universal instantiation,
also called universal quantifier elimination. (1) The argument form ‘Everything
is f; therefore a is f’, and arguments of this form. (2) The rule of inference
that permits one to infer that any given thing is f from the premise that
everything is f. In classical logic, where all terms are taken to denote things
in the domain of discourse, the rule says simply that from (v)A[v] one may
infer A[t], the result of replacing all free occurrences of v in A[v] by the
term t. If non-denoting terms are allowed, however, as in free logic, then the
rule would require an auxiliary premise of the form (Du)u % t to ensure that t
denotes something in the range of the variable v. Likewise in modal logic,
which is sometimes held to contain terms that do not denote “genuine
individuals” (the things over which variables range), an auxiliary premise may
be required. (3) In higher-order logic, the rule of inference that says that
from (X)A[X] one may infer A[F], where F is any expression of the grammatical
category (e.g., n-ary predicate) appropriate to that of X (e.g., n-ary
predicate variable). G.F.S.
universalizability. (1)
Since the 1920s, the moral criterion implicit in Kant’s first formulation of
the categorical imperative: “Act only on that maxim that you can at the same
time will to be a universal law,” often called the principle of universality. A
maxim or principle of action that satisfies this test is said to be
universalizable, hence morally acceptable; one that does not is said to be not
universalizable, hence contrary to duty. (2) A second sense developed in
connection with the work of Hare in the 1950s. For Hare, universalizability is
“common to all judgments which carry descriptive meaning”; so not only
normative claims (moral and evaluative judgments) but also empirical statements
are universalizable. Although Hare describes how such universalizuniversal
universalizability 940 940 ability can
figure in moral argument, for Hare “offenses against . . . universalizability
are logical, not moral.” Consequently, whereas for Kant not all maxims are
universalizable, on Hare’s view they all are, since they all have descriptive
meaning. (3) In a third sense, one that also appears in Hare,
‘universalizability’ refers to the principle of universalizability: “What is
right (or wrong) for one person is right (or wrong) for any similar person in
similar circumstances.” This principle is identical with what Sidgwick (The
Methods of Ethics) called the Principle of Justice. In Generalization in Ethics
(1961) by M. G. Singer (b.1926), it is called the Generalization Principle and
is said to be the formal principle presupposed in all moral reasoning and
consequently the explanation for the feature alleged to hold of all moral
judgments, that of being generalizable. A particular judgment of the form ‘A is
right in doing x’ is said to imply that anyone relevantly similar to A would be
right in doing any act of the kind x in relevantly similar circumstances. The
characteristic of generalizability, of presupposing a general rule, was said to
be true of normative claims, but not of all empirical or descriptive
statements. The Generalization Principle (GP) was said to be involved in the
Generalization Argument (GA): “If the consequences of everyone’s doing x would
be undesirable, while the consequences of no one’s doing x would not be, then
no one ought to do x without a justifying reason,” a form of moral reasoning
resembling, though not identical with, the categorical imperative (CI). One
alleged resemblance is that if the GP is involved in the GP, then it is
involved in the CI, and this would help explain the moral relevance of Kant’s
universalizability test. (4) A further extension of the term
‘universalizability’ appears in Alan Gewirth’s Reason and Morality (1978).
Gewirth formulates “the logical principle of universalizability”: “if some
predicate P belongs to some subject S because S has the property Q . . . then P
must also belong to all other subjects S1, S2, . . . , Sn that have Q.” The
principle of universalizability “in its moral application” is then deduced from
the logical principle of universalizability, and is presupposed in Gewirth’s
Principle of Generic Consistency, “Act in accord with the generic rights of
your recipients as well as yourself,” which is taken to provide an a priori
determinate way of determining relevant similarities and differences, hence of
applying the principle of universalizability. The principle of
universalizability is a formal principle; universalizability in sense (1),
however, is intended to be a substantive principle of morality.
universe of discourse,
the usually limited class of individuals under discussion, whose existence is
presupposed by the discussants, and which in some sense constitutes the
ultimate subject matter of the discussion. Once the universe of a discourse has
been established, expressions such as ‘every object’ and ‘some object’ refer
respectively to every object or to some object in the universe of discourse.
The concept of universe of discourse is due to De Morgan in 1846, but the
expression was coined by Boole eight years later. When a discussion is
formalized in an interpreted standard first-order language, the universe of
discourse is taken as the “universe” of the interpretation, i.e., as the range
of values of the variables. Quine and others have emphasized that the universe
of discourse represents an ontological commitment of the discussants. In a
discussion in a particular science, the universe of discourse is often wider
than the domain of the science, although economies of expression can be
achieved by limiting the universe of discourse to the domain.
Upanishads, a group of
ancient Hindu philosophical texts, or the esoteric sacred doctrines contained
in them. ‘Upanishad’ includes the notion of the student “sitting near” the
guru. In the eighth century A.D., Shankara identified certain Upanishads as the
official source of Vedanta teachings: Aitreya, Brhadaranyaka, Chandogya, Isa,
Katha, Kaufitaki, Kena, Maitri, Mupdaka, Prasna, Svetasvatara, and Taittiriya.
These are the classic universalizability, principle of Upanishads 941 941 Upanishads; together with the Vedanta
Sutras, they constitute the doctrinally authoritative sources for Vedanta. The
Vedanta Sutras are a series of aphorisms, composed somewhere between 200 B.C.
and A.D. 200, attributed to Badarayana. Practically unintelligible without
commentary, these sutras are interpreted in one way by Shankara, in another by
Ramanuja, and in a third way by Madhva (though Madhva’s reading is closer to
Ramanuja’s than to Shankara’s). For Vedanta, the Upanishads are “the end of the
Vedas,” both in the sense of completing the transcript of the immutable source
of truth and articulating the foundational wisdom that the Vedas presuppose.
While the Upanishads agree on the importance of religious knowledge, on the
priority of religious over other sorts of wellbeing, and on the necessity of
religious discipline, they contain radically disparate cosmologies that differ
regarding agent, modality, and product of the creative process and offer
various notions of Brahman and Atman.
BRAHMAN, RAMANUJA, SHANKARA, VEDANTA. K.E.Y. use–mention distinction,
two ways in which terms enter into discourse – used when they refer to or
assert something, mentioned when they are exhibited for consideration of their
properties as terms. If I say, “Mary is sad,” I use the name ‘Mary’ to refer to
Mary so that I can predicate of her the property of being sad. But if I say, “
‘Mary’ contains four letters,” I am mentioning Mary’s name, exhibiting it in
writing or speech to predicate of that term the property of being spelled with
four letters. In the first case, the sentence occurs in what Carnap refers to
as the material mode; in the second, it occurs in the formal mode, and hence in
a metalanguage (a language used to talk about another language). Single
quotation marks or similar orthographic devices are conventionally used to
disambiguate mentioned from used terms. The distinction is important because
there are fallacies of reasoning based on use–mention confusions in the failure
to observe the use– mention distinction, especially when the referents of terms
are themselves linguistic entities. Consider the inference: (1) Some sentences
are written in English. (2) Some sentences are written in English. Here it
looks as though the argument offers a counterexample to the claim that all
arguments of the form ‘P, therefore P’ are circular. But either (1) asserts
that some sentences are written in English, or it provides evidence in support
of the conclusion in (2) by exhibiting a sentence written in English. In the
first case, the sentence is used to assert the same truth in the premise as
expressed in the conclusion, so that the argument remains circular. In the
second case, the sentence is mentioned, and although the argument so
interpreted is not circular, it is no longer strictly of the form ‘P, therefore
P’, but has the significantly different form, ‘ “P” is a sentence written in
English, therefore P’.
utilitarianism, the moral
theory that an action is morally right if and only if it produces at least as
much good (utility) for all people affected by the action as any alternative
action the person could do instead. Its best-known proponent is J. S. Mill, who
formulated the greatest happiness principle (also called the principle of
utility): always act so as to produce the greatest happiness. Two kinds of
issues have been central in debates about whether utilitarianism is an adequate
or true moral theory: first, whether and how utilitarianism can be clearly and
precisely formulated and applied; second, whether the moral implications of
utilitarianism in particular cases are acceptable, or instead constitute
objections to it. Issues of formulation. A central issue of formulation is how
utility is to be defined and whether it can be measured in the way
utilitarianism requires. Early utilitarians often held some form of hedonism,
according to which only pleasure and the absence of pain have utility or
intrinsic value. For something to have intrinsic value is for it to be valuable
for its own sake and apart from its consequences or its relations to other
things. Something has instrumental value, on the other hand, provided it brings
about what has intrinsic value. Most utilitarians have held that hedonism is
too narrow an account of utility because there are many things that people
value intrinsically besides pleasure. Some nonhedonists define utility as
happiness, and among them there is considerable debate about the proper account
of happiness. Happiness has also been criticized as too narrow to exhaust
utility or intrinsic value; e.g., many people value accomplishments, not just
the happiness that may use–mention distinction utilitarianism 942 942 accompany them. Sometimes utilitarianism
is understood as the view that either pleasure or happiness has utility, while
consequentialism is understood as the broader view that morally right action is
action that maximizes the good, however the good is understood. Here, we take
utilitarianism in this broader interpretation that some philosophers reserve
for consequentialism. Most utilitarians who believe hedonism gives too narrow
an account of utility have held that utility is the satisfaction of people’s
informed preferences or desires. This view is neutral about what people desire,
and so can account for the full variety of things and experiences that
different people in fact desire or value. Finally, ideal utilitarians have held
that some things or experiences, e.g. knowledge or being autonomous, are
intrinsically valuable or good whether or not people value or prefer them or
are happier with them. Whatever account of utility a utilitarian adopts, it
must be possible to quantify or measure the good effects or consequences of
actions in order to apply the utilitarian standard of moral rightness.
Happiness utilitarianism, e.g., must calculate whether a particular action, or
instead some possible alternative, would produce more happiness for a given
person; this is called the intrapersonal utility comparison. The method of
measurement may allow cardinal utility measurements, in which numerical units of
happiness may be assigned to different actions (e.g., 30 units for Jones
expected from action a, 25 units for Jones from alternative action b), or only
ordinal utility measurements may be possible, in which actions are ranked only
as producing more or less happiness than alternative actions. Since nearly all
interesting and difficult moral problems involve the happiness of more than one
person, utilitarianism requires calculating which among alternative actions
produces the greatest happiness for all people affected; this is called the
interpersonal utility comparison. Many ordinary judgments about personal action
or public policy implicitly rely on interpersonal utility comparisons; e.g.,
would a family whose members disagree be happiest overall taking its vacation
at the seashore or in the mountains? Some critics of utilitarianism doubt that
it is possible to make interpersonal utility comparisons. Another issue of
formulation is whether the utilitarian principle should be applied to
individual actions or to some form of moral rule. According to act
utilitarianism, each action’s rightness or wrongness depends on the utility it
produces in comparison with possible alternatives. Even act utilitarians agree,
however, that rules of thumb like ‘keep your promises’ can be used for the most
part in practice because following them tends to maximize utility. According to
rule utilitarianism, on the other hand, individual actions are evaluated, in
theory not just in practice, by whether they conform to a justified moral rule,
and the utilitarian standard is applied only to general rules. Some rule
utilitarians hold that actions are right provided they are permitted by rules
the general acceptance of which would maximize utility in the agent’s society,
and wrong only if they would be prohibited by such rules. There are a number of
forms of rule utilitarianism, and utilitarians disagree about whether act or
rule utilitarianism is correct. Moral implications. Most debate about
utilitarianism has focused on its moral implications. Critics have argued that
its implications sharply conflict with most people’s considered moral
judgments, and that this is a strong reason to reject utilitarianism.
Proponents have argued both that many of these conflicts disappear on a proper
understanding of utilitarianism and that the remaining conflicts should throw
the particular judgments, not utilitarianism, into doubt. One important
controversy concerns utilitarianism’s implications for distributive justice.
Utilitarianism requires, in individual actions and in public policy, maximizing
utility without regard to its distribution between different persons. Thus, it
seems to ignore individual rights, whether specific individuals morally deserve
particular benefits or burdens, and potentially to endorse great inequalities
between persons; e.g., some critics have charged that according to
utilitarianism slavery would be morally justified if its benefits to the
slaveowners sufficiently outweighed the burdens to the slaves and if it
produced more overall utility than alternative practices possible in that
society. Defenders of utilitarianism typically argue that in the real world
there is virtually always a better alternative than the action or practice that
the critic charges utilitarianism wrongly supports; e.g., no system of slavery
that has ever existed is plausibly thought to have maximized utility for the
society in question. Defenders of utilitarianism also typically try to show
that it does take account of the moral consideration the critic claims it
wrongly ignores; for instance, utilitarians commonly appeal to the declining
marginal utility of money – equal marginal increments of money tend to produce
less utility (e.g. happiness) for persons, the more money they already utilitarianism
utilitarianism have – as giving some support to equality in income
distribution. Another source of controversy concerns whether moral principles
should be agent-neutral or, in at least some cases, agent-relative.
Utilitarianism is agent-neutral in that it gives all people the same moral aim
– act so as to maximize utility for everyone – whereas agent-relative
principles give different moral aims to different individuals. Defenders of
agent-relative principles note that a commonly accepted moral rule like the prohibition
of killing the innocent is understood as telling each agent that he or she must
not kill, even if doing so is the only way to prevent a still greater number of
killings by others. In this way, a non-utilitarian, agent-relative prohibition
reflects the common moral view that each person bears special moral
responsibility for what he or she does, which is greater than his or her
responsibility to prevent similar wrong actions by others. Common moral beliefs
also permit people to give special weight to their own projects and commitments
and, e.g., to favor to some extent their own children at the expense of other
children in greater need; agent-relative responsibilities to one’s own family
reflect these moral views in a way that agent-neutral utilitarian
responsibilities apparently do not. The debate over neutrality and relativity
is related to a final area of controversy about utilitarianism. Critics charge
that utilitarianism makes morality far too demanding by requiring that one
always act to maximize utility. If, e.g., one reads a book or goes to a movie,
one could nearly always be using one’s time and resources to do more good by
aiding famine relief. The critics believe that this wrongly makes morally
required what should be only supererogatory – action that is good, but goes
beyond “the call of duty” and is not morally required. Here, utilitarians have
often argued that ordinary moral views are seriously mistaken and that morality
can demand greater sacrifices of one’s own interests for the benefit of others
than is commonly believed. There is little doubt that here, and in many other
cases, utilitarianism’s moral implications significantly conflict with
commonsense moral beliefs – the dispute is whether this should count against
commonsense moral beliefs or against utilitarianism.
vagueness, a property of
an expression in virtue of which it can give rise to a “borderline case.” A
borderline case is a situation in which the application of a particular
expression to a (name of) a particular object does not generate an expression
with a definite truth-value; i.e., the piece of language in question neither
unequivocally applies to the object nor fails to apply. Although such a
formulation leaves it open what the pieces of language might be (whole sentences,
individual words, names or singular terms, predicates or general terms), most
discussions have focused on vague general terms and have considered other types
of terms to be nonvague. (Exceptions to this have called attention to the
possibility of vague objects, thereby rendering vague the designation relation
for singular terms.) The formulation also leaves open the possible causes for
the expression’s lacking a definite truth-value. If this indeterminacy is due
to there being insufficient information available to determine applicability or
non-applicability of the term (i.e., we are convinced the term either does or
does not apply, but we just do not have enough information to determine which),
then this is sometimes called epistemic vagueness. It is somewhat misleading to
call this vagueness, for unlike true vagueness, this epistemic vagueness
disappears if more information is brought into the situation. (‘There are
between 1.89 $ 106 and 1.9 $ 106 stars in the sky’ is epistemically vague but
is not vague in the generally accepted sense of the term.) ’Vagueness’ may also
be used to characterize non-linguistic items such as concepts, memories, and
objects, as well as such semilinguistic items as statements and propositions.
Many of the issues involved in discussing the topic of vagueness impinge upon
other philosophical topics, such as the existence of truth-value gaps –
(declarative sentences that are neither true nor false) – and the plausibility
of many-valued logic. There are other related issues such as the nature of
propositions and whether they must be either true or false. We focus here on
linguistic vagueness, as it manifests itself with general terms; for it is this
sort of indeterminacy that defines what most researchers call vagueness, and which
has led the push in some schools of thought to “eliminate vagueness” or to
construct languages that do not manifest vagueness. Linguistic vagueness is
sometimes confused with other linguistic phenomena: generality, ambiguity, and
open texture. Statements can be general (‘Some wheelbarrows are red’, ‘All
insects have antennae’) and if there is no other vagueness infecting them, they
are true or false – and not borderline or vague. Terms can be general
(‘person’, ‘dog’) without being vague. Those general terms apply to many
different objects but are not therefore vague; and furthermore, the fact that
they apply to different kinds of objects (‘person’ applies to both men and
women) also does not show them to be vague or ambiguous. A vague term admits of
borderline cases – a completely determinate situation in which there just is no
correct answer as to whether the term applies to a certain object or not – and
this is not the case with generality. Ambiguous linguistic items, including
structurally ambiguous sentences, also do not have this feature (unless they
also contain vague terms). Rather, an ambiguous sentence allows there to be a
completely determinate situation in which one can simultaneously correctly
affirm the sentence and also deny the sentence, depending on which of the
claims allowed by the ambiguities is being affirmed or denied. Terms are
considered open-textured if they are precise along some dimensions of their
meaning but where other possible dimensions simply have not been considered. It
would therefore not be clear what the applicability of the term would be were
objects to vary along these other dimensions. Although related to vagueness,
open texture is a different notion. Friedrich Waismann, who coined the term,
put it this way: “Open texture . . . is something like the possibility of
vagueness.” Vagueness has long been an irritant to philosophers of logic and
language. Among the oldest of the puzzles associated with vagueness is the
sorites (‘heap’) paradox reported by Cicero (Academica 93): One grain of sand
does not make a heap, and adding a grain of sand to something that is not a
heap will not create a heap; there945 V
945 fore there are no heaps. This type of paradox is traditionally
attributed to Zeno of Elea, who said that a single millet seed makes no sound
when it falls, so a basket of millet seeds cannot make a sound when it is
dumped. The term ‘sorites’ is also applied to the entire series of paradoxes
that have this form, such as the falakros (‘bald man’, Diogenes Laertius, Grammatica
II, 1, 45): A man with no hairs is bald, and adding one hair to a bald man
results in a bald man; therefore all men are bald. The original version of
these sorites paradoxes is attributed to Eubulides (Diogenes Laertius II, 108):
“Isn’t it true that two are few? and also three, and also four, and so on until
ten? But since two are few, ten are also few.” The linchpin in all these
paradoxes is the analysis of vagueness in terms of some underlying continuum
along which an imperceptible or unimportant change occurs. Almost all modern
accounts of the logic of vagueness have assumed this to be the correct analysis
of vagueness, and have geared their logics to deal with such vagueness. But we
will see below that there are other kinds of vagueness too. The search for a
solution to the sorites-type paradoxes has been the stimulus for much research
into alternative semantics. Some philosophers, e.g. Frege, view vagueness as a
pervasive defect of natural language and urge the adoption of an artificial
language in which each predicate is completely precise, without borderline
cases. Russell too thought vagueness thoroughly infected natural language, but
thought it unavoidable – and indeed beneficial – for ordinary usage and
discourse. Despite the occasional argument that vagueness is pragmatic rather
than a semantic phenomenon, the attitude that vagueness is inextricably bound
to natural language (together with the philosophical logician’s self-ascribed
task of formalizing natural language semantics) has led modern writers to the
exploration of alternative logics that might adequately characterize vagueness
– i.e., that would account for our pretheoretic beliefs concerning truth,
falsity, necessary truth, validity, etc., of sentences containing vague
predicates. Some recent writers have also argued that vague language undermines
realism, and that it shows our concepts to be “incoherent.” Long ago it was
seen that the attempt to introduce a third truth-value, indeterminate, solved
nothing – replacing, as it were, the sharp cutoff between a predicate’s
applying and not applying with two sharp cutoffs. Similar remarks could be made
against the adoption of any finitely manyvalued logic as a characterization of
vagueness. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, fuzzy logic was introduced into
the philosophic world. Actually a restatement of the Tarski-Lukasiewicz
infinitevalued logics of the 1930s, one of the side benefits of fuzzy logics
was claimed to be an adequate logic for vagueness. In contrast to classical
logic, in which there are two truth-values (true and false), in fuzzy logic a
sentence is allowed to take any real number between 0 and 1 as a truthvalue.
Intuitively, the closer to 1 the value is, the “more true” the sentence is. The
value of a negated sentence is 1 minus the value of the unnegated sentence;
conjuction is viewed as a minimum function and disjunction as a maximum
function. (Thus, a conjunction takes the value of the “least true” conjunct,
while a disjunction takes the value of the “most true” disjunct.) Since vague
sentences are maximally neither true nor false, they will be valued at
approximately 0.5. It follows that if F is maximally vague, so is the negation
-F; and so are the conjunction (F & -F) and the disjunction (~F 7 -F). Some
theorists object to these results, but defenders of fuzzy logic have argued in
favor of them. Other theorists have attempted to capture the elusive logic of
vagueness by employing modal logic, having the operators AF (meaning ‘F is
definite’) and B F (meaning ‘F is vague’). The logic generated in this way is
peculiar in that A (F & Y)P(AF & AY) is not a theorem. E.g., (p &
-p) is definitely false, hence definite; hence A (p & -p). Yet neither p
nor -p need be definite. (Technically, it is a non-Kripke-normal modal logic.)
