also must involve “the making of distinctions.”
aesthetic attitude, the
appropriate attitude or fre of mind for approaching art (or nature or other
objects or events) so that one might both appreciate its intrinsic perceptual
qualities, and as a result have an aesthetic experience. The aesthetic attitude
has been construed in many ways: (1) as disinterested, so that one’s experience
of the work is not affected by any interest in its possible practical uses, (2)
as a “distancing” of oneself from one’s own personal concerns, (3) as the contemplation
of an object, purely as an object of sensation, as it is in itself, for its own
sake, in a way unaffected by any cognition or knowledge one may have of it.
These different notions of aesthetic attitude have at times been combined
within a single theory. There is considerable doubt about whether there is such
a thing as an aesthetic attitude. There is neither any special kind of action
nor any special way of performing an ordinary action that ensures that we see a
work as it “really is,” and that results in our having an aesthetic experience.
Furthermore, there are no purely sensory experiences, divorced from any
cognitive content whatsoever. Criticisms of the notion of aesthetic attitude
have reinforced attacks on aesthetics as a separate field of study within
philosophy.
aesthetic formalism, the
view that in our interactions with works of art, form should be given primacy.
Rather than taking ‘formalism’ as the ne of one specific theory in the arts, it
is better and more typical to take it to ne that type of theory which
emphasizes the form of the artwork. Or, since emphasis on form is something
that comes in degrees, it is best to think of theories of art as ranged on a
continuum of more formalist and less formalist. It should be added that theories
of art are typically complex, including definitions of art, recommendations
concerning what we should attend to in art, analyses of the nature of the
aesthetic, recommendations concerning the making of aesthetic evaluations,
etc.; and each of these components may be more formalist or less so. Those who
use the concept of form mainly wish to contrast the artifact itself with its
relations to entities outside itself – with its representing various things,
its symbolizing various things, its being expressive of various things, its
being the product of various intentions of the artist, its evoking various
states in beholders, its standing in various relations of influence and
similarity to preceding, succeeding, and contemporary works, etc. There have
been some, however, who in emphasizing form have meant to emphasize not just
the artifact but the perceptible form or design of the artifact. Kant, e.g., in
his theory of aesthetic excellence, not only insisted that the only thing
relevant to determining the beauty of an object is its appearance, but within
the appearance, the form, the design: in visual art, not the colors but the
design that the colors compose; in music, not the timbre of the individual
sounds but the formal relationships ong them. It comes as no surprise that
theories of music have tended to be much more formalist than theories of
literature and dra, with theories of the visual arts located in between. AESTHETICS. N.P.W. aesthetic property, a
property or quality such as being dainty, garish, graceful, balanced, charming,
majestic, trite, elegant, lifeless, ugly, or beautiful. By contrast,
non-aesthetic properties are properties that require no special sensitivity or
perceptiveness to perceive – such as a painting’s being predominantly blue, its
having a small red square in a corner or a kneeling figure in the foreground,
or that the music becomes louder at a given point. Sometimes it is argued that
a special perceptiveness or taste is needed to perceive a work’s aesthetic
qualities, and that this is a defining feature of a property’s being aesthetic.
A corollary of this view is that aesthetic qualities cannot be defined in terms
of non-aesthetic qualities, though some have held that aesthetic qualities
supervene on non-aesthetic qualities.
aesthetics, the branch of
philosophy that exines the nature of art and the character of our adventitious
ideas aesthetics 11 - 11 experience of
art and of the natural environment. It emerged as a separate field of philosophical
inquiry during the eighteenth century in England and on the Continent.
Recognition of aesthetics as a separate branch of philosophy coincided with the
development of theories of art that grouped together painting, poetry,
sculpture, music, and dance (and often landscape gardening) as the se kind of
thing, les beaux arts, or the fine arts. Baumgarten coined the term
‘aesthetics’ in his Reflections on Poetry (1735) as the ne for one of the two
branches of the study of knowledge, i.e., for the study of sensory experience
coupled with feeling, which he argued provided a different type of knowledge
from the distinct, abstract ideas studied by “logic.” He derived it from the
ancient Greek aisthanomai (‘to perceive’), and “the aesthetic” has always been
intimately connected with sensory experience and the kinds of feelings it
arouses. Questions specific to the field of aesthetics are: Is there a special
attitude, the aesthetic attitude, which we should take toward works of art and
the natural environment, and what is it like? Is there a distinctive type of
experience, an aesthetic experience, and what is it? Is there a special object
of attention that we can call the aesthetic object? Finally, is there a
distinctive value, aesthetic value, comparable with moral, epistemic, and
religious values? Some questions overlap with those in the philosophy of art,
such as those concerning the nature of beauty, and whether there is a faculty
of taste that is exercised in judging the aesthetic character and value of
natural objects or works of art. Aesthetics also encompasses the philosophy of
art. The most central issue in the philosophy of art has been how to define
‘art’. Not all cultures have, or have had, a concept of art that coincides with
the one that emerged in Western Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. What justifies our applying our concept to the things people in
these other cultures have produced? There are also many pictures (including
paintings), songs, buildings, and bits of writing, that are not art. What
distinguishes those pictures, musical works, etc., that are art from those that
are not? Various answers have been proposed that identify the distinguishing
features of art in terms of form, expressiveness, intentions of the maker, and
social roles or uses of the object. Since the eighteenth century there have
been debates about what kinds of things count as “art.” Some have argued that
architecture and cerics are not art because their functions are primarily
utilitarian, and novels were for a long time not listed ong the “fine arts”
because they are not embodied in a sensuous medium. Debates continue to arise
over new media and what may be new art forms, such as film, video, photography,
performance art, found art, furniture, posters, earthworks, and computer and
electronic art. Sculptures these days may be made out of dirt, feces, or
various discarded and mass-produced objects, rather than marble or bronze.
There is often an explicit rejection of craft and technique by
twentieth-century artists, and the subject matter has expanded to include the
banal and everyday, and not merely mythological, historical, and religious
subjects as in years past. All of these developments raise questions about the
relevance of the category of “fine” or “high” art. Another set of issues in
philosophy of art concerns how artworks are to be interpreted, appreciated, and
understood. Some views emphasize that artworks are products of individual
efforts, so that a work should be understood in light of the producer’s
knowledge, skill, and intentions. Others see the meaning of a work as
established by social conventions and practices of the artist’s own time, but
which may not be known or understood by the producer. Still others see meaning
as established by the practices of the users, even if they were not in effect
when the work was produced. Are there objective criteria or standards for
evaluating individual artworks? There has been much disagreement over whether
value judgments have universal validity, or whether there can be no disputing
about taste, if value judgments are relative to the tastes and interests of
each individual (or to some group of individuals who share the se tastes and
interests). A judgment such as “This is good” certainly seems to make a claim
about the work itself, though such a claim is often based on the sort of
feeling, understanding, or experience a person has obtained from the work. A
work’s aesthetic or artistic value is generally distinguished from simply
liking it. But is it possible to establish what sort(s) of knowledge or
experience(s) any given work should provide to any suitably prepared perceiver,
and what would it be to be suitably prepared? It is a matter of contention
whether a work’s aesthetic and artistic values are independent of its moral,
political, or epistemic stance or impact. Philosophy of art has also dealt with
the nature of taste, beauty, imagination, creativity, repreaesthetics
aesthetics 12 - 12 sentation,
expression, and expressiveness; style; whether artworks convey knowledge or
truth; the nature of narrative and metaphor; the importance of genre; the
ontological status of artworks; and the character of our emotional responses to
art. Work in the field has always been influenced by philosophical theories of
language or meaning, and theories of knowledge and perception, and continues to
be heavily influenced by psychological and cultural theory, including versions
of semiotics, psychoanalysis, cognitive psychology, feminism, and Marxism. Some
theorists in the late twentieth century have denied that the aesthetic and the
“fine arts” can legitimately be separated out and understood as separate,
autonomous human phenomena; they argue instead that these conceptual categories
themselves manifest and reinforce certain kinds of cultural attitudes and power
relationships. These theorists urge that aesthetics can and should be
eliminated as a separate field of study, and that “the aesthetic” should not be
conceived as a special kind of value. They favor instead a critique of the
roles that images (not only painting, but film, photography, and advertising),
sounds, narrative, and three-dimensional constructions have in expressing and
shaping human attitudes and experiences.
a fortiori argument, an
argument that moves from the premises that everything which possesses (a)
certain characteristic(s) will possess some further characteristic(s) and that
certain things possess the relevant characteristic(s) to an eminent degree to
the conclusion that a fortiori (even more so) these things will possess the
further characteristic(s). The second premise is often left implicit, so a
fortiori arguments are often enthymemes. An exple of an a fortiori argument can
be found in Plato’s Crito: We owe gratitude and respect to our parents and so
should do nothing to harm them. Athenians owe even greater gratitude and
respect to the laws of Athens and so a fortiori should do nothing to harm those
laws.
African philosophy, the
philosophy produced by the preliterate cultures of Africa, distinctive in that
African philosophy in the traditional setting is unwritten. For someone who is
interested in studying, say, Chinese or Arabic philosophy, the written works of
the individual thinkers are available; African philosophy, by contrast (with
the exception of Ethiopian philosophy), has produced no written philosophical
works. The lack of written philosophical literature in Africa’s cultural past
is the outstanding reason for the persistent skepticism about the existence of
African philosophy often entertained by scholars. There are some who would
withhold the term ‘philosophy’ from African traditional thought and would
reserve that term for the philosophical works being written by individual
African philosophers today. There are others who, on the basis of (i) their own
conception of the nature of philosophy, (ii) their sense of the history of the
development of philosophical ideas in other cultures, (iii) their conviction
about the importance of the universal character of the human capacity to
wonder, or of the curiosity that leads some individuals in various cultures to
raise fundental questions about human life and experience, or (iv) their
conviction that literacy is not a necessary condition for philosophizing, would
apply ‘philosophy’ to African traditional thought, even though some of them would
want to characterize it further as ethnophilosophy or folk philosophy. Two
assumptions made about the character of African traditional thought have earned
it those labels: one is the alleged communal (collective) subscription to a
‘monolithic’ set of ideas or beliefs; the other is the alleged lack of
individualist elements in traditional thought. These assumptions have led some
scholars to believe that African thought is a system of ideas or beliefs
unanimously held by a whole tribe (ethnos), even though it may be argued that
thought as such is always the product of an individual intellect. An individual
may refine or build on the philosophical work of another individual, but the
product will still be an individual intellectual enterprise. What seems to have
happened in Africa is that due to lack of a doxographic tradition, the ideas of
unnable (because unidentifiable) individuals that gained currency ong the wider
community bece part of the pool of communal thought, as if they were the
thought or a production of a whole ethnos, and expressed in its oral
literature: in proverbs, myths and folk tales, rituals, religious beliefs, art
symbols, customs, and traditions. These would, in fact, constitute the warp and
woof of the fabric of traditional philosophy in Africa. An extensive and
profound critical evaluation affirming the consequent African philosophy 13
- 13 of concepts and values of
traditional thought can be the starting point of modern African philosophy. The
reason is that most of the traditional concepts, beliefs, and values have not
relaxed their grip on modern African life and thought. But the modern African
philosophy will also have to include the conceptual responses to the
circumstances, experiences, and problems of modern African societies. This
aspect of the philosophical enterprise will have to deal with the critical
analysis, interpretation, and assessment of the changes that traditional values
and ideas are going through in response to the pressures, both internal and
external, weighing heavily on them through the ethos of contemporary life.
Thus, African philosophy will not be a unique system, a windowless monad
impervious to external influences. But it is conceivable – perhaps expected –
that it will have some characteristics of its own. As to the central themes of
African philosophy, what one can appropriately do at this stage of its
development is indicate some of the persistent assumptions, beliefs, and values
embedded in African cultural and historical experiences. These would undoubtedly
include: supernaturalism – ideas about God and other spiritual entities
conceived in African ontologies, the dualistic or monistic perception of the
external world, the (alleged) religiosity or spirituality of the African life,
human destiny, and the moral life; personhood and communitarianism – social and
humanistic ethics, notions of the community and the common good, the nature of
the good life, the status of individuality in African socioethical thought;
political ideas – chiefship and traditional political authority, traditional
ideas of democracy, democratic thought in a communitarian frework, consensual
politics and decision making, political legitimacy, corruption and political
morality; and tradition and modernity – the notion of culture, ethnicity and
nationhood, the nature and development of national culture and identity, the
concept of development, technology, society, and values. These themes and
others have generated various ideas that must be critically analyzed and
evaluated by contemporary African philosophers, who would in this way create a
modern African philosophy with origins in the comprehensive culture and
many-sided experiences of the African, yet aspects of which may be considered
by other cultures to be worthwhile. Thanks to the literary culture they have
inherited, contemporary African philosophers, through their own individual
analyses and arguments, are in a position to contribute to the emergence of a
modern African philosophy that would naturally comprise a multiplicity of individual
philosophical ideas, arguments, and positions. K.G. aga (Sanskrit, ‘what has
come down’), an authoritative religious text of an Indian sect. There are
Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist agas. The Hindu agas fall into three main classes:
Vaifpava texts concerning the worship of Vishnu, Saiva texts dealing with
worship of Siva, and Tantric texts regarding worship of Sakti. Saivism, e.g.,
has twenty-eight agas. An aga may give instructions regarding making temples or
idols, offer meditation techniques, teach philosophical doctrines, or commend
methods of worship. The Mahayana Buddhist term for the basic teachings of the
Theravada Buddhist tradition is ‘aga’.
agape, unselfish love for
all persons. An ethical theory according to which such love is the chief virtue,
and actions are good to the extent that they express it, is sometimes called
agapism. Agape is the Greek word most often used for love in the New Testent,
and is often used in modern languages to signify whatever sort of love the
writer takes to be idealized there. In New Testent Greek, however, it was
probably a quite general word for love, so that any ethical ideal must be found
in the text’s substantive claims, rather than in the linguistic meaning of the
word. R.M.A. agathon, Greek word meaning ‘a good’ or ‘the good’. From Socrates
onward, agathon was taken to be a central object of philosophical inquiry; it
has frequently been assumed to be the goal of all rational action. Plato in the
simile of the sun in the Republic identified it with the Form of the Good, the
source of reality, truth, and intelligibility. Aristotle saw it as eudaimonia,
intellectual or practical virtue, a view that found its way, via Stoicism and
Neoplatonism, into Christianity. Modern theories of utility can be seen as
concerned with essentially the se Socratic question.
agent causation, the idea
that the primary cause of an event is a substance; more specifically, causation
by a substance, as opposed to an event. Thus a brick (a substance) may be said
to be the cause of the breaking of the glass. The expression is also used more
narrowly by Reid and others for aga agent causation the view that an action (or
event) is caused by an exertion of power by some agent endowed with will and
understanding. Thus, a person may be said to be the cause of her action of
opening the door. In this restricted sense (Reid called it “the strict and
proper sense”), an agent-cause must have the power to cause the action or event
and the power not to cause it. Moreover, it must be “up to” the agent whether
to cause the event or not to cause it. (It is not “up to” the brick whether to
cause or not to cause the breaking of the glass.) The restricted sense of agent
causation developed by Reid is closely tied to the view that the agent
possesses free will. Medieval philosophers distinguished the internal activity
of the agent from the external event produced by that activity. The former was
called “immanent causation” and the latter “transeunt causation.” These terms
have been adapted by Chisholm and others to mark the difference between agent
causation and event causation. The idea is that the internal activity is
agentcaused by the person whose activity it is; whereas the external event is
event-caused by the internal activity of the agent.
agnoiology (from Greek
agnoia, ‘ignorance’), the study of ignorance, its quality, and its conditions.
agnosticism (from Greek
a-, ‘not’, and gnastos, ‘known’), term invented by Thomas Henry Huxley in 1869
to denote the philosophical and religious attitude of those who claim that
metaphysical ideas can be neither proved nor disproved. Huxley wrote, “I
neither affirm nor deny the immortality of man. I see no reason for believing
it, but on the other hand, I have no means of disproving it. I have no a priori
objection to the doctrine.” Agnosticism is a form of skepticism applied to
metaphysics, especially theism. The position is sometimes attributed to Kant,
who held that we cannot have knowledge of God or immortality but must be
content with faith. Agnosticism should not be confused with atheism, the belief
that no god exists.
ahkara (Sanskrit,
‘I-maker’, ‘I-crier’), in Hindu thought, the ego or faculty that gives the
sense of ‘I’ or individual personality; by extension, egotism, pride, conceit.
In the Sankhya and Yoga systems, it is the third element of everchanging Nature
evolving in creation. From it evolves the remainder of the phenomenal world.
Other than Nature, which includes the individual intellect (buddhi), the
faculty of perception (manas), the organs, and the senses, is the unchanging
individual self (puruca, Atman). The human predicent results from the ignorant
identification of oneself with Nature rather than the true self. In earlier
texts the cosmic sense of ahkara dominates as the means by which the Creator formulates
Himself to create the world. R.N.Mi. ahanta, Sanskrit word meaning
‘indestructible’, ‘unchangeable’, ‘eternal’. In traditional Hindu philosophical
thought, the truly real was thought to be indestructible and eternal. Thus,
because the Upanishadic Brahman and its subjective counterpart, the Atman, were
regarded as the truly real, they were thought to be unchangeable and eternal.
The Hindu religious classic, the Bhagavad Gita (probably written between the
fifth and the second century B.C.), made ahanta a well-known concept through
the teachings of Krishna, who advised Arjuna that even though one’s body may
perish one’s soul is eternal and indestructible, thus implying that the human
soul contains the essence of the divine reality.
ahim . sa (Sanskrit), traditionally and
literally, nonviolence to living creatures; for modern Indian thinkers, a
positive sense of kindness to all creatures. To the Jains, ahimsa was a vow to
injure no living being (jiva) in thought, word, or deed. Many Buddhists practice
ahimsa as a precept that denies the existence of the ego, since injuring
another is an assertion of egoism. With the modern period, particularly Gandhi,
ahimsa was equated with self-sacrificial love for all beings. For Gandhi it was
the first vow of the satyagrahi, the one who “held onto Truth,” the nonviolent
resister.
aitia (Greek), cause.
