updated 1/8/2005
selected entries from The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy
Simon Blackburn
Note: Blackburn’s dictionary is a highly recommended reference book for philosophy students.
philosophy (Gk., love of knowledge or wisdom) The study of the most general and abstract features of the world and categories with which we think: mind, matter, reason, proof, truth, etc. In philosophy, the concepts with which we approach the world themselves become the topic of enquiry. A philosophy of a discipline such as history, physics, or law seeks not so much so solve historical, physical, or legal questions, as to study the concepts that structure such thinking, and to lay bare their foundations and presuppositions. In this sense philosophy is what happens when a practice becomes self-conscious. . . .
Thales of Miletus (flourished 585 BC) – One of the Seven Sages of ancient Greece and judged by Aristotle to be the founder of physical science; that is, he was the first Greek to search for the ultimate substance of things, which he identified with water. A polymath, he is supposed to have predicted the solar eclipse of 28 May 585 BC and to have introduced the study of geometry to Greece. He apparently believed in some kind of hylozoism and panpsychism, but claims made in late antiquity about his doctrines and discoveries are regarded as unreliable.
Heraclitus of Ephesus (died after 480 BC) Both the life and work of Heraclitus are shadowy, and overlain by later legends and reworkings of his views. . . . The guiding idea of his philosophy was that of the logos (law or principle) governing all things: this logos is capable of being heard or hearkened to by people, it unifies opposites, and it is somehow associated with fire, which is pre-eminent among the four elements that Heraclitus distinguishes: fire, air (breath, the stuff of which souls are composed), earth, and water. Although he is principally remembered for the doctrine of the ‘flux’ of all things, and the famous statement that you cannot step into the same river twice, for new waters are ever flowing in upon you, Heraclitus was probably more interested in measured, balanced processes. . . . The primacy of the divine, eternal logos and the contrast between the unstable world of appearance and the order behind it exercised tremendous influence on Plato and then on the Stoics.
Parmenides of Elea (born c. 515 BC) – Probably the most important of the Presocratics. In his poem On Nature a goddess instructs him that reality must necessarily be, or must necessarily not be, or must both be and not be, which is impossible. Given the first option, it can be deduced that what is real must be ungenerated, imperishable, indivisible, perfect, and motionless. This, the Parmenidean One, obviously contrasts with the relative and specious appearances of things, which arise only through the opposition two equally unreal forms, Light and Dark. Parmenides’ legacy included a profound consciousness of the conflict between reason and experience, and the potentially illusory nature of the latter: if, as Whitehead said, western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato, it might be added that Plato is often a series of comments on Parmenides. Certainly the contrast between the changing perceptible world and the unchanging and eternal intelligible world has exercised philosophy ever since. Zeno’s arguments against the reality of motion are usually interpreted as part of a defence of Parmenides’ system, although Zeno himself probably remained unpersuaded either by monism or pluralism.
Zeno of Elea (born c. 490 BC) – The pupil and principal defender of Parmenides, Zeno was called the inventor of dialectic by Aristotle. His one book, of which we possess only fragments, contained many arguments for the unreality of the pluralistic world that we take ourselves to inhabit. The most famous of these are the four arguments against motion, known as Zeno’s paradoxes. But Zeno also proposed many other antinomies, showing that objects must be both limited and unlimited in number, like and unlike, one and many, infinitesimally small and infinitely large. Zeno’s own attitude to these antinomies, as to his arguments against motion, has been disputed, but he is consistently described as a convinced Parmenidean.
Zeno’s paradoxes Zeno of Elea’s arguments against motion precipitated a crisis in Greek thought. They are presented as four arguments in the forms of paradoxes: (1) the Racecourse, or dichotomy paradox, (2) Achilles and the Tortoise, (3) the Arrow, and (4) the Moving Blocks, or Stadium.
1 Suppose a runner needs to travel from a start S to a finish F. To do this he must first travel to the midpoint, M, and thence to F: but if N is the midpoint of SM, he must first travel to N, and so on ad infinitum (Zeno: ‘what has been said once can always be repeated’). But it is impossible to accomplish an infinite number of tasks in a finite time. Therefore the runner cannot complete (or start) his journey.
2 Achilles runs a race with a tortoise, who has a start of n metres. Suppose the tortoise runs one-tenth as fast as Achilles. Then by the time Achilles has reached the tortoise’s starting-point, the tortoise is n/10 meters ahead. By the time Achilles has reached that point, the tortoise is n/100 metres ahead, and so on ad infinitum. So Achilles cannot catch the tortoise.
3 An arrow cannot move at a place at which it is not. But neither can it move at a place at which it is. But a flying arrow is always at the place at which it is. That is, at any instant it is at rest. But if at no instant is it moving, then it is always at rest.
4 Suppose three equal blocks, A, B, C, of width l, with A and C moving past B at the same speed in opposite directions. Then A takes one time, t, to traverse the width of B, but half the time, t/2, to traverse the width of C. But these are the same length, l. So A takes both t and t/2 to traverse the distance l.
These are the barest forms of the arguments, and different suggestions have been made as to how Zeno might have supported them (for one version, see Bayle’s trilemma). A modern approach might be inclined to dismiss them as superficial, since we are familiar with the mathematical ideas (a) that an infinite series can have a finite sum, which may appear to dispose of (1) and (2), and (b) that there is indeed no such thing as velocity at a point or instant, for velocity is defined only over intervals of time and distance, which may seem to dispose of (3). The fourth paradox seems merely amusing, unless Zeno had in mind that the length l is thought of as a smallest unit of distance (a quantum of space) and that each of A and C are traveling so that they traverse the smallest space in the smallest time. On these assumptions there is a contradiction, for A passes C in half the proposed smallest time.
