Grice's Dictionary -- in five volumes, vol. V.

Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 1775 1854, German philosopher whose metamorscalar implicature Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 816    816 phoses encompass the entire history of German idealism. A Schwabian, Schelling first studied at Tübingen, where he befriended Hölderlin and Hegel. The young Schelling was an enthusiastic exponent of Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre and devoted several early essays to its exposition. After studying science and mathematics at Leipzig, he joined Fichte at Jena in 1798. Meanwhile, in such writings as Philosophische Briefe über Dogmatismus und Kritizismus “Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism,” 1795, Schelling betrayed growing doubts concerning Fichte’s philosophy above all, its treatment of nature and a lively interest in Spinoza. He then turned to constructing a systematic Naturphilosophie philosophy of nature within the context of which nature would be treated more holistically than by either Newtonian science or transcendental idealism. Of his many publications on this topic, two of the more important are Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur “Ideas concerning a Philosophy of Nature,” 1797 and Von der Weltseele “On the World-Soul,” 1798. Whereas transcendental idealism attempts to derive objective experience from an initial act of free self-positing, Schelling’s philosophy of nature attempts to derive consciousness from objects. Beginning with “pure objectivity,” the Naturphilosophie purports to show how nature undergoes a process of unconscious self-development, culminating in the conditions for its own self-representation. The method of Naturphilosophie is fundamentally a priori: it begins with the concept of the unity of nature and accounts for its diversity by interpreting nature as a system of opposed forces or “polarities,” which manifest themselves in ever more complex levels of organization Potenzen. At Jena, Schelling came into contact with Tieck, Novalis, and the Schlegel brothers and became interested in art. This new interest is evident in his System des transzendentalen Idealismus 1800, which describes the path from pure subjectivity self-consciousness to objectivity the necessary positing of the Not-I, or of nature. The most innovative and influential portion of this treatise, which is otherwise closely modeled on Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre, is its conclusion, which presents art as the concrete accomplishment of the philosophical task. In aesthetic experience the identity between the subjective and the objective, the ideal and the real, becomes an object to the experiencing I itself. For Schelling, transcendental idealism and Naturphilosophie are two complementary sides or subdivisions of a larger, more encompassing system, which he dubbed the System of Identity or Absolute Idealism and expounded in a series of publications, including the Darstellung meines Systems der Philosophie “Presentation of My System of Philosophy,” 1801, Bruno 1802, and Vorlesungen über die Methode des akademischen Studiums “Lectures on the Method of Academic Study,” 1803. The most distinctive feature of this system is that it begins with a bald assertion of the unity of thought and being, i.e., with the bare idea of the self-identical “Absolute,” which is described as the first presupposition of all knowledge. Since the identity with which this system commences transcends every conceivable difference, it is also described as the “point of indifference.” From this undifferentiated or “indifferent” starting point, Schelling proceeds to a description of reality as a whole, considered as a differentiated system within which unity is maintained by various synthetic relationships, such as substance and attribute, cause and effect, attraction and repulsion. Like his philosophy of nature, Schelling’s System of Identity utilizes the notion of various hierarchically related Potenzen as its basic organizing principle. The obvious question concerns the precise relationship between the “indifferent” Absolute and the real system of differentiated elements, a question that may be said to have set the agenda for Schelling’s subsequent philosophizing. From 1803 to 1841 Schelling was in Bavaria, where he continued to expound his System of Identity and to explore the philosophies of art and nature. The most distinctive feature of his thought during this period, however, was a new interest in religion and in the theosophical writings of Boehme, whose influence is prominent in the Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit “Philosophical Investigations concerning the Nature of Human Freedom,” 1809, a work often interpreted as anticipating existentialism. He also worked on a speculative interpretation of human history, Die Weltalter, which remained unpublished, and lectured regularly on the history of philosophy. In 1841 Schelling moved to Berlin, where he lectured on his new philosophy of revelation and mythology, which he now characterized as “positive philosophy,” in contradistinction to the purely “negative” philosophy of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel. Some scholars have interpreted these posthumously published lectures as representing the culmination both of Schelling’s own protracted philosophical development and of German idealism as a whole. 

Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 817    817 schema.THEMA. schemata.KANT. schematic form.LOGICAL FORM. scheme, also schema plural: schemata, a metalinguistic frame or template used to specify an infinite set of sentences, its instances, by finite means, often taken with a side condition on how its blanks or placeholders are to be filled. The sentence ‘Either Abe argues or it is not the case that Abe argues’ is an instance of the excluded middle scheme for English: ‘Either . . . or it is not the case that . . .’, where the two blanks are to be filled with one and the same well-formed declarative English sentence. Since first-order number theory cannot be finitely axiomatized, the mathematical induction scheme is used to effectively specify an infinite set of axioms: ‘If zero is such that . . . and the successor of every number such that . . . is also such that . . . , then every number is such that . . .’, where the four blanks are to be filled with one and the same arithmetic open sentence, such as ‘it precedes its own successor’ or ‘it is finite’. Among the best-known is Tarski’s scheme T: ‘. . . is a true sentence if and only if . . .’, where the second blank is filled with a sentence and the first blank by a name of the sentence. 

Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich von 1759 1805, German poet, dramatist, and philosopher. Along with his colleagues Reinhold and Fichte, he participated in systematically revising Kant’s transcendental idealism. Though Schiller’s bestknown theoretical contributions were to aesthetics, his philosophical ambitions were more general, and he proposed a novel solution to the problem of the systematic unity, not merely of the critical philosophy, but of human nature. His most substantial philosophical work, Briefe über die äesthetische Erziehung des Menschen “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man,” 1794/95, examines the relationship between natural necessity and practical freedom and addresses two problems raised by Kant: How can a creature governed by natural necessity and desire ever become aware of its own freedom and thus capable of autonomous moral action? And how can these two sides of human nature  the natural, sensuous side and the rational, supersensuous one  be reconciled? In contradistinction both to those who subordinate principles to feelings “savages” and to those who insist that one should strive to subordinate feelings to principles “barbarians”, Schiller posited an intermediary realm between the sphere of nature and that of freedom, as well as a third basic human drive capable of mediating between sensuous and rational impulses. This third impulse is dubbed the “play impulse,” and the intermediary sphere to which it pertains is that of art and beauty. By cultivating the play impulse i.e., via “aesthetic education” one is not only freed from bondage to sensuality and granted a first glimpse of one’s practical freedom, but one also becomes capable of reconciling the rational and sensuous sides of one’s own nature. This idea of a condition in which opposites are simultaneously cancelled and preserved, as well as the specific project of reconciling freedom and necessity, profoundly influenced subsequent thinkers such as Schelling and Hegel and contributed to the development of German idealism. 

Schlegel, Friedrich von 17721829, German literary critic and philosopher, one of the principal representatives of German Romanticism. In On the Study of Grecian Poetry 1795, Schlegel laid the foundations for the distinction of classical and Romantic literature and a pronounced consciousness of literary modernity. Together with his brother August Wilhelm, he edited the Athenaeum 17981800, the main theoretical organ of German Romanticism, famous for its collection of fragments as a new means of critical communication. Schlegel is the originator of the Romantic theory of irony, a non-dialectical form of philosophizing and literary writing that takes its inspiration from Socratic irony and combines it with Fichte’s thought process of affirmation and negation, “self-creation” and “self-annihilation.” Closely connected wih Schlegel’s theory of irony is his theory of language and understanding hermeneutics. Critical reflection on language promotes an ironic awareness of the “necessity and impossibility of complete communication” Critical Fragments, No. 108; critical reflection on understanding reveals the amount of incomprehensibility, of “positive not-understanding” involved in every act of understanding On Incomprehensibility, 1800. Schlegel’s writings were essential for the rise of historical consciousness in German Romanticism. His On Ancient and Modern Literature 1812 is reputed to represent the first literary history in a modern and broadly comparative fashion. His Philosophy of History 1828, together with his Philosophy of Life 1828 schema Schlegel, Friedrich von 818    818 and Philosophy of Language 1829, confront Hegel’s philosophy from the point of view of a Christian and personalistic type of philosophizing. Schlegel converted to Catholicism in 1808. 

Schleiermacher, Friedrich 17681834, German philosopher, a “critical realist” working among post-Kantian idealists. In philosophy and science he presupposed transcendental features, noted in his dialectic lectures, and advocated integrative but historically contingent, empirical functions. Both develop, but, contra Hegel, not logically. Schleiermacher was a creator of modern general hermeneutics; a father of modern theological and religious studies; an advocate of women’s rights; the cofounder, with Humboldt, of the  at Berlin 180810, where he taught until 1834; and the classic translator of Plato into German. Schleiermacher has had an undeservedly minor place in histories of philosophy. Appointed chiefly to theology, he published less philosophy, though he regularly lectured, in tightly argued discourse, in Grecian philosophy, history of philosophy, dialectic, hermeneutics and criticism, philosophy of mind “psychology”, ethics, politics, aesthetics, and philosophy of education. From the 1980s, his collected writings and large correspondence began to appear in a forty-volume critical edition and in the larger Schleiermacher Studies and Translations series. Brilliant, newly available pieces from his twenties on freedom, the highest good, and values, previously known only in fragments but essential for understanding his views fully, were among the first to appear. Much of his outlook was formed before he became prominent in the early Romantic circle 17961806, distinguishable by his markedly religious, consistently liberal views.

Scholasticism, a set of scholarly and instructional techniques developed in Western European schools of the late medieval period, including the use of commentary and disputed question. ‘Scholasticism’ is derived from Latin scholasticus, which in the twelfth century meant the master of a school. The Scholastic method is usually presented as beginning in the law schools  notably at Bologna  and as being then transported into theology and philosophy by a series of masters including Abelard and Peter Lombard. Within the new universities of the thirteenth century the standardization of the curriculum and the enormous prestige of Aristotle’s work despite the suspicion with which it was initially greeted contributed to the entrenchment of the method and it was not until the educational reforms of the beginning of the sixteenth century that it ceased to be dominant. There is, strictly speaking, no such thing as Scholasticism. As the term was originally used it presupposed that a single philosophy was taught in the universities of late medieval Europe, but there was no such philosophy. The philosophical movements working outside the universities in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and the “neo-Scholastics” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries all found such a presupposition useful, and their influence led scholars to assume it. At first this generated efforts to find a common core in the philosophies taught in the late medieval schools. More recently it has led to efforts to find methods characteristic of their teaching, and to an extension of the term to the schools of late antiquity and of Byzantium. Both among the opponents of the schools in the seventeenth century and among the “neoScholastics,” ‘Scholasticism’ was supposed to designate a doctrine whose core was the doctrine of substance and accidents. As portrayed by Descartes and Locke, the Scholastics accepted the view that among the components of a thing were a substantial form and a number of real accidental forms, many of which corresponded to perceptible properties of the thing  its color, shape, temperature. They were also supposed to have accepted a sharp distinction between natural and unnatural motion. 

School of Names, also called, in Chinese, ming chia, a loosely associated group of Chinese philosophers of the Warring States period 403 221 B.C., also known as pien che Dialecticians or Sophists. The most famous were Hui Shih and Kung-sun Lung Tzu. Though interested in the relation between names and reality, the Sophists addressed such issues as relativity, perspectivism, space, time, causality, essentialism, universalism, and particularism. Perhaps more important than their subject matter, however, was their methodology. As their name suggests, the Sophists Schleiermacher, Friedrich School of Names 819    819 delighted in language games and logical puzzles. They used logic and rational argument not only as a weapon to defeat their philosophical opponents but as a tool to sharpen rational argumentation itself. Paradoxes such as ‘I go to Yüeh today but arrive yesterday’ and ‘A white horse is not a horse’ continue to stimulate philosophical discussion today. Yet frustrated Confucian, Taoist, and Legalist contemporaries chided Sophists for wasting their time on abstractions and puzzles, and for succumbing to intellectualism for its own sake. As Confucianism emerged to become the state ideology, the School of Names 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. 

Schopenhauer, Arthur 17881860, German philosopher. Born in Danzig and schooled in Germany, France, and England during a welltraveled childhood, he became acquainted through his novelist mother with Goethe, Schlegel, and the brothers Grimm. He studied medicine at the  of Göttingen and philosophy at the  of Berlin; received the doctorate from the  of Jena in 1813; and lived much of his adult life in Frankfurt, where he died. Schopenhauer’s dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason 1813, lays the groundwork for all of his later philosophical work. The world of representation equivalent to Kant’s phenomenal world is governed by “the principle of sufficient reason”: “every possible object . . . stands in a necessary relation to other objects, on the one hand as determined, on the other as determining” The World as Will and Representation. Thus, each object of consciousness can be explained in terms of its relations with other objects. The systematic statement of Schopenhauer’s philosophy appeared in The World as Will and Representation 1818. His other works are On Vision and Colors 1815, “On the Will in Nature” 1836, conjoined with “On the Foundation of Morality” in The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics 1841; the second edition of The World as Will and Representation, which included a second volume of essays 1844; an enlarged and revised edition of On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason 1847; and Parerga and Paralipomena, a series of essays 1851. These are all consistent with the principal statement of his thought in The World as Will and Representation. The central postulate of Schopenhauer’s system is that the fundamental reality is will, which he equates with the Kantian thing-in-itself. Unlike Kant, Schopenhauer contends that one can immediately know the thing-in-itself through the experience of an inner, volitional reality within one’s own body. Every phenomenon, according to Schopenhauer, has a comparable inner reality. Consequently, the term ‘will’ can extend to the inner nature of all things. Moreover, because number pertains exclusively to the phenomenal world, the will, as thing-initself, is one. Nevertheless, different types of things manifest the will to different degrees. Schopenhauer accounts for these differences by invoking Plato’s Ideas or Forms. The Ideas are the universal prototypes for the various kinds of objects in the phenomenal world. Taken collectively, the Ideas constitute a hierarchy. We usually overlook them in everyday experience, focusing instead on particulars and their practical relationships to us. However, during aesthetic experience, we recognize the universal Idea within the particular; simultaneously, as aesthetic beholders, we become “the universal subject of knowledge.” Aesthetic experience also quiets the will within us. The complete silencing of the will is, for Schopenhauer, the ideal for human beings, though it is rarely attained. Because will is the fundamental metaphysical principle, our lives are dominated by willing  and, consequently, filled with struggle, conflict, and dissatisfaction. Inspired by Buddhism, Schopenhauer contends that all of life is suffering, which only an end to desire can permanently eliminate as opposed to the respite of aesthetic experience. This is achieved only by the saint, who rejects desire in an inner act termed “denial of the will to live.” The saint fully grasps that the same will motivates all phenomena and, recognizing that nothing is gained through struggle and competition, achieves “resignation.” Such a person achieves the ethical ideal of all religions  compassion toward all beings, resulting from the insight that all are, fundamentally, one. 

Schröder-Bernstein theorem, the theorem that mutually dominant sets are equinumerous. A set A is said to be dominated by a set B if and only if each element of A can be mapped to a unique element of B in such a way that no two elements of A are mapped to the same element of B posSchopenhauer, Arthur Schröder-Bernstein theorem 820    820 sibly with some elements of B left over. Intuitively, if A is dominated by B, then B has at least as many members as A. Given this intuition, one would expect that if A is dominated by B and B is dominated by A, then A and B are equinumerous i.e., A can be mapped to B as described above with no elements of B left over. This is the Schröder-Bernstein theorem. Stated in terms of cardinal numbers, the theorem says that if k m l and l m k, then k % l. Despite the simplicity of the theorem’s statement, its proof is non-trivial. 

Schrödinger, Erwin 18871961, Austrian physicist best known for five papers published in 1926, in which he discovered the Schrödinger wave equation and created modern wave mechanics. For this achievement, he was awarded the Nobel prize in physics shared with Paul Dirac in 1933. Like Einstein, Schrödinger was a resolute but ultimately unsuccessful critic of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. Schrödinger defended the view which he derived from Boltzmann that theories should give a picture, continuous in space and time, of the real processes that produce observable phenomena. Schrödinger’s realistic philosophy of science played an important role in his discovery of wave mechanics. Although his physical interpretation of the psi function was soon abandoned, his approach to quantum mechanics survives in the theories of Louis de Broglie and David Bohm. 

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Schulze, Gottlob Ernst 17611833, German philosopher today known mainly as an acute and influential early critic of Kant and Reinhold. He taught at Wittenberg, Helmstedt, and Göttingen; one of his most important students was Schopenhauer, whose view of Kant was definitely influenced by Schulze’s interpretation. Schulze’s most important work was his Aenesidemus, or “On the Elementary Philosophy Put Forward by Mr. Reinhold in Jena. Together with a Defense of Skepticism” 1792. It fundamentally changed the discussion of Kantian philosophy. Kant’s earliest critics had accused him of being a skeptic like Hume. Kantians, like Reinhold, had argued that critical philosophy was not only opposed to skepticism, but also contained the only possible refutation of skepticism. Schulze tried to show that Kantianism could not refute skepticism, construed as the doctrine that doubts the possibility of any knowledge concerning the existence or non-existence of “things-in-themselves,” and he argued that Kant and his followers begged the skeptic’s question by presupposing that such things exist and causally interact with us. Schulze’s Aenesidemus had a great impact on Fichte and Hegel, and it also influenced neoKantianism.

scientific realism, the view that the subject matter of scientific research and scientific theories exists independently of our knowledge of it, and that the goal of science is the description and explanation of both observable and unobservable aspects of the world. Scientific realism is contrasted with logical empiricism and social constructivism. Early arguments for scientific realism simply stated that, in light of the impressive products and methods of science, realism is the only philosophy that does not make the success of science a miracle. Formulations of scientific realism focus on the objects of theoretical knowledge: theories, laws, and entities. One especially robust argument for scientific realism due to Putnam and Richard Boyd is that the instrumental reliability of scientific methodology in the mature sciences such as physics, chemistry, and some areas of biology can be explained adequately only if we suppose that theories in the mature sciences are at least approximately true and their central theoretical terms are at least partially referential Putnam no longer holds this view. More timid versions of scientific realism do not infer approximate truth of mature theories. For example, Ian Hacking’s “entity realism” 1983 asserts that the instrumental manipulation of postulated entities to produce further effects gives us legitimate grounds for ontological commitment to theoretical entities, but not to laws or theories. Paul Humphreys’s “austere realism” 1989 states that only theoretical commitment to unobserved structures or dispositions could Schrödinger, Erwin scientific realism 821    821 explain the stability of observed outcomes of scientific inquiry. Distinctive versions of scientific realism can be found in works by Richard Boyd 1983, Philip Kitcher 1993, Richard Miller 1987, William Newton-Smith 1981, and J. D. Trout 1998. Despite their differences, all of these versions of realism are distinguished  against logical empiricism  by their commitment that knowledge of unobservable phenomena is not only possible but actual. As well, all of the arguments for scientific realism are abductive; they argue that either the approximate truth of background theories or the existence of theoretical entities and laws provides the best explanation for some significant fact about the scientific theory or practice. Scientific realists address the difference between real entities and merely useful constructs, arguing that realism offers a better explanation for the success of science. In addition, scientific realism recruits evidence from the history and practice of science, and offers explanations for the success of science that are designed to honor the dynamic and uneven character of that evidence. Most arguments for scientific realism cohabit with versions of naturalism. Anti-realist opponents argue that the realist move from instrumental reliability to truth is question-begging. However, realists reply that such formal criticisms are irrelevant; the structure of explanationist arguments is inductive and their principles are a posteriori. 

scope, the “part” of the sentence or proposition to which a given term “applies” under a given interpretation of the sentence. If the sentence ‘Abe does not believe Ben died’ is interpreted as expressing the proposition that Abe believes that it is not the case that Ben died, the scope of ‘not’ is ‘Ben died’; interpreted as “It is not the case that Abe believes that Ben died,” the scope is the rest of the sentence, i.e., ‘Abe believes Ben died’. In the first case we have narrow scope, in the second wide scope. If ‘Every number is not even’ is interpreted with narrow scope, it expresses the false proposition that every number is non-even, which is logically equivalent to the proposition that no number is even. Taken with wide scope it expresses the truth that not every number is even, which is equivalent to the truth that some number is non-even. Under normal interpretations of the sentences, ‘hardened’ has narrow scope in ‘Carl is a hardened recidivist’, whereas ‘alleged’ has wide scope in ‘Dan is an alleged criminal’. Accordingly, ‘Carl is a hardened recidivist’ logically implies ‘Carl is a recidivist’, whereas ‘Dan is an alleged criminal’, being equivalent to ‘Allegedly, Dan is a criminal’, does not imply ‘Dan is a criminal’. Scope considerations are useful in analyzing structural ambiguity and in understanding the difference between the grammatical form of a sentence and the logical form of a proposition it expresses. In a logically perfect language grammatical form mirrors logical form, there is no scope ambiguity, and the scope of a given term is uniquely determined by its context. 

Scottish common sense philosophy, a comprehensive philosophical position developed by Reid in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Reid’s views were propagated by a succession of Scottish popularizers, of whom the most successful was Dugald Stewart. Through them common sense doctrine became nearly a philosophical orthodoxy in Great Britain during the first half of the nineteenth century. Brought to the United States through the s in Princeton and Philadelphia, common sensism continued to be widely taught until the later nineteenth century. The early Reidians Beattie and Oswald were, like Reid himself, read in Germany by Kant and others; and Reid’s views were widely taught in post-Napoleonic France. The archenemy for the common sense theorists was Hume. Reid saw in his skepticism the inevitable outcome of Descartes’s thesis, accepted by Locke, that we do not perceive external objects directly, but that the immediate object of perception is something in the mind. Against this he argued that perception involves both sensation and certain intuitively known general truths or principles that together yield knowledge of external objects. He also argued that there are many other intuitively known general principles, including moral principles, available to all normal humans. As a result he scientific relativism Scottish common sense philosophy 822    822 thought that whenever philosophical argument results in conclusions that run counter to common sense, the philosophy must be wrong. Stewart made some changes in Reid’s acute and original theory, but his main achievement was to propagate it through eloquent classes and widely used textbooks. Common sensism, defending the considered views of the ordinary man, was taken by many to provide a defense of the Christian religious and moral status quo. Reid had argued for free will, and presented a long list of self-evident moral axioms. If this might be plausibly presented as part of the common sense of his time, the same could not be said for some of the religious doctrines that Oswald thought equally self-evident. Reid had not given any rigorous tests for what might count as selfevident. The easy intuitionism of later common sensists was a natural target for those who, like J. S. Mill, thought that any appeal to self-evidence was simply a way of justifying vested interest. Whewell, in both his philosophy of science and his ethics, and Sidgwick, in his moral theory, acknowledged debts to Reid and tried to eliminate the abuses to which his method was open. But in doing so they transformed common sensism beyond the limits within which Reid and those shaped by him operated. 

Searle, John R. b.1932, American philosopher of language and mind D. Phil., Oxford influenced by Frege, Wittgenstein, and J. L. Austin; a founder of speech act theory and an important contributor to debates on intentionality, consciousness, and institutional facts. Language. In Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language 1969, Searle brings together modified versions of Frege’s distinctions between the force F and content P of a sentence, and between singular reference and predication, Austin’s analysis of speech acts, and Grice’s analysis of speaker meaning. Searle explores the hypothesis that the semantics of a natural language can be regarded as a conventional realization of underlying constitutive rules and that illocutionary acts are acts performed in accordance with these rules. Expression and Meaning 1979 extends this analysis to non-literal and indirect illocutionary acts, and attempts to explain Donnellan’s referential-attributive distinction in these terms and proposes an influential taxonomy of five basic types of illocutionary acts based on the illocutionary point or purpose of the act, and word-to-world versus world-toword direction of fit. Language and mind. Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind 1983 forms the foundation for the earlier work on speech acts. Now the semantics of a natural language is seen as the result of the mind intrinsic intentionality imposing conditions of satisfaction or aboutness on objects expressions in a language, which have intentionality only derivatively. Perception and action rather than belief are taken as fundamental. Satisfaction conditions are essentially Fregean i.e. general versus singular and internal  meaning is in the head, relative to a background of non-intentional states, and relative to a network of other intentional states. The philosophy of language becomes a branch of the philosophy of mind. Mind. “Minds, Brains and Programs” 1980 introduced the famous “Chinese room” argument against strong artificial intelligence  the view that appropriately programming a machine is sufficient for giving it intentional states. Suppose a monolingual English-speaker is working in a room producing Chinese answers to Chinese questions well enough to mimic a Chinesespeaker, but by following an algorithm written in English. Such a person does not understand Chinese nor would a computer computing the same algorithm. This is true for any such algorithms because they are syntactically individuated and intentional states are semantically individuated. The Rediscovery of the Mind 1992 continues the attack on the thesis that the brain is a digital computer, and develops a non-reductive “biological naturalism” on which intentionality, like the liquidity of water, is a high-level feature, which is caused by and realized in the brain. Society. The Construction of Social Reality 1995 develops his realistic worldview, starting with an independent world of particles and forces, up through evolutionary biological systems capable of consciousness and intentionality, to institutions and social facts, which are created when persons impose status-features on things, which are collectively recognized and accepted. 

second-order logic, the logic of languages that contain, in addition to variables ranging over objects, variables ranging over properties, relations, functions, or classes of those objects. A model, or interpretation, of a formal language usually contains a domain of discourse. This domain is what the language is about, in the model in question. Variables that range over this domain are called first-order variables. If the language contains only first-order variables, it is called a first-order language, and it is within the purview of first-order logic. Some languages also contain variables that range over properties, relations, functions, or classes of members of the domain of discourse. These are second-order variables. A language that contains first-order and second-order variables, and no others, is a secondorder language. The sentence ‘There is a property shared by all and only prime numbers’ is straightforwardly rendered in a second-order language, because of the bound variable ranging over properties. There are also properties of properties, relations of properties, and the like. Consider, e.g., the property of properties expressed by ‘P has an infinite extension’ or the relation expressed by ‘P has a smaller extension than Q’. A language with variables ranging over such items is called thirdorder. This construction can be continued, producing fourth-order languages, etc. A language is called higher-order if it is at least second-order. Deductive systems for second-order languages are obtained from those for first-order languages by adding straightforward extensions of the axioms and rules concerning quantifiers that bind first-order variables. There may also be an axiom scheme of comprehension: DPExPx S Fx, one instance for each formula F that does not contain P free. The scheme “asserts” that every formula determines the extension of a property. If the language has variables ranging over functions, there may also be a version of the axiom of choice: ERExDyRxy P DfExRxfx. In standard semantics for second-order logic, a model of a given language is the same as a model for the corresponding first-order language. The relation variables range over every relation over the domain-of-discourse, the function variables range over every function from the domain to the domain, etc. In non-standard, or Henkin semantics, each model consists of a domain-ofdiscourse and a specified collection of relations, functions, etc., on the domain. The latter may not include every relation or function. The specified collections are the range of the second-order variables in the model in question. In effect, Henkin semantics regards second-order languages as multi-sorted, first-order languages. 

secundum quid, in a certain respect, or with a qualification. Fallacies can arise from confusing what is true only secundum quid with what is true simpliciter ‘without qualification’, ‘absolutely’, ‘on the whole’, or conversely. Thus a strawberry is red simpliciter on the whole. But it is black, not red, with respect to its seeds, secundum quid. By ignoring the distinction, one might mistakenly infer that the strawberry is both red and not red. Again, a certain thief is a good cook, secundum quid; but it does not follow that he is good simpliciter without qualification. Aristotle was the first to recognize the fallacy secundum quid et simpliciter explicitly, in his Sophistical Refutations. On the basis of some exceptionally enigmatic remarks in the same work, the liar paradox was often regarded in the Middle Ages as an instance of this fallacy. 

self-deception, 1 purposeful action to avoid unpleasant truths and painful topics about oneself or the world; 2 unintentional processes of denial, avoidance, or biased perception; 3 mental states resulting from such action or processes, such as ignorance, false belief, wishful thinking, unjustified opinions, or lack of clear awareness. Thus, parents tend to exaggerate the virtues of their children; lovers disregard clear signs of unreciprocated affection; overeaters rationalize away the need to diet; patients dying of cancer pretend to themselves that their health is improving. In some contexts ‘self-deception’ is neutral and implies no criticism. Deceiving oneself can even be desirable, generating a vital lie that promotes happiness or the ability to cope with difficulties. In other contexts ‘self-deception’ has negative connotations, suggesting bad faith, false consciousness, or what Joseph Butler called “inner hypocrisy”  the refusal to acknowledge our wrongdoing, character flaws, or onerous responsibilities. Existentialist philosophers, like Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and most notably Sartre Being and Nothingness, 1943, denounced self-deception as an inauthentic dishonest, cowardly refusal to confront painful though significant truths, especially about freedom, responsibility, and death. Herbert Fingarette, however, argued that self-deception is morally ambiguous  neither clearly blameworthy nor clearly faultless  because of how it erodes capacities for acting rationally Self-Deception, 1969. The idea of intentionally deceiving oneself seems paradoxical. In deceiving other people I usually know a truth that guides me as I state the opposite falsehood, intending thereby to mislead them into believing the falsehood. Five difficulties seem to prevent me from doing anything like that to myself. 1 With interpersonal deception, one person knows something that another person does not. Yet self-deceivers know the truth all along, and so it seems they cannot use it to make themselves ignorant. One solution is that self-deception occurs over time, with the initial knowledge becoming gradually eroded. Or perhaps selfdeceivers only suspect rather than know the truth, and then disregard relevant evidence. 2 If consciousness implies awareness of one’s own conscious acts, then a conscious intention to deceive myself would be self-defeating, for I would remain conscious of the truth I wish to flee. Sartre’s solution was to view self-deception as spontaneous and not explicitly reflected upon. Freud’s solution was to conceive of self-deception as unconscious repression. 3 It seems that self-deceivers believe a truth that they simultaneously get themselves not to believe, but how is that possible? Perhaps they keep one of two conflicting beliefs unconscious or not fully conscious. 4 Self-deception suggests willfully creating beliefs, but that seems impossible since beliefs cannot voluntarily be chosen. Perhaps beliefs can be indirectly manipulated by selectively ignoring and attending to evidence. 5 It seems that one part of a person the deceiver manipulates another part the victim, but such extreme splits suggest multiple personality disorders rather than self-deception. Perhaps we are composed of “subselves”  relatively unified clusters of elements in the personality. Or perhaps at this point we should jettison interpersonal deception as a model for understanding self-deception.  .

self-determination, the autonomy possessed by a community when it is politically independent; in a strict sense, territorial sovereignty. Within international law, the principle of self-determination appears to grant every people a right to be self-determining, but there is controversy over its interpretation. Applied to established states, the principle calls for recognition of state sovereignty and non-intervention in internal affairs. By providing for the self-determination of subordinate communities, however, it can generate demands for secession that conflict with existing claims of sovereignty. Also, what non-self-governing groups qualify as beneficiaries? The national interpretation of the principle treats cultural or national units as the proper claimants, whereas the regional interpretation confers the right of self-determination upon the populations of well-defined regions regardless of cultural or national affiliations. This difference reflects the roots of the principle in the doctrines of nationalism and popular sovereignty, respectively, but comseeing, non-epistemic self-determination 825    825 plicates its application. 

self-evidence, the property of being self-evident. Only true propositions or truths are self-evident, though false propositions can appear to be self-evident. It is widely held that a true proposition is self-evident if and only if one would be justified in believing it if one adequately understood it. Some would also require that self-evident propositions are known if believed on the basis of such an understanding. Some self-evident propositions are obvious, such as the proposition that all stags are male, but others are not, since it may take considerable reflection to achieve an adequate understanding of them. That slavery is wrong and that there is no knowledge of falsehoods are perhaps examples of the latter. Not all obvious propositions are self-evident, e.g., it is obvious that a stone will fall if dropped, but adequate understanding of that claim does not by itself justify one in believing it. An obvious proposition is one that immediately seems true for anyone who adequately understands it, but its obviousness may rest on wellknown and commonly accepted empirical facts, not on understanding. All analytic propositions are self-evident but not all self-evident propositions are analytic. The propositions that if A is older than B, then B is younger than A, and that no object can be red and green all over at the same time and in the same respects, are arguably self-evident but not analytic. All self-evident propositions are necessary, for one could not be justified in believing a contingent proposition simply in virtue of understanding it. However, not all necessary propositions are self-evident, e.g., that water is H2O and that temperature is the measure of the molecular activity in substances are necessary but not self-evident. A proposition can appear to be selfevident even though it is not. For instance, the proposition that all unmarried adult males are bachelors will appear self-evident to many until they consider that the pope is such a male. A proposition may appear self-evident to some but not to others, even though it must either have or lack the property of being self-evident. Self-evident propositions are knowable non-empirically, or a priori, but some propositions knowable a priori are not self-evident, e.g., certain conclusions of long and difficult chains of mathematical reasoning. 

self-presenting, in the philosophy of Meinong, having the ability  common to all mental states  to be immediately present to our thought. In Meinong’s view, no mental state can be presented to our thought in any other way  e.g., indirectly, via a Lockean “idea of reflection.” The only way to apprehend a mental state is to experience or “live through” it. The experience involved in the apprehension of an external object has thus a double presentational function: 1 via its “content” it presents the object to our thought; 2 as its own “quasi-content” it presents itself immediately to our thought. In the contemporary era, Roderick Chisholm has based his account of empirical knowledge in part on a related concept of the self-presenting. In Chisholm’s sense  the definition of which we omit here  all self-presenting states are mental, but not conversely; for instance, being depressed because of the death of one’s spouse would not be self-presenting. In Chisholm’s epistemology, self-presenting states are a source of certainty in the following way: if F is a self-presenting state, then to be certain that one is in state F it is sufficient that one is, and believes oneself to be in state F. 

self-referential incoherence, an internal defect of an assertion or theory, which it possesses provided that a it establishes some requirement that must be met by assertions or theories, b it is itself subject to this requirement, and c it fails to meet the requirement. The most famous example is logical positivism’s meaning criterion, which requires that all meaningful assertions be either tautological or empirically verifiable, yet is itself neither. A possible early example is found in Hume, whose own writings might have been consigned to the flames had librarians followed his counsel to do so with volumes that contain neither “abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number” nor “experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence.” Bold defiance was shown by Wittgenstein, who, realizing that the propositions of the Tractatus did not “picture” the world, advised the reader to “throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.” An epistemological example is furnished by any foundationalist theory that establishes criteria for rational acceptability that the theory itself cannot meet. 

self-reproducing automaton, a formal model of self-reproduction of a kind introduced by von Neumann. He worked with an intuitive robot model and then with a well-defined cellular automaton model. Imagine a class of robotic automata made of robot parts and operating in an environment of such parts. There are computer parts switches, memory elements, wires, input-output parts sensing elements, display elements, action parts grasping and moving elements, joining and cutting elements, and straight bars to maintain structure and to employ in a storage tape. There are also energy sources that enable the robots to operate and move around. These five categories of parts are sufficient for the construction of robots that can make objects of various kinds, including other robots. These parts also clearly suffice for making a robot version of any finite automaton. Sensing and acting parts can then be added to this robot so that it can make an indefinitely expandable storage tape from straight bars. A “blank tape” consists of bars joined in sequence, and the robot stores information on this tape by attaching bars or not at the junctions. If its finite automaton part can execute programs and is sufficiently powerful, such a robot is a universal computing robot cf. a universal Turing machine. A universal computing robot can be augmented to form a universal constructing robot  a robot that can construct any robot, given its description. Let r be any robot with an indefinitely expandable tape, let Fr be the description of its finite part, and let Tr be the information on its tape. Now take a universal computing robot and augment it with sensing and acting devices and with programs so that when Fr followed by Tr is written on its tape, this augmented universal computer performs as follows. First, it reads the description Fr, finds the needed parts, and constructs the finite part of r. Second, it makes a blank tape, attaches it to the finite part of r, and then copies the information Tr from its own tape onto the new tape. This augmentation of a universal computing robot is a universal constructor. For when it starts with the information Fr,Tr written on its tape, it will construct a copy of r with Tr on its tape. Robot self-reproduction results from applying the universal constructor to itself. Modify the universal constructor slightly so that when only a description Fr is written on its tape, it constructs the finite part of r and then attaches a tape with Fr written on it. Call this version of the universal constructor Cu. Now place Cu’s description FCu on its own tape and start it up. Cu first reads this description and constructs a copy of the finite part of itself in an empty region of the cellular space. Then it adds a blank tape to the new construction and copies FCu onto it. Hence Cu with FCu on its tape has produced another copy of Cu with FCu on its tape. This is automaton self-reproduction. This robot model of self-reproduction is very general. To develop the logic of self-reproduction further, von Neumann first extended the concept of a finite automaton to that of an infinite cellular automaton consisting of an array or “space” of cells, each cell containing the same finite automaton. He chose an infinite checkerboard array for modeling self-reproduction, and he specified a particular twenty-nine-state automaton for each square cell. Each automaton is connected directly to its four contiguous neighbors, and communication between neighbors takes one or two time-steps. The twenty-nine states of a cell fall into three categories. There is a blank state to represent the passivity of an empty area. There are twelve states for switching, storage, and communication, from which any finite automaton can be constructed in a sufficiently large region of cells. And there are sixteen states for simulating the activities of construction and destruction. Von Neumann chose these twenty-nine states in such a way that an area of non-blank cells could compute and grow, i.e., activate a path of cells out to a blank region and convert the cells of that region into a cellular automaton. A specific cellular automaton is embedded in this space by the selection of the initial states of a finite area of cells, all other cells being left blank. A universal computer consists of a sufficiently powerful finite automaton with a tape. The tape is an indefinitely long row of cells in which bits are represented by two different cell states. The finite automaton accesses these cells by means of a construction arm that it extends back and forth in rows of cells contiguous to the tape. When activated, this finite automaton will execute programs stored on its tape. self-reproducing automaton self-reproducing automaton 827    827 A universal constructor results from augmenting the universal computer cf. the robot model. Another construction arm is added, together with a finite automaton controller to operate it. The controller sends signals into the arm to extend it out to a blank region of the cellular space, to move around that region, and to change the states of cells in that region. After the universal constructor has converted the region into a cellular automaton, it directs the construction arm to activate the new automaton and then withdraw from it. Cellular automaton selfreproduction results from applying the universal constructor to itself, as in the robot model. Cellular automata are now studied extensively by humans working interactively with computers as abstract models of both physical and organic systems. See Arthur W. Burks, “Von Neumann’s Self-Reproducing Automata,” in Papers of John von Neumann on Computers and Computer Theory, edited by William Aspray and Arthur Burks, 1987. The study of artificial life is an outgrowth of computer simulations of cellular automata and related automata. Cellular automata organizations are sometimes used in highly parallel computers. 

Sellars, Wilfrid 191289, American philosopher, son of Roy Wood Sellars, and one of the great systematic philosophers of the century. His most influential and representative works are “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” 1956 and “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man” 1960. The Sellarsian system may be outlined as follows. The myth of the given. Thesis 1: Classical empiricism foundationalism maintains that our belief in the commonsense, objective world of physical objects is ultimately justified only by the way that world presents itself in sense experience. Thesis 2: It also typically maintains that sense experience a is not part of that world and b is not a form of conceptual cognition like thinking or believing. Thesis 3: From 1 and 2a classical empiricism concludes that our knowledge of the physical world is inferred from sense experience. Thesis 4: Since inferences derive knowledge from knowledge, sense experience itself must be a form of knowledge. Theses 14 collectively are the doctrine of the given. Each thesis taken individually is plausible. However, Sellars argues that 2b and 4 are incompatible if, as he thinks, knowledge is a kind of conceptual cognition. Concluding that the doctrine of the given is false, he maintains that classical empiricism is a myth. The positive system. From an analysis of theoretical explanation in the physical sciences, Sellars concludes that postulating theoretical entities is justified only if theoretical laws  nomological generalizations referring to theoretical entities  are needed to explain particular observable phenomena for which explanation in terms of exceptionless observation laws is unavailable. While rejecting any classical empiricist interpretation of observation, Sellars agrees that some account of non-inferential knowledge is required to make sense of theoretical explanation thus conceived. He thinks that utterances made in direct response to sensory stimuli observational reports count as non-inferential knowledge when a they possess authority, i.e., occur in conditions ensuring that they reliably indicate some physical property say, shape in the environment and are accepted by the linguistic community as possessing this quality; and b the utterer has justified belief that they possess this authority. Sellars claims that some perceptual conditions induce ordinary people to make observation reports inconsistent with established explanatory principles of the commonsense framework. We thus might tend to report spontaneously that an object is green seen in daylight and blue seen indoors, and yet think it has not undergone any process that could change its color. Sellars sees in such conflicting tendencies vestiges of a primitive conceptual framework whose tensions have been partially resolved by introducing the concept of sense experiences. These experiences count as theoretical entities, since they are postulated to account for observational phenomena for which no exceptionless observation laws exist. This example may serve as a paradigm for a process of theoretical explanation occurring in the framework of commonsense beliefs that Sellars calls the manifest image, a process that itself is a model for his theory of the rational dynamics of conceptual change in both the manifest image and in science  the scientific image. Because the actual process of conceptual evolution in Homo sapiens may not fit this pattern of rational dynamics, Sellars treats these dynamics as occurring within certain hypothetical ideal histories myths of the way in which, from certain conSellars, Roy Wood Sellars, Wilfrid 828    828 ceptually primitive beginnings, one might have come to postulate the requisite theoretical explanations. The manifest image, like the proto-theories from which it arose, is itself subject to various tensions ultimately resolved in the scientific image. Because this latter image contains a metaphysical theory of material objects and persons that is inconsistent with that of its predecessor framework, Sellars regards the manifest image as replaced by its successor. In terms of the Peircean conception of truth that Sellars endorses, the scientific image is the only true image. In this sense Sellars is a scientific realist. There is, however, also an important sense in which Sellars is not a scientific realist: despite discrediting classical empiricism, he thinks that the intrinsic nature of sense experience gives to conceptualization more than simply sensory stimulus yet less than the content of knowledge claims. Inspired by Kant, Sellars treats the manifest image as a Kantian phenomenal world, a world that exists as a cognitive construction which, though lacking ideal factual truth, is guided in part by intrinsic features of sense experience. This is not analytic phenomenalism, which Sellars rejects. Moreover, the special methodological role for sense experience has effects even within the scientific image itself. Theories of mind, perception, and semantics. Mind: In the manifest image thoughts are private episodes endowed with intentionality. Called inner speech, they are theoretical entities whose causal and intentional properties are modeled, respectively, on inferential and semantic properties of overt speech. They are introduced within a behaviorist proto-theory, the Rylean framework, to provide a theoretical explanation for behavior normally accompanied by linguistically overt reasons. Perception: In the manifest image sense experiences are sense impressions  states of persons modeled on two-dimensional, colored physical replicas and introduced in the theoretical language of the adverbial theory of perception to explain why it can look as if some perceptible quality is present when it is not. Semantics: The meaning of a simple predicate p in a language L is the role played in L by p defined in terms of three sets of linguistic rules: language entry rules, intralinguistic rules, and language departure rules. This account also supports a nominalist treatment of abstract entities. Identification of a role for a token of p in L can be effected demonstratively in the speaker’s language by saying that p in L is a member of the class of predicates playing the same role as a demonstrated predicate. Thus a speaker of English might say that ‘rot’ in German plays the semantic role ‘red’ has in English. Sellars sees science and metaphysics as autonomous strands in a single web of philosophical inquiry. Sellarsianism thus presents an important alternative to the view that what is fundamentally real is determined by the logical structure of scientific language alone. Sellars also sees ordinary language as expressing a commonsense framework of beliefs constituting a kind of proto-theory with its own methods, metaphysics, and theoretical entities. Thus, he also presents an important alternative to the view that philosophy concerns not what is ultimately real, but what words like ‘real’ ultimately mean in ordinary language. 

semantic holism, a metaphysical thesis about the nature of representation on which the meaning of a symbol is relative to the entire system of representations containing it. Thus, a linguistic expression can have meaning only in the context of a language; a hypothesis can have significance only in the context of a theory; a concept can have intentionality only in the context of the belief system. Holism about content has profoundly influenced virtually every aspect of contemporary theorizing about language and mind, not only in philosophy, but in linguistics, literary theory, artificial intelligence, psychology, and cognitive science. Contemporary semantic holists include Davidson, Quine, Gilbert Harman, Hartry Field, and Searle. Because semantic holism is a metaphysical and not a semantic thesis, two theorists might agree about the semantic facts but disagree about semantic holism. So, e.g., nothing in Tarski’s writings determines whether the semantic facts expressed by the theorems of an absolute truth semantic atomism semantic holism 829    829 theory are holistic or not. Yet Davidson, a semantic holist, argued that the correct form for a semantic theory for a natural language L is an absolute truth theory for L. Semantic theories, like other theories, need not wear their metaphysical commitments on their sleeves. Holism has some startling consequences. Consider this. Franklin D. Roosevelt who died when the United States still had just forty-eight states did not believe there were fifty states, but I do; semantic holism says that what ‘state’ means in our mouths depends on the totality of our beliefs about states, including, therefore, our beliefs about how many states there are. It seems to follow that he and I must mean different things by ‘state’; hence, if he says “Alaska is not a state” and I say “Alaska is a state” we are not disagreeing. This line of argument leads to such surprising declarations as that natural langauges are not, in general, intertranslatable Quine, Saussure; that there may be no fact of the matter about the meanings of texts Putnam, Derrida; and that scientific theories that differ in their basic postulates are “empirically incommensurable” Paul Feyerabend, Kuhn. For those who find these consequences of semantic holism unpalatable, there are three mutually exclusive responses: semantic atomism, semantic molecularism, or semantic nihilism. Semantic atomists hold that the meaning of any representation linguistic, mental, or otherwise is not determined by the meaning of any other representation. Historically, Anglo-American philosophers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries thought that an idea of an X was about X’s in virtue of this idea’s physically resembling X’s. Resemblance theories are no longer thought viable, but a number of contemporary semantic atomists still believe that the basic semantic relation is between a concept and the things to which it applies, and not one among concepts themselves. These philosophers include Dretske, Dennis Stampe, Fodor, and Ruth Millikan. Semantic molecularism, like semantic holism, holds that the meaning of a representation in a language L is determined by its relationships to the meanings of other expressions in L, but, unlike holism, not by its relationships to every other expression in L. Semantic molecularists are committed to the view, contrary to Quine, that for any expression e in a language L there is an in-principle way of distinguishing between those representations in L the meanings of which determine the meaning of e and those representations in L the meanings of which do not determine the meaning of e. Traditionally, this inprinciple delimitation is supported by an analytic/synthetic distinction. Those representations in L that are meaning-constituting of e are analytically connected to e and those that are not meaning-constituting are synthetically connected to e. Meaning molecularism seems to be the most common position among those philosophers who reject holism. Contemporary meaning molecularists include Michael Devitt, Dummett, Ned Block, and John Perry. Semantic nihilism is perhaps the most radical response to the consequences of holism. It is the view that, strictly speaking, there are no semantic properties. Strictly speaking, there are no mental states; words lack meanings. At least for scientific purposes and perhaps for other purposes as well we must abandon the notion that people are moral or rational agents and that they act out of their beliefs and desires. Semantic nihilists include among their ranks Patricia and Paul Churchland, Stephen Stich, Dennett, and, sometimes, Quine. 

