H. P. Grice, "IMPLICATVRA" -- in twelve volumes, vol. X.

Philosophical psychology -- Eckhart, Johannes, called Meister Eckhart c.12601328, G. 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. Philosophical psychology – “soul-to-soul transfer” – the problem of other minds, the question of what rational basis a person can have for the belief that other persons are similarly conscious and have minds. Every person, by virtue of being conscious, is aware of her own state of consciousness and thus knows she has a mind; but the mental states of others are not similarly apparent to her. An influential attempt to solve this problem was made by philosophical behaviorists. According to Ryle in The Concept of Mind 9, a mind is not a ghost in the physical machine but roughly speaking an aggregate of dispositions to behave intelligently and to respond overtly to sensory stimulation. Since the behavior distinctive of these mentalistic dispositions is readily observable in other human beings, the so-called problem of other minds is easily solved: it arose from mere confusion about the concept of mind. Ryle’s opponents were generally willing to concede that such dispositions provide proof that another person has a “mind” or is a sentient being, but they were not willing to admit that those dispositions provide proof that other people actually have feelings, thoughts, and sensory experiences. Their convictions on this last matter generated a revised version of the otherminds problem; it might be called the problem of other-person experiences. Early efforts to solve the problem of other minds can be viewed as attempts to solve the problem of other-person experiences. According to J. S. Mill’s Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy 1865, one can defend one’s conviction that others have feelings and other subjective experiences by employing an argument from analogy. To develop that analogy one first attends to how one’s own experiences are related to overt or publicly observable phenomena. One might observe that one feels pain when pricked by a pin and that one responds to the pain by wincing and saying “ouch.” The next step is to attend to the behavior and circumstances of others. Since other people are physically very similar to oneself, it is reasonable to conclude that if they are pricked by a pin and respond by wincing and saying “ouch,” they too have felt pain. Analogous inferences involving other sorts of mental states and other sorts of behavior and circumstances add strong support, Mill said, to one’s belief in other-person experiences. Although arguments from analogy are generally conceded to provide rationally acceptable evidence for unobserved phenomena, the analogical argument for other-person experiences was vigorously attacked in the 0s by philosophers influenced by Vitters’s Philosophical Investigations 3. Their central contention was that anyone employing the argument must assume that, solely from her own case, she knows what feelings and thoughts are. This assumption was refuted, they thought, by Vitters’s private language argument, which proved that we learn what feelings and thoughts are only in the process of learning a publicly understandable language containing an appropriate psychological vocabulary. To understand this latter vocabulary, these critics said, one must be able to use its ingredient words correctly in relation to others as well as to oneself; and this can be ascertained only because words like ‘pain’ and ‘depression’ are associated with behavioral criteria. When such criteria are satisfied by the behavior of others, one knows that the words are correctly applied to them and that one is justified in believing that they have the experiences in question. The supposed problem of other-person experiences is thus “dissolved” by a just appreciation of the preconditions for coherent thought about psychological states. Vitters’s claim that, to be conceivable, “an inner process stands in need of external criteria,” lost its hold on philosophers during the 0s. An important consideration was this: if a feeling of pain is a genuine reality different from the behavior that typically accompanies it, then so-called pain behavior cannot be shown to provide adequate evidence for the presence of pain by a purely linguistic argument; some empirical inductive evidence is needed. Since, contrary to Vitters, one knows what the feeling of pain is like only by having that feeling, one’s belief that other people occasionally have feelings that are significantly like the pain one feels oneself apparently must be supported by an argument in which analogy plays a central role. No other strategy seems possible. 

Philosophical theology: Philosophical theology -- deism, the view that true religion is natural religion. Some self-styled Christian deists accepted revelation although they argued that its content is essentially the same as natural religion. Most deists dismissed revealed religion as a fiction. God wants his creatures to be happy and has ordained virtue as the means to it. Since God’s benevolence is disinterested, he will ensure that the knowledge needed for happiness is universally accessible. Salvation cannot, then, depend on special revelation. True religion is an expression of a universal human nature whose essence is reason and is the same in all times and places. Religious traditions such as Christianity and Islam originate in credulity, political tyranny, and priestcraft, which corrupt reason and overlay natural religion with impurities. Deism is largely a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century phenomenon and was most prominent in England. Among the more important English deists were John Toland 16701722, Anthony Collins 16761729, Herbert of Cherbury 15831648, Matthew Tindal 16571733, and Thomas Chubb 16791747. Continental deists included Voltaire and Reimarus. Thomas Paine and Elihu Palmer 17641806 were prominent  deists. Orthodox writers in this period use ‘deism’ as a vague term of abuse. By the late eighteenth century, the term came to mean belief in an “absentee God” who creates the world, ordains its laws, and then leaves it to its own devices. Philosophical theology -- de Maistre, Joseph-Marie, political theorist, diplomat, and Roman Catholic exponent of theocracy. He was educated by the Jesuits in Turin. His counterrevolutionary political philosophy aimed at restoring the foundations of morality, the family, society, and the state in postrevolutionary Europe. Against Enlightenment ideals, he reclaimed Thomism, defended the hereditary and absolute monarchy, and championed ultramontanism The Pope, 1821. Considerations on France 1796 argues that the decline of moral and religious values was responsible for the “satanic” 1789 revolution. Hence Christianity and Enlightenment philosophy were engaged in a fight to the death that he claimed the church would eventually win. Deeply pessimistic about human nature, the Essay on the Generating Principle of Political Constitutions 1810 traces the origin of authority in the human craving for order and discipline. Saint Petersburg Evenings 1821 urges philosophy to surrender to religion and reason to faith. Philosophical theology -- 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.  Philosophical theology -- 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. 

philosophism: birrellism – general refelction on life. Grice defines a philosopher as someone ‘addicted to general reflections on life,’ like Birrell did. f. paraphilosophy – philosophical hacks. “Austin’s expressed view -- the formulation of which no doubt involves some irony -- is that we ‘philosophical hacks’ spend the week making, for the benefit of our tutees, direct attacks on this or that philosophical issue, and that we need to be refreshed, at the week-end, by some suitably chosen ‘para-philosophy’ in which some non-philosophical conception is to be examined with the full rigour of the Austinian Code, with a view to an ultimate analogical pay-off (liable never to be reached) in philosophical currency.” His feeling of superiority as a philosopher is obvious in various fields. He certaintly would not get involved in any ‘empirical’ survey (“We can trust this, qua philosophers, as given.”) Grice held a MA (Lit. Hum.) – Literae Humaniores (Philosophy). So he knew what he was talking about. The curriculum was an easy one. He plays with the fact that empiricists don’t regard philosophy as a sovereign monarch: philosophia regina scientiarum, provided it’s queen consort. In “Conceptual analysis and the province of philosophy,” he plays with the idea that Philosophy is the Supreme Science. Grice was somewhat obsessed as to what ‘philosohical’ stood for, which amused the members of his play group! His play group once spends five weeks in an effort to explain why, sometimes, ‘very’ allows, with little or no change of meaning, the substitution of ‘highly’ (as in ‘very unusual’) and sometimes does not (as in ‘very depressed’ or ‘very wicked’); and we reached no conclusion. This episode was ridiculed by some as an ultimate embodiment of fruitless frivolity. But that response is as out of place as a similar response to the medieval question, ‘How many angels can dance on a needle’s point?’” A needless point?For much as this medieval question is raised in order to display, in a vivid way, a difficulty in the conception of an immaterial substance, so The Play Group discussion is directed, in response to a worry from me, towards an examination, in the first instance, of a conceptual question which is generally agreed among us to be a strong candidate for being a question which had no philosophical importance, with a view to using the results of this examination in finding a distinction between philosophically important and philosophically unimportant enquiries. Grice is fortunate that the Lit. Hum. programme does not have much philosophy! He feels free! In fact, the lack of a philosophical background is felt as a badge of honour. It is ‘too clever’ and un-English to ‘know’ things. A pint of philosophy is all Grice wanted. Figurative. This is Harvardite Gordon’s attempt to formulate a philosophy of the minimum fundamental ideas that all people on the earth should come to know. Reviewed by A. M. Honoré: Short measure. Gordon, a Stanley Plummer scholar, e: Bowdoin and Harvard, in The Eastern Gazette. Grice would exclaim: I always loved Alfred Brooks Gordon! Grice was slightly disapppointed that Gordon had not included the fundamental idea of implicaturum in his pint. Short measure, indeed. Grice gives seminars on Ariskant (“the first part of this individual interested some of my tutees; the second, others.” Ariskant philosophised in Grecian, but also in the pure Teutonic, and Grice collaborated with Baker in this area. Curiously, Baker majors in French and philosophy and does research at the Sorbonne. Grice would sometimes define ‘philoosphy.’ Oddly, Grice gives a nice example of ‘philosopher’ meaning ‘addicted to general, usually stoic, reflections about life.’ In the context where it occurs, the implicaturum is Stevensonian. If Stevenson says that an athlete is usually tall, a philosopher may occasionally be inclined to reflect about life in general, as a birrelist would. Grice’s gives an alternate meaning, intended to display circularity: ‘engaged in philosophical studies.’ The idea of Grice of philosophy is the one the Lit. Hum. instills.  It is a unique experience, unknown in the New World, our actually outside Oxford, or post-Grice, where a classicist is not seen as a philosopher. Once a tutorial fellow in philosophy (rather than classics) and later university lecturer in philosophy (rather than classics) strengthens his attachment. Grice needs to regarded by his tutee as a philosopher simpliciter, as oppoosed to a prof: the Waynflete is a metaphysician; the White is a moralist, the Wykeham a logician, and the Wilde a ‘mental’. For Grice’s “greatest living philosopher,” Heidegger, ‘philosophy’ is a misnomer. While philology merely discourses (logos) on love, the philosopher claims to be a wizard (sophos) of love. Liddell and Scott have “φιλοσοφία,” which they render as “love of knowledge, pursuit thereof, speculation,” “ἡ φ. κτῆσις ἐπιστήμης.” Then there’s “ἡ πρώτη φ.,” with striking originality, metaphysic, Arist. Metaph. 1026a24. Just one sense, but various ambiguities remain in ‘philosopher,’ as per Grice’s two  usages. As it happens, Grice is both addicted to general, usually stoic, speculations about life, and he is a member of The Oxford Philosophical Society.Refs.: The main sources in the Grice Papers are under series III, of the doctrines. See also references under ‘lingusitic botany,’ and Oxonianism. Grice liked to play with the adage of ‘philosophia’ as ‘regina scientiarum.’ A specific essay in his update of “post-war Oxford philosophy,” in WoW on “Conceptual analysis and the province of philosophy,” BANC.

philosophia perennis, a supposed body of truths that appear in the writings of the great philosophers, or the truths common to opposed philosophical viewpoints. The term is derived from the title of a book De perenni philosophia published by Agostino Steuco of Gubbio in 1540. It suggests that the differences between philosophers are inessential and superficial and that the common essential truth emerges, however partially, in the major philosophical schools. Aldous Huxley employed it as a title. L. Lavelle, N. Hartmann, and K. Jaspers also employ the phrase. M. De Wulf and many others use the phrase to characterize Neo-Thomism as the chosen vehicle of essential philosophical truths.

philosophical anthropology, philosophical inquiry concerning human nature, often starting with the question of what generally characterizes human beings in contrast to other kinds of creatures and things. Thus broadly conceived, it is a kind of inquiry as old as philosophy itself, occupying philosophers from Socrates to Sartre; and it embraces philosophical psychology, the philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, and existentialism. Such inquiry presupposes no immutable “essence of man,” but only the meaningfulness of distinguishing between what is “human” and what is not, and the possibility that philosophy as well as other disciplines may contribute to our self-comprehension. It leaves open the question of whether other kinds of naturally occurring or artificially produced entity may possess the hallmarks of our humanity, and countenances the possibility of the biologically evolved, historically developed, and socially and individually variable character of everything about our attained humanity. More narrowly conceived, philosophical anthropology is a specific movement in recent European philosophy associated initially with Scheler and Helmuth Plessner, and subsequently with such figures as Arnold Gehlen, Cassirer, and the later Sartre. It initially emerged in Germany simultaneously with the existential philosophy of Heidegger and the critical social theory of the Frankfurt School, with which it competed as G. philosophers turned their attention to the comprehension of human life. This movement was distinguished from the outset by its attempt to integrate the insights of phenomenological analysis with the perspectives attainable through attention to human and comparative biology, and subsequently to social inquiry as well. This turn to a more naturalistic approach to the understanding of ourselves, as a particular kind of living creature among others, is reflected in the titles of the two works published in 8 that inaugurated the movement: Scheler’s Man’s Place in Nature and Plessner’s The Levels of the Organic and Man. For both Scheler and Plessner, however, as for those who followed them, our nature must be understood by taking further account of the social, cultural, and intellectual dimensions of human life. Even those like Gehlen, whose Der Mensch 0 exhibits a strongly biological orientation, devoted much attention to these dimensions, which our biological nature both constrains and makes possible. For all of them, the relation between the biological and the social and cultural dimensions of human life is a central concern and a key to comprehending our human nature. One of the common themes of the later philosophical-anthropological literature  e.g., Cassirer’s An Essay on Man 5 and Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason 0 as well as Plessner’s Contitio Humana 5 and Gehlen’s Early Man and Late Culture 3  is the plasticity of human nature, made possible by our biological constitution, and the resulting great differences in the ways human beings live. Yet this is not taken to preclude saying anything meaningful about human nature generally; rather, it merely requires attention to the kinds of general features involved and reflected in human diversity and variability. Critics of the very idea and possibility of a philosophical anthropology e.g., Althusser and Foucault typically either deny that there are any such general features or maintain that there are none outside the province of the biological sciences to which philosophy can contribute nothing substantive. Both claims, however, are open to dispute; and the enterprise of a philosophical anthropology remains a viable and potentially significant one.

Philosophical biology – vide: H. P. Grice, “Philosophical biology and philosophical psychology” -- the philosophy of science applied to biology. On a conservative view of the philosophy of science, the same principles apply throughout science. Biology supplies additional examples but does not provide any special problems or require new principles. For example, the reduction of Mendelian genetics to molecular biology exemplifies the same sort of relation as the reduction of thermodynamics to statistical mechanics, and the same general analysis of reduction applies equally to both. More radical philosophers argue that the subject matter of biology has certain unique features; hence, the philosophy of biology is itself unique. The three features of biology most often cited by those who maintain that philosophy of biology is unique are functional organization, embryological development, and the nature of selection. Organisms are functionally organized. They are capable of maintaining their overall organization in the face of fairly extensive variation in their envisonments. Organisms also undergo ontogenetic development resulting from extremely complex interactions between the genetic makeup of the organism and its successive environments. At each step, the course that an organism takes is determined by an interplay between its genetic makeup, its current state of development, and the environment it happens to confront. The complexity of these interactions produces the naturenurture problem. Except for human artifacts, similar organization does not occur in the non-living world. The species problem is another classic issue in the philosophy of biology. Biological species have been a paradigm example of natural kinds since Aristotle. According to nearly all pre-Darwinian philosophers, species are part of the basic makeup of the universe, like gravity and gold. They were held to be as eternal, immutable, and discrete as these other examples of natural kinds. If Darwin was right, species are not eternal. They come and go, and once gone can no more reemerge than Aristotle can once again walk the streets of Athens. Nor are species immutable. A sample of lead can be transmuted into a sample of gold, but these elements as elements remain immutable in the face of such changes. However, Darwin insisted that species themselves, not merely their instances, evolved. Finally, because Darwin thought that species evolved gradually, the boundaries between species are not sharp, casting doubt on the essentialist doctrines so common in his day. In short, if species evolve, they have none of the traditional characteristics of species. Philosophers and biologists to this day are working out the consequences of this radical change in our worldview. The topic that has received the greatest attention by philosophers of biology in the recent literature is the nature of evolutionary theory, in particular selection, adaptation, fitness, and the population structure of species. In order for selection to operate, variation is necessary, successive generations must be organized genealogically, and individuals must interact differentially with their environments. In the simplest case, genes pass on their structure largely intact. In addition, they provide the information necessary to produce organisms. Certain of these organisms are better able to cope with their environments and reproduce than are other organisms. As a result, genes are perpetuated differentially through successive generations. Those characteristics that help an organism cope with its environments are termed adaptations. In a more restricted sense, only those characteristics that arose through past selective advantage count as adaptations. Just as the notion of IQ was devised as a single measure for a combination of the factors that influence our mental abilities, fitness is a measure of relative reproductive success. Claims about the tautological character of the principle philosophical behaviorism philosophy of biology of the survival of the fittest stem from the blunt assertion that fitness just is relative reproductive success, as if intelligence just is what IQ tests measure. Philosophers of biology have collaborated with biologists to analyze the notion of fitness. This literature has concentrated on the role that causation plays in selection and, hence, must play in any adequate explication of fitness. One important distinction that has emerged is between replication and differential interaction with the environment. Selection is a function of the interplay between these two processes. Because of the essential role of variation in selection, all the organisms that belong to the same species either at any one time or through time cannot possibly be essentially the same. Nor can species be treated adequately in terms of the statistical covariance of either characters or genes. The populational structure of species is crucial. For example, species that form numerous, partially isolated demes are much more likely to speciate than those that do not. One especially controversial question is whether species themselves can function in the evolutionary process rather than simply resulting from it. Although philosophers of biology have played an increasingly important role in biology itself, they have also addressed more traditional philosophical questions, especially in connection with evolutionary epistemology and ethics. Advocates of evolutionary epistemology argue that knowledge can be understood in terms of the adaptive character of accurate knowledge. Those organisms that hold false beliefs about their environment, including other organisms, are less likely to reproduce themselves than those with more accurate beliefs. To the extent that this argument has any force at all, it applies only to humansized entities and events. One common response to evolutionary epistemology is that sometimes people who hold manifestly false beliefs flourish at the expense of those who hold more realistic views of the world in which we live. On another version of evolutionary epistemology, knowledge acquisition is viewed as just one more instance of a selection process. The issue is not to justify our beliefs but to understand how they are generated and proliferated. Advocates of evolutionary ethics attempt to justify certain ethical principles in terms of their survival value. Any behavior that increases the likelihood of survival and reproduction is “good,” and anything that detracts from these ends is “bad.” The main objection to evolutionary ethics is that it violates the isought distinction. According to most ethical systems, we are asked to sacrifice ourselves for the good of others. If these others were limited to our biological relatives, then the biological notion of inclusive fitness might be adequate to account for such altruistic behavior, but the scope of ethical systems extends past one’s biological relatives. Advocates of evolutionary ethics are hard pressed to explain the full range of behavior that is traditionally considered as virtuous. Either biological evolution cannot provide an adequate justification for ethical behavior or else ethical systems must be drastically reduced in their scope.

Philosophical economics, the study of methodological issues facing positive economic theory and normative problems on the intersection of welfare economics and political philosophy. Methodological issues. Applying approaches and questions in the philosophy of science specifically to economics, the philosophy of economics explores epistemological and conceptual problems raised by the explanatory aims and strategy of economic theory: Do its assumptions about individual choice constitute laws, and do they explain its derived generalizations about markets and economies? Are these generalizations laws, and if so, how are they tested by observation of economic processes, and how are theories in the various compartments of economics  microeconomics, macroeconomics  related to one another and to econometrics? How are the various schools  neoclassical, institutional, Marxian, etc.  related to one another, and what sorts of tests might enable us to choose between their theories? Historically, the chief issue of interest in the development of the philosophy of economics has been the empirical adequacy of the assumptions of rational “economic man”: that all agents have complete and transitive cardinal or ordinal utility rankings or preference orders and that they always choose that available option which maximizes their utility or preferences. Since the actual behavior of agents appears to disconfirm these assumptions, the claim that they constitute causal laws governing economic behavior is difficult to sustain. On the other hand, the assumption of preference-maximizing behavior is indispensable to twentieth-century economics. These two considerations jointly undermine the claim that economic theory honors criteria on explanatory power and evidential probity drawn philosophy of economics philosophy of economics 669    669 from physical science. Much work by economists and philosophers has been devoted therefore to disputing the claim that the assumptions of rational choice theory are false or to disputing the inference from this claim to the conclusion that the cognitive status of economic theory as empirical science is thereby undermined. Most frequently it has been held that the assumptions of rational choice are as harmless and as indispensable as idealizations are elsewhere in science. This view must deal with the allegation that unlike theories embodying idealization elsewhere in science, economic theory gains little more in predictive power from these assumptions about agents’ calculations than it would secure without any assumptions about individual choice. Normative issues. Both economists and political philosophers are concerned with identifying principles that will ensure just, fair, or equitable distributions of scarce goods. For this reason neoclassical economic theory shares a history with utilitarianism in moral philosophy. Contemporary welfare economics continues to explore the limits of utilitarian prescriptions that optimal economic and political arrangements should maximize and/or equalize utility, welfare, or some surrogate. It also examines the adequacy of alternatives to such utilitarian principles. Thus, economics shares an agenda of interests with political and moral philosophy. Utilitarianism in economics and philosophy has been constrained by an early realization that utilities are neither cardinally measurable nor interpersonally comparable. Therefore the prescription to maximize and/or equalize utility cannot be determinatively obeyed. Welfare theorists have nevertheless attempted to establish principles that will enable us to determine the equity, fairness, or justice of various economic arrangements, and that do not rely on interpersonal comparisons required to measure whether a distribution is maximal or equal in the utility it accords all agents. Inspired by philosophers who have surrendered utilitarianism for other principles of equality, fairness, or justice in distribution, welfare economists have explored Kantian, social contractarian, and communitarian alternatives in a research program that cuts clearly across both disciplines. Political philosophy has also profited as much from innovations in economic theory as welfare economics has benefited from moral philosophy. Theorems from welfare economics that establish the efficiency of markets in securing distributions that meet minimal conditions of optimality and fairness have led moral philosophers to reexamine the moral status of free-market exchange. Moreover, philosophers have come to appreciate that coercive social institutions are sometimes best understood as devices for securing public goods  goods like police protection that cannot be provided to those who pay for them without also providing them to free riders who decline to do so. The recognition that everyone would be worse off, including free riders, were the coercion required to pay for these goods not imposed, is due to welfare economics and has led to a significant revival of interest in the work of Hobbes, who appears to have prefigured such arguments. 

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

philosophy of history, the philosophical study of human history and of attempts to record and interpret it. ‘History’ in English and its equivalent in most modern European languages has two primary senses: 1 the temporal progression of large-scale human events and actions, primarily but not exclusively in the past; and 2 the discipline or inquiry in which knowledge of the human past is acquired or sought. This has led to two senses of ‘philosophy of history’, depending on which “history” has been the object of philosophers’ attentions. Philosophy of history in the first sense is often called substantive or speculative, and placed under metaphysics. Philosophy of history in the second sense is called critical or analytic and can be placed in epistemology. Substantive philosophy of history. In the West, substantive philosophy of history is thought to begin only in the Christian era. In the City of God, Augustine wonders why Rome flourished while pagan, yet fell into disgrace after its conversion to Christiantity. Divine reward and punishment should apply to whole peoples, not just to individuals. The unfolding of events in history should exhibit a plan that is intelligible rationally, morally, and for Augustine theologically. As a believer Augustine is convinced that there is such a plan, though it may not always be evident. In the modern period, philosophers such as Vico and Herder also sought such intelligibility in history. They also believed in a long-term direction or purpose of history that is often opposed to and makes use of the purposes of individuals. The most elaborate and best-known example of this approach is found in Hegel, who thought that the gradual realization of human freedom could be discerned in history even if much slavery, tyranny, and suffering are necessary in the process. Marx, too, claimed to know the laws  in his case economic  according to which history unfolds. Similar searches for overall “meaning” in human history have been undertaken in the twentieth century, notably by Arnold Toynbee 95, author of the twelve-volume Study of History, and Oswald Spengler 06, author of Decline of the West. But the whole enterprise was denounced by the positivists and neo-Kantians of the late nineteenth century as irresponsible metaphysical speculation. This attitude was shared by twentieth-century neopositivists and some of their heirs in the analytic tradition. There is some irony in this, since positivism, explicitly in thinkers like Comte and implicitly in others, involves belief in progressively enlightened stages of human history crowned by the modern age of science. Critical philosophy of history. The critical philosophy of history, i.e., the epistemology of historical knowledge, can be traced to the late nineteenth century and has been dominated by the paradigm of the natural sciences. Those in the positivist, neopositivist, and postpositivist tradition, in keeping with the idea of the unity of science, believe that to know the historical past is to explain events causally, and all causal explanation is ultimately of the same sort. To explain human events is to derive them from laws, which may be social, psychological, and perhaps ultimately biological and physical. Against this reductionism, the neo-Kantians and Dilthey argued that history, like other humanistic disciplines Geisteswissenschaften, follows irreducible rules of its own. It is concerned with particular events or developments for their own sake, not as instances of general laws, and its aim is to understand, rather than explain, human actions. This debate was resurrected in the twentieth century in the English-speaking world. Philosophers like Hempel and Morton White b.7 elaborated on the notion of causal explanation in history, while Collingwood and William Dray b.1 described the “understanding” of historical agents as grasping the thought behind an action or discovering its reasons rather than its causes. The comparison with natural science, and the debate between reductionists and antireductionists, dominated other questions as well: Can or should history be objective and valuefree, as science purportedly is? What is the significance of the fact that historians can never perceive the events that interest them, since they are in the past? Are they not limited by their point of view, their place in history, in a way scientists are not? Some positivists were inclined to exclude history from science, rather than make it into one, relegating it to “literature” because it could never meet the standards of objectivity and genuine explanation; it was often the anti-positivists who defended the cognitive legitimacy of our knowledge of the past. In the non-reductionist tradition, philosophers have increasingly stressed the narrative character of history: to understand human actions generally, and past actions in particular, is to tell a coherent story about them. History, according to W. B. Gallie b.2, is a species of the genus Story. History does not thereby become fiction: narrative remains a “cognitive instrument” Louis Mink, 183 just as appropriate to its domain as theory construction is to science. Nevertheless, concepts previously associated with fictional narratives, such as plot structure and beginning-middle-end, are seen as applying to historical narratives as well. This tradition is carried further by Hayden White b.8, who analyzes classical nineteenth-century histories and even substantive philosophies of history such as Hegel’s as instances of romance, comedy, tragedy, and satire. In White’s work this mode of analysis leads him to some skepticism about history’s capacity to “represent” the reality of the past: narratives seem to be imposed upon the data, often for ideological reasons, rather than drawn from them. To some extent White’s view joins that of some positivists who believe that history’s literary character excludes it from the realm of science. But for White this is hardly a defect. Some philosophers have criticized the emphasis on narrative in discussions of history, since it neglects search and discovery, deciphering and evaluating sources, etc., which is more important to historians than the way they “write up” their results. Furthermore, not all history is presented in narrative form. The debate between pro- and anti-narrativists among philosophers of history has its parallel in a similar debate among historians themselves. Academic history in recent times has seen a strong turn away from traditional political history toward social, cultural, and economic analyses of the human past. Narrative is associated with the supposedly outmoded focus on the doings of kings, popes, and generals. These are considered e.g. by the  historian Fernand Braudel, 285 merely surface ripples compared to the deeper-lying and slower-moving currents of social and economic change. It is the methods and concepts of the social sciences, not the art of the storyteller, on which the historian must draw. This debate has now lost some of its steam and narrative history has made something of a comeback among historians. Among philosophers Paul Ricoeur has tried to show that even ostensibly non-narrative history retains narrative features. Historicity. Historicity or historicality: Geschichtlichkeit is a term used in the phenomenological and hermeneutic tradition from Dilthey and Husserl through Heidegger and Gadamer to indicate an essential feature of human existence. Persons are not merely in history; their past, including their social past, figures in their conception of themselves and their future possibilities. Some awareness of the past is thus constitutive of the self, prior to being formed into a cognitive discipine. Modernism and the postmodern. It is possible to view some of the debates over the modern and postmodern in recent Continental philosophy as a new kind of philosophy of history. Philosophers like Lyotard and Foucault see the modern as the period from the Enlightenment and Romanticism to the present, characterized chiefly by belief in “grand narratives” of historical progress, whether capitalist, Marxist, or positivist, with “man” as the triumphant hero of the story. Such belief is now being or should be abandoned, bringing modernism to an end. In one sense this is like earlier attacks on the substantive philosophy of history, since it unmasks as unjustified moralizing certain beliefs about large-scale patterns in history. It goes even further than the earlier attack, since it finds these beliefs at work even where they are not explicitly expressed. In another sense this is a continuation of the substantive philosophy of history, since it makes its own grand claims about largescale historical patterns. In this it joins hands with other philosophers of our day in a general historicization of knowledge e.g., the philosophy of science merges with the history of science and even of philosophy itself. Thus the later Heidegger  and more recently Richard Rorty  view philosophy itself as a large-scale episode in Western history that is nearing or has reached its end. Philosophy thus merges with the history of philosophy, but only thanks to a philosophical reflection on this history as part of history as a whole. 

philosophy of law, also called general jurisprudence, the study of conceptual and theoretical problems concerning the nature of law as such, or common to any legal system. Problems in the philosophy of law fall roughly into two groups. The first contains problems internal to law and legal systems as such. These include a the nature of legal rules; the conditions under which they can be said to exist and to influence practice; their normative character, as mandatory or advisory; and the indeterminacy of their language; b the structure and logical character of legal norms; the analysis of legal principles as a class of legal norms; and the relation between the normative force of law and coercion; c the identity conditions for legal systems; when a legal system exists; and when one legal system ends and another begins; d the nature of the reasoning used by courts in adjudicating cases; e the justification of legal decisions; whether legal justification is through a chain of inferences or by the coherence of norms and decisions; and the relation between intralegal and extralegal justification; f the nature of legal validity and of what makes a norm a valid law; the relation between validity and efficacy, the fact that the norms of a legal system are obeyed by the norm-subjects; g properties of legal systems, including comprehensiveness the claim to regulate any behavior and completeness the absence of gaps in the law; h legal rights; under what conditions citizens possess them; and their analytical structure as protected normative positions; i legal interpretation; whether it is a pervasive feature of law or is found only in certain kinds of adjudication; its rationality or otherwise; and its essentially ideological character or otherwise. The second group of problems concerns the philosophy of law philosophy of law 676    676 relation between law as one particular social institution in a society and the wider political and moral life of that society: a the nature of legal obligation; whether there is an obligation, prima facie or final, to obey the law as such; whether there is an obligation to obey the law only when certain standards are met, and if so, what those standards might be; b the authority of law; and the conditions under which a legal system has political or moral authority or legitimacy; c the functions of law; whether there are functions performed by a legal system in a society that are internal to the design of law; and analyses from the perspective of political morality of the functioning of legal systems; d the legal concept of responsibility; its analysis and its relation to moral and political concepts of responsibility; in particular, the place of mental elements and causal elements in the assignment of responsibility, and the analysis of those elements; e the analysis and justification of legal punishment; f legal liberty, and the proper limits or otherwise of the intrusion of the legal system into individual liberty; the plausibility of legal moralism; g the relation between law and justice, and the role of a legal system in the maintenance of social justice; h the relation between legal rights and political or moral rights; i the status of legal reasoning as a species of practical reasoning; and the relation between law and practical reason; j law and economics; whether legal decision making in fact tracks, or otherwise ought to track, economic efficiency; k legal systems as sources of and embodiments of political power; and law as essentially gendered, or imbued with race or class biases, or otherwise. Theoretical positions in the philosophy of law tend to group into three large kinds  legal positivism, natural law, and legal realism. Legal positivism concentrates on the first set of problems, and typically gives formal or content-independent solutions to such problems. For example, legal positivism tends to regard legal validity as a property of a legal rule that the rule derives merely from its formal relation to other legal rules; a morally iniquitous law is still for legal positivism a valid legal rule if it satisfies the required formal existence conditions. Legal rights exist as normative consequences of valid legal rules; no questions of the status of the right from the point of view of political morality arise. Legal positivism does not deny the importance of the second set of problems, but assigns the task of treating them to other disciplines  political philosophy, moral philosophy, sociology, psychology, and so forth. Questions of how society should design its legal institutions, for legal positivism, are not technically speaking problems in the philosophy of law, although many legal positivists have presented their theories about such questions. Natural law theory and legal realism, by contrast, regard the sharp distinction between the two kinds of problem as an artifact of legal positivism itself. Their answers to the first set of problems tend to be substantive or content-dependent. Natural law theory, for example, would regard the question of whether a law was consonant with practical reason, or whether a legal system was morally and politically legitimate, as in whole or in part determinative of the issue of legal validity, or of whether a legal norm granted a legal right. The theory would regard the relation between a legal system and liberty or justice as in whole or in part determinative of the normative force and the justification for that system and its laws. Legal realism, especially in its contemporary politicized form, sees the claimed role of the law in legitimizing certain gender, race, or class interests as the prime salient property of law for theoretical analysis, and questions of the determinacy of legal rules or of legal interpretation or legal right as of value only in the service of the project of explaining the political power of law and legal systems.

