A Grice Dictionary -- In Six Volumes, Vol. III.

SPEECH ACT THEORY. feminist epistemology, epistemology from a feminist perspective. It investigates the relevance that the gender of the inquirer/knower has to epistemic practices, including the theoretical practice of epistemology. It is typified both by themes that are exclusively feminist in that they could arise only from a critical attention to gender, and by themes that are non-exclusively feminist in that they might arise from other politicizing theoretical perspectives besides feminism. A central, exclusively feminist theme is the relation between philosophical conceptions of reason and cultural conceptions of masculinity. Here a historicist stance must be adopted, so that philosophy is conceived as the product of historically and culturally situated (hence gendered) authors. This stance brings certain patterns of intellectual association into view – patterns, perhaps, of alignment between philosophical conceptions of reason as contrasted with emotion or intuition, and cultural conceptions of masculinity as contrasted with femininity. A central, non-exclusively feminist theme might be called “social-ism” in epistemology. It has two main tributaries: political philosophy, in the form of Marx’s historical materialism; and philosophy of science, in the form of either Quinean naturalism or Kuhnian historicism. The first has resulted in feminist standpoint theory, which adapts and develops the Marxian idea that different social groups have different epistemic standpoints, where the material positioning of one of the groups is said to bestow an epistemic privilege. The second has resulted in feminist work in philosophy of science which tries to show that not only epistemic values but also non-epistemic (e.g. gendered) values are of necessity sometimes an influence in the generation of scientific theories. If this can be shown, then an important feminist project suggests itself: to work out a rationale for regulating the influence of these values so that science may be more self-transparent and more responsible. By attempting to reveal the epistemological implications of the fact that knowers are diversely situated in social relations of identity and power, feminist epistemology represents a radicalizing innovation in the analytic tradition, which has typically assumed an asocial conception of the epistemic subject, and of the philosopher.  EPISTEMOLOGY, FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY, KUHN, MARXISM, QUINE. M.F. feminist philosophy, a discussion of philosophical concerns that refuses to identify the human experience with the male experience. Writing from a variety of perspectives, feminist philosophers challenge several areas of traditional philosophy on the grounds that they fail (1) to take seriously women’s interests, identities, and issues; and (2) to recognize women’s ways of being, thinking, and doing as valuable as those of men. Feminist philosophers fault traditional metaphysics for splitting the self from the other and the mind from the body; for wondering whether “other minds” exist and whether personal identity depends more on memories or on physical characteristics. Because feminist philosophers reject all forms of ontological dualism, they stress the ways in which individuals interpenetrate each other’s psyches through empathy, and the ways in which the mind and body coconstitute each other. Because Western culture has associated rationality with “masculinity” and emotionality with “femininity,” traditional epistemologists have often concluded that women are less human than men. For this reason, feminist philosophers argue that reason and emotion are symbiotically related, coequal sources of knowledge. Feminist philosophers also argue that Cartesian knowledge, for all its certainty and clarity, is very limFechner’s law feminist philosophy 305 4065A-  AM  305 ited. People want to know more than that they exist; they want to know what other people are thinking and feeling. Feminist philosophers also observe that traditional philosophy of science is not as objective as it claims to be. Whereas traditional philosophers of science often associate scientific success with scientists’ ability to control, rule, and otherwise dominate nature, feminist philosophers of science associate scientific success with scientists’ ability to listen to nature’s self-revelations. Since it willingly yields abstract theory to the testimony of concrete fact, a science that listens to what nature says is probably more objective than one that does not. Feminist philosophers also criticize traditional ethics and traditional social and political philosophy. Rules and principles have dominated traditional ethics. Whether agents seek to maximize utility for the aggregate or do their duty for the sake of duty, they measure their conduct against a set of universal, abstract, and impersonal norms. Feminist philosophers often call this traditional view of ethics a “justice” perspective, contrasting it with a “care” perspective that stresses responsibilities and relationships rather than rights and rules, and that attends more to a moral situation’s particular features than to its general implications. Feminist social and political philosophy focus on the political institutions and social practices that perpetuate women’s subordination. The goals of feminist social and political philosophy are (1) to explain why women are suppressed, repressed, and/or oppressed in ways that men are not; and (2) to suggest morally desirable and politically feasible ways to give women the same justice, freedom, and equality that men have. Liberal feminists believe that because women have the same rights as men do, society must provide women with the same educational and occupational opportunities that men have. Marxist feminists believe that women cannot be men’s equals until women enter the work force en masse and domestic work and child care are socialized. Radical feminists believe that the fundamental causes of women’s oppression are sexual. It is women’s reproductive role and/or their sexual role that causes their subordination. Unless women set their own reproductive goals (childlessness is a legitimate alternative to motherhood) and their own sexual agendas (lesbianism, autoeroticism, and celibacy are alternatives to heterosexuality), women will remain less than free. Psychoanalytic feminists believe that women’s subordination is the result of earlychildhood experiences that cause them to overdevelop their abilities to relate to other people on the one hand and to underdevelop their abilities to assert themselves as autonomous agents on the other. Women’s greatest strength, a capacity for deep relationships, may also be their greatest weakness: a tendency to be controlled by the needs and wants of others. Finally, existentialist feminists claim that the ultimate cause of women’s subordination is ontological. Women are the Other; men are the Self. Until women define themselves in terms of themselves, they will continue to be defined in terms of what they are not: men. Recently, socialist feminists have attempted to weave these distinctive strands of feminist social and political thought into a theoretical whole. They argue that women’s condition is overdetermined by the structures of production, reproduction and sexuality, and the socialization of children. Women’s status and function in all of these structures must change if they are to achieve full liberation. Furthermore, women’s psyches must also be transformed. Only then will women be liberated from the kind of patriarchal thoughts that undermine their self-concept and make them always the Other. Interestingly, the socialist feminist effort to establish a specifically feminist standpoint that represents how women see the world has not gone without challenge. Postmodern feminists regard this effort as an instantiation of the kind of typically male thinking that tells only one story about reality, truth, knowledge, ethics, and politics. For postmodern feminists, such a story is neither feasible nor desirable. It is not feasible because women’s experiences differ across class, racial, and cultural lines. It is not desirable because the “One” and the “True” are philosophical myths that traditional philosophy uses to silence the voices of the many. Feminist philosophy must be many and not One because women are many and not One. The more feminist thoughts, the better. By refusing to center, congeal, and cement separate thoughts into a unified and inflexible truth, feminist philosophers can avoid the pitfalls of traditional philosophy. As attractive as the postmodern feminist approach to philosophy may be, some feminist philosophers worry that an overemphasis on difference and a rejection of unity may lead to intellectual as well as political disintegration. If feminist philosophy is to be without any standpoint whatsoever, it becomes difficult to ground claims about what is good for women in particufeminist philosophy feminist philosophy 306 4065A-  AM  306 lar and for human beings in general. It is a major challenge to contemporary feminist philosophy, therefore, to reconcile the pressures for diversity and difference with those for integration and commonality.  ETHICS, EXISTENTIALISM, MARXISM, POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, POSTMODERN. R.T. Ferguson, Adam (1723–1816), Scottish philosopher and historian. His main theme was the rise and fall of virtue in individuals and societies. In his most important work, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1766), he argued that human happiness (of which virtue is a constituent) is found in pursuing social goods rather than private ends. Ferguson thought that ignoring social goods not only prevented social progress but led to moral corruption and political despotism. To support this he used classical texts and travelers’ writings to reconstruct the history of society from “rude nations” through barbarism to civilization. This allowed him to express his concern for the danger of corruption inherent in the increasing selfinterest manifested in the incipient commercial civilization of his day. He attempted to systematize his moral philosophy in The Principles of Moral and Social Science (1792). J.W.A. Fermat’s last theorem.CHOICE SEQUENCE. Feuerbach, Ludwig Andreas (1804–72), German materialist philosopher and critic of religion. He provided the major link between Hegel’s absolute idealism and such later theories of historical materialism as those of Marx and other “young (or new) Hegelians.” Feuerbach was born in Bavaria and studied theology, first at Heidelberg and then Berlin, where he came under the philosophical influence of Hegel. He received his doctorate in 1828 and, after an early publication severely critical of Christianity, retired from official German academic life. In the years between 1836 and 1846, he produced some of his most influential works, which include “Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy” (1839), The Essence of Christianity (1841), Principles of the Philosophy of the Future (1843), and The Essence of Religion (1846). After a brief collaboration with Marx, he emerged as a popular champion of political liberalism in the revolutionary period of 1848. During the reaction that followed, he again left public life and died dependent upon the support of friends. Feuerbach was pivotal in the intellectual history of the nineteenth century in several respects. First, after a half-century of metaphysical system construction by the German idealists, Feuerbach revived, in a new form, the original Kantian project of philosophical critique. However, whereas Kant had tried “to limit reason in order to make room for faith,” Feuerbach sought to demystify both faith and reason in favor of the concrete and situated existence of embodied human consciousness. Second, his “method” of “transformatory criticism” – directed, in the first instance, at Hegel’s philosophical pronouncements – was adopted by Marx and has retained its philosophical appeal. Briefly, it suggested that “Hegel be stood on his feet” by “inverting” the subject and predicate in Hegel’s idealistic pronouncements. One should, e.g., rewrite “The individual is a function of the Absolute” as “The Absolute is a function of the individual.” Third, Feuerbach asserted that the philosophy of German idealism was ultimately an extenuation of theology, and that theology was merely religious consciousness systematized. But since religion itself proves to be merely a “dream of the human mind,” metaphysics, theology, and religion can be reduced to “anthropology,” the study of concrete embodied human consciousness and its cultural products. The philosophical influence of Feuerbach flows through Marx into virtually all later historical materialist positions; anticipates the existentialist concern with concrete embodied human existence; and serves as a paradigm for all later approaches to religion on the part of the social sciences.  HEGEL, KANT, MARX, MARXISM. J.P.Su. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb (1762–1814), German philosopher. He was a proponent of an uncompromising system of transcendental idealism, the Wissenschaftslehre, which played a key role in the development of post-Kantian philosophy. Born in Saxony, Fichte studied at Jena and Leipzig. The writings of Kant led him to abandon metaphysical determinism and to embrace transcendental idealism as “the first system of human freedom.” His first book, Versuch einer Kritik aller Offenbarung (“Attempt at a Critique of all Revelations,” 1792), earned him a reputation as a brilliant exponent of Kantianism, while his early political writings secured him a reputation as a Jacobin. Inspired by Reinhold, Jacobi, Maimon, and Schulze, Fichte rejected the “letter” of Kantianism and, in the lectures and writings he produced at Jena (1794–99), advanced a new, rigorously systematic presentation of what he took to be its Ferguson, Adam Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 307 4065A-  AM  307 “spirit.” He dispensed with Kant’s things-inthemselves, the original duality of faculties, and the distinction between the transcendental aesthetic and the transcendental analytic. By emphasizing the unity of theoretical and practical reason in a way consistent with “the primacy of practical reason,” Fichte sought to establish the unity of the critical philosophy as well as of human experience. In Ueber den Begriff der Wissenschaftslehre (“On the Concept of the Wissenschaftslehre,” 1794) he explained his conception of philosophy as “the science of science,” to be presented in a deductive system based on a self-evident first principle. The basic “foundations” of this system, which Fichte called Wissenschaftslehre (theory of science), were outlined in his Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre (“Foundations of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre,” 1794–95) and Grundriß der Eigentümlichen der Wissenschaftslehre in Rücksicht auf das theoretische Vermögen (“Outline of the Distinctive Character of the Wissenschaftslehre with respect to the Theoretical Faculty,” 1795) and then, substantially revised, in his lectures on Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo (1796–99). The “foundational” portion of the Wissenschaftslehrelinks our affirmation of freedom to our experience of natural necessity. Beginning with the former (“the I simply posits itself”), it then demonstrates how a freely self-positing subject must be conscious not only of itself, but also of “representations accompanied by a feeling of necessity” and hence of an objective world. Fichte insisted that the essence of selfhood lies in an active positing of its own self-identity and hence that self-consciousness is an auto-productive activity: a Tathandlung or “fact/act.” However, the I can posit itself only as limited; in order for the originally posited act of “sheer self-positing” to occur, certain other mental acts must occur as well, acts through which the I posits for itself an objective, spatiotemporal world, as well as a moral realm of free, rational beings. The I first posits its own limited condition in the form of “feeling” (occasioned by an inexplicable Anstob or “check” upon its own practical striving), then as a “sensation,” then as an “intuition” of a thing, and finally as a “concept.” The distinction between the I and the not-I arises only in these reiterated acts of self-positing, a complete description of which thus amounts to a “genetic deduction” of the necessary conditions of experience. Freedom is thereby shown to be possible only in the context of natural necessity, where it is limited and finite. At the same time “our freedom is a theoretical determining principle of our world.” Though it must posit its freedom “absolutely” – i.e., schlechthin or “for no reason” – a genuinely free agent can exist only as a finite individual endlessly striving to overcome its own limits. After establishing its “foundations,” Fichte extended his Wissenschaftslehre into social and political philosophy and ethics. Subjectivity itself is essentially intersubjective, inasmuch as one can be empirically conscious of oneself only as one individual among many and must thus posit the freedom of others in order to posit one’s own freedom. But for this to occur, the freedom of each individual must be limited; indeed, “the concept of right or justice (Recht) is nothing other than the concept of the coexistence of the freedom of several rational/sensuous beings.” The Grundlage des Naturrechts (“Foundations of Natural Right,” 1796–97) examines how individual freedom must be externally limited if a community of free individuals is to be possible, and demonstrates that a just political order is a demand of reason itself, since “the concept of justice or right is a condition of self-consciousness.” “Natural rights” are thus entirely independent of moral duties. Unlike political philosophy, which purely concerns the public realm, ethics, which is the subject of Das System der Sittenlehre (“The System of Ethical Theory,” 1798), concerns the inner realm of conscience. It views objects not as given to consciousness but as produced by free action, and concerns not what is, but what ought to be. The task of ethics is to indicate the particular duties that follow from the general obligation to determine oneself freely (the categorical imperative). Before Fichte could extend the Wissenschaftslehre into the philosophy of religion, he was accused of atheism and forced to leave Jena. The celebrated controversy over his alleged atheism (the Atheismusstreit) was provoked by “Ueber den Grund unseres Glaubens in einer göttliche Weltregierung” (“On the Basis of our Belief in a Divine Governance of the World,” 1798), in which he sharply distinguished between philosophical and religious questions. While defending our right to posit a “moral world order,” Fichte insisted that this order does not require a personal deity or “moral lawgiver.” After moving to Berlin, Fichte’s first concern was to rebut the charge of atheism and to reply to the indictment of philosophy as “nihilism” advanced in Jacobi’s Open Letter to Fichte (1799). This was the task of Die Bestimmung des Menschen (“The Vocation of Man,” 1800). During the French occupation, he delivered Reden an die deutsche Nation (“Addresses to the German Fichte, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 308 4065A-  AM  308 Nation,” 1808), which proposed a program of national education and attempted to kindle German patriotism. The other publications of his Berlin years include a foray into political economy, Der geschlossene Handelstaat (“The Closed Commercial State,” 1800); a speculative interpretation of human history, Die Grundzüge des gegenwärtiges Zeitalters (“The Characteristics of the Present Age,” 1806); and a mystically tinged treatise on salvation, Die Anweisung zum seligen Leben (“Guide to the Blessed Life,” 1806). In unpublished private lectures he continued to develop radically new versions of the Wissenschaftslehre. Fichte’s substantial influence was not limited to his well-known influence on Schelling and Hegel (both of whom criticized the “subjectivism” of the early Wissenschaftslehre). He is also important in the history of German nationalism and profoundly influenced the early Romantics, especially Novalis and Schlegel. Recent decades have seen renewed interest in Fichte’s transcendental philosophy, expecially the later, unpublished versions of the Wissenschaftslehre. This century’s most significant contribution to Fichte studies, however, is the ongoing publication of the first critical edition of his complete works.  HEGEL, IDEALISM, KANT. D.Br. Ficino, Marsilio (1433–99), Italian Neoplatonic philosopher who played a leading role in the cultural life of Florence. Ordained a priest in 1473, he hoped to draw people to Christ by means of Platonism. It was through Ficino’s translation and commentaries that the works of Plato first became accessible to the Latin-speaking West, but the impact of Plato’s work was considerably affected by Ficino’s other interests. He accepted Neoplatonic interpretations of Plato, including those of Plotinus, whom he translated; and he saw Plato as the heir of Hermes Trismegistus, a mythical Egyptian sage and supposed author of the hermetic corpus, which he translated early in his career. He embraced the notion of a prisca theologia, an ancient wisdom that encapsulated philosophic and religious truth, was handed on to Plato, and was later validated by the Christian revelation. The most popular of his original works was Three Books on Life (1489), which contains the fullest Renaissance exposition of a theory of magic, based mainly on Neoplatonic sources. He postulated a living cosmos in which the World-Soul is linked to the world-body by spirit. This relationship is mirrored in man, whose spirit (or astral body) links his body and soul, and the resulting correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm allows both man’s control of natural objects through magic and his ascent to knowledge of God. Other popular works were his commentary on Plato’s Symposium (1469), which presents a theory of Platonic love; and his Platonic Theology (1474), in which he argues for the immortality of the soul.  NEOPLATONISM. E.J.A. fiction, in the widest usage, whatever contrasts with what is a matter of fact. As applied to works of fiction, however, this is not the appropriate contrast. For a work of fiction, such as a historical novel, might turn out to be true regarding its historical subject, without ceasing to be fiction. The correct contrast of fiction is to non-fiction. If a work of fiction might turn out to be true, how is ‘fiction’ best defined? According to some philosophers, such as Searle, the writer of nonfiction performs illocutionary speech acts, such as asserting that such-and-such occurred, whereas the writer of fiction characteristically only pretends to perform these illocutionary acts. Others hold that the core idea to which appeal should be made is that of making-believe or imagining certain states of affairs. Kendall Walton (Mimesis as Make-Believe, 1990), for instance, holds that a work of fiction is to be construed in terms of a prop whose function is to serve in games of make-believe. Both kinds of theory allow for the possibility that a work of fiction might turn out to be true.  AESTHETICS, IMAGINATION, PHILOSOPHY OF LITERATURE, SPEECH ACT THEORY. B.Ga. fiction, logical.LOGICAL CONSTRUCTION. fictionalism.DUHEM. fideism.EVIDENTIALISM. “Fido” – Fido theory of meaning.MEANING. field (of a relation).RELATION. field theory, a theory that proceeds by assigning values of physical quantities to the points of space, or of space-time, and then lays down laws relating these values. For example, a field theory might suppose a value for matter density, or a temperature for each space-time point, and then relate these values, usually in terms of differential equations. In these examples there is at least the tacit assumption of a physical substance that fills the relevant region of space-time. But no such assumption need be made. For instance, in Ficino, Marsilio field theory 309 4065A-  AM  309 Maxwell’s theory of the electromagnetic field, each point of space-time carries a value for an electric and a magnetic field, and these values are then governed by Maxwell’s equations. In general relativity, the geometry (e.g., the curvature) of space-time is itself treated as a field, with lawlike connections with the distribution of energy and matter. Formulation in terms of a field theory resolves the problem of action at a distance that so exercised Newton and his contemporaries. We often take causal connection to require spatial contiguity. That is, for one entity to act causally on another, the two entities need to be contiguous. But in Newton’s description gravitational attraction acts across spatial distances. Similarly, in electrostatics the mutual repulsion of electric charges is described as acting across spatial distances. In the times of both Newton and Maxwell numerous efforts to understand such action at a distance in terms of some space-filling mediating substance produced no viable theory. Field theories resolve the perplexity. By attributing values of physical quantities directly to the space-time points one can describe gravitation, electrical and magnetic forces, and other interactions without action at a distance or any intervening physical medium. One describes the values of physical quantities, attributed directly to the space-time points, as influencing only the values at immediately neighboring points. In this way the influences propagate through space-time, rather than act instantaneously across distances or through a medium. Of course there is a metaphysical price: on such a description the space-time points themselves take on the role of a kind of dematerialized ether. Indeed, some have argued that the pervasive role of field theory in contemporary physics and the need for space-time points for a field-theoretic description constitute a strong argument for the existence of the space-time points. This conclusion contradicts “relationalism,” which claims that there are only spatiotemporal relations, but no space-time points or regions thought of as particulars. Quantum field theory appears to take on a particularly abstract form of field theory, since it associates a quantum mechanical operator with each space-time point. However, since operators correspond to physical magnitudes rather than to values of such magnitudes, it is better to think of the field-theoretic aspect of quantum field theory in terms of the quantum mechanical amplitudes that it also associates with the space-time points.  EINSTEIN, NEWTON, PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE, QUANTUM MECHANICS, SPACETIME. P.Te. figure.SYLLOGISM. figure–ground, the discrimination of an object or figure from the context or background against which it is set. Even when a connected region is grouped together properly, as in the famous figure that can be seen either as a pair of faces or as a vase, it is possible to interpret the region alternately as figure and as ground. This fact was originally elaborated in 1921 by Edgar Rubin (1886– 1951). Figure–ground effects and the existence of other ambiguous figures such as the Necker cube and the duck–rabbit challenged the prevailing assumption in classical theories of perception – maintained, e.g., by J. S. Mill and H. von Helmholtz – that complex perceptions could be understood in terms of primitive sensations constituting them. The underdetermination of perception by the visual stimulus, noted by Berkeley in his Essay of 1709, takes account of the fact that the retinal image is impoverished with respect to threedimensional information. Identical stimulation at the retina can result from radically different distal sources. Within Gestalt psychology, the Gestalt, or pattern, was recognized to be underdetermined by constituent parts available in proximal stimuli. M. Wertheimer (1880–1943) observed in 1912 that apparent motion could be induced by viewing a series of still pictures in rapid succession. He concluded that perception of the whole, as involving movement, was fundamentally different from the perception of the static images of which it is composed. W. Köhler An example of visual reversal from Edgar Rubin: the object depicted can be seen alternately as a vase or as a pair of faces. The reversal occurs whether there is a black ground and white figure or white figure and black ground. figure figure – ground 310 4065A-  AM  310 (1887–1967) observed that there was no figure– ground articulation in the retinal image, and concluded that inherently ambiguous stimuli required some autonomous selective principles of perceptual organization. As subsequently developed by Gestalt psychologists, form is taken as the primitive unit of perception. In philosophical treatments, figure–ground effects are used to enforce the conclusion that interpretation is central to perception, and that perceptions are no more than hypotheses based on sensory data.  KÖHLER, PERCEPTION. R.C.R. Filmer, Robert (1588–1653), English political writer who produced, most importantly, the posthumous Patriarcha (1680). It is remembered because Locke attacked it in the first of his Two Treatises of Government (1690). Filmer argued that God gave complete authority over the world to Adam, and that from him it descended to his eldest son when he became the head of the family. Thereafter only fathers directly descended from Adam could properly be rulers. Just as Adam’s rule was not derived from the consent of his family, so the king’s inherited authority is not dependent on popular consent. He rightly makes laws and imposes taxes at his own good pleasure, though like a good father he has the welfare of his subjects in view. Filmer’s patriarchalism, intended to bolster the absolute power of the king, is the classic English statement of the doctrine. 

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY. J.B.S. final cause.ARISTOTLE. finitary proof.HILBERT’S PROGRAM. finite automaton.COMPUTER THEORY, TURING MACHINE. finitism.HILBERT, PHILOSOPHY OF MATHEMATICS. first actualization.ARISTOTLE. first cause.PRIME MOVER. first cause argument.PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. first imposition.IMPOSITION. first intention.IMPOSITION. first law of thermodynamics.ENTROPY. first limit theorem.PROBABILITY. first mover.PRIME MOVER. firstness.PEIRCE. first-order.ORDER. first-order logic.FORMAL LOGIC, ORDER, SECOND-ORDER LOGIC. first philosophy, in Aristotle’s Metaphysics, the study of being qua being, including the study of theology (as understood by him), since the divine is being par excellence. Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy was concerned chiefly with the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, and the nature of matter and of the mind.  METAPHYSICS. P.Bu. first potentiality.ARISTOTLE. fitness.PHILOSOPHY OF BIOLOGY. five phases.WU-HSING. Five Ways.AQUINAS. Fludd, Robert (1574–1637), English physician and writer. Influenced by Paracelsus, hermetism, and the cabala, Fludd defended a Neoplatonic worldview on the eve of its supersession by the new mechanistic philosophy. He produced improvements in the manufacture of steel and invented a thermometer, though he also used magnets to cure disease and devised a salve to be applied to a weapon to cure the wound it had inflicted. He held that science got its ideas from Scripture allegorically interpreted, when they were of any value. His works combine theology with an occult, Neoplatonic reading of the Bible, and contain numerous fine diagrams illustrating the mutual sympathy of human beings, the natural world, and the supernatural world, each reflecting the others in parallel harmonic structures. In controversy with Kepler, Fludd claimed to uncover essential natural processes rooted in natural sympathies and the operation of God’s light, rather than merely describing the external movements of the heavens. Creation is the extension of divine light into matter. Evil arises from a darkness in God, his failure to will. Matter is uncreated, but this poses no problem for orthodoxy, since matter is nothing, a mere possibility without the least actuality, not something Filmer, Robert Fludd, Robert 311 4065A-  AM  311 coeternal with the Creator.  NEOPLATONISM. J.Lo. fluxion.CALCULUS. flying arrow paradox.ZENO’S PARADOXES. focal meaning.ARISTOTLE. Fodor, Jerry A. (b.1935), influential contemporary American philosopher of psychology, known for his energetic (and often witty) defense of intensional realism, a computationalrepresentational model of thought, and an atomistic, externalist theory of content determination for mental states. Fodor’s philosophical writings fall under three headings. First, he has defended the theory of mind implicit in contemporary cognitive psychology, that the cognitive mind-brain is both a representational/computational device and, ultimately, physical. He has taken on behaviorists (Ryle), psychologists in the tradition of J. J. Gibson, and eliminative materialists (P. A. Churchland). Second, he has engaged in various theoretical disputes within cognitive psychology, arguing for the modularity of the perceptual and language systems (roughly, the view that they are domain-specific, mandatory, limited-access, innately specified, hardwired, and informationally encapsulated) (The Modularity of Mind, 1983); for a strong form of nativism (that virtually all of our concepts are innate); and for the existence of a “language of thought” (The Language of Thought, 1975). The latter has led him to argue against connectionism as a psychological theory (as opposed to an implementation theory). Finally, he has defended the views of ordinary propositional attitude psychology that our mental states (1) are semantically evaluable (intentional), (2) have causal powers, and (3) are such that the implicit generalizations of folk psychology are largely true of them. His defense is twofold. Folk psychology is unsurpassed in explanatory power; furthermore, it is vindicated by contemporary cognitive psychology insofar as ordinary propositional attitude states can be identified with information-processing states, those that consist in a computational relation to a representation. The representational component of such states allows us to explain the semantic evaluability of the attitudes; the computational component, their causal efficacy. Both sorts of accounts raise difficulties. The first is satisfactory only if supplemented by a naturalistic account of representational content. Here Fodor has argued for an atomistic, externalist causal theory (Psychosemantics, 1987) and against holism (the view that no mental representation has content unless many other non-synonymous mental representations also have content) (Holism: A Shopper’s Guide, 1992), against conceptual role theories (the view that the content of a representation is determined by its conceptual role) (Ned Block, Brian Loar), and against teleofunctional theories (teleofunctionalism is the view that the content of a representation is determined, at least in part, by the biological functions of the representations themselves or systems that produce or use those representations) (Ruth Millikan, David Papineau). The second sort is satisfactory only if it does not imply epiphenomenalism with respect to content properties. To avoid such epiphenomenalism, Fodor has argued that not only strict laws but also ceteris paribus laws can be causal. In addition, he has sought to reconcile his externalism vis-à-vis content with the view that causal efficacy requires an individualistic individuation of states. Two solutions have been explored: the supplementation of broad (externally determined) content with narrow content, where the latter supervenes on what is “in the head” (Psychosemantics, 1987), and its supplementation with modes of presentation identical to sentences of the language of thought (The Elm and the Expert, 1995).  COGNITIVE SCIENCE, CONNECTIONISM, FOLK PSYCHOLOGY, HOLISM, LANGUAGE OF THOUGHT, MEANING, PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. B.V.E. folk psychology, in one sense, a putative network of principles constituting a commonsense theory that allegedly underlies everyday explanations of human behavior; the theory assigns a central role to mental states like belief, desire, and intention. Consider an example of an everyday commonsense psychological explanation: Jane went to the refrigerator because she wanted a beer and she believed there was beer in the refrigerator. Like many such explanations, this adverts to a so-called propositional attitude – a mental state, expressed by a verb (‘believe’) plus a that-clause, whose intentional content is propositional. It also adverts to a mental state, expressed by a verb (‘want’) plus a direct-object phrase, whose intentional content appears not to be propositional. In another, related sense, folk psychology is a network of social practices that includes ascribing such mental states to ourselves and others, and proffering explanations of human behavior that advert to these states. The two senses need fluxion folk psychology 312 4065A-  AM  312 distinguishing because some philosophers who acknowledge the existence of folk psychology in the second sense hold that commonsense psychological explanations do not employ empirical generalizations, and hence that there is no such theory as folk psychology. (Henceforth, ‘FP’ will abbreviate ‘folk psychology’ in the first sense; the unabbreviated phrase will be used in the second sense.) Eliminativism in philosophy of mind asserts that FP is an empirical theory; that FP is therefore subject to potential scientific falsification; and that mature science very probably will establish that FP is so radically false that humans simply do not undergo mental states like beliefs, desires, and intentions. One kind of eliminativist argument first sets forth certain methodological strictures about how FP would have to integrate with mature science in order to be true (e.g., being smoothly reducible to neuroscience, or being absorbed into mature cognitive science), and then contends that these strictures are unlikely to be met. Another kind of argument first claims that FP embodies certain strong empirical commitments (e.g., to mental representations with languagelike syntactic structure), and then contends that such empirical presuppositions are likely to turn out false. One influential version of folk psychological realism largely agrees with eliminativism about what is required to vindicate folk psychology, but also holds that mature science is likely to provide such vindication. Realists of this persuasion typically argue, for instance, that mature cognitive science will very likely incorporate FP, and also will very likely treat beliefs, desires, and other propositional attitudes as states with languagelike syntactic structure. Other versions of folkpsychological realism take issue, in one way or another, with either (i) the eliminativists’ claims about FP’s empirical commitments, or (ii) the eliminativists’ strictures about how FP must mesh with mature science in order to be true, or both. Concerning (i), for instance, some philosophers maintain that FP per se is not committed to the existence of languagelike mental representations. If mature cognitive science turns out not to posit a “language of thought,” they contend, this would not necessarily show that FP is radically false; instead it might only show that propositional attitudes are subserved in some other way than via languagelike representational structures. Concerning (ii), some philosophers hold that FP can be true without being as tightly connected to mature scientific theories as the eliminativists require. For instance, the demand that the special sciences be smoothly reducible to the fundamental natural sciences is widely considered an excessively stringent criterion of intertheoretic compatibility; so perhaps FP could be true without being smoothly reducible to neuroscience. Similarly, the demand that FP be directly absorbable into empirical cognitive science is sometimes considered too stringent as a criterion either of FP’s truth, or of the soundness of its ontology of beliefs, desires, and other propositional attitudes, or of the legitimacy of FP-based explanations of behavior. Perhaps FP is a true theory, and explanatorily legitimate, even if it is not destined to become a part of science. Even if FP’s ontological categories are not scientific natural kinds, perhaps its generalizations are like generalizations about clothing: true, explanatorily usable, and ontologically sound. (No one doubts the existence of hats, coats, or scarves. No one doubts the truth or explanatory utility of generalizations like ‘Coats made of heavy material tend to keep the body warm in cold weather’, even though these generalizations are not laws of any science.) Yet another approach to folk psychology, often wedded to realism about beliefs and desires (although sometimes wedded to instrumentalism), maintains that folk psychology does not employ empirical generalizations, and hence is not a theory at all. One variant denies that folk psychology employs any generalizations, empirical or otherwise. Another variant concedes that there are folk-psychological generalizations, but denies that they are empirical; instead they are held to be analytic truths, or norms of rationality, or both at once. Advocates of non-theory views typically regard folk psychology as a hermeneutic, or interpretive, enterprise. They often claim too that the attribution of propositional attitudes, and also the proffering and grasping of folk-psychological explanations, is a matter of imaginatively projecting oneself into another person’s situation, and then experiencing a kind of empathic understanding, or Verstehen, of the person’s actions and the motives behind them. A more recent, hi-tech, formulation of this idea is that the interpreter “runs a cognitive simulation” of the person whose actions are to be explained. Philosophers who defend folk-psychological realism, in one or another of the ways just canvassed, also sometimes employ arguments based on the allegedly self-stultifying nature of eliminativism. One such argument begins from the premise that the notion of action is folk-psychofolk psychology folk psychology 313 4065A-  AM  313 logical – that a behavioral event counts as an action only if it is caused by propositional attitudes that rationalize it (under some suitable actdescription). If so, and if humans never really undergo propositional attitudes, then they never really act either. In particular, they never really assert anything, or argue for anything (since asserting and arguing are species of action). So if eliminativism is true, the argument concludes, then eliminativists can neither assert it nor argue for it – an allegedly intolerable pragmatic paradox. Eliminativists generally react to such arguments with breathtaking equanimity. A typical reply is that although our present concept of action might well be folk-psychological, this does not preclude the possibility of a future successor concept, purged of any commitment to beliefs and desires, that could inherit much of the role of our current, folk-psychologically tainted, concept of action.  COGNITIVE SCIENCE, PHILOSOPHY OF MIND, REDUCTION, SIMULATION THEORY. T.E.H. Fonseca, Pedro da (1528–99), Portuguese philosopher and logician. He entered the Jesuit order in 1548. Apart from a period (1572–82) in Rome, he lived in Portugal, teaching philosophy and theology at the universities of Evora and Coimbra and performing various administrative duties for his order. He was responsible for the idea of a published course on Aristotelian philosophy, and the resulting series of Coimbra commentaries, the Cursus Conimbricensis, was widely used in the seventeenth century. His own logic text, the Institutes of Dialectic (1564), went into many editions. It is a good example of Renaissance Aristotelianism, with its emphasis on Aristotle’s syllogistic, but it retains some material on medieval developments, notably consequences, exponibles, and supposition theory. Fonseca also wrote a commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics (published in parts from 1577 on), which contains the Greek text, a corrected Latin translation, comments on textual matters, and an extensive exploration of selected philosophical problems. He cites a wide range of medieval philosophers, both Christian and Arab, as well as the newly published Greek commentators on Aristotle. His own position is sympathetic to Aquinas, but generally independent. Fonseca is important not so much for any particular doctrines, though he did hold original views on such matters as analogy, but for his provision of fully documented, carefully written and carefully argued books that, along with others in the same tradition, were read at universities, both Catholic and Protestant, well into the seventeenth century. He represents what is often called the Second Scholasticism. E.J.A. Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bovier de (1657–1757), French writer who heralded the age of the philosophes. A product of Jesuit education, he was a versatile freethinker with skeptical inclinations. Dialogues of the Dead (1683) showed off his analytical mind and elegant style. In 1699, he was appointed secretary of the Academy of Sciences. He composed famous eulogies of scientists; defended the superiority of modern science over tradition in Digression on Ancients and Moderns (1688); popularized Copernican astronomy in Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds (1686) – famous for postulating the inhabitation of planets; stigmatized superstition and credulity in History of Oracles (1687) and The Origin of Fables (1724); promoted Cartesian physics in The Theory of Cartesian Vortices (1752); and wrote Elements of Infinitesimal Calculus (1727) in the wake of Newton and Leibniz. J.-L.S. Foot, Philippa (b.1920), British philosopher who exerted a lasting influence on the development of moral philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century. Her persisting, intertwined themes are opposition to all forms of subjectivism in ethics, the significance of the virtues and vices, and the connection between morality and rationality. In her earlier papers, particularly “Moral Beliefs” (1958) and “Goodness and Choice” (1961), reprinted in Virtues and Vices (1978), she undermines the subjectivist accounts of moral “judgment” derived from C. L. Stevenson and Hare by arguing for many logical or conceptual connections between evaluations and the factual statements on which they must be based. Lately she has developed this kind of thought into the naturalistic claim that moral evaluations are determined by facts about our life and our nature, as evaluations of features of plants and animals (as good or defective specimens of their kind) are determined by facts about their nature and their life. Foot’s opposition to subjectivism has remained constant, but her views on the virtues in relation to rationality have undergone several changes. In “Moral Beliefs” she relates them to self-interest, maintaining that a virtue must benefit its possessor; in the (subsequently repudiated) “Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives” (1972) she went as far as to deny that there was necessarily anything contrary to reason in Fonseca, Pedro da Foot, Philippa 314 4065A-  AM  314 being uncharitable or unjust. In “Does Moral Subjectivism Rest on a Mistake?” (Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 1995) the virtues themselves appear as forms of practical rationality. Her most recent work, soon to be published as The Grammar of Goodness, preserves and develops the latter claim and reinstates ancient connections between virtue, rationality, and happiness.  ETHICS, HARE, VIRTUE ETHICS. R.Hu. force, illocutionary.PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE, SPEECH ACT THEORY. forcing, a method introduced by Paul J. Cohen – see his Set Theory and the Continuum Hypothesis (1966) – to prove independence results in Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory (ZF). Cohen proved the independence of the axiom of choice (AC) from ZF, and of the continuum hypothesis (CH) from ZF ! AC. The consistency of AC with ZF and of CH with ZF ! AC had previously been proved by Gödel by the method of constructible sets. A model of ZF consists of layers, with the elements of a set at one layer always belonging to lower layers. Starting with a model M, Cohen’s method produces an “outer model” N with no more levels but with more sets at each level (whereas Gödel’s method produces an ‘inner model’ L): much of what will become true in N can be “forced” from within M. The method is applicable only to hypotheses in the more “abstract” branches of mathematics (infinitary combinatorics, general topology, measure theory, universal algebra, model theory, etc.); but there it is ubiquitous. Applications include the proof by Robert M. Solovay of the consistency of the measurability of all sets (of all projective sets) with ZF (with ZF ! AC); also the proof by Solovay and Donald A. Martin of the consistency of Martin’s axiom (MA) plus the negation of the continuum hypothesis (-CH) with ZF ! AC. (CH implies MA; and of known consequences of CH about half are implied by MA, about half refutable by MA ! -CH.) Numerous simplifications, extensions, and variants (e.g. Boolean-valued models) of Cohen’s method have been introduced.  INDEPENDENCE RESULTS, SET THEORY. J.Bur. Fordyce, David (1711–51), Scottish philosopher and educational theorist whose writings were influential in the eighteenth century. His lectures formed the basis of his Elements of Moral Philosophy, written originally for The Preceptor (1748), later translated into German and French, and abridged for the articles on moral philosophy in the first Encylopaedia Britannica (1771). Fordyce combines the preacher’s appeal to the heart in the advocacy of virtue with a moral “scientist’s” appraisal of human psychology. He claims to derive our duties experimentally from a study of the prerequisites of human happiness. M.A.St. foreknowledge, divine.DIVINE FOREKNOWLEDGE. form, in metaphysics, especially Plato’s and Aristotle’s, the structure or essence of a thing as contrasted with its matter. (1) Plato’s theory of Forms is a realistic ontology of universals. In his elenchus, Socrates sought what is common to, e.g., all chairs. Plato believed there must be an essence – or Form – common to everything falling under one concept, which makes anything what it is. A chair is a chair because it “participates in” the Form of Chair. The Forms are ideal “patterns,” unchanging, timeless, and perfect. They exist in a world of their own (cf. the Kantian noumenal realm). Plato speaks of them as self-predicating: the Form of Beauty is perfectly beautiful. This led, as he realized, to the Third Man argument that there must be an infinite number of Forms. The only true understanding is of the Forms. This we attain through anamnesis, “recollection.” (2) Aristotle agreed that forms are closely tied to intelligibility, but denied their separate existence. Aristotle explains change and generation through a distinction between the form and matter of substances. A lump of bronze (matter) becomes a statue through its being molded into a certain shape (form). In his earlier metaphysics, Aristotle identified primary substance with the composite of matter and form, e.g. Socrates. Later, he suggests that primary substance is form – what makes Socrates what he is (the form here is his soul). This notion of forms as essences has obvious similarities with the Platonic view. They became the “substantial forms” of Scholasticism, accepted until the seventeenth century. (3) Kant saw form as the a priori aspect of experience. We are presented with phenomenological “matter,” which has no meaning until the mind imposes some form upon it.  ARISTOTLE, KANT, METAPHYSICS, PLATO. R.C. form, aesthetic.

AESTHETIC FORMALISM, AESTHETICS. force, illocutionary form, aesthetic 315 4065A-  AM  315 form, grammatical.LOGICAL FORM. form, logical.LOGICAL FORM. form, Platonic.FORM, PLATO. form, schematic.LOGICAL FORM. form, substantial.FORM, HYLOMORPHISM. formal cause.ARISTOTLE. formal distinction.FUNDAMENTUM DIVISIONIS. formal fallacy, an invalid inference pattern that is described in terms of a formal logic. There are three main cases: (1) an invalid (or otherwise unacceptable) argument identified solely by its form or structure, with no reference to the content of the premises and conclusion (such as equivocation) or to other features, generally of a pragmatic character, of the argumentative discourse (such as unsuitability of the argument for the purposes for which it is given, failure to satisfy inductive standards for acceptable argument, etc.; the latter conditions of argument evaluation fall into the purview of informal fallacy); (2) a formal rule of inference, or an argument form, that is not valid (in the logical system on which the evaluation is made), instances of which are sufficiently frequent, familiar, or deceptive to merit giving a name to the rule or form; and (3) an argument that is an instance of a fallacious rule of inference or of a fallacious argument form and that is not itself valid. The criterion of satisfactory argument typically taken as relevant in discussing formal fallacies is validity. In this regard, it is important to observe that rules of inference and argument forms that are not valid may have instances (which may be another rule or argument form, or may be a specific argument) that are valid. Thus, whereas the argument form (i) P, Q; therefore R (a form that every argument, including every valid argument, consisting of two premises shares) is not valid, the argument form (ii), obtained from (i) by substituting P&Q for R, is a valid instance of (i): (ii) P, Q; therefore P&Q. Since (ii) is not invalid, (ii) is not a formal fallacy though it is an instance of (i). Thus, some instances of formally fallacious rules of inference or argument-forms may be valid and therefore not be formal fallacies. Examples of formal fallacies follow below, presented according to the system of logic appropriate to the level of description of the fallacy. There are no standard names for some of the fallacies listed below. Fallacies of sentential (propositional) logic. Affirming the consequent: If p then q; q / , p. ‘If Richard had his nephews murdered, then Richard was an evil man; Richard was an evil man. Therefore, Richard had his nephews murdered.’ Denying the antecedent: If p then q; not-p / , not-q. ‘If North was found guilty by the courts, then North committed the crimes charged of him; North was not found guilty by the courts. Therefore, North did not commit the crimes charged of him.’ Commutation of conditionals: If p then q / , If q then p. ‘If Reagan was a great leader, then so was Thatcher. Therefore, if Thatcher was a great leader, then so was Reagan.” Improper transposition: If p then q / , If not-p then not-q. ‘If the nations of the Middle East disarm, there will be peace in the region. Therefore, if the nations of the Middle East do not disarm, there will not be peace in the region.’ Improper disjunctive syllogism (affirming one disjunct): p or q; p / ,, not-q. ‘Either John is an alderman or a ward committeeman; John is an alderman. Therefore, John is not a ward committeeman.’ (This rule of inference would be valid if ‘or’ were interpreted exclusively, where ‘p or EXq’ is true if exactly one constituent is true and is false otherwise. In standard systems of logic, however, ‘or’ is interpreted inclusively.) Fallacies of syllogistic logic. Fallacies of distribution (where M is the middle term, P is the major term, and S is the minor term). Undistributed middle term: the middle term is not distributed in either premise (roughly, nothing is said of all members of the class it designates), as in form, grammatical formal fallacy 316 4065A-  AM  316 Some P are M ‘Some politicians are crooks. Some M are S Some crooks are thieves. ,Some S are P. ,Some politicians are thieves.’ Illicit major (undistributed major term): the major term is distributed in the conclusion but not in the major premise, as in All M are P ‘All radicals are communists. No S are M No socialists are radicals. ,Some S are ,Some socialists are not not P. communists.’ Illicit minor (undistributed minor term): the minor term is distributed in the conclusion but not in the minor premise, as in All P are M ‘All neo-Nazis are radicals. All M are S All radicals are terrorists. ,All S are P. ,All terrorists are neoNazis.’ Fallacies of negation. Two negative premises (exclusive premises): the syllogism has two negative premises, as in No M are P ‘No racist is just. Some M are not S Some racists are not police. ,Some S are not P. ,Some police are not just. Illicit negative/affirmative: the syllogism has a negative premise (conclusion) but no negative conclusion (premise), as in All M are P ‘All liars are deceivers. Some M are not S Some liars are not aldermen. ,Some S are P. ,Some aldermen are deceivers.’ and All P are M ‘All vampires are monsters. All M are S All monsters are creatures. ,Some S are not P. ,Some creatures are not vampires.’ Fallacy of existential import: the syllogism has two universal premises and a particular conclusion, as in All P are M ‘All horses are animals. No S are M No unicorns are animals. ,Some S are not P. ,Some unicorns are not horses.’ A syllogism can commit more than one fallacy. For example, the syllogism Some P are M Some M are S ,No S are P commits the fallacies of undistributed middle, illicit minor, illicit major, and illicit negative/affirmative. Fallacies of predicate logic. Illicit quantifier shift: inferring from a universally quantified existential proposition to an existentially quantified universal proposition, as in (Ex) (Dy) Fxy / , (Dy) (Ex) Fxy ‘Everyone is irrational at some time (or other) /, At some time, everyone is irrational.’ Some are/some are not (unwarranted contrast): inferring from ‘Some S are P’ that ‘Some S are not P’ or inferring from ‘Some S are not P’ that ‘Some S are P’, as in (Dx) (Sx & Px) / , (Dx) (Sx & -Px) ‘Some people are left-handed / , Some people are not left-handed.’ Illicit substitution of identicals: where f is an opaque (oblique) context and a and b are singular terms, to infer from fa; a = b / , fb, as in ‘The Inspector believes Hyde is Hyde; Hyde is Jekyll / , The Inspector believes Hyde is Jekyll.’  EXISTENTIAL IMPORT, LOGICAL FORM, MODAL LOGIC, SYLLOGISM. W.K.W. formalism, the view that mathematics concerns manipulations of symbols according to prescribed structural rules. It is cousin to nominalism, the older and more general metaphysical view that denies the existence of all abstract objects and is often contrasted with Platonism, which takes mathematics to be the study of a special class of non-linguistic, non-mental objects, and intuitionism, which takes it to be the study of certain mental constructions. In sophisticated versions, mathematical activity can comprise the study of possible formal manipulations within a system as well as the manipulations themselves, and the “symbols” need not be regarded as either linguistic or concrete. Formalism is often associated with the mathematician formalism formalism 317 4065A-  AM  317 David Hilbert. But Hilbert held that the “finitary” part of mathematics, including, for example, simple truths of arithmetic, describes indubitable facts about real objects and that the “ideal” objects that feature elsewhere in mathematics are introduced to facilitate research about the real objects. Hilbert’s formalism is the view that the foundations of mathematics can be secured by proving the consistency of formal systems to which mathematical theories are reduced. Gödel’s two incompleteness theorems establish important limitations on the success of such a project.  ABSTRACT ENTITY, AESTHETIC FORMALISM, HILBERT’s PROGRAM, MATHEMATICAL INTUITIONISM, PHILOSOPHY OF MATHEMATICS. S.T.K. formalism, aesthetic.AESTHETIC FORMALISM. formalism, ethical.ETHICS. formalism, jurisprudential.JURISPRUDENCE. formalism, legal.JURISPRUDENCE. formalization, an abstract representation of a theory that must satisfy requirements sharper than those imposed on the structure of theories by the axiomatic-deductive method. That method can be traced back to Euclid’s Elements. The crucial additional requirement is the regimentation of inferential steps in proofs: not only do axioms have to be given in advance, but the rules representing argumentative steps must also be taken from a predetermined list. To avoid a regress in the definition of proof and to achieve intersubjectivity on a minimal basis, the rules are to be “formal” or “mechanical” and must take into account only the form of statements. Thus, to exclude any ambiguity, a precise and effectively described language is needed to formalize particular theories. The general kind of requirements was clear to Aristotle and explicit in Leibniz; but it was only Frege who, in his Begriffsschrift (1879), presented, in addition to an expressively rich language with relations and quantifiers, an adequate logical calculus. Indeed, Frege’s calculus, when restricted to the language of predicate logic, turned out to be semantically complete. He provided for the first time the means to formalize mathematical proofs. Frege pursued a clear philosophical aim, namely, to recognize the “epistemological nature” of theorems. In the introduction to his Grundgesetze der Arithmetik (1893), Frege wrote: “By insisting that the chains of inference do not have any gaps we succeed in bringing to light every axiom, assumption, hypothesis or whatever else you want to call it on which a proof rests; in this way we obtain a basis for judging the epistemological nature of the theorem.” The Fregean frame was used in the later development of mathematical logic, in particular, in proof theory. Gödel established through his incompleteness theorems fundamental limits of formalizations of particular theories, like the system of Principia Mathematica or axiomatic set theories. The general notion of formal theory emerged from the subsequent investigations of Church and Turing clarifying the concept of ‘mechanical procedure’ or ‘algorithm.’ Only then was it possible to state and prove the incompleteness theorems for all formal theories satisfying certain very basic representability and derivability conditions. Gödel emphasized repeatedly that these results do not establish “any bounds for the powers of human reason, but rather for the potentialities of pure formalism in mathematics.”  CHURCH’S THESIS, FREGE, GÖDEL’S INCOMPLETENESS THEOREMS, PROOF THEORY. W.S. formalize, narrowly construed, to formulate a subject as a theory in first-order predicate logic; broadly construed, to describe the essentials of the subject in some formal language for which a notion of consequence is defined. For Hilbert, formalizing mathematics requires at least that there be finite means of checking purported proofs.  FORMALIZATION, PROOF THEORY. S.T.K. formal justice.JUSTICE. formal language, a language in which an expression’s grammaticality and interpretation (if any) are determined by precisely defined rules that appeal only to the form or shape of the symbols that constitute it (rather than, for example, to the intention of the speaker). It is usually understood that the rules are finite and effective (so that there is an algorithm for determining whether an expression is a formula) and that the grammatical expressions are uniquely readable, i.e., they are generated by the rules in only one way. A paradigm example is the language of firstorder predicate logic, deriving principally from the Begriffsschrift of Frege. The grammatical formulas of this language can be delineated by an inductive definition: (1) a capital letter ‘F’, ‘G’, or ‘H’, with or without a numerical subscript, folformalism, aesthetic formal language 318 4065A-  AM  318 lowed by a string of lowercase letters ‘a’, ‘b’, or ‘c’, with or without numerical subscripts, is a formula; (2) if A is a formula, so is -A; (3) if A and B are formulas, so are (A & B), (A P B), and (A 7 B); (4) if A is a formula and v is a lowercase letter ‘x’, ‘y’, or ‘z’, with or without numerical subscripts, then DvA' and EvA' are formulas where A' is obtained by replacing one or more occurrences of some lowercase letter in A (together with its subscripts if any) by v; (5) nothing is a formula unless it can be shown to be one by finitely many applications of the clauses 1–4. The definition uses the device of metalinguistic variables: clauses with ‘A’ and ‘B’ are to be regarded as abbreviations of all the clauses that would result by replacing these letters uniformly by names of expressions. It also uses several naming conventions: a string of symbols is named by enclosing it within single quotes and also by replacing each symbol in the string by its name; the symbols ‘7’, ‘(‘,’)’, ‘&’, ‘P’, ‘-’ are considered names of themselves. The interpretation of predicate logic is spelled out by a similar inductive definition of truth in a model. With appropriate conventions and stipulations, alternative definitions of formulas can be given that make expressions like ‘(P 7 Q)’ the names of formulas rather than formulas themselves. On this approach, formulas need not be written symbols at all and form cannot be identified with shape in any narrow sense. For Tarski, Carnap, and others a formal language also included rules of “transformation” specifying when one expression can be regarded as a consequence of others. Today it is more common to view the language and its consequence relation as distinct. Formal languages are often contrasted with natural languages, like English or Swahili. Richard Montague, however, has tried to show that English is itself a formal language, whose rules of grammar and interpretation are similar to – though much more complex than – predicate logic.  FORMAL LOGIC. S.T.K. formal learnability theory, the study of human language learning through explicit formal models typically employing artifical languages and simplified learning strategies. The fundamental problem is how a learner is able to arrive at a grammar of a language on the basis of a finite sample of presented sentences (and perhaps other kinds of information as well). The seminal work is by E. Gold (1967), who showed, roughly, that learnability of certain types of grammars from the Chomsky hierarchy by an unbiased learner required the presentation of ungrammatical strings, identified as such, along with grammatical strings. Recent studies have concentrated on other types of grammar (e.g., generative transformational grammars), modes of presentation, and assumptions about learning strategies in an attempt to approximate the actual situation more closely.  GRAMMAR. R.E.W. formal logic, the science of correct reasoning, going back to Aristotle’s Prior Analytics, based upon the premise that the validity of an argument is a function of its structure or logical form. The modern embodiment of formal logic is symbolic (mathematical) logic. This is the study of valid inference in artificial, precisely formulated languages, the grammatical structure of whose sentences or well-formed formulas is intended to mirror, or be a regimentation of, the logical forms of their natural language counterparts. These formal languages can thus be viewed as (mathematical) models of fragments of natural language. Like models generally, these models are idealizations, typically leaving out of account such phenomena as vagueness, ambiguity, and tense. But the idea underlying symbolic logic is that to the extent that they reflect certain structural features of natural language arguments, the study of valid inference in formal languages can yield insight into the workings of those arguments. The standard course of study for anyone interested in symbolic logic begins with the (classical) propositional calculus (sentential calculus), or PC. Here one constructs a theory of valid inference for a formal language built up from a stock of propositional variables (sentence letters) and an expressively complete set of connectives. In the propositional calculus, one is therefore concerned with arguments whose validity turns upon the presence of (two-valued) truth-functional sentence-forming operators on sentences such as (classical) negation, conjunction, disjunction, and the like. The next step is the predicate calculus (lower functional calculus, first-order logic, elementary quantification theory), the study of valid inference in first-order languages. These are languages built up from an expressively complete set of connectives, first-order universal or existential quantifiers, individual variables, names, predicates (relational symbols), and perhaps function symbols. Further, and more specialized, work in symbolic logic might involve looking at fragments of the language of the propositional or predicate calculus, changing the semantics that the language is standardly given (e.g., by allowing formal learnability theory formal logic 319 4065A-  AM  319 truth-value gaps or more than two truth-values), further embellishing the language (e.g., by adding modal or other non-truth-functional connectives, or higher-order quantifiers), or liberalizing the grammar or syntax of the language (e.g., by permitting infinitely long well-formed formulas). In some of these cases, of course, symbolic logic remains only marginally connected with natural language arguments as the interest shades off into one in formal languages for their own sake, a mark of the most advanced work being done in formal logic today.  DEONTIC LOGIC, EPISTEMIC LOGIC, FREE LOGIC, INFINITARY LOGIC, MANY-VALUED LOGIC, MATHEMATICAL INTUITIONISM, MODAL LOGIC, RELEVANCE LOGIC, SECONDORDER LOGIC. G.F.S. formal mode.METALANGUAGE. formal reality.REALITY. formal semantics, the study of the interpretations of formal languages. A formal language can be defined apart from any interpretation of it. This is done by specifying a set of its symbols and a set of formation rules that determine which strings of symbols are grammatical or well formed. When rules of inference (transformation rules) are added and/or certain sentences are designated as axioms a logical system (also known as a logistic system) is formed. An interpretation of a formal language is (roughly) an assignment of meanings to its symbols and truth conditions to its sentences. Typically a distinction is made between a standard interpretation of a formal language and a non-standard interpretation. Consider a formal language in which arithmetic is formulable. In addition to the symbols of logic (variables, quantifiers, brackets, and connectives), this language will contain ‘0’, ‘!’, ‘•’, and ‘s’. A standard interpretation of it assigns the set of natural numbers as the domain of discourse, zero to ‘0’, addition to ‘!’, multiplication to ‘•’, and the successor function to ‘s’. Other standard interpretations are isomorphic to the one just given. In particular, standard interpretations are numeral-complete in that they correlate the numerals one-to-one with the domain elements. A result due to Gödel and Rosser is that there are universal quantifications (x)A(x) that are not deducible from the Peano axioms (if those axioms are consistent) even though each A(n) is provable. The Peano axioms (if consistent) are true on each standard interpretation. Thus each A(n) is true on such an interpretation. Thus (x)A(x) is true on such an interpretation since a standard interpretation is numeral-complete. However, there are non-standard interpretations that do not correlate the numerals one-to-one with domain elements. On some of these interpretations each A(n) is true but (x)A(x) is false. In constructing and interpreting a formal language we use a language already known to us, say, English. English then becomes our metalanguage, which we use to talk about the formal language, which is our object language. Theorems proven within the object language must be distinguished from those proven in the metalanguage. The latter are metatheorems. One goal of a semantical theory of a formal language is to characterize the consequence relation as expressed in that language and prove semantical metatheorems about that relation. A sentence S is said to be a consequence of a set of sentences K provided S is true on every interpretation on which each sentence in K is true. This notion has to be kept distinct from the notion of deduction. The latter concept can be defined only by reference to a logical system associated with a formal language. Consequence, however, can be characterized independently of a logical system, as was just done.  DEDUCTION, LOGICAL SYNTAX, METALANGUAGE, PROOF THEORY, TRANSFORMATION RULE. C.S. formal sign.SEMIOSIS. formation rule.WELL-FORMED FORMULA. form of life.WITTGENSTEIN. Forms, theory of.PLATO. formula.WELL-FORMED FORMULA. formula, closed.OPEN FORMULA, WELL-FORMED FORMULA. formula, open.OPEN FORMULA, WELL-FORMED FORMULA. Foucault, Michel (1926–84), French philosopher and historian of thought. Foucault’s earliest writings (e.g., Maladie mentale et personnalité [“Mental Illness and Personality”], 1954) focused on psychology and developed within the frameworks of Marxism and existential phenomenology. He soon moved beyond these frameworks, in directions suggested by two fundamental influences: formal mode Foucault, Michel 320 4065A-  AM  320 history and philosophy of science, as practiced by Bachelard and (especially) Canguilhem, and the modernist literature of, e.g., Raymond Roussel, Bataille, and Maurice Blanchot. In studies of psychiatry (Histoire de la folie [“History of Madness in the Classical Age”], 1961), clinical medicine (The Birth of the Clinic, 1963), and the social sciences (The Order of Things, 1966), Foucault developed an approach to intellectual history, “the archaeology of knowledge,” that treated systems of thought as “discursive formations” independent of the beliefs and intentions of individual thinkers. Like Canguilhem’s history of science and like modernist literature, Foucault’s archaeology displaced the human subject from the central role it played in the humanism dominant in our culture since Kant. He reflected on the historical and philosophical significance of his archaeological method in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969). Foucault recognized that archaeology provided no account of transitions from one system to another. Accordingly, he introduced a “genealogical” approach, which does not replace archaeology but goes beyond it to explain changes in systems of discourse by connecting them to changes in the non-discursive practices of social power structures. Foucault’s genealogy admitted the standard economic, social, and political causes but, in a non-standard, Nietzschean vein, refused any unified teleological explanatory scheme (e.g., Whig or Marxist histories). New systems of thought are seen as contingent products of many small, unrelated causes, not fulfillments of grand historical designs. Foucault’s geneaological studies emphasize the essential connection of knowledge and power. Bodies of knowledge are not autonomous intellectual structures that happen to be employed as Baconian instruments of power. Rather, precisely as bodies of knowledge, they are tied (but not reducible) to systems of social control. This essential connection of power and knowledge reflects Foucault’s later view that power is not merely repressive but a creative, if always dangerous, source of positive values. Discipline and Punish (1975) showed how prisons constitute criminals as objects of disciplinary knowledge. The first volume of the History of Sexuality (1976) sketched a project for seeing how, through modern biological and psychological sciences of sexuality, individuals are controlled by their own knowledge as self-scrutinizing and self-forming subjects. The second volume was projected as a study of the origins of the modern notion of a subject in practices of Christian confession. Foucault wrote such a study (The Confessions of the Flesh) but did not publish it because he decided that a proper understanding of the Christian development required a comparison with ancient conceptions of the ethical self. This led to two volumes (1984) on Greek and Roman sexuality: The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self. These final writings make explicit the ethical project that in fact informs all of Foucault’s work: the liberation of human beings from contingent conceptual constraints masked as unsurpassable a priori limits and the adumbration of alternative forms of existence.  BACHELARD, CANGUILHEM, NIETZSCHE. G.G. foundationalism, the view that knowledge and epistemic (knowledge-relevant) justification have a two-tier structure: some instances of knowledge and justification are non-inferential, or foundational; and all other instances thereof are inferential, or non-foundational, in that they derive ultimately from foundational knowledge or justification. This structural view originates in Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics (at least regarding knowledge), receives an extreme formulation in Descartes’s Meditations, and flourishes, with varying details, in the works of such twentieth-century philosophers as Russell, C. I. Lewis, and Chisholm. Versions of foundationalism differ on two main projects: (a) the precise explanation of the nature of non-inferential, or foundational, knowledge and justification, and (b) the specific explanation of how foundational knowledge and justification can be transmitted to non-foundational beliefs. Foundationalism allows for differences on these projects, since it is essentially a view about the structure of knowledge and epistemic justification. The question whether knowledge has foundations is essentially the question whether the sort of justification pertinent to knowledge has a twotier structure. Some philosophers have construed the former question as asking whether knowledge depends on beliefs that are certain in some sense (e.g., indubitable or infallible). This construal bears, however, on only one species of foundationalism: radical foundationalism. Such foundationalism, represented primarily by Descartes, requires that foundational beliefs be certain and able to guarantee the certainty of the non-foundational beliefs they support. Radical foundationalism is currently unpopular for two main reasons. First, very few, if any, of our perceptual beliefs are certain (i.e., indubitable); and, second, those of our beliefs that might be candifoundationalism foundationalism 321 4065A-  AM  321 dates for certainty (e.g., the belief that I am thinking) lack sufficient substance to guarantee the certainty of our rich, highly inferential knowledge of the external world (e.g., our knowledge of physics, chemistry, and biology). Contemporary foundationalists typically endorse modest foundationalism, the view that non-inferentially justified, foundational beliefs need not possess or provide certainty and need not deductively support justified non-foundational beliefs. Foundational beliefs (or statements) are often called basic beliefs (or statements), but the precise understanding of ‘basic’ here is controversial among foundationalists. Foundationalists agree, however, in their general understanding of non-inferentially justified, foundational beliefs as beliefs whose justification does not derive from other beliefs, although they leave open whether the causal basis of foundational beliefs includes other beliefs. (Epistemic justification comes in degrees, but for simplicity we can restrict discussion to justification sufficient for satisfaction of the justification condition for knowledge; we can also restrict discussion to what it takes for a belief to have justification, omitting issues of what it takes to show that a belief has it.) Three prominent accounts of non-inferential justification are available to modest foundationalists: (a) self-justification, (b) justification by non-belief, non-propositional experiences, and (c) justification by a non-belief reliable origin of a belief. Proponents of self-justification (including, at one time, Ducasse and Chisholm) contend that foundational beliefs can justify themselves, with no evidential support elsewhere. Proponents of foundational justification by non-belief experiences shun literal self-justification; they hold, following C. I. Lewis, that foundational perceptual beliefs can be justified by non-belief sensory or perceptual experiences (e.g., seeming to see a dictionary) that make true, are best explained by, or otherwise support, those beliefs (e.g., the belief that there is, or at least appears to be, a dictionary here). Proponents of foundational justification by reliable origins find the basis of non-inferential justification in belief-forming processes (e.g., perception, memory, introspection) that are truth-conducive, i.e., that tend to produce true rather than false beliefs. This view thus appeals to the reliability of a belief’s nonbelief origin, whereas the previous view appeals to the particular sensory or perceptual experiences that correspond to (e.g., make true or are best explained by) a foundational belief. Despite disagreements over the basis of foundational justification, modest foundationalists typically agree that foundational justification is characterized by defeasibility, i.e., can be defeated, undermined, or overridden by a certain sort of expansion of one’s evidence or justified beliefs. For instance, your belief that there is a blue dictionary before you could lose its justification (e.g., the justification from your current perceptual experiences) if you acquired new evidence that there is a blue light shining on the dictionary before you. Foundational justification, therefore, can vary over time if accompanied by relevant changes in one’s perceptual evidence. It does not follow, however, that foundational justification positively depends, i.e., is based, on grounds for denying that there are defeaters. The relevant dependence can be regarded as negative in that there need only be an absence of genuine defeaters. Critics of foundationalism sometimes neglect that latter distinction regarding epistemic dependence. The second big task for foundationalists is to explain how justification transmits from foundational beliefs to inferentially justified, non-foundational beliefs. Radical foundationalists insist, for such transmission, on entailment relations that guarantee the truth or the certainty of nonfoundational beliefs. Modest foundationalists are more flexible, allowing for merely probabilistic inferential connections that transmit justification. For instance, a modest foundationalist can appeal to explanatory inferential connections, as when a foundational belief (e.g., I seem to feel wet) is best explained for a person by a particular physical-object belief (e.g., the belief that the air conditioner overhead is leaking on me). Various other forms of probabilistic inference are available to modest foundationalists; and nothing in principle requires that they restrict foundational beliefs to what one “seems” to sense or to perceive. The traditional motivation for foundationalism comes largely from an eliminative regress argument, outlined originally (regarding knowledge) in Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics. The argument, in shortest form, is that foundationalism is a correct account of the structure of justification since the alternative accounts all fail. Inferential justification is justification wherein one belief, B1, is justified on the basis of another belief, B2. How, if at all, is B2, the supporting belief, itself justified? Obviously, Aristotle suggests, we cannot have a circle here, where B2 is justified by B1; nor can we allow the chain of support to extend endlessly, with no ultimate basis for justification. We cannot, moreover, allow B2 to remain unjustified, foundationalism foundationalism 322 4065A-  AM  322 lest it lack what it takes to support B1. If this is right, the structure of justification does not involve circles, endless regresses, or unjustified starter-beliefs. That is, this structure is evidently foundationalist. This is, in skeletal form, the regress argument for foundationalism. Given appropriate flesh, and due attention to skepticism about justification, this argument poses a serious challenge to non-foundationalist accounts of the structure of epistemic justification, such as epistemic coherentism. More significantly, foundationalism will then show forth as one of the most compelling accounts of the structure of knowledge and justification. This explains, at least in part, why foundationalism has been very prominent historically and is still widely held in contemporary epistemology.  COHERENTISM, EPISTEMOLOGY, JUSTIFICATION. P.K.M. foundation axiom.SET THEORY. Four Books, a group of Confucian texts including the Ta-hsüeh (Great Learning), Chung-Yung (Doctrine of the Mean), Lun Yü (Analects), and Meng Tzu (Book of Mencius), the latter two containing respectively the teachings of Confucius (sixth– fifth century B.C.) and Mencius (fourth century B.C.), and the former two being chapters from the Li-Chi (Book of Rites). Chu Hsi (1130–1200) selected the texts as basic ones for Confucian education, and wrote influential commentaries on them. The texts served as the basis of civil service examinations from 1313 to 1905; as a result, they exerted great influence both on the development of Confucian thought and on Chinese life in general. K.-l.S. four causes.ARISTOTLE. four elements.EMPEDOCLES. four humors.GALEN. Fourier, François-Marie-Charles (1772–1837), French social theorist and radical critic, often called a utopian socialist. His main works were The Theory of Universal Unity (1822) and The New Industrial and Societal World (1829). He argued that since each person has, not an integral soul but only a partial one, personal integrity is possible only in unity with others. Fourier thought that all existing societies were antagonistic. (Following Edenism, he believed societies developed through stages of savagery, patriarchalism, barbarianism, and civilization.) He believed this antagonism could be transcended only in Harmony. It would be based on twelve kinds of passions. (Five were sensual, four affective, and three distributive; and these in turn encouraged the passion for unity.) The basic social unit would be a phalanx containing 300– 400 families (about 1,600–1,800 people) of scientifically blended characters. As a place of production but also of maximal satisfaction of the passions of every member, Harmony should make labor attractive and pleasurable. The main occupations of its members should be gastronomy, opera, and horticulture. It should also establish a new world of love (a form of polygamy) where men and women would be equal in rights. Fourier believed that phalanxes would attract members of all other social systems, even the less civilized, and bring about this new world system. Fourier’s vision of cooperation (both in theory and experimental practice) influenced some anarchists, syndicalists, and the cooperationist movement. His radical social critique was important for the development of political and social thought in France, Europe, and North America.  POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY. G.Fl. fourth condition.EPISTEMOLOGY. fourth condition problem.EPISTEMOLOGY. frame.COGNITIVE SCIENCE. Frankena, William K. (1908–94), American moral philosopher who wrote a series of influential articles and a text, Ethics (1963), which was translated into eight languages and remains in use today. Frankena taught at the University of Michigan (1937–78), where he and his colleagues Charles Stevenson (1908–79), a leading noncognitivist, and Richard Brandt, an important ethical naturalist, formed for many years one of the most formidable faculties in moral philosophy in the world. Frankena was known for analytical rigor and sharp insight, qualities already evident in his first essay, “The Naturalistic Fallacy” (1939), which refuted Moore’s influential claim that ethical naturalism (or any other reductionist ethical theory) could be convicted of logical error. At best, Frankena showed, reductionists could be said to conflate or misidentify ethical properties with properties of some other kind. Even put this way, such assertions were question-begging, Frankena argued. Where Moore claimed to see propfoundation axiom Frankena, William K. 323 4065A-  AM  323 erties of two different kinds, naturalists and other reductionists claimed to be able to see only one. Many of Frankena’s most important papers concerned similarly fundamental issues about value and normative judgment. “Obligation and Motivation in Recent Moral Philosophy” (1958), for example, is a classic treatment of the debate between internalism, which holds that motivation is essential to obligation or to the belief or perception that one is obligated, and externalism, which holds that motivation is only contingently related to these. In addition to metaethics, Frankena’s published works ranged broadly over normative ethical theory, virtue ethics, moral psychology, religious ethics, moral education, and the philosophy of education. Although relatively few of his works were devoted exclusively to the area, Frankena was also known as the preeminent historian of ethics of his day. More usually, Frankena used the history of ethics as a framework within which to discuss issues of perennial interest. It was, however, for Ethics, one of the most widely used and frequently cited philosophical ethics textbooks of the twentieth century, that Frankena was perhaps best known. Ethics continues to provide an unparalleled introduction to the subject, as useful in a first undergraduate course as it is to graduate students and professional philosophers looking for perspicuous ways to frame issues and categorize alternative solutions. For example, when in the 1970s philosophers came to systematically investigate normative ethical theories, it was Frankena’s distinction in Ethics between deontological and teleological theories to which they referred.  ETHICS, MORAL PSYCHOLOGY, MOTIVATIONAL INTERNALISM, NATURALISM. S.L.D. Frankfurt School, a group of philosophers, cultural critics, and social scientists associated with the Institute for Social Research, which was founded in Frankfurt in 1929. Its prominent members included, among others, the philosophers Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse, as well as the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm (1900–80) and the literary critic Walter Benjamin (1892– 1940). Habermas is the leading representative of its second generation. The Frankfurt School is less known for particular theories or doctrines than for its program of a “critical theory of society.” Critical theory represents a sophisticated effort to continue Marx’s transformation of moral philosophy into social and political critique, while rejecting orthodox Marxism as a dogma. Critical theory is primarily a way of doing philosophy, integrating the normative aspects of philosophical reflection with the explanatory achievements of the social sciences. The ultimate goal of its program is to link theory and practice, to provide insight, and to empower subjects to change their oppressive circumstances and achieve human emancipation, a rational society that satisfies human needs and powers. The first generation of the Frankfurt School went through three phases of development. The first, lasting from the beginning of the Institute until the end of the 1930s, can be called “interdisciplinary historical materialism” and is best represented in Horkheimer’s programmatic writings. Horkheimer argued that a revised version of historical materialism could organize the results of social research and give it a critical perspective. The second, “critical theory” phase saw the abandonment of Marxism for a more generalized notion of critique. However, with the near-victory of the Nazis in the early 1940s, Horkheimer and Adorno entered the third phase of the School, “the critique of instrumental reason.” In their Dialectic of Enlightenment (1941) as well as in Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man (1964), the process of instrumentally dominating nature leads to dehumanization and the domination of human beings. In their writings after World War II, Adorno and Horkheimer became increasingly pessimistic, seeing around them a “totally administered society” and a manipulated, commodity culture. Horkheimer’s most important essays are from the first phase and focus on the relation of philosophy and social science. Besides providing a clear definition and program for critical social science, he proposes that the normative orientation of philosophy should be combined with the empirical research in the social sciences. This metaphilosophical orientation distinguishes a “critical,” as opposed to “traditional,” theory. For example, such a program demands rethinking the relation of epistemology to the sociology of science. A critical theory seeks to show how the norm of truth is historical and practical, without falling into the skepticism or relativism of traditional sociologies of knowledge such as Mannheim’s. Adorno’s major writings belong primarily to the second and third phases of the development of the Frankfurt School. As the possibilities for criticism appeared to him increasingly narrow, Adorno sought to discover them in aesthetic experience and the mimetic relation to nature. Adorno’s approach was motivated by his view Frankfurt School Frankfurt School 324 4065A-  AM  324 that modern society is a “false totality.” His diagnosis of the causes traced this trend back to the spread of a one-sided, instrumental reason, based on the domination of nature and other human beings. For this reason, he sought a noninstrumental and non-dominating relation to nature and to others, and found it in diverse and fragmentary experiences. Primarily, it is art that preserves this possibility in contemporary society, since in art there is a possibility of mimesis, or the “non-identical” relation to the object. Adorno’s influential attempt to avoid “the logic of identity” gives his posthumous Aesthetic Theory (1970) and other later works a paradoxical character. It was in reaction to the third phase that the second generation of the Frankfurt School recast the idea of a critical theory. Habermas argued for a new emphasis on normative foundations as well as a return to an interdisciplinary research program in the social sciences. After first developing such a foundation in a theory of cognitive interests (technical, practical, and emancipatory), Habermas turned to a theory of the unavoidable presuppositions of communicative action and an ethics of discourse. The potential for emancipatory change lies in communicative, or discursive, rationality and practices that embody it, such as the democratic public sphere. Habermas’s analysis of communication seeks to provide norms for non-dominating relations to others and a broader notion of reason. 