semantic paradoxes, a collection of paradoxes involving the semantic notions of truth, predication, and definability. The liar paradox is the oldest and most widely known of these, having been formulated by Eubulides as an objection to Aristotle’s correspondence theory of truth. In its simplest form, the liar paradox arises when we try to assess the truth of a sentence or proposition that asserts its own falsity, e.g.: A Sentence A is not true. It would seem that sentence A cannot be true, since it can be true only if what it says is the case, i.e., if it is not true. Thus sentence A is not true. But then, since this is precisely what it claims, it would seem to be true. Several alternative forms of the liar paradox have been given their own names. The postcard paradox, also known as a liar cycle, envisions a postcard with sentence B on one side and sentence C on the other: B The sentence on the other side of this card is true. semantic molecularism semantic paradoxes 830    830 C The sentence on the other side of this card is false. Here, no consistent assignment of truth-values to the pair of sentences is possible. In the preface paradox, it is imagined that a book begins with the claim that at least one sentence in the book is false. This claim is unproblematically true if some later sentence is false, but if the remainder of the book contains only truths, the initial sentence appears to be true if and only if false. The preface paradox is one of many examples of contingent liars, claims that can either have an unproblematic truth-value or be paradoxical, depending on the truth-values of various other claims in this case, the remaining sentences in the book. Related to the preface paradox is Epimenedes’ paradox: Epimenedes, himself from Crete, is said to have claimed that all Cretans are liars. This claim is paradoxical if interpreted to mean that Cretans always lie, or if interpreted to mean they sometimes lie and if no other claim made by Epimenedes was a lie. On the former interpretation, this is a simple variation of the liar paradox; on the latter, it is a form of contingent liar. Other semantic paradoxes include Berry’s paradox, Richard’s paradox, and Grelling’s paradox. The first two involve the notion of definability of numbers. Berry’s paradox begins by noting that names or descriptions of integers consist of finite sequences of syllables. Thus the three-syllable sequence ‘twenty-five’ names 25, and the seven-syllable sequence ‘the sum of three and seven’ names ten. Now consider the collection of all sequences of English syllables that are less than nineteen syllables long. Of these, many are nonsensical ‘bababa’ and some make sense but do not name integers ‘artichoke’, but some do ‘the sum of three and seven’. Since there are only finitely many English syllables, there are only finitely many of these sequences, and only finitely many integers named by them. Berry’s paradox arises when we consider the eighteen-syllable sequence ‘the smallest integer not nameable in less than nineteen syllables’. This phrase appears to be a perfectly well-defined description of an integer. But if the phrase names an integer n, then n is nameable in less than nineteen syllables, and hence is not described by the phrase. Richard’s paradox constructs a similarly paradoxical description using what is known as a diagonal construction. Imagine a list of all finite sequences of letters of the alphabet plus spaces and punctuation, ordered as in a dictionary. Prune this list so that it contains only English definitions of real numbers between 0 and 1. Then consider the definition: “Let r be the real number between 0 and 1 whose kth decimal place is  if the kth decimal place of the number named by the kth member of this list is 1, and 0 otherwise’. This description seems to define a real number that must be different from any number defined on the list. For example, r cannot be defined by the 237th member of the list, because r will differ from that number in at least its 237th decimal place. But if it indeed defines a real number between 0 and 1, then this description should itself be on the list. Yet clearly, it cannot define a number different from the number defined by itself. Apparently, the definition defines a real number between 0 and 1 if and only if it does not appear on the list of such definitions. Grelling’s paradox, also known as the paradox of heterologicality, involves two predicates defined as follows. Say that a predicate is “autological” if it applies to itself. Thus ‘polysyllabic’ and ‘short’ are autological, since ‘polysyllabic’ is polysyllabic, and ‘short’ is short. In contrast, a predicate is “heterological” if and only if it is not autological. The question is whether the predicate ‘heterological’ is heterological. If our answer is yes, then ‘heterological’ applies to itself  and so is autological, not heterological. But if our answer is no, then it does not apply to itself  and so is heterological, once again contradicting our answer. The semantic paradoxes have led to important work in both logic and the philosophy of language, most notably by Russell and Tarski. Russell developed the ramified theory of types as a unified treatment of all the semantic paradoxes. Russell’s theory of types avoids the paradoxes by introducing complex syntactic conditions on formulas and on the definition of new predicates. In the resulting language, definitions like those used in formulating Berry’s and Richard’s paradoxes turn out to be ill-formed, since they quantify over collections of expressions that include themselves, violating what Russell called the vicious circle principle. The theory of types also rules out, on syntactic grounds, predicates that apply to themselves, or to larger expressions containing those very same predicates. In this way, the liar paradox and Grelling’s paradox cannot be constructed within a language conforming to the theory of types. Tarski’s attention to the liar paradox made two fundamental contributions to logic: his development of semantic techniques for defining the truth predicate for formalized languages and his semantic paradoxes semantic paradoxes 831    831 proof of Tarski’s theorem. Tarskian semantics avoids the liar paradox by starting with a formal language, call it L, in which no semantic notions are expressible, and hence in which the liar paradox cannot be formulated. Then using another language, known as the metalanguage, Tarski applies recursive techniques to define the predicate true-in-L, which applies to exactly the true sentences of the original language L. The liar paradox does not arise in the metalanguage, because the sentence D Sentence D is not true-in-L. is, if expressible in the metalanguage, simply true. It is true because D is not a sentence of L, and so a fortiori not a true sentence of L. A truth predicate for the metalanguage can then be defined in yet another language, the metametalanguage, and so forth, resulting in a sequence of consistent truth predicates. Tarski’s theorem uses the liar paradox to prove a significant result in logic. The theorem states that the truth predicate for the first-order language of arithmetic is not definable in arithmetic. That is, if we devise a systematic way of representing sentences of arithmetic by numbers, then it is impossible to define an arithmetical predicate that applies to all and only those numbers that represent true sentences of arithmetic. The theorem is proven by showing that if such a predicate were definable, we could construct a sentence of arithmetic that is true if and only if it is not true: an arithmetical version of sentence A, the liar paradox. Both Russell’s and Tarski’s solutions to the semantic paradoxes have left many philosophers dissatisfied, since the solutions are basically prescriptions for constructing languages in which the paradoxes do not arise. But the fact that paradoxes can be avoided in artificially constructed languages does not itself give a satisfying explanation of what is going wrong when the paradoxes are encountered in natural language, or in an artificial language in which they can be formulated. Most recent work on the liar paradox, following Kripke’s “Outline of a Theory of Truth” 1975, looks at languages in which the paradox can be formulated, and tries to provide a consistent account of truth that preserves as much as possible of the intuitive notion.

semiosis from Grecian semeiosis, ‘observation of signs’, the relation of signification involving the three relata of sign, object, and mind. Semiotic is the science or study of semiosis. The semiotic of John of Saint Thomas and of Peirce includes two distinct components: the relation of signification and the classification of signs. The relation of signification is genuinely triadic and cannot be reduced to the sum of its three subordinate dyads: sign-object, sign-mind, object-mind. A sign represents an object to a mind just as A gives a gift to B. Semiosis is not, as it is often taken to be, a mere compound of a sign-object dyad and a sign-mind dyad because these dyads lack the essential intentionality that unites mind with object; similarly, the gift relation involves not just A giving and B receiving but, crucially, the intention uniting A and B. semantics semiosis 832    832 In the Scholastic logic of John of Saint Thomas, the sign-object dyad is a categorial relation secundum esse, that is, an essential relation, falling in Aristotle’s category of relation, while the sign-mind dyad is a transcendental relation secundum dici, that is, a relation only in an analogical sense, in a manner of speaking; thus the formal rationale of semiosis is constituted by the sign-object dyad. By contrast, in Peirce’s logic, the sign-object dyad and the sign-mind dyad are each only potential semiosis: thus, the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt were merely potential signs until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, just as a road-marking was a merely potential sign to the driver who overlooked it. Classifications of signs typically follow from the logic of semiosis. Thus John of Saint Thomas divides signs according to their relations to their objects into natural signs smoke as a sign of fire, customary signs napkins on the table as a sign that dinner is imminent, and stipulated signs as when a neologism is coined; he also divides signs according to their relations to a mind. An instrumental sign must first be cognized as an object before it can signify e.g., a written word or a symptom; a formal sign, by contrast, directs the mind to its object without having first been cognized e.g., percepts and concepts. Formal signs are not that which we cognize but that by which we cognize. All instrumental signs presuppose the action of formal signs in the semiosis of cognition. Peirce similarly classified signs into three trichotomies according to their relations with 1 themselves, 2 their objects, and 3 their interpretants usually minds; and Charles Morris, who followed Peirce closely, called the relationship of signs to one another the syntactical dimension of semiosis, the relationship of signs to their objects the semantical dimension of semiosis, and the relationship of signs to their interpreters the pragmatic dimension of semiosis. 

sensationalism, the belief that all mental states  particularly cognitive states  are derived, by composition or association, from sensation. It is often joined to the view that sensations provide the only evidence for our beliefs, or more rarely to the view that statements about the world can be reduced, without loss, to statements about sensation. Hobbes was the first important sensationalist in modern times. “There is no conception in man’s mind,” he wrote, “which hath not at first, totally, or by parts, been begotten upon the organs of sense. The rest are derived from that original.” But the belief gained prominence in the eighteenth century, due largely to the influence of Locke. Locke himself was not a sensationalist, because he took the mind’s reflection on its own operations to be an independent source of ideas. But his distinction between simple and complex ideas was used by eighteenthcentury sensationalists such as Condillac and Hartley to explain how conceptions that seem distant from sense might nonetheless be derived from it. And to account for the particular ways in which simple ideas are in fact combined, Condillac and Hartley appealed to a second device described by Locke: the association of ideas. “Elementary” sensations  the building blocks of our mental life  were held by the sensationalists to be non-voluntary, independent of judgment, free of interpretation, discrete or atomic, and infallibly known. Nineteenth-century sensationalists tried to account for perception in terms of such building blocks; they struggled particularly with the perception of space and time. Late nineteenth-century critics such as Ward and James advanced powerful arguments against the reduction of perception to sensation. Perception, they claimed, involves more than the passive reception or recombination and association of discrete pellets of incorrigible information. They urged a change in perspective  to a functionalist viewpoint more closely allied with prevailing trends in biology  from which sensationalism never fully recovered. 

sensibile: Austin, “Sense and sensibile,” as used by Russell, those entities that no one is at the moment perceptually aware of, but that are, in every other respect, just like the objects of perceptual awareness. If one is a direct realist and believes that the objects one is aware of in sense perception are ordinary physical objects, then sensibilia are, of course, just physical objects of which no one is at the moment aware. Assuming with common sense that ordinary objects continue to exist when no one is aware of them, it follows that sensibilia exist. If, however, one believes as Russell did that what one is aware of in ordinary sense perception is some kind of idea in the mind, a so-called sense-datum, then sensibilia have a problematic status. A sensibile then turns out to be an unsensed sense-datum. On some the usual conceptions of sense-data, this is like an unfelt pain, since a sense-datum’s existence not as a sense-datum, but as anything at all depends on our someone’s perception of it. To exist for such things is to be perceived see Berkeley’s “esse est percipii“. If, however, one extends the notion of sense-datum as Moore was inclined to do to whatever it is of which one is directly aware in sense perception, then sensibilia may or may not exist. It depends on what  physical objects or ideas in the mind  we are directly aware of in sense perception and, of course, on the empirical facts about whether objects continue to exist when they are not being perceived. If direct realists are right, horses and trees, when unobserved, are sensibilia. So are the front surfaces of horses and trees things Moore once considered to be sensedata. If the direct realists are wrong, and what we are perceptually aware of are “ideas in the mind,” then whether or not sensibilia exist depends on whether or not such ideas can exist apart from any mind. 

sensorium, the seat and cause of sensation in the brain of humans and other animals. The term is not part of contemporary psychological parlance; it belongs to prebehavioral, prescientific psychology, especially of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Only creatures possessed of a sensorium were thought capable of bodily and perceptual sensations. Some thinkers believed that the sensorium, when excited, also produced muscular activity and motion.

sensus communis, a cognitive faculty to which the five senses report. It was first argued for in Aristotle’s On the Soul II.12, though the term ‘common sense’ was first introduced in Scholastic thought. Aristotle refers to properties such as magnitude that are perceived by more than one sense as common sensibles. To recognize common sensibles, he claims, we must possess a single cognitive power to compare such qualities, received from the different senses, to one another. Augustine says the “inner sense” judges whether the senses are working properly, and perceives whether the animal perceives De libero arbitrio II.35. Aquinas In De anima II, 13.370 held that it is also by the common sense that we perceive we live. He says the common sense uses the external senses to know sensible forms, preparing the sensible species it receives for the operation of the cognitive power, which recognizes the real thing causing the sensible species. 

sentential connective, also called sentential operator, propositional connective, propositional operator, a word or phrase, such as ‘and’, ‘or’, or ‘if . . . then’, that is used to construct compound sentences from atomic  i.e., non-compound  sentences. A sentential connective can be defined formally as an expression containing blanks, such that when the blanks are replaced with sentences the result is a compound sentence. Thus, ‘if ——— then ———’ and ‘——— or ———’ are sentential connectives, since we can replace the blanks with sentences to get the compound sentences ‘If the sky is clear then we can go swimming’ and ‘We can go swimming or we can stay home’. Classical logic makes use of truth-functional connectives only, for which the truth-value of the compound sentence can be determined uniquely by the truth-value of the sentences that replace the blanks. The standard truth-functional sensibilia sentential connective 834    834 connectives are ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘not’, ‘if . . . then’, and ‘if and only if’. There are many non-truth-functional connectives as well, such as ‘it is possible that ———’ and ‘——— because ———’. 

sentimentalism, the theory, prominent in the eighteenth century, that epistemological or moral relations are derived from feelings. Although sentimentalism and sensationalism are both empiricist positions, the latter view has all knowledge built up from sensations, experiences impinging on the senses. Sentimentalists may allow that ideas derive from sensations, but hold that some relations between them are derived internally, that is, from sentiments arising upon reflection. Moral sentimentalists, such as Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Hume, argued that the virtue or vice of a character trait is established by approving or disapproving sentiments. Hume, the most thoroughgoing sentimentalist, also argued that all beliefs about the world depend on sentiments. On his analysis, when we form a belief, we rely on the mind’s causally connecting two experiences, e.g., fire and heat. But, he notes, such causal connections depend on the notion of necessity  that the two perceptions will always be so conjoined  and there is nothing in the perceptions themselves that supplies that notion. The idea of necessary connection is instead derived from a sentiment: our feeling of expectation of the one experience upon the other. Likewise, our notions of substance the unity of experiences in an object and of self the unity of experiences in a subject are sentimentbased. But whereas moral sentiments do not purport to represent the external world, these metaphysical notions of necessity, substance, and self are “fictions,” creations of the imagination purporting to represent something in the outside world.

set-theoretic paradoxes, a collection of paradoxes that reveal difficulties in certain central notions of set theory. The best-known of these are Russell’s paradox, Burali-Forti’s paradox, and Cantor’s paradox. Russell’s paradox, discovered in 1901 by Bertrand Russell, is the simplest and so most problematic of the set-theoretic paradoxes. Using it, we can derive a contradiction directly from Cantor’s unrestricted comprehension schema. This schema asserts that for any formula Px containing x as a free variable, there is a set {x _ Px} whose members are exactly those objects that satisfy Px. To derive the contradiction, take Px to be the formula x 1 x, and let z be the set {x _ x 2 x} whose existence is guaranteed by the comprehension schema. Thus z is the set whose members are exactly those objects that are not members of themselves. We now ask whether z is, itself, a member of z. If the answer is yes, then we can conclude that z must satisfy the criterion of membership in z, i.e., z must not be a member of z. But if the answer is no, then since z is not a member of itself, it satisfies the criterion for membership in z, and so z is a member of z. All modern axiomatizations of set theory avoid Russell’s paradox by restricting the principles that assert the existence of sets. The simplest restriction replaces unrestricted comprehension with the separation schema. Separation asserts that, given any set A and formula Px, there is a set {x 1 A _ Px}, whose members are exactly those members of A that satisfy Px. If we now take Px to be the formula x 2 x, then separation guarantees the existence of a set zA % {x 1 A _ x 2 x}. We can then use Russell’s reasoning to prove the result that zA cannot be a member of the original set A. If it were a member of A, then we could prove that it is a member of itself if and only if it is not a member of itself. Hence it is not a member of A. But this result is not problematic, and so the paradox is avoided. The Burali-Forte paradox and Cantor’s paradox are sometimes known as paradoxes of size, since they show that some collections are too large to be considered sets. The Burali-Forte paradox, discovered by Cesare Burali-Forte, is concerned with the set of all ordinal numbers. In Cantor’s set theory, an ordinal number can be sentential operator set-theoretic paradoxes 835    835 assigned to any well-ordered set. A set is wellordered if every subset of the set has a least element. But Cantor’s set theory also guarantees the existence of the set of all ordinals, again due to the unrestricted comprehension schema. This set of ordinals is well-ordered, and so can be associated with an ordinal number. But it can be shown that the associated ordinal is greater than any ordinal in the set, hence greater than any ordinal number. Cantor’s paradox involves the cardinality of the set of all sets. Cardinality is another notion of size used in set theory: a set A is said to have greater cardinality than a set B if and only if B can be mapped one-to-one onto a subset of A but A cannot be so mapped onto B or any of its subsets. One of Cantor’s fundamental results was that the set of all subsets of a set A known as the power set of A has greater cardinality than the set A. Applying this result to the set V of all sets, we can conclude that the power set of V has greater cardinality than V. But every set in the power set of V is also in V since V contains all sets, and so the power set of V cannot have greater cardinality than V. We thus have a contradiction. Like Russell’s paradox, both of these paradoxes result from the unrestricted comprehension schema, and are avoided by replacing it with weaker set-existence principles. Various principles stronger than the separation schema are needed to get a reasonable set theory, and many alternative axiomatizations have been proposed. But the lesson of these paradoxes is that no setexistence principle can entail the existence of the Russell set, the set of all ordinals, or the set of all sets, on pain of contradiction. 

set theory, the study of collections, ranging from familiar examples like a set of encyclopedias or a deck of cards to mathematical examples like the set of natural numbers or the set of points on a line or the set of functions from a set A to another set B. Sets can be specified in two basic ways: by a list e.g., {0, 2, 4, 6, 8} and as the extension of a property e.g., {x _ x is an even natural number less than 10}, where this is read ‘the set of all x such that x is an even natural number less than 10’. The most fundamental relation in set theory is membership, as in ‘2 is a member of the set of even natural numbers’ in symbols: 2 1 {x _ x is an even natural number}. Membership is determinate, i.e., any candidate for membership in a given set is either in the set or not in the set, with no room for vagueness or ambiguity. A set’s identity is completely determined by its members or elements i.e., sets are extensional rather than intensional. Thus {x _ x is human} is the same set as {x _ x is a featherless biped} because they have the same members. The smallest set possible is the empty or null set, the set with no members. There cannot be more than one empty set, by extensionality. It can be specified, e.g., as {x _ x & x}, but it is most often symbolized as / or { }. A set A is called a subset of a set B and B a superset of A if every member of A is also a member of B; in symbols, A 0 B. So, the set of even natural numbers is a subset of the set of all natural numbers, and any set is a superset of the empty set. The union of two sets A and B is the set whose members are the members of A and the members of B  in symbols, A 4 B % {x _ x 1 A or x 1 B}  so the union of the set of even natural numbers and the set of odd natural numbers is the set of all natural numbers. The intersection of two sets A and B is the set whose members are common to both A and B  in symbols, A 3 B % {x _ x 1 A and x 1 B}  so the intersection of the set of even natural numbers and the set of prime natural numbers is the singleton set {2}, whose only member is the number 2. Two sets whose intersection is empty are called disjoint, e.g., the set of even natural numbers and the set of odd natural numbers. Finally, the difference between a set A and a set B is the set whose members are members of A but not members of B  in symbols, A  B % {x _ x 1 A and x 2 B}  so the set of odd numbers between 5 and 20 minus the set of prime natural numbers is {9, 15}. By extensionality, the order in which the members of a set are listed is unimportant, i.e., {1, 2, 3} % {2, 3, 1}. To introduce the concept of ordering, we need the notion of the ordered pair of a and b  in symbols, a, b or . All that is essential to ordered pairs is that two of them are equal only when their first entries are equal and their second entries are equal. Various sets can be used to simulate this behavior, but the version most commonly used is the Kuratowski ordered pair: a, b is defined to be {{a}, {a, b}}. On this definition, it can indeed be proved that a, b % c, d if and only if a % c and b % d. The Cartesian product of two sets A and B is the set of all ordered pairs whose first entry is in A and whose second entry is B  in symbols, A $ B % {x _ x % a, b for some a 1 A and some b 1 B}. This set-theoretic reflection principles set theory 836    836 same technique can be used to form ordered triples  a, b, c % a, b, c; ordered fourtuples  a, b, c, d % a, b, c, d; and by extension, ordered n-tuples for all finite n. Using only these simple building blocks, substitutes for all the objects of classical mathematics can be constructed inside set theory. For example, a relation is defined as a set of ordered pairs  so the successor relation among natural numbers becomes {0, 1, 1, 2, 2, 3 . . . }  and a function is a relation containing no distinct ordered pairs of the form a, b and a, c  so the successor relation is a function. The natural numbers themselves can be identified with various sequences of sets, the most common of which are finite von Neumann ordinal numbers: /, {/}, {/, {/}, {/}, {/}, {/, {/}}}, . . . . On this definition, 0 % /, 1 % {/}, 2 % {/, {/}}, etc., each number n has n members, the successor of n is n 4 {n}, and n ‹ m if and only if n 1 m. Addition and multiplication can be defined for these numbers, and the Peano axioms proved from the axioms of set theory; see below. Negative, rational, real, and complex numbers, geometric spaces, and more esoteric mathematical objects can all be identified with sets, and the standard theorems about them proved. In this sense, set theory provides a foundation for mathematics. Historically, the theory of sets arose in the late nineteenth century. In his work on the foundations of arithmetic, Frege identified the natural numbers with the extensions of certain concepts; e.g., the number two is the set of all concepts C under which two things fall  in symbols, 2 % {x _ x is a concept, and there are distinct things a and b which fall under x, and anything that falls under x is either a or b}. Cantor was led to consider complex sets of points in the pursuit of a question in the theory of trigonometric series. To describe the properties of these sets, Cantor introduced infinite ordinal numbers after the finite ordinals described above. The first of these, w, is {0, 1, 2, . . .}, now understood in von Neumann’s terms as the set of all finite ordinals. After w, the successor function yields w ! 1 % w 4 {w} % {0, 1, 2, . . . n, n + 1, . . . , w}, then w ! 2 % w ! 1 ! 1 % {0, 1, 2, . . . , w , w ! 1}, w ! 3 % w ! 2 ! 1 % {0, 1, 2, . . . , w, w ! 1, w ! 2}, and so on; after all these comes w ! w % {0, 1, 2, . . . , w, w ! 1, w ! 2, . . . , w ! n, w ! n ! 1, . . .}, and the process begins again. The ordinal numbers are designed to label the positions in an ordering. Consider, e.g., a reordering of the natural numbers in which the odd numbers are placed after the evens: 0, 2, 4, 6, . . . 1, 3, 5, 7, . . . . The number 4 is in the third position of this sequence, and the number 5 is in the w + 2nd. But finite numbers also perform a cardinal function; they tell us how many so-andso’s there are. Here the infinite ordinals are less effective. The natural numbers in their usual order have the same structure as w, but when they are ordered as above, with the evens before the odds, they take on the structure of a much larger ordinal, w ! w. But the answer to the question, How many natural numbers are there? should be the same no matter how they are arranged. Thus, the transfinite ordinals do not provide a stable measure of the size of an infinite set. When are two infinite sets of the same size? On the one hand, the infinite set of even natural numbers seems clearly smaller than the set of all natural numbers; on the other hand, these two sets can be brought into one-to-one correspondence via the mapping that matches 0 to 0, 1 to 2, 2 to 4, 3 to 6, and in general, n to 2n. This puzzle had troubled mathematicians as far back as Galileo, but Cantor took the existence of a oneto-one correspondence between two sets A and B as the definition of ‘A is the same size as B’. This coincides with our usual understanding for finite sets, and it implies that the set of even natural numbers and the set of all natural numbers and w ! 1 and w! 2 and w ! w and w ! w and many more all have the same size. Such infinite sets are called countable, and the number of their elements, the first infinite cardinal number, is F0. Cantor also showed that the set of all subsets of a set A has a size larger than A itself, so there are infinite cardinals greater than F0, namely F1, F2, and so on. Unfortunately, the early set theories were prone to paradoxes. The most famous of these, Russell’s paradox, arises from consideration of the set R of all sets that are not members of themselves: is R 1 R? If it is, it isn’t, and if it isn’t, it is. The Burali-Forti paradox involves the set W of all ordinals: W itself qualifies as an ordinal, so W 1 W, i.e., W ‹ W. Similar difficulties surface with the set of all cardinal numbers and the set of all sets. At fault in all these cases is a seemingly innocuous principle of unlimited comprehension: for any property P, there is a set {x _ x has P}. Just after the turn of the century, Zermelo undertook to systematize set theory by codifying its practice in a series of axioms from which the known derivations of the paradoxes could not be carried out. He proposed the axioms of extensionality two sets with the same members are the same; pairing for any a and b, there is a set {a, b}; separation for any set A and property P, there set theory set theory 837    837 is a set {x _ x 1 A and x has P}; power set for any set A, there is a set {x _ x0 A}; union for any set of sets F, there is a set {x _ x 1 A for some A 1 F}  this yields A 4 B, when F % {A, B} and {A, B} comes from A and B by pairing; infinity w exists; and choice for any set of non-empty sets, there is a set that contains exactly one member from each. The axiom of choice has a vast number of equivalents, including the well-ordering theorem  every set can be well-ordered  and Zorn’s lemma  if every chain in a partially ordered set has an upper bound, then the set has a maximal element. The axiom of separation limits that of unlimited comprehension by requiring a previously given set A from which members are separated by the property P; thus troublesome sets like Russell’s that attempt to collect absolutely all things with P cannot be formed. The most controversial of Zermelo’s axioms at the time was that of choice, because it posits the existence of a choice set  a set that “chooses” one from each of possibly infinitely many non-empty sets  without giving any rule for making the choices. For various philosophical and practical reasons, it is now accepted without much debate. Fraenkel and Skolem later formalized the axiom of replacement if A is a set, and every member a of A is replaced by some b, then there is a set containing all the b’s, and Skolem made both replacement and separation more precise by expressing them as schemata of first-order logic. The final axiom of the contemporary theory is foundation, which guarantees that sets are formed in a series of stages called the iterative hierarchy begin with some non-sets, then form all possible sets of these, then form all possible sets of the things formed so far, then form all possible sets of these, and so on. This iterative picture of sets built up in stages contrasts with the older notion of the extension of a concept; these are sometimes called the mathematical and the logical notions of collection, respectively. The early controversy over the paradoxes and the axiom of choice can be traced to the lack of a clear distinction between these at the time. Zermelo’s first five axioms all but choice plus foundation form a system usually called Z; ZC is Z with choice added. Z plus replacement is ZF, for Zermelo-Fraenkel, and adding choice makes ZFC, the theory of sets in most widespread use today. The consistency of ZFC cannot be proved by standard mathematical means, but decades of experience with the system and the strong intuitive picture provided by the iterative conception suggest that it is. Though ZFC is strong enough for all standard mathematics, it is not enough to answer some natural set-theoretic questions e.g., the continuum problem. This has led to a search for new axioms, such as large cardinal assumptions, but no consensus on these additional principles has yet been reached. 

Sextus Empiricus third century A.D., Grecian Skeptic philosopher whose writings are the chief source of our knowledge about the extreme Skeptic view, Pyrrhonism. Practically nothing is known about him as a person. He was apparently a medical doctor and a teacher in a Skeptical school, probably in Alexandria. What has survived are his Hypotoposes, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, and a series of Skeptical critiques, Against the Dogmatists, questioning the premises and conclusions in many disciplines, such as physics, mathematics, rhetoric, and ethics. In these works, Sextus summarized and organized the views of Skeptical arguers before him. The Outlines starts with an attempt to indicate what Skepticism is, to explain the terminology employed by the Skeptics, how Pyrrhonian Skepticism differs from other so-called Skeptical views, and how the usual answers to Skepticism are rebutted. Sextus points out that the main Hellenistic philosophies, Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Academic Skepticism which is presented as a negative dogmatism, claimed that they would bring the adherent peace of mind, ataraxia. Unfortunately the dogmatic adherent would only become more perturbed by seeing the Skeptical objections that could be brought against his or her view. Then, by suspending judgment, epoche, one would find the tranquillity being sought. Pyrrhonian Skepticism is a kind of mental hygiene or therapy that cures one of dogmatism or rashness. It is like a purge that cleans out foul matter as well as itself. To bring about this state of affairs there are sets of Skeptical arguments that should bring one to suspense of judgment. The first set are the ten tropes of the earlier Skeptic, Anesidemus. The next are the five tropes about causality. And lastly are the tropes about the criterion of knowledge. The ten tropes stress the variability of sense experience among men seven emotions the Sextus Empiricus 838    838 and animals, among men, and within one individual. The varying and conflicting experiences present conflicts about what the perceived object is like. Any attempt to judge beyond appearances, to ascertain that which is non-evident, requires some way of choosing what data to accept. This requires a criterion. Since there is disagreement about what criterion to employ, we need a criterion of a criterion, and so on. Either we accept an arbitrary criterion or we get into an infinite regress. Similarly if we try to prove anything, we need a criterion of what constitutes a proof. If we offer a proof of a theory of proof, this will be circular reasoning, or end up in another infinite regress. Sextus devotes most of his discussion to challenging Stoic logic, which claimed that evident signs could reveal what is non-evident. There might be signs that suggested what is temporarily non-evident, such as smoke indicating that there is a fire, but any supposed linkage between evident signs and what is non-evident can be challenged and questioned. Sextus then applies the groups of Skeptical arguments to various specific subjects  physics, mathematics, music, grammar, ethics  showing that one should suspend judgment on any knowledge claims in these areas. Sextus denies that he is saying any of this dogmatically: he is just stating how he feels at given moments. He hopes that dogmatists sick with a disease, rashness, will be cured and led to tranquillity no matter how good or bad the Skeptical arguments might be. 

Shaftesbury, Lord, in full, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, title of Anthony Ashley Cooper 1671 1713, English philosopher and politician who originated the moral sense theory. He was born at Wimborne St. Giles, Dorsetshire. As a Country Whig he served in the House of Commons for three years and later, as earl, monitored meetings of the House of Lords. Shaftesbury introduced into British moral philosophy the notion of a moral sense, a mental faculty unique to human beings, involving reflection and feeling and constituting their ability to discern right and wrong. He sometimes represents the moral sense as analogous to a purported aesthetic sense, a special capacity by which we perceive, through our emotions, the proportions and harmonies of which, on his Platonic view, beauty is composed. For Shaftesbury, every creature has a “private good or interest,” an end to which it is naturally disposed by its constitution. But there are other goods as well  notably, the public good and the good without qualification of a sentient being. An individual creature’s goodness is defined by the tendency of its “natural affections” to contribute to the “universal system” of nature of which it is a part  i.e., their tendency to promote the public good. Because human beings can reflect on actions and affections, including their own and others’, they experience emotional responses not only to physical stimuli but to these mental objects as well e.g., to the thought of one’s compassion or kindness. Thus, they are capable of perceiving  and acquiring through their actions  a particular species of goodness, namely, virtue. In the virtuous person, the person of integrity, natural appetites and affections are in harmony with each other wherein lies her private good and in harmony with the public interest. Shaftesbury’s attempted reconciliation of selflove and benevolence is in part a response to the egoism of Hobbes, who argued that everyone is in fact motivated by self-interest. His defining morality in terms of psychological and public harmony is also a reaction to the divine voluntarism of his former tutor, Locke, who held that the laws of nature and morality issue from the will of God. On Shaftesbury’s view, morality exists independently of religion, but belief in God serves to produce the highest degree of virtue by nurturing a love for the universal system. Shaftesbury’s theory led to a general refinement of eighteenth-century ideas about moral feelings; a theory of the moral sense emerged, whereby sentiments are  under certain conditions  perceptions of, or constitutive of, right and wrong. In addition to several essays collected in three volumes under the title Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times second edition, 1714, Shaftesbury also wrote stoical moral and religious meditations reminiscent of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. His ideas on moral sentiments exercised considerable influence on the ethical theories of Hutcheson and Hume, who later worked out in detail their own accounts of the moral sense.  shan, o, Chinese terms for ‘good’ and ‘evil’, respectively. These are primary concerns for Chinese philosophers: the Confucianists wanted to do good and get rid of evil, while the Taoists wanted to go beyond good and evil. In fact the Shaftesbury shan, o 839    839 Taoists presupposed that man has the ability to reach a higher level of spirituality. Chinese philosophers often discussed shan and o in relation to human nature. Mencius believed that nature is good; his opponent Kao Tzu, nature is neither good nor evil; Hsün Tzu, nature is evil; and Yang Hsiung, nature is both good and evil. Most Chinese philosophers believed that man is able to do good; they also accepted evil as something natural that needed no explanation. 

shang ti, Chinese term meaning ‘high ancestor’, ‘God’. Shang ti  synonymous with t’ien, in the sense of a powerful anthropomorphic entity  is responsible for such things as the political fortunes of the state. Some speculate that shang ti was originally only a Shang deity, later identified by the Chou conquerors with their t’ien. The term shang ti is also used as a translation of ‘God’. 

Shang Yang, also called Lord Shang d. 338 B.C., Chinese statesman. A prime minister of Ch’in and prominent Legalist, he emphasized the importance of fa law, or more broadly, impartial standards for punishment and reward to the sociopolitical order. Shang Yang maintained that agriculture and war were the keys to a strong state. However, humans are self-interested rational actors. Their interest to avoid hard work and the risk of death in battle is at odds with the ruler’s desire for a strong state. Accordingly, the ruler must rely on harsh punishments and positive rewards to ensure the cooperation of the people. 

Shankara, also transliterated Sankara and Samkara A.D. 788820, Indian philosopher who founded Advaita Vedanta Hinduism. His major works are the Brahma-Sutra-Bhafya a commentary on Badarayana’s Brahma Sutras and his Gita-Bhayfa a commentary on the Bhagavad Gita. He provides a vigorous defense of mindbody dualism, of the existence of a plurality of minds and mind-independent physical objects, and of monotheism. Then, on the basis of appeal to sruti scripture  i.e., the Vedas and Upanishads  and an esoteric enlightenment experience moksha, he relegates dualism, realism, and theism to illusion the level of appearance in favor of a monism that holds that only nirguna or qualityless Brahman exists the level of reality. Some interpreters read this distinction between levels metaphysically rather than epistemologically, but this is inconsistent with Shankara’s monism. 

Shao Yung 101177, Chinese philosopher, a controversial Neo-Confucian figure. His Huangchi ching-shih “Ultimate Principles Governing the World” advances a numerological interpretation of the I-Ching. Shao noticed that the IChing expresses certain cosmological features in numerical terms. He concluded that the cosmos itself must be based on numerical relationships and that the I-Ching is its cipher, which is why the text can be used to predict the future. One of Shao’s charts of the I-Ching’s hexagrams came to the attention of Leibniz, who noticed that, so arranged, they can be construed as describing the numbers 063 in binary expression. Shao probably was not aware of this, and Leibniz interpreted Shao’s arrangement in reverse order, but they shared the belief that certain numerical sequences revealed the structure of the cosmos. P.J.I. Sheffer stroke, also called alternative denial, a binary truth-functor represented by the symbol ‘_’, the logical force of which can be expressed contextually in terms of ‘-’ and ‘&’ by the following definition: p_q % Df -p & q. The importance of the Sheffer stroke lies in the fact that it by itself can express any well-formed expression of truth-functional logic. Thus, since {-,7} forms an expressively complete set, defining -p as p_p and p 7 q as p_p _q_q provides for the possibility of a further reduction of primitive functors to one. This system of symbols is commonly called the stroke notation. I.Bo. shen, Chinese term meaning ‘spirit’, ‘spiritual’, ‘numinous’, ‘demonic’. In early texts, shen is used to mean various nature spirits, with emphasis on the efficacy of spirits to both know and accomplish hence one seeks their advice and aid. Shen came to describe the operations of nature, which accomplishes its ends with “spiritual” efficacy. In texts like the Chuang Tzu, Hsün Tzu, and I-Ching, shen no longer refers to an entity but to a state of resonance with the cosmos. In such a state, the sage can tap into the “spiritual” nature of an event, situation, person, or text and successfully read, react to, and guide the course of events. P.J.I. sheng, Chinese term meaning ‘the sage’, ‘sagehood’. This is the Chinese concept of extraordishang ti sheng 840    840 nary human attainment or perfection. Philosophical Taoism focuses primarily on sheng as complete attunement or adaptability to the natural order of events as well as irregular occurrences and phenomena. Classical Confucianism focuses, on the other hand, on the ideal unity of Heaven t’ien and human beings as having an ethical significance in resolving human problems. Neo-Confucianism tends to focus on sheng as a realizable ideal of the universe as a moral community. In Chang Tsai’s words, “Heaven is my father and Earth is my mother, and even such a small creature as I finds an intimate place in their midst. . . . All people are my brothers and sisters, and all things are my companions.” In Confucianism, sheng the sage is often viewed as one who possesses comprehensive knowledge and insights into the ethical significance of things, events, and human affairs. This ideal of sheng contrasts with chün-tzu, the paradigmatic individual who embodies basic ethical virtues jen, li, i, and chih, but is always liable to error, especially in responding to changing circumstances of human life. For Confucius, sheng sagehood is more like an abstract, supreme ideal of a perfect moral personality, an imagined vision rather than a possible objective of the moral life. He once remarked that he could not ever hope to meet a sheng-jen a sage, but only a chün-tzu. For his eminent followers, on the other hand, e.g., Mencius, Hsün Tzu, and the Neo-Confucians, sheng is a humanly attainable ideal. 

Shen Pu-hai d.337 B.C., Chinese Legalist philosopher who emphasized shu, pragmatic methods or techniques of bureaucratic control whereby the ruler checked the power of officials and ensured their subordination. These techniques included impartial application of publicly promulgated positive law, appointment based on merit, mutual surveillance by officials, and most importantly hsing ming  the assignment of punishment and reward based on the correspondence between one’s official title or stipulated duties ming and one’s performance hsing. Law for Shen Pu-hai was one more pragmatic means to ensure social and bureaucratic order.  HSING, MING. R.P.P. & R.T.A. Shen Tao, also called Shen Tzu 350?275? B.C., Chinese philosopher associated with Legalism, Taoism, and the HuangLao school. Depicted in the Chuang Tzu as a simple-minded naturalist who believed that one only had to abandon knowledge to follow tao the Way, Shen Tao advocated rule by law where laws were to be impartial, publicly promulgated, and changed only if necessary and then in accordance with tao. His main contribution to Legalist theory is the notion that the ruler must rely on shih political purchase, or the power held by virtue of his position. Shen’s law is the pragmatic positive law of the Legalists rather than the natural law of HuangLao. 

Shepherd, Mary d.1847, Scottish philosopher whose main philosophical works are An Essay on the Relation of Cause and Effect 1824 and Essays on the Perception of an External Universe 1827. The first addresses what she takes to be the skeptical consequences of Hume’s account of causation, but a second target is the use William Lawrence 17831867 made of Hume’s associative account of causation to argue that mental functions are reducible to physiological ones. The second work focuses on Hume’s alleged skepticism with regard to the existence of the external world, but she is also concerned to distinguish her position from Berkeley’s. Shepherd was drawn into a public controversy with John Fearn, who published some remarks she had sent him on a book of his, together with his extensive reply. Shepherd replied in an article in Fraser’s magazine 1832, “Lady Mary Shepherd’s Metaphysics,” which deftly refuted Fearn’s rather condescending attack. 

Sherwood, William, also called William Shyreswood 1200/101266/71, English logician who taught logic at Oxford and at Paris between 1235 and 1250. He was the earliest of the three great “summulist” writers, the other two whom he influenced strongly being Peter of Spain and Lambert of Auxerre fl. 1250. His main works are Introductiones in Logicam, Syncategoremata, De insolubilibus, and Obligationes some serious doubts have recently arisen about the authorship of the latter work. Since M. Grabmann published Sherwood’s Introductiones in 1937, historians of logic have paid considerable attention to this seminal medieval logician. While the first four chapters of Introductiones offer the basic ideas of Aristotle’s Organon, and the last chapter neatly lays out the Sophistical Refutations, the fifth tract expounds the famous doctrine of the properties of terms: signification, supposition, conjunction, and appellation  hence the label ‘terminist’ for this sort of logic. These Shen Pu-hai Sherwood, William 841   841 logico-semantic discussions, together with the discussions of syncategorematic words, constitute the logica moderna, as opposed to the more strictly Aristotelian contents of the earlier logica vetus and logica nova. The doctrine of properties of terms and the analysis of syncategorematic terms, especially those of ‘all’, ‘no’ and ‘nothing’, ‘only’, ‘not’, ‘begins’ and ‘ceases’, ‘necessarily’, ‘if’, ‘and’, and ‘or’, may be said to constitute Sherwood’s philosophy of logic. He not only distinguishes categorematic descriptive and syncategorematic logical words but also shows how some terms are used categorematically in some contexts and syncategorematically in others. He recognizes the importance of the order of words and of the scope of logical functors; he also anticipates the variety of composite and divided senses of propositions. Obligationes, if indeed his, attempts to state conditions under which a formal disputation may take place. De Insolubilibus deals with paradoxes of self-reference and with ways of solving them. Understanding Sherwood’s logic is important for understanding the later medieval developments of logica moderna down to Ockham. I.Bo. shih1, Chinese term meaning ‘strategic advantage’. Shih was the key and defining idea in the Militarist philosophers, later appropriated by some of the other classical schools, including the Legalists Han Fei Tzu and the Confucians Hsün Tzu. Like ritual practices li and speaking yen, shih is a level of discourse through which one actively cultivates the leverage and influence of one’s particular place. In the Military texts, the most familiar metaphor for shih is the taut trigger on the drawn crossbow, emphasizing advantageous position, timing, and precision. Shih like immanental order generally begins from the full consideration of the concrete detail. The business of war or effective government does not occur as some independent and isolated event, but unfolds within a broad field of unique natural, social, and political conditions proceeding according to a general pattern that can not only be anticipated but manipulated to one’s advantage. It is the changing configuration of these specific conditions that determines one’s place and one’s influence at any point in time, and gives one a defining disposition. Shih includes intangible forces such as morale, opportunity, timing, psychology, and logistics. 

shih2, Chinese term meaning ‘scholar-knight’ and ‘service’. In the service of the rulers of the “central states” of preimperial China, shih were a lower echelon of the official nobility responsible for both warfare and matters at court, including official documentation, ritual protocol, and law. Most of the early philosophers, trained in the “six arts” of rites, music, archery, charioteering, writing, and counting, belonged to this stratum. Without hereditary position, they lived by their wits and their professional skills, and were responsible for both the intellectual vigor and the enormous social mobility of Warring States China 403221 B.C..

ship of Theseus, the ship of the Grecian hero Theseus, which, according to Plutarch “Life of Theseus,” 23, the Athenians preserved by gradually replacing its timbers. A classic debate ensued concerning identity over time. Suppose a ship’s timbers are replaced one by one over a period of time; at what point, if any, does it cease to be the same ship? What if the ship’s timbers, on removal, are used to build a new ship, identical in structure with the first: which ship has the best claim to be the original ship?

Shpet, Gustav Gustavovich 18791937, leading Russian phenomenologist and highly regarded student and friend of Husserl. He played a major role in the development of phenomenology in Russia prior to the revolution. Graduating from Kiev  in 1906, Shpet accompanied his mentor Chelpanov to Moscow in 1907, commencing graduate studies at Moscow  M.A., 1910; Ph.D., 1916. He attended Husserl’s seminars at Göttingen during 191213, out of which developed a continuing friendship between the two, recorded in correspondence extending through 1918. In 1914 Shpet published a meditation, Iavlenie i smysl Appearance and Sense, inspired by Husserl’s Logical Investigations and, especially, Ideas I, which had appeared in 1913. Between 1914 and 1927 he published six additional books on such disparate topics as the concept of history, Herzen, Russian philosophy, aesthetics, ethnic psychology, and language. He founded and edited the philosophical yearbook Mysl’ i slovo Thought and Word between 1918 and 1921, publishing an important article on skepticism in it. He was arrested in 1935 and sentenced to internal exile. Under these conditions he completed a fine new translation of Hegel’s Phenomenology into Russian, which was published in 1959. He was executed in November 1937.  .

shu1, Chinese term for ‘technique of statecraft’. Such techniques were advocated by Shen Pu-hai and the other Legalist philosophers as instruments of the ruler in power that would guarantee the stable and efficient operations of government. The best-known shu include 1 “accountability” hsing-ming: the duties and obligations of office are clearly articulated, and at intervals a comparison is made between stipulated responsibilities ming and performance hsing; 2 “doing nothing” wu-wei: the engine of state is constructed so that the ministers are integral, functioning components guided by clearly promulgated laws fa, while the ruler stands aloof as the embodiment of the authority of government, thereby receiving credit for successes and deflecting blame back to the officials; 3 “showing nothing” wu-hsien: by secreting the royal person, concealing all likes and dislikes, and proffering no opinion, the ruler not only shields his limitations from public scrutiny, but further encourages a personal mystique as an ideal invested with a superlative degree of all things worthwhile.