philosophy of literature, literary theory. However, while the literary theorist, who is often a literary critic, is primarily interested in the conceptual foundations of practical criticism, philosophy of literature, usually done by philosophers, is more often concerned to place literature in the context of a philosophical system. Plato’s dialogues have much to say about poetry, mostly by way of aligning it with Plato’s metaphysical, epistemological, and ethico-political views. Aristotle’s Poetics, the earliest example of literary theory in the West, is also an attempt to accommodate the practice of Grecian poets to Aristotle’s philosophical system as a whole. Drawing on the thought of philosophers like Kant and Schelling, Samuel Taylor Coleridge offers in his Biographia Literaria a philosophy of literature that is to Romantic poetics what Aristotle’s treatise is to classical poetics: a literary theory that is confirmed both by the poets whose work it legitimates and by the metaphysics that recommends it. Many philosophers, among them Hume, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, and Sartre, have tried to make room for literature in their philosophical edifices. Some philosophers, e.g., the G. Romantics, have made literature and the other arts the cornerstone of philosophy itself. See Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute, 8. Sometimes ‘philosophy of literature’ is understood in a second sense: philosophy and literature; i.e., philosophy and literature taken to be distinct and essentially autonomous activities that may nonetheless sustain determinate relations to each other. Philosophy of literature, understood in this way, is the attempt to identify the differentiae that distinguish philosophy from literature and to specify their relationships to each other. Sometimes the two are distinguished by their subject matter e.g., philosophy deals with objective structures, literature with subjectivity, sometimes by their methods philosophy is an act of reason, literature the product of imagination, inspiration, or the unconscious, sometimes by their effects philosophy produces knowledge, literature produces emotional fulfillment or release, etc. Their relationships then tend to occupy the areas in which they are not essentially distinct. If their subject matters are distinct, their effects may be the same philosophy and literature both produce understanding, the one of fact and the other of feeling; if their methods are distinct, they may be approaching the same subject matter in different ways; and so on. For Aquinas, e.g., philosophy and poetry may deal with the same objects, the one communicating truth about the object in syllogistic form, the other inspiring feelings about it through figurative language. For Heidegger, the philosopher investigates the meaning of being while the poet names the holy, but their preoccupations tend to converge at the deepest levels of thinking. For Sartre, literature is philosophy engagé, existential-political activity in the service of freedom. ’Philosophy of literature’ may also be taken in a third sense: philosophy in literature, the attempt to discover matters of philosophical interest and value in literary texts. The philosopher may undertake to identify, examine, and evaluate the philosophical content of literary texts that contain expressions of philosophical ideas and discussions of philosophical problems  e.g., the debates on free will and theodicy in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Many if not most  courses on philosophy of literature are taught from this point of view. Much interesting and important work has been done in this vein; e.g., Santayana’s Three Philosophical Poets 0, Cavell’s essays on Emerson and Thoreau, and Nussbaum’s Love’s Knowledge 9. It should be noted, however, that to approach the matter in this way presupposes that literature and philosophy are simply different forms of the same content: what philosophy expresses in the form of argument literature expresses in lyric, dramatic, or narrative form. The philosopher’s treatment of literature implies that he is uniquely positioned to explicate the subject matter treated in both literary and philosophical texts, and that the language of philosophy gives optimal expression to a content less adequately expressed in the language of literature. The model for this approach may well be Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, which treats art along with religion as imperfect adumbrations of a truth that is fully and properly articulated only in the conceptual mode of philosophical dialectic. Dissatisfaction with this presupposition and its implicit privileging of philosophy over literature has led to a different view of the relation between philosophy and literature and so to a different program for philosophy of literature. The self-consciously literary form of Kierkegaard’s writing is an integral part of his polemic against the philosophical imperialism of the Hegelians. In this century, the work of philosophers like Derrida and the philosophers and critics who follow his lead suggests that it is mistaken to regard philosophy and literature as alternative expressions of an identical content, and seriously mistaken to think of philosophy as the master discourse, the “proper” expression of a content “improperly” expressed in literature. All texts, on this view, have a “literary” form, the texts of philosophers as well as the texts of novelists and poets, and their content is internally determined by their “means of expression.” There is just as much “literature in philosophy” as there is “philosophy in literature.” Consequently, the philosopher of literature may no longer be able simply to extract philosophical matter from literary form. Rather, the modes of literary expression confront the philosopher with problems that bear on the presuppositions of his own enterprise. E.g., fictional mimesis especially in the works of postmodern writers raises questions about the possibility and the prephilosophy of literature philosophy of literature 678    678 philosophy of logic philosophy of logic 679 sumed normativeness of factual representation, and in so doing tends to undermine the traditional hierarchy that elevates “fact” over “fiction.” Philosophers’ perplexity over the truth-value of fictional statements is an example of the kind of problems the study of literature can create for the practice of philosophy see Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, 2, ch. 7. Or again, the self-reflexivity of contemporary literary texts can lead philosophers to reflect critically on their own undertaking and may seriously unsettle traditional notions of self-referentiality. When it is not regarded as another, attractive but perhaps inferior source of philosophical ideas, literature presents the philosopher with epistemological, metaphysical, and methodological problems not encountered in the course of “normal” philosophizing.

philosophy of logic – H. P. Grice, “Logic and conversation” – “Meaning,” in P. F. Strawson, “Philosophical Logic,” Oxford -- the arena of philosophy devoted to examining the scope and nature of logic. Aristotle considered logic an organon, or foundation, of knowledge. Certainly, inference is the source of much human knowledge. Logic judges inferences good or bad and tries to justify those that are good. One need not agree with Aristotle, therefore, to see logic as essential to epistemology. Philosophers such as Vitters, additionally, have held that the structure of language reflects the structure of the world. Because inferences have elements that are themselves linguistic or are at least expressible in language, logic reveals general features of the structure of language. This makes it essential to linguistics, and, on a Vittersian view, to metaphysics. Moreover, many philosophical battles have been fought with logical weaponry. For all these reasons, philosophers have tried to understand what logic is, what justifies it, and what it tells us about reason, language, and the world. The nature of logic. Logic might be defined as the science of inference; inference, in turn, as the drawing of a conclusion from premises. A simple argument is a sequence, one element of which, the conclusion, the others are thought to support. A complex argument is a series of simple arguments. Logic, then, is primarily concerned with arguments. Already, however, several questions arise. 1 Who thinks that the premises support the conclusion? The speaker? The audience? Any competent speaker of the language? 2 What are the elements of arguments? Thoughts? Propositions? Philosophers following Quine have found these answers unappealing for lack of clear identity criteria. Sentences are more concrete and more sharply individuated. But should we consider sentence tokens or sentence types? Context often affects interpretation, so it appears that we must consider tokens or types-in-context. Moreover, many sentences, even with contextual information supplied, are ambiguous. Is a sequence with an ambiguous sentence one argument which may be good on some readings and bad on others or several? For reasons that will become clear, the elements of arguments should be the primary bearers of truth and falsehood in one’s general theory of language. 3 Finally, and perhaps most importantly, what does ‘support’ mean? Logic evaluates inferences by distinguishing good from bad arguments. This raises issues about the status of logic, for many of its pronouncements are explicitly normative. The philosophy of logic thus includes problems of the nature and justification of norms akin to those arising in metaethics. The solutions, moreover, may vary with the logical system at hand. Some logicians attempt to characterize reasoning in natural language; others try to systematize reasoning in mathematics or other sciences. Still others try to devise an ideal system of reasoning that does not fully correspond to any of these. Logicians concerned with inference in natural, mathematical, or scientific languages tend to justify their norms by describing inferential practices in that language as actually used by those competent in it. These descriptions justify norms partly because the practices they describe include evaluations of inferences as well as inferences themselves. The scope of logic. Logical systems meant to account for natural language inference raise issues of the scope of logic. How does logic differ from semantics, the science of meaning in general? Logicians have often treated only inferences turning on certain commonly used words, such as ‘not’, ‘if’, ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘all’, and ‘some’, taking them, or items in a symbolic language that correspond to them, as logical constants. They have neglected inferences that do not turn on them, such as My brother is married. Therefore, I have a sister-in-law. Increasingly, however, semanticists have used ‘logic’ more broadly, speaking of the logic of belief, perception, abstraction, or even kinship.  Such uses seem to treat logic and semantics as coextensive. Philosophers who have sought to maintain a distinction between the semantics and logic of natural language have tried to develop non-arbitrary criteria of logical constancy. An argument is valid provided the truth of its premises guarantees the truth of its conclusion. This definition relies on the notion of truth, which raises philosophical puzzles of its own. Furthermore, it is natural to ask what kind of connection must hold between the premises and conclusion. One answer specifies that an argument is valid provided replacing its simple constituents with items of similar categories while leaving logical constants intact could never produce true premises and a false conclusion. On this view, validity is a matter of form: an argument is valid if it instantiates a valid form. Logic thus becomes the theory of logical form. On another view, an argument is valid if its conclusion is true in every possible world or model in which its premises are true. This conception need not rely on the notion of a logical constant and so is compatible with the view that logic and semantics are coextensive. Many issues in the philosophy of logic arise from the plethora of systems logicians have devised. Some of these are deviant logics, i.e., logics that differ from classical or standard logic while seeming to treat the same subject matter. Intuitionistic logic, for example, which interprets the connectives and quantifiers non-classically, rejecting the law of excluded middle and the interdefinability of the quantifiers, has been supported with both semantic and ontological arguments. Brouwer, Heyting, and others have defended it as the proper logic of the infinite; Dummett has defended it as the correct logic of natural language. Free logic allows non-denoting referring expressions but interprets the quantifiers as ranging only over existing objects. Many-valued logics use at least three truthvalues, rejecting the classical assumption of bivalence  that every formula is either true or false. Many logical systems attempt to extend classical logic to incorporate tense, modality, abstraction, higher-order quantification, propositional quantification, complement constructions, or the truth predicate. These projects raise important philosophical questions. Modal and tense logics. Tense is a pervasive feature of natural language, and has become important to computer scientists interested in concurrent programs. Modalities of several sorts  alethic possibility, necessity and deontic obligation, permission, for example  appear in natural language in various grammatical guises. Provability, treated as a modality, allows for revealing formalizations of metamathematics. Logicians have usually treated modalities and tenses as sentential operators. C. I. Lewis and Langford pioneered such approaches for alethic modalities; von Wright, for deontic modalities; and Prior, for tense. In each area, many competing systems developed; by the late 0s, there were over two hundred axiom systems in the literature for propositional alethic modal logic alone. How might competing systems be evaluated? Kripke’s semantics for modal logic has proved very helpful. Kripke semantics in effect treats modal operators as quantifiers over possible worlds. Necessarily A, e.g., is true at a world if and only if A is true in all worlds accessible from that world. Kripke showed that certain popular axiom systems result from imposing simple conditions on the accessibility relation. His work spawned a field, known as correspondence theory, devoted to studying the relations between modal axioms and conditions on models. It has helped philosophers and logicians to understand the issues at stake in choosing a modal logic and has raised the question of whether there is one true modal logic. Modal idioms may be ambiguous or indeterminate with respect to some properties of the accessibility relation. Possible worlds raise additional ontological and epistemological questions. Modalities and tenses seem to be linked in natural language, but attempts to bring tense and modal logic together remain young. The sensitivity of tense to intra- and extralinguistic context has cast doubt on the project of using operators to represent tenses. Kamp, e.g., has represented tense and aspect in terms of event structure, building on earlier work by Reichenbach. Truth. Tarski’s theory of truth shows that it is possible to define truth recursively for certain languages. Languages that can refer to their own sentences, however, permit no such definition given Tarski’s assumptions  for they allow the formulation of the liar and similar paradoxes. Tarski concluded that, in giving the semantics for such a language, we must ascend to a more powerful metalanguage. Kripke and others, however, have shown that it is possible for a language permitting self-reference to contain its own truth    680 predicate by surrendering bivalence or taking the truth predicate indexically. Higher-order logic. First-order predicate logic allows quantification only over individuals. Higher-order logics also permit quantification over predicate positions. Natural language seems to permit such quantification: ‘Mary has every quality that John admires’. Mathematics, moreover, may be expressed elegantly in higher-order logic. Peano arithmetic and Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory, e.g., require infinite axiom sets in firstorder logic but are finitely axiomatizable  and categorical, determining their models up to isomorphism  in second-order logic. Because they quantify over properties and relations, higher-order logics seem committed to Platonism. Mathematics reduces to higher-order logic; Quine concludes that the latter is not logic. Its most natural semantics seems to presuppose a prior understanding of properties and relations. Also, on this semantics, it differs greatly from first-order logic. Like set theory, it is incomplete; it is not compact. This raises questions about the boundaries of logic. Must logic be axiomatizable? Must it be possible, i.e., to develop a logical system powerful enough to prove every valid argument valid? Could there be valid arguments with infinitely many premises, any finite fragment of which would be invalid? With an operator for forming abstract terms from predicates, higher-order logics easily allow the formulation of paradoxes. Russell and Whitehead for this reason adopted type theory, which, like Tarski’s theory of truth, uses an infinite hierarchy and corresponding syntactic restrictions to avoid paradox. Type-free theories avoid both the restrictions and the paradoxes, as with truth, by rejecting bivalence or by understanding abstraction indexically. ,

philosophy of mathematics, the study of ontological and epistemological problems raised by the content and practice of mathematics. The present agenda in this field evolved from critical developments, notably the collapse of Pythagoreanism, the development of modern calculus, and an early twentieth-century foundational crisis, which forced mathematicians and philosophers to examine mathematical methods and presuppositions. Grecian mathematics. The Pythagoreans, who represented the height of early demonstrative Grecian mathematics, believed that all scientific relations were measureable by natural numbers 1, 2, 3, etc. or ratios of natural numbers, and thus they assumed discrete, atomic units for the measurement of space, time, and motion. The discovery of irrational magnitudes scotched the first of these beliefs. Zeno’s paradoxes showed that the second was incompatible with the natural assumption that space and time are infinitely divisible. The Grecian reaction, ultimately codified in Euclid’s Elements, included Plato’s separation of mathematics from empirical science and, within mathematics, distinguished number theory  a study of discretely ordered entities  from geometry, which concerns continua. Following Aristotle and employing methods perfected by Eudoxus, Euclid’s proofs used only “potentially infinite” geometric and arithmetic procedures. The Elements’ axiomatic form and its constructive proofs set a standard for future mathematics. Moreover, its dependence on visual intuition whose consequent deductive gaps were already noted by Archimedes, together with the challenge of Euclid’s infamous fifth postulate about parallel lines, and the famous unsolved problems of compass and straightedge construction, established an agenda for generations of mathematicians. The calculus. The two millennia following Euclid saw new analytical tools e.g., Descartes’s geometry that wedded arithmetic and geometric considerations and toyed with infinitesimally small quantities. These, together with the demands of physical application, tempted mathematicians to abandon the pristine Grecian dichotomies. Matters came to a head with Newton’s and Leibniz’s almost simultaneous discovery of the powerful computational techniques of the calculus. While these unified physical science in an unprecedented way, their dependence on unclear notions of infinitesimal spatial and temporal increments emphasized their shaky philosophical foundation. Berkeley, for instance, condemned the calculus for its unintuitability. However, this time the power of the new methods inspired a decidedly conservative response. Kant, in particular, tried to anchor the new mathematics in intuition. Mathematicians, he claimed, construct their objects in the “pure intuitions” of space and time. And these mathematical objects are the a priori forms of transcendentally ideal empirical objects. For Kant this combination of epistemic empiricism and ontological idealism explained the physical applicability of mathematics and thus granted “objective validity” i.e., scientific legitimacy to mathematical procedures. Two nineteenth-century developments undercut this Kantian constructivism in favor of a more abstract conceptual picture of mathematics. First, Jànos Bolyai, Carl F. Gauss, Bernhard Riemann, Nikolai Lobachevsky, and others produced consistent non-Euclidean geometries, which undid the Kantian picture of a single a priori science of space, and once again opened a rift between pure mathematics and its physical applications. Second, Cantor and Dedekind defined the real numbers i.e., the elements of the continuum as infinite sets of rational and ultimately natural numbers. Thus they founded mathematics on the concepts of infinite set and natural number. Cantor’s set theory made the first concept rigorously mathematical; while Peano and Frege both of whom advocated securing rigor by using formal languages did that for the second. Peano axiomatized number theory, and Frege ontologically reduced the natural numbers to sets indeed sets that are the extensions of purely logical concepts. Frege’s Platonistic conception of numbers as unintuitable objects and his claim that mathematical truths follow analytically from purely logical definitions  the thesis of logicism  are both highly anti-Kantian. Foundational crisis and movements. But antiKantianism had its own problems. For one thing, Leopold Kronecker, who following Peter Dirichlet wanted mathematics reduced to arithmetic and no further, attacked Cantor’s abstract set theory on doctrinal grounds. Worse yet, the discovery of internal antinomies challenged the very consistency of abstract foundations. The most famous of these, Russell’s paradox the set of all sets that are not members of themselves both is and isn’t a member of itself, undermined Frege’s basic assumption that every well-formed concept has an extension. This was a full-scale crisis. To be sure, Russell himself together with Whitehead preserved the logicist foundational approach by organizing the universe of sets into a hierarchy of levels so that no set can be a member of itself. This is type theory. However, the crisis encouraged two explicitly Kantian foundational projects. The first, Hilbert’s Program, attempted to secure the “ideal” i.e., infinitary parts of mathematics by formalizing them and then proving the resultant formal systems to be conservative and hence consistent extensions of finitary theories. Since the proof itself was to use no reasoning more complicated than simple numerical calculations  finitary reasoning  the whole metamathematical project belonged to the untainted “contentual” part of mathematics. Finitary reasoning was supposed to update Kant’s intuition-based epistemology, and Hilbert’s consistency proofs mimic Kant’s notion of objective validity. The second project, Brouwer’s intuitionism, rejected formalization, and was not only epistemologically Kantian resting mathematical reasoning on the a priori intuition of time, but ontologically Kantian as well. For intuitionism generated both the natural and the real numbers by temporally ordered conscious acts. The reals, in particular, stem from choice sequences, which exploit Brouwer’s epistemic assumptions about the open future. These foundational movements ultimately failed. Type theory required ad hoc axioms to express the real numbers; Hilbert’s Program foundered on Gödel’s theorems; and intuitionism remained on the fringes because it rejected classical logic and standard mathematics. Nevertheless the legacy of these movements  their formal methods, indeed their philosophical agenda  still characterizes modern research on the ontology and epistemology of mathematics. Set theory, e.g. despite recent challenges from category theory, is the lingua franca of modern mathematics. And formal languages with their precise semantics are ubiquitous in technical and philosophical discussions. Indeed, even intuitionistic mathematics has been formalized, and Michael Dummett has recast its ontological idealism as a semantic antirealism that defines truth as warranted assertability. In a similar semantic vein, Paul Benacerraf proposed that the philosophical problem with Hilbert’s approach is inability to provide a uniform realistic i.e., referential, non-epistemic semantics for the allegedly ideal and contentual parts of mathematics; and the problem with Platonism is that its semantics makes its objects unknowable. Ontological issues. From this modern perspective, the simplest realism is the outright Platonism that attributes a standard model consisting of “independent” objects to classical theories expressed in a first-order language i.e., a language whose quantifiers range over objects but not properties. But in fact realism admits variations on each aspect. For one thing, the Löwenheim-Skolem theorem shows that formalized theories can have non-standard models. There are expansive non-standard models: Abraham Robinson, e.g., used infinitary non-standard models of Peano’s axioms to rigorously reintroduce infinitesimals. Roughly, an infinitesimal is the reciprocal of an infinite element in such a model. And there are also “constructive” models, whose objects must be explicitly definable. Predicative theories inspired by Poincaré and Hermann Weyl, whose stage-by-stage definitions refer only to previously defined objects, produce one variety of such models. Gödel’s constructive universe, which uses less restricted definitions to model apparently non-constructive axioms like the axiom of choice, exemplifies another variety. But there are also views various forms of structuralism which deny that formal theories have unique standard models at all. These views  inspired by the fact, already sensed by Dedekind, that there are multiple equivalid realizations of formal arithmetic  allow a mathematical theory to characterize only a broad family of models and deny unique reference to mathematical terms. Finally, some realistic approaches advocate formalization in secondorder languages, and some eschew ordinary semantics altogether in favor of substitutional quantification. These latter are still realistic, for they still distinguish truth from knowledge. Strict finitists  inspired by Vitters’s more stringent epistemic constraints  reject even the open-futured objects admitted by Brouwer, and countenance only finite or even only “feasible” objects. In the other direction, A. A. Markov and his school in Russia introduced a syntactic notion of algorithm from which they developed the field of “constructive analysis.” And the  mathematician Errett Bishop, starting from a Brouwer-like disenchantment with mathematical realism and with strictly formal approaches, recovered large parts of classical analysis within a non-formal constructive framework. All of these approaches assume abstract i.e., causally isolated mathematical objects, and thus they have difficulty explaining the wide applicability of mathematics constructive or otherwise within empirical science. One response, Quine’s “indispensability” view, integrates mathematical theories into the general network of empirical science. For Quine, mathematical objects  just like ordinary physical objects  exist simply in virtue of being referents for terms in our best scientific theory. By contrast Hartry Field, who denies that any abstract objects exist, also denies that any purely mathematical assertions are literally true. Field attempts to recast physical science in a relational language without mathematical terms and then use Hilbert-style conservative extension results to explain the evident utility of abstract mathematics. Hilary Putnam and Charles Parsons have each suggested views according to which mathematics has no objects proper to itself, but rather concerns only the possibilities of physical constructions. Recently, Geoffrey Hellman has combined this modal approach with structuralism. Epistemological issues. The equivalence proved in the 0s of several different representations of computability to the reasoning representable in elementary formalized arithmetic led Alonzo Church to suggest that the notion of finitary reasoning had been precisely defined. Church’s thesis so named by Stephen Kleene inspired Georg Kreisel’s investigations in the 0s and 70s of the general conditions for rigorously analyzing other informal philosophical notions like semantic consequence, Brouwerian choice sequences, and the very notion of a set. Solomon Feferman has suggested more recently that this sort of piecemeal conceptual analysis is already present in mathematics; and that this rather than any global foundation is the true role of foundational research. In this spirit, the relative consistency arguments of modern proof theory a continuation of Hilbert’s Program provide information about the epistemic grounds of various mathematical theories. Thus, on the one hand, proofs that a seemingly problematic mathematical theory is a conservative extension of a more secure theory provide some epistemic support for the former. In the other direction, the fact that classical number theory is consistent relative to intuitionistic number theory shows contra Hilbert that his view of constructive reasoning must differ from that of the intuitionists. Gödel, who did not believe that mathematics required any ties to empirical perception, suggested nevertheless that we have a special nonsensory faculty of mathematical intuition that, when properly cultivated, can help us decide among formally independent propositions of set theory and other branches of mathematics. Charles Parsons, in contrast, has examined the place of perception-like intuition in mathematical reasoning. Parsons himself has investigated models of arithmetic and of set theory composed of quasi-concrete objects e.g., numerals and other signs. Others consistent with some of Parsons’s observations have given a Husserlstyle phenomenological analysis of mathematical intuition. Frege’s influence encouraged the logical positivists and other philosophers to view mathematical knowledge as analytic or conventional. Poincaré responded that the principle of mathematical induction could not be analytic, and Vitters also attacked this conventionalism. In recent years, various formal independence results and Quine’s attack on analyticity have encouraged philosophers and historians of mathematics to focus on cases of mathematical knowledge that do not stem from conceptual analysis or strict formal provability. Some writers notably Mark Steiner and Philip Kitcher emphasize the analogies between empirical and mathematical discovery. They stress such things as conceptual evolution in mathematics and instances of mathematical generalizations supported by individual cases. Kitcher, in particular, discusses the analogy between axiomatization in mathematics and theoretical unification. Penelope Maddy has investigated the intramathematical grounds underlying the acceptance of various axioms of set theory. More generally, Imre Lakatos argued that most mathematical progress stems from a concept-stretching process of conjecture, refutation, and proof. This view has spawned a historical debate about whether critical developments such as those mentioned above represent Kuhn-style revolutions or even crises, or whether they are natural conceptual advances in a uniformly growing science. 