Some other peculiarities are that (AF Q A -F) is a theorem, and that (AFPBF) is
not. There are also puzzles about whether ((B FP ABF) should be a theorem, and
about iterated modalities in general. Modal logic treatments of vagueness have
not attracted many advocates, except as a portion of a general epistemic logic
(i.e., modal logics might be seen as an account of so-called epistemic
vagueness). A third direction that has been advocated as a logical account of
vagueness has been the method of supervaluations (sometimes called
“supertruth”). The underlying idea here is to allow the vague predicate in a
sentence to be “precisified” in an arbitrary manner. Thus, for the sentence
‘Friar Tuck is bald’, we arbitrarily choose a precise number of hairs on the
head that will demarcate the bald/not-bald border. In this valuation Friar Tuck
is either definitely bald or definitely not bald, and the sentence either is
true or is false. Next, we alter the valuation so that there is some other
bald/not-bald bordervagueness vagueness 946
946 line, etc. A sentence true in all such valuations is deemed “really
true” or “supertrue”; one false in all such valuations is “really false” or
“superfalse.” All others are vague. Note that, in this conception of vagueness,
if F is vague, so is -F. However, unlike fuzzy logic ‘F & -F’ is not
evaluated as vague – it is false in every valuation and hence is superfalse.
And ‘F 7 -F’ is supertrue. These are seen by some as positive features of the
method of supervaluations, and as an argument against the whole fuzzy logic
enterprise. In fact there seem to be at least two distinct types of
(linguistic) vagueness, and it is not at all clear that any of the previously
mentioned logic approaches can deal with both. Without going into the details, we
can just point out that the “sorites vagueness” discussed above presumes an
ordering on a continuous underlying scale; and it is the indistinguishability
of adjacent points on this scale that gives rise to borderline cases. But there
are examples of vague terms for which there is no such scale. A classic example
is ‘religion’: there are a number of factors relevant to determining whether a
social practice is a religion. Having none of these properties guarantees
failing to be a religion, and having all of them guarantees being one. However,
there is no continuum of the sorites variety here; for example, it is easy to
distinguish possessing four from possessing five of the properties, unlike the
sorites case where such a change is imperceptible. In the present type of
vagueness, although we can tell these different cases apart, we just do not
know whether to call the practice a religion or not. Furthermore, some of the
properties (or combinations of properties) are more important or salient in
determining whether the practice is a religion than are other properties or
combinations. We might call this family resemblance vagueness: there are a
number of clearly distinguishable conditions of varying degrees of importance,
and family resemblance vagueness is attributed to there being no definite
answer to the question, How many of which conditions are necessary for the term
to apply? Other examples of family resemblance vagueness are ‘schizophrenia
sufferer’, ‘sexual perversion’, and the venerable ‘game’. A special subclass of
family resemblance vagueness occurs when there are pairs of underlying
properties that normally co-occur, but occasionally apply to different objects.
Consider, e.g., ‘tributary’. When two rivers meet, one is usually considered a
tributary of the other. Among the properties relevant to being a tributary
rather than the main river are: relative volume of water and relative length.
Normally, the shorter of the two rivers has a lesser volume, and in that case
it is the tributary of the other. But occasionally the two properties do not
co-occur and then there is a conflict, giving rise to a kind of vagueness we
might call conflict vagueness. The term ‘tributary’ is vague because its
background conditions admit of such conflicts: there are borderline cases when
these two properties apply to different objects. To conclude: the fundamental
philosophical problems involving vagueness are (1) to give an adequate
characterization of what the phenomenon is, and (2) to characterize our ability
to reason with these terms. These were the problems for the ancient
philosophers, and they remain the problems for modern philosophers.
Vaihinger, philosopher
best known for Die Philosophie des Als Ob (1911; translated by C. K. Ogden as
The Philosophy of “As If” in 1924). A neo-Kantian, he was also influenced by
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. His commentary on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (2
vols., 1881) is still a standard work. Vaihinger was a cofounder of both the
Kant Society and Kant-Studien. The “philosophy of the as if” involves the claim
that values and ideals amount only to “fictions” that serve “life” even if they
are irrational. We must act “as if” they were true because they have biological
utility.
Valentinianism, a form of
Christian gnosticism of Alexandrian origin, founded by Valentinus in the second
century and propagated by Theodotus in Eastern, and Heracleon in Western,
Christianity. To every gnostic, pagan or Christian, knowledge leads to
salvation from the perishable, material world. Valentinianism therefore
prompted famous refutations by Tertullian (Adversus Valentinianos) and Irenaeus
(Adversus haereses). The latter accused the Valentinians of maintaining
“creatio ex nihilo.” Valentinus is believed to have authored the Peri trion
phuseon, the Evangelium veritatis, and the Treatise on the Resurrection. Since
only a few fragments of these remain, his Neoplatonic cosmogony is accessible
mainly through his opponents and critics (Hippolytus, Clement of Alexandria)
and in the Nag Hammadi codices. To explain the origins of creation and of evil,
Valentinus separated God (primal Father) from the Creator (Demiurge) and
attributed the cruVaihinger, Hans Valentinianism 947 947 cial role in the processes of emanation
and redemption to Sophia.
Valentinus (A.D. 100–65),
Christian gnostic teacher. He was born in Alexandria, where he taught until he
moved to Rome in 135. A dualist, he constructed an elaborate cosmology in which
God the Father (Bythos, or Deep Unknown) unites the the feminine Silence (Sige)
and in the overflow of love produces thirty successive divine emanations (or
aeons) constituting the Pleroma (fullness of the Godhead). Each emanation is
arranged hierarchically with a graded existence, becoming progressively further
removed from the Father and hence less divine. The lowest emanation, Sophia
(wisdom), yields to passion and seeks to reach, beyond her ability, to the
Father, which causes her fall. In the process, she causes the creation of the
material universe (wherein resides evil) and the loss of divine sparks from the
Pleroma. The divine elements are embodied in those humans who are the elect.
Jesus Christ is an aeon close to the Father and is sent to retrieve the souls
into the heavenly Pleroma. Valentinus wrote a gospel. His sect stood out in the
early church for ordaining women priests and prophetesses.
valid, having the
property that a well-formed formula, argument, argument form, or rule of
inference has when it is logically correct in a certain respect. A well-formed
formula is valid if it is true under every admissible reinterpretation of its
non-logical symbols. (If truth-value gaps or multiple truth-values are allowed,
‘true’ here might be replaced by ‘non-false’ or takes a “designated”
truth-value.) An argument is valid if it is impossible for the premises all to
be true and, at the same time, the conclusion false. An argument form (schema)
is valid if every argument of that form is valid. A rule of inference is valid
if it cannot lead from all true premises to a false conclusion.
Valla, Lorenzo
(c.1407–57), Italian humanist and historian who taught rhetoric in Pavia and
was later secretary of King Alfonso I of Aragona in Naples, and apostolic
secretary in Rome under Pope Nicholas V. In his dialogue On Pleasure or On the
True Good (1431–34), Stoic and Epicurean interlocutors present their ethical
views, which Valla proceeds to criticize from a Christian point of view. This
work is often regarded as a defense of Epicurean hedonism, because Valla
equates the good with pleasure; but he claims that Christians can find pleasure
only in heaven. His description of the Christian pleasures reflects the
contemporary Renaissance attitude toward the joys of life and might have
contributed to Valla’s reputation for hedonism. In the later work, On Free Will
(between 1435 and 1448), Valla discusses the conflict between divine
foreknowledge and human freedom and rejects Boethius’s then predominantly
accepted solution. Valla distinguishes between God’s knowledge and God’s will,
but denies that there is a rational solution of the apparent conflict between
God’s will and human freedom. As a historian, he is famous for The Donation of
Constantine (1440), which denounces as spurious the famous document on which
medieval jurists and theologians based the papal rights to secular power.
value, the worth of
something. Philosophers have discerned these main forms: intrinsic,
instrumental, inherent, and relational value. Intrinsic value may be taken as
basic and many of the others defined in terms of it. Among the many attempts to
explicate the concept of intrinsic value, some deal primarily with the source
of value, while others employ the concept of the “fittingness” or
“appropriateness” to it of certain kinds of emotions and desires. The first is
favored by Moore and the second by Brentano. Proponents of the first view hold
that the intrinsic value of X is the value that X has solely in virtue of its
intrinsic nature. Thus, the state of affairs, Smith’s experiencing pleasure,
has intrinsic value provided it has value solely in virtue of its intrinsic
nature. Followers of the second approach explicate intrinsic value in terms of
the sorts of emotions and desires appropriate to a thing “in and for itself”
(or “for its own sake”). Thus, one might say X has intrinsic value (or is
intrinsically good) if and only if X is worthy of desire in and for itself, or,
alternatively, it is fitting or appropriate for anyone to favor X in and for
itself. Thus, the state of affairs of Smith’s experiencing pleasure is
intrinsically valuable provided that state of affairs is worthy of desire for
its own sake, or it is fitting for anyone to favor that state of affairs in and
for itself. Concerning the other forms of value, we may say that X has
instrumental value if and only if it is a means to, or causally contributes to,
something that is intrinsically valuable. If Smith’s experiencing pleasure is
intrinsically valuable and his taking a warm bath is a means to, or Valentinus
value 948 948 causally contributes to,
his being pleased, then his taking a warm bath is instrumentally valuable or
“valuable as a means.” Similarly, if health is intrinsically valuable and
exercise is a means to health, then exercise is instrumentally valuable. X has
inherent value if and only if the experience, awareness, or contemplation of X
is intrinsically valuable. If the experience of a beautiful sunset is
intrinsically valuable, then the beautiful sunset has inherent value. X has
contributory value if and only if X contributes to the value of some whole, W,
of which it is a part. If W is a whole that consists of the facts that Smith is
pleased and Brown is pleased, then the fact that Smith is pleased contributes
to the value of W, and Smith’s being pleased has contributory value. Our
example illustrates that something can have contributory value without having
instrumental value, for the fact that Smith is pleased is not a means to W and,
strictly speaking, it does not bring about or causally contribute to W. Given
the distinction between instrumental and contributory value, we may say that
certain sorts of experiences and activities can have contributory value if they
are part of an intrinsically valuable life and contribute to its value, even
though they are not means to it. Finally, we may say that X has relational
value if and only if X has value in virtue of bearing some relation to
something else. Instrumental, inherent, and contributory value may be construed
as forms of relational value. But there are other forms of relational value one
might accept, e.g. one might hold that X is valuable for S in virtue of being
desired by S or being such that S would desire X were S “fully informed” and “rational.”
Some philosophers defend the organicity of intrinsic value. Moore, for example,
held that the intrinsic value of a whole is not necessarily equal to the sum of
the intrinsic values of its parts. According to this view, the presence of an
intrinsically good part might lower the intrinsic value of a whole of which it
is a part and the presence of an intrinsically bad part might raise the
intrinsic value of a whole to which it belongs. Defenders of organicity
sometimes point to examples of Mitfreude (taking joy or pleasure in another’s
joy) and Schadenfreude (taking joy or pleasure in another’s suffering) to
illustrate their view. Suppose Jones believes incorrectly that Smith is happy
and Brown believes incorrectly that Gray is suffering, but Jones is pleased
that Smith is happy and Brown is pleased that Gray is suffering. The former
instance of Mitfreude seems intrinsically better than the latter instance of
Schadenfreude even though they are both instances of pleasure and neither whole
has an intrinsically bad part. The value of each whole is not a “mere sum” of
the values of its parts.
value theory, also called
axiology, the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of value and with
what kinds of things have value. Construed very broadly, value theory is
concerned with all forms of value, such as the aesthetic values of beauty and
ugliness, the ethical values of right, wrong, obligation, virtue, and vice, and
the epistemic values of justification and lack of justification. Understood
more narrowly, value theory is concerned with what is intrinsically valuable or
ultimately worthwhile and desirable for its own sake and with the related
concepts of instrumental, inherent, and contributive value. When construed very
broadly, the study of ethics may be taken as a branch of value theory, but
understood more narrowly value theory may be taken as a branch of ethics. In
its more narrow form, one of the chief questions of the theory of value is,
What is desirable for its own sake? One traditional sort of answer is hedonism.
Hedonism is roughly the view that (i) the only intrinsically good experiences
or states of affairs are those containing pleasure, and the only instrinsically
bad experiences or states of affairs are those containing pain; (ii) all experiences
or states of affairs that contain more pleasure than pain are intrinsically
good and all experiences or states of affairs that contain more pain than
pleasure are intrinsically bad; and (iii) any experience or state of affairs
that is intrinsically good is so in virtue of being pleasant or containing
pleasure and any experience or state of affairs that is intrinsically bad is so
in virtue of being painful or involving pain. Hedonism has value, cognitive
value theory 949 949 been defended by
philosophers such as Epicurus, Bentham, Sidgwick, and, with significant
qualifications, J. S. Mill. Other philosophers, such as C. I. Lewis, and,
perhaps, Brand Blanshard, have held that what is intrinsically or ultimately
desirable are experiences that exhibit “satisfactoriness,” where being pleasant
is but one form of being satisfying. Other philosophers have recognized a
plurality of things other than pleasure or satisfaction as having intrinsic
value. Among the value pluralists are Moore, Rashdall, Ross, Brentano,
Hartmann, and Scheler. In addition to certain kinds of pleasures, these
thinkers count some or all of the following as intrinsically good:
consciousness and the flourishing of life, knowledge and insight, moral virtue
and virtuous actions, friendship and mutual affection, beauty and aesthetic
experience, a just distribution of goods, and self-expression. Many, if not
all, of the philosophers mentioned above distinguish between what has value or
is desirable for its own sake and what is instrumentally valuable. Furthermore,
they hold that what is desirable for its own sake or intrinsically good has a
value not dependent on anyone’s having an interest in it. Both of these claims
have been challenged by other value theorists. Dewey, for example, criticizes
any sharp distinction between what is intrinsically good or good as an end and
what is good as a means on the ground that we adopt and abandon ends to the
extent that they serve as means to the resolution of conflicting impulses and
desires. Perry denies that anything can have value without being an object of
interest. Indeed, Perry claims that ‘X is valuable’ means ‘Interest is taken in
X’ and that it is a subject’s interest in a thing that confers value on it.
Insofar as he holds that the value of a thing is dependent upon a subject’s
interest in that thing, Perry’s value theory is a subjective theory and
contrasts sharply with objective theories holding that some things have value
not dependent on a subject’s interests or attitudes. Some philosophers,
dissatisfied with the view that value depends on a subject’s actual interests
and theories, have proposed various alternatives, including theories holding
that the value of a thing depends on what a subject would desire or have an
interest in if he were fully rational or if desires were based on full
information. Such theories may be called “counterfactual” desire theories since
they take value to be dependent, not upon a subject’s actual interests, but
upon what a subject would desire if certain conditions, which do not obtain,
were to obtain. Value theory is also concerned with the nature of value. Some
philosophers have denied that sentences of the forms ‘X is good’ or ‘X is
intrinsically good’ are, strictly speaking, either true or false. As with other
forms of ethical discourse, they claim that anyone who utters these sentences
is either expressing his emotional attitudes or else prescribing or commending
something. Other philosophers hold that such sentences can express what is true
or false, but disagree about the nature of value and the meaning of value terms
like ‘good’, ‘bad’, and ‘better’. Some philosophers, such as Moore, hold that
in a truth of the form ‘X is intrinsically good’, ‘good’ refers to a simple,
unanalyzable, non-natural property, a property not identical with or analyzable
by any “natural” property such as being pleasant or being desired. Moore’s view
is one form of non-naturalism. Other philosophers, such as Brentano, hold that
‘good’ is a syncategorematic expression; as such it does not refer to a
property or relation at all, though it contributes to the meaning of the
sentence. Still other philosophers have held that ‘X is good’ and ‘X is
intrinsically good’ can be analyzed in natural or non-ethical terms. This sort
of naturalism about value is illustrated by Perry, who holds that ‘X is
valuable’ means ‘X is an object of interest’. The history of value theory is
full of other attempted naturalistic analyses, some of which identify or
analyze ‘good’ in terms of pleasure or being the object of rational desire.
Many philosophers argue that naturalism is preferable on epistemic grounds. If,
e.g., ‘X is valuable’ just means ‘X is an object of interest’, then in order to
know whether something is valuable, one need only know whether it is the object
of someone’s interest. Our knowledge of value is fundamentally no different in
kind from our knowledge of any other empirical fact. This argument, however, is
not decisive against non-naturalism, since it is not obvious that there is no
synthetic a priori knowledge of the sort Moore takes as the fundamental value
cognition. Furthermore, it is not clear that one cannot combine non-naturalism
about value with a broadly empirical epistemology, one that takes certain kinds
of experience as epistemic grounds for beliefs about value.
Vanini, philosopher, a
Renaissance Aristotelian who studied law and theology. He became a monk and
traveled all over Europe. After abjuring, he taught and practiced medicine. He
was burned at the stake by the Inquisition. His major work is four volumes of
dialogues, De admirandis naturae reginae deaeque mortalium arcanis (“On the
Secrets of Nature, Queen and Goddess of Mortal Beings,” 1616). He was
influenced by Averroes and Pietro Pomponazzi, whom he regarded as his teacher.
Vanini rejects revealed religion and claims that God is immanent in nature. The
world is ruled by a necessary natural order and is eternal. Like Averroes, he
denies the immortality and the immateriality of the human soul. Like
Pomponazzi, he denies the existence of miracles and claims that all apparently
extraordinary phenomena can be shown to have natural causes and to be
predetermined. Despite the absence of any original contribution, from the
second half of the seventeenth century Vanini was popular as a symbol of free
and atheist thought.
Vardhamana
Jnatrputra.MAHAVIRA. variable, in logic and mathematics, a symbol interpreted
so as to be associated with a range of values, a set of entities any one of
which may be temporarily assigned as a value of the variable. An occurrence of
a variable in a mathematical or logical expression is a free occurrence if
assigning a value is necessary in order for the containing expression to
acquire a semantic value – a denotation, truth-value, or other meaning. Suppose
a semantic value is assigned to a variable and the same value is attached to a
constant as meaning of the same kind; if an expression contains free
occurrences of just that variable, the value of the expression for that
assignment of value to the variable is standardly taken to be the same as the
value of the expression obtained by substituting the constant for all the free
occurrences of the variable. A bound occurrence of a variable is one that is
not free.
REGRESSION ANALYSIS.
variable, state.STATE. variable, value of.ONTOLOGICAL COMMITMENT, VARIABLE.
variable sum game.GAME THEORY. vasana, Buddhist philosophical term meaning
‘tendency’. It is an explanatory category, designed to show how it is possible
to talk of tendencies or capacities in persons on the basis of a metaphysic
that denies that there are any enduring existents in the continua of events
conventionally called “persons.” According to this metaphysic, when we speak of
the tendency of persons understood in this way to do this or that – to be
jealous, lustful, angry – we are speaking of the presence of karmic seeds in
continua of events, seeds that may mature at different times and so produce
tendencies to engage in this or that action.
ALAYA-VIJÑANA. P.J.G. Vasubandhu (fourth–fifth century A.D.), Indian
philosopher, a Mahayana Buddhist of the Yogacara or Sarvastivada school. He
wrote the Abhidharmakosá (“Treasure Chamber of the Abhidharma,” the Abhidharma
being a compilation of Buddhist philosophy and psychology) and the Vimcatika
(“Proof in Twenty Verses That Everything Is Only Conception”). He held that the
mind is only a stream of ideas and that there is nothing non-mental. In
contrast to Buddhist direct and representational realists, he argued that dream
experience seems to be of objects located in space and existing independent of
the dreamer without their actually doing so.
BUDDHISM. K.E.Y.
Vauvenargues, Luc de
Clapiers de (1715–47), French army officer and secular moralist. Discovering
Plutarch at an early age, he critically adopted Stoic idealism.
Poverty-stricken, obscure, and solitary, he was ambitious for glory. Though
eventful, his military career brought little reward. In poor health, he
resigned in 1744 to write. In 1747, he published Introduction to the Knowledge
of the Human Mind, followed by Reflections and Maxims. Voltaire and Mirabeau
praised his vigorous and eclectic thought, which aimed at teaching people how
to live. Vauvenargues was a deist and an optimist who equally rejected Bossuet’s
Christian pessimism and La Rochefoucauld’s secular pessimism. He asserted human
freedom and natural goodness, but denied social and political equality. A lover
of martial virtues and noble passions, Vauvenargues crafted memVardhamana
Jnatrputra Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers de 951 951 orable maxims and excelled in character
depiction. His complete works were published in 1862.
Vázquez, Gabriel
(1549–1604), Spanish Jesuit theologian and philosopher. Born in Villaescusa de
Haro, he studied at Alcalá de Henares and taught at Ocaña, Madrid, Alcalá, and
Rome. He was a prolific writer; his philosophically most important work is a
commentary on Aquinas’s Summa theologiae. Vázquez was strongly influenced by
Aquinas, but he differed from him in important ways and showed marked leanings
toward Augustine. He rejected the Thomistic doctrine of the real distinction
between essence and existence and the position that matter designated by
quantity (materia signata quantitate) is the principle of individuation. Instead
of Aquinas’s five ways for proving the existence of God, he favored a version
of the moral argument similar to the one later used by Kant and also favored
the teleological argument. Following Augustine, he described the union of body
and soul as a union of two parts. Finally, Vázquez modified the doctrine of
formal and objective concepts present in Toletus and Suárez in a way that
facilitated the development of idealism in early modern philosophy. He
accomplished this by identifying the actual being (esse) of the thing that is
known (conceptus objectivus) with the act (conceptus formalis) whereby it is
known. AQUINAS, AUGUSTINE, ESSENTIALISM,
IDEALISM, SUÁREZ, TOLETUS. J.J.E.G.