ADORNO, CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY, CRITICAL THEORY, MARXISM, PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES, PRAXIS, WEBER. J.Bo. Frankfurt-style case.FREE WILL PROBLEM. free beauty.BEAUTY. freedom, negative.POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE FREEDOM. freedom, positive.POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE FREEDOM. freedom, practical.FREE WILL PROBLEM. free logic, a system of quantification theory, with or without identity, that allows for non-denoting singular terms. In classical quantification theory, all singular terms (free variables and individual constants) are assigned a denotation in all models. But this condition appears counterintuitive when such systems are applied to natural language, where many singular terms seem to be non-denoting (‘Pegasus’, ‘Sherlock Holmes’, and the like). Various solutions of this problem have been proposed, ranging from Frege’s chosen object theory (assign an arbitrary denotation to each non-denoting singular term) to Russell’s description theory (deny singular term status to most expressions used as such in natural language, and eliminate them from the “logical form” of that language) to a weakening of the quantifiers’ “existential import,” which allows for denotations to be possible, but not necessarily actual, objects. All these solutions preserve the structure of classical quantification theory and make adjustments at the level of application. Free logic is a more radical solution: it allows for legitimate singular terms to be denotationless, maintains the quantifiers’ existential import, but modifies both the proof theory and the semantics of first-order logic. Within proof theory, the main modification consists of eliminating the rule of existential generalization, which allows one to infer ‘There exists a flying horse’ from ‘Pegasus is a flying horse’. Within semantics, the main problem is giving truth conditions for sentences containing non-denoting singular terms, and there are various ways of accomplishing this. Conventional semantics assigns truth-values to atomic sentences containing non-denoting singular terms by convention, and then determines the truth-values of complex sentences as usual. Outer domain semantics divides the domain of interpretation into an inner and an outer part, using the inner part as the range of quantifiers and the outer part to provide for “denotations” for non-denoting singular terms (which are then not literally denotationless, but rather left without an existing denotation). Supervaluational semantics, when considering a sentence A, assigns all possible combinations of truth-values to the atomic components of A containing non-denoting singular terms, evaluates A on the basis of each of those combinations, and then assigns to A the logical product of all such evaluations. (Thus both ‘Pegasus flies’ and ‘Pegasus does not fly’ turn out truth-valueless, but ‘Pegasus flies or Pegasus does not fly’ turns out true since whatever truth-value is assigned to its atomic component ‘Pegasus flies’ the truth-value for the whole sentence is true.) A free logic is inclusive if it allows for the possibility that the range of quantifiers be empty (that there exists nothing at all); it is exclusive otherwise.  FORMAL SEMANTICS, PROOF THEORY, QUANTIFICATION. E.Ben. Frankfurt-style case free logic 325 4065A-  AM  325 free rider, a person who benefits from a social arrangement without bearing an appropriate share of the burdens of maintaining that arrangement, e.g. one who benefits from government services without paying one’s taxes that support them. The arrangements from which a free rider benefits may be either formal or informal. Cooperative arrangements that permit free riders are likely to be unstable; parties to the arrangement are unlikely to continue to bear the burdens of maintaining it if others are able to benefit without doing their part. As a result, it is common for cooperative arrangements to include mechanisms to discourage free riders, e.g. legal punishment, or in cases of informal conventions the mere disapproval of one’s peers. It is a matter of some controversy as to whether it is always morally wrong to benefit from an arrangement without contributing to its maintenance.  JUSTICE, SOCIAL CHOICE THEORY, UTILITARIANISM. W.T. free variable.VARIABLE. free will defense.PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. free will problem, the problem of the nature of free agency and its relation to the origins and conditions of responsible behavior. For those who contrast ‘free’ with ‘determined’, a central question is whether humans are free in what they do or determined by external events beyond their control. A related concern is whether an agent’s responsibility for an action requires that the agent, the act, or the relevant decision be free. This, in turn, directs attention to action, motivation, deliberation, choice, and intention, and to the exact sense, if any, in which our actions are under our control. Use of ‘free will’ is a matter of traditional nomenclature; it is debated whether freedom is properly ascribed to the will or the agent, or to actions, choices, deliberations, etc. Controversy over conditions of responsible behavior forms the predominant historical and conceptual background of the free will problem. Most who ascribe moral responsibility acknowledge some sense in which agents must be free in acting as they do; we are not responsible for what we were forced to do or were unable to avoid no matter how hard we tried. But there are differing accounts of moral responsibility and disagreements about the nature and extent of such practical freedom (a notion also important in Kant). Accordingly, the free will problem centers on these questions: Does moral responsibility require any sort of practical freedom? If so, what sort? Are people practically free? Is practical freedom consistent with the antecedent determination of actions, thoughts, and character? There is vivid debate about this last question. Consider a woman deliberating about whom to vote for. From her first-person perspective, she feels free to vote for any candidate and is convinced that the selection is up to her regardless of prior influences. But viewing her eventual behavior as a segment of larger natural and historical processes, many would argue that there are underlying causes determining her choice. With this contrast of intuitions, any attempt to decide whether the voter is free depends on the precise meanings associated with terms like ‘free’, ‘determine’, and ‘up to her’. One thing (event, situation) determines another if the latter is a consequence of it, or necessitated by it, e.g., the voter’s hand movements by her intention. As usually understood, determinism holds that whatever happens is determined by antecedent conditions, where determination is standardly conceived as causation by antecedent events and circumstances. So construed, determinism implies that at any time the future is already fixed and unique, with no possibility of alternative development. Logical versions of determinism declare each future event to be determined by what is already true, specifically, by the truth that it will occur then. Typical theological variants accept the predestination of all circumstances and events inasmuch as a divine being knows in advance (or even from eternity) that they will obtain. Two elements are common to most interpretations of ‘free’. First, freedom requires an absence of determination or certain sorts of determination, and second, one acts and chooses freely only if these endeavors are, properly speaking, one’s own. From here, accounts diverge. Some take freedom (liberty) of indifference or the contingency of alternative courses of action to be critical. Thus, for the woman deliberating about which candidate to select, each choice is an open alternative inasmuch as it is possible but not yet necessitated. Indifference is also construed as motivational equilibrium, a condition some find essential to the idea that a free choice must be rational. Others focus on freedom (liberty) of spontaneity, where the voter is free if she votes as she chooses or desires, a reading that reflects the popular equation of freedom with “doing what you want.” Associated with both analyses is a third by which the woman acts freely if she exercises her control, implying responsiveness to free rider free will problem 326 4065A-  AM  326 intent as well as both abilities to perform an act and to refrain. A fourth view identifies freedom with autonomy, the voter being autonomous to the extent that her selection is self-determined, e.g., by her character, deeper self, higher values, or informed reason. Though distinct, these conceptions are not incompatible, and many accounts of practical freedom include elements of each. Determinism poses problems if practical freedom requires contingency (alternate possibilities of action). Incompatibilism maintains that determinism precludes freedom, though incompatibilists differ whether everything is determined. Those who accept determinism thereby endorse hard determinism (associated with eighteenthcentury thinkers like d’Holbach and, recently, certain behaviorists), according to which freedom is an illusion since behavior is brought about by environmental and genetic factors. Some hard determinists also deny the existence of moral responsibility. At the opposite extreme, metaphysical libertarianism asserts that people are free and responsible and, a fortiori, that the past does not determine a unique future – a position some find enhanced by developments in quantum physics. Among adherents of this sort of incompatibilism are those who advocate a freedom of indifference by describing responsible choices as those that are undetermined by antecedent circumstances (Epicureans). To rebut the charge that choices, so construed, are random and not really one’s “own,” it has been suggested that several elements, including an agent’s reasons, delimit the range of possibilities and influence choices without necessitating them (a view held by Leibniz and, recently, by Robert Kane). Libertarians who espouse agency causation, on the other hand, blend contingency with autonomy in characterizing a free choice as one that is determined by the agent who, in turn, is not caused to make it (a view found in Carneades and Reid). Unwilling to abandon practical freedom yet unable to understand how a lack of determination could be either necessary or desirable for responsibility, many philosophers take practical freedom and responsibility to be consistent with determinism, thereby endorsing compatibilism. Those who also accept determinism advocate what James called soft determinism. Its supporters include some who identify freedom with autonomy (the Stoics, Spinoza) and others who champion freedom of spontaneity (Hobbes, Locke, Hume). The latter speak of liberty as the power of doing or refraining from an action according to what one wills, so that by choosing otherwise one would have done otherwise. An agent fails to have liberty when constrained, that is, when either prevented from acting as one chooses or compelled to act in a manner contrary to what one wills. Extending this model, liberty is also diminished when one is caused to act in a way one would not otherwise prefer, either to avoid a greater danger (coercion) or because there is deliberate interference with the envisioning of alternatives (manipulation). Compatibilists have shown considerable ingenuity in responding to criticisms that they have ignored freedom of choice or the need for open alternatives. Some apply the spontaneity, control, or autonomy models to decisions, so that the voter chooses freely if her decision accords with her desires, is under her control, or conforms to her higher values, deeper character, or informed reason. Others challenge the idea that responsibility requires alternative possibilities of action. The so-called Frankfurt-style cases (developed by Harry G. Frankfurt) are situations where an agent acts in accord with his desires and choices, but because of the presence of a counterfactual intervener – a mechanism that would have prevented the agent from doing any alternative action had he shown signs of acting differently – the agent could not have done otherwise. Frankfurt’s intuition is that the agent is as responsible as he would have been if there were no intervener, and thus that responsible action does not require alternative possibilities. Critics have challenged the details of the Frankfurt-style cases in attempting to undermine the appeal of the intuition. A different compatibilist tactic recognizes the need for open alternatives and employs versions of the indifference model in describing practical freedom. Choices are free if they are contingent relative to certain subsets of circumstances, e.g. those the agent is or claims to be cognizant of, with the openness of alternatives grounded in what one can choose “for all one knows.” Opponents of compatibilism charge that since these refinements leave agents subject to external determination, even by hidden controllers, compatibilism continues to face an insurmountable challenge. Their objections are sometimes summarized by the consequence argument (so called by Peter van Inwagen, who has prominently defended it): if everything were determined by factors beyond one’s control, then one’s acts, choices, and character would also be beyond one’s control, and consequently, agents would never be free and there would be nothing free will problem free will problem 327 4065A-  AM  327 for which they are responsible. Such reasoning usually employs principles asserting the closure of the practical modalities (ability, control, avoidability, inevitability, etc.) under consequence relations. However, there is a reason to suppose that the sort of ability and control required by responsibility involve the agent’s sense of what can be accomplished. Since cognitive states are typically not closed under consequence, the closure principles underlying the consequence argument are disputable. 

ACTION THEORY, CLOSURE, DETERMINISM, DIMINISHED CAPACITY, MIDDLE KNOWLEDGE, RESPONSIBILITY. T.K. Frege, Gottlob (1848–1925), German mathematician and philosopher. A founder of modern mathematical logic, an advocate of logicism, and a major source of twentieth-century analytic philosophy, he directly influenced Russell, Wittgenstein, and Carnap. Frege’s distinction between the sense and the reference of linguistic expressions continues to be debated. His first publication in logic was his strikingly original 1879 Begriffsschrift (Concept-notation). Here he devised a formal language whose central innovation is the quantifier-variable notation to express generality; he set forth in this language a version of second-order quantificational logic that he used to develop a logical definition of the ancestral of a relation. Frege invented his Begriffsschrift in order to circumvent drawbacks of the use of colloquial language to state proofs. Colloquial language is irregular, unperspicuous, and ambiguous in its expression of logical relationships. Moreover, logically crucial features of the content of statements may remain tacit and unspoken. It is thus impossible to determine exhaustively the premises on which the conclusion of any proof conducted within ordinary language depends. Frege’s Begriffsschrift is to force the explicit statement of the logically relevant features of any assertion. Proofs in the system are limited to what can be obtained from a body of evidently true logical axioms by means of a small number of truth-preserving notational manipulations (inference rules). Here is the first hallmark of Frege’s view of logic: his formulation of logic as a formal system and the ideal of explicitness and rigor that this presentation subserves. Although the formal exactitude with which he formulates logic makes possible the metamathematical investigation of formalized theories, he showed almost no interest in metamathematical questions. He intended the Begriffsschrift to be used. How though does Frege conceive of the subject matter of logic? His orientation in logic is shaped by his anti-psychologism, his conviction that psychology has nothing to do with logic. He took his notation to be a full-fledged language in its own right. The logical axioms do not mention objects or properties whose investigation pertains to some special science; and Frege’s quantifiers are unrestricted. Laws of logic are, as he says, the laws of truth, and these are the most general truths. He envisioned the supplementation of the logical vocabulary of the Begriffsschrift with the basic vocabulary of the special sciences. In this way the Begriffsschrift affords a framework for the completely rigorous deductive development of any science whatsoever. This resolutely nonpsychological universalist view of logic as the most general science is the second hallmark of Frege’s view of logic. This universalist view distinguishes his approach sharply from the coeval algebra of logic approach of George Boole and Ernst Schröder. Wittgenstein, both in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) and in later writings, is very critical of Frege’s universalist view. Logical positivism – most notably Carnap in The Logical Syntax of Language (1934) – rejected it as well. Frege’s universalist view is also distinct from more contemporary views. With his view of quantifiers as intrinsically unrestricted, he saw little point in talking of varying interpretations of a language, believing that such talk is a confused way of getting at what is properly said by means of second-order generalizations. In particular, the semantical conception of logical consequences that becomes prominent in logic after Kurt Gödel’s and Tarski’s work is foreign to Frege. Frege’s work in logic was prompted by an inquiry after the ultimate foundation for arithmetic truths. He criticized J. S. Mill’s empiricist attempt to ground knowledge of the arithmetic of the positive integers inductively in our manipulations of small collections of things. He also rejected crudely formalist views that take pure mathematics to be a sort of notational game. In contrast to these views and Kant’s, he hoped to use his Begriffsschrift to define explicitly the basic notions of arithmetic in logical terms and to deduce the basic principles of arithmetic from logical axioms and these definitions. The explicitness and rigor of his formulation of logic will guarantee that there are no implicit extralogical premises on which the arithmetical conclusions depend. Such proofs, he believed, would show arithmetic to be analytic, not synthetic as Kant had claimed. However, Frege redefined ‘analytic’ to mean ‘provable from Frege, Gottlob Frege, Gottlob 328 4065A-  AM  328 logical laws’ (in his rather un-Kantian sense of ‘logic’) and definitions. Frege’s strategy for these proofs rests on an analysis of the concept of cardinal number that he presented in his nontechnical 1884 book, The Foundations of Arithmetic. Frege, attending to the use of numerals in statements like ‘Mars has two moons’, argued that it contains an assertion about a concept, that it asserts that there are exactly two things falling under the concept ‘Martian moon’. He also noted that both numerals in these statements and those of pure arithmetic play the logical role of singular terms, his proper names. He concluded that numbers are objects so that a definition of the concept of number must then specify what objects numbers are. He observed that (1) the number of F % the number of G just in case there is a one-to-one correspondence between the objects that are F and those that are G. The right-hand side of (1) is statable in purely logical terms. As Frege recognized, thanks to the definition of the ancestral of a relation, (1) suffices in the second-order setting of the Begriffsschrift for the derivation of elementary arithmetic. The vindication of his logicism requires, however, the logical definition of the expression ‘the number of’. He sharply criticized the use in mathematics of any notion of set or collection that views a set as built up from its elements. However, he assumed that, corresponding to each concept, there is an object, the extension of the concept. He took the notion of an extension to be a logical one, although one to which the notion of a concept is prior. He adopted as a fundamental logical principle the ill-fated biconditional: the extension of F % the extension of G just in case every F is G, and vice versa. If this principle were valid, he could exploit the equivalence relation over concepts that figures in the right-hand side of (1) to identify the number of F with a certain extension and thus obtain (1) as a theorem. In The Basic Laws of Arithmetic (vol. 1, 1893; vol. 2, 1903) he formalized putative proofs of basic arithmetical laws within a modified version of the Begriffsschrift that included a generalization of the law of extensions. However, Frege’s law of extensions, in the context of his logic, is inconsistent, leading to Russell’s paradox, as Russell communicated to Frege in 1902. Frege’s attempt to establish logicism was thus, on its own terms, unsuccessful. In Begriffsschrift Frege rejected the thesis that every uncompound sentence is logically segmented into a subject and a predicate. Subsequently, he said that his approach in logic was distinctive in starting not from the synthesis of concepts into judgments, but with the notion of truth and that to which this notion is applicable, the judgeable contents or thoughts that are expressed by statements. Although he said that truth is the goal of logic, he did not think that we have a grasp of the notion of truth that is independent of logic. He eschewed a correspondence theory of truth, embracing instead a redundancy view of the truth-predicate. For Frege, to call truth the goal of logic points toward logic’s concern with inference, with the recognition-of-thetruth (judging) of one thought on the basis of the recognition-of-the-truth of another. This recognition-of-the-truth-of is not verbally expressed by a predicate, but rather in the assertive force with which a sentence is uttered. The starting point for logic is then reflection on elementary inference patterns that analyze thoughts and reveal a logical segmentation in language. This starting point, and the fusion of logical and ontological categories it engenders, is arguably what Frege is pointing toward by his enigmatic context principle in Foundations: only in the context of a sentence does a word have a meaning. He views sentences as having a function-argument segmentation like that manifest in the terms of arithmetic, e.g., (3 $ 4) ! 2. Truth-functional inference patterns, like modus ponens, isolate sentences as logical units in compound sentences. Leibniz’s law – the substitution of one name for another in a sentence on the basis of an equation – isolates proper names. Proper names designate objects. Predicates, obtainable by removing proper names from sentences, designate concepts. The removal of a predicate from a sentence leaves a higher level predicate that signifies a second-level concept under which first-level concepts fall. An example is the universal quantifier over objects: it designates a second-level concept under which a first-level concept falls, if every object falls under it. Frege takes each first-level concept to be determinately true or false of each object. Vague predicates, like ‘is bald’, thus fail to signify concepts. This requirement of concept determinacy is a product of Frege’s construal of quantification over objects as intrinsically unrestricted. Thus, concept determinacy is simply a form of the law of the excluded middle: for any concept F and any object x, either x is F or x is not F. Frege elaborates and modifies his basic logical ideas in three seminal papers from 1891–92, “Function and Concept,” “On Concept and Frege, Gottlob Frege, Gottlob 329 4065A-  AM  329 Object,” and “On Sense and Meaning.” In “Function and Concept,” Frege sharpens his conception of the function-argument structure of language. He introduces the two truth-values, the True and the False, and maintains that sentences are proper names of these objects. Concepts become functions that map objects to either the True or the False. The course-of-values of a function is introduced as a generalization of the notion of an extension. Generally then, an object is anything that might be designated by a proper name. There is nothing more basic to be said by way of elucidating what an object is. Similarly, first-level functions are what are designated by the expressions that result from removing names from compound proper names. Frege calls functions unsaturated or incomplete, in contrast to objects, which are saturated. Proper names and function names are not intersubstitutable so that the distinction between objects and functions is a type-theoretic, categorial distinction. No function is an object; no function name designates an object; there are no quantifiers that simultaneously generalize over both functions and concepts. Just here Frege’s exposition of his views, if not the views themselves, encounter a difficulty. In explaining his views, he uses proper names of the form ‘the concept F’ to talk about concepts; and in contrasting unsaturated functions with saturated objects, apepars to generalize over both with a single quantifier. Benno Kerry, a contemporary of Frege, charged Frege’s views with inconsistency. Since the phrase ‘the concept horse’ is a proper name, it must designate an object. On Frege’s view, it follows that the concept ‘horse’ is not a concept, but an object, an apparent inconsistency. Frege responded to Kerry’s criticism in “On Concept and Object.” He embraced Kerry’s paradox, denying that it represents a genuine inconsistency, while admitting that his remarks about the function–object distinction are, as the result of an unavoidable awkwardness of language, misleading. Frege maintained that the distinction between function and object is logically simple and so cannot be properly defined. His remarks on the distinction are informal handwaving designed to elucidate what is captured within the Begriffsschrift by the difference between proper names and function names together with their associated distinct quantifiers. Frege’s handling of the function– object distinction is a likely source for Wittgenstein’s say–show distinction in the Tractatus. At the beginning of “On Sense and Meaning,” Frege distinguishes between the reference or meaning (Bedeutung) of a proper name and its sense (Sinn). He observes that the sentence ‘The Morning Star is identical with the Morning Star’ is a trivial instance of the principle of identity. In contrast, the sentence ‘The Morning Star is identical with the Evening Star’ expresses a substantive astronomical discovery. The two sentences thus differ in what Frege called their cognitive value: someone who understood both might believe the first and doubt the second. This difference cannot be explained in terms of any difference in reference between names in these sentences. Frege explained it in terms of a difference between the senses expressed by ‘the Morning Star’ and ‘the Evening Star’. In posthumously published writings, he indicated that the sense–reference distinction extends to function names as well. In this distinction, Frege extends to names the notion of the judgeable content expressed by a sentence: the sense of a name is the contribution that the name makes to the thought expressed by sentences in which it occurs. Simultaneously, in classifying sentences as proper names of truth-values, he applies to sentences the notion of a name’s referring to something. Frege’s function-argument view of logical segmentation constrains his view of both the meaning and the sense of compound names: the substitution for any name occurring in a compound expression of a name with the same reference (sense) yields a new compound expression with the same reference (sense) as the original. Frege advances several theses about sense that individually and collectively have been a source of debate in philosophy of language. First, the sense of an expression is what is grasped by anyone who understands it. Despite the connection between understanding and sense, Frege provides no account of synonymy, no identity criteria for senses. Second, the sense of an expression is not something psychological. Senses are objective. They exist independently of anyone’s grasping them; their availability to different thinkers is a presupposition for communication in science. Third, the sense expressed by a name is a mode of presentation of the name’s reference. Here Frege’s views contrast with Russell’s. Corresponding to Frege’s thoughts are Russell’s propositions. In The Principles of Mathematics (1903), Russell maintained that the meaningful words in a sentence designate things, properties, and relations that are themselves constituents of the proposition expressed by the sentence. For Frege, our access through judgment to objects and functions is via Frege, Gottlob Frege, Gottlob 330 4065A-  AM  330 the senses that are expressed by names that mean these items. These senses, not the items they present, occur in thoughts. Names expressing different senses may refer to the same item; and some names, while expressing a sense, refer to nothing. Any compound name containing a name that has a sense, but lacks a reference, itself lacks a meaning. A person may fully understand an expression without knowing whether it means anything and without knowing whether it designates what another understood name does. Fourth, the sense ordinarily expressed by a name is the reference of the name, when the name occurs in indirect discourse. Although the Morning Star is identical with the Evening Star, the inference from the sentence ‘Smith believes that the Morning Star is a planet’ to ‘Smith believes that the Evening Star is a planet’ is not sound. Frege, however, accepts Leibniz’s law without restriction. He accordingly takes such seeming failures of Leibniz’s law to expose a pervasive ambiguity in colloquial language: names in indirect discourse do not designate what they designate outside of indirect discourse. The fourth thesis is offered as an explanation of this ambiguity. 

LOGICISM, MEANING, RUSSELL, SET-THEORETIC PARADOXES, SET THEORY. T.R. Frege-Geach point.GEACH. frequency theory of probability.PROBABILITY. French personalism, a Christian socialism stressing social activism and personal responsibility, the theoretical basis for the Christian workers’ Esprit movement begun in the 1930s by Emmanuel Mounier (1905–50), a Christian philosopher and activist. Influenced by both the religious existentialism of Kierkegaard and the radical social action called for by Marx and in part taking direction from the earlier work of Charles Péguy, the movement strongly opposed fascism and called for worker solidarity during the 1930s and 1940s. It also urged a more humane treatment of France’s colonies. Personalism allowed for a Christian socialism independent of both more conservative Christian groups and the Communist labor unions and party. Its most important single book is Mounier’s Personalism. The quarterly journal Esprit has regularly published contributions of leading French and international thinkers. Such well-known Christian philosophers as Henry Duméry, Marcel, Maritain, and Ricoeur were attracted to the movement.  MARCEL, MARITAIN, PERSONALISM, RICOEUR. J.Bi. Freud, Sigmund (1856–1939), Austrian neurologist and psychologist, the founder of psychoanalysis. Starting with the study of hysteria in late nineteenth-century Vienna, Freud developed a theory of the mind that has come to dominate modern thought. His notions of the unconscious, of a mind divided against itself, of the meaningfulness of apparently meaningless activity, of the displacement and transference of feelings, of stages of psychosexual development, of the pervasiveness and importance of sexual motivation, as well as of much else, have helped shape modern consciousness. His language (and that of his translators), whether specifying divisions of the mind (e.g. id, ego, and superego), types of disorder (e.g. obsessional neurosis), or the structure of experience (e.g. Oedipus complex, narcissism), has become the language in which we describe and understand ourselves and others. As the poet W. H. Auden wrote on the occasion of Freud’s death, “if often he was wrong and, at times, absurd, / to us he is no more a person / now but a whole climate of opinion / under whom we conduct our different lives. . . .” Hysteria is a disorder involving organic symptoms with no apparent organic cause. Following early work in neurophysiology, Freud (in collaboration with Josef Breuer) came to the view that “hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences,” in particular buried memories of traumatic experiences, the strangulated affect of which emerged (in conversion hysteria) in the distorted form of physical symptoms. Treatment involved the recovery of the repressed memories to allow the cathartic discharge or abreaction of the previously displaced and strangulated affect. This provided the background for Freud’s seduction theory, which traced hysterical symptoms to traumatic prepubertal sexual assaults (typically by fathers). But Freud later abandoned the seduction theory because the energy assumptions were problematic (e.g., if the only energy involved was strangulated affect from long-past external trauma, why didn’t the symptom successfully use up that energy and so clear itself up?) and because he came to see that fantasy could have the same effects as memory of actual events: “psychical reality was of more importance than material reality.” What was repressed was not memories, but desires. He came to see the repetition of symptoms as fueled by internal, in particular sexual, energy. While it is certainly true that Freud saw the Frege-Geach point Freud, Sigmund 331 4065A-  AM  331 working of sexuality almost everywhere, it is not true that he explained everything in terms of sexuality alone. Psychoanalysis is a theory of internal psychic conflict, and conflict requires at least two parties. Despite developments and changes, Freud’s instinct theory was determinedly dualistic from beginning to end – at the beginning, libido versus ego or self-preservative instincts, and at the end Eros versus Thanatos, life against death. Freud’s instinct theory (not to be confused with standard biological notions of hereditary behavior patterns in animals) places instincts on the borderland between the mental and physical and insists that they are internally complex. In particular, the sexual instinct must be understood as made up of components that vary along a number of dimensions (source, aim, and object). Otherwise, as Freud argues in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), it would be difficult to understand how the various perversions are recognized as “sexual” despite their distance from the “normal” conception of sexuality (heterosexual genital intercourse between adults). His broadened concept of sexuality makes intelligible sexual preferences emphasizing different sources (erotogenic zones or bodily centers of arousal), aims (acts, such as intercourse and looking, designed to achieve pleasure and satisfaction), and objects (whether of the same or different gender, or even other than whole living persons). It also allows for the recognition of infantile sexuality. Phenomena that might not on the surface appear sexual (e.g. childhood thumbsucking) share essential characteristics with obviously sexual activity (infantile sensual sucking involves pleasurable stimulation of the same erotogenic zone, the mouth, stimulated in adult sexual activities such as kissing), and can be understood as earlier stages in the development of the same underlying instinct that expresses itself in such various forms in adult sexuality. The standard developmental stages are oral, anal, phallic, and genital. Neuroses, which Freud saw as “the negative of perversions” (i.e., the same desires that might in some lead to perverse activity, when repressed, result in neurosis), could often be traced to struggles with the Oedipus complex: the “nucleus of the neuroses.” The Oedipus complex, which in its positive form postulates sexual feelings toward the parent of the opposite sex and ambivalently hostile feelings toward the parent of the same sex, suggests that the universal shape of the human condition is a triangle. The conflict reaches its peak between the ages of three and five, during the phallic stage of psychosexual development. The fundamental structuring of emotions has its roots in the prolonged dependency of the human infant, leading to attachment – a primary form of love – to the primary caregiver, who (partly for biological reasons such as lactation) is most often the mother, and the experience of others as rivals for the time, attention, and concern of the primary caregiver. Freud’s views of the Oedipus complex should not be oversimplified. The sexual desires involved, e.g., are typically unconscious and necessarily infantile, and infantile sexuality and its associated desires are not expressed in the same form as mature genital sexuality. His efforts to explain the distinctive features of female psychosexual development in particular led to some of his most controversial views, including the postulation of penis envy to explain why girls but not boys standardly experience a shift in gender of their primary love object (both starting with the mother as the object). Later love objects, including psychoanalysts as the objects of transference feelings (in the analytic setting, the analyst functions as a blank screen onto which the patient projects feelings), are the results of displacement or transference from earlier objects: “The finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it.” Freud used the same structure of explanation for symptoms and for more normal phenomena, such as dreams, jokes, and slips of the tongue. All can be seen as compromise formations between forces pressing for expression (localized by Freud’s structural theory in the id, understood as a reservoir of unconscious instinct) and forces of repression (some also unconscious, seeking to meet the constraints of morality and reality). On Freud’s underlying model, the fundamental process of psychic functioning, the primary process, leads to the uninhibited discharge of psychic energy. Such discharge is experienced as pleasurable, hence the governing principle of the fundamental process is called the pleasure principle. Increase of tension is experienced as unpleasure, and the psychic apparatus aims at a state of equilibrium or constancy (sometimes Freud writes as if the state aimed at is one of zero tension, hence the Nirvana principle associated with the death instinct in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle [1920]). But since pleasure can in fact only be achieved under specific conditions, which sometimes require arrangement, planning, and delay, individuals must learn to inhibit discharge, and this secondary process thinking is governed by what Freud came to call the reality principle. The aim is still satisfaction, but the “exigencies of life” require attention, reasoning, and Freud, Sigmund Freud, Sigmund 332 4065A-  AM  332 judgment to avoid falling into the fantasy wishfulfillment of the primary process. Sometimes defense mechanisms designed to avoid increased tension or unpleasure can fail, leading to neurosis (in general, under the theory, a neurosis is a psychological disorder rooted in unconscious conflict – particular neuroses being correlated with particular phases of development and particular mechanisms of defense). Repression, involving the confining of psychic representations to the unconscious, is the most important of the defense mechanisms. It should be understood that unlike preconscious ideas, which are merely descriptively unconscious (though one may not be aware of them at the moment, they are readily accessible to consciousness), unconscious ideas in the strict sense are kept from awareness by forces of repression, they are dynamically unconscious – as evidenced by the resistance to making the unconscious conscious in therapy. Freud’s deep division of the mind between unconscious and conscious goes beyond neurotic symptoms to help make sense of familiar forms of irrationality (such as selfdeception, ambivalence, and weakness of the will) that are highly problematical on Cartesian models of an indivisible unitary consciousness. Perhaps the best example of the primary process thinking that characterizes the unconscious (unconstrained by the realities of time, contradiction, causation, etc.) can be found in dreaming. Freud regarded dreams as “the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious.” Dreams are the disguised fulfillment of unconscious wishes. In extracting the meaning of dreams through a process of interpretation, Freud relied on a central distinction between the manifest content (the dream as dreamt or as remembered on waking) and the latent content (the unconscious dreamthoughts). Freud held that interpretation via association to particular elements of the manifest content reversed the process of dream construction, the dream-work in which various mechanisms of distortion operated on the day’s residues (perceptions and thoughts stemming from the day before the dream was dreamt) and the latent dream-thoughts to produce the manifest dream. Prominent among the mechanisms are the condensation (in which many meanings are represented by a single idea) and displacement (in which there is a shift of affect from a significant and intense idea to an associated but otherwise insignificant one) also typical of neurotic symptoms, as well as considerations of representability and secondary revision more specific to dream formation. Symbolism is less prominent in Freud’s theory of dreams than is often thought; indeed, the section on symbols appeared only as a later addition to The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). Freud explicitly rejected the ancient “dream book” mode of interpretation in terms of fixed symbols, and believed one had to recover the hidden meaning of a dream through the dreamer’s (not the interpreter’s) associations to particular elements. Such associations are a part of the process of free association, in which a patient is obliged to report to the analyst all thoughts without censorship of any kind. The process is crucial to psychoanalysis, which is both a technique of psychotherapy and a method of investigation of the workings of the mind. Freud used the results of his investigations to speculate about the origins of morality, religion, and political authority. He tended to find their historical and psychological roots in early stages of the development of the individual. Morality in particular he traced to the internalization (as one part of the resolution of the Oedpius complex) of parental prohibitions and demands, producing a conscience or superego (which is also the locus of self-observation and the ego-ideal). Such identification by incorporation – introjection – plays an important role in character formation in general. The instinctual renunciation demanded by morality and often achieved by repression Freud regarded as essential to the order society needs to conduct its business. Civilization gets the energy for the achievements of art and science by sublimation of the same instinctual drives. But the costs of society and civilization to the individual in frustration, unhappiness, and neurosis can be too high. Freud’s individual therapy was meant to lead to the liberation of repressed energies (which would not by itself guarantee happiness); he hoped it might also provide energy to transform the world and moderate its excess demands for restraint. But just as his individual psychology was founded on the inevitability of internal conflict, in his social thought he saw some limits (especially on aggression – the death instinct turned outward) as necessary and he remained pessimistic about the apparently endless struggle reason must wage (Civilization and Its Discontents, 1930). 

JUNG, PHILOSOPHY OF MIND, PHILOSOPHY OF PSYCHOLOGY, SELF-DECEPTION. J.Ne. Fries, Jakob Friedrich.NEO-KANTIANISM. full subset algebra.BOOLEAN ALGEBRA. Fries, Jakob Friedrich full subset algebra 333 4065A-  AM  333 function, mathematical.ALGORITHM, MATHEMATICAL FUNCTION. function, probability.BAYESIAN RATIONALITY. function, state.QUANTUM MECHANICS. function, teleological.TELEOLOGY. functional.RELATION. functional abstraction.

COMBINATORY LOGIC. functional calculus, lower.FORMAL LOGIC. functional completeness.COMPLETENESS. functional dependence, a relationship between variable magnitudes (especially physical magnitudes) and certain properties or processes. In modern physical science there are two types of laws stating such relationships. (1) There are numerical laws stating concomitant variation of certain quantities, where a variation in any one is accompanied by variations in the others. An example is the law for ideal gases: pV % aT, where p is the pressure of the gas, V its volume, T its absolute temperature, and a a constant derived from the mass and the nature of the gas. Such laws say nothing about the temporal order of the variations, and tests of the laws can involve variation of any of the relevant magnitudes. Concomitant variation, not causal sequence, is what is tested for. (2) Other numerical laws state variations of physical magnitudes correlated with times. Galileo’s law of free fall asserts that the change in the unit time of a freely falling body (in a vacuum) in the direction of the earth is equal to gt, where g is a constant and t is the time of the fall, and where the rate of time changes of g is correlative with the temporal interval t. The law is true of any body in a state of free fall and for any duration. Such laws are also called “dynamical” because they refer to temporal processes usually explained by the postulation of forces acting on the objects in question. R.E.B. functional explanation.PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES. functionalism, the view that mental states are defined by their causes and effects. As a metaphysical thesis about the nature of mental states, functionalism holds that what makes an inner state mental is not an intrinsic property of the state, but rather its relations to sensory stimulation (input), to other inner states, and to behavior (output). For example, what makes an inner state a pain is its being a type of state (typically) caused by pinpricks, sunburns, and so on, a type that causes other mental states (e.g., worry), and a type that causes behavior (e.g., saying “ouch”). Propositional attitudes also are identified with functional states: an inner state is a desire for water partly in virtue of its causing a person to pick up a glass and drink its contents when the person believes that the glass contains water. The basic distinction needed for functionalism is that between role (in terms of which a type of mental state is defined) and occupant (the particular thing that occupies a role). Functional states exhibit multiple realizability: in different kinds of beings (humans, computers, Martians), a particular kind of causal role may have different occupants – e.g., the causal role definitive of a belief that p, say, may be occupied by a neural state in a human, but occupied (perhaps) by a hydraulic state in a Martian. Functionalism, like behaviorism, thus entails that mental states may be shared by physically dissimilar systems. Although functionalism does not automatically rule out the existence of immaterial souls, its motivation has been to provide a materialistic account of mentality. The advent of the computer gave impetus to functionalism. First, the distinction between software and hardware suggested the distinction between role (function) and occupant (structure). Second, since computers are automated, they demonstrate how inner states can be causes of output in the absence of a homunculus (i.e., a “little person” intelligently directing output). Third, the Turing machine provided a model for one of the earliest versions of functionalism. A Turing machine is defined by a table that specifies transitions from current state and input to next state (or to output). According to Turing machine functionalism, any being with pscychological states has a unique best description, and each psychological state is identical to a machine table state relative to that description. To be in mental state type M is to instantiate or realize Turing machine T in state S. Turing machine functionalism, developed largely by Putnam, has been criticized by Putnam, Ned Block, and Fodor. To cite just one serious problem: two machine table states – and hence, according to Turing machine functionalism, two psychological states – are distinct if they are followed by different states or by different outputs. So, if a pinprick causes A to say “Ouch” function, mathematical functionalism 334 4065A-  AM  334 and causes B to say “Oh,” then, if Turing machine functionalism were true, A’s and B’s states of pain would be different psychological states. But we do not individuate psychological states so finely, nor should we: such fine-grained individuation would be unsuitable for psychology. Moreover, if we assume that there is a path from any state to any other state, Turing machine functionalism has the unacceptable consequence that no two systems have any of their states in common unless they have all their states in common. Perhaps the most prominent version of functionalism is the causal theory of mind. Whereas Turing machine functionalism is based on a technical computational or psychological theory, the causal theory of mind relies on commonsense understanding: according to the causal theory of mind, the concept of a mental state is the concept of a state apt for bringing about certain kinds of behavior (Armstrong). Mental state terms are defined by the commonsense platitudes in which they appear (David Lewis). Philosophers can determine a priori what mental states are (by conceptual analysis or by definition). Then scientists determine what physical states occupy the causal roles definitive of mental states. If it turned out that there was no physical state that occupied the causal role of, say, pain (i.e., was caused by pinpricks, etc., and caused worry, etc.), it would follow, on the causal theory, that pain does not exist. To be in mental state type M is to be in a physical state N that occupies causal role R. A third version is teleological or “homuncular” functionalism, associated with William G. Lycan and early Dennett. According to homuncular functionalism, a human being is analogous to a large corporation, made up of cooperating departments, each with its own job to perform; these departments interpret stimuli and produce behavioral responses. Each department (at the highest subpersonal level) is in turn constituted by further units (at a sub-subpersonal level) and so on down until the neurological level is reached. The role–occupant distinction is thus relativized to level: an occupant at one level is a role at the next level down. On this view, to be in a mental state type M is to have a sub- . . . subpersonal f-er that is in its characteristic state S(f). All versions of functionalism face problems about the qualitative nature of mental states. The difficulty is that functionalism individuates states in purely relational terms, but the acrid odor of, say, a paper mill seems to have a non-relational, qualitative character that functionalism misses altogether. If two people, on seeing a ripe banana, are in states with the same causes and effects, then, by functionalist definition, they are in the same mental state – say, having a sensation of yellow. But it seems possible that one has an “inverted spectrum” relative to the other, and hence that their states are qualitatively different. Imagine that, on seeing the banana, one of the two is in a state qualitatively indistinguishable from the state that the other would be in on seeing a ripe tomato. Despite widespread intuitions that such inverted spectra are possible, according to functionalism, they are not. A related problem is that of “absent qualia.” The population of China, or even the economy of Bolivia, could be functionally equivalent to a human brain – i.e., there could be a function that mapped the relations between inputs, outputs, and internal states of the population of China onto those of a human brain; yet the population of China, no matter how its members interact with one another and with other nations, intuitively does not have mental states. The status of these arguments remains controversial. 

BEHAVIORISM, INTENTIONALITY, PHILOSOPHY OF MIND, TURING MACHINE. L.R.B. functionalism, analytical.PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. functionalism, machine state.PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. functionalism, Turing machine.FUNCTIONALISM. functional jurisprudence.JURISPRUDENCE. functor.FORMAL LOGIC. fundamentum divisionis (Latin, ‘foundation of a division’), term in Scholastic logic and ontology meaning ‘grounds for a distinction’. Some distinctions categorize separately existing things, such as men and beasts. This is a real distinction, and the fundamentum divisionis exists in reality. Some distinctions categorize things that cannot exist separately but can be distinguished mentally, such as the difference between being a human being and having a sense of humor, or the difference between a soul and one of its powers, say, the power of thinking. A mental distinction is also called a formal distinction. Duns Scotus is well known for the idea of formalis distinctio cum fundamento ex parte rei (a formal distinction with a foundation in the thing), primarily in order to handle logical problems with functionalism, analytical fundamentum divisionis 335 4065A-  AM  335 the Christian concept of God. God is supposed to be absolutely simple; i.e., there can be no multiplicity of composition in him. Yet, according to traditional theology, many properties can be truly attributed to him. He is wise, good, and powerful. In order to preserve the simplicity of God, Duns Scotus claimed that the difference between wisdom, goodness, and power was only formal but still had some foundation in God’s own being. A.P.M. Fung Yu-lan (1895–1990), Chinese philosopher. He was educated at Peking University and earned his Ph.D. from Columbia University. His History of Chinese Philosophy was the first such complete history of high quality by a contemporary scholar. During World War II he attempted to reconstruct Chu Hsi’s philosophy in terms of the New Realism that he had learned from the West, and developed his own system of thought, a new philosophy of li (principle). After the Communist takeover in 1949, he gave up his earlier thought, denouncing Confucian philosophy during the Cultural Revolution. After the Cultural Revolution he changed his position again and rewrote his History of Chinese Philosophy in seven volumes.  CHINESE PHILOSOPHY, CHU HSI. S.-h.L. future contingents, singular events or states of affairs that may come to pass, and also may not come to pass, in the future. There are three traditional problems involving future contingents: the question of universal validity of the principle of bivalence, the question of free will and determinism, and the question of foreknowledge. The debate about future contingents in modern philosophical logic was revived by Lukasiewicz’s work on three-valued logic. He thought that in order to avoid fatalistic consequences, we must admit that the principle of bivalence (for any proposition, p, either p is true or not-p is true) does not hold good for propositions about future contingents. Many authors have considered this view confused. According to von Wright, e.g., when propositions are said to be true or false and ‘is’ in ‘it is true that’ is tenseless or atemporal, the illusion of determinism does not arise. It has its roots in a tacit oscillation between a temporal and an atemporal reading of the phrase ‘it is true’. In a temporalized reading, or in its tensed variants such as ‘it was/will be/is already true’, one can substitute, for ‘true’, other words like ‘certain’, ‘fixed’, or ‘necessary’. Applying this diachronic necessity to atemporal predications of truth yields the idea of logical determinism. In contemporary discussions of tense and modality, future contingents are often treated with the help of a model of time as a line that breaks up into branches as it moves from left to right (i.e., from past to future). Although the conception of truth at a moment has been found philosophically problematic, the model of historical modalities and branching time as such is much used in works on freedom and determination. Aristotle’s On Interpretation IX contains a classic discussion of future contingents with the famous example of tomorrow’s sea battle. Because of various ambiguities in the text and in Aristotle’s modal conceptions in general, the meaning of the passage is in dispute. In the Metaphysics VI.3 and in the Niocmachean Ethics III.5, Aristotle tries to show that not all things are predetermined. The Stoics represented a causally deterministic worldview; an ancient example of logical determinism is Diodorus Cronus’s famous master argument against contingency. Boethius thought that Aristotle’s view can be formulated as follows: the principle of bivalence is universally valid, but propositions about future contingents, unlike those about past and present things, do not obey the stronger principle according to which each proposition is either determinately true or determinately false. A proposition is indeterminately true as long as the conditions that make it true are not yet fixed. This was the standard Latin doctrine from Abelard to Aquinas. Similar discussions occurred in Arabic commentaries on On Interpretation. In the fourteenth century, many thinkers held that Aristotle abandoned bivalence for future contingent propositions. This restriction was usually refuted, but it found some adherents like Peter Aureoli. Duns Scotus and Ockham heavily criticized the Boethian-Thomistic view that God can know future contingents only because the flux of time is present to divine eternity. According to them, God contingently foreknows free acts. Explaining this proved to be a very cumbersome task. Luis de Molina (1535–1600) suggested that God knows what possible creatures would do in any possible situation. This “middle knowledge” theory about counterfactuals of freedom has remained a living theme in philosophy of religion; analogous questions are treated in theories of subjunctive reasoning.  ARISTOTLE, BOETHIUS, FREE WILL PROBLEM, MANY-VALUED LOGIC,

TENSE LOGIC, VAGUENESS. S.K. Fung Yu-lan future contingents 336 4065A-  AM  336 fuzzy logic.FUZZY SET, VAGUENESS. fuzzy set, a set in which membership is a matter of degree. In classical set theory, for every set S and thing x, either x is a member of S or x is not. In fuzzy set theory, things x can be members of sets S to any degree between 0 and 1, inclusive. Degree 1 corresponds to ‘is a member of’ and 0 corresponds to ‘is not’; the intermediate degrees are degrees of vagueness or uncertainty. (Example: Let S be the set of men who are bald at age forty.) L. A. Zadeh developed a logic of fuzzy sets as the basis for a logic of vague predicates. A fuzzy set can be represented mathematically as a function from a given universe into the interval [0, 1].  SET THEORY, VAGUENESS. D.H. fuzzy logic fuzzy set 337 4065A-  AM  337 Gadamer, Hans-Georg (b.1900), German philosopher, the leading proponent of hermeneutics in the second half of the twentieth century. He studied at Marburg in the 1920s with Natorp and Heidegger. His first book, Plato’s Dialectical Ethics (1931), bears their imprint and reflects his abiding interest in Greek philosophy. Truth and Method (1960) established Gadamer as an original thinker and had an impact on a variety of disciplines outside philosophy, including theology, legal theory, and literary criticism. The three parts of Truth and Method combine to displace the scientific conceptions of truth and method as the model for understanding in the human sciences. In the first part, which presents itself as a critique of the abstraction inherent in aesthetic consciousness, Gadamer argues that artworks make a claim to truth. Later Gadamer draws on the play of art in the experience of the beautiful to offer an analogy to how a text draws its readers into the event of truth by making a claim on them. In the central portion of the book Gadamer presents tradition as a condition of understanding. Tradition is not for him an object of historical knowledge, but part of one’s very being. The final section of Truth and Method is concerned with language as the site of tradition. Gadamer sought to shift the focus of hermeneutics from the problems of obscurity and misunderstanding to the community of understanding that the participants in a dialogue share through language. Gadamer was involved in three debates that define his philosophical contribution. The first was an ongoing debate with Heidegger reflected throughout Gadamer’s corpus. Gadamer did not accept all of the innovations that Heidegger introduced into his thinking in the 1930s, particularly his reconstruction of the history of philosophy as the history of being. Gadamer also rejected Heidegger’s elevation of Hölderlin to the status of an authority. Gadamer’s greater accessibility led Habermas to characterize Gadamer’s contribution as that of having “urbanized the Heideggerian province.” The second debate was with Habermas himself. Habermas criticized Gadamer’s rejection of the Enlightenment’s “prejudice against prejudice.” Whereas Habermas objected to the conservatism inherent in Gadamer’s rehabilitation of prejudice, Gadamer explained that he was only setting out the conditions for understanding, conditions that did not exclude the possibility of radical change. The third debate, which formed the basis of Dialogue and Deconstruction (1989), was with Derrida. Derridean deconstruction is indebted to Heidegger’s later philosophy and so this debate was in part about the direction philosophy should take after Heidegger. However, many observers concluded that there was no real engagement between Gadamer and Derrida. To some it seemed that Derrida, by refusing to accept the terms on which Gadamer insisted dialogue should take place, had exposed the limits imposed by hermeneutics. To others it was confirmation that any attempt to circumvent the conditions of dialogue specified by Gadamerian hermeneutics is selfdefeating.  DERRIDA, HEIDEGGER, HERMENEUTICS. R.L.B. Gaius.COMMENTARIES ON PLATO,

MIDDLE PLATONISM. Galen (A.D. 129–c.215), physician and philosopher from Greek Asia Minor. He traveled extensively in the Greco-Roman world before settling in Rome and becoming court physician to Marcus Aurelius. His philosophical interests lay mainly in the philosophy of science (On the Therapeutic Method) and nature (On the Function of Parts), and in logic (Introduction to Logic, in which he develops a crude but pioneering treatment of the logic of relations). Galen espoused an extreme form of directed teleology in natural explanation, and sought to develop a syncretist picture of cause and explanation drawing on Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and preceding medical writers, notably Hippocrates, whose views he attempted to harmonize with those of Plato (On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato). He wrote on philosophical psychology (On the Passions and Errors of the Soul); his materialist account of mind (Mental Characteristics Are Caused by Bodily Conditions) is notable for its caution in approaching issues (such as the actual nature of the substance of the soul and the age and structure of the universe) that he regarded as unde338 G 4065A-  AM  338 cidable. In physiology, he adopted a version of the four-humor theory, that health consists in an appropriate balance of four basic bodily constituents (blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm), and disease in a corresponding imbalance (a view owed ultimately to Hippocrates). He sided with the rationalist physicians against the empiricists, holding that it was possible to elaborate and to support theories concerning the fundamentals of the human body; but he stressed the importance of observation and experiment, in particular in anatomy (he discovered the function of the recurrent laryngeal nerve by dissection and ligation). Via the Arabic tradition, Galen became the most influential doctor of the ancient world; his influence persisted, in spite of the discoveries of the seventeenth century, until the end of the nineteenth century. He also wrote extensively on semantics, but these texts are lost. R.J.H. Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), Italian astronomer, natural philosopher, and physicist. His Dialogue concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632) defended Copernicus by arguing against the major tenets of the Aristotelian cosmology. On his view, one kind of motion replaces the multiple distinct celestial and terrestrial motions of Aristotle; mathematics is applicable to the real world; and explanation of natural events appeals to efficient causes alone, not to hypothesized natural ends. Galileo was called before the Inquisition, was made to recant his Copernican views, and spent the last years of his life under house arrest. Discourse concerning Two New Sciences (1638) created the modern science of mechanics: it proved the laws of free fall, thus making it possible to study accelerated motions; asserted the principle of the independence of forces; and proposed a theory of parabolic ballistics. His work was developed by Huygens and Newton. Galileo’s scientific and technological achievements were prodigious. He invented an air thermoscope, a device for raising water, and a computer for calculating quantities in geometry and ballistics. His discoveries in pure science included the isochronism of the pendulum and the hydrostatic balance. His telescopic observations led to the discovery of four of Jupiter’s satellites (the Medicean Stars), the moon’s mountains, sunspots, the moon’s libration, and the nature of the Milky Way. In methodology Galileo accepted the ancient Greek ideal of demonstrative science, and employed the method of retroductive inference, whereby the phenomena under investigation are attributed to remote causes. Much of his work utilizes the hypothetico-deductive method. R.E.B. gambler’s fallacy, also called Monte Carlo fallacy, the fallacy of supposing, of a sequence of independent events, that the probabilities of later outcomes must increase or decrease to “compensate” for earlier outcomes. For example, since (by Bernoulli’s theorem) in a long run of tosses of a fair coin it is very probable that the coin will come up heads roughly half the time, one might think that a coin that has not come up heads recently must be “due” to come up heads – must have a probability greater than one-half of doing so. But this is a misunderstanding of the law of large numbers, which requires no such compensating tendencies of the coin. The probability of heads remains one-half for each toss despite the preponderance, so far, of tails. In the sufficiently long run what “compensates” for the presence of improbably long subsequences in which, say, tails strongly predominate, is simply that such subsequences occur rarely and therefore have only a slight effect on the statistical character of the whole.  BERNOULLI’S THEOREM, PROBABILITY. R.Ke. game theory, the theory of the structure of, and the rational strategies for performing in, games or gamelike human interactions. Although there were forerunners, game theory was virtually invented by the mathematician John von Neumann and the economist Oskar Morgenstern in the early 1940s. Its most striking feature is its compact representation of interactions of two or more choosers, or players. For example, two players may face two choices each, and in combination these choices produce four possible outcomes. Actual choices are of strategies, not of outcomes, although it is assessments of outcomes that recommend strategies. To do well in a game, even for all choosers to do well, as is often possible, generally requires taking all other players’ positions and interests into account. Hence, to evaluate strategies directly, without reference to the outcomes they might produce in interaction with others, is conspicuously perverse. It is not surprising, therefore, that in ethics, game theory has been preeminently applied to utilitarian moral theory. As the numbers of players and strategies rise, the complexity of games increases geometrically. If two players have two strategies each and each ranks the four possible outcomes without ties, there are already seventy-eight strategically disGalileo Galilei game theory 339 4065A-  AM  339 tinct games. Even minor real-life interactions may have astronomically greater complexity. One might complain that this makes game theory useless. Alternatively, one can note that this makes it realistic and helps us understand why real-life choices are at least as complex as they sometimes seem. To complicate matters further, players can choose over probabilistic combinations of their “pure” strategies. Hence, the original four outcomes in a simple 2 $ 2 game define a continuum of potential outcomes. After noting the structure of games, one might then be struck by an immediate implication of this mere description. A rational individual may be supposed to attempt to maximize her potential or expected outcome in a game. But if there are two or more choosers in a game, in general they cannot all maximize simultaneously over their expected outcomes while assuming that all others are doing likewise. This is a mathematical principle: in general, we cannot maximize over two functions simultaneously. For example, the general notion of the greatest good of the greatest number is incoherent. Hence, in interactive choice contexts, the simple notion of economic rationality is incoherent. Virtually all of early game theory was dedicated to finding an alternative principle for resolving game interactions. There are now many so-called solution theories, most of which are about outcomes rather than strategies (they stipulate which outcomes or range of outcomes is game-theoretically rational). There is little consensus on how to generalize from the ordinary rationality of merely choosing more rather than less (and of displaying consistent preferences) to the general choice of strategies in games. Payoffs in early game theory were almost always represented in cardinal, transferable utilities. Transferable utility is an odd notion that was evidently introduced to avoid the disdain with which economists then treated interpersonal comparisons of utility. It seems to be analogous to money. In the language of contemporary law and economics, one could say the theory is one of wealth maximization. In the early theory, the rationality conditions were as follows. (1) In general, if the sums of the payoffs to all players in various outcomes differ, it is assumed that rational players will manage to divide the largest possible payoff among themselves. (2) No individual will accept a payoff below the “security level” obtainable even if all the other players form a coalition against the individual. (3) Finally, sometimes it is also assumed that no group of players will rationally accept less than it could get as its group security level – but in some games, no outcome can meet this condition. This is an odd combination of individual and collective elements. The collective elements are plausibly thought of as merely predictive: if we individually wish to do well, we should combine efforts to help us do best as a group. But what we want is a theory that converts individual preferences into collective results. Unfortunately, to put a move doing just this in the foundations of the theory is questionbegging. Our fundamental burden is to determine whether a theory of individual rationality can produce collectively good results, not to stipulate that it must. In the theory with cardinal, additive payoffs, we can divide games into constant sum games, in which the sum of all players’ payoffs in each outcome is a constant, and variable sum games. Zerosum games are a special case of constant sum games. Two-person constant sum games are games of pure conflict, because each player’s gain is the other’s loss. In constant sum games with more than two players and in all variable sum games, there is generally reason for coalition formation to improve payoffs to members of the coalition (hence, the appeal of assumptions 1 and 3 above). Games without transferable utility, such as games in which players have only ordinal preferences, may be characterized as games of pure conflict or of pure coordination when players’ preference orderings over outcomes are opposite or identical, respectively, or as games of mixed motive when their orderings are partly the same and partly reversed. Mathematical analysis of such games is evidently less tractable than that of games with cardinal, additive utility, and their theory is only beginning to be extensively developed. Despite the apparent circularity of the rationality assumptions of early game theory, it is the game theorists’ prisoner’s dilemma that makes clear that compelling individual principles of choice can produce collectively deficient outcomes. This game was discovered about 1950 and later given its catchy but inapt name. If they play it in isolation from any other interaction between them, two players in this game can each do what seems individually best and reach an outcome that both consider inferior to the outcome that results from making opposite strategy choices. Even with the knowledge that this is the problem they face, the players still have incentive to choose the strategies that jointly produce the inferior outcome. Prisoner’s dilemma involves both coordination and conflict. It has played a central role in contemporary discusgame theory game theory 340 4065A-  AM  340 sions of moral and political philosophy. Games that predominantly involve coordination, such as when we coordinate in all driving on the right or all on the left, have a similarly central role. The understanding of both classes of games has been read into the political philosophies of Hobbes and Hume and into mutual advantage theories of justice.  DECISION THEORY, PRISONER’S DILEMMA, UTILITARIANISM. R.Har. Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, called Mahatma (1869–1948), Indian nationalist leader, an advocate of nonviolent mass political action who opposed racial discrimination in South Africa (1893–1914) and British colonial rule in India. He called his approach Satyagraha (Sanskrit satya, ‘truth’, and agraha, ‘force’), considering it a science whose end is truth (which he identified with God) and method nonviolence (ahimsa). He emphasized constructive resolution, rather than elimination, of conflict, the interrelatedness of means and ends (precluding evil means to good ends), and the importance of enduring suffering oneself rather than inflicting it upon adversaries. Gandhi believed limited knowledge of truth deprives us of a warrant to use violence. He took nonviolence to be more than mere abstention from violence and to call for courage, discipline, and love of an opponent. Ordinary persons can practice it without full understanding of Satyagraha, which he himself disclaimed. He came to distinguish Satyagraha from passive resistance, a weapon of the weak that can turn to violence when faced with failure. Satyagraha requires strength and consistency and cannot be used in an unjust cause. Not an absolutist, Gandhi said that though nonviolence is always preferable, when forced to choose between violence and cowardice one might better choose violence. He was a man of practice more than a theoretician and claimed the superiority of Satyagraha to violence could be proven only be demonstration, not argument. He saw his work as an experiment with truth. He was influenced particularly by the Bhagavad Gita from Hindu thought, the Sermon on the Mount from Christianity, and the writings of Tolstoy, Ruskin, Emerson, and Thoreau.  BHAGAVAD GITA, NONVIOLENCE, PACIFISM. R.L.H. Gassendi, Pierre (1592–1655), French philosopher and scientist who advocated a via media to scientific knowledge about the empirically observable material world that avoids both the dogmatism of Cartesians, who claimed to have certain knowledge, and the skepticism of Montaigne and Charron, who doubted that we have knowledge about anything. Gassendi presented Epicurean atomism as a model for explaining how bodies are structured and interact. He advanced a hypothetico-deductive method by proposing that experiments should be used to test mechanistic hypotheses. Like the ancient Pyrrhonian Skeptics, he did not challenge the immediate reports of our senses; but unlike them he argued that while we cannot have knowledge of the inner essences of things, we can develop a reliable science of the world of appearances. In this he exemplified the mitigated skepticism of modern science that is always open to revision on the basis of empirical evidence. Gassendi’s first book, Exercitationes Paradoxicae Adversis Aristoteleos (1624), is an attack on Aristotle. He is best known as the author of the fifth set of objections to Descartes’s Meditations(1641), in which Gassendi proposed that even clear and distinct ideas may represent no objects outside our minds, a possibility that Descartes called the objection of objections, but dismissed as destructive of all reason. Gassendi’s Syntagma Philosophiae Epicuri (1649) contains his development of Epicurean philosophy and science. His elaboration of the mechanistic atomic model and his advocacy of experimental testing of hypotheses were crucially important in the rise of modern science. Gassendi’s career as a Catholic priest, Epicurean atomist, mitigated skeptic, and mechanistic scientist presents a puzzle – as do the careers of several other philosopher-priests in the seventeenth century – concerning his true beliefs. On the one hand, he professed faith and set aside Christian doctrine as not open to challenge. On the other hand, he utilized an arsenal of skeptical arguments that was beginning to undermine and would eventually destroy the rational foundations of the church. Gassendi thus appears to be of a type almost unknown today, a thinker indifferent to the apparent discrepancy between his belief in Christian doctrine and his advocacy of materialist science.  DESCARTES, EPICUREANISM, SKEPTICS. R.A.W. Gauss, Carl Friedrich.NON-EUCLIDEAN GEOMETRY. Gay, John (1699–1745), British moralist who tried to reconcile divine command theory and utilitarianism. The son of a minister, Gay was Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand Gay, John 341 4065A-  AM  341 elected a fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he taught church history, Hebrew, and Greek. His one philosophical essay, “Dissertation Concerning the Fundamental Principle of Virtue or Morality” (1731), argues that obligation is founded on the will of God, which, because people are destined to be happy, directs us to act to promote the general happiness. Gay offers an associationist psychology according to which we pursue objects that have come to be associated with happiness (e.g. money), regardless of whether they now make us happy, and argues, contra Hutcheson, that our moral sense is conditioned rather than natural. Gay’s blend of utilitarianism with associationist psychology gave David Hartley the basis for his moral psychology, which later influenced Bentham in his formulation of classical utilitarianism.  HARTLEY, HUTCHESON, MORAL SENSE THEORY. E.S.R. GCH.Appendix of Special Symbols. Geach, Peter (b.1916), English philosopher and logician whose main work has been in logic and philosophy of language. A great admirer of McTaggart, he has published a sympathetic exposition of the latter’s work (Truth, Love and Immortality, 1979), and has always aimed to emulate what he sees as the clarity and rigor of the Scottish idealist’s thought. Greatly influenced by Frege and Wittgenstein, Geach is particularly noted for his powerful use of what he calls “the Frege point,” better called “the Frege-Geach point,” that the same thought may occur as asserted or unasserted and yet retain the same truth-value. The point has been used by Geach to refute ascriptivist theories of responsibility, and can be employed against noncognitivist theories of ethics, which are said to face the Frege-Geach problem of accounting for the sense of moral ascriptions in contexts like ‘If he did wrong, he will be punished’. He is also noted for helping to bring Frege to the English-speaking world, through co-translations with Max Black (1909– 88). In logic he is known for proving, independently of Quine, a contradiction in Frege’s way out of Russell’s paradox (Mind, 1956), and for his defense of modern Fregean-Russellian logic against traditional Aristotelian-Scholastic logic. He also has a deep admiration for the Polish logicians. In metaphysics, Geach is known for his defense of relative identity, the thesis that an object a can be the same F (where F is a kind-term) as an object b while not being the same G, even though a and b are both G’s. His spirited defense of the thesis has been met by equally vigorous attacks, and it has not received wide acceptance. An obvious application of the thesis is to the defense of the doctrine of the Trinity (e.g., the Father is the same god as the Son but not the same person), which has caught the attention of some philosophers of religion. Geach’s main works include Mental Acts (1958), which attacks dispositional theories of mind, Reference and Generality (1962), which contains much important work on logic, and the collection Logic Matters (1972). A notable defender of Catholicism (despite his animadversions against Scholastic logic), his religious views find their greatest exposure in God and the Soul (1969), Providence and Evil (1977), and The Virtues (1977). He is married to the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe.  ASCRIPTIVISM, FREGE, IDENTITY, MCTAGGART, RUSSELL, WITTGENSTEIN. D.S.O. Gegenstandstheorie.ACT-OBJECT PSYCHOLOGY. Geist.HEGEL. Geisteswissenschaften.WEBER. Gemeinschaft.SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY. gender theory.POSTMODERN. genealogy.FOUCAULT, NIETZSCHE. generality.VAGUENESS. generalizability.UNIVERSALIZABILITY. generalization, existential.EXISTENTIAL GENERALIZATION. generalization, universal.UNIVERSALIZABILITY. generalization argument.UNIVERSALIZABILITY. generalization principle.UNIVERSALIZABILITY. generalized continuum hypothesis.Appendix of Special Symbols. generalized quantifier.FORMAL LOGIC. general jurisprudence.JURISPRUDENCE, PHILOSOPHY OF LAW. GCH general jurisprudence 342 4065A-  AM  342 general relativity.RELATIVITY. general systems theory.SYSTEMS THEORY. general term.