Philosophical psychology, -- vide H. P. Grice: “Method in philosophical psychology: from the banal to the bizarre” – in “Conception of Value,” Oxford, Clarendon Press. -- philosophy of mind, the branch of philosophy that includes the philosophy of psychology, philosophical psychology, and the area of metaphysics concerned with the nature of mental phenomena and how they fit into the causal structure of reality. Philosophy of psychology, a branch of the philosophy of science, examines what psychology says about the nature of psychological phenomena; examines aspects of psychological theorizing such as the models used, explanations offered, and laws invoked; and examines how psychology fits with the social sciences and natural sciences. Philosophical psychology investigates folk psychology, a body of commonsensical, protoscientific views about mental phenomena. Such investigations attempt to articulate and refine views found in folk psychology about conceptualization, memory, perception, sensation, consciousness, belief, desire, intention, reasoning, action, and so on. The mindbody problem, a central metaphysical one in the philosophy of mind, is the problem of whether mental phenomena are physical and, if not, how they are related to physical phenomena. Other metaphysical problems in the philosophy of mind include the free will problem, the problem of personal identity, and the problem of how, if at all, irrational phenomena such as akrasia and self-deception are possible. Mindbody dualism Cartesian dualism. The doctrine that the soul is distinct from the body is found in Plato and discussed throughout the history of philosophy, but Descartes is considered the father of the modern mindbody problem. He maintained that the essence of the physical is extension in space. Minds are unextended substances and thus are distinct from any physical substances. The essence of a mental substance is to think. This twofold view is called Cartesian dualism. Descartes was well aware of an intimate relationship between mind and the brain. There is no a priori reason to think that the mind is intimately related to the brain; Aristotle, e.g., did not associate them. Descartes mistakenly thought the seat of the relationship was in the pineal gland. He maintained, however, that our minds are not our brains, lack spatial location, and can continue to exist after the death and destruction of our bodies. Cartesian dualism invites the question: What connects the mind and brain? Causation is Descartes’s answer: states of our minds causally interact with states of our brains. When bodily sensations such as aches, pains, itches, and tickles cause us to moan, wince, scratch, or laugh, they do so by causing brain states events, processes, which in turn cause bodily movements. In deliberate action, we act on our desires, motives, and intentions to carry out our purposes; and acting on these mental states involves their causing brain states, which in turn cause our bodies to move, thereby causally influencing the physical world. The physical world, in turn, influences our minds through its influence on our brains. Perception of the physical world with five senses  sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch  involves causal transactions from the physical to the mental: what we perceive i.e., see, hear, etc. causes a sense experience i.e., a visual experience, aural experience, etc.. Thus, Descartes held that there is two-way psychophysical causal interaction: from the mental to the physical as in action and from the physical to the mental as in perception. The conjunction of Cartesian dualism and the doctrine of two-way psychophysical causal interaction is called Cartesian interactionism. philosophy of mind philosophy of mind 684    684 Perhaps the most widely discussed difficulty for this view is how states of a non-spatial substance a mind can causally interact with states of a substance that is in space a brain. Such interactions have seemed utterly mysterious to many philosophers. Mystery would remain even if an unextended mind is locatable at a point in space say, the center of the pineal gland. For Cartesian interactionism would still have to maintain that causal transactions between mental states and brain states are fundamental, i.e., unmediated by any underlying mechanism. Brain states causally interact with mental states, but there is no answer to the question of how they do so. The interactions are brute facts. Many philosophers, including many of Descartes’s contemporaries, have found that difficult to accept. Parallelism. Malebranche and Leibniz, among others, rejected the possibility of psychophysical causal interaction. They espoused versions of parallelism: the view that the mental and physical realms run in parallel, in that types of mental phenomena co-occur with certain types of physical phenomena, but these co-occurrences never involve causal interactions. On all extant versions, the parallels hold because of God’s creation. Leibniz’s parallelism is preestablished harmony: the explanation of why mental types and certain physical types co-occur is that in the possible world God actualized i.e., this world they co-occur. In discussing the relation between the mental and physical realms, Leibniz used the analogy of two synchronized but unconnected clocks. The analogy is, however, somewhat misleading; suggesting causal mechanisms internal to each clock and intramental and intraphysical causal transactions. But Leibniz’s monadology doctrine excludes the possibility of such transactions: mental and physical phenomena have no effects even within their own realms. Malebranche is associated with occasionalism, according to which only God, through his continuous activities, causes things to happen: non-divine phenomena never cause anything. Occasionalism differs from preestablished harmony in holding that God is continually engaged in acts of creation; each moment creating the world anew, in such a way that the correlations hold. Both brands of parallelism face formidable difficulties. First, both rest on highly contentious, obscure theological hypotheses. The contention that God exists and the creation stories in question require extensive defense and explanation. God’s relationship to the world can seem at least as mysterious as the relationship Descartes posits between minds and brains. Second, since parallelism denies the possibility of psychophysical interaction, its proponents must offer alternatives to the causal theory of perception and the causal theory of action or else deny that we can perceive and that we can act intentionally. Third, since parallelism rejects intramental causation, it must either deny that reasoning is possible or explain how it is possible without causal connections between thoughts. Fourth, since parallelism rejects physical transactions, it is hard to see how it can allow, e.g., that one physical thing ever moves another; for that would require causing a change in location. Perhaps none of these weighty difficulties is ultimately insuperable; in any case, parallelism has been abandoned. Epiphenomenalism. Empirical research gives every indication that the occurrence of any brain state can, in principle, be causally explained by appeal solely to other physical states. To accommodate this, some philosophers espoused epiphenomenalism, the doctrine that physical states cause mental states, but mental states do not cause anything. This thesis was discussed under the name ‘conscious automatism’ by Huxley and Hogeson in the late nineteenth century. William James was the first to use the term ‘epiphenomena’ to mean phenomena that lack causal efficacy. And James Ward coined the term ‘epiphenomenalism’ in 3. Epiphenomenalism implies that there is only one-way psychophysical action  from the physical to the mental. Since epiphenomenalism allows such causal action, it can embrace the causal theory of perception. However, when combined with Cartesian dualism, epiphenomenalism, like Cartesian interactionism, implies the problematic thesis that states of an extended substance can affect states of an unextended substance. An epiphenomenalist can avoid this problem by rejecting the view that the mind is an unextended substance while maintaining that mental states and events are nonetheless distinct from physical states and events. Still, formidable problems would remain. It is hard to see how epiphenomenalism can allow that we are ever intentional agents. For intentional agency requires acting on reasons, which, according to the causal theory of action, requires a causal connection between reasons and actions. Since epiphenomenalism denies that such causal connections are possible, it must either maintain that our sense of agency is illusory or offer an alternative to the causal theory of action. Similarly, it must explain how thinking is possible given that there are no causal connections between thoughts. Monism The dual-aspect theory. Many philosophers reject Descartes’s bifurcation of reality into mental and physical substances. Spinoza held a dualattribute theory  also called the dual-aspect theory  according to which the mental and the physical are distinct modes of a single substance, God. The mental and the physical are only two of infinitely many modes of this one substance. Many philosophers opted for a thoroughgoing monism, according to which all of reality is really of one kind. Materialism, idealism, and neutral monism are three brands of monism. Hobbes, a contemporary of Descartes, espoused materialism, the brand of monism according to which everything is material or physical. Berkeley is associated with idealism, the brand of monism according to which everything is mental. He held that both mental and physical phenomena are perceptions in the mind of God. For Hegel’s idealism, everything is part of the World Spirit. The early twentieth-century British philosophers Bradley and McTaggart also held a version of idealism. Neutral monism is the doctrine that all of reality is ultimately of one kind, which is neither mental nor physical. Hume was a neutral monist, maintaining that mental and physical substances are really just bundles of the neutral entities. Versions of neutral monism were later held by Mach and, for a short time, Russell. Russell called his neutral entities sensibilia and claimed that minds and physical objects are logical constructions out of them. Phenomenalism. This view, espoused in the twentieth century by, among others, Ayer, argues that all empirical statements are synonymous with statements solely about phenomenal appearances. While the doctrine is about statements, phenomenalism is either a neutral monism or an idealism, depending on whether phenomenal appearances are claimed to be neither mental nor physical or, instead, mental. The required translations of physical statements into phenomenal ones proved not to be forthcoming, however. Chisholm offered a reason why they would not be: what appearances a physical state of affairs e.g., objects arrayed in a room has depends both on physical conditions of observation e.g., lighting and physical conditions of the perceiver e.g., of the nervous system. At best, a statement solely about phenomenal appearances is equivalent to one about a physical state of affairs, only when certain physical conditions of observation and certain physical conditions of the perceiver obtain. Materialism. Two problems face any monism: it must characterize the phenomena it takes as basic, and it must explain how the fundamental phenomena make up non-basic phenomena. The idealist and neutral monist theories proposed thus far have faltered on one or both counts. Largely because of scientific successes of the twentieth century, such as the rebirth of the atomic theory of matter, and the successes of quantum mechanics in explaining chemistry and of chemistry in turn in explaining much of biology, many philosophers today hold that materialism will ultimately succeed where idealism and neutral monism apparently failed. Materialism, however, comes in many different varieties and each faces formidable difficulties. Logical behaviorism. Ryle ridiculed Cartesianism as the view that there is a ghost in the machine the body. He claimed that the view that the mind is a substance rests on a category mistake: ‘mind’ is a noun, but does not name an object. Cartesianism confuses the logic of discourse about minds with the logic of discourse about bodies. To have a mind is not to possess a special sort of entity; it is simply to have certain capacities and dispositions. Compare the thesis that to be alive is to possess not a certain entity, an entelechy or élan vital, but rather certain capacities and dispositions. Ryle maintained, moreover, that it was a mistake to regard mental states such as belief, desire, and intention as internal causes of behavior. These states, he claimed, are dispositions to behave in overt ways. In part in response to the dualist point that one can understand our ordinary psychological vocabulary ‘belief’, ‘desire’, ‘pain’, etc. and know nothing about the physical states and events in the brain, logical behaviorism has been proposed as a materialist doctrine that explains this fact. On this view, talk of mental phenomena is shorthand for talk of actual and potential overt bodily behavior i.e., dispositions to overt bodily behavior. Logical behaviorism was much discussed from roughly the 0s until the early 0s. While Ryle is sometimes counted as a logical behaviorist, he was not committed to the thesis that all mental talk can be tr. into behavioral talk. The translations promised by logical behaviorism appear unachievable. As Putnam and others pointed out, one can fake being in pain and one can be in pain and yet not behave or be disposed to behave as if one were in pain e.g., one might be paralyzed or might be a “super-spartan”. Logical behaviorism faces similar difficulties in translating sentences about what Russell called propositional attitudes i.e., beliefs that p, desires that p, hopes that p, intentions that p, and the like. Consider the following sample proposal similar to one offered by Carnap: one believes that the cat is on the mat if and only if one is disposed to assent to ‘The cat is on the mat’. First, the proposed translation meets the condition of being purely behavioral only if assenting is understandable in purely behavioral terms. That is doubtful. The proposal also fails to provide a sufficient or a necessary condition: someone may assent to ‘The cat is on the mat’ and yet not believe the cat is on the mat for the person may be trying to deceive; and a belief that the cat is on the mat will dispose one to assent to ‘The cat is on the mat’ only if one understands what is being asked, wants to indicate that one believes the cat is on the mat, and so on. But none of these conditions is required for believing that the cat is on the mat. Moreover, to invoke any of these mentalistic conditions defeats the attempt to provide a purely behavioral translation of the belief sentence. Although the project of translation has been abandoned, in recent years Dennett has defended a view in the spirit of logical behaviorism, intentional systems theory: belief-desire talk functions to characterize overall patterns of dispositions to overt behavior in an environmental context for the purposes of predicting overt behavior. The theory is sometimes characterized as supervenient behaviorism since it implies that whether an individual has beliefs, desires, intentions and the like supervenes on his dispositions to overt behavior: if two individuals are exactly alike in respect of their dispositions to overt behavior, the one has intentional states if and only if the other does. This view allows, however, that the contents of an individual’s intentional states  what the individual believes, desires, etc.  may depend on environmental factors. So it is not committed to the supervenience of the contents of intentional states on dispositions to overt behavior.the discussion of content externalism below. One objection to this view, due to Ned Block, is that it would mistakenly count as an intentional agent a giant look-up table  “a Blockhead”  that has the same dispositions to peripheral behavior as a genuine intentional agent. A look-up table is a simple mechanical device that looks up preprogrammed responses. Identity theories. In the early 0s, Herbert Feigl claimed that mental states are brain states. He pointed out that if mental properties or state types are merely nomologically correlated with physical properties or state types, the connecting laws would be “nomological danglers”: irreducible to physical laws, and thus additional fundamental laws. According to the identity theory, the connecting laws are not fundamental laws and so not nomological danglers since they can be explained by identifying the mental and physical properties in question. In the late 0s and the early 0s, the philosopher Smart and the psychologist U. T. Place defended the materialist view that sensations are identical with brain processes. Smart claimed that while mental terms differ in meaning from physical terms, scientific investigation reveals that they have the same referents as certain physical terms. Compare the fact that while ‘the Morning Star’ and ‘the Evening Star’ differ in meaning empirical investigation reveals the same referent: Venus. Smart and Place claimed that feeling pain, e.g., is some brain process, exactly which one to be determined by scientific investigation. Smart claimed that sensation talk is paraphraseable in topic-neutral terms; i.e., in terms that leave open whether sensational properties are mental or physical. ‘I have an orange afterimage’ is paraphraseable roughly as: ‘There is something going on like what is going on when I have my eyes open, am awake, and there is an orange illuminated in good light in front of me, i.e., when I really see an orange’. The description is topic-neutral since it leaves open whether what is going on is mental or physical. Smart maintained that scientific investigation reveals that what in fact meets the topic-neutral description is a brain process. He held that psychophysical identity statements such as ‘Pain is C-fiber firing’ are contingent, likening these to, e.g., ‘Lightning is electrical discharge’, which is contingent and knowable only through empirical investigation. Central state materialism. This brand of materialism was defended in the late 0s and the early 0s by Armstrong and others. On this view, mental states are states that are apt to produce a certain range of behavior. Central state materialists maintain that scientific investigation reveals that such states are states of the central nervous system, and thus that mental states are contingently identical with states of the central nervous system. Unlike logical behaviorism, central state materialism does not imply that mental sentences can be tr. into physical sentences. Unlike both logical behaviorism and philosophy of mind philosophy of mind 687    687 intentional systems theory, central state materialism implies that mental states are actual internal states with causal effects. And unlike Cartesian interactionism, it holds that psychophysical interaction is just physical causal interaction. Some central state materialists held in addition that the mind is the brain. However, if the mind were the brain, every change in the brain would be a change in the mind; and that seems false: not every little brain change amounts to a change of mind. Indeed, the mind ceases to exist when brain death occurs, while the brain continues to exist. The moral that most materialists nowadays draw from such considerations is that the mind is not any physical substance, since it is not a substance of any sort. To have a mind is not to possess a special substance, but rather to have certain capacities  to think, feel, etc. To that extent, Ryle was right. However, central state materialists insist that the properly functioning brain is the material seat of mental capacities, that the exercise of mental capacities consists of brain processes, and that mental states are brain states that can produce behavior. Epistemological objections have been raised to identity theories. As self-conscious beings, we have a kind of privileged access to our own mental states. The exact avenue of privileged access, whether it is introspection or not, is controversial. But it has seemed to many philosophers that our access to our own mental states is privileged in being open only to us, whereas we lack any privileged access to the states of our central nervous systems. We come to know about central nervous system states in the same way we come to know about the central nervous system states of others. So, against central state materialism and the identity theory, it is claimed that mental states cannot be states of our central nervous systems. Taking privileged access to imply that we have incorrigible knowledge of our conscious mental states, and despairing of squaring privileged access so understood with materialism, Rorty advocated eliminative materialism, the thesis that there actually are no mental phenomena. A more common materialist response, however, is to deny that privileged access entails incorrigibility and to maintain that privileged access is compatible with materialism. Some materialists maintain that while certain types of mental states e.g., sensations are types of neurological states, it will be knowable only by empirical investigation that they are. Suppose pain is a neural state N. It will be only a posteriori knowable that pain is N. Via the avenue of privileged access, one comes to believe that one is in a pain state, but not that one is in an N-state. One can believe one is in a pain state without believing that one is in an N-state because the concept of pain is different from the concept of N. Nevertheless, pain is N. Compare the fact that while water is H2O, the concept of water is different from that of H2O. Thus, while water is H2O, one can believe there is water in the glass without believing that there is H2O in it. The avenue of privileged access presents N conceptualized as pain, but never as neurological state N. The avenue of privileged access involves the exercise of mental, but not neurophysiological, concepts. However, our mental concepts answer to  apply in virtue of  the same properties state types as do certain of our neurophysiological concepts. The identity theory and central state materialism both hold that there are contingent psychophysical property and type identities. Some theorists in this tradition tried to distinguish a notion of theoretical identity from the notion of strict identity. They held that mental states are theoretically, but not strictly, identical with brain states. Against any such distinction, Kripke argued that identities are metaphysically necessary, i.e., hold in every possible world. If A % B, then necessarily A % B. Kripke acknowledged that there can be contingent statements of identity. But such statements, he argued, will employ at least one term that is not a rigid designator, i.e., a term that designates the same thing in every world in which it designates anything. Thus, since ‘the inventor of bifocals’ is a non-rigid designator, ‘Benjamin Franklin is the inventor of bifocals’ is contingent. While Franklin is the inventor of bifocals, he might not have been. However, statements of identity in which the identity sign is flanked by rigid designators are, if true, metaphysically necessary. Kripke held that proper names are rigid designators, and hence, the true identity statement ‘Cicero is Tully’ is metaphysically necessary. Nonetheless, a metaphysically necessary identity statement can be knowable only a posteriori. Indeed, ‘Cicero is Tully’ is knowable only a posteriori. Both ‘water’ and ‘H2O’, he maintained, are rigid designators: each designates the same kind of stuff in every possible world. And he thus maintained that it is metaphysically necessary that water is H2O, despite its not being a priori knowable that water is H2O. On Kripke’s view, any psychophysical identity statement that employs mental terms and physical terms that are rigid designators will also be metaphysically necessary, if true. Central state materialists maintain that mental concepts are equivalent to concepts whose descriptive content is the state that is apt to produce such-and-such behavior in such-and-such circumstances. These defining descriptions for mental concepts are intended to be meaning-giving, not contingent reference-fixing descriptions; they are, moreover, not rigid designators. Thus, the central state materialists can concede that all identities are necessary, but maintain that psychophysical claims of identity are contingent claims of identity since the mental terms that figure in those statements are not rigid designators. However, Kripke maintained that our concepts of sensations and other qualitative states are not equivalent to the sorts of descriptions in question. The term ‘pain’, he maintained, is a rigid designator. This position might be refuted by a successful functional analysis of the concept of pain in physical and/or topic-neutral terms. However, no successful analysis of this sort has yet been produced. See the section on consciousness below. A materialist can grant Kripke that ‘pain’ is a rigid designator and claim that a statement such as ‘Pain is C-fiber firing’ will be metaphysically necessary if true, but only a posteriori knowable. However, Kripke raised a formidable problem for this materialism. He pointed out that if a statement is metaphysically necessary but only a posteriori knowable, its appearance of contingency calls for explanation. Despite being metaphysically necessary, ‘Water is H2O’ appears contingent. According to Kripke, we explain this appearance by noting that one can coherently imagine a world in which something has all the phenomenal properties of water, and so is an “epistemic counterpart” of it, yet is not H2O. The fact that we can coherently imagine such epistemic counterparts explains why ‘Water is H2O’ appears contingent. But no such explanation is available for e.g. ‘Pain is C-fiber firing’. For an epistemic counterpart of pain, something with the phenomenal properties of pain  the feel of pain  is pain. Something can look, smell, taste, and feel like water yet not be water. But whatever feels like pain is pain: pain is a feeling. In contrast, we can explain the apparent contingency of claims like ‘Water is H2O’ because water is not constituted by its phenomenal properties; our concept of water allows that it may have a “hidden essence,” i.e., an essential microstructure. If Kripke is right, then anyone who maintains that a statement of identity concerning a type of bodily sensation and a type of physical state is metaphysically necessary yet a posteriori, must explain the appearance of contingency in a way that differs from the way Kripke explains the appearance of contingency of ‘Water is H2O’. This is a formidable challenge. The final section, on consciousness, sketches some materialist responses to it. The general issue of property and state type identity is controversial. The claim that water is H2O despite the fact that the concept of water is distinct from the concept of H2O seems plausible. However, property or state type identity is more controversial than the identity of types of substances. For properties or state types, there are no generally accepted “non-duplication principles”  to use a phrase of David Lewis’s. A nonduplication principle for A’s will say that no two A’s can be exactly alike in a certain respect; e.g., no two sets can have exactly the same members. It is widely denied, for instance, that no two properties can be possessed by exactly the same things. Two properties, it is claimed, can be possessed by the same things; likewise, two state types can occur in the same space-time regions. Even assuming that mental concepts are distinct from physical concepts, the issue of whether mental state types are physical state types raises the controversial issue of the non-duplication principle for state types. Token and type physicalisms. Token physicalism is the thesis that every particular is physical. Type physicalism is the thesis that every type or kind of entity is physical; thus, the identity thesis and central state materialism are type physicalist theses since they imply that types of mental states are types of physical states. Type physicalism implies token physicalism: given the former, every token falls under some physical type, and therefore is token-token identical with some token of a physical type. But token physicalism does not imply type physicalism; the former leaves open whether physical tokens fall under non-physical types. Some doctrines billed as materialist or physicalist embrace token epiphenomenalism, but reject type physicalism. Non-reductive materialism. This form of materialism implies token physicalism, but denies type physicalism and, as well, that mental types properties, etc. are reducible to physical types. This doctrine has been discussed since at least the late nineteenth century and was widely discussed in the first third of the twentieth century. The British philosophers George Henry Lewes, Samuel Alexander, Lloyd Morgan, and C. D. Broad all held or thought plausible a certain version of non-reductive materialism. They held or sympathized with the view that every substance philosophy of mind philosophy of mind 689    689 either is or is wholly made up of physical particles, that the well-functioning brain is the material seat of mental capacities, and that token mental states events, processes, etc. are token neurophysiological states events, processes, etc.. However, they either held or thought plausible the view that mental capacities, properties, etc., emerge from, and thus do not reduce to, physical capacities, properties, etc. Lewes coined the term ‘emergence’; and Broad later labeled the doctrine emergent materialism. Emergent materialists maintain that laws correlating mental and physical properties are irreducible. These laws would be what Feigl called nomological danglers. Emergentists maintain that, despite their untidiness, such laws must be accepted with natural piety. Davidson’s doctrine of anomalous monism is a current brand of non-reductive materialism. He explicitly formulates this materialist thesis for events; and his irreducibility thesis is restricted to intentional mental types  e.g., believings, desirings, and intendings. Anomalous monism says that every event token is physical, but that intentional mental predicates and concepts ones expressing propositional attitudes do not reduce, by law or definition, to physical predicates or concepts. Davidson offers an original argument for this irreducibility thesis. Mental predicates and concepts are, he claims, governed by constitutive principles of rationality, but physical predicates and concepts are not. This difference, he contends, excludes the possibility of reduction of mental predicates and concepts to physical ones. Davidson denies, moreover, that there are strict psychological or psychophysical laws. He calls the conjunction of this thesis and his irreducibility thesis the principle of the anomalism of the mental. His argument for token physicalism for events appeals to the principle of the anomalism of the mental and to the principle of the nomological character of causality: when two events are causally related, they are subsumed by a strict law. He maintains that all strict laws are physical. Given that claim, and given the principle of the nomological character of causality, it follows that every event that is a cause or effect is a physical event. On this view, psychophysical causation is just causation between physical events. Stephen Schiffer has also maintained a non-reductive materialism, one he calls ontological physicalism and sentential dualism: every particular is physical, but mental truths are irreducible to physical truths. Non-reductive materialism presupposes that mental state event tokens can fall under physical state types and, thereby, count as physical state tokens. This presupposition is controversial; no uncontroversial non-duplication principle for state tokens settles the issue. Suppose, however, that mental state tokens are physical state tokens, despite mental state types not being physical state types. The issue of how mental state types and physical state types are related remains. Suppose that some physical token x is of a mental type M say, a belief that the cat is on the mat and some other physical token y is not of type M. There must, it seems, be some difference between x and y in virtue of which x is, and y is not, of type M. Otherwise, it is simply a brute fact that x is and y is not of type M. That, however, seems implausible. The claim that certain physical state tokens fall under mental state types simply as a matter of brute fact would leave the difference in question utterly mysterious. But if it is not a brute fact, then there is some explanation of why a certain physical state is a mental state of a certain sort. The non-reductive materialist owes us an explanation that does not imply psychophysical reduction. Moreover, even though the non-reductive materialist can claim that mental states are causes because they are physical states with physical effects, there is some question whether mental state types are relevant to causal relations. Suppose every state is a physical state. Given that physical states causally interact in virtue of falling under physical types, it follows that whenever states causally interact they do so in virtue of falling under physical types. That raises the issue of whether states are ever causes in virtue of falling under mental types. Type epiphenomenalism is the thesis that no state can cause anything in virtue of falling under a mental type. Token epiphenomenalism, the thesis that no mental state can cause anything, implies type epiphenomenalism, but not conversely. Nonreductive materialists are not committed to token physicalism. However, token epiphenomenalism may be false but type epiphenomenalism true since mental states may be causes only in virtue of falling under physical types, never in virtue of falling under mental types. Broad raised the issue of type epiphenomenalism and discussed whether emergent materialism is committed to it. Ted Honderich, Jaegwon Kim, Ernest Sosa, and others have in recent years raised the issue of whether non-reductive materialism is committed to type epiphenomenalism. Brian McLaughlin has argued that the claim that an event acts as a cause in virtue of falling under a certain physical type is consistent with the claim that it also acts as a cause in virtue of falling under a certain mental type, even when the mental type is not identical with the physical type. But even if this is so, the relationship between mental types and physical types must be addressed. Ernest LePore and Barry Loewer, Frank Jackson and Philip Pettit, Stephen Yablo, and others have attempted to characterize a relation between mental types and physical types that allows for the causal relevance of mental types. But whether there is a relation between mental and physical properties that is both adequate to secure the causal relevance of mental properties and available to non-reductive materialists remains an open question. Davidson’s anomalous monism may appear to be a kind of dual-aspect theory: there are events and they can have two sorts of autonomous aspects, mental and physical. However, while Davidson holds that mental properties or types do not reduce to physical ones, he also holds that the mental properties of an event depend on its physical properties in that the former supervene on the latter in this sense: no two events can be exactly alike in every physical respect and yet differ in some mental respect. This proposal introduced the notion of supervenience into contem- porary philosophy of mind. Often nonreductive materialists argue that mental properties types supervene on physical properties types. Kim, however, has distinguished various supervenience relations, and argues that some are too weak to count as versions of materialism as opposed to, say, dual-aspect theory, while other supervenience relations are too strong to use to formulate non-reductive materialism since they imply reducibility. According to Kim, non-reductive materialism is an unstable position. Materialism as a supervenience thesis. Several philosophers have in recent years attempted to define the thesis of materialism using a global supervenience thesis. Their aim is not to formulate a brand of non-reductive materialism; they maintain that their supervenience thesis may well imply reducibility. Their aim is, rather, to formulate a thesis to which anyone who counts as a genuine materialist must subscribe. David Lewis has maintained that materialism is true if and only if any non-alien possible worlds that are physically indiscernible are mentally indiscernible as well. Non-alien possible worlds are worlds that have exactly the same perfectly natural properties as the actual world. Frank Jackson has offered this proposal: materialism is true if and only if any minimal physical duplicate of the actual world is a duplicate simpliciter of the actual world. A world is a physical duplicate of the actual world if and only if it is exactly like the actual world in every physical respect physical particular for physical particular, physical property for physical property, physical relation for physical relation, etc.; and a world is a duplicate simpliciter of the actual world if and only if it is exactly like the actual world in every respect. A minimal physical duplicate of the actual world is a physical duplicate that contains nothing else by way of particulars, kinds, properties, etc. than it must in order to be a physical duplicate of the actual world. Two questions arise for any formulation of the thesis of materialism. Is it adequate to materialism? And, if it is, is it true? Functionalism. The nineteenth-century British philosopher George Henry Lewes maintained that while not every neurological event is mental, every mental event is neurological. He claimed that what makes certain neurological events mental events is their causal role in the organism. This is a very early version of functionalism, nowadays a leading approach to the mindbody problem. Functionalism implies an answer to the question of what makes a state token a mental state of a certain kind M: namely, that it is an instance of some functional state type identical with M. There are two versions of this proposal. On one, a mental state type M of a system will be identical with the state type that plays a certain causal role R in the system. The description ‘the state type that plays R in the system’ will be a nonrigid designator; moreover, different state types may play R in different organisms, in which case the mental state is multiply realizable. On the second version, a mental state type M is identical with a second-order state type, the state of being in some first-order state that plays causal role R. More than one first-order state may play role R, and thus M may be multiply realizable. On either version, if the relevant causal roles are specifiable in physical or topic-neutral terms, then the functional definitions of mental state types will be, in principle, physically reductive. Since the roles would be specified partly in topic-neutral terms, there may well be possible worlds in which the mental states are realized by non-physical states; thus, functionalism does not imply token physicalism. However, functionalists typically maintain that, on the empirical evidence, mental states are realized in our world only by physical states. Functionalism comes in many varieties. philosophy of mind philosophy of mind 691    691 Smart’s topic-neutral analysis of our talk of sensations is in the spirit of functionalism. And Armstrong’s central state materialism counts as a kind of functionalism since it maintains that mental states are states apt to produce a certain range of behavior, and thus identifies states as mental states by their performing this causal role. However, functionalists today typically hold that the defining causal roles include causal roles vis-à-vis input state types, as well as output state types, and also vis-à-vis other internal state types of the system in question. In the 0s David Lewis proposed a functionalist theory, analytical functionalism, according to which definitions of mental predicates such as ‘belief’, ‘desire’, and the like though not predicates such as ‘believes that p’ or ‘desires that q’ can be obtained by conjoining the platitudes of commonsense psychology and formulating the Ramsey sentence for the conjunction. The relevant Ramsey sentence is a second-order quantificational sentence that quantifies over the mental predicates in the conjunction of commonsense psychological platitudes, and from it one can derive definitions of the mental predicates. On this view, it will be analytic that a certain mental state e.g., belief is the state that plays a certain causal role vis-à-vis other states; and it is a matter of empirical investigation what state plays the role. Lewis claimed that such investigation reveals that the state types that play the roles in question are physical states. In the early 0s, Putnam proposed a version of scientific functionalism, machine state functionalism: according to this view, mental states are types of Turing machine table states. Turing machines are mechanical devices consisting of a tape with squares on it that either are blank or contain symbols, and an executive that can move one square to the left, or one square to the right, or stay where it is. And it can either write a symbol on a square, erase a symbol on a square, or leave the square as it is. According to the Church-Turing thesis, every computable function can be computed by a Turing machine. Now there are two functions specifying such a machine: one from input states to output states, the other from input states to input states. And these functions are expressible by counterfactuals e.g., ‘If the machine is in state s 1 and receives input I, it will emit output O and enter state s2’. Machine tables are specified by the counterfactuals that express the functions in question. So the main idea of machine state functionalism is that any given mental type is definable as the state type that participates in certain counterfactual relationships specified in terms of purely formal, and so not semantically interpreted, state types. Any system whose inputs, outputs, and internal states are counterfactually related in the way characterized by a machine table is a realization of that table. This version of machine state functionalism has been abandoned: no one maintains that the mind has the architecture of a Turing machine. However, computational psychology, a branch of cognitive psychology, presupposes a scientific functionalist view of cognitive states: it takes the mind to have a computational architecture. See the section on cognitive psychology below. Functionalism  the view that what makes a state a realization of a mental state is its playing a certain causal role  remains a leading theory of mind. But functionalism faces formidable difficulties. Block has pinpointed one. On the one hand, if the input and output states that figure in the causal role alleged to define a certain mental state are specified in insufficient detail, the functional definition will be too liberal: it will mistakenly classify certain states as of that mental type. On the other hand, if the input and output states are specified in too much detail, the functional definition will be chauvinistic: it will fail to count certain states as instances of the mental state that are in fact such instances. Moreover, it has also been argued that functionalism cannot capture conscious states since types of conscious states do not admit of functional definitions. Cognitive psychology, content, and consciousness Cognitive psychology. Many claim that one aim of cognitive psychology is to provide explanations of intentional capacities, capacities to be in intentional states e.g., believing and to engage in intentional activities e.g., reasoning. Fodor has argued that classical cognitive psychology postulates a cognitive architecture that includes a language of thought: a system of mental representation with a combinatorial syntax and semantics, and computational processes defined over these mental representations in virtue of their syntactic structures. On this view, cognition is rule-governed symbol manipulation. Mental symbols have meanings, but they participate in computational processes solely in virtue of their syntactic or formal properties. The mind is, so to speak, a syntactic engine. The view implies a kind of content parallelism: syntaxsensitive causal transitions between symbols will preserve semantic coherence. Fodor has mainphilosophy of mind philosophy of mind 692    692 tained that, on this language-of-thought view of cognition the classical view, being in a beliefthat-p state can be understood as consisting in bearing a computational relation one that is constitutive of belief to a sentence in the language of thought that means that p; and similarly for desire, intention, and the like. The explanation of intentional capacities will be provided by a computational theory for mental sentences in conjunction with a psychosemantic theory, a theory of meaning for mental sentences. A research program in cognitive science called connectionism postulates networks of neuron-like units. The units can be either on or off, or can have continuous levels of activation. Units are connected, the connections have various degrees of strength, and the connections can be either inhibitory or excitatory. Connectionism has provided fruitful models for studying how neural networks compute information. Moreover, connectionists have had much success in modeling pattern recognition tasks e.g., facial recognition and tasks consisting of learning categories from examples. Some connectionists maintain that connectionism will yield an alternative to the classical language-of-thought account of intentional states and capacities. However, some favor a mixed-models approach to cognition: some cognitive capacities are symbolic, some connectionist. And some hold that connectionism will yield an implementational architecture for a symbolic cognitive architecture, one that will help explain how a symbolic cognitive architecture is realized in the nervous system. Content externalism. Many today hold that Twin-Earth thought experiments by Putnam and Tyler Burge show that the contents of a subject’s mental states do not supervene on intrinsic properties of the subject: two individuals can be exactly alike in every intrinsic respect, yet be in mental states with different contents. In response to Twin-Earth thought experiments, some philosophers have, however, attempted to characterize a notion of narrow content, a kind of content that supervenes on intrinsic properties of thinkers. Content, externalists claim, depends on extrinsic-contextual factors. If externalism is correct, then a psychosemantic theory must examine the relation between mental symbols and the extrinsic, contextual factors that determine contents. Stephen Stich has argued that psychology should eschew psychosemantics and concern itself only with the syntactic properties of mental sentences. Such a psychology could not explain intentional capacities. But Stich urges that computational psychology also eschew that explanatory goal. If, however, psychology is to explain intentional capacities, a psychosemantic theory is needed. Dretske, Fodor, Ruth Millikan, and David Papineau have each independently attempted to provide, in physicalistically respectable terms, foundations for a naturalized externalist theory of the content of mental sentences or internal physical states. Perhaps the leading problem for these theories of content is to explain how the physical and functional facts about a state determine a unique content for it. Appealing to work by Quine and by Kripke, some philosophers argue that such facts will not determine unique contents. Both causal and epistemic concerns have been raised about externalist theories of content. Such theories invite the question whether the property of having a certain content is ever causally relevant. If content is a contextual property of a state that has it, can states have effects in virtue of their having a certain content? This is an important issue because intentional states figure in explanations not only in virtue of their intentional mode whether they are beliefs, or desires, etc. but also in virtue of their contents. Consider an everyday belief-desire explanation. The fact that the subject’s belief was that there was milk in the refrigerator and the fact that the subject’s desire was for milk are both essential to the belief and desire explaining why the subject went to the refrigerator. Dretske, who maintains that content depends on a causal-historical context, has attempted to explain how the property of having a certain content can be causally relevant even though the possession of the property depends on causal-historical factors. And various other philosophers have attempted to explain how the causal relevance of content can be squared with the fact that it fails to supervene on intrinsic properties of the subject. A further controversial question is whether externalism is consistent with our having privileged access to what we are thinking. Consciousness. Conscious states such as pain states, visual experiences, and so on, are such that it is “like” something for the subject of the state to be in them. Such states have a qualitative aspect, a phenomenological character. The what-it-is-like aspects of experiences are called qualia. Qualia pose a serious difficulty for physicalism. Broad argued that one can know all the physical properties of a chemical and how it causally interacts with other physical phenomena and yet not know what it is like to smell it. He concluded that the smell of the chemical is philosophy of mind philosophy of mind 693    693 not itself a physical property, but rather an irreducible emergent property. Frank Jackson has recently defended a version of the argument, which has been dubbed the knowledge argument. Jackson argues that a super-scientist, Mary, who knows all the physical and functional facts about color vision, light, and matter, but has never experienced redness since she has spent her entire life in a black and white room, would not know what it is like to visually experience red. He concludes that the physical and functional topic-neutral facts do not entail all the facts, and thus materialism is false. In response, Lawrence Nemirow, David Lewis, and others have argued that knowing what it is like to be in a certain conscious state is, in part, a matter of know-how e.g., to be able to imagine oneself in the state rather than factual knowledge, and that the failure of knowledge of the physical and functional facts to yield such know-how does not imply the falsity of materialism. Functionalism seems unable to solve the problem of qualia since qualia seem not to be functionally definable. In the 0s, Fodor and Ned Block argued that two states can have the same causal role, thereby realizing the same functional state, yet the qualia associated with each can be inverted. This is called the problem of inverted qualia. The color spectrum, e.g., might be inverted for two individuals a possibility raised by Locke, despite their being in the same functional states. They further argued that two states might realize the same functional state, yet the one might have qualia associated with it and the other not. This is called the problem of absent qualia. Sydney Shoemaker has argued that the possibility of absent qualia can be ruled out on functionalist grounds. However, he has also refined the inverted qualia scenario and further articulated the problem it poses for functionalism. Whether functionalism or physicalism can avoid the problems of absent and inverted qualia remains an open question. Thomas Nagel claims that conscious states are subjective: to fully understand them, one must understand what it is like to be in them, but one can do that only by taking up the experiential point of view of a subject in them. Physical states, in contrast, are objective. Physical science attempts to characterize the world in abstraction from the experiential point of view of any subject. According to Nagel, whether phenomenal mental states reduce to physical states turns on whether subjective states reduce to objective states; and, at present, he claims, we have no understanding of how they could. Nagel has suggested that consciousness may be explainable only by appeal to as yet undiscovered basic nonmental, non-physical properties  “proto-mental properties”  the idea being that experiential points of view might be constituted by protomental properties together with physical properties. He thus claims that panphysicism is worthy of serious consideration. Frank Jackson, James Van Cleve, and David Chalmers have argued that conscious properties are emergent, i.e., fundamental, irreducible macro-properties; and Chalmers sympathizes with a brand of panphysicism. Colin McGinn claims that while conscious properties are likely reductively explainable by brain properties, our minds seem conceptually closed to the explaining properties: we are unable to conceptualize them, just as a cat is unable to conceptualize a square root. Dennett attempts to explain consciousness in supervenient behaviorist terms. David Rosenthal argues that consciousness is a special case of intentionality  more specifically, that conscious states are just states we can come in a certain direct way to believe we are in. Dretske, William Lycan, and Michael Tye argue that conscious properties are intentional properties and physicalistically reducible. Patricia Churchland argues that conscious phenomena are reducible to neurological phenomena. Brian Loar contends that qualia are identical with either functional or neurological states of the brain; and Christopher Hill argues specifically that qualia are identical with neurological states. Loar and Hill attempt to explain away the appearance of contingency of psychophysical identity claims, but in a way different from the way Kripke attempts to explain the appearance of contingency of ‘Water is H2O’, since they concede that that mode of explanation is unavailable. They appeal to differences in the conceptual roles of neurological and functional concepts by contrast with phenomenal concepts. They argue that while such concepts are different, they answer to the same properties. The nature of consciousness thus remains a matter of dispute.  .