The purely mathematical response only works if we have a satisfactory foundation not only for the arithmetic of infinity but also for the measurement of space and time by its means. The real importance of the paradoxes has lain in the pressure they put on those foundations. For instance, the third paradox suggests that if we are happy to treat a line as made up of extensionless points, and time as made up of instants that occupy no time, then motion is a succession of states of rest. The difficulty with using the fact that an infinite series can have a finite sum as a sufficient solution of the paradoxes has been brought out by considering a lamp set to go on for half a minute, go off for a quarter, on for an eighth…At the end of the minute, is it on or off? Neither answer is mathematically acceptable, since there is no last member of the series. So it seems that there can be no such lamp, yet it also seems to be an accurate model of Achilles’ completed journey.
Socrates (c. 470-399 BC) The engaging and infuriating figure of the early dialogues of Plato, Socrates represented the turning-point in Greek philosophy, at which the self-critical reflection on the nature of our concepts and our reasoning emerged as a major concern, alongside cosmological speculation and enquiry. The historical Socrates cannot easily be distinguished from the Platonic character, as there are few other sources for Socrates’ life and doctrine (Xenophon is one). He served as a soldier in the Peloponnesian War, and was married to Xanthippe, by whom he had three male children. He was of strong build, great endurance, and completely indifferent to wealth and luxury.
His subordination of all other concerns to a life spent inquiring after wisdom is the most commanding example, seldom approached, of the proper way of living for a philosopher. He remains the model of a great teacher, but it is uncertain whether he had anything in the nature of a formal school. His friendship with some of the aristocratic party in Athens is often supposed to explain why he was eventually brought to trial, on charges of introducing strange gods and corrupting the youth. Plato’s Crito and Phaedo record the inspirational manner in which he refused to break the laws of Athens and escape during the thirty days between his trial and execution, and they celebrate the fortitude with which he met his death. Whilst his skill at the dialectical, questioning method is unquestioned, his positive contributions and doctrines are matters of some debate, and opinions vary between ascribing to him many of the positive doctrines of Plato, and denying that he had any doctrines at all of his own, apart from his attachment to rigorous dialectical method as the instrument for separating truth from error. All the Greek schools of philosophy conceived of themselves as owing much to Socrates, except for the Epicureans who disliked him intensely, calling him ‘the Athenian buffoon’.
Plato (c. 429-347 BC) Plato was born in Athens of an aristocratic family. He recounts in the Seventh Letter, which, if genuine, is part of his autobiography, that the spectacle of the politics of his day brought him to the conclusion that only philosophers could be fit to rule. After the death of Socrates in 399, he traveled extensively. During this period he made his first trip to Sicily, with whose internal politics he became much entangled; sceptics about the authenticity of the Seventh Letter suppose it to be a forgery designed to support the opposition party of Dion against the tyrant Dionysius II. He visited Sicily at least three times in all and may have been richly subsidized by Dionysius. On return from Sicily he began formal teaching at what became the Academy. Details of Plato’s life are surprisingly sparse, partly because of the Athenian convention against naming contemporaries in literary works; Aristotle, for example, although a student at the Academy for some twenty years, gives us no information about Plato’s life. As a result the dating of his works has to be established on internal evidence, and is subject to scholarly dispute.
Plato’s fame rests on his Dialogues which are all preserved. They are usually divided into three periods, early, middle, and late. Early dialogues include Hippias Minor, Laches, Charmides, Ion, Protagoras, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Gorgias, Meno, Cratylus, and the doubtful Hippias Major, Lysis, Menexenus, and Euthydemus; middle dialogues include Phaedo, Philebus, Symposium, Republic, Theaetetus; and to the late period belong Critias, Parmenides, Phaedrus, Sophist, Statesman, Timaeus, and Laws. The early dialogues establish the figure of Socrates, portrayed as endlessly questioning, ruthlessly shattering the false claims to knowledge of his contemporaries. The aim of the elenctic method is allegedly to clear the ground for establishing a just appreciation of virtue, but more is done negatively than positively. When Socrates asks ‘What is x?’ (virtue, justice, friendship, etc.), he is shown as brushing aside mere examples of x in favour of pursuit of the essence or form of x, or that which makes things x. In the middle dialogues, concern switches to the philosophical underpinnings of this notion of a form, possibly in response to pressure on Plato to justify the dialectical method as more than a sceptical game. The middle dialogues are not in dialogue form, and do not exhibit the Socratic method. The change may have been connected with Plato’s belief that the young should not be exposed to such drastic solvents (the teaching method of the Academy prohibited students younger than 30 years old from such exercises).
It is the middle dialogues that defend the doctrines commonly thought of as Platonism, and the positive doctrines are certainly uncompromising. A pivotal concept is that of the forms. These are independent, real, divine, invisible, and changeless; they share features of the things of which they are the form, but also cause them (so they are not simply common properties, or universals). Unique amongst them is the form of the Good, the quasi-divine goal of mystical apprehension that could be achieved, if at all, only at the end of the philosophical pilgrimage. Apprehension of the forms is knowledge (noesis) whereas belief about the changing everyday world is at best opinion (doxa). Knowledge is recollection of the acquaintance we had with the forms before our immortal souls became imprisoned in our bodies. The Republic develops the celebrated comparison between justice and order in the soul, and that in the state; the famous myth of the cave introduces the doctrine that only those who apprehend the form of the good are fit to rule.