SINGULAR TERM. general will.ROUSSEAU. generative grammar.GRAMMAR. generic consistency, principle of.UNIVERSALIZABILITY. generic sentence.PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE. genetic epistemology.PIAGET. genetic fallacy.INFORMAL FALLACY. genotext.KRISTEVA. Gentile, Giovanni (1875–1944), Italian idealist philosopher and educational reformer. He taught at the universities of Palermo, Pisa, and Rome, and became minister of education in the first years of Mussolini’s government (1922–24). He was the most influential intellectual of the Fascist regime and promoted a radical transformation of the Italian school system, most of which did not survive that era. Gentile rejected Hegel’s dialectics as the process of an objectified thought. His actualism (or actual idealism) claims that only the pure act of thinking or the Transcendental Subject can undergo a dialectical process. All reality, such as nature, God, good, and evil, is immanent in the dialectics of the Transcendental Subject, which is distinct from Empirical Subjects. Among his major works are La teoria generale dello spirito come atto puro (1916; translated as The Theory of Mind as Pure Act, 1922) and Sistema di logica come teoria del conoscere (“System of Logic as a Theory of Knowledge,” 1917). Gentile’s pedagogical views were also influenced by actualism. Education is an act that overcomes the difficulties of intersubjective communication and realizes the unity of the pupil and the teacher within the Transcendental Subject (Sommario di pedagogia come scienza filosofica, “Summary of Pedagogy as a Philosophical Science,” 1913–14). Actualism was influential in Italy during Gentile’s life. With Croce’s historicism, it influenced British idealists like Bosanquet and Collingwood.  IDEALISM. P.Gar. genus.DEFINITION. genus, summum.GENUS GENERALISSIMUM. genus generalissimum (Latin, ‘most general genus’), a genus that is not a species of some higher genus; a broadest natural kind. One of the ten Aristotelian categories, it is also called summum genus (highest genus). For Aristotle and many of his followers, the ten categories are not species of some higher all-inclusive genus – say, being. Otherwise, that all-inclusive genus would wholly include its differences, and would be universally predicable of them. But no genus is predicable of its differences in this manner. Few authors explained this reasoning clearly, but some pointed out that if the difference ‘rational’ just meant ‘rational animal’, then to define ‘man’ as ‘rational animal’ would be to define him as ‘rational animal animal’, which is ill formed. So too generally: no genus can include its differences in this way. Thus there is no all-inclusive genus; the ten categories are the most general genera.  DEFINITION, PRAEDICAMENTA, PREDICABLES. P.V.S. geometric conventionalism.POINCARÉ. geometry, Euclidean.EUCLIDEAN GEOMETRY. geometry, non-Euclidean.NON-EUCLIDEAN GEOMETRY. Gerson, Jean de, original name, Jean Charlier (1363–1429), French theologian, philosopher, and ecclesiastic. He studied in Paris, and succeeded the nominalist Pierre d’Ailly as chancellor of the university in 1395. Both d’Ailly and Gerson played a prominent part in the work of the Council of Constance (1414–18). Much of Gerson’s influence on later thinkers arose from his conciliarism, the view that the church is a political society and that a general council, acting on behalf of the church, has the power to depose a pope who fails to promote the church’s welfare, for it seemed that similar arguments could apply to other forms of political society. Gerson’s conciliarism was not constitutionalism in the modern sense, for he appealed to corporate and hierarchical ideas of church government, and did not rest his case on any principle of individual rights. His main writings dealt with mystical theology, which, he thought, brings the believer closer to the beatific vision of God than do other forms of theology. He was influenced by general relativity Gerson, Jean de 343 4065A-  AM  343 St. Bonaventure and Albertus Magnus, but especially by Pseudo-Dionysius, whom he saw as a disciple of St. Paul and not as a Platonist. He was thus able to adopt an anti-Platonic position in his attacks on the mystic Ruysbroeck and on contemporary followers of Duns Scotus, such as Jean de Ripa. In dismissing Scotist realism, he made use of nominalist positions, particularly those that emphasized divine freedom. He warned theologians against being misled by pride into supposing that natural reason alone could solve metaphysical problems; and he emphasized the importance of a priest’s pastoral duties. Despite his early prominence, he spent the last years of his life in relative obscurity. E.J.A. Gersonides, also called Levi ben Gershom (1288–1344), French Jewish philosopher and mathematician, the leading Jewish Aristotelian after Maimonides. Gersonides was also a distinguished Talmudist, Bible commentator, and astronomer. His philosophical writings include supercommentaries on most of Averroes’ commentaries on Aristotle (1319–24); On the Correct Syllogism (1319), a treatise on the modal syllogism; and a major Scholastic treatise, The Wars of the Lord (1317–29). In addition, his biblical commentaries rank among the best examples of philosophical scriptural exegesis; especially noteworthy is his interpretation of the Song of Songs as an allegory describing the ascent of the human intellect to the agent intellect. Gersonides’ mentors in the Aristotelian tradition were Maimonides and Averroes. However, more than either of them, Gersonides held philosophical truth and revealed truth to be coextensive: he acknowledged neither the conflict that Averroes saw between reason and revelation nor Maimonides’ critical view of the limitations of the human intellect. Furthermore, while remaining within the Aristotelian framework, Gersonides was not uncritical of it; his independence can be illustrated by two of his most distinctive positions. First, against Maimonides, Gersonides claimed that it is possible to demonstrate both the falsity of the Aristotelian theory of the eternity of the world (Averroes’ position) and the absurdity of creation ex nihilo, the traditional rabbinic view that Maimonides adopted, though for nondemonstrative reasons. Instead Gersonides advocated the Platonic theory of temporal creation from primordial matter. Second, unlike Maimonides and Averroes, who both held that the alleged contradiction between divine foreknowledge of future contingent particulars and human freedom is spurious, Gersonides took the dilemma to be real. In defense of human freedom, he then argued that it is logically impossible even for God to have knowledge of particulars as particulars, since his knowledge is only of general laws. At the same time, by redefining ‘omniscience’ as knowing everything that is knowable, he showed that this impossibility is no deficiency in God’s knowledge. Although Gersonides’ biblical commentaries received wide immediate acceptance, subsequent medieval Jewish philosophers, e.g., Hasdai Crescas, by and large reacted negatively to his rigorously rationalistic positions. Especially with the decline of Aristotelianism within the philosophical world, both Jewish and Christian, he was either criticized sharply or simply ignored.  ARISTOTLE, AVERROES, JEWISH PHILOSOPHY, MAIMONIDES, PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. J.Ste. Gesellschaft.SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY. Gestalt.FIGURE–GROUND, KÖHLER. Gestalt psychology.KÖHLER. Gettier problem.EPISTEMOLOGY. Gettier-style example.EPISTEMOLOGY. Geulincx, Arnold (1624–69), Dutch philosopher. Born in Antwerp, he was educated at Louvain and there became professor of philosophy (1646) and dean (1654). In 1657 he was forced out of Louvain, perhaps for his Jansenist or Cartesian tendencies, and in 1658 he moved to Leyden and became a Protestant. Though he taught there until his death, he never attained a regular professorship at the university. His main philosophical work is his Ethica (1675), only Part I of which appeared during his lifetime as De virtute et primis ejus proprietatibus (1665). Also published during his lifetime were the Questiones quodlibeticae (1652; later editions published as Saturnalia), a Logica (1661), and a Methodus inveniendi argumenta (1665). His most important works, though, were published posthumously; in addition to the Ethica, there is the Physica vera (1688), the Physica peripatetica (1690), the Metaphysica vera (1691), and the Metaphysica ad mentem peripateticam (1691). There are also two posthumous commentaries on Descartes’s Principia Philosophiae (1690 and 1691). Geulincx was deeply influenced by Descartes, and had many ideas that closely resemble those Gersonides Geulincx, Arnold 344 4065A-  AM  344 of the later Cartesians as well as those of more independent thinkers like Spinoza and Leibniz. Though his grounds were original, like many later Cartesians, Geulincx upheld a version of occasionalism; he argued that someone or something can only do what it knows how to do, inferring from that that we cannot be the genuine causes of our own bodily movements. In discussing the mind–body relation, Geulincx used a clock analogy similar to one Leibniz used in connection with his preestablished harmony. Geulincx also held a view of mental and material substance reminiscent of that of Spinoza. Finally, he proposed a system of ethics grounded in the idea of a virtuous will. Despite the evident similarities between Geulincx’s views and the views of his more renowned contemporaries, it is very difficult to determine exactly what influence Geulincx may have had on them, and they may have had on him.  DESCARTES, LEIBNIZ, OCCASIONALISM. D.Garb. Ghazali, al-.AL-GHAZALI. ghost in the machine.RYLE. Giles of Rome, original name, Egidio Colonna (c.1243–1316), Italian theologian and ecclesiastic. A member of the order of the Hermits of St. Augustine, he studied arts at Augustinian house and theology at the University in Paris (1260– 72) but was censured by the theology faculty (1277) and denied a license to teach as master. Owing to the intervention of Pope Honorius IV, he later returned from Italy to Paris to teach theology (1285–91), was appointed general of his order (1292), and became archbishop of Bourges (1295). Giles both defended and criticized views of Aquinas. He held that essence and existence are really distinct in creatures, but described them as “things”; that prime matter cannot exist without some substantial form; and, early in his career, that an eternally created world is possible. He defended only one substantial form in composites, including man. He supported Pope Boniface VIII in his quarrel with Philip IV of France. J.F.W. Gilson, Étienne (1884–1978), French Catholic philosopher, historian, cofounder of the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies in Toronto, and a major figure in Neo-Thomism. Gilson discovered medieval philosophy through his pioneering work on Descartes’s Scholastic background. As a historian, he argued that early modern philosophy was incomprehensible without medieval thought, and that medieval philosophy itself did not represent the unified theory of reality that some Thomists had supposed. His studies of Duns Scotus, Augustine, Bernard, Aquinas, Bonaventure, Dante, and Abelard and Héloïse explore this diversity. But in his Gifford lectures (1931–32), The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, Gilson attempted a broad synthesis of medieval teaching on philosophy, metaphysics, ethics, and epistemology, and employed it in his critique of modern philosophy, The Unity of Philosophical Experience (1937). Most of all, Gilson attempted to reestablish Aquinas’s distinction between essence and existence in created being, as in Being and Some Philosophers (1949).  NEO-THOMISM, THOMISM. D.W.H. Gioberti, Vincenzo (1801–52), Italian philosopher and statesman. He was an ordained priest, was imprisoned and exiled for advocating Italian unification, and became a central political figure during the Risorgimento. His major political work, Del primato morale e civile degli Italiani (“On the Moral and Civil Primacy of Italians,” 1843), argues for a federation of the Italian states with the pope as its leader. Gioberti’s philosophical theory, ontologism, in contrast to Hegel’s idealism, identifies the dialectics of Being with God’s creation. He condensed his theory in the formula: “Being creates the existent.” The dialectics of Being, which is the only necessary substance, is a palingenesis, or a return to its origin, in which the existent first departs from and imitates its creator (mimesis), and then returns to its creator (methexis). By intuition, the human mind comes in contact with God and discovers truth by retracing the dialectics of Being. However, knowledge of supernatural truths is given only by God’s revelation (Teorica del soprannaturale [“Theory of the Supernatural,” 1838] and Introduzione allo studio della filosofia [“Introduction to the Study of Philosophy,” 1841]). Gioberti criticized modern philosophers such as Descartes for their psychologism – seeking truth from the human subject instead of from Being itself and its revelation. His thought is still influential in Italy, especially in Christian spiritualism. P.Gar. given, in epistemology, the “brute fact” element to be found or postulated as a component of perceptual experience. Some theorists who endorse the existence of a given element in experience think that we can find this element by careful Ghazali, al- given 345 4065A-  AM  345 introspection of what we experience (Moore, H. H. Price). Such theorists generally distinguish between those components of ordinary perceptual awareness that constitute what we believe or know about the objects we perceive and those components that we strictly perceive. For example, if we analyze introspectively what we are aware of when we see an apple we find that what we believe of the apple is that it is a three-dimensional object with a soft, white interior; what we see of it, strictly speaking, is just a red-shaped expanse of one of its facing sides. This latter is what is “given” in the intended sense. Other theorists treat the given as postulated rather than introspectively found. For example, some theorists treat cognition as an activity imposing form on some material given in conscious experience. On this view, often attributed to Kant, the given and the conceptual are interdefined and logically inseparable. Sometimes this interdependence is seen as rendering a description of the given as impossible; in this case the given is said to be ineffable (C. I. Lewis, Mind and the World Order, 1929). On some theories of knowledge (foundationalism) the first variant of the given – that which is “found” rather than “postulated” – provides the empirical foundations of what we might know or justifiably believe. Thus, if I believe on good evidence that there is a red apple in front of me, the evidence is the non-cognitive part of my perceptual awareness of the red appleshaped expanse. Epistemologies postulating the first kind of givenness thus require a single entity-type to explain the sensorial nature of perception and to provide immediate epistemic foundations for empirical knowledge. This requirement is now widely regarded as impossible to satisfy; hence Wilfred Sellars describes the discredited view as the myth of the given.  PERCEPTION; PHENOMENALISM; SELLARS, WILFRID. T.V. given, myth of the.SELLARS, WILFRID. Glanvill, Joseph (1636–80), English philosopher and Anglican minister who defended the Royal Society against Scholasticism. Glanvill believed that certainty was possible in mathematics and theology, but not in empirical knowledge. In his most important philosophical work, The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), he claimed that the human corruption that resulted from Adam’s fall precludes dogmatic knowledge of nature. Using traditional skeptical arguments as well as an analysis of causality that partially anticipated Hume, Glanvill argued that all empirical knowledge is the probabilistic variety acquired by piecemeal investigation. Despite his skepticism he argued for the existence of witches in Witches and Witchcraft (1668). J.W.A. Gleason’s theorem.QUANTUM LOGIC. global supervenience.SUPERVENIENCE. gnosticism, a dualistic religious and philosophical movement in the early centuries of the Christian church, especially important in the second century under the leadership of Valentinus and Basilides. They taught that matter was evil, the result of a cosmic disruption in which an evil archon (often associated with the god of the Old Testament, Yahweh) rebelled against the heavenly pleroma (the complete spiritual world). In the process divine sparks were unleashed from the pleroma and lodged in material human bodies. Jesus was a high-ranking archon (Logos) sent to restore those souls with divine sparks to the pleroma by imparting esoteric knowledge (gnosis) to them. Gnosticism influenced and threatened the orthodox church from within and without. NonChristian gnostic sects rivaled Christianity, and Christian gnostics threatened orthodoxy by emphasizing salvation by knowledge rather than by faith. Theologians like Clement of Alexandria and his pupil Origen held that there were two roads to salvation, the way of faith for the masses and the way of esoteric or mystical knowledge for the philosophers. Gnosticism profoundly influenced the early church, causing it to define its scriptural canon and to develop a set of creeds and an episcopal organization.  CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA, ORIGEN. L.P.P. goal-directed system.

COMPUTER THEORY, CYBERNETICS. Göckel, Rudolph.GOCLENIUS. Goclenius, Rudolphus, in Germany, Rudolf Göckel (1547–1628), German philosopher. After holding some minor posts elsewhere, Goclenius became professor at the University of Marburg in 1581, where he remained until his death, teaching physics, logic, mathematics, and ethics. Though he was well read and knowledgeable of later trends in these disciplines, his basic sympathies were Aristotelian. Goclenius was very well given, myth of the Goclenius, Rudolphus 346 4065A-  AM  346 regarded by his contemporaries, who called him the Plato of Marburg, the Christian Aristotle, and the Light of Europe, among other things. He published an unusually large number of books, including the Psychologia, hoc est de hominis perfectione . . . (1590), the Conciliator philosophicus (1609), the Controversiae logicae et philosophicae (1609), and numerous other works on logic, rhetoric, physics, metaphysics, and the Latin language. But his most lasting work was his Lexicon Philosophicum (1613), together with its companion, the Lexicon Philosophicum Graecum (1615). These lexicons provide clear definitions of the philosophical terminology of late Scholastic philosophy, and are still useful as reference works for sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century thought. D.Garb. God.DIVINE ATTRIBUTES, PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. God, arguments for the existence of.DIVINE ATTRIBUTES, ENS A SE, PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. Gödel, Kurt.GÖDEL’S INCOMPLETENESS THEOREMS. Gödel numbering.GÖDEL’S INCOMPLETENESS THEOREMS. Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, two theorems formulated and proved by the Austrian logician Kurt Gödel (1906–78) in his famous 1931 paper “Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und vervandter Systeme I,” probably the most celebrated results in the whole of logic. They are aptly referred to as “incompleteness” theorems since each shows, for any member of a certain class of formal systems, that there is a sentence formulable in its language that it cannot prove, but that it would be desirable for it to prove. In the case of the first theorem (G1), what cannot be proved is a true sentence of the language of the given theory. G1 is thus a disappointment to any theory constructor who wants his theory to tell the whole truth about its subject. In the case of the second theorem (G2), what cannot be proved is a sentence of the theory that “expresses” its consistency. G2 is thus a disappointment to those who desire a straightforward execution of Hilbert’s Program. The proofs of the incompleteness theorems can be seen as based on three main ideas. The first is that of a Gödel numbering, i.e., an assignment of natural numbers to each of the various objects (i.e., the terms, formulas, axioms, proofs, etc.) belonging to the various syntactical categories of the given formal system T (referred to here as the “represented theory”) whose metamathematics is under consideration. The second is that of a representational scheme. This includes (i) the use of the Gödel numbering to develop number-theoretic codifications of various of the metamathematical properties pertaining to the represented theory, and (ii) the selection of a theory S (hereafter, the “representing theory”) and a family of formulas from that theory (the “representing formulas”) in terms of which to register as theorems various of the facts concerning the metamathematical properties of the represented theory thus encoded. The basic result of this representational scheme is the weak representation of the set of (Gödel numbers of) theorems of T, where a set L of numbers is said to be weakly represented in S by a formula ‘L(x)’ of S just in case for every number n, n1 L if and only if ‘L([n])’ is a theorem of S, where ‘[n]’ is the standard term of S that, under the intended interpretation of S, designates the number n. Since the set of (Gödel numbers of) theorems of the represented theory T will typically be recursively enumerable, and the representing theory S must be capable of weakly representing this set, the basic strength requirement on S is that it be capable of weakly representing the recursively enumerable sets of natural numbers. Because basic systems of arithmetic (e.g. Robinson’s arithmetic and Peano arithmetic) all have this capacity, Gödel’s theorems are often stated using containment of a fragment of arithmetic as the basic strength requirement governing the capacities of the representing theory (which, of course, is also often the represented theory). More on this point below. The third main idea behind the incompleteness theorems is that of a diagonal or fixed point construction within S for the notion of unprovability-in-T; i.e., the formulation of a sentence Gödel of S which, under the given Gödel numbering of T, the given representation of T’s metamathematical notions in S, and the intended interpretation of the language of S, says of itself that it is not provable-in-T. Gödel is thus false if provable and unprovable if true. More specifically, if ‘ProvT(x)’ is a formula of S that weakly represents the set of (Gödel numbers of) theorems of T in S, then Gödel can be any formula of S that is provably equivalent in S to the formula ‘- ProvT ([Gödel])’. Given this background, G1 can be stated as follows: If (a) the representing theory S is any subtheory of the represented theory T (up to and God Gödel’s incompleteness theorems 347 4065A-  AM  347 including the represented theory itself), (b) the representing theory S is consistent, (c) the formula ‘ProvT (x)’ weakly represents the set of (Gödel numbers of) theorems of the represented theory T in the representing theory S, and (d) Gödel is any sentence provably equivalent in the representing theory S to ‘ProvT ([Gödel])’, then neither Gödel nor -Gödel is a theorem of the representing theory S. The proof proceeds in two parts. In the first part it is shown that, for any representing theory S (up to and including the case where S % T ), if S is consistent, then -Gödel is not a theorem of S. To obtain this in its strongest form, we pick the strongest subtheory S of T possible, namely S % T, and construct a reductio. Thus, suppose that (1) -Gödel is a theorem of T. From (1) and (d) it follows that (2) ‘ProvT([Gödel])’ is a theorem of T. And from (2) and (c) (in the “if” direction) it follows that (3) Gödel is a theorem of T. But (1) and (3) together imply that the representing theory T is inconsistent. Hence, if T is consistent, -Gödel cannot be a theorem of T. In the second part of the proof it is argued that if the representing theory S is consistent, then Gödel is not a theorem of it. Again, to obtain the strongest result, we let S be the strongest subtheory of T possible (namely T itself) and, as before, argue by reductio. Thus we suppose that (A) Gödel is a theorem of S (% T ). From this assumption and condition (d) it follows that (B) ‘-Provr ([Gödel])’ is a theorem of S (% T ). By (A) and (c) (in the “only if” direction) it follows that (C) ‘ProvT ([Gödel])’ is a theorem of S (% T ). But from (B) and (C) it follows that S (% T ) is inconsistent. Hence, Gödel is not provable in any consistent representing theory S up to and including T itself. The above statement of G1 is, of course, not the usual one. The usual statement suppresses the distinction stressed above between the representing and represented theories and collaterally replaces our condition (c) with a clause to the effect that T is a recursively axiomatizable extension of some suitably weak system of arithmetic (e.g. Robinson’s arithmetic, primitive recursive arithmetic, or Peano arithmetic). This puts into a single clause what, metamathematically speaking, are two separate conditions – one pertaining to the representing theory, the other to the represented theory. The requirement that T be an extension of the selected weak arithmetic addresses the question of T’s adequacy as a representing theory, since the crucial fact about extensions of the weak arithmetic chosen is that they are capable of weakly representing all recursively enumerable sets. This constraint on T’s capabilities as a representing theory is in partnership with the usual requirement that, in its capacity as a represented theory, T be recursively axiomatizable. For T’s recursive axiomatizability ensures (under ordinary choices of logic for T ) that its set of theorems will be recursively enumerable – and hence weakly representable in the kind of representing theory that it itself (by virtue of its being an extension of the weak arithmetic specified) is. G1 can, however, be extended to certain theories whose sets of (Gödel numbers of) theorems are not recursively enumerable. When this is done, the basic capacity required of the representing theory is no longer merely that the recursively enumerable sets of natural numbers be representable in it, but that it also be capable of representing various non-recursively enumerable sets, and hence that it go beyond the weak arithmetics mentioned earlier. G2 is a more demanding result that G1 in that it puts significantly stronger demands on the formula ‘ProvT (x)’ used to express the notion of provability for the represented theory T. In proving G1 all that is required of ‘ProvT (x)’ is that it weakly represent θ (% the set of Gödel numbers of theorems of T); i.e., that it yield an extensionally accurate registry of the theorems of the represented theory in the representing theory. G2 places additional conditions on ‘ProvT (x)’; conditions which result from the fact that, to prove G2, we must codify the second part of the proof of G1 in T itself. To do this, ‘ProvT (x)’ must be a provability predicate for T. That is, it must satisfy the following constraints, commonly referred to as the Derivability Conditions (for ‘ProvT (x)’): (I) If A is a theorem of the represented theory, then ‘ProvT ([A])’ must be a theorem of the representing theory. (II) Every instance of the formula ‘ProvT ([A P B]) P (ProvT ([A]) P ProvT ([B]))’ must be a theorem of T. (III) Every instance of the formula ‘ProvT ([A]) P ProvT ([ProvT ([A])])’ must be a theorem of T. (I), of course, is just part of the requirement that ‘ProvT ([A])’ weakly represent T’s theoremset in T. So it does not go beyond what is required for the proof of G1. (II) and (III), however, do. They make it possible to “formalize” the second part of the proof of G1 in T itself. (II) captures, in terms of ‘ProvT (X)’, the modus ponens inference by which (B) is derived from (A), and (III) codiGödel’s incompleteness theorems Gödel’s incompleteness theorems 348 4065A-  AM  348 fies in T the appeal to (c) used in deriving (C) from (A). The result of this “formalization” process is a proof within T of the formula ‘ConT P Gödel’ (where ConT is a formula of the form ‘- ProvT ([#])’, with ‘ProvT (x)’ a provability predicate for T and ‘[#]’ the standard numeral denoting the Gödel number # of some formula refutable in T ). From this, and the proof of the second part of G1 itself (in which the first Derivability Condition, which is just the “only if” direction of (c), figures prominently), we arrive at the following result, which is a generalized form of G2: If S is any consistent representing theory up to and including the represented theory T itself, ‘ProvT (x)’ any provability predicate for T, and ConT any formula of T of the form ‘- ProvT ([#])’, then ConT is not a theorem of S. To the extent that, in being a provability predicate for T, ‘ProvT (x)’ “expresses” the notion of provability of the represented theory T, it seems fair to say that ConT expresses its consistency. And to the extent that this is true, it is sensible to read G2 as saying that for any representing theory S and any represented theory T extending S, if S is consistent, then the consistency of T is not provable in S.  COMPUTER THEORY, CONSISTENCY, HILBERT’S PROGRAM, PROOF THEORY. M.D. Godfrey of Fontaines (probably before 1250– 1306 or 1309), French philosopher. He taught theology at Paris (1285–c.1299; 1303–04). Among his major writings are fifteen Quodlibetal Questions and other disputations. He was strongly Aristotelian in philosophy, with Neoplatonic influences in metaphysics. He defended identity of essence and existence in creatures against theories of their real or intentional distinction, and argued for the possibility of demonstrating God’s existence and of some quidditative knowledge of God. He admitted divine ideas for species but not for individuals within species. He made wide applications of Aristotelian actpotency theory – e.g., to the distinction between the soul and its powers, to the explanation of intellection and volition, to the general theory of substance and accident, and in unusual fashion to essence-existence “composition” of creatures. J.F.W. Godwin, William (1756–1836), English philosopher, novelist, and political writer. Godwin’s main philosophical treatise, Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1793), aroused heated debate. He argued for radical forms of determinism, anarchism, and utilitarianism. Government corrupts everyone by encouraging stereotyped thinking that prevents us from seeing each other as unique individuals. Godwin’s novel Caleb Williams (1794) portrays a good man corrupted by prejudice. Once we remove prejudice and artificial inequality we will see that our acts are wholly determined. This makes punishment pointless. Only in small, anarchic societies can people see others as they really are and thus come to feel sympathetic concern for their wellbeing. Only so can we be virtuous, because virtue is acting from sympathetic feelings to bring the greatest happiness to all affected. Godwin took this principle quite literally, and accepted all its consequences. Truthfulness has no claim on us other than the happiness it brings. If keeping a promise causes less good than breaking it, there is no reason at all to keep it. If one must choose between saving the life either of a major human benefactor or of one’s mother, one must choose the benefactor. Ideally we would need no rules in morals at all. They prevent us from seeing others properly, thereby impairing the sympathetic feelings that constitute virtue. Rights are pointless since sympathetic people will act to help others. Later utilitarians like Bentham had difficulty in separating their positions from Godwin’s notorious views.  BENTHAM. J.B.S. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1749–1832), German writer often considered the leading cultural figure of his age. He wrote lyric poetry, dramas, and fictional, essayistic, and aphoristic prose as well as works in various natural sciences, including anatomy, botany, and optics. A lawyer by training, for most of his life Goethe was a government official at the provincial court of Saxony-Weimar. In his numerous contributions to world literature, such as the novels The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Apprenticeship (1795/96), Elective Affinities (1809), and Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Pilgrimage (1821/29), and the two-part tragedy Faust (1808/32), Goethe represented the tensions between individual and society as well as between culture and nature, with increased recognition of their tragic opposition and the need to cultivate a resigned self-discipline in artistic and social matters. In his poetic and scientific treatment of nature he was influenced by Spinoza’s pantheist identification of nature and God and maintained that everything in nature is animate and expressive of divine presence. In his theory and practice of science he opposed the quantitative and experimental method and Godfrey of Fontaines Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 349 4065A-  AM  349 insisted on a description of the phenomena that was to include the intuitive grasp of the archetypal forms or shapes underlying all development in nature.  PANTHEISM, SPINOZA. G.Z. Goldbach’s conjecture.CHOICE SEQUENCE. golden mean.ARISTOTLE. Goldman, Alvin I(ra) (b.1938), American philosopher who has made notable contributions to action theory, naturalistic and social epistemology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science. He has persistently urged the relevance of cognitive and social science to problems in epistemology, metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, and ethics. A Theory of Human Action (1970) proposes a causal theory of action, describes the generative structure of basic and non-basic action, and argues for the compatibility of free will and determinism. In “Epistemics: The Regulative Theory of Cognition” (1978), he argued that traditional epistemology should be replaced by ‘epistemics’, which differs from traditional epistemology in characterizing knowledge, justified belief, and rational belief in light of empirical cognitive science. Traditional epistemology has used a coarse-grained notion of belief, taken too restrictive a view of cognitive methods, offered advice for ideal cognizers rather than for human beings with limited cognitive resources, and ignored flaws in our cognitive system that must be recognized if cognition is to be improved. Epistemologists must attend to the results of cognitive science if they are to remedy these deficiencies in traditional epistemology. Goldman later developed epistemics in Epistemology and Cognition (1986), in which he developed a historical, reliabilist theory of knowledge and epistemic justification and employed empirical cognitive science to characterize knowledge, evaluate skepticism, and assess human cognitive resources. In Liaisons: Philosophy Meets the Cognitive and Social Sciences (1992) and in Knowledge in a Social World (1999), he defended and elaborated a veritistic (i.e., truth-oriented) evaluation of communal beliefprofiles, social institutions, and social practices (e.g., the practice of restricting evidence admissible in a jury trial). He has opposed the widely accepted view that mental states are functional states (“The Psychology of Folk Psychology,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1993) and defended a simulation theory of mental state attribution, on which one attributes mental states to another by imagining what mental state one would be in if one were in the other’s situation (“In Defense of the Simulation Theory,” 1992). He has also argued that cognitive science bears on ethics by providing information relevant to the nature of moral evaluation, moral choice, and hedonic states associated with the good (e.g., happiness) (“Ethics and Cognitive Science,” 1993).  ACTION THEORY, COGNITIVE SCIENCE, EPISTEMOLOGY, RELIABILISM, SIMULATION THEORY, SOCIAL EPISTEMOLOGY. F.F.S. good.ETHICS. good, common.COMMON GOOD. good-making characteristic, a characteristic that makes whatever is intrinsically or inherently good, good. Hedonists hold that pleasure and conducing to pleasure are the sole good-making characteristics. Pluralists hold that those characteristics are only some among many other goodmaking characteristics, which include, for instance, knowledge, friendship, beauty, and acting from a sense of duty.  ETHICS, HEDONISM. B.R. Goodman, Nelson (1906–98), American philosopher who made seminal contributions to metaphysics, epistemology, and aesthetics. Like Quine, Goodman repudiates analyticity and kindred notions. Goodman’s work can be read as a series of investigations into how to do philosophy without them. A central concern is how symbols structure facts and our understanding of them. The Structure of Appearance (1952) presents Goodman’s constructionalism. Pretheoretical beliefs are vague and mutually inconsistent. By devising an interpreted formal system that derives them from or explicates them in terms of suitable primitives, we bring them into logical contact, eliminate inconsistencies, and disclose unanticipated logical and theoretical connections. Multiple, divergent systems do justice to the same pretheoretical beliefs. All systems satisfying our criteria of adequacy are equally acceptable. Nothing favors any one of them over the others. Ways of Worldmaking (1978) provides a less formal treatment of the same themes. Category schemes dictate criteria of identity for their objects. So mutually irreducible category schemes do not treat of the same things. Since a world consists of the things it comprises, irreducible schemes mark out different worlds. There are, Goodman concludes, many worlds if any. Inasmuch as the categories that define identity Goldbach’s conjecture Goodman, Nelson 350 4065A-  AM  350 conditions on objects are human constructs, we make worlds. Languages of Art (1968) argues that art, like science, makes and reveals worlds. Aesthetics is the branch of epistemology that investigates art’s cognitive functions. Goodman analyzes the syntactic and semantic structures of symbol systems, both literal and figurative, and shows how they advance understanding in art and elsewhere. Fact, Fiction, and Forecast(1954) poses the new riddle of induction. An item is grue if and only if it is examined before future time t and found to be green or is not so examined and is blue. All hitherto examined emeralds are both green and grue. What justifies our expecting future emeralds to be green, not grue? Inductive validity, the riddle demonstrates, depends on the characterization as well as the classification of the evidence class. ‘Green’ is preferable, Goodman maintains, because it is entrenched in inductive practice. This does not guarantee that inferences using ‘green’ will yield truths. Nothing guarantees that. But entrenched predicates are pragmatically advantageous, because they mesh with our habits of thought and other cognitive resources. Goodman’s other works include Problems and Projects (1972), Of Mind and Other Matters (1984), and Reconceptions (1988), written with Catherine Z. Elgin.  AESTHETICS, ANALYTIC –SYNTHETIC DISTINCTION, GRUE PARADOX. C.Z.E. Gorgias (c.483–c.376 B.C.), Greek Sophist. A teacher of rhetoric from Leontini in Syracuse, Gorgias came to Athens in 427 B.C. as an ambassador from his city and caused a sensation with his artful oratory. He is known through references and short quotations in later writers, and through a few surviving texts – two speeches and a philosophical treatise. He taught a rhetorical style much imitated in antiquity, by delivering model speeches to paying audiences. Unlike other Sophists he did not give formal instruction in other topics, nor prepare a formal rhetorical manual. He was known to have had views on language, on the nature of reality, and on virtue. Gorgias’s style was remarkable for its use of poetic devices such as rhyme, meter, and elegant words, as well as for its dependence on artificial parallelism and balanced antithesis. His surviving speeches, defenses of Helen and Palamedes, display a range of arguments that rely heavily on what the ancients called eikos (‘likelihood’ or ‘probability’). Gorgias maintained in his “Helen” that a speech can compel its audience to action; elsewhere he remarked that in the theater it is wiser to be deceived than not. Gorgias’s short book On Nature (or On What Is Not) survives in two paraphrases, one by Sextus Empiricus and the other (now considered more reliable) in an Aristotelian work, On Melissus, Xenophanes, and Gorgias. Gorgias argued for three theses: that nothing exists; that even if it did, it could not be known; and that even if it could be known, it could not be communicated. Although this may be in part a parody, most scholars now take it to be a serious philosophical argument in its own right. In ethics, Plato reports that Gorgias thought there were different virtues for men and for women, a thesis Aristotle defends in the Politics.  SOPHISTS. P.Wo. Göttingen School.NEO-KANTIANISM. grace, efficacious.ARNAULD. Gracián y Morales, Baltasar (1601–58), Spanish writer, moralist, and a leading literary theorist of the Spanish baroque. Born in Belmonte, he entered the Jesuit order in 1619 and became rector of the Jesuit College at Tarragona and a favorite of King Philip III. Gracián’s most important works are Agudeza y arte de ingenio (“The Art of Worldly Wisdom,” 1642–48) and El criticón (“The Critic,” 1651–57). The first provides philosophical support for conceptismo, a Spanish literary movement that sought to create new concepts through the development of an elaborate style, characterized by subtlety (agudeza) and ingenious literary artifices. El criticón, written in the conceptist style, is a philosophical novel that pessimistically criticizes the evils of civilization. Gracián anticipates Rousseau’s noble savage in claiming that, although human beings are fundamentally good in the state of nature, they are corrupted by civilization. Echoing a common theme of Spanish thought at the time, he attributes the nefarious influence of civilization to the confusion it creates between appearance and reality. But Gracián’s pessimism is tempered by faith: man has hope in the afterlife, when reality is finally revealed. Gracián wrote several other influential books. In El héroe (“The Hero,” 1637) and El político (“The Politician,” 1640), he follows Machiavelli in discussing the attributes of the ideal prince; El discreto (“The Man of Discretion,” 1646) explores the ideal gentleman, as judged by Spanish society. Most of Gracián’s books were published under pseudonyms to avoid censure by his order. Gorgias Gracián y Morales, Baltasar 351 4065A-  AM  351 Among authors outside Spain who used his ideas are Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Voltaire, and Rousseau. J.J.E.G. grammar, a system of rules specifying a language. The term has often been used synonymously with ‘syntax’, the principles governing the construction of sentences from words (perhaps also including the systems of word derivation and inflection – case markings, verbal tense markers, and the like). In modern linguistic usage the term more often encompasses other components of the language system such as phonology and semantics as well as syntax. Traditional grammars that we may have encountered in our school days, e.g., the grammars of Latin or English, were typically fragmentary and often prescriptive – basically a selective catalog of forms and sentence patterns, together with constructions to be avoided. Contemporary linguistic grammars, on the other hand, aim to be descriptive, and even explanatory, i.e., embedded within a general theory that offers principled reasons for why natural languages are the way they are. This is in accord with the generally accepted view of linguistics as a science that regards human language as a natural phenomenon to be understood, just as physicists attempt to make sense of the world of physical objects. Since the publication of Syntactic Structures (1957) and Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965) by Noam Chomsky, grammars have been almost universally conceived of as generative devices, i.e., precisely formulated deductive systems – commonly called generative grammars – specifying all and only the well-formed sentences of a language together with a specification of their relevant structural properties. On this view, a grammar of English has the character of a theory of the English language, with the grammatical sentences (and their structures) as its theorems and the grammar rules playing the role of the rules of inference. Like any empirical theory, it is subject to disconfirmation if its predictions do not agree with the facts – if, e.g., the grammar implies that ‘white or snow the is’ is a wellformed sentence or that ‘The snow is white’ is not. The object of this theory construction is to model the system of knowledge possessed by those who are able to speak and understand an unlimited number of novel sentences of the language specified. Thus, a grammar in this sense is a psychological entity – a component of the human mind – and the task of linguistics (avowedly a mentalistic discipline) is to determine exactly of what this knowledge consists. Like other mental phenomena, it is not observable directly but only through its effects. Thus, underlying linguistic competence is to be distinguished from actual linguistic performance, which forms part of the evidence for the former but is not necessarily an accurate reflection of it, containing, as it does, errors, false starts, etc. A central problem is how this competence arises in the individual, i.e., how a grammar is inferred by a child on the basis of a finite, variable, and imperfect sample of utterances encountered in the course of normal development. Many sorts of observations strongly suggest that grammars are not constructed de novo entirely on the basis of experience, and the view is widely held that the child brings to the task a significant, genetically determined predisposition to construct grammars according to a well-defined pattern. If this is so, and since apparently no one language has an advantage over any other in the learning process, this inborn component of linguistic competence can be correctly termed a universal grammar. It represents whatever the grammars of all natural languages, actual or potential, necessarily have in common because of the innate linguistic competence of human beings. The apparent diversity of natural languages has often led to a serious underestimation of the scope of universal grammar. One of the most influential proposals concerning the nature of universal grammar was Chomsky’s theory of transformational grammar. In this framework the syntactic structure of a sentence is given not by a single object (e.g., a parse tree, as in phrase structure grammar), but rather by a sequence of trees connected by operations called transformations. The initial tree in such a sequence is specified (generated) by a phrase structure grammar, together with a lexicon, and is known as the deep structure. The final tree in the sequence, the surface structure, contains the morphemes (meaningful units) of the sentence in the order in which they are written or pronounced. For example, the English sentences ‘John hit the ball’ and its passive counterpart ‘The ball was hit by John’ might be derived from the same deep structure (in this case a tree looking very much like the surface structure for the active sentence) except that the optional transformational rule of passivization has been applied in the derivation of the latter sentence. This rule rearranges the constituents of the tree in such a way that, among other changes, the direct object (‘the ball’) in deep structure becomes the surface-structure subject of the passive sentence. It is thus an important feature of this theory that grammatical grammar grammar 352 4065A-  AM  352 relations such as subject, object, etc., of a sentence are not absolute but are relative to the level of structure. This accounts for the fact that many sentences that appear superficially similar in structure (e.g., ‘John is easy to please’, ‘John is eager to please’) are nonetheless perceived as having different underlying (deep-structure) grammatical relations. Indeed, it was argued that any theory of grammar that failed to make a deep-structure/surface-structure distinction could not be adequate. Contemporary linguistic theories have, nonetheless, tended toward minimizing the importance of the transformational rules with corresponding elaboration of the role of the lexicon and the principles that govern the operation of grammars generally. Theories such as generalized phrase-structure grammar and lexical function grammar postulate no transformational rules at all and capture the relatedness of pairs such as active and passive sentences in other ways. Chomsky’s principles and parameters approach (1981) reduces the transformational component to a single general movement operation that is controlled by the simultaneous interaction of a number of principles or subtheories: binding, government, control, etc. The universal component of the grammar is thus enlarged and the contribution of languagespecific rules is correspondingly diminished. Proponents point to the advantages this would allow in language acquisition. Presumably a considerable portion of the task of grammar construction would consist merely in setting the values of a small number of parameters that could be readily determined on the basis of a small number of instances of grammatical sentences. A rather different approach that has been influential has arisen from the work of Richard Montague, who applied to natural languages the same techniques of model theory developed for logical languages such as the predicate calculus. This so-called Montague grammar uses a categorial grammar as its syntactic component. In this form of grammar, complex lexical and phrasal categories can be of the form A/B. Typically such categories combine by a kind of “cancellation” rule: A/B ! B P A (something of category A/B combines with something of category B to yield something of category A). In addition, there is a close correspondence between the syntactic category of an expression and its semantic type; e.g., common nouns such as ‘book’ and ‘girl’ are of type e/t, and their semantic values are functions from individuals (entities, or e-type things) to truth-values (T-type things), or equivalently, sets of individuals. The result is an explicit, interlocking syntax and semantics specifying not only the syntactic structure of grammatical sentences but also their truth conditions. Montague’s work was embedded in his own view of universal grammar, which has not, by and large, proven persuasive to linguists. A great deal of attention has been given in recent years to merging the undoubted virtues of Montague grammar with a linguistically more palatable view of universal grammar.  CHOMSKY, LOGICAL FORM, PARSING, PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE. R.E.W. grammar, categorial.GRAMMAR. grammar, Montague.GRAMMAR. grammar, transformational.GRAMMAR. grammar, universal.GRAMMAR. grammatical form.LOGICAL FORM. grammaticality intuitions.INTUITION. grammatical predicate.LOGICAL SUBJECT. grammatical subject.LOGICAL SUBJECT. Gramsci, Antonio (1891–1937), Italian political leader whose imprisonment by the Fascists for his involvement with the Italian Communist Party had the ironical result of sparing him from Stalinism and enabling him to better articulate his distinctive political philosophy. In 1917 he welcomed the Bolshevik Revolution as a “revolution against Capital” rather than against capitalism: as a revolution refuting the deterministic Marxism according to which socialism could arise only by the gradual evolution of capitalism, and confirming the possibility of the radical transformation of social institutions. In 1921 he supported creation of the Italian Communist Party; as its general secretary from 1924, he tried to reorganize it along more democratic lines. In 1926 the Fascists outlawed all opposition parties. Gramsci spent the rest of his life in various prisons, where he wrote more than a thousand s of notes ranging from a few lines to chapterlength essays. These Prison Notebooks pose a major interpretive challenge, but they reveal a keen, insightful, and open mind grappling with important social and political problems. The most common interpretation stems from Palmiro Togliatti, Gramsci’s successor as leader of grammar, categorial Gramsci, Antonio 353 4065A-  AM  353 the Italian Communists. After the fall of Fascism and the end of World War II, Togliatti read into Gramsci the so-called Italian road to socialism: a strategy for attaining the traditional Marxist goals of the classless society and the nationalization of the means of production by cultural means, such as education and persuasion. In contrast to Bolshevism, one had to first conquer social institutions, and then their control would yield the desired economic and political changes. This democratic theory of Marxist revolution was long regarded by many as especially relevant to Western industrial societies, and so for this and other reasons Gramsci is a key figure of Western Marxism. The same theory is often called Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, referring to a relationship between two political units where one dominates the other with the consent of that other. This interpretation was a political reconstruction, based primarily on Gramsci’s Communist involvement and on highly selective passages from the Notebooks. It was also based on exaggerating the influence on Gramsci of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Gentile, and minimizing influences like Croce, Mosca, Machiavelli, and Hegel. No new consensus has emerged yet; it would have to be based on analytical and historical spadework barely begun. One main interpretive issue is whether Gramsci, besides questioning the means, was also led to question the ends of traditional Marxism. In one view, his commitment to rational persuasion, political realism, methodological fallibilism, democracy, and pluralism is much deeper than his inclinations toward the classless society, the abolition of private property, the bureaucratically centralized party, and the like; in particular, his pluralism is an aspect of his commitment to the dialectic as a way of thinking, a concept he adapted from Hegel through Croce.  MARXISM. M.A.F. great chain of being.PRINCIPLE OF PLENITUDE. greatest happiness principle.UTILITARIANISM. Great Learning.TA-HSÜEH. Greek Skepticism.SKEPTICS. Green, T(homas) H(ill) (1836–82), British absolute idealist and social philosopher. The son of a clergyman, Green studied and taught at Oxford. His central concern was to resolve what he saw as the spiritual crisis of his age by analyzing knowledge and morality in ways inspired by Kant and Hegel. In his lengthy introduction to Hume’s Treatise, he argued that Hume had shown knowledge and morality to be impossible on empiricist principles. In his major work, Prolegomena to Ethics (1883), Green contended that thought imposed relations on sensory feelings and impulses (whose source was an eternal consciousness) to constitute objects of knowledge and of desire. Furthermore, in acting on desires, rational agents seek the satisfaction of a self that is realized through their own actions. This requires rational agents to live in harmony among themselves and hence to act morally. In Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation (1885) Green transformed classical liberalism by arguing that even though the state has no intrinsic value, its intervention in society is necessary to provide the conditions that enable rational beings to achieve self-satisfaction.  HUME, IDEALISM, POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY. J.W.A. Gregory I, Saint, called Gregory the Great (c.540–604), a pope and Roman political leader. Born a patrician, he was educated for public office and became prefect of Rome in 570. In 579, he was appointed papal representative in Constantinople, returning to Rome as counselor to Pope Pelagius II in 586. He was elected Pope Gregory I in 590. When the Lombards attacked Rome in 594, Gregory bought them off. Constantinople would neither cede nor defend Italy, and Gregory stepped in as secular ruler of what became the Papal States. He asserted the universal jurisdiction of the bishop of Rome, and claimed patriarchy of the West. His writings include important letters; the Moralia, an exposition of the Book of Job summarizing Christian theology; Pastoral Care, which defined the duties of the clergy for the Middle Ages; and Dialogues, which deals chiefly with the immortality of the soul, holding it could enter heaven immediately without awaiting the Last Judgment. His thought, largely Augustinian, is unoriginal, but was much quoted in the Middle Ages.  AUGUSTINE. J.Lo. Gregory of Nyssa, Saint (335–98), Greek theologian and mystic who tried to reconcile Platonism with Christianity. As bishop of Cappadocia in eastern Asia Minor, he championed orthodoxy and was prominent at the First Council of Constantinople. He related the doctrine of the Trinity to Plato’s ideas of the One and the Many. He followed Origen in believing that man’s material great chain of being Gregory of Nyssa 354 4065A-  AM  354 nature was due to the fall and in believing in the Apocatastasis, the universal restoration of all souls, including Satan’s, in the kingdom of God.  APOCATASTASIS, ORIGEN. L.P.P. Gregory of Rimini (c.1300–58), Italian philosopher and monk. He studied in Italy, England, and France, and taught at the universities of Bologna, Padua, Perugia, and Paris before becoming prior general of the Hermits of St. Augustine in his native city of Rimini, about eighteen months before he died. Gregory earned the honorific title “the Authentic Doctor” because he was considered by many of his contemporaries to be a faithful interpreter of Augustine, and thus a defender of tradition, in the midst of the skepticism of Ockham and his disciples regarding what could be known in natural philosophy and theology. Thus, in his commentary on Books I and II of Peter Lombard’s Sentences, Gregory rejected the view that because of God’s omnipotence he can do anything and is therefore unknowable in his nature and his ways. Gregory also maintained that after Adam’s fall from righteousness, men need, in conjunction with their free will, God’s help (grace) to perform morally good actions. In non-religious matters Gregory is usually associated with the theory of the complexe significabile, according to which the object of knowledge acquired by scientific proof is neither an object existing outside the mind, nor a word (simplex) or a proposition (complexum), but rather the complexe significabile, that which is totally and adequately signified by the proposition expressed in the conclusion of the proof in question.  COMPLEXE SIGNIFICABILE. G.S. Grelling’s paradox.SET-THEORETIC PARADOXES.

Grice: English philosopher whose work concerns perception and philosophy of language, and whose most influential contribution is the concept of a conversational implicature and the associated theoretical machinery of conversational ‘postulates.’ The concept of a conversational implicature is first used in his ‘presentation’ on the causal theory of perception and reference. Grice distinguishes between the ‘meaning’ of the words used in a sentence and what is implied by the utterer’s choice of words. If someone says “It looks as if there is a red pillar box in front of me,” the choice of words implies that there is some doubt about the pillar box being red. But, Grice argues, that is a matter of word choice and the sentence itself does not ‘impl’  that there is doubt. The term ‘conversational implicature’ was introduced in Grice’s William James lectures (published in 1988) and used to defend the use of the material implication as a logical translation of ‘if’. With Strawson (“In Defence of Dogma”), Grice gives a spirited defense of the analytic–synthetic distinction against Quine’s criticisms. In subsequent systematic papers Grice attempts, among other things, to give a theoretical grounding of the distinction. Grice’s oeuvre is part of the Oxford ordinary language tradition, if formal and theoretical. He also explores metaphysics, especially the concept of absolute value.  ANALYTIC –SYNTHETIC DISTINCTION, IMPLICATURE, ORDINARY LANGUAGE PHILOSOPHY.