Originally referring to responsibility for a crime, this Greek term ce to be
used by philosophers to signify causality in a somewhat broader sense than the
English ‘cause’ – the traditional rendering of aitia – can convey. An aitia is
any answer to a why-question. According to Aristotle, how such questions ought
to be answered is a philosophical issue addressed differently by different
philosophers. He himself distinguishes four types of answers, and thus four
aitiai, by distinguishing different types of questions: (1) Why is the statue
heavy? Because it is made of bronze (material aitia). (2) Why did Persians
invade Athens? Because the Athenians had raided their territory (moving or
efficient aitia). (3) Why are the angles of a triangle equal to two right
angles? Because of the triangle’s nature (formal aitia). (4) Why did someone
walk after dinner? Because (or for the sake) of his health (final aitia). Only
the second of these would typically be called a cause in English. Though some
render aitia as ‘explanatory principle’ or ‘reason’, these expressions inaptly
suggest a merely mental existence; instead, an aitia is a thing or aspect of a
thing.
akasa, Sanskrit word translated as ‘ether’ or
‘space’. Indian philosophical systems recognized various ontological
categories, including that of substance. Akasa was thought of as a substance
because it was believed to be the substratum of sound. Because akasa was
understood to transmit sound waves, the term is better translated as ‘ether’
than ‘space’, but scholars are not unanimous on this. Akasa, though extended in
space, was viewed as a non-material substance. It was thought of as
all-pervading, infinite, indivisible and imperceivable, being inferred from the
sensed quality of sound.
akrasia, also spelled
acrasia, Greek term for weakness of will. Akrasia is a character flaw, also
called incontinence, exhibited primarily in intentional behavior that conflicts
with the agent’s own values or principles. Its contrary is enkrateia (strength
of will, continence, self-control). Both akrasia and enkrateia, Aristotle says,
“are concerned with what is in excess of the state characteristic of most
people; for the continent abide by their resolutions more, and the incontinent
less, than most people can” (Nicomachean Ethics 1152a25–27). These resolutions
may be viewed as judgments that it would be best to perform an action of a
certain sort, or better to do one thing than another. Enkrateia, on that view,
is the power (kratos) to act as one judges best in the face of competing
motivation. Akrasia is a want or deficiency of such power. (Aristotle himself
limited the sphere of both states more strictly than is now done, regarding
both as concerned specifically with “pleasures and pains and appetites and
aversions arising through touch and taste” [1150a9–10].) Philosophers are
generally more interested in incontinent and continent actions than in the
corresponding states of character. Various species of incontinent or akratic
behavior may be distinguished, including incontinent reasoning and akratic
belief formation. The species of akratic behavior that has attracted most
attention is uncompelled, intentional action that conflicts with a better or
best judgment consciously held by the agent at the time of action. If, e.g.,
while judging it best not to eat a second piece of pie, you intentionally eat
another piece, you act incontinently – provided that your so acting is
uncompelled (e.g., your desire for the pie is not irresistible). Socrates
denied that such action is possible, thereby creating one of the Socratic
paradoxes. In “unorthodox” instances of akratic action, a deed manifests
weakness of will even though it accords with the agent’s better judgment. A boy
who decides, against his better judgment, to participate in a certain dangerous
prank, might – owing to an avoidable failure of nerve – fail to execute his
decision. In such a case, some would claim, his failure to act on his decision
manifests weakness of will or akrasia. If, instead, he masters his fear, his
participating in the prank might manifest strength of will, even though his so
acting conflicts with his better judgment. The occurrence of akratic actions
seems to be a fact of life. Unlike many such (apparent) facts, this one has
received considerable philosophical scrutiny for nearly two and a half
millennia. A major source of the interest is clear: akratic action raises
difficult questions about the connection between thought and action, a
connection of parount importance for most philosophical theories of the
explanation of intentional behavior. Insofar as moral theory does not float
free of evidence about the etiology of human behavior, the tough questions
arise there as well. Ostensible akratic action, then, occupies a philosophical
space in the intersection of the philosophy of mind and moral theory.
akcara (Sanskrit,
‘imperishable’), the highest reality in a variety of Hindu thought systems.
From earliest times it also meant ‘syllable’, reflecting the search for the
ultimate reality by Vedic priest-thinkers and the early primacy given to the
sacred utterance as the support of the ritual order of the universe, later
identified as the syllable Om. In later texts and the systematic thinkers it
refers to the highest reality, which may be a personal supreme being or an
impersonal absolute, such as the Highest Self (paratman) of Shankara (700–50).
Non-technically, it can be used in any thought system of any entity believed to
be imperishable. R.N.Mi. alaya-vijñana, Sanskrit term meaning literally
‘storehouse consciousness’, a category developed by Indian Buddhist
metaphysicians to solve some specific philosophical problems, notably those of
delayed karmic effect and causation at a temporal distance. The alaya-vijñana
“stores,” in unactualized but potential form, as “seeds,” the results of an
agent’s volitional actions. These karmic “seeds” may come to fruition at a
later time. Most Buddhists think of moments of consciousness (vijñana) as
intentional (having an object, being of something); the alaya-vijñana is an
exception, allowing for the continuance of consciousness when the agent is
apparently not conscious of anything (such as during dreless sleep), and so
also for the continuance of potential for future action during those
times.
Albert of Saxony
(1316–90), terminist logician from lower Saxony who taught in the arts faculty
at Paris, 1351–62. He never finished his theology degree, as, under the
influence of Buridan and Nicholas of Oresme, he turned to mathematics, physics,
and logic. He was a founder of the University of Vienna in 1365 and was bishop
of Halberstadt from 1366. His works on logic include Logic, Questions on the
Posterior Analytics, Sophismata, Treatise on Obligations, and Insolubilia. He
also wrote questions on Aristotle’s physical works and on John of Sacrobosco’s
De Sphaera, and short treatises on squaring the circle and on the ratio of the
dieter to the side of a square. His work is competent but rarely original.
Albertus Magnus, also
called Albert the Great (c.1200–80), German Dominican philosophertheologian. As
a Parisian master of theology, he served on a commission that condemned the
Talmud. He left Paris to found the first Dominican studium generale in Germany
at Cologne in 1248. From 1252 until old age, Albert was repeatedly asked to be
an arbiter and peacemaker. After serving briefly as bishop of Regensburg in
1260, he was ordered to preach the crusade of 1263– 64 in Germany. He spent his
last years writing in Cologne. Albert contributed to philosophy chiefly as a
commentator on Aristotle, although he occasionally reached different
conclusions from Aristotle. Primarily, Albert was a theologian, as is evident
from his extensive commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sentences and his commentaries
on the Old and New Testents. As a theologian, he customarily developed his
thought by commenting on traditional texts. For Albert, Aristotle offered
knowledge ascertainable using reason, just as Scripture, based on God’s word,
tells of the supernatural. Albert saw Aristotle’s works, many newly available,
as an encyclopedic compendium of information on the natural universe; included
here is the study of social and political conditions and ethical obligations,
for Aristotelian “natural knowledge” deals with human nature as well as natural
history. Aristotle is the Philosopher; however, unlike Holy Scripture, he must
be corrected in places. Like Holy Scripture, though, Aristotle is occasionally
obscure. To rectify these shortcomings one must rely on other authorities: in
the case of Holy Scripture, reference is to the church fathers and established
interpreters; in the case of Aristotle, to the Peripatetics. The term
‘Peripatetics’ extends to modern as well as ancient authors – al-Farabi,
Avicenna (Ibn-Sina), and Averroes (Ibn-Rushd), as well as Themistius and
Alexander of Aphrodisias; even Seneca, Maimonides, and “our” Boethius are
included. For the most part, Albert saw Plato through the eyes of Aristotle and
Averroes, since apart from the Timaeus very little of Plato’s work was
available in Latin. Albert considered the Liber de causis a work of Aristotle,
supplemented by alFarabi, Avicenna, and al-Ghazali and translated into Latin.
When he commented on the Liber de causis, Albert was not aware that this
Neoplatonic work – which speaks of the world emanating from the One as from a
first cause – was based on Proclus and ultimately on Plotinus. But Albert’s
student, Aquinas, who had better translations of Aristotle, recognized that the
Liber de causis was not an Aristotelian work. Albert’s metaphysics, which is
expounded in his commentaries on Aristotle’s Metaphysics and akcara Albertus
Magnus 17 - 17 on the Liber de causis,
contains profoundly contradictory elements. His inclination to synthesis led
him to attempt to reconcile these elements – as on social and ecclesiastical
questions he often sought peace through compromise. In his Metaphysics and
Physics and in his On the Heavens and On Generation and Corruption, Aristotle
presented the world as ever-changing and taught that an unmoved mover (“thought
thinking itself”) maintained everything in movement and animation by allowing
its spiritual nature to be seen in all its cold, unapproachable beauty. The
Liber de causis, on the other hand, develops the theory that the world emanates
from the One, causing everything in the world in its pantheistic creativity, so
that the caused world returns in mystic harmony to the One. Thus Albert’s
Aristotelian commentaries, begun in 1251–52, culminated in 1265 with his
commentary on a work whose pseudo-Aristotelian character he was unable to
recognize. Nevertheless, the Christian Neoplatonism that Albert placed on an
Aristotelian basis was to exert an influence for centuries. In natural
philosophy, Albert often arrived at views independent of Aristotle. According
to Aristotle’s Physics, motion belongs to no single category; it is incomplete
being. Following Avicenna and Averroes, Albert asks whether “becoming black,”
e.g. – which ceases when change ceases and blackness is finally achieved –
differs from blackness essentially (essentia) or only in its being (esse).
Albert establishes, contrary to Avicenna, that the distinction is only one of
being. In his discussions of place and space, stimulated by Avicenna, Albert
also makes an original contribution. Only two dimensions – width and breadth –
are essential to place, so that a fluid in a bottle is fred by the inner
surface of the bottle. According to Albert, the significance of the third
dimension, depth, is more modest, but nonetheless important. Consider a bucket
of water: its base is the essential part, but its round walls maintain the
cohesion of the water. For Aristotle, time’s material foundation is distinct
from its formal definition. Materially, the movement of the fixed stars is
basic, although time itself is neither movement nor change. Rather, just as
before and after are continuous in space and there are earlier and later
moments in movement as it proceeds through space, so time – being the number of
motion – has earlier and later moments or “nows.” The material of time consists
of the uninterrupted flow of the indivisible nows, while time’s form and
essential expression is number. Following al-Farabi and Avicenna, Albert’s
interpretation of these doctrines emphasizes not only the uninterrupted
continuity of the flow of “nows,” but also the quantity of time, i.e., the
series of discrete, separate, and clearly distinct numbers. Albert’s treatment
of time did not lend itself well to later consideration of time as a dimension;
his concept of time is therefore not well suited to accommodate our unified
concept of space-time. The use of the pseudo-Aristotelian De proprietatibus
elementorum in De causis proprietatum elementorum gave Albert’s worldview a
strong astrological flavor. At issue here is how the planets influence the
earth and mankind. Particularly important is the influence of Jupiter and
Saturn on fire and the seas; when increased, it could produce fiery
conflagrations, and when circumscribed, floods. Albert was encyclopedic: a
scientist and scholar as well as a philosopher and theologian. In addition to
the works mentioned, he produced commentaries on Pseudo-Dionysius, a Summa de
creaturis, a Summa Theologica, and many other treatises. Unlike other
commentators, his exposition was continuous, an extensive paraphrase; he
provided a complete Latin and Christian philosophy. Even in his lifetime, he
was a ned authority; according to Roger Bacon, his views were often given as
much weight as those of Aristotle, Avicenna, and Averroes. His students or
followers include Aquinas, Ulrich of Strassburg (d.1278?), Theodoric of
Freiberg (d.1310?), Giles of Lessines (d.1304?), Meister Eckhart, Johannes
Tauler (d.1361), Henry Suso (d.1366), and Jan van Ruysbroeck (d.1381).
alchemy, a
quasi-scientific practice and mystical art, mainly ancient and medieval, that
had two broad aims: to change baser metals into gold and to develop the elixir
of life, the means to immortality. Classical Western alchemy probably originated
in Egypt in the first three centuries A.D. (with earlier Chinese and later
Islic and Indian variants) and was practiced in earnest in Europe by such
figures as Paracelsus and Newton until the eighteenth century. Western alchemy
addressed concerns of practical metallurgy, but its philosophical significance
derived from an early Greek theory of the relations ong the basic elements and
from a religious-allegorical Albinus alchemy 18 - 18 understanding of the alchemical
transmutation of ores into gold, an understanding that treats this process as a
spiritual ascent from human toward divine perfection. The purification of crude
ores (worldly matter) into gold (material perfection) was thought to require a
transmuting agent, the philosopher’s stone, a mystical substance that, when
mixed with alcohol and swallowed, was believed to produce immortality
(spiritual perfection). The alchemical search for the philosopher’s stone,
though abortive, resulted in the development of ultimately useful experimental
tools (e.g., the ste pump) and methods (e.g., distillation).
alethic modalities,
historically, the four central ways or modes in which a given proposition might
be true or false: necessity, contingency, possibility, and impossibility. (The
term ‘alethic’ derives from Greek aletheia, ‘truth’.) These modalities, and
their logical interconnectedness, can be characterized as follows. A
proposition that is true but possibly false is contingently true (e.g., that
Aristotle taught Alexander); one that is true and not-possibly (i.e.,
“impossibly”) false is necessarily true (e.g., that red things are colored).
Likewise, a proposition that is false but possibly true is contingently false
(e.g., that there are no tigers); and one that is false and not-possibly true
is necessarily false (e.g., that seven and five are fourteen). Though any one
of the four modalities can be defined in terms of any other, necessity and
possibility are generally taken to be the more fundental notions, and most
systems of alethic modal logic take one or the other as basic. Distinct modal
systems differ chiefly in regard to their treatment of iterated modalities, as
in the proposition It is necessarily true that it is possibly true that it is
possibly true that there are no tigers. In the weakest of the most common
systems, usually called T, every iterated modality is distinct from every
other. In the stronger system S4, iterations of any given modality are
redundant. So, e.g., the above proposition is equivalent to It is necessarily
true that it is possibly true that there are no tigers. In the strongest and
most widely accepted system S5, all iteration is redundant. Thus, the two
propositions above are both equivalent simply to It is possibly true that there
are no tigers.
Alexander, Suel (1859–1938),
Australianborn British philosopher. Born in Sydney, he was educated at Balliol
College, Oxford, and taught for most of his career at the University of
Manchester. His aim, which he most fully realized in Space, Time, and Deity
(1920), was to provide a realistic account of the place of mind in nature. He
described nature as a series of levels of existence where irreducible
higher-level qualities emerge inexplicably when lower levels become
sufficiently complex. At its lowest level reality consists of space-time, a
process wherein points of space are redistributed at instants of time and which
might also be called pure motion. From complexities in space-time matter
arises, followed by secondary qualities, life, and mind. Alexander thought that
the still-higher quality of deity, which characterizes the whole universe while
satisfying religious sentiments, is now in the process of emerging from
mind. PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. J.W.A.
Alexander of Aphrodisias (fl. A.D. c.200), Greek philosopher, one of the foremost
commentators on Aristotle in late antiquity. He exercised considerable
influence on later Greek, Arabic, and Latin philosophy through to the
Renaissance. On the problem of universals, Alexander endorses a brand of
conceptualism: although several particulars may share a single, common nature,
this nature does not exist as a universal except while abstracted in thought
from the circumstances that accompany its particular instantiations. Regarding
Aristotle’s notorious distinction between the “agent” and “patient” intellects
in On the Soul III.5, Alexander identifies the agent intellect with God, who,
as the most intelligible entity, makes everything else intelligible. As its own
self-subsistent object, this intellect alone is imperishable; the human intellect,
in contrast, perishes at death. Of Alexander’s many commentaries, only those on
Aristotle’s Metaphysics A–d, Prior Analytics I, Topics, On the Senses, and
Meterologics are extant. We also have two polemical treatises, On Fate and On
Mixture, directed against the Stoics; a psychological treatise, the De anima
(based on Aristotle’s); as well as an assortment of essays (including the De
intellectu) and his Problems and Solutions. Nothing is known of Alexander’s
life apart from his appointment by the emperor Severus to a chair in
Aristotelian philosophy between 198 and 209.
Alexander of Hales (c.1185–1245),
English Franciscan theologian, known as the Doctor Irrefragabilis. The first to
teach theology by lecturing on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, Alexander’s
emphasis on speculative theology initiated the golden age of Scholasticism.
Alexander wrote commentaries on the Psalms and the Gospels; his chief works
include his Glossa in quattuor libros sententiarum, Quaestiones disputatatae
antequ esset frater, and Quaestiones quodlibetales. Alexander did not complete
the Summa fratris Alexandri; Pope Alexander IV ordered the Franciscans to
complete the Summa Halesiana in 1255. Master of theology in 1222, Alexander
played an important role in the history of the University of Paris, writing
parts of Gregory IX’s Parens scientiarum (1231). He also helped negotiate the
peace between England and France in 1235–36. Later in 1236 he gave up his
position as canon of Lichfield and archdeacon of Coventry to become a Franciscan,
the first Franciscan master of theology; his was the original Franciscan chair
of theology at Paris. ong the Franciscans, his most prominent disciples include
St. Bonaventure, Richard Rufus of Cornwall, and John of La Rochelle, to whom he
resigned his chair in theology near the end of his life. R.W. Alexandrian
School, those Neoplatonic philosophers contemporary with and subsequent to
Proclus (A.D. 412–85) who settled in Alexandria and taught there. They include
Hermeias (fl. c.440), Proclus’s fellow-student of Syrianus; Hermeias’s son
monius (either 435–517 or 445– 526); and monius’s three pupils, John Philoponus
(c.490–575), Simplicius (writing after 532), and Asclepius (mid-sixth century).
Later Alexandrians include Olympiodorus (495/505– after 565) and the Christians
Elias (fl. c.540) and David (late sixth century). All these worked exclusively
or primarily on the exegesis of Aristotle. Dascius (c.456–540) also took
lectures from monius at some time between 475 and 485, but in his doctrine he
belongs much more to the Athenian tradition. Simplicius, on the other hand,
while he moved to Athens to teach, remains more in the Alexandrian tradition.
Ever since Karl Praechter, who was influenced by a Hegelian view of historical
development, the Alexandrian Platonists have been seen as professing a simpler
form of metaphysics than the Athenian School, and deliberately avoiding
controversy with the powerful Christian establishment in Alexandria by
confining themselves largely to logic, mathematics, and the exegesis of
Aristotle. There is a certain manifest truth in this picture, but modern
scholarship (in particular Ilsetraut Hadot) has done much to show that even in
monius’s commentaries on Aristotle there lurks distinctive Neoplatonic
doctrine, so that the contrast with the Athenian School has become somewhat
blurred. The School may be said to have come to an end with the departure of
Stephanus to take up the chair of philosophy in Constantinople in about
610.
al-Farabi, Abu Nasr, also
called Abunaser, in Latin, Alpharabius (870–950), Islic philosopher. Born in
Turkestan, he studied and taught in Baghdad when it was the cultural capital of
the Islic world, responsive to the philosophical and scientific legacy of late
antiquity. AlFarabi was highly instrumental in effecting a transition of Greek
philosophy, last publicly known in its entirety in sixth-century Alexandria,
into Islic culture. Despite ongoing opposition because of philosophy’s
identification with pagan and Christian authors, al-Farabi succeeded in
naturalizing Western philosophy in the Islic world, where it retained vitality
for the next three hundred years. Al-Farabi bece known as “the second teacher,”
after Aristotle the main source of philosophical information. His summaries and
interpretations of the teachings of Aristotle and Plato were widely read, and
his attempt at synthesizing their views was very influential. Believing in the
universal nature of truth and holding Plato and Aristotle in the highest
esteem, he minimized their differences and adopted Neoplatonic teachings that
incorporated elements of both traditions. Unlike the first philosopher of the
Islic world, the ninth-century al-Kindi, al-Farabi was in possession of full
Arabic translations of many of the most important texts of classical times and
of some major Hellenistic commentaries on them. His own commentaries and
digests of the works of Plato and Aristotle made them more accessible to later
generations of scholars, even as his relatively independent treatises
established a high standard of logical rigor and subtlety for later Muslim and
Jewish philosophers. Avicenna found his Metaphysics commentary indispensable
for understanding Aristotle’s text, while Maimonides recommended all his
writings, calling them “pure flour.” Medieval Scholastic thought, however, was
more interested in Averroes and Avicenna than in al-Farabi. Contemporary
scholars such as Leo Strauss and Muhsin Mahdi have emphasized the esoteric
nature of al-Farabi’s writings, seen as critical for understanding much of medieval
Islic and Jewish philosophy. Al-Farabi’s main interests lay in logic and
politAlexandrian School al-Farabi, Abu Nasr 20 - 20 ical theory. He understood that the
Organon was just that, a universal instrument for understanding and improving
reasoning and logical discourse. Against the traditional grmarians of Isl, he
argued for the value-free and neutral nature of Greek logic, while against the
theologians of Isl, the mutakallimun, he emphasized the difference between
their dialectical type of discourse and the preferred demonstrative syllogism
of the philosophers. Much of the responsibility for the separation between
Islic theology and philosophy may be attributed to al-Farabi, who avoided
engaging religious dogmas and specifically Muslim beliefs as much as possible.