philosophy of psychology, the philosophical study of psychology. Psychology began to separate from philosophy with the work of the nineteenth-century G. experimentalists, especially Fechner 180187, Helmholtz 1821 94, and Wundt 18320. In the first half of the twentieth century, the separation was completed in this country insofar as separate psychology departments were set up in most universities, psychologists established their own journals and professional associations, and experimental methods were widely employed, although not in every area of psychology the first experimental study of the effectiveness of a psychological therapy did not occur until 3. Despite this achievement of autonomy, however, issues have remained about the nature of the connections, if any, that should continue between psychology and philosophy. One radical view, that virtually all such connections should be severed, was defended by the behaviorist John Watson in his seminal 3 paper “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It.” Watson criticizes psychologists, even the experimentalists, for relying on introspective methods and for making consciousness the subject matter of their discipline. He recommends that psychology be a purely objective experimental branch of natural science, that its theoretical goal be to predict and control behavior, and that it discard all reference to consciousness. In making behavior the sole subject of psychological inquiry, we avoid taking sides on “those time-honored relics of philosophical speculation,” namely competing theories about the mindbody problem, such as interactionism and parallelism. In a later work, published in 5, Watson claimed that the success of behaviorism threatened the very existence of philosophy: “With the behavioristic point of view now becoming dominant, it is hard to find a place for what has been called philosophy. Philosophy is passing  has all but passed, and unless new issues arise which will give a foundation for a new philosophy, the world has seen its last great philosopher.” One new issue was the credibility of behaviorism. Watson gave no argument for his view that prediction and control of behavior should be the only theoretical goals of psychology. If the attempt to explain behavior is also legitimate, as some anti-behaviorists argue, then it would seem to be an empirical question whether that goal can be met without appealing to mentalistic causes. Watson and his successors, such as B. F. Skinner, cited no credible empirical evidence that it could, but instead relied primarily on philosophical arguments for banning postulation of mentalistic causes. As a consequence, behaviorists virtually guaranteed that philosophers of psychology would have at least one additional task beyond wrestling with traditional mind body issues: the analysis and criticism of behaviorism itself. Although behaviorism and the mindbody problem were never the sole subjects of philosophy of psychology, a much richer set of topics developed after 0 when the so-called cognitive revolution occurred in  psychology. These topics include innate knowledge and the acquisition of transformational grammars, intentionality, the nature of mental representation, functionalism, mental imagery, the language of thought, and, more recently, connectionism. Such topics are of interest to many cognitive psychologists and those in other disciplines, such as linguistics and artificial intelligence, who contributed to the emerging discipline known as cognitive science. Thus, after the decline of various forms of behaviorism and the consequent rise of cognitivism, many philosophers of psychology collaborated more closely with psychologists. This increased cooperation was probably due not only to a broadening of the issues, but also to a methodological change in philosophy. In the period roughly between 5 and 5, conceptual analysis dominated both  and English philosophy of psychology and the closely related discipline, the philosophy of mind. Many philosophers took the position that philosophy was essentially an a priori discipline. These philosophers rarely cited the empirical studies of psychologists. In recent decades, however, philosophy of psychology has become more empirical, at least in the sense that more attention is being paid to the details of the empirical studies of psychologists. The result is more interchanges between philosophers and psychologists. Although interest in cognitive psychology appears to predominate in recent  philosophy of psychology, the new emphasis on empirical studies is also reflected in philosophic work on topics not directly related to cognitive psychology. For example, philosophers of psychology have written books in recent years on the clinical foundations of psychoanalysis, the foundations of behavior therapy and behavior modification, and self-deception. The emphasis on empirical data has been taken one step further by naturalists, who argue that in epistemology, at least, and perhaps in all areas of philosophy, philosophical questions should either be replaced by questions from empirical psychology or be answered by appeal to empirical studies in psychology and related disciplines. It is philosophy of psychology philosophy of psychology 695    695 still too early to predict the fruitfulness of the naturalist approach, but this new trend might well have pleased Watson. Taken to an extreme, naturalism would make philosophy dependent on psychology instead of the reverse and thus would further enhance the autonomy of psychology that Watson desired.

philosophy of religion, the subfield of philosophy devoted to the study of religious phenomena. Although religions are typically complex systems of theory and practice, including both myths and rituals, philosophers tend to concentrate on evaluating religious truth claims. In the major theistic traditions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the most important of these claims concern the existence, nature, and activities of God. Such traditions commonly understand God to be something like a person who is disembodied, eternal, free, all-powerful, all-knowing, the creator and sustainer of the universe, and the proper object of human obedience and worship. One important question is whether this conception of the object of human religious activity is coherent; another is whether such a being actually exists. Philosophers of religion have sought rational answers to both questions. The major theistic traditions draw a distinction between religious truths that can be discovered and even known by unaided human reason and those to which humans have access only through a special divine disclosure or revelation. According to Aquinas, e.g., the existence of God and some things about the divine nature can be proved by unaided human reason, but such distinctively Christian doctrines as the Trinity and Incarnation cannot be thus proved and are known to humans only because God has revealed them. Theists disagree about how such divine disclosures occur; the main candidates for vehicles of revelation include religious experience, the teachings of an inspired religious leader, the sacred scriptures of a religious community, and the traditions of a particular church. The religious doctrines Christian traditions take to be the content of revelation are often described as matters of faith. To be sure, such traditions typically affirm that faith goes beyond mere doctrinal belief to include an attitude of profound trust in God. On most accounts, however, faith involves doctrinal belief, and so there is a contrast within the religious domain itself between faith and reason. One way to spell out the contrast  though not the only way  is to imagine that the content of revelation is divided into two parts. On the one hand, there are those doctrines, if any, that can be known by human reason but are also part of revelation; the existence of God is such a doctrine if it can be proved by human reason alone. Such doctrines might be accepted by some people on the basis of rational argument, while others, who lack rational proof, accept them on the authority of revelation. On the other hand, there are those doctrines that cannot be known by human reason and for which the authority of revelation is the sole basis. They are objects of faith rather than reason and are often described as mysteries of faith. Theists disagree about how such exclusive objects of faith are related to reason. One prominent view is that, although they go beyond reason, they are in harmony with it; another is that they are contrary to reason. Those who urge that such doctrines should be accepted despite the fact that, or even precisely because, they are contrary to reason are known as fideists; the famous slogan credo quia absurdum ‘I believe because it is absurd’ captures the flavor of extreme fideism. Many scholars regard Kierkegaard as a fideist on account of his emphasis on the paradoxical nature of the Christian doctrine that Jesus of Nazareth is God incarnate. Modern philosophers of religion have, for the most part, confined their attention to topics treatable without presupposing the truth of any particular tradition’s claims about revelation and have left the exploration of mysteries of faith to the theologians of various traditions. A great deal of philosophical work clarifying the concept of God has been prompted by puzzles that suggest some incoherence in the traditional concept. One kind of puzzle concerns the coherence of individual claims about the nature of God. Consider the traditional affirmation that God is allpowerful omnipotent. Reflection on this doctrine raises a famous question: Can God make a stone so heavy that even God cannot lift it? No matter how this is answered, it seems that there is at least one thing that even God cannot do, i.e., make such a stone or lift such a stone, and so it appears that even God cannot be all-powerful. Such puzzles stimulate attempts by philosophers to analyze the concept of omnipotence in a way that specifies more precisely the scope of the powers coherently attributable to an omnipotent being. To the extent that such attempts succeed, they foster a deeper understanding of the concept of God and, if God exists, of the divine nature. Another sort of puzzle concerns the consistency of attributing two or more properties to philosophy of religion philosophy of religion 696    696 God. Consider the claim that God is both immutable and omniscient. An immutable being is one that cannot undergo internal change, and an omniscient being knows all truths, and believes no falsehoods. If God is omniscient, it seems that God must first know and hence believe that it is now Tuesday and not believe that it is now Wednesday and later know and hence believe that it is now Wednesday and not believe that it is now Tuesday. If so, God’s beliefs change, and since change of belief is an internal change, God is not immutable. So it appears that God is not immutable if God is omniscient. A resolution of this puzzle would further contribute to enriching the philosophical understanding of the concept of God. It is, of course, one thing to elaborate a coherent concept of God; it is quite another to know, apart from revelation, that such a being actually exists. A proof of the existence of God would yield such knowledge, and it is the task of natural theology to evaluate arguments that purport to be such proofs. As opposed to revealed theology, natural theology restricts the assumptions fit to serve as premises in its arguments to things naturally knowable by humans, i.e., knowable without special revelation from supernatural sources. Many people have hoped that such natural religious knowledge could be universally communicated and would justify a form of religious practice that would appeal to all humankind because of its rationality. Such a religion would be a natural religion. The history of natural theology has produced a bewildering variety of arguments for the existence of God. The four main types are these: ontological arguments, cosmological arguments, teleological arguments, and moral arguments. The earliest and most famous version of the ontological argument was set forth by Anselm of Canterbury in chapter 2 of his Proslogion. It is a bold attempt to deduce the existence of God from the concept of God: we understand God to be a perfect being, something than which nothing greater can be conceived. Because we have this concept, God at least exists in our minds as an object of the understanding. Either God exists in the mind alone, or God exists both in the mind and as an extramental reality. But if God existed in the mind alone, then we could conceive of a being greater than that than which nothing greater can be conceived, namely, one that also existed in extramental reality. Since the concept of a being greater than that than which nothing greater can be conceived is incoherent, God cannot exist in the mind alone. Hence God exists not only in the mind but also in extramental reality. The most celebrated criticism of this form of the argument was Kant’s, who claimed that existence is not a real predicate. For Kant, a real predicate contributes to determining the content of a concept and so serves as a part of its definition. But to say that something falling under a concept exists does not add to the content of a concept; there is, Kant said, no difference in conceptual content between a hundred real dollars and a hundred imaginary dollars. Hence whether or not there exists something that corresponds to a concept cannot be settled by definition. The existence of God cannot be deduced from the concept of a perfect being because existence is not contained in the concept or the definition of a perfect being. Contemporary philosophical discussion has focused on a slightly different version of the ontological argument. In chapter 3 of Proslogion Anselm suggested that something than which nothing greater can be conceived cannot be conceived not to exist and so exists necessarily. Following this lead, such philosophers as Charles Hartshorne, Norman Malcolm, and Alvin Plantinga have contended that God cannot be a contingent being who exists in some possible worlds but not in others. The existence of a perfect being is either necessary, in which case God exists in every possible world, or impossible, in which case God exists in no possible worlds. On this view, if it is so much as possible that a perfect being exists, God exists in every possible world and hence in the actual world. The crucial premise in this form of the argument is the assumption that the existence of a perfect being is possible; it is not obviously true and could be rejected without irrationality. For this reason, Plantinga concedes that the argument does not prove or establish its conclusion, but maintains that it does make it rational to accept the existence of God. The key premises of various cosmological arguments are statements of obvious facts of a general sort about the world. Thus, the argument to a first cause begins with the observation that there are now things undergoing change and things causing change. If something is a cause of such change only if it is itself caused to change by something else, then there is an infinitely long chain of causes of change. But, it is alleged, there cannot be a causal chain of infinite length. Therefore there is something that causes change, but is not caused to change by anything else, i.e., a first cause. Many critics of this form of the argument deny its assumption that there cannot be an infinite causal regress or chain of causes. This argument also fails to show that there is only one first cause and does not prove that a first cause must have such divine attributes as omniscience, omnipotence, and perfect goodness. A version of the cosmological argument that has attracted more attention from contemporary philosophers is the argument from contingency to necessity. It starts with the observation that there are contingent beings  beings that could have failed to exist. Since contingent beings do not exist of logical necessity, a contingent being must be caused to exist by some other being, for otherwise there would be no explanation of why it exists rather than not doing so. Either the causal chain of contingent beings has a first member, a contingent being not caused by another contingent being, or it is infinitely long. If, on the one hand, the chain has a first member, then a necessary being exists and causes it. After all, being contingent, the first member must have a cause, but its cause cannot be another contingent being. Hence its cause has to be non-contingent, i.e., a being that could not fail to exist and so is necessary. If, on the other hand, the chain is infinitely long, then a necessary being exists and causes the chain as a whole. This is because the chain as a whole, being itself contingent, requires a cause that must be noncontingent since it is not part of the chain. In either case, if there are contingent beings, a necessary being exists. So, since contingent beings do exist, there is a necessary being that causes their existence. Critics of this argument attack its assumption that there must be an explanation for the existence of every contingent being. Rejecting the principle that there is a sufficient reason for the existence of each contingent thing, they argue that the existence of at least some contingent beings is an inexplicable brute fact. And even if the principle of sufficient reason is true, its truth is not obvious and so it would not be irrational to deny it. Accordingly, William Rowe b.1 concludes that this version of the cosmological argument does not prove the existence of God, but he leaves open the question of whether it shows that theistic belief is reasonable. The starting point of teleological arguments is the phenomenon of goal-directedness in nature. Aquinas, e.g., begins with the claim that we see that things which lack intelligence act for an end so as to achieve the best result. Modern science has discredited this universal metaphysical teleology, but many biological systems do seem to display remarkable adaptations of means to ends. Thus, as William Paley 17431805 insisted, the eye is adapted to seeing and its parts cooperate in complex ways to produce sight. This suggests an analogy between such biological systems and human artifacts, which are known to be products of intelligent design. Spelled out in mechanical terms, the analogy grounds the claim that the world as a whole is like a vast machine composed of many smaller machines. Machines are contrived by intelligent human designers. Since like effects have like causes, the world as a whole and many of its parts are therefore probably products of design by an intelligence resembling the human but greater in proportion to the magnitude of its effects. Because this form of the argument rests on an analogy, it is known as the analogical argument for the existence of God; it is also known as the design argument since it concludes the existence of an intelligent designer of the world. Hume subjected the design argument to sustained criticism in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. If, as most scholars suppose, the character Philo speaks for Hume, Hume does not actually reject the argument. He does, however, think that it warrants only the very weak conclusion that the cause or causes of order in the universe probably bear some remote analogy to human intelligence. As this way of putting it indicates, the argument does not rule out polytheism; perhaps different minor deities designed lions and tigers. Moreover, the analogy with human artificers suggests that the designer or designers of the universe did not create it from nothing but merely imposed order on already existing matter. And on account of the mixture of good and evil in the universe, the argument does not show that the designer or designers are morally admirable enough to deserve obedience or worship. Since the time of Hume, the design argument has been further undermined by the emergence of Darwinian explanations of biological adaptations in terms of natural selection that give explanations of such adaptations in terms of intelligent design stiff competition. Some moral arguments for the existence of God conform to the pattern of inference to the best explanation. It has been argued that the hypothesis that morality depends upon the will of God provides the best explanation of the objectivity of moral obligations. Kant’s moral argument, which is probably the best-known specimen of this type, takes a different tack. According to Kant, the complete good consists of perfect virtue rewarded with perfect happiness, and virtue deserves to be rewarded with proportional happiness because it makes one worthy to be happy. If morality is to command the allegiance of reason, the complete good must be a real possibility, and so practical reason is entitled to postulate that the conditions necessary to guarantee its possibility obtain. As far as anyone can tell, nature and its laws do not furnish such a guarantee; in this world, apparently, the virtuous often suffer while the vicious flourish. And even if the operation of natural laws were to produce happiness in proportion to virtue, this would be merely coincidental, and hence finite moral agents would not have been made happy just because they had by their virtue made themselves worthy of happiness. So practical reason is justified in postulating a supernatural agent with sufficient goodness, knowledge, and power to ensure that finite agents receive the happiness they deserve as a reward for their virtue, though theoretical reason can know nothing of such a being. Critics of this argument have denied that we must postulate a systematic connection between virtue and happiness in order to have good reasons to be moral. Indeed, making such an assumption might actually tempt one to cultivate virtue for the sake of securing happiness rather than for its own sake. It seems therefore that none of these arguments by itself conclusively proves the existence of God. However, some of them might contribute to a cumulative case for the existence of God. According to Richard Swinburne, cosmological, teleological, and moral arguments individually increase the probability of God’s existence even though none of them makes it more probable than not. But when other evidence such as that deriving from providential occurrences and religious experiences is added to the balance, Swinburne concludes that theism becomes more probable than its negation. Whether or not he is right, it does appear to be entirely correct to judge the rationality of theistic belief in the light of our total evidence. But there is a case to be made against theism too. Philosophers of religion are interested in arguments against the existence of God, and fairness does seem to require admitting that our total evidence contains much that bears negatively on the rationality of belief in God. The problem of evil is generally regarded as the strongest objection to theism. Two kinds of evil can be distinguished. Moral evil inheres in the wicked actions of moral agents and the bad consequences they produce. An example is torturing the innocent. When evil actions are considered theologically as offenses against God, they are regarded as sins. Natural evils are bad consequences that apparently derive entirely from the operations of impersonal natural forces, e.g. the human and animal suffering produced by natural catastrophes such as earthquakes and epidemics. Both kinds of evil raise the question of what reasons an omniscient, omnipotent, and perfectly good being could have for permitting or allowing their existence. Theodicy is the enterprise of trying to answer this question and thereby to justify the ways of God to humans. It is, of course, possible to deny the presuppositions of the question. Some thinkers have held that evil is unreal; others have maintained that the deity is limited and so lacks the power or knowledge to prevent the evils that occur. If one accepts the presuppositions of the question, the most promising strategy for theodicy seems to be to claim that each evil God permits is necessary for some greater good or to avoid some alternative to it that is at least as bad if not worse. The strongest form of this doctrine is the claim made by Leibniz that this is the best of all possible worlds. It is unlikely that humans, with their cognitive limitations, could ever understand all the details of the greater goods for which evils are necessary, assuming that such goods exist; however, we can understand how some evils contribute to achieving goods. According to the soul-making theodicy of John Hick b.2, which is rooted in a tradition going back to Irenaeus, admirable human qualities such as compassion could not exist except as responses to suffering, and so evil plays a necessary part in the formation of moral character. But this line of thought does not seem to provide a complete theodicy because much animal suffering occurs unnoticed by humans and child abuse often destroys rather than strengthens the moral character of its victims. Recent philosophical discussion has often focused on the claim that the existence of an omniscient, omnipotent, and perfectly good being is logically inconsistent with the existence of evil or of a certain quantity of evil. This is the logical problem of evil, and the most successful response to it has been the free will defense. Unlike a theodicy, this defense does not speculate about God’s reasons for permitting evil but merely argues that God’s existence is consistent with the existence of evil. Its key idea is that moral good cannot exist apart from libertarian free actions that are not causally determined. If God aims to produce moral good, God must create free creatures upon whose cooperation he must depend, and so divine omnipotence is limited by the freedom God confers on creatures. Since such creatures are also free to do evil, it is possible that God could not have created a world containing moral good but no moral evil. Plantinga extends the defense from moral to natural evil by suggesting that it is also possible that all natural evil is due to the free actions of non-human persons such as Satan and his cohorts. Plantinga and Swinburne have also addressed the probabilistic problem of evil, which is the claim that the existence of evil disconfirms or renders improbable the hypothesis that God exists. Both of them argue for the conclusion that this is not the case. Finally, it is worth mentioning three other topics on which contemporary philosophers of religion have worked to good effect. Important studies of the meaning and use of religious language were stimulated by the challenge of logical positivism’s claim that theological language is cognitively meaningless. Defenses of such Christian doctrines as the Trinity, Incarnation, and Atonement against various philosophical objections have recently been offered by people committed to elaborating an explicitly Christian philosophy. And a growing appreciation of religious pluralism has both sharpened interest in questions about the cultural relativity of religious rationality and begun to encourage progress toward a comparative philosophy of religions. Such work helps to make philosophy of religion a lively and diverse field of inquiry. 

philosophy of science, the branch of philosophy that is centered on a critical examination of the sciences: their methods and their results. One branch of the philosophy of science, methodology, is closely related to the theory of knowledge. It explores the methods by which science arrives at its posited truths concerning the world and critically explores alleged rationales for these methods. Issues concerning the sense in which theories are accepted in science, the nature of the confirmation relation between evidence and hypothesis, the degree to which scientific claims can be falsified by observational data, and the like, are the concern of methodology. Other branches of the philosophy of science are concerned with the meaning and content of the posited scientific results and are closely related to metaphysics and the philosophy of language. Typical problems examined are the nature of scientific laws, the cognitive content of scientific theories referring to unobservables, and the structure of scientific explanations. Finally, philosophy of science explores specific foundational questions arising out of the specific results of the sciences. Typical questions explored might be metaphysical presuppositions of space-time theories, the role of probability in statistical physics, the interpretation of measurement in quantum theory, the structure of explanations in evolutionary biology, and the like. Concepts of the credibility of hypotheses. Some crucial concepts that arise when issues of the credibility of scientific hypotheses are in question are the following: Inductivism is the view that hypotheses can receive evidential support from their predictive success with respect to particular cases falling under them. If one takes the principle of inductive inference to be that the future will be like the past, one is subject to the skeptical objection that this rule is empty of content, and even self-contradictory, if any kind of “similarity” of cases is permitted. To restore content and consistency to the rule, and for other methodological purposes as well, it is frequently alleged that only natural kinds, a delimited set of “genuine” properties, should be allowed in the formulation of scientific hypotheses. The view that theories are first arrived at as creative hypotheses of the scientist’s imagination and only then confronted, for justificatory purposes, with the observational predictions deduced from them, is called the hypotheticodeductive model of science. This model is contrasted with the view that the very discovery of hypotheses is somehow “generated” out of accumulated observational data. The view that hypotheses are confirmed to the degree that they provide the “best explanatory account” of the data is often called abduction and sometimes called inference to the best explanation. The alleged relation that evidence bears to hypothesis, warranting its truth but not, generally, guaranteeing that truth, is called confirmation. Methodological accounts such as inductivism countenance such evidential warrant, frequently speaking of evidence as making a hypothesis probable but not establishing it with certainty. Probability in the confirmational context is supposed to be a relationship holding between propositions that is quantitative and is described by the formal theory of probability. It is supposed to measure the “degree of support” that one proposition gives to another, e.g. the degree of support evidential statements give to a hypothesis allegedly supported by them. Scientific methodologists often claim that science is characterized by convergence. This is the claim that scientific theories in their historical order are converging to an ultimate, final, and ideal theory. Sometimes this final theory is said to be true because it corresponds to the “real world,” as in realist accounts of convergence. In pragmatist versions this ultimate theory is the defining standard of truth. It is sometimes alleged that one ground for choosing the most plausible theory, over and above conformity of the theory with the observational data, is the simplicity of the theory. Many versions of this thesis exist, some emphasizing formal elements of the theory and others, e.g., emphasizing paucity of ontological commitment by the theory as the measure of simplicity. It is sometimes alleged that in choosing which theory to believe, the scientific community opts for theories compatible with the data that make minimal changes in scientific belief necessary from those demanded by previously held theory. The believer in methodological conservatism may also try to defend such epistemic conservatism as normatively rational. An experiment that can decisively show a scientific hypothesis to be false is called a crucial experiment for the hypothesis. It is a thesis of many philosophers that for hypotheses that function in theories and can only confront observational data when conjoined with other theoretical hypotheses, no absolutely decisive crucial experiment can exist. Concepts of the structure of hypotheses. Here are some of the essential concepts encountered when it is the structure of scientific hypotheses that is being explored: In its explanatory account of the world, science posits novel entities and properties. Frequently these are alleged to be not accessible to direct observation. A theory is a set of hypotheses positing such entities and properties. Some philosophers of science divide the logical consequences of a theory into those referring only to observable things and features and those referring to the unobservables as well. Various reductionist, eliminationist, and instrumentalist approaches to theory agree that the full cognitive content of a theory is exhausted by its observational consequences reported by its observation sentences, a claim denied by those who espouse realist accounts of theories. The view that the parts of a theory that do not directly relate observational consequences ought not to be taken as genuinely referential at all, but, rather, as a “mere linguistic instrument” allowing one to derive observational results from observationally specifiable posits, is called instrumentalism. From this point of view terms putatively referring to unobservables fail to have genuine reference and individual non-observational sentences containing such terms are not individually genuinely true or false. Verificationism is the general name for the doctrine that, in one way or another, the semantic content of an assertion is exhausted by the conditions that count as warranting the acceptance or rejection of the assertion. There are many versions of verificationist doctrines that try to do justice both to the empiricist claim that the content of an assertion is its totality of empirical consequences and also to a wide variety of anti-reductionist intuitions about meaning. The doctrine that theoretical sentences must be strictly translatable into sentences expressed solely in observational terms in order that the theoretical assertions have genuine cognitive content is sometimes called operationalism. The “operation” by which a magnitude is determined to have a specified value, characterized observationally, is taken to give the very meaning of attributing that magnitude to an object. The doctrine that the meanings of terms in theories are fixed by the role the terms play in the theory as a whole is often called semantic holism. According to the semantic holist, definitions of theoretical terms by appeal to observational terms cannot be given, but all of the theoretical terms have their meaning given “as a group” by the structure of the theory as a whole. A related doctrine in confirmation theory is that confirmation accrues to whole theories, and not to their individual assertions one at a time. This is confirmational holism. To see another conception of cognitive content, conjoin all the sentences of a theory together. Then replace each theoretical term in the sentence so obtained with a predicate variable and existentially quantify over all the predicate variables so introduced. This is the Ramsey sentence for a finitely axiomatized theory. This sentence has the same logical consequences framable in the observational vocabulary alone as did the original theory. It is often claimed that the Ramsey sentence for a theory exhausts the cognitive content of the theory. The Ramsey sentence is supposed to “define” the meaning of the theoretical terms of the original theory as well as have empirical consequences; yet by asserting the existence of the theoretical properties, it is sometimes alleged to remain a realist construal of the theory. The latter claim is made doubtful, however, by the existence of “merely representational” interpretations of the Ramsey sentence. Theories are often said to be so related that one theory is reducible to another. The study of the relation theories bear to one another in this context is said to be the study of intertheoretic reduction. Such reductive claims can have philosophical origins, as in the alleged reduction of material objects to sense-data or of spatiotemporal relations to causal relations, or they can be scientific discoveries, as in the reduction of the theory of light waves to the theory of electromagnetic radiation. Numerous “models” of the reductive relation exist, appropriate for distinct kinds and cases of reduction. The term scientific realism has many and varied uses. Among other things that have been asserted by those who describe themselves as scientific realists are the claims that “mature” scientific theories typically refer to real features of the world, that the history of past falsifications of accepted scientific theories does not provide good reason for persistent skepticism as to the truth claims of contemporary theories, and that the terms of theories that putatively refer to unobservables ought to be taken at their referential face value and not reinterpreted in some instrumentalistic manner. Internal realism denies irrealist claims founded on the past falsification of accepted theories. Internal realists are, however, skeptical of “metaphysical” claims of “correspondence of true theories to the real world” or of any notion of truth that can be construed in radically non-epistemic terms. While theories may converge to some ultimate “true” theory, the notion of truth here must be understood in some version of a Peircian idea of truth as “ultimate warranted assertability.” The claim that any theory that makes reference to posited unobservable features of the world in its explanatory apparatus will always encounter rival theories incompatible with the original theory but equally compatible with all possible observational data that might be taken as confirmatory of the original theory is the claim of the underdetermination thesis. A generalization taken to have “lawlike force” is called a law of nature. Some suggested criteria for generalizations having lawlike force are the ability of the generalization to back up the truth of claims expressed as counterfactual conditions; the ability of the generalization to be confirmed inductively on the basis of evidence that is only a proper subset of all the particular instances falling under the generality; and the generalization having an appropriate place in the simple, systematic hierarchy of generalizations important for fundamental scientific theories of the world. The application of a scientific law to a given actual situation is usually hedged with the proviso that for the law’s predictions to hold, “all other, unspecified, features of the situation are normal.” Such a qualifying clause is called a ceteris paribus clause. Such “everything else being normal” claims cannot usually be “filled out,” revealing important problems concerning the “open texture” of scientific claims. The claim that the full specification of the state of the world at one time is sufficient, along with the laws of nature, to fix the full state of the world at any other time, is the claim of determinism. This is not to be confused with claims of total predictability, since even if determinism were true the full state of the world at a time might be, in principle, unavailable for knowledge. Concepts of the foundations of physical theories. Here, finally, are a few concepts that are crucial in discussing the foundations of physical theories, in particular theories of space and time and quantum theory: The doctrine that space and time must be thought of as a family of spatial and temporal relations holding among the material constituents of the universe is called relationism. Relationists deny that “space itself” should be considered an additional constituent of the world over and above the world’s material contents. The doctrine that “space itself” must be posited as an additional constituent of the world over and above ordinary material things of the world is substantivalism. Mach’s principle is the demand that all physical phenomena, including the existence of inertial forces used by Newton to argue for a substantivalist position, be explainable in purely relationist terms. Mach speculated that Newton’s explanation for the forces in terms of acceleration with respect to “space itself” could be replaced with an explanation resorting to the acceleration of the test object with respect to the remaining matter of the universe the “fixed stars”. In quantum theory the claim that certain “conjugate” quantities, such as position and momentum, cannot be simultaneously “determined” to arbitrary degrees of accuracy is the uncertainty principle. The issue of whether such a lack of simultaneous exact “determination” is merely a limitation on our knowledge of the system or is, instead, a limitation on the system’s having simultaneous exact values of the conjugate quantities, is a fundamental one in the interpretation of quantum mechanics. Bell’s theorem is a mathematical result aimed at showing that the explanation of the statistical correlations that hold between causally noninteractive systems cannot always rely on the positing that when the systems did causally interact in the past independent values were fixed for some feature of each of the two systems that determined their future observational behavior. The existence of such “local hidden variables” would contradict the correlational predictions of quantum mechanics. The result shows that quantum mechanics has a profoundly “non-local” nature. Can quantum probabilities and correlations be obtained as averages over variables at some deeper level than those specifying the quantum state of a system? If such quantities exist they are called hidden variables. Many different types of hidden variables have been proposed: deterministic, stochastic, local, non-local, etc. A number of proofs exist to the effect that positing certain types of hidden variables would force probabilistic results at the quantum level that contradict the predictions of quantum theory. Complementarity was the term used by Niels Bohr to describe what he took to be a fundamental structure of the world revealed by quantum theory. Sometimes it is used to indicate the fact that magnitudes occur in conjugate pairs subject to the uncertainty relations. Sometimes it is used more broadly to describe such aspects as the ability to encompass some phenomena in a wave picture of the world and other phenomena in a particle picture, but implying that no one picture will do justice to all the experimental results. The orthodox formalization of quantum theory posits two distinct ways in which the quantum state can evolve. When the system is “unobserved,” the state evolves according to the deterministic Schrödinger equation. When “measured,” however, the system suffers a discontinuous “collapse of the wave packet” into a new quantum state determined by the outcome of the measurement process. Understanding how to reconcile the measurement process with the laws of dynamic evolution of the system is the measurement problem. Conservation and symmetry. A number of important physical principles stipulate that some physical quantity is conserved, i.e. that the quantity of it remains invariant over time. Early conservation principles were those of matter mass, of energy, and of momentum. These became assimilated together in the relativistic principle of the conservation of momentum-energy. Other conservation laws such as the conservation of baryon number arose in the theory of elementary particles. A symmetry in physical theory expressed the invariance of some structural feature of the world under some transformation. Examples are translation and rotation invariance in space and the invariance under transformation from one uniformly moving reference frame to another. Such symmetries express the fact that systems related by symmetry transformations behave alike in their physical evolution. Some symmetries are connected with space-time, such as those noted above, whereas others such as the symmetry of electromagnetism under socalled gauge transformations are not. A very important result of the mathematician Emma Noether shows that each conservation law is derivable from the existence of an associated underlying symmetry. Chaos theory and chaotic systems. In the history of the scientific study of deterministic systems, the paradigm of explanation has been the prediction of the future states of a system from a specification of its initial state. In order for such a prediction to be useful, however, nearby initial states must lead to future states that are close to one another. This is now known to hold only in exceptional cases. In general deterministic systems are chaotic systems, i.e., even initial states very close to one another will lead in short intervals of time to future states that diverge quickly from one another. Chaos theory has been developed to provide a wide range of concepts useful for describing the structure of the dynamics of such chaotic systems. The theory studies the features of a system that will determine if its evolution is chaotic or non-chaotic and provides the necessary descriptive categories for characterizing types of chaotic motion. Randomness. The intuitive distinction between a sequence that is random and one that is orderly plays a role in the foundations of probability theory and in the scientific study of dynamical systems. But what is a random sequence? Subjectivist definitions of randomness focus on the inability of an agent to determine, on the basis of his knowledge, the future occurrences in the sequence. Objectivist definitions of randomness seek to characterize it without reference to the knowledge of any agent. Some approaches to defining objective randomness are those that require probability to be the same in the original sequence and in subsequences “mechanically” selectable from it, and those that define a sequence as random if it passes every “effectively constructible” statistical test for randomness. Another important attempt to characterize objective randomness compares the length of a sequence to the length of a computer program used to generate the sequence. The basic idea is that a sequence is random if the computer programs needed to generate the sequence are as long as the sequence itself. 