Groot, Huigh de.GROTIUS. Grosseteste, Robert (c.1168–1253), English theologian who began life on the bottom rung of feudal society in Suffolk and became one of the most influential philosophers in pre-Reformation England. He studied at Oxford, becoming a master of arts between 1186 and 1189. Sometime after this period he joined the household of William de Vere, bishop of Hereford. Grosseteste may have been associated with the local cathedral school in Hereford, several of whose members were part of a relatively advanced scientific tradition. It was a center for the study of natural science and astrology as well as liberal arts and theology. If so, this would explain, at least in part, his lifelong interest in work in natural philosophy. Between 1209 and 1214 Grosseteste became a master of theology, probably in Paris. In 1221 he became the first chancellor of Oxford. From 1229 to 1235 he was secular lecturer in theology to the recently established Franciscan order at Oxford. It was during his tenure with the Franciscans that he studied Greek – an unusual endeavor for a medieval schoolman. He spent the last eighteen years of his life as bishop of Lincoln. As a university scholar, Grosseteste was an original thinker who used Aristotelian and Augustinian theses as points of departure. He believed, with Aristotle, that sense knowledge is the basis of all knowledge, and that the basis for sense knowledge is our discovery of the cause of what is experienced or revealed by experiment. He also believed, with Augustine, that light plays Gregory of Rimini Grosseteste, Robert 355 4065A-  AM  355 an important role in creation. Thus he maintained that God produced the world by first creating prime matter from which issued a point of light (lux), the first corporeal form or power, one of whose manifestations is visible light. The diffusion of this light resulted in extension or tridimensionality in the form of the nine concentric celestial spheres and the four terrestrial spheres of fire, air, water, and earth. According to Grosseteste, the diffusion of light takes place in accordance with laws of mathematical proportionality (geometry). Everything, therefore, is a manifestation of light, and mathematics is consequently indispensable to science and knowledge generally. The principles Grosseteste employs to support his views are presented in, e.g., his commentary on Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, the De luce (“Of Light”), and the De lineis, angulis et figuris (“Of Lines, Angles, and Figures”). He worked in areas as seemingly disparate as optics and angelology. Grosseteste was one of the first to take an interest in and introduce into the Oxford curriculum newly recovered Aristotelian texts – some of which he translated, along with Greek commentaries on them. His work and interest in natural philosophy, mathematics, the Bible, and languages profoundly influenced his younger contemporary, Roger Bacon, and the educational goals of the Franciscan order. It also helped to stimulate work in these areas during the fourteenth century.  COMMENTARIES ON ARISTOTLE. G.S. Grotius, Hugo, in Dutch, Huigh de Groot (1583– 1645), Dutch humanist, a founder of modern views of international law and a major theorist of natural law. A lawyer and Latinist, Grotius developed a new view of the law of nature in order to combat moral skepticism and to show how there could be rational settlement of moral disputes despite religious disagreements. He argued in The Law of War and Peace (1625) that humans are naturally both competitive and sociable. The laws of nature show us how we can live together despite our propensity to conflict. They can be derived from observation of our nature and situation. These laws reflect the fact that each individual possesses rights, which delimit the social space within which we are free to pursue our own goals. Legitimate government arises when we give up some rights in order to save or improve our lives. The obligations that the laws of nature impose would bind us, Grotius notoriously said, even if God did not exist; but he held that God does enforce the laws. They set the limits on the laws that governments may legitimately impose. The laws of nature reflect our possession of both precise perfect rights of justice, which can be protected by force, and imperfect rights, which are not enforceable, nor even statable very precisely. Grotius’s views on our combative but sociable nature, on the function of the law of nature, and on perfect and imperfect rights were of central importance in later discussions of morality and law.  NATURAL LAW, RIGHTS. J.B.S. ground rule.THEMA. grue paradox, a paradox in the theory of induction, according to which every intuitively acceptable inductive argument, A, may be mimicked by indefinitely many other inductive arguments – each seemingly quite analogous to A and therefore seemingly as acceptable, yet each nonetheless intuitively unacceptable, and each yielding a conclusion contradictory to that of A, given the assumption that sufficiently many and varied of the sort of things induced upon exist as yet unexamined (which is the only circumstance in which A is of interest). Suppose the following is an intuitively acceptable inductive argument: (A1) All hitherto observed emeralds are green; therefore, all emeralds are green. Now introduce the colorpredicate ‘grue’, where (for some given, as yet wholly future, temporal interval T) an object is grue provided it has the property of being either green and first examined before T, or blue and not first examined before T. Then consider the following inductive argument: (A2) All hitherto observed emeralds are grue; therefore, all emeralds are grue. The premise is true, and A2 is formally analogous to A1. But A2 is intuitively unacceptable; if there are emeralds unexamined before T, then the conclusion of A2 says that these emeralds are blue, whereas the conclusion of A1 says that they are green. Other counterintuitive competing arguments could be given, e.g.: (A3) All hitherto observed emeralds are grellow; therefore, all emeralds are grellow (where an object is grellow provided it is green and located on the earth, or yellow otherwise). It would seem, therefore, that some restriction on induction is required. The new riddle of induction offers two challenges. First, state the restriction – i.e., demarcate the intuitively acceptable inductions from the unacceptable ones, in some general way, without constant appeal to intuition. Second, justify our preference for the Grotius, Hugo grue paradox 356 4065A-  AM  356 one group of inductions over the other. (These two parts of the new riddle are often conflated. But it is at least conceivable that one might solve the analytical, demarcative part without solving the justificatory part, and, perhaps, vice versa.) It will not do to rule out, a priori, “gruelike” (now commonly called “gruesome”) variances in nature. Water (pure H2O) varies in its physical state along the parameter of temperature. If so, why might not emeralds vary in color along the parameter of time of first examination? One approach to the problem of restriction is to focus on the conclusions of inductive arguments (e.g., All emeralds are green, All emeralds are grue) and to distinguish those which may legitimately so serve (called “projectible hypotheses”) from those which may not. The question then arises whether only non-gruesome hypotheses (those which do not contain gruesome predicates) are projectible. Aside from the task of defining ‘gruesome predicate’ (which could be done structurally relative to a preferred language), the answer is no. The English predicate ‘solid and less than 0; C, or liquid and more than 0; C but less than 100; C, or gaseous and more than 100; C’ is gruesome on any plausible structural account of gruesomeness (note the similarity to the English ‘grue’ equivalent: green and first examined before T, or blue and not first examined before T). Nevertheless, where nontransitional water is pure H2O at one atmosphere of pressure (save that which is in a transitional state, i.e., melting/freezing or boiling/condensing, i.e., at 0°C or 100; C), we happily project the hypothesis that all non-transitional water falls under the above gruesome predicate. Perhaps this is because, if we rewrite the projection about non-transitional water as a conjunction of non-gruesome hypotheses – (i) All water at less than 0; C is solid, (ii) All water at more than 0; C but less than 100; C is liquid, and (iii) All water at more than 100; C is gaseous – we note that (i)–(iii) are all supported (there are known positive instances); whereas if we rewrite the gruesome projection about emeralds as a conjunction of non-gruesome hypotheses – (i*) All emeralds first examined before T are green, and (ii*) All emeralds not first examined before T are blue – we note that (ii*) is as yet unsupported. It would seem that, whereas a non-gruesome hypothesis is projectible provided it is unviolated and supported, a gruesome hypothesis is projectible provided it is unviolated and equivalent to a conjunction of non-gruesome hypotheses, each of which is supported. The grue paradox was discovered by Nelson Goodman. It is most fully stated in his Fact, Fiction and Forecast (1955).  PROBLEM OF INDUCTION, QUALITATIVE PREDICATE. D.A.J. Grundnorm.BASIC NORM. guise theory, a system developed by Castañeda to resolve a number of issues concerning the content of thought and experience, including reference, identity statements, intensional contexts, predication, existential claims, perception, and fictional discourse. For example, since (i) Oedipus believed that he killed the man at the crossroads, and (ii) the man at the crossroads was his (Oedipus’s) father, it might seem that (iii) Oedipus believed that he killed his father. Guise theory blocks this derivation by taking ‘was’ in (ii) to express, not genuine identity, but a contingent sameness relation betweeen the distinct referents of the descriptions. Definite descriptions are typically treated as referential, contrary to Russell’s theory of descriptions, and their referents are identical in both direct and indirect discourse, contrary to Frege’s semantics. To support this solution, guise theory offers unique accounts of predication and singular referents. The latter are individual guises, which, like Fregean senses and Meinong’s incomplete objects, are thinly individuated aspects or “slices” of ordinary objects at best. Every guise is a structure c{F1 . . . , Fn} where c is an operator expressed by ‘the’ in English – transforming a set of properties {F1, . . . , Fn} into a distinct concrete individual, each property being an internal property of the guise. Guises have external properties by standing in various sameness relations to other guises that have these properties internally. There are four such relations, besides genuine identity, each an equivalence relation in its field. If the oldest philosopher happens to be wise, e.g., wisdom is factually predicated of the guise ‘the oldest philosopher’ because it is consubstantiated with ‘the oldest wise philosopher’. Other sameness relations account for fictional predication (consociation) and necessary external predication (conflation). Existence is self-consubstantiation. An ordinary physical object is, at any moment, a cluster of consubstantiated (hence, existing) guises, while continuants are formed through the transubstantiation of guises within temporally distinct clusters. There are no substrates, and while every guise “subsists,” not all exist, e.g., the Norse God of Thunder. The posiGrundnorm guise theory 357 4065A-  AM  357 tion thus permits a unified account of singular reference. One task for guise theory is to explain how a “concretized” set of properties differs internally from a mere set. Perhaps guises are façons de penser whose core sets are concretized if their component properties are conceived as coinstantiated, with non-existents analyzable in terms of the failure of the conceived properties to actually be coinstantiated. However, it is questionable whether this approach can achieve all that Castañeda demands of guise theory.  CASTAÑEDA, PRACTITION. T.K. guise theory guise theory 358 4065A-  AM  358 Habermas, Jürgen (b.1929), German philosopher and social theorist, a leading representative of the second generation of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. His work has consistently returned to the problem of the normative foundations of social criticism and critical social inquiry not supplied in traditional Marxism and other forms of critical theory, such as postmodernism. His habilitation, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1961), is an influential historical analysis of the emergence of the ideal of a public sphere in the eighteenth century and its subsequent decline. Habermas turned then to the problems of the foundations and methodology of the social sciences, developing a criticism of positivism and his own interpretive explanatory approach in The Logic of the Social Sciences (1963) and his first major systematic work, Knowledge and Human Interests (1967). Rejecting the unity of method typical of positivism, Habermas argues that social inquiry is guided by three distinct interests: in control, in understanding, and in emancipation. He is especially concerned to use emancipatory interest to overcome the limitations of the model of inquiry based on understanding and argues against “universality of hermeneutics” (defended by hermeneuticists such as Gadamer) and for the need to supplement interpretations with explanations in the social sciences. As he came to reject the psychoanalytic vocabulary in which he formulated the interest in emancipation, he turned to finding the basis for understanding and social inquiry in a theory of rationality more generally. In the next phase of his career he developed a comprehensive social theory, culminating in his two-volume The Theory of Communicative Action (1982). The goal of this theory is to develop a “critical theory of modernity,” on the basis of a comprehensive theory of communicative (as opposed to instrumental) rationality. The first volume develops a theory of communicative rationality based on “discourse,” or second-order communication that takes place both in everyday interaction and in institutionalized practices of argumentation in science, law, and criticism. This theory of rationality emerges from a universal or “formal” pragmatics, a speech act theory based on making explicit the rules and norms of the competence to communicate in linguistic interaction. The second volume develops a diagnosis of modern society as suffering from “onesided rationalization,” leading to disruptions of the communicative lifeworld by “systems” such as markets and bureaucracies. Finally, Habermas applies his conception of rationality to issues of normative theory, including ethics, politics, and the law. “Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Moral Justification” (1982) argues for an intersubjective notion of practical reason and discursive procedure for the justification of universal norms. This “discourse principle” provides a dialogical version of Kant’s idea of universalization; a norm is justified if and only if it can meet with the reasoned agreement of all those affected. Between Facts and Norms (1992) combines his social and normative theories to give a systematic account of law and democracy. His contribution here is an account of deliberative democracy appropriate to the complexity of modern society. His work in all of these phases provides a systematic defense and critique of modern institutions and a vindication of the universal claims of public practical reason.  CRITICAL THEORY, FRANKFURT SCHOOL, HERMENEUTICS. J.B. haecceity (from Latin haec, ‘this’), (1) loosely, thisness; more specifically, an irreducible category of being, the fundamental actuality of an existent entity; or (2) an individual essence, a property an object has necessarily, without which it would not be or would cease to exist as the individual it is, and which, necessarily, no other object has. There are in the history of philosophy two distinct concepts of haecceity. The idea originated with the work of the thirteenthcentury philosopher Duns Scotus, and was discussed in the same period by Aquinas, as a positive perfection that serves as a primitive existence and individuation principle for concrete existents. In the seventeenth century Leibniz transformed the concept of haecceity, which Duns Scotus had explicitly denied to be a form or universal, into the notion of an individual essence, a distinctive nature or set of necessary characteristics uniquely identifying it under the principle of the identity of indiscernibles. 359 H 4065h-l.qxd  7:39 AM  359 Duns Scotus’s haecceitas applies only to the being of contingently existent entities in the actual world, but Leibniz extends the principle to individuate particular things not only through the changes they may undergo in the actual world, but in any alternative logically possible world. Leibniz admitted as a consequence the controversial thesis that every object by virtue of its haecceity has each of its properties essentially or necessarily, so that only the counterparts of individuals can inhabit distinct logically possible worlds. A further corollary – since the possession of particular parts in a particular arrangement is also a property and hence involved in the individual essence of any complex object – is the doctrine of mereological essentialism: every composite is necessarily constituted by a particular configuration of particular proper parts, and loses its self-identity if any parts are removed or replaced.  DUNS SCOTUS, ESSENTIALISM, IDENTITY OF INDISCERNIBLES, METAPHYSICS. D.J. Haeckel, Ernst (1834–1919), German zoologist, an impassioned adherent of Darwin’s theory of evolution. His popular work Die Welträtsel (The Riddle of the Universe, 1899) became a best-seller and was very influential in its time. Lenin is said to have admired it. Haeckel’s philosophy, which he called monism, is characterized negatively by his rejection of free will, immortality, and theism, as well as his criticisms of the traditional forms of materialism and idealism. Positively it is distinguished by passionate arguments for the fundamental unity of organic and inorganic nature and a form of pantheism. M.K. Ha-Levi, Judah (c.1075–1141), Spanish Jewish philosopher and poet. Born in Toledo, he studied biblical and rabbinical literature as well as philosophy. His poetry introduces Arabic forms in Hebrew religious expression. He was traveling to Jerusalem on a pilgrimage when he died. His most important philosophical work is Kuzari: The Book of Proof and Argument of the Despised Faith, which purports to be a discussion of a Christian, a Muslim, and a Jew, each offering the king of the Khazars (in southern Russia) reasons for adopting his faith. Around 740 the historical king and most of his people converted to Judaism. HaLevi presents the Christian and the Muslim as Aristotelian thinkers, who fail to convince the king. The Jewish spokesman begins by asserting his belief in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of history who is continuously active in history, rather than the God of the philosophers. Jewish history is the inner core of world history. From the revelation at Sinai, the most witnessed divine event claimed by any religion, the Providential history of the Jews is the way God has chosen to make his message clear to all humankind. Ha-Levi’s view is the classical expression of Jewish particularism and nationalism. His ideas have been influential in Judaism and were early printed in Latin and Spanish.  JEWISH PHILOSOPHY. R.H.P. Halldén-complete.COMPLETENESS. hallucination.PSEUDOHALLUCINATION. hallucination, argument from.PERCEPTION. halting problem.COMPUTABILITY. Hamann, Johann Georg (1730–88), German philosopher. Born and educated in Königsberg, Hamann, known as the Magus of the North, was one of the most important Christian thinkers in Germany during the second half of the eighteenth century. Advocating an irrationalistic theory of faith (inspired by Hume), he opposed the prevailing Enlightenment philosophy. He was a mentor of the Sturm und Drang literary movement and had a significant influence on Jacobi, Hegel, and Kierkegaard. As a close acquaintance of Kant, he also had a great impact on the development of Kant’s critical philosophy through his Hume translations. Hamann’s most important works, criticized and admired for their difficult and obscure style, were the Socratic Memorabilia (1759), Aesthetica in nuce (“Aesthetics in a Nutshell,” 1762), and several works on language. He suppressed his “metacritical” writings out of respect for Kant. However, they were published after his death and now constitute the bestknown part of his work. M.K. Hamilton, William (1788–1856), Scottish philosopher and logician. Born in Glasgow and educated at Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Oxford, he was for most of his life professor at the University of Edinburgh (1821–56). Though hardly an orthodox or uncritical follower of Reid and Stewart, he became one of the most important members of the school of Scottish common sense philosophy. His “philosophy of the conditioned” has a somewhat Kantian flavor. Like Kant, he held that we can have knowledge only of “the relative manifestations of an existence, which in itself it is our highest wisdom to recogHaeckel, Ernst Hamilton, William 360 4065h-l.qxd  7:39 AM  360 nize as beyond the reach of philosophy.” Unlike Kant, however, he argued for the position of a “natural realism” in the Reidian tradition. The doctrine of the relativity of knowledge has seemed to many – including J. S. Mill – contradictory to his realism. For Hamilton, the two are held together by a kind of intuitionism that emphasizes certain facts of consciousness that are both primitive and incomprehensible. They are, though constitutive of knowledge, “less forms of cognitions than of beliefs.” In logic he argued for a doctrine involving quantification of predicates and the view that propositions can be reduced to equations.  SCOTTISH COMMON SENSE PHILOSOPHY. M.K. Han Fei Tzu, also called Master Han Fei (third century B.C.), Chinese Legalist political theorist. He was a prince of the state of Han and a student of Hsün Tzu. His thought, recorded in the text Han Fei Tzu, mainly concerned the method of government and was addressed primarily to rulers. Han Fei Tzu believed that human beings are self-seeking by nature, and that they can rarely be transformed by education and moral examples. Accordingly, the ruler should institute a precisely formulated and clearly propagated system of laws (fa) to regulate their behavior, and enforce it with punishment. Officials, in addition to being governed by laws, are to be rewarded and punished according to whether their performance coincides with their official duties and proposed plans. The ruler should enforce this system strictly without favoritism, should shun contact with subordinates to avoid breeding familiarity, and should conceal his personal likes and dislikes to avoid their being exploited. Having properly set up the machinary of government, the government will run smoothly with minimal intervention by the ruler.  CHINESE LEGALISM. K.-l.S. Han Yü (768–824), Chinese poet and essayist who, though his thoughts lacked philosophical depth, was the first to emphasize “correct transmission” of the Way from the sage-emperors to Confucius and Mencius. His views later profoundly influenced Neo-Confucian philosophers in the Sung dynasty. He vigorously defended Confucianism against Buddhism and Taoism on cultural grounds: the monks and nuns were parasites on society. He also formulated a threefold theory on which human nature has superior, medium, and inferior grades.  CONFUCIANISM, CONFUCIUS, MENCIUS, NEO-CONFUCIANISM, TAO-T’UNG. S.-h.L. happiness.ARISTOTLE, HEDONISM, UTILITARIANISM. hard determinism.FREE WILL PROBLEM. Hardenberg, Friedrich von.NOVALIS. hardware.COMPUTER THEORY. Hare, R(ichard) M(ervyn) (b.1919), English philosopher who is one of the most influential moral philosophers of the twentieth century and the developer of prescriptivism in metaethics. Hare was educated at Rugby and Oxford, then served in the British army during World War II and spent years as a prisoner of war in Burma. In 1947 he took a position at Balliol College and was appointed White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford in 1966. On retirement from Oxford, he became Graduate Research Professor at the University of Florida (1983–93). His major books are Language of Morals (1953), Freedom and Reason (1963), Moral Thinking (1981), and Sorting Out Ethics (1997). Many collections of his essays have also appeared, and a collection of other leading philosophers’ articles on his work was published in 1988 (Hare and Critics, eds. Seanor and Fotion). According to Hare, a careful exploration of the nature of our moral concepts reveals that (nonironic) judgments about what one morally ought to do are expressions of the will, or commitments to act, that are subject to certain logical constraints. Because moral judgments are prescriptive, we cannot sincerely subscribe to them while refusing to comply with them in the relevant circumstances. Because moral judgments are universal prescriptions, we cannot sincerely subscribe to them unless we are willing for them to be followed were we in other people’s positions with their preferences. Hare later contended that vividly to imagine ourselves completely in other people’s positions involves our acquiring preferences about what should happen to us in those positions that mirror exactly what those people now want for themselves. So, ideally, we decide on a universal prescription on the basis of not only our existing preferences about the actual situation but also the new preferences we would have if we were wholly in other people’s positions. What we can prescribe universally is what maximizes net satisfaction of this amalgamated set of preferences. Hence, Hare concluded that his theory of moral judgment leads to preference-satisfaction act utilitarianism. However, like most other utilitarians, he argued that the Han Fei Tzu Hare, R(ichard) M(ervyn) 361 4065h-l.qxd  7:39 AM  361 best way to maximize utility is to have, and generally to act on, certain not directly utilitarian dispositions – such as dispositions not to hurt others or steal, to keep promises and tell the truth, to take special responsibility for one’s own family, and so on.  EMOTIVISM, ETHICS, PRESCRIPTIVISM, UTILITARIANISM. B.W.H. harmony, preestablished.LEIBNIZ. harmony of the spheres.PYTHAGORAS. Hart, H(erbert) L(ionel) A(dolphus) (1907–92), English philosopher principally responsible for the revival of legal and political philosophy after World War II. After wartime work with military intelligence, Hart gave up a flourishing law practice to join the Oxford faculty, where he was a brilliant lecturer, a sympathetic and insightful critic, and a generous mentor to many scholars. Like the earlier “legal positivists” Bentham and John Austin, Hart accepted the “separation of law and morals”: moral standards can deliberately be incorporated in law, but there is no automatic or necessary connection between law and sound moral principles. In The Concept of Law (1961) he critiqued the Bentham-Austin notion that laws are orders backed by threats from a political community’s “sovereign” – some person or persons who enjoy habitual obedience and are habitually obedient to no other human – and developed the more complex idea that law is a “union of primary and secondary rules.” Hart agreed that a legal system must contain some “obligation-imposing” “primary” rules, restricting freedom. But he showed that law also includes independent “power-conferring” rules that facilitate choice, and he demonstrated that a legal system requires “secondary” rules that create public offices and authorize official action, such as legislation and adjudication, as well as “rules of recognition” that determine which other rules are valid in the system. Hart held that rules of law are “open-textured,” with a core of determinate meaning and a fringe of indeterminate meaning, and thus capable of answering some but not all legal questions that can arise. He doubted courts’ claims to discover law’s meaning when reasonable competing interpretations are available, and held that courts decide such “hard cases” by first performing the important “legislative” function of filling gaps in the law. Hart’s first book was an influential study (with A. M. Honoré) of Causation in the Law (1959). His inaugural lecture as Professor of Jurisprudence, “Definition and Theory in Jurisprudence” (1953), initiated a career-long study of rights, reflected also in Essays on Bentham: Studies in Jurisprudence and Political Theory (1982) and in Essays in Jurisprudence and Philosophy (1983). He defended liberal public policies. In Law, Liberty and Morality (1963) he refuted Lord Devlin’s contention that a society justifiably enforces the code of its moral majority, whatever it might be. In The Morality of the Criminal Law (1965) and in Punishment and Responsibility (1968), Hart contributed substantially to both analytic and normative theories of crime and punishment.  LIBERALISM, PHILOSOPHY OF LAW, POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, RIGHTS. D.Ly. Hartley, David (1705–57), British physician and philosopher. Although the notion of association of ideas is ancient, he is generally regarded as the founder of associationism as a self-sufficient psychology. Despite similarities between his association psychology and Hume’s, Hartley developed his system independently, acknowledging only the writings of clergyman John Gay (1699– 1745). Hartley was one of many Enlightenment thinkers aspiring to be “Newtons of the mind,” in Peter Gay’s phrase. In Hartley, this took the form of uniting association philosophy with physiology, a project later brought to fruition by Bain. His major work, Observations on Man (1749), pictured mental events and neural events as operating on parallel tracks in which neural events cause mental events. On the mental side, Hartley distinguished (like Hume) between sensation and idea. On the physiological side, Hartley adopted Newton’s conception of nervous transmission by vibrations of a fine granular substance within nerve-tubes. Vibrations within sensory nerves peripheral to the brain corresponded to the sensations they caused, while small vibrations in the brain, vibratiuncles, corresponded to ideas. Hartley proposed a single law of association, contiguity modified by frequency, which took two forms, one for the mental side and one for the neural: ideas, or vibratiuncles, occurring together regularly become associated. Hartley distinguished between simultaneous association, the link between ideas that occur at the same harmony, preestablished Hartley, David 362 4065h-l.qxd  7:39 AM  362 moment, and successive association, between ideas that closely succeed one another. Successive associations occur only in a forward direction; there are no backward associations, a thesis generating much controversy in the later experimental study of memory.  ASSOCIATIONISM. T.H.L. Hartmann, Eduard von (1842–1906), German philosopher who sought to synthesize the thought of Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer. The most important of his fifteen books was Philosophie des Unbewussten (Philosophy of the Unconscious, 1869). For Hartmann both will and idea are interrelated and are expressions of an absolute “thing-in-itself,” the unconscious. The unconscious is the active essence in natural and psychic processes and is the teleological dynamic in organic life. Paradoxically, he claimed that the teleology immanent in the world order and the life process leads to insight into the irrationality of the “will-to-live.” The maturation of rational consciousness would, he held, lead to the negation of the total volitional process and the entire world process would cease. Ideas indicate the “what” of existence and constitute, along with will and the unconscious, the three modes of being. Despite its pessimism, this work enjoyed considerable popularity. Hartmann was an unusual combination of speculative idealist and philosopher of science (defending vitalism and attacking mechanistic materialism); his pessimistic ethics was part of a cosmic drama of redemption. Some of his later works dealt with a critical form of Darwinism that led him to adopt a positive evolutionary stance that undermined his earlier pessimism. His general philosophical position was selfdescribed as “transcendental realism.” His Philosophy of the Unconscious was translated into English by W. C. Coupland in three volumes in 1884. There is little doubt that his metaphysics of the unconscious prepared the way for Freud’s later theory of the unconscious mind.  FREUD, HEGEL, SCHELLING, SCHOPENHAUER. G.J.S. Hartmann, Nicolai (1882–1950), Latvian-born German philosopher. He taught at the universities of Marburg, Cologne, Berlin, and Göttingen, and wrote more than a dozen major works on the history of philosophy, ontology, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics. A realist in epistemology and ontology, Hartmann held that cognition is the apprehension of something independent of the act of apprehension or any other mental events. An accurate phenomenology, such as Husserl’s, would acknowledge, according to him, that we apprehend not only particular, spatiotemporal objects, but also “ideal objects,” “essences,” which Hartmann explicitly identified with Platonic Forms. Among these are ethical values and the objects of mathematics and logic. Our apprehension of values is emotional in character, as Scheler had held. This point is compatible with their objectivity and their mindindependence, since the emotions are just another mode of apprehension. The point applies, however, only to ethical values. Aesthetic values are essentially subjective; they exist only for the subject experiencing them. The number of ethical values is far greater than usually supposed, nor are they derivable from a single fundamental value. At best we only glimpse some of them, and even these may not be simultaneously realizable. This explains and to some extent justifies the existence of moral disagreement, between persons as well as between whole cultures. Hartmann was most obviously influenced by Plato, Husserl, and Scheler. But he was a major, original philosopher in his own right. He has received less recognition than he deserves probably because his views were quite different from those dominant in recent Anglo-American philosophy or in recent Continental philosophy. What is perhaps his most important work, Ethics, was published in German in 1926, one year before Heidegger’s Being and Time, and appeared in English in 1932.  A PRIORI, HUSSERL, MORAL REALISM, PLATO, SCHELER. P.B.u Hartshorne, Charles (b.1897), chief American exponent of process philosophy and theology in the late twentieth century. After receiving the Ph.D. at Harvard in 1923 he came under the influence of Whitehead, and later, with Paul Weiss, edited The Collected Papers of C. S. Peirce (1931–35). In The Philosophy and Psychology of Sensation (1934) Hartshorne argued that all sensations are feelings on an affective continuum. These ideas were later incorporated into a neoclassical metaphysic that is panpsychist, indeterministic, and theistic. Nature is a theater of interactions among ephemeral centers of creative activity, each of which becomes objectively immortal in the memory of God. In Man’s Vision of God (1941) Hartshorne chastised philosophers for being insufficiently attentive to the varieties of theism. His alternative, called dipolar theism, also defended in The Divine Hartmann, Eduard von Hartshorne, Charles 363 4065h-l.qxd  7:39 AM  363 Relativity (1948), pictures God as supremely related to and perfectly responding to every actuality. The universe is God’s body. The divine is, in different respects, infinite and finite, eternal and temporal, necessary and contingent. Establishing God’s existence is a metaphysical project, which Hartshorne characterizes in Creative Synthesis (1970) as the search for necessary truths about existence. The central element in his cumulative case for God’s existence, called the global argument, is a modal version of the ontological argument, which Hartshorne was instrumental in rehabilitating in The Logic of Perfection (1962) and Anselm’s Discovery (1965). Creative Synthesis also articulated the theory that aesthetic values are the most universal and that beauty is a mean between the twin extremes of order/disorder and simplicity/complexity. The Zero Fallacy (1997), Hartshorne’s twentieth book, summarized his assessment of the history of philosophy – also found in Insights and Oversights of Great Thinkers (1983) and Creativity in American Philosophy (1984) – and introduced important refinements of his metaphysics.  PANPSYCHISM, PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION, PROCESS PHILOSOPHY, WHITEHEAD. D.W.V. hasty generalization, fallacy of.INFORMAL FALLACY. heap paradox.SORITES PARADOX. heart.HSIN1. Heaven.T’IEN. hedonic calculus.BENTHAM. hedonism, the view that pleasure (including the absence of pain) is the sole intrinsic good in life. The hedonist may hold that, questions of morality aside, persons inevitably do seek pleasure (psychological hedonism); that, questions of psychology aside, morally we should seek pleasure (ethical hedonism); or that we inevitably do, and ought to, seek pleasure (ethical and psychological hedonism combined). Psychological hedonism itself admits of a variety of possible forms. One may hold, e.g., that all motivation is based on the prospect of present or future pleasure. More plausibly, some philosophers have held that all choices of future actions are based on one’s presently taking greater pleasure in the thought of doing one act rather than another. Still a third type of hedonism – with roots in empirical psychology – is that the attainment of pleasure is the primary drive of a wide range of organisms (including human beings) and is responsible, through some form of conditioning, for all acquired motivations. Ethical hedonists may, but need not, appeal to some form of psychological hedonism to buttress their case. For, at worst, the truth of some form of psychological hedonism makes ethical hedonism empty or inescapable – but not false. As a value theory (a theory of what is ultimately good), ethical hedonism has typically led to one or the other of two conceptions of morally correct action. Both of these are expressions of moral consequentialism in that they judge actions strictly by their consequences. On standard formulations of utilitarianism, actions are judged by the amount of pleasure they produce for all (sentient beings); on some formulations of egoist views, actions are judged by their consequences for one’s own pleasure. Neither egoism nor utilitarianism, however, must be wedded to a hedonistic value theory. A hedonistic value theory admits of a variety of claims about the characteristic sources and types of pleasure. One contentious issue has been what activities yield the greatest quantity of pleasure – with prominent candidates including philosophical and other forms of intellectual discourse, the contemplation of beauty, and activities productive of “the pleasures of the senses.” (Most philosophical hedonists, despite the popular associations of the word, have not espoused sensual pleasure.) Another issue, famously raised by J. S. Mill, is whether such different varieties of pleasure admit of differences of quality (as well as quantity). Even supposing them to be equal in quantity, can we say, e.g., that the pleasures of intellectual activity are superior in quality to those of watching sports on television? And if we do say such things, are we departing from strict hedonism by introducing a value distinction not really based on pleasure at all? Most philosophers have found hedonism – both psychological and ethical – exaggerated in its claims. One difficulty for both sorts of hedonism is the hedonistic paradox, which may be put as follows. Many of the deepest and best pleasures of life (of love, of child rearing, of work) seem to come most often to those who are engaging in an activity for reasons other than pleasure seeking. Hence, not only is it dubious that we always in fact seek (or value only) pleasure, but also dubious that the best way to achieve pleasure is to seek it. Another area of difficulty concerns happihasty, generalization, fallacy of hedonism 364 4065h-l.qxd  7:39 AM  364 ness – and its relation to pleasure. In the tradition of Aristotle, happiness is broadly understood as something like well-being and has been viewed, not implausibly, as a kind of natural end of all human activities. But ‘happiness’ in this sense is broader than ‘pleasure’, insofar as the latter designates a particular kind of feeling, whereas ‘well-being’ does not. Attributions of happiness, moreover, appear to be normative in a way in which attributions of pleasure are not. It is thought that a truly happy person has achieved, is achieving, or stands to achieve, certain things respecting the “truly important” concerns of human life. Of course, such achievements will characteristically produce pleasant feelings; but, just as characteristically, they will involve states of active enjoyment of activities – where, as Aristotle first pointed out, there are no distinctive feelings of pleasure apart from the doing of the activity itself. In short, the Aristotelian thesis that happiness is the natural end of all human activities, even if it is true, does not seem to lend much support to hedonism – psychological or ethical.  ARISTOTLE, ETHICS, EUDAIMONISM, UTILITARIANISM, VALUE. J.A.M. hedonistic paradox.HEDONISM. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770–1831), one of the most influential and systematic of the German idealists, also well known for his philosophy of history and philosophy of religion. Life and works. Hegel, the eldest of three children, was born in Stuttgart, the son of a minor financial official in the court of the Duchy of Württemberg. His mother died when he was eleven. At eighteen, he began attending the theology seminary or Stift attached to the University at Tübingen; he studied theology and classical languages and literature and became friendly with his future colleague and adversary, Schelling, as well as the great genius of German Romantic poetry, Hölderlin. In 1793, upon graduation, he accepted a job as a tutor for a family in Bern, and moved to Frankfurt in 1797 for a similar post. In 1799 his father bequeathed him a modest income and the freedom to resign his tutoring job, pursue his own work, and attempt to establish himself in a university position. In 1801, with the help of Schelling, he moved to the university town of Jena, already widely known as the home of Schiller, Fichte, and the Schlegel brothers. After lecturing for a few years, he became a professor in 1805. Prior to the move to Jena, Hegel’s essays had been chiefly concerned with problems in morality, the theory of culture, and the philosophy of religion. Hegel shared with Rousseau and the German Romantics many doubts about the political and moral implications of the European Enlightenment and modern philosophy in general, even while he still enthusiastically championed what he termed the principle of modernity, “absolute freedom.” Like many, he feared that the modern attack on feudal political and religious authority would merely issue in the reformulation of new internalized and still repressive forms of authority. And he was among that legion of German intellectuals infatuated with ancient Greece and the superiority of their supposedly harmonious social life, compared with the authoritarian and legalistic character of the Jewish and later Christian religions. At Jena, however, he coedited a journal with Schelling, The Critical Journal of Philosophy, and came to work much more on the philosophic issues created by the critical philosophy or “transcendental idealism” of Kant, and its legacy in the work of Rheinhold, Fichte, and Schelling. His written work became much more influenced by these theoretical projects and their attempt to extend Kant’s search for the basic categories necessary for experience to be discriminated and evaluated, and for a theory of the subject that, in some non-empirical way, was responsible for such categories. Problems concerning the completeness, interrelation, and ontological status of such a categorial structure were quite prominent, along with a continuing interest in the relation between a free, self-determining agent and the supposed constraints of moral principles and other agents. In his early years at Jena (especially before Schelling left in 1803), he was particularly preoccupied with this problem of a systematic philosophy, a way of accounting for the basic categories of the natural world and for human practical activity that would ground all such categories on commonly presupposed and logically interrelated, even interdeducible, principles. (In Hegel’s terms, this was the problem of the relation between a “Logic” and a “Philosophy of Nature” and “Philosophy of Spirit.”) After 1803, however, while he was preparing his own systematic philosophy for publication, what had been planned as a short introduction to this system took on a life of its own and grew into one of Hegel’s most provocative and influential books. Working at a furious pace, he finished hedonistic paradox Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 365 4065h-l.qxd  7:39 AM  365 what would be eventually called The Phenomenology of Spirit in a period of great personal and political turmoil. During the final writing of the book, he had learned that Christina Burkhard would give birth to his illegitimate son. (Ludwig was born in February 1807.) And he is supposed to have completed the text on October 13, 1807, the day Napoleon’s armies captured Jena. It was certainly an unprecedented work. In conception, it is about the human race itself as a developing, progressively more self-conscious subject, but its content seems to take in a vast, heterogeneous range of topics, from technical issues in empiricist epistemology to the significance of burial rituals. Its range is so heterogeneous that there is controversy to this day about whether it has any overall unity, or whether it was pieced together at the last minute. Adding to the interpretive problem, Hegel often invented his own striking language of “inverted worlds,” “struggles to the death for recognition,” “unhappy consciousness,” “spiritual animal kingdoms,” and “beautiful souls.” Continuing his university career at Jena in those times looked out of the question, so Hegel accepted a job at Bamberg editing a newspaper, and in the following year began an eight-year stint (1808–16) as headmaster and philosophy teacher at a Gymnasium (or secondary school) at Nürnberg. During this period, at forty-one, he married the twenty-year-old Marie von Tucher. He also wrote what is easily his most difficult work, and the one he often referred to as his most important, a magisterial two-volume Science of Logic, which attempts to be a philosophical account of the concepts necessary in all possible kinds of account-givings. Finally, in 1816, Hegel was offered a chair in philosophy at the University of Heidelberg, where he published the first of several versions of his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, his own systematic account of the relation between the “logic” of human thought and the “real” expression of such interrelated categories in our understanding of the natural world and in our understanding and evaluation of our own activities. In 1818, he accepted the much more prestigious post in philosophy at Berlin, where he remained until his death in 1831. Soon after his arrival in Berlin, he began to exert a powerful influence over German letters and intellectual life. In 1821, in the midst of a growing political and nationalist crisis in Prussia, he published his controversial book on political philosophy, The Philosophy of Right. His lectures at the university were later published as his philosophy of history, of aesthetics, and of religion, and as his history of philosophy. Philosophy. Hegel’s most important ideas were formed gradually, in response to a number of issues in philosophy and often in response to historical events. Moreover, his language and approach were so heterodox that he has inspired as much controversy about the meaning of his position as about its adequacy. Hence any summary will be as much a summary of the controversies as of the basic position. His dissatisfactions with the absence of a public realm, or any forms of genuine social solidarity in the German states and in modernity generally, and his distaste with what he called the “positivity” of the orthodox religions of the day (their reliance on law, scripture, and abstract claims to authority), led him to various attempts to make use of the Greek polis and classical art, as well as the early Christian understanding of love and a renewed “folk religion,” as critical foils to such tendencies. For some time, he also regarded much traditional and modern philosophy as itself a kind of lifeless classifying that only contributed to contemporary fragmentation, myopia, and confusion. These concerns remained with him throughout his life, and he is thus rightly known as one of the first modern thinkers to argue that what had come to be accepted as the central problem of modern social and political life, the legitimacy of state power, had been too narrowly conceived. There are now all sorts of circumstances, he argued, in which people might satisfy the modern criterion of legitimacy and “consent” to the use of some power, but not fully understand the terms within which such issues are posed, or assent in an attenuated, resentful, manipulated, or confused way. In such cases they would experience no connection between their individual will and the actual content of the institutions they are supposed to have sanctioned. The modern problem is as much alienation (Entfremdung) as sovereignty, an exercise of will in which the product of one’s will appears “strange” or “alien,” “other,” and which results in much of modern life, however chosen or willed, being fundamentally unsatisfying. However, during the Jena years, his views on this issue changed. Most importantly, philosophical issues moved closer to center stage in the Hegelian drama. He no longer regarded philosophy as some sort of self-undermining activity that merely prepared one for some leap into genuine “speculation” (roughly Schelling’s position) Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 366 4065h-l.qxd  7:39 AM  366 and began to champion a unique kind of comprehensive, very determinate reflection on the interrelations among all the various classical alternatives in philosophy. Much more controversially, he also attempted to understand the way in which such relations and transitions were also reflected in the history of the art, politics, and religions of various historical communities. He thus came to think that philosophy should be some sort of recollection of its past history, a realization of the mere partiality, rather than falsity, of its past attempts at a comprehensive teaching, and an account of the centrality of these continuously developing attempts in the development of other human practices. Through understanding the “logic” of such a development, a reconciliation of sorts with the implications of such a rational process in contemporary life, or at least with the potentialities inherent in contemporary life, would be possible. In all such influences and developments, one revolutionary aspect of Hegel’s position became clearer. For while Hegel still frequently argued that the subject matter of philosophy was “reason,” or “the Absolute,” the unconditioned presupposition of all human account-giving and evaluation, and thereby an understanding of the “whole” within which the natural world and human deeds were “parts,” he also always construed this claim to mean that the subject matter of philosophy was the history of human experience itself. Philosophy was about the real world of human change and development, understood by Hegel to be the collective self-education of the human species about itself. It could be this, and satisfy the more traditional ideals because, in one of his most famous phrases, “what is actual is rational,” or because some full account could be given of the logic or teleological order, even the necessity, for the great conceptual and political changes in human history. We could thereby finally reassure ourselves that the way our species had come to conceptualize and evaluate is not finite or contingent, but is “identical” with “what there is, in truth.” This identity theory or Absolute Knowledgemeans that we will then be able to be “at home” in the world and so will have understood what philosophers have always tried to understand, “how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.” The way it all hangs together is, finally, “due to us,” in some collective and historical and “logical” sense. (In a much disputed passage in his Philosophy of Religion lectures, Hegel even suggested that with such an understanding, history itself would be over.) Several elements in this general position have inspired a good deal of excitement and controversy. To advance claims such as these Hegel had to argue against a powerful, deeply influential assumption in modern thought: the priority of the individual, self-conscious subject. Such an assumption means, for example, that almost all social relations, almost all our bonds to other human beings, exist because and only because they are made, willed into existence by individuals otherwise naturally unattached to each other. With respect to knowledge claims, while there may be many beliefs in a common tradition that we unreflectively share with others, such shared beliefs are also taken primarily to be the result of individuals continuously affirming such beliefs, however implicitly or unreflectively. Their being shared is simply a consequence of their being simultaneously affirmed or assented to by individuals. Hegel’s account requires a different picture, an insistence on the priority of some kind of collective subject, which he called human “spirit” or Geist. His general theory of conceptual and historical change requires the assumption of such a collective subject, one that even can be said to be “coming to self-consciousness” about itself, and this required that he argue against the view that so much could be understood as the result of individual will and reflection. Rather, he tried in many different ways to show that the formation of what might appear to an individual to be his or her own particular intention or desire or belief already reflected a complex social inheritance that could itself be said to be evolving, even evolving progressively, with a “logic” of its own. The completion of such collective attempts at self-knowledge resulted in what Hegel called the realization of Absolute Spirit, by which he either meant the absolute completion of the human attempt to know itself, or the realization in human affairs of some sort of extrahuman transcendence, or full expression of an infinite God. Hegel tried to advance all such claims about social subjectivity without in some way hypostatizing or reifying such a subject, as if it existed independently of the actions and thoughts of individuals. This claim about the deep dependence of individuals on one another (even for their very identity), even while they maintain their independence, is one of the best-known examples of Hegel’s attempt at a dialectical resolution of many of the traditional oppositions and antinomies of past thought. Hegel often argued that what appeared to be contraries in philosophy, such as mind/body, freedom/determinism, Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 367 4065h-l.qxd  7:39 AM  367 idealism/materialism, universal/particular, the state/the individual, or even God/man, appeared such incompatible alternatives only because of the undeveloped and so incomplete perspective within which the oppositions were formulated. So, in one of his more famous attacks on such dualisms, human freedom according to Hegel could not be understood coherently as some purely rational self-determination, independent of heteronomous impulses, nor the human being as a perpetual opposition between reason and sensibility. In his moral theory, Kant had argued for the latter view and Hegel regularly returned to such Kantian claims about the opposition of duty and inclination as deeply typical of modern dualism. Hegel claimed that Kant’s version of a rational principle, the “categorical imperative,” was so formal and devoid of content as not to be action-guiding (it could not coherently rule in or rule out the appropriate actions), and that the “moral point of view” rigoristically demanded a pure or dutiful motivation to which no human agent could conform. By contrast, Hegel claimed that the dualisms of morality could be overcome in ethical life (Sittlichkeit), those modern social institutions which, it was claimed, provided the content or true “objects” of a rational will. These institutions, the family, civil society, and the state, did not require duties in potential conflict with our own substantive ends, but were rather experienced as the “realization” of our individual free will. It has remained controversial what for Hegel a truly free, rational self-determination, continuous with, rather than constraining, our desire for happiness and self-actualization, amounted to. Many commentators have noted that, among modern philosophers, only Spinoza, whom Hegel greatly admired, was as insistent on such a thoroughgoing compatibilism, and on a refusal to adopt the Christian view of human beings as permanently divided against themselves. In his most ambitious analysis of such oppositions Hegel went so far as to claim that, not only could alternatives be shown to be ultimately compatible when thought together within some higher-order “Notion” (Begriff) that resolved or “sublated” the opposition, but that one term in such opposition could actually be said to imply or require its contrary, that a “positing” of such a notion would, to maintain consistency, require its own “negating,” and that it was this sort of dialectical opposition that could be shown to require a sublation, or Aufhebung (a term of art in Hegel that simultaneously means in German ‘to cancel’, ‘to preserve’, and ‘to raise up’). This claim for a dialectical development of our fundamental notions has been the most severely criticized in Hegel’s philosophy. Many critics have doubted that so much basic conceptual change can be accounted for by an internal critique, one that merely develops the presuppositions inherent in the affirmation of some notion or position or related practice. This issue has especially attracted critics of Hegel’s Science of Logic, where he tries first to show that the attempt to categorize anything that is, simply and immediately, as “Being,” is an attempt that both “negates itself,” or ends up categorizing everything as “Nothing,” and then that this self-negation requires a resolution in the higher-order category of “Becoming.” This analysis continues into an extended argument that purports to show that any attempt to categorize anything at all must ultimately make use of the distinctions of “essence” and “appearance,” and elements of syllogistic and finally Hegel’s own dialectical logic, and both the details and the grand design of that project have been the subject of a good deal of controversy. (Unfortunately, much of this controversy has been greatly confused by the popular association of the terms “thesis,” “antithesis,” and “synthesis” with Hegel’s theory of dialectic. These crude, mechanical notions were invented in 1837 by a less-than-sensitive Hegel expositor, Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus, and were never used as terms of art by Hegel.) Others have argued that the tensions Hegel does identify in various positions and practices require a much broader analysis of the historical, especially economic, context within which positions are formulated and become important, or some more detailed attention to the empirical discoveries or paradoxes that, at the very least, contribute to basic conceptual change. Those worried about the latter problem have also raised questions about the logical relation between universal and particular implied in Hegel’s account. Hegel, following Fichte, radicalizes a Kantian claim about the inaccessibility of pure particularity in sensations (Kant had written that “intuitions without concepts are blind”). Hegel charges that Kant did not draw sufficiently radical conclusions from such an antiempiricist claim, that he should have completely rethought the traditional distinction between “what was given to the mind” and “what the mind did with the given.” By contrast Hegel is confident that he has a theory of a “concrete universal,” concepts that cannot be understood as pale generalizations or abstract representations of given particulars, because they are required for particulars to Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 368 4065h-l.qxd  7:39 AM  368 be apprehended in the first place. They are not originally dependent on an immediate acquaintance with particulars; there is no such acquaintance. Critics wonder if Hegel has much of a theory of particularity left, if he does not claim rather that particulars, or whatever now corresponds to them, are only interrelations of concepts, and in which the actual details of the organization of the natural world and human history are deduced as conceptual necessities in Hegel’s Encyclopedia. (This interpretation of Hegel, that he believes all entities are really the thoughts, expressions, or modes of a single underlying mental substance, and that this mind develops and posits itself with some sort of conceptual necessity, has been termed a panlogicism, a term of art coined by Hermann Glockner, a Hegel commentator in the first half of the twentieth century. It is a much-disputed reading.) Such critics are especially concerned with the implications of this issue in Hegel’s political theory, where the great modern opposition between the state and the individual seems subjected to this same logic, and the individual’s true individuality is said to reside in and only in the political universal, the State. Thus, on the one hand, Hegel’s political philosophy is often praised for its early identification and analysis of a fundamental, new aspect of contemporary life – the categorically distinct realm of political life in modernity, or the independence of the “State” from the social world of private individuals engaged in competition and private association (“civil society”). But, on the other hand, his attempt to argue for a completion of these domains in the State, or that individuals could only be said to be free in allegiance to a State, has been, at least since Marx, one of the most criticized aspects of his philosophy. Finally, criticisms also frequently target the underlying intention behind such claims: Hegel’s career-long insistence on finding some basic unity among the many fragmented spheres of modern thought and existence, and his demand that this unity be articulated in a discursive account, that it not be merely felt, or gestured at, or celebrated in edifying speculation. PostHegelian thinkers have tended to be suspicious of any such intimations of a whole for modern experience, and have argued that, with the destruction of the premodern world, we simply have to content ourselves with the disconnected, autonomous spheres of modern interests. In his lecture courses these basic themes are treated in wide-ranging accounts of the basic institutions of cultural history. History itself is treated as fundamentally political history, and, in typically Hegelian fashion, the major epochs of political history are claimed to be as they were because of the internal inadequacies of past epochs, all until some final political semiconsciousness is achieved and realized. Art is treated equally developmentally, evolving from symbolic, through “classical,” to the most intensely self-conscious form of aesthetic subjectivity, romantic art. The Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion embody these themes in some of the most controversial ways, since Hegel often treats religion and its development as a kind of picture or accessible “representation” of his own views about the relation of thought to being, the proper understanding of human finitude and “infinity,” and the essentially social or communal nature of religious life. This has inspired a characteristic debate among Hegel scholars, with some arguing that Hegel’s appropriation of religion shows that his own themes are essentially religious (if an odd, pantheistic version of Christianity), while others argue that he has so Hegelianized religious issues that there is little distinctively religious left. Influence. This last debate is typical of that prominent in the post-Hegelian tradition. Although, in the decades following his death, there was a great deal of work by self-described Hegelians on the history of law, on political philosophy, and on aesthetics, most of the prominent academic defenders of Hegel were interested in theology, and many of these were interested in defending an interpretation of Hegel consistent with traditional Christian views of a personal God and personal immortality. This began to change with the work of “young Hegelians” such as D. F. Strauss (1808–74), Feuerbach (1804–72), Bruno Bauer (1809–82), and Arnold Ruge (1803–80), who emphasized the humanistic and historical dimensions of Hegel’s account of religion, rejected the Old Hegelian tendencies toward a reconciliation with contemporary political life, and began to reinterpret and expand Hegel’s account of the productive activity of human spirit (eventually focusing on labor rather than intellectual and cultural life). Strauss himself characterized the fight as between “left,” “center,” and “right” Hegelians, depending on whether one was critical or conservative politically, or had a theistic or a humanistic view of Hegelian Geist. The most famous young or left Hegelian was Marx, especially during his days in Paris as coeditor, with Ruge, of the Deutsch-französischen Jahrbücher (1844). Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 369 4065h-l.qxd  7:39 AM  369 In Great Britain, with its long skeptical, empiricist, and utilitarian tradition, Hegel’s work had little influence until the latter part of the nineteenth century, when philosophers such as Green and Caird took up some of the holistic themes in Hegel and developed a neo-Hegelian reading of issues in politics and religion that began to have influence in the academy. The most prominent of the British neo-Hegelians of the next generation were Bosanquet, McTaggart, and especially Bradley, all of whom were interested in many of the metaphysical implications of Hegel’s idealism, what they took to be a Hegelian claim for the “internally related” interconnection of all particulars within one single, ideal or mental, substance. Moore and Russell waged a hugely successful counterattack in the name of traditional empiricism and what would be called “analytic philosophy” against such an enterprise and in this tradition largely finished off the influence of Hegel (or what was left of the historical Hegel in these neo-Hegelian versions). In Germany, Hegel has continued to influence a number of different schools of neo-Marxism, sometimes itself simply called “Hegelian Marxism,” especially the Frankfurt School, or “critical theory” group (especially Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse). And he has been extremely influential in France, particularly thanks to the lectures of a brilliant if idiosyncratic Russian émigré, Alexander Kojève, who taught Hegel in the 1930s at the École Pratique des Hautes Études to the likes of Merleau-Ponty and Lacan. Kojève was as much influenced by Marx and Heidegger as Hegel, but his lectures inspired many thinkers to turn again to Hegel’s account of human selfdefinition in time and to the historicity of all institutions and practices and so forged an unusual link between Hegel and postwar existentialism. Hegelian themes continue to resurface in contemporary hermeneutics, in “communitarianism” in ethics, and in the increasing attention given to conceptual change and history in the philosophy of science. This has meant for many that Hegel should now be regarded not only as the origin of a distinctive tradition in European philosophy that emphasizes the historical and social nature of human existence, but as a potential contributor to many new and often interdisciplinary approaches to philosophy.  FRANKFURT SCHOOL, IDEALISM, KANT, PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. R.B.P. Hegelians, Young.HEGEL. Hegesias.CYRENAICS. Heidegger, Martin (1889–1976), German philosopher whose early works contributed to phenomenology and existentialism (e.g., Sartre) and whose later works paved the way to hermeneutics (Gadamer) and post-structuralism (Derrida and Foucault). Born in Messkirch in the Black Forest region, Heidegger first trained to be a Jesuit, but switched to mathematics and philosophy in 1911. As an instructor at Freiburg University, he worked with the founder of phenomenology, Husserl. His masterwork, Sein und Zeit (Being and Time, 1927), was published while he was teaching at Marburg University. This work, in opposition to the preoccupation with epistemology dominant at the time, focused on the traditional question of metaphysics: What is the being of entities in general? Rejecting abstract theoretical approaches to this question, Heidegger drew on Kierkegaard’s religious individualism and the influential movement called life-philosophy – Lebensphilosophie, then identified with Nietzsche, Bergson, and Dilthey – to develop a highly original account of humans as embedded in concrete situations of action. Heidegger accepted Husserl’s chair at Freiburg in 1928; in 1933, having been elected rector of the University, he joined the Nazi party. Although he stepped down as rector one year later, new evidence suggests complicity with the Nazis until the end of the war. Starting in the late thirties, his writings started to shift toward the “antihumanist” and “poetic” form of thinking referred to as “later Heidegger.” Heidegger’s lifelong project was to answer the “question of being” (Seinsfrage). This question asks, concerning things in general (rocks, tools, people, etc.), what is it to be an entity of these sorts? It is the question of ontology first posed by ancient Greek philosophers from Anaximander to Aristotle. Heidegger holds, however, that philosophers starting with Plato have gone astray in trying to answer this question because they have tended to think of being as a property or essence enduringly present in things. In other words, they have fallen into the “metaphysics of presence,” which thinks of being as substance. What is overlooked in traditional metaphysics is the background conditions that enable entities to show up as counting or mattering in some specific way in the first place. In his early works, Heidegger tries to bring this concealed dimension of things to light by recasting the question of being: What is the meaning of being? Or, put differently, how do entities come to show up as intelligible to Hegelians, Young Heidegger, Martin 370 4065h-l.qxd  7:39 AM  370 us in some determinate way? And this question calls for an analysis of the entity that has some prior understanding of things: human existence or Dasein (the German word for “existence” or “being-there,” used to refer to the structures of humans that make possible an understanding of being). Heidegger’s claim is that Dasein’s pretheoretical (or “preontological”) understanding of being, embodied in its everyday practices, opens a “clearing” in which entities can show up as, say, tools, protons, numbers, mental events, and so on. This historically unfolding clearing is what the metaphysical tradition has overlooked. In order to clarify the conditions that make possible an understanding of being, then, Being and Time begins with an analytic of Dasein. But Heidegger notes that traditional interpretations of human existence have been one-sided to the extent that they concentrate on our ways of existing when we are engaged in theorizing and detached reflection. It is this narrow focus on the spectator attitude that leads to the picture, found in Descartes, of the self as a mind or subject representing material objects – the so-called subjectobject model. In order to bypass this traditional picture, Heidegger sets out to describe Dasein’s “average everydayness,” i.e., our ordinary, prereflective agency when we are caught up in the midst of practical affairs. The “phenomenology of everydayness” is supposed to lead us to see the totality of human existence, including our moods, our capacity for authentic individuality, and our full range of involvements with the world and with others. The analytic of Dasein is also an ontological hermeneutics to the extent that it provides an account of how understanding in general is possible. The result of the analytic is a portrayal of human existence that is in accord with what Heidegger regards as the earliest Greek experience of being as an emerging-into-presence (physis): to be human is to be a temporal event of self-manifestation that lets other sorts of entities first come to “emerge and abide” in the world. From the standpoint of this description, the traditional concept of substance – whether mental or physical – simply has no role to play in grasping humans. Heidegger’s brilliant diagnoses or “de-structurings” of the tradition suggest that the idea of substance arises only when the conditions making entities possible are forgotten or concealed. Heidegger holds that there is no pregiven human essence. Instead, humans, as self-interpreting beings, just are what they make of themselves in the course of their active lives. Thus, as everyday agency, Dasein is not an object with properties, but is rather the “happening” of a life course “stretched out between birth and death.” Understood as the “historicity” of a temporal movement or “becoming,” Dasein is found to have three main “existentials” or basic structures shared by every “existentiell” (i.e., specific and local) way of living. First, Dasein finds itself thrown into a world not of its choosing, already delivered over to the task of living out its life in a concrete context. This “facticity” of our lives is revealed in the moods that let things matter to us in some way or other – e.g., the burdensome feelings of concern that accompany being a parent in our culture. Second, as projection, Dasein is always already taking some stand on its life by acting in the world. Understood as agency, human existence is “ahead of itself” in two senses: (1) our competent dealings with familiar situations sketch out a range of possibilities for how things may turn out in the future, and (2) each of our actions is contributing to shaping our lives as people of specific sorts. Dasein is futuredirected in the sense that the ongoing fulfillment of possibilities in the course of one’s active life constitutes one’s identity (or being). To say that Dasein is “being-toward-death” is to say that the stands we take (our “understanding”) define our being as a totality. Thus, my actual ways of treating my children throughout my life define my being as a parent in the end, regardless of what good intentions I might have. Finally, Dasein is discourse in the sense that we are always articulating – or “addressing and discussing” – the entities that show up in our concernful absorption in current situations. These three existentials define human existence as a temporal unfolding. The unity of these dimensions – being already in a world, ahead of itself, and engaged with things – Heidegger calls care. This is what it means to say that humans are the entities whose being is at issue for them. Taking a stand on our own being, we constitute our identity through what we do. The formal structure of Dasein as temporality is made concrete through one’s specific involvements in the world (where ‘world’ is used in the life-world sense in which we talk about the business world or the world of academia). Dasein is the unitary phenomenon of being-in-the-world. A core component of Heidegger’s early works is his description of how Dasein’s practical dealings with equipment define the being of the entities that show up in the world. In hammering in a workshop, e.g., what ordinarily shows up for us is not a hammer-thing with properties, but rather a web of significance relations shaped by Heidegger, Martin Heidegger, Martin 371 4065h-l.qxd  7:39 AM  371 our projects. Hammering is “in order to” join boards, which is “for” building a bookcase, which is “for the sake of” being a person with a neat study. The hammer is encountered in terms of its place in this holistic context of functionality – the “ready-to-hand.” In other words, the being of the equipment – its “ontological definition” – consists of its relations to other equipment and its actual use within the entire practical context. Seen from this standpoint, the brute, meaningless objects assumed to be basic by the metaphysical tradition – the “present-at-hand” – can show up only when there is a breakdown in our ordinary dealings with things, e.g., when the hammer breaks or is missing. In this sense, the ready-to-hand is said to be more primordial than the material objects treated as basic by the natural sciences. It follows, then, that the being of entities in the world is constituted by the framework of intelligibility or “disclosedness” opened by Dasein’s practices. This clearing is truth in the original meaning of the Greek word aletheia, which Heidegger renders as ‘un-concealment’. But it would be wrong to think that what is claimed here is that humans are initially just given, and that they then go on to create a clearing. For, in Heidegger’s view, our own being as agents of specific types is defined by the world into which we are thrown: in my workshop, I can be a craftsman or an amateur, but not a samurai paying court to a daimyo. Our identity as agents is made possible by the context of shared forms of life and linguistic practices of a public life-world. For the most part, we exist as the “they” (das Man), participants in the historically constituted “cohappening of a people” (Volk). The embeddedness of our existence in a cultural context explains our inveterate tendency toward inauthenticity. As we become initiated into the practices of our community, we are inclined to drift along with the crowd, doing what “one” does, enacting stereotyped roles, and thereby losing our ability to seize on and define our own lives. Such falling into public preoccupations Heidegger sees as a sign that we are fleeing from the fact that we are finite beings who stand before death (understood as the culmination of our possibilities). When, through anxiety and hearing the call of conscience, we face up to our being-toward-death, our lives can be transformed. To be authentic is to clear-sightedly face up to one’s responsibility for what one’s life is adding up to as a whole. And because our lives are inseparable from our community’s existence, authenticity involves seizing on the possibilities circulating in our shared “heritage” in order to realize a communal “destiny.” Heidegger’s ideal of resolute “taking action” in the current historical situation no doubt contributed to his leap into politics in the 1930s. According to his writings of that period, the ancient Greeks inaugurated a “first beginning” for Western civilization, but centuries of forgetfulness (beginning with the Latinization of Greek words) have torn us away from the primal experience of being rooted in that initial setting. Heidegger hoped that, guided by the insights embodied in great works of art (especially Hölderlin’s poetry), National Socialism would help bring about a world-rejuvenating “new beginning” comparable to the first beginning in ancient Greece. Heidegger’s later writings attempt to fully escape the subjectivism he sees dominating Western thought from its inception up to Nietzsche. “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1935), for example, shows how a great work of art such as a Greek temple, by shaping the world in which a people live, constitutes the kinds of people that can live in that world. An Introduction to Metaphysics (1935) tries to recover the Greek experience of humans as beings whose activities of gathering and naming (logos) are above all a response to what is more than human. The later writings emphasize that which resists all human mastery and comprehension. Such terms as ‘nothingness’, ‘earth’, and ‘mystery’ suggest that what shows itself to us always depends on a background of what does not show itself, what remains concealed. Language comes to be understood as the medium through which anything, including the human, first becomes accessible and intelligible. Because language is the source of all intelligibility, Heidegger says that humans do not speak, but rather language speaks us – an idea that became central to poststructuralist theories. In his writings after the war, Heidegger replaces the notions of resoluteness and political activism with a new ideal of letting-be or releasement (Gelassenheit), a stance characterized by meditative thinking, thankfulness for the “gift” of being, and openness to the silent “call” of language. The technological “enframing” (Gestell) of our age – encountering everything as a standing reserve on hand for our use – is treated not as something humans do, but instead as a manifestation of being itself. The “anti-humanism” of these later works is seen in the description of technology (the mobilization of everything for the sole purpose of greater efficiency) as an Heidegger, Martin Heidegger, Martin 372 4065h-l.qxd  7:39 AM  372 epochal event in the “history of being,” a way things have come-into-their-own (Ereignis) rather than as a human accomplishment. The history or “sending” (Geschick) of being consists of epochs that have all gone increasingly astray from the original beginning inaugurated by the pre-Socratics. Since human willpower alone cannot bring about a new epoch, technology cannot be ended by our efforts. But a non-technological way of encountering things is hinted at in a description of a jug as a fourfold of earth, sky, mortals, and gods, and Heidegger reflects on forms of poetry that point to a new, non-metaphysical way of experiencing being. Through a transformed relation to language and art, and by abandoning “onto-theology” (the attempt to ground all entities in one supreme entity), we might prepare ourselves for a transformed way of understanding being. 

Hellenistic philosophy, the philosophical systems of the Hellenistic age (323–30 B.C., although 311–87 B.C. better defines it as a philosophical era), notably Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Skepticism. These all emerged in the generation after Aristotle’s death (322 B.C.), and dominated philosophical debate until the first century B.C., during which there were revivals of traditional Platonism and of Aristotelianism. The age was one in which much of the eastern Mediterranean world absorbed Greek culture (was “Hellenized,” hence “Hellenistic”), and recruits to philosophy flocked from this region to Athens, which remained the center of philosophical activity until 87 B.C. Then the Roman sack of Athens drove many philosophers into exile, and neither the schools nor the styles of philosophy that had grown up there ever fully recovered. Very few philosophical writings survive intact from the period. Our knowledge of Hellenistic philosophers depends mainly on later doxography, on the Roman writers Lucretius and Cicero (both mid-first century B.C.), and on what we learn from the schools’ critics in later centuries, e.g. Sextus Empiricus and Plutarch. ’Skeptic’, a term not actually current before the very end of the Hellenistic age, serves as a convenient label to characterize two philosophical movements. The first is the New Academy: the school founded by Plato, the Academy, became in this period a largely dialectical one, conducting searching critiques of other schools’ doctrines without declaring any of its own, beyond perhaps the assertion (however guarded) that nothing could be known and the accompanying recommendation of “suspension of judgment” (epoche). The nature and vivacity of Stoicism owed much to its prolonged debates with the New Academy. The founder of this Academic phase was Arcesilaus (school head c.268– c.241); its most revered and influential protagonist was Carneades (school head in the mid-second century); and its most prestigious voice was that of Cicero (106–43 B.C.), whose highly influential philosophical works were written mainly from a New Academic stance. But by the early first century B.C. the Academy was drifting back to a more doctrinal stance, and in the later part of the century it was largely eclipsed by a second “skeptic” movement, Pyrrhonism. This was founded by Aenesidemus, a pioneering skeptic despite his claim to be merely reviving the philosophy of Pyrrho, a philosophical guru of the early Hellenistic period. His neo-Pyrrhonism survives today mainly through the writings of Sextus Empiricus (second century A.D.), an adherent of the school who, strictly speaking, represents its post-Hellenistic phase. The Peripatos, Aristotle’s school, officially survived throughout the era, but it is not regarded as a distinctively “Hellenistic” movement. Despite the eminence of Aristotle’s first successor, Theophrastus (school head 322–287), it thereafter fell from prominence, its fortunes only reviving around the mid-first century B.C. It is disputed how far the other Hellenistic philosophers were even aware of Aristotle’s treatises, which should not in any case be regarded as a primary influence on them. Each school had a location in Athens to which it could draw pupils. The Epicurean school was a relatively private institution, its “Garden” outside the city walls housing a close-knit philosophical community. The Stoics took their name from the Stoa Poikile, the “Painted Colonnade” in central Athens where they gathered. The Academics were based in the Academy, a public grove just outside the city. Philosophers were public figures, a familiar sight around town. Each school’s philosophical identity was further clarified by its absolute loyalty to the name of its Heidelberg School Hellenistic philosophy 373 4065h-l.qxd  7:39 AM  373 founder – respectively Epicurus, Zeno of Citium, and Plato – and by the polarities that developed in interschool debates. Epicureanism is diametrically opposed on most issues to Stoicism. Academic Skepticism provides another antithesis to Stoicism, not through any positions of its own (it had none), but through its unflagging critical campaign against every Stoic thesis. It is often said that in this age the old Greek political institution of the city-state had broken down, and that the Hellenistic philosophies were an answer to the resulting crisis of values. Whether or not there is any truth in this, it remains clear that moral concerns were now much less confined to the individual city-state than previously, and that at an extreme the boundaries had been pushed back to include all mankind within the scope of an individual’s moral obligations. Our “affinity” (oikeiosis) to all mankind is an originally Stoic doctrine that acquired increasing currency with other schools. This attitude partly reflects the weakening of national and cultural boundaries in the Hellenistic period, as also in the Roman imperial period that followed it. The three recognized divisions of philosophy were ethics, logic, and physics. In ethics, the central objective was to state and defend an account of the “end” (telos), the moral goal to which all activity was subordinated: the Epicureans named pleasure, the Stoics conformity with nature. Much debate centered on the semimythical figure of the wise man, whose conduct in every conceivable circumstance was debated by all schools. Logic in its modern sense was primarily a Stoic concern, rejected as irrelevant by the Epicureans. But Hellenistic logic included epistemology, where the primary focus of interest was the “criterion of truth,” the ultimate yardstick against which all judgments could be reliably tested. Empiricism was a surprisingly uncontroversial feature of Hellenistic theories: there was little interest in the Platonic-Aristotelian idea that knowledge in the strict sense is non-sensory, and the debate between dogmatists and Skeptics was more concerned with the question whether any proposed sensory criterion was adequate. Both Stoics and Epicureans attached especial importance to prolepsis, the generic notion of a thing, held to be either innate or naturally acquired in a way that gave it a guaranteed veridical status. Physics saw an opposition between Epicurean atomism, with its denial of divine providence, and the Stoic world-continuum, imbued with divine rationality. The issue of determinism was also placed on the philosophical map: Epicurean morality depends on the denial of (both physical and logical) determinism, whereas Stoic morality is compatible with, indeed actually requires, the deterministic causal nexus through which providence operates. 

Helmholtz, Hermann von (1821–94), German physiologist and physicist known for groundbreaking work in physics, physiological optics, perceptual psychology, and the philosophy of geometry. Formally trained as a physician, he distinguished himself in physics in 1848 as a codiscoverer of the law of conservation of energy, and by the end of his life was perhaps the most influential figure in German physical research. Philosophically, his most important influence was on the study of space. Intuitionist psychologists held that the geometrical structure of three-dimensional space was given directly in sensation by innate physiological mechanisms; Helmholtz brought this theory to severe empirical trials and argued, on the contrary, that our knowledge of space consists of inferences from accumulated experience. On the mathematical side, he attacked Kant’s view that Euclidean geometry is the a priori form of outer intuition by showing that it is possible to have visual experience of non-Euclidean space (“On the Origins and Meaning of Geometrical Axioms,” 1870). His crucial insight was that empirical geometry depends on physical assumptions about the behavior of measuring instruments. This inspired the view of Poincaré and logical empiricism that the empirical content of geometry is fixed by physical definitions, and made possible Einstein’s use of non-Euclidean geometry in physics.  PHILOSOPHY OF MATHEMATICS, POINCARÉ. R.D. Helvétius, Claude Adrien (1715–71), French philosopher prominent in the formative phases of eighteenth-century materialism in France. His De l’esprit (1758) was widely discussed internationally, but condemned by the University of Paris and burned by the government. Helvétius attempted to clarify his doctrine in his posthumously published De l’homme. Following Locke’s criticism of the innate ideas, Helvétius stressed the function of experience in our acquisition of knowledge. In accord with the doctrines of d’Holbach, Condillac, and La Mettrie, the materialist Helvétius regarded the sensations as the basis of all our knowledge. Only by Helmholtz, Hermann von Helvétius, Claude Adrien 374 4065h-l.qxd  7:39 AM  374 comparison, abstraction, and combination of sensations do we reach the level of concepts. Peculiar to Helvétius, however, is the stress on the social determinations of our knowledge. Specific interests and passions are the starting point of all our striving for knowledge. Egoism is the spring of our desires and actions. The civil laws of the enlightened state enabled egoism to be transformed into social competition and thereby diverted toward public benefits. Like his materialist contemporary d’Holbach and later Condorcet, Helvétius sharply criticized the social function of the church. Priests, he claimed, provided society with wrong moral ideas. He demanded a thorough reform of the educational system for the purpose of individual and social emancipation. In contrast to the teachings of Rousseau, Helvétius praised the further development of science, art, and industry as instruments for the historical progress of mankind. The ideal society consists of enlightened because well-educated citizens living in comfortable and even moderately luxurious circumstances. All people should participate in the search for truth, by means of public debates and discussions. Truth is equated with the moral good. Helvétius had some influence on Marxist historical materialism. H.P. Hempel, Carl G(ustav) (1905–97), eminent philosopher of science associated with the Vienna Circle of logical empiricist philosophers in the early 1930s, before his emigration to the United States; thereafter he became one of the most influential philosophers of science of his time, largely through groundbreaking work on the logical analysis of the concepts of confirmation and scientific explanation. Hempel received his doctorate under Reichenbach at the University of Berlin in 1934 with a dissertation on the logical analysis of probability. He studied with Carnap at the University of Vienna in 1929–30, where he participated in the “protocol-sentence debate” concerning the observational basis of scientific knowledge raging within the Vienna Circle between Moritz Schlick (1882–1936) and Otto Neurath (1882–1945). Hempel was attracted to the “radical physicalism” articulated by Neurath and Carnap, which denied the foundational role of immediate experience and asserted that all statements of the total language of science (including observation reports or protocol-sentences) can be revised as science progresses. This led to Hempel’s first major publication, “On the Logical Positivists’ Theory of Truth” (1935). He moved to the United States to work with Carnap at the University of Chicago in 1937–38. He also taught at Queens College and Yale before his long career at Princeton (1955–1975). In the 1940s he collaborated with his friends Olaf Helmer and Paul Oppenheim on a celebrated series of papers, the most influential of which are “Studies in the Logic of Confirmation” (1945) and “Studies in the Logic of Explanation” (1948, coauthored with Oppenheim). The latter paper articulated the deductive-nomological model, which characterizes scientific explanations as deductively valid arguments proceeding from general laws and initial conditions to the fact to be explained, and served as the basis for all future work on the subject. Hempel’s papers on explanation and confirmation (and also related topics such as concept formation, criteria of meaningfulness, and scientific theories) were collected together in Aspects of Scientific Explanation (1965), one of the most important works in postwar philosophy of science. He also published a more popular, but extremely influential introduction to the field, Philosophy of Natural Science (1966). Hempel and Kuhn became colleagues at Princeton in the 1960s. Another fruitful collaboration ensued, as a result of which Hempel moved away from the Carnapian tradition of logical analysis toward a more naturalistic and pragmatic conception of science in his later work. As he himself explains, however, this later turn can also be seen as a return to a similarly naturalistic conception Neurath had earlier defended within the Vienna Circle. 

henotheism, allegiance to one supreme deity while conceding existence to others; also described as monolatry, incipient monotheism, or practical monotheism. It occupies a middle ground between polytheism and radical monotheism, which denies reality to all gods save one. It has been claimed that early Judaism passed through a henotheistic phase, acknowledging other Middle Eastern deities (albeit condemning their worship), en route to exclusive recognition of Yahweh. But the concept of progress from polytheism through henotheism Hempel, Carl G(ustav) henotheism 375 4065h-l.qxd  7:39 AM  375 to monotheism is a rationalizing construct, and cannot be supposed to capture the complex development of any historical religion, including that of ancient Israel. A.E.L. Henry of Ghent (c.1217–93), Belgian theologian and philosopher. After serving as a church official at Tournai and Brugge, he taught theology at Paris from 1276. His major writings were Summa quaestionum ordinariarum (Summa of Ordinary Questions) and Quodlibeta (Quodlibetal Questions). He was the leading representative of the neoAugustinian movement at Paris in the final quarter of the thirteenth century. His theory of knowledge combines Aristotelian elements with Augustinian illuminationism. Heavily dependent on Avicenna for his view of the reality enjoyed by essences of creatures (esse essentiae) from eternity, he rejected both real distinction and real identity of essence and existence in creatures, and defended their intentional distinction. He also rejected a real distinction between the soul and its powers and rejected the purely potential character of prime matter. He defended the duality of substantial form in man, the unicity of form in other material substances, and the primacy of will in the act of choice. J.F.W. Hentisberi, Hentisberus.