He was able to accommodate belief in prophecy and revelation to a general
theory of emanation, though he made no special claims for the prophet of Isl.
His general view of religion was that it was a popular and symbolic
representation of philosophical ideas, often designed by philosophers. The
influence of Plato’s Republic in this and other areas of political philosophy
is evident, though al-Farabi’s Principles of the Views of the Citizens of the
Best State manages to give an Islic coloration to Platonic teachings.
Al-Farabi’s metaphysical beliefs are more problematical still, and he was
reputed to have disowned his earlier belief in the immortality of the
soul.
al-Ghazali, Abu Hid
(1058–1111). Islic philosopher, theologian, jurist, and mystic. He was born in
Khurasan and educated in Nishapur, then an intellectual center of eastern Isl.
He was appointed the head of a seminary, the newly founded Niziyah of Baghdad,
in which he taught law and theology with great success. Yet his exposure to
logic and philosophy led him to seek a certainty in knowledge beyond that
assumed by his profession. At first he attempted to address his problem
academically, but after five years in Baghdad he resigned, left his fily, and
embarked on the mystic’s solitary quest for al-Haqq (Arabic for ‘the truth’,
‘the True One’). As a Sufi he wandered for ten years through many of Isl’s
major cities and centers of learning, finally returning to Nishapur and to
teaching theology before his death. Al-Ghazali’s literary and intellectual
legacy is particularly rich and multifaceted. In the catholicity of his work
and the esteem in which he is held within Isl he may be compared to Aquinas and
Maimonides in the Christian and Jewish traditions respectively. His
Revivification of the Religious Sciences is considered to this day a major
theological compendium. His mystical treatises also have retained their
popularity, as has his much celebrated autobiography, The Deliverance from
Error. This book chronicles his lifelong quest for truth and certainty, and his
disappointment with the premises of dogmatic theology, both orthodox Sunni and
heterodox Shiite thought, as well as with the teachings of the philosophers.
The light of truth ce to him, he believed, only through divine grace; he
considered his senses and reasoning powers all susceptible to error. It was
this pervasive sense of skepticism that led him, while still in Baghdad, to
investigate philosophy’s claims to knowledge. He first composed a summa of
philosophical teachings, based primarily on the views of Avicenna, and called
it The Intentions of the Philosophers. He later published a detailed and
penetrating critique of these views, The Incoherence of the Philosophers.
Averroes arose later in Muslim Spain to defend philosophy, particularly that of
Aristotle, calling his book The Incoherence of the Incoherence. Averroes’ work
was more appreciated in the West, however, which also preferred al-Ghazali’s
Intentions to his Incoherence. The former, shorn of its polemical purpose and
thus appearing as a philosophical summa, was translated by Dominicus
Gundissalinus as Logica et Philosophia Algazelis, giving al-Ghazali a
reputation in the West as at least a sometime advocate of philosophy. His
attack upon the physics and metaphysics of his day, which was an alg of
Aristotelian and Neoplatonic doctrines, was firmly rooted in Aristotelian
logic, and anticipates Hume in understanding the non-necessary nature of causal
relationships. For al-Ghazali, the world as a whole proceeds not by any eternal
or logical necessity, but by the will of God. That will is indefensible on
philosophical grounds, he believed, as is the philosophers’ notion of divine
omniscience. Their god cannot on their terms be related to the world, and is
ultimately redundant logically. What is regarded as miraculous becomes
possible, once nature is understood to have no autonomy or necessary
entailments.
algorithm, a clerical or
effective procedure that can be applied to any of a class of certain symbolic
inputs and that will in a finite time and number of steps eventuate in a result
in a correalgebra, Boolean algorithm 21 -
21 sponding symbolic output. A function for which an algorithm
(sometimes more than one) can be given is an algorithmic function. The
following are common exples: (a) given n, finding the nth prime number; (b)
differentiating a polynomial; (c) finding the greatest common divisor of x and
y (the Euclidean algorithm); and (d) given two numbers x, y, deciding whether x
is a multiple of y. When an algorithm is used to calculate values of a
numerical function, as in (a), (b), and (c), the function can also be described
as algorithmically computable, effectively computable, or just computable.
Algorithms are generally agreed to have the following properties – which made
them essential to the theory of computation and the development of the
Church-Turing thesis – (i) an algorithm can be given by a finite string of
instructions, (ii) a computation device (or agent) can carry out or compute in
accordance with the instructions, (iii) there will be provisions for computing,
storing, and recalling steps in a computation, (iv) computations can be carried
out in a discrete and stepwise fashion (in, say, a digital computer), and (v)
computations can be carried out in a deterministic fashion (in, say, a
deterministic version of a Turing machine).
al-Kindi, Abu Yusuf, in Latin, Alkindus
(c.800– 70), Arab philosopher who was an early and prominent supporter of
philosophical studies ong the Muslims. He combined a noble Arab lineage with an
influential position in the caliphate during a critical period for the
translation and propagation of Greek sciences in Arabic. Known as “the
philosopher of the Arabs,” he more than any other scholar of his generation was
responsible, as a patron, book collector, editor, and writer, for the
acceptance of philosophy, despite its foreign and non-Islic Greek source. Later
writers surpassed him in knowledge of philosophy, and his numerous epistles,
treatises, and books were eventually left in limbo. Of the 250 titles recorded
in his ne on an unusual variety of subjects, most are lost. About forty survive
in a poor state, full of uncertain readings and other textual problems.
Nevertheless, al-Kindi’s works provide ple evidence of his close interest in
Aristotle and to an extent Plato. Unlike later philosophers in the Islic world,
he firmly believed he could combine literal Koranic religious doctrines and
Greek philosophical concepts. ong his best-known philosophical works is On
First Philosophy (English translation by A. Ivry, 1974), whose theme is that
the noblest part of philosophy is first philosophy, which is knowledge of the
First Truth and the First Cause. Al-Kindi includes an extended demonstration of
the finiteness of the universe, time, and motion and the consequent infinitude
of a creator who was their cause, who is the pure unity that is the ultimate
source of all else and yet who, in al-Kindi’s mind, brings the world into being
ex nihilo. In On the Number of Aristotle’s Books, he separates prophetic
knowledge from ordinary, discursive philosophy: prophets know intuitively without
effort or time.
Allais’s paradox, a
puzzle about rationality devised by Maurice Allais (b. 1911). Leonard Savage
(1917–71) advanced the sure-thing principle, which states that a rational
agent’s ranking of a pair of gbles having the se consequence in a state S
agrees with her ranking of any other pair of gbles the se as the first pair
except for having some other common consequence in S. Allais devised an apparent
counterexple with four gbles involving a 100-ticket lottery. The table lists
prizes in units of $100,000. Ticket Numbers Gbles 1 2 – 11 12 – 100 A 5 5 5 B 0
25 5 C 5 5 0 D 0 25 0 Changing A’s and B’s common consequence for tickets
12–100 from 5 to 0 yields C and D respectively. Hence the sure-thing principle
prohibits simultaneously preferring A to B, and D to C. Yet most people have
these preferences, which seem coherent. This conflict generates the paradox.
Savage presented the sure-thing principle in The Foundations of Statistics
(1954). Responding to preliminary drafts of that work, Allais formulated his
counterexple in “The Foundations of a Positive Theory of Choice Involving Risk
and a Criticism of the Postulates and Axioms of the erican School” (1952). .
al-Razi, Abu Bakr, in
Latin, Rhazes (c.854–925 or 932), Persian physician, philosopher, and chemist.
He headed the hospital in Rayy, his birthplace, and later in Baghdad, often
returning to Rayy, where he died. A learned Galenist and critic of Galen, he
brought the se empirical, Hippocratic spirit to medicine that he had used in
transmuting alchemy into a (Neoplatonically) naturalistic art. His medical
works, including the first treatise on smallpox, drew on extensive (and
compassionate) clinical experience and omnivorous reading – both reading and
observation preserved in the twenty-five-volume Hawi, translated in 1279 as the
Continens. al-Razi’s mildly ascetic ethics springs from hedonic prudential
considerations and from his atomism. In keeping with the Epicureanism he might
have imbibed from Galenic sources, he rejects special prophecy as imposture,
arguing that reason, God’s gift to all alike, is sufficient guidance. (Only
differences of interest and application separate the subtle devices of artisans
from those of intellectuals.) God, the world Soul, time, space, and matter are
all eternal substances. Nature originates from Soul’s irrational desire for
embodiment, which is her only way of learning that her true homeland is the
intellectual world. God’s gift of intelligence gave order to the movements she
stirred up at the creation, and allows her escape from a world in which pains
outweigh pleasures and death is surcease. For one who engages in philosophy
“creatively, diligently, and persistently” will inevitably surpass his
predecessors; and anyone who thinks independently is assured of both progress
and immortality. L.E.G. Alston, Willi P. (b.1921), erican philosopher widely
acknowledged as one of the most important contemporary epistemologists and one
of the most important philosophers of religion of the twentieth century. He is
particularly known for his argument that putative perception of God is
epistemologically on all fours with putative perception of everyday material
objects. Alston graduated from Centenary College in 1942 and the U.S. Army in
1946. A fine musician, he had to choose between philosophy and music.
Philosophy won out; he received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and
began his philosophical career at the University of Michigan, where he taught
for twenty-two years. Since 1980 he has taught at Syracuse University. Although
his dissertation and some of his early work were on Whitehead, he soon turned
to philosophy of language (Philosophy of Language, 1964). Since the early 1970s
Alston has concentrated on epistemology and philosophy of religion. In
epistemology he has defended foundationalism (although not classical
foundationalism), investigated epistemic justification with unusual depth and
penetration, and called attention to important levels distinctions. His chief
works here are Epistemic Justification (1989), a collection of essays; and The
Reliability of Sense Perception (1993). His chief work in philosophy of
religion is Divine Nature and Human Language (1989), a collection of essays on
metaphysical and epistemological topics; and Perceiving God (1991). The latter
is a magisterial argument for the conclusion that experiential awareness of
God, more specifically perception of God, makes an important contribution to the
grounds of religious belief. In addition to this scholarly work, Alston was a
founder of the Society of Christian Philosophers, a professional society with
more than 1,100 members, and the founding editor of Faith and Philosophy.
Althusser, Louis (1918–90),
French Marxist philosopher whose publication in 1965 of two collections of
essays, Pour Marx (“For Marx”) and Lire le Capital (“Reading Capital”), made
him a sensation in French intellectual circles and attracted a large
international readership. The English translations of these texts in 1969 and
1970, respectively, helped shape the development of Marxist thought in the
English-speaking world throughout the 1970s. Drawing on the work of
non-positivist French historians and philosophers of science, especially
Bachelard, Althusser proclaimed the existence of an “epistemological break” in
Marx’s work, occurring in the mid-1840s. What preceded this break was, in
Althusser’s view, a prescientific theoretical humanism derived from Feuerbach
and ultimately from Hegel. What followed it, Althusser maintained, was a
science of history a all-things-considered reason Althusser, Louis 23 - 23 development as monumental, potentially,
as the rise of the new sciences of nature in the seventh century. Althusser
argued that the nature and even the existence of this new kind of science had
yet to be acknowledged, even by Marx himself. It therefore had to be
reconstructed from Marx’s writings, Das Kapital especially, and also discerned
in the political practice of Lenin and other like-minded revolutionaries who
implicitly understood what Marx intended. Althusser did little, however, to
elaborate the content of this new science. Rather, he tirelessly defended it
progrmatically against rival construals of Marxism. In so doing, he took
particular aim at neo-Hegelian and “humanistic” currents in the larger Marxist
culture and (implicitly) in the French Communist Party, to which he belonged
throughout his adult life. After 1968, Althusser’s influence in France faded.
But he continued to teach at l’École Normale Superieure and to write, making
important contributions to political theory and to understandings of “ideology”
and related concepts. He also faced increasingly severe bouts of mania and
depression. In 1980, in what the French courts deemed an episode of “temporary
insanity,” he strangled his wife. Althusser avoided prison, but spent much of
the 1980s in mental institutions. During this period he wrote two extraordinary
memoirs, L’avenir dure longtemps (“The Future Lasts Forever”) and Les faits
(“The Facts”), published posthumously in 1992.
biguity, a phonological (or orthographic) form
having multiple meanings (senses, characters, semantic representations)
assigned by the language system. A lexical biguity occurs when a lexical item
(word) is assigned multiple meanings by the language. It includes (a) homonymy,
i.e., distinct lexical items having the se sound or form but different senses –
‘knight’/’night’, ‘lead’ (n.)/‘lead’ (v.), ‘bear’ (n.)/‘bear’ (v.); and (b)
polysemy, i.e., a single lexical item having multiple senses – ‘lb’ (the
animal)/‘lb’ (the flesh), ‘window’ (glass)/‘window’ (opening). The distinction
between homonymy and polysemy is problematic. A structural biguity occurs when
a phrase or sentence is correlated by the grmar of the language with distinct
constituent structures (phrase markers or sequences of phrase markers). Exple:
‘Competent women and men should apply’ – ‘[NP[NPCompetent women] and men] . .
.’ vs. ‘[NPCompetent[NPwomen and men]] . . .’, where ‘NP’ stands for ‘noun
phrase’. A scope biguity is a structural biguity deriving from alternative
interpretations of scopes of operators (see below). Exples: ‘Walt will diet and
exercise only if his doctor approves’ – sentence operator scope: doctor’s approval
is a necessary condition for both diet and exercise (wide scope ‘only if’) vs.
approval necessary for exercise but not for dieting (wide scope ‘and’); ‘Bertie
has a theory about every occurrence’ – quantifier scope: one grand theory
explaining all occurrences (‘a theory’ having wide scope over ‘every
occurrence’) vs. all occurrences explained by several theories together (‘every
occurrence’ having wide scope). The scope of an operator is the shortest full
subformula to which the operator is attached. Thus, in `(A & B) C’, the
scope of ‘&’ is ‘(A & B)’. For natural languages, the scope of an
operator is what it C-commands. (X C-commands Y in a tree diagr provided the
first branching node that dominates X also dominates Y.) An occurrence of an
operator has wide scope relative to that of another operator provided the scope
of the former properly includes scope of the latter. Exples: in ‘~(A & B)’,
’-’ has wide scope over ‘&’; in ‘(Dx) (Ey) Fxy’, the existential quantifier
has wide scope over the universal quantifier. A pragmatic biguity is duality of
use resting on pragmatic principles such as those which underlie reference and
conversational implicature; e.g., depending on contextual variables, ‘I don’t
know that he’s right’ can express doubt or merely the denial of genuine
knowledge. IMPLICATURE, MEANING,
PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE, PRAGMATIC CONTRADICTION, SCOPE, VAGUENESS. W.K.W.
biguity, elliptic.ELLIPSIS. brose, Saint, known as brose of Milan (c.339–97),
Roman church leader and theologian. While bishop of Milan (374–97), he not only
led the struggle against the Arian heresy and its political manifestations, but
offered new models for preaching, for Scriptural exegesis, and for hymnody. His
works also contributed to medieval Latin philosophy. brose’s appropriation of
Neoplatonic doctrines was noteworthy in itself, and it worked powerfully on and
through Augustine. brose’s commentary on the account of creation in Genesis,
his Hexaemeron, preserved for medieval readers many pieces of ancient natural
history and even some altruism brose, Saint 24 - 24 elements of physical explanation. Perhaps
most importantly, brose engaged ancient philosophical ethics in the search for
moral lessons that marks his exegesis of Scripture; he also reworked Cicero’s
De officiis as a treatise on the virtues and duties of Christian living.
monius Saccas (early
third century A.D.), Platonist philosopher who taught in Alexandria. He
apparently served early in the century as the teacher of the Christian
philosopher Origen. He attracted the attention of Plotinus, who ce to the city
in 232 in search of philosophical enlightenment (Porphyry, Life of Plotinus 3).
monius (the epithet ‘Saccas’ seems to mean ‘the bagman’) was undoubtedly a
charismatic figure, but it is not at all clear what, if any, were his
distinctive analysis, the process of breaking up a concept, proposition,
linguistic complex, or fact into its simple or ultimate constituents. That on
which the analysis is done is called the analysandum, and that which does the
analysis is called the analysans. A number of the most important philosophers
of the twentieth century, including Russell, Moore, and (the early)
Wittgenstein, have argued that philosophical analysis is the proper method of
philosophy. But the practitioners of analytic philosophy have disagreed about
what kind of thing is to be analyzed. For exple, Moore tried to analyze
sense-data into their constituent parts. Here the analysandum is a complex
psychological fact, the having of a sense-datum. More commonly, analytic philosophers
have tried to analyze concepts or propositions. This is conceptual analysis.
Still others have seen it as their task to give an analysis of various kinds of
sentences – e.g., those involving proper nes or definite descriptions. This is
linguistic analysis. Each of these kinds of analysis faces a version of a
puzzle that has come to be called the paradox of analysis. For linguistic
analyses, the paradox can be expressed as follows: for an analysis to be
adequate, the analysans must be synonymous with the analysandum; e.g., if ‘male
sibling’ is to analyze ‘brother’, they must mean the se; but if they are
synonymous, then ‘a brother is a male sibling’ is synonymous with ‘a brother is
a brother’; but the two sentences do not seem synonymous. Expressed as a
dilemma, the paradox is that any proposed analysis would seem to be either
inadequate (because the analysans and the analysandum are not synonymous) or
uninformative (because they are synonymous).
analytic philosophy, an
umbrella term currently used to cover a diverse assortment of philosophical
techniques and tendencies. As in the case of chicken-sexing, it is relatively
easy to identify analytic philosophy and philosophers, though difficult to say
with any precision what the criteria are. Analytic philosophy is sometimes
called Oxford philosophy or linguistic philosophy, but these labels are, at
least, misleading. Whatever else it is, analytic philosophy is manifestly not a
school, doctrine, or body of accepted propositions. Analytic philosophers tend
largely, though not exclusively, to be English-speaking academics whose
writings are directed, on the whole, to other English-speaking philosophers.