philosophy of the social sciences, the study of the logic and methods of the social sciences. Central questions include: What are the criteria of a good social explanation? How if at all are the social sciences distinct from the natural sciences? Is there a distinctive method for social research? Through what empirical procedures are social science assertions to be evaluated? Are there irreducible social laws? Are there causal relations among social phenomena? Do social facts and regularities require some form of reduction to facts about individuals? What is the role of theory in social explanation? The philosophy of social science aims to provide an interpretation of the social sciences that answers these questions. The philosophy of social science, like that of natural science, has both a descriptive and a prescriptive side. On the one hand, the field is about the social sciences  the explanations, methods, empirical arguments, theories, hypotheses, etc., that actually occur in the social science literature. This means that the philosopher needs extensive knowledge of several areas of social science research in order to be able to formulate an analysis of the social sciences that corresponds appropriately to scientists’ practice. On the other hand, the field is epistemic: it is concerned with the idea that scientific theories and hypotheses are put forward as true or probable, and are justified on rational grounds empirical and theoretical. The philosopher aims to provide a critical evaluation of existing social science methods and practices insofar as these methods are found to be less truth-enhancing than they might be. These two aspects of the philosophical enterprise suggest that philosophy of social science should be construed as a rational reconstruction of existing social science practice  a reconstruction guided by existing practice but extending beyond that practice by identifying faulty assumptions, forms of reasoning, and explanatory frameworks. Philosophers have disagreed over the relation between the social and natural sciences. One position is naturalism, according to which the methods of the social sciences should correspond closely to those of the natural sciences. This position is closely related to physicalism, the doctrine that all higher-level phenomena and regularities  including social phenomena  are ultimately reducible to physical entities and the laws that govern them. On the other side is the view that the social sciences are inherently distinct from the natural sciences. This perspective holds that social phenomena are metaphysically distinguishable from natural phenomena because they are intentional  they depend on the meaningful actions of individuals. On this view, natural phenomena admit of causal explanation, whereas social phenomena require intentional explanation. The anti-naturalist position also maintains that there is a corresponding difference between the methods appropriate to natural and social science. Advocates of the Verstehen method hold that there is a method of intuitive interpretation of human action that is radically distinct from methods of inquiry in the natural sciences. One important school within the philosophy of social science takes its origin in this fact of the meaningfulness of human action. Interpretive sociology maintains that the goal of social inquiry is to provide interpretations of human conduct within the context of culturally specific meaningful arrangements. This approach draws an analogy between literary texts and social phenomena: both are complex systems of meaningful elements, and the goal of the interpreter is to provide an interpretation of the elements that makes sense of them. In this respect social science involves a hermeneutic inquiry: it requires that the interpreter should tease out the meanings underlying a particular complex of social behavior, much as a literary critic pieces together an interpretation of the meaning of a complex philosophy of the social sciences philosophy of the social sciences 704    704 literary text. An example of this approach is Weber’s treatment of the relation between capitalism and the Protestant ethic. Weber attempts to identify the elements of western European culture that shaped human action in this environment in such a way as to produce capitalism. On this account, both Calvinism and capitalism are historically specific complexes of values and meanings, and we can better understand the emergence of capitalism by seeing how it corresponds to the meaningful structures of Calvinism. Interpretive sociologists often take the meaningfulness of social phenomena to imply that social phenomena do not admit of causal explanation. However, it is possible to accept the idea that social phenomena derive from the purposive actions of individuals without relinquishing the goal of providing causal explanations of social phenomena. For it is necessary to distinguish between the general idea of a causal relation between two events or conditions and the more specific idea of “causal determination through strict laws of nature.” It is true that social phenomena rarely derive from strict laws of nature; wars do not result from antecedent political tensions in the way that earthquakes result from antecedent conditions in plate tectonics. However, since non-deterministic causal relations can derive from the choices of individual persons, it is evident that social phenomena admit of causal explanation, and in fact much social explanation depends on asserting causal relations between social events and processes  e.g., the claim that the administrative competence of the state is a crucial causal factor in determining the success or failure of a revolutionary movement. A central goal of causal explanation is to discover the conditions existing prior to the event that, given the law-governed regularities among phenomena of this sort, were sufficient to produce this event. To say that C is a cause of E is to assert that the occurrence of C, in the context of a field of social processes and mechanisms F, brought about E or increased the likelihood of the occurrence of E. Central to causal arguments in the social sciences is the idea of a causal mechanism  a series of events or actions leading from cause to effect. Suppose it is held that the extension of a trolley line from the central city to the periphery caused the deterioration of public schools in the central city. In order to make out such a claim it is necessary to provide some account of the social and political mechanisms that join the antecedent condition to the consequent. An important variety of causal explanation in social science is materialist explanation. This type of explanation attempts to explain a social feature in terms of features of the material environment in the context of which the social phenomenon occurs. Features of the environment that often appear in materialist explanations include topography and climate; thus it is sometimes maintained that banditry thrives in remote regions because the rugged terrain makes it more difficult for the state to repress bandits. But materialist explanations may also refer to the material needs of society  e.g., the need to produce food and other consumption goods to support the population. Thus Marx holds that it is the development of the “productive forces” technology that drives the development of property relations and political systems. In each case the materialist explanation must refer to the fact of human agency  the fact that human beings are capable of making deliberative choices on the basis of their wants and beliefs  in order to carry out the explanation; in the banditry example, the explanation depends on the fact that bandits are prudent enough to realize that their prospects for survival are better in the periphery than in the core. So materialist explanations too accept the point that social phenomena depend on the purposive actions of individuals. A central issue in the philosophy of social science involves the relation between social regularities and facts about individuals. Methodological individualism is the position that asserts the primacy of facts about individuals over facts about social entities. This doctrine takes three forms: a claim about social entities, a claim about social concepts, and a claim about social regularities. The first version maintains that social entities are reducible to ensembles of individuals  as an insurance company might be reduced to the ensemble of employees, supervisors, managers, and owners whose actions constitute the company. Likewise, it is sometimes held that social concepts must be reducible to concepts involving only individuals  e.g., the concept of a social class might be defined in terms of concepts pertaining only to individuals and their behavior. Finally, it is sometimes held that social regularities must be derivable from regularities of individual behavior. There are several positions opposed to methodological individualism. At the extreme there is methodological holism  the doctrine that social entities, facts, and laws are autonomous and irreducible; for example, that social structures such as the state have dynamic properties independent of the beliefs and purposes of the particular persons who occupy positions within the structure. A third position intermediate between these two holds that every social explanation requires microfoundations  an account of the circumstances at the individual level that led individuals to behave in such ways as to bring about the observed social regularities. If we observe that an industrial strike is successful over an extended period of time, it is not sufficient to explain this circumstance by referring to the common interest that members of the union have in winning their demands. Rather, we need information about the circumstances of the individual union member that induce him or her to contribute to this public good. The microfoundations dictum does not require, however, that social explanations be couched in non-social concepts; instead, the circumstances of individual agents may be characterized in social terms. Central to most theories of explanation is the idea that explanation depends on general laws governing the phenomena in question. Thus the discovery of the laws of electrodynamics permitted the explanation of a variety of electromagnetic phenomena. But social phenomena derive from the actions of purposive men and women; so what kinds of regularities are available on the basis of which to provide social explanations? A fruitful research framework in the social sciences is the idea that men and women are rational, so it is possible to explain their behavior as the outcome of a deliberation about means of achieving their individual ends. This fact in turn gives rise to a set of regularities about individual behavior that may be used as a ground for social explanation. We may explain some complex social phenomenon as the aggregate result of the actions of a large number of individual agents with a hypothesized set of goals within a structured environment of choice. Social scientists have often been inclined to offer functional explanations of social phenomena. A functional explanation of a social feature is one that explains the presence and persistence of the feature in terms of the beneficial consequences the feature has for the ongoing working of the social system as a whole. It might be held, e.g., that sports clubs in working-class Britain exist because they give working-class people a way of expending energy that would otherwise go into struggles against an exploitative system, thus undermining social stability. Sports clubs are explained, then, in terms of their contribution to social stability. This type of explanation is based on an analogy between biology and sociology. Biologists explain species traits in terms of their contribution to reproductive fitness, and sociologists sometimes explain social traits in terms of their contribution to “social” fitness. However, the analogy is misleading, because there is a general mechanism establishing functionality in the biological realm that is not present in the social realm. This is the mechanism of natural selection, through which a species arrives at a set of traits that are locally optimal. There is no analogous process at work in the social realm, however; so it is groundless to suppose that social traits exist because of their beneficial consequences for the good of society as a whole or important subsystems within society. So functional explanations of social phenomena must be buttressed by specific accounts of the causal processes that underlie the postulated functional relationships. 

phrastic: It is convenient to take Grice mocking Hare in Prolegomena. “To say ‘x is good’ is to recommend x.’ An implicaturum: annullable:  “x is good but I don’t recommend it.” Hare was well aware of the implicaturum. Loving Grice’s account of ‘or,’ Hare gives the example: “Post the letter: therefore; post the letter or burn it.” Grice mainly quotes Hare’s duet, the phrastic and the neustic, and spends some time exploring what the phrastic actually is. He seems to prefer ‘radix.’ But then Hare also has then the ‘neustic,’ that Grice is not so concerned with since he has his own terminology for it. And for Urmson’s festschrift, Hare comes up with the tropic and the clistic. So each has a Griceian correlate.

Physicalism: One of the twelve labours of H. P. Grice. -- Churchland, p. s., philosopher and advocate of neurophilosophy. She received her B.Phil. from Oxford in 9 and held positions at the Unichün-tzu Churchland, Patricia Smith 140   140 versity of Manitoba and the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, settling at the ofCalifornia,SanDiego, with appointments in philosophy and the Institute for Neural Computation. Skeptical of philosophy’s a priori specification of mental categories and dissatisfied with computational psychology’s purely top-down approach to their function, Churchland began studying the brain at the  of Manitoba medical school. The result was a unique merger of science and philosophy, a “neurophilosophy” that challenged the prevailing methodology of mind. Thus, in a series of articles that includes “Fodor on Language Learning” 8 and “A Perspective on Mind-Brain Research” 0, she outlines a new neurobiologically based paradigm. It subsumes simple non-linguistic structures and organisms, since the brain is an evolved organ; but it preserves functionalism, since a cognitive system’s mental states are explained via high-level neurofunctional theories. It is a strategy of cooperation between psychology and neuroscience, a “co-evolutionary” process eloquently described in Neurophilosophy 6 with the prediction that genuine cognitive phenomena will be reduced, some as conceptualized within the commonsense framework, others as transformed through the sciences. The same intellectual confluence is displayed through Churchland’s various collaborations: with psychologist and computational neurobiologist Terrence Sejnowski in The Computational Brain 2; with neuroscientist Rodolfo Llinas in The Mind-Brain Continuum 6; and with philosopher and husband Paul Churchland in On the Contrary 8 she and Paul Churchland are jointly appraised in R. McCauley, The Churchlands and Their Critics, 6. From the viewpoint of neurophilosophy, interdisciplinary cooperation is essential for advancing knowledge, for the truth lies in the intertheoretic details. Churchland: Paul M. b.2, -born  philosopher, leading proponent of eliminative materialism. He received his Ph.D. from the  of Pittsburgh in 9 and held positions at the Universities of Toronto, Manitoba, and the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton. He is professor of philosophy and member of the Institute for Neural Computation at the  of California, San Diego. Churchland’s literary corpus constitutes a lucidly written, scientifically informed narrative where his neurocomputational philosophy unfolds. Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind 9 maintains that, though science is best construed realistically, perception is conceptually driven, with no observational given, while language is holistic, with meaning fixed by networks of associated usage. Moreover, regarding the structure of science, higher-level theories should be reduced by, incorporated into, or eliminated in favor of more basic theories from natural science, and, in the specific case, commonsense psychology is a largely false empirical theory, to be replaced by a non-sentential, neuroscientific framework. This skepticism regarding “sentential” approaches is a common thread, present in earlier papers, and taken up again in “Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes” 1. When fully developed, the non-sentential, neuroscientific framework takes the form of connectionist network or parallel distributed processing models. Thus, with essays in A Neurocomputational Perspective 9, Churchland adds that genuine psychological processes are sequences of activation patterns over neuronal networks. Scientific theories, likewise, are learned vectors in the space of possible activation patterns, with scientific explanation being prototypical activation of a preferred vector. Classical epistemology, too, should be neurocomputationally naturalized. Indeed, Churchland suggests a semantic view whereby synonymy, or the sharing of concepts, is a similarity between patterns in neuronal state-space. Even moral knowledge is analyzed as stored prototypes of social reality that are elicited when an individual navigates through other neurocomputational systems. The entire picture is expressed in The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul 6 and, with his wife Patricia Churchland, by the essays in On the Contrary 8. What has emerged is a neurocomputational embodiment of the naturalist program, a panphilosophy that promises to capture science, epistemology, language, and morals in one broad sweep of its connectionist net. 

physicalism: one of the twelve labours of Grice. in the widest sense of the term, materialism applied to the question of the nature of mind. So construed, physicalism is the thesis  call it ontological physicalism  that whatever exists or occurs is ultimately constituted out of physical entities. But sometimes ‘physicalism’ is used to refer to the thesis that whatever exists or occurs can be completely described in the vocabulary of physics. Such a view goes with either reductionism or eliminativism about the mental. Here reductionism is the view that psychological explanations, including explanations in terms of “folk-psychological” concepts such as those of belief and desire, are reducible to explanations formulable in a physical vocabulary, which in turn would imply that entities referred to in psychological explanations can be fully described in physical terms; and elminativism is the view that nothing corresponds to the terms in psychological explanations, and that the only correct explanations are in physical terms. The term ‘physicalism’ appears to have originated in the Vienna Circle, and the reductionist version initially favored there was a version of behaviorism: psychological statements were held to be translatable into behavioral statements, mainly hypothetical conditionals, expressible in a physical vocabulary. The psychophysical identity theory held by Herbert Feigl, Smart, and others, sometimes called type physicalism, is reductionist in a somewhat different sense. This holds that mental states and events are identical with neurophysiological states and events. While it denies that there can be analytic, meaning-preserving translations of mental statements into physicalistic ones, it holds that by means of synthetic “bridge laws,” identifying mental types with physical ones, mental statements can in principle be tr. into physicalistic ones with which they are at least nomologically equivalent if the terms in the bridge laws are rigid designators, the equivalence will be necessary. The possibility of such a translation is typically denied by functionalist accounts of mind, on the grounds that the same mental state may have indefinitely many different physical realizations, and sometimes on the grounds that it is logically possible, even if it never happens, that mental states should be realized non-physically. In his classic paper “The ‘mental’ and the ‘physical’ “ 8, Feigl distinguishes two senses of ‘physical’: ‘physical1’ and ‘physical2’. ‘Physical1’ is practically synonymous with ‘scientific’, applying to whatever is “an essential part of the coherent and adequate descriptive and explanatory account of the spatiotemporal world.” ‘Physical2’ refers to “the type of concepts and laws which suffice in principle for the explanation and prediction of inorganic processes.” It would seem that if Cartesian dualism were true, supposing that possible, then once an integrated science of the interaction of immaterial souls and material bodies had been developed, concepts for describing the former would count as physical1. Construed as an ontological doctrine, physicalism says that whatever exists or occurs is entirely constituted out of those entities that constitute inorganic things and processes. Construed as a reductionist or elminativist thesis about description and explanation, it is the claim that a vocabulary adequate for describing and explaining inorganic things and processes is adequate for describing and explaining whatever exists. While the second of these theses seems to imply the first, the first does not imply the second. It can be questioned whether the notion of a “full” description of what exists makes sense. And many ontological physicalists materialists hold that a reduction to explanations couched in the terminology of physics is impossible, not only in the case of psychological explanations but also in the case of explanations couched in the terminology of such special sciences as biology. Their objection to such reduction is not merely that a purely physical description of e.g. biological or psychological phenomena would be unwieldy; it is that such descriptions necessarily miss important laws and generalizations, ones that can only be formulated in terms of biological, psychological, etc., concepts. If ontological physicalists materialists are not committed to the reducibility of psychology to physics, neither are they committed to any sort of identity theory claiming that entities picked out by mental or psychological descriptions are identical to entities fully characterizable by physical descriptions. As already noted, materialists who are functionalists deny that there are typetype identities between mental entities and physical ones. And some deny that materialists are even committed to token-token identities, claiming that any psychological event could have had a different physical composition and so is not identical to any event individuated in terms of a purely physical taxonomy. 

physis, Grecian term for nature, primarily used to refer to the nature or essence of a living thing Aristotle, Metaphysics V.4. Physis is defined by Aristotle in Physics II.1 as a source of movement and rest that belongs to something in virtue of itself, and identified by him primarily with the form, rather than the matter, of the thing. The term is also used to refer to the natural world as a whole. Physis is often contrasted with techne, art; in ethics it is also contrasted with nomos, convention, e.g. by Callicles in Plato’s Gorgias 482e ff., who distinguishes natural from conventional justice. 

physiologicum: Oddly, among the twelve isms that attack Grice on his ascent to the city of eternal truth, there is Naturalism and Physicalism – but Roman natura is Grecian physis. In “Some remarks about the senses,” Grice distinguishes a physicalist identification of the senses (in terms of the different stimuli and the mechanisms that connects the organs to the brain) versus other criteria, notably one involving introspection and the nature of ‘experience’ – “providing,” he adds, that ‘seeing’ is an experience! Grice would use ‘natural,’ relying on the idea that it’s Grecian ‘physis.’ Liddell and Scott have “φύσις,” from “φύω,” and which they render as “origin.” the natural form or constitution of a person or thing as the result of growth, and hence nature, constitution, and nature as an originating power, “φ. λέγεται . . ὅθεν ἡ κίνησις ἡ πρώτη ἐν ἑκάστῳ τῶν φύσει ὄντων” Arist.Metaph.1014b16; concrete, the creation, 'Nature.’ Grice is casual in his use of ‘natural’ versus ‘non-natural’ in 1948 for the Oxford Philosophical Society. In later works, there’s a reference to naturalism, which is more serious. Refs.: The keyword should be ‘naturalism,’ but also Grice’s diatribes against ‘physicalism,’ and of course the ‘natural’ and ‘non-natural,’ BANC.

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

Piaget, Jean 60, Swiss psychologist and epistemologist who profoundly influenced questions, theories, and methods in the study of cognitive development. The philosophical interpretation and implications of his work, however, remain controversial. Piaget regarded himself as engaged in genetic epistemology, the study of what knowledge is through an empirical investigation of how our epistemic relations to objects are improved. Piaget hypothesized that our epistemic relations are constructed through the progressive organization of increasingly complex behavioral interactions with physical objects. The cognitive system of the adult is neither learned, in the Skinnerian sense, nor genetically preprogrammed. Rather, it results from the organization of specific interactions whose character is shaped both by the features of the objects interacted with a process called accommodation and by the current cognitive system of the child a process called assimilation. The tendency toward equilibrium results in a change in the nature of the interaction as well as in the cognitive system. Of particular importance for the field of cognitive development were Piaget’s detailed descriptions and categorizations of changes in the organization of the cognitive system from birth through adolescence. That work focused on changes in the child’s understanding of such things as space, time, cause, number, length, weight, and morality. Among his major works are The Child’s Conception of Number 1, Biology and Knowledge 7, Genetic Epistemology 0, and Psychology and Epistemology 0. 

Pico della Mirandola, G., philosopher who, in 1486, wrote a series of 900 theses which he hoped to dispute publicly in Rome. Thirteen of these were criticized by a papal commission. When Pico defended himself in his Apology, the pope condemned all 900 theses. Pico fled to France, but was briefly imprisoned there in 1488. On his release, he returned to Florence and devoted himself to private study. He hoped to write a Concord of Plato and Aristotle, but the only part he was able to complete was On Being and the One 1492, in which he uses Aquinas and Christianity to reconcile Plato’s and Aristotle’s views about God’s being and unity. He is often described as a syncretist, but in fact he made it clear that the truth of Christianity has priority over the prisca theologia or ancient wisdom found in the hermetic corpus and the cabala. Though he was interested in magic and astrology, he adopts a guarded attitude toward them in his Heptaplus 1489, which contains a mystical interpretation of Genesis; and in his Disputations Against Astrology, published posthumously, he rejects them both. The treatise is largely technical, and the question of human freedom is set aside as not directly relevant. This fact casts some doubt on the popular thesis that Pico’s philosophy was a celebration of man’s freedom and dignity. Great weight has been placed on Pico’s most famous work, On the Dignity of Man 1486. This is a short oration intended as an introduction to the disputation of his 900 theses, and the title was invented after his death. Pico has been interpreted as saying that man is set apart from the rest of creation, and is completely free to form his own nature. In fact, as the Heptaplus shows, Pico saw man as a microcosm containing elements of the angelic, celestial, and elemental worlds. Man is thus firmly within the hierarchy of nature, and is a bond and link between the worlds. In the oration, the emphasis on freedom is a moral one: man is free to choose between good and evil.

pilgrimage: Grice’s pilgrimage. In his pilgrimage towards what he calls the city of Eternal Truth he finds twelve perils – which he lists. The first is Extensionalism (as opposed to Intensionalism – vide intentum -- consequentes rem intellectam: intendere est essentialiter ipsum esse intentio ... quam a concepto sibi adequato: Odint 226; esse intentum est esse non reale: The second is Nominalism (opposite Realism and Conceptualism – Universalism, Abstractionism). It is funny that Grice was criticised for representing each of the perils!The third is Positivism. Opposite to Negativism. Just kidding.  Opposite to anything Sir Freddie Ayer was opposite to!The fourth is Naturalism. Opposite Non-Naturalism. Just joking! But that’s the hateful word brought by G. E. Moore, whom Grice liked (“Some like Witters, but Moore’s MY man.”) The fifth is Mechanism. Opposite Libertarianism, or Finalism, But I guess one likes Libertarianism.The sixth is Phenomenalism. You cannot oppose it to Physicalism, beause that comes next. So this is G. A. Paul (“Is there a problem about sense data?). And the opposite is anything this Scots philosopher was against!The seventh is Reductionism. Opposite Reductivism. Grice was proud to teach J. M. Rountree the distinction between a benevolent reductionist and a malignant eliminationist reductionist. The eighth is physicalism.Opposite metaphysicalism.  The ninth is materialism. Hyleism. Opposite Formalism. Or Immaterialism. The tenth is Empiricism. Opposite Rationalism. The eleventh is Scepticism.Opposite Dogmatism.and the twelfth is functionalism. Opposite Grice! So now let’s order the twelve perils alphabetically. Empiricism. Extensionalism. Functionalism. MaterialismMechanism. Naturalism. Nominalism. Phenomenalism. Positivism. Physicalism. Reductionism. Scepticism. Now let us see how they apply to the theory of the conversational implicaturum and conversation as rational cooperation. Empiricism – Grice is an avowed rationalist.Extensionalism – His main concern is that the predicate in the proposition which is communicated is void, we yield the counterintuitive result that an emissor who communicates that the S is V, where V is vacuous communicates the same thing he would be communicating for any other vacuous predicate V’Functionalism – There is a purely experiential qualia in some emissor communicating that p that is not covered by the common-or-garden variety of functionalism. E.g. “I love myself.” Materialism – rationalism means dealing with a realm of noumena which goes beyond materialismMechanism – rationalism entails end-setting unweighed finality and freedom. Naturalism – communication involves optimality which is beyond naturalism Nominalism – a predicate is an abstractum. Phenomenalism – there is realism which gives priority to the material thing, not the sense datum. A sense datum of an apple does not nourish us. Positivism – an emissor may communicate a value, which is not positivistically reduced to something verifiable. Physicalism – there must be multiple realization, and many things physicalists say sound ‘harsh’ to Grice’s ears (“Smith’s brain being in state C doesn’t have adequate evidence”). Reductionism – We are not eliminating anything. Scepticism – there are dogmas which are derived from paradigm cases, even sophisticated ones.How to introduce the twelve entriesEmpiricism – from Greek empereia – cf. etymology for English ‘experience.’Extensionalism -- extensumFunctionalism – functum. Materialism  -- Mechanism Naturalism Nominalism Phenomenalism Positivism Physicalism Reductionism Scepticism.  this section events are reviewed according to principal scenes of action. Place names appear in the order in which major incidents occur. City of Destruction. The city stands as a symbol of the entire world as it is, with all of its sins, corruptions, and sorrows. No one living there can have any hope of salvation. Convinced that the city is about to be blasted by the wrath of God, Christian flees and sets out alone on a pilgrimage which he hopes will lead him to Mount Zion, to the Celestial City, where he can enjoy eternal life in the happy company of God and the Heavenly Host. Slough of Despond. A swamp, a bog, a quagmire, the first obstacle in Christian's course. Pilgrims are apt to get mired down here by their doubts and fears. After much difficulty and with some providential help, Christian finally manages to flounder across the treacherous bog and is on his way again. Village of Morality. Near the village Christian meets Mr. Worldly Wiseman, who, though not religiously inclined, is a friendly and well-disposed person. He tells Christian that it would be foolish of him to continue his pilgrimage, the end of which could only be hunger, pain, and death. Christian should be a sensible fellow and settle down in the Village of Morality. It would be a good place to raise a family, for living was cheap there and they would have honest, well-behaved people as neighbors — people who lived by the Ten Commandments. More than a little tempted by this, Christian decides that he should at least have a look at Morality. But along the way he is stopped by his friend Evangelist, who berates him sharply for having listened to anything Mr. Worldly Wiseman might have to say. If Christian is seriously interested in saving his soul, he would be well advised to get back as quickly as possible on the path to the Wicket Gate which Evangelist had pointed out to him before. Wicket Gate. Arriving almost out of breath, Christian reads the sign on the gate: "Knock and it shall be opened unto you." He knocks a number of times before arousing the gatekeeper, a "grave person" named Good-will, who comes out to ask what Christian wants. After the latter has explained his mission, he is let through the gate, which opens on the Holy Way, a straight and narrow path leading toward the Celestial City. Christian asks if he can now be relieved of the heavy burden — a sack filled with his sins and woes — that he has been carrying on his back for so long. Good-will replies that he cannot help him, but that if all goes well, Christian will be freed of his burden in due course. Interpreter's House. On Good-will's advice, Christian makes his first stop at the large house of Interpreter, a character symbolizing the Holy Spirit. Interpreter shows his guest a number of "excellent things." These include a portrait of the ideal pastor with the Bible in his hand and a crown of gold on his head; a dusty parlor which is like the human heart before it is cleansed with the Gospel; a sinner in an iron cage, an apostate doomed to suffer the torments of Hell through all eternity; a wall with a fire burning against it. A figure (the Devil himself) is busily throwing water on the fire to put it out. But he would never succeed, Interpreter explains, because the fire represents the divine spirit in the human heart and a figure on the far side of the wall keeps the fire burning brightly by secretly pouring oil on it — "the oil of Christ's Grace." The Cross. Beyond Interpreter's House, Christian comes to the Cross, which stands on higher ground beside the Holy Way. Below it, at the foot of the gentle slope, is an open sepulcher. When Christian stops by the Cross, the burden on his back suddenly slips from his shoulders, rolls down the slope, and falls into the open sepulcher, to be seen no more. As Christian stands weeping with joy, three Shining Ones (angels) appear. They tell him all his sins are now forgiven, give him bright new raiment to replace his old ragged clothes, and hand him a parchment, "a Roll with a seal upon it." For his edification and instruction, Christian is to read the Roll as he goes along, and when he reaches the Pearly Gates, he is to present it as his credentials a sort of passport to Heaven, as it were. Difficulty Hill. The Holy Way beyond the Cross is fenced in with a high wall on either side. The walls have been erected to force all aspiring Pilgrims to enter the Holy Way in the proper manner, through the Wicket Gate. As Christian is passing along, two men — Formalist and Hypocrisy — climb over the wall and drop down beside him. Christian finds fault with this and gives the wall-jumpers a lecture on the dangers of trying shortcuts. They have been successfully taking shortcuts all their lives, the intruders reply, and all will go well this time. Not too pleased with his company, Christian proceeds with Hypocrisy and Formalist to the foot of Difficulty Hill, where three paths join and they must make a choice. One path goes straight ahead up the steep slope of the hill; another goes around the base of the hill to the right; the third, around the hill to the left. Christian argues that the right path is the one leading straight ahead up Difficulty Hill. Not liking the prospect of much exertion, Formalist and Hypocrisy decide to take the easier way on the level paths going around the hill. Both get lost and perish. Halfway up Difficulty Hill, so steep in places that he has to inch forward on hands and knees, Christian comes to a pleasant arbor provided for the comfort of weary Pilgrims. Sitting down to rest, Christian reaches into his blouse and takes out his precious Roll. While reading it, he drops off to sleep, being awakened when he hears a voice saying sternly: "Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise." Jumping up, Christian makes with all speed to the top of the hill, where he meets two Pilgrims coming toward him — Timorous and Mistrust. They have been up ahead, they say, and there are lions there. They are giving up their pilgrimage and returning home, and unsuccessfully try to persuade Christian to come with them. Their report about the lions disturbs Christian, who reaches into his blouse to get his Roll so that he may read it and be comforted. To his consternation, the Roll is not there. Carefully searching along the way, Christian retraces his steps to the arbor, where, as he recalls, he had been reading the Roll when he allowed himself to doze off in "sinful sleep." Not finding his treasure immediately, he sits down and weeps, considering himself utterly undone by his carelessness in losing "his pass into the Celestial City." When in deepest despair, he chances to see something lying half-covered in the grass. It is his precious Roll, which he tucks away securely in his blouse. Having offered a prayer of thanks "to God for directing his eye to the place where it lay," Christian wearily climbs back to the top of Difficulty Hill. From there he sees a stately building and as it is getting on toward dark, hastens there. Palace Beautiful. A narrow path leads off the Holy Way to the lodge in front of Palace Beautiful. Starting up the path, Christian sees two lions, stops, and turns around as if to retreat. The porter at the lodge, Watchful, who has been observing him, calls out that there is nothing to be afraid of if one has faith. The lions are chained, one on either side of the path, and anyone with faith can pass safely between them if he keeps carefully to the middle of the path, which Christian does. Arriving at the lodge, he asks if he can get lodging for the night. The porter, Watchful, replies that he will find out from those in charge of Palace Beautiful. Soon, four virgins come out to the lodge, all of them "grave and beautiful damsels": Discretion, Prudence, Piety, and Charity. Satisfied with Christian's answers to their questions, they invite him in, introduce him to the rest of the family, serve him supper, and assign him to a beautiful bedroom — Peace — for the night. Next morning, the virgins show him the "rarities" of the place: First, the library, filled with ancient documents dating back to the beginning of time; next, the armory, packed with swords, shields, helmets, breastplates, and other things sufficient to equip all servants of the Lord, even if they were as numerous as the stars in the sky. Leading their guest to the roof of the palace, the virgins point to mountains in the distance — the Delectable Mountains, which lie on the way to the Celestial City. Before allowing Christian to depart, the virgins give him arms and armor to protect himself during the next stretch of his journey, which they warn will be dangerous. Valley of Humiliation. Here Christian is attacked and almost overcome by a "foul fiend" named Apollyon — a hideous monster with scales like a fish, wings like a dragon, mouth like a lion, and feet like a bear; flames and smoke belch out of a hole in his belly. Christian, after a painful struggle, wounds the fiend with his sword and drives him off. Valley of the Shadow of Death. This is a wilderness, a land of deserts and pits, inhabited only by yowling hobgoblins and other dreadful creatures. The path here is very narrow, edged on one side by a deep, water-filled ditch in which many have drowned; on the other side, by a treacherous bog. Walking carefully, Christian goes on and soon finds himself close to the open mouth of Hell, the Burning Pit, out of which comes a cloud of noxious fumes, long fingers of fire, showers of sparks, and hideous noises. With flames flickering all around and smoke almost choking him, Christian manages to get through by use of "All-prayer." Nearing the end of the valley, he hears a shout raised by someone up ahead: "Though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I will fear none ill, for Thou art with me." As only a Pilgrim could have raised that cry, Christian hastens forward to see who it might be. To his surprise and delight he finds that it is an old friend, Faithful, one of his neighbors in the City of Destruction. Vanity Fair. Happily journeying together, exchanging stories about their adventures and misadventures, the two Pilgrims come to the town of Vanity Fair, through which they must pass. Interested only in commerce and money-making, the town holds a year-round fair at which all kinds of things are bought and sold — "houses, lands, trades, titles, . . . lusts, pleasures, . . . bodies, souls, silver, gold, pearls, precious stones, and what not." Christian and Faithful infuriate the merchandisers by turning up their noses at the wares offered them, saying that they would buy nothing but the Truth. Their presence and their attitude cause a hubbub in the town, which leads the authorities to jail them for disturbing the peace. The prisoners conduct themselves so well that they win the sympathy of many townspeople, producing more strife and commotion in the streets, and the prisoners are held responsible for this, too, though they have done nothing. It is decided to indict them on the charge of disrupting trade, creating dissension, and treating with contempt the customs and laws laid down for the town by its prince, old Beelzebub himself. Brought to trial first, Faithful is convicted and sentenced to be executed in the manner prescribed by the presiding judge, Lord Hate-good. The hapless Faithful is scourged, brutally beaten, lanced with knives, stoned, and then burned to ashes at the stake. Thus, he becomes another of the Christian martyrs assured of enjoying eternal bliss up on high. Doubting Castle and Giant Despair. In a manner only vaguely explained, Christian gets free and goes on his way — but not alone, for he has been joined by Hopeful, a native of Vanity Fair who is fleeing in search of better things. After a few minor adventures, the two reach a sparkling stream, the River of the Water of Life, which meanders through beautiful meadows bright with flowers. For a time the Holy Way follows the river bank but then veers off into rougher ground which is hard on the sore tired feet of the travelers. Wishing there were an easier way, they plod along until they come to another meadow behind a high fence. Having climbed the fence to have a look, Christian persuades Hopeful that they should move over into By-path Meadow, where there is a soft grassy path paralleling theirs. Moving along, they catch up with Vain-confidence, who says that he is bound for the Celestial City and knows the way perfectly. Night comes on, but he continues to push ahead briskly, with Christian and Hopeful following. Suddenly, the latter hear a frightened cry and a loud thud. Vain-confidence has been dashed to pieces by falling into a deep pit dug by the owner of the meadow. Christian and Hopeful retreat, but as they can see nothing in the dark, they decide to lie down in the meadow to pass the night. Next morning, they are surprised and seized by the prince of By-path Meadow, a giant named Despair. Charging them with malicious trespassing, he hauls them to his stronghold, Doubting Castle, and throws them into a deep dark dungeon, where they lie for days without food or drink. At length, Giant Despair appears, beats them almost senseless, and advises them to take their own lives so that he will not have to come back to finish them off himself. When all seems hopeless, Christian suddenly brightens up, "as one half amazed," and exclaims: "What a fool am I, thus to lie in a stinking dungeon when I may as well walk at liberty. I have a key in my bosom called Promise which will (I am persuaded) open any lock in Doubting Castle." Finding that the magic key works, the prisoners are soon out in the open and running as fast as they can to get back onto the Holy Way, where they erect a sign warning other Pilgrims against being tempted by the apparent ease of traveling by way of By-path Meadow. Delectable Mountains. Christian and Hopeful next come to the Delectable Mountains, where they find gardens, orchards, vineyards, and fountains of water. Four shepherds — Experience, Knowledge, Watchful, and Sincere — come to greet them, telling them that the mountains are the Lord's, as are the flocks of sheep grazing there. Having been escorted around the mountains and shown the sights there, the two Pilgrims on the eve of their departure receive from the shepherds a paper instructing them on what to do and what to avoid on the journey ahead. For one thing, they should not lie down and sleep in the Enchanted Ground, for that would be fatal. Country of Beulah. This is a happy land where the sun shines day and night, flowers bloom continuously, and the sweet and pleasant air is filled with bird-song. There is no lack of grain and wine. Christian and Hopeful stop to rest and enjoy themselves here, pleased that the Celestial City is now within sight, which leads them to assume that the way there is now clear. Dark River. Proceeding, they are amazed when they come to the Dark River, a wide, swift-flowing stream. They look around for a bridge or boat on which to cross. A Shining One appears and tells them that they must make their way across as best they can, that fording the river is a test of faith, that those with faith have nothing to fear. Wading into the river, Hopeful finds firm footing, but Christian does not He is soon floundering in water over his head, fearing that he will be drowned, that he will never see "the land that flows with milk and honey." Hopeful helps Christian by holding his head above water, and the two finally achieve the crossing. Celestial City. On the far side of the river, two Shining Ones are waiting for the Pilgrims and take them by the arm to assist them in climbing the steep slope to the Celestial City, which stands on a "mighty hill . . . higher than the clouds." Coming to the gate of the city, built all of precious stones, Christian and Hopeful present their credentials, which are taken to the King (God). He orders the gate to be opened, and the two weary but elated Pilgrims go in, to find that the streets are paved with gold and that along them walk many men with crowns on their heads and golden harps in their hands.