The Parmenides and Theaetetus are late middle or early late dialogues, and the former contains sufficiently devastating criticism of the doctrine of forms to throw Plato’s later views into doubt. The latter is a brilliant investigation of the concept of knowledge that ushers in the classical and still widely accepted account of knowledge as true belief plus a logos, or certification by reason. In the late works, especially the last and longest dialogue, the Laws, Plato returns to the character of the ideal republic in a more sober manner, with civic piety and religion taking much of the burden of education away from philosophy. The Timaeus is especially interesting as a scientific treatise, whose cosmology echoed on in the Neoplatonism of the Christian era. Plato is generally regarded as the inventor of the philosophical argument as we know it, and many would claim that the depth and range of his thought have never been surpassed.
Academy of Athens Teaching college founded by Plato, around 387 BC. Although knowledge of its organization is fragmentary, it appears to have favoured a teaching method based on discussion and seminars. The fundamental studies were mathematics and dialectic. It is customary to distinguish the Old Academy (Plato and his immediate successors) and the New Academy (beginning with Arcesilaus). The distinction is first made by Antiochus of Ascalon. The Old Academy included Aristotle, Speusippus, Eudoxus, Xenocrates, and Theaetetus of Athens. It was largely preoccupied with mathematical and cosmological themes arising from the late work of Plato, although at some point ethical interests also emerged. There is a sharp break with Arcesilaus, who produced the sceptical New Academy which maintained a running battle with the teaching of the Stoics. The last head of the sceptical Academy was Philo of Larissa, who went to Rome c. 87 BC when Mithridates VI of Persia threatened Athens, thereby ending the Academy as an institution. The rehabilitation of dogmatic Platonic themes after Antiochus of Ascalon (c. 79 BC) was not properly the doing of the Academy, but paved the way for the emergence of Neoplatonism.
arete (Gk., the goodness or excellence of a thing) – The goodness or virtue of a person. In the thought of Plato and Aristotle virtue is connected with performing a function (ergon), just as an eye is good if it performs its proper function of vision. This is its telos or purpose. Arete is therefore identified with what enables a person to live well or successfully, although whether virtue is then just a means to successful life or is an essential part of the activity of living well becomes controversial. According to Aristotle the various virtues consist in knowing how to strike a mean between opposing vices of excess and defect. Greek thought also paves the way for the Christian ideal that the fullest development of arete for human beings consists in a self-sufficient life of contemplation and wisdom. The Sanskrit word kusala is used in Buddhism to represent the same association of goodness with the skill of being a good human being.
virtue A virtue is a trait of character that is to be admired: one rendering its possessor better, either morally, or intellectually, or in the conduct of specific affairs. Both Plato and Aristotle devote much time to the unity of the virtues, or the way in which possession of one in the right way requires possession of the others; another central concern is the way in which possession of virtue, which might seem to stand in the way of self-interest, in fact makes possible the achievement of eudaimonia. But different conceptions of moral virtue and its relation to other virtue characterize Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian, Enlightenment, Romantic, and 20th century ethical writing. These divisions reflect central preoccupations of their time and needs of the cultures in which they gain predominance: the humility, charity, patience, and chastity of Christianity would have been unintelligible as ethical virtues to classical Greeks, whereas the ‘magnanimity’ of the great-souled man of Aristotle is hard for us to tread as an unqualified good. Syntheses of Christian and Greek conceptions are attempted by Aquinas, but a resolute return to an Artistotelian conception has been impossible since the emergence of generalized benevolence as a leading virtue. For Hume a virtue is a trait of character with the power of producing love or pride, by being ‘useful or agreeable’ to its possessors and those affected by them. In Kant, virtue is purely a trait that can act as a handmaiden to the doing of duty, having no independent ethical value, and in utilitarianism, virtues are traits of character that further pursuit of the general happiness.
dialectic (Gk., dialektike, the art of conversation or debate) Most fundamentally, the process of reasoning to obtain truth and knowledge on any topic. According to the different views of this process, different conceptions of dialectic emerge. Thus in the Socratic method dialectic is the process of eliciting the truth by means of questions aimed at opening out what is already implicitly known, or at exposing the contradictions and muddles of an opponent’s position. In the middle dialogues of Plato, however, it becomes the total process of enlightenment, whereby the philosopher is educated so as to achieve knowledge of the supreme good, the form of the Good. For Aristotle, dialectic is any rational inference based on probable premises. In Kant, dialectic is the ‘logic of illusion’, or the misuse of logic to deliver the appearance of solid belief. It is one of the jobs of true philosophy to reveal the places where reason transgresses its proper boundaries, producing the illusions of transcendental metaphysics. In Hegel, dialectic refers to the necessary process that makes up progress in both thought and the world (which are identified in Hegel’s idealism, although the idea that processes in the world unfold in a way that mirrors the processes of reason is as old as Heraclitus). The process is one of overcoming the contradiction between thesis and antithesis, by means of synthesis; the synthesis in turn becomes contradicted, and the process repeats itself until final perfection is reached.
elenchus (Gk, cross-examination) – The dialectical or Socratic method of eliciting truth by cross-examination; hence sometimes the elenctic method.
Socratic method The method of teaching in which the master imparts no information but asks a sequence of questions, through answering which the pupil eventually comes to the desired knowledge. Socratic irony is the pose of ignorance on the part of the master, who may in fact know more about the matter than he lets on.