Sidgwick, Henry 18381900, English philosopher, economist, and educator. Best known for The Methods of Ethics1874, he also wrote the still valuable Outlines of the History of Ethics 1886, as well as studies of economics, politics, literature, and alleged psychic phenomena. He was deeply involved in the founding of the first  for women at Cambridge , where he was a professor. In the Methods Sidgwick tried to assess the rationality of the main ways in which ordinary people go about making moral decisions. He thought that our common “methods of ethics” fall into three main patterns. One is articulated by the philosophical theory known as intuitionism. This is the view that we can just see straight off either what particular act is right or what binding rule or general principle we ought to follow. Another common method is spelled out by philosophical egoism, the view that we ought in each act to get as much good as we can for ourselves. The third widely used method is represented by utilitarianism, the view that we ought in each case to bring about as much good as possible for everyone affected. Can any or all of the methods prescribed by these views be rationally defended? And how are they related to one another? By framing his philosophical questions in these terms, Sidgwick made it centrally important to examine the chief philosophical theories of morality in the light of the commonsense morals of his time. He thought that no theory wildly at odds with commonsense morality would be acceptable. Intuitionism, a theory originating with Butler, transmitted by Reid, and most systematically expounded during the Victorian era by Whewell, was widely held to be the best available defense of Christian morals. Egoism was thought by many to be the clearest pattern of practical rationality and was frequently said to be compatible with Christianity. And J. S. Mill had argued that utilitarianism was both rational and in accord with common sense. But whatever their relation to ordinary morality, the theories seemed to be seriously at odds with one another. Examining all the chief commonsense precepts and rules of morality, such as that promises ought to be kept, Sidgwick argued that none is truly self-evident or intuitively certain. Each fails to guide us at certain points where we expect it to answer our practical questions. Utilitarianism, he found, could provide a complicated method for filling these gaps. But what ultimately justifies utilitarianism is certain very general axioms seen intuitively to be true. Among them are the principles that what is right in one case must be right in any similar case, and that we ought to aim at good generally, not just at some particular part of it. Thus intuitionism and utilitarianism can be reconciled. When taken together they yield a complete and justifiable method of ethics that is in accord with common sense. What then of egoism? It can provide as complete a method as utilitarianism, and it also involves a self-evident axiom. But its results often contradict those of utilitarianism. Hence there is a serious problem. The method that instructs us to act always for the good generally and the method that tells one to act solely for one’s own good are equally rational. Since the two methods give contradictory directions, while each method rests on self-evident axioms, it shriek operator Sidgwick, Henry 843   843 seems that practical reason is fundamentally incoherent. Sidgwick could see no way to solve the problem. Sidgwick’s bleak conclusion has not been generally accepted, but his Methods is widely viewed as one of the best works of moral philosophy ever written. His account of classical utilitarianism is unsurpassed. His discussions of the general status of morality and of particular moral concepts are enduring models of clarity and acumen. His insights about the relations between egoism and utilitarianism have stimulated much valuable research. And his way of framing moral problems, by asking about the relations between commonsense beliefs and the best available theories, has set much of the agenda for twentiethcentury ethics. 

Siger of Brabant c.124084, French philosopher, an activist in the philosophical and political struggles both within the arts faculty and between arts and theology at Paris during the 1260s and 1270s. He is usually regarded as a leader of a “radical Aristotelianism” that owed much to Liber de causis, to Avicenna, and to Averroes. He taught that everything originates through a series of emanations from a first cause. The world and each species including the human species are eternal. Human beings share a single active intellect. There is no good reason to think that Siger advanced the view that there was a double truth, one in theology and another in natural philosophy. It is difficult to distinguish Siger’s own views from those he attributes to “the Philosophers” and thus to know the extent to which he held the heterodox views he taught as the best interpretation of the prescribed texts in the arts curriculum. In any case, Siger was summoned before the French Inquisition in 1276, but fled Paris. He was never convicted of heresy, but it seems that the condemnations at Paris in 1277 were partially directed at his teaching. He was stabbed to death by his clerk in Orvieto then the papal seat in 1284. .

signifier, a vocal sound or a written symbol. The concept owes its modern formulation to the Swiss linguist Saussure. Rather than using the older conception of sign and referent, he divided the sign itself into two interrelated parts, a signifier and a signified. The signified is the concept and the signifier is either a vocal sound or writing. The relation between the two, according to Saussure, is entirely arbitrary, in that signifiers tend to vary with different languages. We can utter or write ‘vache’, ‘cow’, or ‘vaca’, depending on our native language, and still come up with the same signified i.e., concept. 

Simmel, Georg 18581918, German philosopher and one of the founders of sociology as a distinct discipline. Born and educated in Berlin, he was a popular lecturer at its university. But the unorthodoxy of his interests and unprofessional writing style probably kept him from being offered a regular professorship until 1914, and then only at the provincial  of Strasbourg. He died four years later. His writings ranged from conventional philosophical topics  with books on ethics, philosophy of history, education, religion, and the philosophers Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche  to books on Rembrandt, Goethe, and the philosophy of money. He wrote numerous essays on various artists and poets, on different cities, and on such themes as love, adventure, shame, and on being a stranger, as well as on many specifically sociological topics. Simmel was regarded as a Kulturphilosoph who meditated on his themes in an insightful and digressive rather than scholarly and systematic style. Though late in life he sketched a unifying Lebensphilosophie philosophy of life that considers all works and structures of culture as products of different forms of human experience, Simmel has remained of interest primarily for a multiplicity of insights into specific topics.

Simplicius sixth century A.D., Grecian Neoplatonist philosopher born in Cilicia on the southeast coast of modern Turkey. His surviving works are extensive commentaries on Aristotle’s On the Heavens, Physics, and Categories, and on the Encheiridion of Epictetus. The authenticity of the commentary on Aristotle’s On the Soul attributed to Simplicius has been disputed. He studied with Ammonius in Alexandria, and with Damascius, the last known head of the Platonist school in Athens. Justinian closed the school in 529. Two or three years later a group of philosophers, including Damascius and Simplicius, visited the court of the Sassanian king Khosrow I Chosroes but soon returned to the Byzantine Empire under a guarantee of their right to maintain their own beliefs. It is generally agreed that most, if not all, of Simplicius’s extant works date from the period after his stay with Khosrow. But there is no consensus about where Simplicius spent his last years both Athens and Harran have been proposed recently, or whether he resumed teaching philosophy; his commentaries, unlike most of the others that survive from that period, are scholarly treatises rather than classroom expositions. Simplicius’s Aristotle commentaries are the most valuable extant works in the genre. He is our source for many of the fragments of the preSocratic philosophers, and he frequently invokes material from now-lost commentaries and philosophical works. He is a deeply committed Neoplatonist, convinced that there is no serious conflict between the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle. The view of earlier scholars that his Encheiridion commentary embodies a more moderate Platonism associated with Alexandria is now generally rejected. Simplicius’s virulent defense of the eternity of the world in response to the attack of the Christian John Philoponus illustrates the intellectual vitality of paganism at a time when the Mediterranean world had been officially Christian for about three centuries. 

simulation theory, the view that one represents the mental activities and processes of others by mentally simulating them, i.e., generating similar activities and processes in oneself. By simulating them, one can anticipate their product or outcome; or, where this is already known, test hypotheses about their starting point. For example, one anticipates the product of another’s theoretical or practical inferences from given premises by making inferences from the same premises oneself; or, knowing what the product is, one retroduces the premises. In the case of practical reasoning, to reason from the same premises would typically require indexical adjustments, such as shifts in spatial, temporal, and personal “point of view,” to place oneself in the other’s physical and epistemic situation insofar as it differs from one’s own. One may also compensate for the other’s reasoning capacity and level of expertise, if possible, or modify one’s character and outlook as an actor might, to fit the other’s background. Such adjustments, even when insufficient for making decisions in the role of the other, allow one to discriminate between action options likely to be attractive or unattractive to the agent. One would be prepared for the former actions and surprised by the latter. The simulation theory is usually considered an alternative to an assumption sometimes called the “theory theory” that underlies much recent philosophy of mind: that our commonsense understanding of people rests on a speculative theory, a “folk psychology” that posits mental states, events, and processes as unobservables that explain behavior. Some hold that the simulation theory undercuts the debate between philosophers who consider folk psychology a respectable theory and those the eliminative materialists who reject it. Unlike earlier writing on empathic understanding and historical reenactment, discussions of the simulation theory often appeal to empirical findings, particularly experimental results in developmental psychology. They also theorize about the mechanism that would accomplish simulation: presumably one that calls up computational resources ordinarily used for engagement with the world, but runs them off-line, so that their output is not “endorsed” or acted upon and their inputs are not limited to those that would regulate one’s own behavior. Although simulation theorists agree that the ascription of mental states to others relies chiefly on simulation, they differ on the nature of selfascription. Some especially Robert Gordon and simple supposition simulation theory 845   845 Jane Heal, who independently proposed the theory give a non-introspectionist account, while others especially Goldman lean toward a more traditional introspectionist account. The simulation theory has affected developmental psychology as well as branches of philosophy outside the philosophy of mind, especially aesthetics and philosophy of the social sciences. Some philosophers believe it sheds light on traditional topics such as the problem of other minds, referential opacity, broad and narrow content, and the peculiarities of self-knowledge. 

singular term, an expression, such as ‘Zeus’, ‘the President’, or ‘my favorite chair’, that can be the grammatical subject of what is semantically a subject-predicate sentence. By contrast, a general term, such as ‘table’ or ‘swam’ is one that can serve in predicative position. It is also often said that a singular term is a word or phrase that could refer or ostensibly refer, on a given occasion of use, only to a single object, whereas a general term is predicable of more than one object. Singular terms are thus the expressions that replace, or are replaced by, individual variables in applications of such quantifier rules as universal instantiation and existential generalization or flank ‘%’ in identity statements. 

situation ethics, a kind of anti-theoretical, caseby-case applied ethics in vogue largely in some European and American religious circles for twenty years or so following World War II. It is characterized by the insistence that each moral choice must be determined by one’s particular context or situation  i.e., by a consideration of the outcomes that various possible courses of action might have, given one’s situation. To that degree, situation ethics has affinities to both act utilitarianism and traditional casuistry. But in contrast to utilitarianism, situation ethics rejects the idea that there are universal or even fixed moral principles beyond various indeterminate commitments or ideals e.g., to Christian love or humanism. In contrast to traditional casuistry, it rejects the effort to construct general guidelines from a case or to classify the salient features of a case so that it can be used as a precedent. The anti-theoretical stance of situation ethics is so thoroughgoing that writers identified with the position have not carefully described its connections to consequentialism, existentialism, intuitionism, personalism, pragmatism, relativism, or any other developed philosophical view to which it appears to have some affinity. 

Siva, one of the great gods of Hinduism with Vishnu and Brahman, auspicious controller of karma and samsara, destroyer but also giver of life. He is worshiped in Saivism with his consort Sakti. A variety of deities are regarded in Saivism as forms of Siva, with the consequence that polytheism is moved substantially toward monotheism. K.E.Y. six emotions the.CH’ING. skepticism, in the most common sense, the refusal to grant that there is any knowledge or justification. Skepticism can be either partial or total, either practical or theoretical, and, if theoretical, either moderate or radical, and either of knowledge or of justification. Skepticism is partial iff if and only if it is restricted to particular fields of beliefs or propositions, and total iff not thus restricted. And if partial, it may be highly restricted, as is the skepticism for which religion is only opium, or much more general, as when not only is religion simulator, universal skepticism 846   846 called opium, but also history bunk and metaphysics meaningless. Skepticism is practical iff it is an attitude of deliberately withholding both belief and disbelief, accompanied perhaps but not necessarily by commitment to a recommendation for people generally, that they do likewise. Practical skepticism can of course be either total or partial, and if partial it can be more or less general. Skepticism is theoretical iff it is a commitment to the belief that there is no knowledge justified belief of a certain kind or of certain kinds. Such theoretical skepticism comes in several varieties. It is moderate and total iff it holds that there is no certain superknowledge superjustified belief whatsoever, not even in logic or mathematics, nor through introspection of one’s present experience. It is radical and total iff it holds that there isn’t even any ordinary knowledge justified belief at all. It is moderate and partial, on the other hand, iff it holds that there is no certain superknowledge superjustified belief of a certain specific kind K or of certain specific kinds K1, . . . , Kn less than the totality of such kinds. It is radical and partial, finally, iff it holds that there isn’t even any ordinary knowledge justified belief at all of that kind K or of those kinds K1, . . . , Kn. Grecian skepticism can be traced back to Socrates’ epistemic modesty. Suppressed by the prolific theoretical virtuosity of Plato and Aristotle, such modesty reasserted itself in the skepticism of the Academy led by Arcesilaus and later by Carneades. In this period began a long controversy pitting Academic Skeptics against the Stoics Zeno and later Chrysippus, and their followers. Prolonged controversy, sometimes heated, softened the competing views, but before agreement congealed Anesidemus broke with the Academy and reclaimed the arguments and tradition of Pyrrho, who wrote nothing, but whose Skeptic teachings had been preserved by a student, Timon in the third century B.C.. After enduring more than two centuries, neoPyrrhonism was summarized, c.200 A.D., by Sextus Empiricus Outlines of Pyrrhonism and Adversus mathematicos. Skepticism thus ended as a school, but as a philosophical tradition it has been influential long after that, and is so even now. It has influenced strongly not only Cicero Academica and De natura deorum, St. Augustine Contra academicos, and Montaigne “Apology for Raimund Sebond”, but also the great historical philosophers of the Western tradition, from Descartes through Hegel. Both on the Continent and in the Anglophone sphere a new wave of skepticism has built for decades, with logical positivism, deconstructionism, historicism, neopragmatism, and relativism, and the writings of Foucault knowledge as a mask of power, Derrida deconstruction, Quine indeterminacy and eliminativism, Kuhn incommensurability, and Rorty solidarity over objectivity, edification over inquiry. At the same time a rising tide of books and articles continues other philosophical traditions in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, etc. It is interesting to compare the cognitive disengagement recommended by practical skepticism with the affective disengagement dear to stoicism especially in light of the epistemological controversies that long divided Academic Skepticism from the Stoa, giving rise to a rivalry dominant in Hellenistic philosophy. If believing and favoring are positive, with disbelieving and disfavoring their respective negative counterparts, then the magnitude of our happiness positive or unhappiness negative over a given matter is determined by the product of our belief/disbelief and our favoring/disfavoring with regard to that same matter. The fear of unhappiness may lead one stoically to disengage from affective engagement, on either side of any matter that escapes one’s total control. And this is a kind of practical affective “skepticism.” Similarly, if believing and truth are positive, with disbelieving and falsity their respective negative counterparts, then the magnitude of our correctness positive or error negative over a given matter is determined by the product of our belief/disbelief and the truth/falsity with regard to that same matter where the positive or negative magnitude of the truth or falsity at issue may be determined by some measure of “theoretical importance,” though alternatively one could just assign all truths a value of !1 and all falsehoods a value of †1. The fear of error may lead one skeptically to disengage from cognitive engagement, on either side of any matter that involves risk of error. And this is “practical cognitive skepticism.” We wish to attain happiness and avoid unhappiness. This leads to the disengagement of the stoic. We wish to attain the truth and avoid error. This leads to the disengagement of the skeptic, the practical skeptic. Each opts for a conservative policy, but one that is surely optional, given just the reasoning indicated. For in avoiding unhappiness the stoic also forfeits a corresponding possibility of happiness. And in avoiding error the skeptic also forfeits a corresponding possibility to grasp a truth. These twin policies appeal to conservatism in our nature, and will reasonably preskepticism skepticism 847   847 vail in the lives of those committed to avoiding risk as a paramount objective. For this very desire must then be given its due, if we judge it rational. Skepticism is instrumental in the birth of modern epistemology, and modern philosophy, at the hands of Descartes, whose skepticism is methodological but sophisticated and well informed by that of the ancients. Skepticism is also a main force, perhaps the main force, in the broad sweep of Western philosophy from Descartes through Hegel. Though preeminent in the history of our subject, skepticism since then has suffered decades of neglect, and only in recent years has reclaimed much attention and even applause. Some recent influential discussions go so far as to grant that we do not know we are not dreaming. But they also insist one can still know when there is a fire before one. The key is to analyze knowledge as a kind of appropriate responsiveness to its object truth: what is required is that the subject “track” through his belief the truth of what he believes. S tracks the truth of P iff: S would not believe P if P were false. Such an analysis of tracking, when conjoined with the view of knowledge as tracking, enables one to explain how one can know about the fire even if for all one knows it is just a dream. The crucial fact here is that even if P logically entails Q, one may still be able to track the truth of P though unable to track the truth of Q. Nozick, Philosophical Explanations, 1981. Many problems arise in the literature on this approach. One that seems especially troubling is that though it enables us to understand how contingent knowledge of our surroundings is possible, the tracking account falls short of enabling an explanation of how such knowledge on our part is actual. To explain how one knows that there is a fire before one F, according to the tracking account one presumably would invoke one’s tracking the truth of F. But this leads deductively almost immediately to the claim that one is not dreaming: Not D. And this is not something one can know, according to the tracking account. So how is one to explain one’s justification for making that claim? Most troubling of all here is the fact that one is now cornered by the tracking account into making combinations of claims of the following form: I am quite sure that p, but I have no knowledge at all as to whether p. And this seems incoherent. A Cartesian dream argument that has had much play in recent discussions of skepticism is made explicit by Barry Stroud, The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism, 1984 as follows. One knows that if one knows F then one is not dreaming, in which case if one really knows F then one must know one is not dreaming. However, one does not know one is not dreaming. So one does not know F. Q.E.D. And why does one fail to know one is not dreaming? Because in order to know it one would need to know that one has passed some test, some empirical procedure to determine whether one is dreaming. But any such supposed test  say, pinching oneself  could just be part of a dream, and dreaming one passes the test would not suffice to show one was not dreaming. However, might one not actually be witnessing the fire, and passing the test  and be doing this in wakeful life, not in a dream  and would that not be compatible with one’s knowing of the fire and of one’s wakefulness? Not so, according to the argument, since in order to know of the fire one needs prior knowledge of one’s wakefulness. But in order to know of one’s wakefulness one needs prior knowledge of the results of the test procedure. But this in turn requires prior knowledge that one is awake and not dreaming. And we have a vicious circle. We might well hold that it is possible to know one is not dreaming even in the absence of any positive test result, or at most in conjunction with coordinate not prior knowledge of such a positive indication. How in that case would one know of one’s wakefulness? Perhaps one would know it by believing it through the exercise of a reliable faculty. Perhaps one would know it through its coherence with the rest of one’s comprehensive and coherent body of beliefs. Perhaps both. But, it may be urged, if these are the ways one might know of one’s wakefulness, does not this answer commit us to a theory of the form of A below? A The proposition that p is something one knows believes justifiably if and only if one satisfies conditions C with respect to it. And if so, are we not caught in a vicious circle by the question as to how we know  what justifies us in believing  A itself? This is far from obvious, since the requirement that we must submit to some test procedure for wakefulness and know ourselves to test positively, before we can know ourselves to be awake, is itself a requirement that seems to lead equally to a principle such as A. At least it is not evident why the proposal of the externalist or of the coherentist as to how we know we are awake should be any more closely related to a general principle like A than is the foundationalist? notion skepticism skepticism 848   848 that in order to know we are awake we need epistemically prior knowledge that we test positive in a way that does not presuppose already acquired knowledge of the external world. The problem of how to justify the likes of A is a descendant of the infamous “problem of the criterion,” reclaimed in the sixteenth century and again in this century by Chisholm, Theory of Knowledge, 1966, 1977, and 1988 but much used already by the Skeptics of antiquity under the title of the diallelus. About explanations of our knowledge or justification in general of the form indicated by A, we are told that they are inadequate in a way revealed by examples like the following. Suppose we want to know how we know anything at all about the external world, and part of the answer is that we know the location of our neighbor by knowing the location of her car in her driveway. Surely this would be at best the beginning of an answer that might be satisfactory in the end if recursive, e.g., but as it stands it cannot be satisfactory without supplementation. The objection here is based on a comparison between two appeals: the appeal of a theorist of knowledge to a principle like A in the course of explaining our knowledge or justification in general, on one side; and the appeal to the car’s location in explaining our knowledge of facts about the external world, on the other side. This comparison is said to be fatal to the ambition to explain our knowledge or justification in general. But are the appeals relevantly analogous? One important difference is this. In the example of the car, we explain the presence, in some subject S, of a piece of knowledge of a certain kind of the external world by appeal to the presence in S of some other piece of knowledge of the very same kind. So there is an immediate problem if it is our aim to explain how any knowledge of the sort in question ever comes to be unless the explication is just beginning, and is to turn recursive in due course. Now of course A is theoretically ambitious, and in that respect the theorist who gives an answer of the form of A is doing something similar to what must be done by the protagonist in our car example, someone who is attempting to provide a general explanation of how any knowledge of a certain kind comes about. Nevertheless, there is also an important difference, namely that the theorist whose aim it is to give a general account of the form of A need not attribute any knowledge whatsoever to a subject S in explaining how that subject comes to have a piece of knowledge or justified belief. For there is no need to require that the conditions C appealed to by principle A must be conditions that include attribution of any knowledge at all to the subject in question. It is true that in claiming that A itself meets conditions C, and that it is this which explains how one knows A, we do perhaps take ourselves to know A or at least to be justified in believing it. But if so, this is the inevitable lot of anyone who seriously puts forward any explanation of anything. And it is quite different from a proposal that part of what explains how something is known or justifiably believed includes a claim to knowledge or justified belief of the very same sort. In sum, as in the case of one’s belief that one is awake, the belief in something of the form of A may be said to be known, and in so saying one does not commit oneself to adducing an ulterior reason in favor of A, or even to having such a reason in reserve. One is of course committed to being justified in believing A, perhaps even to having knowledge that A. But it is not at all clear that the only way to be justified in believing A is by way of adduced reasons in favor of A, or that one knows A only if one adduces strong enough reasons in its favor. For we often know things in the absence of such adduced reasons. Thus consider one’s knowledge through memory of which door one used to come into a room that has more than one open door. Returning finally to A, in its case the explanation of how one knows it may, once again, take the form of an appeal to the justifying power of intellectual virtues or of coherence  or both. Recent accounts of the nature of thought and representation undermine a tradition of wholesale doubt about nature, whose momentum is hard to stop, and threatens to leave the subject alone and restricted to a solipsism of the present moment. But there may be a way to stop skepticism early  by questioning the possibility of its being sensibly held, given what is required for meaningful language and thought. Consider our grasp of observable shape and color properties that objects around us might have. Such grasp seems partly constituted by our discriminatory abilities. When we discern a shape or a color we do so presumably in terms of a distinctive impact that such a shape or color has on us. We are put systematically into a certain distinctive state X when we are appropriately related, in good light, with our eyes open, etc., to the presence in our environment of that shape or color. What makes one’s distinctive state one of thinking of sphericity rather than something else, is said to be that it is a state tied by systematic causal relations to skepticism skepticism 849   849 the presence of sphericity in one’s normal environment. A light now flickers at the end of the skeptic’s tunnel. In doubt now is the coherence of traditional skeptical reflection. Indeed, our predecessors in earlier centuries may have moved in the wrong direction when they attempted a reduction of nature to the mind. For there is no way to make sense of one’s mind without its contents, and there is no way to make sense of how one’s mind can have such contents except by appeal to how one is causally related to one’s environment. If the very existence of that environment is put in doubt, that cuts the ground from under one’s ability reasonably to characterize one’s own mind, or to feel any confidence about its contents. Perhaps, then, one could not be a “brain in a vat.” Much contemporary thought about language and the requirements for meaningful language thus suggests that a lot of knowledge must already be in place for us to be able to think meaningfully about a surrounding reality, so as to be able to question its very existence. If so, then radical skepticism answers itself. For if we can so much as understand a radical skepticism about the existence of our surrounding reality, then we must already know a great deal about that reality. 

Skeptics, those ancient thinkers who developed sets of arguments to show either that no knowledge is possible Academic Skepticism or that there is not sufficient or adequate evidence to tell if any knowledge is possible. If the latter is the case then these thinkers advocated suspending judgment on all question concerning knowledge Pyrrhonian Skepticism. Academic Skepticism gets its name from the fact that it was formulated in Plato’s Academy in the third century B.C., starting from Socrates’ statement, “All I know is that I know nothing.” It was developed by Arcesilaus c.268241 and Carneades c.213129, into a series of arguments, directed principally against the Stoics, purporting to show that nothing can be known. The Academics posed a series of problems to show that what we think we know by our senses may be unreliable, and that we cannot be sure about the reliability of our reasoning. We do not possess a guaranteed standard or criterion for ascertaining which of our judgments is true or false. Any purported knowledge claim contains some element that goes beyond immediate experience. If this claim constituted knowledge we would have to know something that could not possibly be false. The evidence for the claim would have to be based on our senses and our reason, both of which are to some degree unreliable. So the knowledge claim may be false or doubtful, and hence cannot constitute genuine knowledge. So, the Academics said that nothing is certain. The best we can attain is probable information. Carneades is supposed to have developed a form of verification theory and a kind of probabilism, similar in some ways to that of modern pragmatists and positivists. Academic Skepticism dominated the philosophizing of Plato’s Academy until the first century B.C. While Cicero was a student there, the Academy turned from Skepticism to a kind of eclectic philosophy. Its Skeptical arguments have been preserved in Cicero’s works, Academia and De natura deorum, in Augustine’s refutation in his Contra academicos, as well as in the summary presented by Diogenes Laertius in his lives of the Grecian philosophers. Skeptical thinking found another home in the school of the Pyrrhonian Skeptics, probably connected with the Methodic school of medicine in Alexandria. The Pyrrhonian movement traces its origins to Pyrrho of Elis c.360275 B.C. and his student Timon c.315225 B.C.. The stories about Pyrrho indicate that he was not a theoretician but a practical doubter who would not make any judgments that went beyond immediate experience. He is supposed to have refused to judge if what appeared to be chariots might strike him, and he was often rescued by his students because he would not make any commitments. His concerns were apparently ethical. He sought to avoid unhappiness that might result from accepting any value theory. If the theory was at all doubtful, accepting it might lead to mental anguish. The theoretical formulation of Pyrrhonian Skepticism is attributed to Aenesidemus c.100 40 B.C.. Pyrrhonists regarded dogmatic philosophers and Academic Skeptics as asserting too much, the former saying that something can be known and the latter that nothing can be known. The Pyrrhonists suspended judgments on all questions on which there was any conflicting evidence, including whether or not anything could be known. The Pyrrhonists used some of the same kinds of arguments developed by Arcesilaus and skepticism, moral Skeptics 850   850 Carneades. Aenesidemus and those who followed after him organized the arguments into sets of “tropes” or ways of leading to suspense of judgment on various questions. Sets of ten, eight, five, and two tropes appear in the only surviving writing of the Pyrrhonists, the works of Sextus Empiricus, a third-century A.D. teacher of Pyrrhonism. Each set of tropes offers suggestions for suspending judgment about any knowledge claims that go beyond appearances. The tropes seek to show that for any claim, evidence for and evidence against it can be offered. The disagreements among human beings, the variety of human experiences, the fluctuation of human judgments under differing conditions, illness, drunkenness, etc., all point to the opposition of evidence for and against each knowledge claim. Any criterion we employ to sift and weigh the evidence can also be opposed by countercriterion claims. Given this situation, the Pyrrhonian Skeptics sought to avoid committing themselves concerning any kind of question. They would not even commit themselves as to whether the arguments they put forth were sound or not. For them Skepticism was not a statable theory, but rather an ability or mental attitude for opposing evidence for and against any knowledge claim that went beyond what was apparent, that dealt with the non-evident. This opposing produced an equipollence, a balancing of the opposing evidences, that would lead to suspending judgment on any question. Suspending judgment led to a state of mind called “ataraxia,” quietude, peace of mind, or unperturbedness. In such a state the Skeptic was no longer concerned or worried or disturbed about matters beyond appearances. The Pyrrhonians averred that Skepticism was a cure for a disease called “dogmatism” or rashness. The dogmatists made assertions about the non-evident, and then became disturbed about whether these assertions were true. The disturbance became a mental disease or disorder. The Pyrrhonians, who apparently were medical doctors, offered relief by showing the patient how and why he should suspend judgment instead of dogmatizing. Then the disease would disappear and the patient would be in a state of tranquillity, the peace of mind sought by Hellenistic dogmatic philosophers. The Pyrrhonists, unlike the Academic Skeptics, were not negative dogmatists. The Pyrrhonists said neither that knowledge is possible nor that it is impossible. They remained seekers, while allowing the Skeptical arguments and the equipollence of evidences to act as a purge of dogmatic assertions. The purge eliminates all dogmas as well as itself. After this the Pyrrhonist lives undogmatically, following natural inclinations, immediate experience, and the laws and customs of his society, without ever judging or committing himself to any view about them. In this state the Pyrrhonist would have no worries, and yet be able to function naturally and according to law and custom. The Pyrrhonian movement disappeared during the third century A.D., possibly because it was not considered an alternative to the powerful religious movements of the time. Only scant traces of it appear before the Renaissance, when the texts of Sextus and Cicero were rediscovered and used to formulate a modern skeptical view by such thinkers as Montaigne and Charron. 

Skolem, Thoralf 18871963, Norwegian mathematician. A pioneer of mathematical logic, he made fundamental contributions to recursion theory, set theory in particular, the proposal and formulation in 1922 of the axiom of replacement, and model theory. His most important results for the philosophy of mathematics are the Downward Löwenheim-Skolem theorem 1919, 1922, whose first proof involved putting formulas into Skolem normal form; and a demonstration 193334 of the existence of models of first-order arithmetic not isomorphic to the standard model. Both results exhibit the extreme non-categoricity that can occur with formulations of mathematical theories in firstorder logic, and caused Skolem to be skeptical about the use of formal systems, particularly for set theory, as a foundation for mathematics. The existence of non-standard models is actually a consequence of the completeness and first incompleteness theorems Gödel, 1930, 1931, for these together show that there must be sentences of arithmetic if consistent that are true in the standard model, but false in some other, nonisomorphic model. However, Skolem’s result describes a general technique for constructing such models. Skolem’s theorem is now more easily proved using the compactness theorem, an easy consequence of the completeness theorem. The Löwenheim-Skolem theorem produces a similar problem of characterization, the Skolem paradox, pointed out by Skolem in 1922. Roughly, this says that if first-order set theory has a model, it must also have a countable model whose continuum is a countable set, and thus apparently non-standard. This does not contraSkolem, Thoralf Skolem, Thoralf 851   851 dict Cantor’s theorem, which merely demands that the countable model contain as an element no function that maps its natural numbers one-toone onto its continuum, although there must be such a function outside the model. Although usually seen as limiting first-order logic, this result is extremely fruitful technically, providing one basis of the proof of the independence of the continuum hypothesis from the usual axioms of set theory given by Gödel in 1938 and Cohen in 1963. This connection between independence results and the existence of countable models was partially foreseen by Skolem in 1922. 

slippery slope argument, an argument that an action apparently unobjectionable in itself would set in motion a train of events leading ultimately to an undesirable outcome. The metaphor portrays one on the edge of a slippery slope, where taking the first step down will inevitably cause sliding to the bottom. For example, it is sometimes argued that voluntary euthanasia should not be legalized because this will lead to killing unwanted people, e.g. the handicapped or elderly, against their will. In some versions the argument aims to show that one should intervene to stop an ongoing train of events; e.g., it has been argued that suppressing a Communist revolution in one country was necessary to prevent the spread of Communism throughout a whole region via the so-called domino effect. Slippery slope arguments with dubious causal assumptions are often classed as fallacies under the general heading of the fallacy of the false cause. This argument is also sometimes called the wedge argument. There is some disagreement concerning the breadth of the category of slippery slope arguments. Some would restrict the term to arguments with evaluative conclusions, while others construe it more broadly so as to include other sorites arguments. 

Smart, John Jamieson Carswell b.1920, British-born Australian philosopher whose name is associated with three doctrines in particular: the mindbody identity theory, scientific realism, and utilitarianism. A student of Ryle’s at Oxford, he rejected logical behaviorism in favor of what came to be known as Australian materialism. This is the view that mental processes  and, as Armstrong brought Smart to see, mental states  cannot be explained simply in terms of behavioristic dispositions. In order to make good sense of how the ordinary person talks of them we have to see them as brain processes  and states  under other names. Smart developed this identity theory of mind and brain, under the stimulus of his colleague, U. T. Place, in “Sensations and Brain Processes” Philosophical Review, 1959. It became a mainstay of twentieth-century philosophy. Smart endorsed the materialist analysis of mind on the grounds that it gave a simple picture that was consistent with the findings of science. He took a realist view of the claims of science, rejecting phenomenalism, instrumentalism, and the like, and he argued that commonsense beliefs should be maintained only so far as they are plausible in the light of total science. Philosophy and Scientific Realism 1963 gave forceful expression to this physicalist picture of the world, as did some later works. He attracted attention in particular for his argument that if we take science seriously then we have to endorse the four-dimensional picture of the universe and recognize as an illusion the experience of the passing of time. He published a number of defenses of utilitarianism, the best known being his contribution to J. J. C. Smart and Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism, For and Against 1973. He gave new life to act utilitarianism at a time when utilitarians were few and most were attached to rule utilitarianism or other restricted forms of the doctrine. 

Smith, Adam 172390, Scottish economist and philosopher, a founder of modern political economy and a major contributor to ethics and the psychology of morals. His first published work was The Theory of Moral Sentiments 1759. This book immediately made him famous, and earned the praise of thinkers of the stature of Hume, Burke, and Kant. It sought to answer two questions: Wherein does virtue consist, and by means of what psychological principles do we deterSkolem-Löwenheim theorem Smith, Adam 852   852 mine this or that to be virtuous or the contrary? His answer to the first combined ancient Stoic and Aristotelian views of virtue with modern views derived from Hutcheson and others. His answer to the second built on Hume’s theory of sympathy  our ability to put ourselves imaginatively in the situation of another  as well as on the notion of the “impartial spectator.” Smith throughout is skeptical about metaphysical and theological views of virtue and of the psychology of morals. The self-understanding of reasonable moral actors ought to serve as the moral philosopher’s guide. Smith’s discussion ranges from the motivation of wealth to the psychological causes of religious and political fanaticism. Smith’s second published work, the immensely influential An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations 1776, attempts to explain why free economic, political, and religious markets are not only more efficient, when properly regulated, but also more in keeping with nature, more likely to win the approval of an impartial spectator, than monopolistic alternatives. Taken together, Smith’s two books attempt to show how virtue and liberty can complement each other. He shows full awareness of the potentially dehumanizing force of what was later called “capitalism,” and sought remedies in schemes for liberal education and properly organized religion. Smith did not live to complete his system, which was to include an analysis of “natural jurisprudence.” We possess student notes of his lectures on jurisprudence and on rhetoric, as well as several impressive essays on the evolution of the history of science and on the fine arts. 

social action, a subclass of human action involving the interaction among agents and their mutual orientation, or the action of groups. While all intelligible actions are in some sense social, social actions must be directed to others. Talcott Parsons 190279 captured what is distinctive about social action in his concept of “double contingency,” and similar concepts have been developed by other philosophers and sociologists, including Weber, Mead, and Wittgenstein. Whereas in monological action the agents’ fulfilling their purposes depends only on contingent facts about the world, the success of social action is also contingent on how other agents react to what the agent does and how that agent reacts to other agents, and so on. An agent successfully communicates, e.g., not merely by finding some appropriate expression in an existing symbol system, but also by understanding how other agents will understand him. Game theory describes and explains another type of double contingency in its analysis of the interdependency of choices and strategies among rational agents. Games are also significant in two other respects. First, they exemplify the cognitive requirements for social interaction, as in Mead’s analysis of agents’ perspective taking: as a subject “I”, I am an object for others “me”, and can take a third-person perspective along with others on the interaction itself “the generalized other”. Second, games are regulated by shared rules and mediated through symbolic meanings; Wittgenstein’s private language argument establishes that rules cannot be followed “privately.” Some philosophers, such as Peter Winch, conclude from this argument that rule-following is a basic feature of distinctively social action. Some actions are social in the sense that they can only be done in groups. Individualists such as Weber, Jon Elster, and Raimo Tuomela believe that these can be analyzed as the sum of the actions of each individual. But holists such as Marx, Durkheim, and Margaret Gilbert reject this reduction and argue that in social actions agents must see themselves as members of a collective agent. Holism has stronger or weaker versions: strong holists, such as Durkheim and Hegel, see the collective subject as singular, the collective consciousness of a society. Weak holists, such as Gilbert and Habermas, believe that social actions have plural, rather than singular, collective subjects. Holists generally establish the plausibility of their view by referring to larger contexts and sequences of action, such as shared symbol systems or social institutions. Explanations of social actions thus refer not only to the mutual expectations of agents, but also to these larger causal contexts, shared meanings, and mechanisms of coordination. Theories of social action must then explain the emergence of social order, and proposals range from Hobbes’s coercive authority to Talcott Parsons’s value consensus about shared goals among the members of groups. 

social biology, the understanding of social behavior, especially human social behavior, from a biological perspective; often connected with the political philosophy of social Darwinism. social action social biology 853   853 Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species highlighted the significance of social behavior in organic evolution, and in the Descent of Man, he showed how significant such behavior is for humans. He argued that it is a product of natural selection; but it was not until 1964 that the English biologist William Hamilton showed precisely how such behavior could evolve, namely through “kin selection” as an aid to the biological wellbeing of close relatives. Since then, other models of explanation have been proposed, extending the theory to non-relatives. Best known is the self-describing “reciprocal altruism.” Social biology became notorious in 1975 when Edward O. Wilson published a major treatise on the subject: Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Accusations of sexism and racism were leveled because Wilson suggested that Western social systems are biologically innate, and that in some respects males are stronger, more aggressive, more naturally promiscuous than females. Critics argued that all social biology is in fact a manifestation of social Darwinism, a nineteenthcentury philosophy owing more to Herbert Spencer than to Charles Darwin, supposedly legitimating extreme laissez-faire economics and an unbridled societal struggle for existence. Such a charge is extremely serious, for as Moore pointed out in his Principia Ethica 1903, Spencer surely commits the naturalistic fallacy, inasmuch as he is attempting to derive the way that the world ought to be from the way that it is. Naturally enough, defenders of social biology, or “sociobiology” as it is now better known, denied vehemently that their science is mere right-wing ideology by another name. They pointed to many who have drawn very different social conclusions on the basis of biology. Best known is the Russian anarchist Kropotkin, who argued that societies are properly based on a biological propensity to mutual aid. With respect to contemporary debate, it is perhaps fairest to say that sociobiology, particularly that pertaining to humans, did not always show sufficient sensitivity toward all societal groups  although certainly there was never the crude racism of the fascist regimes of the 1930s. However, recent work is far more careful in these respects. Now, indeed, the study of social behavior from a biological perspective is one of the most exciting and forward-moving branches of the life sciences.  .

social choice theory, the theory of the rational action of a group of agents. Important social choices are typically made over alternative means of collectively providing goods. These might be goods for individual members of the group, or more characteristically, public goods, goods such that no one can be excluded from enjoying their benefits once they are available. Perhaps the most central aspect of social choice theory concerns rational individual choice in a social context. Since what is rational for one agent to do will often depend on what is rational for another to do and vice versa, these choices take on a strategic dimension. The prisoner’s dilemma illustrates how it can be very difficult to reconcile individual and collectively rational decisions, especially in non-dynamic contexts. There are many situations, particularly in the provision of public goods, however, where simple prisoner’s dilemmas can be avoided and more manageable coordination problems remain. In these cases, individuals may find it rational to contractually or conventionally bind themselves to courses of action that lead to the greater good of all even though they are not straightforwardly utility-maximizing for particular individuals. Establishing the rationality of these contracts or conventions is one of the leading problems of social choice theory, because coordination can collapse if a rational agent first agrees to cooperate and then reneges and becomes a free rider on the collective efforts of others. Other forms of uncooperative behaviors such as violating rules established by society or being deceptive about one’s preferences pose similar difficulties. Hobbes attempted to solve these problems by proposing that people would agree to submit to the authority of a sovereign whose punitive powers would make uncooperative behavior an unattractive option. It has also been argued that cooperation is rational if the concept of rationality is extended beyond utility-maximizing in the right way. Other arguments stress benefits beyond selfinterest that accrue to cooperators. Another major aspect of social choice theory concerns the rational action of a powerful central authority, or social planner, whose mission is to optimize the social good. Although the central planner may be instituted by rational individual choice, this part of the theory simply assumes the institution. The planner’s task of making a onetime allocation of resources to the production of various commodities is tractable if social good or social utility is known as a function of various commodities. When the planner must take into account dynamical considerations, the technical social choice theory social choice theory 854   854 problems are more difficult. This economic growth theory raises important ethical questions about intergenerational conflict. The assumption of a social analogue of the individual utility functions is particularly worrisome. It can be shown formally that taking the results of majority votes can lead to intransitive social orderings of possible choices and it is, therefore, a generally unsuitable procedure for the planner to follow. Moreover, under very general conditions there is no way of aggregating individual preferences into a consistent social choice function of the kind needed by the planner. 

social constructivism, also called social constructionism, any of a variety of views which claim that knowledge in some area is the product of our social practices and institutions, or of the interactions and negotiations between relevant social groups. Mild versions hold that social factors shape interpretations of the world. Stronger versions maintain that the world, or some significant portion of it, is somehow constituted by theories, practices, and institutions. Defenders often move from mild to stronger versions by insisting that the world is accessible to us only through our interpretations, and that the idea of an independent reality is at best an irrelevant abstraction and at worst incoherent. This philosophical position is distinct from, though distantly related to, a view of the same name in social and developmental psychology, associated with such figures as Piaget and Lev Vygotsky, which sees learning as a process in which subjects actively construct knowledge. Social constructivism has roots in Kant’s idealism, which claims that we cannot know things in themselves and that knowledge of the world is possible only by imposing pre-given categories of thought on otherwise inchoate experience. But where Kant believed that the categories with which we interpret and thus construct the world are given a priori, contemporary constructivists believe that the relevant concepts and associated practices vary from one group or historical period to another. Since there are no independent standards for evaluating conceptual schemes, social constructivism leads naturally to relativism. These views are generally thought to be present in Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which argues that observation and methods in science are deeply theory-dependent and that scientists with fundamentally different assumptions or paradigms effectively live in different worlds. Kuhn thus offers a view of science in opposition to both scientific realism which holds that theory-dependent methods can give us knowledge of a theory-independent world and empiricism which draws a sharp line between theory and observation. Kuhn was reluctant to accept the apparently radical consequences of his views, but his work has influenced recent social studies of science, whose proponents frequently embrace both relativism and strong constructivism. Another influence is the principle of symmetry advocated by David Bloor and Barry Barnes, which holds that sociologists should explain the acceptance of scientific views in the same way whether they believe those views to be true or to be false. This approach is elaborated in the work of Harry Collins, Steve Woolgar, and others. Constructivist themes are also prominent in the work of feminist critics of science such as Sandra Harding and Donna Haraway, and in the complex views of Bruno Latour. Critics, such as Richard Boyd and Philip Kitcher, while applauding the detailed case studies produced by constructivists, claim that the positive arguments for constructivism are fallacious, that it fails to account satisfactorily for actual scientific practice, and that like other versions of idealism and relativism it is only dubiously coherent. 

social contract, an agreement either between the people and their ruler, or among the people in a community. The idea of a social contract has been used in arguments that differ in what they aim to justify or explain e.g., the state, conceptions of justice, morality, what they take the problem of justification to be, and whether or not they presuppose a moral theory or purport to be a moral theory. Traditionally the term has been used in arguments that attempt to explain the nature of political obligation and/or the kind of responsibility that rulers have to their subjects. Philosophers such as Plato, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant argue that human beings would find life in a prepolitical “state of nature” a state that some argue is also presocietal so difficult that they would agree  either with one another or with a social constructivism social contract 855   855 prospective ruler  to the creation of political institutions that each believes would improve his or her lot. Note that because the argument explains political or social cohesion as the product of an agreement among individuals, it makes these individuals conceptually prior to political or social units. Marx and other socialist and communitarian thinkers have argued against conceptualizing an individual’s relationship to her political and social community in this way. Have social contracts in political societies actually taken place? Hume ridicules the idea that they are real, and questions what value makebelieve agreements can have as explanations of actual political obligations. Although many social contract theorists admit that there is almost never an explicit act of agreement in a community, nonetheless they maintain that such an agreement is implicitly made when members of the society engage in certain acts through which they give their tacit consent to the ruling regime. It is controversial what actions constitute giving tacit consent: Plato and Locke maintain that the acceptance of benefits is sufficient to give such consent, but some have argued that it is wrong to feel obliged to those who foist upon us benefits for which we have not asked. It is also unclear how much of an obligation a person can be under if he gives only tacit consent to a regime. How are we to understand the terms of a social contract establishing a state? When the people agree to obey the ruler, do they surrender their own power to him, as Hobbes tried to argue? Or do they merely lend him that power, reserving the right to take it from him if and when they see fit, as Locke maintained? If power is merely on loan to the ruler, rebellion against him could be condoned if he violates the conditions of that loan. But if the people’s grant of power is a surrender, there are no such conditions, and the people could never be justified in taking back that power via revolution. Despite controversies surrounding their interpretation, social contract arguments have been important to the development of modern democratic states: the idea of the government as the creation of the people, which they can and should judge and which they have the right to overthrow if they find it wanting, contributed to the development of democratic forms of polity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. American and French revolutionaries explicitly acknowledged their debts to social contract theorists such as Locke and Rousseau. In the twentieth century, the social contract idea has been used as a device for defining various moral conceptions e.g. theories of justice by those who find its focus on individuals useful in the development of theories that argue against views e.g. utilitarianism that allow individuals to be sacrificed for the benefit of the group.

social epistemology, the study of the social dimensions or determinants of knowledge, or the ways in which social factors promote or perturb the quest for knowledge. Some writers use the term ‘knowledge’ loosely, as designating mere belief. On their view social epistemology should simply describe how social factors influence beliefs, without concern for the rationality or truth of these beliefs. Many historians and sociologists of science, e.g., study scientific practices in the same spirit that anthropologists study native cultures, remaining neutral about the referential status of scientists’ constructs or the truth-values of their beliefs. Others try to show that social factors like political or professional interests are causally operative, and take such findings to debunk any objectivist pretensions of science. Still other writers retain a normative, critical dimension in social epistemology, but do not presume that social practices necessarily undermine objectivity. Even if knowledge is construed as true or rational belief, social practices might enhance knowledge acquisition. One social practice is trusting the opinions of authorities, a practice that can produce truth if the trusted authorities are genuinely authoritative. Such trust may also be perfectly rational in a complex world, where division of epistemic labor is required. Even a scientist’s pursuit of extra-epistemic interests such as professional rewards may not be antithetical to truth in favorable circumstances. Institutional provisions, e.g., judicial rules of evidence, provide another example of social factors. Exclusionary rules might actually serve the cause of truth or accuracy in judgment if the excluded evidence would tend to mislead or prejudice jurors. 

social philosophy, broadly the philosophy of socisocial Darwinism social philosophy 856   856 ety, including the philosophy of social science and many of its components, e.g., economics and history, political philosophy, most of what we now think of as ethics, and philosophy of law. But we may distinguish two narrower senses. In one, it is the conceptual theory of society, including the theory of the study of society  the common part of all the philosophical studies mentioned. In the other, it is a normative study, the part of moral philosophy that concerns social action and individual involvement with society in general. The central job of social philosophy in the first of these narrower senses is to articulate the correct notion or concept of society. This would include formulating a suitable definition of ‘society’; the question is then which concepts are better for which purposes, and how they are related. Thus we may distinguish “thin” and “thick” conceptions of society. The former would identify the least that can be said before we cease talking about society at all  say, a number of people who interact, whose actions affect the behavior of their fellows. Thicker conceptions would then add such things as community rules, goals, customs, and ideals. An important empirical question is whether any interacting groups ever do lack such things and what if anything is common to the rules, etc., that actual societies have. Descriptive social philosophy will obviously border on, if not merge into, social science itself, e.g. into sociology, social psychology, or economics. And some outlooks in social philosophy will tend to ally with one social science as more distinctively typical than others  e.g., the individualist view looks to economics, the holist to sociology. A major methodological controversy concerns holism versus individualism. Holism maintains that at least some social groups must be studied as units, irreducible to their members: we cannot understand a society merely by understanding the actions and motivations of its members. Individualism denies that societies are “organisms,” and holds that we can understand society only in that way. Classic German sociologists e.g., Weber distinguished between Gesellschaft, whose paradigm is the voluntary association, such as a chess club, whose activities are the coordinated actions of a number of people who intentionally join that group in order to pursue the purposes that identify it; and Gemeinschaft, whose members find their identities in that group. Thus, the French are not a group whose members teamed up with like-minded people to form French society. They were French before they had separate individual purposes. The holist views society as essentially a Gemeinschaft. Individualists agree that there are such groupings but deny that they require a separate kind of irreducibly collective explanation: to understand the French we must understand how typical French individuals behave  compared, say, with the Germans, and so on. The methods of Western economics typify the analytical tendencies of methodological individualism, showing how we can understand large-scale economic phenomena in terms of the rational actions of particular economic agents. Cf. Adam Smith’s invisible hand thesis: each economic agent seeks only his own good, yet the result is the macrophenomenal good of the whole. Another pervasive issue concerns the role of intentional characterizations and explanations in these fields. Ordinary people explain behavior by reference to its purposes, and they formulate these in terms that rely on public rules of language and doubtless many other rules. To understand society, we must hook onto the selfunderstanding of the people in that society this view is termed Verstehen. Recent work in philosophy of science raises the question whether intentional concepts can really be fundamental in explaining anything, and whether we must ultimately conceive people as in some sense material systems, e.g. as computer-like. Major questions for the program of replicating human intelligence in data-processing terms cf. artificial intelligence are raised by the symbolic aspects of interaction. Additionally, we should note the emergence of sociobiology as a potent source of explanations of social phenomena. Normative social philosophy, in turn, tends inevitably to merge into either politics or ethics, especially the part of ethics dealing with how people ought to treat others, especially in large groups, in relation to social institutions or social structures. This contrasts with ethics in the sense concerned with how individual people may attain the good life for themselves. All such theories allot major importance to social relations; but if one’s theory leaves the individual wide freedom of choice, then a theory of individually chosen goods will still have a distinctive subject matter. The normative involvements of social philosophy have paralleled the foregoing in important ways. Individualists have held that the good of a society must be analyzed in terms of the goods of its individual members. Of special importance has been the view that society must respect indisocial philosophy social philosophy 857   857 vidual rights, blocking certain actions alleged to promote social good as a whole. Organicist philosophers such as Hegel hold that it is the other way around: the state or nation is higher than the individual, who is rightly subordinated to it, and individuals have fundamental duties toward the groups of which they are members. Outrightly fascist versions of such views are unpopular today, but more benign versions continue in modified form, notably by communitarians. Socialism and especially communism, though focused originally on economic aspects of society, have characteristically been identified with the organicist outlook. Their extreme opposite is to be found in the libertarians, who hold that the right to individual liberty is fundamental in society, and that no institutions may override that right. Libertarians hold that society ought to be treated strictly as an association, a Gesellschaft, even though they might not deny that it is ontogenetically Gemeinschaft. They might agree that religious groups, e.g., cannot be wholly understood as separate individuals. Nevertheless, the libertarian holds that religious and cultural practices may not be interfered with or even supported by society. Libertarians are strong supporters of free-market economic methods, and opponents of any sort of state intervention into the affairs of individuals. Social Darwinism, advocating the “survival of the socially fittest,” has sometimes been associated with the libertarian view. Insofar as there is any kind of standard view on these matters, it combines elements of both individualism and holism. Typical social philosophers today accept that society has duties, not voluntary for individual members, to support education, health, and some degree of welfare for all. But they also agree that individual rights are to be respected, especially civil rights, such as freedom of speech and religion. How to combine these two apparently disparate sets of ideas into a coherent whole is the problem. John Rawls’s celebrated Theory of Justice, 1971, is a contemporary classic that attempts to do just that. 