Plantinga, Alvin b.2, one of the most important twentieth-century  philosophers of religion. His ideas have determined the direction of debate in many aspects of the discipline. He has also contributed substantially to analytic epistemology and the metaphysics of modality. Plantinga is currently director of the Center for Philosophy of Religion and John O’Brien Professor of Philosophy at the  of Notre Dame. Plantinga’s philosophy of religion has centered on the epistemology of religious belief. His God and Other Minds 7 introduced a defining claim of his career  that belief in God may be rational even if it is not supported by successful arguments from natural theology. This claim was fully developed in a series of articles published in the 0s, in which he argued for the position he calls “Reformed Epistemology.” Borrowing from the work of theologians such as Calvin, Bavinck, and Barth, Plantinga reasoned that theistic belief is “properly basic,” justified not by other beliefs but by immediate experience. This position was most thoroughly treated in his article “Reason and Belief in God” Plantinga and Wolterstorff, eds., Faith and Rationality, 3. In early work Plantinga assumed an internalist view of epistemic justification. Later he moved to externalism, arguing that basic theistic belief would count as knowledge if true and appropriately produced. He developed this approach in “Justification and Theism” Faith and Philosophy, 7. These ideas led to the development of a full-scale externalist epistemological theory, first presented in his 9 Gifford Lectures and later published in the two-volume set Warrant: The Current Debate and Warrant and Proper Function 3. This theory has become the focal point of much contemporary debate in analytic epistemology. Plantinga is also a leading theorist in the metaphysics of modality. The Nature of Necessity 4 developed a possible worlds semantics that has become standard in the literature. His analysis of possible worlds as maximally consistent states of affairs offers a realist compromise between nominalist and extreme reificationist conceptions. In the last two chapters, Plantinga brings his modal metaphysics to bear on two classical topics in the philosophy of religion. He presented what many consider the definitive version of the free will defense against the argument from evil and a modal version of the ontological argument that may have produced more response than any version since Anselm’s original offering. 

Platonic -- H. P. Grice as a Platonian commentator – vide his “Metaphysics, Philosophical Eschatology, and Plato’s Republic” -- commentaries on Plato, a term designating the works in the tradition of commentary hypomnema on Plato that may go back to the Old Academy Crantor is attested by Proclus to have been the first to have “commented” on the Timaeus. More probably, the tradition arises in the first century B.C. in Alexandria, where we find Eudorus commenting, again, on the Timaeus, but possibly also if the scholars who attribute to him the Anonymous Theaetetus Commentary are correct on the Theaetetus. It seems also as if the Stoic Posidonius composed a commentary of some sort on the Timaeus. The commentary form such as we can observe in the biblical commentaries of Philo of Alexandria owes much to the Stoic tradition of commentary on Homer, as practiced by the second-century B.C. School of Pergamum. It was normal to select usually consecutive portions of text lemmata for general, and then detailed, comment, raising and answering “problems” aporiai, refuting one’s predecessors, and dealing with points of both doctrine and philology. By the second century A.D. the tradition of Platonic commentary was firmly established. We have evidence of commentaries by the Middle Platonists Gaius, Albinus, Atticus, Numenius, and Cronius, mainly on the Timaeus, but also on at least parts of the Republic, as well as a work by Atticus’s pupil Herpocration of Argos, in twentyfour books, on Plato’s work as a whole. These works are all lost, but in the surviving works of Plutarch we find exegesis of parts of Plato’s works, such as the creation of the soul in the Timaeus 35a36d. The Latin commentary of Calcidius fourth century A.D. is also basically Middle Platonic. In the Neoplatonic period after Plotinus, who did not indulge in formal commentary, though many of his essays are in fact informal commentaries, we have evidence of much more comprehensive exegetic activity. Porphyry initiated the tradition with commentaries on the Phaedo, commentaries on Plato commentaries on Plato 160   160 Cratylus, Sophist, Philebus, Parmenides of which the surviving anonymous fragment of commentary is probably a part, and the Timaeus. He also commented on the myth of Er in the Republic. It seems to have been Porphyry who is responsible for introducing the allegorical interpretation of the introductory portions of the dialogues, though it was only his follower Iamblichus who also commented on all the above dialogues, as well as the Alcibiades and the Phaedrus who introduced the principle that each dialogue should have only one central theme, or skopos. The tradition was carried on in the Athenian School by Syrianus and his pupils Hermeias on the Phaedrus  surviving and Proclus Alcibiades, Cratylus, Timaeus, Parmenides  all surviving, at least in part, and continued in later times by Damascius Phaedo, Philebus, Parmenides and Olympiodorus Alcibiades, Phaedo, Gorgias  also surviving, though sometimes only in the form of pupils’ notes. These commentaries are not now to be valued primarily as expositions of Plato’s thought though they do contain useful insights, and much valuable information; they are best regarded as original philosophical treatises presented in the mode of commentary, as is so much of later Grecian philosophy, where it is not originality but rather faithfulness to an inspired master and a great tradition that is being striven for. 

Platonism Platonism -- Damascius c.462c.550, Grecian Neoplatonist philosopher, last head of the Athenian Academy before its closure by Justinian in A.D. 529. Born probably in Damascus, he studied first in Alexandria, and then moved to Athens shortly before Proclus’s death in 485. He returned to Alexandria, where he attended the lectures of Ammonius, but came back again to Athens in around 515, to assume the headship of the Academy. After the closure, he retired briefly with some other philosophers, including Simplicius, to Persia, but left after about a year, probably for Syria, where he died. He composed many works, including a life of his master Isidorus, which survives in truncated form; commentaries on Aristotle’s Categories, On the Heavens, and Meteorologics I all lost; commentaries on Plato’s Alcibiades, Phaedo, Philebus, and Parmenides, which survive; and a surviving treatise On First Principles. His philosophical system is a further elaboration of the scholastic Neoplatonism of Proclus, exhibiting a great proliferation of metaphysical entities.  Platonism -- Eudoxus, 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.  Plato: preeminent Grecian philosopher whose chief contribution consists in his conception of the observable world as an imperfect image of a realm of unobservable and unchanging “Forms,” and his conception of the best life as one centered on the love of these divine objects. Life and influences. Born in Athens to a politically powerful and aristocratic family, Plato came under the influence of Socrates during his youth and set aside his ambitions for a political career after Socrates was executed for impiety. His travels in southern Italy and Sicily brought him into closer contact with the followers of Pythagoras, whose research in mathematics played an important role in his intellectual development. He was also acquainted with Cratylus, a follower of Heraclitus, and was influenced by their doctrine that the world is in constant flux. He wrote in opposition to the relativism of Protagoras and the purely materialistic mode of explanation adopted by Democritus. At the urging of a devoted follower, Dion, he became involved in the politics of Syracuse, the wealthiest city of the Grecian world, but his efforts to mold the ideas of its tyrant, Dionysius II, were unmitigated failures. These painful events are described in Plato’s Letters Epistles, the longest and most important of which is the Seventh Letter, and although the authenticity of the Letters is a matter of controversy, there is little doubt that the author was well acquainted with Plato’s life. After returning from his first visit to Sicily in 387, Plato established the Academy, a fraternal association devoted to research and teaching, and named after the sacred site on the outskirts of Athens where it was located. As a center for political training, it rivaled the school of Isocrates, which concentrated entirely on rhetoric. The bestknown student of the Academy was Aristotle, who joined at the age of seventeen when Plato was sixty and remained for twenty years. Chronology of the works. Plato’s works, many of which take the form of dialogues between Socrates and several other speakers, were composed over a period of about fifty years, and this has led scholars to seek some pattern of philosophical development in them. Increasingly sophisticated stylometric tests have been devised to calculate the linguistic similarities among the dialogues. Ancient sources indicate that the Laws was Plato’s last work, and there is now consensus that many affinities exist between the style of this work and several others, which can therefore also be safely regarded as late works; these include the Sophist, Statesman, and Philebus perhaps written in that order. Stylometric tests also support a rough division of Plato’s other works into early and middle periods. For example, the Apology, Charmides, Crito, Euthyphro, Hippias Minor, Ion, Laches, and Protagoras listed alphabetically are widely thought to be early; while the Phaedo, Symposium, Republic, and Phaedrus perhaps written in that order are agreed to belong to his middle period. But in some cases it is difficult or impossible to tell which of two works belonging to the same general period preceded the other; this is especially true of the early dialogues. The most controversial chronological question concerns the Timaeus: stylometric tests often place it with the later dialogues, though some scholars think that its philosophical doctrines are discarded in the later dialogues, and they therefore assign it to Plato’s middle period. The underlying issue is whether he abandoned some of the main doctrines of this middle period. Early and middle dialogues. The early dialogues typically portray an encounter between Socrates and an interlocutor who complacently assumes that he understands a common evaluative concept like courage, piety, or beauty. For example, Euthyphro, in the dialogue that bears his name, denies that there is any impiety in prosecuting his father, but repeated questioning by Socrates shows that he cannot say what single thing all pious acts have in common by virtue of which they are rightly called pious. Socrates professes to have no answer to these “What is X?” questions, and this fits well with the claim he makes in the Apology that his peculiarly human form of wisdom consists in realizing how little he knows. In these early dialogues, Socrates seeks but fails to find a philosophically defensible theory that would ground our use of normative terms. The Meno is similar to these early dialogues  it asks what virtue is, and fails to find an answer  but it goes beyond them and marks a transition in Plato’s thinking. It raises for the first time a question about methodology: if one does not have knowledge, how is it possible to acquire it simply by raising the questions Socrates poses in the early dialogues? To show that it is possible, Plato demonstrates that even a slave ignorant of geometry can begin to learn the subject through questioning. The dialogue then proposes an explanation of our ability to learn in this way: the soul acquired knowledge before it entered the body, and when we learn we are really recollecting what we once knew and forgot. This bold speculation about the soul and our ability to learn contrasts with the noncommittal position Socrates takes in the Apology, where he is undecided whether the dead lose all consciousness or continue their activities in Hades. The confidence in immortality evident in the Meno is bolstered by arguments given in the Phaedo, Republic, and Phaedrus. In these dialogues, Plato uses metaphysical considerations about the nature of the soul and its ability to learn to support a conception of what the good human life is. Whereas the Socrates of the early dialogues focuses almost exclusively on ethical questions and is pessimistic about the extent to which we can answer them, Plato, beginning with the Meno and continuing throughout the rest of his career, confidently asserts that we can answer Socratic questions if we pursue ethical and metaphysical inquiries together. The Forms. The Phaedo is the first dialogue in which Plato decisively posits the existence of the abstract objects that he often called “Forms” or “Ideas.” The latter term should be used with caution, since these objects are not creations of a mind, but exist independently of thought; the singular Grecian terms Plato often uses to name these abstract objects are eidos and idea. These Forms are eternal, changeless, and incorporeal; since they are imperceptible, we can come to have knowledge of them only through thought. Plato insists that it would be an error to identify two equal sticks with what Equality itself is, or beautiful bodies with what Beauty itself is; after all, he says, we might mistakenly take two equal sticks to be unequal, but we would never suffer from the delusion that Equality itself is unequal. The unchanging and incorporeal Form is the sort of object that is presupposed by Socratic inquiry; what every pious act has in common with every other is that it bears a certain relationship  called “participation”  to one and the same thing, the Form of Piety. In this sense, what makes a pious act pious and a pair of equal sticks equal are the Forms Piety and Equality. When we call sticks equal or acts pious, we are implicitly appealing to a standard of equality or piety, just as someone appeals to a standard when she says that a painted portrait of someone is a man. Of course, the pigment on the canvas is not a man; rather, it is properly called a man because it bears a certain relationship to a very different sort of object. In precisely this way, Plato claims that the Forms are what many of our words refer to, even though they are radically different sorts of objects from the ones revealed to the senses. For Plato the Forms are not merely an unusual item to be added to our list of existing objects. Rather, they are a source of moral and religious inspiration, and their discovery is therefore a decisive turning point in one’s life. This process is described by a fictional priestess named Diotima in the Symposium, a dialogue containing a series of speeches in praise of love and concluding with a remarkable description of the passionate response Socrates inspired in Alcibiades, his most notorious admirer. According to Diotima’s account, those who are in love are searching for something they do not yet understand; whether they realize it or not, they seek the eternal possession of the good, and they can obtain it only through productive activity of some sort. Physical love perpetuates the species and achieves a lower form of immortality, but a more beautiful kind of offspring is produced by those who govern cities and shape the moral characteristics of future generations. Best of all is the kind of love that eventually attaches itself to the Form of Beauty, since this is the most beautiful of all objects and provides the greatest happiness to the lover. One develops a love for this Form by ascending through various stages of emotional attachment and understanding. Beginning with an attraction to the beauty of one person’s body, one gradually develops an appreciation for the beauty present in all other beautiful bodies; then one’s recognition of the beauty in people’s souls takes on increasing strength, and leads to a deeper attachment to the beauty of customs, laws, and systems of knowledge; and this process of emotional growth and deepening insight eventually culminates in the discovery of the eternal and changeless beauty of Beauty itself. Plato’s theory of erotic passion does not endorse “Platonic love,” if that phrase designates a purely spiritual relationship completely devoid of physical attraction or expression. What he insists on is that desires for physical contact be restrained so that they do not subvert the greater good that can be accomplished in human relationships. His sexual orientation like that of many of his Athenian contemporaries is clearly homosexual, and he values the moral growth that can occur when one man is physically attracted to another, but in Book I of the Laws he condemns genital activity when it is homosexual, on the ground that such activity should serve a purely procreative purpose. Plato’s thoughts about love are further developed in the Phaedrus. The lover’s longing for and physical attraction to another make him disregard the norms of commonplace and dispassionate human relationships: love of the right sort is therefore one of four kinds of divine madness. This fourfold classificatory scheme is then used as a model of proper methodology. Starting with the Phaedrus, classification  what Plato calls the “collection and division of kinds”  becomes the principal method to be used by philosophers, and this approach is most fully employed in such late works as the Sophist, Statesman, and Philebus. Presumably it contributed to Aristotle’s interest in categories and biological classification. The Republic. The moral and metaphysical theory centered on the Forms is most fully developed in the Republic, a dialogue that tries to determine whether it is in one’s own best interests to be a just person. It is commonly assumed that injustice pays if one can get away with it, and that just behavior merely serves the interests of others. Plato attempts to show that on the contrary justice, properly understood, is so great a good that it is worth any sacrifice. To support this astonishing thesis, he portrays an ideal political community: there we will see justice writ large, and so we will be better able to find justice in the individual soul. An ideal city, he argues, must make radical innovations. It should be ruled by specially trained philosophers, since their understanding of the Form of the Good will give them greater insight into everyday affairs. Their education is compared to that of a prisoner who, having once gazed upon nothing but shadows in the artificial light of a cave, is released from bondage, leaves the cave, eventually learns to see the sun, and is thereby equipped to return to the cave and see the images there for what they are. Everything in the rulers’ lives is designed to promote their allegiance to the community: they are forbidden private possessions, their sexual lives are regulated by eugenic considerations, and they are not to know who their children are. Positions of political power are open to women, since the physical differences between them and men do not in all cases deprive them of the intellectual or moral capacities needed for political office. The works of poets are to be carefully regulated, for the false moral notions of the traditional poets have had a powerful and deleterious impact on the general public. Philosophical reflection is to replace popular poetry as the force that guides moral education. What makes this city ideally just, according to Plato, is the dedication of each of its components to one task for which it is naturally suited and specially trained. The rulers are ideally equipped to rule; the soldiers are best able to enforce their commands; and the economic class, composed of farmers, craftsmen, builders, and so on, are content to do their work and to leave the tasks of making and enforcing the laws to others. Accordingly what makes the soul of a human being just is the same principle: each of its components must properly perform its own task. The part of us that is capable of understanding and reasoning is the part that must rule; the assertive part that makes us capable of anger and competitive spirit must give our understanding the force it needs; and our appetites for food and sex must be trained so that they seek only those objects that reason approves. It is not enough to educate someone’s reason, for unless the emotions and appetites are properly trained they will overpower it. Just individuals are those who have fully integrated these elements of the soul. They do not unthinkingly follow a list of rules; rather, their just treatment of others flows from their own balanced psychological condition. And the paradigm of a just person is a philosopher, for reason rules when it becomes passionately attached to the most intelligible objects there are: the Forms. It emerges that justice pays because attachment to these supremely valuable objects is part of what true justice of the soul is. The worth of our lives depends on the worth of the objects to which we devote ourselves. Those who think that injustice pays assume that wealth, domination, or the pleasures of physical appetite are supremely valuable; their mistake lies in their limited conception of what sorts of objects are worth loving. Late dialogues. The Republic does not contain Plato’s last thoughts on moral or metaphysical matters. For example, although he continues to hold in his final work, the Laws, that the family and private wealth should ideally be abolished, he describes in great detail a second-best community that retains these and many other institutions of ordinary political life. The sovereignty of law in such a state is stressed continually; political offices are to be filled by elections and lots, and magistrates are subject to careful scrutiny and prosecution. Power is divided among several councils and offices, and philosophical training is not a prerequisite for political participation. This second-best state is still worlds apart from a modern liberal democracy  poetic works and many features of private life are carefully regulated, and atheism is punished with death  but it is remarkable that Plato, after having made no concessions to popular participation in the Republic, devoted so much energy to finding a proper place for it in his final work. Plato’s thoughts about metaphysics also continued to evolve, and perhaps the most serious problem in interpreting his work as a whole is the problem of grasping the direction of these further developments. One notorious obstacle to understanding his later metaphysics is presented by the Parmenides, for here we find an unanswered series of criticisms of the theory of Forms. For example, it is said that if there is reason to posit one Form of Largeness to select an arbitrary example then there is an equally good reason to posit an unlimited number of Forms of this type. The “first” Form of Largeness must exist because according to Plato whenever a number of things are large, there is a Form of Largeness that makes them large; but now, the argument continues, if we consider this Form together with the other large things, we should recognize still another Form, which makes the large things and Largeness itself large. The argument can be pursued indefinitely, but it seems absurd that there should be an unlimited number of Forms of this one type. In antiquity the argument was named the Third Man, because it claims that in addition to a second type of object called “man”  the Form of Man  there is even a third. What is Plato’s response to this and other objections to his theory? He says in the Parmenides that we must continue to affirm the existence of such objects, for language and thought require them; but instead of responding directly to the criticisms, he embarks on a prolonged examination of the concept of unity, reaching apparently conflicting conclusions about it. Whether these contradictions are merely apparent and whether this treatment of unity contains a response to the earlier critique of the Forms are difficult matters of interpretation. But in any case it is clear that Plato continues to uphold the existence of unchanging realities; the real difficulty is whether and how he modifies his earlier views about them. In the Timaeus, there seem to be no modifications at all  a fact that has led some scholars to believe, in spite of some stylometric evidence to the contrary, that this work was written before Plato composed the critique of the Forms in the Parmenides. This dialogue presents an account of how a divine but not omnipotent craftsman transformed the disorderly materials of the universe into a harmonious cosmos by looking to the unchanging Forms as paradigms and creating, to the best of his limited abilities, constantly fluctuating images of those paradigms. The created cosmos is viewed as a single living organism governed by its own divinely intelligent soul; time itself came into existence with the cosmos, being an image of the timeless nature of the Forms; space, however, is not created by the divine craftsman but is the characterless receptacle in which all change takes place. The basic ingredients of the universe are not earth, air, fire, and water, as some thinkers held; rather, these elements are composed of planes, which are in turn made out of elementary triangular shapes. The Timaeus is an attempt to show that although many other types of objects besides the Forms must be invoked in order to understand the orderly nature of the changing universe  souls, triangles, space  the best scientific explanations will portray the physical world as a purposeful and very good approximation to a perfect pattern inherent in these unchanging and eternal objects. But Forms do not play as important a role in the Philebus, a late dialogue that contains Plato’s fullest answer to the question, What is the good? He argues that neither pleasure not intelligence can by itself be identified with the good, since no one would be satisfied with a life that contained just one of these but totally lacked the other. Instead, goodness is identified with proportion, beauty, and truth; and intelligence is ranked a superior good to pleasure because of its greater kinship to these three. Here, as in the middle dialogues, Plato insists that a proper understanding of goodness requires a metaphysical grounding. To evaluate the role of pleasure in human life, we need a methodology that applies to all other areas of understanding. More specifically, we must recognize that everything can be placed in one of four categories: the limited, the unlimited, the mixture of these two, and the intelligent creation of this mixture. Where Forms are to be located in this scheme is unclear. Although metaphysics is invoked to answer practical questions, as in the Republic, it is not precisely the same metaphysics as before. Though we naturally think of Plato primarily as a writer of philosophical works, he regards the written word as inferior to spoken interchange as an instrument for learning and teaching. The drawbacks inherent in written composition are most fully set forth in the Phaedrus. There is no doubt that in the Academy he participated fully in philosophical debate, and on at least one occasion he lectured to a general audience. We are told by Aristoxenus, a pupil of Aristotle, that many in Plato’s audience were baffled and disappointed by a lecture in which he maintained that Good is one. We can safely assume that in conversation Plato put forward important philosophical ideas that nonetheless did not find their way into his writings. Aristotle refers in Physics IV.2 to one of Plato’s doctrines as unwritten, and the enigmatic positions he ascribes to Plato in Metaphysics I.6  that the Forms are to be explained in terms of number, which are in turn generated from the One and the dyad of great and small  seem to have been expounded solely in discussion. Some scholars have put great weight on the statement in the Seventh Letter that the most fundamental philosophical matters must remain unwritten, and, using later testimony about Plato’s unwritten doctrines, they read the dialogues as signs of a more profound but hidden truth. The authenticity of the Seventh Letter is a disputed question, however. In any case, since Aristotle himself treats the middle and late dialogues as undissembling accounts of Plato’s philosophy, we are on firm ground in adopting the same approach. 

playgroup: The motivation for the three playgroups were different. Austin’s first playgroup was for fun. Grice never attended. Austin’s new playgroup, or ‘second’ playgroup, if you must, was a sobriquet Grice gave because it was ANYTHING BUT. Grice’s playgroup upon Austin’s death was for fun, like the ‘first’ playgroup. Since Grice participated in the second and third, he expanded. The second playgroup was for ‘philosophical hacks’ who needed ‘para-philosophy.’ The third playgroup was for fun fun. While Austin belonged to the first and the second playgroups, there were notorious differences. In the first playgroup, he was not the master, and his resentment towards Ayer can be seen in “Sense and Sensibilia.” The second playgroup had Austin as the master. It is said that the playgroup survived Austin’s demise with Grice’s leadership – But Grice’s playgroup was still a different thing – some complained about the disorderly and rambling nature – Austin had kept a very tidy organisation and power structure. Since Grice does NOT mention his own playgroup, it is best to restrict playgroup as an ironic sobriquet by Grice to anything but a playgroup, conducted after the war by Austin, by invitation only, to full-time university lecturers in philosophy. Austin would hold a central position, and Austin’s motivation was to ‘reach’ agreement. Usually, when agreement was not reached, Austin could be pretty impolite. Grice found himself IN THE PLAYGROUP. He obviously preferred a friendlier atmosphere, as his own group later testified. But he was also involved in philosophical activity OTHER than the play group. Notably his joint endeavours with Strawson, Warnock, Pears, and Thomson. For some reason he chose each for a specific area: Warnock for the philosophy of perception (Grice’s implicaturum is that he would not explore meta-ethics with Warnock – he wouldn’t feel like, nor Warnock would). Philosophy of action of all things, with J. F. Thomson. Philosophical psychology with D. F. Pears – so this brings Pears’s observations on intending, deciding, predicting, to the fore. And ontology with P. F. Strawson. Certainlty he would not involve with Strawson on endless disagreements about the alleged divergence or lack thereof between truth-functional devices and their vernacular counterparts! Grice also mentions collaboration with Austin in teaching – “an altogether flintier experience,” as Warnock knows and “Grice can testify.” – There was joint seminars with A. M. Quinton, and a few others. One may add the tutorials. Some of his tutees left Griceian traces: A. G. N. Flew, David Bostock, J. L. Ackrill, T. C. Potts.  The term was meant ironically. The playgroup activities smack of military or civil service!  while this can be safely called Grice’s playgroup, it was founded by Austin at All Souls, where it had only seven members. After the war, Grice joined in. The full list is found elsewhere. With Austin’s death, Grice felt the responsibility to continue with it, and plus, he enjoyed it! In alphabetical order. It is this group that made history.  J. L. Austin, A. G. N. Flew, P. L. Gardiner, H. P. Grice, S. N. Hampshire, R. M. Hare, H. L. A. Hart,  P. H. Nowell-Smith, G. A. Paul, D. F. Pears, P. F. Strawson, J. F. Thomson, J. O. Urmson, G. J. Warnock, A. D. Woozley. Grice distinguishes it very well from Ryle’s group, and the group of neo-Wittgensteinians. And those three groups were those only involved with ‘ordinary language.’