The dilemma arises whatever the source of authority is supposed to be. Do we care about the good because it is good, or do we just call good those things that we care about? It also generalizes to affect our understanding of the authority of other things: mathematics, or necessary truth, for example. Are truths necessary because we deem them to be so, or do we deem them to be so because they are necessary?
forms The theory of forms is probably the most characteristic, and most contested of the doctrines of Plato. In the background lie the Pythagorean conception of form as the key to physical nature, but also the sceptical doctrine associated with Cratylus (said by Aristotle to have been one of the teachers of Plato) that in the heaving confusion of the perceptible world nothing is fixed, so thought can gain no foothold and nothing can be said. In escaping from this impasse Plato attempts to present a way in which the forms of things are intelligible but abstract shared features. Ordinary things gain their natures by either ‘imitating’ forms (which then become thought of as transcendent and somehow independent of the sensible world) or ‘participating’ in them (in which case they are immanent, present in things, and perhaps less mysterious). The train of thought is illustrated with both geometrical and ethical examples. The plate that the potter makes is not itself perfectly round, but perfect roundness is an ideal. It may be found in the world, but it is something to which things approximate, and it plays a role in rendering intelligible the world in which they do so. Similarly actual human institutions may only approximate to the ideal of justice, but the ideal or form provides an intelligible dimension of description and criticism. Of course, to apply it means having the special knowledge of the geometer, in the case of roundness, or of the thinker who has attained knowledge of what justice consists in, in the case of ethics. Knowledge of the forms thus becomes itself an ideal toward which philosophers strive. It is this line of thought that ends up with Plato echoing the “Eleatic distinction between the real world, in this case the world of the forms, accessible only to the intellect, and the deceptive world of unstable perception and mere doxa or belief. The world of forms is itself unchanging, as change implies development towards the realization of form. But whereas Parmenides thinks of the real, eternal world as a kind of physical world, in Plato it becomes entirely non-physical.
The transcendental element in Plato’s thought is most visible in the Symposium, the Phaedo, and the Republic. The problem of interpretation is however confused by the question of whether Socrates’ voice is also that of Plato (again, according to Aristotle, Metaphysics M, xiii. 178 b, Socrates did not make universals separate, but others, i.e. Plato, did). In the later dialogue Parmenides, Plato squarely confronts the problems of thinking of forms either as transcending particular things, or as partaken of by particular things, and therefore divisible. What is needed is an accommodation between the idea that universals are present in particulars, and the idea that they are merely imitated by them.
Aristotle (384-322 BC) Along with Plato the most influential philosopher of the western tradition, Aristotle was born at Stagira in Macedonia, the son of Nicomachus, the court physician to the Macedonian king Amyntas II. At the age of 17 he entered Plato’s academy in Athens, and remained there until Plato’s death. When the Academy under Speusippus turned to mathematical and speculative pursuits, Aristotle accepted the invitation of Hermias to reside at Assos. Upon the death of Hermias (whose niece, Pythias, he married) in 345, Aristotle went to Mytilene on the island of Lesbos. To this period belong many of his zoological researches. Between 343/2 and 340 he acted as tutor to the young Alexander the Great, at the invitation of his father Philip of Macedon. In 335 he returned to Athens, and on the outskirts of the city in a grove sacred to Apollo Lyceus he found a school, the Lyceum (where was the peripatos or covered walk from which his followers, the Peripatetics, took their name). Here he conducted and organized research on many subjects and built the first great library of antiquity. . . .
The works known in his lifetime include dialogues modelled on those of Plato, but these are now lost. It is also known that he accumulated an immense collection of natural and historical observations during his headship of the Lyceum, but these too are mainly lost. The extant corpus is nearly all preserved through the edition of Andronicus of Rhodes, made in the 1st centruy BC. The principal works of philosophical interest are (a) logical works . . .; (b) works on physics . . .; (c) psychology and natural history . . .; (d) ethics . . . Finally, (e) the general investigation of the things that are: the Metaphysics.
The scale of Aristotles’s researches, and their central place in the subsequent history of philosophy, mean that his work defies brief description. His relationship to Plato is complex, with scholars on the whole repudiating the idea of a development away from an originally accepted Platonism, even to the point of detecting a swing towards Plato in the later metaphysics. The traditional contrast is between Plato’s otherworldly, formal and a priori conception of true knowledge (noēsis), as opposed to Arristotle’s intense concern for the observed detail of natural phenomena, including those of thought, language, and psychology. Thus while Plato is the patron saint of transcendental theories of knowledge and especially of ethics, Aristotle is concerned to protect knowledge of the plural and multifarious world we live in. [In the latter half of the twentieth century is ethics has inspired a resurgence of interest in virtue theory.]
epistemology (Gk., epistēmē, knowledge) The theory of knowledge. Its central questions include the origin of knowledge; the place of experience in generating knowledge, and the place of reason in doing so; the relationship between knowledge and certainty, and between knowledge and the impossibility of error; the possibility of universal skepticism; and the changing forms of knowledge that arise from new conceptualizations of the world. All of these issues link with other central concerns of philosophy, such as the nature of truth and the nature of experience and meaning. It is possible to see epistemology as dominated by two rival metaphors. One is that of a building or pyramid, built on foundations. In this conception it is the job of the philosopher to describe especially secure foundations, and to identify secure modes of construction, so that the resulting edifice can be shown to be sound. This metaphor favours some idea of the ‘given’ as a basis of knowledge, and of a rationally defensible theory of confirmation and inference as a method of construction. The other metaphor is that if a boat or fuselage, that has no foundation but owes its strength to the stability of given by its interlocking parts. This rejects the idea that a basis in the ‘given’, favours ideas of coherence and holism, but finds it harder to ward off skepticism.
The problem of defining knowledge in terms of true belief plus some favoured relation between the believer and the facts began with Plato’s view in the Theaetetus that knowledge is true belief plus a logos.
essentialism The doctrine that it is correct to distinguish between those properties of a thing, or kind of thing, that are essential to it, and those that are merely accidental. Essential properties are ones that it cannot lose without ceasing to exist. Thus a person wearing a hat may take off the hat, or might not have been wearing the hat, but the same person cannot cease to occupy space, and we cannot postulate a possible situation in which the person is not occupying space. If we agree with this (it is not beyond debate, which illustrates the difficulty with essentialism), occupying space is an essential property of persons, but wearing a hat an accidental one. The main problem is to locate the grounds for this intuitive distinction. One suggestion is that it arises simply from the ways of describing things, and is therefore linguistic or even conventional in origin. Contrasted with this (the nominal essence) is the Lockean idea that things themselves have underlying natures (real essences) that underly and explain their other properties.