Vedanta, also called
Uttara Mimamsa (‘the end of the Vedas’), the most influential of the six
orthodox schools of Hinduism. Much of the philosophical content of other
schools has been taken up into it. It claims to present the correct
interpretation of the Vedas and Upanishads, along with the Bhagavad Gita,
sacred texts within Indian culture. Much of the dispute over these texts is
religious as well as philosophical in nature; it concerns whether or not they
are best read theistically or monistically. To read these texts theistically is
to see them as teaching the existence of an omnipotent and omniscient personal
Brahman, who in sport (not out of need, but not without moral seriousness)
everlastingly sustains the material world and conscious selves in existence;
the ultimate good of the conscious selves then consists in being rightly
related to Brahman. To read these texts monistically is to see them as teaching
the existence of a qualityless ineffable Brahman who appears to the
unenlightened to be manifested in a multiplicity of bodies and minds and in a
personal deity; critics naturally ask to whom such an appearance appears. Two
great thinkers in the theistic Vedantic tradition are Ramanuja (traditional
dates: 1017– 1137) and Madhva (b.1238). Shankara (788– 820?) represents Advaita
Vedanta (‘Advaita’ meaning ‘non-dual’) and defends the view that the sacred
texts ought to be read monistically; his view is often compared to the absolute
idealism embraced by Bradley; for Shankara what appears as a pluralistic world
is really a seamless unity. Madhva is a leading proponent of Dvaita Vedanta, an
uncompromisingly theistic reading of the same texts; for him, what appears as a
pluralistic world is a pluralistic world that exists distinct from, though
dependent on, Brahman. Ramanuja is a leading exponent of Visistadvaita Vedanta,
often called “qualified non-dualism” because Ramanuja, in contrast to Madhva,
views the pluralistic world that appears as the body of Brahman but, in
contrast to Shankara, views that body as real and distinct from Brahman
conceived as an omnicompetent person. BRADLEY,
BRAHMAN, HINDUISM.
Vedas, the earliest Hindu
sacred texts. ‘Veda’ literally means a text that contains knowledge, in
particular sacred knowledge concerning the nature of ultimate reality and the
proper human ways of relating thereto. Passed down orally and then composed
over a millennium beginning around 1400 B.C., there are four collections of
Vedas: the Rg Veda (1,028 sacred songs of praise with some cosmological
speculations), the Sama Veda (chants to accompany sacrifices), Yajur Veda
(sacrificial formulas and mantras), and Atharva Veda (magical formulas, myths,
and legends). The term ‘Veda’ also applies to the Brahmanas (ritual and
theological commentaries on the prior Vedas); the Aranyakas(mainly composed by
men who have passed through their householder stage of life and retired to the
forest to meditate), and the Upanishads, which more fully reflect the idea of
theoretical sacred knowledge, while the early Vedas are more practice-oriented,
concerned with ritual and sacrifice. All these texts are regarded as scripture
(sruti), “heard” in an oral tradition believed to be handed down by sages by
whom their content was “seen.” The content is held to express a timeless and
uncreated wisdom produced by neither God nor human. It contains material ranging
from instructions concerning the proper sacriVázquez, Gabriel Vedas 952 952 fices to make and how to make them
properly, through hymns and mantras, to accounts of the nature of Brahman,
humankind, and the cosmos. Sruti contrasts with smrti (tradition), which is
humanly produced commentary on scripture. The Bhagavad Gita, perhaps strictly
smrti, typically has the de facto status of sruti. K.E.Y. veil of
ignorance.RAWLS. velleity.VOLITION. Venn diagram, a logic diagram invented by
the logician John Venn in which standard form statements (the four kinds listed
below) are represented by two appropriately marked overlapping circles, as
follows: Syllogisms are represented by three overlapping circles, as in the
examples below. If a few simple rules are followed, e.g. “diagram universal
premises first,” then in a valid syllogism diagramming the premises
automatically gives a diagram in which the conclusion is represented. In an
invalid syllogism diagramming the premises does not automatically give a
diagram in which the conclusion is represented, as below. Venn diagrams are
less perspicuous for the beginner than Euler diagrams.
verificationism, a
metaphysical theory about what determines meaning: the meaning of a statement
consists in its method(s) of verification. Verificationism thus differs
radically from the account that identifies meaning with truth conditions, as is
implicit in Frege’s work and explicit in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and
throughout the writings of Davidson. On Davidson’s theory, e.g., the crucial
notions for a theory of meaning are truth and falsity. Contemporary
verificationists, under the influence of the Oxford philosopher Michael
Dummett, propose what they see as a constraint on the concept of truth rather
than a criterion of meaningfulness. No foundational place is generally assigned
in modern verificationist semantics to corroboration by observation statements;
and modern verificationism is not reductionist. Thus, many philosophers read
Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” as rejecting verificationism. This is
because they fail to notice an important distinction. What Quine rejects is not
verificationism but “reductionism,” namely, the theory that there is, for each
statement, a corresponding range of verifying conditions determinable a priori.
Reductionism is inherently localist with regard to verification; whereas
verificationism, as such, is neutral on whether verification is holistic. And,
lastly, modern verificationism is, veil of ignorance verificationism 953 953 whereas traditional verificationism
never was, connected with revisionism in the philosophy of logic and
mathematics (e.g., rejecting the principle of bivalence).
Verstehen (German,
‘understanding’, ‘interpretation’), a method in the human sciences that aims at
reconstructing meanings from the “agent’s point of view.” Such a method makes
primary how agents understand themselves, as, e.g., when cultural
anthropologists try to understand symbols and practices from the “native’s
point of view.” Understanding in this sense is often contrasted with
explanation, or Erklärung. Whereas explanations discover causes in light of
general laws and take an external perspective, understanding aims at
explicating the meaning that, from an internal perspective, an action or
expression has for the actor. This distinction often is the basis for a further
methodological and ontological distinction between the natural and the human
sciences, the Natur- and the Geisteswissenschaften. Whereas the data of the
natural sciences may be theory-dependent and in that sense interpretive, the
human sciences are “doubly” interpretive; they try to interpret the
interpretations that human subjects give to their actions and practices. The
human sciences do not aim at explaining events but at understanding meanings,
texts, and text analogues. Actions, artifacts, and social relations are all
like texts in that they have a significance for and by human subjects. The
method of Verstehen thus denies the “unity of science” thesis typical of
accounts of explanation given by empiricists and positivists. However, other
philosophers such as Weber argue against such a dichotomy and assert that the
social sciences in particular must incorporate features of both explanation and
understanding, and psychoanalysis and theories of ideology unify both
approaches. Even among proponents of this method, the precise nature of
interpretation remains controversial. While Dilthey and other neo-Kantians
proposed that Verstehen is the imaginative reexperiencing of the subjective
point of view of the actor, Wittgenstein and his following propose a sharp
distinction between reasons and causes and understand reasons in terms of
relating an action to the relevant rules or norms that it follows. In both
cases, the aim of the human sciences is to understand what the text or text
analogue really means for the agent. Following Heidegger, recent German
hermeneutics argues that Verstehen does not refer to special disciplinary
techniques nor to merely cognitive and theoretical achievements, but to the practical
mode of all human existence, its situatedness in a world that projects various
possibilities. All understanding then becomes interpretation, itself a
universal feature of all human activity, including the natural sciences. The
criteria of success in Verstehen also remain disputed, particularly since many
philosophers deny that it constitutes a method. If all understanding is
interpretation, then there are no presuppositionless, neutral data that can put
them to an empirical test. Verstehen is therefore not a method but an event, in
which there is a “fusion of horizons” between text and interpreter. Whether
criteria such as coherence, the capacity to engage in a tradition, or
increasing dialogue apply depends on the type, purpose, and context of various
interpretations.
vicious regress, regress
that is in some way unacceptable, where a regress is an infinite series of
items each of which is in some sense dependent on a prior item of a similar
sort, e.g. an infinite series of events each of which is caused by the next
prior event in the series. Reasons for holding a regress to be vicious might be
that it is either impossible or that its existence is inconsistent with things
known to be true. The claim that something would lead to a vicious regress is often
made as part of a reductio ad absurdum argument strategy. An example of this
can be found in Aquinas’s argument for the existence of an uncaused cause on
the ground that an infinite regress of causes is vicious. Those responding to
the argument have sometimes contended that this regress is not in fact vicious
and hence that the argument fails. A more convincing example of a regress is
generated by the principle that one’s coming to know the meaning of a word must
always be based on a prior understanding of other words. If this principle is
correct, then one can know the meaning of a word w1 only on the basis of
previously understanding the meanings of other words (w2 and w3). But a further
application of the principle yields the result that one can understand these
words (w2 and w3) only on the basis of understanding still other words. This
leads to an infinite regress. Since no one understands any words at birth, the
regress implies that no one ever comes to understand any words. But this is
clearly false. Since the existence of this regress is inconsistent with an
obvious truth, we may conclude that the regress is vicious and consequently
that the principle that generates it is false.
Vico, Philosopher who
founded modern philosophy of history, philosophy of culture, and philosophy of
mythology. He was born and lived all his life in or near Naples, where he
taught eloquence. The Inquisition was a force in Naples throughout Vico’s
lifetime. A turning point in his career was his loss of the concourse for a
chair of civil law (1723). Although a disappointment and an injustice, it
enabled him to produce his major philosophical work. He was appointed royal
historiographer by Charles of Bourbon. Vico’s major work is “La scienza nuova” completely revised in a second, definitive
version in 1730. In the 1720s, he published three connected works in Latin on
jurisprudence, under the title Universal Law; one contains a sketch of his
conception of a “new science” of the historical life of nations. Vico’s
principal works preceding this are On the Study Methods of Our Time (1709),
comparing the ancients with the moderns regarding human education, and On the
Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians (1710), attacking the Cartesian conception
of metaphysics. His Autobiography inaugurates the conception of modern
intellectual autobiography. Basic to Vico’s philosophy is his principle that
“the true is the made” (“verum ipsum factum”), that what is true is convertible
with what is made. This principle is central in his conception of “science”
(scientia, scienza). A science is possible only for those subjects in which
such a conversion is possible. There can be a science of mathematics, since
mathematical truths are such because we make them. Analogously, there can be a
science of the civil world of the historical life of nations. Since we make the
things of the civil world, it is possible for us to have a science of them. As
the makers of our own world, like God as the maker who makes by knowing and
knows by making, we can have knowledge per caussas (through causes, from
within). In the natural sciences we can have only conscientia (a kind of
“consciousness”), not scientia, because things in nature are not made by the
knower. Vico’s “new science” is a science of the principles whereby “men make
history”; it is also a demonstration of “what providence has wrought in
history.” All nations rise and fall in cycles within history (corsi e ricorsi)
in a pattern governed by providence. The world of nations or, in the
Augustinian phrase Vico uses, “the great city of the human race,” exhibits a
pattern of three ages of “ideal eternal history” (storia ideale eterna). Every
nation passes through an age of gods (when people think in terms of gods), an
age of heroes (when all virtues and institutions are formed through the
personalities of heroes), and an age of humans (when all sense of the divine is
lost, life becomes luxurious and false, and thought becomes abstract and
ineffective); then the cycle must begin again. In the first two ages all life
and thought are governed by the primordial power of “imagination” (fantasia)
and the world is ordered through the power of humans to form experience in
terms of “imaginative universals” (universali fantastici). These two ages are
governed by “poetic wisdom” (sapienza poetica). At the basis of Vico’s
conception of history, society, and knowledge is a conception of mythical
thought as the origin of the human world. Fantasia is the original power of the
human mind through which the true and the made are converted to create the
myths and gods that are at the basis of any cycle of history. Michelet was the
primary supporter of Vico’s ideas in the nineteenth century; he made them the
basis of his own philosophy of history. Coleridge is the principal disseminator
of Vico’s views in England. James Joyce used the New Science as a substructure
for Finnegans Wake, making plays on Vico’s name, beginning with one in Latin in
the first sentence: “by a commodius vicus of recirculation.” Croce revives
Vico’s philosophical thought, wishing to conceive Vico as the Italian Hegel.
Vico’s ideas have been the subject of analysis by such prominent philosophical
thinkers as Horkheimer and Berlin, by anthropologists such as Edmund Leach, and
by literary critics such as René Wellek and Herbert Read.
Vienna Circle – vide
ayerism -- a group of philosophers and scientists who met periodically for
discussions in Vienna from 1922 to 1938 and who proposed a self-consciously
revolutionary conception of scientific knowledge. The Circle was initiated by
the mathematician Hans Hahn to continue a prewar forum with the physicist
Philip Frank and the social scientist Otto Neurath after the arrival in Vienna
of Moritz Schlick, a philosopher who had studied with Max Planck. Carnap joined
in 1926 (from 1931 in Prague); other members included Herbert Feigl (from 1930
in Iowa), Friedrich Waismann, Bergmann, Viktor Kraft, and Bela von Juhos.
Viennese associates of the Circle included Kurt Gödel, Karl Menger, Felix
Kaufmann, and Edgar Zilsel. (Popper was not a member or associate.) During its
formative period the Circle’s activities were confined to discussion meetings
(many on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus). In 1929 the Circle entered its public
period with the formation of the Verein Ernst Mach, the publication of its
manifesto Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung: Der Wiener Kreis by Carnap, Hahn,
and Neurath (translated in Neurath, Empiricism and Sociology, 1973), and the
first of a series of philosophical monographs edited by Frank and Schlick. It also
began collaboration with the independent but broadly like-minded Berlin
“Society of Empirical Philosophy,” including Reichenbach, Kurt Grelling, Kurt
Lewin, Friedrich Kraus, Walter Dubislav, Hempel, and Richard von Mises: the
groups together organized their first public conferences in Prague and
Königsberg, acquired editorship of a philosophical journal renamed Erkenntnis,
and later organized the international Unity of Science congresses. The death
and dispersion of key members from 1934 onward (Hahn died in 1934, Neurath left
for Holland in 1934, Carnap left for the United States in 1935, Schlick died in
1936) did not mean the extinction of Vienna Circle philosophy. Through the
subsequent work of earlier visitors (Ayer, Ernest Nagel, Quine) and members and
collaborators who emigrated to the United States (Carnap, Feigl, Frank, Hempel,
and Reichenbach), the logical positivism of the Circle (Reichenbach and Neurath
independently preferred “logical empiricism”) strongly influenced the
development of analytic philosophy. The Circle’s discussions concerned the
philosophy of formal and physical science, and even though their individual
publications ranged much wider, it is the attitude toward science that defines
the Circle within the philosophical movements of central Europe at the time.
The Circle rejected the need for a specifically philosophical epistemology that
bestowed justification on knowledge claims from beyond science itself. In this,
the Circle may also have drawn on a distinct Austrian tradition (a thesis of
its historian Neurath): in most of Germany, science and philosophy had parted
ways during the nineteenth century. Starting with Helmholtz, of course, there
also arose a movement that sought to distinguish the scientific respectability
of the Kantian tradition from the speculations of German idealism, yet after
1880 neo-Kantians insisted on the autonomy of epistemology, disparaging earlier
fellow travelers as “positivist.” Yet the program of reducing the knowledge
claim of science and providing legitimations to what’s left found wide favor
with the more empirical-minded like Mach. Comprehensive description, not
explanation, of natural phenomena became the task for theorists who no longer
looked to philosophy for foundations, but found them in the utility of their
preferred empirical procedures. Along with the positivists, the Vienna Circle
thought uneconomical the Kantian answer to the question of the possibility of
objectivity, the synthetic a priori. Moreover, the Vienna Circle and its
conventionalist precursors Poincaré and Duhem saw them contradicted by the
results of formal science. Riemann’s geometries showed that questions about the
geometry of physical space were open to more than one answer: Was physical
space Euclidean or non-Euclidean? It fell to Einstein and the pre-Circle
Schlick (Space and Time in Contemporary Physics, 1917) to argue that relativity
theory showed the untenability of Kant’s conception of space and time as
forever fixed synthetic a priori forms of intuition. Yet Frege’s anti-psychologistic
critique had also shown empiricism unable to account for knowledge of
arithmetic and the conventionalists had ended the positivist dream of a theory
of experiential elements that bridged the gap between descriptions of fact and
general principles of science. How, then, could the Vienna Circle defend the
claim – under attack as just one worldview among others – that science provides
knowledge? The Circle confronted the problem of constitutive conventions. As
befitted their self-image beyond Kant and Mach, they found their paraVienna
Circle Vienna Circle 956 956 digmatic
answer in the theory of relativity: they thought that irreducible conventions
of measurement with wide-ranging implications were sharply separable from pure
facts like point coincidences. Empirical theories were viewed as logical
structures of statements freely created, yet accountable to experiential input
via their predictive consequences identifiable by observation. The Vienna
Circle defended empiricism by the reconceptualization of the relation between a
priori and a posteriori inquiries. First, in a manner sympathetic to Frege’s
and Russell’s doctrine of logicism and guided by Wittgenstein’s notion of
tautology, arithmetic was considered a part of logic and treated as entirely
analytical, without any empirical content; its truth was held to be exhausted
by what is provable from the premises and rules of a formal symbolic system.
(Carnap’s Logical Syntax of Language, 1934, assimilated Gödel’s incompleteness
result by claiming that not every such proof could be demonstrated in those
systems themselves which are powerful enough to represent classical
arithmetic.) The synthetic a priori was not needed for formal science because
all of its results were non-synthetic. Second, the Circle adopted
verificationism: supposedly empirical concepts whose applicability was
indiscernible were excluded from science. The terms for unobservables were to
be reconstructed by logical operations from the observational terms. Only if
such reconstructions were provided did the more theoretical parts of science
retain their empirical character. (Just what kind of reduction was aimed for
was not always clear and earlier radical positions were gradually weakened;
Reichenbach instead considered the relation between observational and
theoretical statements to be probabilistic.) Empirical science needed no
synthetic a priori either; all of its statements were a posteriori. Combined
with the view that the analysis of the logical form of expressions allowed for
the exact determination of their combinatorial value, verificationism was to
exhibit the knowledge claims of science and eliminate metaphysics. Whatever
meaning did not survive identification with the scientific was deemed
irrelevant to knowledge claims (Reichenbach did not share this view either).
Since the Circle also observed the then long-discussed ban on issuing
unconditional value statements in science, its metaethical positions may be
broadly characterized as endorsing noncognitivism. Its members were not simply
emotivists, however, holding that value judgments were mere expressions of
feeling, but sought to distinguish the factual and evaluative contents of value
judgments. Those who, like Schlick (Questions of Ethics, 1930), engaged in
metaethics, distinguished the expressive component (x desires y) of value
judgments from their implied descriptive component (doing zfurthers aim y) and
held that the demand inherent in moral principles possessed validity if the
implied description was true and the expressed desire was endorsed. This
analysis of normative concepts did not render them meaningless but allowed for
psychological and sociological studies of ethical systems; Menger’s formal
variant (Morality, Decision and Social Organization, 1934) proved influential
for decision theory. The semiotic view that knowledge required structured
representations was developed in close contact with foundational research in
mathematics and depended on the “new” logic of Frege, Russell, and
Wittgenstein, out of which quantification theory was emerging. Major new
results were quickly integrated (albeit controversially) and Carnap’s works
reflect the development of the conception of logic itself. In his Logical
Syntax he adopted the “Principle of Tolerance” vis-à-vis the question of the
foundation of the formal sciences: the choice of logics (and languages) was
conventional and constrained, apart from the demand for consistency, only by
pragmatic considerations. The proposed language form and its difference from
alternatives simply had to be stated as exactly as possible: whether a
logico-linguistic framework as a whole correctly represented reality was a
cognitively meaningless question. Yet what was the status of the verifiability
principle? Carnap’s suggestion that it represents not a discovery but a
proposal for future scientific language use deserves to be taken seriously, for
it not only characterizes his own conventionalism, but also amplifies the
Circle’s linguistic turn, according to which all philosophy concerned ways of
representing, rather than the nature of the represented. What the Vienna Circle
“discovered” was how much of science was conventional: its verificationism was
a proposal for accommodating the creativity of scientific theorizing without
accommodating idealism. Whether an empirical claim in order to be meaningful
needed to be actually verified or only potentially verifiable, or fallible or
only potentially testable, and whether so by current or only by future means,
became matters of discussion during the 1930s. Equally important for the
question whether the Circle’s conventionalism avoided idealism and metaphysics
were the issues of the status of theoretical discourse about Vienna Circle
Vienna Circle 957 957 unobservables and
the nature of science’s empirical foundation. The view suggested in Schlick’s
early General Theory of Knowledge (1918, 2d. ed. 1925) and Frank’s The Causal
Law and its Limitations (1932) and elaborated in Carnap’s “Logical Foundations
of the Unity of Science” (in Foundations of the Unity of Science I.1, 1938)
characterized the theoretical language as an uninterpreted calculus that is
related to the fully interpreted observational language only by partial
definitions. Did such an instrumentalism require for its empirical anchor the
sharp separation of observational from theoretical terms? Could such a
separation even be maintained? Consider the unity of science thesis. According
to the methodological version, endorsed by all members, all of science abides
by the same criteria: no basic methodological differences separate the natural
from the social or cultural sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) as claimed by
those who distinguish between ‘explanation’ and ‘understanding’. According to
the metalinguistic version, all objects of scientific knowledge could in
principle be comprehended by the same “universal” language. Physicalism asserts
that this is the language that speaks of physical objects. While everybody in
the Circle endorsed physicalism in this sense, the understanding of its importance
varied, as became clear in the socalled protocol sentence debate. (The
nomological version of the unity thesis was only later clearly distinguished:
whether all scientific laws could be reduced to those of physics was another
matter on which Neurath came to differ.) Ostensively, this debate concerned the
question of the form, content, and epistemological status of scientific
evidence statements. Schlick’s unrevisable “affirmations” talked about
phenomenal states in statements not themselves part of the language of science
(“The Foundation of Knowledge,” 1934, translated in Ayer, ed., Logical
Positivism). Carnap’s preference changed from unrevisable statements in a
primitive methodologically solipsistic protocol language that were fallibly
translatable into the physicalistic system language (1931; see Unity of
Science, 1934), via arbitrary revisable statements of that system language that
are taken as temporary resting points in testing (1932), to revisable
statements in the scientific observation language (1935; see “Testability and
Meaning,” Philosophy of Science, 1936–37). These changes were partly prompted
by Neurath, whose own revisable “protocol statements” spoke, amongst other
matters, of the relation between observers and the observed in a “universal
slang” that mixed expressions of the physicalistically cleansed colloquial and
the high scientific languages (“Protocol Statements,” 1932, translated in Ayer,
ed., Logical Positivism). Ultimately, these proposals answered to different
projects. Since all agreed that all statements of science were hypothetical,
the questions of their “foundation” concerned rather the very nature of Vienna
Circle philosophy. For Schlick philosophy became the activity of meaning
determination (inspired by Wittgenstein); Carnap pursued it as the rational
reconstruction of knowledge claims concerned only with what Reichenbach called
the “context of justification” (its logical aspects, not the “context of
discovery”); and Neurath replaced philosophy altogether with a naturalistic,
interdisciplinary, empirical inquiry into science as a distinctive discursive
practice, precluding the orthodox conception of the unity of science. The
Vienna Circle was neither a monolithic nor a necessarily reductionist
philosophical movement, and quick assimilation to the tradition of British
empiricism mistakes its struggles with the form–content dichotomy for
foundationalism, when instead sophisticated responses to the question of the
presuppositions of their own theories of knowledge were being developed. In its
time and place, the Circle was a minority voice; the sociopolitical dimension
of its theories – stressed more by some (Neurath) than others (Schlick) – as a
renewal of Enlightenment thought, ultimately against the rising tide of Blutund-Boden
metaphysics, is gaining recognition. After the celebrated “death” of
reductionist logical positivism in the 1960s the historical Vienna Circle is
reemerging as a multifaceted object of the history of analytical philosophy
itself, revealing in nuce different strands of reasoning still significant for
postpositivist theory of science. .