They are the intellectual heirs of Russell, Moore, and Wittgenstein,
philosophers who self-consciously pursued “philosophical analysis” in the early
part of the twentieth century. Analysis, as practiced by Russell and Moore,
concerned not language per se, but concepts and propositions. In their eyes,
while it did not exhaust the domain of philosophy, analysis provided a vital
tool for laying bare the logical form of reality. Wittgenstein, in the
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), contended, though obliquely, that the
structure of language reveals the structure of the world; every meaningful
sentence is analyzable into atomic constituents that designate the fine-grained
constituents of reality. This “Tractarian” view was one Wittgenstein was to
renounce in his later work, but it had considerable influence within the Vienna
Circle in the 1920s, and in the subsequent development of logical positivism in
the 1930s and 1940s. Carnap and Ayer, both exponents of positivism, held that
the task of philosophy was not to uncover elusive metaphysical truths, but to
provide analyses of scientific sentences. (Other sentences, those in ethics,
for instance, were thought to lack “cognitive significance.”) Their model was
Russell’s theory of descriptions, which provided a technique for analyzing away
apparent commitments to suspicious entities. Meanwhile, a number of former
proponents of analysis, influenced by Wittgenstein, had taken up what ce to be
called ordinary language philosophy. Philosophers of this persuasion focused on
the role of words in the lives of ordinary speakers, hoping thereby to escape
long-standing philosophical muddles. These muddles resulted, they thought, from
a natural tendency, when pursuing philosophical theses, to be misled by the
grmatical form of sentences in which those questions were posed. (A classic
illustration might be Heidegger’s supposition that ‘nothing’ must designate
something, though a very peculiar something.) Today, it is difficult to find
much unanimity in the ranks of analytic philosophers. There is, perhaps, an
implicit respect for argument and clarity, an evolving though informal
agreement as to what problems are and are not tractable, and a conviction that
philosophy is in some sense continuous with science. The practice of analytic
philosophers to address one another rather than the broader public has led some
to decry philosophy’s “professionalization” and to call for a return to a
pluralistic, community-oriented style of philosophizing. Analytic philosophers
respond by pointing out that analytic techniques and standards have been well
represented in the history of philosophy.
analytic–synthetic distinction, the
distinction, made fous by Kant, according to which an affirmative
subject-predicate statement (proposition, judgment) is called analytic if the
predicate concept is contained in the subject concept, and synthetic otherwise.
The statement ‘All red roses are red’ is analytic, since the concept ‘red’ is
contained in the concept ‘red roses’. ‘All roses are red’ is synthetic, since
the concept ‘red’ is not contained in the concept ‘roses’. The denial of an
affirmative subject-predicate statement entails a contradiction if it is
analytic. E.g., ‘Not all red roses are red’ entails ‘Some roses are both red
and not red’. One concept may be contained in another, in Kant’s sense, even
though the terms used to express them are not related as part to whole. Since
‘biped’ means ‘two-footed animal’, the concept ‘two-footed’ is contained in the
concept ‘biped’. It is accordingly analytic that all bipeds are two-footed. The
se analytic statement is expressed by the synonymous sentences ‘All bipeds are
two-footed’ and ‘All two-footed animals are two-footed’. Unlike statements,
sentences cannot be classified as analytic or synthetic except relative to an
interpretation. analytical jurisprudence analytic–synthetic distinction 26 - 26 Witness ‘All Russian teachers are
Russian’, which in one sense expresses the analytic statement ‘All teachers
that are Russian are Russian’, and in another the synthetic statement ‘All
teachers of Russian are Russian’. Kant’s innovation over Leibniz and Hume lay
in separating the logicosemantic analytic–synthetic distinction from the
epistemological a priori–a posteriori distinction and from the
modalmetaphysical necessary–contingent distinction. It seems evident that any
analytic statement is a priori (knowable without empirical evidence) and
necessary (something that could not be false). The converse is highly
controversial. Kant and his rationalist followers maintain that some a priori
and necessary statements are synthetic, citing exples from logic (‘Contradictions
are impossible’, ‘The identity relation is transitive’), mathematics (‘The sum
of 7 and 5 is 12’, ‘The straight line between two points is the shortest’), and
metaphysics (‘Every event is caused’). Empiricists like J. S. Mill, Carnap,
Ayer, and C. I. Lewis argue that such exples are either synthetic a posteriori
or analytic a priori. Philosophers since Kant have tried to clarify the
analytic–synthetic distinction, and generalize it to all statements. On one
definition, a sentence is analytic (on a given interpretation) provided it is
“true solely in virtue of the meaning or definition of its terms.” The truth of
any sentence depends in part on the meanings of its terms. `All emeralds are
green’ would be false, e.g., if ‘emerald’ meant ‘ruby’. What makes the sentence
synthetic, it is claimed, is that its truth also depends on the properties of
emeralds, nely, their being green. But the se holds for analytic sentences: the
truth of ‘All red roses are red’ depends on the properties of red roses, nely,
their being red. Neither is true solely in virtue of meaning. A more adequate
generalization defines an analytic statement as a formal logical truth: one
“true in virtue of its logical form,” so that all statements with the se form
are true. In terms of sentences under an interpretation, an analytic truth is
an explicit logical truth (one whose surface structure represents its logical
form) or one that becomes an explicit logical truth when synonyms are
substituted. The negative statement that tomorrow is not both Sunday and not
Sunday is analytic by this definition, because all statements of the form : (p
& - p) are true. Kant’s definition is obtained as a special case by
stipulating that the predicate of an affirmative subjectpredicate statement is
contained in the subject provided the statement is logically true. On a third
generalization, ‘analytic’ denotes any statement whose denial entails a
contradiction. Subject S contains predicate P provided being S entails being P.
Whether this is broader or narrower than the second generalization depends on
how ‘entailment’, ‘logical form’, and ‘contradiction’ are defined. On some
construals, ‘Red is a color’ counts as analytic on the third generalization
(its denial entails ‘Something is and is not a color’) but not on the second
(‘red’ and ‘colored’ are logically unstructured), while the rulings are
reversed for a counterfactual conditional like ‘If this were a red rose it
would be red’. Following Quine, many have denied any distinction between
analytic and synthetic statements. Some arguments presume the problematic “true
by meaning” definition. Others are that: (1) the distinction cannot be defined
without using related notions like ‘meaning’, ‘concept’, and ‘statement’, which
are neither extensional nor definable in terms of behavior; (2) some statements
(like ‘All cats are animals’) are hard to classify as analytic or synthetic;
and (3) no statement (allegedly) is immune from rejection in the face of new
empirical evidence. If these arguments were sound, however, the distinction
between logical truths and others would seem equally dubious, a conclusion
seldom embraced. Some describe a priori truths, both synthetic and analytic, as
conceptual truths, on the theory that they are all true in virtue of the nature
of the concepts they contain. Conceptual truths are said to have no “factual
content” because they are about concepts rather than things in the actual
world. While it is natural to classify a priori truths together, the proffered
theory is questionable. As indicated above, all truths hold in part because of
the identity of their concepts, and in part because of the nature of the
objects they are about. It is a fact that all emeralds are emeralds, and this
proposition is about emeralds, not concepts
ananke (Greek),
necessity. The term was used by early Greek philosophers for a constraining or
moving natural force. In Parmenides (frg. 8, line 30) ananke encompasses
reality in limiting bonds; according to Diogenes Laertius, Democriannesis
ananke 27 - 27 tus calls the vortex
that generates the cosmos ananke; Plato (Timaeus 47e ff.) refers to ananke as
the irrational element in nature, which reason orders in creating the physical
world. As used by Aristotle (Metaphysics V.5), the basic meaning of ‘necessary’
is ‘that which cannot be otherwise’, a sense that includes logical necessity.
He also distinguishes (Physics II.9) between simple and hypothetical necessity
(conditions that must hold if something is to occur).
anaphora, a device of
reference or cross-reference in which a term (called an anaphor), typically a
pronoun, has its semantic properties determined by a term or noun phrase
(called the anaphor’s antecedent) that occurs earlier. Sometimes the antecedent
is a proper ne or other independently referring expression, as in ‘Jill went up
the hill and then she ce down again’. In such cases, the anaphor refers to the
se object as its antecedent. In other cases, the anaphor seems to function as a
variable bound by an antecedent quantifier, as in ‘If any miner bought a
donkey, he is penniless’. But anaphora is puzzling because not every exple
falls neatly into one of these two groups. Thus, in ‘John owns some sheep and
Harry vaccinates them’ (an exple due to Gareth Evans) the anaphor is arguably
not bound by its antecedent ‘some sheep’. And in ‘Every miner who owns a donkey
beats it’ (a fous type of case discovered by Geach), the anaphor is arguably
neither bound by ‘a donkey’ nor a uniquely referring expression.
anattavada, the Buddhist
doctrine of no-soul, attributed to the Buddha (sixth century B.C.). The
Buddha’s idea of dependent origination (pratityasutpada) leads to a process
ontology of change where nothing is absolute, permanent, or substantive.
Accordingly, the Buddha taught that a person’s self consists of a bundle of
fleeting impressions, analyzed into five groups (skandhas), rather than a
substantive entity called the “soul.” The Buddha’s method of introspection to
find out whether we can be aware of a soullike substance inside us is
remarkably similar to David Hume’s. The Hindu philosophical schools objected to
anattavada because they thought it could not satisfactorily explain such issues
as personal identity, moral responsibility and karma, and rebirth. D.K.C.
Anaxagoras (c.500–428 B.C.), Greek philosopher who was the first of the
pre-Socratics to teach in Athens (c.480–450), where he influenced leading
intellectuals such as Pericles and Euripides. He left Athens when he was
prosecuted for impiety. Writing in response to Parmenides, he elaborated a
theory of matter according to which nothing comes into being or perishes. The
ultimate realities are stuffs such as water and earth, flesh and bone, but so
are contraries such as hot and cold, likewise treated as stuffs. Every
phenomenal substance has a portion of every elemental stuff, and there are no
minimal parts of anything, but matter takes on the phenomenal properties of
whatever predominates in the mixture. Anaxagoras posits an indefinite number of
elemental stuffs, in contrast to his contemporary Empedocles, who requires only
four elements; but Anaxagoras follows Parmenides more rigorously, allowing no
properties or substances to emerge that were not already present in the cosmos
as its constituents. Thus there is no ultimate gap between appearance and reality:
everything we perceive is real. In Anaxagoras’s cosmogony, an initial chaos of
complete mixture gives way to an ordered world when noûs (mind) begins a vortex
motion that separates cosmic masses of ether (the bright upper air), air,
water, and earth. Mind is finer than the stuffs and is found in living things,
but it does not mix with stuffs. Anaxagoras’s theory of mind provides the first
hint of a mind–matter dualism. Plato and Aristotle thought his assigning a
cosmic role to mind made him sound like “a sober man” ong his contemporaries,
but they were disappointed that he did not exploit his idea to provide
teleological explanations of natural phenomena.
Anaximander (c.612–545
B.C.), Greek philosopher and cosmologist, reputedly the student and successor
of Thales in the Milesian school. He described the cosmos as originating from
apeiron (the boundless) by a process of separating off; a disk-shaped earth was
formed, surrounded by concentric heavenly rings of fire enclosed in air. At
“breathing holes” in the air we see jets of fire, which are the stars, moon,
and sun. The earth stays in place because there is no reason for it to tend one
way or another. The seasons arise from alternating periods where hot and dry or
wet and anaphor Anaximander 28 - 28 cold
powers predominate, governed by a temporal process (figuratively portrayed as
the judgment of Time). Anaximander drew a map of the world and explained winds,
rain, and lightning by naturalistic hypotheses. He also described the emergence
of life in a way that prefigures the theory of evolution. Anaximander’s
interest in cosmology and cosmogony and his brilliant conjectures set the major
questions for later preSocratics.
Anaximenes of Miletus
(fl. c.545 B.C.), Greek philosopher, a pre-Socratic who, following in the
tradition of the Milesians Thales and Anaximander, speculated about cosmology
and meteorology. The source (arche) of the cosmos is air (aer, originally
mist), which by a process of rarefaction becomes fire, and by a process of
condensation becomes wind, clouds, water, earth, and stones. Air is divine and
causes life. The earth is flat and rides on a cushion of air, while a heavenly
firment revolves about it like a felt cap. Anaximenes also explained
meteorological phenomena and earthquakes. Although less innovative than his
predecessor Anaximander, he made progress in naturalistic explanations by
appealing to a quantitative process of rarefaction and condensation rather than
to mythical processes involving quasi-personal agents.
ancestral(of a given
relation R), the relation (also called the transitive closure of R) that
relates one given individual to a second if and only if the first can be
“reached” from the second by repeated “applications” of the given relation R.
The ancestor relation is the ancestral of the parent relation since one person
is an ancestor of a second if the first is a parent of the second or the first
is a parent of a parent of the second or the first is a parent of a parent of a
parent of the second, and so on. Frege discovered a simple method of giving a
materially adequate and formally correct definition of the ancestral of a given
relation in terms of the relation itself (plus logical concepts). This method
is informally illustrated as follows: in order for one person A to be an
ancestor of a second person B it is necessary and sufficient for A to have
every property that belongs to every parent of B and that belongs to every
parent of any person to whom it belongs. This and other similar methods made
possible the reduction of all numerical concepts to those of zero and
successor, which Frege then attempted to reduce to concepts of pure logic.
Frege’s definition of the ancestral has become a paradigm in modern analytic
philosophy as well as a historical benchmark of the watershed between
traditional logic and modern logic. It demonstrates the exactness of modern
logical analysis and, in comparison, the narrowness of traditional logic. FREGE, LOGICISM, RELATION. J.Cor. ancient
atomism, the theory, originated by Leucippus and elaborated by Democritus, that
the ultimate realities are atoms and the void. The theory was later used by
Epicurus as the foundation for a philosophy stressing ethical concerns,
Epicureanism.
Andronicus of Rhodes
(first century B.C.), Greek philosopher, a leading member of the Lyceum who was
largely responsible for establishing the canon of Aristotle’s works still read
today. He also edited the works of Theophrastus. At the time, Aristotle was
known primarily for his philosophical dialogues, only fragments of which now
survive; his more methodical treatises had stopped circulating soon after his
death. By producing the first systematic edition of Aristotle’s corpus,
Andronicus revived study of the treatises, and the resulting critical debates
dratically affected the course of philosophy. Little is recorded about
Andronicus’s labors; but besides editing the texts and discussing titles,
arrangement, and authenticity, he sought to explicate and assess Aristotle’s
thought. In so doing, he and his colleagues initiated the exegetical tradition
of Aristotelian commentaries. Nothing he wrote survives; a summary account of
emotions formerly ascribed to him is spurious.
Angst, German term for a
special form of anxiety, an emotion seen by existentialists as both constituting
and revealing the human condition. Angst plays a key role in the writings of
Heidegger, whose concept is closely related to Kierkegaard’s angest and
Sartre’s angoisse. The concept is first treated in this distinctive way in
Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety (1844), where anxiety is described as “the
dizziness of freedom.” Anxiety here represents freedom’s self-awareness; it is
the psychological precondition for the individAnaximenes of Miletus Angst 29
- 29 ual’s attempt to become autonomous,
a possibility that is seen as both alluring and disturbing.
anhomoeomerous.HOMOEOMEROUS.
animal faith.SANTAYANA. Anniceraioi.ANNICERIS.
Anniceris (fl. c.320–280
B.C.), Greek philosopher. A pupil of Antipater, he established a separate
branch of the Cyrenaic school known as the Anniceraioi. He subscribed to
typical Cyrenaic hedonism, arguing that the end of each action should be one’s
own pleasure, since we can know nothing of others’ experiences. He tempered the
implications of hedonism with the claim that a wise man attaches weight to
respect for parents, patriotism, gratitude, and friendship, perhaps influencing
Epicurus in this regard. Anniceris also played down the Cyrenaic stress on the
intellect’s role in hedonistic practical rationality, taking the Aristotelian
view that cultivation of the right habits is indispensable.
Anscombe, G. E. M. – vide
H. P. Grice, “Reply to Anscombe,” -- (b.
1919), Irish philosopher who has held positions at Oxford and Cbridge, best
known for her work in the philosophy of mind and for her editions and
translations of Wittgenstein’s later writings. Anscombe studied philosophy with
Wittgenstein and bece closely associated with him, writing An Introduction to
Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (1959). She is married to Peter Geach. Anscombe’s
first major work was Intention (1957). She argues that the concept of intention
is central to our understanding of ourselves as rational agents. The basic case
is that of the intentions with which we act. These are identified by the reasons
we give in answer to why-questions concerning our actions. Such reasons usually
form a hierarchy that constitutes a practical syllogism of which action itself
is the conclusion. Hence our intentions are a form of active practical
knowledge that normally leads to action. Anscombe compares the direction of fit
of this kind of knowledge with a shopping list’s relation to one’s purchases,
and contrasts it with the direction of fit characteristic of a list of these
purchases drawn up by an observer of the shopper. She maintains that the deep
mistake of modern (i.e., post-medieval) philosophy has been to think that all
knowledge is of this latter, observational, type. This conception of active
knowledge expressed through an agent’s intentions conflicts with the passive
conception of rationality characteristic of Hume and his followers, and
Anscombe develops this challenge in papers critical of the is–ought distinction
of Hume and his modern successors. In a fous paper, “Modern Moral Philosophy”
(1958), she also argues that ought-statements make sense only in the context of
a moral theology that grounds morality in divine commands. Since our culture
rejects this theology, it is no surprise that “modern moral philosophers”
cannot find much sense in them. We should therefore abandon them and return to
the older conceptions of practical rationality and virtue. These conceptions,
and the associated conception of natural law, provide the background to an
uncompromising defense of traditional Catholic morality concerning sexuality,
war, and the importance of the distinction between intention and foresight.
Anscombe has never been afraid of unpopular positions – philosophical and
ethical. Her three volumes of Collected Papers (1981) include a defense of
singular causation, an attack on the very idea of a subject of thought, and a
critique of pacifism. She is one of the most original and distinctive English
philosophers of her generation.
Anselm, Saint, called
Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109), Italian-born English philosophical
theologian. A Benedictine monk and the second Norman archbishop of Canterbury,
he is best known for his distinctive method – fides quaerens intellectum; his
“ontological” argument for the existence of God in his treatise Proslogion; and
his classic formulation of the satisfaction theory of the Atonement in the Cur
Deus homo. Like Augustine before him, Anselm is a Christian Platonist in
metaphysics. He argues that the most accessible proofs of the existence of God
are through value theory: in his treatise Monologion, anhomoeomerous Anselm 30
- 30 he deploys a cosmological
argument, showing the existence of a source of all goods, which is the Good per
se and hence supremely good; that se thing exists per se and is the Supreme
Being. In the Proslogion, Anselm begins with his conception of a being a
greater than which cannot be conceived, and mounts his ontological argument
that a being a greater than which cannot be conceived exists in the intellect,
because even the fool understands the phrase when he hears it; but if it
existed in the intellect alone, a greater could be conceived that existed in
reality. This supremely valuable object is essentially whatever it is – other
things being equal – that is better to be than not to be, and hence living,
wise, powerful, true, just, blessed, immaterial, immutable, and eternal per se;
even the paradigm of sensory goods – Beauty, Harmony, Sweetness, and Pleasant
Texture, in its own ineffable manner. Nevertheless, God is supremely simple,
not compounded of a plurality of excellences, but “omne et unum, totum et solum
bonum,” a being a more delectable than which cannot be conceived. Everything
other than God has its being and its well-being through God as efficient cause.