Essentialism is used in feminist writing of the view that females (or males) have an essential nature (e.g. nurturing and caring versus being aggressive and selfish), as opposed to differing by a variety of accidental or contingent features brought about by social forces.
accident In Aristotelian metaphysics an accident is a property of a thing which is no part of the essence of the thing: something it could lose or have added without ceasing to be the same thing or the same substance. The accidents divide into categories: quantity, action (i.e. place in the causal order, or ability to affect things or be affected by them), quality, space, time, and relation.
idea (Gk., eidos, visible form) A notion stretching all the way from one pole, where it denotes a subjective, internal presence in the mind, somehow thought of as representing something about the world, to the other pole, where it represents an eternal, timeless unchanging form or concept: the concept of the number series or of justice, for example, thought of as independent objects of enquiry and perhaps of knowledge. These two poles are not distinct meanings of the term, although they give rise to many problems of interpretation, but between them they define a space of philosophical problems. On the one hand, ideas are that with which we think, or in Locke’s terms, whatever the mind may be employed about in thinking. Looked at that way they seem to be inherently transient, fleeting, and unstable private presences. On the other hand, ideas provide the way in which objective knowledge can be expressed. They are the essential components of understanding, and any intelligible proposition that is true must be capable of being understood. Plato’s theory of forms is a celebration of the objective and timeless existence of ideas as concepts, and in his hands ideas of reified to the point where they make up the only real world, of separate and perfect models of which the empirical world is only a poor cousin. This doctrine, notable in the Timaeus, opened the way for the Neoplatonic notion of ideas as the thoughts of God. The concept gradually lost this other-worldly aspect, until after Descrates ideas become assimilated to whatever it is that lies in the mind of any thinking being.
Together with a general bias towards the sensory, so that what lies in the mind may be thought of as something like images, and a belief that thinking is well explained as the manipulation of images, this is developed by Locke, Berkeley, and Hume into a full-scale view of the understanding as the domain of images, although they were all aware of anomalies that were later regarded as fatal to this doctrine. The defects in the account were exposed by Kant, who realized that the understanding needs to be thought of more in terms of rules and organizing principles than of any kind of copy of what is given in experience. Kant also recognized the danger of the opposite extreme (that of Leibniz) of failing to connect the elements of understanding with those of experience at all (Critique of Pure Reason, A270).
It has become more common to think of ideas, or concepts, as dependent upon social and especially linguistic structures, rather than the self-standing creations of an individual mind, but the tension between the objective and the subjective aspect of the matter lingers on, for instance in debates about the possibility of objective knowledge, of indeterminacy in translation, and of identity between the thoughts people entertain at one time and those that they entertain at another.
metaphysics Originally a title for those books of Aristotle that came after the Physics, the term is now applied to any enquiry that raises questions about reality that lie beyond or behind those capable of being tackled by the methods of science. Naturally, an immediately contested issue is whether there are any such questions, or whether any text of metaphysics should, in Hume’s words, be ‘committed to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion’ (Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Bk. Xiii, Pt. 3). The traditional examples will include questions of mind and body, substance and accident, events, causation, and the categories of things that exist. The permanent complaint about metaphysics is that in so far as there are real questions in these areas, ordinary scientific method forms the only possible approach to them. Hostility to metaphysics was one of the banners of logical positivism, and survies in a different way in the scientific naturalism of writers such as Quine. Metaphysics, then, tends to become concerned more with the presuppositions of scientific thought, or of thought in general, although here, too, any suggestion that there is one timeless way in which thought has to be conducted meets sharp opposition. A useful distinction is drawn by Strawson, between descriptive metaphysics, which contents itself with describing the basic framework of concepts with which thought is (perhaps at a time) conducted, as opposed to revisionary metaphysics, which aims for a criticism and revision of some hapless way of thought. Although the possibility of revisionary metaphysics may be doubted, it continues to the present time: eliminativism in the philosophy of mind and postmodernist disenchantment with objectivity and truth are conspicuous examples.
ontology Derived from the Greek word for being, but a 17th-century coinage for the branch of metaphysics that concerns itself with what exists. Apart from the ontological argument itself there have existed many a priori arguments that the world must contain things of one kind or another: simple things, unextended things, eternal substances, necessary beings, and so on. Such arguments often depend upon some version of the principle of sufficient reason. Kant is the greatest opponent of the view that unaided reason can tell us in detail what kinds of thing must exist, and therefore do exist. In the 20th century, Heidegger is often thought of primarily as an ontologist. Quine’s principle of ontological commitment is that to be is to be the value of a bound variable, a principle not telling us what things exist, but how to determine what things a theory claims to exist. These are the things the variables range over in a properly regimented formal presentation of the theory. Philosophers characteristically charge each other with reifying things improperly, and in the history of philosophy every kind of thing will at one time or another have been thought to be the fictitious result of an ontological mistake.
argument To argue is to produce considerations designed to support a conclusion. An argument is either the process of doing this (in which sense an argument may be heated or protracted) or the product, i.e. the set of propositions adduced (the premises), the pattern of inference and the conclusion reached. An argument may be deductively valid, in which case the conclusion follows from the premises, or it may be persuasive in other ways. Logic is the study of valid and invalid forms of argument.