Socinianism, an unorthodox Christian religious movement originating in the sixteenth century from the work of Italian reformer Laelius Socinus “Sozzini” in Italian; 152562 and his nephew Faustus Socinus 15391603. Born in Siena of a patrician family, Laelius was widely read in theology. Influenced by the evangelical movement in Italy, he made contact with noted Protestant reformers, including Calvin and Melanchthon, some of whom questioned his orthodoxy. In response, he wrote a confession of faith one of a small number of his writings to have survived. After Laelius’s death, his work was carried on by his nephew, Faustus, whose writings including On the Authority of Scripture, 1570; On the Savior Jesus Christ, 1578; and On Predestination, 1578 expressed heterodox views. Faustus believed that Christ’s nature was entirely human, that souls did not possess immortality by nature though there would be selective resurrection for believers, that invocation of Christ in prayer was permissible but not required, and he argued against predestination. After publication of his 1578 writings, Faustus was invited to Transylvania and Poland to engage in a dispute within the Reformed churches there. He decided to make his permanent residence in Poland, which, through his tireless efforts, became the center of the Socinian movement. The most important document of this movement was the Racovian Catechism, published in 1605 shortly after Faustus’s death. The Minor church of Poland, centered at Racov, became the focal point of the movement. Its academy attracted hundreds of students and its publishing house produced books in many languages defending Socinian ideas. Socinianism, as represented by the Racovian Catechism and other writings collected by Faustus’s Polish disciples, involves the views of Laelius and especially Faustus Socinus, aligned with the anti-Trinitarian views of the Polish Minor church founded in 1556. It accepts Christ’s message as the definitive revelation of God, but regards Christ as human, not divine; rejects the natural immortality of the soul, but argues for the selective resurrection of the faithful; rejects the doctrine of the Trinity; emphasizes human free will against predestinationism; defends pacifism and the separation of church and state; and argues that reason  not creeds, dogmatic tradition, or church authority  must be the final interpreter of Scripture. Its view of God is temporalistic: God’s eternity is existence at all times, not timelessness, and God knows future free actions only when they occur. In these respects, the Socinian view of God anticipates aspects of modern process theology. Socinianism was suppressed in Poland in 1658, but it had already spread to other European social sciences, philosophy of the Socinianism 858   858 countries, including Holland where it appealed to followers of Arminius and England, where it influenced the Cambridge Platonists, Locke, and other philosophers, as well as scientists like Newton. In England, it also influenced and was closely associated with the development of Unitarianism. 

Socrates 469399 B.C., Grecian philosopher, the exemplar of the examined life, best known for his dictum that only such a life is worth living. Although he wrote nothing, his thoughts and way of life had a profound impact on many of his contemporaries, and, through Plato’s portrayal of him in his early writings, he became a major source of inspiration and ideas for later generations of philosophers. His daily occupation was adversarial public conversation with anyone willing to argue with him. A man of great intellectual brilliance, moral integrity, personal magnetism, and physical self-command, he challenged the moral complacency of his fellow citizens, and embarrassed them with their inability to answer such questions as What is virtue?  questions that he thought we must answer, if we are to know how best to live our lives. His ideas and personality won him a devoted following among the young, but he was far from universally admired. Formal charges were made against him for refusing to recognize the gods of the city, introducing other new divinities, and corrupting the youth. Tried on a single day before a large jury 500 was a typical size, he was found guilty by a small margin: had thirty jurors voted differently, he would have been acquitted. The punishment selected by the jury was death and was administered by means of poison, probably hemlock. Why was he brought to trial and convicted? Part of the answer lies in Plato’s Apology, which purports to be the defense Socrates gave at his trial. Here he says that he has for many years been falsely portrayed as someone whose scientific theories dethrone the traditional gods and put natural forces in their place, and as someone who charges a fee for offering private instruction on how to make a weak argument seem strong in the courtroom. This is the picture of Socrates drawn in a play of Aristophanes, the Clouds, first presented in 423. It is unlikely that Aristophanes intended his play as an accurate depiction of Socrates, and the unscrupulous buffoon found in the Clouds would never have won the devotion of so serious a moralist as Plato. Aristophanes drew together the assorted characteristics of various fifth-century thinkers and named this amalgam “Socrates” because the real Socrates was one of several controversial intellectuals of the period. Nonetheless, it is unlikely that the charges against Socrates or Aristophanes’ caricature were entirely without foundation. Both Xenophon’s Memorabilia and Plato’s Euthyphro say that Socrates aroused suspicion because he thought a certain divine sign or voice appeared to him and gave him useful instruction about how to act. By claiming a unique and private source of divine inspiration, Socrates may have been thought to challenge the city’s exclusive control over religious matters. His willingness to disobey the city is admitted in Plato’s Apology, where he says that he would have to disobey a hypothetical order to stop asking his philosophical questions, since he regards them as serving a religious purpose. In the Euthyphro he seeks a rational basis for making sacrifices and performing other services to the gods; but he finds none, and implies that no one else has one. Such a challenge to traditional religious practice could easily have aroused a suspicion of atheism and lent credibility to the formal charges against him. Furthermore, Socrates makes statements in Plato’s early dialogues and in Xenophon’s Memorabilia that could easily have offended the political sensibilities of his contemporaries. He holds that only those who have given special study to political matters should make decisions. For politics is a kind of craft, and in all other crafts only those who have shown their mastery are entrusted with public responsibilities. Athens was a democracy in which each citizen had an equal legal right to shape policy, and Socrates’ analogy between the role of an expert in politics and in other crafts may have been seen as a threat to this egalitarianism. Doubts about his political allegiance, though not mentioned in the formal charges against him, could easily have swayed some jurors to vote against him. Socrates is the subject not only of Plato’s early dialogues but also of Xenophon’s Memorabilia, Socinus, Faustus Socrates 859   859 and in many respects their portraits are consistent with each other. But there are also some important differences. In the Memorabilia, Socrates teaches whatever a gentleman needs to know for civic purposes. He is filled with platitudinous advice, and is never perplexed by the questions he raises; e.g., he knows what the virtues are, equating them with obedience to the law. His views are not threatening or controversial, and always receive the assent of his interlocutors. By contrast, Plato’s Socrates presents himself as a perplexed inquirer who knows only that he knows nothing about moral matters. His interlocutors are sometimes annoyed by his questions and threatened by their inability to answer them. And he is sometimes led by force of argument to controversial conclusions. Such a Socrates could easily have made enemies, whereas Xenophon’s Socrates is sometimes too “good” to be true. But it is important to bear in mind that it is only the early works of Plato that should be read as an accurate depiction of the historical Socrates. Plato’s own theories, as presented in his middle and late dialogues, enter into philosophical terrain that had not been explored by the historical Socrates  even though in the middle and some of the late dialogues a figure called Socrates remains the principal speaker. We are told by Aristotle that Socrates confined himself to ethical questions, and that he did not postulate a separate realm of imperceptible and eternal abstract objects called “Forms” or “Ideas.” Although the figure called Socrates affirms the existence of these objects in such Platonic dialogues as the Phaedo and the Republic, Aristotle takes this interlocutor to be a vehicle for Platonic philosophy, and attributes to Socrates only those positions that we find in Plato’s earlier writing, e.g. in the Apology, Charmides, Crito, Euthyphro, Hippias Minor, Hippias Major, Ion, Laches, Lysis, and Protagoras. Socrates focused on moral philosophy almost exclusively; Plato’s attention was also devoted to the study of metaphysics, epistemology, physical theory, mathematics, language, and political philosophy. When we distinguish the philosophies of Socrates and Plato in this way, we find continuities in their thought  for instance, the questions posed in the early dialogues receive answers in the Republic  but there are important differences. For Socrates, being virtuous is a purely intellectual matter: it simply involves knowing what is good for human beings; once we master this subject, we will act as we should. Because he equates virtue with knowledge, Socrates frequently draws analogies between being virtuous and having mastered any ordinary subject  cooking, building, or geometry, e.g. For mastery of these subjects does not involve a training of the emotions. By contrast, Plato affirms the existence of powerful emotional drives that can deflect us from our own good, if they are not disciplined by reason. He denies Socrates’ assumption that the emotions will not resist reason, once one comes to understand where one’s own good lies. Socrates says in Plato’s Apology that the only knowledge he has is that he knows nothing, but it would be a mistake to infer that he has no convictions about moral matters  convictions arrived at through a difficult process of reasoning. He holds that the unexamined life is not worth living, that it is better to be treated unjustly than to do injustice, that understanding of moral matters is the only unconditional good, that the virtues are all forms of knowledge and cannot be separated from each other, that death is not an evil, that a good person cannot be harmed, that the gods possess the wisdom human beings lack and never act immorally, and so on. He does not accept these propositions as articles of faith, but is prepared to defend any of them; for he can show his interlocutors that their beliefs ought to lead them to accept these conclusions, paradoxical though they may be. Since Socrates can defend his beliefs and has subjected them to intellectual scrutiny, why does he present himself as someone who has no knowledge  excepting the knowledge of his own ignorance? The answer lies in his assumption that it is only a fully accomplished expert in any field who can claim knowledge or wisdom of that field; someone has knowledge of navigational matters, e.g., only if he has mastered the art of sailing, can answer all inquiries about this subject, and can train others to do the same. Judged by this high epistemic standard, Socrates can hardly claim to be a moral expert, for he lacks answers to the questions he raises, and cannot teach others to be virtuous. Though he has examined his moral beliefs and can offer reasons for them  an accomplishment that gives him an overbearing sense of superiority to his contemporaries  he takes himself to be quite distant from the ideal of moral perfection, which would involve a thorough understanding of all moral matters. This keen sense of the moral and intellectual deficiency of all human beings accounts for a great deal of Socrates’ appeal, just as his arrogant disdain for his fellow citizens no doubt contributed to his demise. Socrates Socrates 860   860 

Socratic intellectualism, the claim that moral goodness or virtue consists exclusively in a kind of knowledge, with the implication that if one knows what is good and evil, one cannot fail to be a good person and to act in a morally upright way. The claim and the term derive from Socrates; a corollary is another claim of Socrates: there is no moral weakness or akrasia  all wrong action is due to the agent’s ignorance. Socrates defends this view in Plato’s dialogue Protagoras. There are two ways to understand Socrates’ view that knowledge of the good is sufficient for right action. 1 All desires are rational, being focused on what is believed to be good; thus, an agent who knows what is good will have no desire to act contrary to that knowledge. 2 There are non-rational desires, but knowledge of the good has sufficient motivational power to overcome them. Socratic intellectualism was abandoned by Plato and Aristotle, both of whom held that emotional makeup is an essential part of moral character. However, they retained the Socratic idea that there is a kind of knowledge or wisdom that ensures right action  but this knowledge presupposes antecedent training and molding of the passions. Socratic intellectualism was later revived and enjoyed a long life as a key doctrine of the Stoics. 

Socratic irony, a form of indirect communication frequently employed by Socrates in Plato’s early dialogues, chiefly to praise insincerely the abilities of his interlocutors while revealing their ignorance; or, to disparage his own abilities, e.g. by denying that he has knowledge. Interpreters disagree whether Socrates’ self-disparagement is insincere. 

Socratic paradoxes, a collection of theses associated with Socrates that contradict opinions about moral or practical matters shared by most people. Although there is no consensus on the precise number of Socratic paradoxes, each of the following theses has been identified as one. 1 Because no one desires evil things, anyone who pursues evil things does so involuntarily. 2 Because virtue is knowledge, anyone who does something morally wrong does so involuntarily. 3 It is better to be unjustly treated than to do what is unjust. The first two theses are associated with weakness of will or akrasia. It is sometimes claimed that the topic of the first thesis is prudential weakness, whereas that of the second is moral weakness; the reference to “evil things” in 1 is not limited to things that are morally evil. Naturally, various competing interpretations of these theses have been offered. 

solipsism, the doctrine that there exists a firstperson perspective possessing privileged and irreducible characteristics, in virtue of which we stand in various kinds of isolation from any other persons or external things that may exist. This doctrine is associated with but distinct from egocentricism. On one variant of solipsism Thomas Nagel’s we are isolated from other sentient beings because we can never adequately understand their experience empathic solipsism. Another variant depends on the thesis that the meanings or referents of all words are mental entities uniquely accessible only to the language user semantic solipsism. A restricted variant, due to Wittgenstein, asserts that first-person ascriptions of psychological states have a meaning fundamentally different from that of second- or thirdperson ascriptions psychological solipsism. In extreme forms semantic solipsism can lead to the view that the only things that can be meaningfully said to exist are ourselves or our mental states ontological solipsism. Skepticism about the existence of the world external to our minds is sometimes considered a form of epistemological solipsism, since it asserts that we stand in epistemological isolation from that world, partly as a result of the epistemic priority possessed by firstperson access to mental states. In addition to these substantive versions of solipsism, several variants go under the rubric methodological solipsism. The idea is that when we seek to explain why sentient beings behave in certain ways by looking to what they believe, desire, hope, and fear, we should identify these psychological states only with events that occur inside the mind or brain, not with external events, since the former alone are the proximate and sufficient causal explanations of bodily behavior. Socratic intellectualism solipsism 861   861 

Solovyov, Vladimir 18531900, Russian philosopher, theologian, essayist, and poet. In addition to major treatises and dialogues in speculative philosophy, Solovyov wrote sensitive literary criticism and influential essays on current social, political, and ecclesiastical questions. His serious verse is subtle and delicate; his light verse is rich in comic invention. The mystical image of the “Divine Sophia,” which Solovyov articulated in theoretical concepts as well as poetic symbols, powerfully influenced the Russian symbolist poets of the early twentieth century. His stress on the human role in the “divine-human process” that creates both cosmic and historical being led to charges of heresy from Russian Orthodox traditionalists. Solovyov’s rationalistic “justification of the good” in history, society, and individual life was inspired by Plato, Spinoza, and especially Hegel. However, at the end of his life Solovyov offered in Three Conversations on War, Progress, and the End of History, 1900 a contrasting apocalyptic vision of historical and cosmic disaster, including the appearance, in the twenty-first century, of the Antichrist. In ethics, social philosophy, philosophy of history, and theory of culture, Solovyov was both a vigorous ecumenist and a “good European” who affirmed the intrinsic value of both the “individual human person” Russian lichnost’ and the “individual nation or people” narodnost’, but he decisively repudiated the perversions of these values in egoism and nationalism, respectively. He contrasted the fruits of English narodnost’  the works of Shakespeare and Byron, Berkeley and Newton  with the fruits of English nationalism  the repressive and destructive expansion of the British Empire. In opposing ethnic, national, and religious exclusiveness and self-centeredness, Solovyov also, and quite consistently, opposed the growing xenophobia and antiSemitism of his own time. Since 1988 long-suppressed works by and about Solovyov have been widely republished in Russia, and fresh interpretations of his philosophy and theology have begun to appear. 

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

Sophists, any of a number of ancient Grecians, roughly contemporaneous with Socrates, who professed to teach, for a fee, rhetoric, philosophy, and how to succeed in life. They typically were itinerants, visiting much of the Grecian world, and gave public exhibitions at Olympia and Delphi. They were part of the general expansion of Grecian learning and of the changing culture in which the previous informal educational methods were inadequate. For example, the growing litigiousness of Athenian society demanded Solovyov, Vladimir Sophists 862   862 instruction in the art of speaking well, which the Sophists helped fulfill. The Sophists have been portrayed as intellectual charlatans hence the pejorative use of ‘sophism’, teaching their sophistical reasoning for money, and at the other extreme as Victorian moralists and educators. The truth is more complex. They were not a school, and shared no body of opinions. They were typically concerned with ethics unlike many earlier philosophers, who emphasized physical inquiries and about the relationship between laws and customs nomos and nature phusis. Protagoras of Abdera c.490c.420 B.C. was the most famous and perhaps the first Sophist. He visited Athens frequently, and became a friend of its leader, Pericles; he therefore was invited to draw up a legal code for the colony of Thurii 444. According to some late reports, he died in a shipwreck as he was leaving Athens, having been tried for and found guilty of impiety. He claimed that he knew nothing about the gods, because of human limitations and the difficulty of the question. We have only a few short quotations from his works. His “Truth” also known as the “Throws,” i.e., how to overthrow an opponent’s arguments begins with his most famous claim: “Humans are the measure of all things  of things that are, that they are, of things that are not, that they are not.” That is, there is no objective truth; the world is for each person as it appears to that person. Of what use, then, are skills? Skilled people can change others’ perceptions in useful ways. For example, a doctor can change a sick person’s perceptions so that she is healthy. Protagoras taught his students to “make the weaker argument the stronger,” i.e., to alter people’s perceptions about the value of arguments. Aristophanes satirizes Protagoras as one who would make unjust arguments defeat just arguments. This is true for ethical judgments, too: laws and customs are simply products of human agreement. But because laws and customs result from experiences of what is most useful, they should be followed rather than nature. No perception or judgment is more true than another, but some are more useful, and those that are more useful should be followed. Gorgias c.483376 was a student of Empedocles. His town, Leontini in Sicily, sent him as an ambassador to Athens in 427; his visit was a great success, and the Athenians were amazed at his rhetorical ability. Like other Sophists, he charged for instruction and gave speeches at religious festivals. Gorgias denied that he taught virtue; instead, he produced clever speakers. He insisted that different people have different virtues: for example, women’s virtue differs from men’s. Since there is no truth and if there were we couldn’t know it, we must rely on opinion, and so speakers who can change people’s opinions have great power  greater than the power produced by any other skill. In his “Encomium on Helen” he argues that if she left Menelaus and went with Paris because she was convinced by speech, she wasn’t responsible for her actions. Two paraphrases of Gorgias’s “About What Doesn’t Exist” survive; in this he argues that nothing exists, that even if something did, we couldn’t know it, and that even if we could know anything we couldn’t explain it to anyone. We can’t know anything, because some things we think of do not exist, and so we have no way of judging whether the things we think of exist. And we can’t express any knowledge we may have, because no two people can think of the same thing, since the same thing can’t be in two places, and because we use words in speech, not colors or shapes or objects. This may be merely a parody of Parmenides’ argument that only one thing exists. Antiphon the Sophist fifth century is probably although not certainly to be distinguished from Antiphon the orator d. 411, some of whose speeches we possess. We know nothing about his life if he is distinct from the orator. In addition to brief quotations in later authors, we have two papyrus fragments of his “On Truth.” In these he argues that we should follow laws and customs only if there are witnesses and so our action will affect our reputation; otherwise, we should follow nature, which is often inconsistent with following custom. Custom is established by human agreement, and so disobeying it is detrimental only if others know it is disobeyed, whereas nature’s demands unlike those of custom can’t be ignored with impunity. Antiphon assumes that rational actions are selfinterested, and that justice demands actions contrary to self-interest  a position Plato attacks in the Republic. Antiphon was also a materialist: the nature of a bed is wood, since if a buried bed could grow it would grow wood, not a bed. His view is one of Aristotle’s main concerns in the Physics, since Aristotle admits in the Categories that persistence through change is the best test for substance, but won’t admit that matter is substance. Hippias fifth century was from Elis, in the Peloponnesus, which used him as an ambasSophists Sophists 863   863 sador. He competed at the festival of Olympus with both prepared and extemporaneous speeches. He had a phenomenal memory. Since Plato repeatedly makes fun of him in the two dialogues that bear his name, he probably was selfimportant and serious. He was a polymath who claimed he could do anything, including making speeches and clothes; he wrote a work collecting what he regarded as the best things said by others. According to one report, he made a mathematical discovery the quadratrix, the first curve other than the circle known to the Grecians. In the Protagoras, Plato has Hippias contrast nature and custom, which often does violence to nature. Prodicus fifth century was from Ceos, in the Cyclades, which frequently employed him on diplomatic missions. He apparently demanded high fees, but had two versions of his lecture  one cost fifty drachmas, the other one drachma. Socrates jokes that if he could have afforded the fifty-drachma lecture, he would have learned the truth about the correctness of words, and Aristotle says that when Prodicus added something exciting to keep his audience’s attention he called it “slipping in the fifty-drachma lecture for them.” We have at least the content of one lecture of his, the “Choice of Heracles,” which consists of banal moralizing. Prodicus was praised by Socrates for his emphasis on the right use of words and on distinguishing between synonyms. He also had a naturalistic view of the origin of theology: useful things were regarded as gods.

Sorel, Georges 18471922, French socialist activist and philosopher best known for his Reflections on Violence 1906, which develops the notion of revolutionary syndicalism as seen through proletarian violence and the interpretation of myth. An early proponent of the quasiMarxist position of gradual democratic reformism, Sorel eventually developed a highly subjective interpretation of historical materialism that, while retaining a conception of proletarian revolution, now understood it through myth rather than reason. He was in large part reacting to the empiricism of the French Enlightenment and the statistical structuring of sociological studies. In contrast to Marx and Engels, who held that revolution would occur when the proletariat attained its own class consciousness through an understanding of its true relationship to the means of production in capitalist society, Sorel introduced myth rather than reason as the correct way to interpret social totality. Myth allows for the necessary reaction to bourgeois rationalism and permits the social theorist to negate the status quo through the authenticity of revolutionary violence. By acknowledging the irrationality of the status quo, myth permits the possibility of social understanding and its necessary reaction, human emancipation through proletarian revolution. Marxism is myth because it juxtaposes the irreducibility of capitalist organization to its negation  violent proletarian revolution. The intermediary stage in this development is radical syndicalism, which organizes workers into groups opposed to bourgeois authority, instills the myth of proletarian revolution in the workers, and allows them in postrevolutionary times to work toward a social arrangement of worker and peasant governance and collaboration. The vehicle through which all this is accomplished is the general strike, whose aim, through the justified violence of its ends, is to facilitate the downfall and ultimate elimination of the bourgeoisie. In doing so the proletariat will lead society to a classless and harmonious stage in history. By stressing the notion of spontaneity Sorel thought he had solved the vexing problems of party and future bureaucracy found in much of the revolutionary literature of his day. In his later years he was interested in the writings of both Lenin and Mussolini. 

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

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

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

Soto, Domingo de 14941560, Spanish Dominican theologian and philosopher. Born in Segovia, he studied in Alcalá de Henares and Paris, taught at Segovia and Salamanca, and was named official representative of the Holy Roman Empire at the Council of Trent by Charles V. Among Soto’s many works, his commentaries on Aristotle’s Physics and On the Soul stand out. He also wrote a book on the nature of grace and an important treatise on law. Soto was one of the early members of the school of Spanish Thomism, but he did not always follow Aquinas. He rejected the doctrine of the real distinction between essence and existence and adopted Duns Scotus’s position that the primary object of human understanding is indeterminate being in general. Apart from metaphysics and theology, Soto’s philosophy of law and political theory are historically important. He maintained, contrary to his teacher Vitoria, that law originates in the understanding rather than in the will of the legislator. He also distinguished natural from positive law: the latter arises from the decision of legislators, whereas the former is based on nature. Soto was a founder of the general theory of international law. 

soul, also called spirit, an entity supposed to be present only in living things, corresponding to the Grecian psyche and Latin anima. Since there seems to be no material difference between an organism in the last moments of its life and the organism’s newly dead body, many philosophers since the time of Plato have claimed that the soul is an immaterial component of an organism. Because only material things are observed to be subject to dissolution, Plato took the soul’s immateriality as grounds for its immortality. Neither Plato nor Aristotle thought that only persons had souls: Aristotle ascribed souls to animals and plants since they all exhibited some living functions. Unlike Plato, Aristotle denied the transmigration of souls from one species to another or from one body to another after death; he was also more skeptical about the soul’s capacity for disembodiment  roughly, survival and functioning without a body. Descartes argued that only persons had souls and that the soul’s immaterial nature made freedom possible even if the human body is subject to deterministic physical laws. As the subject of thought, memory, emotion, desire, and action, the soul has been supposed to be an entity that makes self-consciousness possible, that differentiates simultaneous experiences into experiences either of the same person or of different persons, and that accounts for personal identity or a person’s continued identity through time. Dualists argue that soul and body must be distinct in order to explain consciousness and the possibility of immortality. Materialists argue that consciousness is entirely the result of complex physical processes. 

soundness, 1 of an argument the property of being valid and having all true premises; 2 of a logic the property of being not too strong in a certain respect. A logic L has weak soundness provided every theorem of L is valid. And L has strong soundness if for every set G of sentences, every sentence deducible from G using L is a logical consequence of G.

space, an extended manifold of several dimensions, where the number of dimensions corresponds to the number of variable magnitudes Soto, Domingo de space 866   866 needed to specify a location in the manifold; in particular, the three-dimensional manifold in which physical objects are situated and with respect to which their mutual positions and distances are defined. Ancient Grecian atomism defined space as the infinite void in which atoms move; but whether space is finite or infinite, and whether void spaces exist, have remained in question. Aristotle described the universe as a finite plenum and reduced space to the aggregate of all places of physical things. His view was preeminent until Renaissance Neoplatonism, the Copernican revolution, and the revival of atomism reintroduced infinite, homogeneous space as a fundamental cosmological assumption. Further controversy concerned whether the space assumed by early modern astronomy should be thought of as an independently existing thing or as an abstraction from the spatial relations of physical bodies. Interest in the relativity of motion encouraged the latter view, but Newton pointed out that mechanics presupposes absolute distinctions among motions, and he concluded that absolute space must be postulated along with the basic laws of motion Principia, 1687. Leibniz argued for the relational view from the identity of indiscernibles: the parts of space are indistinguishable from one another and therefore cannot be independently existing things. Relativistic physics has defused the original controversy by revealing both space and spatial relations as merely observer-dependent manifestations of the structure of spacetime. Meanwhile, Kant shifted the metaphysical controversy to epistemological grounds by claiming that space, with its Euclidean structure, is neither a “thing-in-itself” nor a relation of thingsin-themselves, but the a priori form of outer intuition. His view was challenged by the elaboration of non-Euclidean geometries in the nineteenth century, by Helmholtz’s arguments that both intuitive and physical space are known through empirical investigation, and finally by the use of non-Euclidean geometry in the theory of relativity. Precisely what geometrical presuppositions are inherent in human spatial perception, and what must be learned from experience, remain subjects of psychological investigation. 

space-time, a four-dimensional continuum combining the three dimensions of space with time in order to represent motion geometrically. Each point is the location of an event, all of which together represent “the world” through time; paths in the continuum worldlines represent the dynamical histories of moving particles, so that straight worldlines correspond to uniform motions; three-dimensional sections of constant time value “spacelike hypersurfaces” or “simultaneity slices” represent all of space at a given time. The idea was foreshadowed when Kant represented “the phenomenal world” as a plane defined by space and time as perpendicular axes Inaugural Dissertation, 1770, and when Joseph Louis Lagrange 17361814 referred to mechanics as “the analytic geometry of four dimensions.” But classical mechanics assumes a universal standard of simultaneity, and so it can treat space and time separately. The concept of space-time was explicitly developed only when Einstein criticized absolute simultaneity and made the velocity of light a universal constant. The mathematician Hermann Minkowski showed in 1908 that the observer-independent structure of special relativity could be represented by a metric space of four dimensions: observers in relative motion would disagree on intervals of length and time, but agree on a fourdimensional interval combining spatial and temporal measurements. Minkowski’s model then made possible the general theory of relativity, which describes gravity as a curvature of spacetime in the presence of mass and the paths of falling bodies as the straightest worldlines in curved space-time. 

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

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

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

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

Spencer, Herbert 18201903, English philosopher, social reformer, and editor of The Economist. In epistemology, Spencer adopted the ninespeculative reason Spencer, Herbert 869   869 teenth-century trend toward positivism: the only reliable knowledge of the universe is to be found in the sciences. His ethics were utilitarian, following Bentham and J. S. Mill: pleasure and pain are the criteria of value as signs of happiness or unhappiness in the individual. His Synthetic Philosophy, expounded in books written over many years, assumed both in biology and psychology the existence of Lamarckian evolution: given a characteristic environment, every animal possesses a disposition to make itself into what it will, failing maladaptive interventions, eventually become. The dispositions gain expression as inherited acquired habits. Spencer could not accept that species originate by chance variations and natural selection alone: direct adaptation to environmental constraints is mainly responsible for biological changes. Evolution also includes the progression of societies in the direction of a dynamical equilibrium of individuals: the human condition is perfectible because human faculties are completely adapted to life in society, implying that evil and immorality will eventually disappear. His ideas on evolution predated publication of the major works of Darwin; A. R. Wallace was influenced by his writings.

Spinoza, Baruch 163277, Dutch metaphysician, epistemologist, psychologist, moral philosopher, political theorist, and philosopher of religion, generally regarded as one of the most important figures of seventeenth-century rationalism. Life and works. Born and educated in the Jewish community of Amsterdam, he forsook his given name ‘Baruch’ in favor of the Latin ‘Benedict’ at the age of twenty-two. Between 1652 and 1656 he studied the philosophy of Descartes in the school of Francis van den Enden. Having developed unorthodox views of the divine nature and having ceased to be fully observant of Jewish practice, he was excommunicated by the Jewish community in 1656. He spent his entire life in Holland; after leaving Amsterdam in 1660, he resided successively in Rijnsburg, Voorburg, and the Hague. He supported himself at least partly through grinding lenses, and his knowledge of optics involved him in an area of inquiry of great importance to seventeenth-century science. Acquainted with such leading intellectual figures as Leibniz, Huygens, and Henry Oldenberg, he declined a professorship at the  of Heidelberg partly on the grounds that it might interfere with his intellectual freedom. His premature death at the age of fortyfour was due to consumption. The only work published under Spinoza’s name during his lifetime was his Principles of Descartes’s Philosophy Renati Des Cartes Principiorum Philosophiae, Pars I et II, 1663, an attempt to recast and present Parts I and II of Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy in the manner that Spinoza called geometrical order or geometrical method. Modeled on the Elements of Euclid and on what Descartes called the method of synthesis, Spinoza’s “geometrical order” involves an initial set of definitions and axioms, from which various propositions are demonstrated, with notes or scholia attached where necessary. This work, which established his credentials as an expositor of Cartesian philosophy, had its origins in his endeavor to teach Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy to a private student. Spinoza’s TheologicalPolitical Treatise Tractatus Theologico-Politicus was published anonymously in 1670. After his death, his close circle of friends published his Posthumous Works Opera Postuma, 1677, which included his masterpieces, Ethic, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order Ethica, Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata. The Posthumous Works also included his early unfinished Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione, his later unfinished Political Treatise Tractatus Politicus, a Hebrew Grammar, and Correspondence. An unpublished early work entitled Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being Korte Vorhandelung van God, de Mensch en deszelvs Welstand, in many ways a forerunner of the Ethics, was rediscovered in copied manuscript and published in the nineteenth century. Spinoza’s authorship of two brief scientific treatises, On the Rainbow and On the Calculation of Chances, is still disputed. Metaphysics. Spinoza often uses the term ‘God, or Nature’ “Deus, sive Natura“, and this identification of God with Nature is at the heart of his metaphysics. Because of this identification, his philosophy is often regarded as a version of pantheism and/or naturalism. But although philosophy begins with metaphysics for Spinoza, his metaphysics is ultimately in the service of his ethics. Because his naturalized God has no desires or purposes, human ethics cannot properly be derived from divine command. Rather, Spinozistic ethics seeks to demonstrate, from an adequate understanding of the divine nature and its expression in human nature, the way in which human beings can maximize their advantage. Central to the successful pursuit of this Speusippus Spinoza, Baruch 870   870 advantage is adequate knowledge, which leads to increasing control of the passions and to cooperative action. Spinoza’s ontology, like that of Descartes, consists of substances, their attributes which Descartes called principal attributes, and their modes. In the Ethics, Spinoza defines ‘substance’ as what is “in itself, and is conceived through itself”; ‘attribute’ as that which “the intellect perceives of a substance as constituting its essence”; and ‘mode’ as “the affections of a substance, or that which is in another through which also it is conceived.” While Descartes had recognized a strict sense in which only God is a substance, he also recognized a second sense in which there are two kinds of created substances, each with its own principal attribute: extended substances, whose only principal attribute is extension; and minds, whose only principal attribute is thought. Spinoza, in contrast, consistently maintains that there is only one substance. His metaphysics is thus a form of substantial monism. This one substance is God, which Spinoza defines as “a being absolutely infinite, i.e., a substance consisting of an infinity of attributes, of which each expresses an eternal and infinite essence.” Thus, whereas Descartes limited each created substance to one principal attribute, Spinoza claims that the one substance has infinite attributes, each expressing the divine nature without limitation in its own way. Of these infinite attributes, however, humans can comprehend only two: extension and thought. Within each attribute, the modes of God are of two kinds: infinite modes, which are pervasive features of each attribute, such as the laws of nature; and finite modes, which are local and limited modifications of substance. There is an infinite sequence of finite modes. Descartes regarded a human being as a substantial union of two different substances, the thinking soul and the extended body, in causal interaction with each other. Spinoza, in contrast, regards a human being as a finite mode of God, existing simultaneously in God as a mode of thought and as a mode of extension. He holds that every mode of extension is literally identical with the mode of thought that is the “idea of” that mode of extension. Since the human mind is the idea of the human body, it follows that the human mind and the human body are literally the same thing, conceived under two different attributes. Because they are actually identical, there is no causal interaction between the mind and the body; but there is a complete parallelism between what occurs in the mind and what occurs in the body. Since every mode of extension has a corresponding and identical mode of thought however rudimentary that might be, Spinoza allows that every mode of extension is “animated to some degree”; his view is thus a form of panpsychism. Another central feature of Spinoza’s metaphysics is his necessitarianism, expressed in his claim that “things could have been produced . . . in no other way, and in no other order” than that in which they have been produced. He derives this necessitarianism from his doctrine that God exists necessarily for which he offers several arguments, including a version of the ontological argument and his doctrine that everything that can follow from the divine nature must necessarily do so. Thus, although he does not use the term, he accepts a very strong version of the principle of sufficient reason. At the outset of the Ethics, he defines a thing as free when its actions are determined by its own nature alone. Only God  whose actions are determined entirely by the necessity of his own nature, and for whom nothing is external  is completely free in this sense. Nevertheless, human beings can achieve a relative freedom to the extent that they live the kind of life described in the later parts of the Ethics. Hence, Spinoza is a compatibilist concerning the relation between freedom and determinism. “Freedom of the will” in any sense that implies a lack of causal determination, however, is simply an illusion based on ignorance of the true causes of a being’s actions. The recognition that all occurrences are causally determined, Spinoza holds, has a positive consolatory power that aids one in controlling the passions. Epistemology and psychology. Like other rationalists, Spinoza distinguishes two representational faculties: the imagination and the intellect. The imagination is a faculty of forming imagistic representations of things, derived ultimately from the mechanisms of the senses; the intellect is a faculty of forming adequate, nonimagistic conceptions of things. He also distinguishes three “kinds of knowledge.” The first or lowest kind he calls opinion or imagination opinio, imaginatio. It includes “random or indeterminate experience” experientia vaga and also “hearsay, or knowledge from mere signs”; it thus depends on the confused and mutilated deliverances of the senses, and is inadequate. The second kind of knowledge he calls reason ratio; it depends on common notions i.e., features of things that are “common to all, and equally in the part and in the whole” or on adequate knowledge of the properties as opposed to the Spinoza, Baruch Spinoza, Baruch 871   871 essences of things. The third kind of knowledge he calls intuitive knowledge scientia intuitiva; it proceeds from adequate knowledge of the essence or attributes of God to knowledge of the essence of things, and hence proceeds in the proper order, from causes to effects. Both the second and third kinds of knowledge are adequate. The third kind is preferable, however, as involving not only certain knowledge that something is so, but also knowledge of how and why it is so. Because there is only one substance  God  the individual things of the world are not distinguished from one another by any difference of substance. Rather, among the internal qualitative modifications and differentiations of each divine attribute, there are patterns that have a tendency to endure; these constitute individual things. As they occur within the attribute of extension, Spinoza calls these patterns fixed proportions of motion and rest. Although these individual things are thus modes of the one substance, rather than substances in their own right, each has a nature or essence describable in terms of the thing’s particular pattern and its mechanisms for the preservation of its own being. This tendency toward self-preservation Spinoza calls conatus sometimes translated as ‘endeavor’. Every individual thing has some conatus. An individual thing acts, or is active, to the extent that what occurs can be explained or understood through its own nature i.e., its selfpreservatory mechanism alone; it is passive to the extent that what happens must be explained through the nature of other forces impinging on it. Thus, every thing, to whatever extent it can, actively strives to persevere in its existence; and whatever aids this self-preservation constitutes that individual’s advantage. Spinoza’s specifically human psychology is an application of this more general doctrine of conatus. That application is made through appeal to several specific characteristics of human beings: they form imagistic representations of other individuals by means of their senses; they are sufficiently complex to undergo increases and decreases in their capacity for action; and they are capable of engaging in reason. The fundamental concepts of his psychology are desire, which is conatus itself, especially as one is conscious of it as directed toward attaining a particular object; pleasure, which is an increase in capacity for action; and pain, which is a decrease in capacity for action. He defines other emotions in terms of these basic emotions, as they occur in particular combinations, in particular kinds of circumstances, with particular kinds of causes, and/or with particular kinds of objects. When a person is the adequate cause of his or her own emotions, these emotions are active emotions; otherwise, they are passions. Desire and pleasure can be either active emotions or passions, depending on the circumstances; pain, however, can only be a passion. Spinoza does not deny the phenomenon of altruism: one’s self-preservatory mechanism, and hence one’s desire, can become focused on a wide variety of objects, including the well-being of a loved person or object  even to one’s own detriment. However, because he reduces all human motivation, including altruistic motivation, to permutations of the endeavor to seek one’s own advantage, his theory is arguably a form of psychological egoism. Ethics. Spinoza’s ethical theory does not take the form of a set of moral commands. Rather, he seeks to demonstrate, by considering human actions and appetites objectively  “just as if it were a Question of lines, planes, and bodies”  wherein a person’s true advantage lies. Readers who genuinely grasp the demonstrated truths will, he holds, ipso facto be motivated, to at least some extent, to live their lives accordingly. Thus, Spinozistic ethics seeks to show how a person acts when “guided by reason“; to act in this way is at the same time to act with virtue, or power. All actions that result from understanding  i.e., all virtuous actions  may be attributed to strength of character fortitudo. Such virtuous actions may be further divided into two classes: those due to tenacity animositas, or “the Desire by which each one strives, solely from the dictate of reason, to preserve his being”; and those due to nobility generositas, or “the Desire by which each one strives, solely from the dictate of reason, to aid other men and join them to him in friendship.” Thus, the virtuous person does not merely pursue private advantage, but seeks to cooperate with others; returns love for hatred; always acts honestly, not deceptively; and seeks to join himself with others in a political state. Nevertheless, the ultimate reason for aiding others and joining them to oneself in friendship is that “nothing is more useful to man than man”  i.e., because doing so is conducive to one’s own advantage, and particularly to one’s pursuit of knowledge, which is a good that can be shared without loss. Although Spinoza holds that we generally use the terms ‘good’ and ‘evil’ simply to report subjective appearances  so that we call “good” whatever we desire, and “evil” whatever we seek to avoid  he proposes that we Spinoza, Baruch Spinoza, Baruch 872   872 define ‘good’ philosophically as ‘what we certainly know to be useful to us’, and ‘evil’ as ‘what we certainly know prevents us from being masters of some good’. Since God is perfect and has no needs, it follows that nothing is either good or evil for God. Spinoza’s ultimate appeal to the agent’s advantage arguably renders his ethical theory a form of ethical egoism, even though he emphasizes the existence of common shareable goods and the instrumental ethical importance of cooperation with others. However, it is not a form of hedonism; for despite the prominence he gives to pleasure, the ultimate aim of human action is a higher state of perfection or capacity for action, of whose increasing attainment pleasure is only an indicator. A human being whose self-preservatory mechanism is driven or distorted by external forces is said to be in bondage to the passions; in contrast, one who successfully pursues only what is truly advantageous, in consequence of genuine understanding of where that advantage properly lies, is free. Accordingly, Spinoza also expresses his conception of a virtuous life guided by reason in terms of an ideal “free man.” Above all, the free man seeks understanding of himself and of Nature. Adequate knowledge, and particularly knowledge of the third kind, leads to blessedness, to peace of mind, and to the intellectual love of God. Blessedness is not a reward for virtue, however, but rather an integral aspect of the virtuous life. The human mind is itself a part of the infinite intellect of God, and adequate knowledge is an eternal aspect of that infinite intellect. Hence, as one gains knowledge, a greater part of one’s own mind comes to be identified with something that is eternal, and one becomes less dependent on  and less disturbed by  the local forces of one’s immediate environment. Accordingly, the free man “thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation on life, not on death.” Moreover, just as one’s adequate knowledge is literally an eternal part of the infinite intellect of God, the resulting blessedness, peace of mind, and intellectual love are literally aspects of what might be considered God’s own eternal “emotional” life. Although this endows the free man with a kind of blessed immortality, it is not a personal immortality, since the sensation and memory that are essential to personal individuality are not eternal. Rather, the free man achieves during his lifetime an increasing participation in a body of adequate knowledge that has itself always been eternal, so that, at death, a large part of the free man’s mind has become identified with the eternal. It is thus a kind of “immortality” in which one can participate while one lives, not merely when one dies. Politics and philosophical theology. Spinoza’s political theory, like that of Hobbes, treats rights and power as equivalent. Citizens give up rights to the state for the sake of the protection that the state can provide. Hobbes, however, regards this social contract as nearly absolute, one in which citizens give up all of their rights except the right to resist death. Spinoza, in contrast, emphasizes that citizens cannot give up the right to pursue their own advantage as they see it, in its full generality; and hence that the power, and right, of any actual state is always limited by the state’s practical ability to enforce its dictates so as to alter the citizens’ continuing perception of their own advantage. Furthermore, he has a more extensive conception of the nature of an individual’s own advantage than Hobbes, since for him one’s own true advantage lies not merely in fending off death and pursuing pleasure, but in achieving the adequate knowledge that brings blessedness and allows one to participate in that which is eternal. In consequence, Spinoza, unlike Hobbes, recommends a limited, constitutional state that encourages freedom of expression and religious toleration. Such a state  itself a kind of individual  best preserves its own being, and provides both the most stable and the most beneficial form of government for its citizens. In his Theological-Political Treatise, Spinoza also takes up popular religion, the interpretation of Scripture, and their bearing on the well-being of the state. He characterizes the Old Testament prophets as individuals whose vivid imaginations produced messages of political value for the ancient Hebrew state. Using a naturalistic outlook and historical hermeneutic methods that anticipate the later “higher criticism” of the Bible, he seeks to show that Scriptural writers themselves consistently treat only justice and charity as essential to salvation, and hence that dogmatic doxastic requirements are not justified by Scripture. Popular religion should thus propound only these two requirements, which it may imaginatively represent, to the minds of the many, as the requirements for rewards granted by a divine Lawgiver. The few, who are more philosophical, and who thus rely on intellect, will recognize that the natural laws of human psychology require charity and justice as conditions of happiness, and that what the vulgar construe as rewards granted by personal divine intervention are in fact the natural consequences of a virtuous life. Spinoza, Baruch Spinoza, Baruch 873   873 Because of his identificaton of God with Nature and his treatment of popular religion, Spinoza’s contemporaries often regarded his philosophy as a thinly disguised atheism. Paradoxically, however, nineteenth-century Romanticism embraced him for his pantheism; Novalis, e.g., famously characterized him as “the God-intoxicated man.” In fact, Spinoza ascribes to Nature most of the characteristics that Western theologians have ascribed to God: Spinozistic Nature is infinite, eternal, necessarily existing, the object of an ontological argument, the first cause of all things, all-knowing, and the being whose contemplation produces blessedness, intellectual love, and participation in a kind of immortality or eternal life. Spinoza’s claim to affirm the existence of God is therefore no mere evasion. However, he emphatically denies that God is a person or acts for purposes; that anything is good or evil from the divine perspective; or that there is a personal immortality involving memory. In addition to his influence on the history of biblical criticism and on literature including not only Novalis but such writers as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Heine, Shelley, George Eliot, George Sand, Somerset Maugham, Jorge Luis Borges, and Bernard Malamud, Spinoza has affected the philosophical outlooks of such diverse twentieth-century thinkers as Freud and Einstein. Contemporary physicists have seen in his monistic metaphysics an anticipation of twentieth-century field metaphysics. More generally, he is a leading intellectual forebear of twentieth-century determinism and naturalism, and of the mindbody identity theory. 