Moreover, God is the paradigm of all created natures, the latter ranking as
better to the extent that they more perfectly resemble God. Thus, it is better
to be human than to be horse, to be horse than to be wood, even though in
comparison with God everything else is “almost nothing.” For every created nature,
there is a that-for-which-it-ismade (ad quod factum est). On the one hand,
Anselm thinks of such teleology as part of the internal structure of the
natures themselves: a creature of type F is a true F only insofar as it
is/does/exemplifies that for which F’s were made; a defective F, to the extent
that it does not. On the other hand, for Anselm, the telos of a created nature
is that-for-which-God-made-it. Because God is personal and acts through reason
and will, Anselm infers that prior (in the order of explanation) to creation,
there was, in the reason of the maker, an exemplar, form, likeness, or rule of
what he was going to make. In De veritate Anselm maintains that such teleology
gives rise to obligation: since creatures owe their being and well-being to God
as their cause, so they owe their being and well-being to God in the sense of
having an obligation to praise him by being the best beings they can. Since
every creature is of some nature or other, each can be its best by being
that-for-which-God-made-it. Abstracting from impediments, non-rational natures
fulfill this obligation and “act rightly” by natural necessity; rational
creatures, when they exercise their powers of reason and will to fulfill God’s
purpose in creating them. Thus, the goodness of a creature (how good a being it
is) is a function of twin factors: its natural telos (i.e., what sort of
imitation of divine nature it aims for), and its rightness (in exercising its
natural powers to fulfill its telos). By contrast, God as absolutely
independent owes no one anything and so has no obligations to creatures. In De
casu diaboli, Anselm underlines the optimism of his ontology, reasoning that
since the Supreme Good and the Supreme Being are identical, every being is good
and every good a being. Two further conclusions follow. First, evil is a
privation of being, the absence of good in something that properly ought to
have it (e.g., blindness in normally sighted animals, injustice in humans or
angels). Second, since all genuine powers are given to enable a being to
fulfill its natural telos and so to be the best being it can, all genuine
(metaphysically basic) powers are optimific and essentially aim at goods, so
that evils are merely incidental side effects of their operation, involving some
lack of coordination ong powers or between their exercise and the surrounding
context. Thus, divine omnipotence does not, properly speaking, include
corruptibility, passibility, or the ability to lie, because the latter are
defects and/or powers in other things whose exercise obstructs the flourishing
of the corruptible, passible, or potential liar. Anselm’s distinctive action
theory begins teleologically with the observation that humans and angels were
made for a happy immortality enjoying God, and to that end were given the
powers of reason to make accurate value assessments and will to love
accordingly. Anselm regards freedom and imputability of choice as essential and
permanent features of all rational beings. But freedom cannot be defined as a
power for opposites (the power to sin and the power not to sin), both because
neither God nor the good angels have any power to sin, and because sin is an
evil at which no metaphysically basic power can aim. Rather, freedom is the
power to preserve justice for its own sake. Choices and actions are imputable
to an agent only if they are spontaneous, from the agent itself. Creatures
cannot act spontaneously by the necessity of their natures, because they do not
have their natures from themselves but receive them from God. To give them the
opportunity to become just of themselves, God furnishes them with two motivational
drives toward the good: an affection for the advantageous (affectio commodi) or
a tendency to will things for the sake of their benefit to the agent itself;
and an affection for justice (affectio justitiae) or a tendency to will things
because of their own intrinsic value. Creatures are able to align these drives
(by letting the latter temper the former) or not. The good angels, who
preserved justice by not willing some advantage possible for them but forbidden
by God for that time, can no longer will more advantage than God wills for
them, because he wills their maximum as a reward. By contrast, creatures, who
sin by refusing to delay gratification in accordance with God’s will, lose both
uprightness of will and their affection for justice, and hence the ability to
temper their pursuit of advantage or to will the best goods. Justice will never
be restored to angels who desert it. But if animality makes human nature
weaker, it also opens the possibility of redemption. Anselm’s argument for the
necessity of the Incarnation plays out the dialectic of justice and mercy so
characteristic of his prayers. He begins with the demands of justice: humans
owe it to God to make all of their choices and actions conform to his will;
failure to render what was owed insults God’s honor and makes the offender
liable to make satisfaction; because it is worse to dishonor God than for
countless worlds to be destroyed, the satisfaction owed for any small sin is
incommensurate with any created good; it would be maximally indecent for God to
overlook such a great offense. Such calculations threaten certain ruin for the
sinner, because God alone can do/be immeasurably deserving, and depriving the
creature of its honor (through the eternal frustration of its telos) seems the
only way to balance the scales. Yet, justice also forbids that God’s purposes
be thwarted through created resistance, and it was divine mercy that made
humans for a beatific immortality with him. Likewise, humans come in filies by
virtue of their biological nature (which angels do not share), and justice
allows an offense by one fily member to be compensated by another. Assuming
that all actual humans are descended from common first parents, Anselm claims
that the human race can make satisfaction for sin, if God becomes human and
renders to God what Ad’s fily owes. When Anselm insists that humans were made
for beatific intimacy with God and therefore are obliged to strive into God
with all of their powers, he emphatically includes reason or intellect along
with emotion and will. God, the controlling subject matter, is in part
permanently inaccessible to us (because of the ontological incommensuration
between God and creatures) and our progress is further hpered by the
consequences of sin. Our powers will function best, and hence we have a duty to
follow right order in their use: by submitting first to the holistic discipline
of faith, which will focus our souls and point us in the right direction. Yet
it is also a duty not to remain passive in our appreciation of authority, but
rather for faith to seek to understand what it has believed. Anselm’s works
display a dialectical structure, full of questions, objections, and contrasting
opinions, designed to stir up the mind. His quartet of teaching dialogues – De
grmatico, De veritate, De libertate arbitrii, and De casu diaboli as well as
his last philosophical treatise, De concordia, anticipate the genre of the
Scholastic question (quaestio) so dominant in the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries. His discussions are likewise remarkable for their attention to
modalities and proper-versus-improper linguistic usage.
antilogism, an
inconsistent triad of propositions, two of which are the premises of a valid
categorical syllogism and the third of which is the contradictory of the
conclusion of this valid categorical syllogism. An antilogism is a special form
of antilogy or self-contradiction.
antinomianism, the view
that one is not bound by moral law; specifically, the view that Christians are
by grace set free from the need to observe moral laws. During the Reformation,
antinomianism was believed by some (but not An Sich antinomianism 32 - 32 Martin Luther) to follow from the
Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith alone.
Antiochus of Ascalon
(c.130–c.68 B.C.), Greek philosopher and the last prominent member of the New
Academy. He played the major role in ending its two centuries of Skepticism and
helped revive interest in doctrines from the Old Academy, as he called Plato,
Aristotle, and their associates. The impulse for this decisive shift ce in
epistemology, where the Skeptical Academy had long agreed with Stoicism that
knowledge requires an infallible “criterion of truth” but disputed the Stoic
claim to find this criterion in “cognitive perception.” Antiochus’s teacher,
Philo of Larissa, broke with this tradition and proposed that perception need
not be cognitive to qualify as knowledge. Rejecting this concession, Antiochus
offered new arguments for the Stoic claim that some perception is cognitive,
and hence knowledge. He also proposed a similar accommodation in ethics, where
he agreed with the Stoics that virtue alone is sufficient for happiness but
insisted with Aristotle that virtue is not the only good. These and similar
attempts to mediate fundental disputes have led some to label Antiochus an
eclectic or syncretist; but some of his proposals, especially his appeal to the
Old Academy, set the stage for Middle Platonism, which also sought to reconcile
Plato and Aristotle. No works by Antiochus survive, but his students included
many eminent Romans, most notably Cicero, who summarizes Antiochus’s
epistemology in the Academica, his critique of Stoic ethics in De finibus IV,
and his purportedly Aristotelian ethics in De finibus V.
anti-realism, rejection,
in one or another form or area of inquiry, of realism, the view that there are
knowable mind-independent facts, objects, or properties. Metaphysical realists
make the general claim that there is a world of mind-independent objects.
Realists in particular areas make more specific or limited claims. Thus moral
realists hold that there are mind-independent moral properties, mathematical
realists that there are mind-independent mathematical facts, scientific
realists that scientific inquiry reveals the existence of previously unknown
and unobservable mind-independent entities and properties. Antirealists deny
either that facts of the relevant sort are mind-independent or that knowledge
of such facts is possible. Berkeley’s subjective idealism, which claims that
the world consists only of minds and their contents, is a metaphysical
anti-realism. Constructivist anti-realists, on the other hand, deny that the
world consists only of mental phenomena, but claim that it is constituted by,
or constructed from, our evidence or beliefs. Many philosophers find
constructivism implausible or even incoherent as a metaphysical doctrine, but
much more plausible when restricted to a particular domain, such as ethics or
mathematics. Debates between realists and anti-realists have been particularly
intense in philosophy of science. Scientific realism has been rejected both by
constructivists such as Kuhn, who hold that scientific facts are constructed by
the scientific community, and by empiricists who hold that knowledge is limited
to what can be observed. A sophisticated version of the latter doctrine is Bas
van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism, which allows scientists free rein in
constructing scientific models, but claims that evidence for such models
confirms only their observable implications.
apeiron, Greek term
meaning ‘the boundless’ or ‘the unlimited’, which evolved to signify ‘the
infinite’. Anaximander introduced the term to philosophy by saying that the
source of all things was apeiron. There is some disagreement about whether he
meant by this the spatially antinomy apeiron 33 - 33 unbounded, the temporally unbounded, or
the qualitatively indeterminate. It seems likely that he intended the term to
convey the first meaning, but the other two senses also happen to apply to the
spatially unbounded. After Anaximander, Anaximenes declared as his first
principle that air is boundless, and Xenophanes made his flat earth extend downward
without bounds, and probably outward horizontally without limit as well.
Rejecting the tradition of boundless principles, Parmenides argued that
“what-is” must be held within determinate boundaries. But his follower Melissus
again argued that what-is must be boundless – in both time and space – for it
can have no beginning or end. Another follower of Parmenides, Zeno of Elea,
argued that if there are many substances, antinomies arise, including the
consequences that substances are both limited and unlimited (apeira) in number,
and that they are so small as not to have size and so large as to be unlimited
in size. Rejecting monism, Anaxagoras argued for an indefinite number of
elements that are each unlimited in size, and the Pythagorean Philolaus made limiters
(perainonta) and unlimiteds (apeira) the principles from which all things are
composed. The atomists Leucippus and Democritus conceived of a boundless
universe, partly full (of an infinite number of atoms) and partly void; and in
the universe are countless (apeiroi) worlds. Finally Aristotle arrived at an
abstract understanding of the apeiron as “the infinite,” claiming to settle
paradoxes about the boundless by allowing for real quantities to be infinitely
divisible potentially, but not actually (Physics III.4–8). The development of
the notion of the apeiron shows how Greek philosophers evolved ever more
abstract philosophical ideas from relatively concrete conceptions.
apocatastasis (from
Greek, ‘reestablishment’), the restoration of all souls, including Satan’s and
his minions’, in the kingdom of God. God’s goodness will triumph over evil, and
through a process of spiritual education souls will be brought to repentance
and made fit for divine life. The theory originates with Origen but was also held
by Gregory of Nyssa. In modern times F. D. Maurice (1805–72) and Karl Barth
(1886– 1968) held this position.
aporia (plural: aporiai),
Greek term meaning ‘puzzle’, ‘question for discussion’, ‘state of perplexity’.
The aporetic method – the raising of puzzles without offering solutions – is
typical of the elenchus in the early Socratic dialogues of Plato. These consist
in the testing of definitions and often end with an aporia, e.g., that piety is
both what is and what is not loved by the gods. Compare the paradoxes of Zeno,
e.g., that motion is both possible and impossible. In Aristotle’s dialectic,
the resolution of aporiai discovered in the views on a subject is an important
source of philosophical understanding. The beliefs that one should love oneself
most of all and that self-love is sheful, e.g., can be resolved with the right
understanding of ‘self’. The possibility of argument for two inconsistent
positions was an important factor in the development of Skepticism. In modern
philosophy, the antinomies that Kant claimed reason would arrive at in
attempting to prove the existence of objects corresponding to transcendental
ideas may be seen as aporiai.
applied ethics, the
domain of ethics that includes professional ethics, such as business ethics, engineering
ethics, and medical ethics, as well as practical ethics such as environmental
ethics, which is applied, and thus practical as opposed to theoretical, but not
focused on any one discipline. One of the major disputes ong those who work in
applied ethics is whether or not there is a general and universal account of
morality applicable both to the ethical issues in the professions and to
various practical problems. Some philosophers believe that each of the
professions or each field of activity develops an ethical code for itself and
that there need be no apellatio applied ethics 34 - 34 close relationship between (e.g.)
business ethics, medical ethics, and environmental ethics. Others hold that the
se moral system applies to all professions and fields. They claim that the
appearance of different moral systems is simply due to certain problems being
more salient for some professions and fields than for others. The former
position accepts the consequence that the ethical codes of different professions
might conflict with one another, so that a physician in business might find
that business ethics would require one action but medical ethics another.
Engineers who have been promoted to management positions sometimes express
concern over the tension between what they perceive to be their responsibility
as engineers and their responsibility as managers in a business. Many lawyers
seem to hold that there is similar tension between what common morality
requires and what they must do as lawyers. Those who accept a universal
morality hold that these tensions are all resolvable because there is only one
common morality. Underlying both positions is the pervasive but false view of
common morality as providing a unique right answer to every moral problem.
Those who hold that each profession or field has its own moral code do not
realize that common morality allows for conflicts of duties. Most of those who
put forward moral theories, e.g., utilitarians, Kantians, and contractarians,
attempt to generate a universal moral system that solves all moral problems.
This creates a situation that leads many in applied ethics to dismiss
theoretical ethics as irrelevant to their concerns. An alternative view of a
moral theory is to think of it on the model of a scientific theory, primarily
concerned to describe common morality rather than generate a new improved
version. On this model, it is clear that although morality rules out many
alternatives as unacceptable, it does not provide unique right answers to every
controversial moral question. On this model, different fields and different
professions may interpret the common moral system in somewhat different ways.
For exple, although deception is always immoral if not justified, what counts
as deception is not the se in all professions. Not informing a patient of an
alternative treatment counts as deceptive for a physician, but not telling a
customer of an alternative to what she is about to buy does not count as
deceptive for a salesperson. The professions also have considerable input into
what special duties are incurred by becoming a member of their profession.
Applied ethics is thus not the mechanical application of a common morality to a
particular profession or field, but an independent discipline that clarifies
and analyzes the practices in a field or profession so that common morality can
be applied.
a priori, prior to or independent of
experience; contrasted with ‘a posteriori’ (empirical). These two terms are
primarily used to mark a distinction between (1) two modes of epistemic
justification, together with derivative distinctions between (2) kinds of
propositions, (3) kinds of knowledge, and (4) kinds of argument. They are also
used to indicate a distinction between (5) two ways in which a concept or idea
may be acquired. (1) A belief or claim is said to be justified a priori if its
epistemic justification, the reason or warrant for thinking it to be true, does
not depend at all on sensory or introspective or other sorts of experience;
whereas if its justification does depend at least in part on such experience,
it is said to be justified a posteriori or empirically. This specific
distinction has to do only with the justification of the belief, and not at all
with how the constituent concepts are acquired; thus it is no objection to a
claim of a priori justificatory status for a particular belief that experience
is required for the acquisition of some of the constituent concepts. It is
clear that the relevant notion of experience includes sensory and introspective
experience, as well as such things as kinesthetic experience. Equally clearly,
to construe experience in the broadest possible sense of, roughly, a conscious
undergoing of any sort would be to destroy the point of the distinction, since
even a priori justification presumably involves some sort of conscious process
of awareness. The construal that is perhaps most faithful to the traditional
usage is that which construes experience as any sort of cognitive input that
derives, presumably causally, from features of the actual world that may not
hold in other possible worlds. Thus, e.g., such things as clairvoyance or
telepathy, if they were to exist, would count as forms of experience and any
knowledge resulting therefrom as a posteriori; but the intuitive apprehension of
properties or numbers or other sorts of abstract entities that are the se in
all possible worlds, would not. Understood in this way, the concept of a priori
justification is an essentially negative concept, specifying as it does what
the justification of the belief does not depend on, but saying nothing a priori
a priori 35 - 35 about what it does
depend on. Historically, the main positive conception was that offered by
proponents of rationalism (such as Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz),
according to which a priori justification derives from the intuitive
apprehension of necessary facts pertaining to universals and other abstract
entities. (Although Kant is often regarded as a rationalist, his restriction of
substantive a priori knowledge to the world of appearances represents a major
departure from the main rationalist tradition.) In contrast, proponents of
traditional empiricism, if they do not repudiate the concept of a priori
justification altogether (as does Quine), typically attempt to account for such
justification by appeal to linguistic or conceptual conventions. The most
standard formulation of this empiricist view (a development of the view of Hume
that all a priori knowledge pertains to “relations of ideas”) is the claim
(typical of logical positivism) that all a priori knowable claims or
propositions are analytic. (A rationalist would claim in opposition that at
least some a priori claims or propositions are synthetic.) (2) A proposition
that is the content of an a priori justified belief is often referred to as an
a priori proposition (or an a priori truth). This usage is also often extended
to include any proposition that is capable of being the content of such a
belief, whether it actually has this status or not. (3) If, in addition to
being justified a priori or a posteriori, a belief is also true and satisfies
whatever further conditions may be required for it to constitute knowledge,
that knowledge is derivatively characterized as a priori or a posteriori
(empirical), respectively. (Though a priori justification is often regarded as
by itself guaranteeing truth, this should be regarded as a further substantive
thesis, not as part of the very concept of a priori justification.) Exples of
knowledge that have been classically regarded as a priori in this sense are
mathematical knowledge, knowledge of logical truths, and knowledge of necessary
entailments and exclusions of commonsense concepts (‘Nothing can be red and
green all over at the se time’, ‘If A is later than B and B is later than C,
then A is later than C’); but many claims of metaphysics, ethics, and even
theology have also been claimed to have this status. (4) A deductively valid
argument that also satisfies the further condition that each of the premises
(or sometimes one or more particularly central premises) are justified a priori
is referred to as an a priori argument. This label is also sometimes applied to
arguments that are claimed to have this status, even if the correctness of this
claim is in question. (5) In addition to the uses just catalogued that derive
from the distinction between modes of justification, the terms ‘a priori’ and
‘a posteriori’ are also employed to distinguish two ways in which a concept or
idea might be acquired by an individual person. An a posteriori or empirical
concept or idea is one that is derived from experience, via a process of
abstraction or ostensive definition. In contrast, an a priori concept or idea
is one that is not derived from experience in this way and thus presumably does
not require any particular experience to be realized (though the explicit
realization of such a concept might still require experience as a “trigger”).
The main historical account of such concepts, again held mainly by
rationalists, construes them as innate, either implanted in the mind by God or,
in the more contemporary version of the claim held by Chomsky, Fodor, and
others, resulting from evolutionary development. Concepts typically regarded as
having this sort of status include the concepts of substance, causation, God,
necessity, infinity, and many others. Empiricists, in contrast, typically hold
that all concepts are derived from experience.
Aquinas, Saint Thomas
(1225–74), Italian philosopher-theologian, the most influential thinker of the
medieval period. He produced a powerful philosophical synthesis that combined
Aristotelian and Neoplatonic elements within a Christian context in an original
and ingenious way. Life and works. Thomas was born at Aquino castle in
Roccasecca, Italy, and took early schooling at the Benedictine Abbey of Monte
Cassino. He then studied liberal arts and philosophy at the University of
Naples (1239–44) and joined the Dominican order. While going to Paris for
further studies as a Dominican, he was detained by his fily for about a year.