counterexample A counterexample is an example that refutes a claim about some subject-matter. Switzerland is a counterexample to the claim that all countries with armed citizens are dangerous. Notice that it is not a counterexample to the claim that some countries with armed citizens are dangerous. Much philosophy proceeds by finding counterexamples. For example, the claim that if you have promised someone to be at a place at a time, you must be there, could be countered with the example of a situation in which the person you promised has died in the meantime. In some developments of logic a counterexample set is made by combining the premises of some argument with the negation of the conclusion, and seeing if a contradiction can be derived. If it can, then the original argument was valid.
ambiguity Having more than one meaning. The simplest case is lexical ambiguity, where a single term has two meanings. A sentence or grammatically complex construction can be ambiguous without any of the words in it being so, because of structural ambiguity: ‘All the nice girls love a sailor’ can bear at least three meanings for this reason (there is one particular sailor, such as Prince Andrew, loved by all; to each nice girl her own sailor whom she loves; to each nice girl any sailor is lovable).
divine command Theories of ethics that ground the nature of ethical demands in the fact that they represent the commands of God. The classic philosophical problem in front of such an account, apart from the fragile access we have to any such commands, is the Euthyphro dilemma. The social problem generated by the account is that in periods of declining religious belief, people become unable to attach importance to moral concerns either: ‘if God is dead, everything is permitted.’
morality Although the morality of people and their ethics amount to the same thing, there is a usage that restricts morality to systems such as that of Kant, based on notions such as duty, obligation, and principles of conduct, reserving ethics for the more Aristotelian approach to practical reasoning, based on the notion of a virtue, and generally avoiding the separation of ‘moral’ considerations from other practical considerations. The scholarly issues are complex, with some writers seeing Kant as more Aristotelian, and Aristotle as more involved with a separate sphere of responsibility and duty, than the simple contrast suggests.
moral realism Realism as applied to the judgments of ethics, and to the values, obligations, rights, etc. that are referred to in ethical theory. The leading idea is to see moral truth as grounded in the nature of things rather than in subjective and variable human reactions to things. Like realism in other areas, this is capable of many different formulations. Generally speaking moral realism aspires to protecting the objectivity of ethical judgment (opposing relativism and subjectivism); it may assimilate moral truths to those of mathematics, hope that they have some divine sanction, or see them as guaranteed by human nature.
relativism The permanently tempting doctrine that in some areas at least, truth itself is relative to the standpoint of the judging subject (‘beauty lies in the eye of the beholder’). The first classical statement is the doctrine of the Sophist Protagoras that ‘man is the measure of all things’. Relativism may be a global doctrine about all knowledge, or a local doctrine about some area (aesthetics, ethics, or judgments of secondary qualities, for example). The aspects of the subjects supposed to de determine what truth is ‘for them’ may include historical, cultural, social, linguistic, or psychological background, or brute sensory constitution. Relativism is one attempt to take these contingencies into account in formulating the relationship between the believer and the truth believed. It may be regarded as an attempt to avoid the skepticism that almost inevitably follows when an absolute conception of truth is combined with recognizing our differently rooted, variable, contingent ways of making judgments.
Relativism is frequently rejected on the grounds that it is essential to the idea of belief or judgment that there are standards that it must meet, independently of anyone’s propensity to accept it. Inability to make sense of such standards eventually paralyses all thought. Sophisticated relativists such as [William] James (who described pragmatism as a form of relativism) reply that assessments of truth and falsity may be made in a disciplined way within a framework, even if the framework is itself contingent, and that the ‘circum-pressure of experience’ is all we need and can have as a ‘guarantee against licentious thinking’ (The Meaning of Truth, 1909). The central problem of relativism is one of giving it as a coherent formulation, making the doctrine more than the platitude that differently situated people may judge differently, and views may each be true. Much postmodernist thought may be regarded as a somewhat abandoned celebration of relativism.
scepticism (Gk., sceptsis, enquiry or questioning) Although Greek scepticism centered on the value of enquiry and questioning, scepticism is now the denial that knowledge or even rational belief is possible, either about some specific subject-matter (e.g. ethics) or in any are whatsoever. . . . Scepticism should not be confused with relativism, which is a doctrine about the nature of truth, . . .
Descartes, René (1596- 1650) French mathematician and founding father of modern philosophy. Born in La Haye, near Tours, Descartes was educated at the new Jesuit college at La Flèche, before reading law at Poitiers. In 1618 he enlisted in the Dutch army of Maurice of Nassau, in order to have leisure to think. His interest in the methodology of a unified science is supposed to have been stimulated by a dream 'in a stove-heated room' when he was serving at Ulm in 1619. In the subsequent ten years he travelled widely, returning to Holland in 1628. Little is known of his private life, but the death of his illegitimate five-year-old daughter Francine in 1640 is known to have been a devastating blow. His first work, the Regulae ad Directionem Ingenii (1628/9), was never completed. In Holland, between 1628 and 1649, Descartes wrote, and then cautiously suppressed, Le Monde (1634), and in 1637 produced the Discours de la méthode as a preface to the treatise on mathematics and physics in which he introduced the notion of Cartesian co-ordinates. His best-known philosophical work, the Meditationes de Prima Philosophia (Meditations on First Philosophy), together with objections by distinguished contemporaries and replies by Descartes (the Objections and Replies), appeared in 1641. . . . His last work was Les Passions de l'âme (The Passions of the Soul), published in 1649. In that year Descartes visited the court of Kristina of Sweden, where he contracted pneumonia, allegedly through being required to break his normal habit of late rising in order to give lessons at 5:00 a.m. . . .
