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

H. P. Grice, St. John’s, Oxford.

THESAVRVS GRICEIANVUM

Compiled by H. P. Grice’s Play Group -- Deposited at the Bodelian, Oxford.

abderites: the Grecian philosophers Leucippus and Democritus, the two earliest exponents of atomism, later revived by Baron Russell as “logical” atomism, calling himself a neo-abderite. Even though Abdera, in Thrace in northern Greece, is home to three pre-Socratics  Leucippus, Democritus, and Protagoras   ‘Abderite’ and the phrase ‘School of Abdera’ are applied only to Leucippus and Democritus. We can thus distinguish between early Grecian atomism and Epicureanism, which is the later version of atomism developed by Epicurus of Athens. This usage is in one respect inapt: the corresponding Grecian “abderite” is used by some snobs in antiquity as a synonym of ‘simpleton,’ not in disparagement of any of the three philosophers of Abdera but as a regional slur, the three philosophers but not Russell included.

abduction: as opposed to in-duction and de-duction, abduction refers to canons of reasoning for the discovery, as opposed to the justification, of scientific hypotheses or theories. Reichenbach distinguished the context of justification and the context of discovery, arguing that philosophy legitimately is concerned only with the former, which concerns verification and confirmation, whereas the latter is a matter for psychology. Thus he and other logical positivists claimed there are inductive logics of justification but not logics for discovery. Both hypotheticodeductive and Bayesian or other probabilistic inductive logics of justification have been proposed. Close examination of actual scientific practice increasingly reveals justificatory arguments and procedures that call into question the adequacy of such logics. N. R. Hanson distinguishes the reasons for accepting a specific hypothesis from the reasons for suggesting that the correct hypothesis will be of a particular kind. For the latter he attempted to develop logics of retroductive or abductive reasoning that stressed analogical reasoning, but did not succeed in convincing many that these logics were different in kind from logics of justification. Today few regard the search for rigorous formal logics of discovery as promising. Rather, the search has turned to looking for “logics” in some weaker sense. Heuristic procedures, strategies for discovery, and the like are explored. Others have focused on investigating rationality in the growth of scientific knowledge, say, by exploring conditions under which research traditions or programs are progressive or degenerating. Some have explored recourse to techniques from cognitive science or artificial intelligence. Claims of success generally are controversial.

abélard: pierre abailard, philosopher whose writings, particularly Theologia Christiana, constitute one of the more impressive attempts of the medieval period to use logical techniques to explicate Christian dogmas. He was born of a minor noble family in Brittany and studied logic and theology under some of the most notable teachers of the early twelfth century, including Roscelin, William of Champeaux, and Anselm of Laon. He rapidly eclipsed his teachers in logic and attracted students from all over Europe. His forays into theology were less enthusiastically received. Twice his views on the Trinity were condemned as heretical. Abelard led a dramatic life punctuated by bitter disputes with his opponents and a dangerous and celebrated love affair with Héloïse. Much of this story is told in his autobiographical work, Historia calamitatum. Abelard’s two most important Griceian works in logic are his “Logica ingredientibus” and his “Dialectica.” In these treatises and others he is the first medieval Scholastic to make full use of Aristotle’s “De interpretation” and Boethius’s commentaries on it to produce a sophisticated theory of the signification of words and sentences. The theory distinguishes the signification of an expression both from what the expression names and the idea in the mind of the emissor associated with the expression. Abélard allows a role for mental images in thinking, but he carefully avoids claiming that these are what words signify. In this he is very much aware of the pitfalls of subjectivist theories of meaning. His positive doctrines on what words signify tie in closely with his views on the signification of propositions and universals. For Abelard propositions are sentences that are either true or false; what they say their dicta is what they signify and these dicta are the primary bearers of truth and falsity. Abelard developed a genuinely propositional logic, the first since the Stoics. A universal, on the other hand, is a common noun or adjective, and what it means is what the verb phrase part of a proposition signifies. This is a sort of truncated dictum, which Abelard variously called a status, nature, or property. Neither status nor dicta are things, Abelard said, but they are mind-independent objects of thought. Abelard was particularly devastating in his attacks on realist theories of universals, but his view that universals are words was not meant to deny the objectivity of our knowledge of the world. Abelard’s theories in logic and ontology went far beyond the traditional ideas that had been handed down from Aristotle through the mediation of the late ancient commentators, Boethius in particular. They could have formed the basis of a fundamentally new synthesis in Western logic, but when more of the Aristotelian corpus became available in Western Europe during the twelfth century, concentration shifted to assimilating this already fully elaborated system of ideas. Consequently, Abelard’s influence on later Scholastic thought, though noticeable, is not nearly as great as one might expect, given the acuteness and originality of his insights.  A

abhidharma: the analytical and systematic presentation of the major conceptual categories constituting Buddhist doctrine; used as a label for both the texts that contain such presentations and the content of what is presented. Early abhidharma texts up to about the second century A.D. are catechetical in form, defining key doctrinal terms schematically through question and answer; later works are more discursive, often containing extensive discussions of controverted metaphysical issues such as the existence of past objects or the nature of reference. The goal of abhidharma is to make a complete inventory of existents and of the relations that may hold among them. 

abhinivesha: Sanskrit word meaning ‘self-love’ or ‘will to live’. In Indian philosophy in general and in the Sankhya-Yoga system in particular, abhinivesha was regarded as an aspect of avidya ignorance. Some other manifestations of avidya were said to be fear, attachment, and aversion, all of which were thought to generate karmic bondage and prevent one from attaining spiritual liberation. Lumped together with these, abhinivesha obviously has a negative connotation, even though in the Indian tradition it was not necessarily wrong, and even commendable at times, to exhibit self-love and a healthy will to live and prosper in the material world. So presumably the negative connotation of abhinivesha is an indication that what may be otherwise permissible can be improper or morally wrong if pursued in excess or for the wrong reason. 

Abrabanel, Isaac ben Judah, philosopher and statesman. On the periphery between late medieval philosophy and Renaissance humanism, Abrabanel concerned himself with traditional medieval Jewish subjects such as creation, prophecy, and theodicy. His works include biblical commentaries as well as philosophical and theological treatises; his most significant writings constitute his critique of Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed, found in Rosh Amanah 1505 and Mifalot Elohim 1503. In his criticism of the Aristotelians, Abrabanel was influenced by Isaac Arama. Endorsing the rabbinic concept of prophecy, Abrabanel attacks Maimonides’ naturalistic views of prophecy: he argues that Moses is not to be distinguished from the other prophets and that the knowledge of the prophets is not merely scientific and metaphysical, but miraculously produced by God. This emphasis upon the miraculous as opposed to the natural is developed in his theory of history and politics. His views about the ideal state reflect humanist leanings. While Abrabanel does see the civilized state of humans as a rebellion against God resulting from the fall, he is interested in the best kind of government under these circumstances. Accordingly, unity of society does not require a concentrated power but can be achieved through a collective will. This kind of government, Abrabanel claims, is advocated by the Torah and shown to be effective by the Italian republics of the period. With the coming of the Messiah, humankind will realize its spiritual potential, and when the corporeal universe vanishes, each soul will be able to contemplate eternally the essence of God. Abrabanel’s political views influenced later Jewish messianic movements, and his biblical commenabhidharma Abrabanel, Isaac ben Judah 2 4065A-   2 taries, translated into Latin, influenced later Christian humanist circles.  

Abrabanel, Judah, also called Leone Ebreo or Leo Hebraeus, philosopher, poet, and physician. The oldest son of Isaac Abrabanel, Judah Abrabanel was, philosophically, a representative of Italian Platonism. He wrote his predominantly Neoplatonic philosophical work Dialoghi d’Amore Dialogues of Love in 1535. The original Italian manuscript was translated into French, Latin, and Hebrew between 1551 and 1560. The interlocutors of this Platonic-style dialogue, Sophia and Philo, explore the nature of cosmic love. This love not only exists between God and creatures, but also operates in matter and form, the four elements, and the entire universe; it reflects both sensuous and intellectual beauty; in short it is transformed from a relation between God and the universe into a fundamental force around which all things are ordered. There is a mystical aspect to Abrabanel’s account of love, and it is not surprising that reflections on mysticism, in addition to astrology, astronomy, and aesthetics, emerge throughout the work. Although primarily reflecting medieval Platonism and Neoplatonism, Abrabanel was also influenced by Marcilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Maimonides, and Ibn Gabirol. His dialogue was read by many philosophers, including Giordano Bruno and Spinoza. His concept of love may be found in lyrical poetry of the period in Italy, France, and Spain, as well as in Michelangelo’s Sonnets and Torquato Tasso’s Minturno.   

absolutum: the, term used by idealists to describe the one independent reality of which all things are an expression. Kant used the adjective ‘absolute’ to characterize what is unconditionally valid. He claimed that pure reason searched for absolute grounds of the understanding that were ideals only, but that practical reason postulated the real existence of such grounds as necessary for morality. This apparent inconsistency led his successors to attempt to systematize his view of reason. To do this, Schelling introduced the term ‘the Absolute’ for the unconditioned ground and hence identity of subject and object. Schelling was criticized by Hegel, who defined the Absolute as spirit: the logical necessity that embodies itself in the world in order to achieve self-knowledge and freedom during the course of history. Many prominent nineteenthcentury British and American idealists, including Bosanquet, Royce, and Bradley, defended the existence of a quasi-Hegelian absolute. 

abstractum: an entity object lacking spatiotemporal properties, but supposed to have being, to exist, or in medieval Scholastic terminology to subsist. Abstracta, sometimes collected under the category of universals, include mathematical objects, such as numbers, sets, and geometrical figures, propositions, properties, and relations. Abstract entities are said to be abstracted from particulars. The abstract triangle has only the properties common to all triangles, and none peculiar to any particular triangles; it has no definite color, size, or specific type, such as isosceles or scalene. Abstracta are admitted to an ontology by Quine’s criterion if they must be supposed to exist or subsist in order to make the propositions of an accepted theory true. Properties and relations may be needed to account for resemblances among particulars, such as the redness shared by all red things. Propositions as the abstract contents or meanings of thoughts and expressions of thought are sometimes said to be necessary to explain translation between languages, and other semantic properties and relations. Historically, abstract entities are associated with Plato’s realist ontology of Ideas or Forms. For Plato, these are the abstract and only real entities, instantiated or participated in by spatiotemporal objects in the world of appearance or empirical phenomena. Aristotle denied the independent existence of abstract entities, and redefined a diluted sense of Plato’s Forms as the secondary substances that inhere in primary substances or spatiotemporal particulars as the only genuine existents. The dispute persisted in medieval philosophy between realist metaphysicians, including Augustine and Aquinas, who accepted the existence of abstracta, and nominalists, such as Ockham, who maintained that similar objects may simply be referred to by the same name without participating in an abstract form. In modern philosophy, the problem of abstracta has been a point of contention between rationalism, which is generally committed to the existence of abstract entities, and empiricism, which rejects abstracta because they cannot be experienced by the senses. Berkeley and Hume argued against Locke’s theory of abstract ideas by observing that introspection shows all ideas to be particular, from which they concluded that we can have no adequate concept of an abstract entity; instead, when we reason about what we call abstracta we are actually thinking about particular ideas delegated by the mind to represent an entire class of resemblant particulars, from which we may freely substitute others if we mistakenly draw conclusions peculiar to the example chosen. Abstract propositions were defended by Bolzano and Frege in the nineteenth century as the meanings of thought in language and logic. Dispute persists about the need for and nature of abstract entities, but many philosophers believe they are indispensable in metaphysics. 

academia, the school established by Plato around 385 B.C. at his property outside Athens near the public park and gymnasium known by that name. Although it may not have maintained a continuous tradition, the many and varied philosophers of the Academy all considered themselves Plato’s successors, and all of them celebrated and studied his work. The school survived in some form until A.D. 529, when it was dissolved, along with the other pagan schools, by the Eastern Roman emperor Justinian I. The history of the Academy is divided by some authorities into that of the Old Academy Plato, Speusippus, Xenocrates, and their followers and the New Academy the Skeptical Academy of the third and second centuries B.C.. Others speak of five phases in its history: Old as before, Middle Arcesilaus, New Carneades, Fourth Philo of Larisa, and Fifth Antiochus of Ascalon. For most of its history the Academy was devoted to elucidating doctrines associated with Plato that were not entirely explicit in the dialogues. These “unwritten doctrines” were apparently passed down to his immediate successors and are known to us mainly through the work of Aristotle: there are two opposed first principles, the One and the Indefinite Dyad Great and Small; these generate Forms or Ideas which may be identified with numbers, from which in turn come intermediate mathematicals and, at the lowest level, perceptible things Aristotle, Metaphysics I.6. After Plato’s death in 347, the Academy passed to his nephew Speusippus c.407339, who led the school until his death. Although his written works have perished, his views on certain main points, along with some quotations, were recorded by surviving authors. Under the influence of late Pythagoreans, Speusippus anticipated Plotinus by holding that the One transcends being, goodness, and even Intellect, and that the Dyad which he identifies with matter is the cause of all beings. To explain the gradations of beings, he posited gradations of matter, and this gave rise to Aristotle’s charge that Speusippus saw the universe as a series of disjointed episodes. Speusippus abandoned the theory of Forms as ideal numbers, and gave heavier emphasis than other Platonists to the mathematicals. Xenocrates 396314, who once went with Plato to Sicily, succeeded Speusippus and led the Academy till his own death. Although he was a prolific author, Xenocrates’ works have not survived, and he is known only through the work of other authors. He was induced by Aristotle’s objections to reject Speusippus’s views on some points, and he developed theories that were a major influence on Middle Platonism, as well as on Stoicism. In Xenocrates’ theory the One is Intellect, and the Forms are ideas in the mind of this divine principle; the One is not transcendent, but it resides in an intellectual space above the heavens. While the One is good, the Dyad is evil, and the sublunary world is identified with Hades. Having taken Forms to be mathematical entities, he had no use for intermediate mathematicals. Forms he defined further as paradigmatic causes of regular natural phenomena, and soul as self-moving number. Polemon c.350267 led the Academy from 314 to 267, and was chiefly known for his fine character, which set an example of self-control for his students. The Stoics probably derived their concept of oikeiosis an accommodation to nature from his teaching. After Polemon’s death, his colleague Crates led the Academy until the accession of Arcesilaus. The New Academy arose when Arcesilaus became the leader of the school in about 265 B.C. and turned the dialectical tradition of Plato to the Skeptical aim of suspending belief. The debate between the New Academy and Stoicism dominated philosophical discussion for the next century and a half. On the Academic side the most prominent spokesman was Carneades c.213 129 B.C.. In the early years of the first century B.C., Philo of Larisa attempted to reconcile the Old and the New Academy. His pupil, the former Skeptic Antiochus of Ascalon, was enraged by this and broke away to refound the Old Academy in about 87 B.C. This was the beginning of Middle Platonism c.80 B.C.A.D. 220. Antiochus’s school was eclectic in combining elements of Platonism, Stoicism, and Aristotelian philosophy, and is known to us mainly through Cicero’s Academica. Middle Platonism revived the main themes of Speusippus and Xenocrates, but often used Stoic or neo-Pythagorean concepts to explain them. The influence of the Stoic Posidonius 13550/51 B.C. was strongly felt on the Academy in this period, and Platonism flourished at centers other than the Academy in Athens, most notably in Alexandria, with Eudorus first century B.C. and Philo of Alexandria fl. A.D. 39. After the death of Philo, the center of interest returned to Athens, where Plutarch of Chaeronia A.D. c.45c.125 studied with Ammonius at the Academy, although Plutarch spent most of his career at his home in nearby Boeotia. His many philosophical treatises, which are rich sources for the history of philosophy, are gathered under the title Moralia; his interest in ethics and moral education led him to write the Parallel Lives paired biographies of famous Romans and Athenians, for which he is best known. After this period, the Academy ceased to be the name for a species of Platonic philosophy, although the school remained a center for Platonism, and was especially prominent under the leadership of the Neoplatonist Proclus c.410 85.  .

accidens: a feature or property of a substance e.g., an organism or an artifact without which the substance could still exist. According to a common essentialist view of persons, Socrates’ size, color, and integrity are among his accidents, while his humanity is not. For Descartes, thinking is the essence of the soul, while any particular thought a soul entertains is an accident. According to a common theology, God has no accidents, since all truths about him flow by necessity from his nature. These examples suggest the diversity of traditional uses of the notion of accident. There is no uniform conception; but the Cartesian view, according to which the accidents are modes of ways of specifying the essence of a substance, is representative. An important ambiguity concerns the identity of accidents: if Plato and Aristotle have the same weight, is that weight one accident say, the property of weighing precisely 70 kilograms or two one accident for Plato, one for Aristotle? Different theorists give different answers and some have changed their minds. Issues about accidents have become peripheral in this century because of the decline of traditional concerns about substance. But the more general questions about necessity and contingency are very much alive. 

accidentalism: the metaphysical thesis that the occurrence of some events is either not necessitated or not causally determined or not predictable. Many determinists have maintained that although all events are caused, some nevertheless occur accidentally, if only because the causal laws determining them might have been different. Some philosophers have argued that even if determinism is true, some events, such as a discovery, could not have been predicted, on grounds that to predict a discovery is to make the discovery. The term may also designate a theory of individuation: that individuals of the same kind or species are numerically distinct in virtue of possessing some different accidental properties. Two horses are the same in essence but numerically distinct because one of them is black, e.g., while the other is white. Accidentalism presupposes the identity of indiscernibles but goes beyond it by claiming that accidental properties account for numerical diversity within a species. Peter Abelard criticized a version of accidentalism espoused by his teacher, William of Champeaux, on the ground that accidental properties depend for their existence on the distinct individuals in which they inhere, and so the properties cannot account for the distinctness of the individuals. 

accidie also acedia, apathy, listlessness, or ennui. This condition is problematic for the internalist thesis that, necessarily, any belief that one morally ought to do something is conceptually sufficient for having motivation to do it. Ann has long believed that she ought, morally, to assist her ailing mother, and she has dutifully acted accordingly. Seemingly, she may continue to believe this, even though, owing to a recent personal tragedy, she now suffers from accidie and is wholly lacking in motivation to assist her mother. 

acosmism: a term formed in analogy to ‘atheism,’ meaning the denial of the ultimate reality of the world. Ernst Platner used it in 1776 to describe Spinoza’s philosophy, arguing that Spinoza did not intend to deny “the existence of the Godhead, but the existence of the world.” Maimon, Fichte, Hegel, and others make the same claim. By the time of Feuerbach it was also used to characterize a basic feature of Christianity: the denial of the world or worldliness.  .

action theory, the study of the ontological structure of human action, the process by which it originates, and the ways in which it is explained. Most human actions are acts of commission: they constitute a class of events in which a subject the agent brings about some change or changes. Thus, in moving one’s finger, one brings it about that one’s finger moves. When the change brought about is an ongoing process e.g., the continuing appearance of words on a , the behavior is called an activity writing. An action of omission occurs when an agent refrains from performing an action of commission. Since actions of commission are events, the question of their ontology is in part a matter of the general ontology of change. An important issue here is whether what occurs when an action is performed should be viewed as abstract or concrete. On the first approach, actions are understood either as proposition-like entities e.g., Booth’s moving a finger, or as a species of universal  namely, an act-type moving a finger. What “occurred” when Booth moved his finger in Ford’s Theater on April 14, 1865, is held to be the abstract entity in question, and the entity is viewed as repeatable: that is, precisely the same entity is held to have occurred on every other occasion of Booth’s moving his finger. When actions are viewed as concrete, on the other hand, Booth’s moving his finger in Ford’s Theater is understood to be a non-repeatable particular, accidental property action theory 6 4065A-   6 and the movement of the finger counts as an acttoken, which instantiates the corresponding acttype. Concrete actions are time-bound: each belongs to a single behavioral episode, and other instantiations of the same act-type count as distinct events. A second important ontological issue concerns the fact that by moving his finger, Booth also fired a gun, and killed Lincoln. It is common for more than one thing to be accomplished in a single exercise of agency, and how such doings are related is a matter of debate. If actions are understood as abstract entities, the answer is essentially foregone: there must be as many different actions on Booth’s part as there are types exemplified. But if actions are viewed as particulars the same token can count as an instance of more than one type, and identity claims become possible. Here there is disagreement. Fine-grained theories of act individuation tend to confine identity claims to actions that differ only in ways describable through different modifications of the same main verb  e.g., where Placido both sings and sings loudly. Otherwise, different types are held to require different tokens: Booth’s action of moving his finger is held to have generated or given rise to distinct actions of firing the gun and killing Lincoln, by virtue of having had as causal consequences the gun’s discharge and Lincoln’s death. The opposite, coarse-grained theory, however, views these causal relations as grounds for claiming Booth’s acts were precisely identical. On this view, for Booth to kill Lincoln was simply for him to do something that caused Lincoln’s death  which was in fact nothing more than to move his finger  and similarly for his firing the gun. There is also a compromise account, on which Booth’s actions are related as part to whole, each consisting in a longer segment of the causal chain that terminates with Lincoln’s death. The action of killing Lincoln consisted, on this view, in the entire sequence; but that of firing the gun terminated with the gun’s discharge, and that of moving the finger with the finger’s motion. When, as in Booth’s case, more than one thing is accomplished in a single exercise of agency, some are done by doing others. But if all actions were performed by performing others, an infinite regress would result. There must, then, be a class of basic actions  i.e., actions fundamental to the performance of all others, but not themselves done by doing something else. There is disagreement, however, on which actions are basic. Some theories treat bodily movements, such as Booth’s moving his finger, as basic. Others point out that it is possible to engage in action but to accomplish less than a bodily movement, as when one tries to move a limb that is restrained or paralyzed, and fails. According to these accounts, bodily actions arise out of a still more basic mental activity, usually called volition or willing, which is held to constitute the standard means for performing all overt actions. The question of how bodily actions originate is closely associated with that of what distinguishes them from involuntary and reflex bodily events, as well as from events in the inanimate world. There is general agreement that the crucial difference concerns the mental states that attend action, and in particular the fact that voluntary actions typically arise out of states of intending on the part of the agent. But the nature of the relation is difficult, and there is the complicating factor that intention is sometimes held to reduce to other mental states, such as the agent’s desires and beliefs. That issue aside, it would appear that unintentional actions arise out of more basic actions that are intentional, as when one unintentionally breaks a shoelace by intentionally tugging on it. But how intention is first translated into action is much more problematic, especially when bodily movements are viewed as basic actions. One cannot, e.g., count Booth’s moving his finger as an intentional action simply because he intended to do so, or even on the ground if it is true that his intention caused his finger to move. The latter might have occurred through a strictly autonomic response had Booth been nervous enough, and then the moving of the finger would not have counted as an action at all, much less as intentional. Avoiding such “wayward causal chains” requires accounting for the agent’s voluntary control over what occurs in genuinely intentional action  a difficult task when bodily actions are held to be basic. Volitional accounts have greater success here, since they can hold that movements are intentional only when the agent’s intention is executed through volitional activity. But they must sidestep another threatened regress: if we call for an activity of willing to explain why Booth’s moving his finger counts as intentional action, we cannot do the same for willing itself. Yet on most accounts volition does have the characteristics of intentional behavior. Volitional theories of action must, then, provide an alternative account of how mental activity can be intentional. Actions are explained by invoking the agent’s reasons for performing them. Characteristically, a reason may be understood to consist in a positive attitude of the agent toward one or another action theory action theory 7 4065A-   7 outcome, and a belief to the effect that the outcome may be achieved by performing the action in question. Thus Emily might spend the summer in France out of a desire to learn French, and a belief that spending time in France is the best way to do so. Disputed questions about reasons include how confident the agent must be that the action selected will in fact lead to the envisioned outcome, and whether obligation represents a source of motivation that can operate independently of the agent’s desires. Frequently, more than one course of action is available to an agent. Deliberation is the process of searching out and weighing the reasons for and against such alternatives. When successfully concluded, deliberation usually issues in a decision, by which an intention to undertake one of the contemplated actions is formed. The intention is then carried out when the time for action comes. Much debate has centered on the question of how reasons are related to decisions and actions. As with intention, an agent’s simply having a reason is not enough for the reason to explain her behavior: her desire to learn French notwithstanding, Emily might have gone to France simply because she was transferred there. Only when an agent does something for a reason does the reason explain what is done. It is frequently claimed that this bespeaks a causal relation between the agent’s strongest reason and her decision or action. This, however, suggests a determinist stance on the free will problem, leading some philosophers to balk. An alternative is to treat reason explanations as teleological explanations, wherein an action is held to be reasonable or justified in virtue of the goals toward which it was directed. But positions that treat reason explanations as non-causal require an alternative account of what it is to decide or act for one reason rather than another. 

action verb: a verb applied to an agent and describing an activity, an action, or an attempt at or a culmination of an action. Verbs applying to agents may be distinguished in two basic ways: by whether they can take the progressive continuous form and by whether or not there is a specific moment of occurrence/completion of the action named by the verb. An activity verb is one describing something that goes on for a time but with no inherent endpoint, such as ‘drive’, ‘laugh’, or ‘meditate’. One can stop doing such a thing but one cannot complete doing it. Indeed, one can be said to have done it as soon as one has begun doing it. An accomplishment verb is one describing something that goes on for a time toward an inherent endpoint, such as ‘paint’ a fence, ‘solve’ a problem, or ‘climb’ a mountain. Such a thing takes a certain time to do, and one cannot be said to have done it until it has been completed. An achievement verb is one describing either the culmination of an activity, such as ‘finish’ a job or ‘reach’ a goal; the effecting of a change, such as ‘fire’ an employee or ‘drop’ an egg; or undergoing a change, such as ‘hear’ an explosion or ‘forget’ a name. An achievement does not go on for a period of time but may be the culmination of something that does. Ryle singled out achievement verbs and state verbs see below partly in order to disabuse philosophers of the idea that what psychological verbs name must invariably be inner acts or activities modeled on bodily actions or activities. A task verb is an activity verb that implies attempting to do something named by an achievement verb. For example, to seek is to attempt to find, to sniff is to attempt to smell, and to treat is to attempt to cure. A state verb is a verb not an action verb describing a condition, disposition, or habit rather than something that goes on or takes place. Examples include ‘own’, ‘weigh’, ‘want’, ‘hate’, ‘frequent’, and ‘teetotal’. These differences were articulated by Zeno Vendler in Linguistics and Philosophy 1967. Taking them into account, linguists have classified verbs and verb phrases into four main aspectual classes, which they distinguish in respect to the availability and interpretation of the simple present tense, of the perfect tenses, of the progressive construction, and of various temporal adverbials, such as adverbs like ‘yesterday’, ‘finally’, and ‘often’, and prepositional phrases like ‘for a long time’ and ‘in a while’. Many verbs belong to more than one category by virtue of having several related uses. For example, ‘run’ is both an activity and an accomplishment verb, and ‘weigh’ is both a state and an accomplishment verb. Linguists single out a class of causative verbs, such as ‘force’, ‘inspire’, and ‘persuade’, some of which are achievement and some accomplishment verbs. Such causative verbs as ‘break’, ‘burn’, and ‘improve’ have a correlative intransitive use, so that, e.g., to break something is to cause it to break.

act-object psychology: also called act-contentobject psychology, a philosophical theory that identifies in every psychological state a mental act, a lived-through phenomenological content, such as a mental image or description of properties, and an intended object that the mental act is about or toward which it is directed by virtue of its content. The distinction between the act, content, and object of thought originated with Alois Höfler’s Logik 1890, written in collaboration with Meinong. But the theory is historically most often associated with its development in Kazimierz Twardowski’s Zur Lehre vom Inhalt und Gegenstand der Vorstellung “On the Content and Object of Presentations,” 1894, despite Twardowski’s acknowledgment of his debt to Höfler. Act-object psychology arose as a reaction to Franz Brentano’s immanent intentionality thesis in his influential Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt “Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint,” 1874, in which Brentano maintains that intentionality is “the mark of the mental,” by contrast with purely physical phenomena. Brentano requires that intended objects belong immanently to the mental acts that intend them  a philosophical commitment that laid Brentano open to charges of epistemological idealism and psychologism. Yet Brentano’s followers, who accepted the intentionality of thought but resisted what they came to see as its detachable idealism and psychologism, responded by distinguishing the act-immanent phenomenological content of a psychological state from its act-transcendent intended object, arguing that Brentano had wrongly and unnecessarily conflated mental content with the external objects of thought. Twardowski goes so far as to claim that content and object can never be identical, an exclusion in turn that is vigorously challenged by Husserl in his Logische Untersuchungen “Logical Investigations,” 1913, 1922, and by others in the phenomenological tradition who acknowledge the possibility that a self-reflexive thought can sometimes be about its own content as intended object, in which content and object are indistinguishable. Act-object psychology continues to be of interest to contemporary philosophy because of its relation to ongoing projects in phenomenology, and as a result of a resurgence of study of the concept of intentionality and qualia in philosophy of mind, cognitive psychology, and Gegenstandstheorie, or existent and non-existent intended object theory, in philosophical logic and semantics. 

adelard of bath: Benedictine monk notable for his contributions to the introduction of Arabic science in the West. After studying at Tours, he taught at Laon, then spent seven years traveling in Italy, possibly Spain, and Cilicia and Syria, before returning to England. In his dialogue On the Same and the Different, he remarks, concerning universals, that the names of individuals, species, and genera are imposed on the same essence regarded in different respects. He also wrote Seventy-six Questions on Nature, based on Arabic learning; works on the use of the abacus and the astrolabe; a work on falconry; and translations of Abu Ma’shar’s Arabic active euthanasia Adelard of Bath 9 4065A-   9 Shorter Introduction to Astronomy, al-Khwarizmi’s fl. c.830 astronomical tables, and Euclid’s Elements.

adhyatman Sanskrit, ‘relating to or belonging to the self’, in early Hindu texts concerning such topics as knowledge of the self, meditating on that which appertains to the self, or spiritual exercise related to the self adhyatma-yoga. Later, it became a term for the Supreme Spirit, the Supreme Self, or the soul, which, in Indian thought, is other than the ego. In monistic systems, e.g. Advaita Vedanta, the adhyatman is the one Self that is the impersonal Absolute Brahman, a state of pure consciousness, ultimately the only Real. In dualist systems, e.g. Dvaita Vedanta, it is the true self or soul of each individual.

adorno, T. W.: philosopher and aesthetic theorist, one of the main philosophers of the first generation of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. With Horkheimer, Adorno gave philosophical direction to the Frankfurt School and its research projects in its Institute for Social Research. An accomplished musician and composer, Adorno first focused on the theory of culture and art, working to develop a non-reductionist but materialist theory of art and music in many essays from the 1930s. Under the influence of Walter Benjamin, he turned toward developing a “micrological” account of cultural artifacts, viewing them as “constellations” of social and historical forces. As his collaboration with Horkheimer increased, Adorno turned to the problem of a selfdefeating dialectic of modern reason and freedom. Under the influence of the seemingly imminent victory of the Nazis in Europe, this analysis focused on the “entwinement of myth and Enlightenment.” The Dialectic of Enlightenment 1941 argues that instrumental reason promises the subject autonomy from the forces of nature only to enslave it again by its own repression of its impulses and inclinations. The only way around this self-domination is “non-identity thinking,” found in the unifying tendencies of a non-repressive reason. This self-defeating dialectic is represented by the striking image of Ulysses tied to the mast to survive his encounter with the Sirens. Adorno initially hoped for a positive analysis of the Enlightenment to overcome this genealogy of modern reason, but it is never developed. Instead, he turned to an increasingly pessimistic analysis of the growing reification of modern life and of the possibility of a “totally administered society.” Adorno held that “autonomous art” can open up established reality and negate the experience of reification. Aesthetic Theory 1970 develops this idea of autonomous art in terms of aesthetic form, or the capacity of the internal organization of art to restructure existing patterns of meaning. Authentic works of art have a “truth-value” in their capacity to bring to awareness social contradictions and antinomies. In Negative Dialectics 1966 Adorno provides a more general account of social criticism under the “fragmenting” conditions of modern rationalization and domination. These and other writings have had a large impact on cultural criticism, particularly through Adorno’s analysis of popular culture and the “culture industry.”

Advaita, also called Uttara Mimamsa, in Hinduism, the non-dualistic form of Vedanta. Advaita Vedanta makes an epistemological distinction not a metaphysical one between the level of appearance and the level of reality. This marks off how things appear versus how they are; there appear to be a multitude of distinct persons and physical objects, and a personal deity, whereas there is only ineffable Brahman. This doctrine, according to Advaita, is taught in the Upanishads and realized in an esoteric enlightenment experience called moksha. The opposing evidence provided by all experiences that a have a subject-consciousness-object structure e.g., seeing a sunset and evidence a distinction between what one experiences and oneself, or b have a subject/content structure e.g., feeling pain and evidence a distinction between oneself and one’s states, is dismissed on the ground that these experiences involve “the making of distinctions.” Critics claim that moksha itself, as an experience in which something allegedly is learned or grasped, also must involve “the making of distinctions.” 

aesthetic attitude, the appropriate attitude or frame of mind for approaching art or nature or other objects or events so that one might both appreciate its intrinsic perceptual qualities, and as a result have an aesthetic experience. The aesthetic attitude has been construed in many ways: 1 as disinterested, so that one’s experience of the work is not affected by any interest in its possible practical uses, 2 as a “distancing” of oneself from one’s own personal concerns, 3 as the contemplation of an object, purely as an object of sensation, as it is in itself, for its own sake, in a way unaffected by any cognition or knowledge one may have of it. These different notions of aesthetic attitude have at times been combined within a single theory. There is considerable doubt about whether there is such a thing as an aesthetic attitude. There is neither any special kind of action nor any special way of performing an ordinary action that ensures that we see a work as it “really is,” and that results in our having an aesthetic experience. Furthermore, there are no purely sensory experiences, divorced from any cognitive content whatsoever. Criticisms of the notion of aesthetic attitude have reinforced attacks on aesthetics as a separate field of study within philosophy. 

aesthetic formalism: the view that in our interactions with works of art, form should be given primacy. Rather than taking ‘formalism’ as the name of one specific theory in the arts, it is better and more typical to take it to name that type of theory which emphasizes the form of the artwork. Or, since emphasis on form is something that comes in degrees, it is best to think of theories of art as ranged on a continuum of more formalist and less formalist. It should be added that theories of art are typically complex, including definitions of art, recommendations concerning what we should attend to in art, analyses of the nature of the aesthetic, recommendations concerning the making of aesthetic evaluations, etc.; and each of these components may be more formalist or less so. Those who use the concept of form mainly wish to contrast the artifact itself with its relations to entities outside itself  with its representing various things, its symbolizing various things, its being expressive of various things, its being the product of various intentions of the artist, its evoking various states in beholders, its standing in various relations of influence and similarity to preceding, succeeding, and contemporary works, etc. There have been some, however, who in emphasizing form have meant to emphasize not just the artifact but the perceptible form or design of the artifact. Kant, e.g., in his theory of aesthetic excellence, not only insisted that the only thing relevant to determining the beauty of an object is its appearance, but within the appearance, the form, the design: in visual art, not the colors but the design that the colors compose; in music, not the timbre of the individual sounds but the formal relationships among them. It comes as no surprise that theories of music have tended to be much more formalist than theories of literature and drama, with theories of the visual arts located in between. 

aesthetic property: a property or quality such as being dainty, garish, graceful, balanced, charming, majestic, trite, elegant, lifeless, ugly, or beautiful. By contrast, non-aesthetic properties are properties that require no special sensitivity or perceptiveness to perceive  such as a painting’s being predominantly blue, its having a small red square in a corner or a kneeling figure in the foreground, or that the music becomes louder at a given point. Sometimes it is argued that a special perceptiveness or taste is needed to perceive a work’s aesthetic qualities, and that this is a defining feature of a property’s being aesthetic. A corollary of this view is that aesthetic qualities cannot be defined in terms of non-aesthetic qualities, though some have held that aesthetic qualities supervene on non-aesthetic qualities. 

aesthetics: the branch of philosophy that examines the nature of art and the character of our adventitious ideas and experience of art and of the natural environment. It emerged as a separate field of philosophical inquiry during the eighteenth century in England and on the Continent. Recognition of aesthetics as a separate branch of philosophy coincided with the development of theories of art that grouped together painting, poetry, sculpture, music, and dance and often landscape gardening as the same kind of thing, les beaux arts, or the fine arts. Baumgarten coined the term ‘aesthetics’ in his Reflections on Poetry 1735 as the name for one of the two branches of the study of knowledge, i.e., for the study of sensory experience coupled with feeling, which he argued provided a different type of knowledge from the distinct, abstract ideas studied by “logic.” He derived it from the ancient Grecian aisthanomai ‘to perceive’, and “the aesthetic” has always been intimately connected with sensory experience and the kinds of feelings it arouses. Questions specific to the field of aesthetics are: Is there a special attitude, the aesthetic attitude, which we should take toward works of art and the natural environment, and what is it like? Is there a distinctive type of experience, an aesthetic experience, and what is it? Is there a special object of attention that we can call the aesthetic object? Finally, is there a distinctive value, aesthetic value, comparable with moral, epistemic, and religious values? Some questions overlap with those in the philosophy of art, such as those concerning the nature of beauty, and whether there is a faculty of taste that is exercised in judging the aesthetic character and value of natural objects or works of art. Aesthetics also encompasses the philosophy of art. The most central issue in the philosophy of art has been how to define ‘art’. Not all cultures have, or have had, a concept of art that coincides with the one that emerged in Western Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. What justifies our applying our concept to the things people in these other cultures have produced? There are also many pictures including paintings, songs, buildings, and bits of writing, that are not art. What distinguishes those pictures, musical works, etc., that are art from those that are not? Various answers have been proposed that identify the distinguishing features of art in terms of form, expressiveness, intentions of the maker, and social roles or uses of the object. Since the eighteenth century there have been debates about what kinds of things count as “art.” Some have argued that architecture and ceramics are not art because their functions are primarily utilitarian, and novels were for a long time not listed among the “fine arts” because they are not embodied in a sensuous medium. Debates continue to arise over new media and what may be new art forms, such as film, video, photography, performance art, found art, furniture, posters, earthworks, and computer and electronic art. Sculptures these days may be made out of dirt, feces, or various discarded and mass-produced objects, rather than marble or bronze. There is often an explicit rejection of craft and technique by twentieth-century artists, and the subject matter has expanded to include the banal and everyday, and not merely mythological, historical, and religious subjects as in years past. All of these developments raise questions about the relevance of the category of “fine” or “high” art. Another set of issues in philosophy of art concerns how artworks are to be interpreted, appreciated, and understood. Some views emphasize that artworks are products of individual efforts, so that a work should be understood in light of the producer’s knowledge, skill, and intentions. Others see the meaning of a work as established by social conventions and practices of the artist’s own time, but which may not be known or understood by the producer. Still others see meaning as established by the practices of the users, even if they were not in effect when the work was produced. Are there objective criteria or standards for evaluating individual artworks? There has been much disagreement over whether value judgments have universal validity, or whether there can be no disputing about taste, if value judgments are relative to the tastes and interests of each individual or to some group of individuals who share the same tastes and interests. A judgment such as “This is good” certainly seems to make a claim about the work itself, though such a claim is often based on the sort of feeling, understanding, or experience a person has obtained from the work. A work’s aesthetic or artistic value is generally distinguished from simply liking it. But is it possible to establish what sorts of knowledge or experiences any given work should provide to any suitably prepared perceiver, and what would it be to be suitably prepared? It is a matter of contention whether a work’s aesthetic and artistic values are independent of its moral, political, or epistemic stance or impact. Philosophy of art has also dealt with the nature of taste, beauty, imagination, creativity, repreaesthetics aesthetics 12 4065A-   12 sentation, expression, and expressiveness; style; whether artworks convey knowledge or truth; the nature of narrative and metaphor; the importance of genre; the ontological status of artworks; and the character of our emotional responses to art. Work in the field has always been influenced by philosophical theories of language or meaning, and theories of knowledge and perception, and continues to be heavily influenced by psychological and cultural theory, including versions of semiotics, psychoanalysis, cognitive psychology, feminism, and Marxism. Some theorists in the late twentieth century have denied that the aesthetic and the “fine arts” can legitimately be separated out and understood as separate, autonomous human phenomena; they argue instead that these conceptual categories themselves manifest and reinforce certain kinds of cultural attitudes and power relationships. These theorists urge that aesthetics can and should be eliminated as a separate field of study, and that “the aesthetic” should not be conceived as a special kind of value. They favor instead a critique of the roles that images not only painting, but film, photography, and advertising, sounds, narrative, and three-dimensional constructions have in expressing and shaping human attitudes and experiences.  

a fortiori argument: an argument that moves from the premises that everything which possesses a certain characteristics will possess some further characteristics and that certain things possess the relevant characteristics to an eminent degree to the conclusion that a fortiori even more so these things will possess the further characteristics. The second premise is often left implicit, so a fortiori arguments are often enthymemes. An example of an a fortiori argument can be found in Plato’s Crito: We owe gratitude and respect to our parents and so should do nothing to harm them. Athenians owe even greater gratitude and respect to the laws of Athens and so a fortiori should do nothing to harm those laws. 

African philosophy: the philosophy produced by the preliterate cultures of Africa, distinctive in that African philosophy in the traditional setting is unwritten. For someone who is interested in studying, say, Chinese or Arabic philosophy, the written works of the individual thinkers are available; African philosophy, by contrast with the exception of Ethiopian philosophy, has produced no written philosophical works. The lack of written philosophical literature in Africa’s cultural past is the outstanding reason for the persistent skepticism about the existence of African philosophy often entertained by scholars. There are some who would withhold the term ‘philosophy’ from African traditional thought and would reserve that term for the philosophical works being written by individual African philosophers today. There are others who, on the basis of i their own conception of the nature of philosophy, ii their sense of the history of the development of philosophical ideas in other cultures, iii their conviction about the importance of the universal character of the human capacity to wonder, or of the curiosity that leads some individuals in various cultures to raise fundamental questions about human life and experience, or iv their conviction that literacy is not a necessary condition for philosophizing, would apply ‘philosophy’ to African traditional thought, even though some of them would want to characterize it further as ethnophilosophy or folk philosophy. Two assumptions made about the character of African traditional thought have earned it those labels: one is the alleged communal collective subscription to a ‘monolithic’ set of ideas or beliefs; the other is the alleged lack of individualist elements in traditional thought. These assumptions have led some scholars to believe that African thought is a system of ideas or beliefs unanimously held by a whole tribe ethnos, even though it may be argued that thought as such is always the product of an individual intellect. An individual may refine or build on the philosophical work of another individual, but the product will still be an individual intellectual enterprise. What seems to have happened in Africa is that due to lack of a doxographic tradition, the ideas of unnamable because unidentifiable individuals that gained currency among the wider community became part of the pool of communal thought, as if they were the thought or a production of a whole ethnos, and expressed in its oral literature: in proverbs, myths and folk tales, rituals, religious beliefs, art symbols, customs, and traditions. These would, in fact, constitute the warp and woof of the fabric of traditional philosophy in Africa. An extensive and profound critical evaluation of concepts and values of traditional thought can be the starting point of modern African philosophy. The reason is that most of the traditional concepts, beliefs, and values have not relaxed their grip on modern African life and thought. But the modern African philosophy will also have to include the conceptual responses to the circumstances, experiences, and problems of modern African societies. This aspect of the philosophical enterprise will have to deal with the critical analysis, interpretation, and assessment of the changes that traditional values and ideas are going through in response to the pressures, both internal and external, weighing heavily on them through the ethos of contemporary life. Thus, African philosophy will not be a unique system, a windowless monad impervious to external influences. But it is conceivable  perhaps expected  that it will have some characteristics of its own. As to the central themes of African philosophy, what one can appropriately do at this stage of its development is indicate some of the persistent assumptions, beliefs, and values embedded in African cultural and historical experiences. These would undoubtedly include: supernaturalism  ideas about God and other spiritual entities conceived in African ontologies, the dualistic or monistic perception of the external world, the alleged religiosity or spirituality of the African life, human destiny, and the moral life; personhood and communitarianism  social and humanistic ethics, notions of the community and the common good, the nature of the good life, the status of individuality in African socioethical thought; political ideas  chiefship and traditional political authority, traditional ideas of democracy, democratic thought in a communitarian framework, consensual politics and decision making, political legitimacy, corruption and political morality; and tradition and modernity  the notion of culture, ethnicity and nationhood, the nature and development of national culture and identity, the concept of development, technology, society, and values. These themes and others have generated various ideas that must be critically analyzed and evaluated by contemporary African philosophers, who would in this way create a modern African philosophy with origins in the comprehensive culture and many-sided experiences of the African, yet aspects of which may be considered by other cultures to be worthwhile. Thanks to the literary culture they have inherited, contemporary African philosophers, through their own individual analyses and arguments, are in a position to contribute to the emergence of a modern African philosophy that would naturally comprise a multiplicity of individual philosophical ideas, arguments, and positions. K.G. agama Sanskrit, ‘what has come down’, an authoritative religious text of an Indian sect. There are Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist agamas. The Hindu agamas fall into three main classes: Vaifpava texts concerning the worship of Vishnu, Saiva texts dealing with worship of Siva, and Tantric texts regarding worship of Sakti. Saivism, e.g., has twenty-eight agamas. An agama may give instructions regarding making temples or idols, offer meditation techniques, teach philosophical doctrines, or commend methods of worship. The Mahayana Buddhist term for the basic teachings of the Theravada Buddhist tradition is ‘agama’.

agape: unselfish love for all persons. An ethical theory according to which such love is the chief virtue, and actions are good to the extent that they express it, is sometimes called agapism. Agape is the Grecian word most often used for love in the New Testament, and is often used in modern languages to signify whatever sort of love the writer takes to be idealized there. In New Testament Grecian, however, it was probably a quite general word for love, so that any ethical ideal must be found in the text’s substantive claims, rather than in the linguistic meaning of the word. R.M.A. agathon, Grecian word meaning ‘a good’ or ‘the good’. From Socrates onward, agathon was taken to be a central object of philosophical inquiry; it has frequently been assumed to be the goal of all rational action. Plato in the simile of the sun in the Republic identified it with the Form of the Good, the source of reality, truth, and intelligibility. Aristotle saw it as eudaimonia, intellectual or practical virtue, a view that found its way, via Stoicism and Neoplatonism, into Christianity. Modern theories of utility can be seen as concerned with essentially the same Socratic question.

agent causation: the idea that the primary cause of an event is a substance; more specifically, causation by a substance, as opposed to an event. Thus a brick a substance may be said to be the cause of the breaking of the glass. The expression is also used more narrowly by Reid and others for agama the view that an action or event is caused by an exertion of power by some agent endowed with will and understanding. Thus, a person may be said to be the cause of her action of opening the door. In this restricted sense Reid called it “the strict and proper sense”, an agent-cause must have the power to cause the action or event and the power not to cause it. Moreover, it must be “up to” the agent whether to cause the event or not to cause it. It is not “up to” the brick whether to cause or not to cause the breaking of the glass. The restricted sense of agent causation developed by Reid is closely tied to the view that the agent possesses free will. Medieval philosophers distinguished the internal activity of the agent from the external event produced by that activity. The former was called “immanent causation” and the latter “transeunt causation.” These terms have been adapted by Chisholm and others to mark the difference between agent causation and event causation. The idea is that the internal activity is agentcaused by the person whose activity it is; whereas the external event is event-caused by the internal activity of the agent.  

agnoiology from Grecian agnoia, ‘ignorance’, the study of ignorance, its quality, and its conditions.

agnosticism from Grecian a-, ‘not’, and gnastos, ‘known’, term invented by Thomas Henry Huxley in 1869 to denote the philosophical and religious attitude of those who claim that metaphysical ideas can be neither proved nor disproved. Huxley wrote, “I neither affirm nor deny the immortality of man. I see no reason for believing it, but on the other hand, I have no means of disproving it. I have no a priori objection to the doctrine.” Agnosticism is a form of skepticism applied to metaphysics, especially theism. The position is sometimes attributed to Kant, who held that we cannot have knowledge of God or immortality but must be content with faith. Agnosticism should not be confused with atheism, the belief that no god exists.

ahamkara Sanskrit, ‘I-maker’, ‘I-crier’, in Hindu thought, the ego or faculty that gives the sense of ‘I’ or individual personality; by extension, egotism, pride, conceit. In the Sankhya and Yoga systems, it is the third element of everchanging Nature evolving in creation. From it evolves the remainder of the phenomenal world. Other than Nature, which includes the individual intellect buddhi, the faculty of perception manas, the organs, and the senses, is the unchanging individual self puruca, Atman. The human predicament results from the ignorant identification of oneself with Nature rather than the true self. In earlier texts the cosmic sense of ahamkara dominates as the means by which the Creator formulates Himself to create the world. R.N.Mi. ahanta, Sanskrit word meaning ‘indestructible’, ‘unchangeable’, ‘eternal’. In traditional Hindu philosophical thought, the truly real was thought to be indestructible and eternal. Thus, because the Upanishadic Brahman and its subjective counterpart, the Atman, were regarded as the truly real, they were thought to be unchangeable and eternal. The Hindu religious classic, the Bhagavad Gita probably written between the fifth and the second century B.C., made ahanta a well-known concept through the teachings of Krishna, who advised Arjuna that even though one’s body may perish one’s soul is eternal and indestructible, thus implying that the human soul contains the essence of the divine reality. 

ahim . sa Sanskrit, traditionally and literally, nonviolence to living creatures; for modern Indian thinkers, a positive sense of kindness to all creatures. To the Jains, ahimsa was a vow to injure no living being jiva in thought, word, or deed. Many Buddhists practice ahimsa as a precept that denies the existence of the ego, since injuring another is an assertion of egoism. With the modern period, particularly Gandhi, ahimsa was equated with self-sacrificial love for all beings. For Gandhi it was the first vow of the satyagrahi, the one who “held onto Truth,” the nonviolent resister. 

aitia Grecian, cause. Originally referring to responsibility for a crime, this Grecian term came to be used by philosophers to signify causality in a somewhat broader sense than the English ‘cause’  the traditional rendering of aitia  can convey. An aitia is any answer to a why-question. According to Aristotle, how such questions ought to be answered is a philosophical issue addressed differently by different philosophers. He himself distinguishes four types of answers, and thus four aitiai, by distinguishing different types of questions: 1 Why is the statue heavy? Because it is made of bronze material aitia. 2 Why did Persians invade Athens? Because the Athenians had raided their territory moving or efficient aitia. 3 Why are the angles of a triangle equal to two right angles? Because of the triangle’s nature formal aitia. 4 Why did someone walk after dinner? Because or for the sake of his health final aitia. Only the second of these would typically be called a cause in English. Though some render aitia as ‘explanatory principle’ or ‘reason’, these expressions inaptly suggest a merely mental existence; instead, an aitia is a thing or aspect of a thing.

akasa, Sanskrit word translated as ‘ether’ or ‘space’. Indian philosophical systems recognized various ontological categories, including that of substance. Akasa was thought of as a substance because it was believed to be the substratum of sound. Because akasa was understood to transmit sound waves, the term is better translated as ‘ether’ than ‘space’, but scholars are not unanimous on this. Akasa, though extended in space, was viewed as a non-material substance. It was thought of as all-pervading, infinite, indivisible and imperceivable, being inferred from the sensed quality of sound.

akrasia: also spelled acrasia, Grecian term for weakness of will. Akrasia is a character flaw, also called incontinence, exhibited primarily in intentional behavior that conflicts with the agent’s own values or principles. Its contrary is enkrateia strength of will, continence, self-control. Both akrasia and enkrateia, Aristotle says, “are concerned with what is in excess of the state characteristic of most people; for the continent abide by their resolutions more, and the incontinent less, than most people can” Nicomachean Ethics 1152a2527. These resolutions may be viewed as judgments that it would be best to perform an action of a certain sort, or better to do one thing than another. Enkrateia, on that view, is the power kratos to act as one judges best in the face of competing motivation. Akrasia is a want or deficiency of such power. Aristotle himself limited the sphere of both states more strictly than is now done, regarding both as concerned specifically with “pleasures and pains and appetites and aversions arising through touch and taste” [1150a910]. Philosophers are generally more interested in incontinent and continent actions than in the corresponding states of character. Various species of incontinent or akratic behavior may be distinguished, including incontinent reasoning and akratic belief formation. The species of akratic behavior that has attracted most attention is uncompelled, intentional action that conflicts with a better or best judgment consciously held by the agent at the time of action. If, e.g., while judging it best not to eat a second piece of pie, you intentionally eat another piece, you act incontinently  provided that your so acting is uncompelled e.g., your desire for the pie is not irresistible. Socrates denied that such action is possible, thereby creating one of the Socratic paradoxes. In “unorthodox” instances of akratic action, a deed manifests weakness of will even though it accords with the agent’s better judgment. A boy who decides, against his better judgment, to participate in a certain dangerous prank, might  owing to an avoidable failure of nerve  fail to execute his decision. In such a case, some would claim, his failure to act on his decision manifests weakness of will or akrasia. If, instead, he masters his fear, his participating in the prank might manifest strength of will, even though his so acting conflicts with his better judgment. The occurrence of akratic actions seems to be a fact of life. Unlike many such apparent facts, this one has received considerable philosophical scrutiny for nearly two and a half millennia. A major source of the interest is clear: akratic action raises difficult questions about the connection between thought and action, a connection of paramount importance for most philosophical theories of the explanation of intentional behavior. Insofar as moral theory does not float free of evidence about the etiology of human behavior, the tough questions arise there as well. Ostensible akratic action, then, occupies a philosophical space in the intersection of the philosophy of mind and moral theory. 

akcara Sanskrit, ‘imperishable’, the highest reality in a variety of Hindu thought systems. From earliest times it also meant ‘syllable’, reflecting the search for the ultimate reality by Vedic priest-thinkers and the early primacy given to the sacred utterance as the support of the ritual order of the universe, later identified as the syllable Om. In later texts and the systematic thinkers it refers to the highest reality, which may be a personal supreme being or an impersonal absolute, such as the Highest Self paramatman of Shankara 70050. Non-technically, it can be used in any thought system of any entity believed to be imperishable. R.N.Mi. alaya-vijñana, Sanskrit term meaning literally ‘storehouse consciousness’, a category developed by Indian Buddhist metaphysicians to solve some specific philosophical problems, notably those of delayed karmic effect and causation at a temporal distance. The alaya-vijñana “stores,” in unactualized but potential form, as “seeds,” the results of an agent’s volitional actions. These karmic “seeds” may come to fruition at a later time. Most Buddhists think of moments of consciousness vijñana as intentional having an object, being of something; the alaya-vijñana is an exception, allowing for the continuance of consciousness when the agent is apparently not conscious of anything such as during dreamless sleep, and so also for the continuance of potential for future action during those times. 

Albert of Saxony: terminist logician from lower Saxony who taught in the arts faculty at Paris, 135162. He never finished his theology degree, as, under the influence of Buridan and Nicholas of Oresme, he turned to mathematics, physics, and logic. He was a founder of the  of Vienna in 1365 and was bishop of Halberstadt from 1366. His works on logic include Logic, Questions on the Posterior Analytics, Sophismata, Treatise on Obligations, and Insolubilia. He also wrote questions on Aristotle’s physical works and on John of Sacrobosco’s De Sphaera, and short treatises on squaring the circle and on the ratio of the diameter to the side of a square. His work is competent but rarely original. 

Albertus Magnus: Dominican philosopher. As a Parisian master of theology, he served on a commission that condemned the Talmud. He left Paris to found the first Dominican studium generale in Germany at Cologne in 1248. From 1252 until old age, Albert was repeatedly asked to be an arbiter and peacemaker. After serving briefly as bishop of Regensburg in 1260, he was ordered to preach the crusade of 1263 64 in Germany. He spent his last years writing in Cologne. Albert contributed to philosophy chiefly as a commentator on Aristotle, although he occasionally reached different conclusions from Aristotle. Primarily, Albert was a theologian, as is evident from his extensive commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sentences and his commentaries on the Old and New Testaments. As a theologian, he customarily developed his thought by commenting on traditional texts. For Albert, Aristotle offered knowledge ascertainable using reason, just as Scripture, based on God’s word, tells of the supernatural. Albert saw Aristotle’s works, many newly available, as an encyclopedic compendium of information on the natural universe; included here is the study of social and political conditions and ethical obligations, for Aristotelian “natural knowledge” deals with human nature as well as natural history. Aristotle is the Philosopher; however, unlike Holy Scripture, he must be corrected in places. Like Holy Scripture, though, Aristotle is occasionally obscure. To rectify these shortcomings one must rely on other authorities: in the case of Holy Scripture, reference is to the church fathers and established interpreters; in the case of Aristotle, to the Peripatetics. The term ‘Peripatetics’ extends to modern as well as ancient authors  al-Farabi, Avicenna Ibn-Sina, and Averroes Ibn-Rushd, as well as Themistius and Alexander of Aphrodisias; even Seneca, Maimonides, and “our” Boethius are included. For the most part, Albert saw Plato through the eyes of Aristotle and Averroes, since apart from the Timaeus very little of Plato’s work was available in Latin. Albert considered the Liber de causis a work of Aristotle, supplemented by alFarabi, Avicenna, and al-Ghazali and translated into Latin. When he commented on the Liber de causis, Albert was not aware that this Neoplatonic work  which speaks of the world emanating from the One as from a first cause  was based on Proclus and ultimately on Plotinus. But Albert’s student, Aquinas, who had better translations of Aristotle, recognized that the Liber de causis was not an Aristotelian work. Albert’s metaphysics, which is expounded in his commentaries on Aristotle’s Metaphysics on the Liber de causis, contains profoundly contradictory elements. His inclination to synthesis led him to attempt to reconcile these elements  as on social and ecclesiastical questions he often sought peace through compromise. In his Metaphysics and Physics and in his On the Heavens and On Generation and Corruption, Aristotle presented the world as ever-changing and taught that an unmoved mover “thought thinking itself” maintained everything in movement and animation by allowing its spiritual nature to be seen in all its cold, unapproachable beauty. The Liber de causis, on the other hand, develops the theory that the world emanates from the One, causing everything in the world in its pantheistic creativity, so that the caused world returns in mystic harmony to the One. Thus Albert’s Aristotelian commentaries, begun in 125152, culminated in 1265 with his commentary on a work whose pseudo-Aristotelian character he was unable to recognize. Nevertheless, the Christian Neoplatonism that Albert placed on an Aristotelian basis was to exert an influence for centuries. In natural philosophy, Albert often arrived at views independent of Aristotle. According to Aristotle’s Physics, motion belongs to no single category; it is incomplete being. Following Avicenna and Averroes, Albert asks whether “becoming black,” e.g.  which ceases when change ceases and blackness is finally achieved  differs from blackness essentially essentia or only in its being esse. Albert establishes, contrary to Avicenna, that the distinction is only one of being. In his discussions of place and space, stimulated by Avicenna, Albert also makes an original contribution. Only two dimensions  width and breadth  are essential to place, so that a fluid in a bottle is framed by the inner surface of the bottle. According to Albert, the significance of the third dimension, depth, is more modest, but nonetheless important. Consider a bucket of water: its base is the essential part, but its round walls maintain the cohesion of the water. For Aristotle, time’s material foundation is distinct from its formal definition. Materially, the movement of the fixed stars is basic, although time itself is neither movement nor change. Rather, just as before and after are continuous in space and there are earlier and later moments in movement as it proceeds through space, so time  being the number of motion  has earlier and later moments or “nows.” The material of time consists of the uninterrupted flow of the indivisible nows, while time’s form and essential expression is number. Following al-Farabi and Avicenna, Albert’s interpretation of these doctrines emphasizes not only the uninterrupted continuity of the flow of “nows,” but also the quantity of time, i.e., the series of discrete, separate, and clearly distinct numbers. Albert’s treatment of time did not lend itself well to later consideration of time as a dimension; his concept of time is therefore not well suited to accommodate our unified concept of space-time. The use of the pseudo-Aristotelian De proprietatibus elementorum in De causis proprietatum elementorum gave Albert’s worldview a strong astrological flavor. At issue here is how the planets influence the earth and mankind. Particularly important is the influence of Jupiter and Saturn on fire and the seas; when increased, it could produce fiery conflagrations, and when circumscribed, floods. Albert was encyclopedic: a scientist and scholar as well as a philosopher and theologian. In addition to the works mentioned, he produced commentaries on Pseudo-Dionysius, a Summa de creaturis, a Summa Theologica, and many other treatises. Unlike other commentators, his exposition was continuous, an extensive paraphrase; he provided a complete Latin and Christian philosophy. Even in his lifetime, he was a named authority; according to Roger Bacon, his views were often given as much weight as those of Aristotle, Avicenna, and Averroes. His students or followers include Aquinas, Ulrich of Strassburg d.1278?, Theodoric of Freiberg d.1310?, Giles of Lessines d.1304?, Meister Eckhart, Johannes Tauler d.1361, Henry Suso d.1366, and Jan van Ruysbroeck d.1381. 

alchemy: a quasi-scientific practice and mystical art, mainly ancient and medieval, that had two broad aims: to change baser metals into gold and to develop the elixir of life, the means to immortality. Classical Western alchemy probably originated in Egypt in the first three centuries A.D. with earlier Chinese and later Islamic and Indian variants and was practiced in earnest in Europe by such figures as Paracelsus and Newton until the eighteenth century. Western alchemy addressed concerns of practical metallurgy, but its philosophical significance derived from an early Grecian theory of the relations among the basic elements and from a religious-allegorical Albinus alchemy 18 4065A-   18 understanding of the alchemical transmutation of ores into gold, an understanding that treats this process as a spiritual ascent from human toward divine perfection. The purification of crude ores worldly matter into gold material perfection was thought to require a transmuting agent, the philosopher’s stone, a mystical substance that, when mixed with alcohol and swallowed, was believed to produce immortality spiritual perfection. The alchemical search for the philosopher’s stone, though abortive, resulted in the development of ultimately useful experimental tools e.g., the steam pump and methods e.g., distillation.

alethic modalities: historically, the four central ways or modes in which a given proposition might be true or false: necessity, contingency, possibility, and impossibility. The term ‘alethic’ derives from Grecian aletheia, ‘truth’. These modalities, and their logical interconnectedness, can be characterized as follows. A proposition that is true but possibly false is contingently true e.g., that Aristotle taught Alexander; one that is true and not-possibly i.e., “impossibly” false is necessarily true e.g., that red things are colored. Likewise, a proposition that is false but possibly true is contingently false e.g., that there are no tigers; and one that is false and not-possibly true is necessarily false e.g., that seven and five are fourteen. Though any one of the four modalities can be defined in terms of any other, necessity and possibility are generally taken to be the more fundamental notions, and most systems of alethic modal logic take one or the other as basic. Distinct modal systems differ chiefly in regard to their treatment of iterated modalities, as in the proposition It is necessarily true that it is possibly true that it is possibly true that there are no tigers. In the weakest of the most common systems, usually called T, every iterated modality is distinct from every other. In the stronger system S4, iterations of any given modality are redundant. So, e.g., the above proposition is equivalent to It is necessarily true that it is possibly true that there are no tigers. In the strongest and most widely accepted system S5, all iteration is redundant. Thus, the two propositions above are both equivalent simply to It is possibly true that there are no tigers. 

Alexander, Samuel 18591938, Australian-born British philosopher. Born in Sydney, he was educated at Balliol, Oxford, and taught for most of his career at the  of Manchester. His aim, which he most fully realized in Space, Time, and Deity 1920, was to provide a realistic account of the place of mind in nature. He described nature as a series of levels of existence where irreducible higher-level qualities emerge inexplicably when lower levels become sufficiently complex. At its lowest level reality consists of space-time, a process wherein points of space are redistributed at instants of time and which might also be called pure motion. From complexities in space-time matter arises, followed by secondary qualities, life, and mind. Alexander thought that the still-higher quality of deity, which characterizes the whole universe while satisfying religious sentiments, is now in the process of emerging from mind. 

Alexander of Aphrodisias: Grecian philosopher, one of the foremost commentators on Aristotle in late antiquity. He exercised considerable influence on later Grecian, Arabic, and Latin philosophy through to the Renaissance. On the problem of universals, Alexander endorses a brand of conceptualism: although several particulars may share a single, common nature, this nature does not exist as a universal except while abstracted in thought from the circumstances that accompany its particular instantiations. Regarding Aristotle’s notorious distinction between the “agent” and “patient” intellects in On the Soul III.5, Alexander identifies the agent intellect with God, who, as the most intelligible entity, makes everything else intelligible. As its own self-subsistent object, this intellect alone is imperishable; the human intellect, in contrast, perishes at death. Of Alexander’s many commentaries, only those on Aristotle’s Metaphysics Ad, Prior Analytics I, Topics, On the Senses, and Meterologics are extant. We also have two polemical treatises, On Fate and On Mixture, directed against the Stoics; a psychological treatise, the De anima based on Aristotle’s; as well as an assortment of essays including the De intellectu and his Problems and Solutions. Nothing is known of Alexander’s life apart from his appointment by the emperor Severus to a chair in Aristotelian philosophy between 198 and 209. 

Alexander of Hales c.11851245, English Franciscan theologian, known as the Doctor IrrefragaAlcinous Alexander of Hales 19 4065A-   19 bilis. The first to teach theology by lecturing on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, Alexander’s emphasis on speculative theology initiated the golden age of Scholasticism. Alexander wrote commentaries on the Psalms and the Gospels; his chief works include his Glossa in quattuor libros sententiarum, Quaestiones disputatatae antequam esset frater, and Quaestiones quodlibetales. Alexander did not complete the Summa fratris Alexandri; Pope Alexander IV ordered the Franciscans to complete the Summa Halesiana in 1255. Master of theology in 1222, Alexander played an important role in the history of the  of Paris, writing parts of Gregory IX’s Parens scientiarum 1231. He also helped negotiate the peace between England and France in 123536. Later in 1236 he gave up his position as canon of Lichfield and archdeacon of Coventry to become a Franciscan, the first Franciscan master of theology; his was the original Franciscan chair of theology at Paris. Among the Franciscans, his most prominent disciples include St. Bonaventure, Richard Rufus of Cornwall, and John of La Rochelle, to whom he resigned his chair in theology near the end of his life. R.W. Alexandrian School, those Neoplatonic philosophers contemporary with and subsequent to Proclus A.D. 41285 who settled in Alexandria and taught there. They include Hermeias fl. c.440, Proclus’s fellow-student of Syrianus; Hermeias’s son Ammonius either 435517 or 445 526; and Ammonius’s three pupils, John Philoponus c.490575, Simplicius writing after 532, and Asclepius mid-sixth century. Later Alexandrians include Olympiodorus 495/505 after 565 and the Christians Elias fl. c.540 and David late sixth century. All these worked exclusively or primarily on the exegesis of Aristotle. Damascius c.456540 also took lectures from Ammonius at some time between 475 and 485, but in his doctrine he belongs much more to the Athenian tradition. Simplicius, on the other hand, while he moved to Athens to teach, remains more in the Alexandrian tradition. Ever since Karl Praechter, who was influenced by a Hegelian view of historical development, the Alexandrian Platonists have been seen as professing a simpler form of metaphysics than the Athenian School, and deliberately avoiding controversy with the powerful Christian establishment in Alexandria by confining themselves largely to logic, mathematics, and the exegesis of Aristotle. There is a certain manifest truth in this picture, but modern scholarship in particular Ilsetraut Hadot has done much to show that even in Ammonius’s commentaries on Aristotle there lurks distinctive Neoplatonic doctrine, so that the contrast with the Athenian School has become somewhat blurred. The School may be said to have come to an end with the departure of Stephanus to take up the chair of philosophy in Constantinople in about 610.

Alpharabius: al-Farabi, Abu Nasr, also called Abunaser, philosopher. Born in Turkestan, he studied and taught in Baghdad when it was the cultural capital of the Islamic world, responsive to the philosophical and scientific legacy of late antiquity. AlFarabi was highly instrumental in effecting a transition of Grecian philosophy, last publicly known in its entirety in sixth-century Alexandria, into Islamic culture. Despite ongoing opposition because of philosophy’s identification with pagan and Christian authors, al-Farabi succeeded in naturalizing Western philosophy in the Islamic world, where it retained vitality for the next three hundred years. Al-Farabi became known as “the second teacher,” after Aristotle the main source of philosophical information. His summaries and interpretations of the teachings of Aristotle and Plato were widely read, and his attempt at synthesizing their views was very influential. Believing in the universal nature of truth and holding Plato and Aristotle in the highest esteem, he minimized their differences and adopted Neoplatonic teachings that incorporated elements of both traditions. Unlike the first philosopher of the Islamic world, the ninth-century al-Kindi, al-Farabi was in possession of full Arabic translations of many of the most important texts of classical times and of some major Hellenistic commentaries on them. His own commentaries and digests of the works of Plato and Aristotle made them more accessible to later generations of scholars, even as his relatively independent treatises established a high standard of logical rigor and subtlety for later Muslim and Jewish philosophers. Avicenna found his Metaphysics commentary indispensable for understanding Aristotle’s text, while Maimonides recommended all his writings, calling them “pure flour.” Medieval Scholastic thought, however, was more interested in Averroes and Avicenna than in al-Farabi. Contemporary scholars such as Leo Strauss and Muhsin Mahdi have emphasized the esoteric nature of al-Farabi’s writings, seen as critical for understanding much of medieval Islamic and Jewish philosophy. Al-Farabi’s main interests lay in logic and political theory. He understood that the Organon was just that, a universal instrument for understanding and improving reasoning and logical discourse. Against the traditional grammarians of Islam, he argued for the value-free and neutral nature of Grecian logic, while against the theologians of Islam, the mutakallimun, he emphasized the difference between their dialectical type of discourse and the preferred demonstrative syllogism of the philosophers. Much of the responsibility for the separation between Islamic theology and philosophy may be attributed to al-Farabi, who avoided engaging religious dogmas and specifically Muslim beliefs as much as possible. He was able to accommodate belief in prophecy and revelation to a general theory of emanation, though he made no special claims for the prophet of Islam. His general view of religion was that it was a popular and symbolic representation of philosophical ideas, often designed by philosophers. The influence of Plato’s Republic in this and other areas of political philosophy is evident, though al-Farabi’s Principles of the Views of the Citizens of the Best State manages to give an Islamic coloration to Platonic teachings. Al-Farabi’s metaphysical beliefs are more problematical still, and he was reputed to have disowned his earlier belief in the immortality of the soul. 

al-Ghazali, Abu Hamid: Islamic philosopher, theologian, jurist, and mystic. He was born in Khurasan and educated in Nishapur, then an intellectual center of eastern Islam. He was appointed the head of a seminary, the newly founded Nizamiyah of Baghdad, in which he taught law and theology with great success. Yet his exposure to logic and philosophy led him to seek a certainty in knowledge beyond that assumed by his profession. At first he attempted to address his problem academically, but after five years in Baghdad he resigned, left his family, and embarked on the mystic’s solitary quest for al-Haqq Arabic for ‘the truth’, ‘the True One’. As a Sufi he wandered for ten years through many of Islam’s major cities and centers of learning, finally returning to Nishapur and to teaching theology before his death. Al-Ghazali’s literary and intellectual legacy is particularly rich and multifaceted. In the catholicity of his work and the esteem in which he is held within Islam he may be compared to Aquinas and Maimonides in the Christian and Jewish traditions respectively. His Revivification of the Religious Sciences is considered to this day a major theological compendium. His mystical treatises also have retained their popularity, as has his much celebrated autobiography, The Deliverance from Error. This book chronicles his lifelong quest for truth and certainty, and his disappointment with the premises of dogmatic theology, both orthodox Sunni and heterodox Shiite thought, as well as with the teachings of the philosophers. The light of truth came to him, he believed, only through divine grace; he considered his senses and reasoning powers all susceptible to error. It was this pervasive sense of skepticism that led him, while still in Baghdad, to investigate philosophy’s claims to knowledge. He first composed a summa of philosophical teachings, based primarily on the views of Avicenna, and called it The Intentions of the Philosophers. He later published a detailed and penetrating critique of these views, The Incoherence of the Philosophers. Averroes arose later in Muslim Spain to defend philosophy, particularly that of Aristotle, calling his book The Incoherence of the Incoherence. Averroes’ work was more appreciated in the West, however, which also preferred al-Ghazali’s Intentions to his Incoherence. The former, shorn of its polemical purpose and thus appearing as a philosophical summa, was translated by Dominicus Gundissalinus as Logica et Philosophia Algazelis, giving al-Ghazali a reputation in the West as at least a sometime advocate of philosophy. His attack upon the physics and metaphysics of his day, which was an amalgam of Aristotelian and Neoplatonic doctrines, was firmly rooted in Aristotelian logic, and anticipates Hume in understanding the non-necessary nature of causal relationships. For al-Ghazali, the world as a whole proceeds not by any eternal or logical necessity, but by the will of God. That will is indefensible on philosophical grounds, he believed, as is the philosophers’ notion of divine omniscience. Their god cannot on their terms be related to the world, and is ultimately redundant logically. What is regarded as miraculous becomes possible, once nature is understood to have no autonomy or necessary entailments. 

algorithm: a clerical or effective procedure that can be applied to any of a class of certain symbolic inputs and that will in a finite time and number of steps eventuate in a result in a corresponding symbolic output. A function for which an algorithm sometimes more than one can be given is an algorithmic function. The following are common examples: a given n, finding the nth prime number; b differentiating a polynomial; c finding the greatest common divisor of x and y the Euclidean algorithm; and d given two numbers x, y, deciding whether x is a multiple of y. When an algorithm is used to calculate values of a numerical function, as in a, b, and c, the function can also be described as algorithmically computable, effectively computable, or just computable. Algorithms are generally agreed to have the following properties  which made them essential to the theory of computation and the development of the Church-Turing thesis  i an algorithm can be given by a finite string of instructions, ii a computation device or agent can carry out or compute in accordance with the instructions, iii there will be provisions for computing, storing, and recalling steps in a computation, iv computations can be carried out in a discrete and stepwise fashion in, say, a digital computer, and v computations can be carried out in a deterministic fashion in, say, a deterministic version of a Turing machine. 

Alkindus: al-Kindi, Abu Yusuf, philosopher who was an early and prominent supporter of philosophical studies among the Muslims. He combined a noble Arab lineage with an influential position in the caliphate during a critical period for the translation and propagation of Grecian sciences in Arabic. Known as “the philosopher of the Arabs,” he more than any other scholar of his generation was responsible, as a patron, book collector, editor, and writer, for the acceptance of philosophy, despite its foreign and non-Islamic Grecian source. Later writers surpassed him in knowledge of philosophy, and his numerous epistles, treatises, and books were eventually left in limbo. Of the 250 titles recorded in his name on an unusual variety of subjects, most are lost. About forty survive in a poor state, full of uncertain readings and other textual problems. Nevertheless, al-Kindi’s works provide ample evidence of his close interest in Aristotle and to an extent Plato. Unlike later philosophers in the Islamic world, he firmly believed he could combine literal Koranic religious doctrines and Grecian philosophical concepts. Among his best-known philosophical works is On First Philosophy English translation by A. Ivry, 1974, whose theme is that the noblest part of philosophy is first philosophy, which is knowledge of the First Truth and the First Cause. Al-Kindi includes an extended demonstration of the finiteness of the universe, time, and motion and the consequent infinitude of a creator who was their cause, who is the pure unity that is the ultimate source of all else and yet who, in al-Kindi’s mind, brings the world into being ex nihilo. In On the Number of Aristotle’s Books, he separates prophetic knowledge from ordinary, discursive philosophy: prophets know intuitively without effort or time. 

Allais’s paradox: a puzzle about rationality devised by Maurice Allais b. 1911. Leonard Savage 191771 advanced the sure-thing principle, which states that a rational agent’s ranking of a pair of gambles having the same consequence in a state S agrees with her ranking of any other pair of gambles the same as the first pair except for having some other common consequence in S. Allais devised an apparent counterexample with four gambles involving a 100-ticket lottery. The table lists prizes in units of $100,000. Ticket Numbers Gambles 1 2  11 12  100 A 5 5 5 B 0 25 5 C 5 5 0 D 0 25 0 Changing A’s and B’s common consequence for tickets 12100 from 5 to 0 yields C and D respectively. Hence the sure-thing principle prohibits simultaneously preferring A to B, and D to C. Yet most people have these preferences, which seem coherent. This conflict generates the paradox. Savage presented the sure-thing principle in The Foundations of Statistics 1954. Responding to preliminary drafts of that work, Allais formulated his counterexample in “The Foundations of a Positive Theory of Choice Involving Risk and a Criticism of the Postulates and Axioms of the American School” 1952. 

Rhazes: al-Razi, Abu Bakr, physician, philosopher, and chemist. He headed the hospital in Rayy, his birthplace, and later in Baghdad, often returning to Rayy, where he died. A learned Galenist and critic of Galen, he brought the same empirical, Hippocratic spirit to medicine that he had used in transmuting alchemy into a Neoplatonically naturalistic art. His medical works, including the first treatise on smallpox, drew on extensive and compassionate clinical experience and omnivorous reading  both reading and observation preserved in the twenty-five-volume Hawi, translated in 1279 as the Continens. al-Razi’s mildly ascetic ethics springs from hedonic prudential considerations and from his atomism. In keeping with the Epicureanism he might have imbibed from Galenic sources, he rejects special prophecy as imposture, arguing that reason, God’s gift to all alike, is sufficient guidance. Only differences of interest and application separate the subtle devices of artisans from those of intellectuals. God, the world Soul, time, space, and matter are all eternal substances. Nature originates from Soul’s irrational desire for embodiment, which is her only way of learning that her true homeland is the intellectual world. God’s gift of intelligence gave order to the movements she stirred up at the creation, and allows her escape from a world in which pains outweigh pleasures and death is surcease. For one who engages in philosophy “creatively, diligently, and persistently” will inevitably surpass his predecessors; and anyone who thinks independently is assured of both progress and immortality

alston: w. p. cites H. P. Grice as ideationist. Philosopher widely acknowledged as one of the most important contemporary epistemologists and one of the most important philosophers of religion of the twentieth century. He is particularly known for his argument that putative perception of God is epistemologically on all fours with putative perception of everyday material objects. Alston graduated from Centenary and the U.S. Army. A fine musician, he had to choose between philosophy and music. Philosophy won out; he received his Ph.D. from the  of Chicago and began his philosophical career at the  of Michigan, where he taught for twenty-two years. Since 1980 he has taught at Syracuse . Although his dissertation and some of his early work were on Whitehead, he soon turned to philosophy of language Philosophy of Language, 1964. Since the early 1970s Alston has concentrated on epistemology and philosophy of religion. In epistemology he has defended foundationalism although not classical foundationalism, investigated epistemic justification with unusual depth and penetration, and called attention to important levels distinctions. His chief works here are Epistemic Justification, a collection of essays; and The Reliability of Sense Perception. His chief work in philosophy of religion is Divine Nature and Human Language, a collection of essays on metaphysical and epistemological topics; and Perceiving God. The latter is a magisterial argument for the conclusion that experiential awareness of God, more specifically perception of God, makes an important contribution to the grounds of religious belief. In addition to this scholarly work, Alston was a founder of the Society of Christian Philosophers, a professional society with more than 1,100 members, and the founding editor of Faith and Philosophy. 

Althusser, LouisL Marxist philosopher whose publication in 1965 of two collections of essays, Pour Marx “For Marx” and Lire le Capital “Reading Capital”, made him a sensation in French intellectual circles and attracted a large international readership. The English translations of these texts in 1969 and 1970, respectively, helped shape the development of Marxist thought in the English-speaking world throughout the 1970s. Drawing on the work of non-positivist French historians and philosophers of science, especially Bachelard, Althusser proclaimed the existence of an “epistemological break” in Marx’s work, occurring in the mid-1840s. What preceded this break was, in Althusser’s view, a prescientific theoretical humanism derived from Feuerbach and ultimately from Hegel. What followed it, Althusser maintained, was a science of history a all-things-considered reason Althusser, Louis 23 4065A-   23 development as monumental, potentially, as the rise of the new sciences of nature in the seventh century. Althusser argued that the nature and even the existence of this new kind of science had yet to be acknowledged, even by Marx himself. It therefore had to be reconstructed from Marx’s writings, Das Kapital especially, and also discerned in the political practice of Lenin and other like-minded revolutionaries who implicitly understood what Marx intended. Althusser did little, however, to elaborate the content of this new science. Rather, he tirelessly defended it programmatically against rival construals of Marxism. In so doing, he took particular aim at neo-Hegelian and “humanistic” currents in the larger Marxist culture and implicitly in the French Communist Party, to which he belonged throughout his adult life. After 1968, Althusser’s influence in France faded. But he continued to teach at l’École Normale Superieure and to write, making important contributions to political theory and to understandings of “ideology” and related concepts. He also faced increasingly severe bouts of mania and depression. In 1980, in what the French courts deemed an episode of “temporary insanity,” he strangled his wife. Althusser avoided prison, but spent much of the 1980s in mental institutions. During this period he wrote two extraordinary memoirs, L’avenir dure longtemps “The Future Lasts Forever” and Les faits “The Facts”, published posthumously in 1992.

ambiguity, a phonological or orthographic form having multiple meanings senses, characters, semantic representations assigned by the language system. A lexical ambiguity occurs when a lexical item word is assigned multiple meanings by the language. It includes a homonymy, i.e., distinct lexical items having the same sound or form but different senses  ‘knight’/’night’, ‘lead’ n./‘lead’ v., ‘bear’ n./‘bear’ v.; and b polysemy, i.e., a single lexical item having multiple senses  ‘lamb’ the animal/‘lamb’ the flesh, ‘window’ glass/‘window’ opening. The distinction between homonymy and polysemy is problematic. A structural ambiguity occurs when a phrase or sentence is correlated by the grammar of the language with distinct constituent structures phrase markers or sequences of phrase markers. Example: ‘Competent women and men should apply’  ‘[NP[NPCompetent women] and men] . . .’ vs. ‘[NPCompetent[NPwomen and men]] . . .’, where ‘NP’ stands for ‘noun phrase’. A scope ambiguity is a structural ambiguity deriving from alternative interpretations of scopes of operators see below. Examples: ‘Walt will diet and exercise only if his doctor approves’  sentence operator scope: doctor’s approval is a necessary condition for both diet and exercise wide scope ‘only if’ vs. approval necessary for exercise but not for dieting wide scope ‘and’; ‘Bertie has a theory about every occurrence’  quantifier scope: one grand theory explaining all occurrences ‘a theory’ having wide scope over ‘every occurrence’ vs. all occurrences explained by several theories together ‘every occurrence’ having wide scope. The scope of an operator is the shortest full subformula to which the operator is attached. Thus, in `A & B C’, the scope of ‘&’ is ‘A & B’. For natural languages, the scope of an operator is what it C-commands. X C-commands Y in a tree diagram provided the first branching node that dominates X also dominates Y. An occurrence of an operator has wide scope relative to that of another operator provided the scope of the former properly includes scope of the latter. Examples: in ‘~A & B’, ’-’ has wide scope over ‘&’; in ‘Dx Ey Fxy’, the existential quantifier has wide scope over the universal quantifier. A pragmatic ambiguity is duality of use resting on pragmatic principles such as those which underlie reference and conversational implicature; e.g., depending on contextual variables, ‘I don’t know that he’s right’ can express doubt or merely the denial of genuine knowledge. 

Ambrose, Saint, known as Ambrose of Milan c.33997, Roman church leader and theologian. While bishop of Milan, he not only led the struggle against the Arian heresy and its political manifestations, but offered new models for preaching, for Scriptural exegesis, and for hymnody. His works also contributed to medieval Latin philosophy. Ambrose’s appropriation of Neoplatonic doctrines was noteworthy in itself, and it worked powerfully on and through Augustine. Ambrose’s commentary on the account of creation in Genesis, his Hexaemeron, preserved for medieval readers many pieces of ancient natural history and even some altruism Ambrose, Saint 24 4065A-   24 elements of physical explanation. Perhaps most importantly, Ambrose engaged ancient philosophical ethics in the search for moral lessons that marks his exegesis of Scripture; he also reworked Cicero’s De officiis as a treatise on the virtues and duties of Christian living.

Ammonius Saccas early third century A.D., Platonist philosopher who taught in Alexandria. He apparently served early in the century as the teacher of the Christian philosopher Origen. He attracted the attention of Plotinus, who came to the city in 232 in search of philosophical enlightenment Porphyry, Life of Plotinus 3. Ammonius the epithet ‘Saccas’ seems to mean ‘the bagman’ was undoubtedly a charismatic figure, but it is not at all clear what, if any, were his distinctive doctrines, though he seems to have been influenced by Numenius. He wrote nothing, and may be thought of, in E. R. Dodds’s words, as the Socrates of Neoplatonism. 

analysis, the process of breaking up a concept, proposition, linguistic complex, or fact into its simple or ultimate constituents. That on which the analysis is done is called the analysandum, and that which does the analysis is called the analysans. A number of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, including Russell, Moore, and the early Wittgenstein, have argued that philosophical analysis is the proper method of philosophy. But the practitioners of analytic philosophy have disagreed about what kind of thing is to be analyzed. For example, Moore tried to analyze sense-data into their constituent parts. Here the analysandum is a complex psychological fact, the having of a sense-datum. More commonly, analytic philosophers have tried to analyze concepts or propositions. This is conceptual analysis. Still others have seen it as their task to give an analysis of various kinds of sentences  e.g., those involving proper names or definite descriptions. This is linguistic analysis. Each of these kinds of analysis faces a version of a puzzle that has come to be called the paradox of analysis. For linguistic analyses, the paradox can be expressed as follows: for an analysis to be adequate, the analysans must be synonymous with the analysandum; e.g., if ‘male sibling’ is to analyze ‘brother’, they must mean the same; but if they are synonymous, then ‘a brother is a male sibling’ is synonymous with ‘a brother is a brother’; but the two sentences do not seem synonymous. Expressed as a dilemma, the paradox is that any proposed analysis would seem to be either inadequate because the analysans and the analysandum are not synonymous or uninformative because they are synonymous. 

analytic philosophy: an umbrella term currently used to cover a diverse assortment of philosophical techniques and tendencies. As in the case of chicken-sexing, it is relatively easy to identify analytic philosophy and philosophers, though difficult to say with any precision what the criteria are. Analytic philosophy is sometimes called Oxford philosophy or linguistic philosophy, but these labels are, at least, misleading. Whatever else it is, analytic philosophy is manifestly not a school, doctrine, or body of accepted propositions. At Cambridge, analytic philosophers are the intellectual heirs of Russell, Moore, and Wittgenstein, philosophers who self-consciously pursued “philosophical analysis” in the early part of the twentieth century. Analysis, as practiced by Russell and Moore, concerned not language per se, but concepts and propositions. In their eyes, while it did not exhaust the domain of philosophy, analysis provided a vital tool for laying bare the logical form of reality. Wittgenstein, in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, contended, though obliquely, that the structure of language reveals the structure of the world; every meaningful sentence is analyzable into atomic constituents that designate the finegrained constituents of reality. This “Tractarian” view was one Wittgenstein was to renounce in his later work, but it had considerable influence within the Vienna Circle in the 1920s, and in the subsequent development of logical positivism in the 1930s and 1940s. Carnap and Ayer, both exponents of positivism, held that the task of philosophy was not to uncover elusive metaphysical truths, but to provide analyses of scientific sentences. Other sentences, those in ethics, for instance, were thought to lack “cognitive significance.” Their model was Russell’s theory of descriptions, which provided a technique for analyzing away apparent commitments to suspicious entities. Meanwhile, a number of former proponents of analysis, influenced by Wittgenstein, had taken up what came to be called ordinary language philosophy. Philosophers of this persuasion focused on the role of words in the lives of ordinary speakers, hoping thereby to escape long-standing philosophical muddles. These muddles resulted, they thought, from a natural tendency, when pursuing philosophical theses, to be misled by the grammatical form of sentences in which those questions were posed. A classic illustration might be Heidegger’s supposition that ‘nothing’ must designate something, though a very peculiar something. Today, it is difficult to find much unanimity in the ranks of analytic philosophers. There is, perhaps, an implicit respect for argument and clarity, an evolving though informal agreement as to what problems are and are not tractable, and a conviction that philosophy is in some sense continuous with science. The practice of analytic philosophers to address one another rather than the broader public has led some to decry philosophy’s “professionalization” and to call for a return to a pluralistic, community-oriented style of philosophizing. Analytic philosophers respond by pointing out that analytic techniques and standards have been well represented in the history of philosophy. 

analyticity: H. P. Grice, “In defence of a dogma,” in Studies in the way of words. the analyticsynthetic distinction, the distinction, made famous by Kant, according to which an affirmative subject-predicate statement proposition, judgment is called analytic if the predicate concept is contained in the subject concept, and synthetic otherwise. The statement ‘All red roses are red’ is analytic, since the concept ‘red’ is contained in the concept ‘red roses’. ‘All roses are red’ is synthetic, since the concept ‘red’ is not contained in the concept ‘roses’. The denial of an affirmative subject-predicate statement entails a contradiction if it is analytic. E.g., ‘Not all red roses are red’ entails ‘Some roses are both red and not red’. One concept may be contained in another, in Kant’s sense, even though the terms used to express them are not related as part to whole. Since ‘biped’ means ‘two-footed animal’, the concept ‘two-footed’ is contained in the concept ‘biped’. It is accordingly analytic that all bipeds are two-footed. The same analytic statement is expressed by the synonymous sentences ‘All bipeds are two-footed’ and ‘All two-footed animals are two-footed’. Unlike statements, sentences cannot be classified as analytic or synthetic except relative to an interpretation. analytical jurisprudence analyticsynthetic distinction 26 4065A-   26 Witness ‘All Russian teachers are Russian’, which in one sense expresses the analytic statement ‘All teachers that are Russian are Russian’, and in another the synthetic statement ‘All teachers of Russian are Russian’. Kant’s innovation over Leibniz and Hume lay in separating the logicosemantic analyticsynthetic distinction from the epistemological a prioria posteriori distinction and from the modalmetaphysical necessarycontingent distinction. It seems evident that any analytic statement is a priori knowable without empirical evidence and necessary something that could not be false. The converse is highly controversial. Kant and his rationalist followers maintain that some a priori and necessary statements are synthetic, citing examples from logic ‘Contradictions are impossible’, ‘The identity relation is transitive’, mathematics ‘The sum of 7 and 5 is 12’, ‘The straight line between two points is the shortest’, and metaphysics ‘Every event is caused’. Empiricists like J. S. Mill, Carnap, Ayer, and C. I. Lewis argue that such examples are either synthetic a posteriori or analytic a priori. Philosophers since Kant have tried to clarify the analyticsynthetic distinction, and generalize it to all statements. On one definition, a sentence is analytic on a given interpretation provided it is “true solely in virtue of the meaning or definition of its terms.” The truth of any sentence depends in part on the meanings of its terms. `All emeralds are green’ would be false, e.g., if ‘emerald’ meant ‘ruby’. What makes the sentence synthetic, it is claimed, is that its truth also depends on the properties of emeralds, namely, their being green. But the same holds for analytic sentences: the truth of ‘All red roses are red’ depends on the properties of red roses, namely, their being red. Neither is true solely in virtue of meaning. A more adequate generalization defines an analytic statement as a formal logical truth: one “true in virtue of its logical form,” so that all statements with the same form are true. In terms of sentences under an interpretation, an analytic truth is an explicit logical truth one whose surface structure represents its logical form or one that becomes an explicit logical truth when synonyms are substituted. The negative statement that tomorrow is not both Sunday and not Sunday is analytic by this definition, because all statements of the form : p & - p are true. Kant’s definition is obtained as a special case by stipulating that the predicate of an affirmative subjectpredicate statement is contained in the subject provided the statement is logically true. On a third generalization, ‘analytic’ denotes any statement whose denial entails a contradiction. Subject S contains predicate P provided being S entails being P. Whether this is broader or narrower than the second generalization depends on how ‘entailment’, ‘logical form’, and ‘contradiction’ are defined. On some construals, ‘Red is a color’ counts as analytic on the third generalization its denial entails ‘Something is and is not a color’ but not on the second ‘red’ and ‘colored’ are logically unstructured, while the rulings are reversed for a counterfactual conditional like ‘If this were a red rose it would be red’. Following Quine, many have denied any distinction between analytic and synthetic statements. Some arguments presume the problematic “true by meaning” definition. Others are that: 1 the distinction cannot be defined without using related notions like ‘meaning’, ‘concept’, and ‘statement’, which are neither extensional nor definable in terms of behavior; 2 some statements like ‘All cats are animals’ are hard to classify as analytic or synthetic; and 3 no statement allegedly is immune from rejection in the face of new empirical evidence. If these arguments were sound, however, the distinction between logical truths and others would seem equally dubious, a conclusion seldom embraced. Some describe a priori truths, both synthetic and analytic, as conceptual truths, on the theory that they are all true in virtue of the nature of the concepts they contain. Conceptual truths are said to have no “factual content” because they are about concepts rather than things in the actual world. While it is natural to classify a priori truths together, the proffered theory is questionable. As indicated above, all truths hold in part because of the identity of their concepts, and in part because of the nature of the objects they are about. It is a fact that all emeralds are emeralds, and this proposition is about emeralds, not concepts.

ananke Grecian, necessity. The term was used by early Grecian philosophers for a constraining or moving natural force. In Parmenides frg. 8, line 30 ananke encompasses reality in limiting bonds; according to Diogenes Laertius, Democrianamnesis ananke 27 4065A-   27 tus calls the vortex that generates the cosmos ananke; Plato Timaeus 47e ff. refers to ananke as the irrational element in nature, which reason orders in creating the physical world. As used by Aristotle Metaphysics V.5, the basic meaning of ‘necessary’ is ‘that which cannot be otherwise’, a sense that includes logical necessity. He also distinguishes Physics II.9 between simple and hypothetical necessity conditions that must hold if something is to occur. 

anaphora: a device of reference or cross-reference in which a term called an anaphor, typically a pronoun, has its semantic properties determined by a term or noun phrase called the anaphor’s antecedent that occurs earlier. Sometimes the antecedent is a proper name or other independently referring expression, as in ‘Jill went up the hill and then she came down again’. In such cases, the anaphor refers to the same object as its antecedent. In other cases, the anaphor seems to function as a variable bound by an antecedent quantifier, as in ‘If any miner bought a donkey, he is penniless’. But anaphora is puzzling because not every example falls neatly into one of these two groups. Thus, in ‘John owns some sheep and Harry vaccinates them’ an example due to Gareth Evans the anaphor is arguably not bound by its antecedent ‘some sheep’. And in ‘Every miner who owns a donkey beats it’ a famous type of case discovered by Geach, the anaphor is arguably neither bound by ‘a donkey’ nor a uniquely referring expression.

anattavada, the Buddhist doctrine of no-soul, attributed to the Buddha sixth century B.C.. The Buddha’s idea of dependent origination pratityasamutpada leads to a process ontology of change where nothing is absolute, permanent, or substantive. Accordingly, the Buddha taught that a person’s self consists of a bundle of fleeting impressions, analyzed into five groups skandhas, rather than a substantive entity called the “soul.” The Buddha’s method of introspection to find out whether we can be aware of a soullike substance inside us is remarkably similar to David Hume’s. The Hindu philosophical schools objected to anattavada because they thought it could not satisfactorily explain such issues as personal identity, moral responsibility and karma, and rebirth. D.K.C. Anaxagoras c.500428 B.C., Grecian philosopher who was the first of the pre-Socratics to teach in Athens c.480450, where he influenced leading intellectuals such as Pericles and Euripides. He left Athens when he was prosecuted for impiety. Writing in response to Parmenides, he elaborated a theory of matter according to which nothing comes into being or perishes. The ultimate realities are stuffs such as water and earth, flesh and bone, but so are contraries such as hot and cold, likewise treated as stuffs. Every phenomenal substance has a portion of every elemental stuff, and there are no minimal parts of anything, but matter takes on the phenomenal properties of whatever predominates in the mixture. Anaxagoras posits an indefinite number of elemental stuffs, in contrast to his contemporary Empedocles, who requires only four elements; but Anaxagoras follows Parmenides more rigorously, allowing no properties or substances to emerge that were not already present in the cosmos as its constituents. Thus there is no ultimate gap between appearance and reality: everything we perceive is real. In Anaxagoras’s cosmogony, an initial chaos of complete mixture gives way to an ordered world when noûs mind begins a vortex motion that separates cosmic masses of ether the bright upper air, air, water, and earth. Mind is finer than the stuffs and is found in living things, but it does not mix with stuffs. Anaxagoras’s theory of mind provides the first hint of a mindmatter dualism. Plato and Aristotle thought his assigning a cosmic role to mind made him sound like “a sober man” among his contemporaries, but they were disappointed that he did not exploit his idea to provide teleological explanations of natural phenomena. 

Anaximander: Grecian philosopher and cosmologist, reputedly the student and successor of Thales in the Milesian school. He described the cosmos as originating from apeiron the boundless by a process of separating off; a disk-shaped earth was formed, surrounded by concentric heavenly rings of fire enclosed in air. At “breathing holes” in the air we see jets of fire, which are the stars, moon, and sun. The earth stays in place because there is no reason for it to tend one way or another. The seasons arise from alternating periods where hot and dry or wet and anaphor Anaximander 28 4065A-   28 cold powers predominate, governed by a temporal process figuratively portrayed as the judgment of Time. Anaximander drew a map of the world and explained winds, rain, and lightning by naturalistic hypotheses. He also described the emergence of life in a way that prefigures the theory of evolution. Anaximander’s interest in cosmology and cosmogony and his brilliant conjectures set the major questions for later preSocratics. 

Anaximenes of Miletus: Grecian philosopher, a pre-Socratic who, following in the tradition of the Milesians Thales and Anaximander, speculated about cosmology and meteorology. The source arche of the cosmos is air aer, originally mist, which by a process of rarefaction becomes fire, and by a process of condensation becomes wind, clouds, water, earth, and stones. Air is divine and causes life. The earth is flat and rides on a cushion of air, while a heavenly firmament revolves about it like a felt cap. Anaximenes also explained meteorological phenomena and earthquakes. Although less innovative than his predecessor Anaximander, he made progress in naturalistic explanations by appealing to a quantitative process of rarefaction and condensation rather than to mythical processes involving quasi-personal agents. D.W.G. ancestralof a given relation R, the relation also called the transitive closure of R that relates one given individual to a second if and only if the first can be “reached” from the second by repeated “applications” of the given relation R. The ancestor relation is the ancestral of the parent relation since one person is an ancestor of a second if the first is a parent of the second or the first is a parent of a parent of the second or the first is a parent of a parent of a parent of the second, and so on. Frege discovered a simple method of giving a materially adequate and formally correct definition of the ancestral of a given relation in terms of the relation itself plus logical concepts. This method is informally illustrated as follows: in order for one person A to be an ancestor of a second person B it is necessary and sufficient for A to have every property that belongs to every parent of B and that belongs to every parent of any person to whom it belongs. This and other similar methods made possible the reduction of all numerical concepts to those of zero and successor, which Frege then attempted to reduce to concepts of pure logic. Frege’s definition of the ancestral has become a paradigm in modern analytic philosophy as well as a historical benchmark of the watershed between traditional logic and modern logic. It demonstrates the exactness of modern logical analysis and, in comparison, the narrowness of traditional logic. 

ancient atomism, the theory, originated by Leucippus and elaborated by Democritus, that the ultimate realities are atoms and the void. The theory was later used by Epicurus as the foundation for a philosophy stressing ethical concerns, Epicureanism. 

Andronicus of Rhodes first century B.C., Grecian philosopher, a leading member of the Lyceum who was largely responsible for establishing the canon of Aristotle’s works still read today. He also edited the works of Theophrastus. At the time, Aristotle was known primarily for his philosophical dialogues, only fragments of which now survive; his more methodical treatises had stopped circulating soon after his death. By producing the first systematic edition of Aristotle’s corpus, Andronicus revived study of the treatises, and the resulting critical debates dramatically affected the course of philosophy. Little is recorded about Andronicus’s labors; but besides editing the texts and discussing titles, arrangement, and authenticity, he sought to explicate and assess Aristotle’s thought. In so doing, he and his colleagues initiated the exegetical tradition of Aristotelian commentaries. Nothing he wrote survives; a summary account of emotions formerly ascribed to him is spurious. 

Angst: German term for a special form of anxiety, an emotion seen by existentialists as both constituting and revealing the human condition. Angst plays a key role in the writings of Heidegger, whose concept is closely related to Kierkegaard’s angest and Sartre’s angoisse. The concept is first treated in this distinctive way in Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety 1844, where anxiety is described as “the dizziness of freedom.” Anxiety here represents freedom’s self-awareness; it is the psychological precondition for the individual’s attempt to become autonomous, a possibility that is seen as both alluring and disturbing. 

Anniceris, Grecian philosopher. A pupil of Antipater, he established a separate branch of the Cyrenaic school known as the Anniceraioi. He subscribed to typical Cyrenaic hedonism, arguing that the end of each action should be one’s own pleasure, since we can know nothing of others’ experiences. He tempered the implications of hedonism with the claim that a wise man attaches weight to respect for parents, patriotism, gratitude, and friendship, perhaps influencing Epicurus in this regard. Anniceris also played down the Cyrenaic stress on the intellect’s role in hedonistic practical rationality, taking the Aristotelian view that cultivation of the right habits is indispensable. 

Anscombe: Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret, Irish philosopher who has held positions at Oxford and Cambridge, best known for her work in the philosophy of mind and for her editions and translations of Wittgenstein’s later writings. Anscombe studied philosophy with Wittgenstein and became closely associated with him, writing An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus 1959. She is married to Peter Geach. Anscombe’s first major work was Intention 1957. She argues that the concept of intention is central to our understanding of ourselves as rational agents. The basic case is that of the intentions with which we act. These are identified by the reasons we give in answer to why-questions concerning our actions. Such reasons usually form a hierarchy that constitutes a practical syllogism of which action itself is the conclusion. Hence our intentions are a form of active practical knowledge that normally leads to action. Anscombe compares the direction of fit of this kind of knowledge with a shopping list’s relation to one’s purchases, and contrasts it with the direction of fit characteristic of a list of these purchases drawn up by an observer of the shopper. She maintains that the deep mistake of modern i.e., post-medieval philosophy has been to think that all knowledge is of this latter, observational, type. This conception of active knowledge expressed through an agent’s intentions conflicts with the passive conception of rationality characteristic of Hume and his followers, and Anscombe develops this challenge in papers critical of the isought distinction of Hume and his modern successors. In a famous paper, “Modern Moral Philosophy” 1958, she also argues that ought-statements make sense only in the context of a moral theology that grounds morality in divine commands. Since our culture rejects this theology, it is no surprise that “modern moral philosophers” cannot find much sense in them. We should therefore abandon them and return to the older conceptions of practical rationality and virtue. These conceptions, and the associated conception of natural law, provide the background to an uncompromising defense of traditional Catholic morality concerning sexuality, war, and the importance of the distinction between intention and foresight. Anscombe has never been afraid of unpopular positions  philosophical and ethical. Her three volumes of Collected Papers 1981 include a defense of singular causation, an attack on the very idea of a subject of thought, and a critique of pacifism. She is one of the most original and distinctive English philosophers of her generation. 

Anselm, Saint, called Anselm of Canterbury 10331109, Italian-born English philosophical theologian. A Benedictine monk and the second Norman archbishop of Canterbury, he is best known for his distinctive method  fides quaerens intellectum; his “ontological” argument for the existence of God in his treatise Proslogion; and his classic formulation of the satisfaction theory of the Atonement in the Cur Deus homo. Like Augustine before him, Anselm is a Christian Platonist in metaphysics. He argues that the most accessible proofs of the existence of God are through value theory: in his treatise Monologion, he deploys a cosmological argument, showing the existence of a source of all goods, which is the Good per se and hence supremely good; that same thing exists per se and is the Supreme Being. In the Proslogion, Anselm begins with his conception of a being a greater than which cannot be conceived, and mounts his ontological argument that a being a greater than which cannot be conceived exists in the intellect, because even the fool understands the phrase when he hears it; but if it existed in the intellect alone, a greater could be conceived that existed in reality. This supremely valuable object is essentially whatever it is  other things being equal  that is better to be than not to be, and hence living, wise, powerful, true, just, blessed, immaterial, immutable, and eternal per se; even the paradigm of sensory goods  Beauty, Harmony, Sweetness, and Pleasant Texture, in its own ineffable manner. Nevertheless, God is supremely simple, not compounded of a plurality of excellences, but “omne et unum, totum et solum bonum,” a being a more delectable than which cannot be conceived. Everything other than God has its being and its well-being through God as efficient cause. Moreover, God is the paradigm of all created natures, the latter ranking as better to the extent that they more perfectly resemble God. Thus, it is better to be human than to be horse, to be horse than to be wood, even though in comparison with God everything else is “almost nothing.” For every created nature, there is a that-for-which-it-ismade ad quod factum est. On the one hand, Anselm thinks of such teleology as part of the internal structure of the natures themselves: a creature of type F is a true F only insofar as it is/does/exemplifies that for which F’s were made; a defective F, to the extent that it does not. On the other hand, for Anselm, the telos of a created nature is that-for-which-God-made-it. Because God is personal and acts through reason and will, Anselm infers that prior in the order of explanation to creation, there was, in the reason of the maker, an exemplar, form, likeness, or rule of what he was going to make. In De veritate Anselm maintains that such teleology gives rise to obligation: since creatures owe their being and well-being to God as their cause, so they owe their being and well-being to God in the sense of having an obligation to praise him by being the best beings they can. Since every creature is of some nature or other, each can be its best by being that-for-which-God-made-it. Abstracting from impediments, non-rational natures fulfill this obligation and “act rightly” by natural necessity; rational creatures, when they exercise their powers of reason and will to fulfill God’s purpose in creating them. Thus, the goodness of a creature how good a being it is is a function of twin factors: its natural telos i.e., what sort of imitation of divine nature it aims for, and its rightness in exercising its natural powers to fulfill its telos. By contrast, God as absolutely independent owes no one anything and so has no obligations to creatures. In De casu diaboli, Anselm underlines the optimism of his ontology, reasoning that since the Supreme Good and the Supreme Being are identical, every being is good and every good a being. Two further conclusions follow. First, evil is a privation of being, the absence of good in something that properly ought to have it e.g., blindness in normally sighted animals, injustice in humans or angels. Second, since all genuine powers are given to enable a being to fulfill its natural telos and so to be the best being it can, all genuine metaphysically basic powers are optimific and essentially aim at goods, so that evils are merely incidental side effects of their operation, involving some lack of coordination among powers or between their exercise and the surrounding context. Thus, divine omnipotence does not, properly speaking, include corruptibility, passibility, or the ability to lie, because the latter are defects and/or powers in other things whose exercise obstructs the flourishing of the corruptible, passible, or potential liar. Anselm’s distinctive action theory begins teleologically with the observation that humans and angels were made for a happy immortality enjoying God, and to that end were given the powers of reason to make accurate value assessments and will to love accordingly. Anselm regards freedom and imputability of choice as essential and permanent features of all rational beings. But freedom cannot be defined as a power for opposites the power to sin and the power not to sin, both because neither God nor the good angels have any power to sin, and because sin is an evil at which no metaphysically basic power can aim. Rather, freedom is the power to preserve justice for its own sake. Choices and actions are imputable to an agent only if they are spontaneous, from the agent itself. Creatures cannot act spontaneously by the necessity of their natures, because they do not have their natures from themselves but receive them from God. To give them the opportunity to become just of themselves, God furnishes them with two motivaAnselm Anselm 31   31 tional drives toward the good: an affection for the advantageous affectio commodi or a tendency to will things for the sake of their benefit to the agent itself; and an affection for justice affectio justitiae or a tendency to will things because of their own intrinsic value. Creatures are able to align these drives by letting the latter temper the former or not. The good angels, who preserved justice by not willing some advantage possible for them but forbidden by God for that time, can no longer will more advantage than God wills for them, because he wills their maximum as a reward. By contrast, creatures, who sin by refusing to delay gratification in accordance with God’s will, lose both uprightness of will and their affection for justice, and hence the ability to temper their pursuit of advantage or to will the best goods. Justice will never be restored to angels who desert it. But if animality makes human nature weaker, it also opens the possibility of redemption. Anselm’s argument for the necessity of the Incarnation plays out the dialectic of justice and mercy so characteristic of his prayers. He begins with the demands of justice: humans owe it to God to make all of their choices and actions conform to his will; failure to render what was owed insults God’s honor and makes the offender liable to make satisfaction; because it is worse to dishonor God than for countless worlds to be destroyed, the satisfaction owed for any small sin is incommensurate with any created good; it would be maximally indecent for God to overlook such a great offense. Such calculations threaten certain ruin for the sinner, because God alone can do/be immeasurably deserving, and depriving the creature of its honor through the eternal frustration of its telos seems the only way to balance the scales. Yet, justice also forbids that God’s purposes be thwarted through created resistance, and it was divine mercy that made humans for a beatific immortality with him. Likewise, humans come in families by virtue of their biological nature which angels do not share, and justice allows an offense by one family member to be compensated by another. Assuming that all actual humans are descended from common first parents, Anselm claims that the human race can make satisfaction for sin, if God becomes human and renders to God what Adam’s family owes. When Anselm insists that humans were made for beatific intimacy with God and therefore are obliged to strive into God with all of their powers, he emphatically includes reason or intellect along with emotion and will. God, the controlling subject matter, is in part permanently inaccessible to us because of the ontological incommensuration between God and creatures and our progress is further hampered by the consequences of sin. Our powers will function best, and hence we have a duty to follow right order in their use: by submitting first to the holistic discipline of faith, which will focus our souls and point us in the right direction. Yet it is also a duty not to remain passive in our appreciation of authority, but rather for faith to seek to understand what it has believed. Anselm’s works display a dialectical structure, full of questions, objections, and contrasting opinions, designed to stir up the mind. His quartet of teaching dialogues  De grammatico, De veritate, De libertate arbitrii, and De casu diaboli as well as his last philosophical treatise, De concordia, anticipate the genre of the Scholastic question quaestio so dominant in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. His discussions are likewise remarkable for their attention to modalities and proper-versus-improper linguistic usage. 

antilogism, an inconsistent triad of propositions, two of which are the premises of a valid categorical syllogism and the third of which is the contradictory of the conclusion of this valid categorical syllogism. An antilogism is a special form of antilogy or self-contradiction. 

antinomianism, the view that one is not bound by moral law; specifically, the view that Christians are by grace set free from the need to observe moral laws. During the Reformation, antinomianism was believed by some but not An Sich antinomianism 32   32 Martin Luther to follow from the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith alone. 

Antiochus of Ascalon c.130c.68 B.C., Grecian philosopher and the last prominent member of the New Academy. He played the major role in ending its two centuries of Skepticism and helped revive interest in doctrines from the Old Academy, as he called Plato, Aristotle, and their associates. The impulse for this decisive shift came in epistemology, where the Skeptical Academy had long agreed with Stoicism that knowledge requires an infallible “criterion of truth” but disputed the Stoic claim to find this criterion in “cognitive perception.” Antiochus’s teacher, Philo of Larissa, broke with this tradition and proposed that perception need not be cognitive to qualify as knowledge. Rejecting this concession, Antiochus offered new arguments for the Stoic claim that some perception is cognitive, and hence knowledge. He also proposed a similar accommodation in ethics, where he agreed with the Stoics that virtue alone is sufficient for happiness but insisted with Aristotle that virtue is not the only good. These and similar attempts to mediate fundamental disputes have led some to label Antiochus an eclectic or syncretist; but some of his proposals, especially his appeal to the Old Academy, set the stage for Middle Platonism, which also sought to reconcile Plato and Aristotle. No works by Antiochus survive, but his students included many eminent Romans, most notably Cicero, who summarizes Antiochus’s epistemology in the Academica, his critique of Stoic ethics in De finibus IV, and his purportedly Aristotelian ethics in De finibus V. 

anti-realism, rejection, in one or another form or area of inquiry, of realism, the view that there are knowable mind-independent facts, objects, or properties. Metaphysical realists make the general claim that there is a world of mind-independent objects. Realists in particular areas make more specific or limited claims. Thus moral realists hold that there are mind-independent moral properties, mathematical realists that there are mind-independent mathematical facts, scientific realists that scientific inquiry reveals the existence of previously unknown and unobservable mind-independent entities and properties. Antirealists deny either that facts of the relevant sort are mind-independent or that knowledge of such facts is possible. Berkeley’s subjective idealism, which claims that the world consists only of minds and their contents, is a metaphysical anti-realism. Constructivist anti-realists, on the other hand, deny that the world consists only of mental phenomena, but claim that it is constituted by, or constructed from, our evidence or beliefs. Many philosophers find constructivism implausible or even incoherent as a metaphysical doctrine, but much more plausible when restricted to a particular domain, such as ethics or mathematics. Debates between realists and anti-realists have been particularly intense in philosophy of science. Scientific realism has been rejected both by constructivists such as Kuhn, who hold that scientific facts are constructed by the scientific community, and by empiricists who hold that knowledge is limited to what can be observed. A sophisticated version of the latter doctrine is Bas van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism, which allows scientists free rein in constructing scientific models, but claims that evidence for such models confirms only their observable implications. 

apeiron, Grecian term meaning ‘the boundless’ or ‘the unlimited’, which evolved to signify ‘the infinite’. Anaximander introduced the term to philosophy by saying that the source of all things was apeiron. There is some disagreement about whether he meant by this the spatially antinomy apeiron 33   33 unbounded, the temporally unbounded, or the qualitatively indeterminate. It seems likely that he intended the term to convey the first meaning, but the other two senses also happen to apply to the spatially unbounded. After Anaximander, Anaximenes declared as his first principle that air is boundless, and Xenophanes made his flat earth extend downward without bounds, and probably outward horizontally without limit as well. Rejecting the tradition of boundless principles, Parmenides argued that “what-is” must be held within determinate boundaries. But his follower Melissus again argued that what-is must be boundless  in both time and space  for it can have no beginning or end. Another follower of Parmenides, Zeno of Elea, argued that if there are many substances, antinomies arise, including the consequences that substances are both limited and unlimited apeira in number, and that they are so small as not to have size and so large as to be unlimited in size. Rejecting monism, Anaxagoras argued for an indefinite number of elements that are each unlimited in size, and the Pythagorean Philolaus made limiters perainonta and unlimiteds apeira the principles from which all things are composed. The atomists Leucippus and Democritus conceived of a boundless universe, partly full of an infinite number of atoms and partly void; and in the universe are countless apeiroi worlds. Finally Aristotle arrived at an abstract understanding of the apeiron as “the infinite,” claiming to settle paradoxes about the boundless by allowing for real quantities to be infinitely divisible potentially, but not actually Physics III.48. The development of the notion of the apeiron shows how Grecian philosophers evolved ever more abstract philosophical ideas from relatively concrete conceptions. 

apocatastasis from Grecian, ‘reestablishment’, the restoration of all souls, including Satan’s and his minions’, in the kingdom of God. God’s goodness will triumph over evil, and through a process of spiritual education souls will be brought to repentance and made fit for divine life. The theory originates with Origen but was also held by Gregory of Nyssa. In modern times F. D. Maurice 180572 and Karl Barth 1886 1968 held this position. 

aporia plural: aporiai, Grecian term meaning ‘puzzle’, ‘question for discussion’, ‘state of perplexity’. The aporetic method  the raising of puzzles without offering solutions  is typical of the elenchus in the early Socratic dialogues of Plato. These consist in the testing of definitions and often end with an aporia, e.g., that piety is both what is and what is not loved by the gods. Compare the paradoxes of Zeno, e.g., that motion is both possible and impossible. In Aristotle’s dialectic, the resolution of aporiai discovered in the views on a subject is an important source of philosophical understanding. The beliefs that one should love oneself most of all and that self-love is shameful, e.g., can be resolved with the right understanding of ‘self’. The possibility of argument for two inconsistent positions was an important factor in the development of Skepticism. In modern philosophy, the antinomies that Kant claimed reason would arrive at in attempting to prove the existence of objects corresponding to transcendental ideas may be seen as aporiai. 

applied ethics, the domain of ethics that includes professional ethics, such as business ethics, engineering ethics, and medical ethics, as well as practical ethics such as environmental ethics, which is applied, and thus practical as opposed to theoretical, but not focused on any one discipline. One of the major disputes among those who work in applied ethics is whether or not there is a general and universal account of morality applicable both to the ethical issues in the professions and to various practical problems. Some philosophers believe that each of the professions or each field of activity develops an ethical code for itself and that there need be no apellatio applied ethics 34   34 close relationship between e.g. business ethics, medical ethics, and environmental ethics. Others hold that the same moral system applies to all professions and fields. They claim that the appearance of different moral systems is simply due to certain problems being more salient for some professions and fields than for others. The former position accepts the consequence that the ethical codes of different professions might conflict with one another, so that a physician in business might find that business ethics would require one action but medical ethics another. Engineers who have been promoted to management positions sometimes express concern over the tension between what they perceive to be their responsibility as engineers and their responsibility as managers in a business. Many lawyers seem to hold that there is similar tension between what common morality requires and what they must do as lawyers. Those who accept a universal morality hold that these tensions are all resolvable because there is only one common morality. Underlying both positions is the pervasive but false view of common morality as providing a unique right answer to every moral problem. Those who hold that each profession or field has its own moral code do not realize that common morality allows for conflicts of duties. Most of those who put forward moral theories, e.g., utilitarians, Kantians, and contractarians, attempt to generate a universal moral system that solves all moral problems. This creates a situation that leads many in applied ethics to dismiss theoretical ethics as irrelevant to their concerns. An alternative view of a moral theory is to think of it on the model of a scientific theory, primarily concerned to describe common morality rather than generate a new improved version. On this model, it is clear that although morality rules out many alternatives as unacceptable, it does not provide unique right answers to every controversial moral question. On this model, different fields and different professions may interpret the common moral system in somewhat different ways. For example, although deception is always immoral if not justified, what counts as deception is not the same in all professions. Not informing a patient of an alternative treatment counts as deceptive for a physician, but not telling a customer of an alternative to what she is about to buy does not count as deceptive for a salesperson. The professions also have considerable input into what special duties are incurred by becoming a member of their profession. Applied ethics is thus not the mechanical application of a common morality to a particular profession or field, but an independent discipline that clarifies and analyzes the practices in a field or profession so that common morality can be applied. 

a priori, prior to or independent of experience; contrasted with ‘a posteriori’ empirical. These two terms are primarily used to mark a distinction between 1 two modes of epistemic justification, together with derivative distinctions between 2 kinds of propositions, 3 kinds of knowledge, and 4 kinds of argument. They are also used to indicate a distinction between 5 two ways in which a concept or idea may be acquired. 1 A belief or claim is said to be justified a priori if its epistemic justification, the reason or warrant for thinking it to be true, does not depend at all on sensory or introspective or other sorts of experience; whereas if its justification does depend at least in part on such experience, it is said to be justified a posteriori or empirically. This specific distinction has to do only with the justification of the belief, and not at all with how the constituent concepts are acquired; thus it is no objection to a claim of a priori justificatory status for a particular belief that experience is required for the acquisition of some of the constituent concepts. It is clear that the relevant notion of experience includes sensory and introspective experience, as well as such things as kinesthetic experience. Equally clearly, to construe experience in the broadest possible sense of, roughly, a conscious undergoing of any sort would be to destroy the point of the distinction, since even a priori justification presumably involves some sort of conscious process of awareness. The construal that is perhaps most faithful to the traditional usage is that which construes experience as any sort of cognitive input that derives, presumably causally, from features of the actual world that may not hold in other possible worlds. Thus, e.g., such things as clairvoyance or telepathy, if they were to exist, would count as forms of experience and any knowledge resulting therefrom as a posteriori; but the intuitive apprehension of properties or numbers or other sorts of abstract entities that are the same in all possible worlds, would not. Understood in this way, the concept of a priori justification is an essentially negative concept, specifying as it does what the justification of the belief does not depend on, but saying nothing a priori a priori 35   35 about what it does depend on. Historically, the main positive conception was that offered by proponents of rationalism such as Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, according to which a priori justification derives from the intuitive apprehension of necessary facts pertaining to universals and other abstract entities. Although Kant is often regarded as a rationalist, his restriction of substantive a priori knowledge to the world of appearances represents a major departure from the main rationalist tradition. In contrast, proponents of traditional empiricism, if they do not repudiate the concept of a priori justification altogether as does Quine, typically attempt to account for such justification by appeal to linguistic or conceptual conventions. The most standard formulation of this empiricist view a development of the view of Hume that all a priori knowledge pertains to “relations of ideas” is the claim typical of logical positivism that all a priori knowable claims or propositions are analytic. A rationalist would claim in opposition that at least some a priori claims or propositions are synthetic. 2 A proposition that is the content of an a priori justified belief is often referred to as an a priori proposition or an a priori truth. This usage is also often extended to include any proposition that is capable of being the content of such a belief, whether it actually has this status or not. 3 If, in addition to being justified a priori or a posteriori, a belief is also true and satisfies whatever further conditions may be required for it to constitute knowledge, that knowledge is derivatively characterized as a priori or a posteriori empirical, respectively. Though a priori justification is often regarded as by itself guaranteeing truth, this should be regarded as a further substantive thesis, not as part of the very concept of a priori justification. Examples of knowledge that have been classically regarded as a priori in this sense are mathematical knowledge, knowledge of logical truths, and knowledge of necessary entailments and exclusions of commonsense concepts ‘Nothing can be red and green all over at the same time’, ‘If A is later than B and B is later than C, then A is later than C’; but many claims of metaphysics, ethics, and even theology have also been claimed to have this status. 4 A deductively valid argument that also satisfies the further condition that each of the premises or sometimes one or more particularly central premises are justified a priori is referred to as an a priori argument. This label is also sometimes applied to arguments that are claimed to have this status, even if the correctness of this claim is in question. 5 In addition to the uses just catalogued that derive from the distinction between modes of justification, the terms ‘a priori’ and ‘a posteriori’ are also employed to distinguish two ways in which a concept or idea might be acquired by an individual person. An a posteriori or empirical concept or idea is one that is derived from experience, via a process of abstraction or ostensive definition. In contrast, an a priori concept or idea is one that is not derived from experience in this way and thus presumably does not require any particular experience to be realized though the explicit realization of such a concept might still require experience as a “trigger”. The main historical account of such concepts, again held mainly by rationalists, construes them as innate, either implanted in the mind by God or, in the more contemporary version of the claim held by Chomsky, Fodor, and others, resulting from evolutionary development. Concepts typically regarded as having this sort of status include the concepts of substance, causation, God, necessity, infinity, and many others. Empiricists, in contrast, typically hold that all concepts are derived from experience. 

Aquinas, Saint Thomas 122574, Italian philosopher-theologian, the most influential thinker of the medieval period. He produced a powerful philosophical synthesis that combined Aristotelian and Neoplatonic elements within a Christian context in an original and ingenious way. Life and works. Thomas was born at Aquino castle in Roccasecca, Italy, and took early schooling at the Benedictine Abbey of Monte Cassino. He then studied liberal arts and philosophy at the  of Naples 123944 and joined the Dominican order. While going to Paris for further studies as a Dominican, he was detained by his family for about a year. Upon being released, he studied with the Dominicans at Paris, perhaps privately, until 1248, when he journeyed to a priori argument Aquinas, Saint Thomas 36   36 Cologne to work under Albertus Magnus. Thomas’s own report reportatio of Albertus’s lectures on the Divine Names of Dionysius and his notes on Albertus’s lectures on Aristotle’s Ethics date from this period. In 1252 Thomas returned to Paris to lecture there as a bachelor in theology. His resulting commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard dates from this period, as do two philosophical treatises, On Being and Essence De ente et essentia and On the Principles of Nature De principiis naturae. In 1256 he began lecturing as master of theology at Paris. From this period 125659 date a series of scriptural commentaries, the disputations On Truth De veritate, Quodlibetal Questions VIIXI, and earlier parts of the Summa against the Gentiles Summa contra gentiles; hereafter SCG. At different locations in Italy from 1259 to 1269, Thomas continued to write prodigiously, including, among other works, the completion of the SCG; a commentary on the Divine Names; disputations On the Power of God De potentia Dei and On Evil De malo; and Summa of Theology Summa theologiae; hereafter ST, Part I. In January 1269, he resumed teaching in Paris as regent master and wrote extensively until returning to Italy in 1272. From this second Parisian regency date the disputations On the Soul De anima and On Virtues De virtutibus; continuation of ST; Quodlibets IVI and XII; On the Unity of the Intellect against the Averroists De unitate intellectus contra Averroistas; most if not all of his commentaries on Aristotle; a commentary on the Book of Causes Liber de causis; and On the Eternity of the World De aeternitate mundi. In 1272 Thomas returned to Italy where he lectured on theology at Naples and continued to write until December 6, 1273, when his scholarly work ceased. He died three months later en route to the Second Council of Lyons. Doctrine. Aquinas was both a philosopher and a theologian. The greater part of his writings are theological, but there are many strictly philosophical works within his corpus, such as On Being and Essence, On the Principles of Nature, On the Eternity of the World, and the commentaries on Aristotle and on the Book of Causes. Also important are large sections of strictly philosophical writing incorporated into theological works such as the SCG, ST, and various disputations. Aquinas clearly distinguishes between strictly philosophical investigation and theological investigation. If philosophy is based on the light of natural reason, theology sacra doctrina presupposes faith in divine revelation. While the natural light of reason is insufficient to discover things that can be made known to human beings only through revelation, e.g., belief in the Trinity, Thomas holds that it is impossible for those things revealed to us by God through faith to be opposed to those we can discover by using human reason. For then one or the other would have to be false; and since both come to us from God, God himself would be the author of falsity, something Thomas rejects as abhorrent. Hence it is appropriate for the theologian to use philosophical reasoning in theologizing. Aquinas also distinguishes between the orders to be followed by the theologian and by the philosopher. In theology one reasons from belief in God and his revelation to the implications of this for created reality. In philosophy one begins with an investigation of created reality insofar as this can be understood by human reason and then seeks to arrive at some knowledge of divine reality viewed as the cause of created reality and the end or goal of one’s philosophical inquiry SCG II, c. 4. This means that the order Aquinas follows in his theological Summae SCG and ST is not the same as that which he prescribes for the philosopher cf. Prooemium to Commentary on the Metaphysics. Also underlying much of Aquinas’s thought is his acceptance of the difference between theoretical or speculative philosophy including natural philosophy, mathematics, and metaphysics and practical philosophy. Being and analogy. For Aquinas the highest part of philosophy is metaphysics, the science of being as being. The subject of this science is not God, but being, viewed without restriction to any given kind of being, or simply as being Prooemium to Commentary on Metaphysics; In de trinitate, qu. 5, a. 4. The metaphysician does not enjoy a direct vision of God in this life, but can reason to knowledge of him by moving from created effects to awareness of him as their uncreated cause. God is therefore not the subject of metaphysics, nor is he included in its subject. God can be studied by the metaphysician only indirectly, as the cause of the finite beings that fall under being as being, the subject of the science. In order to account for the human intellect’s discovery of being as being, in contrast with being as mobile studied by natural philosophy or being as quantified studied by mathematics, Thomas appeals to a special kind of intellectual operation, a negative judgment, technically named by him “separation.” Through this operation one discovers that being, in order to be realized as such, need not be material and changAquinas, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Saint Thomas 37   37 ing. Only as a result of this judgment is one justified in studying being as being. Following Aristotle and Averroes, Thomas is convinced that the term ‘being’ is used in various ways and with different meanings. Yet these different usages are not unrelated and do enjoy an underlying unity sufficient for being as being to be the subject of a single science. On the level of finite being Thomas adopts and adapts Aristotle’s theory of unity by reference to a first order of being. For Thomas as for Aristotle this unity is guaranteed by the primary referent in our predication of being  substance. Other things are named being only because they are in some way ordered to and dependent on substance, the primary instance of being. Hence being is analogous. Since Thomas’s application of analogy to the divine names presupposes the existence of God, we shall first examine his discussion of that issue. The existence of God and the “five ways.” Thomas holds that unaided human reason, i.e., philosophical reason, can demonstrate that God exists, that he is one, etc., by reasoning from effect to cause De trinitate, qu. 2, a. 3; SCG I, c. 4. Best-known among his many presentations of argumentation for God’s existence are the “five ways.” Perhaps even more interesting for today’s student of his metaphysics is a brief argument developed in one of his first writings, On Being and Essence c.4. There he wishes to determine how essence is realized in what he terms “separate substances,” i.e., the soul, intelligences angels of the Christian tradition, and the first cause God. After criticizing the view that created separate substances are composed of matter and form, Aquinas counters that they are not entirely free from composition. They are composed of a form or essence and an act of existing esse. He immediately develops a complex argument: 1 We can think of an essence or quiddity without knowing whether or not it actually exists. Therefore in such entities essence and act of existing differ unless 2 there is a thing whose quiddity and act of existing are identical. At best there can be only one such being, he continues, by eliminating multiplication of such an entity either through the addition of some difference or through the reception of its form in different instances of matter. Hence, any such being can only be separate and unreceived esse, whereas esse in all else is received in something else, i.e., essence. 3 Since esse in all other entities is therefore distinct from essence or quiddity, existence is communicated to such beings by something else, i.e., they are caused. Since that which exists through something else must be traced back to that which exists of itself, there must be some thing that causes the existence of everything else and that is identical with its act of existing. Otherwise one would regress to infinity in caused causes of existence, which Thomas here dismisses as unacceptable. In qu. 2, a. 1 of ST I Thomas rejects the claim that God’s existence is self-evident to us in this life, and in a. 2 maintains that God’s existence can be demonstrated by reasoning from knowledge of an existing effect to knowledge of God as the cause required for that effect to exist. The first way or argument art. 3 rests upon the fact that various things in our world of sense experience are moved. But whatever is moved is moved by something else. To justify this, Thomas reasons that to be moved is to be reduced from potentiality to actuality, and that nothing can reduce itself from potency to act; for it would then have to be in potency if it is to be moved and in act at the same time and in the same respect. This does not mean that a mover must formally possess the act it is to communicate to something else if it is to move the latter; it must at least possess it virtually, i.e., have the power to communicate it. Whatever is moved, therefore, must be moved by something else. One cannot regress to infinity with moved movers, for then there would be no first mover and, consequently, no other mover; for second movers do not move unless they are moved by a first mover. One must, therefore, conclude to the existence of a first mover which is moved by nothing else, and this “everyone understands to be God.” The second way takes as its point of departure an ordering of efficient causes as indicated to us by our investigation of sensible things. By this Thomas means that we perceive in the world of sensible things that certain efficient causes cannot exercise their causal activity unless they are also caused by something else. But nothing can be the efficient cause of itself, since it would then have to be prior to itself. One cannot regress to infinity in ordered efficient causes. In ordered efficient causes, the first is the cause of the intermediary, and the intermediary is the cause of the last whether the intermediary is one or many. Hence if there were no first efficient cause, there would be no intermediary and no last cause. Thomas concludes from this that one must acknowledge the existence of a first efficient cause, “which everyone names God.” The third way consists of two major parts. Some Aquinas, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Saint Thomas 38   38 textual variants have complicated the proper interpretation of the first part. In brief, Aquinas appeals to the fact that certain things are subject to generation and corruption to show that they are “possible,” i.e., capable of existing and not existing. Not all things can be of this kind revised text, for that which has the possibility of not existing at some time does not exist. If, therefore, all things are capable of not existing, at some time there was nothing whatsoever. If that were so, even now there would be nothing, since what does not exist can only begin to exist through something else that exists. Therefore not all beings are capable of existing and not existing. There must be some necessary being. Since such a necessary, i.e., incorruptible, being might still be caused by something else, Thomas adds a second part to the argument. Every necessary being either depends on something else for its necessity or it does not. One cannot regress to infinity in necessary beings that depend on something else for their necessity. Therefore there must be some being that is necessary of itself and that does not depend on another cause for its necessity, i.e., God. The statement in the first part to the effect that what has the possibility of not existing at some point does not exist has been subject to considerable dispute among commentators. Moreover, even if one grants this and supposes that every individual being is a “possible” and therefore has not existed at some point in the past, it does not easily follow from this that the totality of existing things will also have been nonexistent at some point in the past. Given this, some interpreters prefer to substitute for the third way the more satisfactory versions found in SCG I ch. 15 and SCG II ch. 15. Thomas’s fourth way is based on the varying degrees of perfection we discover among the beings we experience. Some are more or less good, more or less true, more or less noble, etc., than others. But the more and less are said of different things insofar as they approach in varying degrees something that is such to a maximum degree. Therefore there is something that is truest and best and noblest and hence that is also being to the maximum degree. To support this Thomas comments that those things that are true to the maximum degree also enjoy being to the maximum degree; in other words he appeals to the convertibility between being and truth of being. In the second part of this argument Thomas argues that what is supremely such in a given genus is the cause of all other things in that genus. Therefore there is something that is the cause of being, goodness, etc., for all other beings, and this we call God. Much discussion has centered on Thomas’s claim that the more and less are said of different things insofar as they approach something that is such to the maximum degree. Some find this insufficient to justify the conclusion that a maximum must exist, and would here insert an appeal to efficient causality and his theory of participation. If certan entities share or participate in such a perfection only to a limited degree, they must receive that perfection from something else. While more satisfactory from a philosophical perspective, such an insertion seems to change the argument of the fourth way significantly. The fifth way is based on the way things in the universe are governed. Thomas observes that certain things that lack the ability to know, i.e., natural bodies, act for an end. This follows from the fact that they always or at least usually act in the same way to attain that which is best. For Thomas this indicates that they reach their ends by “intention” and not merely from chance. And this in turn implies that they are directed to their ends by some knowing and intelligent being. Hence some intelligent being exists that orders natural things to their ends. This argument rests on final causality and should not be confused with any based on order and design. Aquinas’s frequently repeated denial that in this life we can know what God is should here be recalled. If we can know that God exists and what he is not, we cannot know what he is see, e.g., SCG I, c. 30. Even when we apply the names of pure perfections to God, we first discover such perfections in limited fashion in creatures. What the names of such perfections are intended to signify may indeed be free from all imperfection, but every such name carries with it some deficiency in the way in which it signifies. When a name such as ‘goodness’, for instance, is signified abstractly e.g., ‘God is goodness’, this abstract way of signifying suggests that goodness does not subsist in itself. When such a name is signified concretely e.g., ‘God is good’, this concrete way of signifying implies some kind of composition between God and his goodness. Hence while such names are to be affirmed of God as regards that which they signify, the way in which they signify is to be denied of him. This final point sets the stage for Thomas to apply his theory of analogy to the divine names. Names of pure perfections such as ‘good’, ‘true’, ‘being’, etc., cannot be applied to God with Aquinas, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Saint Thomas 39   39 exactly the same meaning they have when affirmed of creatures univocally, nor with entirely different meanings equivocally. Hence they are affirmed of God and of creatures by an analogy based on the relationship that obtains between a creature viewed as an effect and God its uncaused cause. Because some minimum degree of similarity must obtain between any effect and its cause, Thomas is convinced that in some way a caused perfection imitates and participates in God, its uncaused and unparticipated source. Because no caused effect can ever be equal to its uncreated cause, every perfection that we affirm of God is realized in him in a way different from the way we discover it in creatures. This dissimilarity is so great that we can never have quidditative knowledge of God in this life know what God is. But the similarity is sufficient for us to conclude that what we understand by a perfection such as goodness in creatures is present in God in unrestricted fashion. Even though Thomas’s identification of the kind of analogy to be used in predicating divine names underwent some development, in mature works such as On the Power of God qu. 7, a. 7, SCG I c.34, and ST I qu. 13, a. 5, he identifies this as the analogy of “one to another,” rather than as the analogy of “many to one.” In none of these works does he propose using the analogy of “proportionality” that he had previously defended in On Truth qu. 2, a. 11. Theological virtues. While Aquinas is convinced that human reason can arrive at knowledge that God exists and at meaningful predication of the divine names, he does not think the majority of human beings will actually succeed in such an effort SCG I, c. 4; ST IIIIae, qu. 2, a. 4. Hence he concludes that it was fitting for God to reveal such truths to mankind along with others that purely philosophical inquiry could never discover even in principle. Acceptance of the truth of divine revelation presupposes the gift of the theological virtue of faith in the believer. Faith is an infused virtue by reason of which we accept on God’s authority what he has revealed to us. To believe is an act of the intellect that assents to divine truth as a result of a command on the part of the human will, a will that itself is moved by God through grace ST II IIae, qu. 2, a. 9. For Thomas the theological virtues, having God the ultimate end as their object, are prior to all other virtues whether natural or infused. Because the ultimate end must be present in the intellect before it is present to the will, and because the ultimate end is present in the will by reason of hope and charity the other two theological virtues, in this respect faith is prior to hope and charity. Hope is the theological virtue through which we trust that with divine assistance we will attain the infinite good  eternal enjoyment of God ST IIIIae, qu. 17, aa. 12. In the order of generation, hope is prior to charity; but in the order of perfection charity is prior both to hope and faith. While neither faith nor hope will remain in those who reach the eternal vision of God in the life to come, charity will endure in the blessed. It is a virtue or habitual form that is infused into the soul by God and that inclines us to love him for his own sake. If charity is more excellent than faith or hope ST II IIae, qu. 23, a. 6, through charity the acts of all other virtues are ordered to God, their ultimate end qu. 23, a. 8. 

Arabic philosophy, the philosophy produced in Arabic by philosophers of various ethnic and religious backgrounds who lived in societies in which Islamic civilization was dominant and who identified with its cultural values. The appellation ‘Islamic philosophy’ is misleading, for it suggests a specific religious content that was not necessarily there  just as medieval Latin philosophy is not “Christian” philosophy. In the historical evolution of Western philosophy it is the heir to post-Plotinian late Grecian philosophy and the immediate precursor of later medieval philosophy, which it heavily influenced and to which it exhibits a parallel but independent development after Avicenna well into the twentieth century. The philosophical curriculum of higher education that had spread among the Hellenized peoples of Egypt, the Middle East, and Iran in the sixth century followed the classification of the sciences current in Alexandria, a classification that had developed from that of Aristotle’s works. Aristotle’s Organon, including the Rhetoric and Poetics, and prefaced by Porphyry’s Isagoge, constituted the canonical nine books on logic, the instrument of philosophy. Philosophy proper was then divided into theoretical and practical: theoretical philosophy was further subdivided into physics, mathematics, and metaphysics; and practical into ethics, economics household management, and politics. Carriers of this higher education were primarily the Eastern churches and monastic centers in the Fertile Crescent. With the advent of Islam in the seventh Arabic philosophy Arabic philosophy 40   40 century and the eventual spread of Arabic as the language of learning, the entire curriculum was translated upon demand into Arabic by Syriacspeaking Christians in the eighth through the tenth centuries. The demand from Arab intellectuals, who by the time of the translations had developed a significant scholarly tradition of their own and actively commissioned the translations. The entire corpus of Aristotle’s writings, together with the complete range of commentaries from Alexander of Aphrodisias onward, constituted in Arabic the standard textbooks in logic, physics including meteorology, the theory of the soul, and zoology, metaphysics, and ethics. Metaphysics was also studied as a rule in conjunction with or in the light of the pseudoAristotelian Theologia Aristotelis selections from Plotinus’s Enneads, Books 46 and the Liber de causis, along with other selections from Proclus’s Elements of Theology. Mathematics included geometry Euclid’s Elements, astronomy Ptolemy’s Almagest, arithmetic Nicomachus’s Introduction, and music Ptolemy’s Harmonics. Economics was based almost exclusively on the neo-Pythagorean Bryson’s Oikonomikos, while politics mainly drew on Plato’s Republic and the Laws and especially on the pseudepigraphic correspondence between Aristotle and Alexander Aristotle’s Politics was known in Arabic in fragmentary form. In medicine, which was considered an applied science and as such remained outside this classification, Galen’s entire works were translated. His abridgments of Plato and his Stoicizing logic formed the basic source of knowledge on these subjects in Arabic. The early history of Arabic philosophy presents two independent lines of development. One is associated with the first philosopher and Arab polymath al-Kindi d.873 and his followers, notably as-Sarakhsi d.889, Abu-Zayd alBalkhi d.934, and al-‘Amiri d.992. These philosophers, who appear to stand closer to the Neoplatonism of Athens than to the neo-Aristotelianism of Alexandria, sought in their works to present the various parts of philosophy to an Arab audience, integrate them into Islamic intellectual life, and solve the philosophical problems that arose in the process. The famous physician Rhazes Abu-Bakr ar-Razi, d.925 may be tenuously related to this line, although he appears to be mostly an autodidact and his philosophy was decidedly more eclectic, leaving no following. The second is that of the Aristotelians of Baghdad, founded by the Nestorian scholar and translator Matta Ibn Yanus d.940. His Aristotelianism can be traced directly to the Alexandrian commentators and reaches beyond them to Alexander of Aphrodisias and Themistius. His students, al-Farabi d.950 and Yahya Ibn ‘Adi d.974, and the wide circle of disciples of the latter, prominent among whom are Abu-Sulayman as-Sijistani d.c.985, ‘Isa Ibn-Zur‘a d.1008, AlHasan Ibn-Suwar d.c.1030, and Abu-l-Faraj Ibn at-Tayyib d.1043, engaged in rigorous textual analysis and philosophical interpretation of Aristotle’s works and composed independent monographs on all branches of philosophy. The Aristotelian line of Baghdad, and especially the work of al-Farabi, was transmitted to Islamic Spain al-Andalus toward the end of the tenth century and formed the basis of the philosophical tradition there, whose major exponents were Ibn Bajja Avempace, d.1139, Ibn Tufayl d.1186, Averroes Ibn Rushd, d.1198, and Maimonides Ibn Maymun, d.1204. This tradition came to an end with the reconquista of all Islamic Spain except Granada about two decades after the death of Ibn Tumlas d.1223, the last major Andalusian philosopher. These two lines eventually merge in the work of Avicenna, who set himself the task of synthesizing, in the light of concerns valid in his time, the divergent tendencies of Aristotelian philosophy as it had developed throughout the ages. The Alexandrian schema of the classification of the sciences, which was adopted by Arabic philosophy, implicitly also presented, by means of the connections it established among the various subjects, a blueprint of a work that would encompass all philosophy. Philosophers prior to Avicenna, both the Grecians after Plotinus and the Arabs, failed to note its potential as an outline for a comprehensive work on all philosophy, and had worked on different parts of it. Avicenna was the first to perceive this and to create in his various writings an internally consistent system having mutually interdependent parts and based on the syllogistic logic of Aristotle. His philosophical summae thus mark the end of ancient and the beginning of Scholastic philosophy. In these works Avicenna paid relatively little attention to certain parts of philosophy, in particular the mathematical part of theoretical, and virtually the entirety of practical, philosophy. As a result, Arabic philosophy after him concentrated on three major fields  logic, physics, and metaphysics  which became the norm. Practical philosophy developed along different lines, to a large extent divorced from mainstream philosophy. The highly influential work by Miskawayh d.1030 on ethics provided a model that was followed by later treatises, which constituted a sepArabic philosophy Arabic philosophy 41   41 arate genre of philosophical writings. As for mathematics, its different parts were pursued largely independently of the rest of philosophy. After Avicenna, Arabic philosophy was dominated by his thought and developed along the lines of the reconstructed Peripateticism he established. In the first place, his powerful integrative systematization of philosophy elicited a reaction by certain philosophers toward a more pristine Aristotelianism, notably by Averroes, ‘Abd-al-Latif al-Baghdadi d.1231, and the eighteenth-century Ottoman scholar Yanyali Esat As‘ad of Yanya, d.1730, who even executed new Arabic translations from the Grecian of some of Aristotle’s physical works. Secondly, it generated among his followers, notable among whom are Nafir-ad-Din at-Tusi d.1274 and Qutb-ad-Din ar-Razi d.1364, a long series of philosophically fecund commentaries and supercommentaries. Thirdly, it forced most theological writing to adopt logic as its method, and philosophical, rather than theological, analysis as the means of argumentation, a procedure established by al-Ghazali d.1111 and consolidated by Fakhr-ad-Din ar-Razi d.1209. And fourthly, it formed the basis for the further development of his metaphysics in particular the concepts of essence and existence and the schema of emanation through the incorporation of the illuminationist philosophy of Suhrawardi of Aleppo d.1193 and the mystical theories of Ibn ‘Arabi d.1240 in the works of Shiite philosophers active since Safavid times sixteenth century. This movement, initiated by Mir Damad d.1632 and developed by his pupil Mulla Fadra d.1640, has continued after the latter’s death among Iranian philosophers writing partly also in Persian. The colonization of the Arab world by Western powers since the nineteenth century has resulted in the spread of modern European, and especially French, philosophy among Arab intellectuals. Modern Arab philosophical thought is now developing along these lines while at the same time efforts are being made to relate it to traditional Arabic philosophy.  .

aradhya, Sanskrit word meaning ‘object of worship or reverence’. In traditional Indian society, reverence was almost a way of life. Elders, especially one’s parents and teachers, were held in godlike esteem. The Indians revered life in any form as sacred; hence, ahimsa nonviolence and vegetarianism were two important features of the ideal Indian life. In the Hindu polytheistic tradition, which continues even today, the countless Vedic deities, along with the later gods and goddesses in the Hindu pantheon, serve as aradhya objects. A popular form of aradhya in today’s Hindu society is often a chosen deity worshiped in a household. 

Arcesilaus of Pitane c.315242 B.C., Grecian Skeptic philosopher, founder of the Middle Academy. Influenced by Socratic elenchus, he claimed that, unlike Socrates, he was not even certain that he was certain of nothing. He shows the influence of Pyrrho in attacking the Stoic doctrine that the subjective certainty of the wise is the criterion of truth. At the theoretical level he advocated epoche, suspension of rational judgment; at the practical, he argued that eulogon, probability, can justify action  an early version of coherentism. His ethical views were not extreme; he held, e.g., that one should attend to one’s own life rather than external objects. Though he wrote nothing except verse, he led the Academy into two hundred years of Skepticism. R.C. Archelaus of Athens.

Archytas fl. 400350 B.C., Grecian Pythagorean philosopher from Tarentum in southern Italy. He was elected general seven times and sent a ship to rescue Plato from Dionysius II of Syracuse in 361. He is famous for solutions to specific mathematical problems, such as the doubling of the cube, but little is known about his general philosophical principles. His proof that the numbers in a superparticular ratio have no mean proportional has relevance to music theory, as does his work with the arithmetic, geometric, and harmonic means. He gave mathematical accounts of the diatonic, enharmonic, and chromatic scales and developed a theory of acoustics. Fragments 1 and 2 and perhaps 3 are authentic, but most material preserved in his name is spurious. 

Arendt, Hannah 190675, German-born American social and political theorist. She was aradhya Arendt, Hannah 42   42 educated in her native Germany, studying with Heidegger and Jaspers; fled to France in 1933; and emigrated in 1941 to the United States, where she taught at various universities. Her major works are The Origins of Totalitarianism 1951, The Human Condition 1958, Between Past and Future 1961, On Revolution 1963, Crises of the Republic 1972, and The Life of the Mind 1978. In Arendt’s view, for reasons established by Kant and deepened by Nietzsche, there is a breach between being and thinking, one that cannot be closed by thought. Understood as philosophizing or contemplation, thinking is a form of egoism that isolates us from one another and our world. Despite Kant, modernity remains mired in egoism, a condition compounded by the emergence of a “mass” that consists of bodies with needs temporarily met by producing and consuming and which demands governments that minister to these needs. In place of thinking, laboring, and the administration of things now called democracy, all of which are instrumental but futile as responses to the “thrown” quality of our condition, Arendt proposed to those capable of it a mode of being, political action, that she found in pronounced form in pre-Socratic Greece and briefly but gloriously at the founding of the Roman and American republics. Political action is initiation, the making of beginnings that can be explained neither causally nor teleologically. It is done in the space of appearances constituted by the presence of other political actors whose re-sponses  the telling of equally unpredictable stories concerning one another’s actions  determine what actions are taken and give character to the acting participants. In addition to the refined discernments already implied, political action requires the courage to initiate one knows not what. Its outcome is power; not over other people or things but mutual empowerment to continue acting in concert and thereby to overcome egoism and achieve positive freedom and humanity. 

arete, ancient Grecian term meaning ‘virtue’ or ‘excellence’. In philosophical contexts, the term was used mainly of virtues of human character; in broader contexts, arete was applicable to many different sorts of excellence. The cardinal virtues in the classical period were courage, wisdom, temperance sophrosune, piety, and justice. Sophists such as Protagoras claimed to teach such virtues, and Socrates challenged their credentials for doing so. Several early Platonic dialogues show Socrates asking after definitions of virtues, and Socrates investigates arete in other dialogues as well. Conventional views allowed that a person can have one virtue such as courage but lack another such as wisdom, but Plato’s Protagoras shows Socrates defending his thesis of the unity of arete, which implies that a person who has one arete has them all. Platonic accounts of the cardinal virtues with the exception of piety are given in Book IV of the Republic. Substantial parts of the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle are given over to discussions of arete, which he divides into virtues of character and virtues of intellect. This discussion is the ancestor of most modern theories of virtue ethics. 

argument, a sequence of statements such that some of them the premises purport to give reason to accept another of them, the conclusion. Since we speak of bad arguments and weak arguments, the premises of an argument need not really support the conclusion, but they must give some appearance of doing so or the term ‘argument’ is misapplied. Logic is mainly concerned with the question of validity: whether if the premises are true we would have reason to accept the conclusion. A valid argument with true premises is called sound. A valid deductive argument is one such that if we accept the premises we are logically bound to accept the conclusion and if we reject the conclusion we are logically bound to reject one or more of the premises. Alternatively, the premises logically entail the conclusion. A good inductive argument  some would reserve ‘valid’ for deductive arguments  is one such that if we accept the premises we are logically bound to regard the conclusion as probable, and, in addition, as more probable than it would be if the premises should be false. A few arguments have only one premise and/or more than one conclusion. 

Arianism, diverse but related teachings in early Christianity that subordinated the Son to God the Father. In reaction the church developed its doctrine of the Trinity, whereby the Son and Holy Spirit, though distinct persons hypostases, share with the Father, as his ontological equals, the one being or substance ousia of God. Arius c.250  c.336 taught in Alexandria, where, on the hierarchical model of Middle Platonism, he sharply distinguished Scripture’s transcendent God from the Logos or Son incarnate in Jesus. The latter, subject to suffering and humanly obedient to God, is inferior to the immutable Creator, the object of that obedience. God alone is eternal and ungenerated; the Son, divine not by nature but by God’s choosing, is generated, with a beginning: the unique creature, through whom all else is made. The Council of Nicea, in 325, condemned Arius and favored his enemy Athanasius, affirming the Son’s creatorhood and full deity, having the same being or substance homoousios as the Father. Arianism still flourished, evolving into the extreme view that the Son’s being was neither the same as the Father’s nor like it homoiousios, but unlike it anomoios. This too was anathematized, by the Council of 381 at Constantinople, which, ratifying what is commonly called the Nicene Creed, sealed orthodox Trinitarianism and the equality of the three persons against Arian subordinationism. 

Aristotle: preeminent Grecian philosopher born in Stagira, hence sometimes called the Stagirite. Aristotle came to Athens as a teenager and remained for two decades in Plato’s Academy. Following Plato’s death in 347, Aristotle traveled to Assos and to Lesbos, where he associated with Theophrastus and collected a wealth of biological data, and later to Macedonia, where he tutored Alexander the Great. In 335 he returned to Athens and founded his own philosophical school in the Lyceum. The site’s colonnaded walk peripatos conferred on Aristotle and his group the name ‘the Peripatetics’. Alexander’s death in 323 unleashed antiMacedonian forces in Athens. Charged with impiety, and mindful of the fate of Socrates, Aristotle withdrew to Chalcis, where he died. Chiefly influenced by his association with Plato, Aristotle also makes wide use of the preSocratics. A number of works begin by criticizing and, ultimately, building on their views. The direction of Plato’s influence is debated. Some scholars see Aristotle’s career as a measured retreat from his teacher’s doctrines. For others he began as a confirmed anti-Platonist but returned to the fold as he matured. More likely, Aristotle early on developed a keenly independent voice that expressed enduring puzzlement over such Platonic doctrines as the separate existence of Ideas and the construction of physical reality from two-dimensional triangles. Such unease was no doubt heightened by Aristotle’s appreciation for the evidential value of observation as well as by his conviction that long-received and well-entrenched opinion is likely to contain at least part of the truth. Aristotle reportedly wrote a few popular works for publication, some of which are dialogues. Of these we have only fragments and reports. Notably lost are also his lectures on the good and on the Ideas. Ancient cataloguers also list under Aristotle’s name some 158 constitutions of Grecian states. Of these, only the Constitution of Athens has survived, on a papyrus discovered in 1890. What remains is an enormous body of writing on virtually every topic of philosophical significance. Much of it consists of detailed lecture notes, working drafts, and accounts of his lectures written by others. Although efforts may have been under way in Aristotle’s lifetime, Andronicus of Rhodes, in the first century B.C., is credited with giving the Aristotelian corpus its present organization. Virtually no extant manuscripts predate the ninth century A.D., so the corpus has been transmitted by a complex history of manuscript transcription. In 1831 the Berlin Academy published the first critical edition of Aristotle’s work. Scholars still cite Aristotle by , column, and line of this edition. Logic and language. The writings on logic and language are concentrated in six early works: Categories, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics, Posterior Analytics, Topics, and Sophistical Refutations. Known since late antiquity as the Organon, these works share a concern with what is now called semantics. The Categories focuses on the relation between uncombined terms, such as ‘white’ or ‘man’, and the items they signify; On Interpretation offers an account of how terms combine to yield simple statements; Prior Analytics provides a systematic account of how three terms must be distributed in two categorical statements so as to yield logically a third such statement; Posterior Analytics specifies the conditions that categorical statements must meet to play a role in scientific explanation. The Topics, sometimes said to include Sophistical Refutations, is a handbook of “topics” and techniques for dialectical arguments concerning, principally, the four predicables: accident what may or may not belong to a subject, as sitting belongs to Socrates; definition what signifies a subject’s essence, as rational animal is the essence of man; proprium what is not in the essence of a subject but is unique to or counterpredicable of it, as all and only persons are risible; and genus what is in the essence of subjects differing in species, as animal is in the essence of both men and oxen. Categories treats the basic kinds of things that exist and their interrelations. Every uncombined term, says Aristotle, signifies essentially something in one of ten categories  a substance, a quantity, a quality, a relative, a place, a time, a position, a having, a doing, or a being affected. This doctrine underlies Aristotle’s admonition that there are as many proper or per se senses of ‘being’ as there are categories. In order to isolate the things that exist primarily, namely, primary substances, from all other things and to give an account of their nature, two asymmetric relations of ontological dependence are employed. First, substance ousia is distinguished from the accidental categories by the fact that every accident is present in a substance and, therefore, cannot exist without a substance in which to inhere. Second, the category of substance itself is divided into ordinary individuals or primary substances, such as Socrates, and secondary substances, such as the species man and the genus animal. Secondary substances are said of primary substances and indicate what kind of thing the subject is. A mark of this is that both the name and the definition of the secondary substance can be predicated of the primary substance, as both man and rational animal can be predicated of Socrates. Universals in non-substance categories are also said of subjects, as color is said of white. Therefore, directly or indirectly, everything else is either present in or said of primary substances and without them nothing would exist. And because they are neither present in a subject nor said of a subject, primary substances depend on nothing else for their existence. So, in the Categories, the ordinary individual is ontologically basic. On Interpretation offers an account of those meaningful expressions that are true or false, namely, statements or assertions. Following Plato’s Sophist, a simple statement is composed of the semantically heterogeneous parts, name onoma and verb rhema. In ‘Socrates runs’ the name has the strictly referential function of signifying the subject of attribution. The verb, on the other hand, is essentially predicative, signifying something holding of the subject. Verbs also indicate when something is asserted to hold and so make precise the statement’s truth conditions. Simple statements also include general categorical statements. Since medieval times it has become customary to refer to the basic categoricals by letters: A Every man is white, E No man is white, I Some man is white, and O Not every man is white. On Interpretation outlines their logical relations in what is now called the square of opposition: A & E are contraries, A & O and E & I are contradictories, and A & I and E & O are superimplications. That A implies I reflects the no longer current view that Aristotle Aristotle 45   45 all affirmative statements carry existential import. One ambition of On Interpretation is a theory of the truth conditions for all statements that affirm or deny one thing or another. However, statements involving future contingencies pose a special problem. Consider Aristotle’s notorious sea battle. Either it will or it will not happen tomorrow. If the first, then the statement ‘There will be a sea battle tomorrow’ is now true. Hence, it is now fixed that the sea battle occur tomorrow. If the second, then it is now fixed that the sea battle not occur tomorrow. Either way there can be no future contingencies. Although some hold that Aristotle would embrace the determinism they find implicit in this consequence, most argue either that he suspends the law of excluded middle for future contingencies or that he denies the principle of bivalence for future contingent statements. On the first option Aristotle gives up the claim that either the sea battle will happen tomorrow or not. On the second he keeps the claim but allows that future contingent statements are neither true nor false. Aristotle’s evident attachment to the law of excluded middle, perhaps, favors the second option. Prior Analytics marks the invention of logic as a formal discipline in that the work contains the first virtually complete system of logical inference, sometimes called syllogistic. The fact that the first chapter of the Prior Analytics reports that there is a syllogism whenever, certain things being stated, something else follows of necessity, might suggest that Aristotle intended to capture a general notion of logical consequence. However, the syllogisms that constitute the system of the Prior Analytics are restricted to the basic categorical statements introduced in On Interpretation. A syllogism consists of three different categorical statements: two premises and a conclusion. The Prior Analytics tells us which pairs of categoricals logically yield a third. The fourteen basic valid forms are divided into three figures and, within each figure, into moods. The system is foundational because second- and third-figure syllogisms are reducible to first-figure syllogisms, whose validity is self-evident. Although syllogisms are conveniently written as conditional sentences, the syllogistic proper is, perhaps, best seen as a system of valid deductive inferences rather than as a system of valid conditional sentences or sentence forms. Posterior Analytics extends syllogistic to science and scientific explanation. A science is a deductively ordered body of knowledge about a definite genus or domain of nature. Scientific knowledge episteme consists not in knowing that, e.g., there is thunder in the clouds, but rather in knowing why there is thunder. So the theory of scientific knowledge is a theory of explanation and the vehicle of explanation is the first-figure syllogism Barbara: If 1 P belongs to all M and 2 M belongs to all S, then 3 P belongs to all S. To explain, e.g., why there is thunder, i.e., why there is noise in the clouds, we say: 3H Noise P belongs to the clouds S because 2H Quenching of fire M belongs to the clouds S and 1H Noise P belongs to quenching of fire M. Because what is explained in science is invariant and holds of necessity, the premises of a scientific or demonstrative syllogism must be necessary. In requiring that the premises be prior to and more knowable than the conclusion, Aristotle embraces the view that explanation is asymmetrical: knowledge of the conclusion depends on knowledge of each premise, but each premise can be known independently of the conclusion. The premises must also give the causes of the conclusion. To inquire why P belongs to S is, in effect, to seek the middle term that gives the cause. Finally, the premises must be immediate and non-demonstrable. A premise is immediate just in case there is no middle term connecting its subject and predicate terms. Were P to belong to M because of a new middle, M1, then there would be a new, more basic premise, that is essential to the full explanation. Ultimately, explanation of a received fact will consist in a chain of syllogisms terminating in primary premises that are immediate. These serve as axioms that define the science in question because they reflect the essential nature of the fact to be explained  as in 1H the essence of thunder lies in the quenching of fire. Because they are immediate, primary premises are not capable of syllogistic demonstration, yet they must be known if syllogisms containing them are to constitute knowledge of the conclusion. Moreover, were it necessary to know the primary premises syllogistically, demonstration would proceed infinitely or in a circle. The first alternative defeats the very possibility of explanation and the second undermines its asymmetric character. Thus, the primary premises must be known by the direct grasp of the mind noûs. This just signals the appropriate way for the highest principles of a science to be known  even demonstrable propositions can be known directly, but they are explained only when located within the structure of the relevant science, i.e., only when demonstrated syllogistically. Although all sciences exhibit the same formal structure and use Aristotle Aristotle 46   46 certain common principles, different sciences have different primary premises and, hence, different subject matters. This “one genus to one science” rule legislates that each science and its explanations be autonomous. Aristotle recognizes three kinds of intellectual discipline. Productive disciplines, such as house building, concern the making of something external to the agent. Practical disciplines, such as ethics, concern the doing of something not separate from the agent, namely, action and choice. Theoretical disciplines are concerned with truth for its own sake. As such, they alone are sciences in the special sense of the Posterior Analytics. The three main kinds of special science are individuated by their objects  natural science by objects that are separate but not changeless, mathematics by objects that are changeless but not separate, and theology by separate and changeless objects. The mathematician studies the same objects as the natural scientist but in a quite different way. He takes an actual object, e.g. a chalk figure used in demonstration, and abstracts from or “thinks away” those of its properties, such as definiteness of size and imperfection of shape, that are irrelevant to its standing as a perfect exemplar of the purely mathematical properties under investigation. Mathematicians simply treat this abstracted circle, which is not separate from matter, as if it were separate. In this way the theorems they prove about the object can be taken as universal and necessary. Physics. As the science of nature physis, physics studies those things whose principles and causes of change and rest are internal. Aristotle’s central treatise on nature, the Physics, analyzes the most general features of natural phenomena: cause, change, time, place, infinity, and continuity. The doctrine of the four causes is especially important in Aristotle’s work. A cause aitia is something like an explanatory factor. The material cause of a house, for instance, is the matter hyle from which it is built; the moving or efficient cause is the builder, more exactly, the form in the builder’s soul; the formal cause is its plan or form eidos; and the final cause is its purpose or end telos: provision of shelter. The complete explanation of the coming to be of a house will factor in all of these causes. In natural phenomena efficient, formal, and final causes often coincide. The form transmitted by the father is both the efficient cause and the form of the child, and the latter is glossed in terms of the child’s end or complete development. This explains why Aristotle often simply contrasts matter and form. Although its objects are compounds of both, physics gives priority to the study of natural form. This accords with the Posterior Analytics’ insistence that explanation proceed through causes that give the essence and reflects Aristotle’s commitment to teleology. A natural process counts essentially as the development of, say, an oak or a man because its very identity depends on the complete form realized at its end. As with all things natural, the end is an internal governing principle of the process rather than an external goal. All natural things are subject to change kinesis. Defined as the actualization of the potential qua potential, a change is not an ontologically basic item. There is no category for changes. Rather, they are reductively explained in terms of more basic things  substances, properties, and potentialities. A pale man, e.g., has the potentiality to be or become tanned. If this potentiality is utterly unactualized, no change will ensue; if completely actualized, the change will have ended. So the potentiality must be actualized but not, so to speak, exhausted; i.e., it must be actualized qua potentiality. Designed for the ongoing operations of the natural world, the Physics’ definition of change does not cover the generation and corruption of substantial items themselves. This sort of change, which involves matter and elemental change, receives extensive treatment in On Generation and Corruption. Aristotle rejects the atomists’ contention that the world consists of an infinite totality of indivisible atoms in various arrangements. Rather, his basic stuff is uniform elemental matter, any part of which is divisible into smaller such parts. Because nothing that is actually infinite can exist, it is only in principle that matter is always further dividable. So while countenancing the potential infinite, Aristotle squarely denies the actual infinite. This holds for the motions of the sublunary elemental bodies earth, air, fire, and water as well as for the circular motions of the heavenly bodies composed of a fifth element, aether, whose natural motion is circular. These are discussed in On the Heavens. The four sublunary elements are further discussed in Meteorology, the fourth book of which might be described as an early treatise on chemical combination. Psychology. Because the soul psyche is officially defined as the form of a body with the potentiality for life, psychology is a subfield of natural science. In effect, Aristotle applies the Aristotle Aristotle 47   47 apparatus of form and matter to the traditional Grecian view of the soul as the principle and cause of life. Although even the nutritive and reproductive powers of plants are effects of the soul, most of his attention is focused on topics that are psychological in the modern sense. On the Soul gives a general account of the nature and number of the soul’s principal cognitive faculties. Subsequent works, chiefly those collected as the Parva naturalia, apply the general theory to a broad range of psychological phenomena from memory and recollection to dreaming, sleeping, and waking. The soul is a complex of faculties. Faculties, at least those distinctive of persons, are capacities for cognitively grasping objects. Sight grasps colors, smell odors, hearing sounds, and the mind grasps universals. An organism’s form is the particular organization of its material parts that enable it to exercise these characteristic functions. Because an infant, e.g., has the capacity to do geometry, Aristotle distinguishes two varieties of capacity or potentiality dynamis and actuality entelecheia. The infant is a geometer only in potentiality. This first potentiality comes to him simply by belonging to the appropriate species, i.e., by coming into the world endowed with the potential to develop into a competent geometer. By actualizing, through experience and training, this first potentiality, he acquires a first actualization. This actualization is also a second potentiality, since it renders him a competent geometer able to exercise his knowledge at will. The exercise itself is a second actualization and amounts to active contemplation of a particular item of knowledge, e.g. the Pythagorean theorem. So the soul is further defined as the first actualization of a complex natural body. Faculties, like sciences, are individuated by their objects. Objects of perception aisthesis fall into three general kinds. Special proper sensibles, such as colors and sounds, are directly perceived by one and only one sense and are immune to error. They demarcate the five special senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. Common sensibles, such as movement and shape, are directly perceived by more than one special sense. Both special and common sensibles are proper objects of perception because they have a direct causal effect on the perceptual system. By contrast, the son of Diares is an incidental sensible because he is perceived not directly but as a consequence of directly perceiving something else that happens to be the son of Diares  e.g., a white thing. Aristotle calls the mind noûs the place of forms because it is able to grasp objects apart from matter. These objects are nothing like Plato’s separately existing Forms. As Aristotelian universals, their existence is entailed by and depends on their having instances. Thus, On the Soul’s remark that universals are “somehow in the soul” only reflects their role in assuring the autonomy of thought. The mind has no organ because it is not the form or first actualization of any physical structure. So, unlike perceptual faculties, it is not strongly dependent on the body. However, the mind thinks its objects by way of images, which are something like internal representations, and these are physically based. Insofar as it thus depends on imagination phantasia, the mind is weakly dependent on the body. This would be sufficient to establish the naturalized nature of Aristotle’s mind were it not for what some consider an incurably dualist intrusion. In distinguishing something in the mind that makes all things from something that becomes all things, Aristotle introduces the notorious distinction between the active and passive intellects and may even suggest that the first is separable from the body. Opinion on the nature of the active intellect diverges widely, some even discounting it as an irrelevant insertion. But unlike perception, which depends on external objects, thinking is up to us. Therefore, it cannot simply be a matter of the mind’s being affected. So Aristotle needs a mechanism that enables us to produce thoughts autonomously. In light of this functional role, the question of active intellect’s ontological status is less pressing. Biology. Aristotle’s biological writings, which constitute about a quarter of the corpus, bring biological phenomena under the general framework of natural science: the four causes, form and matter, actuality and potentiality, and especially the teleological character of natural processes. If the Physics proceeds in an a priori style, the History of Animals, Parts of Animals, and Generation of Animals achieve an extraordinary synthesis of observation, theory, and general scientific principle. History of Animals is a comparative study of generic features of animals, including analogous parts, activities, and dispositions. Although its morphological and physiological descriptions show surprisingly little interest in teleology, Parts of Animals is squarely teleological. Animal parts, especially organs, are ultimately differentiated by function rather than morphology. The composition of, e.g., teeth and flesh is determined by their role in the overall functioning of the organism and, hence, requires Aristotle Aristotle 48   48 teleology. Generation of Animals applies the formmatter and actualitypotentiality distinctions to animal reproduction, inheritance, and the development of accidental characteristics. The species form governs the development of an organism and determines what the organism is essentially. Although in the Metaphysics and elsewhere accidental characteristics, including inherited ones, are excluded from science, in the biological writings form has an expanded role and explains the inheritance of non-essential characteristics, such as eye color. The more fully the father’s form is imposed on the minimally formed matter of the mother, the more completely the father’s traits are passed on to the offspring. The extent to which matter resists imposition of form determines the extent to which traits of the mother emerge, or even those of more distant ancestors. Aristotle shared the Platonists’ interest in animal classification. Recent scholarship suggests that this is less an interest in elaborating a Linnean-style taxonomy of the animal kingdom than an interest in establishing the complex differentiae and genera central to definitions of living things. The biological works argue, moreover, that no single differentia could give the whole essence of a species and that the differentiae that do give the essence will fall into more than one division. If the second point rejects the method of dichotomous division favored by Plato and the Academy, the first counters Aristotle’s own standard view that essence can be reduced to a single final differentia. The biological sciences are not, then, automatically accommodated by the Posterior Analytics model of explanation, where the essence or explanatory middle is conceived as a single causal property. A number of themes discussed in this section are brought together in a relatively late work, Motion of Animals. Its psychophysical account of the mechanisms of animal movement stands at the juncture of physics, psychology, and biology. Metaphysics. In Andronicus’s edition, the fourteen books now known as the Metaphysics were placed after the Physics, whence comes the word ‘metaphysics’, whose literal meaning is ‘what comes after the physics’. Aristotle himself prefers ‘first philosophy’ or ‘wisdom’ sophia. The subject is defined as the theoretical science of the causes and principles of what is most knowable. This makes metaphysics a limiting case of Aristotle’s broadly used distinction between what is better known to us and what is better known by nature. The genus animal, e.g., is better known by nature than the species man because it is further removed from the senses and because it can be known independently of the species. The first condition suggests that the most knowable objects would be the separately existing and thoroughly non-sensible objects of theology and, hence, that metaphysics is a special science. The second condition suggests that the most knowable objects are simply the most general notions that apply to things in general. This favors identifying metaphysics as the general science of being qua being. Special sciences study restricted modes of being. Physics, for instance, studies being qua having an internal principle of change and rest. A general science of being studies the principles and causes of things that are, simply insofar as they are. A good deal of the Metaphysics supports this conception of metaphysics. For example, Book IV, on the principle of non-contradiction, and Book X, on unity, similarity, and difference, treat notions that apply to anything whatever. So, too, for the discussion of form and actuality in the central books VII, VIII, and IX. Book XII, on the other hand, appears to regard metaphysics as the special science of theology. Aristotle himself attempts to reconcile these two conceptions of metaphysics. Because it studies immovable substance, theology counts as first philosophy. However, it is also general precisely because it is first, and so it will include the study of being qua being. Scholars have found this solution as perplexing as the problem. Although Book XII proves the causal necessity for motion of an eternal substance that is an unmoved mover, this establishes no conceptual connection between the forms of sensible compounds and the pure form that is the unmoved mover. Yet such a connection is required, if a single science is to encompass both. Problems of reconciliation aside, Aristotle had to face a prior difficulty concerning the very possibility of a general science of being. For the Posterior Analytics requires the existence of a genus for each science but the Metaphysics twice argues that being is not a genus. The latter claim, which Aristotle never relinquishes, is implicit in the Categories, where being falls directly into kinds, namely, the categories. Because these highest genera do not result from differentiation of a single genus, no univocal sense of being covers them. Although being is, therefore, ambiguous in as many ways as there are categories, a thread connects them. The ontological priority accorded primary substance in the Categories is made part of the very definition of non-substantial entities Aristotle Aristotle 49   49 in the Metaphysics: to be an accident is by definition to be an accident of some substance. Thus, the different senses of being all refer to the primary kind of being, substance, in the way that exercise, diet, medicine, and climate are healthy by standing in some relation to the single thing health. The discovery of focal meaning, as this is sometimes called, introduces a new way of providing a subject matter with the internal unity required for science. Accordingly, the Metaphysics modifies the strict “one genus to one science” rule of the Posterior Analytics. A single science may also include objects whose definitions are different so long as these definitions are related focally to one thing. So focal meaning makes possible the science of being qua being. Focal meaning also makes substance the central object of investigation. The principles and causes of being in general can be illuminated by studying the principles and causes of the primary instance of being. Although the Categories distinguishes primary substances from other things that are and indicates their salient characteristics e.g., their ability to remain one and the same while taking contrary properties, it does not explain why it is that primary substances have such characteristics. The difficult central books of the Metaphysics  VII, VIII, and IX  investigate precisely this. In effect, they ask what, primarily, about the Categories’ primary substances explains their nature. Their target, in short, is the substance of the primary substances of the Categories. As concrete empirical particulars, the latter are compounds of form and matter the distinction is not explicit in the Categories and so their substance must be sought among these internal structural features. Thus, Metaphysics VII considers form, matter, and the compound of form and matter, and quickly turns to form as the best candidate. In developing a conception of form that can play the required explanatory role, the notion of essence to ti en einai assumes center stage. The essence of a man, e.g., is the cause of certain matter constituting a man, namely, the soul. So form in the sense of essence is the primary substance of the Metaphysics. This is obviously not the primary substance of the Categories and, although the same word eidos is used, neither is this form the species of the Categories. The latter is treated in the Metaphysics as a kind of universal compound abstracted from particular compounds and appears to be denied substantial status. While there is broad, though not universal, agreement that in the Metaphysics form is primary substance, there is equally broad disagreement over whether this is particular form, the form belonging to a single individual, or species form, the form common to all individuals in the species. There is also lively discussion concerning the relation of the Metaphysics doctrine of primary substance to the earlier doctrine of the Categories. Although a few scholars see an outright contradiction here, most take the divergence as evidence of the development of Aristotle’s views on substance. Finally, the role of the central books in the Metaphysics as a whole continues to be debated. Some see them as an entirely selfcontained analysis of form, others as preparatory to Book XII’s discussion of non-sensible form and the role of the unmoved mover as the final cause of motion. Practical philosophy. Two of Aristotle’s most heralded works, the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics, are treatises in practical philosophy. Their aim is effective action in matters of conduct. So they deal with what is up to us and can be otherwise because in this domain lie choice and action. The practical nature of ethics lies mainly in the development of a certain kind of agent. The Nicomachean Ethics was written, Aristotle reminds us, “not in order to know what virtue is, but in order to become good.” One becomes good by becoming a good chooser and doer. This is not simply a matter of choosing and doing right actions but of choosing or doing them in the right way. Aristotle assumes that, for the most part, agents know what ought to be done the evil or vicious person is an exception. The akratic or morally weak agent desires to do other than what he knows ought to be done and acts on this desire against his better judgment. The enkratic or morally strong person shares the akratic agent’s desire but acts in accordance with his better judgment. In neither kind of choice are desire and judgment in harmony. In the virtuous, on the other hand, desire and judgment agree. So their choices and actions will be free of the conflict and pain that inevitably accompany those of the akratic and enkratic agent. This is because the part of their soul that governs choice and action is so disposed that desire and right judgment coincide. Acquiring a stable disposition hexis of this sort amounts to acquiring moral virtue ethike arete. The disposition is concerned with choices as would be determined by the person of practical wisdom phronesis; these will be actions lying between extreme alternatives. They will lie in a mean  popularly called the “golden mean”  relative to the talents and stores of the agent. Choosing in this way is not easily done. It involves, for instance, feeling anger or extending Aristotle Aristotle 50   50 generosity at the right time, toward the right people, in the right way, and for the right reasons. Intellectual virtues, such as excellence at mathematics, can be acquired by teaching, but moral virtue cannot. I may know what ought to be done and even perform virtuous acts without being able to act virtuously. Nonetheless, because moral virtue is a disposition concerning choice, deliberate performance of virtuous acts can, ultimately, instill a disposition to choose them in harmony and with pleasure and, hence, to act virtuously. Aristotle rejected Plato’s transcendental Form of the Good as irrelevant to the affairs of persons and, in general, had little sympathy with the notion of an absolute good. The goal of choice and action is the human good, namely, living well. This, however, is not simply a matter of possessing the requisite practical disposition. Practical wisdom, which is necessary for living well, involves skill at calculating the best means to achieve one’s ends and this is an intellectual virtue. But the ends that are presupposed by deliberation are established by moral virtue. The end of all action, the good for man, is happiness eudaimonia. Most things, such as wealth, are valued only as a means to a worthy end. Honor, pleasure, reason, and individual virtues, such as courage and generosity, are deemed worthy in their own right but they can also be sought for the sake of eudaimonia. Eudaimonia alone can be sought only for its own sake. Eudaimonia is not a static state of the soul but a kind of activity energeia of the soul  something like human flourishing. The happy person’s life will be selfsufficient and complete in the highest measure. The good for man, then, is activity in accordance with virtue or the highest virtue, should there be one. Here ‘virtue’ means something like excellence and applies to much besides man. The excellence of an ax lies in its cutting, that of a horse in its equestrian qualities. In short, a thing’s excellence is a matter of how well it performs its characteristic functions or, we might say, how well it realizes its nature. The natural functions of persons reside in the exercise of their natural cognitive faculties, most importantly, the faculty of reason. So human happiness consists in activity in accordance with reason. However, persons can exercise reason in practical or in purely theoretical matters. The first suggests that happiness consists in the practical life of moral virtue, the second that it consists in the life of theoretical activity. Most of the Nicomachean Ethics is devoted to the moral virtues but the final book appears to favor theoretical activity theoria as the highest and most choiceworthy end. It is man’s closest approach to divine activity. Much recent scholarship is devoted to the relation between these two conceptions of the good, particularly, to whether they are of equal value and whether they exclude or include one another. Ethics and politics are closely connected. Aristotle conceives of the state as a natural entity arising among persons to serve a natural function. This is not merely, e.g., provision for the common defense or promotion of trade. Rather, the state of the Politics also has eudaimonia as its goal, namely, fostering the complete and selfsufficient lives of its citizens. Aristotle produced a complex taxonomy of constitutions but reduced them, in effect, to three kinds: monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. Which best serves the natural end of a state was, to some extent, a relative matter for Aristotle. Although he appears to have favored democracy, in some circumstances monarchy might be appropriate. The standard ordering of Aristotle’s works ends with the Rhetoric and the Poetics. The Rhetoric’s extensive discussion of oratory or the art of persuasion locates it between politics and literary theory. The relatively short Poetics is devoted chiefly to the analysis of tragedy. It has had an enormous historical influence on aesthetic theory in general as well as on the writing of drama. 

Arminius, Jacobus 15601609, Dutch theologian who, as a Dutch Reformed pastor and later professor at the  of Leiden, challenged Calvinist orthodoxy on predestination and free will. After his death, followers codified Arminius’s views in a document asserting that God’s grace is necessary for salvation, but not irresistible: the divine decree depends on human free choice. This became the basis for Arminianism, which was condemned by the Dutch ReAristotle, commentaries on Arminius, Jacobus 51   51 formed synod but vigorously debated for centuries among Protestant theologians of different denominations. The term ‘Arminian’ is still occasionally applied to theologians who defend a free human response to divine grace against predestinationism.

Armstrong, David M. b.1926, Australian philosopher of mind and metaphysician, and until his retirement Challis Professor of Philosophy at Sydney, noted for his allegiance to a physicalist account of consciousness and to a realist view of properties conceived as universals. A Materialist Theory of the Mind 1968 develops a scientifically motivated version of the view that mental states are identical with physical states of the central nervous system. Universals and Scientific Realism 1978 and What Is a Law of Nature? argue that a scientifically adequate ontology must include universals in order to explain the status of natural laws. Armstrong contends that laws must be construed as expressing relations of necessitation between universals rather than mere regularities among particulars. However, he is only prepared to acknowledge the existence of such universals as are required for the purposes of scientific explanation. Moreover, he adopts an “immanent” or “Aristotelian” as opposed to a “transcendent” or “Platonic” realism, refusing to accept the existence of uninstantiated universals and denying that universals somehow exist “outside” space and time. More recently, Armstrong has integrated his scientifically inspired physicalism and property realism within the overall framework of an ontology of states of affairs, notably in A World of States of Affairs. Here he advocates the truthmaker principle that every truth must be made true by some existing state of affairs and contends that states of affairs, rather than the universals and particulars that he regards as their constituents, are the basic building blocks of reality. Within this ontology, which in some ways resembles that of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, necessity and possibility are accommodated by appeal to combinatorial principles. As Armstrong explains in A Combinatorial Theory of Possibility, this approach offers an ontologically economical alternative to the realist conception of possible worlds defended by David Lewis. 

Arnauld, Antoine: philosopher, perhaps the most important and best-known intellectual associated with the Jansenist community at Port-Royal, as well as a staunch and orthodox champion of Cartesian philosophy. His theological writings defend the Augustinian doctrine of efficacious grace, according to which salvation is not earned by one’s own acts, but granted by the irresistible grace of God. He also argues in favor of a strict contritionism, whereby one’s absolution must be based on a true, heartfelt repentance, a love of God, rather than a selfish fear of God’s punishment. These views brought him and Port-Royal to the center of religious controversy in seventeenth-century France, as Jansenism came to be perceived as a subversive extension of Protestant reform. Arnauld was also constantly engaged in philosophical disputation, and was regarded as one of the sharpest and most philosophically acute thinkers of his time. His influence on several major philosophers of the period resulted mainly from his penetrating criticism of their systems. In 1641, Arnauld was asked to comment on Descartes’s Meditations. The objections he sent  regarding, among other topics, the representational nature of ideas, the circularity of Descartes’s proofs for the existence of God, and the apparent irreconcilability of Descartes’s conception of material substance with the Catholic doctrine of Eucharistic transubstantiation  were considered by Descartes to be the most intelligent and serious of all. Arnauld offered his objections in a constructive spirit, and soon became an enthusiastic defender of Descartes’s philosophy, regarding it as beneficial both to the advancement of human learning and to Christian piety. He insists, for example, that the immortality of the soul is well grounded in Cartesian mind body dualism. In 1662, Arnauld composed with Pierre Nicole the Port-Royal Logic, an influential treatise on language and reasoning. After several decades of theological polemic, during which he fled France to the Netherlands, Arnauld resumed his public philosophical activities with the publication in 1683 of On True and False Ideas and in 1685 of Philosophical and Theological Reflections on the New System of Nature and Grace. These two works, opening salvos in what would become a long debate, constitute a detailed attack on Malebranche’s theology and its philosophical foundations. In the first, mainly philosophical treatise, Arnauld insists that ideas, or the mental representations that mediate human knowledge, are nothing but acts of the mind that put us in direct cognitive and perceptual contact with things in the world. Malebranche, as Arnauld reads him, Armstrong, David M. Arnauld, Antoine 52   52 argues that ideas are immaterial but nonmental objects in God’s understanding that we know and perceive instead of physical things. Thus, the debate is often characterized as between Arnauld’s direct realism and Malebranche’s representative theory. Such mental acts also have representational content, or what Arnauld following Descartes calls “objective reality.” This content explains the act’s intentionality, or directedness toward an object. Arnauld would later argue with Pierre Bayle, who came to Malebranche’s defense, over whether all mental phenomena have intentionality, as Arnauld believes, or, as Bayle asserts, certain events in the soul e.g., pleasures and pains are non-intentional. This initial critique of Malebranche’s epistemology and philosophy of mind, however, was intended by Arnauld only as a prolegomenon to the more important attack on his theology; in particular, on Malebranche’s claim that God always acts by general volitions and never by particular volitions. This view, Arnauld argues, undermines the true Catholic system of divine providence and threatens the efficacy of God’s will by removing God from direct governance of the world. In 1686, Arnauld also entered into discussions with Leibniz regarding the latter’s Discourse on Metaphysics. In the ensuing correspondence, Arnauld focuses his critique on Leibniz’s concept of substance and on his causal theory, the preestablished harmony. In this exchange, like the one with Malebranche, Arnauld is concerned to preserve what he takes to be the proper way to conceive of God’s freedom and providence; although his remarks on substance in which he objects to Leibniz’s reintroduction of “substantial forms” is also clearly motivated by his commitment to a strict Cartesian ontology  bodies are nothing more than extension, devoid of any spiritual element. Most of his philosophical activity in the latter half of the century, in fact, is a vigorous defense of Cartesianism, particularly on theological grounds e.g., demonstrating the consistency between Cartesian metaphysics and the Catholic dogma of real presence in the Eucharist, as it became the object of condemnation in both Catholic and Protestant circles. 

Arrow’s paradox, also called Arrow’s impossibility theorem, a major result in social choice theory, named for its discoverer, economist Kenneth Arrow. It is intuitive to suppose that the preferences of individuals in a society can be expressed formally, and then aggregated into an expression of social preferences, a social choice function. Arrow’s paradox is that individual preferences having certain well-behaved formalizations demonstrably cannot be aggregated into a similarly well-behaved social choice function satisfying four plausible formal conditions: 1 collective rationality  any set of individual orderings and alternatives must yield a social ordering; 2 Pareto optimality  if all individuals prefer one ordering to another, the social ordering must also agree; 3 non-dictatorship  the social ordering must not be identical to a particular individual’s ordering; and 4 independence of irrelevant alternatives  the social ordering depends on no properties of the individual orderings other than the orders themselves, and for a given set of alternatives it depends only on the orderings of those particular alternatives. Most attempts to resolve the paradox have focused on aspects of 1 and 4. Some argue that preferences can be rational even if they are intransitive. Others argue that cardinal orderings, and hence, interpersonal comparisons of preference intensity, are relevant. 

artificial intelligence, also called AI, the scientific effort to design and build intelligent artifacts. Since the effort inevitably presupposes and tests theories about the nature of intelligence, it has implications for the philosophy of mind  perhaps even more than does empirical psychology. For one thing, actual construction amounts to a direct assault on the mindbody problem; should it succeed, some form of materialism would seem to be vindicated. For another, a working model, even a limited one, requires a more global conception of what intelligence is than do experiments to test specific hypotheses. In fact, psychology’s own overview of its domain Arouet, François-Marie artificial intelligence 53   53 has been much influenced by fundamental concepts drawn from AI. Although the idea of an intelligent artifact is old, serious scientific research dates only from the 1950s, and is associated with the development of programmable computers. Intelligence is understood as a structural property or capacity of an active system; i.e., it does not matter what the system is made of, as long as its parts and their interactions yield intelligent behavior overall. For instance, if solving logical problems, playing chess, or conversing in English manifests intelligence, then it is not important whether the “implementation” is electronic, biological, or mechanical, just as long as it solves, plays, or talks. Computers are relevant mainly because of their flexibility and economy: software systems are unmatched in achievable active complexity per invested effort. Despite the generality of programmable structures and the variety of historical approaches to the mind, the bulk of AI research divides into two broad camps  which we can think of as language-oriented and pattern-oriented, respectively. Conspicuous by their absence are significant influences from the conditionedresponse paradigm, the psychoanalytic tradition, the mental picture idea, empiricist atomistic associationism, and so on. Moreover, both AI camps tend to focus on cognitive issues, sometimes including perception and motor control. Notably omitted are such psychologically important topics as affect, personality, aesthetic and moral judgment, conceptual change, mental illness, etc. Perhaps such matters are beyond the purview of artificial intelligence; yet it is an unobvious substantive thesis that intellect can be cordoned off and realized independently of the rest of human life. The two main AI paradigms emerged together in the 1950s along with cybernetic and information-theoretic approaches, which turned out to be dead ends; and both are vigorous today. But for most of the sixties and seventies, the language-based orientation dominated attention and funding, for three signal reasons. First, computer data structures and processes themselves seemed languagelike: data were syntactically and semantically articulated, and processing was localized serial. Second, twentieth-century linguistics and logic made it intelligible that and how such systems might work: automatic symbol manipulation made clear, powerful sense. Finally, the sorts of performance most amenable to the approach  explicit reasoning and “figuring out”  strike both popular and educated opinion as particularly “intellectual”; hence, early successes were all the more impressive, while “trivial” stumbling blocks were easier to ignore. The basic idea of the linguistic or symbol manipulation camp is that thinking is like talking  inner discourse  and, hence, that thoughts are like sentences. The suggestion is venerable; and Hobbes even linked it explicitly to computation. Yet, it was a major scientific achievement to turn the general idea into a serious theory. The account does not apply only, or even especially, to the sort of thinking that is accessible to conscious reflection. Nor is the “language of thought” supposed to be much like English, predicate logic, LISP, or any other familiar notation; rather, its detailed character is an empirical research problem. And, despite fictional stereotypes, the aim is not to build superlogical or inhumanly rational automata. Our human tendencies to take things for granted, make intuitive leaps, and resist implausible conclusions are not weaknesses that AI strives to overcome but abilities integral to real intelligence that AI aspires to share. In what sense, then, is thought supposed to be languagelike? Three items are essential. First, thought tokens have a combinatorial syntactic structure; i.e., they are compounds of welldefined atomic constituents in well-defined recursively specifiable arrangements. So the constituents are analogous to words, and the arrangements are analogous to phrases and sentences; but there is no supposition that they should resemble any known words or grammar. Second, the contents of thought tokens, what they “mean,” are a systematic function of their composition: the constituents and forms of combination have determinate significances that together determine the content of any wellformed compound. So this is like the meaning of a sentence being determined by its grammar and the meanings of its words. Third, the intelligent progress or sequence of thought is specifiable by rules expressed syntactically  they can be carried out by processes sensitive only to syntactic properties. Here the analogy is to proof theory: the formal validity of an argument is a matter of its according with rules expressed formally. But this analogy is particularly treacherous, because it immediately suggests the rigor of logical inference; but, if intelligence is specifiable by formal rules, these must be far more permissive, context-sensitive, and so on, than those of formal logic. Syntax as such is perfectly neutral as to how the constituents are identified by sound, by artificial intelligence artificial intelligence 54   54 shape, by magnetic profile and arranged in time, in space, via address pointers. It is, in effect, a free parameter: whatever can serve as a bridge between the semantics and the processing. The account shares with many others the assumptions that thoughts are contentful meaningful and that the processes in which they occur can somehow be realized physically. It is distinguished by the two further theses that there must be some independent way of describing these thoughts that mediates between simultaneously determines their contents and how they are processed, and that, so described, they are combinatorially structured. Such a description is syntactical. We can distinguish two principal phases in language-oriented AI, each lasting about twenty years. Very roughly, the first phase emphasized processing search and reasoning, whereas the second has emphasized representation knowledge. To see how this went, it is important to appreciate the intellectual breakthrough required to conceive AI at all. A machine, such as a computer, is a deterministic system, except for random elements. That is fine for perfectly constrained domains, like numerical calculation, sorting, and parsing, or for domains that are constrained except for prescribed randomness, such as statistical modeling. But, in the general case, intelligent behavior is neither perfectly constrained nor perfectly constrained with a little random variation thrown in. Rather, it is generally focused and sensible, yet also fallible and somewhat variable. Consider, e.g., chess playing an early test bed for AI: listing all the legal moves for any given position is a perfectly constrained problem, and easy to program; but choosing the best move is not. Yet an intelligent player does not simply determine which moves would be legal and then choose one randomly; intelligence in chess play is to choose, if not always the best, at least usually a good move. This is something between perfect determinacy and randomness, a “between” that is not simply a mixture of the two. How is it achievable in a machine? The crucial innovation that first made AI concretely and realistically conceivable is that of a heuristic procedure. The term ‘heuristic’ derives from the Grecian word for discovery, as in Archimedes’ exclamation “Eureka!” The relevant point for AI is that discovery is a matter neither of following exact directions to a goal nor of dumb luck, but of looking around sensibly, being guided as much as possible by what you know in advance and what you find along the way. So a heuristic procedure is one for sensible discovery, a procedure for sensibly guided search. In chess, e.g., a player does well to bear in mind a number of rules of thumb: other things being equal, rooks are more valuable than knights, it is an asset to control the center of the board, and so on. Such guidelines, of course, are not valid in every situation; nor will they all be best satisfied by the same move. But, by following them while searching as far ahead through various scenarios as possible, a player can make generally sensible moves  much better than random  within the constraints of the game. This picture even accords fairly well with the introspective feel of choosing a move, particularly for less experienced players. The essential insight for AI is that such roughand-ready ceteris paribus rules can be deterministically programmed. It all depends on how you look at it. One and the same bit of computer program can be, from one point of view, a deterministic, infallible procedure for computing how a given move would change the relative balance of pieces, and from another, a generally sensible but fallible procedure for estimating how “good” that move would be. The substantive thesis about intelligence  human and artificial alike  then is that our powerful but fallible ability to form “intuitive” hunches, educated guesses, etc., is the result of largely unconscious search, guided by such heuristic rules. The second phase of language-inspired AI, dating roughly from the mid-1970s, builds on the idea of heuristic procedure, but dramatically changes the emphasis. The earlier work was framed by a conception of intelligence as finding solutions to problems good moves, e.g.. From such a perspective, the specification of the problem the rules of the game plus the current position and the provision of some heuristic guides domain-specific rules of thumb are merely a setting of the parameters; the real work, the real exercise of intelligence, lies in the intensive guided search undertaken in the specified terms. The later phase, impressed not so much by our problem-solving prowess as by how well we get along with “simple” common sense, has shifted the emphasis from search and reasoning to knowledge. The motivation for this shift can be seen in the following two sentences: We gave the monkey the banana because it was ripe. We gave the monkey the banana because it was hungry. artificial intelligence artificial intelligence 55   55 The word ‘it’ is ambiguous, as the terminal adjectives make clear. Yet listeners effortlessly understand what is meant, to the point, usually, of not even noticing the ambiguity. The question is, how? Of course, it is “just common sense” that monkeys don’t get ripe and bananas don’t get hungry, so . . . But three further observations show that this is not so much an answer as a restatement of the issue. First, sentences that rely on common sense to avoid misunderstanding are anything but rare: conversation is rife with them. Second, just about any odd fact that “everybody knows” can be the bit of common sense that understanding the next sentence depends on; and the range of such knowledge is vast. Yet, third, dialogue proceeds in real time without a hitch, almost always. So the whole range of commonsense knowledge must be somehow at our mental fingertips all the time. The underlying difficulty is not with speed or quantity alone, but with relevance. How does a system, given all that it knows about aardvarks, Alabama, and ax handles, “home in on” the pertinent fact that bananas don’t get hungry, in the fraction of a second it can afford to spend on the pronoun ‘it’? The answer proposed is both simple and powerful: common sense is not just randomly stored information, but is instead highly organized by topics, with lots of indexes, cross-references, tables, hierarchies, and so on. The words in the sentence itself trigger the “articles” on monkeys, bananas, hunger, and so on, and these quickly reveal that monkeys are mammals, hence animals, that bananas are fruit, hence from plants, that hunger is what animals feel when they need to eat  and that settles it. The amount of search and reasoning is minimal; the issue of relevance is solved instead by the antecedent structure in the stored knowledge itself. While this requires larger and more elaborate systems, the hope is that it will make them faster and more flexible. The other main orientation toward artificial intelligence, the pattern-based approach  often called “connectionism” or “parallel distributed processing”  reemerged from the shadow of symbol processing only in the 1980s, and remains in many ways less developed. The basic inspiration comes not from language or any other psychological phenomenon such as imagery or affect, but from the microstructure of the brain. The components of a connectionist system are relatively simple active nodes  lots of them  and relatively simple connections between those nodes  again, lots of them. One important type and the easiest to visualize has the nodes divided into layers, such that each node in layer A is connected to each node in layer B, each node in layer B is connected to each node in layer C, and so on. Each node has an activation level, which varies in response to the activations of other, connected nodes; and each connection has a weight, which determines how strongly and in what direction the activation of one node affects that of the other. The analogy with neurons and synapses, though imprecise, is intended. So imagine a layered network with finely tuned connection weights and random or zero activation levels. Now suppose the activations of all the nodes in layer A are set in some particular way  some pattern is imposed on the activation state of this layer. These activations will propagate out along all the connections from layer A to layer B, and activate some pattern there. The activation of each node in layer B is a function of the activations of all the nodes in layer A, and of the weights of all the connections to it from those nodes. But since each node in layer B has its own connections from the nodes in layer A, it will respond in its own unique way to this pattern of activations in layer A. Thus, the pattern that results in layer B is a joint function of the pattern that was imposed on layer A and of the pattern of connection weights between the two layers. And a similar story can be told about layer B’s influence on layer C, and so on, until some final pattern is induced in the last layer. What are these patterns? They might be any number of things; but two general possibilities can be distinguished. They might be tantamount to or substrata beneath representations of some familiar sort, such as sentencelike structures or images; or they might be a kind or kinds of representation previously unknown. Now, people certainly do sometimes think in sentences and probably images; so, to the extent that networks are taken as complete brain models, the first alternative must be at least partly right. But, to that extent, the models are also more physiological than psychological: it is rather the implemented sentences or images that directly model the mind. Thus, it is the possibility of a new genus of representation  sometimes called distributed representation  that is particularly exciting. On this alternative, the patterns in the mind represent in some way other than by mimetic imagery or articulate description. How? An important feature of all network models is that there are two quite different categories of pattern. On the one hand, there are the relatively ephemeral patterns of activation in various artificial intelligence artificial intelligence 56   56 groups of nodes; on the other, there are the relatively stable patterns of connection strength among the nodes. Since there are in general many more connections than nodes, the latter patterns are richer; and it is they that determine the capabilities of the network with regard to the former patterns. Many of the abilities most easily and “naturally” realized in networks can be subsumed under the heading pattern completion: the connection weights are adjusted  perhaps via a training regime  such that the network will complete any of the activation patterns from a predetermined group. So, suppose some fraction say half of the nodes in the net are clamped to the values they would have for one of those patterns say P while the remainder are given random or default activations. Then the network, when run, will reset the latter activations to the values belonging to P  thus “completing” it. If the unclamped activations are regarded as variations or deviations, pattern completion amounts to normalization, or grouping by similarity. If the initial or input nodes are always the same as in layered networks, then we have pattern association or transformation from input to output. If the input pattern is a memory probe, pattern completion becomes access by content. If the output pattern is an identifier, then it is pattern recognition. And so on. Note that, although the operands are activation patterns, the “knowledge” about them, the ability to complete them, is contained in the connection patterns; hence, that ability or know-how is what the network represents. There is no obvious upper bound on the possible refinement or intricacy of these pattern groupings and associations. If the input patterns are sensory stimuli and the output patterns are motor control, then we have a potential model of coordinated and even skillful behavior. In a system also capable of language, a network model or component might account for verbal recognition and content association, and even such “nonliteral” effects as trope and tone. Yet at least some sort of “symbol manipulation” seems essential for language use, regardless of how networklike the implementation is. One current speculation is that it might suffice to approximate a battery of symbolic processes as a special subsystem within a cognitive system that fundamentally works on quite different principles. The attraction of the pattern-based approach is, at this point, not so much actual achievement as it is promise  on two grounds. In the first place, the space of possible models, not only network topologies but also ways of construing the patterns, is vast. Those built and tested so far have been, for practical reasons, rather small; so it is possible to hope beyond their present limitations to systems of significantly greater capability. But second, and perhaps even more attractive, those directions in which patternbased systems show the most promise  skills, recognition, similarity, and the like  are among the areas of greatest frustration for languagebased AI. Hence it remains possible, for a while at least, to overlook the fact that, to date, no connectionist network can perform long division, let alone play chess or solve symbolic logic problems. 

artificial life, an interdisciplinary science studying the most general character of the fundamental processes of life. These processes include self-organization, self-reproduction, learning, adaptation, and evolution. Artificial life or ALife is to theoretical biology roughly what artificial intelligence AI is to theoretical psychology  computer simulation is the methodology of choice. In fact, since the mind exhibits many of life’s fundamental properties, AI could be considered a subfield of ALife. However, whereas most traditional AI models are serial systems with complicated, centralized controllers making decisions based on global state information, most natural systems exhibiting complex autonomous behavior are parallel, distributed networks of simple entities making decisions based solely on their local state information, so typical ALife models have a corresponding distributed architecture. A computer simulation of evolving “bugs” can illustrate what ALife models are like. Moving around in a two-dimensional world periodically laden with heaps of “food,” these bugs eat, reproduce, and sometimes perish from starvation. Each bug’s movement is genetically determined by the quantities of food in its immediate neighborhood, and random mutations and crossovers modify these genomes during reproduction. Simulations started with random genes show spontaneous waves of highly adaptive genetic novelties continuously sweeping through the population at precisely quantifiable rates.C. Langston et al., eds., Artificial Life II 1991. artificial language artificial life 57   57 ALife science raises and promises to inform many philosophical issues, such as: Is functionalism the right approach toward life? When, if ever, is a simulation of life really alive? When do systems exhibit the spontaneous emergence of properties? 

ascriptivism, the theory that to call an action voluntary is not to describe it as caused in a certain way by the agent who did it, but to express a commitment to hold the agent responsible for the action. Ascriptivism is thus a kind of noncognitivism as applied to judgments about the voluntariness of acts. Introduced by Hart in “Ascription of Rights and Responsibilities,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 1949, ascriptivism was given its name and attacked in Geach’s “Ascriptivism,” Philosophical Review 1960. Hart recanted in the Preface to his Punishment and Responsibility 1968. 

associationism, the psychological doctrine that association is the sole or primary basis of learning as well as of intelligent thought and behavior. Association occurs when one type of thought, idea, or behavior follows, or is contingent upon, another thought, idea, or behavior or external event, and the second somehow bonds with the first. If the idea of eggs is paired with the idea of ham, then the two ideas may become associated. Associationists argue that complex states of mind and mental processes can be analyzed into associated elements. The complex may be novel, but the elements are products of past associations. Associationism often is combined with hedonism. Hedonism explains why events associate or bond: bonds are forged by pleasant experiences. If the pleasantness of eating eggs is combined with the pleasantness of eating ham, then ideas of ham and eggs associate. Bonding may also be explained by various non-hedonistic principles of association, as in Hume’s theory of the association of ideas. One of these principles is contiguity in place or time. Associationism contributes to the componential analysis of intelligent, rational activity into non-intelligent, non-rational, mechanical processes. People believe as they do, not because of rational connections among beliefs, but because beliefs associatively bond. Thus one may think of London when thinking of England, not because one possesses an inner logic of geographic beliefs from which one infers that London is in England. The two thoughts may co-occur because of contiguity or other principles. Kinds of associationism occur in behaviorist models of classical and operant conditioning. Certain associationist ideas, if not associationism itself, appear in connectionist models of cognition, especially the principle that contiguities breed bonding. Several philosophers and psychologists, including Hume, Hartley, and J. S. Mill among philosophers and E. L. Thorndike 18741949 and B. F. Skinner 190490 among psychologists, are associationists. 

Astell, Mary, an early English feminist and author of A Serious Proposal to the Ladies 1694 and 1697 and Some Reflections on Marriage 1700. These works argue that women’s shortcomings are not due to a lack of intellectual ability, since women have rational souls, and present an educational program to fit them rationally for their religious duties. Astell entered as well into the philosophical, theological, and political controversies of her day. Her Letters Concerning the Love of God 1695 is a correspondence with the ascriptivism Astell, Mary 58   58 English Malebranchian, John Norris, over such issues as Norris’s contention that our duty is to God only. Her most substantial work, The Christian Religion, as Professed by a Daughter of the Church of England 1705, lays out her views on the grounds and implications of natural and revealed religion. This work includes considerable critical attention to John Locke’s ideas, and both this and the Letters called forth refutations from Locke’s friend, Damaris Cudworth. 

Athanasius c.297373, early Christian father, bishop in Alexandria though frequently exiled, and a leading protagonist in the fourth-century disputes concerning Christ’s relationship to God. Through major works like On the Incarnation, Against the Arians, and Letters on the Holy Spirit, Athanasius contributed greatly to the classical doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity. Opposing all forms of Arianism, which denied Christ’s divinity and reduced him to a creature, Athanasius taught, in the language of the Nicene Creed, that Christ the Son, and likewise the Holy Spirit, were of the same being as God the Father homoousios. Thus with terminology and concepts drawn from Grecian philosophy, he helped to forge the distinctly Christian and un-Hellenistic doctrine of the eternal triune God, who became enfleshed in time and matter and restored humanity to immortality, forfeited through sin, by involvement in its condition of corruption and decay. 

atheism from Grecian a-, ‘not’, and theos, ‘god’, the view that there are no gods. A widely used sense denotes merely not believing in God and is consistent with agnosticism. A stricter sense denotes a belief that there is no God; this use has become the standard one. In the Apology Socrates is accused of atheism for not believing in the official Athenian gods. Some distinguish between theoretical atheism and practical atheism. A theoretical atheist is one who self-consciously denies the existence of a supreme being, whereas a practical atheist may believe that a supreme being exists but lives as though there were no god.

Atman, in Hindu thought, the individual, viewed by Advaita Vedanta as numerically identical to, and by other varieties of Vedanta as dependent on and capable of worship of, Brahman. Sometimes in Hinduism conceived as inherently conscious and possessed of intrinsic mental qualities, and sometimes viewed as having mental qualities only in the sense that the composite of Atman-embodied-in-a-physical-body has this feature, Atman beginninglessly transmigrates from life to life or, for Advaita, appears to do so. It is embodied in successive bodies, accumulating karma and possibly achieving enlightenment with its consequent release from samsara, the transmigratory wheel.

attribution theory, a theory in social psychology concerned with how and why ordinary people explain events. People explain by attributing causal powers to certain events rather than others. The theory attempts to describe and clarify everyday commonsense explanation, to identify criteria of explanatory success presupposed by common sense, and to compare and contrast commonsense explanation with scientific explanation. The heart of attribution theory is the thesis that people tend to attribute causal power to factors personally important to them, which they believe covary with alleged effects. For example, a woman may designate sexual discrimination as the cause of her not being promoted in a corporation. Being female is important to her and she believes that promotion and failure covary with gender. Males get promoted; females don’t. Causal attributions tend to preserve self-esteem, reduce cognitive dissonance, and diminish the attributor’s personal responsibility for misdeeds. When attributional styles or habits contribute to emotional ill-being, e.g. to chronic, inappropriate feelings of depression or guilt, attribution theory offers the following therapeutic recommendation: change attributions so as to reduce emotional ill-being and increase well-being. Hence if the woman blames herself for the failure, and if self-blame is part of her depressive attributional style, she would be encouraged to look outside herself, perhaps to sexual discrimination, for the explanation.

Augustine, Saint, known as Augustine of Hippo 354430, Christian philosopher and church father, one of the chief sources of Christian thought in the West; his importance for medieval and modern European philosophy is impossible to describe briefly or ever to circumscribe. Matters are made more difficult because Augustine wrote voluminously and dialectically as a Christian theologian, treating philosophical topics for the most part only as they were helpful to theology  or as corrected by it. Augustine fashioned the narrative of the Confessions 397400 out of the events of the first half of his life. He thus supplied later biographers with both a seductive selection of biographical detail and a compelling story of his successive conversions from adolescent sensuality, to the image-laden religion of the Manichaeans, to a version of Neoplatonism, and then to Christianity. The story is an unexcelled introduction to Augustine’s views of philosophy. It shows, for instance, that Augustine received very little formal education in philosophy. He was trained as a rhetorician, and the only philosophical work that he mentions among his early reading is Cicero’s lost Hortensius, an exercise in persuasion to the study of philosophy. Again, the narrative makes plain that Augustine finally rejected Manichaeanism because he came to see it as bad philosophy: a set of sophistical fantasies without rational coherence or explanatory force. More importantly, Augustine’s final conversion to Christianity was prepared by his reading in “certain books of the Platonists” Confessions 7.9.13. These Latin translations, which seem to have been anthologies or manuals of philosophic teaching, taught Augustine a form of Neoplatonism that enabled him to conceive of a cosmic hierarchy descending from an immaterial, eternal, and intelligible God. On Augustine’s judgment, philosophy could do no more than that; it could not give him the power to order his own life so as to live happily and in a stable relation with the now-discovered God. Yet in his first years as a Christian, Augustine took time to write a number of works in philosophical genres. Best known among them are a refutation of Academic Skepticism Contra academicos, 386, a theodicy De ordine, 386, and a dialogue on the place of human choice within the providentially ordered hierarchy created by God De libero arbitrio, 388/39195. Within the decade of his conversion, Augustine was drafted into the priesthood 391 and then consecrated bishop 395. The thirty-five years of his life after that consecration were consumed by labors on behalf of the church in northern Africa and through the Latin-speaking portions of the increasingly fragmented empire. Most of Augustine’s episcopal writing was polemical both in origin and in form; he composed against authors or movements he judged heretical, especially the Donatists and Pelagians. But Augustine’s sense of his authorship also led him to write works of fundamental theology conceived on a grand scale. The most famous of these works, beyond the Confessions, are On the Trinity 399412, 420, On Genesis according to the Letter 40115, and On the City of God 41326. On the Trinity elaborates in subtle detail the distinguishable “traces” of Father, Son, and Spirit in the created world and particularly in the human soul’s triad of memory, intellect, and will. The commentary on Genesis 13, which is meant to be much more than a “literal” commentary in the modern sense, treats many topics in philosophical psychology and anthropology. It also teaches such cosmological doctrines as the “seed-reasons” rationes seminales by which creatures are given intelligible form. The City of God begins with a critique of the bankruptcy of pagan civic religion and its attendant philosophies, but it ends with the depiction of human history as a combat between forces of self-love, conceived as a diabolic city of earth, and the graced love of God, which founds that heavenly city within which alone peace is possible. attributive pluralism Augustine 60   60 A number of other, discrete doctrines have been attached to Augustine, usually without the dialectical nuances he would have considered indispensable. One such doctrine concerns divine “illumination” of the human intellect, i.e., some active intervention by God in ordinary processes of human understanding. Another doctrine typically attributed to Augustine is the inability of the human will to do morally good actions without grace. A more authentically Augustinian teaching is that introspection or inwardness is the way of discovering the created hierarchies by which to ascend to God. Another authentic teaching would be that time, which is a distension of the divine “now,” serves as the medium or narrative structure for the creation’s return to God. But no list of doctrines or positions, however authentic or inauthentic, can serve as a faithful representation of Augustine’s thought, which gives itself only through the carefully wrought rhetorical forms of his texts. 

Austin, John: English legal philosopher known especially for his command theory of law. His career as a lawyer was unsuccessful but his reputation as a scholar was such that on the founding of  , London, he was offered the chair of jurisprudence. In 1832 he published the first ten of his lectures, compressed into six as The Province of Jurisprudence Determined. Although he published a few papers, and his somewhat fragmentary Lectures on Jurisprudence 1863 was published posthumously, it is on the Province that his reputation rests. He and Bentham his friend, London neighbor, and fellow utilitarian were the foremost English legal philosophers of their time, and their influence on the course of legal philosophy endures. Austin held that the first task of legal philosophy, one to which he bends most of his energy, is to make clear what laws are, and if possible to explain why they are what they are: their rationale. Until those matters are clear, legislative proposals and legal arguments can never be clear, since irrelevant considerations will inevitably creep in. The proper place for moral or theological considerations is in discussion of what the positive law ought to be, not of what it is. Theological considerations reduce to moral ones, since God can be assumed to be a good utilitarian. It is positive laws, “that is to say the laws which are simply and strictly so called, . . . which form the appropriate matter of general and particular jurisprudence.” They must also be distinguished from “laws metaphorical or figurative.” A law in its most general senseis “a rule laid down for the guidance of an intelligent being by an intelligent being having power over him.” It is a command, however phrased. It is the commands of men to men, of political superiors, that form the body of positive law. General or comparative jurisprudence, the source of the rationale, if any, of particular laws, is possible because there are commands nearly universal that may be attributed to God or Nature, but they become positive law only when laid down by a ruler. The general model of an Austinian analytic jurisprudence built upon a framework of definitions has been widely followed, but cogent objections, especially by Hart, have undermined the command theory of law. 

Austin: j. l. H. P. Grice, “The Austinian Code.” English philosopher, a leading exponent of postwar “linguistic” philosophy. Educated primarily as a classicist at Shrewsbury and Balliol , Oxford, he taught philosophy at Magdalen . During World War II he served at a high level in military intelligence, which earned him the O.B.E., Croix de Guerre, and Legion of Merit. In 1952 he became White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford, and in 1955 and 1958 he held visiting appointments at Harvard and Berkeley, respectively. In his relatively brief career, Austin published only a few invited papers; his influence was exerted mainly through discussion with his colleagues, whom he dominated more by critical intelligence than by any preconceived view of what philosophy should be. Unlike some others, Austin did not believe that philosophical problems all arise out of aberrations from “ordinary language,” nor did he necessarily find solutions there; he dwelt, rather, on the authority of the vernacular as a source of nice and pregnant distinctions, and held that it deserves much closer attention than it commonly receives from philosophers. It is useless, he thought, to pontificate at large about knowledge, reality, or existence, for example, without first examining in detail how, and when, the words ‘know’, ‘real’, and ‘exist’ are employed in daily life. In Sense and Sensibilia 1962; compiled from lecture notes, the sense-datum theory comes under withering fire for its failings in this respect. Austin also provoked controversy with his well-known distinction between “performative” and “constative” utterances ‘I promise’ makes a promise, whereas ‘he promised’ merely reports one; he later recast this as a threefold differentiation of locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary “forces” in utterance, corresponding roughly to the meaning, intention, and consequences of saying a thing, in one context or another. Though never very stable or fully worked out, these ideas have since found a place in the still-evolving study of speech acts. 

autarkia, ancient Grecian term meaning ‘self-sufficiency’. Autarkia was widely regarded as a mark of the human good, happiness eudaimonia. A life is self-sufficient when it is worthy of choice and lacks nothing. What makes a life self-sufficient  and thereby happy  was a matter of controversy. Stoics maintained that the mere possession of virtue would suffice; Aristotle and the Peripatetics insisted that virtue must be exercised and even, perhaps, accompanied by material goods. There was also a debate among later Grecian thinkers over whether a self-sufficient life is solitary or whether only life in a community can be self-sufficient. 

avatar from Sanskrit avatara, in Hindu thought, any of the repeated “descents” of the Supreme Being into the physical world as an animal, human being, or combination thereof, to destroy evil and restore order. Predominately identified as the actions of the god Vishnu, these entrances into the world indicate that Vishnu as lord will adjust the cycle of karma. Its earliest reference is in the Bhagavad Gita 150 B.C., where Krishna says that whenever dharma languishes he incarnates in age after age to destroy evildoers and promote the good. Later lists of avatars of Vishnu cite ten, twenty, or more, with Krishna and the Buddha as famous examples. The inclusion of prominent local deities in the list brought them under the influence of Vishnu devotees, and today even Jesus and Muhammad may be included. Modern philosophers such as Radhakrishnan 18881975 redefine the concept non-theistically, identifying an avatar as a human being who has attained enlightenment.

Avenarius, Richard 184396, German philosopher. He was born in Paris and educated at the  of Leipzig. He became a professor at Leipzig and succeeded Windelband at the  of Zürich in 1877. For a time he was editor of the Zeitschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie. His earliest work was Über die beiden ersten Phasen des Spinozischen Pantheismus 1868. His major work, Kritik der reinen Erfahrung Critique of Pure Experience, 2 vols., 188890, was followed by his last study, Der menschliche Weltbegriffe 1891. In his post-Kantian Kritik Avenarius presented a radical positivism that sought to base philosophy on scientific principles. This “empirio-criticism” emphasized “pure experience” and descriptive and general definitions of experience. Metaphysical claims to transcend experience were rejected as mere creations of the mind. Like Hume, Avenarius denied the ontological validity of substance and causality. Seeking a scientific empiricism, he endeavored to delineate a descriptive determination of the form and content of pure experience. He thought that the subAustralian materialism Avenarius, Richard 62   62 jectobject dichotomy, the separation of inner and outer experiences, falsified reality. If we could avoid “introjecting” feeling, thought, and will into experience and thereby splitting it into subject and object, we could attain the original “natural” view of the world. Although Avenarius, in his Critique of Pure Experience, thought that changes in brain states parallel states of consciousness, he did not reduce sensations or states of consciousness to physiological changes in the brain. Because his theory of pure experience undermined dogmatic materialism, Lenin attacked his philosophy in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism 1952. His epistemology influenced Mach and his emphasis upon pure experience had considerable influence on James.

Averroes, in Arabic, Ibn Rushd 112698, Islamic philosopher, jurist, and physician. Scion of a long line of qadis religious judges, he was born at Córdova and educated in Islamic law. Introduced to the Almohad ruler by Ibn Tufayl, author of the philosophical allegory Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, he feigned ignorance of philosophy, only to learn that the leader of the dynasty so feared for its orthodoxy was thoroughly at home with philosophical issues. He was given a robe of honor and a mount and later invited to write his famous commentaries on Aristotle and made qadi of Seville, finally succeeding Ibn Tufayl as royal physician and becoming chief qadi of Córdova. He was persecuted when the sultan’s successor needed orthodox support in his war with Christian Spain, but died in the calm of Marrakesh, the edicts against him rescinded. His works, most often preserved in Hebrew or Latin translations ‘Averroes’ reflects efforts to Latinize ‘Ibn Rushd’, include medical and astronomical writings; short, middle, and long commentaries on Aristotle “his was the ultimate human mind”; a commentary on Plato’s Republic; and spirited juridical and conceptual defenses of philosophy: The Decisive Treatise and Incoherence of the Incoherence. The former argues that philosophy, although restricted to the adept, is mandated by the Koranic 59:2 injunction to reflect on God’s design. The latter answers alGhazali’s Incoherence of the Philosophers, defending naturalism and its presumed corollary, the world’s eternity, but often cutting adrift the more Platonizing and original doctrines of Avicenna, al-Ghazali’s chief stalking horse. Thus Averroes rejects Avicenna’s idea that the world itself is contingent if it is necessitated by its causes, arguing that removing the necessity that is the hallmark of God’s wisdom would leave us no way of inferring a wise Author of nature. Ultimately Averroes rejects emanation and seeks to return natural theology to the physics of matter and motion, discrediting Avicenna’s metaphysical approach and locating God’s act in the ordering of eternal matter. On bodily resurrection, individual providence, and miracles, he takes refuge in authority, fudge, and bluff; and even his defense of causal necessity smacks of a dogmatism expressive of the awkwardness of his position and the stiffening of Peripatetic thought. Yet he retains the idea that the intellect is immortal, indeed impersonal: since only matter differentiates individuals, all minds are ultimately one; they reach fulfillment and beatitude by making contact ittifal; cf. Plotinus’s aphe with the Active Intellect. Many Jewish philosophers like Narboni and Albalag followed Averroes’ arguments explicitly, reinterpreting Maimonides accordingly. But Averroes’ efforts to accommodate rhetorical and dialectical along with philosophical discourse led to the branding of his Christian followers as exponents of a “double truth,” although no text advances such a doctrine. Siger of Brabant, Boethius of Dacia, and Bernier of Nivelles were condemned for Averroistic heresies at Paris in the 1270s. But from the thirteenth to mid-seventeenth centuries Latin scholars regularly read Aristotle with Averroes’ commentaries. His philosophic respondents include Ibn Taymiyya d.1327, Gersonides, Albertus Magnus, and Aquinas. Spinoza’s dogged eternalism links him vividly to Averroes. 

Avicenna, in Arabic, Ibn Sina 9801037, Islamic philosopher and physician. Born near Bukhara, where his father served as a provincial governor, Avicenna came to manhood as the Persian Samanid dynasty was crumbling and spent much of his life fleeing from court to court to avoid the clutches of the rapacious conqueror Mamhmad of Ghazna. His autobiography describes him as an intuitive student of philosophy and other Grecian sciences who could not see the point of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, until he read a tiny essay by al-Farabi870950, who showed him what it means to seek the nature of being as such. It was in metaphysics that Avicenna made his greatest contributions to philosophy, brilliantly synthesizing the rival approaches of the Aristotelian-Neoplatonic tradition with the creationist monotheism of Islamic dialectical theology kalam. Where Aristotle sought and found being in its fullest sense in what was changeless in its nature above all, in the species of things, the heavenly bodies, the cosmos as a whole, kalam understood being as the immediately given, allowing no inference beyond a single contingent datum to any necessary properties, correlatives, continuators, or successors. The result was a stringent atomist occasionalism resting ultimately on an early version of logical atomism. Avicenna preserved an Aristotelian naturalism alongside the Scriptural idea of the contingency of the world by arguing that any finite being is contingent in itself but necessary in relation to its causes. He adapted al-Farabi’s Neoplatonic emanationism to this schematization and naturalized in philosophy his own distinctive version of the kalam argument from contingency: any being must be either necessary or contingent, but if contingent, it requires a cause; since no infinite causal regress is possible, there must be a Necessary Being, which is therefore simple, the ultimate cause of all other things. Avicenna found refuge at the court of one ‘Ala al-Dawla, who bravely resisted the military pressures of Mahmud against his lands around Isfahan and made the philosopher and savant his vizier. Here Avicenna completed his famous philosophic work the Shifa’ known in Latin as the Sufficientia and his Qanun fi Tibb, the Galenic Canon, which remained in use as a medical textbook until finally brought down by the weight of criticisms during the Renaissance. Avicenna’s philosophy was the central target of the polemical critique of the Muslim theologian al-Ghazali 10581111 in his Incoherence of the Philosophers, mainly on the grounds that the philosopher’s retention of the Aristotelian doctrine of the eternity of the world was inconsistent with his claim that God was the author of the world. Avicenna’s related affirmations of the necessity of causation and universality of God’s knowledge, al-Ghazali argued, made miracles impossible and divine governance too impersonal to deserve the name. Yet Avicenna’s philosophic works numbering over a hundred in their Arabic and sometimes Persian originals continued to exercise a major influence on Muslim and Jewish philosophers and through Latin translations on philosophers in the West. 

avidya, Sanskrit word meaning ‘ignorance’, ‘lack of wisdom’. Avidya is a key concept in India’s philosophical systems, which attempted to explain the reasons for karmic bondage leading to suffering and release from such bondage through spiritual liberation. The general idea was that karmic fetters arise because of avidya, which is ignorance of the true nature of reality. When wisdom dispells avidya, the individual is freed from bondage. There was intense speculation in Indian philosophy regarding the nature and the metaphysical status of avidya. If avidya causes bondage that traps the individual in the transmigratory cycle of life and death samsara, then where does avidya reside and how does it come into being? D.K.C. awareness, consciousness, a central feature of our lives that is notoriously difficult to characterize. You experience goings-on in the world, and, turning inward “introspecting”, you experience your experiencing. Objects of awareness can be external or internal. Pressing your finger on the edge of a table, you can be aware of the table’s edge, and aware of the feeling of pressure though perhaps not simultaneously. Philosophers from Locke to Nagel have insisted that our experiences have distinctive qualities: there is “something it is like” to have them. It would seem important, then, to distinguish qualities of objects of which you are aware from qualities of your awareness. Suppose you are aware of a round, red tomato. The tomato, but not your awareness, is round and red. What then are the qualities of your awareness? Here we encounter a deep puzzle that divides theorists into intransigent camps. Some materialists, like Dennett, insist that awareness lacks qualities or lacks qualities distinct from its objects: the qualities we attribute to experiences are really those of experienced objects. This opens the way to a dismissal of “phenomenal” qualities qualia, qualities that seem to have no place in the material world. Others T. Nagel, Ned Block regard such qualities as patently genuine, preferring to dismiss any theory unable to accommodate them. Convinced that the qualities of awareness are ineliminable and irreducible to respectable material properties, some philosophers, following Frank Jackson, contend they are “epiphenomenal”: real but causally inefficacious. Still others, including Searle, point to what they regard as a fundamental distinction between the “intrinsically subjecavidya awareness 64   64 tive” character of awareness and the “objective,” “public” character of material objects, but deny that this yields epiphenomenalism. 

axiomatic method, originally, a method for reorganizing the accepted propositions and concepts of an existent science in order to increase certainty in the propositions and clarity in the concepts. Application of this method was thought to require the identification of 1 the “universe of discourse” domain, genus of entities constituting the primary subject matter of the science, 2 the “primitive concepts” that can be grasped immediately without the use of definition, 3 the “primitive propositions” or “axioms”, whose truth is knowable immediately, without the use of deduction, 4 an immediately acceptable “primitive definition” in terms of primitive concepts for each non-primitive concept, and 5 a deduction constructed by chaining immediate, logically cogent inferences ultimately from primitive propositions and definitions for each nonprimitive accepted proposition. Prominent proponents of more or less modernized versions of the axiomatic method, e.g. Pascal, Nicod 18931924, and Tarski, emphasizing the critical and regulatory function of the axiomatic method, explicitly open the possibility that axiomatization of an existent, preaxiomatic science may lead to rejection or modification of propositions, concepts, and argumentations that had previously been accepted. In many cases attempts to realize the ideal of an axiomatic science have resulted in discovery of “smuggled premises” and other previously unnoted presuppositions, leading in turn to recognition of the need for new axioms. Modern axiomatizations of geometry are much richer in detail than those produced in ancient Greece. The earliest extant axiomatic text is based on an axiomatization of geometry due to Euclid fl. 300 B.C., which itself was based on earlier, nolonger-extant texts. Archimedes 287212 B.C. was one of the earliest of a succession of postEuclidean geometers, including Hilbert, Oswald Veblen 18801960, and Tarski, to propose modifications of axiomatizations of classical geometry. The traditional axiomatic method, often called the geometric method, made several presuppositions no longer widely accepted. The advent of non-Euclidean geometry was particularly important in this connection. For some workers, the goal of reorganizing an existent science was joined to or replaced by a new goal: characterizing or giving implicit definition to the structure of the subject matter of the science. Moreover, subsequent innovations in logic and foundations of mathematics, especially development of syntactically precise formalized languages and effective systems of formal deductions, have substantially increased the degree of rigor attainable. In particular, critical axiomatic exposition of a body of scientific knowledge is now not thought to be fully adequate, however successful it may be in realizing the goals of the original axiomatic method, so long as it does not present the underlying logic including language, semantics, and deduction system. For these and other reasons the expression ‘axiomatic method’ has undergone many “redefinitions,” some of which have only the most tenuous connection with the original meaning. 

axiom of comprehension, also called axiom of abstraction, the axiom that for every property, there is a corresponding set of things having that property; i.e., f DA x x 1 A È f x, where f is a property and A is a set. The axiom was used in Frege’s formulation of set theory and is the axiom that yields Russell’s paradox, discovered in 1901. If fx is instantiated as x 2 x, then the result that A 1 A È A 2 A is easily obtained, which yields, in classical logic, the explicit contradiction A 1 A & A 2 A. The paradox can be avoided by modifying the comprehension axiom and using instead the separation axiom, f DA x x 1 A Èfx & x 1 B. This yields only the result that A 1 A ÈA 2 A & A 1 B, which is not a contradiction. The paradox can also be avoided by retaining the comprehension axiom but restricting the symbolic language, so that ‘x 1 x’ is not a meaningful formula. Russell’s type theory, presented in Principia Mathematica, uses this approach.  FREGE, RUSSELL, SET THEORY, TYPE THEORY. V.K. axiology axiom of comprehension 65   65 axiom of consistency, an axiom stating that a given set of sentences is consistent. Let L be a formal language, D a deductive system for L, S any set of sentences of L, and C the statement ‘S is consistent’ i.e., ‘No contradiction is derivable from S via D’. For certain sets S e.g., the theorems of D it is interesting to ask: Can C be expressed in L? If so, can C be proved in D? If C can be expressed in L but not proved in D, can C be added consistently to D as a new axiom? Example from Gödel: Let L and D be adequate for elementary number theory, and S be the axioms of D; then C can be expressed in L but not proved in D, but can be added as a new axiom to form a stronger system D’. Sometimes we can express in L an axiom of consistency in the semantic sense i.e., ‘There is a universe in which all the sentences in S are true’. Trivial example: suppose the only non-logical axiom in D is ‘For any two sets B and B’, there exists the union of B and B’ ’. Then C might be ‘There is a set U such that, for any sets B and B’ in U, there exists in U the union of B and B’ ’. 

ayer: a. j. , philosopher of Swiss ancestry, one of the most important of the Oxford logical positivists. He continued to occupy a dominant place in analytic philosophy as he gradually modified his adherence to central tenets of the view. He was educated at Eton and Oxford, and, after a brief period at the  of Vienna, became a lecturer in philosophy at Christ Church in 1933. After the war he returned to Oxford as fellow and dean of Wadham . He was Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at the  of London 194659, Wykeham Professor of Logic in the  of Oxford and a fellow of New  195978, and a fellow of Wolfson , Oxford 197883. Ayer was knighted in 1973 and was a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur. His early work clearly and forcefully developed the implications of the positivists’ doctrines that all cognitive statements are either analytic and a priori, or synthetic, contingent, and a posteriori, and that empirically meaningful statements must be verifiable must admit of confirmation or disconfirmation. In doing so he defended reductionist analyses of the self, the external world, and other minds. Value statements that fail the empiricist’s criterion of meaning but defy naturalistic analysis were denied truth-value and assigned emotive meaning. Throughout his writings he maintained a foundationalist perspective in epistemology in which sense-data later more neutrally described occupied not only a privileged epistemic position but constituted the subject matter of the most basic statements to be used in reductive analyses. Although in later works he significantly modified many of his early views and abandoned much of their strict reductionism, he remained faithful to an empiricist’s version of foundationalism and the basic idea behind the verifiability criterion of meaning. His books include Language, Truth and Logic; The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge; The Problems of Knowledge; Philosophical Essays; The Concept of a Person; The Origins of Pragmatism; Metaphysics and Common Sense; Russell and Moore: The Analytical Heritage; The Central Questions of Philosophy; Probability and Evidence; Philosophy in the Twentieth Century; Russell; Hume; Freedom and Morality, Ludwig Wittgenstein; and Voltaire. 

Babbage, Charles 17921871, English applied mathematician, inventor, and expert on machinery and manufacturing. His chief interest was in developing mechanical “engines” to compute tables of functions. Until the invention of the electronic computer, printed tables of functions were important aids to calculation. Babbage invented the difference engine, a machine that consisted of a series of accumulators each of which, in turn, transmitted its contents to its successor, which added to them to its own contents. He built only a model, but George and Edvard Scheutz built difference engines that were actually used. Though tables of squares and cubes could be calculated by a difference engine, the more commonly used tables of logarithms and of trigonometric functions could not. To calculate these and other useful functions, Babbage conceived of the analytical engine, a machine for numerical analysis. The analytical engine was to have a store memory and a mill arithmetic unit. The store was to hold decimal numbers on toothed wheels, and to transmit them to the mill and back by means of wheels and toothed bars. The mill was to carry out the arithmetic operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division mechanically, greatly extending the technology of small calculators. The operations of the mill were to be governed by pegged drums, derived from the music box. A desired sequence of operations would be punched on cards, which would be strung together like the cards of a Jacquard loom and read by the machine. The control mechanisms could branch and execute a different sequence of cards when a designated quantity changed sign. Numbers would be entered from punched cards and the answers punched on cards. The answers might also be imprinted on metal sheets from which the calculated tables would be printed, thus avoiding the errors of proofreading. Although Babbage formulated various partial plans for the analytical engine and built a few pieces of it, the machine was never realized. Given the limitations of mechanical computing technology, building an analytical engine would probably not have been an economical way to produce numerical tables. The modern electronic computer was invented and developed completely independently of Babbage’s pioneering work. Yet because of it, Babbage’s work has been publicized and he has become famous. 

Bachelard, Gaston 18841962, French philosopher of science and literary analyst. His philosophy of science developed, e.g., in The New Scientific Spirit, 1934, and Rational Materialism, 1953 began from reflections on the relativistic and quantum revolutions in twentieth-century physics. Bachelard viewed science as developing through a series of discontinuous changes epistemological breaks. Such breaks overcome epistemological obstacles: methodological and conceptual features of commonsense or outdated science that block the path of inquiry. Bachelard’s emphasis on the discontinuity of scientific change strikingly anticipated Thomas Kuhn’s focus, many years later, on revolutionary paradigm change. However, unlike Kuhn, Bachelard held to a strong notion of scientific progress across revolutionary discontinuities. Although each scientific framework rejects its predecessors as fundamentally erroneous, earlier frameworks may embody permanent achievements that will be preserved as special cases within subsequent frameworks. Newton’s laws of motion, e.g., are special limit-cases of relativity theory. Bachelard based his philosophy of science on a “non-Cartesian epistemology” that rejects Descartes’s claim that knowledge must be founded on incorrigible intuitions of first truths. All knowledge claims are subject to revision in the light of further evidence. Similarly, he rejected a naive realism that defines reality in terms of givens of ordinary sense experience and ignores the ontological constructions of scientific concepts and instrumentation. He maintained, however, that denying this sort of realism did not entail accepting idealism, which makes only the mental ultimately real. Instead he argued for an “applied rationalism,” which recognizes the active role of reason in constituting objects of knowledge while admitting that any constituting act of reason must be directed toward an antecedently given object. 67 B   67 Although Bachelard denied the objective reality of the perceptual and imaginative worlds, he emphasized their subjective and poetic significance. Complementing his writings on science are a series of books on imagination and poetic imagery e.g., The Psychoanalysis of Fire, 1938; The Poetics of Space, 1957 which subtly unpack the meaning of archetypal in Jung’s sense images. He put forward a “law of the four elements,” according to which all images can be related to the earth, air, fire, and water posited by Empedocles as the fundamental forms of matter. Together with Georges Canguilhem, his successor at the Sorbonne, Bachelard had an immense impact on several generations of French students of philosophy. He and Canguilhem offered an important alternative to the more fashionable and widely known phenomenology and existentialism and were major influences on among others Althusser and Foucault. 

Bacon, Francis: English philosopher, essayist, and scientific methodologist. In politics Bacon rose to the position of lord chancellor. In 1621 he retired to private life after conviction for taking bribes in his official capacity as judge. Bacon championed the new empiricism resulting from the achievements of early modern science. He opposed alleged knowledge based on appeals to authority, and on the barrenness of Scholasticism. He thought that what is needed is a new attitude and methodology based strictly on scientific practices. The goal of acquiring knowledge is the good of mankind: knowledge is power. The social order that should result from applied science is portrayed in his New Atlantis1627. The method of induction to be employed is worked out in detail in his Novum Organum 1620. This new logic is to replace that of Aristotle’s syllogism, as well as induction by simple enumeration of instances. Neither of these older logics can produce knowledge of actual natural laws. Bacon thought that we must intervene in nature, manipulating it by means of experimental control leading to the invention of new technology. There are well-known hindrances to acquisition of knowledge of causal laws. Such hindrances false opinions, prejudices, which “anticipate” nature rather than explain it, Bacon calls idols idola. Idols of the tribe idola tribus are natural mental tendencies, among which are the idle search for purposes in nature, and the impulse to read our own desires and needs into nature. Idols of the cave idola specus are predispositions of particular individuals. The individual is inclined to form opinions based on idiosyncrasies of education, social intercourse, reading, and favored authorities. Idols of the marketplace idola fori Bacon regards as the most potentially dangerous of all dispositions, because they arise from common uses of language that often result in verbal disputes. Many words, though thought to be meaningful, stand for nonexistent things; others, although they name actual things, are poorly defined or used in confused ways. Idols of the theater idola theatri depend upon the influence of received theories. The only authority possessed by such theories is that they are ingenious verbal constructions. The aim of acquiring genuine knowledge does not depend on superior skill in the use of words, but rather on the discovery of natural laws. Once the idols are eliminated, the mind is free to seek knowledge of natural laws based on experimentation. Bacon held that nothing exists in nature except bodies material objects acting in conformity with fixed laws. These laws are “forms.” For example, Bacon thought that the form or cause of heat is the motion of the tiny particles making up a body. This form is that on which the existence of heat depends. What induction seeks to show is that certain laws are perfectly general, universal in application. In every case of heat, there is a measurable change in the motion of the particles constituting the moving body. Bacon thought that scientific induction proceeds as follows. First, we look for those cases where, given certain changes, certain others invariably follow. In his example, if certain changes in the form motion of particles take place, heat always follows. We seek to find all of the “positive instances” of the form that give rise to the effect of that form. Next, we investigate the “negative instances,” cases where in the absence of the form, the qualitative change does not take place. In the operation of these methods it is important to try to produce experimentally “prerogative instances,” particularly striking or typical examples of the phenomenon under investigation. Finally, in cases where the object under study is present to some greater or lesser degree, we must be able to take into account why these changes occur. In the example, quantitative changes in degrees of heat will be correlated to quantitative changes in the speed of the motion of the particles. This method implies that backward causation Bacon, Francis 68   68 in many cases we can invent instruments to measure changes in degree. Such inventions are of course the hoped-for outcome of scientific inquiry, because their possession improves the lot of human beings. Bacon’s strikingly modern but not entirely novel empiricist methodology influenced nineteenth-century figures e.g., Sir John Herschel and J. S. Mill who generalized his results and used them as the basis for displaying new insights into scientific methodology. 

Bacon, Roger c.1214c.1293, English philosopher who earned the honorific title of Doctor Mirabilis. He was one of the first medievals in the Latin West to lecture and comment on newly recovered work by Aristotle in natural philosophy, physics, and metaphysics. Born in Somerset and educated at both Oxford  and the  of Paris, he became by 1273 a master of arts at Paris, where he taught for about ten years. In 1247 he resigned his teaching post to devote his energies to investigating and promoting topics he considered neglected but important insofar as they would lead to knowledge of God. The English “experimentalist” Grosseteste, the Frenchman Peter of Maricourt, who did pioneering work on magnetism, and the author of the pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum secretorum influenced Roger’s new perspective. By 1257, however, partly from fatigue, Roger had put this work aside and entered the Franciscan order in England. To his dismay, he did not receive within the order the respect and freedom to write and teach he had expected. During the early 1260s Roger’s views about reforming the  curriculum reached Cardinal Guy le Gos de Foulques, who, upon becoming Pope Clement IV in 1265, demanded to see Roger’s writings. In response, Roger produced the Opus maius 1267  an encyclopedic work that argues, among other things, that 1 the study of Hebrew and Grecian is indispensable for understanding the Bible, 2 the study of mathematics encompassing geometry, astronomy, and astrology is, with experimentation, the key to all the sciences and instrumental in theology, and 3 philosophy can serve theology by helping in the conversion of non-believers. Roger believed that although the Bible is the basis for human knowledge, we can use reason in the service of knowledge. It is not that rational argument can, on his view, provide fullblown proof of anything, but rather that with the aid of reason one can formulate hypotheses about nature that can be confirmed by experience. According to Roger, knowledge arrived at in this way will lead to knowledge of nature’s creator. All philosophical, scientific, and linguistic endeavors are valuable ultimately for the service they can render to theology. Roger summarizes and develops his views on these matters in the Opus minus and the Opus tertium, produced within a year of the Opus maius. Roger was altogether serious in advocating curricular change. He took every opportunity to rail against many of his celebrated contemporaries e.g., Alexander of Hales, Bonaventure, Albertus Magnus, and Aquinas for not being properly trained in philosophy and for contributing to the demise of theology by lecturing on Peter Lombard’s Sentences instead of the Bible. He also wrote both Grecian and Hebrew grammars, did important work in optics, and argued for calendar reform on the basis of his admittedly derivative astronomical research. One should not, however, think that Roger was a good mathematician or natural scientist. He apparently never produced a single theorem or proof in mathematics, he was not always a good judge of astronomical competence he preferred al-Bitruji to Ptolemy, and he held alchemy in high regard, believing that base metals could be turned into silver and gold. Some have gone so far as to claim that Roger’s renown in the history of science is vastly overrated, based in part on his being confusedly linked with the fourteenthcentury Oxford Calculators, who do deserve credit for paving the way for certain developments in seventeenth-century science. Roger’s devotion to curricular reform eventually led to his imprisonment by Jerome of Ascoli the future Pope Nicholas IV, probably between 1277 and 1279. Roger’s teachings were said to have contained “suspect novelties.” Judging from the date of his imprisonment, these novelties may have been any number of propositions condemned by the bishop of Paris, Étienne Tempier, in 1277. But his imprisonment may also have had something to do with the anger he undoubtedly provoked by constantly abusing the members of his order regarding their approach to education, or with his controversial Joachimite views about the apocalypse and the imminent coming of the Antichrist. Given Roger’s interest in educational reform and his knack for systematization, it is not unlikely that he was abreast of and had something to say about most of the central philosophical issues of the day. If so, his writings could be Bacon, Roger Bacon, Roger 69   69 an important source of information about thirteenth-century Scholastic philosophy generally. In this connection, recent investigations have revealed, e.g., that he may well have played an important role in the development of logic and philosophy of language during the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. In the course of challenging the views of certain people some of whom have been tentatively identified as Richard of Cornwall, Lambert of Auxerre, Siger of Brabant, Henry of Ghent, Boethius of Dacia, William Sherwood, and the Magister Abstractionum on the nature of signs and how words function as signs, Roger develops and defends views that appear to be original. The pertinent texts include the Sumule dialectices c.1250, the De signis part of Part III of the Opus maius, and the Compendium studii theologiae 1292. E.g., in connection with the question whether Jesus could be called a man during the three-day entombment and, thus, in connection with the related question whether man can be said to be animal when no man exists, and with the sophism ‘This is a dead man, therefore this is a man’, Roger was not content to distinguish words from all other signs as had been the tradition. He distinguished between signs originating from nature and from the soul, and between natural signification and conventional ad placitum signification which results expressly or tacitly from the imposition of meaning by one or more individuals. He maintained that words signify existing and non-existing entities only equivocally, because words conventionally signify only presently existing things. On this view, therefore, ‘man’ is not used univocally when applied to an existing man and to a dead man. 

bad faith, 1 dishonest and blameworthy instances of self-deception; 2 inauthentic and self-deceptive refusal to admit to ourselves and others our full freedom, thereby avoiding anxiety in making decisions and evading responsibility for actions and attitudes Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1943; 3 hypocrisy or dishonesty in speech and conduct, as in making a promise without intending to keep it. One self-deceiving strategy identified by Sartre is to embrace other people’s views in order to avoid having to form one’s own; another is to disregard options so that one’s life appears predetermined to move in a fixed direction. Occasionally Sartre used a narrower, fourth sense: self-deceptive beliefs held on the basis of insincere and unreasonable interpretations of evidence, as contrasted with the dishonesty of “sincerely” acknowledging one truth “I am disposed to be a thief” in order to deny a deeper truth “I am free to change”. 

Bain, Alexander 18181903, British philosopher and reformer, biographer of James Mill 1882 and J. S. Mill 1882 and founder of the first psychological journal, Mind 1876. In the development of psychology, Bain represents in England alongside Continental thinkers such as Taine and Lotze the final step toward the founding of psychology as a science. His significance stems from his wish to “unite psychology and physiology,” fulfilled in The Senses and the Intellect 1855 and The Emotions and the Will 1859, abridged in one volume, Mental and Moral Science 1868. Neither Bain’s psychology nor his physiology were particularly original. His psychology came from English empiricism and associationism, his physiology from Johannes Muller’s 180158 Elements of Physiology 1842. Muller was an early advocate of the reflex, or sensorimotor, conception of the nervous system, holding that neurons conduct sensory information to the brain or motor commands from the brain, the brain connecting sensation with appropriate motor response. Like Hartley before him, Bain grounded the laws of mental association in the laws of neural connection. In opposition to faculty psychology, Bain rejected the existence of mental powers located in different parts of the brain On the Study of Character, 1861. By combining associationism with modern physiology, he virtually completed the movement of philosophical psychology toward science. In philosophy, his most important concept was his analysis of belief as “a preparation to act.” By thus entwining conception and action, he laid the foundation for pragmatism, and for the focus on adaptive behavior central to modern psychology. 

Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich 18951975, Russian philosopher and cultural theorist whose influence is pervasive in a wide range of academic disciplines  from literary hermeneutics to the epistemology of the human sciences, cultural theory, and feminism. He may legitimately be called a philosophical anthropologist in the venerable Continental tradition. Because of his seminal work on Rabelais and Dostoevsky’s poetics, Baden School Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich 70   70 his influence has been greatest in literary hermeneutics. Without question dialogism, or the construal of dialogue, is the hallmark of Bakhtin’s thought. Dialogue marks the existential condition of humanity in which the self and the other are asymmetrical but double-binding. In his words, to exist means to communicate dialogically, and when the dialogue ends, everything else ends. Unlike Hegelian and Marxian dialectics but like the Chinese correlative logic of yin and yang, Bakhtin’s dialogism is infinitely polyphonic, open-ended, and indeterminate, i.e., “unfinalizable”  to use his term. Dialogue means that there are neither first nor last words. The past and the future are interlocked and revolve around the axis of the present. Bakhtin’s dialogism is paradigmatic in a threefold sense. First, dialogue is never abstract but embodied. The lived body is the material condition of social existence as ongoing dialogue. Not only does the word become enfleshed, but dialogue is also the incorporation of the self and the other. Appropriately, therefore, Bakhtin’s body politics may be called a Slavic version of Tantrism. Second, the Rabelaisian carnivalesque that Bakhtin’s dialogism incorporates points to the “jesterly” politics of resistance and protest against the “priestly” establishment of officialdom. Third, the most distinguishing characteristic of Bakhtin’s dialogism is the primacy of the other over the self, with a twofold consequence: one concerns ethics and the other epistemology. In modern philosophy, the discovery of “Thou” or the primacy of the other over the self in asymmetrical reciprocity is credited to Feuerbach. It is hailed as the “Copernican revolution” of mind, ethics, and social thought. Ethically, Bakhtin’s dialogism, based on heteronomy, signals the birth of a new philosophy of responsibility that challenges and transgresses the Anglo-American tradition of “rights talk.” Epistemologically, it lends our welcoming ears to the credence that the other may be right  the attitude that Gadamer calls the soul of dialogical hermeneutics. 

Bakunin, Mikhail 181476, Russian revolutionary anarchist. He lived in Western Europe in 184049 and again in 186176 after an intervening period in Western and Russian prisons and Siberian exile. Bakunin is best known for his vigorous if incoherent anarchist-socialist views. On the one hand, he claimed that the masses’ “instinct for freedom” would spark the social revolution; on the other, he claimed that the revolution would be the work of a conspiratorial elite of disciplined professionals. Still, Bakunin made two significant if limited philosophic contributions. 1 In the early 1840s he spoke of the “incessant self-immolation of the positive in the pure flame of the negative,” and came to see that “flame” as a necessary dialectical component of revolutionary action. His sharpest criticism was directed not at conservative attempts to defend the existing order but rather at Hegelian attempts to reconcile positive and negative and “liberal” efforts to find a “modest and harmless place” for the negative within the positive. For Bakunin the negative is absolutely justified in its “constructive” elimination of the positive. Writing in German in 1842 he exploited both senses of the word Lust, namely “joy” and “urge,” declaring that the Lust to destroy is at the same time a creative Lust. 2 From 1861 until the end of his life Bakunin was committed to scientism, materialism, and atheism. But in the late 1860s he formulated a forceful critique of the political and social role of scientific elites and institutions. Individual life is concrete and particular; science is abstract and general and incapable of understanding or valuing living individuals. Instead, it tends to ignore or to exploit them. Bakunin, who had preached an anarchist revolt against church and state, now preached a “revolt of life against science, or rather against government by science.” This was related to his anarchist critique of Marx’s statism and technicism; but it raised the more general question  one of continuing relevance and urgency  of the role of scientific experts in decisions about public policy. 

Bañez, Domingo 15281604, Spanish Dominican theologian and philosopher. Born in Valladolid, he studied at Salamanca, where he also taught for many years. As spiritual director of St. Teresa of Ávila, he exerted considerable influence on her views. He is known for his disputes with Molina concerning divine grace. Against Molina he held physical predetermination, the view that God physically determines the secondary causes of human action. This renders grace intrinsically efficacious and independent of human will and merits. He is also known for his Bakunin, Mikhail Bañez, Domingo 71   71 understanding of the centrality of the act of existence esse in Thomistic metaphysics. Bañez’s most important works are his commentaries on Aquinas’s Summa theologiae and Aristotle’s On Generation and Corruption. 

bargaining theory, the branch of game theory that treats agreements, e.g., wage agreements between labor and management. In the simplest bargaining problems there are two bargainers. They can jointly realize various outcomes, including the outcome that occurs if they fail to reach an agreement. Each bargainer assigns a certain amount of utility to each outcome. The question is, what outcome will they realize if they are rational? Methods of solving bargaining problems are controversial. The best-known proposals are Nash’s and Kalai and Smorodinsky’s. Nash proposes maximizing the product of utility gains with respect to the disagreement point. Kalai and Smorodinsky propose maximizing utility gains with respect to the disagreement point, subject to the constraint that the ratio of utility gains equals the ratio of greatest possible gains. These methods of selecting an outcome have been axiomatically characterized. For each method, there are certain axioms of outcome selection such that that method alone satisfies the axioms. The axioms incorporate principles of rationality from cooperative game theory. They focus on features of outcomes rather than bargaining strategies. For example, one axiom requires that the outcome selected be Pareto-optimal, i.e., be an outcome such that no alternative is better for one of the bargainers and not worse for the other. Bargaining problems may become more complicated in several ways. First, there may be more than two bargainers. If unanimity is not required for beneficial agreements, splinter groups or coalitions may form. Second, the protocol for offers, counteroffers, etc., may be relevant. Then principles of non-cooperative game theory concerning strategies are needed to justify solutions. Third, the context of a bargaining problem may be relevant. For instance, opportunities for side payments, differences in bargaining power, and interpersonal comparisons of utility may influence the solution. Fourth, simplifying assumptions, such as the assumption that bargainers have complete information about their bargaining situation, may be discarded. Bargaining theory is part of the philosophical study of rationality. It is also important in ethics as a foundation for contractarian theories of morality and for certain theories of distributive justice. 

Barthes, Roland: post-structuralist literary critic and essayist. Born in Cherbourg, he suffered from numerous ailments as a child and spent much of his early life as a semiinvalid. After leaving the military, he took up several positions teaching subjects like classics, grammar, and philology. His interest in linguistics finally drew him to literature, and by the mid-1960s he had already published what would become a classic in structural analysis, The Elements of Semiology. Its principal message is that words are merely one kind of sign whose meaning lies in relations of difference between them. This concept was later amended to include the reading subject, and the structuring effect that the subject has on the literary work  a concept expressed later in his S/Z and The Pleasure of the Text. Barthes’s most mature contributions to the post-structuralist movement were brilliant and witty interpretations of visual, tactile, and aural sign systems, culminating in the publication of several books and essays on photography, advertising, film, and cuisine. 

Grundnorm: also called basic norm, in a legal system, the norm that determines the legal validity of all other norms. The content of such an ultimate norm may provide, e.g., that norms created by a legislature or by a court are legally valid. The validity of such an ultimate norm cannot be established as a matter of social fact such as the social fact that the norm is accepted by some group within a society. Rather, the validity of the basic norm for any given legal system must be presupposed by the validity of the norms that it legitimates as laws. The idea of a basic norm is associated with the legal philosopher Hans Kelsen. 

Basilides A.D. c.12040, Syrian Christian gnostic teacher in Alexandria who rivaled Valentinus. He improved on Valentinus’s doctrine of emanations, positing 365 the number of days in a year levels of existence in the Pleroma the fullness of the Godhead, all descending from the ineffable Father. He taught that the rival God was the God of the Jews the God of the Old Testament, who created the material world. Redemption consists in the coming of the first begotten of the Father, Noûs Mind, in human form in order to release the spiritual element imprisoned within human bodies. Like other gnostics he taught that we are saved by knowledge, not faith. He apparently held to the idea of reincarnation before the restoration of all things to the Pleroma. 

basing relation, also called basis relation, the relation between a belief or item of knowledge and a second belief or item of knowledge when the latter is the ground basis of the first. It is clear that some knowledge is indirect, i.e., had or gained on the basis of some evidence, as opposed to direct knowledge, which assuming there is any is not so gained, or based. The same holds for justified belief. In one broad sense of the term, the basing relation is just the one connecting indirect knowledge or indirectly justified belief to the evidence: to give an account of either of the latter is to give an account of the basing relation. There is a narrower view of the basing relation, perhaps implicit in the first. A person knows some proposition P on the basis of evidence or reasons only if her belief that P is based on the evidence or reasons, or perhaps on the possession of the evidence or reasons. The narrow basing relation is indicated by this question: where a belief that P constitutes indirect knowledge or justification, what is it for that belief to be based on the evidence or reasons that support the knowledge or justification? The most widely favored view is that the relevant belief is based on evidence or reasons only if the belief is causally related to the belief or reasons. Proponents of this causal view differ concerning what, beyond this causal relationship, is needed by an account of the narrow basing relation. 

Bataille, Georges 18971962, French philosopher and novelist with enormous influence on post-structuralist thought. By locating value in expenditure as opposed to accumulation, Bataille inaugurates the era of the death of the subject. He insists that individuals must transgress the limits imposed by subjectivity to escape isolation and communicate. Bataille’s prewar philosophical contributions consist mainly of short essays, the most significant of which have been collected in Visions of Excess. These essays introduce the central idea that base matter disrupts rational subjectivity by attesting to the continuity in which individuals lose themselves. Inner Experience 1943, Bataille’s first lengthy philosophical treatise, was followed by Guilty 1944 and On Nietzsche 1945. Together, these three works constitute Bataille’s Summa Atheologica, which explores the play of the isolation and the dissolution of beings in terms of the experience of excess laughter, tears, eroticism, death, sacrifice, poetry. The Accursed Share 1949, which he considered his most important work, is his most systematic account of the social and economic implications of expenditure. In Erotism 1957 and The Tears of Eros 1961, he focuses on the excesses of sex and death. Throughout his life, Bataille was concerned with the question of value. He located it in the excess that lacerates individuals and opens channels of communication. 

Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb 171462, German philosopher. Born in Berlin, he was educated in Halle and taught at Halle 173840 and Frankfurt an der Oder 174062. Baumgarten was brought up in the Pietist circle of A. H. Francke but adopted the anti-Pietist rationalism of Wolff. He wrote textbooks in metabasic particular Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb 73   73 physics Metaphysica, 1739 and ethics Ethica Philosophica, 1740; Initia Philosophiae Practicae Prima [“First Elements of Practical Philosophy”], 1760 on which Kant lectured. For the most part, Baumgarten did not significantly depart from Wolff, although in metaphysics he was both further and yet closer to Leibniz than was Wolff: unlike Leibniz, he argued for real physical influx, but, unlike Wolff, he did not restrict preestablished harmony to the mindbody relationship alone, but paradoxically reextended it to include all relations of substances. Baumgarten’s claim to fame, however, rests on his introduction of the discipline of aesthetics into German philosophy, and indeed on his introduction of the term ‘aesthetics’ as well. Wolff had explained pleasure as the response to the perception of perfection by means of the senses, in turn understood as clear but confused perception. Baumgarten subtly but significantly departed from Wolff by redefining our response to beauty as pleasure in the perfection of sensory perception, i.e., in the unique potential of sensory as opposed to merely conceptual representation. This concept was first introduced in his dissertation Meditationes Philosophicae de Nonnullis ad Poema Pertinentibus “Philosophical Meditations on some Matters pertaining to Poetry,” 1735, which defined a poem as a “perfect sensate discourse,” and then generalized in his twovolume but still incomplete Aesthetica 1750 58. One might describe Baumgarten’s aesthetics as cognitivist but no longer rationalist: while in science or logic we must always prefer discursive clarity, in art we respond with pleasure to the maximally dense or “confused” intimation of ideas. Baumgarten’s theory had great influence on Lessing and Mendelssohn, on Kant’s theory of aesthetic ideas, and even on the aesthetics of Hegel. 

Crazy-bayesy – cited by H. P. Grice, “Aspects of reason.” Bayesian rationality, minimally, a property a system of beliefs or the believer has in virtue of the system’s “conforming to the probability calculus.” “Bayesians” differ on what “rationality” requires, but most agree that i beliefs come in degrees of firmness; ii these “degrees of belief” are theoretically or ideally quantifiable; iii such quantification can be understood in terms of person-relative, time-indexed “credence functions” from appropriate sets of objects of belief propositions or sentences  each set closed under at least finite truth-functional combinations  into the set of real numbers; iv at any given time t, a person’s credence function at t ought to be usually: “on pain of a Dutch book argument” a probability function; that is, a mapping from the given set into the real numbers in such a way that the “probability” the value assigned to any given object A in the set is greater than or equal to zero, and is equal to unity % 1 if A is a necessary truth, and, for any given objects A and B in the set, if A and B are incompatible the negation of their conjunction is a necessary truth then the probability assigned to their disjunction is equal to the sum of the probabilities assigned to each; so that the usual propositional probability axioms impose a sort of logic on degrees of belief. If a credence function is a probability function, then it or the believer at the given time is “coherent.” On these matters, on conditional degrees of belief, and on the further constraint on rationality many Bayesians impose that change of belief ought to accord with “conditionalization”, the reader should consult John Earman, Bayes or Bust? A Critical Examination of Bayesian Confirmation Theory 1992; Colin Howson and Peter Urbach, Scientific Reasoning: The Bayesian Approach 1989; and Richard Jeffrey, The Logic of Decision 1965. 

Bayes’s theorem, any of several relationships between prior and posterior probabilities or odds, especially 13 below. All of these depend upon the basic relationship 0 between contemporaneous conditional and unconditional probabilities. Non-Bayesians think these useful only in narrow ranges of cases, generally because of skepticism about accessibility or significance of priors. According to 1, posterior probability is prior probability times the “relevance quotient” Carnap’s term. According to 2, posterior odds are Bayesian Bayes’s theorem 74   74 prior odds times the “likelihood ratio” R. A. Fisher’s term. Relationship 3 comes from 1 by expanding P data via the law of total probability. Bayes’s rule 4 for updating probabilities has you set your new unconditional probabilities equal to your old conditional ones when fresh certainty about data leaves probabilities conditionally upon the data unchanged. The corresponding rule 5 has you do the same for odds. In decision theory the term is used differently, for the rule “Choose so as to maximize expectation of utility.” 

Bayle, Pierre 16471706, French philosopher who also pioneered in disinterested, critical history. A Calvinist forced into exile in 1681, Bayle nevertheless rejected the prevailing use of history as an instrument of partisan or sectarian interest. He achieved fame and notoriety with his multivolume Dictionnaire historique et critique 1695. For each subject covered, Bayle provided a biographical sketch and a dispassionate examination of the historical record and interpretive controversies. He also repeatedly probed the troubled and troubling boundary between reason and faith philosophy and religion. In the article “David,” the seemingly illicit conduct of God’s purported agent yielded reflections on the morals of the elect and the autonomy of ethics. In “Pyrrho,” Bayle argued that self-evidence, the most plausible candidate for the criterion of truth, is discredited by Christianity because some self-evident principles contradict essential Christian truths and are therefore false. Finally, provoking Leibniz’s Theodicy, Bayle argued, most relentlessly in “Manichaeans” and “Paulicians,” that there is no defensible rational solution to the problem of evil. Bayle portrayed himself as a Christian skeptic, but others have seen instead an ironic critic of religion  a precursor of the French Enlightenment. Bayle’s purely philosophical reflections support his self-assessment, since he consistently maintains that philosophy achieves not comprehension and contentment, but paradox and puzzlement. In making this case he proved to be a superb critic of philosophical systems. Some examples are “Zeno of Elea”  on space, time, and motion; “Rorarius”  on mind and body and animal mechanism; and “Spinoza”  on the perils of monism. Bayle’s skepticism concerning philosophy significantly influenced Berkeley and Hume. His other important works include Pensées diverses de la comète de 1683 1683; Commentaire philosophique sur ces paroles de Jesus Christ: contrain les d’entrer 1686; and Réponse aux questions d’un provincial1704; and an early learned periodical, the Nouvelles de la République des Lettres 1684 87. 

Beattie, James 17351803, Scottish philosopher and poet who, in criticizing Hume, widened the latter’s audience. A member of the Scottish school of common sense philosophy along with Oswald and Reid, Beattie’s major work was An Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth 1771, in which he criticizes Hume for fostering skepticism and infidelity. His positive view was that the mind possesses a common sense, i.e., a power for perceiving self-evident truths. Common sense is instinctive, unalterable by education; truth is what common sense determines the mind to believe. Beattie cited Hume and then claimed that his views led to moral and religious evils. When Beattie’s Essay was translated into German 1772, Kant could read Hume’s discussions of personal identity and causation. Since these topics were not covered in Hume’s Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Beattie provided Kant access to two issues in the Treatises of Human Nature critical to the development of transcendental idealism.

beauty, an aesthetic property commonly thought of as a species of aesthetic value. As such, it has been variously thought to be 1 a simple, indefinable property that cannot be defined in terms of any other properties; 2 a property or set of properties of an object that makes the object capable of producing a certain sort of pleasurable experience in any suitable perceiver; or 3 whatever produces a particular sort of pleasurable experience, even though what produces the experience may vary from individual to individual. It is in this last sense that beauty is thought to be “in the eye of the beholder.” If beauty is a simple, indefinable property, as in 1, then it cannot be defined conceptually and has to be apprehended by intuition or taste. Beauty, on this account, would be a particular sort of aesthetic property. If beauty is an object’s Bayle, Pierre beauty 75   75 capacity to produce a special sort of pleasurable experience, as in 2, then it is necessary to say what properties provide it with this capacity. The most favored candidates for these have been formal or structural properties, such as order, symmetry, and proportion. In the Philebus Plato argues that the form or essence of beauty is knowable, exact, rational, and measurable. He also holds that simple geometrical shapes, simple colors, and musical notes all have “intrinsic beauty,” which arouses a pure, “unmixed” pleasure in the perceiver and is unaffected by context. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries many treatises were written on individual art forms, each allegedly governed by its own rules. In the eighteenth century, Hutcheson held that ‘beauty’ refers to an “idea raised in us,” and that any object that excites this idea is beautiful. He thought that the property of the object that excites this idea is “uniformity in variety.” Kant explained the nature of beauty by analyzing judgments that something is beautiful. Such judgments refer to an experience of the perceiver. But they are not merely expressions of personal experience; we claim that others should also have the same experience, and that they should make the same judgment i.e., judgments that something is beautiful have “universal validity”. Such judgments are disinterested  determined not by any needs or wants on the part of the perceiver, but just by contemplating the mere appearance of the object. These are judgments about an object’s free beauty, and making them requires using only those mental capacities that all humans have by virtue of their ability to communicate with one another. Hence the pleasures experienced in response to such beauty can in principle be shared by anyone. Some have held, as in 3, that we apply the term ‘beautiful’ to things because of the pleasure they give us, and not on the basis of any specific qualities an object has. Archibald Alison held that it is impossible to find any properties common to all those things we call beautiful. Santayana believed beauty is “pleasure regarded as a quality of a thing,” and made no pretense that certain qualities ought to produce that pleasure. The Grecian term to kalon, which is often translated as ‘beauty’, did not refer to a thing’s autonomous aesthetic value, but rather to its “excellence,” which is connected with its moral worth and/or usefulness. This concept is closer to Kant’s notion of dependent beauty, possessed by an object judged as a particular kind of thing such as a beautiful cat or a beautiful horse, than it is to free beauty, possessed by an object judged simply on the basis of its appearance and not in terms of any concept of use. 

Beccaria, Cesare: criminologist and judicial and penal reformer. He studied in Parma and Pavia and taught political economy in Milan. Here, he met Pietro and Alessandro Verri and other Milanese intellectuals attempting to promote political, economical, and judiciary reforms. His major work, Dei delitti e delle pene “On Crimes and Punishments,” 1764, denounces the contemporary methods in the administration of justice and the treatment of criminals. Beccaria argues that the highest good is the greatest happiness shared by the greatest number of people; hence, actions against the state are the most serious crimes. Crimes against individuals and property are less serious, and crimes endangering public harmony are the least serious. The purposes of punishment are deterrence and the protection of society. However, the employment of torture to obtain confessions is unjust and useless: it results in acquittal of the strong and the ruthless and conviction of the weak and the innocent. Beccaria also rejects the death penalty as a war of the state against the individual. He claims that the duration and certainty of the punishment, not its intensity, most strongly affect criminals. Beccaria was influenced by Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Condillac. His major work was translated into many languages and set guidelines for revising the criminal and judicial systems of several European countries.

behaviorism, broadly, the view that behavior is fundamental in understanding mental phenomena. The term applies both to a scientific research Beauvoir, Simone de behaviorism 76   76 program in psychology and to a philosophical doctrine. Accordingly, we distinguish between scientific psychological, methodological behaviorism and philosophical logical, analytical behaviorism. Scientific behaviorism. First propounded by the American psychologist J. B. Watson who introduced the term in 1913 and further developed especially by C. L. Hull, E. C. Tolman, and B. F. Skinner, it departed from the introspectionist tradition by redefining the proper task of psychology as the explanation and prediction of behavior  where to explain behavior is to provide a “functional analysis” of it, i.e., to specify the independent variables stimuli of which the behavior response is lawfully a function. It insisted that all variables  including behavior as the dependent variable  must be specifiable by the experimental procedures of the natural sciences: merely introspectible, internal states of consciousness are thus excluded from the proper domain of psychology. Although some behaviorists were prepared to admit internal neurophysiological conditions among the variables “intervening variables”, others of more radical bent e.g. Skinner insisted on environmental variables alone, arguing that any relevant variations in the hypothetical inner states would themselves in general be a function of variations in past and present environmental conditions as, e.g., thirst is a function of water deprivation. Although some basic responses are inherited reflexes, most are learned and integrated into complex patterns by a process of conditioning. In classical respondent conditioning, a response already under the control of a given stimulus will be elicited by new stimuli if these are repeatedly paired with the old stimulus: this is how we learn to respond to new situations. In operant conditioning, a response that has repeatedly been followed by a reinforcing stimulus reward will occur with greater frequency and will thus be “selected” over other possible responses: this is how we learn new responses. Conditioned responses can also be unlearned or “extinguished” by prolonged dissociation from the old eliciting stimuli or by repeated withholding of the reinforcing stimuli. To show how all human behavior, including “cognitive” or intelligent behavior, can be “shaped” by such processes of selective reinforcement and extinction of responses was the ultimate objective of scientific behaviorism. Grave difficulties in the way of the realization of this objective led to increasingly radical liberalization of the distinctive features of behaviorist methodology and eventually to its displacement by more cognitively oriented approaches e.g. those inspired by information theory and by Chomsky’s work in linguistics. Philosophical behaviorism. A semantic thesis about the meaning of mentalistic expressions, it received its most sanguine formulation by the logical positivists particularly Carnap, Hempel, and Ayer, who asserted that statements containing mentalistic expressions have the same meaning as, and are thus translatable into, some set of publicly verifiable confirmable, testable statements describing behavioral and bodily processes and dispositions including verbalbehavioral dispositions. Because of the reductivist concerns expressed by the logical positivist thesis of physicalism and the unity of science, logical behaviorism as some positivists preferred to call it was a corollary of the thesis that psychology is ultimately via a behavioristic analysis reducible to physics, and that all of its statements, like those of physics, are expressible in a strictly extensional language. Another influential formulation of philosophical behaviorism is due to Ryle The Concept of Mind, 1949, whose classic critique of Cartesian dualism rests on the view that mental predicates are often used to ascribe dispositions to behave in characteristic ways: but such ascriptions, for Ryle, have the form of conditional, lawlike statements whose function is not to report the occurrence of inner states, physical or non-physical, of which behavior is the causal manifestation, but to license inferences about how the agent would behave if certain conditions obtained. To suppose that all declarative uses of mental language have a fact-stating or -reporting role at all is, for Ryle, to make a series of “category mistakes”  of which both Descartes and the logical positivists were equally guilty. Unlike the behaviorism of the positivists, Ryle’s behaviorism required no physicalistic reduction of mental language, and relied instead on ordinary language descriptions of human behavior. A further version of philosophical behaviorism can be traced to Wittgenstein Philosophical Investigations, 1953, who argues that the epistemic criteria for the applicability of mentalistic terms cannot be private, introspectively accessible inner states but must instead be intersubjectively observable behavior. Unlike the previously mentioned versions of philosophical behaviorism, Wittgenstein’s behaviorism seems to be consistent with metaphysical mindbody dualism, and is thus also non-reductivist. behaviorism behaviorism 77   77 Philosophical behaviorism underwent severe criticism in the 1950s and 1960s, especially by Chisholm, Charles Taylor, Putnam, and Fodor. Nonetheless it still lives on in more or less attenuated forms in the work of such diverse philosophers as Quine, Dennett, Armstrong, David Lewis, U. T. Place, and Dummett. Though current “functionalism” is often referred to as the natural heir to behaviorism, functionalism especially of the Armstrong-Lewis variety crucially differs from behaviorism in insisting that mental predicates, while definable in terms of behavior and behavioral dispositions, nonetheless designate inner causal states  states that are apt to cause certain characteristic behaviors. 

behavior therapy, a spectrum of behavior modification techniques applied as therapy, such as aversion therapy, extinction, modeling, redintegration, operant conditioning, and desensitization. Unlike psychotherapy, which probes a client’s recollected history, behavior therapy focuses on immediate behavior, and aims to eliminate undesired behavior and produce desired behavior through methods derived from the experimental analysis of behavior and from reinforcement theory. A chronic problem with psychotherapy is that the client’s past is filtered through limited and biased recollection. Behavior therapy is more mechanical, creating systems of reinforcement and conditioning that may work independently of the client’s long-term memory. Collectively, behavior-therapeutic techniques compose a motley set. Some behavior therapists adapt techniques from psychotherapy, as in covert desensitization, where verbally induced mental images are employed as reinforcers. A persistent problem with behavior therapy is that it may require repeated application. Consider aversion therapy. It consists of pairing painful or punishing stimuli with unwelcome behavior. In the absence, after therapy, of the painful stimulus, the behavior may recur because association between behavior and punishment is broken. Critics charge that behavior therapy deals with immediate disturbances and overt behavior, to the neglect of underlying problems and irrationalities. 

Belief: H. P. Grice, “Disposition and belief,” H. P. Grice, “Knowledge and belief.” a dispositional psychological state in virtue of which a person will assent to a proposition under certain conditions. Propositional knowledge, traditionally understood, entails belief. A behavioral view implies that beliefs are just dispositions to behave in certain ways. Your believing that the stove is hot is just your being disposed to act in a manner appropriate to its being hot. The problem is that our beliefs, including their propositional content indicated by a “that”-clause, typically explain why we do what we do. You avoid touching the stove because you believe that it’s dangerously hot. Explaining action via beliefs refers indispensably to propositional content, but the behavioral view does not accommodate this. A state-object view implies that belief consists of a special relation between a psychological state and an object of belief, what is believed. The objects of belief, traditionally understood, are abstract propositions existing independently of anyone’s thinking of them. The state of believing is a propositional attitude involving some degree of confidence toward a propositional object of belief. Such a view allows that two persons, even separated by a long period of time, can believe the same thing. A state-object view allows that beliefs be dispositional rather than episodic, since they can exist while no action is occurring. Such a view grants, however, that one can have a disposition to act owing to believing something. Regarding mental action, a belief typically generates a disposition to assent, at least under appropriate circumstances, to the proposition believed. Given the central role of propositional content, however, a state-object view denies that beliefs are just dispositions to act. In addition, such a view should distinguish between dispositional believing and a mere disposition to believe. One can be merely disposed to believe many things that one does not actually believe, owing to one’s lacking the appropriate psychological attitude to relevant propositional content. Beliefs are either occurrent or non-occurrent. Occurrent belief, unlike non-occurrent belief, requires current assent to the proposition believed. If the assent is self-conscious, the belief is an explicit occurrent belief; if the assent is not self-conscious, the belief is an implicit occurrent behaviorism, supervenient belief 78   78 belief. Non-occurrent beliefs permit that we do not cease to believe that 2 ! 2 % 4, for instance, merely because we now happen to be thinking of something else or nothing at all.  .

belief revision, the process by which cognitive states change in light of new information. This topic looms large in discussions of Bayes’s Theorem and other approaches in decision theory. The reasons prompting belief revision are characteristically epistemic; they concern such notions as quality of evidence and the tendency to yield truths. Many different rules have been proposed for updating one’s belief set. In general, belief revision typically balances risk of error against information increase. Belief revision is widely thought to proceed either by expansion or by conceptual revision. Expansion occurs in virtue of new observations; a belief is changed, or a new belief established, when a hypothesis or provisional belief is supported by evidence whose probability is high enough to meet a favored criterion of epistemic warrant. The hypothesis then becomes part of the existing belief corpus, or is sufficient to prompt revision. Conceptual revision occurs when appropriate changes are made in theoretical assumptions  in accordance with such principles as simplicity and explanatory or predictive power  by which the corpus is organized. In actual cases, we tend to revise beliefs with an eye toward advancing the best comprehensive explanation in the relevant cognitive domain. 

Beneke: F. E, philosopher who was influenced by Herbart and English empiricism and criticized rationalistic metaphysics. He taught at Berlin and published some eighteen books in philosophy. His major work was Lehrbuch der Psychologie als Naturwissenschaft 1833. He wrote a critical study of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and another on his moral theory; other works included Psychologie Skizzen 1825, Metaphysik und Religionphilosophie 1840, and Die neue Psychologie 1845. The “new psychology” developed by Beneke held that the hypostatization of “faculties” led to a mythical psychology. He proposed a method that would yield a natural science of the soul or, in effect, an associationist psychology. Influenced by the British empiricists, he conceived the elements of mental life as dynamic, active processes or impulses Trieben. These “elementary faculties,” originally activated by stimuli, generate the substantial unity of the nature of the psychic by their persistence as traces, as well as by their reciprocal adjustment in relation to the continuous production of new forces. In what Beneke called “pragmatic psychology,” the psyche is a bundle of impulses, forces, and functions. Psychological theory should rest on inductive analyses of the facts of inner perception. This, in turn, is the foundation of the philosophical disciplines of logic, ethics, metaphysics, and philosophy of religion. In this regard, Beneke held a psychologism. He agreed with Herbart that psychology must be based on inner experience and must eschew metaphysical speculation, but rejected Hebart’s mathematical reductionism. Beneke sought to create a “pragmatic philosophy” based on his psychology. In his last years he contributed to pedagogic theory. 

Bentham: j. Engish philosopher of ethics and political-legal theory. Born in London, he entered Queen’s, Oxford, at age 12, and after graduation entered Lincoln’s Inn to study law. He was admitted to the bar in 1767 but never practiced. He spent his life writing, advocating changes along utilitarian lines maximal happiness for everyone affected of the whole legal system, especially the criminal law. He was a strong influence in changes of the British law of evidence; in abolition of laws permitting imprisonment for indebtedness; in the belief, basic Bentham, Jeremy 79   79 reform of Parliamentary representation; in the formation of a civil service recruited by examination; and in much else. His major work published during his lifetime was An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation 1789. He became head of a “radical” group including James Mill and J. S. Mill, and founded the Westminster Review and  , London where his embalmed body still reposes in a closet. He was a friend of Catherine of Russia and John Quincy Adams, and was made a citizen of France in 1792. Pleasure, he said, is the only good, and pain the only evil: “else the words good and evil have no meaning.” He gives a list of examples of what he means by ‘pleasure’: pleasures of taste, smell, or touch; of acquiring property; of learning that one has the goodwill of others; of power; of a view of the pleasures of those one cares about. Bentham was also a psychological hedonist: pleasures and pains determine what we do. Take pain. Your state of mind may be painful now at the time just prior to action because it includes the expectation of the pain say of being burned; the present pain or the expectation of later pain  Bentham is undecided which motivates action to prevent being burned. One of a person’s pleasures, however, may be sympathetic enjoyment of the well-being of another. So it seems one can be motivated by the prospect of the happiness of another. His psychology here is not incompatible with altruistic motivation. Bentham’s critical utilitarianism lies in his claim that any action, or measure of government, ought to be taken if and only if it tends to augment the happiness of everyone affected  not at all a novel principle, historically. When “thus interpreted, the words ought, and right and wrong . . . have a meaning: when otherwise, they have none.” Bentham evidently did not mean this statement as a purely linguistic point about the actual meaning of moral terms. Neither can this principle be proved; it is a first principle from which all proofs proceed. What kind of reason, then, can he offer in its support? At one point he says that the principle of utility, at least unconsciously, governs the judgment of “every thinking man . . . unavoidably.” But his chief answer is his critique of a widely held principle that a person properly calls an act wrong if when informed of the facts he disapproves of it. Bentham cites other language as coming to the same thesis: talk of a “moral sense,” or common sense, or the understanding, or the law of nature, or right reason, or the “fitness of things.” He says that this is no principle at all, since a “principle is something that points out some external consideration, as a means of warranting and guiding the internal sentiments of approbation. . . .” The alleged principle also allows for widespread disagreement about what is moral. So far, Bentham’s proposal has not told us exactly how to determine whether an action or social measure is right or wrong. Bentham suggests a hedonic calculus: in comparing two actions under consideration, we count up the pleasures or pains each will probably produce  how intense, how long-lasting, whether near or remote, including any derivative later pleasures or pains that may be caused, and sum them up for all persons who will be affected. Evidently these directions can provide at best only approximate results. We are in no position to decide whether one pleasure for one hour is greater than another pleasure for half an hour, even when they are both pleasures of one person who can compare them. How much more when the pleasures are of different persons? Still, we can make judgments important for the theory of punishment: whether a blow in the face with no lasting damage for one person is more or less painful than fifty lashes for his assailant! Bentham has been much criticized because he thought that two pleasures are equal in value, if they are equally intense, enduring, etc. As he said, “Quantity of pleasure being equal, pushpin is as good as poetry.” It has been thought e.g., by J. S. Mill that some pleasures, especially intellectual ones, are higher and deserve to count more. But it may be replied that the so-called higher pleasures are more enduring, are less likely to be followed by satiety, and open up new horizons of enjoyment; and when these facts are taken into account, it is not clear that there is need to accord higher status to intellectual pleasures as such. A major goal of Bentham’s was to apply to the criminal law his principle of maximizing the general utility. Bentham thought there should be no punishment of an offense if it is not injurious to someone. So how much punishment should there be? The least amount the effect of which will result in a greater degree of happiness, overall. The benefit of punishment is primarily deterrence, by attaching to the thought of a given act the thought of the painful sanction  which will deter both the past and prospective lawbreakers. The punishment, then, must be severe enough to outweigh the benefit of the offense to the agent, making allowance, by addition, for the uncertainty that the punishment will actually occur. There are some harmful acts, however, that it is Bentham, Jeremy Bentham, Jeremy 80   80 not beneficial to punish. One is an act needful to produce a greater benefit, or avoid a serious evil, for the agent. Others are those which a penal prohibition could not deter: when the law is unpublished or the agent is insane or an infant. In some cases society need feel no alarm about the future actions of the agent. Thus, an act is criminal only if intentional, and the agent is excused if he acted on the basis of beliefs such that, were they true, the act would have caused no harm, unless these beliefs were culpable in the sense that they would not have been held by a person of ordinary prudence or benevolence. The propriety of punishing an act also depends somewhat on its motive, although no motive e.g., sexual desire, curiosity, wanting money, love of reputation  is bad in itself. Yet the propriety of punishment is affected by the presence of some motivations that enhance public security because it is unlikely that they  e.g., sympathetic concern or concern for reputation  will lead to bad intentional acts. When a given motive leads to a bad intention, it is usually because of the weakness of motives like sympathy, concern for avoiding punishment, or respect for law. In general, the sanction of moral criticism should take lines roughly similar to those of the ideal law. But there are some forms of behavior, e.g., imprudence or fornication, which the law is hardly suited to punish, that can be sanctioned by morality. The business of the moral philosopher is censorial: to say what the law, or morality, ought to be. To say what is the law is a different matter: what it is is the commands of the sovereign, defined as one whom the public, in general, habitually obeys. As consisting of commands, it is imperatival. The imperatives may be addressed to the public, as in “Let no one steal,” or to judges: “Let a judge sentence anyone who steals to be hanged.” It may be thought that there is a third part, an explanation, say, of what is a person’s property; but this can be absorbed in the imperatival part, since the designations of property are just imperatives about who is to be free to do what. Why should anyone obey the actual laws? Bentham’s answer is that one should do so if and only if it promises to maximize the general happiness. He eschews contract theories of political obligation: individuals now alive never contracted, and so how are they bound? He also opposes appeal to natural rights. If what are often mentioned as natural rights were taken seriously, no government could survive: it could not tax, require military service, etc. Nor does he accept appeal to “natural law,” as if, once some law is shown to be immoral, it can be said to be not really law. That would be absurd. 

Berdyaev: N., philosopher, he began as a “Kantian Marxist” in epistemology, ethical theory, and philosophy of history, but soon turned away from Marxism although he continued to accept Marx’s critique of capitalism toward a theistic philosophy of existence stressing the values of creativity and “meonic” freedom  a freedom allegedly prior to all being, including that of God. In exile after 1922, Berdyaev appears to have been the first to grasp clearly in the early 1920s that the Marxist view of historical time involves a morally unacceptable devaluing and instrumentalizing of the historical present including living persons for the sake of the remote future end of a perfected communist society. Berdyaev rejects the Marxist position on both Christian and Kantian grounds, as a violation of the intrinsic value of human persons. He sees the historical order as marked by inescapable tragedy, and welcomes the “end of history” as an “overcoming” of objective historical time by subjective “existential” time with its free, unobjectified creativity. For Berdyaev the “world of objects”  physical things, laws of nature, social institutions, and human roles and relationships  is a pervasive threat to “free spiritual creativity.” Yet such creativity appears to be subject to inevitable frustration, since its outward embodiments are always “partial and fragmentary” and no “outward action” can escape ultimate “tragic failure.” Russian Orthodox traditionalists condemned Berdyaev for claiming that all creation is a “divine-human process” and for denying God’s omnipotence, but such Western process theologians as Hartshorne find Berdyaev’s position highly congenial. 

bergmann, gustav: infamous for calling H. P. Grice “one of them English futilitarians” -- philosopher, the youngest member of the Vienna Circle. Born in Vienna, he received his doctorate in mathematics in 1928 from the  of Vienna. Originally influenced by logical positivism, he became a phenomenalist who also posited mental acts irreducible to sense-data see his The Metaphysics of Logical Positivism, 1954. Although he eventually rejected phenomenalism, his ontology of material objects remained structurally phenomenalistic. Bergmann’s world is one of momentary bare i.e. natureless particulars exemplifying phenomenally simple Berdyaev, Nicolas Bergmann, Gustav 81   81 universals, relational as well as non-relational. Some of these universals are non-mental, such as color properties and spatial relations, while others, such as the “intentional characters” in virtue of which some particulars mental acts intend or represent the facts that are their “objects,” are mental. Bergmann insisted that the world is independent of both our experience of it and our thought and discourse about it: he claimed that the connection of exemplification and even the propositional connectives and quantifiers are mind-independent. See Meaning and Existence, 1959; Logic and Reality, 1964; and Realism: A Critique of Brentano and Meinong, 1967. Such extreme realism produced many criticisms of his philosophy that are only finally addressed in Bergmann’s recently, and posthumously, published book, New Foundations of Ontology 1992, in which he concedes that his atomistic approach to ontology has inevitable limitations and proposes a way of squaring this insight with his thoroughgoing realism. 

bergson: h. l.: cited by H. P. Grice in “Personal identity,” philosopher, the most influential of the first half of the twentieth century. Born in Paris and educated at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure, he began his teaching career at Clermont-Ferrand in 1884 and was called in 1900 to the Collège de France, where his lectures enjoyed unparalleled success until his retirement in 1921. Ideally placed in la belle époque of prewar Paris, his ideas influenced a broad spectrum of artistic, literary, social, and political movements. In 1918 he received the Légion d’honneur and was admitted into the French Academy. From 1922 through 1925 he participated in the League of Nations, presiding over the creation of what was later to become UNESCO. Forced by crippling arthritis into virtual seclusion during his later years, Bergson was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1928. Initially a disciple of Spencer, Bergson broke with him after a careful examination of Spencer’s concept of time and mechanistic positivism. Following a deeply entrenched tradition in Western thought, Spencer treats time on an analogy with space as a series of discrete numerical units: instants, seconds, minutes. When confronted with experience, however  especially with that of our own psychological states  such concepts are, Bergson concludes, patently inadequate. Real duration, unlike clock time, is qualitative, dynamic, irreversible. It cannot be “spatialized” without being deformed. It gives rise in us, moreover, to free acts, which, being qualitative and spontaneous, cannot be predicted. Bergson’s dramatic contrast of real duration and geometrical space, first developed in Time and Free Will 1890, was followed in 1896 by the mind body theory of Matter and Memory. He argues here that the brain is not a locale for thought but a motor organ that, receiving stimuli from its environment, may respond with adaptive behavior. To his psychological and metaphysical distinction between duration and space Bergson adds, in An Introduction to Metaphysics 1903, an important epistemological distinction between intuition and analysis. Intuition probes the flow of duration in its concreteness; analysis breaks up duration into static, fragmentary concepts. In Creative Evolution 1907, his best-known work, Bergson argues against both Lamarck and Darwin, urging that biological evolution is impelled by a vital impetus or élan vital that drives life to overcome the downward entropic drift of matter. Biological organisms, unlike dice, must compete and survive as they undergo permutations. Hence the unresolved dilemma of Darwinism. Either mutations occur one or a few at a time in which case how can they be “saved up” to constitute new organs? or they occur all at once in which case one has a “miracle”. Bergson’s vitalism, popular in literary circles, was not accepted by many scientists or philosophers. His most general contention, however  that biological evolution is not consistent with or even well served by a mechanistic philosophy  was broadly appreciated and to many seemed convincing. This aspect of Bergson’s writings influenced thinkers as diverse as Lloyd Morgan, Alexis Carrel, Sewall Wright, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and A. N. Whitehead. The contrasts in terms of which Bergson developed his thought duration/space, intuition/ analysis, life/entropy are replaced in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion 1932 by a new duality, that of the “open” and the “closed.” The Judeo-Christian tradition, he contends, if it has embraced in its history both the open society and the closed society, exhibits in its great saints and mystics a profound opening out of the human spirit toward all humanity. Bergson’s distinction between the open and the closed society was popularized by Karl Popper in his The Open Society and Its Enemies. While it has attracted serious criticism, Bergson’s philosophy has also significantly affected subsequent thinkers. Novelists as diverse as Bergson, Henri Louis Bergson, Henri Louis 82   82 Nikos Kazantzakis, Marcel Proust, and William Faulkner; poets as unlike as Charles Péguy, Robert Frost, and Antonio Machado; and psychologists as dissimilar as Pierre Janet and Jean Piaget were to profit significantly from his explorations of duration, conceptualization, and memory. Both French existentialism and American process philosophy bear the imprint of his thought. 

Berkeley: g., Irish philosopher and bishop in the Anglican Church of Ireland, one of the three great British empiricists along with Locke and Hume. He developed novel and influential views on the visual perception of distance and size, and an idealist metaphysical system that he defended partly on the seemingly paradoxical ground that it was the best defense of common sense and safeguard against skepticism. Berkeley studied at Trinity , Dublin, from which he graduated at nineteen. He was elected to a fellowship at Trinity in 1707, and did the bulk of his philosophical writing between that year and 1713. He was made dean of Derry in 1724, following extensive traveling on the Continent; he spent the years 172832 in Rhode Island, waiting in vain for promised Crown funds to establish a  in Bermuda. He was made bishop of Cloyne, Ireland, in 1734, and he remained there as a cleric for nearly the remainder of his life. Berkeley’s first major publication, the Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision 1709, is principally a work in the psychology of vision, though it has important philosophical presuppositions and implications. Berkeley’s theory of vision became something like the received view on the topic for nearly two hundred years and is a landmark work in the history of psychology. The work is devoted to three connected matters: how do we see, or visually estimate, the distances of objects from ourselves, the situation or place at which objects are located, and the magnitude of such objects? Earlier views, such as those of Descartes, Malebranche, and Molyneux, are rejected on the ground that their answers to the above questions allow that a person can see the distance of an object without having first learned to correlate visual and other cues. This was supposedly done by a kind of natural geometry, a computation of the distance by determining the altitude of a triangle formed by light rays from the object and the line extending from one retina to the other. On the contrary, Berkeley holds that it is clear that seeing distance is something one learns to do through trial and error, mainly by correlating cues that suggest distance: the distinctness or confusion of the visual appearance; the feelings received when the eyes turn; and the sensations attending the straining of the eyes. None of these bears any necessary connection to distance. Berkeley infers from this account that a person born blind and later given sight would not be able to tell by sight alone the distances objects were from her, nor tell the difference between a sphere and a cube. He also argues that in visually estimating distance, one is really estimating which tangible ideas one would likely experience if one were to take steps to approach the object. Not that these tangible ideas are themselves necessarily connected to the visual appearances. Instead, Berkeley holds that tangible and visual ideas are entirely heterogeneous, i.e., they are numerically and specifically distinct. The latter is a philosophical consequence of Berkeley’s theory of vision, which is sharply at odds with a central doctrine of Locke’s Essay, namely, that some ideas are common to both sight and touch. Locke’s doctrines also receive a great deal of attention in the Principles of Human Knowledge 1710. Here Berkeley considers the doctrine of abstract general ideas, which he finds in Book III of Locke’s Essay. He argues against such ideas partly on the ground that we cannot engage in the process of abstraction, partly on the ground that some abstract ideas are impossible objects, and also on the ground that such ideas are not needed for either language learning or language use. These arguments are of fundamental importance for Berkeley, since he thinks that the doctrine of abstract ideas helps to support metaphysical realism, absolute space, absolute motion, and absolute time Principles, 5, 100, 11011, as well as the view that some ideas are common to sight and touch New Theory, 123. All of these doctrines Berkeley holds to be mistaken, and the first is in direct conflict with his idealism. Hence, it is important for him to undermine any support these doctrines might receive from the abstract ideas thesis. Berkeleyan idealism is the view that the only existing entities are finite and infinite perceivers each of which is a spirit or mental substance, and entities that are perceived. Such a thesis implies that ordinary physical objects exist if and only if they are perceived, something Berkeley encapsulates in the esse est percipi principle: for all senBerkeley, George Berkeley, George 83   83 sible objects, i.e., objects capable of being perceived, their being is to be perceived. He gives essentially two arguments for this thesis. First, he holds that every physical object is just a collection of sensible qualities, and that every sensible quality is an idea. So, physical objects are just collections of sensible ideas. No idea can exist unperceived, something everyone in the period would have granted. Hence, no physical object can exist unperceived. The second argument is the socalled master argument of Principles 2224. There Berkeley argues that one cannot conceive a sensible object existing unperceived, because if one attempts to do this one must thereby conceive that very object. He concludes from this that no such object can exist “without the mind,” that is, wholly unperceived. Many of Berkeley’s opponents would have held instead that a physical object is best analyzed as a material substratum, in which some sensible qualities inhere. So Berkeley spends some effort arguing against material substrata or what he sometimes calls matter. His principal argument is that a sensible quality cannot inhere in matter, because a sensible quality is an idea, and surely an idea cannot exist except in a mind. This argument would be decisive if it were true that each sensible quality is an idea. Unfortunately, Berkeley gives no argument whatever for this contention in the Principles, and for that reason Berkeleyan idealism is not there well founded. Nor does the master argument fare much better, for there Berkeley seems to require a premise asserting that if an object is conceived, then that object is perceived. Yet such a premise is highly dubious. Probably Berkeley realized that his case for idealism had not been successful, and certainly he was stung by the poor reception of the Principles. His next book, Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous 1713, is aimed at rectifying these matters. There he argues at length for the thesis that each sensible quality is an idea. The master argument is repeated, but it is unnecessary if every sensible quality is an idea. In the Dialogues Berkeley is also much concerned to combat skepticism and defend common sense. He argues that representative realism as held by Locke leads to skepticism regarding the external world and this, Berkeley thinks, helps to support atheism and free thinking in religion. He also argues, more directly, that representative realism is false. Such a thesis incorporates the claim that somesensible ideas represent real qualities in objects, the so-called primary qualities. But Berkeley argues that a sensible idea can be like nothing but another idea, and so ideas cannot represent qualities in objects. In this way, Berkeley eliminates one main support of skepticism, and to that extent helps to support the commonsensical idea that we gain knowledge of the existence and nature of ordinary physical objects by means of perception. Berkeley’s positive views in epistemology are usually interpreted as a version of foundationalism. That is, he is generally thought to have defended the view that beliefs about currently perceived ideas are basic beliefs, beliefs that are immediately and non-inferentially justified or that count as pieces of immediate knowledge, and that all other justified beliefs in contingent propositions are justified by being somehow based upon the basic beliefs. Indeed, such a foundationalist doctrine is often taken to help define empiricism, held in common by Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. But whatever the merits of such a view as an interpretation of Locke or Hume, it is not Berkeley’s theory. This is because he allows that perceivers often have immediate and noninferential justified beliefs, and knowledge, about physical objects. Hence, Berkeley accepts a version of foundationalism that allows for basic beliefs quite different from just beliefs about one’s currently perceived ideas. Indeed, he goes so far as to maintain that such physical object beliefs are often certain, something neither Locke nor Hume would accept. In arguing against the existence of matter, Berkeley also maintains that we literally have no coherent concept of such stuff because we cannot have any sensible idea of it. Parity of reasoning would seem to dictate that Berkeley should reject mental substance as well, thereby threatening his idealism from another quarter. Berkeley is sensitive to this line of reasoning, and replies that while we have no idea of the self, we do have some notion of the self, that is, some lessthan-complete concept. He argues that a person gains some immediate knowledge of the existence and nature of herself in a reflex act; that is, when she is perceiving something she is also conscious that something is engaging in this perception, and this is sufficient for knowledge of that perceiving entity. To complement his idealism, Berkeley worked out a version of scientific instrumentalism, both in the Principles and in a later Latin work, De Motu 1721, a doctrine that anticipates the views of Mach. In the Dialogues he tries to show how his idealism is consistent with the biblical account of the creation, and consistent as well with common sense. Berkeley, George Berkeley, George 84   84 Three later works of Berkeley’s gained him an enormous amount of attention. Alciphron 1734 was written while Berkeley was in Rhode Island, and is a philosophical defense of Christian doctrine. It also contains some additional comments on perception, supplementing earlier work on that topic. The Analyst 1734 contains trenchant criticism of the method of fluxions in differential calculus, and it set off a flurry of pamphlet replies to Berkeley’s criticisms, to which Berkeley responded in his A Defense of Free Thinking in Mathematics. Siris 1744 contains a detailed account of the medicinal values of tar-water, water boiled with the bark of certain trees. This book also contains a defense of a sort of corpuscularian philosophy that seems to be at odds with the idealism elaborated in the earlier works for which Berkeley is now famous. In the years 170708, the youthful Berkeley kept a series of notebooks in which he worked out his ideas in philosophy and mathematics. These books, now known as the Philosophical Commentaries, provide the student of Berkeley with the rare opportunity to see a great philosopher’s thought in development. 

Berlin: I. Russian-born philosopher and historian of ideas. He is widely acclaimed for his doctrine of radical objective pluralism; his writings on liberty; his modification, refinement, and defense of traditional liberalism against the totalitarian doctrines of the twentieth century not least Marxism-Leninism; and his brilliant and illuminating studies in the history of ideas from Machiavelli and Vico to Marx and Sorel. A founding father with Austin, Ayer, and others of Oxford philosophy in the 1930s, he published several influential papers in its general spirit, but, without abandoning its empirical approach, he came increasingly to dissent from what seemed to him its unduly barren, doctrinaire, and truthdenying tendencies. From the 1950s onward he broke away to devote himself principally to social and political philosophy and to the study of general ideas. His two most important contributions in social and political theory, brought together with two other valuable essays in Four Essays on Liberty 1969, are “Historical Inevitability” 1954 and his 1958 inaugural lecture as Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford, “Two Concepts of Liberty.” The first is a bold and decisive attack on historical determinism and moral relativism and subjectivism and a ringing endorsement of the role of free will and responsibility in human history. The second contains Berlin’s enormously influential attempt to distinguish clearly between “negative” and “positive” liberty. Negative liberty, foreshadowed by such thinkers as J. S. Mill, Constant, and above all Herzen, consists in making minimal assumptions about the ultimate nature and needs of the subject, in ensuring a minimum of external interference by authority of any provenance, and in leaving open as large a field for free individual choice as is consonant with a minimum of social organization and order. Positive liberty, associated with monist and voluntarist thinkers of all kinds, not least Hegel, the German Idealists, and their historical progeny, begins with the notion of self-mastery and proceeds to make dogmatic and far-reaching metaphysical assumptions about the essence of the subject. It then deduces from these the proper paths to freedom, and, finally, seeks to drive flesh-and-blood individuals down these preordained paths, whether they wish it or not, within the framework of a tight-knit centralized state under the irrefragable rule of rational experts, thus perverting what begins as a legitimate human ideal, i.e. positive self-direction and self-mastery, into a tyranny. “Two Concepts of Liberty” also sets out to disentangle liberty in either of these senses from other ends, such as the craving for recognition, the need to belong, or human solidarity, fraternity, or equality. Berlin’s work in the history of ideas is of a piece with his other writings. Vico and Herder 1976 presents the emergence of that historicism and pluralism which shook the two-thousand-yearold monist rationalist faith in a unified body of truth regarding all questions of fact and principle in all fields of human knowledge. From this profound intellectual overturn Berlin traces in subsequent volumes of essays, such as Against the Current 1979, The Crooked Timber of Humanity 1990, and The Sense of Reality 1996, the growth of some of the principal intellectual movements that mark our era, among them nationalism, fascism, relativism, subjectivism, nihilism, voluntarism, and existentialism. He also presents with persuasiveness and clarity that peculiar objective pluralism which he identified and made his own. There is an irreducible plurality of objective human values, many of which are incompatible with one another; hence the ineluctable need for absolute choices by individuals and groups, a need that confers supreme value upon, and forms one of the major justifications of, his conception of negative liberty; Berlin, Isaiah Berlin, Isaiah 85   85 hence, too, his insistence that utopia, namely a world where all valid human ends and objective values are simultaneously realized in an ultimate synthesis, is a conceptual impossibility. While not himself founder of any definable school or movement, Berlin’s influence as a philosopher and as a human being has been immense, not least on a variety of distinguished thinkers such as Stuart Hampshire, Charles Taylor, Bernard Williams, Richard Wollheim, Gerry Cohen, Steven Lukes, David Pears, and many others. His general intellectual and moral impact on the life of the twentieth century as writer, diplomat, patron of music and the arts, international academic elder statesman, loved and trusted friend to the great and the humble, and dazzling lecturer, conversationalist, and animateur des idées, will furnish inexhaustible material to future historians. 

Bernard of Chartres fl. 111426, French philosopher. He was first a teacher 111419 and later chancellor 111926 of the cathedral school at Chartres, which was then an active center of learning in the liberal arts and philosophy. Bernard himself was renowned as a grammarian, i.e., as an expositor of difficult texts, and as a teacher of Plato. None of his works has survived whole, and only three fragments are preserved in works by others. He is now best known for an image recorded both by his student, John of Salisbury, and by William of Conches. In Bernard’s image, he and all his medieval contemporaries were in relation to the ancient authors like “dwarfs sitting on the shoulders of giants.” John of Salisbury takes the image to mean both that the medievals could see more and further than the ancients, and that they could do so only because they had been lifted up by such powerful predecessors. M.D.J. Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint 10901153, French Cistercian monk, mystic, and religious leader. He is most noted for his doctrine of Christian humility and his depiction of the mystical experience, which exerted considerable influence on later Christian mystics. Educated in France, he entered the monastery at Cîteaux in 1112, and three years later founded a daughter monastery at Clairvaux. According to Bernard, honest self-knowledge should reveal the extent to which we fail to be what we should be in the eyes of God. That selfknowledge should lead us to curb our pride and so become more humble. Humility is necessary for spiritual purification, which in turn is necessary for contemplation of God, the highest form of which is union with God. Consistent with orthodox Christian doctrine, Bernard maintains that mystical union does not entail identity. One does not become God; rather, one’s will and God’s will come into complete conformity. 

Bernoulli’s theorem, also called the weak law of large numbers, the principle that if a series of trials is repeated n times where a there are two possible outcomes, 0 and 1, on each trial, b the probability p of 0 is the same on each trial, and c this probability is independent of the outcome of other trials, then, for arbitrary positive e, as the number n of trials is increased, the probability that the absolute value Kr/n  pK of the difference between the relative frequency r/n of 0’s in the n trials and p is less than e approaches 1. The first proof of this theorem was given by Jakob Bernoulli in Part IV of his posthumously published Ars Conjectandi of 1713. Simplifications were later constructed and his result has been generalized in a series of “weak laws of large numbers.” Although Bernoulli’s theorem derives a conclusion about the probability of the relative frequency r/n of 0’s for large n of trials given the value of p, in Ars Conjectandi and correspondence with Leibniz, Bernoulli thought it could be used to reason from information about r/n to the value of p when the latter is unknown. Speculation persists as to whether Bernoulli anticipated the inverse inference of Bayes, the confidence interval estimation of Peirce, J. Neyman, and E. S. Pearson, or the fiducial argument of R. A. Fisher. 

Bertrand’s box paradox, a puzzle concerning conditional probability. Imagine three boxes with two drawers apiece. Each drawer of the first box contains a gold medal. Each drawer of the second contains a silver medal. One drawer of the third contains a gold medal, and the other a silver medal. At random, a box is selected and one of its drawers is opened. If a gold medal appears, what is the probability that the third box was selected? The probability seems to be ½, because the box is either the first or the third, and they seem equally probable. But a gold medal is less probable from the third box than from the first, Bernard of Chartres Bertrand’s box paradox 86   86 so the third box is actually less probable than the first. By Bayes’s theorem its probability is 1 /3. Joseph Bertrand, a French mathematician, published the paradox in Calcul des probabilités Calculus of Probabilities, 1889. 

Bertrand’s paradox, an inconsistency arising from the classical definition of an event’s probability as the number of favorable cases divided by the number of possible cases. Given a circle, a chord is selected at random. What is the probability that the chord is longer than a side of an equilateral triangle inscribed in the circle? The event has these characterizations: 1 the apex angle of an isosceles triangle inscribed in the circle and having the chord as a leg is less than 60°, 2 the chord intersects the diameter perpendicular to it less than ½ a radius from the circle’s center, and 3 the chord’s midpoint lies within a circle concentric with the original and of ¼ its area. The definition thus suggests that the event’s probability is 1 /3, 1 /2, and also ¼. Joseph Bertrand, a French mathematician, published the paradox in Calcul des probabilités 1889. 

Beth’s definability theorem, a theorem for firstorder logic. A theory defines a term t implicitly if and only if an explicit definition of the term, on the basis of the other primitive concepts, is entailed by the theory. A theory defines a term implicitly if any two models of the theory with the same domain and the same extension for the other primitive terms are identical, i.e., also have the same extension for the term. An explicit definition of a term is a sentence that states necessary and sufficient conditions for the term’s applicability. Beth’s theorem was implicit in a method to show independence of a term that was first used by the Italian logician Alessandro Padoa 18681937. Padoa suggested, in 1900, that independence of a primitive algebraic term from the other terms occurring in a set of axioms can be established by two true interpretations of the axioms that differ only in the interpretation of the term whose independence has to be proven. He claimed, without proof, that the existence of two such models is not only sufficient for, but also implied by, independence. Tarski first gave a proof of Beth’s theorem in 1926 for the logic of the Principia Mathematica of Whitehead and Russell, but the result was only obtained for first-order logic in 1953 by the Dutch logician Evert Beth 190864. In modern expositions Beth’s theorem is a direct implication of Craig’s interpolation theorem. In a variation on Padoa’s method, Karel de Bouvère described in 1959 a one-model method to show indefinability: if the set of logical consequences of a theory formulated in terms of the remaining vocabulary cannot be extended to a model of the full theory, a term is not explicitly definable in terms of the remaining vocabulary. In the philosophy of science literature this is called a failure of Ramsey-eliminability of the term. 

Bhagavad Gita from Sanskrit Bhagavadgita, ‘song of the blessed one/exalted lord’, Hindu devotional poem composed and edited between the fifth century B.C. and the second century A.D. It contains eighteen chapters and seven hundred verses, and forms the sixth book Chapters 23 40 of the Indian epic Mahabharata. In its narrative, the warrior Arjuna, reluctantly waiting to wage war, receives a revelation from the Lord Krishna that emphasizes selfless deeds and bhakti, or devotion. Strictly classified as smrti or fallible tradition, the Gita is typically treated as shruti or infallible revelation. Such major thinkers as Shankara, Ramanuja, and Madhva wrote commentaries on this beloved book. Shankara reads it as teaching that enlightenment comes through right Advaita Vedanta knowledge alone even without performance of religious duties. Ramanuja takes it to hold that enlightenment comes through performance of religious duties, particularly devotion to God for whose sake alone all other duties must be performed if one’s sins are to be washed away. Such devotion leads to or at its zenith includes self-knowledge and knowledge of personal Brahman. Madhva sees the Gita as emphasizing divine uniqueness and the necessity of love and attachment to God and not to oneself or the consequences of one’s deeds.

bhakti Sanskrit, in Hindu theistic thought systems, devotion. Bhakti includes the ideas of faith, surrender, love, affection, and attachment. Its most common form of expression is worship by means of offerings, puja. Theistic thinkers such as Ramanuja and Madhva argue that devotion is the key element that solves the human predicament. As a result the deity responds with grace or kindness prasadam and thereby causes the devotee to prosper or attain moksha. The Bhakti Sutras twelfth century A.D. distinguish “lower bhakti,” i.e., devotion with personal goals in mind, from “higher bhakti,” i.e., selfless devotion practiced only to please the deity. The latter is libBertrand’s paradox bhakti 87   87 eration. Modern Hindu philosophers, following Shankara and the modern Hindu apologist Swami Vivekananda 18621902, often relegate bhakti to a lower path than knowledge jnana for those who are unable to follow philosophy, but in the philosophical systems of many theists it is defended as the highest path with the main obstacle as unbelief, not ignorance. 

bhavanga, a subliminal mode of consciousness, according to Theravada Buddhist philosophers, in which no mental activity occurs. The continued existence of the bhavanga-mind in states where there is no intentional mental activity e.g., dreamless sleep is what guarantees the continuance of a particular mental continuum in such states. It operates also in ordinary events of sensation and conceptualization, being connected with such intentional mental events in complex ways, and is appealed to as an explanatory category in the accounts of the process leading from death to rebirth. Some Buddhists also use it as a soteriological category, identifying the bhavanga-mind with mind in its pure state, mind as luminous and radiant. 

biconditional, the logical operator, usually written with a triple-bar sign S or a doubleheaded arrow Q, used to indicate that two propositions have the same truth-value: that either both are true or else both are false. The term also designates a proposition having this sign, or a natural language expression of it, as its main connective; e.g., P if and only if Q. The truth table for the biconditional is The biconditional is so called because its application is logically equivalent to the conjunction ‘P-conditional-Q-and-Q-conditional-P’. 

bioethics, the subfield of ethics that concerns the ethical issues arising in medicine and from advances in biological science. One central area of bioethics is the ethical issues that arise in relations between health care professionals and patients. A second area focuses on broader issues of social justice in health care. A third area concerns the ethical issues raised by new biological knowledge or technology. In relations between health care professionals and patients, a fundamental issue is the appropriate role of each in decision making about patient care. More traditional views assigning principal decision-making authority to physicians have largely been replaced with ideals of shared decision making that assign a more active role to patients. Shared decision making is thought to reflect better the importance of patients’ self-determination in controlling their care. This increased role for patients is reflected in the ethical and legal doctrine of informed consent, which requires that health care not be rendered without the informed and voluntary consent of a competent patient. The requirement that consent be informed places a positive responsibility on health care professionals to provide their patients with the information they need to make informed decisions about care. The requirement that consent be voluntary requires that treatment not be forced, nor that patients’ decisions be coerced or manipulated. If patients lack the capacity to make competent health care decisions, e.g. young children or cognitively impaired adults, a surrogate, typically a parent in the case of children or a close family member in the case of adults, must decide for them. Surrogates’ decisions should follow the patient’s advance directive if one exists, be the decision the patient would have made in the circumstances if competent, or follow the patient’s best interests if the patient has never been competent or his or her wishes are not known. A major focus in bioethics generally, and treatment decision making in particular, is care at or near the end of life. It is now widely agreed that patients are entitled to decide about and to refuse, according to their own values, any lifesustaining treatment. They are also entitled to have desired treatments that may shorten their lives, such as high doses of pain medications necessary to relieve severe pain from cancer, although in practice pain treatment remains inadequate for many patients. Much more controversial is whether more active means to end life such as physician-assisted suicide and voluntary euthanasia are morally permissible in indibhavanga bioethics 88   88 vidual cases or justified as public policy; both remain illegal except in a very few jurisdictions. Several other moral principles have been central to defining professionalpatient relationships in health care. A principle of truth telling requires that professionals not lie to patients. Whereas in the past it was common, especially with patients with terminal cancers, not to inform patients fully about their diagnosis and prognosis, studies have shown that practice has changed substantially and that fully informing patients does not have the bad effects for patients that had been feared in the past. Principles of privacy and confidentiality require that information gathered in the professionalpatient relationship not be disclosed to third parties without patients’ consent. Especially with highly personal information in mental health care, or information that may lead to discrimination, such as a diagnosis of AIDS, assurance of confidentiality is fundamental to the trust necessary to a wellfunctioning professionalpatient relationship. Nevertheless, exceptions to confidentiality to prevent imminent and serious harm to others are well recognized ethically and legally. More recently, work in bioethics has focused on justice in the allocation of health care. Whereas nearly all developed countries treat health care as a moral and legal right, and ensure it to all their citizens through some form of national health care system, in the United States about 15 percent of the population remains without any form of health insurance. This has fed debates about whether health care is a right or privilege, a public or individual responsibility. Most bioethicists have supported a right to health care because of health care’s fundamental impact on people’s well-being, opportunity, ability to plan their lives, and even lives themselves. Even if there is a moral right to health care, however, few defend an unlimited right to all beneficial health care, no matter how small the benefit and how high the cost. Consequently, it is necessary to prioritize or ration health care services to reflect limited budgets for health care, and both the standards and procedures for doing so are ethically controversial. Utilitarians and defenders of cost-effectiveness analysis in health policy support using limited resources to maximize aggregate health benefits for the population. Their critics argue that this ignores concerns about equity, concerns about how health care resources and health are distributed. For example, some have argued that equity requires giving priority to treating the worst-off or sickest, even at a sacrifice in aggregate health benefits; moreover, taking account in prioritization of differences in costs of different treatments can lead to ethically problematic results, such as giving higher priority to providing very small benefits to many persons than very large but individually more expensive benefits, including life-saving interventions, to a few persons, as the state of Oregon found in its initial widely publicized prioritization program. In the face of controversy over standards for rationing care, it is natural to rely on fair procedures to make rationing decisions. Other bioethics issues arise from dramatic advances in biological knowledge and technology. Perhaps the most prominent example is new knowledge of human genetics, propelled in substantial part by the worldwide Human Genome Project, which seeks to map the entire human genome. This project and related research will enable the prevention of genetically transmitted diseases, but already raises questions about which conditions to prevent in offspring and which should be accepted and lived with, particularly when the means of preventing the condition is by abortion of the fetus with the condition. Looking further into the future, new genetic knowledge and technology will likely enable us to enhance normal capacities, not just prevent or cure disease, and to manipulate the genes of future children, raising profoundly difficult questions about what kinds of persons to create and the degree to which deliberate human design should replace “nature” in the creation of our offspring. A dramatic example of new abilities to create offspring, though now limited to the animal realm, was the cloning in Scotland in 1997 of a sheep from a single cell of an adult sheep; this event raised the very controversial future prospect of cloning human beings. Finally, new reproductive technologies, such as oocyte egg donation, and practices such as surrogate motherhood, raise deep issues about the meaning and nature of parenthood and families. 

bit from binary digit, a unit or measure of information. Suggested by John W. Tukey, a bit is both an amount of information a reduction of eight equally likely possibilities to one generates three bits [% log2 8] of information and a system of representing that quantity. The binary system uses 1’s and 0’s.

black box, a hypothetical unit specified only by functional role, in order to explain some effect or behavior. The term may refer to a single entity with an unknown structure, or unknown internal organization, which realizes some known function, or to any one of a system of such entities, whose organization and functions are inferred from the behavior of an organism or entity of which they are constituents. Within behaviorism and classical learning theory, the basic functions were taken to be generalized mechanisms governing the relationship of stimulus to response, including reinforcement, inhibition, extinction, and arousal. The organism was treated as a black box realizing these functions. Within cybernetics, though there are no simple inputoutput rules describing the organism, there is an emphasis on functional organization and feedback in controlling behavior. The components within a cybernetic system are treated as black boxes. In both cases, the details of underlying structure, mechanism, and dynamics are either unknown or regarded as unimportant. 

blindsight, a residual visual capacity resulting from lesions in certain areas of the brain the striate cortex, area 17. Under routine clinical testing, persons suffering such lesions appear to be densely blind in particular regions of the visual field. Researchers have long recognized that, in primates, comparable lesions do not result in similar deficits. It has seemed unlikely that this disparity could be due to differences in brain function, however. And, indeed, when human subjects are tested in the way non-human subjects are tested, the disparity vanishes. Although subjects report that they can detect nothing in the blind field, when required to “guess” at properties of items situated there, they perform remarkably well. They seem to “know” the contents of the blind field while remaining unaware that they know, often expressing astonishment on being told the results of testing in the blind field. 

Bloch: e., philosopher, influenced by Marxism, his views went beyond Marxism as he matured. He fled Germany in the 1930s, but returned after World War II to a professorship in East Germany, where his increasingly unorthodox ideas were eventually censured by the Communist authorities, forcing a move to West Germany in the 1960s. His major work, The Principle of Hope 195459, is influenced by German idealism, Jewish mysticism, Neoplatonism, utopianism, and numerous other sources besides Marxism. Humans are essentially unfinished, moved by a cosmic impulse, “hope,” a tendency in them to strive for the as-yet-unrealized, which manifests itself as utopia, or vision of future possibilities. Despite his atheism, Bloch wished to retrieve the sense of self-transcending that he saw in the religious and mythical traditions of humankind. His ideas have consequently influenced theology as well as philosophy, e.g. the “theology of hope” of Jurgen Moltmann. R.H.K. Blondel, Maurice 18611949, French Christian philosopher who discovered the deist background of human action. In his main work, Action 1893, 2d rev. ed. 1950, Blondel held that action is part of the very nature of human beings and as such becomes an object of philosophy; through philosophy, action should find its meaning, i.e. realize itself rationally. An appropriate phenomenology of action through phenomenological description uncovers the phenomenal level of action but points beyond it. Such a supraphenomenal sense of action provides it a metaphysical status. This phenomenology of action rests on an immanent dialectics of action: a gap between the aim of the action and its realization. This gap, while dissatisfying to the actor, also drives him toward new activities. The only immanent solution of this dialectics and its consequences is a transcendent one. We have to realize that we, like other humans, cannot grasp our own activities and must accept our limitations and our finitude as well as the insufficiency of our philosophy, which is now understood as a philosophy of insufficiency and points toward the existence of the supernatural element in every human act, namely God. Human activity is the outcome of divine grace. Through action bit Blondel, Maurice 90   90 one touches the existence of God, something not possible by logical argumentation. In the later phase of his development Blondel deserted his early “anti-intellectualism” and stressed the close relation between thought and action, now understood as inseparable and mutually interrelated. He came to see philosophy as a rational instrument of understanding one’s actions as well as one’s insufficiency.

Bodin, Jean c.152996, French political philosopher whose philosophy centers on the concept of sovereignty. His Six livres de la république 1577 defines a state as constituted by common public interests, families, and the sovereign. The sovereign is the lawgiver, who stands beyond the absolute rights he possesses; he must, however, follow the law of God, natural law, and the constitution. The ideal state was for Bodin a monarchy that uses aristocratic and democratic structures of government for the sake of the common good. In order to achieve a broader empirical picture of politics Bodin used historical comparisons. This is methodologically reflected in his Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem 1566. Bodin was clearly a theorist of absolutism. As a member of the Politique group he played a practical role in emancipating the state from the church. His thinking was influenced by his experience of civil war. In his Heptaplomeres posthumous he pleaded for tolerance with respect to all religions, including Islam and Judaism. As a public prosecutor, however, he wrote a manual for judges in witchcraft trials De la démonomanie des sorciers, 1580. By stressing the peacemaking role of a strong state Bodin was a forerunner of Hobbes. 

boehme: j. protestant speculative mystic. Influenced especially by Paracelsus, Boehme received little formal education, but was successful enough as a shoemaker to devote himself to his writing, explicating his religious experiences. He published little in his lifetime, though enough to attract charges of heresy from local clergy. He did gather followers, and his works were published after his death. His writings are elaborately symbolic rather than argumentative, but respond deeply to fundamental problems in the Christian worldview. He holds that the Godhead, omnipotent will, is as nothing to us, since we can in no way grasp it. The Mysterium Magnum, the ideal world, is conceived in God’s mind through an impulse to selfrevelation. The actual world, separate from God, is created through His will, and seeks to return to the peace of the Godhead. The world is good, as God is, but its goodness falls away, and is restored at the end of history, though not entirely, for some souls are damned eternally. Human beings enjoy free will, and create themselves through rebirth in faith. The Fall is necessary for the selfknowledge gained in recovery from it. Recognition of one’s hidden, free self is a recognition of God manifested in the world, so that human salvation completes God’s act of self-revelation. It is also a recognition of evil rooted in the blind will underlying all individual existence, without which there would be nothing except the Godhead. Boehme’s works influenced Hegel and the later Schelling. 

Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus, Roman philosopher and Aristotelian translator and commentator. He was born into a wealthy patrician family in Rome and had a distinguished political career under the Ostrogothic king Theodoric before being arrested and executed on charges of treason. His logic and philosophical theology contain important contributions to the philosophy of the late classical and early medieval periods, and his translations of and commentaries on Aristotle profoundly influenced the history of philosophy, particularly in the medieval Latin West. His most famous work, The Consolation of Philosophy, composed during his imprisonment, is a moving reflection on the nature of human happiness and the problem of evil and contains classic discussions of providence, fate, chance, and the apparent incompatibility of divine foreknowledge and human free choice. He was known during his own lifetime, however, as a brilliant scholar whose knowledge of the Grecian language and ancient Grecian philosophy set him apart from his Latin contemporaries. He conceived his scholarly career as devoted to preserving and making accessible to the Latin West the great philosophical achievement of ancient Greece. To this end he announced an ambitious plan to translate into Latin and write commenbodily continuity Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus 91   91 taries on all of Plato and Aristotle, but it seems that he achieved this goal only for Aristotle’s Organon. His extant translations include Porphyry’s Isagoge an introduction to Aristotle’s Categories and Aristotle’s Categories, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics, Topics, and Sophistical Refutations. He wrote two commentaries on the Isagoge and On Interpretation and one on the Categories, and we have what appear to be his notes for a commentary on the Prior Analytics. His translation of the Posterior Analytics and his commentary on the Topics are lost. He also commented on Cicero’s Topica and wrote his own treatises on logic, including De syllogismis hypotheticis, De syllogismis categoricis, Introductio in categoricos syllogismos, De divisione, and De topicis differentiis, in which he elaborates and supplements Aristotelian logic. Boethius shared the common Neoplatonist view that the Platonist and Aristotelian systems could be harmonized by following Aristotle in logic and natural philosophy and Plato in metaphysics and theology. This plan for harmonization rests on a distinction between two kinds of forms: 1 forms that are conjoined with matter to constitute bodies  these, which he calls “images” imagines, correspond to the forms in Aristotle’s hylomorphic account of corporeal substances; and 2 forms that are pure and entirely separate from matter, corresponding to Plato’s ontologically separate Forms. He calls these “true forms” and “the forms themselves.” He holds that the former, “enmattered” forms depend for their being on the latter, pure forms. Boethius takes these three sorts of entities  bodies, enmattered forms, and separate forms  to be the respective objects of three different cognitive activities, which constitute the three branches of speculative philosophy. Natural philosophy is concerned with enmattered forms as enmattered, mathematics with enmattered forms considered apart from their matter though they cannot be separated from matter in actuality, and theology with the pure and separate forms. He thinks that the mental abstraction characteristic of mathematics is important for understanding the Peripatetic account of universals: the enmattered, particular forms found in sensible things can be considered as universal when they are considered apart from the matter in which they inhere though they cannot actually exist apart from matter. But he stops short of endorsing this moderately realist Aristotelian account of universals. His commitment to an ontology that includes not just Aristotelian natural forms but also Platonist Forms existing apart from matter implies a strong realist view of universals. With the exception of De fide catholica, which is a straightforward credal statement, Boethius’s theological treatises De Trinitate, Utrum Pater et Filius, Quomodo substantiae, and Contra Euthychen et Nestorium show his commitment to using logic and metaphysics, particularly the Aristotelian doctrines of the categories and predicables, to clarify and resolve issues in Christian theology. De Trinitate, e.g., includes a historically influential discussion of the Aristotelian categories and the applicability of various kinds of predicates to God. Running through these treatises is his view that predicates in the category of relation are unique by virtue of not always requiring for their applicability an ontological ground in the subjects to which they apply, a doctrine that gave rise to the common medieval distinction between so-called real and non-real relations. Regardless of the intrinsic significance of Boethius’s philosophical ideas, he stands as a monumental figure in the history of medieval philosophy rivaled in importance only by Aristotle and Augustine. Until the recovery of the works of Aristotle in the mid-twelfth century, medieval philosophers depended almost entirely on Boethius’s translations and commentaries for their knowledge of pagan ancient philosophy, and his treatises on logic continued to be influential throughout the Middle Ages. The preoccupation of early medieval philosophers with logic and with the problem of universals in particular is due largely to their having been tutored by Boethius and Boethius’s Aristotle. The theological treatises also received wide attention in the Middle Ages, giving rise to a commentary tradition extending from the ninth century through the Renaissance and shaping discussion of central theological doctrines such as the Trinity and Incarnation. 

boltzmann, l., physicist who was a spirited advocate of the atomic theory and a pioneer in developing the kinetic theory of gases and statistical mechanics. Boltzmann’s most famous achievements were the transport equation, the H-theorem, and the probabilistic interpretation of entropy. This work is summarized in his Vorlesungen über Gastheorie “Lectures on the Theory of Gases,” 189698. He held chairs in physics at the universities of Graz, Vienna, Munich, and Leipzig before returning to Vienna as professor of theoretical physics in 1902. In 1903 he succeeded Mach at Boltzmann, Ludwig Boltzmann, Ludwig 92   92 Vienna and lectured on the philosophy of science. In the 1890s the atomic-kinetic theory was attacked by Mach and by the energeticists led by Wilhelm Ostwald. Boltzmann’s counterattack can be found in his Populäre Schriften “Popular Writings,” 1905. Boltzmann agreed with his critics that many of his mechanical models of gas molecules could not be true but, like Maxwell, defended models as invaluable heuristic tools. Boltzmann also insisted that it was futile to try to eliminate all metaphysical pictures from theories in favor of bare equations. For Boltzmann, the goal of physics is not merely the discovery of equations but the construction of a coherent picture of reality. Boltzmann defended his H-theorem against the reversibility objection of Loschmidt and the recurrence objection of Zermelo by conceding that a spontaneous decrease in entropy was possible but extremely unlikely. Boltzmann’s views that irreversibility depends on the probability of initial conditions and that entropy increase determines the direction of time are defended by Reichenbach in The Direction of Time 1956. 

bolzano: b., philosopher. He studied philosophy, mathematics, physics, and theology in Prague; received the Ph.D.; was ordained a priest 1805; was appointed to a chair in religion at Charles  in 1806; and, owing to his criticism of the Austrian constitution, was dismissed in 1819. He composed his two main works from 1823 through 1841: the Wissenschaftslehre 4 vols., 1837 and the posthumous Grössenlehre. His ontology and logical semantics influenced Husserl and, indirectly, Lukasiewicz, Tarski, and others of the Warsaw School. His conception of ethics and social philosophy affected both the cultural life of Bohemia and the Austrian system of education. Bolzano recognized a profound distinction between the actual thoughts and judgments Urteile of human beings, their linguistic expressions, and the abstract propositions Sätze an sich and their parts which exist independently of those thoughts, judgments, and expressions. A proposition in Bolzano’s sense is a preexistent sequence of ideas-as-such Vorstellungen an sich. Only propositions containing finite ideas-as-such are accessible to the mind. Real things existing concretely in space and time have subsistence Dasein whereas abstract objects such as propositions have only logical existence. Adherences, i.e., forces, applied to certain concrete substances give rise to subjective ideas, thoughts, or judgments. A subjective idea is a part of a judgment that is not itself a judgment. The set of judgments is ordered by a causal relation. Bolzano’s abstract world is constituted of sets, ideas-as-such, certain properties Beschaffenheiten, and objects constructed from these. Thus, sentence shapes are a kind of ideas-as-such, and certain complexes of ideas-as-such constitute propositions. Ideas-as-such can be generated from expressions of a language by postulates for the relation of being an object of something. Analogously, properties can be generated by postulates for the relation of something being applied to an object. Bolzano’s notion of religion is based on his distinction between propositions and judgments. His Lehrbuch der Religionswissenschaft 4 vols., 1834 distinguishes between religion in the objective and subjective senses. The former is a set of religious propositions, whereas the latter is the set of religious views of a single person. Hence, a subjective religion can contain an objective one. By defining a religious proposition as being moral and imperatives the rules of utilitarianism, Bolzano integrated his notion of religion within his ontology. In the Grössenlehre Bolzano intended to give a detailed, well-founded exposition of contemporary mathematics and also to inaugurate new domains of research. Natural numbers are defined, half a century before Frege, as properties of “bijective” sets the members of which can be put in one-to-one correspondence, and real numbers are conceived as properties of sets of certain infinite sequences of rational numbers. The analysis of infinite sets brought him to reject the Euclidean doctrine that the whole is always greater than any of its parts and, hence, to the insight that a set is infinite if and only if it is bijective to a proper subset of itself. This anticipates Peirce and Dedekind. Bolzano’s extension of the linear continuum of finite numbers by infinitesimals implies a relatively constructive approach to nonstandard analysis. In the development of standard analysis the most remarkable result of the Grössenlehre is the anticipation of Weirstrass’s discovery that there exist nowhere differentiable continuous functions. The Wissenschaftslehre was intended to lay the logical and epistemological foundations of Bolzano’s mathematics. A theory of science in Bolzano’s sense is a collection of rules for delimiting the set of scientific textbooks. Whether a Bolzano, Bernard Bolzano, Bernard 93   93 class of true propositions is a worthwhile object of representation in a scientific textbook is an ethical question decidable on utilitarian principles. Bolzano proceeded from an expanded and standardized ordinary language through which he could describe propositions and their parts. He defined the semantic notion of truth and introduced the function corresponding to a “replacement” operation on propositions. One of his major achievements was his definition of logical derivability logische Ableitbarkeit between sets of propositions: B is logically derivable from A if and only if all elements of the sum of A and B are simultaneously true for some replacement of their non-logical ideas-as-such and if all elements of B are true for any such replacement that makes all elements of A true. In addition to this notion, which is similar to Tarski’s concept of consequence of 1936, Bolzano introduced a notion corresponding to Gentzen’s concept of consequence. A proposition is universally valid allgemeingültig if it is derivable from the null class. In his proof theory Bolzano formulated counterparts to Gentzen’s cut rule. Bolzano introduced a notion of inductive probability as a generalization of derivability in a limited domain. This notion has the formal properties of conditional probability. These features and Bolzano’s characterization of probability density by the technique of variation are reminiscent of Wittgenstein’s inductive logic and Carnap’s theory of regular confirmation functions. The replacement of conceptual complexes in propositions would, if applied to a formalized language, correspond closely to a substitutionsemantic conception of quantification. His own philosophical language was based on a kind of free logic. In essence, Bolzano characterized a substitution-semantic notion of consequence with a finite number of antecedents. His quantification over individual and general concepts amounts to the introduction of a non-elementary logic of lowest order containing a quantification theory of predicate variables but no set-theoretical principles such as choice axioms. His conception of universal validity and of the semantic superstructure of logic leads to a semantically adequate extension of the predicate-logical version of Lewis’s system S5 of modal logic without paradoxes. It is also possible to simulate Bolzano’s theory of probability in a substitution-semantically constructed theory of probability functions. Hence, by means of an ontologically parsimonious superstructure without possible-worlds metaphysics, Bolzano was able to delimit essentially the realms of classical logical truth and additive probability spaces. In geometry Bolzano created a new foundation from a topological point of view. He defined the notion of an isolated point of a set in a way reminiscent of the notion of a point at which a set is well-dimensional in the sense of Urysohn and Menger. On this basis he introduced his topological notion of a continuum and formulated a recursive definition of the dimensionality of non-empty subsets of the Euclidean 3-space, which is closely related to the inductive dimension concept of Urysohn and Menger. In a remarkable paragraph of an unfinished late manuscript on geometry he stated the celebrated curve theorem of Jordan. 

Bonaventure, Saint c.122174, Italian theologian. Born John of Fidanza in Bagnorea, Tuscany, he was educated at Paris, earning a master’s degree in arts and a doctorate in theology. He joined the Franciscans about 1243, while still a student, and was elected minister general of the order in 1257. Made cardinal bishop of Albano by Pope Gregory X in 1274, Bonaventure helped organize the Second Ecumenical Council of Lyons, during the course of which he died, in July 1274. He was canonized in 1482 and named a doctor of the church in 1587. Bonaventure wrote and preached extensively on the relation between philosophy and theology, the role of reason in spiritual and religious life, and the extent to which knowledge in God is obtainable by the “wayfarer.” His basic position is nicely expressed in De reductione artium ad theologiam “On the Reduction of the Arts to Theology”: “the manifold wisdom of God, which is clearly revealed in sacred scripture, lies hidden in all knowledge and in all nature.” He adds, “all divisions of knowledge are handmaids of theology.” But he is critical of those theologians who wish to sever the connection between faith and reason. As he argues in another famous work, Itinerarium mentis ad deum “The Mind’s Journey unto God,” 1259, “since, relative to our life on earth, the world is itself a ladder for ascending to God, we find here certain traces, certain images” of the divine hand, in which God himself is mirrored. Although Bonaventure’s own philosophical outlook is Augustinian, he was also influenced by Aristotle, whose newly available works he both read and appreciated. Thus, while upholdBonaventure, Saint Bonaventure, Saint 94   94 ing the Aristotelian ideas that knowledge of the external world is based on the senses and that the mind comes into existence as a tabula rasa, he also contends that divine illumination is necessary to explain both the acquisition of universal concepts from sense images, and the certainty of intellectual judgment. His own illuminationist epistemology seeks a middle ground between, on the one hand, those who maintain that the eternal light is the sole reason for human knowing, providing the human intellect with its archetypal and intelligible objects, and, on the other, those holding that the eternal light merely influences human knowing, helping guide it toward truth. He holds that our intellect has certain knowledge when stable; eternal archetypes are “contuited by us [a nobis contuita],” together with intelligible species produced by its own fallible powers. In metaphysics, Bonaventure defends exemplarism, the doctrine that all creation is patterned after exemplar causes or ideas in the mind of God. Like Aquinas, but unlike Duns Scotus, he argues that it is through such ideas that God knows all creatures. He also adopts the emanationist principle that creation proceeds from God’s goodness, which is self-diffusive, but differs from other emanationists, such as al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, in arguing that divine emanation is neither necessary nor indirect i.e., accomplished by secondary agents or intelligences. Indeed, he sees the views of these Islamic philosophers as typical of the errors bound to follow once Aristotelian rationalism is taken to its extreme. He is also well known for his anti-Aristotelian argument that the eternity of the world  something even Aquinas following Maimonides concedes as a theoretical possibility  is demonstrably false. Bonaventure also subscribes to several other doctrines characteristic of medieval Augustinianism: universal hylomorphism, the thesis, defended by Ibn Gabirol and Avicenna among others, that everything other than God is composed of matter and form; the plurality of forms, the view that subjects and predicates in the category of substance are ordered in terms of their metaphysical priority; and the ontological view of truth, according to which truth is a kind of rightness perceived by the mind. In a similar vein, Bonaventure argues that knowledge ultimately consists in perceiving truth directly, without argument or demonstration. Bonaventure also wrote several classic works in the tradition of mystical theology. His bestknown and most popular mystical work is the aforementioned Itinerarium, written in 1259 on a pilgrimage to La Verna, during which he beheld the six-winged seraph that had also appeared to Francis of Assisi when Francis received the stigmata. Bonaventure outlines a seven-stage spiritual journey, in which our mind moves from first considering God’s traces in the perfections of irrational creatures, to a final state of peaceful repose, in which our affections are “transferred and transformed into God.” Central to his writings on spiritual life is the theme of the “three ways”: the purgative way, inspired by conscience, which expels sin; the illuminative way, inspired by the intellect, which imitates Christ; and the unitive way, inspired by wisdom, which unites us to God through love. Bonaventure’s writings most immediately influenced the work of other medieval Augustinians, such as Matthew of Aquasparta and John Peckham, and later, followers of Duns Scotus. But his modern reputation rests on his profound contributions to philosophical theology, Franciscan spirituality, and mystical thought, in all three of which he remains an authoritative source. 

book of life, expression found in Hebrew and Christian scriptures signifying a record kept by the Lord of those destined for eternal happiness Exodus 32:32; Psalms 68; Malachi 3:16; Daniel 12:1; Philippians 4:3; Revelation 3:5, 17:8, 20:12, 21:27. Medieval philosophers often referred to the book of life when discussing issues of predestination, divine omniscience, foreknowledge, and free will. Figures like Augustine and Aquinas asked whether it represented God’s unerring foreknowledge or predestination, or whether some names could be added or deleted from it. The term is used by some contemporary philosophers to mean a record of all the events in a person’s life. 

Boolean algebra, 1 an ordered triple B,†,3, where B is a set containing at least two elements and † and 3 are unary and binary operations in B such that i a 3 b % b 3 a, ii a 3 b 3 c % a 3 b 3 c, iii a 3 † a % b 3 † b, and iv a 3 b = a if and only if a 3 † b % a 3 † a; 2 the theboo-hurrah theory Boolean algebra 95   95 ory of such algebras. Such structures are modern descendants of algebras published by the mathematician G. Boole in 1847 and representing the first successful algebraic treatment of logic. Interpreting † and 3 as negation and conjunction, respectively, makes Boolean algebra a calculus of propositions. Likewise, if B % {T,F} and † and 3 are the truth-functions for negation and conjunction, then B,†,3  the truth table for those two connectives  forms a two-element Boolean algebra. Picturing a Boolean algebra is simple. B,†,3 is a full subset algebra if B is the set of all subsets of a given set and † and 3 are set complementation and intersection, respectively. Then every finite Boolean algebra is isomorphic to a full subset algebra, while every infinite Boolean algebra is isomorphic to a subalgebra of such an algebra. It is for this reason that Boolean algebra is often characterized as the calculus of classes. 

borderline case, in the logical sense, a case that falls within the “gray area” or “twilight zone” associated with a vague concept; in the pragmatic sense, a doubtful, disputed, or arguable case. These two senses are not mutually exclusive, of course. A moment of time near sunrise or sunset may be a borderline case of daytime or nighttime in the logical sense, but not in the pragmatic sense. A sufficiently freshly fertilized ovum may be a borderline case of a person in both senses. Fermat’s hypothesis, or any of a large number of other disputed mathematical propositions, may be a borderline case in the pragmatic sense but not in the logical sense. A borderline case per se in either sense need not be a limiting case or a degenerate case.

bosanquet:  b.: Cited by H. P. Grice. English philosopher, the most systematic Oxford absolute idealist and, with F. H. Bradley, the leading Oxford defender of absolute idealism. Although he derived his last name from Huguenot ancestors, Bosanquet was thoroughly English. Born at Altwick and educated at Harrow and Balliol, Oxford, he was for eleven years a fellow of  University College, Oxford. The death of his father in 1880 and the resulting inheritance enabled Bosanquet to leave Oxford for London and a career as a writer and social activist. While writing, he taught courses for the London Ethical Society’s Center for  Extension and donated time to the Charity Organization Society. In 1895 he married his coworker in the Charity Organization Society, Helen Dendy, who was also the translator of Christoph Sigwart’s Logic. Bosanquet was professor of moral philosophy at St. Andrews from 1903 to 1908. He gave the Gifford Lectures in 1911 and 1912. Otherwise he lived in London until his death. Bosanquet’s most comprehensive work, his two-volume Gifford Lectures, The Principle of Individuality and Value and The Value and Destiny of the Individual, covers most aspects of his philosophy. In The Principle of Individuality and Value he argues that the search for truth proceeds by eliminating contradictions in experience. For Bosanquet a contradiction arises when there are incompatible interpretations of the same fact. This involves making distinctions that harmonize the incompatible interpretations in a larger body of knowledge. Bosanquet thought there was no way to arrest this process short of recognizing that all human experience forms a comprehensive whole which is reality. Bosanquet called this totality “the Absolute.” Just as conflicting interpretations of the same fact find harmonious places in the Absolute, so conflicting desires are also included. The Absolute thus satisfies all desires and provides Bosanquet’s standard for evaluating other objects. This is because in his view the value of an object is determined by its ability to satisfy desires. From this Bosanquet concluded that human beings, as fragments of the Absolute, acquire greater value as they realize themselves by partaking more fully in the Absolute. In The Value and Destiny of the Individual Bosanquet explained how human beings could do this. As finite, human beings face obstacles they cannot overcome; yet they desire the good i.e., the Absolute which for Bosanquet overcomes all obstacles and satisfies all desires. Humans can best realize a desire for the good, Bosanquet thinks, by surrendering their private desires for the sake of the good. This attitude of surrender, which Bosanquet calls the religious consciousness, relates human beings to what is permanently valuable in reality and increases their own value and satisfaction accordingly. Bosanquet’s defense of this metaphysical vision rests heavily on his first major work, Logic or the Morphology of Knowledge 1888; 2d ed., 1911. As the subtitle indicates, Bosanquet took the subject matter of Logic to be the structure of knowledge. Like Hegel, who was in many ways his inspiration, Bosanquet thought that the nature of knowledge was defined by structures repeated in different parts of knowledge. He called these structures forms of judgment and tried to show that simple judgments are dependent on increasingly complex ones and finally on an all-inclusive judgment that defines reality. For example, the simplest element of knowledge is a demonstrative judgment like “This is hot.” But making such a judgment presupposes understanding the contrast between ‘this’ and ‘that’. Demonstrative judgments thus depend on comparative judgments like “This is hotter than that.” Since these judgments are less dependent on other judgments, they more fully embody human knowledge. Bosanquet claimed that the series of increasingly complex judgments are not arranged in a simple linear order but develop along different branches finally uniting in disjunctive judgments that attribute to reality an exhaustive set of mutually exclusive alternatives which are themselves judgments. When one contained judgment is asserted on the basis of another, a judgment containing both is an inference. For Bosanquet inferences are mediated judgments that assert their conclusions based on grounds. When these grounds are made fully explicit in a judgment containing them, that judgment embodies the nature of inference: that one must accept the conclusion or reject the whole of knowledge. Since for Bosanquet the difference between any judgment and the reality it represents is that a judgment is composed of ideas that abstract from reality, a fully comprehensive judgment includes all aspects of reality. It is thus identical to reality. By locating all judgments within this one, Bosanquet claimed to have described the morphology of knowledge as well as to have shown that thought is identical to reality. Bosanquet removed an objection to this identification in History of Aesthetics 1892, where he traces the development of the philosophy of the beautiful from its inception through absolute idealism. According to Plato and Aristotle beauty is found in imitations of reality, while in objective idealism it is reality in sensuous form. Drawing heavily on Kant, Bosanquet saw this process as an overcoming of the opposition between sense and reason by showing how a pleasurable feeling can partake of reason. He thought that absolute idealism explained this by showing that we experience objects as beautiful because their sensible qualities exhibit the unifying activity of reason. Bosanquet treated the political implications of absolute idealism in his Philosophical Theory of the State 1898; 3d ed., 1920, where he argues that humans achieve their ends only in communities. According to Bosanquet, all humans rationally will their own ends. Because their ends differ from moment to moment, the ends they rationally will are those that harmonize their desires at particular moments. Similarly, because the ends of different individuals overlap and conflict, what they rationally will are ends that harmonize their desires, which are the ends of humans in communities. They are willed by the general will, the realization of which is self-rule or liberty. This provides the rational ground of political obligation, since the most comprehensive system of modern life is the state, the end of which is the realization of the best life for its citizens. 

Boscovich, Roger Joseph, or Rudjer Josip Bos v kovic’, philosopher. Born of Serbian and Italian parents, he was a Jesuit and polymath best known for his A Theory of Natural Philosophy Reduced to a Single Law of the Actions Existing in Nature. This work attempts to explain all physical phenomena in terms of the attractions and repulsions of point particles puncta that are indistinguishable in their intrinsic qualitative properties. According to Boscovich’s single law, puncta at a certain distance attract, until upon approaching one another they reach a point at which they repel, and eventually reach equilibrium. Thus, Boscovich defends a form of dynamism, or the theory that nature is to be understood in terms of force and not mass where forces are functions of time and distance. By dispensing with extended substance, Boscovich avoided epistemological difficulties facing Locke’s natural philosophy and anticipated developments in modern physics. Among those influenced by Boscovich were Kant who defended a version of dynamism, Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, and Lord Kelvin. Boscovich’s theory has proved to be empirically inadequate to account for phenomena such as light. A philosophical difficulty for Boscovich’s puncta, which are physical substances, arises out of their zero-dimensionality. It is plausible that any power must have a basis in an object’s intrinsic properties, and puncta appear to lack such support for their powers. However, it is extensional properties that puncta lack, and Boscovich could argue that the categorial property of being an unextended spatial substance provides the needed basis.

Bouwsma, Oets Kolk, philosopher, a practitioner of ordinary language philosophy and celebrated teacher. Through work on Moore and contact with students such as Norman Malcolm and Morris Lazerowitz, whom he sent from Nebraska to work with Moore, Bouwsma discovered Wittgenstein. He became known for conveying an understanding of Wittgenstein’s techniques of philosophical analysis through his own often humorous grasp of sense and nonsense. Focusing on a particular pivotal sentence in an argument, he provided imaginative surroundings for it, showing how, in the philosopher’s mouth, the sentence lacked sense. He sometimes described this as “the method of failure.” In connection with Descartes’s evil genius, e.g., Bouwsma invents an elaborate story in which the evil genius tries but fails to permanently deceive by means of a totally paper world. Our inability to imagine such a deception undermines the sense of the evil genius argument. His writings are replete with similar stories, analogies, and teases of sense and nonsense for such philosophical standards as Berkeley’s idealism, Moore’s theory of sensedata, and Anselm’s ontological argument. Bouwsma did not advocate theories nor put forward refutations of other philosophers’ views. His talent lay rather in exposing some central sentence in an argument as disguised nonsense. In this, he went beyond Wittgenstein, working out the details of the latter’s insights into language. In addition to this appropriation of Wittgenstein, Bouwsma also appropriated Kierkegaard, understanding him too as one who dispelled philosophical illusions  those arising from the attempt to understand Christianity. The ordinary language of religious philosophy was that of scriptures. He drew upon this language in his many essays on religious themes. His religious dimension made whole this person who gave no quarter to traditional metaphysics. His papers are published under the titles Philosophical Essays, Toward a New Sensibility, Without Proof or Evidence, and Wittgenstein Conversations 194951. His philosophical notebooks are housed at the Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas. 

Boyle, Robert 162791, British chemist and physicist who was a major figure in seventeenthcentury natural philosophy. To his contemporaries he was “the restorer” in England of the mechanical philosophy. His program was to replace the vacuous explanations characteristic of Peripateticism the “quality of whiteness” in snow explains why it dazzles the eyes by explanations employing the “two grand and most catholic principles of bodies, matter and motion,” matter being composed of corpuscles, with motion “the grand agent of all that happens in nature.” Boyle wrote influentially on scientific methodology, emphasizing experimentation a Baconian influence, experimental precision, and the importance of devising “good and excellent” hypotheses. The dispute with Spinoza on the validation of explanatory hypotheses contrasted Boyle’s experimental way with Spinoza’s way of rational analysis. The 1670s dispute with Henry More on the ontological grounds of corporeal activity confronted More’s “Spirit of Nature” with the “essential modifications” motion and the “seminal principle” of activity with which Boyle claimed God had directly endowed matter. As a champion of the corpuscularian philosophy, Boyle was an important link in the development before Locke of the distinction between primary and secondary qualities. A leading advocate of natural theology, he provided in his will for the establishment of the Boyle Lectures to defend Protestant Christianity against atheism and materialism. 

Bradley: f. h., the most original and influential nineteenth-century British idealist. Born at Clapham, he was the fourth son of an evangelical minister. His younger brother A. C. Bradley was a well-known Shakespearean critic. From 1870 until his death Bradley was a fellow of Merton , Oxford. A kidney ailment, which first occurred in 1871, compelled him to lead a retiring life. This, combined with his forceful literary style, his love of irony, the dedication of three of his books to an unknown woman, and acclaim as the greatest British idealist since Berkeley, has lent an aura of mystery to his personal life. The aim of Bradley’s first important work, Ethical Studies 1876, is not to offer guidance for dealing with practical moral problems Bradley condemned this as casuistry, but rather to explain what makes morality as embodied in the consciousness of individuals and in social institutions possible. Bradley thought it was the fact that moral agents take morality as an end in itself which involves identifying their wills with an ideal provided in part by their stations in society and then transferring that ideal to reality through action. Bradley called this process “selfrealization.” He thought that moral agents could realize their good selves only by suppressing their bad selves, from which he concluded that morality could never be completely realized, since realizing a good self requires having a bad one. For this reason Bradley believed that the moral consciousness would develop into religious consciousness which, in his secularized version of Christianity, required dying to one’s natural self through faith in the actual existence of the moral ideal. In Ethical Studies Bradley admitted that a full defense of his ethics would require a metaphysical system, something he did not then have. Much of Bradley’s remaining work was an attempt to provide the outline of such a system by solving what he called “the great problem of the relation between thought and reality.” He first confronted this problem in The Principles of Logic1883, which is his description of thought. He took thought to be embodied in judgments, which are distinguished from other mental activities by being true or false. This is made possible by the fact that their contents, which Bradley called ideas, represent reality. A problem arises because ideas are universals and so represent kinds of things, while the things themselves are all individuals. Bradley solves this problem by distinguishing between the logical and grammatical forms of a judgment and arguing that all judgments have the logical form of conditionals. They assert that universal connections between qualities obtain in reality. The qualities are universals, the connections between them are conditional, while reality is one individual whole that we have contact with in immediate experience. All judgments, in his view, are abstractions from a diverse but non-relational immediate experience. Since judgments are inescapably relational, they fail to represent accurately non-relational reality and so fail to reach truth, which is the goal of thought. From this Bradley concluded that, contrary to what some of his more Hegelian contemporaries were saying, thought is not identical to reality and is never more than partially true. Appearance and Reality 1893 is Bradley’s description of reality: it is experience, all of it, all at once, blended in a harmonious way. Bradley defended this view by means of his criterion for reality. Reality, he proclaimed, does not contradict itself; anything that does is merely appearance. In Part I of Appearance and Reality Bradley relied on an infinite regress argument, now called Bradley’s regress, to contend that relations and all relational phenomena, including thought, are contradictory. They are appearance, not reality. In Part II he claimed that appearances are contradictory because they are abstracted by thought from the immediate experience of which they are a part. Appearances constitute the content of this whole, which in Bradley’s view is experience. In other words, reality is experience in its totality. Bradley called this unified, consistent all-inclusive reality “the Absolute.” Today Bradley is mainly remembered for his argument against the reality of relations, and as the philosopher who provoked Russell’s and Moore’s revolution in philosophy. He would be better remembered as a founder of twentiethcentury philosophy who based metaphysical conclusions on his account of the logical forms of judgments. 

Brahman, in Hinduism, the ultimate reality, possessed of being, consciousness, and bliss, dependent on nothing else for existence. Brahman is conceived as a personal deity Brahma in Vis’istadvaita and Dvaita Vedanta and as apersonal and qualityless in Advaita Vedanta, in which “being, consciousness, and bliss” are interpreted negatively. While Brahman is conceived as saguna or “with qualities” in Vis’istadvaita and Dvaita, for Advaita Brahman is nirguna or qualityless. For Vis’istadvaita, ‘Brahman’ secondarily refers to the world dependent on Brahman strictly so called, namely all minds and material things that constitute Brahman’s body. For Advaita, each apparently individual mind or other thing is identical to Brahman; Dvaita does not construe the world, or anything else, as Brahman’s body. Enlightenment, or moksha, with its consequent escape from the cycle of rebirths, for Advaita involves recognizing one’s identity with nirguna Brahman, and for Dvaita and Vis’istadvaita involves repenting and forsaking one’s sins and trusting a gracious Brahman for salvation. 

brandt: Richard B., moral philosopher, most closely associated with rule utilitarianism which term he coined, earned degrees from Denison  and Cambridge , and obtained a Ph.D. from Yale in 1936. He taught at Swarthmore  from 1937 to 1964 and at the  of Michigan from 1964 to 1981. His six books and nearly one hundred articles included work on philosophy of religion, epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, political philosophy, and philosophy of law. His greatest contributions were in moral philosophy. He first defended rule utilitarianism in his textbook Ethical Theory 1959, but greatly refined his view in the 1960s in a series of articles, which were widely discussed and reprinted and eventually collected together in Morality, Utilitarianism, and Rights 1992. Further refinements appear in his A Theory of the Good and the Right 1979 and Facts, Values, and Morality 1996. Brandt famously argued for a “reforming definition” of ‘rational person’. He proposed that we use it to designate someone whose desires would survive exposure to all relevant empirical facts and to correct logical reasoning. He also proposed a “reforming definition” of ‘morally right’ that assigns it the descriptive meaning ‘would be permitted by any moral code that all or nearly all rational people would publicly favor for the agent’s society if they expected to spend a lifetime in that society’. In his view, rational choice between moral codes is determined not by prior moral commitments but by expected consequences. Brandt admitted that different rational people may favor different codes, since different rational people may have different levels of natural benevolence. But he also contended that most rational people would favor a rule-utilitarian code. 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              

Brentano, Franz: philosopher, one of the most intellectually influential and personally charismatic of his time. He is known especially for his distinction between psychological and physical phenomena on the basis of intentionality or internal object-directedness of thought, his revival of Aristotelianism and empirical methods in philosophy and psychology, and his value theory and ethics supported by the concept of correct pro- and anti-emotions or love and hate attitudes. Brentano made noted contributions to the theory of metaphysical categories, phenomenology, epistemology, syllogistic logic, and philosophy of religion. His teaching made a profound impact on his students in Würzburg and Vienna, many of whom became internationally respected thinkers in their fields, including Meinong, Husserl, Twardowski, Christian von Ehrenfels, Anton Marty, and Freud. Brentano began his study of philosophy at the Aschaffenburg Royal Bavarian Gymnasium; in 185658 he attended the universities of Munich and Würzburg, and then enrolled at the  of Berlin, where he undertook his first investigations of Aristotle’s metaphysics under the supervision of F. A. Trendelenburg. In 1859 60, he attended the Academy in Münster, reading intensively in the medieval Aristotelians; in 1862 he received the doctorate in philosophy in absentia from the  of Tübingen. He was ordained a Catholic priest in 1864, and was later involved in a controversy over the doctrine of papal infallibility, eventually leaving the church in 1873. He taught first as Privatdozent in the Philosophical Faculty of the  of Würzburg 186674, and then accepted a professorship at the  of Vienna. In 1880 he decided to marry, temporarily resigning his position to acquire Saxon citizenship, in order to avoid legal difficulties in Austria, where marriages of former priests were not officially recognized. Brentano was promised restoration of his position after his circumvention of these restrictions, but although he was later reinstated as lecturer, his appeals for reappointment as professor were answered only with delay and equivocation. He left Vienna in 1895, retiring to Italy, his family’s country of origin. At last he moved to Zürich, Switzerland, shortly before Italy entered World War I. Here he remained active both in philosophy and psychology, despite his ensuing blindness, writing and revising numerous books and articles, frequently meeting with former students and colleagues, and maintaining an extensive philosophical-literary correspondence, until his death. In Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt “Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint,” 1874, Brentano argued that intentionality is the mark of the mental, that every psychological experience contains an intended object  also called an intentional object  which the thought is about or toward which the thought is directed. Thus, in desire, something is desired. According to the immanent intentionality thesis, this means that the desired object is literally contained within the psychological experience of desire. Brentano claims that this is uniquely true of mental as opposed to physical or non-psychological phenomena, so that the intentionality of the psychological distinguishes mental from physical states. The immanent intentionality thesis proBrentano, Franz Brentano, Franz 100   100 vides a framework in which Brentano identifies three categories of psychological phenomena: thoughts Vorstellungen, judgments, and emotive phenomena. He further maintains that every thought is also self-consciously reflected back onto itself as a secondary intended object in what he called the eigentümliche Verfleckung. From 1905 through 1911, with the publication in that year of Von der Klassifikation der psychischen Phänomene, Brentano gradually abandoned the immanent intentionality thesis in favor of his later philosophy of reism, according to which only individuals exist, excluding putative nonexistent irrealia, such as lacks, absences, and mere possibilities. In the meantime, his students Twardowski, Meinong, and Husserl, reacting negatively to the idealism, psychologism, and related philosophical problems apparent in the early immanent intentionality thesis, developed alternative non-immanence approaches to intentionality, leading, in the case of Twardowski and Meinong and his students in the Graz school of phenomenological psychology, to the construction of Gegenstandstheorie, the theory of transcendent existent and nonexistent intended objects, and to Husserl’s later transcendental phenomenology. The intentionality of the mental in Brentano’s revival of the medieval Aristotelian doctrine is one of his most important contributions to contemporary non-mechanistic theories of mind, meaning, and expression. Brentano’s immanent intentionality thesis was, however, rejected by philosophers who otherwise agreed with his underlying claim that thought is essentially object-directed. Brentano’s value theory Werttheorie offers a pluralistic account of value, permitting many different kinds of things to be valuable  although, in keeping with his later reism, he denies the existence of an abstract realm of values. Intrinsic value is objective rather than subjective, in the sense that he believes the pro- and anti-emotions we may have toward an act or situation are objectively correct if they present themselves to emotional preference with the same apodicity or unquestionable sense of rightness as other selfevident matters of non-ethical judgment. Among the controversial consequences of Brentano’s value theory is the conclusion that there can be no such thing as absolute evil. The implication follows from Brentano’s observation, first, that evil requires evil consciousness, and that consciousness of any kind, even the worst imaginable malice or malevolent ill will, is considered merely as consciousness intrinsically good. This means that necessarily there is always a mixture of intrinsic good even in the most malicious possible states of mind, by virtue alone of being consciously experienced, so that pure evil never obtains. Brentano’s value theory admits of no defense against those who happen not to share the same “correct” emotional attitudes toward the situations he describes. If it is objected that to another person’s emotional preferences only good consciousness is intrinsically good, while infinitely bad consciousness despite being a state of consciousness appears instead to contain no intrinsic good and is absolutely evil, there is no recourse within Brentano’s ethics except to acknowledge that this contrary emotive attitude toward infinitely bad consciousness may also be correct, even though it contradicts his evaluations. Brentano’s empirical psychology and articulation of the intentionality thesis, his moral philosophy and value theory, his investigations of Aristotle’s metaphysics at a time when Aristotelian realism was little appreciated in the prevailing climate of post-Kantian idealism, his epistemic theory of evident judgment, his suggestions for the reform of syllogistic logic, his treatment of the principle of sufficient reason and existence of God, his interpretation of a fourstage cycle of successive trends in the history of philosophy, together with his teaching and personal moral example, continue to inspire a variety of divergent philosophical traditions. 

broad: cited by H. P. Grice in “Personal identity” and “Prolegomena” (re: Benjamin on Broad on remembering). Charlie Dunbar 18871971, English epistemologist, metaphysician, moral philosopher, and philosopher of science. He was educated at Trinity , Cambridge, taught at several universities in Scotland, and then returned to Trinity, first as lecturer in moral science and eventually as Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy. His philosophical views are in the broadly realist tradition of Moore and Russell, though with substantial influence also from his teachers at Cambridge, McTaggart and W. E. Johnson. Broad wrote voluminously and incisively on an extremely wide range of philosophical topics, including most prominently the nature of perception, a priori knowledge and concepts, the problem of induction, the mind Brentano’s thesis Broad, Charlie Dunbar 101   101 body problem, the free will problem, various topics in moral philosophy, the nature and philosophical significance of psychical research, the nature of philosophy itself, and various historical figures such as Leibniz, Kant, and McTaggart. Broad’s work in the philosophy of perception centers on the nature of sense-data or sensa, as he calls them and their relation to physical objects. He defends a rather cautious, tentative version of the causal theory of perception. With regard to a priori knowledge, Broad rejects the empiricist view that all such knowledge is of analytic propositions, claiming instead that reason can intuit necessary and universal connections between properties or characteristics; his view of concept acquisition is that while most concepts are abstracted from experience, some are a priori, though not necessarily innate. Broad holds that the rationality of inductive inference depends on a further general premise about the world, a more complicated version of the thesis that nature is uniform, which is difficult to state precisely and even more difficult to justify. Broad’s view of the mindbody problem is a version of dualism, though one that places primary emphasis on individual mental events, is much more uncertain about the existence and nature of the mind as a substance, and is quite sympathetic to epiphenomenalism. His main contribution to the free will problem consists in an elaborate analysis of the libertarian conception of freedom, which he holds to be both impossible to realize and at the same time quite possibly an essential precondition of the ordinary conception of obligation. Broad’s work in ethics is diverse and difficult to summarize, but much of it centers on the issue of whether ethical judgments are genuinely cognitive in character. Broad was one of the few philosophers to take psychical research seriously. He served as president of the Society for Psychical Research and was an occasional observer of experiments in this area. His philosophical writings on this subject, while not uncritical, are in the main sympathetic and are largely concerned to defend concepts like precognition against charges of incoherence and also to draw out their implications for more familiar philosophical issues. As regards the nature of philosophy, Broad distinguishes between “critical” and “speculative” philosophy. Critical philosophy is analysis of the basic concepts of ordinary life and of science, roughly in the tradition of Moore and Russell. A very high proportion of Broad’s own work consists of such analyses, often amazingly detailed and meticulous in character. But he is also sympathetic to the speculative attempt to arrive at an overall conception of the nature of the universe and the position of human beings therein, while at the same time expressing doubts that anything even remotely approaching demonstration is possible in such endeavors. The foregoing catalog of views reveals something of the range of Broad’s philosophical thought, but it fails to bring out what is most strikingly valuable about it. Broad’s positions on various issues do not form anything like a system he himself is reported to have said that there is nothing that answers to the description “Broad’s philosophy”. While his views are invariably subtle, thoughtful, and critically penetrating, they rarely have the sort of one-sided novelty that has come to be so highly valued in philosophy. What they do have is exceptional clarity, dialectical insight, and even-handedness. Broad’s skill at uncovering and displaying the precise shape of a philosophical issue, clarifying the relevant arguments and objections, and cataloging in detail the merits and demerits of the opposing positions has rarely been equaled. One who seeks a clear-cut resolution of an issue is likely to be impatient and disappointed with Broad’s careful, measured discussions, in which unusual effort is made to accord all positions and arguments their due. But one who seeks a comprehensive and balanced understanding of the issue in question is unlikely to find a more trustworthy guide. 

brouwer, L. E. J: philosopher and founder of the intuitionist school in the philosophy of mathematics. Educated at the Municipal  of Amsterdam, where he received his doctorate in 1907, he remained there for his entire professional career, as Privaat-Docent 190912 and then professor 191255. He was among the preeminent topologists of his time, proving several important results. Philosophically, he was also unique in his strongly held conviction that philosophical ideas and arguments concerning the nature of mathematics ought to affect and be reflected in its practice. His general orientation in the philosophy of mathematics was Kantian. This was manifested in his radical critique of the role accorded to logical reasoning by classical mathematics; a role that Brouwer, following Kant, believed to be incompatible with the role that intuition must properly play in mathematical reasoning. The bestknown, if not the most fundamental, part of his Brouwer, Luitzgen Egbertus Jan Brouwer, Luitzgen Egbertus Jan 102   102 critique of the role accorded to logic by classical mathematics was his attack on the principle of the excluded middle and related principles of classical logic. He challenged their reliability, arguing that their unrestricted use leads to results that, intuitionistically speaking, are not true. However, in its fundaments, Brouwer’s critique was not so much an attack on particular principles of classical logic as a criticism of the general role that classical mathematics grants to logical reasoning. He believed that logical structure and hence logical inference is a product of the linguistic representation of mathematical thought and not a feature of that thought itself. He stated this view in the so-called First Act of Intuitionism, which contains not only the chief critical idea of Brouwer’s position, but also its core positive element. This positive element says, with Kant, that mathematics is an essentially languageless activity of the mind. Brouwer went on to say something with which Kant would only have partially agreed: that this activity has its origin in the perception of a move of time. The critical element complements this by saying that mathematics is thus to be kept wholly distinct from mathematical language and the phenomena of language described by logic. The so-called Second Act of Intuitionism then extends the positive part of the First Act by stating that the “self-unfolding” of the primordial intuition of a move of time is the basis not only of the construction of the natural numbers but also of the intuitionistic continuum. Together, these two ideas form the basis of Brouwer’s philosophy of mathematics  a philosophy that is radically at odds with most of twentieth-century philosophy of mathematics. 

bruno, giordano, speculative philosopher. He was born in Naples, where he entered the Dominican order in 1565. In 1576 he was suspected of heresy and abandoned his order. He studied and taught in Geneva, but left because of difficulties with the Calvinists. Thereafter he studied and taught in Toulouse, Paris, England, various German universities, and Prague. In 1591 he rashly returned to Venice, and was arrested by the Venetian Inquisition in 1592. In 1593 he was handed over to the Roman Inquisition, which burned him to death as a heretic. Because of his unhappy end, his support for the Copernican heliocentric hypothesis, and his pronounced anti-Aristotelianism, Bruno has been mistakenly seen as the proponent of a scientific worldview against medieval obscurantism. In fact, he should be interpreted in the context of Renaissance hermetism. Indeed, Bruno was so impressed by the hermetic corpus, a body of writings attributed to the mythical Egyptian sage Hermes Trismegistus, that he called for a return to the magical religion of the Egyptians. He was also strongly influenced by Lull, Nicholas of Cusa, Ficino, and Agrippa von Nettesheim, an early sixteenth-century author of an influential treatise on magic. Several of Bruno’s works were devoted to magic, and it plays an important role in his books on the art of memory. Techniques for improving the memory had long been a subject of discussion, but he linked them with the notion that one could so imprint images of the universe on the mind as to achieve special knowledge of divine realities and the magic powers associated with such knowledge. He emphasized the importance of the imagination as a cognitive power, since it brings us into contact with the divine. Nonetheless, he also held that human ideas are mere shadows of divine ideas, and that God is transcendent and hence incomprehensible. Bruno’s best-known works are the Italian dialogues he wrote while in England, including the following, all published in 1584: The Ash Wednesday Supper; On Cause, Principle and Unity; The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast; and On the Infinite Universe and Worlds. He presents a vision of the universe as a living and infinitely extended unity containing innumerable worlds, each of which is like a great animal with a life of its own. He maintained the unity of matter with universal form or the World-Soul, thus suggesting a kind of pantheism attractive to later German idealists, such as Schelling. However, he never identified the World-Soul with God, who remained separate from matter and form. He combined his speculative philosophy of nature with the recommendation of a new naturalistic ethics. Bruno’s support of Copernicus in The Ash Wednesday Supper was related to his belief that a living earth must move, and he specifically rejected any appeal to mere mathematics to prove cosmological hypotheses. In later work he described the monad as a living version of the Democritean atom. Despite some obvious parallels with both Spinoza and Leibniz, he seems not to have had much direct influence on seventeenth-century thinkers. E.J.A. Brunschvicg, Léon 18691944, French philosopher, an influential professor at the Sorbonne and the École Normale Supérieure of Paris, and a founder of the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 1893 and the Société Française de Bruno, Giordano Brunschvicg, Léon 103   103 Philosophie 1901. In 1940 he was forced by the Nazis to leave Paris and sought refuge in the nonoccupied zone, where he died. A monistic idealist, Brunschvicg unfolded a philosophy of mind Introduction to the Life of the Mind, 1900. His epistemology highlights judgment. Thinking is judging and judging is acting. He defined philosophy as “the mind’s methodical self-reflection.” Philosophy investigates man’s growing self-understanding. The mind’s recesses, or metaphysical truth, are accessible through analysis of the mind’s timely manifestations. His major works therefore describe the progress of science as progress of consciousness: The Stages of Mathematical Philosophy 1912, Human Experience and Physical Causality 1922, The Progress of Conscience in Western Philosophy 1927, and Ages of Intelligence 1934. An heir of Renouvier, Cournot, and Revaisson, Brunschvicg advocated a moral and spiritual conception of science and attempted to reconcile idealism and positivism. J.-L.S. B-series.TIME. B-theory of time.TIME. Buber, Martin 18781965, German Jewish philosopher, theologian, and political leader. Buber’s early influences include Hasidism and neo-Kantianism. Eventually he broke with the latter and became known as a leading religious existentialist. His chief philosophic works include his most famous book, Ich und du “I and Thou,” 1923; Moses 1946; Between Man and Man 1947; and Eclipse of God 1952. The crux of Buber’s thought is his conception of two primary relationships: I-Thou and I-It. IThou is characterized by openness, reciprocity, and a deep sense of personal involvement. The I confronts its Thou not as something to be studied, measured, or manipulated, but as a unique presence that responds to the I in its individuality. I-It is characterized by the tendency to treat something as an impersonal object governed by causal, social, or economic forces. Buber rejects the idea that people are isolated, autonomous agents operating according to abstract rules. Instead, reality arises between agents as they encounter and transform each other. In a word, reality is dialogical. Buber describes God as the ultimate Thou, the Thou who can never become an It. Thus God is reached not by inference but by a willingness to respond to the concrete reality of the divine presence. 

Buchmanism, also called the Moral Rearmament Movement, a non-creedal international movement that sought to bring about universal brotherhood through a commitment to an objectivist moral system derived largely from the Gospels. It was founded by Frank Buchman 18781961, an American Lutheran minister who resigned from his church in 1908 in order to expand his ministry. To promote the movement, Buchman founded the Oxford Group at Oxford  in 1921.

Buddha from Sanskrit, ‘the enlightened one’, a title but not a name of Siddharta Gotama c.563c.483 B.C., the historical founder of Buddhism, and of any of his later representations. ‘Buddha’ can also mean anyone who has attained the state of enlightenment Buddhahood sought in Buddhism. The Pali Canon mentions twenty-four Buddhas. Siddharta Gotama was the son of the ruler of a small state in what is now Nepal. Tradition says that he left home at the age of twenty-nine to seek enlightenment, achieved it at the age of thirty-five, and was a wandering teacher until his death at eighty. He found ready-made in Indian culture the ideas of karma ‘fruits of action’ and samsara ‘wheel of rebirth’ as well as the view that escape from the wheel is the highest good, and offered his own Buddhist way of escape. 

Buddhagosa fourthfifth century A.D., Theraveda Buddhist philosopher whose major work was the Visuddhimagga “Path of Purification”. He accepted the typical Buddhist doctrine that everything that exists Nirvana aside is impermanent and momentary. A mind at a moment is only a momentary collection of momentary states; over time it is a series of such collections; similarly for a physical object. He held that, through sensory perception, physical objects are known to exist mind-independently. To the objection that perception of an object cannot occur in a moment since perception requires memory, attention, recognition, examination, and the like, he theorized that there is physical time and there is mental time; a single physical moment passes while distinct mental moments mount to sixteen in number. Hence a complex perceptual process can occur within a series of mental moments while a single material moment passes. Critics e.g., Buddhist Yogacara philosophers saw in this a denial of impermanence. 

Buddhism, a religion of eastern and central Asia founded by Siddharta Gotama Buddha. The Buddha found ready-made in Indian culture the ideas of karma ‘fruits of action’ and samsara ‘wheel of rebirth’, as well as the view that escape from the wheel is the highest good. Buddhist doctrine, like that of other Indian religions, offers its distinctive way to achieve that end. It teaches that at the core of the problem is desire or craving  for wealth, pleasure, power, continued existence  which fuels the flame of continued life. It adds that the solution is the snuffing out of craving by following the Eightfold Path right speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, concentration, views, and intentions. The idea is that intuitive wisdom follows upon moral conduct and mental discipline in accord with Buddhist precepts. This involves accepting these claims: all existence is unsatisfactory dukkha; all existence is impermanent anicca; and there is no permanent self anatta. Along with these claims go the doctrines of momentariness everything that exists is transitory, lasting only a moment and codependent origination everything that exists does so dependently on other things. Since God is typically conceived in monotheistic religions as existing independently and as either eternal or everlasting, there is no room within a Buddhist perspective for monotheism. Save for a heretical school, Buddhist traditions also reject all belief in substances. A substance, in this sense, is something that has properties, is not itself a property or a collection of properties, and endures through time. The obvious contrast to the Buddhist perspective is the notion of a self in Hinduism and Jainism, which is beginningless and endless, an indestructible entity sometimes conceived as inherently self-conscious and sometimes viewed as conscious only when embodied. But even the notion of a substance that endured but had a beginning or end or both, or a substance that existed dependently and endured so long as its sustaining conditions obtained, would run deep against the grain of typical Buddhist teaching. The Buddha is said to have offered no opinion, and to have found no profit in speculation, on certain questions: whether the world is or is not eternal, whether the world is or is not infinite, and whether the soul is different from or identical to the body. The religious reason given for this indifference is that reflection on such matters does not lead to enlightenment. A philosophical reason sometimes given is that if, as Buddhism claims, there is no world of substances, whether minds or bodies, then these questions have no straightforward answer. They are like the question, What does the horn of the hare weigh? Hares have no horns to be heavy or light. Seen in the context of the assumptions common in the culture in which they were asked, the questions would suggest that there are substantival minds and bodies and a world made up of them, and to answer these questions, even negatively, would have involved at least implicitly sanctioning that suggestion. Broadly, Indian Buddhism divides into Theravada “Doctrine of the Elders,” namely those who heard and followed the Buddha; this school is also called Hinayana, or “Lesser Vehicle” and Mahayana “Greater Vehicle”. The Sautrantika and Vaibhasika schools belong to Theravada and the Madhyamika and Yogacara schools are Mahayana. The Theravada schools. The Sautrantika school holds that while sensory experience justifies belief in the existence of mind-independent objects, the justification it provides requires us to infer from our sensory experience physical objects that we do not directly experience; it embraces representative realism. Thus, while our seeming to experience mind-independent objects is no illusion, our knowledge that it is not illusory rests as much on inference as on perception. The explanation of the fact that we cannot perceive as we wish  that we see and taste but rice and water though we would prefer meat and wine  is that what we see depends on what there is to be represented and what the conditions are under which we do our perceiving. The Vaibhasika followers of the Vaibhasha commentary school defends direct realism, contending that if sensory perception does not justify us in claiming actually to sense objects there is no way in which we can infer their existence. If what we directly experience are alleged representations or copies of objects we never see, from which we must then infer the objects copied, we have no reason to think that the copies are copies of anything. We do not determine the content of our perception because it typically is determined for us by the objects that we see. The very distinctions between dreams and waking perceptions, or veridical perceptions and illusions, to which idealists appeal, depend for their appropriateness to the idealist’s purpose on our being able to tell that some perceptual experiences are reliable and some are not; but then the idealist cannot successfully use them. For both Theravada schools, there is no need to correct our belief in physical Buddhism Buddhism 105   105 objects, or in minds, beyond our viewing both minds and objects as collections of different sorts of momentary states. The Mahayana schools. The Madhyamika school holds out for a more radical revision. Our experience of physical objects is reliable only if the beliefs that we properly base on it are true  only if things are as they sensorily seem. These beliefs are true only if we can sensorily distinguish between individual objects. But everything exists dependently, and nothing that exists dependently is an individual. So there are no individuals and we cannot distinguish between individual objects. So our sensory experience is not reliable, but rather is systematically illusory. Madhyamika then adds the doctrine of an ineffable ultimate reality hidden behind our ordinary experience and descriptions, which is accessible only in esoteric enlightenment experience. In this respect it is like Advaita Vedanta, which it probably influenced. One result of the overall Madhyamika teaching described here is that Nirvana and samsara,the goal and ordinary life, are identified; roughly samsara is how Nirvana seems to the unenlightened as roughly, for Advaita, the world of dependent things is how qualityless Brahman appears to the unenlightened. The Yogacara perhaps “Yoga” because it used meditation to remove belief in mind-independent physical objects school of Mahayana Buddhism contends for a more ambitious revision of our beliefs about objects than does Sautrantika or Vaibhasika, but a less radical one than the Madhyamika. Against the latter, it contends that if mind itself is empty of essence and if all there is is an ineffable reality, then there is no one to see the truth and no reliable way to discover it. Against the direct physical-object realism of the Vaibhasika and the representational realism of the Sautrantika, the Yogacara philosophers argue that dream experience seems to be of objects that exist mind-independently and in a public space, and yet there are no such objects and there is no such space. What we have experiential evidence for is the existence of non-substantival minds and the experiences that those minds have. There are no substances at all and no physical states; there are only mental states that compose minds. Yogacara philosophers too had to explain why our perceptual content is not something we can decide by whim, and its explanation came in terms of the theory that each collection of momentary states, and hence each series or stream of such collections, contains impressions that represent past experiences. These impressions become potent under certain circumstances and determine the content of one’s explicit or conscious perception. The stream, or substream, of representative impressions is a storehouse of memories and plays a role in Yogacara theory analogous to that of the Atman or Jiva in some of the schools of Hinduism. Critics suspected it of being a thin surrogate for a substantival self. AsaNga, Dignaga, and especially Vasubandhu were leading Yogacara philosophers. Further, critics of the Yogacara idealism argued that while the view contends that there are minds other than one’s own, it provided no way in which that belief could be justified. Our discussion has dealt with Indian Buddhism. Buddhism largely died out in India around the thirteenth century. It thrived in other places, especially China, Tibet, and Japan. Japanese Pure Land Buddhism resembles monotheism more than do any of the traditions that we have discussed. Zen is a form of Mahayana that developed in China in the sixth and seventh centuries A.D. and spread to Japan. It involves esoteric teachings outside the sacred writings, following which is believed to lead to realization of Buddhahood. The metaphysical and epistemological issues briefly discussed here demonstrate that the Buddhist tradition found it natural to trace the consequences of views about the nature of objects and persons, and about what experience teaches, beyond the scope of what Buddhism as a religion might strictly require. There are direct realists, representational realists, and idealists, and the question arises as to whether idealism slides into solipsism. There is no way of telling what a particular religious doctrine may or may not be related to. Arguably, certain Buddhist doctrines are incompatible with certain views in contemporary physics and Buddhist apologists have claimed that contemporary physics provides some sort of confirmation of basic Buddhist categories. There is no a priori way to limit the relationships that may come to light between apparently very diverse, and quite unrelated, issues and doctrines. 

bundle theory, a view that accepts the idea that concrete objects consist of properties but denies the need for introducing substrata to account for their diversity. By contrast, one traditional view of concrete particular objects is that they are complexes consisting of two more fundamental kinds of entities: properties that can be exemplified by many different objects and a substratum that exemplifies those properties belonging to a particular object. Properties account for the qualitative identity of such objects while substrata account for their numerical diversity. The bundle theory is usually glossed as the view that a concrete object is nothing but a bundle of properties. This gloss, however, is inadequate. For if a “bundle” of properties is, e.g., a set of properties, then bundles of properties differ in significant ways from concrete objects. For sets of properties are necessary and eternal while concrete objects are contingent and perishing. A more adequate statement of the theory holds that a concrete object is a complex of properties which all stand in a fundamental contingent relation, call it co-instantiation, to one another. On this account, complexes of properties are neither necessary nor eternal. Critics of the theory, however, maintain that such complexes have all their properties essentially and cannot change properties, whereas concrete objects have some of their properties accidentally and undergo change. This objection fails to recognize that there are two distinct problems addressed by the bundle theory: a individuation and b identity through time. The first problem arises for all objects, both momentary and enduring. The second, however, arises only for enduring objects. The bundle theory typically offers two different solutions to these problems. An enduring concrete object is analyzed as a series of momentary objects which stand in some contingent relation R. Different versions of the theory offer differing accounts of the relation. For example, Hume holds that the self is a series of co-instantiated impressions and ideas, whose members are related to one another by causation and resemblance this is his bundle theory of the self. A momentary object, however, is analyzed as a complex of properties all of which stand in the relation of co-instantiation to one another. Consequently, even if one grants that a momentary complex of properties has all of its members essentially, it does not follow that an enduring object, which contains the complex as a temporal part, has those properties essentially unless one endorses the controversial thesis that an enduring object has its temporal parts essentially. Similarly, even if one grants that a momentary complex of properties cannot change in its properties, it does not follow that an enduring object, which consists of such complexes, cannot change its properties. Critics of the bundle theory argue that its analysis of momentary objects is also problematic. For it appears possible that two different momentary objects have all properties in common, yet there cannot be two different complexes with all properties in common. There are two responses available to a proponent of the theory. The first is to distinguish between a strong and a weak version of the theory. On the strong version, the thesis that a momentary object is a complex of co-instantiated properties is a necessary truth, while on the weak version it is a contingent truth. The possibility of two momentary objects with all properties in common impugns only the strong version of the theory. The second is to challenge the basis of the claim that it is possible for two momentary objects to have all their properties in common. Although critics allege that such a state of affairs is conceivable, proponents argue that investigation into the nature of conceivability does not underwrite this claim. 

Buridan, Jean c.1300 after 1358, philosopher. He was born in Béthune and educated at the  of Paris. Unlike most philosophers of his time, Buridan spent his academic career as a master in the faculty of arts, without seeking an advanced degree in theology. He was also unusual in being a secular cleric rather than a member of a religious order. Buridan wrote extensively on logic and natural philosophy, although only a few of his works have appeared in modern editions. The most important on logic are the Summulae de dialectica “Sum of Dialectic”, an introduction to logic conceived as a revision of, and extended commentary on, the Summulae logicales of Peter of Spain, a widely used logic textbook of the period; and the Tractatus de consequentiis, a treatise on modes of inference. Most of Buridan’s other Buddhism, Theravada Buridan, Jean 107   107 writings are short literal commentaries expositiones and longer critical studies quaestiones of Aristotle’s works. Like most medieval nominalists, Buridan argued that universals have no real existence, except as concepts by which the mind “conceives of many things indifferently.” Likewise, he included only particular substances and qualities in his basic ontology. But his nominalist program is distinctive in its implementation. He differs, e.g., from Ockham in his accounts of motion, time, and quantity appealing, in the latter case, to quantitative forms to explain the impenetrability of bodies. In natural philosophy, Buridan is best known for introducing to the West the non-Aristotelian concept of impetus, or impressed force, to explain projectile motion. Although asses appear often in his examples, the particular example that has come via Spinoza and others to be known as “Buridan’s ass,” an ass starving to death between two equidistant and equally tempting piles of hay, is unknown in Buridan’s writings. It may, however, have originated as a caricature of Buridan’s theory of action, which attempts to find a middle ground between Aristotelian intellectualism and Franciscan voluntarism by arguing that the will’s freedom to act consists primarily in its ability to defer choice in the absence of a compelling reason to act one way or the other. Buridan’s intellectual legacy was considerable. His works continued to be read and discussed in universities for centuries after his death. Three of his students and disciples, Albert of Saxony, Marsilius of Inghen, and Nicole Oresme, went on to become distinguished philosophers in their own right. 

Burke, Edmund, statesman and one of the eighteenth century’s greatest political writers. Born in Dublin, he moved to London to study law, then undertook a literary and political career. He sat in the House of Commons from 1765 to 1794. In speeches and pamphlets during these years he offered an ideological perspective on politics that endures to this day as the fountain of conservative wisdom. The philosophical stance that pervades Burke’s parliamentary career and writings is skepticism, a profound distrust of political rationalism, i.e., the achievement in the political realm of abstract and rational structures, ideals, and objectives. Burkean skeptics are profoundly anti-ideological, detesting what they consider the complex, mysterious, and existential givens of political life distorted, criticized, or planned from a perspective of abstract, generalized, and rational categories. The seminal expression of Burke’s skeptical conservatism is found in the Reflections on the Revolution in France 1790. The conservatism of the Reflections was earlier displayed, however, in Burke’s response to radical demands in England for democratic reform of Parliament in the early 1780s. The English radicals assumed that legislators could remake governments, when all wise men knew that “a prescriptive government never was made upon any foregone theory.” How ridiculous, then, to put governments on Procrustean beds and make them fit “the theories which learned and speculative men have made.” Such prideful presumption required much more rational capacity than could be found among ordinary mortals. One victim of Burke’s skepticism is the vaunted liberal idea of the social contract. Commonwealths were neither constructed nor ought they to be renovated according to a priori principles. The concept of an original act of contract is just such a principle. The only contract in politics is the agreement that binds generations past, present, and future, one that “is but a clause in the great primeval contract of an eternal society.” Burke rejects the voluntaristic quality of rationalist liberal contractualism. Individuals are not free to create their own political institutions. Political society and law are not “subject to the will of those who, by an obligation above them, and infinitely superior, are bound to submit their will to that law.” Men and groups “are not morally at liberty, at their pleasure, and on their speculations of a contingent improvement” to rip apart their communities and dissolve them into an “unsocial, uncivil, unconnected chaos.” Burke saw our stock of reason as small; despite this people still fled their basic limitations in flights of ideological fancy. They recognized no barrier to their powers and sought in politics to make reality match their speculative visions. Burke devoutly wished that people would appreciate their weakness, their “subordinate rank in the creation.” God has “subjected us to act the part which belongs to the place assigned us.” And that place is to know the limits of one’s rational and speculative faculties. Instead of relying on their own meager supply of reason, politicians should avail themselves “of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages.” Because people forget this they weave rational schemes of reform far beyond their power to implement. Buridan’s ass Burke, Edmund 108   108 Burke stands as the champion of political skepticism in revolt against Enlightenment rationalism and its “smugness of adulterated metaphysics,” which produced the “revolution of doctrine and theoretic dogma.” The sins of the French were produced by the “clumsy subtlety of their political metaphysics.” The “faith in the dogmatism of philosophers” led them to rely on reason and abstract ideas, on speculation and a priori principles of natural right, freedom, and equality as the basis for reforming governments. Englishmen, like Burke, had no such illusions; they understood the complexity and fragility of human nature and human institutions, they were not “the converts of Rousseau . . . the disciples of Voltaire; Helvetius [had] made no progress amongst [them].” 

Burley, Walter c.1275c.1344, English philosopher who taught philosophy at Oxford and theology at Paris. An orthodox Aristotelian and a realist, he attacked Ockham’s logic and his interpretation of the Aristotelian categories. Burley commented on almost of all of Aristotle’s works in logic, natural philosophy, and moral philosophy. An early Oxford Calculator, Burley began his work as a fellow of Merton  in 1301. By 1310, he was at Paris. A student of Thomas Wilton, he probably incepted before 1322; by 1324 he was a fellow of the Sorbonne. His commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sentences has been lost. After leaving Paris, Burley was associated with the household of Richard of Bury and the court of Edward III, who sent him as an envoy to the papal curia in 1327. De vita et moribus philosophorum “On the Life and Manners of Philosophers”, an influential, popular account of the lives of the philosophers, has often been attributed to Burley, but modern scholarship suggests that the attribution is incorrect. Many of Burley’s independent works dealt with problems in natural philosophy, notably De intensione et remissione formarum “On the Intension and Remission of Forms”, De potentiis animae “On the Faculties of the Soul”, and De substantia orbis. De primo et ultimo instanti “On First and Last Instants” discusses which temporal processes have intrinsic, which extrinsic limits. In his Tractatus de formis Burley attacks Ockham’s theory of quantity. Similarly, Burley’s theory of motion opposed Ockham’s views. Ockham restricts the account of motion to the thing moving, and the quality, quantity, and place acquired by motion. By contrast, Burley emphasizes the process of motion and the quantitative measurement of that process. Burley attacks the view that the forms successively acquired in motion are included in the form finally acquired. He ridicules the view that contrary qualities hot and cold could simultaneously inhere in the same subject producing intermediate qualities warmth. Burley emphasized the formal character of logic in his De puritate artis logicae “On the Purity of the Art of Logic”, one of the great medieval treatises on logic. Ockham attacked a preliminary version of De puritate in his Summa logicae; Burley called Ockham a beginner in logic. In De puritate artis logicae, Burley makes syllogistics a subdivision of consequences. His treatment of negation is particularly interesting for his views on double negation and the restrictions on the rule that notnot-p implies p. Burley distinguished between analogous words and analogous concepts and natures. His theory of analogy deserves detailed discussion. These views, like the views expressed in most of Burley’s works, have seldom been carefully studied by modern philosophers. 

butler: J., cited by H. P. Grice, principle of conversational benevolence. English theologian and Anglican bishop who made important contributions to moral philosophy, to the understanding of moral agency, and to the development of deontological ethics. Better known in his own time for The Analogy of Religion 1736, a defense, along broadly empiricist lines, of orthodox, “revealed” Christian doctrine against deist criticism, Butler’s main philosophical legacy was a series of highly influential arguments and theses contained in a collection of Sermons 1725 and in two “Dissertations” appended to The Analogy  one on virtue and the other on personal identity. The analytical method of these essays “everything is what it is and not another thing” provided a model for much of English-speaking moral philosophy to follow. For example, Butler is often credited with refuting psychological hedonism, the view that all motives can be reduced to the desire for pleasure or happiness. The sources of human motivation are complex and structurally various, he argued. Appetites and passions seek their own peculiar objects, and pleasure must itself be understood as involving an intrinsic positive regard for a particular object. Other philosophers had maintained, like Butler, that we can desire, e.g., the happiness of others intrinsically, and not just as a means to our own happiness. And others had argued that the person who aims singlemindedly at his own happiness is unlikely to attain it. Butler’s distinctive contribution was to demonstrate that happiness and pleasure themselves require completion by specific objects for which we have an intrinsic positive regard. Self-love, the desire for our own happiness, is a reflective desire for, roughly, the satisfaction of our other desires. But self-love is not our only reflective desire; we also have “a settled reasonable principle of benevolence.” We can consider the goods of others and come on reflection to desire their welfare more or less independently of particular emotional involvement such as compassion. In morals, Butler equally opposed attempts to reduce virtue to benevolence, even of the most universal and impartial sort. Benevolence seeks the good or happiness of others, whereas the regulative principle of virtue is conscience, the faculty of moral approval or disapproval of conduct and character. Moral agency requires, he argued, the capacities to reflect disinterestedly on action, motive, and character, to judge these in distinctively moral terms and not just in terms of their relation to the non-moral good of happiness, and to guide conduct by such judgments. Butler’s views about the centrality of conscience in the moral life were important in the development of deontological ethics as well as in the working out of an associated account of moral agency. Along the first lines, he argued in the “Dissertation” that what it is right for a person to do depends, not just on the non-morally good or bad consequences of an action, but on such other morally relevant features as the relationships the agent bears to affected others e.g., friend or beneficiary, or whether fraud, injustice, treachery, or violence is involved. Butler thus distinguished analytically between distinctively moral evaluation of action and assessing an act’s relation to such non-moral values as happiness. And he provided succeeding deontological theorists with a litany of examples where the right thing to do is apparently not what would have the best consequences. Butler believed God instills a “principle of reflection” or conscience in us through which we intrinsically disapprove of such actions as fraud and injustice. But he also believed that God, being omniscient and benevolent, fitted us with these moral attitudes because “He foresaw this constitution of our nature would produce more happiness, than forming us with a temper of mere general benevolence.” This points, however, toward a kind of anti-deontological or consequentialist view, sometimes called indirect consequentialism, which readily acknowledges that what it is right to do does not depend on which act will have the best consequences. It is entirely appropriate, according to indirect consequentialism, that conscience approve or disapprove of acts on grounds other than a calculation of consequences precisely because its doing so has the best consequences. Here we have a version of the sort of view later to be found, for example, in Mill’s defense of utilitarianism against the objection that it conflicts with justice and rights. Morality is a system of social control that demands allegiance to considerations other than utility, e.g., justice and honesty. But it is justifiable only to the extent that the system itself has utility. This sets up something of a tension. From the conscientious perspective an agent must distinguish between the question of which action would have the best consequences and the question of what he should do. And from that perspective, Butler thinks, one will necessarily regard one’s answer to the second question as authoritative for conduct. Conscience necessarily implicitly asserts its own authority, Butler famously claimed. Thus, insofar as agents come to regard their conscience as simply a method of social control with good consequences, they will come to be alienated from the inherent authority their conscience implicitly claims. A similar issue arises concerning the relation between conscience and self-love. Butler says that both self-love and conscience are “superior principles in the nature of man” in that an action will be unsuitable to a person’s nature if it is contrary to either. This makes conscience’s authority conditional on its not conflicting with self-love and vice versa. Some scholars, moreover, read other passages as implying that no agent could reasonably follow conscience unless doing so was in the agent’s interest. But again, it would seem that an agent who internalized such a view would be alienated from the authority that, if Butler is right, conscience implicitly claims. For Butler, conscience or the principle of reflection is uniquely the faculty of practical judgment. Unlike either self-love or benevolence, even when these are added to the powers of inference and empirical cognition, only conscience makes moral agency possible. Only a creature with conscience can accord with or violate his own judgment of what he ought to do, and thereby be a “law to himself.” This suggests a view that, like Kant’s, seeks to link deontology to a conception of autonomous moral agency.

cabala from Hebrew qabbala, ‘tradition’, a system of Jewish mysticism and theosophy practiced from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century; loosely, all forms of Jewish mysticism. Believed by its adherents to be a tradition communicated to Moses at Sinai, the main body of cabalistic writing, the Zohar, is thought to be the work primarily of Moses de León of Guadalajara, in the thirteenth century, though he attributed it to the second-century rabbi Simon bar Yohai. The Zohar builds on earlier Jewish mysticism, and is replete with gnostic and Neoplatonic themes. It offers the initiated access to the mysteries of God’s being, human destiny, and the meaning of the commandments. The transcendent and strictly unitary God of rabbinic Judaism here encounters ten apparently real divine powers, called sefirot, which together represent God’s being and appearance in the cosmos and include male and female principles. Evil in the world is seen as a reflection of a cosmic rupture in this system, and redemption on earth entails restoration of the divine order. Mankind can assist in this task through knowledge, piety, and observance of the law. Isaac Luria in the sixteenth century developed these themes with graphic descriptions of the dramas of creation, cosmic rupture, and restoration, the latter process requiring human assistance more than ever.

Caird, Edward 18351908, Scottish philosopher, a leading absolute idealist. Influential as both a writer and a teacher, Caird was professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow and master of Balliol , Oxford. His aim in philosophy was to overcome intellectual oppositions. In his main work, The Critical Philosophy of Kant 1889, he argued that Kant had done this by using reason to synthesize rationalism and empiricism while reconciling science and religion. In Caird’s view, Kant unfortunately treated reason as subjective, thereby retaining an opposition between self and world. Loosely following Hegel, Caird claimed that objective reason, or the Absolute, was a larger whole in which both self and world were fragments. In his Evolution of Religion 1893 Caird argued that religion progressively understands God as the Absolute and hence as what reconciles self and world. This allowed him to defend Christianity as the highest evolutionary stage of religion without defending the literal truth of Scripture. 

Cajetan, original name, Tommaso de Vio c.1469 1534, Italian prelate and theologian. Born in Gaeta from which he took his name, he entered the Dominican order in 1484 and studied philosophy and theology at Naples, Bologna, and Padua. He became a cardinal in 1517; during the following two years he traveled to Germany, where he engaged in a theological controversy with Luther. His major work is a Commentary on St. Thomas’ Summa of Theology 1508, which promoted a renewal of interest in Scholastic and Thomistic philosophy during the sixteenth century. In agreement with Aquinas, Cajetan places the origin of human knowledge in sense perception. In contrast with Aquinas, he denies that the immortality of the soul and the existence of God as our creator can be proved. Cajetan’s work in logic was based on traditional Aristotelian syllogistic logic but is original in its discussion of the notion of analogy. Cajetan distinguishes three types: analogy of inequality, analogy of attribution, and analogy of proportion. Whereas he rejected the first two types as improper, he regarded the last as the basic type of analogy and appealed to it in explaining how humans come to know God and how analogical reasoning applied to God and God’s creatures avoids being equivocal. 

calculus, a central branch of mathematics, originally conceived in connection with the determination of the tangent or normal to a curve and of the area between it and some fixed axis; but it also embraced the calculation of volumes and of areas of curved surfaces, the lengths of curved lines, and so on. Mathematical analysis is a still broader branch that subsumed the calculus under its rubric see below, together with the theories of functions and of infinite series. Still more general and/or abstract versions of analysis have been developed during the twentieth century, with applications to other branches of mathematics, such as probability theory. The origins of the calculus go back to Grecian mathematics, usually in problems of determining the slope of a tangent to a curve and the area enclosed underneath it by some fixed axes or by a closed curve; sometimes related questions such as the length of an arc of a curve, or the area of a curved surface, were considered. The subject flourished in the seventeenth century when the analytical geometry of Descartes gave algebraic means to extend the procedures. It developed further when the problems of slope and area were seen to require the finding of new functions, and that the pertaining processes were seen to be inverse. Newton and Leibniz had these insights in the late seventeenth century, independently and in different forms. In the Leibnizian differential calculus the differential dx was proposed as an infinitesimal increment on x, and of the same dimension as x; the slope of the tangent to a curve with y as a function of x was the ratio dy/dx. The integral, ex, was infinitely large and of the dimension of x; thus for linear variables x and y the area ey dx was the sum of the areas of rectangles y high and dx wide. All these quantities were variable, and so could admit higher-order differentials and integrals ddx, eex, and so on. This theory was extended during the eighteenth century, especially by Euler, to functions of several independent variables, and with the creation of the calculus of variations. The chief motivation was to solve differential equations: they were motivated largely by problems in mechanics, which was then the single largest branch of mathematics. Newton’s less successful fluxional calculus used limits in its basic definitions, thereby changing dimensions for the defined terms. The fluxion was the rate of change of a variable quantity relative to “time”; conversely, that variable was the “fluent” of its fluxion. These quantities were also variable; fluxions and fluents of higher orders could be defined from them. A third tradition was developed during the late eighteenth century by J. L. Lagrange. For him the “derived functions” of a function fx were definable by purely algebraic means from its Taylorian power-series expansion about any value of x. By these means it was hoped to avoid the use of both infinitesimals and limits, which exhibited conceptual difficulties, the former due to their unclear ontology as values greater than zero but smaller than any orthodox quantity, the latter because of the naive theories of their deployment. In the early nineteenth century the Newtonian tradition died away, and Lagrange’s did not gain general conviction; however, the LeibnizEuler line kept some of its health, for its utility in physical applications. But all these theories gradually became eclipsed by the mathematical analysis of A. L. Cauchy. As with Newton’s calculus, the theory of limits was central, but they were handled in a much more sophisticated way. He replaced the usual practice of defining the integral as more or less automatically the inverse of the differential or fluxion or whatever by giving independent definitions of the derivative and the integral; thus for the first time the fundamental “theorem” of the calculus, stating their inverse relationship, became a genuine theorem, requiring sufficient conditions upon the function to ensure its truth. Indeed, Cauchy pioneered the routine specification of necessary and/or sufficient conditions for truth of theorems in analysis. His discipline also incorporated the theory of discontinuous functions and the convergence or divergence of infinite series. Again, general definitions were proffered and conditions sought for properties to hold. Cauchy’s discipline was refined and extended in the second half of the nineteenth century by K. Weierstrass and his followers at Berlin. The study of existence theorems as for irrational numbers, and also technical questions largely concerned with trigonometric series, led to the emergence of set topology. In addition, special attention was given to processes involving several variables changing in value together, and as a result the importance of quantifiers was recognized  for example, reversing their order from ‘there is a y such that for all x . . .’ to ‘for all x, there is a y . . .’. This developed later into general set theory, and then to mathematical logic: Cantor was the major figure in the first aspect, while G. Peano pioneered much for the second. Under this regime of “rigor,” infinitesimals such as dx became unacceptable as mathematical objects. However, they always kept an unofficial place because of their utility when applying the calculus, and since World War II theories have been put forward in which the established level of rigor and generality are preserved and even improved but in which infinitesimals are reinstated. The best-known of these theories, the non-standard analysis of A. Robinson, makes use of model theory by defining infinitesimals as arithmetical inverses of the transfinite integers generated by a “non-standard model” of Peano’s postulates for the natural numbers. calculus calculus

Calvin, John 150964, French theologian and church reformer, a major figure in the Protestant Reformation. He was especially important for the so-called Reformed churches in France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Germany, Scotland, and England. Calvin was a theologian in the humanist tradition rather than a philosopher. He valued philosophy as “a noble gift of God” and cited philosophers especially Plato when it suited his purposes; but he rejected philosophical speculation about “higher things” and despised  though sometimes exploiting its resources  the dominant Scholastic philosophy of his time, to which he had been introduced at the  of Paris. His eclectic culture also included a variety of philosophical ideas, of whose source he was often unaware, that inevitably helped to shape his thought. His Christianae religionis institutio first ed. 1536 but repeatedly enlarged; in English generally cited as Institutes, his theological treatises, his massive biblical commentaries, and his letters, all of which were translated into most European languages, thus helped to transmit various philosophical motifs and attitudes in an unsystematic form both to contemporaries and to posterity. He passed on to his followers impulses derived from both the antiqui and the moderni. From the former he inherited an intellectualist anthropology that conceived of the personality as a hierarchy of faculties properly subordinated to reason, which was at odds with his evangelical theology; and, though he professed to scorn Stoicism, a moralism often more Stoic than evangelical. He also relied occasionally on the Scholastic quaestio, and regularly treated substantives, like the antiqui, as real entities. These elements in his thought also found expression in tendencies to a natural theology based on an innate and universal religious instinct that can discern evidences of the existence and attributes of God everywhere in nature, and a conception of the Diety as immutable and intelligible. This side of Calvinism eventually found expression in Unitarianism and universalism. It was, however, in uneasy tension with other tendencies in his thought that reflect both his biblicism and a nominalist and Scotist sense of the extreme transcendence of God. Like other humanists, therefore, he was also profoundly skeptical about the capacity of the human mind to grasp ultimate truth, an attitude that rested, for him, on both the consequences of original sin and the merely conventional origins of language. Corollaries of this were his sense of the contingency of all human intellectual constructions and a tendency to emphasize the utility rather than the truth even of such major elements in his theology as the doctrine of predestination. It may well be no accident, therefore, that later skepticism and pragmatism have been conspicuous in thinkers nurtured by later Calvinism, such as Bayle, Hume, and James. 

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Cambridge change, a non-genuine change. If I turn pale, I am changing, whereas your turning pale is only a Cambridge change in me. When I acquire the property of being such that you are pale, I do not change. In general, an object’s acquiring a new property is not a sufficient condition for that object to change although some other object may genuinely change. Thus also, my being such that you are pale counts only as a Cambridge property of me, a property such that my gaining or losing it is only a Cambridge change. Cambridge properties are a proper subclass of extrinsic properties: being south of Chicago is considered an extrinsic property of me, but since my moving to Canada would be a genuine change, being south of Chicago cannot, for me, be a Cambridge property. The concept of a Cambridge change reflects a way of thinking entrenched in common sense, but it is difficult to clarify, and its philosophical value is controversial. Neither science nor formal semantics, e.g., supports this viewpoint. Perhaps calculus, fluxional Cambridge changes and properties are, for better or worse, inseparable from a vague, intuitive metaphysics. 

Cambridge Platonists, a group of seventeenthcentury philosopher-theologians at the  of Cambridge, principally including Benjamin Whichcote 160983, often designated the father of the Cambridge Platonists; Henry More; Ralph Cudworth 161788; and John Smith 161652. Whichcote, Cudworth, and Smith received their  education in or were at some time fellows of Emmanuel , a stronghold of the Calvinism in which they were nurtured and against which they rebelled under mainly Erasmian, Arminian, and Neoplatonic influences. Other Cambridge men who shared their ideas and attitudes to varying degrees were Nathanael Culverwel 1618?51, Peter Sterry 161372, George Rust d.1670, John Worthington 161871, and Simon Patrick 1625 1707. As a generic label, ‘Cambridge Platonists’ is a handy umbrella term rather than a dependable signal of doctrinal unity or affiliation. The Cambridge Platonists were not a self-constituted group articled to an explicit manifesto; no two of them shared quite the same set of doctrines or values. Their Platonism was not exclusively the pristine teaching of Plato, but was formed rather from Platonic ideas supposedly prefigured in Hermes Trismegistus, in the Chaldean Oracles, and in Pythagoras, and which they found in Origen and other church fathers, in the Neoplatonism of Plotinus and Proclus, and in the Florentine Neoplatonism of Ficino. They took contrasting and changing positions on the important belief originating in Florence with Giovanni Pico della Mirandola that Pythagoras and Plato derived their wisdom ultimately from Moses and the cabala. They were not equally committed to philosophical pursuits, nor were they equally versed in the new philosophies and scientific advances of the time. The Cambridge Platonists’ concerns were ultimately religious and theological rather than primarily philosophical. They philosophized as theologians, making eclectic use of philosophical doctrines whether Platonic or not for apologetic purposes. They wanted to defend “true religion,” namely, their latitudinarian vision of Anglican Christianity, against a variety of enemies: the Calvinist doctrine of predestination; sectarianism; religious enthusiasm; fanaticism; the “hide-bound, strait-laced spirit” of Interregnum Puritanism; the “narrow, persecuting spirit” that followed the Restoration; atheism; and the impieties incipient in certain trends in contemporary science and philosophy. Notable among the latter were the doctrines of the mechanical philosophers, especially the materialism and mechanical determinism of Hobbes and the mechanistic pretensions of the Cartesians. The existence of God, the existence, immortality, and dignity of the human soul, the existence of spirit activating the natural world, human free will, and the primacy of reason are among the principal teachings of the Cambridge Platonists. They emphasized the positive role of reason in all aspects of philosophy, religion, and ethics, insisting in particular that it is irrationality that endangers the Christian life. Human reason and understanding was “the Candle of the Lord” Whichcote’s phrase, perhaps their most cherished image. In Whichcote’s words, “To go against Reason, is to go against God . . . Reason is the Divine Governor of Man’s Life; it is the very Voice of God.” Accordingly, “there is no real clashing at all betwixt any genuine point of Christianity and what true Philosophy and right Reason does determine or allow” More. Reason directs us to the self-evidence of first principles, which “must be seen in their own light, and are perceived by an inward power of nature.” Yet in keeping with the Plotinian mystical tenor of their thought, they found within the human soul the “Divine Sagacity” More’s term, which is the prime cause of human reason and therefore superior to it. Denying the Calvinist doctrine that revelation is the only source of spiritual light, they taught that the “natural light” enables us to know God and interpret the Scriptures. Cambridge Platonism was uncompromisingly innatist. Human reason has inherited immutable intellectual, moral, and religious notions, “anticipations of the soul,” which negate the claims of empiricism. The Cambridge Platonists were skeptical with regard to certain kinds of knowledge, and recognized the role of skepticism as a critical instrument in epistemology. But they were dismissive of the idea that Pyrrhonism be taken seriously in the practical affairs of the philosopher at work, and especially of the Christian soul in its quest for divine knowledge and understanding. Truth is not compromised by our inability to devise apodictic demonstrations. Indeed Whichcote passed a moral censure on those who pretend “the doubtfulness and uncertainty of reason.” Innatism and the natural light of reason shaped the Cambridge Platonists’ moral philosophy. The unchangeable and eternal ideas of good and evil in the divine mind are the exemplars of ethical axioms or noemata that enable the human mind to make moral judgments. More argued for a “boniform faculty,” a faculty higher than reason by which the soul rejoices in reason’s judgment of the good. The most philosophically committed and systematic of the group were More, Cudworth, and Culverwel. Smith, perhaps the most intellectually gifted and certainly the most promising note his dates, defended Whichcote’s Christian teaching, insisting that theology is more “a Divine Life than a Divine Science.” More exclusively theological in their leanings were Whichcote, who wrote little of solid philosophical interest, Rust, who followed Cudworth’s moral philosophy, and Sterry. Only Patrick, More, and Cudworth all fellows of the Royal Society were sufficiently attracted to the new science especially the work of Descartes to discuss it in any detail or to turn it to philosophical and theological advantage. Though often described as a Platonist, Culverwel was really a neo-Aristotelian with Platonic embellishments and, like Sterry, a Calvinist. He denied innate ideas and supported the tabula rasa doctrine, commending “the Platonists . . . that they lookt upon the spirit of a man as the Candle of the Lord, though they were deceived in the time when ‘twas lighted.” The Cambridge Platonists were influential as latitudinarians, as advocates of rational theology, as severe critics of unbridled mechanism and materialism, and as the initiators, in England, of the intuitionist ethical tradition. In the England of Locke they are a striking counterinstance of innatism and non-empirical philosophy. 

camera obscura, a darkened enclosure that focuses light from an external object by a pinpoint hole instead of a lens, creating an inverted, reversed image on the opposite wall. The adoption of the camera obscura as a model for the eye revolutionized the study of visual perception by rendering obsolete previous speculative philosophical theories, in particular the emanation theory, which explained perception as due to emanated copy-images of objects entering the eye, and theories that located the image of perception in the lens rather than the retina. By shifting the location of sensation to a projection on the retina, the camera obscura doctrine helped support the distinction of primary and secondary sense qualities, undermining the medieval realist view of perception and moving toward the idea that consciousness is radically split off from the world.

Campanella, Tommaso 15681639, Italian theologian, philosopher, and poet. He joined the Dominican order in 1582. Most of the years between 1592 and 1634 he spent in prison for heresy and for conspiring to replace Spanish rule in southern Italy with a utopian republic. He fled to France in 1634 and spent his last years in freedom. Some of his best poetry was written while he was chained in a dungeon; and during less rigorous confinement he managed to write over a hundred books, not all of which survive. His best-known work, The City of the Sun 1602; published 1623, describes a community governed in accordance with astrological principles, with a priest as head of state. In later political writings, Campanella attacked Machiavelli and called for either a universal Spanish monarchy with the pope as spiritual head or a universal theocracy with the pope as both spiritual and temporal leader. His first publication was Philosophy Demonstrated by the Senses 1591, which supported the theories of Telesio and initiated his lifelong attack on Aristotelianism. He hoped to found a new Christian philosophy based on the two books of nature and Scripture, both of which are manifestations of God. While he appealed to sense experience, he was not a straightforward empiricist, for he saw the natural world as alive and sentient, and he thought of magic as a tool for utilizing natural processes. In this he was strongly influenced by Ficino. Despite his own difficulties with Rome, he wrote in support of Galileo. 

Campbell, Norman Robert 18801949, British physicist and philosopher of science. A successful experimental physicist, Campbell with A. Wood discovered the radioactivity of potassium. His analysis of science depended on a sharp distinction between experimental laws and theories. Experimental laws are generalizations established by observations. A theory has the following structure. First, it requires a largely arbitrary hypothesis, which in itself is untestable. To render it testable, the theory requires a “dictionary” of propositions linking the hypothesis to scientific laws, which can be established experimentally. But theories are not merely logical relations between hypotheses and experimental Cambridge property Campbell, Norman Robert 115   115 laws; they also require concrete analogies or models. Indeed, the models suggest the nature of the propositions in the dictionary. The analogies are essential components of the theory, and, for Campbell, are nearly always mechanical. His theory of science greatly influenced Nagel’s The Structure of Science 1961. 

Camus, Albert 191360, French philosophical novelist and essayist who was also a prose poet and the conscience of his times. He was born and raised in Algeria, and his experiences as a fatherless, tubercular youth, as a young playwright and journalist in Algiers, and later in the anti-German resistance in Paris during World War II informed everything he wrote. His best-known writings are not overtly political; his most famous works, the novel The Stranger written in 1940, published in 1942 and his book-length essay The Myth of Sisyphus written in 1941, published in 1943 explore the notion of “the absurd,” which Camus alternatively describes as the human condition and as “a widespread sensitivity of our times.” The absurd, briefly defined, is the confrontation between ourselves  with our demands for rationality and justice  and an “indifferent universe.” Sisyphus, who was condemned by the gods to the endless, futile task of rolling a rock up a mountain whence it would roll back down of its own weight, thus becomes an exemplar of the human condition, struggling hopelessly and pointlessly to achieve something. The odd antihero of The Stranger, on the other hand, unconsciously accepts the absurdity of life. He makes no judgments, accepts the most repulsive characters as his friends and neighbors, and remains unmoved by the death of his mother and his own killing of a man. Facing execution for his crime, he “opens his heart to the benign indifference of the universe.” But such stoic acceptance is not the message of Camus’s philosophy. Sisyphus thrives he is even “happy” by virtue of his scorn and defiance of the gods, and by virtue of a “rebellion” that refuses to give in to despair. This same theme motivates Camus’s later novel, The Plague1947, and his long essay The Rebel 1951. In his last work, however, a novel called The Fall published in 1956, the year before he won the Nobel prize for literature, Camus presents an unforgettably perverse character named Jean-Baptiste Clamence, who exemplifies all the bitterness and despair rejected by his previous characters and in his earlier essays. Clamence, like the character in The Stranger, refuses to judge people, but whereas Meursault the “stranger” is incapable of judgment, Clamence who was once a lawyer makes it a matter of philosophical principle, “for who among us is innocent?” It is unclear where Camus’s thinking was heading when he was killed in an automobile accident with his publisher, Gallimard, who survived. 

Canguilhem, Georges 190496, French historian and philosopher of science. Canguilhem succeeded Gaston Bachelard as director of the Institut d’Histoire des Sciences et des Techniques at the  of Paris. He developed and sometimes revised Bachelard’s view of science, extending it to issues in the biological and medical sciences, where he focused particularly on the concepts of the normal and the pathological The Normal and the Pathological, 1966. On his account norms are not objective in the sense of being derived from value-neutral scientific inquiry, but are rooted in the biological reality of the organisms that they regulate. Canguilhem also introduced an important methodological distinction between concepts and theories. Rejecting the common view that scientific concepts are simply functions of the theories in which they are embedded, he argued that the use of concepts to interpret data is quite distinct from the use of theories to explain the data. Consequently, the same concepts may occur in very different theoretical contexts. Canguilhem made particularly effective use of this distinction in tracing the origin of the concept of reflex action. 

Cantor, Georg 18451918, German mathematician, one of a number of late nineteenthcentury mathematicians and philosophers including Frege, Dedekind, Peano, Russell, and Hilbert who transformed both mathematics and the study of its philosophical foundations. The philosophical import of Cantor’s work is threefold. First, it was primarily Cantor who turned arbitrary collections into objects of mathematical study, sets. Second, he created a coherent mathematical theory of the infinite, in particular a theory of transfinite numbers. Third, linking these, he was the first to indicate that it might be possible to present mathematics as nothing but the theory of sets, thus making set theory foundational for mathematics. This contributed to the Camus, Albert Cantor, Georg 116   116 view that the foundations of mathematics should itself become an object of mathematical study. Cantor also held to a form of principle of plenitude, the belief that all the infinities given in his theory of transfinite numbers are represented not just in mathematical or “immanent” reality, but also in the “transient” reality of God’s created world. Cantor’s main, direct achievement is his theory of transfinite numbers and infinity. He characterized as did Frege sameness of size in terms of one-to-one correspondence, thus accepting the paradoxical results known to Galileo and others, e.g., that the collection of all natural numbers has the same cardinality or size as that of all even numbers. He added to these surprising results by showing 1874 that there is the same number of algebraic and thus rational numbers as there are natural numbers, but that there are more points on a continuous line than there are natural or rational or algebraic numbers, thus revealing that there are at least two different kinds of infinity present in ordinary mathematics, and consequently demonstrating the need for a mathematical treatment of these infinities. This latter result is often expressed by saying that the continuum is uncountable. Cantor’s theorem of 1892 is a generalization of part of this, for it says that the set of all subsets the power-set of a given set must be cardinally greater than that set, thus giving rise to the possibility of indefinitely many different infinities. The collection of all real numbers has the same size as the power-set of natural numbers. Cantor’s theory of transfinite numbers 1880 97 was his developed mathematical theory of infinity, with the infinite cardinal numbers the F-, or aleph-, numbers based on the infinite ordinal numbers that he introduced in 1880 and 1883. The F-numbers are in effect the cardinalities of infinite well-ordered sets. The theory thus generates two famous questions, whether all sets in particular the continuum can be well ordered, and if so which of the F-numbers represents the cardinality of the continuum. The former question was answered positively by Zermelo in 1904, though at the expense of postulating one of the most controversial principles in the history of mathematics, the axiom of choice. The latter question is the celebrated continuum problem. Cantor’s famous continuum hypothesis CH is his conjecture that the cardinality of the continuum is represented by F1, the second aleph. CH was shown to be independent of the usual assumptions of set theory by Gödel 1938 and Cohen 1963. Extensions of Cohen’s methods show that it is consistent to assume that the cardinality of the continuum is given by almost any of the vast array of F-numbers. The continuum problem is now widely considered insoluble. Cantor’s conception of set is often taken to admit the whole universe of sets as a set, thus engendering contradiction, in particular in the form of Cantor’s paradox. For Cantor’s theorem would say that the power-set of the universe must be bigger than it, while, since this powerset is a set of sets, it must be contained in the universal set, and thus can be no bigger. However, it follows from Cantor’s early 1883 considerations of what he called the “absolute infinite” that none of the collections discovered later to be at the base of the paradoxes can be proper sets. Moreover, correspondence with Hilbert in 1897 and Dedekind in 1899 see Cantor, Gesammelte Abhandlungen mathematischen und philosophischen Inhalts, 1932 shows clearly that Cantor was well aware that contradictions will arise if such collections are treated as ordinary sets. 

cardinal virtues, prudence practical wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice. Medievals deemed them cardinal from Latin cardo, ‘hinge’ because of their important or pivotal role in human flourishing. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates explains them through a doctrine of the three parts of the soul, suggesting that a person is prudent when knowledge of how to live wisdom informs her reason, courageous when informed reason governs her capacity for wrath, temperate when it also governs her appetites, and just when each part performs its proper task with informed reason in control. Development of thought on the cardinal virtues was closely tied to the doctrine of the unity of the virtues, i.e., that a person possessing one virtue will have them all. 

Carlyle, Thomas 17951881, Scottish-born essayist, historian, and social critic, one of the most popular writers and lecturers in nineteenth-century Britain. His works include literary criticism, history, and cultural criticism. With respect to philosophy, his views on the theory of history are his most significant contributions. According to Carlyle, great personages are the most important causal factor in history. On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History 1841 asserts, “Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here. They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modellers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain; all things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, the practical realisation and embodiment, of Thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world: the soul of the whole world’s history, it may justly be considered, were the history of these.” Carlyle’s doctrine has been challenged from many different directions. Hegelian and Marxist philosophers maintain that the so-called great men of history are not really the engine of history, but merely reflections of deeper forces, such as economic ones, while contemporary historians emphasize the priority of “history from below”  the social history of everyday people  as far more representative of the historical process.

Carnap, Rudolf 18911970, German-born American philosopher, one of the leaders of the Vienna Circle, a movement loosely called logical positivism or logical empiricism. He made fundamental contributions to semantics and the philosophy of science, as well as to the foundations of probability and inductive logic. He was a staunch advocate of, and active in, the unity of science movement. Carnap received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the  of Jena in 1921. His first major work was Die Logische Aufbau der Welt 1928, in which he sought to apply the new logic recently developed by Frege and by Russell and Whitehead to problems in the philosophy of science. Although influential, it was not translated until 1967, when it appeared as The Logical Structure of the World. It was important as one of the first clear and unambiguous statements that the important work of philosophy concerned logical structure: that language and its logic were to be the focus of attention. In 1935 Carnap left his native Germany for the United States, where he taught at the  of Chicago and then at UCLA. Die Logiche Syntax der Sprach 1934 was rapidly translated into English, appearing as The Logical Syntax of Language 1937. This was followed in 1941 by Introduction to Semantics, and in 1942 by The Formalization of Logic. In 1947 Meaning and Necessity appeared; it provided the groundwork for a modal logic that would mirror the meticulous semantic development of first-order logic in the first two volumes. One of the most important concepts introduced in these volumes was that of a state description. A state description is the linguistic counterpart of a possible world: in a given language, the most complete description of the world that can be given. Carnap then turned to one of the most pervasive and important problems to arise in both the philosophy of science and the theory of meaning. To say that the meaning of a sentence is given by the conditions under which it would be verified as the early positivists did or that a scientific theory is verified by predictions that turn out to be true, is clearly to speak loosely. Absolute verification does not occur. To carry out the program of scientific philosophy in a realistic way, we must be able to speak of the support given by inconclusive evidence, either in providing epistemological justification for scientific knowledge, or in characterizing the meanings of many of the terms of our scientific language. This calls for an understanding of probability, or as Carnap preferred to call it, degree of confirmation. We must distinguish between two senses of probability: what he called probability1, corresponding to credibility, and probability2, corresponding to the frequency or empirical conception of probability defended by Reichenbach and von Mises. ‘Degree of confirmation’ was to be the formal concept corresponding to credibility. The first book on this subject, written from the same point of view as the works on semantics, was The Logical Foundations of Probability 1950. The goal was a logical definition of ‘ch,e’: the degree of confirmation of a hypothesis h, relative to a body of evidence e, or the degree of rational belief that one whose total evidence was e should commit to h. Of course we must first settle on a formal language in which to express the hypothesis and the evidence; for this Carnap chooses a first-order language based on a finite number of one-place predicates, and a countable number of individual constants. Against this background, we perform the following reductions: ‘ch,e’ represents a conditional probability; thus it can be represented as the ratio of the absolute probabilCarlyle, Thomas Carnap, Rudolf 118   118 ity of h & e to the absolute probability of e. Absolute probabilities are represented by the value of a measure function m, defined for sentences of the language. The problem is to define m. But every sentence in Carnap’s languages is equivalent to a disjunction of state descriptions; the measure to be assigned to it must, according to the probability calculus, be the sum of the measures assigned to its constituent state descriptions. Now the problem is to define m for state descriptions. Recall that state descriptions were part of the machinery Carnap developed earlier. The function c† is a confirmation function based on the assignment of equal measures to each state description. It is inadequate, because if h is not entailed by e, c†h,e % m†h, the a priori measure assigned to h. We cannot “learn from experience.” A measure that does not have that drawback is m*, which is based on the assignment of equal measures to each structure description. A structure description is a set of state descriptions; two state descriptions belong to the same structure description just in case one can be obtained from the other by a permutation of individual constants. Within the structure description, equal values are assigned to each state description. In the next book, The Continuum of Inductive Methods, Carnap takes the rate at which we learn from experience to be a fundamental parameter of his assignments of probability. Like measures on state descriptions, the values of the probability of the singular predictive inference determine all other probabilities. The “singular predictive inference” is the inference from the observation that individual 1 has one set of properties, individual 2 has another set of properties, etc., to the conclusion: individual j will have property k. Finally, in the last works Studies in Inductive Logic and Probability, vols. I [1971] and II [1980], edited with Richard Jeffrey Carnap offered two long articles constituting his Basic System of Inductive Logic. This system is built around a language having families of attributes e.g., color or sound that can be captured by predicates. The basic structure is still monadic, and the logic still lacks identity, but there are more parameters. There is a parameter l that reflects the “rate of learning from experience”; a parameter h that reflects an inductive relation between values of attributes belonging to families. With the introduction of arbitrary parameters, Carnap was edging toward a subjective or personalistic view of probability. How far he was willing to go down the subjectivist garden path is open to question; that he discovered more to be relevant to inductive logic than the “language” of science seems clear. Carnap’s work on probability measures on formal languages is destined to live for a long time. So too is his work on formal semantics. He was a staunch advocate of the fruitfulness of formal studies in philosophy, of being clear and explicit, and of offering concrete examples. Beyond the particular philosophical doctrines he advocated, these commitments characterize his contribution to philosophy. 

Carroll, Lewis, pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson 183298, English writer and mathematician. The eldest son of a large clerical family, he was educated at Rugby and Christ Church, Oxford, where he remained for the rest of his uneventful life, as mathematical lecturer until 1881 and curator of the senior commonroom. His mathematical writings under his own name are more numerous than important. He was, however, the only Oxonian of his day to contribute to symbolic logic, and is remembered for his syllogistic diagrams, for his methods for constructing and solving elaborate sorites problems, for his early interest in logical paradoxes, and for the many amusing examples that continue to reappear in modern textbooks. Fame descended upon him almost by accident, as the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland 1865, Through the Looking Glass 1872, The Hunting of the Snark 1876, and Sylvie and Bruno 1889 93; saving the last, the only children’s books to bring no blush of embarrassment to an adult reader’s cheek. Dodgson took deacon’s orders in 1861, and though pastorally inactive, was in many ways an archetype of the prim Victorian clergyman. His religious opinions were carefully thought out, but not of great philosophic interest. The Oxford movement passed him by; he worried about sin though rejecting the doctrine of eternal punishment, abhorred profanity, and fussed over Sunday observance, but was oddly tolerant of theatergoing, a lifelong habit of his own. Apart from the sentimental messages later inserted in them, the Alice books and Snark are blessedly devoid of religious or moral concern. Full of rudeness, aggression, and quarrelsome, if fallacious, argument, they have, on the other hand, a natural attraction for philosophers, who pillage Carneades Carroll, Lewis 119   119 them freely for illustrations. Humpty-Dumpty, the various Kings and Queens, the Mad Hatter, the Caterpillar, the White Rabbit, the Cheshire Cat, the Unicorn, the Tweedle brothers, the Bellman, the Baker, and the Snark make fleeting appearances in the s of Russell, Moore, Broad, Quine, Nagel, Austin, Ayer, Ryle, Blanshard, and even Wittgenstein an unlikely admirer of the Mock Turtle. The first such allusion to the March Hare is in Venn’s Symbolic Logic 1881. The usual reasons for quotation are to make some point about meaning, stipulative definition, the logic of negation, time reversal, dream consciousness, the reification of fictions and nonentities, or the absurdities that arise from taking “ordinary language” too literally. For exponents of word processing, the effect of running Jabberwocky through a spell-checker is to extinguish all hope for the future of Artificial Intelligence. Though himself no philosopher, Carroll’s unique sense of philosophic humor keeps him and his illustrator, Sir John Tenniel effortlessly alive in the modern age. Alice has been translated into seventy-five languages; new editions and critical studies appear every year; imitations, parodies, cartoons, quotations, and ephemera proliferate beyond number; and Carroll societies flourish in several countries, notably Britain and the United States.

Carvaka, Indian materialism. Its varieties share the view that the mind is simply the body and its capacities, but differ as to whether every mental property is simply a physical property under some psychological description reductive materialism or there are emergent irreducibly mental properties that are caused by physical properties and themselves have no causal impact epiphenomenalism. Some Carvaka epistemologists, at least according to their critics, accept only perception as a reliable source of knowledge, but in its most sophisticated form Carvaka, not unlike logical positivism, allows inference at least to conclusions that concern perceptually accessible states of affairs. 

Cassirer, Ernst 18741945, German philosopher and intellectual historian. He was born in the German city of Breslau now Wroclaw, Poland and educated at various German universities. He completed his studies in 1899 at Marburg under Hermann Cohen, founder of the Marburg School of neo-Kantianism. Cassirer lectured at the  of Berlin from 1906 to 1919, then accepted a professorship at the newly founded  of Hamburg. With the rise of Nazism he left Germany in 1933, going first to a visiting appointment at All Souls , Oxford 1933 35 and then to a professorship at the  of Göteborg, Sweden 193541. In 1941 he went to the United States; he taught first at Yale 194144 and then at Columbia 194445. Cassirer’s works may be divided into those in the history of philosophy and culture and those that present his own systematic thought. The former include major editions of Leibniz and Kant; his four-volume study The Problem of Knowledge vols. 13, 190620; vol. 4, 1950, which traces the subject from Nicholas of Cusa to the twentieth century; and individual works on Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Rousseau, Goethe, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and English Platonism. The latter include his multivolume The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms 192329, which presents a philosophy of human culture based on types of symbolism found in myth, language, and mathematical science; and individual works concerned with problems in such fields as logic, psychology, aesthetics, linguistics, and concept formation in the humanities. Two of his best-known works are An Essay on Man 1944 and The Myth of the State 1946. Cassirer did not consider his systematic philosophy and his historical studies as separate endeavors; each grounded the other. Because of his involvement with the Marburg School, his philosophical position is frequently but mistakenly typed as neo-Kantian. Kant is an important influence on him, but so are Hegel, Herder, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Goethe, Leibniz, and Vico. Cassirer derives his principal philosophical concept, symbolic form, most directly from Heinrich Hertz’s conception of notation in mechanics and the conception of the symbol in art of the Hegelian aesthetician, Friedrich Theodor Vischer. In a wider sense his conception of symbolic form is a transformation of “idea” and “form” within the whole tradition of philosophical idealism. Cassirer’s conception of symbolic form is not based on a distinction between the symbolic and the literal. In his view all human knowledge depends on the power to form experience through some type of symbolism. The forms of human knowledge are coextensive with forms of human culture. Those he most often analyzes are myth and religion, art, language, history, and science. These forms of symbolism constitute a total system of human knowledge and culture that is the subject matter of philosophy. Cassirer’s influence is most evident in the aesthetics of Susanne Langer 18951985, but his conception of the symbol has entered into theoretical anthropology, psychology, structural linguistics, literary criticism, myth theory, aesthetics, and phenomenology. His studies of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment still stand as groundbreaking works in intellectual history. 

Castañeda, Hector-Neri 192491, American analytical philosopher. Heavily influenced by his own critical reaction to Quine, Chisholm, and his teacher Wilfrid Sellars, Castañeda published four books and more than 175 essays. His work combines originality, rigor, and penetration, together with an unusual comprehensiveness  his network of theory and criticism reaches into nearly every area of philosophy, including action theory; deontic logic and practical reason; ethics; history of philosophy; metaphysics and ontology; philosophical methodology; philosophy of language, mind, and perception; and the theory of knowledge. His principal contributions are to metaphysics and ontology, indexical reference, and deontic logic and practical reasoning. In metaphysics and ontology, Castañeda’s chief work is guise theory, first articulated in a 1974 essay, a complex and global account of language, mind, ontology, and predication. By holding that ordinary concrete individuals, properties, and propositions all break down or separate into their various aspects or guises, he theorizes that thinking and reference are directed toward the latter. Each guise is a genuine item in the ontological inventory, having properties internally and externally. In addition, guises are related by standing in various sameness relations, only one of which is the familiar relation of strict identity. Since every guise enjoys bona fide ontological standing, whereas only some of these actually exist, Castañeda’s ontology and semantics are Meinongian. With its intricate account of predication, guise theory affords a unified treatment of a wide range of philosophical problems concerning reference to nonexistents, negative existentials, intentional identity, referential opacity, and other matters. Castañeda also played a pivotal role in emphasizing the significance of indexical reference. If, e.g., Paul assertively utters ‘I prefer Chardonnay’, it would obviously be incorrect for Bob to report ‘Paul says that I prefer Chardonnay’, since the last statement expresses Bob’s speaker’s reference, not Paul’s. At the same time, Castañeda contends, it is likewise incorrect for Bob to report Paul’s saying as either ‘Paul says that Paul prefers Chardonnay’ or ‘Paul says that Al’s luncheon guest prefers Chardonnay’ when Paul is Al’s only luncheon guest, since each of these fail to represent the essentially indexical element of Paul’s assertion. Instead, Bob may correctly report ‘Paul says that he himself prefers Chardonnay’, where ‘he himself’ is a quasi-indicator, serving to depict Paul’s reference to himself qua self. For Castañeda and others, quasi-indicators are a person’s irreducible, essential means for describing the thoughts and experiences of others. A complete account of his view of indexicals, together with a full articulation of guise theory and his unorthodox theories of definite descriptions and proper names, is contained in Thinking, Language, and Experience 1989. Castañeda’s main views on practical reason and deontic logic turn on his fundamental practitionproposition distinction. A number of valuable essays on these views, together with his important replies, are collected in James E. Tomberlin, ed., Agent, Language, and the Structure of the World 1983, and Tomberlin, ed., Hector-Neri Castañeda 1986. The latter also includes Castañeda’s revealing intellectual autobiography. .

casuistry, the case-analysis approach to the interpretation of general moral rules. Casuistry starts with paradigm cases of how and when a given general moral rule should be applied, and then reasons by analogy to cases in which the proper application of the rule is less obvious  e.g., a case in which lying is the only way for a priest not to betray a secret revealed in confession. The point of considering the series of cases is to ascertain the morally relevant similarities and differences between cases. Casuistry’s heyday was the first half of the seventeenth century. Reacting against casuistry’s popularity with the Jesuits and against its tendency to qualify general moral rules, Pascal penned a polemic against casuistry from which the term never recovered see his Provincial Letters, 1656. But the kind of reasoning to which the term refers is flourishing in contemporary practical ethics.

categorical theory, a theory all of whose models are isomorphic. Because of its weak expressive power, in first-order logic with identity only theories with a finite model can be categorical; without identity no theories are categorical. A more interesting property, therefore, is being categorical in power: a theory is categorical in power a when the theory has, up to isomorphism, only one model with a domain of cardinality a. Categoricity in power shows the capacity to characterize a structure completely, only limited by cardinality. For example, the first-order theory of dense order without endpoints is categorical in power w the cardinality of the natural numbers. The first-order theory of simple discrete orderings with initial element, the ordering of the natural numbers, is not categorical in power w. There are countable discrete orders, not isomorphic to the natural numbers, that are elementary equivalent to it, i.e., have the same elementary, first-order theory. In first-order logic categorical theories are complete. This is not necessarily true for extensions of first-order logic for which no completeness theorem holds. In such a logic a set of axioms may be categorical without providing an informative characterization of the theory of its unique model. The term ‘elementary equivalence’ was introduced around 1936 by Tarski for the property of being indistinguishable by elementary means. According to Oswald Veblen, who first used the term ‘categorical’ in 1904, in a discussion of the foundations of geometry, that term was suggested to him by the American pragmatist John Dewey. 

categoricity, the semantic property belonging to a set of sentences, a “postulate set,” that implicitly defines completely describes, or characterizes up to isomorphism the structure of its intended interpretation or standard model. The best-known categorical set of sentences is the postulate set for number theory attributed to Peano, which completely characterizes the structure of an arithmetic progression. This structure is exemplified by the system of natural numbers with zero as distinguished element and successor addition of one as distinguished function. Other exemplifications of this structure are obtained by taking as distinguished element an arbitrary integer, taking as distinguished function the process of adding an arbitrary positive or negative integer and taking as universe of discourse or domain the result of repeated application of the distinguished function to the distinguished element. See, e.g., Russell’s Introduction to the Mathematical Philosophy, 1918. More precisely, a postulate set is defined to be categorical if every two of its models satisfying interpretations or realizations are isomorphic to each other, where, of course, two interpretations are isomorphic if between their respective universes of discourse there exists a one-to-one correspondence by which the distinguished elements, functions, relations, etc., of the one are mapped exactly onto those of the other. The importance of the analytic geometry of Descartes involves the fact that the system of points of a geometrical line with the “left-of relation” distinguished is isomorphic to the system of real numbers with the “less-than” relation distinguished. Categoricity, the ideal limit of success for the axiomatic method considered as a method for characterizing subject matter rather than for reorganizing a science, is known to be impossible with respect to certain subject matters using certain formal languages. The concept of categoricity can be traced back at least as far as Dedekind; the word is due to Dewey. 

Category: H. P. Grice and J. L. Austin, “Categories.” H. P. Grice and P. F. Strawson, “Categories.” an ultimate class. Categories are the highest genera of entities in the world. They may contain species but are not themselves species of any higher genera. Aristotle, the first philosopher to discuss categories systematically, listed ten, including substance, quality, quantity, relation, place, and time. If a set of categories is complete, then each entity in the world will belong to a category and no entity will belong to more than one category. A prominent example of a set of categories is Descartes’s dualistic classification of mind and matter. This example brings out clearly another feature of categories: an attribute that can belong to entities in one category cannot be an attribute of entities in any other category. Thus, entities in the category of matter have extension and color while no entity in the category of mind can have extension or color. 

category mistake, the placing of an entity in the wrong category. In one of Ryle’s examples, to place the activity of exhibiting team spirit in the same class with the activities of pitching, batting, and catching is to make a category mistake; exhibiting team spirit is not a special function like pitching or batting but instead a way those special functions are performed. A second use of ‘category mistake’ is to refer to the attribution to an entity of a property which that entity cannot have not merely does not happen to have, as in ‘This memory is violet’ or, to use an example from Carnap, ‘Caesar is a prime number’. These two kinds of category mistake may seem different, but both involve misunderstandings of the natures of the things being talked about. It is thought that they go beyond simple error or ordinary mistakes, as when one attributes a property to a thing which that thing could have but does not have, since category mistakes involve attributions of properties e.g., being a special function to things e.g., team spirit that those things cannot have. According to Ryle, the test for category differences depends on whether replacement of one expression for another in the same sentence results in a type of unintelligibility that he calls “absurdity.” 

category theory, a mathematical theory that studies the universal properties of structures via their relationships with one another. A category C consists of two collections Obc and Morc , the objects and the morphisms of C, satisfying the following conditions: i for each pair a, b of objects there is associated a collection Morc a, b of morphisms such that each member of Morc belongs to one of these collections; ii for each object a of Obc , there is a morphism ida , called the identity on a; iii a composition law associating with each morphism f: a P b and each morphism g: b P c a morphism gf:a P c, called the composite of f and g; iv for morphisms f: a P b, g: b P c, and h: c P d, the equation hgf % hgf holds; v for any morphism f: a P b, we have idbf % f and fida % f. Sets with specific structures together with a collection of mappings preserving these structures are categories. Examples: 1 sets with functions between them; 2 groups with group homomorphisms; 3 topological spaces with continuous functions; 4 sets with surjections instead of arbitrary maps constitute a different category. But a category need not be composed of sets and set-theoretical maps. Examples: 5 a collection of propositions linked by the relation of logical entailment is a category and so is any preordered set; 6 a monoid taken as the unique object and its elements as the morphisms is a category. The properties of an object of a category are determined by the morphisms that are coming out of and going in this object. Objects with a universal property occupy a key position. Thus, a terminal object a is characterized by the following universal property: for any object b there is a unique morphism from b to a. A singleton set is a terminal object in the category of sets. The Cartesian product of sets, the product of groups, and the conjunction of propositions are all terminal objects in appropriate categories. Thus category theory unifies concepts and sheds a new light on the notion of universality. 

causal law, a statement describing a regular and invariant connection between types of events or states, where the connections involved are causal in some sense. When one speaks of causal laws as distinguished from laws that are not 123 category mistake causal law   123 causal, the intended distinction may vary. Sometimes, a law is said to be causal if it relates events or states occurring at successive times, also called a law of succession: e.g., ‘Ingestion of strychnine leads to death.’ A causal law in this sense contrasts with a law of coexistence, which connects events or states occurring at the same time e.g., the Wiedemann-Franz law relating thermal and electric conductivity in metals. One important kind of causal law is the deterministic law. Causal laws of this kind state exceptionless connections between events, while probabilistic or statistical laws specify probability relationships between events. For any system governed by a set of deterministic laws, given the state of a system at a time, as characterized by a set of state variables, these laws will yield a unique state of the system for any later time or, perhaps, at any time, earlier or later. Probabilistic laws will yield, for a given antecedent state of a system, only a probability value for the occurrence of a certain state at a later time. The laws of classical mechanics are often thought to be paradigmatic examples of causal laws in this sense, whereas the laws of quantum mechanics are claimed to be essentially probabilistic. Causal laws are sometimes taken to be laws that explicitly specify certain events as causes of certain other events. Simple laws of this kind will have the form ‘Events of kind F cause events of kind G’; e.g., ‘Heating causes metals to expand’. A weaker related concept is this: a causal law is one that states a regularity between events which in fact are related as cause to effect, although the statement of the law itself does not say so laws of motion expressed by differential equations are perhaps causal laws in this sense. These senses of ‘causal law’ presuppose a prior concept of causation. Finally, causal laws may be contrasted with teleological laws, laws that supposedly describe how certain systems, in particular biological organisms, behave so as to achieve certain “goals” or “end states.” Such laws are sometimes claimed to embody the idea that a future state that does not as yet exist can exert an influence on the present behavior of a system. Just what form such laws take and exactly how they differ from ordinary laws have not been made wholly clear, however. 

causal theory of proper names, the view that proper names designate what they name by virtue of a kind of causal connection to it. This view is a special case, and in some instances an unwarranted interpretation, of a direct reference view of names. On this approach, proper names, e.g., ‘Machiavelli’, are, as J. S. Mill wrote, “purely denotative. . . . they denote the individuals who are called by them; but they do not indicate or imply any attributes as belonging to those individuals” A System of Logic, 1879. Proper names may suggest certain properties to many competent speakers, but any such associated information is no part of the definition of the name. Names, on this view, have no definitions. What connects a name to what it names is not the latter’s satisfying some condition specified in the name’s definition. Names, instead, are simply attached to things, applied as labels, as it were. A proper name, once attached, becomes a socially available device for making the relevant name bearer a subject of discourse. On the other leading view, the descriptivist view, a proper name is associated with something like a definition. ‘Aristotle’, on this view, applies by definition to whoever satisfies the relevant properties  e.g., is ‘the teacher of Alexander the Great, who wrote the Nicomachean Ethics’. Russell, e.g., maintained that ordinary proper names which he contrasted with logically proper or genuine names have definitions, that they are abbreviated definite descriptions. Frege held that names have sense, a view whose proper interpretation remains in dispute, but is often supposed to be closely related to Russell’s approach. Others, most notably Searle, have defended descendants of the descriptivist view. An important variant, sometimes attributed to Frege, denies that names have articulable definitions, but nevertheless associates them with senses. And the bearer will still be, by definition as it were, the unique thing to satisfy the relevant mode of presentation. causal overdetermination causal theory of proper names 124   124 The direct reference approach is sometimes misleadingly called the causal theory of names. But the key idea need have nothing to do with causation: a proper name functions as a tag or label for its bearer, not as a surrogate for a descriptive expression. Whence the allegedly misleading term ‘causal theory of names’? Contemporary defenders of Mill’s conception like Keith Donnellan and Kripke felt the need to expand upon Mill’s brief remarks. What connects a present use of a name with a referent? Here Donnellan and Kripke introduce the notion of a “historical chains of communication.” As Kripke tells the story, a baby is baptized with a proper name. The name is used, first by those present at the baptism, subsequently by those who pick up the name in conversation, reading, and so on. The name is thus propagated, spread by usage “from link to link as if by a chain” Naming and Necessity, 1980. There emerges a historical chain of uses of the name that, according to Donnellan and Kripke, bridges the gap between a present use of the name and the individual so named. This “historical chain of communication” is occasionally referred to as a “casual chain of communication.” The idea is that one’s use of the name can be thought of as a causal factor in one’s listener’s ability to use the name to refer to the same individual. However, although Kripke in Naming and Necessity does occasionally refer to the chain of communication as causal, he more often simply speaks of the chain of communication, or of the fact that the name has been passed “by tradition from link to link” p. 106. The causal aspect is not one that Kripke underscores. In more recent writings on the topic, as well as in lectures, Kripke never mentions causation in this connection, and Donnellan questions whether the chain of communication should be thought of as a causal chain. This is not to suggest that there is no view properly called a “causal theory of names.” There is such a view, but it is not the view of Kripke and Donnellan. The causal theory of names is a view propounded by physicalistically minded philosophers who desire to “reduce” the notion of “reference” to something more physicalistically acceptable, such as the notion of a causal chain running from “baptism” to later use. This is a view whose motivation is explicitly rejected by Kripke, and should be sharply distinguished from the more popular anti-Fregean approach sketched above.