Upon being released, he studied with the Dominicans at Paris, perhaps
privately, until 1248, when he journeyed to a priori argument Aquinas, Saint
Thomas 36 - 36 Cologne to work under
Albertus Magnus. Thomas’s own report (reportatio) of Albertus’s lectures on the
Divine Nes of Dionysius and his notes on Albertus’s lectures on Aristotle’s
Ethics date from this period. In 1252 Thomas returned to Paris to lecture there
as a bachelor in theology. His resulting commentary on the Sentences of Peter
Lombard dates from this period, as do two philosophical treatises, On Being and
Essence (De ente et essentia) and On the Principles of Nature (De principiis
naturae). In 1256 he began lecturing as master of theology at Paris. From this
period (1256–59) date a series of scriptural commentaries, the disputations On
Truth (De veritate), Quodlibetal Questions VII–XI, and earlier parts of the
Summa against the Gentiles (Summa contra gentiles; hereafter SCG). At different
locations in Italy from 1259 to 1269, Thomas continued to write prodigiously,
including, ong other works, the completion of the SCG; a commentary on the
Divine Nes; disputations On the Power of God (De potentia Dei) and On Evil (De
malo); and Summa of Theology (Summa theologiae; hereafter ST), Part I. In
January 1269, he resumed teaching in Paris as regent master and wrote
extensively until returning to Italy in 1272. From this second Parisian regency
date the disputations On the Soul (De anima) and On Virtues (De virtutibus);
continuation of ST; Quodlibets I–VI and XII; On the Unity of the Intellect
against the Averroists (De unitate intellectus contra Averroistas); most if not
all of his commentaries on Aristotle; a commentary on the Book of Causes (Liber
de causis); and On the Eternity of the World (De aeternitate mundi). In 1272
Thomas returned to Italy where he lectured on theology at Naples and continued
to write until December 6, 1273, when his scholarly work ceased. He died three
months later en route to the Second Council of Lyons. Doctrine. Aquinas was
both a philosopher and a theologian. The greater part of his writings are
theological, but there are many strictly philosophical works within his corpus,
such as On Being and Essence, On the Principles of Nature, On the Eternity of
the World, and the commentaries on Aristotle and on the Book of Causes. Also
important are large sections of strictly philosophical writing incorporated
into theological works such as the SCG, ST, and various disputations. Aquinas
clearly distinguishes between strictly philosophical investigation and
theological investigation. If philosophy is based on the light of natural
reason, theology (sacra doctrina) presupposes faith in divine revelation. While
the natural light of reason is insufficient to discover things that can be made
known to human beings only through revelation, e.g., belief in the Trinity,
Thomas holds that it is impossible for those things revealed to us by God
through faith to be opposed to those we can discover by using human reason. For
then one or the other would have to be false; and since both come to us from
God, God himself would be the author of falsity, something Thomas rejects as
abhorrent. Hence it is appropriate for the theologian to use philosophical
reasoning in theologizing. Aquinas also distinguishes between the orders to be
followed by the theologian and by the philosopher. In theology one reasons from
belief in God and his revelation to the implications of this for created
reality. In philosophy one begins with an investigation of created reality
insofar as this can be understood by human reason and then seeks to arrive at
some knowledge of divine reality viewed as the cause of created reality and the
end or goal of one’s philosophical inquiry (SCG II, c. 4). This means that the
order Aquinas follows in his theological Summae (SCG and ST) is not the se as
that which he prescribes for the philosopher (cf. Prooemium to Commentary on
the Metaphysics). Also underlying much of Aquinas’s thought is his acceptance
of the difference between theoretical or speculative philosophy (including
natural philosophy, mathematics, and metaphysics) and practical philosophy.
Being and analogy. For Aquinas the highest part of philosophy is metaphysics,
the science of being as being. The subject of this science is not God, but
being, viewed without restriction to any given kind of being, or simply as
being (Prooemium to Commentary on Metaphysics; In de trinitate, qu. 5, a. 4).
The metaphysician does not enjoy a direct vision of God in this life, but can
reason to knowledge of him by moving from created effects to awareness of him
as their uncreated cause. God is therefore not the subject of metaphysics, nor
is he included in its subject. God can be studied by the metaphysician only
indirectly, as the cause of the finite beings that fall under being as being,
the subject of the science. In order to account for the human intellect’s
discovery of being as being, in contrast with being as mobile (studied by
natural philosophy) or being as quantified (studied by mathematics), Thomas
appeals to a special kind of intellectual operation, a negative judgment,
technically ned by him “separation.” Through this operation one discovers that
being, in order to be realized as such, need not be material and changAquinas,
Saint Thomas Aquinas, Saint Thomas 37 -
37 ing. Only as a result of this judgment is one justified in studying
being as being. Following Aristotle (and Averroes), Thomas is convinced that
the term ‘being’ is used in various ways and with different meanings. Yet these
different usages are not unrelated and do enjoy an underlying unity sufficient
for being as being to be the subject of a single science. On the level of
finite being Thomas adopts and adapts Aristotle’s theory of unity by reference
to a first order of being. For Thomas as for Aristotle this unity is guaranteed
by the primary referent in our predication of being – substance. Other things
are ned being only because they are in some way ordered to and dependent on
substance, the primary instance of being. Hence being is analogous. Since
Thomas’s application of analogy to the divine nes presupposes the existence of
God, we shall first exine his discussion of that issue. The existence of God
and the “five ways.” Thomas holds that unaided human reason, i.e., philosophical
reason, can demonstrate that God exists, that he is one, etc., by reasoning
from effect to cause (De trinitate, qu. 2, a. 3; SCG I, c. 4). Best-known ong
his many presentations of argumentation for God’s existence are the “five
ways.” Perhaps even more interesting for today’s student of his metaphysics is
a brief argument developed in one of his first writings, On Being and Essence
(c.4). There he wishes to determine how essence is realized in what he terms
“separate substances,” i.e., the soul, intelligences (angels of the Christian
tradition), and the first cause (God). After criticizing the view that created
separate substances are composed of matter and form, Aquinas counters that they
are not entirely free from composition. They are composed of a form (or
essence) and an act of existing (esse). He immediately develops a complex
argument: (1) We can think of an essence or quiddity without knowing whether or
not it actually exists. Therefore in such entities essence and act of existing
differ unless (2) there is a thing whose quiddity and act of existing are
identical. At best there can be only one such being, he continues, by
eliminating multiplication of such an entity either through the addition of
some difference or through the reception of its form in different instances of
matter. Hence, any such being can only be separate and unreceived esse, whereas
esse in all else is received in something else, i.e., essence. (3) Since esse
in all other entities is therefore distinct from essence or quiddity, existence
is communicated to such beings by something else, i.e., they are caused. Since
that which exists through something else must be traced back to that which
exists of itself, there must be some thing that causes the existence of
everything else and that is identical with its act of existing. Otherwise one
would regress to infinity in caused causes of existence, which Thomas here
dismisses as unacceptable. In qu. 2, a. 1 of ST I Thomas rejects the claim that
God’s existence is self-evident to us in this life, and in a. 2 maintains that
God’s existence can be demonstrated by reasoning from knowledge of an existing
effect to knowledge of God as the cause required for that effect to exist. The
first way or argument (art. 3) rests upon the fact that various things in our
world of sense experience are moved. But whatever is moved is moved by
something else. To justify this, Thomas reasons that to be moved is to be
reduced from potentiality to actuality, and that nothing can reduce itself from
potency to act; for it would then have to be in potency (if it is to be moved)
and in act at the se time and in the se respect. (This does not mean that a
mover must formally possess the act it is to communicate to something else if
it is to move the latter; it must at least possess it virtually, i.e., have the
power to communicate it.) Whatever is moved, therefore, must be moved by
something else. One cannot regress to infinity with moved movers, for then
there would be no first mover and, consequently, no other mover; for second
movers do not move unless they are moved by a first mover. One must, therefore,
conclude to the existence of a first mover which is moved by nothing else, and
this “everyone understands to be God.” The second way takes as its point of
departure an ordering of efficient causes as indicated to us by our
investigation of sensible things. By this Thomas means that we perceive in the
world of sensible things that certain efficient causes cannot exercise their
causal activity unless they are also caused by something else. But nothing can
be the efficient cause of itself, since it would then have to be prior to
itself. One cannot regress to infinity in ordered efficient causes. In ordered
efficient causes, the first is the cause of the intermediary, and the
intermediary is the cause of the last whether the intermediary is one or many.
Hence if there were no first efficient cause, there would be no intermediary
and no last cause. Thomas concludes from this that one must acknowledge the
existence of a first efficient cause, “which everyone nes God.” The third way
consists of two major parts. Some Aquinas, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Saint Thomas
38 - 38 textual variants have
complicated the proper interpretation of the first part. In brief, Aquinas
appeals to the fact that certain things are subject to generation and
corruption to show that they are “possible,” i.e., capable of existing and not
existing. Not all things can be of this kind (revised text), for that which has
the possibility of not existing at some time does not exist. If, therefore, all
things are capable of not existing, at some time there was nothing whatsoever.
If that were so, even now there would be nothing, since what does not exist can
only begin to exist through something else that exists. Therefore not all
beings are capable of existing and not existing. There must be some necessary
being. Since such a necessary, i.e., incorruptible, being might still be caused
by something else, Thomas adds a second part to the argument. Every necessary being
either depends on something else for its necessity or it does not. One cannot
regress to infinity in necessary beings that depend on something else for their
necessity. Therefore there must be some being that is necessary of itself and
that does not depend on another cause for its necessity, i.e., God. The
statement in the first part to the effect that what has the possibility of not
existing at some point does not exist has been subject to considerable dispute
ong commentators. Moreover, even if one grants this and supposes that every
individual being is a “possible” and therefore has not existed at some point in
the past, it does not easily follow from this that the totality of existing
things will also have been nonexistent at some point in the past. Given this,
some interpreters prefer to substitute for the third way the more satisfactory
versions found in SCG I (ch. 15) and SCG II (ch. 15). Thomas’s fourth way is
based on the varying degrees of perfection we discover ong the beings we
experience. Some are more or less good, more or less true, more or less noble,
etc., than others. But the more and less are said of different things insofar
as they approach in varying degrees something that is such to a maximum degree.
Therefore there is something that is truest and best and noblest and hence that
is also being to the maximum degree. To support this Thomas comments that those
things that are true to the maximum degree also enjoy being to the maximum
degree; in other words he appeals to the convertibility between being and truth
(of being). In the second part of this argument Thomas argues that what is
supremely such in a given genus is the cause of all other things in that genus.
Therefore there is something that is the cause of being, goodness, etc., for
all other beings, and this we call God. Much discussion has centered on
Thomas’s claim that the more and less are said of different things insofar as
they approach something that is such to the maximum degree. Some find this
insufficient to justify the conclusion that a maximum must exist, and would
here insert an appeal to efficient causality and his theory of participation.
If certan entities share or participate in such a perfection only to a limited
degree, they must receive that perfection from something else. While more
satisfactory from a philosophical perspective, such an insertion seems to
change the argument of the fourth way significantly. The fifth way is based on
the way things in the universe are governed. Thomas observes that certain things
that lack the ability to know, i.e., natural bodies, act for an end. This
follows from the fact that they always or at least usually act in the se way to
attain that which is best. For Thomas this indicates that they reach their ends
by “intention” and not merely from chance. And this in turn implies that they
are directed to their ends by some knowing and intelligent being. Hence some
intelligent being exists that orders natural things to their ends. This
argument rests on final causality and should not be confused with any based on
order and design. Aquinas’s frequently repeated denial that in this life we can
know what God is should here be recalled. If we can know that God exists and
what he is not, we cannot know what he is (see, e.g., SCG I, c. 30). Even when
we apply the nes of pure perfections to God, we first discover such perfections
in limited fashion in creatures. What the nes of such perfections are intended
to signify may indeed be free from all imperfection, but every such ne carries
with it some deficiency in the way in which it signifies. When a ne such as
‘goodness’, for instance, is signified abstractly (e.g., ‘God is goodness’),
this abstract way of signifying suggests that goodness does not subsist in
itself. When such a ne is signified concretely (e.g., ‘God is good’), this
concrete way of signifying implies some kind of composition between God and his
goodness. Hence while such nes are to be affirmed of God as regards that which
they signify, the way in which they signify is to be denied of him. This final
point sets the stage for Thomas to apply his theory of analogy to the divine
nes. Nes of pure perfections such as ‘good’, ‘true’, ‘being’, etc., cannot be
applied to God with Aquinas, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Saint Thomas 39 - 39 exactly the se meaning they have when
affirmed of creatures (univocally), nor with entirely different meanings
(equivocally). Hence they are affirmed of God and of creatures by an analogy
based on the relationship that obtains between a creature viewed as an effect
and God its uncaused cause. Because some minimum degree of similarity must
obtain between any effect and its cause, Thomas is convinced that in some way a
caused perfection imitates and participates in God, its uncaused and
unparticipated source. Because no caused effect can ever be equal to its
uncreated cause, every perfection that we affirm of God is realized in him in a
way different from the way we discover it in creatures. This dissimilarity is
so great that we can never have quidditative knowledge of God in this life
(know what God is). But the similarity is sufficient for us to conclude that
what we understand by a perfection such as goodness in creatures is present in
God in unrestricted fashion. Even though Thomas’s identification of the kind of
analogy to be used in predicating divine nes underwent some development, in
mature works such as On the Power of God (qu. 7, a. 7), SCG I (c.34), and ST I
(qu. 13, a. 5), he identifies this as the analogy of “one to another,” rather
than as the analogy of “many to one.” In none of these works does he propose
using the analogy of “proportionality” that he had previously defended in On
Truth (qu. 2, a. 11). Theological virtues. While Aquinas is convinced that
human reason can arrive at knowledge that God exists and at meaningful
predication of the divine nes, he does not think the majority of human beings
will actually succeed in such an effort (SCG I, c. 4; ST II–IIae, qu. 2, a. 4).
Hence he concludes that it was fitting for God to reveal such truths to mankind
along with others that purely philosophical inquiry could never discover even
in principle. Acceptance of the truth of divine revelation presupposes the gift
of the theological virtue of faith in the believer. Faith is an infused virtue
by reason of which we accept on God’s authority what he has revealed to us. To
believe is an act of the intellect that assents to divine truth as a result of
a command on the part of the human will, a will that itself is moved by God
through grace (ST II– IIae, qu. 2, a. 9). For Thomas the theological virtues,
having God (the ultimate end) as their object, are prior to all other virtues
whether natural or infused. Because the ultimate end must be present in the
intellect before it is present to the will, and because the ultimate end is
present in the will by reason of hope and charity (the other two theological
virtues), in this respect faith is prior to hope and charity. Hope is the
theological virtue through which we trust that with divine assistance we will
attain the infinite good – eternal enjoyment of God (ST II–IIae, qu. 17, aa.
1–2). In the order of generation, hope is prior to charity; but in the order of
perfection charity is prior both to hope and faith. While neither faith nor
hope will remain in those who reach the eternal vision of God in the life to
come, charity will endure in the blessed. It is a virtue or habitual form that
is infused into the soul by God and that inclines us to love him for his own
sake. If charity is more excellent than faith or hope (ST II– IIae, qu. 23, a.
6), through charity the acts of all other virtues are ordered to God, their
ultimate end (qu. 23, a. 8).
Arabic philosophy, the
philosophy produced in Arabic by philosophers of various ethnic and religious
backgrounds who lived in societies in which Islic civilization was dominant and
who identified with its cultural values. (The appellation ‘Islic philosophy’ is
misleading, for it suggests a specific religious content that was not
necessarily there – just as medieval Latin philosophy is not “Christian”
philosophy.) In the historical evolution of Western philosophy it is the heir
to post-Plotinian late Greek philosophy and the immediate precursor of later
medieval philosophy, which it heavily influenced and to which it exhibits a parallel
but independent development after Avicenna well into the twentieth century. The
philosophical curriculum of higher education that had spread ong the Hellenized
peoples of Egypt, the Middle East, and Iran in the sixth century followed the
classification of the sciences current in Alexandria, a classification that had
developed from that of Aristotle’s works. Aristotle’s Organon, including the
Rhetoric and Poetics, and prefaced by Porphyry’s Isagoge, constituted the
canonical nine books on logic, the instrument of philosophy. Philosophy proper
was then divided into theoretical and practical: theoretical philosophy was
further subdivided into physics, mathematics, and metaphysics; and practical
into ethics, economics (household management), and politics. Carriers of this
higher education were primarily the Eastern churches and monastic centers in
the Fertile Crescent. With the advent of Isl in the seventh Arabic philosophy
Arabic philosophy 40 - 40 century and
the eventual spread of Arabic as the language of learning, the entire
curriculum was translated upon demand into Arabic by Syriacspeaking Christians
in the eighth through the tenth centuries. The demand from Arab intellectuals,
who by the time of the translations had developed a significant scholarly tradition
of their own and actively commissioned the translations. The entire corpus of
Aristotle’s writings, together with the complete range of commentaries from
Alexander of Aphrodisias onward, constituted in Arabic the standard textbooks
in logic, physics (including meteorology, the theory of the soul, and zoology),
metaphysics, and ethics. Metaphysics was also studied as a rule in conjunction
with or in the light of the pseudoAristotelian Theologia Aristotelis
(selections from Plotinus’s Enneads, Books 4–6) and the Liber de causis, along
with other selections from Proclus’s Elements of Theology. Mathematics included
geometry (Euclid’s Elements), astronomy (Ptolemy’s Almagest), arithmetic
(Nicomachus’s Introduction), and music (Ptolemy’s Harmonics). Economics was
based almost exclusively on the neo-Pythagorean Bryson’s Oikonomikos, while
politics mainly drew on Plato’s Republic and the Laws and especially on the
pseudepigraphic correspondence between Aristotle and Alexander (Aristotle’s
Politics was known in Arabic in fragmentary form). In medicine, which was
considered an applied science and as such remained outside this classification,
Galen’s entire works were translated. His abridgments of Plato and his
Stoicizing logic formed the basic source of knowledge on these subjects in
Arabic. The early history of Arabic philosophy presents two independent lines
of development. One is associated with the first philosopher and Arab polymath
al-Kindi (d.873) and his followers, notably as-Sarakhsi (d.889), Abu-Zayd
alBalkhi (d.934), and al-‘iri (d.992). These philosophers, who appear to stand
closer to the Neoplatonism of Athens than to the neo-Aristotelianism of
Alexandria, sought in their works to present the various parts of philosophy to
an Arab audience, integrate them into Islic intellectual life, and solve the
philosophical problems that arose in the process. The fous physician Rhazes
(Abu-Bakr ar-Razi, d.925) may be tenuously related to this line, although he
appears to be mostly an autodidact and his philosophy was decidedly more
eclectic, leaving no following. The second is that of the Aristotelians of
Baghdad, founded by the Nestorian scholar and translator Matta Ibn Yanus
(d.940). His Aristotelianism can be traced directly to the Alexandrian
commentators and reaches beyond them to Alexander of Aphrodisias and
Themistius. His students, al-Farabi (d.950) and Yahya Ibn ‘Adi (d.974), and the
wide circle of disciples of the latter, prominent ong whom are Abu-Sulayman
as-Sijistani (d.c.985), ‘Isa Ibn-Zur‘a (d.1008), AlHasan Ibn-Suwar (d.c.1030),
and Abu-l-Faraj Ibn at-Tayyib (d.1043), engaged in rigorous textual analysis
and philosophical interpretation of Aristotle’s works and composed independent
monographs on all branches of philosophy. The Aristotelian line of Baghdad, and
especially the work of al-Farabi, was transmitted to Islic Spain (al-Andalus)
toward the end of the tenth century and formed the basis of the philosophical
tradition there, whose major exponents were Ibn Bajja (Avempace, d.1139), Ibn
Tufayl (d.1186), Averroes (Ibn Rushd, d.1198), and Maimonides (Ibn Maymun,
d.1204). This tradition ce to an end with the reconquista of all Islic Spain
except Granada about two decades after the death of Ibn Tumlas (d.1223), the
last major Andalusian philosopher. These two lines eventually merge in the work
of Avicenna, who set himself the task of synthesizing, in the light of concerns
valid in his time, the divergent tendencies of Aristotelian philosophy as it
had developed throughout the ages. The Alexandrian schema of the classification
of the sciences, which was adopted by Arabic philosophy, implicitly also
presented, by means of the connections it established ong the various subjects,
a blueprint of a work that would encompass all philosophy. Philosophers prior
to Avicenna, both the Greeks after Plotinus and the Arabs, failed to note its
potential as an outline for a comprehensive work on all philosophy, and had
worked on different parts of it. Avicenna was the first to perceive this and to
create in his various writings an internally consistent system having mutually
interdependent parts and based on the syllogistic logic of Aristotle. His
philosophical summae thus mark the end of ancient and the beginning of
Scholastic philosophy. In these works Avicenna paid relatively little attention
to certain parts of philosophy, in particular the mathematical part of
theoretical, and virtually the entirety of practical, philosophy. As a result,
Arabic philosophy after him concentrated on three major fields – logic, physics,
and metaphysics – which bece the norm. Practical philosophy developed along
different lines, to a large extent divorced from mainstre philosophy. The
highly influential work by Miskawayh (d.1030) on ethics provided a model that
was followed by later treatises, which constituted a sepArabic philosophy
Arabic philosophy 41 - 41 arate genre
of philosophical writings. As for mathematics, its different parts were pursued
largely independently of the rest of philosophy. After Avicenna, Arabic
philosophy was dominated by his thought and developed along the lines of the
reconstructed Peripateticism he established. In the first place, his powerful
integrative systematization of philosophy elicited a reaction by certain
philosophers toward a more pristine Aristotelianism, notably by Averroes,
‘Abd-al-Latif al-Baghdadi (d.1231), and the eighteenth-century Ottoman scholar
Yanyali Esat (As‘ad of Yanya, d.1730), who even executed new Arabic
translations from the Greek of some of Aristotle’s physical works. Secondly, it
generated ong his followers, notable ong whom are Nafir-ad-Din at-Tusi (d.1274)
and Qutb-ad-Din ar-Razi (d.1364), a long series of philosophically fecund
commentaries and supercommentaries. Thirdly, it forced most theological writing
to adopt logic as its method, and philosophical, rather than theological,
analysis as the means of argumentation, a procedure established by al-Ghazali
(d.1111) and consolidated by Fakhr-ad-Din ar-Razi (d.1209). And fourthly, it
formed the basis for the further development of his metaphysics (in particular
the concepts of essence and existence and the schema of emanation) through the
incorporation of the illuminationist philosophy of Suhrawardi of Aleppo
(d.1193) and the mystical theories of Ibn ‘Arabi (d.1240) in the works of Shiite
philosophers active since Safavid times (sixteenth century). This movement,
initiated by Mir Dad (d.1632) and developed by his pupil Mulla Fadra (d.1640),
has continued after the latter’s death ong Iranian philosophers writing partly
also in Persian. The colonization of the Arab world by Western powers since the
nineteenth century has resulted in the spread of modern European, and
especially French, philosophy ong Arab intellectuals. Modern Arab philosophical
thought is now developing along these lines while at the se time efforts are
being made to relate it to traditional Arabic philosophy. AL-FARABI, AL-GHAZALi, AL-KINDI, ARISTOTLE,
AVERROES, AVICENNA, ISLIC NEOPLATONISM. D.Gu. aradhya, Sanskrit word meaning ‘object
of worship or reverence’. In traditional Indian society, reverence was almost a
way of life. Elders, especially one’s parents and teachers, were held in
godlike esteem. The Indians revered life in any form as sacred; hence, ahimsa
(nonviolence) and vegetarianism were two important features of the ideal Indian
life. In the Hindu polytheistic tradition, which continues even today, the
countless Vedic deities, along with the later gods and goddesses in the Hindu
pantheon, serve as aradhya objects. A popular form of aradhya in today’s Hindu
society is often a chosen deity worshiped in a household. AHIMSA. D.K.C. Arcesilaus of Pitane
(c.315–242 B.C.), Greek Skeptic philosopher, founder of the Middle Academy.