Vijñanavada, an idealist
school of Buddhist thought in India in the fourth century A.D. It engaged in
lively debates on important epistemological and metaphysical issues with the
Buddhist Madhyamika school (known for its relativistic and nihilistic views),
with Buddhist realist schools, and with various Hindu philosophical systems of
its time. Madhyamika philosophy used effective dialectic to show the
contradictions in our everyday philosophical notions such as cause, substance,
self, etc., but the Vijñanavada school, while agreeing with the Madhyamikas on
this point, went further and Vijñanavada Vijñanavada 958 958 gave innovative explanations regarding
the origin and the status of our mental constructions and of the mind itself.
Unlike the Madhyamikas, who held that reality is “emptiness” (sunyata), the
Vijñanavadins held that the reality is consciousness or the mind (vijñana). The
Vijñanavada school is also known as Yogacara. Its idealism is remarkably
similar to the subjective idealism of Berkeley. Consistent with the process
ontology of all the Buddhist schools in India, Vijñanavadins held that
consciousness or the mind is not a substance but an ever-changing stream of
ideas or impressions. BUDDHISM. D.K.C.
vijñapti, Indian Buddhist term meaning ‘representation’, used by some
philosophers as a label for a mental event that appears, phenomenally, to have
an intentional object and to represent or communicate to its possessor some
information about extramental reality. The term was used mostly by Buddhists
with idealist tendencies who claimed that there is nothing but representation,
nothing but communicative mental events, and that a complete account of human
experience can be given without postulating the existence of anything
extramental. This view was not uncontroversial, and in defending it Indian
Buddhists developed arguments that are in important ways analogous to those
constructed by Western idealists.
violence, (1) the use of
force to cause physical harm, death, or destruction (physical violence); (2)
the causing of severe mental or emotional harm, as through humiliation,
deprivation, or brainwashing, whether using force or not (psychological
violence); (3) more broadly, profaning, desecrating, defiling, or showing
disrespect for (i.e., “doing violence” to) something valued, sacred, or
cherished; (4) extreme physical force in the natural world, as in tornados,
hurricanes, and earthquakes. Physical violence may be directed against persons,
animals, or property. In the first two cases, harm, pain, suffering, and death
figure prominently; in the third, illegality or illegitimacy (the forceful
destruction of property is typically considered violence when it lacks authorization).
Psychological violence applies principally to persons. It may be understood as
the violation of beings worthy of respect. But it can apply to higher animals
as well (as in the damaging mental effects of some experimentation, e.g.,
involving isolation and deprivation). Environmentalists sometimes speak of
violence against the environment, implying both destruction and disrespect for
the natural world. Sometimes the concept of violence is used to characterize
acts or practices of which one morally disapproves. To this extent it has a
normative force. But this prejudges whether violence is wrong. One may, on the
other hand, regard inflicting harm or death as only prima facie wrong (i.e.,
wrong all other things being equal). This gives violence a normative character,
establishing its prima facie wrongness. But it leaves open the ultimate moral
justifiability of its use. Established practices of physical or psychological
violence – e.g., war, capital punishment – constitute institutionalized
violence. So do illegal or extralegal practices like vigilantism, torture, and
state terrorism (e.g., death squads). Anarchists sometimes regard the courts,
prisons, and police essential to maintaining the state as violence. Racism and
sexism may be considered institutional violence owing to their associated
psychological as well as physical violence.
NONVIOLENCE. R.L.H. vipassana (Pali, ‘insight’, ‘discernment’), Indian
Buddhist term used to describe both a particular kind of meditational practice
and the states of consciousness produced by it. The meditational practice is
aimed at getting the practitioner to perceive and cognize in accord with the
major categories of Buddhist metaphysics. Since that metaphysics is
constitutively deconstructive, being concerned with parts rather than wholes,
the method too is analytic and deconstructive. The practitioner is encouraged
to analyze the perceived solidities and continuities of her everyday experience
into transitory events, and so to cultivate the perception of such events until
she experiences the world no longer in terms of medium-sized physical objects
that endure through time, but solely in terms of transitory events. Arriving at
such a condition is called the attainment of vipassana.
virtue epistemology, the
subfield of epistemology that takes epistemic virtue to be central to
understanding justification or knowledge or both. An epistemic virtue is a
personal quality conducive to the discovery of truth, the avoidance of error,
or some other intellectually valuable goal. Following Aristotle, we should
distinguish these virtues from such qualities as wisdom or good judgment, which
are the intellectual basis of practical – but not necessarily intellectual –
success. The importance, and to an extent, the very definition, of this notion
depends, however, on larger issues of epistemology. For those who favor a
naturalist conception of knowledge (say, as belief formed in a “reliable” way),
there is reason to call any truth-conducive quality or properly working
cognitive mechanism an epistemic virtue. There is no particular reason to limit
the epistemic virtues to recognizable personal qualities: a high mathematical
aptitude may count as an epistemic virtue. For those who favor a more
“normative” conception of knowledge, the corresponding notion of an epistemic
virtue (or vice) will be narrower: it will be tied to personal qualities (like
impartiality or carelessness) whose exercise one would associate with an ethics
of belief.
virtue ethics, also
called virtue-based ethics and agent-based ethics, conceptions or theories of
morality in which virtues play a central or independent role. Thus, it is more
than simply the account of the virtues offered by a given theory. Some take the
principal claim of virtue ethics to be about the moral subject – that, in
living her life, she should focus her attention on the cultivation of her (or
others’) virtues. Others take the principal claim to be about the moral
theorist – that, in mapping the structure of our moral thought, she should concentrate
on the virtues. This latter view can be construed weakly as holding that the
moral virtues are no less basic than other moral concepts. In this type of
virtue ethics, virtues are independent of other moral concepts in that claims
about morally virtuous character or action are, in the main, neither reducible
to nor justified on the basis of underlying claims about moral duty or rights,
or about what is impersonally valuable. It can also be construed strongly as
holding that the moral virtues are more basic than other moral concepts. In
such a virtue ethics, virtues are fundamental, i.e., claims about other moral
concepts are either reducible to underlying claims about moral virtues or
justified on their basis. Forms of virtue ethics predominated in Western
philosophy before the Renaissance, most notably in Aristotle, but also in Plato
and Aquinas. Several ancient and medieval philosophers endorsed strong versions
of virtue ethics. These views focused on character rather than on discrete
behavior, identifying illicit behavior with vicious behavior, i.e., conduct
that would be seriously out of character for a virtuous person. A virtuous
person, in turn, was defined as one with dispositions relevantly linked to
human flourishing. On these views, while a person of good character, or someone
who carefully observes her, may be able to articulate certain principles or
rules by which she guides her conduct (or to which, at least, it outwardly
conforms), the principles are not an ultimate source of moral justification. On
the contrary, they are justified only insofar as the conduct they endorse would
be in character for a virtuous person. For Aristotle, the connection between
flourishing and virtue seems conceptual. (He conceived moral virtues as
dispositions to choose under the proper guidance of reason, and defined a
flourishing life as one lived in accordance with these virtues.) While most
accounts of the virtues link them to the flourishing of the virtuous person,
there are other possibilities. In principle, the flourishing to which virtue is
tied (whether causally or conceptually) may be either that of the virtuous
subject herself, or that of some patient who is a recipient of her virtuous
behavior, or that of some larger affected group – the agent’s community,
perhaps, or all humanity, or even sentient life in general. For the
philosophers of ancient Greece, it was human nature, usually conceived
teleologically, that fixed the content of this flourishing. Medieval Christian
writers reinterpreted this, stipulating both that the flourishing life to which
the virtues lead extends past death, and that human flourishing is not merely
the fulfillment of capacities and tendencies inherent in human nature, but is
the realization of a divine plan. In late twentieth-century versions of virtue
ethics, some theorists have suggested that it is neither to a teleology
inherent in human nature nor to the divine will that we should look in
determining the content of that flourishing to which the virtues lead. They
understand flourishing more as a matter of a person’s living a life that meets
the standards of her cultural, historical tradition. In his most general
characterization, Aristotle called a thing’s virtues those features of it that
made it and its operation good. The moral virtues were what made people live
well. This use of ‘making’ is ambiguous. Where he and other premodern thinkers
thought the connection between virtues and living well to be conceptual, moral
theorists of the modernist era have usually virtue ethics virtue ethics understood
it causally. They commonly maintain that a virtue is a character trait that
disposes a person to do what can be independently identified as morally
required or to effect what is best (best for herself, according to some
theories; best for others, according to different ones). Benjamin Franklin,
e.g., deemed it virtuous for a person to be frugal, because he thought
frugality was likely to result in her having a less troubled life. On views of
this sort, a lively concern for the welfare of others has moral importance only
inasmuch as it tends to motivate people actually to perform helpful actions. In
short, benevolence is a virtue because it conduces to beneficent conduct;
veracity, because it conduces to truth telling; fidelity, because it conduces
to promise keeping; and so on. Reacting to this aspect of modernist philosophy,
recent proponents of virtue ethics deny that moral virtues derive from prior
determinations of what actions are right or of what states of affairs are best.
Some, especially certain theorists of liberalism, assign virtues to what they
see as one compartment of moral thought and duties to a separate, and only
loosely connected compartment. For them, the life (and theory) of virtue is
autonomous. They hold that virtues and duties have independent sources of
justification, with virtues chiefly concerned with the individual’s personal
“ideals,” self-image, or conception of her life goals, while duties and rights
are thought to derive from social rules regulating interpersonal dealings.
Proponents of virtue ethics maintain that it has certain advantages over more
modern alternatives. They argue that virtue ethics is properly concrete,
because it grounds morality in facts about human nature or about the concrete
development of particular cultural traditions, in contrast with modernist
attempts to ground morality in subjective preference or in abstract principles
of reason. They also claim that virtue ethics is truer to human psychology in
concentrating on the less conscious aspects of motivation – on relatively
stable dispositions, habits, and long-term goals, for example – where modern
ethics focuses on decision making directed by principles and rules. Virtue
ethics, some say, offers a more unified and comprehensive conception of moral
life, one that extends beyond actions to comprise wants, goals, likes and
dislikes, and, in general, what sort of person one is and aims to be.
Proponents of virtue ethics also contend that, without the sensitivity and
appreciation of their situation and its opportunities that only virtues
consistently make available, agents cannot properly apply the rules that
modernist ethical theories offer to guide their actions. Nor, in their view,
will the agent follow those rules unless her virtues offer her sufficient
clarity of purpose and perseverance against temptation. Several objections have
been raised against virtue ethics in its most recent forms. Critics contend
that it is antiquarian, because it relies on conceptions of human nature whose
teleology renders them obsolete; circular, because it allegedly defines right
action in terms of virtues while defining virtues in terms of right action;
arbitrary and irrelevant to modern society, since there is today no accepted
standard either of what constitutes human flourishing or of which dispositions
lead to it; of no practical use, because it offers no guidance when virtues
seem to conflict; egoistic, in that it ultimately directs the subject’s moral
attention to herself rather than to others; and fatalistic, in allowing the
morality of one’s behavior to hinge finally on luck in one’s constitution,
upbringing, and opportunities. There may be versions of virtue ethics that
escape the force of all or most of the objections, but not every form of virtue
ethics can claim for itself all the advantages mentioned above.
Vishnu (from Sanskrit
Vifpu), major Hindu god and Supreme Lord for his devotees, the Vaishpavites.
Vaishpavite philosophers regard Vishnu as the referent of the term ‘Brahman’ in
the Vedic texts. Later texts attempt a synthesis of Vishnu with two other
deities into a trimurti (‘three forms’ of the Absolute), with Brahma as
Creator, Vishnu as Preserver, and Siva as Destroyer. This relatively unpopular
idea is used by modern thinkers to speak of these gods as three forms of the
formless Absolute. Madhva and Ramanuja regard Vishnu as the Highest Lord,
possessed of infinite good qualities and superior to the qualityless Absolute
of the nondualist thinkers. Vaishpavite thinkers identify Vishnu with the
Purusa, the primeval, cosmic person, and Prajapati, Creator god, of the Vedas,
and give him epithets that identify Vishnu with other representatives of a
Supreme Being. He is Creator, Preserver, and Destroyer of the Universe. Vishnu
is best known for the doctrine of avatar, his “descents” into the world in
various virtues, cardinal forms to promote righteousness. Through this and the
concept of vyuhas, aspects or fragments, Vaishpavites incorporated other
deities, hero cults, and savior myths into their fold. He was a minor deity in
the early Vedic literature, known for his “three strides” across the universe,
which indicate that he pervades all. During the epic period (400 B.C.–A.D.
400), Vishnu became one of the most popular gods in India, represented iconographically
as dark-complexioned and holding a conch and discus. His consort is usually
Laksmi and his vehicle the bird Garuda.
Visistadvaita Vedanta, a
form of Hinduism for which Brahman is an independently existing, omnipotent,
omniscient personal deity. In creative, morally serious sport, Brahman
everlastingly sustains in existence a world of both minds and physical things,
these together being the body of Brahman in the sense that Brahman can act on
any part of the world without first acting on some other part and that the
world manifests (though in some ways it also hides) Brahman’s nature. In
response to repentance and trust, Brahman will forgive one’s sins and bring one
into a gracious relationship that ends the cycle of rebirths.
vitalism.PHILOSOPHY OF
BIOLOGY. vital lie, (1) an instance of self-deception (or lying to oneself)
when it fosters hope, confidence, self-esteem, mental health, or creativity;
(2) any false belief or unjustified attitude that helps people cope with
difficulties; (3) a lie to other people designed to promote their wellbeing.
For example, self-deceiving optimism about one’s prospects for success in work
or personal relationships may generate hope, mobilize energy, enrich life’s
meaning, and increase chances for success. Henrik Ibsen dramatized “life-lies”
as essential for happiness (The Wild Duck, 1884), and Eugene O’Neill portrayed
“pipe dreams” as necessary crutches (The Iceman Cometh, 1939). Nietzsche
endorsed “pious illusions” or “holy fictions” about the past that liberate
individuals and societies from shame and guilt (On the Advantage and
Disadvantage of History for Life, 1874). Schiller praised normal degrees of
vanity and self-conceit because they support selfesteem (Problems of Belief,
1924).
Vitoria, Dominican jurist,
political philosopher, and theologian who is regarded as the founder of modern
international law. Born in Vitoria or Burgos, he studied and taught at the
College of SaintJacques in Paris, where he met Erasmus and Vives. He also
taught at the College of San Gregorio in Valladolid and at Salamanca. His most
famous works are the notes (relectiones) for twelve public addresses he
delivered at Salamanca, published posthumously in 1557. Two relectiones stand
out: De Indis and De jure belli. They were responses to the legal and political
issues raised by the discovery and colonization of America. In contrast with
Mariana’s contract Arianism, Vitoria held that political society is our natural
state. The aim of the state is to promote the common good and preserve the
rights of citizens. Citizenship is the result of birthplace (jus solis) rather
than blood (jus sanguini). The authority of the state resides in the body
politic but is transferred to rulers for its proper exercise. The best form of
government is monarchy because it preserves the unity necessary for social
action while safeguarding individual freedoms. Apart from the societies of
individual states, humans belong to an international society. This society has
its own authority and laws that establish the rights and duties of the states.
These laws constitute the law of nations (jus gentium). J.J.E.G. Vives, Juan
Luis (1492?–1540), Spanish humanist and teacher. Born in Valencia, he attended
the University of Paris (1509–14) and lived most of his life in Flanders. With
his friend Erasmus he prepared a widely used commentary (1522) of Augustine’s
De civitate Dei. From 1523 to 1528 Vives visited England, taught at Oxford,
befriended More, and became Catherine of Aragon’s confidant. While in Paris,
Vives repudiated medieval logic as useless (Adversus pseudodialecticos, 1520)
and proposed instead a dialectic emphasizing resourceful reasoning and clear
and persuasive exposition (De tradendis disciplinis, 1532). His method was
partially inspired by Rudolph Agricola and probably influential upon Peter
Ramus. Less interested in theology than Erasmus or More, he surpassed both in
philosophical depth. As one of the great pedagogues of his age, Vives proposed
a plan of education that substituted the Aristotelian ideal of speculative
certainty for a pragmatic probability capable of guiding action. Vives enlarged
the scope of women’s education (De institutione feminae Christianae, 1524) and
contributed to the teaching of classical Latin (Exercitatio linguae latinae, 1538).
A champion of EuroVisistadvaita Vedanta Vives, Juan Luis 962 962 pean unity against the Turks, he
professed the belief that international order (De concordia, 1526) depended
upon the control of passion (De anima et vita, 1538). As a social reformer, Vives
pioneered the secularization of welfare (De subventione pauperum, 1526) and
opposed the abuse of legal jargon (Aedes legum, 1520). Although his Jewish
parents were victimized by the Inquisition, Vives remained a Catholic and
managed to write an apology of Christianity without taking sides in
controversial theological matters (De veritate fidei, 1543). C.G.Nore.
volition, cf.
desideratum. a mental event involved with the initiation of action. ‘To will’
is sometimes taken to be the corresponding verb form of ‘volition’. The concept
of volition is rooted in modern philosophy; contemporary philosophers have
transformed it by identifying volitions with ordinary mental events, such as
intentions, or beliefs plus desires. Volitions, especially in contemporary
guises, are often taken to be complex mental events consisting of cognitive,
affective, and conative elements. The conative element is the impetus – the
underlying motivation – for the action. A velleity is a conative element
insufficient by itself to initiate action. The will is a faculty, or set of
abilities, that yields the mental events involved in initiating action. There
are three primary theories about the role of volitions in action. The first is
a reductive account in which action is identified with the entire causal
sequence of the mental event (the volition) causing the bodily behavior. J. S.
Mill, for example, says: “Now what is action? Not one thing, but a series of
two things: the state of mind called a volition, followed by an effect. . . . [T]he
two together constitute the action” (Logic). Mary’s raising her arm is Mary’s
mental state causing her arm to rise. Neither Mary’s volitional state nor her
arm’s rising are themselves actions; rather, the entire causal sequence (the
“causing”) is the action. The primary difficulty for this account is
maintaining its reductive status. There is no way to delineate volition and the
resultant bodily behavior without referring to action. There are two
non-reductive accounts, one that identifies the action with the initiating
volition and another that identifies the action with the effect of the
volition. In the former, a volition is the action, and bodily movements are
mere causal consequences. Berkeley advocates this view: “The Mind . . . is to
be accounted active in . . . so far forth as volition is included. . . . In
plucking this flower I am active, because I do it by the motion of my hand,
which was consequent upon my volition” (Three Dialogues). In this century,
Prichard is associated with this theory: “to act is really to will something”
(Moral Obligation, 1949), where willing is sui generis (though at other places
Prichard equates willing with the action of mentally setting oneself to do
something). In this sense, a volition is an act of will. This account has come
under attack by Ryle (Concept of Mind, 1949). Ryle argues that it leads to a
vicious regress, in that to will to do something, one must will to will to do
it, and so on. It has been countered that the regress collapses; there is
nothing beyond willing that one must do in order to will. Another criticism of
Ryle’s, which is more telling, is that ‘volition’ is an obscurantic term of
art; “[volition] is an artificial concept. We have to study certain specialist
theories in order to find out how it is to be manipulated. . . . [It is like]
‘phlogiston’ and ‘animal spirits’ . . . [which] have now no utility” (Concept
of Mind). Another approach, the causal theory of action, identifies an action
with the causal consequences of volition. Locke, e.g., says: “Volition or
willing is an act of the mind directing its thought to the production of any
action, and thereby exerting its power to produce it. . . . [V]olition is
nothing but that particular determination of the mind, whereby . . . the mind
endeavors to give rise, continuation, or stop, to any action which it takes to
be in its power” (Essay concerning Human Understanding). This is a functional
account, since an event is an action in virtue of its causal role. Mary’s arm
rising is Mary’s action of raising her arm in virtue of being caused by her
willing to raise it. If her arm’s rising had been caused by a nervous twitch,
it would not be action, even if the bodily movements were photographically the
same. In response to Ryle’s charge of obscurantism, contemporary causal
theorists tend to identify volitions with ordinary mental events. For example,
Davidson takes the cause of actions to be beliefs plus desires and Wilfrid
Sellars takes volitions to be intentions to do something here and now. Despite
its plausibility, however, the causal theory faces two difficult problems: the
first is purported counterexamples based on wayward causal chains connecting
the antecedent mental event and the bodily movements; the second is provision
of an enlightening account of these mental events, e.g. intending, that does
justice to the conative element.