Spir, Afrikan 183790, German philosopher. He served in the Crimean War as a Russian officer. A non-academic, he published books in German and French. His major works are Forschung nach der Gewissheit in der Erkenntnis der Wirklichkeit Inquiry concerning Certainty in the Knowledge of Actuality, 1869 and the two-volume Denken und Wirklichkeit: Versuch einer Erneuerung der kritischen Philosophie Thought and Actuality: Attempt at a Revival of Critical Philosophy, 1873. Thought and Actuality presents a metaphysics based on the radical separation of the apparent world and an absolute reality. All we can know about the “unconditioned” is that it must conform with the principle of identity. While retaining the unknowable thing-in-itself of Kant, Spir argued for the empirical reality of time, which is given to us in immediate experience and depends on our experience of a succession of differential states. The aim of philosophy is to reach fundamental and immediate certainties. Of the works included in his Gesammelte Schriften 1883 84, only a relatively minor study, Right and Wrong, was translated into English in 1954. There are a number of references to Spir in the writings of Nietzsche, which indicate that some of Nietzsche’s central notions were influenced, both positively and negatively, by Spir’s analyses of becoming and temporality, as well as by his concept of the separation of the world of appearance and the “true world.” G.J.S. spirit.SOUL. spirit, Absolute.

split brain effects, a wide array of behavioral effects consequent upon the severing of the cerebral commisures, and generally interpreted as indicating asymmetry in cerebral functions. The human brain has considerable leftright functional differentiation, or asymmetry, that affects behavior. The most obvious example is handedness. By the 1860s Bouillaud, Dax, and Broca had observed that the effects of unilateral damage indicated that the left hemisphere was preferentially involved in language. Since the 1960s, this commitment to functional asymmetry has been reinforced by studies of patients in whom communication between the hemispheres has been surgically disrupted. Split brain effects depend on severing the cerebral commisures, and especially the corpus callosum, which are neural structures mediating communication between the cerebral hemispheres. Commisurotomies have been performed since the 1940s to control severe epilepsy. This is intended to leave both hemispheres intact and functioning independently. Beginning in the 1960s, J. E. Bogen, M. S. Gazzaniga, and R. W. Sperry conducted an array of psychological tests to evaluate the distinctive abilities of the different hemispheres. Ascertaining the degree of cerebral asymmetry depends on a carefully controlled experimental design in which access of the disassociated hemispheres to peripheral cues is limited. The result has been a wide array of striking results. For example, patients are unable to match an object such as a key felt in one hand with a similar object felt in the other; patients are unable to name an object Spir, Afrikan split brain effects 874   874 held in the left hand, though they can name an object held in the right. Researchers have concluded that these results confirm a clear lateralization of speech, writing, and calculation in the left hemisphere for righthanded patients, leaving the right hemisphere largely unable to respond in speech or writing, and typically unable to perform even simple calculations. It is often concluded that the left hemisphere is specialized for verbal and analytic modes of thinking, while the right hemisphere is specialized for more spatial and synthetic modes of thinking. The precise character and extent of these differences in normal subjects are less clear. R.C.R. spontaneity, liberty of.FREE WILL PROBLEM, HUME. spread law.

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

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

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

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

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

Steiner, Rudolf 18611925, Austrian spiritualist and founder of anthroposophy. Trained as a scientist, he edited Goethe’s scientific writings and prepared the standard edition of his complete works from 1889 to 1896. Steiner’s major work, Die Philosophie der Freiheit, was published in 1894. His Friedrich Nietzsche: Ein Kämpfer gegen seine Zeit 1895 was translated in 1960 by Margaret deRis as Friedrich Nietzsche: Fighter for Freedom. Steiner taught at a workingmen’s  and edited a literary journal, Magazin für Literatur, in Berlin. In 1901 he embraced a spiritualism which emphasized a form of knowledge that transcended sensory experience and was attained by the “higher self.” He held that man had previously been attuned to spiritual processes by virtue of a dreamlike state of consciousness, but was diverted from this consciousness by preoccupation with material entities. Through training, individuals could retrieve their innate capacity to perceive a spiritual realm. Steiner’s writings on this theme are The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity 1894, Occult Science: An Outline 1913, On the Riddle of Man 1916, and On the Riddles of the Soul 1917. His last work was his autobiography 1924. To advance his teachings, he founded the Anthroposophical Society 1912 and a school of “spiritual science” called the Goetheanum near Basel, Switzerland. His work inspired the Waldorf School movement, which comprises some eighty schools for children. The anthroposophy movement he established remains active in Europe and the United States. G.J.S. Stephen, Sir Leslie 18321904, English literary critic, editor, intellectual historian, and philosopher. He was the first chief editor of the great Dictionary of National Biography, writing hundreds of the entries himself. Brought up in an intensely religious household, he lost his faith and spent much of his time trying to construct a moral and intellectual outlook to replace it. His main works in intellectual history, the two-volume History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century 1876 and the three-volume English Utilitarians 1900, were undertaken as part of this project. So was his one purely philosophical work, the Science of Ethics 1882, in which he tried to develop an evolutionary theory of morality. Stephen was impatient of philosophical technicalities. Hence his treatise on ethics does very little to resolve the problems  some of them pointed out to him by his friend Henry Sidgwick  with evolutionary ethics, and does not get beyond the several other works on the subject published during this period. His histories of thought are sometimes superficial, and their focus of interest is not ours; but they are still useful because of their scope and the massive scholarship they put to use. 

Stillingfleet, Edward 163599, English divine and controversialist who first made his name with Irenicum 1659, using natural-law doctrines to oppose religious sectarianism. His Origines Sacrae 1662, ostensibly on the superiority of the Scriptural record over other forms of ancient history, was for its day a learned study in the moral certainty of historical evidence, the authority of testimony, and the credibility of miracles. In drawing eclectically on philosophy from antiquity to the Cambridge Platonists, he was much influenced by the Cartesian theory of ideas, but later repudiated Cartesianism for its mechanist tendency. For three decades he pamphleteered on behalf of the moral certainty of orthodox Protestant belief against what he considered the beliefs “contrary to reason” of Roman Catholicism. This led to controversy with Unitarian and deist writers who argued that mysteries like the Trinity were equally contrary to “clear and distinct” ideas. He was alarmed at the use made of Locke’s “new,” i.e. nonCartesian, way of ideas by John Toland in Christianity not Mysterious 1696, and devoted his last years to challenging Locke to prove his orthodoxy. The debate was largely over the concepts of substance, essence, and person, and of faith and certainty. Locke gave no quarter in the public controversy, but in the fourth edition of his Essay 1700 he silently amended some passages that had provoked Stillingfleet. 

Stirner, Max, pseudonym of Kasper Schmidt 180556, German philosopher who proposed a theory of radical individualism. Born in Bayreuth, he taught in Gymnasiums and later at a Berlin academy for women. He translated what became a standard German version of Smith’s Wealth of Nations and contributed articles to the Rhenische Zeitung. His most important work was statistical probability Stirner, Max 878   878 Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum 1845, translated by Steven T. Byington as The Ego and His Own 1907. His second book was Die Geschichte der Reaktion 1852. Stirner was in reaction to Hegel and was for a time associated with the left Hegelians. He stressed the priority of will and instinct over reason and proposed a radical anarchic individualism. Each individual is unique, and the independent ego is the fundamental value and reality. Stirner attacked the state, religious ideas, and abstractions such as “humanity” as “spectres” that are deceptive illusions, remnants of erroneous hypostatizations. His defense of egoism is such that the individual is considered to have no obligations or duties, and especially not to the state. Encouraging an individual “rebellion” against state domination and control, Stirner attracted a following among nineteenthand twentieth-century anarchists. The sole goal of life is the cultivation of “uniqueness” or “ownness.” Engels and Marx attacked his ideas at length under the rubric “Saint Marx” in The German Ideology. Insofar as his theory of radical individualism offers no clearly stated ethical requirements, it has been characterized as a form of nihilistic egoism. 

stochastic process, a process that evolves, as time goes by, according to a probabilistic principle rather than a deterministic principle. Such processes are also called random processes, but ‘stochastic’ does not imply complete disorderliness. The principle of evolution governing a stochastic or random process is precise, though probabilistic, in form. For example, suppose some process unfolds in discrete successive stages. And suppose that given any initial sequence of stages, S1, S2, . . . , Sn, there is a precise probability that the next stage Sn+1 will be state S, a precise probability that it will be SH, and so on for all possible continuations of the sequence of states. These probabilities are called transition probabilities. An evolving sequence of this kind is called a discrete-time stochastic process, or discrete-time random process. A theoretically important special case occurs when transition probabilities depend only on the latest stage in the sequence of stages. When an evolving process has this property it is called a discrete-time Markov process. A simple example of a discrete-time Markov process is the behavior of a person who keeps taking either a step forward or a step back according to whether a coin falls heads or tails; the probabilistic principle of movement is always applied to the person’s most recent position. The successive stages of a stochastic process need not be discrete. If they are continuous, they constitute a “continuous-time” stochastic or random process. The mathematical theory of stochastic processes has many applications in science and technology. The evolution of epidemics, the process of soil erosion, and the spread of cracks in metals have all been given plausible models as stochastic processes, to mention just a few areas of research. 

Stoicism, one of the three leading movements constituting Hellenistic philosophy. Its founder was Zeno of Citium 334262 B.C., who was succeeded as school head by Cleanthes 331 232. But the third head, Chrysippus c.280 c.206, was its greatest exponent and most voluminous writer. These three are the leading representatives of Early Stoicism. No work by any early Stoic survives intact, except Cleanthes’ short “Hymn to Zeus.” Otherwise we are dependent on doxography, on isolated quotations, and on secondary sources, most of them hostile. Nevertheless, a remarkably coherent account of the system can be assembled. The Stoic world is an ideally good organism, all of whose parts interact for the benefit of the whole. It is imbued with divine reason logos, its entire development providentially ordained by fate and repeated identically from one world phase to the next in a never-ending cycle, each phase ending with a conflagration ekpyrosis. Only bodies strictly “exist” and can interact. Body is infinitely divisible, and contains no void. At the lowest level, the world is analyzed into an active principle, god, and a passive principle, matter, both probably corporeal. Out of these are generated, at a higher level, the four elements air, fire, earth, and water, whose own interaction is analogous to that of god and matter: air and fire, severally or conjointly, are an active rational force called breath Grecian pneuma, Latin spiritus, while earth and water constitute the passive substrate on which these act, totally interpenetrating each other thanks to the non-particulate structure of body and its capacity to be mixed “through and through.” Most physical analysis is conducted at this higher level, and pneuma becomes a key concept in physics and biology. A thing’s qualities are constituted by its pneuma, which has the additional role of giving it cohestochastic process Stoicism 879   879 sion and thus an essential identity. In inanimate objects this unifying pneuma is called a hexis state; in plants it is called physis nature; and in animals “soul.” Even qualities of soul, e.g. justice, are portions of pneuma, and they too are therefore bodies: only thus could they have their evident causal efficacy. Four incorporeals are admitted: place, void which surrounds the world, time, and lekta see below; these do not strictly “exist”  they lack the corporeal power of interaction  but as items with some objective standing in the world they are, at least, “somethings.” Universals, identified with Plato’s Forms, are treated as concepts ennoemata, convenient fictions that do not even earn the status of “somethings.” Stoic ethics is founded on the principle that only virtue is good, only vice bad. Other things conventionally assigned a value are “indifferent” adiaphora, although some, e.g., health, wealth, and honor, are naturally “preferred” proegmena, while their opposites are “dispreferred” apoproegmena. Even though their possession is irrelevant to happiness, from birth these indifferents serve as the appropriate subject matter of our choices, each correct choice being a “proper function” kathekon  not yet a morally good act, but a step toward our eventual end telos of “living in accordance with nature.” As we develop our rationality, the appropriate choices become more complex, less intuitive. For example, it may sometimes be more in accordance with nature’s plan to sacrifice your wealth or health, in which case it becomes your “proper function” to do so. You have a specific role to play in the world plan, and moral progress prokope consists in learning it. This progress involves widening your natural “affinity” oikeiosis: an initial concern for yourself and your parts is later extended to those close to you, and eventually to all mankind. That is the Stoic route toward justice. However, justice and the other virtues are actually found only in the sage, an idealized perfectly rational person totally in tune with the divine cosmic plan. The Stoics doubted whether any sages existed, although there was a tendency to treat at least Socrates as having been one. The sage is totally good, everyone else totally bad, on the paradoxical Stoic principle that all sins are equal. The sage’s actions, however similar externally to mere “proper functions,” have an entirely distinct character: they are renamed ‘right actions’ katorthomata. Acting purely from “right reason,” he is distinguished by his “freedom from passion” apatheia: morally wrong impulses, or passions, are at root intellectual errors of mistaking what is indifferent for good or bad, whereas the sage’s evaluations are always correct. The sage alone is happy and truly free, living in perfect harmony with the divine plan. All human lives are predetermined by the providentially designed, all-embracing causal nexus of fate; yet being the principal causes of their actions, the good and the bad alike are responsible for them: determinism and morality are fully compatible. Stoic epistemology defends the existence of cognitive certainty against the attacks of the New Academy. Belief is described as assent synkatathesis to an impression phantasia, i.e. taking as true the propositional content of some perceptual or reflective impression. Certainty comes through the “cognitive impression” phantasia kataleptike, a self-certifying perceptual representation of external fact, claimed to be commonplace. Out of sets of such impressions we acquire generic conceptions prolepseis and become rational. The highest intellectual state, knowledge episteme, in which all cognitions become mutually supporting and hence “unshakable by reason,” is the prerogative of the wise. Everyone else is in a state of mere opinion doxa or of ignorance. Nevertheless, the cognitive impression serves as a “criterion of truth” for all. A further important criterion is prolepseis, also called common conceptions and common notions koinai ennoiai, often appealed to in philosophical argument. Although officially dependent on experience, they often sound more like innate intuitions, purportedly indubitable. Stoic logic is propositional, by contrast with Aristotle’s logic of terms. The basic unit is the simple proposition axioma, the primary bearer of truth and falsehood. Syllogistic also employs complex propositions  conditional, conjunctive, and disjunctive  and rests on five “indemonstrable” inference schemata to which others can be reduced with the aid of four rules called themata. All these items belong to the class of lekta  “sayables” or “expressibles.” Words are bodies vibrating portions of air, as are external objects, but predicates like that expressed by ‘ . . . walks’, and the meanings of whole sentences, e.g., ‘Socrates walks’, are incorporeal lekta. The structure and content of both thoughts and sentences are analyzed by mapping them onto lekta, but the lekta are themselves causally inert. Conventionally, a second phase of the school is distinguished as Middle Stoicism. It developed largely at Rhodes under Panaetius and Posidonius, both of whom influenced the presentation of Stoicism in Cicero’s influential philosophical treatises mid-first century B.C.. Panaetius Stoicism Stoicism 880   880 c.185c.110 softened some classical Stoic positions, his ethics being more pragmatic and less concerned with the idealized sage. Posidonius c.135c.50 made Stoicism more open to Platonic and Aristotelian ideas, reviving Plato’s inclusion of irrational components in the soul. A third phase, Roman Stoicism, is the only Stoic era whose writings have survived in quantity. It is represented especially by the younger Seneca A.D. c.165, Epictetus A.D. c.55c.135, and Marcus Aurelius A.D. 12180. It continued the trend set by Panaetius, with a strong primary focus on practical and personal ethics. Many prominent Roman political figures were Stoics. After the second century A.D. Stoicism as a system fell from prominence, but its terminology and concepts had by then become an ineradicable part of ancient thought. Through the writings of Cicero and Seneca, its impact on the moral and political thought of the Renaissance was immense. 

Stout, George Frederick 18601944, British psychologist and philosopher. A student of Ward, he was influenced by Herbart and especially Brentano. He was editor of Mind 18921920. He followed Ward in rejecting associationism and sensationism, and proposing analysis of mind as activity rather than passivity, consisting of acts of cognition, feeling, and conation. Stout stressed attention as the essential function of mind, and argued for the goal-directedness of all mental activity and behavior, greatly influencing McDougall’s hormic psychology. He reinterpreted traditional associationist ideas to emphasize primacy of mental activity; e.g., association by contiguity  a passive mechanical process imposed on mind  became association by continuity of attentional interest. With Brentano, he argued that mental representation involves “thought reference” to a real object known through the representation that is itself the object of thought, like Locke’s “idea.” In philosophy he was influenced by Moore and Russell. His major works are Analytic Psychology 1896 and Manual of Psychology 1899. 

Strato of Lampsacus c.335c.267 B.C., Grecian philosopher and polymath nicknamed “the Physicist” for his innovative ideas in natural science. He succeeded Theophrastus as head of the Lyceum. Earlier he served as royal tutor in Alexandria, where his students included Aristarchus, who devised the first heliocentric model. Of Strato’s many writings only fragments and summaries survive. These show him criticizing the abstract conceptual analysis of earlier theorists and paying closer attention to empirical evidence. Among his targets were atomist arguments that motion is impossible unless there is void, and also Aristotle’s thesis that matter is fully continuous. Strato argued that no large void occurs in nature, but that matter is naturally porous, laced with tiny pockets of void. His investigations of compression and suction were influential in ancient physiology. In dynamics, he proposed that bodies have no property of lightness but only more or less weight. 

Strawson: p. f. – Grice’s tutee. b.1919, British philosopher who has made major contributions to logic, metaphysics, and the study of Kant. His career has been at Oxford, where he was the leading philosopher of his generation. His first important work, “On Referring” 1950, argues that Russell’s theory of descriptions fails to deal properly with the role of descriptions as “referring expressions” because Russell assumed the “bogus trichotomy” that sentences are true, false, or meaningless: for Strawson, sentences with empty descriptions are meaningful but “neither true nor false” because the general presuppositions governing the use of referring expressions are not fulfilled. One aspect of this argument was Russell’s alleged insensitivity to the ordinary use of definite descriptions. The contrast between the abstract schemata of formal logic and the manifold richness of the inferences inherent in ordinary language is the central theme of Strawson’s first book, Introduction to Logical Theory 1952. In Individuals 1959 Strawson reintroduced metaphysics as a respectable philosophical discipline after decades of positivist rhetoric. But his project is only “descriptive” metaphysics  elucidation of the basic features of our own conceptual scheme  and his arguments are based on the philosophy of language: “basic” particulars Stoicism, Middle Strawson, Sir Peter 881   881 are those which are basic objects of reference, and it is the spatiotemporal and sortal conditions for their identification and reidentification by speakers that constitute the basic categories. Three arguments are especially famous: 1 even in a purely auditory world objective reference on the basis of experience requires at least an analogue of space; 2 because self-reference presupposes reference to others, persons, conceived as bearers of both physical and psychological properties, are a type of basic particular; and 3 “feature-placing” discourse, such as ‘it is snowing here now’, is “the ultimate propositional level” through which reference to particulars enters discourse. Strawson’s next book, The Bounds of Sense 1966, provides a critical reading of Kant’s theoretical philosophy. His aim is to extricate what he sees as the profound truths concerning the presuppositions of objective experience and judgment that Kant’s transcendental arguments establish from the mysterious metaphysics of Kant’s transcendental idealism. Strawson’s critics have argued, however, that the resulting position is unstable: transcendental arguments can tell us only what we must suppose to be the case. So if Kant’s idealism, which restricts such suppositions to things as they appear to us, is abandoned, we can draw conclusions concerning the way the world itself must be only if we add the verificationist thesis that ability to make sense of such suppositions requires ability to verify them. In his next book, Skepticism and Naturalism: Some Varieties 1985, Strawson conceded this: transcendental arguments belong within descriptive metaphysics and should not be regarded as attempts to provide an external justification of our conceptual scheme. In truth no such external justification is either possible or needed: instead  and here Strawson invokes Hume rather than Kant  our reasonings come to an end in natural propensities for belief that are beyond question because they alone make it possible to raise questions. In a famous earlier paper Strawson had urged much the same point concerning the free will debate: defenders of our ordinary attitudes of reproach and gratitude should not seek to ground them in the “panicky metaphysics” of a supra-causal free will; instead they can and need do no more than point to our unshakable commitment to these “reactive” attitudes through which we manifest our attachment to that fundamental category of our conceptual scheme  persons. 

structuralism, a distinctive yet extremely wide range of productive research conducted in the social and human sciences from the 1950s through the 1970s, principally in France. It is difficult to describe structuralism as a movement, because of the methodological constraints exercised by the various disciplines that came to be influenced by structuralism  e.g., anthropology, philosophy, literary theory, psychoanalysis, political theory, even mathematics. Nonetheless, structuralism is generally held to derive its organizing principles from the early twentieth-century work of Saussure, the founder of structural linguistics. Arguing against the prevailing historicist and philological approaches to linguistics, he proposed a “scientific” model of language, one understood as a closed system of elements and rules that account for the production and the social communication of meaning. Inspired by Durkheim’s notion of a “social fact”  that domain of objectivity wherein the psychological and the social orders converge  Saussure viewed language as the repository of discursive signs shared by a given linguistic community. The particular sign is composed of two elements, a phonemic signifier, or distinctive sound element, and a corresponding meaning, or signified element. The defining relation between the sign’s sound and meaning components is held to be arbitrary, i.e., based on conventional association, and not due to any function of the speaking substrict conditional structuralism 882   882 ject’s personal inclination, or to any external consideration of reference. What lends specificity or identity to each particular signifier is its differential relation to the other signifiers in the greater set; hence, each basic unit of language is itself the product of differences between other elements within the system. This principle of differential  and structural  relation was extended by Troubetzkoy to the order of phonemes, whereby a defining set of vocalic differences underlies the constitution of all linguistic phonemes. Finally, for Saussure, the closed set of signs is governed by a system of grammatical, phonemic, and syntactic rules. Language thus derives its significance from its own autonomous organization, and this serves to guarantee its communicative function. Since language is the foremost instance of social sign systems in general, the structural account might serve as an exemplary model for understanding the very intelligibility of social systems as such  hence, its obvious relevance to the broader concerns of the social and human sciences. This implication was raised by Saussure himself, in his Course on General Linguistics1916, but it was advanced dramatically by the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss  who is generally acknowledged to be the founder of modern structuralism  in his extensive analyses in the area of social anthropology, beginning with his Elementary Structures of Kinship 1949. Lévi-Strauss argued that society is itself organized according to one form or another of significant communication and exchange  whether this be of information, knowledge, or myths, or even of its members themselves. The organization of social phenomena could thus be clarified through a detailed elaboration of their subtending structures, which, collectively, testify to a deeper and all-inclusive, social rationality. As with the analysis of language, these social structures would be disclosed, not by direct observation, but by inference and deduction from the observed empirical data. Furthermore, since these structures are models of specific relations, which in turn express the differential properties of the component elements under investigation, the structural analysis is both readily formalizable and susceptible to a broad variety of applications. In Britain, e.g., Edmund Leach pursued these analyses in the domain of social anthropology; in the United States, Chomsky applied insights of structuralism to linguistic theory and philosophy of mind; in Italy, Eco conducted extensive structuralist analyses in the fields of social and literary semiotics. With its acknowledgment that language is a rule-governed social system of signs, and that effective communication depends on the resources available to the speaker from within the codes of language itself, the structuralist approach tends to be less preoccupied with the more traditional considerations of “subjectivity” and “history” in its treatment of meaningful discourse. In the post-structuralism that grew out of this approach, the French philosopher Foucault, e.g., focused on the generation of the “subject” by the various epistemic discourses of imitation and representation, as well as on the institutional roles of knowledge and power in producing and conserving particular “disciplines” in the natural and social sciences. These disciplines, Foucault suggested, in turn govern our theoretical and practical notions of madness, criminality, punishment, sexuality, etc., notions that collectively serve to “normalize” the individual subject to their determinations. Likewise, in the domain of psychoanalysis, Lacan drew on the work of Saussure and Lévi-Strauss to emphasize Freud’s concern with language and to argue that, as a set of determining codes, language serves to structure the subject’s very unconscious. Problematically, however, it is the very dynamism of language, including metaphor, metonymy, condensation, displacement, etc., that introduces the social symbolic into the constitution of the subject. Althusser applied the principles of structuralist methodology to his analysis of Marxism, especially the role played by contradiction in understanding infrastructural and superstructural formation, i.e., for the constitution of the historical dialectic. His account followed Marx’s rejection of Feuerbach, at once denying the role of traditional subjectivity and humanism, and presenting a “scientific” analysis of “historical materialism,” one that would be anti-historicist in principle but attentive to the actual political state of affairs. For Althusser, such a philosophical analysis helped provide an “objective” discernment to the historical transformation of social reality. The restraint the structuralists extended toward the traditional views of subjectivity and history dramatically colored their treatment both of the individuals who are agents of meaningful discourse and of the linguistically articulable object field in general. This redirection of research interests particularly in France, due to the influential work of Barthes and Michel Serres in the fields of poetics, cultural semiotics, and communication theory has resulted in a series of original analyses and also provoked lively debates between the adherents of structuralist structuralism structuralism 883   883 methodology and the more conventionally oriented schools of thought e.g., phenomenology, existentialism, Marxism, and empiricist and positivist philosophies of science. These debates served as an agency to open up subsequent discussions on deconstruction and postmodernist theory for the philosophical generation of the 1980s and later. These post-structuralist thinkers were perhaps less concerned with the organization of social phenomena than with their initial constitution and subsequent dynamics. Hence, the problematics of the subject and history  or, in broader terms, temporality itself  were again engaged. The new discussions were abetted by a more critical appraisal of language and tended to be antiHegelian in their rejection of the totalizing tendency of systematic metaphysics. Heidegger’s critique of traditional metaphysics was one of the major influences in the discussions following structuralism, as was the reexamination of Nietzsche’s earlier accounts of “genealogy,” his antiessentialism, and his teaching of a dynamic “will to power.” Additionally, many poststructuralist philosophers stressed the Freudian notions of the libido and the unconscious as determining factors in understanding not only the subject, but the deep rhetorical and affective components of language use. An astonishing variety of philosophers and critics engaged in the debates initially framed by the structuralist thinkers of the period, and their extended responses and critical reappraisals formed the vibrant, poststructuralist period of French intellectual life. Such figures as Ricoeur, Emmanuel Levinas, Kristeva, Maurice Blanchot, Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Philippe LacoueLabarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Irigaray inaugurated a series of contemporary reflections that have become international in scope.

Suárez, Francisco, also known as Doctor Eximius 15481617, Spanish Jesuit philosopher and theologian. Born in Granada, he studied at Salamanca and taught there and at Rome, Coimbra, and other leading universities. Suárez’s most important works are De legibus “On Law,” 1612, De Deo uno et trino “On the Trinity,” 1606, De anima “On the Soul,” 1621, and the monumental Disputationes metaphysicae “Metaphysical Disputations,” 1597. The Disputationes has a unique place in philosophy, being the first systematic and comprehensive work of metaphysics written in the West that is not a commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Divided into fifty-four disputations, it discusses every metaphysical issue known at the time. Its influence was immediate and lasting and can be seen in the work of Scholastics in both Europe and Latin America, and of modern philosophers such as Descartes, Leibniz, Wolff, and Schopenhauer. Suárez’s main contributions to philosophy occurred in metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of law. In all three areas he was influenced by Aristotle and Aquinas, although he also drew inspiration from Ockham, Duns Scotus, and others. In metaphysics, Suárez is known for his views on the nature of metaphysics, being, and individuation. Metaphysics is the science of “being insofar as it is real being” ens in quantum ens reale, and its proper object of study is the object concept of being. This understanding of the object of metaphysics is often seen as paving the way for early modern metaphysical theory, in which the object of metaphysics is mental. For Suárez the concept of being is derived by analogy from the similarity existing among things. Existing reality for Suárez is composed of individuals: everything that exists is individual, including substances and their properties, accidents, principles, and components. He understands individuality as incommunicability, namely, the inability of individuals to be divided into entities of the same specific kind as themselves. The principle of individuation is “entity,” which he identifies with “essence as it exists.” This principle applies both to substances and their properties, accidents, principles, and components. In epistemology, two of Suárez’s views stand out: that the intellect knows the individual through a proper and separate concept without structuralism, mathematical Suárez, Francisco 884   884 having to turn to reflection, a position that supports an empiricist epistemology in which, contrary to Thomism, knowledge of the individual is not mediated through universals; and 2 his view of middle knowledge scientia media, the knowledge God has of what every free creature would freely do in every possible situation. This notion was used by Suárez and Molina to explain how God can control human actions without violating free will. In philosophy of law, Suárez was an innovative thinker whose ideas influenced Grotius. For him law is fundamentally an act of the will rather than a result of an ordinance of reason, as Aquinas held. Law is divided into eternal, divine, natural, and human. Human law is based on natural or divine law and is not the result of human creation. 

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

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

subject-object dichotomy, the distinction between thinkers and what they think about. The distinction is not exclusive, since subjects can also be objects, as in reflexive self-conscious thought, which takes the subject as its intended object. The dichotomy also need not be an exhaustive distinction in the strong sense that everything is either a subject or an object, since in a logically possible world in which there are no thinkers, there may yet be mind-independent subaltern subjectobject dichotomy 885   885 things that are neither subjects nor objects. Whether there are non-thinking things that are not objects of thought in the actual world depends on whether or not it is sufficient in logic to intend every individual thing by such thoughts and expressions as ‘We can think of everything that exists’. The dichotomy is an interimplicative distinction between thinkers and what they think about, in which each presupposes the other. If there are no subjects, then neither are there objects in the true sense, and conversely. A subjectobject dichotomy is acknowledged in most Western philosophical traditions, but emphasized especially in Continental philosophy, beginning with Kant, and carrying through idealist thought in Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer. It is also prominent in intentionalist philosophy, in the empirical psychology of Brentano, the object theory of Meinong, Ernst Mally 18791944, and Twardowski, and the transcendental phenomenology of Husserl. Subjectobject dichotomy is denied by certain mysticisms, renounced as the philosophical fiction of duality, of which Cartesian mindbody dualism is a particular instance, and criticized by mystics as a confusion that prevents mind from recognizing its essential oneness with the world, thereby contributing to unnecessary intellectual and moral dilemmas. 

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

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

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

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

substantialism, the view that the primary, most fundamental entities are substances, everything else being dependent for its existence on them, either as a property of them or a relation between them. Different versions of the view would correspond to the different senses of the word ‘substance’. 

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

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

summum bonum Latin, ‘highest good’, that in relation to which all other things have at most instrumental value value only insofar as they are productive of what is the highest good. Philosophical conceptions of the summum bonum have for the most part been teleological in character. That is, they have identified the highest good in terms of some goal or goals that human beings, it is supposed, pursue by their very nature. These natural goals or ends have differed considerably. For the theist, this end is God; for the rationalist, it is the rational comprehension of what is real; for hedonism, it is pleasure; etc. The highest good, however, need not be teleologically construed. It may simply be posited, or supposed, that it is known, through some intuitive process, that a certain type of thing is “intrinsically good.” On such a view, the relevant contrast is not so much between what is good as an end and what is good as a means to this end, as between what is good purely in itself and what is good only in combination with certain other elements the “extrinsically good”. Perhaps the best example of such a view of the highest good would be the position of Moore. Must the summum bonum be just one thing, or one kind of thing? Yes, to this extent: although one could certainly combine pluralism the view that there are many, irreducibly different goods with an assertion that the summum bonum is “complex,” the notion of the highest good has typically been the province of monists believers in a single good, not pluralists. J.A.M. summum genus.

Sung Hsing, also called Sung Tzu c.360290 B.C., Chinese philosopher associated with Mohism and the HuangLao school. He was a member of the Chi-hsia Academy of Ch’i, a late Warring States center that attracted intellectuals of every persuasion. His Mohist ideas include an emphasis on utility, thrift, meritocracy, and a reluctance to wage war. He is praised by the Taoist Chuang Tzu for his beliefs that one’s essential desires and needs are few and that one should heed internal cultivation rather than social judgments. The combination of internal tranquillity and political activism is characteristic of HuangLao thought. 

sunyata Sanskrit, ‘emptiness’, a property said by some Indian Buddhist philosophers to be possessed necessarily by everything that exists. If something is empty it possesses no essential or inherent nature svabhava, which is to say that both its existence and its nature are dependent on things or events other than itself. The thesis ‘everything is empty’ is therefore approximately equivalent to ‘everything is causally dependent’; the contradictories of these theses were typically argued by defenders of emptiness to be incoherent and thus not worthy of assent. To deny emptiness was also taken to require the affirmasuicide, assisted sunyata 889   889 tion of permanence and non-contingency: if something is non-empty in any respect, it is in just that respect permanent and non-contingent. 

Sun Yat-sen 18661925, Chinese statesman, founder of the Republic of China in 1911. Educated as a medical doctor in England, he became a revolutionary to end the reign of the last dynasty in China. He founded the Nationalist Party and developed the so-called Three People’s Principles: the nationalist, democratic, and socialist principles. He claimed to be transmitting the Confucian Way. Sun adopted a policy of cooperation with the Communists, but his successor Chiang Kai-shek 18871975 broke with them. He is now also honored on the mainland as a bourgeois social democrat paving the way for the Communist Revolution. 

supererogation, the property of going beyond the call of duty. Supererogatory actions are sometimes equated with actions that are morally good in the sense that they are encouraged by morality but not required by it. Sometimes they are equated with morally commendable actions, i.e., actions that indicate a superior moral character. It is quite common for morally good actions to be morally commendable and vice versa, so that it is not surprising that these two kinds of supererogatory actions are not clearly distinguished even though they are quite distinct. Certain kinds of actions are not normally considered to be morally required, e.g., giving to charity, though morality certainly encourages doing them. However, if one is wealthy and gives only a small amount to charity, then, although one’s act is supererogatory in the sense of being morally good, it is not supererogatory in the sense of being morally commendable, for it does not indicate a superior moral character. Certain kinds of actions are normally morally required, e.g., keeping one’s promises. However, when the harm or risk of harm of keeping one’s promise is sufficiently great compared to the harm caused by breaking the promise to excuse breaking the promise, then keeping one’s promise counts as a supererogatory act in the sense of being morally commendable. Some versions of consequentialism claim that everyone is always morally required to act so as to bring about the best consequences. On such a theory there are no actions that are morally encouraged but not required; thus, for those holding such theories, if there are supererogatory acts, they must be morally commendable. Many versions of non-consequentialism also fail to provide for acts that are morally encouraged but not morally required; thus, if they allow for supererogatory acts, they must regard them as morally required acts done at such significant personal cost that one might be excused for not doing them. The view that all actions are either morally required, morally prohibited, or morally indifferent makes it impossible to secure a place for supererogatory acts in the sense of morally good acts. This view that there are no acts that are morally encouraged but not morally required may be the result of misleading terminology. Both Kant and Mill distinguish between duties of perfect obligation and duties of imperfect obligation, acknowledging that a duty of imperfect obligation does not specify any particular act that one is morally required to do. However, since they use the term ‘duty’ it is very easy to view all acts falling under these “duties” as being morally required. One way of avoiding the view that all morally encouraged acts are morally required is to avoid the common philosophical misuse of the term ‘duty’. One can replace ‘duties of perfect obligation’ with ‘actions required by moral rules’ and ‘duties of imperfect obligation’ with ‘actions encouraged by moral ideals’. However, a theory that includes the kinds of acts that are supererogatory in the sense of being morally good has to distinguish between that sense of ‘supererogatory’ and the sense meaning ‘morally commendable’, i.e., indicating a superior moral character in the agent. For as pointed out above, not all morally good acts are morally commendable, nor are all morally commendable acts morally good, even though a particular act may be supererogatory in both senses. 

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

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

survival, continued existence after one’s biological death. So understood, survival can pertain only to beings that are organisms at some time or other, not to beings that are disembodied at all times as angels are said to be or to beings that are embodied but never as organisms as might be said of computers. Theories that maintain that one’s individual consciousness is absorbed into a universal consciousness after death or that one continues to exist only through one’s descendants, insofar as they deny one’s own continued existence as an individual, are not theories of survival. Although survival does not entail immortality or anything about reward or punishment in an afterlife, many theories of survival incorporate these features. Theories about survival have expressed differing attitudes about the importance of the body. supervenient behaviorism survival 892   892 Some philosophers have maintained that persons cannot survive without their own bodies, typically espousing a doctrine of resurrection; such a view was held by Aquinas. Others, including the Pythagoreans, have believed that one can survive in other bodies, allowing for reincarnation into a body of the same species or even for transmigration into a body of another species. Some, including Plato and perhaps the Pythagoreans, have claimed that no body is necessary, and that survival is fully achieved by one’s escaping embodiment. There is a similar spectrum of opinion about the importance of one’s mental life. Some, such as Locke, have supposed that survival of the same person would require memory of one’s having experienced specific past events. Plato’s doctrine of recollection, in contrast, supposes that one can survive without any experiential memory; all that one typically is capable of recollecting are impersonal necessary truths. Philosophers have tested the relative importance of bodily versus mental factors by means of various thought experiments, of which the following is typical. Suppose that a person’s whole mental life  memories, skills, and character traits  were somehow duplicated into a data bank and erased from the person, leaving a living radical amnesiac. Suppose further that the person’s mental life were transcribed into another radically amnesiac body. Has the person survived, and if so, as whom? 

sutra from Sanskrit sutra, ‘thread’, ‘precept’, a single verse or aphorism of Hindu or Buddhist teaching, or a collection of them. Written to be memorized, they provide a means of encoding and transmitting laws and rules of grammar, ritual, poetic meter, and philosophical disputation. Typically using technical terms and written so as to be mnemonic, they serve well for passing on information in an oral tradition. What makes them serviceable for this purpose also makes them largely unintelligible without commentary. The sutra style is typical in philosophical traditions. The Brahma-Sutras of Badharana are an example of a set of sutras regarded as authoritative by Vedanta but interpreted in vastly different ways by Shankara, Ramanuja, and Madhva. The sutras associated with Buddhism typically are more expansive than those associated with Hinduism, and thus more intelligible on their own. The Tripitaka “Basket of the Teachings” is a collection of sutras that Buddhist tradition ascribes to Ananda, who is said to have recited them from memory at the first Buddhist council; each sutra is introduced by the words ‘Thus have I heard’. Sutras are associated with Theravada as well as Mahayana Buddhism and deal with both religious and philosophical topics. K.E.Y. Swedenborgianism, the theosophy professed by a worldwide movement established as the New Jerusalem Church in London in 1788 by the followers of Emanuel Swedenborg 16881772, a Swedish natural philosopher, visionary, and biblical exegete. Author of geological and cosmological works, he fused the rationalist Cartesian and empiricist Lockean legacies into a natural philosophy Principia Rerum Naturalium, 1734 that propounded the harmony of the mechanistic universe with biblical revelation. Inspired by Liebniz, Malebranche, Platonism, and Neoplatonism, he unfolded a doctrine of correspondence A Hieroglyphic Key, 1741 to account for the relation between body and soul and between the natural and spiritual worlds, and applied it to biblical exegesis. What attracted the wide following of the “Spirit-Seer” were his theosophic speculations in the line of Boehme and the mystical, prophetic tradition in which he excelled Heavenly Arcana, 174956. J.-L.S. Swinburne, Richard b.1934, British philosopher of religion and of science. In philosophy of science, he has contributed to confirmation theory and to the philosophy of space and time. His work in philosophy of religion is the most ambitious project in philosophical theology undertaken by a British philosopher in the twentieth century. Its first part is a trilogy on the coherence and justification of theistic belief and the rationality of living by that belief: The Coherence of Theism 1977, The Existence of God 1979, and Faith and Reason 1981. Since 1985, when Swinburne became Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion at the  of Oxford, he has written a tetralogy about some of the most central of the distinctively Christian religious doctrines: Responsibility and Atonement 1989, Revelation 1992, The Christian God 1994, and Providence and the Problem of Evil 1998. The most interesting feature of the trilogy is its contribution to natural theology. Using Bayesian reasoning, Swinburne builds a cumulative case for theism by arguing that its probability is raised sustaining cause Swinburne, Richard 893   893 by such things as the existence of the universe, its order, the existence of consciousness, human opportunities to do good, the pattern of history, evidence of miracles, and religious experience. The existence of evil does not count against the existence of God. On our total evidence theism is more probable than not. In the tetralogy he explicates and defends such Christian doctrines as original sin, the Atonement, Heaven, Hell, the Trinity, the Incarnation, and Providence. He also analyzes the grounds for supposing that some Christian doctrines are revealed truths, and argues for a Christian theodicy in response to the problem of evil. 

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

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

synderesis, in medieval moral theology, conscience. St. Jerome used the term, and it became a fixture because of Peter Lombard’s inclusion of it in his Sentences. Despite this origin, ‘synderesis’ is distinguished from ‘conscience’ by Aquinas, for whom synderesis is the quasi-habitual grasp of the most common principles of the moral order i.e., natural law, whereas conscience is the application of such knowledge to fleeting and unrepeatable circumstances. ’Conscience’ is ambiguous in the way in which ‘knowledge’ is: knowledge can be the mental state of the knower or what the knower knows. But ‘conscience’, like ‘synderesis’, is typically used for the mental state. Sometimes, however, conscience is taken to include general moral knowledge as well as its application here and now; but the content of synderesis is the most general precepts, whereas the content of conscience, if general knowledge, will be less general precepts. Since conscience can be erroneous, the question arises as to whether synderesis and its object, natural law precepts, can be obscured and forgotten because of bad behavior or upbringing. Aquinas held that while great attrition can take place, such common moral knowledge cannot be wholly expunged from the human mind. This is a version of the Aristotelian doctrine that there are starting points of knowledge so easily grasped that the grasping of them is a defining mark of the human being. However perversely the human agent behaves there will remain not only the comprehensive realization that good is to be done and evil avoided, but also the recognition of some substantive human goods. 

synergism, in Christian soteriology, the cooperation within human consciousness of free will and divine grace in the processes of conversion and regeneration. Synergism became an issue in sixteenth-century Lutheranism during a controversy prompted by Philip Melanchthon 1497 syncategorematic synergism 897   897 1569. Under the influence of Erasmus, Melanchthon mentioned, in the 1533 edition of his Common Places, three causes of good actions: “the Word, the Holy Spirit, and the will.” Advocated by Pfeffinger, a Philipist, synergism was attacked by the orthodox, predestinarian, and monergist party, Amsdorf and Flacius, who retorted with Gnesio-Lutheranism. The ensuing Formula of Concord 1577 officialized monergism. Synergism occupies a middle position between uncritical trust in human noetic and salvific capacity Pelagianism and deism and exclusive trust in divine agency Calvinist and Lutheran fideism. Catholicism, Arminianism, Anglicanism, Methodism, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century liberal Protestantism have professed versions of synergism. 

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

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

Tai Chen 172477, Chinese philologist, philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer. A prominent member of the K’ao-cheng evidential research School, Tai attacked the Neo-Confucian dualism of li pattern and ch’i ether, insisting that li is simply the orderly structure of ch’i. In terms of ethics, li consists of “feelings that do not err.” In his Meng-tzu tzu-yi shu-cheng “Meanings of Terms in the Mencius Explained and Attested”, Tai argues for the need to move from mere yi-chien opinions to pu-te chih-yi undeviating standards by applying the Confucian golden rule  not as a formal principle determining right action but as a winnowing procedure that culls out improper desires and allows only proper ones to inform one’s actions. Beginning with tzu jan natural desires, one tests their universalizability with the golden rule, thereby identifying those that accord with what is pi-jan necessary. One spontaneously k’o approves of the “necessary,” and Tai claims this is what Mencius describes as the “joy” of moral action.  MENCIUS. P.J.I. t’ai-chi, Chinese term meaning ‘Great Ultimate’, an idea first developed in the “Appended Remarks” of the I-Ching, where it is said that in the system of Change there is the Great Ultimate. It generates the Two Modes yin and yang; the Two Modes generate the Four Forms major and minor yin and yang; and the Four Forms generate the Eight Trigrams. In his “Explanation of the Diagram of the Great Ultimate,” Chou Tunyi 101773 spoke of “Non-ultimate wu-chi and also the Great Ultimate!” He generated controversies. Chu Hsi 11301200 approved Chou’s formulation and interpreted t’ai-chi as li principle, which is formless on the one hand and has principle on the other hand. 

T’ang Chün-i 190978, Chinese philosopher, a leading contemporary New Confucian and cofounder, with Ch’ien Mu, of New Asia  in Hong Kong in 1949. He acknowledged that it was through the influence of Hsiung Shih-li that he could see the true insights in Chinese philosophy. He drafted a manifesto published in 1958 and signed by Carsun Chang 18871969, Hsü Fu-kuan, and Mou Tsung-san. They criticized current sinological studies as superficial and inadequate, and maintained that China must learn science and democracy from the West, but the West must also learn human-heartedness and love of harmony and peace from Chinese culture. 