Plekhanov, Georgy Valentinovich 18568, a leading theoretician of the Russian revolutionary movement and the father of Russian Marxism. Exiled from his native Russia for most of his adult life, in 3 he founded in Switzerland the first Russian Marxist association  the Emancipation of Labor, a forerunner of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ party. In philosophy he sought to systematize and disseminate the outlook of Marx and Engels, for which he popularized the name ‘dialectical materialism’. For the most part an orthodox Marxist in his understanding of history, Plekhanov argued that historical developments cannot be diverted or accelerated at will; he believed that Russia was not ready for a proletarian revolution in the first decades of the twentieth century, and consequently he opposed the Bolshevik faction in the Plato, commentaries on Plekhanov, Georgy Valentinovich 713    713 split 3 of the Social Democratic party. At the same time he was not a simplistic economic determinist: he accepted the role of geographical, psychological, and other non-economic factors in historical change. In epistemology, Plekhanov agreed with Kant that we cannot know things in themselves, but he argued that our sensations may be conceived as “hieroglyphs,” corresponding point by point to the elements of reality without resembling them. In ethics, too, Plekhanov sought to supplement Marx with Kant, tempering the class analysis of morality with the view that there are universally binding ethical principles, such as the principle that human beings should be treated as ends rather than means. Because in these and other respects Plekhanov’s version of Marxism conflicted with Lenin’s, his philosophy was scornfully rejected by doctrinaire Marxist-Leninists during the Stalin era. 

Plotinus, Greco-Roman Neoplatonist philosopher. Born in Egypt, though doubtless of Grecian ancestry, he studied Platonic philosophy in Alexandria with Ammonius Saccas 23243; then, after a brief adventure on the staff of the Emperor Gordian III on an unsuccessful expedition against the Persians, he came to Rome in 244 and continued teaching philosophy there until his death. He enjoyed the support of many prominent people, including even the Emperor Gallienus and his wife. His chief pupils were Amelius and Porphyry, the latter of whom collected and edited his philosophical essays, the Enneads so called because arranged by Porphyry in six groups of nine. The first three groups concern the physical world and our relation to it, the fourth concerns Soul, the fifth Intelligence, and the sixth the One. Porphyry’s arrangement is generally followed today, though a chronological sequence of tractates, which he also provides in his introductory Life of Plotinus, is perhaps preferable. The most important treatises are I.1; I.2; I.6; II.4; II.8; III.23; III.6; III.7; IV.34; V.1; V.3; VI.45; VI.7; VI.8; VI.9; and the group III.8, V.8, V.5, and II.9 a single treatise, split up by Porphyry, that is a wide-ranging account of Plotinus’s philosophical position, culminating in an attack on gnosticism. Plotinus saw himself as a faithful exponent of Plato see especially Enneads V.1, but he is far more than that. Platonism had developed considerably in the five centuries that separate Plato from Plotinus, taking on much from both Aristotelianism and Stoicism, and Plotinus is the heir to this process. He also adds much himself. 

pluralism, a philosophical perspective on the world that emphasizes diversity rather than homogeneity, multiplicity rather than unity, difference rather than sameness. The philosophical consequences of pluralism were addressed by Grecian antiquity in its preoccupation with the problem of the one and the many. The proponents of pluralism, represented principally by Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and the Atomists Leucippus and Democritus, maintained that reality was made up of a multiplicity of entities. Adherence to this doctrine set them in opposition to the monism of the Eleatic School Parmenides, which taught that reality was an impermeable unity and an unbroken solidarity. It was thus that pluralism came to be defined as a philosophical alternative to monism. In the development of Occidental thought, pluralism came to be contrasted not only with monism but also with dualism, the philosophical doctrine that there are two, and only two, kinds of existents. Descartes, with his doctrine of two distinct substances  extended non-thinking substance versus non-extended thinking substance  is commonly regarded as having provided the clearest example of philosophical dualism. Pluralism thus needs to be understood as marking out philosophical alternatives to both monism and dualism. Pluralism as a metaphysical doctrine requires that we distinguish substantival from attributive pluralism. Substantival pluralism views the world as containing a multiplicity of substances that remain irreducible to each other. Attributive pluralism finds the multiplicity of kinds not among the furniture of substances that make up the world but rather among a diversity of attributes and distinguishing properties. However, pluralism came to be defined not only as a metaphysical doctrine but also as a regulative principle of explanation that calls upon differing explanatory principles and conceptual schemes to account for the manifold events of nature and the varieties of human experience. Recent philosophical thought has witnessed a resurgence of interest in pluralism. This was evident in the development of  pragmatism, where pluralism received piquant expression in James’s A Pluralistic Universe 9. More recently pluralism was given a voice in the thought of the later Vitters, with its heavy accent on the plurality of language games displayed in our ordinary discourse. Also, in the current developments of philosophical postmodernism Jean-François Lyotard, one finds an explicit pluralistic orientation. Here the emphasis falls on the multiplicity of signifiers, phrase regimens, genres of discourse, and narrational strategies. The alleged unities and totalities of thought, discourse, and action are subverted in the interests of reclaiming the diversified and heterogeneous world of human experience. Pluralism in contemporary thought initiates a move into a postmetaphysical age. It is less concerned with traditional metaphysical and epistemological issues, seeking answers to questions about the nature and kinds of substances and attributes; and it is more attuned to the diversity of social practices and the multiple roles of language, discourse, and narrative in the panoply of human affairs. 

pluralitive logic, also called pleonetetic logic, the logic of ‘many’, ‘most’, ‘few’, and similar terms including ‘four out of five’, ‘over 45 percent’ and so on. Consider 1 ‘Almost all F are G’ 2 ‘Almost all F are not G’ 3 ‘Most F are G’ 4 ‘Most F are not G’ 5 ‘Many F are G’ 6 ‘Many F are not G’ 1 i.e., ‘Few F are not G’ and 6 are contradictory, as are 2 and 5 and 3 and 4. 1 and 2 cannot be true together i.e., they are contraries, nor can 3 and 4, while 5 and 6 cannot be false together i.e., they are subcontraries. Moreover, 1 entails 3 which entails 5, and 2 entails 4 which entails 6. Thus 16 form a generalized “square of opposition” fitting inside the standard one. Sometimes 3 is said to be true if more than half the F’s are G, but this makes ‘most’ unnecessarily precise, for ‘most’ does not literally mean ‘more than half’. Although many pluralitive terms are vague, their interrelations are logically precise. Again, one might define ‘many’ as ‘There are at least n’, for some fixed n, at least relative to context. But this not only erodes the vagueness, it also fails to work for arbitrarily large and infinite domains. ‘Few’, ‘most’, and ‘many’ are binary quantifiers, a type of generalized quantifier. A unary quantifier, such as the standard quantifiers ‘some’ and ‘all’, connotes a second-level property, e.g., ‘Something is F’ means ‘F has an instance’, and ‘All F’s are G’ means ‘F and not G has no instance’. A generalized quantifier connotes a second-level relation. ‘Most F’s are G’ connotes a binary relation between F and G, one that cannot be reduced to any property of a truth-functional compound of F and G. In fact, none of the standard pluralitive terms can be defined in first-order logic. 

plurality of causes, as used by J. S. Mill, more than one cause of a single effect; i.e., tokens of different event types causing different tokens of the same event type. Plurality of causes is distinct from overdetermination of an event by more than one actual or potential token cause. For example, an animal’s death has a plurality of causes: it may die of starvation, of bleeding, of a blow to the head, and so on. Mill thought these cases were important because he saw that the existence of a plurality of causes creates problems for his four methods for determining causes. Mill’s method of agreement is specifically vulnerable to the problem: the method fails to reveal the cause of an event when the event has more than one type of cause, because the method presumes that causes are necessary for their effects. Actually, plurality of causes is a commonplace fact about the world because very few causes are necessary for their effects. Unless the background conditions are specified in great detail, or the identity of the effect type is defined very narrowly, almost all cases involve a plurality of causes. For example, flipping the light switch is a necessary cause of the light’s going on, only if one assumes that there will be no short circuit across the switch, that the wiring will remain as it is, and so on, or if one assumes that by ‘the light’s going on’ one means the light’s going on in the normal way. 

Po-hu tung “White Tiger Hall Consultations”, an important Chin. Confucian work of the later Han dynasty, resulting from discussions at the imperial palace in A.D. 79 on the classics and their commentaries. Divided into forty-three headings, the text sums up the dominant teachings of Confucianism by affirming the absolute position of the monarch, a cosmology and moral psychology based on the yinyang theory, and a comprehensive social and political philosophy. While emphasizing benevolent government, it legitimizes the right of the ruler to use force to quell disorder. A system of “three bonds and six relationships” defines the hierarchical structure of society. Human nature, identified with the yang cosmic force, must be cultivated, while feelings yin are to be controlled especially by rituals and education. The Confucian orthodoxy affirmed also marks an end to the debate between the Old Text school and the New Text school that divided earlier Han scholars. 

poiesis Grecian, ‘production’, behavior aimed at an external end. In Aristotle, poiesis is opposed to praxis action. It is characteristic of crafts  e.g. building, the end of which is houses. It is thus a kinesis process. For Aristotle, exercising the virtues, since it must be undertaken for its own sake, cannot be poiesis. The knowledge involved in virtue is therefore not the same as that involved in crafts. R.C.

Poincaré: j. h., philosopher of science. Born into a prominent family in Nancy, he showed extraordinary talent in mathematics from an early age. He studied at the École des Mines and worked as a mining engineer while completing his doctorate in mathematics 1879. In 1, he was appointed professor at the  of Paris, where he lectured on mathematics, physics, and astronomy until his death. His original contributions to the theory of differential equations, algebraic topology, and number theory made him the leading mathematician of his day. He published almost five hundred technical papers as well as three widely read books on the philosophy of science: Science and Hypothesis 2, The Value of Science 5, and Science and Method 8. Poincaré’s philosophy of science was shaped by his approach to mathematics. Geometric axioms are neither synthetic a priori nor empirical; they are more properly understood as definitions. Thus, when one set of axioms is preferred over another for use in physics, the choice is a matter of “convention”; it is governed by criteria of simplicity and economy of expression rather than by which geometry is “correct.” Though Euclidean geometry is used to describe the motions of bodies in space, it makes no sense to ask whether physical space “really” is Euclidean. Discovery in mathematics resembles discovery in the physical sciences, but whereas the former is a construction of the human mind, the latter has to be fitted to an order of nature that is ultimately independent of mind. Science provides an economic and fruitful way of expressing the relationships between classes of sensations, enabling reliable predictions to be made. These sensations reflect the world that causes them; the limited objectivity of science derives from this fact, but science does not purport to determine the nature of that underlying world. Conventions, choices that are not determinable by rule, enter into the physical sciences at all levels. Such principles as that of the conservation of energy may appear to be empirical, but are in fact postulates that scientists have chosen to treat as implicit definitions. The decision between alternative hypotheses also involves an element of convention: the choice of a particular curve to represent a finite set of data points, e.g., requires a judgment as to which is simpler. Two kinds of hypotheses, in particular, must be distinguished. Inductive generalizations from observation “real generalizations” are hypothetical in the limited sense that they are always capable of further precision. Then there are theories “indifferent hypotheses” that postulate underlying entities or structures. These entities may seem explanatory, but strictly speaking are no more than devices useful in calculation. For atomic theory to explain, atoms would have to exist. But this cannot be established in the only way permissible for a scientific claim, i.e. directly by experiment. Shortly before he died, Poincaré finally allowed that Perrin’s experimental verification of Einstein’s predictions regarding Brownian motion, plus his careful marshaling of twelve other distinct experimental methods of calculating Avogadro’s number, constituted the equivalent of an experimental proof of the existence of atoms: “One can say that we see them because we can count them. . . . The atom of the chemist is now a reality.”

 polarity, the relation between distinct phenomena, terms, or concepts such that each inextricably requires, though it is opposed to, the other, as in the relation between the north and south poles of a magnet. In application to terms or concepts, polarity entails that the meaning of one involves the meaning of the other. This is conceptual polarity. Terms are existentially polar provided an instance of one cannot exist unless there exists an instance of the other. The second sense implies the first. Supply and demand and good and evil are instances of conceptual polarity. North and south and buying and selling are instances of existential polarity. Some polar concepts are opposites, such as truth and falsity. Some are correlative, such as question and answer: an answer is always an answer to a question; a question calls for an answer, but a question can be an answer, and an answer can be a question. The concept is not restricted to pairs and can be extended to generate mutual interdependence, multipolarity.

Polish logic, logic as researched, elucidated, and taught in Poland, 939. Between the two wars colleagues Jan Lukasiewicz, Tadeusz Kotarbigki, and Stanislaw Lesniewski, assisted by students-become-collaborators such as Alfred Tarski, Jerzy Slupecki, Stanislaw Jaskowski, and Boleslaw Sobocigski, together with mathematicians in Warsaw and philosophical colleagues elsewhere, like Kasimir Ajdukiewicz and Tadeusz Czezowski, made Warsaw an internationally known center of research in logic, metalogic, semantics, and foundations of mathematics. The Warsaw “school” also dominated Polish philosophy, and made Poland the country that introduced modern logic even in secondary schools. All three founders took their doctorates in Lvov under Kasimir Twardowski 18668, mentor of leading thinkers of independent Poland between the wars. Arriving from Vienna to take the chair of philosophy at twenty-nine, Twardowski had to choose between concentrating on his own research and organizing the study of philosophy in Poland. Dedicating his life primarily to the community task, he became the founder of modern Polish philosophy. Twardowski’s informal distinction between distributive and collective conceptions influenced classification of philosophy and the sciences, and anticipated Lesniewski’s formal axiomatizations in ontology and mereology, respectively. Another common inheritance important in Polish logic was Twardowski’s stress on the processproduct ambiguity. He applied this distinction to disambiguate ‘meaning’ and refine his teacher Brentano’s account of mental acts as meaningful “intentional” events, by differentiating 1 what is meant or “intended” by the act, its objective noema or noematic “intentional object,” from 2 its corresponding noetic meaning or subjective “content,” the correlated characteristic or structure by which it “intends” its “object” or “objective”  i.e., means that: suchand-such is so. Twardowski’s teaching  especially this careful analysis of “contents” and “objects” of mental acts  contributed to Meinong’s theory of objects, and linked it, Husserl’s phenomenology, and Anton Marty’s “philosophical grammar” with the “descriptive psychology” of their common teacher, the Aristotelian and Scholastic empiricist Brentano, and thus with sources of the analytic movements in Vienna and Cambridge. Twardowski’s lectures on the philosophical logic of content and judgment prepared the ground for scientific semantics; his references to Boolean algebra opened the door to mathematical logic; and his phenomenological idea of a general theory of objects pointed toward Lesniewski’s ontology. Twardowski’s maieutic character, integrity, grounding in philosophical traditions, and arduous training lectures began at six a.m., together with his realist defense of the classical Aristotelian correspondence theory of truth against “irrationalism,” dogmatism, skepticism, and psychologism, influenced his many pupils, who became leaders of Polish thought in diverse fields. But more influential than any doctrine was his rigorist ideal of philosophy as a strict scientific discipline of criticism and logical analysis, precise definition, and conceptual clarification. His was a school not of doctrine but of method. Maintaining this common methodological inheritance in their divergent ways, and encouraged to learn more mathematical logic than Twardowski himself knew, his students in logic were early influenced by Frege’s and Husserl’s critique of psychologism in logic, Husserl’s logical investigations, and the logical reconstruction of classical mathematics by Frege, Schröder, Whitehead, and Russell. As lecturer in Lvov from 8 until his appointment to Warsaw in 5, Lukasiewicz introduced mathematical logic into Poland. To Lesniewski, newly arrived from studies in G.y as an enthusiast for Marty’s philosophy of language, Lukasiewicz’s influential 0 Critique of Aristotle’s principle of contradiction was a “revelation” in 1. Among other things it revealed paradoxes like Russell’s, which preoccupied him for the next eleven years as, logically refuting Twardowski’s Platonist theory of abstraction, he worked out his own solutions and, influenced also by Leon Chwistek, outgrew the influence of Hans Cornelius and Leon Petraz´ycki, and developed his own “constructively nominalist” foundations. In 9 Kotarbisski and Lesniewski joined Lukasiewicz in Warsaw, where they attracted students like Tarski, Sobocigski, and Slupecki in the first generation, and Andrzej Mostowski and Czeslaw Lejewski in the next. When the war came, the survivors were scattered and the metalogicians Morchaj Wajsberg, Moritz Presburger, and Adolf Lindenbaum were killed or “disappeared” by the Gestapo. Lukasiewicz concentrated increasingly on history of logic especially in reconstructing the logic of Aristotle and the Stoics and deductive problems concerning syllogistic and propositional logic. His idea of logical probability and development of three- or manyvalued and modal calculi reflected his indeterminist sympathies in prewar exchanges with Kotarbigski and Lesniewski on the status of truths eternal, sempiternal, or both?, especially as concerns future contingencies. Lesniewski concentrated on developing his logical systems. He left elaboration of many of his seminal metalogical and semantic insights to Tarski, who, despite a divergent inclination to simplify metamathematical deductions by expedient postulation, shared with Lesniewski, Lukasiewicz, and Ajdukiewicz the conviction that only formalized languages can be made logically consistent subjects and instruments of rigorous scientific investigation. Kotarbigski drew on Lesniewski’s logic of predication to defend his “reism” as one possible application of Lesniewski’s ontology, to facilitate his “concretist” program for translating abstractions into more concrete terms, and to rationalize his “imitationist” account of mental acts or dispositions. Inheriting Twardowski’s role as cultural leader and educator, Kotarbigski popularized the logical achievements of his colleagues in e.g. his substantial 9 treatise on the theory of knowledge, formal logic, and scientific methodology; this work became required reading for serious students and, together with the lucid textbooks by Lukasiewicz and Ajdukiewicz, raised the level of philosophical discussion in Poland. Jaskowski published a system of “natural deduction” by the suppositional method practiced by Lesniewski since 6. Ajdukiewicz based his syntax on Lesniewski’s logical grammar, and by his searching critiques influenced Kotarbigski’s “reist” and “concretist” formulations. Closest in Poland to the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle, Ajdukiewicz brought new sophistication to the philosophy of language and of science by his examination of the role of conventions and meaning postulates in scientific theory and language, distinguishing axiomatic, deductive, and empirical rules of meaning. His evolving and refined conventionalist analyses of theories, languages, “world perspectives,” synonymy, translation, and analyticity, and his philosophical clarification by paraphrase anticipated views of Carnap, Feigl, and Quine. But the Polish thinkers, beyond their common methodological inheritance and general adherence to extensional logic, subscribed to little common doctrine, and in their exchanges with the Vienna positivists remained “too sober” said Lukasiewicz to join in sweeping antimetaphysical manifestos. Like Twardowski, they were critics of traditional formulations, who sought not to proscribe but to reform metaphysics, by reformulating issues clearly enough to advance understanding. Indeed, except for Chwistek, the mathematician Jan Slezygski, and the historians I. M. Bochegski, Z. A. Jordan, and Jan Salamucha, in addition to the phenomenologist Roman Ingarden, the key figures in Polish logic were all philosophical descendants of Twardowski. 

political philosophy, the study of the nature and justification of coercive institutions. Coercive institutions range in size from the family to the nation-state and world organizations like the United Nations. They are institutions that at least sometimes employ force or the threat of force to control the behavior of their members. Justifying such coercive institutions requires showing that the authorities within them have a right to be obeyed and that their members have a corresponding obligation to obey them, i.e., that these institutions have legitimate political authority over their members. Classical political philosophers, like Plato and Aristotle, were primarily interested in providing a justification for city-states like Athens or Sparta. But historically, as larger coercive institutions became possible and desirable, political philosophers sought to justify them. After the seventeenth century, most political philosophers focused on providing a justification for nationstates whose claim to legitimate authority is restricted by both geography and nationality. But from time to time, and more frequently in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, some political philosophers have sought to provide a justification for various forms of world government with even more extensive powers than those presently exercised by the United Nations. And quite recently, feminist political philosophers have raised important challenges to the authority of the family as it is presently constituted. Anarchism from Grecian an archos, ‘no government’ rejects this central task of political philosophy. It maintains that no coercive institutions are justified. Proudhon, the first self-described anarchist, believed that coercive institutions should be replaced by social and economic organizations based on voluntary contractual agreement, and he advocated peaceful change toward anarchism. Others, notably Blanqui and Bakunin, advocated the use of violence to destroy the power of coercive institutions. Anarchism inspired the anarcho-syndicalist movement, Makhno and his followers during the Russian Civil War, the  anarchists during the  Civil War, and the anarchist gauchistes during the 8 “May Events” in France. Most political philosophers, however, have sought to justify coercive institutions; they have simply disagreed over what sort of coercive institutions are justified. Liberalism, which derives from the work of Locke, is the view that coercive institutions are justified when they promote liberty. For Locke, liberty requires a constitutional monarchy with parliamentary government. Over time, however, the ideal of liberty became subject to at least two interpretations. The view that seems closest to Locke’s is classical liberalism, which is now more frequently called political libertarianism. This form of liberalism interprets constraints on liberty as positive acts i.e., acts of commission that prevent people from doing what they otherwise could do. According to this view, failing to help people in need does not restrict their liberty. Libertarians maintain that when liberty is so interpreted only a minimal or night-watchman state that protects against force, theft, and fraud can be justified. In contrast, in welfare liberalism, a form of liberalism that derives from the work of T. H. Green, constraints on liberty are interpreted to include, in addition, negative acts i.e., acts of omission that prevent people from doing what they otherwise could do. According to this view, failing to help people in need does restrict their liberty. Welfare liberals maintain that when liberty is interpreted in this fashion, coercive institutions of a welfare state requiring a guaranteed social minimum and equal opportunity are justified. While no one denies that when liberty is given a welfare liberal interpretation some form of welfare state is required, there is considerable debate over whether a minimal state is required when liberty is given a libertarian interpretation. At issue is whether the liberty of the poor is constrained when they are prevented from taking from the surplus possessions of the rich what they need for survival. If such prevention does constrain the liberty of the poor, it could be argued that their liberty should have priority over the liberty of the rich not to be interfered with when using their surplus possessions for luxury purposes. In this way, it could be shown that even when the ideal of liberty is given a libertarian interpretation, a welfare state, rather than a minimal state, is justified. Both libertarianism and welfare liberalism are committed to individualism. This view takes the rights of individuals to be basic and justifies the actions of coercive institutions as promoting those rights. Communitarianism, which derives from the writings of Hegel, rejects individualism. It maintains that rights of individuals are not basic and that the collective can have rights that are independent of and even opposed to what liberals claim are the rights of individuals. According to communitarians, individuals are constituted by the institutions and practices of which they are a part, and their rights and obligations derive from those same institutions and practices. Fascism is an extreme form of communitarianism that advocates an authoritarian state with limited rights for individuals. In its National Socialism Nazi variety, fascism was also antiSemitic and militarist. In contrast to liberalism and communitarianism, socialism takes equality to be the basic ideal and justifies coercive institutions insofar as they promote equality. In capitalist societies where the means of production are owned and controlled by a relatively small number of people and used primarily for their benefit, socialists favor taking control of the means of production and redirecting their use to the general welfare. According to Marx, the principle of distribution for a socialist society is: from each according to ability, to each according to needs. Socialists disagree among themselves, however, over who should control the means of production in a socialist society. In the version of socialism favored by Lenin, those who control the means of production are to be an elite seemingly differing only in their ends from the capitalist elite they replaced. In other forms of socialism, the means of production are to be controlled democratically. In advanced capitalist societies, national defense, police and fire protection, income redistribution, and environmental protection are already under democratic control. Democracy or “government by the people” is thought to apply in these areas, and to require some form of representation. Socialists simply propose to extend the domain of democratic control to include control of the means of production, on the ground that the very same arguments that support democratic control in these recognized areas also support democratic control of the means of production. In addition, according to Marx, socialism will transform itself into communism when most of the work that people perform in society becomes its own reward, making differential monetary reward generally unnecessary. Then distribution in society can proceed according to the principle, from each according to ability, to each according to needs. It so happens that all of the above political views have been interpreted in ways that deny that women have the same basic rights as men. By contrast, feminism, almost by definition, is the political view that women and men have the same basic rights. In recent years, most political philosophers have come to endorse equal basic rights for women and men, but rarely do they address questions that feminists consider of the utmost importance, e.g., how responsibilities and duties are to be assigned in family structures. Each of these political views must be evaluated both internally and externally by comparison with the other views. Once this is done, their practical recommendations may not be so different. For example, if welfare liberals recognize that the basic rights of their view extend to distant peoples and future generations, they may end up endorsing the same degree of equality socialists defend. Whatever their practical requirements, each of these political views justifies civil disobedience, even revolution, when certain of those requirements have not been met. Civil disobedience is an illegal action undertaken to draw attention to a failure by the relevant authorities to meet basic moral requirements, e.g., the refusal of Rosa Parks to give up her seat in a bus to a white man in accord with the local ordinance in Montgomery, Alabama, in 5. Civil disobedience is justified when illegal action of this sort is the best way to get the relevant authorities to bring the law into better correspondence with basic moral requirements. By contrast, revolutionary action is justified when it is the only way to correct a radical failure of the relevant authorities to meet basic moral requirements. When revolutionary action is justified, people no longer have a political obligation to obey the relevant authorities; that is, they are no longer morally required to obey them, although they may still continue to do so, e.g. out of habit or fear. Recent contemporary political philosophy has focused on the communitarianliberal debate. In defense of the communitarian view, Alasdair MacIntyre has argued that virtually all forms of liberalism attempt to separate rules defining right action from conceptions of the human good. On this account, he contends, these forms of liberalism must fail because the rules defining right action cannot be adequately grounded apart from a conception of the good. Responding to this type of criticism, some liberals have openly conceded that their view is not grounded independently of some conception of the good. Rawls, e.g., has recently made clear that his liberalism requires a conception of the political good, although not a comprehensive conception of the good. It would seem, therefore, that the debate between communitarians and liberals must turn on a comparative evaluation of their competing conceptions of the good. Unfortunately, contemporary communitarians have not yet been very forthcoming about what particular conception of the good their view requires. 

political theory, reflection concerning the empirical, normative, and conceptual dimensions of political life. There are no topics that all political theorists do or ought to address, no required procedures, no doctrines acknowledged to be authoritative. The meaning of ‘political theory’ resides in its fluctuating uses, not in any essential property. It is nevertheless possible to identify concerted tendencies among those who have practiced this activity over twenty-five centuries. Since approximately the seventeenth century, a primary question has been how best to justify the political rule of some people over others. This question subordinated the issue that had directed and organized most previous political theory, namely, what constitutes the best form of political regime. Assuming political association to be a divinely ordained or naturally necessary feature of the human estate, earlier thinkers had asked what mode of political association contributes most to realizing the good for humankind. Signaling the variable but intimate relationship between political theory and political practice, the change in question reflected and helped to consolidate acceptance of the postulate of natural human equality, the denial of divinely or naturally given authority of some human beings over others. Only a small minority of postseventeenth-century thinkers have entertained the possibility, perhaps suggested by this postulate, that no form of rule can be justified, but the shift in question altered the political theory agenda. Issues concerning consent, individual liberties and rights, various forms of equality as integral to justice, democratic and other controls on the authority and power of government  none of which were among the first concerns of ancient or medieval political thinkers  moved to the center of political theory. Recurrent tendencies and tensions in political theory may also be discerned along dimensions that cross-cut historical divisions. In its most celebrated representations, political theory is integral to philosophy. Systematic thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, Hobbes and Hegel, present their political thoughts as supporting and supported by their ethics and theology, metaphysics and epistemology. Political argumentation must satisfy the same criteria of logic, truth, and justification as any other; a political doctrine must be grounded in the nature of reality. Other political theorists align themselves with empirical science rather than philosophy. Often focusing on questions of power, they aim to give accurate accounts and factually grounded assessments of government and politics in particular times and places. Books IVVI of Aristotle’s Politics inaugurate this conception of political theory; it is represented by Montesquieu, Marx, and much of utilitarianism, and it is the numerically predominant form of academic political theorizing in the twentieth century. Yet others, e.g., Socrates, Machiavelli, Rousseau, and twentieth-century thinkers such as Rawls, mix the previously mentioned modes but understand themselves as primarily pursuing the practical objective of improving their own political societies.

polysyllogism, a series of syllogisms connected by the fact that the conclusion of one syllogism becomes a premise of another. The syllogism whose conclusion is used as a premise in another syllogism within the chain is called the prosyllogism; the syllogism is which the conclusion of another syllogism within the chain is used as a premise is called the episyllogism. To illustrate, take the standard form of the simplest polysyllogism: a 1 Every B is A 2 Every C is B 3 , Every C is A b 4 Every C is A 5 Every D is C 6 , Every D is A. The first member a of this polysyllogism is the prosyllogism, since its conclusion, 3, occurs as a premise, 4, in the second argument. This second member, b, is the episyllogism, since it employs as one of its premises 4 the conclusion 3 of the first syllogism. It should be noted that the terms ‘prosyllogism’ and ‘episyllogism’ are correlative terms. Moreover, a polysyllogism may have more than two members. 

Pomponazzi, Pietro 14621525,  philosopher, an Aristotelian who taught at the universities of Padua and Bologna. In De incantationibus “On Incantations,” 1556, he regards the world as a system of natural causes that can explain apparently miraculous phenomena. Human beings are subject to the natural order of the world, yet divine predestination and human freedom are compatible De fato, “On Fate,” 1567. Furthermore, he distinguishes between what is proved by natural reason and what is accepted by faith, and claims that, since there are arguments for and against the immortality of the human individual soul, this belief is to be accepted solely on the basis of faith De immortalitate animae, “On the Immortality of the Soul,” He defended his view of immortality in the Apologia 1518 and in the Defensorium 1519. These three works were reprinted as Tractatus acutissimi 1525. Pomponazzi’s work was influential until the seventeenth century, when Aristotelianism ceased to be the main philosophy taught at the universities. The eighteenth-century freethinkers showed new interest in his distinction between natural reason and faith. P.Gar. pons asinorum Latin, ‘asses’ bridge’, a methodological device based upon Aristotle’s description of the ways in which one finds a suitable middle term to demonstrate categorical propositions. Thus, to prove the universal affirmative, one should consider the characters that entail the predicate P and the characters entailed by the subject S. If we find in the two groups of characters a common member, we can use it as a middle term in the syllogistic proof of say ‘All S are P’. Take ‘All men are mortal’ as the contemplated conclusion. We find that ‘organism’ is among the characters entailing the predicate ‘mortal’ and is also found in the group of characters entailed by the subject ‘men’, and thus it may be used in a syllogistic proof of ‘All men are mortal’. To prove negative propositions we must, in addition, consider characters incompatible with the predicate, or incompatible with the subject. Finally, proofs of particular propositions require considering characters that entail the subject. 

Popper, Karl Raimund, Austrian-born British philosopher best known for contributions to philosophy of science and to social and political philosophy. Educated at the  of Vienna Ph.D., 8, he taught philosophy in New Zealand for a decade before becoming a reader and then professor in logic and scientific method at the London School of Economics 669. He was knighted in 5, elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 6, and appointed Companion of Honour in 2 see his autobiography, Unended Quest, 6. In opposition to logical positivism’s verifiability criterion of cognitive significance, Popper proposes that science be characterized by its method: the criterion of demarcation of empirical science from pseudo-science and metaphysics is falsifiability Logik der Forschung, 4, tr. as The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 9. According to falsificationism, science grows, and may even approach the truth, not by amassing supporting evidence, but through an unending cycle of problems, tentative solutions  unjustifiable conjectures  and error elimination; i.e., the vigorous testing of deductive consequences and the refutation of conjectures that fail Conjectures and Refutations, 3. Since conjectures are not inferences and refutations are not inductive, there is no inductive inference or inductive logic. More generally, criticism is installed as the hallmark of rationality, and the traditional justificationist insistence on proof, conclusive or inconclusive, on confirmation, and on positive argument, is repudiated. Popper brings to the central problems of Kant’s philosophy an uncompromising realism and objectivism, the tools of modern logic, and a Darwinian perspective on knowledge, thereby solving Hume’s problem of induction without lapsing into irrationalism Objective Knowledge, 2. He made contributions of permanent importance also to the axiomatization of probability theory The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 9; to its interpretation, especially the propensity interpretation Postscript to The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 3 vols. 283; and to many other problems The Self and Its Brain, with John C. Eccles, 7. Popper’s social philosophy, like his epistemology, is anti-authoritarian. Since it is a historicist error to suppose that we can predict the future of mankind The Poverty of Historicism, 7, the prime task of social institutions in an open society  one that encourages criticism and allows rulers to be replaced without violence  must be not large-scale utopian planning but the minimization, through piecemeal reform, of avoidable suffering. This way alone permits proper assessment of success or failure, and thus of learning from experience The Open Society and Its Enemies, 5. 