Voltaire, pen name of
François-Marie Arouet (1694–1778), French philosopher and writer who won early
fame as a playwright and poet and later was an influential popularizer of
Newtonian natural philosophy. His enduring reputation rests on his acerbically witty
essays on religious and moral topics (especially the Philosophical Letters,
1734, and the Philosophical Dictionary, 1764), his brilliant stories, and his
passionate polemics against the injustices of the ancien régime. In Whitehead’s
phrase, he was more “a philosophe than a philosopher” in the current
specialized disciplinary sense. He borrowed most of his views on metaphysics
and epistemology from Locke, whose work, along with Newton’s, he came to know
and extravagantly admire during his stay (1726–28) in England. His is best
placed in the line of great French literary moralists that includes Montaigne,
Pascal, Diderot, and Camus. Voltaire’s position is skeptical, empirical, and
humanistic. His skepticism is not of the radical sort that concerned Descartes.
But he denies that we can find adequate support for the grand metaphysical
claims of systematic philosophers, such as Leibniz, or for the dogmatic
theology of institutional religions. Voltaire’s empiricism urges us to be
content with the limited and fallible knowledge of our everyday experience and
its development through the methods of empirical science. His humanism makes a
plea, based on his empiricist skepticism, for religious and social tolerance:
none of us can know enough to be justified in persecuting those who disagree
with us on fundamental philosophical and theological matters. Voltaire’s
positive view is that our human condition, for all its flaws and perils, is
meaningful and livable strictly in its own terms, quite apart from any connection
to the threats and promises of dubious transcendental realms. Voltaire’s
position is well illustrated by his views on religion. Although complex
doctrines about the Trinity or the Incarnation strike him as gratuitous
nonsense, he nonetheless is firmly convinced of the reality of a good God who
enjoins us through our moral sense to love one another as brothers and sisters.
Indeed, it is precisely this moral sense that he finds outraged by the
intolerance of institutional Christianity. His deepest religious thinking
concerns the problem of evil, which he treated in his “Poem of the Lisbon
Earthquake” and the classic tales Zadig (1747) and Candide (1759). He rejects
the Panglossian view (held by Candide’s Dr. Pangloss, a caricature of Leibniz)
that we can see the hand of providence in our daily life but is prepared to
acknowledge that an all-good God does not (as an extreme deism would hold) let
his universe just blindly run. Whatever metaphysical truth there may be in the
thought that “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds,” Voltaire
insists that this idea is ludicrous as a practical response to evil and
recommends instead concrete action to solve specific local problems: “We must
cultivate our garden.” Voltaire was and remains an immensely controversial
figure. Will Durant regarded him as “the greatest man who ever lived,” while
Joseph de Maistre maintained that “admiration for Voltaire is an infallible
sign of a corrupt soul.” Perhaps it is enough to say that he wrote with
unequaled charm and wit and stood for values that are essential to, if perhaps
not the very core of, our humanity.
voluntarism, any
philosophical view that makes our ability to control the phenomena in question
an essential part of the correct understanding of those phenomena. Thus,
ethical voluntarism is the doctrine that the standards that define right and
wrong conduct are in some sense chosen by us. Doxastic voluntarism is the
doctrine that we have extensive control over what we believe; we choose what to
believe. A special case of doxastic voluntarism is theological voluntarism,
which implies that religious belief requires a substantial element of choice;
the evidence alone cannot decide the issue. This is a view that is closely
associated with Pascal, Kierkegaard, and James. Historical voluntarism is the
doctrine that the human will is a major factor in history. Such views contrast
with Marxist views of history. Metaphysical voluntarism is the doctrine, linked
with Schopenhauer, that the fundamental organizing principle of the world is
not the incarnation of a rational or a moral order but rather the will, which
for Schopenhauer is an ultimately meaningless striving for survival, to be
found in all of nature.
von Neumann, John
(1903–57), Hungarian-born American mathematician, physicist, logician,
economist, engineer, and computer scientist. Born in Budapest and trained in
Hungary, Switzerland, and Germany, he visited Princeton University in 1930 and
became a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in 1933.
His most outstanding work in pure mathematics was on rings of operators in
Hilbert spaces. In quantum mechanics he showed the equivalence of matrix
mechanics to wave mechanics, and argued that quantum mechanics could not be
embedded in an underlying deterministic system. He established important
results in set theory and mathematical logic, and worked on Hilbert’s Program
to prove the consistency of mathematics within mathematics until he was shocked
by Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. He established the mathematical theory of
games and later showed its application to economics. In these many different
areas, von Neumann demonstrated a remarkable ability to analyze a subject
matter and develop a mathematical formalism that answered basic questions about
that subject matter; formalization in logic is the special case of this process
where the subject matter is language and reasoning. With the advent of World
War II von Neumann turned his great analytical ability to more applied areas of
hydrodynamics, ballistics, and nuclear explosives. In 1945 he began to work on
the design, use, and theory of electronic computers. He later became a leading
scientist in government. Von Neumann contributed to the hardware architecture
of the modern electronic computer, and he invented the first modern program
language. A program in this language could change the addresses of its own
instructions, so that it became possible to use the same subroutine on
different data structures and to write programs to process programs. Von
Neumann proposed to use a computer as a research tool for exploring very
complex phenomena, such as the discontinuous nature of shock waves. He began
the development of a theory of automata that would cover computing,
communication, and control systems, as well as natural organisms, biological
evolution, and societies. To this end, he initiated the study of probabilistic
automata and of selfreproducing and cellular automata.
von Wright, G. H., Finnish
philosopher, one of the most influential analytic philosophers of the twentieth
century. His early work, influenced by logical empiricism, is on logic,
probability, and induction, including contributions in modal and deontic logic,
the logic of norms and action, preference logic, tense logic, causality, and determinism.
In the 1970s his ideas about the explanation of action helped to link the
analytic tradition to Continental hermeneutics. His most important contribution
is A Treatise on Induction and Probability (1951), which develops a system of
eliminative induction using the concepts of necessary and sufficient condition.
In 1939 von Wright went to Cambridge to meet Broad, and he attended
Wittgenstein’s lectures. Regular discussions with Moore also had an impact on
him. In 1948 von Wright succeeded Wittgenstein as professor at Cambridge
University. After Wittgenstein’s death in 1951, von Wright returned to
Helsinki. Together with Anscombe and Rush Rhees, he became executor and editor
of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass. The study, organization, systematization, and publication
of this exceptionally rich work became a lifelong task for him. In his
Cambridge years von Wright became interested in the logical properties of
various modalities: alethic, deontic, epistemic. An Essay in Modal Logic (1951)
studies, syntactically, various deductive systems of modal logic. That year he
published his famous article “Deontic Logic” in Mind. It made him the founder
of modern deontic logic. These logical works profoundly influenced analytic
philosophy, especially action theory. Von Wright distinguishes technical oughts
(means-ends relationships) from norms issued by a norm-authority. His Norm and
Action (1963) discusses philosophical problems concerning the existence of
norms and the truth of normative statements. His main work on metaethics is The
Varieties of Goodness (1963). In Explanation and Understanding (1971) he turned
to philosophical problems concerning the human sciences. He defends a
manipulation view of causality, where the concept of action is basic for that
of cause: human action cannot be explained causally by laws, but must be
understood intentionally. The basic model of intentionality is the practical
syllogism, which explains action by a logical connection with wants and
beliefs. This work, sometimes characterized as anti-positivist analytical
hermeneutics, bridges analytic and Continental philosophy. His studies in
truth, knowledge, modality, lawlikeness, causality, determinism, norms, and
practical inference were published in 1983–84 in his Philosophical Papers. von Neumann,
John von Wright, G. H. 965 965 In 1961
von Wright became a member of the Academy of Finland, the highest honor Finland
gives to its scientists. Over many years he has written, in Swedish and
Finnish, eloquent essays in the history of ideas and the philosophy of culture.
He has become increasingly critical of the modern scientific-technological
civilization, its narrowly instrumental concept of rationality, and its myth of
progress. His public pleas for peace, human rights, and a more harmonious coexistence
of human beings and nature have made him the most esteemed intellectual in the
Scandinavian countries.
voting paradox, the
possibility that if there are three candidates, A, B, and C, for democratic
choice, with at least three choosers, and the choosers are asked to make
sequential choices among pairs of candidates, A could defeat B by a majority
vote, B could defeat C, and C could defeat A. (This would be the outcome if the
choosers’ preferences were ABC, BCA, and CAB.) Hence, although each individual
voter may have a clear preference ordering over the candidates, the collective
may have cyclic preferences, so that individual and majoritarian collective
preference orderings are not analogous. While this fact is not a logical
paradox, it is perplexing to many analysts of social choice. It may also be
morally perplexing in that it suggests majority rule can be quite capricious.
For example, suppose we vote sequentially over various pairs of candidates,
with the winner at each step facing a new candidate. If the candidates are
favored by cyclic majorities, the last candidate to enter the fray will win the
final vote. Hence, control over the sequence of votes may determine the
outcome. It is easy to find cyclic preferences over such candidates as movies
and other matters of taste. Hence, the problem of the voting paradox is clearly
real and not merely a logical contrivance. But is it important? Institutions
may block the generation of evidence for cyclic majorities by making choices
pairwise and sequentially, as above. And some issues over which we vote provoke
preference patterns that cannot produce cycles. For example, if our issue is
one of unidimensional liberalism versus conservatism on some major political
issue such as welfare programs, there may be no one who would prefer to spend
both more and less money than what is spent in the status quo. Hence, everyone
may display single-peaked preferences with preferences falling as we move in
either direction (toward more money or toward less) from the peak. If all
important issues and combinations of issues had this preference structure, the
voting paradox would be unimportant. It is widely supposed by many public
choice scholars that collective preferences are not single-peaked for many
issues or, therefore, for combinations of issues. Hence, collective choices may
be quite chaotic. What order they display may result from institutional
manipulation. If this is correct, we may wonder whether democracy in the sense
of the sovereignty of the electorate is a coherent notion.
Vorstellung voting
paradox 966 966 wang, pa, Chinese
political titles meaning ‘king’ and ‘hegemon’, respectively. A true wang has
the Mandate of Heaven and rules by te rather than by force. The institution of
the pa developed during a period in which the kings of China lacked any real
power. In order to bring an end to political chaos, the most powerful of the
nobles was appointed pa, and effectively ruled while the wang reigned. During
the Warring States period in China (403–221 B.C.), rulers began to assume the
title of wang regardless of whether they had either the power of a pa or the
right to rule of a wang. After this period, the title of Emperor (ti or huang-ti)
replaced wang.
Wang Ch’ung (A.D.
27–100?), Chinese philosopher, commonly regarded as the most independent-minded
thinker in the Later Han period (25–220). He wrote the Lun-heng (“Balanced
Inquiries”). Since Tung Chung-shu, Confucian doctrine of the unity of man and
nature had degenerated into one of mutual influence, with talk of strange
phenomena and calamities abounding. Wang Ch’ung cast serious doubts on such
superstitions. He even dared to challenge the authority of Confucius and
Mencius. His outlook was naturalistic. According to him, things in the world
are produced by the interaction of material forces (ch’i). He rejected the
teleological point of view and was fatalistic.
Wang Fu-chih (1619–92),
Chinese philosopher and innovative Confucian thinker. Wang attacked the
Neo-Confucian dualism of li (pattern) and ch’i (ether), arguing that li is the
orderly structure of individual ch’i (implements/things and events), which are
composed of ch’i (ether). Wang rejected all transcendental ontology and
believed society evolves and improves over time. He is touted as a “materialist”
by Marxist thinkers in contemporary China, though the term is hardly
applicable, as is clear from his criticisms of Shao Yung. Wang attacked Shao’s
overly “objective” account of the world, arguing that all such formal
descriptions fail because they disregard intuition, our only access to the
lively, shen (spiritual) nature of the universe.
Wang Pi (A.D. 226–49),
Chinese philosopher of the Hsüan hsüeh (Mysterious Learning) School. He is
described, along with thinkers like Kuo Hsiang, as a Neo-Taoist. Unlike Kuo,
who believed the world to be self-generated, Wang claimed it arose from a
mysterious unified state called wu (non-being). But like Kuo, Wang regarded
Confucius as the one true sage, arguing that Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu only
“talked about” non-being, whereas Confucius embodied it. Wang is important for
his development of the notion li (pattern) and his pioneering use of the paired
concepts t’i (substance) and yung (function). His commentary on the Tao Te
Ching, the oldest known, has had a profound and persistent influence on later
Chinese thought.
Wang Yang-ming
(1472–1529), Chinese philosopher known for his doctrines of the unity of
knowledge and action (chih-hsing ho-i) and liangchih (innate knowledge of the
good). Wang was also known as a sort of metaphysical idealist, anticipated by
Lu Hsiang-shan, for his insistence on the quasi-identity of mind and li
(principle, reason). The basic concern of Wang’s philosophy is the question,
How can one become a Confucian sage (sheng)? This is a question intelligible
only in the light of understanding and commitment to the Confucian vision of
jen or ideal of the universe as a moral community. Wang reminded his students
that the concrete significance of such a vision in human life cannot be
exhausted with any claim to finality. He stressed that one must get rid of any
selfish desires in the pursuit of jen. Unlike Chu Hsi, Wang showed little
interest in empirical inquiry concerning the rationales of existing things. For
him, “things” are the objectives of moral will. To investigate things is to
rectify one’s mind, to get rid of evil thoughts and to do good. Rectification
of the mind involves, in particular, an acknowledgment of the unity of moral
knowledge and action (chihhsing ho-i), an enlargement of the scope of moral
concern in the light of the vision of jen, rather than extensive acquisition of
factual knowledge.
Ward, James (1843–1925),
English philosopher and psychologist. Influenced by Lotze, Herbart, and
Brentano, Ward sharply criticized Bain’s associationism and its allied
nineteenth-century reductive naturalism. His psychology rejected the
associationists’ sensationism, which regarded mind as passive, capable only of
sensory receptivity and composed solely of cognitive presentations. Ward emphasized
the mind’s inherent activity, asserting, like Kant, the prior existence of an
inferred but necessarily existing ego or subject capable of feeling and, most
importantly, of conation, shaping both experience and behavior by the willful
exercise of attention. Ward’s psychology stresses attention and will. In his
metaphysics, Ward resisted the naturalists’ mechanistic materialism, proposing
instead a teleological spiritualistic monism. While his criticisms of
associationism and naturalism were telling, Ward was a transitional figure
whose positive influence is limited, if we except H. P. Grice who follows him
to a T. Although sympathetic to scientific psychology – he founded scientific
psychology in Britain by establishing a psychology laboratory – he, with his student Stout, represented the
beginning of armchair psychology at Oxford, which Grice adored. Through Stout
he influenced the hormic psychology of McDougall, and Grice who calls himself a
Stoutian (“until Prichard converted me”). Ward’s major work is “Psychology”
(Encyclopedia Britannica, 9th ed., 1886), reworked as Psychological Principles
(1918). A
wayward causal chain, a
causal chain, referred to in a proposed causal analysis of a key concept, that
goes awry. Causal analyses have been proposed for key concepts – e.g.,
reference, action, explanation, knowledge, artwork. There are two main cases of
wayward (or deviant) causal chains that defeat a causal analysis: (1) those in
which the prescribed causal route is followed, but the expected event does not
occur; and (2) those in which the expected event occurs, but the prescribed
causal route is not followed. Consider action. One proposed analysis is that a
person’s doing something is an action if and only if what he does is caused by
his beliefs and desires. The possibility of wayward causal chains defeats this
analysis. For case (1), suppose, while climbing, John finds he is supporting
another man on a rope. John wants to rid himself of this danger, and he
believes that he can do so by loosening his grip. His belief and desire unnerve
him, causing him to loosen his hold. The prescribed causal route was followed,
but the ensuing event, his grip loosening, is not an action. For case (2),
suppose Harry wants to kill his rich uncle, and he believes that he can find
him at home. His beliefs and desires so agitate him that he drives recklessly.
He hits and kills a pedestrian, who, by chance, is his uncle. The killing
occurs, but without following the prescribed causal route; the killing was an
accidental consequence of what Harry did.
Weber, Max (1864–1920),
German social theorist and sociologist. Born in Berlin in a liberal and
intellectual household, he taught economics in Heidelberg, where his circle
included leading sociologists and philosophers such as Simmel and Lukacs.
Although Weber gave up his professorship after a nervous breakdown in 1889, he
remained important in public life, an adviser to the commissions that drafted
the peace treaty at Versailles and the Weimar constitution. Weber’s social theory
was influenced philosophically by both neo-Kantianism and Nietzsche, creating
tensions in a theorist who focused much of his attention on Occidental
rationalism and yet was a noncognitivist in ethics. He wrote many comparative
studies on topics such as law and urbanization and a celebrated study of the
cultural factors responsible for the rise of capitalism, The Protestant Ethic
and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904). But his major, synthetic work in social
theory is Economy and Society (1914); it includes a methodological introduction
to the basic concepts of sociology that has been treated by many philosophers
of social science. One of the main theoretical goals of Weber’s work is to
understand how social processes become “rationalized,” taking up certain themes
want-belief model Weber, Max 968 of the
German philosophy of history since Hegel as part of social theory. Culture,
e.g., became rationalized in the process of the “disenchantment of worldviews”
in the West, a process that Weber thought had “universal significance.” But because
of his goal-oriented theory of action and his noncognitivism in ethics, Weber
saw rationalization exclusively in terms of the spread of purposive, or
means–ends rationality (Zweckrationalität). Rational action means choosing the
most effective means of achieving one’s goals and implies judging the
consequences of one’s actions and choices. In contrast, value rationality
(Wertrationalität) consists of actions oriented to ultimate ends, where
considerations of consequences are irrelevant. Although such action is rational
insofar as it directs and organizes human conduct, the choice of such ends or
values themselves cannot be a matter for rational or scientific judgment.
Indeed, for Weber this meant that politics was the sphere for the struggle
between irreducibly competing ultimate ends, where “gods and demons fight it
out” and charismatic leaders invent new gods and values. Professional
politicians, however, should act according to an “ethics of responsibility”
(Verantwortungsethik) aimed at consequences, and not an “ethics of conviction”
(Gesinnungsethik) aimed at abstract principles or ultimate ends. Weber also
believed that rationalization brought the separation of “value spheres” that
can never again be unified by reason: art, science, and morality have their own
“logics.” Weber’s influential methodological writings reject positivist
philosophy of science, yet call for “value neutrality.” He accepts the
neo-Kantian distinction, common in his day under the influence of Rickert, between
the natural and the human sciences, between the Natur- and the
Geisteswissenschaften. Because human social action is purposive and meaningful,
the explanations of social sciences must be related to the values (Wertbezogen)
and ideals of the actors it studies. Against positivism, Weber saw an
ineliminable element of Verstehen, or understanding of meanings, in the
methodology of the human sciences. For example, he criticized the legal
positivist notion of behavioral conformity for failing to refer to actors’
beliefs in legitimacy. But for Weber Verstehen is not intuition or empathy and
does not exclude causal analysis; reasons can be causes. Thus, explanations in
social science must have both causal and subjective adequacy. Weber also
thought that adequate explanations of large-scale, macrosocial phenomena
require the construction of ideal types, which abstract and summarize the
common features of complex, empirical phenomena such as “sects,” “authority,”
or even “the Protestant ethic.” Weberian ideal types are neither merely
descriptive nor simply heuristic, but come at the end of inquiry through the
successful theoretical analysis of diverse phenomena in various historical and
cultural contexts. Weber’s analysis of rationality as the disenchantment of the
world and the spread of purposive reason led him to argue that reason and
progress could turn into their opposites, a notion that enormously influenced
critical theory. Weber had a critical “diagnosis of the times” and a
pessimistic philosophy of history. At the end of The Protestant Ethic Weber
warns that rationalism is desiccating sources of value and constructing an
“iron cage” of increasing bureaucratization, resulting in a loss of meaning and
freedom in social life. According to Weber, these basic tensions of modern
rationality cannot be resolved.
Weil, Simone (1909–43),
French religious philosopher and writer. Born in Paris, Weil was one of the
first women to graduate from the École Normale Supérieure, having earlier
studied under the philosopher Alain. While teaching in various French lycées
Weil became involved in radical leftist politics, and her early works concern
social problems and labor. They also show an attempt to work out a theory of
action as fundamental to human knowing. This is seen first in her diploma
essay, “Science and Perception in Descartes,” and later in her critique of
Marx, capitalism, and technocracy in “Reflections concerning the Causes of
Social Oppression and Liberty.” Believing that humans cannot escape certain
basic harsh necessities of embodied life, Weil sought to find a way by which
freedom and dignity could be achieved by organizing labor in such a way that
the mind could understand that necessity and thereby come to consent to it.