Descartes' theory of knowledge starts with the quest for certainty, for an indubitable starting-point or foundation on the basis alone of which progress is possible . . . This is eventually found in the celebrated 'Cogito ergo sum': I think therefore I am. By locating the point of certainty in my own awareness of my own self, Descartes gives a first-person twist to the theory of knowledge that dominated the following centuries in spite of various counter-attacks on behalf of social and public starting-points. The metaphysics associated with this priority is the famous Cartesian dualism, or separation of mind and matter into two different but interacting substances. Descartes rigorously and rightly sees that it takes divine dispensation to certify any relationship between the two realms thus divided, and to prove the reliability of the senses invokes a 'clear and distinct perception' of highly dubious proofs of the existence of a benevolent deity. This has not met general acceptance as Hume drily puts it, 'to have recourse to the veracity of the supreme Being, in order to prove the veracity of our senses, is surely making a very unexpected circuit'. . . .
Although the structure of Descartes's epistemology, theory of mind, and theory of matter have been rejected many times, their relentless exposure of the hardest issues, their exemplary clarity, and even their initial plausibility, all contrive to make him the central point of reference for modern philosophy.
dualism Any view that postulates two kinds of things in some domain is dualist; contrasting views according to which there is only one kind of thing are monistic. The most famous example of the contrast is mind-body dualism, contrasted with monism in the form either of idealism (only mind) or more often physicalism (only body or matter).
Hume, David (1711--76) Scottish philosopher, historian and essayist. Hume is the most influential thoroughgoing naturalist in modern philosophy, and a pivotal figure of the Enlightenment. Born the the second son of a minor Scottish landowner, Hume attended Edinburgh university. In 1734 he removed to the little town of La Flèche in Anjou to write and study . . . In 1739 he returned to oversee the printing of the Treatise of Human Nature, his first and greatest philosophical work. . . .
The avowed aim of the Treatise was to bring the experimental method into the study of the human mind. Hume believed that the success of natural science, culminating in the Newtonian mechanics, lay in finding the few simple principles that would enable one to discern order in the apparent chaos of natural systems. Events in nature are in themselves 'loose and separate', and the art of the scientist is to detect the patterns in which they fall. Similarly separate events in the mind, such as the onset of ideas, impressions, and passions, should be seen as natural events, ordered by principles that are open to empirical discovery. The first components of the mind are individual 'perceptions' or impressions and ideas. Ideas for Hume, as for earlier empiricists such as Berkeley, are faint or less forceful versions of impressions. They are the components of thought, and Hume was the first modern philosopher seriously to explore the difficulty of explaining how, on the basis of this private kaleidoscope, we attain a conception of ourselves as inhabiting a public world of independent objects extended in space and ordered b y causal laws. Hume's resolute naturalism rejects any model in which sense experience enables us to reason our way to such a conception; instead it arises purely as the result of 'custom and habit', and reason can neither assist nor oppose the process. Similarly the passions, under which Hume includes any pressure on practical choice, including ethical pressure, are outside the sway of reason but themselves rise and fall in naturally detectable patterns. . . .
Hume's Olympian intelligence earned him incalculable influence; almost all anthropological, sociological and comparative studies find a seed in his work, whilst the attempt to escape his radical empiricism has motivated philosophers from Kant to the present day.
empiricism The permanent strand in philosophy that attempts to tie knowledge to experience. [Often contrasted with rationalism.]
materialism The view that the world is entirely composed of matter. Philosophers now tend to prefer the term physicalism, since physics has shown that matter itself resolves into forces and energy, and is just one amongst other physically respectable denizens of the universe.
Kant, Immanuel (1724-1804) German philosopher and founder of critical philosophy. The son of a saddler, Kant was born and educated in Königsberg (Kaliningrad [now a part of a Russian exclave sandwiched between Lithuania and Poland]) in East Prussia. . . . In 1770 he was appointed to the chair of logic and metaphysics at Königsberg. It was after this that he entered on his greatest, 'critical' period. His life was orderly to the point of caricature: he never left Königsberg, and never married.
. . . The first step to the critical philosophy was the Inaugural Dissertation of 1770 . . . , in which for the first time Kant unveils the view that we can have a priori knowledge of space and time only because they are forms imposed by our own minds upon experience . . . One of Kant's central moves is to argue that the unity of consciousness itself presupposes orderly experience, tied together in accordance with universal and necessary laws. It is this part of his work that constitutes his attempt to answer the inductive scepticism, and subjectivity about causation, left by Hume. (Kant's famous remark that it was Hume who awoke him from his dogmatic slumbers was made in the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics in 1783, . . .)
[Kant's major works are the three Critiques--of Pure Reason (1781), of Practical Reason (1788) and of Judgment (1790). The second critique was preceded by a shorter work, the Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals (1785), which sketches his ethical theory and is often assigned to students to read.] His ethics is based uncompromisingly on the search for a single supreme principle of morality, a principle moreover that has rational authority, leading rather than following the passions, and binding on all rational creatures. Every action springs from some subjective principle, or maxim, and the moral worth of an individual lies entirely in the question of whether the maxim of [one's] action is respect for the law, the duty of obeying the categorical imperative. [One of his formulations of this imperative is: "Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law."]
In spite of the notorious difficulty of reading Kant, made worse by his penchant for scholastic systematization and obscure terminology, his place as the greatest philosopher of the last three hundred years is well assured. He made the first decisive break with the sensationalist empiricism that prevailed in the 18th century, but without retreating to an indefensible rationalism. Whilst his confidence in the a priori and the structure of his idealism have been widely rejected, it is not too much to say that all modern epistemology, metaphysics, and even ethics, is implicitly affected by the architecture he created.
a priori/a posteriori A contrast first between propositions. A proposition is knowable a priori [Lat., "from before" or "prior to"] if it can be known without experience of the specific course of events in the actual world. . . . Something is knowable only a posteriori [Lat., "from after"] if it cannot be known a priori. . . .
idealism Any doctrine holding that reality is fundamentally mental in nature. . . .
rationalism Any philosophy magnifying the role played by unaided reason, in the acquisition and justification of knowledge. . . .