Heraclitus (fl. c.500 B.C.), Greek philosopher. A transition figure between the Milesian philosophers and the later pluralists, Heraclitus stressed unity in the world of change. He follows the Milesians in positing a series of cyclical transformations of basic stuffs of the world; for instance, he holds that fire changes to water and earth in turn. Moreover, he seems to endorse a single source or arche of natural substances, namely fire. But he also observes that natural transformations necessarily involve contraries such as hot and cold, wet and dry. Indeed, without the one contrary the other would not exist, and without contraries the cosmos would not exist. Hence strife is justice, and war is the father and king of all. In the conflict of opposites there is a hidden harmony that sustains the world, symbolized by the tension of a bow or the attunement of a lyre. Scholars disagree about whether Heraclitus’s chief view is that there is a one in the many or that process is reality. Clearly the underlying unity of phenomena is important for him. But he also stresses the transience of physical substances and the importance of processes and qualities. Moreover, his underlying source of unity seems to be a law of process and opposition; thus he seems to affirm both the unity of phenomena and the reality of process. Criticizing his predecessors such as Pythagoras and Xenophanes for doing research without insight, Heraclitus claims that we should listen to the logos, which teaches that all things are one. The logos, a principle of order and knowledge, is common to all, but the many remain ignorant of it, like sleepwalkers unaware of the reality around them. All things come to pass according to the logos; hence it is the law of change, or at least its expression. Heraclitus wrote a single book, perhaps organized into sections on cosmology, politics and ethics, and theology. Apparently, however, he did not provide a continuous argument but a series of epigrammatic remarks meant to reveal the nature of reality through oracular and riddling language. Although he seems to have been a recluse without immediate disciples, he may have stirred Parmenides to his reaction against contraries. In the late fifth century B.C. Cratylus of Athens preached a radical Heraclitean doctrine according to which everything is in flux and there is accordingly no knowledge of the world. This version of Heracliteanism influenced Plato’s view of the sensible world and caused Plato and Aristotle to attribute a radical doctrine of flux to Heraclitus. Democritus imitated Heraclitus’s ethical sayings, and in Hellenistic times the Stoics appealed to him for their basic principles. 

Herbart, Johann Friedrich (1776–1841), German philosopher who significantly contributed to psychology and the theory of education. Rejecting the idealism of Fichte and Hegel, he attempted to establish a form of psychology founded on experience. The task of philosophy is the analysis of concepts given in ordinary experience. Logic must clarify these concepts, Metaphysics should correct them, while Aesthetics and Ethics are to complement them by an analysis of values. Herbart advocated a form of determinism in psychology and ethics. The laws that govern psychological processes are identical with those that govern the heavens. He subordinated ethics to aesthetics, arguing that our moral values originate from certain immediate and involuntary judgments of like and dislike. The five basic ideas of morality are inner freedom, perfection, benevolence, law, and justice or equity. Herbart’s view of education – that it should aim at producing individuals who possess inner freedom and strength of character – was highly influential in nineteenth-century Germany. M.K. Henry of Ghent Herbart, Johann Friedrich 376 4065h-l.qxd  7:39 AM  376 Herder, Johann Gottfried von (1744–1803), German philosopher, an intellectual and literary figure central to the transition from the German Enlightenment to Romanticism. He was born in East Prussia and received an early classical education. About 1762, while studying theology at the University of Königsberg, he came under the influence of Kant. He also began a lifelong friendship with Hamann, who especially stimulated his interests in the interrelations among language, culture, and history. After ordination as a Lutheran minister in 1765, he began his association with the Berlin Academy, earning its prestigious “prize” for his “Essay on the Origin of Language” (1772). In 1776 he was appointed Generalsuperintendent of the Lutheran clergy at Weimar through the intercession of Goethe. He was then able to focus his intellectual and literary powers on most of the major issues of his time. Of particular note are his contributions to psychology in Of the Cognition and Sensation of the Human Soul (1778); to the philosophy of history and culture in Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784–91), perhaps his most influential work; and to philosophy in Understanding and Experience (1799), which contains his extensive Metakritik of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Herder was an intellectual maverick and provocateur, writing when the Enlightenment conception of reason was in decline but before its limited defense by Kant or its total rejection by Romanticism had become entrenched in the German-speaking world. Rejecting any rational system, Herder’s thought is best viewed as a mosaic of certain ideas that reemerge in various guises throughout his writings. Because of these features, Herder’s thought has been compared with that of Rousseau. Herder’s philosophy can be described as involving elements of naturalism, organicism, and vitalism. He rejected philosophical explanations, appealing to the supernatural or divine, such as the concept of the “immortal soul” in psychology, a “divine origin” of language, or “providence” in history. He sought to discern an underlying primordial force to account for the psychological unity of the various “faculties.” He viewed this natural tendency toward “organic formation” as also operative in language and culture, and as ultimately manifested in the dynamic development of the various cultures in the form of a universal history. Finally, he often wrote in a way that suggested the dynamic process of life itself as the basic metaphor undergirding his thought. His influence can be traced through Humboldt into later linguistics and through Schelling and Hegel in the philosophy of history and later German historicism. He anticipated elements of vitalism in Schopenhauer and Bergson.  NATURALISM, ORGANICISM, PHILOSOPHY OF BIOLOGY. J.P.Su. hereditary property.RELATION. Hermarchus.EPICUREANISM. hermeneutic circle.HERMENEUTICS. hermeneutics, the art or theory of interpretation, as well as a type of philosophy that starts with questions of interpretation. Originally concerned more narrowly with interpreting sacred texts, the term acquired a much broader significance in its historical development and finally became a philosophical position in twentieth-century German philosophy. There are two competing positions in hermeneutics: whereas the first follows Dilthey and sees interpretation or Verstehen as a method for the historical and human sciences, the second follows Heidegger and sees it as an “ontological event,” an interaction between interpreter and text that is part of the history of what is understood. Providing rules or criteria for understanding what an author or native “really” meant is a typical problem for the first approach. The interpretation of the law provides an example for the second view, since the process of applying the law inevitably transforms it. In general, hermeneutics is the analysis of this process and its conditions of possibility. It has typically focused on the interpretation of ancient texts and distant peoples, cases where the unproblematic everyday understanding and communication cannot be assumed. Schleiermacher’s analysis of understanding and expression related to texts and speech marks the beginning of hermeneutics in the modern sense of a scientific methodology. This emphasis on methodology continues in nineteenth-century historicism and culminates in Dilthey’s attempt to ground the human sciences in a theory of interpretation, understood as the imaginative but publicly verifiable reenactment of the subjective experiences of others. Such a method of interpretation reveals the possibility of an objective knowledge of human beings not accessible to empiricist inquiry and thus of a distinct methodology for the human sciences. One result of the analysis of interpretation in the nineteenth century was the recognition of “the hermeneutic circle,” first developed by SchleierHerder, Johann Gottfried von hermeneutics 377 4065h-l.qxd  7:39 AM  377 macher. The circularity of interpretation concerns the relation of parts to the whole: the interpretation of each part is dependent on the interpretation of the whole. But interpretation is circular in a stronger sense: if every interpretation is itself based on interpretation, then the circle of interpretation, even if it is not vicious, cannot be escaped. Twentieth-century hermeneutics advanced by Heidegger and Gadamer radicalize this notion of the hermeneutic circle, seeing it as a feature of all knowledge and activity. Hermeneutics is then no longer the method of the human sciences but “universal,” and interpretation is part of the finite and situated character of all human knowing. “Philosophical hermeneutics” therefore criticizes Cartesian foundationalism in epistemology and Enlightenment universalism in ethics, seeing science as a cultural practice and prejudices (or prejudgments) as ineliminable in all judgments. Positively, it emphasizes understanding as continuing a historical tradition, as well as dialogical openness, in which prejudices are challenged and horizons broadened. 

hermetism, also hermeticism, a philosophical theology whose basic impulse was the gnostic conviction that human salvation depends on revealed knowledge (gnosis) of God and of the human and natural creations. Texts ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus, a Greco-Egyptian version of the Egyptian god Thoth, may have appeared as early as the fourth century B.C., but the surviving Corpus Hermeticum in Greek and Latin is a product of the second and third centuries A.D. Fragments of the same literature exist in Greek, Armenian, and Coptic as well; the Coptic versions are part of a discovery made at Nag Hammadi after World War II. All these Hermetica record hermetism as just described. Other Hermetica traceable to the same period but surviving in later Arabic or Latin versions deal with astrology, alchemy, magic, and other kinds of occultism. Lactantius, Augustine, and other early Christians cited Hermes but disagreed on his value; before Iamblichus, pagan philosophers showed little interest. Muslims connected Hermes with a Koranic figure, Idris, and thereby enlarged the medieval hermetic tradition, which had its first large effects in the Latin West among the twelfth-century Platonists of Chartres. The only ancient hermetic text then available in the West was the Latin Asclepius, but in 1463 Ficino interrupted his epochal translation of Plato to Latinize fourteen of the seventeen Greek discourses in the main body of the Corpus Hermeticum (as distinct from the many Greek fragments preserved by Stobaeus but unknown to Ficino). Ficino was willing to move so quickly to Hermes because he believed that this Egyptian deity stood at the head of the “ancient theology” (prisca theologia), a tradition of pagan revelation that ran parallel to Christian scripture, culminated with Plato, and continued through Plotinus and the later Neoplatonists. Ficino’s Hermes translation, which he called the Pimander, shows no interest in the magic and astrology about which he theorized later in his career. Trinitarian theology was his original motivation. The Pimander was enormously influential in the later Renaissance, when Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Lodovico Lazzarelli, Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples, Symphorien Champier, Francesco Giorgi, Agostino Steuco, Francesco Patrizi, and others enriched Western appreciation of Hermes. The first printed Greek Hermetica was the 1554 edition of Adrien Turnebus. The last before the nineteenth century appeared in 1630, a textual hiatus that reflected a decline in the reputation of Hermes after Isaac Casaubon proved philologically in 1614 that the Greek Hermetica had to be post-Christian, not the remains of primeval Egyptian wisdom. After Casaubon, hermetic ideas fell out of fashion with most Western philosophers of the current canon, but the historiography of the ancient theology remained influential for Newton and for lesser figures even later. The content of the Hermetica was out of tune with the new science, so Casaubon’s redating left Hermes to the theosophical heirs of Robert Fludd, whose opponents (Kepler, Mersenne, Gassendi) turned away from the Hermetica and similar fascinations of Renaissance humanist culture. By the nineteenth century, only theosophists took Hermes seriously as a prophet of pagan wisdom, but he was then rediscovered by German students of Christianity and Hellenistic religions, especially Richard Reitzenstein, who published his Poimandres in 1904. The ancient Hermetica are now read in the 1946–54 edition of A. D. Nock and A. J. Festugière.  FICINO. B.P.C. Herzen, Alexander (1812–70), Russian editor, memoirist, and social philosopher, in exile in Western Europe from 1847. Herzen moved in his philosophy of history from an early Hegelian hermeticism Herzen, Alexander 378 4065h-l.qxd  7:39 AM  378 rationalism to a “philosophy of contingency,” stressing the “whirlwind of chances” in nature and in human life and the “tousled improvisation” of the historical process. He rejected determinism, emphasizing the “phenomenological fact” of the experienced “sense of freedom.” Anticipating the Dostoevsky of the “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor,” he offered an original analysis of the “escape from freedom” and the cleaving to moral and political authority, and sketched a curiously contemporary-sounding “emotivist” ethical theory. After 1848, disillusioned with “bourgeois” Europe and its “selfenclosed individualism,” but equally disillusioned with what he had come to see as the bourgeois ideal of many European socialists, Herzen turned to the Russian peasant and the peasant village commune as offering the best hope for a humane development of society. In this “Russian socialism” he anticipated a central doctrine of the Russian populists of the 1870s. Herzen stood alone in resisting the common tendency of such otherwise different thinkers as Feuerbach, Marx, and J. S. Mill to undervalue the historical present, to overvalue the historical future, and to treat actual persons as means in the service of remote, merely possible historical ends. Herzen’s own central emphasis fell powerfully and consistently on the freedom, independence, and non-instrumentalizable value of living persons. And he saw more clearly than any of his contemporaries that there are no future persons, that it is only in the present that free human individuals live and move and have their being. 

heuristics, a rule or solution adopted to reduce the complexity of computational tasks, thereby reducing demands on resources such as time, memory, and attention. If an algorithm is a procedure yielding a correct solution to a problem, then a heuristic procedure may not reach a solution even if there is one, or may provide an incorrect answer. The reliability of heuristics varies between domains; the resulting biases are predictable, and provide information about system design. Chess, for example, is a finite game with a finite number of possible positions, but there is no known algorithm for finding the optimal move. Computers and humans both employ heuristics in evaluating intermediate moves, relying on a few significant cues to game quality, such as safety of the king, material balance, and center control. The use of these criteria simplifies the problem, making it computationally tractable. They are heuristic guides, reliable but limited in success. There is no guarantee that the result will be the best move or even good. They are nonetheless satisfactory for competent chess. Work on human judgment indicates a similar moral. Examples of judgmental infelicities support the view that human reasoning systematically violates standards for statistical reasoning, ignoring base rates, sample size, and correlations. Experimental results suggest that humans utilize judgmental heuristics in gauging probabilities, such as representativeness, or the degree to which an individual or event resembles a prototypical member of a category. Such heuristics produce reasonable judgments in many cases, but are of limited validity when measured by a Bayesian standard. Judgmental heuristics are biased and subject to systemic errors. Experimental support for the importance of these heuristics depends on cases in which subjects deviate from the normative standard.  BAYESIAN RATIONALITY, EMPIRICAL DECISION THEORY. R.C.R. hexis (Greek, from hexo, ‘to have’, ‘to be disposed’), a (good or bad) condition, disposition, or state. The traditional rendering, ‘habit’ (Latin habitus), is misleading, for it tends to suggest the idea of an involuntary and merely repetitious pattern of behavior. A hexis is rather a state of character or of mind that disposes us to deliberately choose to act or to think in a certain way. The term acquired a quasi-technical status after Aristotle advanced the view that hexis is the genus of virtue, both moral and intellectual. In the Nicomachean Ethics he distinguishes hexeis from passions (pathe) and faculties (dunamis) of the soul. If a man fighting in the front ranks feels afraid when he sees the enemy approaching, he is undergoing an involuntary passion. His capacity to be affected by fear on this or other occasions is part of his makeup, one of his faculties. If he chooses to stay where his commanders placed him, this is due to the hexis or state of character we call courage. Likewise, one who is consistently good at identifying what is best for oneself can be said to possess a hexis called prudence. Not all states and dispositions are commendable. Cowardice and stupidity are also hexeis. Both in the sense of ‘state’ and of ‘possession’ hexis plays a role in Aristotle’s Categories.  ARISTOTLE, VIRTUE ETHICS. A.G.-L. heterological hexis 379 4065h-l.qxd  7:39 AM  379 Heytesbury, William, also called Hentisberus, Hentisberi, Tisberi (before 1313–c.1372), English philosopher and chancellor of Oxford University. He wrote Sophismata (“Sophisms”), Regulae solvendi sophismata (“Rules for Solving Sophisms”), and De sensu composito et diviso (“On the Composite and Divided Sense”). Other works are doubtfully attributed to him. Heytesbury belonged to the generation immediately after Thomas Bradwardine and Kilvington, and was among the most significant members of the Oxford Calculators, important in the early developemnt of physics. Unlike Kilvington but like Bradwardine, he appealed to mathematical calculations in addition to logical and conceptual analysis in the treatment of change, motion, acceleration, and other physical notions. His Regulae includes perhaps the most influential treatment of the liar paradox in the Middle Ages. Heytesbury’s work makes widespread use of “imaginary” thought experiments assuming physical impossibilities that are yet logically consistent. His influence was especially strong in Italy in the fifteenth century, where his works were studied widely and commented on many times. 

OXFORD CALCULATORS. P.V.S. hidden variable.PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE, QUANTUM MECHANICS. hierarchical system.COMPUTER THEORY. hierarchy, a division of mathematical objects into subclasses in accordance with an ordering that reflects their complexity. Around the turn of the century, analysts interested in the “descriptive set theory” of the real numbers defined and studied two systems of classification for sets of reals, the Borel (due to Emil Borel) and the G hierarchies. In the 1940s, logicians interested in recursion and definability (most importantly, Stephen Kleene) introduced and studied other hierarchies (the arithmetic, the hyperarithmetic, and the analytical hierarchies) of reals (identified with sets of natural numbers) and of sets of reals; the relations between this work and the earlier work were made explicit in the 1950s by J. Addison. Other sorts of hierarchies have been introduced in other corners of logic. All these so-called hierarchies have at least this in common: they divide a class of mathematical objects into subclasses subject to a natural well-founded ordering (e.g., by subsethood) that reflects the complexity (in a sense specific to the hierarchy under consideration) of the objects they contain. What follows describes several hierarchies from the study of definability. (For more historical and mathematical information see Descriptive Set Theory by Y. Moschovakis, North-Holland Publishing Co., 1980.) (1) Hierarchies of formulas. Consider a formal language L with quantifiers ‘E’ and ‘D’. Given a set B of formulas in L, we inductively define a hierarchy that treats the members of B as “basic.” Set P0 % S0 % B. Suppose sets Pn and Sn of formulas have been defined. Let Pn!1 % the set of all formulas of the form Q1u1 . . . Qmumw when u1, . . . , um are distinct variables, Q1, . . . , Qm are all ‘E’, m M 1, and w 1 Sn. Let Sn+1 % the set of all formulas of that form for Q1, . . . , Qm all ‘D’, and w 1 Pn. Here are two such hierarchies for languages of arithmetic. Take the logical constants to be truthfunctions, ‘E’ and ‘D’. (i) Let L0 % the first-order language of arithmetic, based on ‘%’, a two-place predicate-constant ‘‹’, an individual-constant for 0, functionconstants for successor, addition, and multiplication; ‘first-order’ means that bound variables are all first-order (ranging over individuals); we’ll allow free second-order variables (ranging over properties or sets of individuals). Let B % the set of bounded formulas, i.e. those formed from atomic formulas using connectives and bounded quantification: if w is bounded so are Eu(u ‹ t / w) and Du(u ‹ t & w). (ii) Let L1 % the second-order language of arithmetic (formed from L0 by allowing bound second-order variables); let B % the set of formulas in which no second-order variable is bound, and take all u1, . . . , um as above to be second-order variables. (2) Hierarchies of definable sets. (i) The Arithmetic Hierarchy. For a set of natural numbers (call such a thing ‘a real’) A : A 1 P0 n [ or S0 n ] if and only if A is defined over the standard model of arithmetic (i.e., with the constant for 0 assigned to 0, etc., and with the first-order variables ranging over the natural numbers) by a formula of L0 in Pn [respectively Sn] as described in (1.i). Set D0 n % P0 n Thus: In fact, all these inclusions are proper. This hierarchy classifies the reals simple enough to be defined by arithmetic formulas. Example: ‘Dy x % y ! y’ defines the set even of even natural numHeytesbury, William hierarchy 380 4065h-l.qxd  7:39 AM  380 bers; the formula 1 S1, so even 1 S0 1; even is also defined by a formula in P1; so even 1 P0 1, giving even 1 D0 1. In fact, S0 1 % the class of recursively enumerable reals, and D0 1 % the class of recursive reals. The classification of reals under the arithmetic hierarchy reflects complexity of defining formulas; it differs from classification in terms of a notion of degree of unsolvability, that reflecting a notion of comparative computational complexity; but there are connections between these classifications. The Arithmetic Hierarchy extends to sets of reals (using a free second-order variable in defining sentences). Example: ‘Dx (Xx & Dy y % x ! x)’ 1 S1 and defines the set of those reals with an even number; so that set 1 S0 1. (ii) The Analytical Hierarchy. Given a real A : A 1 P1 n [S1 1] if and only if A is defined (over the standard model of arithmetic with second-order variables ranging over all sets of natural numbers) by a formula of L1 in Pn (respectively Sn) as described in (1.ii); D1 n % P1 n 3 S1 n. Similarly for a set of reals. The inclusions pictured above carry over, replacing superscripted 0’s by 1’s. This classifies all reals and sets of reals simple enough to have analytical (i.e., second-order arithmetic) definitions. The subscripted ‘n’ in ‘P0 n’, etc., ranged over natural numbers. But the Arithmetic Hierarchy is extended “upward” into the transfinite by the ramified-analytical hierarchy. Let R0 % the class of all arithmetical reals. For an ordinal a let Ra!1 % the class of all sets of reals definable by formulas of L1 in which second-order variables range only over reals in Ra – this constraint imposes ramification. For a limit-ordinal l, let Rl % Ua where n % m ! 1. So to determine relative possibility in a model, we identify R with a collection of pairs of the form where each of u and v is in W. If a pair is in R, v is possible relative to u, and if is not in R, v is impossible relative to u. The relative possibility relation then enters into the rules for evaluating modal operators. For example, we do not want to say that at the actual world, it is possible for me to originate from a different sperm and egg, since the only worlds where this takes place are impossible relative to the actual world. So we have the rule that B f is true at a world u if f is true at some world v such that v is possible relative to u. Similarly, Af is true at a world u if f is true at every world v which is possible relative to u. R may have simple first-order properties such as reflexivity, (Ex)Rxx, symmetry, (Ex)(Ey)(Rxy P Ryx), and transitivity, (Ex)(Ey)(Ez)((Rxy & Ryz) P Rxz), and different modal systems can be modal logic modal logic 575    575 obtained by imposing different combinations of these on R (other systems can be obtained from higher-order constraints). The least constrained system is the system K, in which no structural properties are put on R. In K we have B (B & C) X B B, since if B (B & C) holds at w* then (B & C) holds at some world w possible relative to w*, and thus by the truth-function for &, B holds at w as well, so B B holds at w*. Hence any interpretation that makes B (B & C) true (% true at w*) also makes B B true. Since there are no restrictions on R in K, we can expect B (B & C) X B B in every system of modal logic generated by constraining R. However, for K we also have C Z B C. For suppose C holds at w*. B C holds at w* only if there is some world possible relative to w* where C holds. But there need be no such world. In particular, since R need not be reflexive, w* itself need not be possible relative to w*. Concomitantly, in any system for which we stipulate a reflexive R, we will have C X B C. The simplest such system is known as T, which has the same semantics as K except that R is stipulated to be reflexive in every interpretation. In other systems, further or different constraints are put on R. For example, in the system B, each interpretation must have an R that is reflexive and symmetric, and in the system S4, each interpretation must have an R that is reflexive and transitive. In B we have B C Z B B C, as can be shown by an interpretation with nontransitive R, while in S4 we have B AC Z C, as can be shown by an interpretation with non-symmetric R. Correspondingly, in S4, B C X B B C, and in B, B AC X C. The system in which R is reflexive, transitive, and symmetric is called S5, and in this system, R can be omitted. For if R has all three properties, R is an equivalence relation, i.e., it partitions W into mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive equivalence classes. If Cu is the equivalence class to which u belongs, then the truthvalue of a formula at u is independent of the truth-values of sentence letters at worlds not in Cu, so only the worlds in Cw* are relevant to the truth-values of sentences in an S5 interpretation. But within Cw* R is universal: every world is possible relative to every other. Consequently, in an S5 interpretation, we need not specify a relative possibility relation, and the evaluation rules for B and A need not mention relative possibility; e.g., we can say that B f is true at a world u if there is at least one world v at which f is true. Note that by the characteristics of R, whenever 9 X s in K, T, B, or S4, then 9 X s in S5: the other systems are contained in S5. K is contained in all the systems we have mentioned, while T is contained in B and S4, neither of which is contained in the other. Sentential modal logics give rise to quantified modal logics, of which quantified S5 is the bestknown. Just as, in the sentential case, each world in an interpretation is associated with a valuation of sentence letters as in non-modal sentential logic, so in quantified modal logic, each world is associated with a valuation of the sort familiar in non-modal first-order logic. More specifically, in quantified S5, each world w is assigned a domain Dw – the things that exist at w – such that at least one Dw is non-empty, and each atomic n-place predicate of the language is assigned an extension Extw of n-tuples of objects that satisfy the predicate at w. So even restricting ourselves to just the one first-order extension of a sentential system, S5, various degrees of freedom are already evident. We discuss the following: (a) variability of domains, (b) interpretation of quantifiers, and (c) predication. (a) Should all worlds have the same domain or may the domains of different worlds be different? The latter appears to be the more natural choice; e.g., if neither of of Dw* and Du are subsets of the other, this represents the intuitive idea that some things that exist might not have, and that there could have been things that do not actually exist (though formulating this latter claim requires adding an operator for ‘actually’ to the language). So we should distinguish two versions of S5, one with constant domains, S5C, and the other with variable domains, S5V. (b) Should the truth of (Dn)f at a world w require that f is true at w of some object in Dw or merely of some object in D (D is the domain of all possible objects, 4weWDw)? The former treatment is called the actualist reading of the quantifiers, the latter, the possibilist reading. In S5C there is no real choice, since for any w, D % Dw, but the issue is live in S5V. (c) Should we require that for any n-place atomic predicate F, an n-tuple of objects satisfies F at w only if every member of the n-tuple belongs to Dw, i.e., should we require that atomic predicates be existence-entailing? If we abbreviate (Dy) (y % x) by Ex (for ‘x exists’), then in S5C, A(Ex)AEx is logically valid on the actualist reading of E (%-D-) and on the possibilist. On the former, the formula says that at each world, anything that exists at that world exists at every world, which is true; while on the latter, using the definition of ‘Ex’, it says that at each world, anything that exists at some world or other is such that at every world, it exists at some world or other, which is also true; indeed, the formula stays valid in S5C with possibilist quantifiers even if we make E a primitive logical constant, stipulated to be true at every w of modal logic modal logic 576    576 exactly the things that exist at w. But in S5V with actualist quantifiers, A(Ex)AEx is invalid, as is (Ex)AEx – consider an interpretation where for some u, Du is a proper subset of Dw*. However, in S5V with possibilist quantifiers, the status of the formula, if ‘Ex’ is defined, depends on whether identity is existence-entailing. If it is existenceentailing, then A(Ex)AEx is invalid, since an object in D satisfies (Dy)(y % x) at w only if that object exists at w, while if identity is not existence-entailing, the formula is valid. The interaction of the various options is also evident in the evaluation of two well-known schemata: the Barcan formula, B (Dx)fx P (Dx) B fx; and its converse, (Dx) B fx P B (Dx)fx. In S5C with ‘Ex’ either defined or primitive, both schemata are valid, but in S5V with actualist quantifiers, they both fail. For the latter case, if we substitute -E for f in the converse Barcan formula we get a conditional whose antecedent holds at w* if there is u with Du a proper subset of Dw*, but whose consequent is logically false. The Barcan formula fails when there is a world u with Du not a subset of Dw*, and the condition f is true of some non-actual object at u and not of any actual object there. For then B (Dx)f holds at w* while (Dx) B fx fails there. However, if we require atomic predicates to be existence-entailing, then instances of the converse Barcan formula with f atomic are valid. In S5V with possibilist quantifiers, all instances of both schemata are valid, since the prefixes (Dx) B and B (Dx) correspond to (Dx) (Dw) and (Dw) (Dx), which are equivalent (with actualist quantifiers, the prefixes correspond to (Dx 1 Dw*), and (Dw) (Dx 1 Dw) which are non-equivalent if Dw and Dw* need not be the same set). Finally in S5V with actualist quantifiers, the standard quantifier introduction and elimination rules must be adjusted. Suppose c is a name for an object that does not actually exist; then - Ec is true but (Dx) - Ex is false. The quantifier rules must be those of free logic: we require Ec & fc before we infer (Dv)fv and Ec P fc, as well as the usual EI restrictions, before we infer (Ev)fv. 

mode (from Latin modus, ‘way’, ‘fashion’), a term used in many senses in philosophy. In Aristotelian logic, it refers either to the arrangement of universal, particular, affirmative, or negative propositions within a syllogism, only certain of which are valid (this is often translated as ‘mood’ in English), or to the property a proposition has by virtue of which it is necessary or contingent, possible or impossible. In Scholastic metaphysics, it was often used in a not altogether technical sense to mean that which characterizes a thing and distinguishes it from others. Micraelius (Lexicon philosophicum, 1653) writes that “a mode does not compose a thing, but distinguishes it and makes it determinate.” It was also used in the context of the modal distinction in the theory of distinctions to designate the distinction that holds between a substance and its modes or between two modes of a single substance. The term ‘mode’ also appears in the technical vocabulary of medieval speculative grammar in connection with the notions of modes of signifying (modi significandi), modes of understanding (modi intelligendi), and modes of being (modi essendi). The term ‘mode’ became especially important in the seventeenth century, when Descartes, Spinoza, and Locke each took it up, giving it three somewhat different special meanings within their respective systems. Descartes makes ‘mode’ a central notion in his metaphysics in his Principia philosophiae. For Descartes, each substance is characterized by a principal attribute, thought for mind and extension for body. Modes, then, are particular ways of being extended or thinking, i.e., particular sizes, shapes, etc., or particular thoughts, properties (in the broad sense) that individual things (substances) have. In this way, ‘mode’ occupies the role in Descartes’s philosophy that ‘accident’ does in Aristotelian philosophy. But for Descartes, each mode must be connected with the principal attribute of a substance, a way of being extended or a way of thinking, whereas for the Aristotelian, accidents may or may not be connected with the essence of the substance in which they inhere. Like Descartes, Spinoza recognizes three basic metaphysical terms, ‘substance,’ ‘attribute’, and ‘mode’. Recalling Descartes, he defines ‘mode’ as “the affections of a substance, or that which is in another, and which is also conceived through another” (Ethics I). But for Spinoza, there is only one substance, which has all possible attributes. This makes it somewhat difficult to determine exactly what Spinoza means by ‘modes’, whether they are to be construed as being in some sense “properties” of God, the one infinite modal logic of programs mode 577    577 substance, or whether they are to be construed more broadly as simply individual things that depend for their existence on God, just as Cartesian modes depend on Cartesian substance. Spinoza also introduces somewhat obscure distinctions between infinite and finite modes, and between immediate and mediate infinite modes. Locke uses ‘mode’ in a way that evidently derives from Descartes’s usage, but that also differs from it. For Locke, modes are “such complex Ideas, which however compounded, contain not in them the supposition of subsisting by themselves, but are considered as Dependences on, or Affections of Substances” (Essay II). Modes are thus ideas that represent to us the complex properties of things, ideas derived from what Locke calls the simple ideas that come to us from experience. Locke distinguishes between simple modes like number, space, and infinity, which are supposed to be constructed by compounding the same idea many times, and mixed modes like obligation or theft, which are supposed to be compounded of many simple ideas of different sorts.  DESCARTES, LOCKE, METAPHYSICS, PROPERTY, SPINOZA. D.Garb. model.COMPUTER THEORY, MODEL THEORY. modeling, computer.COMPUTER THEORY. model set.HINTIKKA SET. model theory, a branch of mathematical logic that deals with the connection between a language and its interpretations or structures. Basic to it is the characterization of the conditions under which a sentence is true in structure. It is confusing that the term ‘model’ itself is used slightly differently: a model for a sentence is a structure for the language of the sentence in which it is true. Model theory was originally developed for explicitly constructed, formal languages, with the purpose of studying foundational questions of mathematics, but was later applied to the semantical analysis of empirical theories, a development initiated by the Dutch philosopher Evert Beth, and of natural languages, as in Montague grammar. More recently, in situation theory, we find a theory of semantics in which not the concept of truth in a structure, but that of information carried by a statement about a situation, is central. The term ‘model theory’ came into use in the 1930s, with the work on first-order model theory by Tarski, but some of the most central results of the field date from before that time. The history of the field is complicated by the fact that in the 1910s and 1920s, when the first model-theoretic findings were obtained, the separation between first-order logic and its extensions was not yet completed. Thus, in 1915, there appeared an article by Leopold Löwenheim, containing the first version of what is now called the Löwenheim-Skolem theorem. Löwenheim proved that every satisfiable sentence has a countable model, but he did not yet work in firstorder logic as we now understand it. One of the first who did so was the Norwegian logician Thoralf Skolem, who showed in 1920 that a set of first-order sentences that has a model, has a countable model, one form of the LöwenheimSkolem theorem. Skolem argued that logic was first-order logic and that first-order logic was the proper basis for metamathematical investigations, fully accepting the relativity of set-theoretic notions in first-order logic. Within philosophy this thesis is still dominant, but in the end it has not prevailed in mathematical logic. In 1930 Kurt Gödel solved an open problem of Hilbert-Ackermann and proved a completeness theorem for first-order logic. This immediately led to another important model-theoretic result, the compactness theorem: if every finite subset of a set of sentences has a model then the set has a model. A good source for information about the model theory of first-order logic, or classical model theory, is still Model Theory by C. C. Chang and H. J. Keisler (1973). When the separation between first-order logic and stronger logics had been completed and the model theory of first-order logic had become a mature field, logicians undertook in the late 1950s the study of extended model theory, the model theory of extensions of first-order logic: first of cardinality quantifiers, later of infinitary languages and of fragments of second-order logic. With so many examples of logics around – where sometimes classical theorems did generalize, sometimes not – Per Lindström showed in 1969 what sets first-order logic apart from its extensions: it is the strongest logic that is both compact and satisfies the LöwenheimSkolem theorem. This work has been the beginning of a study of the relations between various properties logics may possess, the so-called abstract model.  FORMAL SEMANTICS, LÖWENHEIMSKOLEM THEOREM, SATISFACTION. Z.G.S. model model theory 578    578 modernism.POSTMODERN. modest foundationalism.FOUNDATIONALISM. modularity, the commitment to functionally independent and specialized cognitive systems in psychological organization, or, more generally, in the organization of any complex system. Modularity entails that behavior is the product of components with subordinate functions, that these functions are realized in discrete physical systems, and that the subsystems are minimally interactive. Modular organization varies from simple decomposability to what Herbert Simon calls near decomposability. In the former, component systems are independent, operating according to intrinsically determined principles; system behavior is an additive or aggregative function of these independent contributions. In the latter, the short-run behavior of components is independent of the behavior of other components; the system behavior is a relatively simple function of component contributions. In the early nineteenth century, Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828) defended a modular organization for the mind/brain, holding that the cerebral hemispheres consist of a variety of organs, or centers, each subserving specific intellectual and moral functions. This picture of the brain as a collection of relatively independent organs contrasts sharply with the traditional view that intellectual activity involves the exercise of a general faculty in a variety of domains, a view that was common to Descartes and Hume as well as Gall’s major opponents such as Pierre Flourens (1794–1867). By the middle of the nineteenth century, the French physicians Jean-Baptiste Bouillaud (1796–1881) and Pierre-Paul Broca (1824–80) defended the view that language is controlled by localized structures in the left hemisphere and is relatively independent of other cognitive activities. It was later discovered by Karl Wernicke (1848–1905) that there are at least two centers for the control of language, one more posterior and one more anterior. On these views, there are discrete physical structures responsible for language, which are largely independent of one another and of structures responsible for other psychological functions. This is therefore a modular organization. This view of the neurophysiological organization of language continues to have advocates into the late twentieth century, though the precise characterization of the functions these two centers serve is controversial. Many more recent views have tended to limit modularity to more peripheral functions such as vision, hearing, and motor control and speech, but have excluded so-called higher cognitive processes. 

modus ponens, in full, modus ponendo ponens (Latin, ‘proposing method’), (1) the argument form ‘If A then B; A; therefore, B’, and arguments of this form (compare fallacy of affirming the consequent); (2) the rule of inference that permits one to infer the consequent of a conditional from that conditional and its antecedent. This is also known as the rule of /-elimination or rule of /- detachment.  COUNTERFACTUALS, FORMAL FALLACY. G.F.S. modus tollendo ponens.SYLLOGISM. modus tollens, in full, modus tollendo tollens (Latin, ‘removing method’), (1) the argument form ‘If A then B; not-B; therefore, not-A’, and arguments of this form (compare fallacy of denying the antecedent); (2) the rule of inference that permits one to infer the negation of the antecedent of a conditional from that conditional and the negation of its consequent.  COUNTERFACTUALS, FORMAL FALLACY. G.F.S. Mohism, a school of classical Chinese thought founded by Mo Tzu (fl. 479–438 B.C.). Mo Tzu was the first major philosopher to challenge Confucius. Whereas Confucius believed a moral life was an end in itself, Mo Tzu advocated a form of utilitarianism wherein the test of moral rightness (yi) was the amount of benefit (li) to the gods, state, and people. Accordingly, Mo Tzu condemned war as harmful, criticized Confucians for their elaborate funerals and wasteful indulgence in music, and promoted a hierarchical meritocracy dominated by a powerful ruler as the most efficient way to unify the conflicting moral views and interests of the people, and thereby achieve social order. Mo Tzu also attacked fatalism, and unlike the agnostic Confucius, firmly believed in spirits and an anthropomorphic Heaven (t’ien) that rewarded those who benefited others and punished those who did not. He is most famous for his doctrine of chien ai or impartial concern (often translated as universal love). Whereas Confucius espoused a relational morality in which one’s obligations modernism Mohism 579    579 varied depending on the status of the parties and the degree of closeness, Mo Tzu insisted that each person be treated equally as an object of moral concern. During the Warring States period (403–221 B.C.), the Mohists split into three factions. The Later Mohist Canons, most of which were written as late as the third century B.C., are characterized by analytical reasoning and logical sophistication. Later Mohists sought to provide a rational rather than a religious basis for Mo Tzu’s utilitarianism based upon logical (and causal) necessity (pi). Treating a wide variety of subjects from politics to optics to economics, the Canons are organized around four topics: discourse, or knowledge of the relation between names and objects; ethics, or knowledge of how to act; sciences, or knowledge of objects; and argumentation, or knowledge of names. As Confucianism emerged to become the state ideology, the Mohists disappeared sometime in the early Han dynasty (206 B.C.–A.D. 220), having been in important measure co-opted by the leading interpreter of Confucianism of the period, Hsün Tzu (c.298–238 B.C.). 

CONFUCIANISM, LI3, MO TZU, YI. R.P.P. & R.T.A. Mohist School.MOHISM, MO TZU. moksha.MAYA. Molina, Luis de (1535–1600), Spanish Jesuit theologian and philosopher. He studied and taught at Coimbra and Évora and also taught in Lisbon and Madrid. His most important works are the Concordia liberi arbitrii cum gratiae donis(“Free Will and Grace,” 1588), Commentaria in primam divi Thomae partem (“Commentary on the First Part of Thomas’s Summa,” 1592), and De justitia et jure (“On Justice and Law,” 1592–1613). Molina is best known for his doctrine of middle knowledge (scientia media). Its aim was to preserve free will while maintaining the Christian doctrine of the efficacy of divine grace. It was opposed by Thomists such as Bañez, who maintained that God exercises physical predetermination over secondary causes of human action and, thus, that grace is intrinsically efficacious and independent of human will and merits. For Molina, although God has foreknowledge of what human beings will choose to do, neither that knowledge nor God’s grace determine human will; the cooperation (concursus) of divine grace with human will does not determine the will to a particular action. This is made possible by God’s middle knowledge, which is a knowledge in between the knowledge God has of what existed, exists, and will exist, and the knowledge God has of what has not existed, does not exist, and will not exist. Middle knowledge is God’s knowledge of conditional future contingent events, namely, of what persons would do under any possible set of circumstances. Thanks to this knowledge, God can arrange for certain human acts to occur by prearranging the circumstances surrounding the choice without determining the human will. Thus, God’s grace is concurrent with the act of the will and does not predetermine it, rendering the Thomistic distinction between sufficient and efficacious grace superfluous.  AQUINAS, FREE WILL PROBLEM, FUTURE CONTINGENTS, MIDDLE KNOWLEDGE. J.J.E.G. Molyneux question, also called Molyneux’s problem, the question that, in correspondence with Locke, William Molyneux (or Molineux, 1656– 98), a Dublin lawyer and member of the Irish Parliament, posed and Locke inserted in the second edition of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1694; book 2, chap. 9, section 8): Suppose a Man born blind, and now adult, and taught by his touch to distinguish a Cube, and a Sphere of the same metal, and nighly of the same bigness, so as to tell, when he felt one and t’other, which is the Cube, which the Sphere. Suppose then the Cube and Sphere placed on a Table, and the Blind Man to be made to see. Quære, Whether by his sight, before he touch’d them, he could now distinguish, and tell, which is the Globe, which the Cube. Although it is tempting to regard Molyneux’s question as straightforwardly empirical, attempts to gauge the abilities of newly sighted adults have yielded disappointing and ambiguous results. More interesting, perhaps, is the way in which different theories of perception answer the question. Thus, according to Locke, sensory modalities constitute discrete perceptual channels, the contents of which perceivers must learn to correlate. Such a theory answers the question in the negative (as did Molyneux himself). Other theories encourage different responses. 

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

SKEPTICISM, SKEPTICS. R.H.P. Montanism, a charismatic, schismatic movement in early Christianity, originating in Phrygia in the late second century. It rebuked the mainstream church for laxity and apathy, and taught moral purity, new, i.e. postbiblical, revelation, and the imminent end of the world. Traditional accounts, deriving from critics of the movement, contain exaggerations and probably some fabrications. Montanus himself, abetted by the prophetesses Maximilla and Prisca, announced in ecstatic speech a new, final age of prophecy. This fulfilled the biblical promises that in the last days the Holy Spirit would be poured out universally (Joel 2: 28ff.; Acts 2: 16ff.) and would teach “the whole truth” (Jon. 14:26; 16:13). It also empowered the Montanists to enjoin more rigorous discipline than that required by Jesus. The sect denied that forgiveness through baptism covered serious subsequent sin; forbade remarriage for widows and widowers; practiced fasting; and condemned believers who evaded persecution. Some later followers may have identified Montanus with the Holy Spirit itself, though he claimed only to be the Spirit’s mouthpiece. The “new prophecy” flourished for a generation, especially in North Africa, gaining a famous convert in Tertullian. But the church’s bishops repudiated the movement’s criticisms and innovations, and turned more resolutely against postapostolic revelation, apocalyptic expectation, and ascetic extremes.

Montesquieu, Baron de La Brède et de, title of Charles-Louis de Secondat (1689–1755), French political philosopher, the political philosophe of the Enlightenment. He was born at La Brède, educated at the Oratorian Collège de Juilly (1700–05), and received law degrees from the University of Bordeaux (1708). From his uncle he inherited the barony of Montesquieu (1716) and the office of Président à Mortier at the Parliament of Guyenne at Bordeaux. Fame, national monism Montesquieu 581    581 and international, came suddenly (1721) with the Lettres persanes (“The Persian Letters”), published in Holland and France, a landmark of the Enlightenment. His Réflexions sur la monarchie universelle en Europe, written and printed (1734) to remind the authorities of his qualifications and availability, delivered the wrong message at the wrong time (anti-militarism, pacifism, free trade, while France supported Poland’s King Stanislas, dethroned by Russia and Austria). Montesquieu withdrew the Réflexions before publication and substituted the Considerations on the Romans: the same thesis is expounded here, but in the exclusively classical context of ancient history. The stratagem succeeded: the Amsterdam edition was freely imported; the Paris edition appeared with a royal privilège (1734). A few months after the appearance of the Considerations, he undertook L’Esprit des lois, the outline of a modern political science, conceived as the foundation of an effective governmental policy. His optimism was shaken by the disasters of the War of Austrian Succession (1740–48); the Esprit des lois underwent hurried changes that upset its original plan. During the very printing process, the author was discovering the true essence of his philosophie pratique: it would never culminate in a final, invariable program, but in an orientation, continuously, intelligently adapting to the unpredictable circumstances of historical time in the light of permanent values. According to L’Esprit des lois, governments are either republics, monarchies, or despotisms. The principles, or motivational forces, of these types of government are, respectively, political virtue, honor, and fear. The type of government a people has depends on its character, history, and geographical situation. Only a constitutional government that separates its executive, legislative, and judicial powers preserves political liberty, taken as the power to do what one ought to will. A constitutional monarchy with separation of powers is the best form of government. Montesquieu influenced the authors of the U.S. Constitution and the political philosophers Burke and Rousseau. 

BURKE, ENCYCLOPEDIA, POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, ROUSSEAU. C.J.B. mood.

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

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

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

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

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

moral psychology, (1) the subfield of psychology that traces the development over time of moral reasoning and opinions in the lives of individuals (this subdiscipline includes work of Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg, and Carol Gilligan); (2) the part of philosophy where philosophy of mind and ethics overlap, which concerns all the psychological issues relevant to morality. There are many different psychological matters relevant to ethics, and each may be relevant in more than one way. Different ethical theories imply different sorts of connections. So moral psychology includes work of many and diverse kinds. But several traditional clusters of concern are evident. Some elements of moral psychology consider the psychological matters relevant to metaethical issues, i.e., to issues about the general nature of moral truth, judgment, and knowledge. Different metaethical theories invoke mental phenomena in different ways: noncognitivism maintains that sentences expressing moral judgments do not function to report truths or falsehoods, but rather, e.g., to express certain emotions or to prescribe certain actions. So some forms of noncognitivism imply that an understanding of certain sorts of emotions, or of special activities like prescribing that may involve particular psychological elements, is crucial to a full understanding of how ethical sentences are meaningful. Certain forms of cognitivism, the view that moral (declarative) sentences do express truths or falsehoods, imply that moral facts consist of psychological facts, that for instance moral judgments consist of expressions of positive psychological attitudes of some particular kind toward the objects of those judgments. And an understanding of psychological phenomena like sentiment is crucial according to certain sorts of projectivism, which hold that the supposed moral properties of things are mere misleading projections of our sentiments onto the objects of those sentiments. Certain traditional moral sense theories and certain traditional forms of intuitionism have held that special psychological faculties are crucial for our epistemic access to moral truth. Particular views in normative ethics, particular views about the moral status of acts, persons, and other targets of normative evaluation, also often suggest that an understanding of certain psychological matters is crucial to ethics. Actions, intentions, and character are some of the targets of evaluation of normative ethics, and their proper understanding involves many issues in philosophy of mind. Also, many normative theorists have maintained that there is a close connection between pleasure, happiness, or desiresatisfaction and a person’s good, and these things are also a concern of philosophy of mind. In addition, the rightness of actions is often held to be closely connected to the motives, beliefs, and other psychological phenomena that lie behind those actions. Various other traditional philosophical concerns link ethical and psychological issues: the nature of the patterns in the long-term development in individuals of moral opinions and reasoning, the appropriate form for moral education and punishment, the connections between obligation and motivation, i.e., between moral reasons and psychological causes, and the notion of free will and its relation to moral responsibility and autonomy. Some work in philosophy of mind also suggests that moral phenomena, or at least normative phenomena of some kind, play a crucial role in illuminating or constituting psychological phenomena of various kinds, but the traditional concern of moral psychology has been with the articulation of the sort of philosophy of mind that can be useful to ethics.  AKRASIA, ETHICS, PRACTICAL REASONING, SELF-DECEPTION. J.R.M. moral rationalism, the view that the substance of morality, usually in the form of general moral principles, can be known a priori. The view is defended by Kant in Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, but it goes back at least to Plato. Both Plato and Kant thought that a priori moral knowledge could have an impact on what we do quite independently of any desire that we happen to have. This motivational view is also ordinarily associated with moral rationalism. It comes in two quite different forms. The first is that a priori moral knowledge consists in a sui generis mental state that is both belief-like and desire-like. This seems to have been Plato’s view, for he held that the belief that something is good is itself a disposition to promote that thing. The second is that a priori moral knowledge consists in a belief that is capable of rationally producing a distinct desire. morality, slave moral rationalism 587    587 Rationalists who make the first claim have had trouble accommodating the possibility of someone’s believing that something is good but, through weakness of will, not mustering the desire to do it. Accordingly, they have been forced to assimilate weakness of will to ignorance of the good. Rationalists who make the second claim about reason’s action-producing capacity face no such problem. For this reason, their view is often preferred. The best-known anti-rationalist about morality is Hume. His Treatise of Human Nature denies both that morality’s substance can be known by reason alone and that reason alone is capable of producing action. 

moral realism, a metaethical view committed to the objectivity of ethics. It has (1) metaphysical, (2) semantic, and (3) epistemological components. (1) Its metaphysical component is the claim that there are moral facts and moral properties whose existence and nature are independent of people’s beliefs and attitudes about what is right or wrong. In this claim, moral realism contrasts with an error theory and with other forms of nihilism that deny the existence of moral facts and properties. It contrasts as well with various versions of moral relativism and other forms of ethical constructivism that make moral facts consist in facts about people’s moral beliefs and attitudes. (2) Its semantic component is primarily cognitivist. Cognitivism holds that moral judgments should be construed as assertions about the moral properties of actions, persons, policies, and other objects of moral assessment, that moral predicates purport to refer to properties of such objects, that moral judgments (or the propositions that they express) can be true or false, and that cognizers can have the cognitive attitude of belief toward the propositions that moral judgments express. These cognitivist claims contrast with the noncognitive claims of emotivism and prescriptivism, according to which the primary purpose of moral judgments is to express the appraiser’s attitudes or commitments, rather than to state facts or ascribe properties. Moral realism also holds that truth for moral judgments is non-epistemic; in this way it contrasts with moral relativism and other forms of ethical constructivism that make the truth of a moral judgment epistemic. The metaphysical and semantic theses imply that there are some true moral propositions. An error theory accepts the cognitivist semantic claims but denies the realist metaphysical thesis. It holds that moral judgments should be construed as containing referring expressions and having truth-values, but insists that these referring expressions are empty, because there are no moral facts, and that no moral claims are true. Also on this theory, commonsense moral thought presupposes the existence of moral facts and properties, but is systematically in error. In this way, the error theory stands to moral realism much as atheism stands to theism in a world of theists. (J. L. Mackie introduced and defended the error theory in his Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, 1977.) (3) Finally, if moral realism is to avoid skepticism it must claim that some moral beliefs are true, that there are methods for justifying moral beliefs, and that moral knowledge is possible. While making these metaphysical, semantic, and epistemological claims, moral realism is compatible with a wide variety of other metaphysical, semantic, and epistemological principles and so can take many different forms. The moral realists in the early part of the twentieth century were generally intuitionists. Intuitionism combined a commitment to moral realism with a foundationalist moral epistemology according to which moral knowledge must rest on self-evident moral truths and with the nonnaturalist claim that moral facts and properties are sui generis and not reducible to any natural facts or properties. Friends of noncognitivism found the metaphysical and epistemological commitments of intuitionism extravagant and so rejected moral realism. Later moral realists have generally sought to defend moral realism without the metaphysical and epistemological trappings of intuitionism. One such version of moral realism takes a naturalistic form. This form of ethical naturalism claims that our moral beliefs are justified when they form part of an explanatorily coherent system of beliefs with one another and with various non-moral beliefs, and insists that moral properties are just natural properties of the people, actions, and policies that instantiate them. Debate between realists and anti-realists and within the realist camp centers on such issues as the relation between moral judgment and action, the rational authority of morality, moral epistemology and methodology, the relation between moral and non-moral natural properties, the place of ethics in a naturalismoral realism moral realism 588    588 tic worldview, and the parity of ethics and the sciences. 

EMOTIVISM, ETHICAL CONSTRUCTIVISM, ETHICAL OBJECTIVISM, ETHICS, NATURALISM. D.O.B. Moral Rearmament Movement.BUCHMANISM. moral sense theory, an ethical theory, developed by eighteenth-century British philosophers – notably Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Hume – according to which the pleasure or pain a person feels upon thinking about (or “observing”) certain character traits is indicative of the virtue or vice, respectively, of those features. It is a theory of “moral perception,” offered in response to moral rationalism, the view that moral distinctions are derived by reason alone, and combines Locke’s empiricist doctrine that all ideas begin in experience with the belief, widely shared at the time, that feelings play a central role in moral evaluation and motivation. On this theory, our emotional responses to persons’ characters are often “perceptions” of their morality, just as our experiences of an apple’s redness and sweetness are perceptions of its color and taste. These ideas of morality are seen as products of an “internal” sense, because they are produced in the “observer” only after she forms a concept of the conduct or trait being observed (or contemplated) – as when a person realizes that she is seeing someone intentionally harm another and reacts with displeasure at what she sees. The moral sense is conceived as being analogous to, or possibly an aspect of, our capacity to recognize varying degrees of beauty in things, which modern writers call “the sense of beauty.” Rejecting the popular view that morality is based on the will of God, Shaftesbury maintains rather that morality depends on human nature, and he introduces the notion of a sense of right and wrong, possessed uniquely by human beings, who alone are capable of reflection. Hutcheson argues that to approve of a character is to regard it as virtuous. For him, reason, which discovers relations of inanimate objects to rational agents, is unable to arouse our approval in the absence of a moral sense. Ultimately, we can explain why, for example, we approve of someone’s temperate character only by appealing to our natural tendency to feel pleasure (sometimes identified with approval) at the thought of characters that exhibit benevolence, the trait to which all other virtues can be traced. This disposition to feel approval (and disapproval) is what Hutcheson identifies as the moral sense. Hume emphasizes that typical human beings make moral distinctions on the basis of their feelings only when those sentiments are experienced from a disinterested or “general” point of view. In other words, we turn our initial sentiments into moral judgments by compensating for the fact that we feel more strongly about those to whom we are emotionally close than those from whom we are more distant. On a widely held interpretation of Hume, the moral sense provides not only judgments, but also motives to act according to those judgments, since its feelings may be motivating passions or arouse such passions. Roderick Firth’s (1917–87) twentieth-century ideal observer theory, according to which moral good is designated by the projected reactions of a hypothetically omniscient, disinterested observer possessing other ideal traits, as well as Brandt’s contemporary moral spectator theory, are direct descendants of the moral sense theory.  BUTLER, HUME, HUTCHESON, SHAFTESBURY. E.S.R. moral skepticism, any metaethical view that raises fundamental doubts about morality as a whole. Different kinds of doubts lead to different kinds of moral skepticism. The primary kinds of moral skepticism are epistemological. Moral justification skepticism is the claim that nobody ever has (any or adequate) justification for believing any substantive moral claim. Moral knowledge skepticism is the claim that nobody ever knows that any substantive moral claim is true. If knowledge implies justification, as is often assumed, then moral justification skepticism implies moral knowledge skepticism. But even if knowledge requires justification, it requires more, so moral knowledge skepticism does not imply moral justification skepticism. Another kind of skeptical view in metaethics rests on linguistic analysis. Some emotivists, expressivists, and prescriptivists argue that moral claims (like “Cheating is morally wrong”) resemble expressions of emotion or desire (like “Boo, cheating”) or prescriptions for action (like “Don’t cheat”), which are neither true nor false, so moral claims themselves are neither true nor false. This linguistic moral skepticism, which is sometimes called noncognitivism, implies moral knowledge skepticism if knowledge implies truth. Even if such linguistic analyses are rejected, Moral Rearmament Movement moral skepticism 589    589 one can still hold that no moral properties or facts really exist. This ontological moral skepticism can be combined with the linguistic view that moral claims assert moral properties and facts to yield an error theory that all positive moral claims are false. A different kind of doubt about morality is often raised by asking, “Why should I be moral?” Practical moral skepticism answers that there is not always any reason or any adequate reason to be moral or to do what is morally required. This view concerns reasons to act rather than reasons to believe. Moral skepticism of all these kinds is often seen as immoral, but moral skeptics can act and be motivated and even hold moral beliefs in much the same way as non-skeptics. Moral skeptics just deny that their or anyone else’s moral beliefs are justified or known or true, or that they have adequate reason to be moral. 

EMOTIVISM, ETHICS, JUSTIFICATION, MORAL EPISTEMOLOGY, PRESCRIPTIVISM, SKEPTICISM. W.S.-A. moral status, the suitability of a being to be viewed as an appropriate object of direct moral concern; the nature or degree of a being’s ability to count as a ground of claims against moral agents; the moral standing, rank, or importance of a (kind of) being; the condition of being a moral patient; moral considerability. Ordinary moral reflection involves considering others. But which others ought to be considered? And how are the various objects of moral consideration to be weighed against one another? Anything might be the topic of moral discussion, but not everything is thought to be an appropriate object of direct moral concern. If there are any ethical constraints on how we may treat a ceramic plate, these seem to derive from considerations about other beings, not from the interests or good or nature of the plate. The same applies, presumably, to a clod of earth. Many philosophers view a living but insentient being, such as a dandelion, in the same way; others have doubts. According to some, even sentient animal life is little more deserving of moral consideration than the clod or the dandelion. This tradition, which restricts significant moral status to humans, has come under vigorous and varied attack by defenders of animal liberation. This attack criticizes speciesism, and argues that “humanism” is analogous to theories that illegitimately base moral status on race, gender, or social class. Some philosophers have referred to beings that are appropriate objects of direct moral concern as “moral patients.” Moral agents are those beings whose actions are subject to moral evaluation; analogously, moral patients would be those beings whose suffering (in the sense of being the objects of the actions of moral agents) permits or demands moral evaluation. Others apply the label ‘moral patients’ more narrowly, just to those beings that are appropriate objects of direct moral concern but are not (also) moral agents. The issue of moral status concerns not only whether beings count at all morally, but also to what degree they count. After all, beings who are moral patients might still have their claims outweighed by the preferred claims of other beings who possess some special moral status. We might, with Nozick, propose “utilitarianism for animals, Kantianism for people.” Similarly, the bodily autonomy argument in defense of abortion, made famous by Thomson, does not deny that the fetus is a moral patient, but insists that her/his/its claims are limited by the pregnant woman’s prior claim to control her bodily destiny. It has often been thought that moral status should be tied to the condition of “personhood.” The idea has been either that only persons are moral patients, or that persons possess a special moral status that makes them (morally) more important than nonpersons. Personhood, on such theories, is a minimal condition for moral patiency. Why? Moral patiency is said to be “correlative” with moral agency: a creature has both or neither. Alternatively, persons have been viewed not as the only moral patients, but as a specially privileged elite among moral patients, possessing rights as well as interests.  ETHICS, KANT, PERSONAL IDENTITY, PERSONHOOD, RIGHTS. E.J. moral subjectivism.ETHICS. More, Henry (1614–87), English philosopher, theologian, and poet, the most prolific of the Cambridge Platonists. In 1631 he entered Christ’s College, where he spent the rest of his life after becoming Fellow in 1641. He was primarily an apologist of anti-Calvinist, latitudinarian stamp whose inalienable philosophico- theological purpose was to demonstrate the existence and immortality of the soul and to cure “two enormous distempers of the mind,” atheism and “enthusiasm.” He described himself as “a Fisher for Philosophers, desirous to draw them to or retain them in the Christian Faith.” His eclectic method deployed Neoplatonism (notably Plotinus and Ficino), mystical theologies, cabamoral status More, Henry 590    590 listic doctrines (as More misconceived them), empirical findings (including reports of witchcraft and ghosts), the new science, and the new philosophy, notably the philosophy of Descartes. Yet he rejected Descartes’s beast-machine doctrine, his version of dualism, and the pretensions of Cartesian mechanical philosophy to explain all physical phenomena. Animals have souls; the universe is alive with souls. Body and spirit are spatially extended, the former being essentially impenetrable, inert, and discerpible (divisible into parts), the latter essentially penetrable, indiscerpible, active, and capable of a spiritual density, which More called essential spissitude, “the redoubling or contracting of substance into less space than it does sometimes occupy.” Physical processes are activated and ordered by the spirit of nature, a hylarchic principle and “the vicarious power of God upon this great automaton, the world.” More’s writings on natural philosophy, especially his doctrine of infinite space, are thought to have influenced Newton. More attacked Hobbes’s materialism and, in the 1660s and 1670s, the impieties of Dutch Cartesianism, including the perceived atheism of Spinoza and his circle. He regretted the “enthusiasm” for and conversion to Quakerism of Anne Conway, his “extramural” tutee and assiduous correspondent. More had a partiality for coinages and linguistic exotica. We owe to him ‘Cartesianism’ (1662), coined a few years before the first appearance of the French equivalent, and the substantive ‘materialist’ (1668).

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

ACCIDIE, ACTION THEORY, MOTIVATIONAL EXPLANATION, MOTIVATIONAL INTERNALISM. A.R.M. motivational explanation, a type of explanation of goal-directed behavior where the explanans appeals to the motives of the agent. The explanation usually is in the following form: Smith swam hard in order to win the race. Here the description of what Smith did identifies the behavior to be explained, and the phrase that follows ‘in order to’ identifies the goal or the state of affairs the obtaining of which was the moving force behind the behavior. The general presumption is that the agent whose behavior is being explained is capable of deliberating and acting on the decisions reached as a result of the deliberation. Thus, it is dubious whether the explanation contained in ‘The plant turned toward the sun in order to receive more light’ is a motivational explanation. Two problems are thought to surround motivational explanations. First, since the state of affairs set as the goal is, at the time of the action, non-existent, it can only act as the “moving force” by appearing as the intentional object of an inner psychological state of the agent. Thus, motives are generally desires for specific objects or states of affairs on which the agent acts. So motivational explanation is basically the type of explanation provided in folk psychology, and as such it inherits all the alleged problems of the latter. And second, what counts as a motive for an action under one description usually fails to be a motive for the same action under a different description. My motive for saying “hello” may have been my desire to answer the phone, but my motive for saying “hello” loudly was to express my irritation at the person calling me so late at night. 