T’an Ssu-t’ung 186498, Chinese philosopher of the late Ching dynasty, a close associate of K’ang Yu-wei and Liang Ch’i-ch’ao. He was a syncretist who lumped together Confucianism, Mohism, Taoism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Western science. His book on Jen-hsüeh philosophy of humanity identified humanity with ether, a cosmic force, and gave a new interpreta900 T   900 tion to the unity between nature and humanity. Jen for him is the source of all existence and creatures; it is none other than reality itself. He participated in the Hundred Days Reform in 1898 and died a martyr. His personal example inspired many revolutionaries afterward. 

tao, Chinese term meaning ‘path’, ‘way’, ‘account’. From the sense of a literal path, road, or way, the term comes to mean a way of doing something e.g., living one’s life or organizing society, especially the way advocated by a particular individual or school of thought “the way of the Master,” “the way of the Mohists,” etc.. Frequently, it refers to the way of doing something, the right way e.g., “The Way has not been put into practice for a long time”. Tao also came to refer to the linguistic account that embodies or describes a way. Finally, in some texts the tao is a metaphysical entity. For example, in Neo-Confucianism, tao is identified with li principle. In some contexts it is difficult to tell what sense is intended. 

tao-hsin, jen-hsin, Chinese terms used by NeoConfucian philosophers to contrast the mind according to the Way tao-hsin and the mind according to man’s artificial, selfish desires jenhsin. When one responds spontaneously without making discrimination, one is acting according to the Way. One is naturally happy, sad, angry, and joyful as circumstances require. But when one’s self is alienated from the Way, one works only for self-interest, and the emotions and desires are excessive and deviate from the Mean. In the Confucian tradition sages and worthies take Heaven as their model, while common people are urged to take chün-tzu the superior men as their model.  .

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

 tao-t’ung, Chinese term meaning ‘the orthodox line of transmission of the Way’. According to Chu Hsi 11301200, the first to use this term, the line of transmission can be traced back to ancient sage-emperors, Confucius and Mencius. The line was broken since Mencius and was only revived by the Ch’eng brothers in the Sung dynasty. The interesting feature is that the line has excluded important Confucian scholars such as Hsün Tzu fl. 298238 B.C. and Tung Chungshu c.179c.104 B.C.. The idea of tao-t’ung can be traced back to Han Yü 768824 and Mencius. 

Tarski, Alfred 190183, Polish-born American mathematician, logician, and philosopher of logic famous for his investigations of the concepts of truth and consequence conducted in the 1930s. His analysis of the concept of truth in syntactically precise, fully interpreted languages resulted in a definition of truth and an articulate defense of the correspondence theory of truth. Sentences of the following kind are now known as Tarskian biconditionals: ‘The sentence “Every perfect number is even” is true if and only if every perfect number is even.’ One of Tarski’s major philosophical insights is that each Tarskian biconditional is, in his words, a partial definition of truth and, consequently, all Tarskian biconditionals whose right-hand sides exhaust the sentences of a given formal language together constitute an implicit definition of ‘true’ as applicable to sentences of that given formal language. This insight, because of its penetrating depth and disarming simplicity, has become a staple of modern analytic philosophy. Moreover, it in effect reduced the philosophical problem of defining truth to the logical problem of constructing a single sentence having the form of a definition and having as consequences each of the Tarskian biconditionals. Tarski’s solution to this problem is the famous Tarski truth definition, versions of which appear in virtually every mathematical logic text. Tarski’s second most widely recognized philosophical achievement was his analysis and explication of the concept of consequence. Consequence is interdefinable with validity as applied to arguments: a given conclusion is a consequence of a given premise-set if and only if the argument composed of the given conclusion and the given premise-set is valid; conversely, a given argument is valid if and only if its conclusion is a consequence of its premise-set. Shortly after discovering the truth definition, Tarski presented his “no-countermodels” definition of consequence: a given sentence is a consequence of a given set of sentences if and only if every model of the set is a model of the sentence in other words, if and only if there is no way to reinterpret the non-logical terms in such a way as to render the sentence false while rendering all sentences in the set true. As Quine has emphasized, this definition reduces the modal notion of logical necessity to a combination of syntactic and semantic concepts, thus avoiding reference to modalities and/or to “possible worlds.” After Tarski’s definitive work on truth and on consequence he devoted his energies largely to more purely mathematical work. For example, in answer to Gödel’s proof that arithmetic is incomplete and undecidable, Tarski showed that algebra and geometry are both complete and decidable. Tarski’s truth definition and his consequence definition are found in his 1956 collection Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics 2d ed., 1983: article VIII, pp. 152278, contains the truth definition; article XVI, pp. 40920, contains the consequence definition. His published articles, nearly 3,000 s in all, have been available together since 1986 in the four-volume Alfred Tarski, Collected Papers, edited by S. Givant and R. McKenzie. 

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

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

Taylor, Harriet 180758, English feminist and writer. She was the wife of J. S. Mill, who called her the “most admirable person” he had ever met; but according to her critics, Taylor was “a stupid woman” with “a knack for repeating prettily what J.S.M. said.” Although Mill may have exaggerated her moral and intellectual virtues, her writings on marriage, the enfranchisement of women, and toleration did influence his Subjection of Women and On Liberty. In The Enfranchisement of Women, Taylor rejected the reigning “angel in the house” ideal of woman. She argued that confining women to the house impeded both sexes’ development. Taylor was a feminist philosopher in her own right, who argued even more strongly than Mill that women are entitled to the same educational, legal, and economic opportunities that men enjoy. R.T. te, Chinese term meaning ‘moral charisma’ or ‘virtue’. In its earliest use, te is the quality bestowed on a ruler by Heaven t’ien which makes his subjects willingly follow him. Rule by te is traditionally thought to be not just ethically preferable to rule by force but also more effective instrumentally. It is a necessary condition for having te that one be ethically exemplary, but traditional thinkers differ over whether being virtuous is also sufficient for the bestowal of te, and whether the bestowal of te makes one even more virtuous. Te soon came also to refer to virtue, in the sense of either a disposition that contributes to human flourishing benevolence, courage, etc. or the specific excellence of any kind of thing. B.W.V.N. techne Grecian, ‘art’, ‘craft’, a human skill based on general principles and capable of being taught. In this sense, a manual craft such as carpentry is a techne, but so are sciences such as medicine and arithmetic. According to Plato Gorgias 501a, a genuine techne understands its subject matter and can give a rational account of its activity. Aristotle Metaphysics I.1 distinguishes technefrom experience on the grounds that techne involves knowledge of universals and causes, and can be taught. Sometimes ‘techne’ is restricted to the productive as opposed to theoretical and practical arts, as at Nicomachean Ethics VI.4. Techne and its products are often contrasted with physis, nature Physics II.1. 

Teichmüller, Gustav 183288, German philosopher who contributed to the history of philosophy and developed a theory of knowledge and a metaphysical conception based on these historical studies. Born in Braunschweig, he taught at Göttingen and Basel and was influenced by Lotze and Leibniz. His major works are Aristotelische Forschungen Aristotelian Investigations, 186773 and Die wirkliche und scheinbar Welt The Actual and the Apparent World, 1882. His other works are Ueber die Unsterblichkeit der Seele 1874, Studien zur Geschichte der Begriffe 1874, Darwinismus und Philosophie 1877, Ueber das Wesen der Liebe 1879, Religionsphilosophie 1886, and the posthumously published Neue Grundlegung der Psychologie und Logik 1889. Teichmüller maintained that the self of immediate experience, the “I,” is the most fundamental reality and that the conceptual world is a projection of its constituting activity. On the basis of his studies in the history of metaphysics and his sympathies with Leibniz’s monadology, he held that each metaphysical system contained partial truths and construed each metaphysical standpoint as a perspective on a complex reality. Thinking of both metaphysical interpretations of reality and the subjectivity of individual immediate experience, Teichmüller christened his own philosophical position “perspectivism.” His work influenced later European thought through its impact on the philosophical reflections of Nietzsche, who was probably influenced by him in the development of his perspectival theory of knowledge. 

Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre 18811955, French paleontologist, Jesuit priest, and philosopher. His Taylor, Harriet Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre 904   904 philosophical work, while published only posthumously, was vigorously discussed throughout his career. His writings generated considerable controversy within the church, since one of his principal concerns was to bring about a forceful yet generous reconciliation between the traditional Christian dogma and the dramatic advances yielded by modern science. His philosophy consisted of systematic reflections on cosmology, biology, physics, anthropology, social theory, and theology  reflections guided, he maintained, by his fascination with the nature of life, energy, and matter, and by his profound respect for human spirituality. Teilhard was educated in philosophy and mathematics at the Jesuit  of Mongré, near Lyons. He entered the Jesuit order at the age of eighteen and was ordained a priest in 1911. He went on to study at Aix-en-Provence, Laval, and Caen, as well as on the Isle of Jersey and at Hastings, England. Returning to Paris after the war, he studied biology, geology, and paleontology at the Museum of Natural History and at the Institut Catholique, receiving a doctoral degree in geology in 1922. In 1923, shortly after appointment to the faculty of geology at the Institut Catholique, he took leave to pursue field research in China. His research resulted in the discovery, in 1929, of Peking man Sinanthropus pekinensis  which he saw as “perhaps the next to the last step traceable between the anthropoids and man.” It was during this period that Teilhard began to compose one of his major theoretical works, The Phenomenon of Man 1955, in which he stressed the deep continuity of evolutionary development and the emergence of humanity from the animal realm. He argued that received evolutionary theory was fully compatible with Christian doctrine. Indeed, it is the synthesis of evolutionary theory with his own Christian theology that perhaps best characterizes the broad tenor of his thought. Starting with the very inception of the evolutionary trajectory, i.e., with what he termed the “Alpha point” of creation, Teilhard’s general theory resists any absolute disjunction between the inorganic and organic. Indeed, matter and spirit are two “stages” or “aspects” of the same cosmic stuff. These transitions from one state to another may be said to correspond to those between the somatic and psychic, the exterior and interior, according to the state of relative development, organization, and complexity. Hence, for Teilhard, much as for Bergson whose work greatly influenced him, evolutionary development is characterized by a progression from the simplest components of matter and energy what he termed the lithosphere, through the organization of flora and fauna the biosphere, to the complex formations of sentient and cognitive human life the noosphere. In this sense, evolution is a “progressive spiritualization of matter.” He held this to be an orthogenetic process, one of “directed evolution” or “Genesis,” by which matter would irreversibly metamorphose itself, in a process of involution and complexification, toward the psychic. Specifically, Teilhard’s account sought to overcome what he saw as a prescientific worldview, one based on a largely antiquated and indefensible metaphysical dualism. By accomplishing this, he hoped to realize a productive convergence of science and religion. The end of evolution, what he termed “the Omega point,” would be the full presence of Christ, embodied in a universal human society. Many have tended to see a Christian pantheism expressed in such views. Teilhard himself stressed a profoundly personalist, spiritual perspective, drawn not only from the theological tradition of Thomism, but from that of Pauline Neoplatonism and Christian mysticism as well  especially that tradition extending from Meister Eckhart through Cardinal Bérulle and Malebranche.

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

Telesio, Bernardino 150988, Italian philosopher whose early scientific empiricism influenced Francis Bacon and Galileo. He studied in Padua, where he completed his doctorate in 1535, and practiced philosophy in Naples and Cosenza without holding any academic position. His major work, the nine volumes of De rerum natura iuxta propria principia “On the Nature of Things According to Their Principles,” 1586, contains an attempt to interpret nature on the basis of its own principles, which Telesio identifies with the two incorporeal active forces of heat and cold, and the corporeal and passive physical substratum. As the two active forces permeate all of nature and are endowed with sensation, Telesio argues that all of nature possesses some degree of sensation. Human beings share with animals a material substance produced by heat and coming into existence with the body, called spirit. They are also given a mind by God. Telesio knew both the Averroistic and the Alexandrist interpretations of Aristotle. However, he broke with both, criticizing Aristotle’s Physics and claiming that nature is investigated better by the senses than by the intellect. P.Gar. telishment, punishment of one suspected of wrongdoing, but whom the authorities know to be innocent, imposed as a deterrent to future wrongdoers. Telishment is thus not punishment insofar as punishment requires that the recipient’s harsh treatment be deserved. Telishment is classically given as one of the thought experiments challenging utilitarianism and more broadly, consequentialism as a theory of ethics, for such a theory seems to justify telishment on some occasions. 

telos, ancient Grecian term meaning ‘end’ or ‘purpose’. Telos is a key concept not only in Grecian ethics but also in Grecian science. The purpose of a human being is a good life, and human activities are evaluated according to whether they lead to or manifest this telos. Plants, animals, and even inanimate objects were also thought to have a telos through which their activities and relations could be understood and evaluated. Though a telos could be something that transcends human activities and sensible things, as Plato thought, it need not be anything apart from nature. Aristotle, e.g., identified the telos of a sensible thing with its immanent form. It follows that the purpose of the thing is simply to be what it is and that, in general, a thing pursues its purpose when it endeavors to preserve itself. Aristotle’s view shows that ‘purpose in nature’ need not mean a higher purpose beyond nature. Yet, his immanent purpose does not exclude “higher” purposes, and Aristotelian teleology was pressed into service by medieval thinkers as a framework for understanding God’s agency through nature. Thinkers in the modern period argued against the prominent role accorded to telos by ancient telepathy telos 906   906 and medieval thinkers, and they replaced it with analyses in terms of mechanism and law.

tense logic, an extension of classical logic introduced by Arthur Prior Past, Present, and Future, 1967, involving operators P and F for the past and future tenses, or ‘it was the case that . . .’ and ‘it will be the case that . . .’. Classical or mathematical logic was developed as a logic of unchanging mathematical truth, and can be applied to tensed discourse only by artificial regimentation inspired by mathematical physics, introducing quantification over “times” or “instants.” Thus ‘It will have been the case that p,’ which Prior represents simply as FPp, classical logic represents as ‘There [exists] an instant t and there [exists] an instant tH such that t [is] later than the present and tH [is] earlier than t, and at tH it [is] the case that pH, or DtDtH t o‹t8tH ‹t8ptH, where the brackets indicate that the verbs are to be understood as tenseless. Prior’s motives were in part linguistic to produce a formalization less removed from natural language than the classical and in part metaphysical to avoid ontological commitment to such entities as instants. Much effort was devoted to finding tense-logical principles equivalent to various classical assertions about the structure of the earlierlater order among instants; e.g., ‘Between any two instants there is another instant’ corresponds to the validity of the axioms Pp P PPp and Fp P FFp. Less is expressible using P and F than is expressible with explicit quantification over instants, and further operators for ‘since’ and ‘until’ or ‘now’ and ‘then’ have been introduced by Hans Kamp and others. These are especially important in combination with quantification, as in ‘When he was in power, all who now condemn him then praised him.’ As tense is closely related to mood, so tense logic is closely related to modal logic. As Kripke models for modal logic consist each of a set X of “worlds” and a relation R of ‘x is an alternative to y’, so for tense logic they consist each of a set X of “instants” and a relation R of ‘x is earlier than y’: Thus instants, banished from the syntax or proof theory, reappear in the semantics or model theory. Modality and tense are both involved in the issue of future contingents, and one of Prior’s motives was a desire to produce a formalism in which the views on this topic of ancient, medieval, and early modern logicians from Aristotle with his “sea fight tomorrow” and Diodorus Cronos with his “Master Argument” through Ockham to Peirce could be represented. The most important precursor to Prior’s work on tense logic was that on many-valued logics by Lukasiewicz, which was motivated largely by the problem of future contingents. Also related to tense and mood is aspect, and modifications to represent this grammatical category evaluating formulas at periods rather than instants of time have also been introduced. Like modal logic, tense logic has been the object of intensive study in theoretical computer science, especially in connection with attempts to develop languages in which properties of programs can be expressed and proved; variants of tense logic under such labels as “dynamic logic” or “process logic” have thus been extensively developed for technological rather than philosophical motives. 

of Ávila, Saint 151582, Spanish religious, mystic, and author of spiritual treatises. Having entered the Carmelite order at Ávila at twenty-two, Teresa spent the next twenty-five years seeking guidance in the practice of prayer. Despite variously inept spiritual advisers, she seems to have undergone a number of mystical experiences and to have made increasingly important discoveries about interior life. After 1560 Teresa took on a public role by attaching herself to the reforming party within the Spanish Carmelites. Her remaining years were occupied with the reform, in which she was associated most famously with John of the Cross. She also composed several works, including a spiritual autobiography the Vida and two masterpieces of spirituality, the Way of Perfection and the Interior Castle. The latter two, but especially the Castle, offer philosophical suggestions about the soul’s passions, activities, faculties, and ground. Their principal motive is to teach the reader how to progress, by successive surrender, toward the divine Trinity dwelling at the soul’s center.

terminist logic, a school of logic originating in twelfth-century Europe and dominant in the universities until its demise in the humanistic reforms. Its chief goal was the elucidation of the logical form the “exposition” of propositions advanced in the context of Scholastic disputation. Its central theory concerned the properties of terms, especially supposition, and did the work of modern quantification theory. Important logicians in the school include Peter of Spain, William Sherwood, Walter Burley, William Heytesbury, and Paul of Venice. 

terminus a quo Latin, ‘term from which’, the starting point of some process. The terminus ad quem is the ending point. For example, change is a process that begins from some state the terminus a quo and proceeds to some state at which it ends the terminus ad quem. In particular, in the ripening of an apple, the green apple is the terminus a quo and the red apple is the terminus ad quem.

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

testability, in the sciences, capacity of a theory to undergo experimental testing. Theories in the natural sciences are regularly subjected to experimental tests involving detailed and rigorous control of variable factors. Not naive observation of the workings of nature, but disciplined, designed intervention in such workings, is the hallmark of testability. Logically regarded, testing takes the form of seeking confirmation of theories by obtaining positive test results. We can represent a theory as a conjunction of a hypothesis and a statement of initial conditions, H • A. This conjunction deductively entails testable or observational consequences O. Hence, H • A P O. If O obtains, H • A is said to be confirmed, or rendered probable. But such confirmation is not decisive; O may be entailed by, and hence explained by, many other theories. For this reason, Popper insisted that the testability of theories should seek disconfirmations or falsifications. The logical schema H • A P O not-O not-H • A is deductively valid, hence apparently decisive. On this view, science progresses, not by finding the truth, but by discarding the false. Testability becomes falsifiability. This deductive schema modus tollens is also employed in the analysis of crucial tests. Consider two hypotheses H1 and H2, both introduced to explain some phenomenon. H1 predicts that for some test condition C, we have the test result ‘if C then e1’, and H2, the result ‘if C then e2’, where e1 and e2 are logically incompatible. If experiment falsifies ‘if C then e1’ e1 does not actually occur as a test result, the hypothesis H1 is false, which implies that H2 is true. It was originally supposed that the experiments of J. B. L. Foucault constituted a decisive falsify

cation of the corpuscular theory of the nature of light, and thus provided a decisive establishment of the truth of its rival, the wave theory of light. This account of crucial experiments neglects certain points in logic and also the role of auxiliary hypotheses in science. As Duhem pointed term, minor testability 908   908 out, rarely, if ever, does a hypothesis face the facts in isolation from other supporting assumptions. Furthermore, it is a fact of logic that the falsification of a conjunction of a hypothesis and its auxiliary assumptions and initial conditions not-H • A is logically equivalent to not-H or not-A, and the test result itself provides no warrant for choosing which alternative to reject. Duhem further suggested that rejection of any component part of a complex theory is based on extra-evidential considerations factors like simplicity and fruitfulness and cannot be forced by negative test results. Acceptance of Duhem’s view led Quine to suggest that a theory must face the tribunal of experience en bloc; no single hypothesis can be tested in isolation. Original conceptions of testability and falsifiability construed scientific method as hypothetico-deductive. Difficulties with these reconstructions of the logic of experiment have led philosophers of science to favor an explication of empirical support based on the logic of probability. 

testimony, an act of telling, including all assertions apparently intended to impart information, regardless of social setting. In an extended sense personal letters and messages, books, and other published material purporting to contain factual information also constitute testimony. Testimony may be sincere or insincere, and may express knowledge or baseless prejudice. When it expresses knowledge, and it is rightly believed, this knowledge is disseminated to its recipients, near or remote. Secondhand knowledge can be passed on further, producing long chains of testimony; but these chains always begin with the report of an eyewitness or expert. In any social group with a common language there is potential for the sharing, through testimony, of the fruits of individuals’ idiosyncratic acquisition of knowledge through perception and inference. In advanced societies specialization in the gathering and production of knowledge and its wider dissemination through spoken and written testimony is a fundamental socioepistemic fact, and a very large part of each person’s body of knowledge and belief stems from testimony. Thus the question when a person may properly believe what another tells her, and what grounds her epistemic entitlement to do so, is a crucial one in epistemology. Reductionists about testimony insist that this entitlement must derive from our entitlement to believe what we perceive to be so, and to draw inferences from this according to familiar general principles. See e.g., Hume’s classic discussion, in his Enquiry into Human Understanding, section X. On this view, I can perceive that someone has told me that p, but can thereby come to know that p only by means of an inference  one that goes via additional, empirically grounded knowledge of the trustworthiness of that person. Anti-reductionists insist, by contrast, that there is a general entitlement to believe what one is told just as such  defeated by knowledge of one’s informant’s lack of trustworthiness her mendacity or incompetence, but not needing to be bolstered positively by empirically based knowledge of her trustworthiness. Anti-reductionists thus see testimony as an autonomous source of knowledge on a par with perception, inference, and memory. One argument adduced for anti-reductionism is transcendental: We have many beliefs acquired from testimony, and these beliefs are knowledge; their status as knowledge cannot be accounted for in the way required by the reductionist  that is, the reliability of testimony cannot be independently confirmed; therefore the reductionist’s insistence on this is mistaken. However, while it is perhaps true that the reliability of all the beliefs one has that depend on past testimony cannot be simultaneously confirmed, one can certainly sometimes ascertain, without circularity, that a specific assertion by a particular person is likely to be correct  if, e.g.,one’s own experience has established that that person has a good track record of reliability about that kind of thing. 

Tetens, Johann Nicolas 17361807, German philosopher and psychologist, sometimes called the German Locke. After his studies in Rostock and Copenhagen, he taught at Bützow and Kiel until 1789. He had a second successful career as a public servant in Denmark 17901807 that did not leave him time for philosophical work. Tetens was one of the most important German philosophers between Wolff and Kant. Like Kant, whom he significantly influenced, Tetens attempted to find a middle way between empiricism and rationalism. His most important work, the Philosophische Versuche über die menschliche Natur und ihre Entwicklung “Philosophical Essays on Human Nature and its Development,” 1777, is indicative of the state of philosophical discustestimony Tetens, Johann Nicolas 909   909 sion in Germany before Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Tetens, who followed the “psychological method” of Locke, tended toward a naturalism, like that of Hume. However, Tetens made a more radical distinction between reason and sensation than Hume allowed and attempted to show how basic rational principles guarantee the objectivity of human knowledge. M.K. Tetractys.

Thales of Miletus fl. c.585 B.C., Grecian philosopher who was regarded as one of the Seven Sages of Greece. He was also considered the first philosopher, founder of the Milesians. Thales is also reputed to have been an engineer, astronomer, mathematician, and statesman. His doctrines even early Grecian sources know only by hearsay: he said that water is the arche, and that the earth floats on water like a raft. The magnet has a soul, and all things are full of the gods. Thales’ attempt to explain natural phenomena in natural rather than exclusively supernatural terms bore fruit in his follower Anaximander. 

Thema: in Stoic logic, a ground rule used to reduce argument forms to basic forms. The Stoics analyzed arguments by their form schema, or tropos. They represented forms using numbers to represent claims; for example, ‘if the first, the second; but the first; therefore the second’. Some forms were undemonstrable; others were reduced to the undemonstrable argument forms by ground rules themata; e.g., if R follows from P & Q, -Q follows from P & -R. The five undemonstrable arguments are: 1 modus ponens; 2 modus tollens; 3 not both P and Q, P, so not-Q; 4 P or Q but not both, P, so not-Q; and 5 disjunctive syllogism. The evidence about the four ground rules is incomplete, but a sound and consistent system for propositional logic can be developed that is consistent with the evidence we have. See Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers, 77681, for an introduction to the Stoic theory of arguments; other evidence is more scattered. 

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

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

theological naturalism, the attempt to develop a naturalistic conception of God. As a philosophical position, naturalism holds 1 that the only reliable methods of knowing what there is are methods continuous with those of the developed sciences, and 2 that the application of those methods supports the view that the constituents of reality are either physical or are causally dependent on physical things and their modifications. Since supernaturalism affirms that God is purely spiritual and causally independent of physical things, naturalists hold that either belief in God must be abandoned as rationally unsupported or the concept of God must be reconstituted consistently with naturalism. Earlier attempts to do the latter include the work of Feuerbach and Comte. In twentieth-century American naturalism the most significant attempts to develop a naturalistic conception of God are due to Dewey and Henry Nelson Wieman 18841975. In A Common Faith Dewey proposed a view of God as the unity of ideal ends resulting from human imagination, ends arousing us to desire and action. Supernaturalism, he argued, was the product of a primitive need to convert the objects of desire, the greatest ideals, into an already existing reality. In contrast to Dewey, Wieman insisted on viewing God as a process in the natural world that leads to the best that humans can achieve if they but submit to its working in their lives. In his earlier work he viewed God as a cosmic process that not only works for human good but is what actually produced human life. Later he identified God with creative interchange, a process that occurs only within already existing human communities. While Wieman’s God is not a human creation, as are Dewey’s ideal ends, it is difficult to see how love and devotion are appropriate to a natural process that works as it does without thought or purpose. Thus, while Dewey’s God ideal ends lacks creative power but may well qualify as an object of love and devotion, Wieman’s God a process in nature is capable of creative power but, while worthy of our care and attention, does not seem to qualify as an object of love and devotion. Neither view, then, satisfies the two fundamental features associated with the traditional idea of God: possessing creative power and being an appropriate object of supreme love and devotion. 

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

theoretical term, a term occurring in a scientific theory that purports to make reference to an unobservable entity e.g., ‘electron’, property e.g., ‘the monatomicity of a molecule’, or relation ‘greater electrical resistance’. The qualification ‘purports to’ is required because instrumentalists deny that any such unobservables exist; nevertheless, they acknowledge that a scientific theory, such as the atomic theory of matter, may be a useful tool for organizing our knowledge of observables and predicting future experiences. Scientific realists, in contrast, maintain that at least some of the theoretical terms e.g., ‘quark’ or ‘neutrino’ actually denote entities that are not directly observable  they hold, i.e., that such things exist. For either group, theoretical terms are contrasted with such observational terms as ‘rope’, ‘smooth’, and ‘louder than’, which refer to observable entities, properties, or relations. Much philosophical controversy has centered on how to draw the distinction between the observable and the unobservable. Did Galileo observe the moons of Jupiter with his telescope? Do we observe bacteria under a microscope? Do physicists observe electrons in bubble chambers? Do astronomers observe the supernova explosions with neutrino counters? Do we observe ordinary material objects, or are sense-data the only observables? Are there any observational terms at all, or are all terms theory-laden? Another important meaning of ‘theoretical term’ occurs if one regards a scientific theory as a semiformal axiomatic system. It is then natural to think of its vocabulary as divided into three parts, i terms of logic and mathematics, ii terms drawn from ordinary language or from other theories, and iii theoretical terms that constitute the special vocabulary of that particular theory. Thermodynamics, e.g., employs i terms for numbers and mathematical operations, ii such terms as ‘pressure’ and ‘volume’ that are common to many branches of physics, and iii such special thermodynamical terms as ‘temperature’, ‘heat’, and ‘entropy’. In this second sense, a theoretical term need not even purport to refer to unobservables. For example, although special equipment is necessary for its precise quantitatheoretical entity theoretical term 912   912 tive measurement, temperature is an observable property. Even if theories are not regarded as axiomatic systems, their technical terms can be considered theoretical. Such terms need not purport to refer to unobservables, nor be the exclusive property of one particular theory. In some cases, e.g., ‘work’ in physics, an ordinary word is used in the theory with a meaning that departs significantly from its ordinary use. Serious questions have been raised about the meaning of theoretical terms. Some philosophers have insisted that, to be meaningful, they must be given operational definitions. Others have appealed to coordinative definitions to secure at least partial interpretation of axiomatic theories. The verifiability criterion has been invoked to secure the meaningfulness of scientific theories containing such terms. A theoretical concept or construct is a concept expressed by a theoretical term in any of the foregoing senses. The term ‘theoretical entity’ has often been used to refer to unobservables, but this usage is confusing, in part because, without introducing any special vocabulary, we can talk about objects too small to be perceived directly  e.g., spheres of gamboge a yellow resin less than 106 meters in diameter, which figured in a historically important experiment by Jean Perrin. 

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

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

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

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

Theosophy, any philosophical mysticism, especially those that purport to be mathematically or scientifically based, such as Pythagoreanism, Neoplatonism, or gnosticism. Vedic Hinduism, and certain aspects of Buddhism, Taoism, and Islamic Sufism, can also be considered theosophical. In narrower senses, ‘theosophy’ may refer to the philosophy of Swedenborg, Steiner, or Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky 183191. Swedenborg’s theosophy originally consisted of a rationalistic cosmology, inspired by certain elements of Cartesian and Leibnizian philosophy, and a Christian mysticism. Swedenborg labored to explain the interconnections between soul and body. Steiner’s theosophy is a reaction to standard scientific theory. It purports to be as rigorous as ordinary science, but superior to it by incorporating spiritual truths about reality. According to his theosophy, reality is organic and evolving by its own resource. Genuine knowledge is intuitive, not discursive. Madame Blavatsky founded the Theosophical Society in 1875. Her views were eclectic, but were strongly influenced by mystical elements of Indian philosophy. 

Thomism, the theology and philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. The term is applied broadly to various thinkers from different periods who were heavily influenced by Aquinas’s thought in their own philosophizing and theologizing. Here three different eras and three different groups of thinkers will be distinguished: those who supported Aquinas’s thought in the fifty years or so following his death in 1274; certain highly skilled interpreters and commentators who flourished during the period of “Second Thomism” sixteenthseventeenth centuries; and various late nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers who have been deeply influenced in their own work by Aquinas. Thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Thomism. Although Aquinas’s genius was recognized by many during his own lifetime, a number of his views were immediately contested by other Scholastic thinkers. Controversies ranged, e.g., over his defense of only one substantial form in human beings; his claim that prime matter is purely potential and cannot, therefore, be kept in existence without some substantial form, even by divine power; his emphasis on the role of the human intellect in the act of choice; his espousal of a real distinction betweeen the soul and its powers; and his defense of some kind of objective or “real” rather than a merely mind-dependent composition of essence and act of existing esse in creatures. Some of Aquinas’s positions were included directly or indirectly in the 219 propositions condemned by Bishop Stephen Tempier of Paris in 1277, and his defense of one single substantial form in man was condemned by Archbishop Robert Kilwardby at Oxford in 1277, with renewed prohibitions by his successor as archbishop of Canterbury, John Peckham, in 1284 and 1286. Only after Aquinas’s canonization in 1323 were the Paris prohibitions revoked insofar as they touched on his teaching in 1325. Even within his own Dominican order, disagreement about some of his views developed within the first decades after his death, notwithstanding the order’s highly sympathetic espousal of his cause. Early English Dominican defenders of his general views included William Hothum d.1298, Richard Knapwell d.c.1288, Robert Orford b. after 1250, fl.129095, Thomas Sutton d. c.1315?, and William Macclesfield d.1303. French Dominican Thomists included Bernard of Trilia d.1292, Giles of Lessines in present-day Belgium d.c.1304?, John Quidort of Paris d. 1306, Bernard of Auvergne d. after 1307, Hervé Nédélec d.1323, Armand of Bellevue fl. 131634, and William Peter Godin d.1336. The secular master at Paris, Peter of Auvergne d. 1304, while remaining very independent in his own views, knew Aquinas’s thought well and completed some of his commentaries on Aristotle. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Thomism. Sometimes known as the period of Second Thomism, this revival gained impetus from the early fifteenth-century writer John Capreolus 13801444 in his Defenses of Thomas’s Theology Defensiones theologiae Divi Thomae, a commentary on the Sentences. A number of fifteenth-century Dominican and secular teachers in German universities also contributed: Kaspar Grunwald Freiburg; Cornelius Sneek and John Stoppe in Rostock; Leonard of Brixental Vienna; Gerard of Heerenberg, Lambert of Heerenberg, and John Versor all at Cologne; Gerhard of Elten; and in Belgium Denis the Carthusian. Outstanding among various sixteenth-century commentators on Thomas were Tommaso de Vio Cardinal Cajetan, Francis Sylvester of Ferrara, Francisco de Vitoria Salamanca, and Francisco’s disciples Domingo de Soto and Melchior Cano. Most important among early seventeenth-century Thomists was John of St. Thomas, who lectured at Piacenza, Madrid, and Alcalá, and is best known for his Cursus philosophicus and his Cursus theologicus. Theravada Buddhism Thomism 916   916 The nineteenth- and twentieth-century revival. By the early to mid-nineteenth century the study of Aquinas had been largely abandoned outside Dominican circles, and in most Roman Catholic s and seminaries a kind of Cartesian and Suarezian Scholasticism was taught. Long before he became Pope Leo XIII, Joachim Pecci and his brother Joseph had taken steps to introduce the teaching of Thomistic philosophy at the diocesan seminary at Perugia in 1846. Earlier efforts in this direction had been made by Vincenzo Buzzetti 17781824, by Buzzetti’s students Serafino and Domenico Sordi, and by Taparelli d’Aglezio, who became director of the Collegio Romano Gregorian  in 1824. Leo’s encyclical Aeterni Patris1879 marked an official effort on the part of the Roman Catholic church to foster the study of the philosophy and theology of Thomas Aquinas. The intent was to draw upon Aquinas’s original writings in order to prepare students of philosophy and theology to deal with problems raised by contemporary thought. The Leonine Commission was established to publish a critical edition of all of Aquinas’s writings; this effort continues today. Important centers of Thomistic studies developed, such as the Higher Institute of Philosophy at Louvain founded by Cardinal Mercier, the Dominican School of Saulchoir in France, and the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto. Different groups of Roman, Belgian, and French Jesuits acknowledged a deep indebtedness to Aquinas for their personal philosophical reflections. There was also a concentration of effort in the United States at universities such as The Catholic  of America, St. Louis , Notre Dame, Fordham, Marquette, and Boston , to mention but a few, and by the Dominicans at River Forest. A great weakness of many of the nineteenthand twentieth-century Latin manuals produced during this effort was a lack of historical sensitivity and expertise, which resulted in an unreal and highly abstract presentation of an “Aristotelian-Thomistic” philosophy. This weakness was largely offset by the development of solid historical research both in the thought of Aquinas and in medieval philosophy and theology in general, championed by scholars such as H. Denifle, M. De Wulf, M. Grabmann, P. Mandonnet, F. Van Steenberghen, E. Gilson and many of his students at Toronto, and by a host of more recent and contemporary scholars. Much of this historical work continues today both within and without Catholic scholarly circles. At the same time, remarkable diversity in interpreting Aquinas’s thought has emerged on the part of many twentieth-century scholars. Witness, e.g., the heavy influence of Cajetan and John of St. Thomas on the Thomism of Maritain; the much more historically grounded approaches developed in quite different ways by Gilson and F. Van Steenberghen; the emphasis on the metaphysics of participation in Aquinas in the very different presentations by L. Geiger and C. Fabro; the emphasis on existence esse promoted by Gilson and many others but resisted by still other interpreters; the movement known as Transcendental Thomism, originally inspired by P. Rousselot and by J. Marechal in dialogue with Kant; and the long controversy about the appropriateness of describing Thomas’s philosophy and that of other medievals as a Christian philosophy. An increasing number of non-Catholic thinkers are currently directing considerable attention to Aquinas, and the varying backgrounds they bring to his texts will undoubtedly result in still other interesting interpretations and applications of his thought to contemporary concerns. 

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

Thoreau, Henry David 181762, American naturalist and writer. Born in Concord, Massachusetts, he attended Harvard 183337 and then returned to Concord to study nature and write, making a frugal living as a schoolteacher, land surveyor, and pencil maker. Commentators have emphasized three aspects of his life: his love and penetrating study of the flora and fauna of the Concord area, recorded with philosophical reflections in Walden 1854; his continuous pursuit of simplicity in the externals of life, thus avoiding a life of “quiet desperation”; and his acts of civil disobedience. The last item has been somewhat overemphasized; not paying a poll tax by way of protest was not original with Thoreau. However, his essay “Resistance to Civil Government” immortalized his protest and influenced people like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., in later years. Thoreau eventually helped runaway slaves at considerable risk; still, he considered himself a student of nature and not a reformer. 

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

t’i, yung, Chinese terms often rendered into English as ‘substance’ and ‘function’, respectively. Ch’eng Yi 10331107, in the preface to his Commentary to the Book of Changes, says: “Substance t’i and function yung come from the same source, and there is no gap between the manifest and the hidden.” Such thought is characteristic of the Chinese way of thinking. Chu Hsi 11301200 applied the pair of concepts to his theory of human nature; he maintained that jen humanity is nature, substance, while love is Thoreau, Henry David t’i, yung 918   918 feeling, function. In the late Ch’ing dynasty 16441912 Chang Chih-tung 18371909 advocated Chinese learning for t’i and Western learning for yung. 

t’ien, Chinese term meaning ‘heaven’, ‘sky’. T’ien has a range of uses running from the most to the least anthropomorphic. At one extreme, t’ien is identified with shang ti. T’ien can be spoken of as having desires and engaging in purposive actions, such as bestowing the Mandate of Heaven t’ien ming. T’ien ming has a political and an ethical use. It can be the mandate to rule given to a virtuous individual. It can also be the moral requirements that apply to each individual, especially as these are embodied in one’s nature. At the other extreme, thinkers such as Hsün-Tzu identify t’ien with the natural order. Even in texts where t’ien is sometimes used anthropomorphically, it can also be used as synonymous with ming in the sense of fate, or simply refer to the sky. After the introduction of Buddhism into China, the phrase ‘Hall of Heaven’ t’ien t’ang is used to refer to the paradise awaiting some souls after death. 

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

Tillich, Paul 18861965, German-born American philosopher and theologian. Born in Starzeddel, eastern Germany, he was educated in philosophy and theology and ordained in the Prussian Evangelical Church in 1912. He served as an army chaplain during World War I and later taught at Berlin, Marburg, Dresden, Leipzig, and Frankfurt. In November 1933, following suspension from his teaching post by the Nazis, he emigrated to the United States, where he taught at Columbia and Union Theological Seminary until 1955, and then at Harvard and Chicago until his death. A popular preacher and speaker, he developed a wide audience in the United States through such writings as The Protestant Era 1948, Systematic Theology three volumes: 1951, 1957, 1963, The Courage to Be 1952, and Dynamics of Faith 1957. His sometimes unconventional lifestyle, as well as his syncretic yet original thought, moved “on the boundary” between theology and other elements of culture  especially art, literature, political thought, and depth psychology  in the belief that religion should relate to the whole extent, and the very depths, of human existence. Tillich’s thought, despite its distinctive “ontological” vocabulary, was greatly influenced by the voluntaristic tradition from Augustine through Schelling, Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. It was a systematic theology that sought to state fresh Christian answers to deep existential questions raised by individuals and cultures  his method of correlation. Every age has its distinctive kairos, “crisis” or “fullness of time,” the right time for creative thought and action. In Weimar Germany, Tillich found the times ripe for religious socialism. In postWorld War II America, he focused more on psychological themes: in the midst of anxiety over death, meaninglessness, and guilt, everyone seeks the courage to be, which comes only by avoiding the abyss of non-being welling up in the demonic and by placing one’s unconditional faith  ultit’ien Tillich, Paul 919   919 mate concern  not in any particular being e.g. God but in Being-Itself “the God above God,” the ground of being. This is essentially the Protestant principle, which prohibits lodging ultimate concern in any finite and limited reality including state, race, and religious institutions and symbols. Tillich was especially influential after World War II. He represented for many a welcome critical openness to the spiritual depths of modern culture, opposing both demonic idolatry of this world as in National Socialism and sectarian denial of cultural resources for faith as in Barthian neo-orthodoxy. 

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

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

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

Toletus, Francisco 153296, Spanish Jesuit theologian and philosopher. Born in Córdoba, he studied at Valencia, Salamanca, and Rome, and became the first Jesuit cardinal in 1594. He composed commentaries on several of Aristotle’s works and a commentary on Aquinas’s Summa theologiae. Toletus followed a Thomistic line, but departed from Thomism in some details. He held that individuals are directly apprehended by the intellect and that the agent intellect is the same power as the possible intellect. He rejected the Thomistic doctrines of the real distinction between essence and existence and of individuation by designated matter; for Toletus individuation results from form.  AQUINAS. J.J.E.G. tonk, a sentential connective whose meaning and logic are completely characterized by the two rules or axioms 1 [P P P tonk Q] and 2 [P tonk Q P Q]. If 1 and 2 are added to any normal system, then every Q can be derived from any P. Arthur Prior invented ‘tonk’ to show that deductive validity must not be conceived as depending solely on arbitrary syntactically defined rules or axioms. We may prohibit ‘tonk’ on the ground that it is not a natural, independently meaningful notion, but we may also prohibit it on purely syntactical grounds. E.g., we may require that, for every connective C, the C-introduction rule [xxx P . . . C . . .] and the C-elimination rule [ - - - C - - - P yyy] be such that the yyy is part of xxx or is related to xxx in some other syntactical way. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

transversality, transcendence of the sovereignty of identity or self-sameness by recognizing the alterity of the Other as Unterschied  to use Heidegger’s term  which signifies the sense of relatedness by way of difference. An innovative idea employed and appropriated by such diverse philosophers as Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, transversality is meant to replace the Eurocentric formulation of truth as universal in an age when the world is said to be rushing toward the global village. Universality has been a Eurocentric idea because what is particular in the West is universalized, whereas what is particular elsewhere remains particularized. Since its center is everywhere and its circumference nowhere, truth is polycentric and correlative. Particularly noteworthy is the American phenomenologist Calvin O. Schrag’s attempt to appropriate transversality by splitting the difference between the two extremes of absolutism and relativism on the one hand and modernity’s totalizing practices and postmodernity’s fragmentary tendencies on the other.

Arbor porphyriana:  a structure generated from the logical and metaphysical apparatus of Aristotle’s Categories, as systematized by Porphyry and later writers. A tree in the category of substance begins with substance as its highest genus and divides that genus into mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive subordinate genera by means of a pair of opposites, called differentiae, yielding, e.g., corporeal substance and incorporeal substance. The process of division by differentiae continues until a lowest species is reached, a species that cannot be divided further. The species “human being” is said to be a lowest species whose derivation can be recaptured from the formula “mortal, rational, sensitive, animate, corporeal substance.” 

Trinitarianism, the theological doctrine that God consists of three persons. The persons who constitute the Holy Trinity are the Father; the Son, who is Jesus Christ; and the Holy Spirit or Holy Ghost. The doctrine states that each of these three persons is God and yet they are not three Gods but one God. According to a traditional formulation, the three persons are but one substance. In the opinion of Aquinas, the existence of God can be proved by human reason, but the existence of the three persons cannot be proved and is known only by revelation. According to Christian tradition, revelation contains information about the relations among the three persons, and these relations ground proper attributes of each that distinguish them from one another. Thus, since the Father begets the Son, a proper attribute of the Father is paternity and a proper attribute of the Son is filiation. Procession transparent Trinitarianism 928   928 or spiration is a proper attribute of the Holy Spirit. A disagreement about procession has contributed to dividing Eastern and Western Christianity. The Eastern Orthodox church teaches that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son. A theory of double procession according to which the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son has been widely accepted in the West. This disagreement is known as the filioque ‘and the Son’ controversy because it arose from the fact that adding this Latin phrase to the Nicene Creed became acceptable in the West but not in the East. Unitarianism denies that God consists of three persons and so is committed to denying the divinity of Jesus. The monotheistic faiths of Judaism and Islam are unitarian, but there are unitarians who consider themselves Christians. 

Troeltsch, Ernst 18651923, German philosopher and historian whose primary aim was to provide a scientific foundation for theology. Educated at Erlangen, Göttingen under Ritschl and Lagarde, and Berlin, he initially taught theology at Heidelberg and later philosophy in Berlin. He launched the school of history of religion with his epoch-making “On Historical and Dogmatical Method in Theology” 1896. His contributions to theology The Religious Apriori, 1904, philosophy, sociology, and history Historicism and Its Problems, 1922 were vastly influential. Troeltsch claimed that only a philosophy of religion drawn from the history and development of religious consciousness could strengthen the standing of the science of religion among the sciences and advance the Christian strategy against materialism, naturalism, skepticism, aestheticism, and pantheism. His historical masterpiece, Protestantism and Progress 1906, argues that early Protestantism was a modified medieval Catholicism that delayed the development of modern culture. As a sociologist, he addressed, in The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches 1912, the twofold issue of whether religious beliefs and movements are conditioned by external factors and whether, in turn, they affect society and culture. From Christian social history he inferred three types of “sociological self-formation of the Christian idea”: the church, the sect, and the mystic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tung Chung-shu c.179c.104 B.C., Chinese philosopher, a Han scholar famous for his answers to questions by Emperor Wu, which were instrumental in making Confucianism the state doctrine in 136 B.C. He wrote Ch’un-ch’iu fan-lu “Luxuriant Gems of the Spring and Autumn Annals”, in which he read moral messages from historical events recorded in the classic in such a way that they could be applied to future history. Tung’s teachings were actually quite different from those of Confucius and Mencius. He believed that Heaven and the Way do not change, and he taught the so-called Three Bonds, according to which the ruler, the father, and the husband are to be the standards of the ruled, the son, and the wife. These added a conservative ring to Confucianism, so that the rulers were happy to use it in combination with Legalist practice to create a state Confucianism. He also incorporated many ideas from the yinyang school in his philosophy. He believed that history goes in cycles, the five powers wood, fire, earth, metal, water succeed each other, and there is a strict correlation between natural affairs and human affairs. He saw natural disasters as warning signs for the rulers to cultivate virtues and not to abuse their powers.