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770-1831) German philosopher. Born at Stuttgart, Hegel studied at Tübingen, where his contemporaries included Schelling ant the poet Hölderlin. After holding positions as a tutor he went to Jena in 1801 as a Privatdozent in philosophy, qualified by his thesis De Orbitis Planetarium . . . While in Jena he collaborated with Schelling in editing the Kritisches Journal der Philosophie, to which he contributed many articles, and wrote his first major work the Phänomenologie des Geistes (trs as The Phenomenology of Mind, 1910; also as The Phenomenology of Spirit, 1977). Promoted to a chair in 1805, he ten was forced to leave Jena because of the Napoleonic war, became editor of a newspaper, and from 1807 spent eight years as director of the Gymnasium in Nürnberg. While there he published the two volumes of the Wissenschaft der Logik (1812-16, trs. as The Logic of Hegel, 1874). In 1816 he became professor philosophy at Heidelberg, where he produced the Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse ('Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline'). Two years later he succeeded Fichte as professor in Berlin and entered into his most famous and influential period, [producing the work translated as The Philosophy of Right in 1821 . . . Hegel attracted great numbers of foreign students in Berlin, and had an unparalleled influence on German philosophy in the 19th century. . ., [as well as] English philosophy in the absolute idealist phase, . . .[and continues to be a major influence in European philosophy to the present.]
The cornerstone of Hegel's system, or world view, is the notion of freedom, conceived not as simple licence to fulfil preferences but as the rare condition of living self-consciously and in a fully rationally organized community or state . . . Surprisingly, history can be seen as progress towards freedom: here Hegel follows the spirit of his own age, voicing a confidence in progress and purpose in the otherwise jumbled kaleidoscope of history, but incidentally providing a dangerously intoxicating model for all social and political movements that pride themselves that they are on the side of the future. . . . [S]tarting from the Kantian response to scepticism he charts in the Phenomenology the development of all possible forms of consciousness, to the point where awareness becomes possible not of mere phenomena, but of reality as it is in itself, identified both with knowledge of the Absolute and with the moment when 'mind' finally knows itself. [Hence the philosophy of Absolute idealism.]
Russell, Bertrand Arthur William (1872-1970) English philosopher. Russell was born into the liberal and aristocratic family descended from the Prime Minister, John Russell, and educated first at home, and then from 1890 at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read mathematics. From an early age, and especially after meeting the mathematician G. Peano (1848-1932) in 1900, his interests were devoted to the foundations of mathematics. The Principles of Mathematics was published in 1902, a year after the discovery of Russell's paradox. After a period spent wrestling with the problem, Russell propounded the theory of definite descriptions and the theory of types, which were central elements in his own solution. From 1907 to 1910 he worked in collaboration with [Alfred North] Whitehead for ten to twelve hours a day for eight months of the year on Principia Mathematica, published in three volumes, 1910-13. During this period he also laid the foundations of his life as a radical, active, liberal intellectual, beginning by standing as a suffragist candidate for Parliament. During the First World War he was imprisoned for six months for publishing the statement that American soldiers would be employed as strike-breakers in Britain, 'an occupation as which they were accustomed when in their own country.'
. . . [F]rom 1938 to 1944 [Russell] taught at a number of American universities, including Chicago and the university of California at Los Angeles. He was however denied employment by the City university of New York, on the grounds that his works were 'lecherous, libidinous, lustful, venerous, erotomaniac, aphrodisiac, irreverent, narrow-minded, untruthful, and bereft of moral fiber'. . . .He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1950, . .
In his general philosophical approach Russell was not only a realist, but also perhaps in continued opposition to the monolithic nature of absolute idealism, a pluralist and foundationalist, intent upon bringing the resources of modern logic to a basic empiricism. . . .
Moore, George Edward (1873-1958) British philosopher, and one of the founders of analytical philosophy. Moore was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. He was a lecturer at Cambridge from 1911, professor from 1925 to 1938, and the editor of Mind from 1921 to 1947. Moore began philosophy under the influence of absolute idealism, but in the last years of the 19th century he and Russell came to break with that tradition, and to espouse various kinds of realism centered upon the possibility of relating minds to independent facts. Moore was one of the founders and most skilled practitioners of analytical philosophy.
realism/anti-realism The standard opposition between those who affirm, and those who deny, the real existence of some kind of thing, or some kind of fact or state of affairs.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1889-1951) Austrian philosopher. Born the youngest of eight children into a wealthy Viennese family, Wittgenstein originally studied engineering, . . .In 1908 he went to Manchester to study aeronautics. Becoming fascinated by the philosophy of mathematics, in 1911 he visited [Gottlob] Frege, who advised him to study under Russell in Cambridge. Until the First World War he worked as Russell's protégé and collaborator, on problems in the foundations of logic and mathematics. During the war he served in the Austrian army, and completed the manuscript that was published in 1921 as the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus . . . Convinced that he ad definitively solved all soluble problems of philosophy he abandoned the subject for rural school-teaching in Austria, until 1929 when contact with the Vienna circle, mathematical intuitionism, and above all [Frank] Ramsay persuaded him that there remained work to do, and he returned to Cambridge, where he became professor in 1939. . . . He was undoubtedly the most charismatic figure of 20th-century philosophy, living and writing with a power and intensity that frequently overwhelmed his contemporaries and readers.
It is usual to divide Wittgenstein's work into the early period, culminating in the Tractatus, and late period from 1929 until his death, whose most famous expession is the Philosophical Investigations, published in 1953 [after his death]. . . . Both periods are dominated by a concern with the nature of language, the way in which it represents the world, and the implications this has for logic and mathematics.