ACTION THEORY, EXPLANATION, FOLK PSYCHOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. B.E. motivational internalism, the view that moral motivation is internal to moral duty (or the sense of duty). The view represents the contemporary understanding of Hume’s thesis that morality is essentially practical. Hume went on to point out the apparent logical gap between statements of fact, which express theoretical judgments, and statements about what ought to be done, which express practical judgments. Motivational internalism offers one explanation for this gap. No motivation is internal to the recognition of facts. The specific internal relation the view affirms is that of necessity. Thus, motivational internalists hold that if one sees that one has a duty to do a certain action or that it would be right to do it, then necessarily one has a motive to do it. For example, if one sees that it is one’s duty to donate blood, then necessarily one has a motive to donate blood. Motivational externalism, the opposing view, denies this relation. Its adherents hold that it is possible for one to see that one has a duty to do a certain action or that it would be right to do it yet have no motive to do it. Motivational externalists typically, though not universally, deny any real gap between theoretical and practical judgments. Motivational internalism takes either of two forms, rationalist and anti-rationalist. Rationalists, such as Plato and Kant, hold that the content or truth of a moral requirement guarantees in those who understand it a motive of compliance. Anti-rationalists, such as Hume, hold that moral judgment necessarily has some affective or volitional component that supplies a motive for the relevant action but that renders morality less a matter of reason and truth than of feeling or commitment. It is also possible in the abstract to motivational explanation motivational internalism 592    592 Mo Tzu mysticism 593 draw an analogous distinction between two forms of motivational externalism, cognitivist and noncognitivist, but because the view springs from an interest in assimilating practical judgment to theoretical judgment, its only influential form has been cognitivist.  EMOTIVISM, ETHICS, HUME. J.D. Mo Tzu, also known as Master Mo, Mo Ti (fifth century B.C.), Chinese philosopher and founder of the Mohist school of thought, which was a major rival to Confucianism in ancient China. The text Mo Tzu contains different versions of his teachings as well as subsequent developments of his thought. Mo Tzu regarded rightness (yi) as determined by what benefits (li) the public, where benefit is understood in terms of such things as order and increased resources in society. He opposed the musical activities and ritual practices of the Confucians on the ground that such practices are detrimental to the public good. He is probably best known for advocating the ideal of an equal concern to benefit and avoid harm to every human being. Practicing this ideal is to the public good, since strife and disorder stem from partiality toward oneself or one’s family or social group. Also, it being the will of Heaven (t’ien) that people have equal concern for all, one will be rewarded or punished by Heaven according to whether one practices this ideal. In response to worries about the practicability of the ideal, Mo Tzu insisted that it was simple and easy to put the ideal into practice, leaving himself open to the charge that he neglected the complexities of emotional management.  CONFUCIANISM, MOHISM. K.-l.S. Mou Tsung-san (1909–95), Chinese philosopher, perhaps the most original thinker among contemporary Neo-Confucians. Educated at Peking University, he first studied Western philosophy but was converted to Chinese philosophy under the influence of Hsiung Shih-li. He made a great breakthrough in his study of Sung–Ming NeoConfucian philosophy, arguing that Chu Hsi was really a side branch that took the position of the orthodoxy. He maintained that all three major Chinese traditions, Confucian, Taoist, and Buddhist, assert that humans have the endowment for intellectual intuition, meaning personal participation in tao (the Way).  CHINESE PHILOSOPHY, HSIUNG SHIH-LI, HSÜ FU-KUAN, NEO-CONFUCIANISM, T’ANG CHÜN-I. S.-h.L. moving rows paradox.ZENO’s PARADOXES. multiple realizability.FUNCTIONALISM. multiple-relation theory.PERCEPTION. mystical experience, an experience alleged to reveal some aspect of reality not normally accessible to sensory experience or cognition. The experience – typically characterized by its profound emotional impact on the one who experiences it, its transcendence of spatial and temporal distinctions, its transitoriness, and its ineffability – is often but not always associated with some religious tradition. In theistic religions, mystical experiences are claimed to be brought about by God or by some other superhuman agent. Theistic mystical experiences evoke feelings of worshipful awe. Their content can vary from something no more articulate than a feeling of closeness to God to something as specific as an item of revealed theology, such as, for a Christian mystic, a vision of the Trinity. Non-theistic mystical experiences are usually claimed to reveal the metaphysical unity of all things and to provide those who experience them with a sense of inner peace or bliss.  MYSTICISM. W.E.M. mysticism, a doctrine or discipline maintaining that one can gain knowledge of reality that is not accessible to sense perception or to rational, conceptual thought. Generally associated with a religious tradition, mysticism can take a theistic form, as it has in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions, or a non-theistic form, as it has in Buddhism and some varieties of Hinduism. Mystics claim that the mystical experience, the vehicle of mystical knowledge, is usually the result of spiritual training, involving some combination of prayer, meditation, fasting, bodily discipline, and renunciation of worldly concerns. Theistic varieties of mysticism describe the mystical experience as granted by God and thus not subject to the control of the mystic. Although theists claim to feel closeness to God during the mystical experience, they regard assertions of identity of the self with God as heretical. Non-theistic varieties are more apt to describe the experience as one that can be induced and controlled by the mystic and in which distinctions between the self and reality, or subject and object, are revealed to be illusory. Mystics claim that, although veridical, their experiences cannot be adequately described in language, because ordinary communication is based on sense experience and conceptual differentiation: mystical writings are thus characterized by metaphor and simile. It is con   593 troversial whether all mystical experiences are basically the same, and whether the apparent diversity among them is the result of interpretations influenced by different cultural traditions.  MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE, PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. W.E.M. myth of Er, a tale at the end of Plato’s Republic dramatizing the rewards of justice and philosophy by depicting the process of reincarnation. Complementing the main argument of the work, that it is intrinsically better to be just than unjust, this longest of Plato’s myths blends traditional lore with speculative cosmology to show that justice also pays, usually in life and certainly in the afterlife. Er, a warrior who revived shortly after death, reports how judges assign the souls of the just to heaven but others to punishment in the underworld, and how most return after a thousand years to behold the celestial order, to choose their next lives, and to be born anew.  PLATO. S.A.W. myth of the given.SELLARS, WILFRID. myth of Er myth of the given 594    594 Nagarjuna (fl. early second century A.D.), Indian Mahayana Buddhist philosopher, founder of the Madhyamika view. The Mulanadhyamakarika Prajña (“The Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way”) and the Sunyatasaptati (“The Septuagint on Emptiness”) are perhaps his major works. He distinguishes between “two truths”: a conditional truth, which is provisional and reflects the sort of distinctions we make in everyday speech and find in ordinary experience; and a final truth, which is that there exists only an ineffable independent reality. Overcoming acceptance of the conventional, conditional truth is requisite for seeing the final truth in enlightenment.  MADHYAMIKA. K.E.Y. Nagel, Ernest (1901–85), Czech-born American philosopher, the preeminent American philosopher of science in the period from the mid-1930s to the 1960s. Arriving in New York as a ten-yearold immigrant, he earned his B.S. degree from the College of the City of New York and his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1931. He was a member of the Philosophy Department at Columbia from 1930 to 1970. He coauthored the influential An Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method with his former teacher, M. R. Cohen. His many publications include two well-known classics: Principles of the Theory of Probability (1939) and Structure of Science (1960). Nagel was sensitive to developments in logic, foundations of mathematics, and probability theory, and he shared with Russell and with members of the Vienna Circle like Carnap and Phillip Frank a respect for the relevance of scientific inquiry for philosophical reflection. But his writing also reveals the influences of M. R. Cohen and that strand in the thinking of the pragmatism of Peirce and Dewey which Nagel himself called “contextualist naturalism.” He was a persuasive critic of Russell’s views of the data of sensation as a source of non-inferential premises for knowledge and of cognate views expressed by some members of the Vienna Circle. Unlike Frege, Russell, Carnap, Popper, and others, he rejected the view that taking account of context in characterizing method threatened to taint philosophical reflection with an unacceptable psychologism. This stance subsequently allowed him to oppose historicist and sociologist approaches to the philosophy of science. Nagel’s contextualism is reflected in his contention that ideas of determinism, probability, explanation, and reduction “can be significantly discussed only if they are directed to the theories or formulations of a science and not its subject matter” (Principles of the Theory of Probability, 1939). This attitude infused his influential discussions of covering law explanation, statistical explanation, functional explanation, and reduction of one theory to another, in both natural and social science. Similarly, his contention that participants in the debate between realism and instrumentalism should clarify the import of their differences for (context-sensitive) scientific methodology served as the core of his argument casting doubt on the significance of the dispute. In addition to his extensive writings on scientific knowledge methodology, Nagel wrote influential essays on measurement, the history of mathematics, and the philosophy of law.  COVERING LAW MODEL, PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE, REDUCTION, VIENNA CIRCLE. I.L. Nagel, Thomas (b.1937), American professor of philosophy and of law at New York University, known for his important contributions in the fields of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and political philosophy. Nagel’s work in these areas is unified by a particular vision of perennial philosophical problems, according to which they emerge from a clash between two perspectives from which human beings can view themselves and the world. From an impersonal perspective, which results from detaching ourselves from our particular viewpoints, we strive to achieve an objective view of the world, whereas from a personal perspective, we see the world from our particular point of view. According to Nagel, dominance of the impersonal perspective in trying to understand reality leads to implausible philosophical views because it fails to accommodate facts about the self, minds, agency, and values that are revealed through engaged personal perspectives. In the philosophy of mind, for instance, Nagel criticizes various reductive accounts of mentality 595 N    595 resulting from taking an exclusively impersonal standpoint because they inevitably fail to account for the irreducibly subjective character of consciousness. In ethics, consequentialist moral theories (like utilitarianism), which feature strong impartialist demands that stem from taking a detached, impersonal perspective, find resistance from the personal perspective within which individual goals and motives are accorded an importance not found in strongly impartialist moral theories. An examination of such problems in metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics is found in his Moral Questions (1979) and The View from Nowhere (1986). In Equality and Partiality (1990) Nagel argues that the impersonal standpoint gives rise to an egalitarian form of impartial regard for all people that often clashes with the goals, concerns, and affections that individuals experience from a personal perspective. Quite generally, then, as Nagel sees it, one important philosophical task is to explore ways in which these two standpoints on both theoretical and practical matters might be integrated. Nagel has also made important contributions regarding the nature and possibility of reason or rationality in both its theoretical and its practical uses. The Possibility of Altruism (1970) is an exploration of the structure of practical reason in which Nagel defends the rationality of prudence and altruism, arguing that the possibility of such behavior is connected with our capacities to view ourselves respectively persisting through time and recognizing the reality of other persons. The Last Word (1998) is a defense of reason against skeptical views, according to which reason is a merely contingent, locally conditioned feature of particular cultures and hence relative.  ETHICS, MORAL RATIONALISM, PHILOSOPHY OF MIND, PRACTICAL REASON. M.C.T. naive realism.PERCEPTION. name, logically proper.RUSSELL. names, causal theory of.CAUSAL THEORY OF PROPER NAMES. names, descriptivist theory of.CAUSAL THEORY OF PROPER NAMES. narrow content.PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. narrow reflective equilibrium.REFLECTIVE EQUILIBRIUM. nativism.FODOR. Natorp, Paul Gerhard.

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

THEOLOGICAL NATURALISM. naturalistic epistemology, an approach to epistemology that views the human subject as a natural phenomenon and uses empirical science to study epistemic activity. The phrase was introduced by Quine (“Epistemology Naturalized,” in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays, 1969), who proposed that epistemology should be a chapter of psychology. Quine construed classical epistemology as Cartesian epistemology, an attempt to ground all knowledge in a firmly logical way on immediate experience. In its twentieth-century embodiment, it hoped to give a translation of all discourse and a deductive validation of all science in terms of sense experience, logic, and set theory. Repudiating this dream as forlorn, Quine urged that epistemology be abandoned and replaced by psychology. It would be a scientific study of how the subject takes sensory stimulations as input and delivers as output a theory of the three-dimensional world. This formulation appears to eliminate the normative mission of epistemology. In later writing, however, Quine has suggested that normative epistemology can be naturalized as a chapter of engineering: the technology of predicting experience, or sensory stimulations. Some theories of knowledge are naturalistic in their depiction of knowers as physical systems in causal interaction with the environment. One such theory is the causal theory of knowing, which says that a person knows that p provided his belief that p has a suitable causal connection with a corresponding state of affairs. Another example is the information-theoretic approach developed by Dretske (Knowledge and the Flow of Information, 1981). This says that a person knows that p only if some signal “carries” this information (that p) to him, where information is construed as an objective commodity that can be processed and transmitted via instruments, gauges, neurons, and the like. Information is “carried” from one site to another when events located at those sites are connected by a suitable lawful dependence. The normative concept of justification has also been the subject of naturalistic construals. Whereas many theories of justified belief focus on logical or probabilistic relations between evidence and hypothesis, naturalistic theories focus on the psychological processes causally responsible for the belief. The logical status of a belief does not fix its justificational status. Belief in a tautology, for instance, is not justified if it is formed by blind trust in an ignorant guru. According to Goldman (Epistemology and Cognition, 1986), a belief qualifies as justified only if it is produced by reliable belief-forming processes, i.e., processes that generally have a high truth ratio. Goldman’s larger program for naturalistic epistemology is called “epistemics,” an interdisciplinary enterprise in which cognitive science would play a major role. Epistemics would seek to identify the subset of cognitive operations available to the human cognizer that are best from a truth-bearing standpoint. Relevant truth-linked properties include problem-solving power and speed, i.e., the abilities to obtain correct answers to questions of interest and to do so quickly. Close connections between epistemology and artificial intelligence have been proposed by Clark Glymour, Gilbert Harman, John Pollock, and Paul Thagard. Harman stresses that principles of good reasoning are not directly given by rules of logic. Modus ponens, e.g., does not tell you to infer q if you already believe p and ‘if p then q’. In some cases it is better to subtract a belief in one of the premises rather than add a belief in q. Belief revision also requires attention to the storage and computational limitations of the mind. Limits of memory capacity, e.g., suggest a principle of clutter avoidance: not filling one’s mind with vast numbers of useless beliefs (Harman, Change in View, 1986). Other conceptions of naturalistic epistemology focus on the history of science. Larry Laudan conceives of naturalistic epistemology as a scientific inquiry that gathers empirical evidence concerning the past track records of various scientific methodologies, with the aim of determining which of these methodologies can best advance the chosen cognitive ends. Naturalistic epistemology need not confine its attention to individual epistemic agents; it can also study communities of agents. This perspective invites contributions from sciences that address the social side of the knowledge-seeking enterprise. If naturalistic epistemology is a normative inquiry, however, it must not simply naturalism, biological naturalistic epistemology 598    598 describe social practices or social influences; it must analyze the impact of these factors on the attainment of cognitive ends. Philosophers such as David Hull, Nicholas Rescher, Philip Kitcher, and Alvin Goldman have sketched models inspired by population biology and economics to explore the epistemic consequences of alternative distributions of research activity and different ways that professional rewards might influence the course of research.  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, EPISTEMOLOGY, NATURALISM, RELIABILISM. A.I.G. naturalistic fallacy.MOORE. natural kind, a category of entities classically conceived as having modal implications; e.g., if Socrates is a member of the natural kind human being, then he is necessarily a human being. The idea that nature fixes certain sortals, such as ‘water’ and ‘human being’, as correct classifications that appear to designate kinds of entities has roots going back at least to Plato and Aristotle. Anil Gupta has argued that sortals are to be distinguished from properties designated by such predicates as ‘red’ by including criteria for individuating the particulars (bits or amounts for mass nouns) that fall under them as well as criteria for sorting those particulars into the class. Quine is salient among those who find the modal implications of natural kinds objectionable. He has argued that the idea of natural kinds is rooted in prescientific intuitive judgments of comparative similarity, and he has suggested that as these intuitive classifications are replaced by classifications based on scientific theories these modal implications drop away. Kripke and Putnam have argued that science in fact uses natural kind terms having the modal implications Quine finds so objectionable. They see an important role in scientific methodology for the capacity to refer demonstratively to such natural kinds by pointing out particulars that fall under them. Certain inferences within science – such as the inference to the charge for electrons generally from the measurement of the charge on one or a few electrons – seem to be additional aspects of a role for natural kind terms in scientific practice. Other roles in the methodology of science for natural kind concepts have been discussed in recent work by Ian Hacking and Thomas Kuhn.  COUNT NOUN, ESSENTIALISM, PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE, QUALITATIVE PREDICATE. W.Har. natural language.FORMAL LANGUAGE, PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE. natural law, also called law of nature, in moral and political philosophy, an objective norm or set of objective norms governing human behavior, similar to the positive laws of a human ruler, but binding on all people alike and usually understood as involving a superhuman legislator. Ancient Greek and Roman thought, particularly Stoicism, introduced ideas of eternal laws directing the actions of all rational beings and built into the very structure of the universe. Roman lawyers developed a doctrine of a law that all civilized peoples would recognize, and made some effort to explain it in terms of a natural law common to animals and humans. The most influential forms of natural law theory, however, arose from later efforts to use Stoic and legal language to work out a Christian theory of morality and politics. The aim was to show that the principles of morals could be known by reason alone, without revelation, so that the whole human race could know how to live properly. The law of nature applies, on this understanding, only to rational beings, who can obey or disobey it deliberately and freely. It is thus different in kind from the laws God laid down for the inanimate and irrational parts of creation. Natural law theorists often saw continuities and analogies between natural laws for humans and those for the rest of creation but did not confuse them. The most enduringly influential natural law writer was Aquinas. On his view God’s eternal reason ordains laws directing all things to act for the good of the community of the universe, the declaration of His own glory. Human reason can participate sufficiently in God’s eternal reason to show us the good of the human community. The natural law is thus our sharing in the eternal law in a way appropriate to our human nature. God lays down certain other laws through revelation; these divine laws point us toward our eternal goal. The natural law concerns our earthly good, and needs to be supplemented by human laws. Such laws can vary from community to community, but to be binding they must always stay within the limits of the law of nature. God engraved the most basic principles of the natural law in the minds of all people alike, but their detailed application takes reasoning powers that not everyone may have. Opponents of Aquinas – called voluntarists – argued that God’s will, not his intellect, is the source of law, and that God could have laid down different natural laws for us. Hugo Grotius naturalistic fallacy natural law 599    599 rejected their position, but unlike Aquinas he conceived of natural law as meant not to direct us to bring about some definite common good but to set the limits on the ways in which each of us could properly pursue our own personal aims. This Grotian outlook was developed by Hobbes, Pufendorf, and Locke along voluntarist lines. Thomistic views continued to be expounded by Protestant as well as Roman Catholic writers until the end of the seventeenth century. Thereafter, while natural law theory remained central to Catholic teaching, it ceased to attract major new non-Catholic proponents. Natural law doctrine in both Thomistic and Grotian versions treats morality as basically a matter of compliance with law. Obligation and duty, obedience and disobedience, merit and guilt, reward and punishment, are central notions. Virtues are simply habits of following laws. Though the law is suited to our distinctive human nature and can be discovered by the proper use of reason, it is not a self-imposed law. In following it we are obeying God. Since the early eighteenth century, philosophical discussions of whether or not there is an objective morality have largely ceased to center on natural law. The idea remains alive, however, in jurisprudence. Natural law theories are opposed to legal positivism, the view that the only binding laws are those imposed by human sovereigns, who cannot be subject to higher legal constraints. Legal theorists arguing that there are rational objective limits to the legislative power of rulers often think of these limits in terms of natural law, even when their theories do not invoke or imply any of the religious aspects of earlier natural law positions.  AQUINAS, GROTIUS, HOBBES, PHILOSOPHY OF LAW, PUFENDORF. J.B.S. natural light.DESCARTES. natural meaning.MEANING. naturalness.JUAN CHI. natural number.MATHEMATICAL ANALYSIS, MATHEMATICAL INDUCTION. natural philosophy, the study of nature or of the spatiotemporal world. This was regarded as a task for philosophy before the emergence of modern science, especially physics and astronomy, and the term is now only used with reference to premodern times. Philosophical questions about nature still remain, e.g., whether materialism is true, but they would usually be placed in metaphysics or in a branch of it that may be called philosophy of nature. Natural philosophy is not to be confused with metaphysical naturalism, which is the metaphysical view (no part of science itself) that all that there is is the spatiotemporal world and that the only way to study it is that of the empirical sciences. It is also not to be confused with natural theology, which also may be considered part of metaphysics.  METAPHYSICS. P.Bu. natural religion, a term first occurring in the second half of the seventeenth century, used in three related senses, the most common being (1) a body of truths about God and our duty that can be discovered by natural reason. These truths are sufficient for salvation or (according to some orthodox Christians) would have been sufficient if Adam had not sinned. Natural religion in this sense should be distinguished from natural theology, which does not imply this. A natural religion may also be (2) one that has a human, as distinct from a divine, origin. It may also be (3) a religion of human nature as such, as distinguished from religious beliefs and practices that have been determined by local circumstances. Natural religion in the third sense is identified with humanity’s original religion. In all three senses, natural religion includes a belief in God’s existence, justice, benevolence, and providential government; in immortality; and in the dictates of common morality. While the concept is associated with deism, it is also sympathetically treated by Christian writers like Clarke, who argues that revealed religion simply restores natural religion to its original purity and adds inducements to compliance. 

CLARKE, PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. W.J.Wa. natural right.RIGHTS. natural selection.DARWINISM. natural sign.THEORY OF SIGNS. natural theology.PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION, THEOLOGIA NATURALIS. natura naturans.SPINOZA. natura naturata.SPINOZA. nature, law of.NATURAL LAW, PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE. natural light nature, law of 600    600 nature, right of.HOBBES. nature, state of.HOBBES. Naturphilosophie.SCHELLING. Naturwissenschaften.WEBER. Néant.SARTRE. necessary.CONTINGENT. necessary condition.CONDITION. necessary truth.NECESSITY. necessitarianism, the doctrine that necessity is an objective feature of the world. Natural language permits speakers to express modalities: a state of affairs can be actual (Paris’s being in France), merely possible (chlorophyll’s making things blue), or necessary (2 ! 2 % 4). Anti-necessitarians believe that these distinctions are not grounded in the nature of the world. Some of them claim that the distinctions are merely verbal. Others, e.g., Hume, believed that psychological facts, like our expectations of future events, explain the idea of necessity. Yet others contend that the modalities reflect epistemic considerations; necessity reflects the highest level of an inquirer’s commitment. Some necessitarians believe there are different modes of metaphysical necessity, e.g., causal and logical necessity. Certain proponents of idealism believe that each fact is necessarily connected with every other fact so that the ultimate goal of scientific inquiry is the discovery of a completely rigorous mathematical system of the world.  DETERMINISM, FREE WILL PROBLEM. B.B. necessity, a modal property attributable to a whole proposition (dictum) just when it is not possible that the proposition be false (the proposition being de dicto necessary). Narrowly construed, a proposition P is logically necessary provided P satisfies certain syntactic conditions, namely, that P’s denial is formally self-contradictory. More broadly, P is logically necessary just when P satisfies certain semantic conditions, namely, that P’s denial is false, and P true, in all possible worlds. These semantic conditions were first suggested by Leibniz, refined by Wittgenstein and Carnap, and fully developed as the possible worlds semantics of Kripke, Hintikka, et al., in the 1960s. Previously, philosophers had to rely largely on intuition to determine the acceptability or otherwise of formulas involving the necessity operator, A, and were at a loss as to which of various axiomatic systems for modal logic, as developed in the 1930s by C. I. Lewis, best captured the notion of logical necessity. There was much debate, for instance, over the characteristic (NN) thesis of Lewis’s system S4, namely, AP / A AP (if P is necessary then it is necessarily necessary). But given a Leibnizian account of the truth conditions for a statement of the form Aa namely (R1) that Aa is true provided a is true in all possible worlds, and (R2) that Aa is false provided there is at least one possible world in which a is false, a proof can be constructed by reductio ad absurdum. For suppose that AP / AAP is false in some arbitrarily chosen world W. Then its antecedent will be true in W, and hence (by R1) it follows (a) that P will be true in all possible worlds. But equally its consequent will be false in W, and hence (by R2) AP will be false in at least one possible world, from which (again by R2) it follows (b) that P will be false in at least one possible world, thus contradicting (a). A similar proof can be constructed for the characteristic thesis of S5, namely, -A-P / A-A-P (if P is possibly true then it is necessarily possible). Necessity is also attributable to a property F of an object O provided it is not possible that (there is no possible world in which) O exists and lacks F – F being de re necessary, internal or essential to O. For instance, the non-repeatable (haecceitist) property of being identical to O is de re necessary (essential) to O, and arguably the repeatable property of being extended is de re necessary to all colored objects.  CONTINGENT, ESSENTIALISM, HAECCEITY, MODAL LOGIC, POSSIBLE WORLDS. R.D.B. necessity, metaphysical.NECESSITY, PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. necessity, nomic.LAWLIKE GENERALIZATION. negation, the logical operation on propositions that is indicated, e.g., by the prefatory clause ‘It is not the case that . . .’. Negation is standardly distinguished sharply from the operation on predicates that is called complementation and that is indicated by the prefix ‘non-’. Because negation can also be indicated by the adverb ‘not’, a distinction is often drawn between external negation, which is indicated by attaching the prefatory ‘It is not the case that . . .’ to an assertion, and internal negation, which is indicated by inserting the adverb ‘not’ (along with, perhaps, nature, right of negation 601    601 grammatically necessary words like ‘do’ or ‘does’) into the assertion in such a way as to indicate that the adverb ‘not’ modifies the verb. In a number of cases, the question arises as to whether external and internal negation yield logically equivalent results. For example, ‘It is not the case that Santa Claus exists’ would seem obviously to be true, whereas ‘Santa Claus does not exist’ seems to some philosophers to presuppose what it denies, on the ground that nothing could be truly asserted of Santa Claus unless he existed.  DOUBLE NEGATION, TRUTH TABLE. R.W.B. negation-complete.COMPLETENESS. negative duty.DUTY. negative feedback.CYBERNETICS. negative freedom.

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

neo-Kantianism, the diverse Kantian movement that emerged within German philosophy in the 1860s, gained a strong academic foothold in the 1870s, reached its height during the three decades prior to World War I, and disappeared with the rise of Nazism. The movement was initially focused on renewed study and elaboration of Kant’s epistemology in response to the growing epistemic authority of the natural sciences and as an alternative to both Hegelian and speculative idealism and the emerging materialism of, among others, Ludwig Büchner (1824–99). Later neo-Kantianism explored Kant’s whole philosophy, applied his critical method to disciplines other than the natural sciences, and developed its own philosophical systems. Some originators and/or early contributors were Kuno Fischer (1824–1907), Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–94), Friedrich Albert Lange (1828–75), Eduard Zeller (1814–1908), and Otto Liebmann (1840–1912), whose Kant und die Epigonen (1865) repeatedly stated what became a neoKantian motto, “Back to Kant!” Several forms of neo-Kantianism are to be distinguished. T. K. Oesterreich (1880–1949), in Friedrich Ueberwegs Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie (“F.U.’s Compendium of the History of Philosophy,” 1923), developed the standard, somewhat chronological, classification: (1) The physiological neo-Kantianism of Helmholtz and Lange, who claimed that physiology is “developed or corrected Kantianism.” (2) The metaphysical neo-Kantianism of the later Liebmann, who argued for a Kantian “critical metaphysics” (beyond epistemology) in the form of “hypotheses” about the essence of things. (3) The realist neo-Kantianism of Alois Riehl (1844–1924), who emphasized the real existence of Kant’s thing-in-itself. (4) The logistic-methodological neo-Kantianism of the Marburg School of Hermann Cohen (1842–1918) and Paul Natorp (1854–1924). (5) The axiological neo-Kantianism of the Baden or Southwest German School of Windelband (1848–1915) and Heinrich Rickert (1863–1936). (6) The relativistic neo-Kantianism of Georg Simmel (1858–1918), who argued for Kantian categories relative to individuals and cultures. (7) The psychological neo-Kantianism of Leonard Nelson (1882–1927), originator of the Göttingen School; also known as the neo-Friesian School, after Jakob Friedrich Fries (1773–1843), Nelson’s self-proclaimed precursor. Like Fries, Nelson held that Kantian a priori principles cannot be transcendentally justified, but can be discovered only through introspection. Oesterreich’s classification has been narrowed or modified, partly because of conflicting views on how distinctly “Kantian” a philosopher must have been to be called “neo-Kantian.” The very term ‘neo-Kantianism’ has even been called into question, as suggesting real intellectual commonality where little or none is to be found. There is, however, growing consensus that Marneo-Euclidean geometry neo-Kantianism 603    603 burg and Baden neo-Kantianism were the most important and influential. Marburg School. Its founder, Cohen, developed its characteristic Kantian idealism of the natural sciences by arguing that physical objects are truly known only through the laws of these sciences and that these laws presuppose the application of Kantian a priori principles and concepts. Cohen elaborated this idealism by eliminating Kant’s dualism of sensibility and understanding, claiming that space and time are construction methods of “pure thought” rather than a priori forms of perception and that the notion of any “given” (perceptual data) prior to the “activity” of “pure thought” is meaningless. Accordingly, Cohen reformulated Kant’s thing-in-itself as the regulative idea that the mathematical description of the world can always be improved. Cohen also emphasized that “pure thought” refers not to individual consciousess – on his account Kant had not yet sufficiently left behind a “subject–object” epistemology – but rather to the content of his own system of a priori principles, which he saw as subject to change with the progress of science. Just as Cohen held that epistemology must be based on the “fact of science,” he argued, in a decisive step beyond Kant, that ethics must transcendentally deduce both the moral law and the ideal moral subject from a humanistic science – more specifically, from jurisprudence’s notion of the legal person. This analysis led to the view that the moral law demands that all institutions, including economic enterprises, become democratic – so that they display unified wills and intentions as transcendental conditions of the legal person – and that all individuals become colegislators. Thus Cohen arrived at his frequently cited claim that Kant “is the true and real originator of German socialism.” Other important Marburg Kantians were Cohen’s colleague Natorp, best known for his studies on Plato and philosophy of education, and their students Karl Vorländer (1860–1928), who focused on Kantian socialist ethics as a corrective of orthodox Marxism, and Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945). Baden School. The basic task of philosophy and its transcendental method is seen as identifying universal values that make possible culture in its varied expressions. This focus is evident in Windelband’s influential insight that the natural sciences seek to formulate general laws – nomothetic knowledge – while the historical sciences seek to describe unique events – idiographic knowledge. This distinction is based on the values (interests) of mastery of nature and understanding and reliving the unique past in order to affirm our individuality. Windelband’s view of the historical sciences as idiographic raised the problem of selection central to his successor Rickert’s writings: How can historians objectively determine which individual events are historically significant? Rickert argued that this selection must be based on the values that are generally recognized within the cultures under investigation, not on the values of historians themselves. Rickert also developed the transcendental argument that the objectivity of the historical sciences necessitates the assumption that the generally recognized values of different cultures approximate in various degrees universally valid values. This argument was rejected by Weber, whose methodological work was greatly indebted to Rickert.  CASSIRER, COHEN, KANT, LANGE, TRANSCENDENTAL ARGUMENT, WINDELBAND. H.v.d.L. Neoplatonism, that period of Platonism following on the new impetus provided by the philosophical speculations of Plotinus (A.D. 204–69). It extends, as a minimum, to the closing of the Platonic School in Athens by Justinian in 529, but maximally through Byzantium, with such figures as Michael Psellus (1018–78) and Pletho (c.1360–1452), the Renaissance (Ficino, Pico, and the Florentine Academy), and the early modern period (the Cambridge Platonists, Thomas Taylor), to the advent of the “scientific” study of the works of Plato with Schleiermacher (1768–1834) at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The term was formerly also used to characterize the whole period from the Old Academy of Plato’s immediate successors, Speusippus and Xenocrates, through what is now termed Middle Platonism (c.80 B.C.–A.D. 220), down to Plotinus. This account confines itself to the “minimum” interpretation. Neoplatonism proper may be divided into three main periods: that of Plotinus and his immediate followers (third century); the “Syrian” School of Iamblichus and his followers (fourth century); and the “Athenian” School begun by Plutarch of Athens, and including Syrianus, Proclus, and their successors, down to Damascius (fifth–sixth centuries). Plotinus and his school. Plotinus’s innovations in Platonism (developed in his essays, the Enneads, collected and edited by his pupil Porphyry after his death), are mainly two: (a) above Neoplatonism Neoplatonism 604    604 the traditional supreme principle of earlier Platonism (and Aristotelianism), a self-thinking intellect, which was also regarded as true being, he postulated a principle superior to intellect and being, totally unitary and simple (“the One”); (b) he saw reality as a series of levels (One, Intelligence, Soul), each higher one outflowing or radiating into the next lower, while still remaining unaffected in itself, and the lower ones fixing themselves in being by somehow “reflecting back” upon their priors. This eternal process gives the universe its existence and character. Intelligence operates in a state of non-temporal simultaneity, holding within itself the “forms” of all things. Soul, in turn, generates time, and receives the forms into itself as “reason principles” (logoi). Our physical three-dimensional world is the result of the lower aspect of Soul (nature) projecting itself upon a kind of negative field of force, which Plotinus calls “matter.” Matter has no positive existence, but is simply the receptacle for the unfolding of Soul in its lowest aspect, which projects the forms in three-dimensional space. Plotinus often speaks of matter as “evil” (e.g. Enneads II.8), and of the Soul as suffering a “fall” (e.g. Enneads V.1, 1), but in fact he sees the whole cosmic process as an inevitable result of the superabundant productivity of the One, and thus “the best of all possible worlds.” Plotinus was himself a mystic, but he arrived at his philosophical conclusions by perfectly logical means, and he had not much use for either traditional religion or any of the more recent superstitions. His immediate pupils, Amelius (c.225–90) and Porphyry (234–c.305), while somewhat more hospitable to these, remained largely true to his philosophy (though Amelius had a weakness for triadic elaborations in metaphysics). Porphyry was to have wide influence, both in the Latin West (through such men as Marius Victorinus, Augustine, and Boethius), and in the Greek East (and even, through translations, on medieval Islam), as the founder of the Neoplatonic tradition of commentary on both Plato and Aristotle, but it is mainly as an expounder of Plotinus’s philosophy that he is known. He added little that is distinctive, though that little is currently becoming better appreciated. Iamblichus and the Syrian School. Iamblichus (c.245–325), descendant of an old Syrian noble family, was a pupil of Porphyry’s, but dissented from him on various important issues. He set up his own school in Apamea in Syria, and attracted many pupils. One chief point of dissent was the role of theurgy (really just magic, with philosophical underpinnings, but not unlike Christian sacramental theology). Iamblichus claimed, as against Porphyry, that philosophical reasoning alone could not attain the highest degree of enlightenment, without the aid of theurgic rites, and his view on this was followed by all later Platonists. He also produced a metaphysical scheme far more elaborate than Plotinus’s, by a Scholastic filling in, normally with systems of triads, of gaps in the “chain of being” left by Plotinus’s more fluid and dynamic approach to philosophy. For instance, he postulated two Ones, one completely transcendent, the other the source of all creation, thus “resolving” a tension in Plotinus’s metaphysics. Iamblichus was also concerned to fit as many of the traditional gods as possible into his system, which later attracted the attention of the Emperor Julian, who based himself on Iamblichus when attempting to set up a Hellenic religion to rival Christianity, a project which, however, died with him in 363. The Athenian School. The precise links between the pupils of Iamblichus and Plutarch (d.432), founder of the Athenian School, remain obscure, but the Athenians always retained a great respect for the Syrian. Plutarch himself is a dim figure, but Syrianus (c.370–437), though little of his writings survives, can be seen from constant references to him by his pupil Proclus (412– 85) to be a major figure, and the source of most of Proclus’s metaphysical elaborations. The Athenians essentially developed and systematized further the doctrines of Iamblichus, creating new levels of divinity (e.g. intelligibleintellectual gods, and “henads” in the realm of the One – though they rejected the two Ones), this process reaching its culmination in the thought of the last head of the Athenian Academy, Damascius (c.456–540). The drive to systematize reality and to objectivize concepts, exhibited most dramatically in Proclus’s Elements of Theology, is a lasting legacy of the later Neoplatonists, and had a significant influence on the thought, among others, of Hegel. 

neo-Scholasticism, the movement given impetus Neoplatonism, Islamic neo-Scholasticism 605    605 by Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879), which, while stressing Aquinas, was a general recommendation of the study of medieval Scholasticism as a source for the solution of vexing modern problems. Leo assumed that there was a doctrine common to Aquinas, Bonaventure, Albertus Magnus, and Duns Scotus, and that Aquinas was a preeminent spokesman of the common view. Maurice De Wulf employed the phrase ‘perennial philosophy’ to designate this common medieval core as well as what of Scholasticism is relevant to later times. Historians like Mandonnet, Grabmann, and Gilson soon contested the idea that there was a single medieval doctrine and drew attention to the profound differences between the great medieval masters. The discussion of Christian philosophy precipitated by Brehier in 1931 generated a variety of suggestions as to what medieval thinkers and later Christian philosophers have in common, but this was quite different from the assumption of Aeterni Patris. The pedagogical directives of this and later encyclicals brought about a revival of Thomism rather than of Scholasticism, generally in seminaries, ecclesiastical colleges, and Catholic universities. Louvain’s Higher Institute of Philosophy under the direction of Cardinal Mercier and its Revue de Philosophie Néoscolastique were among the first fruits of the Thomistic revival. The studia generalia of the Dominican order continued at a new pace, the Saulchoir publishing the Revue thomiste. In graduate centers in Milan, Madrid, Latin America, Paris, and Rome, men were trained for the task of teaching in colleges and seminaries, and scholarly research began to flourish as well. The Leonine edition of the writings of Aquinas was soon joined by new critical editions of Bonaventure, Duns Scotus, and Ockham, as well as Albertus Magnus. Medieval studies in the broader sense gained from the quest for manuscripts and the growth of paleography and codicology. Besides the historians mentioned above, Jacques Maritain (1882–1973), a layman and convert to Catholicism, did much both in his native France and in the United States to promote the study of Aquinas. The Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies at Toronto, with Gilson regularly and Maritain frequently in residence, became a source of college and university teachers in Canada and the United States, as Louvain and, in Rome, the Jesuit Gregorianum and the Dominican Angelicum already were. In the 1940s Americans took doctorates in theology and philosophy at Laval in Quebec and soon the influence of Charles De Koninck was felt. Jesuits at St. Louis University began to publish The Modern Schoolman, Dominicans in Washington The Thomist, and the American Catholic Philosophical Association The New Scholasticism. The School of Philosophy at Catholic University, long the primary domestic source of professors and scholars, was complemented by graduate programs at St. Louis, Georgetown, Notre Dame, Fordham, and Marquette. In the golden period of the Thomistic revival in the United States, from the 1930s until the end of the Vatican Council II in 1965, there were varieties of Thomism based on the variety of views on the relation between philosophy and science. By the 1960s Thomistic philosophy was a prominent part of the curriculum of all Catholic colleges and universities. By 1970, it had all but disappeared under the mistaken notion that this was the intent of Vatican II. This had the effect of releasing Aquinas into the wider philosophical world.  AQUINAS, NEO-THOMISM, SCHOLASTICISM. R.M. Neo-Taoism, in Chinese, hsüan-hsüeh (‘Profound Learning’, ‘Mysterious Learning’, or ‘Dark Learning’), a broad, multifaceted revival of Taoist learning that dominated Chinese philosophy from the third to the sixth century A.D. Literally ‘dark red’, hsüan is used in the Lao Tzu (Tao Te Ching) to describe the sublime mystery of the tao. Historically, hsüan-hsüeh formed a major topic of “Pure Conversation” (ch’ing-t’an), where scholars in a time of political upheaval sought to arrest the perceived decline of the tao. When the Wei dynasty replaced the Han in A.D. 220, a first wave of Neo-Taoist philosophers represented by Ho Yen (c.190–249) and Wang Pi (226–49) radically reinterpreted the classical heritage to bring to light its profound meaning. The Confucian orthodoxy – as distinguished from the original teachings of Confucius – was deemed ineffectual and an obstacle to renewal. One of the most important debates in Profound Learning – the debate on “words and meaning” – criticizes Han scholarship for its literal imagination and confronts the question of interpretation. Words are necessary but not sufficient for understanding. The ancient sages had a unified view of the Tao, articulated most clearly in the I-Ching, Lao Tzu, and Chuang Tzu, but distorted by Han scholars. Most Neo-Taoists concentrated on these “Three Profound Treatises” (san-hsüan). Wang Pi is best known for his commentaries on the I-Ching and the Lao Tzu; and Kuo Hsiang (d.312), another Neo-Taoism Neo-Taoism 606    606 leading Neo-Taoist, is arguably the most important Chuang Tzu commentator in Chinese history. The tao is the source of all being, but against identifying the tao with a creator “heaven” or an original “vital energy” (ch’i), Wang Pi argues that being originates from “non-being” (wu). The concept of non-being, taken from the Lao Tzu, brings out the transcendence of the tao. Nameless and without form, the tao as such can be described only negatively as wu, literally “not having” any characteristics. In contrast, for Kuo Hsiang, non-being does not explain the origin of being because, as entirely conceptual, it cannot create anything. If non-being cannot bring forth being, and if the idea of a creator remains problematic, the only alternative is to regard the created order as coming into existence spontaneously. This implies that being is eternal. Particular beings can be traced to contingent causes, but ultimately the origin of being can be understood only in terms of a process of “selftransformation.” Chinese sources often contrast Wang Pi’s “valuing non-being” (kuei-wu) with Kuo Hsiang’s “exaltation of being” (ch’ung-yu). In ethics and politics, Wang stresses that the tao is manifest in nature as constant principles (li). This is what the classics mean by tzu-jan, naturalness or literally what is of itself so. The hierarchical structure of sociopolitical relations also has a basis in the order of nature. While Wang emphasizes unity, Kuo Hsiang champions diversity. The principle of nature dictates that everyone has a particular “share” of vital energy, the creative power of the tao that determines one’s physical, intellectual, and moral capacity. Individual differences ought to be accepted, but do not warrant value discrimination. Each individual is in principle complete in his/her own way, and constitutes an indispensable part in a larger whole. Taoist ethics thus consists in being true to oneself, and nourishing one’s nature. In government, naturalness finds expression in non-action (wu-wei), which may be contrasted with Legalist policies emphasizing punishment and control. For Wang Pi, wu-wei aims at preserving the natural order so that the myriad things can flourish. Practically, it involves the elimination of willful intervention and a return to “emptiness and quiescence”; i.e., freedom from the dictates of desire and a life of guileless simplicity. Not to be confused with total inaction, according to Kuo Hsiang, wu-weisignifies a mode of being that fully uses one’s natural endowment. When one is guided by inherent moral principles, there is no place for artificiality or self-deception in the Taoist way of life. Ethical purity does not entail renunciation. Though the sage finds himself along the corridors of power, he safeguards his nature and remains empty of desire. In government, the sage ruler naturally reduces arbitrary restrictions, adjusts policies to suit changing needs, identifies the right people for office, and generally creates an environment in which all under heaven can dwell in peace and realize their potential. Ho Yen died a victim of political intrigue, at the close of the Cheng-shih reign period (240–49) of the Wei dynasty. Wang Pi died later in the same year. Historians refer to “Cheng-shih hsüanhsüeh” to mark the first phase of Neo-Taoism. Later, political power was controlled by the Ssuma family, who eventually founded the Chin dynasty in A.D. 265. During the Wei–Chin transition, a group of intellectuals, the “Seven Worthies of the Bamboo Grove,” came to represent the voice of Profound Learning. Among them, Hsi K’ang (223–62), Juan Chi (210–63), and Hsiang Hsiu (c.227–80) are of particular interest to philosophy. In different ways, they look to naturalness as a basis for renewal. Debates in Profound Learning often revolve around the relationship between “orthodox teachings” (ming-chiao) and tzu-jan. For Wang Pi and Kuo Hsiang, government and society should ideally conform to nature. Both Hsi K’ang and Juan Chi found ming-chiao impinging on naturalness. This also gave impetus to the development of a counterculture. Central to this is the place of emotion in the ethical life. Ho Yen is credited with the view that sages are without emotions (ch’ing), whose exceptional ch’i-endowment translates into a purity of being that excludes emotional disturbance. Hsi K’ang also values dispassion, and Hsiang Hsiu urges putting passion under the rule of ritual; but many appreciated strong emotion as a sign of authenticity, which often contravened orthodox teachings. As Pure Conversation gained currency, it became fashionable to give free rein to one’s impulses; and many hoped to establish a reputation by opposing orthodoxy. The debate on naturalness raises the further question of talent or capacity (ts’ai) and its relationship to human nature (hsing). In Profound Learning, four distinct positions have been proposed: that talent and nature are identical (t’ung); different (i); harmonious (ho); and separate (li). This is important because the right talent must be identified to serve political ends. In the early fourth century, the Chin dynasty had to flee its capital and rebuild in south China. As the literati resettled, they looked back to the Neo-Taoism Neo-Taoism 607    607 time of Ho Yen and Wang Pi as the golden age of Profound Learning. Although Pure Conversation continued with undiminished vigor, it did not introduce many new ideas. As it entered its last phase, another Taoist work, the Lieh-tzu, came to rival the “Three Profound Treatises.” Chang Chan (c.330–400) wrote an important commentary on the work, which not only recapitulated many of the ideas that spanned the spectrum of Neo-Taoist philosophy but also borrowed Buddhist ideas. From the fourth century onward, Buddhist masters frequently engaged in Pure Conversation and challenged hsüan-hsüeh scholars at their own game.  BUDDHISM, CHINESE LEGALISM, CHINESE PHILOSOPHY. A.K.L.C. Neo-Thomism, a philosophical-theological movement in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries manifesting a revival of interest in Aquinas. It was stimulated by Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879) calling for a renewed emphasis on the teaching of Thomistic principles to meet the intellectual and social challenges of modernity. The movement reached its peak in the 1950s, though its influence continues to be seen in organizations such as the American Catholic Philosophical Association. Among its major figures are Joseph Kleutgen, Désiré Mercier, Joseph Maréchal, Pierre Rousselot, Réginald Garrigou-LaGrange, Martin Grabmann, M.-D. Chenu, Jacques Maritain, Étienne Gilson, Yves R. Simon, Josef Pieper, Karl Rahner, Cornelio Fabro, Emerich Coreth, Bernard Lonergan, and W. Norris Clarke. Few, if any, of these figures have described themselves as NeoThomists; some explicitly rejected the designation. Neo-Thomists have little in common except their commitment to Aquinas and his relevance to the contemporary world. Their interest produced a more historically accurate understanding of Aquinas and his contribution to medieval thought (Grabmann, Gilson, Chenu), including a previously ignored use of the Platonic metaphysics of participation (Fabro). This richer understanding of Aquinas, as forging a creative synthesis in the midst of competing traditions, has made arguing for his relevance easier. Those Neo-Thomists who were suspicious of modernity produced fresh readings of Aquinas’s texts applied to contemporary problems (Pieper, Gilson). Their influence can be seen in the revival of virtue theory and the work of Alasdair MacIntyre. Others sought to develop Aquinas’s thought with the aid of later Thomists (Maritain, Simon) and incorporated the interpretations of Counter-Reformation Thomists, such as Cajetan and Jean Poinsot, to produce more sophisticated, and controversial, accounts of the intelligence, intentionality, semiotics, and practical knowledge. Those Neo-Thomists willing to engage modern thought on its own terms interpreted modern philosophy sympathetically using the principles of Aquinas (Maréchal, Lonergan, Clarke), seeking dialogue rather than confrontation. However, some readings of Aquinas are so thoroughly integrated into modern philosophy that they can seem assimilated (Rahner, Coreth); their highly individualized metaphysics inspired as much by other philosophical influences, especially Heidegger, as Aquinas. Some of the labels currently used among Neo-Thomists suggest a division in the movement over critical, postKantian methodology. ‘Existential Thomism’ is used for those who emphasize both the real distinction between essence and existence and the role of the sensible in the mind’s first grasp of being. ‘Transcendental Thomism’ applies to figures like Maréchal, Rousselot, Rahner, and Coreth who rely upon the inherent dynamism of the mind toward the real, rooted in Aquinas’s theory of the active intellect, from which to deduce their metaphysics of being.  AQUINAS, GILSON, MARITAIN, MERCIER, THOMISM. D.W.H. Neumann, John von.VON NEUMANN. neural net.CONNECTIONISM. neural network modeling.CONNECTIONISM. Neurath, Otto.VIENNA CIRCLE. neurophilosophy.CHURCHLAND, PATRICIA. neuroscience.COGNITIVE SCIENCE. neustic.PRESCRIPTIVISM. neutrality.LIBERALISM. neutral monism.PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. New Academy, the name given the Academy, the school founded by Plato in Athens, during the time it was controlled by Academic Skeptics after about 265 B.C. Its principal leaders in this period were Arcesilaus (315–242) and Carneades (219– 129); our most accessible source for the New Academy is Cicero’s Academica. A master of logical techniques such as sorites Neo-Thomism New Academy 608    608 (which he learned from Diodorus), Arcesilaus attempted to revive the dialectic of Plato, using it to achieve the suspension of belief he learned to value from Pyrrho. Later, and especially under the leadership of Carneades, the New Academy developed a special relationship with Stoicism: as the Stoics found new ways to defend their doctrine of the criterion, Carneades found new ways to refute it in the Stoics’ own terms. Carneades’ visit to Rome in 155 B.C. with a Stoic and a Peripatetic marks the beginning of Rome’s interest in Greek philosophy. His anti-Stoic arguments were recorded by his successor Clitomachus (d. c.110 B.C.), whose work is known to us through summaries in Cicero. Clitomachus was succeeded by Philo of Larisa (c.160–79 B.C.), who was the teacher of Antiochus of Ascalon (c.130–c.67 B.C.). Philo later attempted to reconcile the Old and the New Academy by softening the Skepticism of the New and by fostering a Skeptical reading of Plato. Angered by this, Antiochus broke away in about 87 B.C. to found what he called the Old Academy, which is now considered to be the beginning of Middle Platonism. Probably about the same time, Aenesidemus (dates unknown) revived the strict Skepticism of Pyrrho and founded the school that is known to us through the work of Sextus Empiricus. Academic Skepticism differed from Pyrrhonism in its sharp focus on Stoic positions, and possibly in allowing for a weak assent (as opposed to belief, which they suspended) in what is probable; and Pyrrhonians accused Academic Skeptics of being dogmatic in their rejection of the possibility of knowledge. The New Academy had a major influence on the development of modern philosophy, most conspicuously through Hume, who considered that his brand of mitigated skepticism belonged to this school. 

ACADEMY, ISLAMIC NEOPLATONISM, SKEPTICS. P.Wo. Newcomb’s paradox, a conflict between two widely accepted principles of rational decision, arising in the following decision problem, known as Newcomb’s problem. Two boxes are before you. The first contains either $1,000,000 or nothing. The second contains $1,000. You may take the first box alone or both boxes. Someone with uncanny foresight has predicted your choice and fixed the content of the first box according to his prediction. If he has predicted that you will take only the first box, he has put $1,000,000 in that box; and if he has predicted that you will take both boxes, he has left the first box empty. The expected utility of an option is commonly obtained by multiplying the utility of its possible outcomes by their probabilities given the option, and then adding the products. Because the predictor is reliable, the probability that you receive $1,000,000 given that you take only the first box is high, whereas the probability that you receive $1,001,000 given that you take both boxes is low. Accordingly, the expected utility of taking only the first box is greater than the expected utility of taking both boxes. Therefore the principle of maximizing expected utility says to take only the first box. However, the principle of dominance says that if the states determining the outcomes of options are causally independent of the options, and there is one option that is better than the others in each state, then you should adopt it. Since your choice does not causally influence the contents of the first box, and since choosing both boxes yields $1,000 in addition to the contents of the first box whatever they are, the principle says to take both boxes. Newcomb’s paradox is named after its formulator, William Newcomb. Nozick publicized it in “Newcomb’s Problem and Two Principles of Choice” (1969). Many theorists have responded to the paradox by changing the definition of the expected utility of an option so that it is sensitive to the causal influence of the option on the states that determine its outcome, but is insensitive to the evidential bearing of the option on those states.  DECISION THEORY, UTILITARIANISM. P.We. Newcomb’s problem.NEWCOMB’S PARADOX. Newman, John Henry (1801–90), English prelate and philosopher of religion. As fellow at Oriel College, Oxford, he was a prominent member of the Anglican Oxford Movement. He became a Roman Catholic in 1845, took holy orders in 1847, and was made a cardinal in 1879. His most important philosophical work is the Grammar of Assent (1870). Here Newman explored the difference between formal reasoning and the informal or natural movement of the mind in discerning the truth about the concrete and historical. Concrete reasoning in the mode of natural inference is implicit and unreflective; it deals not with general principles as such but with their employment in particular circumstances. Thus a scientist must judge whether the phenomenon he confronts is a novel significant datum, a coincidence, or merely an insignificant variation in the data. The acquired capacity to make judgments of Newcomb’s paradox Newman, John Henry 609    609 this sort Newman called the illative sense, an intellectual skill shaped by experience and personal insight and generally limited for individuals to particular fields of endeavor. The illative sense makes possible a judgment of certitude about the matter considered, even though the formal argument that partially outlines the process possesses only objective probability for the novice. Hence probability is not necessarily opposed to certitude. In becoming aware of its tacit dimension, Newman spoke of recognizing a mode of informal inference. He distinguished such reasoning, which, by virtue of the illative sense, culminates in a judgment of certitude about the way things are (real assent), from formal reasoning conditioned by the certainty or probability of the premises, which assents to the conclusion thus conditioned (notional assent). In real assent, the proposition functions to “image” the reality, to make its reality present. In the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845), Newman analyzed the ways in which some ideas unfold themselves only through historical development, within a tradition of inquiry. He sought to delineate the common pattern of such development in politics, science, philosophy, and religion. Although his focal interest was in how religious doctrines develop, he emphasizes the general character of such a pattern of progressive articulation. F.J.C. New Realism, an early twentieth-century revival, both in England and in the United States, of various forms of realism in reaction to the dominant idealisms inherited from the nineteenth century. In America this revival took a cooperative form when six philosophers (Ralph Barton Perry, Edwin Holt, William Pepperell Montague, Walter Pitkin, Edward Spaulding, and Walter Marvin) published “A Program and First Platform of Six Realists” (1910), followed two years later by the cooperative volume The New Realism, in which each authored an essay. This volume gave rise to the designation ‘New Realists’ for these six philosophers. Although they clearly disagreed on many particulars, they concurred on several matters of philosophical style and epistemological substance. Procedurally they endorsed a cooperative and piecemeal approach to philosophical problems, and they were constitutionally inclined to a closeness of analysis that would prepare the way for later philosophical tendencies. Substantively they agreed on several epistemological stances central to the refutation of idealism. Among the doctrines in the New Realist platform were the rejection of the fundamental character of epistemology; the view that the entities investigated in logic, mathematics, and science are not “mental” in any ordinary sense; the view that the things known are not the products of the knowing relation nor in any fundamental sense conditioned by their being known; and the view that the objects known are immediately and directly present to consciousness while being independent of that relation. New Realism was a version of direct realism, which viewed the notions of mediation and representation in knowledge as opening gambits on the slippery slope to idealism. Their refutation of idealism focused on pointing out the fallacy of moving from the truism that every object of knowledge is known to the claim that its being consists in its being known. That we are obviously at the center of what we know entails nothing about the nature of what we know. Perry dubbed this fact “the egocentric predicament,” and supplemented this observation with arguments to the effect that the objects of knowledge are in fact independent of the knowing relation. New Realism as a version of direct realism had as its primary conceptual obstacle “the facts of relativity,” i.e., error, illusion, perceptual variation, and valuation. Dealing with these phenomena without invoking “mental intermediaries” proved to be the stumbling block, and New Realism soon gave way to a second cooperative venture by another group of American philosophers that came to be known as Critical Realism. The term ‘new realism’ is also occasionally used with regard to those British philosophers (principal among them Moore and Russell) similarly involved in refuting idealism. Although individually more significant than the American group, theirs was not a cooperative effort, so the group term came to have primarily an American referent. 

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

ARISTOTLE, OCKHAM, RATIONALISM. J.A.Z. Nicholas of Cusa, also called Nicolaus Cusanus, Nicholas Kryfts (1401–64), German philosopher, an important Renaissance Platonist. Born in Kues on the Moselle, he earned a doctorate in canon law in 1423. He became known for his De concordantia catholica, written at the Council of Basel in 1432, a work defending the conciliarist position against the pope. Later, he decided that only the pope could provide unity for the church in its negotiations with the East, and allied himself with the papacy. In 1437–38, returning from a papal legation to Constantinople, he had his famous insight into the coincidence of opposites (coincidentia oppositorum) in the infinite, upon which his On Learned Ignorance is based. His unceasing labor was chiefly responsible for the Vienna Concordat with the Eastern church in 1448. He was made cardinal in 1449 as a reward for his efforts, and bishop of Brixen (Bressanone) in 1450. He traveled widely in Germany as a papal legate (1450–52) before settling down in his see. Cusa’s central insight was that all oppositions are united in their infinite measure, so that what would be logical contradictions for finite things coexist without contradiction in God, who is the measure of (i.e., is the form or essence of) all things, and identical to them inasmuch as he is identical with their reality, quiddity, or essence. Considered as it is contracted to the individual, a thing is only an image of its measure, not a reality in itself. His position drew on mathematical models, arguing, for instance, that an infinite straight line tangent to a circle is the measure of the curved circumference, since a circle of infinite diameter, containing all the being possible in a circle, would coincide with the tangent. In general, the measure of a thing must contain all the possible being of that sort of thing, and so is infinite, or unlimited, in its being. Cusa attacked Aristotelians for their unwillingness to give up the principle of non-contradiction. His epistemology is a form of Platonic skepticism. Our knowledge is never of reality, the infinite measure of things that is their essence, but only of finite images of reality corresponding to the finite copies with which we must deal. These images are constructed by our own minds, and do not represent an immediate grasp of any reality. Their highest form is found in mathematics, and it is only through mathematics that reason can understand the world. In relation to the infinite real, these images and the contracted realities they enable us to know have only an infinitesimal reality. Our knowledge is only a mass of conjectures, i.e., assertions that are true insofar as Nicholas Kryfts Nicholas of Cusa 612    612 they capture some part of the truth, but never the whole truth, the infinite measure, as it really is in itself. Cusa was much read in the Renaissance, and is somethimes said to have had significant influence on German thought of the eighteenth century, in particular on Leibniz, and German idealism, but it is uncertain, despite the considerable intrinsic merit of his thought, if this is true.  PLATO. J.Lo. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm (1844–1900), German philosopher and cultural critic. Born in a small town in the Prussian province of Saxony, Nietzsche’s early education emphasized religion and classical languages and literature. After a year at the university at Bonn he transferred to Leipzig, where he pursued classical studies. There he happened upon Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, which profoundly influenced his subsequent concerns and early philosophical thinking. It was as a classical philologist, however, that he was appointed professor at the Swiss university at Basel, before he had even received his doctorate, at the astonishingly early age of twenty-four. A mere twenty years of productive life remained to him, ending with a mental and physical collapse in January 1889, from which he never recovered. He held his position at Basel for a decade, resigning in 1879 owing to the deterioration of his health from illnesses he had contracted in 1870 as a volunteer medical orderly in the Franco-Prussian war. At Basel he lectured on a variety of subjects chiefly relating to classical studies, including Greek and Roman philosophy as well as literature. During his early years there he also became intensely involved with the composer Richard Wagner; and his fascination with Wagner was reflected in several of his early works – most notably his first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), and his subsequent essay Richard Wagner in Bayreuth (1876). His later break with Wagner, culminating in his polemic The Case of Wagner(1888), was both profound and painful to him. While at first regarding Wagner as a creative genius showing the way to a cultural and spiritual renewal, Nietzsche came to see him and his art as epitomizing and exacerbating the fundamental problem with which he became increasingly concerned. This problem was the pervasive intellectual and cultural crisis Nietzsche later characterized in terms of the “death of God” and the advent of “nihilism.” Traditional religious and metaphysical ways of thinking were on the wane, leaving a void that modern science could not fill, and endangering the health of civilization. The discovery of some life-affirming alternative to Schopenhauer’s radically pessimistic response to this disillusionment became Nietzsche’s primary concern. In The Birth of Tragedy he looked to the Greeks for clues and to Wagner for inspiration, believing that their art held the key to renewed human flourishing for a humanity bereft both of the consolations of religious faith and of confidence in reason and science as substitutes for it. In his subsequent series of Untimely Meditations (1873–76) he expanded upon his theme of the need to reorient human thought and endeavor to this end, and criticized a variety of tendencies detrimental to it that he discerned among his contemporaries. Both the deterioration of Nietzsche’s health and the shift of his interest away from his original discipline prevented retention of his position at Basel. In the first years after his retirement, he completed his transition from philologist to philosopher and published the several parts of Human, All-Too-Human (1878–90), Daybreak (1881), and the first four parts of The Gay Science (1882). These aphoristic writings sharpened and extended his analytical and critical assessment of various human tendencies and social, cultural, and intellectual phenomena. During this period his thinking became much more sophisticated; and he developed the philosophical styles and concerns that found mature expression in the writings of the final years of his brief active life, following the publication of the four parts of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–85). These last remarkably productive years saw the appearance of Beyond Good and Evil (1886), a fifth part of The Gay Science, On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), The Case of Wagner (1888), and a series of prefaces to his earlier works (1886–87), as well as the completion of several books published after his collapse – Twilight of the Idols (1889), The Antichrist (1895), and Ecce Homo (1908). He was also amassing a great deal of material in notebooks, of which a selection was later published under the title The Will to Power. (The status and significance of this mass of Nachlass material are matters of continuing controversy.) In the early 1880s, when he wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche arrived at a conception of human life and possibility – and with it, of value and meaning – that he believed could overcome the Schopenhauerian pessimism and nihilism that he saw as outcomes of the collapse of traditional modes of religious and philosophical interNietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm 613    613 pretation. He prophesied a period of nihilism in the aftermath of their decline and fall; but this prospect deeply distressed him. He was convinced of the untenability of the “God hypothesis,” and indeed of all religious and metaphysical interpretations of the world and ourselves; and yet he was well aware that the very possibility of the affirmation of life was at stake, and required more than the mere abandonment of all such “lies” and “fictions.” He took the basic challenge of philosophy now to be to reinterpret life and the world along more tenable lines that would also overcome nihilism. What Nietzsche called “the death of God” was both a cultural event – the waning and impending demise of the “Christian-moral” interpretation of life and the world – and also a philosophical development: the abandonment of anything like the God-hypothesis (all demidivine absolutes included). As a cultural event it was a phenomenon to be reckoned with, and a source of profound concern; for he feared a “nihilistic rebound” in its wake, and worried about the consequences for human life and culture if no countermovement to it were forthcoming. As a philosophical development, on the other hand, it was his point of departure, which he took to call for a radical reconsideration of everything from life and the world and human existence and knowledge to value and morality. The “de-deification of nature,” the “translation of man back into nature,” the “revaluation of values,” the tracing of the “genealogy of morals” and their critique, and the elaboration of “naturalistic” accounts of knowledge, value, morality, and our entire “spiritual” nature thus came to be his main tasks. His published and unpublished writings contain a wealth of remarks, observations, and suggestions contributing importantly to them. It is a matter of controversy, even among those with a high regard for Nietzsche, whether he tried to work out positions on issues bearing any resemblance to those occupying other philosophers before and after him in the mainstream of the history of philosophy. He was harshly critical of most of his predecessors and contemporaries; and he broke fundamentally with them and their basic ideas and procedures. His own writings, moreover, bear little resemblance to those of most other philosophers. Those he himself published (as well as his reflections in his notebooks) do not systematically set out and develop views. Rather, they consist for the most part in collections of short paragraphs and sets of aphorisms, often only loosely if at all connected. Many deal with philosophical topics, but in very unconventional ways; and because his remarks about these topics are scattered through many different works, they are all too easily taken in isolation and misunderstood. On some topics, moreover, much of what he wrote is found only in his very rough notebooks, which he filled with thoughts without indicating the extent of his reflected commitment to them. His language, furthermore, is by turns coolly analytical, heatedly polemical, sharply critical, and highly metaphorical; and he seldom indicates clearly the scope of his claims and what he means by his terms. It is not surprising, therefore, that many philosophers have found it difficult to know what to make of him and to take him seriously – and that some have taken him to repudiate altogether the traditional philosophical enterprise of seeking reasoned conclusions with respect to questions of the kind with which philosophers have long been concerned, heralding the “death” not only of religious and metaphysical thinking, but also of philosophy itself. Others read him very differently, as having sought to effect a fundamental reorientation of philosophical thinking, and to indicate by both precept and example how philosophical inquiry might better be pursued. Those who regard Nietzsche in the former way take his criticisms of his philosophical predecessors and contemporaries to apply to any attempt to address such matters. They seize upon and construe some of his more sweeping negative pronouncements on truth and knowledge as indicating that he believed we can only produce fictions and merely expedient (or possibly creative) perspectival expressions of our needs and desires, as groups or as individuals. They thus take him as a radical nihilist, concerned to subvert the entire philosophical enterprise and replace it with a kind of thinking more akin to the literary exploration of human possibilities in the service of life – a kind of artistic play liberated from concern with truth and knowledge. Those who view him in the latter way, on the other hand, take seriously his concern to find a way of overcoming the nihilism he believed to result from traditional ways of thinking; his retention of recast notions of truth and knowledge; and his evident concern – especially in his later writings – to contribute to the comprehension of a broad range of phenomena. This way of understanding him, like the former, remains controversial; but it permits an interpretation of his writings that is philosophically more fruitful. Nietzsche indisputably insisted upon the interpretive character of all human thought; and he called for “new philosophers” who would follow him in engaging in more self-conscious and intellectually responsible attempts to assess and improve upon prevailing interpretations of human life. He also was deeply concerned with how these matters might better be evaluated, and with the values by which human beings live and might better do so. Thus he made much of the need for a revaluation of all received values, and for attention to the problems of the nature, status, and standards of value and evaluation. One form of inquiry he took to be of great utility in connection with both of these tasks is genealogical inquiry into the conditions under which various modes of interpretation and evaluation have arisen. It is only one of the kinds of inquiry he considered necessary in both cases, however, serving merely to prepare for others that must be brought to bear before any conclusions are warranted. Nietzsche further emphasized the perspectival character of all thinking and the merely provisional character of all knowing, rejecting the idea of the very possibility of absolute knowledge transcending all perspectives. However, because he also rejected the idea that things (and values) have absolute existence “in themselves” apart from the relations in which he supposes their reality to consist, he held that, if viewed in the multiplicity of perspectives from which various of these relations come to light, they admit of a significant measure of comprehension. This perspectivism thus does not exclude the possibility of any sort of knowledge deserving of the name, but rather indicates how it is to be conceived and achieved. His kind of philosophy, which he characterizes as fröhliche Wissenschaft (cheerful science), proceeds by way of a variety of such “perspectival” approaches to the various matters with which he deals. Thus for Nietzsche there is no “truth” in the sense of the correspondence of anything we might think or say to “being,” and indeed no “true world of being” to which it may even be imagined to fail to correspond; no “knowledge” conceived in terms of any such truth and reality; and, further, no knowledge at all – even of ourselves and the world of which we are a part – that is absolute, non-perspectival, and certain. But that is not the end of the matter. There are, e.g., ways of thinking that may be more or less well warranted in relation to differing sorts of interest and practice, not only within the context of social life but also in our dealings with our environing world. Nietzsche’s reflections on the reconceptualization of truth and knowledge thus point in the direction of a naturalistic epistemology that he would have replace the conceptions of truth and knowledge of his predecessors, and fill the nihilistic void seemingly left by their bankruptcy. There is, moreover, a good deal about ourselves and our world that he became convinced we can comprehend. Our comprehension may be restricted to what life and the world show themselves to be and involve in our experience; but if they are the only kind of reality, there is no longer any reason to divorce the notions of truth, knowledge, and value from them. The question then becomes how best to interpret and assess what we find as we proceed to explore them. It is to these tasks of interpretation and “revaluation” that Nietzsche devoted his main efforts in his later writings. In speaking of the death of God, Nietzsche had in mind not only the abandonment of the Godhypothesis (which he considered to be utterly “unworthy of belief,” owing its invention and appeal entirely to naïveté, error, all-too-human need, and ulterior motivation), but also the demise of all metaphysical substitutes for it. He likewise criticized and rejected the related postulations of substantial “souls” and self-contained “things,” taking both notions to be ontological fictions merely reflecting our artificial (though convenient) linguistic-conceptual shorthand for functionally unitary products, processes, and sets of relations. In place of this cluster of traditional ontological categories and interpretations, he conceived the world in terms of an interplay of forces without any inherent structure or final end. It ceaselessly organizes and reorganizes itself, as the fundamental disposition he called will to power gives rise to successive arrays of power relationships. “This world is the will to power – and nothing besides,” he wrote; “and you yourselves are also this will to power – and nothing besides!” Nietzsche’s idea of the eternal return (or eternal recurrence) underscores this conception of a world without beginning or end, in which things happen repeatedly in the way they always have. He first introduced this idea as a test of one’s ability to affirm one’s own life and the general character of life in this world as they are, without reservation, qualification, or appeal to anything transcending them. He later entertained the thought that all events might actually recur eternally in exactly the same sequence, and experimented in his unpublished writings with arguments to this effect. For the most part, however, he restricted himself to less problematic    615 Neitzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm 616 uses of the idea that do not presuppose its literal truth in this radical form. His rhetorical embellishments and experimental elaborations of the idea may have been intended to make it more vivid and compelling; but he employed it chiefly to depict his conception of the radically non-linear character of events in this world and their fundamental homogeneity, and to provide a way of testing our ability to live with it. If we are sufficiently strong and well disposed to life to affirm it even on the supposition that it will only be the same sequence of events repeated eternally, we have what it takes to endure and flourish in the kind of world in which Nietzsche believed we find ourselves in the aftermath of disillusionment. Nietzsche construed human nature and existence naturalistically, in terms of the will to power and its ramifications in the establishment and expression of the kinds of complex systems of dynamic quanta in which human beings consist. “The soul is only a word for something about the body,” he has Zarathustra say; and the body is fundamentally a configuration of natural forces and processes. At the same time, he insisted on the importance of social arrangements and interactions in the development of human forms of awareness and activity. He also emphasized the possibility of the emergence of exceptional human beings capable of an independence and creativity elevating them above the level of the general human rule. So he stressed the difference between “higher men” and “the herd,” and through Zarathustra proclaimed the Übermensch (‘overman’ or ‘superman’) to be “the meaning of the earth,” employing this image to convey the ideal of the overcoming of the “all-too-human” and the fullest possible creative “enhancement of life.” Far from seeking to diminish our humanity by stressing our animality, he sought to direct our efforts to the emergence of a “higher humanity” capable of endowing existence with a human redemption and justification, above all through the enrichment of cultural life. Notwithstanding his frequent characterization as a nihilist, therefore, Nietzsche in fact sought to counter and overcome the nihilism he expected to prevail in the aftermath of the collapse and abandonment of traditional religious and metaphysical modes of interpretation and evaluation. While he was highly critical of the latter, it was not his intention merely to oppose them; for he further attempted to make out the possibility of forms of truth and knowledge to which philosophical interpreters of life and the world might aspire, and espoused a “Dionysian value-standard” in place of all non-naturalistic modes of valuation. In keeping with his interpretation of life and the world in terms of his conception of will to power, Nietzsche framed this standard in terms of his interpretation of them. The only tenable alternative to nihilism must be based upon a recognition and affirmation of the world’s fundamental character. This meant positing as a general standard of value the attainment of a kind of life in which the will to power as the creative transformation of existence is raised to its highest possible intensity and qualitative expression. This in turn led him to take the “enhancement of life” and creativity to be the guiding ideas of his revaluation of values and development of a naturalistic value theory. This way of thinking carried over into Nietzsche’s thinking about morality. Insisting that moralities as well as other traditional modes of valuation ought to be assessed “in the perspective of life,” he argued that most of them were contrary to the enhancement of life, reflecting the all-too-human needs and weaknesses and fears of less favored human groups and types. Distinguishing between “master” and “slave” moralities, he found the latter to have become the dominant type of morality in the modern world. He regarded present-day morality as a “herd-animal morality,” well suited to the requirements and vulnerabilities of the mediocre who are the human rule, but stultifying and detrimental to the development of potential exceptions to that rule. Accordingly, he drew attention to the origins and functions of this type of morality (as a social-control mechanism and device by which the weak defend and avenge and assert themselves against the actually or potentially stronger). He further suggested the desirability of a “higher morality” for the exceptions, in which the contrast of the basic “slave/herd morality” categories of “good and evil” would be replaced by categories more akin to the “good and bad” contrast characteristic of “master morality,” with a revised (and variable) content better attuned to the conditions and attainable qualities of the enhanced forms of life such exceptional human beings can achieve. The strongly creative flavor of Nietzsche’s notions of such a “higher humanity” and associated “higher morality” reflects his linkage of both to his conception of art, to which he attached great importance. Art, for Nietzsche, is fundamentally creative (rather than cognitive), serving to prepare for the emergence of a sensi   616 bility and manner of life reflecting the highest potentiality of human beings. Art, as the creative transformation of the world as we find it (and of ourselves thereby) on a small scale and in particular media, affords a glimpse of a kind of life that would be lived more fully in this manner, and constitutes a step toward emergence. In this way, Nietzsche’s mature thought thus expands upon the idea of the basic connection between art and the justification of life that was his general theme in his first major work, The Birth of Tragedy.  EXISTENTIALISM, HEGEL, KANT, SCHOPENHAUER. R.Sc. Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu (Latin, ‘Nothing is in the understanding that had not previously been in the senses’), a principal tenet of empiricism. A weak interpretation of the principle maintains that all concepts are acquired from sensory experience; no concepts are innate or a priori. A stronger interpretation adds that all propositional knowledge is derived from sense experience. The weak interpretation was held by Aquinas and Locke, who thought nevertheless that we can know some propositions to be true in virtue of the relations between the concepts involved. The stronger interpretation was endorsed by J. S. Mill, who argued that even the truths of mathematics are inductively based on experience.