After a year of testing her theories by working in three factories in 1934–35,
Weil’s early optimism was shattered by the discovery of what she called
“affliction” (malheur), a destruction of the human person to which one cannot
consent. Three important religious experiences, however, caused her to attempt
to put the problem into a Weber’s law Weil, Simone 969 969 larger context. By arguing that
necessity obeys a transcendent goodness and then by using a kenotic model of
Christ’s incarnation and crucifixion, she tried to show that affliction can
have a purpose and be morally enlightening. The key is the renunciation of any
ultimate possession of power as well as the social personality constituted by
that power. This is a process of “attention” and “decreation” by which one
sheds the veil that otherwise separates one from appreciating goodness in
anything but oneself, but most especially from God. She understands God as a
goodness that is revealed in self-emptying and in incarnation, and creation as
an act of renunciation and not power. During her last months, while working for
the Free French in London, Weil’s social and religious interests came together,
especially in The Need for Roots. Beginning with a critique of social rights
and replacing it with obligations, Weil sought to show, on the one hand, how
modern societies had illegitimately become the focus of value, and on the other
hand, how cultures could be reconstructed so that they would root humans in
something more ultimate than themselves. Returning to her earlier themes, Weil
argued that in order for this rootedness to occur, physical labor must become
the spiritual core of culture. Weil died of tuberculosis while this book was in
progress. Often regarded as mystical and syncretistic, Weil’s philosophy owes
much to an original reading of Plato (e.g., in Intimations of Christianity
Among the Ancient Greeks) as well as to Marx, Alain, and Christianity. Recent
studies, however, have also seen her as significantly contributing to social,
moral, and religious philosophy. Her concern with problems of action and
persons is not dissimilar to Wittgenstein’s.
well-formed formula, a
grammatically wellformed sentence or (structured) predicate of an artificial
language of the sort studied by logicians. A well-formed formula is sometimes
known as a wff (pronounced ‘woof’) or simply a formula. Delineating the
formulas of a language involves providing it with a syntax or grammar, composed
of both a vocabulary (a specification of the symbols from which the language is
to be built, sorted into grammatical categories) and formation rules (a purely
formal or syntactical specification of which strings of symbols are
grammatically well-formed and which are not). Formulas are classified as either
open or closed, depending on whether or not they contain free variables
(variables not bound by quantifiers). Closed formulas, such as (x) (Fx / Gx),
are sentences, the potential bearers of truth-values. Open formulas, such as Fx
/ Gx, are handled in any of three ways. On some accounts, these formulas are on
a par with closed ones, the free variables being treated as names. On others,
open formulas are (structured) predicates, the free variables being treated as
place holders for terms. And on still other accounts, the free variables are
regarded as implicitly bound by universal quantifiers, again making open
formulas sentences.
Westermarck: philosopher
who spent his life studying the mores and morals of cultures. His main works,
The Origin and Development of Moral Ideas and Ethical Relativity, attack the
idea that moral principles express objective value. In defending ethical
relativism, he argued that moral judgments are based not on intellectual but on
emotional grounds. He admitted that cultural variability in itself does not
prove ethical relativism, but contended that the fundamental differences are so
comprehensive and deep as to constitute a strong presumption in favor of relativism.
wheel of
rebirth.BUDDHISM, SAMSARA. Whewell, William (1794–1866), English historian,
astronomer, and philosopher of science. He was a master of Trinity College,
Cambridge (1841–66). Francis Bacon’s early work on induction was furthered by
Whewell, J. F. W. Herschel, and J. S. Mill, who attempted to create a logic of
welfare economics Whewell, William 970
970 induction, a methodology that can both discover generalizations
about experience and prove them to be necessary. Whewell’s theory of scientific
method is based on his reading of the history of the inductive sciences. He
thought that induction began with a non-inferential act, the superimposition of
an idea on data, a “colligation,” a way of seeing facts in a “new light.”
Colligations generalize over data, and must satisfy three “tests of truth.”
First, colligations must be empirically adequate; they must account for the
given data. Any number of ideas may be adequate to explain given data, so a
more severe test is required. Second, because colligations introduce
generalizations, they must apply to events or properties of objects not yet
given: they must provide successful predictions, thereby enlarging the evidence
in favor of the colligation. Third, the best inductions are those where
evidence for various hypotheses originally thought to cover unrelated kinds of
data “jumps together,” providing a consilience of inductions. Consilience
characterizes those theories achieving large measures of simplicity,
generality, unification, and deductive strength. Furthermore, consilience is a
test of the necessary truth of theories, which implies that what many regard as
merely pragmatic virtues of theories like simplicity and unifying force have an
epistemic status. Whewell thus provides a strong argument for scientific
realism. Whewell’s examples of consilient theories are Newton’s theory of
universal gravitation, which covers phenomena as seemingly diverse as the
motions of the heavenly bodies and the motions of the tides, and the undulatory
theory of light, which explains both the polarization of light by crystals and
the colors of fringes. There is evidence that Whewell’s methodology was employed
by Maxwell, who designed the influential Cavendish Laboratories at Cambridge.
Peirce and Mach favored Whewell’s account of method over Mill’s empiricist
theory of induction.
Whitehead, A. N.
(1861–1947), English mathematician, logician, philosopher of science, and
metaphysician. Educated first at the Sherborne School in Dorsetshire and then
at Trinity College, Cambridge, Whitehead emerged as a first-class mathematician
with a rich general background. In 1885 he became a fellow of Trinity College and
remained there in a teaching role until 1910. In the early 1890s Bertrand
Russell entered Trinity College as a student in mathematics; by the beginning
of the new century Russell had become not only a student and friend but a
colleague of Whitehead’s at Trinity College. Each had written a first book on
algebra (Whitehead’s A Treatise on Universal Algebra won him election to the
Royal Society in 1903). When they discovered that their projected second books
largely overlapped, they undertook a collaboration on a volume that they
estimated would take about a year to write; in fact, it was a decade later that
the three volumes of their ground-breaking Principia Mathematica appeared,
launching symbolic logic in its modern form. In the second decade of this century
Whitehead and Russell drifted apart; their responses to World War I differed
radically, and their intellectual interests and orientations diverged.
Whitehead’s London period (1910–24) is often viewed as the second phase of a
three-phase career. His association with the University of London involved him
in practical issues affecting the character of working-class education. For a
decade (1914–24) Whitehead held a professorship at the Imperial College of
Science and Technology and also served as dean of the Faculty of Science in the
University, chair of the Academic Council (which managed educational affairs in
London), and chair of the council that managed Goldsmith’s College. His book
The Aims of Education (1928) is a collection of essays largely growing out of
reflections on the experiences of these years. Intellectually, Whitehead’s
interests were moving toward issues in the philosophy of science. In the years
1919–22 he published An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge,
The Concept of Nature, and The Principle of Relativity – the third led to his
later (1931) election as a fellow of the British Academy. In 1924, at the age
of sixty-three, Whitehead made a dramatic move, both geographically and
intellectually, to launch phase three of his career: never having formally
studied philosophy in his life, he agreed to become professor of philosophy at
Harvard University, a position he held until retirement in 1937. The
accompanying intellectual shift was a move from philosophy of science to metaphysics.
The earlier investigations had assumed the self-containedness of nature:
“nature is closed to mind.” The philosophy of nature examined nature at the
level of abstraction entailed by this assumption. Whitehead had come to regard
philosophy as “the critic of abstractions,” a notion introduced in Science and
the Modern World (1925). This book traced the intertwined emergence of
Newtonian science and its philosophical presuppositions. It noted that with the
development of the theory of relativity in the twentieth century, scientific
understanding had left behind the Newtonian conceptuality that had generated
the still-dominant philosophical assumptions, and that those philosophical
assumptions considered in themselves had become inadequate to explicate our
full concrete experience. Philosophy as the critic of abstractions must
recognize the limitations of a stance that assumes that nature is closed to
mind, and must push deeper, beyond such an abstraction, to create a scheme of
ideas more in harmony with scientific developments and able to do justice to
human beings as part of nature. Science and the Modern World merely outlines
what such a philosophy might be; in 1929 Whitehead published his magnum opus,
titled Process and Reality. In this volume, subtitled “An Essay in Cosmology,”
his metaphysical understanding is given its final form. It is customary to
regard this book as the central document of what has become known as process
philosophy, though Whitehead himself frequently spoke of his system of ideas as
the philosophy of organism. Process and Reality begins with a sentence that
sheds a great deal of light upon Whitehead’s metaphysical orientation: “These
lectures are based upon a recurrence to that phase of philosophic thought which
began with Descartes and ended with Hume.” Descartes, adapting the classical
notion of substance to his own purposes, begins a “phase of philosophic
thought” by assuming there are two distinct, utterly different kinds of
substance, mind and matter, each requiring nothing but itself in order to
exist. This assumption launches the reign of epistemology within philosophy: if
knowing begins with the experiencing of a mental substance capable of existing
by itself and cut off from everything external to it, then the philosophical
challenge is to try to justify the claim to establish contact with a reality
external to it. The phrase “and ended with Hume” expresses Whitehead’s
conviction that Hume (and more elegantly, he notes, Santayana) showed that if
one begins with Descartes’s metaphysical assumptions, skepticism is inevitable.
Contemporary philosophers have talked about the end of philosophy. From
Whitehead’s perspective such talk presupposes a far too narrow view of the
nature of philosophy. It is true that a phase of philosophy has ended, a phase
dominated by epistemology. Whitehead’s response is to offer the dictum that all
epistemological difficulties are at bottom only camouflaged metaphysical
difficulties. One must return to that moment of Cartesian beginning and replace
the substance metaphysics with an orientation that avoids the epistemological
trap, meshes harmoniously with the scientific understandings that have
displaced the much simpler physics of Descartes’s day, and is consonant with
the facts of evolution. These are the considerations that generate Whitehead’s
fundamental metaphysical category, the category of an actual occasion. An
actual occasion is not an enduring, substantial entity. Rather, it is a process
of becoming, a process of weaving together the “prehensions” (a primitive form
of ‘apprehension’ meant to indicate a “taking account of,” or “feeling,” devoid
of conscious awareness) of the actual occasions that are in the immediate past.
Whitehead calls this process of weaving together the inheritances of the past
“concrescence.” An actual entity is its process of concrescence, its process of
growing together into a unified perspective on its immediate past. (The seeds
of Whitehead’s epistemological realism are planted in these fundamental first
moves: “The philosophy of organism is the inversion of Kant’s philosophy. . . .
For Kant, the world emerges from the subject; for the philosophy of organism,
the subject emerges from the world.”) It is customary to compare an actual
occasion with a Leibnizian monad, with the caveat that whereas a monad is
windowless, an actual occasion is “all window.” It is as though one were to
take Aristotle’s system of categories and ask what would result if the category
of substance were displaced from its position of preeminence by the category of
relation – the result would, mutatis mutandis, be an understanding of being
somewhat on the model of a Whiteheadian actual occasion. In moving from
Descartes’s dualism of mental substance and material substance to his own
notion of an actual entity, Whitehead has been doing philosophy conceived of as
the critique of abstractions. He holds that both mind and matter are
abstractions from the concretely real. They are important abstractions,
necessary for everyday thought and, of supreme importance, absolutely essential
in enabling the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries to accomplish their
magnificent advances in scientific thinking. Indeed, Whitehead, in his
philosophy of science phase, by proceeding as though “nature is closed to mind,”
was operating with those selfsame abstractions. He came to see that while these
abstractions were indispensable for certain kinds of investigations, they were,
at the philosophical level, as Hume had demonstrated, a disaster. In
considering mind and matter to be ontological ultimates, Descartes had
committed what Whitehead termed the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. The
category of an actual occasion designates the fully real, the fully concrete.
The challenge for such an orientation, the challenge that Process and Reality
is designed to meet, is so to describe actual occasions that it is intelligible
how collections of actual occasions, termed “nexus” or societies, emerge,
exhibiting the characteristics we find associated with “minds” and “material structures.”
Perhaps most significantly, if this challenge is met successfully, biology will
be placed, in the eyes of philosophy, on an even footing with physics;
metaphysics will do justice both to human beings and to human beings as a part
of nature; and such vexing contemporary problem areas as animal rights and
environmental ethics will appear in a new light. Whitehead’s last two books,
Adventures of Ideas (1933) and Modes of Thought (1938), are less technical and
more lyrical than is Process and Reality. Adventures of Ideas is clearly the
more significant of these two. It presents a philosophical study of the notion
of civilization. It holds that the social changes in a civilization are driven
by two sorts of forces: brute, senseless agencies of compulsion on the one
hand, and formulated aspirations and articulated beliefs on the other. (These
two sorts of forces are epitomized by barbarians and Christianity in the
ancient Roman world and by steam and democracy in the world of the industrial
revolution.) Whitehead’s focal point in Adventures of Ideas is aspirations,
beliefs, and ideals as instruments of change. In particular, he is concerned to
articulate the ideals and aspirations appropriate to our own era. The character
of such ideals and aspirations at any moment is limited by the philosophical
understandings available at that moment, because in their struggle for release
and efficacy such ideals and aspirations can appear only in the forms permitted
by the available philosophical discourse. In the final section of Adventures of
Ideas Whitehead presents a statement of ideals and aspirations fit for our era
as his own philosophy of organism allows them to take shape and be articulated.
The notions of beauty, truth, adventure, zest, Eros, and peace are given a
content drawn from the technical understandings elaborated in Process and
Reality. But in Adventures of Ideas a less technical language is used, a
language reminiscent of the poetic imagery found in the style of Plato’s
Republic, a language making the ideas accessible to readers who have not
mastered Process and Reality, but at the same time far richer and more
meaningful to those who have. Whitehead notes in Adventures of Ideas that
Plato’s later thought “circles round the interweaving of seven main notions,
namely, The Ideas, The Physical Elements, The Psyche, The Eros, The Harmony,
The Mathematical Relations, The Receptacle. These notions are as important for
us now, as they were then at the dawn of the modern world, when civilizations
of the old type were dying.” Whitehead uses these notions in quite novel and
modern ways; one who is unfamiliar with his metaphysics can get something of
what he means as he speaks of the Eros of the Universe, but if one is familiar
from Process and Reality with the notions of the Primordial Nature of God and
the Consequent Nature of God then one sees much deeper into the meanings
present in Adventures of Ideas. Whitehead was not religious in any narrow,
doctrinal, sectarian sense. He explicitly likened his stance to that of
Aristotle, dispassionately considering the requirements of his metaphysical
system as they refer to the question of the existence and nature of God.
Whitehead’s thoughts on these matters are most fully developed in Chapter 11 of
Science and the Modern World, in the final chapter of Process and Reality, and
in Religion in the Making (1926). These thoughts are expressed at a high level
of generality. Perhaps because of this, a large part of the interest generated
by Whitehead’s thought has been within the community of theologians. His ideas
fairly beg for elaboration and development in the context of particular modes
of religious understanding. It is as though many modern theologians, recalling
the relation between the theology of Aquinas and the metaphysics of Aristotle,
cannot resist the temptation to play Aquinas to Whitehead’s Aristotle. Process
theology, or Neo-Classical Theology as it is referred to by Hartshorne, one of
its leading practitioners, has been the arena within which a great deal of clarification
and development of Whitehead’s ideas has occurred. Whitehead was a gentle man,
soft-spoken, never overbearing or threatening. He constantly encouraged
students to step out on their own, to develop their creative capacities. His
concern not to inhibit students made him a notoriously easy grader; it was said
that an A-minus in one of his courses was equivalent to failure. Lucien Price’s
Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead chronicles many evenings of discussion in
the Whitehead household. He there described Whitehead as follows: Whitehead,
Alfred North Whitehead, Alfred North 973
973 his face, serene, luminous, often smiling, the complexion pink and
white, the eyes brilliant blue, clear and candid as a child’s yet with the
depth of the sage, often laughing or twinkling with humour. And there was his
figure, slender, frail, and bent with its lifetime of a scholar’s toil. Always
benign, there was not a grain of ill will anywhere in him; for all his
formidable armament, never a wounding word.
Alnwick -- (d. 1333),
English Franciscan theologian. William studied under Duns Scotus at Paris, and
wrote the Reportatio Parisiensia, a central source for Duns Scotus’s teaching.
In his own works, William opposed Scotus on the univocity of being and
haecceitas. Some of his views were attacked by Ockham.
William of Auvergne
(c.1190–1249), French philosopher who was born in Aurillac, taught at Paris,
and became bishop of Paris in 1228. Critical of the new Aristotelianism of his
time, he insisted that the soul is an individual, immortal form of intellectual
activity alone, so that a second form was needed for the body and sensation.
Though he rejected the notion of an agent intellect, he described the soul as a
mirror that reflects both exemplary ideas in God’s mind and sensible singulars.
He conceived being as something common to everything that is, after the manner
of Duns Scotus, but rejected the Avicennan doctrine that God necessarily
produces the universe, arguing that His creative activity is free of all determination.
He is the first example of the complex of ideas we call Augustinianism, which
would pass on through Alexander of Hales to Bonaventure and other Franciscans,
forming a point of departure for the philosophy of Duns Scotus.
William of Auxerre (c.1140–1231),
French theologian and renowned teacher of grammar, arts, and theology at the
University of Paris. In 1231 he was appointed by Pope Gregory IX to a
commission charged with editing Aristotle’s writings for doctrinal purity. The
commission never submitted a report, perhaps partly due to William’s death
later that same year. William’s major work, the Summa aurea (1215–20),
represents one of the earliest systematic attempts to reconcile the Augustinian
and Aristotelian traditions in medieval philosophy. William tempers, e.g., the
Aristotelian concession that human cognition begins with the reception in the
material intellect of a species or sensible representation from a corporeal
thing, with the Augustinian idea that it is not possible to understand the
principles of any discipline without an interior, supernatural illumination. He
also originated the theological distinction between perfect happiness, which is
uncreated and proper to God, and imperfect happiness, which pertains to human
beings. William was also one of the first to express what became, in later
centuries, the important distinction between God’s absolute and ordained
powers, taking, with Gilbert of Poitiers, the view that God could, absolutely
speaking, change the past. The Summa aurea helped shape the thought of several
important philosophers and theologians who were active later in the century,
including Albertus Magnus, Bonaventure, and Aquinas. William remained an
authority in theological discussions throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries.
William of Moerbeke
(c.1215–1286), French scholar who was the most important thirteenth century
translator from Greek into Latin of works in philosophy and natural science.
Having joined the Dominicans and spent some time in Greek-speaking territories,
William served at the papal court and then as (Catholic) archbishop of Corinth
(1278–c.1286). But he worked from the 1260s on as a careful and literal-minded
translator. William was the first to render into Latin white horse paradox
William of Moerbeke 974 974 some of the
most important works by Aristotle, including the Politics, Poetics, and History
of Animals. He retranslated or revised earlier translations of several other
Aristotelian works. William also provided the first Latin versions of
commentaries on Aristotle by Alexander of Aphrodisias, Themistius, Ammonius,
John Philoponus, and Simplicius, not to mention his efforts on behalf of Greek
optics, mathematics, and medicine. When William provided the first Latin
translation of Proclus’s Elements of Theology, Western readers could at last
recognize the Liber de causis as an Arabic compilation from Proclus rather than
as a work by Aristotle.
Williams: B. A. O.
London-born Welsh philosopher who has made major contributions to many fields
but is primarily known as a moral philosopher. His approach to ethics, set out
in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985), is characterized by a
wide-ranging skepticism, directed mainly at the capacity of academic moral
philosophy to further the aim of reflectively living an ethical life. One line
of skeptical argument attacks the very idea of practical reason. Attributions
of practical reasons to a particular agent must, in Williams’s view, be
attributions of states that can potentially explain the agent’s action.
Therefore such reasons must be either within the agent’s existing set of
motivations or within the revised set of motivations that the agent would
acquire upon sound reasoning. Williams argues from these minimal assumptions
that this view of reasons as internal reasons undermines the idea of reason
itself being a source of authority over practice. Williams’s connected
skepticism about the claims of moral realism is based both on his general
stance toward realism and on his view of the nature of modern societies. In
opposition to internal realism, Williams has consistently argued that
reflection on our conception of the world allows one to develop a conception of
the world maximally independent of our peculiar ways of conceptualizing reality
– an absolute conception of the world. Such absoluteness is, he argues, an
inappropriate aspiration for ethical thought. Our ethical thinking is better
viewed as one way of structuring a form of ethical life than as the ethical
truth about how life is best lived. The pervasive reflectiveness and radical
pluralism of modern societies makes them inhospitable contexts for viewing
ethical concepts as making knowledge available to groups of concept users.
Modernity has produced at the level of theory a distortion of our ethical
practice, namely a conception of the morality system. This view is
reductionist, is focused centrally on obligations, and rests on various
fictions about responsibility and blame that Williams challenges in such works
as Shame and Necessity (1993). Much academic moral philosophy, in his view, is
shaped by the covert influence of the morality system, and such distinctively
modern outlooks as Kantianism and utilitarianism monopolize the terms of
contemporary debate with insufficient attention to their origin in a distorted
view of the ethical. Williams’s views are not skeptical through and through; he
retains a commitment to the values of truth, truthfulness in a life, and
individualism. His most recent work, which thematizes the long-implicit influence
of Nietzsche on his ethical philosophy, explicitly offers a vindicatory
“genealogical” narrative for these ideals.
Wilson, J. C. Oxonian
philosopher, like Grice. Cook Wilson studied with T. H. Green before becoming
Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford and leading the Oxford reaction against
the then entrenched absolute idealism. More influential as a tutor than as a
writer, his major oeuvre, Statement and Inference, was posthumously
reconstructed from drafts of papers, philosophical correspondence, and an
extensive set of often inconsistent lectures for his logic courses. A staunch
critic of Whitehead’s mathematical logic, Wilson conceived of logic as the
study of thinking, an activity unified by the fact that thinking either is
knowledge or depends on knowledge (“What we know we kow”). Wilson claims that
knowledge involves apprehending an object that in most cases is independent of
the act of apprehension and that knowledge is indefinable without circularity,
views he defended by appealing to common usage. Many of Wilson’s ideas are
disseminated by H. W. B. Joseph, especially in his “Logic.” Rejecting “symbolic
logic,” Joseph attempts to reinvigorate traditional logic conceived along
Wilsonian lines. To do so Joseph combined a careful exposition of Aristotle
with insights drawn from idealistic logicians. Besides Joseph, Wilson
decisively influenced a generation of Oxford philosophers including Prichard
and Ross, and Grice who explores the ‘interrogative subordination’ in the
account of ‘if.’ (“Who killed Cock Robin”).