Turing machine, an abstract automaton or imagined computer consisting of a finite automaton operating an indefinitely long storage tape. The finite automaton provides the computing power of the machine. The tape is used for input, output, and calculation workspace; in the case of the universal Turing machine, it also specifies another Turing machine. Initially, only a finite number of squares of the tape are marked with symbols, while the rest are blank. The finite automaton part of the machine has a finite number of internal states and operates discretely, at times t % 0, 1, 2, . . . . At each time-step the automaton examines the tape square under its tape head, possibly changes what is there, moves the tape left or right, and then changes its internal state. The law governing this sequence of actions is deterministic and is defined in a state table. For each internal state and each tape symbol or blank under the tape head, the state table describes the tape action performed by the machine and gives the next internal state of the machine. Since a machine has only a finite number of internal states and of tape symbols, the state table of a machine is finite in length and can be stored on a tape. There is a universal Turing machine Mu that can simulate every Turing machine including itself: when the state table of any machine M is written on the tape of Mu, the universal machine Mu will perform the same input-output computation that M performs. Mu does this by using the state table of M to calculate M’s complete history for any given input. Turing machines may be thought of as conceptual devices for enumerating the elements of an infinite set e.g., the theorems of a formal language, or as decision machines e.g., deciding of any truth-functional formula whether it is a tautology. A. M. Turing showed that there are welldefined logical tasks that cannot be carried out by any machine; in particular, no machine can solve the halting problem. Tsou Yen Turing machine 933   933 Turing’s definition of a machine was theoretical; it was not a practical specification for a machine. After the modern electronic computer was invented, he proposed a test for judging whether there is a computer that is behaviorally equivalent to a human in reasoning and intellectual creative power. The Turing test is a “black box” type of experiment that Turing proposed as a way of deciding whether a computer can think. Two rooms are fitted with the same input-output equipment going to an outside experimenter. A person is placed in one room and a programmed electronic computer in the other, each in communication with the experimenter. By issuing instructions and asking questions, the experimenter tries to decide which room has the computer and which the human. If the experimenter cannot tell, that outcome is strong evidence that the computer can think as well as the person. More directly, it shows that the computer and the human are equivalent for all the behaviors tested. Since the computer is a finite automaton, perhaps the most significant test task is that of doing creative mathematics about the non-enumerable infinite. 

Turnbull, George 16981748, Scottish moral sense philosopher and educational theorist. He was briefly a philosophy regent at Aberdeen 172127 and a teacher of Reid. His Principles of Moral and Christian Philosophy 1740 and Discourse upon the Nature and Origin of Moral and Civil Laws 1741 show him as the most systematic of those who aimed to recast moral philosophy on a Newtonian model, deriving moral laws “experimentally” from human psychology. In A Treatise on Ancient Painting 1740, Observations Upon Liberal Education 1742, and some smaller works, he extolled history and the arts as propaedeutic to the teaching of virtue and natural religion. 

Twin-Earth, a fictitious planet first visited by Hilary Putnam in a thought experiment designed to show, among other things, that “ ‘meanings’ just ain’t in the head” “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’,” 1975. Twin-Earth is exactly like Earth with one notable exception: ponds, rivers, and ice trays on Twin-Earth contain, not H2O, but XYZ, a liquid superficially indistinguishable from water but with a different chemical constitution. According to Putnam, although some inhabitants of Twin-Earth closely resemble inhabitants of Earth, ‘water’, when uttered by a Twin-Earthling, does not mean water. Water is H2O, and, on Twin-Earth, the word ‘water’ designates a different substance, XYZ, Twin-water. The moral drawn by Putnam is that the meanings of at least some of our words, and the significance of some of our thoughts, depend, in part, on how things stand outside our heads. Two “molecular duplicates,” two agents with qualitatively similar mental lives, might mean very different things by their utterances and think very different thoughts. Although Twin-Earth has become a popular stopping-off place for philosophers en route to theories of meaning and mental content, others regard Twin-Earth as hopelessly remote, doubting that useful conclusions can be drawn about our Earthly circumstances from research conducted there. 

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

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

typetoken distinction, as drawn by Peirce, the contrast between a category and a member of that category. An individual or token is said to exemplify a type; it possesses the property that characterizes that type. In philosophy this distinction is often applied to linguistic expressions and to mental states, but it can be applied also to objects, events, properties, and states of affairs. Related to it are the distinctions between type and token individuation and between qualitative and numerical identity. Distinct tokens of the same type, such as two ants, may be qualitatively identical but cannot be numerically identical. Irrespective of the controversial metaphysical view that every individual has an essence, a type type theory, ramified typetoken distinction 936   936 to which it belongs essentially, every individual belongs to many types, although for a certain theoretical or practical purpose it may belong to one particularly salient type e.g., the entomologist’s Formicidae or the picnicker’s buttinsky. The typetoken distinction as applied in the philosophy of language marks the difference between linguistic expressions, such as words and sentences, which are the subject of linguistics, and the products of acts of writing or speaking the subject of speech act theory. Confusing the two can lead to conflating matters of speaker meaning withmatters of word or sentence meaning as noted by Grice. An expression is a linguistic type and can be used over and over, whereas a token of a type can be produced only once, though of course it may be reproduced copied. A writer composes an essay a type and produces a manuscript a token, of which there might be many copies more tokens. A token of a type is not the same as an occurrence of a type. In the previous sentence there are two occurrences of the word ‘type’; in each inscription of that sentence, there are two tokens of that word. In philosophy of mind the typetoken distinction underlies the contrast between two forms of physicalism, the typetype identity theory or type physicalism and the tokentoken identity theory or token physicalism. 

tzu jan, Chinese term meaning ‘naturally’, ‘spontaneity’, or ‘so-of-itself’. It is a Taoist term of art describing the ideal state of agents and quality of actions. A coordinate concept is wu wei nonaction, particularly in the Tao Te Ching. Taoists seek to eliminate the rational “human” perspective and return to spontaneous “Heavenly” inclinations. Actions then will be unself-conscious, and we and what we do will be tzu jan spontaneous. Wang Ch’ung presents an early critique of this Taoist notion in chapter 54 of his Lun Heng. Later thinkers appropriate the term to support their own positions. For example, Neo-Confucians regard particular familial and social obligations as tzu jan, as are certain virtuous inclinations. 

Unamuno, Miguel de 18641936, Spanish philosopher, scholar, and writer. Born in Bilbao, he studied in Bilbao and Madrid and taught Grecian and philosophy in Salamanca. His open criticism of the Spanish government led to dismissal from the  and exile 192430 and, again, to dismissal from the rectorship in 1936. Unamuno is an important figure in Spanish letters. Like Ortega y Gasset, his aim was to capture life in its complex emotional and intellectual dimensions rather than to describe the world scientifically. Thus, he favored fiction as a medium for his ideas and may be considered a precursor of existentialism. He wrote several philosophically significant novels, a commentary on Don Quijote 1905, and some poetry and drama; his philosophical ideas are most explicitly stated in Del sentimiento trágico de la vida “The Tragic Sense of Life,” 1913. Unamuno perceived a tragic sense permeating human life, a sense arising from our desire for immortality and from the certainty of death. In this predicament man must abandon all pretense

 of rationalism and embrace faith. Faith characterizes the authentic life, while reason leads to despair, but faith can never completely displace reason. Torn between the two, we can find hope only in faith; for reason deals only with abstractions, while we are “flesh and bones” and can find fulfillment only through commitment to an ideal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Valentinus A.D. 10065, Christian gnostic teacher. He was born in Alexandria, where he taught until he moved to Rome in 135. A dualist, he constructed an elaborate cosmology in which God the Father Bythos, or Deep Unknown unites the the feminine Silence Sige and in the overflow of love produces thirty successive divine emanations or aeons constituting the Pleroma fullness of the Godhead. Each emanation is arranged hierarchically with a graded existence, becoming progressively further removed from the Father and hence less divine. The lowest emanation, Sophia wisdom, yields to passion and seeks to reach, beyond her ability, to the Father, which causes her fall. In the process, she causes the creation of the material universe wherein resides evil and the loss of divine sparks from the Pleroma. The divine elements are embodied in those humans who are the elect. Jesus Christ is an aeon close to the Father and is sent to retrieve the souls into the heavenly Pleroma. Valentinus wrote a gospel. His sect stood out in the early church for ordaining women priests and prophetesses. 

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

Valla, Lorenzo c.140757, Italian humanist and historian who taught rhetoric in Pavia and was later secretary of King Alfonso I of Aragona in Naples, and apostolic secretary in Rome under Pope Nicholas V. In his dialogue On Pleasure or On the True Good 143134, Stoic and Epicurean interlocutors present their ethical views, which Valla proceeds to criticize from a Christian point of view. This work is often regarded as a defense of Epicurean hedonism, because Valla equates the good with pleasure; but he claims that Christians can find pleasure only in heaven. His description of the Christian pleasures reflects the contemporary Renaissance attitude toward the joys of life and might have contributed to Valla’s reputation for hedonism. In the later work, On Free Will between 1435 and 1448, Valla discusses the conflict between divine foreknowledge and human freedom and rejects Boethius’s then predominantly accepted solution. Valla distinguishes between God’s knowledge and God’s will, but denies that there is a rational solution of the apparent conflict between God’s will and human freedom. As a historian, he is famous for The Donation of Constantine 1440, which denounces as spurious the famous document on which medieval jurists and theologians based the papal rights to secular power.

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

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

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

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

vasana, Buddhist philosophical term meaning ‘tendency’. It is an explanatory category, designed to show how it is possible to talk of tendencies or capacities in persons on the basis of a metaphysic that denies that there are any enduring existents in the continua of events conventionally called “persons.” According to this metaphysic, when we speak of the tendency of persons understood in this way to do this or that  to be jealous, lustful, angry  we are speaking of the presence of karmic seeds in continua of events, seeds that may mature at different times and so produce tendencies to engage in this or that action. 

Vasubandhu fourthfifth century A.D., Indian philosopher, a Mahayana Buddhist of the Yogacara or Sarvastivada school. He wrote the Abhidharmakosá “Treasure Chamber of the Abhidharma,” the Abhidharma being a compilation of Buddhist philosophy and psychology and the Vimcatika “Proof in Twenty Verses That Everything Is Only Conception”. He held that the mind is only a stream of ideas and that there is nothing non-mental. In contrast to Buddhist direct and representational realists, he argued that dream experience seems to be of objects located in space and existing independent of the dreamer without their actually doing so. 

Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers de 171547, French army officer and secular moralist. Discovering Plutarch at an early age, he critically adopted Stoic idealism. Poverty-stricken, obscure, and solitary, he was ambitious for glory. Though eventful, his military career brought little reward. In poor health, he resigned in 1744 to write. In 1747, he published Introduction to the Knowledge of the Human Mind, followed by Reflections and Maxims. Voltaire and Mirabeau praised his vigorous and eclectic thought, which aimed at teaching people how to live. Vauvenargues was a deist and an optimist who equally rejected Bossuet’s Christian pessimism and La Rochefoucauld’s secular pessimism. He asserted human freedom and natural goodness, but denied social and political equality. A lover of martial virtues and noble passions, Vauvenargues crafted memVardhamana Jnatrputra Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers de 951   951 orable maxims and excelled in character depiction. His complete works were published in 1862. 

Vázquez, Gabriel 15491604, Spanish Jesuit theologian and philosopher. Born in Villaescusa de Haro, he studied at Alcalá de Henares and taught at Ocaña, Madrid, Alcalá, and Rome. He was a prolific writer; his philosophically most important work is a commentary on Aquinas’s Summa theologiae. Vázquez was strongly influenced by Aquinas, but he differed from him in important ways and showed marked leanings toward Augustine. He rejected the Thomistic doctrine of the real distinction between essence and existence and the position that matter designated by quantity materia signata quantitate is the principle of individuation. Instead of Aquinas’s five ways for proving the existence of God, he favored a version of the moral argument similar to the one later used by Kant and also favored the teleological argument. Following Augustine, he described the union of body and soul as a union of two parts. Finally, Vázquez modified the doctrine of formal and objective concepts present in Toletus and Suárez in a way that facilitated the development of idealism in early modern philosophy. He accomplished this by identifying the actual being esse of the thing that is known conceptus objectivus with the act conceptus formalis whereby it is known.  

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

Vedas, the earliest Hindu sacred texts. ‘Veda’ literally means a text that contains knowledge, in particular sacred knowledge concerning the nature of ultimate reality and the proper human ways of relating thereto. Passed down orally and then composed over a millennium beginning around 1400 B.C., there are four collections of Vedas: the Rg Veda 1,028 sacred songs of praise with some cosmological speculations, the Sama Veda chants to accompany sacrifices, Yajur Veda sacrificial formulas and mantras, and Atharva Veda magical formulas, myths, and legends. The term ‘Veda’ also applies to the Brahmanas ritual and theological commentaries on the prior Vedas; the Aranyakasmainly composed by men who have passed through their householder stage of life and retired to the forest to meditate, and the Upanishads, which more fully reflect the idea of theoretical sacred knowledge, while the early Vedas are more practice-oriented, concerned with ritual and sacrifice. All these texts are regarded as scripture sruti, “heard” in an oral tradition believed to be handed down by sages by whom their content was “seen.” The content is held to express a timeless and uncreated wisdom produced by neither God nor human. It contains material ranging from instructions concerning the proper sacrifices to make and how to make them properly, through hymns and mantras, to accounts of the nature of Brahman, humankind, and the cosmos. Sruti contrasts with smrti tradition, which is humanly produced commentary on scripture. The Bhagavad Gita, perhaps strictly smrti, typically has the de facto status of sruti.

Venn diagram, a logic diagram invented by the logician John Venn in which standard form statements the four kinds listed below are represented by two appropriately marked overlapping circles, as follows: Syllogisms are represented by three overlapping circles, as in the examples below. If a few simple rules are followed, e.g. “diagram universal premises first,” then in a valid syllogism diagramming the premises automatically gives a diagram in which the conclusion is represented. In an invalid syllogism diagramming the premises does not automatically give a diagram in which the conclusion is represented, as below. Venn diagrams are less perspicuous for the beginner than Euler diagrams.

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

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

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

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

Vienna Circle  vide ayerism -- a group of philosophers and scientists who met periodically for discussions in Vienna from 1922 to 1938 and who proposed a self-consciously revolutionary conception of scientific knowledge. The Circle was initiated by the mathematician Hans Hahn to continue a prewar forum with the physicist Philip Frank and the social scientist Otto Neurath after the arrival in Vienna of Moritz Schlick, a philosopher who had studied with Max Planck. Carnap joined in 1926 from 1931 in Prague; other members included Herbert Feigl from 1930 in Iowa, Friedrich Waismann, Bergmann, Viktor Kraft, and Bela von Juhos. Viennese associates of the Circle included Kurt Gödel, Karl Menger, Felix Kaufmann, and Edgar Zilsel. Popper was not a member or associate. During its formative period the Circle’s activities were confined to discussion meetings many on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. In 1929 the Circle entered its public period with the formation of the Verein Ernst Mach, the publication of its manifesto Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung: Der Wiener Kreis by Carnap, Hahn, and Neurath translated in Neurath, Empiricism and Sociology, 1973, and the first of a series of philosophical monographs edited by Frank and Schlick. It also began collaboration with the independent but broadly like-minded Berlin “Society of Empirical Philosophy,” including Reichenbach, Kurt Grelling, Kurt Lewin, Friedrich Kraus, Walter Dubislav, Hempel, and Richard von Mises: the groups together organized their first public conferences in Prague and Königsberg, acquired editorship of a philosophical journal renamed Erkenntnis, and later organized the international Unity of Science congresses. The death and dispersion of key members from 1934 onward Hahn died in 1934, Neurath left for Holland in 1934, Carnap left for the United States in 1935, Schlick died in 1936 did not mean the extinction of Vienna Circle philosophy. Through the subsequent work of earlier visitors Ayer, Ernest Nagel, Quine and members and collaborators who emigrated to the United States Carnap, Feigl, Frank, Hempel, and Reichenbach, the logical positivism of the Circle Reichenbach and Neurath independently preferred “logical empiricism” strongly influenced the development of analytic philosophy. The Circle’s discussions concerned the philosophy of formal and physical science, and even though their individual publications ranged much wider, it is the attitude toward science that defines the Circle within the philosophical movements of central Europe at the time. The Circle rejected the need for a specifically philosophical epistemology that bestowed justification on knowledge claims from beyond science itself. In this, the Circle may also have drawn on a distinct Austrian tradition a thesis of its historian Neurath: in most of Germany, science and philosophy had parted ways during the nineteenth century. Starting with Helmholtz, of course, there also arose a movement that sought to distinguish the scientific respectability of the Kantian tradition from the speculations of German idealism, yet after 1880 neo-Kantians insisted on the autonomy of epistemology, disparaging earlier fellow travelers as “positivist.” Yet the program of reducing the knowledge claim of science and providing legitimations to what’s left found wide favor with the more empirical-minded like Mach. Comprehensive description, not explanation, of natural phenomena became the task for theorists who no longer looked to philosophy for foundations, but found them in the utility of their preferred empirical procedures. Along with the positivists, the Vienna Circle thought uneconomical the Kantian answer to the question of the possibility of objectivity, the synthetic a priori. Moreover, the Vienna Circle and its conventionalist precursors Poincaré and Duhem saw them contradicted by the results of formal science. Riemann’s geometries showed that questions about the geometry of physical space were open to more than one answer: Was physical space Euclidean or non-Euclidean? It fell to Einstein and the pre-Circle Schlick Space and Time in Contemporary Physics, 1917 to argue that relativity theory showed the untenability of Kant’s conception of space and time as forever fixed synthetic a priori forms of intuition. Yet Frege’s anti-psychologistic critique had also shown empiricism unable to account for knowledge of arithmetic and the conventionalists had ended the positivist dream of a theory of experiential elements that bridged the gap between descriptions of fact and general principles of science. How, then, could the Vienna Circle defend the claim  under attack as just one worldview among others  that science provides knowledge? The Circle confronted the problem of constitutive conventions. As befitted their self-image beyond Kant and Mach, they found their paraVienna Circle Vienna Circle 956   956 digmatic answer in the theory of relativity: they thought that irreducible conventions of measurement with wide-ranging implications were sharply separable from pure facts like point coincidences. Empirical theories were viewed as logical structures of statements freely created, yet accountable to experiential input via their predictive consequences identifiable by observation. The Vienna Circle defended empiricism by the reconceptualization of the relation between a priori and a posteriori inquiries. First, in a manner sympathetic to Frege’s and Russell’s doctrine of logicism and guided by Wittgenstein’s notion of tautology, arithmetic was considered a part of logic and treated as entirely analytical, without any empirical content; its truth was held to be exhausted by what is provable from the premises and rules of a formal symbolic system. Carnap’s Logical Syntax of Language, 1934, assimilated Gödel’s incompleteness result by claiming that not every such proof could be demonstrated in those systems themselves which are powerful enough to represent classical arithmetic. The synthetic a priori was not needed for formal science because all of its results were non-synthetic. Second, the Circle adopted verificationism: supposedly empirical concepts whose applicability was indiscernible were excluded from science. The terms for unobservables were to be reconstructed by logical operations from the observational terms. Only if such reconstructions were provided did the more theoretical parts of science retain their empirical character. Just what kind of reduction was aimed for was not always clear and earlier radical positions were gradually weakened; Reichenbach instead considered the relation between observational and theoretical statements to be probabilistic. Empirical science needed no synthetic a priori either; all of its statements were a posteriori. Combined with the view that the analysis of the logical form of expressions allowed for the exact determination of their combinatorial value, verificationism was to exhibit the knowledge claims of science and eliminate metaphysics. Whatever meaning did not survive identification with the scientific was deemed irrelevant to knowledge claims Reichenbach did not share this view either. Since the Circle also observed the then long-discussed ban on issuing unconditional value statements in science, its metaethical positions may be broadly characterized as endorsing noncognitivism. Its members were not simply emotivists, however, holding that value judgments were mere expressions of feeling, but sought to distinguish the factual and evaluative contents of value judgments. Those who, like Schlick Questions of Ethics, 1930, engaged in metaethics, distinguished the expressive component x desires y of value judgments from their implied descriptive component doing zfurthers aim y and held that the demand inherent in moral principles possessed validity if the implied description was true and the expressed desire was endorsed. This analysis of normative concepts did not render them meaningless but allowed for psychological and sociological studies of ethical systems; Menger’s formal variant Morality, Decision and Social Organization, 1934 proved influential for decision theory. The semiotic view that knowledge required structured representations was developed in close contact with foundational research in mathematics and depended on the “new” logic of Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein, out of which quantification theory was emerging. Major new results were quickly integrated albeit controversially and Carnap’s works reflect the development of the conception of logic itself. In his Logical Syntax he adopted the “Principle of Tolerance” vis-à-vis the question of the foundation of the formal sciences: the choice of logics and languages was conventional and constrained, apart from the demand for consistency, only by pragmatic considerations. The proposed language form and its difference from alternatives simply had to be stated as exactly as possible: whether a logico-linguistic framework as a whole correctly represented reality was a cognitively meaningless question. Yet what was the status of the verifiability principle? Carnap’s suggestion that it represents not a discovery but a proposal for future scientific language use deserves to be taken seriously, for it not only characterizes his own conventionalism, but also amplifies the Circle’s linguistic turn, according to which all philosophy concerned ways of representing, rather than the nature of the represented. What the Vienna Circle “discovered” was how much of science was conventional: its verificationism was a proposal for accommodating the creativity of scientific theorizing without accommodating idealism. Whether an empirical claim in order to be meaningful needed to be actually verified or only potentially verifiable, or fallible or only potentially testable, and whether so by current or only by future means, became matters of discussion during the 1930s. Equally important for the question whether the Circle’s conventionalism avoided idealism and metaphysics were the issues of the status of theoretical discourse about unobservables and the nature of science’s empirical foundation. The view suggested in Schlick’s early General Theory of Knowledge 1918, 2d. ed. 1925 and Frank’s The Causal Law and its Limitations 1932 and elaborated in Carnap’s “Logical Foundations of the Unity of Science” in Foundations of the Unity of Science I.1, 1938 characterized the theoretical language as an uninterpreted calculus that is related to the fully interpreted observational language only by partial definitions. Did such an instrumentalism require for its empirical anchor the sharp separation of observational from theoretical terms? Could such a separation even be maintained? Consider the unity of science thesis. According to the methodological version, endorsed by all members, all of science abides by the same criteria: no basic methodological differences separate the natural from the social or cultural sciences Geisteswissenschaften as claimed by those who distinguish between ‘explanation’ and ‘understanding’. According to the metalinguistic version, all objects of scientific knowledge could in principle be comprehended by the same “universal” language. Physicalism asserts that this is the language that speaks of physical objects. While everybody in the Circle endorsed physicalism in this sense, the understanding of its importance varied, as became clear in the socalled protocol sentence debate. The nomological version of the unity thesis was only later clearly distinguished: whether all scientific laws could be reduced to those of physics was another matter on which Neurath came to differ. Ostensively, this debate concerned the question of the form, content, and epistemological status of scientific evidence statements. Schlick’s unrevisable “affirmations” talked about phenomenal states in statements not themselves part of the language of science “The Foundation of Knowledge,” 1934, translated in Ayer, ed., Logical Positivism. Carnap’s preference changed from unrevisable statements in a primitive methodologically solipsistic protocol language that were fallibly translatable into the physicalistic system language 1931; see Unity of Science, 1934, via arbitrary revisable statements of that system language that are taken as temporary resting points in testing 1932, to revisable statements in the scientific observation language 1935; see “Testability and Meaning,” Philosophy of Science, 193637. These changes were partly prompted by Neurath, whose own revisable “protocol statements” spoke, amongst other matters, of the relation between observers and the observed in a “universal slang” that mixed expressions of the physicalistically cleansed colloquial and the high scientific languages “Protocol Statements,” 1932, translated in Ayer, ed., Logical Positivism. Ultimately, these proposals answered to different projects. Since all agreed that all statements of science were hypothetical, the questions of their “foundation” concerned rather the very nature of Vienna Circle philosophy. For Schlick philosophy became the activity of meaning determination inspired by Wittgenstein; Carnap pursued it as the rational reconstruction of knowledge claims concerned only with what Reichenbach called the “context of justification” its logical aspects, not the “context of discovery”; and Neurath replaced philosophy altogether with a naturalistic, interdisciplinary, empirical inquiry into science as a distinctive discursive practice, precluding the orthodox conception of the unity of science. The Vienna Circle was neither a monolithic nor a necessarily reductionist philosophical movement, and quick assimilation to the tradition of British empiricism mistakes its struggles with the formcontent dichotomy for foundationalism, when instead sophisticated responses to the question of the presuppositions of their own theories of knowledge were being developed. In its time and place, the Circle was a minority voice; the sociopolitical dimension of its theories  stressed more by some Neurath than others Schlick  as a renewal of Enlightenment thought, ultimately against the rising tide of Blutund-Boden metaphysics, is gaining recognition. After the celebrated “death” of reductionist logical positivism in the 1960s the historical Vienna Circle is reemerging as a multifaceted object of the history of analytical philosophy itself, revealing in nuce different strands of reasoning still significant for postpositivist theory of science.  .

Vijñanavada, an idealist school of Buddhist thought in India in the fourth century A.D. It engaged in lively debates on important epistemological and metaphysical issues with the Buddhist Madhyamika school known for its relativistic and nihilistic views, with Buddhist realist schools, and with various Hindu philosophical systems of its time. Madhyamika philosophy used effective dialectic to show the contradictions in our everyday philosophical notions such as cause, substance, self, etc., but the Vijñanavada school, while agreeing with the Madhyamikas on this point, went further and Vijñanavada Vijñanavada 958   958 gave innovative explanations regarding the origin and the status of our mental constructions and of the mind itself. Unlike the Madhyamikas, who held that reality is “emptiness” sunyata, the Vijñanavadins held that the reality is consciousness or the mind vijñana. The Vijñanavada school is also known as Yogacara. Its idealism is remarkably similar to the subjective idealism of Berkeley. Consistent with the process ontology of all the Buddhist schools in India, Vijñanavadins held that consciousness or the mind is not a substance but an ever-changing stream of ideas or impressions. 

vijñapti, Indian Buddhist term meaning ‘representation’, used by some philosophers as a label for a mental event that appears, phenomenally, to have an intentional object and to represent or communicate to its possessor some information about extramental reality. The term was used mostly by Buddhists with idealist tendencies who claimed that there is nothing but representation, nothing but communicative mental events, and that a complete account of human experience can be given without postulating the existence of anything extramental. This view was not uncontroversial, and in defending it Indian Buddhists developed arguments that are in important ways analogous to those constructed by Western idealists.

violence, 1 the use of force to cause physical harm, death, or destruction physical violence; 2 the causing of severe mental or emotional harm, as through humiliation, deprivation, or brainwashing, whether using force or not psychological violence; 3 more broadly, profaning, desecrating, defiling, or showing disrespect for i.e., “doing violence” to something valued, sacred, or cherished; 4 extreme physical force in the natural world, as in tornados, hurricanes, and earthquakes. Physical violence may be directed against persons, animals, or property. In the first two cases, harm, pain, suffering, and death figure prominently; in the third, illegality or illegitimacy the forceful destruction of property is typically considered violence when it lacks authorization. Psychological violence applies principally to persons. It may be understood as the violation of beings worthy of respect. But it can apply to higher animals as well as in the damaging mental effects of some experimentation, e.g., involving isolation and deprivation. Environmentalists sometimes speak of violence against the environment, implying both destruction and disrespect for the natural world. Sometimes the concept of violence is used to characterize acts or practices of which one morally disapproves. To this extent it has a normative force. But this prejudges whether violence is wrong. One may, on the other hand, regard inflicting harm or death as only prima facie wrong i.e., wrong all other things being equal. This gives violence a normative character, establishing its prima facie wrongness. But it leaves open the ultimate moral justifiability of its use. Established practices of physical or psychological violence  e.g., war, capital punishment  constitute institutionalized violence. So do illegal or extralegal practices like vigilantism, torture, and state terrorism e.g., death squads. Anarchists sometimes regard the courts, prisons, and police essential to maintaining the state as violence. Racism and sexism may be considered institutional violence owing to their associated psychological as well as physical violence. 

vipassana Pali, ‘insight’, ‘discernment’, Indian Buddhist term used to describe both a particular kind of meditational practice and the states of consciousness produced by it. The meditational practice is aimed at getting the practitioner to perceive and cognize in accord with the major categories of Buddhist metaphysics. Since that metaphysics is constitutively deconstructive, being concerned with parts rather than wholes, the method too is analytic and deconstructive. The practitioner is encouraged to analyze the perceived solidities and continuities of her everyday experience into transitory events, and so to cultivate the perception of such events until she experiences the world no longer in terms of medium-sized physical objects that endure through time, but solely in terms of transitory events. Arriving at such a condition is called the attainment of vipassana.  

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

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

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

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

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

Vitoria, Dominican jurist, political philosopher, and theologian who is regarded as the founder of modern international law. Born in Vitoria or Burgos, he studied and taught at the  of SaintJacques in Paris, where he met Erasmus and Vives. He also taught at the  of San Gregorio in Valladolid and at Salamanca. His most famous works are the notes relectiones for twelve public addresses he delivered at Salamanca, published posthumously in 1557. Two relectiones stand out: De Indis and De jure belli. They were responses to the legal and political issues raised by the discovery and colonization of America. In contrast with Mariana’s contract Arianism, Vitoria held that political society is our natural state. The aim of the state is to promote the common good and preserve the rights of citizens. Citizenship is the result of birthplace jus solis rather than blood jus sanguini. The authority of the state resides in the body politic but is transferred to rulers for its proper exercise. The best form of government is monarchy because it preserves the unity necessary for social action while safeguarding individual freedoms. Apart from the societies of individual states, humans belong to an international society. This society has its own authority and laws that establish the rights and duties of the states. These laws constitute the law of nations jus gentium.

Vives, Juan Luis 1492?1540, Spanish humanist and teacher. Born in Valencia, he attended the  of Paris 150914 and lived most of his life in Flanders. With his friend Erasmus he prepared a widely used commentary 1522 of Augustine’s De civitate Dei. From 1523 to 1528 Vives visited England, taught at Oxford, befriended More, and became Catherine of Aragon’s confidant. While in Paris, Vives repudiated medieval logic as useless Adversus pseudodialecticos, 1520 and proposed instead a dialectic emphasizing resourceful reasoning and clear and persuasive exposition De tradendis disciplinis, 1532. His method was partially inspired by Rudolph Agricola and probably influential upon Peter Ramus. Less interested in theology than Erasmus or More, he surpassed both in philosophical depth. As one of the great pedagogues of his age, Vives proposed a plan of education that substituted the Aristotelian ideal of speculative certainty for a pragmatic probability capable of guiding action. Vives enlarged the scope of women’s education De institutione feminae Christianae, 1524 and contributed to the teaching of classical Latin Exercitatio linguae latinae, 1538. A champion of EuroVisistadvaita Vedanta Vives, Juan Luis 962   962 pean unity against the Turks, he professed the belief that international order De concordia, 1526 depended upon the control of passion De anima et vita, 1538. As a social reformer, Vives pioneered the secularization of welfare De subventione pauperum, 1526 and opposed the abuse of legal jargon Aedes legum, 1520. Although his Jewish parents were victimized by the Inquisition, Vives remained a Catholic and managed to write an apology of Christianity without taking sides in controversial theological matters De veritate fidei, 1543. C.G.Nore.

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

Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet 16941778, French philosopher and writer who won early fame as a playwright and poet and later was an influential popularizer of Newtonian natural philosophy. His enduring reputation rests on his acerbically witty essays on religious and moral topics especially the Philosophical Letters, 1734, and the Philosophical Dictionary, 1764, his brilliant stories, and his passionate polemics against the injustices of the ancien régime. In Whitehead’s phrase, he was more “a philosophe than a philosopher” in the current specialized disciplinary sense. He borrowed most of his views on metaphysics and epistemology from Locke, whose work, along with Newton’s, he came to know and extravagantly admire during his stay 172628 in England. His is best placed in the line of great French literary moralists that includes Montaigne, Pascal, Diderot, and Camus. Voltaire’s position is skeptical, empirical, and humanistic. His skepticism is not of the radical sort that concerned Descartes. But he denies that we can find adequate support for the grand metaphysical claims of systematic philosophers, such as Leibniz, or for the dogmatic theology of institutional religions. Voltaire’s empiricism urges us to be content with the limited and fallible knowledge of our everyday experience and its development through the methods of empirical science. His humanism makes a plea, based on his empiricist skepticism, for religious and social tolerance: none of us can know enough to be justified in persecuting those who disagree with us on fundamental philosophical and theological matters. Voltaire’s positive view is that our human condition, for all its flaws and perils, is meaningful and livable strictly in its own terms, quite apart from any connection to the threats and promises of dubious transcendental realms. Voltaire’s position is well illustrated by his views on religion. Although complex doctrines about the Trinity or the Incarnation strike him as gratuitous nonsense, he nonetheless is firmly convinced of the reality of a good God who enjoins us through our moral sense to love one another as brothers and sisters. Indeed, it is precisely this moral sense that he finds outraged by the intolerance of institutional Christianity. His deepest religious thinking concerns the problem of evil, which he treated in his “Poem of the Lisbon Earthquake” and the classic tales Zadig 1747 and Candide 1759. He rejects the Panglossian view held by Candide’s Dr. Pangloss, a caricature of Leibniz that we can see the hand of providence in our daily life but is prepared to acknowledge that an all-good God does not as an extreme deism would hold let his universe just blindly run. Whatever metaphysical truth there may be in the thought that “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds,” Voltaire insists that this idea is ludicrous as a practical response to evil and recommends instead concrete action to solve specific local problems: “We must cultivate our garden.” Voltaire was and remains an immensely controversial figure. Will Durant regarded him as “the greatest man who ever lived,” while Joseph de Maistre maintained that “admiration for Voltaire is an infallible sign of a corrupt soul.” Perhaps it is enough to say that he wrote with unequaled charm and wit and stood for values that are essential to, if perhaps not the very core of, our humanity.

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

von Neumann, John 190357, Hungarian-born American mathematician, physicist, logician, economist, engineer, and computer scientist. Born in Budapest and trained in Hungary, Switzerland, and Germany, he visited Princeton  in 1930 and became a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in 1933. His most outstanding work in pure mathematics was on rings of operators in Hilbert spaces. In quantum mechanics he showed the equivalence of matrix mechanics to wave mechanics, and argued that quantum mechanics could not be embedded in an underlying deterministic system. He established important results in set theory and mathematical logic, and worked on Hilbert’s Program to prove the consistency of mathematics within mathematics until he was shocked by Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. He established the mathematical theory of games and later showed its application to economics. In these many different areas, von Neumann demonstrated a remarkable ability to analyze a subject matter and develop a mathematical formalism that answered basic questions about that subject matter; formalization in logic is the special case of this process where the subject matter is language and reasoning. With the advent of World War II von Neumann turned his great analytical ability to more applied areas of hydrodynamics, ballistics, and nuclear explosives. In 1945 he began to work on the design, use, and theory of electronic computers. He later became a leading scientist in government. Von Neumann contributed to the hardware architecture of the modern electronic computer, and he invented the first modern program language. A program in this language could change the addresses of its own instructions, so that it became possible to use the same subroutine on different data structures and to write programs to process programs. Von Neumann proposed to use a computer as a research tool for exploring very complex phenomena, such as the discontinuous nature of shock waves. He began the development of a theory of automata that would cover computing, communication, and control systems, as well as natural organisms, biological evolution, and societies. To this end, he initiated the study of probabilistic automata and of selfreproducing and cellular automata.

von Wright, G. H., Finnish philosopher, one of the most influential analytic philosophers of the twentieth century. His early work, influenced by logical empiricism, is on logic, probability, and induction, including contributions in modal and deontic logic, the logic of norms and action, preference logic, tense logic, causality, and determinism. In the 1970s his ideas about the explanation of action helped to link the analytic tradition to Continental hermeneutics. His most important contribution is A Treatise on Induction and Probability 1951, which develops a system of eliminative induction using the concepts of necessary and sufficient condition. In 1939 von Wright went to Cambridge to meet Broad, and he attended Wittgenstein’s lectures. Regular discussions with Moore also had an impact on him. In 1948 von Wright succeeded Wittgenstein as professor at Cambridge . After Wittgenstein’s death in 1951, von Wright returned to Helsinki. Together with Anscombe and Rush Rhees, he became executor and editor of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass. The study, organization, systematization, and publication of this exceptionally rich work became a lifelong task for him. In his Cambridge years von Wright became interested in the logical properties of various modalities: alethic, deontic, epistemic. An Essay in Modal Logic 1951 studies, syntactically, various deductive systems of modal logic. That year he published his famous article “Deontic Logic” in Mind. It made him the founder of modern deontic logic. These logical works profoundly influenced analytic philosophy, especially action theory. Von Wright distinguishes technical oughts means-ends relationships from norms issued by a norm-authority. His Norm and Action 1963 discusses philosophical problems concerning the existence of norms and the truth of normative statements. His main work on metaethics is The Varieties of Goodness 1963. In Explanation and Understanding 1971 he turned to philosophical problems concerning the human sciences. He defends a manipulation view of causality, where the concept of action is basic for that of cause: human action cannot be explained causally by laws, but must be understood intentionally. The basic model of intentionality is the practical syllogism, which explains action by a logical connection with wants and beliefs. This work, sometimes characterized as anti-positivist analytical hermeneutics, bridges analytic and Continental philosophy. His studies in truth, knowledge, modality, lawlikeness, causality, determinism, norms, and practical inference were published in 198384 in his Philosophical Papers. von Neumann, John von Wright, G. H. 965   965 In 1961 von Wright became a member of the Academy of Finland, the highest honor Finland gives to its scientists. Over many years he has written, in Swedish and Finnish, eloquent essays in the history of ideas and the philosophy of culture. He has become increasingly critical of the modern scientific-technological civilization, its narrowly instrumental concept of rationality, and its myth of progress. His public pleas for peace, human rights, and a more harmonious coexistence of human beings and nature have made him the most esteemed intellectual in the Scandinavian countries. 

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

Vorstellung voting paradox 966   966 wang, pa, Chinese political titles meaning ‘king’ and ‘hegemon’, respectively. A true wang has the Mandate of Heaven and rules by te rather than by force. The institution of the pa developed during a period in which the kings of China lacked any real power. In order to bring an end to political chaos, the most powerful of the nobles was appointed pa, and effectively ruled while the wang reigned. During the Warring States period in China 403221 B.C., rulers began to assume the title of wang regardless of whether they had either the power of a pa or the right to rule of a wang. After this period, the title of Emperor ti or huang-ti replaced wang.  

Wang Ch’ung A.D. 27100?, Chinese philosopher, commonly regarded as the most independent-minded thinker in the Later Han period 25220. He wrote the Lun-heng “Balanced Inquiries”. Since Tung Chung-shu, Confucian doctrine of the unity of man and nature had degenerated into one of mutual influence, with talk of strange phenomena and calamities abounding. Wang Ch’ung cast serious doubts on such superstitions. He even dared to challenge the authority of Confucius and Mencius. His outlook was naturalistic. According to him, things in the world are produced by the interaction of material forces ch’i. He rejected the teleological point of view and was fatalistic. 

Wang Fu-chih 161992, Chinese philosopher and innovative Confucian thinker. Wang attacked the Neo-Confucian dualism of li pattern and ch’i ether, arguing that li is the orderly structure of individual ch’i implements/things and events, which are composed of ch’i ether. Wang rejected all transcendental ontology and believed society evolves and improves over time. He is touted as a “materialist” by Marxist thinkers in contemporary China, though the term is hardly applicable, as is clear from his criticisms of Shao Yung. Wang attacked Shao’s overly “objective” account of the world, arguing that all such formal descriptions fail because they disregard intuition, our only access to the lively, shen spiritual nature of the universe. 

Wang Pi A.D. 22649, Chinese philosopher of the Hsüan hsüeh Mysterious Learning School. He is described, along with thinkers like Kuo Hsiang, as a Neo-Taoist. Unlike Kuo, who believed the world to be self-generated, Wang claimed it arose from a mysterious unified state called wu non-being. But like Kuo, Wang regarded Confucius as the one true sage, arguing that Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu only “talked about” non-being, whereas Confucius embodied it. Wang is important for his development of the notion li pattern and his pioneering use of the paired concepts t’i substance and yung function. His commentary on the Tao Te Ching, the oldest known, has had a profound and persistent influence on later Chinese thought.

Wang Yang-ming 14721529, Chinese philosopher known for his doctrines of the unity of knowledge and action chih-hsing ho-i and liangchih innate knowledge of the good. Wang was also known as a sort of metaphysical idealist, anticipated by Lu Hsiang-shan, for his insistence on the quasi-identity of mind and li principle, reason. The basic concern of Wang’s philosophy is the question, How can one become a Confucian sage sheng? This is a question intelligible only in the light of understanding and commitment to the Confucian vision of jen or ideal of the universe as a moral community. Wang reminded his students that the concrete significance of such a vision in human life cannot be exhausted with any claim to finality. He stressed that one must get rid of any selfish desires in the pursuit of jen. Unlike Chu Hsi, Wang showed little interest in empirical inquiry concerning the rationales of existing things. For him, “things” are the objectives of moral will. To investigate things is to rectify one’s mind, to get rid of evil thoughts and to do good. Rectification of the mind involves, in particular, an acknowledgment of the unity of moral knowledge and action chihhsing ho-i, an enlargement of the scope of moral concern in the light of the vision of jen, rather than extensive acquisition of factual knowledge. 

Ward, James 18431925, English philosopher and psychologist. Influenced by Lotze, Herbart, and Brentano, Ward sharply criticized Bain’s associationism and its allied nineteenth-century reductive naturalism. His psychology rejected the associationists’ sensationism, which regarded mind as passive, capable only of sensory receptivity and composed solely of cognitive presentations. Ward emphasized the mind’s inherent activity, asserting, like Kant, the prior existence of an inferred but necessarily existing ego or subject capable of feeling and, most importantly, of conation, shaping both experience and behavior by the willful exercise of attention. Ward’s psychology stresses attention and will. In his metaphysics, Ward resisted the naturalists’ mechanistic materialism, proposing instead a teleological spiritualistic monism. While his criticisms of associationism and naturalism were telling, Ward was a transitional figure whose positive influence is limited, if we except H. P. Grice who follows him to a T. Although sympathetic to scientific psychology  he founded scientific psychology in Britain by establishing a psychology laboratory   he, with his student Stout, represented the beginning of armchair psychology at Oxford, which Grice adored. Through Stout he influenced the hormic psychology of McDougall, and Grice who calls himself a Stoutian “until Prichard converted me”. Ward’s major work is “Psychology” Encyclopedia Britannica, 9th ed., 1886, reworked as Psychological Principles 1918. 

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

Weber, Max 18641920, German social theorist and sociologist. Born in Berlin in a liberal and intellectual household, he taught economics in Heidelberg, where his circle included leading sociologists and philosophers such as Simmel and Lukacs. Although Weber gave up his professorship after a nervous breakdown in 1889, he remained important in public life, an adviser to the commissions that drafted the peace treaty at Versailles and the Weimar constitution. Weber’s social theory was influenced philosophically by both neo-Kantianism and Nietzsche, creating tensions in a theorist who focused much of his attention on Occidental rationalism and yet was a noncognitivist in ethics. He wrote many comparative studies on topics such as law and urbanization and a celebrated study of the cultural factors responsible for the rise of capitalism, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism 1904. But his major, synthetic work in social theory is Economy and Society 1914; it includes a methodological introduction to the basic concepts of sociology that has been treated by many philosophers of social science. One of the main theoretical goals of Weber’s work is to understand how social processes become “rationalized,” taking up certain themes want-belief model Weber, Max  968 of the German philosophy of history since Hegel as part of social theory. Culture, e.g., became rationalized in the process of the “disenchantment of worldviews” in the West, a process that Weber thought had “universal significance.” But because of his goal-oriented theory of action and his noncognitivism in ethics, Weber saw rationalization exclusively in terms of the spread of purposive, or meansends rationality Zweckrationalität. Rational action means choosing the most effective means of achieving one’s goals and implies judging the consequences of one’s actions and choices. In contrast, value rationality Wertrationalität consists of actions oriented to ultimate ends, where considerations of consequences are irrelevant. Although such action is rational insofar as it directs and organizes human conduct, the choice of such ends or values themselves cannot be a matter for rational or scientific judgment. Indeed, for Weber this meant that politics was the sphere for the struggle between irreducibly competing ultimate ends, where “gods and demons fight it out” and charismatic leaders invent new gods and values. Professional politicians, however, should act according to an “ethics of responsibility” Verantwortungsethik aimed at consequences, and not an “ethics of conviction” Gesinnungsethik aimed at abstract principles or ultimate ends. Weber also believed that rationalization brought the separation of “value spheres” that can never again be unified by reason: art, science, and morality have their own “logics.” Weber’s influential methodological writings reject positivist philosophy of science, yet call for “value neutrality.” He accepts the neo-Kantian distinction, common in his day under the influence of Rickert, between the natural and the human sciences, between the Natur- and the Geisteswissenschaften. Because human social action is purposive and meaningful, the explanations of social sciences must be related to the values Wertbezogen and ideals of the actors it studies. Against positivism, Weber saw an ineliminable element of Verstehen, or understanding of meanings, in the methodology of the human sciences. For example, he criticized the legal positivist notion of behavioral conformity for failing to refer to actors’ beliefs in legitimacy. But for Weber Verstehen is not intuition or empathy and does not exclude causal analysis; reasons can be causes. Thus, explanations in social science must have both causal and subjective adequacy. Weber also thought that adequate explanations of large-scale, macrosocial phenomena require the construction of ideal types, which abstract and summarize the common features of complex, empirical phenomena such as “sects,” “authority,” or even “the Protestant ethic.” Weberian ideal types are neither merely descriptive nor simply heuristic, but come at the end of inquiry through the successful theoretical analysis of diverse phenomena in various historical and cultural contexts. Weber’s analysis of rationality as the disenchantment of the world and the spread of purposive reason led him to argue that reason and progress could turn into their opposites, a notion that enormously influenced critical theory. Weber had a critical “diagnosis of the times” and a pessimistic philosophy of history. At the end of The Protestant Ethic Weber warns that rationalism is desiccating sources of value and constructing an “iron cage” of increasing bureaucratization, resulting in a loss of meaning and freedom in social life. According to Weber, these basic tensions of modern rationality cannot be resolved.  