 EMPIRICISM. W.E.M. Nihil ex nihilo fit (Latin, ‘Nothing arises from nothing’), an intuitive metaphysical principle first enunciated in the West by Parmenides, often held equivalent to the proposition that nothing arises without a cause. Creation ex nihilo is God’s production of the world without any natural or material cause, but involves a supernatural cause, and so it would not violate the principle. J.Lo. nihilism, ethical.RELATIVISM. nihilism, philosophical.NIETZSCHE, RUSSIAN NIHILISM. nihilism, Russian.RUSSIAN NIHILISM. nihilism, semantic.SEMANTIC HOLISM. nirodha-samapatti, also known as samjnavedayita-nirodha (Sanskrit, ‘attainment of cessation’), a term used by Indian Buddhists to denote a state produced by meditation in which no mental events of any kind occur. What ceases in nirodha-samapatti is all the operations of the mind; all that remains is the mindless body. Some Buddhists took this state to have salvific significance, and so likened it to Nirvana. But its principal philosophical interest lies in the puzzle it produced for Buddhist theorists: What causal account can be given that will make sense of the reemergence of mental events from a continuum in which none exist, given the pan-Buddhist assumption that all existents are momentary? P.J.G. NN thesis.NECESSITY. noema.HUSSERL, NOETIC. noemata moralia.MORE, THOMAS. noematic analysis.HUSSERL. noesis.DIVIDED LINE, HUSSERL. noetic (from Greek noetikos, from noetos, ‘perceiving’), of or relating to apprehension by the intellect. In a strict sense the term refers to nonsensuous data given to the cognitive faculty, which discloses their intelligible meaning as distinguished from their sensible apprehension. We hear a sentence spoken, but it becomes intelligible for us only when the sounds function as a foundation for noetic apprehension. For Plato, the objects of such apprehension (noetá) are the Forms (eide) with respect to which the sensible phenomena are only occasions of manifestation: the Forms in themselves transcend the sensible and have their being in a realm apart. For empiricist thinkers, e.g., Locke, there is strictly speaking no distinct noetic aspect, since “ideas” are only faint sense impressions. In a looser sense, however, one may speak of ideas as independent of reference to particular sense impressions, i.e. independent of their origin, and then an idea can be taken to signify a class of objects. Husserl uses the term to describe the intentionality or dyadic character of consciousness in general, i.e. including both eidetic or categorial and perceptual knowing. He speaks of the correlation of noesis or intending and noema or the intended object of awareness. The categorial or eidetic is the perceptual object as intellectually cognized; it is not a realm apart, but rather what is disclosed or made present (“constituted”) Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu noetic 617    617 when the mode of appearance of the perceptual object is intended by a categorial noesis. 

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non-Euclidean geometry, those axiomatized versions of geometry in which the parallel axiom of Euclidean geometry is rejected, after so many unsuccessful attempts to prove it. As in so many branches of mathematics, C. F. Gauss had thought out much of the matter first, but he kept most of his ideas to himself. As a result, credit is given to J. Bolyai and N. Lobachevsky, who worked independently from the late 1820s. Instead of assuming that just one line passes through a point in a plane parallel to a non-coincident coplanar line, they offered a geometry in which a line admits more than one parallel, and the sum of the “angles” between the “sides” of a “triangle” lies below 180°. Then in mid-century G. F. B. Riemann conceived of a geometry in which lines always meet (so no parallels), and the sum of the “angles” exceeds 180°. In this connection he distinguished between the unboundedness of space as a property of its extent, and the special case of the infinite measure over which distance might be taken (which is dependent upon the curvature of that space). Pursuing the (published) insight of Gauss, that the curvature of a surface could be defined in terms only of properties dependent solely on the surface itself (and later called “intrinsic”), Riemann also defined the metric on a surface in a very general and intrinsic way, in terms of the differential arc length. Thereby he clarified the ideas of “distance” that his non-Euclidean precursors had introduced (drawing on trigonometric and hyperbolic functions); arc length was now understood geodesically as the shortest “distance” between two “points” on a surface, and was specified independent of any assumptions of a geometry within which the surface was embedded. Further properties, such as that pertaining to the “volume” of a three-“dimensional” solid, were also studied. The two main types of non-Euclidean geometry, and its Euclidean parent, may be summarized as follows: Reaction to these geometries was slow to develop, but their impact gradually emerged. As mathematics, their legitimacy was doubted; but in 1868 E. Beltrami produced a model of a Bolyai-type two-dimensional space inside a planar circle. The importance of this model was to show that the consistency of this geometry depended upon that of the Euclidean version, thereby dispelling the fear that it was an inconsistent flash of the imagination. During the last thirty years of the nineteenth century a variety of variant geometries were proposed, and the relationships between them were studied, together with consequences for projective geometry. On the empirical side, these geometries, and especially Riemann’s approach, affected the understanding of the relationship between geometry and space; in particular, it posed the question whether space is curved or not (the latnoetic analysis non-Euclidean geometry 618    618 non-monotonic logic nonviolence 619 ter being the Euclidean answer). The geometries thus played a role in the emergence and articulation of relativity theory, especially the differential geometry and tensorial calculus within which its mathematical properties could be expressed. Philosophically the new geometries stressed the hypothetical nature of axiomatizing, in contrast to the customary view of mathematical theories as true in some (usually) unclear sense. This feature led to the name ‘metageometry’ for them; it was intended (as an ironical proposal of opponents) to be in line with the hypothetical character of metaphysics in philosophy. They also helped to encourage conventionalist philosophy of science (with Poincaré, e.g.), and put fresh light on the age-old question of the (im)possibility of a priori knowledge. 

non-monotonic logic, a logic that fails to be monotonic, i.e., in proof-theoretic terms, fails to meet the condition that for all statements u1, . . . un,f,y, if ‘u1, . . . un Yf’, then, for any y, ‘u1 , . . . un, y Y f’. (Equivalently, let Γ represent a collection of statements, u1 . . . un, and say that in monotonic logic, if ‘Γ Y f’, then, for any y, ‘Γ, y Y f’ and similarly in other cases.) A non-monotonic logic is any logic with the following property: For some Γ, f, and y, ‘ΓNML f’ but ‘Γ, y K!NML f’. This is a weak non-monotonic logic. In a strong non-monotonic logic, we might have, again for some Γ, f, y, where Γ is consistent and Γ 8 f is consistent: ‘Γ, y YNML > f’. A primary motivation (among AI researchers) for non-monotonic logic or defeasible reasoning, which is so evident in commonsense reasoning, is to produce a machine representation for default reasoning or defeasible reasoning. The interest in defeasible reasoning readily spreads to epistemology, logic, and ethics. The exigencies of practical affairs requires leaping to conclusions, going beyond available evidence, making assumptions. In doing so, we often err and must leap back from our conclusions, undo our assumptions, revise our beliefs. In the literature’s standard example, Tweety is a bird and all birds fly, except penguins and ostriches. Does Tweety fly? If pressed, we may need to form a belief about this matter. Upon discovering that Tweety is a penguin, we may have to retract our conclusion. Any representation of defeasible reasoning must capture the nonmonotonicity of this reasoning. Non-monotonic logic is an attempt to do this within logic itself – by adding rules of inference that do not preserve monotonicity. Although practical affairs require us to reason defeasibly, the best way to achieve non-monotonicity may not be to add non-monotonic rules of inference to standard logic. What one gives up in such systems may well not be worth the cost: loss of the deduction theorem and of a coherent notion of consistency. Therefore, the challenge of non-monotonic logic (or defeasible reasoning, generally) is to develop a rigorous way to represent the structure of non-monotonic reasoning without losing or abandoning the historically hard-won properties of monotonic (standard) logic. 

nonviolence, the renunciation of violence in personal, social, or international affairs. It often includes a commitment (called active nonviolence or nonviolent direct action) actively to oppose violence (and usually evil or injustice as well) by nonviolent means. Nonviolence may renounce physical violence alone or both physical and psychological violence. It may represent a purely personal commitment or be intended to be normative for others as well. When unconditional – absolute    619 norm normative relativism 620 nonviolence – it renounces violence in all actual and hypothetical circumstances. When conditional – conditional nonviolence – it concedes the justifiability of violence in hypothetical circumstances but denies it in practice. Held on moral grounds (principled nonviolence), the commitment belongs to an ethics of conduct or an ethics of virtue. If the former, it will likely be expressed as a moral rule or principle (e.g., One ought always to act nonviolently) to guide action. If the latter, it will urge cultivating the traits and dispositions of a nonviolent character (which presumably then will be expressed in nonviolent action). As a principle, nonviolence may be considered either basic or derivative. Either way, its justification will be either utilitarian or deontological. Held on non-moral grounds (pragmatic nonviolence), nonviolence is a means to specific social, political, economic, or other ends, themselves held on non-moral grounds. Its justification lies in its effectiveness for these limited purposes rather than as a way of life or a guide to conduct in general. An alternative source of power, it may then be used in the service of evil as well as good. Nonviolent social action, whether of a principled or pragmatic sort, may include noncooperation, mass demonstrations, marches, strikes, boycotts, and civil disobedience – techniques explored extensively in the writings of Gene Sharp. Undertaken in defense of an entire nation or state, nonviolence provides an alternative to war. It seeks to deny an invading or occupying force the capacity to attain its objectives by withholding the cooperation of the populace needed for effective rule and by nonviolent direct action, including civil disobedience. It may also be used against oppressive domestic rule or on behalf of social justice. Gandhi’s campaign against British rule in India, Scandinavian resistance to Nazi occupation during World War II, and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s actions on behalf of civil rights in the United States are illustrative. Nonviolence has origins in Far Eastern thought, particularly Taoism and Jainism. It has strands in the Jewish Talmud, and many find it implied by the New Testament’s Sermon on the Mount.  CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE, GANDHI, PACIFISM. R.L.H. norm.BASIC NORM. normal form, a formula equivalent to a given logical formula, but having special properties. The main varieties follow. Conjunctive normal form. If D1 . . . Dn are disjunctions of sentential variables or their negations, such as (p 7 -q 7 r), then a formula F is in conjunctive normal form provided F % D1 & D2 & . . & Dn. The following are in conjunctive normal form: (-p 7 q); (p 7 q 7 r) & (-p 7 -q 7 -r) & (-q 7 r). Every formula of sentential logic has an equivalent conjunctive normal form; this fact can be used to prove the completeness of sentential logic. Disjunctive normal form. If C1 . . . Cn are conjunctions of sentential variables or their negations, such as p & -q & -r, then a formula F is in disjunctive normal form provided F % C1 7 C27 . . Cn. The following are thus in disjunctive normal form: (p & -q) 7 (-p & q); (p & q & -r) 7 (-p & -q & -r). Every formula of sentential logic has an equivalent disjunctive normal form. Prenex normal form. A formula of predicate logic is in prenex normal form if (1) all quantifiers occur at the beginning of the formula, (2) the scope of the quantifiers extends to the end of the formula, and (3) what follows the quantifiers contains at least one occurrence of every variable that appears in the set of quantifiers. Thus, (Dx)(Dy)(Fx / Gy) and (x)(Dy)(z)((Fxy 7 Gyz) / Dxyz) are in prenex normal form. The formula may contain free variables; thus, (Dx)(y) (Fxyz / Gwyx) is also in prenex normal form. The following, however, are not in prenex normal form: (x)(Dy) (Fx / Gx); (x)(y) Fxy / Gxy. Every formula of predicate logic has an equivalent formula in prenex normal form. Skolem normal form. A formula F in predicate logic is in Skolem normal form provided (1) F is in prenex normal form, (2) every existential quantifier precedes any universal quantifier, (3) F contains at least one existential quantifier, and (4) F contains no free variables. Thus, (Dx)(Dy) (z)(Fxy / Gyz) and (Dx)(Dy)(Dz)(w)(Fxy 7 Fyz 7 Fzw) are in Skolem normal form; however, (Dx) (y) Fxyz and (x) (y) (Fxy 7 Gyx) are not. Any formula has an equivalent Skolem normal form; this has implications for the completeness of predicate logic. 

notum per se (Latin, ‘known through itself’), self-evident. This term corresponds roughly to the term ‘analytic’. In Thomistic theology, there are two ways for a thing to be self-evident, secundum se (in itself) and quoad nos (to us). The proposition that God exists is self-evident in itself, because God’s existence is identical with his essence; but it is not self-evident to us (humans), because humans are not directly acquainted with God’s essence.Aquinas’s Summa theologiae I, q.2,a.1,c. 

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

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

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

Nyaya-Vaishesika, one of the orthodox schools of Hinduism. It holds that earth, air, fire, and water are the four types of atoms. Space is a substance and a container of atoms. The atoms are everlasting and eternal, though their combinations are neither. Properties of complexes are explained in terms of the properties of their components. There are emergent properties the causation of which does not require that something come from nothing; one need only grant brute causal connections. Nyaya is a monotheistic perspective and Nyaya philosopher Udana wrote a text – Kusmañjali (“The Handful of Flowers”) – in natural theology; this tenth-century work is an Indian classic on the subject. In addition to material things composed of atoms, there are immaterial persons. Each person is an enduring, substantial self whose nature is to be conscious and who is capable of love and aversion, of feeling pleasure and pain, and of making choices; selves differ from one another even when not embodied by virtue of being different centers of consciousness, not merely in terms of having had diverse transmigratory biographies. Nyaya-Vaishesika is the Hindu school most like Anglo-American philosophy, as evidenced in its studies of inference and perception.  HINDUISM. K.E.Y. Nyaya-Vaishesika Nyaya-Vaishesika 623    623 Oakeshott, Michael (1900–91), British philosopher and political theorist trained at Cambridge and in Germany. He taught first at Cambridge and Oxford; from 1951 he was professor of political science at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His works include Experience and Its Modes (1933), Rationalism in Politics (1962), On Human Conduct (1975), and On History (1983). Oakeshott’s misleading general reputation, based on Rationalism in Politics, is as a conservative political thinker. Experience and Its Modes is a systematic work in the tradition of Hegel. Human experience is exclusively of a world of ideas intelligible insofar as it is coherent. This world divides into modes (historical, scientific, practical, and poetic experience), each being partly coherent and categorially distinct from all others. Philosophy is the never entirely successful attempt to articulate the coherence of the world of ideas and the place of modally specific experience within that whole. His later works examine the postulates of historical and practical experience, particularly those of religion, morality, and politics. All conduct in the practical mode postulates freedom and is an “exhibition of intelligence” by agents who appropriate inherited languages and ideas to the generic activity of self-enactment. Some conduct pursues specific purposes and occurs in “enterprise associations” identified by goals shared among those who participate in them. The most estimable forms of conduct, exemplified by “conversation,” have no such purpose and occur in “civil societies” under the purely “adverbial” considerations of morality and law. “Rationalists” illicitly use philosophy to dictate to practical experience and subordinate human conduct to some master purpose. Oakeshott’s distinctive achievement is to have melded holistic idealism with a morality and politics radical in their affirmation of individuality.  POLITICAL THEORY. R.E.F. obiectum quo (Latin, ‘object by which’), in medieval and Scholastic epistemology, the object by which an object is known. It should be understood in contrast with obiectum quod, which refers to the object that is known. For example, when a person knows what an apple is, the apple is the obiectum quod and his concept of the apple is the obiectum quo. That is, the concept is instrumental to knowing the apple, but is not itself what is known. Human beings need concepts in order to have knowledge, because their knowledge is receptive, in contrast with God’s which is productive. (God creates what he knows.) Human knowledge is mediated; divine knowledge is immediate. Scholastic philosophers believe that the distinction between obiectum quod and obiectum quo exposes the crucial mistake of idealism. According to idealists, the object of knowledge, i.e., what a person knows, is an idea. In contrast, the Scholastics maintain that idealists conflate the object of knowledge with the means by which human knowledge is made possible. Humans must be connected to the object of knowledge by something (obiectum quo), but what connects them is not that to which they are connected. A.P.M. object, intentional.BRENTANO. object, propositional.PROPOSITION. objective body.EMBODIMENT. objective probability.PROBABILITY. objective reality.DESCARTES, REALITY. objective reason.REASONS FOR ACTION. objective rightness. In ethics, an action is objectively right for a person to perform (on some occasion) if the agent’s performing it (on that occasion) really is right, whether or not the agent, or anyone else, believes it is. An action is subjectively right for a person to perform (on some occasion) if the agent believes, or perhaps justifiably believes, of that action that it is (objectively) right. For example, according to a version of utilitarianism, an action is objectively right provided the action is optimific in the sense that the consequences that would result from its per624 O    624 formance are at least as good as those that would result from any alternative action the agent could instead perform. Were this theory correct, then an action would be an objectively right action for an agent to perform (on some occasion) if and only if that action is in fact optimific. An action can be both objectively and subjectively right or neither. But an action can also be subjectively right, but fail to be objectively right, as where the action fails to be optimific (again assuming that a utilitarian theory is correct), yet the agent believes the action is objectively right. And an action can be objectively right but not subjectively right, where, despite the objective rightness of the action, the agent has no beliefs about its rightness or believes falsely that it is not objectively right. This distinction is important in our moral assessments of agents and their actions. In cases where we judge a person’s action to be objectively wrong, we often mitigate our judgment of the agent when we judge that the action was, for the agent, subjectively right. This same objective–subjective distinction applies to other ethical categories such as wrongness and obligatoriness, and some philosophers extend it to items other than actions, e.g., emotions. 

obligationes, the study of inferentially inescapable, yet logically odd arguments, used by late medieval logicians in analyzing inferential reasoning. In Topics VIII.3 Aristotle describes a respondent’s task in a philosophical argument as providing answers so that, if they must defend the impossible, the impossibility lies in the nature of the position, and not in its logical defense. In Prior Analytics I.13 Aristotle argues that nothing impossible follows from the possible. Burley, whose logic exemplifies early fourteenth-century obligationes literature, described the resulting logical exercise as a contest between interlocutor and respondent. The interlocutor must force the respondent into maintaining contradictory statements in defending a position, and the respondent must avoid this while avoiding maintaining the impossible, which can be either a position logically incompatible with the position defended or something impossible in itself. Especially interesting to Scholastic logicians were the paradoxes of disputation inherent in such disputes. Assuming that a respondent has successfully defended his position, the interlocutor may be able to propose a commonplace position that the respondent can neither accept nor reject, given the truth of the first, successfully defended position. Roger Swineshead introduced a controversial innovation to obligationes reasoning, later rejected by Paul of Venice. In the traditional style of obligation, a premise was relevant to the argument only if it followed from or was inconsistent with either (a) the proposition defended or (b) all the premises consequent to the former and prior to the premise in question. By admitting any premise that was either consequent to or inconsistent with the proposition defended alone, without regard to intermediate premises, Swineshead eliminated concern with the order of sentences proposed by the interlocutor, making the respondent’s task harder.  ARISTOTLE, BURLEY, KILVINGTON, OXFORD CALCULATORS, PAUL OF VENICE. S.E.L. oblique context. As explained by Frege in “Über Sinn und Bedeutung” (1892), a linguistic context is oblique (ungerade) if and only if an expression (e.g., proper name, dependent clause, or sentence) in that context does not express its direct (customary) sense. For Frege, the sense of an expression is the mode of presentation of its nominatum, if any. Thus in direct speech, the direct (customary) sense of an expression designates its direct (customary) nominatum. For example, the context of the proper name ‘Kepler’ in (1) Kepler died in misery. is non-oblique (i.e., direct) since the proper name expresses its direct (customary) sense, say, the sense of ‘the man who discovered the elliptical planetary orbits’, thereby designating its direct (customary) nominatum, Kepler himself. Moreover, the entire sentence expresses its direct sense, namely, the proposition that Kepler died in misery, thereby designating its direct nominatum, a truth-value, namely, the true. By contrast, objectivism oblique context 625    625 in indirect speech an expression neither expresses its direct sense nor, therefore, designates its direct nominatum. One such sort of oblique context is direct quotation, as in (2) ‘Kepler’ has six letters. The word appearing within the quotation marks neither expresses its direct (customary) sense nor, therefore, designates its direct (customary) nominatum, Kepler. Rather, it designates a word, a proper name. Another sort of oblique context is engendered by the verbs of propositional attitude. Thus, the context of the proper name ‘Kepler’ in (3) Frege believed Kepler died in misery. is oblique, since the proper name expresses its indirect sense, say, the sense of the words ‘the man widely known as Kepler’, thereby designating its indirect nominatum, namely, the sense of ‘the man who discovered the elliptical planetary orbits’. Note that the indirect nominatum of ‘Kepler’ in (3) is the same as the direct sense of ‘Kepler’ in (1). Thus, while ‘Kepler’ in (1) designates the man Kepler, ‘Kepler’ in (3) designates the direct (customary) sense of the word ‘Kepler’ in (1). Similarly, in (3) the context of the dependent clause ‘Kepler died in misery’ is oblique since the dependent clause expresses its indirect sense, namely, the sense of the words ‘the proposition that Kepler died in misery’, thereby designating its indirect nominatum, namely, the proposition that Kepler died in misery. Note that the indirect nominatum of ‘Kepler died in misery’ in (3) is the same as the direct sense of ‘Kepler died in misery’ in (1). Thus, while ‘Kepler died in misery’ in (1) designates a truthvalue, ‘Kepler died in misery’ in (3) designates a proposition, the direct (customary) sense of the words ‘Kepler died in misery’ in (1). 

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

Occam, William (c.1285–1347), also written William Occam, known as the More than Subtle Doctor, English Scholastic philosopher known equally as the father of nominalism and for his role in the Franciscan dispute with Pope John XXII over poverty. Born probably in the village of Ockham near London, William Ockham entered the Franciscan order at an early age and studied at Oxford, attaining the rank of baccalarius formatus. His brilliant but controversial career was cut short when John Lutterell, former chancellor of Oxford University, presented the pope with a list of fifty-six allegedly heretical theses extracted from Ockham’s writings. The papal commission studied them for two years and found fifty-one open to censure, but none was formally condemned. While in Avignon, Ockham researched previous papal concessions to the Franciscans regarding collective poverty, eventually concluding that John XXII contradicted his predecessors and hence was “no true pope.” After committing these charges to writing, Ockham fled with Michael of Cesena, then minister general of the order, first to Pisa and ultimately to Munich, where he lived until his death, writing many treatises about church–state relations. Although departures from his eminent predecessors have combined with ecclesiastical difficulties to make Ockham unjustly notorious, his thought remains, by current lights, philosophically and theologically conservative. On most metaphysical issues, Ockham fancied himself the true interpreter of Aristotle. Rejecting the doctrine that universals are real things other than names or concepts as “the worst error of philosophy,” Ockham dismissed not only Platonism, but also “modern realist” doctrines according to which natures enjoy a double mode of existence and are universal in the intellect but numerically multiplied in particulars. He argues that everything real is individual and particular, while universality is a property pertaining only to names and that by virtue of their signification relations. Because Ockham understands the primary names to be mental (i.e., naturally significant concepts), his own theory of universals is best classified as a form of conceptualism. Ockham rejects atomism, and defends Aristotelian hylomorphism in physics and metaphysics, complete with its distinction between substantial and accidental forms. Yet, he opposes the reifying tendency of the “moderns” (unnamed contemporary opponents), who posited a distinct kind of thing (res) for each of Aristotle’s ten categories; he argues that – from a purely philosophical point of view – it is indefensible to posit anything besides particular substances and qualities. Ockham followed the Franciscan school in recognizing a plurality of substantial forms in living things (in humans, the forms of corporeity, sensory soul, and intellectual soul), but diverged from Duns Scotus in asserting a real, not a formal, distinction among them. Aristotle had reached behind regular correlations in nature to posit substance-things and accident-things as primitive explanatory entities that essentially are or give rise to powers (virtus) that produce the regularities; similarly, Ockham distinguishes efficient causality properly speaking from sine qua non causality, depending on whether the correlation between A’s and B’s is produced by the power of A or by the will of another, and explicitly denies the existence of any sine qua non causation in nature. Further, Ockham insists, in Aristotelian fashion, that created substance- and accident-natures are essentially the causal powers they are in and of themselves and hence independently of their relations to anything else; so that not even God can make heat naturally a coolant. Yet, if God cannot change, He shares with created things the occurrent Ockham, William 627    627 ability to obstruct such “Aristotelian” productive powers and prevent their normal operation. Ockham’s nominalistic conceptualism about universals does not keep him from endorsing the uniformity of nature principle, because he holds that individual natures are powers and hence that co-specific things are maximally similar powers. Likewise, he is conventional in appealing to several other a priori causal principles: “Everything that is in motion is moved by something,” “Being cannot come from non-being,” “Whatever is produced by something is really conserved by something as long as it exists.” He even recognizes a kind of necessary connection between created causes and effects – e.g., while God could act alone to produce any created effect, a particular created effect could not have had another created cause of the same species instead. Ockham’s main innovation on the topic of causality is his attack on Duns Scotus’s distinction between “essential” and “accidental” orders and contrary contention that every genuine efficient cause is an immediate cause of its effects. Ockham is an Aristotelian reliabilist in epistemology, taking for granted as he does that human cognitive faculties (the senses and intellect) work always or for the most part. Ockham infers that since we have certain knowledge both of material things and of our own mental acts, there must be some distinctive species of acts of awareness (intuitive cognitions) that are the power to produce such evident judgments. Ockham is matter-of-fact both about the disruption of human cognitive functions by created obstacles (as in sensory illusion) and about divine power to intervene in many ways. Such facts carry no skeptical consequences for Ockham, because he defines certainty in terms of freedom from actual doubt and error, not from the logical, metaphysical, or natural possibility of error. In action theory, Ockham defends the liberty of indifference or contingency for all rational beings, created or divine. Ockham shares Duns Scotus’s understanding of the will as a self-determining power for opposites, but not his distaste for causal models. Thus, Ockham allows that (1) unfree acts of will may be necessitated, either by the agent’s own nature, by its other acts, or by an external cause; and that (2) the efficient causes of free acts may include the agent’s intellectual and sensory cognitions as well as the will itself. While recognizing innate motivational tendencies in the human agent – e.g., the inclination to seek sensory pleasure and avoid pain, the affectio commodi (tendency to seek its own advantage), and the affectio iustitiae (inclination to love things for their own intrinsic worth) – he denies that these limit the will’s scope. Thus, Ockham goes beyond Duns Scotus in assigning the will the power, with respect to any option, to will for it (velle), to will against it (nolle), or not to act at all. In particular, Ockham concludes that the will can will against (nolle) the good, whether ignorantly or perversely – by hating God or by willing against its own happiness, the good-in-general, the enjoyment of a clear vision of God, or its own ultimate end. The will can also will (velle) evils – the opposite of what right reason dictates, unjust deeds qua unjust, dishonest, and contrary to right reason, and evil under the aspect of evil. Ockham enforces the traditional division of moral science into non-positive morality or ethics, which directs acts apart from any precept of a superior authority and draws its principles from reason and experience; and positive morality, which deals with laws that oblige us to pursue or avoid things, not because they are good or evil in themselves, but because some legitimate superior commands them. The notion that Ockham sponsors an unmodified divine command theory of ethics rests on conflation and confusion. Rather, in the area of non-positive morality, Ockham advances what we might label a “modified right reason theory,” which begins with the Aristotelian ideal of rational self-government, according to which morally virtuous action involves the agent’s free coordination of choice with right reason. He then observes that suitably informed right reason would dictate that God, as the infinite good, ought to be loved above all and for his own sake, and that such love ought to be expressed by the effort to please him in every way (among other things, by obeying all his commands). Thus, if right reason is the primary norm in ethics, divine commands are a secondary, derivative norm. Once again, Ockham is utterly unconcerned about the logical possibility opened by divine liberty of indifference, that these twin norms might conflict (say, if God commanded us to act contrary to right reason); for him, their de facto congruence suffices for the moral life. In the area of soteriological merit and demerit (a branch of positive morality), things are the other way around: divine will is the primary norm; yet because God includes following the dictates of right reason among the criteria for divine acceptance (thereby giving the moral life eternal significance), right reason becomes a secondary and derivative norm there. 

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

Olivi, Peter John (c.1247–98), French philosopher-theologian whose views on the theory and practice of Franciscan poverty led to a long series of investigations of his orthodoxy. Olivi’s preference for humility, as well as the suspicion with which he was regarded, prevented his becoming a master of theology at Paris. After 1285, he was effectively vindicated and permitted to teach at Florence and Montpellier. But after his death, probably in part because his remains were venerated and his views were championed by the Franciscan Spirituals, his orthodoxy was again examined. The Council of Vienne (1311–12) condemned three unrelated tenets associated with Olivi. Finally, in 1326, Pope John XXII condemned a series of statements based on Olivi’s Apocalypse commentary. Olivi thought of himself chiefly as a theologian, writing copious biblical commentaries; his philosophy of history was influenced by Joachim of Fiore. His views on poverty inspired the leader of the Franciscan Observant reform movement, St. Bernardino of Siena. Apart from his views on poverty, Olivi is best known for his philosophical independence from Aristotle, whom he condemned as a materialist. Contrary to Aristotle’s theory of projectile motion, Olivi advocated a theory of impetus. He undermined orthodox views on Aristotelian categories. His attack on the category of relation was thought to have dangerous implications in Trinitarian theology. Ockham’s theory of quantity is in part a defense of views presented by Olivi. Olivi was critical of Augustinian as well as Aristotelian views; he abandoned the theories of seminal reason and divine illumination. He also argued against positing impressed sensible and intelligible species, claiming that only the soul, not perceptual objects, played an active role in perception. Bold as his philosophical views were, he presented them tentatively. A voluntarist, he emphasized the importance of will. He claimed that an act of understanding was not possible in the absence of an act of will. He provided an important experiential argument for the freedom of the will. His treatises on contracts revealed a sophisticated understanding of economics. His treatise on evangelical poverty includes the first defense of a theory of papal infallibility. R.W. Olympiodorus.

NEOPLATONISM. omega, the last letter of the Greek alphabet (w). Following Cantor (1845–1911), it is used in lowercase as a proper name for the first infinite ordinal number, which is the ordinal of the natural ordering of the set of finite ordinals. By extension it is also used as a proper name for the set of finite ordinals itself or even for the set of natural numbers. Following Gödel (1906–78), it is used as a prefix in names of various logical properties of sets of sentences, most notably omega-completeness and omega-consistency. Omega-completeness, in the original sense due to Tarski, is a syntactical property of sets of sentences in a formal arithmetic language involving a symbol ‘0’ for the number zero and a symbol ‘s’ for the so-called successor function, resulting in each natural number being named by an expression, called a numeral, in the following series: ‘0’, ‘s0’, ‘ss0’, and so on. For example, five is denoted by ‘sssss0’. A set of sentences is said to be omegacomplete if it (deductively) yields every universal sentence all of whose singular instances it yields. In this framework, as usual, every universal sentence, ‘for every n, n has P’ yields each and every one of its singular instances, ‘0 has P’, ‘s0 has P’, ‘ss0 has P’, etc. However, as had been known by logicians at least since the Middle Ages, the converse is not true, i.e., it is not in general the case that a universal sentence is deducible from the set of its singular instances. Thus one should not expect to find omega-completeness except in exceptional sets. The set of all true sentences of arithmetic is such an exceptional set; the reason is the semantic fact that every universal sentence (whether or not in arithmetic) is materially equivalent to the set of all its singular instances. A set of sentences that is not omega-complete is Ockham’s razor omega 629    629 said to be omega-incomplete. The existence of omega-incomplete sets of sentences is a phenomenon at the core of the 1931 Gödel incompleteness result, which shows that every “effective” axiom set for arithmetic is omega-incomplete and thus has as theorems all singular instances of a universal sentence that is not one of its theorems. Although this is a remarkable fact, the existence of omega-incomplete sets per se is far from remarkable, as suggested above. In fact, the empty set and equivalently the set of all tautologies are omega-incomplete because each yields all singular instances of the non-tautological formal sentence, here called FS, that expresses the proposition that every number is either zero or a successor. Omega-consistency belongs to a set that does not yield the negation of any universal sentence all of whose singular instances it yields. A set that is not omega-consistent is said to be omega-inconsistent. Omega-inconsistency of course implies consistency in the ordinary sense; but it is easy to find consistent sets that are not omega-consistent, e.g., the set whose only member is the negation of the formal sentence FS mentioned above. Corresponding to the syntactical properties just mentioned there are analogous semantic properties whose definitions are obtained by substituting ‘(semantically) implies’ for ‘(deductively) yields’. The Greek letter omega and its English name have many other uses in modern logic. Carnap introduced a non-effective, non-logical rule, called the omega rule, for “inferring” a universal sentence from its singular instances; adding the omega rule to a standard axiomatization of arithmetic produces a complete but non-effective axiomatization. An omega-valued logic is a many-valued logic whose set of truth-values is or is the same size as the set of natural numbers. 

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

ARISTOTLE, ONE–MANY PROBLEM, PLATO. E.C.H. omega, order type one over many 630    630 one-way reduction sentence.REDUCTION SENTENCE. ontological argument.PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. ontological commitment, the object or objects common to the ontology fulfilling some (regimented) theory (a term fashioned by Quine). The ontology of a (regimented) theory consists in the objects the theory assumes there to be. In order to show that a theory assumes a given object, or objects of a given class, we must show that the theory would be true only if that object existed, or if that class is not empty. This can be shown in two different but equivalent ways: if the notation of the theory contains the existential quantifier ‘(Ex)’ of first-order predicate logic, then the theory is shown to assume a given object, or objects of a given class, provided that object is required among the values of the bound variables, or (additionally) is required among the values of the domain of a given predicate, in order for the theory to be true. Thus, if the theory entails the sentence ‘(Ex)(x is a dog)’, then the values over which the bound variable ‘x’ ranges must include at least one dog, in order for the theory to be true. Alternatively, if the notation of the theory contains for each predicate a complementary predicate, then the theory assumes a given object, or objects of a given class, provided some predicate is required to be true of that object, in order for the theory to be true. Thus, if the theory contains the predicate ‘is a dog’, then the extension of ‘is a dog’ cannot be empty, if the theory is to be true. However, it is possible for different, even mutually exclusive, ontologies to fulfill a theory equally well. Thus, an ontology containing collies to the exclusion of spaniels and one containing spaniels to the exclusion of collies might each fulfill a theory that entails ‘(Ex) (x is a dog)’. It follows that some of the objects a theory assumes (in its ontology) may not be among those to which the theory is ontologically committed. A theory is ontologically committed to a given object only if that object is common to all of the ontologies fulfilling the theory. And the theory is ontologically committed to objects of a given class provided that class is not empty according to each of the ontologies fulfilling the theory. 

open formula, also called open sentence, a sentence with a free occurrence of a variable. A closed sentence, sometimes called a statement, has no free occurrences of variables. In a language whose only variable-binding operators are quantifiers, an occurrence of a variable in a formula is bound provided that occurrence either is within the scope of a quantifier employing that variable or is the occurrence in that quantifier. An occurrence of a variable in a formula is free provided it is not bound. The formula ‘xy ( O’ is open because both ‘x’ and ‘y’ occur as free variables. In ‘For some real number y, xy ( O’, no occurrence of ‘y’ is free; but the occurrence of ‘x’ is free, so the formula is open. The sentence ‘For every real number x, for some real number y, xy ( O’ is closed, since none of the variables occur free. Semantically, an open formula such as ‘xy ( 0’ is neither true nor false but rather true of or false of each assignment of values to its free-occurring variables. For example, ‘xy ( 0’ is true of each assignment of two positive or two negative real numbers to ‘x’ and to ‘y’ and it is false of each assignment of 0 to either and false at each assignment of a positive real to one of the variables and a negative to the other. 

open texture, the possibility of vagueness. Frieone-way reduction sentence open texture 631    631 drich Waismann (“Verifiability,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1945) introduced the concept, claiming that open texture is a universal property of empirical terms. Waismann claimed that an inexhaustible source of vagueness remains even after measures are taken to make an expression precise. His grounds were, first, that there are an indefinite number of possibilities for which it is indeterminate whether the expression applies (i.e., for which the expression is vague). There is, e.g., no definite answer whether a catlike creature that repeatedly vanishes into thin air, then reappears, is a cat. Waismann’s explanation is that when we define an empirical term, we frame criteria of its applicability only for foreseeable circumstances. Not all possible situations in which we may use the term, however, can be foreseen. Thus, in unanticipated circumstances, real or merely possible, a term’s criteria of applicability may yield no definite answer to whether it applies. Second, even for terms such as ‘gold’, for which there are several precise criteria of application (specific gravity, X-ray spectrograph, solubility in aqua regia), applying different criteria can yield divergent verdicts, the result being vagueness. Waismann uses the concept of open texture to explain why experiential statements are not conclusively verifiable, and why phenomenalist attempts to translate material object statements fail. 

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

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

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operator theory of adverbs, a theory that treats adverbs and other predicate modifiers as predicate-forming operators on predicates. The theory expands the syntax of first-order logic by adding operators of various degrees, and makes corresponding additions to the semantics. Romane Clark, Terence Parsons, and Richard Montague (with Hans Kamp) developed the theory independently in the early 1970s. For example: ‘John runs quickly through the kitchen’ contains a simple one-place predicate, ‘runs’ (applied to John); a zero-place operator, ‘quickly’, and a one-place operator, ‘through ()’ (with ‘the kitchen’ filling its place). The logical form of the sentence becomes [O1 1(a) [O2 0 [P(b)]]], which can be read: [through (the kitchen) [quickly [runs (John)]]]. Semantically ‘quickly’ will be associated with an operation that takes us from the extension of ‘runs’ to a subset of that extension. ‘John runs quickly’ will imply ‘John runs’. ‘Through (the kitchen)’ and other operators are handled similarly. The wide variety of predicate modifiers complicates the inferential conditions and semantics of the operators. ‘John is finally done’ implies ‘John is done’. ‘John is nearly done’ implies ‘John is not done’. Clark tries to distinguish various types of predicate modifiers and provides a different semantic analysis for operators of different sorts. The theory can easily characterize syntactic aspects of predicate modifier iteration. In addition, after being modified the original predicates remain as predicates, and maintain their original degree. Further, there is no need to force John’s running into subject position as might be the case if we try to make ‘quickly’ an ordinary predicate. T.J.D. O-proposition.

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order, the level of a logic as determined by the type of entity over which the free variables of that logic range. Entities of the lowest type, usually called type O, are known as individuals, and entities of higher type are constructed from entities of lower type. For example, type 1 entities are (i) functions from individuals or n-tuples of individuals to individuals, and (ii) n-place relations on individuals. First-order logic is that logic whose variables range over individuals, and a model for first-order logic includes a domain of individuals. The other logics are known as higher-order logics, and the first of these is second-order logic, in which there are variables that range over type 1 entities. In a model for second-order logic, the first-order domain determines the second-order domain. For every sentence to have a definite truth-value, only totally defined functions are allowed in the range of second-order function variables, so these variables range over the collection of total functions from n-tuples of individuals to individuals, for every value of n. The second-order predicate variables range over all subsets of n-tuples of individuals. Thus if D is the domain of individuals of a model, the type 1 entities are the union of the two sets {X: Dn: X 0 Dn$D}, {X: Dn: X 0 Dn}. Quantifiers may bind second-order variables and are subject to introduction and elimination rules. Thus whereas in first-order logic one may infer ‘Someone is wise, ‘(Dx)Wx’, from ‘Socrates is wise’, ‘Ws’, in second-order logic one may also infer ‘there is something that Socrates is’, ‘(DX)Xs’. The step from first- to second-order logic iterates: in general, type n entities are the domain of n ! 1th–order variables in n ! 1th– order logic, and the whole hierarchy is known as the theory of types.  TYPE THEORY. G.Fo. ordered n-tuple.SET THEORY. ordered pair.SET THEORY. operator, deontic ordered pair 633    633 ordering, an arrangement of the elements of a set so that some of them come before others. If X is a set, it is useful to identify an ordering R of X with a subset R of X$X, the set of all ordered pairs with members in X. If ‹ x,y ( 1 R then x comes before y in the ordering of X by R, and if ‹ x,y ( 2 R and ‹ y,x ( 2 R, then x and y are incomparable. Orders on X are therefore relations on X, since a relation on a set X is any subset of X $ X. Some minimal conditions a relation must meet to be an ordering are (i) reflexivity: (Ex)Rxx; (ii) antisymmetry: (Ex)(Ey)((Rxy & Ryx) / x % y); and (iii) transitivity: (Ex)(Ey)(Ez)((Rxy & Ryz) / Rxz). A relation meeting these three conditions is known as a partial order (also less commonly called a semi-order), and if reflexivity is replaced by irreflexivity, (Ex)-Rxx, as a strict partial order. Other orders are strengthenings of these. Thus a tree-ordering of X is a partial order with a distinguished root element a, i.e. (Ex)Rax, and that satisfies the backward linearity condition that from any element there is a unique path back to a: (Ex)(Ey)(Ez)((Ryx & Rzx) / (Ryz 7 Rzy). A total order on X is a partial order satisfying the connectedness requirement: (Ex)(Ey)(Rxy 7 Ryx). Total orderings are sometimes known as strict linear orderings, contrasting with weak linear orderings, in which the requirement of antisymmetry is dropped. The natural number line in its usual order is a strict linear order; a weak linear ordering of a set X is a strict linear order of levels on which various members of X may be found, while adding antisymmetry means that each level contains only one member. Two other important orders are dense (partial or total) orders, in which, between any two elements, there is a third; and well-orders. A set X is said to be well-ordered by R if R is total and every non-empty subset of Y of X has an R-least member: (EY 0 X)[Y & / / (Dz 1 Y)(Ew 1 Y)Rzw]. Well-ordering rules out infinite descending sequences, while a strict well-ordering, which is irreflexive rather than reflexive, rules out loops. The best-known example is the membership relation of axiomatic set theory, in which there are no loops such as x 1 y 1 x or x 1 x, and no infinite descending chains . . . x2 1 x1 1 x0.  RELATION, SET THEORY. G.Fo. ordering, Archimedian.LEXICAL ORDERING. order type omega, in mathematics, the order type of the infinite set of natural numbers. The last letter of the Greek alphabet, w, is used to denote this order type; w is thus the first infinite ordinal number. It can be defined as the set of all finite ordinal numbers ordered by magnitude; that is, w % {0,1,2,3 . . . }. A set has order type w provided it is denumerably infinite, has a first element but not a last element, has for each element a unique successor, and has just one element with no immediate predecessor. The set of even numbers ordered by magnitude, {2,4,6,8 . . . }, is of order type w. The set of natural numbers listing first all even numbers and then all odd numbers, {2,4,6,8 . . .; 1,3,5,7 . . . }, is not of order type w, since it has two elements, 1 and 2, with no immediate predecessor. The set of negative integers ordered by magnitude, { . . . –3,–2,–1}, is also not of order type w, since it has no first element. V.K. ordinal logic, any means of associating effectively and uniformly a logic (in the sense of a formal axiomatic system) Sa with each constructive ordinal notation a. This notion and term for it was introduced by Alan Turing in his paper “Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals” (1939). Turing’s aim was to try to overcome the incompleteness of formal systems discovered by Gödel in 1931, by means of the transfinitely iterated, successive adjunction of unprovable but correct principles. For example, according to Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem, for each effectively presented formal system S containing a modicum of elementary number theory, if S is consistent then S does not prove the purely universal arithmetical proposition Cons expressing the consistency of S (via the Gödelnumbering of symbolic expressions), even though Cons is correct. However, it may be that the result S’ of adjoining Cons to S is inconsistent. This will not happen if every purely existential statement provable in S is correct; call this condition (E-C). Then if S satisfies (E-C), so also does S; % S ! Cons ; now S; is still incomplete by Gödel’s theorem, though it is more complete than S. Clearly the passage from S to S; can be iterated any finite number of times, beginning with any S0 satisfying (E-C), to form S1 % S; 0, S2 % S; 1, etc. But this procedure can also be extended into the transfinite, by taking Sw to be the union of the systems Sn for n % 0,1, 2 . . . and then Sw!1 % S;w, Sw!2 % S;w!1, etc.; condition (EC) is preserved throughout. To see how far this and other effective extension procedures of any effectively presented system S to another S; can be iterated into the transfinite, one needs the notion of the set O of constructive ordinal notations, due to Alonzo Church and Stephen C. Kleene in 1936. O is a set ordering ordinal logic 634    634 of natural numbers, and each a in O denotes an ordinal a, written as KaK. There is in O a notation for 0, and with each a in O is associated a notation sc(a) in O with Ksc(a)K % KaK ! 1; finally, if f is a number of an effective function {f} such that for each n, {f}(n) % an is in O and KanK < Kan!1K, then we have a notation ø(f) in O with Kø(f)K % limnKanK. For quite general effective extension procedures of S to S; and for any given S0, one can associate with each a in O a formal system Sa satisfying Ssc(a) % S;a and Sø(f) % the union of the S{f}(n) for n % 0,1, 2. . . . However, as there might be many notations for each constructive ordinal, this ordinal logic need not be invariant, in the sense that one need not have: if KaK % KbK then Sa and Sb have the same consequences. Turing proved that an ordinal logic cannot be both complete for true purely universal statements and invariant. Using an extension procedure by certain proof-theoretic reflection principles, he constructed an ordinal logic that is complete for true purely universal statements, hence not invariant. (The history of this and later work on ordinal logics is traced by the undersigned in “Turing in the Land of O(z),” in The Universal Turing Machine: A Half Century Survey, edited by Rolf Herken [1988].) 

ordinary language philosophy, a loosely structured philosophical movement holding that the significance of concepts, including those central to traditional philosophy – e.g., the concepts of truth and knowledge – is fixed by linguistic practice. Philosophers, then, must be attuned to the actual uses of words associated with these concepts. The movement enjoyed considerable prominence chiefly among English-speaking philosophers between the mid-1940s and the early 1960s. It was initially inspired by the work of Wittgenstein, and later by John Wisdom, Gilbert Ryle, Norman Malcolm, and J. L. Austin, though its roots go back at least to Moore and arguably to Socrates. Ordinary language philosophers do not mean to suggest that, to discover what truth is, we are to poll our fellow speakers or consult dictionaries. Rather, we are to ask how the word ‘truth’ functions in everyday, nonphilosophical settings. A philosopher whose theory of truth is at odds with ordinary usage has simply misidentified the concept. Philosophical error, ironically, was thought by Wittgenstein to arise from our “bewitchment” by language. When engaging in philosophy, we may easily be misled by superficial linguistic similarities. We suppose minds to be special sorts of entity, for instance, in part because of grammatical parallels between ‘mind’ and ‘body’. When we fail to discover any entity that might plausibly count as a mind, we conclude that minds must be nonphysical entities. The cure requires that we remind ourselves how ‘mind’ and its cognates are actually used by ordinary speakers.  ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY; AUSTIN, J. J.F.H. organic, having parts that are organized and interrelated in a way that is the same as, or analogous to, the way in which the parts of a living animal or other biological organism are organized and interrelated. Thus, an organic unity or organic whole is a whole that is organic in the above sense. These terms are primarily used of entities that are not literally organisms but are supposedly analogous to them. Among the applications of the concept of an organic unity are: to works of art, to the state (e.g., by Hegel), and to the universe as a whole (e.g., in absolute idealism). The principal element in the concept is perhaps the notion of an entity whose parts cannot be understood except by reference to their contribution to the whole entity. Thus to describe something as an organic unity is typically to imply that its properties cannot be given a reductive explanation in terms of those of its parts; rather, at least some of the properties of the parts must themselves be explained by reference to the properties of the whole. Hence it usually involves a form of holism. Other features sometimes attributed to organic unities include a mutual dependence between the existence of the parts and that of the whole and the need for a teleological explanation of properties of the parts in terms of some end or purpose associated with the whole. To what extent these characteristics belong to genuine biological organisms is disputed. 

organicism, a theory that applies the notion of an organic unity, especially to things that are not literally organisms. G. E. Moore, in Principia Ethica, proposed a principle of organic unities, concerning intrinsic value: the (intrinsic) value of a whole need not be equivalent to the sum of the (intrinsic) values of its parts. Moore applies the principle in arguing that there is no systematic relation between ordinal utility organicism 635    635 the intrinsic value of an element of a complex whole and the difference that the presence of that element makes to the value of the whole. E.g., he holds that although a situation in which someone experiences pleasure in the contemplation of a beautiful object has far greater intrinsic goodness than a situation in which the person contemplates the same object without feeling pleasure, this does not mean that the pleasure itself has much intrinsic value.

organism, a carbon-based living thing or substance, e.g., a paramecium, a tree, or an ant. Alternatively, ‘organism’ can mean a hypothetical living thing of another natural kind, e.g., a silicon-based living thing. Defining conditions of a carbon-based living thing, x, are as follows. (1) x has a layer made of m-molecules, i.e., carbonbased macromolecules of repeated units that have a high capacity for selective reactions with other similar molecules. x can absorb and excrete through this layer. (2) x can metabolize m-molecules. (3) x can synthesize m-molecular parts of x by means of activities of a proper part of x that is a nuclear molecule, i.e., an m-molecule that can copy itself. (4) x can exercise the foregoing capacities in such a way that the corresponding activities are causally interrelated as follows: x’s absorption and excretion causally contribute to x’s metabolism; these processes jointly causally contribute to x’s synthesizing; and x’s synthesizing causally contributes to x’s absorption, excretion, and metabolism. (5) x belongs to a natural kind of compound physical substance that can have a member, y, such that: y has a proper part, z; z is a nuclear molecule; and y reproduces by means of z’s copying itself. (6) x is not possibly a proper part of something that satisfies (1)–(6). The last condition expresses the independence and autonomy of an organism. For example, a part of an organism, e.g., a heart cell, is not an organism. It also follows that a colony of organisms, e.g., a colony of ants, is not an organism. 

LIFE, ORGANIC, ORGANICISM. J.Ho. & G.Ro. Organon.ARISTOTLE. Origen (A.D. 185–253), Christian theologian and biblical scholar in the Alexandrian church. Born in Egypt, he became head of the catechetical school in Alexandria. Like his mentor, Clement of Alexandria, he was influenced by Middle Platonism. His principal works were Hexapla, On First Principles, and Contra Celsum. The Hexapla, little of which survives, consisted of six Hebrew and two Greek versions of the Old Testament with Origen’s commentary. On First Principles sets forth the most systematic Christian theology of the early church, including some doctrines subsequently declared heretical, such as the subordination of the Son (“a secondary god”) and Spirit to the Father, preexisting human souls (but not their transmigration), and a premundane fall from grace of each human soul. The most famous of his views was the notion of apocatastasis, universal salvation, the universal restoration of all creation to God in which evil is defeated and the devil and his minions repent of their sins. He interpreted hell as a temporary purgatory in which impure souls were purified and made ready for heaven. His notion of subordination of the Son of God to the Father was condemned by the church in 533. Origen’s Contra Celsum is the first sustained work in Christian apologetics. It defends Christianity before the pagan world. Origen was a leading exponent of the allegorical interpretation of the Scriptures, holding that the text had three levels of meaning corresponding to the three parts of human nature: body, soul, and spirit. The first was the historical sense, sufficient for simple people; the second was the moral sense; and the third was the mystical sense, open only to the deepest souls. L.P.P. original position.

LIBERALISM, RAWLS. Orpheus.ORPHISM. Orphism, a religious movement in ancient Greece that may have influenced Plato and some of the pre-Socratics. Neither the nature of the movement nor the scope of its influence is adequately understood: ancient sources and modern scholars tend to confuse Orphism with Pythagoreanism and with ancient mystery cults, especially the Bacchic or Dionysiac mysteries. “Orphic poems,” i.e., poems attributed to Orpheus (a mythic figure), circulated as early as the mid-sixth century B.C. We have only indirect evidence of the early Orphic poems; but we do have a sizable body of fragments from poems composed in later antiquity. Central to both early and later versions is a theogonic-cosmogonic narrative that posits Night as the primal entity – ostensibly a revision of the account offered by Hesiod – and gives major emphasis to organic unity Orphism 636    636 Ortega y Gasset, José outer converse 637 the birth, death through dismemberment, and rebirth of the god Dionysus. Plato gives us clear evidence of the existence in his time of itinerant religious teachers who, drawing on the “books of Orpheus,” performed and taught rituals of initiation and purification intended to procure divine favor either in this life or in an afterlife. The extreme skepticism of such scholars as Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff and I. M. Linforth concerning the importance of early Orphism for Greek religion and Greek philosophy has been undermined by archaeological findings in recent decades: the Derveni papyrus, which is a fragment of a philosophical commentary on an Orphic theogony; and inscriptions with Orphic instructions for the dead, from funerary sites in southern Italy, mainland Greece, and the Crimea. A.P.D.M. Ortega y Gasset, José (1883–1955), Spanish philosopher and essayist. Born in Madrid, he studied there and in Leipzig, Berlin, and Marburg. In 1910 he was named professor of metaphysics at the University of Madrid and taught there until 1936, when he was forced to leave because of his political involvement in and support for the Spanish Republic. He returned to Spain in 1945. Ortega was a prolific writer whose works fill nine thick volumes. Among his most influential books are Meditaciones del Quijote (“Meditations on the Quixote,” 1914), El tema de nuestro tiempo (“The Modern Theme,” 1923), La revolución de las masas (“The Revolt of the Masses,” 1932), La deshumanización del arte (“The Dehumanization of Art,” 1925), Historia como sistema (“History as a System,” 1941), and the posthumously published El hombre y la gente (“Man and People,” 1957) and La idea de principio en Leibniz(“The Idea of Principle in Leibniz,” 1958). His influence in Spain and Latin America was enormous, in part because of his brilliant style of writing and lecturing. He avoided jargon and rejected systematization; most of his works were first written as articles for newspapers and magazines. In 1923 he founded the Revista de Occidente, a cultural magazine that helped spread his ideas and introduced German thought into Spain and Latin America. Ortega ventured into nearly every branch of philosophy, but the kernel of his views is his metaphysics of vital reason (rasón vital) and his perspectival epistemology. For Ortega, reality is identified with “my life”; something is real only insofar as it is rooted and appears in “my life.” “My life” is further unpacked as “myself” and “my circumstances” (“yo soy yo y mi circumstancia“). The self is not an entity separate from what surrounds it; there is a dynamic interaction and interdependence of self and things. These and the self together constitute reality. Because every life is the result of an interaction between self and circumstances, every self has a unique perspective. Truth, then, is perspectival, depending on the unique point of view from which it is determined, and no perspective is false except one that claims exclusivity. This doctrine is known as Ortega’s perspectivism. J.J.E.G. ostensive definition.DEFINITION. Ostwald, Wilhelm.ENERGETICISM. other minds, problem of.

PROBLEM OF OTHER MINDS. ought–is problem.FACT–VALUE DISTINCTION. ousia, ancient Greek term traditionally translated as ‘substance’. Formed from the participle for ‘being’, the term ousia refers to the character of being, beingness, as if this were itself an entity. Just as redness is the character that red things have, so ousia is the character that beings have. Thus, the ousia of something is the character that makes it be, its nature. But ousia also refers to an entity that possesses being in its own right; for consider a case where the ousia of something is just the thing itself. Such a thing possesses being by virtue of itself; because its being depends on nothing else, it is self-subsistent and has a higher degree of being than things whose being depends on something else. Such a thing would be an ousia. Just which entities meet the criteria for ousia is a question addressed by Aristotle. Something such as redness that exists only as an attribute would not have being in its own right. An individual person is an ousia, but Aristotle also argues that his form is more properly an ousia; and an unmoved mover is the highest type of ousia. The traditional rendering of the term into Latin as substantia and English as ‘substance’ is appropriate only in contexts like Aristotle’s Categories where an ousia “stands under” attributes. In his Metaphysics, where Aristotle argues that being a substrate does not characterize ousia, and in other Greek writers, ‘substance’ is often not an apt translation.  SUBSTANCE. E.C.H. outer converse.CONVERSE, OUTER AND INNER.    637 outer domain semantics.

FREE LOGIC. overdetermination.CAUSATION. overman.NIETZSCHE. overriding reason.REASONS FOR ACTION. Oxford Calculators, a group of natural philosophers, mathematicians, and logicians who flourished at Oxford University in the second quarter of the fourteenth century. The name derives from the Liber calculationum (Book of Calculations), written some time before 1350. The author of this work, often called “Calculator” by later Continental authors, was probably named Richard Swineshead. The Book of Calculations discussed a number of issues related to the quantification or measurement of local motion, alteration, and augmentation (for a fuller description, see John Murdoch and Edith Sylla, “Swineshead, Richard,” in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, Vol. 13, 1976). The Book of Calculations has been studied mainly by historians of science and grouped together with a number of other works discussing natural philosophical topics by such authors as Thomas Bradwardine, William Heytesbury, and John Dumbleton. In earlier histories many of the authors now referred to as Oxford Calculators are referred to as the Merton School, since many of them were fellows of Merton College. But since some authors whose work appears to fit into the same intellectual tradition (e.g., Richard Kilvington, whose Sophismata represents an earlier stage of the tradition later epitomized by William Heytesbury’s Sophismata) have no known connection with Merton College, the name ‘Oxford Calculators’ would appear to be a more accurate appellation. The works of the Oxford Calculators were produced in the context of education in the Oxford arts faculty (see Edith Sylla, “The Oxford Calculators,” in Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny, and Jan Pinborg, eds., The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, 1982). In Oxford at this time logic was the centerpiece of the early years of undergraduate education. After logic, Oxford came to be known for its work in mathematics, astronomy, and natural philosophy. Students studying under the Oxford faculty of arts not only heard lectures on the liberal arts and on natural philosophy, moral philosophy, and metaphysics; they were also required to take part in disputations. William Heytesbury’s Regule solvendi sophismatum (Rules for Solving Sophismata) explicitly and Swineshead’s Book of Calculations implicitly are written to prepare students for these disputations. The three influences most formative on the work of the Oxford Calculators were (1) the tradition of commentaries on the works of Aristotle; (2) the developments in logical theory, particularly the theories of categorematic and syncategorematic terms and the theory of logical supposition; and (3) developments in mathematics, particularly the theory of ratios as developed in Thomas Bradwardine’s De proportionibus velocitatum in motibus (On the Ratios of Velocities in Motions). In addition to Richard Swineshead, Heytesbury, Bradwardine, Dumbleton, and Kilvington, other authors and works related to the work of the Oxford Calculators are Walter Burley, De primo et ultimo instanti, Tractatus Primus (De formis accidentalibus), Tractatus Secundus (De intensione et remissione formarum); Roger Swineshead, Descriptiones motuum; and John Bode, A est unum calidum. These and other works had a considerable later influence on the Continent. 

BURLEY, COMMENTARIES ON ARISTOTLE, HEYTESBURY, KILVINGTON. E.D.S. Oxford philosophy.ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY. Oxford school of intuitionism.PRICHARD. outer domain semantics Oxford school of intuitionism 638    638 PA.APPENDIX OF SPECIAL SYMBOLS. pa.WANG, PA. pacifism, (1) opposition to war, usually on moral or religious grounds, but sometimes on the practical ground (pragmatic pacifism) that it is wasteful and ineffective; (2) opposition to all killing and violence; (3) opposition only to war of a specified kind (e.g., nuclear pacifism). Not to be confused with passivism, pacifism usually involves actively promoting peace, understood to imply cooperation and justice among peoples and not merely absence of war. But some (usually religious) pacifists accept military service so long as they do not carry weapons. Many pacifists subscribe to nonviolence. But some consider violence and/or killing permissible, say, in personal self-defense, law enforcement, abortion, or euthanasia. Absolute pacifism rejects war in all circumstances, hypothetical and actual. Conditional pacifism concedes war’s permissibility in some hypothetical circumstances but maintains its wrongness in practice. If at least some hypothetical wars have better consequences than their alternative, absolute pacifism will almost inevitably be deontological in character, holding war intrinsically wrong or unexceptionably prohibited by moral principle or divine commandment. Conditional pacifism may be held on either deontological or utilitarian (teleological or sometimes consequentialist) grounds. If deontological, it may hold war at most prima facie wrong intrinsically but nonetheless virtually always impermissible in practice because of the absence of counterbalancing right-making features. If utilitarian, it will hold war wrong, not intrinsically, but solely because of its consequences. It may say either that every particular war has worse consequences than its avoidance (act utilitarianism) or that general acceptance of (or following or compliance with) a rule prohibiting war will have best consequences even if occasional particular wars have best consequences (rule utilitarianism). 