Windelband, Wilhelm
(1848–1915), German philosopher and originator of Baden neoKantianism. He
studied under Kuno Fischer (1824–1907) and Lotze, and was professor at Zürich,
Freiburg, Strasbourg, and Heidelberg. Windelband gave Baden neo-Kantianism its
distinctive mark of Kantian axiology as the core of critical philosophy. He is
widely recognized for innovative work in the history of philosophy, in which
problems rather than individual philosophers are the focus and organizing
principle of exposition. He is also known for his distinction, first drawn in
“Geschichte und Naturwissenschaft” (“History and Natural Science,” 1894), between
the nomothetic knowledge that most natural sciences seek (the discovery of
general laws in order to master nature) and the idiographic knowledge that the
historical sciences pursue (description of individual and unique aspects of
reality with the aim of self-affirmation). His most important student, and
successor at Heidelberg, was Heinrich Rickert (1863– 1936), who made lasting
contributions to the methodology of the historical sciences. NEO-KANTIANISM. H.v.d.L. wisdom, an
understanding of the highest principles of things that functions as a guide for
living a truly exemplary human life. From the preSocratics through Plato this
was a unified notion. But Aristotle introduced a distinction between
theoretical wisdom (sophia) and practical wisdom (phronesis), the former being
the intellectual virtue that disposed one to grasp the nature of reality in
terms of its ultimate causes (metaphysics), the latter being the ultimate
practical virtue that disposed one to make sound judgments bearing on the
conduct of life. The former invoked a contrast between deep understanding
versus wide information, whereas the latter invoked a contrast between sound
judgment and mere technical facility. This distinction between theoretical and
practical wisdom persisted through the Middle Ages and continues to our own
day, as is evident in our use of the term ‘wisdom’ to designate both knowledge
of the highest kind and the capacity for sound judgment in matters of conduct.
Vitters, Ludwig
(1889–1951), Vienna-born philosopher (trained as an enginner at Manchester),
one of the most original and challenging philosophical writers of the twentieth
century. Born in Vienna into an assimilated family of Jewish extraction, he
went to England as a student and eventually became a protégé of Russell’s at
Cambridge. He returned to Austria at the beginning of The Great War I, but went
back to Cambridge in 1928 and taught there as a fellow and professor. Despite
spending much of his professional life in England, Wittgenstein never lost
contact with his Austrian background, and his writings combine in a unique way
ideas derived from both the insular and the continental European tradition. His
thought is strongly marked by a deep skepticism about philosophy, but he
retained the conviction that there was something important to be rescued from
the traditional enterprise. In his Blue Book (1958) he referred to his own work
as “one of the heirs of the subject that used to be called philosophy.” What
strikes readers first when they look at Wittgenstein’s writings is the peculiar
form of their composition. They are generally made up of short individual notes
that are most often numbered in sequence and, in the more finished writings,
evidently selected and arranged with the greatest care. Those notes range from
fairly technical discussions on matters of logic, the mind, meaning,
understanding, acting, seeing, mathematics, and knowledge, to aphoristic
observations about ethics, culture, art, and the meaning of life. Because of
their wide-ranging character, their unusual perspective on things, and their
often intriguing style, Wittgenstein’s writings have proved to appeal to both
professional philosophers and those interested in philosophy in a more general
way. The writings as well as his unusual life and personality have already
produced a large body of interpretive literature. But given his uncompromising
stand, it is questionable whether his thought will ever be fully integrated
into academic philosophy. It is more likely that, like Pascal and Nietzsche, he
will remain an uneasy presence in philosophy. From an early date onward
Wittgenstein was greatly influenced by the idea that philosophical problems can
be resolved by paying attention to the working of language – a thought he may
have gained from Fritz Mauthner’s Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache
(1901–02). Wittgenstein’s affinity to Mauthner is, indeed, evident in all
phases of his philosophical development, though it is particularly noticeable
in his later thinking.Until recently it has been common to divide
Wittgenstein’s work into two sharply distinct phases, separated by a prolonged
period of dormancy. According to this schema the early (“Tractarian”) period is
that of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), which Wittgenstein wrote in
the trenches of World War I, and the later period that of the Philosophical
Investigations (1953), which he composed between 1936 and 1948. But the
division of his work into these two periods has proved misleading. First, in
spite of obvious changes in his thinking, Wittgenstein remained throughout
skeptical toward traditional philosophy and persisted in channeling
philosophical questioning in a new direction. Second, the common view fails to
account for the fact that even between 1920 and 1928, when Wittgenstein abstained
from actual work in philosophy, he read widely in philosophical and
semiphilosophical authors, and between 1928 and 1936 he renewed his interest in
philosophical work and wrote copiously on philosophical matters. The posthumous
publication of texts such as The Blue and Brown Books, Philosophical Grammar,
Philosophical Remarks, and Conversations with the Vienna Circle has led to
acknowledgment of a middle period in Wittgenstein’s development, in which he
explored a large number of philosophical issues and viewpoints – a period that
served as a transition between the early and the late work. Early period. As
the son of a greatly successful industrialist and engineer, Wittgenstein first
studied engineering in Berlin and Manchester, and traces of that early training
are evident throughout his writing. But his interest shifted soon to pure
mathematics and the foundations of mathematics, and in pursuing questions about
them he became acquainted with Russell and Frege and their work. The two men
had a profound and lasting effect on Wittgenstein even when he later came to
criticize and reject their ideas. That influence is particularly noticeable in
the Tractatus, which can be read as an attempt to reconcile Russell’s atomism
with Frege’s apriorism. But the book is at the same time moved by quite
different and non-technical concerns. For even before turning to systematic
philosophy Wittgenstein had been profoundly moved by Schopenhauer’s thought as
it is spelled out in The World as Will and Representation, and while he was
serving as a soldier in World War I, he renewed his interest in Schopenhauer’s
metaphysical, ethical, aesthetic, and mystical outlook. The resulting
confluence of ideas is evident in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and gives
the book its peculiar character. Composed in a dauntingly severe and compressed
style, the book attempts to show that traditional philosophy rests entirely on
a misunderstanding of “the logic of our language.” Following in Frege’s and
Russell’s footsteps, Wittgenstein argued that every meaningful sentence must
have a precise logical structure. That structure may, however, be hidden
beneath the clothing of the grammatical appearance of the sentence and may
therefore require the most detailed analysis in order to be made evident. Such
analysis, Wittgenstein was convinced, would establish that every meaningful
sentence is either a truth-functional composite of another simpler sentence or
an atomic sentence consisting of a concatenation of simple names. He argued
further that every atomic sentence is a logical picture of a possible state of
affairs, which must, as a result, have exactly the same formal structure as the
atomic sentence that depicts it. He employed this “picture theory of meaning” –
as it is usually called – to derive conclusions about the nature of the world
from his observations about the structure of the atomic sentences. He
postulated, in particular, that the world must itself have a precise logical
structure, even though we may not be able to determine it completely. He also
held that the world consists primarily of facts, corresponding to the true
atomic sentences, rather than of things, and that those facts, in turn, are
concatenations of simple objects, corresponding to the simple names of which
the atomic sentences are composed. Because he derived these metaphysical
conclusions from his view of the nature of language, Wittgenstein did not
consider it essential to describe what those simple objects, their
concatenations, and the facts consisting of them are actually like. As a
result, there has been a great deal of uncertainty and disagreement among
interpreters about their character. The propositions of the Tractatus are for
the most part concerned with spelling out Wittgenstein’s account of the logical
structure of language and the world and these parts of the book have
understandably been of most interest to philosophers who are primarily
concerned with questions of symbolic logic and its applications. But for
Wittgenstein himself the most important part of the book consisted of the
negative conclusions about philosophy that he reaches at the end of his text:
in particular, that all sentences that are not atomic pictures of
concatenations of objects or truth-functional composites of such are strictly
speaking meaningless. Among these he included all the propositions of ethics
and aesthetics, all propositions dealing with the meaning of life, all
propositions of logic, indeed all philosophical propositions, and finally all
the propositions of the Tractatus itself. These are all strictly meaningless;
they aim at saying something important, but what they try to express in words
can only show itself. As a result Wittgenstein concluded that anyone who
understood what the Tractatus was saying would finally discard its propositions
as senseless, that she would throw away the ladder after climbing up on it.
Someone who reached such a state would have no more temptation to pronounce
philosophical propositions. She would see the world rightly and would then also
recognize that the only strictly meaningful propositions are those of natural
science; but those could never touch what was really important in human life,
the mystical. That would have to be contemplated in silence. For “whereof one
cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,” as the last proposition of the
Tractatus declared. Middle period. It was only natural that Wittgenstein should
not embark on an academic career after he had completed that work. Instead he
trained to be a school teacher and taught primary school for a number of years
in the mountains of lower Austria. In the mid-1920s he also built a house for
his sister; this can be seen as an attempt to give visual expression to the
logical, aesthetic, and ethical ideas of the Tractatus. In those years he developed
a number of interests seminal for his later development. His school experience
drew his attention to the way in which children learn language and to the whole
process of enculturation. He also developed an interest in psychology and read
Freud and others. Though he remained hostile to Freud’s theoretical
explanations of his psychoanalytic work, he was fascinated with the analytic
practice itself and later came to speak of his own work as therapeutic in
character. In this period of dormancy Wittgenstein also became acquainted with
the members of the Vienna Circle, who had adopted his Tractatus as one of their
key texts. For a while he even accepted the positivist principle of meaning
advocated by the members of that Circle, according to which the meaning of a
sentence is the method of its verification. This he would later modify into the
more generous claim that the meaning of a sentence is its use. Wittgenstein’s
most decisive step in his middle period was to abandon the belief of the
Tractatus that meaningful sentences must have a precise (hidden) logical
structure and the accompanying belief that this structure corresponds to the
logical structure of the facts depicted by those sentences. The Tractatus had,
indeed, proceeded on the assumption that all the different symbolic devices
that can describe the world must be constructed according to the same
underlying logic. In a sense, there was then only one meaningful language in
the Tractatus, and from it one was supposed to be able to read off the logical structure
of the world. In the middle period Wittgenstein concluded that this doctrine
constituted a piece of unwarranted metaphysics and that the Tractatus was
itself flawed by what it had tried to combat, i.e., the misunderstanding of the
logic of language. Where he had previously held it possible to ground
metaphysics on logic, he now argued that metaphysics leads the philosopher into
complete darkness. Turning his attention back to language he concluded that
almost everything he had said about it in the Tractatus had been in error.
There were, in fact, many different languages with many different structures
that could meet quite different specific needs. Language was not strictly held
together by logical structure, but consisted, in fact, of a multiplicity of
simpler substructures or language games. Sentences could not be taken to be
logical pictures of facts and the simple components of sentences did not all
function as names of simple objects. These new reflections on language served
Wittgenstein, in the first place, as an aid to thinking about the nature of the
human mind, and specifically about the relation between private experience and
the physical world. Against the existence of a Cartesian mental substance, he
argued that the word ‘I’ did not serve as a name of anything, but occurred in
expressions meant to draw attention to a particular body. For a while, at
least, he also thought he could explain the difference between private
experience and the physical world in terms of the existence of two languages, a
primary language of experience and a secondary language of physics. This
duallanguage view, which is evident in both the Philosophical Remarks and The
Blue Book, Wittgenstein was to give up later in favor of the assumption that
our grasp of inner phenomena is dependent on the existence of outer criteria.
From the mid-1930s onward he also renewed his interest in the philosophy of
mathematics. In contrast to Frege and Russell, he argued strenuously that no
part of mathematics is reducible purely to logic. Instead he set out to
describe mathematics as part of our natural history and as consisting of a
number of diverse language games. He also insisted that the meaning of those
games depended on the uses to which the mathematical formulas were put. Applying
the principle of verification to mathematics, he held that the meaning of a
mathematical formula lies in its proof. These remarks on the philosophy of
mathematics have remained among Wittgenstein’s most controversial and least
explored writings. Later period. Wittgenstein’s middle period was characterized
by intensive philosophical work on a broad but quickly changing front. By 1936,
however, his thinking was finally ready to settle down once again into a
steadier pattern, and he now began to elaborate the views for which he became
most famous. Where he had constructed his earlier work around the logic devised
by Frege and Russell, he now concerned himself mainly with the actual working
of ordinary language. This brought him close to the tradition of British common
sense philosophy that Moore had revived and made him one of the godfathers of
the ordinary language philosophy that was to flourish in Oxford in the 1950s.
In the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein emphasized that there are
countless different uses of what we call “symbols,” “words,” and “sentences.”
The task of philosophy is to gain a perspicuous view of those multiple uses and
thereby to dissolve philosophical and metaphysical puzzles. These puzzles were
the result of insufficient attention to the working of language and could be
resolved only by carefully retracing the linguistic steps by which they had
been reached. Wittgenstein thus came to think of philosophy as a descriptive,
analytic, and ultimately therapeutic practice. In the Investigations he set out
to show how common philosophical views about meaning (including the logical
atomism of the Tractatus), about the nature of concepts, about logical
necessity, about rule-following, and about the mind–body problem were all the
product of an insufficient grasp of how language works. In one of the most
influential passages of the book he argued that concept words do not denote
sharply circumscribed concepts, but are meant to mark family resemblances
between the things labeled with the concept. He also held that logical
necessity results from linguistic convention and that rules cannot determine
their own applications, that rule-following presupposes the existence of
regular practices. Furthermore, the words of our language have meaning only
insofar as there exist public criteria for their correct application. As a
consequence, he argued, there cannot be a completely private language, i.e., a
language that in principle can be used only to speak about one’s own inner
experience. This private language argument has caused much discussion.
Interpreters have disagreed not only over the structure of the argument and
where it occurs in Wittgenstein’s text, but also over the question whether he
meant to say that language is necessarily social. Because he said that to speak
of inner experiences there must be external and publicly available criteria, he
has often been taken to be advocating a logical behaviorism, but nowhere does
he, in fact, deny the existence of inner states. What he says is merely that
our understanding of someone’s pain is connected to the existence of natural
and linguistic expressions of pain. In the Philosophical Investigations
Wittgenstein repeatedly draws attention to the fact that language must be
learned. This learning, he says, is fundamentally a process of inculcation and
drill. In learning a language the child is initiated in a form of life. In
Wittgenstein’s later work the notion of form of life serves to identify the
whole complex of natural and cultural circumstances presupposed by our language
and by a particular understanding of the world. He elaborated those ideas in
notes on which he worked between 1948 and his death in 1951 and which are now
published under the title On Certainty. He insisted in them that every belief
is always part of a system of beliefs that together constitute a worldview. All
confirmation and disconfirmation of a belief presuppose such a system and are
internal to the system. For all this he was not advocating a relativism, but a
naturalism that assumes that the world ultimately determines which language
games can be played. Wittgenstein’s final notes vividly illustrate the
continuity of his basic concerns throughout all the changes his thinking went
through. For they reveal once more how he remained skeptical about all
philosophical theories and how he understood his own undertaking as the attempt
to undermine the need for any such theorizing. The considerations of On
Certainty are evidently directed against both philosophical skeptics and those philosophers
who want to refute skepticism. Against the philosophical skeptics Wittgenstein
insisted that there is real knowledge, but this knowledge is always dispersed
and not necessarily reliable; it consists of things we have heard and read, of
what has been drilled into us, and of our modifications of this inheritance. We
have no general reason to doubt this inherited Wittgenstein, Ludwig
Wittgenstein, Ludwig 979 979 body of
knowledge, we do not generally doubt it, and we are, in fact, not in a position
to do so. But On Certainty also argues that it is impossible to refute
skepticism by pointing to propositions that are absolutely certain, as
Descartes did when he declared ‘I think, therefore I am’ indubitable, or as
Moore did when he said, “I know for certain that this is a hand here.” The fact
that such propositions are considered certain, Wittgenstein argued, indicates
only that they play an indispensable, normative role in our language game; they
are the riverbed through which the thought of our language game flows. Such
propositions cannot be taken to express metaphysical truths. Here, too, the
conclusion is that all philosophical argumentation must come to an end, but
that the end of such argumentation is not an absolute, self-evident truth, but
a certain kind of natural human practice.
wodeham: Oxonian
philosopher, like Grice. Adam de (c. 1295–1358), English Franciscan
philosopher-theologian who lectured on Peter Lombard’s Sentences at London,
Norwich, and Oxford. His published works include the Tractatus de
indivisibilibus; his Lectura secunda (Norwich lectures); and an abbreviation of
his Oxford lectures by Henry Totting of Oyta, published by John Major in 1512.
Wodeham’s main work, the Oxford lectures, themselves remain unpublished. A
brilliant interpreter of Duns Scotus, whose original manuscripts he consulted,
Wodeham deemed Duns Scotus the greatest Franciscan doctor. William Ockham,
Wodeham’s teacher, was the other great influence on Wodeham’s philosophical
theology. Wodeham defended Ockham’s views against attacks mounted by Walter
Chatton; he also wrote the prologue to Ockham’s Summa logicae. Wodeham’s own
influence rivaled that of Ockham. Among the authors he strongly influenced are
Gregory of Rimini, John of Mirecourt, Nicholas of Autrecourt, Pierre d’Ailly,
Peter Ceffons, Alfonso Vargas, Peter of Candia (Alexander V), Henry Totting of
Oyta, and John Major. Wodeham’s theological works were written for an audience
with a very sophisticated understanding of current issues in semantics, logic,
and medieval mathematical physics. Contrary to Duns Scotus and Ockham, Wodeham
argued that the sensitive and intellective souls were not distinct. He further
develops the theory of intuitive cognition, distinguishing intellectual
intuition of our own acts of intellect, will, and memory from sensory intuition
of external objects. Scientific knowledge based on experience can be based on
intuition, according to Wodeham. He distinguishes different grades of evidence,
and allows that sensory perceptions may be mistaken. Nonetheless, they can form
the basis for scientific knowledge, since they are reliable; mistakes can be
corrected by reason and experience. In semantic theory, Wodeham defends the
view that the immediate object of scientific knowledge is the complexe
significabile, that which the conclusion is designed to signify. DUNS SCOTUS, OCKHAM, PETER LOMBARD. R.W.
wolff, Christian
(1679–1754), German philosopher and the most powerful advocate for secular
rationalism in early eighteenth-century Germany. Although he was a Lutheran,
his early education in Catholic Breslau made him familiar with both the
Scholasticism of Aquinas and Suárez and more modern sources. His later studies
at Leipzig were completed with a dissertation on the application of
mathematical methods to ethics (1703), which brought him to the attention of
Leibniz. He remained in correspondence with Leibniz until the latter’s death
(1716), and became known as the popularizer of Leibniz’s philosophy, although
his views did not derive from that source alone. Appointed to teach mathematics
in Halle in 1706 (he published mathematical textbooks and compendia that
dominated German universities for decades), Wolff began lecturing on philosophy
as well by 1709. His rectoral address On the Practical Philosophy of the
Chinese (1721) argued that revelation and even belief in God were unnecessary
for arriving at sound principles of moral and political reasoning; this brought
his uneasy relations with the Halle Pietists to a head, and in 1723 they
secured his dismissal and indeed banishment. Wolff was immediately welcomed in
Marburg, where he became a hero for freedom of thought, and did not return to
Prussia until the ascension of Frederick the Great in 1740, when he resumed his
post at Halle. Wolff published an immense series of texts on logic,
metaphysics, ethics, politics, natural theology, and teleology (1713–24), in
which he created the philosophical terminology of modern German; he then
published an even more extensive series of works in Latin for the rest of his
life, expanding and modifying his German works but also adding works on natural
and positive law and economics (1723–55). He accepted the traWodeham, Adam de
Wolff, Christian 980 980 ditional
division of logic into the doctrines of concepts, judgment, and inference,
which influenced the organization of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781–87)
and even Hegel’s Science of Logic(1816). In metaphysics, he included general
ontology and then the special disciplines of rational cosmology, rational
psychology, and rational theology (Kant replaced Wolff’s general ontology with
his transcendental aesthetic and analytic, and then demolished Wolff’s special
metaphysics in his transcendental dialectic). Wolff’s metaphysics drew heavily
on Leibniz, but also on Descartes and even empiricists like Locke.
Methodologically, he attempted to derive the principle of sufficient reason
from the logical law of identity (like the unpublished Leibniz of the 1680s
rather than the published Leibniz of the 1700s); substantively, he began his
German metaphysics with a reconstruction of Descartes’s cogito argument, then
argued for a simple, immaterial soul, all of its faculties reducible to forms
of representation and related to body by preestablished harmony. Although
rejected by Crusius and then Kant, Wolff’s attempt to found philosophy on a
single principle continued to influence German idealism as late as Reinhold,
Fichte, and Hegel, and his example of beginning metaphysics from the unique
representative power of the soul continued to influence not only later writers
such as Reinhold and Fichte but also Kant’s own conception of the
transcendental unity of apperception. In spite of the academic influence of his
metaphysics, Wolff’s importance for German culture lay in his rationalist
rather than theological ethics. He argued that moral worth lies in the perfection
of the objective essence of mankind; as the essence of a human is to be an
intellect and a will (with the latter dependent on the former), which are
physically embodied and dependent for their well-being on the well-being of
their physical body, morality requires perfection of the intellect and will,
physical body, and external conditions for the well-being of that combination.
Each person is obliged to perfect all instantiations of this essence, but in
practice does so most effectively in his own case; duties to oneself therefore
precede duties to others and to God. Because pleasure is the sensible sign of
perfection, Wolff’s perfectionism resembles contemporary utilitarianism. Since
he held that human perfection can be understood by human reason independently
of any revelation, Wolff joined contemporary British enlighteners such as
Shaftesbury and Hutcheson in arguing that morality does not depend on divine
commands, indeed the recognition of divine commands depends on an antecedent
comprehension of morality (although morality does require respect for God, and
thus the atheistic morality of the Chinese, even though sound as far as it
went, was not complete). This was the doctrine that put Wolff’s life in danger,
but it had tremendous repercussions for the remainder of his century, and
certainly in Kant.
wollaston, William
(1659–1724), English moralist notorious for arguing that the immorality of
actions lies in their implying false propositions. An assistant headmaster who
later took priestly orders, Wollaston maintains in his one published work, The
Religion of Nature Delineated (1722), that the foundations of religion and
morality are mutually dependent. God has preestablished a harmony between
reason (or truth) and happiness, so that actions that contradict truth through
misrepresentation thereby frustrate human happiness and are thus evil. For
instance, if a person steals another’s watch, her falsely representing the
watch as her own makes the act wrong. Wollaston’s views, particularly his
taking morality to consist in universal and necessary truths, were influenced
by the rationalists Ralph Cudworth and Clarke. Among his many critics the most
famous was Hume, who contends that Wollaston’s theory implies an absurdity: any
action concealed from public view (e.g., adultery) conveys no false proposition
and therefore is not immoral.