Influenced by Socratic elenchus, he claimed that, unlike Socrates, he was not
even certain that he was certain of nothing. He shows the influence of Pyrrho
in attacking the Stoic doctrine that the subjective certainty of the wise is
the criterion of truth. At the theoretical level he advocated epoche,
suspension of rational judgment; at the practical, he argued that eulogon,
probability, can justify action – an early version of coherentism. His ethical
views were not extreme; he held, e.g., that one should attend to one’s own life
rather than external objects. Though he wrote nothing except verse, he led the
Academy into two hundred years of Skepticism. R.C. Archelaus of Athens.
Archytas (fl. 400–350
B.C.), Greek Pythagorean philosopher from Tarentum in southern Italy. He was
elected general seven times and sent a ship to rescue Plato from Dionysius II
of Syracuse in 361. He is fous for solutions to specific mathematical problems,
such as the doubling of the cube, but little is known about his general
philosophical principles. His proof that the numbers in a superparticular ratio
have no mean proportional has relevance to music theory, as does his work with
the arithmetic, geometric, and harmonic means. He gave mathematical accounts of
the diatonic, enharmonic, and chromatic scales and developed a theory of
acoustics. Fragments 1 and 2 and perhaps 3 are authentic, but most material
preserved in his ne is spurious.
Arendt, Hannah (1906–75),
German-born erican social and political theorist. She was aradhya Arendt,
Hannah 42 - 42 educated in her native
Germany, studying with Heidegger and Jaspers; fled to France in 1933; and
emigrated in 1941 to the United States, where she taught at various
universities. Her major works are The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The
Human Condition (1958), Between Past and Future (1961), On Revolution (1963), Crises
of the Republic (1972), and The Life of the Mind (1978). In Arendt’s view, for
reasons established by Kant and deepened by Nietzsche, there is a breach
between being and thinking, one that cannot be closed by thought. Understood as
philosophizing or contemplation, thinking is a form of egoism that isolates us
from one another and our world. Despite Kant, modernity remains mired in
egoism, a condition compounded by the emergence of a “mass” that consists of
bodies with needs temporarily met by producing and consuming and which demands
governments that minister to these needs. In place of thinking, laboring, and
the administration of things now called democracy, all of which are
instrumental but futile as responses to the “thrown” quality of our condition,
Arendt proposed to those capable of it a mode of being, political action, that
she found in pronounced form in pre-Socratic Greece and briefly but gloriously
at the founding of the Roman and erican republics. Political action is
initiation, the making of beginnings that can be explained neither causally nor
teleologically. It is done in the space of appearances constituted by the
presence of other political actors whose re-sponses – the telling of equally
unpredictable stories concerning one another’s actions – determine what actions
are taken and give character to the acting participants. In addition to the
refined discernments already implied, political action requires the courage to
initiate one knows not what. Its outcome is power; not over other people or
things but mutual empowerment to continue acting in concert and thereby to
overcome egoism and achieve (positive) freedom and humanity.
arete, ancient Greek term meaning ‘virtue’ or
‘excellence’. In philosophical contexts, the term was used mainly of virtues of
human character; in broader contexts, arete was applicable to many different
sorts of excellence. The cardinal virtues in the classical period were courage,
wisdom, temperance (sophrosune), piety, and justice. Sophists such as
Protagoras claimed to teach such virtues, and Socrates challenged their
credentials for doing so. Several early Platonic dialogues show Socrates asking
after definitions of virtues, and Socrates investigates arete in other
dialogues as well. Conventional views allowed that a person can have one virtue
(such as courage) but lack another (such as wisdom), but Plato’s Protagoras
shows Socrates defending his thesis of the unity of arete, which implies that a
person who has one arete has them all. Platonic accounts of the cardinal
virtues (with the exception of piety) are given in Book IV of the Republic.
Substantial parts of the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle are given over to
discussions of arete, which he divides into virtues of character and virtues of
intellect. This discussion is the ancestor of most modern theories of virtue
ethics.
argument, a sequence of
statements such that some of them (the premises) purport to give reason to
accept another of them, the conclusion. Since we speak of bad arguments and
weak arguments, the premises of an argument need not really support the
conclusion, but they must give some appearance of doing so or the term
‘argument’ is misapplied. Logic is mainly concerned with the question of
validity: whether if the premises are true we would have reason to accept the
conclusion. A valid argument with true premises is called sound. A valid
deductive argument is one such that if we accept the premises we are logically
bound to accept the conclusion and if we reject the conclusion we are logically
bound to reject one or more of the premises. Alternatively, the premises
logically entail the conclusion. A good inductive argument – some would reserve
‘valid’ for deductive arguments – is one such that if we accept the premises we
are logically bound to regard the conclusion as probable, and, in addition, as
more probable than it would be if the premises should be false. A few arguments
have only one premise and/or more than one conclusion.
Arianism, diverse but
related teachings in early Christianity that subordinated the Son to God the
Father. In reaction the church developed its doctrine of the Trinity, whereby
the Son (and Holy Spirit), though distinct persons (hypostases), share with the
Father, as his ontological equals, the one being or substance (ousia) of God.
Arius (c.250 – c.336) taught in Alexandria, where, on the hierarchical model of
Middle Platonism, he sharply distinguished Scripture’s transcendent God from
the Logos or Son incarnate in Jesus. The latter, subject to suffering and
humanly obedient to God, is inferior to the immutable Creator, the object of
that obedience. God alone is eternal and ungenerated; the Son, divine not by
nature but by God’s choosing, is generated, with a beginning: the unique
creature, through whom all else is made. The Council of Nicea, in 325,
condemned Arius and favored his enemy Athanasius, affirming the Son’s
creatorhood and full deity, having the se being or substance (homoousios) as
the Father. Arianism still flourished, evolving into the extreme view that the
Son’s being was neither the se as the Father’s nor like it (homoiousios), but
unlike it (anomoios). This too was anathematized, by the Council of 381 at
Constantinople, which, ratifying what is commonly called the Nicene Creed,
sealed orthodox Trinitarianism and the equality of the three persons against
Arian subordinationism.
Aristotle (384–322 B.C.),
preeminent Greek philosopher born in Stagira, hence sometimes called the
Stagirite. Aristotle ce to Athens as a teenager and remained for two decades in
Plato’s Academy. Following Plato’s death in 347, Aristotle traveled to Assos
and to Lesbos, where he associated with Theophrastus and collected a wealth of
biological data, and later to Macedonia, where he tutored Alexander the Great.
In 335 he returned to Athens and founded his own philosophical school in the
Lyceum. The site’s colonnaded walk (peripatos) conferred on Aristotle and his
group the ne ‘the Peripatetics’. Alexander’s death in 323 unleashed
antiMacedonian forces in Athens. Charged with impiety, and mindful of the fate
of Socrates, Aristotle withdrew to Chalcis, where he died. Chiefly influenced
by his association with Plato, Aristotle also makes wide use of the
preSocratics. A number of works begin by criticizing and, ultimately, building
on their views. The direction of Plato’s influence is debated. Some scholars
see Aristotle’s career as a measured retreat from his teacher’s doctrines. For
others he began as a confirmed anti-Platonist but returned to the fold as he
matured. More likely, Aristotle early on developed a keenly independent voice
that expressed enduring puzzlement over such Platonic doctrines as the separate
existence of Ideas and the construction of physical reality from
two-dimensional triangles. Such unease was no doubt heightened by Aristotle’s
appreciation for the evidential value of observation as well as by his
conviction that long-received and well-entrenched opinion is likely to contain
at least part of the truth. Aristotle reportedly wrote a few popular works for
publication, some of which are dialogues. Of these we have only fragments and
reports. Notably lost are also his lectures on the good and on the Ideas.
Ancient cataloguers also argument from authority Aristotle 44 - 44 list under Aristotle’s ne some 158
constitutions of Greek states. Of these, only the Constitution of Athens has
survived, on a papyrus discovered in 1890. What remains is an enormous body of
writing on virtually every topic of philosophical significance. Much of it
consists of detailed lecture notes, working drafts, and accounts of his
lectures written by others. Although efforts may have been under way in
Aristotle’s lifetime, Andronicus of Rhodes, in the first century B.C., is
credited with giving the Aristotelian corpus its present organization. Virtually
no extant manuscripts predate the ninth century A.D., so the corpus has been
transmitted by a complex history of manuscript transcription. In 1831 the
Berlin Academy published the first critical edition of Aristotle’s work.
Scholars still cite Aristotle by , column, and line of this edition. Logic and
language. The writings on logic and language are concentrated in six early
works: Categories, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics, Posterior Analytics,
Topics, and Sophistical Refutations. Known since late antiquity as the Organon,
these works share a concern with what is now called semantics. The Categories
focuses on the relation between uncombined terms, such as ‘white’ or ‘man’, and
the items they signify; On Interpretation offers an account of how terms
combine to yield simple statements; Prior Analytics provides a systematic
account of how three terms must be distributed in two categorical statements so
as to yield logically a third such statement; Posterior Analytics specifies the
conditions that categorical statements must meet to play a role in scientific
explanation. The Topics, sometimes said to include Sophistical Refutations, is
a handbook of “topics” and techniques for dialectical arguments concerning,
principally, the four predicables: accident (what may or may not belong to a
subject, as sitting belongs to Socrates); definition (what signifies a
subject’s essence, as rational animal is the essence of man); proprium (what is
not in the essence of a subject but is unique to or counterpredicable of it, as
all and only persons are risible); and genus (what is in the essence of
subjects differing in species, as animal is in the essence of both men and
oxen). Categories treats the basic kinds of things that exist and their
interrelations. Every uncombined term, says Aristotle, signifies essentially
something in one of ten categories – a substance, a quantity, a quality, a
relative, a place, a time, a position, a having, a doing, or a being affected.
This doctrine underlies Aristotle’s admonition that there are as many proper or
per se senses of ‘being’ as there are categories. In order to isolate the
things that exist primarily, nely, primary substances, from all other things
and to give an account of their nature, two asymmetric relations of ontological
dependence are employed. First, substance (ousia) is distinguished from the
accidental categories by the fact that every accident is present in a substance
and, therefore, cannot exist without a substance in which to inhere. Second,
the category of substance itself is divided into ordinary individuals or
primary substances, such as Socrates, and secondary substances, such as the
species man and the genus animal. Secondary substances are said of primary
substances and indicate what kind of thing the subject is. A mark of this is
that both the ne and the definition of the secondary substance can be
predicated of the primary substance, as both man and rational animal can be
predicated of Socrates. Universals in non-substance categories are also said of
subjects, as color is said of white. Therefore, directly or indirectly,
everything else is either present in or said of primary substances and without
them nothing would exist. And because they are neither present in a subject nor
said of a subject, primary substances depend on nothing else for their
existence. So, in the Categories, the ordinary individual is ontologically
basic. On Interpretation offers an account of those meaningful expressions that
are true or false, nely, statements or assertions. Following Plato’s Sophist, a
simple statement is composed of the semantically heterogeneous parts, ne
(onoma) and verb (rhema). In ‘Socrates runs’ the ne has the strictly
referential function of signifying the subject of attribution. The verb, on the
other hand, is essentially predicative, signifying something holding of the
subject. Verbs also indicate when something is asserted to hold and so make
precise the statement’s truth conditions. Simple statements also include
general categorical statements. Since medieval times it has become customary to
refer to the basic categoricals by letters: (A) Every man is white, (E) No man
is white, (I) Some man is white, and (O) Not every man is white. On
Interpretation outlines their logical relations in what is now called the
square of opposition: A & E are contraries, A & O and E & I are
contradictories, and A & I and E & O are superimplications. That A
implies I reflects the no longer current view that Aristotle Aristotle 45 - 45 all affirmative statements carry existential
import. One bition of On Interpretation is a theory of the truth conditions for
all statements that affirm or deny one thing or another. However, statements
involving future contingencies pose a special problem. Consider Aristotle’s
notorious sea battle. Either it will or it will not happen tomorrow. If the
first, then the statement ‘There will be a sea battle tomorrow’ is now true.
Hence, it is now fixed that the sea battle occur tomorrow. If the second, then
it is now fixed that the sea battle not occur tomorrow. Either way there can be
no future contingencies. Although some hold that Aristotle would embrace the
determinism they find implicit in this consequence, most argue either that he
suspends the law of excluded middle for future contingencies or that he denies
the principle of bivalence for future contingent statements. On the first
option Aristotle gives up the claim that either the sea battle will happen
tomorrow or not. On the second he keeps the claim but allows that future
contingent statements are neither true nor false. Aristotle’s evident
attachment to the law of excluded middle, perhaps, favors the second option.
Prior Analytics marks the invention of logic as a formal discipline in that the
work contains the first virtually complete system of logical inference,
sometimes called syllogistic. The fact that the first chapter of the Prior
Analytics reports that there is a syllogism whenever, certain things being
stated, something else follows of necessity, might suggest that Aristotle
intended to capture a general notion of logical consequence. However, the
syllogisms that constitute the system of the Prior Analytics are restricted to
the basic categorical statements introduced in On Interpretation. A syllogism
consists of three different categorical statements: two premises and a
conclusion. The Prior Analytics tells us which pairs of categoricals logically
yield a third. The fourteen basic valid forms are divided into three figures
and, within each figure, into moods. The system is foundational because second-
and third-figure syllogisms are reducible to first-figure syllogisms, whose
validity is self-evident. Although syllogisms are conveniently written as
conditional sentences, the syllogistic proper is, perhaps, best seen as a
system of valid deductive inferences rather than as a system of valid
conditional sentences or sentence forms. Posterior Analytics extends
syllogistic to science and scientific explanation. A science is a deductively
ordered body of knowledge about a definite genus or domain of nature.
Scientific knowledge (episteme) consists not in knowing that, e.g., there is
thunder in the clouds, but rather in knowing why there is thunder. So the
theory of scientific knowledge is a theory of explanation and the vehicle of
explanation is the first-figure syllogism Barbara: If (1) P belongs to all M
and (2) M belongs to all S, then (3) P belongs to all S. To explain, e.g., why
there is thunder, i.e., why there is noise in the clouds, we say: (3H) Noise
(P) belongs to the clouds (S) because (2H) Quenching of fire (M) belongs to the
clouds (S) and (1H) Noise (P) belongs to quenching of fire (M). Because what is
explained in science is invariant and holds of necessity, the premises of a
scientific or demonstrative syllogism must be necessary. In requiring that the
premises be prior to and more knowable than the conclusion, Aristotle embraces
the view that explanation is asymmetrical: knowledge of the conclusion depends
on knowledge of each premise, but each premise can be known independently of
the conclusion. The premises must also give the causes of the conclusion. To
inquire why P belongs to S is, in effect, to seek the middle term that gives
the cause. Finally, the premises must be immediate and non-demonstrable. A
premise is immediate just in case there is no middle term connecting its
subject and predicate terms. Were P to belong to M because of a new middle, M1,
then there would be a new, more basic premise, that is essential to the full
explanation. Ultimately, explanation of a received fact will consist in a chain
of syllogisms terminating in primary premises that are immediate. These serve
as axioms that define the science in question because they reflect the
essential nature of the fact to be explained – as in (1H) the essence of thunder
lies in the quenching of fire. Because they are immediate, primary premises are
not capable of syllogistic demonstration, yet they must be known if syllogisms
containing them are to constitute knowledge of the conclusion. Moreover, were
it necessary to know the primary premises syllogistically, demonstration would
proceed infinitely or in a circle. The first alternative defeats the very
possibility of explanation and the second undermines its asymmetric character.
Thus, the primary premises must be known by the direct grasp of the mind
(noûs). This just signals the appropriate way for the highest principles of a
science to be known – even demonstrable propositions can be known directly, but
they are explained only when located within the structure of the relevant
science, i.e., only when demonstrated syllogistically. Although all sciences
exhibit the se formal structure and use Aristotle Aristotle 46 - 46 certain common principles, different
sciences have different primary premises and, hence, different subject matters.
This “one genus to one science” rule legislates that each science and its
explanations be autonomous. Aristotle recognizes three kinds of intellectual
discipline. Productive disciplines, such as house building, concern the making
of something external to the agent. Practical disciplines, such as ethics,
concern the doing of something not separate from the agent, nely, action and
choice. Theoretical disciplines are concerned with truth for its own sake. As
such, they alone are sciences in the special sense of the Posterior Analytics.
The three main kinds of special science are individuated by their objects –
natural science by objects that are separate but not changeless, mathematics by
objects that are changeless but not separate, and theology by separate and
changeless objects. The mathematician studies the se objects as the natural
scientist but in a quite different way. He takes an actual object, e.g. a chalk
figure used in demonstration, and abstracts from or “thinks away” those of its properties,
such as definiteness of size and imperfection of shape, that are irrelevant to
its standing as a perfect exemplar of the purely mathematical properties under
investigation. Mathematicians simply treat this abstracted circle, which is not
separate from matter, as if it were separate. In this way the theorems they
prove about the object can be taken as universal and necessary. Physics. As the
science of nature (physis), physics studies those things whose principles and
causes of change and rest are internal. Aristotle’s central treatise on nature,
the Physics, analyzes the most general features of natural phenomena: cause,
change, time, place, infinity, and continuity. The doctrine of the four causes
is especially important in Aristotle’s work. A cause (aitia) is something like
an explanatory factor. The material cause of a house, for instance, is the
matter (hyle) from which it is built; the moving or efficient cause is the
builder, more exactly, the form in the builder’s soul; the formal cause is its
plan or form (eidos); and the final cause is its purpose or end (telos):
provision of shelter. The complete explanation of the coming to be of a house
will factor in all of these causes. In natural phenomena efficient, formal, and
final causes often coincide. The form transmitted by the father is both the
efficient cause and the form of the child, and the latter is glossed in terms
of the child’s end or complete development. This explains why Aristotle often
simply contrasts matter and form. Although its objects are compounds of both,
physics gives priority to the study of natural form. This accords with the
Posterior Analytics’ insistence that explanation proceed through causes that
give the essence and reflects Aristotle’s commitment to teleology. A natural
process counts essentially as the development of, say, an oak or a man because
its very identity depends on the complete form realized at its end. As with all
things natural, the end is an internal governing principle of the process
rather than an external goal. All natural things are subject to change
(kinesis). Defined as the actualization of the potential qua potential, a
change is not an ontologically basic item. There is no category for changes.
Rather, they are reductively explained in terms of more basic things –
substances, properties, and potentialities. A pale man, e.g., has the
potentiality to be or become tanned. If this potentiality is utterly
unactualized, no change will ensue; if completely actualized, the change will
have ended. So the potentiality must be actualized but not, so to speak,
exhausted; i.e., it must be actualized qua potentiality. Designed for the
ongoing operations of the natural world, the Physics’ definition of change does
not cover the generation and corruption of substantial items themselves. This
sort of change, which involves matter and elemental change, receives extensive
treatment in On Generation and Corruption. Aristotle rejects the atomists’
contention that the world consists of an infinite totality of indivisible atoms
in various arrangements. Rather, his basic stuff is uniform elemental matter,
any part of which is divisible into smaller such parts. Because nothing that is
actually infinite can exist, it is only in principle that matter is always
further dividable. So while countenancing the potential infinite, Aristotle
squarely denies the actual infinite. This holds for the motions of the
sublunary elemental bodies (earth, air, fire, and water) as well as for the
circular motions of the heavenly bodies (composed of a fifth element, aether,
whose natural motion is circular). These are discussed in On the Heavens. The
four sublunary elements are further discussed in Meteorology, the fourth book
of which might be described as an early treatise on chemical combination.
Psychology. Because the soul (psyche) is officially defined as the form of a
body with the potentiality for life, psychology is a subfield of natural
science. In effect, Aristotle applies the apparatus of form and matter to the
traditional Greek view of the soul as the principle and cause of life. Although
even the nutritive and reproductive powers of plants are effects of the soul,
most of his attention is focused on topics that are psychological in the modern
sense. On the Soul gives a general account of the nature and number of the
soul’s principal cognitive faculties. Subsequent works, chiefly those collected
as the Parva naturalia, apply the general theory to a broad range of
psychological phenomena from memory and recollection to dreing, sleeping, and
waking. The soul is a complex of faculties. Faculties, at least those
distinctive of persons, are capacities for cognitively grasping objects. Sight
grasps colors, smell odors, hearing sounds, and the mind grasps universals. An
organism’s form is the particular organization of its material parts that
enable it to exercise these characteristic functions. Because an infant, e.g.,
has the capacity to do geometry, Aristotle distinguishes two varieties of
capacity or potentiality (dynis) and actuality (entelecheia). The infant is a
geometer only in potentiality. This first potentiality comes to him simply by
belonging to the appropriate species, i.e., by coming into the world endowed
with the potential to develop into a competent geometer. By actualizing, through
experience and training, this first potentiality, he acquires a first
actualization. This actualization is also a second potentiality, since it
renders him a competent geometer able to exercise his knowledge at will. The
exercise itself is a second actualization and ounts to active contemplation of
a particular item of knowledge, e.g. the Pythagorean theorem. So the soul is
further defined as the first actualization of a complex natural body.
Faculties, like sciences, are individuated by their objects. Objects of
perception (aisthesis) fall into three general kinds. Special (proper)
sensibles, such as colors and sounds, are directly perceived by one and only
one sense and are immune to error. They demarcate the five special senses:
sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. Common sensibles, such as movement and
shape, are directly perceived by more than one special sense. Both special and
common sensibles are proper objects of perception because they have a direct
causal effect on the perceptual system. By contrast, the son of Diares is an
incidental sensible because he is perceived not directly but as a consequence
of directly perceiving something else that happens to be the son of Diares –
e.g., a white thing. Aristotle calls the mind (noûs) the place of forms because
it is able to grasp objects apart from matter. These objects are nothing like
Plato’s separately existing Forms. As Aristotelian universals, their existence
is entailed by and depends on their having instances. Thus, On the Soul’s
remark that universals are “somehow in the soul” only reflects their role in
assuring the autonomy of thought. The mind has no organ because it is not the
form or first actualization of any physical structure. So, unlike perceptual
faculties, it is not strongly dependent on the body. However, the mind thinks
its objects by way of images, which are something like internal
representations, and these are physically based. Insofar as it thus depends on
imagination (phantasia), the mind is weakly dependent on the body. This would
be sufficient to establish the naturalized nature of Aristotle’s mind were it
not for what some consider an incurably dualist intrusion. In distinguishing
something in the mind that makes all things from something that becomes all
things, Aristotle introduces the notorious distinction between the active and
passive intellects and may even suggest that the first is separable from the
body. Opinion on the nature of the active intellect diverges widely, some even
discounting it as an irrelevant insertion. But unlike perception, which depends
on external objects, thinking is up to us. Therefore, it cannot simply be a
matter of the mind’s being affected. So Aristotle needs a mechanism that
enables us to produce thoughts autonomously. In light of this functional role,
the question of active intellect’s ontological status is less pressing.
Biology. Aristotle’s biological writings, which constitute about a quarter of
the corpus, bring biological phenomena under the general frework of natural
science: the four causes, form and matter, actuality and potentiality, and
especially the teleological character of natural processes. If the Physics
proceeds in an a priori style, the History of Animals, Parts of Animals, and
Generation of Animals achieve an extraordinary synthesis of observation,
theory, and general scientific principle. History of Animals is a comparative
study of generic features of animals, including analogous parts, activities,
and dispositions. Although its morphological and physiological descriptions
show surprisingly little interest in teleology, Parts of Animals is squarely
teleological. Animal parts, especially organs, are ultimately differentiated by
function rather than morphology. The composition of, e.g., teeth and flesh is
determined by their role in the overall functioning of the organism and, hence,
requires Aristotle Aristotle 48 - 48
teleology. Generation of Animals applies the form–matter and
actuality–potentiality distinctions to animal reproduction, inheritance, and
the development of accidental characteristics. The species form governs the
development of an organism and determines what the organism is essentially.
Although in the Metaphysics and elsewhere accidental characteristics, including
inherited ones, are excluded from science, in the biological writings form has
an expanded role and explains the inheritance of non-essential characteristics,
such as eye color. The more fully the father’s form is imposed on the minimally
formed matter of the mother, the more completely the father’s traits are passed
on to the offspring. The extent to which matter resists imposition of form
determines the extent to which traits of the mother emerge, or even those of
more distant ancestors. Aristotle shared the Platonists’ interest in animal
classification. Recent scholarship suggests that this is less an interest in
elaborating a Linnean-style taxonomy of the animal kingdom than an interest in
establishing the complex differentiae and genera central to definitions of
living things. The biological works argue, moreover, that no single differentia
could give the whole essence of a species and that the differentiae that do
give the essence will fall into more than one division. If the second point
rejects the method of dichotomous division favored by Plato and the Academy,
the first counters Aristotle’s own standard view that essence can be reduced to
a single final differentia. The biological sciences are not, then,
automatically accommodated by the Posterior Analytics model of explanation,
where the essence or explanatory middle is conceived as a single causal
property. A number of themes discussed in this section are brought together in
a relatively late work, Motion of Animals. Its psychophysical account of the
mechanisms of animal movement stands at the juncture of physics, psychology,
and biology. Metaphysics. In Andronicus’s edition, the fourteen books now known
as the Metaphysics were placed after the Physics, whence comes the word
‘metaphysics’, whose literal meaning is ‘what comes after the physics’.
Aristotle himself prefers ‘first philosophy’ or ‘wisdom’ (sophia). The subject
is defined as the theoretical science of the causes and principles of what is
most knowable. This makes metaphysics a limiting case of Aristotle’s broadly
used distinction between what is better known to us and what is better known by
nature. The genus animal, e.g., is better known by nature than the species man
because it is further removed from the senses and because it can be known
independently of the species. The first condition suggests that the most
knowable objects would be the separately existing and thoroughly non-sensible
objects of theology and, hence, that metaphysics is a special science. The
second condition suggests that the most knowable objects are simply the most
general notions that apply to things in general. This favors identifying
metaphysics as the general science of being qua being. Special sciences study
restricted modes of being. Physics, for instance, studies being qua having an
internal principle of change and rest. A general science of being studies the
principles and causes of things that are, simply insofar as they are. A good
deal of the Metaphysics supports this conception of metaphysics. For exple,
Book IV, on the principle of non-contradiction, and Book X, on unity,
similarity, and difference, treat notions that apply to anything whatever. So,
too, for the discussion of form and actuality in the central books VII, VIII,
and IX. Book XII, on the other hand, appears to regard metaphysics as the
special science of theology. Aristotle himself attempts to reconcile these two
conceptions of metaphysics. Because it studies immovable substance, theology
counts as first philosophy. However, it is also general precisely because it is
first, and so it will include the study of being qua being. Scholars have found
this solution as perplexing as the problem. Although Book XII proves the causal
necessity for motion of an eternal substance that is an unmoved mover, this
establishes no conceptual connection between the forms of sensible compounds
and the pure form that is the unmoved mover. Yet such a connection is required,
if a single science is to encompass both. Problems of reconciliation aside,
Aristotle had to face a prior difficulty concerning the very possibility of a
general science of being. For the Posterior Analytics requires the existence of
a genus for each science but the Metaphysics twice argues that being is not a
genus. The latter claim, which Aristotle never relinquishes, is implicit in the
Categories, where being falls directly into kinds, nely, the categories.
Because these highest genera do not result from differentiation of a single
genus, no univocal sense of being covers them. Although being is, therefore,
biguous in as many ways as there are categories, a thread connects them. The
ontological priority accorded primary substance in the Categories is made part
of the very definition of non-substantial entities Aristotle Aristotle 49
- 49 in the Metaphysics: to be an
accident is by definition to be an accident of some substance. Thus, the
different senses of being all refer to the primary kind of being, substance, in
the way that exercise, diet, medicine, and climate are healthy by standing in
some relation to the single thing health. The discovery of focal meaning, as
this is sometimes called, introduces a new way of providing a subject matter
with the internal unity required for science. Accordingly, the Metaphysics
modifies the strict “one genus to one science” rule of the Posterior Analytics.
A single science may also include objects whose definitions are different so
long as these definitions are related focally to one thing. So focal meaning
makes possible the science of being qua being. Focal meaning also makes
substance the central object of investigation. The principles and causes of
being in general can be illuminated by studying the principles and causes of
the primary instance of being. Although the Categories distinguishes primary
substances from other things that are and indicates their salient
characteristics (e.g., their ability to remain one and the se while taking
contrary properties), it does not explain why it is that primary substances
have such characteristics. The difficult central books of the Metaphysics –
VII, VIII, and IX – investigate precisely this. In effect, they ask what,
primarily, about the Categories’ primary substances explains their nature.
Their target, in short, is the substance of the primary substances of the
Categories. As concrete empirical particulars, the latter are compounds of form
and matter (the distinction is not explicit in the Categories) and so their
substance must be sought ong these internal structural features. Thus,
Metaphysics VII considers form, matter, and the compound of form and matter,
and quickly turns to form as the best candidate. In developing a conception of
form that can play the required explanatory role, the notion of essence (to ti
en einai) assumes center stage. The essence of a man, e.g., is the cause of
certain matter constituting a man, nely, the soul. So form in the sense of
essence is the primary substance of the Metaphysics. This is obviously not the
primary substance of the Categories and, although the se word (eidos) is used,
neither is this form the species of the Categories. The latter is treated in
the Metaphysics as a kind of universal compound abstracted from particular
compounds and appears to be denied substantial status. While there is broad,
though not universal, agreement that in the Metaphysics form is primary
substance, there is equally broad disagreement over whether this is particular
form, the form belonging to a single individual, or species form, the form
common to all individuals in the species. There is also lively discussion
concerning the relation of the Metaphysics doctrine of primary substance to the
earlier doctrine of the Categories. Although a few scholars see an outright
contradiction here, most take the divergence as evidence of the development of
Aristotle’s views on substance. Finally, the role of the central books in the
Metaphysics as a whole continues to be debated. Some see them as an entirely
selfcontained analysis of form, others as preparatory to Book XII’s discussion
of non-sensible form and the role of the unmoved mover as the final cause of
motion. Practical philosophy. Two of Aristotle’s most heralded works, the
Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics, are treatises in practical philosophy.
Their aim is effective action in matters of conduct. So they deal with what is
up to us and can be otherwise because in this domain lie choice and action. The
practical nature of ethics lies mainly in the development of a certain kind of
agent. The Nicomachean Ethics was written, Aristotle reminds us, “not in order
to know what virtue is, but in order to become good.” One becomes good by
becoming a good chooser and doer. This is not simply a matter of choosing and
doing right actions but of choosing or doing them in the right way. Aristotle
assumes that, for the most part, agents know what ought to be done (the evil or
vicious person is an exception). The akratic or morally weak agent desires to
do other than what he knows ought to be done and acts on this desire against
his better judgment. The enkratic or morally strong person shares the akratic
agent’s desire but acts in accordance with his better judgment. In neither kind
of choice are desire and judgment in harmony. In the virtuous, on the other
hand, desire and judgment agree. So their choices and actions will be free of
the conflict and pain that inevitably accompany those of the akratic and
enkratic agent. This is because the part of their soul that governs choice and
action is so disposed that desire and right judgment coincide. Acquiring a
stable disposition (hexis) of this sort ounts to acquiring moral virtue (ethike
arete). The disposition is concerned with choices as would be determined by the
person of practical wisdom (phronesis); these will be actions lying between
extreme alternatives. They will lie in a mean – popularly called the “golden mean”
– relative to the talents and stores of the agent. Choosing in this way is not
easily done. It involves, for instance, feeling anger or extending Aristotle
Aristotle 50 - 50 generosity at the
right time, toward the right people, in the right way, and for the right
reasons. Intellectual virtues, such as excellence at mathematics, can be
acquired by teaching, but moral virtue cannot. I may know what ought to be done
and even perform virtuous acts without being able to act virtuously.
Nonetheless, because moral virtue is a disposition concerning choice,
deliberate performance of virtuous acts can, ultimately, instill a disposition
to choose them in harmony and with pleasure and, hence, to act virtuously.
Aristotle rejected Plato’s transcendental Form of the Good as irrelevant to the
affairs of persons and, in general, had little sympathy with the notion of an
absolute good. The goal of choice and action is the human good, nely, living
well. This, however, is not simply a matter of possessing the requisite
practical disposition. Practical wisdom, which is necessary for living well,
involves skill at calculating the best means to achieve one’s ends and this is
an intellectual virtue. But the ends that are presupposed by deliberation are
established by moral virtue. The end of all action, the good for man, is
happiness (eudaimonia). Most things, such as wealth, are valued only as a means
to a worthy end. Honor, pleasure, reason, and individual virtues, such as
courage and generosity, are deemed worthy in their own right but they can also
be sought for the sake of eudaimonia. Eudaimonia alone can be sought only for
its own sake. Eudaimonia is not a static state of the soul but a kind of
activity (energeia) of the soul – something like human flourishing. The happy
person’s life will be selfsufficient and complete in the highest measure. The
good for man, then, is activity in accordance with virtue or the highest
virtue, should there be one. Here ‘virtue’ means something like excellence and
applies to much besides man. The excellence of an ax lies in its cutting, that
of a horse in its equestrian qualities. In short, a thing’s excellence is a
matter of how well it performs its characteristic functions or, we might say,
how well it realizes its nature. The natural functions of persons reside in the
exercise of their natural cognitive faculties, most importantly, the faculty of
reason. So human happiness consists in activity in accordance with reason.
However, persons can exercise reason in practical or in purely theoretical
matters. The first suggests that happiness consists in the practical life of
moral virtue, the second that it consists in the life of theoretical activity.
Most of the Nicomachean Ethics is devoted to the moral virtues but the final
book appears to favor theoretical activity (theoria) as the highest and most
choiceworthy end. It is man’s closest approach to divine activity. Much recent
scholarship is devoted to the relation between these two conceptions of the
good, particularly, to whether they are of equal value and whether they exclude
or include one another. Ethics and politics are closely connected. Aristotle
conceives of the state as a natural entity arising ong persons to serve a
natural function. This is not merely, e.g., provision for the common defense or
promotion of trade. Rather, the state of the Politics also has eudaimonia as
its goal, nely, fostering the complete and selfsufficient lives of its
citizens. Aristotle produced a complex taxonomy of constitutions but reduced
them, in effect, to three kinds: monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. Which
best serves the natural end of a state was, to some extent, a relative matter
for Aristotle. Although he appears to have favored democracy, in some
circumstances monarchy might be appropriate. The standard ordering of
Aristotle’s works ends with the Rhetoric and the Poetics. The Rhetoric’s
extensive discussion of oratory or the art of persuasion locates it between
politics and literary theory. The relatively short Poetics is devoted chiefly
to the analysis of tragedy. It has had an enormous historical influence on
aesthetic theory in general as well as on the writing of dra. .
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