Weil, Simone 190943, French religious philosopher and writer. Born in Paris, Weil was one of the first women to graduate from the École Normale Supérieure, having earlier studied under the philosopher Alain. While teaching in various French lycées Weil became involved in radical leftist politics, and her early works concern social problems and labor. They also show an attempt to work out a theory of action as fundamental to human knowing. This is seen first in her diploma essay, “Science and Perception in Descartes,” and later in her critique of Marx, capitalism, and technocracy in “Reflections concerning the Causes of Social Oppression and Liberty.” Believing that humans cannot escape certain basic harsh necessities of embodied life, Weil sought to find a way by which freedom and dignity could be achieved by organizing labor in such a way that the mind could understand that necessity and thereby come to consent to it. After a year of testing her theories by working in three factories in 193435, Weil’s early optimism was shattered by the discovery of what she called “affliction” malheur, a destruction of the human person to which one cannot consent. Three important religious experiences, however, caused her to attempt to put the problem into a Weber’s law Weil, Simone 969   969 larger context. By arguing that necessity obeys a transcendent goodness and then by using a kenotic model of Christ’s incarnation and crucifixion, she tried to show that affliction can have a purpose and be morally enlightening. The key is the renunciation of any ultimate possession of power as well as the social personality constituted by that power. This is a process of “attention” and “decreation” by which one sheds the veil that otherwise separates one from appreciating goodness in anything but oneself, but most especially from God. She understands God as a goodness that is revealed in self-emptying and in incarnation, and creation as an act of renunciation and not power. During her last months, while working for the Free French in London, Weil’s social and religious interests came together, especially in The Need for Roots. Beginning with a critique of social rights and replacing it with obligations, Weil sought to show, on the one hand, how modern societies had illegitimately become the focus of value, and on the other hand, how cultures could be reconstructed so that they would root humans in something more ultimate than themselves. Returning to her earlier themes, Weil argued that in order for this rootedness to occur, physical labor must become the spiritual core of culture. Weil died of tuberculosis while this book was in progress. Often regarded as mystical and syncretistic, Weil’s philosophy owes much to an original reading of Plato e.g., in Intimations of Christianity Among the Ancient Grecians as well as to Marx, Alain, and Christianity. Recent studies, however, have also seen her as significantly contributing to social, moral, and religious philosophy. Her concern with problems of action and persons is not dissimilar to Wittgenstein’s. 

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

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

Whewell, William 17941866, English historian, astronomer, and philosopher of science. He was a master of Trinity , Cambridge 184166. Francis Bacon’s early work on induction was furthered by Whewell, J. F. W. Herschel, and J. S. Mill, who attempted to create a logic of welfare economics Whewell, William 970   970 induction, a methodology that can both discover generalizations about experience and prove them to be necessary. Whewell’s theory of scientific method is based on his reading of the history of the inductive sciences. He thought that induction began with a non-inferential act, the superimposition of an idea on data, a “colligation,” a way of seeing facts in a “new light.” Colligations generalize over data, and must satisfy three “tests of truth.” First, colligations must be empirically adequate; they must account for the given data. Any number of ideas may be adequate to explain given data, so a more severe test is required. Second, because colligations introduce generalizations, they must apply to events or properties of objects not yet given: they must provide successful predictions, thereby enlarging the evidence in favor of the colligation. Third, the best inductions are those where evidence for various hypotheses originally thought to cover unrelated kinds of data “jumps together,” providing a consilience of inductions. Consilience characterizes those theories achieving large measures of simplicity, generality, unification, and deductive strength. Furthermore, consilience is a test of the necessary truth of theories, which implies that what many regard as merely pragmatic virtues of theories like simplicity and unifying force have an epistemic status. Whewell thus provides a strong argument for scientific realism. Whewell’s examples of consilient theories are Newton’s theory of universal gravitation, which covers phenomena as seemingly diverse as the motions of the heavenly bodies and the motions of the tides, and the undulatory theory of light, which explains both the polarization of light by crystals and the colors of fringes. There is evidence that Whewell’s methodology was employed by Maxwell, who designed the influential Cavendish Laboratories at Cambridge. Peirce and Mach favored Whewell’s account of method over Mill’s empiricist theory of induction.

Whitehead, A. N. 18611947, English mathematician, logician, philosopher of science, and metaphysician. Educated first at the Sherborne School in Dorsetshire and then at Trinity , Cambridge, Whitehead emerged as a first-class mathematician with a rich general background. In 1885 he became a fellow of Trinity  and remained there in a teaching role until 1910. In the early 1890s Bertrand Russell entered Trinity  as a student in mathematics; by the beginning of the new century Russell had become not only a student and friend but a colleague of Whitehead’s at Trinity . Each had written a first book on algebra Whitehead’s A Treatise on Universal Algebra won him election to the Royal Society in 1903. When they discovered that their projected second books largely overlapped, they undertook a collaboration on a volume that they estimated would take about a year to write; in fact, it was a decade later that the three volumes of their ground-breaking Principia Mathematica appeared, launching symbolic logic in its modern form. In the second decade of this century Whitehead and Russell drifted apart; their responses to World War I differed radically, and their intellectual interests and orientations diverged. Whitehead’s London period 191024 is often viewed as the second phase of a three-phase career. His association with the  of London involved him in practical issues affecting the character of working-class education. For a decade 191424 Whitehead held a professorship at the Imperial  of Science and Technology and also served as dean of the Faculty of Science in the , chair of the Academic Council which managed educational affairs in London, and chair of the council that managed Goldsmith’s . His book The Aims of Education 1928 is a collection of essays largely growing out of reflections on the experiences of these years. Intellectually, Whitehead’s interests were moving toward issues in the philosophy of science. In the years 191922 he published An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge, The Concept of Nature, and The Principle of Relativity  the third led to his later 1931 election as a fellow of the British Academy. In 1924, at the age of sixty-three, Whitehead made a dramatic move, both geographically and intellectually, to launch phase three of his career: never having formally studied philosophy in his life, he agreed to become professor of philosophy at Harvard , a position he held until retirement in 1937. The accompanying intellectual shift was a move from philosophy of science to metaphysics. The earlier investigations had assumed the self-containedness of nature: “nature is closed to mind.” The philosophy of nature examined nature at the level of abstraction entailed by this assumption. Whitehead had come to regard philosophy as “the critic of abstractions,” a notion introduced in Science and the Modern World 1925. This book traced the intertwined emergence of Newtonian science and its philosophical presuppositions. It noted that with the development of the theory of relativity in the twentieth century, scientific understanding had left behind the Newtonian conceptuality that had generated the still-dominant philosophical assumptions, and that those philosophical assumptions considered in themselves had become inadequate to explicate our full concrete experience. Philosophy as the critic of abstractions must recognize the limitations of a stance that assumes that nature is closed to mind, and must push deeper, beyond such an abstraction, to create a scheme of ideas more in harmony with scientific developments and able to do justice to human beings as part of nature. Science and the Modern World merely outlines what such a philosophy might be; in 1929 Whitehead published his magnum opus, titled Process and Reality. In this volume, subtitled “An Essay in Cosmology,” his metaphysical understanding is given its final form. It is customary to regard this book as the central document of what has become known as process philosophy, though Whitehead himself frequently spoke of his system of ideas as the philosophy of organism. Process and Reality begins with a sentence that sheds a great deal of light upon Whitehead’s metaphysical orientation: “These lectures are based upon a recurrence to that phase of philosophic thought which began with Descartes and ended with Hume.” Descartes, adapting the classical notion of substance to his own purposes, begins a “phase of philosophic thought” by assuming there are two distinct, utterly different kinds of substance, mind and matter, each requiring nothing but itself in order to exist. This assumption launches the reign of epistemology within philosophy: if knowing begins with the experiencing of a mental substance capable of existing by itself and cut off from everything external to it, then the philosophical challenge is to try to justify the claim to establish contact with a reality external to it. The phrase “and ended with Hume” expresses Whitehead’s conviction that Hume and more elegantly, he notes, Santayana showed that if one begins with Descartes’s metaphysical assumptions, skepticism is inevitable. Contemporary philosophers have talked about the end of philosophy. From Whitehead’s perspective such talk presupposes a far too narrow view of the nature of philosophy. It is true that a phase of philosophy has ended, a phase dominated by epistemology. Whitehead’s response is to offer the dictum that all epistemological difficulties are at bottom only camouflaged metaphysical difficulties. One must return to that moment of Cartesian beginning and replace the substance metaphysics with an orientation that avoids the epistemological trap, meshes harmoniously with the scientific understandings that have displaced the much simpler physics of Descartes’s day, and is consonant with the facts of evolution. These are the considerations that generate Whitehead’s fundamental metaphysical category, the category of an actual occasion. An actual occasion is not an enduring, substantial entity. Rather, it is a process of becoming, a process of weaving together the “prehensions” a primitive form of ‘apprehension’ meant to indicate a “taking account of,” or “feeling,” devoid of conscious awareness of the actual occasions that are in the immediate past. Whitehead calls this process of weaving together the inheritances of the past “concrescence.” An actual entity is its process of concrescence, its process of growing together into a unified perspective on its immediate past. The seeds of Whitehead’s epistemological realism are planted in these fundamental first moves: “The philosophy of organism is the inversion of Kant’s philosophy. . . . For Kant, the world emerges from the subject; for the philosophy of organism, the subject emerges from the world.” It is customary to compare an actual occasion with a Leibnizian monad, with the caveat that whereas a monad is windowless, an actual occasion is “all window.” It is as though one were to take Aristotle’s system of categories and ask what would result if the category of substance were displaced from its position of preeminence by the category of relation  the result would, mutatis mutandis, be an understanding of being somewhat on the model of a Whiteheadian actual occasion. In moving from Descartes’s dualism of mental substance and material substance to his own notion of an actual entity, Whitehead has been doing philosophy conceived of as the critique of abstractions. He holds that both mind and matter are abstractions from the concretely real. They are important abstractions, necessary for everyday thought and, of supreme importance, absolutely essential in enabling the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries to accomplish their magnificent advances in scientific thinking. Indeed, Whitehead, in his philosophy of science phase, by proceeding as though “nature is closed to mind,” was operating with those selfsame abstractions. He came to see that while these abstractions were indispensable for certain kinds of investigations, they were, at the philosophical level, as Hume had demonstrated, a disaster. In considering mind and matter to be ontological ultimates, Descartes had committed what Whitehead termed the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. The category of an actual occasion designates the fully real, the fully concrete. The challenge for such an orientation, the challenge that Process and Reality is designed to meet, is so to describe actual occasions that it is intelligible how collections of actual occasions, termed “nexus” or societies, emerge, exhibiting the characteristics we find associated with “minds” and “material structures.” Perhaps most significantly, if this challenge is met successfully, biology will be placed, in the eyes of philosophy, on an even footing with physics; metaphysics will do justice both to human beings and to human beings as a part of nature; and such vexing contemporary problem areas as animal rights and environmental ethics will appear in a new light. Whitehead’s last two books, Adventures of Ideas 1933 and Modes of Thought 1938, are less technical and more lyrical than is Process and Reality. Adventures of Ideas is clearly the more significant of these two. It presents a philosophical study of the notion of civilization. It holds that the social changes in a civilization are driven by two sorts of forces: brute, senseless agencies of compulsion on the one hand, and formulated aspirations and articulated beliefs on the other. These two sorts of forces are epitomized by barbarians and Christianity in the ancient Roman world and by steam and democracy in the world of the industrial revolution. Whitehead’s focal point in Adventures of Ideas is aspirations, beliefs, and ideals as instruments of change. In particular, he is concerned to articulate the ideals and aspirations appropriate to our own era. The character of such ideals and aspirations at any moment is limited by the philosophical understandings available at that moment, because in their struggle for release and efficacy such ideals and aspirations can appear only in the forms permitted by the available philosophical discourse. In the final section of Adventures of Ideas Whitehead presents a statement of ideals and aspirations fit for our era as his own philosophy of organism allows them to take shape and be articulated. The notions of beauty, truth, adventure, zest, Eros, and peace are given a content drawn from the technical understandings elaborated in Process and Reality. But in Adventures of Ideas a less technical language is used, a language reminiscent of the poetic imagery found in the style of Plato’s Republic, a language making the ideas accessible to readers who have not mastered Process and Reality, but at the same time far richer and more meaningful to those who have. Whitehead notes in Adventures of Ideas that Plato’s later thought “circles round the interweaving of seven main notions, namely, The Ideas, The Physical Elements, The Psyche, The Eros, The Harmony, The Mathematical Relations, The Receptacle. These notions are as important for us now, as they were then at the dawn of the modern world, when civilizations of the old type were dying.” Whitehead uses these notions in quite novel and modern ways; one who is unfamiliar with his metaphysics can get something of what he means as he speaks of the Eros of the Universe, but if one is familiar from Process and Reality with the notions of the Primordial Nature of God and the Consequent Nature of God then one sees much deeper into the meanings present in Adventures of Ideas. Whitehead was not religious in any narrow, doctrinal, sectarian sense. He explicitly likened his stance to that of Aristotle, dispassionately considering the requirements of his metaphysical system as they refer to the question of the existence and nature of God. Whitehead’s thoughts on these matters are most fully developed in Chapter 11 of Science and the Modern World, in the final chapter of Process and Reality, and in Religion in the Making 1926. These thoughts are expressed at a high level of generality. Perhaps because of this, a large part of the interest generated by Whitehead’s thought has been within the community of theologians. His ideas fairly beg for elaboration and development in the context of particular modes of religious understanding. It is as though many modern theologians, recalling the relation between the theology of Aquinas and the metaphysics of Aristotle, cannot resist the temptation to play Aquinas to Whitehead’s Aristotle. Process theology, or Neo-Classical Theology as it is referred to by Hartshorne, one of its leading practitioners, has been the arena within which a great deal of clarification and development of Whitehead’s ideas has occurred. Whitehead was a gentle man, soft-spoken, never overbearing or threatening. He constantly encouraged students to step out on their own, to develop their creative capacities. His concern not to inhibit students made him a notoriously easy grader; it was said that an A-minus in one of his courses was equivalent to failure. Lucien Price’s Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead chronicles many evenings of discussion in the Whitehead household. He there described Whitehead as follows: Whitehead, Alfred North Whitehead, Alfred North 973   973 his face, serene, luminous, often smiling, the complexion pink and white, the eyes brilliant blue, clear and candid as a child’s yet with the depth of the sage, often laughing or twinkling with humour. And there was his figure, slender, frail, and bent with its lifetime of a scholar’s toil. Always benign, there was not a grain of ill will anywhere in him; for all his formidable armament, never a wounding word. 

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

William of Auvergne c.11901249, French philosopher who was born in Aurillac, taught at Paris, and became bishop of Paris in 1228. Critical of the new Aristotelianism of his time, he insisted that the soul is an individual, immortal form of intellectual activity alone, so that a second form was needed for the body and sensation. Though he rejected the notion of an agent intellect, he described the soul as a mirror that reflects both exemplary ideas in God’s mind and sensible singulars. He conceived being as something common to everything that is, after the manner of Duns Scotus, but rejected the Avicennan doctrine that God necessarily produces the universe, arguing that His creative activity is free of all determination. He is the first example of the complex of ideas we call Augustinianism, which would pass on through Alexander of Hales to Bonaventure and other Franciscans, forming a point of departure for the philosophy of Duns Scotus.  

William of Auxerre c.11401231, French theologian and renowned teacher of grammar, arts, and theology at the  of Paris. In 1231 he was appointed by Pope Gregory IX to a commission charged with editing Aristotle’s writings for doctrinal purity. The commission never submitted a report, perhaps partly due to William’s death later that same year. William’s major work, the Summa aurea 121520, represents one of the earliest systematic attempts to reconcile the Augustinian and Aristotelian traditions in medieval philosophy. William tempers, e.g., the Aristotelian concession that human cognition begins with the reception in the material intellect of a species or sensible representation from a corporeal thing, with the Augustinian idea that it is not possible to understand the principles of any discipline without an interior, supernatural illumination. He also originated the theological distinction between perfect happiness, which is uncreated and proper to God, and imperfect happiness, which pertains to human beings. William was also one of the first to express what became, in later centuries, the important distinction between God’s absolute and ordained powers, taking, with Gilbert of Poitiers, the view that God could, absolutely speaking, change the past. The Summa aurea helped shape the thought of several important philosophers and theologians who were active later in the century, including Albertus Magnus, Bonaventure, and Aquinas. William remained an authority in theological discussions throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.   

William of Moerbeke c.12151286, French scholar who was the most important thirteenth century translator from Grecian into Latin of works in philosophy and natural science. Having joined the Dominicans and spent some time in Grecian-speaking territories, William served at the papal court and then as Catholic archbishop of Corinth 1278c.1286. But he worked from the 1260s on as a careful and literal-minded translator. William was the first to render into Latin white horse paradox William of Moerbeke 974   974 some of the most important works by Aristotle, including the Politics, Poetics, and History of Animals. He retranslated or revised earlier translations of several other Aristotelian works. William also provided the first Latin versions of commentaries on Aristotle by Alexander of Aphrodisias, Themistius, Ammonius, John Philoponus, and Simplicius, not to mention his efforts on behalf of Grecian optics, mathematics, and medicine. When William provided the first Latin translation of Proclus’s Elements of Theology, Western readers could at last recognize the Liber de causis as an Arabic compilation from Proclus rather than as a work by Aristotle.  

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

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

Windelband, Wilhelm 18481915, German philosopher and originator of Baden neoKantianism. He studied under Kuno Fischer 18241907 and Lotze, and was professor at Zürich, Freiburg, Strasbourg, and Heidelberg. Windelband gave Baden neo-Kantianism its distinctive mark of Kantian axiology as the core of critical philosophy. He is widely recognized for innovative work in the history of philosophy, in which problems rather than individual philosophers are the focus and organizing principle of exposition. He is also known for his distinction, first drawn in “Geschichte und Naturwissenschaft” “History and Natural Science,” 1894, between the nomothetic knowledge that most natural sciences seek the discovery of general laws in order to master nature and the idiographic knowledge that the historical sciences pursue description of individual and unique aspects of reality with the aim of self-affirmation. His most important student, and successor at Heidelberg, was Heinrich Rickert 1863 1936, who made lasting contributions to the methodology of the historical sciences.  NEO-KANTIANISM. H.v.d.L. wisdom, an understanding of the highest principles of things that functions as a guide for living a truly exemplary human life. From the preSocratics through Plato this was a unified notion. But Aristotle introduced a distinction between theoretical wisdom sophia and practical wisdom phronesis, the former being the intellectual virtue that disposed one to grasp the nature of reality in terms of its ultimate causes metaphysics, the latter being the ultimate practical virtue that disposed one to make sound judgments bearing on the conduct of life. The former invoked a contrast between deep understanding versus wide information, whereas the latter invoked a contrast between sound judgment and mere technical facility. This distinction between theoretical and practical wisdom persisted through the Middle Ages and continues to our own day, as is evident in our use of the term ‘wisdom’ to designate both knowledge of the highest kind and the capacity for sound judgment in matters of conduct. 

Vitters, Ludwig 18891951, Vienna-born philosopher trained as an enginner at Manchester, one of the most original and challenging philosophical writers of the twentieth century. Born in Vienna into an assimilated family of Jewish extraction, he went to England as a student and eventually became a protégé of Russell’s at Cambridge. He returned to Austria at the beginning of The Great War I, but went back to Cambridge in 1928 and taught there as a fellow and professor. Despite spending much of his professional life in England, Wittgenstein never lost contact with his Austrian background, and his writings combine in a unique way ideas derived from both the insular and the continental European tradition. His thought is strongly marked by a deep skepticism about philosophy, but he retained the conviction that there was something important to be rescued from the traditional enterprise. In his Blue Book 1958 he referred to his own work as “one of the heirs of the subject that used to be called philosophy.” What strikes readers first when they look at Wittgenstein’s writings is the peculiar form of their composition. They are generally made up of short individual notes that are most often numbered in sequence and, in the more finished writings, evidently selected and arranged with the greatest care. Those notes range from fairly technical discussions on matters of logic, the mind, meaning, understanding, acting, seeing, mathematics, and knowledge, to aphoristic observations about ethics, culture, art, and the meaning of life. Because of their wide-ranging character, their unusual perspective on things, and their often intriguing style, Wittgenstein’s writings have proved to appeal to both professional philosophers and those interested in philosophy in a more general way. The writings as well as his unusual life and personality have already produced a large body of interpretive literature. But given his uncompromising stand, it is questionable whether his thought will ever be fully integrated into academic philosophy. It is more likely that, like Pascal and Nietzsche, he will remain an uneasy presence in philosophy. From an early date onward Wittgenstein was greatly influenced by the idea that philosophical problems can be resolved by paying attention to the working of language  a thought he may have gained from Fritz Mauthner’s Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache 190102. Wittgenstein’s affinity to Mauthner is, indeed, evident in all phases of his philosophical development, though it is particularly noticeable in his later thinking.Until recently it has been common to divide Wittgenstein’s work into two sharply distinct phases, separated by a prolonged period of dormancy. According to this schema the early “Tractarian” period is that of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 1921, which Wittgenstein wrote in the trenches of World War I, and the later period that of the Philosophical Investigations 1953, which he composed between 1936 and 1948. But the division of his work into these two periods has proved misleading. First, in spite of obvious changes in his thinking, Wittgenstein remained throughout skeptical toward traditional philosophy and persisted in channeling philosophical questioning in a new direction. Second, the common view fails to account for the fact that even between 1920 and 1928, when Wittgenstein abstained from actual work in philosophy, he read widely in philosophical and semiphilosophical authors, and between 1928 and 1936 he renewed his interest in philosophical work and wrote copiously on philosophical matters. The posthumous publication of texts such as The Blue and Brown Books, Philosophical Grammar, Philosophical Remarks, and Conversations with the Vienna Circle has led to acknowledgment of a middle period in Wittgenstein’s development, in which he explored a large number of philosophical issues and viewpoints  a period that served as a transition between the early and the late work. Early period. As the son of a greatly successful industrialist and engineer, Wittgenstein first studied engineering in Berlin and Manchester, and traces of that early training are evident throughout his writing. But his interest shifted soon to pure mathematics and the foundations of mathematics, and in pursuing questions about them he became acquainted with Russell and Frege and their work. The two men had a profound and lasting effect on Wittgenstein even when he later came to criticize and reject their ideas. That influence is particularly noticeable in the Tractatus, which can be read as an attempt to reconcile Russell’s atomism with Frege’s apriorism. But the book is at the same time moved by quite different and non-technical concerns. For even before turning to systematic philosophy Wittgenstein had been profoundly moved by Schopenhauer’s thought as it is spelled out in The World as Will and Representation, and while he was serving as a soldier in World War I, he renewed his interest in Schopenhauer’s metaphysical, ethical, aesthetic, and mystical outlook. The resulting confluence of ideas is evident in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and gives the book its peculiar character. Composed in a dauntingly severe and compressed style, the book attempts to show that traditional philosophy rests entirely on a misunderstanding of “the logic of our language.” Following in Frege’s and Russell’s footsteps, Wittgenstein argued that every meaningful sentence must have a precise logical structure. That structure may, however, be hidden beneath the clothing of the grammatical appearance of the sentence and may therefore require the most detailed analysis in order to be made evident. Such analysis, Wittgenstein was convinced, would establish that every meaningful sentence is either a truth-functional composite of another simpler sentence or an atomic sentence consisting of a concatenation of simple names. He argued further that every atomic sentence is a logical picture of a possible state of affairs, which must, as a result, have exactly the same formal structure as the atomic sentence that depicts it. He employed this “picture theory of meaning”  as it is usually called  to derive conclusions about the nature of the world from his observations about the structure of the atomic sentences. He postulated, in particular, that the world must itself have a precise logical structure, even though we may not be able to determine it completely. He also held that the world consists primarily of facts, corresponding to the true atomic sentences, rather than of things, and that those facts, in turn, are concatenations of simple objects, corresponding to the simple names of which the atomic sentences are composed. Because he derived these metaphysical conclusions from his view of the nature of language, Wittgenstein did not consider it essential to describe what those simple objects, their concatenations, and the facts consisting of them are actually like. As a result, there has been a great deal of uncertainty and disagreement among interpreters about their character. The propositions of the Tractatus are for the most part concerned with spelling out Wittgenstein’s account of the logical structure of language and the world and these parts of the book have understandably been of most interest to philosophers who are primarily concerned with questions of symbolic logic and its applications. But for Wittgenstein himself the most important part of the book consisted of the negative conclusions about philosophy that he reaches at the end of his text: in particular, that all sentences that are not atomic pictures of concatenations of objects or truth-functional composites of such are strictly speaking meaningless. Among these he included all the propositions of ethics and aesthetics, all propositions dealing with the meaning of life, all propositions of logic, indeed all philosophical propositions, and finally all the propositions of the Tractatus itself. These are all strictly meaningless; they aim at saying something important, but what they try to express in words can only show itself. As a result Wittgenstein concluded that anyone who understood what the Tractatus was saying would finally discard its propositions as senseless, that she would throw away the ladder after climbing up on it. Someone who reached such a state would have no more temptation to pronounce philosophical propositions. She would see the world rightly and would then also recognize that the only strictly meaningful propositions are those of natural science; but those could never touch what was really important in human life, the mystical. That would have to be contemplated in silence. For “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,” as the last proposition of the Tractatus declared. Middle period. It was only natural that Wittgenstein should not embark on an academic career after he had completed that work. Instead he trained to be a school teacher and taught primary school for a number of years in the mountains of lower Austria. In the mid-1920s he also built a house for his sister; this can be seen as an attempt to give visual expression to the logical, aesthetic, and ethical ideas of the Tractatus. In those years he developed a number of interests seminal for his later development. His school experience drew his attention to the way in which children learn language and to the whole process of enculturation. He also developed an interest in psychology and read Freud and others. Though he remained hostile to Freud’s theoretical explanations of his psychoanalytic work, he was fascinated with the analytic practice itself and later came to speak of his own work as therapeutic in character. In this period of dormancy Wittgenstein also became acquainted with the members of the Vienna Circle, who had adopted his Tractatus as one of their key texts. For a while he even accepted the positivist principle of meaning advocated by the members of that Circle, according to which the meaning of a sentence is the method of its verification. This he would later modify into the more generous claim that the meaning of a sentence is its use. Wittgenstein’s most decisive step in his middle period was to abandon the belief of the Tractatus that meaningful sentences must have a precise hidden logical structure and the accompanying belief that this structure corresponds to the logical structure of the facts depicted by those sentences. The Tractatus had, indeed, proceeded on the assumption that all the different symbolic devices that can describe the world must be constructed according to the same underlying logic. In a sense, there was then only one meaningful language in the Tractatus, and from it one was supposed to be able to read off the logical structure of the world. In the middle period Wittgenstein concluded that this doctrine constituted a piece of unwarranted metaphysics and that the Tractatus was itself flawed by what it had tried to combat, i.e., the misunderstanding of the logic of language. Where he had previously held it possible to ground metaphysics on logic, he now argued that metaphysics leads the philosopher into complete darkness. Turning his attention back to language he concluded that almost everything he had said about it in the Tractatus had been in error. There were, in fact, many different languages with many different structures that could meet quite different specific needs. Language was not strictly held together by logical structure, but consisted, in fact, of a multiplicity of simpler substructures or language games. Sentences could not be taken to be logical pictures of facts and the simple components of sentences did not all function as names of simple objects. These new reflections on language served Wittgenstein, in the first place, as an aid to thinking about the nature of the human mind, and specifically about the relation between private experience and the physical world. Against the existence of a Cartesian mental substance, he argued that the word ‘I’ did not serve as a name of anything, but occurred in expressions meant to draw attention to a particular body. For a while, at least, he also thought he could explain the difference between private experience and the physical world in terms of the existence of two languages, a primary language of experience and a secondary language of physics. This duallanguage view, which is evident in both the Philosophical Remarks and The Blue Book, Wittgenstein was to give up later in favor of the assumption that our grasp of inner phenomena is dependent on the existence of outer criteria. From the mid-1930s onward he also renewed his interest in the philosophy of mathematics. In contrast to Frege and Russell, he argued strenuously that no part of mathematics is reducible purely to logic. Instead he set out to describe mathematics as part of our natural history and as consisting of a number of diverse language games. He also insisted that the meaning of those games depended on the uses to which the mathematical formulas were put. Applying the principle of verification to mathematics, he held that the meaning of a mathematical formula lies in its proof. These remarks on the philosophy of mathematics have remained among Wittgenstein’s most controversial and least explored writings. Later period. Wittgenstein’s middle period was characterized by intensive philosophical work on a broad but quickly changing front. By 1936, however, his thinking was finally ready to settle down once again into a steadier pattern, and he now began to elaborate the views for which he became most famous. Where he had constructed his earlier work around the logic devised by Frege and Russell, he now concerned himself mainly with the actual working of ordinary language. This brought him close to the tradition of British common sense philosophy that Moore had revived and made him one of the godfathers of the ordinary language philosophy that was to flourish in Oxford in the 1950s. In the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein emphasized that there are countless different uses of what we call “symbols,” “words,” and “sentences.” The task of philosophy is to gain a perspicuous view of those multiple uses and thereby to dissolve philosophical and metaphysical puzzles. These puzzles were the result of insufficient attention to the working of language and could be resolved only by carefully retracing the linguistic steps by which they had been reached. Wittgenstein thus came to think of philosophy as a descriptive, analytic, and ultimately therapeutic practice. In the Investigations he set out to show how common philosophical views about meaning including the logical atomism of the Tractatus, about the nature of concepts, about logical necessity, about rule-following, and about the mindbody problem were all the product of an insufficient grasp of how language works. In one of the most influential passages of the book he argued that concept words do not denote sharply circumscribed concepts, but are meant to mark family resemblances between the things labeled with the concept. He also held that logical necessity results from linguistic convention and that rules cannot determine their own applications, that rule-following presupposes the existence of regular practices. Furthermore, the words of our language have meaning only insofar as there exist public criteria for their correct application. As a consequence, he argued, there cannot be a completely private language, i.e., a language that in principle can be used only to speak about one’s own inner experience. This private language argument has caused much discussion. Interpreters have disagreed not only over the structure of the argument and where it occurs in Wittgenstein’s text, but also over the question whether he meant to say that language is necessarily social. Because he said that to speak of inner experiences there must be external and publicly available criteria, he has often been taken to be advocating a logical behaviorism, but nowhere does he, in fact, deny the existence of inner states. What he says is merely that our understanding of someone’s pain is connected to the existence of natural and linguistic expressions of pain. In the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein repeatedly draws attention to the fact that language must be learned. This learning, he says, is fundamentally a process of inculcation and drill. In learning a language the child is initiated in a form of life. In Wittgenstein’s later work the notion of form of life serves to identify the whole complex of natural and cultural circumstances presupposed by our language and by a particular understanding of the world. He elaborated those ideas in notes on which he worked between 1948 and his death in 1951 and which are now published under the title On Certainty. He insisted in them that every belief is always part of a system of beliefs that together constitute a worldview. All confirmation and disconfirmation of a belief presuppose such a system and are internal to the system. For all this he was not advocating a relativism, but a naturalism that assumes that the world ultimately determines which language games can be played. Wittgenstein’s final notes vividly illustrate the continuity of his basic concerns throughout all the changes his thinking went through. For they reveal once more how he remained skeptical about all philosophical theories and how he understood his own undertaking as the attempt to undermine the need for any such theorizing. The considerations of On Certainty are evidently directed against both philosophical skeptics and those philosophers who want to refute skepticism. Against the philosophical skeptics Wittgenstein insisted that there is real knowledge, but this knowledge is always dispersed and not necessarily reliable; it consists of things we have heard and read, of what has been drilled into us, and of our modifications of this inheritance. We have no general reason to doubt this inherited Wittgenstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ludwig 979   979 body of knowledge, we do not generally doubt it, and we are, in fact, not in a position to do so. But On Certainty also argues that it is impossible to refute skepticism by pointing to propositions that are absolutely certain, as Descartes did when he declared ‘I think, therefore I am’ indubitable, or as Moore did when he said, “I know for certain that this is a hand here.” The fact that such propositions are considered certain, Wittgenstein argued, indicates only that they play an indispensable, normative role in our language game; they are the riverbed through which the thought of our language game flows. Such propositions cannot be taken to express metaphysical truths. Here, too, the conclusion is that all philosophical argumentation must come to an end, but that the end of such argumentation is not an absolute, self-evident truth, but a certain kind of natural human practice.  

wodeham: Oxonian philosopher, like Grice. Adam de c. 12951358, English Franciscan philosopher-theologian who lectured on Peter Lombard’s Sentences at London, Norwich, and Oxford. His published works include the Tractatus de indivisibilibus; his Lectura secunda Norwich lectures; and an abbreviation of his Oxford lectures by Henry Totting of Oyta, published by John Major in 1512. Wodeham’s main work, the Oxford lectures, themselves remain unpublished. A brilliant interpreter of Duns Scotus, whose original manuscripts he consulted, Wodeham deemed Duns Scotus the greatest Franciscan doctor. William Ockham, Wodeham’s teacher, was the other great influence on Wodeham’s philosophical theology. Wodeham defended Ockham’s views against attacks mounted by Walter Chatton; he also wrote the prologue to Ockham’s Summa logicae. Wodeham’s own influence rivaled that of Ockham. Among the authors he strongly influenced are Gregory of Rimini, John of Mirecourt, Nicholas of Autrecourt, Pierre d’Ailly, Peter Ceffons, Alfonso Vargas, Peter of Candia Alexander V, Henry Totting of Oyta, and John Major. Wodeham’s theological works were written for an audience with a very sophisticated understanding of current issues in semantics, logic, and medieval mathematical physics. Contrary to Duns Scotus and Ockham, Wodeham argued that the sensitive and intellective souls were not distinct. He further develops the theory of intuitive cognition, distinguishing intellectual intuition of our own acts of intellect, will, and memory from sensory intuition of external objects. Scientific knowledge based on experience can be based on intuition, according to Wodeham. He distinguishes different grades of evidence, and allows that sensory perceptions may be mistaken. Nonetheless, they can form the basis for scientific knowledge, since they are reliable; mistakes can be corrected by reason and experience. In semantic theory, Wodeham defends the view that the immediate object of scientific knowledge is the complexe significabile, that which the conclusion is designed to signify. 

wolff, Christian 16791754, German philosopher and the most powerful advocate for secular rationalism in early eighteenth-century Germany. Although he was a Lutheran, his early education in Catholic Breslau made him familiar with both the Scholasticism of Aquinas and Suárez and more modern sources. His later studies at Leipzig were completed with a dissertation on the application of mathematical methods to ethics 1703, which brought him to the attention of Leibniz. He remained in correspondence with Leibniz until the latter’s death 1716, and became known as the popularizer of Leibniz’s philosophy, although his views did not derive from that source alone. Appointed to teach mathematics in Halle in 1706 he published mathematical textbooks and compendia that dominated German universities for decades, Wolff began lecturing on philosophy as well by 1709. His rectoral address On the Practical Philosophy of the Chinese 1721 argued that revelation and even belief in God were unnecessary for arriving at sound principles of moral and political reasoning; this brought his uneasy relations with the Halle Pietists to a head, and in 1723 they secured his dismissal and indeed banishment. Wolff was immediately welcomed in Marburg, where he became a hero for freedom of thought, and did not return to Prussia until the ascension of Frederick the Great in 1740, when he resumed his post at Halle. Wolff published an immense series of texts on logic, metaphysics, ethics, politics, natural theology, and teleology 171324, in which he created the philosophical terminology of modern German; he then published an even more extensive series of works in Latin for the rest of his life, expanding and modifying his German works but also adding works on natural and positive law and economics 172355. He accepted the traWodeham, Adam de Wolff, Christian 980   980 ditional division of logic into the doctrines of concepts, judgment, and inference, which influenced the organization of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason 178187 and even Hegel’s Science of Logic1816. In metaphysics, he included general ontology and then the special disciplines of rational cosmology, rational psychology, and rational theology Kant replaced Wolff’s general ontology with his transcendental aesthetic and analytic, and then demolished Wolff’s special metaphysics in his transcendental dialectic. Wolff’s metaphysics drew heavily on Leibniz, but also on Descartes and even empiricists like Locke. Methodologically, he attempted to derive the principle of sufficient reason from the logical law of identity like the unpublished Leibniz of the 1680s rather than the published Leibniz of the 1700s; substantively, he began his German metaphysics with a reconstruction of Descartes’s cogito argument, then argued for a simple, immaterial soul, all of its faculties reducible to forms of representation and related to body by preestablished harmony. Although rejected by Crusius and then Kant, Wolff’s attempt to found philosophy on a single principle continued to influence German idealism as late as Reinhold, Fichte, and Hegel, and his example of beginning metaphysics from the unique representative power of the soul continued to influence not only later writers such as Reinhold and Fichte but also Kant’s own conception of the transcendental unity of apperception. In spite of the academic influence of his metaphysics, Wolff’s importance for German culture lay in his rationalist rather than theological ethics. He argued that moral worth lies in the perfection of the objective essence of mankind; as the essence of a human is to be an intellect and a will with the latter dependent on the former, which are physically embodied and dependent for their well-being on the well-being of their physical body, morality requires perfection of the intellect and will, physical body, and external conditions for the well-being of that combination. Each person is obliged to perfect all instantiations of this essence, but in practice does so most effectively in his own case; duties to oneself therefore precede duties to others and to God. Because pleasure is the sensible sign of perfection, Wolff’s perfectionism resembles contemporary utilitarianism. Since he held that human perfection can be understood by human reason independently of any revelation, Wolff joined contemporary British enlighteners such as Shaftesbury and Hutcheson in arguing that morality does not depend on divine commands, indeed the recognition of divine commands depends on an antecedent comprehension of morality although morality does require respect for God, and thus the atheistic morality of the Chinese, even though sound as far as it went, was not complete. This was the doctrine that put Wolff’s life in danger, but it had tremendous repercussions for the remainder of his century, and certainly in Kant. 

wollaston, William 16591724, English moralist notorious for arguing that the immorality of actions lies in their implying false propositions. An assistant headmaster who later took priestly orders, Wollaston maintains in his one published work, The Religion of Nature Delineated 1722, that the foundations of religion and morality are mutually dependent. God has preestablished a harmony between reason or truth and happiness, so that actions that contradict truth through misrepresentation thereby frustrate human happiness and are thus evil. For instance, if a person steals another’s watch, her falsely representing the watch as her own makes the act wrong. Wollaston’s views, particularly his taking morality to consist in universal and necessary truths, were influenced by the rationalists Ralph Cudworth and Clarke. Among his many critics the most famous was Hume, who contends that Wollaston’s theory implies an absurdity: any action concealed from public view e.g., adultery conveys no false proposition and therefore is not immoral.

Wollstonecraft, Mary 175997, English author and feminist whose A Vindication of the Rights of Women 1792 is a central text of feminist philosophy. Her chief target is Rousseau: her goal is to argue against the separate and different education Rousseau provided for girls and to extend his recommendations to girls as well as boys. Wollstonecraft saw such an improved education for women as necessary to their asserting their right as “human creatures” to develop their faculties in a way conducive to human virtue. She also wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Men 1790, an attack on Edmund Burke’s pamphlet on the French Revolution, as well as novels, essays, an account of her travels, and books for children. 

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

wu.YU, WU. wu-hsing, Chinese term meaning ‘five phases, processes, or elements’. The five phases  earth, wood, metal, fire, and water  along with yin and yang, were the basis of Chinese correlative cosmologies developed in the Warring States period 403221 B.C. and early Han dynasty 206 B.C. A.D. 220. These cosmologies posited a relation between the human world and the natural order. Thus the five phases were correlated to patterns in human history such as the cyclical rise and fall of dynasties, to sociopolitical order and the monthly rituals of rulers, to musical notes and tastes, even to organs of the body. Whereas the goal of early cosmologists such as Tsou Yen was to bring the human order into harmony with the natural order via the five phases, Han dynasty cosmologists and immortality seekers sought to control nature and prolong life by manipulating the five phases, particularly within the body.

Wundt: Wilhelm Maximilien 18321920, German philosopher and psychologist, a founder of scientific psychology. Although trained as a physician, he turned to philosophy and in 1879, at the  of Leipzig, established the first recognized psychology laboratory. For Wundt, psychology was the science of conscious experience, a definition soon overtaken by behaviorism. Wundt’s psychology had two departments: the so-called physiological psychology Grundzuge der physiologischen Psychologie, 3 vols., 1873 74; only vol. 1 of the fifth edition, 1910, was translated into English, primarily the experimental study of immediate experience broadly modeled on Fechner’s psychophysics; and the Volkerpsychologie Volkerpsychologie, 10 vols., 190020; fragment translated as The Language of Gestures, 1973, the non-experimental study of the higher mental processes via their products, language, myth, and custom. Although Wundt was a prodigious investigator and author, and was revered as psychology’s founder, his theories, unlike his methods, exerted little influence. A typical German scholar of his time, he also wrote across the whole of philosophy, including logic and ethics. .

wu wei, Chinese philosophical term often translated as ‘non-action’ and associated with Taoism. It is actually used in both Taoist and non-Taoist texts to describe an ideal state of existence or ideal form of government, interpreted differently in different texts. In the Chuang Tzu, it describes a state of existence in which one is not guided by preconceived goals or projects, including moral ideals; in the Lao Tzu, it refers to the absence of striving toward worldly goals, and also describes the ideal form of government, which does not teach or impose on the people standards of behavior, including those of conventional morality. In other texts, it is sometimes used to describe the effortlessness of moral action, and sometimes used to refer to the absence of any need for active participation in government by the ruler, resulting either from the appointment of worthy and able officials inspired by the moral example of the ruler, or from the establishment of an effective machinery of government presided over by a ruler with prestige. 

Wyclif, John c.133084, English theologian and religious reformer. He worked for most of his life in Oxford as a secular clerk, teaching philosophy and later theology and writing extensively in both fields. The mode of thought expressed in his surviving works is one of extreme realism, and in this his thought fostered the split of Bohemian, later Hussite, philosophy from that of the German masters teaching in Prague. His worldline Wyclif, John 982   982 philosophical summa was most influential for his teaching on universals, but also dealt extensively with the question of determinism; these issues underlay his later handling of the questions of the Eucharist and of the identity of the church respectively. His influence on English philosophy was severely curtailed by the growing hostility of the church to his ideas, the condemnation of many of his tenets, the persecution of his followers, and the destruction of his writings.

Xenophanes c.570c.475 B.C., Grecian philosopher, a proponent of an idealized conception of the divine, and the first of the pre-Socratics to propound epistemological views. Born in Colophon, an Ionian Grecian city on the coast of Asia Minor, he emigrated as a young man to the Grecian West Sicily and southern Italy. The formative influence of the Milesians is evident in his rationalism. He is the first of the pre-Socratics for whom we have not only ancient reports but also quite a few verbatim quotations  fragments from his “Lampoons” Silloi and from other didactic poetry. Xenophanes attacks the worldview of Homer, Hesiod, and traditional Grecian piety: it is an outrage that the poets attribute moral failings to the gods. Traditional religion reflects regional biases blond gods for the Northerners; black gods for the Africans. Indeed, anthropomorphic gods reflect the ultimate bias, that of the human viewpoint “If cattle, or horses, or lions . . . could draw pictures of the gods . . . ,” frg. 15. There is a single “greatest” god, who is not at all like a human being, either in body or in mind; he perceives without the aid of organs, he effects changes without “moving,” through the sheer power of his thought. The rainbow is no sign from Zeus; it is simply a special cloud formation. Nor are the sun or the moon gods. All phenomena in the skies, from the elusive “Twin Sons of Zeus” St. Elmo’s fire to sun, moon, and stars, are varieties of cloud formation. There are no mysterious infernal regions; the familiar strata of earth stretch down ad infinitum. The only cosmic limit is the one visible at our feet: the horizontal border between earth and air. Remarkably, Xenophanes tempers his theological and cosmological pronouncements with an epistemological caveat: what he offers is only a “conjecture.” In later antiquity Xenophanes came to be regarded as the founder of the Eleatic School, and his teachings were assimilated to those of Parmenides and Melissus. This appears to be based on nothing more than Xenophanes’ emphasis on the oneness and utter immobility of God.

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

Yang Chu, also called Yang Tzu c.370319 B.C., Chinese philosopher most famous for the assertion, attributed to him by Mencius, that one ought not sacrifice even a single hair to save the whole world. Widely criticized as a selfish egotist and hedonist, Yang Chu was a private person who valued bodily integrity, health, and longevity over fame, fortune, and power. He believed that because one’s body and lifespan were bestowed by Heaven t’ien, one has a duty and natural inclination to maintain bodily health and live out one’s years. Far from sanctioning hedonistic indulgence, this Heavenimposed duty requires discipline.  

Yang Hsiung 53 B.C.A.D. 18, Chinese philosopher who wrote two books: Tai-hsüan ching “Classic of the Supremely Profound Principle”, an imitation of the I-Ching, and Fa-yen “Model Sayings”, an imitation of the Analects. The former was ignored by his contemporaries, but the latter was quite popular in his time. His thoughts were eclectic. He was the first in the history of Chinese thought to advance the doctrine of human nature as a mixture of good and evil in order to avoid the extremes of Mencius and Hsün Tzu.   

Yen Yuan 16351704, Chinese traditionalist and social critic. Like Wang Fu-chih, he attacked Neo-Confucian metaphysical dualism, regarding the Neo-Confucians’ views as wild speculations obscuring the true nature of Confucianism. Chu Hsi interpreted ko wu investigating things as discovering some transcendent “thing” called li pattern, and Wang Yang-ming understood ko wu as rectifying one’s thoughts, but Yen argued it meant a kind of knowledge by acquaintance: the “hands-on” practice of traditional rituals and disciplines. As “proof” that SungMing Confucians were wrong, Yen pointed to their social and political failures. Like many, he believed Confucianism was not only true but efficacious as well; failure to reform the world could be understood only as a personal failure to grasp and implement the Way.  .

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

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

yü, Chinese term meaning ‘desire’. One can feel yü toward sex objects or food, but one can also yü to be a more virtuous person. Yü is paired contrastively with wu aversion, which has a similarly broad range of objects. After the introduction of Buddhism into China, some thinkers contended that the absence of yü and wu was the goal of self-cultivation. Generally, however, the presence of at least some yü and wu has been thought to be essential to moral perfection.

yu, wu, Chinese terms literally meaning ‘having’ and ‘nothing’, respectively; they are often rendered into English as ‘being’ and ‘non-being’. But the Chinese never developed the mutually contradictory concepts of Being and Non-Being in Parmenides’ sense. In chapter 2 of Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu says that “being yu and non-being wu produce each other.” They appear to be a pair of interdependent concepts. But in chapter 40 Lao Tzu also says that “being comes from non-being.” It seems that for Taoism non-being is more fundamental than being, while for Confucianism the opposite is true. The two traditions were seen to be complementary by later scholars. 

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

zabarella: a proto-Griceain  H. P. Grice. Jacopo 153289, Italian Aristotelian philosopher who taught at the  of Padua. He wrote extensive commentaries on Aristotle’s Physics and On the Soul and also discussed other interpreters such as Averroes. However, his most original contribution was his work in logic, Opera logica 1578. Zabarella regards logic as a preliminary study that provides the tools necessary for philosophical analysis. Two such tools are order and method: order teaches us how to organize the content of a discipline to apprehend it more easily; method teaches us how to draw syllogistic inferences. Zabarella reduces the varieties of orders and methods classified by other interpreters to compositive and resolutive orders and methods. The compositive order from first principles to their consequences applies to theoretical disciplines. The resolutive order from a desired end to means appropriate to its achievement applies to practical disciplines. This much was already in Aristotle. Zabarella offers an original analysis of method. The compositive method infers particular consequences from general principles. The resolutive method infers originating principles from particular consequences, as in inductive reasoning or in reasoning from effect to cause. It has been suggested that Zabarella’s terminology might have influenced Galileo’s mechanics.

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

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

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