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

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

DIVINE ATTRIBUTES, HUME, MIRACLE, PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION, UTILITARIANISM. W.J.Wa. Panaetius.STOICISM. panentheism.KRAUSE, PANTHEISM. panlogism.HEGEL.

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

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

BRAHMAN, PANTHEISMUSSTREIT, PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. A.P.M.

Pantheismusstreit (German, ‘dispute over pantheism’), a debate primarily between the German philosophers Jacobi and Mendelssohn, although it also included Lessing, Kant, and Goethe. The basic issue concerned what pantheism is and whether all pantheists are atheists. In particular, it concerned whether Spinoza was a pantheist, and if so, whether he was an atheist; and how close Lessing’s thought was to Spinoza’s. The standard view, propounded by Bayle and Leibniz, was that Spinoza’s pantheism was a thin veil for his atheism. Lessing and Goethe did not accept this harsh interpretation of him. They believed that his pantheism avoided the alienating transcendence of the standard Judeo-Christian concept of God. It was debated whether Lessing was a Spinozist or some form of theistic pantheist. Lessing was critical of dogmatic religions and denied that there was any revelation given to all people for rational acceptance. He may have told Jacobi that he was a Spinozist; but he may also have been speaking ironically or hypothetically.  SPINOZA. A.P.M. Paracelsus, pseudonym of Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim (1493–1541), Swiss chemist, physician, and natural philosopher. He pursued medical studies at various German and Austrian universities, probably completing them at Ferrara (1513–16). Thereafter he had little to do with the academic world, apart from a brief and stormy period as professor of medicine at Basle (1527–28). Instead, he worked first as a military surgeon and later as an itinerant physician in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. His works were mainly in German rather than Latin, and only a few were published during his lifetime. His importance for medical practice lay in his insistence on observation and experiment, and his use of chemical methods for preparing drugs. The success of Paracelsian medicine and chemistry in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was, however, largely due to the theoretical background he provided. He firmly rejected the classical medical inheritance, particularly Galen’s explanation of disease as an imbalance of humors; he drew on a combination of biblical sources, German mysticism, alchemy, and Neoplatonic magic as found in Ficino to present a unified view of humankind and the universe. He saw man as a microcosm, reflecting the nature of the divine world through his immortal soul, the sidereal world through his astral body or vital principle, and the terrestrial world through his visible body. Knowledge requires union with the object, but because elements of all the worlds are found in man, he can acquire knowledge of the universe and of God, as partially revealed in nature. The physician needs knowledge of vital principles (called astra) in order to heal. Disease is caused by external agents that can affect the human vital principle as well as the visible body. Chemical methods are employed to isolate the appropriate vital principles in minerals and herbs, and these are used as antidotes. Paracelsus further held that matter contains three principles, sulfur, mercury, and salt. As a result, he thought it was possible to transform one metal into another by varying the proportions of the fundamental principles; and that such transformations could also be used in the production of drugs.  ALCHEMY, MYSTICISM. E.J.A. paraconsistency, the property of a logic in which one cannot derive all statements from a contradiction. What is objectionable about contradictions, from the standpoint of classical logic, is not just that they are false but that they imply any statement whatsoever: one who accepts a contradiction is thereby committed to accepting everything. In paraconsistent logics, however, such as relevance logics, contradictions are isolated inferentially and thus rendered relatively harmless. The interest in such logics stems from the fact that people sometimes continue to work in inconsistent theories even after the inconsistency has been exposed, and do so without inferring everything. Whether this phenomenon can be explained satisfactorily by the classical logician or shows instead that the underlying logic of, e.g., science and mathematics is some non-classical paraconsistent logic, is disputed.  CONSISTENCY, RELEVANCE LOGIC. G.F.S. paradigm, as used by Thomas Kuhn (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962), a set of scientific and metaphysical beliefs that make up a theoretical framework within which scientific theories Pantheismusstreit paradigm 641    641 can be tested, evaluated, and if necessary revised. Kuhn’s principal thesis, in which the notion of a paradigm plays a central role, is structured around an argument against the logical empiricist view of scientific theory change. Empiricists viewed theory change as an ongoing smooth and cumulative process in which empirical facts, discovered through observation or experimentation, forced revisions in our theories and thus added to our ever-increasing knowledge of the world. It was claimed that, combined with this process of revision, there existed a process of intertheoretic reduction that enabled us to understand the macro in terms of the micro, and that ultimately aimed at a unity of science. Kuhn maintains that this view is incompatible with what actually happens in case after case in the history of science. Scientific change occurs by “revolutions” in which an older paradigm is overthrown and is replaced by a framework incompatible or even incommensurate with it. Thus the alleged empirical “facts,” which were adduced to support the older theory, become irrelevant to the new; the questions asked and answered in the new framework cut across those of the old; indeed the vocabularies of the two frameworks make up different languages, not easily intertranslatable. These episodes of revolution are separated by long periods of “normal science,” during which the theories of a given paradigm are honed, refined, and elaborated. These periods are sometimes referred to as periods of “puzzle solving,” because the changes are to be understood more as fiddling with the details of the theories to “save the phenomena” than as steps taking us closer to the truth. A number of philosophers have complained that Kuhn’s conception of a paradigm is too imprecise to do the work he intended for it. In fact, Kuhn, fifteen years later, admitted that at least two distinct ideas were exploited by the term: (i) the “shared elements [that] account for the relatively unproblematic character of professional communication and for the relative unanimity of professional judgment,” and (ii) “concrete problem solutions, accepted by the group [of scientists] as, in a quite usual sense, paradigmatic” (Kuhn, “Second Thoughts on Paradigms,” 1977). Kuhn offers the terms ‘disciplinary matrix’ and ‘exemplar’, respectively, for these two ideas.  KUHN, LOGICAL POSITIVISM, PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE, REDUCTION, UNITY OF SCIENCE. B.E. paradigm case argument, an argument designed to yield an affirmative answer to the following general type of skeptically motivated question: Are A’s really B? E.g., Do material objects really exist? Are any of our actions really free? Does induction really provide reasonable grounds for one’s beliefs? The structure of the argument is simple: in situations that are “typical,” “exemplary,” or “paradigmatic,” standards for which are supplied by common sense, or ordinary language, part of what it is to be B essentially involves A. Hence it is absurd to doubt if A’s are ever B, or to doubt if in general A’s are B. (More commonly, the argument is encountered in the linguistic mode: part of what it means for something to be B is that, in paradigm cases, it be an A. Hence the question whether A’s are ever B is meaningless.) An example may be found in the application of the argument to the problem of induction. (See Strawson, Introduction to Logical Theory, 1952.) When one believes a generalization of the form ‘All F’s are G’ on the basis of good inductive evidence, i.e., evidence constituted by innumerable and varied instances of F all of which are G, one would thereby have good reasons for holding this belief. The argument for this claim is based on the content of the concepts of reasonableness and of strength of evidence. Thus according to Strawson, the following two propositions are analytic: (1) It is reasonable to have a degree of belief in a proposition that is proportional to the strength of the evidence in its favor. (2) The evidence for a generalization is strong in proportion as the number of instances, and the variety of circumstances in which they have been found, is great. Hence, Strawson concludes, “to ask whether it is reasonable to place reliance on inductive procedures is like asking whether it is reasonable to proportion the degree of one’s convictions to the strength of the evidence. Doing this is what ‘being reasonable’ means in such a context” (p. 257). In such arguments the role played by the appeal to paradigm cases is crucial. In Strawson’s version, paradigm cases are constituted by “innumerable and varied instances.” Without such an appeal the argument would fail completely, for it is clear that not all uses of induction are reasonable. Even when this appeal is made clear though, the argument remains questionable, for it fails to confront adequately the force of the word ‘really’ in the skeptical challenges. paradigm case argument paradigm case argument 642    642  ANALYTIC-SYNTHETIC DISTINCTION, PROBLEM OF INDUCTION. B.E.

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

DEONTIC PARADOXES, PARADOXES OF OMNIPOTENCE, SEMANTIC PARADOXES, SET-THEORETIC PARADOXES, ZENO’S PARADOXES. J.Et. paradoxes, deontic.DEONTIC PARADOXES. paradoxes, logical.SET-THEORETIC PARADOXES. paradoxes, semantic.SEMANTIC PARADOXES. paradoxes, set-theoretic.SET-THEORETIC PARADOXES. paradoxes of confirmation.CONFIRMATION. paradoxes of material implication.IMPLICATION. paradoxes of omnipotence, a series of paradoxes in philosophical theology that maintain that God could not be omnipotent because the concept is inconsistent, alleged to result from the intuitive idea that if God is omnipotent, then God must be able to do anything. (1) Can God perform logically contradictory tasks? If God can, then God should be able to make himself simultaneously omnipotent and not omnipotent, which is absurd. If God cannot, then it appears that there is something God cannot do. Many philosophers have sought to avoid this consequence by claiming that the notion of performing a logically contradictory task is empty, and that question (1) specifies no task that God can perform or fail to perform. (2) Can God cease to be omnipotent? If God can and were to do so, then at any time thereparadox paradoxes of omnipotence 643    643 after, God would no longer be completely sovereign over all things. If God cannot, then God cannot do something that others can do, namely, impose limitations on one’s own powers. A popular response to question (2) is to say that omnipotence is an essential attribute of a necessarily existing being. According to this response, although God cannot cease to be omnipotent any more than God can cease to exist, these features are not liabilities but rather the lack of liabilities in God. (3) Can God create another being who is omnipotent? Is it logically possible for two beings to be omnipotent? It might seem that there could be, if they never disagreed in fact with each other. If, however, omnipotence requires control over all possible but counterfactual situations, there could be two omnipotent beings only if it were impossible for them to disagree. (4) Can God create a stone too heavy for God to move? If God can, then there is something that God cannot do – move such a stone – and if God cannot, then there is something God cannot do – create such a stone. One reply is to maintain that ‘God cannot create a stone too heavy for God to move’ is a harmless consequence of ‘God can create stones of any weight and God can move stones of any weight.’  DIVINE ATTRIBUTES, PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. W.E.M. paradoxes of self-reference.RUSSELL, TYPE THEORY. paradoxes of set theory.SET-THEORETIC PARADOXES, SET THEORY. paradoxes of strict implication.IMPLICATION. paradox of analysis, an argument that it is impossible for an analysis of a meaning to be informative for one who already understands the meaning. Consider: ‘An F is a G’ (e.g., ‘A circle is a line all points on which are equidistant from some one point’) gives a correct analysis of the meaning of ‘F’ only if ‘G’ means the same as ‘F’; but then anyone who already understands both meanings must already know what the sentence says. Indeed, that will be the same as what the trivial ‘An F is an F’ says, since replacing one expression by another with the same meaning should preserve what the sentence says. The conclusion that ‘An F is a G’ cannot be informative (for one who already understands all its terms) is paradoxical only for cases where ‘G’ is not only synonymous with but more complex than ‘F’, in such a way as to give an analysis of ‘F’. (‘A first cousin is an offspring of a parent’s sibling’ gives an analysis, but ‘A dad is a father’ does not and in fact could not be informative for one who already knows the meaning of all its words.) The paradox appears to fail to distinguish between different sorts of knowledge. Encountering for the first time (and understanding) a correct analysis of a meaning one already grasps brings one from merely tacit to explicit knowledge of its truth. One sees that it does capture the meaning and thereby sees a way of articulating the meaning one had not thought of before.  ANALYSIS, DEFINITION, MEANING. C.G. paradox of omniscience, an objection to the possibility of omniscience, developed by Patrick Grim, that appeals to an application of Cantor’s power set theorem. Omniscience requires knowing all truths; according to Grim, that means knowing every truth in the set of all truths. But there is no set of all truths. Suppose that there were a set T of all truths. Consider all the subsets of T, that is, all members of the power set 3T. Take some truth T1. For each member of 3T either T1 is a member of that set or T1 is not a member of that set. There will thus correspond to each member of 3T a further truth specifying whether T1 is or is not a member of that set. Therefore there are at least as many truths as there are members of 3T. By the power set theorem, there are more members of 3T than there are of T. So T is not the set of all truths. By a parallel argument, no other set is, either. So there is no set of all truths, after all, and therefore no one who knows every member of that set. The objection may be countered by denying that the claim ‘for every proposition p, if p is true God knows that p’ requires that there be a set of all true propositions.  CANTOR, DIVINE ATTRIBUTES. E.R.W. paradox of self-deception.SELF-DECEPTION. paradox of the examination.UNEXPECTED EXAMINATION PARADOX. paradox of the heap.SORITES PARADOX. paradox of the knower.DEONTIC PARADOXES. paradox of the ravens.CONFIRMATION. paradox of the stone.PARADOXES OF OMNIPOTENCE. paradoxes of self-reference paradox of the stone 644    644 parallel distributed processing.CONNECTIONISM. parallelism.PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. parallelism, psychophysical.PHILOSOPHY OF MIND.

parapsychology, the study of certain anomalous phenomena and ostensible causal connections neither recognized nor clearly rejected by traditional science. Parapsychology’s principal areas of investigation are extrasensory perception (ESP), psychokinesis (PK), and cases suggesting the survival of mental functioning following bodily death. The study of ESP has traditionally focused on two sorts of ostensible phenomena, telepathy (the apparent anomalous influence of one person’s mental states on those of another, commonly identified with apparent communication between two minds by extrasensory means) and clairvoyance (the apparent anomalous influence of a physical state of affairs on a person’s mental states, commonly identified with the supposed ability to perceive or know of objects or events not present to the senses). The forms of ESP may be viewed either as types of cognition (e.g., the anomalous knowledge of another person’s mental states) or as merely a form of anomalous causal influence (e.g., a distant burning house causing one to have – possibly incongruous – thoughts about fire). The study of PK covers the apparent ability to produce various physical effects independently of familiar or recognized intermediate sorts of causal links. These effects include the ostensible movement of remote objects, materializations (the apparently instantaneous production of matter), apports (the apparently instantaneous relocation of an object), and (in laboratory experiments) statistically significant non-random behavior of normally random microscopic processes (such as radioactive decay). Survival research focuses on cases of ostensible reincarnation and mental mediumship (i.e., “channeling” of information from an apparently deceased communicator). Cases of ostensible precognition may be viewed as types of telepathy and clairvoyance, and suggest the causal influence of some state of affairs on an earlier event (an agent’s ostensible precognitive experience). However, those opposed to backward causation may interpret ostensible precognition either as a form of unconscious inference based on contemporaneous information acquired by ESP, or else as a form of PK (possibly in conjunction with telepathic influence) by which the precognizer brings about the events apparently precognized. The data of parapsychology raise two particularly deep issues. The evidence suggesting survival poses a direct challenge to materialist theories of the mental. And the evidence for ESP and PK suggests the viability of a “magical” worldview associated usually with so-called primitive societies, according to which we have direct and intimate access to and influence on the thoughts and bodily states of others.  PHILOSOPHY OF MIND, PHILOSOPHY OF PSYCHOLOGY. S.E.B. Pareto efficiency, also called Pareto optimality, a state of affairs in which no one can be made better off without making someone worse off. The Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923) referred to optimality rather than efficiency, but usage has drifted toward the less normative term. Pareto supposed that utilitarian addition of welfare across individuals is meaningless. He concluded that the only useful aggregate measures of welfare must be ordinal. One state of affairs is Pareto-superior to another if we cannot move to the second state without making someone worse off. Although the Pareto criteria are generally thought to be positive rather than normative, they are often used as normative principles for justifying particular changes or refusals to make changes. For example, some economists and philosophers take the Pareto criteria as moral constraints and therefore oppose certain government policies. In market and voluntary exchange contexts, it makes sense to suppose every exchange will be Pareto-improving, at least for the direct parties to the exchange. If, however, we fail to account for external effects of our exchange on other people, it may not be Pareto-improving. Moreover, we may fail to provide collective benefits that require the cooperation or coordination of many individuals’ efforts. Hence, even in markets, we cannot expect to achieve Pareto efficiency. We might therefore suppose we should invite government intervention to help us. But in typical social contexts, it is often hard to believe that significant policy changes can be Paretoimproving: there are sure to be losers from any change.  PERFECT COMPETITION, SOCIAL CHOICE THEORY, UTILITARIANISM. R.Har. Pareto optimality.PARETO EFFICIENCY. Pareto-superior.PARETO EFFICIENCY. parallel distributed processing Pareto-superior 645    645 Parfit, Derek (b.1942), British philosopher internationally known for his major contributions to the metaphysics of persons, moral theory, and practical reasoning. Parfit first rose to prominence by challenging the prevalent view that personal identity is a “deep fact” that must be all or nothing and that matters greatly in rational and moral deliberations. Exploring puzzle cases involving fission and fusion, Parfit propounded a reductionist account of personal identity, arguing that what matters in survival are physical and psychological continuities. These are a matter of degree, and sometimes there may be no answer as to whether some future person would be me. Parfit’s magnum opus, Reasons and Persons (1984), is a strikingly original book brimming with startling conclusions that have significantly reshaped the philosophical agenda. Part One treats different theories of morality, rationality, and the good; blameless wrongdoing; moral immorality; rational irrationality; imperceptible harms and benefits; harmless torturers; and the self-defeatingness of certain theories. Part Two introduces a critical present-aim theory of individual rationality, and attacks the standard selfinterest theory. It also discusses the rationality of different attitudes to time, such as caring more about the future than the past, and more about the near than the remote. Addressing the age-old conflict between self-interest and morality, Parfit illustrates that contrary to what the self-interest theory demands, it can be rational to care about certain other aims as much as, or more than, about our own future well-being. In addition, Parfit notes that the self-interest theory is a hybrid position, neutral with respect to time but partial with respect to persons. Thus, it can be challenged from one direction by morality, which is neutral with respect to both persons and time, and from the other by a present-aim theory, which is partial with respect to both persons and time. Part Three refines Parfit’s views regarding personal identity and further criticizes the self-interest theory: personal identity is not what matters, hence reasons to be specially concerned about our future are not provided by the fact that it will be our future. Part Four presents puzzles regarding future generations and argues that the moral principles we need when considering future people must take an impersonal form. Parfit’s arguments deeply challenge our understanding of moral ideals and, some believe, the possibility of comparing outcomes. Parfit has three forthcoming manuscripts, tentatively titled Rediscovering Reasons, The Metaphysics of the Self, and On What Matters. His current focus is the normativity of reasons. A reductionist about persons, he is a non-reductionist about reasons. He believes in irreducibily normative beliefs that are in a strong sense true. A realist about reasons for acting and caring, he challenges the views of naturalists, noncognitivists, and constructivists. Parfit contends that internalists conflate normativity with motivating force, that contrary to the prevalent view that all reasons are provided by desires, no reasons are, and that Kant poses a greater threat to rationalism than Hume. Parfit is Senior Research Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and a regular visiting professor at both Harvard and New York University. Legendary for monograph-length criticisms of book manuscripts, he is editor of the Oxford Ethics Series, whose goal is to make definite moral progress, a goal Parfit himself is widely believed to have attained. 

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

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

particular proposition.SYLLOGISM. partition, division of a set into mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive subsets. Derivatively, parousia partition 647    647 ‘partition’ can mean any set P whose members are mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive subsets of set S. Each subset of a partition P is called a partition class of S with respect to P. Partitions are intimately associated with equivalence relations, i.e. with relations that are transitive, symmetric, and reflexive. Given an equivalence relation R defined on a set S, R induces a partition P of S in the following natural way: members s1 and s2 belong to the same partition class of P if and only if s1 has the relation R to s2. Conversely, given a partition P of a set S, P induces an equivalence relation R defined on S in the following natural way: members s1 and s2 are such that s1 has the relation R to s2 if and only if s1 and s2 belong to the same partition class of P. For obvious reasons, then, partition classes are also known as equivalence classes.  RELATION, SET THEORY. R.W.B. Parva naturalia.ARISTOTLE. Pascal, Blaise (1623–62), French philosopher known for his brilliance as a mathematician, physicist, inventor, theologian, polemicist, and French prose stylist. Born at Clermont-Ferrand in the Auvergne, he was educated by his father, Étienne, and first gained note for his contribution to mathematics when at sixteen he produced, under the influence of Desargues, a work on the projective geometry of the cone. This was published in 1640 under the title Essai pour les coniques and includes what has since become known as Pascal’s theorem. Pascal’s other mathematical accomplishments include the original development of probability theory, worked out in correspondence with Fermat, and a method of infinitesimal analysis to which Leibniz gave credit for inspiring his own development of the calculus. Pascal’s early scientific fame rests also on his work in physics, which includes a treatise on hydrostatics (Traités de l’équilibre des liqueurs et de la pesanteur de la masse de l’air) and his experiments with the barometer, which attempted to establish the possibility of a vacuum and the weight of air as the cause of the mercury’s suspension. Pascal’s fame as a stylist rests primarily on his Lettres provinciales (1656–57), which were an anonymous contribution to a dispute between the Jansenists, headed by Arnauld, and the Jesuits. Jansenism was a Catholic religious movement that emphasized an Augustinian position on questions of grace and free will. Pascal, who was not himself a Jansenist, wrote a series of scathing satirical letters ridiculing both Jesuit casuistry and the persecution of the Jansenists for their purported adherence to five propositions in Jansen’s Augustinus. Pascal’s philosophical contributions are found throughout his work, but primarily in his Pensées (1670), an intended apology for Christianity left incomplete and fragmentary at his death. The influence of the Pensées on religious thought and later existentialism has been profound because of their extraordinary insight, passion, and depth. At the time of Pascal’s death some of the fragments were sewn together in clusters; many others were left unorganized, but recent scholarship has recovered much of the original plan of organization. The Pensées raise skeptical arguments that had become part of philosophical parlance since Montaigne. While these arguments were originally raised in order to deny the possibility of knowledge, Pascal, like Descartes in the Meditations, tries to utilize them toward a positive end. He argues that what skepticism shows us is not that knowledge is impossible, but that there is a certain paradox about human nature: we possess knowledge yet recognize that this knowledge cannot be rationally justified and that rational arguments can even be directed against it (fragments 109, 131, and 110). This peculiarity can be explained only through the Christian doctrine of the fall (e.g., fragment 117). Pascal extends his skeptical considerations by undermining the possibility of demonstrative proof of God’s existence. Such knowledge is impossible on philosophical grounds because such a proof could be successful only if an absurdity followed from denying God’s existence, and nature furnishes us with no knowledge incompatible with unbelief (fragments 429 and 781). Furthermore, demonstrative proof of God’s existence is incompatible with the epistemological claims of Christianity, which make God’s personal agency essential to religious knowledge (fragments 460, 449). Pascal’s use of skepticism and his refusal to admit proofs of God’s existence have led some commentators, like Richard Popkin (“Fideism,” 1967) and Terence Penelhum (“Skepticism and Fideism,” 1983) to interpret Pascal as a fideist, i.e., one who denies that religious belief can be based on anything other than pragmatic reasons. But such an interpretation disregards Pascal’s attempts to show that Christian belief is rational because of the explanatory power of its doctrines, particularly its doctrine of the fall (e.g., fragments 131, 137, 149, 431, 449, and 482). These purported demonstrations of the explanatory superiority of Christianity prepare Parva naturalia Pascal, Blaise 648    648 the way for Pascal’s famous “wager” (fragment 418). The wager is among the fragments that Pascal had not classified at the time of his death, but textual evidence shows that it would have been included in Section 12, entitled “Commencement,” after the demonstrations of the superior explanatory power of Christianity. The wager is a direct application of the principles developed in Pascal’s earlier work on probability, where he discovered a calculus that could be used to determine the most rational action when faced with uncertainty about future events, or what is now known as decision theory. In this case the uncertainty is the truth of Christianity and its claims about afterlife; and the actions under consideration are whether to believe or not. The choice of the most rational action depends on what would now be called its “expected value.” The expected value of an action is determined by (1) assigning a value, s, to each possible outcome of the action, (2) subtracting the cost of the action, c, from this value, and (3) multiplying the difference by the probability of the respective outcomes and adding these products together. Pascal invites the reader to consider Christian faith and unbelief as if they were acts of wagering on the truth of Christianity. If one believes, then there are two possible outcomes – either God exists or not. If God does exist, the stake to be gained is infinite life. If God does not exist, there are no winnings. Because the potential winnings are infinite, religious belief is more rational than unbelief because of its greater expected value. The wager has been subjected to numerous criticisms. William James argued that it is indecisive, because it would apply with equal validity to any religion that offers a promise of infinite rewards (The Will to Believe, 1897). But this ignores Pascal’s careful attempt to show that only Christianity has adequate explanatory power, so that the choice is intended to be between Christianity and unbelief. A stronger objection to the wager arises from contemporary work in decision theory that prohibits the introduction of infinite values because they have the counterintuitive result of making even the slightest risk irrational. But while these objections are valid, they do not refute Pascal’s strategy in the Pensées, in which the proofs of Christianity’s explanatory power and the wager have only the preliminary role of inducing the reader to seek the religious certainty that comes only from a saving religious experience which he calls “inspiration” (fragments 110, 381, 382, 588, 808).  DECISION THEORY, PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION, PROBABILITY. D.F. Pascal’s wager.PASCAL. passion.EMOTION, HUME, PRACTICAL REASONING. passions.EMOTION. passions, direct.HUME. passions, indirect.HUME. passive euthanasia.

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

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

AUGUSTINE, BOETHIUS, CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA, GREGORY OF NYSSA, TERTULLIAN. M.D.J. Paul of Venice (c.1368–1429), Italian philosopher and theologian. A Hermit of Saint Augustine (O.E.S.A.), he spent three years as a student patriarchalism Paul of Venice 650    650 in Oxford (1390–93) and taught at the University of Padua, where he became a doctor of arts and theology in 1408. He also held appointments at the universities of Parma, Siena, and Bologna. He was active in the administration of his order, holding various high offices. Paul of Venice wrote commentaries on several logical, ethical, and physical works of Aristotle, but his name is connected especially with an extremely popular textbook, Logica parva (over 150 manuscripts survive, and more than forty printed editions of it were made), and with a huge Logica magna. These Oxford-influenced works contributed to the favorable climate enjoyed by the English logic in northern Italian universities from the late fourteenth century through the fifteenth century. I.Bo. Peano, Giuseppe.LOGICAL FORM, PEANO POSTULATES. Peano postulates, also called Peano axioms, a list of assumptions from which the integers can be defined from some initial integer, equality, and successorship, and usually seen as defining progressions. The Peano postulates for arithmetic were produced by G. Peano in 1889. He took the set N of integers with a first term 1 and an equality relation between them, and assumed these nine axioms: 1 belongs to N; N has more than one member; equality is reflexive, symmetric, and associative, and closed over N; the successor of any integer in N also belongs to N, and is unique; and a principle of mathematical induction applying across the members of N, in that if 1 belongs to some subset M of N and so does the successor of any of its members, then in fact M % N. In some ways Peano’s formulation was not clear. He had no explicit rules of inference, nor any guarantee of the legitimacy of inductive definitions (which Dedekind established shortly before him). Further, the four properties attached to equality were seen to belong to the underlying “logic” rather than to arithmetic itself; they are now detached. It was realized (by Peano himself) that the postulates specified progressions rather than integers (e.g., 1, ½, ¼, 1 /8, . . . , would satisfy them, with suitable interpretations of the properties). But his work was significant in the axiomatization of arithmetic; still deeper foundations would lead with Russell and others to a major role for general set theory in the foundations of mathematics. In addition, with O. Veblen, T. Skolem, and others, this insight led in the early twentieth century to “non-standard” models of the postulates being developed in set theory and mathematical analysis; one could go beyond the ‘. . .’ in the sequence above and admit “further” objects, to produce valuable alternative models of the postulates. These procedures were of great significance also to model theory, in highlighting the property of the non-categoricity of an axiom system. A notable case was the “non-standard analysis” of A. Robinson, where infinitesimals were defined as arithmetical inverses of transfinite numbers without incurring the usual perils of rigor associated with them.  PHILOSOPHY OF MATHEMATICS. I.G.-G. Peirce, Charles S(anders) (1839–1914), American philosopher, scientist, and mathematician, the founder of the philosophical movement called pragmatism. Peirce was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the second son of Benjamin Peirce, who was professor of mathematics and astronomy at Harvard and one of America’s leading mathematicians. Charles Peirce studied at Harvard University and in 1863 received a degree in chemistry. In 1861 he began work with the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, and remained in this service for thirty years. Simultaneously with his professional career as a scientist, Peirce worked in logic and philosophy. He lectured on philosophy and logic at various universities and institutes, but was never able to obtain a permanent academic position as a teacher of philosophy. In 1887 he retired to Milford, Pennsylvania, and devoted the rest of his life to philosophical work. He earned a meager income from occasional lectures and by writing articles for periodicals and dictionaries. He spent his last years in extreme poverty and ill health. Pragmatism. Peirce formulated the basic principles of pragmatism in two articles, “The Fixation of Belief” and “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (1877–78). The title of the latter paper refers to Descartes’s doctrine of clear and distinct ideas. According to Peirce, the criteria of clarity and distinctness must be supplemented by a third condition of meaningfulness, which states that the meaning of a proposition or an “intellectual conception” lies in its “practical consequences.” In his paper “Pragmatism” (1905) he formulated the “Principle of Pragmatism” or the “Pragmatic Maxim” as follows: In order to ascertain the meaning of an intellectual conception we should consider what Peano, Giuseppe Peirce, Charles S(anders) 651    651 practical consequences might conceivably result by necessity from the truth of that conception; and the sum of these consequences will constitute the entire meaning of the conception. By “practical consequences” Peirce means conditional propositions of the form ‘if p, then q’, where the antecedent describes some action or experimental condition, and the consequent describes an observable phenomenon or a “sensible effect.” According to the Pragmatic Maxim, the meaning of a proposition (or of an “intellectual conception”) can be expressed as a conjunction of such “practical conditionals.” The Pragmatic Maxim might be criticized on the ground that many meaningful sentences (e.g., theoretical hypotheses) do not entail any “practical consequences” in themselves, but only in conjunction with other hypotheses. Peirce anticipated this objection by observing that “the maxim of pragmatism is that a conception can have no logical effect or import differing from that of a second conception except so far as, taken in connection with other conceptions and intentions, it might conceivably modify our practical conduct differently from that of the second conception” (“Pragmatism and Abduction,” 1903). Theory of inquiry and philosophy of science. Peirce adopted Bain’s definition of belief as “that which a man is prepared to act upon.” Belief guides action, and as a content of belief a proposition can be regarded as a maxim of conduct. According to Peirce, belief is a satisfactory and desirable state, whereas the opposite of belief, the state of doubt, is an unsatisfactory state. The starting point of inquiry is usually some surprising phenomenon that is inconsistent with one’s previously accepted beliefs, and that therefore creates a state of doubt. The purpose of inquiry is the replacement of this state by that of belief: “the sole aim of inquiry is the settlement of opinion.” A successful inquiry leads to stable opinion, a state of belief that need not later be given up. Peirce regarded the ultimate stability of opinion as a criterion of truth and reality: “the real . . . is that which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of you and me.” He accepted, however, an objectivist conception of truth and reality: the defining characteristic of reality is its independence of the opinions of individual persons. In “The Fixation of Belief” Peirce argued that the scientific method, a method in which we let our beliefs be determined by external reality, “by something upon which our thinking has no effect,” is the best way of settling opinion. Much of his philosophical work was devoted to the analysis of the various forms of inference and argument employed in science. He studied the concept of probability and probabilistic reasoning in science, criticized the subjectivist view of probability, and adopted an objectivist conception, according to which probability can be defined as a relative frequency in the long run. Peirce distinguished between three main types of inference, which correspond to three stages of inquiry: (i) abduction, a tentative acceptance of an explanatory hypothesis which, if true, would make the phenomenon under investigation intelligible; (ii) deduction, the derivation of testable consequences from the explanatory hypothesis; and (iii) induction, the evaluation of the hypothesis in the light of these consequences. He called this method of inquiry the inductive method; in the contemporary philosophy of science it is usually called the hypothetico-deductive method. According to Peirce, the scientific method can be viewed as an application of the pragmatic maxim: the testable consequences derived from an explanatory hypothesis constitute its concrete “meaning” in the sense of the Pragmatic Maxim. Thus the Maxim determines the admissibility of a hypothesis as a possible (meaningful) explanation. According to Pierce, inquiry is always dependent on beliefs that are not subject to doubt at the time of the inquiry, but such beliefs might be questioned on some other occasion. Our knowledge does not rest on indubitable “first premises,” but all beliefs are dependent on other beliefs. According to Peirce’s doctrine of fallibilism, the conclusions of science are always tentative. The rationality of the scientific method does not depend on the certainty of its conclusions, but on its self-corrective character: by continued application of the method science can detect and correct its own mistakes, and thus eventually lead to the discovery of truth. Logic, the theory of signs, and the philosophy of language. In “The Logic of Relatives,” published in 1883 in a collection of papers by himself and his students at the Johns Hopkins University (Studies in Logic by Members of the Johns Hopkins University), Peirce formalized relational statements by using subscript indices for individuals (individual variables), and construed the quantifiers ‘some’ and ‘every’ as variable binding operators; thus Peirce can be regarded (together Peirce, Charles S(anders) Peirce, Charles S(anders) 652    652 with the German logician Frege) as one of the founders of quantification theory (predicate logic). In his paper “On the Algebra of Logic – A Contribution to the Philosophy of Notation” (1885) he interpreted propositional logic as a calculus of truth-values, and defined (logically) necessary truth (in propositional logic) as truth for all truth-value assignments to sentential letters. He studied the logic of modalities and in the 1890s he invented a system of logical graphs (called “existential graphs”), based on a diagrammatic representation of propositions, in which he anticipated some basic ideas of the possible worlds semantics of modal logic. Peirce’s letters and notebooks contain significant logical and philosophical insights. For example, he examined three-valued truth tables (“Triadic Logic”), and discovered (in 1886) the possibility of representing the truth-functional connectives of propositional logic by electrical switching circuits. Peirce regarded logic as a part of a more general area of inquiry, the theory of signs, which he also called semeiotic (nowadays usually spelled ‘semiotic(s)’). According to Peirce, sign relations are triadic, involving the sign itself, its object (or what the sign stands for), and an interpretant which determines how the sign represents the object; the interpretant can be regarded as the meaning of the sign. The interpretant of a sign is another sign which in turn has its own interpretant (or interpretants); such a sequence of interpretants ends in an “ultimate logical interpretant,” which is “a change of habit of conduct.” On the basis of the triadic character of the sign relation Peirce distinguished three divisions of signs. These divisions were based on (i) the character of the sign itself, (ii) the relation between the sign and its object, and (iii) the way in which the interpretant represents the object. These divisions reflect Peirce’s system of three fundamental ontological categories, which he termed Quality or Firstness, Relation or Secondness, and Representation or Thirdness. Thus, according to the first division, a sign can be (a) a qualisign, a mere quality or appearance (a First); (b) a sinsign or token, an individual object, or event (a Second); or (c) a legisign or a general type (a Third). Secondly, signs can be divided into icons, indices, and symbols on the basis of their relations to their objects: an icon refers to an object on the basis of its similarity to the object (in some respect); an index stands in a dynamic or causal relation to its object; whereas a symbol functions as a sign of an object by virtue of a rule or habit of interpretation. Peirce’s third division divides signs into rhemes (predicative signs), propositional signs (propositions), and arguments. Some of the concepts and distinctions introduced by Peirce, e.g., the distinction between “types” and “tokens” and the division of signs into “icons,” “indices,” and “symbols,” have become part of the standard conceptual repertoire of philosophy and semiotics. In his philosophy of language Peirce made a distinction between a proposition and an assertion, and studied the logical character of assertive speech acts. Metaphysics. In spite of his critical attitude toward traditional metaphysics, Peirce believed that metaphysical questions can be discussed in a meaningful way. According to Peirce, metaphysics studies the most general traits of reality, and “kinds of phenomena with which every man’s experience is so saturated that he usually pays no particular attention to them.” The basic categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness mentioned above occupy a central position in Peirce’s metaphysics. Especially in his later writings he emphasized the reality and metaphysical irreducibility of Thirdness, and defended the view that general phenomena (for example, general laws) cannot be regarded as mere conjunctions of their actual individual instances. This view was associated with Peirce’s synechism, the doctrine that the world contains genuinely continuous phenomena. He regarded synechism as a new form of Scholastic realism. In the area of modalities Peirce’s basic categories appear as possibility, actuality, and necessity. Here he argued that reality cannot be identified with existence (or actuality), but comprises real (objective) possibilities. This view was partly based on his realization that many conditional statements, for instance the “practical” conditionals expressing the empirical import of a proposition (in the sense of the Pragmatic Maxim), cannot be construed as material or truth-functional conditionals, but must be regarded as modal (subjunctive) conditionals. In his cosmology Peirce propounded the doctrine of tychism, according to which there is absolute chance in the universe, and the basic laws of nature are probabilistic and inexact. Peirce’s position in contemporary philosophy. Peirce had few disciples, but some of his students and colleagues became influential figures in American philosophy and science, e.g., the philosophers James, Royce, and Dewey and the economist Thorstein Veblen. Peirce’s pragmatism Peirce, Charles S(anders) Peirce, Charles S(anders) 653    653 became widely known through James’s lectures and writings, but Peirce was dissatisfied with James’s version of pragmatism, and renamed his own form of it ‘pragmaticism’, which term he considered to be “ugly enough to keep it safe from kidnappers.” Pragmatism became an influential philosophical movement during the twentieth century through Dewey (philosophy of science and philosophy of education), C. I. Lewis (theory of knowledge), Ramsey, Ernest Nagel, and Quine (philosophy of science). Peirce’s work in logic influenced, mainly through his contacts with the German logician Ernst Schröder, the model-theoretic tradition in twentieth-century logic. There are three comprehensive collections of Peirce’s papers: Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (1931–58), vols. 1–6 edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, vols. 7–8 edited by Arthur Burks; The New Elements of Mathematics by Charles S. Peirce (1976), edited by Carolyn Eisele; and Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition (1982–).  DEWEY, JAMES, PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE, PRAGMATISM, TRUTH, TYCHISM. R.Hi. Peirce’s law, the principle ‘((A P B) P A) P A’, which holds in classical logic but fails in the eyes of relevance logicians when ‘ P’ is read as ‘entails’.  IMPLICATION,

Pelagianism, the doctrine in Christian theology that, through the exercise of free will, human beings can attain moral perfection. A broad movement devoted to this proposition was only loosely associated with its eponymous leader. Pelagius (c.354–c.425), a lay theologian from Britain or Ireland, taught in Rome prior to its sacking in 410. He and his disciple Celestius found a forceful adversary in Augustine, whom they provoked to stiffen his stance on original sin, the bondage of the will, and humanity’s total reliance upon God’s grace and predestination for salvation. To Pelagius, this constituted fatalism and encouraged moral apathy. God would not demand perfection, as the Bible sometimes suggested, were that impossible to attain. Rather grace made the struggle easier for a sanctity that would not be unreachable even in its absence. Though in the habit of sinning, in consequence of the fall, we have not forfeited the capacity to overcome that habit nor been released from the imperative to do so. For all its moral earnestness this teaching seems to be in conflict with much of the New Testament, especially as interpreted by Augustine, and it was condemned as heresy in 418. The bondage of the will has often been reaffirmed, perhaps most notably by Luther in dispute with Erasmus. Yet Christian theology and practice have always had their sympathizers with Pelagianism and with its reluctance to attest the loss of free will, the inevitability of sin, and the utter necessity of God’s grace. A.E.L. Pelagius.PELAGIANISM. per accidens (Latin, ‘by accident’), by, as, or being an accident or non-essential feature. A per accidens predication is one in which an accident is predicated of a substance. (The terminology is medieval. Note that the accident and substance themselves, not words standing for them, are the terms of the predication relation.) An ens (entity) per accidens is either an accident or the “accidental unity” of a substance and an accident (Descartes, e.g., insists that a person is not a per accidens union of body and mind.)

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

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

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

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

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

DEFINITION. Peripatetic School, also called Peripatos, the philosophical community founded by Aristotle at a public gymnasium (the Lyceum) after his return to Athens in c.335 B.C. The derivation of ‘Peripatetic’ from the alleged Aristotelian custom of “walking about” (peripatein) is probably wrong. The name should be explained by reference to a “covered walking hall” (peripatos) among the school facilities. A scholarch or headmaster presided over roughly two classes of members: the presbyteroi or seniors, who probably had some teaching duties, and the neaniskoi or juniors. No evidence of female philosophers in the Lyceum has survived. During Aristotle’s lifetime his own lectures, whether for the inner circle of the school or for the city at large, were probably the key attraction and core activity; but given Aristotle’s knack for organizing group research projects, we may assume that young and old Peripatetics spent much of their time working on their own specific assignments either at the library, where they could consult works of earlier writers, or at some kind of repository for specimens used in zoological and botanical investigations. As a resident alien, Aristotle could not own property in Athens and hence was not the legal owner of the school. Upon his final departure from Athens in 322, his longtime collaborator Theophrastus of Eresus in Lesbos (c.370–287) succeeded him as scholarch. Theophrastus was an able Aristotelian who wrote extensively on metaphysics, psychology, physiology, botany, ethics, politics, and the history of philosophy. With the help of the Peripatetic dictator Demetrius of Phaleron, he was able to secure property rights over the physical facilities of the school. Under Theophrastus, the Peripatos continued to flourish and is said to have had 2,000 students, surely not all at the same time. His successor, Strato of Lampsakos (c.335–269), had narrower interests and abandoned key Aristotelian tenets. With him a progressive decline set in, to which the early loss of Aristotle’s personal library, taken to Asia Minor perfect duty Peripatetic School 659    659 by Neleus of Skepsis, certainly contributed. By the first century B.C. the Peripatos had ceased to exist. Philosophers of later periods sympathetic to Aristotle’s views have also been called Peripatetics.  PERIPATETIC SCHOOL. perlocutionary act.SPEECH ACT THEORY. permissibility.DEONTIC LOGIC, EPISTEMOLOGY. Perry, Ralph Barton (1876–1957), American philosopher who taught at Harvard University and wrote extensively in ethics, social philosophy, and the theory of knowledge. He received a Pulitzer Prize in 1936 for The Thought and Character of William James, a biography of his teacher and colleague. Perry’s other major works include: The Moral Economy (1909), General Theory of Value (1926), Puritanism and Democracy (1944), and Realms of Value (1954). He is perhaps best known for his views on value. He writes in General Theory of Value, “Any object, whatever it be, acquires value when any interest, whatever it be, is taken in it; just as anything whatsoever becomes a target when anyone whosoever aims at it.” Something’s having value is nothing but its being the object of some interest, and to know whether it has value one need only know whether it is the object of someone’s interest. Morality aims at the promotion of the moral good, which he defines as “harmonious happiness.” This consists in the reconciliation, harmonizing, and fulfillment of all interests. Perry’s epistemological and metaphysical views were part of a revolt against idealism and dualism. Along with five other philosophers, he wrote The New Realism (1912). The “New Realists” held that the objects of perception and memory are directly presented to consciousness and are just what they appear to be; nothing intervenes between the knower and the external world. The view that the objects of perception and memory are presented by means of ideas leads, they argued, to idealism, skepticism, and absurdity. Perry is also known for having developed, along with E. B. Holt, the “specific response” theory, which is an attempt to construe belief and perception in terms of bodily adjustment and behavior.  NEW REALISM, VALUE. N.M.L. per se.ESSENTIALISM, PER

personal identity, the (numerical) identity over time of persons. The question of what personal identity consists in is the question of what it is (what the necessary and sufficient conditions are) for a person existing at one time and a person existing at another time to be one and the same person. Here there is no question of there being any entity that is the “identity” of a person; to say that a person’s identity consists in such and such is just shorthand for saying that facts about personal identity, i.e., facts to the effect that someone existing at one time is the same as someone existing at another time, consist in such and such. (This should not be confused with the usage, common in ordinary speech and in psychology, in which persons are said to have identities, and, sometimes, to seek, lose, or regain their identities, where one’s “identity” intimately involves a set of values and goals that structure one’s life.) The words ‘identical’ and ‘same’ mean nothing different in judgments about persons than in judgments about other things. The problem of personal identity is therefore not one of defining a special sense of ‘identical,’ and it is at least misleading to characterize it as defining a particular kind of identity. Applying Quine’s slogan “no entity without identity,” one might say that characterizing any sort of entity involves indicating what the identity conditions for entities of that sort are (so, e.g., part of the explanation of the concept of a set is that sets having the same members are identical), and that asking what the identity of persons consists in is just a way of asking what sorts of things persons are. But the main focus in traditional discussions of the topic has been on one kind of identity judgment about persons, namely those asserting “identity over time”; the question has been about what the persistence of persons over time consists in. What has made the identity (persistence) of persons of special philosophical interest is partly its epistemology and partly its connections with moral and evaluative matters. The crucial epistemological fact is that persons have, in memory, an access to their own past histories that is unlike the access they have to the histories of other things (including other persons); when one remembers doing or experiencing something, one normally has no need to employ any criterion of identity in order to know that the subject of the remembered action or experience is (i.e., is identical with) oneself. The moral and evaluative matters include moral responsibility (someone can be held responsible for a past action only Peripatos personal identity 660    660 if he or she is identical to the person who did it) and our concern for our own survival and future well-being (since it seems, although this has been questioned, that what one wants in wanting to survive is that there should exist in the future someone who is identical to oneself). The modern history of the topic of personal identity begins with Locke, who held that the identity of a person consists neither in the identity of an immaterial substance (as dualists might be expected to hold) nor in the identity of a material substance or “animal body” (as materialists might be expected to hold), and that it consists instead in “same consciousness.” His view appears to have been that the persistence of a person through time consists in the fact that certain actions, thoughts, experiences, etc., occurring at different times, are somehow united in memory. Modern theories descended from Locke’s take memory continuity to be a special case of something more general, psychological continuity, and hold that personal identity consists in this. This is sometimes put in terms of the notion of a “person-stage,” i.e., a momentary “time slice” of the history of a person. A series of person-stages will be psychologically continuous if the psychological states (including memories) occurring in later members of the series grow out of, in certain characteristic ways, those occurring in earlier members of it; and according to the psychological continuity view of personal identity, person-stages occurring at different times are stages of the same person provided they belong to a single, non-branching, psychologically continuous series of person-stages. Opponents of the Lockean and neo-Lockean (psychological continuity) view tend to fall into two camps. Some, following Butler and Reid, hold that personal identity is indefinable, and that nothing informative can be said about what it consists in. Others hold that the identity of a person consists in some sort of physical continuity – perhaps the identity of a living human organism, or the identity of a human brain. In the actual cases we know about (putting aside issues about non-bodily survival of death), psychological continuity and physical continuity go together. Much of the debate between psychological continuity theories and physical continuity theories has centered on the interpretation of thought experiments involving brain transplants, brain-state transfers, etc., in which these come apart. Such examples make vivid the question of whether our fundamental criteria of personal identity are psychological, physical, or both. Recently philosophical attention has shifted somewhat from the question of what personal identity consists in to questions about its importance. The consideration of hypothetical cases of “fission” (in which two persons at a later time are psychologically continuous with one person at an earlier time) has suggested to some that we can have survival – or at any rate what matters in survival – without personal identity, and that our self-interested concern for the future is really a concern for whatever future persons are psychologically continuous with us. 

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

 IDEALISM, NEO-THOMISM. C.F.D. personalism personalism 661    661 personality.CHARACTER. personal supposition.

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

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

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

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

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

SARTRE, SCHELER. J.J.K. phenotext.KRISTEVA. Philodemus.EPICUREANISM. Philo Judaeus (c.20 B.C.–A.D. 40), Jewish Hellenistic philosopher of Alexandria who composed the bulk of his work in the form of commentaries and discourses on Scripture. He made the first known sustained attempt to synthesize its revealed teachings with the doctrines of classical philosophy. Although he was not the first to apply the methods of allegorical interpretation to Scripture, the number and variety of his interpretations make Philo unique. With this interpretive tool, he transformed biblical narratives into Platonic accounts of the soul’s quest for God and its struggle against passion, and the Mosaic commandments into specific manifestations of general laws of nature. Philo’s most influential idea was his conception of God, which combines the personal, ethical deity of the Bible with the abstract, transcendentalist theology of Platonism and Pythagoreanism. The Philonic deity is both the loving, just God of the Hebrew Patriarchs and the eternal One whose essence is absolutely unknowable and who creates the material world by will from primordial matter which He creates ex nihilo. Besides the intelligible realm of ideas, which Philo is the earliest known philosopher to identify as God’s thoughts, he posited an intermediate divine being which he called, adopting scriptural language, the logos. Although the exact nature of the logos is hard to pin down – Philo variously and, without any concern for consistency, called it the “first-begotten Son of the uncreated Father,” “Second God,” “idea of ideas,” “archetype of human reason,” and “pattern of creation” – its main functions are clear: to bridge the huge gulf between the transcendent deity and the lower world and to serve as the unifying law of the universe, the ground of its order and rationality. A philosophical eclectic, Philo was unknown to medieval Jewish philosophers but, beyond his anticipations of Neoplatonism, he had a lasting impact on Christianity through Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Ambrose.  HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHY. J.Ste. Philolaus (470?–390? B.C.), pre-Socratic Greek philosopher from Croton in southern Italy, the first Pythagorean to write a book. The surviving fragments of it are the earliest primary texts for Pythagoreanism, but numerous spurious fragments have also been preserved. Philolaus’s book begins with a cosmogony and includes astronomical, medical, and psychological doctrines. His major innovation was to argue that the cosmos and everything in it is a combination not just of unlimiteds (what is structured and ordered, e.g. material elements) but also of limiters (structural and ordering elements, e.g. shapes). These elements are held together in a harmonia (fitting together), which comes to be in accord with perspicuous mathematical relationships, such as the whole number ratios that correspond to the harmonic intervals (e.g. octave % phenotext Philolaus 666    666 1 : 2). He argued that secure knowledge is possible insofar as we grasp the number in accordance with which things are put together. His astronomical system is famous as the first to make the earth a planet. Along with the sun, moon, fixed stars, five planets, and counter-earth (thus making the perfect number ten), the earth circles the central fire (a combination of the limiter “center” and the unlimited “fire”). Philolaus’s influence is seen in Plato’s Philebus; he is the primary source for Aristotle’s account of Pythagoreanism.  PYTHAGORAS. C.A.H. Philo of Larisa.ACADEMY. Philoponus, John.JOHANNES PHILOPONUS. philosopher’s stone.

philosophia perennis, a supposed body of truths that appear in the writings of the great philosophers, or the truths common to opposed philosophical viewpoints. The term is derived from the title of a book (De perenni philosophia) published by Agostino Steuco of Gubbio in 1540. It suggests that the differences between philosophers are inessential and superficial and that the common essential truth emerges, however partially, in the major philosophical schools. Aldous Huxley employed it as a title. L. Lavelle, N. Hartmann, and K. Jaspers also employ the phrase. M. De Wulf and many others use the phrase to characterize Neo-Thomism as the chosen vehicle of essential philosophical truths. R.M. philosophical anthropology, philosophical inquiry concerning human nature, often starting with the question of what generally characterizes human beings in contrast to other kinds of creatures and things. Thus broadly conceived, it is a kind of inquiry as old as philosophy itself, occupying philosophers from Socrates to Sartre; and it embraces philosophical psychology, the philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, and existentialism. Such inquiry presupposes no immutable “essence of man,” but only the meaningfulness of distinguishing between what is “human” and what is not, and the possibility that philosophy as well as other disciplines may contribute to our self-comprehension. It leaves open the question of whether other kinds of naturally occurring or artificially produced entity may possess the hallmarks of our humanity, and countenances the possibility of the biologically evolved, historically developed, and socially and individually variable character of everything about our attained humanity. More narrowly conceived, philosophical anthropology is a specific movement in recent European philosophy associated initially with Scheler and Helmuth Plessner, and subsequently with such figures as Arnold Gehlen, Cassirer, and the later Sartre. It initially emerged in the late 1920s in Germany, simultaneously with the existential philosophy of Heidegger and the critical social theory of the Frankfurt School, with which it competed as German philosophers turned their attention to the comprehension of human life. This movement was distinguished from the outset by its attempt to integrate the insights of phenomenological analysis with the perspectives attainable through attention to human and comparative biology, and subsequently to social inquiry as well. This turn to a more naturalistic approach to the understanding of ourselves, as a particular kind of living creature among others, is reflected in the titles of the two works published in 1928 that inaugurated the movement: Scheler’s Man’s Place in Nature and Plessner’s The Levels of the Organic and Man. For both Scheler and Plessner, however, as for those who followed them, our nature must be understood by taking further account of the social, cultural, and intellectual dimensions of human life. Even those like Gehlen, whose Der Mensch (1940) exhibits a strongly biological orientation, devoted much attention to these dimensions, which our biological nature both constrains and makes possible. For all of them, the relation between the biological and the social and cultural dimensions of human life is a central concern and a key to comprehending our human nature. One of the common themes of the later philosophical-anthropological literature – e.g., Cassirer’s An Essay on Man (1945) and Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) as well as Plessner’s Contitio Humana (1965) and Gehlen’s Early Man and Late Culture (1963) – is the plasticity of human nature, made possible by our biological constitution, and the resulting great differences in the ways human beings live. Yet this is not taken to preclude saying anything meaningful about human nature generally; rather, it merely requires attention to the kinds of general features involved and reflected in human diversity and variability. Critics of the very idea and possibility of a philosophical anthropology (e.g., Althusser and Foucault) typically either deny that there are any Philo of Larisa philosophical anthropology 667    667 such general features or maintain that there are none outside the province of the biological sciences (to which philosophy can contribute nothing substantive). Both claims, however, are open to dispute; and the enterprise of a philosophical anthropology remains a viable and potentially significant one.  FRANKFURT SCHOOL, NIETZSCHE. R.Sc. philosophical behaviorism.BEHAVIORISM. philosophical psychology.PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. philosophical theology.METAPHYSICS. philosophy, critical.BROAD, KANT. philosophy, Laphilosophy, speculative.SPECULATIVE PHILOSOPHY. philosophy of action.ACTION THEORY. philosophy of art.AESTHETICS. philosophy of biology, the philosophy of science applied to biology. On a conservative view of the philosophy of science, the same principles apply throughout science. Biology supplies additional examples but does not provide any special problems or require new principles. For example, the reduction of Mendelian genetics to molecular biology exemplifies the same sort of relation as the reduction of thermodynamics to statistical mechanics, and the same general analysis of reduction applies equally to both. More radical philosophers argue that the subject matter of biology has certain unique features; hence, the philosophy of biology is itself unique. The three features of biology most often cited by those who maintain that philosophy of biology is unique are functional organization, embryological development, and the nature of selection. Organisms are functionally organized. They are capable of maintaining their overall organization in the face of fairly extensive variation in their envisonments. Organisms also undergo ontogenetic development resulting from extremely complex interactions between the genetic makeup of the organism and its successive environments. At each step, the course that an organism takes is determined by an interplay between its genetic makeup, its current state of development, and the environment it happens to confront. The complexity of these interactions produces the nature–nurture problem. Except for human artifacts, similar organization does not occur in the non-living world. The species problem is another classic issue in the philosophy of biology. Biological species have been a paradigm example of natural kinds since Aristotle. According to nearly all pre-Darwinian philosophers, species are part of the basic makeup of the universe, like gravity and gold. They were held to be as eternal, immutable, and discrete as these other examples of natural kinds. If Darwin was right, species are not eternal. They come and go, and once gone can no more reemerge than Aristotle can once again walk the streets of Athens. Nor are species immutable. A sample of lead can be transmuted into a sample of gold, but these elements as elements remain immutable in the face of such changes. However, Darwin insisted that species themselves, not merely their instances, evolved. Finally, because Darwin thought that species evolved gradually, the boundaries between species are not sharp, casting doubt on the essentialist doctrines so common in his day. In short, if species evolve, they have none of the traditional characteristics of species. Philosophers and biologists to this day are working out the consequences of this radical change in our worldview. The topic that has received the greatest attention by philosophers of biology in the recent literature is the nature of evolutionary theory, in particular selection, adaptation, fitness, and the population structure of species. In order for selection to operate, variation is necessary, successive generations must be organized genealogically, and individuals must interact differentially with their environments. In the simplest case, genes pass on their structure largely intact. In addition, they provide the information necessary to produce organisms. Certain of these organisms are better able to cope with their environments and reproduce than are other organisms. As a result, genes are perpetuated differentially through successive generations. Those characteristics that help an organism cope with its environments are termed adaptations. In a more restricted sense, only those characteristics that arose through past selective advantage count as adaptations. Just as the notion of IQ was devised as a single measure for a combination of the factors that influence our mental abilities, fitness is a measure of relative reproductive success. Claims about the tautological character of the principle philosophical behaviorism philosophy of biology of the survival of the fittest stem from the blunt assertion that fitness just is relative reproductive success, as if intelligence just is what IQ tests measure. Philosophers of biology have collaborated with biologists to analyze the notion of fitness. This literature has concentrated on the role that causation plays in selection and, hence, must play in any adequate explication of fitness. One important distinction that has emerged is between replication and differential interaction with the environment. Selection is a function of the interplay between these two processes. Because of the essential role of variation in selection, all the organisms that belong to the same species either at any one time or through time cannot possibly be essentially the same. Nor can species be treated adequately in terms of the statistical covariance of either characters or genes. The populational structure of species is crucial. For example, species that form numerous, partially isolated demes are much more likely to speciate than those that do not. One especially controversial question is whether species themselves can function in the evolutionary process rather than simply resulting from it. Although philosophers of biology have played an increasingly important role in biology itself, they have also addressed more traditional philosophical questions, especially in connection with evolutionary epistemology and ethics. Advocates of evolutionary epistemology argue that knowledge can be understood in terms of the adaptive character of accurate knowledge. Those organisms that hold false beliefs about their environment, including other organisms, are less likely to reproduce themselves than those with more accurate beliefs. To the extent that this argument has any force at all, it applies only to humansized entities and events. One common response to evolutionary epistemology is that sometimes people who hold manifestly false beliefs flourish at the expense of those who hold more realistic views of the world in which we live. On another version of evolutionary epistemology, knowledge acquisition is viewed as just one more instance of a selection process. The issue is not to justify our beliefs but to understand how they are generated and proliferated. Advocates of evolutionary ethics attempt to justify certain ethical principles in terms of their survival value. Any behavior that increases the likelihood of survival and reproduction is “good,” and anything that detracts from these ends is “bad.” The main objection to evolutionary ethics is that it violates the is–ought distinction. According to most ethical systems, we are asked to sacrifice ourselves for the good of others. If these others were limited to our biological relatives, then the biological notion of inclusive fitness might be adequate to account for such altruistic behavior, but the scope of ethical systems extends past one’s biological relatives. Advocates of evolutionary ethics are hard pressed to explain the full range of behavior that is traditionally considered as virtuous. Either biological evolution cannot provide an adequate justification for ethical behavior or else ethical systems must be drastically reduced in their scope.  DARWINISM, ESSENTIALISM, MECHANISTIC EXPLANATIONS, MENDEL, PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE. D.L.H. philosophy of economics, the study of methodological issues facing positive economic theory and normative problems on the intersection of welfare economics and political philosophy. Methodological issues. Applying approaches and questions in the philosophy of science specifically to economics, the philosophy of economics explores epistemological and conceptual problems raised by the explanatory aims and strategy of economic theory: Do its assumptions about individual choice constitute laws, and do they explain its derived generalizations about markets and economies? Are these generalizations laws, and if so, how are they tested by observation of economic processes, and how are theories in the various compartments of economics – microeconomics, macroeconomics – related to one another and to econometrics? How are the various schools – neoclassical, institutional, Marxian, etc. – related to one another, and what sorts of tests might enable us to choose between their theories? Historically, the chief issue of interest in the development of the philosophy of economics has been the empirical adequacy of the assumptions of rational “economic man”: that all agents have complete and transitive cardinal or ordinal utility rankings or preference orders and that they always choose that available option which maximizes their utility or preferences. Since the actual behavior of agents appears to disconfirm these assumptions, the claim that they constitute causal laws governing economic behavior is difficult to sustain. On the other hand, the assumption of preference-maximizing behavior is indispensable to twentieth-century economics. These two considerations jointly undermine the claim that economic theory honors criteria on explanatory power and evidential probity drawn philosophy of economics philosophy of economics 669    669 from physical science. Much work by economists and philosophers has been devoted therefore to disputing the claim that the assumptions of rational choice theory are false or to disputing the inference from this claim to the conclusion that the cognitive status of economic theory as empirical science is thereby undermined. Most frequently it has been held that the assumptions of rational choice are as harmless and as indispensable as idealizations are elsewhere in science. This view must deal with the allegation that unlike theories embodying idealization elsewhere in science, economic theory gains little more in predictive power from these assumptions about agents’ calculations than it would secure without any assumptions about individual choice. Normative issues. Both economists and political philosophers are concerned with identifying principles that will ensure just, fair, or equitable distributions of scarce goods. For this reason neoclassical economic theory shares a history with utilitarianism in moral philosophy. Contemporary welfare economics continues to explore the limits of utilitarian prescriptions that optimal economic and political arrangements should maximize and/or equalize utility, welfare, or some surrogate. It also examines the adequacy of alternatives to such utilitarian principles. Thus, economics shares an agenda of interests with political and moral philosophy. Utilitarianism in economics and philosophy has been constrained by an early realization that utilities are neither cardinally measurable nor interpersonally comparable. Therefore the prescription to maximize and/or equalize utility cannot be determinatively obeyed. Welfare theorists have nevertheless attempted to establish principles that will enable us to determine the equity, fairness, or justice of various economic arrangements, and that do not rely on interpersonal comparisons required to measure whether a distribution is maximal or equal in the utility it accords all agents. Inspired by philosophers who have surrendered utilitarianism for other principles of equality, fairness, or justice in distribution, welfare economists have explored Kantian, social contractarian, and communitarian alternatives in a research program that cuts clearly across both disciplines. Political philosophy has also profited as much from innovations in economic theory as welfare economics has benefited from moral philosophy. Theorems from welfare economics that establish the efficiency of markets in securing distributions that meet minimal conditions of optimality and fairness have led moral philosophers to reexamine the moral status of free-market exchange. Moreover, philosophers have come to appreciate that coercive social institutions are sometimes best understood as devices for securing public goods – goods like police protection that cannot be provided to those who pay for them without also providing them to free riders who decline to do so. The recognition that everyone would be worse off, including free riders, were the coercion required to pay for these goods not imposed, is due to welfare economics and has led to a significant revival of interest in the work of Hobbes, who appears to have prefigured such arguments.  DECISION THEORY, PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES, POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY,

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

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

philosophy of language, the philosophical study of natural language and its workings, particularly of linguistic meaning and the use of language. A natural language is any one of the thousands of various tongues that have developed historically among populations of human beings and have been used for everyday purposes – including English, Italian, Swahili, and Latin – as opposed to the formal and other artificial “languages” invented by mathematicians, logicians, and computer scientists, such as arithmetic, the predicate calculus, and LISP or COBOL. There are intermediate cases, e.g., Esperanto, Pig Latin, and the sort of “philosophese” that mixes English words with logical symbols. Contemporary philosophy of language centers on the theory of meaning, but also includes the theory of reference, the theory of truth, philosophical pragmatics, and the philosophy of linguistics. The main question addressed by the theory of meaning is: In virtue of what are certain physical marks or noises meaningful linguistic expressions, and in virtue of what does any particular set of marks or noises have the distinctive meaning it does? A theory of meaning should also give a comprehensive account of the “meaning phenomena,” or general semantic properties of sentences: synonymy, ambiguity, entailment, and the like. Some theorists have thought to express these questions and issues in terms of languageneutral items called propositions: ‘In virtue of what does a particular set of marks or noises express the proposition it does?’; cf. ‘ “La neige est blanche” expresses the proposition that snow is white’, and ‘Synonymous sentences express the same proposition’. On this view, to understand a sentence is to “grasp” the proposition expressed by that sentence. But the explanatory role and even the existence of such entities are disputed. It has often been maintained that certain special sentences are true solely in virtue of their meanings and/or the meanings of their component expressions, without regard to what the nonlinguistic world is like (‘No bachelor is married’; ‘If a thing is blue it is colored’). Such vacuously true sentences are called analytic. However, Quine and others have disputed whether there really is such a thing as analyticity. Philosophers have offered a number of sharply competing hypotheses as to the nature of meaning, including: (1) the referential view that words mean by standing for things, and that a sentence means what it does because its parts correspond referentially to the elements of an actual or possible state of affairs in the world; (2) ideational or mentalist theories, according to philosophy of language philosophy of language 673    673 which meanings are ideas or other psychological phenomena in people’s minds; (3) “use” theories, inspired by Wittgenstein and to a lesser extent by J. L. Austin: a linguistic expression’s “meaning” is its conventionally assigned role as a game-piece-like token used in one or more existing social practices;