Porphyry, Grecian Neoplatonist philosopher, second to Plotinus in influence. He was born in Tyre, and is thus sometimes called Porphyry the Phoenician. As a young man he went to Athens, where he absorbed the Platonism of Cassius Longinus, who had in turn been influenced by Ammonius Saccas in Alexandria. Porphyry went to Rome in 263, where he became a disciple of Plotinus, who had also been influenced by Ammonius. Porphyry lived in Rome until 269, when, urged by Plotinus to pons asinorum Porphyry 722    722 travel as a cure for severe depression, he traveled to Sicily. He remained there for several years before returning to Rome to take over Plotinus’s school. He apparently died in Rome. Porphyry is not noted for original thought. He seems to have dedicated himself to explicating Aristotle’s logic and defending Plotinus’s version of Neoplatonism. During his years in Sicily, Porphyry wrote his two most famous works, the lengthy Against the Christians, of which only fragments survive, and the Isagoge, or “Introduction.” The Isagoge, which purports to give an elementary exposition of the concepts necessary to understand Aristotle’s Categories, was tr. into Latin by Boethius and routinely published in the Middle Ages with Latin editions of Aristotle’s Organon, or logical treatises. Its inclusion in that format arguably precipitated the discussion of the so-called problem of universals in the twelfth century. During his later years in Rome, Porphyry collected Plotinus’s writings, editing and organizing them into a scheme of his own  not Plotinus’s  design, six groups of nine treatises, thus called the Enneads. Porphyry prefaced his edition with an informative biography of Plotinus, written shortly before Porphyry’s own death. 

Port-Royal Logic, originally entitled “La logique, ou L’art de penser,” a treatise on logic, language, and method composed by Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole 162595, possibly with the help of Pascal, all of whom were solitaires associated with the convent at Port-Royal-des-Champs, the spiritual and intellectual center of  Jansenism. Originally written as an instruction manual for the son of the Duc de Luynes, the Logic was soon expanded and published the first edition appeared in 1662, but it was constantly being modified, augmented, and rewritten by its authors; by 1685 six editions in  had appeared. The work develops the linguistic theories presented by Arnauld and Claude Lancelot in the Grammaire générale et raisonnée 1660, and reflects the pedagogical principles embodied in the curriculum of the “little schools” run by PortRoyal. Its content is also permeated by the Cartesianism to which Arnauld was devoted. The Logic’s influence grew beyond Jansenist circles, and it soon became in seventeenth-century France a standard manual for rigorous thinking. Eventually, it was adopted as a textbook in  schools. The authors declare their goal to be to make thought more precise for better distinguishing truth from error  philosophical and theological  and to develop sound judgment. They are especially concerned to dispel the errors and confusions of the Scholastics. Logic is “the art of directing reason to a knowledge of things for the instruction of ourselves and others.” This art consists in reflecting on the mind’s four principal operations: conceiving, judging, reasoning, and ordering. Accordingly, the Logic is divided into four sections: on ideas and conception, on judgments, on reasoning, and on method..

positive and negative freedom, respectively, the area within which the individual is self-determining and the area within which the individual is left free from interference by others. More specifically, one is free in the positive sense to the extent that one has control over one’s life, or rules oneself. In this sense the term is very close to that of ‘autonomy’. The forces that can prevent this self-determination are usually thought of as internal, as desires or passions. This conception of freedom can be said to have originated with Plato, according to whom a person is free when the parts of the soul are rightly related to each other, i.e. the rational part of the soul rules the other parts. Other advocates of positive freedom include Spinoza, Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel. One is free in the negative sense if one is not prevented from doing something by another person. One is prevented from doing something if another person makes it impossible for one to do something or uses coercion to prevent one from doing something. Hence persons are free in the negative sense if they are not made unfree in the negative sense. The term ‘negative liberty’ was coined by Bentham to mean the absence of coercion. Advocates of negative freedom include Hobbes, Locke, and Hume. 

possible worlds, alternative worlds in terms of which one may think of possibility. The idea of thinking about possibility in terms of such worlds has played an important part, both in Leibnizian philosophical theology and in the development of modal logic and philosophical reflection about it in recent decades. But there are important differences in the forms the idea has taken, and the uses to which it has been put, in the two contexts. Leibniz used it in his account of creation. In his view God’s mind necessarily and eternally contains the ideas of infinitely many worlds that God could have created, and God has chosen the best of these and made it actual, thus creating it. Similar views are found in the thought of Leibniz’s contemporary, Malebranche. The possible worlds are thus the complete alternatives among which God chose. They are possible at least in the sense that they are logically consistent; whether something more is required in order for them to be coherent as worlds is a difficult question in Leibniz interpretation. They are complete in that they are possible totalities of creatures; each includes a whole possible universe, in its whole spatial extent and its whole temporal history if it is spatially and temporally ordered. The temporal completeness deserves emphasis. If “the world of tomorrow” is “a better world” than “the world of today,” it will still be part of the same “possible world” the actual one; for the actual “world,” in the relevant sense, includes whatever actually has happened or will happen throughout all time. The completeness extends to every detail, so that a milligram’s difference in the weight of the smallest bird would make a different possible world. The completeness of possible worlds may be limited in one way, however. Leibniz speaks of worlds as aggregates of finite things. As alternatives for God’s creation, they may well not be thought of as including God, or at any rate, not every fact about God. For this and other reasons it is not clear that in Leibniz’s thought the possible can be identified with what is true in some possible world, or the necessary with what is true in all possible worlds. That identification is regularly assumed, however, in the recent development of what has become known as possible worlds semantics for modal logic the logic of possibility and necessity, and of other conceptions, e.g. those pertaining to time and to morality, that have turned out to be formally analogous. The basic idea here is that such notions as those of validity, soundness, and completeness can be defined for modal logic in terms of models constructed from sets of alternative “worlds.” Since the late 0s many important results have been obtained by this method, whose best-known exponent is Saul Kripke. Some of the most interesting proofs depend on the idea of a relation of accessibility between worlds in the set. Intuitively, one world is accessible from another if and only if the former is possible in or from the point of view of the latter. Different systems of modal logic are appropriate depending on the properties of this relation e.g., on whether it is or is not reflexive and/or transitive and/or symmetrical. The purely formal results of these methods are well established. The application of possible worlds semantics to conceptions occurring in metaphysically richer discourse is more controversial, however. Some of the controversy is related to debates over the metaphysical reality of various sorts of possibility and necessity. Particularly controversial, and also a focus of much interest, have been attempts to understand modal claims de re, about particular individuals as such e.g., that I could not have been a musical performance, in terms of the identity and nonidentity of individuals in different possible worlds. Similarly, there is debate over the applicability of a related treatment of subjunctive conditionals, developed by Robert Stalnaker and David Lewis, though it is clear that it yields interesting formal results. What is required, on this approach, for the truth of ‘If it were the case that A, then it would be the case that B’, is that, among those possible worlds in which A is true, some world in which B is true be more similar, in the relevant respects, to the actual world than any world in which B is false. One of the most controversial topics is the nature of possible worlds themselves. Mathematical logicians need not be concerned with this; a wide variety of sets of objects, real or fictitious, can be viewed as having the properties required of sets of “worlds” for their purposes. But if metaphysically robust issues of modality e.g., whether there are more possible colors than we ever see are to be understood in terms of possible worlds, the question of the nature of the worlds must be taken seriously. Some philosophers would deny any serious metaphysical role to the notion of possible worlds. At the other extreme, David Lewis has defended a view of possible worlds as concrete totalities, things of the same sort as the whole actual universe, made up of entities like planets, persons, and so forth. On his view, the actuality of the actual world consists only in its being this one, the one that we are in; apart from its relation to us or our linguistic acts, the actual is not metaphysically distinguished from the merely possible. Many philosophers find this result counterintuitive, and the infinity of concrete possible worlds an extravagant ontology; but Lewis argues that his view makes possible attractive reductions of modality both logical and causal, and of such notions as that of a proposition, to more concrete notions. Other philosophers are prepared to say there are non-actual possible worlds, but that they are entities of a quite different sort from the actual concrete universe  sets of propositions, perhaps, or some other type of “abstract” object. Leibniz himself held a view of this kind, thinking of possible worlds as having their being only in God’s mind, as intentional objects of God’s thought. 

post-modern – H. P. Grice plays with the ‘modernists,’ versus the ‘neo-traditionalists.’ Since he sees a neotraditionalist like Strawson (neotraditionalist, like neocon, is a joke) and a modernist like Whitehead as BOTH making the same mistake, it is fair to see Grice as a ‘post-modernist’ -- of or relating to a complex set of reactions to modern philosophy and its presuppositions, as opposed to the kind of agreement on substantive doctrines or philosophical questions that often characterizes a philosophical movement. Although there is little agreement on precisely what the presuppositions of modern philosophy are, and disagreement on which philosophers exemplify these presuppositions, postmodern philosophy typically opposes foundationalism, essentialism, and realism. For Rorty, e.g., the presuppositions to be set aside are foundationalist assumptions shared by the leading sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century philosophers. For Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida, the contested presuppositions to be set aside are as old as metaphysics itself, and are perhaps best exemplified by Plato. Postmodern philosophy has even been characterized, by Lyotard, as preceding modern philosophy, in the sense that the presuppositions of philosophical modernism emerge out of a disposition whose antecedent, unarticulated beliefs are already postmodern. Postmodern philosophy is therefore usefully regarded as a complex cluster concept that includes the following elements: an anti- or post- epistemological standpoint; anti-essentialism; anti-realism; anti-foundationalism; opposition to transcendental arguments and transcendental standpoints; rejection of the picture of knowledge as accurate representation; rejection of truth as correspondence to reality; rejection of the very idea of canonical descriptions; rejection of final vocabularies, i.e., rejection of principles, distinctions, and descriptions that are thought to be unconditionally binding for all times, persons, and places; and a suspicion of grand narratives, metanarratives of the sort perhaps best illustrated by dialectical materialism. In addition to these things postmodern philosophy is “against,” it also opposes characterizing this menu of oppositions as relativism, skepticism, or nihilism, and it rejects as “the metaphysics of presence” the traditional, putatively impossible dream of a complete, unique, and closed explanatory system, an explanatory system typically fueled by binary oppositions. On the positive side, one often finds the following themes: its critique of the notion of the neutrality and sovereignty of reason  including insistence on its pervasively gendered, historical, and ethnocentric character; its conception of the social construction of wordworld mappings; its tendency to embrace historicism; its critique of the ultimate status of a contrast between epistemology, on the one hand, and the sociology of knowledge, on the other hand; its dissolution of the notion of the autonomous, rational subject; its insistence on the artifactual status of divisions of labor in knowledge acquisition and production; and its ambivalence about the Enlightenment and its ideology. Many of these elements or elective affinities were already surfacing in the growing opposition to the spectator theory of knowledge, in Europe and in the English-speaking world, long before the term ‘postmodern’ became a commonplace. In Anglophone philosophy this took the early form of Dewey’s and pragmatism’s opposition to positivism, early Kuhn’s redescription of scientific practice, and Vitters’s insistence on the language-game character of representation; critiques of “the myth of the given” from Sellars to Davidson and Quine; the emergence of epistemology naturalized; and the putative description-dependent character of data, tethered to the theory dependence of descriptions in Kuhn, Sellars, Quine, and Arthur Fine  perhaps in all constructivists in the philosophy of science. In Europe, many of these elective affinities surfaced explicitly in and were identified with poststructuralism, although traces are clearly evident in Heidegger’s and later in Derrida’s attacks on Husserl’s residual Cartesianism; the rejection of essential descriptions Wesensanschauungen in Husserl’s sense; Saussure’s and structuralism’s attack on the autonomy and coherence of a transcendental signified standing over against a selftransparent subject; Derrida’s deconstructing the metaphysics of presence; Foucault’s redescriptions of epistemes; the convergence between - and English-speaking social constructivists; attacks on the language of enabling conditions as reflected in worries about the purchase of necessary and sufficient conditions talk on both sides of the Atlantic; and Lyotard’s many interventions, particularly those against grand narratives. Many of these elective affinities that characterize postmodern philosophy can also be seen in the virtually universal challenges to moral philosophy as it has been understood traditionally in the West, not only in G. and  philosophy, but in the reevaluation of “the morality of principles” in the work of MacIntyre, Williams, Nussbaum, John McDowell, and others. The force of postmodern critiques can perhaps best be seen in some of the challenges of feminist theory, as in the work of Judith Butler and Hélène Cixous, and gender theory generally. For it is in gender theory that the conception of “reason” itself as it has functioned in the shared philosophical tradition is redescribed as a conception that, it is often argued, is engendered, patriarchal, homophobic, and deeply optional. The term ‘postmodern’ is less clear in philosophy, its application more uncertain and divided than in some other fields, e.g., postmodern architecture. In architecture the concept is relatively clear. It displaces modernism in assignable ways, emerges as an oppositional force against architectural modernism, a rejection of the work and tradition inaugurated by Walter Gropius, Henri Le Corbusier, and Mies van der Rohe, especially the International Style. In postmodern architecture, the modernist principle of abstraction, of geometric purity and simplicity, is displaced by multivocity and pluralism, by renewed interest in buildings as signs and signifiers, interest in their referential potential and resources. The modernist’s aspiration to buildings that are timeless in an important sense is itself read by postmodernists as an iconography that privileges the brave new world of science and technology, an aspiration that glorifies uncritically the industrial revolution of which it is itself a quintessential expression. This aspiration to timelessness is displaced in postmodern architecture by a direct and self-conscious openness to and engagement with history. It is this relative specificity of the concept postmodern architecture that enabled Charles Jencks to write that “Modern Architecture died in St. Louis Missouri on July 15, 2 at 3:32 P.M.” Unfortunately, no remotely similar sentence can be written about postmodern philosophy. 

Potentia -- 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.  Potentia -- 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 0s 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. 

potency, for Aristotle, a kind of capacity that is a correlative of action. We require no instruction to grasp the difference between ‘X can do Y’ and ‘X is doing Y’, the latter meaning that the deed is actually being done. That an agent has a potency to do something is not a pure prediction so much as a generalization from past performance of individual or kind. Aristotle uses the example of a builder, meaning someone able to build, and then confronts the Megaric objection that the builder can be called a builder only when he actually builds. Clearly one who is doing something can do it, but Aristotle insists that the napping carpenter has the potency to hammer and saw. A potency based on an acquired skill like carpentry derives from the potency shared by those who acquire and those who do not acquire the skill. An unskilled worker can be said to be a builder “in potency,” not in the sense that he has the skill and can employ it, but in the sense that he can acquire the skill. In both acquisition and employment, ‘potency’ refers to the actual  either the actual acquisition of the skill or its actual use. These post-structuralism potency 726    726 potentiality, first practical attitude 727 correlatives emerged from Aristotle’s analysis of change and becoming. That which, from not having the skill, comes to have it is said to be “in potency” to that skill. From not having a certain shape, wood comes to have a certain shape. In the shaped wood, a potency is actualized. Potency must not be identified with the unshaped, with what Aristotle calls privation. Privation is the negation of P in a subject capable of P. Parmenides’ identification of privation and potency, according to Aristotle, led him to deny change. How can not-P become P? It is the subject of not-P to which the change is attributed and which survives the change that is in potency to X. 

poverty of the stimulus, a psychological phenomenon exhibited when behavior is stimulusunbound, and hence the immediate stimulus characterized in straightforward physical terms does not completely control behavior. Human beings sort stimuli in various ways and hosts of influences seem to affect when, why, and how we respond  our background beliefs, facility with language, hypotheses about stimuli, etc. Suppose a person visiting a museum notices a painting she has never before seen. Pondering the unfamiliar painting, she says, “an ambitious visual synthesis of the music of Mahler and the poetry of Keats.” If stimulus painting controls response, then her utterance is a product of earlier responses to similar stimuli. Given poverty of the stimulus, no such control is exerted by the stimulus the painting. Of course, some influence of response must be conceded to the painting, for without it there would be no utterance. However, the utterance may well outstrip the visitor’s conditioning and learning history. Perhaps she had never before talked of painting in terms of music and poetry. The linguist Noam Chomsky made poverty of the stimulus central to his criticism of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior 7. Chomsky argued that there is no predicting, and certainly no critical stimulus control of, much human behavior.

 power, a disposition; an ability or capacity to yield some outcome. One tradition which includes Locke distinguishes active and passive powers. A knife has the active power to slice an apple, which has the passive power to be sliced by the knife. The distinction seems largely grammatical, however. Powers act in concert: the power of a grain of salt to dissolve in water and the water’s power to dissolve the salt are reciprocal and their manifestations mutual. Powers or dispositions are sometimes thought to be relational properties of objects, properties possessed only in virtue of objects standing in appropriate relations to other objects. However, if we distinguish, as we must, between a power and its manifestation, and if we allow that an object could possess a power that it never manifested a grain of salt remains soluble even if it never dissolves, it would seem that an object could possess a power even if appropriate reciprocal partners for its manifestation were altogether non-existent. This appears to have been Locke’s view An Essay concerning Human Understanding, 1690 of “secondary qualities” colors, sounds, and the like, which he regarded as powers of objects to produce certain sorts of sensory experience in observers. Philosophers who take powers seriously disagree over whether powers are intrinsic, “built into” properties this view, defended by C. B. Martin, seems to have been Locke’s, or whether the connection between properties and the powers they bestow is contingent, dependent perhaps upon contingent laws of nature a position endorsed by Armstrong. Is the solubility of salt a characteristic built into the salt, or is it a “second-order” property possessed by the salt in virtue of i the salt’s possession of some “firstorder” property and ii the laws of nature? Reductive analyses of powers, though influential, have not fared well. Suppose a grain of salt is soluble in water. Does this mean that if the salt were placed in water, it would dissolve? No. Imagine that were the salt placed in water, a technician would intervene, imposing an electromagnetic field, thereby preventing the salt from dissolving. Attempts to exclude “blocking” conditions  by appending “other things equal” clauses perhaps  face charges of circularity: in nailing down what other things must be equal we find ourselves appealing to powers. Powers evidently are fundamental features of our world. 

practical reason, the capacity for argument or demonstrative inference, considered in its application to the task of prescribing or selecting behavior. Some philosophical concerns in this area pertain to the actual thought processes by which plans of action are formulated and carried out in practical situations. A second major issue is what role, if any, practical reason plays in determining norms of conduct. Here there are two fundamental positions. Instrumentalism is typified by Hume’s claim that reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions. According to instrumentalism, reason by itself is incapable of influencing action directly. It may do so indirectly, by disclosing facts that arouse motivational impulses. And it fulfills an indispensable function in discerning meansend relations by which our objectives may be attained. But none of those objectives is set by reason. All are set by the passions  the desiderative and aversive impulses aroused in us by what our cognitive faculties apprehend. It does not follow from this alone that ethical motivation reduces to mere desire and aversion, based on the pleasure and pain different courses of action might afford. There might yet be a specifically ethical passion, or it might be that independently based moral injunctions have in themselves a special capacity to provoke ordinary desire and aversion. Nevertheless, instrumentalism is often associated with the view that pleasure and pain, happiness and unhappiness, are the sole objects of value and disvalue, and hence the only possible motivators of conduct. Hence, it is claimed, moral injunctions must be grounded in these motives, and practical reason is of interest only as subordinated to inclination. The alternative to instrumentalism is the view championed by Kant, that practical reason is an autonomous source of normative principles, capable of motivating behavior independently of ordinary desire and aversion. On this view it is the passions that lack intrinsic moral import, and the function of practical reason is to limit their motivational role by formulating normative principles binding for all rational agents and founded in the operation of practical reason itself. Theories of this kind usually view moral principles as grounded in consistency, and an impartial respect for the autonomy of all rational agents. To be morally acceptable, principles of conduct must be universalizable, so that all rational agents could behave in the same way without their conduct either destroying itself or being inconsistently motivated. There are advantages and disadvantages to each of these views. Instrumentalism offers a simpler account of both the function of practical reason and the sources of human motivation. But it introduces a strong subjective element by giving primacy to desire, thereby posing a problem of how moral principles can be universally binding. The Kantian approach offers more promise here, since it makes universalizability essential to any type of behavior being moral. But it is more complex, and the claim that the deliverances of practical reason carry intrinsic motivational force is open to challenge. 

practical reasoning, the inferential process by which considerations for or against envisioned courses of action are brought to bear on the formation and execution of intention. The content of a piece of practical reasoning is a practical argument. Practical arguments can be complex, but they are often summarized in syllogistic form. Important issues concerning practical reasoning include how it relates to theoretical reasoning, whether it is a causal process, and how it can be evaluated. Theories of practical reasoning tend to divide into two basic categories. On one sort of view, the intrinsic features of practical reasoning exhibit little or no difference from those of theoretical reasoning. What makes practical reasoning practical is its subject matter and motivation. Hence the following could be a bona fide practical syllogism: Exercise would be good for me. Jogging is exercise. Therefore, jogging would be good for me. This argument has practical subject matter, and if made with a view toward intention formation it would be practical in motivation also. But it consists entirely of propositions, which are appropriate contents for belief-states. In principle, therefore, an agent could accept its conclusion without intending or even desiring to jog. Intention formation requires a further step. But if the content of an intention cannot be a proposition, that step could not count in itself as practical reasoning unless such reasoning can employ the contents of strictly practical mental states. Hence many philosophers call for practical syllogisms such as: Would that I exercise. Jogging is exercise. Therefore, I shall go jogging. Here the first premise is optative and understood to represent the content of a desire, and the conclusion is the content of a decision or act of intention formation. These contents are not true or false, and so are not propositions. Theories that restrict the contents of practical reasoning to propositions have the advantage that they allow such reasoning to be evaluated in terms of familiar logical principles. Those that permit the inclusion of optative content entail a need for more complex modes of evaluation. However, they bring more of the process of intention formation under the aegis of reason; also, they can be extended to cover the execution of intentions, in terms of syllogisms that terminate in volition. Both accounts must deal with cases of self-deception, in which the considerations an agent cites to justify a decision are not those from which it sprang, and cases of akrasia, where the agent views one course of action as superior, yet carries out another. Because mental content is always abstract, it cannot in itself be a nomic cause of behavior. But the states and events to which it belongs  desires, beliefs, etc.  can count as causes, and are so treated in deterministic explanations of action. Opponents of determinism reject this step, and seek to explain action solely through the teleological or justifying force carried by mental content. Practical syllogisms often summarize very complex thought processes, in which multiple options are considered, each with its own positive and negative aspects. Some philosophers hold that when successfully concluded, this process issues in a judgment of what action would be best all things considered  i.e., in light of all relevant considerations. Practical reasoning can be evaluated in numerous ways. Some concern the reasoning process itself: whether it is timely and duly considers the relevant alternatives, as well as whether it is well structured logically. Other concerns have to do with the products of practical reasoning. Decisions may be deemed irrational if they result in incompatible intentions, or conflict with the agent’s beliefs regarding what is possible. They may also be criticized if they conflict with the agent’s best interests. Finally, an agent’s intentions can fail to accord with standards of morality. The relationship among these ways of evaluating intentions is important to the foundations of ethics. 

practition, Castaneda’s term for the characteristic content of practical thinking. Each practition represents an action as something to be done, say, as intended, commanded, recommended, etc., and not as an accomplishment or prediction. Thus, unlike propositions, practitions are not truth-valued, but they can be components of valid arguments and so possess values akin to truth; e.g., the command ‘James, extinguish your cigar!’ seems legitimate given that James is smoking a cigar in a crowded bus. Acknowledging practitions is directly relevant to many other fields. 

praedicamenta singular: praedicamentum, in medieval philosophy, the ten Aristotelian categories: substance, quantity, quality, relation, where, when, position i.e., orientation  e.g., “upright”, having, action, and passivity. These were the ten most general of all genera. All of them except substance were regarded as accidental. It was disputed whether this tenfold classification was intended as a linguistic division among categorematic terms or as an ontological division among extralinguistic realities. Some authors held that the division was primarily linguistic, and that extralinguistic realities were divided according to some but not all the praedicamenta. Most authors held that everything in any way real belonged to one praedicamentum or another, although some made an exception for God. But authors who believed in complexe significabile usually regarded them as not belonging to any praedicamentum. 

pragmatic contradiction, a contradiction that is generated by pragmatic rather than logical implication. A logically implies B if it is impossible for B to be false if A is true, whereas A pragmatically implies B if in most but not necessarily all contexts, saying ‘A’ can reasonably be taken as indicating that B is true. Thus, if I say, “It’s raining,” what I say does not logically imply that I believe that it is raining, since it is possible for it to be raining without my believing it is. Nor does my saying that it is raining logically imply that I believe that it is, since it is possible for me to say this without believing it. But my saying this does pragmatically imply that I believe that it is raining, since normally my saying this can reasonably be taken to indicate that I believe it. Accordingly, if I were to say, “It’s raining but I don’t believe that it’s raining,” the result would be a pragmatic contradiction. The first part “It’s raining” does not logically imply the negation of the second part “I don’t believe that it’s raining” but my saying the first part does pragmatically imply the negation of the second part. 

pragmatism, a philosophy that stresses the relation of theory to praxis and takes the continuity of experience and nature as revealed through the outcome of directed action as the starting point for reflection. Experience is the ongoing transaction of organism and environment, i.e., both subject and object are constituted in the process. When intelligently ordered, initial conditions are deliberately transformed according to ends-inview, i.e., intentionally, into a subsequent state of affairs thought to be more desirable. Knowledge is therefore guided by interests or values. Since the reality of objects cannot be known prior to experience, truth claims can be justified only as the fulfillment of conditions that are experimentally determined, i.e., the outcome of inquiry. As a philosophic movement, pragmatism was first formulated by Peirce in the early 1870s in the Metaphysical Club in Cambridge, Massachusetts; it was announced as a distinctive position in James’s 8 address to the Philosophical Union at the  of California at Berkeley, and further elaborated according to the Chicago School, especially by Dewey, Mead, and Jane Addams 18605. Emphasis on the reciprocity of theory and praxis, knowledge and action, facts and values, follows from its postDarwinian understanding of human experience, including cognition, as a developmental, historically contingent, process. C. I. Lewis’s pragmatic a priori and Quine’s rejection of the analytic synthetic distinction develop these insights further. Knowledge is instrumental  a tool for organizing experience satisfactorily. Concepts are habits of belief or rules of action. Truth cannot be determined solely by epistemological criteria because the adequacy of these criteria cannot be determined apart from the goals sought and values instantiated. Values, which arise in historically specific cultural situations, are intelligently appropriated only to the extent that they satisfactorily resolve problems and are judged worth retaining. According to pragmatic theories of truth, truths are beliefs that are confirmed in the course of experience and are therefore fallible, subject to further revision. True beliefs for Peirce represent real objects as successively confirmed until they converge on a final determination; for James, leadings that are worthwhile; and according to Dewey’s theory of inquiry, the transformation of an indeterminate situation into a determinate one that leads to warranted assertions. Pragmatic ethics is naturalistic, pluralistic, developmental, and experimental. It reflects on the motivations influencing ethical systems, examines the individual developmental process wherein an individual’s values are gradually distinguished from those of society, situates moral judgments within problematic situations irreducibly individual and social, and proposes as ultimate criteria for decision making the value for life as growth, determined by all those affected by the actual or projected outcomes. The original interdisciplinary development of pragmatism continues in its influence on the humanities. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., member of the Metaphysical Club, later justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, developed a pragmatic theory of law. Peirce’s Principle of Pragmatism, by which meaning resides in conceivable practical effects, and his triadic theory of signs developed into the field of semiotics. James’s Principles of Psychology 0 not only established experimental psychology in North America, but shifted philosophical attention away from abstract analyses of rationality to the continuity of the biological and the mental. The reflex arc theory was reconstructed into an interactive loop of perception, feeling, thinking, and behavior, and joined with the selective interest of consciousness to become the basis of radical empiricism. Mead’s theory of the emergence of self and mind in social acts and Dewey’s analyses of the individual and society influenced the human sciences. Dewey’s theory of education as community-oriented, based on the psychological developmental stages of growth, and directed toward full participation in a democratic society, was the philosophical basis of progressive education. 

praxis from Grecian prasso, ‘doing’, ‘acting’, in Aristotle, the sphere of thought and action that comprises the ethical and political life of man, contrasted with the theoretical designs of logic and epistemology theoria. It was thus that ‘praxis’ acquired its general definition of ‘practice’ through a contrastive comparison with ‘theory’. Throughout the history of Western philosophy the concept of praxis found a place in a variety of philosophical vocabularies. Marx and the neoMarxists linked the concept with a production paradigm in the interests of historical explanation. Within such a scheme of things the activities constituting the relations of production and exchange are seen as the dominant features of the socioeconomic history of humankind. Significations of ‘praxis’ are also discernible in the root meaning of pragma deed, affair, which informed the development of  pragmatism. In more recent times the notion of praxis has played a prominent role in the formation of the school of critical theory, in which the performatives of praxis are seen to be more directly associated with the entwined phenomena of discourse, communication, and social practices. The central philosophical issues addressed in the current literature on praxis have to do with the theorypractice relationship and the problems associated with a value-free science. The general thrust is that of undermining or subverting the traditional bifurcation of theory and practice via a recognition of praxis-oriented endeavors that antedate both theory construction and the construal of practice as a mere application of theory. Both the project of “pure theory,” which makes claims for a value-neutral standpoint, and the purely instrumentalist understanding of practice, as itself shorn of discernment and insight, are jettisoned. The consequent philosophical task becomes that of understanding human thought and action against the backdrop of the everyday communicative endeavors, habits, and skills, and social practices that make up our inheritance in the world. 

Praxis school, a school of philosophy originating in Zagreb and Belgrade which, from 4 to 4, published the international edition of the leading postwar Marxist journal Praxis. During the same period, it organized the Korcula Summer School, which attracted scholars from around the Western world. In a reduced form the school continues each spring with the Social Philosophy Course in Dubrovnik, Croatia. The founders of praxis philosophy include Gajo Petrovic Zagreb, Milan Kangrga Zagreb, and Mihailo Markovic Belgrade. Another wellknown member of the group is Svetozar Stojanovic Belgrade, and a second-generation leader is Gvozden Flego Zagreb. The Praxis school emphasized the writings of the young Marx while subjecting dogmatic Marxism to one of its strongest criticisms. Distinguishing between Marx’s and Engels’s writings and emphasizing alienation and a dynamic concept of the human being, it contributed to a greater understanding of the interrelationship between the individual and society. Through its insistence on Marx’s call for a “ruthless critique,” the school stressed open inquiry and freedom of speech in both East and West. Quite possibly the most important and original philosopher of the group, and certainly Croatia’s leading twentieth-century philosopher, was Gajo Petrovic 793. He called for 1 understanding philosophy as a radical critique of all existing things, and 2 understanding human beings as beings of praxis and creativity. This later led to a view of human beings as revolutionary by nature. At present he is probably best remembered for his Marx in the Mid-Twentieth Century and Philosophie und Revolution. Milan Kangrga b.3 also emphasizes human creativity while insisting that one should understand human beings as producers who humanize nature. An ethical problematic of humanity can pragmatism, ethical Praxis school 731    731 be realized through a variety of disciplines that include aesthetics, philosophical anthropolgy, theory of knowledge, ontology, and social thought. Mihailo Markovic b.3, a member of the Belgrade Eight, is best known for his theory of meaning, which leads him to a theory of socialist humanism. His most widely read work in the West is From Affluence to Praxis: Philosophy and Social Criticism. 

Pre-analytic, considered but naive; commonsensical; not tainted by prior explicit theorizing; said of judgments and, derivatively, of beliefs or intuitions underlying such judgments. Preanalytic judgments are often used to test philosophical theses. All things considered, we prefer theories that accord with preanalytic judgments to those that do not, although most theorists exhibit a willingness to revise preanalytic assessments in light of subsequent inquiry. Thus, a preanalytic judgment might be thought to constitute a starting point for the philosophical consideration of a given topic. Is justice giving every man his due? It may seem so, preanalytically. Attention to concrete examples, however, may lead us to a different view. It is doubtful, even in such cases, that we altogether abandon preanalytic judgments. Rather, we endeavor to reconcile apparently competing judgments, making adjustments in a way that optimizes overall coherence.