Wollstonecraft, Mary
(1759–97), English author and feminist whose A Vindication of the Rights of
Women (1792) is a central text of feminist philosophy. Her chief target is Rousseau:
her goal is to argue against the separate and different education Rousseau
provided for girls and to extend his recommendations to girls as well as boys.
Wollstonecraft saw such an improved education for women as necessary to their
asserting their right as “human creatures” to develop their faculties in a way
conducive to human virtue. She also wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790), an attack on Edmund Burke’s pamphlet on the French Revolution, as well
as novels, essays, an account of her travels, and books for children. FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY. M.At. woof.WELL-FORMED
FORMULA. works, justification by.JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH. Wollaston, William
works, justification by 981 981
worldline.SPACE-TIME. worldview.DILTHEY.
wright, C: philosopher. His
philosophical discussions are stimulating and attracted many, including Peirce,
James, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who thinks of him as their “intellectual
boxing master.” Wright eventually accepted empiricism, especially that of J. S.
Mill, though under Darwinian influence he modified Mill’s view considerably by
rejecting the empiricist claim that general propositions merely summarize
particulars. Wright claims instead that scientific theories are hypotheses to
be further developed, and insisted that a moral rule is irreducible and needs
no utilitarian “proof.” Though he denied the “summary” view of universals, he
is not strictly a pragmatist, since for him a low-level empirical proposition
like Peirce’s ‘this diamond is hard’ is not a hypothesis but a self-contained
irreducible statement. PEIRCE,
PRAGMATISM.
wu.YU, WU. wu-hsing,
Chinese term meaning ‘five phases, processes, or elements’. The five phases –
earth, wood, metal, fire, and water – along with yin and yang, were the basis
of Chinese correlative cosmologies developed in the Warring States period
(403–221 B.C.) and early Han dynasty (206 B.C.– A.D. 220). These cosmologies
posited a relation between the human world and the natural order. Thus the five
phases were correlated to patterns in human history such as the cyclical rise
and fall of dynasties, to sociopolitical order and the monthly rituals of
rulers, to musical notes and tastes, even to organs of the body. Whereas the
goal of early cosmologists such as Tsou Yen was to bring the human order into
harmony with the natural order via the five phases, Han dynasty cosmologists
and immortality seekers sought to control nature and prolong life by
manipulating the five phases, particularly within the body.
Wundt: Wilhelm Maximilien
(1832–1920), German philosopher and psychologist, a founder of scientific
psychology. Although trained as a physician, he turned to philosophy and in
1879, at the University of Leipzig, established the first recognized psychology
laboratory. For Wundt, psychology was the science of conscious experience, a
definition soon overtaken by behaviorism. Wundt’s psychology had two
departments: the so-called physiological psychology (Grundzuge der
physiologischen Psychologie, 3 vols., 1873– 74; only vol. 1 of the fifth
edition, 1910, was translated into English), primarily the experimental study
of immediate experience broadly modeled on Fechner’s psychophysics; and the
Volkerpsychologie (Volkerpsychologie, 10 vols., 1900–20; fragment translated as
The Language of Gestures, 1973), the non-experimental study of the higher
mental processes via their products, language, myth, and custom. Although Wundt
was a prodigious investigator and author, and was revered as psychology’s
founder, his theories, unlike his methods, exerted little influence. A typical
German scholar of his time, he also wrote across the whole of philosophy, including
logic and ethics. .
wu wei, Chinese
philosophical term often translated as ‘non-action’ and associated with Taoism.
It is actually used in both Taoist and non-Taoist texts to describe an ideal
state of existence or ideal form of government, interpreted differently in
different texts. In the Chuang Tzu, it describes a state of existence in which
one is not guided by preconceived goals or projects, including moral ideals; in
the Lao Tzu, it refers to the absence of striving toward worldly goals, and
also describes the ideal form of government, which does not teach or impose on
the people standards of behavior, including those of conventional morality. In
other texts, it is sometimes used to describe the effortlessness of moral
action, and sometimes used to refer to the absence of any need for active
participation in government by the ruler, resulting either from the appointment
of worthy and able officials inspired by the moral example of the ruler, or
from the establishment of an effective machinery of government presided over by
a ruler with prestige. TAOISM. K.-l.S.
Wyclif, John (c.1330–84), English theologian and religious reformer. He worked
for most of his life in Oxford as a secular clerk, teaching philosophy and
later theology and writing extensively in both fields. The mode of thought
expressed in his surviving works is one of extreme realism, and in this his
thought fostered the split of Bohemian, later Hussite, philosophy from that of
the German masters teaching in Prague. His worldline Wyclif, John 982 982 philosophical summa was most influential
for his teaching on universals, but also dealt extensively with the question of
determinism; these issues underlay his later handling of the questions of the
Eucharist and of the identity of the church respectively. His influence on
English philosophy was severely curtailed by the growing hostility of the
church to his ideas, the condemnation of many of his tenets, the persecution of
his followers, and the destruction of his writings. A.Hu. Wyclif, John Wyclif,
John 983 983 Xenocrates.ACADEMY.
Xenophanes (c.570–c.475 B.C.), Greek philosopher, a proponent of an idealized
conception of the divine, and the first of the pre-Socratics to propound
epistemological views. Born in Colophon, an Ionian Greek city on the coast of
Asia Minor, he emigrated as a young man to the Greek West (Sicily and southern
Italy). The formative influence of the Milesians is evident in his rationalism.
He is the first of the pre-Socratics for whom we have not only ancient reports
but also quite a few verbatim quotations – fragments from his “Lampoons”
(Silloi) and from other didactic poetry. Xenophanes attacks the worldview of
Homer, Hesiod, and traditional Greek piety: it is an outrage that the poets
attribute moral failings to the gods. Traditional religion reflects regional
biases (blond gods for the Northerners; black gods for the Africans). Indeed, anthropomorphic
gods reflect the ultimate bias, that of the human viewpoint (“If cattle, or
horses, or lions . . . could draw pictures of the gods . . . ,” frg. 15). There
is a single “greatest” god, who is not at all like a human being, either in
body or in mind; he perceives without the aid of organs, he effects changes
without “moving,” through the sheer power of his thought. The rainbow is no
sign from Zeus; it is simply a special cloud formation. Nor are the sun or the
moon gods. All phenomena in the skies, from the elusive “Twin Sons of Zeus”
(St. Elmo’s fire) to sun, moon, and stars, are varieties of cloud formation.
There are no mysterious infernal regions; the familiar strata of earth stretch
down ad infinitum. The only cosmic limit is the one visible at our feet: the
horizontal border between earth and air. Remarkably, Xenophanes tempers his
theological and cosmological pronouncements with an epistemological caveat:
what he offers is only a “conjecture.” In later antiquity Xenophanes came to be
regarded as the founder of the Eleatic School, and his teachings were
assimilated to those of Parmenides and Melissus. This appears to be based on
nothing more than Xenophanes’ emphasis on the oneness and utter immobility of
God.
Xenophon (c.430–c.350
B.C.), Greek soldier and historian, author of several Socratic dialogues, along
with important works on history, education, political theory, and other topics.
He was interested in philosophy, and he was a penetrating and intelligent
“social thinker” whose views on morality and society have been influential over
many centuries. His perspective on Socrates’ character and moral significance
provides a valuable supplement and corrective to the better-known views of
Plato. Xenophon’s Socratic dialogues, the only ones besides Plato’s to survive
intact, help us obtain a broader picture of the Socratic dialogue as a literary
genre. They also provide precious evidence concerning the thoughts and
personalities of other followers of Socrates, such as Antisthenes and Alcibiades.
Xenophon’s longest and richest Socratic work is the Memorabilia, or “Memoirs of
Socrates,” which stresses Socrates’ self-sufficiency and his beneficial effect
on his companions. Xenophon’s Apology of Socrates and his Symposium were
probably intended as responses to Plato’s Apology and Symposium. Xenophon’s
Socratic dialogue on estate management, the Oeconomicus, is valuable for its
underlying social theory and its evidence concerning the role and status of
women in classical Athens.
yang.YIN, YANG. Yang Chu,
also called Yang Tzu (c.370–319 B.C.), Chinese philosopher most famous for the
assertion, attributed to him by Mencius, that one ought not sacrifice even a
single hair to save the whole world. Widely criticized as a selfish egotist and
hedonist, Yang Chu was a private person who valued bodily integrity, health,
and longevity over fame, fortune, and power. He believed that because one’s
body and lifespan were bestowed by Heaven (t’ien), one has a duty (and natural
inclination) to maintain bodily health and live out one’s years. Far from
sanctioning hedonistic indulgence, this Heavenimposed duty requires discipline.
Yang Hsiung (53 B.C.–A.D.
18), Chinese philosopher who wrote two books: Tai-hsüan ching (“Classic of the
Supremely Profound Principle”), an imitation of the I-Ching, and Fa-yen (“Model
Sayings”), an imitation of the Analects. The former was ignored by his
contemporaries, but the latter was quite popular in his time. His thoughts were
eclectic. He was the first in the history of Chinese thought to advance the
doctrine of human nature as a mixture of good and evil in order to avoid the
extremes of Mencius and Hsün Tzu.
Yen Yuan (1635–1704),
Chinese traditionalist and social critic. Like Wang Fu-chih, he attacked
Neo-Confucian metaphysical dualism, regarding the Neo-Confucians’ views as wild
speculations obscuring the true nature of Confucianism. Chu Hsi interpreted ko
wu (investigating things) as discovering some transcendent “thing” called li
(pattern), and Wang Yang-ming understood ko wu as rectifying one’s thoughts,
but Yen argued it meant a kind of knowledge by acquaintance: the “hands-on”
practice of traditional rituals and disciplines. As “proof” that Sung–Ming
Confucians were wrong, Yen pointed to their social and political failures. Like
many, he believed Confucianism was not only true but efficacious as well;
failure to reform the world could be understood only as a personal failure to grasp
and implement the Way. .
yi, Chinese term probably
with an earlier meaning of ‘sense of honor’, subsequently used to refer to the
fitting or right way of conducting oneself (when so used, it is often
translated as ‘rightness’ or ‘duty’), as well as to a commitment to doing what
is fitting or right (when so used, it is often translated as ‘righteousness’ or
‘dutifulness’). For Mohists, yi is determined by what benefits (li) the public,
where benefit is understood in terms of such things as order and increased
resources in society. For Confucians, while yi behavior is often behavior in
accordance with traditional norms, it may also call for departure from such
norms. Yi is determined not by specific rules of conduct, but by the proper
weighing (chüan) of relevant considerations in a given context of action. Yi in
the sense of a firm commitment to doing what is fitting or right, even in
adverse circumstances, is an important component of the Confucian ethical
ideal.
yin, yang, metaphors used
in the classical tradition of Chinese philosophy to express contrast and
difference. Originally they designated the shady side and the sunny side of a
hill, and gradually came to suggest the way in which one thing “overshadows”
another in some particular aspect of their relationship. Yin and yang are not
“principles” or “essences” that help classify things; rather, they are ad hoc
explanatory categories that report on relationships and interactions among
immediate concrete things of the world. Yin and yang always describe the
relationships that are constitutive of unique particulars, and provide a
vocabulary for “reading” the distinctions that obtain among them. The
complementary nature of the opposition captured in this pairing expresses the
mutuality, interdependence, diversity, and creative efficacy of the dynamic
relationships that are deemed immanent in and valorize the world. The full
range of difference in the world is deemed explicable 985 Y 985 through this pairing.
yü, Chinese term meaning
‘desire’. One can feel yü toward sex objects or food, but one can also yü to be
a more virtuous person. Yü is paired contrastively with wu (aversion), which
has a similarly broad range of objects. After the introduction of Buddhism into
China, some thinkers contended that the absence of yü and wu was the goal of
self-cultivation. Generally, however, the presence of at least some yü and wu
has been thought to be essential to moral perfection. B.W.V.N. yu, wu, Chinese
terms literally meaning ‘having’ and ‘nothing’, respectively; they are often
rendered into English as ‘being’ and ‘non-being’. But the Chinese never developed
the mutually contradictory concepts of Being and Non-Being in Parmenides’
sense. In chapter 2 of Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu says that “being (yu) and
non-being (wu) produce each other.” They appear to be a pair of interdependent
concepts. But in chapter 40 Lao Tzu also says that “being comes from
non-being.” It seems that for Taoism non-being is more fundamental than being,
while for Confucianism the opposite is true. The two traditions were seen to be
complementary by later scholars.
yung, Chinese term usually translated as
‘courage’ or ‘bravery’. Different forms of yung are described in Chinese
philosophical texts, such as a readiness to avenge an insult or to compete with
others, or an absence of fear. Confucians advocate an ideal form of yung guided
by rightness (yi). A person with yung of the ideal kind is fully committed to
rightness, and will abide by rightness even at the risk of death. Also,
realizing upon self-examination that there is no fault in oneself, the person
will be without fear or uncertainty.
Zabarella:
a proto-Griceain – H. P. Grice. Jacopo (1532–89), Italian Aristotelian
philosopher who taught at the University of Padua. He wrote extensive
commentaries on Aristotle’s Physics and On the Soul and also discussed other
interpreters such as Averroes. However, his most original contribution was his
work in logic, Opera logica (1578). Zabarella regards logic as a preliminary
study that provides the tools necessary for philosophical analysis. Two such
tools are order and method: order teaches us how to organize the content of a
discipline to apprehend it more easily; method teaches us how to draw
syllogistic inferences. Zabarella reduces the varieties of orders and methods
classified by other interpreters to compositive and resolutive orders and
methods. The compositive order from first principles to their consequences
applies to theoretical disciplines. The resolutive order from a desired end to
means appropriate to its achievement applies to practical disciplines. This
much was already in Aristotle. Zabarella offers an original analysis of method.
The compositive method infers particular consequences from general principles.
The resolutive method infers originating principles from particular
consequences, as in inductive reasoning or in reasoning from effect to cause.
It has been suggested that Zabarella’s terminology might have influenced
Galileo’s mechanics.
Zeigarnik effect:
‘Conversation as a compete task and the Zeigmaik effect’ – H. P. Grice. the
selective recall of uncompleted tasks in comparison to completed tasks. The
effect was named for Bluma Zeigarnik, a student of K. Lewin, who discovered it
and described it in a paper published in the Psychologische Forschung in 1927.
Subjects received an array of short tasks, such as counting backward and
stringing beads, for rapid completion. Performance on half of these was
interrupted. Subsequent recall for the tasks favored the interrupted tasks.
Zeigarnik concluded that recall is influenced by motivation and not merely
associational strength. The effect was thought relevant to Freud’s claim that
unfulfilled wishes are persistent. Lewin attempted to derive the effect from
field theory, suggesting that an attempt to reach a goal creates a tension
released only when that goal is reached; interruption of the attempt produces a
tension favoring recall. Conditions affecting the Zeigarnik effect are
incompletely understood, as is its significance.
Zeno’s
paradoxes: “Linguistic puzzles, in nature.” – H. P. Grice. four
paradoxes relating to space and motion attributed to Zeno of Elea (fifth
century B.C.): the racetrack, Achilles and the tortoise, the stadium, and the
arrow. Zeno’s work is known to us through secondary sources, in particular
Aristotle. The racetrack paradox. If a runner is to reach the end of the track,
he must first complete an infinite number of different journeys: getting to the
midpoint, then to the point midway between the midpoint and the end, then to
the point midway between this one and the end, and so on. But it is logically
impossible for someone to complete an infinite series of journeys. Therefore
the runner cannot reach the end of the track. Since it is irrelevant to the
argument how far the end of the track is – it could be a foot or an inch or a
micron away – this argument, if sound, shows that all motion is impossible.
Moving to any point will involve an infinite number of journeys, and an
infinite number of journeys cannot be completed. The paradox of Achilles and
the tortoise. Achilles can run much faster than the tortoise, so when a race is
arranged between them the tortoise is given a lead. Zeno argued that Achilles
can never catch up with the tortoise no matter how fast he runs and no matter
how long the race goes on. For the first thing Achilles has to do is to get to
the place from which the tortoise started. But the tortoise, though slow, is
unflag987 Z 987 ging: while Achilles
was occupied in making up his handicap, the tortoise has advanced a little
farther. So the next thing Achilles has to do is to get to the new place the
tortoise occupies. While he is doing this, the tortoise will have gone a little
farther still. However small the gap that remains, it will take Achilles some
time to cross it, and in that time the tortoise will have created another gap.
So however fast Achilles runs, all that the tortoise has to do, in order not to
be beaten, is not to stop. The stadium paradox. Imagine three equal cubes, A,
B, and C, with sides all of length l, arranged in a line stretching away from
one. A is moved perpendicularly out of line to the right by a distance equal to
l. At the same time, and at the same rate, C is moved perpendicularly out of
line to the left by a distance equal to l. The time it takes A to travel l/2
(relative to B) equals the time it takes A to travel to l (relative to C). So,
in Aristotle’s words, “it follows, he [Zeno] thinks, that half the time equals
its double” (Physics 259b35). The arrow paradox. At any instant of time, the
flying arrow “occupies a space equal to itself.” That is, the arrow at an
instant cannot be moving, for motion takes a period of time, and a temporal
instant is conceived as a point, not itself having duration. It follows that
the arrow is at rest at every instant, and so does not move. What goes for
arrows goes for everything: nothing moves. Scholars disagree about what Zeno
himself took his paradoxes to show. There is no evidence that he offered any
“solutions” to them. One view is that they were part of a program to establish
that multiplicity is an illusion, and that reality is a seamless whole. The
argument could be reconstructed like this: if you allow that reality can be
successively divided into parts, you find yourself with these insupportable
paradoxes; so you must think of reality as a single indivisible One.
zoroastrianism: H.
P. Grice wrote, “Thus Implicated Zarahustra, the national religion of ancient
Iran. Zoroastrianism suffered a steep decline after the seventh century A.D.
because of conversion to Islam. Of a remnant of roughly 100,000 adherents
today, three-fourths are Parsis (“Persians)” in or from western India; the
others are Iranian Zoroastrians. The tradition is identified with its prophet;
his name in Persian, Zarathushtra, is preserved in German, but the ancient
Greek rendering of that name, Zoroaster, is the form used in most other modern
European languages. Zoroaster’s hymns to Ahura Mazda (“the Wise Lord”), called
the Gathas, are interspersed among ritual hymns to other divine powers in the
collection known as the Avesta. In them, Zoroaster seeks reassurance that good
will ultimately triumph over evil and that Ahura Mazda will be a protector to
him in his prophetic mission. The Gathas expect that humans, by aligning
themselves with the force of righteousness and against evil, will receive bliss
and benefit in the next existence. The dating of the texts and of the prophet
himself is an elusive matter for scholars, but it is clear that Zoroaster lived
somewhere in Iran sometime prior to the emergence of the Achaemenid empire in
the sixth century B.C. His own faith in Ahura Mazda, reflected in the Gathas,
came to be integrated with other strains of old Indo-Iranian religion. We see
these in the Avesta’s hymns and the religion’s ritual practices. They venerate
an array of Iranian divine powers that resemble in function the deities found
in the Vedas of India. A common Indo-Iranian heritage is indicated conclusively
by similarities of language and of content between the Avesta and the Vedas.
Classical Zoroastrian orthodoxy does not replace the Indo-Iranian divinities
with Ahura Mazda, but instead incorporates them into its thinking more or less
as Ahura Mazda’s agents. The Achaemenid kings from the sixth through the fourth
centuries B.C. mention Ahura Mazda in their inscriptions, but not Zoroaster.
The Parthians, from the third century B.C. to the third century A.D.,
highlighted Mithra among the Indo-Iranian pantheon. But it was under the
Sasanians, who ruled Iran from the third to the seventh centuries, that
Zoroastrianism became the established religion. A salient doctrine is the
teaching concerning the struggle between good and evil. The time frame from the
world’s creation to the final resolution or judgment finds the Wise Lord, Ahura
Mazda (or Ohrmazd, in the Pahlavi language of Sasanian times), locked in a
struggle with the evil spirit, Angra Mainyu (in Pahlavi, Ahriman). The teaching
expands on an implication in the text of the Gathas, particularly Yasna 30,
that the good and evil spirits, coming together in the beginning and
establishing the living and inanimate realms, determined that at the end
benefit would accrue to the righteous but not the wicked. In Sasanian times,
there was speculative concern to assert Ahura Mazda’s infinity, omnipotence,
and omniscience, qualities that may indicate an impact of Mediterranean
philosophy. For example, the Bundahishn, a Pahlavi cosmological and
eschatological narrative, portrays Ahura Mazda as infinite in all four compass
directions but the evil spirit as limited in one and therefore doomed to
ultimate defeat. Such doctrine has been termed by some dualistic, in that it
has (at least in Sasanian times) seen the power of God rivaled by that of an
evil spirit. Zoroastrians today assert that they are monotheists, and do not
worship the evil spirit. But to the extent that the characterization may hold
historically, Zoroastrianism has manifested an “ethical” dualism, of good and
evil forces. Although capable of ritual pollution through waste products and
decay, the physical world, God’s creation, remains potentially morally good.
Contrast “ontological” dualism, as in gnostic and Manichaean teaching, where
the physical world itself is the result of the fall or entrapment of spirit in
matter. In the nineteenth century, Zoroastrian texts newly accessible to Europe
produced an awareness of the prophet’s concern for ethical matters. Nietzsche’s
values in his work Thus Spake Zarathustra, however, are his own, not those of
the ancient prophet. The title is arresting, but the connection of Nietzsche
with historical Zoroastrianism is a connection in theme only, in that the work
advances ideas about good and evil in an oracular style.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment