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

dialectic: H. P. Grice, “Athenian dialectic and Oxonian dialectic,” an argumentative exchange involving contradiction or a technique or method connected with such exchanges. The word’s origin is the Grecian dialegein, ‘to argue’ or ‘converse’; in Aristotle and others, this often has the sense ‘argue for a conclusion’, ‘establish by argument’. By Plato’s time, if not earlier, it had acquired a technical sense: a form of argumentation through question and answer. The adjective dialektikos, ‘dialectical’, would mean ‘concerned with dialegein’ or of persons ‘skilled in dialegein’; the feminine dialektike is then ‘the art of dialegein’. Aristotle says that Zeno of Elea invented diagonalization dialectic 232   232 dialectic. He apparently had in mind Zeno’s paradoxical arguments against motion and multiplicity, which Aristotle saw as dialectical because they rested on premises his adversaries conceded and deduced contradictory consequences from them. A first definition of dialectical argument might then be: ‘argument conducted by question and answer, resting on an opponent’s concessions, and aiming at refuting the opponent by deriving contradictory consequences’. This roughly fits the style of argument Socrates is shown engaging in by Plato. So construed, dialectic is primarily an art of refutation. Plato, however, came to apply ‘dialectic’ to the method by which philosophers attain knowledge of Forms. His understanding of that method appears to vary from one dialogue to another and is difficult to interpret. In Republic VIVII, dialectic is a method that somehow establishes “non-hypothetical” conclusions; in the Sophist, it is a method of discovering definitions by successive divisions of genera into their species. Aristotle’s concept of dialectical argument comes closer to Socrates and Zeno: it proceeds by question and answer, normally aims at refutation, and cannot scientifically or philosophically establish anything. Aristotle differentiates dialectical arguments from demonstration apodeixis, or scientific arguments, on the basis of their premises: demonstrations must have “true and primary” premises, dialectical arguments premises that are “apparent,” “reputable,” or “accepted” these are alternative, and disputed, renderings of the term endoxos. However, dialectical arguments must be valid, unlike eristic or sophistical arguments. The Topics, which Aristotle says is the first art of dialectic, is organized as a handbook for dialectical debates; Book VIII clearly presupposes a ruledirected, formalized style of disputation presumably practiced in the Academy. This use of ‘dialectic’ reappears in the early Middle Ages in Europe, though as Aristotle’s works became better known after the twelfth century dialectic was increasingly associated with the formalized disputations practiced in the universities recalling once again the formalized practice presupposed by Aristotle’s Topics. In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant declared that the ancient meaning of ‘dialectic’ was ‘the logic of illusion’ and proposed a “Transcendental Dialectic” that analyzed the “antinomies” deductions of contradictory conclusions to which pure reason is inevitably led when it extends beyond its proper sphere. This concept was further developed by Fichte and Schelling into a traidic notion of thesis, opposing antithesis, and resultant synthesis. Hegel transformed the notion of contradiction from a logical to a metaphysical one, making dialectic into a theory not simply of arguments but of historical processes within the development of “spirit”; Marx transformed this still further by replacing ‘spirit’ with ‘matter’. 

diallelon from ancient Grecian di allelon, ‘through one another’, a circular definition. A definition is circular provided either the definiendum occurs in the definiens, as in ‘Law is a lawful command’, or a first term is defined by means of a second term, which in turn is defined by the first term, as in ‘Law is the expressed wish of a ruler, and a ruler is one who establishes laws.’ A diallelus is a circular argument: an attempt to establish a conclusion by a premise that cannot be known unless the conclusion is known in the first place. Descartes, e.g., argued: I clearly and distinctly perceive that God exists, and what I clearly and distinctly perceive is true. Therefore, God exists. To justify the premise that clear and distinct perceptions are true, however, he appealed to his knowledge of God’s existence.

dianoia, Grecian term for the faculty of thought, specifically of drawing conclusions from assumptions and of constructing and following arguments. The term may also designate the thought that results from using this faculty. We would use dianoia to construct a mathematical proof; in contrast, a being  if there is such a being it would be a god  that could simply intuit the truth of the theorem would use the faculty of intellectual intuition, noûs. In contrast with noûs, dianoia is the distinctly human faculty of reason. Plato uses noûs and dianoia to designate, respectively, the highest and second levels of the faculties represented on the divided line Republic 511de.  PLATO. E.C.H. dialectical argument dianoia 233   233 dichotomy paradox.

dictum de omni et nullo, also dici de omni et nullo Latin, ‘said of all and none’, two principles that were supposed by medieval logicians to underlie all valid syllogisms. Dictum de omni applies most naturally to universal affirmative propositions, maintaining that in such a proposition, whatever falls under the subject term also falls under the predicate term. Thus, in ‘Every whale is a mammal’, whatever is included under ‘whale’ is included under ‘mammal’. Dictum de nullo applies to universal negative propositions, such as ‘No whale is a lizard’, maintaining that whatever falls under the subject term does not fall under the predicate term.  SYLLOGISM. W.E.M. Diderot, Denis 171384, French philosopher, Encyclopedist, dramatist, novelist, and art critic, a champion of Enlightenment values. He is known primarily as general editor of the Encyclopedia 174773, an analytical and interpretive compendium of eighteenth-century science and technology. A friend of Rousseau and Condillac, Diderot translated Shaftesbury’s Inquiry Concerning Virtue 1745 into French. Revealing Lucretian affinities Philosophical Thoughts, 1746, he assailed Christianity in The Skeptics’ Walk 1747 and argued for a materialistic and evolutionary universe Letter on the Blind, 1749; this led to a short imprisonment. Diderot wrote mediocre bourgeois comedies; some bleak fiction The Nun, 1760; and two satirical dialogues, Rameau’s Nephew 1767 and Jacques the Fatalist 176584, his masterpieces. He innovatively theorized on drama Discourse on Dramatic Poetry, 1758 and elevated art criticism to a literary genre Salons in Grimm’s Literary Correspondence. At Catherine II’s invitation, Diderot visited Saint Petersburg in 1773 and planned the creation of a Russian . Promoting science, especially biology and chemistry, Diderot unfolded a philosophy of nature inclined toward monism. His works include physiological investigations, Letter on the Deaf and Dumb 1751 and Elements of Physiology 177480; a sensationalistic epistemology, On the Interpretation of Nature 1745; an aesthetic, Essays on Painting 1765; a materialistic philosophy of science, D’Alembert’s Dream 1769; an anthropology, Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville 1772; and an anti-behavioristic Refutation of Helvétius’ Work “On Man” 177380. 

différance, a French coinage deployed by Derrida in De la Grammatologie 1967, where he defines it as “an economic concept designating the production of differing/deferring.” Différance is polysemic, but its key function is to name the prime condition for the functioning of all language and thought: differing, the differentiation of signs from each other that allows us to differentiate things from each other. Deferring is the process by which signs refer to each other, thus constituting the self-reference essential to language, without ever capturing the being or presence that is the transcendent entity toward which it is aimed. Without the concepts or idealities generated by the iteration of signs, we could never identify a dog as a dog, could not perceive a dog or any other thing as such. Perception presupposes language, which, in turn, presupposes the ideality generated by the repetition of signs. Thus there can be no perceptual origin for language; language depends upon an “original repetition,” a deliberate oxymoron that Derrida employs to signal the impossibility of conceiving an origin of language from within the linguistic framework in which we find ourselves. Différance is the condition for language, and language is the condition for experience: whatever meaning we may find in the world is attributed to the differing/ deferring play of signifiers. The notion of différance and the correlative thesis that meaning is language-dependent have been appropriated by radical thinkers in the attempt to demonstrate that political inequalities are grounded in nothing other than the conventions of sign systems governing differing cultures.

dignity, a moral worth or status usually attributed to human persons. Persons are said to have dignity as well as to express it. Persons are typically thought to have 1 “human dignity” an dichotomy paradox dignity 234   234 intrinsic moral worth, a basic moral status, or both, which is had equally by all persons; and 2 a “sense of dignity” an awareness of one’s dignity inclining toward the expression of one’s dignity and the avoidance of humiliation. Persons can lack a sense of dignity without consequent loss of their human dignity. In Kant’s influential account of the equal dignity of all persons, human dignity is grounded in the capacity for practical rationality, especially the capacity for autonomous self-legislation under the categorical imperative. Kant holds that dignity contrasts with price and that there is nothing  not pleasure nor communal welfare nor other good consequences  for which it is morally acceptable to sacrifice human dignity. Kant’s categorical rejection of the use of persons as mere means suggests a now-common link between the possession of human dignity and human rights see, e.g., the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. One now widespread discussion of dignity concerns “dying with dignity” and the right to conditions conducive thereto. 

dilemma, an argument or argument form in which one of the premises is a disjunction. Constructive dilemmas take the form ‘If A and B, if C then D, A or C; therefore B or D’ and are instances of modus ponens in the special case where A is C and B is D; destructive dilemmas are of the form ‘If A then B, if C then D, not-B or not-D; therefore not-A or not-C’ and are likewise instances of modus tollens in that special case. A dilemma in which the disjunctive premise is false is commonly known as a false dilemma. 

Dilthey, Wilhelm 18331911, German philosopher and historian whose main project was to establish the conditions of historical knowledge, much as Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason had for our knowledge of nature. He studied theology, history, and philosophy at Heidelberg and Berlin and in 1882 accepted the chair earlier held by Hegel at the  of Berlin. Dilthey’s first attempt at a critique of historical reason is found in the Introduction to the Human Sciences 1883, the last in the Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences 1910. He is also a recognized contributor to hermeneutics, literary criticism, and worldview theory. His Life of Schleiermacher and essays on the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Hegel are model works of Geistesgeschichte, in which philosophical ideas are analyzed in relation to their social and cultural milieu. Dilthey holds that life is the ultimate nexus of reality behind which we cannot go. Life is viewed, not primarily in biological terms as in Nietzsche and Bergson, but as the historical totality of human experience. The basic categories whereby we reflect on life provide the background for the epistemological categories of the sciences. According to Dilthey, Aristotle’s category of acting and suffering is rooted in prescientific experience, which is then explicated as the category of efficacy or influence Wirkung in the human sciences and as the category of cause Ursache in the natural sciences. Our understanding of influence in the human sciences is less removed from the full reality of life than are the causal explanations arrived at in the natural sciences. To this extent the human sciences can claim a priority over the natural sciences. Whereas we have direct access to the real elements of the historical world psychophysical human beings, the elements of the natural world are merely hypothetical entities such as atoms. The natural sciences deal with outer experiences, while the human sciences are based on inner experience. Inner experience is reflexive and implicitly self-aware, but need not be introspective or explicitly self-conscious. In fact, we often have inner experiences of the same objects that outer experience is about. An outer experience of an object focuses on its physical properties; an inner experience of it on our felt responses to it. A lived experience Erlebnis of it includes both. The distinction between the natural and the human sciences is also related to the methodological difference between explanation and understanding. The natural sciences seek causal explanations of nature  connecting the discrete representations of outer experience through hypothetical generalizations. The human sciences aim at an understanding Verstehen that articulates the typical structures of life given in lived experience. Finding lived experience to be inherently connected and meaningful, Dilthey opposed traditional atomistic and associationist psychologies and developed a descriptive psychology that Husserl recognized as anticipating phenomenological psychology. In Ideas 1894 Dilthey argued that descriptive psychology could provide a neutral foundation for the other human sciences, but in his later dilemma Dilthey, Wilhelm 235   235 hermeneutical writings, which influenced Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer, he rejected the possibility of a foundational discipline or method. In the Formation, he asserted that all the human sciences are interpretive and mutually dependent. Hermeneutically conceived, understanding is a process of interpreting the “objectifications of life,” the external expressions of human experience and activity. The understanding of others is mediated by these common objectifications and not immediately available through empathy Einfühlung. Moreover, to fully understand myself I must interpret the expressions of my life just as I interpret the expressions of others. Whereas the natural sciences aim at ever broader generalizations, the human sciences place equal weight on understanding individuality and universality. Dilthey regarded individuals as points of intersection of the social and cultural systems in which they participate. Any psychological contribution to understanding human life must be integrated into this more public framework. Although universal laws of history are rejected, particular human sciences can establish uniformities limited to specific social and cultural systems. In a set of sketches 1911 supplementing the Formation, Dilthey further developed the categories of life in relation to the human sciences. After analyzing formal categories such as the partwhole relation shared by all the sciences, he distinguished the real categories of the human sciences from those of the natural sciences. The most important human science categories are value, purpose, and meaning, but they by no means exhaust the concepts needed to reflect on the ultimate sense of our existence. Such reflection receives its fullest expression in a worldview Weltanschauung, such as the worldviews developed in religion, art, and philosophy. A worldview constitutes an overall perspective on life that sums up what we know about the world, how we evaluate it emotionally, and how we respond to it volitionally. Since Dilthey distinguished three exclusive and recurrent types of worldview naturalism e.g., Democritus, Hume, the idealism of freedom e.g., Socrates, Kant, and objective idealism e.g., Parmenides, Hegel  he is often regarded as a relativist. But Dilthey thought that both the natural and the human sciences could in their separate ways attain objective truth through a proper sense of method. Metaphysical formulations of worldviews are relative only because they attempt an impossible synthesis of all truth.  .

diminished capacity, a legal defense to criminal liability that exists in two distinct forms: 1 the mens rea variant, in which a defendant uses evidence of mental abnormality to cast doubt on the prosecution’s assertion that, at the time of the crime, the defendant possessed the mental state criteria, the mens rea, required by the legal definition of the offense charged; and 2 the partial responsibility variant, in which a defendant uses evidence of mental abnormality to support a claim that, even if the defendant’s mental state satisfied the mens rea criteria for the offense, the defendant’s responsibility for the crime is diminished and thus the defendant should be convicted of a lesser crime and/or a lesser sentence should be imposed. The mental abnormality may be produced by mental disorder, intoxication, trauma, or other causes. The mens rea variant is not a distinct excuse: a defendant is simply arguing that the prosecution cannot prove the definitional, mental state criteria for the crime. Partial responsibility is an excuse, but unlike the similar, complete excuse of legal insanity, partial responsibility does not produce total acquittal; rather, a defendant’s claim is for reduced punishment. A defendant may raise either or both variants of diminished capacity and the insanity defense in the same case. For example, a common definition of firstdegree murder requires the prosecution to prove that a defendant intended to kill and did so after premeditation. A defendant charged with this crime might raise both variants as follows. To deny the allegation of premeditation, a defendant might claim that the killing occurred instantaneously in response to a “command hallucination.” If believed, a defendant cannot be convicted of premeditated homicide, but can be convicted of the lesser crime of second-degree murder, which typically requires only intent. And even a defendant who killed intentionally and premeditatedly might claim partial responsibility because the psychotic mental state rendered the agent’s reasons for action nonculpably irrational. In this case, either the degree of crime might be reduced by operation of the partial excuse, rather than by negation of definitional mens rea, or a defendant might be convicted of first-degree murder but given a lesser penalty. In the United States the mens rea variant exists in about half the jurisdictions, although its scope diminished capacity diminished capacity 236   236 is usually limited in various ways, primarily to avoid a defendant’s being acquitted and freed if mental abnormality negated all the definitional mental state criteria of the crime charged. In English law, the mens rea variant exists but is limited by the type of evidence usable to support it. No American jurisdiction has adopted a distinct, straightforward partial responsibility variant, but various analogous doctrines and procedures are widely accepted. For example, partial responsibility grounds both the doctrine that intentional killing should be reduced from murder to voluntary manslaughter if a defendant acted “in the heat of passion” upon legally adequate provocation, and the sentencing judge’s discretion to award a decreased sentence based on a defendant’s mental abnormality. In addition to such partial responsibility analogues, England, Wales, and Scotland have directly adopted the partial responsibility variant, termed “diminished responsibility,” but it applies only to prosecutions for murder. “Diminished responsibility” reduces a conviction to a lesser crime, such as manslaughter or culpable homicide, for behavior that would otherwise constitute murder. 

direction of fit, a metaphor that derives from a story in Anscombe’s Intention 1957 about a detective who follows a shopper around town making a list of the things that the shopper buys. As Anscombe notes, whereas the detective’s list has to match the way the world is each of the things the shopper buys must be on the detective’s list, the shopper’s list is such that the world has to fit with it each of the things on the list are things that he must buy. The metaphor is now standardly used to describe the difference between kinds of speech act assertions versus commands and ment

al states beliefs versus desires. For example, beliefs are said to have the world-to-mind direction of fit because it is in the nature of beliefs that their contents are supposed to match the world: false beliefs are to be abandoned. Desires are said to have the opposite mind-to-world direction of fit because it is in the nature of desires that the world is supposed to match their contents. This is so at least to the extent that the role of an unsatisfied desire that the world be a certain way is to prompt behavior aimed at making the world that way. 

direct realism, the theory that perceiving is epistemically direct, unmediated by conscious or unconscious inference. Direct realism is distinguished, on the one hand, from indirect, or representative, realism, the view that perceptual awareness of material objects is mediated by an awareness of sensory representations, and, on the other hand, from forms of phenomenalism that identify material objects with states of mind. It might be thought that direct realism is incompatible with causal theories of perception. Such theories invoke causal chains leading from objects perceived causes to perceptual states of perceivers effects. Since effects must be distinct from causes, the relation between an instance of perceiving and an object perceived, it would seem, cannot be direct. This, however, confuses epistemic directness with causal directness. A direct realist need only be committed to the former. In perceiving a tomato to be red, the content of my perceptual awareness is the tomato’s being red. I enter this state as a result of a complex causal process, perhaps. But my perception may be direct in the sense that it is unmediated by an awareness of a representational sensory state from which I am led to an awareness of the tomato. Perceptual error, and more particularly, hallucinations and illusions, are usually thought to pose special difficulties for direct realists. My hallucinating a red tomato, for instance, is not my being directly aware of a red tomato, since I may hallucinate the tomato even when none is present. Perhaps, then, my hallucinating a red tomato is partly a matter of my being directly diminished responsibility direct realism 237   237 aware of a round, red sensory representation. And if my awareness in this case is indistinguishable from my perception of an actual red tomato, why not suppose that I am aware of a sensory representation in the veridical case as well? A direct realist may respond by denying that hallucinations are in fact indistinguishable from veridical perceivings or by calling into question the claim that, if sensory representations are required to explain hallucinations, they need be postulated in the veridical case. 

disembodiment, the immaterial state of existence of a person who previously had a body. Disembodiment is thus to be distinguished from nonembodiment or immateriality. God and angels, if they exist, are non-embodied, or immaterial. By contrast, if human beings continue to exist after their bodies die, then they are disembodied. As this example suggests, disembodiment is typically discussed in the context of immortality or survival of death. It presupposes a view according to which persons are souls or some sort of immaterial entity that is capable of existing apart from a body. Whether it is possible for a person to become disembodied is a matter of controversy. Most philosophers who believe that this is possible assume that a disembodied person is conscious, but it is not obvious that this should be the case. 

disjunction elimination. 1 The argument form ‘A or B, if A then C, if B then C; therefore, C’ and arguments of this form. 2 The rule of inference that permits one to infer C from a disjunction together with derivations of C from each of the disjuncts separately. This is also known as the rule of disjunctive elimination or V-elimination. 

disjunction introduction. 1 The argument form ‘A or B; therefore, A or B’ and arguments of this form. 2 The rule of inference that permits one to infer a disjunction from either of its disjuncts. This is also known as the rule of addition or Vintroduction.  .

disjunctive proposition, a proposition whose main propositional operator main connective is the disjunction operator, i.e., the logical operator that represents ‘and/or’. Thus, ‘P-and/orQ-and-R’ is not a disjunctive proposition because its main connective is the conjunction operation, but ‘P-and/or-Q-and-R’ is disjunctive.

disposition, a tendency of an object or system to act or react in characteristic ways in certain situations. Fragility, solubility, and radioactivity are typical physical dispositions; generosity and irritability are typical dispositions of persons. For behaviorism, functionalism, and some forms of materialism, mental events, such as the occurrence of an idea, and states such as beliefs, are also dispositions. Hypothetical or conditional statements are implied by dispositional claims and capture their basic meaning: the glass would shatter if suitably struck; left undisturbed, a radium atom will probably decay in a certain time; etc. These are usually taken as subjunctive rather than material conditionals to avoid problems like having to count as soluble anything not immersed in water. The characteristic mode of action or reaction  shattering, decaying, etc.  is termed the disposition’s manifestation or display. But it need not be observable. Fragility is a regular or universal disposition; a suitably struck glass invariably shatters. Radioactivity is variable or probabilistic; radium may or may not decay in a certain situation. Dispositions may also be multitrack or multiply manifested,rather than single-track or singly manifested: like hardness or elasticity, they may have different manifestations in different situations. In The Concept of Mind 1949 Ryle argued that there is nothing more to dispositional claims than their associated conditionals: dispositional properties are not occurrent; to possess a dispositional property is not to undergo any episode or occurrence, or to be in a particular state. Coupled with a positivist rejection of unobservables, direct reference disposition 238   238 and a conception of mental episodes and states as dispositions, this supports the view of behaviorism that such episodes and states are nothing but dispositions to observable behavior. By contrast, realism holds that dispositional talk is also about actual or occurrent properties or states, possibly unknown or unobservable. In particular, it is about the bases of dispositions in intrinsic properties or states: fragility is based in molecular structure, radioactivity in nuclear structure. A disposition’s basis is viewed as at least partly the cause of its manifestation. Some philosophers hold that the bases are categorical, not dispositional D. M. Armstrong, A Materialist Theory of Mind, 1968. Others, notably Popper, hold that all properties are dispositional. 

distribution, the property of standing for every individual designated by a term. The Latin term distributio originated in the twelfth century; it was applied to terms as part of a theory of reference, and it may have simply indicated the property of a term prefixed by a universal quantifier. The term ‘dog’ in ‘Every dog has his day’ is distributed, because it supposedly refers to every dog. In contrast, the same term in ‘A dog bit the mailman’ is not distributed because it refers to only one dog. In time, the idea of distribution came to be used only as a heuristic device for determining the validity of categorical syllogisms: 1 every term that is distributed in a premise must be distributed in the conclusion; 2 the middle term must be distributed at least once. Most explanations of distribution in logic textbooks are perfunctory; and it is stipulated that the subject terms of universal propositions and the predicate terms of negative propositions are distributed. This is intuitive for A-propositions, e.g., ‘All humans are mortal’; the property of being mortal is distributed over each human. The idea of distribution is not intuitive for, say, the predicate term of O-propositions. According to the doctrine, the sentence ‘Some humans are not selfish’ says in effect that if all the selfish things are compared with some select human one that is not selfish, the relation of identity does not hold between that human and any of the selfish things. Notice that the idea of distribution is not mentioned in this explanation. The idea of distribution is currently disreputable, mostly because of the criticisms of Geach in Reference and Generality 1968 and its irrelevance to standard semantic theories. The related term ‘distributively’ means ‘in a manner designating every item in a group individually’, and is used in contrast with ‘collectively’. The sentence ‘The rocks weighed 100 pounds’ is ambiguous. If ‘rocks’ is taken distributively, then the sentence means that each rock weighed 100 pounds. If ‘rocks’ is taken collectively, then the sentence means that the total weight of the rocks was 100 pounds. 

distributive laws, the logical principles A 8 B 7 C S A 8 B 7 A 7 C and A 7 B 8 C S A 7 B 8 A 7 C. Conjunction is thus said to distribute over disjunction and disjunction over conjunction. 

divided line, one of three analogies with the sun and cave offered in Plato’s Republic VI, 509d 511e as a partial explanation of the Good. Socrates divides a line into two unequal segments: the longer represents the intelligible world and the shorter the sensible world. Then each of the segments is divided in the same proportion. Socrates associates four mental states with the four resulting segments beginning with the shortest: eikasia, illusion or the apprehension of images; pistis, belief in ordinary physical objects; dianoia, the sort of hypothetical reasondispositional belief divided line 239   239 ing engaged in by mathematicians; and noesis, rational ascent to the first principle of the Good by means of dialectic. 

divine attributes, properties of God; especially, those properties that are essential and unique to God. Among properties traditionally taken to be attributes of God, omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence are naturally taken to mean having, respectively, power, knowledge, and moral goodness to the maximum degree. Here God is understood as an eternal or everlasting being of immense power, knowledge, and goodness, who is the creator and sustainer of the universe and is worthy of human worship. Omnipotence is maximal power. Some philosophers, notably Descartes, have thought that omnipotence requires the ability to do absolutely anything, including the logically impossible. Most classical theists, however, understood omnipotence as involving vast powers, while nevertheless being subject to a range of limitations of ability, including the inability to do what is logically impossible, the inability to change the past or to do things incompatible with what has happened, and the inability to do things that cannot be done by a being who has other divine attributes, e.g., to sin or to lie. Omniscience is unlimited knowledge. According to the most straightforward account, omniscience is knowledge of all true propositions. But there may be reasons for recognizing a limitation on the class of true propositions that a being must know in order to be omniscient. For example, if there are true propositions about the future, omniscience would then include foreknowledge. But some philosophers have thought that foreknowledge of human actions is incompatible with those actions being free. This has led some to deny that there are truths about the future and others to deny that such truths are knowable. In the latter case, omniscience might be taken to be knowledge of all knowable truths. Or if God is eternal and if there are certain tensed or temporally indexical propositions that can be known only by someone who is in time, then omniscience presumably does not extend to such propositions. It is a matter of controversy whether omniscience includes middle knowledge, i.e., knowledge of what an agent would do if other, counterfactual, conditions were to obtain. Since recent critics of middle knowledge in contrast to Báñez and other sixteenth-century Dominican opponents of Molina usually deny that the relevant counterfactual conditionals alleged to be the object of such knowledge are true, denying the possibility of middle knowledge need not restrict the class of true propositions a being must know in order to be omniscient. Finally, although the concept of omniscience might not itself constrain how an omniscient being acquires its knowledge, it is usually held that God’s knowledge is neither inferential i.e., derived from premises or evidence nor dependent upon causal processes. Omnibenevolenceis, literally, complete desire for good; less strictly, perfect moral goodness. Traditionally it has been thought that God does not merely happen to be good but that he must be so and that he is unable to do what is wrong. According to the former claim God is essentially good; according to the latter he is impeccable. It is a matter of controversy whether God is perfectly good in virtue of complying with an external moral standard or whether he himself sets the standard for goodness. Divine sovereignty is God’s rule over all of creation. According to this doctrine God did not merely create the world and then let it run on its own; he continues to govern it in complete detail according to his good plan. Sovereignty is thus related to divine providence. A difficult question is how to reconcile a robust view of God’s control of the world with libertarian free will. Aseity or perseity is complete independence. In a straightforward sense, God is not dependent on anyone or anything for his existence. According to stronger interpretation of aseity, God is completely independent of everything else, including his properties. This view supports a doctrine of divine simplicity according to which God is not distinct from his properties. Simplicity is the property of having no parts of any kind. According to the doctrine of divine simplicity, God not only has no spatial or temporal parts, but there is no distinction between God and his essence, between his various attributes in him omniscience and omnipotence, e.g., are identical, and between God and his attributes. Attributing simplicity to God was standard in medieval theology, but the doctrine has seemed to many contemporary philosophers to be baffling, if not incoherent. 

divine command ethics, an ethical theory according to which part or all of morality divine attributes divine command ethics 240   240 depends upon the will of God as promulgated by divine commands. This theory has an important place in the history of Christian ethics. Divine command theories are prominent in the Franciscan ethics developed by John Duns Scotus and William Ockham; they are also endorsed by disciples of Ockham such as d’Ailly, Gerson, and Gabriel Biel; both Luther and Calvin adopt divine command ethics; and in modern British thought, important divine command theorists include Locke, Berkeley, and Paley. Divine command theories are typically offered as accounts of the deontological part of morality, which consists of moral requirements obligation, permissions rightness, and prohibitions wrongness. On a divine command conception, actions forbidden by God are morally wrong because they are thus forbidden, actions not forbidden by God are morally right because they are not thus forbidden, and actions commanded by God are morally obligatory because they are thus commanded. Many Christians find divine command ethics attractive because the ethics of love advocated in the Gospels makes love the subject of a command. Matthew 22:3740 records Jesus as saying that we are commanded to love God and the neighbor. According to Kierkegaard, there are two reasons to suppose that Christian love of neighbor must be an obligation imposed by divine command: first, only an obligatory love can be sufficiently extensive to embrace everyone, even one’s enemies; second, only an obligatory love can be invulnerable to changes in its objects, a love that alters not when it alteration finds. The chief objection to the theory is that dependence on divine commands would make morality unacceptably arbitrary. According to divine command ethics, murder would not be wrong if God did not exist or existed but failed to forbid it. Perhaps the strongest reply to this objection appeals to the doctrines of God’s necessary existence and essential goodness. God could not fail to exist and be good, and so God could not fail to forbid murder. In short, divine commands are not arbitrary fiats. 

divine foreknowledge, God’s knowledge of the future. It appears to be a straightforward consequence of God’s omniscience that he has knowledge of the future, for presumably omniscience includes knowledge of all truths and there are truths about the future. Moreover, divine foreknowledge seems to be required by orthodox religious commitment to divine prophecy and divine providence. In the former case, God could not reliably reveal what will happen if he does know what will happen. And in the latter case, it is difficult to see how God could have a plan for what happens without knowing what that will be. A problem arises, however, in that it has seemed to many that divine foreknowledge is incompatible with human free action. Some philosophers notably Boethius have reasoned as follows: If God knows that a person will do a certain action, then the person must perform that action, but if a person must perform an action, the person does not perform the action freely. So if God knows that a person will perform an action, the person does not perform the action freely. This reason for thinking that divine foreknowledge is incompatible with human free action commits a simple modal fallacy. What must be the case is the conditional that if God knows that a person will perform an action then the person will in fact perform the action. But what is required to derive the conclusion is the implausible claim that from the assumption that God knows that a person will perform an action it follows not simply that the person will perform the action but that the person must perform it. Perhaps other attempts to demonstrate the incompatibility, however, are not as easily dismissed. One response to the apparent dilemma is to say that there really are no such truths about the future, either none at all or none about events, like future free actions, that are not causally necessitated by present conditions. Another response is to concede that there are truths about the future but to deny that truths about future free actions are knowable. In this case omniscience may be understood as knowledge, not of all truths, but of all knowable truths. A third, and historically important, response is to hold that God is eternal and that from his perspective everything is present and thus not future. These responses implicitly agree that divine foreknowledge is incompatible with human freedom, but they provide different accounts of omniscience according to which it does not include foreknowledge, or, at any rate, not foreknowledge of future free actions. 

domain, of a science, the class of individuals that constitute its subject matter. Zoology, number theory, and plane geometry have as their respective domains the class of animals, the class of natural numbers, and the class of plane figures. In Posterior Analytics 76b10, Aristotle observes that each science presupposes its domain, its basic concepts, and its basic principles. In modern formalizations of a science using a standard firstorder formal language, the domain of the science is often, but not always, taken as the universe of the intended interpretation or intended model, i.e. as the range of values of the individual variables. 

donkey sentences, sentences exemplified by ‘Every man who owns a donkey beats it’, ‘If a man owns a donkey, he beats it’, and similar forms (“Every nice girl loves a sailor”), which have posed logical puzzles since medieval times but were noted more recently by Geach. At issue is the logical form of such sentences  specifically, the correct construal of the pronoun ‘it’ and the indefinite noun phrase ‘a donkey’. Translations into predicate logic by the usual strategy of rendering the indefinite as existential quantification and the pronoun as a bound variable cf. ‘John owns a donkey and beats it’ P Dx x is a donkey & John owns x & John beats x are either ill-formed or have the wrong truth conditions. With a universal quantifier, the logical form carries the controversial implication that every donkey-owning man beats every donkey he owns. Efforts to resolve these issues have spawned much significant research in logic and linguistic semantics. 

doomsday argument, an argument associated chiefly with the mathematician Brandon Carter and the philosopher John Leslie purporting to show, by appeal to Bayes’s theorem and Bayes’s rule, that whatever antecedent probability we may have assigned to the hypothesis that human life will end relatively soon is magnified, perhaps greatly, upon our learning or noticing that we are among the first few score thousands of millions of human beings to exist.Leslie’s The End of the World: The Science and Ethics of Human Extinction 1996. The argument is based on an allegedly close analogy between the question of the probability of imminent human extinction given our ordinal location in the temporal swath of humanity and the fact that the reader’s name being among the first few drawn randomly from an urn may greatly enhance for the reader the probability that the urn contains fairly few names rather than very many. 

double negation. 1 The principle, also called the law of double negation, that every proposition is logically equivalent to its double negation. Thus, the proposition that Roger is a rabbit is equivalent to the proposition that Roger is not not a rabbit. The law holds in classical logic but not for certain non-classical concepts of negation. In intuitionist logic, for example, a proposition implies, but need not be implied by, its double negation. 2 The rule of inference, also called the rule of double negation, that permits one to infer the double negation of A from A, and vice versa. 

double truth, the theory that a thing can be true in philosophy or according to reason while its opposite is true in theology or according to faith. It serves as a response to conflicts between reason and faith. For example, on one interpretation of Aristotle, there is only one rational human soul, whereas, according to Christian theology, there are many rational human souls. The theory of double truth was attributed to Averroes and to Latin Averroists such as Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia by their opponents, but it is doubtful that they actually held it. Averroes seems to have held that a single truth is scientifically formulated in philosophy and allegorically expressed in theology. Latin Averroists apparently thought that philosophy concerns what would have been true by natural necessity absent special divine intervention, and theology deals with what is actually true by virtue of such intervention. On this view, there would have been only one rational human soul if God had not miraculously intervened to multiply what by nature could not be multiplied. No one clearly endorsed the view that rational human souls are both only one and also many in number. 

doxastic from Grecian doxa, ‘belief’, of or pertaining to belief. A doxastic mental state, for instance, is or incorporates a belief. Doxastic states of mind are to be distinguished, on the one hand, from such non-doxastic states as desires, sensations, and emotions, and, on the other hand, from subdoxastic states. By extension, a doxastic principle is a principle governing belief. A doxastic principle might set out conditions under which an agent’s forming or abandoning a belief is justified epistemically or otherwise. 

doxographers, compilers of and commentators on the opinions of ancient Grecian philosophers. ‘Doxographers’ is an English translation of the modern Latin term coined by Hermann Diels for the title of his work Doxographi Graeci 1879. Here Diels assembled a series of Grecian texts in which the views of Grecian philosophers from the archaic to the Hellenistic era are set out in a relatively schematic way. In a lengthy introduction Diels reconstructed the history of the writing of these opinions, the doxography; this reconstruction is now a standard part of the historiography of ancient philosophy. The doxography itself is important both as a source of information for early Grecian philosophy and also because later writers, ancient, medieval, and modern, often relied on it rather than primary materials. The crucial text for Diels’s reconstruction was the book Physical Opinions of the Philosophers Placita Philosophorum, traditionally ascribed to Plutarch but no longer thought to be by him. The work lists the views of various philosophers and schools under subject headings such as “What Is Nature?” and “On the Rainbow.” Out of this work and others Diels reconstructed a Collection of Opinions that he ascribed to Aetius A.D. c.100, a person mentioned by Theodoret fifth century as the author of such a work. Diels took Aetius’s ultimate source to be Theophrastus, who wrote a more discursive Physical Opinions. Because Aetius mentions the views of Hellenistic philosophers writing after Theophrastus, Diels postulated an intermediate source, which he called the Vetusta Placita c.100 B.C.. The most accessible doxographical material is in the Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius A.D. c.200, who is, however, mainly interested in biography. He arranges philosophers by schools and treats each school chronologically. I.M. dravya, in Indian philosophies, substance. In Nyaya-Vaishesika all living and non-living things are substances, possessors of qualities gunas and causes of effects. Substances come in nine varieties: earth, air, fire, water, ether, time, space, minds, and bodies. For Jainism, there are six types of substances: the principles of motion and rest, space, time, minds, and bodies. Each except time is extended and each except bodies is immaterial. Visistadvaita, claiming six sorts of substance, includes God as a substance, as does Dvaita, on which all other substances depend for existence. Typically, schools of Buddhism deny that there are any substances, holding that what appear to be such are only bundles of events or states. K.E.Y. dravyasat Sanskrit, ‘existence as a thing’ or, more loosely, ‘primary existence’, a category used by Indian Buddhist scholars to label the double truth dravyasat 243   243 most basic kind of existence that entities can have. It was usually opposed to prajñaptisat, ‘existence as a designation’ or ‘secondary existence’. According to most varieties of Buddhist metaphysics, anything that can be an object of thought or designation must exist in some sense; but some things exist primarily, really, in their own right dravya-sat, while others exist only as objects of linguistic reference prajñapti-sat. An example of the first kind would be a moment of physical form; an example of the second kind would be an ordinary object such as a pot, since this is composed of a series of existents of the first kind.

Dretske, Fred b.1932, American philosopher best known for his externalistic representational naturalism about experience, belief, perception, and knowledge. Educated at Purdue  and the  of Minnesota, he has taught at the  of Wisconsin 196088 and Stanford  198898. In Seeing and Knowing 1969 Dretske develops an account of non-epistemic seeing, denying that seeing is believing  that for a subject S to see a dog, say, S must apply a concept to it dog, animal, furry. The dog must look some way to S S must visually differentiate the dog, but need not conceptually categorize it. This contrasts with epistemic seeing, where for S to see that a dog is before him, S would have to believe that it is a dog. In Knowledge and the Flow of Information 1981, a mind-independent objective sense of ‘information’ is applied to propositional knowledge and belief content. “Information” replaced Dretske’s earlier notion of a “conclusive reason” 1971. Knowing that p requires having a true belief caused or causally sustained by an event that carries the information that p. Also, the semantic content of a belief is identified with the most specific digitally encoded piece of information to which it becomes selectively sensitive during a period of learning. In Explaining Behavior 1988, Dretske’s account of representation and misrepresentation takes on a teleological flavor. The semantic meaning of a structure is now identified with its indicator function. A structure recruited for a causal role of indicating F’s, and sustained in that causal role by this ability, comes to mean F  thereby providing a causal role for the content of cognitive states, and avoiding epiphenomenalism about semantic content. In Naturalizing the Mind 1995, Dretske’s theory of meaning is applied to the problems of consciousness and qualia. He argues that the empirically significant features of conscious experience are exhausted by their functional and hence representational roles of indicating external sensible properties. He rejects the views that consciousness is composed of a higher-order hierarchy of mental states and that qualia are due to intrinsic, non-representational features of the underlying physical systems. Dretske is also known for his contributions on the nature of contrastive statements, laws of nature, causation, and epistemic non-closure, among other topics. 

dualism, the view that reality consists of two disparate parts. The crux of dualism is an apparently unbridgeable gap between two incommensurable orders of being that must be reconciled if our assumption that there is a comprehensible universe is to be justified. Dualism is exhibited in the pre-Socratic division between appearance and reality; Plato’s realm of being containing eternal Ideas and realm of becoming containing changing things; the medieval division between finite man and infinite God; Descartes’s substance dualism of thinking mind and extended matter; Hume’s separation of fact from value; Kant’s division between empirical phenomena and transcendental noumena; the epistemological double-aspect theory of James and Russell, who postulate a neutral substance that can be understood in separate ways either as mind or brain; and Heidegger’s separation of being and time that inspired Sartre’s contrast of being and nothingness. The doctrine of two truths, the sacred and the profane or the religious and the secular, is a dualistic response to the conflict between religion and science. Descartes’s dualism is taken to be the source of the mindbody problem. If the mind is active unextended thinking and the body is passive unthinking extension, how can these essentially unlike and independently existing substances interact causally, and how can mental ideas represent material things? How, in other words, can the mind know and influence the body, and how can the body affect the mind? Descartes said mind and body interact and that ideas represent material things without resembling them, but dream argument dualism 244   244 could not explain how, and concluded merely that God makes these things happen. Proposed dualist solutions to the mindbody problem are Malebranche’s occasionalism mind and body do not interact but God makes them appear to; Leibniz’s preestablished harmony among noninteracting monads; and Spinoza’s property dualism of mutually exclusive but parallel attributes expressing the one substance God. Recent mindbody dualists are Popper and John C. Eccles. Monistic alternatives to dualism include Hobbes’s view that the mental is merely the epiphenomena of the material; Berkeley’s view that material things are collections of mental ideas; and the contemporary materialist view of Smart, Armstrong, and Paul and Patricia Churchland that the mind is the brain. A classic treatment of these matters is Arthur O. Lovejoy’s The Revolt Against Dualism. Dualism is related to binary thinking, i.e., to systems of thought that are two-valued, such as logic in which theorems are valid or invalid, epistemology in which knowledge claims are true or false, and ethics in which individuals are good or bad and their actions are right or wrong. In The Quest for Certainty, Dewey finds that all modern problems of philosophy derive from dualistic oppositions, particularly between spirit and nature. Like Hegel, he proposes a synthesis of oppositions seen as theses versus antitheses. Recent attacks on the view that dualistic divisions can be explicitly described or maintained have been made by Wittgenstein, who offers instead a classification scheme based on overlapping family resemblances; by Quine, who casts doubt on the division between analytic or formal truths based on meanings and synthetic or empirical truths based on facts; and by Derrida, who challenges our ability to distinguish between the subjective and the objective. But despite the extremely difficult problems posed by ontological dualism, and despite the cogency of many arguments against dualistic thinking, Western philosophy continues to be predominantly dualistic, as witnessed by the indispensable use of two-valued matrixes in logic and ethics and by the intractable problem of rendering mental intentions in terms of material mechanisms or vice versa. 

Ducasse, Curt John 18811969, Frenchborn American philosopher of mind and aesthetician. He arrived in the United States in 1900, received his Ph.D. from Harvard 1912, and taught at the  of Washington 191226 and Brown  192658. His most important work is Nature, Mind and Death 1951. The key to his general theory is a non-Humean view of causation: the relation of causing is triadic, involving i an initial event, ii the set of conditions under which it occurs, and iii a resulting event; the initial event is the cause, the resulting event is the effect. On the basis of this view he constructed a theory of categories  an explication of such concepts as those of substance, property, mind, matter, and body. Among the theses he defended were that minds are substances, that they causally interact with bodies, and that human beings are free despite every event’s having a cause. In A Critical Examination of the Belief in a Life after Death 1961, he concluded that “the balance of the evidence so far obtained is on the side of . . . survival.” Like Schopenhauer, whom he admired, Ducasse was receptive to the religious and philosophical writings of the Far East. He wrote with remarkable objectivity on the philosophical problems associated with so-called paranormal phenomena. Ducasse’s epistemological views are developed in Truth, Knowledge and Causation 1968. He sets forth a realistic theory of perception he says, about sense-qualities, “Berkeley is right and the realists are wrong” and, of material things, “the realists are right and Berkeley is wrong”. He provides the classical formulation of the “adverbial theory” or sense-qualities, according to which such qualities are not objects of experience or awareness but ways of experiencing or of being aware. One does not perceive a red material object by sensing a red sense-datum; for then perceiving would involve three entities  i the perceiving subject, ii the red sense-datum, and iii the red material object. But one may perceive a red material object by sensing redly; then the only entities involved are i the perceiving subject and ii the material object. Ducasse observes that, analogously, although it may be natural to say “dancing a waltz,” it would be more accurate to speak of “dancing waltzily.” 

Duhem, Pierre-Maurice-Marie 245   245 French physicist who wrote extensively on the history and philosophy of science. Like Georg Helm, Wilhelm Ostwald, and others, he was an energeticist, believing generalized thermodynamics to be the foundation of all of physics and chemistry. Duhem spent his whole scientific life advancing energetics, from his failed dissertation in physics a version of which was accepted as a dissertation in mathematics, published as Le potentiel thermodynamique 1886, to his mature treatise, Traité d’énergétique 1911. His scientific legacy includes the Gibbs-Duhem and DuhemMargules equations. Possibly because his work was considered threatening by the Parisian scientific establishment or because of his right-wing politics and fervent Catholicism, he never obtained the position he merited in the intellectual world of Paris. He taught at the provincial universities of Lille, Rennes, and, finally, Bordeaux. Duhem’s work in the history and philosophy of science can be viewed as a defense of the aims and methods of energetics; whatever Duhem’s initial motivation, his historical and philosophical work took on a life of its own. Topics of interest to him included the relation between history of science and philosophy of science, the nature of conceptual change, the historical structure of scientific knowledge, and the relation between science and religion. Duhem was an anti-atomist or anti-Cartesian; in the contemporary debates about light and magnetism, Duhem’s anti-atomist stance was also directed against the work of Maxwell. According to Duhem, atomists resolve the bodies perceived by the senses into smaller, imperceptible bodies. The explanation of observable phenomena is then referred to these imperceptible bodies and their motions, suitably combined. Duhem’s rejection of atomism was based on his instrumentalism or fictionalism: physical theories are not explanations but representations; they do not reveal the true nature of matter, but give general rules of which laws are particular cases; theoretical propositions are not true or false, but convenient or inconvenient. An important reason for treating physics as nonexplanatory was Duhem’s claim that there is general consensus in physics and none in metaphysics  thus his insistence on the autonomy of physics from metaphysics. But he also thought that scientific representations become more complete over time until they gain the status of a natural classification. Accordingly, Duhem attacked the use of models by some scientists, e.g. Faraday and Maxwell. Duhem’s rejection of atomism was coupled with a rejection of inductivism, the doctrine that the only physical principles are general laws known through induction, based on observation of facts. Duhem’s rejection forms a series of theses collectively known as the Duhem thesis: experiments in physics are observations of phenomena accompanied by interpretations; physicists therefore do not submit single hypotheses, but whole groups of them, to the control of experiment; thus, experimental evidence alone cannot conclusively falsify hypotheses. For similar reasons, Duhem rejected the possibility of a crucial experiment. In his historical studies, Duhem argued that there were no abrupt discontinuities between medieval and early modern science  the so-called continuity thesis; that religion played a positive role in the development of science in the Latin West; and that the history of physics could be seen as a cumulative whole, defining the direction in which progress could be expected. Duhem’s philosophical works were discussed by the founders of twentieth-century philosophy of science, including Mach, Poincaré, the members of the Vienna Circle, and Popper. A revival of interest in Duhem’s philosophy began with Quine’s reference in 1953 to the Duhem thesis also known as the Duhem-Quine thesis. As a result, Duhem’s philosophical works were translated into English  as The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory 1954 and To Save the Phenomena 1969. By contrast, few of Duhem’s extensive historical works  Les origines de la statique 2 vols., 190608, Études sur Léonard de Vinci 3 vols., 190613, and Système du monde 10 vols., 191359, e.g.  have been translated, with five volumes of the Système du monde actually remaining in manuscript form until 195459. Unlike his philosophical work, Duhem’s historical work was not sympathetically received by his influential contemporaries, notably George Sarton. His supposed main conclusions were rejected by the next generation of historians of science, who presented modern science as discontinuous with that of the Middle Ages. This view was echoed by historically oriented philosophers of science who, from the early 1960s, emphasized discontinuities as a recurrent feature of change in science  e.g. Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions 1962. 

dummett, m. a. e. – cited by H. P. Grice. philosopher of language, logic, and mathematics, noted for his sympathy for metaphysical antirealism and for his exposition of the philosophy of Frege. Dummett regards allegiance to the principle of bivalence as the hallmark of a realist attitude toward any field of discourse. This is the principle that any meaningful assertoric sentence must be determinately either true or else false, independently of anyone’s ability to ascertain its truth-value by recourse to appropriate empirical evidence or methods of proof. According to Dummett, the sentences of any learnable language cannot have verification-transcendent truth conditions and consequently we should query the intelligibility of certain statements that realists regard as meaningful. On these grounds, he calls into question realism about the past and realism in the philosophy of mathematics in several of the papers in two collections of his essays, Truth and Other Enigmas 1978 and The Seas of Language 1993. In The Logical Basis of Metaphysics 1991, Dummett makes clear his view that the fundamental questions of metaphysics have to be approached through the philosophy of language, and more specifically through the theory of meaning. Here his philosophical debts to Frege and Wittgenstein are manifest. Dummett has been the world’s foremost expositor and champion of Frege’s philosophy, above all in two highly influential books, Frege: Philosophy of Language 1973 and Frege: Philosophy of Mathematics 1991. This is despite the fact that Frege himself advocated a form of Platonism in semantics and the philosophy of mathematics that is quite at odds with Dummett’s own anti-realist inclinations. It would appear, however, from what Dummett says in Origins of Analytical Philosophy 1993, that he regards Frege’s great achievement as that of having presaged the “linguistic turn” in philosophy that was to see its most valuable fruit in the later work of Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein’s principle that grasp of the meaning of a linguistic expression must be exhaustively manifested by the use of that expression is one that underlies Dummett’s own approach to meaning and his anti-realist leanings. In logic and the philosophy of mathematics this is shown in Dummett’s sympathy for the intuitionistic approach of Brouwer and Heyting, which involves a repudiation of the law of excluded middle, as set forth in Dummett’s own book on the subject, Elements of Intuitionism 1977. 

dunamis, also dynamis Grecian, ‘power’, ‘capacity’, as used by pre-Socratics such as Anaximander and Anaxagoras, one of the elementary character-powers, such as the hot or the cold, from which they believed the world was constructed. Plato’s early theory of Forms borrowed from the concept of character-powers as causes present in things; courage, e.g., is treated in the Laches as a power in the soul. Aristotle also used the word in this sense to explain the origins of the elements. In the Metaphysics especially Book IX, Aristotle used dunamis in a different sense to mean ‘potentiality’ in contrast to ‘actuality’ energeia or entelecheia. In the earlier sense of dunamis, matter is treated as potentiality, in that it has the potential to receive form and so be actualized as a concrete substance. In the later Aristotelian sense of dunamis, dormant abilities are treated as potentialities, and dunamis is to energeia as sleeping is to waking, or having sight to seeing. 

Duns Scotus, John 12661308, Scottish Franciscan metaphysician and philosophical theologian. He lectured at Oxford, Paris, and Cologne, where he died and his remains are still venerated. Modifying Avicenna’s conception of metaphysics as the science of being qua being, but univocally conceived, Duns Scotus showed its goal was to demonstrate God as the Infinite Being revealed to Moses as the “I am who am”, whose creative will is the source of the world’s contingency. Out of love God fashioned each creature with a unique “haecceity” or particularity formally distinct from its individualized nature. Descriptively identical with others of its kind, this nature, conceived in abstraction from haecceity, is both objectively real and potentially universal, and provides the basis for scientific knowledge that Peirce calls “Scotistic realism.” Duns Scotus brought many of Augustine’s insights, treasured by his Franciscan predecessors, into the mainstream of the Aristotelianism of his day. Their notion of the will’s “supersufficient potentiality” for self-determination he showed can be reconciled with Aristotle’s notion of an “active potency,” if one rejects the controDuhem thesis Duns Scotus, John 247   247 versial principle that “whatever is moved is moved by another.” Paradoxically, Aristotle’s criteria for rational and non-rational potencies prove the rationality of the will, not the intellect, for he claimed that only rational faculties are able to act in opposite ways and are thus the source of creativity in the arts. If so, then intellect, with but one mode of acting determined by objective evidence, is non-rational, and so is classed with active potencies called collectively “nature.” Only the will, acting “with reason,” is free to will or nill this or that. Thus “nature” and “will” represent Duns Scotus’s primary division of active potencies, corresponding roughly to Aristotle’s dichotomy of non-rational and rational. Original too is his development of Anselm’s distinction of the will’s twofold inclination or “affection”: one for the advantageous, the other for justice. The first endows the will with an “intellectual appetite” for happiness and actualization of self or species; the second supplies the will’s specific difference from other natural appetites, giving it an innate desire to love goods objectively according to their intrinsic worth. Guided by right reason, this “affection for justice” inclines the will to act ethically, giving it a congenital freedom from the need always to seek the advantageous. Both natural affections can be supernaturalized, the “affection for justice” by charity, inclining us to love God above all and for his own sake; the affection for the advantageous by the virtue of hope, inclining us to love God as our ultimate good and future source of beatitude. Another influential psychological theory is that of intuitive intellectual cognition, or the simple, non-judgmental awareness of a hereand-now existential situation. First developed as a necessary theological condition for the face-toface vision of God in the next life, intellectual intuition is needed to explain our certainty of primary contingent truths, such as “I think,” “I choose,” etc., and our awareness of existence. Unlike Ockham, Duns Scotus never made intellectual intuition the basis for his epistemology, nor believed it puts one in direct contact with any extramental substance material or spiritual, for in this life, at least, our intellect works through the sensory imagination. Intellectual intuition seems to be that indistinct peripheral aura associated with each direct sensory-intellectual cognition. We know of it explicitly only in retrospect when we consider the necessary conditions for intellectual memory. It continued to be a topic of discussion and dispute down to the time of Calvin, who, influenced by the Scotist John Major, used an auditory rather than a visual sense model of intellectual intuition to explain our “experience of God.” 

Dutch book, a bet or combination of bets whereby the bettor is bound to suffer a net loss regardless of the outcome. A simple example would be a bet on a proposition p at odds of 3 : 2 combined with a bet on not-p at the same odds, the total amount of money at stake in each bet being five dollars. Under this arrangement, if p turned out to be true one would win two dollars by the first bet but lose three dollars by the second, and if p turned out to be false one would win two dollars by the second bet but lose three dollars by the first. Hence, whatever happened, one would lose a dollar. 

Dutch book argument, the argument that a rational person’s degrees of belief must conform to the axioms of the probability calculus, since otherwise, by the Dutch book theorem, he would be vulnerable to a Dutch book. R.Ke. Dutch book theorem, the proposition that anyone who a counts a bet on a proposition p as fair if the odds correspond to his degree of belief that p is true and who b is willing to make any combination of bets he would regard individually as fair will be vulnerable to a Dutch book provided his degrees of belief do not conform to the axioms of the probability calculus. Thus, anyone of whom a and b are true and whose degree of belief in a disjunction of two incompatible propositions is not equal to the sum of his degrees of belief in the two propositions taken individually would be vulnerable to a Dutch book. R.Ke. duty, what a person is obligated or required to do. Duties can be moral, legal, parental, occupational, etc., depending on their foundations or grounds. Because a duty can have several different grounds, it can be, say, both moral and legal, though it need not be of more than one type. Natural duties are moral duties people have simply in virtue of being persons, i.e., simply in virtue of their nature. There is a prima facie duty to do something if and only if there is an appropriate basis for doing that thing. For instance, a prima facie moral duty will be one for which there is a moral basis, i.e., some moral grounds. This conDutch book duty 248   248 trasts with an all-things-considered duty, which is a duty one has if the appropriate grounds that support it outweigh any that count against it. Negative duties are duties not to do certain things, such as to kill or harm, while positive duties are duties to act in certain ways, such as to relieve suffering or bring aid. While the question of precisely how to draw the distinction between negative and positive duties is disputed, it is generally thought that the violation of a negative duty involves an agent’s causing some state of affairs that is the basis of the action’s wrongness e.g., harm, death, or the breaking of a trust, whereas the violation of a positive duty involves an agent’s allowing those states of affairs to occur or be brought about. Imperfect duties are, in Kant’s words, “duties which allow leeway in the interest of inclination,” i.e., that permit one to choose among several possible ways of fulfilling them. Perfect duties do not allow that leeway. Thus, the duty to help those in need is an imperfect duty since it can be fulfilled by helping the sick, the starving, the oppressed, etc., and if one chooses to help, say, the sick, one can choose which of the sick to help. However, the duty to keep one’s promises and the duty not to harm others are perfect duties since they do not allow one to choose which promises to keep or which people not to harm. Most positive duties are imperfect; most negative ones, perfect. 

du Vair, Guillaume 15561621, French philosopher, bishop, and political figure. Du Vair and Justus Lipsius were the two most influential propagators of neo-Stoicism in early modern Europe. Du Vair’s Sainte Philosophie “Holy Philosophy,” 1584 and his shorter Philosophie morale des Stoïques “Moral Philosophy of the Stoics,” 1585, were translated and frequently reprinted. The latter presents Epictetus in a form usable by ordinary people in troubled times. We are to follow nature and live according to reason; we are not to be upset by what we cannot control; virtue is the good. Du Vair inserts, moreover, a distinctly religious note. We must be pious, accept our lot as God’s will, and consider morality obedience to his command. Du Vair thus Christianized Stoicism, making it widely acceptable. By teaching that reason alone enables us to know how we ought to live, he became a founder of modern rationalism in ethics. 

Dvaita Vedanta, a variety of Hinduism according to which Brahman is an independently existing, omnipotent, omniscient personal deity. In Dvaita Vedanta, Brahman everlastingly sustains in existence a world of minds and physical things without their being properly viewed as the body of Brahman, since this would mistakenly suggest that Brahman is limited and can be affected in ways analogous to those in which human beings are limited and can be affected by their bodies. The Upanishadic texts concerning the individual Aman’s identity to Brahman, and all things being in Brahman, are understood as asserting dependence on Brahman and resemblance to Brahman rather than numerical identity with Brahman. Each person is held to have his or her own essence cf. the medieval Scholastic notion of a haecceity and accordingly some are destined for enlightenment, some for endless transmigration, and some for misery.

Dworkin, Ronald M. b.1931, American jurist, political philosopher, and a central contributor to recent legal and political theory. He has served as professor of jurisprudence,  of Oxford 196998, professor of law, New York  1975, and Quain Professor of Jurisprudence,  , London 1998. He was the first significant critic of Hart’s positivist analysis of law as based on a determinable set of social rules. Dworkin argues that the law contains legal principles as well as legal rules. Legal principles are standards phrased generally e.g., ‘No one shall profit from his own wrong’; they do not have a formal “pedigree,” but are requirements of morality. Nonetheless, courts are obliged to apply such principles, and thus have no lawmaking discretion. Judicially enforceable legal rights must derive from antecedent political rights. Dworkin characterizes rights as political “trumps”  hence his title Taking Rights Seriously 2d ed., 1978, which collects the papers that defend the views sketched. Dworkin postulates an idealized judge, Hercules, who can invariably determine what rights are legally enforceable. Dworkin denies any metaphysical commitments thereby, and emphasizes instead the constructive and interpretive nature of both adjudication and legal theory. These arguments are made in papers collected in A Matter of Principle 1985. Law’s Empire 1986 systematizes his view. He presents there a theory of “law as integrity.” The court’s obligation is to make the community’s law the best it can be by finding decisions that best fit both institutional du Vair, Guillaume Dworkin, Ronald M. 249   249 history and moral principle. Hercules always best determines the best fit. Dworkin has also contributed to substantive political theory. He defends a form of liberalism that makes equality as prominent as liberty. His account of equality is found in a number of independent papers; see, e.g., “Foundations of Liberal Equality,” Tanner Lectures on Human Values XI 1990. Dworkin has applied his liberal theory in two ways. He has continually acted as a critical watchdog of the U.S. Supreme Court, assessing decisions for their adherence to the ideals of principle, respect for equality, and achievement of best fit. Some of these essays are in the two collections mentioned; the most recent are in Freedom’s Law 1996. Life’s Dominion 1993 derives from these ideals an account of abortion and euthanasia. Dworkin’s philosophizing has a conceptual richness and rhetorical fire that, when not wholly under control, give his theoretical positions a protean quality at the level of detail. Nonetheless, the ideas that adjudication should be principled and enforce rights, and that we all deserve equal dignity and respect, exercise a powerful fascination. 

dynamic logic, a branch of logic in which, in addition to the usual category of formulas interpretable as propositions, there is a category of expressions interpretable as actions. Dynamic logic originally called the modal logic of programs emerged in the late 1970s as one step in a long tradition within theoretical computer science aimed at providing a way to formalize the analysis of programs and their action. A particular concern here was program verification: what can be said of the effect of a program if started at a certain point? To this end operators [a] and ‹a were introduced with the following intuitive readings: [a]A to mean ‘after every terminating computation according to a it is the case that A’ and ‹aA to mean ‘after some terminating computation according to a it is the case that A’. The logic of these operators may be seen as a generalization of ordinary modal logic: where modal logic has one box operator A and one diamond operator B, dynamic logic has one box operator [a] and one diamond operator ‹a for every program expression a in the language. In possible worlds semantics for modal logic a model is a triple U, R, V where U is a universe of points, R a binary relation, and V a valuation assigning to each atomic formula a subset of U. In dynamic logic, a model is a triple U, R, V where U and V are as before but R is a family of binary relations Ra, one for every program expression a in the language. Writing ‘Xx A’, where x is a point in U, for ‘A is true at x’ in the model in question, we have the following characteristic truth conditions truth-functional compounds are evaluated by truth tables, as in modal logic: Xx P if and only if x is a point in VP, where P is an atomic formula, Xx[a]A if and only if, for all y, if x is Ra- related to y then Xy A, Xx ‹a if and only if, for some y, x is Ra-related to y and Xy A. Traditionally, dynamic logic will contain machinery for rendering the three regular operators on programs: ‘!’ sum, ‘;’ composition, and ‘*’ Kleene’s star operation, as well as the test operator ‘?’, which, operating on a proposition, will yield a program. The action a ! b consists in carrying out a or carrying out b; the action a;b in first carrying out a, then carrying out b; the action a* in carrying out a some finite number of times not excluding 0; the action ?A in verifying that A. Only standard models reflect these intuitions: Ra ! b % Ra 4 Rb, Ra;b % Ra _ Rb, Ra* % Ra*, R?A % {x,x : Xx A} where ‘*’ is the ancestral star The smallest propositional dynamic logic PDL is the set of formulas true at every point in every standard model. Note that dynamic logic analyzes non-deterministic action  this is evident at the level of atomic programs p where Rp is a relation, not necessarily a function, and also in the definitions of Ra + b and Ra*. Dynamic logic has been extended in various ways, e.g., to first- and second-order predicate logic. Furthermore, just as deontic logic, tense logic, etc., are referred to as modal logic in the wide sense, so extensions of dynamic logic in the narrow sense such as process logic are often loosely referred to as dynamic logic in the wide sense. Dyad dynamic logic 250   250 The philosophical interest in dynamic logic rests with the expectation that it will prove a fruitful instrument for analyzing the concept of action in general: a successful analysis would be valuable in itself and would also be relevant to other disciplines such as deontic logic and the logic of imperatives. 

Eckhart, Johannes, called Meister Eckhart c.12601328, German mystic, theologian, and preacher. Eckhart entered the Dominican order early and began an academic circuit that took him several times to Paris as a student and master of theology and that initiated him into ways of thinking much influenced by Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. At Paris, Eckhart wrote the required commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard and finished for publication at least three formal disputations. But he had already held office within the Dominicans, and he continued to alternate work as administrator and as teacher. Eckhart preached throughout these years, and he continued to write spiritual treatises in the vernacular, of which the most important is the Book of Divine Consolation 1313/1322. Only about a third of Eckhart’s main project in Latin, the Opus tripartitum, seems ever to have been completed. Beginning in the early 1320s, questions were raised about Eckhart’s orthodoxy. The questions centered on what was characteristic of his teaching, namely the emphasis on the soul’s attaining “emptiness” so as to “give birth to God.” The soul is ennobled by its emptying, and it can begin to “labor” with God to deliver a spark that enacts the miraculous union-and-difference of their love. After being acquitted of heresy once, Eckhart was condemned on 108 propositions drawn from his writings by a commission at Cologne. The condemnation was appealed to the Holy See, but in 1329 Eckhart was there judged “probably heretical” on 17 of 28 propositions drawn from both his academic and popular works. The condemnation clearly limited Eckhart’s explicit influence in theology, though he was deeply appropriated not only by mystics such as Johannes Tauler and Henry Suso, but by church figures such as Nicholas of Cusa and Martin Luther. He has since been taken up by thinkers as different as Hegel, Fichte, and Heidegger.

Eco: u. – cites H. P. Grice in “Cognitive constraints of communication.” Umberto b.1932, Italian philosopher, intellectual historian, and novelist. A leading figure in the field of semiotics, the general theory of signs. Eco has devoted most of his vast production to the notion of interpretation and its role in communication. In the 1960s, building on the idea that an active process of interpretation is required to take any sign as a sign, he pioneered reader-oriented criticism The Open Work, 1962, 1976; The Role of the Reader, 1979 and championed a holistic view of meaning, holding that all of the interpreter’s beliefs, i.e., his encyclopedia, are potentially relevant to word meaning. In the 1970s, equally influenced by Peirce and the French structuralists, he offered a unified theory of signs A Theory of Semiotics, 1976, aiming at grounding the study of communication in general. He opposed the idea of communication as a natural process, steering a middle way between realism and idealism, particularly of the Sapir-Whorf variety. The issue of realism looms large also in his recent work. In The Limits of Interpretation 1990 and Interpretation and Overinterpretation 1992, he attacks deconstructionism. Kant and the Platypus 1997 defends a “contractarian” form of realism, holding that the reader’s interpretation, driven by the Peircean regulative idea of objectivity and collaborating with the speaker’s underdetermined intentions, is needed to fix reference. In his historical essays, ranging from medieval aesthetics The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, 1956 to the attempts at constructing artificial and “perfect” languages The Search for the Perfect Language, 1993 to medieval semiotics, he traces the origins of some central notions in contemporary philosophy of language e.g., meaning, symbol, denotation and such recent concerns as the language of mind and translation, to larger issues in the history of philosophy. All his novels are pervaded by philosophical queries, such as Is the world an ordered whole? The Name of the Rose, 1980, and How much interpretation can one tolerate without falling prey to some conspiracy syndrome? Foucault’s Pendulum, 1988. Everywhere, he engages the reader in the game of controlled interpretations. 

eduction, the process of initial clarification, as of a phenomenon, text, or argument, that normally takes place prior to logical analysis. Out of the flux of vague and confused experiences certain characteristics are drawn into some kind of order or intelligibility in order that attention can be focused on them Aristotle, Physics I. These characteristics often are latent, hidden, or implicit. The notion often is used with reference to texts as well as experience. Thus it becomes closely related to exegesis and hermeneutics, tending to be reserved for the sorts of clarification that precede formal or logical analyses. 

Edwards, Jonathan 170358, American philosopher and theologian. He was educated at Yale, preached in New York City, and in 1729 assumed a Congregational pastorate in Northampton, Massachusetts, where he became a leader in the Great Awakening. Because of a dispute with his parishioners over qualifications for communion, he was forced to leave in 1750. In 1751, he took charge of congregations in Stockbridge, a frontier town sixty miles to the west. He was elected third president of Princeton in 1757 but died shortly after inauguration. Edwards deeply influenced Congregational and Presbyterian theology in America for over a century, but had little impact on philosophy. Interest in him revived in the middle of the twentieth century, first among literary scholars and theologians and later among philosophers. While most of Edwards’s published work defends the Puritan version of Calvinist orthodoxy, his notebooks reveal an interest in philosophical problems for their own sake. Although he was indebted to Continental rationalists like Malebranche, to the Cambridge Platonists, and especially to Locke, his own contributions are sophisticated and original. The doctrine of God’s absolute sovereignty is explicated by occasionalism, a subjective idealism similar to Berkeley’s, and phenomenalism. According to Edwards, what are “vulgarly” called causal relations are mere constant conjunctions. True causes necessitate their effects. Since God’s will alone meets this condition, God is the only true cause. He is also the only true substance. Physical objects are collections of ideas of color, shape, and other “corporeal” qualities. Finite minds are series of “thoughts” or “perceptions.” Any substance underlying perceptions, thoughts, and “corporeal ideas” must be something that “subsists by itself, stands underneath, and keeps up” physical and mental qualities. As the only thing that does so, God is the only real substance. As the only true cause and the only real substance, God is “in effect being in general.” God creates to communicate his glory. Since God’s internal glory is constituted by his infinite knowledge of, love of, and delight in himself as the highest good, his “communication ad extra” consists in the knowledge of, love of, and joy in himself which he bestows upon creatures. The essence of God’s internal and external glory is “holiness” or “true benevolence,” a disinterested love of being in general i.e., of God and the beings dependent on him. Holiness constitutes “true beauty,” a divine splendor or radiance of which “secondary” ordinary beauty is an imperfect image. God is thus supremely beautiful and the world is suffused with his loveliness. Vindications of Calvinist conceptions of sin and grace are found in Freedom of the Will 1754 and Original Sin 1758. The former includes sophisticated defenses of theological determinism and compatibilism. The latter contains arguments for occasionalism and interesting discussions of identity. Edwards thinks that natural laws determine kinds or species, and kinds or species determine criteria of identity. Since the laws of nature depend on God’s “arbitrary” decision, God establishes criteria of identity. He can thus, e.g., constitute Adam and his posterity as “one thing.” Edwards’s religious epistemology is developed in A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections 1746 and On the Nature of True Virtue 1765. The conversion experience involves the acquisition of a “new sense of the heart.” Its core is the mind’s apprehension of a “new simple idea,” the idea of “true beauty.” This idea is needed to properly understand theological truths. True Virtue also provides the fullest account of Edwards’s ethics  a moral sense theory that identifies virtue with benevolence. Although indebted to contemporaries like Hutcheson, Edwards criticizes their attempts to construct ethics on secular foundations. True benevolence ecofeminism Edwards, Jonathan 253   253 embraces being in general. Since God is, in effect, being in general, its essence is the love of God. A love restricted to family, nation, humanity, or other “private systems” is a form of self-love. 

effective procedure, a step-by-step recipe for computing the values of a function. It determines what is to be done at each step, without requiring any ingenuity of anyone or any machine executing it. The input and output of the procedure consist of items that can be processed mechanically. Idealizing a little, inputs and outputs are often taken to be strings on a finite alphabet. It is customary to extend the notion to procedures for manipulating natural numbers, via a canonical notation. Each number is associated with a string, its numeral. Typical examples of effective procedures are the standard grade school procedures for addition, multiplication, etc. One can execute the procedures without knowing anything about the natural numbers. The term ‘mechanical procedure’ or ‘algorithm’ is sometimes also used. A function f is computable if there is an effective procedure A that computes f. For every m in the domain of f, if A were given m as input, it would produce fm as output. Turing machines are mathematical models of effective procedures. Church’s thesis, or Turing’s thesis, is that a function is computable provided there is a Turing machine that computes it. In other words, for every effective procedure, there is a Turing machine that computes the same function. 

egocentric particular, a word whose denotation is determined by identity of the speaker and/or the time, place, and audience of his utterance. Examples are generally thought to include ‘I,’ ‘you’, ‘here’, ‘there’, ‘this’, ‘that’, ‘now’, ‘past’, ‘present’, and ‘future’. The term ‘egocentric particular’ was introduced by Russell in An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth 1940. In an earlier work, “The Philosophy of Logical Atomism” Monist, 191819, Russell called such words “emphatic particulars.” Some important questions arise regarding egocentric particulars. Are some egocentric particulars more basic than others so that the rest can be correctly defined in terms of them but they cannot be correctly defined in terms of the rest? Russell thought all egocentric particulars can be defined by ‘this’; ‘I’, for example, has the same meaning as ‘the biography to which this belongs’, where ‘this’ denotes a sense-datum experienced by the speaker. Yet, at the same time, ‘this’ can be defined by the combination ‘what I-now notice’. Must we use at least some egocentric particulars to give a complete description of the world? Our ability to describe the world from a speaker-neutral perspective, so that the denotations of the terms in our description are independent of when, where, and by whom they are used, depends on our ability to describe the world without using egocentric particulars. Russell held that egocentric particulars are not needed in any part of the description of the world. 

egocentric predicament, each person’s apparently problematic position as an experiencing subject, assuming that all our experiences are private in that no one else can have them. Two problems concern our ability to gain empirical knowledge. First, it is hard to see how we gain empirical knowledge of what others experience, if all experience is private. We cannot have their experience to see what it is like, for any experience we have is our experience and so not theirs. Second, it is hard to see how we gain empirical knowledge of how the external world is, independently of our experience. All our empirically justified beliefs seem to rest ultimately on what is given in experience, and if the empirically given is private, it seems it can only support justified beliefs about the world as we experience it. A third major problem concerns our ability to communicate with others. It is hard to see how we describe the world in a language others understand. We give meaning to some of our words by defining them by other words that already have effective procedure egocentric predicament 254   254 meaning, and this process of definition appears to end with words we define ostensively; i.e., we use them to name something given in experience. If experiences are private, no one else can grasp the meaning of our ostensively defined words or any words we use them to define. No one else can understand our attempts to describe the world. 

Egoism: cf. H. P. Grice, “The principle of conversational self-love and the principle of conversational benevolence,” any view that, in a certain way, makes the self central. There are several different versions of egoism, all of which have to do with how actions relate to the self. Ethical egoism is the view that people ought to do what is in their own selfinterest. Psychological egoism is a view about people’s motives, inclinations, or dispositions. One statement of psychological egoism says that, as a matter of fact, people always do what they believe is in their self-interest and, human nature being what it is, they cannot do otherwise. Another says that people never desire anything for its own sake except what they believe is in their own self-interest. Altruism is the opposite of egoism. Any ethical view that implies that people sometimes ought to do what is in the interest of others and not in their self-interest can be considered a form of ethical altruism. The view that, human nature being what it is, people can do what they do not believe to be in their self-interest might be called psychological altruism. Different species of ethical and psychological egoism result from different interpretations of self-interest and of acting from self-interest, respectively. Some people have a broad conception of acting from self-interest such that people acting from a desire to help others can be said to be acting out of self-interest, provided they think doing so will not, on balance, take away from their own good. Others have a narrower conception of acting from selfinterest such that one acts from self-interest only if one acts from the desire to further one’s own happiness or good. Butler identified self-love with the desire to further one’s own happiness or good and self-interested action with action performed from that desire alone. Since we obviously have other particular desires, such as the desires for honor, for power, for revenge, and to promote the good of others, he concluded that psychological egoism was false. People with a broader conception of acting from self-interest would ask whether anyone with those particular desires would act on them if they believed that, on balance, acting on them would result in a loss of happiness or good for themselves. If some would, then psychological egoism is false, but if, given human nature as it is, no one would, it is true even if self-love is not the only source of motivation in human beings. Just as there are broader and narrower conceptions of acting from self-interest, there are broader and narrower conceptions of self-interest itself, as well as subjective and objective conceptions of self-interest. Subjective conceptions relate a person’s self-interest solely to the satisfaction of his desires or to what that person believes will make his life go best for him. Objective conceptions see self-interest, at least in part, as independent of the person’s desires and beliefs. Some conceptions of self-interest are narrower than others, allowing that the satisfaction of only certain desires is in a person’s self-interest, e.g., desires whose satisfaction makes that person’s life go better for her. And some conceptions of self-interest count only the satisfaction of idealized desires, ones that someone would have after reflection about the nature of those desires and what they typically lead to, as furthering a person’s self-interest. 

Einfühlung German, ‘feeling into’, empathy. In contrast to sympathy, where one’s identity is preserved in feeling with or for the other, in empathy or Einfühlung one tends to lose oneself in the other. The concept of Einfühlung received its classical formulation in the work of Theodor Lipps, who characterized it as a process of involuntary, inner imitation whereby a subject identifies through feeling with the movement of another body, whether it be the real leap of a dancer or the illusory upward lift of an architectural column. Complete empathy is considered to be aesthetic, providing a non-representational access to beauty. Husserl used a phenomenologically purified concept of Einfühlung to account for the way the self directly recognizes the other. Husserl’s student Edith Stein described Einfühlung as a blind egoism Einfühlung 255   255 mode of knowledge that reaches the experience of the other without possessing it. Einfühlung is not to be equated with Verstehen or human understanding, which, as Dilthey pointed out, requires the use of all one’s mental powers, and cannot be reduced to a mere mode of feeling. To understand is not to apprehend something empathetically as the projected locus of an actual experience, but to apperceive the meaning of expressions of experience in relation to their context. Whereas understanding is reflective, empathy is prereflective. 

Einstein, Albert 18791955, German-born American physicist, founder of the special and general theories of relativity and a fundamental contributor to several branches of physics and to the philosophical analysis and critique of modern physics, notably of relativity and the quantum theory. Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in 1922, “especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.” Born in Ulm in the German state of Württemberg, Einstein studied physics at the Polytechnic in Zürich, Switzerland. He was called to Berlin as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics 1914 at the peak of the German ultranationalism that surrounded World War I. His reaction was to circulate an internationalist “Manifesto to Europeans” and to pursue Zionist and pacifist programs. Following the dramatic confirmation of the general theory of relativity 1919 Einstein became an international celebrity. This fame also made him the frequent target of German anti-Semites, who, during one notable episode, described the theory of relativity as “a Jewish fraud.” In 1933 Einstein left Germany for the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Although his life was always centered on science, he was also engaged in the politics and culture of his times. He carried on an extensive correspondence whose publication will run to over forty volumes with both famous and ordinary people, including significant philosophical correspondence with Cassirer, Reichenbach, Moritz Schlick, and others. Despite reservations over logical positivism, he was something of a patron of the movement, helping to secure academic positions for several of its leading figures. In 1939 Einstein signed a letter drafted by the nuclear physicist Leo Szilard informing President Roosevelt about the prospects for harnessing atomic energy and warning of the German efforts to make a bomb. Einstein did not further participate in the development of atomic weapons, and later was influential in the movement against them. In 1952 he was offered, and declined, the presidency of Israel. He died still working on a unified field theory, and just as the founders of the Pugwash movement for nuclear disarmament adopted a manifesto he had cosigned with Russell. Einstein’s philosophical thinking was influenced by early exposure to Kant and later study of Hume and Mach, whose impact shows in the operationalism used to treat time in his famous 1905 paper on special relativity. That work also displays a passion for unity in science characteristic of nearly all his physical thinking, and that may relate to the monism of Spinoza, a philosopher whom he read and reread. Einstein’s own understanding of relativity stressed the invariance of the space-time interval and promoted realism with regard to the structure of spacetime. Realism also shows up in Einstein’s work on Brownian motion 1905, which was explicitly motivated by his long-standing interest in demonstrating the reality of molecules and atoms, and in the realist treatment of light quanta in his analysis 1905 of the photoelectric effect. While he pioneered the development of statistical physics, especially in his seminal investigations of quantum phenomena 190525, he never broke with his belief in determinism as the only truly fundamental approach to physical processes. Here again one sees an affinity with Spinoza. Realism and determinism brought Einstein into conflict with the new quantum theory 192526, whose observer dependence and “flight into statistics” convinced him that it could not constitute genuinely fundamental physics. Although influential in its development, he became the theory’s foremost critic, never contributing to its refinement but turning instead to the program of unifying the electromagnetic and gravitational fields into one grand, deterministic synthesis that would somehow make room for quantum effects as limiting or singular cases. It is generally agreed that his unified field program was not successful, although his vision continues to inspire other unification programs, and his critical assessments of quantum mechanics still challenge the instrumentalism associated with the theory. Einstein’s philosophical reflections constitute an important chapter in twentieth-century thought. He understood realism as less a metaphysical doctrine than a motivational program, and he argued that determinism was a feature of theories rather than an aspect of the world Einstein, Albert Einstein, Albert 256   256 directly. Along with the unity of science, other central themes in his thinking include his rejection of inductivism and his espousal of holism and constructivism or conventionalism, emphasizing that meanings, concepts, and theories are free creations, not logically derivable from experience but subject rather to overall criteria of comprehensibility, empirical adequacy, and logical simplicity. Holism is also apparent in his acute analysis of the testability of geometry and his rejection of Poincaré’s geometric conventionalism. 

Eleatic School, strictly, two fifth-century B.C. Grecian philosophers, Parmenides and Zeno of Elea. The Ionian Grecian colony of Elea or Hyele in southern Italy became Velia in Roman times and retains that name today. A playful remark by Plato in Sophist 242d gave rise to the notion that Xenophanes of Colophon, who was active in southern Italy and Sicily, was Parmenides’ teacher, had anticipated Parmenides’ views, and founded the Eleatic School. Moreover, Melissus of Samos and according to some ancient sources even the atomist philosopher Leucippus of Abdera came to be regarded as “Eleatics,” in the sense of sharing fundamental views with Parmenides and Zeno. In the broad and traditional use of the term, the Eleatic School characteristically holds that “all is one” and that change and plurality are unreal. So stated, the School’s position is represented best by Melissus. 

elenchus, a cross-examination or refutation. Typically in Plato’s early dialogues, Socrates has a conversation with someone who claims to have some sort of knowledge, and Socrates refutes this claim by showing the interlocutor that what he thinks he knows is inconsistent with his other opinions. This refutation is called an elenchus. It is not entirely negative, for awareness of his own ignorance is supposed to spur the interlocutor to further inquiry, and the concepts and assumptions employed in the refutations serve as the basis for positive Platonic treatments of the same topic. In contrast, sophistic elenchi are merely eristic: they aim simply at the refutation of an opponent by any means. Thus, Aristotle calls fallacies that only appear to be refutations “sophistical elenchi.” 

Elizabeth of Bohemia 161880, German Princess whose philosophical reputation rests on her correspondence with Descartes. The most heavily discussed portion of this correspondence focuses on the relationship between the mind and the body and on Descartes’s claim that the mind-body union is a simple notion. Her discussions of free will and of the nature of the sovereign good also have philosophical interest. 

ellipsis, an expression spoken or written from which semantically or syntactically essential material has been deleted, usually for conciseness. Elliptical sentences are often used to answer questions without repeating material occurring in the questions. For example, the word ‘Lincoln’ may be an answer to the question of the authorship of the Gettysburg Address or to the question of the birthplace of George Boole. The single word ‘Lincoln’ can be seen as an elliptical name when used as an ellipsis of ‘Abraham Lincoln’, and it can be seen as an elliptical sentence when used as an ellipsis for ‘Abraham Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address’. Other typical elliptical sentences are: ‘Abe is a father of two [children]’, ‘Ben arrives at twelve [noon]’. A typical ellipsis that occurs in discussion of ellipses involves citing the elliptical sentences with the deleted material added in brackets often with ‘sc.’ or ‘scilicet’ instead of also presenting the complete sentence. Ellipsis also occurs above the sentential level, e.g. where well-known premises are omitted in the course of argumentation. The word ‘enthymeme’ designates an elliptical argument expression from which one or more premise-expressions have been deleted. The élan vital ellipsis 257   257 expression ‘elliptic ambiguity’ designates ambiguity arising from ellipsis. 

emanationism, a doctrine about the origin and ontological structure of the world, most frequently associated with Plotinus and other Neoplatonists, according to which everything else that exists is an emanation from a primordial unity, called by Plotinus “the One.” The first product of emanation from the One is Intelligence noûs, a realm resembling Plato’s world of Forms. From Intelligence emanates Soul psuche, conceived as an active principle that imposes, insofar as that is possible, the rational structure of Intelligence on the matter that emanates from Soul. The process of emanation is typically conceived to be necessary and timeless: although Soul, for instance, proceeds from Intelligence, the notion of procession is one of logical dependence rather than temporal sequence. The One remains unaffected and undiminished by emanation: Plotinus likens the One to the sun, which necessarily emits light from its naturally infinite abundance without suffering change or loss of its own substance. Although emanationism influenced some Jewish, Christian, and Islamic thinkers, it was incompatible with those theistic doctrines of divine activity that maintained that God’s creative choice and the world thus created were contingent, and that God can, if he chooses, interact directly with individual creatures. 

embodiment, the bodily aspects of human subjectivity. Embodiment is the central theme in European phenomenology, with its most extensive treatment in the works of Maurice MerleauPonty. Merleau-Ponty’s account of embodiment distinguishes between “the objective body,” which is the body regarded as a physiological entity, and “the phenomenal body,” which is not just some body, some particular physiological entity, but my or your body as I or you experience it. Of course, it is possible to experience one’s own body as a physiological entity. But this is not typically the case. Typically, I experience my body tacitly as a unified potential or capacity for doing this and that  typing this sentence, scratching that itch, etc. Moreover, this sense that I have of my own motor capacities expressed, say, as a kind of bodily confidence does not depend on an understanding of the physiological processes involved in performing the action in question. The distinction between the objective and phenomenal body is central to understanding the phenomenological treatment of embodiment. Embodiment is not a concept that pertains to the body grasped as a physiological entity. Rather it pertains to the phenomenal body and to the role it plays in our object-directed experiences. 

Emerson, Ralph Waldo 180382, American philosophical essayist, lecturer, and poet, a leading figure in the transcendentalist movement. He was born in Boston and educated at Harvard. As a young man he taught school and served as a Unitarian minister 182632. After he resigned his pastorate in 1832, he traveled to Europe to visit Coleridge, Carlyle, and Wordsworth. Upon his return, he settled in Concord, Massachusetts, and began anew as a public lecturer, essayist, and cultural critic. All the while he maintained a voluminous correspondence and kept a detailed, evocative journal. Most of this material has been published, and it casts considerable light on the depth of his thought, at times more so than his public presentations and books. His life was pockmarked by personal tragedies, notably the death of his father when Emerson was eight; the death of his first wife, Ellen, after two years of marriage; and the death of his oldest son, Waldo, at the age of five. Such afflictions belie the commonly held assumption that Emerson was a thinker who did not face the intractable problem of evil. To the contrary, his writings should be read as a continuing struggle to render the richest possible version of our situation, given that “things are in the saddle and ride mankind.” Although Emerson did not write a systematic work in philosophy, he unquestionably bequeathed an important philosophical vision and countless philosophical pieces. Beginning with his concentration on the motif of nature, its embracing quality, and the rhythms of our inextricable presence within its activities, Emerson details the “compensatory” ebb and flow of the human journey. The human soul and nature are related as “print” to “seal,” and yet nature is not always beneficent. In his essay “Compensation,” emanationism Emerson, Ralph Waldo 258   258 Emerson writes that “the value of the universe continues to throw itself into every point. If the good is there, so is the evil; if the affinity, so the repulsion, if the force, so the limitation.” After the acclaim given the publication of Emerson’s first book, Nature 1836, he began to gather his public lectures, a presentational medium at which he was riveting, convincing, and inspiring. In 1841 Emerson published his Essays  First Series, which included the lovely piece “Circles,” wherein he follows the blunt maxim “we grizzle every day” with the healing affirmation that “life is a series of surprises.” This volume also contains “Self-Reliance,” which furnished a motto for the self-proclaiming intrepidity of nineteenth-century American individualism. The enthusiastic response to Emerson’s essays enabled him to publish three additional collections within the decade: Essays  Second Series 1844, Nature, Addresses and Lectures 1849, and Representative Men 1850. These books and their successors contained lectures, orations, poems, and addresses over a wide range of topics, philosophical, personal, characterological, travel, historical, and literary. Emerson’s prose is swift, clear, and epigrammatic, like a series of written stochastic probes, resulting in a Yankee crazy quilt, munificent of shape and color. Emerson spoke to be heard and wrote to be read, especially by the often denigrated “common” person. In fact, during Emerson’s European lecture tour in 1848, a letter to a London newspaper requested lowering the admission price so that poorer people could attend, for “to miss him is to lose an important part of the Nineteenth Century.” Emerson’s deeply democratic attitude had a reflective philosophical base. He believed that ordinary experience was epiphanic if we but open ourselves to its virtually infinite messages. Despite his Brahmanic appearance and demeanor, Emerson was in continuous touch with ordinary things. He wrote, “Our chief experiences have been casual.” His belief in the explosive and pedagogical character of ordinary experience is especially present in his influential oration “The American Scholar.” After criticizing American thought as thoroughly derivative, he plots the influences necessary to generate a genuine scholar, paramount among them nature and the learning of the past, though he cautions us not to be trapped in excessive retrospection at the expense of “an original relation to the universe.” It is his discussion of “action” as the third influence on the scholar that enables him to project his clearest statement of his underlying philosophical commitment. Without action, “thought can never ripen into truth,” moreover, “thinking is a partial act,” whereas living is a “total act.” Expressly opposed to any form of psychological, religious, philosophical, or behavioral dualism, he counsels us that the spiritual is not set apart, beyond reach of those who toil in the everyday. Rather, the most profound meanings of the human condition, “lurk” in the “common,” the “low,” the “familiar,” the “today.” The influence of the thought of Emerson reaches across class, caste, genre, and persuasion. Thinkers as diverse as James, Nietzsche, Whitman, Proust, Gertrude Stein, Robert Frost, Frank Lloyd Wright, Frederick Law Olmsted, and Wallace Stevens are among those deeply indebted to Emerson. Yet, it was Dewey who best caught the enduring bequest of Emerson, writing of “the final word of Emerson’s philosophy, [as] the identity of Being, unqualified and immutable, with character.”

emotion, as conceived by philosophers and psychologists, any of several general types of mental states, approximately those that had been called “passions” by earlier philosophers, such as Descartes and Hume. Anger, e.g., is one emotion, fear a second, and joy a third. An emotion may also be a content-specific type, e.g., fear of an earthquake, or a token of an emotion type, e.g., Mary’s present fear that an earthquake is imminent. The various states typically classified as emotions appear to be linked together only by overlapping family resemblances rather than by a set of necessary and sufficient conditions. Thus an adequate philosophical or psychological “theory of emotion” should probably be a family of theories. Even to label these states “emotions” wrongly suggests that they are all marked by emotion, in the older sense of mental agitation a metaphorical extension of the original sense, agitated motion. A person who is, e.g., pleased or sad about something is not typically agitated. To speak of anger, fear, joy, sadness, etc., collectively as “the emotions” fosters the assumption which James said he took for granted that these are just qualitatively distinct feelings of mental agitation. This exaggerates the importance of agitation and neglects the characteristic differences, noted by Aristotle, Spinoza, and others, in the types of situations that evoke the various emotions. One important feature of most emotions is captured by the older category of passions, in the sense of ‘ways of being acted upon’. In many lanemotion emotion 259   259 guages nearly all emotion adjectives are derived from participles: e.g., the English words ‘amused’, ‘annoyed’, ‘ashamed’, ‘astonished’, ‘delighted’, ‘embarrassed’, ‘excited’, ‘frightened’, ‘horrified’, ‘irritated’, ‘pleased’, ‘terrified’, ‘surprised’, ‘upset’, and ‘worried’. When we are, e.g., embarrassed, something acts on us, i.e., embarrasses us: typically, some situation or fact of which we are aware, such as our having on unmatched shoes. To call embarrassment a passion in the sense of a way of being acted upon does not imply that we are “passive” with respect to it, i.e., have no control over whether a given situation embarrasses us and thus no responsibility for our embarrassment. Not only situations and facts but also persons may “do” something to us, as in love and hate, and mere possibilities may have an effect on us, as in fear and hope. The possibility emotions are sometimes characterized as “forward-looking,” and emotions that are responses to actual situations or facts are said to be “backward-looking.” These temporal characterizations are inaccurate and misleading. One may be fearful or hopeful that a certain event occurred in the past, provided one is not certain as to whether it occurred; and one may be, e.g., embarrassed about what is going to occur, provided one is certain it will occur. In various passions the effect on us may include involuntary physiological changes, feelings of agitation due to arousal of the autonomic nervous system, characteristic facial expressions, and inclinations toward intentional action or inaction that arise independently of any rational warrant. Phenomenologically, however, these effects do not appear to us to be alien and non-rational, like muscular spasms. Rather they seem an integral part of our perception of the situation as, e.g., an embarrassing situation, or one that warrants our embarrassment. 

emotive conjugation: I went to Oxford; you went to Cambridge; he went to the London School of Economics”: a humorous verbal conjugation, designed to expose and mock first-person bias, in which ostensibly the same action is described in successively more pejorative terms through the first, second, and third persons e.g., “I am firm, You are stubborn, He is a pig-headed fool”. This example was used by Russell in the course of a BBC Radio “Brains’ Trust” discussion. It was popularized later that year when The New Statesman ran a competition for other examples. An “unprecedented response” brought in 2,000 entries, including: “I am well informed, You listen to gossip, He believes what he reads in the paper”; and “I went to Oxford, You went to Cambridge, He went to the London School of Economics” Russell was educated at Cambridge and later taught there. 

emotivism, a noncognitivist metaethical view opposed to cognitivism, which holds that moral judgments should be construed as assertions about the moral properties of actions, persons, policies, and other objects of moral assessment, that moral predicates purport to refer to properties of such objects, that moral judgments or the propositions that they express can be true or false, and that cognizers can have the cognitive attitude of belief toward the propositions that moral judgments express. Noncognitivism denies these claims; it holds that moral judgments do not make assertions or express propositions. If moral judgments do not express propositions, the former can be neither true nor false, and moral belief and moral knowledge are not possible. The emotivist is a noncognitivist who claims that moral judgments, in their primary sense, express the appraiser’s attitudes  approval or disapproval  toward the object of evaluation, rather than make assertions about the properties of that object. Because emotivism treats moral judgments as the expressions of the appraiser’s pro and con attitudes, it is sometimes referred to as the boohurrah theory of ethics. Emotivists distinguish their thesis that moral judgments express the appraiser’s attitudes from the subjectivist claim that they state or report the appraiser’s attitudes the latter view is a form of cognitivism. Some versions of emotivism distinguish between this primary, emotive meaning of moral judgments and a secondary, descriptive meaning. In its primary, emotive meaning, a moral judgment expresses the appraiser’s attitudes toward the object of evaluation rather than ascribing properties to that object. But secondarily, moral judgments refer to those non-moral properties of the object of evaluation in virtue of which the appraiser has and expresses her attitudes. So if I judge that your act of torture is wrong, my judgment has two components. Its primary, emotive emotions, the seven emotivism 260   260 sense is to express my disapproval of your act. Its secondary, descriptive sense is to denote those non-moral properties of your act upon which I base my disapproval. These are presumably the very properties that make it an act of torture  roughly, a causing of intense pain in order to punish, coerce, or afford sadistic pleasure. By making emotive meaning primary, emotivists claim to preserve the univocity of moral language between speakers who employ different criteria of application for their moral terms. Also, by stressing the intimate connection between moral judgment and the agent’s non-cognitive attitudes, emotivists claim to capture the motivational properties of moral judgment. Some emotivists have also attempted to account for ascriptions of truth to moral judgments by accepting the redundancy account of ascriptions of truth as expressions of agreement with the original judgment. The emotivist must think that such ascriptions of truth to moral judgments merely reflect the ascriber’s agreement in noncognitive attitude with the attitude expressed by the original judgment. Critics of emotivism challenge these alleged virtues. They claim that moral agreement need not track agreement in attitude; there can be moral disagreement without disagreement in attitude between moralists with different moral views, and disagreement in attitude without moral disagreement between moralists and immoralists. By distinguishing between the meaning of moral terms and speakers’ beliefs about the extension of those terms, critics claim that we can account for the univocity of moral terms in spite of moral disagreement without introducing a primary emotive sense for moral terms. Critics also allege that the emotivist analysis of moral judgments as the expression of the appraiser’s attitudes precludes recognizing the possibility of moral judgments that do not engage or reflect the attitudes of the appraiser. For instance, it is not clear how emotivism can accommodate the amoralist  one who recognizes moral requirements but is indifferent to them. Critics also charge emotivism with failure to capture the cognitive aspects of moral discourse. Because emotivism is a theory about moral judgment or assertion, it is difficult for the emotivist to give a semantic analysis of moral predicates in unasserted contexts, such as in the antecedents of conditional moral judgments e.g., “If he did wrong, then he ought to be punished”. Finally, one might want to recognize the truth of some moral judgments, perhaps in order to make room for the possibility of moral mistakes. If so, then one may not be satisfied with the emotivist’s appeal to redundancy or disquotational accounts of the ascription of truth. Emotivism was introduced by Ayer in Language, Truth, and Logic 2d ed., 1946 and refined by C. L. Stevenson in Facts and Values 1963 and Ethics and Language 1944. 

empathy, imaginative projection into another person’s situation, especially for vicarious capture of its emotional and motivational qualities. The term is an English rendering by the AngloAmerican psychologist E. G. Titchener, 1867 1927 of the German Einfühlung, made popular by Theodore Lipps 18511914, which also covered imaginative identification with inanimate objects of aesthetic contemplation. Under ‘sympathy’, many aspects were earlier discussed by Hume, Adam Smith, and other Scottish philosophers. Empathy has been considered a precondition of ethical thinking and a major contributor to social bonding and altruism, mental state attribution, language use, and translation. The relevant spectrum of phenomena includes automatic and often subliminal motor mimicry of the expressions or manifestations of another’s real or feigned emotion, pain, or pleasure; emotional contagion, by which one “catches” another’s apparent emotion, often unconsciously and without reference to its cause or “object”; conscious and unconscious mimicry of direction of gaze, with consequent transfer of attention from the other’s response to its cause; and conscious or unconscious role-taking, which reconstructs in imagination with or without imagery aspects of the other’s situation as the other “perceives” it.

Empedocles c.495c.435 B.C., Grecian preSocratic philosopher who created a physical theory in response to Parmenides while incorporating Pythagorean ideas of the soul into his philosophy. Following Parmenides in his rejection of coming-to-be and perishing, he accounted for phenomenal change by positing four elements his “roots,” rizomata, earth, empathic solipsism Empedocles 261   261 water, air, and fire. When they mix together in set proportions they create compound substances such as blood and bone. Two forces act on the elements, Love and Strife, the former joining the different elements, the latter separating them. In his cyclical cosmogony the four elements combine to form the Sphere, a completely homogeneous spherical body permeated by Love, which, shattered by Strife, grows into a cosmos with the elements forming distinct cosmic masses of earth, water the seas, air, and fire. There is controversy over whether Empedocles posits one or two periods when living things exist in the cycle. On one view there are two periods, between which intervenes a stage of complete separation of the elements. Empedocles accepts the Pythagorean view of reincarnation of souls, seeing life as punishment for an original sin and requiring the expiation of a pious and philosophical life. Thus the exile and return of the individual soul reflects in the microcosm the cosmic movement from harmony to division to harmony. Empedocles’ four elements became standard in natural philosophy down to the early modern era, and Aristotle recognized his Love and Strife as an early expression of the efficient cause. 

empirical decision theory, the scientific study of human judgment and decision making. A growing body of empirical research has described the actual limitations on inductive reasoning. By contrast, traditional decision theory is normative; the theory proposes ideal procedures for solving some class of problems. The descriptive study of decision making was pioneered by figures including Amos Tversky, Daniel Kahneman, Richard Nisbett, and Lee Ross, and their empirical research has documented the limitations and biases of various heuristics, or simple rules of thumb, routinely used in reasoning. The representativeness heuristic is a rule of thumb used to judge probabilities based on the degree to which one class represents or resembles another class. For example, we assume that basketball players have a “hot hand” during a particular game  producing an uninterrupted string of successful shots  because we underestimate the relative frequency with which such successful runs occur in the entire population of that player’s record. The availability heuristic is a rule of thumb that uses the ease with which an instance comes to mind as an index of the probability of an event. Such a rule is unreliable when salience in memory misleads; for example, most people incorrectly rate death by shark attack as more probable than death by falling airplane parts. For an overview, see D. Kahneman, P. Slovic, and A. Tversky, eds., Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, 1982. These biases, found in laypeople and statistical experts alike, have a natural explanation on accounts such as Herbert Simon’s 1957 concept of “bounded rationality.” According to this view, the limitations on our decision making are fixed in part by specific features of our psychological architecture. This architecture places constraints on such factors as processing speed and information capacity, and this in turn produces predictable, systematic errors in performance. Thus, rather than proposing highly idealized rules appropriate to an omniscient Laplacean genius  more characteristic of traditional normative approaches to decision theory  empirical decision theory attempts to formulate a descriptively accurate, and thus psychologically realistic, account of rationality. Even if certain simple rules can, in particular settings, outperform other strategies, it is still important to understand the causes of the systematic errors we make on tasks perfectly representative of routine decision making. Once the context is specified, empirical decision-making research allows us to study both descriptive decision rules that we follow spontaneously and normative rules that we ought to follow upon reflection. 

empiricism from empiric, ‘doctor who relies on practical experience’, ultimately from Grecian empeiria, ‘experience’, a type of theory in epistemology, the basic idea behind all examples of the type being that experience has primacy in human knowledge and justified belief. Because empiricism is not a single view but a type of view with many different examples, it is appropriate to speak not just of empiricism but of empiricisms. Perhaps the most fundamental distinction to be drawn among the various empiricisms is that between those consisting of some claim about concepts and those consisting of some empirical empiricism 262   262 claim about beliefs  call these, respectively, concept-empiricisms and belief-empiricisms. Concept-empiricisms all begin by singling out those concepts that apply to some experience or other; the concept of dizziness, e.g., applies to the experience of dizziness. And what is then claimed is that all concepts that human beings do and can possess either apply to some experience that someone has had, or have been derived from such concepts by someone’s performing on those concepts one or another such mental operation as combination, distinction, and abstraction. How exactly my concepts are and must be related to my experience and to my performance of those mental operations are matters on which concept-empiricists differ; most if not all would grant we each acquire many concepts by learning language, and it does not seem plausible to hold that each concept thus acquired either applies to some experience that one has oneself had or has been derived from such by oneself. But though concept-empiricists disagree concerning the conditions for linguistic acquisition or transmission of a concept, what unites them, to repeat, is the claim that all human concepts either apply to some experience that someone has actually had or they have been derived from such by someone’s actually performing on those the mental operations of combination, distinction, and abstraction. Most concept-empiricists will also say something more: that the experience must have evoked the concept in the person having the experience, or that the person having the experience must have recognized that the concept applies to his or her experience, or something of that sort. What unites all belief-empiricists is the claim that for one’s beliefs to possess one or another truth-relevant merit, they must be related in one or another way to someone’s experience. Beliefempiricisms differ from each other, for one thing, with respect to the merit concerning which the claim is made. Some belief-empiricists claim that a belief does not have the status of knowledge unless it has the requisite relation to experience; some claim that a belief lacks warrant unless it has that relation; others claim that a belief is not permissibly held unless it stands in that relation; and yet others claim that it is not a properly scientific belief unless it stands in that relation. And not even this list exhausts the possibilities. Belief-empiricisms also differ with respect to the specific relation to experience that is said to be necessary for the merit in question to be present. Some belief-empiricists hold, for example, that a belief is permissibly held only if its propositional content is either a report of the person’s present or remembered experience, or the belief is held on the basis of such beliefs and is probable with respect to the beliefs on the basis of which it is held. Kant, by contrast, held the rather different view that if a belief is to constitute empirical knowledge, it must in some way be about experience. Third, belief-empiricisms differ from each other with respect to the person to whose experience a belief must stand in the relation specified if it is to possess the merit specified. It need not always be an experience of the person whose belief is being considered. It might be an experience of someone giving testimony about it. It should be obvious that a philosopher might well accept one kind of empiricism while rejecting others. Thus to ask philosophers whether they are empiricists is a question void for vagueness. It is regularly said of Locke that he was an empiricist; and indeed, he was a concept-empiricist of a certain sort. But he embraced no version whatsoever of belief-empiricism. Up to this point, ‘experience’ has been used without explanation. But anyone acquainted with the history of philosophy will be aware that different philosophers pick out different phenomena with the word; and even when they pick out the same phenomenon, they have different views as to the structure of the phenomenon that they call ‘experience.’ The differences on these matters reflect yet more distinctions among empiricisms than have been delineated above. 

enantiamorphs from Grecian enantios, ‘opposite’, and morphe, ‘form’, objects whose shapes differ as do those of a right and left hand. One of a pair of enantiamorphs can be made to look identical in shape to the other by viewing it in a mirror but not merely by changing its spatial orientation. Enantiamorphs figure prominently in the work of Kant, who argued that the existence of enantiamorphic pairs entailed that Leibnizian relational theories of space were to be rejected in favor of Newtonian absolutist theories, that some facts about space could be apprehended empiricism, constructive enantiamorphs 263   263 only by “pure intuition,” and that space was mind-dependent. 

Encyclopedia, in French, Encyclopédie; full English title: Encyclopedia, or a Descriptive Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts and Trades. Launched in 1747 by the Parisian publisher Le Breton, who had secured d’Alembert’s and Diderot’s editorship, the Encyclopedia was gradually released from 1751 to 1772, despite a temporary revocation of its royal privilege. Comprising seventeen folio volumes of 17,818 articles and eleven folio volumes of 2,885 plates, the work required a staff of 272 contributors, writers, and engravers. It incorporated the accumulated knowledge and rationalist, secularist views of the French Enlightenment and prescribed economic, social, and political reforms. Enormously successful, the work was reprinted with revisions five times before 1789. Contributions were made by the philosophes Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, d’Holbach, Naigeon, and Saint-Lambert; the writers Duclos and Marmontel; the theologians Morellet and Malet; enlightened clerics, e.g. Raynal; explorers, e.g. La Condamine; natural scientists, e.g. Daubenton; physicians, e.g. Bouillet; the economists Turgot and Quesnay; engineers, e.g. Perronet; horologists, e.g. Berthoud; and scores of other experts. “The purpose of an Encyclopedia,” wrote Diderot, “is to collect the knowledge dispersed on the surface of the earth, and to unfold its general system” “Encyclopedia,” Vol. 5, 1755. The Encyclopedia offered the educated reader a comprehensive, systematic, and descriptive repository of contemporary liberal and mechanical arts. D’Alembert and Diderot developed a sensationalist epistemology “Preliminary Discourse” under the influence of Locke and Condillac. They compiled and rationally classified existing knowledge according to the noetic process memory, imagination, and reason. Based on the assumption of the unity of theory and praxis, their approach was positivistic and utilitarian. The Encyclopedists vindicated experimental reason and the rule of nature, fostered the practice of criticism, and stimulated the development of new sciences. In religious matters, they cultivated ambiguity to escape censorship. Whereas most contributors held either conciliatory or orthodox positions, d’Alembert, Diderot, and d’Holbach barely concealed their naturalistic and atheistic opinions. Their radicalism was pervasive. Supernaturalism, obscurantism, and fanaticism were among the Encyclopedists’ favorite targets. They identified religion with superstition and theology with black magic; asserted the superiority of natural morality over theological ethics; demanded religious toleration; and championed human rights. They innovatively retraced the historical conditions of the development of modern philosophy. They furthermore pioneered ideas on trade and industry and anticipated the relevance of historiography, sociology, economics, and linguistics. As the most ambitious and expansive reference work of its time, the Encyclopedia crystallized the confidence of the eighteenth-century bourgeoisie in the capacity of reason to dispel the shadows of ignorance and improve society. 

energeia, Grecian term coined by Aristotle and often translated as ‘activity’, ‘actuality’, and even ‘act’, but more literally rendered ‘a state of functioning’. Since for Aristotle the function of an object is its telos or aim, energeia can also be described as an entelecheia or realization another coined term he uses interchangeably with energeia. So understood, it can denote either a something’s being functional, though not in use at the moment, and b something’s actually functioning, which Aristotle describes as a “first realization” and “second realization” respectively On the Soul II.5. In general, every energeia is correlative to some dunamis, a capability or power to function in a certain way, and in the central books of the Metaphysics Aristotle uses the linkage between these two concepts to explain the relation of form to matter. He also distinguishes between energeia and kinesis change or motion Metaphysics IX.6; Nicomachean Ethics X.4. A kinesis is defined by reference to its terminus e.g., learning how to multiply and is thus incomplete at any point before reaching its conclusion. An energeia, in contrast, is a state complete in itself e.g., seeing. Thus, Aristotle says that at any time that I am seeing, it is also true that I have seen; but it is not true that at any time I am learning that I have learned. In Grecian, this difference is not so much one of tense as of encrateia energeia 264   264 aspect: the perfect tense marks a “perfect” or complete state, and not necessarily prior activity. 

energeticism, also called energetism or energism, the doctrine that energy is the fundamental substance underlying all change. Its most prominent champion was the physical chemist Wilhelm Ostwald 18531932. In his address “Die Überwindung des wissenschaftlichen Materialismus” “The Conquest of Scientific Materialism”, delivered at Lübeck in 1895, Ostwald chastised the atomic-kinetic theory as lacking progress and claimed that a unified science, energetics, could be based solely on the concept of energy. Many of Ostwald’s criticisms of materialism and mechanistic reductionism derived from Mach. Ostwald’s attempts to deduce the fundamental equations of thermodynamics and mechanics from the principles of energy conservation and transformation were indebted to the writings of Georg Helm 18741919, especially Die Lehre von Energie “The Laws of Energy,” 1887 and Die Energetik “Energetics,” 1898. Ostwald defended Helm’s factorization thesis that all changes in energy can be analyzed as a product of intensity and capacity factors. The factorization thesis and the attempt to derive mechanics and thermodynamics from the principles of energetics were subjected to devastating criticisms by Boltzmann and Max Planck. Boltzmann also criticized the dogmatism of Ostwald’s rejection of the atomickinetic theory. Ostwald’s program to unify the sciences under the banner of energetics withered in

Engels, Friedrich 182095, German socialist and economist who, with Marx, was the founder of what later was called Marxism. Whether there are significant differences between Marx and Engels is a question much in dispute among scholars of Marxism. Certainly there are differences in emphasis, but there was also a division of labor between them. Engels, and not Marx, presented a Marxist account of natural science and integrated Darwinian elements in Marxian theory. But they also coauthored major works, including The Holy Family, The German Ideology 1845, and The Communist Manifesto 1848. Engels thought of himself as the junior partner in their lifelong collaboration. That judgment is correct, but Engels’s work is both significant and more accessible than Marx’s. He gave popular articulations of their common views in such books as Socialism: Utopian and Scientific and AntiDühring 1878. His work, more than Marx’s, was taken by the Second International and many subsequent Marxist militants to be definitive of Marxism. Only much later with some Western Marxist theoreticians did his influence decline. Engels’s first major work, The Condition of the Working Class in England 1845, vividly depicted workers’ lives, misery, and systematic exploitation. But he also saw the working class as a new force created by the industrial revolution, and he developed an account of how this new force would lead to the revolutionary transformation of society, including collective ownership and control of the means of production and a rational ordering of social life; all this would supersede the waste and disparity of human conditions that he took to be inescapable under capitalism. The German Ideology, jointly authored with Marx, first articulated what was later called historical materialism, a conception central to Marxist theory. It is the view that the economic structure of society is the foundation of society; as the productive forces develop, the economic structure changes and with that political, legal, moral, religious, and philosophical ideas change accordingly. Until the consolidation of socialism, societies are divided into antagonistic classes, a person’s class being determined by her relationship to the means of production. The dominant ideas of a society will be strongly conditioned by the economic structure of the society and serve the class interests of the dominant class. The social consciousness the ruling ideology will be that which answers to the interests of the dominant class. From the 1850s on, Engels took an increasing interest in connecting historical materialism with developments in natural science. This work took definitive form in his Anti-Dühring, the first general account of Marxism, and in his posthumously published Dialectics of Nature. AntiDühring also contains his most extensive discussion of morality. It was in these works that Engels articulated the dialectical method and a systematic communist worldview that sought to establish that there were not only social laws expressing empirical regularities in society but also universal laws of nature and thought. These dialectical laws, Engels believed, reveal that both nature and society are in a continuous process of evolutionary though conflict-laden development. Engels should not be considered primarily, if at all, a speculative philosopher. Like Marx, he was energeticism Engels, Friedrich 265   265 critical of and ironical about speculative philosophy and was a central figure in the socialist movement. While always concerned that his account be warrantedly assertible, Engels sought to make it not only true, but also a finely tuned instrument of working-class emancipation which would lead to a world without classes. 

Enlightenment, a late eighteenth-century international movement in thought, with important social and political ramifications. The Enlightenment is at once a style, an attitude, a temper  critical, secular, skeptical, empirical, and practical. It is also characterized by core beliefs in human rationality, in what it took to be “nature,” and in the “natural feelings” of mankind. Four of its most prominent exemplars are Hume, Thomas Jefferson, Kant, and Voltaire. The Enlightenment belief in human rationality had several aspects. 1 Human beings are free to the extent that their actions are carried out for a reason. Actions prompted by traditional authority, whether religious or political, are therefore not free; liberation requires weakening if not also overthrow of this authority. 2 Human rationality is universal, requiring only education for its development. In virtue of their common rationality, all human beings have certain rights, among them the right to choose and shape their individual destinies. 3 A final aspect of the belief in human rationality was that the true forms of all things could be discovered, whether of the universe Newton’s laws, of the mind associationist psychology, of good government the U.S. Constitution, of a happy life which, like good government, was “balanced”, or of beautiful architecture Palladio’s principles. The Enlightenment was preeminently a “formalist” age, and prose, not poetry, was its primary means of expression. The Enlightenment thought of itself as a return to the classical ideas of the Grecians and more especially the Romans. But in fact it provided one source of the revolutions that shook Europe and America at the end of the eighteenth century, and it laid the intellectual foundations for both the generally scientific worldview and the liberal democratic society, which, despite the many attacks made on them, continue to function as cultural ideals. 

ens a se Latin,’a being from itself’, a being that is completely independent and self-sufficient. Since every creature depends at least upon God for its existence, only God could be ens a se. In fact, only God is, and he must be. For if God depended on any other being, he would be dependent and hence not self-sufficient. To the extent that the ontological argument is plausible, it depends on conceiving of God as ens a se. In other words, God as ens a se is the greatest conceivable being. The idea of ens a se is very important in the Monologion and Proslogion of Anselm, in various works of Duns Scotus, and later Scholastic thought. Ens a se should be distinguished from ens ex se, according to Anselm in Monologion. Ens a se is from itself and not “out of itself.” In other words, ens a se does not depend upon itself for its own existence, because it is supposed to be dependent on absolutely nothing. Further, if ens a se depended upon itself, it would cause itself to exist, and that is impossible, according to medieval and Scholastic philosophers, who took causality to be irreflexive. It is also transitive and asymmetric. Hence, the medieval idea of ens a se should not be confused with Spinoza’s idea of causa sui. Later Scholastics often coined abstract terms to designate the property or entity that makes something to be what it is, in analogy with forming, say, ‘rigidity’ from ‘rigid’. The Latin term ‘aseitas’ is formed from the prepositional phrase in ‘ens a se’ in this way; ‘aseitas’ is translated into English as ‘aseity’. A better-known example of forming an abstract noun from a concrete word is ‘haecceitas’ thisness from ‘haec’ this. 

ens rationis Latin, ‘a being of reason’, a thing dependent for its existence upon reason or thought; sometimes known as an intentional being. Ens rationis is the contrasting term for a real being res or ens in re extra animam, such as an individual animal. Real beings exist independently of thought and are the foundation for truth. A being of reason depends upon thought or reason for its existence and is an invention of Enlightenment ens rationis 266   266 the mind, even if it has a foundation in some real being. This conception requires the idea that there are degrees of being. Two kinds of entia rationis are distinguished: those with a foundation in reality and those without one. The objects of logic, which include genera and species, e.g., animal and human, respectively, are entia rationis that have a foundation in reality, but are abstracted from it. In contrast, mythic and fictional objects, such as a chimera or Pegasus, have no foundation in reality. Blindness and deafness are also sometimes called entia rationis. 

ens realissimum: used by Grice. Latin, ‘most real being’, an informal term for God that occurs rarely in Scholastic philosophers. Within Kant’s philosophy, it has a technical sense. It is an extension of Baumgarten’s idea of ens perfectissimum most perfect being, a being that has the greatest number of possible perfections to the greatest degree. Since ens perfectissimum refers to God as the sum of all possibilities and since actuality is greater than possibility, according to Kant, the idea of God as the sum of all actualities, that is, ens realissimum, is a preferable term for God. Kant thinks that human knowledge is “constrained” to posit the idea of a necessary being. The necessary being that has the best claim to necessity is one that is completely unconditioned, that is, dependent on nothing; this is ens realissimum. He sometimes explicates it in three ways: as the substratum of all realities, as the ground of all realities, and as the sum of all realities. Ens realissimum is nonetheless empirically invalid, since it cannot be experienced by humans. It is something ideal for reason, not real in experience. According to Kant, the ontological argument begins with the concept of ens realissimum and concludes that an existing object falls under that concept Critique of Pure Reason, Book II, chapter 3. 

entelechy from Grecian entelecheia, actuality. Aristotle, who coined both terms, treats entelecheia as a near synonym of energeia when it is used in this sense. Entelecheia figures in Aristotle’s definition of the soul as the first actuality of the natural body On the Soul II.1. This is explained by analogy with knowledge: first actuality is to knowledge as second actuality is to the active use of knowledge. ’Entelechy’ is also a technical term in Leibniz for the primitive active force in every monad, which is combined with primary matter, and from which the active force, vis viva, is somehow derived. The vitalist philosopher Hans Driesch used the Aristotelian term in his account of biology. Life, he held, is an entelechy; and an entelechy is a substantial entity, rather like a mind, that controls organic processes. 

enthymeme, an incompletely stated syllogism, with one premise, or even the conclusion, omitted. The term sometimes designates incompletely stated arguments of other kinds. We are expected to supply the missing premise or draw the conclusion if it is not stated. The result is supposed to be a syllogistic inference. For example: ‘He will eventually get caught, for he is a thief’; or ‘He will eventually be caught, for all habitual thieves get caught’. This notion of enthymeme as an incompletely stated syllogism has a long tradition and does not seem inconsistent with Aristotle’s own characterization of it. Thus, Peter of Spain openly declares that an enthymeme is an argument with a single premise that needs to be reduced to syllogism. But Peter also points out that Aristotle spoke of enthymeme as “being of ycos and signum,” and he explains that ycos here means ‘probable proposition’ while signum expresses the necessity of inference. ‘P, therefore Q’ is an ycos in the sense of a proposition that appears to be true to all or to many; but insofar as P has virtually a double power, that of itself and of the proposition understood along with it, it is both probable and demonstrative, albeit from a different point of view. 

entropy, in physics, a measure of disorder; in information theory, a measure of “information” in a technical sense. In statistical physics the number of microstates accessible to the various particles of a large system of particles such as a cabbage or the air in a room is represented as W. Accessible microstates might be, for instance, energy levels the various particles can reach. One can greatly simplify the ens realissimum entropy 267   267 statement of certain laws of nature by introducing a logarithmic measure of these accessible microstates. This measure, called entropy, is defined by the formula: SEntropy % df. klnW, where k is Boltzmann’s constant. When the entropy of a system increases, the system becomes more random and disordered, in the sense that a larger number of microstates become available for the system’s particles to enter. If a large physical system within which exchanges of energy occur is isolated, exchanging no energy with its environment, the entropy of the system tends to increase and never decreases. This result of statistical physics is part of the second law of thermodynamics. In real, evolving physical systems effectively isolated from their environments, entropy increases and thus aspects of the system’s organization that depend upon there being only a limited range of accessible microstates are altered. For example, a cabbage totally isolated in a container would decay as complicated organic molecules eventually became unstructured in the course of ongoing exchanges of energy and attendant entropy increases. In information theory, a state or event is said to contain more information than a second state or event if the former state is less probable and thus in a sense more surprising than the latter. Other plausible constraints suggest a logarithmic measure of information content. Suppose X is a set of alternative possible states, xi , and pxi  is the probability of each xi 1 X. If state xi has occurred the information content of that occurrence is taken to be -log2pxi . This function increases as the probability of xi decreases. If it is unknown which xi will occur, it is reasonable to represent the expected information content of X as the sum of the information contents of the alternative states xi weighted in each case by the probability of the state, giving: This is called the Shannon entropy. Both Shannon entropy and physical entropy can be thought of as logarithmic measures of disarray. But this statement trades on a broad understanding of ‘disarray’. A close relationship between the two concepts of entropy should not be assumed. 

envelope paradox, an apparent paradox in decision theory that runs as follows. You are shown two envelopes, M and N, and are reliably informed that each contains some finite positive amount of money, that the amount in one unspecified envelope is twice the amount in the unspecified other, and that you may choose only one. Call the amount in M ‘m’ and that in N ‘n’. It might seem that: there is a half chance that m % 2n and a half chance that m = n/2, so that the “expected value” of m is ½2n ! ½n/2 % 1.25n, so that you should prefer envelope M. But by similar reasoning it might seem that the expected value of n is 1.25m, so that you should prefer envelope N. 

environmental philosophy, the critical study of concepts defining relations between human beings and their non-human environment. Environmental ethics, a major component of environmental philosophy, addresses the normative significance of these relations. The relevance of ecological relations to human affairs has been recognized at least since Darwin, but the growing sense of human responsibility for their deterioration, reflected in books such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring 1962 and Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation 1975, has prompted the recent upsurge of interest. Environmental philosophers have adduced a wide variety of human attitudes and practices to account for the perceived deterioration, including religious and scientific attitudes, social institutions, and industrial technology. Proposed remedies typically urge a reorientation or new “ethic” that recognizes “intrinsic value” in the natural world. Examples include the “land ethic” of Aldo Leopold 18871948, which pictures humans as belonging to, rather than owning, the biotic community “the land”; deep ecology, a stance articulated by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess b.1912, which advocates forms of identification with the non-human world; and ecofeminism, which rejects prevailing attitudes to the natural world that are perceived as patriarchal. At the heart of environmental ethics lies the attempt to articulate the basis of concern for the natural world. It encompasses global as well as local issues, and considers the longer-term ecological, and even evolutionary, fate of the human and non-human world. Many of its practitioners question the anthropocentric claim that human beings are the exclusive or even central focus of envelope paradox environmental philosophy 268   268 ethical concern. In thus extending both the scope and the grounds of concern, it presents a challenge to the stance of conventional interhuman ethics. It debates how to balance the claims of present and future, human and non-human, sentient and non-sentient, individuals and wholes. It investigates the prospects for a sustainable relationship between economic and ecological systems, and pursues the implications of this relationship with respect to social justice and political institutions. Besides also engaging metaethical questions about, for example, the objectivity and commensurability of values, environmental philosophers are led to consider the nature and significance of environmental change and the ontological status of collective entities such as species and ecosystems. In a more traditional vein, environmental philosophy revives metaphysical debates surrounding the perennial question of “man’s place in nature,” and finds both precedent and inspiration in earlier philosophies and cultures. 

epapoge, Grecian term for ‘induction’. Especially in the logic of Aristotle, epagoge is opposed to argument by syllogism. Aristotle describes it as “a move from particulars to the universal.” E.g., premises that the skilled navigator is the best navigator, the skilled charioteer the best charioteer, and the skilled philosopher the best philosopher may support the conclusion by epagoge that those skilled in something are usually the best at it. Aristotle thought it more persuasive and clearer than the syllogistic method, since it relies on the senses and is available to all humans. The term was later applied to dialectical arguments intended to trap opponents. R.C. epicheirema, a polysyllogism in which each premise represents an enthymematic argument; e.g., ‘A lie creates disbelief, because it is an assertion that does not correspond to truth; flattery is a lie, because it is a conscious distortion of truth; therefore, flattery creates disbelief’. Each premise constitutes an enthymematic syllogism. Thus, the first premise could be expanded into the following full-fledged syllogism: ‘Every assertion that does not correspond to truth creates disbelief; a lie is an assertion that does not correspond to truth; therefore a lie creates disbelief’. We could likewise expand the second premise and offer a complete argument for it. Epicheirema can thus be a powerful tool in oral polemics, especially when one argues regressively, first stating the conclusion with a sketch of support in terms of enthymemes, and then  if challenged to do so  expanding any or all of these enthymemes into standard categorical syllogisms. 

Epicureanism, one of the three leading movements constituting Hellenistic philosophy. It was founded by Epicurus 341271 B.C., together with his close colleagues Metrodorus c.331 278, Hermarchus Epicurus’s successor as head of the Athenian school, and Polyaenus d. 278. He set up Epicurean communities at Mytilene, Lampsacus, and finally Athens 306 B.C., where his school the Garden became synonymous with Epicureanism. These groups set out to live the ideal Epicurean life, detached from political society without actively opposing it, and devoting themselves to philosophical discussion and the cult of friendship. Their correspondence was anthologized and studied as a model of the philosophical life by later Epicureans, for whom the writings of Epicurus and his three cofounders, known collectively as “the Men,” held a virtually biblical status. Epicurus wrote voluminously, but all that survives are three brief epitomes the Letter to Herodotus on physics, the Letter to Pythocles on astronomy, etc., and the Letter to Menoeceus on ethics, a group of maxims, and papyrus fragments of his magnum opus On Nature. Otherwise, we are almost entirely dependent on secondary citations, doxography, and the writings of his later followers. The Epicurean physical theory is atomistic, developed out of the fifth-century system of Democritus. Per se existents are divided into bodies and space, each of them infinite in quantity. Space is, or includes, absolute void, without which motion would be impossible, while body is constituted out of physically indivisible particles, “atoms.” Atoms are themselves further analyzable as sets of absolute “minima,” the ultimate quanta of magnitude, posited by Epicurus to circumvent the paradoxes that Zeno of Elea had derived from the hypothesis of infinite divisibility. Atoms themselves have only the primary properties of shape, size, and weight. All secondary properties, e.g. color, are generated out of atomic compounds; given their dependent status, they cannot be added to the list of per se existents, but it does not follow, as the skeptical tradition in atomism had held, that they are not real either. Atoms are in constant rapid motion, epapoge Epicureanism 269   269 at equal speed since in the pure void there is nothing to slow them down. Stability emerges as an overall property of compounds, which large groups of atoms form by settling into regular patterns of complex motion, governed by the three motive principles of weight, collisions, and a minimal random movement, the “swerve,” which initiates new patterns of motion and blocks the danger of determinism. Our world itself, like the countless other worlds, is such a compound, accidentally generated and of finite duration. There is no divine mind behind it, or behind the evolution of life and society: the gods are to be viewed as ideal beings, models of the Epicurean good life, and therefore blissfully detached from our affairs. Canonic, the Epicurean theory of knowledge, rests on the principle that “all sensations are true.” Denial of empirical cognition is argued to amount to skepticism, which is in turn rejected as a self-refuting position. Sensations are representationally not propositionally true. In the paradigm case of sight, thin films of atoms Grecian eidola, Latin simulacra constantly flood off bodies, and our eyes mechanically report those that reach them, neither embroidering nor interpreting. Inference from these guaranteed photographic, as it were data to the nature of external objects themselves involves judgment, and there alone error can occur. Sensations thus constitute one of the three “criteria of truth,” along with feelings, a criterion of values and introspective information, and prolepseis, or naturally acquired generic conceptions. On the basis of sense evidence, we are entitled to infer the nature of microscopic or remote phenomena. Celestial phenomena, e.g., cannot be regarded as divinely engineered which would conflict with the prolepsis of the gods as tranquil, and experience supplies plenty of models that would account for them naturalistically. Such grounds amount to consistency with directly observed phenomena, and are called ouk antimarturesis “lack of counterevidence”. Paradoxically, when several alternative explanations of the same phenomenon pass this test, all must be accepted: although only one of them can be true for each token phenomenon, the others, given their intrinsic possibility and the spatial and temporal infinity of the universe, must be true for tokens of the same type elsewhere. Fortunately, when it comes to the basic tenets of physics, it is held that only one theory passes this test of consistency with phenomena. Epicurean ethics is hedonistic. Pleasure is our innate natural goal, to which all other values, including virtue, are subordinated. Pain is the only evil, and there is no intermediate state. Philosophy’s task is to show how pleasure can be maximized, as follows: Bodily pleasure becomes more secure if we adopt a simple way of life that satisfies only our natural and necessary desires, with the support of like-minded friends. Bodily pain, when inevitable, can be outweighed by mental pleasure, which exceeds it because it can range over past, present, and future. The highest pleasure, whether of soul or body, is a satisfied state, “katastematic pleasure.” The pleasures of stimulation “kinetic pleasures”, including those resulting from luxuries, can vary this state, but have no incremental value: striving to accumulate them does not increase overall pleasure, but does increase our vulnerability to fortune. Our primary aim should instead be to minimize pain. This is achieved for the body through a simple way of life, and for the soul through the study of physics, which achieves the ultimate katastematic pleasure, ”freedom from disturbance” ataraxia, by eliminating the two main sources of human anguish, the fears of the gods and of death. It teaches us a that cosmic phenomena do not convey divine threats, b that death is mere disintegration of the soul, with hell an illusion. To fear our own future non-existence is as irrational as to regret the non-existence we enjoyed before we were born. Physics also teaches us how to evade determinism, which would turn moral agents into mindless fatalists: the swerve doctrine secures indeterminism, as does the logical doctrine that future-tensed propositions may be neither true nor false. The Epicureans were the first explicit defenders of free will, although we lack the details of their positive explanation of it. Finally, although Epicurean groups sought to opt out of public life, they took a keen and respectful interest in civic justice, which they analyzed not as an absolute value, but as a contract between humans to refrain from harmful activity on grounds of utility, perpetually subject to revision in the light of changing circumstances. Epicureanism enjoyed widespread popularity, but unlike its great rival Stoicism it never entered the intellectual bloodstream of the ancient world. Its stances were dismissed by many as philistine, especially its rejection of all cultural activities not geared to the Epicurean good life. It was also increasingly viewed as atheistic, and its ascetic hedonism was misrepresented as crude sensualism hence the modern use of ‘epicure’. The school nevertheless continued to flourish down to and well beyond the end of the Hellenistic age. In the first century B.C. its exponents Epicureanism Epicureanism 270   270 included Philodemus, whose fragmentarily surviving treatise On Signs attests to sophisticated debates on induction between Stoics and Epicureans, and Lucretius, the Roman author of the great Epicurean didactic poem On the Nature of Things. In the second century A.D. another Epicurean, Diogenes of Oenoanda, had his philosophical writings engraved on stone in a public colonnade, and passages have survived. Thereafter Epicureanism’s prominence declined. Serious interest in it was revived by Renaissance humanists, and its atomism was an important influence on early modern physics, especially through Gassendi. 

epistemic deontologism, a duty-based view of the nature of epistemic justification. A central concern of epistemology is to account for the distinction between justified and unjustified beliefs. According to epistemic deontologism, the concept of justification may be analyzed by using, in a specific sense relevant to the pursuit of knowledge, terms such as ‘ought’, ‘obligatory’, ‘permissible’, and ‘forbidden’. A subject S is justified in believing that p provided S does not violate any epistemic obligations  those that arise from the goal of believing what is true and not believing what is false. Equivalently, S is justified in believing that p provided believing p is  from the point of view taken in the pursuit of truth  permissible for S. Among contemporary epistemologists, this view is held by Chisholm, Laurence BonJour, and Carl Ginet. Its significance is twofold. If justification is a function of meeting obligations, then it is, contrary to some versions of naturalistic epistemology, normative. Second, if the normativity of justification is deontological, the factors that determine whether a belief is justified must be internal to the subject’s mind. Critics of epistemic deontologism, most conspicuously Alston, contend that belief is involuntary and thus cannot be a proper object of obligations. If, e.g., one is looking out the window and notices that it is raining, one is psychologically forced to believe that it is raining. Deontologists can reply to this objection by rejecting its underlying premise: epistemic obligations require that belief be voluntary. Alternatively, they may insist that belief is voluntary after all, and thus subject to epistemic obligations, for there is a means by which one can avoid believing what one ought not to believe: weighing the evidence, or deliberation. 

epistemic logic, the logical investigation of epistemic concepts and statements. Epistemic concepts include the concepts of knowledge, reasonable belief, justification, evidence, certainty, and related notions. Epistemic logic is usually taken to include the logic of belief or doxastic logic. Much of the recent work on epistemic logic is based on the view that it is a branch of modal logic. In the early 1950s von Wright observed that the epistemic notions verified known to be true, undecided, and falsified are related to each other in the same way as the alethic modalities necessary, contingent, and impossible, and behave logically in analogous ways. This analogy is not surprising in view of the fact that the meaning of modal concepts is often explained epistemically. For example, in the 1890s Peirce defined informational possibility as that “which in a given state of information is not perfectly known not to be true,” and called informationally necessary “that which is perfectly known to be true.” The modal logic of epistemic and doxastic concepts was studied systematically by Hintikka in his pioneering Knowledge and Belief1962, which applied to the concepts of knowledge and belief the semantical method the method of modal sets that he had used earlier for the investigation of modal logic. In this approach, the truth of the proposition that a knows that p briefly Kap in a possible world or situation u is taken to mean that p holds in all epistemic alternatives of Epicurus epistemic logic 271   271 u; these are understood as worlds compatible with what a knows at u. If the relation of epistemic alternativeness is reflexive, the principle ‘KapPp’ only what is the case can be known is valid, and the assumption that the alternativeness relation is transitive validates the so-called KK-thesis, ‘Kap P Ka Ka p’ if a knows that p, a knows that a knows that p; these two assumptions together make the logic of knowledge similar to an S4-type modal logic. If the knowledge operator Ka and the corresponding epistemic possibility operator Pa are added to quantification theory with identity, it becomes possible to study the interplay between quantifiers and epistemic operators and the behavior of individual terms in epistemic contexts, and analyze such locutions as ‘a knows who what b some F is’. The problems of epistemic logic in this area are part of the general problem of giving a coherent semantical account of propositional attitudes. If a proposition p is true in all epistemic alternatives of a given world, so are all logical consequences of p; thus the possible-worlds semantics of epistemic concepts outlined above leads to the result that a person knows all logical consequences of what he knows. This is a paradoxical conclusion; it is called the problem of logical omniscience. The solution of this problem requires a distinction between different levels of knowledge  for example, between tacit and explicit knowledge. A more realistic model of knowledge can be obtained by supplementing the basic possible-worlds account by an analysis of the processes by which the implicit knowledge can be activated and made explicit. Modal epistemic logics have found fruitful applications in the recent work on knowledge representation and in the logic and semantics of questions and answers in which questions are interpreted as requests for knowledge or “epistemic imperatives.” 

epistemic principle, a principle of rationality applicable to such concepts as knowledge, justification, and reasonable belief. Epistemic principles include the principles of epistemic logic and principles that relate different epistemic concepts to one another, or epistemic concepts to nonepistemic ones e.g., semantic concepts. Epistemic concepts include the concepts of knowledge, reasonable belief, justification, epistemic probability, and other concepts that are used for the purpose of assessing the reasonableness of beliefs and knowledge claims. Epistemic principles can be formulated as principles concerning belief systems or information systems, i.e., systems that characterize a person’s possible doxastic state at a given time; a belief system may be construed as a set of accepted propositions or as a system of degrees of belief. It is possible to distinguish two kinds of epistemic principles: a principles concerning the rationality of a single belief system, and b principles concerning the rational changes of belief. The former include the requirements of coherence and consistency for beliefs and for probabilities; such principles may be said to concern the statics of belief systems. The latter principles include various principles of belief revision and adjustment, i.e., principles concerning the dynamics of belief systems. 

epistemic privacy, the relation a person has to a proposition when only that person can have direct or non-inferential knowledge of the proposition. It is widely thought that people have epistemic privacy with respect to propositions about certain of their own mental states. According to this view, a person can know directly that he has certain thoughts or feelings or sensory experiences. Perhaps others can also know that the person has these thoughts, feelings, or experiences, but if they can it is only as a result of inference from propositions about the person’s behavior or physical condition. 

epistemic regress argument, an argument, originating in Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, aiming to show that knowledge and epistemic justification have a two-tier structure as described by epistemic foundationalism. It lends itself to the following outline regarding justification. If you have any justified belief, this belief occurs in an evidential chain including at least two links: the supporting link i.e., the evidence and the supported link i.e., the justified belief. This does epistemic operator epistemic regress argument 272   272 not mean, however, that all evidence consists of beliefs. Evidential chains might come in any of four kinds: circular chains, endless chains, chains ending in unjustified beliefs, and chains anchored in foundational beliefs that do not derive their justification from other beliefs. Only the fourth, foundationalist kind is defensible as grounding knowledge and epistemic justification. Could all justification be inferential? A belief, B1, is inferentially justified when it owes its justification, at least in part, to some other belief, B2. Whence the justification for B2? If B2 owes its justification to B1, we have a troublesome circle. How can B2 yield justification or evidence for B1, if B2 owes its evidential status to B1? On the other hand, if B2 owes its justification to another belief, B3, and B3 owes its justification to yet another belief, B4, and so on ad infinitum, we have a troublesome endless regress of justification. Such a regress seems to deliver not actual justification, but at best merely potential justification, for the belief at its head. Actual finite humans, furthermore, seem not to be able to comprehend, or to possess, all the steps of an infinite regress of justification. Finally, if B2 is itself unjustified, it evidently will be unable to provide justification for B1. It seems, then, that the structure of inferential justification does not consist of either circular justification, endless regresses of justification, or unjustified starter-beliefs. We have foundationalism, then, as the most viable account of evidential chains, so long as we understand it as the structural view that some beliefs are justified non-inferentially i.e., without deriving justification from other beliefs, but can nonetheless provide justification for other beliefs. More precisely, if we have any justified beliefs, we have some foundational, non-inferentially justified beliefs. This regress argument needs some refinement before its full force can be appreciated. With suitable refinement, however, it can seriously challenge such alternatives to foundationalism as coherentism and contextualism. The regress argument has been a key motivation for foundationalism in the history of epistemology. 

epistemology from Grecian episteme, ‘knowledge’, and logos, ‘explanation’, the study of the nature of knowledge and justification; specifically, the study of a the defining features, b the substantive conditions or sources, and c the limits of knowledge and justification. The latter three categories are represented by traditional philosophical controversy over the analysis of knowledge and justification, the sources of knowledge and justification e.g., rationalism versus empiricism, and the viability of skepticism about knowledge and justification. Kinds of knowledge. Knowledge can be either explicit or tacit. Explicit knowledge is self-conscious in that the knower is aware of the relevant state of knowledge, whereas tacit knowledge is implicit, hidden from self-consciousness. Much of our knowledge is tacit: it is genuine but we are unaware of the relevant states of knowledge, even if we can achieve awareness upon suitable reflection. In this regard, knowledge resembles many of our psychological states. The existence of a psychological state in a person does not require the person’s awareness of that state, although it may require the person’s awareness of an object of that state such as what is sensed or perceived. Philosophers have identified various species of knowledge: for example, propositional knowledge that something is so, non-propositional knowledge of something e.g., knowledge by acquaintance, or by direct awareness, empirical a posteriori propositional knowledge, nonempirical a priori propositional knowledge, and knowledge of how to do something. Philosophical controversy has arisen over distinctions between such species, for example, over i the relations between some of these species e.g., does knowing-how reduce to knowledge-that?, and ii the viability of some of these species e.g., is there really such a thing as, or even a coherent notion of, a priori knowledge?. A primary concern of classical modern philosophy, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was the extent of our a priori knowledge relative to the extent of our a posteriori knowledge. Such rationalists as Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza contended that all genuine knowledge of the real world is a priori, whereas such empiricists as Locke, Berkeley, and Hume argued that all such knowledge is a posteriori. In his Critique of Pure Reason 1781, Kant sought a grand reconciliation, aiming to preserve the key lessons of both rationalism and empiricism. Since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a posteriori knowledge has been widely regarded as knowledge that depends for its supporting ground on some specific sensory or perceptual experience; and a priori knowledge has been widely regarded as knowledge that does not depend for its supporting ground on such experience. Kant and others have held that the supporting ground for a priori knowledge comes solely from purely intellectual processes called “pure reason” or “pure understanding.” Knowledge of logical and mathematical truths typically serves as a standard case of a priori knowledge, whereas knowledge of the existence or presence of physical objects typically serves as a standard case of a posteriori knowledge. A major task for an account of a priori knowledge is the explanation of what the relevant purely intellectual processes are, and of how they contribute to non-empirical knowledge. An analogous task for an account of a posteriori knowledge is the explanation of what sensory or perceptual experience is and how it contributes to empirical knowledge. More fundamentally, epistemologists have sought an account of propositional knowledge in general, i.e., an account of what is common to a priori and a posteriori knowledge. Ever since Plato’s Meno and Theaetetus c.400 B.C., epistemologists have tried to identify the essential, defining components of knowledge. Identifying these components will yield an analysis of knowledge. A prominent traditional view, suggested by Plato and Kant among others, is that propositional knowledge that something is so has three individually necessary and jointly sufficient components: justification, truth, and belief. On this view, propositional knowledge is, by definition, justified true belief. This is the tripartite definition that has come to be called the standard analysis. We can clarify it by attending briefly to each of its three conditions. The belief condition. This requires that anyone who knows that p where ‘p’ stands for any proposition or statement must believe that p. If, therefore, you do not believe that minds are brains say, because you have not considered the matter at all, then you do not know that minds are brains. A knower must be psychologically related somehow to a proposition that is an object of knowledge for that knower. Proponents of the standard analysis hold that only belief can provide the needed psychological relation. Philosophers do not share a uniform account of belief, but some considerations supply common ground. Beliefs are not actions of assenting to a proposition; they rather are dispositional psychological states that can exist even when unmanifested. You do not cease believing that 2 ! 2 % 4, for example, whenever your attention leaves arithmetic. Our believing that p seems to require that we have a tendency to assent to p in certain situations, but it seems also to be more than just such a tendency. What else believing requires remains highly controversial among philosophers. Some philosophers have opposed the belief condition of the standard analysis on the ground that we can accept, or assent to, a known proposition without actually believing it. They contend that we can accept a proposition even if we fail to acquire a tendency, required by believing, to accept that proposition in certain situations. On this view, acceptance is a psychological act that does not entail any dispositional psychological state, and such acceptance is sufficient to relate a knower psychologically to a known proposition. However this view fares, one underlying assumption of the standard analysis seems correct: our concept of knowledge requires that a knower be psychologically related somehow to a known proposition. Barring that requirement, we shall be hard put to explain how knowers psychologically possess their knowledge of known propositions. Even if knowledge requires belief, belief that p does not require knowledge that p, since belief can typically be false. This observation, familiar from Plato’s Theaetetus, assumes that knowledge has a truth condition. On the standard analysis, if you know that p, then it is true that p. If, therefore, it is false that minds are brains, then you do not know that minds are brains. It is thus misleading to say, e.g., that astronomers before Copernicus knew that the earth is flat; at best, they justifiably believed that they knew this. The truth condition. This condition of the standard analysis has not attracted any serious challenge. Controversy over it has focused instead on Pilate’s vexing question: What is truth? This question concerns what truth consists in, not our ways of finding out what is true. Influential answers come from at least three approaches: truth as correspondence i.e., agreement, of some specified sort, between a proposition and an actual situation; truth as coherence i.e., interconnectedness of a proposition with a specified system of propositions; and truth as pragmatic cognitive value i.e., usefulness of a proposition in achieving certain intellectual goals. Without assessing these prominent approaches, we should recognize, in accord with the standard analysis, that our concept of knowledge seems to have a factual requirement: we epistemology epistemology 274   274 genuinely know that p only if it is the case that p. The pertinent notion of “its being the case” seems equivalent to the notion of “how reality is” or “how things really are.” The latter notion seems essential to our notion of knowledge, but is open to controversy over its explication. The justification condition. Knowledge is not simply true belief. Some true beliefs are supported only by lucky guesswork and hence do not qualify as knowledge. Knowledge requires that the satisfaction of its belief condition be “appropriately related” to the satisfaction of its truth condition. This is one broad way of understanding the justification condition of the standard analysis. More specifically, we might say that a knower must have adequate indication that a known proposition is true. If we understand such adequate indication as a sort of evidence indicating that a proposition is true, we have reached the traditional general view of the justification condition: justification as evidence. Questions about justification attract the lion’s share of attention in contemporary epistemology. Controversy focuses on the meaning of ‘justification’ as well as on the substantive conditions for a belief’s being justified in a way appropriate to knowledge. Current debates about the meaning of ‘justification’ revolve around the question whether, and if so how, the concept of epistemic knowledge-relevant justification is normative. Since the 1950s Chisholm has defended the following deontological obligation-oriented notion of justification: the claim that a proposition, p, is epistemically justified for you means that it is false that you ought to refrain from accepting p. In other terms, to say that p is epistemically justified is to say that accepting p is epistemically permissible  at least in the sense that accepting p is consistent with a certain set of epistemic rules. This deontological construal enjoys wide representation in contemporary epistemology. A normative construal of justification need not be deontological; it need not use the notions of obligation and permission. Alston, for instance, has introduced a non-deontological normative concept of justification that relies mainly on the notion of what is epistemically good from the viewpoint of maximizing truth and minimizing falsity. Alston links epistemic goodness to a belief’s being based on adequate grounds in the absence of overriding reasons to the contrary. Some epistemologists shun normative construals of justification as superfluous. One noteworthy view is that ‘epistemic justification’ means simply ‘evidential support’ of a certain sort. To say that p is epistemically justifiable to some extent for you is, on this view, just to say that p is supportable to some extent by your overall evidential reasons. This construal will be non-normative so long as the notions of supportability and an evidential reason are nonnormative. Some philosophers have tried to explicate the latter notions without relying on talk of epistemic permissibility or epistemic goodness. We can understand the relevant notion of “support” in terms of non-normative notions of entailment and explanation or, answering why-questions. We can understand the notion of an “evidential reason” via the notion of a psychological state that can stand in a certain truth-indicating support relation to propositions. For instance, we might regard nondoxastic states of “seeming to perceive” something e.g., seeming to see a dictionary here as foundational truth indicators for certain physical-object propositions e.g., the proposition that there is a dictionary here, in virtue of those states being best explained by those propositions. If anything resembling this approach succeeds, we can get by without the aforementioned normative notions of epistemic justification. Foundationalism versus coherentism. Talk of foundational truth indicators brings us to a key controversy over justification: Does epistemic justification, and thus knowledge, have foundations, and if so, in what sense? This question can be clarified as the issue whether some beliefs can not only a have their epistemic justification non-inferentially i.e., apart from evidential support from any other beliefs, but also b provide epistemic justification for all justified beliefs that lack such non-inferential justification. Foundationalism gives an affirmative answer to this issue, and is represented in varying ways by, e.g., Aristotle, Descartes, Russell, C. I. Lewis, and Chisholm. Foundationalists do not share a uniform account of non-inferential justification. Some construe non-inferential justification as self-justification. Others reject literal self-justification for beliefs, and argue that foundational beliefs have their non-inferential justification in virtue of evidential support from the deliverances of non-belief psychological states, e.g., perception “seem-ing-to-perceive” states, sensation “seeming-to-sense” states, or memory “seeming-toremember” states. Still others understand noninferential justification in terms of a belief’s being “reliably produced,” i.e., caused and sustained by epistemology epistemology 275   275 some non-belief belief-producing process or source e.g., perception, memory, introspection that tends to produce true rather than false beliefs. This last view takes the causal source of a belief to be crucial to its justification. Unlike Descartes, contemporary foundationalists clearly separate claims to non-inferential, foundational justification from claims to certainty. They typically settle for a modest foundationalism implying that foundational beliefs need not be indubitable or infallible. This contrasts with the radical foundationalism of Descartes. The traditional competitor to foundationalism is the coherence theory of justification, i.e., epistemic coherentism. This is not the coherence definition of truth; it rather is the view that the justification of any belief depends on that belief’s having evidential support from some other belief via coherence relations such as entailment or explanatory relations. Notable proponents include Hegel, Bosanquet, and Sellars. A prominent contemporary version of epistemic coherentism states that evidential coherence relations among beliefs are typically explanatory relations. The rough idea is that a belief is justified for you so long as it either best explains, or is best explained by, some member of the system of beliefs that has maximal explanatory power for you. Contemporary coherentism is uniformly systemic or holistic; it finds the ultimate source of justification in a system of interconnected beliefs or potential beliefs. One problem has troubled all versions of coherentism that aim to explain empirical justification: the isolation argument. According to this argument, coherentism entails that you can be epistemically justified in accepting an empirical proposition that is incompatible with, or at least improbable given, your total empirical evidence. The key assumption of this argument is that your total empirical evidence includes non-belief sensory and perceptual awareness-states, such as your feeling pain or your seeming to see something. These are not belief-states. Epistemic coherentism, by definition, makes justification a function solely of coherence relations between propositions, such as propositions one believes or accepts. Thus, such coherentism seems to isolate justification from the evidential import of non-belief awareness-states. Coherentists have tried to handle this problem, but no resolution enjoys wide acceptance. Causal and contextualist theories. Some contemporary epistemologists endorse contextualism regarding epistemic justification, a view suggested by Dewey, Wittgenstein, and Kuhn, among others. On this view, all justified beliefs depend for their evidential support on some unjustified beliefs that need no justification. In any context of inquiry, people simply assume the acceptability of some propositions as starting points for inquiry, and these “contextually basic” propositions, though lacking evidential support, can serve as evidential support for other propositions. Contextualists stress that contextually basic propositions can vary from context to context e.g., from theological inquiry to biological inquiry and from social group to social group. The main problem for contextualists comes from their view that unjustified assumptions can provide epistemic justification for other propositions. We need a precise explanation of how an unjustified assumption can yield evidential support, how a non-probable belief can make another belief probable. Contextualists have not given a uniform explanation here. Recently some epistemologists have recommended that we give up the traditional evidence condition for knowledge. They recommend that we construe the justification condition as a causal condition. Roughly, the idea is that you know that p if and only if a you believe that p, b p is true, and c your believing that p is causally produced and sustained by the fact that makes p true. This is the basis of the causal theory of knowing, which comes with varying details. Any such causal theory faces serious problems from our knowledge of universal propositions. Evidently, we know, for instance, that all dictionaries are produced by people, but our believing that this is so seems not to be causally supported by the fact that all dictionaries are humanly produced. It is not clear that the latter fact causally produces any beliefs. Another problem is that causal theories typically neglect what seems to be crucial to any account of the justification condition: the requirement that justificational support for a belief be accessible, in some sense, to the believer. The rough idea is that one must be able to access, or bring to awareness, the justification underlying one’s beliefs. The causal origins of a belief are, of course, often very complex and inaccessible to a believer. Causal theories thus face problems from an accessibility requirement on justification. Internalism regarding justification preserves an accessibility requirement on what confers justification, whereas epistemic externalism rejects this requirement. Debates over internalism and exepistemology epistemology 276   276 ternalism abound in current epistemology, but internalists do not yet share a uniform detailed account of accessibility. The Gettier problem. The standard analysis of knowledge, however elaborated, faces a devastating challenge that initially gave rise to causal theories of knowledge: the Gettier problem. In 1963 Edmund Gettier published a highly influential challenge to the view that if you have a justified true belief that p, then you know that p. Here is one of Gettier’s counterexamples to this view: Smith is justified in believing the false proposition that i Jones owns a Ford. On the basis of i, Smith infers, and thus is justified in believing, that ii either Jones owns a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona. As it happens, Brown is in Barcelona, and so ii is true. So, although Smith is justified in believing the true proposition ii, Smith does not know ii. Gettier-style counterexamples are cases where a person has justified true belief that p but lacks knowledge that p. The Gettier problem is the problem of finding a modification of, or an alternative to, the standard analysis that avoids difficulties from Gettier-style counterexamples. The controversy over the Gettier problem is highly complex and still unsettled. Many epistemologists take the lesson of Gettier-style counterexamples to be that propositional knowledge requires a fourth condition, beyond the justification, truth, and belief conditions. No specific fourth condition has received overwhelming acceptance, but some proposals have become prominent. The so-called defeasibility condition, e.g., requires that the justification appropriate to knowledge be “undefeated” in the general sense that some appropriate subjunctive conditional concerning defeaters of justification be true of that justification. For instance, one simple defeasibility fourth condition requires of Smith’s knowing that p that there be no true proposition, q, such that if q became justified for Smith, p would no longer be justified for Smith. So if Smith knows, on the basis of his visual perception, that Mary removed books from the library, then Smith’s coming to believe the true proposition that Mary’s identical twin removed books from the library would not undermine the justification for Smith’s belief concerning Mary herself. A different approach shuns subjunctive conditionals of that sort, and contends that propositional knowledge requires justified true belief that is sustained by the collective totality of actual truths. This approach requires a detailed account of when justification is undermined and restored. The Gettier problem is epistemologically important. One branch of epistemology seeks a precise understanding of the nature e.g., the essential components of propositional knowledge. Our having a precise understanding of propositional knowledge requires our having a Gettier-proof analysis of such knowledge. Epistemologists thus need a defensible solution to the Gettier problem, however complex that solution is. Skepticism. Epistemologists debate the limits, or scope, of knowledge. The more restricted we take the limits of knowledge to be, the more skeptical we are. Two influential types of skepticism are knowledge skepticism and justification skepticism. Unrestricted knowledge skepticism implies that no one knows anything, whereas unrestricted justification skepticism implies the more extreme view that no one is even justified in believing anything. Some forms of skepticism are stronger than others. Knowledge skepticism in its strongest form implies that it is impossible for anyone to know anything. A weaker form would deny the actuality of our having knowledge, but leave open its possibility. Many skeptics have restricted their skepticism to a particular domain of supposed knowledge: e.g., knowledge of the external world, knowledge of other minds, knowledge of the past or the future, or knowledge of unperceived items. Such limited skepticism is more common than unrestricted skepticism in the history of epistemology. Arguments supporting skepticism come in many forms. One of the most difficult is the problem of the criterion, a version of which has been stated by the sixteenth-century skeptic Montaigne: “To adjudicate [between the true and the false] among the appearances of things, we need to have a distinguishing method; to validate this method, we need to have a justifying argument; but to validate this justifying argument, we need the very method at issue. And there we are, going round on the wheel.” This line of skeptical argument originated in ancient Greece, with epistemology itself. It forces us to face this question: How can we specify what we know without having specified how we know, and how can we specify how we know without having specified what we know? Is there any reasonable way out of this threatening circle? This is one of the most difficult epistemological problems, and a cogent epistemology must offer a defensible solution to epistemology epistemology 277   277 it. Contemporary epistemology still lacks a widely accepted reply to this urgent problem.

equipollence, term used by Sextus Empiricus to express the view that there are arguments of equal strength on all sides of any question and that therefore we should suspend judgment on every question that can be raised. 

equiprobable, having the same probability. Sometimes used in the same way as ‘equipossible’, the term is associated with Laplace’s the “classical” interpretation of probability, where the probability of an event is the ratio of the number of equipossibilities favorable to the event to the total number of equipossibilities. For example, the probability of rolling an even number with a “fair” six-sided die is ½  there being three equipossibilities 2, 4, 6 favorable to even, and six equipossibilities 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 in all and 3 /6 % ½. The concept is now generally thought not to be widely applicable to the interpretation of probability, since natural equipossibilities are not always at hand as in assessing the probability of a thermonuclear war tomorrow. 

equivalence, mutual inferability. The following are main kinds: two statements are materially equivalent provided they have the same truthvalue, and logically equivalent provided each can be deduced from the other; two sentences or words are equivalent in meaning provided they can be substituted for each other in any context without altering the meaning of that context. In truth-functional logic, two statements are logically equivalent if they can never have truthvalues different from each other. In this sense of ‘logically equivalent’ all tautologies are equivalent to each other and all contradictions are equivalent to each other. Similarly, in extensional set theory, two classes are equivalent provided they have the same numbers, so that all empty classes are regarded as equivalent. In a non-extensional set theory, classes would be equivalent only if their conditions of membership were logically equivalent or equivalent in meaning.

equivocation, the use of an expression in two or more different senses in a single context. For example, in ‘The end of anything is its perfection. But the end of life is death; so death is the perfection of life’, the expression ‘end’ is first used in the sense of ‘goal or purpose,’ but in its second occurrence ‘end’ means ‘termination.’ The use of the two senses in this context is an equivocation. Where the context in which the expression used is an argument, the fallacy of equivocation may be committed.

Erasmus, Desiderius 1466?1536, Dutch scholar and philosopher who played an important role in Renaissance humanism. Like his Italian forerunners Petrarch, Coluccio Salutati, Lorenzo Valla, Leonardo Bruni, and others, Erasmus stressed within philosophy and theology the function of philological precision, grammatical correctness, and rhetorical elegance. But for Erasmus the virtues of bonae literarae which are cultivated by the study of authors of Latin and Grecian antiquity must be decisively linked with Christian spirituality. Erasmus has been called by Huizinga the first modern intellectual because he tried to influence and reform the mentality of society by working within the shadow of ecclesiastical and political leaders. He epistemology, evolutionary Erasmus, Desiderius 278   278 became one of the first humanists to make efficient use of the then new medium of printing. His writings embrace various forms, including diatribe, oration, locution, comment, dialogue, and letter. After studying in Christian schools and living for a time in the monastery of Steyn near Gouda in the Netherlands, Erasmus worked for different patrons. He gained a post as secretary to the bishop of Kamerijk, during which time he wrote his first published book, the Adagia first edition 1500, a collection of annotated Latin adages. Erasmus was an adviser to the Emperor Charles V, to whom he dedicated his Institutio principii christiani 1516. After studies at the  of Paris, where he attended lectures by the humanist Faber Stapulensis, Erasmus was put in touch by his patron Lord Mountjoy with the British humanists John Colet and Thomas More. Erasmus led a restless life, residing in several European cities including London, Louvain, Basel, Freiburg, Bologna, Turin where he was awarded a doctorate of theology in 1506, and Rome. By using the means of modern philology, which led to the ideal of the bonae literarae, Erasmus tried to reform the Christian-influenced mentality of his times. Inspired by Valla’s Annotationes to the New Testament, he completed a new Latin translation of the New Testament, edited the writings of the early church fathers, especially St. Hieronymus, and wrote several commentaries on psalms. He tried to regenerate the spirit of early Christianity by laying bare its original sense against the background of scholastic interpretation. In his view, the rituals of the existing church blocked the development of an authentic Christian spirituality. Though Erasmus shared with Luther a critical approach toward the existing church, he did not side with the Reformation. His Diatribe de libero arbitrio 1524, in which he pleaded for the free will of man, was answered by Luther’s De servo arbitrio. The historically most influential books of Erasmus were Enchirion militis christiani 1503, in which he attacked hirelings and soldiers; the Encomium moriae id est Laus stultitiae 1511, a satire on modern life and the ecclesiastical pillars of society; and the sketches of human life, the Colloquia first published in 1518, often enlarged until 1553. In the small book Querela pacis 1517, he rejected the ideology of justified wars propounded by Augustine and Aquinas. Against the madness of war Erasmus appealed to the virtues of tolerance, friendliness, and gentleness. All these virtues were for him the essence of Christianity. 

Erfahrung, German term translated into English, especially since Kant, as ‘experience’. Kant does not use it as a technical term; rather, it indicates that which requires explanation through more precisely drawn technical distinctions such as those among ‘sensibility’, ‘understanding’, and ‘reason’. In the early twentieth century, Husserl sometimes distinguishes between Erfahrung and Erlebnis, the former indicating experience as capable of being thematized and methodically described or analyzed, the latter experience as “lived through” and never fully available to analysis. Such a distinction occasionally reappears in later texts of phenomenology and existentialism. 

Erigena, John Scotus, also called John the Scot, Eriugena, and Scottigena c.81077, Irish-born scholar and theologian. He taught grammar and dialectics at the court of Charles the Bald near Laon from 845 on. In a controversy in 851, John argued that there was only one predestination, to good, since evil was strictly nothing. Thus no one is compelled to evil by God’s foreknowledge, since, strictly speaking, God has no foreknowledge of what is not. But his reliance on dialectic, his Origenist conception of the world as a place of education repairing the damage done by sin, his interest in cosmology, and his perceived Pelagian tendencies excited opposition. Attacked by Prudentius of Troyes and Flores of Lyons, he was condemned at the councils of Valencia 855 and Langres 859. Charles commissioned him to translate the works of Pseudo-Dionysius and the Ambigua of Maximus the Confessor from the Grecian. These works opened up a new world, and John followed his translations with commentaries on the Gospel of John and Pseudo-Dionysius, and then his chief work, the Division of Nature or Periphyseon 82666, in the Neoplatonic tradition. He treats the universe as a procession from God, everything real in nature being a trace of God, and then a return to God through the presence of nature in human reason and man’s union with God. John held that the nature of man is not destroyed by union with God, though it is deified. He was condemned for pantheism at Paris in 1210. J.Lo. eristic, the art of controversy, often involving fallacious but persuasive reasoning. The ancient Sophists brought this art to a high level to achieve their personal goal. They may have found their material in the “encounters” in the Erfahrung eristic 279   279 law courts as well as in daily life. To enhance persuasion they endorsed the use of unsound principles such as hasty generalizations, faulty analogies, illegitimate appeal to authority, the post hoc ergo propter hoc i.e., “after this, therefore because of this” and other presumed principles. Aristotle exposed eristic argumentation in his Sophistical Refutations, which itself draws examples from Plato’s Euthydemus. From this latter work comes the famous example: ‘That dog is a father and that dog is his, therefore that dog is his father’. What is perhaps worse than its obvious invalidity is that the argument is superficially similar to a sound argument such as ‘This is a table and this is brown, therefore this is a brown table’. In the Sophistical Refutations Aristotle undertakes to find procedures for detection of bad arguments and to propose rules for constructing sound arguments. 

Erlebnis, German term for experience used in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German philosophy. Erlebnis denotes experience in all its direct immediacy and lived fullness. It contrasts with the more typical German word Erfahrung, denoting ordinary experience as mediated through intellectual and constructive elements. As immediate, Erlebnis eludes conceptualization, in both the lived present and the interiority of experience. As direct, Erlebnis is also disclosive and extraordinary: it reveals something real that otherwise escapes thinking. Typical examples include art, religion, and love, all of which also show the anti-rationalist and polemical uses of the concept. It is especially popular among the Romantic mystics like Novalis and the anti-rationalists Nietzsche and Bergson, as well as in phenomenology, Lebensphilosophie, and existentialism. As used in post-Hegelian German philosophy, the term describes two aspects of subjectivity. The first concerns the epistemology of the human sciences and of phenomenology. Against naturalism and objectivism, philosophers appeal to the ineliminable, subjective qualities of experience to argue that interpreters must understand “what it is like to be” some experiencing subject, from the inside. The second use of the term is to denote extraordinary and interior experiences like art, religion, freedom, and vital energy. In both cases, it is unclear how such experience could be identified or known in its immediacy, and much recent German thought, such as Heidegger and hermeneutics, rejects the concept. 

Eros, the Grecian god of erotic love. Eros came to be symbolic of various aspects of love, first appearing in Hesiod in opposition to reason. In general, however, Eros was seen by Grecians e.g., Parmenides as a unifying force. In Empedocles, it is one of two external forces explaining the history of the cosmos, the other being Strife. These forces resemble the “hidden harmony” of Heraclitus. The Symposium of Plato is the best-known ancient discussion of Eros, containing speeches from various standpoints  mythical, sophistic, etc. Socrates says he has learned from the priestess Diotima of a nobler form of Eros in which sexual desire can be developed into the pursuit of understanding the Form of beauty. The contrast between agape and Eros is found first in Democritus. This became important in Christian accounts of love. In Neoplatonism, Eros referred to the mystical union with Being sought by philosophers. Eros has become important recently in the work of Continental writers. 

erotetic, in the strict sense, pertaining to questions. Erotetic logic is the logic of questions. Different conceptions of questions yield different kinds of erotetic logic. A Platonistic approach holds that questions exist independently of interrogatives. For P. Tichý, a question is a function on possible worlds, the right answer being the value of the function at the actual world. Erotetic logic is the logic of such functions. In the epistemic-imperative approach of L. Bqvist, Hintikka, et al., one begins with a system for epistemic sentences and embeds this in a system for imperative sentences, thus obtaining sentences of the form ‘make it the case that I know . . .’ and complex compounds of such sentences. Certain ones of these are defined to be interrogatives. Then erotetic logic is the logic of epistemic imperatives and the conditions for satisfaction of these imperatives. In the abstract interrogative approach of N. Belnap, T. Kubigski, and many others, one chooses certain types of expression to serve as interrogatives, and, for each type, specifies what expressions count as answers of various kinds direct, partial, . . .. On this approach we may say that interrogatives express questions, or we may identify questions with interrogatives, in Erklärung erotetic 280   280 which case the only meaning that an interrogative has is that it has the answers that it does. Either way, the emphasis is on interrogatives, and erotetic logic is the logic of systems that provide interrogatives and specify answers to them. In the broad sense, ‘erotetic’ designates what pertains to utterance-and-response. In this sense erotetic logic is the logic of the relations between 1 sentences of many kinds and 2 the expressions that count as appropriate replies to them. This includes not only the relations between question and answer but also, e.g., between assertion and agreement or denial, command and report of compliance or refusal, and for many types of sentence S between S and various corrective replies to S e.g., denial of the presupposition of S. Erotetic logics may differ in the class of sentences treated, the types of response counted as appropriate, the assignment of other content presupposition, projection, etc., and other details. 

essentialism, a metaphysical theory that objects have essences and that there is a distinction between essential and non-essential or accidental predications. Different issues have, however, been central in debates about essences and essential predication in different periods in the history of philosophy. In our own day, it is commitment to the notion of de re modality that is generally taken to render a theory essentialist; but in the essentialist tradition stemming from Aristotle, discussions of essence and essential predication focus on the distinction between what an object is and how it is. According to Aristotle, the universals that an ordinary object instantiates include some that mark it out as what it is and others that characterize it in some way but do not figure in an account of what it is. In the Categories, he tells us that while the former are said of the object, the latter are merely present in it; and in other writings, he distinguishes between what he calls kath hauto or per se predications where these include the predication of what-universals and kata sumbebekos or per accidens predications where these include the predication of how-universals. He concedes that universals predicated of an object kath hauto are necessary to that object; but he construes the necessity here as derivative. It is because a universal marks out an entity, x, as what x is and hence underlies its being the thing that it is that the universal is necessarily predicated of x. The concept of definition is critically involved in Aristotle’s essentialism. First, it is the kind  infima species  under which an object falls or one of the items genus or differentia included in the definition of that kind that is predicated of the object kath hauto. But, second, Aristotle’s notion of an essence just is the notion of the ontological correlate of a definition. The term in his writings we translate as ‘essence’ is the expression to ti ein einai the what it is to be. Typically, the expression is followed by a substantival expression in the dative case, so that the expressions denoting essences are phrases like ‘the what it is to be for a horse’ and ‘the what it is to be for an oak tree’; and Aristotle tells us that, for any kind, K, the what it is to be for a K just is that which we identify when we provide a complete and accurate definition of K. Now, Aristotle holds that there is definition only of universals; and this commits him to the view that there are no individual essences. Although he concedes that we can provide definitions of universals from any of his list of ten categories, he gives pride of place to the essences of universals from the category of substance. Substance-universals can be identified without reference to essences from other categories, but the essences of qualities, quantities, and other non-substances can be defined only by reference to the essences of substances. In his early writings, Aristotle took the familiar particulars of common sense things like the individual man and horse of Categories V to be the primary substances; and in these writings it is the essences we isolate by defining the kinds or species under which familiar particulars fall that are construed as the basic or paradigmatic essences. However, in later writings, where ordinary particulars are taken to be complexes of matter and form, it is the substantial forms of familiar particulars that are the primary substances, so their essences are the primary or basic essences; and a central theme in Aristotle’s most mature writings is the idea that the primary substances and their essences are necessarily one and the same in number. error theory essentialism 281   281 The conception of essence as the ontological correlate of a definition  often called quiddity  persists throughout the medieval tradition; and in early modern philosophy, the idea that the identity of an object is constituted by what it is plays an important role in Continental rationalist thinkers. Indeed, in the writings of Leibniz, we find the most extreme version of traditional essentialism. Whereas Aristotle had held that essences are invariably general, Leibniz insisted that each individual has an essence peculiar to it. He called the essence associated with an entity its complete individual concept; and he maintained that the individual concept somehow entails all the properties exemplified by the relevant individual. Accordingly, Leibniz believed that an omniscient being could, for each possible world and each possible individual, infer from the individual concept of that individual the whole range of properties exemplified by that individual in that possible world. But, then, from the perspective of an omniscient being, all of the propositions identifying the properties the individual actually exhibits would express what Aristotle called kath hauto predications. Leibniz, of course, denied that our perspective is that of an omniscient being; we fail to grasp individual essences in their fullness, so from our perspective, the distinction between essential and accidental predications holds. While classical rationalists espoused a thoroughgoing essentialism, the Aristotlelian conceptions of essence and definition were the repeated targets of attacks by classical British empiricists. Hobbes, e.g., found the notion of essence philosophically useless and insisted that definition merely displays the meanings conventionally associated with linguistic expressions. Locke, on the other hand, continued to speak of essences; but he distinguished between real and nominal essences. As he saw it, the familiar objects of common sense are collections of copresent sensible ideas to which we attach a single name like ‘man’ or ‘horse’. Identifying the ideas constitutive of the relevant collection gives us the nominal essence of a man or a horse. Locke did not deny that real essences might underlie such collections, but he insisted that it is nominal rather than real essences to which we have epistemic access. Hume, in turn, endorsed the idea that familiar objects are collections of sensible ideas, but rejected the idea of some underlying real essence to which we have no access; and he implicitly reinforced the Hobbesian critique of Aristotelian essences with his attack on the idea of de re necessities. So definition merely expresses the meanings we conventionally associate with words, and the only necessity associated with definition is linguistic or verbal necessity. From its origins, the twentieth-century analytic tradition endorsed the classical empiricist critique of essences and the Humean view that necessity is merely linguistic. Indeed, even the Humean concession that there is a special class of statements true in virtue of their meanings came into question in the forties and fifties, when philosophers like Quine argued that it is impossible to provide a noncircular criterion for distinguishing analytic and synthetic statements. So by the late 1950s, it had become the conventional wisdom of philosophers in the Anglo-American tradition that both the notion of a real essence and the derivative idea that some among the properties true of an object are essential to that object are philosophical dead ends. But over the past three decades, developments in the semantics of modal logic have called into question traditional empiricist skepticism about essence and modality and have given rise to a rebirth of essentialism. In the late fifties and early sixties, logicians like Kripke, Hintikka, and Richard Montague showed how formal techniques that have as their intuitive core the Leibnizian idea that necessity is truth in all possible worlds enable us to provide completeness proofs for a whole range of nonequivalent modal logics. Metaphysicians seized on the intuitions underlying these formal methods. They proposed that we take the picture of alternative possible worlds seriously and claimed that attributions of de dicto modality necessity and possibility as they apply to propositions can be understood to involve quantification over possible worlds. Thus, to say that a proposition, p, is necessary is to say that for every possible world, W, p is true in W; and to say that p is possible is to say that there is at least one possible world, W, such that p is true in W. These metaphysicians went on to claim that the framework of possible worlds enables us to make sense of de re modality. Whereas de dicto modality attaches to propositions taken as a whole, an ascription of de re modality identifies the modal status of an object’s exemplification of an attribute. Thus, we speak of Socrates as being necessarily or essentially rational, but only contingently snub-nosed. Intuitively, the essential properties of an object are those it could not have lacked; whereas its contingent properties are properties it exemplifies but could have failed to exemplify. The “friends of possible worlds” insisted that we can make perfectly good sense of this intuitive distinction if we say that an object, essentialism essentialism 282   282 x, exhibits a property, P, essentially just in case x exhibits P in the actual world and in every possible world in which x exists and that x exhibits P merely contingently just in case x exhibits P in the actual world, but there is at least one possible world, W, such that x exists in W and fails to exhibit P in W. Not only have these neo-essentialists invoked the Leibnizian conception of alternative possible worlds in characterizing the de re modalities, many have endorsed Leibniz’s idea that each object has an individual essence or what is sometimes called a haecceity. As we have seen, the intuitive idea of an individual essence is the idea of a property an object exhibits essentially and that no other object could possibly exhibit; and contemporary essentialists have fleshed out this intuitive notion by saying that a property, P, is the haecceity or individual essence of an object, x, just in case 1 x exhibits P in the actual world and in all worlds in which x exists and 2 there is no possible world where an object distinct from x exhibits P. And some defenders of individual essences like Plantinga have followed Leibniz in holding that the haecceity of an object provides a complete concept of that object, a property such that it entails, for every possible world, W, and every property, P, either the proposition that the object in question has P in W or the proposition that it fails to have P in W. Accordingly, they agree that an omniscient being could infer from the individual essence of an object a complete account of the history of that object in each possible world in which it exists. 

eternal return, the doctrine that the same events, occurring in the same sequence and involving the same things, have occurred infinitely many times in the past and will occur infinitely many times in the future. Attributed most notably to the Stoics and Nietzsche, the doctrine is antithetical to philosophical and religious viewpoints that claim that the world order is unique, contingent in part, and directed toward some goal. The Stoics interpret eternal return as the consequence of perpetual divine activity imposing exceptionless causal principles on the world in a supremely rational, providential way. The world, being the best possible, can only be repeated endlessly. The Stoics do not explain why the best world cannot be everlasting, making repetition unnecessary. It is not clear whether Nietzsche asserted eternal return as a cosmological doctrine or only as a thought experiment designed to confront one with the authenticity of one’s life: would one affirm that life even if one were consigned to live it over again without end? On either interpretation, Nietzsche’s version, like the Stoic version, stresses the inexorability and necessary interconnectedness of all things and events, although unlike the Stoic version, it rejects divine providence. 

ethical constructivism, a form of anti-realism about ethics which holds that there are moral facts and truths, but insists that these facts and truths are in some way constituted by or dependent on our moral beliefs, reactions, or attitudes. For instance, an ideal observer theory that represents the moral rightness and wrongness of an act in terms of the moral approval and disapproval that an appraiser would have under suitably idealized conditions can be understood as a form of ethical constructivism. Another form of constructivism identifies the truth of a moral belief with its being part of the appropriate system of beliefs, e.g., of a system of moral and nonmoral beliefs that is internally coherent. Such a view would maintain a coherence theory of moral truth. Moral relativism is a constructivist view that allows for a plurality of moral facts and truths. Thus, if the idealizing conditions appealed to in an ideal observer theory allow that different appraisers can have different reactions to the same actions under ideal conditions, then that ideal observer theory will be a version of moral relativism as well as of ethical constructivism. Or, if different systems of moral beliefs satisfy the appropriate epistemic conditions e.g. are equally coherent, then the truth or falsity of particular moral beliefs will have to be relativized to different moral systems or codes.

ethical objectivism, the view that the objects of the most basic concepts of ethics which may be supposed to be values, obligations, duties, oughts, rights, or what not exist, or that facts about them hold, objectively and that similarly worded ethical statements by different persons make the same factual claims and thus do not concern merely the speaker’s feelings. To say that a fact is objective, or that something has objective existence, is usually to say that its holding or existence is not derivative from its being thought to hold or exist. In the Scholastic terminology still current in the seventeenth century ‘objective’ had the more or less contrary meaning of having status only as an object of thought. In contrast, fact, or a thing’s existence, is subjective if it holds or exists only in the sense that it is thought to hold or exist, or that it is merely a convenient human posit for practical purposes. A fact holds, or an object exists, intersubjectively if somehow its acknowledgment is binding on all thinking subjects or all subjects in some specified group, although it does not hold or exist independently of their thinking about it. Some thinkers suppose that intersubjectivity is all that can ever properly be meant by objectivity. Objectivism may be naturalist or non-naturalist. The naturalist objectivist believes that values, duties, or whatever are natural phenomena detectable by introspection, perception, or scientific inference. Thus values may be identified with certain empirical qualities of anybody’s experience, or duties with empirical facts about the effects of action, e.g. as promoting or hindering social cohesion. The non-naturalist objectivist eschewing what Moore called the naturalistic fallacy believes that values or obligations or whatever items he thinks most basic in ethics exist independently of any belief about them, but that their existence is not a matter of any ordinary fact detectable in the above ways but can be revealed to ethical intuition as standing in a necessary but not analytic relation to natural phenomena. ‘Ethical subjectivism’ usually means the doctrine that ethical statements are simply reports on the speaker’s feelings though, confusingly enough, such statements may be objectively true or false. Perhaps it ought to mean the doctrine that nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so. Attitude theories of morality, for which such statements express, rather than report upon, the speaker’s feelings, are also, despite the objections of their proponents, sometimes called subjectivist. In a more popular usage an objective matter of fact is one on which all reasonable persons can be expected to agree, while a matter is subjective if various alternative opinions can be accepted as reasonable. What is subjective in this sense may be quite objective in the more philosophical sense in question above. 

ethics, the philosophical study of morality. The word is also commonly used interchangeably with ‘morality’ to mean the subject matter of this study; and sometimes it is used more narrowly to mean the moral principles of a particular tradition, group, or individual. Christian ethics and Albert Schweitzer’s ethics are examples. In this article the word will be used exclusively to mean the philosophical study. Ethics, along with logic, metaphysics, and epistemology, is one of the main branches of philosophy. It corresponds, in the traditional division of the field into formal, natural, and moral philosophy, to the last of these disciplines. It can in turn be divided into the general study of goodness, the general study of right action, applied ethics, metaethics, moral psychology, and the metaphysics of moral responsibility. These divisions are not sharp, and many important studies in ethics, particularly those that examine or develop whole systems of ethics, are interdivisional. Nonetheless, they facilitate the identification of different problems, movements, and schools within the discipline. The first two, the general study of goodness and the general study of right action, constitute the main business of ethics. Correlatively, its principal substantive questions are what ends we ought, as fully rational human beings, to choose and pursue and what moral principles should govern our choices and pursuits. How these questions are related is the discipline’s principal structural question, and structural differences among systems of ethics reflect different answers to this question. In contemporary ethics, the study of structure has come increasingly to the fore, especially as a preliminary to the general study of right action. In the natural order of exposition, however, the substantive questions come first. Goodness and the question of ends. Philosophers have typically treated the question of the ends we ought to pursue in one of two ways: either as a question about the components of a good life or as a question about what sorts of things are good in themselves. On the first way of treating the question, it is assumed that we naturally seek a good life; hence, determining its components amounts to determining, relative to our desire for such a life, what ends we ought to pursue. On the second way, no such assumption about human nature is made; rather it is assumed that whatever is good in itself is worth choosing or pursuing. The first way of treating the question leads directly to the theory of human well-being. The second way leads directly to the theory of intrinsic value. The first theory originated in ancient ethics, and eudaimonia was the Grecian word for its subject, a word usually translated ‘happiness,’ but sometimes translated ‘flourishing’ in order to make the question of human well-being seem more a matter of how well a person is doing than how good he is feeling. These alternatives reflect the different conceptions of human well-being that inform the two major views within the theory: the view that feeling good or pleasure is the essence of human well-being and the view that doing well or excelling at things worth doing is its essence. The first view is hedonism in its classical form. Its most famous exponent among the ancients was Epicurus. The second view is perfectionism, a view that is common to several schools of ancient ethics. Its adherents include Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. Among the moderns, the best-known defenders of classical hedonism and perfectionism are respectively J. S. Mill and Nietzsche. Although these two views differ on the question of what human well-being essentially consists in, neither thereby denies that the other’s answer has a place in a good human life. Indeed, mature statements of each typically assign the other’s answer an ancillary place. Thus, hedonism, as expounded by Epicurus, takes excelling at things worth doing  exercising one’s intellectual powers and moral virtues in exemplary and fruitful ways, e.g.  as the tried and true means to experiencing life’s most satisfying pleasures. And perfectionism, as developed in Aristotle’s ethics, underscores the importance of pleasure  the deep satisfaction that comes from doing an important job well, e.g.  as a natural concomitant of achieving excellence in things that matter. The two views, as expressed in these mature statements, differ not so much in the kinds of activities they take to be central to a good life as in the ways they explain the goodness of such a life. The chief difference between them, then, is philosophical rather than prescriptive. The second theory, the theory of intrinsic value, also has roots in ancient ethics, specifically, Plato’s theory of Forms. But unlike Plato’s theory, the basic tenets of which include certain doctrines about the reality and transcendence of value, the theory of intrinsic value neither contains nor presupposes any metaphysical theses. At issue in the theory is what things are good in themselves, and one can take a position on this issue without committing oneself to any thesis about the reality or unreality of goodness or about its transcendence or immanence. A list of the different things philosophers have considered good in themselves would include life, happiness, pleasure, knowledge, virtue, friendship, beauty, and harmony. The list could easily be extended. An interest in what constitutes the goodness of the various items on the list has brought philosophers to focus primarily on the question of whether something unites them. The opposing views on this question are monism and pluralism. Monists affirm the list’s unity; pluralists deny it. Plato, for instance, was a monist. He held that the goodness of everything good in itself consisted in harmony and therefore each such thing owed its goodness to its being harmonious. Alternatively, some philosophers have proposed pleasure as the sole constituent of goodness. Indeed, conceiving of pleasure as a particular kind of experience or state of consciousness, they have proposed this kind of experience as the only thing good in itself and characterized all other good things as instrumentally good, as owing their goodness to their being sources of pleasure. Thus, hedonism too can be a species of monism. In this case, though, one must distinguish between the view that it is one’s own experiences of pleasure that are intrinsically good and the view that anyone’s experiences of pleasure, indeed, any sentient being’s experiences of pleasure, are intrinsically good. The former is called by Sidgwick egoistic hedonism, the latter universal hedonism. This distinction can be made general, as a distinction between egoistic and universal views of what is good in itself or, as philosophers now commonly say, between agent-relative and agent-neutral value. As such, it indicates a significant point of disagreement in the theory of intrinsic value, a disagreement in which the seeming arbitrariness and blindness of egoism make it harder to defend. In drawing this conclusion, however, one must be careful not to mistake these egoistic views for views in the theory of human well-being, for each set of views represents a set of alternative answers to a different question. One must be careful, in other words, not to infer from the greater defensibility of universalism vis-à-vis egoism that universalism is the predominant view in the general study of goodness. Right action. The general study of right action concerns the principles of right and wrong that govern our choices and pursuits. In modern ethics these principles are typically given a jural conception. Accordingly, they are understood to constitute a moral code that defines the duties of men and women who live together in fellowship. This conception of moral principles is chiefly due to the influence of Christianity in the West, though some of its elements were already present in Stoic ethics. Its ascendancy in the general study of right action puts the theory of duty at the center of that study. The theory has two parts: the systematic exposition of the moral code that defines our duties; and its justification. The first part, when fully developed, presents complete formulations of the fundamental principles of right and wrong and shows how they yield all moral duties. The standard model is an axiomatic system in mathematics, though some philosophers have proposed a technical system of an applied science, such as medicine or strategy, as an alternative. The second part, if successful, establishes the authority of the principles and so validates the code. Various methods and criteria of justification are commonly used; no single one is canonical. Success in establishing the principles’ authority depends on the soundness of the argument that proceeds from whatever method or criterion is used. One traditional criterion is implicit in the idea of an axiomatic system. On this criterion, the fundamental principles of right and wrong are authoritative in virtue of being self-evident truths. That is, they are regarded as comparable to axioms not only in being the first principles of a deductive system but also in being principles whose truth can be seen immediately upon reflection. Use of this criterion to establish the principles’ authority is the hallmark of intuitionism. Once one of the dominant views in ethics, its position in the discipline has now been seriously eroded by a strong, twentieth-century tide of skepticism about all claims of self-evidence. Currently, the most influential method of justification consistent with using the model of an axiomatic system to expound the morality of right and wrong draws on the jural conception of its principles. On this method, the principles are interpreted as expressions of a legislative will, and accordingly their authority derives from the sovereignty of the person or collective whose will they are taken to express. The oldest example of the method’s use is the divine command theory. On this theory, moral principles are taken to be laws issued by God to humanity, and their authority thus derives from God’s supremacy. The theory is the original Christian source of the principles’ jural conception. The rise of secular thought since the Enlightenment has, however, limited its appeal. Later examples, which continue to attract broad interest and discussion, are formalism and contractarianism. Formalism is best exemplified in Kant’s ethics. It takes a moral principle to be a precept that satisfies the formal criteria of a universal law, and it takes formal criteria to be the marks of pure reason. Consequently, moral principles are laws that issue from reason. As Kant puts it, they are laws that we, as rational beings, give to ourselves and that regulate our conduct insofar as we engage each other’s rational nature. They are laws for a republic of reason or, as Kant says, a kingdom of ends whose legislature comprises all rational beings. Through this ideal, Kant makes intelligible and forceful the otherwise obscure notion that moral principles derive their authority from the sovereignty of reason. Contractarianism also draws inspiration from Kant’s ethics as well as from the social contract theories of Locke and Rousseau. Its fullest and most influential statement appears in the work of Rawls. On this view, moral principles represent ethics ethics 286   286 the ideal terms of social cooperation for people who live together in fellowship and regard each other as equals. Specifically, they are taken to be the conditions of an ideal agreement among such people, an agreement that they would adopt if they met as an assembly of equals to decide collectively on the social arrangements governing their relations and reached their decision as a result of open debate and rational deliberation. The authority of moral principles derives, then, from the fairness of the procedures by which the terms of social cooperation would be arrived at in this hypothetical constitutional convention and the assumption that any rational individual who wanted to live peaceably with others and who imagined himself a party to this convention would, in view of the fairness of its procedures, assent to its results. It derives, that is, from the hypothetical consent of the governed. Philosophers who think of a moral code on the model of a technical system of an applied science use an entirely different method of justification. In their view, just as the principles of medicine represent knowledge about how best to promote health, so the principles of right and wrong represent knowledge about how best to promote the ends of morality. These philosophers, then, have a teleological conception of the code. Our fundamental duty is to promote certain ends, and the principles of right and wrong organize and direct our efforts in this regard. What justifies the principles, on this view, is that the ends they serve are the right ones to promote and the actions they prescribe are the best ways to promote them. The principles are authoritative, in other words, in virtue of the wisdom of their prescriptions. Different teleological views in the theory of duty correspond to different answers to the question of what the right ends to promote are. The most common answer is happiness; and the main division among the corresponding views mirrors the distinction in the theory of intrinsic value between egoism and universalism. Thus, egoism and universalism in the theory of duty hold, respectively, that the fundamental duty of morality is to promote, as best as one can, one’s own happiness and that it is to promote, as best as one can, the happiness of humanity. The former is ethical egoism and is based on the ideal of rational self-love. The latter is utilitarianism and is based on the ideal of rational benevolence. Ethical egoism’s most famous exponents in modern philosophy are Hobbes and Spinoza. It has had few distinguished defenders since their time. Bentham and J. S. Mill head the list of distinguished defenders of utilitarianism. The view continues to be enormously influential. On these teleological views, answers to questions about the ends we ought to pursue determine the principles of right and wrong. Put differently, the general study of right action, on these views, is subordinate to the general study of goodness. This is one of the two leading answers to the structural question about how the two studies are related. The other is that the general study of right action is to some extent independent of the general study of goodness. On views that represent this answer, some principles of right and wrong, notably principles of justice and honesty, prescribe actions even though more evil than good would result from doing them. These views are deontological. Fiat justitia ruat coelum captures their spirit. The opposition between teleology and deontology in ethics underlies many of the disputes in the general study of right action. The principal substantive and structural questions of ethics arise not only with respect to the conduct of human life generally but also with respect to specific walks of life such as medicine, law, journalism, engineering, and business. The examination of these questions in relation to the common practices and traditional codes of such professions and occupations has resulted in the special studies of applied ethics. In these studies, ideas and theories from the general studies of goodness and right action are applied to particular circumstances and problems of some profession or occupation, and standard philosophical techniques are used to define, clarify, and organize the ethical issues found in its domain. In medicine, in particular, where rapid advances in technology create, overnight, novel ethical problems on matters of life and death, the study of biomedical ethics has generated substantial interest among practitioners and scholars alike. Metaethics. To a large extent, the general studies of goodness and right action and the special studies of applied ethics consist in systematizing, deepening, and revising our beliefs about how we ought to conduct our lives. At the same time, it is characteristic of philosophers, when reflecting on such systems of belief, to examine the nature and grounds of these beliefs. These questions, when asked about ethical beliefs, define the field of metaethics. The relation of this field to the other studies is commonly represented by taking the other studies to constitute the field of ethics proper and then taking metaethics to be the study of the concepts, methods of justification, and ontological assumptions of the field of ethics proper. Accordingly, metaethics can proceed from either an interest in the epistemology of ethics or an interest in its metaphysics. On the first approach, the study focuses on questions about the character of ethical knowledge. Typically, it concentrates on the simplest ethical beliefs, such as ‘Stealing is wrong’ and ‘It is better to give than to receive’, and proceeds by analyzing the concepts in virtue of which these beliefs are ethical and examining their logical basis. On the second approach, the study focuses on questions about the existence and character of ethical properties. Typically, it concentrates on the most general ethical predicates such as goodness and wrongfulness and considers whether there truly are ethical properties represented by these predicates and, if so, whether and how they are interwoven into the natural world. The two approaches are complementary. Neither dominates the other. The epistemological approach is comparative. It looks to the most successful branches of knowledge, the natural sciences and pure mathematics, for paradigms. The former supplies the paradigm of knowledge that is based on observation of natural phenomena; the latter supplies the paradigm of knowledge that seemingly results from the sheer exercise of reason. Under the influence of these paradigms, three distinct views have emerged: naturalism, rationalism, and noncognitivism. Naturalism takes ethical knowledge to be empirical and accordingly models it on the paradigm of the natural sciences. Ethical concepts, on this view, concern natural phenomena. Rationalism takes ethical knowledge to be a priori and accordingly models it on the paradigm of pure mathematics. Ethical concepts, on this view, concern morality understood as something completely distinct from, though applicable to, natural phenomena, something whose content and structure can be apprehended by reason independently of sensory inputs. Noncognitivism, in opposition to these other views, denies that ethics is a genuine branch of knowledge or takes it to be a branch of knowledge only in a qualified sense. In either case, it denies that ethics is properly modeled on science or mathematics. On the most extreme form of noncognitivism, there are no genuine ethical concepts; words like ‘right’, ‘wrong’, ‘good’, and ‘evil’ have no cognitive meaning but rather serve to vent feelings and emotions, to express decisions and commitments, or to influence attitudes and dispositions. On less extreme forms, these words are taken to have some cognitive meaning, but conveying that meaning is held to be decidedly secondary to the purposes of venting feelings, expressing decisions, or influencing attitudes. Naturalism is well represented in the work of Mill; rationalism in the works of Kant and the intuitionists. And noncognitivism, which did not emerge as a distinctive view until the twentieth century, is most powerfully expounded in the works of C. L. Stevenson and Hare. Its central tenets, however, were anticipated by Hume, whose skeptical attacks on rationalism set the agenda for subsequent work in metaethics. The metaphysical approach is centered on the question of objectivity, the question of whether ethical predicates represent real properties of an external world or merely apparent or invented properties, properties that owe their existence to the perception, feeling, or thought of those who ascribe them. Two views dominate this approach. The first, moral realism, affirms the real existence of ethical properties. It takes them to inhere in the external world and thus to exist independently of their being perceived. For moral realism, ethics is an objective discipline, a discipline that promises discovery and confirmation of objective truths. At the same time, moral realists differ fundamentally on the question of the character of ethical properties. Some, such as Plato and Moore, regard them as purely intellective and thus irreducibly distinct from empirical properties. Others, such as Aristotle and Mill, regard them as empirical and either reducible to or at least supervenient on other empirical properties. The second view, moral subjectivism, denies the real existence of ethical properties. On this view, to predicate, say, goodness of a person is to impose some feeling, impulse, or other state of mind onto the world, much as one projects an emotion onto one’s circumstances when one describes them as delightful or sad. On the assumption of moral subjectivism, ethics is not a source of objective truth. In ancient philosophy, moral subjectivism was advanced by some of the Sophists, notably Protagoras. In modern philosophy, Hume expounded it in the eighteenth century and Sartre in the twentieth century. Regardless of approach, one and perhaps the central problem of metaethics is how value is related to fact. On the epistemological approach, this problem is commonly posed as the question of whether judgments of value are derivable from statements of fact. Or, to be more exact, can there be a logically valid argument whose conclusion is a judgment of value and all of whose premises are statements of fact? On the metaphysical approach, the problem is commonly posed as the question of whether moral predicates represent properties that are explicable as complexes of empirical properties. At issue, in either case, is whether ethics is an autonomous discipline, whether the study of moral values and principles is to some degree independent of the study of observable properties and events. A negative answer to these questions affirms the autonomy of ethics; a positive answer denies ethics’ autonomy and implies that it is a branch of the natural sciences. Moral psychology. Even those who affirm the autonomy of ethics recognize that some facts, particularly facts of human psychology, bear on the general studies of goodness and right action. No one maintains that these studies float free of all conception of human appetite and passion or that they presuppose no account of the human capacity for voluntary action. It is generally recognized that an adequate understanding of desire, emotion, deliberation, choice, volition, character, and personality is indispensable to the theoretical treatment of human well-being, intrinsic value, and duty. Investigations into the nature of these psychological phenomena are therefore an essential, though auxiliary, part of ethics. They constitute the adjunct field of moral psychology. One area of particular interest within this field is the study of those capacities by virtue of which men and women qualify as moral agents, beings who are responsible for their actions. This study is especially important to the theory of duty since that theory, in modern philosophy, characteristically assumes a strong doctrine of individual responsibility. That is, it assumes principles of culpability for wrongdoing that require, as conditions of justified blame, that the act of wrongdoing be one’s own and that it not be done innocently. Only moral agents are capable of meeting these conditions. And the presumption is that normal, adult human beings qualify as moral agents whereas small children and nonhuman animals do not. The study then focuses on those capacities that distinguish the former from the latter as responsible beings. The main issue is whether the power of reason alone accounts for these capacities. On one side of the issue are philosophers like Kant who hold that it does. Reason, in their view, is both the pilot and the engine of moral agency. It not only guides one toward actions in conformity with one’s duty, but it also produces the desire to do one’s duty and can invest that desire with enough strength to overrule conflicting impulses of appetite and passion. On the other side are philosophers, such as Hume and Mill, who take reason to be one of several capacities that constitute moral agency. On their view, reason works strictly in the service of natural and sublimated desires, fears, and aversions to produce intelligent action, to guide its possessor toward the objects of those desires and away from the objects of those fears. It cannot, however, by itself originate any desire or fear. Thus, the desire to act rightly, the aversion to acting wrongly, which are constituents of moral agency, are not products of reason but are instead acquired through some mechanical process of socialization by which their objects become associated with the objects of natural desires and aversions. On one view, then, moral agency consists in the power of reason to govern behavior, and being rational is thus sufficient for being responsible for one’s actions. On the other view, moral agency consists in several things including reason, but also including a desire to act rightly and an aversion to acting wrongly that originate in natural desires and aversions. On this view, to be responsible for one’s actions, one must not only be rational but also have certain desires and aversions whose acquisition is not guaranteed by the maturation of reason. Within moral psychology, one cardinal test of these views is how well they can accommodate and explain such common experiences of moral agency as conscience, weakness, and moral dilemma. At some point, however, the views must be tested by questions about freedom. For one cannot be responsible for one’s actions if one is incapable of acting freely, which is to say, of one’s own free will. The capacity for free action is thus essential to moral agency, and how this capacity is to be explained, whether it fits within a deterministic universe, and if not, whether the notion of moral responsibility should be jettisoned, are among the deepest questions that the student of moral agency must face. What is more, they are not questions to which moral psychology can furnish answers. At this point, ethics descends into metaphysics. 

ethnography, an open-ended family of techniques through which anthropologists investigate cultures; also, the organized descriptions of other cultures that result from this method. Cultural anthropology  ethnology  is based primarily on fieldwork through which anthropologists immerse themselves in the life of a local culture village, neighborhood and attempt to describe and interpret aspects of the culture. Careful observation is one central tool of investigation. Through it the anthropologist can observe and record various features of social life, e.g. trading practices, farming techniques, or marriage arrangements. A second central tool is the interview, through which the researcher explores the beliefs and values of members of the local culture. Tools of historical research, including particularly oral history, are also of use in ethnography, since the cultural practices of interest often derive from a remote point in time. 

ethnology, the comparative and analytical study of cultures; cultural anthroplogy. Anthropologists aim to describe and interpret aspects of the culture of various social groups  e.g., the hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari, rice villages of the Chinese Canton Delta, or a community of physicists at Livermore Laboratory. Topics of particular interest include religious beliefs, linguistic practices, kinship arrangements, marriage patterns, farming technology, dietary practices, gender relations, and power relations. Cultural anthropology is generally conceived as an empirical science, and this raises several methodological and conceptual difficulties. First is the role of the observer. The injection of an alien observer into the local culture unavoidably disturbs that culture. Second, there is the problem of intelligibility across cultural systems  radical translation. One goal of ethnographic research is to arrive at an interpretation of a set of beliefs and values that are thought to be radically different from the researcher’s own beliefs and values; but if this is so, then it is questionable whether they can be accurately translated into the researcher’s conceptual scheme. Third, there is the problem of empirical testing of ethnographic interpretations. To what extent do empirical procedures constrain the construction of an interpretation of a given cultural milieu? Finally, there is the problem of generalizability. To what extent does fieldwork in one location permit anthropologists to generalize to a larger context  other villages, the dispersed ethnic group represented by this village, or this village at other times? 

ethnomethodology, a phenomenological approach to interpreting everyday action and speech in various social contexts. Derived from phenomenological sociology and introduced by Harold Garfinkel, the method aims to guide research into meaningful social practices as experienced by participants. A major objective of the method is to interpret the rules that underlie everyday activity and thus constitute part of the normative basis of a given social order. Research from this perspective generally focuses on mundane social activities  e.g., psychiatrists evaluating patients’ files, jurors deliberating on defendants’ culpability, or coroners judging causes of death. The investigator then attempts to reconstruct an underlying set of rules and ad hoc procedures that may be taken to have guided the observed activity. The approach emphasizes the contextuality of social practice  the richness of unspoken shared understandings that guide and orient participants’ actions in a given practice or activity.

Euclidean geometry, the version of geometry that includes among its axioms the parallel axiom, which asserts that, given a line L in a plane, there exists just one line in the plane that passes through a point not on L but never meets L. The phrase ‘Euclidean geometry’ refers both to the doctrine of geometry to be found in Euclid’s Elements fourth century B.C. and to the mathematical discipline that was built on this basis afterward. In order to present properties of rectilinear and curvilinear curves in the plane and solids in space, Euclid sought definitions, axioms, ethics, divine command Euclidean geometry 290   290 and postulates to ground the reasoning. Some of his assumptions belonged more to the underlying logic than to the geometry itself. Of the specifically geometrical axioms, the least self-evident stated that only one line passes through a point in a plane parallel to a non-coincident line within it, and many efforts were made to prove it from the other axioms. Notable forays were made by G. Saccheri, J. Playfair, and A. M. Legendre, among others, to put forward results logically contradictory to the parallel axiom e.g., that the sum of the angles between the sides of a triangle is greater than 180° and thus standing as candidates for falsehood; however, none of them led to paradox. Nor did logically equivalent axioms such as that the angle sum equals 180° seem to be more or less evident than the axiom itself. The next stages of this line of reasoning led to non-Euclidean geometry. From the point of view of logic and rigor, Euclid was thought to be an apotheosis of certainty in human knowledge; indeed, ‘Euclidean’ was also used to suggest certainty, without any particular concern with geometry. Ironically, investigations undertaken in the late nineteenth century showed that, quite apart from the question of the parallel axiom, Euclid’s system actually depended on more axioms than he had realized, and that filling all the gaps would be a formidable task. Pioneering work done especially by M. Pasch and G. Peano was brought to a climax in 1899 by Hilbert, who produced what was hoped to be a complete axiom system. Even then the axiom of continuity had to wait for the second edition! The endeavor had consequences beyond the Euclidean remit; it was an important example of the growth of axiomatization in mathematics as a whole, and it led Hilbert himself to see that questions like the consistency and completeness of a mathematical theory must be asked at another level, which he called metamathematics. It also gave his work a formalist character; he said that his axiomatic talk of points, lines, and planes could be of other objects. Within the Euclidean realm, attention has fallen in recent decades upon “neo-Euclidean” geometries, in which the parallel axiom is upheld but a different metric is proposed. For example, given a planar triangle ABC, the Euclidean distance between A and B is the hypotenuse AB; but the “rectangular distance” AC ! CB also satisfies the properties of a metric, and a geometry working with it is very useful in, e.g., economic geography, as anyone who drives around a city will readily understand. 

eudaimonism from Grecian eudaimonia, ‘happiness’, ‘flourishing’, the ethical doctrine that happiness is the ultimate justification for morality. The ancient Grecian philosophers typically begin their ethical treatises with an account of happiness, and then argue that the best way to achieve a happy life is through the cultivation and exercise of virtue. Most of them make virtue or virtuous activity a constituent of the happy life; the Epicureans, however, construe happiness in terms of pleasure, and treat virtue as a means to the end of pleasant living. Ethical eudaimonism is sometimes combined with psychological eudaimonism  i.e., the view that all free, intentional action is aimed ultimately at the agent’s happiness. A common feature of ancient discussions of ethics, and one distinguishing them from most modern discussions, is the view that an agent would not be rationally justified in a course of action that promised less happiness than some alternative open to him. Hence it seems that most of the ancient theories are forms of egosim. But the ancient theories differ from modern versions of egoism since, according to the ancients, at least some of the virtues are dispositions to act from primarily other-regarding motives: although the agent’s happiness is the ultimate justification of virtuous action, it is not necessarily what motivates such action. Since happiness is regarded by most of the ancients as the ultimate end that justifies our actions, their ethical theories seem teleological; i.e., right or virtuous action is construed as action that contributes to or maximizes the good. But appearances are again misleading, for the ancients typically regard virtuous action as also valuable for its own sake and hence constitutive of the agent’s happiness. 

Eudoxus of Cnidus c.408c.355 B.C., Grecian astronomer and mathematician, a student of Plato. He created a test of the equality of two ratios, invented the method of exhaustion for calculating areas and volumes within curved boundaries, and introduced an astronomical system consisting of homocentric celestial spheres. This system views the visible universe as a set of twenty-seven spheres contained one inside the other and each concentric to the earth. Every celestial body is located on the equator of an ideal eudaimonia Eudoxus of Cnidus 291   291 sphere that revolves with uniform speed on its axis. The poles are embedded in the surface of another sphere, which also revolves uniformly around an axis inclined at a constant angle to that of the first sphere. In this way enough spheres are introduced to capture the apparent motions of all heavenly bodies. Aristotle adopted the system of homocentric spheres and provided a physical interpretation for it in his cosmology. R.E.B. Euler diagram, a logic diagram invented by the mathematician Euler that represents standard form statements in syllogistic logic by two circles and a syllogism by three circles. In modern adaptations of Euler diagrams, distributed terms are represented by complete circles and undistributed terms by partial circles circle segments or circles made with dotted lines: Euler diagrams are more perspicuous ways of showing validity and invalidity of syllogisms than Venn diagrams, but less useful as a mechanical test of validity since there may be several choices of ways to represent a syllogism in Euler diagrams, only one of which will show that the syllogism is invalid. 

euthanasia, broadly, the beneficent timing or negotiation of the death of a sick person; more narrowly, the killing of a human being on the grounds that he is better off dead. In an extended sense, the word ‘euthanasia’ is used to refer to the painless killing of non-human animals, in our interests at least as much as in theirs. Active euthanasia is the taking of steps to end a person’s  especially a patient’s  life. Passive euthanasia is the omission or termination of means of prolonging life, on the grounds that the person is better off without them. The distinction between active and passive euthanasia is a rough guide for applying the more fundamental distinction between intending the patient’s death and pursuing other goals, such as the relief of her pain, with the expectation that she will die sooner rather than later as a result. Voluntary euthanasia is euthanasia with the patient’s consent, or at his request. Involuntary euthanasia is euthanasia over the patient’s objections. Non-voluntary euthanasia is the killing of a person deemed incompetent with the consent of someone  say a parent  authorized to speak on his behalf. Since candidates for euthanasia are frequently in no condition to make major decisions, the question whether there is a difference between involuntary and non-voluntary euthanasia is of great importance. Few moralists hold that life must be prolonged whatever the cost. Traditional morality forbids directly intended euthanasia: human life belongs to God and may be taken only by him. The most important arguments for euthanasia are the pain and indignity suffered by those with incurable diseases, the burden imposed by persons unable to take part in normal human activities, and the supposed right of persons to dispose of their lives however they please. Non-theological arguments against euthanasia include the danger of expanding the principle of euthanasia to an everwidening range of persons and the opacity of death and its consequent incommensurability with life, so that we cannot safely judge that a person is better off dead. 

event, anything that happens; an occurrence. Two fundamental questions about events, which philosophers have usually treated together, are: 1 Are there events?, and 2 If so, what is their nature? Some philosophers simply assume that there are events. Others argue for that, typically through finding semantic theories for ordinary claims that apparently concern the fact that some agent has done something or that some thing has changed. Most philosophers presume that the events whose existence is proved by such arguments are abstract particulars, “particulars” in the sense that they are non-repeatable and spatially locatable, “abstract” in the sense that more than one event can occur simultaneously in the same place. The theories of events espoused by Davidson in his causal view, Kim though his view may be unstable in this respect, Jonathan Bennett, and Lawrence Lombard take them to be abstract particulars. However, Chisholm takes Euler diagram event 292   292 events to be abstract universals; and Quine and Davidson in his later view take them to be concrete particulars. Some philosophers who think of events as abstract particulars tend to associate the concept of an event with the concept of change; an event is a change in some object or other though some philosophers have doubts about this and others have denied it outright. The time at which an event, construed as a particular, occurs can be associated with the shortest time at which the object, which is the subject of that event, changes from the having of one property to the having of another, contrary property. Events inherit whatever spatial locations they have from the spatial locations, if any, of the things that those events are changes in. Thus, an event that is a change in an object, x, from being F to being G, is located wherever x is at the time it changes from being F to being G. Some events are those of which another event is composed e.g., the sinking of a ship seems composed of the sinkings of its parts. However, it also seems clear that not every group of events comprises another; there just is no event composed of a certain explosion on Venus and my birth. Any adequate theory about the nature of events must address the question of what properties, if any, such things have essentially. One issue is whether the causes or effects of events are essential to those events. A second is whether it is essential to each event that it be a change in the entity it is in fact a change in. A third is whether it is essential to each event that it occur at the time at which it in fact occurs. A chief component of a theory of events is a criterion of identity, a principle giving conditions necessary and sufficient for an event e and an event eH to be one and the same event. Quine holds that events may be identified with the temporal parts of physical objects, and that events and physical objects would thus share the same condition of identity: sameness of spatiotemporal location. Davidson once proposed that events are identical provided they have the same causes and effects. More recently, Davidson abandoned this position in favor of Quine’s. Kim takes an event to be the exemplification of a property or relation by an object or objects at a time. This idea has led to his view that an event e is the same as an event eH if and only if e and eH are the exemplifications of the same property by the same objects at the same time. Lombard’s view is a variation on this account, and is derived from the idea of events as the changes that physical objects undergo when they alter. 

evidence, information bearing on the truth or falsity of a proposition. In philosophical discussions, a person’s evidence is generally taken to be all the information a person has, positive or negative, relevant to a proposition. The notion of evidence used in philosophy thus differs from the ordinary notion according to which physical objects, such as a strand of hair or a drop of blood, counts as evidence. One’s information about such objects could be evidence in the philosophical sense. The concept of evidence plays a central role in our understanding of knowledge and rationality. According to a traditional and widely held view, one has knowledge only when one has a true belief based on very strong evidence. Rational belief is belief based on adequate evidence, even if that evidence falls short of what is needed for knowledge. Many traditional philosophical debates, such as those about our knowledge of the external world, the rationality of religious belief, and the rational basis for moral judgments, are largely about whether the evidence we have in these areas is sufficient to yield knowledge or rational belief. The senses are a primary source of evidence. Thus, for most, if not all, of our beliefs, ultimately our evidence traces back to sensory experience. Other sources of evidence include memory and the testimony of others. Of course, both of these sources rely on the senses in one way or another. According to rationalist views, we can also get evidence for some propositions through mere reason or reflection, and so reason is an additional source of evidence. The evidence one has for a belief may be conclusive or inconclusive. Conclusive evidence is so strong as to rule out all possibility of error. The discussions of skepticism show clearly that we lack conclusive evidence for our beliefs about the external world, about the past, about other minds, and about nearly any other topic. Thus, an individual’s perceptual experiences provide only inconclusive evidence for beliefs about the external world since such experiences can be deceptive or hallucinatory. Inconclusive, or prima facie, evidence can always be defeated or event causation evidence 293   293 overridden by subsequently acquired evidence, as, e.g., when testimonial evidence in favor of a proposition is overridden by the evidence provided by subsequent experiences. 

evidentialism, in the philosophy of religion, the view that religious beliefs can be rationally accepted only if they are supported by one’s “total evidence,” understood to mean all the other propositions one knows or justifiably believes to be true. Evidentialists typically add that, in order to be rational, one’s degree of belief should be proportioned to the strength of the evidential support. Evidentialism was formulated by Locke as a weapon against the sectarians of his day and has since been used by Clifford among many others to attack religious belief in general. A milder form of evidentialism is found in Aquinas, who, unlike Clifford, thinks religion can meet the evidentialist challenge. A contrasting view is fideism, best understood as the claim that one’s fundamental religious convictions are not subject to independent rational assessment. A reason often given for this is that devotion to God should be one’s “ultimate concern,” and to subject faith to the judgment of reason is to place reason above God and make of it an idol. Proponents of fideism include Tertullian, Kierkegaard, Karl Barth, and some Wittgensteinians. A third view, which as yet lacks a generally accepted label, may be termed experientialism; it asserts that some religious beliefs are directly justified by religious experience. Experientialism differs from evidentialism in holding that religious beliefs can be rational without being supported by inferences from other beliefs one holds; thus theistic arguments are superfluous, whether or not there are any sound ones available. But experientialism is not fideism; it holds that religious beliefs may be directly grounded in religious experience wtihout the mediation of other beliefs, and may be rationally warranted on that account, just as perceptual beliefs are directly grounded in perceptual experience. Recent examples of experientialism are found in Plantinga’s “Reformed Epistemology,” which asserts that religious beliefs grounded in experience can be “properly basic,” and in the contention of Alston that in religious experience the subject may be “perceiving God.” 

evolutionary epistemology, a theory of knowledge inspired by and derived from the fact and processes of organic evolution the term was coined by the social psychologist Donald Campbell. Most evolutionary epistemologists subscribe to the theory of evolution through natural selection, as presented by Darwin in the Origin of Species 1859. However, one does find variants, especially one based on some kind of neoLamarckism, where the inheritance of acquired characters is central Spencer endorsed this view and another based on some kind of jerky or “saltationary” evolutionism Thomas Kuhn, at the end of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, accepts this idea. There are two approaches to evolutionary epistemology. First, one can think of the transformation of organisms and the processes driving such change as an analogy for the growth of knowledge, particularly scientific knowledge. “Darwin’s bulldog,” T. H. Huxley, was one of the first to propose this idea. He argued that just as between organisms we have a struggle for existence, leading to the selection of the fittest, so between scientific ideas we have a struggle leading to a selection of the fittest. Notable exponents of this view today include Stephen Toulmin, who has worked through the analogy in some detail, and David Hull, who brings a sensitive sociological perspective to bear on the position. Karl Popper identifies with this form of evolutionary epistemology, arguing that the selection of ideas is his view of science as bold conjecture and rigorous attempt at refutation by another name. The problem with this analogical type of evolutionary epistemology lies in the disanalogy between the raw variants of biology mutations, which are random, and the raw variants of science new hypotheses, which are very rarely random. This difference probably accounts for the fact that whereas Darwinian evolution is not genuinely progressive, science is or seems to be the paradigm of a progressive enterprise. Because of this problem, a second set of epistemologists inspired by evolution insist that one must take the biology literally. This evidence of the senses evolutionary epistemology 294   294 group, which includes Darwin, who speculated in this way even in his earliest notebooks, claims that evolution predisposes us to think in certain fixed adaptive patterns. The laws of logic, e.g., as well as mathematics and the methodological dictates of science, have their foundations in the fact that those of our would-be ancestors who took them seriously survived and reproduced, and those that did not did not. No one claims that we have innate knowledge of the kind demolished by Locke. Rather, our thinking is channeled in certain directions by our biology. In an update of the biogenetic law, therefore, one might say that whereas a claim like 5 ! 7 % 12 is phylogenetically a posteriori, it is ontogenetically a priori. A major division in this school is between the continental evolutionists, most notably the late Konrad Lorenz, and the Anglo-Saxon supporters, e.g. Michael Ruse. The former think that their evolutionary epistemology simply updates the critical philosophy of Kant, and that biology both explains the necessity of the synthetic a priori and makes reasonable belief in the thing-in-itself. The latter deny that one can ever get that necessity, certainly not from biology, or that evolution makes reasonable a belief in an objectively real world, independent of our knowing. Historically, these epistemologists look to Hume and in some respects to the American pragmatists, especially William James. Today, they acknowledge a strong family resemblance to such naturalized epistemologists as Quine, who has endorsed a kind of evolutionary epistemology. Critics of this position, e.g. Philip Kitcher, usually strike at what they see as the soft scientific underbelly. They argue that the belief that the mind is constructed according to various innate adaptive channels is without warrant. It is but one more manifestation of today’s Darwinians illicitly seeing adaptation everywhere. It is better and more reasonable to think knowledge is rooted in culture, if it is person-dependent at all. A mark of a good philosophy, like a good science, is that it opens up new avenues for research. Although evolutionary epistemology is not favored by conventional philosophers, who sneer at the crudities of its frequently nonphilosophically trained proselytizers, its supporters feel convinced that they are contributing to a forward-moving philosophical research program. As evolutionists, they are used to things taking time to succeed. .

evolutionary psychology, the subfield of psychology that explains human behavior and cultural arrangements by employing evolutionary biology and cognitive psychology to discover, catalog, and analyze psychological mechanisms. Human minds allegedly possess many innate, special-purpose, domain-specific psychological mechanisms modules whose development requires minimal input and whose operations are context-sensitive, mostly automatic, and independent of one another and of general intelligence. Disagreements persist about the functional isolation and innateness of these modules. Some evolutionary psychologists compare the mind  with its specialized modules  to a Swiss army knife. Different modules substantially constrain behavior and cognition associated with language, sociality, face recognition, and so on. Evolutionary psychologists emphasize that psychological phenomena reflect the influence of biological evolution. These modules and associated behavior patterns assumed their forms during the Pleistocene. An evolutionary perspective identifies adaptive problems and features of the Pleistocene environment that constrained possible solutions. Adaptive problems often have cognitive dimensions. For example, an evolutionary imperative to aid kin presumes the ability to detect kin. Evolutionary psychologists propose models to meet the requisite cognitive demands. Plausible models should produce adaptive behaviors and avoid maladaptive ones  e.g., generating too many false positives when identifying kin. Experimental psychological evidence and social scientific field observations aid assessment of these proposals. These modules have changed little. Modern humans manage with primitive hunter-gatherers’ cognitive equipment amid the rapid cultural change that equipment produces. The pace of that change outstrips the ability of biological evolution to keep up. Evolutionary psychologists hold, consequently, that: 1 contrary to sociobiology, which appeals to biological evolution directly, exclusively evolutionary explanations of human behavior will not suffice; 2 contrary to theories of cultural evolution, which appeal to biological evolution analogically, it is at least possible that no cultural arrangement has ever been adaptive; and 3 contrary to social scientists, who appeal to some general conception of learning or socialization to explain cultural transmission, specialized psychological evolutionary ethics evolutionary psychology 295   295 mechanisms contribute substantially to that process. 

existential generalization, a rule of inference admissible in classical quantification theory. It allows one to infer an existentially quantified statement DxA from any instance A a/x of it. Intuitively, it allows one to infer ‘There exists a liar’ from ‘Epimenides is a liar’. It is equivalent to universal instantiation  the rule that allows one to infer any instance A a/x of a universally quantified statement ExA from ExA. Intuitively, it allows one to infer ‘My car is valuable’ from ‘Everything is valuable’. Both rules can also have equivalent formulations as axioms; then they are called specification ExA / A a/x and particularization Aa/x / DxA. All of these equivalent principles are denied by free logic, which only admits weakened versions of them. In the case of existential generalization, the weakened version is: infer DxA from Aa/x & E!a. Intuitively: infer ‘There exists a liar’ from ‘Epimenides is a liar and Epimenides exists’. 

existential import, a commitment to the existence of something implied by a sentence, statement, or proposition. For example, in Aristotelian logic though not in modern quantification theory, any sentence of the form ‘All F’s are G’s’ implies ‘There is an F that is a G’ and is thus said to have as existential import a commitment to the existence of an F that is a G. According to Russell’s theory of descriptions, sentences containing definite descriptions can likewise have existential import since ‘The F is a G’ implies ‘There is an F’. The presence of singular terms is also often claimed to give rise to existential commitment. Underlying this notion of existential import is the idea  long stressed by W. V. Quine  that ontological commitment is measured by existential sentences statements, propositions of the form Dv f. 

existential instantiation, a rule of inference admissible in classical quantification theory. It allows one to infer a statement A from an existentially quantified statement DxB if A can be inferred from an instance Ba/x of DxB, provided that a does not occur in either A or B or any other premise of the argument if there are any. Intuitively, it allows one to infer a contradiction C from ‘There exists a highest prime’ if C can be inferred from ‘a is a highest prime’ and a does not occur in C. Free logic allows for a stronger form of this rule: with the same provisions as above, A can be inferred from DxB if it can be inferred from Ba/x & E!a. Intuitively, it is enough to infer ‘There is a highest natural number’ from ‘a is a highest prime and a exists’. 

existentialism, a philosophical and literary movement that came to prominence in Europe, particularly in France, immediately after World War II, and that focused on the uniqueness of each human individual as distinguished from abstract universal human qualities. Historians differ as to antecedents. Some see an existentialist precursor in Pascal, whose aphoristically expressed Catholic fideism questioned the power of rationalist thought and preferred the God of Scripture to the abstract “God of the philosophers.” Many agree that Kierkegaard, whose fundamentally similar but Protestant fideism was based on a profound unwillingness to situate either God or any individual’s relationship with God within a systematic philosophy, as Hegel had done, should be exact similarity existentialism 296   296 considered the first modern existentialist, though he too lived long before the term emerged. Others find a proto-existentialist in Nietzsche, because of the aphoristic and anti-systematic nature of his writings, and on the literary side, in Dostoevsky. A number of twentiethcentury novelists, such as Franz Kafka, have been labeled existentialists. A strong existentialist strain is to be found in certain other theist philosophers who have written since Kierkegaard, such as Lequier, Berdyaev, Marcel, Jaspers, and Buber, but Marcel later decided to reject the label ‘existentialist’, which he had previously employed. This reflects its increasing identification with the atheistic existentialism of Sartre, whose successes, as in the novel Nausea, and the philosophical work Being and Nothingness, did most to popularize the word. A mass-audience lecture, “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” which Sartre to his later regret allowed to be published, provided the occasion for Heidegger, whose early thought had greatly influenced Sartre’s evolution, to take his distance from Sartre’s existentialism, in particular for its self-conscious concentration on human reality over Being. Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism, written in reply to a French admirer, signals an important turn in his thinking. Nevertheless, many historians continue to classify Heidegger as an existentialist  quite reasonably, given his early emphasis on existential categories and ideas such as anxiety in the presence of death, our sense of being “thrown” into existence, and our temptation to choose anonymity over authenticity in our conduct. This illustrates the difficulty of fixing the term ‘existentialism’. Other French thinkers of the time, all acquaintances of Sartre’s, who are often classified as existentialists, are Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, and, though with less reason, Merleau-Ponty. Camus’s novels, such as The Stranger and The Plague, are cited along with Nausea as epitomizing the uniqueness of the existentialist antihero who acts out of authenticity, i.e., in freedom from any conventional expectations about what so-called human nature a concept rejected by Sartre supposedly requires in a given situation, and with a sense of personal responsibility and absolute lucidity that precludes the “bad faith” or lying to oneself that characterizes most conventional human behavior. Good scholarship prescribes caution, however, about superimposing too many Sartrean categories on Camus. In fact the latter, in his brief philosophical essays, notably The Myth of Sisyphus, distinguishes existentialist writers and philosophers, such as Kierkegaard, from absurdist thinkers and heroes, whom he regards more highly, and of whom the mythical Sisyphus condemned eternally by the gods to roll a huge boulder up a hill before being forced, just before reaching the summit, to start anew is the epitome. Camus focuses on the concept of the absurd, which Kierkegaard had used to characterize the object of his religious faith an incarnate God. But for Camus existential absurdity lies in the fact, as he sees it, that there is always at best an imperfect fit between human reasoning and its intended objects, hence an impossibility of achieving certitude. Kierkegaard’s leap of faith is, for Camus, one more pseudo-solution to this hard, absurdist reality. Almost alone among those named besides Sartre who himself concentrated more on social and political thought and became indebted to Marxism in his later years, Simone de Beauvoir 190886 unqualifiedly accepted the existentialist label. In The Ethics of Ambiguity, she attempted, using categories familiar in Sartre, to produce an existentialist ethics based on the recognition of radical human freedom as “projected” toward an open future, the rejection of inauthenticity, and a condemnation of the “spirit of seriousness” akin to the “spirit of gravity” criticized by Nietzsche whereby individuals identify themselves wholly with certain fixed qualities, values, tenets, or prejudices. Her feminist masterpiece, The Second Sex, relies heavily on the distinction, part existentialist and part Hegelian in inspiration, between a life of immanence, or passive acceptance of the role into which one has been socialized, and one of transcendence, actively and freely testing one’s possibilities with a view to redefining one’s future. Historically, women have been consigned to the sphere of immanence, says de Beauvoir, but in fact a woman in the traditional sense is not something that one is made, without appeal, but rather something that one becomes. The Sartrean ontology of Being and Nothingness, according to which there are two fundamental asymmetrical “regions of being,” being-in-itself and being-for-itself, the latter having no definable essence and hence, as “nothing” in itself, serving as the ground for freedom, creativity, and action, serves well as a theoretical framework for an existentialist approach to human existence. Being and Nothingness also names a third ontological region, being-for-others, but that may be disregarded here. However, it would be a mistake to treat even Sartre’s existentialist insights, much less those of others, as dependent on this ontology, to which he himself made little direct existentialism existentialism 297   297 reference in his later works. Rather, it is the implications of the common central claim that we human beings exist without justification hence “absurdly” in a world into which we are “thrown,” condemned to assume full responsibility for our free actions and for the very values according to which we act, that make existentialism a continuing philosophical challenge, particularly to ethicists who believe right choices to be dictated by our alleged human essence or nature. 

explanation, an act of making something intelligible or understandable, as when we explain an event by showing why or how it occurred. Just about anything can be the object of explanation: a concept, a rule, the meaning of a word, the point of a chess move, the structure of a novel. However, there are two sorts of things whose explanation has been intensively discussed in philosophy: events and human actions. Individual events, say the collapse of a bridge, are usually explained by specifying their cause: the bridge collapsed because of the pressure of the flood water and its weakened structure. This is an example of causal explanation. There usually are indefinitely many causal factors responsible for the occurrence of an event, and the choice of a particular factor as “the cause” appears to depend primarily on contextual considerations. Thus, one explanation of an automobile accident may cite the icy road condition; another the inexperienced driver; and still another the defective brakes. Context may determine which of these and other possible explanations is the appropriate one. These explanations of why an event occurred are sometimes contrasted with explanations of how an event occurred. A “how” explanation of an event consists in an informative description of the process that has led to the occurrence of the event, and such descriptions are likely to involve descriptions of causal processes. The covering law model is an influential attempt to represent the general form of such explanations: an explanation of an event consists in “subsuming,” or “covering,” it under a law. When the covering law is deterministic, the explanation is thought to take the form of a deductive argument: a statement  the explanandum  describing the event to be explained is logically derived from the explanans  the law together with statements of antecedent conditions. Thus, we might explain why a given rod expanded by offering this argument: ‘All metals expand when heated; this rod is metallic and it was heated; therefore, it expanded’. Such an explanation is called a deductive-nomological explanation. On the other hand, probabilistic or statistical laws are thought to yield statistical explanations of individual events. Thus, the explanation of the contraction of a contagious disease on the basis of exposure to a patient with the disease may take the form of a statistical explanation. Details of the statistical model have been a matter of much controversy. It is sometimes claimed that although explanations, whether in ordinary life or in the sciences, seldom conform fully to the covering law model, the model nevertheless represents an ideal that all explanations must strive to attain. The covering law model, though influential, is not universally accepted. Human actions are often explained by being “rationalized’  i.e., by citing the agent’s beliefs and desires and other “intentional” mental states such as emotions, hopes, and expectations that constitute a reason for doing what was done. You opened the window because you wanted some fresh air and believed that by opening the window you could secure this result. It has been a controversial issue whether such rationalizing explanations are causal; i.e., whether they invoke beliefs and desires as a cause of the action. Another issue is whether existential polarity explanation 298   298 these “rationalizing” explanations must conform to the covering law model, and if so, what laws might underwrite such explanations. 

exponible. In medieval logic, exponible propositions were those that needed to be expounded, i.e., elaborated in order to make clear their true logical form. A modern example might be: ‘Giorgione was so called because of his size’, which has a misleading form, suggesting a simple predication, whereas it really means, ‘Giorgione was called “Giorgione” because of his size’. Medieval examples were: ‘Every man except Socrates is running’, expounded as ‘Socrates is not running and every man other than Socrates is running’; and ‘Only Socrates says something true’, uttered by, say, Plato, which Albert of Saxony claims should be expounded not only as ‘Socrates says something true and no one other than Socrates says something true’, but needs a third clause, ‘Plato says something false’. This last example brings out an important aspect of exponible propositions, namely, their use in sophisms. Sophismatic treatises were a common medieval genre in which metaphysical and logical issues were approached dialectically by their application in solving puzzle cases. Another important ingredient of exponible propositions was their containing a particular term, sometimes called the exponible term; attention on such terms was focused in the study of syncategorematic expressions, especially in the thirteenth century. However, note that such exponible terms could only be expounded in context, not by an explicit definition. Syncategorematic terms that produced exponible propositions were terms such as ‘twice’, ‘except’, ‘begins’ and ‘ceases’, and ‘insofar as’ e.g. ‘Socrates insofar as he is rational is risible’. 

exportation 1 In classical logic, the principle that A 8 B / C is logically equivalent to A / B / C. 2 The principle A 8 B P C P A P B P C, which relevance logicians hold to be fallacious when ‘P’ is read as ‘entails’. 3 In discussions of propositional attitude verbs, the principle that from ‘a Vs that b is an f’ one may infer ‘a Vs f-hood of b’, where V has its relational transparent sense. For example, exportation in sense 3 takes one from ‘Ralph believes that Ortcutt is a spy’ to ‘Ralph believes spyhood of Ortcutt’, wherein ‘Ortcutt’ can now be replaced by a bound variable to yield ‘Dx Ralph believes spyhood of x’. 

expression theory of art, a theory that defines art as the expression of feelings or emotion sometimes called expressionism in art. Such theories first acquired major importance in the nineteenth century in connection with the rise of Romanticism. Expression theories are as various as the different views about what counts as expressing emotion. There are four main variants. 1 Expression as communication. This requires that the artist actually have the feelings that are expressed, when they are initially expressed. They are “embodied” in some external form, and thereby transmitted to the perceiver. Leo Tolstoy 18281910 held a view of this sort. 2 Expression as intuition. An intuition is the apprehension of the unity and individuality of something. An intuition is “in the mind,” and hence the artwork is also. Croce held this view, and in his later work argued that the unity of an intuition is established by feeling. 3 Expression as clarification. An artist starts out with vague, undefined feelings, and expression is a process of coming to clarify, articulate, and understand them. This view retains Croce’s idea that expression is in the artist’s mind, as well as explanation, covering law expression theory of art 299   299 his view that we are all artists to the degree that we articulate, clarify, and come to understand our own feelings. Collingwood held this view. 4 Expression as a property of the object. For an artwork to be an expression of emotion is for it to have a given structure or form. Suzanne K. Langer 18951985 argued that music and the other arts “presented” or exhibited structures or forms of feeling in general. 

extensionalism, a family of ontologies and semantic theories restricted to existent entities. Extensionalist ontology denies that the domain of any true theory needs to include non-existents, such as fictional, imaginary, and impossible objects like Pegasus the winged horse or round squares. Extensionalist semantics reduces meaning and truth to set-theoretical relations between terms in a language and the existent objects, standardly spatiotemporal and abstract entities, that belong to the term’s extension. The extension of a name is the particular existent denoted by the name; the extension of a predicate is the set of existent objects that have the property represented by the predicate. The sentence ‘All whales are mammals’ is true in extensionalist semantics provided there are no whales that are not mammals, no existent objects in the extension of the predicate ‘whale’ that are not also in the extension of ‘mammal’. Linguistic contexts are extensional if: i they make reference only to existent objects; ii they support substitution of codesignative terms referring to the same thing, or of logically equivalent propositions, salva veritate without loss of truthvalue; and iii it is logically valid to existentially quantify conclude that There exists an object such that . . . etc. objects referred to within the context. Contexts that do not meet these requirements are intensional, non-extensional, or referentially opaque. The implications of extensionalism, associated with the work of Frege, Russell, Quine, and mainstream analytic philosophy, are to limit its explanations of mind and meaning to existent objects and material-mechanical properties and relations describable in an exclusively extensional idiom. Extensionalist semantics must try to analyze away apparent references to nonexistent objects, or, as in Russell’s extensionalist theory of definite descriptions, to classify all such predications as false. Extensionalist ontology in the philosophy of mind must eliminate or reduce propositional attitudes or de dicto mental states, expressed in an intensional idiom, such as ‘believes that ————’, ‘fears that ————’, and the like, usually in favor of extensional characterizations of neurophysiological states. Whether extensionalist philosophy can satisfy these explanatory obligations, as the thesis of extensionality maintains, is controversial. 

externalism, the view that there are objective reasons for action that are not dependent on the agent’s desires, and in that sense external to the agent. Internalism about reasons is the view that reasons for action must be internal in the sense that they are grounded in motivational facts about the agent, e.g. her desires and goals. Classic internalists such as Hume deny that there are objective reasons for action. For instance, whether the fact that an action would promote health is a reason to do it depends on whether one has a desire to be healthy. It may be a reason for some and not for others. The doctrine is hence a version of relativism; a fact is a reason only insofar as it is so connected to an agent’s psychological states that it can motivate the agent. By contrast, externalists hold that not all reasons depend on the internal states of particular agents. Thus an externalist could hold that promoting health is objectively good and that the fact that an action would promote one’s health is a reason to perform it regardless of whether one desires health. This dispute is closely tied to the debate over motivational internalism, which may be conceived as the view that moral beliefs for instance are, by virtue of entailing motivation, internal reasons for action. Those who reject motivational internalism must either deny that expressive completeness externalism 300   300 sound moral beliefs always provide reasons for action or hold that they provide external reasons. 

extrinsic desire, a desire of something for its conduciveness to something else that one desires. Extrinsic desires are distinguished from intrinsic desires, desires of items for their own sake, or as ends. Thus, an individual might desire financial security extrinsically, as a means to her happiness, and desire happiness intrinsically, as an end. Some desires are mixed: their objects are desired both for themselves and for their conduciveness to something else. Jacques may desire to jog, e.g., both for its own sake as an end and for the sake of his health. A desire is strictly intrinsic if and only if its object is desired for itself alone. A desire is strictly extrinsic if and only if its object is not desired, even partly, for its own sake. Desires for “good news”  e.g., a desire to hear that one’s child has survived a car accident  are sometimes classified as extrinsic desires, even if the information is desired only because of what it indicates and not for any instrumental value that it may have. Desires of each kind help to explain action. Owing partly to a mixed desire to entertain a friend, Martha might acquire a variety of extrinsic desires for actions conducive to that goal. Less happily, intrinsically desiring to be rid of his toothache, George might extrinsically desire to schedule a dental appointment. If all goes well for Martha and George, their desires will be satisfied, and that will be due in part to the effects of the desires upon their behavior. 

fa, Chinese term for 1 a standard, model, paradigm, or exemplar; 2 proper procedure, behavior, or technique; 3 a rule or law; 4 dharma. A mental image yi of a circle, a compass, and a particular circle can each serve as a fa for identifying circles. The sage-kings, their institutions, and their behavior are all fa for rulers to emulate. Methods of governing e.g., by reward and punishment are fa. Explicit laws or bureaucratic rules are also fa. See Mo Tzu, “Dialectical Chapters,” and Kuan Tzu, chapter 6, “Seven Standards.” After the introduction of Buddhism to China, fa is used to translate ‘dharma’. 

Fact-value distinction, the apparently fundamental difference between how things are and how they should be. That people obey the law or act honestly or desire money is one thing; that they should is quite another. The first is a matter of fact, the second a matter of value. Hume is usually credited with drawing the distinction when he noticed that one cannot uncontroversially infer an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ the isought gap. From the fact, say, that an action would maximize overall happiness, we cannot legitimately infer that it ought to be done  without the introduction of some so far suppressed evaluative premise. We could secure the inference by assuming that one ought always to do what maximizes overall happiness. But that assumption is evidently evaluative. And any other premise that might link the non-evaluative premises to an evaluative conclusion would look equally evaluative. No matter how detailed and extensive the non-evaluative premises, it seems no evaluative conclusion follows directly and as a matter of logic. Some have replied that at least a few non-evaluative claims do entail evaluative ones. To take one popular example, from the fact that some promise was made, we might it appears legitimately infer that it ought to be kept, other things equal  and this without the introduction of an evaluative premise. Yet many argue that the inference fails, or that the premise is actually evaluative, or that the conclusion is not. Hume himself was both bold and brief about the gap’s significance, claiming simply that paying attention to it “wou’d subvert all the vulgar systems of morality, and let us see, that the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations of objects, nor is perceiv’d by reason” Treatise of Human Nature. Others have been more expansive. Moore, for instance, in effect relied upon the gap to establish via the open question argument that any attempt to define evaluative terms using non-evaluative ones would commit the naturalistic fallacy. Moore’s main target was the suggestion that ‘good’ means “pleasant” and the fallacy, in this context, is supposed to be misidentifying an evaluative property, being good, with a natural property, being pleasant. Assuming that evaluative terms have meaning, Moore held that some could be defined using others he thought, e.g., that ‘right’ could be defined as “productive of the greatest possible good” and that the rest, though meaningful, must be indefinable terms denoting simple, non-natural, properties. Accepting Moore’s use of the open question argument but rejecting both his non-naturalism and his assumption that evaluative terms must have descriptive meaning, emotivists and prescriptivists e.g. Ayer, C. L. Stevenson, and Hare argued that evaluative terms have a role in language other than to denote properties. According to them, the primary role of evaluative language is not to describe, but to prescribe. The logical gap between ‘is’ and ‘ought’, they argue, establishes both the difference between fact and value and the difference between describing how things are and recommending how they might be. Some naturalists, though, acknowledge the gap and yet maintain that the evaluative claims nonetheless do refer to natural properties. In the process they deny the ontological force of the open question argument and 302 F   302 treat evaluative claims as describing a special class of facts. 

faculty psychology, the view that the mind is a collection of departments responsible for distinct psychological functions. Related to faculty psychology is the doctrine of localization of function, wherein each faculty has a specific brain location. Faculty psychologies oppose theories of mind as a unity with one function e.g., those of Descartes and associationism or as a unity with various capabilities e.g., that of Ockham, and oppose the related holistic distributionist or mass-action theory of the brain. Faculty psychology began with Aristotle, who divided the human soul into five special senses, three inner senses common sense, imagination, memory and active and passive mind. In the Middle Ages e.g., Aquinas Aristotle’s three inner senses were subdivied, creating more elaborate lists of five to seven inward wits. Islamic physicianphilosophers such as Avicenna integrated Aristotelian faculty psychology with Galenic medicine by proposing brain locations for the faculties. Two important developments in faculty psychology occurred during the eighteenth century. First, Scottish philosophers led by Reid developed a version of faculty psychology opposed to the empiricist and associationist psychologies of Locke and Hume. The Scots proposed that humans were endowed by God with a set of faculties permitting knowledge of the world and morality. The Scottish system exerted considerable influence in the United States, where it was widely taught as a moral, character-building discipline, and in the nineteenth century this “Old Psychology” opposed the experimental “New Psychology.” Second, despite then being called a charlatan, Franz Joseph Gall 17581828 laid the foundation for modern neuropsychology in his work on localization of function. Gall rejected existing faculty psychologies as philosophical, unbiological, and incapable of accounting for everyday behavior. Gall proposed an innovative behavioral and biological list of faculties and brain localizations based on comparative anatomy, behavior study, and measurements of the human skull. Today, faculty psychology survives in trait and instinct theories of personality, Fodor’s theory that mental functions are implemented by neurologically “encapsulated” organs, and localizationist theories of the brain.  .

fallibilism, the doctrine, relative to some significant class of beliefs or propositions, that they are inherently uncertain and possibly mistaken. The most extreme form of the doctrine attributes uncertainty to every belief; more restricted forms attribute it to all empirical beliefs or to beliefs concerning the past, the future, other minds, or the external world. Most contemporary philosophers reject the doctrine in its extreme form, holding that beliefs about such things as elementary logical principles and the character of one’s current feelings cannot possibly be mistaken. Philosophers who reject fallibilism in some form generally insist that certain beliefs are analytically true, self-evident, or intuitively obvious. These means of supporting the infallibility of faculty psychology fallibilism 303   303 some beliefs are now generally discredited. W. V. Quine has cast serious doubt on the very notion of analytic truth, and the appeal to self-evidence or intuitive obviousness is open to the charge that those who officially accept it do not always agree on what is thus evident or obvious there is no objective way of identifying it, and that beliefs said to be self-evident have sometimes been proved false, the causal principle and the axiom of abstraction in set theory being striking examples. In addition to emphasizing the evolution of logical and mathematical principles, fallibilists have supported their position mainly by arguing that the existence and nature of mind-independent objects can legitimately be ascertained only be experimental methods and that such methods can yield conclusions that are, at best, probable rather than certain.

false consciousness, 1 lack of clear awareness of the source and significance of one’s beliefs and attitudes concerning society, religion, or values; 2 objectionable forms of ignorance and false belief; 3 dishonest forms of self-deception. Marxists if not Marx use the expression to explain and condemn illusions generated by unfair economic relationships. Thus, workers who are unaware of their alienation, and “happy homemakers” who only dimly sense their dependency and quiet desperation, are molded in their attitudes by economic power relationships that make the status quo seem natural, thereby eclipsing their long-term best interests. Again, religion is construed as an economically driven ideology that functions as an “opiate” blocking clear awareness of human needs. Collingwood interprets false consciousness as self-corrupting untruthfulness in disowning one’s emotions and ideas The Principles of Art, 1938.  .

false pleasure, pleasure taken in something false. If it is false that Jones is honest, but Smith believes Jones is honest and is pleased that Jones is honest, then Smith’s pleasure is false. If pleasure is construed as an intentional attitude, then the truth or falsity of a pleasure is a function of whether its intentional object obtains. On this view, S’s being pleased that p is a true pleasure if an only if S is pleased that p and p is true. S’s being pleased that p is a false pleasure if and only if S is pleased that p and p is false. Alternatively, Plato uses the expression ‘false pleasure’ to refer to things such as the cessation of pain or neutral states that are neither pleasant nor painful that a subject confuses with genuine or true pleasures. Thus, being released from tight shackles might mistakenly be thought pleasant when it is merely the cessation of a pain.  .

Fang, Thomé H. 18991976, Chinese philosopher of culture. Educated at the  of Nanking and the  of Wisconsin, he had an early interest in Dewey’s pragmatism, but returned to the ideals of Chinese philosophy during World War II. He had a grand philosophical scheme, always discussing issues from a comparative viewpoint through perspectives of ancient Grecian, modern European, Chinese, and Indian thought. He exerted a profound influence on younger philosophers in Taiwan after 1949. 

Fechner, Gustav Theodor 180187, German physicist and philosopher whose Elemente der Psychophysik 1860; English translation, 1966 inaugurated experimental psychology. Obsessed with the mindbody problem, Fechner advanced an identity theory in which every object is both mental and physical, and in support invented psychophysics  the “exact science of the functional relations . . . between mind and body.” Fechner began with the concept of the limen, or sensory threshold. The absolute threshold is the stimulus strength R, Reiz needed to create a conscious sensation S, and the relative threshold is the strength that must be added to a stimulus for a just noticeable difference jnd to be perceived. E. H. Weber 17951878 had shown that a constant ratio held between relative threshold and false cause, fallacy of Fechner, Gustav Theodor 304   304 stimulus magnitude, Weber’s law: DR/R % k. By experimentally determining jnd’s for pairs of stimulus magnitudes such as weights, Fechner formulated his “functional relation,” S % k log R, Fechner’s law, an identity equation of mind and matter. Later psychophysicists replaced it with a power law, R % kSn, where n depends on the kind of stimulus. The importance of psychophysics to psychology consisted in its showing that quantification of experience was possible, and its providing a general paradigm for psychological experimentation in which controlled stimulus conditions are systematically varied and effects observed. In his later years, Fechner brought the experimental method to bear on aesthetics Vorschule der Aesthetik, 1876.

feminist epistemology, epistemology from a feminist perspective. It investigates the relevance that the gender of the inquirer/knower has to epistemic practices, including the theoretical practice of epistemology. It is typified both by themes that are exclusively feminist in that they could arise only from a critical attention to gender, and by themes that are non-exclusively feminist in that they might arise from other politicizing theoretical perspectives besides feminism. A central, exclusively feminist theme is the relation between philosophical conceptions of reason and cultural conceptions of masculinity. Here a historicist stance must be adopted, so that philosophy is conceived as the product of historically and culturally situated hence gendered authors. This stance brings certain patterns of intellectual association into view  patterns, perhaps, of alignment between philosophical conceptions of reason as contrasted with emotion or intuition, and cultural conceptions of masculinity as contrasted with femininity. A central, non-exclusively feminist theme might be called “social-ism” in epistemology. It has two main tributaries: political philosophy, in the form of Marx’s historical materialism; and philosophy of science, in the form of either Quinean naturalism or Kuhnian historicism. The first has resulted in feminist standpoint theory, which adapts and develops the Marxian idea that different social groups have different epistemic standpoints, where the material positioning of one of the groups is said to bestow an epistemic privilege. The second has resulted in feminist work in philosophy of science which tries to show that not only epistemic values but also non-epistemic e.g. gendered values are of necessity sometimes an influence in the generation of scientific theories. If this can be shown, then an important feminist project suggests itself: to work out a rationale for regulating the influence of these values so that science may be more self-transparent and more responsible. By attempting to reveal the epistemological implications of the fact that knowers are diversely situated in social relations of identity and power, feminist epistemology represents a radicalizing innovation in the analytic tradition, which has typically assumed an asocial conception of the epistemic subject, and of the philosopher. 

feminist philosophy, a discussion of philosophical concerns that refuses to identify the human experience with the male experience. Writing from a variety of perspectives, feminist philosophers challenge several areas of traditional philosophy on the grounds that they fail 1 to take seriously women’s interests, identities, and issues; and 2 to recognize women’s ways of being, thinking, and doing as valuable as those of men. Feminist philosophers fault traditional metaphysics for splitting the self from the other and the mind from the body; for wondering whether “other minds” exist and whether personal identity depends more on memories or on physical characteristics. Because feminist philosophers reject all forms of ontological dualism, they stress the ways in which individuals interpenetrate each other’s psyches through empathy, and the ways in which the mind and body coconstitute each other. Because Western culture has associated rationality with “masculinity” and emotionality with “femininity,” traditional epistemologists have often concluded that women are less human than men. For this reason, feminist philosophers argue that reason and emotion are symbiotically related, coequal sources of knowledge. Feminist philosophers also argue that Cartesian knowledge, for all its certainty and clarity, is very limFechner’s law feminist philosophy 305   305 ited. People want to know more than that they exist; they want to know what other people are thinking and feeling. Feminist philosophers also observe that traditional philosophy of science is not as objective as it claims to be. Whereas traditional philosophers of science often associate scientific success with scientists’ ability to control, rule, and otherwise dominate nature, feminist philosophers of science associate scientific success with scientists’ ability to listen to nature’s self-revelations. Since it willingly yields abstract theory to the testimony of concrete fact, a science that listens to what nature says is probably more objective than one that does not. Feminist philosophers also criticize traditional ethics and traditional social and political philosophy. Rules and principles have dominated traditional ethics. Whether agents seek to maximize utility for the aggregate or do their duty for the sake of duty, they measure their conduct against a set of universal, abstract, and impersonal norms. Feminist philosophers often call this traditional view of ethics a “justice” perspective, contrasting it with a “care” perspective that stresses responsibilities and relationships rather than rights and rules, and that attends more to a moral situation’s particular features than to its general implications. Feminist social and political philosophy focus on the political institutions and social practices that perpetuate women’s subordination. The goals of feminist social and political philosophy are 1 to explain why women are suppressed, repressed, and/or oppressed in ways that men are not; and 2 to suggest morally desirable and politically feasible ways to give women the same justice, freedom, and equality that men have. Liberal feminists believe that because women have the same rights as men do, society must provide women with the same educational and occupational opportunities that men have. Marxist feminists believe that women cannot be men’s equals until women enter the work force en masse and domestic work and child care are socialized. Radical feminists believe that the fundamental causes of women’s oppression are sexual. It is women’s reproductive role and/or their sexual role that causes their subordination. Unless women set their own reproductive goals childlessness is a legitimate alternative to motherhood and their own sexual agendas lesbianism, autoeroticism, and celibacy are alternatives to heterosexuality, women will remain less than free. Psychoanalytic feminists believe that women’s subordination is the result of earlychildhood experiences that cause them to overdevelop their abilities to relate to other people on the one hand and to underdevelop their abilities to assert themselves as autonomous agents on the other. Women’s greatest strength, a capacity for deep relationships, may also be their greatest weakness: a tendency to be controlled by the needs and wants of others. Finally, existentialist feminists claim that the ultimate cause of women’s subordination is ontological. Women are the Other; men are the Self. Until women define themselves in terms of themselves, they will continue to be defined in terms of what they are not: men. Recently, socialist feminists have attempted to weave these distinctive strands of feminist social and political thought into a theoretical whole. They argue that women’s condition is overdetermined by the structures of production, reproduction and sexuality, and the socialization of children. Women’s status and function in all of these structures must change if they are to achieve full liberation. Furthermore, women’s psyches must also be transformed. Only then will women be liberated from the kind of patriarchal thoughts that undermine their self-concept and make them always the Other. Interestingly, the socialist feminist effort to establish a specifically feminist standpoint that represents how women see the world has not gone without challenge. Postmodern feminists regard this effort as an instantiation of the kind of typically male thinking that tells only one story about reality, truth, knowledge, ethics, and politics. For postmodern feminists, such a story is neither feasible nor desirable. It is not feasible because women’s experiences differ across class, racial, and cultural lines. It is not desirable because the “One” and the “True” are philosophical myths that traditional philosophy uses to silence the voices of the many. Feminist philosophy must be many and not One because women are many and not One. The more feminist thoughts, the better. By refusing to center, congeal, and cement separate thoughts into a unified and inflexible truth, feminist philosophers can avoid the pitfalls of traditional philosophy. As attractive as the postmodern feminist approach to philosophy may be, some feminist philosophers worry that an overemphasis on difference and a rejection of unity may lead to intellectual as well as political disintegration. If feminist philosophy is to be without any standpoint whatsoever, it becomes difficult to ground claims about what is good for women in particufeminist philosophy feminist philosophy 306   306 lar and for human beings in general. It is a major challenge to contemporary feminist philosophy, therefore, to reconcile the pressures for diversity and difference with those for integration and commonality. 

Ferguson, Adam 17231816, Scottish philosopher and historian. His main theme was the rise and fall of virtue in individuals and societies. In his most important work, An Essay on the History of Civil Society 1766, he argued that human happiness of which virtue is a constituent is found in pursuing social goods rather than private ends. Ferguson thought that ignoring social goods not only prevented social progress but led to moral corruption and political despotism. To support this he used classical texts and travelers’ writings to reconstruct the history of society from “rude nations” through barbarism to civilization. This allowed him to express his concern for the danger of corruption inherent in the increasing selfinterest manifested in the incipient commercial civilization of his day. He attempted to systematize his moral philosophy in The Principles of Moral and Social Science 1792. J.W.A. Fermat’s last theorem.

Feuerbach, Ludwig Andreas 180472, German materialist philosopher and critic of religion. He provided the major link between Hegel’s absolute idealism and such later theories of historical materialism as those of Marx and other “young or new Hegelians.” Feuerbach was born in Bavaria and studied theology, first at Heidelberg and then Berlin, where he came under the philosophical influence of Hegel. He received his doctorate in 1828 and, after an early publication severely critical of Christianity, retired from official German academic life. In the years between 1836 and 1846, he produced some of his most influential works, which include “Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy” 1839, The Essence of Christianity 1841, Principles of the Philosophy of the Future 1843, and The Essence of Religion 1846. After a brief collaboration with Marx, he emerged as a popular champion of political liberalism in the revolutionary period of 1848. During the reaction that followed, he again left public life and died dependent upon the support of friends. Feuerbach was pivotal in the intellectual history of the nineteenth century in several respects. First, after a half-century of metaphysical system construction by the German idealists, Feuerbach revived, in a new form, the original Kantian project of philosophical critique. However, whereas Kant had tried “to limit reason in order to make room for faith,” Feuerbach sought to demystify both faith and reason in favor of the concrete and situated existence of embodied human consciousness. Second, his “method” of “transformatory criticism”  directed, in the first instance, at Hegel’s philosophical pronouncements  was adopted by Marx and has retained its philosophical appeal. Briefly, it suggested that “Hegel be stood on his feet” by “inverting” the subject and predicate in Hegel’s idealistic pronouncements. One should, e.g., rewrite “The individual is a function of the Absolute” as “The Absolute is a function of the individual.” Third, Feuerbach asserted that the philosophy of German idealism was ultimately an extenuation of theology, and that theology was merely religious consciousness systematized. But since religion itself proves to be merely a “dream of the human mind,” metaphysics, theology, and religion can be reduced to “anthropology,” the study of concrete embodied human consciousness and its cultural products. The philosophical influence of Feuerbach flows through Marx into virtually all later historical materialist positions; anticipates the existentialist concern with concrete embodied human existence; and serves as a paradigm for all later approaches to religion on the part of the social sciences. 

Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 17621814, German philosopher. He was a proponent of an uncompromising system of transcendental idealism, the Wissenschaftslehre, which played a key role in the development of post-Kantian philosophy. Born in Saxony, Fichte studied at Jena and Leipzig. The writings of Kant led him to abandon metaphysical determinism and to embrace transcendental idealism as “the first system of human freedom.” His first book, Versuch einer Kritik aller Offenbarung “Attempt at a Critique of all Revelations,” 1792, earned him a reputation as a brilliant exponent of Kantianism, while his early political writings secured him a reputation as a Jacobin. Inspired by Reinhold, Jacobi, Maimon, and Schulze, Fichte rejected the “letter” of Kantianism and, in the lectures and writings he produced at Jena 179499, advanced a new, rigorously systematic presentation of what he took to be its Ferguson, Adam Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 307   307 “spirit.” He dispensed with Kant’s things-inthemselves, the original duality of faculties, and the distinction between the transcendental aesthetic and the transcendental analytic. By emphasizing the unity of theoretical and practical reason in a way consistent with “the primacy of practical reason,” Fichte sought to establish the unity of the critical philosophy as well as of human experience. In Ueber den Begriff der Wissenschaftslehre “On the Concept of the Wissenschaftslehre,” 1794 he explained his conception of philosophy as “the science of science,” to be presented in a deductive system based on a self-evident first principle. The basic “foundations” of this system, which Fichte called Wissenschaftslehre theory of science, were outlined in his Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre “Foundations of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre,” 179495 and Grundriß der Eigentümlichen der Wissenschaftslehre in Rücksicht auf das theoretische Vermögen “Outline of the Distinctive Character of the Wissenschaftslehre with respect to the Theoretical Faculty,” 1795 and then, substantially revised, in his lectures on Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo 179699. The “foundational” portion of the Wissenschaftslehrelinks our affirmation of freedom to our experience of natural necessity. Beginning with the former “the I simply posits itself”, it then demonstrates how a freely self-positing subject must be conscious not only of itself, but also of “representations accompanied by a feeling of necessity” and hence of an objective world. Fichte insisted that the essence of selfhood lies in an active positing of its own self-identity and hence that self-consciousness is an auto-productive activity: a Tathandlung or “fact/act.” However, the I can posit itself only as limited; in order for the originally posited act of “sheer self-positing” to occur, certain other mental acts must occur as well, acts through which the I posits for itself an objective, spatiotemporal world, as well as a moral realm of free, rational beings. The I first posits its own limited condition in the form of “feeling” occasioned by an inexplicable Anstob or “check” upon its own practical striving, then as a “sensation,” then as an “intuition” of a thing, and finally as a “concept.” The distinction between the I and the not-I arises only in these reiterated acts of self-positing, a complete description of which thus amounts to a “genetic deduction” of the necessary conditions of experience. Freedom is thereby shown to be possible only in the context of natural necessity, where it is limited and finite. At the same time “our freedom is a theoretical determining principle of our world.” Though it must posit its freedom “absolutely”  i.e., schlechthin or “for no reason”  a genuinely free agent can exist only as a finite individual endlessly striving to overcome its own limits. After establishing its “foundations,” Fichte extended his Wissenschaftslehre into social and political philosophy and ethics. Subjectivity itself is essentially intersubjective, inasmuch as one can be empirically conscious of oneself only as one individual among many and must thus posit the freedom of others in order to posit one’s own freedom. But for this to occur, the freedom of each individual must be limited; indeed, “the concept of right or justice Recht is nothing other than the concept of the coexistence of the freedom of several rational/sensuous beings.” The Grundlage des Naturrechts “Foundations of Natural Right,” 179697 examines how individual freedom must be externally limited if a community of free individuals is to be possible, and demonstrates that a just political order is a demand of reason itself, since “the concept of justice or right is a condition of self-consciousness.” “Natural rights” are thus entirely independent of moral duties. Unlike political philosophy, which purely concerns the public realm, ethics, which is the subject of Das System der Sittenlehre “The System of Ethical Theory,” 1798, concerns the inner realm of conscience. It views objects not as given to consciousness but as produced by free action, and concerns not what is, but what ought to be. The task of ethics is to indicate the particular duties that follow from the general obligation to determine oneself freely the categorical imperative. Before Fichte could extend the Wissenschaftslehre into the philosophy of religion, he was accused of atheism and forced to leave Jena. The celebrated controversy over his alleged atheism the Atheismusstreit was provoked by “Ueber den Grund unseres Glaubens in einer göttliche Weltregierung” “On the Basis of our Belief in a Divine Governance of the World,” 1798, in which he sharply distinguished between philosophical and religious questions. While defending our right to posit a “moral world order,” Fichte insisted that this order does not require a personal deity or “moral lawgiver.” After moving to Berlin, Fichte’s first concern was to rebut the charge of atheism and to reply to the indictment of philosophy as “nihilism” advanced in Jacobi’s Open Letter to Fichte 1799. This was the task of Die Bestimmung des Menschen “The Vocation of Man,” 1800. During the French occupation, he delivered Reden an die deutsche Nation “Addresses to the German Fichte, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 308   308 Nation,” 1808, which proposed a program of national education and attempted to kindle German patriotism. The other publications of his Berlin years include a foray into political economy, Der geschlossene Handelstaat “The Closed Commercial State,” 1800; a speculative interpretation of human history, Die Grundzüge des gegenwärtiges Zeitalters “The Characteristics of the Present Age,” 1806; and a mystically tinged treatise on salvation, Die Anweisung zum seligen Leben “Guide to the Blessed Life,” 1806. In unpublished private lectures he continued to develop radically new versions of the Wissenschaftslehre. Fichte’s substantial influence was not limited to his well-known influence on Schelling and Hegel both of whom criticized the “subjectivism” of the early Wissenschaftslehre. He is also important in the history of German nationalism and profoundly influenced the early Romantics, especially Novalis and Schlegel. Recent decades have seen renewed interest in Fichte’s transcendental philosophy, expecially the later, unpublished versions of the Wissenschaftslehre. This century’s most significant contribution to Fichte studies, however, is the ongoing publication of the first critical edition of his complete works. 

Ficino, Marsilio 143399, Italian Neoplatonic philosopher who played a leading role in the cultural life of Florence. Ordained a priest in 1473, he hoped to draw people to Christ by means of Platonism. It was through Ficino’s translation and commentaries that the works of Plato first became accessible to the Latin-speaking West, but the impact of Plato’s work was considerably affected by Ficino’s other interests. He accepted Neoplatonic interpretations of Plato, including those of Plotinus, whom he translated; and he saw Plato as the heir of Hermes Trismegistus, a mythical Egyptian sage and supposed author of the hermetic corpus, which he translated early in his career. He embraced the notion of a prisca theologia, an ancient wisdom that encapsulated philosophic and religious truth, was handed on to Plato, and was later validated by the Christian revelation. The most popular of his original works was Three Books on Life 1489, which contains the fullest Renaissance exposition of a theory of magic, based mainly on Neoplatonic sources. He postulated a living cosmos in which the World-Soul is linked to the world-body by spirit. This relationship is mirrored in man, whose spirit or astral body links his body and soul, and the resulting correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm allows both man’s control of natural objects through magic and his ascent to knowledge of God. Other popular works were his commentary on Plato’s Symposium 1469, which presents a theory of Platonic love; and his Platonic Theology 1474, in which he argues for the immortality of the soul. 

fiction, in the widest usage, whatever contrasts with what is a matter of fact. As applied to works of fiction, however, this is not the appropriate contrast. For a work of fiction, such as a historical novel, might turn out to be true regarding its historical subject, without ceasing to be fiction. The correct contrast of fiction is to non-fiction. If a work of fiction might turn out to be true, how is ‘fiction’ best defined? According to some philosophers, such as Searle, the writer of nonfiction performs illocutionary speech acts, such as asserting that such-and-such occurred, whereas the writer of fiction characteristically only pretends to perform these illocutionary acts. Others hold that the core idea to which appeal should be made is that of making-believe or imagining certain states of affairs. Kendall Walton Mimesis as Make-Believe, 1990, for instance, holds that a work of fiction is to be construed in terms of a prop whose function is to serve in games of make-believe. Both kinds of theory allow for the possibility that a work of fiction might turn out to be true. 

field theory, a theory that proceeds by assigning values of physical quantities to the points of space, or of space-time, and then lays down laws relating these values. For example, a field theory might suppose a value for matter density, or a temperature for each space-time point, and then relate these values, usually in terms of differential equations. In these examples there is at least the tacit assumption of a physical substance that fills the relevant region of space-time. But no such assumption need be made. For instance, in Ficino, Marsilio field theory 309   309 Maxwell’s theory of the electromagnetic field, each point of space-time carries a value for an electric and a magnetic field, and these values are then governed by Maxwell’s equations. In general relativity, the geometry e.g., the curvature of space-time is itself treated as a field, with lawlike connections with the distribution of energy and matter. Formulation in terms of a field theory resolves the problem of action at a distance that so exercised Newton and his contemporaries. We often take causal connection to require spatial contiguity. That is, for one entity to act causally on another, the two entities need to be contiguous. But in Newton’s description gravitational attraction acts across spatial distances. Similarly, in electrostatics the mutual repulsion of electric charges is described as acting across spatial distances. In the times of both Newton and Maxwell numerous efforts to understand such action at a distance in terms of some space-filling mediating substance produced no viable theory. Field theories resolve the perplexity. By attributing values of physical quantities directly to the space-time points one can describe gravitation, electrical and magnetic forces, and other interactions without action at a distance or any intervening physical medium. One describes the values of physical quantities, attributed directly to the space-time points, as influencing only the values at immediately neighboring points. In this way the influences propagate through space-time, rather than act instantaneously across distances or through a medium. Of course there is a metaphysical price: on such a description the space-time points themselves take on the role of a kind of dematerialized ether. Indeed, some have argued that the pervasive role of field theory in contemporary physics and the need for space-time points for a field-theoretic description constitute a strong argument for the existence of the space-time points. This conclusion contradicts “relationalism,” which claims that there are only spatiotemporal relations, but no space-time points or regions thought of as particulars. Quantum field theory appears to take on a particularly abstract form of field theory, since it associates a quantum mechanical operator with each space-time point. However, since operators correspond to physical magnitudes rather than to values of such magnitudes, it is better to think of the field-theoretic aspect of quantum field theory in terms of the quantum mechanical amplitudes that it also associates with the space-time points. 

figureground, the discrimination of an object or figure from the context or background against which it is set. Even when a connected region is grouped together properly, as in the famous figure that can be seen either as a pair of faces or as a vase, it is possible to interpret the region alternately as figure and as ground. This fact was originally elaborated in 1921 by Edgar Rubin 1886 1951. Figureground effects and the existence of other ambiguous figures such as the Necker cube and the duckrabbit challenged the prevailing assumption in classical theories of perception  maintained, e.g., by J. S. Mill and H. von Helmholtz  that complex perceptions could be understood in terms of primitive sensations constituting them. The underdetermination of perception by the visual stimulus, noted by Berkeley in his Essay of 1709, takes account of the fact that the retinal image is impoverished with respect to threedimensional information. Identical stimulation at the retina can result from radically different distal sources. Within Gestalt psychology, the Gestalt, or pattern, was recognized to be underdetermined by constituent parts available in proximal stimuli. M. Wertheimer 18801943 observed in 1912 that apparent motion could be induced by viewing a series of still pictures in rapid succession. He concluded that perception of the whole, as involving movement, was fundamentally different from the perception of the static images of which it is composed. W. Köhler An example of visual reversal from Edgar Rubin: the object depicted can be seen alternately as a vase or as a pair of faces. The reversal occurs whether there is a black ground and white figure or white figure and black ground. figure figure  ground 310   310 18871967 observed that there was no figure ground articulation in the retinal image, and concluded that inherently ambiguous stimuli required some autonomous selective principles of perceptual organization. As subsequently developed by Gestalt psychologists, form is taken as the primitive unit of perception. In philosophical treatments, figureground effects are used to enforce the conclusion that interpretation is central to perception, and that perceptions are no more than hypotheses based on sensory data. 

Filmer, Robert 15881653, English political writer who produced, most importantly, the posthumous Patriarcha 1680. It is remembered because Locke attacked it in the first of his Two Treatises of Government 1690. Filmer argued that God gave complete authority over the world to Adam, and that from him it descended to his eldest son when he became the head of the family. Thereafter only fathers directly descended from Adam could properly be rulers. Just as Adam’s rule was not derived from the consent of his family, so the king’s inherited authority is not dependent on popular consent. He rightly makes laws and imposes taxes at his own good pleasure, though like a good father he has the welfare of his subjects in view. Filmer’s patriarchalism, intended to bolster the absolute power of the king, is the classic English statement of the doctrine. 

first philosophy, in Aristotle’s Metaphysics, the study of being qua being, including the study of theology as understood by him, since the divine is being par excellence. Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy was concerned chiefly with the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, and the nature of matter and of the mind.

 Fludd, Robert 15741637, English physician and writer. Influenced by Paracelsus, hermetism, and the cabala, Fludd defended a Neoplatonic worldview on the eve of its supersession by the new mechanistic philosophy. He produced improvements in the manufacture of steel and invented a thermometer, though he also used magnets to cure disease and devised a salve to be applied to a weapon to cure the wound it had inflicted. He held that science got its ideas from Scripture allegorically interpreted, when they were of any value. His works combine theology with an occult, Neoplatonic reading of the Bible, and contain numerous fine diagrams illustrating the mutual sympathy of human beings, the natural world, and the supernatural world, each reflecting the others in parallel harmonic structures. In controversy with Kepler, Fludd claimed to uncover essential natural processes rooted in natural sympathies and the operation of God’s light, rather than merely describing the external movements of the heavens. Creation is the extension of divine light into matter. Evil arises from a darkness in God, his failure to will. Matter is uncreated, but this poses no problem for orthodoxy, since matter is nothing, a mere possibility without the least actuality, not something Filmer, Robert Fludd, Robert 311   311 coeternal with the Creator. 

Fodor, Jerry A. b.1935, influential contemporary American philosopher of psychology, known for his energetic and often witty defense of intensional realism, a computationalrepresentational model of thought, and an atomistic, externalist theory of content determination for mental states. Fodor’s philosophical writings fall under three headings. First, he has defended the theory of mind implicit in contemporary cognitive psychology, that the cognitive mind-brain is both a representational/computational device and, ultimately, physical. He has taken on behaviorists Ryle, psychologists in the tradition of J. J. Gibson, and eliminative materialists P. A. Churchland. Second, he has engaged in various theoretical disputes within cognitive psychology, arguing for the modularity of the perceptual and language systems roughly, the view that they are domain-specific, mandatory, limited-access, innately specified, hardwired, and informationally encapsulated The Modularity of Mind, 1983; for a strong form of nativism that virtually all of our concepts are innate; and for the existence of a “language of thought” The Language of Thought, 1975. The latter has led him to argue against connectionism as a psychological theory as opposed to an implementation theory. Finally, he has defended the views of ordinary propositional attitude psychology that our mental states 1 are semantically evaluable intentional, 2 have causal powers, and 3 are such that the implicit generalizations of folk psychology are largely true of them. His defense is twofold. Folk psychology is unsurpassed in explanatory power; furthermore, it is vindicated by contemporary cognitive psychology insofar as ordinary propositional attitude states can be identified with information-processing states, those that consist in a computational relation to a representation. The representational component of such states allows us to explain the semantic evaluability of the attitudes; the computational component, their causal efficacy. Both sorts of accounts raise difficulties. The first is satisfactory only if supplemented by a naturalistic account of representational content. Here Fodor has argued for an atomistic, externalist causal theory Psychosemantics, 1987 and against holism the view that no mental representation has content unless many other non-synonymous mental representations also have content Holism: A Shopper’s Guide, 1992, against conceptual role theories the view that the content of a representation is determined by its conceptual role Ned Block, Brian Loar, and against teleofunctional theories teleofunctionalism is the view that the content of a representation is determined, at least in part, by the biological functions of the representations themselves or systems that produce or use those representations Ruth Millikan, David Papineau. The second sort is satisfactory only if it does not imply epiphenomenalism with respect to content properties. To avoid such epiphenomenalism, Fodor has argued that not only strict laws but also ceteris paribus laws can be causal. In addition, he has sought to reconcile his externalism vis-à-vis content with the view that causal efficacy requires an individualistic individuation of states. Two solutions have been explored: the supplementation of broad externally determined content with narrow content, where the latter supervenes on what is “in the head” Psychosemantics, 1987, and its supplementation with modes of presentation identical to sentences of the language of thought The Elm and the Expert, 1995. 

folk psychology, in one sense, a putative network of principles constituting a commonsense theory that allegedly underlies everyday explanations of human behavior; the theory assigns a central role to mental states like belief, desire, and intention. Consider an example of an everyday commonsense psychological explanation: Jane went to the refrigerator because she wanted a beer and she believed there was beer in the refrigerator. Like many such explanations, this adverts to a so-called propositional attitude  a mental state, expressed by a verb ‘believe’ plus a that-clause, whose intentional content is propositional. It also adverts to a mental state, expressed by a verb ‘want’ plus a direct-object phrase, whose intentional content appears not to be propositional. In another, related sense, folk psychology is a network of social practices that includes ascribing such mental states to ourselves and others, and proffering explanations of human behavior that advert to these states. The two senses need fluxion folk psychology 312   312 distinguishing because some philosophers who acknowledge the existence of folk psychology in the second sense hold that commonsense psychological explanations do not employ empirical generalizations, and hence that there is no such theory as folk psychology. Henceforth, ‘FP’ will abbreviate ‘folk psychology’ in the first sense; the unabbreviated phrase will be used in the second sense. Eliminativism in philosophy of mind asserts that FP is an empirical theory; that FP is therefore subject to potential scientific falsification; and that mature science very probably will establish that FP is so radically false that humans simply do not undergo mental states like beliefs, desires, and intentions. One kind of eliminativist argument first sets forth certain methodological strictures about how FP would have to integrate with mature science in order to be true e.g., being smoothly reducible to neuroscience, or being absorbed into mature cognitive science, and then contends that these strictures are unlikely to be met. Another kind of argument first claims that FP embodies certain strong empirical commitments e.g., to mental representations with languagelike syntactic structure, and then contends that such empirical presuppositions are likely to turn out false. One influential version of folk psychological realism largely agrees with eliminativism about what is required to vindicate folk psychology, but also holds that mature science is likely to provide such vindication. Realists of this persuasion typically argue, for instance, that mature cognitive science will very likely incorporate FP, and also will very likely treat beliefs, desires, and other propositional attitudes as states with languagelike syntactic structure. Other versions of folkpsychological realism take issue, in one way or another, with either i the eliminativists’ claims about FP’s empirical commitments, or ii the eliminativists’ strictures about how FP must mesh with mature science in order to be true, or both. Concerning i, for instance, some philosophers maintain that FP per se is not committed to the existence of languagelike mental representations. If mature cognitive science turns out not to posit a “language of thought,” they contend, this would not necessarily show that FP is radically false; instead it might only show that propositional attitudes are subserved in some other way than via languagelike representational structures. Concerning ii, some philosophers hold that FP can be true without being as tightly connected to mature scientific theories as the eliminativists require. For instance, the demand that the special sciences be smoothly reducible to the fundamental natural sciences is widely considered an excessively stringent criterion of intertheoretic compatibility; so perhaps FP could be true without being smoothly reducible to neuroscience. Similarly, the demand that FP be directly absorbable into empirical cognitive science is sometimes considered too stringent as a criterion either of FP’s truth, or of the soundness of its ontology of beliefs, desires, and other propositional attitudes, or of the legitimacy of FP-based explanations of behavior. Perhaps FP is a true theory, and explanatorily legitimate, even if it is not destined to become a part of science. Even if FP’s ontological categories are not scientific natural kinds, perhaps its generalizations are like generalizations about clothing: true, explanatorily usable, and ontologically sound. No one doubts the existence of hats, coats, or scarves. No one doubts the truth or explanatory utility of generalizations like ‘Coats made of heavy material tend to keep the body warm in cold weather’, even though these generalizations are not laws of any science. Yet another approach to folk psychology, often wedded to realism about beliefs and desires although sometimes wedded to instrumentalism, maintains that folk psychology does not employ empirical generalizations, and hence is not a theory at all. One variant denies that folk psychology employs any generalizations, empirical or otherwise. Another variant concedes that there are folk-psychological generalizations, but denies that they are empirical; instead they are held to be analytic truths, or norms of rationality, or both at once. Advocates of non-theory views typically regard folk psychology as a hermeneutic, or interpretive, enterprise. They often claim too that the attribution of propositional attitudes, and also the proffering and grasping of folk-psychological explanations, is a matter of imaginatively projecting oneself into another person’s situation, and then experiencing a kind of empathic understanding, or Verstehen, of the person’s actions and the motives behind them. A more recent, hi-tech, formulation of this idea is that the interpreter “runs a cognitive simulation” of the person whose actions are to be explained. Philosophers who defend folk-psychological realism, in one or another of the ways just canvassed, also sometimes employ arguments based on the allegedly self-stultifying nature of eliminativism. One such argument begins from the premise that the notion of action is folk-psychofolk psychology folk psychology 313   313 logical  that a behavioral event counts as an action only if it is caused by propositional attitudes that rationalize it under some suitable actdescription. If so, and if humans never really undergo propositional attitudes, then they never really act either. In particular, they never really assert anything, or argue for anything since asserting and arguing are species of action. So if eliminativism is true, the argument concludes, then eliminativists can neither assert it nor argue for it  an allegedly intolerable pragmatic paradox. Eliminativists generally react to such arguments with breathtaking equanimity. A typical reply is that although our present concept of action might well be folk-psychological, this does not preclude the possibility of a future successor concept, purged of any commitment to beliefs and desires, that could inherit much of the role of our current, folk-psychologically tainted, concept of action. 

Fonseca, Pedro da 152899, Portuguese philosopher and logician. He entered the Jesuit order in 1548. Apart from a period 157282 in Rome, he lived in Portugal, teaching philosophy and theology at the universities of Evora and Coimbra and performing various administrative duties for his order. He was responsible for the idea of a published course on Aristotelian philosophy, and the resulting series of Coimbra commentaries, the Cursus Conimbricensis, was widely used in the seventeenth century. His own logic text, the Institutes of Dialectic 1564, went into many editions. It is a good example of Renaissance Aristotelianism, with its emphasis on Aristotle’s syllogistic, but it retains some material on medieval developments, notably consequences, exponibles, and supposition theory. Fonseca also wrote a commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics published in parts from 1577 on, which contains the Grecian text, a corrected Latin translation, comments on textual matters, and an extensive exploration of selected philosophical problems. He cites a wide range of medieval philosophers, both Christian and Arab, as well as the newly published Grecian commentators on Aristotle. His own position is sympathetic to Aquinas, but generally independent. Fonseca is important not so much for any particular doctrines, though he did hold original views on such matters as analogy, but for his provision of fully documented, carefully written and carefully argued books that, along with others in the same tradition, were read at universities, both Catholic and Protestant, well into the seventeenth century. He represents what is often called the Second Scholasticism. E.J.A. Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bovier de 16571757, French writer who heralded the age of the philosophes. A product of Jesuit education, he was a versatile freethinker with skeptical inclinations. Dialogues of the Dead 1683 showed off his analytical mind and elegant style. In 1699, he was appointed secretary of the Academy of Sciences. He composed famous eulogies of scientists; defended the superiority of modern science over tradition in Digression on Ancients and Moderns 1688; popularized Copernican astronomy in Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds 1686  famous for postulating the inhabitation of planets; stigmatized superstition and credulity in History of Oracles 1687 and The Origin of Fables 1724; promoted Cartesian physics in The Theory of Cartesian Vortices 1752; and wrote Elements of Infinitesimal Calculus 1727 in the wake of Newton and Leibniz. J.-L.S. Foot, Philippa b.1920, British philosopher who exerted a lasting influence on the development of moral philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century. Her persisting, intertwined themes are opposition to all forms of subjectivism in ethics, the significance of the virtues and vices, and the connection between morality and rationality. In her earlier papers, particularly “Moral Beliefs” 1958 and “Goodness and Choice” 1961, reprinted in Virtues and Vices 1978, she undermines the subjectivist accounts of moral “judgment” derived from C. L. Stevenson and Hare by arguing for many logical or conceptual connections between evaluations and the factual statements on which they must be based. Lately she has developed this kind of thought into the naturalistic claim that moral evaluations are determined by facts about our life and our nature, as evaluations of features of plants and animals as good or defective specimens of their kind are determined by facts about their nature and their life. Foot’s opposition to subjectivism has remained constant, but her views on the virtues in relation to rationality have undergone several changes. In “Moral Beliefs” she relates them to self-interest, maintaining that a virtue must benefit its possessor; in the subsequently repudiated “Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives” 1972 she went as far as to deny that there was necessarily anything contrary to reason in Fonseca, Pedro da Foot, Philippa 314   314 being uncharitable or unjust. In “Does Moral Subjectivism Rest on a Mistake?” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 1995 the virtues themselves appear as forms of practical rationality. Her most recent work, soon to be published as The Grammar of Goodness, preserves and develops the latter claim and reinstates ancient connections between virtue, rationality, and happiness. 

forcing, a method introduced by Paul J. Cohen  see his Set Theory and the Continuum Hypothesis 1966  to prove independence results in Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory ZF. Cohen proved the independence of the axiom of choice AC from ZF, and of the continuum hypothesis CH from ZF ! AC. The consistency of AC with ZF and of CH with ZF ! AC had previously been proved by Gödel by the method of constructible sets. A model of ZF consists of layers, with the elements of a set at one layer always belonging to lower layers. Starting with a model M, Cohen’s method produces an “outer model” N with no more levels but with more sets at each level whereas Gödel’s method produces an ‘inner model’ L: much of what will become true in N can be “forced” from within M. The method is applicable only to hypotheses in the more “abstract” branches of mathematics infinitary combinatorics, general topology, measure theory, universal algebra, model theory, etc.; but there it is ubiquitous. Applications include the proof by Robert M. Solovay of the consistency of the measurability of all sets of all projective sets with ZF with ZF ! AC; also the proof by Solovay and Donald A. Martin of the consistency of Martin’s axiom MA plus the negation of the continuum hypothesis -CH with ZF ! AC. CH implies MA; and of known consequences of CH about half are implied by MA, about half refutable by MA ! -CH. Numerous simplifications, extensions, and variants e.g. Boolean-valued models of Cohen’s method have been introduced. 

Fordyce, David 171151, Scottish philosopher and educational theorist whose writings were influential in the eighteenth century. His lectures formed the basis of his Elements of Moral Philosophy, written originally for The Preceptor 1748, later translated into German and French, and abridged for the articles on moral philosophy in the first Encylopaedia Britannica 1771. Fordyce combines the preacher’s appeal to the heart in the advocacy of virtue with a moral “scientist’s” appraisal of human psychology. He claims to derive our duties experimentally from a study of the prerequisites of human happiness. M.A.St. foreknowledge, divine.

form, in metaphysics, especially Plato’s and Aristotle’s, the structure or essence of a thing as contrasted with its matter. 1 Plato’s theory of Forms is a realistic ontology of universals. In his elenchus, Socrates sought what is common to, e.g., all chairs. Plato believed there must be an essence  or Form  common to everything falling under one concept, which makes anything what it is. A chair is a chair because it “participates in” the Form of Chair. The Forms are ideal “patterns,” unchanging, timeless, and perfect. They exist in a world of their own cf. the Kantian noumenal realm. Plato speaks of them as self-predicating: the Form of Beauty is perfectly beautiful. This led, as he realized, to the Third Man argument that there must be an infinite number of Forms. The only true understanding is of the Forms. This we attain through anamnesis, “recollection.” 2 Aristotle agreed that forms are closely tied to intelligibility, but denied their separate existence. Aristotle explains change and generation through a distinction between the form and matter of substances. A lump of bronze matter becomes a statue through its being molded into a certain shape form. In his earlier metaphysics, Aristotle identified primary substance with the composite of matter and form, e.g. Socrates. Later, he suggests that primary substance is form  what makes Socrates what he is the form here is his soul. This notion of forms as essences has obvious similarities with the Platonic view. They became the “substantial forms” of Scholasticism, accepted until the seventeenth century. 3 Kant saw form as the a priori aspect of experience. We are presented with phenomenological “matter,” which has no meaning until the mind imposes some form upon it. 

formal fallacy, an invalid inference pattern that is described in terms of a formal logic. There are three main cases: 1 an invalid or otherwise unacceptable argument identified solely by its form or structure, with no reference to the content of the premises and conclusion such as equivocation or to other features, generally of a pragmatic character, of the argumentative discourse such as unsuitability of the argument for the purposes for which it is given, failure to satisfy inductive standards for acceptable argument, etc.; the latter conditions of argument evaluation fall into the purview of informal fallacy; 2 a formal rule of inference, or an argument form, that is not valid in the logical system on which the evaluation is made, instances of which are sufficiently frequent, familiar, or deceptive to merit giving a name to the rule or form; and 3 an argument that is an instance of a fallacious rule of inference or of a fallacious argument form and that is not itself valid. The criterion of satisfactory argument typically taken as relevant in discussing formal fallacies is validity. In this regard, it is important to observe that rules of inference and argument forms that are not valid may have instances which may be another rule or argument form, or may be a specific argument that are valid. Thus, whereas the argument form i P, Q; therefore R a form that every argument, including every valid argument, consisting of two premises shares is not valid, the argument form ii, obtained from i by substituting P&Q for R, is a valid instance of i: ii P, Q; therefore P&Q. Since ii is not invalid, ii is not a formal fallacy though it is an instance of i. Thus, some instances of formally fallacious rules of inference or argument-forms may be valid and therefore not be formal fallacies. Examples of formal fallacies follow below, presented according to the system of logic appropriate to the level of description of the fallacy. There are no standard names for some of the fallacies listed below. Fallacies of sentential propositional logic. Affirming the consequent: If p then q; q / , p. ‘If Richard had his nephews murdered, then Richard was an evil man; Richard was an evil man. Therefore, Richard had his nephews murdered.’ Denying the antecedent: If p then q; not-p / , not-q. ‘If North was found guilty by the courts, then North committed the crimes charged of him; North was not found guilty by the courts. Therefore, North did not commit the crimes charged of him.’ Commutation of conditionals: If p then q / , If q then p. ‘If Reagan was a great leader, then so was Thatcher. Therefore, if Thatcher was a great leader, then so was Reagan.” Improper transposition: If p then q / , If not-p then not-q. ‘If the nations of the Middle East disarm, there will be peace in the region. Therefore, if the nations of the Middle East do not disarm, there will not be peace in the region.’ Improper disjunctive syllogism affirming one disjunct: p or q; p / ,, not-q. ‘Either John is an alderman or a ward committeeman; John is an alderman. Therefore, John is not a ward committeeman.’ This rule of inference would be valid if ‘or’ were interpreted exclusively, where ‘p or EXq’ is true if exactly one constituent is true and is false otherwise. In standard systems of logic, however, ‘or’ is interpreted inclusively. Fallacies of syllogistic logic. Fallacies of distribution where M is the middle term, P is the major term, and S is the minor term. Undistributed middle term: the middle term is not distributed in either premise roughly, nothing is said of all members of the class it designates, as in form, grammatical formal fallacy 316   316 Some P are M ‘Some politicians are crooks. Some M are S Some crooks are thieves. ,Some S are P. ,Some politicians are thieves.’ Illicit major undistributed major term: the major term is distributed in the conclusion but not in the major premise, as in All M are P ‘All radicals are communists. No S are M No socialists are radicals. ,Some S are ,Some socialists are not not P. communists.’ Illicit minor undistributed minor term: the minor term is distributed in the conclusion but not in the minor premise, as in All P are M ‘All neo-Nazis are radicals. All M are S All radicals are terrorists. ,All S are P. ,All terrorists are neoNazis.’ Fallacies of negation. Two negative premises exclusive premises: the syllogism has two negative premises, as in No M are P ‘No racist is just. Some M are not S Some racists are not police. ,Some S are not P. ,Some police are not just. Illicit negative/affirmative: the syllogism has a negative premise conclusion but no negative conclusion premise, as in All M are P ‘All liars are deceivers. Some M are not S Some liars are not aldermen. ,Some S are P. ,Some aldermen are deceivers.’ and All P are M ‘All vampires are monsters. All M are S All monsters are creatures. ,Some S are not P. ,Some creatures are not vampires.’ Fallacy of existential import: the syllogism has two universal premises and a particular conclusion, as in All P are M ‘All horses are animals. No S are M No unicorns are animals. ,Some S are not P. ,Some unicorns are not horses.’ A syllogism can commit more than one fallacy. For example, the syllogism Some P are M Some M are S ,No S are P commits the fallacies of undistributed middle, illicit minor, illicit major, and illicit negative/affirmative. Fallacies of predicate logic. Illicit quantifier shift: inferring from a universally quantified existential proposition to an existentially quantified universal proposition, as in Ex Dy Fxy / , Dy Ex Fxy ‘Everyone is irrational at some time or other /, At some time, everyone is irrational.’ Some are/some are not unwarranted contrast: inferring from ‘Some S are P’ that ‘Some S are not P’ or inferring from ‘Some S are not P’ that ‘Some S are P’, as in Dx Sx & Px / , Dx Sx & -Px ‘Some people are left-handed / , Some people are not left-handed.’ Illicit substitution of identicals: where f is an opaque oblique context and a and b are singular terms, to infer from fa; a = b / , fb, as in ‘The Inspector believes Hyde is Hyde; Hyde is Jekyll / , The Inspector believes Hyde is Jekyll.’ 

formalism, the view that mathematics concerns manipulations of symbols according to prescribed structural rules. It is cousin to nominalism, the older and more general metaphysical view that denies the existence of all abstract objects and is often contrasted with Platonism, which takes mathematics to be the study of a special class of non-linguistic, non-mental objects, and intuitionism, which takes it to be the study of certain mental constructions. In sophisticated versions, mathematical activity can comprise the study of possible formal manipulations within a system as well as the manipulations themselves, and the “symbols” need not be regarded as either linguistic or concrete. Formalism is often associated with the mathematician formalism formalism 317   317 David Hilbert. But Hilbert held that the “finitary” part of mathematics, including, for example, simple truths of arithmetic, describes indubitable facts about real objects and that the “ideal” objects that feature elsewhere in mathematics are introduced to facilitate research about the real objects. Hilbert’s formalism is the view that the foundations of mathematics can be secured by proving the consistency of formal systems to which mathematical theories are reduced. Gödel’s two incompleteness theorems establish important limitations on the success of such a project. 

formalization, an abstract representation of a theory that must satisfy requirements sharper than those imposed on the structure of theories by the axiomatic-deductive method. That method can be traced back to Euclid’s Elements. The crucial additional requirement is the regimentation of inferential steps in proofs: not only do axioms have to be given in advance, but the rules representing argumentative steps must also be taken from a predetermined list. To avoid a regress in the definition of proof and to achieve intersubjectivity on a minimal basis, the rules are to be “formal” or “mechanical” and must take into account only the form of statements. Thus, to exclude any ambiguity, a precise and effectively described language is needed to formalize particular theories. The general kind of requirements was clear to Aristotle and explicit in Leibniz; but it was only Frege who, in his Begriffsschrift 1879, presented, in addition to an expressively rich language with relations and quantifiers, an adequate logical calculus. Indeed, Frege’s calculus, when restricted to the language of predicate logic, turned out to be semantically complete. He provided for the first time the means to formalize mathematical proofs. Frege pursued a clear philosophical aim, namely, to recognize the “epistemological nature” of theorems. In the introduction to his Grundgesetze der Arithmetik 1893, Frege wrote: “By insisting that the chains of inference do not have any gaps we succeed in bringing to light every axiom, assumption, hypothesis or whatever else you want to call it on which a proof rests; in this way we obtain a basis for judging the epistemological nature of the theorem.” The Fregean frame was used in the later development of mathematical logic, in particular, in proof theory. Gödel established through his incompleteness theorems fundamental limits of formalizations of particular theories, like the system of Principia Mathematica or axiomatic set theories. The general notion of formal theory emerged from the subsequent investigations of Church and Turing clarifying the concept of ‘mechanical procedure’ or ‘algorithm.’ Only then was it possible to state and prove the incompleteness theorems for all formal theories satisfying certain very basic representability and derivability conditions. Gödel emphasized repeatedly that these results do not establish “any bounds for the powers of human reason, but rather for the potentialities of pure formalism in mathematics.” 

Formalize: narrowly construed, to formulate a subject as a theory in first-order predicate logic; broadly construed, to describe the essentials of the subject in some formal language for which a notion of consequence is defined. For Hilbert, formalizing mathematics requires at least that there be finite means of checking purported proofs. 

formal language: H. P. Grice, “Bergmann on ideal language versus ordinary language,” a language in which an expression’s grammaticality and interpretation if any are determined by precisely defined rules that appeal only to the form or shape of the symbols that constitute it rather than, for example, to the intention of the speaker. It is usually understood that the rules are finite and effective so that there is an algorithm for determining whether an expression is a formula and that the grammatical expressions are uniquely readable, i.e., they are generated by the rules in only one way. A paradigm example is the language of firstorder predicate logic, deriving principally from the Begriffsschrift of Frege. The grammatical formulas of this language can be delineated by an inductive definition: 1 a capital letter ‘F’, ‘G’, or ‘H’, with or without a numerical subscript, folformalism, aesthetic formal language 318   318 lowed by a string of lowercase letters ‘a’, ‘b’, or ‘c’, with or without numerical subscripts, is a formula; 2 if A is a formula, so is -A; 3 if A and B are formulas, so are A & B, A P B, and A 7 B; 4 if A is a formula and v is a lowercase letter ‘x’, ‘y’, or ‘z’, with or without numerical subscripts, then DvA' and EvA' are formulas where A' is obtained by replacing one or more occurrences of some lowercase letter in A together with its subscripts if any by v; 5 nothing is a formula unless it can be shown to be one by finitely many applications of the clauses 14. The definition uses the device of metalinguistic variables: clauses with ‘A’ and ‘B’ are to be regarded as abbreviations of all the clauses that would result by replacing these letters uniformly by names of expressions. It also uses several naming conventions: a string of symbols is named by enclosing it within single quotes and also by replacing each symbol in the string by its name; the symbols ‘7’, ‘‘,’’, ‘&’, ‘P’, ‘-’ are considered names of themselves. The interpretation of predicate logic is spelled out by a similar inductive definition of truth in a model. With appropriate conventions and stipulations, alternative definitions of formulas can be given that make expressions like ‘P 7 Q’ the names of formulas rather than formulas themselves. On this approach, formulas need not be written symbols at all and form cannot be identified with shape in any narrow sense. For Tarski, Carnap, and others a formal language also included rules of “transformation” specifying when one expression can be regarded as a consequence of others. Today it is more common to view the language and its consequence relation as distinct. Formal languages are often contrasted with natural languages, like English or Swahili. Richard Montague, however, has tried to show that English is itself a formal language, whose rules of grammar and interpretation are similar to  though much more complex than  predicate logic. 

formal learnability theory, the study of human language learning through explicit formal models typically employing artifical languages and simplified learning strategies. The fundamental problem is how a learner is able to arrive at a grammar of a language on the basis of a finite sample of presented sentences and perhaps other kinds of information as well. The seminal work is by E. Gold 1967, who showed, roughly, that learnability of certain types of grammars from the Chomsky hierarchy by an unbiased learner required the presentation of ungrammatical strings, identified as such, along with grammatical strings. Recent studies have concentrated on other types of grammar e.g., generative transformational grammars, modes of presentation, and assumptions about learning strategies in an attempt to approximate the actual situation more closely. 

formal logic, the science of correct reasoning, going back to Aristotle’s Prior Analytics, based upon the premise that the validity of an argument is a function of its structure or logical form. The modern embodiment of formal logic is symbolic mathematical logic. This is the study of valid inference in artificial, precisely formulated languages, the grammatical structure of whose sentences or well-formed formulas is intended to mirror, or be a regimentation of, the logical forms of their natural language counterparts. These formal languages can thus be viewed as mathematical models of fragments of natural language. Like models generally, these models are idealizations, typically leaving out of account such phenomena as vagueness, ambiguity, and tense. But the idea underlying symbolic logic is that to the extent that they reflect certain structural features of natural language arguments, the study of valid inference in formal languages can yield insight into the workings of those arguments. The standard course of study for anyone interested in symbolic logic begins with the classical propositional calculus sentential calculus, or PC. Here one constructs a theory of valid inference for a formal language built up from a stock of propositional variables sentence letters and an expressively complete set of connectives. In the propositional calculus, one is therefore concerned with arguments whose validity turns upon the presence of two-valued truth-functional sentence-forming operators on sentences such as classical negation, conjunction, disjunction, and the like. The next step is the predicate calculus lower functional calculus, first-order logic, elementary quantification theory, the study of valid inference in first-order languages. These are languages built up from an expressively complete set of connectives, first-order universal or existential quantifiers, individual variables, names, predicates relational symbols, and perhaps function symbols. Further, and more specialized, work in symbolic logic might involve looking at fragments of the language of the propositional or predicate calculus, changing the semantics that the language is standardly given e.g., by allowing formal learnability theory formal logic 319   319 truth-value gaps or more than two truth-values, further embellishing the language e.g., by adding modal or other non-truth-functional connectives, or higher-order quantifiers, or liberalizing the grammar or syntax of the language e.g., by permitting infinitely long well-formed formulas. In some of these cases, of course, symbolic logic remains only marginally connected with natural language arguments as the interest shades off into one in formal languages for their own sake, a mark of the most advanced work being done in formal logic today. 

formal semantics, the study of the interpretations of formal languages. A formal language can be defined apart from any interpretation of it. This is done by specifying a set of its symbols and a set of formation rules that determine which strings of symbols are grammatical or well formed. When rules of inference transformation rules are added and/or certain sentences are designated as axioms a logical system also known as a logistic system is formed. An interpretation of a formal language is roughly an assignment of meanings to its symbols and truth conditions to its sentences. Typically a distinction is made between a standard interpretation of a formal language and a non-standard interpretation. Consider a formal language in which arithmetic is formulable. In addition to the symbols of logic variables, quantifiers, brackets, and connectives, this language will contain ‘0’, ‘!’, ‘•’, and ‘s’. A standard interpretation of it assigns the set of natural numbers as the domain of discourse, zero to ‘0’, addition to ‘!’, multiplication to ‘•’, and the successor function to ‘s’. Other standard interpretations are isomorphic to the one just given. In particular, standard interpretations are numeral-complete in that they correlate the numerals one-to-one with the domain elements. A result due to Gödel and Rosser is that there are universal quantifications xAx that are not deducible from the Peano axioms if those axioms are consistent even though each An is provable. The Peano axioms if consistent are true on each standard interpretation. Thus each An is true on such an interpretation. Thus xAx is true on such an interpretation since a standard interpretation is numeral-complete. However, there are non-standard interpretations that do not correlate the numerals one-to-one with domain elements. On some of these interpretations each An is true but xAx is false. In constructing and interpreting a formal language we use a language already known to us, say, English. English then becomes our metalanguage, which we use to talk about the formal language, which is our object language. Theorems proven within the object language must be distinguished from those proven in the metalanguage. The latter are metatheorems. One goal of a semantical theory of a formal language is to characterize the consequence relation as expressed in that language and prove semantical metatheorems about that relation. A sentence S is said to be a consequence of a set of sentences K provided S is true on every interpretation on which each sentence in K is true. This notion has to be kept distinct from the notion of deduction. The latter concept can be defined only by reference to a logical system associated with a formal language. Consequence, however, can be characterized independently of a logical system, as was just done. 

Foucault: m., philosopher and historian of thought. Foucault’s earliest writings e.g., Maladie mentale et personnalité [“Mental Illness and Personality”], 1954 focused on psychology and developed within the frameworks of Marxism and existential phenomenology. He soon moved beyond these frameworks, in directions suggested by two fundamental influences: formal mode Foucault, Michel 320   320 history and philosophy of science, as practiced by Bachelard and especially Canguilhem, and the modernist literature of, e.g., Raymond Roussel, Bataille, and Maurice Blanchot. In studies of psychiatry Histoire de la folie [“History of Madness in the Classical Age”], 1961, clinical medicine The Birth of the Clinic, 1963, and the social sciences The Order of Things, 1966, Foucault developed an approach to intellectual history, “the archaeology of knowledge,” that treated systems of thought as “discursive formations” independent of the beliefs and intentions of individual thinkers. Like Canguilhem’s history of science and like modernist literature, Foucault’s archaeology displaced the human subject from the central role it played in the humanism dominant in our culture since Kant. He reflected on the historical and philosophical significance of his archaeological method in The Archaeology of Knowledge 1969. Foucault recognized that archaeology provided no account of transitions from one system to another. Accordingly, he introduced a “genealogical” approach, which does not replace archaeology but goes beyond it to explain changes in systems of discourse by connecting them to changes in the non-discursive practices of social power structures. Foucault’s genealogy admitted the standard economic, social, and political causes but, in a non-standard, Nietzschean vein, refused any unified teleological explanatory scheme e.g., Whig or Marxist histories. New systems of thought are seen as contingent products of many small, unrelated causes, not fulfillments of grand historical designs. Foucault’s geneaological studies emphasize the essential connection of knowledge and power. Bodies of knowledge are not autonomous intellectual structures that happen to be employed as Baconian instruments of power. Rather, precisely as bodies of knowledge, they are tied but not reducible to systems of social control. This essential connection of power and knowledge reflects Foucault’s later view that power is not merely repressive but a creative, if always dangerous, source of positive values. Discipline and Punish 1975 showed how prisons constitute criminals as objects of disciplinary knowledge. The first volume of the History of Sexuality 1976 sketched a project for seeing how, through modern biological and psychological sciences of sexuality, individuals are controlled by their own knowledge as self-scrutinizing and self-forming subjects. The second volume was projected as a study of the origins of the modern notion of a subject in practices of Christian confession. Foucault wrote such a study The Confessions of the Flesh but did not publish it because he decided that a proper understanding of the Christian development required a comparison with ancient conceptions of the ethical self. This led to two volumes 1984 on Grecian and Roman sexuality: The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self. These final writings make explicit the ethical project that in fact informs all of Foucault’s work: the liberation of human beings from contingent conceptual constraints masked as unsurpassable a priori limits and the adumbration of alternative forms of existence. 

foundationalism, the view that knowledge and epistemic knowledge-relevant justification have a two-tier structure: some instances of knowledge and justification are non-inferential, or foundational; and all other instances thereof are inferential, or non-foundational, in that they derive ultimately from foundational knowledge or justification. This structural view originates in Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics at least regarding knowledge, receives an extreme formulation in Descartes’s Meditations, and flourishes, with varying details, in the works of such twentieth-century philosophers as Russell, C. I. Lewis, and Chisholm. Versions of foundationalism differ on two main projects: a the precise explanation of the nature of non-inferential, or foundational, knowledge and justification, and b the specific explanation of how foundational knowledge and justification can be transmitted to non-foundational beliefs. Foundationalism allows for differences on these projects, since it is essentially a view about the structure of knowledge and epistemic justification. The question whether knowledge has foundations is essentially the question whether the sort of justification pertinent to knowledge has a twotier structure. Some philosophers have construed the former question as asking whether knowledge depends on beliefs that are certain in some sense e.g., indubitable or infallible. This construal bears, however, on only one species of foundationalism: radical foundationalism. Such foundationalism, represented primarily by Descartes, requires that foundational beliefs be certain and able to guarantee the certainty of the non-foundational beliefs they support. Radical foundationalism is currently unpopular for two main reasons. First, very few, if any, of our perceptual beliefs are certain i.e., indubitable; and, second, those of our beliefs that might be candifoundationalism foundationalism 321   321 dates for certainty e.g., the belief that I am thinking lack sufficient substance to guarantee the certainty of our rich, highly inferential knowledge of the external world e.g., our knowledge of physics, chemistry, and biology. Contemporary foundationalists typically endorse modest foundationalism, the view that non-inferentially justified, foundational beliefs need not possess or provide certainty and need not deductively support justified non-foundational beliefs. Foundational beliefs or statements are often called basic beliefs or statements, but the precise understanding of ‘basic’ here is controversial among foundationalists. Foundationalists agree, however, in their general understanding of non-inferentially justified, foundational beliefs as beliefs whose justification does not derive from other beliefs, although they leave open whether the causal basis of foundational beliefs includes other beliefs. Epistemic justification comes in degrees, but for simplicity we can restrict discussion to justification sufficient for satisfaction of the justification condition for knowledge; we can also restrict discussion to what it takes for a belief to have justification, omitting issues of what it takes to show that a belief has it. Three prominent accounts of non-inferential justification are available to modest foundationalists: a self-justification, b justification by non-belief, non-propositional experiences, and c justification by a non-belief reliable origin of a belief. Proponents of self-justification including, at one time, Ducasse and Chisholm contend that foundational beliefs can justify themselves, with no evidential support elsewhere. Proponents of foundational justification by non-belief experiences shun literal self-justification; they hold, following C. I. Lewis, that foundational perceptual beliefs can be justified by non-belief sensory or perceptual experiences e.g., seeming to see a dictionary that make true, are best explained by, or otherwise support, those beliefs e.g., the belief that there is, or at least appears to be, a dictionary here. Proponents of foundational justification by reliable origins find the basis of non-inferential justification in belief-forming processes e.g., perception, memory, introspection that are truth-conducive, i.e., that tend to produce true rather than false beliefs. This view thus appeals to the reliability of a belief’s nonbelief origin, whereas the previous view appeals to the particular sensory or perceptual experiences that correspond to e.g., make true or are best explained by a foundational belief. Despite disagreements over the basis of foundational justification, modest foundationalists typically agree that foundational justification is characterized by defeasibility, i.e., can be defeated, undermined, or overridden by a certain sort of expansion of one’s evidence or justified beliefs. For instance, your belief that there is a blue dictionary before you could lose its justification e.g., the justification from your current perceptual experiences if you acquired new evidence that there is a blue light shining on the dictionary before you. Foundational justification, therefore, can vary over time if accompanied by relevant changes in one’s perceptual evidence. It does not follow, however, that foundational justification positively depends, i.e., is based, on grounds for denying that there are defeaters. The relevant dependence can be regarded as negative in that there need only be an absence of genuine defeaters. Critics of foundationalism sometimes neglect that latter distinction regarding epistemic dependence. The second big task for foundationalists is to explain how justification transmits from foundational beliefs to inferentially justified, non-foundational beliefs. Radical foundationalists insist, for such transmission, on entailment relations that guarantee the truth or the certainty of nonfoundational beliefs. Modest foundationalists are more flexible, allowing for merely probabilistic inferential connections that transmit justification. For instance, a modest foundationalist can appeal to explanatory inferential connections, as when a foundational belief e.g., I seem to feel wet is best explained for a person by a particular physical-object belief e.g., the belief that the air conditioner overhead is leaking on me. Various other forms of probabilistic inference are available to modest foundationalists; and nothing in principle requires that they restrict foundational beliefs to what one “seems” to sense or to perceive. The traditional motivation for foundationalism comes largely from an eliminative regress argument, outlined originally regarding knowledge in Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics. The argument, in shortest form, is that foundationalism is a correct account of the structure of justification since the alternative accounts all fail. Inferential justification is justification wherein one belief, B1, is justified on the basis of another belief, B2. How, if at all, is B2, the supporting belief, itself justified? Obviously, Aristotle suggests, we cannot have a circle here, where B2 is justified by B1; nor can we allow the chain of support to extend endlessly, with no ultimate basis for justification. We cannot, moreover, allow B2 to remain unjustified, foundationalism foundationalism 322   322 lest it lack what it takes to support B1. If this is right, the structure of justification does not involve circles, endless regresses, or unjustified starter-beliefs. That is, this structure is evidently foundationalist. This is, in skeletal form, the regress argument for foundationalism. Given appropriate flesh, and due attention to skepticism about justification, this argument poses a serious challenge to non-foundationalist accounts of the structure of epistemic justification, such as epistemic coherentism. More significantly, foundationalism will then show forth as one of the most compelling accounts of the structure of knowledge and justification. This explains, at least in part, why foundationalism has been very prominent historically and is still widely held in contemporary epistemology. 

Four Books, a group of Confucian texts including the Ta-hsüeh Great Learning, Chung-Yung Doctrine of the Mean, Lun Yü Analects, and Meng Tzu Book of Mencius, the latter two containing respectively the teachings of Confucius sixth fifth century B.C. and Mencius fourth century B.C., and the former two being chapters from the Li-Chi Book of Rites. Chu Hsi 11301200 selected the texts as basic ones for Confucian education, and wrote influential commentaries on them. The texts served as the basis of civil service examinations from 1313 to 1905; as a result, they exerted great influence both on the development of Confucian thought and on Chinese life in general.

Fourier, François-Marie-Charles 17721837, French social theorist and radical critic, often called a utopian socialist. His main works were The Theory of Universal Unity 1822 and The New Industrial and Societal World 1829. He argued that since each person has, not an integral soul but only a partial one, personal integrity is possible only in unity with others. Fourier thought that all existing societies were antagonistic. Following Edenism, he believed societies developed through stages of savagery, patriarchalism, barbarianism, and civilization. He believed this antagonism could be transcended only in Harmony. It would be based on twelve kinds of passions. Five were sensual, four affective, and three distributive; and these in turn encouraged the passion for unity. The basic social unit would be a phalanx containing 300 400 families about 1,6001,800 people of scientifically blended characters. As a place of production but also of maximal satisfaction of the passions of every member, Harmony should make labor attractive and pleasurable. The main occupations of its members should be gastronomy, opera, and horticulture. It should also establish a new world of love a form of polygamy where men and women would be equal in rights. Fourier believed that phalanxes would attract members of all other social systems, even the less civilized, and bring about this new world system. Fourier’s vision of cooperation both in theory and experimental practice influenced some anarchists, syndicalists, and the cooperationist movement. His radical social critique was important for the development of political and social thought in France, Europe, and North America. 

Frankena, William K. 190894, American moral philosopher who wrote a series of influential articles and a text, Ethics 1963, which was translated into eight languages and remains in use today. Frankena taught at the  of Michigan 193778, where he and his colleagues Charles Stevenson 190879, a leading noncognitivist, and Richard Brandt, an important ethical naturalist, formed for many years one of the most formidable faculties in moral philosophy in the world. Frankena was known for analytical rigor and sharp insight, qualities already evident in his first essay, “The Naturalistic Fallacy” 1939, which refuted Moore’s influential claim that ethical naturalism or any other reductionist ethical theory could be convicted of logical error. At best, Frankena showed, reductionists could be said to conflate or misidentify ethical properties with properties of some other kind. Even put this way, such assertions were question-begging, Frankena argued. Where Moore claimed to see propfoundation axiom Frankena, William K. 323   323 erties of two different kinds, naturalists and other reductionists claimed to be able to see only one. Many of Frankena’s most important papers concerned similarly fundamental issues about value and normative judgment. “Obligation and Motivation in Recent Moral Philosophy” 1958, for example, is a classic treatment of the debate between internalism, which holds that motivation is essential to obligation or to the belief or perception that one is obligated, and externalism, which holds that motivation is only contingently related to these. In addition to metaethics, Frankena’s published works ranged broadly over normative ethical theory, virtue ethics, moral psychology, religious ethics, moral education, and the philosophy of education. Although relatively few of his works were devoted exclusively to the area, Frankena was also known as the preeminent historian of ethics of his day. More usually, Frankena used the history of ethics as a framework within which to discuss issues of perennial interest. It was, however, for Ethics, one of the most widely used and frequently cited philosophical ethics textbooks of the twentieth century, that Frankena was perhaps best known. Ethics continues to provide an unparalleled introduction to the subject, as useful in a first undergraduate course as it is to graduate students and professional philosophers looking for perspicuous ways to frame issues and categorize alternative solutions. For example, when in the 1970s philosophers came to systematically investigate normative ethical theories, it was Frankena’s distinction in Ethics between deontological and teleological theories to which they referred. 

Frankfurt School, a group of philosophers, cultural critics, and social scientists associated with the Institute for Social Research, which was founded in Frankfurt in 1929. Its prominent members included, among others, the philosophers Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse, as well as the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm 190080 and the literary critic Walter Benjamin 1892 1940. Habermas is the leading representative of its second generation. The Frankfurt School is less known for particular theories or doctrines than for its program of a “critical theory of society.” Critical theory represents a sophisticated effort to continue Marx’s transformation of moral philosophy into social and political critique, while rejecting orthodox Marxism as a dogma. Critical theory is primarily a way of doing philosophy, integrating the normative aspects of philosophical reflection with the explanatory achievements of the social sciences. The ultimate goal of its program is to link theory and practice, to provide insight, and to empower subjects to change their oppressive circumstances and achieve human emancipation, a rational society that satisfies human needs and powers. The first generation of the Frankfurt School went through three phases of development. The first, lasting from the beginning of the Institute until the end of the 1930s, can be called “interdisciplinary historical materialism” and is best represented in Horkheimer’s programmatic writings. Horkheimer argued that a revised version of historical materialism could organize the results of social research and give it a critical perspective. The second, “critical theory” phase saw the abandonment of Marxism for a more generalized notion of critique. However, with the near-victory of the Nazis in the early 1940s, Horkheimer and Adorno entered the third phase of the School, “the critique of instrumental reason.” In their Dialectic of Enlightenment 1941 as well as in Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man 1964, the process of instrumentally dominating nature leads to dehumanization and the domination of human beings. In their writings after World War II, Adorno and Horkheimer became increasingly pessimistic, seeing around them a “totally administered society” and a manipulated, commodity culture. Horkheimer’s most important essays are from the first phase and focus on the relation of philosophy and social science. Besides providing a clear definition and program for critical social science, he proposes that the normative orientation of philosophy should be combined with the empirical research in the social sciences. This metaphilosophical orientation distinguishes a “critical,” as opposed to “traditional,” theory. For example, such a program demands rethinking the relation of epistemology to the sociology of science. A critical theory seeks to show how the norm of truth is historical and practical, without falling into the skepticism or relativism of traditional sociologies of knowledge such as Mannheim’s. Adorno’s major writings belong primarily to the second and third phases of the development of the Frankfurt School. As the possibilities for criticism appeared to him increasingly narrow, Adorno sought to discover them in aesthetic experience and the mimetic relation to nature. Adorno’s approach was motivated by his view Frankfurt School Frankfurt School 324   324 that modern society is a “false totality.” His diagnosis of the causes traced this trend back to the spread of a one-sided, instrumental reason, based on the domination of nature and other human beings. For this reason, he sought a noninstrumental and non-dominating relation to nature and to others, and found it in diverse and fragmentary experiences. Primarily, it is art that preserves this possibility in contemporary society, since in art there is a possibility of mimesis, or the “non-identical” relation to the object. Adorno’s influential attempt to avoid “the logic of identity” gives his posthumous Aesthetic Theory 1970 and other later works a paradoxical character. It was in reaction to the third phase that the second generation of the Frankfurt School recast the idea of a critical theory. Habermas argued for a new emphasis on normative foundations as well as a return to an interdisciplinary research program in the social sciences. After first developing such a foundation in a theory of cognitive interests technical, practical, and emancipatory, Habermas turned to a theory of the unavoidable presuppositions of communicative action and an ethics of discourse. The potential for emancipatory change lies in communicative, or discursive, rationality and practices that embody it, such as the democratic public sphere. Habermas’s analysis of communication seeks to provide norms for non-dominating relations to others and a broader notion of reason. 

free logic, a system of quantification theory, with or without identity, that allows for non-denoting singular terms. In classical quantification theory, all singular terms free variables and individual constants are assigned a denotation in all models. But this condition appears counterintuitive when such systems are applied to natural language, where many singular terms seem to be non-denoting ‘Pegasus’, ‘Sherlock Holmes’, and the like. Various solutions of this problem have been proposed, ranging from Frege’s chosen object theory assign an arbitrary denotation to each non-denoting singular term to Russell’s description theory deny singular term status to most expressions used as such in natural language, and eliminate them from the “logical form” of that language to a weakening of the quantifiers’ “existential import,” which allows for denotations to be possible, but not necessarily actual, objects. All these solutions preserve the structure of classical quantification theory and make adjustments at the level of application. Free logic is a more radical solution: it allows for legitimate singular terms to be denotationless, maintains the quantifiers’ existential import, but modifies both the proof theory and the semantics of first-order logic. Within proof theory, the main modification consists of eliminating the rule of existential generalization, which allows one to infer ‘There exists a flying horse’ from ‘Pegasus is a flying horse’. Within semantics, the main problem is giving truth conditions for sentences containing non-denoting singular terms, and there are various ways of accomplishing this. Conventional semantics assigns truth-values to atomic sentences containing non-denoting singular terms by convention, and then determines the truth-values of complex sentences as usual. Outer domain semantics divides the domain of interpretation into an inner and an outer part, using the inner part as the range of quantifiers and the outer part to provide for “denotations” for non-denoting singular terms which are then not literally denotationless, but rather left without an existing denotation. Supervaluational semantics, when considering a sentence A, assigns all possible combinations of truth-values to the atomic components of A containing non-denoting singular terms, evaluates A on the basis of each of those combinations, and then assigns to A the logical product of all such evaluations. Thus both ‘Pegasus flies’ and ‘Pegasus does not fly’ turn out truth-valueless, but ‘Pegasus flies or Pegasus does not fly’ turns out true since whatever truth-value is assigned to its atomic component ‘Pegasus flies’ the truth-value for the whole sentence is true. A free logic is inclusive if it allows for the possibility that the range of quantifiers be empty that there exists nothing at all; it is exclusive otherwise. 

free rider, a person who benefits from a social arrangement without bearing an appropriate share of the burdens of maintaining that arrangement, e.g. one who benefits from government services without paying one’s taxes that support them. The arrangements from which a free rider benefits may be either formal or informal. Cooperative arrangements that permit free riders are likely to be unstable; parties to the arrangement are unlikely to continue to bear the burdens of maintaining it if others are able to benefit without doing their part. As a result, it is common for cooperative arrangements to include mechanisms to discourage free riders, e.g. legal punishment, or in cases of informal conventions the mere disapproval of one’s peers. It is a matter of some controversy as to whether it is always morally wrong to benefit from an arrangement without contributing to its maintenance. 

free will problem, the problem of the nature of free agency and its relation to the origins and conditions of responsible behavior. For those who contrast ‘free’ with ‘determined’, a central question is whether humans are free in what they do or determined by external events beyond their control. A related concern is whether an agent’s responsibility for an action requires that the agent, the act, or the relevant decision be free. This, in turn, directs attention to action, motivation, deliberation, choice, and intention, and to the exact sense, if any, in which our actions are under our control. Use of ‘free will’ is a matter of traditional nomenclature; it is debated whether freedom is properly ascribed to the will or the agent, or to actions, choices, deliberations, etc. Controversy over conditions of responsible behavior forms the predominant historical and conceptual background of the free will problem. Most who ascribe moral responsibility acknowledge some sense in which agents must be free in acting as they do; we are not responsible for what we were forced to do or were unable to avoid no matter how hard we tried. But there are differing accounts of moral responsibility and disagreements about the nature and extent of such practical freedom a notion also important in Kant. Accordingly, the free will problem centers on these questions: Does moral responsibility require any sort of practical freedom? If so, what sort? Are people practically free? Is practical freedom consistent with the antecedent determination of actions, thoughts, and character? There is vivid debate about this last question. Consider a woman deliberating about whom to vote for. From her first-person perspective, she feels free to vote for any candidate and is convinced that the selection is up to her regardless of prior influences. But viewing her eventual behavior as a segment of larger natural and historical processes, many would argue that there are underlying causes determining her choice. With this contrast of intuitions, any attempt to decide whether the voter is free depends on the precise meanings associated with terms like ‘free’, ‘determine’, and ‘up to her’. One thing event, situation determines another if the latter is a consequence of it, or necessitated by it, e.g., the voter’s hand movements by her intention. As usually understood, determinism holds that whatever happens is determined by antecedent conditions, where determination is standardly conceived as causation by antecedent events and circumstances. So construed, determinism implies that at any time the future is already fixed and unique, with no possibility of alternative development. Logical versions of determinism declare each future event to be determined by what is already true, specifically, by the truth that it will occur then. Typical theological variants accept the predestination of all circumstances and events inasmuch as a divine being knows in advance or even from eternity that they will obtain. Two elements are common to most interpretations of ‘free’. First, freedom requires an absence of determination or certain sorts of determination, and second, one acts and chooses freely only if these endeavors are, properly speaking, one’s own. From here, accounts diverge. Some take freedom liberty of indifference or the contingency of alternative courses of action to be critical. Thus, for the woman deliberating about which candidate to select, each choice is an open alternative inasmuch as it is possible but not yet necessitated. Indifference is also construed as motivational equilibrium, a condition some find essential to the idea that a free choice must be rational. Others focus on freedom liberty of spontaneity, where the voter is free if she votes as she chooses or desires, a reading that reflects the popular equation of freedom with “doing what you want.” Associated with both analyses is a third by which the woman acts freely if she exercises her control, implying responsiveness to free rider free will problem 326   326 intent as well as both abilities to perform an act and to refrain. A fourth view identifies freedom with autonomy, the voter being autonomous to the extent that her selection is self-determined, e.g., by her character, deeper self, higher values, or informed reason. Though distinct, these conceptions are not incompatible, and many accounts of practical freedom include elements of each. Determinism poses problems if practical freedom requires contingency alternate possibilities of action. Incompatibilism maintains that determinism precludes freedom, though incompatibilists differ whether everything is determined. Those who accept determinism thereby endorse hard determinism associated with eighteenthcentury thinkers like d’Holbach and, recently, certain behaviorists, according to which freedom is an illusion since behavior is brought about by environmental and genetic factors. Some hard determinists also deny the existence of moral responsibility. At the opposite extreme, metaphysical libertarianism asserts that people are free and responsible and, a fortiori, that the past does not determine a unique future  a position some find enhanced by developments in quantum physics. Among adherents of this sort of incompatibilism are those who advocate a freedom of indifference by describing responsible choices as those that are undetermined by antecedent circumstances Epicureans. To rebut the charge that choices, so construed, are random and not really one’s “own,” it has been suggested that several elements, including an agent’s reasons, delimit the range of possibilities and influence choices without necessitating them a view held by Leibniz and, recently, by Robert Kane. Libertarians who espouse agency causation, on the other hand, blend contingency with autonomy in characterizing a free choice as one that is determined by the agent who, in turn, is not caused to make it a view found in Carneades and Reid. Unwilling to abandon practical freedom yet unable to understand how a lack of determination could be either necessary or desirable for responsibility, many philosophers take practical freedom and responsibility to be consistent with determinism, thereby endorsing compatibilism. Those who also accept determinism advocate what James called soft determinism. Its supporters include some who identify freedom with autonomy the Stoics, Spinoza and others who champion freedom of spontaneity Hobbes, Locke, Hume. The latter speak of liberty as the power of doing or refraining from an action according to what one wills, so that by choosing otherwise one would have done otherwise. An agent fails to have liberty when constrained, that is, when either prevented from acting as one chooses or compelled to act in a manner contrary to what one wills. Extending this model, liberty is also diminished when one is caused to act in a way one would not otherwise prefer, either to avoid a greater danger coercion or because there is deliberate interference with the envisioning of alternatives manipulation. Compatibilists have shown considerable ingenuity in responding to criticisms that they have ignored freedom of choice or the need for open alternatives. Some apply the spontaneity, control, or autonomy models to decisions, so that the voter chooses freely if her decision accords with her desires, is under her control, or conforms to her higher values, deeper character, or informed reason. Others challenge the idea that responsibility requires alternative possibilities of action. The so-called Frankfurt-style cases developed by Harry G. Frankfurt are situations where an agent acts in accord with his desires and choices, but because of the presence of a counterfactual intervener  a mechanism that would have prevented the agent from doing any alternative action had he shown signs of acting differently  the agent could not have done otherwise. Frankfurt’s intuition is that the agent is as responsible as he would have been if there were no intervener, and thus that responsible action does not require alternative possibilities. Critics have challenged the details of the Frankfurt-style cases in attempting to undermine the appeal of the intuition. A different compatibilist tactic recognizes the need for open alternatives and employs versions of the indifference model in describing practical freedom. Choices are free if they are contingent relative to certain subsets of circumstances, e.g. those the agent is or claims to be cognizant of, with the openness of alternatives grounded in what one can choose “for all one knows.” Opponents of compatibilism charge that since these refinements leave agents subject to external determination, even by hidden controllers, compatibilism continues to face an insurmountable challenge. Their objections are sometimes summarized by the consequence argument so called by Peter van Inwagen, who has prominently defended it: if everything were determined by factors beyond one’s control, then one’s acts, choices, and character would also be beyond one’s control, and consequently, agents would never be free and there would be nothing free will problem free will problem 327   327 for which they are responsible. Such reasoning usually employs principles asserting the closure of the practical modalities ability, control, avoidability, inevitability, etc. under consequence relations. However, there is a reason to suppose that the sort of ability and control required by responsibility involve the agent’s sense of what can be accomplished. Since cognitive states are typically not closed under consequence, the closure principles underlying the consequence argument are disputable. 

Frege, Gottlob 18481925, German mathematician and philosopher. A founder of modern mathematical logic, an advocate of logicism, and a major source of twentieth-century analytic philosophy, he directly influenced Russell, Wittgenstein, and Carnap. Frege’s distinction between the sense and the reference of linguistic expressions continues to be debated. His first publication in logic was his strikingly original 1879 Begriffsschrift Concept-notation. Here he devised a formal language whose central innovation is the quantifier-variable notation to express generality; he set forth in this language a version of second-order quantificational logic that he used to develop a logical definition of the ancestral of a relation. Frege invented his Begriffsschrift in order to circumvent drawbacks of the use of colloquial language to state proofs. Colloquial language is irregular, unperspicuous, and ambiguous in its expression of logical relationships. Moreover, logically crucial features of the content of statements may remain tacit and unspoken. It is thus impossible to determine exhaustively the premises on which the conclusion of any proof conducted within ordinary language depends. Frege’s Begriffsschrift is to force the explicit statement of the logically relevant features of any assertion. Proofs in the system are limited to what can be obtained from a body of evidently true logical axioms by means of a small number of truth-preserving notational manipulations inference rules. Here is the first hallmark of Frege’s view of logic: his formulation of logic as a formal system and the ideal of explicitness and rigor that this presentation subserves. Although the formal exactitude with which he formulates logic makes possible the metamathematical investigation of formalized theories, he showed almost no interest in metamathematical questions. He intended the Begriffsschrift to be used. How though does Frege conceive of the subject matter of logic? His orientation in logic is shaped by his anti-psychologism, his conviction that psychology has nothing to do with logic. He took his notation to be a full-fledged language in its own right. The logical axioms do not mention objects or properties whose investigation pertains to some special science; and Frege’s quantifiers are unrestricted. Laws of logic are, as he says, the laws of truth, and these are the most general truths. He envisioned the supplementation of the logical vocabulary of the Begriffsschrift with the basic vocabulary of the special sciences. In this way the Begriffsschrift affords a framework for the completely rigorous deductive development of any science whatsoever. This resolutely nonpsychological universalist view of logic as the most general science is the second hallmark of Frege’s view of logic. This universalist view distinguishes his approach sharply from the coeval algebra of logic approach of George Boole and Ernst Schröder. Wittgenstein, both in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 1921 and in later writings, is very critical of Frege’s universalist view. Logical positivism  most notably Carnap in The Logical Syntax of Language 1934  rejected it as well. Frege’s universalist view is also distinct from more contemporary views. With his view of quantifiers as intrinsically unrestricted, he saw little point in talking of varying interpretations of a language, believing that such talk is a confused way of getting at what is properly said by means of second-order generalizations. In particular, the semantical conception of logical consequences that becomes prominent in logic after Kurt Gödel’s and Tarski’s work is foreign to Frege. Frege’s work in logic was prompted by an inquiry after the ultimate foundation for arithmetic truths. He criticized J. S. Mill’s empiricist attempt to ground knowledge of the arithmetic of the positive integers inductively in our manipulations of small collections of things. He also rejected crudely formalist views that take pure mathematics to be a sort of notational game. In contrast to these views and Kant’s, he hoped to use his Begriffsschrift to define explicitly the basic notions of arithmetic in logical terms and to deduce the basic principles of arithmetic from logical axioms and these definitions. The explicitness and rigor of his formulation of logic will guarantee that there are no implicit extralogical premises on which the arithmetical conclusions depend. Such proofs, he believed, would show arithmetic to be analytic, not synthetic as Kant had claimed. However, Frege redefined ‘analytic’ to mean ‘provable from  logical laws’ in his rather un-Kantian sense of ‘logic’ and definitions. Frege’s strategy for these proofs rests on an analysis of the concept of cardinal number that he presented in his nontechnical 1884 book, The Foundations of Arithmetic. Frege, attending to the use of numerals in statements like ‘Mars has two moons’, argued that it contains an assertion about a concept, that it asserts that there are exactly two things falling under the concept ‘Martian moon’. He also noted that both numerals in these statements and those of pure arithmetic play the logical role of singular terms, his proper names. He concluded that numbers are objects so that a definition of the concept of number must then specify what objects numbers are. He observed that 1 the number of F % the number of G just in case there is a one-to-one correspondence between the objects that are F and those that are G. The right-hand side of 1 is statable in purely logical terms. As Frege recognized, thanks to the definition of the ancestral of a relation, 1 suffices in the second-order setting of the Begriffsschrift for the derivation of elementary arithmetic. The vindication of his logicism requires, however, the logical definition of the expression ‘the number of’. He sharply criticized the use in mathematics of any notion of set or collection that views a set as built up from its elements. However, he assumed that, corresponding to each concept, there is an object, the extension of the concept. He took the notion of an extension to be a logical one, although one to which the notion of a concept is prior. He adopted as a fundamental logical principle the ill-fated biconditional: the extension of F % the extension of G just in case every F is G, and vice versa. If this principle were valid, he could exploit the equivalence relation over concepts that figures in the right-hand side of 1 to identify the number of F with a certain extension and thus obtain 1 as a theorem. In The Basic Laws of Arithmetic vol. 1, 1893; vol. 2, 1903 he formalized putative proofs of basic arithmetical laws within a modified version of the Begriffsschrift that included a generalization of the law of extensions. However, Frege’s law of extensions, in the context of his logic, is inconsistent, leading to Russell’s paradox, as Russell communicated to Frege in 1902. Frege’s attempt to establish logicism was thus, on its own terms, unsuccessful. In Begriffsschrift Frege rejected the thesis that every uncompound sentence is logically segmented into a subject and a predicate. Subsequently, he said that his approach in logic was distinctive in starting not from the synthesis of concepts into judgments, but with the notion of truth and that to which this notion is applicable, the judgeable contents or thoughts that are expressed by statements. Although he said that truth is the goal of logic, he did not think that we have a grasp of the notion of truth that is independent of logic. He eschewed a correspondence theory of truth, embracing instead a redundancy view of the truth-predicate. For Frege, to call truth the goal of logic points toward logic’s concern with inference, with the recognition-of-thetruth judging of one thought on the basis of the recognition-of-the-truth of another. This recognition-of-the-truth-of is not verbally expressed by a predicate, but rather in the assertive force with which a sentence is uttered. The starting point for logic is then reflection on elementary inference patterns that analyze thoughts and reveal a logical segmentation in language. This starting point, and the fusion of logical and ontological categories it engenders, is arguably what Frege is pointing toward by his enigmatic context principle in Foundations: only in the context of a sentence does a word have a meaning. He views sentences as having a function-argument segmentation like that manifest in the terms of arithmetic, e.g., 3 $ 4 ! 2. Truth-functional inference patterns, like modus ponens, isolate sentences as logical units in compound sentences. Leibniz’s law  the substitution of one name for another in a sentence on the basis of an equation  isolates proper names. Proper names designate objects. Predicates, obtainable by removing proper names from sentences, designate concepts. The removal of a predicate from a sentence leaves a higher level predicate that signifies a second-level concept under which first-level concepts fall. An example is the universal quantifier over objects: it designates a second-level concept under which a first-level concept falls, if every object falls under it. Frege takes each first-level concept to be determinately true or false of each object. Vague predicates, like ‘is bald’, thus fail to signify concepts. This requirement of concept determinacy is a product of Frege’s construal of quantification over objects as intrinsically unrestricted. Thus, concept determinacy is simply a form of the law of the excluded middle: for any concept F and any object x, either x is F or x is not F. Frege elaborates and modifies his basic logical ideas in three seminal papers from 189192, “Function and Concept,” “On Concept and Frege, Gottlob Frege, Gottlob 329   329 Object,” and “On Sense and Meaning.” In “Function and Concept,” Frege sharpens his conception of the function-argument structure of language. He introduces the two truth-values, the True and the False, and maintains that sentences are proper names of these objects. Concepts become functions that map objects to either the True or the False. The course-of-values of a function is introduced as a generalization of the notion of an extension. Generally then, an object is anything that might be designated by a proper name. There is nothing more basic to be said by way of elucidating what an object is. Similarly, first-level functions are what are designated by the expressions that result from removing names from compound proper names. Frege calls functions unsaturated or incomplete, in contrast to objects, which are saturated. Proper names and function names are not intersubstitutable so that the distinction between objects and functions is a type-theoretic, categorial distinction. No function is an object; no function name designates an object; there are no quantifiers that simultaneously generalize over both functions and concepts. Just here Frege’s exposition of his views, if not the views themselves, encounter a difficulty. In explaining his views, he uses proper names of the form ‘the concept F’ to talk about concepts; and in contrasting unsaturated functions with saturated objects, apepars to generalize over both with a single quantifier. Benno Kerry, a contemporary of Frege, charged Frege’s views with inconsistency. Since the phrase ‘the concept horse’ is a proper name, it must designate an object. On Frege’s view, it follows that the concept ‘horse’ is not a concept, but an object, an apparent inconsistency. Frege responded to Kerry’s criticism in “On Concept and Object.” He embraced Kerry’s paradox, denying that it represents a genuine inconsistency, while admitting that his remarks about the functionobject distinction are, as the result of an unavoidable awkwardness of language, misleading. Frege maintained that the distinction between function and object is logically simple and so cannot be properly defined. His remarks on the distinction are informal handwaving designed to elucidate what is captured within the Begriffsschrift by the difference between proper names and function names together with their associated distinct quantifiers. Frege’s handling of the function object distinction is a likely source for Wittgenstein’s sayshow distinction in the Tractatus. At the beginning of “On Sense and Meaning,” Frege distinguishes between the reference or meaning Bedeutung of a proper name and its sense Sinn. He observes that the sentence ‘The Morning Star is identical with the Morning Star’ is a trivial instance of the principle of identity. In contrast, the sentence ‘The Morning Star is identical with the Evening Star’ expresses a substantive astronomical discovery. The two sentences thus differ in what Frege called their cognitive value: someone who understood both might believe the first and doubt the second. This difference cannot be explained in terms of any difference in reference between names in these sentences. Frege explained it in terms of a difference between the senses expressed by ‘the Morning Star’ and ‘the Evening Star’. In posthumously published writings, he indicated that the sensereference distinction extends to function names as well. In this distinction, Frege extends to names the notion of the judgeable content expressed by a sentence: the sense of a name is the contribution that the name makes to the thought expressed by sentences in which it occurs. Simultaneously, in classifying sentences as proper names of truth-values, he applies to sentences the notion of a name’s referring to something. Frege’s function-argument view of logical segmentation constrains his view of both the meaning and the sense of compound names: the substitution for any name occurring in a compound expression of a name with the same reference sense yields a new compound expression with the same reference sense as the original. Frege advances several theses about sense that individually and collectively have been a source of debate in philosophy of language. First, the sense of an expression is what is grasped by anyone who understands it. Despite the connection between understanding and sense, Frege provides no account of synonymy, no identity criteria for senses. Second, the sense of an expression is not something psychological. Senses are objective. They exist independently of anyone’s grasping them; their availability to different thinkers is a presupposition for communication in science. Third, the sense expressed by a name is a mode of presentation of the name’s reference. Here Frege’s views contrast with Russell’s. Corresponding to Frege’s thoughts are Russell’s propositions. In The Principles of Mathematics 1903, Russell maintained that the meaningful words in a sentence designate things, properties, and relations that are themselves constituents of the proposition expressed by the sentence. For Frege, our access through judgment to objects and functions is via Frege, Gottlob Frege, Gottlob 330   330 the senses that are expressed by names that mean these items. These senses, not the items they present, occur in thoughts. Names expressing different senses may refer to the same item; and some names, while expressing a sense, refer to nothing. Any compound name containing a name that has a sense, but lacks a reference, itself lacks a meaning. A person may fully understand an expression without knowing whether it means anything and without knowing whether it designates what another understood name does. Fourth, the sense ordinarily expressed by a name is the reference of the name, when the name occurs in indirect discourse. Although the Morning Star is identical with the Evening Star, the inference from the sentence ‘Smith believes that the Morning Star is a planet’ to ‘Smith believes that the Evening Star is a planet’ is not sound. Frege, however, accepts Leibniz’s law without restriction. He accordingly takes such seeming failures of Leibniz’s law to expose a pervasive ambiguity in colloquial language: names in indirect discourse do not designate what they designate outside of indirect discourse. The fourth thesis is offered as an explanation of this ambiguity. 

French personalism, a Christian socialism stressing social activism and personal responsibility, the theoretical basis for the Christian workers’ Esprit movement begun in the 1930s by Emmanuel Mounier 190550, a Christian philosopher and activist. Influenced by both the religious existentialism of Kierkegaard and the radical social action called for by Marx and in part taking direction from the earlier work of Charles Péguy, the movement strongly opposed fascism and called for worker solidarity during the 1930s and 1940s. It also urged a more humane treatment of France’s colonies. Personalism allowed for a Christian socialism independent of both more conservative Christian groups and the Communist labor unions and party. Its most important single book is Mounier’s Personalism. The quarterly journal Esprit has regularly published contributions of leading French and international thinkers. Such well-known Christian philosophers as Henry Duméry, Marcel, Maritain, and Ricoeur were attracted to the movement. 

Freud, Sigmund 18561939, Austrian neurologist and psychologist, the founder of psychoanalysis. Starting with the study of hysteria in late nineteenth-century Vienna, Freud developed a theory of the mind that has come to dominate modern thought. His notions of the unconscious, of a mind divided against itself, of the meaningfulness of apparently meaningless activity, of the displacement and transference of feelings, of stages of psychosexual development, of the pervasiveness and importance of sexual motivation, as well as of much else, have helped shape modern consciousness. His language and that of his translators, whether specifying divisions of the mind e.g. id, ego, and superego, types of disorder e.g. obsessional neurosis, or the structure of experience e.g. Oedipus complex, narcissism, has become the language in which we describe and understand ourselves and others. As the poet W. H. Auden wrote on the occasion of Freud’s death, “if often he was wrong and, at times, absurd, / to us he is no more a person / now but a whole climate of opinion / under whom we conduct our different lives. . . .” Hysteria is a disorder involving organic symptoms with no apparent organic cause. Following early work in neurophysiology, Freud in collaboration with Josef Breuer came to the view that “hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences,” in particular buried memories of traumatic experiences, the strangulated affect of which emerged in conversion hysteria in the distorted form of physical symptoms. Treatment involved the recovery of the repressed memories to allow the cathartic discharge or abreaction of the previously displaced and strangulated affect. This provided the background for Freud’s seduction theory, which traced hysterical symptoms to traumatic prepubertal sexual assaults typically by fathers. But Freud later abandoned the seduction theory because the energy assumptions were problematic e.g., if the only energy involved was strangulated affect from long-past external trauma, why didn’t the symptom successfully use up that energy and so clear itself up? and because he came to see that fantasy could have the same effects as memory of actual events: “psychical reality was of more importance than material reality.” What was repressed was not memories, but desires. He came to see the repetition of symptoms as fueled by internal, in particular sexual, energy. While it is certainly true that Freud saw the Frege-Geach point Freud, Sigmund 331   331 working of sexuality almost everywhere, it is not true that he explained everything in terms of sexuality alone. Psychoanalysis is a theory of internal psychic conflict, and conflict requires at least two parties. Despite developments and changes, Freud’s instinct theory was determinedly dualistic from beginning to end  at the beginning, libido versus ego or self-preservative instincts, and at the end Eros versus Thanatos, life against death. Freud’s instinct theory not to be confused with standard biological notions of hereditary behavior patterns in animals places instincts on the borderland between the mental and physical and insists that they are internally complex. In particular, the sexual instinct must be understood as made up of components that vary along a number of dimensions source, aim, and object. Otherwise, as Freud argues in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality 1905, it would be difficult to understand how the various perversions are recognized as “sexual” despite their distance from the “normal” conception of sexuality heterosexual genital intercourse between adults. His broadened concept of sexuality makes intelligible sexual preferences emphasizing different sources erotogenic zones or bodily centers of arousal, aims acts, such as intercourse and looking, designed to achieve pleasure and satisfaction, and objects whether of the same or different gender, or even other than whole living persons. It also allows for the recognition of infantile sexuality. Phenomena that might not on the surface appear sexual e.g. childhood thumbsucking share essential characteristics with obviously sexual activity infantile sensual sucking involves pleasurable stimulation of the same erotogenic zone, the mouth, stimulated in adult sexual activities such as kissing, and can be understood as earlier stages in the development of the same underlying instinct that expresses itself in such various forms in adult sexuality. The standard developmental stages are oral, anal, phallic, and genital. Neuroses, which Freud saw as “the negative of perversions” i.e., the same desires that might in some lead to perverse activity, when repressed, result in neurosis, could often be traced to struggles with the Oedipus complex: the “nucleus of the neuroses.” The Oedipus complex, which in its positive form postulates sexual feelings toward the parent of the opposite sex and ambivalently hostile feelings toward the parent of the same sex, suggests that the universal shape of the human condition is a triangle. The conflict reaches its peak between the ages of three and five, during the phallic stage of psychosexual development. The fundamental structuring of emotions has its roots in the prolonged dependency of the human infant, leading to attachment  a primary form of love  to the primary caregiver, who partly for biological reasons such as lactation is most often the mother, and the experience of others as rivals for the time, attention, and concern of the primary caregiver. Freud’s views of the Oedipus complex should not be oversimplified. The sexual desires involved, e.g., are typically unconscious and necessarily infantile, and infantile sexuality and its associated desires are not expressed in the same form as mature genital sexuality. His efforts to explain the distinctive features of female psychosexual development in particular led to some of his most controversial views, including the postulation of penis envy to explain why girls but not boys standardly experience a shift in gender of their primary love object both starting with the mother as the object. Later love objects, including psychoanalysts as the objects of transference feelings in the analytic setting, the analyst functions as a blank screen onto which the patient projects feelings, are the results of displacement or transference from earlier objects: “The finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it.” Freud used the same structure of explanation for symptoms and for more normal phenomena, such as dreams, jokes, and slips of the tongue. All can be seen as compromise formations between forces pressing for expression localized by Freud’s structural theory in the id, understood as a reservoir of unconscious instinct and forces of repression some also unconscious, seeking to meet the constraints of morality and reality. On Freud’s underlying model, the fundamental process of psychic functioning, the primary process, leads to the uninhibited discharge of psychic energy. Such discharge is experienced as pleasurable, hence the governing principle of the fundamental process is called the pleasure principle. Increase of tension is experienced as unpleasure, and the psychic apparatus aims at a state of equilibrium or constancy sometimes Freud writes as if the state aimed at is one of zero tension, hence the Nirvana principle associated with the death instinct in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle [1920]. But since pleasure can in fact only be achieved under specific conditions, which sometimes require arrangement, planning, and delay, individuals must learn to inhibit discharge, and this secondary process thinking is governed by what Freud came to call the reality principle. The aim is still satisfaction, but the “exigencies of life” require attention, reasoning, and Freud, Sigmund Freud, Sigmund 332   332 judgment to avoid falling into the fantasy wishfulfillment of the primary process. Sometimes defense mechanisms designed to avoid increased tension or unpleasure can fail, leading to neurosis in general, under the theory, a neurosis is a psychological disorder rooted in unconscious conflict  particular neuroses being correlated with particular phases of development and particular mechanisms of defense. Repression, involving the confining of psychic representations to the unconscious, is the most important of the defense mechanisms. It should be understood that unlike preconscious ideas, which are merely descriptively unconscious though one may not be aware of them at the moment, they are readily accessible to consciousness, unconscious ideas in the strict sense are kept from awareness by forces of repression, they are dynamically unconscious  as evidenced by the resistance to making the unconscious conscious in therapy. Freud’s deep division of the mind between unconscious and conscious goes beyond neurotic symptoms to help make sense of familiar forms of irrationality such as selfdeception, ambivalence, and weakness of the will that are highly problematical on Cartesian models of an indivisible unitary consciousness. Perhaps the best example of the primary process thinking that characterizes the unconscious unconstrained by the realities of time, contradiction, causation, etc. can be found in dreaming. Freud regarded dreams as “the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious.” Dreams are the disguised fulfillment of unconscious wishes. In extracting the meaning of dreams through a process of interpretation, Freud relied on a central distinction between the manifest content the dream as dreamt or as remembered on waking and the latent content the unconscious dreamthoughts. Freud held that interpretation via association to particular elements of the manifest content reversed the process of dream construction, the dream-work in which various mechanisms of distortion operated on the day’s residues perceptions and thoughts stemming from the day before the dream was dreamt and the latent dream-thoughts to produce the manifest dream. Prominent among the mechanisms are the condensation in which many meanings are represented by a single idea and displacement in which there is a shift of affect from a significant and intense idea to an associated but otherwise insignificant one also typical of neurotic symptoms, as well as considerations of representability and secondary revision more specific to dream formation. Symbolism is less prominent in Freud’s theory of dreams than is often thought; indeed, the section on symbols appeared only as a later addition to The Interpretation of Dreams 1900. Freud explicitly rejected the ancient “dream book” mode of interpretation in terms of fixed symbols, and believed one had to recover the hidden meaning of a dream through the dreamer’s not the interpreter’s associations to particular elements. Such associations are a part of the process of free association, in which a patient is obliged to report to the analyst all thoughts without censorship of any kind. The process is crucial to psychoanalysis, which is both a technique of psychotherapy and a method of investigation of the workings of the mind. Freud used the results of his investigations to speculate about the origins of morality, religion, and political authority. He tended to find their historical and psychological roots in early stages of the development of the individual. Morality in particular he traced to the internalization as one part of the resolution of the Oedpius complex of parental prohibitions and demands, producing a conscience or superego which is also the locus of self-observation and the ego-ideal. Such identification by incorporation  introjection  plays an important role in character formation in general. The instinctual renunciation demanded by morality and often achieved by repression Freud regarded as essential to the order society needs to conduct its business. Civilization gets the energy for the achievements of art and science by sublimation of the same instinctual drives. But the costs of society and civilization to the individual in frustration, unhappiness, and neurosis can be too high. Freud’s individual therapy was meant to lead to the liberation of repressed energies which would not by itself guarantee happiness; he hoped it might also provide energy to transform the world and moderate its excess demands for restraint. But just as his individual psychology was founded on the inevitability of internal conflict, in his social thought he saw some limits especially on aggression  the death instinct turned outward as necessary and he remained pessimistic about the apparently endless struggle reason must wage Civilization and Its Discontents, 1930. 

functional dependence, a relationship between variable magnitudes especially physical magnitudes and certain properties or processes. In modern physical science there are two types of laws stating such relationships. 1 There are numerical laws stating concomitant variation of certain quantities, where a variation in any one is accompanied by variations in the others. An example is the law for ideal gases: pV % aT, where p is the pressure of the gas, V its volume, T its absolute temperature, and a a constant derived from the mass and the nature of the gas. Such laws say nothing about the temporal order of the variations, and tests of the laws can involve variation of any of the relevant magnitudes. Concomitant variation, not causal sequence, is what is tested for. 2 Other numerical laws state variations of physical magnitudes correlated with times. Galileo’s law of free fall asserts that the change in the unit time of a freely falling body in a vacuum in the direction of the earth is equal to gt, where g is a constant and t is the time of the fall, and where the rate of time changes of g is correlative with the temporal interval t. The law is true of any body in a state of free fall and for any duration. Such laws are also called “dynamical” because they refer to temporal processes usually explained by the postulation of forces acting on the objects in question. R.E.B. functional explanation.

functionalism, the view that mental states are defined by their causes and effects. As a metaphysical thesis about the nature of mental states, functionalism holds that what makes an inner state mental is not an intrinsic property of the state, but rather its relations to sensory stimulation input, to other inner states, and to behavior output. For example, what makes an inner state a pain is its being a type of state typically caused by pinpricks, sunburns, and so on, a type that causes other mental states e.g., worry, and a type that causes behavior e.g., saying “ouch”. Propositional attitudes also are identified with functional states: an inner state is a desire for water partly in virtue of its causing a person to pick up a glass and drink its contents when the person believes that the glass contains water. The basic distinction needed for functionalism is that between role in terms of which a type of mental state is defined and occupant the particular thing that occupies a role. Functional states exhibit multiple realizability: in different kinds of beings humans, computers, Martians, a particular kind of causal role may have different occupants  e.g., the causal role definitive of a belief that p, say, may be occupied by a neural state in a human, but occupied perhaps by a hydraulic state in a Martian. Functionalism, like behaviorism, thus entails that mental states may be shared by physically dissimilar systems. Although functionalism does not automatically rule out the existence of immaterial souls, its motivation has been to provide a materialistic account of mentality. The advent of the computer gave impetus to functionalism. First, the distinction between software and hardware suggested the distinction between role function and occupant structure. Second, since computers are automated, they demonstrate how inner states can be causes of output in the absence of a homunculus i.e., a “little person” intelligently directing output. Third, the Turing machine provided a model for one of the earliest versions of functionalism. A Turing machine is defined by a table that specifies transitions from current state and input to next state or to output. According to Turing machine functionalism, any being with pscychological states has a unique best description, and each psychological state is identical to a machine table state relative to that description. To be in mental state type M is to instantiate or realize Turing machine T in state S. Turing machine functionalism, developed largely by Putnam, has been criticized by Putnam, Ned Block, and Fodor. To cite just one serious problem: two machine table states  and hence, according to Turing machine functionalism, two psychological states  are distinct if they are followed by different states or by different outputs. So, if a pinprick causes A to say “Ouch” function, mathematical functionalism 334   334 and causes B to say “Oh,” then, if Turing machine functionalism were true, A’s and B’s states of pain would be different psychological states. But we do not individuate psychological states so finely, nor should we: such fine-grained individuation would be unsuitable for psychology. Moreover, if we assume that there is a path from any state to any other state, Turing machine functionalism has the unacceptable consequence that no two systems have any of their states in common unless they have all their states in common. Perhaps the most prominent version of functionalism is the causal theory of mind. Whereas Turing machine functionalism is based on a technical computational or psychological theory, the causal theory of mind relies on commonsense understanding: according to the causal theory of mind, the concept of a mental state is the concept of a state apt for bringing about certain kinds of behavior Armstrong. Mental state terms are defined by the commonsense platitudes in which they appear David Lewis. Philosophers can determine a priori what mental states are by conceptual analysis or by definition. Then scientists determine what physical states occupy the causal roles definitive of mental states. If it turned out that there was no physical state that occupied the causal role of, say, pain i.e., was caused by pinpricks, etc., and caused worry, etc., it would follow, on the causal theory, that pain does not exist. To be in mental state type M is to be in a physical state N that occupies causal role R. A third version is teleological or “homuncular” functionalism, associated with William G. Lycan and early Dennett. According to homuncular functionalism, a human being is analogous to a large corporation, made up of cooperating departments, each with its own job to perform; these departments interpret stimuli and produce behavioral responses. Each department at the highest subpersonal level is in turn constituted by further units at a sub-subpersonal level and so on down until the neurological level is reached. The roleoccupant distinction is thus relativized to level: an occupant at one level is a role at the next level down. On this view, to be in a mental state type M is to have a sub- . . . subpersonal f-er that is in its characteristic state Sf. All versions of functionalism face problems about the qualitative nature of mental states. The difficulty is that functionalism individuates states in purely relational terms, but the acrid odor of, say, a paper mill seems to have a non-relational, qualitative character that functionalism misses altogether. If two people, on seeing a ripe banana, are in states with the same causes and effects, then, by functionalist definition, they are in the same mental state  say, having a sensation of yellow. But it seems possible that one has an “inverted spectrum” relative to the other, and hence that their states are qualitatively different. Imagine that, on seeing the banana, one of the two is in a state qualitatively indistinguishable from the state that the other would be in on seeing a ripe tomato. Despite widespread intuitions that such inverted spectra are possible, according to functionalism, they are not. A related problem is that of “absent qualia.” The population of China, or even the economy of Bolivia, could be functionally equivalent to a human brain  i.e., there could be a function that mapped the relations between inputs, outputs, and internal states of the population of China onto those of a human brain; yet the population of China, no matter how its members interact with one another and with other nations, intuitively does not have mental states. The status of these arguments remains controversial. 

fundamentum divisionis Latin, ‘foundation of a division’, term in Scholastic logic and ontology meaning ‘grounds for a distinction’. Some distinctions categorize separately existing things, such as men and beasts. This is a real distinction, and the fundamentum divisionis exists in reality. Some distinctions categorize things that cannot exist separately but can be distinguished mentally, such as the difference between being a human being and having a sense of humor, or the difference between a soul and one of its powers, say, the power of thinking. A mental distinction is also called a formal distinction. Duns Scotus is well known for the idea of formalis distinctio cum fundamento ex parte rei a formal distinction with a foundation in the thing, primarily in order to handle logical problems with functionalism, analytical fundamentum divisionis 335   335 the Christian concept of God. God is supposed to be absolutely simple; i.e., there can be no multiplicity of composition in him. Yet, according to traditional theology, many properties can be truly attributed to him. He is wise, good, and powerful. In order to preserve the simplicity of God, Duns Scotus claimed that the difference between wisdom, goodness, and power was only formal but still had some foundation in God’s own being.

Fung Yu-lan 18951990, Chinese philosopher. He was educated at Peking  and earned his Ph.D. from Columbia . His History of Chinese Philosophy was the first such complete history of high quality by a contemporary scholar. During World War II he attempted to reconstruct Chu Hsi’s philosophy in terms of the New Realism that he had learned from the West, and developed his own system of thought, a new philosophy of li principle. After the Communist takeover in 1949, he gave up his earlier thought, denouncing Confucian philosophy during the Cultural Revolution. After the Cultural Revolution he changed his position again and rewrote his History of Chinese Philosophy in seven volumes.

future contingents, singular events or states of affairs that may come to pass, and also may not come to pass, in the future. There are three traditional problems involving future contingents: the question of universal validity of the principle of bivalence, the question of free will and determinism, and the question of foreknowledge. The debate about future contingents in modern philosophical logic was revived by Lukasiewicz’s work on three-valued logic. He thought that in order to avoid fatalistic consequences, we must admit that the principle of bivalence for any proposition, p, either p is true or not-p is true does not hold good for propositions about future contingents. Many authors have considered this view confused. According to von Wright, e.g., when propositions are said to be true or false and ‘is’ in ‘it is true that’ is tenseless or atemporal, the illusion of determinism does not arise. It has its roots in a tacit oscillation between a temporal and an atemporal reading of the phrase ‘it is true’. In a temporalized reading, or in its tensed variants such as ‘it was/will be/is already true’, one can substitute, for ‘true’, other words like ‘certain’, ‘fixed’, or ‘necessary’. Applying this diachronic necessity to atemporal predications of truth yields the idea of logical determinism. In contemporary discussions of tense and modality, future contingents are often treated with the help of a model of time as a line that breaks up into branches as it moves from left to right i.e., from past to future. Although the conception of truth at a moment has been found philosophically problematic, the model of historical modalities and branching time as such is much used in works on freedom and determination. Aristotle’s On Interpretation IX contains a classic discussion of future contingents with the famous example of tomorrow’s sea battle. Because of various ambiguities in the text and in Aristotle’s modal conceptions in general, the meaning of the passage is in dispute. In the Metaphysics VI.3 and in the Niocmachean Ethics III.5, Aristotle tries to show that not all things are predetermined. The Stoics represented a causally deterministic worldview; an ancient example of logical determinism is Diodorus Cronus’s famous master argument against contingency. Boethius thought that Aristotle’s view can be formulated as follows: the principle of bivalence is universally valid, but propositions about future contingents, unlike those about past and present things, do not obey the stronger principle according to which each proposition is either determinately true or determinately false. A proposition is indeterminately true as long as the conditions that make it true are not yet fixed. This was the standard Latin doctrine from Abelard to Aquinas. Similar discussions occurred in Arabic commentaries on On Interpretation. In the fourteenth century, many thinkers held that Aristotle abandoned bivalence for future contingent propositions. This restriction was usually refuted, but it found some adherents like Peter Aureoli. Duns Scotus and Ockham heavily criticized the Boethian-Thomistic view that God can know future contingents only because the flux of time is present to divine eternity. According to them, God contingently foreknows free acts. Explaining this proved to be a very cumbersome task. Luis de Molina 15351600 suggested that God knows what possible creatures would do in any possible situation. This “middle knowledge” theory about counterfactuals of freedom has remained a living theme in philosophy of religion; analogous questions are treated in theories of subjunctive reasoning. 

fuzzy set, a set in which membership is a matter of degree. In classical set theory, for every set S and thing x, either x is a member of S or x is not. In fuzzy set theory, things x can be members of sets S to any degree between 0 and 1, inclusive. Degree 1 corresponds to ‘is a member of’ and 0 corresponds to ‘is not’; the intermediate degrees are degrees of vagueness or uncertainty. Example: Let S be the set of men who are bald at age forty. L. A. Zadeh developed a logic of fuzzy sets as the basis for a logic of vague predicates. A fuzzy set can be represented mathematically as a function from a given universe into the interval [0, 1].  SET THEORY, VAGUENESS. D.H. fuzzy logic fuzzy set 337   337

Gadamer, Hans-Georg b.1900, German philosopher, the leading proponent of hermeneutics in the second half of the twentieth century. He studied at Marburg in the 1920s with Natorp and Heidegger. His first book, Plato’s Dialectical Ethics 1931, bears their imprint and reflects his abiding interest in Grecian philosophy. Truth and Method 1960 established Gadamer as an original thinker and had an impact on a variety of disciplines outside philosophy, including theology, legal theory, and literary criticism. The three parts of Truth and Method combine to displace the scientific conceptions of truth and method as the model for understanding in the human sciences. In the first part, which presents itself as a critique of the abstraction inherent in aesthetic consciousness, Gadamer argues that artworks make a claim to truth. Later Gadamer draws on the play of art in the experience of the beautiful to offer an analogy to how a text draws its readers into the event of truth by making a claim on them. In the central portion of the book Gadamer presents tradition as a condition of understanding. Tradition is not for him an object of historical knowledge, but part of one’s very being. The final section of Truth and Method is concerned with language as the site of tradition. Gadamer sought to shift the focus of hermeneutics from the problems of obscurity and misunderstanding to the community of understanding that the participants in a dialogue share through language. Gadamer was involved in three debates that define his philosophical contribution. The first was an ongoing debate with Heidegger reflected throughout Gadamer’s corpus. Gadamer did not accept all of the innovations that Heidegger introduced into his thinking in the 1930s, particularly his reconstruction of the history of philosophy as the history of being. Gadamer also rejected Heidegger’s elevation of Hölderlin to the status of an authority. Gadamer’s greater accessibility led Habermas to characterize Gadamer’s contribution as that of having “urbanized the Heideggerian province.” The second debate was with Habermas himself. Habermas criticized Gadamer’s rejection of the Enlightenment’s “prejudice against prejudice.” Whereas Habermas objected to the conservatism inherent in Gadamer’s rehabilitation of prejudice, Gadamer explained that he was only setting out the conditions for understanding, conditions that did not exclude the possibility of radical change. The third debate, which formed the basis of Dialogue and Deconstruction 1989, was with Derrida. Derridean deconstruction is indebted to Heidegger’s later philosophy and so this debate was in part about the direction philosophy should take after Heidegger. However, many observers concluded that there was no real engagement between Gadamer and Derrida. To some it seemed that Derrida, by refusing to accept the terms on which Gadamer insisted dialogue should take place, had exposed the limits imposed by hermeneutics. To others it was confirmation that any attempt to circumvent the conditions of dialogue specified by Gadamerian hermeneutics is selfdefeating.

 Galen A.D. 129c.215, physician and philosopher from Grecian Asia Minor. He traveled extensively in the Greco-Roman world before settling in Rome and becoming court physician to Marcus Aurelius. His philosophical interests lay mainly in the philosophy of science On the Therapeutic Method and nature On the Function of Parts, and in logic Introduction to Logic, in which he develops a crude but pioneering treatment of the logic of relations. Galen espoused an extreme form of directed teleology in natural explanation, and sought to develop a syncretist picture of cause and explanation drawing on Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and preceding medical writers, notably Hippocrates, whose views he attempted to harmonize with those of Plato On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato. He wrote on philosophical psychology On the Passions and Errors of the Soul; his materialist account of mind Mental Characteristics Are Caused by Bodily Conditions is notable for its caution in approaching issues such as the actual nature of the substance of the soul and the age and structure of the universe that he regarded as unde338 G   338 cidable. In physiology, he adopted a version of the four-humor theory, that health consists in an appropriate balance of four basic bodily constituents blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm, and disease in a corresponding imbalance a view owed ultimately to Hippocrates. He sided with the rationalist physicians against the empiricists, holding that it was possible to elaborate and to support theories concerning the fundamentals of the human body; but he stressed the importance of observation and experiment, in particular in anatomy he discovered the function of the recurrent laryngeal nerve by dissection and ligation. Via the Arabic tradition, Galen became the most influential doctor of the ancient world; his influence persisted, in spite of the discoveries of the seventeenth century, until the end of the nineteenth century. He also wrote extensively on semantics, but these texts are lost.

Galileo Galilei 15641642, Italian astronomer, natural philosopher, and physicist. His Dialogue concerning the Two Chief World Systems 1632 defended Copernicus by arguing against the major tenets of the Aristotelian cosmology. On his view, one kind of motion replaces the multiple distinct celestial and terrestrial motions of Aristotle; mathematics is applicable to the real world; and explanation of natural events appeals to efficient causes alone, not to hypothesized natural ends. Galileo was called before the Inquisition, was made to recant his Copernican views, and spent the last years of his life under house arrest. Discourse concerning Two New Sciences 1638 created the modern science of mechanics: it proved the laws of free fall, thus making it possible to study accelerated motions; asserted the principle of the independence of forces; and proposed a theory of parabolic ballistics. His work was developed by Huygens and Newton. Galileo’s scientific and technological achievements were prodigious. He invented an air thermoscope, a device for raising water, and a computer for calculating quantities in geometry and ballistics. His discoveries in pure science included the isochronism of the pendulum and the hydrostatic balance. His telescopic observations led to the discovery of four of Jupiter’s satellites the Medicean Stars, the moon’s mountains, sunspots, the moon’s libration, and the nature of the Milky Way. In methodology Galileo accepted the ancient Grecian ideal of demonstrative science, and employed the method of retroductive inference, whereby the phenomena under investigation are attributed to remote causes. Much of his work utilizes the hypothetico-deductive method. R.E.B. gambler’s fallacy, also called Monte Carlo fallacy, the fallacy of supposing, of a sequence of independent events, that the probabilities of later outcomes must increase or decrease to “compensate” for earlier outcomes. For example, since by Bernoulli’s theorem in a long run of tosses of a fair coin it is very probable that the coin will come up heads roughly half the time, one might think that a coin that has not come up heads recently must be “due” to come up heads  must have a probability greater than one-half of doing so. But this is a misunderstanding of the law of large numbers, which requires no such compensating tendencies of the coin. The probability of heads remains one-half for each toss despite the preponderance, so far, of tails. In the sufficiently long run what “compensates” for the presence of improbably long subsequences in which, say, tails strongly predominate, is simply that such subsequences occur rarely and therefore have only a slight effect on the statistical character of the whole. 

game theory: J. Hintikka, “Grice and game theory.” the theory of the structure of, and the rational strategies for performing in, games or gamelike human interactions. Although there were forerunners, game theory was virtually invented by the mathematician John von Neumann and the economist Oskar Morgenstern in the early 1940s. Its most striking feature is its compact representation of interactions of two or more choosers, or players. For example, two players may face two choices each, and in combination these choices produce four possible outcomes. Actual choices are of strategies, not of outcomes, although it is assessments of outcomes that recommend strategies. To do well in a game, even for all choosers to do well, as is often possible, generally requires taking all other players’ positions and interests into account. Hence, to evaluate strategies directly, without reference to the outcomes they might produce in interaction with others, is conspicuously perverse. It is not surprising, therefore, that in ethics, game theory has been preeminently applied to utilitarian moral theory. As the numbers of players and strategies rise, the complexity of games increases geometrically. If two players have two strategies each and each ranks the four possible outcomes without ties, there are already seventy-eight strategically disGalileo Galilei game theory 339   339 tinct games. Even minor real-life interactions may have astronomically greater complexity. One might complain that this makes game theory useless. Alternatively, one can note that this makes it realistic and helps us understand why real-life choices are at least as complex as they sometimes seem. To complicate matters further, players can choose over probabilistic combinations of their “pure” strategies. Hence, the original four outcomes in a simple 2 $ 2 game define a continuum of potential outcomes. After noting the structure of games, one might then be struck by an immediate implication of this mere description. A rational individual may be supposed to attempt to maximize her potential or expected outcome in a game. But if there are two or more choosers in a game, in general they cannot all maximize simultaneously over their expected outcomes while assuming that all others are doing likewise. This is a mathematical principle: in general, we cannot maximize over two functions simultaneously. For example, the general notion of the greatest good of the greatest number is incoherent. Hence, in interactive choice contexts, the simple notion of economic rationality is incoherent. Virtually all of early game theory was dedicated to finding an alternative principle for resolving game interactions. There are now many so-called solution theories, most of which are about outcomes rather than strategies they stipulate which outcomes or range of outcomes is game-theoretically rational. There is little consensus on how to generalize from the ordinary rationality of merely choosing more rather than less and of displaying consistent preferences to the general choice of strategies in games. Payoffs in early game theory were almost always represented in cardinal, transferable utilities. Transferable utility is an odd notion that was evidently introduced to avoid the disdain with which economists then treated interpersonal comparisons of utility. It seems to be analogous to money. In the language of contemporary law and economics, one could say the theory is one of wealth maximization. In the early theory, the rationality conditions were as follows. 1 In general, if the sums of the payoffs to all players in various outcomes differ, it is assumed that rational players will manage to divide the largest possible payoff among themselves. 2 No individual will accept a payoff below the “security level” obtainable even if all the other players form a coalition against the individual. 3 Finally, sometimes it is also assumed that no group of players will rationally accept less than it could get as its group security level  but in some games, no outcome can meet this condition. This is an odd combination of individual and collective elements. The collective elements are plausibly thought of as merely predictive: if we individually wish to do well, we should combine efforts to help us do best as a group. But what we want is a theory that converts individual preferences into collective results. Unfortunately, to put a move doing just this in the foundations of the theory is questionbegging. Our fundamental burden is to determine whether a theory of individual rationality can produce collectively good results, not to stipulate that it must. In the theory with cardinal, additive payoffs, we can divide games into constant sum games, in which the sum of all players’ payoffs in each outcome is a constant, and variable sum games. Zero-sum games are a special case of constant sum games. Two-person constant sum games are games of pure conflict, because each player’s gain is the other’s loss. In constant sum games with more than two players and in all variable sum games, there is generally reason for coalition formation to improve payoffs to members of the coalition hence, the appeal of assumptions 1 and 3 above. Games without transferable utility, such as games in which players have only ordinal preferences, may be characterized as games of pure conflict or of pure coordination when players’ preference orderings over outcomes are opposite or identical, respectively, or as games of mixed motive when their orderings are partly the same and partly reversed. Mathematical analysis of such games is evidently less tractable than that of games with cardinal, additive utility, and their theory is only beginning to be extensively developed. Despite the apparent circularity of the rationality assumptions of early game theory, it is the game theorists’ prisoner’s dilemma that makes clear that compelling individual principles of choice can produce collectively deficient outcomes. This game was discovered about 1950 and later given its catchy but inapt name. If they play it in isolation from any other interaction between them, two players in this game can each do what seems individually best and reach an outcome that both consider inferior to the outcome that results from making opposite strategy choices. Even with the knowledge that this is the problem they face, the players still have incentive to choose the strategies that jointly produce the inferior outcome. Prisoner’s dilemma involves both coordination and conflict. It has played a central role in contemporary discusgame theory game theory 340   340 sions of moral and political philosophy. Games that predominantly involve coordination, such as when we coordinate in all driving on the right or all on the left, have a similarly central role. The understanding of both classes of games has been read into the political philosophies of Hobbes and Hume and into mutual advantage theories of justice. 

Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, called Mahatma 18691948, Indian nationalist leader, an advocate of nonviolent mass political action who opposed racial discrimination in South Africa 18931914 and British colonial rule in India. He called his approach Satyagraha Sanskrit satya, ‘truth’, and agraha, ‘force’, considering it a science whose end is truth which he identified with God and method nonviolence ahimsa. He emphasized constructive resolution, rather than elimination, of conflict, the interrelatedness of means and ends precluding evil means to good ends, and the importance of enduring suffering oneself rather than inflicting it upon adversaries. Gandhi believed limited knowledge of truth deprives us of a warrant to use violence. He took nonviolence to be more than mere abstention from violence and to call for courage, discipline, and love of an opponent. Ordinary persons can practice it without full understanding of Satyagraha, which he himself disclaimed. He came to distinguish Satyagraha from passive resistance, a weapon of the weak that can turn to violence when faced with failure. Satyagraha requires strength and consistency and cannot be used in an unjust cause. Not an absolutist, Gandhi said that though nonviolence is always preferable, when forced to choose between violence and cowardice one might better choose violence. He was a man of practice more than a theoretician and claimed the superiority of Satyagraha to violence could be proven only be demonstration, not argument. He saw his work as an experiment with truth. He was influenced particularly by the Bhagavad Gita from Hindu thought, the Sermon on the Mount from Christianity, and the writings of Tolstoy, Ruskin, Emerson, and Thoreau. 

Gassendi, Pierre 15921655, French philosopher and scientist who advocated a via media to scientific knowledge about the empirically observable material world that avoids both the dogmatism of Cartesians, who claimed to have certain knowledge, and the skepticism of Montaigne and Charron, who doubted that we have knowledge about anything. Gassendi presented Epicurean atomism as a model for explaining how bodies are structured and interact. He advanced a hypothetico-deductive method by proposing that experiments should be used to test mechanistic hypotheses. Like the ancient Pyrrhonian Skeptics, he did not challenge the immediate reports of our senses; but unlike them he argued that while we cannot have knowledge of the inner essences of things, we can develop a reliable science of the world of appearances. In this he exemplified the mitigated skepticism of modern science that is always open to revision on the basis of empirical evidence. Gassendi’s first book, Exercitationes Paradoxicae Adversis Aristoteleos 1624, is an attack on Aristotle. He is best known as the author of the fifth set of objections to Descartes’s Meditations1641, in which Gassendi proposed that even clear and distinct ideas may represent no objects outside our minds, a possibility that Descartes called the objection of objections, but dismissed as destructive of all reason. Gassendi’s Syntagma Philosophiae Epicuri 1649 contains his development of Epicurean philosophy and science. His elaboration of the mechanistic atomic model and his advocacy of experimental testing of hypotheses were crucially important in the rise of modern science. Gassendi’s career as a Catholic priest, Epicurean atomist, mitigated skeptic, and mechanistic scientist presents a puzzle  as do the careers of several other philosopher-priests in the seventeenth century  concerning his true beliefs. On the one hand, he professed faith and set aside Christian doctrine as not open to challenge. On the other hand, he utilized an arsenal of skeptical arguments that was beginning to undermine and would eventually destroy the rational foundations of the church. Gassendi thus appears to be of a type almost unknown today, a thinker indifferent to the apparent discrepancy between his belief in Christian doctrine and his advocacy of materialist science. 

Gay, John 16991745, British moralist who tried to reconcile divine command theory and utilitarianism. The son of a minister, Gay was Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand Gay, John 341   341 elected a fellow of Sidney Sussex , Cambridge, where he taught church history, Hebrew, and Grecian. His one philosophical essay, “Dissertation Concerning the Fundamental Principle of Virtue or Morality” 1731, argues that obligation is founded on the will of God, which, because people are destined to be happy, directs us to act to promote the general happiness. Gay offers an associationist psychology according to which we pursue objects that have come to be associated with happiness e.g. money, regardless of whether they now make us happy, and argues, contra Hutcheson, that our moral sense is conditioned rather than natural. Gay’s blend of utilitarianism with associationist psychology gave David Hartley the basis for his moral psychology, which later influenced Bentham in his formulation of classical utilitarianism. 

Geach, Peter b.1916, English philosopher and logician whose main work has been in logic and philosophy of language. A great admirer of McTaggart, he has published a sympathetic exposition of the latter’s work Truth, Love and Immortality, 1979, and has always aimed to emulate what he sees as the clarity and rigor of the Scottish idealist’s thought. Greatly influenced by Frege and Wittgenstein, Geach is particularly noted for his powerful use of what he calls “the Frege point,” better called “the Frege-Geach point,” that the same thought may occur as asserted or unasserted and yet retain the same truth-value. The point has been used by Geach to refute ascriptivist theories of responsibility, and can be employed against noncognitivist theories of ethics, which are said to face the Frege-Geach problem of accounting for the sense of moral ascriptions in contexts like ‘If he did wrong, he will be punished’. He is also noted for helping to bring Frege to the English-speaking world, through co-translations with Max Black 1909 88. In logic he is known for proving, independently of Quine, a contradiction in Frege’s way out of Russell’s paradox Mind, 1956, and for his defense of modern Fregean-Russellian logic against traditional Aristotelian-Scholastic logic. He also has a deep admiration for the Polish logicians. In metaphysics, Geach is known for his defense of relative identity, the thesis that an object a can be the same F where F is a kind-term as an object b while not being the same G, even though a and b are both G’s. His spirited defense of the thesis has been met by equally vigorous attacks, and it has not received wide acceptance. An obvious application of the thesis is to the defense of the doctrine of the Trinity e.g., the Father is the same god as the Son but not the same person, which has caught the attention of some philosophers of religion. Geach’s main works include Mental Acts 1958, which attacks dispositional theories of mind, Reference and Generality 1962, which contains much important work on logic, and the collection Logic Matters 1972. A notable defender of Catholicism despite his animadversions against Scholastic logic, his religious views find their greatest exposure in God and the Soul 1969, Providence and Evil 1977, and The Virtues 1977. He is married to the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe. 

Gentile, Giovanni 18751944, Italian idealist philosopher and educational reformer. He taught at the universities of Palermo, Pisa, and Rome, and became minister of education in the first years of Mussolini’s government 192224. He was the most influential intellectual of the Fascist regime and promoted a radical transformation of the Italian school system, most of which did not survive that era. Gentile rejected Hegel’s dialectics as the process of an objectified thought. His actualism or actual idealism claims that only the pure act of thinking or the Transcendental Subject can undergo a dialectical process. All reality, such as nature, God, good, and evil, is immanent in the dialectics of the Transcendental Subject, which is distinct from Empirical Subjects. Among his major works are La teoria generale dello spirito come atto puro 1916; translated as The Theory of Mind as Pure Act, 1922 and Sistema di logica come teoria del conoscere “System of Logic as a Theory of Knowledge,” 1917. Gentile’s pedagogical views were also influenced by actualism. Education is an act that overcomes the difficulties of intersubjective communication and realizes the unity of the pupil and the teacher within the Transcendental Subject Sommario di pedagogia come scienza filosofica, “Summary of Pedagogy as a Philosophical Science,” 191314. Actualism was influential in Italy during Gentile’s life. With Croce’s historicism, it influenced British idealists like Bosanquet and Collingwood. 

genus generalissimum Latin, ‘most general genus’, a genus that is not a species of some higher genus; a broadest natural kind. One of the ten Aristotelian categories, it is also called summum genus highest genus. For Aristotle and many of his followers, the ten categories are not species of some higher all-inclusive genus  say, being. Otherwise, that all-inclusive genus would wholly include its differences, and would be universally predicable of them. But no genus is predicable of its differences in this manner. Few authors explained this reasoning clearly, but some pointed out that if the difference ‘rational’ just meant ‘rational animal’, then to define ‘man’ as ‘rational animal’ would be to define him as ‘rational animal animal’, which is ill formed. So too generally: no genus can include its differences in this way. Thus there is no all-inclusive genus; the ten categories are the most general genera. 

Gerson, Jean de, original name, Jean Charlier 13631429, French theologian, philosopher, and ecclesiastic. He studied in Paris, and succeeded the nominalist Pierre d’Ailly as chancellor of the  in 1395. Both d’Ailly and Gerson played a prominent part in the work of the Council of Constance 141418. Much of Gerson’s influence on later thinkers arose from his conciliarism, the view that the church is a political society and that a general council, acting on behalf of the church, has the power to depose a pope who fails to promote the church’s welfare, for it seemed that similar arguments could apply to other forms of political society. Gerson’s conciliarism was not constitutionalism in the modern sense, for he appealed to corporate and hierarchical ideas of church government, and did not rest his case on any principle of individual rights. His main writings dealt with mystical theology, which, he thought, brings the believer closer to the beatific vision of God than do other forms of theology. He was influenced by general relativity Gerson, Jean de 343   343 St. Bonaventure and Albertus Magnus, but especially by Pseudo-Dionysius, whom he saw as a disciple of St. Paul and not as a Platonist. He was thus able to adopt an anti-Platonic position in his attacks on the mystic Ruysbroeck and on contemporary followers of Duns Scotus, such as Jean de Ripa. In dismissing Scotist realism, he made use of nominalist positions, particularly those that emphasized divine freedom. He warned theologians against being misled by pride into supposing that natural reason alone could solve metaphysical problems; and he emphasized the importance of a priest’s pastoral duties. Despite his early prominence, he spent the last years of his life in relative obscurity.

Gersonides, also called Levi ben Gershom 12881344, French Jewish philosopher and mathematician, the leading Jewish Aristotelian after Maimonides. Gersonides was also a distinguished Talmudist, Bible commentator, and astronomer. His philosophical writings include supercommentaries on most of Averroes’ commentaries on Aristotle 131924; On the Correct Syllogism 1319, a treatise on the modal syllogism; and a major Scholastic treatise, The Wars of the Lord 131729. In addition, his biblical commentaries rank among the best examples of philosophical scriptural exegesis; especially noteworthy is his interpretation of the Song of Songs as an allegory describing the ascent of the human intellect to the agent intellect. Gersonides’ mentors in the Aristotelian tradition were Maimonides and Averroes. However, more than either of them, Gersonides held philosophical truth and revealed truth to be coextensive: he acknowledged neither the conflict that Averroes saw between reason and revelation nor Maimonides’ critical view of the limitations of the human intellect. Furthermore, while remaining within the Aristotelian framework, Gersonides was not uncritical of it; his independence can be illustrated by two of his most distinctive positions. First, against Maimonides, Gersonides claimed that it is possible to demonstrate both the falsity of the Aristotelian theory of the eternity of the world Averroes’ position and the absurdity of creation ex nihilo, the traditional rabbinic view that Maimonides adopted, though for nondemonstrative reasons. Instead Gersonides advocated the Platonic theory of temporal creation from primordial matter. Second, unlike Maimonides and Averroes, who both held that the alleged contradiction between divine foreknowledge of future contingent particulars and human freedom is spurious, Gersonides took the dilemma to be real. In defense of human freedom, he then argued that it is logically impossible even for God to have knowledge of particulars as particulars, since his knowledge is only of general laws. At the same time, by redefining ‘omniscience’ as knowing everything that is knowable, he showed that this impossibility is no deficiency in God’s knowledge. Although Gersonides’ biblical commentaries received wide immediate acceptance, subsequent medieval Jewish philosophers, e.g., Hasdai Crescas, by and large reacted negatively to his rigorously rationalistic positions. Especially with the decline of Aristotelianism within the philosophical world, both Jewish and Christian, he was either criticized sharply or simply ignored. 

Geulincx, Arnold 162469, Dutch philosopher. Born in Antwerp, he was educated at Louvain and there became professor of philosophy 1646 and dean 1654. In 1657 he was forced out of Louvain, perhaps for his Jansenist or Cartesian tendencies, and in 1658 he moved to Leyden and became a Protestant. Though he taught there until his death, he never attained a regular professorship at the . His main philosophical work is his Ethica 1675, only Part I of which appeared during his lifetime as De virtute et primis ejus proprietatibus 1665. Also published during his lifetime were the Questiones quodlibeticae 1652; later editions published as Saturnalia, a Logica 1661, and a Methodus inveniendi argumenta 1665. His most important works, though, were published posthumously; in addition to the Ethica, there is the Physica vera 1688, the Physica peripatetica 1690, the Metaphysica vera 1691, and the Metaphysica ad mentem peripateticam 1691. There are also two posthumous commentaries on Descartes’s Principia Philosophiae 1690 and 1691. Geulincx was deeply influenced by Descartes, and had many ideas that closely resemble those Gersonides Geulincx, Arnold 344   344 of the later Cartesians as well as those of more independent thinkers like Spinoza and Leibniz. Though his grounds were original, like many later Cartesians, Geulincx upheld a version of occasionalism; he argued that someone or something can only do what it knows how to do, inferring from that that we cannot be the genuine causes of our own bodily movements. In discussing the mindbody relation, Geulincx used a clock analogy similar to one Leibniz used in connection with his preestablished harmony. Geulincx also held a view of mental and material substance reminiscent of that of Spinoza. Finally, he proposed a system of ethics grounded in the idea of a virtuous will. Despite the evident similarities between Geulincx’s views and the views of his more renowned contemporaries, it is very difficult to determine exactly what influence Geulincx may have had on them, and they may have had on him. 

Giles of Rome, original name, Egidio Colonna c.12431316, Italian theologian and ecclesiastic. A member of the order of the Hermits of St. Augustine, he studied arts at Augustinian house and theology at the  in Paris 1260 72 but was censured by the theology faculty 1277 and denied a license to teach as master. Owing to the intervention of Pope Honorius IV, he later returned from Italy to Paris to teach theology 128591, was appointed general of his order 1292, and became archbishop of Bourges 1295. Giles both defended and criticized views of Aquinas. He held that essence and existence are really distinct in creatures, but described them as “things”; that prime matter cannot exist without some substantial form; and, early in his career, that an eternally created world is possible. He defended only one substantial form in composites, including man. He supported Pope Boniface VIII in his quarrel with Philip IV of France.

Gilson, Étienne 18841978, French Catholic philosopher, historian, cofounder of the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies in Toronto, and a major figure in Neo-Thomism. Gilson discovered medieval philosophy through his pioneering work on Descartes’s Scholastic background. As a historian, he argued that early modern philosophy was incomprehensible without medieval thought, and that medieval philosophy itself did not represent the unified theory of reality that some Thomists had supposed. His studies of Duns Scotus, Augustine, Bernard, Aquinas, Bonaventure, Dante, and Abelard and Héloïse explore this diversity. But in his Gifford lectures 193132, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, Gilson attempted a broad synthesis of medieval teaching on philosophy, metaphysics, ethics, and epistemology, and employed it in his critique of modern philosophy, The Unity of Philosophical Experience 1937. Most of all, Gilson attempted to reestablish Aquinas’s distinction between essence and existence in created being, as in Being and Some Philosophers 1949. 

Gioberti, Vincenzo 180152, Italian philosopher and statesman. He was an ordained priest, was imprisoned and exiled for advocating Italian unification, and became a central political figure during the Risorgimento. His major political work, Del primato morale e civile degli Italiani “On the Moral and Civil Primacy of Italians,” 1843, argues for a federation of the Italian states with the pope as its leader. Gioberti’s philosophical theory, ontologism, in contrast to Hegel’s idealism, identifies the dialectics of Being with God’s creation. He condensed his theory in the formula: “Being creates the existent.” The dialectics of Being, which is the only necessary substance, is a palingenesis, or a return to its origin, in which the existent first departs from and imitates its creator mimesis, and then returns to its creator methexis. By intuition, the human mind comes in contact with God and discovers truth by retracing the dialectics of Being. However, knowledge of supernatural truths is given only by God’s revelation Teorica del soprannaturale [“Theory of the Supernatural,” 1838] and Introduzione allo studio della filosofia [“Introduction to the Study of Philosophy,” 1841]. Gioberti criticized modern philosophers such as Descartes for their psychologism  seeking truth from the human subject instead of from Being itself and its revelation. His thought is still influential in Italy, especially in Christian spiritualism. P.Gar. given, in epistemology, the “brute fact” element to be found or postulated as a component of perceptual experience. Some theorists who endorse the existence of a given element in experience think that we can find this element by careful Ghazali, al- given 345   345 introspection of what we experience Moore, H. H. Price. Such theorists generally distinguish between those components of ordinary perceptual awareness that constitute what we believe or know about the objects we perceive and those components that we strictly perceive. For example, if we analyze introspectively what we are aware of when we see an apple we find that what we believe of the apple is that it is a three-dimensional object with a soft, white interior; what we see of it, strictly speaking, is just a red-shaped expanse of one of its facing sides. This latter is what is “given” in the intended sense. Other theorists treat the given as postulated rather than introspectively found. For example, some theorists treat cognition as an activity imposing form on some material given in conscious experience. On this view, often attributed to Kant, the given and the conceptual are interdefined and logically inseparable. Sometimes this interdependence is seen as rendering a description of the given as impossible; in this case the given is said to be ineffable C. I. Lewis, Mind and the World Order, 1929. On some theories of knowledge foundationalism the first variant of the given  that which is “found” rather than “postulated”  provides the empirical foundations of what we might know or justifiably believe. Thus, if I believe on good evidence that there is a red apple in front of me, the evidence is the non-cognitive part of my perceptual awareness of the red appleshaped expanse. Epistemologies postulating the first kind of givenness thus require a single entity-type to explain the sensorial nature of perception and to provide immediate epistemic foundations for empirical knowledge. This requirement is now widely regarded as impossible to satisfy; hence Wilfred Sellars describes the discredited view as the myth of the given. 

Glanvill, Joseph 163680, English philosopher and Anglican minister who defended the Royal Society against Scholasticism. Glanvill believed that certainty was possible in mathematics and theology, but not in empirical knowledge. In his most important philosophical work, The Vanity of Dogmatizing 1661, he claimed that the human corruption that resulted from Adam’s fall precludes dogmatic knowledge of nature. Using traditional skeptical arguments as well as an analysis of causality that partially anticipated Hume, Glanvill argued that all empirical knowledge is the probabilistic variety acquired by piecemeal investigation. Despite his skepticism he argued for the existence of witches in Witches and Witchcraft 1668.

gnosticism, a dualistic religious and philosophical movement in the early centuries of the Christian church, especially important in the second century under the leadership of Valentinus and Basilides. They taught that matter was evil, the result of a cosmic disruption in which an evil archon often associated with the god of the Old Testament, Yahweh rebelled against the heavenly pleroma the complete spiritual world. In the process divine sparks were unleashed from the pleroma and lodged in material human bodies. Jesus was a high-ranking archon Logos sent to restore those souls with divine sparks to the pleroma by imparting esoteric knowledge gnosis to them. Gnosticism influenced and threatened the orthodox church from within and without. NonChristian gnostic sects rivaled Christianity, and Christian gnostics threatened orthodoxy by emphasizing salvation by knowledge rather than by faith. Theologians like Clement of Alexandria and his pupil Origen held that there were two roads to salvation, the way of faith for the masses and the way of esoteric or mystical knowledge for the philosophers. Gnosticism profoundly influenced the early church, causing it to define its scriptural canon and to develop a set of creeds and an episcopal organization. 

Goclenius, Rudolphus, in Germany, Rudolf Göckel 15471628, German philosopher. After holding some minor posts elsewhere, Goclenius became professor at the  of Marburg in 1581, where he remained until his death, teaching physics, logic, mathematics, and ethics. Though he was well read and knowledgeable of later trends in these disciplines, his basic sympathies were Aristotelian. Goclenius was very well given, myth of the Goclenius, Rudolphus 346   346 regarded by his contemporaries, who called him the Plato of Marburg, the Christian Aristotle, and the Light of Europe, among other things. He published an unusually large number of books, including the Psychologia, hoc est de hominis perfectione . . . 1590, the Conciliator philosophicus 1609, the Controversiae logicae et philosophicae 1609, and numerous other works on logic, rhetoric, physics, metaphysics, and the Latin language. But his most lasting work was his Lexicon Philosophicum 1613, together with its companion, the Lexicon Philosophicum Graecum 1615. These lexicons provide clear definitions of the philosophical terminology of late Scholastic philosophy, and are still useful as reference works for sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century thought. D.Garb. God

Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, two theorems formulated and proved by the Austrian logician Kurt Gödel 190678 in his famous 1931 paper “Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und vervandter Systeme I,” probably the most celebrated results in the whole of logic. They are aptly referred to as “incompleteness” theorems since each shows, for any member of a certain class of formal systems, that there is a sentence formulable in its language that it cannot prove, but that it would be desirable for it to prove. In the case of the first theorem G1, what cannot be proved is a true sentence of the language of the given theory. G1 is thus a disappointment to any theory constructor who wants his theory to tell the whole truth about its subject. In the case of the second theorem G2, what cannot be proved is a sentence of the theory that “expresses” its consistency. G2 is thus a disappointment to those who desire a straightforward execution of Hilbert’s Program. The proofs of the incompleteness theorems can be seen as based on three main ideas. The first is that of a Gödel numbering, i.e., an assignment of natural numbers to each of the various objects i.e., the terms, formulas, axioms, proofs, etc. belonging to the various syntactical categories of the given formal system T referred to here as the “represented theory” whose metamathematics is under consideration. The second is that of a representational scheme. This includes i the use of the Gödel numbering to develop number-theoretic codifications of various of the metamathematical properties pertaining to the represented theory, and ii the selection of a theory S hereafter, the “representing theory” and a family of formulas from that theory the “representing formulas” in terms of which to register as theorems various of the facts concerning the metamathematical properties of the represented theory thus encoded. The basic result of this representational scheme is the weak representation of the set of Gödel numbers of theorems of T, where a set L of numbers is said to be weakly represented in S by a formula ‘Lx’ of S just in case for every number n, n1 L if and only if ‘L[n]’ is a theorem of S, where ‘[n]’ is the standard term of S that, under the intended interpretation of S, designates the number n. Since the set of Gödel numbers of theorems of the represented theory T will typically be recursively enumerable, and the representing theory S must be capable of weakly representing this set, the basic strength requirement on S is that it be capable of weakly representing the recursively enumerable sets of natural numbers. Because basic systems of arithmetic e.g. Robinson’s arithmetic and Peano arithmetic all have this capacity, Gödel’s theorems are often stated using containment of a fragment of arithmetic as the basic strength requirement governing the capacities of the representing theory which, of course, is also often the represented theory. More on this point below. The third main idea behind the incompleteness theorems is that of a diagonal or fixed point construction within S for the notion of unprovability-in-T; i.e., the formulation of a sentence Gödel of S which, under the given Gödel numbering of T, the given representation of T’s metamathematical notions in S, and the intended interpretation of the language of S, says of itself that it is not provable-in-T. Gödel is thus false if provable and unprovable if true. More specifically, if ‘ProvTx’ is a formula of S that weakly represents the set of Gödel numbers of theorems of T in S, then Gödel can be any formula of S that is provably equivalent in S to the formula ‘- ProvT [Gödel]’. Given this background, G1 can be stated as follows: If a the representing theory S is any subtheory of the represented theory T up to and God Gödel’s incompleteness theorems 347   347 including the represented theory itself, b the representing theory S is consistent, c the formula ‘ProvT x’ weakly represents the set of Gödel numbers of theorems of the represented theory T in the representing theory S, and d Gödel is any sentence provably equivalent in the representing theory S to ‘ProvT [Gödel]’, then neither Gödel nor -Gödel is a theorem of the representing theory S. The proof proceeds in two parts. In the first part it is shown that, for any representing theory S up to and including the case where S % T , if S is consistent, then -Gödel is not a theorem of S. To obtain this in its strongest form, we pick the strongest subtheory S of T possible, namely S % T, and construct a reductio. Thus, suppose that 1 -Gödel is a theorem of T. From 1 and d it follows that 2 ‘ProvT[Gödel]’ is a theorem of T. And from 2 and c in the “if” direction it follows that 3 Gödel is a theorem of T. But 1 and 3 together imply that the representing theory T is inconsistent. Hence, if T is consistent, -Gödel cannot be a theorem of T. In the second part of the proof it is argued that if the representing theory S is consistent, then Gödel is not a theorem of it. Again, to obtain the strongest result, we let S be the strongest subtheory of T possible namely T itself and, as before, argue by reductio. Thus we suppose that A Gödel is a theorem of S % T . From this assumption and condition d it follows that B ‘-Provr [Gödel]’ is a theorem of S % T . By A and c in the “only if” direction it follows that C ‘ProvT [Gödel]’ is a theorem of S % T . But from B and C it follows that S % T  is inconsistent. Hence, Gödel is not provable in any consistent representing theory S up to and including T itself. The above statement of G1 is, of course, not the usual one. The usual statement suppresses the distinction stressed above between the representing and represented theories and collaterally replaces our condition c with a clause to the effect that T is a recursively axiomatizable extension of some suitably weak system of arithmetic e.g. Robinson’s arithmetic, primitive recursive arithmetic, or Peano arithmetic. This puts into a single clause what, metamathematically speaking, are two separate conditions  one pertaining to the representing theory, the other to the represented theory. The requirement that T be an extension of the selected weak arithmetic addresses the question of T’s adequacy as a representing theory, since the crucial fact about extensions of the weak arithmetic chosen is that they are capable of weakly representing all recursively enumerable sets. This constraint on T’s capabilities as a representing theory is in partnership with the usual requirement that, in its capacity as a represented theory, T be recursively axiomatizable. For T’s recursive axiomatizability ensures under ordinary choices of logic for T  that its set of theorems will be recursively enumerable  and hence weakly representable in the kind of representing theory that it itself by virtue of its being an extension of the weak arithmetic specified is. G1 can, however, be extended to certain theories whose sets of Gödel numbers of theorems are not recursively enumerable. When this is done, the basic capacity required of the representing theory is no longer merely that the recursively enumerable sets of natural numbers be representable in it, but that it also be capable of representing various non-recursively enumerable sets, and hence that it go beyond the weak arithmetics mentioned earlier. G2 is a more demanding result that G1 in that it puts significantly stronger demands on the formula ‘ProvT x’ used to express the notion of provability for the represented theory T. In proving G1 all that is required of ‘ProvT x’ is that it weakly represent θ % the set of Gödel numbers of theorems of T; i.e., that it yield an extensionally accurate registry of the theorems of the represented theory in the representing theory. G2 places additional conditions on ‘ProvT x’; conditions which result from the fact that, to prove G2, we must codify the second part of the proof of G1 in T itself. To do this, ‘ProvT x’ must be a provability predicate for T. That is, it must satisfy the following constraints, commonly referred to as the Derivability Conditions for ‘ProvT x’: I If A is a theorem of the represented theory, then ‘ProvT [A]’ must be a theorem of the representing theory. II Every instance of the formula ‘ProvT [A P B] P ProvT [A] P ProvT [B]’ must be a theorem of T. III Every instance of the formula ‘ProvT [A] P ProvT [ProvT [A]]’ must be a theorem of T. I, of course, is just part of the requirement that ‘ProvT [A]’ weakly represent T’s theoremset in T. So it does not go beyond what is required for the proof of G1. II and III, however, do. They make it possible to “formalize” the second part of the proof of G1 in T itself. II captures, in terms of ‘ProvT X’, the modus ponens inference by which B is derived from A, and III codiGödel’s incompleteness theorems Gödel’s incompleteness theorems 348   348 fies in T the appeal to c used in deriving C from A. The result of this “formalization” process is a proof within T of the formula ‘ConT P Gödel’ where ConT is a formula of the form ‘- ProvT [#]’, with ‘ProvT x’ a provability predicate for T and ‘[#]’ the standard numeral denoting the Gödel number # of some formula refutable in T . From this, and the proof of the second part of G1 itself in which the first Derivability Condition, which is just the “only if” direction of c, figures prominently, we arrive at the following result, which is a generalized form of G2: If S is any consistent representing theory up to and including the represented theory T itself, ‘ProvT x’ any provability predicate for T, and ConT any formula of T of the form ‘- ProvT [#]’, then ConT is not a theorem of S. To the extent that, in being a provability predicate for T, ‘ProvT x’ “expresses” the notion of provability of the represented theory T, it seems fair to say that ConT expresses its consistency. And to the extent that this is true, it is sensible to read G2 as saying that for any representing theory S and any represented theory T extending S, if S is consistent, then the consistency of T is not provable in S. 

Godfrey of Fontaines probably before 1250 1306 or 1309, French philosopher. He taught theology at Paris 1285c.1299; 130304. Among his major writings are fifteen Quodlibetal Questions and other disputations. He was strongly Aristotelian in philosophy, with Neoplatonic influences in metaphysics. He defended identity of essence and existence in creatures against theories of their real or intentional distinction, and argued for the possibility of demonstrating God’s existence and of some quidditative knowledge of God. He admitted divine ideas for species but not for individuals within species. He made wide applications of Aristotelian actpotency theory  e.g., to the distinction between the soul and its powers, to the explanation of intellection and volition, to the general theory of substance and accident, and in unusual fashion to essence-existence “composition” of creatures.

Godwin, William 17561836, English philosopher, novelist, and political writer. Godwin’s main philosophical treatise, Enquiry concerning Political Justice 1793, aroused heated debate. He argued for radical forms of determinism, anarchism, and utilitarianism. Government corrupts everyone by encouraging stereotyped thinking that prevents us from seeing each other as unique individuals. Godwin’s novel Caleb Williams 1794 portrays a good man corrupted by prejudice. Once we remove prejudice and artificial inequality we will see that our acts are wholly determined. This makes punishment pointless. Only in small, anarchic societies can people see others as they really are and thus come to feel sympathetic concern for their wellbeing. Only so can we be virtuous, because virtue is acting from sympathetic feelings to bring the greatest happiness to all affected. Godwin took this principle quite literally, and accepted all its consequences. Truthfulness has no claim on us other than the happiness it brings. If keeping a promise causes less good than breaking it, there is no reason at all to keep it. If one must choose between saving the life either of a major human benefactor or of one’s mother, one must choose the benefactor. Ideally we would need no rules in morals at all. They prevent us from seeing others properly, thereby impairing the sympathetic feelings that constitute virtue. Rights are pointless since sympathetic people will act to help others. Later utilitarians like Bentham had difficulty in separating their positions from Godwin’s notorious views. 

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 17491832, German writer often considered the leading cultural figure of his age. He wrote lyric poetry, dramas, and fictional, essayistic, and aphoristic prose as well as works in various natural sciences, including anatomy, botany, and optics. A lawyer by training, for most of his life Goethe was a government official at the provincial court of Saxony-Weimar. In his numerous contributions to world literature, such as the novels The Sorrows of Young Werther 1774, Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Apprenticeship 1795/96, Elective Affinities 1809, and Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Pilgrimage 1821/29, and the two-part tragedy Faust 1808/32, Goethe represented the tensions between individual and society as well as between culture and nature, with increased recognition of their tragic opposition and the need to cultivate a resigned self-discipline in artistic and social matters. In his poetic and scientific treatment of nature he was influenced by Spinoza’s pantheist identification of nature and God and maintained that everything in nature is animate and expressive of divine presence. In his theory and practice of science he opposed the quantitative and experimental method and Godfrey of Fontaines Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 349   349 insisted on a description of the phenomena that was to include the intuitive grasp of the archetypal forms or shapes underlying all development in nature. 

Goldman, Alvin Ira b.1938, American philosopher who has made notable contributions to action theory, naturalistic and social epistemology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science. He has persistently urged the relevance of cognitive and social science to problems in epistemology, metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, and ethics. A Theory of Human Action 1970 proposes a causal theory of action, describes the generative structure of basic and non-basic action, and argues for the compatibility of free will and determinism. In “Epistemics: The Regulative Theory of Cognition” 1978, he argued that traditional epistemology should be replaced by ‘epistemics’, which differs from traditional epistemology in characterizing knowledge, justified belief, and rational belief in light of empirical cognitive science. Traditional epistemology has used a coarse-grained notion of belief, taken too restrictive a view of cognitive methods, offered advice for ideal cognizers rather than for human beings with limited cognitive resources, and ignored flaws in our cognitive system that must be recognized if cognition is to be improved. Epistemologists must attend to the results of cognitive science if they are to remedy these deficiencies in traditional epistemology. Goldman later developed epistemics in Epistemology and Cognition 1986, in which he developed a historical, reliabilist theory of knowledge and epistemic justification and employed empirical cognitive science to characterize knowledge, evaluate skepticism, and assess human cognitive resources. In Liaisons: Philosophy Meets the Cognitive and Social Sciences 1992 and in Knowledge in a Social World 1999, he defended and elaborated a veritistic i.e., truth-oriented evaluation of communal beliefprofiles, social institutions, and social practices e.g., the practice of restricting evidence admissible in a jury trial. He has opposed the widely accepted view that mental states are functional states “The Psychology of Folk Psychology,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1993 and defended a simulation theory of mental state attribution, on which one attributes mental states to another by imagining what mental state one would be in if one were in the other’s situation “In Defense of the Simulation Theory,” 1992. He has also argued that cognitive science bears on ethics by providing information relevant to the nature of moral evaluation, moral choice, and hedonic states associated with the good e.g., happiness “Ethics and Cognitive Science,” 1993. 

good-making characteristic, a characteristic that makes whatever is intrinsically or inherently good, good. Hedonists hold that pleasure and conducing to pleasure are the sole good-making characteristics. Pluralists hold that those characteristics are only some among many other goodmaking characteristics, which include, for instance, knowledge, friendship, beauty, and acting from a sense of duty.

Goodman, Nelson 190698, American philosopher who made seminal contributions to metaphysics, epistemology, and aesthetics. Like Quine, Goodman repudiates analyticity and kindred notions. Goodman’s work can be read as a series of investigations into how to do philosophy without them. A central concern is how symbols structure facts and our understanding of them. The Structure of Appearance 1952 presents Goodman’s constructionalism. Pretheoretical beliefs are vague and mutually inconsistent. By devising an interpreted formal system that derives them from or explicates them in terms of suitable primitives, we bring them into logical contact, eliminate inconsistencies, and disclose unanticipated logical and theoretical connections. Multiple, divergent systems do justice to the same pretheoretical beliefs. All systems satisfying our criteria of adequacy are equally acceptable. Nothing favors any one of them over the others. Ways of Worldmaking 1978 provides a less formal treatment of the same themes. Category schemes dictate criteria of identity for their objects. So mutually irreducible category schemes do not treat of the same things. Since a world consists of the things it comprises, irreducible schemes mark out different worlds. There are, Goodman concludes, many worlds if any. Inasmuch as the categories that define identity Goldbach’s conjecture Goodman, Nelson 350   350 conditions on objects are human constructs, we make worlds. Languages of Art 1968 argues that art, like science, makes and reveals worlds. Aesthetics is the branch of epistemology that investigates art’s cognitive functions. Goodman analyzes the syntactic and semantic structures of symbol systems, both literal and figurative, and shows how they advance understanding in art and elsewhere. Fact, Fiction, and Forecast1954 poses the new riddle of induction. An item is grue if and only if it is examined before future time t and found to be green or is not so examined and is blue. All hitherto examined emeralds are both green and grue. What justifies our expecting future emeralds to be green, not grue? Inductive validity, the riddle demonstrates, depends on the characterization as well as the classification of the evidence class. ‘Green’ is preferable, Goodman maintains, because it is entrenched in inductive practice. This does not guarantee that inferences using ‘green’ will yield truths. Nothing guarantees that. But entrenched predicates are pragmatically advantageous, because they mesh with our habits of thought and other cognitive resources. Goodman’s other works include Problems and Projects 1972, Of Mind and Other Matters 1984, and Reconceptions 1988, written with Catherine Z. Elgin. 

Gorgias c.483c.376 B.C., Grecian Sophist. A teacher of rhetoric from Leontini in Syracuse, Gorgias came to Athens in 427 B.C. as an ambassador from his city and caused a sensation with his artful oratory. He is known through references and short quotations in later writers, and through a few surviving texts  two speeches and a philosophical treatise. He taught a rhetorical style much imitated in antiquity, by delivering model speeches to paying audiences. Unlike other Sophists he did not give formal instruction in other topics, nor prepare a formal rhetorical manual. He was known to have had views on language, on the nature of reality, and on virtue. Gorgias’s style was remarkable for its use of poetic devices such as rhyme, meter, and elegant words, as well as for its dependence on artificial parallelism and balanced antithesis. His surviving speeches, defenses of Helen and Palamedes, display a range of arguments that rely heavily on what the ancients called eikos ‘likelihood’ or ‘probability’. Gorgias maintained in his “Helen” that a speech can compel its audience to action; elsewhere he remarked that in the theater it is wiser to be deceived than not. Gorgias’s short book On Nature or On What Is Not survives in two paraphrases, one by Sextus Empiricus and the other now considered more reliable in an Aristotelian work, On Melissus, Xenophanes, and Gorgias. Gorgias argued for three theses: that nothing exists; that even if it did, it could not be known; and that even if it could be known, it could not be communicated. Although this may be in part a parody, most scholars now take it to be a serious philosophical argument in its own right. In ethics, Plato reports that Gorgias thought there were different virtues for men and for women, a thesis Aristotle defends in the Politics.

Gracián y Morales, Baltasar 160158, Spanish writer, moralist, and a leading literary theorist of the Spanish baroque. Born in Belmonte, he entered the Jesuit order in 1619 and became rector of the Jesuit  at Tarragona and a favorite of King Philip III. Gracián’s most important works are Agudeza y arte de ingenio “The Art of Worldly Wisdom,” 164248 and El criticón “The Critic,” 165157. The first provides philosophical support for conceptismo, a Spanish literary movement that sought to create new concepts through the development of an elaborate style, characterized by subtlety agudeza and ingenious literary artifices. El criticón, written in the conceptist style, is a philosophical novel that pessimistically criticizes the evils of civilization. Gracián anticipates Rousseau’s noble savage in claiming that, although human beings are fundamentally good in the state of nature, they are corrupted by civilization. Echoing a common theme of Spanish thought at the time, he attributes the nefarious influence of civilization to the confusion it creates between appearance and reality. But Gracián’s pessimism is tempered by faith: man has hope in the afterlife, when reality is finally revealed. Gracián wrote several other influential books. In El héroe “The Hero,” 1637 and El político “The Politician,” 1640, he follows Machiavelli in discussing the attributes of the ideal prince; El discreto “The Man of Discretion,” 1646 explores the ideal gentleman, as judged by Spanish society. Most of Gracián’s books were published under pseudonyms to avoid censure by his order. Gorgias Gracián y Morales, Baltasar 351   351 Among authors outside Spain who used his ideas are Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Voltaire, and Rousseau.

grammar, a system of rules specifying a language. The term has often been used synonymously with ‘syntax’, the principles governing the construction of sentences from words perhaps also including the systems of word derivation and inflection  case markings, verbal tense markers, and the like. In modern linguistic usage the term more often encompasses other components of the language system such as phonology and semantics as well as syntax. Traditional grammars that we may have encountered in our school days, e.g., the grammars of Latin or English, were typically fragmentary and often prescriptive  basically a selective catalog of forms and sentence patterns, together with constructions to be avoided. Contemporary linguistic grammars, on the other hand, aim to be descriptive, and even explanatory, i.e., embedded within a general theory that offers principled reasons for why natural languages are the way they are. This is in accord with the generally accepted view of linguistics as a science that regards human language as a natural phenomenon to be understood, just as physicists attempt to make sense of the world of physical objects. Since the publication of Syntactic Structures 1957 and Aspects of the Theory of Syntax 1965 by Noam Chomsky, grammars have been almost universally conceived of as generative devices, i.e., precisely formulated deductive systems  commonly called generative grammars  specifying all and only the well-formed sentences of a language together with a specification of their relevant structural properties. On this view, a grammar of English has the character of a theory of the English language, with the grammatical sentences and their structures as its theorems and the grammar rules playing the role of the rules of inference. Like any empirical theory, it is subject to disconfirmation if its predictions do not agree with the facts  if, e.g., the grammar implies that ‘white or snow the is’ is a wellformed sentence or that ‘The snow is white’ is not. The object of this theory construction is to model the system of knowledge possessed by those who are able to speak and understand an unlimited number of novel sentences of the language specified. Thus, a grammar in this sense is a psychological entity  a component of the human mind  and the task of linguistics avowedly a mentalistic discipline is to determine exactly of what this knowledge consists. Like other mental phenomena, it is not observable directly but only through its effects. Thus, underlying linguistic competence is to be distinguished from actual linguistic performance, which forms part of the evidence for the former but is not necessarily an accurate reflection of it, containing, as it does, errors, false starts, etc. A central problem is how this competence arises in the individual, i.e., how a grammar is inferred by a child on the basis of a finite, variable, and imperfect sample of utterances encountered in the course of normal development. Many sorts of observations strongly suggest that grammars are not constructed de novo entirely on the basis of experience, and the view is widely held that the child brings to the task a significant, genetically determined predisposition to construct grammars according to a well-defined pattern. If this is so, and since apparently no one language has an advantage over any other in the learning process, this inborn component of linguistic competence can be correctly termed a universal grammar. It represents whatever the grammars of all natural languages, actual or potential, necessarily have in common because of the innate linguistic competence of human beings. The apparent diversity of natural languages has often led to a serious underestimation of the scope of universal grammar. One of the most influential proposals concerning the nature of universal grammar was Chomsky’s theory of transformational grammar. In this framework the syntactic structure of a sentence is given not by a single object e.g., a parse tree, as in phrase structure grammar, but rather by a sequence of trees connected by operations called transformations. The initial tree in such a sequence is specified generated by a phrase structure grammar, together with a lexicon, and is known as the deep structure. The final tree in the sequence, the surface structure, contains the morphemes meaningful units of the sentence in the order in which they are written or pronounced. For example, the English sentences ‘John hit the ball’ and its passive counterpart ‘The ball was hit by John’ might be derived from the same deep structure in this case a tree looking very much like the surface structure for the active sentence except that the optional transformational rule of passivization has been applied in the derivation of the latter sentence. This rule rearranges the constituents of the tree in such a way that, among other changes, the direct object ‘the ball’ in deep structure becomes the surface-structure subject of the passive sentence. It is thus an important feature of this theory that grammatical grammar grammar 352   352 relations such as subject, object, etc., of a sentence are not absolute but are relative to the level of structure. This accounts for the fact that many sentences that appear superficially similar in structure e.g., ‘John is easy to please’, ‘John is eager to please’ are nonetheless perceived as having different underlying deep-structure grammatical relations. Indeed, it was argued that any theory of grammar that failed to make a deep-structure/surface-structure distinction could not be adequate. Contemporary linguistic theories have, nonetheless, tended toward minimizing the importance of the transformational rules with corresponding elaboration of the role of the lexicon and the principles that govern the operation of grammars generally. Theories such as generalized phrase-structure grammar and lexical function grammar postulate no transformational rules at all and capture the relatedness of pairs such as active and passive sentences in other ways. Chomsky’s principles and parameters approach 1981 reduces the transformational component to a single general movement operation that is controlled by the simultaneous interaction of a number of principles or subtheories: binding, government, control, etc. The universal component of the grammar is thus enlarged and the contribution of languagespecific rules is correspondingly diminished. Proponents point to the advantages this would allow in language acquisition. Presumably a considerable portion of the task of grammar construction would consist merely in setting the values of a small number of parameters that could be readily determined on the basis of a small number of instances of grammatical sentences. A rather different approach that has been influential has arisen from the work of Richard Montague, who applied to natural languages the same techniques of model theory developed for logical languages such as the predicate calculus. This so-called Montague grammar uses a categorial grammar as its syntactic component. In this form of grammar, complex lexical and phrasal categories can be of the form A/B. Typically such categories combine by a kind of “cancellation” rule: A/B ! B P A something of category A/B combines with something of category B to yield something of category A. In addition, there is a close correspondence between the syntactic category of an expression and its semantic type; e.g., common nouns such as ‘book’ and ‘girl’ are of type e/t, and their semantic values are functions from individuals entities, or e-type things to truth-values T-type things, or equivalently, sets of individuals. The result is an explicit, interlocking syntax and semantics specifying not only the syntactic structure of grammatical sentences but also their truth conditions. Montague’s work was embedded in his own view of universal grammar, which has not, by and large, proven persuasive to linguists. A great deal of attention has been given in recent years to merging the undoubted virtues of Montague grammar with a linguistically more palatable view of universal grammar. 

Gramsci, Antonio 18911937, Italian political leader whose imprisonment by the Fascists for his involvement with the Italian Communist Party had the ironical result of sparing him from Stalinism and enabling him to better articulate his distinctive political philosophy. In 1917 he welcomed the Bolshevik Revolution as a “revolution against Capital” rather than against capitalism: as a revolution refuting the deterministic Marxism according to which socialism could arise only by the gradual evolution of capitalism, and confirming the possibility of the radical transformation of social institutions. In 1921 he supported creation of the Italian Communist Party; as its general secretary from 1924, he tried to reorganize it along more democratic lines. In 1926 the Fascists outlawed all opposition parties. Gramsci spent the rest of his life in various prisons, where he wrote more than a thousand s of notes ranging from a few lines to chapterlength essays. These Prison Notebooks pose a major interpretive challenge, but they reveal a keen, insightful, and open mind grappling with important social and political problems. The most common interpretation stems from Palmiro Togliatti, Gramsci’s successor as leader of grammar, categorial Gramsci, Antonio 353   353 the Italian Communists. After the fall of Fascism and the end of World War II, Togliatti read into Gramsci the so-called Italian road to socialism: a strategy for attaining the traditional Marxist goals of the classless society and the nationalization of the means of production by cultural means, such as education and persuasion. In contrast to Bolshevism, one had to first conquer social institutions, and then their control would yield the desired economic and political changes. This democratic theory of Marxist revolution was long regarded by many as especially relevant to Western industrial societies, and so for this and other reasons Gramsci is a key figure of Western Marxism. The same theory is often called Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, referring to a relationship between two political units where one dominates the other with the consent of that other. This interpretation was a political reconstruction, based primarily on Gramsci’s Communist involvement and on highly selective passages from the Notebooks. It was also based on exaggerating the influence on Gramsci of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Gentile, and minimizing influences like Croce, Mosca, Machiavelli, and Hegel. No new consensus has emerged yet; it would have to be based on analytical and historical spadework barely begun. One main interpretive issue is whether Gramsci, besides questioning the means, was also led to question the ends of traditional Marxism. In one view, his commitment to rational persuasion, political realism, methodological fallibilism, democracy, and pluralism is much deeper than his inclinations toward the classless society, the abolition of private property, the bureaucratically centralized party, and the like; in particular, his pluralism is an aspect of his commitment to the dialectic as a way of thinking, a concept he adapted from Hegel through Croce. 

Green, Thomas Hill 183682, British absolute idealist and social philosopher. The son of a clergyman, Green studied and taught at Oxford. His central concern was to resolve what he saw as the spiritual crisis of his age by analyzing knowledge and morality in ways inspired by Kant and Hegel. In his lengthy introduction to Hume’s Treatise, he argued that Hume had shown knowledge and morality to be impossible on empiricist principles. In his major work, Prolegomena to Ethics 1883, Green contended that thought imposed relations on sensory feelings and impulses whose source was an eternal consciousness to constitute objects of knowledge and of desire. Furthermore, in acting on desires, rational agents seek the satisfaction of a self that is realized through their own actions. This requires rational agents to live in harmony among themselves and hence to act morally. In Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation 1885 Green transformed classical liberalism by arguing that even though the state has no intrinsic value, its intervention in society is necessary to provide the conditions that enable rational beings to achieve self-satisfaction. 

Gregory I, Saint, called Gregory the Great c.540604, a pope and Roman political leader. Born a patrician, he was educated for public office and became prefect of Rome in 570. In 579, he was appointed papal representative in Constantinople, returning to Rome as counselor to Pope Pelagius II in 586. He was elected Pope Gregory I in 590. When the Lombards attacked Rome in 594, Gregory bought them off. Constantinople would neither cede nor defend Italy, and Gregory stepped in as secular ruler of what became the Papal States. He asserted the universal jurisdiction of the bishop of Rome, and claimed patriarchy of the West. His writings include important letters; the Moralia, an exposition of the Book of Job summarizing Christian theology; Pastoral Care, which defined the duties of the clergy for the Middle Ages; and Dialogues, which deals chiefly with the immortality of the soul, holding it could enter heaven immediately without awaiting the Last Judgment. His thought, largely Augustinian, is unoriginal, but was much quoted in the Middle Ages. 

Gregory of Nyssa, Saint 33598, Grecian theologian and mystic who tried to reconcile Platonism with Christianity. As bishop of Cappadocia in eastern Asia Minor, he championed orthodoxy and was prominent at the First Council of Constantinople. He related the doctrine of the Trinity to Plato’s ideas of the One and the Many. He followed Origen in believing that man’s material great chain of being Gregory of Nyssa 354   354 nature was due to the fall and in believing in the Apocatastasis, the universal restoration of all souls, including Satan’s, in the kingdom of God.  APOCATASTASIS, ORIGEN. L.P.P. Gregory of Rimini c.130058, Italian philosopher and monk. He studied in Italy, England, and France, and taught at the universities of Bologna, Padua, Perugia, and Paris before becoming prior general of the Hermits of St. Augustine in his native city of Rimini, about eighteen months before he died. Gregory earned the honorific title “the Authentic Doctor” because he was considered by many of his contemporaries to be a faithful interpreter of Augustine, and thus a defender of tradition, in the midst of the skepticism of Ockham and his disciples regarding what could be known in natural philosophy and theology. Thus, in his commentary on Books I and II of Peter Lombard’s Sentences, Gregory rejected the view that because of God’s omnipotence he can do anything and is therefore unknowable in his nature and his ways. Gregory also maintained that after Adam’s fall from righteousness, men need, in conjunction with their free will, God’s help grace to perform morally good actions. In non-religious matters Gregory is usually associated with the theory of the complexe significabile, according to which the object of knowledge acquired by scientific proof is neither an object existing outside the mind, nor a word simplex or a proposition complexum, but rather the complexe significabile, that which is totally and adequately signified by the proposition expressed in the conclusion of the proof in question.

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

Grosseteste, Robert c.11681253, English theologian who began life on the bottom rung of feudal society in Suffolk and became one of the most influential philosophers in pre-Reformation England. He studied at Oxford, becoming a master of arts between 1186 and 1189. Sometime after this period he joined the household of William de Vere, bishop of Hereford. Grosseteste may have been associated with the local cathedral school in Hereford, several of whose members were part of a relatively advanced scientific tradition. It was a center for the study of natural science and astrology as well as liberal arts and theology. If so, this would explain, at least in part, his lifelong interest in work in natural philosophy. Between 1209 and 1214 Grosseteste became a master of theology, probably in Paris. In 1221 he became the first chancellor of Oxford. From 1229 to 1235 he was secular lecturer in theology to the recently established Franciscan order at Oxford. It was during his tenure with the Franciscans that he studied Grecian  an unusual endeavor for a medieval schoolman. He spent the last eighteen years of his life as bishop of Lincoln. As a  scholar, Grosseteste was an original thinker who used Aristotelian and Augustinian theses as points of departure. He believed, with Aristotle, that sense knowledge is the basis of all knowledge, and that the basis for sense knowledge is our discovery of the cause of what is experienced or revealed by experiment. He also believed, with Augustine, that light plays Gregory of Rimini Grosseteste, Robert 355   355 an important role in creation. Thus he maintained that God produced the world by first creating prime matter from which issued a point of light lux, the first corporeal form or power, one of whose manifestations is visible light. The diffusion of this light resulted in extension or tridimensionality in the form of the nine concentric celestial spheres and the four terrestrial spheres of fire, air, water, and earth. According to Grosseteste, the diffusion of light takes place in accordance with laws of mathematical proportionality geometry. Everything, therefore, is a manifestation of light, and mathematics is consequently indispensable to science and knowledge generally. The principles Grosseteste employs to support his views are presented in, e.g., his commentary on Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, the De luce “Of Light”, and the De lineis, angulis et figuris “Of Lines, Angles, and Figures”. He worked in areas as seemingly disparate as optics and angelology. Grosseteste was one of the first to take an interest in and introduce into the Oxford curriculum newly recovered Aristotelian texts  some of which he translated, along with Grecian commentaries on them. His work and interest in natural philosophy, mathematics, the Bible, and languages profoundly influenced his younger contemporary, Roger Bacon, and the educational goals of the Franciscan order. It also helped to stimulate work in these areas during the fourteenth century. 

Grotius, Hugo, in Dutch, Huigh de Groot 1583 1645, Dutch humanist, a founder of modern views of international law and a major theorist of natural law. A lawyer and Latinist, Grotius developed a new view of the law of nature in order to combat moral skepticism and to show how there could be rational settlement of moral disputes despite religious disagreements. He argued in The Law of War and Peace 1625 that humans are naturally both competitive and sociable. The laws of nature show us how we can live together despite our propensity to conflict. They can be derived from observation of our nature and situation. These laws reflect the fact that each individual possesses rights, which delimit the social space within which we are free to pursue our own goals. Legitimate government arises when we give up some rights in order to save or improve our lives. The obligations that the laws of nature impose would bind us, Grotius notoriously said, even if God did not exist; but he held that God does enforce the laws. They set the limits on the laws that governments may legitimately impose. The laws of nature reflect our possession of both precise perfect rights of justice, which can be protected by force, and imperfect rights, which are not enforceable, nor even statable very precisely. Grotius’s views on our combative but sociable nature, on the function of the law of nature, and on perfect and imperfect rights were of central importance in later discussions of morality and law. 

grue paradox, a paradox in the theory of induction, according to which every intuitively acceptable inductive argument, A, may be mimicked by indefinitely many other inductive arguments  each seemingly quite analogous to A and therefore seemingly as acceptable, yet each nonetheless intuitively unacceptable, and each yielding a conclusion contradictory to that of A, given the assumption that sufficiently many and varied of the sort of things induced upon exist as yet unexamined which is the only circumstance in which A is of interest. Suppose the following is an intuitively acceptable inductive argument: A1 All hitherto observed emeralds are green; therefore, all emeralds are green. Now introduce the colorpredicate ‘grue’, where for some given, as yet wholly future, temporal interval T an object is grue provided it has the property of being either green and first examined before T, or blue and not first examined before T. Then consider the following inductive argument: A2 All hitherto observed emeralds are grue; therefore, all emeralds are grue. The premise is true, and A2 is formally analogous to A1. But A2 is intuitively unacceptable; if there are emeralds unexamined before T, then the conclusion of A2 says that these emeralds are blue, whereas the conclusion of A1 says that they are green. Other counterintuitive competing arguments could be given, e.g.: A3 All hitherto observed emeralds are grellow; therefore, all emeralds are grellow where an object is grellow provided it is green and located on the earth, or yellow otherwise. It would seem, therefore, that some restriction on induction is required. The new riddle of induction offers two challenges. First, state the restriction  i.e., demarcate the intuitively acceptable inductions from the unacceptable ones, in some general way, without constant appeal to intuition. Second, justify our preference for the Grotius, Hugo grue paradox 356   356 one group of inductions over the other. These two parts of the new riddle are often conflated. But it is at least conceivable that one might solve the analytical, demarcative part without solving the justificatory part, and, perhaps, vice versa. It will not do to rule out, a priori, “gruelike” now commonly called “gruesome” variances in nature. Water pure H2O varies in its physical state along the parameter of temperature. If so, why might not emeralds vary in color along the parameter of time of first examination? One approach to the problem of restriction is to focus on the conclusions of inductive arguments e.g., All emeralds are green, All emeralds are grue and to distinguish those which may legitimately so serve called “projectible hypotheses” from those which may not. The question then arises whether only non-gruesome hypotheses those which do not contain gruesome predicates are projectible. Aside from the task of defining ‘gruesome predicate’ which could be done structurally relative to a preferred language, the answer is no. The English predicate ‘solid and less than 0; C, or liquid and more than 0; C but less than 100; C, or gaseous and more than 100; C’ is gruesome on any plausible structural account of gruesomeness note the similarity to the English ‘grue’ equivalent: green and first examined before T, or blue and not first examined before T. Nevertheless, where nontransitional water is pure H2O at one atmosphere of pressure save that which is in a transitional state, i.e., melting/freezing or boiling/condensing, i.e., at 0°C or 100; C, we happily project the hypothesis that all non-transitional water falls under the above gruesome predicate. Perhaps this is because, if we rewrite the projection about non-transitional water as a conjunction of non-gruesome hypotheses  i All water at less than 0; C is solid, ii All water at more than 0; C but less than 100; C is liquid, and iii All water at more than 100; C is gaseous  we note that iiii are all supported there are known positive instances; whereas if we rewrite the gruesome projection about emeralds as a conjunction of non-gruesome hypotheses  i* All emeralds first examined before T are green, and ii* All emeralds not first examined before T are blue  we note that ii* is as yet unsupported. It would seem that, whereas a non-gruesome hypothesis is projectible provided it is unviolated and supported, a gruesome hypothesis is projectible provided it is unviolated and equivalent to a conjunction of non-gruesome hypotheses, each of which is supported. The grue paradox was discovered by Nelson Goodman. It is most fully stated in his Fact, Fiction and Forecast 1955. 

guise theory, a system developed by Castañeda to resolve a number of issues concerning the content of thought and experience, including reference, identity statements, intensional contexts, predication, existential claims, perception, and fictional discourse. For example, since i Oedipus believed that he killed the man at the crossroads, and ii the man at the crossroads was his Oedipus’s father, it might seem that iii Oedipus believed that he killed his father. Guise theory blocks this derivation by taking ‘was’ in ii to express, not genuine identity, but a contingent sameness relation betweeen the distinct referents of the descriptions. Definite descriptions are typically treated as referential, contrary to Russell’s theory of descriptions, and their referents are identical in both direct and indirect discourse, contrary to Frege’s semantics. To support this solution, guise theory offers unique accounts of predication and singular referents. The latter are individual guises, which, like Fregean senses and Meinong’s incomplete objects, are thinly individuated aspects or “slices” of ordinary objects at best. Every guise is a structure c{F1 . . . , Fn} where c is an operator expressed by ‘the’ in English  transforming a set of properties {F1, . . . , Fn} into a distinct concrete individual, each property being an internal property of the guise. Guises have external properties by standing in various sameness relations to other guises that have these properties internally. There are four such relations, besides genuine identity, each an equivalence relation in its field. If the oldest philosopher happens to be wise, e.g., wisdom is factually predicated of the guise ‘the oldest philosopher’ because it is consubstantiated with ‘the oldest wise philosopher’. Other sameness relations account for fictional predication consociation and necessary external predication conflation. Existence is self-consubstantiation. An ordinary physical object is, at any moment, a cluster of consubstantiated hence, existing guises, while continuants are formed through the transubstantiation of guises within temporally distinct clusters. There are no substrates, and while every guise “subsists,” not all exist, e.g., the Norse God of Thunder. The posiGrundnorm guise theory 357   357 tion thus permits a unified account of singular reference. One task for guise theory is to explain how a “concretized” set of properties differs internally from a mere set. Perhaps guises are façons de penser whose core sets are concretized if their component properties are conceived as coinstantiated, with non-existents analyzable in terms of the failure of the conceived properties to actually be coinstantiated. However, it is questionable whether this approach can achieve all that Castañeda demands of guise theory. 

Habermas, Jürgen b.1929, German philosopher and social theorist, a leading representative of the second generation of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. His work has consistently returned to the problem of the normative foundations of social criticism and critical social inquiry not supplied in traditional Marxism and other forms of critical theory, such as postmodernism. His habilitation, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere 1961, is an influential historical analysis of the emergence of the ideal of a public sphere in the eighteenth century and its subsequent decline. Habermas turned then to the problems of the foundations and methodology of the social sciences, developing a criticism of positivism and his own interpretive explanatory approach in The Logic of the Social Sciences 1963 and his first major systematic work, Knowledge and Human Interests 1967. Rejecting the unity of method typical of positivism, Habermas argues that social inquiry is guided by three distinct interests: in control, in understanding, and in emancipation. He is especially concerned to use emancipatory interest to overcome the limitations of the model of inquiry based on understanding and argues against “universality of hermeneutics” defended by hermeneuticists such as Gadamer and for the need to supplement interpretations with explanations in the social sciences. As he came to reject the psychoanalytic vocabulary in which he formulated the interest in emancipation, he turned to finding the basis for understanding and social inquiry in a theory of rationality more generally. In the next phase of his career he developed a comprehensive social theory, culminating in his two-volume The Theory of Communicative Action 1982. The goal of this theory is to develop a “critical theory of modernity,” on the basis of a comprehensive theory of communicative as opposed to instrumental rationality. The first volume develops a theory of communicative rationality based on “discourse,” or second-order communication that takes place both in everyday interaction and in institutionalized practices of argumentation in science, law, and criticism. This theory of rationality emerges from a universal or “formal” pragmatics, a speech act theory based on making explicit the rules and norms of the competence to communicate in linguistic interaction. The second volume develops a diagnosis of modern society as suffering from “onesided rationalization,” leading to disruptions of the communicative lifeworld by “systems” such as markets and bureaucracies. Finally, Habermas applies his conception of rationality to issues of normative theory, including ethics, politics, and the law. “Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Moral Justification” 1982 argues for an intersubjective notion of practical reason and discursive procedure for the justification of universal norms. This “discourse principle” provides a dialogical version of Kant’s idea of universalization; a norm is justified if and only if it can meet with the reasoned agreement of all those affected. Between Facts and Norms 1992 combines his social and normative theories to give a systematic account of law and democracy. His contribution here is an account of deliberative democracy appropriate to the complexity of modern society. His work in all of these phases provides a systematic defense and critique of modern institutions and a vindication of the universal claims of public practical reason. 

haecceity from Latin haec, ‘this’, 1 loosely, thisness; more specifically, an irreducible category of being, the fundamental actuality of an existent entity; or 2 an individual essence, a property an object has necessarily, without which it would not be or would cease to exist as the individual it is, and which, necessarily, no other object has. There are in the history of philosophy two distinct concepts of haecceity. The idea originated with the work of the thirteenthcentury philosopher Duns Scotus, and was discussed in the same period by Aquinas, as a positive perfection that serves as a primitive existence and individuation principle for concrete existents. In the seventeenth century Leibniz transformed the concept of haecceity, which Duns Scotus had explicitly denied to be a form or universal, into the notion of an individual essence, a distinctive nature or set of necessary characteristics uniquely identifying it under the principle of the identity of indiscernibles. 359 H    AM  359 Duns Scotus’s haecceitas applies only to the being of contingently existent entities in the actual world, but Leibniz extends the principle to individuate particular things not only through the changes they may undergo in the actual world, but in any alternative logically possible world. Leibniz admitted as a consequence the controversial thesis that every object by virtue of its haecceity has each of its properties essentially or necessarily, so that only the counterparts of individuals can inhabit distinct logically possible worlds. A further corollary  since the possession of particular parts in a particular arrangement is also a property and hence involved in the individual essence of any complex object  is the doctrine of mereological essentialism: every composite is necessarily constituted by a particular configuration of particular proper parts, and loses its self-identity if any parts are removed or replaced. 

Haeckel, Ernst 18341919, German zoologist, an impassioned adherent of Darwin’s theory of evolution. His popular work Die Welträtsel The Riddle of the Universe, 1899 became a best-seller and was very influential in its time. Lenin is said to have admired it. Haeckel’s philosophy, which he called monism, is characterized negatively by his rejection of free will, immortality, and theism, as well as his criticisms of the traditional forms of materialism and idealism. Positively it is distinguished by passionate arguments for the fundamental unity of organic and inorganic nature and a form of pantheism.

Ha-Levi, Judah c.10751141, Spanish Jewish philosopher and poet. Born in Toledo, he studied biblical and rabbinical literature as well as philosophy. His poetry introduces Arabic forms in Hebrew religious expression. He was traveling to Jerusalem on a pilgrimage when he died. His most important philosophical work is Kuzari: The Book of Proof and Argument of the Despised Faith, which purports to be a discussion of a Christian, a Muslim, and a Jew, each offering the king of the Khazars in southern Russia reasons for adopting his faith. Around 740 the historical king and most of his people converted to Judaism. HaLevi presents the Christian and the Muslim as Aristotelian thinkers, who fail to convince the king. The Jewish spokesman begins by asserting his belief in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of history who is continuously active in history, rather than the God of the philosophers. Jewish history is the inner core of world history. From the revelation at Sinai, the most witnessed divine event claimed by any religion, the Providential history of the Jews is the way God has chosen to make his message clear to all humankind. Ha-Levi’s view is the classical expression of Jewish particularism and nationalism. His ideas have been influential in Judaism and were early printed in Latin and Spanish. 

Hamann, Johann Georg 173088, German philosopher. Born and educated in Königsberg, Hamann, known as the Magus of the North, was one of the most important Christian thinkers in Germany during the second half of the eighteenth century. Advocating an irrationalistic theory of faith inspired by Hume, he opposed the prevailing Enlightenment philosophy. He was a mentor of the Sturm und Drang literary movement and had a significant influence on Jacobi, Hegel, and Kierkegaard. As a close acquaintance of Kant, he also had a great impact on the development of Kant’s critical philosophy through his Hume translations. Hamann’s most important works, criticized and admired for their difficult and obscure style, were the Socratic Memorabilia 1759, Aesthetica in nuce “Aesthetics in a Nutshell,” 1762, and several works on language. He suppressed his “metacritical” writings out of respect for Kant. However, they were published after his death and now constitute the bestknown part of his work. M.K. Hamilton, William 17881856, Scottish philosopher and logician. Born in Glasgow and educated at Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Oxford, he was for most of his life professor at the  of Edinburgh 182156. Though hardly an orthodox or uncritical follower of Reid and Stewart, he became one of the most important members of the school of Scottish common sense philosophy. His “philosophy of the conditioned” has a somewhat Kantian flavor. Like Kant, he held that we can have knowledge only of “the relative manifestations of an existence, which in itself it is our highest wisdom to recogHaeckel, Ernst Hamilton, William 360    AM  360 nize as beyond the reach of philosophy.” Unlike Kant, however, he argued for the position of a “natural realism” in the Reidian tradition. The doctrine of the relativity of knowledge has seemed to many  including J. S. Mill  contradictory to his realism. For Hamilton, the two are held together by a kind of intuitionism that emphasizes certain facts of consciousness that are both primitive and incomprehensible. They are, though constitutive of knowledge, “less forms of cognitions than of beliefs.” In logic he argued for a doctrine involving quantification of predicates and the view that propositions can be reduced to equations. 

Han Fei Tzu, also called Master Han Fei third century B.C., Chinese Legalist political theorist. He was a prince of the state of Han and a student of Hsün Tzu. His thought, recorded in the text Han Fei Tzu, mainly concerned the method of government and was addressed primarily to rulers. Han Fei Tzu believed that human beings are self-seeking by nature, and that they can rarely be transformed by education and moral examples. Accordingly, the ruler should institute a precisely formulated and clearly propagated system of laws fa to regulate their behavior, and enforce it with punishment. Officials, in addition to being governed by laws, are to be rewarded and punished according to whether their performance coincides with their official duties and proposed plans. The ruler should enforce this system strictly without favoritism, should shun contact with subordinates to avoid breeding familiarity, and should conceal his personal likes and dislikes to avoid their being exploited. Having properly set up the machinary of government, the government will run smoothly with minimal intervention by the ruler. 

Han Yü 768824, Chinese poet and essayist who, though his thoughts lacked philosophical depth, was the first to emphasize “correct transmission” of the Way from the sage-emperors to Confucius and Mencius. His views later profoundly influenced Neo-Confucian philosophers in the Sung dynasty. He vigorously defended Confucianism against Buddhism and Taoism on cultural grounds: the monks and nuns were parasites on society. He also formulated a threefold theory on which human nature has superior, medium, and inferior grades. 

hare: r. m. citd by H. P. Grice, “Hare’s neustrics”. b.1919, English philosopher who is one of the most influential moral philosophers of the twentieth century and the developer of prescriptivism in metaethics. Hare was educated at Rugby and Oxford, then served in the British army during World War II and spent years as a prisoner of war in Burma. In 1947 he took a position at Balliol  and was appointed White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy at the  of Oxford in 1966. On retirement from Oxford, he became Graduate Research Professor at the  of Florida 198393. His major books are Language of Morals 1953, Freedom and Reason 1963, Moral Thinking 1981, and Sorting Out Ethics 1997. Many collections of his essays have also appeared, and a collection of other leading philosophers’ articles on his work was published in 1988 Hare and Critics, eds. Seanor and Fotion. According to Hare, a careful exploration of the nature of our moral concepts reveals that nonironic judgments about what one morally ought to do are expressions of the will, or commitments to act, that are subject to certain logical constraints. Because moral judgments are prescriptive, we cannot sincerely subscribe to them while refusing to comply with them in the relevant circumstances. Because moral judgments are universal prescriptions, we cannot sincerely subscribe to them unless we are willing for them to be followed were we in other people’s positions with their preferences. Hare later contended that vividly to imagine ourselves completely in other people’s positions involves our acquiring preferences about what should happen to us in those positions that mirror exactly what those people now want for themselves. So, ideally, we decide on a universal prescription on the basis of not only our existing preferences about the actual situation but also the new preferences we would have if we were wholly in other people’s positions. What we can prescribe universally is what maximizes net satisfaction of this amalgamated set of preferences. Hence, Hare concluded that his theory of moral judgment leads to preference-satisfaction act utilitarianism. However, like most other utilitarians, he argued that the Han Fei Tzu Hare, Richard Mervyn 361    AM  361 best way to maximize utility is to have, and generally to act on, certain not directly utilitarian dispositions  such as dispositions not to hurt others or steal, to keep promises and tell the truth, to take special responsibility for one’s own family, and so on. 

hart: h. l. a. – cited by Grice, “Hare on ‘carefully.’ Philosopher of European ancestry born in Yorkshire, principally responsible for the revival of legal and political philosophy after World War II. After wartime work with military intelligence, Hart gave up a flourishing law practice to join the Oxford faculty, where he was a brilliant lecturer, a sympathetic and insightful critic, and a generous mentor to many scholars. Like the earlier “legal positivists” Bentham and John Austin, Hart accepted the “separation of law and morals”: moral standards can deliberately be incorporated in law, but there is no automatic or necessary connection between law and sound moral principles. In The Concept of Law 1961 he critiqued the Bentham-Austin notion that laws are orders backed by threats from a political community’s “sovereign”  some person or persons who enjoy habitual obedience and are habitually obedient to no other human  and developed the more complex idea that law is a “union of primary and secondary rules.” Hart agreed that a legal system must contain some “obligation-imposing” “primary” rules, restricting freedom. But he showed that law also includes independent “power-conferring” rules that facilitate choice, and he demonstrated that a legal system requires “secondary” rules that create public offices and authorize official action, such as legislation and adjudication, as well as “rules of recognition” that determine which other rules are valid in the system. Hart held that rules of law are “open-textured,” with a core of determinate meaning and a fringe of indeterminate meaning, and thus capable of answering some but not all legal questions that can arise. He doubted courts’ claims to discover law’s meaning when reasonable competing interpretations are available, and held that courts decide such “hard cases” by first performing the important “legislative” function of filling gaps in the law. Hart’s first book was an influential study with A. M. Honoré of Causation in the Law 1959. His inaugural lecture as Professor of Jurisprudence, “Definition and Theory in Jurisprudence” 1953, initiated a career-long study of rights, reflected also in Essays on Bentham: Studies in Jurisprudence and Political Theory 1982 and in Essays in Jurisprudence and Philosophy 1983. He defended liberal public policies. In Law, Liberty and Morality 1963 he refuted Lord Devlin’s contention that a society justifiably enforces the code of its moral majority, whatever it might be. In The Morality of the Criminal Law 1965 and in Punishment and Responsibility 1968, Hart contributed substantially to both analytic and normative theories of crime and punishment. 

Hartley, David 170557, British physician and philosopher. Although the notion of association of ideas is ancient, he is generally regarded as the founder of associationism as a self-sufficient psychology. Despite similarities between his association psychology and Hume’s, Hartley developed his system independently, acknowledging only the writings of clergyman John Gay 1699 1745. Hartley was one of many Enlightenment thinkers aspiring to be “Newtons of the mind,” in Peter Gay’s phrase. In Hartley, this took the form of uniting association philosophy with physiology, a project later brought to fruition by Bain. His major work, Observations on Man 1749, pictured mental events and neural events as operating on parallel tracks in which neural events cause mental events. On the mental side, Hartley distinguished like Hume between sensation and idea. On the physiological side, Hartley adopted Newton’s conception of nervous transmission by vibrations of a fine granular substance within nerve-tubes. Vibrations within sensory nerves peripheral to the brain corresponded to the sensations they caused, while small vibrations in the brain, vibratiuncles, corresponded to ideas. Hartley proposed a single law of association, contiguity modified by frequency, which took two forms, one for the mental side and one for the neural: ideas, or vibratiuncles, occurring together regularly become associated. Hartley distinguished between simultaneous association, the link between ideas that occur at the same harmony, preestablished Hartley, David 362    AM  362 moment, and successive association, between ideas that closely succeed one another. Successive associations occur only in a forward direction; there are no backward associations, a thesis generating much controversy in the later experimental study of memory.  A

Hartmann, Eduard von 18421906, German philosopher who sought to synthesize the thought of Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer. The most important of his fifteen books was Philosophie des Unbewussten Philosophy of the Unconscious, 1869. For Hartmann both will and idea are interrelated and are expressions of an absolute “thing-in-itself,” the unconscious. The unconscious is the active essence in natural and psychic processes and is the teleological dynamic in organic life. Paradoxically, he claimed that the teleology immanent in the world order and the life process leads to insight into the irrationality of the “will-to-live.” The maturation of rational consciousness would, he held, lead to the negation of the total volitional process and the entire world process would cease. Ideas indicate the “what” of existence and constitute, along with will and the unconscious, the three modes of being. Despite its pessimism, this work enjoyed considerable popularity. Hartmann was an unusual combination of speculative idealist and philosopher of science defending vitalism and attacking mechanistic materialism; his pessimistic ethics was part of a cosmic drama of redemption. Some of his later works dealt with a critical form of Darwinism that led him to adopt a positive evolutionary stance that undermined his earlier pessimism. His general philosophical position was selfdescribed as “transcendental realism.” His Philosophy of the Unconscious was translated into English by W. C. Coupland in three volumes in 1884. There is little doubt that his metaphysics of the unconscious prepared the way for Freud’s later theory of the unconscious mind. 

Hartmann, Nicolai 18821950, Latvian-born German philosopher. He taught at the universities of Marburg, Cologne, Berlin, and Göttingen, and wrote more than a dozen major works on the history of philosophy, ontology, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics. A realist in epistemology and ontology, Hartmann held that cognition is the apprehension of something independent of the act of apprehension or any other mental events. An accurate phenomenology, such as Husserl’s, would acknowledge, according to him, that we apprehend not only particular, spatiotemporal objects, but also “ideal objects,” “essences,” which Hartmann explicitly identified with Platonic Forms. Among these are ethical values and the objects of mathematics and logic. Our apprehension of values is emotional in character, as Scheler had held. This point is compatible with their objectivity and their mindindependence, since the emotions are just another mode of apprehension. The point applies, however, only to ethical values. Aesthetic values are essentially subjective; they exist only for the subject experiencing them. The number of ethical values is far greater than usually supposed, nor are they derivable from a single fundamental value. At best we only glimpse some of them, and even these may not be simultaneously realizable. This explains and to some extent justifies the existence of moral disagreement, between persons as well as between whole cultures. Hartmann was most obviously influenced by Plato, Husserl, and Scheler. But he was a major, original philosopher in his own right. He has received less recognition than he deserves probably because his views were quite different from those dominant in recent Anglo-American philosophy or in recent Continental philosophy. What is perhaps his most important work, Ethics, was published in German in 1926, one year before Heidegger’s Being and Time, and appeared in English in 1932. 

Hartshorne, Charles b.1897, chief American exponent of process philosophy and theology in the late twentieth century. After receiving the Ph.D. at Harvard in 1923 he came under the influence of Whitehead, and later, with Paul Weiss, edited The Collected Papers of C. S. Peirce 193135. In The Philosophy and Psychology of Sensation 1934 Hartshorne argued that all sensations are feelings on an affective continuum. These ideas were later incorporated into a neoclassical metaphysic that is panpsychist, indeterministic, and theistic. Nature is a theater of interactions among ephemeral centers of creative activity, each of which becomes objectively immortal in the memory of God. In Man’s Vision of God 1941 Hartshorne chastised philosophers for being insufficiently attentive to the varieties of theism. His alternative, called dipolar theism, also defended in The Divine Hartmann, Eduard von Hartshorne, Charles 363    AM  363 Relativity 1948, pictures God as supremely related to and perfectly responding to every actuality. The universe is God’s body. The divine is, in different respects, infinite and finite, eternal and temporal, necessary and contingent. Establishing God’s existence is a metaphysical project, which Hartshorne characterizes in Creative Synthesis 1970 as the search for necessary truths about existence. The central element in his cumulative case for God’s existence, called the global argument, is a modal version of the ontological argument, which Hartshorne was instrumental in rehabilitating in The Logic of Perfection 1962 and Anselm’s Discovery 1965. Creative Synthesis also articulated the theory that aesthetic values are the most universal and that beauty is a mean between the twin extremes of order/disorder and simplicity/complexity. The Zero Fallacy 1997, Hartshorne’s twentieth book, summarized his assessment of the history of philosophy  also found in Insights and Oversights of Great Thinkers 1983 and Creativity in American Philosophy 1984  and introduced important refinements of his metaphysics. 

hedonism, the view that pleasure including the absence of pain is the sole intrinsic good in life. The hedonist may hold that, questions of morality aside, persons inevitably do seek pleasure psychological hedonism; that, questions of psychology aside, morally we should seek pleasure ethical hedonism; or that we inevitably do, and ought to, seek pleasure ethical and psychological hedonism combined. Psychological hedonism itself admits of a variety of possible forms. One may hold, e.g., that all motivation is based on the prospect of present or future pleasure. More plausibly, some philosophers have held that all choices of future actions are based on one’s presently taking greater pleasure in the thought of doing one act rather than another. Still a third type of hedonism  with roots in empirical psychology  is that the attainment of pleasure is the primary drive of a wide range of organisms including human beings and is responsible, through some form of conditioning, for all acquired motivations. Ethical hedonists may, but need not, appeal to some form of psychological hedonism to buttress their case. For, at worst, the truth of some form of psychological hedonism makes ethical hedonism empty or inescapable  but not false. As a value theory a theory of what is ultimately good, ethical hedonism has typically led to one or the other of two conceptions of morally correct action. Both of these are expressions of moral consequentialism in that they judge actions strictly by their consequences. On standard formulations of utilitarianism, actions are judged by the amount of pleasure they produce for all sentient beings; on some formulations of egoist views, actions are judged by their consequences for one’s own pleasure. Neither egoism nor utilitarianism, however, must be wedded to a hedonistic value theory. A hedonistic value theory admits of a variety of claims about the characteristic sources and types of pleasure. One contentious issue has been what activities yield the greatest quantity of pleasure  with prominent candidates including philosophical and other forms of intellectual discourse, the contemplation of beauty, and activities productive of “the pleasures of the senses.” Most philosophical hedonists, despite the popular associations of the word, have not espoused sensual pleasure. Another issue, famously raised by J. S. Mill, is whether such different varieties of pleasure admit of differences of quality as well as quantity. Even supposing them to be equal in quantity, can we say, e.g., that the pleasures of intellectual activity are superior in quality to those of watching sports on television? And if we do say such things, are we departing from strict hedonism by introducing a value distinction not really based on pleasure at all? Most philosophers have found hedonism  both psychological and ethical  exaggerated in its claims. One difficulty for both sorts of hedonism is the hedonistic paradox, which may be put as follows. Many of the deepest and best pleasures of life of love, of child rearing, of work seem to come most often to those who are engaging in an activity for reasons other than pleasure seeking. Hence, not only is it dubious that we always in fact seek or value only pleasure, but also dubious that the best way to achieve pleasure is to seek it. Another area of difficulty concerns happihasty, generalization, fallacy of hedonism 364    AM  364 ness  and its relation to pleasure. In the tradition of Aristotle, happiness is broadly understood as something like well-being and has been viewed, not implausibly, as a kind of natural end of all human activities. But ‘happiness’ in this sense is broader than ‘pleasure’, insofar as the latter designates a particular kind of feeling, whereas ‘well-being’ does not. Attributions of happiness, moreover, appear to be normative in a way in which attributions of pleasure are not. It is thought that a truly happy person has achieved, is achieving, or stands to achieve, certain things respecting the “truly important” concerns of human life. Of course, such achievements will characteristically produce pleasant feelings; but, just as characteristically, they will involve states of active enjoyment of activities  where, as Aristotle first pointed out, there are no distinctive feelings of pleasure apart from the doing of the activity itself. In short, the Aristotelian thesis that happiness is the natural end of all human activities, even if it is true, does not seem to lend much support to hedonism  psychological or ethical. 

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 17701831, one of the most influential and systematic of the German idealists, also well known for his philosophy of history and philosophy of religion. Life and works. Hegel, the eldest of three children, was born in Stuttgart, the son of a minor financial official in the court of the Duchy of Württemberg. His mother died when he was eleven. At eighteen, he began attending the theology seminary or Stift attached to the  at Tübingen; he studied theology and classical languages and literature and became friendly with his future colleague and adversary, Schelling, as well as the great genius of German Romantic poetry, Hölderlin. In 1793, upon graduation, he accepted a job as a tutor for a family in Bern, and moved to Frankfurt in 1797 for a similar post. In 1799 his father bequeathed him a modest income and the freedom to resign his tutoring job, pursue his own work, and attempt to establish himself in a  position. In 1801, with the help of Schelling, he moved to the  town of Jena, already widely known as the home of Schiller, Fichte, and the Schlegel brothers. After lecturing for a few years, he became a professor in 1805. Prior to the move to Jena, Hegel’s essays had been chiefly concerned with problems in morality, the theory of culture, and the philosophy of religion. Hegel shared with Rousseau and the German Romantics many doubts about the political and moral implications of the European Enlightenment and modern philosophy in general, even while he still enthusiastically championed what he termed the principle of modernity, “absolute freedom.” Like many, he feared that the modern attack on feudal political and religious authority would merely issue in the reformulation of new internalized and still repressive forms of authority. And he was among that legion of German intellectuals infatuated with ancient Greece and the superiority of their supposedly harmonious social life, compared with the authoritarian and legalistic character of the Jewish and later Christian religions. At Jena, however, he coedited a journal with Schelling, The Critical Journal of Philosophy, and came to work much more on the philosophic issues created by the critical philosophy or “transcendental idealism” of Kant, and its legacy in the work of Rheinhold, Fichte, and Schelling. His written work became much more influenced by these theoretical projects and their attempt to extend Kant’s search for the basic categories necessary for experience to be discriminated and evaluated, and for a theory of the subject that, in some non-empirical way, was responsible for such categories. Problems concerning the completeness, interrelation, and ontological status of such a categorial structure were quite prominent, along with a continuing interest in the relation between a free, self-determining agent and the supposed constraints of moral principles and other agents. In his early years at Jena especially before Schelling left in 1803, he was particularly preoccupied with this problem of a systematic philosophy, a way of accounting for the basic categories of the natural world and for human practical activity that would ground all such categories on commonly presupposed and logically interrelated, even interdeducible, principles. In Hegel’s terms, this was the problem of the relation between a “Logic” and a “Philosophy of Nature” and “Philosophy of Spirit.” After 1803, however, while he was preparing his own systematic philosophy for publication, what had been planned as a short introduction to this system took on a life of its own and grew into one of Hegel’s most provocative and influential books. Working at a furious pace, he finished hedonistic paradox Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 365    AM  365 what would be eventually called The Phenomenology of Spirit in a period of great personal and political turmoil. During the final writing of the book, he had learned that Christina Burkhard would give birth to his illegitimate son. Ludwig was born in February 1807. And he is supposed to have completed the text on October 13, 1807, the day Napoleon’s armies captured Jena. It was certainly an unprecedented work. In conception, it is about the human race itself as a developing, progressively more self-conscious subject, but its content seems to take in a vast, heterogeneous range of topics, from technical issues in empiricist epistemology to the significance of burial rituals. Its range is so heterogeneous that there is controversy to this day about whether it has any overall unity, or whether it was pieced together at the last minute. Adding to the interpretive problem, Hegel often invented his own striking language of “inverted worlds,” “struggles to the death for recognition,” “unhappy consciousness,” “spiritual animal kingdoms,” and “beautiful souls.” Continuing his  career at Jena in those times looked out of the question, so Hegel accepted a job at Bamberg editing a newspaper, and in the following year began an eight-year stint 180816 as headmaster and philosophy teacher at a Gymnasium or secondary school at Nürnberg. During this period, at forty-one, he married the twenty-year-old Marie von Tucher. He also wrote what is easily his most difficult work, and the one he often referred to as his most important, a magisterial two-volume Science of Logic, which attempts to be a philosophical account of the concepts necessary in all possible kinds of account-givings. Finally, in 1816, Hegel was offered a chair in philosophy at the  of Heidelberg, where he published the first of several versions of his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, his own systematic account of the relation between the “logic” of human thought and the “real” expression of such interrelated categories in our understanding of the natural world and in our understanding and evaluation of our own activities. In 1818, he accepted the much more prestigious post in philosophy at Berlin, where he remained until his death in 1831. Soon after his arrival in Berlin, he began to exert a powerful influence over German letters and intellectual life. In 1821, in the midst of a growing political and nationalist crisis in Prussia, he published his controversial book on political philosophy, The Philosophy of Right. His lectures at the  were later published as his philosophy of history, of aesthetics, and of religion, and as his history of philosophy. Philosophy. Hegel’s most important ideas were formed gradually, in response to a number of issues in philosophy and often in response to historical events. Moreover, his language and approach were so heterodox that he has inspired as much controversy about the meaning of his position as about its adequacy. Hence any summary will be as much a summary of the controversies as of the basic position. His dissatisfactions with the absence of a public realm, or any forms of genuine social solidarity in the German states and in modernity generally, and his distaste with what he called the “positivity” of the orthodox religions of the day their reliance on law, scripture, and abstract claims to authority, led him to various attempts to make use of the Grecian polis and classical art, as well as the early Christian understanding of love and a renewed “folk religion,” as critical foils to such tendencies. For some time, he also regarded much traditional and modern philosophy as itself a kind of lifeless classifying that only contributed to contemporary fragmentation, myopia, and confusion. These concerns remained with him throughout his life, and he is thus rightly known as one of the first modern thinkers to argue that what had come to be accepted as the central problem of modern social and political life, the legitimacy of state power, had been too narrowly conceived. There are now all sorts of circumstances, he argued, in which people might satisfy the modern criterion of legitimacy and “consent” to the use of some power, but not fully understand the terms within which such issues are posed, or assent in an attenuated, resentful, manipulated, or confused way. In such cases they would experience no connection between their individual will and the actual content of the institutions they are supposed to have sanctioned. The modern problem is as much alienation Entfremdung as sovereignty, an exercise of will in which the product of one’s will appears “strange” or “alien,” “other,” and which results in much of modern life, however chosen or willed, being fundamentally unsatisfying. However, during the Jena years, his views on this issue changed. Most importantly, philosophical issues moved closer to center stage in the Hegelian drama. He no longer regarded philosophy as some sort of self-undermining activity that merely prepared one for some leap into genuine “speculation” roughly Schelling’s position Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 366    AM  366 and began to champion a unique kind of comprehensive, very determinate reflection on the interrelations among all the various classical alternatives in philosophy. Much more controversially, he also attempted to understand the way in which such relations and transitions were also reflected in the history of the art, politics, and religions of various historical communities. He thus came to think that philosophy should be some sort of recollection of its past history, a realization of the mere partiality, rather than falsity, of its past attempts at a comprehensive teaching, and an account of the centrality of these continuously developing attempts in the development of other human practices. Through understanding the “logic” of such a development, a reconciliation of sorts with the implications of such a rational process in contemporary life, or at least with the potentialities inherent in contemporary life, would be possible. In all such influences and developments, one revolutionary aspect of Hegel’s position became clearer. For while Hegel still frequently argued that the subject matter of philosophy was “reason,” or “the Absolute,” the unconditioned presupposition of all human account-giving and evaluation, and thereby an understanding of the “whole” within which the natural world and human deeds were “parts,” he also always construed this claim to mean that the subject matter of philosophy was the history of human experience itself. Philosophy was about the real world of human change and development, understood by Hegel to be the collective self-education of the human species about itself. It could be this, and satisfy the more traditional ideals because, in one of his most famous phrases, “what is actual is rational,” or because some full account could be given of the logic or teleological order, even the necessity, for the great conceptual and political changes in human history. We could thereby finally reassure ourselves that the way our species had come to conceptualize and evaluate is not finite or contingent, but is “identical” with “what there is, in truth.” This identity theory or Absolute Knowledgemeans that we will then be able to be “at home” in the world and so will have understood what philosophers have always tried to understand, “how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.” The way it all hangs together is, finally, “due to us,” in some collective and historical and “logical” sense. In a much disputed passage in his Philosophy of Religion lectures, Hegel even suggested that with such an understanding, history itself would be over. Several elements in this general position have inspired a good deal of excitement and controversy. To advance claims such as these Hegel had to argue against a powerful, deeply influential assumption in modern thought: the priority of the individual, self-conscious subject. Such an assumption means, for example, that almost all social relations, almost all our bonds to other human beings, exist because and only because they are made, willed into existence by individuals otherwise naturally unattached to each other. With respect to knowledge claims, while there may be many beliefs in a common tradition that we unreflectively share with others, such shared beliefs are also taken primarily to be the result of individuals continuously affirming such beliefs, however implicitly or unreflectively. Their being shared is simply a consequence of their being simultaneously affirmed or assented to by individuals. Hegel’s account requires a different picture, an insistence on the priority of some kind of collective subject, which he called human “spirit” or Geist. His general theory of conceptual and historical change requires the assumption of such a collective subject, one that even can be said to be “coming to self-consciousness” about itself, and this required that he argue against the view that so much could be understood as the result of individual will and reflection. Rather, he tried in many different ways to show that the formation of what might appear to an individual to be his or her own particular intention or desire or belief already reflected a complex social inheritance that could itself be said to be evolving, even evolving progressively, with a “logic” of its own. The completion of such collective attempts at self-knowledge resulted in what Hegel called the realization of Absolute Spirit, by which he either meant the absolute completion of the human attempt to know itself, or the realization in human affairs of some sort of extrahuman transcendence, or full expression of an infinite God. Hegel tried to advance all such claims about social subjectivity without in some way hypostatizing or reifying such a subject, as if it existed independently of the actions and thoughts of individuals. This claim about the deep dependence of individuals on one another even for their very identity, even while they maintain their independence, is one of the best-known examples of Hegel’s attempt at a dialectical resolution of many of the traditional oppositions and antinomies of past thought. Hegel often argued that what appeared to be contraries in philosophy, such as mind/body, freedom/determinism, Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 367    AM  367 idealism/materialism, universal/particular, the state/the individual, or even God/man, appeared such incompatible alternatives only because of the undeveloped and so incomplete perspective within which the oppositions were formulated. So, in one of his more famous attacks on such dualisms, human freedom according to Hegel could not be understood coherently as some purely rational self-determination, independent of heteronomous impulses, nor the human being as a perpetual opposition between reason and sensibility. In his moral theory, Kant had argued for the latter view and Hegel regularly returned to such Kantian claims about the opposition of duty and inclination as deeply typical of modern dualism. Hegel claimed that Kant’s version of a rational principle, the “categorical imperative,” was so formal and devoid of content as not to be action-guiding it could not coherently rule in or rule out the appropriate actions, and that the “moral point of view” rigoristically demanded a pure or dutiful motivation to which no human agent could conform. By contrast, Hegel claimed that the dualisms of morality could be overcome in ethical life Sittlichkeit, those modern social institutions which, it was claimed, provided the content or true “objects” of a rational will. These institutions, the family, civil society, and the state, did not require duties in potential conflict with our own substantive ends, but were rather experienced as the “realization” of our individual free will. It has remained controversial what for Hegel a truly free, rational self-determination, continuous with, rather than constraining, our desire for happiness and self-actualization, amounted to. Many commentators have noted that, among modern philosophers, only Spinoza, whom Hegel greatly admired, was as insistent on such a thoroughgoing compatibilism, and on a refusal to adopt the Christian view of human beings as permanently divided against themselves. In his most ambitious analysis of such oppositions Hegel went so far as to claim that, not only could alternatives be shown to be ultimately compatible when thought together within some higher-order “Notion” Begriff that resolved or “sublated” the opposition, but that one term in such opposition could actually be said to imply or require its contrary, that a “positing” of such a notion would, to maintain consistency, require its own “negating,” and that it was this sort of dialectical opposition that could be shown to require a sublation, or Aufhebung a term of art in Hegel that simultaneously means in German ‘to cancel’, ‘to preserve’, and ‘to raise up’. This claim for a dialectical development of our fundamental notions has been the most severely criticized in Hegel’s philosophy. Many critics have doubted that so much basic conceptual change can be accounted for by an internal critique, one that merely develops the presuppositions inherent in the affirmation of some notion or position or related practice. This issue has especially attracted critics of Hegel’s Science of Logic, where he tries first to show that the attempt to categorize anything that is, simply and immediately, as “Being,” is an attempt that both “negates itself,” or ends up categorizing everything as “Nothing,” and then that this self-negation requires a resolution in the higher-order category of “Becoming.” This analysis continues into an extended argument that purports to show that any attempt to categorize anything at all must ultimately make use of the distinctions of “essence” and “appearance,” and elements of syllogistic and finally Hegel’s own dialectical logic, and both the details and the grand design of that project have been the subject of a good deal of controversy. Unfortunately, much of this controversy has been greatly confused by the popular association of the terms “thesis,” “antithesis,” and “synthesis” with Hegel’s theory of dialectic. These crude, mechanical notions were invented in 1837 by a less-than-sensitive Hegel expositor, Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus, and were never used as terms of art by Hegel. Others have argued that the tensions Hegel does identify in various positions and practices require a much broader analysis of the historical, especially economic, context within which positions are formulated and become important, or some more detailed attention to the empirical discoveries or paradoxes that, at the very least, contribute to basic conceptual change. Those worried about the latter problem have also raised questions about the logical relation between universal and particular implied in Hegel’s account. Hegel, following Fichte, radicalizes a Kantian claim about the inaccessibility of pure particularity in sensations Kant had written that “intuitions without concepts are blind”. Hegel charges that Kant did not draw sufficiently radical conclusions from such an antiempiricist claim, that he should have completely rethought the traditional distinction between “what was given to the mind” and “what the mind did with the given.” By contrast Hegel is confident that he has a theory of a “concrete universal,” concepts that cannot be understood as pale generalizations or abstract representations of given particulars, because they are required for particulars to Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 368    AM  368 be apprehended in the first place. They are not originally dependent on an immediate acquaintance with particulars; there is no such acquaintance. Critics wonder if Hegel has much of a theory of particularity left, if he does not claim rather that particulars, or whatever now corresponds to them, are only interrelations of concepts, and in which the actual details of the organization of the natural world and human history are deduced as conceptual necessities in Hegel’s Encyclopedia. This interpretation of Hegel, that he believes all entities are really the thoughts, expressions, or modes of a single underlying mental substance, and that this mind develops and posits itself with some sort of conceptual necessity, has been termed a panlogicism, a term of art coined by Hermann Glockner, a Hegel commentator in the first half of the twentieth century. It is a much-disputed reading. Such critics are especially concerned with the implications of this issue in Hegel’s political theory, where the great modern opposition between the state and the individual seems subjected to this same logic, and the individual’s true individuality is said to reside in and only in the political universal, the State. Thus, on the one hand, Hegel’s political philosophy is often praised for its early identification and analysis of a fundamental, new aspect of contemporary life  the categorically distinct realm of political life in modernity, or the independence of the “State” from the social world of private individuals engaged in competition and private association “civil society”. But, on the other hand, his attempt to argue for a completion of these domains in the State, or that individuals could only be said to be free in allegiance to a State, has been, at least since Marx, one of the most criticized aspects of his philosophy. Finally, criticisms also frequently target the underlying intention behind such claims: Hegel’s career-long insistence on finding some basic unity among the many fragmented spheres of modern thought and existence, and his demand that this unity be articulated in a discursive account, that it not be merely felt, or gestured at, or celebrated in edifying speculation. PostHegelian thinkers have tended to be suspicious of any such intimations of a whole for modern experience, and have argued that, with the destruction of the premodern world, we simply have to content ourselves with the disconnected, autonomous spheres of modern interests. In his lecture courses these basic themes are treated in wide-ranging accounts of the basic institutions of cultural history. History itself is treated as fundamentally political history, and, in typically Hegelian fashion, the major epochs of political history are claimed to be as they were because of the internal inadequacies of past epochs, all until some final political semiconsciousness is achieved and realized. Art is treated equally developmentally, evolving from symbolic, through “classical,” to the most intensely self-conscious form of aesthetic subjectivity, romantic art. The Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion embody these themes in some of the most controversial ways, since Hegel often treats religion and its development as a kind of picture or accessible “representation” of his own views about the relation of thought to being, the proper understanding of human finitude and “infinity,” and the essentially social or communal nature of religious life. This has inspired a characteristic debate among Hegel scholars, with some arguing that Hegel’s appropriation of religion shows that his own themes are essentially religious if an odd, pantheistic version of Christianity, while others argue that he has so Hegelianized religious issues that there is little distinctively religious left. Influence. This last debate is typical of that prominent in the post-Hegelian tradition. Although, in the decades following his death, there was a great deal of work by self-described Hegelians on the history of law, on political philosophy, and on aesthetics, most of the prominent academic defenders of Hegel were interested in theology, and many of these were interested in defending an interpretation of Hegel consistent with traditional Christian views of a personal God and personal immortality. This began to change with the work of “young Hegelians” such as D. F. Strauss 180874, Feuerbach 180472, Bruno Bauer 180982, and Arnold Ruge 180380, who emphasized the humanistic and historical dimensions of Hegel’s account of religion, rejected the Old Hegelian tendencies toward a reconciliation with contemporary political life, and began to reinterpret and expand Hegel’s account of the productive activity of human spirit eventually focusing on labor rather than intellectual and cultural life. Strauss himself characterized the fight as between “left,” “center,” and “right” Hegelians, depending on whether one was critical or conservative politically, or had a theistic or a humanistic view of Hegelian Geist. The most famous young or left Hegelian was Marx, especially during his days in Paris as coeditor, with Ruge, of the Deutsch-französischen Jahrbücher 1844. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 369    AM  369 In Great Britain, with its long skeptical, empiricist, and utilitarian tradition, Hegel’s work had little influence until the latter part of the nineteenth century, when philosophers such as Green and Caird took up some of the holistic themes in Hegel and developed a neo-Hegelian reading of issues in politics and religion that began to have influence in the academy. The most prominent of the British neo-Hegelians of the next generation were Bosanquet, McTaggart, and especially Bradley, all of whom were interested in many of the metaphysical implications of Hegel’s idealism, what they took to be a Hegelian claim for the “internally related” interconnection of all particulars within one single, ideal or mental, substance. Moore and Russell waged a hugely successful counterattack in the name of traditional empiricism and what would be called “analytic philosophy” against such an enterprise and in this tradition largely finished off the influence of Hegel or what was left of the historical Hegel in these neo-Hegelian versions. In Germany, Hegel has continued to influence a number of different schools of neo-Marxism, sometimes itself simply called “Hegelian Marxism,” especially the Frankfurt School, or “critical theory” group especially Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse. And he has been extremely influential in France, particularly thanks to the lectures of a brilliant if idiosyncratic Russian émigré, Alexander Kojève, who taught Hegel in the 1930s at the École Pratique des Hautes Études to the likes of Merleau-Ponty and Lacan. Kojève was as much influenced by Marx and Heidegger as Hegel, but his lectures inspired many thinkers to turn again to Hegel’s account of human selfdefinition in time and to the historicity of all institutions and practices and so forged an unusual link between Hegel and postwar existentialism. Hegelian themes continue to resurface in contemporary hermeneutics, in “communitarianism” in ethics, and in the increasing attention given to conceptual change and history in the philosophy of science. This has meant for many that Hegel should now be regarded not only as the origin of a distinctive tradition in European philosophy that emphasizes the historical and social nature of human existence, but as a potential contributor to many new and often interdisciplinary approaches to philosophy. 

Heidegger, Martin: “the greatest philosopher that ever lived” – H. P. Grice. German philosopher whose early works contributed to phenomenology and existentialism e.g., Sartre and whose later works paved the way to hermeneutics Gadamer and post-structuralism Derrida and Foucault. Born in Messkirch in the Black Forest region, Heidegger first trained to be a Jesuit, but switched to mathematics and philosophy in 1911. As an instructor at Freiburg , he worked with the founder of phenomenology, Husserl. His masterwork, Sein und Zeit Being and Time, 1927, was published while he was teaching at Marburg . This work, in opposition to the preoccupation with epistemology dominant at the time, focused on the traditional question of metaphysics: What is the being of entities in general? Rejecting abstract theoretical approaches to this question, Heidegger drew on Kierkegaard’s religious individualism and the influential movement called life-philosophy  Lebensphilosophie, then identified with Nietzsche, Bergson, and Dilthey  to develop a highly original account of humans as embedded in concrete situations of action. Heidegger accepted Husserl’s chair at Freiburg in 1928; in 1933, having been elected rector of the , he joined the Nazi party. Although he stepped down as rector one year later, new evidence suggests complicity with the Nazis until the end of the war. Starting in the late thirties, his writings started to shift toward the “antihumanist” and “poetic” form of thinking referred to as “later Heidegger.” Heidegger’s lifelong project was to answer the “question of being” Seinsfrage. This question asks, concerning things in general rocks, tools, people, etc., what is it to be an entity of these sorts? It is the question of ontology first posed by ancient Grecian philosophers from Anaximander to Aristotle. Heidegger holds, however, that philosophers starting with Plato have gone astray in trying to answer this question because they have tended to think of being as a property or essence enduringly present in things. In other words, they have fallen into the “metaphysics of presence,” which thinks of being as substance. What is overlooked in traditional metaphysics is the background conditions that enable entities to show up as counting or mattering in some specific way in the first place. In his early works, Heidegger tries to bring this concealed dimension of things to light by recasting the question of being: What is the meaning of being? Or, put differently, how do entities come to show up as intelligible to Hegelians, Young Heidegger, Martin 370    AM  370 us in some determinate way? And this question calls for an analysis of the entity that has some prior understanding of things: human existence or Dasein the German word for “existence” or “being-there,” used to refer to the structures of humans that make possible an understanding of being. Heidegger’s claim is that Dasein’s pretheoretical or “preontological” understanding of being, embodied in its everyday practices, opens a “clearing” in which entities can show up as, say, tools, protons, numbers, mental events, and so on. This historically unfolding clearing is what the metaphysical tradition has overlooked. In order to clarify the conditions that make possible an understanding of being, then, Being and Time begins with an analytic of Dasein. But Heidegger notes that traditional interpretations of human existence have been one-sided to the extent that they concentrate on our ways of existing when we are engaged in theorizing and detached reflection. It is this narrow focus on the spectator attitude that leads to the picture, found in Descartes, of the self as a mind or subject representing material objects  the so-called subjectobject model. In order to bypass this traditional picture, Heidegger sets out to describe Dasein’s “average everydayness,” i.e., our ordinary, prereflective agency when we are caught up in the midst of practical affairs. The “phenomenology of everydayness” is supposed to lead us to see the totality of human existence, including our moods, our capacity for authentic individuality, and our full range of involvements with the world and with others. The analytic of Dasein is also an ontological hermeneutics to the extent that it provides an account of how understanding in general is possible. The result of the analytic is a portrayal of human existence that is in accord with what Heidegger regards as the earliest Grecian experience of being as an emerging-into-presence physis: to be human is to be a temporal event of self-manifestation that lets other sorts of entities first come to “emerge and abide” in the world. From the standpoint of this description, the traditional concept of substance  whether mental or physical  simply has no role to play in grasping humans. Heidegger’s brilliant diagnoses or “de-structurings” of the tradition suggest that the idea of substance arises only when the conditions making entities possible are forgotten or concealed. Heidegger holds that there is no pregiven human essence. Instead, humans, as self-interpreting beings, just are what they make of themselves in the course of their active lives. Thus, as everyday agency, Dasein is not an object with properties, but is rather the “happening” of a life course “stretched out between birth and death.” Understood as the “historicity” of a temporal movement or “becoming,” Dasein is found to have three main “existentials” or basic structures shared by every “existentiell” i.e., specific and local way of living. First, Dasein finds itself thrown into a world not of its choosing, already delivered over to the task of living out its life in a concrete context. This “facticity” of our lives is revealed in the moods that let things matter to us in some way or other  e.g., the burdensome feelings of concern that accompany being a parent in our culture. Second, as projection, Dasein is always already taking some stand on its life by acting in the world. Understood as agency, human existence is “ahead of itself” in two senses: 1 our competent dealings with familiar situations sketch out a range of possibilities for how things may turn out in the future, and 2 each of our actions is contributing to shaping our lives as people of specific sorts. Dasein is futuredirected in the sense that the ongoing fulfillment of possibilities in the course of one’s active life constitutes one’s identity or being. To say that Dasein is “being-toward-death” is to say that the stands we take our “understanding” define our being as a totality. Thus, my actual ways of treating my children throughout my life define my being as a parent in the end, regardless of what good intentions I might have. Finally, Dasein is discourse in the sense that we are always articulating  or “addressing and discussing”  the entities that show up in our concernful absorption in current situations. These three existentials define human existence as a temporal unfolding. The unity of these dimensions  being already in a world, ahead of itself, and engaged with things  Heidegger calls care. This is what it means to say that humans are the entities whose being is at issue for them. Taking a stand on our own being, we constitute our identity through what we do. The formal structure of Dasein as temporality is made concrete through one’s specific involvements in the world where ‘world’ is used in the life-world sense in which we talk about the business world or the world of academia. Dasein is the unitary phenomenon of being-in-the-world. A core component of Heidegger’s early works is his description of how Dasein’s practical dealings with equipment define the being of the entities that show up in the world. In hammering in a workshop, e.g., what ordinarily shows up for us is not a hammer-thing with properties, but rather a web of significance relations shaped by Heidegger, Martin Heidegger, Martin 371    AM  371 our projects. Hammering is “in order to” join boards, which is “for” building a bookcase, which is “for the sake of” being a person with a neat study. The hammer is encountered in terms of its place in this holistic context of functionality  the “ready-to-hand.” In other words, the being of the equipment  its “ontological definition”  consists of its relations to other equipment and its actual use within the entire practical context. Seen from this standpoint, the brute, meaningless objects assumed to be basic by the metaphysical tradition  the “present-at-hand”  can show up only when there is a breakdown in our ordinary dealings with things, e.g., when the hammer breaks or is missing. In this sense, the ready-to-hand is said to be more primordial than the material objects treated as basic by the natural sciences. It follows, then, that the being of entities in the world is constituted by the framework of intelligibility or “disclosedness” opened by Dasein’s practices. This clearing is truth in the original meaning of the Grecian word aletheia, which Heidegger renders as ‘un-concealment’. But it would be wrong to think that what is claimed here is that humans are initially just given, and that they then go on to create a clearing. For, in Heidegger’s view, our own being as agents of specific types is defined by the world into which we are thrown: in my workshop, I can be a craftsman or an amateur, but not a samurai paying court to a daimyo. Our identity as agents is made possible by the context of shared forms of life and linguistic practices of a public life-world. For the most part, we exist as the “they” das Man, participants in the historically constituted “cohappening of a people” Volk. The embeddedness of our existence in a cultural context explains our inveterate tendency toward inauthenticity. As we become initiated into the practices of our community, we are inclined to drift along with the crowd, doing what “one” does, enacting stereotyped roles, and thereby losing our ability to seize on and define our own lives. Such falling into public preoccupations Heidegger sees as a sign that we are fleeing from the fact that we are finite beings who stand before death understood as the culmination of our possibilities. When, through anxiety and hearing the call of conscience, we face up to our being-toward-death, our lives can be transformed. To be authentic is to clear-sightedly face up to one’s responsibility for what one’s life is adding up to as a whole. And because our lives are inseparable from our community’s existence, authenticity involves seizing on the possibilities circulating in our shared “heritage” in order to realize a communal “destiny.” Heidegger’s ideal of resolute “taking action” in the current historical situation no doubt contributed to his leap into politics in the 1930s. According to his writings of that period, the ancient Grecians inaugurated a “first beginning” for Western civilization, but centuries of forgetfulness beginning with the Latinization of Grecian words have torn us away from the primal experience of being rooted in that initial setting. Heidegger hoped that, guided by the insights embodied in great works of art especially Hölderlin’s poetry, National Socialism would help bring about a world-rejuvenating “new beginning” comparable to the first beginning in ancient Greece. Heidegger’s later writings attempt to fully escape the subjectivism he sees dominating Western thought from its inception up to Nietzsche. “The Origin of the Work of Art” 1935, for example, shows how a great work of art such as a Grecian temple, by shaping the world in which a people live, constitutes the kinds of people that can live in that world. An Introduction to Metaphysics 1935 tries to recover the Grecian experience of humans as beings whose activities of gathering and naming logos are above all a response to what is more than human. The later writings emphasize that which resists all human mastery and comprehension. Such terms as ‘nothingness’, ‘earth’, and ‘mystery’ suggest that what shows itself to us always depends on a background of what does not show itself, what remains concealed. Language comes to be understood as the medium through which anything, including the human, first becomes accessible and intelligible. Because language is the source of all intelligibility, Heidegger says that humans do not speak, but rather language speaks us  an idea that became central to poststructuralist theories. In his writings after the war, Heidegger replaces the notions of resoluteness and political activism with a new ideal of letting-be or releasement Gelassenheit, a stance characterized by meditative thinking, thankfulness for the “gift” of being, and openness to the silent “call” of language. The technological “enframing” Gestell of our age  encountering everything as a standing reserve on hand for our use  is treated not as something humans do, but instead as a manifestation of being itself. The “anti-humanism” of these later works is seen in the description of technology the mobilization of everything for the sole purpose of greater efficiency as an Heidegger, Martin Heidegger, Martin 372    AM  372 epochal event in the “history of being,” a way things have come-into-their-own Ereignis rather than as a human accomplishment. The history or “sending” Geschick of being consists of epochs that have all gone increasingly astray from the original beginning inaugurated by the pre-Socratics. Since human willpower alone cannot bring about a new epoch, technology cannot be ended by our efforts. But a non-technological way of encountering things is hinted at in a description of a jug as a fourfold of earth, sky, mortals, and gods, and Heidegger reflects on forms of poetry that point to a new, non-metaphysical way of experiencing being. Through a transformed relation to language and art, and by abandoning “onto-theology” the attempt to ground all entities in one supreme entity, we might prepare ourselves for a transformed way of understanding being. 

Hellenistic philosophy, the philosophical systems of the Hellenistic age 32330 B.C., although 31187 B.C. better defines it as a philosophical era, notably Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Skepticism. These all emerged in the generation after Aristotle’s death 322 B.C., and dominated philosophical debate until the first century B.C., during which there were revivals of traditional Platonism and of Aristotelianism. The age was one in which much of the eastern Mediterranean world absorbed Grecian culture was “Hellenized,” hence “Hellenistic”, and recruits to philosophy flocked from this region to Athens, which remained the center of philosophical activity until 87 B.C. Then the Roman sack of Athens drove many philosophers into exile, and neither the schools nor the styles of philosophy that had grown up there ever fully recovered. Very few philosophical writings survive intact from the period. Our knowledge of Hellenistic philosophers depends mainly on later doxography, on the Roman writers Lucretius and Cicero both mid-first century B.C., and on what we learn from the schools’ critics in later centuries, e.g. Sextus Empiricus and Plutarch. ’Skeptic’, a term not actually current before the very end of the Hellenistic age, serves as a convenient label to characterize two philosophical movements. The first is the New Academy: the school founded by Plato, the Academy, became in this period a largely dialectical one, conducting searching critiques of other schools’ doctrines without declaring any of its own, beyond perhaps the assertion however guarded that nothing could be known and the accompanying recommendation of “suspension of judgment” epoche. The nature and vivacity of Stoicism owed much to its prolonged debates with the New Academy. The founder of this Academic phase was Arcesilaus school head c.268 c.241; its most revered and influential protagonist was Carneades school head in the mid-second century; and its most prestigious voice was that of Cicero 10643 B.C., whose highly influential philosophical works were written mainly from a New Academic stance. But by the early first century B.C. the Academy was drifting back to a more doctrinal stance, and in the later part of the century it was largely eclipsed by a second “skeptic” movement, Pyrrhonism. This was founded by Aenesidemus, a pioneering skeptic despite his claim to be merely reviving the philosophy of Pyrrho, a philosophical guru of the early Hellenistic period. His neo-Pyrrhonism survives today mainly through the writings of Sextus Empiricus second century A.D., an adherent of the school who, strictly speaking, represents its post-Hellenistic phase. The Peripatos, Aristotle’s school, officially survived throughout the era, but it is not regarded as a distinctively “Hellenistic” movement. Despite the eminence of Aristotle’s first successor, Theophrastus school head 322287, it thereafter fell from prominence, its fortunes only reviving around the mid-first century B.C. It is disputed how far the other Hellenistic philosophers were even aware of Aristotle’s treatises, which should not in any case be regarded as a primary influence on them. Each school had a location in Athens to which it could draw pupils. The Epicurean school was a relatively private institution, its “Garden” outside the city walls housing a close-knit philosophical community. The Stoics took their name from the Stoa Poikile, the “Painted Colonnade” in central Athens where they gathered. The Academics were based in the Academy, a public grove just outside the city. Philosophers were public figures, a familiar sight around town. Each school’s philosophical identity was further clarified by its absolute loyalty to the name of its Heidelberg School Hellenistic philosophy 373    AM  373 founder  respectively Epicurus, Zeno of Citium, and Plato  and by the polarities that developed in interschool debates. Epicureanism is diametrically opposed on most issues to Stoicism. Academic Skepticism provides another antithesis to Stoicism, not through any positions of its own it had none, but through its unflagging critical campaign against every Stoic thesis. It is often said that in this age the old Grecian political institution of the city-state had broken down, and that the Hellenistic philosophies were an answer to the resulting crisis of values. Whether or not there is any truth in this, it remains clear that moral concerns were now much less confined to the individual city-state than previously, and that at an extreme the boundaries had been pushed back to include all mankind within the scope of an individual’s moral obligations. Our “affinity” oikeiosis to all mankind is an originally Stoic doctrine that acquired increasing currency with other schools. This attitude partly reflects the weakening of national and cultural boundaries in the Hellenistic period, as also in the Roman imperial period that followed it. The three recognized divisions of philosophy were ethics, logic, and physics. In ethics, the central objective was to state and defend an account of the “end” telos, the moral goal to which all activity was subordinated: the Epicureans named pleasure, the Stoics conformity with nature. Much debate centered on the semimythical figure of the wise man, whose conduct in every conceivable circumstance was debated by all schools. Logic in its modern sense was primarily a Stoic concern, rejected as irrelevant by the Epicureans. But Hellenistic logic included epistemology, where the primary focus of interest was the “criterion of truth,” the ultimate yardstick against which all judgments could be reliably tested. Empiricism was a surprisingly uncontroversial feature of Hellenistic theories: there was little interest in the Platonic-Aristotelian idea that knowledge in the strict sense is non-sensory, and the debate between dogmatists and Skeptics was more concerned with the question whether any proposed sensory criterion was adequate. Both Stoics and Epicureans attached especial importance to prolepsis, the generic notion of a thing, held to be either innate or naturally acquired in a way that gave it a guaranteed veridical status. Physics saw an opposition between Epicurean atomism, with its denial of divine providence, and the Stoic world-continuum, imbued with divine rationality. The issue of determinism was also placed on the philosophical map: Epicurean morality depends on the denial of both physical and logical determinism, whereas Stoic morality is compatible with, indeed actually requires, the deterministic causal nexus through which providence operates. 

Helmholtz, Hermann von 182194, German physiologist and physicist known for groundbreaking work in physics, physiological optics, perceptual psychology, and the philosophy of geometry. Formally trained as a physician, he distinguished himself in physics in 1848 as a codiscoverer of the law of conservation of energy, and by the end of his life was perhaps the most influential figure in German physical research. Philosophically, his most important influence was on the study of space. Intuitionist psychologists held that the geometrical structure of three-dimensional space was given directly in sensation by innate physiological mechanisms; Helmholtz brought this theory to severe empirical trials and argued, on the contrary, that our knowledge of space consists of inferences from accumulated experience. On the mathematical side, he attacked Kant’s view that Euclidean geometry is the a priori form of outer intuition by showing that it is possible to have visual experience of non-Euclidean space “On the Origins and Meaning of Geometrical Axioms,” 1870. His crucial insight was that empirical geometry depends on physical assumptions about the behavior of measuring instruments. This inspired the view of Poincaré and logical empiricism that the empirical content of geometry is fixed by physical definitions, and made possible Einstein’s use of non-Euclidean geometry in physics. 

Helvétius, Claude Adrien 171571, French philosopher prominent in the formative phases of eighteenth-century materialism in France. His De l’esprit 1758 was widely discussed internationally, but condemned by the  of Paris and burned by the government. Helvétius attempted to clarify his doctrine in his posthumously published De l’homme. Following Locke’s criticism of the innate ideas, Helvétius stressed the function of experience in our acquisition of knowledge. In accord with the doctrines of d’Holbach, Condillac, and La Mettrie, the materialist Helvétius regarded the sensations as the basis of all our knowledge. Only by Helmholtz, Hermann von Helvétius, Claude Adrien 374    AM  374 comparison, abstraction, and combination of sensations do we reach the level of concepts. Peculiar to Helvétius, however, is the stress on the social determinations of our knowledge. Specific interests and passions are the starting point of all our striving for knowledge. Egoism is the spring of our desires and actions. The civil laws of the enlightened state enabled egoism to be transformed into social competition and thereby diverted toward public benefits. Like his materialist contemporary d’Holbach and later Condorcet, Helvétius sharply criticized the social function of the church. Priests, he claimed, provided society with wrong moral ideas. He demanded a thorough reform of the educational system for the purpose of individual and social emancipation. In contrast to the teachings of Rousseau, Helvétius praised the further development of science, art, and industry as instruments for the historical progress of mankind. The ideal society consists of enlightened because well-educated citizens living in comfortable and even moderately luxurious circumstances. All people should participate in the search for truth, by means of public debates and discussions. Truth is equated with the moral good. Helvétius had some influence on Marxist historical materialism. H.P. Hempel, Carl Gustav 190597, eminent philosopher of science associated with the Vienna Circle of logical empiricist philosophers in the early 1930s, before his emigration to the United States; thereafter he became one of the most influential philosophers of science of his time, largely through groundbreaking work on the logical analysis of the concepts of confirmation and scientific explanation. Hempel received his doctorate under Reichenbach at the  of Berlin in 1934 with a dissertation on the logical analysis of probability. He studied with Carnap at the  of Vienna in 192930, where he participated in the “protocol-sentence debate” concerning the observational basis of scientific knowledge raging within the Vienna Circle between Moritz Schlick 18821936 and Otto Neurath 18821945. Hempel was attracted to the “radical physicalism” articulated by Neurath and Carnap, which denied the foundational role of immediate experience and asserted that all statements of the total language of science including observation reports or protocol-sentences can be revised as science progresses. This led to Hempel’s first major publication, “On the Logical Positivists’ Theory of Truth” 1935. He moved to the United States to work with Carnap at the  of Chicago in 193738. He also taught at Queens  and Yale before his long career at Princeton 19551975. In the 1940s he collaborated with his friends Olaf Helmer and Paul Oppenheim on a celebrated series of papers, the most influential of which are “Studies in the Logic of Confirmation” 1945 and “Studies in the Logic of Explanation” 1948, coauthored with Oppenheim. The latter paper articulated the deductive-nomological model, which characterizes scientific explanations as deductively valid arguments proceeding from general laws and initial conditions to the fact to be explained, and served as the basis for all future work on the subject. Hempel’s papers on explanation and confirmation and also related topics such as concept formation, criteria of meaningfulness, and scientific theories were collected together in Aspects of Scientific Explanation 1965, one of the most important works in postwar philosophy of science. He also published a more popular, but extremely influential introduction to the field, Philosophy of Natural Science 1966. Hempel and Kuhn became colleagues at Princeton in the 1960s. Another fruitful collaboration ensued, as a result of which Hempel moved away from the Carnapian tradition of logical analysis toward a more naturalistic and pragmatic conception of science in his later work. As he himself explains, however, this later turn can also be seen as a return to a similarly naturalistic conception Neurath had earlier defended within the Vienna Circle. 

henotheism, allegiance to one supreme deity while conceding existence to others; also described as monolatry, incipient monotheism, or practical monotheism. It occupies a middle ground between polytheism and radical monotheism, which denies reality to all gods save one. It has been claimed that early Judaism passed through a henotheistic phase, acknowledging other Middle Eastern deities albeit condemning their worship, en route to exclusive recognition of Yahweh. But the concept of progress from polytheism through henotheism Hempel, Carl Gustav henotheism 375    AM  375 to monotheism is a rationalizing construct, and cannot be supposed to capture the complex development of any historical religion, including that of ancient Israel. A.E.L. Henry of Ghent c.121793, Belgian theologian and philosopher. After serving as a church official at Tournai and Brugge, he taught theology at Paris from 1276. His major writings were Summa quaestionum ordinariarum Summa of Ordinary Questions and Quodlibeta Quodlibetal Questions. He was the leading representative of the neoAugustinian movement at Paris in the final quarter of the thirteenth century. His theory of knowledge combines Aristotelian elements with Augustinian illuminationism. Heavily dependent on Avicenna for his view of the reality enjoyed by essences of creatures esse essentiae from eternity, he rejected both real distinction and real identity of essence and existence in creatures, and defended their intentional distinction. He also rejected a real distinction between the soul and its powers and rejected the purely potential character of prime matter. He defended the duality of substantial form in man, the unicity of form in other material substances, and the primacy of will in the act of choice. J.F.W. Hentisberi, Hentisberus.

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

Herbart, Johann Friedrich 17761841, German philosopher who significantly contributed to psychology and the theory of education. Rejecting the idealism of Fichte and Hegel, he attempted to establish a form of psychology founded on experience. The task of philosophy is the analysis of concepts given in ordinary experience. Logic must clarify these concepts, Metaphysics should correct them, while Aesthetics and Ethics are to complement them by an analysis of values. Herbart advocated a form of determinism in psychology and ethics. The laws that govern psychological processes are identical with those that govern the heavens. He subordinated ethics to aesthetics, arguing that our moral values originate from certain immediate and involuntary judgments of like and dislike. The five basic ideas of morality are inner freedom, perfection, benevolence, law, and justice or equity. Herbart’s view of education  that it should aim at producing individuals who possess inner freedom and strength of character  was highly influential in nineteenth-century Germany. M.K. Henry of Ghent Herbart, Johann Friedrich 376    AM  376 Herder, Johann Gottfried von 17441803, German philosopher, an intellectual and literary figure central to the transition from the German Enlightenment to Romanticism. He was born in East Prussia and received an early classical education. About 1762, while studying theology at the  of Königsberg, he came under the influence of Kant. He also began a lifelong friendship with Hamann, who especially stimulated his interests in the interrelations among language, culture, and history. After ordination as a Lutheran minister in 1765, he began his association with the Berlin Academy, earning its prestigious “prize” for his “Essay on the Origin of Language” 1772. In 1776 he was appointed Generalsuperintendent of the Lutheran clergy at Weimar through the intercession of Goethe. He was then able to focus his intellectual and literary powers on most of the major issues of his time. Of particular note are his contributions to psychology in Of the Cognition and Sensation of the Human Soul 1778; to the philosophy of history and culture in Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Mankind 178491, perhaps his most influential work; and to philosophy in Understanding and Experience 1799, which contains his extensive Metakritik of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Herder was an intellectual maverick and provocateur, writing when the Enlightenment conception of reason was in decline but before its limited defense by Kant or its total rejection by Romanticism had become entrenched in the German-speaking world. Rejecting any rational system, Herder’s thought is best viewed as a mosaic of certain ideas that reemerge in various guises throughout his writings. Because of these features, Herder’s thought has been compared with that of Rousseau. Herder’s philosophy can be described as involving elements of naturalism, organicism, and vitalism. He rejected philosophical explanations, appealing to the supernatural or divine, such as the concept of the “immortal soul” in psychology, a “divine origin” of language, or “providence” in history. He sought to discern an underlying primordial force to account for the psychological unity of the various “faculties.” He viewed this natural tendency toward “organic formation” as also operative in language and culture, and as ultimately manifested in the dynamic development of the various cultures in the form of a universal history. Finally, he often wrote in a way that suggested the dynamic process of life itself as the basic metaphor undergirding his thought. His influence can be traced through Humboldt into later linguistics and through Schelling and Hegel in the philosophy of history and later German historicism. He anticipated elements of vitalism in Schopenhauer and Bergson. 

hermeneutics, the art or theory of interpretation, as well as a type of philosophy that starts with questions of interpretation. Originally concerned more narrowly with interpreting sacred texts, the term acquired a much broader significance in its historical development and finally became a philosophical position in twentieth-century German philosophy. There are two competing positions in hermeneutics: whereas the first follows Dilthey and sees interpretation or Verstehen as a method for the historical and human sciences, the second follows Heidegger and sees it as an “ontological event,” an interaction between interpreter and text that is part of the history of what is understood. Providing rules or criteria for understanding what an author or native “really” meant is a typical problem for the first approach. The interpretation of the law provides an example for the second view, since the process of applying the law inevitably transforms it. In general, hermeneutics is the analysis of this process and its conditions of possibility. It has typically focused on the interpretation of ancient texts and distant peoples, cases where the unproblematic everyday understanding and communication cannot be assumed. Schleiermacher’s analysis of understanding and expression related to texts and speech marks the beginning of hermeneutics in the modern sense of a scientific methodology. This emphasis on methodology continues in nineteenth-century historicism and culminates in Dilthey’s attempt to ground the human sciences in a theory of interpretation, understood as the imaginative but publicly verifiable reenactment of the subjective experiences of others. Such a method of interpretation reveals the possibility of an objective knowledge of human beings not accessible to empiricist inquiry and thus of a distinct methodology for the human sciences. One result of the analysis of interpretation in the nineteenth century was the recognition of “the hermeneutic circle,” first developed by SchleierHerder, Johann Gottfried von hermeneutics 377    AM  377 macher. The circularity of interpretation concerns the relation of parts to the whole: the interpretation of each part is dependent on the interpretation of the whole. But interpretation is circular in a stronger sense: if every interpretation is itself based on interpretation, then the circle of interpretation, even if it is not vicious, cannot be escaped. Twentieth-century hermeneutics advanced by Heidegger and Gadamer radicalize this notion of the hermeneutic circle, seeing it as a feature of all knowledge and activity. Hermeneutics is then no longer the method of the human sciences but “universal,” and interpretation is part of the finite and situated character of all human knowing. “Philosophical hermeneutics” therefore criticizes Cartesian foundationalism in epistemology and Enlightenment universalism in ethics, seeing science as a cultural practice and prejudices or prejudgments as ineliminable in all judgments. Positively, it emphasizes understanding as continuing a historical tradition, as well as dialogical openness, in which prejudices are challenged and horizons broadened. 

hermetism, also hermeticism, a philosophical theology whose basic impulse was the gnostic conviction that human salvation depends on revealed knowledge gnosis of God and of the human and natural creations. Texts ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus, a Greco-Egyptian version of the Egyptian god Thoth, may have appeared as early as the fourth century B.C., but the surviving Corpus Hermeticum in Grecian and Latin is a product of the second and third centuries A.D. Fragments of the same literature exist in Grecian, Armenian, and Coptic as well; the Coptic versions are part of a discovery made at Nag Hammadi after World War II. All these Hermetica record hermetism as just described. Other Hermetica traceable to the same period but surviving in later Arabic or Latin versions deal with astrology, alchemy, magic, and other kinds of occultism. Lactantius, Augustine, and other early Christians cited Hermes but disagreed on his value; before Iamblichus, pagan philosophers showed little interest. Muslims connected Hermes with a Koranic figure, Idris, and thereby enlarged the medieval hermetic tradition, which had its first large effects in the Latin West among the twelfth-century Platonists of Chartres. The only ancient hermetic text then available in the West was the Latin Asclepius, but in 1463 Ficino interrupted his epochal translation of Plato to Latinize fourteen of the seventeen Grecian discourses in the main body of the Corpus Hermeticum as distinct from the many Grecian fragments preserved by Stobaeus but unknown to Ficino. Ficino was willing to move so quickly to Hermes because he believed that this Egyptian deity stood at the head of the “ancient theology” prisca theologia, a tradition of pagan revelation that ran parallel to Christian scripture, culminated with Plato, and continued through Plotinus and the later Neoplatonists. Ficino’s Hermes translation, which he called the Pimander, shows no interest in the magic and astrology about which he theorized later in his career. Trinitarian theology was his original motivation. The Pimander was enormously influential in the later Renaissance, when Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Lodovico Lazzarelli, Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples, Symphorien Champier, Francesco Giorgi, Agostino Steuco, Francesco Patrizi, and others enriched Western appreciation of Hermes. The first printed Grecian Hermetica was the 1554 edition of Adrien Turnebus. The last before the nineteenth century appeared in 1630, a textual hiatus that reflected a decline in the reputation of Hermes after Isaac Casaubon proved philologically in 1614 that the Grecian Hermetica had to be post-Christian, not the remains of primeval Egyptian wisdom. After Casaubon, hermetic ideas fell out of fashion with most Western philosophers of the current canon, but the historiography of the ancient theology remained influential for Newton and for lesser figures even later. The content of the Hermetica was out of tune with the new science, so Casaubon’s redating left Hermes to the theosophical heirs of Robert Fludd, whose opponents Kepler, Mersenne, Gassendi turned away from the Hermetica and similar fascinations of Renaissance humanist culture. By the nineteenth century, only theosophists took Hermes seriously as a prophet of pagan wisdom, but he was then rediscovered by German students of Christianity and Hellenistic religions, especially Richard Reitzenstein, who published his Poimandres in 1904. The ancient Hermetica are now read in the 194654 edition of A. D. Nock and A. J. Festugière. 

Herzen, Alexander 181270, Russian editor, memoirist, and social philosopher, in exile in Western Europe from 1847. Herzen moved in his philosophy of history from an early Hegelian hermeticism Herzen, Alexander 378    AM  378 rationalism to a “philosophy of contingency,” stressing the “whirlwind of chances” in nature and in human life and the “tousled improvisation” of the historical process. He rejected determinism, emphasizing the “phenomenological fact” of the experienced “sense of freedom.” Anticipating the Dostoevsky of the “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor,” he offered an original analysis of the “escape from freedom” and the cleaving to moral and political authority, and sketched a curiously contemporary-sounding “emotivist” ethical theory. After 1848, disillusioned with “bourgeois” Europe and its “selfenclosed individualism,” but equally disillusioned with what he had come to see as the bourgeois ideal of many European socialists, Herzen turned to the Russian peasant and the peasant village commune as offering the best hope for a humane development of society. In this “Russian socialism” he anticipated a central doctrine of the Russian populists of the 1870s. Herzen stood alone in resisting the common tendency of such otherwise different thinkers as Feuerbach, Marx, and J. S. Mill to undervalue the historical present, to overvalue the historical future, and to treat actual persons as means in the service of remote, merely possible historical ends. Herzen’s own central emphasis fell powerfully and consistently on the freedom, independence, and non-instrumentalizable value of living persons. And he saw more clearly than any of his contemporaries that there are no future persons, that it is only in the present that free human individuals live and move and have their being. 

heuristics, a rule or solution adopted to reduce the complexity of computational tasks, thereby reducing demands on resources such as time, memory, and attention. If an algorithm is a procedure yielding a correct solution to a problem, then a heuristic procedure may not reach a solution even if there is one, or may provide an incorrect answer. The reliability of heuristics varies between domains; the resulting biases are predictable, and provide information about system design. Chess, for example, is a finite game with a finite number of possible positions, but there is no known algorithm for finding the optimal move. Computers and humans both employ heuristics in evaluating intermediate moves, relying on a few significant cues to game quality, such as safety of the king, material balance, and center control. The use of these criteria simplifies the problem, making it computationally tractable. They are heuristic guides, reliable but limited in success. There is no guarantee that the result will be the best move or even good. They are nonetheless satisfactory for competent chess. Work on human judgment indicates a similar moral. Examples of judgmental infelicities support the view that human reasoning systematically violates standards for statistical reasoning, ignoring base rates, sample size, and correlations. Experimental results suggest that humans utilize judgmental heuristics in gauging probabilities, such as representativeness, or the degree to which an individual or event resembles a prototypical member of a category. Such heuristics produce reasonable judgments in many cases, but are of limited validity when measured by a Bayesian standard. Judgmental heuristics are biased and subject to systemic errors. Experimental support for the importance of these heuristics depends on cases in which subjects deviate from the normative standard. 

hexis Grecian, from hexo, ‘to have’, ‘to be disposed’, a good or bad condition, disposition, or state. The traditional rendering, ‘habit’ Latin habitus, is misleading, for it tends to suggest the idea of an involuntary and merely repetitious pattern of behavior. A hexis is rather a state of character or of mind that disposes us to deliberately choose to act or to think in a certain way. The term acquired a quasi-technical status after Aristotle advanced the view that hexis is the genus of virtue, both moral and intellectual. In the Nicomachean Ethics he distinguishes hexeis from passions pathe and faculties dunamis of the soul. If a man fighting in the front ranks feels afraid when he sees the enemy approaching, he is undergoing an involuntary passion. His capacity to be affected by fear on this or other occasions is part of his makeup, one of his faculties. If he chooses to stay where his commanders placed him, this is due to the hexis or state of character we call courage. Likewise, one who is consistently good at identifying what is best for oneself can be said to possess a hexis called prudence. Not all states and dispositions are commendable. Cowardice and stupidity are also hexeis. Both in the sense of ‘state’ and of ‘possession’ hexis plays a role in Aristotle’s Categories. 

Heytesbury, William, also called Hentisberus, Hentisberi, Tisberi before 1313c.1372, English philosopher and chancellor of Oxford . He wrote Sophismata “Sophisms”, Regulae solvendi sophismata “Rules for Solving Sophisms”, and De sensu composito et diviso “On the Composite and Divided Sense”. Other works are doubtfully attributed to him. Heytesbury belonged to the generation immediately after Thomas Bradwardine and Kilvington, and was among the most significant members of the Oxford Calculators, important in the early developemnt of physics. Unlike Kilvington but like Bradwardine, he appealed to mathematical calculations in addition to logical and conceptual analysis in the treatment of change, motion, acceleration, and other physical notions. His Regulae includes perhaps the most influential treatment of the liar paradox in the Middle Ages. Heytesbury’s work makes widespread use of “imaginary” thought experiments assuming physical impossibilities that are yet logically consistent. His influence was especially strong in Italy in the fifteenth century, where his works were studied widely and commented on many times. 

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

mode from Latin modus, ‘way’, ‘fashion’, a term used in many senses in philosophy. In Aristotelian logic, it refers either to the arrangement of universal, particular, affirmative, or negative propositions within a syllogism, only certain of which are valid this is often translated as ‘mood’ in English, or to the property a proposition has by virtue of which it is necessary or contingent, possible or impossible. In Scholastic metaphysics, it was often used in a not altogether technical sense to mean that which characterizes a thing and distinguishes it from others. Micraelius Lexicon philosophicum, 1653 writes that “a mode does not compose a thing, but distinguishes it and makes it determinate.” It was also used in the context of the modal distinction in the theory of distinctions to designate the distinction that holds between a substance and its modes or between two modes of a single substance. The term ‘mode’ also appears in the technical vocabulary of medieval speculative grammar in connection with the notions of modes of signifying modi significandi, modes of understanding modi intelligendi, and modes of being modi essendi. The term ‘mode’ became especially important in the seventeenth century, when Descartes, Spinoza, and Locke each took it up, giving it three somewhat different special meanings within their respective systems. Descartes makes ‘mode’ a central notion in his metaphysics in his Principia philosophiae. For Descartes, each substance is characterized by a principal attribute, thought for mind and extension for body. Modes, then, are particular ways of being extended or thinking, i.e., particular sizes, shapes, etc., or particular thoughts, properties in the broad sense that individual things substances have. In this way, ‘mode’ occupies the role in Descartes’s philosophy that ‘accident’ does in Aristotelian philosophy. But for Descartes, each mode must be connected with the principal attribute of a substance, a way of being extended or a way of thinking, whereas for the Aristotelian, accidents may or may not be connected with the essence of the substance in which they inhere. Like Descartes, Spinoza recognizes three basic metaphysical terms, ‘substance,’ ‘attribute’, and ‘mode’. Recalling Descartes, he defines ‘mode’ as “the affections of a substance, or that which is in another, and which is also conceived through another” Ethics I. But for Spinoza, there is only one substance, which has all possible attributes. This makes it somewhat difficult to determine exactly what Spinoza means by ‘modes’, whether they are to be construed as being in some sense “properties” of God, the one infinite modal logic of programs mode 577    577 substance, or whether they are to be construed more broadly as simply individual things that depend for their existence on God, just as Cartesian modes depend on Cartesian substance. Spinoza also introduces somewhat obscure distinctions between infinite and finite modes, and between immediate and mediate infinite modes. Locke uses ‘mode’ in a way that evidently derives from Descartes’s usage, but that also differs from it. For Locke, modes are “such complex Ideas, which however compounded, contain not in them the supposition of subsisting by themselves, but are considered as Dependences on, or Affections of Substances” Essay II. Modes are thus ideas that represent to us the complex properties of things, ideas derived from what Locke calls the simple ideas that come to us from experience. Locke distinguishes between simple modes like number, space, and infinity, which are supposed to be constructed by compounding the same idea many times, and mixed modes like obligation or theft, which are supposed to be compounded of many simple ideas of different sorts. 

model theory: H. P. Grice, “A conversational model,” a branch of mathematical logic that deals with the connection between a language and its interpretations or structures. Basic to it is the characterization of the conditions under which a sentence is true in structure. It is confusing that the term ‘model’ itself is used slightly differently: a model for a sentence is a structure for the language of the sentence in which it is true. Model theory was originally developed for explicitly constructed, formal languages, with the purpose of studying foundational questions of mathematics, but was later applied to the semantical analysis of empirical theories, a development initiated by the Dutch philosopher Evert Beth, and of natural languages, as in Montague grammar. More recently, in situation theory, we find a theory of semantics in which not the concept of truth in a structure, but that of information carried by a statement about a situation, is central. The term ‘model theory’ came into use in the 1930s, with the work on first-order model theory by Tarski, but some of the most central results of the field date from before that time. The history of the field is complicated by the fact that in the 1910s and 1920s, when the first model-theoretic findings were obtained, the separation between first-order logic and its extensions was not yet completed. Thus, in 1915, there appeared an article by Leopold Löwenheim, containing the first version of what is now called the Löwenheim-Skolem theorem. Löwenheim proved that every satisfiable sentence has a countable model, but he did not yet work in firstorder logic as we now understand it. One of the first who did so was the Norwegian logician Thoralf Skolem, who showed in 1920 that a set of first-order sentences that has a model, has a countable model, one form of the LöwenheimSkolem theorem. Skolem argued that logic was first-order logic and that first-order logic was the proper basis for metamathematical investigations, fully accepting the relativity of set-theoretic notions in first-order logic. Within philosophy this thesis is still dominant, but in the end it has not prevailed in mathematical logic. In 1930 Kurt Gödel solved an open problem of Hilbert-Ackermann and proved a completeness theorem for first-order logic. This immediately led to another important model-theoretic result, the compactness theorem: if every finite subset of a set of sentences has a model then the set has a model. A good source for information about the model theory of first-order logic, or classical model theory, is still Model Theory by C. C. Chang and H. J. Keisler 1973. When the separation between first-order logic and stronger logics had been completed and the model theory of first-order logic had become a mature field, logicians undertook in the late 1950s the study of extended model theory, the model theory of extensions of first-order logic: first of cardinality quantifiers, later of infinitary languages and of fragments of second-order logic. With so many examples of logics around  where sometimes classical theorems did generalize, sometimes not  Per Lindström showed in 1969 what sets first-order logic apart from its extensions: it is the strongest logic that is both compact and satisfies the LöwenheimSkolem theorem. This work has been the beginning of a study of the relations between various properties logics may possess, the so-called abstract model. 

modularity, the commitment to functionally independent and specialized cognitive systems in psychological organization, or, more generally, in the organization of any complex system. Modularity entails that behavior is the product of components with subordinate functions, that these functions are realized in discrete physical systems, and that the subsystems are minimally interactive. Modular organization varies from simple decomposability to what Herbert Simon calls near decomposability. In the former, component systems are independent, operating according to intrinsically determined principles; system behavior is an additive or aggregative function of these independent contributions. In the latter, the short-run behavior of components is independent of the behavior of other components; the system behavior is a relatively simple function of component contributions. In the early nineteenth century, Franz Joseph Gall 17581828 defended a modular organization for the mind/brain, holding that the cerebral hemispheres consist of a variety of organs, or centers, each subserving specific intellectual and moral functions. This picture of the brain as a collection of relatively independent organs contrasts sharply with the traditional view that intellectual activity involves the exercise of a general faculty in a variety of domains, a view that was common to Descartes and Hume as well as Gall’s major opponents such as Pierre Flourens 17941867. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the French physicians Jean-Baptiste Bouillaud 17961881 and Pierre-Paul Broca 182480 defended the view that language is controlled by localized structures in the left hemisphere and is relatively independent of other cognitive activities. It was later discovered by Karl Wernicke 18481905 that there are at least two centers for the control of language, one more posterior and one more anterior. On these views, there are discrete physical structures responsible for language, which are largely independent of one another and of structures responsible for other psychological functions. This is therefore a modular organization. This view of the neurophysiological organization of language continues to have advocates into the late twentieth century, though the precise characterization of the functions these two centers serve is controversial. Many more recent views have tended to limit modularity to more peripheral functions such as vision, hearing, and motor control and speech, but have excluded so-called higher cognitive processes. 

modus ponens, in full, modus ponendo ponens Latin, ‘proposing method’, 1 the argument form ‘If A then B; A; therefore, B’, and arguments of this form compare fallacy of affirming the consequent; 2 the rule of inference that permits one to infer the consequent of a conditional from that conditional and its antecedent. This is also known as the rule of /-elimination or rule of /- detachment. 

modus tollens, in full, modus tollendo tollens Latin, ‘removing method’, 1 the argument form ‘If A then B; not-B; therefore, not-A’, and arguments of this form compare fallacy of denying the antecedent; 2 the rule of inference that permits one to infer the negation of the antecedent of a conditional from that conditional and the negation of its consequent. 

Mohism, a school of classical Chinese thought founded by Mo Tzu fl. 479438 B.C.. Mo Tzu was the first major philosopher to challenge Confucius. Whereas Confucius believed a moral life was an end in itself, Mo Tzu advocated a form of utilitarianism wherein the test of moral rightness yi was the amount of benefit li to the gods, state, and people. Accordingly, Mo Tzu condemned war as harmful, criticized Confucians for their elaborate funerals and wasteful indulgence in music, and promoted a hierarchical meritocracy dominated by a powerful ruler as the most efficient way to unify the conflicting moral views and interests of the people, and thereby achieve social order. Mo Tzu also attacked fatalism, and unlike the agnostic Confucius, firmly believed in spirits and an anthropomorphic Heaven t’ien that rewarded those who benefited others and punished those who did not. He is most famous for his doctrine of chien ai or impartial concern often translated as universal love. Whereas Confucius espoused a relational morality in which one’s obligations modernism Mohism 579    579 varied depending on the status of the parties and the degree of closeness, Mo Tzu insisted that each person be treated equally as an object of moral concern. During the Warring States period 403221 B.C., the Mohists split into three factions. The Later Mohist Canons, most of which were written as late as the third century B.C., are characterized by analytical reasoning and logical sophistication. Later Mohists sought to provide a rational rather than a religious basis for Mo Tzu’s utilitarianism based upon logical and causal necessity pi. Treating a wide variety of subjects from politics to optics to economics, the Canons are organized around four topics: discourse, or knowledge of the relation between names and objects; ethics, or knowledge of how to act; sciences, or knowledge of objects; and argumentation, or knowledge of names. As Confucianism emerged to become the state ideology, the Mohists disappeared sometime in the early Han dynasty 206 B.C.A.D. 220, having been in important measure co-opted by the leading interpreter of Confucianism of the period, Hsün Tzu c.298238 B.C.. 

Molina, Luis de 15351600, Spanish Jesuit theologian and philosopher. He studied and taught at Coimbra and Évora and also taught in Lisbon and Madrid. His most important works are the Concordia liberi arbitrii cum gratiae donis“Free Will and Grace,” 1588, Commentaria in primam divi Thomae partem “Commentary on the First Part of Thomas’s Summa,” 1592, and De justitia et jure “On Justice and Law,” 15921613. Molina is best known for his doctrine of middle knowledge scientia media. Its aim was to preserve free will while maintaining the Christian doctrine of the efficacy of divine grace. It was opposed by Thomists such as Bañez, who maintained that God exercises physical predetermination over secondary causes of human action and, thus, that grace is intrinsically efficacious and independent of human will and merits. For Molina, although God has foreknowledge of what human beings will choose to do, neither that knowledge nor God’s grace determine human will; the cooperation concursus of divine grace with human will does not determine the will to a particular action. This is made possible by God’s middle knowledge, which is a knowledge in between the knowledge God has of what existed, exists, and will exist, and the knowledge God has of what has not existed, does not exist, and will not exist. Middle knowledge is God’s knowledge of conditional future contingent events, namely, of what persons would do under any possible set of circumstances. Thanks to this knowledge, God can arrange for certain human acts to occur by prearranging the circumstances surrounding the choice without determining the human will. Thus, God’s grace is concurrent with the act of the will and does not predetermine it, rendering the Thomistic distinction between sufficient and efficacious grace superfluous. 

Molyneux question, also called Molyneux’s problem, the question that, in correspondence with Locke, William Molyneux or Molineux, 1656 98, a Dublin lawyer and member of the Irish Parliament, posed and Locke inserted in the second edition of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding 1694; book 2, chap. 9, section 8: Suppose a Man born blind, and now adult, and taught by his touch to distinguish a Cube, and a Sphere of the same metal, and nighly of the same bigness, so as to tell, when he felt one and t’other, which is the Cube, which the Sphere. Suppose then the Cube and Sphere placed on a Table, and the Blind Man to be made to see. Quære, Whether by his sight, before he touch’d them, he could now distinguish, and tell, which is the Globe, which the Cube. Although it is tempting to regard Molyneux’s question as straightforwardly empirical, attempts to gauge the abilities of newly sighted adults have yielded disappointing and ambiguous results. More interesting, perhaps, is the way in which different theories of perception answer the question. Thus, according to Locke, sensory modalities constitute discrete perceptual channels, the contents of which perceivers must learn to correlate. Such a theory answers the question in the negative as did Molyneux himself. Other theories encourage different responses. 

Montaigne, Michel de 153392, French essayist and philosopher who set forth the Renaissance version of Grecian skepticism. Born and raised in Bordeaux, he became its mayor, and was an adviser to leaders of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. In 1568 he translated the work of the Spanish rationalist theologian Raimund Sebond on natural theology. Shortly thereafter he began writing essais, attempts, as the author said, to paint himself. These, the first in this genre, are rambling, curious discussions of various topics, suggesting tolerance and an undogmatic Stoic morality. The longest essai, the “Apology for Raimund Sebond,” “defends” Sebond’s rationalism by arguing that since no adequate reasons or evidence could be given to support any point of view in theology, philosophy, or science, one should not blame Sebond for his views. Montaigne then presents and develops the skeptical arguments found in Sextus Empiricus and Cicero. Montaigne related skeptical points to thencurrent findings and problems. Data of explorers, he argues, reinforce the cultural and ethical relativism of the ancient Skeptics. Disagreements between Scholastics, Platonists, and Renaissance naturalists on almost everything cast doubt on whether any theory is correct. Scientists like Copernicus and Paracelsus contradict previous scientists, and will probably be contradicted by future ones. Montaigne then offers the more theoretical objections of the Skeptics, about the unreliability of sense experience and reasoning and our inability to find an unquestionable criterion of true knowledge. Trying to know reality is like trying to clutch water. What should we then do? Montaigne advocates suspending judgment on all theories that go beyond experience, accepting experience undogmatically, living according to the dictates of nature, and following the rules and customs of one’s society. Therefore one should remain in the religion in which one was born, and accept only those principles that God chooses to reveal to us. Montaigne’s skepticism greatly influenced European thinkers in undermining confidence in previous theories and forcing them to seek new ways of grounding knowledge. His acceptance of religion on custom and faith provided a way of living with total skepticism. His presentation of skepticism in a modern language shaped the vocabulary and the problems of philosophy in modern times. 

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

Montesquieu, Baron de La Brède et de, title of Charles-Louis de Secondat 16891755, French political philosopher, the political philosophe of the Enlightenment. He was born at La Brède, educated at the Oratorian Collège de Juilly 170005, and received law degrees from the  of Bordeaux 1708. From his uncle he inherited the barony of Montesquieu 1716 and the office of Président à Mortier at the Parliament of Guyenne at Bordeaux. Fame, national monism Montesquieu 581    581 and international, came suddenly 1721 with the Lettres persanes “The Persian Letters”, published in Holland and France, a landmark of the Enlightenment. His Réflexions sur la monarchie universelle en Europe, written and printed 1734 to remind the authorities of his qualifications and availability, delivered the wrong message at the wrong time anti-militarism, pacifism, free trade, while France supported Poland’s King Stanislas, dethroned by Russia and Austria. Montesquieu withdrew the Réflexions before publication and substituted the Considerations on the Romans: the same thesis is expounded here, but in the exclusively classical context of ancient history. The stratagem succeeded: the Amsterdam edition was freely imported; the Paris edition appeared with a royal privilège 1734. A few months after the appearance of the Considerations, he undertook L’Esprit des lois, the outline of a modern political science, conceived as the foundation of an effective governmental policy. His optimism was shaken by the disasters of the War of Austrian Succession 174048; the Esprit des lois underwent hurried changes that upset its original plan. During the very printing process, the author was discovering the true essence of his philosophie pratique: it would never culminate in a final, invariable program, but in an orientation, continuously, intelligently adapting to the unpredictable circumstances of historical time in the light of permanent values. According to L’Esprit des lois, governments are either republics, monarchies, or despotisms. The principles, or motivational forces, of these types of government are, respectively, political virtue, honor, and fear. The type of government a people has depends on its character, history, and geographical situation. Only a constitutional government that separates its executive, legislative, and judicial powers preserves political liberty, taken as the power to do what one ought to will. A constitutional monarchy with separation of powers is the best form of government. Montesquieu influenced the authors of the U.S. Constitution and the political philosophers Burke and Rousseau.  

Moore: g. e. – cited by H. P. Grice. Irish London-born philosopher who spearheaded the attack on idealism and was a major supporter of realism in all its forms: metaphysical, epistemological, and axiological. He was born in Upper Norwood, a suburb of London; did his undergraduate work at Cambridge ; spent 18981904 as a fellow of Trinity ; returned to Cambridge in 1911 as a lecturer; and was granted a professorship there in 1925. He also served as editor of Mind. The bulk of his work falls into four categories: metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and philosophical methodology. Metaphysics. In this area, Moore is mainly known for his attempted refutation of idealism and his defense thereby of realism. In his “The Refutation of Idealism” 1903, he argued that there is a crucial premise that is essential to all possible arguments for the idealistic conclusion that “All reality is mental spiritual.” This premise is: “To be is to be perceived” in the broad sense of ‘perceive’. Moore argued that, under every possible interpretation of it, that premise is either a tautology or false; hence no significant conclusion can ever be inferred from it. His positive defense of realism had several prongs. One was to show that there are certain claims held by non-realist philosophers, both idealist ones and skeptical ones. Moore argued, in “A Defense of Common Sense” 1925, that these claims are either factually false or self-contradictory, or that in some cases there is no good reason to believe them. Among the claims that Moore attacked are these: “Propositions about purported material facts are false”; “No one has ever known any such propositions to be true”; “Every purported physical fact is logically dependent on some mental fact”; and “Every physical fact is causally dependent on some mental fact.” Another major prong of Moore’s defense of realism was to argue for the existence of an external world and later to give a “Proof of an External World” 1933. Epistemology. Most of Moore’s work in this area dealt with the various kinds of knowledge we have, why they must be distinguished, and the problem of perception and our knowledge of an external world. Because he had already argued for the existence of an external world in his metaphysics, he here focused on how we know it. In many papers and chapters e.g., “The Nature and Reality of Objects of Perception,” 1906 he examined and at times supported three main positions: naive or direct realism, representative or indirect realism, and phenomenalism. Although he seemed to favor direct realism at first, in the majority of his papers he found representative realism to be the most supportable position despite its problems. It should also be noted that, in connection with his leanings mood toward representative realism, Moore maintained the existence of sense-data and argued at length for an account of just how they are related to physical objects. That there are sense-data Moore never doubted. The question was, What is their ontological status? With regard to the various kinds of knowledge or ways of knowing, Moore made a distinction between dispositional or non-actualized and actualized knowledge. Within the latter Moore made distinctions between direct apprehension often known as knowledge by acquaintance, indirect apprehension, and knowledge proper or propositional knowledge. He devoted much of his work to finding the conditions for knowledge proper. Ethics. In his major work in ethics, Principia Ethica 1903, Moore maintained that the central problem of ethics is, What is good?  meaning by this, not what things are good, but how ‘good’ is to be defined. He argued that there can be only one answer, one that may seem disappointing, namely: good is good, or, alternatively, ‘good’ is indefinable. Thus ‘good’ denotes a “unique, simple object of thought” that is indefinable and unanalyzable. His first argument on behalf of that claim consisted in showing that to identify good with some other object i.e., to define ‘good’ is to commit the naturalistic fallacy. To commit this fallacy is to reduce ethical propositions to either psychological propositions or reportive definitions as to how people use words. In other words, what was meant to be an ethical proposition, that X is good, becomes a factual proposition about people’s desires or their usage of words. Moore’s second argument ran like this: Suppose ‘good’ were definable. Then the result would be even worse than that of reducing ethical propositions to non-ethical propositions  ethical propositions would be tautologies! For example, suppose you defined ‘good’ as ‘pleasure’. Then suppose you maintained that pleasure is good. All you would be asserting is that pleasure is pleasure, a tautology. To avoid this conclusion ‘good’ must mean something other than ‘pleasure’. Why is this the naturalistic fallacy? Because good is a non-natural property. But even if it were a natural one, there would still be a fallacy. Hence some have proposed calling it the definist fallacy  the fallacy of attempting to define ‘good’ by any means. This argument is often known as the open question argument because whatever purported definition of ‘good’ anyone offers, it would always be an open question whether whatever satisfies the definition really is good. In the last part of Principia Ethica Moore turned to a discussion of what sorts of things are the greatest goods with which we are acquainted. He argued for the view that they are personal affection and aesthetic enjoyments. Philosophical methodology. Moore’s methodology in philosophy had many components, but two stand out: his appeal to and defense of common sense and his utilization of various methods of philosophical/conceptual analysis. “A Defense of Common Sense” argued for his claim that the commonsense view of the world is wholly true, and for the claim that any view which opposed that view is either factually false or self-contradictory. Throughout his writings Moore distinguished several kinds of analysis and made use of them extensively in dealing with philosophical problems. All of these may be found in the works cited above and other essays gathered into Moore’s Philosophical Studies1922 and Philosophical Papers 1959. These have been referred to as refutational analysis, with two subforms, showing contradictions and “translation into the concrete”; distinctional analysis; decompositional analysis either definitional or divisional; and reductional analysis. Moore was greatly revered as a teacher. Many of his students and colleagues have paid high tribute to him in very warm and grateful terms.  .

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

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

moral epistemology, the discipline, at the intersection of ethics and epistemology, that studies the epistemic status and relations of moral judgments and principles. It has developed out of an interest, common to both ethics and epistemology, in questions of justification and justifiability  in epistemology, of statements or beliefs, and in ethics, of actions as well as judgments of actions and also general principles of judgment. Its most prominent questions include the following. Can normative claims be true or false? If so, how can they be known to be true or false? If not, what status do they have, and are they capable of justification? If they are capable of moral argument for God’s existence moral epistemology 584    584 justification, how can they be justified? Does the justification of normative claims differ with respect to particular claims and with respect to general principles? In epistemology recent years have seen a tendency to accept as valid an account of knowledge as entailing justified true belief, a conception that requires an account not just of truth but also of justification and of justified belief. Thus, under what conditions is someone justified, epistemically, in believing something? Justification, of actions, of judgments, and of principles, has long been a central element in ethics. It is only recently that justification in ethics came to be thought of as an epistemological problem, hence ‘moral epistemology’, as an expression, is a fairly recent coinage, although its problems have a long lineage. One long-standing linkage is provided by the challenge of skepticism. Skepticism in ethics can be about the existence of any genuine distinction between right and wrong, or it can focus on the possibility of attaining any knowledge of right and wrong, good or bad. Is there a right answer? is a question in the metaphysics of ethics. Can we know what the right answer is, and if so how? is one of moral epistemology. Problems of perception and observation and ones about observation statements or sense-data play an important role in epistemology. There is not any obvious parallel in moral epistemology, unless it is the role of prereflective moral judgments, or commonsense moral judgments  moral judgments unguided by any overt moral theory  which can be taken to provide the data of moral theory, and which need to be explained, systematized, coordinated, or revised to attain an appropriate relation between theory and data. This would be analogous to taking the data of epistemology to be provided, not by sense-data or observations but by judgments of perception or observation statements. Once this step is taken the parallel is very close. One source of moral skepticism is the apparent lack of any observational counterpart for moral predicates, which generates the question how moral judgments can be true if there is nothing for them to correspond to. Another source of moral skepticism is apparently constant disagreement and uncertainty, which would appear to be explained by the skeptical hypothesis denying the reality of moral distinctions. Noncognitivism in ethics maintains that moral judgments are not objects of knowledge, that they make no statements capable of truth or falsity, but are or are akin to expressions of attitudes. Some other major differences among ethical theories are largely epistemological in character. Intuitionism maintains that basic moral propositions are knowable by intuition. Empiricism in ethics maintains that moral propositions can be established by empirical means or are complex forms of empirical statements. Ethical rationalism maintains that the fundamental principles of morality can be established a priori as holding of necessity. This is exemplified by Kant’s moral philosophy, in which the categorical imperative is regarded as synthetic a priori; more recently by what Alan Gewirth b.1912 calls the “principle of generic consistency,” which he claims it is selfcontradictory to deny. Ethical empiricism is exemplified by classical utilitarianism, such as that of Bentham, which aspires to develop ethics as an empirical science. If the consequences of actions can be scientifically predicted and their utilities calculated, then ethics can be a science. Situationism is equivalent to concrete case intuitionism in maintaining that we can know immediately what ought to be done in specific cases, but most ethical theories maintain that what ought to be done is, in J. S. Mill’s words, determined by “the application of a law to an individual case.” Different theories differ on the epistemic status of these laws and on the process of application. Deductivists, either empiricistic or rationalistic, hold that the law is essentially unchanged in the application; non-deductivists hold that the law is modified in the process of application. This distinction is explained in F. L. Will [190998], Beyond Deduction, 1988. There is similar variation about what if anything is selfevident, Sidgwick maintaining that only certain highly abstract principles are self-evident, Ross that only general rules are, and Prichard that only concrete judgments are, “by an act of moral thinking.” Other problems in moral epistemology are provided by the factvalue distinction  and controversies about whether there is any such distinction  and the isought question, the question how a moral judgment can be derived from statements of fact alone. Naturalists affirm the possibility, non-naturalists deny it. Prescriptivists claim that moral judgments are prescriptions and cannot be deduced from descriptive statements alone. This question ultimately leads to the question how an ultimate principle can be justified. If it cannot be deduced from statements of fact, that route is out; if it must be deduced from some other moral principle, then the principle deduced cannot be ultimate and in any case this process is either circular or leads to an infimoral epistemology moral epistemology 585    585 nite regress. If the ultimate principle is self-evident, then the problem may have an answer. But if it is not it would appear to be arbitrary. The problem of the justification of an ultimate principle continues to be a leading one in moral epistemology. Recently there has been much interest in the status and existence of “moral facts.” Are there any, what are they, and how are they established as “facts”? This relates to questions about moral realism. Moral realism maintains that moral predicates are real and can be known to be so; anti-realists deny this. This denial links with the view that moral properties supervene on natural ones, and the problem of supervenience is another recent link between ethics and epistemology. Pragmatism in ethics maintains that a moral problem is like any problem in that it is the occasion for inquiry and moral judgments are to be regarded as hypotheses to be tested by how well they resolve the problem. This amounts to an attempt to bypass the isought problem and all such “dualisms.” So is constructivism, a development owing much to the work of Rawls, which contrasts with moral realism. Constructivism maintains that moral ideas are human constructs and the task is not epistemological or metaphysical but practical and theoretical  that of attaining reflective equilibrium between considered moral judgments and the principles that coordinate and explain them. On this view there are no moral facts. Opponents maintain that this only replaces a foundationalist view of ethics with a coherence conception. The question whether questions of moral epistemology can in this way be bypassed can be regarded as itself a question of moral epistemology. And the question of the foundations of morality, and whether there are foundations, can still be regarded as a question of moral epistemology, as distinct from a question of the most convenient and efficient arrangement of our moral ideas. 

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

moral psychology, 1 the subfield of psychology that traces the development over time of moral reasoning and opinions in the lives of individuals this subdiscipline includes work of Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg, and Carol Gilligan; 2 the part of philosophy where philosophy of mind and ethics overlap, which concerns all the psychological issues relevant to morality. There are many different psychological matters relevant to ethics, and each may be relevant in more than one way. Different ethical theories imply different sorts of connections. So moral psychology includes work of many and diverse kinds. But several traditional clusters of concern are evident. Some elements of moral psychology consider the psychological matters relevant to metaethical issues, i.e., to issues about the general nature of moral truth, judgment, and knowledge. Different metaethical theories invoke mental phenomena in different ways: noncognitivism maintains that sentences expressing moral judgments do not function to report truths or falsehoods, but rather, e.g., to express certain emotions or to prescribe certain actions. So some forms of noncognitivism imply that an understanding of certain sorts of emotions, or of special activities like prescribing that may involve particular psychological elements, is crucial to a full understanding of how ethical sentences are meaningful. Certain forms of cognitivism, the view that moral declarative sentences do express truths or falsehoods, imply that moral facts consist of psychological facts, that for instance moral judgments consist of expressions of positive psychological attitudes of some particular kind toward the objects of those judgments. And an understanding of psychological phenomena like sentiment is crucial according to certain sorts of projectivism, which hold that the supposed moral properties of things are mere misleading projections of our sentiments onto the objects of those sentiments. Certain traditional moral sense theories and certain traditional forms of intuitionism have held that special psychological faculties are crucial for our epistemic access to moral truth. Particular views in normative ethics, particular views about the moral status of acts, persons, and other targets of normative evaluation, also often suggest that an understanding of certain psychological matters is crucial to ethics. Actions, intentions, and character are some of the targets of evaluation of normative ethics, and their proper understanding involves many issues in philosophy of mind. Also, many normative theorists have maintained that there is a close connection between pleasure, happiness, or desiresatisfaction and a person’s good, and these things are also a concern of philosophy of mind. In addition, the rightness of actions is often held to be closely connected to the motives, beliefs, and other psychological phenomena that lie behind those actions. Various other traditional philosophical concerns link ethical and psychological issues: the nature of the patterns in the long-term development in individuals of moral opinions and reasoning, the appropriate form for moral education and punishment, the connections between obligation and motivation, i.e., between moral reasons and psychological causes, and the notion of free will and its relation to moral responsibility and autonomy. Some work in philosophy of mind also suggests that moral phenomena, or at least normative phenomena of some kind, play a crucial role in illuminating or constituting psychological phenomena of various kinds, but the traditional concern of moral psychology has been with the articulation of the sort of philosophy of mind that can be useful to ethics. 

moral rationalism, the view that the substance of morality, usually in the form of general moral principles, can be known a priori. The view is defended by Kant in Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, but it goes back at least to Plato. Both Plato and Kant thought that a priori moral knowledge could have an impact on what we do quite independently of any desire that we happen to have. This motivational view is also ordinarily associated with moral rationalism. It comes in two quite different forms. The first is that a priori moral knowledge consists in a sui generis mental state that is both belief-like and desire-like. This seems to have been Plato’s view, for he held that the belief that something is good is itself a disposition to promote that thing. The second is that a priori moral knowledge consists in a belief that is capable of rationally producing a distinct desire. morality, slave moral rationalism 587    587 Rationalists who make the first claim have had trouble accommodating the possibility of someone’s believing that something is good but, through weakness of will, not mustering the desire to do it. Accordingly, they have been forced to assimilate weakness of will to ignorance of the good. Rationalists who make the second claim about reason’s action-producing capacity face no such problem. For this reason, their view is often preferred. The best-known anti-rationalist about morality is Hume. His Treatise of Human Nature denies both that morality’s substance can be known by reason alone and that reason alone is capable of producing action. 

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

moral sense theory, an ethical theory, developed by eighteenth-century British philosophers  notably Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Hume  according to which the pleasure or pain a person feels upon thinking about or “observing” certain character traits is indicative of the virtue or vice, respectively, of those features. It is a theory of “moral perception,” offered in response to moral rationalism, the view that moral distinctions are derived by reason alone, and combines Locke’s empiricist doctrine that all ideas begin in experience with the belief, widely shared at the time, that feelings play a central role in moral evaluation and motivation. On this theory, our emotional responses to persons’ characters are often “perceptions” of their morality, just as our experiences of an apple’s redness and sweetness are perceptions of its color and taste. These ideas of morality are seen as products of an “internal” sense, because they are produced in the “observer” only after she forms a concept of the conduct or trait being observed or contemplated  as when a person realizes that she is seeing someone intentionally harm another and reacts with displeasure at what she sees. The moral sense is conceived as being analogous to, or possibly an aspect of, our capacity to recognize varying degrees of beauty in things, which modern writers call “the sense of beauty.” Rejecting the popular view that morality is based on the will of God, Shaftesbury maintains rather that morality depends on human nature, and he introduces the notion of a sense of right and wrong, possessed uniquely by human beings, who alone are capable of reflection. Hutcheson argues that to approve of a character is to regard it as virtuous. For him, reason, which discovers relations of inanimate objects to rational agents, is unable to arouse our approval in the absence of a moral sense. Ultimately, we can explain why, for example, we approve of someone’s temperate character only by appealing to our natural tendency to feel pleasure sometimes identified with approval at the thought of characters that exhibit benevolence, the trait to which all other virtues can be traced. This disposition to feel approval and disapproval is what Hutcheson identifies as the moral sense. Hume emphasizes that typical human beings make moral distinctions on the basis of their feelings only when those sentiments are experienced from a disinterested or “general” point of view. In other words, we turn our initial sentiments into moral judgments by compensating for the fact that we feel more strongly about those to whom we are emotionally close than those from whom we are more distant. On a widely held interpretation of Hume, the moral sense provides not only judgments, but also motives to act according to those judgments, since its feelings may be motivating passions or arouse such passions. Roderick Firth’s 191787 twentieth-century ideal observer theory, according to which moral good is designated by the projected reactions of a hypothetically omniscient, disinterested observer possessing other ideal traits, as well as Brandt’s contemporary moral spectator theory, are direct descendants of the moral sense theory. 

moral scepticism, any metaethical view that raises fundamental doubts about morality as a whole. Different kinds of doubts lead to different kinds of moral skepticism. The primary kinds of moral skepticism are epistemological. Moral justification skepticism is the claim that nobody ever has any or adequate justification for believing any substantive moral claim. Moral knowledge skepticism is the claim that nobody ever knows that any substantive moral claim is true. If knowledge implies justification, as is often assumed, then moral justification skepticism implies moral knowledge skepticism. But even if knowledge requires justification, it requires more, so moral knowledge skepticism does not imply moral justification skepticism. Another kind of skeptical view in metaethics rests on linguistic analysis. Some emotivists, expressivists, and prescriptivists argue that moral claims like “Cheating is morally wrong” resemble expressions of emotion or desire like “Boo, cheating” or prescriptions for action like “Don’t cheat”, which are neither true nor false, so moral claims themselves are neither true nor false. This linguistic moral skepticism, which is sometimes called noncognitivism, implies moral knowledge skepticism if knowledge implies truth. Even if such linguistic analyses are rejected, Moral Rearmament Movement moral skepticism 589    589 one can still hold that no moral properties or facts really exist. This ontological moral skepticism can be combined with the linguistic view that moral claims assert moral properties and facts to yield an error theory that all positive moral claims are false. A different kind of doubt about morality is often raised by asking, “Why should I be moral?” Practical moral skepticism answers that there is not always any reason or any adequate reason to be moral or to do what is morally required. This view concerns reasons to act rather than reasons to believe. Moral skepticism of all these kinds is often seen as immoral, but moral skeptics can act and be motivated and even hold moral beliefs in much the same way as non-skeptics. Moral skeptics just deny that their or anyone else’s moral beliefs are justified or known or true, or that they have adequate reason to be moral. 

moral status, the suitability of a being to be viewed as an appropriate object of direct moral concern; the nature or degree of a being’s ability to count as a ground of claims against moral agents; the moral standing, rank, or importance of a kind of being; the condition of being a moral patient; moral considerability. Ordinary moral reflection involves considering others. But which others ought to be considered? And how are the various objects of moral consideration to be weighed against one another? Anything might be the topic of moral discussion, but not everything is thought to be an appropriate object of direct moral concern. If there are any ethical constraints on how we may treat a ceramic plate, these seem to derive from considerations about other beings, not from the interests or good or nature of the plate. The same applies, presumably, to a clod of earth. Many philosophers view a living but insentient being, such as a dandelion, in the same way; others have doubts. According to some, even sentient animal life is little more deserving of moral consideration than the clod or the dandelion. This tradition, which restricts significant moral status to humans, has come under vigorous and varied attack by defenders of animal liberation. This attack criticizes speciesism, and argues that “humanism” is analogous to theories that illegitimately base moral status on race, gender, or social class. Some philosophers have referred to beings that are appropriate objects of direct moral concern as “moral patients.” Moral agents are those beings whose actions are subject to moral evaluation; analogously, moral patients would be those beings whose suffering in the sense of being the objects of the actions of moral agents permits or demands moral evaluation. Others apply the label ‘moral patients’ more narrowly, just to those beings that are appropriate objects of direct moral concern but are not also moral agents. The issue of moral status concerns not only whether beings count at all morally, but also to what degree they count. After all, beings who are moral patients might still have their claims outweighed by the preferred claims of other beings who possess some special moral status. We might, with Nozick, propose “utilitarianism for animals, Kantianism for people.” Similarly, the bodily autonomy argument in defense of abortion, made famous by Thomson, does not deny that the fetus is a moral patient, but insists that her/his/its claims are limited by the pregnant woman’s prior claim to control her bodily destiny. It has often been thought that moral status should be tied to the condition of “personhood.” The idea has been either that only persons are moral patients, or that persons possess a special moral status that makes them morally more important than nonpersons. Personhood, on such theories, is a minimal condition for moral patiency. Why? Moral patiency is said to be “correlative” with moral agency: a creature has both or neither. Alternatively, persons have been viewed not as the only moral patients, but as a specially privileged elite among moral patients, possessing rights as well as interests. 

More, Henry 161487, English philosopher, theologian, and poet, the most prolific of the Cambridge Platonists. In 1631 he entered Christ’s , where he spent the rest of his life after becoming Fellow in 1641. He was primarily an apologist of anti-Calvinist, latitudinarian stamp whose inalienable philosophico- theological purpose was to demonstrate the existence and immortality of the soul and to cure “two enormous distempers of the mind,” atheism and “enthusiasm.” He described himself as “a Fisher for Philosophers, desirous to draw them to or retain them in the Christian Faith.” His eclectic method deployed Neoplatonism notably Plotinus and Ficino, mystical theologies, cabamoral status More, Henry 590    590 listic doctrines as More misconceived them, empirical findings including reports of witchcraft and ghosts, the new science, and the new philosophy, notably the philosophy of Descartes. Yet he rejected Descartes’s beast-machine doctrine, his version of dualism, and the pretensions of Cartesian mechanical philosophy to explain all physical phenomena. Animals have souls; the universe is alive with souls. Body and spirit are spatially extended, the former being essentially impenetrable, inert, and discerpible divisible into parts, the latter essentially penetrable, indiscerpible, active, and capable of a spiritual density, which More called essential spissitude, “the redoubling or contracting of substance into less space than it does sometimes occupy.” Physical processes are activated and ordered by the spirit of nature, a hylarchic principle and “the vicarious power of God upon this great automaton, the world.” More’s writings on natural philosophy, especially his doctrine of infinite space, are thought to have influenced Newton. More attacked Hobbes’s materialism and, in the 1660s and 1670s, the impieties of Dutch Cartesianism, including the perceived atheism of Spinoza and his circle. He regretted the “enthusiasm” for and conversion to Quakerism of Anne Conway, his “extramural” tutee and assiduous correspondent. More had a partiality for coinages and linguistic exotica. We owe to him ‘Cartesianism’ 1662, coined a few years before the first appearance of the French equivalent, and the substantive ‘materialist’ 1668.

More, Sir Thomas 1477 or 14781535, English humanist, statesman, martyr, and saint. A lawyer by profession, he entered royal service in 1517 and became lord chancellor in 1529. After refusing to swear to the Act of Supremacy, which named Henry VIII the head of the English church, More was beheaded as a traitor. Although his writings include biography, poetry, letters, and anti-heretical tracts, his only philosophical work, Utopia published in Latin, 1516, is his masterpiece. Covering a wide variety of subjects including government, education, punishment, religion, family life, and euthanasia, Utopia contrasts European social institutions with their counterparts on the imaginary island of Utopia. Inspired in part by Plato’s Republic, the Utopian communal system is designed to teach virtue and reward it with happiness. The absence of money, private property, and most social distinctions allows Utopians the leisure to develop the faculties in which happiness consists. Because of More’s love of irony, Utopia has been subject to quite different interpretations.  

Mosca, Gaetano 18581941, Italian political scientist who made pioneering contributions to the theory of democratic elitism. Combining the life of a  professor with that of a politician, he taught such subjects as constitutional law, public law, political science, and history of political theory; at various times he was also an editor of the Parliamentary proceedings, an elected member of the Chamber of Deputies, an under-secretary for colonial affairs, a newspaper columnist, and a member of the Senate. For Mosca ‘elitism’ refers to the empirical generalization that every society is ruled by an organized minority. His democratic commitment is embodied in what he calls juridical defense: the normative principle that political developments are to be judged by whether and how they prevent any one person, class, force, or institution from dominating the others. His third main contribution is a framework consisting of two intersecting distinctions that yield four possible ideal types, defined as follows: in autocracy, authority flows from the rulers to the ruled; in liberalism, from the ruled to the rulers; in democracy, the ruling class is open to renewal by members of other classes; in aristocracy it is not. He was influenced by, and in turn influenced, positivism, for the elitist thesis presumably constitutes the fundamental “law” of political “science.” Even deeper is his connection with the tradition of Machiavelli’s political realism. There is also no question that he practiced an empirical approach. In the tradition of elitism, he may be compared and contrasted with Pareto, Michels, and Schumpeter; and in the tradition of Italian political philosophy, to Croce, Gentile, and Gramsci. 

motivation, a property central in motivational explanations of intentional conduct. To assert that Ann is driving to Boston today because she wants to see the Red Sox play and believes that they are playing today in Boston is to offer a More, Sir Thomas motivation 591    591 motivational explanation of this action. On a popular interpretation, the assertion mentions a pair of attitudes: a desire and a belief. Ann’s desire is a paradigmatic motivational attitude in that it inclines her to bring about the satisfaction of that very attitude. The primary function of motivational attitudes is to bring about their own satisfaction by inducing the agent to undertake a suitable course of action, and, arguably, any attitude that has that function is, ipso facto, a motivational one. The related thesis that only attitudes having this function are motivational  or, more precisely, motivation-constituting  is implausible. Ann hopes that the Sox won yesterday. Plainly, her hope cannot bring about its own satisfaction, since Ann has no control over the past. Even so, the hope seemingly may motivate action e.g., Ann’s searching for sports news on her car radio, in which case the hope is motivation-constituting. Some philosophers have claimed that our beliefs that we are morally required to take a particular course of action are motivation-constituting, and such beliefs obviously do not have the function of bringing about their own satisfaction i.e., their truth. However, the claim is controversial, as is the related claim that beliefs of this kind are “besires”  that is, not merely beliefs but desires as well. 

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

motivational internalism, the view that moral motivation is internal to moral duty or the sense of duty. The view represents the contemporary understanding of Hume’s thesis that morality is essentially practical. Hume went on to point out the apparent logical gap between statements of fact, which express theoretical judgments, and statements about what ought to be done, which express practical judgments. Motivational internalism offers one explanation for this gap. No motivation is internal to the recognition of facts. The specific internal relation the view affirms is that of necessity. Thus, motivational internalists hold that if one sees that one has a duty to do a certain action or that it would be right to do it, then necessarily one has a motive to do it. For example, if one sees that it is one’s duty to donate blood, then necessarily one has a motive to donate blood. Motivational externalism, the opposing view, denies this relation. Its adherents hold that it is possible for one to see that one has a duty to do a certain action or that it would be right to do it yet have no motive to do it. Motivational externalists typically, though not universally, deny any real gap between theoretical and practical judgments. Motivational internalism takes either of two forms, rationalist and anti-rationalist. Rationalists, such as Plato and Kant, hold that the content or truth of a moral requirement guarantees in those who understand it a motive of compliance. Anti-rationalists, such as Hume, hold that moral judgment necessarily has some affective or volitional component that supplies a motive for the relevant action but that renders morality less a matter of reason and truth than of feeling or commitment. It is also possible in the abstract to motivational explanation motivational internalism 592    592 Mo Tzu mysticism 593 draw an analogous distinction between two forms of motivational externalism, cognitivist and noncognitivist, but because the view springs from an interest in assimilating practical judgment to theoretical judgment, its only influential form has been cognitivist. 

Mo Tzu, also known as Master Mo, Mo Ti fifth century B.C., Chinese philosopher and founder of the Mohist school of thought, which was a major rival to Confucianism in ancient China. The text Mo Tzu contains different versions of his teachings as well as subsequent developments of his thought. Mo Tzu regarded rightness yi as determined by what benefits li the public, where benefit is understood in terms of such things as order and increased resources in society. He opposed the musical activities and ritual practices of the Confucians on the ground that such practices are detrimental to the public good. He is probably best known for advocating the ideal of an equal concern to benefit and avoid harm to every human being. Practicing this ideal is to the public good, since strife and disorder stem from partiality toward oneself or one’s family or social group. Also, it being the will of Heaven t’ien that people have equal concern for all, one will be rewarded or punished by Heaven according to whether one practices this ideal. In response to worries about the practicability of the ideal, Mo Tzu insisted that it was simple and easy to put the ideal into practice, leaving himself open to the charge that he neglected the complexities of emotional management.  CONFUCIANISM, MOHISM. K.-l.S. Mou Tsung-san 190995, Chinese philosopher, perhaps the most original thinker among contemporary Neo-Confucians. Educated at Peking , he first studied Western philosophy but was converted to Chinese philosophy under the influence of Hsiung Shih-li. He made a great breakthrough in his study of SungMing NeoConfucian philosophy, arguing that Chu Hsi was really a side branch that took the position of the orthodoxy. He maintained that all three major Chinese traditions, Confucian, Taoist, and Buddhist, assert that humans have the endowment for intellectual intuition, meaning personal participation in tao the Way. 

mystical experience, an experience alleged to reveal some aspect of reality not normally accessible to sensory experience or cognition. The experience  typically characterized by its profound emotional impact on the one who experiences it, its transcendence of spatial and temporal distinctions, its transitoriness, and its ineffability  is often but not always associated with some religious tradition. In theistic religions, mystical experiences are claimed to be brought about by God or by some other superhuman agent. Theistic mystical experiences evoke feelings of worshipful awe. Their content can vary from something no more articulate than a feeling of closeness to God to something as specific as an item of revealed theology, such as, for a Christian mystic, a vision of the Trinity. Non-theistic mystical experiences are usually claimed to reveal the metaphysical unity of all things and to provide those who experience them with a sense of inner peace or bliss.  MYSTICISM. W.E.M. mysticism, a doctrine or discipline maintaining that one can gain knowledge of reality that is not accessible to sense perception or to rational, conceptual thought. Generally associated with a religious tradition, mysticism can take a theistic form, as it has in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions, or a non-theistic form, as it has in Buddhism and some varieties of Hinduism. Mystics claim that the mystical experience, the vehicle of mystical knowledge, is usually the result of spiritual training, involving some combination of prayer, meditation, fasting, bodily discipline, and renunciation of worldly concerns. Theistic varieties of mysticism describe the mystical experience as granted by God and thus not subject to the control of the mystic. Although theists claim to feel closeness to God during the mystical experience, they regard assertions of identity of the self with God as heretical. Non-theistic varieties are more apt to describe the experience as one that can be induced and controlled by the mystic and in which distinctions between the self and reality, or subject and object, are revealed to be illusory. Mystics claim that, although veridical, their experiences cannot be adequately described in language, because ordinary communication is based on sense experience and conceptual differentiation: mystical writings are thus characterized by metaphor and simile. It is con   593 troversial whether all mystical experiences are basically the same, and whether the apparent diversity among them is the result of interpretations influenced by different cultural traditions. 

myth of Er, a tale at the end of Plato’s Republic dramatizing the rewards of justice and philosophy by depicting the process of reincarnation. Complementing the main argument of the work, that it is intrinsically better to be just than unjust, this longest of Plato’s myths blends traditional lore with speculative cosmology to show that justice also pays, usually in life and certainly in the afterlife. Er, a warrior who revived shortly after death, reports how judges assign the souls of the just to heaven but others to punishment in the underworld, and how most return after a thousand years to behold the celestial order, to choose their next lives, and to be born anew. 

Nagarjuna fl. early second century A.D., Indian Mahayana Buddhist philosopher, founder of the Madhyamika view. The Mulanadhyamakarika Prajña “The Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way” and the Sunyatasaptati “The Septuagint on Emptiness” are perhaps his major works. He distinguishes between “two truths”: a conditional truth, which is provisional and reflects the sort of distinctions we make in everyday speech and find in ordinary experience; and a final truth, which is that there exists only an ineffable independent reality. Overcoming acceptance of the conventional, conditional truth is requisite for seeing the final truth in enlightenment. 

Nagel, Ernest 190185, Czech-born American philosopher, the preeminent American philosopher of science in the period from the mid-1930s to the 1960s. Arriving in New York as a ten-yearold immigrant, he earned his B.S. degree from the  of the City of New York and his Ph.D. from Columbia  in 1931. He was a member of the Philosophy Department at Columbia from 1930 to 1970. He coauthored the influential An Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method with his former teacher, M. R. Cohen. His many publications include two well-known classics: Principles of the Theory of Probability 1939 and Structure of Science 1960. Nagel was sensitive to developments in logic, foundations of mathematics, and probability theory, and he shared with Russell and with members of the Vienna Circle like Carnap and Phillip Frank a respect for the relevance of scientific inquiry for philosophical reflection. But his writing also reveals the influences of M. R. Cohen and that strand in the thinking of the pragmatism of Peirce and Dewey which Nagel himself called “contextualist naturalism.” He was a persuasive critic of Russell’s views of the data of sensation as a source of non-inferential premises for knowledge and of cognate views expressed by some members of the Vienna Circle. Unlike Frege, Russell, Carnap, Popper, and others, he rejected the view that taking account of context in characterizing method threatened to taint philosophical reflection with an unacceptable psychologism. This stance subsequently allowed him to oppose historicist and sociologist approaches to the philosophy of science. Nagel’s contextualism is reflected in his contention that ideas of determinism, probability, explanation, and reduction “can be significantly discussed only if they are directed to the theories or formulations of a science and not its subject matter” Principles of the Theory of Probability, 1939. This attitude infused his influential discussions of covering law explanation, statistical explanation, functional explanation, and reduction of one theory to another, in both natural and social science. Similarly, his contention that participants in the debate between realism and instrumentalism should clarify the import of their differences for context-sensitive scientific methodology served as the core of his argument casting doubt on the significance of the dispute. In addition to his extensive writings on scientific knowledge methodology, Nagel wrote influential essays on measurement, the history of mathematics, and the philosophy of law. 

Nagel, Thomas b.1937, American professor of philosophy and of law at New York , known for his important contributions in the fields of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and political philosophy. Nagel’s work in these areas is unified by a particular vision of perennial philosophical problems, according to which they emerge from a clash between two perspectives from which human beings can view themselves and the world. From an impersonal perspective, which results from detaching ourselves from our particular viewpoints, we strive to achieve an objective view of the world, whereas from a personal perspective, we see the world from our particular point of view. According to Nagel, dominance of the impersonal perspective in trying to understand reality leads to implausible philosophical views because it fails to accommodate facts about the self, minds, agency, and values that are revealed through engaged personal perspectives. In the philosophy of mind, for instance, Nagel criticizes various reductive accounts of mentality 595 N    595 resulting from taking an exclusively impersonal standpoint because they inevitably fail to account for the irreducibly subjective character of consciousness. In ethics, consequentialist moral theories like utilitarianism, which feature strong impartialist demands that stem from taking a detached, impersonal perspective, find resistance from the personal perspective within which individual goals and motives are accorded an importance not found in strongly impartialist moral theories. An examination of such problems in metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics is found in his Moral Questions 1979 and The View from Nowhere 1986. In Equality and Partiality 1990 Nagel argues that the impersonal standpoint gives rise to an egalitarian form of impartial regard for all people that often clashes with the goals, concerns, and affections that individuals experience from a personal perspective. Quite generally, then, as Nagel sees it, one important philosophical task is to explore ways in which these two standpoints on both theoretical and practical matters might be integrated. Nagel has also made important contributions regarding the nature and possibility of reason or rationality in both its theoretical and its practical uses. The Possibility of Altruism 1970 is an exploration of the structure of practical reason in which Nagel defends the rationality of prudence and altruism, arguing that the possibility of such behavior is connected with our capacities to view ourselves respectively persisting through time and recognizing the reality of other persons. The Last Word 1998 is a defense of reason against skeptical views, according to which reason is a merely contingent, locally conditioned feature of particular cultures and hence relative. 

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

naturalistic epistemology, an approach to epistemology that views the human subject as a natural phenomenon and uses empirical science to study epistemic activity. The phrase was introduced by Quine “Epistemology Naturalized,” in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays, 1969, who proposed that epistemology should be a chapter of psychology. Quine construed classical epistemology as Cartesian epistemology, an attempt to ground all knowledge in a firmly logical way on immediate experience. In its twentieth-century embodiment, it hoped to give a translation of all discourse and a deductive validation of all science in terms of sense experience, logic, and set theory. Repudiating this dream as forlorn, Quine urged that epistemology be abandoned and replaced by psychology. It would be a scientific study of how the subject takes sensory stimulations as input and delivers as output a theory of the three-dimensional world. This formulation appears to eliminate the normative mission of epistemology. In later writing, however, Quine has suggested that normative epistemology can be naturalized as a chapter of engineering: the technology of predicting experience, or sensory stimulations. Some theories of knowledge are naturalistic in their depiction of knowers as physical systems in causal interaction with the environment. One such theory is the causal theory of knowing, which says that a person knows that p provided his belief that p has a suitable causal connection with a corresponding state of affairs. Another example is the information-theoretic approach developed by Dretske Knowledge and the Flow of Information, 1981. This says that a person knows that p only if some signal “carries” this information that p to him, where information is construed as an objective commodity that can be processed and transmitted via instruments, gauges, neurons, and the like. Information is “carried” from one site to another when events located at those sites are connected by a suitable lawful dependence. The normative concept of justification has also been the subject of naturalistic construals. Whereas many theories of justified belief focus on logical or probabilistic relations between evidence and hypothesis, naturalistic theories focus on the psychological processes causally responsible for the belief. The logical status of a belief does not fix its justificational status. Belief in a tautology, for instance, is not justified if it is formed by blind trust in an ignorant guru. According to Goldman Epistemology and Cognition, 1986, a belief qualifies as justified only if it is produced by reliable belief-forming processes, i.e., processes that generally have a high truth ratio. Goldman’s larger program for naturalistic epistemology is called “epistemics,” an interdisciplinary enterprise in which cognitive science would play a major role. Epistemics would seek to identify the subset of cognitive operations available to the human cognizer that are best from a truth-bearing standpoint. Relevant truth-linked properties include problem-solving power and speed, i.e., the abilities to obtain correct answers to questions of interest and to do so quickly. Close connections between epistemology and artificial intelligence have been proposed by Clark Glymour, Gilbert Harman, John Pollock, and Paul Thagard. Harman stresses that principles of good reasoning are not directly given by rules of logic. Modus ponens, e.g., does not tell you to infer q if you already believe p and ‘if p then q’. In some cases it is better to subtract a belief in one of the premises rather than add a belief in q. Belief revision also requires attention to the storage and computational limitations of the mind. Limits of memory capacity, e.g., suggest a principle of clutter avoidance: not filling one’s mind with vast numbers of useless beliefs Harman, Change in View, 1986. Other conceptions of naturalistic epistemology focus on the history of science. Larry Laudan conceives of naturalistic epistemology as a scientific inquiry that gathers empirical evidence concerning the past track records of various scientific methodologies, with the aim of determining which of these methodologies can best advance the chosen cognitive ends. Naturalistic epistemology need not confine its attention to individual epistemic agents; it can also study communities of agents. This perspective invites contributions from sciences that address the social side of the knowledge-seeking enterprise. If naturalistic epistemology is a normative inquiry, however, it must not simply naturalism, biological naturalistic epistemology 598    598 describe social practices or social influences; it must analyze the impact of these factors on the attainment of cognitive ends. Philosophers such as David Hull, Nicholas Rescher, Philip Kitcher, and Alvin Goldman have sketched models inspired by population biology and economics to explore the epistemic consequences of alternative distributions of research activity and different ways that professional rewards might influence the course of research. 

natural kind, a category of entities classically conceived as having modal implications; e.g., if Socrates is a member of the natural kind human being, then he is necessarily a human being. The idea that nature fixes certain sortals, such as ‘water’ and ‘human being’, as correct classifications that appear to designate kinds of entities has roots going back at least to Plato and Aristotle. Anil Gupta has argued that sortals are to be distinguished from properties designated by such predicates as ‘red’ by including criteria for individuating the particulars bits or amounts for mass nouns that fall under them as well as criteria for sorting those particulars into the class. Quine is salient among those who find the modal implications of natural kinds objectionable. He has argued that the idea of natural kinds is rooted in prescientific intuitive judgments of comparative similarity, and he has suggested that as these intuitive classifications are replaced by classifications based on scientific theories these modal implications drop away. Kripke and Putnam have argued that science in fact uses natural kind terms having the modal implications Quine finds so objectionable. They see an important role in scientific methodology for the capacity to refer demonstratively to such natural kinds by pointing out particulars that fall under them. Certain inferences within science  such as the inference to the charge for electrons generally from the measurement of the charge on one or a few electrons  seem to be additional aspects of a role for natural kind terms in scientific practice. Other roles in the methodology of science for natural kind concepts have been discussed in recent work by Ian Hacking and Thomas Kuhn. 

natural law, also called law of nature, in moral and political philosophy, an objective norm or set of objective norms governing human behavior, similar to the positive laws of a human ruler, but binding on all people alike and usually understood as involving a superhuman legislator. Ancient Grecian and Roman thought, particularly Stoicism, introduced ideas of eternal laws directing the actions of all rational beings and built into the very structure of the universe. Roman lawyers developed a doctrine of a law that all civilized peoples would recognize, and made some effort to explain it in terms of a natural law common to animals and humans. The most influential forms of natural law theory, however, arose from later efforts to use Stoic and legal language to work out a Christian theory of morality and politics. The aim was to show that the principles of morals could be known by reason alone, without revelation, so that the whole human race could know how to live properly. The law of nature applies, on this understanding, only to rational beings, who can obey or disobey it deliberately and freely. It is thus different in kind from the laws God laid down for the inanimate and irrational parts of creation. Natural law theorists often saw continuities and analogies between natural laws for humans and those for the rest of creation but did not confuse them. The most enduringly influential natural law writer was Aquinas. On his view God’s eternal reason ordains laws directing all things to act for the good of the community of the universe, the declaration of His own glory. Human reason can participate sufficiently in God’s eternal reason to show us the good of the human community. The natural law is thus our sharing in the eternal law in a way appropriate to our human nature. God lays down certain other laws through revelation; these divine laws point us toward our eternal goal. The natural law concerns our earthly good, and needs to be supplemented by human laws. Such laws can vary from community to community, but to be binding they must always stay within the limits of the law of nature. God engraved the most basic principles of the natural law in the minds of all people alike, but their detailed application takes reasoning powers that not everyone may have. Opponents of Aquinas  called voluntarists  argued that God’s will, not his intellect, is the source of law, and that God could have laid down different natural laws for us. Hugo Grotius naturalistic fallacy natural law 599    599 rejected their position, but unlike Aquinas he conceived of natural law as meant not to direct us to bring about some definite common good but to set the limits on the ways in which each of us could properly pursue our own personal aims. This Grotian outlook was developed by Hobbes, Pufendorf, and Locke along voluntarist lines. Thomistic views continued to be expounded by Protestant as well as Roman Catholic writers until the end of the seventeenth century. Thereafter, while natural law theory remained central to Catholic teaching, it ceased to attract major new non-Catholic proponents. Natural law doctrine in both Thomistic and Grotian versions treats morality as basically a matter of compliance with law. Obligation and duty, obedience and disobedience, merit and guilt, reward and punishment, are central notions. Virtues are simply habits of following laws. Though the law is suited to our distinctive human nature and can be discovered by the proper use of reason, it is not a self-imposed law. In following it we are obeying God. Since the early eighteenth century, philosophical discussions of whether or not there is an objective morality have largely ceased to center on natural law. The idea remains alive, however, in jurisprudence. Natural law theories are opposed to legal positivism, the view that the only binding laws are those imposed by human sovereigns, who cannot be subject to higher legal constraints. Legal theorists arguing that there are rational objective limits to the legislative power of rulers often think of these limits in terms of natural law, even when their theories do not invoke or imply any of the religious aspects of earlier natural law positions. 

natural philosophy, the study of nature or of the spatiotemporal world. This was regarded as a task for philosophy before the emergence of modern science, especially physics and astronomy, and the term is now only used with reference to premodern times. Philosophical questions about nature still remain, e.g., whether materialism is true, but they would usually be placed in metaphysics or in a branch of it that may be called philosophy of nature. Natural philosophy is not to be confused with metaphysical naturalism, which is the metaphysical view no part of science itself that all that there is is the spatiotemporal world and that the only way to study it is that of the empirical sciences. It is also not to be confused with natural theology, which also may be considered part of metaphysics.

natural religion, a term first occurring in the second half of the seventeenth century, used in three related senses, the most common being 1 a body of truths about God and our duty that can be discovered by natural reason. These truths are sufficient for salvation or according to some orthodox Christians would have been sufficient if Adam had not sinned. Natural religion in this sense should be distinguished from natural theology, which does not imply this. A natural religion may also be 2 one that has a human, as distinct from a divine, origin. It may also be 3 a religion of human nature as such, as distinguished from religious beliefs and practices that have been determined by local circumstances. Natural religion in the third sense is identified with humanity’s original religion. In all three senses, natural religion includes a belief in God’s existence, justice, benevolence, and providential government; in immortality; and in the dictates of common morality. While the concept is associated with deism, it is also sympathetically treated by Christian writers like Clarke, who argues that revealed religion simply restores natural religion to its original purity and adds inducements to compliance. 

necessitarianism, the doctrine that necessity is an objective feature of the world. Natural language permits speakers to express modalities: a state of affairs can be actual Paris’s being in France, merely possible chlorophyll’s making things blue, or necessary 2 ! 2 % 4. Anti-necessitarians believe that these distinctions are not grounded in the nature of the world. Some of them claim that the distinctions are merely verbal. Others, e.g., Hume, believed that psychological facts, like our expectations of future events, explain the idea of necessity. Yet others contend that the modalities reflect epistemic considerations; necessity reflects the highest level of an inquirer’s commitment. Some necessitarians believe there are different modes of metaphysical necessity, e.g., causal and logical necessity. Certain proponents of idealism believe that each fact is necessarily connected with every other fact so that the ultimate goal of scientific inquiry is the discovery of a completely rigorous mathematical system of the world.

necessity, a modal property attributable to a whole proposition dictum just when it is not possible that the proposition be false the proposition being de dicto necessary. Narrowly construed, a proposition P is logically necessary provided P satisfies certain syntactic conditions, namely, that P’s denial is formally self-contradictory. More broadly, P is logically necessary just when P satisfies certain semantic conditions, namely, that P’s denial is false, and P true, in all possible worlds. These semantic conditions were first suggested by Leibniz, refined by Wittgenstein and Carnap, and fully developed as the possible worlds semantics of Kripke, Hintikka, et al., in the 1960s. Previously, philosophers had to rely largely on intuition to determine the acceptability or otherwise of formulas involving the necessity operator, A, and were at a loss as to which of various axiomatic systems for modal logic, as developed in the 1930s by C. I. Lewis, best captured the notion of logical necessity. There was much debate, for instance, over the characteristic NN thesis of Lewis’s system S4, namely, AP / A AP if P is necessary then it is necessarily necessary. But given a Leibnizian account of the truth conditions for a statement of the form Aa namely R1 that Aa is true provided a is true in all possible worlds, and R2 that Aa is false provided there is at least one possible world in which a is false, a proof can be constructed by reductio ad absurdum. For suppose that AP / AAP is false in some arbitrarily chosen world W. Then its antecedent will be true in W, and hence by R1 it follows a that P will be true in all possible worlds. But equally its consequent will be false in W, and hence by R2 AP will be false in at least one possible world, from which again by R2 it follows b that P will be false in at least one possible world, thus contradicting a. A similar proof can be constructed for the characteristic thesis of S5, namely, -A-P / A-A-P if P is possibly true then it is necessarily possible. Necessity is also attributable to a property F of an object O provided it is not possible that there is no possible world in which O exists and lacks F  F being de re necessary, internal or essential to O. For instance, the non-repeatable haecceitist property of being identical to O is de re necessary essential to O, and arguably the repeatable property of being extended is de re necessary to all colored objects. 

negation: H. P. Grice, “Negation.” the logical operation on propositions that is indicated, e.g., by the prefatory clause ‘It is not the case that . . .’. Negation is standardly distinguished sharply from the operation on predicates that is called complementation and that is indicated by the prefix ‘non-’. Because negation can also be indicated by the adverb ‘not’, a distinction is often drawn between external negation, which is indicated by attaching the prefatory ‘It is not the case that . . .’ to an assertion, and internal negation, which is indicated by inserting the adverb ‘not’ along with, perhaps, nature, right of negation 601    601 grammatically necessary words like ‘do’ or ‘does’ into the assertion in such a way as to indicate that the adverb ‘not’ modifies the verb. In a number of cases, the question arises as to whether external and internal negation yield logically equivalent results. For example, ‘It is not the case that Santa Claus exists’ would seem obviously to be true, whereas ‘Santa Claus does not exist’ seems to some philosophers to presuppose what it denies, on the ground that nothing could be truly asserted of Santa Claus unless he existed. 

Nemesius of Emesa fl. c.390400, Grecian Christian philosopher. His treatise on the soul, On the Nature of Man, translated from Grecian into Latin by Alphanus of Salerno and Burgundio of Pisa c.1160, was attributed to Gregory of Nyssa in the Middle Ages, and enjoyed some authority; the treatise rejects Plato for underplaying the unity of soul and body, and Aristotle for making the soul essentially corporeal. The soul is selfsubsistent, incorporeal, and by nature immortal, but naturally suited for union with the body. Nemesius draws on Ammonius Saccas and Porphyry, as well as analogy to the union of divine and human nature in Christ, to explain the incorruptible soul’s perfect union with the corruptible body. His review of the powers of the soul draws especially on Galen on the brain. His view that rational creatures possess free will in virtue of their rationality influenced Maximus the Confessor and John of Damascus.

Neo-Confucianism, Confucianism as revived in China during the late tenth to mid-seventeenth centuries. It has also been called Tao-hsüeh learning of the Way or Li-hsüeh learning of principles in the broader sense. It is without any doubt Confucianism, since SungMing Confucianists also found their ultimate commitment in jen humanity or human-heartedness and regulated their behavior by li propriety. But it acquired new features, since it was a movement in response to the challenges from Buddhism and Neo-Taoism. Therefore it developed sophisticated theories of human mind and nature and also cosmology and metaphysics far beyond the scope of Pre-Ch’in Confucianism. If the Confucian ideal may be characterized by nei-sheng-waiwang inward sageliness and outward kingliness, then the Neo-Confucianists certainly made greater contributions to the nei-sheng side, as they considered wei-chi-chih-hsüeh learning for one’s self as their primary concern, and developed sophisticated discipline of the mind comparable to the kind of transcendental meditation practiced by Buddhists and Taoists. They put emphasis on finding resources within the self. Hence they moved away from the Han tradition of writing extensive commentaries on the Five Classics. Instead, they looked for guidance to the so-called Four Books: the Analects, the Mencius, The Great Learning, and The Doctrine of the Mean. They also believed that they should put what they had learned from the words of the sages and worthies into practice in order to make themselves better. This was to start a new trend in sharp contrast to the earlier Five Dynasties period 90760, when moral standards had fallen to a new low. According to Chu Hsi, the movement started with Chou Tun-yi 101773, who, along with Chang Tsai 102077, gave new interpretations to the I-Ching the Book of Changes and The Doctrine of the Mean in combination with the Analects and the Mencius so as to develop new cosmologies and metaphysics in response to the challenges from Buddhism and Taoism. The name of Shao Yung 101177, an expert on the I-Ching, was excluded, as his views were considered too Taoistic. But the true founders and leaders of the movement were the two Ch’eng brothers  Ch’eng Hao 103285 and Ch’eng Yi 1033 1107. Onetime pupils of Chou, they developed li principle into a philosophical concept. Even though Hua-yen Buddhism had used the term first, the Ch’eng brothers gave it a totally new interpretation from a Confucian perspective. Later scholars find that the thoughts of the two brothers differed both in style and in substance. Ch’eng Hao believed in i-pen one foundation, while Ch’eng Yi developed a dualistic metaphysics of li principle and ch’i material force. On the surface Chu Hsi was the follower of the Ch’eng brothers, but in fact he was only following the lead of Ch’eng Yi, and promoted the socalled Li-hsüeh learning of principles in the narrower sense. His younger contemporary negation-complete Neo-Confucianism 602    602 Lu Hsiang-shan 113993 objected to Chu’s method of looking for principles among things. He urged us to realize principle within one’s own mind, went back to Mencius’s teaching to establish the greater part of the self first, and promoted the so-called hsin-hsüeh learning of the mind. But Chu Hsi’s commentaries on the Four Books were adopted as the basis of civil service examinations in the Yüan dynasty; Lu’s views were largely ignored until there were revived in the Ming dynasty 13681644 by Wang Yang-ming 14721529, who identified the mind with principle and advocated that knowledge and action are one. Since LuWang’s thoughts were closer to Mencius, who was honored to have represented the orthodox line of transmission of the Way, Mou Tsung-san advanced the theory that Chu Hsi was the side branch taking over the orthodoxy; he also believed that Hu Hung 110055 and Liu Tsung-chou 15781645 developed a third branch of Neo-Confucianism in addition to that of Ch’eng and Chu and that of Lu and Wang. His views have generated many controversies. SungMing Neo-Confucianism was hailed as creating the second golden period of Chinese philosophy since the late Chou. Huang Tsung-hsi 161095, a pupil of Liu Tsung-chou and the last important figure in SungMing Neo-Confucianism, extensively studied the movement and wrote essential works on it. 

neo-Kantianism, the diverse Kantian movement that emerged within German philosophy in the 1860s, gained a strong academic foothold in the 1870s, reached its height during the three decades prior to World War I, and disappeared with the rise of Nazism. The movement was initially focused on renewed study and elaboration of Kant’s epistemology in response to the growing epistemic authority of the natural sciences and as an alternative to both Hegelian and speculative idealism and the emerging materialism of, among others, Ludwig Büchner 182499. Later neo-Kantianism explored Kant’s whole philosophy, applied his critical method to disciplines other than the natural sciences, and developed its own philosophical systems. Some originators and/or early contributors were Kuno Fischer 18241907, Hermann von Helmholtz 182194, Friedrich Albert Lange 182875, Eduard Zeller 18141908, and Otto Liebmann 18401912, whose Kant und die Epigonen 1865 repeatedly stated what became a neoKantian motto, “Back to Kant!” Several forms of neo-Kantianism are to be distinguished. T. K. Oesterreich 18801949, in Friedrich Ueberwegs Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie “F.U.’s Compendium of the History of Philosophy,” 1923, developed the standard, somewhat chronological, classification: 1 The physiological neo-Kantianism of Helmholtz and Lange, who claimed that physiology is “developed or corrected Kantianism.” 2 The metaphysical neo-Kantianism of the later Liebmann, who argued for a Kantian “critical metaphysics” beyond epistemology in the form of “hypotheses” about the essence of things. 3 The realist neo-Kantianism of Alois Riehl 18441924, who emphasized the real existence of Kant’s thing-in-itself. 4 The logistic-methodological neo-Kantianism of the Marburg School of Hermann Cohen 18421918 and Paul Natorp 18541924. 5 The axiological neo-Kantianism of the Baden or Southwest German School of Windelband 18481915 and Heinrich Rickert 18631936. 6 The relativistic neo-Kantianism of Georg Simmel 18581918, who argued for Kantian categories relative to individuals and cultures. 7 The psychological neo-Kantianism of Leonard Nelson 18821927, originator of the Göttingen School; also known as the neo-Friesian School, after Jakob Friedrich Fries 17731843, Nelson’s self-proclaimed precursor. Like Fries, Nelson held that Kantian a priori principles cannot be transcendentally justified, but can be discovered only through introspection. Oesterreich’s classification has been narrowed or modified, partly because of conflicting views on how distinctly “Kantian” a philosopher must have been to be called “neo-Kantian.” The very term ‘neo-Kantianism’ has even been called into question, as suggesting real intellectual commonality where little or none is to be found. There is, however, growing consensus that Marneo-Euclidean geometry neo-Kantianism 603    603 burg and Baden neo-Kantianism were the most important and influential. Marburg School. Its founder, Cohen, developed its characteristic Kantian idealism of the natural sciences by arguing that physical objects are truly known only through the laws of these sciences and that these laws presuppose the application of Kantian a priori principles and concepts. Cohen elaborated this idealism by eliminating Kant’s dualism of sensibility and understanding, claiming that space and time are construction methods of “pure thought” rather than a priori forms of perception and that the notion of any “given” perceptual data prior to the “activity” of “pure thought” is meaningless. Accordingly, Cohen reformulated Kant’s thing-in-itself as the regulative idea that the mathematical description of the world can always be improved. Cohen also emphasized that “pure thought” refers not to individual consciousess  on his account Kant had not yet sufficiently left behind a “subjectobject” epistemology  but rather to the content of his own system of a priori principles, which he saw as subject to change with the progress of science. Just as Cohen held that epistemology must be based on the “fact of science,” he argued, in a decisive step beyond Kant, that ethics must transcendentally deduce both the moral law and the ideal moral subject from a humanistic science  more specifically, from jurisprudence’s notion of the legal person. This analysis led to the view that the moral law demands that all institutions, including economic enterprises, become democratic  so that they display unified wills and intentions as transcendental conditions of the legal person  and that all individuals become colegislators. Thus Cohen arrived at his frequently cited claim that Kant “is the true and real originator of German socialism.” Other important Marburg Kantians were Cohen’s colleague Natorp, best known for his studies on Plato and philosophy of education, and their students Karl Vorländer 18601928, who focused on Kantian socialist ethics as a corrective of orthodox Marxism, and Ernst Cassirer 18741945. Baden School. The basic task of philosophy and its transcendental method is seen as identifying universal values that make possible culture in its varied expressions. This focus is evident in Windelband’s influential insight that the natural sciences seek to formulate general laws  nomothetic knowledge  while the historical sciences seek to describe unique events  idiographic knowledge. This distinction is based on the values interests of mastery of nature and understanding and reliving the unique past in order to affirm our individuality. Windelband’s view of the historical sciences as idiographic raised the problem of selection central to his successor Rickert’s writings: How can historians objectively determine which individual events are historically significant? Rickert argued that this selection must be based on the values that are generally recognized within the cultures under investigation, not on the values of historians themselves. Rickert also developed the transcendental argument that the objectivity of the historical sciences necessitates the assumption that the generally recognized values of different cultures approximate in various degrees universally valid values. This argument was rejected by Weber, whose methodological work was greatly indebted to Rickert. 

Neoplatonism, that period of Platonism following on the new impetus provided by the philosophical speculations of Plotinus A.D. 20469. It extends, as a minimum, to the closing of the Platonic School in Athens by Justinian in 529, but maximally through Byzantium, with such figures as Michael Psellus 101878 and Pletho c.13601452, the Renaissance Ficino, Pico, and the Florentine Academy, and the early modern period the Cambridge Platonists, Thomas Taylor, to the advent of the “scientific” study of the works of Plato with Schleiermacher 17681834 at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The term was formerly also used to characterize the whole period from the Old Academy of Plato’s immediate successors, Speusippus and Xenocrates, through what is now termed Middle Platonism c.80 B.C.A.D. 220, down to Plotinus. This account confines itself to the “minimum” interpretation. Neoplatonism proper may be divided into three main periods: that of Plotinus and his immediate followers third century; the “Syrian” School of Iamblichus and his followers fourth century; and the “Athenian” School begun by Plutarch of Athens, and including Syrianus, Proclus, and their successors, down to Damascius fifthsixth centuries. Plotinus and his school. Plotinus’s innovations in Platonism developed in his essays, the Enneads, collected and edited by his pupil Porphyry after his death, are mainly two: a above Neoplatonism Neoplatonism 604    604 the traditional supreme principle of earlier Platonism and Aristotelianism, a self-thinking intellect, which was also regarded as true being, he postulated a principle superior to intellect and being, totally unitary and simple “the One”; b he saw reality as a series of levels One, Intelligence, Soul, each higher one outflowing or radiating into the next lower, while still remaining unaffected in itself, and the lower ones fixing themselves in being by somehow “reflecting back” upon their priors. This eternal process gives the universe its existence and character. Intelligence operates in a state of non-temporal simultaneity, holding within itself the “forms” of all things. Soul, in turn, generates time, and receives the forms into itself as “reason principles” logoi. Our physical three-dimensional world is the result of the lower aspect of Soul nature projecting itself upon a kind of negative field of force, which Plotinus calls “matter.” Matter has no positive existence, but is simply the receptacle for the unfolding of Soul in its lowest aspect, which projects the forms in three-dimensional space. Plotinus often speaks of matter as “evil” e.g. Enneads II.8, and of the Soul as suffering a “fall” e.g. Enneads V.1, 1, but in fact he sees the whole cosmic process as an inevitable result of the superabundant productivity of the One, and thus “the best of all possible worlds.” Plotinus was himself a mystic, but he arrived at his philosophical conclusions by perfectly logical means, and he had not much use for either traditional religion or any of the more recent superstitions. His immediate pupils, Amelius c.22590 and Porphyry 234c.305, while somewhat more hospitable to these, remained largely true to his philosophy though Amelius had a weakness for triadic elaborations in metaphysics. Porphyry was to have wide influence, both in the Latin West through such men as Marius Victorinus, Augustine, and Boethius, and in the Grecian East and even, through translations, on medieval Islam, as the founder of the Neoplatonic tradition of commentary on both Plato and Aristotle, but it is mainly as an expounder of Plotinus’s philosophy that he is known. He added little that is distinctive, though that little is currently becoming better appreciated. Iamblichus and the Syrian School. Iamblichus c.245325, descendant of an old Syrian noble family, was a pupil of Porphyry’s, but dissented from him on various important issues. He set up his own school in Apamea in Syria, and attracted many pupils. One chief point of dissent was the role of theurgy really just magic, with philosophical underpinnings, but not unlike Christian sacramental theology. Iamblichus claimed, as against Porphyry, that philosophical reasoning alone could not attain the highest degree of enlightenment, without the aid of theurgic rites, and his view on this was followed by all later Platonists. He also produced a metaphysical scheme far more elaborate than Plotinus’s, by a Scholastic filling in, normally with systems of triads, of gaps in the “chain of being” left by Plotinus’s more fluid and dynamic approach to philosophy. For instance, he postulated two Ones, one completely transcendent, the other the source of all creation, thus “resolving” a tension in Plotinus’s metaphysics. Iamblichus was also concerned to fit as many of the traditional gods as possible into his system, which later attracted the attention of the Emperor Julian, who based himself on Iamblichus when attempting to set up a Hellenic religion to rival Christianity, a project which, however, died with him in 363. The Athenian School. The precise links between the pupils of Iamblichus and Plutarch d.432, founder of the Athenian School, remain obscure, but the Athenians always retained a great respect for the Syrian. Plutarch himself is a dim figure, but Syrianus c.370437, though little of his writings survives, can be seen from constant references to him by his pupil Proclus 412 85 to be a major figure, and the source of most of Proclus’s metaphysical elaborations. The Athenians essentially developed and systematized further the doctrines of Iamblichus, creating new levels of divinity e.g. intelligibleintellectual gods, and “henads” in the realm of the One  though they rejected the two Ones, this process reaching its culmination in the thought of the last head of the Athenian Academy, Damascius c.456540. The drive to systematize reality and to objectivize concepts, exhibited most dramatically in Proclus’s Elements of Theology, is a lasting legacy of the later Neoplatonists, and had a significant influence on the thought, among others, of Hegel. 

neo-Scholasticism, the movement given impetus Neoplatonism, Islamic neo-Scholasticism 605    605 by Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni Patris 1879, which, while stressing Aquinas, was a general recommendation of the study of medieval Scholasticism as a source for the solution of vexing modern problems. Leo assumed that there was a doctrine common to Aquinas, Bonaventure, Albertus Magnus, and Duns Scotus, and that Aquinas was a preeminent spokesman of the common view. Maurice De Wulf employed the phrase ‘perennial philosophy’ to designate this common medieval core as well as what of Scholasticism is relevant to later times. Historians like Mandonnet, Grabmann, and Gilson soon contested the idea that there was a single medieval doctrine and drew attention to the profound differences between the great medieval masters. The discussion of Christian philosophy precipitated by Brehier in 1931 generated a variety of suggestions as to what medieval thinkers and later Christian philosophers have in common, but this was quite different from the assumption of Aeterni Patris. The pedagogical directives of this and later encyclicals brought about a revival of Thomism rather than of Scholasticism, generally in seminaries, ecclesiastical s, and Catholic universities. Louvain’s Higher Institute of Philosophy under the direction of Cardinal Mercier and its Revue de Philosophie Néoscolastique were among the first fruits of the Thomistic revival. The studia generalia of the Dominican order continued at a new pace, the Saulchoir publishing the Revue thomiste. In graduate centers in Milan, Madrid, Latin America, Paris, and Rome, men were trained for the task of teaching in s and seminaries, and scholarly research began to flourish as well. The Leonine edition of the writings of Aquinas was soon joined by new critical editions of Bonaventure, Duns Scotus, and Ockham, as well as Albertus Magnus. Medieval studies in the broader sense gained from the quest for manuscripts and the growth of paleography and codicology. Besides the historians mentioned above, Jacques Maritain 18821973, a layman and convert to Catholicism, did much both in his native France and in the United States to promote the study of Aquinas. The Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies at Toronto, with Gilson regularly and Maritain frequently in residence, became a source of  and  teachers in Canada and the United States, as Louvain and, in Rome, the Jesuit Gregorianum and the Dominican Angelicum already were. In the 1940s Americans took doctorates in theology and philosophy at Laval in Quebec and soon the influence of Charles De Koninck was felt. Jesuits at St. Louis  began to publish The Modern Schoolman, Dominicans in Washington The Thomist, and the American Catholic Philosophical Association The New Scholasticism. The School of Philosophy at Catholic , long the primary domestic source of professors and scholars, was complemented by graduate programs at St. Louis, Georgetown, Notre Dame, Fordham, and Marquette. In the golden period of the Thomistic revival in the United States, from the 1930s until the end of the Vatican Council II in 1965, there were varieties of Thomism based on the variety of views on the relation between philosophy and science. By the 1960s Thomistic philosophy was a prominent part of the curriculum of all Catholic s and universities. By 1970, it had all but disappeared under the mistaken notion that this was the intent of Vatican II. This had the effect of releasing Aquinas into the wider philosophical world. 

Neo-Taoism, in Chinese, hsüan-hsüeh ‘Profound Learning’, ‘Mysterious Learning’, or ‘Dark Learning’, a broad, multifaceted revival of Taoist learning that dominated Chinese philosophy from the third to the sixth century A.D. Literally ‘dark red’, hsüan is used in the Lao Tzu Tao Te Ching to describe the sublime mystery of the tao. Historically, hsüan-hsüeh formed a major topic of “Pure Conversation” ch’ing-t’an, where scholars in a time of political upheaval sought to arrest the perceived decline of the tao. When the Wei dynasty replaced the Han in A.D. 220, a first wave of Neo-Taoist philosophers represented by Ho Yen c.190249 and Wang Pi 22649 radically reinterpreted the classical heritage to bring to light its profound meaning. The Confucian orthodoxy  as distinguished from the original teachings of Confucius  was deemed ineffectual and an obstacle to renewal. One of the most important debates in Profound Learning  the debate on “words and meaning”  criticizes Han scholarship for its literal imagination and confronts the question of interpretation. Words are necessary but not sufficient for understanding. The ancient sages had a unified view of the Tao, articulated most clearly in the I-Ching, Lao Tzu, and Chuang Tzu, but distorted by Han scholars. Most Neo-Taoists concentrated on these “Three Profound Treatises” san-hsüan. Wang Pi is best known for his commentaries on the I-Ching and the Lao Tzu; and Kuo Hsiang d.312, another Neo-Taoism Neo-Taoism 606    606 leading Neo-Taoist, is arguably the most important Chuang Tzu commentator in Chinese history. The tao is the source of all being, but against identifying the tao with a creator “heaven” or an original “vital energy” ch’i, Wang Pi argues that being originates from “non-being” wu. The concept of non-being, taken from the Lao Tzu, brings out the transcendence of the tao. Nameless and without form, the tao as such can be described only negatively as wu, literally “not having” any characteristics. In contrast, for Kuo Hsiang, non-being does not explain the origin of being because, as entirely conceptual, it cannot create anything. If non-being cannot bring forth being, and if the idea of a creator remains problematic, the only alternative is to regard the created order as coming into existence spontaneously. This implies that being is eternal. Particular beings can be traced to contingent causes, but ultimately the origin of being can be understood only in terms of a process of “selftransformation.” Chinese sources often contrast Wang Pi’s “valuing non-being” kuei-wu with Kuo Hsiang’s “exaltation of being” ch’ung-yu. In ethics and politics, Wang stresses that the tao is manifest in nature as constant principles li. This is what the classics mean by tzu-jan, naturalness or literally what is of itself so. The hierarchical structure of sociopolitical relations also has a basis in the order of nature. While Wang emphasizes unity, Kuo Hsiang champions diversity. The principle of nature dictates that everyone has a particular “share” of vital energy, the creative power of the tao that determines one’s physical, intellectual, and moral capacity. Individual differences ought to be accepted, but do not warrant value discrimination. Each individual is in principle complete in his/her own way, and constitutes an indispensable part in a larger whole. Taoist ethics thus consists in being true to oneself, and nourishing one’s nature. In government, naturalness finds expression in non-action wu-wei, which may be contrasted with Legalist policies emphasizing punishment and control. For Wang Pi, wu-wei aims at preserving the natural order so that the myriad things can flourish. Practically, it involves the elimination of willful intervention and a return to “emptiness and quiescence”; i.e., freedom from the dictates of desire and a life of guileless simplicity. Not to be confused with total inaction, according to Kuo Hsiang, wu-weisignifies a mode of being that fully uses one’s natural endowment. When one is guided by inherent moral principles, there is no place for artificiality or self-deception in the Taoist way of life. Ethical purity does not entail renunciation. Though the sage finds himself along the corridors of power, he safeguards his nature and remains empty of desire. In government, the sage ruler naturally reduces arbitrary restrictions, adjusts policies to suit changing needs, identifies the right people for office, and generally creates an environment in which all under heaven can dwell in peace and realize their potential. Ho Yen died a victim of political intrigue, at the close of the Cheng-shih reign period 24049 of the Wei dynasty. Wang Pi died later in the same year. Historians refer to “Cheng-shih hsüanhsüeh” to mark the first phase of Neo-Taoism. Later, political power was controlled by the Ssuma family, who eventually founded the Chin dynasty in A.D. 265. During the WeiChin transition, a group of intellectuals, the “Seven Worthies of the Bamboo Grove,” came to represent the voice of Profound Learning. Among them, Hsi K’ang 22362, Juan Chi 21063, and Hsiang Hsiu c.22780 are of particular interest to philosophy. In different ways, they look to naturalness as a basis for renewal. Debates in Profound Learning often revolve around the relationship between “orthodox teachings” ming-chiao and tzu-jan. For Wang Pi and Kuo Hsiang, government and society should ideally conform to nature. Both Hsi K’ang and Juan Chi found ming-chiao impinging on naturalness. This also gave impetus to the development of a counterculture. Central to this is the place of emotion in the ethical life. Ho Yen is credited with the view that sages are without emotions ch’ing, whose exceptional ch’i-endowment translates into a purity of being that excludes emotional disturbance. Hsi K’ang also values dispassion, and Hsiang Hsiu urges putting passion under the rule of ritual; but many appreciated strong emotion as a sign of authenticity, which often contravened orthodox teachings. As Pure Conversation gained currency, it became fashionable to give free rein to one’s impulses; and many hoped to establish a reputation by opposing orthodoxy. The debate on naturalness raises the further question of talent or capacity ts’ai and its relationship to human nature hsing. In Profound Learning, four distinct positions have been proposed: that talent and nature are identical t’ung; different i; harmonious ho; and separate li. This is important because the right talent must be identified to serve political ends. In the early fourth century, the Chin dynasty had to flee its capital and rebuild in south China. As the literati resettled, they looked back to the Neo-Taoism Neo-Taoism 607    607 time of Ho Yen and Wang Pi as the golden age of Profound Learning. Although Pure Conversation continued with undiminished vigor, it did not introduce many new ideas. As it entered its last phase, another Taoist work, the Lieh-tzu, came to rival the “Three Profound Treatises.” Chang Chan c.330400 wrote an important commentary on the work, which not only recapitulated many of the ideas that spanned the spectrum of Neo-Taoist philosophy but also borrowed Buddhist ideas. From the fourth century onward, Buddhist masters frequently engaged in Pure Conversation and challenged hsüan-hsüeh scholars at their own game. 

Neo-Thomism, a philosophical-theological movement in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries manifesting a revival of interest in Aquinas. It was stimulated by Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni Patris 1879 calling for a renewed emphasis on the teaching of Thomistic principles to meet the intellectual and social challenges of modernity. The movement reached its peak in the 1950s, though its influence continues to be seen in organizations such as the American Catholic Philosophical Association. Among its major figures are Joseph Kleutgen, Désiré Mercier, Joseph Maréchal, Pierre Rousselot, Réginald Garrigou-LaGrange, Martin Grabmann, M.-D. Chenu, Jacques Maritain, Étienne Gilson, Yves R. Simon, Josef Pieper, Karl Rahner, Cornelio Fabro, Emerich Coreth, Bernard Lonergan, and W. Norris Clarke. Few, if any, of these figures have described themselves as NeoThomists; some explicitly rejected the designation. Neo-Thomists have little in common except their commitment to Aquinas and his relevance to the contemporary world. Their interest produced a more historically accurate understanding of Aquinas and his contribution to medieval thought Grabmann, Gilson, Chenu, including a previously ignored use of the Platonic metaphysics of participation Fabro. This richer understanding of Aquinas, as forging a creative synthesis in the midst of competing traditions, has made arguing for his relevance easier. Those Neo-Thomists who were suspicious of modernity produced fresh readings of Aquinas’s texts applied to contemporary problems Pieper, Gilson. Their influence can be seen in the revival of virtue theory and the work of Alasdair MacIntyre. Others sought to develop Aquinas’s thought with the aid of later Thomists Maritain, Simon and incorporated the interpretations of Counter-Reformation Thomists, such as Cajetan and Jean Poinsot, to produce more sophisticated, and controversial, accounts of the intelligence, intentionality, semiotics, and practical knowledge. Those Neo-Thomists willing to engage modern thought on its own terms interpreted modern philosophy sympathetically using the principles of Aquinas Maréchal, Lonergan, Clarke, seeking dialogue rather than confrontation. However, some readings of Aquinas are so thoroughly integrated into modern philosophy that they can seem assimilated Rahner, Coreth; their highly individualized metaphysics inspired as much by other philosophical influences, especially Heidegger, as Aquinas. Some of the labels currently used among Neo-Thomists suggest a division in the movement over critical, postKantian methodology. ‘Existential Thomism’ is used for those who emphasize both the real distinction between essence and existence and the role of the sensible in the mind’s first grasp of being. ‘Transcendental Thomism’ applies to figures like Maréchal, Rousselot, Rahner, and Coreth who rely upon the inherent dynamism of the mind toward the real, rooted in Aquinas’s theory of the active intellect, from which to deduce their metaphysics of being. 

New Academy, the name given the Academy, the school founded by Plato in Athens, during the time it was controlled by Academic Skeptics after about 265 B.C. Its principal leaders in this period were Arcesilaus 315242 and Carneades 219 129; our most accessible source for the New Academy is Cicero’s Academica. A master of logical techniques such as sorites Neo-Thomism New Academy 608    608 which he learned from Diodorus, Arcesilaus attempted to revive the dialectic of Plato, using it to achieve the suspension of belief he learned to value from Pyrrho. Later, and especially under the leadership of Carneades, the New Academy developed a special relationship with Stoicism: as the Stoics found new ways to defend their doctrine of the criterion, Carneades found new ways to refute it in the Stoics’ own terms. Carneades’ visit to Rome in 155 B.C. with a Stoic and a Peripatetic marks the beginning of Rome’s interest in Grecian philosophy. His anti-Stoic arguments were recorded by his successor Clitomachus d. c.110 B.C., whose work is known to us through summaries in Cicero. Clitomachus was succeeded by Philo of Larisa c.16079 B.C., who was the teacher of Antiochus of Ascalon c.130c.67 B.C.. Philo later attempted to reconcile the Old and the New Academy by softening the Skepticism of the New and by fostering a Skeptical reading of Plato. Angered by this, Antiochus broke away in about 87 B.C. to found what he called the Old Academy, which is now considered to be the beginning of Middle Platonism. Probably about the same time, Aenesidemus dates unknown revived the strict Skepticism of Pyrrho and founded the school that is known to us through the work of Sextus Empiricus. Academic Skepticism differed from Pyrrhonism in its sharp focus on Stoic positions, and possibly in allowing for a weak assent as opposed to belief, which they suspended in what is probable; and Pyrrhonians accused Academic Skeptics of being dogmatic in their rejection of the possibility of knowledge. The New Academy had a major influence on the development of modern philosophy, most conspicuously through Hume, who considered that his brand of mitigated skepticism belonged to this school. 

Newcomb’s paradox, a conflict between two widely accepted principles of rational decision, arising in the following decision problem, known as Newcomb’s problem. Two boxes are before you. The first contains either $1,000,000 or nothing. The second contains $1,000. You may take the first box alone or both boxes. Someone with uncanny foresight has predicted your choice and fixed the content of the first box according to his prediction. If he has predicted that you will take only the first box, he has put $1,000,000 in that box; and if he has predicted that you will take both boxes, he has left the first box empty. The expected utility of an option is commonly obtained by multiplying the utility of its possible outcomes by their probabilities given the option, and then adding the products. Because the predictor is reliable, the probability that you receive $1,000,000 given that you take only the first box is high, whereas the probability that you receive $1,001,000 given that you take both boxes is low. Accordingly, the expected utility of taking only the first box is greater than the expected utility of taking both boxes. Therefore the principle of maximizing expected utility says to take only the first box. However, the principle of dominance says that if the states determining the outcomes of options are causally independent of the options, and there is one option that is better than the others in each state, then you should adopt it. Since your choice does not causally influence the contents of the first box, and since choosing both boxes yields $1,000 in addition to the contents of the first box whatever they are, the principle says to take both boxes. Newcomb’s paradox is named after its formulator, William Newcomb. Nozick publicized it in “Newcomb’s Problem and Two Principles of Choice” 1969. Many theorists have responded to the paradox by changing the definition of the expected utility of an option so that it is sensitive to the causal influence of the option on the states that determine its outcome, but is insensitive to the evidential bearing of the option on those states. 

Newman, John Henry 180190, English prelate and philosopher of religion. As fellow at Oriel , Oxford, he was a prominent member of the Anglican Oxford Movement. He became a Roman Catholic in 1845, took holy orders in 1847, and was made a cardinal in 1879. His most important philosophical work is the Grammar of Assent 1870. Here Newman explored the difference between formal reasoning and the informal or natural movement of the mind in discerning the truth about the concrete and historical. Concrete reasoning in the mode of natural inference is implicit and unreflective; it deals not with general principles as such but with their employment in particular circumstances. Thus a scientist must judge whether the phenomenon he confronts is a novel significant datum, a coincidence, or merely an insignificant variation in the data. The acquired capacity to make judgments of Newcomb’s paradox Newman, John Henry 609    609 this sort Newman called the illative sense, an intellectual skill shaped by experience and personal insight and generally limited for individuals to particular fields of endeavor. The illative sense makes possible a judgment of certitude about the matter considered, even though the formal argument that partially outlines the process possesses only objective probability for the novice. Hence probability is not necessarily opposed to certitude. In becoming aware of its tacit dimension, Newman spoke of recognizing a mode of informal inference. He distinguished such reasoning, which, by virtue of the illative sense, culminates in a judgment of certitude about the way things are real assent, from formal reasoning conditioned by the certainty or probability of the premises, which assents to the conclusion thus conditioned notional assent. In real assent, the proposition functions to “image” the reality, to make its reality present. In the Development of Christian Doctrine 1845, Newman analyzed the ways in which some ideas unfold themselves only through historical development, within a tradition of inquiry. He sought to delineate the common pattern of such development in politics, science, philosophy, and religion. Although his focal interest was in how religious doctrines develop, he emphasizes the general character of such a pattern of progressive articulation. F.J.C. New Realism, an early twentieth-century revival, both in England and in the United States, of various forms of realism in reaction to the dominant idealisms inherited from the nineteenth century. In America this revival took a cooperative form when six philosophers Ralph Barton Perry, Edwin Holt, William Pepperell Montague, Walter Pitkin, Edward Spaulding, and Walter Marvin published “A Program and First Platform of Six Realists” 1910, followed two years later by the cooperative volume The New Realism, in which each authored an essay. This volume gave rise to the designation ‘New Realists’ for these six philosophers. Although they clearly disagreed on many particulars, they concurred on several matters of philosophical style and epistemological substance. Procedurally they endorsed a cooperative and piecemeal approach to philosophical problems, and they were constitutionally inclined to a closeness of analysis that would prepare the way for later philosophical tendencies. Substantively they agreed on several epistemological stances central to the refutation of idealism. Among the doctrines in the New Realist platform were the rejection of the fundamental character of epistemology; the view that the entities investigated in logic, mathematics, and science are not “mental” in any ordinary sense; the view that the things known are not the products of the knowing relation nor in any fundamental sense conditioned by their being known; and the view that the objects known are immediately and directly present to consciousness while being independent of that relation. New Realism was a version of direct realism, which viewed the notions of mediation and representation in knowledge as opening gambits on the slippery slope to idealism. Their refutation of idealism focused on pointing out the fallacy of moving from the truism that every object of knowledge is known to the claim that its being consists in its being known. That we are obviously at the center of what we know entails nothing about the nature of what we know. Perry dubbed this fact “the egocentric predicament,” and supplemented this observation with arguments to the effect that the objects of knowledge are in fact independent of the knowing relation. New Realism as a version of direct realism had as its primary conceptual obstacle “the facts of relativity,” i.e., error, illusion, perceptual variation, and valuation. Dealing with these phenomena without invoking “mental intermediaries” proved to be the stumbling block, and New Realism soon gave way to a second cooperative venture by another group of American philosophers that came to be known as Critical Realism. The term ‘new realism’ is also occasionally used with regard to those British philosophers principal among them Moore and Russell similarly involved in refuting idealism. Although individually more significant than the American group, theirs was not a cooperative effort, so the group term came to have primarily an American referent. 

Newton, Sir Isaac 16421727, English physicist and mathematician, one of the greatest scientists of all time. Born in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, he attended Cambridge , receiving the B.A. in 1665; he became a fellow of Trinity in New Realism Newton, Sir Isaac 610    610 1667 and Lucasian Professor of Mathematics in 1669. He was elected fellow of the Royal Society in 1671 and served as its president from 1703 until his death. In 1696 he was appointed warden of the mint. In his later years he was involved in political and governmental affairs rather than in active scientific work. A sensitive, secretive person, he was prone to irascibility  most notably in a dispute with Leibniz over priority of invention of the calculus. His unparalleled scientific accomplishments overshadow a deep and sustained interest in ancient chronology, biblical study, theology, and alchemy. In his early twenties Newton’s genius asserted itself in an astonishing period of mathematical and experimental creativity. In the years 1664 67, he discovered the binomial theorem; the “method of fluxions” calculus; the principle of the composition of light; and fundamentals of his theory of universal gravitation. Newton’s masterpiece, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica “The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy”, appeared in 1687. This work sets forth the mathematical laws of physics and “the system of the world.” Its exposition is modeled on Euclidean geometry: propositions are demonstrated mathematically from definitions and mathematical axioms. The world system consists of material bodies masses composed of hard particles at rest or in motion and interacting according to three axioms or laws of motion: 1 Every body continues in its state of rest or of uniform motion in a straight line unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it. 2 The change of motion is proportional to the motive force impressed and is made in the direction of the straight line in which that force is impressed. [Here, the impressed force equals mass times the rate of change of velocity, i.e., acceleration. Hence the familiar formula, F % ma.] 3 To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction; or, the mutual action of two bodies upon each other is always equal and directed to contrary parts. Newton’s general law of gravitation in modern restatement is: Every particle of matter attracts every other particle with a force varying directly as the product of their masses and inversely as the square of the distance between them. The statement of the laws of motion is preceded by an equally famous scholium in which Newton enunciates the ultimate conditions of his universal system: absolute time, space, place, and motion. He speaks of these as independently existing “quantities” according to which true measurements of bodies and motions can be made as distinct from relative “sensible measures” and apparent observations. Newton seems to have thought that his system of mathematical principles presupposed and is validated by the absolute framework. The scholium has been the subject of much critical discussion. The main problem concerns the justification of the absolute framework. Newton commends adherence to experimental observation and induction for advancing scientific knowledge, and he rejects speculative hypotheses. But absolute time and space are not observable. In the scholium Newton did offer a renowned experiment using a rotating pail of water as evidence for distinguishing true and apparent motions and proof of absolute motion. It has been remarked that conflicting strains of a rationalism anticipating Kant and empiricism anticipating Hume are present in Newton’s conception of science. Some of these issues are also evident in Newton’s Optics 1704, especially the fourth edition, 1730, which includes a series of suggestive “Queries” on the nature of light, gravity, matter, scientific method, and God. The triumphant reception given to Newton’s Principia in England and on the Continent led to idealization of the man and his work. Thus Alexander Pope’s famous epitaph: Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night; God said, “Let Newton be!” and all was light. The term ‘Newtonian’, then, denoted the view of nature as a universal system of mathematical reason and order divinely created and administered. The metaphor of a “universal machine” was frequently applied. The view is central in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, inspiring a religion of reason and the scientific study of society and the human mind. More narrowly, ‘Newtonian’ suggests a reduction of any subject matter to an ontology of individual particles and the laws and basic terms of mechanics: mass, length, and time. 

Nicholas of Autrecourt c.1300after 1350, French philosopher and theologian. Born in Autrecourt, he was educated at Paris and earned bachelor’s degrees in theology and law and a master’s degree in arts. After a list of propositions from his writings was condemned in 1346, he was sentenced to burn his works publicly and recant, which he did in Paris the following year. He was appointed dean of Metz cathedral in 1350. Nicholas’s ecclesiastical troubles arose partly from nine letters two of which survive which reduce to absurdity the view that appearances provide a sufficient basis for certain and evident knowledge. On the contrary, except for “certitude of the faith,” we can be certain only of what is equivalent or reducible to the principle of noncontradiction. He accepts as a consequence of this that we can never validly infer the existence of one distinct thing from another, including the existence of substances from qualities, or causes from effects. Indeed, he finds that “in the whole of his natural philosophy and metaphysics, Aristotle had such [evident] certainty of scarcely two conclusions, and perhaps not even of one.” Nicholas devotes another work, the Exigit ordo executionis also known as The Universal Treatise, to an extended critique of Aristotelianism. It attacks what seemed to him the blind adherence given by his contemporaries to Aristotle and Averroes, showing that the opposite of many conclusions alleged to have been demonstrated by the Philosopher  e.g., on the divisibility of continua, the reality of motion, and the truth of appearances  are just as evident or apparent as those conclusions themselves. Because so few of his writings are extant, however, it is difficult to ascertain just what Nicholas’s own views were. Likewise, the reasons for his condemnation are not well understood, although recent studies have suggested that his troubles might have been due to a reaction to certain ideas that he appropriated from English theologians, such as Adam de Wodeham. Nicholas’s views elicited comment not only from church authorities, but also from other philosophers, including Buridan, Marsilius of Inghen, Albert of Saxony, and Nicholas of Oresme. Despite a few surface similarities, however, there is no evidence that his teachings on certainty or causality had any influence on modern philosophers, such as Descartes or Hume. 

Nicholas of Cusa, also called Nicolaus Cusanus, Nicholas Kryfts 140164, German philosopher, an important Renaissance Platonist. Born in Kues on the Moselle, he earned a doctorate in canon law in 1423. He became known for his De concordantia catholica, written at the Council of Basel in 1432, a work defending the conciliarist position against the pope. Later, he decided that only the pope could provide unity for the church in its negotiations with the East, and allied himself with the papacy. In 143738, returning from a papal legation to Constantinople, he had his famous insight into the coincidence of opposites coincidentia oppositorum in the infinite, upon which his On Learned Ignorance is based. His unceasing labor was chiefly responsible for the Vienna Concordat with the Eastern church in 1448. He was made cardinal in 1449 as a reward for his efforts, and bishop of Brixen Bressanone in 1450. He traveled widely in Germany as a papal legate 145052 before settling down in his see. Cusa’s central insight was that all oppositions are united in their infinite measure, so that what would be logical contradictions for finite things coexist without contradiction in God, who is the measure of i.e., is the form or essence of all things, and identical to them inasmuch as he is identical with their reality, quiddity, or essence. Considered as it is contracted to the individual, a thing is only an image of its measure, not a reality in itself. His position drew on mathematical models, arguing, for instance, that an infinite straight line tangent to a circle is the measure of the curved circumference, since a circle of infinite diameter, containing all the being possible in a circle, would coincide with the tangent. In general, the measure of a thing must contain all the possible being of that sort of thing, and so is infinite, or unlimited, in its being. Cusa attacked Aristotelians for their unwillingness to give up the principle of non-contradiction. His epistemology is a form of Platonic skepticism. Our knowledge is never of reality, the infinite measure of things that is their essence, but only of finite images of reality corresponding to the finite copies with which we must deal. These images are constructed by our own minds, and do not represent an immediate grasp of any reality. Their highest form is found in mathematics, and it is only through mathematics that reason can understand the world. In relation to the infinite real, these images and the contracted realities they enable us to know have only an infinitesimal reality. Our knowledge is only a mass of conjectures, i.e., assertions that are true insofar as Nicholas Kryfts Nicholas of Cusa 612    612 they capture some part of the truth, but never the whole truth, the infinite measure, as it really is in itself. Cusa was much read in the Renaissance, and is somethimes said to have had significant influence on German thought of the eighteenth century, in particular on Leibniz, and German idealism, but it is uncertain, despite the considerable intrinsic merit of his thought, if this is true.  PLATO. J.Lo. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm 18441900, German philosopher and cultural critic. Born in a small town in the Prussian province of Saxony, Nietzsche’s early education emphasized religion and classical languages and literature. After a year at the  at Bonn he transferred to Leipzig, where he pursued classical studies. There he happened upon Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, which profoundly influenced his subsequent concerns and early philosophical thinking. It was as a classical philologist, however, that he was appointed professor at the Swiss  at Basel, before he had even received his doctorate, at the astonishingly early age of twenty-four. A mere twenty years of productive life remained to him, ending with a mental and physical collapse in January 1889, from which he never recovered. He held his position at Basel for a decade, resigning in 1879 owing to the deterioration of his health from illnesses he had contracted in 1870 as a volunteer medical orderly in the Franco-Prussian war. At Basel he lectured on a variety of subjects chiefly relating to classical studies, including Grecian and Roman philosophy as well as literature. During his early years there he also became intensely involved with the composer Richard Wagner; and his fascination with Wagner was reflected in several of his early works  most notably his first book, The Birth of Tragedy 1872, and his subsequent essay Richard Wagner in Bayreuth 1876. His later break with Wagner, culminating in his polemic The Case of Wagner1888, was both profound and painful to him. While at first regarding Wagner as a creative genius showing the way to a cultural and spiritual renewal, Nietzsche came to see him and his art as epitomizing and exacerbating the fundamental problem with which he became increasingly concerned. This problem was the pervasive intellectual and cultural crisis Nietzsche later characterized in terms of the “death of God” and the advent of “nihilism.” Traditional religious and metaphysical ways of thinking were on the wane, leaving a void that modern science could not fill, and endangering the health of civilization. The discovery of some life-affirming alternative to Schopenhauer’s radically pessimistic response to this disillusionment became Nietzsche’s primary concern. In The Birth of Tragedy he looked to the Grecians for clues and to Wagner for inspiration, believing that their art held the key to renewed human flourishing for a humanity bereft both of the consolations of religious faith and of confidence in reason and science as substitutes for it. In his subsequent series of Untimely Meditations 187376 he expanded upon his theme of the need to reorient human thought and endeavor to this end, and criticized a variety of tendencies detrimental to it that he discerned among his contemporaries. Both the deterioration of Nietzsche’s health and the shift of his interest away from his original discipline prevented retention of his position at Basel. In the first years after his retirement, he completed his transition from philologist to philosopher and published the several parts of Human, All-Too-Human 187890, Daybreak 1881, and the first four parts of The Gay Science 1882. These aphoristic writings sharpened and extended his analytical and critical assessment of various human tendencies and social, cultural, and intellectual phenomena. During this period his thinking became much more sophisticated; and he developed the philosophical styles and concerns that found mature expression in the writings of the final years of his brief active life, following the publication of the four parts of Thus Spoke Zarathustra 188385. These last remarkably productive years saw the appearance of Beyond Good and Evil 1886, a fifth part of The Gay Science, On the Genealogy of Morals 1887, The Case of Wagner 1888, and a series of prefaces to his earlier works 188687, as well as the completion of several books published after his collapse  Twilight of the Idols 1889, The Antichrist 1895, and Ecce Homo 1908. He was also amassing a great deal of material in notebooks, of which a selection was later published under the title The Will to Power. The status and significance of this mass of Nachlass material are matters of continuing controversy. In the early 1880s, when he wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche arrived at a conception of human life and possibility  and with it, of value and meaning  that he believed could overcome the Schopenhauerian pessimism and nihilism that he saw as outcomes of the collapse of traditional modes of religious and philosophical interpretation. He prophesied a period of nihilism in the aftermath of their decline and fall; but this prospect deeply distressed him. He was convinced of the untenability of the “God hypothesis,” and indeed of all religious and metaphysical interpretations of the world and ourselves; and yet he was well aware that the very possibility of the affirmation of life was at stake, and required more than the mere abandonment of all such “lies” and “fictions.” He took the basic challenge of philosophy now to be to reinterpret life and the world along more tenable lines that would also overcome nihilism. What Nietzsche called “the death of God” was both a cultural event  the waning and impending demise of the “Christian-moral” interpretation of life and the world  and also a philosophical development: the abandonment of anything like the God-hypothesis all demidivine absolutes included. As a cultural event it was a phenomenon to be reckoned with, and a source of profound concern; for he feared a “nihilistic rebound” in its wake, and worried about the consequences for human life and culture if no countermovement to it were forthcoming. As a philosophical development, on the other hand, it was his point of departure, which he took to call for a radical reconsideration of everything from life and the world and human existence and knowledge to value and morality. The “de-deification of nature,” the “translation of man back into nature,” the “revaluation of values,” the tracing of the “genealogy of morals” and their critique, and the elaboration of “naturalistic” accounts of knowledge, value, morality, and our entire “spiritual” nature thus came to be his main tasks. His published and unpublished writings contain a wealth of remarks, observations, and suggestions contributing importantly to them. It is a matter of controversy, even among those with a high regard for Nietzsche, whether he tried to work out positions on issues bearing any resemblance to those occupying other philosophers before and after him in the mainstream of the history of philosophy. He was harshly critical of most of his predecessors and contemporaries; and he broke fundamentally with them and their basic ideas and procedures. His own writings, moreover, bear little resemblance to those of most other philosophers. Those he himself published as well as his reflections in his notebooks do not systematically set out and develop views. Rather, they consist for the most part in collections of short paragraphs and sets of aphorisms, often only loosely if at all connected. Many deal with philosophical topics, but in very unconventional ways; and because his remarks about these topics are scattered through many different works, they are all too easily taken in isolation and misunderstood. On some topics, moreover, much of what he wrote is found only in his very rough notebooks, which he filled with thoughts without indicating the extent of his reflected commitment to them. His language, furthermore, is by turns coolly analytical, heatedly polemical, sharply critical, and highly metaphorical; and he seldom indicates clearly the scope of his claims and what he means by his terms. It is not surprising, therefore, that many philosophers have found it difficult to know what to make of him and to take him seriously  and that some have taken him to repudiate altogether the traditional philosophical enterprise of seeking reasoned conclusions with respect to questions of the kind with which philosophers have long been concerned, heralding the “death” not only of religious and metaphysical thinking, but also of philosophy itself. Others read him very differently, as having sought to effect a fundamental reorientation of philosophical thinking, and to indicate by both precept and example how philosophical inquiry might better be pursued. Those who regard Nietzsche in the former way take his criticisms of his philosophical predecessors and contemporaries to apply to any attempt to address such matters. They seize upon and construe some of his more sweeping negative pronouncements on truth and knowledge as indicating that he believed we can only produce fictions and merely expedient or possibly creative perspectival expressions of our needs and desires, as groups or as individuals. They thus take him as a radical nihilist, concerned to subvert the entire philosophical enterprise and replace it with a kind of thinking more akin to the literary exploration of human possibilities in the service of life  a kind of artistic play liberated from concern with truth and knowledge. Those who view him in the latter way, on the other hand, take seriously his concern to find a way of overcoming the nihilism he believed to result from traditional ways of thinking; his retention of recast notions of truth and knowledge; and his evident concern  especially in his later writings  to contribute to the comprehension of a broad range of phenomena. This way of understanding him, like the former, remains controversial; but it permits an interpretation of his writings that is philosophically more fruitful. Nietzsche indisputably insisted upon the interpretive character of all human thought; and he called for “new philosophers” who would follow him in engaging in more self-conscious and intellectually responsible attempts to assess and improve upon prevailing interpretations of human life. He also was deeply concerned with how these matters might better be evaluated, and with the values by which human beings live and might better do so. Thus he made much of the need for a revaluation of all received values, and for attention to the problems of the nature, status, and standards of value and evaluation. One form of inquiry he took to be of great utility in connection with both of these tasks is genealogical inquiry into the conditions under which various modes of interpretation and evaluation have arisen. It is only one of the kinds of inquiry he considered necessary in both cases, however, serving merely to prepare for others that must be brought to bear before any conclusions are warranted. Nietzsche further emphasized the perspectival character of all thinking and the merely provisional character of all knowing, rejecting the idea of the very possibility of absolute knowledge transcending all perspectives. However, because he also rejected the idea that things and values have absolute existence “in themselves” apart from the relations in which he supposes their reality to consist, he held that, if viewed in the multiplicity of perspectives from which various of these relations come to light, they admit of a significant measure of comprehension. This perspectivism thus does not exclude the possibility of any sort of knowledge deserving of the name, but rather indicates how it is to be conceived and achieved. His kind of philosophy, which he characterizes as fröhliche Wissenschaft cheerful science, proceeds by way of a variety of such “perspectival” approaches to the various matters with which he deals. Thus for Nietzsche there is no “truth” in the sense of the correspondence of anything we might think or say to “being,” and indeed no “true world of being” to which it may even be imagined to fail to correspond; no “knowledge” conceived in terms of any such truth and reality; and, further, no knowledge at all  even of ourselves and the world of which we are a part  that is absolute, non-perspectival, and certain. But that is not the end of the matter. There are, e.g., ways of thinking that may be more or less well warranted in relation to differing sorts of interest and practice, not only within the context of social life but also in our dealings with our environing world. Nietzsche’s reflections on the reconceptualization of truth and knowledge thus point in the direction of a naturalistic epistemology that he would have replace the conceptions of truth and knowledge of his predecessors, and fill the nihilistic void seemingly left by their bankruptcy. There is, moreover, a good deal about ourselves and our world that he became convinced we can comprehend. Our comprehension may be restricted to what life and the world show themselves to be and involve in our experience; but if they are the only kind of reality, there is no longer any reason to divorce the notions of truth, knowledge, and value from them. The question then becomes how best to interpret and assess what we find as we proceed to explore them. It is to these tasks of interpretation and “revaluation” that Nietzsche devoted his main efforts in his later writings. In speaking of the death of God, Nietzsche had in mind not only the abandonment of the Godhypothesis which he considered to be utterly “unworthy of belief,” owing its invention and appeal entirely to naïveté, error, all-too-human need, and ulterior motivation, but also the demise of all metaphysical substitutes for it. He likewise criticized and rejected the related postulations of substantial “souls” and self-contained “things,” taking both notions to be ontological fictions merely reflecting our artificial though convenient linguistic-conceptual shorthand for functionally unitary products, processes, and sets of relations. In place of this cluster of traditional ontological categories and interpretations, he conceived the world in terms of an interplay of forces without any inherent structure or final end. It ceaselessly organizes and reorganizes itself, as the fundamental disposition he called will to power gives rise to successive arrays of power relationships. “This world is the will to power  and nothing besides,” he wrote; “and you yourselves are also this will to power  and nothing besides!” Nietzsche’s idea of the eternal return or eternal recurrence underscores this conception of a world without beginning or end, in which things happen repeatedly in the way they always have. He first introduced this idea as a test of one’s ability to affirm one’s own life and the general character of life in this world as they are, without reservation, qualification, or appeal to anything transcending them. He later entertained the thought that all events might actually recur eternally in exactly the same sequence, and experimented in his unpublished writings with arguments to this effect. For the most part, however, he restricted himself to less problematic    615 Neitzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm 616 uses of the idea that do not presuppose its literal truth in this radical form. His rhetorical embellishments and experimental elaborations of the idea may have been intended to make it more vivid and compelling; but he employed it chiefly to depict his conception of the radically non-linear character of events in this world and their fundamental homogeneity, and to provide a way of testing our ability to live with it. If we are sufficiently strong and well disposed to life to affirm it even on the supposition that it will only be the same sequence of events repeated eternally, we have what it takes to endure and flourish in the kind of world in which Nietzsche believed we find ourselves in the aftermath of disillusionment. Nietzsche construed human nature and existence naturalistically, in terms of the will to power and its ramifications in the establishment and expression of the kinds of complex systems of dynamic quanta in which human beings consist. “The soul is only a word for something about the body,” he has Zarathustra say; and the body is fundamentally a configuration of natural forces and processes. At the same time, he insisted on the importance of social arrangements and interactions in the development of human forms of awareness and activity. He also emphasized the possibility of the emergence of exceptional human beings capable of an independence and creativity elevating them above the level of the general human rule. So he stressed the difference between “higher men” and “the herd,” and through Zarathustra proclaimed the Übermensch ‘overman’ or ‘superman’ to be “the meaning of the earth,” employing this image to convey the ideal of the overcoming of the “all-too-human” and the fullest possible creative “enhancement of life.” Far from seeking to diminish our humanity by stressing our animality, he sought to direct our efforts to the emergence of a “higher humanity” capable of endowing existence with a human redemption and justification, above all through the enrichment of cultural life. Notwithstanding his frequent characterization as a nihilist, therefore, Nietzsche in fact sought to counter and overcome the nihilism he expected to prevail in the aftermath of the collapse and abandonment of traditional religious and metaphysical modes of interpretation and evaluation. While he was highly critical of the latter, it was not his intention merely to oppose them; for he further attempted to make out the possibility of forms of truth and knowledge to which philosophical interpreters of life and the world might aspire, and espoused a “Dionysian value-standard” in place of all non-naturalistic modes of valuation. In keeping with his interpretation of life and the world in terms of his conception of will to power, Nietzsche framed this standard in terms of his interpretation of them. The only tenable alternative to nihilism must be based upon a recognition and affirmation of the world’s fundamental character. This meant positing as a general standard of value the attainment of a kind of life in which the will to power as the creative transformation of existence is raised to its highest possible intensity and qualitative expression. This in turn led him to take the “enhancement of life” and creativity to be the guiding ideas of his revaluation of values and development of a naturalistic value theory. This way of thinking carried over into Nietzsche’s thinking about morality. Insisting that moralities as well as other traditional modes of valuation ought to be assessed “in the perspective of life,” he argued that most of them were contrary to the enhancement of life, reflecting the all-too-human needs and weaknesses and fears of less favored human groups and types. Distinguishing between “master” and “slave” moralities, he found the latter to have become the dominant type of morality in the modern world. He regarded present-day morality as a “herd-animal morality,” well suited to the requirements and vulnerabilities of the mediocre who are the human rule, but stultifying and detrimental to the development of potential exceptions to that rule. Accordingly, he drew attention to the origins and functions of this type of morality as a social-control mechanism and device by which the weak defend and avenge and assert themselves against the actually or potentially stronger. He further suggested the desirability of a “higher morality” for the exceptions, in which the contrast of the basic “slave/herd morality” categories of “good and evil” would be replaced by categories more akin to the “good and bad” contrast characteristic of “master morality,” with a revised and variable content better attuned to the conditions and attainable qualities of the enhanced forms of life such exceptional human beings can achieve. The strongly creative flavor of Nietzsche’s notions of such a “higher humanity” and associated “higher morality” reflects his linkage of both to his conception of art, to which he attached great importance. Art, for Nietzsche, is fundamentally creative rather than cognitive, serving to prepare for the emergence of a sensi   616 bility and manner of life reflecting the highest potentiality of human beings. Art, as the creative transformation of the world as we find it and of ourselves thereby on a small scale and in particular media, affords a glimpse of a kind of life that would be lived more fully in this manner, and constitutes a step toward emergence. In this way, Nietzsche’s mature thought thus expands upon the idea of the basic connection between art and the justification of life that was his general theme in his first major work, The Birth of Tragedy. 

Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu:, a principal tenet of empiricism. A weak interpretation of the principle maintains that all concepts are acquired from sensory experience; no concepts are innate or a priori. A stronger interpretation adds that all propositional knowledge is derived from sense experience. The weak interpretation was held by Aquinas and Locke, who thought nevertheless that we can know some propositions to be true in virtue of the relations between the concepts involved. The stronger interpretation was endorsed by J. S. Mill, who argued that even the truths of mathematics are inductively based on experience.

Nihil ex nihilo fit Latin, ‘Nothing arises from nothing’, an intuitive metaphysical principle first enunciated in the West by Parmenides, often held equivalent to the proposition that nothing arises without a cause. Creation ex nihilo is God’s production of the world without any natural or material cause, but involves a supernatural cause, and so it would not violate the principle.

nirodha-samapatti, also known as samjnavedayita-nirodha Sanskrit, ‘attainment of cessation’, a term used by Indian Buddhists to denote a state produced by meditation in which no mental events of any kind occur. What ceases in nirodha-samapatti is all the operations of the mind; all that remains is the mindless body. Some Buddhists took this state to have salvific significance, and so likened it to Nirvana. But its principal philosophical interest lies in the puzzle it produced for Buddhist theorists: What causal account can be given that will make sense of the reemergence of mental events from a continuum in which none exist, given the pan-Buddhist assumption that all existents are momentary?

noetic from Grecian noetikos, from noetos, ‘perceiving’, of or relating to apprehension by the intellect. In a strict sense the term refers to nonsensuous data given to the cognitive faculty, which discloses their intelligible meaning as distinguished from their sensible apprehension. We hear a sentence spoken, but it becomes intelligible for us only when the sounds function as a foundation for noetic apprehension. For Plato, the objects of such apprehension noetá are the Forms eide with respect to which the sensible phenomena are only occasions of manifestation: the Forms in themselves transcend the sensible and have their being in a realm apart. For empiricist thinkers, e.g., Locke, there is strictly speaking no distinct noetic aspect, since “ideas” are only faint sense impressions. In a looser sense, however, one may speak of ideas as independent of reference to particular sense impressions, i.e. independent of their origin, and then an idea can be taken to signify a class of objects. Husserl uses the term to describe the intentionality or dyadic character of consciousness in general, i.e. including both eidetic or categorial and perceptual knowing. He speaks of the correlation of noesis or intending and noema or the intended object of awareness. The categorial or eidetic is the perceptual object as intellectually cognized; it is not a realm apart, but rather what is disclosed or made present “constituted” Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu noetic 617    617 when the mode of appearance of the perceptual object is intended by a categorial noesis. 

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

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

nonviolence, the renunciation of violence in personal, social, or international affairs. It often includes a commitment called active nonviolence or nonviolent direct action actively to oppose violence and usually evil or injustice as well by nonviolent means. Nonviolence may renounce physical violence alone or both physical and psychological violence. It may represent a purely personal commitment or be intended to be normative for others as well. When unconditional  absolute    619 norm normative relativism 620 nonviolence  it renounces violence in all actual and hypothetical circumstances. When conditional  conditional nonviolence  it concedes the justifiability of violence in hypothetical circumstances but denies it in practice. Held on moral grounds principled nonviolence, the commitment belongs to an ethics of conduct or an ethics of virtue. If the former, it will likely be expressed as a moral rule or principle e.g., One ought always to act nonviolently to guide action. If the latter, it will urge cultivating the traits and dispositions of a nonviolent character which presumably then will be expressed in nonviolent action. As a principle, nonviolence may be considered either basic or derivative. Either way, its justification will be either utilitarian or deontological. Held on non-moral grounds pragmatic nonviolence, nonviolence is a means to specific social, political, economic, or other ends, themselves held on non-moral grounds. Its justification lies in its effectiveness for these limited purposes rather than as a way of life or a guide to conduct in general. An alternative source of power, it may then be used in the service of evil as well as good. Nonviolent social action, whether of a principled or pragmatic sort, may include noncooperation, mass demonstrations, marches, strikes, boycotts, and civil disobedience  techniques explored extensively in the writings of Gene Sharp. Undertaken in defense of an entire nation or state, nonviolence provides an alternative to war. It seeks to deny an invading or occupying force the capacity to attain its objectives by withholding the cooperation of the populace needed for effective rule and by nonviolent direct action, including civil disobedience. It may also be used against oppressive domestic rule or on behalf of social justice. Gandhi’s campaign against British rule in India, Scandinavian resistance to Nazi occupation during World War II, and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s actions on behalf of civil rights in the United States are illustrative. Nonviolence has origins in Far Eastern thought, particularly Taoism and Jainism. It has strands in the Jewish Talmud, and many find it implied by the New Testament’s Sermon on the Mount.

normal form, a formula equivalent to a given logical formula, but having special properties. The main varieties follow. Conjunctive normal form. If D1 . . . Dn are disjunctions of sentential variables or their negations, such as p 7 -q 7 r, then a formula F is in conjunctive normal form provided F % D1 & D2 & . . & Dn. The following are in conjunctive normal form: -p 7 q; p 7 q 7 r & -p 7 -q 7 -r & -q 7 r. Every formula of sentential logic has an equivalent conjunctive normal form; this fact can be used to prove the completeness of sentential logic. Disjunctive normal form. If C1 . . . Cn are conjunctions of sentential variables or their negations, such as p & -q & -r, then a formula F is in disjunctive normal form provided F % C1 7 C27 . . Cn. The following are thus in disjunctive normal form: p & -q 7 -p & q; p & q & -r 7 -p & -q & -r. Every formula of sentential logic has an equivalent disjunctive normal form. Prenex normal form. A formula of predicate logic is in prenex normal form if 1 all quantifiers occur at the beginning of the formula, 2 the scope of the quantifiers extends to the end of the formula, and 3 what follows the quantifiers contains at least one occurrence of every variable that appears in the set of quantifiers. Thus, DxDyFx / Gy and xDyzFxy 7 Gyz / Dxyz are in prenex normal form. The formula may contain free variables; thus, Dxy Fxyz / Gwyx is also in prenex normal form. The following, however, are not in prenex normal form: xDy Fx / Gx; xy Fxy / Gxy. Every formula of predicate logic has an equivalent formula in prenex normal form. Skolem normal form. A formula F in predicate logic is in Skolem normal form provided 1 F is in prenex normal form, 2 every existential quantifier precedes any universal quantifier, 3 F contains at least one existential quantifier, and 4 F contains no free variables. Thus, DxDy zFxy / Gyz and DxDyDzwFxy 7 Fyz 7 Fzw are in Skolem normal form; however, Dx y Fxyz and x y Fxy 7 Gyx are not. Any formula has an equivalent Skolem normal form; this has implications for the completeness of predicate logic. 

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

noûs, Grecian term for mind or the faculty of reason. Noûs is the highest type of thinking, the kind a god would do. Sometimes called the faculty of intellectual intuition, it is at work when someone understands definitions, concepts, and anything else that is grasped all at once. Noûs stands in contrast with another intellectual faculty, dianoia. When we work through the steps of an argument, we exercise dianoia; to be certain the conclusion is true without argument  to just “see” it, as, perhaps, a god might  is to exercise noûs. Just which objects could be apprehended by noûs was controversial.

Novalis, pseudonym of Friedrich von Hardenberg 17721801, German poet and philosopher of early German Romanticism. His starting point was Fichte’s reflective type of transcendental philosophy; he attempted to complement Fichte’s focus on philosophical speculation by including other forms of intellectual experience such as faith, love, poetry, and religion, and exhibit their equally autonomous status of existence. Of special importance in this regard is his analysis of the imagination in contrast to reason, of the poetic power in distinction from the reasonable faculties. Novalis insists on a complementary interaction between these two spheres, on a union of philosophy and poetry. Another important aspect of his speculation concerns the relation between the inner and the outer world, subject and object, the human being and nature. Novalis attempted to reveal the correspondence, even unity between these two realms and to present the world as a “universal trope” or a “symbolic image” of the human mind and vice versa. He expressed his philosophical thought mostly in fragments. 

Nozick, Robert b.1938, American philosopher, Harvard , best known for Anarchy, State, and Utopia, which defends the libertarian position that only a minimal state limited to protecting rights is just. Nozick argues that a minimal state, but not a more extensive state, could arise without violating rights. Drawing on Kant’s dictum that people may not be used as mere means, Nozick says that people’s rights are inviolable, no matter how useful violations might be to the state. He criticizes principles of redistributive justice on which theorists base defenses of extensive states, such as the principle of utility, and Rawls’s principle that goods should be distributed in favor of the least well-off. Enforcing these principles requires eliminating the cumulative effects of free exchanges, which violates permanent, bequeathable property rights. Nozick’s own entitlement theory says that a distribution of holdings is just if people under that distribution are entitled to what they hold. Entitlements, in turn, would be clarified using principles of justice in acquisition, transfer, and rectification. Nozick’s other works include Philosophical Explanations 1981, The Examined Life 1989, The Nature of Rationality 1993, and Socratic Puzzles 1997. These are contributions to rational choice theory, epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of religion, and ethics. Philosophical Explanations features two especially important contributions. The first is Nozick’s reliabilist, causal view that beliefs that constitute knowledge must track the truth. My belief that say a cat is on the mat tracks the truth only if a I would not believe this if a cat were not on the mat, and b I would believe this if a cat were there. The tracking account positions Nozick to reject the principle that people know all of the things they believe via deductions from things they know, and to reject versions of skepticism based on this principle of closure. The second is Nozick’s closest continuer theory of identity, according to which A’s identity at a later time can depend on facts about other existing things, for it depends on 1 what continues A closely enough to be A and 2 what    621 n-tuple Nussbaum, Martha Craven 622 continues A more closely than any other existing thing. Nozick’s 1969 essay “Newcomb’s Problem and Two Principles of Choice” is another important contribution. It is the first discussion of Newcomb’s problem, a problem in decision theory, and presents many positions prominent in subsequent debate. 

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

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

Nyaya-Vaishesika, one of the orthodox schools of Hinduism. It holds that earth, air, fire, and water are the four types of atoms. Space is a substance and a container of atoms. The atoms are everlasting and eternal, though their combinations are neither. Properties of complexes are explained in terms of the properties of their components. There are emergent properties the causation of which does not require that something come from nothing; one need only grant brute causal connections. Nyaya is a monotheistic perspective and Nyaya philosopher Udana wrote a text  Kusmañjali “The Handful of Flowers”  in natural theology; this tenth-century work is an Indian classic on the subject. In addition to material things composed of atoms, there are immaterial persons. Each person is an enduring, substantial self whose nature is to be conscious and who is capable of love and aversion, of feeling pleasure and pain, and of making choices; selves differ from one another even when not embodied by virtue of being different centers of consciousness, not merely in terms of having had diverse transmigratory biographies. Nyaya-Vaishesika is the Hindu school most like Anglo-American philosophy, as evidenced in its studies of inference and perception. 

Oakeshott, M.: H. P. Grice, “Oakeshott’s conversational implicature,” English philosopher and political theorist trained at Cambridge and in Germany. He taught first at Cambridge and Oxford; from 1951 he was professor of political science at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His works include Experience and Its Modes 1933, Rationalism in Politics 1962, On Human Conduct 1975, and On History 1983. Oakeshott’s misleading general reputation, based on Rationalism in Politics, is as a conservative political thinker. Experience and Its Modes is a systematic work in the tradition of Hegel. Human experience is exclusively of a world of ideas intelligible insofar as it is coherent. This world divides into modes historical, scientific, practical, and poetic experience, each being partly coherent and categorially distinct from all others. Philosophy is the never entirely successful attempt to articulate the coherence of the world of ideas and the place of modally specific experience within that whole. His later works examine the postulates of historical and practical experience, particularly those of religion, morality, and politics. All conduct in the practical mode postulates freedom and is an “exhibition of intelligence” by agents who appropriate inherited languages and ideas to the generic activity of self-enactment. Some conduct pursues specific purposes and occurs in “enterprise associations” identified by goals shared among those who participate in them. The most estimable forms of conduct, exemplified by “conversation,” have no such purpose and occur in “civil societies” under the purely “adverbial” considerations of morality and law. “Rationalists” illicitly use philosophy to dictate to practical experience and subordinate human conduct to some master purpose. Oakeshott’s distinctive achievement is to have melded holistic idealism with a morality and politics radical in their affirmation of individuality. 

obiectum quo Latin, ‘object by which’, in medieval and Scholastic epistemology, the object by which an object is known. It should be understood in contrast with obiectum quod, which refers to the object that is known. For example, when a person knows what an apple is, the apple is the obiectum quod and his concept of the apple is the obiectum quo. That is, the concept is instrumental to knowing the apple, but is not itself what is known. Human beings need concepts in order to have knowledge, because their knowledge is receptive, in contrast with God’s which is productive. God creates what he knows. Human knowledge is mediated; divine knowledge is immediate. Scholastic philosophers believe that the distinction between obiectum quod and obiectum quo exposes the crucial mistake of idealism. According to idealists, the object of knowledge, i.e., what a person knows, is an idea. In contrast, the Scholastics maintain that idealists conflate the object of knowledge with the means by which human knowledge is made possible. Humans must be connected to the object of knowledge by something obiectum quo, but what connects them is not that to which they are connected. A.P.M. object, intentional.

objective rightness. In ethics, an action is objectively right for a person to perform on some occasion if the agent’s performing it on that occasion really is right, whether or not the agent, or anyone else, believes it is. An action is subjectively right for a person to perform on some occasion if the agent believes, or perhaps justifiably believes, of that action that it is objectively right. For example, according to a version of utilitarianism, an action is objectively right provided the action is optimific in the sense that the consequences that would result from its per624 O    624 formance are at least as good as those that would result from any alternative action the agent could instead perform. Were this theory correct, then an action would be an objectively right action for an agent to perform on some occasion if and only if that action is in fact optimific. An action can be both objectively and subjectively right or neither. But an action can also be subjectively right, but fail to be objectively right, as where the action fails to be optimific again assuming that a utilitarian theory is correct, yet the agent believes the action is objectively right. And an action can be objectively right but not subjectively right, where, despite the objective rightness of the action, the agent has no beliefs about its rightness or believes falsely that it is not objectively right. This distinction is important in our moral assessments of agents and their actions. In cases where we judge a person’s action to be objectively wrong, we often mitigate our judgment of the agent when we judge that the action was, for the agent, subjectively right. This same objectivesubjective distinction applies to other ethical categories such as wrongness and obligatoriness, and some philosophers extend it to items other than actions, e.g., emotions. 

obligationes, the study of inferentially inescapable, yet logically odd arguments, used by late medieval logicians in analyzing inferential reasoning. In Topics VIII.3 Aristotle describes a respondent’s task in a philosophical argument as providing answers so that, if they must defend the impossible, the impossibility lies in the nature of the position, and not in its logical defense. In Prior Analytics I.13 Aristotle argues that nothing impossible follows from the possible. Burley, whose logic exemplifies early fourteenth-century obligationes literature, described the resulting logical exercise as a contest between interlocutor and respondent. The interlocutor must force the respondent into maintaining contradictory statements in defending a position, and the respondent must avoid this while avoiding maintaining the impossible, which can be either a position logically incompatible with the position defended or something impossible in itself. Especially interesting to Scholastic logicians were the paradoxes of disputation inherent in such disputes. Assuming that a respondent has successfully defended his position, the interlocutor may be able to propose a commonplace position that the respondent can neither accept nor reject, given the truth of the first, successfully defended position. Roger Swineshead introduced a controversial innovation to obligationes reasoning, later rejected by Paul of Venice. In the traditional style of obligation, a premise was relevant to the argument only if it followed from or was inconsistent with either a the proposition defended or b all the premises consequent to the former and prior to the premise in question. By admitting any premise that was either consequent to or inconsistent with the proposition defended alone, without regard to intermediate premises, Swineshead eliminated concern with the order of sentences proposed by the interlocutor, making the respondent’s task harder. 

oblique context. As explained by Frege in “Über Sinn und Bedeutung” 1892, a linguistic context is oblique ungerade if and only if an expression e.g., proper name, dependent clause, or sentence in that context does not express its direct customary sense. For Frege, the sense of an expression is the mode of presentation of its nominatum, if any. Thus in direct speech, the direct customary sense of an expression designates its direct customary nominatum. For example, the context of the proper name ‘Kepler’ in 1 Kepler died in misery. is non-oblique i.e., direct since the proper name expresses its direct customary sense, say, the sense of ‘the man who discovered the elliptical planetary orbits’, thereby designating its direct customary nominatum, Kepler himself. Moreover, the entire sentence expresses its direct sense, namely, the proposition that Kepler died in misery, thereby designating its direct nominatum, a truth-value, namely, the true. By contrast, objectivism oblique context 625    625 in indirect speech an expression neither expresses its direct sense nor, therefore, designates its direct nominatum. One such sort of oblique context is direct quotation, as in 2 ‘Kepler’ has six letters. The word appearing within the quotation marks neither expresses its direct customary sense nor, therefore, designates its direct customary nominatum, Kepler. Rather, it designates a word, a proper name. Another sort of oblique context is engendered by the verbs of propositional attitude. Thus, the context of the proper name ‘Kepler’ in 3 Frege believed Kepler died in misery. is oblique, since the proper name expresses its indirect sense, say, the sense of the words ‘the man widely known as Kepler’, thereby designating its indirect nominatum, namely, the sense of ‘the man who discovered the elliptical planetary orbits’. Note that the indirect nominatum of ‘Kepler’ in 3 is the same as the direct sense of ‘Kepler’ in 1. Thus, while ‘Kepler’ in 1 designates the man Kepler, ‘Kepler’ in 3 designates the direct customary sense of the word ‘Kepler’ in 1. Similarly, in 3 the context of the dependent clause ‘Kepler died in misery’ is oblique since the dependent clause expresses its indirect sense, namely, the sense of the words ‘the proposition that Kepler died in misery’, thereby designating its indirect nominatum, namely, the proposition that Kepler died in misery. Note that the indirect nominatum of ‘Kepler died in misery’ in 3 is the same as the direct sense of ‘Kepler died in misery’ in 1. Thus, while ‘Kepler died in misery’ in 1 designates a truthvalue, ‘Kepler died in misery’ in 3 designates a proposition, the direct customary sense of the words ‘Kepler died in misery’ in 1. 

obversion, a sort of immediate inference that allows a transformation of affirmative categorical A-propositions and I-propositions into the corresponding negative E-propositions and O-propositions, and of E- and O-propositions into the corresponding A- and I-propositions, keeping in each case the order of the subject and predicate terms, but changing the original predicate into its complement, i.e., into a negated term. For example, ‘Every man is mortal’  ’No man is non-mortal’; ‘Some students are happy’  ‘Some students are not non-happy’; ‘No dogs are jealous’  ‘All dogs are non-jealous’; and ‘Some bankers are not rich’  ‘Some bankers are not non-rich’.  .

occasionalism, a theory of causation held by a number of important seventeenth-century Cartesian philosophers, including Johannes Clauberg 162265, Géraud de Cordemoy 1626 84, Arnold Geulincx 162469, Louis de la Forge 163266, and Nicolas Malebranche 16381715. In its most extreme version, occasionalism is the doctrine that all finite created entities are devoid of causal efficacy, and that God is the only true causal agent. Bodies do not cause effects in other bodies nor in minds; and minds do not cause effects in bodies nor even within themselves. God is directly, immediately, and solely responsible for bringing about all phenomena. When a needle pricks the skin, the physical event is merely an occasion for God to cause the relevant mental state pain; a volition in the soul to raise an arm or to think of something is only an occasion for God to cause the arm to rise or the ideas to be present to the mind; and the impact of one billiard ball upon another is an occasion for God to move the second ball. In all three contexts  mindbody, bodybody, and mind alone  God’s ubiquitous causal activity proceeds in accordance with certain general laws, and except for miracles he acts only when the requisite material or psychic conditions obtain. Less thoroughgoing forms of occasionalism limit divine causation e.g., to mindbody or bodybody alone. Far from being an ad hoc solution to a Cartesian mindbody problem, as it is often considered, occasionalism is argued for from general philosophical considerations regarding the nature of causal relations considerations that later appear, modified, in Hume, from an analysis of the Cartesian concept of matoblique intention occasionalism 626    626 ter and of the necessary impotence of finite substance, and, perhaps most importantly, from theological premises about the essential ontological relation between an omnipotent God and the created world that he sustains in existence. Occasionalism can also be regarded as a way of providing a metaphysical foundation for explanations in mechanistic natural philosophy. Occasionalists are arguing that motion must ultimately be grounded in something higher than the passive, inert extension of Cartesian bodies emptied of the substantial forms of the Scholastics; it needs a causal ground in an active power. But if a body consists in extension alone, motive force cannot be an inherent property of bodies. Occasionalists thus identify force with the will of God. In this way, they are simply drawing out the implications of Descartes’s own metaphysics of matter and motion. 

Occam, William c.12851347, also written William Occam, known as the More than Subtle Doctor, English Scholastic philosopher known equally as the father of nominalism and for his role in the Franciscan dispute with Pope John XXII over poverty. Born probably in the village of Ockham near London, William Ockham entered the Franciscan order at an early age and studied at Oxford, attaining the rank of baccalarius formatus. His brilliant but controversial career was cut short when John Lutterell, former chancellor of Oxford , presented the pope with a list of fifty-six allegedly heretical theses extracted from Ockham’s writings. The papal commission studied them for two years and found fifty-one open to censure, but none was formally condemned. While in Avignon, Ockham researched previous papal concessions to the Franciscans regarding collective poverty, eventually concluding that John XXII contradicted his predecessors and hence was “no true pope.” After committing these charges to writing, Ockham fled with Michael of Cesena, then minister general of the order, first to Pisa and ultimately to Munich, where he lived until his death, writing many treatises about churchstate relations. Although departures from his eminent predecessors have combined with ecclesiastical difficulties to make Ockham unjustly notorious, his thought remains, by current lights, philosophically and theologically conservative. On most metaphysical issues, Ockham fancied himself the true interpreter of Aristotle. Rejecting the doctrine that universals are real things other than names or concepts as “the worst error of philosophy,” Ockham dismissed not only Platonism, but also “modern realist” doctrines according to which natures enjoy a double mode of existence and are universal in the intellect but numerically multiplied in particulars. He argues that everything real is individual and particular, while universality is a property pertaining only to names and that by virtue of their signification relations. Because Ockham understands the primary names to be mental i.e., naturally significant concepts, his own theory of universals is best classified as a form of conceptualism. Ockham rejects atomism, and defends Aristotelian hylomorphism in physics and metaphysics, complete with its distinction between substantial and accidental forms. Yet, he opposes the reifying tendency of the “moderns” unnamed contemporary opponents, who posited a distinct kind of thing res for each of Aristotle’s ten categories; he argues that  from a purely philosophical point of view  it is indefensible to posit anything besides particular substances and qualities. Ockham followed the Franciscan school in recognizing a plurality of substantial forms in living things in humans, the forms of corporeity, sensory soul, and intellectual soul, but diverged from Duns Scotus in asserting a real, not a formal, distinction among them. Aristotle had reached behind regular correlations in nature to posit substance-things and accident-things as primitive explanatory entities that essentially are or give rise to powers virtus that produce the regularities; similarly, Ockham distinguishes efficient causality properly speaking from sine qua non causality, depending on whether the correlation between A’s and B’s is produced by the power of A or by the will of another, and explicitly denies the existence of any sine qua non causation in nature. Further, Ockham insists, in Aristotelian fashion, that created substance- and accident-natures are essentially the causal powers they are in and of themselves and hence independently of their relations to anything else; so that not even God can make heat naturally a coolant. Yet, if God cannot change, He shares with created things the occurrent Ockham, William 627    627 ability to obstruct such “Aristotelian” productive powers and prevent their normal operation. Ockham’s nominalistic conceptualism about universals does not keep him from endorsing the uniformity of nature principle, because he holds that individual natures are powers and hence that co-specific things are maximally similar powers. Likewise, he is conventional in appealing to several other a priori causal principles: “Everything that is in motion is moved by something,” “Being cannot come from non-being,” “Whatever is produced by something is really conserved by something as long as it exists.” He even recognizes a kind of necessary connection between created causes and effects  e.g., while God could act alone to produce any created effect, a particular created effect could not have had another created cause of the same species instead. Ockham’s main innovation on the topic of causality is his attack on Duns Scotus’s distinction between “essential” and “accidental” orders and contrary contention that every genuine efficient cause is an immediate cause of its effects. Ockham is an Aristotelian reliabilist in epistemology, taking for granted as he does that human cognitive faculties the senses and intellect work always or for the most part. Ockham infers that since we have certain knowledge both of material things and of our own mental acts, there must be some distinctive species of acts of awareness intuitive cognitions that are the power to produce such evident judgments. Ockham is matter-of-fact both about the disruption of human cognitive functions by created obstacles as in sensory illusion and about divine power to intervene in many ways. Such facts carry no skeptical consequences for Ockham, because he defines certainty in terms of freedom from actual doubt and error, not from the logical, metaphysical, or natural possibility of error. In action theory, Ockham defends the liberty of indifference or contingency for all rational beings, created or divine. Ockham shares Duns Scotus’s understanding of the will as a self-determining power for opposites, but not his distaste for causal models. Thus, Ockham allows that 1 unfree acts of will may be necessitated, either by the agent’s own nature, by its other acts, or by an external cause; and that 2 the efficient causes of free acts may include the agent’s intellectual and sensory cognitions as well as the will itself. While recognizing innate motivational tendencies in the human agent  e.g., the inclination to seek sensory pleasure and avoid pain, the affectio commodi tendency to seek its own advantage, and the affectio iustitiae inclination to love things for their own intrinsic worth  he denies that these limit the will’s scope. Thus, Ockham goes beyond Duns Scotus in assigning the will the power, with respect to any option, to will for it velle, to will against it nolle, or not to act at all. In particular, Ockham concludes that the will can will against nolle the good, whether ignorantly or perversely  by hating God or by willing against its own happiness, the good-in-general, the enjoyment of a clear vision of God, or its own ultimate end. The will can also will velle evils  the opposite of what right reason dictates, unjust deeds qua unjust, dishonest, and contrary to right reason, and evil under the aspect of evil. Ockham enforces the traditional division of moral science into non-positive morality or ethics, which directs acts apart from any precept of a superior authority and draws its principles from reason and experience; and positive morality, which deals with laws that oblige us to pursue or avoid things, not because they are good or evil in themselves, but because some legitimate superior commands them. The notion that Ockham sponsors an unmodified divine command theory of ethics rests on conflation and confusion. Rather, in the area of non-positive morality, Ockham advances what we might label a “modified right reason theory,” which begins with the Aristotelian ideal of rational self-government, according to which morally virtuous action involves the agent’s free coordination of choice with right reason. He then observes that suitably informed right reason would dictate that God, as the infinite good, ought to be loved above all and for his own sake, and that such love ought to be expressed by the effort to please him in every way among other things, by obeying all his commands. Thus, if right reason is the primary norm in ethics, divine commands are a secondary, derivative norm. Once again, Ockham is utterly unconcerned about the logical possibility opened by divine liberty of indifference, that these twin norms might conflict say, if God commanded us to act contrary to right reason; for him, their de facto congruence suffices for the moral life. In the area of soteriological merit and demerit a branch of positive morality, things are the other way around: divine will is the primary norm; yet because God includes following the dictates of right reason among the criteria for divine acceptance thereby giving the moral life eternal significance, right reason becomes a secondary and derivative norm there. 

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

Olivi, Peter John, philosopher-theologian whose views on the theory and practice of Franciscan poverty led to a long series of investigations of his orthodoxy. Olivi’s preference for humility, as well as the suspicion with which he was regarded, prevented his becoming a master of theology at Paris. After 1285, he was effectively vindicated and permitted to teach at Florence and Montpellier. But after his death, probably in part because his remains were venerated and his views were championed by the Franciscan Spirituals, his orthodoxy was again examined. The Council of Vienne 131112 condemned three unrelated tenets associated with Olivi. Finally, in 1326, Pope John XXII condemned a series of statements based on Olivi’s Apocalypse commentary. Olivi thought of himself chiefly as a theologian, writing copious biblical commentaries; his philosophy of history was influenced by Joachim of Fiore. His views on poverty inspired the leader of the Franciscan Observant reform movement, St. Bernardino of Siena. Apart from his views on poverty, Olivi is best known for his philosophical independence from Aristotle, whom he condemned as a materialist. Contrary to Aristotle’s theory of projectile motion, Olivi advocated a theory of impetus. He undermined orthodox views on Aristotelian categories. His attack on the category of relation was thought to have dangerous implications in Trinitarian theology. Ockham’s theory of quantity is in part a defense of views presented by Olivi. Olivi was critical of Augustinian as well as Aristotelian views; he abandoned the theories of seminal reason and divine illumination. He also argued against positing impressed sensible and intelligible species, claiming that only the soul, not perceptual objects, played an active role in perception. Bold as his philosophical views were, he presented them tentatively. A voluntarist, he emphasized the importance of will. He claimed that an act of understanding was not possible in the absence of an act of will. He provided an important experiential argument for the freedom of the will. His treatises on contracts revealed a sophisticated understanding of economics. His treatise on evangelical poverty includes the first defense of a theory of papal infallibility.